544 - Biodiversity Is Biosecurity

Program Notes

https://www.patreon.com/lorenzohagerty

The last great mushroom conference of the millennium - Breitenbush, OR 1999

Date this lecture was recorded: August 2016

Today’s podcast features the 2016 Palenque Norte lecture by Paul Stamets, who is one of the leading mycologists in the world. In this talk Paul covers a wide range of knowledge about mushrooms and mycelium that will blow your mind. For anyone interested in biology, this talk is not to be missed. As Paul says, “There’s a recurring lessen here folks, when we’re facing extinction events pairing with fungi has an evolutionary advantage. And we should make use of that.”

[NOTE: The quotations below are by Paul Stamets]

“If Terence [McKenna] was sitting here right now I’d tell him the same thing, ‘Terence, 95% of the stuff you say is total bullshit. But you say it so well.”

“There’s a recurring lessen here folks, when we’re facing extinction events pairing with fungi has an evolutionary advantage. And we should make use of that.”

Transcript

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Greetings from cyberdelic space, this is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the psychedelic

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salon.

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This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

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Well, it’s been about three weeks since my last podcast from here in Salon 1,

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but during that time we’ve received a donation from Ryan Q,

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along with a major donation by Ed D.

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And that has encouraged me to buy a new cassette recorder in an effort to, well, eliminate that pesty clicking sound on the rest

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of the McKenna tapes that I still

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have left to digitize.

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And I’m sure all of us here in the salon

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are going to appreciate your generous donation,

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Ed. Also,

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six people have now become my patrons

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through my Patreon.com

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account, and those fine souls

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are Dennis H.,

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Robin L., Jessa F., Daryl C., Tim C., and Charles B.

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And thanks to some of the suggestions that my patrons have been making, this new book that I’m

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working on, I believe, is becoming significantly better than it was going to be without their

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input. So, thank you one and all for your encouragement and your support.

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Now, for today’s program, I’m going to play a Palenque Norte lecture that Paul Stamets gave at Burning Man,

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either in 2015 or 2016.

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Unfortunately, my notes on the tape aren’t very clear,

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and after I play this talk, I’ll tell you how I came across

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this recording. While I’m sure that most of our fellow salonners are familiar with Paul’s work,

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for any newcomers here, let me set the stage as best I can. As we all know, Sasha Shulgin,

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in my opinion at least, was the greatest chemist who lived during my own life. Well, also in my own opinion,

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Paul Stamets is to mycology what Sasha was to chemistry.

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And I don’t think that there’s any question about the fact that

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Paul Stamets has done more to further our knowledge of

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what may be the most important life form on this planet.

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And I’m including us humans in that, in case you’re wondering.

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And after listening to Paul’s talk right now, I suspect that most people are going to agree with

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me. Paul titled this presentation, Biodiversity is Biosecurity. And I would add as a subtitle,

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not simply Magic Mushrooms, but rather the Magic of Mushrooms, or better yet, the magic of mycelium.

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Now, Paul used quite a few slides to illustrate this talk, but after previewing it, I think that

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well, the majority of this talk isn’t going to be too hard to follow, even without the slides. And

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I also think that you’re going to be really surprised by much of the information that

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Paul provides in this talk.

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So let’s join him now.

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The subject of my talk is really biodiversity is biosecurity.

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And we are here today because of many microorganisms that have been involved in quorums or guilds that have come together.

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And through the course of evolution, you know, these species, including ourselves, have evolved.

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Well, understanding biodiversity today is so important for our future survival.

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We have entered into 6X, the sixth greatest extinction event known in the history of life on this planet.

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But this extinction event is not caused by an asteroid or some great celestial event

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it’s caused by an organism

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by us, and not only are we the cause

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of this extinction event, but we’re likely to be its victim

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there’s approximately

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8.3 million species on this planet

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we’re losing at best

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guesstimates around 30,000 species

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per year, you do the math

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you know, in 100 years

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we’re going to be losing

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more than a third of the biodiversity of the species on this planet that got us here today.

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So this is like rivets in an airplane.

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And how many rivets in an airplane must be lost or will be lost before you have a cataclysmic collapse of the ecosystem?

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And I think that’s something that we face today.

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So there’s a great Bruce Willis movie with asteroids coming to hit the Earth, you know,

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and all the nations of the Earth gather together and marshal their resources to blow up or deflect the asteroid before it makes impact.

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Well, that’s great because, you know, it’s a great movie.

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But the extinction event that we’re experiencing is happening over several hundred years.

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And we, unfortunately, suffer from a form of ecological myopia.

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We look at the environment and our relationships, unfortunately,

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in the limited viewscape of our lifespan, which is 75 to 85 years.

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And so in a sense, I wish this extinction event was happening much more quickly

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because then people would see how serious it is.

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But because of our politicians, because of the economic interests that govern the world right now,

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the short traders, the millisecond trading on Wall Street, the grab for money, money is power.

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And unfortunately, it is disempowering a lot of the voices on this planet that need to be heard

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and a lot of these technologies that need to be brought to the forefront so i hope this is the

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beginning of a mycological revolution i am revolutionary and at heart and in my spirit

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but i am also a peaceful warrior so we have to be able to bring this new knowledge to the forefront in a peaceful and deliberate fashion.

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But I also believe it has to be sustainable.

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And so in our economic system, it has to be economically sustainable,

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which means it has to be profitable in order to be delivered to the market.

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Because everyone who is idealistic, myself included, I’m 60 years of age.

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I just turned 60 a few weeks ago.

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I’m 60 years of age. I turned 60 a few weeks ago.

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And my idealism has been tempered by the reality that if you cannot make it economically practicable,

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then it’s not going to be ecologically sustainable.

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So that’s the harsh reality that we face. We can’t live in a utopian avatar-like environment without having some very

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important considerations

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to the economics.

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So I am happy

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that the AAAS, the American

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Association of Advanced Science, appointed me

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as an invention ambassador.

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It’s the most prestigious scientific organization

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in the world.

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I was frankly shocked.

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I thought it was spam. I got it was spam I got this email

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I got this email and I’ve been working

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on a chapter for a new book

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I’m writing on how to survive 6X

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and I wrote this chapter, it’s 8 pages

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long, it’s a macro view

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about how we can utilize fungi

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to be able to survive 6X

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so I finished that article

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and then later that night, I’m looking at my emails

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and a AAAS came in.

