The Hidden Intelligence of Mushrooms with Paul Stamets

0:00 I want to talk about a subject I've never talked with anyone before on a podcast. I was told also, even within the field of mycology, it's a career killer to mention psilocybin. And now as a career maker, psilocybin's a prodrug, becomes psilocin. And docs with the 5-HT2A receptors stimulate new neurons to grow. It stimulates neuroplasticity as a whole. It's the least toxic of the most powerful medicine that I have ever seen. I'm 71 years of age. I'm on no drugs. You look great. No drugs. I did 90 push-ups this morning. But I also published... I have, you know, 35 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals. Psilocybin is a tryptamine. These are alkaloids. Looking at the fact that these happy molecules, serotonin make a happy molecule, you know, I really believe that psilocybin makes nicer people. This is clearly and easily the most exciting time for psychiatry, possibly in the entire history of our field. Dig into this a little deeper, please. You know, fact check me. Welcome back to the Psychedelic Report.

0:58 I'm your host, Dr. Dave Rabin, and today we're coming to you live from Beyond Wonderland Psychedelic Science Conference in Austin, Texas with somebody who has been on the show before at least once, if not twice, who is one of my favorite mycologists and one of the world's favorite mycologists who has really just... uh has a lifetime of work that has reshaped the way we think about everything from mushrooms and fungi to the way we interact with the world living world around us so paul stamets thank you so much for taking the time to come back on with us well thank you dave and let's be very clear there's a whole bunch of mycologists out there there's a lot of people that are carrying this information forward and piercing the envelope and i'm just so gratified that

1:55 This is not such an eclectic, bizarre science as it once was. And in fact, many students, when they were being given advice, they were told not to get into the field of mycology because there was nothing important about it. Same with psychiatry. We know it's so important. It's amazing how you can be given fundamentally exactly the opposite advice that you should be being given. But yeah, it's a great time because it seems like there's a... revolution from the underground sweeping the entire planet and mycelium is more than just a metaphor it's you know actionable uh solutions that we can tap into the deep well of knowledge in the mycelial networks and this is what we're so excited about yeah absolutely i mean it's it's funny that you said that about mycology and the kind of evolution and emergence of the import recognize now importance of that field in modern times because when i went into psychiatry the first question that this is in

2:55 2012, the first question that my wife's physician father asked, my father-in-law asked her, and that many other people asked me were, did you do bad in school? Is that why you chose this path? And of course, now everybody recognizes that this is clearly and easily the most exciting time for psychiatry, possibly in the entire history of our field. And mycology, I would say the same. It's like, thanks to your work and other wonderful mycologists, we Like the understanding of the mycelial network alone is just such an incredible discovery to share with the world in terms of how we're connected to everything around us. Yeah, it's an irony because I was told also, even within the field of mycology, it's a career killer to mention psilocybin. And I was a career maker. Right. But that's why, because it has a universality of use.

3:47 you know both the psilocybin mushrooms and tapping into the immunity benefits of mycelium against the universality of use so we're talking about the neuroscape the health of the nervous system and psychology and we're also talking about immunity and both of those arenas this is where some of the most powerful breakthroughs in medicine bridging natural products to conventional medicine that we're seeing so much traction so i'm delighted i'm actually anxious to get back to research i can't wait to leave this conference I have papers that I'm reviewing, I'm writing, and we have just research results that are cascading in. It's just like an avalanche of data right now. It's very self-affirming in many ways, but it also makes us wonder what else is out there. It's really a new dawn in the field of biological sciences. And I've always maintained, you know, biodiversity is biosecurity. Well, microdiversity.

4:41 supports biodiversity without exactly mycelial networks there isn't biodiversity so there's a through line between microdiversity biodiversity to biosecurity and that's what we really need to invest in yeah i love that and i think you made a really great point which is that you know one of the ways we know we're on the right track as researchers and scientists is when we ask questions that then, the right questions that give us answers that then unlock all of these other questions we hadn't necessarily considered before that are really worth investigating. And one of the things that stood out to me most about your talk here that I really loved the way you described this, because I've heard you speak many times before, but I haven't heard you talk about this in this specific way, was you described that we live in a tryptamine universe.

5:30 right it was something like that this is where i just want to push the envelope of people's imaginations this is like a galilean concept and you're really good at that by the way well but i also publish i have you know 35 peer-reviewed articles in scientific journals i encourage people to look me up and go to mushroom references dot com https colon slash last mushroom references.com there's a thousand peer-reviewed articles the abstracts of which in the doi numbers but this is for those people who are skeptical and i love skeptics my best supporters have been my skeptics right so why i mentioned that we live in a tryptamine universe is because i'm an amateur astronomer very much an amateur but i wanted to go into astronomy me too originally that was you know but there was last night you know looking out into the stars or looking at the ground underneath your feet i was more grounded and even though i was aspirational to go into the stars the reality was you know let's take care of this planet yeah we're here we're here now um so

6:32 why i mentioned this is 14 amino acids have been retrieved now from asteroids including the four uh the essential amino acids ag ct um that are the building blocks of dna and one that's associated with rna and there's other there's another you know nine other essential proteins amino acids that are essential for life but those are the building blocks of dna and so we knew that and then in 2016 nasa sent a probe another osiris probe very appropriately named and it went to a asteroid um out beyond jupiter and interesting this asteroid has an elliptical orbit that actually comes close to the earth which is interesting but it formed 4.6 billion years ago The Earth formed 4.5. So just older than Earth. Older than the formation of the Earth. And indeed, this little asteroid is a rubble field that coalesced together from something else. And they also found water on it.

