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

1. 0:00 – 10:05

   Start

   1. TFTim Ferriss0:00

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

   2. SPSpeaker0:06

      Can I ask you a personal question?

   3. TFTim Ferriss0:08

      Now would seem an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite?

   4. SPSpeaker0:12

      I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show.

   5. TFTim Ferriss0:19

      [upbeat music] 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 on an interactive leaderboard to keep you motivated. There are also up to 14 new classes added every day with more than 8,000 classes on demand, and you can pick based on length, 45 minutes, 20 minutes, whatever, music, hip-hop, rock and roll, or say low impact versus high intensity or interval. You can pick the class structure and style that works for you. And in my case, I quite like Matt Wilpers, and I tend to do on-demand and listen to a lot of and watch many of the same classes over and over. But I'm kind of promiscuous and also enjoy classes from a lot of the other instructors. They have, Peloton, an amazing roster of incredible instructors in New York City with a whole range of styles and personalities, so you can find what you're in the mood for. You also get real-time metrics that you can use to track your performance over time, and that will help, I would say, catalyze you to beat your personal best. Now, that all sounds good, right? Gamification, yada, yada, yada. I didn't think that it would work for me or in any way incentivize me, but they really 100% hit the nail on the head. I was very, very impressed with how motivating it was, and it worked tremendously to keep me pushing, uh, which quite honestly takes a fair amount. I can get quite lazy, particularly with anything that edges on endurance, which is kind of more than five reps of anything for me. So check it out. Discover this cutting-edge indoor cycling bike that brings the studio experience right to your home. Peloton is offering listeners of this podcast a limited time offer. Go to onepeloton.com. That's O-N-E, Peloton, P-E-L-O-T-O-N.com, and enter the code TIM, all caps, at checkout and get $100 off of accessories with your Peloton bike purchase. So get a great workout at home anytime you want. Check it out. Go to onepeloton.com and use the code TIM to get started. [upbeat music] 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 to reintroduce non-fiction purists to the beauty and truth and enjoyment of fiction. The Graveyard Book, it is incredible. And I like the version that Neil reads himself, but the entire ensemble cast is also fun. Audible members get a credit every month good for any audiobook in the store, regardless of price, and unused credits roll over to the next month. So if you didn't like your audiobook, no problem. You can exchange it, no questions asked. Plus, your books are yours to keep. With Audible, you can go back and re-listen anytime, even if you cancel your membership. And for some books, again, Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman, I've listened many, many times. You may even just start over as soon as you finish it the first time. Audible also helps you to listen to more books by letting you switch seamlessly between devices, picking up exactly where you left off, whether it's on your phone, through your car, from a tablet, or at home on an Amazon Echo, whatever. You can get through tons of books, hands and eyes-free, while doing almost anything. So that is part of the beauty of audio. It is a secondary activity when you're walking the dog, cooking, whatever it might be. Audible content includes an unmatched selection of audiobooks, original audio 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 is super simple. Go to audible.com/tim or text Tim to 500-500 on your telephone to get started today. Check it out. [upbeat music] Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it 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. 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. Uh [chuckles] 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, uh, 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. He has discovered and named numerous new species of psilocybin mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms, or psilocybe mushrooms, uh, 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, uh, 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 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, uh, 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’s 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. And, uh, we do get into the importance of bees and how without bees, pretty much everything goes down the toilet, uh, 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, uh, to this, to the tune of seven figures over the next year or two, to supporting psychedelic science and research, uh, 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. And if you want to support at, uh, lower dollar amounts, uh, 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. And if you can only listen to one part, jump ahead about 49 minutes or so, 49 minutes and 50 seconds, I believe, but yeah, let's call it 49 minutes, to listen to his description of his first experience with psilocybe mushrooms or psilocybin-containing mushrooms and the effect it had on his lifelong stutter. It is fucking nuts. So [laughs] 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. [static noise]

2. 10:05 – 18:14

   Fungi and mycelium overview

   1. TFTim Ferriss10:06

      Paul, welcome to the show.

   2. SPSpeaker10:08

      Thank you, Tim. Honored to be here.

   3. TFTim Ferriss10:10

      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, uh, are, are very selfishly points of insecurity for me. So F-U-N-G-I, how should we pronounce that?

   4. SPSpeaker10:41

      Well, that's an excellent question. Um, fungi, according to Oxford, uh, English Dictionary, with a J, is the correct pronunciation. But fun-gee, fu- uh, fun-guy, or fun-jai.

   5. TFTim Ferriss10:52

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SPSpeaker10:52

      So fungi is what us mycologists use. Uh, though people from... Spanish mycologists will use fun-gee. Uh, Italian mycologists will say fun-gee. Uh, but, uh, English speakers, uh, the standard pronunciation is fungi, with a J.

   7. TFTim Ferriss11:07

      Fungi.

   8. SPSpeaker11:08

      Mm.

   9. TFTim Ferriss11:08

      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?

   10. SPSpeaker11:27

       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 m- 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, 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 fi- fine filaments that look like cobwebs, um, are, are running underground, and this underground network is being challenged by all sorts of microbes. 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 there can be up to eight miles of mycelium per cubic inch And now they only have one cell wall between, um, their, their internal s- uh, 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 2,200 acres in size. Now, it's one cell wall thick, 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, uh, that is so central to habitat and to 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. In four or five days they mature and, and then they rot. And in, in 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. Um, and the birds come to fruit. 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, or another fruit, uh, 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.

   11. TFTim Ferriss14:02

       [laughs]

   12. SPSpeaker14:03

       And then they sp- in the course of them eating them, they spread the spores. But the mycelium literally can be e-existent, it seem not, not invisible. Invisible to us ridiculously stupid humans that are thundering giants upon these networks that are underneath their feet. 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, uh, made material in competition with other fungi and other organisms.

   13. TFTim Ferriss14:46

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

   14. SPSpeaker15:18

       [laughs] I love this question. Well, it... You bring up a very good point. For, for almost 100 years now, the mycology departments were a subset of botany departments. They really should be in the zoology departments. Uh, 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 Opisthokonta that joins fungi and animalia together. When, uh, basically, these mycelial networks, um, when, uh, when they hit the land, uh, from the ocean, uh, many people don't realize some of the m- largest networks of mycelium in the world now have been discovered, uh, in, uh, below the sediment layers of the ocean. 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 a evolutionary point of view, 650 million years ago, we chose the path of encircling our nutrients, basically in a cellular sac, a stomach. The mycelium, uh, digests nutrients externally. If it is the enzymes, the acids, and other compounds that break down complex organic molecules and then absorbs those, uh, through the cell walls. The entire mycelial network, um, is as like a sponge. It absorbs selectively those nutrients that it needs. And animals, uh, went sort of overground and we developed these digestive systems and a, and a protective, uh, skin, uh, enveloped structure, our bodies. Uh, and then the mycelium continued on its course very happily developing underground. So with the divergence of fungi and, and a- animals is v- extremely well documented. But an, an extraordinary article came out just this past year. Um, and this article, you know, the, the, uh, the Big Bang was about 13.8 billion years ago. The Earth formed around 4.5 billion years ago. Uh, the first unicellular organisms, uh, were found, um, a few hundred million years later. But the first multicellular organism so far found, the oldest one, is 2.4 billion years ago. It was found in South African lava, uh, 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, 150, uh, 115 million years ago, this is before the, the Great Extinction event that killed off the, the, the, uh, dinosaurs, um, and at that time, mushrooms also had their form.

3. 18:14 – 19:16

   Dangers of antifungal drugs

   1. SPSpeaker18:14

      So these mushrooms are really ancient organisms. They had developed their forms long before we had developed ours. We are descended from these fungal networks. Um, they are our progenitor, uh, ancestors. We are We are really descendants of fungi. This is why under the microscope so many of our cells look so similar to that of, of 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. Um, those who've had immunosuppressants are well aware of this. Um, and, um, when you defeat the immune system of the human body using immuno- uh, suppressants for, uh, organ transplants, um, and other, uh, reasons in, in medicine, you're really, um, you're dancing with death because it's extremely damaging, uh, to your immune system that can hold many of these infections at

4. 19:16 – 35:47

   Childhood—and a carpenter-ant defense

   1. SPSpeaker19:16

      bay.

   2. TFTim Ferriss19:16

      There are so many directions that I want to go with this. I'm gonna try to contain my, uh, ADD and focus this in, uh, a direction towards another type of utility, and it 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 -

   3. SPSpeaker19:39

      [laughs]

   4. TFTim Ferriss19:39

      [laughs] I was wondering if you could talk about your history with carpenter ants and the intersection with mycelium.

   5. SPSpeaker19:49

      [laughs] Um, this is, uh, something very dear to my heart. So, well, um, let me-- I'm gonna, I'm gonna segue, um, because there could be listeners out there who have children, and I'm gonna tell their children through the story how vacuuming and helping your mother and your parents made me over a million dollars.