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I thought it was an advertisement or something like this.

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And I wanted to throw it in the trash, and I clicked on it, and they go, you’ve been nominated to be an invention ambassador.

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And so I went, geez, I don’t have time.

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I’m tired, a little stoned.

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So I clicked on the link, and I looked at it, and thanks to Google and Chrome, autofill.

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I put in P, and boom, everything autofilled.

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And then at the very end, they said, and you need to make your case.

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We require an eight-page article from you, you know, and it’s due tomorrow.

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So I went, attach, send.

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And then a series of meetings occurred.

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I was heavily vetted.

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I had to go through a gauntlet of many other scientists that asked very critical questions.

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They talked to my supporters, to my critics.

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And then out of 250 or so people, there were nominated seven of us were appointed invention ambassadors,

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including the founder, the discoverer of digital photography, which is kind of big.

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So I have great other scientists,

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and so we go around the country trying to inform the public the importance of science

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and bridging the gap between the importance of invention,

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science, and discovery,

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and how it can affect people’s lives in a positive way.

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So I’d like to acknowledge my other ambassadors here

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and Triple A for that acknowledgement. So I also want to give credit to my teachers. I like to do

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this in every lecture because I think it’s very important. I came in the field of mycology when

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I was about 18 years of age. I was 4A-ing when I was 15 or so, but I got pretty serious when I was

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17, 18 years of age.

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And Dr. Michael Bugue is my professor at the Evergreen State College.

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Some of you know him in the audience.

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Daniel Stuntz, a professor emeritus at the University of Washington in Seattle.

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Alexander Smith, University of Michigan.

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And Catherine Skates from Post Falls, Idaho.

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These people were very kind to me,

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and their kindness and generosity is why I’m here today speaking to you.

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Now, all the more interesting that these scientists took me under their wing because they were somewhat politically conservative by today’s measures

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because when I showed up there, this is what I looked like.

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So, I don’t have as much of that hair today.

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But nevertheless, there was a surge of interest in psilocybin mushrooms.

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I started looking for them.

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I taxonomically studied that group.

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I got involved and discovered several new species in the genus Psilocybe.

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I think I have four psilocybin species that I’ve named so far that were new to science at the time.

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And so there was a time of Charles Manson and the hippies, and there was a tremendous polarization.

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Those of you who did not live through the 60s and 70s, you really a pretty much a free ride on the backs of a lot of

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us, because there was a revolution going on in this country. And there were road warriors,

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thousands and thousands of people were hitchhiking across country. There’s a whole tribal movement.

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I hitchhiked across country 13 times. And there’s a whole anti-war pro-environmental movement

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that was surging across the country

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under great adversity. The law enforcement, the cops, and the whole society were against us.

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So when I showed up looking like this saying, I’m interested in doing a taxonomy of psilocybin

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mushrooms, they said, sure you are. So, but I want to give credit where credit is due i don’t know if we can

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alter this screen just a little bit here i make my slides a little tight um but here is a golgi

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monkey the diet his diet is up to 35 fungi mushrooms particularly a mushroom called Ascopolyperus. It lives in the Amazon, and it consumes more than 12 times

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its body weight per year. Now, I bring this to your attention because this is one primate of

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23 primates. We are primates, so we’re one of those 23, that has, from an evolutionary point of view,

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figured out which mushrooms are edible, which ones are poisonous. Now think of that. If there’s 23

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primates out there, including one that eats more than 12 times its body weight in fungi, that speaks

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to a long ancestral knowledge of the understanding of forest fungi. We were all forest people.

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For millions of years, we live in intimate contact with the forest ecosystem. 12,000,

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10,000 years ago, agriculture was invented and deforestation began as we started cutting

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down the woods to plant vegetables, etc. And that deforestation, unfortunately, has accelerated. And now we’re

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well past the tipping point. And the deforestation now, I think, is one of the primary causes of

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many of the problems that we face today. So I bring this up because a good dear friend of mine,

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Terrence McKenna, and many of you knew Terrence and know of Terrence’s work. Terrence and I became very good friends the last five years of his life.

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And if Terrence was sitting here right now, I’d tell him the same thing.

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Terrence, 95% of the stuff that you say is total bullshit.

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But you say it so well.

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So Terrence had the greatest command of the English language of anyone that I’ve ever met.

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And he was extremely persuasive and fun and entertaining to listen to. But as one critic said, and I do agree with this

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critic, if 5% of what Terence said is true, then his contribution cannot be denied. And one of the

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things that Terence presented was the stoned ape hypothesis. He calls it a stoned ape theory.

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I call it a hypothesis because we don’t have enough facts to make it a theory.

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But the stoned ape hypothesis postulates, and it was first by Roland Fisher in 1970,

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he first published this,

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that under the influence of psilocybin,

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your ability to see and hear is substantially improved.

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And he did some lab tests, basically.

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And Terence postulated that, and I think he had it wrong,

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because he said after the last ice age, as our ancestors were tracking ungulates across the prairie,

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well, if you’re a hunter, some people are hunters in this audience, I’m sure,

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what do you look for?

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You look for tracks, footprints.

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You look for scat, you look for poop.

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So in the savanna areas of Africa,

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as you were looking and trying to track animals,

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you would end up finding manure, dung,

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and these large mushrooms, Solospecubensis, would be growing out manure, dung,

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and these large mushrooms, Solospe cubensis, would be growing out of the dung.

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This is from elephant dung.

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So lots of ungulates and other animals, like elephants,

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are breeding grounds for Solospe cubensis.

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So you’re hungry, you’re with your clan, you’re tracking animals, you can’t find them.

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You find these big bodacious mushrooms.

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You’re hungry.

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The majority of primates are grub eaters.

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They actually go after grub larvae and they eat them as a source of protein.

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So looking into the dung for grub

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and encountering psilocybes,

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I think it’s something that would happen.

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And I wanted to present to you the concept.

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This is how it probably happened for millions of years,

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hundreds of thousands of times.

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Imagine, you’re a clan, you’re going across the prairies, you’re hungry,

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you all share in eating these mushrooms coming from the dung.

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You’re catapulted into this incredible experience,

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fractal geometry for the first time in your life.

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You know, you’re bonding, you’re laughing, you know, you’re hugging.

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You have this spiritual experience that brings the clam together.

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Well, it happens, you know, because of epigenesis.

