#340: Paul Stamets — How Mushrooms Can Save You and (Perhaps) the World

Paul Stamets (@PaulStamets https://twitter.com/PaulStamets) is an intellectual and industry leader in the habitat, medicinal use, and production of fungi. Part of his mission is to deepen our understanding and respect for the organisms that literally exist under every footstep taken on this path of life. Paul is the author of a new study in Nature's Scientific Reports https://rdcu.be/8vQo, which details how mushroom extracts—specifically extracts from woodland polypore mushrooms—can greatly reduce viruses that contribute to bee colony collapse. Paul is the author of six books, including Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1580085792/offsitoftimfe-20, Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1580081754/offsitoftimfe-20, and Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World: An Identification Guide http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0898158397/offsitoftimfe-20, and he has discovered and named numerous species of psilocybin mushrooms. Paul is also the founder and owner of Fungi Perfecti https://fungi.com/, makers of the Host Defense https://hostdefense.com/ mushroom supplement line, and it is something I've been using since Samin Nosrat https://tim.blog/2018/10/01/samin-nosrat/ recommended it in my last book, Tribe of Mentors http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1328994961/offsitoftimfe-20. Paul has received numerous awards, including Invention Ambassador (2014-2015) for the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the National Mycologist Award (2014) from the North American Mycological Association (NAMA), and the Gordon & Tina Wasson Award (2015) from the Mycological Society of America (MSA). The implications, applications, and medicinal uses of what we discuss in this interview are truly mind-boggling, and we get into some of my favorite subjects, including psychedelics and other aspects of bending reality. If you're interested in contributing to psychedelic science and research, you can do so at MAPS https://store.maps.org/np/clients/maps/donation.jsp (Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies), or if you've got $100,000 or more to spare, visit me at tim.blog/science http://tim.blog/science. I hope you enjoy this entire interview, but if you only have time to listen to one part, I recommend checking in at the [56:25] mark to hear how Paul's first experience with psilocybin mushrooms affected his lifelong stutter. Enjoy! This podcast is brought to you by Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/, which has become a staple of my daily routine. I picked up this bike after seeing the success of my friend Kevin Rose, and I've been enjoying it more than I ever imagined. Peloton is an indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right to your home. No worrying about fitting classes into your busy schedule or making it to a studio with a crazy commute. New classes are added every day, and this includes options led by elite NYC instructors in your own living room. You can even live stream studio classes taught by the world's best instructors, or find your favorite class on demand. Peloton https://www.onepeloton.com/ is offering listeners to this show a special offer. Visit onepeloton.com https://www.onepeloton.com/ and enter the code TIM at checkout to receive $100 off accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. This is a great way to get in your workouts, or an incredible gift. Again, that's onepeloton.com https://www.onepeloton.com/ and enter the code TIM. This podcast is brought to you by Audible http://audible.com/tim. I have used Audible http://audible.com/tim for years, and I love audiobooks. I have a few to recommend: Ready Player One https://www.audible.com/pd/Sci-Fi-Fantasy/Ready-Player-One-Audiobook/B005FRGT44/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20by Ernest ClineThe Tao of Seneca https://www.audible.com/pd/Nonfiction/The-Tao-of-Seneca-Audiobook/B01AIXEJKU/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20by SenecaThe Graveyard Book http://www.audible.com/pd/Teens/The-Graveyard-Book-Full-Cast-Production-Audiobook/B00LXHQO22/?tag=offsitoftimfe-20by Neil Gaiman All you need to do to get your free 30-day Audible trial is visit Audible.com/Tim http://audible.com/tim. 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• 0:01Tim Ferriss?

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start to shake.

• 0:06Speaker 01

  Can I ask you a personal question? No, we're just seeing an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:24Tim Ferriss?

  This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do, we'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies, hard to do that at the gym, take a shower, and I'm in higher gear for the rest of the day. It's really convenient and has become something that I look forward to. So you have a lot of options. For one, if you like, you can ride live with thousands of other riders across the country

• 1:08Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:34Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:00Tim Ferriss?

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• 3:45Tim Ferriss?

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• 4:30Tim Ferriss?

  shows, news, comedy, and much more from leading audiobook publishers, broadcasters, entertainers, magazine and newspaper publishers, and business information providers. Maybe that's what I am, a business information provider. And right now, Audible is offering listeners of this podcast a free audiobook with a 30-day trial membership. Check it out. Go to audible.com/tim and browse the unmatched selection of audio programs. Download a title free and start listening. It's super simple. Go to audible.com/tim or text TIM to 500-500 on your telephone to get started today. Check it out. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it

• 5:13Tim Ferriss?

  is my job to deconstruct world-class performers, people who are the best at what they do, to tease out the routines, the life lessons, the habits, the favorite books, whatever it might be, that you can hopefully apply and test in your own life. My guest today is Paul Stamets. Hundreds, maybe thousands of people have requested that I have Paul on the show. You can find him on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube, Paul Stamets, S-T-A-M-E-T-S. He is an intellectual and industry leader in the habitat medicinal use and production of fungi. That's F-U-N-G-I, fungi, some people say. And you might also think of mycelium or mushrooms.

• 5:54Tim Ferriss?

  Part of his mission is to deepen our understanding of and respect for the organisms that literally exist under every footstep taken on this path of life. This episode is bonkers. The implications, applications, medicinal uses of many of the things that he'll discuss are truly mind-boggling. And we do get into some of my favorite subjects, including psychedelics and other aspects of bending reality. Here we go. Back to the bio. Paul is the author of six books, including Mycelium Running, subtitle, How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. Growing gourmet and medicinal mushrooms and psilocybin mushrooms of the world.

• 6:37Tim Ferriss?

  He has discovered and named numerous new species of psilocybin mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms, or Psilocybin mushrooms, better known as magic mushrooms, and is the founder and owner of fungi perfecti, makers of the host defense mushroom supplement line. And little known fact, I have been using host defense products for a few years now after Samin Nosrat said that one of them was her favorite purchase of less than $100 in the last year or two, and that was in my last book, Tribe of Mentors. So I do have some familiarity with his products. Paul has received numerous awards, including Invention Ambassador for the American Association

• 7:18Tim Ferriss?

  for the Advancements of Science, the National Mycologist Award from the North American Mycological Association, and the Gordon and Tina Wasson Award from the Mycological Society of America. His Instagram is awesome, if you want to see some really, really, really weird fungi and him off in the woods all over the world doing weird things. And in very new and breaking news, we are actually holding the podcast, waiting for this to happen, Paul is the author of a new study in Nature Scientific Reports, which details how mushroom extracts, specifically extracts from woodland polypore mushrooms, can greatly reduce viruses that contribute to bee colony collapse. This is a huge, huge, huge deal.

• 8:01Tim Ferriss?

  And we do get into the importance of bees and how without bees, pretty much everything goes down the toilet, including a lot of humanity. So I will include a link in the show notes, which you can always find at tim.blog/podcast for everyone who wants to check that out. And two other announcements, if you are interested, as I am, and I'm certainly committed to the tune of seven figures over the next year or two. To supporting psychedelic science and research, please join me. And if you're interested in doing so at a higher dollar amount, meaning over $100,000, please go to tim.blog/science. That's tim.blog/science.

• 8:46Tim Ferriss?

  And if you want to support at lower dollar amounts, check out maps.org. And for anyone who's already filled out that form, I will be reaching out soon. There's a lot of amazing stuff on the horizon that I hope you'll be involved with. And last but not least, the blog now contains transcripts of every podcast episode to date. People have been asking for this for a long, long time. I wanted to do it right. So now you can find transcripts to every episode of the podcast at tim.blog/transcripts. And that is a long intro. So without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Paul Stamets.

• 9:29Tim Ferriss?

  And if you can only listen to one part, jump ahead about 49 minutes or so, 49 minutes and 50 seconds, I believe, but eh, let's call it 49 minutes, to listen to his description of his first experience with Psilocybin mushrooms or psilocybin-containing mushrooms and the effect it had on his lifelong stutter. It is fucking nuts. So if you're gonna skip around, jump ahead 49 minutes or so and listen to that story. It is really, really wild. So there you have it. Enjoy.

• 10:06Tim Ferriss?

  Paul, welcome to the show.

• 10:08Speaker 02

  Thank you, Tim. Honored to be here.

• 10:10Tim Ferriss?

  I've had so many listeners request you on the show. I have wanted to have you on the show for so many years. And finally, when you made your very comprehensive cameo in Michael Pollan's most recent book, that served as the reminder that I had to reach out somehow. So I'm very pleased that you're here. And I thought we could start with some definitions and pronunciation, which are very selfishly points of insecurity for me. So FUNGI, how should we pronounce that?

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Well, that's an excellent question. Um fungi, according to Oxford English Dictionary, with a J is the correct pronunciation. But funji, fungi or fungi. So fungi is what us mycologists use. Uh though people, um Spanish mycologists will use funji, you know, Italian mycologists will say funji. Uh but uh English speakers, uh the standard pronunciation is fungi with a J.

• 11:07Tim Ferriss?

  Fungi. And then there are two terms that I suspect may not be totally synonymous. We have mushrooms and mycelium or mycelium. I don't know the correct pronunciation. Are mushrooms a subset of mycelium, one component part? Can you define or distinguish those two for us, please?

• 11:27Speaker 02

  The mycelium is the underground network analogous to the roots of a tree. Uh and the fruit bodies are the mushrooms. So they are produced as reproductive structures long after many challenges on the path of growth uh in the wood, in woods, underground, et cetera. The mycelial networks are vast. It's been called the proverbial tip of the iceberg. But just think of this as the, the mycelium um navigates through a microbially hostile environment. Literally, there can be uh tens of millions of microbes per gram of soil. And the mycelial, these five fine filaments that look like cobwebs, um are, are running underground. And this underground network is being challenged by all sorts of microbes.

• 12:12Speaker 02

  And as many people know that um bacteria like to eat fungi, that's why mushrooms rot. Um but the fungi are able to navigate with these mycelial networks, only one cell wall thick, and they can be up to eight miles of mycelium per cubic inch. And now they only have one cell wall between um their, their internal cells and the external environment. We have five or six skin layers that protect us from infection. The mycelium basically has one cell layer. And yet is able to overcome the challenges of millions of microbes, many of which want to consume it. And it navigates to create the largest organism on this planet. It's a mycelial mat in eastern Oregon, over twenty-two hundred acres in size. Now it's one cell wall thick.

• 12:56Speaker 02

  And yet it's the largest organism on this planet. And that's a testimonial to the immunological power of the mycelium. And this vast underground network that is so central to habitat and human and plant health is something that we have really tapped into. So mushrooms come from mycelium. The mycelium can grow literally for decades before a single mushroom forms. Mushrooms are highly perishable. They're like fish and four or five days they mature and then they rot and then doing so they sporulate just before they rot and they attract insects that are then help spread the spores, much like, you know, birds spread seeds. And the birds come to fruit.

• 13:37Speaker 02

  The fruit of the tree, like a peach, for instance, attracts insects and birds and then the peach pit or seeds of an apple or what other fruit are spread. So the fragrance of the mushrooms are beacons, fragrance beacons that emanate through the ecosystem and the scent trails and entice animals to come to these bodaciously delicious fruit bodies. And then they, in the course of them eating them, they spread the spores. But the mycelium literally can be existent, seem not, not invisible, invisible to us ridiculously stupid humans that are thundering giants upon these networks that are underneath their feet.

• 14:20Speaker 02

  But the mycelium really races behind us and we're the biggest walking catastrophe that I know on the planet. And as we walk, we break wood chips, we leave impressions. Well, the mycelium is sensitive to those impressions of our footsteps. And as we create new debris fields, the mycelium reaches up behind our footsteps to gobble up that newly made material in competition with other fungi and other organisms.

• 14:47Tim Ferriss?

  Mycelium, if we're looking at mycelium and as one component of that, or rather not, the product of that, I suppose, and please feel free to correct me if I screw things up by restating, mushrooms people have had a decent amount of exposure to, and they tend to associate it with, say, the produce aisle in a grocery store. And think of them perhaps as plants. From a genetic perspective or an evolutionary perspective, how should people think about mycelium?

• 15:20Speaker 02

  I love this question. Well, you bring up a very good point. For almost 100 years now, the mycology departments were a subset of botany departments. They really should be in the zoology departments. We separated from fungi about 650 million years ago. 650 million years ago, we had a common ancestor. In fact, there's a new super kingdom called a Piscocanta that joins fungi and animalia together. When, basically, these mycelial networks, when they hit the land from the ocean, many people don't realize some of the largest networks of mycelium in the world now have been discovered in, below the sediment layers of the ocean.

• 16:04Speaker 02

  There's vast mycelial networks throughout the entire ocean. There's lots of dead organic plant material that's falling down to the sediments, and the mycelium is involved in gobbling those up. But from an evolutionary point of view, 650 million years ago, we chose the path of encirculating our nutrients, basically in a cellular sac, a stomach. The mycelium digests nutrients externally. If it is enzymes and acids and other compounds that break down complex organic molecules and then absorbs those through the cell walls. The entire... Mycelial network is like a sponge. It absorbs selectively those nutrients that it needs. And animals went sort of overground.

• 16:48Speaker 02

  And we developed these digestive systems and a protective skin enveloped structure or bodies. And then the mycelium continued to us, of course, very happily developing underground. So with the divergence of fungi and animals is extremely well documented. But an extraordinary article came out just this past year. And this article, you know, the big bang was about 13.8 billion years ago. The earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago. The first unicellular organisms were found a few hundred million years later.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  But the first multicellular organisms so far found, the oldest one, is 2.4 billion years ago. It was found in South African lava in the basalt. And it's 2.4 billion years old. The oldest representation so far in the fossil record of a multicellular organism. And these are mycelial networks. So the mycelium had its form long before we've had ours. And moreover, in Brazil, 115 million years ago. This is before the great extinction event that killed off the dinosaurs. And at that time, mushrooms also had their forms. So these mushrooms are really ancient organisms.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  They had developed their forms long before we had developed ours. We are descended from these fungal networks. They are progenitor ancestors. We are really descendants of fungi. This is why under the microscope, so many of our cells look so similar to fungi. And also why our best antibiotics that we have coming from fungi are very good at preventing bacteria from growing. But we have very, very few good antifungal antibiotics because of our close evolutionary history that are not toxic or highly toxic to us. So antifungal drugs are extremely dangerous. Those who've had immunosuppressants are well aware of this. And when you defeat the immune system of the human body using immunosuppressants

• 19:00Speaker 02

  for organ transplants and other reasons in medicine, you really...