   6. TFTim Ferriss20:09

      [laughs]

   7. SPSpeaker20:10

      Um, and it, it, it ties into carpenter ants. So, um, I grew up in a-- So I'm gonna... I'm, I need two minutes to set this up. Um-

   8. TFTim Ferriss20:17

      Oh, we, we have all the time in the world. [laughs]

   9. SPSpeaker20:19

      Okay. So I grew up in a small town in Ohio, Columbiana, Ohio. A very conservative town, about five thousand people. Um, and I grew up in a fairly wealthy household. My, the family had steel mills and sawmills, and we were affluent. Um, we had 400 people in the town under unemployment of a town of about five thousand. Um, so the, the Stamets Enterprise Company, unfortunately because of-- After World War II, we bombed, you know, we bombed Japan, we, we bombed Germany, but they retooled. They rebuilt their factories, so they had modern factories after the war. Um, in the United States, we didn't do that, and so the machine tool industry really fell apart in the early 1960s. There's a huge, uh, economic downturn. 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 10 or 11 years of age, the entire financial empire collapsed. We lost everything, and, like, we laid off over 400 people in the town were laid off. I'm going to school. These, these kids and their parents, you know, are not very happy about what was happening. It was really, uh, devastating to, to us. And, and my parents separated, and we lived in this big house. The electricity was cut off. The water was cut off. Um, I remember eating cat food. I was just so hungry. Gave me tremendous farts. Uh-

   10. TFTim Ferriss21:40

       [laughs]

   11. SPSpeaker21:40

       But, uh, but I-- my mom was really desperate. My brother John went on to Yale. My brother Bill was at Cornell. Um, and, um, 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 to the plate and help my mother as much as possible. I remember running a hose from my neighbor's, about 500 feet of hose, uh, just to get two or three PSI so we could trickle feed it into the toilet so we could flush them. It was really a strange and really bewildering sort of, um, Kafkaesque e-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, uh, with those, th-those two, uh, avenues. Um, but I got really good at helping my mom vacuum, um, because she needed help, and we c-didn't have, you know, the support team we had anymore. So I was always, like, tearing apart vacuum c-cleaners and borrowing parts and trying to get, 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 word segues into carpenter ants is the, is the following. So I grew up in a, you know, in this an affluent environment. I came out to Washington State, became a logger hippie for three years, you know, working in the woods, then moved out, outside of Olympia, Washington. I went to the Evergreen State College, and I tried to start this little business. And I lived in a house that, uh, Dr. Andrew Weil said is the worst house he's ever seen anyone live in in North America. Um, that's one statement.

   12. TFTim Ferriss23:17

       [laughs]

   13. SPSpeaker23:18

       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 are so many leaks that I just keep on putting up buckets. And then, um, one day I remember there was 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 gonna get up and leave me because the conditions were so bad. But anyhow, I would be making my espresso in the morning and, um, 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, uh, 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 out 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, uh, w-with the carpenter ants munching them. And so I went, "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, um, 'cause The war against nature, um, in my mind is a war against your own biology, and, uh, 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, uh, insects and pathogenic means, of course, causing disease of insects. And this group of entomopathogenic, uh, uh, 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 Metarhizium. So meta and rhizium, uh, you know, m- uh, l- lots of mycelium, lots of rhizomorphs. And so I looked into this group of met- of Metarhizium fungi, non-toxic to bees, non-toxic to, to fish, non-toxic to humans. Um, and I, I got some of these fungi and I started growing them out. Now, I started studying this and I'm going, "Well, this is really interesting. Why isn't this not available everywhere? Why- why isn't, you know, Lowe's and Home Depot and Walmart, why aren't they selling this?" Well, for a very good reason. The insects aren't stupid. Um, 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. It is a dance of, of, of dinner and death between insects and fungi. Many insects eat fungi, many, uh, fungi eat insects. Um, the two of them don't like to, uh, be at the s- dinner table at the same time.

   14. TFTim Ferriss26:09

       [laughs]

   15. SPSpeaker26:10

       So I end up, um, 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 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, um, the... when they put, made bait stations around people's houses, the insects wouldn't go near those bait stations because they smell the spores. And so the spore repellency property prevented these bait traps from going into market for preventing, uh, termites, fire ants, carpenter ants, uh, moisture ants. All sorts of, uh, ants and termites are infected by these, these, these, this sporulating fungus Metarhizium. So I, I thought, "Well, I have a laboratory." I have very large laboratories. We produce about 50,000 kilos of mycelium of the f- of, of many different, uh, gourmet medicinal mushrooms, uh, per week. And my environments are Class 100 clean rooms. These are high-tech clean room environments using HEPA filters, high efficiency particular air filters. Um, and the last thing I want is a sporulating mold [laughs] in my laboratories. So I got these cultures and I was shocked at how much spores they were. L- it would remind 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, could become contaminated from airborne spores. So I, 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, that had no sporulation on it. And I went, "Whoa, [coughs] that's interesting." I look up in scientific literature and everybody said, "Oh, the culture is losing the ability to reproduce. It is re- losing the ability to sporulate. It is senescing. Avoid sectors" That's what they're called, these wedges are white sectors, because that path of genetic, of, uh, path down that gene trail will end up meaning the culture will die. And, a- and they partially got that right, but I was motivated by not having spores in my laboratory, so I chased those white sectors and then, and they grow out in about a week or two weeks on a, on a standard size Petri dish. And then after about five or six, seven transfers, that white wedge got bigger and bigger and bigger, and pretty soon, no sporulation.

   16. TFTim Ferriss28:56

       And this is current day in your... The, th- 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-

   17. SPSpeaker29:10

       No, no

   18. TFTim Ferriss29:10

       ... the chronology.

   19. SPSpeaker29:11

       That ac- th- this is, this is synchronous with that, with the flat roof.

   20. TFTim Ferriss29:15

       Oh, okay. Okay. Got it. Got it.

   21. SPSpeaker29:15

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

   22. TFTim Ferriss29:21

       Gotcha.

   23. SPSpeaker29:21

       So anyhow, so I f- I finally grew it out. I grew it out on rice, and I made a big deal to my daughter. Um, and I am so thankful to her for the reasons you're about to hear. Um, and I made a big deal in the middle of summer saying, "We're gonna trick the carpenter ants," 'cause every morning I'm sucking up all those [laughs] 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 of Sociobiology proving this was effective against subterranean termites, Formosan termites. We've done experiments just now with the USDA, uh, and other, uh, teams. Some of the biggest pesticide companies in the world, I'm... 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, uh, uh, ants, termites, uh, thrips, flies, mosquitoes, um, you know, uh, mites. 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 attractancy 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, these conidial, these pre-conidial, pre-sporulating sectors that I described, we end up creating a super attractant so powerful that when the attractant was diluted 500 to one with water, diluting the extract made it more potent in terms of attractancy. In one experiment, two drops of this was put on a, on a pane of glass, and fire ants, uh, uh, walked directly to that place and then scratched at that place until they died, walking about a meter, uh, creating a trail that other then, uh, uh, fire ants would follow.

   24. TFTim Ferriss32:48

       [laughs]

   25. SPSpeaker32:50

       So, so we have done this now with choices. They're called T-tests. We've done this with, um... The T-tests are even better. A T-test oftentimes is, you know, go left, uh, for the control, go right for the treatment. But we ended up doing, uh, four and five choice experiments where there was only one, uh, corridor or avenue that had the treatment, and the other ones were all controls. Uh, so highly significant activity, and we found something that I can... My dream is to be able to, uh, to attract a locust plague into a 55-gallon drum. Um, we can put these in foggers in, you know, in Africa and just create a massive, a huge, a huge attractancy factor. The cool thing also is the attractancy is not lethal. Um, so, um, that, that, that comes later. The infectious state of the mycelium, it grows, and then it penetrates the, uh, the exoskeleton with a hyphal peg. It kind of anchors itself like s- 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 it mummifies them. So these, these are... Many people have heard about these zombie fungi. This is what they are. Uh, some of them have a Cordyceps representation. It is a little club fungi. In Costa Rica and elsewhere in the subtropics, the, um, um, many of the ants there are well known for the leafcutter ants and other ants are known that if they get infected with this fungus, they climb to the top canopy of, of the trees and they lock their mandible underneath a leaf and boing, a mushroom comes out of their head and their anus, uh, and it sporulates. In 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, um, it's-

   26. TFTim Ferriss34:31

       [laughs]

   27. SPSpeaker34:31

       So that was a breakthrough, and the reason why, and I end up, uh, licensing this to a group of investors, and I got a million dollars. And, uh, so I like to tell my daughter, um, she was very instrumental in this. And, um, the, the licensing agreement had some limits on it. They had to take it to market within five years or I pull 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 because I have patents on antiviral properties of mycelium, and I have these patents on these entomopathogenic fungi, uh, for all insects and all diseases vectored by insects. It doesn't get bigger than that.

5. 35:47 – 44:08

   Fighting viruses with mycelium

   1. TFTim Ferriss35:47

      What... Are there any types and, and, um, uh, th- there are a number of different areas I wanna dig deeper. Are there, are there any particular common viruses or particularly lethal viruses that you've seen applications for using mycelium in terms of-

   2. SPSpeaker36:06

      Yeah

   3. TFTim Ferriss36:06

      ... resistance or defeating?