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That is going to have a selective expression on your genes,

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that is going to have a selective expression on your genes,

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and your gene expressions are going to be influenced by those experiences repetitively hundreds of thousands of times.

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And so I think that the stoned ape hypothesis has good merit.

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Well, there’s other reasons for thinking that it has good merit.

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An article came out just about a year and a half ago

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on the effects of psilocybin causing neurogenesis. Well, creating new neurons. And in conclusion

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of the article, it says the psilocybin induced the extinction of a conditioned fear response

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to life-threatening events.

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And then Roland Griffin at John Hopkins has published a number of articles,

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one on the mystical type experience occasioned by the use of psilocybin.

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Well, let’s take those two facts, now substantiated by science,

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that you can lose fear conditioning from life-threatening events,

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and you can have a mystical experience.

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Well, so I put this together because I had this epiphany this morning. I said, well, that means then that psilocybin induces courage and kindness.

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Now think of that.

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If your primate clans have this experience,

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and the leader of the clan is the mycologically astute individual

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who’s training the other ones how to identify and use these mushrooms,

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then I think those are characteristics that lead to leadership.

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So I suggest to you, and I’ve never said this in public before,

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I suggest to you, and I’ve never said this in public before, that I think our top leaders at Google, at Microsoft, in government, you know, all over the world, they need to have more courage and more kindness.

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Therefore, I would encourage all the leaders of the world to engage in SoulSciVent. Yeah!

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to engage in Soul Sibon. Yeah!

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And I think we need more Soul Sibon experienced leaders.

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So I think the logic is pretty good, don’t you?

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Okay.

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So the B Shaman figure, the Sili-Enanjar Plateau,

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is 7,000 years ago, 5,000 years BCE.

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This is the actual pictograph on the cave.

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And then Kat Harrison made it clearer, in a sense.

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And this is a second rendition from her drawing.

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But in northern Algeria, the Sili Anujger plateau was translated as the plateau of running rivers.

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Now, because of the Sahara Desert, it’s been deforested, of course, and these mushrooms are –

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there’s only been one case of these mushrooms, Selassie mariae, that’s been found in this location or near this location.

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But the intent of the artist is clear.

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And this is an amazing thing that we know about the histories of our ancestors

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going back thousands of years really only through archaeology and through art.

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And so this artist is quite emphatically excited about mushrooms. And no scientist who was involved in reporting these images

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ever dared to make the statement that these could have been mushrooms.

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And this is the problem that scientists face,

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is the fear of being ridiculed.

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And so if you go out on a limb and you make them extraordinarily strong

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and sort of out there statement,

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then the reputation of the scientists will be forever impaired

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because they’ll be tagged for making these crazy statements.

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So this speaks to mycophobia, the irrational fear of fungi,

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and it also has permeated academia.

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And this is something that I think we need to change.

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So the use of mushrooms has been very well recorded.

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Hippocrates first mentioned several polypore mushrooms as anti-inflammatories around 440 BCE.

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And Dioscorides also mentioned several mushrooms.

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Some of you know about the agaricon mushroom that we focused a lot of our research on.

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And Dioscorides was one of the first physicians who mentioned that.

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Also, in 55 BCE, in the first Materia Medica, the first pharmacopoeia,

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that was recorded on the use of plants and mushrooms for medicinal purposes.

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And then this is a relief from around 400 years, also BCE,

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that shows Demeter giving Persephone a mushroom before she goes into the underworld.

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And it speaks to the Eleusinian mysteries.

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Many people have spoken on this.

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And basically, in the Greek mythology basically it’s in the greek

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mythology is the origination of the seasons and persephone upon consuming the mushroom

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you know goes into the underworld and then in the spring she returns and that was supposedly

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the birth of the seasons and how the seasons came about

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I’m a mushroom person and it’s really dry here

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so I’m going to be drinking a lot of water

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so this is where my wife Dusty and I

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spend a lot of time in the old growth forest

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of Washington State

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that’s where we live

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and the old growth forest is a library

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to us of strains.

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And when you look at the number of species of fungi,

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about 1.5 million species of fungi in the genome of 8.3 million total species on the planet.

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And about 10% of those are mushroom-forming fungi, about 150,000 species, of which we’ve identified so far around 14,000 and giving them scientific names.

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That means less than 10% approximately of the mushroom-forming species that are out there have we actually identified.

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Well, think of that as 14,000 species books in a library.

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has 14,000 species books in a library.

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And over the millennia, nearly over millions of years,

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our ancestors have gone into that library of nature,

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selected out mushroom species, consumed them.

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Some of them will feed you, some will heal you,

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some will get you high, and some will kill you.

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So when Uncle Harry ate that mushroom, oops, he died, well, we’ll avoid that one, right?

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So our body intellect of knowledge

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from a cultural point of view

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expanded over the eons.

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So from that 14,000 species,

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if we use that number in the environmental library,

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our ancestors narrowed down to about 200 species,

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which are safe, which have interesting properties,

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and of those 200 species, there’s 50 species approximately out of 14,000

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that have medicinally very, very interesting properties

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that are compatible with our microbiome.

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There’s a lot of talk about the microbiomes,

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but I’ll explain how fungi also share in common the compatibility factors

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of the mushroom’s microbiome with our microbiomes

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is critically important for how well you receive the mushrooms how well you digest them your

00:22:50 ►

reactions to them so you know we have had a fairly good selection criteria over the eons

00:22:56 ►

from hundreds of thousands of empirical scientists basically consuming these fungi learning which

00:23:01 ►

ones are edible which ones are not and passing that information orally, for the most part, down through the generations.

00:23:08 ►

So the Golgi monkey is one primate,

00:23:11 ►

but think of the body intellect of that inner species knowledge groups,

00:23:15 ►

because our ancestors no doubt would observe other animals consuming mushrooms

00:23:18 ►

and then experiment with them as well.

00:23:21 ►

So there’s a lateral transfer of knowledge also.

00:23:24 ►

Okay, so here’s a cross-section

00:23:26 ►

of an environment. I’m going to go through this really quickly. There are saprophytic fungi that

00:23:31 ►

grow on dead wood. There are endophytic fungi that are virtually inside of trees and the stems and

00:23:37 ►

the leaves. Some great research that’s come out by a mycologist by the name of Arnold in particular.

00:23:43 ►

that’s come out by a mycologist by the name of Arnold in particular.