• 19:07Speaker 02

  You're dancing with death because it's extremely damaging to your immune system that can hold many of these infections at bay.

• 19:16Tim Ferriss?

  There are so many directions that I want to go with this. I'm going to try to contain my ADD and focus this in a direction towards another type of utility and relates to a problem that if I were to walk 15 feet, I could observe with my own eyes right now, and that is carpenter ants. And I was wondering if you could talk about your history with carpenter ants and the intersection with mycelium?

• 19:49Speaker 02

  This is a subject very dear to my heart. So, well, I'm going to segue because there could be listeners out there who have children, and I'm going to tell their children through the story how vacuuming and helping your mother and your parents made me over a million dollars. And it ties into carpenter ants. So I grew up in a, so I need two minutes to set this up.

• 20:17Tim Ferriss?

  We have all the time in the world.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  Okay. So I grew up in a small town in Ohio, Columbiana, Ohio, a very conservative town, about 5,000 people. And I grew up in a fairly wealthy household. My family had steel mills and sawmills, and we were affluent. We had 400 people in the town under unemployment of a town of about 5,000. So the Stamets Enterprise Company, unfortunately, because of, after World War II, we bombed, you know, we bombed Japan, we bombed Germany, but they retooled, they rebuilt their factories. They had modern factories after the war. In the United States, we didn't do that. And so the machine tool industry really fell apart in the early 1960s, a huge... Economic downturn.

• 21:02Speaker 02

  And so I was the best experience of my life was the fact that I grew up in a wealthy environment and then when I was ten or eleven years of age, the entire financial empire collapsed. We lost everything. And we laid off over four hundred people in the town, were laid off. I'm going to school, these kids and their parents, you know, are not very happy about what was happening. It was really devastating to us. And my parents separated and we lived in this big house. Electricity was cut off, the water was cut off. I remember eating cat food, I was just so hungry, gave me tremendous farts. But, uh, but I, my mom was really desperate.

• 21:43Speaker 02

  My brother John went on to Yale, my brother Bill was at Cornell. And this is, you know, towards the end of their college experiences. And I was there home alone with my mother and my twin brother. And I just really had to step up the plate to help my mother as much as possible. I remember running a hose from our neighbors, about five hundred feet of hose, just to get two or three PSI so we could trickle feed it into the toilet so we can flush them. It was really strange and the bewildering sort of Kafkaesque existence because we were shunned by the town. My mother went into religion, my dad went into alcohol. They both were self-medicating in a sense, with those two avenues.

• 22:26Speaker 02

  But I got really good at helping my mom vacuum because she needed help and we didn't have, you know, the support team we had anymore. So I was always like tearing apart vacuum cleaners and borrowing parts and trying to get, trying to help my mom any way I could. So I vacuumed, vacuumed, vacuumed. I got, I'm really still passionate about vacuuming. It's one of my, I'm a really good house husband. I like washing dishes and vacuuming a lot. So how this works, that was in the Carpenter era, is the following. So I grew up in a, you know, in this affluent environment. I came out of Washington State, became a logger hippie for three years, you know, working in the woods, then moved outside of Olympia, Washington. I went to the Evergreen State College.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  And I tried to start this little business and I lived in a house that Dr. Andrew Weil said is the worst house he's ever seen anyone live in in North America. That's one statement. It was a flat, flat house built with military surplus materials and I had 12 buckets catching water from the flat roof. Why you need to build a flat roof in Washington state with army surplus materials is another question. But there's so many leaks that I just keep on putting up buckets. And then one day I remember there's a storm and, and the, the house fell like two or three inches and my wife goes, "My God, the house is falling." I said, "Don't worry, dear, we don't have to fill the buckets as much because the water will run out faster." I was just trying to be able to be optimistic because I was afraid that she was going to get up and leave me because the conditions were so bad.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  But anyhow, I would be making my espresso in the morning and, and I look over in the corner and there's a pile of sawdust from carpenter ants. And I see them running around and the carpenter, carpenter ants are more nocturnal than they are, you know, active in the daytime. And so I'd make my espresso every morning, I'd look over at the pile of sawdust, pull up the vacuum cleaner, vacuum it up. I did it the next day and the next day and the next day. I did this for hundreds of days, realizing the house is getting more, less structurally sound with the carpenter ants munching them. And so I, well, you know, I gotta do something about this. And so, you know, I didn't want to use Raid, I didn't want to use, you know, toxic insecticides

• 24:32Speaker 02

  because the war against nature, in my mind, is a war against your own biology. And what's toxic to other organisms is likely toxic to you and this has been well founded now with lots of examples. So I went to the Environmental Protection Agency homepage and I looked up a group of fungi that would attack ants. And these are called entomopathogenic fungi. Now, it's a mouthful, but entomo means insects, pathogenic means, of course, causing disease of insects. And this group of entomopathogenic fungi that was particularly of interest and supported by scientific literature and with the encouragement of the EPA was a group of fungi in the genus Meteryzium.

• 25:13Speaker 02

  So Metta and Rhizium, you know, lots of mycelium, lots of rhizomores. And so I looked into this group of Meteryzium fungi, non-toxic to bees, non-toxic to fish, non-toxic to humans. And I got some of these fungi and I started growing them out. Now, I started studying this and I go, "Well, this is really interesting. Why isn't this not available everywhere? Why isn't Lowe's and Home Depot and Walmart, why aren't they selling this?" Well, for a very good reason. The insects aren't stupid. When you see insects like carpenter ants that are constantly cleaning themselves, they're trying to get the spores of this fungus off of them. It's the most common fungus, according to some reports, in the soil underneath your feet. It is everywhere.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  It is a dance of dinner and death between insects and fungi. Many insects eat fungi, many fungi eat insects. The two of them don't like to be at this dinner table at the same time. So I ended up getting this fungus and I studied it. And the reason why it never came to market is for the spore repellency property. Now, this is really important because these insects have realized that the scent of these spores meant that there's a disease threat to the colony. So the insects fastidiously clean themselves of these spores. So when these big companies like Bayer and Dow and Syngenta tried to make bait stations

• 26:38Speaker 02

  using these spores, even though in the laboratory they could dust the insects with the spores, and sure enough, five days later, they would kill the insects. When they made bait stations around people's houses, the insects wouldn't go near those bait stations because they saw the spores. And so the spore repellency property prevented these bait traps from going into market for preventing termites, fire ants, carpenter ants, moisture ants, all sorts of ants and termites are infected by these sporulating fungus, Meteryzium. So I thought, "Well, I have a laboratory, I have very large laboratories. We produce about 50,000 kilos of mycelium of many different gourmet and medicinal mushrooms per week."

• 27:24Speaker 02

  And my environments are class 100 clean rooms. These are high-tech clean room environments using heap of filters, high-efficiency particulate air filters. And the last thing I want is a sporulating mold in my laboratories. So I got these cultures and I was shocked at how many spores there were. It reminds somebody of a penicillium mold, you know, growing on cheese. You want that flying around your laboratory because my oyster mushroom cultures or my shiitake cultures could become contaminated from airborne spores. So I cultured this out really quickly and so the window of exposure was very short and I set up all these precautions. And then I'm culturing these fungi and then they grow out as green molds. And then I saw this white wedge, a V-shaped wedge that was all white, it had no sporulation

• 28:09Speaker 02

  on it. And I went, whoa, that's interesting. I looked up in scientific literature and everybody said, oh, the culture is losing the ability to reproduce. It is losing the ability to sporulate. It is senescent. Avoid sectors, that's what they're called, these wedges are white sectors, because that path of genetic, of a path down that gene trail will end up, meaning the culture will die. They partially got that right. But I was motivated by not having spores in my laboratory, so I chased those white sectors. And they grow out in about a week or two weeks on a standard-sized Petri dish. And then after about five or six, seven transfers, that white wedge got bigger and bigger and

• 28:53Speaker 02

  bigger and pretty soon, no sporulation.

• 28:56Tim Ferriss?

  And this is current day in your, the, this experiment that you were running was, is, is done more recently, not when you were under the, the flat roof built by military surplus. Is that right? I'm just trying to place the chronology.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  No, this is, this is synchronous with that, with the flat roof.

• 29:14Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it.

• 29:15Speaker 02

  So, but I had to grow out my laboratory to have enough mycelium to be able to treat the carpenter ants.

• 29:21Tim Ferriss?

  Gotcha.

• 29:22Speaker 02

  So anyhow, so I finally grew it out, I grew it out on the rice and I made a big deal to my daughter, and I am so thankful to her for the reasons you're about to hear. And I made a big deal in the middle of summer saying, we're gonna trick the carpenter ants. Because every morning I'm sucking up all those others. And so I asked her for her Barbie doll dish, which I still have, I'm gonna mount it in a frame. And I put like twenty-five kernels of white mycelium on rice of this meterysium fungus without spores because they wouldn't go near the rice if it had spores. And I laid it out at around eight thirty at night in the summer afternoon, or it's the summer evening. And I made a big deal of it. And I got my daughter involved, you know, as a citizen scientist, young, she was only,

• 30:05Speaker 02

  oh my gosh, she was probably fourteen at the time. And so then we went to bed. So thankfully, my daughter woke up at one, two o'clock in the morning, and she, rather than going straight to the bathroom, she wanted to look at her Barbie doll dish. She went over there, turned on the lights, and it was swarming with carpenter ants. I go, oh my gosh, you've got to be kidding. And so she ran into our bedroom, said, Dad, Dusty, wake up, you've got to see this. And, you know, we didn't want to wake up, it's two o'clock in the morning, but she dragged us out of bed, and we went over there, and it was just covered with carpenter ants. They're picking up the rice, and they're going into the recesses of the house, disappearing. And like, oh my gosh, that was amazing, because I had mice in the house. The mice could have eaten the rice, and I would never have known.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  But we watched for a few minutes, and they took away all the myceliated rice. So we fast forward, I'm making my espresso every morning, hundreds of times, I get the vacuum cleaner out, I go to that spot, and there's no sawdust. The carpenter ants were gone. And I went, oh my gosh, I just think I figured out a way to overcome the spore repellency property. So now, this has been elaborated, we published an article in the journal Sociobiology, proving this was effective against subterranean termites, Formosan termites. We've done experiments now with USDA and other teams, some of the biggest pesticide companies in the world.

• 31:29Speaker 02

  I'd have to check my NDAs to see if they're still covered or not, but everyone listening can imagine who they are. They tested this. It's effective against bedbugs, ants, termites, thrips, flies, mosquitoes, you know, mites.

• 31:50Speaker 02

  Phenomenal reach. And so I ended up finding something that is a super attractant. And basically, the opposite of the spore repellency property is the mycelial attractiveness property. Two sides of the same coin, the yin and yang of nature. It's kind of harmonious in that sense, I like that. And we found that if we diluted the mycelial extracts on rice without the spores, these precanidial, pre-sporulating sectors that I described, we end up creating a super attractant so powerful that when the attractant was diluted 500 to 1 with water, diluting the extract made it more potent in terms of attractiveness. In one experiment, two drops of this were put on a pane of glass,

• 32:34Speaker 02

  and fire ants walked directly to that place and then scratched at that place until they died, walking about a meter, creating a trail that other than fire ants would follow. So we have done this now with choice, they're called T tests. We've done this with, the T tests are even better. T tests oftentimes is, you know, go left for the control, go right for the treatment. But we ended up doing four and five choice experiments where there was only one corridor or avenue that had the treatment, and the other ones were all controls. So highly significant activity. And we found something that I can, my dream is be able to to attract a locust plague into a 55 gallon drum.

• 33:20Speaker 02

  We can put these in foggers, you know, in Africa, and just create a massive, huge attractiveness factor. The cool thing also is the attractiveness is not lethal. So that comes later. The infectious state of the mycelium, it grows, and then it penetrates the exoskeleton with a hyphal peg. It kind of anchors itself like a sticky little tongue. And then it dissolves the exoskeleton, the chitin, and then the hyphal peg invades into the body of the insect and mummifies them. So these are, many people heard about these zombie fungi, this is what they are. Some of them have a cordyceps representation, is a little club fungi. In Costa Rica and elsewhere in the subtropics, the, um, um, many of the ants there are well-known

• 34:05Speaker 02

  for the leaf cutter ants and other ants are known that they have to get infected with this fungus, they climb to the top canopy of, of the trees and they lock their mantabul underneath a leaf and boing, a mushroom comes out of their head and their anus. Uh, and it sporulates, and this way the fungus gets to sporulate in free air conditions, high up in the canopy. So it causes uncontrolled behavior of climbing with these insects. So this, I am, it's, so that was breakthrough. And the reason why, and I ended up licensing this to a group of investors and I got a million dollars. And so I like to tell my daughter, um, she was very instrumental in this. And, um, the licensing agreement had some limits on it. They had to take it to market within five years.

• 34:50Speaker 02

  I pulled back the licensing agreement. Um, and they didn't take it to market, so I pulled it back and everything's actually quite friendly. Um, but it's a little bit of a mystery why it did not make it to market. Um, and I have a lot of conspiracy theories as to why it did not make it to market. Um, I hesitate to mention those. Um, but I was given a chunk of change and I was smart enough to realize that they can't crush this and that was a condition. This has to come to market, if it doesn't come to market, then I get the patent rights back. And now I've been issued, uh, nine patents on this. People can go to the US Patent homepage and look them up. The latest patent that I, it was issued on this two years ago is really phenomenal.

