Joe Rogan Experience #2134 - Paul Stamets

(drumbeats) Joe Rogan podcast, check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. (instrumental music) What is going on, my friend? How are you?

Hey.

Good to see you again.

Good to see you, brother.

It's been a while.

It's been a while, and there's a lot of interesting developments. So this is the never-ending story, I feel.

The never-ending story of mushrooms.

Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Yeah. So this giant one that you brought me, explain this again, 'cause you were telling me out there, I'm like, "Let's save this for the show," 'cause this- this is crazy.

Sure. This is, uh, the best gift that I can give from a mycologist to a friend. This is a rare old growth mushroom called Agarikon, only grows in the old growth forest, is now on the red list of threatened species, uh, in Europe. This one was found on the ground, folks. So it's important that people don't pick these. They are very rare. Literally, one out of a hundred times in the old growth forest, I'll find one. So this is, uh, really important that people understand how important biodiversity, mycodiversity, we're talking about fungi. Agarikon was first described by Dioscorides over 2,000 years ago as elixirium ad longum vitam.

Wow.

The elixir of long life. It's also revered by the Haida and the Tlingit in the Northwest First Nations as a mushroom very important for their own pharmacopeia. So a 2,000 years history of use, other sides of the world, and directly after 9/11, I was approached by the BioShield, uh, Biodefense Department, and they ran over 2,200 assays. The ser- the concern was, uh, weaponizable viruses. So they saw an article I wrote in Herbal Gram called Novel Antivirals from Mushrooms, a whopping one page long. That's all there was in the scientific literature. So I knew in my intuition this rare species could have some properties. Of more than 2 million samples tested by the US Defense Department, USAMRID, US Army Research Institute, infectious diseases, and NIH, in collaboration of more than 2 million samples, synthetics and natural compounds, we were in the top 10 of all samples active against, in this case, poxviruses, and we're the only natural product. So the- there's a vetted press release that talks about this that we- came out in 2004. So I've dedicated my life, you know, I have a company, and fortunately, I put in a lot of my resources. I've literally spent millions of dollars collecting strains from the old growth forest, and I'm happy to announce that we have more than 107 strains of Agarikon isolated from Northern California, even Northern Arizona, British Columbia, and in Europe. I have now the largest culture library of Agarikon in the world. And so people go, "Why is this important?" Well, it's not only important because the old growth forest are declining. I mean, there's less than 1%, but I believe the old growth forests are cultural libraries that will be essential for biodefense. And from the research that we did with the BioShield program in 2004, then I have a TED Talk in 2008 that talks about this, and that I'm very thankful that we have completed a COVID-19 clinical trial, the results of which was presented at the Georgetown University of Medicine, uh, School of Medicine on September 23rd, 2023. And what we looked at, and my colleagues and superb physicians and researchers led by a great team at the Krupp Center for Integrative Medicine at University of California, San Diego, and it was a double-blind placebo-controlled study. And in that study, um, the idea was to look at vaccine enhancement. So before mRNA vaccines, there's just so much noise and confusion, and you know, the- the sense the dust hadn't settled enough. But the mRNA enhancement vaccine, which is called MOCA19, they gave half the patients a placebo, which was mycelium grown on rice, of- I'm- I'm sorry, just rice, and Agarikon and turkey tail combined that were grown on rice. So one, the control, the placebo, is just rice, neutral, and the other one is Agarikon and turkey tail. That turkey tail is the most well studied medicinal mushroom in the world. We populate a website for physicians at mushroomreferences.com. No branding, just pure science. People can go to mushroomreferences.com and see this. So double-blind placebo-controlled, and they literally recruited people directly out of the vaccination lines or people getting Pfizer or Moderna vaccines and said, "Hey, do you want to be involved in a medicinal mushroom vaccine study, enhancement study?" And people- people then signed up. And so they got hide- uh, they consumed Agarikon or turkey tail or the placebo for four days, and then they measured symptoms post-vaccination, and then six months out. And so I- there are two slides that I have that I sent along to you that I'm allowed to show.