00:23:49 ►

There’s more than 200 species of endophytic fungi that can live within a tree as part of this host defensive immunity that is growing symbiotically

00:23:54 ►

to help the immune system of the tree.

00:23:58 ►

And by doing so, it helps these fungi survive.

00:24:02 ►

There’s the mycorrhizal fungi that are in the root zones.

00:24:01 ►

helps these fungi survive.

00:24:04 ►

There’s the mycorrhizal fungi that are in the root zones,

00:24:11 ►

and the parasitic fungi are killing the plants with the weaker immune systems.

00:24:13 ►

So those are four just general groups.

00:24:16 ►

Some parasitic fungi can live saprophytically,

00:24:18 ►

but there’s a pretty clear division between these groups.

00:24:24 ►

So an article came out in Science about seven years ago that all plants are part fungus.

00:24:29 ►

And so if you meet people who say,

00:24:31 ►

I don’t like to eat fungi,

00:24:33 ►

then tell them to stop eating plants

00:24:35 ►

because all plants are part fungi.

00:24:38 ►

Now this also segues into botanical medicine research

00:24:41 ►

because one has to ask,

00:24:43 ►

especially with the alkaloids being produced by these fungi,

00:24:46 ►

what is the extract of a plant,

00:24:51 ►

the medicinal properties of that plant,

00:24:53 ►

how much is actually due to the endophytic fungi

00:24:55 ►

that are being extracted from the plant itself?

00:24:58 ►

And so without understanding that contribution,

00:25:00 ►

I think we only have part of the picture.

00:25:04 ►

So some great books that I recommend,

00:25:06 ►

Mycorrhizal Symbiosis is the root of a pine tree.

00:25:10 ►

This is basically the root, and all this is the mycelium.

00:25:13 ►

It expands the root zones literally hundreds if not thousands of times.

00:25:18 ►

The mycorrhizal fungi are getting a benefit of sugars being secreted by the plants,

00:25:24 ►

are getting a benefit of sugars being secreted by the plants,

00:25:29 ►

and then the mycorrhizal fungi are mineralizing rocks and sending essential minerals directly through the roots.

00:25:32 ►

So it’s a bidirectional cooperative relationship

00:25:35 ►

where the fungi are being rewarded with sugars

00:25:38 ►

whenever they’re contributing minerals.

00:25:41 ►

And since that many plants are mineral only restricted so this is a

00:25:47 ►

really extraordinary article that came out on fungal networks that are communicating

00:25:53 ►

underneath the soil now this is something that i i speculated in my book mycelium running over

00:25:59 ►

10 years ago but a very simple experiment and what they did is they had bean plants, and they had

00:26:08 ►

four bean plants, and they put them in the common soil. Well, first they put them in individual pots,

00:26:15 ►

and they then had mycorrhizal fungi in the roots, individual pots that were separated.

00:26:19 ►

They introduced aphids to the first plant. And when they introduced the aphids, there’s an immune

00:26:24 ►

response,

00:26:25 ►

and there are anti-aphids alkaloids being produced by the bean plant

00:26:28 ►

to protect the bean plant from being parasitized by the aphids.

00:26:32 ►

Well, when they analyzed the leaves of the adjacent plants,

00:26:35 ►

they did not upregulate those alkaloids.

00:26:38 ►

So they repeated the experiment, and then they joined,

00:26:41 ►

they put all those four bean plants in common soil

00:26:45 ►

and let them grow and they all began and the mycelium interconnected them and when they

00:26:50 ►

introduced the aphids to their first plant the three other plants upregulated expression

00:26:55 ►

expression of alkaloids and they showed that the first plant that was exposed to aphids via the

00:27:01 ►

mycelium in the root zone, information was passed to the adjacent plants

00:27:06 ►

to warn them that there’s a predator on the horizon. That was the first time scientifically

00:27:11 ►

that this was shown. This speaks to the fact that the mycelium is a soil, there’s an internet-based

00:27:20 ►

mycelial network that’s cross-communicating underground in order to protect the plants that are in the ecosystem.

00:27:29 ►

Several examples of mycelium here.

00:27:32 ►

The mycelium produces extracellular droplets or enzymes,

00:27:37 ►

and in these droplets are all sorts of exotic compounds

00:27:40 ►

that are of great interest to me and many other scientists currently.

00:27:45 ►

The mycelium externally digests its nutrients. We evolved from fungi about 650 million years ago. There is now a

00:27:54 ►

new super kingdom that joins animalia and fungi together called a Paislaconta. And I think 24

00:28:01 ►

scientists published this in the Journal of Eukaryotic Microbiology about six or seven years ago.

00:28:07 ►

Note to self, if you want to get through peer review, you have about two dozen other scientists co-author the article with you.

00:28:13 ►

It’s very hard for peer reviewers to negate the opinions of 24 other scientists.

00:28:20 ►

But it speaks to the fact that we share a common ancestor with fungi more so than we do with any other kingdom.

00:28:29 ►

And the fungi were basically underground and producing nutrients and enzymes that are being excreted externally

00:28:37 ►

and digested nutrients externally and then brought in those nutrients and needed through the cell walls.

00:28:42 ►

We went the route of basically encirculating our nutrients in a cellular membrane, i.e. a sac,

00:28:50 ►

and then we would produce the enzymes to digest food internally within the stomach.

00:28:56 ►

In both cases, digestive enzymes are being produced.

00:28:59 ►

In both cases, a microbiome of a commensal bacteria are being enlisted to help the digestion process.

00:29:09 ►

So here’s the mycelium. I was a scanning electron microscopist for many years. This is the mycelium.

00:29:15 ►

And then under four environmental stimuli, introduction of water, we all know that because

00:29:20 ►

of rain. And with rain, you have evaporationoration so you have a drop in temperature the second one

00:29:25 ►

the third one is that as the ground becomes moist the mycelium comes up to the surface

00:29:31 ►

it comes to a highly oxygenated environment from a high co2 environment in the ground

00:29:36 ►

so it exhales carbon dioxide inhales oxygen so the oxygen is the third trigger. And the fourth one that’s quite surprising

00:29:46 ►

to most people is light. 99% of all mushrooms require light for them to be produced from the

00:29:52 ►

mycelium. There’s no chlorophyll, but they are photosensitive and phototropic. Most mushrooms

00:29:58 ►

will go towards light. So some of those of you who have grown mushrooms in an apartment or

00:30:03 ►

bedroom or at home,

00:30:08 ►

and if you had a window, oftentimes you’ll see the mushrooms go directly towards the light.