• 35:31Speaker 02

  Because I have patents on antiviral properties of mycelium. And I have these patents on these entomopathogenic fungi for all insects and all diseases vectored by insects. It doesn't get bigger than that.

• 35:46Tim Ferriss?

  What, are there any types and, and, uh, there are a number of different areas I want to dig deeper. Are there, are there any particular common viruses or particularly lethal viruses that you've seen applications for using mycelium?

• 36:06Tim Ferriss?

  In terms of resistance or defeating?

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, well, there's a lot of examples of that. And so I published an article in a journal, peer-reviewed journal called Herbogram, in June of 2001, summarizing all the literature that's been published on the anti-viral properties of mushroom mycelium. It was a whopping one-page-long with like six references, there's virtually very, very little out there. Well, that was in June of 2001. September 11th, 2001, you know, 9/11 occurred. Very quickly, the greatest concern for the US Defense Department and biosecurity was

• 36:51Speaker 02

  weaponizable viruses, pox viruses, you know, anthrax is a bacterium. The anthrax attacks occurred a few weeks later. A group of researchers in the US Defense Department who were scavenging the literature saw my article. And I said, "Wow, there's some evidence here." And they contacted me because I have a very large library. Now, it may seem large to people who don't have libraries. I have about 800 strains of different species of mushrooms, many of which collected from the old growth forest. So some libraries have 20,000, you know, cultures. So I'm small compared to them, but I'm private. I'm not a big institution. And so they said, "Well, listen, you've published some interesting articles here. There's some evidence.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  We have been funded by Dick Cheney and George Bush. Ironically, I have a debt of gratitude to them with the Bioshield bio-defense programs called Project Bio-Defense, but then became known as the Bioshield program." And so they elicited my support, and then I began to send them cultures of mushrooms boiled in hot water, ethanol extracts of the mushrooms, the mycelium that gave rise to the mushrooms. Et cetera, et cetera. So I ended up sending out sets of a hundred of these samples. I mean, for me, this is a coup d'etat. I have government laboratories that'll give me free research, you know, on my extracts.

• 38:16Speaker 02

  And so we started sending these out and didn't hear from them for a while. And I even realized I was really disorganized. It was a new program. And I got a colonel, I'd love to mention his name, he worked at Fort Detrick, you know, where they have smallpox and, you know, it's a bioweapons facility, biohazard facility of the US government with the most pathogenic bacteria and viruses and other disease organisms. And so I had an MD person who was my controller. Federal Express one day, you know, about two months later after I submitted the extracts, delivered this big package of research reports on anti-pox properties, smallpox properties of our extracts.

• 39:00Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, going through it, no activity, no activity. I get the sample number 78, high activity against pox viruses. And then sample 81, high activity. Sample 88, high activity. Whoa. I mean, it's like, you know, you're looking at not effective, no results in the first 77 pages, you know, it's pretty disappointing. Then bam. I got really excited, so I called my colonel at Fort Detrick and I said, these results are amazing, it's exciting. And he goes, what results? I go, the results that Federal Express had delivered to me. He goes, you're not supposed to get those, I am. I said, well, I'll take a photocopy and I'll send them to you. He didn't appreciate the humor, but it was a very, very bizarre time.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  And some very, very strange things occurred at that time. But we ended up finding that those three highly active results came from an old growth mushroom called Agaricon. Agarikon is the longest living mushroom in the world, number one or number two, some debate about that. It grows exclusively in the old growth forests, Northern California, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and a few sky islands in Europe, in the Alps, Slovenia, and Austria, on large trees. But it is an indicator species of an old growth forest. And those three anti-POX results came from three different, separate strains of agarikon

• 40:30Speaker 02

  that I had isolated from my many adventures in the old growth forest. So, whoa. This has got people very excited. Now, I'd love to be taken to the mat. I'm reference driven. Okay? So, anybody out there skeptical of this, you can do two things. You can Google my name, Stamets, National Public Radio, NPR, and POX, and you'll see a vetted press release interview on National Public Radio with me, the former Deputy Director of the FDA, and the head of one of the research divisions of BioShield Biodefense Program, Dr. Jack Seacrest from Southern Research University. So, and then, so because I'm in competition with pharma, and I'm a lone researcher, I

• 41:15Speaker 02

  have a little company, and I thought, well, I checked into this, and I already had this entomopathogenic fungi patents that were just, you know, tremendous achievements, because the entire pesticide industry missed all that. So I thought, well, if this is novel, I should protect myself, so I filed a patent on it, on agarikon against viruses, particularly pox viruses, flu viruses, herpes. These are all the other results that we received. These extracts were highly active against multiple viruses, not just pox viruses.

• 41:47Tim Ferriss?

  Quick question for you. Is that prevent, for preventative use, curative use, both? What were the applications?

• 41:55Speaker 02

  This is, Tim, where I have to draw the line. Because these are in vitro, in vitro tests with human cells.

• 42:03Speaker 02

  And taking through three different testing protocols to the point where the next test is in a in vivo model.

• 42:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 42:14Speaker 02

  With an animal. So this is the best pharmaceutical drug discovery that you can go through before you get it, get it, go to a living host. These are living human cells in vitro, not in vivo. In vivo means it's the, you know, a small mammal, like a mouse, you know, a rat, you know, a monkey, or it goes into human clinical studies.

• 42:38Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 42:39Speaker 02

  So these are vitro tests. And to be, even though we have identified now the molecules that are active against smallpox. We worked with the University of Mississippi School of Pharmacy under Dr. Simir Ross. We did a bioguided fractionation over many years, and we have identified two new anti-pox molecules more potent than Cydothivir, which is the preeminent comparative antiviral drug control with less toxicity and more efficacy than Cydothivir. But, that being said, there's clearly an upregulation of the immune system. And so what is the contribution of these molecules versus upregulating of the immune system? Is there a combination of both?

• 43:23Speaker 02

  Is there synergism? There's multiple molecules being engaged, multiple immune pathways. This is where you can get lost, you cannot see the forest for the trees. If you end up focusing so much on the mechanisms of action and don't see the result, if you were infected with one of these viruses, you really don't care about the mechanism of action, you just wanted to know whether you could overcome the virus or not. So, we have found the anti-pox molecules. We have not yet found the anti-flu or the anti-herpes molecules to date. And I have another really good example of, is specific to your original question, of the mycelium being active against viruses.

• 44:08Tim Ferriss?

  Can I pause for one quick second?

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 44:11Tim Ferriss?

  I have to know what happened after the lieutenant call, because I imagine someone on his end had to have their head rolled for that type of security breach by mailing FedEx to the wrong place with those research reports. What happened after that?

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 44:27Speaker 02

  I don't have to make up these stories. I don't have to make up any stories. They're too good to be true as they are, but this is what happened. I was in Canada. I'm speaking to you right now from Cortez Island, British Columbia. I was up here on Cortez Island, and one of my employees called up and said, "Paul, there's a helicopter buzzing around the laboratories." I go, "No big deal. Helicopters fly over all the time." And he goes, "No, it's really low." And I go, "How low?" And he goes, "Listen," he puts his cellphone up to the air, "chum, chum, chum, chum, chum." I go, "Well," I go, "what are the numbers on the tail?" He goes, "There are no numbers. It's a Black Hawk military helicopter that's right on top of the laboratories." I go, "Oh, my God. You're kidding."

• 45:10Speaker 02

  I go, and this is right after we got the POCs results, right after I talked to the Colonel, you know, like two weeks later, a week later. And I said, "Okay, listen, shut down the business." And I knew immediately, you know, the government's going to screw up here, and they're going to, and an abundance of caution, they're going to end up overstepping their bounds. And I said, "This is crazy. I've already been vetted. I've already been permitted. I've already in dialogue with these people, and they're trying to spook me? I mean, what's going on here?" So I shut down the business. At the time, I only had ten employees. Now I have a hundred. And I said, "So shut down the business. Give the cultures of Agarcon to several of the employees. I never want to know who has them. You know, let's decentralize ourselves as a target right now." And so I shut down the business. All the employees left, you know, and the helicopter's

• 45:54Speaker 02

  still buzzing around. And so the next day, I called up, pretty pissed off, to the Colonel, saying, "What is going on?" You know? And he got really nervous. Now, he's got two black eyes, right? They deliver the wrong results, the right results to the wrong person. And now, you know, he goes, "Oh, the government, you know, on one hand doesn't talk to the other, and they got over-exuberant, and, you know, and, you know, terrorists got this technology that could immunize themselves, and they're..." And it's like, whatever, you know? So... Anyhow, it's funny because I was going through the airports. I got five stars on every single airline ticket. I just joked to my wife, here we go again. I'm gonna get stopped and searched, you know?

• 46:39Speaker 02

  And then after this, then all those, those five stars got taken away and I streamed through security, no problem. But I was obviously suddenly on their radar because I'm, I'm non-conventional. Um, but the fact that I'm here today actually makes me more of a patriotic American than I was before. So anyhow, so this is, so I filed these patents, a, a, a patent on, on a Garacon versus these viruses. I filed it in 2004. You can look this up. Go to the US Patent homepage. You'll see my filing dates. I filed this patent in 2004, 2009, 11 was 2001. So I had to write the patent, get more research results. We got lots and lots of positive results from the Bioshield program. I think they, they, I, I talked to one of the researchers last year and he goes, do

• 47:23Speaker 02

  you know that we analyzed 2,392 of your samples? And I'm like, I'm so glad I didn't have to pay for that. But we got about 40 excellent hits from my 800 or so cultures, um, that were surprising, uh, which has led into, I think, a paradigm shifting solution that, for many of the problems that we face today. But I filed this patent in 2004. 2006 is not even on the Patent Application homepage. Anybody out there who didn't know about patents, usually six months to a year, the patent application shows up at the USPTO.gov website, US Patent and Trademark Office.gov website. And it didn't show up. It's over two years.

• 48:08Speaker 02

  So I called up my patent attorney going, you know, what is going on here? He gets a hold of the Patent Office and the Department of Defense took the patent out of the Patent Office because of national security.

• 48:19Speaker 02

  I said, "You're kidding." That's kind of a pat on my back. I was like, "Wow, really? You think it's that important?" But I said, "That's not right." So we did an intergovernmental agency trace and a request. And the DOD finally released a patent to go back into the queue. And so 10 years after I submitted a patent application. Now, folks, usually two to three years, you get a ruling. 10 years after I submitted the patent, it was approved.

• 48:45Tim Ferriss?

  That's a long wait.

• 48:47Speaker 02

  That's a long wait. The good news is it's approved in 2014, so I've got 17 years. And the whole thing about patents, I mean, we would not be talking today if there weren't patents. People think, you know, patents become open source after 17 years. The idea is to reward the inventor, to incentivize things to come to market. Because a patent that is not practiced is not useful or beneficial to society, you know, within that 17 years or outside the 17 years. It has to be brought to market. There has to be a commercial incentive. Patents are awarded for three reasons. One, no prior art. No evidence in the scientific or popular literature of anyone saying is having the same idea. Two, unobviousness.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  You want experts saying, "Paul Stamets, you're full of BS. This will never work." And so I have a message to all my critics out there. I want to say, "Thank you. You have helped me so much in ways that you did not intend, but I'm really happy that some people come out and say..." And the third is usefulness. So that's the three things. No prior art, contrary to conventional wisdom, you know, and usefulness. And so, you know, obviously, that fits all three of those categories. So then the pox molecules, I have not patented. They're open source. Hopefully, we'll never have a smallpox epidemic or pandemic again. And I think that's obviously serves a greater good.

• 50:12Tim Ferriss?

  Another follow-up question that, out of self-interest, I'd love to ask, related to the carpenter ants. For people who are eager to try to address something with carpenter ants specifically, are there any current recommendations that you would have, number one? And then, talking about conventional, or contrary to conventional wisdom, I think at this point, people are wondering, how did this guy become so obsessed with this stuff? So I do want to roll back the clock and talk about, among other things, your stutter. But first, I have to know, is there anything you would recommend as it relates to carpenter ants, or is it a waiting game?

• 50:51Speaker 02

  Well, the test of a patent is that it's reproducible. The EPA and USDA now are allowing this fungus in food handling facilities, the first fungus ever to be allowed for controlling insects in food handling facilities. And is that safe? The safety documents supplied by the EPA are now open source and in public domain. So the companies that did all the research proving that this fungus was not dangerous, now have released all their commercial interest in it. The strain of Meterysium called F52 is a public domain strain. So

• 51:32Speaker 02

  what I'm saying is, you're not legal for you to go out and use this and commercialize it without EPA registration, but the test of the patent is reproducible. And so, all of the methods for doing this is published. And I just submitted my entire portfolio with all my research, you know, and all eight or nine patents, all the documentation of all these companies that have done the research, you know, in themselves. And I've submitted to a very, very well-known company that has an extremely potent insecticide that many people know that use it on the market.

• 52:12Speaker 02

  And the word I got back is, why would we want to disrupt a proven profit wheel? It's something that, my ants did not re-invade for 10 years. Because after the ants were killed, the carpenter ants, they sporulated. So the spore repellency property prevented future invasions. That's not a very good economic model. When you can treat a house once and they don't come back. A far better economic business plan is having a consumer buying it every month and spraying toxic chemicals that kill the workers but don't kill the queen. The whole key to this is the mycelium is taken back into the nest like a Trojan horse. It's presented to the queen, who then spreads it to the brood.

• 52:56Speaker 02

  And they're all living in this honey, this sort of myceliated palace. And then, before they realize it, vroom, it sporulates and it kills the queen. They can kill the queen, it can control the colony. After it sporulates, the spore repellency property prevents other carpenter ants from coming into your house. So it's a 10-year solution for about 25 cents. That's what it costs to produce. Of course, the packaging and all that stuff, you add up the numbers pretty quickly, but it's incredibly, it's very inexpensive to produce. And it can be produced in huge quantities. So it did not make it to market, and I'm exasperated.