7:35 Well, when they retrieved this asteroid, not only did they find the four amino acids essential for DNA, but they found something else that was very fragile and oftentimes destroyed in meteorites, which heretofore now we think had this other compound, and it was tryptophan. So many of you know about tryptophan. It's in your Thanksgiving turkey. So tryptophan, when it... loses a carbon dioxide molecule, which is one enzymatic reaction. This is not a difficult reaction. It's occurring all over. When then tryptophan becomes tryptamines. So it's called decarboxylation. And when it loses that CO2, it becomes a tryptamine. Now, this fit really well with my world or view of life because I believe matter begets life.

8:23 Life becomes single cells. Single cells become multicellular. And then these cells grow out. They branch. Membranes form. Networks are born. We share a more common ancestor of the fungi than we do with any other kingdom. We came from a super kingdom called a Paislaconta. We were basically from protus, eukaryotic single cells. They have a nucleus. And their branch split into mycozoa. Mycozoa led to animals and to mycota. So it's called hollowzoa and hollow mycota. Technically, those are the new terms. So that mycota led to mycelium digesting its nutrients externally. We went the route of encirculating our nutrients with basically a cellular sac, a stomach. And so that led in the animals then diversified.

9:16 basically and we create this sort of permit semi-permeable barrier the mycelium digests nutrients externally inhales oxygen exhales carbon dioxide produces these acids that are in digesting as nutrients externally And I speculated on this, and now it's very well established. These are also neurological networks. 50 word packets have been identified from much mycelium. Wow. Signals that have been actually discrete word packets that have been identified from mycelium. They're using in transmission that are streaming. By word packets, you mean? Electrical signals, right? That are actually discrete electrical signals that are words. Yeah, that are unique. Now, you can play with this. How many words?

9:59 are needed to create a coherent sentence, how many words are actually needed to write a novel, right? I mean, you can do the permutation of the algorithms. But 50 words is like a two-year-old's vocabulary, basically. Potentially, but the assembling of those words, you know, is more than just words. There are word packets you can put in the sentences. So this is just the beginning. So that's what we've been able to decipher. Now, epigenetically, this is really important that people understand. Most people understand antibiotics came from fungi. Penicillium chrysogenum gave us penicillin. What many people may not know is that these mycelial networks sets up guilds of cooperating organisms. So these quora or quorum of cooperating organisms that can be more than a mile to eight miles of mycelium in rich forest soil.

10:51 Like underground. Underground. And I just fact-checked this just recently. I went deep dive to make sure the data was correct here. A mile to eight miles of mycelium in a cubic inch, about 20 grams of mass in a cubic inch. More than a million bacterial species. Wow. A million bacterial species. More than a billion bacteria are coexisting within the matrix of mycelium. wow now when you think about these mycelial networks they have antibiotics and they have prebiotics and they also seek alliances because it helps the commons these networks growing together create ecosystems that flourish they give rise to plants yeah a great giant communities that create debris fields that guess what feeds the mycelium. So it's a community of self-interest and cooperating organisms. Very malleable, high plasticity, which means basically it can change and adapt. But these membranes tend to be basically incredibly intelligent. And by supporting these membranes in the ecosystems, this is where we are today. We are now Neanderthals with nuclear weapons, sort of not understanding.

12:01 of how much we are connected with the ecosystem as well established now 80 90 of our cells you know our cells are bacterial yeah and we have mitochondria that came from bacteria that's inside of our cells this is our energy machinery and so it's really well understand that we are actually our community We have viral DNA that's been inserted into our cells over the years. And hey, if you want to talk about panspermia, you know, proto-viral, you know, RNA, maybe what's happening, you know, through the cosmos. Certainly the Earth is spewing out an enormous amount of genetic material, right, going into the atmosphere and beyond. So when Bennu was brought back about three years ago, This is the asteroid. The asteroid. Circling Jupiter. Out beyond Jupiter. Out beyond Jupiter. They found tryptophan. And then tryptamines are what we are using right now to communicate serotonin. Psilocybin is a tryptamine. These are alkaloids. And so looking at the fact that these happy molecules, serotonin being a happy molecule, it's a molecule of consciousness.

13:05 And tryptamine derived. And tryptamine is centered. Then because these neural networks, you know, from life, just creating these networks and the communications that we've already established, it just dawned on me like a huge epiphany. Oh my God, we'll find mycelial-like structures and organisms throughout the universe. We'll find tryptamines throughout the universe. These will be communication networks. They'll be using serotonin and tryptamines. And it's inevitable. then that I think that we live in a conscious universe. Our conception of the consciousness of the universe is, of course, you know, a tiny fraction. What can we realize? What can we not know? I mean, the enormity of the concept exceeds our ability of comprehension. But we have the elements now to make that argument. And so I believe now, very firmly, we will find mycelial-based organisms on other planets.