00:30:12 ►

So those are the four primary stimuli that induce mushrooms to form,

00:30:14 ►

and they form very, very quickly.

00:30:23 ►

So the mushroom mycelium is the immune system of the mushroom organism.

00:30:24 ►

The mushrooms are the fruit. The mycelium can be

00:30:26 ►

in the ground or growing for months, years, decades. And the mushrooms come up and they’re

00:30:31 ►

the fruit body, much like a peach is to a tree that attracts herbivores, insects. The mushrooms

00:30:38 ►

come up and they form very, very quickly. So five days of oyster mushrooms, that’s how quickly they grow. So the mushrooms really

00:30:47 ►

don’t need a good immune system. Good luck to any bacterium that wants to destroy the mushroom or

00:30:52 ►

eat it before it reproduces. The mushroom produces spores, attracts insects, but the mushroom

00:30:58 ►

mycelium from which it’s spraying has a very, very intense and active immune system that we can tap into. So a short version

00:31:08 ►

of the mushroom life cycle, two spores come together. If they’re sexually compatible,

00:31:14 ►

they fuse and the mycelium becomes binuculate and dikaryotic downstream. And very quickly,

00:31:21 ►

the mushrooms form, more spores are being produced. But this stage here can go on for years.

00:31:27 ►

This stage here oftentimes is just five days.

00:31:32 ►

So at a permaculture conference,

00:31:34 ►

I was surprised that most permaculturists did not know

00:31:37 ►

that mushroom mycelium produces water.

00:31:40 ►

And on a substrate of straw or sawdust,

00:31:43 ►

when the mycelium decomposes straw or sawdust, when the mycelium decomposes straw or sawdust,

00:31:47 ►

20% of that mass becomes water.

00:31:51 ►

So the mycelium hydrates environments in which they are resident,

00:31:56 ►

and in doing so, they condition the ecosystem conducive to the growth of the mycelium

00:32:00 ►

that then can go into these moist environments and take advantage of those newly available nutrients.

00:32:08 ►

This is my manly man picture.

00:32:12 ►

So part of my younger experience, and I’m quite proud of this,

00:32:15 ►

when I was 19 to 21, I went into the woods.

00:32:19 ►

I think a lot of young men suffer from testosterone poisoning.

00:32:24 ►

And I decided, well, what’s the most difficult job in America, and what’s something that really tests me?

00:32:29 ►

And I thought, well, setting chokers in the woods.

00:32:31 ►

So I was in the logging industry for about four years, two years, the last two years as a logger.

00:32:39 ►

And it was a brutally difficult job.

00:32:44 ►

Three of my crewmates and a crew of six got killed.

00:32:48 ►

They wanted me to become what’s called the hooker, not a prostitute.

00:32:53 ►

But that’s the chief of the crew.

00:32:55 ►

And I said, no, I’m going back to college.

00:32:57 ►

And some of my best friends were these loggers.

00:33:00 ►

And you’re working with them day in and day out.

00:33:07 ►

And they’re watching your back. And you’re working with them day in and day out and they’re watching your back and you’re watching their back because things happen when logs

00:33:11 ►

break lines. I still, in my nightmares,

00:33:16 ►

remember this.

00:33:20 ►

If you’re a logger, if you have anybody who’s set chokers or been around a logging community,

00:33:24 ►

that means basically there’s a steel wire that’s broken

00:33:27 ►

that’s going through the brush so fast you can’t see it.

00:33:31 ►

And if it hits you, it’ll cut you in half.

00:33:33 ►

And so anyhow, but these loggers I was with,

00:33:37 ►

they were really into mushrooms.

00:33:39 ►

And some of them were really environmentalists.

00:33:41 ►

Like, we can’t log this forest.

00:33:43 ►

This is my best chanterelle patch, you know.

00:33:45 ►

So it was very interesting to look at that.

00:33:47 ►

But what the logging industry did is they demonized the environmentalists in order to distract, I think, young men and women,

00:33:55 ►

but mostly young men, from the fact that the logging industry was going to destroy your bodies at the age of 35.

00:34:01 ►

Your backs would be broken.

00:34:03 ►

You’d have bad discs.

00:34:04 ►

And there’s no safety net.

00:34:06 ►

So they distracted the young loggers from demonizing the environmentalists,

00:34:11 ►

as that is your enemy, when in fact the logging industry was exploiting young people’s bodies

00:34:16 ►

and damaging them for life and then leaving them for younger people.

00:34:24 ►

So here’s wood chips.

00:34:25 ►

We add mycelium to it.

00:34:27 ►

Lots of things happen,

00:34:28 ►

but ultimately fungi generate soil.

00:34:31 ►

They’re the grand soil magicians of nature.

00:34:34 ►

They demolecularize cellulose and lignin.

00:34:38 ►

In the process of decomposition,

00:34:39 ►

all sorts of other nutrients are being produced

00:34:41 ►

for benefit of other organisms within the ecosystem.

00:34:44 ►

So fungi create soil. We need more soil on this planet, sorts of other nutrients are being produced for benefit of other organisms within the ecosystem.

00:34:51 ►

So fungi create soil. We need more soil on this planet. And the loss of soils, and this has been, you know, I think is leading to the loss of biodiversity.

00:34:56 ►

So we live up here in the Puget Sound area. Here’s the Columbia River. and down here is the largest organism in the world.

00:35:13 ►

It’s a mycelial mat that is 2,200 acres in size, 1,665 football fields, three feet deep.

00:35:18 ►

The largest organism in the world, a contiguous mycelial mat, and it’s one cell wall thick.

00:35:22 ►

You have five or six skin layers that protect you from infection.

00:35:24 ►

The mycelium has one cell wall.

00:35:28 ►

And on the other side of the cell wall is hundreds of millions of other microorganisms,

00:35:31 ►

many of which are eager to consume the mycelium.

00:35:37 ►

How is it possible it can achieve the greatest mass of any organism and yet only be one cell wall away from all these potential parasitic microorganisms?

00:35:41 ►

It’s because it’s in constant biomolecular communication with its ecosystem, and because of its network-like design, it’s able to upregulate immune defenses that

00:35:50 ►

prevents it from being parasitized. And these immune defenses are quite sophisticated.