• 53:39Speaker 02

  I have one really great story on this, that this woman named Chris, that works for a company that has three letters in their name. She was given the mandate because their stockholders were really upset because of the reputation of this company causing toxic spills that harmed thousands of people. And they wanted to, the Green Movement, can you find green solutions? She was given the mandate to find a green solution to replace toxic insecticides. She was given a budget, she found me. We dialogued for months, I gave her samples, she set up experiments. Two of the researchers were so excited, they called me up at home. And both of them said, I'm not supposed to be telling you this, but this is the most

• 54:24Speaker 02

  exciting thing we've ever seen in our life, you know, as entomologists, in fighting these problems. She went to the board of directors prior to going. We connected, went over the data together, messaging, you know, how to create, you know, the most clear communication to the board of directors, all men. And she was a steel magnolia. I've never met her in person. I wanted to hire her immediately. She ran these meetings just so professionally. And she was really excited and she went, goes in. The next day in the afternoon, I'm waiting for her call and she calls. And the person on the phone is so angry. I'm going, who is this? And I go, this is Chris. She goes, I'm so angry, I can't see straight.

• 55:08Speaker 02

  I go, I mean, she's totally composed before and she's lost her composure. I go, Chris, what happened? She goes, I went in there, I made my presentation. All men, they looked at me steely eyed. And she said, this is the best. You gave me this mandate, I found something, this is a game changer. Again, we can come with an ecologically rational and sustainable solution based on nature.

• 55:34Speaker 02

  And they looked at her in a dour face. And then the chairman of the company looked at her and said, Chris, your budget never was in research, it was in advertising.

• 55:45Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, God.

• 55:47Speaker 02

  Very much similar to BP, remember, Beyond Petroleum? How much of BP's budget actually is in alternative fuels versus how much is in oil? Now, how much of their advertising budget is in alternative fuels as opposed to oil? I mean, clearly, it's called greenwashing. And so that was, and I just, so that happened like seven or eight years ago. And then this past month, I just had the same thing happen again. It's a disruptive technology. It rocks the apple cart and many of these exercises are coming from the petroleum industry as byproducts from their waste material.

• 56:24Tim Ferriss?

  So I want to talk disruptive and something challenging to the status quo and contrary to most conventional wisdom. But that requires going way, way back and talking a bit about perhaps your childhood, which you described in part already. But when did you develop a stutter? And? Why don't you still have a stutter?

• 56:51Speaker 02

  Uh, but I started stuttering when really when I was um about five years old. I mean, I started from the time that I could talk. Um, my family was dysfunctional. And I've been told that sometimes the type of stuttering that I have is a is related to a defect, a neurological development in the seventh and eighth month. That's one possible reason. But the type of stuttering I have, anyone seen The King's Speech? I had that and worse. So I

• 57:26Speaker 02

  you know, just could not speak. And I'd find alternative pathways to trick my brain with a prepositional or adverbial phrase. Because your brain gets further ahead than your mouth can articulate. And then you become self-conscious. And the type of stutterer that I am, as most stutterers, we don't stutter when we sing. We don't stutter. If I start speaking in a British accent, uh, or you create an accent. And you don't stutter when you talk to animals. So it's a very interesting, it's a something that's triggered by social contact. And so it was very difficult for me to date ladies. They wanted the super jocks, the self-assured men. And I was a stutterer.

• 58:12Speaker 02

  And so I always stared at the ground and I found fossils, I found mushrooms. Um, but it's very difficult for me. Now, I grew up in a small town in Ohio. And my dad was a officer on the aircraft carrier, the Intrepid. And so during World War II, so after World War II, he got the Intrepid Aircraft Carrier Radio. And it was in our basement. And so my brother John, who was very interested in chemistry, uh, he created this huge, you know, huge, like three racks of chemicals, you know, in the basement and his laboratory. He had Bunsen burners, all sorts of experiments going all the time. And, but he never let me quote unquote, "play in the laboratory." I could play on the radio. And I could watch him, but he's my older brother. I was the youngest one in my family, so.

• 58:58Speaker 02

  And so John went on to Yale, my brother Bill went on to Cornell. And they left, and they left me in this laboratory. So my dream was always to have a laboratory, you know, and living in the country. And that's kind of what I'm doing now. But John, when he came back from Yale, he came back with a book called Altered States of Consciousness by Charles Tartt. And it was an anthology of research articles on changing your consciousness. From either drugs, or from spinning, or from dreams. It's one of the early books, from yours to California Davis. So John lent me this book, and I said, Johnny, I'd never like to see it, but he says, well, listen, I'm on break for two weeks, but I need the book because it's part of our class.

• 59:40Speaker 02

  So I got this book, and I'm just devouring this book, you know, and and John was my hero. He was my mentor. John went to Mexico and Colombia, came back with incredible stories of magic mushrooms and consuming them. You know, I just, I adored him, and of course, I wanted to do the same, then he gave me this book, and so I'm really getting excited about this, but my best friend, Ryan Snyder, wanted also to read this book. And so Ryan goes, can I borrow your book, your brother's book? And I go, sure, you can borrow it, but I need it back. And so he was giving it back to me in two or three days. So several days passed, and I asked Ryan about the book, and he hemmed and hawed, and a week later, where's the book? And he wouldn't respond, sort of looking me in the eye. Always a good sign. Yeah.

• 1:00:25Speaker 02

  So I go, where's my book, where's my brother's book? Then two weeks, and my other John's now pressuring me, Paul, I need that textbook, you know, as part of the class. So I finally got a hold of Ryan, and I said, where is my brother's book? And Ryan said, Paul, I can't give it back to you. And I said, why? So my dad found it and burned it. I said, your dad burned my brother's book? What? He goes, yeah, it was considered to be counterculture and threatening, you know, to our family, you know, structure and all. I go, I could not believe it. I was so upset, and I was so apologetic to my brother, who did not take it well.

• 1:01:09Speaker 02

  You know, like, last time I'm gonna trust you, um, to have a scene. So I was really bad, and so, so, but I thought to myself, you know, if this was so disturbing to this alpha male, you know, conservative, you know, neocon-like personality, then I think I found a subject I'm gonna explore more. So that got me into magic mushrooms, and from my experience, and also tremendous amount of guilt for my brother trusting me with this textbook, and I couldn't return it to him. So John was really interested in this subject, he inspired me.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  And then John went on to chemistry, then neurophysiology, University of Washington Medical School on full scholarship and I was left in the laboratory and so I started experimenting with marijuana. I remember the DEA came to Columbia, Ohio, they had a whole display of drugs and a whole bunch of me and my friends just went there to look at them. Wow, look at that one. How old were you at the time? Fourteen, fifteen years of age. I mean, drugs on display, drugs you've heard about and you've never seen. Look how small that LSE is, that's incredible. So, I still had this really bad stuttering habit and it was really socially debilitating on multiple levels. And so I ended up, and I was in Ohio, and I ended up buying a bag of magic mushrooms.

• 1:02:31Speaker 02

  I was not really into the drug scene, so I didn't really know how things should cost, you know. So I, for twenty bucks, I bought a bag. And I just, I knew set and setting was really important, but I had no guide, nobody else in my little circle was into it. And so there was a really great walk that I would like to walk in the woods, up on the hills, and beautiful rolling hills of Ohio, northern Ohio. And I thought, okay, set and setting's important. So I took the bag and I thought, that would be one dose. It was not one dose, folks. I probably ate about twenty grams. Oh my god. Of Psilocybe cubensis. Now, in defense of this, I need to make it clear, these were not grown, these were harvested. And so they were exposed to the sun, so they may have

• 1:03:16Speaker 02

  been only equivalent to like ten grams of cubensis. For people who are listening, five grams of Psilocybe cubensis is the hero's journey. You know, you're full-blown, you're into starscape, you're changing dimensions, you're fractal patterns, the air becomes a sea of mathematical formulas and your mind is opened up, your heart's opened up, you feel one with the universe. That's the hero's journey, that's five grams. You know, you really don't get that until going over three grams, you start getting into it. But, so ten to twenty grams is the superhero's journey. I've never eaten these before. And so I walked, I was walking into this place, about an hour walk, I started consuming them and drinking

• 1:03:56Speaker 02

  water because they were dried. And then I saw a tree that I love climbing. And this tree had its limbs, so it was a perfect climbing tree, and at the very top of a hill. So I thought that's a great place. I mean, set and setting, getting a good view, that's what I need. I could feel the mushrooms coming on. As I climbed up the tree, you know, stem, branch by branch, I got higher and higher. So it was kind of a ascending euphoria, you know, that kind of, kind of went with everything. It was very cool. And I got to the top of the tree and beautiful landscape. And I'm up there and just the mushrooms are coming on. I'm getting higher and higher. And I just realized, well, I'm really getting high here. And it's a little, it's dizzying. So I'm holding on to the tree. And on the horizon, this

• 1:04:41Speaker 02

  big, black bank of boiling, dark, angry clouds. It was a summer storm coming in. In Ohio, when you see the summer storms, they're terrifying. I mean, there are lightning bolts coming down and thunder and lightning. It was often in the distance, but it was coming down to me really quickly. And I'm getting higher and higher as a thunderstorm, lightning storm's coming closer and closer. I'm getting vertigo. And I go, oh, my God, I, you know, I can't get off the tree. I don't want to fall. So I held on the tree for dear life. And it became my axis mundi, sort of my axis right into the earth. And I had this amazing experience. I mean, just beautiful experience, but also the threat of lightning coming closer and closer. And every lightning strike, it would hit and be fractal patterns would just emanate

• 1:05:25Speaker 02

  out from every lightning strike. And synesthesia occurred, you know, where there, you know, it's sound and, and, and visions were merging together. And, and sounds had visions and visions had sounds. And it was just incredibly complex. You know, one of my favorite books is The Glass Bead Game by, by Herman Hesse, also called Magister Ludi. It's a rather erudite. He got the Nobel Prize for it in 1955. But that, that was a deep dive into, into inner space exploration. But I felt like I was a part of the glass bead game. And there I was, I was ascending into this higher state of consciousness. And then I realized, oh, my God, I'm in the highest.

• 1:06:10Speaker 02

  Point in miles during a lightning storm. This is not a good place to be. And then I was up there, I was terrified and the lightning storm came closer and closer. And I had these empathogenic, you know, just empathy for the universe. One, everything is fine. If I die here today, my life is complete. Now I understand I'm part of the fabric of all the matter that's around me. I'm one with everything. I'm made of stardust. Everything's made of stardust. This is a continuum of nature. Death is natural. Birth is natural. Transitions are just the way of existence. And then the lightning storm and the wind came up.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  I was washed with warm rain and it was just terrifying, a lightning storm. And I, I'm up there and I'm thinking, oh, I'm gonna die. But if I don't die, Paul, what are you gonna learn from this experience? Challenge yourself right now. This is all great and wonderful, but let's get down to brass tacks. What's your biggest issues? You're not gonna die. What's your biggest issue? I stuttering. So I'm having this dialogue with myself. I just can't overcome the stuttering habit. You know, I'm not stupid and I went to, for people to understand how bad it was. I was interviewed for special education because of my stuttering. Cause I couldn't read in class.

• 1:07:33Speaker 02

  And so when it was my turn to read, I, they would pass on me because no one had the patience to hear a stutterer. And please don't finish a stutterer's sentence. Look at them, smile and engage. Help them finish their sentence. Don't finish it for them. That robs them of the opportunity of overcoming this speech deficit. So I scored high in my test, so I didn't get to put into special education. But it was a pretty demoralizing to realize I'm gonna go in to the special education class. But I didn't. So I thought stuttering was my issue. And so I started saying to myself, Paul, stop stuttering now. You can do this. You're not stupid. You come from a very smart family.

• 1:08:18Speaker 02

  You have, you know, you can do this. And so I said, stop stuttering now, over and over and over again, hundreds, if not thousands of times. And the storm washed over me. I felt like I achieved a state of godhead. I felt enlightened. I come from a Christian background, so I had this empath- empathy with Jesus, you know, and now I understand why Jesus went into wilderness. Now I understand why Jesus, you know, said, "Don't go into churches, go into nature." Whatever, you know, that's my cultural background. But I saw, I, I connected on that level. And I realized, "Oh, my gosh, this is something I can overcome." So I came out of the tree, obviously did not get electrocuted. And I went back home, and then the next morning,

• 1:09:03Speaker 02

  there's this girl that I greatly admired, and she was super sweet and nice to me. And I really love her to this day because of her kindness. Um, and, and I didn't want to talk to her because every time I (mumbling) I (mumbling) You know, and then you get these half breaths going on, and then you can't get out of this loop. And, um, she's coming along the sidewalk in the morning, and she looks at me, and she's so sweet. She said, "Good morning, Paul. How are you?" And I cast my eyes up from the sidewalk, and I looked at her, and I said, "I'm doing fine. Thank you for asking." And I stopped stuttering, just like that.

• 1:09:47Speaker 02

  Now, I do have, I've had about four or five relapses, you know, um. If it's a lot of noise, and I've been drinking, and somebody asks me, "How do you grow mushrooms? It's like filling a well with a teaspoon." It's like, where do I begin, you know, it's like, so... Or if I'm meeting somebody super famous or something like that, you know, but that's natural. You know, people get stage fright, um, when they're, you know, so... But it's, it's something that I think is really important because there's one other aspect that's related to hearing that I want to mention, and I have a really good friend, he's passed on now, named Bill Webb, he's lived in Big Sur, California. And I was 19 years old when I wrote my first book, Psilocybin, Mushrooms and Their Allies.