14:03 We're likely to find animals in other planets, you know, the bacteria. We'll find protists. We'll find viruses. It's not unique just to the Earth because the elements for this formula of life we know now exist beyond the Earth. And where did Bennu come from? Right. What was before Bennu? Well, it had water on it. Right. So it's a rubble field that assembled into an asteroid from something else that was. Great. That came from somewhere else. Somewhere else. So what's the lineage, you know, of the molecules in Bennu? This now gets really exciting. Maybe the alien spaceship crashed into it and just like, you know, their DNA just got splatted. It went through the windshield. You know what I mean? Yeah, that begs the question. The protomolecules that give rise to life, either on Earth or alien, I think that's a commonality in our shared existence.

15:00 How you elaborate into whether an alien came to Earth in a certain form or not becomes a matter of debate. I don't think it's debatable that the molecular constructs, basically the proto-elements that give rise to life now, I don't think that could be disputed. We have the proteins of DNA. We have the amino acids of DNA. We have found them. The Japanese first found a whole bunch of them, and NASA's found several times. But now that we have tryptophan. In space. From asteroids. From asteroids, right. So this is super, super exciting. Because for me, think about it. You and I are talking. Dave and Paul are talking. People are listening. And you think about how far back we can determine, you know, the universe.

15:50 from the big bang 13.8 billion years ago to present we're here for such a tiny blip of time yeah but we're kind of a world pool of atoms and the molecules that coalesced and Paul and Dave and you. And we're so temporal, but we didn't exist in this form prior to our birth. Right. After we die, we're going to be disassembled and we'll go back into the matrix of molecules from which we came. And we'll just exist in people's memories. Yeah. But can that be bad? Think about it. Can it be bad? I think the universe is bonded by love. I agree. you know, and cooperation and synergy. And we do have pathogens out there, but they're testing the immune system of the universe. And this is why I want to carry this further. Not only do I think the universe has consciousness, not only do I think there's these neuroscapes that are flying throughout the universe, but I think the universe is undergoing constantly an immunity challenge. And it needs to have the pathogens in order to...

16:54 to evolve and to create more solutions. Because if it was stagnant and not stressed, then it would never develop these evolutionary successes that we're seeing together. And life would be excruciatingly boring. Pardon? Life would be excruciatingly boring if everything was just stagnant. Yeah. And so, you know, this is not an argument for pro-pathogens, but it is an argument for stress testing. And athletically, cognitively, everything we do in life, you exercise, you get the benefit. right you know you're a couch potato you don't it's part of like hormesis right we talk about like you slightly increase stress in the body and then what does not when that stress is in a safe environment that what does not kill you makes you stronger as nietzsche and obi-wan said right like there's there's like this ability for us to grow but to grow and become better stronger faster and more skilled we need to be challenged and part of that challenge is the challenge that happens to our immune system

17:49 through interaction with the environment, as you described so eloquently earlier. We are filled with pathogens. They live on our skin, they live in our mouth, they live in our gut, and they live in our DNA from viruses, and they're all part of us. And I think that shifts the nature of how we think about life from one of more, we live in relationship and symbiosis with everything else around us, rather than we live in an extraction relationship. Let me build on that further, because that's an extremely important point that you've made. In this quorum that I've described, the million species of bacteria in a cubic inch, you know, miles of mycelium, and it creates this fundamental food web. Think about the cross-talking between all those receptors. Right. You know, this is why I believe natural intelligence far exceeds artificial intelligence. Absolutely. And I just came from a group of...

18:40 super high-level AI experts. They told me something I was shocked by. I bet they did. I was talking about natural intelligence, the complexity of the cross-talking of all these organisms that create this complex biosphere that allow us to evolve. And the deep well of natural intelligence in the soil far exceeds anything computationally we can even comprehend. And one of the experts there says, you know, I just met. with some of these the top ai people you know all these names and they said they have encountered now and they're seeing a data wall have you heard about this explain to me what you mean by data wall is 99 of all the discoverable data in the history of humans has already been codified into artificial intelligence there is not new data to harvest

19:31 Because it captured all the text already. All the history of humans has been captured. But it's not all. It's not all. It's only what's written and what's in text and audio and video. That's it. Discoverable. Yeah. Now it's not inventable. Inventable means that you can use AI to invent new things. But historically, they're hitting a data wall. And it's exponentially increasing artificial intelligence, and it's exponentially decreasing the amount of new discoverable, historically, data that's in the historical record. So I was shocked because I was talking about natural intelligence, and they said that's where they're going. The AI experts are going to dive into the ecosystem and the crosstalk in between the receptors and the quorum of millions of organisms synergistically organized, you know, like a flock of sparrows or something, you know. And this ecosystem has a symbiosis and this ability to do something that is just mind boggling. And so that's where AI.