   4. SPSpeaker36:10

      Yeah. Well, there's, there, there's a lot of examples of that. Um, and so I published an article in a journal, a peer-reviewed journal called Herbalgram in June of 2001 summarizing, uh, all the literature ins- that's been published on the, on the antiviral properties of mushroom mycelium. It was a whopping one page long with like six references. There was 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, uh, for the US Defense Department and, and biosecurity was the weaponizable viruses, uh, poxviruses. You know, anthrax is a bacterium. The anthrax attacks occurred a few weeks later. A group of researchers, um, in the US Defense Department who were scavenging the literature saw my article and said, "Wow, there's some evidence here." And they contacted me because I have a very large lir- uh, library. Now, it may sound large to people who don't have libraries. I have about 800 strains of, uh, different species of mushrooms cl- many of which collected from the old growth forest. Uh, so some libraries have 20,000, you know, uh, uh, cultures, so I'm, I'm small compared to them, but I'm private. I'm not, not a big institution. And so they said, "Well listen, you've, you've published some interesting articles here. There's some evidence. Uh, we have been mis- fund- funded by Dick Cheney and George, George Bush." Ironically, I have a debt of gratitude to them [laughs] with the BioShield, BioDefense program. It's called Pr- uh, Project Bio- BioDefense, 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, uh, ethanol extracts of the mushrooms, the mycelium that gave rise to the mushrooms, et cetera, et cetera. And so I ended up sending out, uh, sets of 100 of these samples. I mean, this, for me, this is a coup d'état. I have government laboratories that'll give me free research, you know, on my extracts. And so we started sending these out and, uh, didn't hear from them for a while. And um, and you realize they're really disorganized. It was a new program and I got a, 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 bio- bioweapons, um, facility, biohazard, um, fa- facility of the US government where they have the most pathogenic bacteria and viruses and other disease organisms. And so I had a MD person who was my controller. Federal Express one day, you know, about two months later after I submitted the extracts, uh, delivered me this big package of research reports on anti-pox properties, smallpox properties of our extracts. Well, I mean, going through it, no activity, no activity. I get to sample number 78, high activity against poxviruses. And in sample 81, high activity. Sample 88, high activity. Whoa. I mean, this is like, you know, you're looking at, uh, not effective and no results in the first 77 pages, you know, and it's pretty disappointing. Then bam, I got really excited. So I called my... I called up, uh, uh, my, like my colonel at Fort Detrick and, and I said, "These results are amazing. It's exciting." And he goes, "What results?" I go, "The results that Federal Express just delivered to me." He goes, "You're not supposed to get those, I am."

   5. TFTim Ferriss39:36

      [laughs]

   6. SPSpeaker39:37

      I said, "Well-

   7. TFTim Ferriss39:38

      Oops

   8. SPSpeaker39:38

      ... I'll make a photocopy and I'll send them to you." You know?

   9. TFTim Ferriss39:40

      [laughs]

   10. SPSpeaker39:41

       He didn't appreciate the humor, but it was a very, very bizarre time and some very, very strange things ha- occurred, um, that at that time. But we ended up finding that those three highly active results came from an old growth mushroom called agarikon. Now 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, in, um, the Alps, Slovenia, uh, um, and Austria on larch trees. But it is a indicator species of an old growth forest. And those three anti-pox results came from three different separate strains of agarikon that I had isolated, um, from my many adventures in the old growth forest. So, whoa, this has got people very excited. Now, I, I 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, um, and pox, um, and you'll see a vetted press release interview on National Public Radio with me, the former, um, uh, deputy director of the FDA and the head of, uh, one of the research divisions of BioShield BioDefense program, Dr. Jack Secreast from Southern Research, uh, University. So, and then [coughs] so because I'm in competition with pharma and I'm a lone researcher, I have a little company, and um, I thought, well, my... I checked into this and I already had these entomopathogenic fungi patents that were just, you know, tremendous achievements because the entire pesticide industry missed all that. Um, so I thought, well, this is novel. I should protect myself. So I filed a patent on it, on agarikon against viruses, uh, particularly poxviruses, um, flu viruses, herpes. These are all the other results that we received. These extracts were highly active against multiple viruses, not just poxviruses.

   11. TFTim Ferriss41:47

       Quick question for you. Uh, is that prevent- for preventative use, curative use, both? What, uh, what, what are the applications?

   12. SPSpeaker41:55

       This is, this is, this is, Tim, where I have to draw the line.

   13. TFTim Ferriss41:57

       Mm-hmm.

   14. SPSpeaker41:57

       Um, because these are in vitr- uh, in, in vitro tests with human cells and taking through three different, uh, uh, testing protocols to the point where the next test is in a, in, uh, in vivo model-

   15. TFTim Ferriss42:13

       Right

   16. SPSpeaker42:13

       ... of, with an animal.

   17. TFTim Ferriss42:15

       Mm-hmm.

   18. SPSpeaker42:15

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

   19. TFTim Ferriss42:38

       Right.

   20. SPSpeaker42:38

       So these are in 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. Samir Ras. We did a bio-guided fractionation over many years, and we have identified two new anti-pox molecules more potent than cidofovir, which is the preeminent, uh, comparative, uh, antiviral drug control. With less toxicity and more efficacy than cidofovir. But that being said, there's clearly an upregulation of the immune system. And so h- what is the contribution of these molecules versus upregulating of the immune system? Is it a combination of both? 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 mechanism of action and don't see the result, if you are, uh, infected with one of these viruses, you really don't care about the mechanism of action. You just want to know whether you're going to 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.

   21. TFTim Ferriss43:59

       Mm-hmm.

   22. SPSpeaker43:59

       And I have another really good example of... is specific to your original question of the my- mycelium being active against viruses.

6. 44:08 – 46:57

   A top-secret wrong delivery

   1. TFTim Ferriss44:08

      Can I pause for one quick second?

   2. SPSpeaker44:10

      Sure.

   3. TFTim Ferriss44:10

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

   4. SPSpeaker44:25

      Oh my God. 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 a- as they are, but this is what happened. I was in Canada. I'm speaking to you right now from Cortes Island, British Columbia. I was up here on Cortes 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 cell phone up the, to the air and he goes, "Chum, chum, chum, chum, chum." I go, "Wow." I go, "What are the numbers on the tail?" He goes, "There are no numbers. It's a Black Hawk military helicopter-"

   5. TFTim Ferriss45:04

      [laughs]

   6. SPSpeaker45:04

      "... that's right on top of the laboratories."

   7. TFTim Ferriss45:06

      [laughs]

   8. SPSpeaker45:07

      I go, "Oh my God, you're kidding." I go... And this is right after we got the pox results, right after I talked to the colonel, you know, like two weeks later or a week later. And I said, "Okay, listen, shut down the business." And I, I knew immediately, you know, the government's going to screw up here, and they're gonna... they're... and in an abundance of caution, they're gonna end up overstepping their bounds. And I said, "This is crazy. I've already been vetted. I've already been permitted. I'm already in dialogue with these people, uh, and they, they're trying to spook me? I mean, what's going on here?" So I shut down the business. At the time only had 10 employees. Now I have 100. Um, and I said, "So shut down the business. Give the cultures of agarikon to several of the employees. I never want to know who, who has them. You know, let's decentralize ourself as a target right now." And so I shut down the business. All the employees left, you know, and the helicopter's still buzzing around. And so the next day, I called up pretty pissed off s- to the colonel saying, "What is going on?" You know? And he, you know, got really nervous. Now he's got two black eyes, right? The, the, they delivered the wrong results... the, the right results to the wrong person. And now one, you know, he goes, "Oh, the government, you know, one hand doesn't talk to the other and they got overexuberant and, you know, and, you know, if, if terrorists got this technology, they could immunize themselves and they could..." And it's like, whatever, you know? So anyhow, it was funny because we... And I'm going through the airports, I got five stars on every single airline ticket. I joked to my wife, "Here we go again. I'm gonna get stopped and searched," you know? 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

7. 46:57 – 51:49

   Run-in with the US Dept. of Defense

   1. SPSpeaker46:58

      anyhow, so this is a... I filed these patents, a, a patent on, on agarikon 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. 2000... 9/11 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 you know that we analyzed 2,392 of your samples?" [laughs] And I went, "I'm so glad I didn't have to pay for that."

   2. TFTim Ferriss47:30

      [laughs]

   3. SPSpeaker47:31

      Um, but we got about 40 excellent hits, uh, from my 800 or so cultures, um, uh, that were surprising, um, which has led into, I think, a paradigm-shifting solution that for many of the problems that we face today. But I fi- filed this patent in 2004. In 2006, it's not even on the patent application homepage. Now 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.uh, gov website, and it didn't show up. It's over two years. So I got a hold of 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. 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?" Um, but I said, "That's not right." So we did an inter-government 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 the patent application... Now folks, uh, usually two to three years, you get a ruling. 10 years after the, I submitted the patent, it was approved.

   4. TFTim Ferriss48:46

      That's a long wait.

   5. SPSpeaker48:46

      That's a, that's a long wait. The good news is, it was 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 of, you know, patents become open sourced after 17 years. The i- idea is to reward the inventor, to incentivize the thing to come to market, 'cause 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 in- incentive. Patents are awarded for three reasons. One, no prior art, no evidence in the scientific or popular literature of anyone saying this, having the same idea. Two, unobviousness. 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 [laughs] have come out and maybe say... And, and the third is usefulness. So those are the th- three things. No prior art, contrary to conventional wisdom, you know, and, and usefulness. And so, you know, obviously, that fits all three of those categories. So n- then the, the, the pox molecules I, I have not patent, patented. They're open source. Hopefully we'll never have a smallpox, um, epidemic or pandemic again, and I think that's obviously, uh, serves a greater good.

   6. TFTim Ferriss50:11

      So, uh, another follow-up question that, uh, out of self-interest I'd love to ask related to the carpenter ants. So 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?" Uh, so I do wanna roll back the clock and talk about, among other things, your stutter. But first, I have to know, is there anything you would recommend a- as it relates to carpenter ants, or is it a waiting game? Uh...