00:35:56 ►

And so the mycelium can form spirals in culture, the spirals in the forest. And this is a closer view of the mushroom that created this huge mycelium mat.

00:36:09 ►

It’s a honey mushroom called Armillaria astoi.

00:36:11 ►

It’s an edible mushroom.

00:36:13 ►

It kills the trees.

00:36:14 ►

The Forest Service comes and then cuts the trees down.

00:36:18 ►

And so this mushroom then grows saprophytically.

00:36:21 ►

The Forest Service cuts the trees down because of fire hazard, obviously.

00:36:25 ►

When the trees die, they’re extremely dry, and they’re a tremendous fuel for fire.

00:36:33 ►

So now looking at the influence of mycorrhizal species,

00:36:37 ►

this is from Mike Amaranthus, a friend of mine.

00:36:39 ►

This is a fir tree without mycorrhizae, with mycorrhizae, without mycorrhizae, with mycorrhizae.

00:36:44 ►

This is very well established that plants benefit from the mycorrhizae, with mycorrhizae, without mycorrhizae, with mycorrhizae. This is very well established that plants benefit from the mycorrhizal fungi.

00:36:48 ►

In fact, it’s difficult to buy any soil now from any nursery that does not have mycorrhizae in it.

00:36:55 ►

So we purchased some land on Cortez Island, and I’ve written a number of patents.

00:37:03 ►

One of my patents I licensed for a large amount of money.

00:37:06 ►

And then George Bush got reelected. And so I bought land in Canada. That seemed like a good

00:37:13 ►

idea. And so we bought 160 acres in Canada. And we planted 33,000 trees. And they were being sold

00:37:21 ►

by these loggers. They have six other bids for the

00:37:25 ►

property i came in there so listen i’ll take over the planting leave the roads all you have to do

00:37:30 ►

is flip the paper no conditions and everybody else had all these conditions on their bids and they

00:37:36 ►

so they they said great we’ll love to sell so do you we left the roads up because we wanted to have

00:37:42 ►

as ecological barriers and so we would a plant we planted,000 trees with and without mycorrhizae

00:37:49 ►

and with and without a collar of wood chips around the tree.

00:37:53 ►

The idea is I’m opposed to burning, except under specific circumstances.

00:38:00 ►

But when you burn, wood chips is liberated into carbon dioxide and other gases in one day and

00:38:06 ►

you’re robbing the carbon bank of the ecosystem that led to those trees in the first place

00:38:11 ►

and what’s happening in the logging community when i was doing it that we were doing three log loads

00:38:17 ►

three logs to a logging truck these are massive old growth trees And what’s happened now is there’s only one mill in the United States that can mill old-growth trees in Washington, Oregon, Idaho.

00:38:32 ►

All the other mills have been retooled because the trees have gotten smaller.

00:38:36 ►

The trees have gotten smaller because there’s second and third growth, and you have what’s called premature decline.

00:38:41 ►

You’ve got monocropping.

00:38:42 ►

You cut down all the trees.

00:38:43 ►

It’s biodiverse.

00:38:44 ►

You put it in all the

00:38:45 ►

same age trees, they all grow up at the same age, they’re crowded, and then the soil’s thin, so the

00:38:51 ►

winds come and the trees get blown down. So the economists for the logging industry said you need

00:38:58 ►

to cut those trees sooner and sooner. By the third and fourth regeneration regeneration the trees are so small

00:39:05 ►

the roots are so shallow

00:39:07 ►

the soil is so thin

00:39:10 ►

they’re incentivized to cut the trees

00:39:15 ►

when there’s small poles

00:39:16 ►

so this was happening after the fourth or fifth cut

00:39:19 ►

they abandoned that land

00:39:21 ►

they sold off their real estate

00:39:22 ►

so this was happening all over the world.

00:39:33 ►

So here is two of our Douglas fir trees.

00:39:36 ►

This is a Douglas fir tree without wood chips and a collar of wood chips.

00:39:41 ►

So what we did is told the loggers, leave all the brush. We hired four people

00:39:47 ►

for four months. It cost about $25, 000,$ 35,000. And we chipped all the brush, which was a huge

00:39:55 ►

amount of work. But we had control sites. We put 1,100 trees into an Excel spreadsheet.

00:40:00 ►

We tagged them. And three of my fellow employees measure the trees and the width and the

00:40:09 ►

girth and the height every year and so this is very exciting because now we have a clear separation

00:40:17 ►

from the benefit of the the trees with mycorrhizae and wood chips versus those that did not. And so what I realized is that,

00:40:25 ►

you know, the forests are not being measured with the ecological metric that most of us would

00:40:31 ►

appreciate. Besides timber, board, feet of lumber, there’s clean water, there’s biodiversity, there’s

00:40:37 ►

habitat, there’s recreation for your kids, for you to go in there, for hunters, for foragers of

00:40:43 ►

mushrooms. Those metrics don’t matter.

00:40:46 ►

They should matter, but they don’t in our capitalistic system. What matters is timber,

00:40:50 ►

board feet of lumber coming from the woods. So I thought, well, if you could demonstrate

00:40:55 ►

that it is economically more advantageous to leave the wood chips there, use mycorrhizal fungi,

00:41:02 ►

then you can meet them on that playing field,

00:41:05 ►

which I don’t agree with the rules, but that’s the rules that we have to abide by,

00:41:08 ►

and showing that actually you can get more timber foot footage of lumber out of the forest if you follow this other methodology.

00:41:17 ►

We looked throughout the scientific literature and the forestry journals.

00:41:21 ►

No one had done this.

00:41:22 ►

We were shocked.

00:41:23 ►

No one had done that, taken the time to do it on a large scale like this.

00:41:27 ►

So we’re going to publish this.

00:41:29 ►

We’re at 10 years now, and we have increasingly higher significance.

00:41:35 ►

We have separation now.

00:41:37 ►

The top one is the height of the tree.

00:41:38 ►

This is the girth of the trees.

00:41:40 ►

So the trees are getting wider in the girth, and they’re also getting taller.

00:41:45 ►

So the mycelium presents itself in many forms. This is what I call happy mycelium. I’m

00:41:50 ►

very happy when I see mycelium growing like this. It constantly forks.