20:32 could be very useful is going into ecosystems that are collapsing seeing how the crosstalk is being interrupted how it's being muted how those chains of communication have been disrupted how pathogens swirls out of control because of loss of biodiversity or the armamentarium of of your cooperating defensive organisms has been defeated and so the idea that we can really rehabilitate so i just speculated it'd be really cool to have shoes maybe a copper underlying maybe with little spikes and so as you walked across the ecosystem you could be sensing the mycelial intelligence and up regulating to say oh my gosh there's the e coli pole over here avoid that stuff you know or you know there's a pathogen or it's not right then you could have mycelial suits you could have a mycelial hat we could create membranes sensory membranes that we could actually communicate

21:25 not only with the ecosystem of soil, but atmospherically, you know, with pollution, with sensors to radioactivity, to rain coming, to change in barometric pressure. I mean, this goes on and on. We can create the interface to be able to be connected with our biospheres. And ultimately, it extends out into the universe so we can tap into universal consciousness. That's what I'm really excited about. Yeah, I love that. It's a fascinating time to be alive. And, you know, I see those opportunities that you just described as using technology to help people get more in touch with the ecosystem, the environment around us is being really valuable because we've thoroughly lost touch in many, many parts of the world, in Western world in particular. In the Western world in particular, because this is why I think it's really interesting that

22:18 Science is going full circle into what indigenous peoples knew. emphatically yeah right they already had the answer to these questions and we have known for thousands of years yeah and we have to articulate all these little models and building blocks in order to be able to to come up with a with an articulable uh discussion about why we think this works right it's the mode of active action oftentimes get loose sites of what i call the inside of the molecules for the mushrooms right right is that you can focus on the molecules and lose the you know force for the trees the molecules for the mushrooms yeah And so that's why I'm really interested in psilocybin. That's why I think psilocybin opens up the gateways of the senses and allows us to be able to feel the universe as a sensory. We can sense the universe beyond the vocabulary of our limited cognition. And that, you know, we all, most of us can sense when the rain is coming.

23:19 right we don't need a barometer right we don't need a psychometer to measure humidity right we sense it i think most of us i was deep in the old growth forest with my partner up in the corn old growth forest and both of us looked at each other at the same time and said we're being hunted no way yeah hair stood up in the back of our neck that sort of feeling and she looked at me and we almost said it at the same time oh my god something stalking us and we we got out of there oh wow yeah did you find out what it was no we didn't know what it was it was probably a bear um but we had the sense that we were being looked upon yeah and No, no. The fact we both had that, we're in the woods all the time. All the time. Never have we had this experience before. I had recently, I think it was a cougar, because I caught up with a cougar in one of my wildlife cameras. And I was biking. And I had that sense. And so my partner got me googly eyes for the back of my helmet. Oh, yeah. The googly eyes are like eyeballs in the back that bounce. Yeah. Because cougars always attack you from behind. But this is sort of an exosensory perception.

24:29 Maybe it's not extrasensory. It's perception beyond our conventional senses. Beyond the conventional five physical senses. I think there's truth to that. I don't think these things are made up. I think that from a predator-prey evolutionary point of view, anticipation of near-horizon threats is something that's evolutionary advantageous. And I think that goes into this. We're actually much more sensitive than we're aware of our sensitivity. That's why indigenous peoples, I think, using psychedelics, they kind of understand this. Yeah, absolutely. And that was actually a strong motivation for why I wrote my book that just came out where I cite your work and a simple guide. It's called Simple Guide to Being Alive, which bridges indigenous wisdom with Western science, kind of explaining, hey, we in the 21st century, Western science is just now catching up to explain how a lot of this understanding of our interaction with nature is actually actually makes sense from an indigenous perspective. We now kind of understand these relationships. And one of the focuses of the book is

25:28 my research into the emotional nervous system, which includes a part of the brain that everybody knows called the amygdala and includes this other part of the brain called the insulate cortex that's responsible for three of our most important human features, which are empathy, introspection, self-reflection, and interoception, body awareness. And what you're describing, these are also senses, right? Introspection is looking inside yourself, metacognition, things like that. like being aware of your feelings and your thoughts. Empathy is feeling other people's feelings and thoughts or a tree or mycelium's feelings and thoughts, putting yourself in anything else's perspective that's alive and then, or that exists. And then interoception is your body feeling and what you described with the hair standing up on your neck. Like that is a paired interoceptive feedback system that's linked to your amygdala that's saying, hey, there's something going on. And then the amygdala detects the newness.

26:26 that something might be new you pay attention to it you notice the hair standing up and you both have this instant cognitive recognition we have to get the f out of here yeah right that is just it's so it's so cool that we were all as humans designed and even beyond humans into great apes and and dolphins and whales anyone any animals that most animals that have some primitive representation of these limbic structures in the brain are all can all do this kind of thing and the opposite is true i mean there's a magnetism right there are people that you meet even from a distance and you feel a magnetic attraction exactly it's not not physiological it's not based on sex and motivation it's just that you have this gravitational

27:08 field that you feel pulled to this person and you're almost friends before you even meet each other yeah you know that's so this if you're a fight or flight syndrome but there's also the love magnetic attraction and that's what i think the psychedelics do absolutely they bring us into this field of love yeah and that's what i'm you know i really believe that psilocybin makes nicer people I agree. Smarter people. I love when you describe that. I love you describing that in the context of the stoned ape hypothesis, because that makes a ton of sense when you think about how human consciousness and the degree to which we are conscious compared to our predecessors, it dramatically accelerated over the course of what, like 50,000 years, right? It's more than a hypothesis. Let me say, a hypothesis is a speculative idea, not necessarily a...