   7. SPSpeaker50:53

      Well, the, the test of a patent is that it's reproducible. Um, the EPA and the USDA now are allowing this fungus in food handling facilities, the first fungus ever to be allowed for controlling insects in food handling facilities. It is that safe. The safety, the safety documents suppli- supplied by the EPA are now, uh, open source and in public domain. So the companies that did all the research proving that this fungus was not dangerous, uh, now have released all their commercial interest in it. The strain of Metarhizium called F52 is a public domain strain. Um, so what I'm saying is you're not legal for you to go out and use this and commercialize it without EPA registration, uh, but that test of a patent is reproducible. And so all of the methods for doing this is published and, um,

8. 51:49 – 53:34

   A too-effective product

   1. SPSpeaker51:49

      and I'm-- I just submitted my entire portfolio with all my research, you know, and all, um, eight or nine patents, all the documentation of all these companies that have done the research, you know, in themselves. Um, and I've submitted to a very, very well-known company that has a extremely potent, uh, insecticide that many people know that use it on the market. And it's-- the word I got back is, "Why would we want to disrupt a proven profit wheel-

   2. TFTim Ferriss52:19

      Yeah

   3. SPSpeaker52:19

      ... with something that..." Because my ants did not, uh, reinvade for 10 years, 'cause 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, uh, business plan is having consumer buying it every month and spraying toxic chemicals that kill the workers but don't kill the queen. The whole, 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, and they're all living in this honey, this sort of myceliated, uh, um, um, um, uh, palace. Uh, and then before they realize it, voof, it sporulates and it kills the queen. If it can kill the queen, it can control the whole colony. After it sporulates, the spore repellency property prevents other wor- uh, uh, carpenter ants from coming into your house. So it is a, it's a 10-year solution for about 25 cents. Um, that's what it costs to produce. Of course, the packaging and all that stuff, you'd-- it add up the numbers pretty quickly. But it's incredibly... It's very inexpensive to produce, and it can be produced in

9. 53:34 – 56:24

   The “greenwashing” of corporate images

   1. SPSpeaker53:34

      huge quantities. So it did not make it to market, and I've, I'm, I'm exasperated. Um, I've one really great story on this that this woman named Chris, uh, that works for a company that has three letters in their name, she was [laughs] she was given the mandate because of the c- their stockholders were really upset because of the reputation of this company c- causing toxic spills that harmed thousands of people, and they wanted-- so the grow 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 exciting thing we've ever seen in our life, you know, as, as, a- a- as entomologists in fighting these problems." She went to the board of directors. Pr- prior to going, we, 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 magnol- magnolia. I've never met her in person. I wanted to hire her immediately. She ran these, these, these meetings just so professionally, and she was really excited, and she went, goes in, and 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." I go-- I mean, she's totally composed before, and she's lost her composure. And 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. It can, it can, we can come with a ecologically rational and sustainable solution based on nature." Um, and they looked at her, uh, 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."

   2. TFTim Ferriss55:45

      [laughs] Oh, God.

   3. SPSpeaker55:47

      Very much similar to BP. Remember Beyond Petroleum?

   4. TFTim Ferriss55:51

      Right.

   5. SPSpeaker55:51

      How much of, uh, 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, it's called greenwashing. And, um, and so, so that, that was... And I just... So that, 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 insecticides are coming from the petroleum industry as byproducts from their waste material.

10. 56:24 – 1:16:43

    A lifelong stutter cured by psilocybin

    1. TFTim Ferriss56:24

       So, so I wanna talk disruptive and something challenging to the status quo and, and contrary to most conventional wisdom, but that requires going way, way back and talking a bit about, uh, 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?

    2. SPSpeaker56:51

       Uh, I started stuttering when, really, when I was, um, probably about five years old. I mean, I stuttered from the time that I could talk. Um, my family was disfun- dysfunctional, and I've been told that sometimes the type of stuttering that I have is a, is related to a defect, um, a neurological development in the seventh and eighth month. That's one possible reason. But the type of stuttering I have, anyone's seen The King's Speech, I had that and worse. So I c- c- c- c- c... You know, just could not speak, and I'd find alternative pathways to trick my brain with a preposition or adverbial phrase, 'cause 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 s- 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. And so I used to always stare at the ground, and I found fossils, I found mushrooms. Um, but it was 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 in 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. And so John went on to Yale, my brother Bill went on to Cornell, and they left, and they left me this laboratory. So I, my dream was always to have a laboratory, you know, and l- living in the country, and that's kind of what I'm doing now. But John, when he came back from Yale, came back with a book called Altered States of Consciousness by Charles Tart. And it was an anthology of research articles on changing your consciousness from either drugs or from, uh, spinning or from dreams. He diff- It, it... One of the early books from the University of California at Davis. So John lent me this book, and I said, "John, you know, I'd really like to see it," but he says, "Well, listen, I'm on break for two weeks, but I need the book because part of our class." So I got this book. I'm just devouring this book, you know? And, and John was my hero. He was my mentor, and John went to Mexico and Colombia, came back with these 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? No, your brother's book." And I go, "Sure, you can borrow it, but I need it back." And so I said, "Give it back to me in two or three days." So several days pass, 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 look at me in the eye and, uh-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:00:22

       [laughs] Always a good sign.

    4. SPSpeaker1:00:24

       Yeah. So I go, "Where's my book? You know, where my brother's book?" And then w- Then two weeks, and my brother John's now pressuring me. "Paul, I need that textbook, you know, as part of the class." So I finally g- g- I got a hold of Ryan and I said, "Where is my brother's book?" And my, Ryan said, "Paul, I can't give it back to you." And I said, "Why?" He said, "My dad found it and burned it."

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:00:46

       [laughs]

    6. SPSpeaker1:00:49

       I said, "Your dad burned my brother's book?"

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:00:53

       [laughs]

    8. SPSpeaker1:00:55

       "What?" He goes, "Yeah, it was considered to be counterculture and threatening, you know, to our family, you know, i- i- structure and all." I go, I could not believe it. Now, I was so upset, and I was so apologetic to my brother, who did not take it well. You know, like, "Last time I'm gonna trust you," um, type of a scene. And 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 [laughs]

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:01:30

       [laughs]

    10. SPSpeaker1:01:31

        So that got me into, into magic mushrooms, and, um, from my experience, and also a tremendous amount of guilt for my brother trusting me with his textbook, and I couldn't return it to him. So John was really interested in the subject. He inspired me, and then John went on to chemistry, then neurophysiology, University of Washington, uh, Medical School on a full scholarship, and I was left in the laboratory. And, and so I started experimenting with, you know, marijuana. I remember the DEA came to Columbiana, Ohio. They, they had a whole display of drugs, and a whole bunch of me and my friends just went there to look at them. We're like, "Wow, look at that one."

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:02:05

        [laughs] How, how old were you at the time?

    12. SPSpeaker1:02:07

        Oh, 14, 15 years of age.

    13. TFTim Ferriss1:02:09

        Mm-hmm.

    14. SPSpeaker1:02:09

        I mean, drugs on display, drugs you've heard about and you've never seen, you know?

    15. TFTim Ferriss1:02:12

        [laughs]

    16. SPSpeaker1:02:13

        So look, look how small that LSD is. That's incredible. [laughs] So I still had this really bad stuttering habit, and it was really socially debilitating, um, on multiple levels. And so I ended up... And I was in Ohio, and I ended up buying a bag of magic mushrooms. And I've never... N- Was not really into the drug scene, so I didn't really know how much things should cost, you know? So I, for 20 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, and I thought, "Okay, set and setting's important." So I took the bag, and, and, um, I thought that would be one dose.

    17. TFTim Ferriss1:02:59

        [laughs]

    18. SPSpeaker1:03:02

        It was not one dose, folks. [laughs] I probably ate about 20 grams-

    19. TFTim Ferriss1:03:06

        Oh, my God

    20. SPSpeaker1:03:07

        ... of, of psilocybe cubensis. Now, in, 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 been only the equivalent to, like, 10 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, you know, changing dimensions. You're, you're fractal patterns. The air becomes a sea of mathematical formulas, and your mind has opened up. Your heart's opened up. You're... Feel one with the universe. That's the, 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 10 to 20 grams is, is the superhero's j- 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 water because they were dried, and then, um, 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, uh, getting a good view, that's what I need. And I could feel the mushrooms coming on, and I... As I climbed up the tree, you know, stem, uh, branch by branch, I got higher and higher, so it was kind of a, this 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 it just, the mushrooms are coming on. I'm getting higher and higher, and, and I just realized, wow, I'm, uh, really getting high here, and it's a little, it's dizzying, so I'm holding onto the tree. And on the horizon was this 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 h- they're terrifying. Um, there were d- lightning bolts coming down and thunder and lightning. It was off in the distance, but it was coming at me really quickly. And I'm getting higher and higher as the 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 there'd be gg- gg- gg- gg, fractal patterns would just emanate out from every lightning strike, and z- z- z- synesthesia occurred, you know, where there, you know, uh, uh, s- and sound and, and, and, and visions were merging together and, and, um, sounds had visions, and visions had sounds, and it was just an incredibly complex... You know, the... One of my favorite books is The Glass Bead Game by, by Hermann Hesse, uh-

    21. TFTim Ferriss1:05:48

        Mm-hmm

    22. SPSpeaker1:05:48

        ... also, also called, uh, Magister Ludi. It's a rather erudite. He got the Nobel Prize for it in 1955. Um, but that, that was a, a deep dive into, into, uh, inner space exploration. But I felt like I was p- part of the Glass Bead Game, and I... There I was. I was ascending into this higher state of consciousness, and then I realized, "Oh, my God, I'm in the highest point in miles during a lightning storm. This is not a good place to be."