00:41:56 ►

And then mushrooms form, as you saw, within just a few days. And the mushrooms begin to rot

00:42:01 ►

after sporulation. They give themselves up.

00:42:05 ►

All sorts of organisms begin to grow on them.

00:42:08 ►

And so coming back a few days later, the mushroom spores are germinating.

00:42:13 ►

Lots of other organisms are occurring also.

00:42:16 ►

And then a few days later, coming back to the same mushroom, it goes subterranean.

00:42:20 ►

The mushroom basically dematerializes and rematerializes into mycelium.

00:42:27 ►

And my foot there covers approximately 300 miles of mycelium.

00:42:31 ►

There’s more than a mile of mycelium per cubic inch of soil.

00:42:36 ►

So these soils are myceliated landscapes.

00:42:39 ►

And these landscapes are the large amount of the biomass of soil is fungal tissue.

00:42:45 ►

So my friend Patrick Kickey made this microscopic movie, and this is the mycelium over several

00:42:52 ►

hours, and these are bundles of nuclei that are streaming through the mycelial networks.

00:42:58 ►

And the mycelium at the end tips, when it’s branching constantly, is polynucleate.

00:43:03 ►

And that polynucleation is extremely important as an adaptive mechanism for responding to

00:43:09 ►

catastrophic and also for evolving new techniques for overcoming hurdles that would limit their

00:43:15 ►

growth.

00:43:16 ►

So think of it like in the width of my arms, there can be literally tens of millions of

00:43:22 ►

end branchings of mycelium.

00:43:24 ►

And the older mycelium in the interior may only have two nuclei per cell,

00:43:28 ►

but the tips can have hundreds of nuclei per cell.

00:43:31 ►

Well, think of those as little scientific communities all doing experiments.

00:43:34 ►

And if there’s a new exotic chemical, a toxin, a new piece of wood, a piece of plastic,

00:43:42 ►

and the mycelium is hungry,

00:43:47 ►

a piece of plastic and the mycelium is hungry if if those those nuclei then code for a new genetic sequence and expresses a new enzyme that can decompose this foreign material what happens

00:43:54 ►

is the information the mycelium surges because it can digest this new food and then the information

00:44:00 ►

back channels to the mycelium so these become self-educating membranes.

00:44:08 ►

And this gives them incredible adaptive properties that most other organisms cannot achieve.

00:44:13 ►

So here’s a fantastic experiment that the Japanese did, which I love.

00:44:18 ►

And the Japanese decided, because a slime mold

00:44:21 ►

has these very interesting properties of navigation, they decided, well, let’s see if a slime mold has these very interesting properties of navigation,

00:44:25 ►

they decided, well, let’s see if a slime mold could redesign the Japanese subway system.

00:44:31 ►

So this is Tokyo, and this is a slime mold,

00:44:34 ►

and these are the satellite cities around Tokyo.

00:44:38 ►

And then after five hours, it’s growing.

00:44:41 ►

After 11 hours, it’s growing into each of these points.

00:44:44 ►

It’s in their city with an oat flake there.

00:44:46 ►

And there’s all sorts of random

00:44:48 ►

exploratory branches from the

00:44:50 ►

mycelium here. At 11 hours,

00:44:53 ►

at 26 hours,

00:44:54 ►

it shuts down all the non-essential

00:44:56 ►

pathways and redesigned

00:44:58 ►

the Tokyo subway system

00:45:00 ►

in a more efficient manner

00:45:02 ►

than it’s designed today. And moreover,

00:45:04 ►

when mathematicians looked at solving this problem, the slime

00:45:08 ►

mold achieved near optimization of being able to connect

00:45:11 ►

the sub-cities around Tokyo in a more efficient manner than the modern

00:45:15 ►

engineers had been able to do.

00:45:19 ►

I look at this and I say, of course, after hundreds

00:45:23 ►

of millions of years of evolution,

00:45:25 ►

conservation of resources, efficiencies rewarded through natural selection,

00:45:30 ►

that, of course, the mycelium would find the most proximate, you know,

00:45:33 ►

and the most efficient way of being able to absorb nutrients.

00:45:38 ►

But this, I think, you know, if you have an engineering problem,

00:45:42 ►

maybe you should consult a slime mold.

00:45:44 ►

Maybe this is a good thing to do.

00:45:48 ►

So now I’m going to wax poetic,

00:45:50 ►

but I increasingly feel more and more confident about the mycelial archetype.

00:45:58 ►

These are brain neurons.

00:46:00 ►

The organization of the computer Internet, represented here,

00:46:04 ►

also conforms to the same archetype shared by that of the mycelium.

00:46:08 ►

When you go and looking at dark matter, this is the deep field view from Hubble telescope,

00:46:14 ►

these are postulated as to what dark matter would look like if you could see it.

00:46:18 ►

It also forms the same cobweb-like mycelial archetype.

00:46:23 ►

And then looking at the mycelium now going in the furthest

00:46:27 ►

view of the universe, there’s the strings of all the galaxies all put together. It conforms to the

00:46:34 ►

same archetype compared, that is shared by the mycelium. I don’t see these as accidents.

00:46:42 ►

At different orders of magnitude, you know, nature rewards efficiency, elasticity, resilience, the ability to adapt.

00:46:50 ►

And I think this is the way of the universe.

00:46:54 ►

I personally feel a lot better about my own mortality.

00:46:58 ►

You know, we are part of the same matrix.

00:47:00 ►

We’re part of the same molecular matrix.

00:47:04 ►

We will demolecularize.

00:47:07 ►

We will reform.

00:47:08 ►

Our molecules will be shared by other organisms.

00:47:11 ►

I think this is the way of the universe.

00:47:14 ►

I believe matter begets life.

00:47:17 ►

Life becomes single cells.

00:47:19 ►

Single cells become strings.

00:47:21 ►

Linearly, they branch.

00:47:23 ►

Networks and membranes form.

00:47:26 ►

They encounter other membranes.

00:47:28 ►

They either compete or cooperate.

00:47:30 ►

They have commensal organisms in between that are interfacing.

00:47:34 ►

And I think this is the part, this is the way of life

00:47:36 ►

that we’ll find other network-based organisms throughout the universe

00:47:39 ►

and probably in fungal forms.

00:47:43 ►

So I like this.

00:47:45 ►

This is from the Discovery Channel,

00:47:47 ►

and I do a lot of fermentation with mycelium in my laboratory,

00:47:51 ►

and this is what it looks like.