27:57 founded in fact you're just speculating and then you sort of gather facts a theory is now factually supporting a hypothesis where it's a testable as a testable theory and then it becomes factually accurate or science can we call this a theory yet well i think it's merged you know i would call it the stained stone of hypothesis which has now become a theory let me explain why 22 primates eat maggots grub as a food right insect larvae And what's the best place to find insect larvae is in mushrooms. So 23 with humans. The Golgi monkey of Bolivia, I think, eats more than 15% of its body weight in mushrooms per year. Wow. And mushrooms attract flies, flies, live eggs, maggots grow. So if you're hungry and your family's hungry, you're going to look for grub. And rather than digging it out of the manure, which has all this E. coli, et cetera, a nice, clean, beautiful mushroom that has full fly larvae,

28:54 Find it there. My goodness. You've got the protein and psilocybe cubensis, you know, harvests lots of maggots, lots of fly larvae. So the encountering of our ancestors based motivated by starvation, tracking animals based on. their scat yeah you know and their migration patterns and then right just naturally you know you're hunting you find scat you find mushrooms you're hungry they have maggots in them food you eat them so it's not a rare experience it would happen over and over and you're sure common to all primates almost most primates eat mushrooms so i think the encounter of psilocybin mushrooms growing fly larvae maggots tracking ungulates across the prairie by our ancestors. That would happen millions and millions of times. And that's sparking. We know now that psilocybin is a prodrug, becomes psilocin. Psilocin talks with five HD2A receptors and track bees.

29:53 which are BDNFs, brain-derived neurotropic fasters, to stimulate new neurons to grow. Yeah, which stimulates neuroplasticity as a whole. Just think of this now. So Terrence McKenna didn't know about this or any of this back then. This was last like 20 years, 10 years. It's been the past 15 to 20 years we have this knowledge now. Much more of the neuroscience has been better defined. But there's an example that, okay, I knew Terrence really well. And I told Terrence, and Dennis, his brother, told him also, 95% of what you say, Terrence, is pure bullshit. But 5%? Hmm. And so this is where, if you don't worry about tenure, you don't worry about being vilified by your critics, and you're bold enough to make these speculative ideas, you don't have to be right all the time. One hundred times, it could be a breakthrough. And that is the lesson.

30:47 of the scientific breakthroughs in science is having these visionaries that go out on a limb, you know, obviously sacrificing themselves, you know, sometimes literally, physically, but being able to push the envelope of the imagination to find something that's provable later on. Right. I just heard there was a conference in the Vatican and the Vatican is really into astronomy. Yeah. And astrology apparently. Well, astronomy in particular now, but I just heard from somebody who was in the Vatican, with the astrophysicists in the Vatican, when you think it's an oxymoron, and one of the astrophysicists said, well, we were wrong about Galileo. So the idea of other life forms, you know, and this is interesting also, this is where I still, so I've been, is informing many religious leaders who are more now convinced in their devotion to a higher concept.

31:47 We've anthropomorphized, you know, God is into Jesus or Moses or whatever. But the imperfection of our interpretation of the enormity of the concept does not impugn the concept. It's just a reflection of our inability to articulate the idea. And so we create these little models that we can identify with. Anyhow, it's kind of fun. Yeah, no, it's great. I mean, I love the way you think about this stuff because you're really taking the box off that many of us were given and you're just kind of like, you're not afraid to ask the hard and interesting questions that a lot of other folks are not asking. And when you ask those kinds of questions, you get really interesting answers back. There was a physician I met.

32:30 who was at Stanford Medical School, and he was just becoming a doctor with his class. He raised his hand in the class with psychiatrists. And what about psychedelics? And the professor vilified the student, attacked him viciously, viciously, where he was just like felt so harmed by this just antagonism, this psychiatrist. And then this same physician, 20, 30 years later, is leading studies in psychedelics for psychiatry. But that's an example. When you get a knee-jerk reaction of an authoritarian, he refuses to even entertain an imaginative idea. It's a time to be able to change your professor. Yeah. what i have benefited from is the kindness of my professors who would laugh at me say these are crazy ideas but it was entertained by them yes and didn't shut me down right but it coaxed me so okay well prove that these mice tell me more are intelligent yeah and that's what we need to we need to take young people's creativity