    23. TFTim Ferriss1:06:17

        [laughs]

    24. SPSpeaker1:06:19

        And, uh, 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 surround 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, are just the way of, way of existence. And then the lightning storm and the wind came up, and washed with, 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?" And I, I... Stuttering. So I'm having this dialogue with myself. Like, "I just can't overcome this 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. And so when it was my turn to read, I, uh, 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. Um, so I scored high on my test, so I didn't get put into special education, but it was, uh, pretty demoralizing to realize I'm gonna go into the special education class. Um, 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. You have, you know, y- 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'd achieved a state of Godhead. I felt enlightened. I come from a Christian background, so I had this empathe- uh, empathy with Jesus, you know, and now I understand why Jesus went in the 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 [laughs] and I went back home, and then the next morning, there's this girl that I greatly admired, and she was super sweet and nice to me, and I really s- love her to this day because of her kindness. Um, and, and I didn't wanna talk to her because every time I t-t-t-talked, t-talked, I c-c-c-c-c-c-c ... 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, uh, along the sidewalk and, in the morning, and she looks at me and she's so sweet and 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 [claps] just like that. 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? [laughs]

    25. SPSpeaker1:10:00

        [laughs]

    26. SPSpeaker1:10:01

        It's like, so, or if I'm meeting somebody who's super famous or something like that, you know, it's, but that's natural. You know, people get stage fright, um-

    27. SPSpeaker1:10:08

        Definitely

    28. SPSpeaker1:10:08

        ... when they're up, 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 m- 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, Psilocybe Mushrooms and Their Allies. I was self-trained. I got involved at the University of Washington with Dr. Daniel Stuntz, part of a taxonomic key council, and I adopted the taxonomy of psilocybin mushrooms as my speciality. At that time, there was very little literature on it. Most of the books in libraries had been razored, the pages had been razored out. Dr. Stuntz had a intact library, so I could study with him. I became a taxonomist. I wrote taxonomic keys, starting when I was 19 or 20, 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 was 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, and I'm meeting, 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, "And 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.

    29. SPSpeaker1:11:41

        [laughs]

    30. SPSpeaker1:11:41

        And the publisher went, "No way."
11. 1:16:43 – 1:18:10

    On profit-driven pharmaceutical companies

    1. SPSpeaker1:16:43

       a lot of people, people who are listening may not understand, these are not m- uh, drugs of abuse. You eat these mushrooms one day. The next day, you're like, "No way. [laughs] I'm not going near those things."

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:16:52

       [laughs]

    3. SPSpeaker1:16:52

       You look at them and you 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-

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:17:00

       Yeah

    5. SPSpeaker1:17:01

       ... 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.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:17:17

       Definitely. Uh, and, uh, this, this in many ways relates to your... Well, it, it relates to a few of your previous stories very well insomuch 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 the therapy and adjunct pre- and post-support and things of that type. Uh, but not, uh, uh, i- in the, the sort of one and done or three times and done aspect of it actually makes it very challenging to commercialize and make widespread unless you're relating on, uh, or relying on donations, excuse me. Uh,

12. 1:18:10 – 1:21:40

    Why humans fear mycelia

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:18:10

       I would love to hear your thoughts, just to expand on this a little bit, does, do you think, say, psilocybin or another that I know very little about but wanted to discuss with you, but I, I, we, we can talk about both or either, say, lion's mane. Are there, uh... In this case, should I say mushrooms or should I say mycelium or mycelia? What would be the right way to... Are [laughs] what would be the right term to use here?

    2. SPSpeaker1:18:35

       Well, I mean-

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:18:36

       That have-

    4. SPSpeaker1:18:36

       ... mushrooms-

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:18:37

       Yeah.

    6. SPSpeaker1:18:37

       It-

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:18:38

       Oh, sorry. Go ahead

    8. SPSpeaker1:18:38

       ... well, mushrooms, uh, mushrooms are what people know.

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:18:40

       Yeah.

    10. SPSpeaker1:18:41

        But mycelium is emerging as a tremendously important reservoir of many bioactive, uh, molecules that are, supersede the benefit of mushrooms. 25... A whole genome sequencing of, uh, reishi mushrooms, uh, uh, in the genus, uh, Ganoderma, um, uh, these, uh, the common lingzhi, lingchi, lingchih, uh, reishi, mannentake, the 10,000-year mushroom, the mushroom of immortality, these are all common names out of Asia. Um, th- there are 25% more genes are active and expressed in the mycelial form than it is in the fruit body form. The, the fruit body is the mushroom form. It's the end of its life cycle. So, uh, much of our research has found going side-by-side comparisons of mushrooms, which are protein rich, uh, they're beta-glucan rich, they have lots of carbohydrates and polysaccharides. They're nutritionally dense. But the mycelium is, is articulating constantly a bioshield of defense And, uh, 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 themself up anyhow. Moreover, I think that the sequence of bacteria that rots mushrooms is absolutely instrumentally im- uh, 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 de- deterministic microbiomes. And the mycobiome, the, the fungal biome, is determining the microbiome. Because many of these bacteria are adversarial. Some of them 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 g- uh, gene expressions, it is a fertile ground for, uh, learning, for being able to articulate, uh, responses as new challenges in the environment. The mushroom fruit body is at the end of a s- uh, 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, and animals, and plants for weeks, months, 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 and medicinal anymore. All, 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, uh, erinacines. Now, the lion's mane mushroom is called Hericium erinaceus.

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:21:39

        So-

    12. SPSpeaker1:21:39

        That's the Latin binomial

13. 1:21:40 – 1:23:44

    Lion’s mane

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:21:40

       ... 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.

    2. SPSpeaker1:21:56

       Right.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:21:56

       So, so please continue.

    4. SPSpeaker1:21:57

       So the erinacines 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's perfectly legal. Um, it, it has a long history of use, multi-thousands years, uh, history of use. It looked like a, a, a casc- it looked like pom-poms that cheerleaders use. It has white cascading crystals, uh, a, a, a, a descending, uh, um, um, teeth. Um, and it's a, a beautifully beautiful mushroom. It tastes like shrimp or lobster when you add butter to it, when you cook it. But the compounds that are most neurogenerative are in, from the mycelium, not from the mushrooms.

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:22:44

       Hmm.

    6. SPSpeaker1:22:44

       And so the erinacines are from the mycelium. Hericenones are another group of nerve growth factors. They're from the mushrooms. But the erinacines by far are 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 93 years of age in a few days. Uh, she's smart as a whip. 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, a- and my twin brother goes, "Well, 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 prevent neuropathies.

14. 1:23:44 – 1:29:48

    Treating neurodegenerative diseases

    1. SPSpeaker1:23:44

       And I think stacking them with psilocybin is something I'm really keen on, is doing microdosing of psilocybin stacked with lion's mane.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:23:54

       Hmm.

    3. SPSpeaker1:23:54

       Now, lion's mane in and of itself, we know has neuroregenerative properties. It's a big subject of research. If you go to PubMed or Google Scholar Alerts, you know, put in lion's mane and neural regeneration or N- NGF, uh, 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 had, gets Alzheimer's, for instance, have, um, amyloid plaque formation that interrupts and de- erodes the myelin sheath, prevents neurotransmission. And so lion's mane mushrooms have been demonstrated, uh, behaviorally in people with, uh, cognitive tests, but also, um, through, uh, dissection of mice. Uh, 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 neuro- neurotoxic. But it mimics that of the, what happens to the nervous system of Alzheimer's patients, because amyloid plaque formation can be, uh, can, can form. Their behavior changes. They lose the ability of navigating through mazes. They lose the novelty inquisitiveness fact- factor. Their short-term memory is basically erased, um, uh, or much of it. And then when they fed them lion's mane mushrooms, and they dissected the mice, and sure enough they saw that the amyloid plaque formation was there. And then those fully, uh, uh, uh, diseased mice, when they would then feed them lion's mane mushrooms for 23 days, they regained the ability of navigating through maze. They re-engaged inquisitiveness. That's called the novelty, uh, response, the novelty experiment Um, and then upon d- dissecting those knife, uh, and the resections of the tissue, they could see, uh, that the amyloid plaque had largely resolved, remyelination had occurred. And so you, you bundle that with, you know, you've got a behavior as well as physical evidence, you have regeneration of myelin. So lion's mane mushrooms are, it's just a very, very fascinating mushroom. I think about Einstein in, 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, these geniuses with all this experience, all this knowledge, uh, all this sense of being and context, to lose them at, at the end of th- their life is us losing a library that just... As the library books that fall into pieces in your hands. And, and I think it's so important for, uh, our cultures to preserve that knowledge, and I think lion's mane mushroom is a huge one.

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:26:45

       The, the slow descent into sort of cognitive malfunction, uh, 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, uh, I completely agree with you. Uh, this is something I've been fixated on for quite some time. If you were to, [inhales] uh, if you were to design a study involving the microdosing, microadministration of psilocybin under proper supervision and, uh, you know, sort of re- researcher controls, what might... Do you have any idea what that might look like? What the protocol might look like?

    5. SPSpeaker1:27:31

       It's a very timely question, uh, 'cause in two hours from now, I have a group of, uh, um, of financial people, uh, that are key, uh, in supporting the current psilocybin research at Johns Hopkins and elsewhere. Uh, they're arriving here, uh, 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, uh, 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. Um, it's, it's-- this whole patent landscape, I'm, I'm, I, I see both sides of the arguments of open sourcing and then also keeping things closed source. But [coughs] I pa- I filed a patent on neurogenesis, you can look it up, uh, stacking lion's mane, psilocybin, and niacin, nicotinic acid. Now, uh, I spoke before what is patentable. It is no prior art, and it speaks against conventional wisdom. So-- and when I gave a talk at MAPS, um, uh, recently, I asked the audience, about eight hundred people, "How many people remember during the 1970s and '80s, it was well known, especially on the West Coast, that if you wanna come down from a bad trip on psilocybin or LSD, you could take a bunch of niacin? You'll get a hot flu- uh, flush." And people who don't know, I mean, take like five hundred milligrams of niacin, you get red, and you get tingly all over your skin. You get this niacin flush. And about fifty people raised their hands. 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. Number one, there's no evidence that that's true, but it was common knowledge. Number two, because it excites the nerve endings, and 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 mane, lion's mane erinacines and the psilocybin to the endpoints of the nervous systems, if the vascular system's still intact, to deliver these compounds to create neurogenesis, uh, and prevent neuropathy, uh, at the endpoints of the nervous system.