• 1:10:32Speaker 02

  I was self-trained, I got involved in the University of Washington with Dr. Daniel Stunt's part of a taxonomy key council. And I adopted the taxonomy of psilocybin mushrooms as my speciality. And at that time, there's very little literature on it. Most of the books and libraries have been razored, the pages have been razored out. Dr. Stunt's had an intact library, so I could study with him, I became a taxonomist. I wrote Taxonomic Keys, starting when I was nineteen or twenty, and that became the core of my book. So I'm, I have this manuscript, and I go to Montana Books in Seattle to pitch the book. And Montana Books is producing some, some gay-friendly literature, and they were on the cutting edge. And I was recommended that I see them, and so I made an appointment. I go up to Seattle,

• 1:11:17Speaker 02

  and I'm meeting the head of Montana Books. And he goes, "You know, this is not our market. It's a, you know, interesting subject. Really what you need is a book agent." And he goes, "The best book agent I know is Bill Webb, and I haven't seen him in two years." And at the sounds of those words, a little bell jingles on the front door of Montana Books. And in walks Bill Webb. And the publisher's going, "No way." So Bill and I became tight friends. He invited me down to Big Sur. He was a friend of, of, of Henry Miller. Um, and, um, and was just a really fantastic individual.

• 1:12:00Speaker 02

  He became a father figure to me at a really critical time in my life. And so Bill and I, we did journeys together, you know, sacred journeys. With, and he loved my Obi-Wan Kenobi. You realize I'm, you know, nineteen, twenty years of age. I'm with a seventy-five-year-old, you know, who, who's a friend of Ansel Adams. He had Ansel Adams' library of, of, of many of his imprints. And working with his wife and curating them. I mean, really cultured, intellectually interesting guy. Beautiful place. And so Bill and I tripped several times, and it was a wonderful experience for me. And it brings tears to my eyes just talking about Bill. And so Bill, he died about fifteen years ago. And Bill calls me up about three or four months before he dies.

• 1:12:46Speaker 02

  And he goes, "Paul, I have to tell you something that's so important." And Bill says, "I haven't heard from you in years. How's it going?" And he goes, "Well, frankly, life sucks. I've lost, losing my sight, I'm losing my hearing. I can't hear the waves, so the seagulls now. I live above the cliffs of Big Sur, except for this damn hearing aid, which is always malfunctioning." And I said, "I hate it, but I've got to tell you something that's so important that you know." And I go, "Okay, Bill." And I said, "What is it?" And Bill goes, "No, I really want you to listen, Paul. This is important." I go, "Bill, I understand." And then he kind of kept on emphasizing it. And so finally, I got frustrated. "Bill, I got the message, okay? I know what you're gonna tell me is important." He goes, "I wanna make sure that you tell other people. Will you promise me?" And I go, "I promise you."

• 1:13:28Speaker 02

  He said, "Paul, I think I found something medically very important about psilocybin." I go, "What?" He said, "Well, I went on the hero's journey." I was, you know, took out my hearing aid. I'm lying, you know, in full bliss, one with the universe. You know, he's like eighty years age, or eighty-two years of age when he's doing this by himself. And he's like, "No, I can hear the seagulls. I can hear the waves." I go, "Oh, my gosh, I can hear everything." And he reached for his hearing aid. He didn't have it in. And he goes, "Oh, my gosh, I can hear." And then he heard this click, click, click, click, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And he looked around going, "That's weird. That's an unusual sound." And click, click, click, click, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. Click, click. And he goes, he couldn't figure out what it was.

• 1:14:12Speaker 02

  And he looked around. He looked around. And finally, he saw what it was. There are ants walking on the deck, and he was hearing their footsteps.

• 1:14:21Tim Ferriss?

  That is wild.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  Now, this is where even I, and I'm a liberal kind of guy, I'm going, "Wait a second, you know? Tell me that again, you know?" And that's why Bill set me up by saying, "You have to tell other people this." So I've been working with Roland Griffiths at Johns Hopkins University, the clinical studies on psilocybin, etc. And I really emphasize this to many of the researchers. They could easily do a test, you know, while these patients are in session, to test their hearing, to see if they have increased sensitivity, increased range, tonal ranges. It's a very easy metric. But I think what happened with me on the tree in the lightning storm

• 1:15:05Speaker 02

  is that I created a new neurological pathway of articulating my thoughts and overcoming the social phobia. The social phobia is a trigger. It's definitely an environmental trigger. And then we get locked into these loops that are really, really strange. Another good thing to tell a stutterer is, can you demonstrate different ways of stuttering? They'll do it!

• 1:15:34Speaker 02

  You want me to stutter? Different ways of stuttering? I'll give you three different ways of stuttering. And it's so it's really weird.

• 1:15:40Tim Ferriss?

  So does that act as a pattern interrupt that helps them to overcome at least temporarily the stuttering? Or is it just useful for a non-stutterer to hear different ways of stuttering?

• 1:15:51Speaker 02

  Hmm. I hadn't thought of that. That's I'm not sure how to answer that. But I do think that once a new neurological pathways are established, you can capitalize on them by re-remembering them. And this is the thing that Johns Hopkins University, some of the most surprising results is 14 months after these experiences, when many of the patients said it was the most important spiritual experience of their lives. 14 months afterwards, not only did they have demonstrable benefits, being nicer people, being a better parent, a better husband, socially more well-adapted. But the fact that they re-remembered the experience,

• 1:16:35Speaker 02

  re-enforced those benefits that they experienced directly after the experience. So a lot of people, people who are listening may not understand, these are not drugs of abuse. You eat these mushrooms one day, the next day you're like, no way. I'm not going to hear those things. You look at them and you've got the repellency property, right? The psilocybin repellency property, like, I'm not touching those for months. But boy, that was a great experience, you know? So these are not substances of abuse. But they're shockingly powerful to the point that you're not ready for the hero's journey for a long time. So these are not drugs of abuse by any stretch of the imagination. They really should be re-categorized as a therapeutic drug.

• 1:17:17Tim Ferriss?

  Definitely. And this, this in many ways relates to your, well, it relates to a few of your previous stories very well in so much as, A, psilocybin is very challenging as a medical model in In several respects, one of which is that it does not require, say, daily or weekly administration. And it is economically difficult to create a for-profit model unless you are monetizing a therapy and adjunct pre and post support and things of that type. The not, and the, the sort of one and done, or three times and done aspect of it actually

• 1:18:01Tim Ferriss?

  makes it very challenging to commercialize and make widespread unless you're relating on, or relying on donations, excuse me. I would love to hear your thoughts, just to expand on this a little bit. Do you think, say, psilocybin, or another that I know very little about but wanted to discuss with you, but we can talk about both or either, say, lion's mane. Are there, in this case, should I say mushrooms, or should I say mycelium, or mycelia? What would be the right way to, what would be the right term to use here?

• 1:18:35Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, mushrooms.

• 1:18:37Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. I'm sorry.

• 1:18:39Speaker 02

  Mushrooms, mushrooms are what people know. But mycelium is emerging as a tremendously important reservoir of many bioactive molecules that are supersede the benefit of mushrooms. Twenty-five, and whole genome sequencing of reishi mushrooms in the genus Ganoderma, these, the common Lingza, Lingchi, Lingcher, reishi, Manantaki, the 10,000-year mushroom, the mushroom of immortality, these are all common names out of Asia. There are 25% more genes are active and expressed in the mycelial form than it is in the fruit body form. The fruit body is a mushroom form, it's the end of its life cycle.

• 1:19:19Speaker 02

  So, much of our research has found going side-by-side comparisons of mushrooms, which are protein-rich, they're beta-glucan-rich, they have lots of carbohydrates and polysaccharides, they're nutritionally dense, but the mycelium is articulating constantly a bio shield of defense. And from exposure, when the mushrooms form... Good luck to any bacterium that's gonna rot it. It's gonna, it's gonna spoil it in four or five days and then gives itself up anyhow. Moreover, I think that the sequence of bacteria that rots mushrooms is absolutely instrumentally important for the evolution of the ecosystem to give rise to the trees that create the debris fields that feed the mycelium. So these are deterministic microbiomes.

• 1:20:04Speaker 02

  And the mycobion, the fungal biome, is determining the microbiome. Because many of the bacteria are adversarial, some are commensal, some are actually mutualistically beneficial. So the mycelium is this articulation of this network that because of epigenesis, the ability to respond to environmental stimuli and upregulate and express new gene expressions, it is a fertile ground for learning, for being able to articulate responses to new challenges in the environment. The mushroom fruit body is at the end of this thing, but, you know, people are attracted to mushrooms and they fear that typically nature, that which is ephemeral. Now, we're around trees and we're around dogs and animals and plants for weeks, months,

• 1:20:50Speaker 02

  years. So the familiarity factor of constant exposure day to day gives us some confidence in, oh, that animal's not gonna attack me, or that plant is one that my ancestors have been using and, and we understand it. But mushrooms that come up and disappear in four or five days, some can feed you, some can kill you, some can heal you, some can send you on a psychoactive journey. That which is so powerful but so ephemeral is naturally to be afraid of them. So we have about 200 species of mushrooms that are edible medicinal. I don't know the difference between edible medicinal anymore. All edible mushrooms have medicinal properties. But the mycelium expresses a lot more of these compounds. And with lion's mane, there's a group of aronacins.

• 1:21:35Speaker 02

  Now, the lion's mane mushroom is called Heristium aronaceous. That's a Latin binomial.

• 1:21:40Tim Ferriss?

  Paul, I don't want to interrupt, but I just want to pause for one second to plant a seed and we can come back to it, or spore and come back to it later, which is potential applications to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. But I don't want to interrupt, I just want to plant that seed so that I don't forget it myself. So, please continue.

• 1:21:57Speaker 02

  So the aronacins are some of the strongest nerve growth factors ever discovered by science. NGF factors are called nerve growth factors. And they regenerate myelin on the axons of nerves. So now lion's mane is perfectly legal. Um, it has a long history of use, multi thousands of years, uh, history of use. It looks like a, a, a casc- it looks like pom poms that cheerleaders use. It's white cascading crystals, uh, uh, uh, uh, descending, uh, um, uh, teeth. Um, and it's a beautifully, beautiful mushroom. It tastes like shrimp or lobster when you add butter to it, when you cook it.

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  But the compounds that are most neurogenerative are in from the mycelium, not from the mushrooms. And so the aerenacins are from the mycelium. Hericinones are another group of neuro factors. They're from the mushrooms. But the aerenacins by far, much more neuroregenerative. There's been several clinical studies that have come out on mild cognitive dysfunction out of Japan. Um, and they are very promising as an, as a, it's the first smart mushroom. Well, psilocybin mushroom may be the first smart mushroom in my mind, but, but, but lion's mane mushrooms is one mushroom that I take it on a daily basis. My mother takes it on a daily basis. She's almost ninety-three years of age and a few days. Uh, she's smart as a whip.

• 1:23:20Speaker 02

  She beat my two brothers in Scrabble, uh, not too long ago, which was a lot of fun. I went, really? I told my brothers, mom beat you in Scrabble, you know? Uh, my twin brother goes, whoa, you know, she got lucky. And I go, oh, that was a clean win then, because my brother was very defensive. But, but nevertheless, my, my, the lion's mane mushrooms, I think, are extremely helpful, uh, to, for rent neuropathies. And I think stacking them with psilocybin, something I'm really keen on, is doing microdosing of psilocybin stacked with lion's mane. Now, lion's mane in and of itself, we know has neuroregenerative properties. It's a big subject of research.

• 1:24:00Speaker 02

  If you go to PubMed or Google Scholar Alerts, you know, put in lion's mane and neuroregeneration or NNGF factors. And you'll, you'll, there's several dozen peer reviewed articles extensively exploring, um, the regeneration of, of myelin, which is the conductive sheath on the axons of nerves. And those who get Alzheimer's, if for instance, have, um, amyloid plaque formation that interrupts and de- erodes the myelin sheath, prevents neurotransmission.

• 1:24:30Speaker 02

  And so lion's mane mushrooms have been demonstrated behaviorally in people with cognitive tests, but also through dissection of mice. Prior to using lion's mane, they would inject these mice with a polypeptide that induces amyloid plaque formation. It's a very, very potent toxin that's neurotoxic. But it makes that of what happens to the nervous system of Alzheimer's patients because amyloid plaque formation can be, can form, their behavior changes, they lose the ability of navigating through mazes, they lose the novelty inquisitiveness factor, the short-term memory is basically erased, or much of it.

• 1:25:14Speaker 02

  And then when they fed them lion's mane mushrooms, and they dissected those mice, and sure enough, they saw that the amyloid plaque formation was there. And then those fully diseased mice, when they would then feed them lion's mane mushrooms for 23 days, they regain the ability of navigating through mazes, they re-engage inquisitiveness. It's called the novelty response, the novelty experiment. And then upon dissecting those knife, and the resections of the tissue, they could see that the amyloid plaque had largely resolved, re-myelination had occurred. And so you bundle that with, you know, you've got a behavior as well as physical evidence of regeneration of myelin.

• 1:25:57Speaker 02

  So lion's mane mushrooms are just a very, very fascinating mushroom. I think about Einstein in his last days, I think about some of my mentors in mycology in their very last days, we are losing encyclopedic knowledge. These are mental giants that have so much to give to the next generation as part of our national heritage, our intellectual national heritage. And to lose these geniuses with all this experience, all this knowledge, all this sense of being and context, to lose them at the end of their life is us losing a library that just...

• 1:26:34Speaker 02

  As the library books that fall into pieces in your hands and I think it's so important for our cultures to preserve that knowledge and I think lion's mane mushroom is a huge one.

• 1:26:44Tim Ferriss?

  The the slow descent into sort of cognitive malfunction is is what I would cite when people ask me what I'm afraid of. I mean, that that is it. I mean, being trapped in your body without the cognitive capabilities that you would want or need to not just function but thrive. And I completely agree with you. This is something I've been fixated on for quite some time. If you were to

• 1:27:14Tim Ferriss?

  if you were to design a study involving the microdosing, microadministration of psilocybin under proper supervision and

• 1:27:25Tim Ferriss?

  you know, sort of researcher controls, what might, do you have any idea what that might look like? What the protocol might look like?