33:43 allow them to have an outlet to explore, but it's got to be a testable hypothesis that leads to a theory that leads to science. And it needs to go into peer-reviewed scientific journals so your peers can throw spears at the idea and the seal of armor. Holds up. Holds up, yeah. You're still following rigorously the scientific method, but you're not shutting down curiosity in the process. As a classic example, we have two. um double-blind placebo-controlled clinical trials with agaricon mycelium and turkey tail mycelium oh interesting one was just published in march of 2026 and bmc immunology anybody can look this up it basically is agaricon is an old growth mushroom that only grows in the old growth forest turkey tail everyone's seen it it grows on logs we bundled those both together because i was approached by a group of people when the coveted pandemic came is our natural products that can potentiate the immune system the fda

34:40 didn't want to approve this because of the cytokine storm you stimulate the immune system the immune system's inflammatory response most people die from covid from flu viruses from ebola from the cytokine storm right so fortunately in the journal and inflammation research we published an article on turkey tail showing it stimulates interleukin 10 and interleukin 1 ra these are anti-inflammatory cytokines so these mushrooms are called immunomodulators right but we're able to show yeah we can upgrade our immunity but we can express anti-inflammatory cytokines at the same time preventing putatively the cytokine storm so the fda approved us With 90 patients, BMC immunology, the first study that we published. So it's augmentation of the mRNA vaccine from Moderna and Pfizer. Now, the results are just fantastic. We lessen.

35:29 The adverse side effects, statistically significant. Two to three days after you get the vaccine, you feel like you're hit by a truck. What we would do is headaches, muscle aches. Massive reduction of the adverse symptoms. We decouple what's called reactogenicity to the vaccine with immunogenicity. And so, you know, when you get this bad reaction from the vaccine, doctors tell you, well, that's just your immune system. Well, that's kind of true. But it's an inflammatory response. That's why you have muscle aches. We were able to... massively reduce muscle aches, headaches, et cetera. The really extraordinary result from taking this for four days, six months later, when the 90 people's blood- They drew the titers again. They took the blood and they sampled it. We had triple the antibody reservoirs than the people who just got the vaccine. Which is the opposite of what they would suspect. Yeah, most antibodies decline over time. The fact that we actually increased antibody reservoirs.

36:24 yeah it was like that's amazing this is amazing so what we think we're doing is that we're for lack of a better phrase we're like reproving programming the endogenous immune system upregulating it to a higher state of readiness then it was a counter as a pathogen that the antibody reservoirs have a kind of memory it's a reserve there yeah and it's able to express itself for long term in this case covet protection yeah Then we did another study that's under peer review right now with 50 patients. Now, these phase one studies oftentimes only have six or 10 people, safety studies. It cost several million dollars. In fact, we have 140 people in these studies. It's a good data set, especially for a natural product. And this newest study that is under peer review right now is extraordinary, the results, because people were recruited who were sick. And the people...

37:16 who actually got the vaccine but the vaccine didn't work that well they got sick but the people who got the vaccine in agaricon and turkey tail had 50 reduction in their adverse symptoms 5.1 days sooner wow than the people who got the vaccine wow and still got sick so i mean tamiflu reduces your disease fee shorten your disease cycle by point nine days or 1.2 days. It's a multi-billion dollar drug. The fact that we have five times the result of Tamiflu, ostensibly, it's amazing. And it's a natural product. So this is why I address skeptics. Where's the peer-reviewed scientific articles? Bam, we have them. Where are the clinical trials? We have two. Now, face your prejudice. Do you think that natural products are not useful for enhancing conventional medicine?

38:07 Of course they do. Nutrition enhances conventional medicine. Yeah, anything that boosts vagal nerve tone will enhance traditional medicine. So these two are compatible. This false divide that natural products don't have any utility is in a sense a scientific prejudice, a hubris. It is a hubris. And we need to actually look at the data. And people go, well, we don't know the mechanisms of action. Well, we didn't know the mechanisms of action. aspirin until like in the 1970s yeah tylenol i think we just figured out it just became a you know a theory yeah we still don't quite know which i have to say i you know i had an achilles tendon you know issue just recently and i'm 71 years of age i'm on no drugs you know you look great no no drugs i did 90 push-ups this morning it's my sort of mantra i do push-ups every day and i'm extremely sensitive to anything

38:58 So the Achilles tendon burn, you know, one or two Tylenols. Man, this stuff works great. It's fantastic, you know. So my emphasis is that the majority of drugs still have their origins in natural products. The idea of doing a single molecule for a single effect does not treat the system. And we are complex organisms, and we need to look at treating the system. by being able to activate multiple receptor sites that collaborate with each other synergize and tell each other this is good for the host immunity right and they have the best interest right now in our survival yeah as a community just like the soil does so you help the soil biosphere you help your own biosphere internally your system is very smart yeah being able to protect the host you we are natural products yeah you know and so using natural products that are that mesh well with our immunity and our neuroscape is what

40:00 think the new revolution is in science yeah i think so too and it's really setting that prejudice aside towards whole plant medicine so that we can really appreciate the entourage yeah right because whole plants have so many other molecules alkaloids flavonoids all these different other compounds that are active in some way that you don't get when you get synthetic pure psilocybin or THC from a vape, you're missing like the 200 other plus active ingredients that exist in those plants in nature that are important and helpful. And they often, I think one of the things we've seen in Western medicine that's been very interesting is if we make the mistake of following the single molecule, single receptor hypothesis too far, we see horrible consequences. Think about Vioxx.