15. 1:29:48 – 1:33:50

    On microdosing’s sexiness

    1. SPSpeaker1:29:48

       So I filed a patent, uh, stacking niacin, psilocybin, and lion's mane. The psilocybin, uh, uh, dosage is about one-twentieth of a gram.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:29:58

       Mm-hmm.

    3. SPSpeaker1:29:58

       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 one-twentieth below threshold dose that would create neurogenesis and perhaps make them cognitively more astute and make them a better person, you know, socially and, 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?

    4. TFTim Ferriss1:30:24

       [laughs]

    5. SPSpeaker1:30:24

       For the, you know, these older people to say when they're, they're kids, "Yeah, I'm microdosing," you know? Microdosing is extremely popular right now, as you probably are well aware.

    6. TFTim Ferriss1:30:32

       Definitely.

    7. SPSpeaker1:30:32

       But that's something that I, that we would like to see a clinical study. Now, the clinical study we already know, for any clinicians out there, you have too many variables in your, in your clinical study, and I agree. So we were looking at psilocybin alone, uh, lion's mane alone, psilocybin stacked with, uh, uh, with lion's mane. Uh, the niacin will have to come, um, later 'cause it's just, you, and you need enough, uh, cohorts, enough people, um, enrolled in the clinical study in order to have a statistical significance, almost stuttered there. Um, uh, so that's, that, that's what we're looking at is looking at, uh, stacking this and, and maybe do this clinical study in Canada. Uh, right now the FDA is very favorable, uh, to these clinical studies. I had a, a report from somebody who 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. Uh, and they were like... So the FDA scientists are quite focused on this, and it's something we all... You know, the difference between a medicine and a toxin is dose. I wouldn't call a psilocybin a toxin. Well, there's maybe one mo- a funny example that just came out in the literature of that, but, um, I wouldn't call it necessarily a toxin, but having a subthreshold dose, I think makes a, uh, is a, is a really valid approach because, um... And you probably shouldn't take these every day because you would normalize the receptors, you know? And so washing the c- 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, um, probably a better approach than taking them every day.

    8. TFTim Ferriss1:32:23

       Mm-hmm.

    9. SPSpeaker1:32:23

       So the, the jury's out on that, and a lot of different opinions of it, of it, so.

    10. TFTim Ferriss1:32:29

        It's, it's endlessly fascinating though, and, uh, y- you are right on the, on the money, so to speak, [laughs] or lack of money, given how effective they are in limited number of sessions at, uh, the combination, which is certainly has been studied and is being studied of efficacy and low toxicity. Um, and as you mentioned earlier, if a rat... If you put, and, you know, Michael Pollan and I have chatted about this a little bit in his, his podcast. But if you were to administer, say, uh, to a rat in a box, cocaine or heroin, and they c- they have to choose between those drugs or food, they will consume, uh, these types of opiates or stimulants until they die, d- to the absence of food. Whereas with, say, LSD, uh, I would also assume psilocybin, they, they take one dose, and that's the last time they touch that particular [laughs] petal.

    11. SPSpeaker1:33:22

        [laughs]

    12. TFTim Ferriss1:33:23

        And, uh, this is, uh... I, I don't want to take us too far afield and, and focus on this exclusively, but, uh, I, I really appreciate you, y- 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, uh, s- epidemic scale problems that we're experiencing. And,

16. 1:33:50 – 1:42:59

    The essence of Paul Stamets

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:33:50

       uh, I, I wanted to, uh, ask, we are gonna 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, it relates to something we, we were chatting about a little bit before we started recording, and talk about the, the decisions that made Paul Stamets Paul Stamets. Because-

    2. SPSpeaker1:34:15

       Mm

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:34:15

       ... there are so many mycologists out there, uh, I, 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, uh, Mother Jones. It says, uh, uh, "Paul Stamets is a modern example of the amateur scientist from the ea- 17th and 18th century who made a wonderful, who made wonderful contributions with only their native curiosity and keen sense of observation." Uh, and you can certainly comment on that if you don't feel like it's accurate, but what, what are the decisions you made, if any, come to mind, or habits you've cultivated that have allowed you, helped you to arrive where you are? I mean, you, uh, have made many discoveries. You've, uh, 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 [laughs] at a cocktail party.

    4. SPSpeaker1:35:12

       No, I, I, I have been, um, exposed to a circle of kindness, and I believe in karma. I was a child who had a lot of problems, and I want a big debt of gratitude to my professor, Dr. Michael Bugg. He never humiliated me, you know, at the Everglades 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, um, you know, and dive more deeply into the subject matter, but I was never humiliated. Um, and a s- a circle of kindness, and I really believe in karma, um, because this has meant, this has been a huge thing in my life, is the fact that, um, I believe evolution is an extension of gratitude and sharing. And it's not this, necessarily this, this, um, neo-Darwinian, uh, 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 our ourselves from our weaknesses to become stronger. Um, what very few, uh, lots of people know this, but very few different schools of people know this. I got into the 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 the Aspen Academy of Martial Arts. I first got into Goju-Ryu, Shi, uh, Shotokan, Shito-Ryu, got my first black belt in TaeKwonDo, and then became a black belt in Hwa Rang Do, which is by far one of the most sophisticated styles in the world, similar to Aikido and, and, uh, some other styles, Kuk Sool. But th- that, I had one experience that I think is emblematic of this, is, uh, 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, and, um, and he wants to fight a black belt, you know? Just a biker dude, and he's just pissed off at the world. And he came in, and, and remember that the head instructor does not fight at a challenge like this. They have too much to lose, uh, you know, if they screw up, you know, they lose face in front of their students. So, you know, anyhow, my, my, the head instructor, Gene, said, "Paul, I got another one." [laughs] And I go, "Okay."

    5. TFTim Ferriss1:37:38

       [laughs]

    6. SPSpeaker1:37:38

       And, um, and so this biker came in and, and then, and 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 I was really polite and, you know, I extended my hand, shook my hand, and 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? Um, and, and then we got out on the mat, and this guy just attacked me ferociously. I mean, it was not a, not a sort of like a boxers, you know, they have a little bit of like, "Okay, let's do it," and, you know, we have a little con- a g- you know, um, compassion for each other, you know? The, a little simpatico for another fellow warrior. No, this guy was, like, out to hurt me. And so I block, block, block him, block, block, and um, and this guy's just, you know, just swinging and kicking, and like, he can't kick well, number one, but he's just, like, overly aggressive and, and, you know, after a while, you know, you can block 10 or 20 times, but, you know, you're starting getting hurt, right? You know? The, these are, this guy is just ferociously trying to hurt me. And so I looked over at, uh, my head instructor, and he nodded his head and said, "Okay, Paul, time to take him out." [laughs]

    7. TFTim Ferriss1:38:41

       [laughs]

    8. SPSpeaker1:38:41

       And, you know, did three or four punches, you know, um, sucker punched him, did a jumping hook kick, bam, hit him in the temple [claps hands] , bam, then he went down. On, 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 on his trachea at the same time. Now, what people are really concerned about their vision, and also in their face, you know? So the, when you lock your finger into the eyeball and you're 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 stung from this kick, you know? And 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," and I extended my hand in friendship. He's laying on the map. This big burly biker guy started crying because 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... And 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. 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 gonna 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 célèbre of my life. And, and so-

    9. TFTim Ferriss1:40:50

       And, and we're definitely gonna dig into that. Uh, I, I absolutely want to explore it. I was just gonna echo what you said, uh, about the power of kindness. A friend of mine, a very good friend of mine, was just telling me recently, who perhaps not surprisingly has a lot of psychonautic experience, [laughs] some mileage with, uh, 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, uh, focused very heavily on phase III trials for MDMA in the treatment of, uh, PTSD, uh, which is, is fascinating, and I encourage people to take a look at that at, at maps.org. But what my friend said to me is, not too long ago, several weeks ago, he went into a coffee shop, uh, 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 it w- he meant it very sincerely, and she just broke down crying. Similar experience, like she had not had, it didn't seem, anyone express kindness to her in God knows how long. I mean, weeks, months, who knows? And it ju- 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.

    10. SPSpeaker1:42:10

        And that's what... You know, I have a business, um, uh, you know, um, but anybody who's ordered from our business, I, I own the business, so I run it, and I, uh, several years ago, I got these little stickers that say, "You are beautiful."

    11. TFTim Ferriss1:42:24

        Hmm.

    12. SPSpeaker1:42:25

        And every time someone orders from our business, in their order are two "You are beautiful" stickers, and I've had so many people write saying they were just having a horrible day. A physician just wrote to me recently. He had said, "Oh, my God, I, I cannot believe this little messaging." I send two because then they can pass one forward. So every order, in 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 entire day. That, again, extension of gratitude and affirmation, you know,

17. 1:42:59 – 1:44:24

    Astromycology

    1. SPSpeaker1:42:59

       and we are all on this planet together. We lift and 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 re- we enter into the fabric of nature from which we sprung, and I think that fabric in 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, on the verge where science and spirituality are converging, and now we're understanding nature and the extent of the cosmos, the, the hundreds of billions of galaxies. I mean, just, um, I always wanted to be a, an astromycologist. I kind of am now in some sense, but I've always wanted to... And, 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 in neurons, the computer internet, the organization of dark matter. This is a continua- a con- continuation on different orders of magnitude of the way of being. We are in all involved in this network of being, and this is just one of our strands in that network that we're living today.