• 1:27:31Speaker 02

  That's a very timely question. Because in two hours from now, I have a group of

• 1:27:38Speaker 02

  of financial people that are key in supporting the current psilocybin research at John Topkins and elsewhere. They're arriving here specifically and staying with me for three days to talk about exactly this. I had an idea and I'm gonna probably open source this. I sometimes I file patents, I call them blocking patents. I file a patent that I think should be open source in order so other people can't get a patent on it and this might be in that category. It's this whole patent landscape, I'm I'm I see both sides of the arguments of open sourcing and then also keeping things closed source. But I filed a patent on neurogenesis, you can look it up, stacking lion's mane, psilocybin and niacin, nicotinic acid. Now,

• 1:28:23Speaker 02

  I spoke before, what is patentable is no prior art, it speaks against conventional wisdom.

• 1:28:30Speaker 02

  So, and when I gave a talk at MAPS, um, uh, recently, I asked the audience, about 800 people, how many people remember during the 1970s and 80s? It was well-known, especially on the West Coast, that if you want to come down from a bad trip on psilocybin or LSD, you could take a bunch of niacin. You'll get a hot flush, and people who don't know it, when you take like 500mg of niacin, you get red, and you get tingly all over your skin. You get this niacin flush. And about 50 people raised their hand. I actually recorded that. I needed that for my patentability. Because that was common knowledge that niacin counteracted the effects of psilocybin. I think not.

• 1:29:12Speaker 02

  Number one, there's no evidence that that's true, but it was common knowledge. Number two, because it excites the nerve endings, neuropathies oftentimes occur from the deadening of the nerves at the fingertips and the toes. It struck me that if I could excite the nerve endings, perhaps I could drive these lion's mane aerenacines and the psilocybin to the endpoints of the nervous systems, if the vascular system's still intact, to deliver these compounds to create neurogenesis and prevent neuropathy at the endpoints of the nervous system. So I filed a patent stacking niacin, psilocybin, and lion's mane.

• 1:29:53Speaker 02

  The psilocybin dosage is about 1/20 of a gram. Now, that is below the threshold of what people would experience, any change in consciousness. So I know lots of people who would not dare take a psilocybin mushroom. But the idea of taking 1/20 below threshold dose that would create neurogenesis and perhaps make them cognitively more astute, and make them a better person, you know, socially and intellectually, I know a lot of people are interested in that. And plus, it's kind of groovy, it's kind of sexy. You know, for these older people to say, but they're kids. Yeah, I'm microdosing, you know? Microdosing is extremely popular right now, as you probably are well aware. Definitely. But that's something that we would like to see a clinical study. Now, the clinical study, we already know, for the many clinicians out there,

• 1:30:38Speaker 02

  you have too many variables in your, in your clinical study, and I agree. So, we were looking at psilocybin alone, lion's mane alone, psilocybin stacked with, uh, with lion's mane. Uh, then niacin will have to come, um, later. Because it's just, you, and you need enough cohorts, enough people, um... Enrolled in the clinical study in order to have statistical significance, almost stuttered there.

• 1:31:06Speaker 02

  So that's what we're looking at is looking at stacking this and maybe do this clinical study in Canada. Right now, the FDA is very favorable to these clinical studies. I had a report from somebody met with the FDA regulators and their scientists, and they said they have never seen a drug that was so non-toxic, so effective from one treatment in the history of their looking at approving new drugs. And they were like, so the FDA scientists are quite focused on this. It's something we all, you know, the difference between a medicine and a toxin is dose. I wouldn't call psilocybin a toxin. Well, there's

• 1:31:51Speaker 02

  maybe one funny example that just came out in the literature of that, but I wouldn't call it necessarily a toxin, but having a sub-threshold dose, I think, makes a, is a, is a really valid approach because, and you probably shouldn't take these every day because you'd normalize the receptors, you know, and so washing the receptors and having them recalibrate themselves is probably a good thing to do. So pulse therapy, three to four days on, three to four days off, is probably a better approach than taking them every day. So the jury's out on that. I'm a lot of different opinions, but I've had some.

• 1:32:29Tim Ferriss?

  It's endlessly fascinating, though, and you are right on the money, so to speak, or lack of money, given how effective they are in limited number of sessions at the combination, which is certainly has been studied and is being studied of efficacy and low toxicity. And as you mentioned earlier, if a rat, if you put, and Michael Pollan and I've chatted about this a little bit in his podcast, but if you were to administer, say, to a rat in a box cocaine or heroin, and they have to choose between those drugs or food, they will consume these types of opiates or stimulants until they die to

• 1:33:12Tim Ferriss?

  the absence of food, whereas with, say, LSD, I would also assume psilocybin, they take one dose, and that's the last time they touch that particular pedal.

• 1:33:23Tim Ferriss?

  And this is, I don't want to take us too far afield and focus on this exclusively, but I really appreciate you having spent so much time thinking about how these natural companions who have coexisted and have been ingested by humans for thousands of years can be applied for some of these epidemic scale problems that we're experiencing. And I wanted to ask, we are going to talk about some of the applications of mushrooms outside of human medicine, but I would love to read a description of you, and then it relates to something we were chatting about a little bit before we started recording,

• 1:34:08Tim Ferriss?

  and talk about the decisions that made Paul Stamets Paul Stamets, because there are so many mycologists out there, I certainly don't know the exact number, but you are, if not the best known, certainly one of the best known, and the description is from Mother Jones, says, "Paul Stamets is a modern example of the amateur scientist from the 17th and 18th century who made wonderful contributions with only their native curiosity and keen sense of observation." And you can certainly comment on that if you don't feel like it's accurate, but what are the decisions you made, if any, come to mind, or habits you've cultivated that

• 1:34:52Tim Ferriss?

  have allowed you, helped you to arrive where you are? I mean, you have made many discoveries, you've excelled in multiple fields. Why is that? How did you become who you are in this current moment? And you can start anywhere. I don't want to be one of the people who asks you, "How do you grow mushrooms at a cocktail party?"

• 1:35:13Speaker 02

  I have been exposed to a circle of kindness, and I believe in karma. I was a child who had a lot of problems.

• 1:35:25Speaker 02

  And I want a big debt of gratitude to my professor, Dr. Michael Buug. He never humiliated me. And at the Evergains State College, I'd make some dumb statements. He was entertained by them. But entertained by them in a humorous way that engaged me to explore, you know, you know, and dive more deeply into the subject matter. But I was never humiliated. Um, and a circle of kindness. And I really believe in karma. Um, because this has been, this has been a huge thing in my life. Is the fact that, um, I believe evolution is an extension of gratitude and sharing.

• 1:36:06Speaker 02

  And it's not this necessarily this, this neo-Darwinian concept of competition. The first to food wins. It's a collaboration of people who are allied together with common interests. And we need to shepherd all of ourselves from our weaknesses to become stronger. Um, but very few, lots of people know this, but very few different schools of people know this. I got into martial arts when I was 14. I have two black belts. I had schools for 30, 40 years. Um, I have long-haired hippie, really nice person. And I, um, kind of turned into a different individual. I've been in thousands of fights. Um, I started at Aspen Academy of Martial Arts. I first got into Gojiru, Shodokan, Shitoru.

• 1:36:50Speaker 02

  Got my first black belt in Taekwondo and then began on Black Belt in Hwanrongdo, which is by far one of the most sophisticated styles in the world. Similar to Hap Kido and, and some other styles, Kuksul. But that, I had one experience that I think is emblematic of this. Is that I was an early young black belt in Taekwondo. And a big biker came in. He was just seething with anger and wired on amphetamines. And, um, and he wants to fight a black belt, you know? Just a biker dude and he just pissed off at the world. And he came in and, and number one, the head instructor does not fight at a challenge like this. They have too much to lose, you know? If they screw up, you know, they lose face in front of their students.

• 1:37:32Speaker 02

  So, you know, anyhow, my, my, the head instructor, Gene, said, Paul, I got another one. Okay. And so this biker came in and then said, "I'll let you fight one of my black belts. This is fine." So Paul, come over here. And so I came over there and was really polite. And you know, I extended my hand, shook my hand. He wouldn't shake my hand. He just was all piss and vinegar and wanted to fight me. And I said, "Well, we have a few rules. Take off your shoes," you know. And then we got on the mat and this guy just attacked me ferociously. I mean, it was not, not sort of like the boxers, you know, they have a little bit of like, "Okay, let's do it." You know, we have a little compassion for each other, you know, a little simpatico for another fellow warrior. Now, this guy was like out there hurting me. It's like block, block, block, block, blocking him.

• 1:38:17Speaker 02

  And this guy is just swinging and kicking and he can't kick well, number one, but he's just like overly aggressive. And you know, after a while, you know, you can block 10 or 20 times, but you know, you start getting hurt, right? You know, these are, these guys just ferociously trying to hurt me. And so I looked over at my head instructor and he nodded his head and said, "Okay, Paul, time to take him out."

• 1:38:41Speaker 02

  You know, did three or four punches, you know, sucker punched him, did a jumping hook kick, bam, hit him in the temple, bam, then he went down on the ground, you know, semi-conscious. And then I'm hovering over and I put my hand onto his trachea. I put my middle finger into the inside of his eyeball and that way I could pop his eyeball and pull out his trachea at the same time. Now, people are really concerned about their vision and also in their face, you know. So when you lock your finger into the eyeball and ready to take out the eyeball, people want to give up really fast. He was terrified. He had the look of like, "Oh, my God, I'm gonna lose my eyeball." And this guy's got, you know, he didn't, he was just waking up from being stunned from this kick, you know. And

• 1:39:25Speaker 02

  I got him like that and I knew I had, okay, this is it. Now I can take him out right now. This is the end of his life, you know, end of his, you know, basically he's done. And then I go. I released, I said, you know, you actually did really well. I extended my hand in friendship. He's laying on the mat. This big burly biker guy started crying. Cause I was nice to him. I took him down, but I wasn't glorifying in my win. I was extending my hand in friendship. Changed his life. When I left the school, he was a brown belt. He became this big teddy bear. He's shepherding all these little, I told him, listen, the girl here, she's got a yellow belt. You've got a white belt. You bow to her. That's the way it works here.

• 1:40:09Speaker 02

  It's based on your experience and respect. Totally changed his life. So, so that's a story of my life is that, you know, the extension of, and I think psilocybin mushrooms make people nicer people. I just really believe that. There is this understanding that your life is not just your life. Your life is in the context of nature. And how are we going to inspire and lead and promote the forces of good and generosity and mutualism? And how are we going to get away from the people who want to tear it all down? My, my work with bees, I think is, is the, is the cause celebre of my life.

• 1:40:49Tim Ferriss?

  And we're definitely gonna dig into that. I, I absolutely want to explore it. I was just gonna echo what you said about the power of kindness. A friend of mine, very good friend of mine, was just telling me recently, who perhaps not surprisingly has a lot of psychonautic experience, some mileage with certain mushrooms that we've been discussing. And also for anyone who doesn't know what MAPS is, it's the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies. They're also focused very heavily on phase three trials for MDMA in the treatment of PTSD, which is, is fascinating. And I encourage people to take a look at that at MAPS.org.

• 1:41:29Tim Ferriss?

  But what my friend said to me is not too long ago, several weeks ago, he went into a coffee shop and it was some Dunkin' Donuts or something like that in an airport. And this woman said, thank you, at the end of the transaction. And he looked at her in the eyes and he said, no, thank you. And he was just kind of being a joker and he's a charming guy, but he meant it very sincerely. And she just broke down crying. Similar experience, like she had not had, it didn't seem anyone expressed kindness to her in God knows how long. I mean, weeks, months, who knows? And

• 1:42:01Tim Ferriss?

  It just was such a stark reminder, just like your story about the power of those little acts, those tiny little micro decisions that we all make thousands of times a day.

• 1:42:10Speaker 02

  And that's what, you know, I have a business, um, you know, but anybody who has ordered from our business, I own the business, so I run it. And I, several years ago, I got these little stickers that say, "You are beautiful." And every time someone orders from our business and their order are two, you are beautiful stickers. And I've had so many people write saying they were just a horrible day. A physician just wrote to me recently, he had said, "Oh, my God, I cannot believe this little messaging. I send two because then they can pass one forward." So every order and every box, there are two "You are beautiful" stickers. And so many people have written saying that's what they needed to see. That changed their

• 1:42:53Speaker 02

  entire day. That, again, extension of gratitude and affirmation, you know, and we are all on this planet together. We live in this time and space. Tim, you're gonna die. I'm gonna die. Everybody listening to this podcast is gonna die. But we enter into the fabric of nature from which we sprung. And I think that fabric of nature is based on the extension of goodness. I just know it empirically. And all the noise we have around politics and everything else is just so narrowly focused in the context of the greater being. I think that we are on the verge where science and spirituality are converging. And now we're understanding nature and the extent of the cosmos, the hundreds of billions of galaxies.

• 1:43:38Speaker 02

  I mean, just, I always wanted to be an astro-mycologist. I kind of am now in some sense, but I've always wanted to, you know, I think we'll find fungal networks throughout nature, throughout the universe, on multiple planets. Multicellular organisms will form as networks. Networks will give rise to animals. And I think that we are a descendant of this network-based paradigm that's represented not only in mycelium and neurons and the computer internet, the organization of dark matter. This is a continuation on different orders of magnitude of the way of being. We are all involved in this network of being. And this is just one of our strands in that network that we're living today.

• 1:44:23Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to get to bees, and I'm gonna get to it by way of... Laying out some illustrations of these webs, these strands of interconnectedness. And this is from Discover Magazine from a few years back. And I'm just going to quote here, it'll take 30 to 60 seconds probably. And then I want to talk about bees specifically. It starts with this, and this is a very incomplete list, of course. But Stamets is researching a wide variety of ways in which fungi could help solve human problems. Here is a partial list. One, environmental cleanup. Mushrooms could be used to break down petrochemicals or absorb radiation from contaminated soil and water. Two, wastewater filtration.

• 1:45:07Tim Ferriss?