40:52 Celebrex, right? These medicines that were trying to hone down a single receptor site for pain relief, which are derivatives of like NSAIDs and aspirin. And they had the side effect of sudden cardiac death that was unpredictable, right? That is a horrible side effect when you're trying to treat your Achilles. tendon pain and all of a sudden you're at risk of sudden cardiac death and you didn't realize right like that is completely avoidable and part of the reason why we think that happened is because some of the entourage molecules at higher levels without when it wasn't so reduced and like the aspirin form were actually protective of the body that prevented that those kinds of side effects from happening so i think we're also going to find as we relinquish our prejudice and and our hubris as from a scientific community we're going to see that whole plant medicine is actually much far superior and when we address it that way i think we can scale it more effectively because people can start to grow and cultivate their own medicine at home yeah i want to talk about a subject i've never talked with anyone uh before on a podcast

41:54 because you bring up something really important. Just as there's a prejudice against natural products, there's also the concern that introducing a new single molecule may have adverse effects. And specifically, there has been a criticism of microdosing psilocybin. Psilocybin is a produg, becomes psilocin. And it docs with the 5-HT2A receptors. Well, phenfloramine, fen-fen, is a diet drug. And phenfloramine was pulled off the market because it caused the heart valve anonymously. And so some scientists were saying, well, you know, psilocin docs with the same receptors as phenfloramine. And could you cause, you know, heart issues? In newborns? Pardon me? In newborns. No, in people. And then it also is teratogenic. Yes, it can be.

42:43 And so the criticism was, wow, microdosing could be bad for the heart because it causes heart anomaly. So this is where it's good to have the question, but let's keep this in perspective. Eight million Americans are dosing themselves with psilocybin. At least. At least, you know, hundreds of millions of doses of psilocybin. We're not seeing the heart valve issue show up in any hospitals or anything like that. Moreover, fenfloramine has a half-life of 30 hours. Actually, fenfloramine becomes norfenfloramine after a few hours. It's even more potent. But the half-life is 30 hours. Well, the half-life of psilocin is about two hours. When you do the math, there is one four millionth of psilocin in 30 hours. So even though it's binding with the same receptor,

43:39 It is out of your bloodstream so quickly. Right. And we have no evidence of that. And when you're looking at other drugs that bind with these same receptors, they don't cause heart valve anomalies. So this is like alarmist physicians. Oh, my gosh, you could create heart valve anomalies by microdesis results. But when you look at it, just the pharmacokinetics of this is not even close. Right. You know, and then you're doing four milligrams of fenfluramine, medium microdosing is, you know, in that one to four milligram range. And so it is comparable. They're in the same dosage ranges. Right. But the fact that fenfluramine stays in your system or norefenfluramine so long. It had the docking occupancy latency period so much longer. Prolonged exposure. So even if they were comparable one to one, it's not the same thing. Right. So this is something that I think, and I can't go into great details, but we've tested this now on multiple animals. Oh, interesting. And so the FDA is comfortable.

44:41 with our analysis, we have no evidence of heart valve anomalies. So all the physicians out there, when you talk about fen-fen, you talk about microdosing, you know, dig into this a little deeper, please. You know, fact check me. But indeed, this is as good that critics bring this up. We need to have, we need to study this. But, you know, studying this now, both just empirically, just what we're seeing with a massive drawing of microdosing, no reports of this, and the fact. that we have pharmacokinetically, we've been looking into this and we've done now small mammal research and we're seeing no evidence of this. So it looks at microdosing as very safe. And psilocybin mushrooms, the LD50 is 42 pounds. Yeah, I know. And you can't eat anything for 42 pounds. There's no way you can put that much mushrooms into your body. It's the least toxic of the most powerful medicine that I've ever seen.

45:36 Yeah, and that low toxicity threshold, I think, is also really helpful to help people feel safe enough to work with it, which is great. But I think the one thing I really wanted to come back to, to wrap up, is going back to, is Bennu, right? Bennu. Bennu. So I want to make sure I pronounce it correctly. B-E-N-N-U. Are you familiar, I'm sure you are, with Francis Crick's astonishing hypothesis? So Francis Crick, for those who don't know, one was awarded with Watson the Nobel Prize for discovering... the structure of double helical structure of dna psychedelics were helpful and psychedelics were helpful right and i think he he lsd in particular i think was one that he uh was using at the time and it's always interested me it's been very interesting to me and i talk about this in my book about how indigenous cultures you know from the cosmic serpent jeremy narby's work with the asheninka and the shipibo and so many of their patterns of what they see and they call the source of life is two snakes interlocking like a double helix

46:33 right i think there's a medical symbol that shows that too yeah right and so this double helical structure is repeated throughout so many different parts of our lives over and over again and converges now in a bunch of areas and then you mentioned when we very first started this conversation i asked you about the tryptamine universe and you described tryptophan found on this asteroid and you described the four elements of DNA, the four core amino acids, right, A, C, G, and T that were found on an asteroid that is 100 million years older than the Earth. And Francis Crick's hypothesis, astonishing hypothesis, which may now be able to become a theory, is so interesting because he, I mean, he hypothesized that we are all aliens that came from DNA that came from somewhere else and then landed on the Earth and then those amino acids.