    2. TFTim Ferriss1:44:23

       And

18. 1:44:24 – 1:49:19

    How fungi could solve human problems

    1. TFTim Ferriss1:44:24

       I, I, I want to get to bees, and I'm gonna get to it by way of laying out some illustrations of these, these webs, these strands of interconnectedness. And this is from Discover Magazine from a few years back, and I'm just gonna quote here. It'll take 30 to 60 seconds probably, and then I wanna talk about bees specifically. Uh, 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. Uh, mushroom mycelia could cleanse runoff from storm drains, farms, or log- 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 non-toxic to other. Four, medicines, which we've, we've discussed, could provide new antibiotic, antiviral, and immune-boosting compounds, and even chemotherapies. Five, forestry. Planting symbiotic mushroom species could speed reforestation in clear-cut woodlands. Six, agriculture. Adding... Ooh, this is the word that I can never pronounce. Adding M-Y-C-O-R-R-I, uh, H-I-Z-A-L. How do, how do we say that?

    2. SPSpeaker1:45:47

       Mycorrhizal.

    3. TFTim Ferriss1:45:48

       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, uh, 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 gonna pause here for one second just to let people soak in that. And then second, uh, in both preparation for this conversation, but also over the last two years reading various descriptions of what has been called the, the Wood Wide Web, I think is what they call it, [laughs] the, you know, the mycelium and how they facilitate communication between trees and other organisms. It's really mind-bending stuff. I mean, it's, it's, it's the type of narrative and description and discovery that if described, I'm just making this up perhaps, but, like, 50 years ago would've been thought science fiction. And, uh, I would love for you to describe, uh, y- what you have done in the world of bees. Uh, but I just find this so not only staggeringly fascinating and m- much of it counterintuitive, but important. Um, so that's my, that's my soapbox for the moment. But, uh, in any case, would, would love you to take that wherever you'd like.

    4. SPSpeaker1:47:21

       Okay. Well, I would recommend that people s- uh, read my book, Mycelium Running: How Mushrooms Can Help Save the World. It covers into these, uh, sub- subjects, uh, very, very deeply. Um, and the book is used as now as a introductory mycology book at many universities. Um, I, I typically don't, uh, promote, uh, a product from stage. There's no lectures out there you can find this, but I do wanna draw people's attention to fungi.com, F-U-N-G-I.com. There's an amazing letter from a Syrian refugee, and I want people... We obscured his face because we don't, uh, want him to be targeted by Assad, Assad's assassins. Uh, but he has brought in mushroom cultivation into the refugee camps using recyclable, uh, materials from the cardboard and all the paper. And he literally... You have to read the letter to... It just brings tears to your eyes. He's over 1,000 people now engaged in growing mushrooms, oyster mushrooms in refugee camps and, and, uh, from the Syrian crisis that are helping people, uh, feed themselves. And, um, and, um, think about all those, uh, thousand people now understanding how to grow mushrooms, what the downstream effect will be with their children. Uh, when they get out of those camps, they'll have skill sets that can really expand this in, in a huge way. Um, I believe that mycelium is the, uh, foundation of the food web. It is essential for food biosecurity. 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 myceli- mycelial mats, uh, uh, control and, um, uh, destined populations of bacteria that are uniquely specific to the mycelium, uh, that is growing, uh, in, in, uh, wood chips or in straw. Uh, so they actually articulate the populations of bacteria, uh, downstream from the mycelial networks.

19. 1:49:19 – 1:50:20

    Fantastic Fungi and the Wood Wide Web

    1. SPSpeaker1:49:19

       But this is gonna s- segue. So we talked about the, the antiviral stuff, you know, the BioShield, Biodefense program and 9/11. Well, and I had this antipathogenic fungi, uh, patents and working, um, against, you know, uh, termites and carpenter ants and, and, uh, bedbugs and mites. And so a good friend of mine, Louis Schwartzberg, he actually has finished a movie called Fantastic Fungi. It is coming out in the next few months. We've been making it for over 10 years, um, with, uh, Lynn Yer- Lynn Lear, uh, Norman Lear, um, and his, th- that group. And, uh, the, I just saw the, the final cut, um, a few days ago. It is Quite good. I'm really happy where, where it's going. But it talks about the wood wide web, and Susan Simard 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 peas in a pod. She was doing her work parallel to my doing mine and, and we ended up in, you know, really in a, in the, in the, the same, uh, intellectual ecosystem, so to speak.

20. 1:50:20 – 1:56:51

    Colony collapse disorder bonding liberals and conservatives

    1. SPSpeaker1:50:20

       Um, but so when Louie was doing a, a movie, he was, uh, looking at butterflies, and then he got into bees and colony collapse. And colony collapse is really, uh, colony collapse disorder is a euphemism created by the media, but it does speak to a very serious issue. Um, in Oklahoma last year, 74% of the beehives died. Now think of it. If you were, uh, having, uh, 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. Um, 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 one 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 Louie came to me, he said, "Paul, there's a, there's a huge problem with colony collapse and bees are dying. What can you do about it?" Well, I had a series of events, um, and these events, when you string them together, led to me an, to an epiphany in that I am a controversial mycologist. I have 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, 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 co-factors. Now, health or disease, in my mind, is a series of coefficient variables, factors which are strung together. 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 neonics would not be toxic, and then they found out they were toxic, and so they were banned in Europe last month. Neonics are still used in the United States and Canada. Um, these, there are so many... 70% of the food is thought to be, uh, absolutely critically dependent upon bee pollination services. You know, um, two arms, uh, length away from direct bee pollination contact. So bees are, are dying 'cause of a confluence of variables. Loss of hab- habitat, neonics, pesticide exposure, factory farming. It's not natural for bees to be 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 it's a, that's a great, great, uh, scenario for diseases to be spread. 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, that's its Latin binom- binom- the binomial. It injects a whole slew of viruses into the bees. And these, uh, these now all bees in the world have these viruses. Working with the USDA, Dr. Jay Evans, and, uh, who is a USDA virologist who's widely published and a senior scientist at the USDA, has not seen a virus-free bee in more than 10 years. What's happened now is a virus is being spread by the Varroa mite, 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 beehives with this Amitraz, this toxic, you know, tick miticide, and they were 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, and 80% of the pollination services that we benefit from, from bees pollinating are actually coming from wild bees, not the honeybee, which is Apis mellifera, which is a, it produces huge colonies. The, the wild bees are oftentimes called solitary bees, are very small groups of a dozen bees or two dozen bees are ground dwellers. Um, and those bees provide over 80% of the services that are benefiting, uh, agriculture. So the honeybees, the main-- We have about 2 million, um, 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. And so now we have evolved into a viral pandemic, uh, 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 out at Thanksgiving dinner, you don't want to talk about Hillary or Trump, talk about the importance of bees. It's the number one issue that brings liberals and conservatives together because everyone recognizes the importance of bees, uh, as it is, uh, 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 to me to an epiphany.

21. 1:56:51 – 2:02:25

    “Failure is the price of tuition”

    1. SPSpeaker1:56:51

       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've 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. In 1984, I had the garden giant mushroom growing in my garden. It's a wood chip mushroom. It grows on wood chips. It produces mushrooms up to five pounds per specimen. People can look it up. Um, 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 w- all over my wood chips. And I look really closely, and they're moving the wood chips to the side, just 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 the garden giant mycelium in my garden, traveling about 800 to 1,000 feet. And so I went out there, I photographed it. Thank God I found the photographs. They were Kodachrome 64 slides. In sweltering heat, you know, two years ago, I found them up in the attic. But I published this in Harrowsmith Magazine in 1988. I published this in 1994 in Growing Gourmet and Medicinal Mushrooms, one of my books. And I speculated, oh, the bees are going after the sugar-rich exudates because the 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 microfactorial equation. So that's the first microfactor. Factor number one, Paul sees bees attracted to the wood chips in his garden. I forgot about it. Microfactor number two, Paul gets involved with the Bio Shield program, discovers that polypore mushrooms have antiviral properties, and many patents have issued now. I have more patents on this. People can look them up. Um, and so that was another experience that I had. Um, number three, my getting rid of the carpenter ants in 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, uh, it's an open source, you know, online journal, scientific journal. There's an... On the cover of the, of the PLOS was a big article on the discovery that... See, colony collapse happens, most people don't know this, 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 dewar- 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. When you see bees on a flower, it's the last days of their life. 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 the 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're, again, a, a cattle rancher or sheep rancher, you're losing more than 50% of your... It's, it's psychologically damaging as well as economically damaging, and people just give up. So I had these experiences, and then I saw in this journal that when they looked at the honey in the abandoned p- beehives, it lacked a certain chemical called p-coumaric acid. P-coumaric 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-coumaric acid, they found these bees, hundreds of pounds of honey, no bees in the beehive, it lacks this essential nutrient, p-coumaric acid. Now, I'm not a chemist, but I'd seen p-coumaric acid before because in the research I've done, I look at what's called the delignification of wood, how fungi gobble up wood and break it down. And I recognized p-coumaric acid as a chemical constituent that was present, uh, in breaking down wood. And that's why you see myceliated wood smells fragrant and odiferous. There's a lot o- uh, outgassing of, uh, microflavonoids, uh, phenol, phenolic compounds that are going into... And that's why after a rain in, in the, in the woods, the wood smell- 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, uh, and part of the outgassing of the mycelium.