  Mushroom mycelia could cleanse runoff from storm drains, farms, or logging roads. They could be used to filter out the nitrates, endocrine disruptors, and pharmaceutical residues that disrupt ecosystems and damage human health. Three, pesticides. Fungal bug killers, which we discussed, could be used to target troublesome species while remaining nontoxic to other. Four, medicines, which we've discussed, could provide new antibiotic, antiviral, and immune boosting compounds, and even chemotherapies. Five, forestry. Planting symbiotic mushroom species could speed reforestation and clear cut woodlands. Six, agriculture, adding, oh, this is the word that I can never pronounce, adding MYCORRISHAL. How do we say that?

• 1:45:47Speaker 02

  Mycorrhizal.

• 1:45:48Tim Ferriss?

  Mycorrhizal, thank you. Adding mycorrhizal fungi to soil could improve crop yields without the need for toxic chemical fertilizers. Seven, famine relief. Mushrooms could be grown rapidly in refugee camps and disaster zones using just wood chips or saltwater soaked straw. Eight, biofuels. Growing mushrooms for biodiesel could require far less soil and other resources than commonly cultivated fuel crops. Nine, which segues to what we were just chatting about, space travel. Because of their usefulness in soil creation and the tolerance of many species for radiation, mushrooms could be grown by interstellar voyagers and used to terraform other worlds. So I'm going to pause here for one second, just to let people soak in that. And then second, in both preparation for this conversation, but also over the last

• 1:46:30Tim Ferriss?

  two years, reading various descriptions of what has been called the wood wide web, I think is what they call it, the mycelium, and how they facilitate communication between trees and other organisms. It's really mind bending stuff. I mean, it's the type of...

• 1:46:51Tim Ferriss?

  Narrative and description and discovery that if described, I'm just making this up perhaps, but like 50 years ago would have been thought science fiction. And I would love for you to describe what you have done in the world of bees. But I just find this so not only staggeringly fascinating and much of it counterintuitive, but important. So that's my, that's my soapbox for the moment. But in any case, would, would love you to take that wherever you'd like.

• 1:47:20Speaker 02

  Okay, well, I would recommend that people read my book, Mycelium Running, How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. It covers into these subjects very, very deeply. And the book is used now as an introductory mycology book at many universities. I typically don't promote a product from stage. There's no lectures out there, you can find this. But I do want to draw people's attention to fungi.com, F-U-N-G-I dot com. There's an amazing letter from a Syrian refugee. And I want people, we obscured his face because we don't want him to be targeted by Assad's assassins. But he has brought in mushroom cultivation into refugee camps using recyclable materials from cardboard and all the paper.

• 1:48:04Speaker 02

  And he literally, you have to read the letter to, it just brings tears to your eyes. He's over a thousand people now engaged in growing mushrooms, oyster mushrooms in refugee camps and from the Syrian crisis that are helping people feed themselves. And, and think about all those thousand people now understanding how to grow mushrooms, what the downstream effect will be with their children. When they get out of those camps, they'll have skill sets that can really expand this in a huge way. I believe that the mycelium is the foundation of the food web. It is essential for food biosecurity.

• 1:48:46Speaker 02

  I mentioned that the mycelium creates the microbiomes. We've done next gen sequencing, we've been able to prove this. I've not published it, but people can see my talks on it, showing that different mycelial mats, the control and destined populations of bacteria that are uniquely specific to the mycelium that are growing in wood chips or in straw. And so they actually articulate the populations of bacteria downstream from the mycelial networks. But this is kind of segue. So we talked about the antiviral stuff, you know, the Bioshield Bio Defense Program and 9/11.

• 1:49:27Speaker 02

  Well, and I had this antipapagenic fungi patents and working against, you know, termites and carpenter ants and bedbugs and mites. And so, a good friend of mine, Louis Schwartzberg, he actually has finished a movie called Fantastic Fungi, is coming out in the next few months. We've been making it for over 10 years with Lynn Lear, Norman Lear, and that group. And I just saw the final cut a few days ago. It is quite good. I'm really happy where it's going. But it talks about the wood wide web. And Susan Sumard is a British Columbia mycologist, and I'm a total fan of her work. And a big kudos to her because she and I are two Ps in the pod.

• 1:50:11Speaker 02

  She was doing her work parallel to my going mine, and we ended up, you know, really in the same intellectual ecosystem, so to speak. But, so when Louis was doing a movie, he was looking at butterflies, and then he got into bees and colony collapse. And colony collapse is really, colony collapse disorder is a euphemism created by the media, but it does speak to a very serious issue. In Oklahoma last year, 74% of the beehives died. Now, think of it. If you were having cattle or sheep at your ranch, and you lost 75% of your sheep or cattle, that is devastating. Well, it's also devastating to beekeepers.

• 1:50:56Speaker 02

  35% or more of our food is directly dependent upon bee pollination. 70% is indirect. Many people don't realize that most of our dairy products are dependent upon bee pollination because alfalfa and hay is dependent upon bees. All the almonds that you consume, every almond that you consume was visited by a bee on that flower. And so the almond industry specifically needs honeybees in particular. And so when Louis came to me, he said, "Paul, there's a huge problem with colony collapse, and bees are dying. What can you do about it?"

• 1:51:31Speaker 02

  Well, I had a series of events. Um, and these events, when you string them together, led to me to an epiphany. And that I am a controversial mycologist. I had been trained academically in mycology as an undergraduate student. But I married a woman 11 years older than me, who had three kids. Uh, 12, 14, and 16 when I was 22. I couldn't afford to move my kids to other cities to go to graduate school. I got accepted into several graduate schools, but I couldn't afford to move. So I started this little mail order business and packed 30,000 boxes. Before I had a single employee, now I have over 100 employees. So it's a real testimonial to stamina and good luck.

• 1:52:13Speaker 02

  And also the extension of generosity by some very kind people who came to my rescue a few times over my life. But in the course of looking, uh, at the situation with bees, I started looking at it and there's, there's many cofactors. Now, health or disease, in my mind, is a series of coefficient variables. Factors which are strung together at the end of the equation means health or disease. So there is not a single cause for colony collapse. It's a perfect storm of unfortunately bad things that have been happening to the bees. Habitat loss is one. Neonicotinoids, we already know they've been banned in Europe. Ironically, from a study that Bayer and Syngenta sponsored, thinking that neonicx would not be toxic.

• 1:52:58Speaker 02

  And then they found out they were toxic and so they were banned in Europe last month. Neonicx are still used in the United States and Canada. Um, these, there's so many, 70% of the food is thought to be, uh, absolutely critically dependent upon bee pollination services. You know, um, two arms length away from direct bee pollination contact. So bees are, are dying because of a confluence of variables, last habitat, neonicx, pesticide exposure. Factory farming, it's not natural for bees to put on trucks and travel a thousand miles to the almond orchards of California. They all are concentrated, they spread diseases amongst themselves. Uh, and then they disperse and so that's a great, great, uh, scenario for diseases to be spread.

• 1:53:43Speaker 02

  But the, by far, the, the biggest one that's been identified in the scientific literature is the varroa mite. And the varroa mite was introduced in 1987. It came from Asia. Varroa destructor. That's this Latin binomial. It injects a whole slew of viruses into the bees. And these now all bees in the world have these viruses. Working with the USDA, Dr. Jay Evans. And it was a USDA virologist who's widely published and a senior scientist at the USDA. Has not seen a virus-free bee more than 10 years. What's happened now is a virus is being spread by the varroa mite.

• 1:54:25Speaker 02

  And the varroa mite was controlled by a miticide. That was used to control ticks on cattle called Amitraz. Now, Amitraz is not legal to use by beekeepers, but they use it. They were soaking their bee hives with this Amitraz, this toxic, you know, tick miticide. And they're drenching it twice per year to control the mites. And now they're up to eight times per year within 10 years. The mites have developed a resistance. The mites are like having a pancake on your back. They attach themselves, they're extremely hard to dislodge. And now 27 viruses have been identified being vectored by mites. What's the big surprise is all the wild bees now have these viruses.

• 1:55:11Speaker 02

  And 80% of the pollination services that we benefit from bees pollinating are actually coming from wild bees. Not the honeybee, which is Apis malefira, which is a, it produces huge colonies. The wild bees are oftentimes called solitary bees, they're very small groups of a dozen bees or two dozen bees are ground dwellers. And those bees provide over 80% of the services that are benefiting agriculture. So the honeybees, the man we have about 2 million hives in the United States. The average loss right now is over 50% nationally, a few hotspots. But those hotspots then emanate out and epidemics become pandemics.

• 1:55:53Speaker 02

  And so now we have evolved into a viral pandemic of these viruses spreading throughout the world. And it was just discovered in the past two or three years. That these bees are infected with these viruses when they visit a flower. And they get the pollen on them. They also spread the viruses to the pollen they leave. And so when the wild bees come, they become infected. So this is a direct threat to worldwide food biosecurity. The loss of bees is such an important issue, and interestingly, it's the number one bridge issue between liberals and conservatives. So I like to tell people, you go on a Thanksgiving dinner, you don't want to talk about Hillary or Trump, talk about the importance of bees. It's a number one issue that brings liberals and conservatives together, because everyone

• 1:56:36Speaker 02

  recognizes the importance of bees as it is for food biosecurity. So my friend Louis came to me, and I started studying this subject, and I had five experiences in a row that led me to an epiphany. And no matter what my critics say, and I, you know, I've been wrong sometimes, I'm not right all the time, so I accept that. But I push the envelope because I don't have to worry about tenure, I'm self-employed, I can risk to be wrong. But the more I speculate, the more I test, the more I do research, you know, that's what it takes, it takes efforts to see if something will work. And so I failed a lot of times, and the failure is the price of tuition I've paid to learn a new lesson. All that being said, this is what happened.

• 1:57:20Speaker 02

  In 1984, I had the garden giant mushroom growing in my garden. It's a wood chip mushroom that grows on wood chips, produces mushrooms up to five pounds per specimen, people can look it up. And I had these wood chips permeated with mycelium, and I had two beehives. And one day in July, I come out and I see the bees all over my wood chips. I looked really closely, and they're moving the wood chips to the side, it's like you pushing a semi-truck to the side, some of these wood chips are really big, to expose the mycelium. And I looked very carefully, and from dawn to dusk for 40 days, there's a continuous convoy of bees to my wood chips of a garden giant mycelium in my garden, traveling about 800 to 1,000 feet.

• 1:58:06Speaker 02

  And so I went out there, I photographed it. Thank God I found the photographs. There were Kodachrome 64 slides. And sweltering heat, you know, two years ago, I found them up in an attic. But I published this in Herald's List Magazine in 1988. I published this in 1994 in Growing Gourmet in Medicinal Mushrooms, one of my books. And I speculated, oh, the bees are going after the sugar-rich exudates. Because mycelium is producing these polysaccharides that are sweet. And they're fragrant. And maybe that's why the bees are going there. Okay, that's, that's one. I'm gonna give you a myco-factorial equation. So that's the first myco-factor. Factor number one, Paul sees bees attracted to woodchips in his garden. I forgot about it. Myco-factor number two, Paul gets involved with the Bioshield program.

• 1:58:51Speaker 02

  Discovers that polycore mushrooms have antiviral properties. And many patents have issued now. I have more patents on this. People can look them up. And so that was another experience that I had. Number three, getting rid of the carpenter ants from my house using entomopathogenic fungus relating that insects are vectors of disease. And then, moving forward, I'm looking at the research articles. And in PLOS, it's an open source, you know, online journal, scientific journal. There's, and the cover of the PLOS was a big article on the discovery that see, when colony collapse happens, most people don't know this.

• 1:59:36Speaker 02

  Is that you go out to your beehives on Monday, everything is fine. You go out there on Thursday, and they're all gone. They're gone. It's not like there's a whole bunch of dead bees laying in front of the beehive. They're gone. They fly away. And it turns out that the bees are, there's a deformed wing virus, which is the number one virus of concern that's been identified by researchers. Almost a dozen papers have been published in the past three years identifying the deformed wing virus as the virus that is the most debilitating to the bees. It not only reduces the tensile strength of their wings, but they're deformed, they can't fly at all. We see bees on a flower, it's the last days of their life.

• 2:00:20Speaker 02

  Bees used to go out to get pollen for nine days, and now they're going out for four days. So they can't bring enough pollen back to the hive. So the newly hatched bees, which are nurse bees, are prematurely recruited to go out to get pollen because the colony is stressed. And then the brood has mites on them, and the bees can't attend to the brood, so they abandon the babies. And then mites then freely go around injecting these viruses into the bees. And so at some point, it comes to a tipping point, and then the bees leave the hive and they don't come back. So imagine if you were, again, a cattle rancher or sheep rancher, you're losing more than 50% of your... It's psychologically damaging, as well as economically damaging. And people just give up.

• 2:01:06Speaker 02

  So I had these experiences, and then I saw in this journal that when they looked at the honey in the abandoned beehives, it lacked a certain chemical called P-mercymeric acid. P-mercymeric acid is the chemical trigger that governs the detoxification pathway in bees. It's called the cytochrome P450 pathway. All animals use it. We have it mostly in our liver. It's how we break down toxins. Without P-mercymeric acid, they found these bees, hundreds of pounds of honey, no bees in the beehive, it lacks this essential nutrient, P-mercymeric acid. Now, I'm not a chemist, but I'd seen P-mercymeric acid before, because in the research I've

• 2:01:47Speaker 02

  done, I look at what's called the de-lingification of wood, how fungi gobble up wood and break it down. And I recognized P-mercymeric acid as a chemical constituent that was present in breaking down wood. And that's why you see myceliated wood smells fragrant and odoriferous. There's a lot of outgassing of mycophlavonoids, phenolic compounds that are going into... And that's why after a rain in the woods, the wood smells so good, that's the outgassing of mycelium. All these scent trails are being created to entice us and insects and other animals to follow scent trails, and part of the outgassing of the mycelium.

• 2:02:26Speaker 02

  Okay, I had all those four experiences, and then I go to sleep.