47:26 like what you just described on Bennu came to the earth and then had a fertile place to start to become dna and then turn it to sell you know sell your structures base and life what do you think about all this do you think what we're finding with Bennu now and that the existence of the basic elements of dna and tryptophan are existing on a asteroid that is 100 million years older than the earth which we did not know before or comprehend is that supportive evidence of this, you know, this hypothesis that we are all actually aliens. Well, I mean, let me rephrase it another way. We're all masses of matter. Aren't these just the elemental building blocks of matter in life? So maybe it's the wrong question to ask. We're in a form of a continuum of the evolution of matter that has become these soft-bodied organisms.

48:26 but we're born from the very rocks upon which we walk. So maybe there is just this almost seamless transition of rocks and matter to life, and it's just happening everywhere. And how are you going to assemble the building blocks? You're going to assemble them. with the building blocks of dna and rna so maybe that's just the inevitable path the inevitability of life is rooted to the mere existence of matter this is why i had an extraordinary psychedelic experience um about two years ago and i was so thankful because i was thinking about the meaning of life the universe and matter and everything and i got one word And it was a blessing. And I told my partner, I got one word as a communication. Did you remember it? I'm going to tell you what it is. I mean, it was like one word. And I want to emphasize it was like in, you know, 48 font, bold underline. And the word was existence. We have always existed. We will exist forever.

49:36 we live in existence existence is something that is the all of oneness of us and so knowing that you have always exist you will always exist and so the communication i got is just like synopsized in everything we live in existence forever and that it just made me feel so warm and fuzzy you know i just wanted to hug my partner saying it's all good yeah No, when you realize how simple and elegant the simplicity is and how beautiful and hilarious it is that it takes us so long to sometimes come back to that existence, that being part of life, it's just so revitalizing and rejuvenating and just grounding, bringing us back to ourselves. You know, it's just beautiful. So I really appreciate you sharing that with us. This psychedelic movement is really creating a wellspring of kind people.

50:34 people who want to cooperate now of course there's going to be crazy people up there there's not people go off the rails it's going to be fake charlatans and and people are exploiting the vulnerable what i really liked i think is what you said up on a panel if i'm not mistaken i'm sorry it's been it's okay yeah it's been two three days yeah but those people who have a psychedelic experience and feel like now They're God and they have a message, right? That was you. The narcissist, you know, that just their ego inflation as opposed to ego dissolution. Right. Well, the majority of people benefit from ego dissolution and have. And I heard from another person, I think Robin Card Harris, as you mentioned, the feeling of the oceanic experience is a high predictor of healing from PTSD, depression, anxiety. But of course.

51:27 And it's not all perfect for all people. You will have maybe 80% benefit, 70% benefit, and you'll have some people who won't benefit. But my favorite quote from Voltaire is, don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. I love that quote. Because this is where the path of medicine is. We're so good at that. So good at that. I mean, we always want to be exacting and specific. And the naysayers, it's kind of an ego thing. They want to pick apart your argument just because they can fly a single flaw they think can sink the ship with their argument. And then become famous for it. Yeah, become famous for it. We just say, oh, there's a whole hole in the ship. We'll put some putty there. We'll keep on moving, right? So I think we need in this society so much not to have the perfect be the enemy of the good. Because I really believe the majority of people are good. I really believe that most people want.

52:16 better lives for their neighbors their children their family they don't want to live in despair and depression in an inflammatory state of existence yeah by being happy and creative you're immunologically beneficial it's neurologically beneficial it's socially beneficial so i think we have an opportunity here of just creating a spark of goodness like a pebble in the pond of positivity we can just spread this out and this could be a phase change literally in the evolution of humans I couldn't agree more. And I think that's a great place for us to end today because it leaves us with words of hope and wisdom. And it reminds me of a quote also, which is one of my favorites, which is, it was Rumi, which is, you are not a drop in the ocean, you are the entire ocean in a drop.

53:05 which I actually, I think I would paraphrase as in my own words, you are both a drop in the ocean and the entire ocean in a drop. I have rediscovered Rumi and I am just stunned by the profound wisdom. Oh my goodness. It was just amazing. We need Rumi's today. Yeah. And I think- What a poet. Yeah. What a poet, wise person who's in a sense predictive still today. We're quoting Rumi. and we're quoting voltaire yeah because there's some fundamental truths in life when you hear these you have this sort of sit back take a deep breath and you know it to be true right and you don't necessarily have to understand it you can know without You can know it in your body without necessarily understanding every little bit in your mind, which I like the knowing without knowing concept that I find really great that we also have forgotten a lot. Yeah. Well, thank you, brother Dave. Thank you so much for- Dr. Dave. It's okay. I'll take brother. Okay. Thank you so much for taking the time to join me at your busy schedule and such a pleasure to have you back on. All right. Glad we could do this. Me too. All right. Take care.