22. 2:02:25 – 2:09:51

    How to save the bees

    1. SPSpeaker2:02:26

       Okay. I had all those four experiences, and then I go to sleep, and then 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... Uh, this, it shook me to the core." He said, "Stop everything you're doing. Focus on this. This is too important." So I called the University of California, Davis. It's never a good idea to start a conversation with another scientist that you've not, not met with the words, "I had a dream." [laughs]

    2. SPSpeaker2:03:06

       [laughs]

    3. SPSpeaker2:03:06

       [coughs] I mean, that conversation went nowhere. It was like, "Crazy person, goodbye."

    4. SPSpeaker2:03:10

       [laughs]

    5. SPSpeaker2:03:11

       So I called up Washington State University. I was at TED, I think at the TED that you spoke at, and I was at TED, and I went out and I was given Steve Sheppard's name from Washington State University. He's a chair of entomology in Pullman, Washington, uh, Washington State University's Agricultural Science College. And I said, "Listen, Steve, please just give me a half an hour. It's gonna 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 wanna 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 is extraordinary breakthrough. With our mycelial extracts of these polypore mushrooms, these, these wood conks that look like, um... They're called, um, h- hoof-shaped mushrooms that grow on trees. Everyone's seen them. Um, with the mycelium that's extracted in water and ethanol, the very same extracts that we use in the BioShield Biodefense 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 one milliliter per hundred, you know, one unit per hundred, 1%, we give it to the bees, and then 7 to 12 days later, those viruses are reduced by thousands of times. 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. Now think of the implications of this. This means that I think 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 reduce viruses that harm birds, bird flu, H5N1, H3-- H1N1 in pigs, that harm people, poxviruses, herpesviruses, birds, pigs, people, bees. This speaks to something I think that is very deeply profound in understanding that within nature, these mycelial n- 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, 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 polypore mushrooms, they're all active to d- 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. Many of these viruses, herpesviruses are known as oncoviruses that cause cancer. Uh, a lot 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 sixth ext-- the sixth great extinction known, uh, life on this planet. We have 8.3 million species. We're los- losing more than 30,000 a year. Do the math. In 100 years, that's more than a third of the biodiversity that is unraveling all around us. What can we do? This is actionable ecological solutions that's paradigm shifting, that's scalable, ecologically rational, economically sustainable. Again, all these fungi grow in every forest of the world. And we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh, and everybody missed this. Now I've been issued now 10 patents, the United States, Canada, uh, Australia, New Zealand, and Eurasia. When I first got the first patent award, for five seconds I was excited, literally, and then I became h- horribly demoralized. I said, "You've gotta be kidding." There's no prior art. No one... They did the, the patent offices did the most ma... 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, uh, w- let alone reducing the viruses, uh, that are being vectored by mites. The fact that I'm the one who discovered this is horribly depressing. It means that we're, we're truly Neanderthals with nuclear weapons, and people talk about climate change and how biodiversity is a bunch of liberal scientists. Are you freaking 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, uh, countries with the left, l- but, you know, Europe and, and Eurasia. Um, uh, not, 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 now that these patents are issuing is, um... And I'm, I'm, I've made mistakes, and there are mycologists out there whose eyes roll, but I'm very happy to have received several rewards, one of which from the Mycological Society of America for bringing more students into the field of mycology than anyone in history. So they were kind of schizophrenic about me because I'm a psychedelic researcher, I'm not trained, and yet I'm bringing all these students into their classrooms that want to save the world. And they said, "Paul, you've created a cr- huge problem. We want to study yeast, and these students want to save the world. What do we do?" So, um, 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 can be more powerful than pharmaceuticals with a greater bioshield of defense, with less toxicity and more utility in a sustainable way, and that, I think, is paradigm shifting.

    6. TFTim Ferriss2:09:43

       I hope you're right. I, I hope you're right, and I look forward to, uh, learning more about this as the discussion opens.

23. 2:09:51 – 2:25:53

    How to save the world

    1. TFTim Ferriss2:09:51

       Is there anything for people listening who are, 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, uh, that would enable them to be part of an environmental and, uh, 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. SPSpeaker2:10:25

       Absolutely. Uh, the simplest thing that people can do is let wood rot. Give up this idea of a, a Elizabethian yard that's highly manicured and managed. Nature likes fractal faces. The 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 rot- logs rot in your, in your garden, in your yard. Mushrooms will come up that'll help feed the bees. It'll help build these fractally intense, uh, environments that are really important for biodiversity. That's one. Uh, we have a campaign for supporting Washington State, uh, University, uh, W-WSU, uh, .b-uh, bees.wsu.edu. We've raised over $3 million now, uh, for bee research, uh, at WSU. We have just begun to explore the role of these polypore mushrooms. Uh, there's hundreds of them to test. Uh, we've hit the home runs on our very first ones. We're extremely lucky. But the fact that, you know, this is, this speaks to... We can reduce these viruses 45,000 to one with one treatment. I mean, what antiviral drug will do that? You know? Um, that is a complex soup of constituents or, uh, you know, the contrast is, is surprising. So supporting, uh, um, uh, bee company, um, um, bee nonprofits, joining a, a mushroom society. There's the North American Mycological Association, which is a parent organization for, uh, called NAMA, and their website is namyco.org, N-A-M-Y-C-O.O-R-G. They have a listing of all the local mycological societies, you know, in pe- in the Canada, United States, and Mexico. Um, that's one. Uh, joining your bee, um, 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, uh, biodiverse networks that have evolved to help plants grow. When you add lots of fertilizers and insecticides, 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, uh, inputs as much as, as fertilizers, et cetera. 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 in 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 strange, you know, characterizations, uh, it really is based on something that's fundamentally good for the commons.

    3. TFTim Ferriss2:13:59

       Well, and 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, uh, holistic fashion, or they can be compounded to the point where they become, uh, exponentially more difficult to unwind and to solve for. Uh-

    4. SPSpeaker2:14:38

       Yeah. In, in the field of mycology, I'm just gonna say in the field of mycology, I have no, 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, and I've met these people, it's just not part of my DNA to pitch. And I look at them going, " [sighs] 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, uh, I have a great group, a community of individuals who are, who believe in this, who see the results. And, um, Michael Pollan's book and Fantastic Fungi and, you know, your, your in support, et cetera, helps spread this message. But, you know, I'm 63 years of age, and I'm gonna die with a smile on my face because it's the heritage that we leave, not, not the material possessions that we own during this 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, uh, a Zen, um, like attitude. And I think that, um, it's time for people to take action. We need a revolution.

    5. TFTim Ferriss2:16:01

       It is time. It is time for people to take action. Uh, could not agree more. Uh, and you've given a number of recommendations that I will link to in the show notes as usual. So everyone listening, ev- everything we've discussed, all the links to everything, uh, 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. Uh, and on social media, on Instagram, you're Paul Stamets. Facebook, Paul Stamets. YouTube, Paul Stamets. Is there a s- a... For people who want to know where to go for what, is there one, uh, best place for certain things, a, a certain best place to say hello if people want to reach out to you somehow?

    6. SPSpeaker2:16:49

       Oh, that's k- complicated, like you, Tim, you know?

    7. TFTim Ferriss2:16:52

       [laughs]

    8. SPSpeaker2:16:52

       'Cause, uh, we get so many, uh, people wanting to contact us. But, but for... I, I wanna feed some of the researchers out there and people who wanna get into some of the, the detailed, uh, research articles. We have a website that we populate called mushroom resour- uh, mushroomreferences.com. Mushroomreferences.com. I... Several hundred peer-reviewed, uh, articles, um, that we link to with abstracts that talk about, um, the most recent research of the, uh, from mycelium. Um, and it's, um, a deep dive. Many physicians are unfamiliar, and because the public expects that they're going to be experts about everything in health, they're actually quite ignorant. And so I have found this has been a challenge. This is why I speak to a lot of, uh, uh, acade- a lot of academic conferences, uh, to, to 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, um, but otherwise, you know, fungi.com is a hub, and we have a resource section, uh, at the... and on that website that links to many other, uh, nonprofits, uh, lots of other resources, uh, including, uh, Cornell University was a particularly a good one. Um, there is, uh, MycoWeb, which is extremely good. M-Y-K-O-W-E-B. MycoWeb's a really good one. And, um, so there's a lot of mycologists out there that are genuinely really, really good people. Um, but they have... I've in a sense have tasked them [laughs] with expectations greater than some of which they can deliver, and I apologize for that, but time is short. This every- it is so important that everybody gets a- aboard the starship and, and try to do good.

    9. TFTim Ferriss2:18:38

       Well, I, uh, thank you so much for your time, um, today, Paul. This has been really fun for me, and I, I'm sure for, 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, this first conversation on the podcast?

    10. SPSpeaker2:18:59

        Um, 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.

    11. TFTim Ferriss2:19:12

        Hear, hear.

    12. SPSpeaker2:19:13

        So.

    13. TFTim Ferriss2:19:13

        That is-

    14. SPSpeaker2:19:14

        Okay

    15. TFTim Ferriss2:19:14

        ... an excellent way to wrap up. And, uh, once again, Paul, a real pleasure to spend this time with you. I have pages and pages and pages of notes, [laughs] of follow-ups for myself and for my family, and, uh, also the many different avenues that I want to explore. And, uh, to everyone listening, you can 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, uh, pages in those books that you might consume one after the other, and actually take a, take a meaningful step forward, uh, with, with somehow bending the reality around you, uh, in a positive direction. And till next time, thanks for listening. [upbeat music] 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? 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Episode duration: 2:26:03