• 2:02:32Speaker 02

  And I have a waking dream. And this waking dream hit me like a lightning bolt. I said, oh, my God. I woke up, I think, I said, I think I know how to save the bees. And so I first called a very good friend of mine, Lee Stein. I said, listen, I had this waking dream. I just, it shook me to the core. He said, stop everything you're doing. Focus on this. This is too important. So I called up the University of California, Davis. It's never a good idea to start a conversation with another scientist that you've not met with the words, I had a dream. That conversation went nowhere. It was like, crazy person, goodbye. So I called up Washington State University. I was at TED, I think at the TED that you spoke at.

• 2:03:16Speaker 02

  And I was at TED and I went out and I was giving Steve Shepherd's name from Washington State University. He's a chair of entomology in Pullman, Washington. Washington State University's Agricultural Science College. And I said, listen, Steve, please just give me a half an hour. It's going to sound crazy to you at first, but let me talk to you about this. About 15 minutes in, he said, stop, go nowhere else. We want to work with you. So the end result of this is we tested this on 532 beehives in Southern California two years ago. We've done seven tests now in outdoor beehives. We have found something, I think, that's extraordinary breakthrough. With our mycelial extracts of these polyphore mushrooms, these wood conks that look like,

• 2:03:59Speaker 02

  they're called hoof-shaped mushrooms that grow on trees. Everyone's seen them. With the mycelium that's extracted in water and ethanol, the very same extracts that we use in the Bioshiobiod Defense Program, we gave it to the bees and we've submitted an article to a renowned scientific journal. And from one dose at 1%, now, all beekeepers feed sugar water to their bees. It's 50% sugar, 50% water. So 1 milliliter per 100, you know, 1 unit per 100, 1%. We give it to the bees. And then seven to 12 days later, those viruses are reduced by thousands of times.

• 2:04:41Speaker 02

  In the article that we submitted, we reduced the Lake Sinai virus by more than 45,000 times. The deformed wing virus by more than 800 times with one dose and it doubles the lifespan of bees. Think of the implications of this. This means that I think

• 2:05:02Speaker 02

  I have a window now in understanding something fundamental to the foundation of nature. The mycelium not only controls the microbiomes and are deterministic in the downstream evolution of ecosystems, but they also control the immunological health of the animal inhabitants. Because the very same extracts that produce viruses that harm birds, bird flu, H5N1, H3, H1N1, in pigs, that harm people, pox viruses, herpes viruses, birds, pigs, people, bees. This speaks to something I think that is very deeply profound in understanding that

• 2:05:47Speaker 02

  within nature, these mycelial networks are everywhere. Every tree is infused with mycelium. Every vegetable you eat is infused with fungi. This is part of the mutualistic relationship that we have with these fungi that increases the host defense and resistance against disease. There's a plurality of fungi in such diverse populations that create a matrix of defense. We have found that these individual species now, we've tested five different polyporum mushrooms, they're all active to different degrees. What we have not reported in the scientific article that we submitted is that we have one result that's over 100 million times reduction of these viruses with one treatment.

• 2:06:28Speaker 02

  Many of these viruses, herpes viruses, are known as oncoviruses that cause cancer. Lots of them cause inflammation that destabilizes the immune system. This is something I think is so critically important. Everyone's talking about bad news, and we are in the 6X, the sixth great extinction known in life on this planet. We have 8.3 million species, we're losing more than 30,000 a year. Do the math, in 100 years, that's more than a third of the biodiversity that's unraveling all around us. What can we do? This is actionable ecological solutions, this paradigm shifting, this scalable, ecologically rational, economically sustainable. Again, all these fungi grow on every forest of the world, and we all grew up in Winnie

• 2:07:13Speaker 02

  the Pooh, and everybody missed this. Now I've been issued now 10 patents.

• 2:07:20Speaker 02

  The United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Eurasia. When I first got the first patent award, for five seconds, I was excited, literally. And then I became horribly demoralized. I said, "You've got to be kidding. There's no prior art, no one..." They did the Patent Office, they have massive search engines in every language, Chinese, French, Japanese, English, German, and there's not a single mention, anywhere out there, that bees benefit from mycelium immunologically, let alone reducing the viruses that are being vectored by mites. The fact that I'm the one who discovered this is horribly depressing.

• 2:08:02Speaker 02

  It means that we're truly Neanderthals with nuclear weapons. And people talk about climate change and how biodiversity is a bit like a liberal scientist. Are you frigging kidding? This is so fundamental to who we are and where we've come from. So, I've open sourced it to all the developing countries, but, you know, Europe and Eurasia. Not Asia, not South America, not Mexico, not Africa. You know, in order for a solution to be effective, it's got to be practiced. In order for it to be practiced, it's got to be commercially successful. In order for it to be commercially successful, it's got to go to market with some protection of your idea. But the fact that these patents are issuing is...

• 2:08:46Speaker 02

  And I've made mistakes, and there are mycolologists out there whose eyes roll, but I'm very happy to have received several rewards, one of which from the Mycolos Society of America for bringing more students into the field of mycology than anyone in history. So, they're kind of schizophrenic about me, because I'm a psychedelic researcher, not trained, and I bring in all these students into their classrooms who want to save the world. And they said, "Paul, you've created a huge problem. We want to study yeast, and these students want to save the world. What do we do?" So, but, so I think this is something that is actionable solutions, and I think I can make the argument, and this is very provocative, but I can make the argument that natural products

• 2:09:27Speaker 02

  can be more powerful than pharmaceuticals with a greater bio-shield of defense, with less toxicity and more utility in a sustainable way. And that, I think, is paradigm shifting.

• 2:09:43Tim Ferriss?

  I hope you're right. I hope you're right, and I look forward to learning more about this as the discussion opens. Is there anything for people listening who are not mycologists, nor future mycologists, who want to help in some fashion, meaning they want to make personal decisions, maybe think of policy changes, or types of support that would enable them to be part of an environmental and systemic solution, rather than simply compounding the existing problems? Are there new behaviors, things they can do, anything that you would suggest to people who are listening?

• 2:10:24Speaker 02

  Absolutely. The simplest thing that people can do is let wood rot. Give up this idea of an Elizabethan yard that's highly manicured and managed. Nature likes fractal faces. Fractalization of nature at different orders of magnitude, it gives all these niches to microorganisms and microbiome biodiversity that's critical for sustainability. So, rather than letting, hauling the wood off, having a rotting log, let logs rot in your garden, in your yard. Mushrooms will come up. They'll help feed the bees. They'll help build these fractally intense environments that are really important for biodiversity. That's one. We

• 2:11:09Speaker 02

  have a campaign for supporting Washington State University, wsu.bes.wsu.edu. We've raised over $3 million now for bee research at WSU. We have just begun to explore the role of these polypore mushrooms. There's hundreds of them to test. We've hit the home runs on our very first ones. We're extremely lucky.

• 2:11:37Speaker 02

  But the fact that, you know, this is, this speaks to, we can reduce these viruses forty-five thousand to one with one treatment. I mean, what antiviral drug will do that, you know, um, that is a complex soup of constituents or, you know, the contrast is, is surprising. So, supporting a, a, a bee company, bee nonprofits, joining a mushroom society, these, the North American Mycological Association, which is a parent organization for, called NAMA, and their website is namyco.org, N-A-M-Y-C-O dot O-R-G. They have a listing of all the local mycological societies, you know, in Canada, the United States and Mexico.

• 2:12:22Speaker 02

  Um, that's one, uh, joining your bee, uh, and get involved in supporting, frankly, uh, farmers and developing biodiverse landscapes. And the march to monoculture and the march to the industrialization of agriculture is sacrificing the very biodiverse networks that have evolved to help plants grow. When you add lots of fertilizers in this exercise, you defeat the natural systems of the mycelium that has engaged and helped plants for hundreds of millions of years. When you have mycelium helping plants, you do not need external inputs as much as fertilizers, et cetera.

• 2:13:04Speaker 02

  And I think there are ecologically rational solutions to many of the problems that we face today. But this really speaks to the concept of seven generations. And first, peoples really have this so much as a pillar of their understanding and dealing with nature. We should give up this idea of making money in the short term and we should embrace the idea of creating sustainability in the long term. True conservatives should be conserving natural resources and thinking about downstream generations. Right now, we have hungry, greedy people who, whose morals have been hijacked, um, for whatever reason. And I think that this, this nature-loving movement with all of its...

• 2:13:51Speaker 02

  Strange, you know, characterizations, it really is based on something that's fundamentally good for the commons.

• 2:13:58Tim Ferriss?

  Well, it makes me think of what you said at the very beginning, or certainly in the earlier portions of this conversation, which is the war against nature is a war against your own biology. And ultimately, what is best for what you're discussing is also best for us, which means it's best for me, it's best for you, it's best for each person listening to this. And certainly, if you're thinking out multiple generations, these problems can be solved in a very pragmatic, holistic fashion, or they can be compounded to the point where they become exponentially more difficult to unwind and to solve for.

• 2:14:36Speaker 02

  In the field of my call, I just want to say, in the field of my call, you have no other science that is underfunded, underappreciated, and yet has such an enormous elasticity of benefits. And if I was a Bill Gates or a Jeff Bezos, you know, I've met these people, it's just not part of my DNA to pitch. And I look at them going, "I could do so much benefit for hundreds of millions of people, but I can't even begin to talk about this, because I don't want to pitch." But thankfully, my company is soaring, and I have a great group, a community of individuals who are, who believe in this, who see the results.

• 2:15:18Speaker 02

  And Michael Pollan's book, and Fantastic Fungi, and, you know, you're in support, etc., helps spread this message. But, you know, I'm 63 years of age, and I want to die with a smile on my face, because it's the heritage that we leave, not the material possessions that we own during a short lifetime. We all need to create legacies, where our names will be heralded in the future as a person who cared more about other people than they cared about themselves. That is truly a Christian, a Buddhist, a Zen-like attitude. And I think that it's time for people to take action. We need a revolution.

• 2:16:01Tim Ferriss?

  It is time. It is time for people to take action. Could not agree more. And you've given a number of recommendations that I will link to in the show notes, as usual. So everyone listening, everything we've discussed, all the links to everything, certainly that I can track down and that my team can track down will be in the show notes at tim.blog/podcast for this episode. And Paul, you've been very generous with your time. People can find you at fungi.com, fungi.net, hostdefense.com. And on social media, on Instagram, you're Paul Stamets, Facebook, Paul Stamets, YouTube, Paul Stamets. Is there a, for people who want to know where to go for what, is there one best place for certain things, a certain best

• 2:16:45Tim Ferriss?

  place to say hello if people want to reach out to you somehow?

• 2:16:49Speaker 02

  That's complicated, like you, Tim. You know, we get so many people wanting to contact us. But I want to feed some of the researchers out there, and people who want to get into some of the detailed research articles. We have a website that we populate called mushroom references.com. mushroomreferences.com. Several hundred peer-reviewed articles that we link to with abstracts that talk about some of the most recent research of the, from mycelium. And it's a deep dive. Many physicians are unfamiliar. And because the public expects that there are going to be experts about everything in health, they're actually quite

• 2:17:31Speaker 02

  ignorant. And so I have found this has been a challenge. This is why I speak to a lot of academic conferences, a lot of medical conferences, is that there is a desperate need by these physicians to get on board and be familiarized with some of the latest research. So, but otherwise, you know, fungi.com is a hub, and we have a resource section on that website that links to many other nonprofits, lots of other resources, including Cornell University, that's particularly a good one. There is MycoWeb, which is extremely

• 2:18:09Speaker 02

  good. M-Y-K-O-W-E-B. MycoWeb is a really good one. And so there's a lot of mycologists out there that are genuinely really, really good people. But they have, I've, in a sense, have tasked them with expectations greater than some of which they can deliver. And I apologize for that, but time is short. It's so important that everybody gets aboard the starship and try to do good.

• 2:18:38Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I thank you so much for your time today, Paul. This has been really fun for me, and I'm sure for many, many people who are listening. Is there anything else that you would like to share or recommend before we wrap up at least this first conversation on the podcast?

• 2:18:58Speaker 02

  If you see somebody being abused, or somebody being shamed, step up. Extend a hand of generosity and show people a better way of acting.

• 2:19:12Tim Ferriss?

  Here, here. That is an excellent way to wrap up. And once again, Paul, a real pleasure to spend this time with you. I have pages and pages and pages of notes, follow-ups for myself and for my family, and also the many different avenues that I want to explore. And to everyone listening, find the show notes tim.blog/podcast. And until next time, keep experimenting and express some kindness. It is time to take action. So get off of the earphones, get off of the earbuds, get off of the pages in those books that you might consume one after the other, and actually take a meaningful step forward with somehow

• 2:19:54Tim Ferriss?

  bending the reality around you in a positive direction. And until next time, thanks for listening.

• 2:20:02Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, guys. This is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend? And Five Bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit. That I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short.

• 2:20:44Tim Ferriss?

  It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out, just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Audible, which has the largest selection of audiobooks on the planet. I've used Audible for many years and I have several audiobooks to recommend right off the bat if you're looking for a new one. Ready Player One by Ernest Cline, you may have heard of it. The Tao of Seneca by Seneca, if you want to hear my favorite collection of letters of all time, as well as The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, which is a fiction book I use

• 2:21:26Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:22:11Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:22:56Tim Ferriss?

  Download a title free and start listening. It's super simple. Go to audible.com/tim or text TIM to 500-500 on your telephone to get started today. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Peloton, which I've been using probably for about a year now. Peloton is a cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings live studio classes right into your home. You can also do on-demand, which is what I do. We'll come back to that. So you don't have to worry about fitting classes into a busy schedule or making it to a studio or gym with a hectic or unpredictable commute. I, for instance, have a Peloton bike right in my master bedroom at home, and it's one of the first things I do many mornings. I wake up, I meditate for a bit, then I knock out a short 20-minute ride in my undies.

• 2:23:41Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:24:24Tim Ferriss?

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• 2:25:07Tim Ferriss?

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