00:47:53 ►

I’m going, oh, my goodness, this is what dark matter looks like also.

00:47:57 ►

And so it’s just, you know, these things shout out at you.

00:48:02 ►

I’m working with cultures and petri dishes and doing fermentation and liquid,

00:48:06 ►

and I look at this, and I can’t help but think of these things as being,

00:48:10 ►

wow, this is part of a larger paradigm in which we’re all inserted.

00:48:15 ►

So the universe formed about 13.8 billion years ago after the Big Bang.

00:48:20 ►

Thank you.

00:48:30 ►

And then the Earth formed about 14.5 billion years ago.

00:48:34 ►

Oh, yes, okay.

00:48:36 ►

And their first organisms were thought to be

00:48:38 ►

about 3.8 billion years ago.

00:48:41 ►

So about 700 million years, you know,

00:48:43 ►

from the formation of the Earth,

00:48:44 ►

the first organisms

00:48:45 ►

began to form. Well, 420 million years ago, this organism existed. There was a big controversy

00:48:54 ►

in science for a long time. It was first discovered in 1857, given the name Prototaxides.

00:49:00 ►

And then Dr. Kevin Boyce in the Journal of Geology finally figured out through carbon dating what this organism was.

00:49:08 ►

And he was able to find out that Prototaxides was a giant fungus dotting across the planet.

00:49:17 ►

And these were up to 30 feet high, the tallest organisms on land at that time. This is before vascular plants.

00:49:26 ►

Ferns and whatnot were the tallest

00:49:28 ►

plants at that time, 420 million

00:49:30 ►

years ago.

00:49:31 ►

These were the tallest organisms on Earth.

00:49:34 ►

It was

00:49:35 ►

electromagnetically a lot more

00:49:37 ►

exciting back then.

00:49:39 ►

They would attract lightning strikes, you have epigenesis,

00:49:42 ►

you would have insects.

00:49:44 ►

There’s a major discovery to realize that Prototoxides was a giant fungus

00:49:50 ►

dotting the faces of the Earth.

00:49:52 ►

Well, we advance forward to 250 million years ago at the time of Pangea,

00:49:58 ►

where we had a huge cataclysmic extinction event.

00:50:02 ►

And this extinction event is not fully understood. There’s three

00:50:07 ►

competing theories. One is the asteroid impact. The other one is methane hydrate bursts from the

00:50:12 ►

ocean. The third one is volcanoes bursting. I don’t see them as mutually exclusive. The asteroid

00:50:17 ►

impact created the earthquakes that would crack the crust that would cause the fissures that the

00:50:23 ►

volcanic, you know volcanic flow would occur,

00:50:26 ►

and the methane hydrate would burst from the ocean.

00:50:29 ►

In any event, different percentages are used,

00:50:33 ►

but approximately 90% of the species on the planet became extinct.

00:50:37 ►

The Earth became shrouded in dust, sunlight was cut off, and fungi inherited the Earth.

00:50:44 ►

In fact, we know what the fungus is.

00:50:47 ►

It’s called Reduvios spornitis.

00:50:50 ►

And this fungus gobbled up the wood debris

00:50:56 ►

and became the most predominant organism found in the fossil record

00:51:01 ►

directly after 250 million years ago, microscopically.

00:51:05 ►

So that’s interesting.

00:51:08 ►

So then we go to Gondwana land about 140 million years ago,

00:51:13 ►

plus or minus 20 million in that, and then we have continental drift.

00:51:17 ►

And then 65 million years ago, we have an asteroid impact.

00:51:20 ►

Now we know about this one for sure, and it struck in the Yucatan, but a repeating

00:51:27 ►

extinction event. Huge amount of dust in the atmosphere, sunlight’s cut off, and fungi

00:51:32 ►

re-inherit the earth. There’s a recurring lesson here, folks. When we’re facing extinction events,

00:51:38 ►

pairing with fungi has an evolutionary advantage, and we should make use of that.

00:51:47 ►

an evolutionary advantage, and we should make use of that. So looking at the mycelium, here it’s wicking up to the surface. This is called a shiro. It’s a Matsutake shiro. And the mycelium’s

00:51:54 ►

exhaling carbon dioxide, inhaling oxygen. So the mycelium is not only an externalized stomach

00:52:02 ►

digesting nutrients outside of its cells,

00:52:07 ►

it’s also an externalized lungs.

00:52:11 ►

It’s exhaling carbon dioxide, inhaling oxygen.

00:52:18 ►

And as I postulated earlier, I believe these are externalized intelligent neurological networks that are sentient.

00:52:21 ►

They’re aware when you walk across them in the forest.

00:52:25 ►

They’re watching you.

00:52:26 ►

They’re leaping up behind you in the competition of you breaking wood.

00:52:30 ►

And a lot of these fungi follow human activity.

00:52:34 ►

It’s very interesting in the field of mycology,

00:52:36 ►

and several mycologists are here,

00:52:38 ►

that the predominant psilocybin mushrooms that grow on wood

00:52:41 ►

are associated with human chipping of wood, building houses,

00:52:47 ►

landscaping, putting wood chips down. And they’re oftentimes rare in the virgin forest,

00:52:52 ►

but they’re extremely common around academic institutions, law enforcement facilities,

00:52:59 ►

you know, Google, Googleplex. I don’t know if anyone from Google here, but you got psilocybes

00:53:02 ►

growing in your yard. maybe that’s good.

00:53:07 ►

Anyhow,

00:53:08 ►

the mycelium can be unified by

00:53:09 ►

disparate

00:53:12 ►

species of plants.

00:53:14 ►

They can all be unified by one fungus.

00:53:18 ►

I believe

00:53:19 ►

habitats are immune systems

00:53:20 ►

and the mycelial networks are the cellular bridges

00:53:22 ►

that connect us all.

00:53:26 ►

This is where I live on 20 acres on Skookum Inlet and this is our facility here and we produce

00:53:35 ►

about 20,000 kilos of mycelium a week. We have about 24 laminar flow benches. We now have a

00:53:42 ►

company of 68 employees. We have five facilities now. This is

00:53:47 ►

our facility that we, this is my, where I live. And so we have this laboratory complex, about 20,000

00:53:52 ►

square feet of laboratories. We grow about 700 species of fungi. Now, when I first moved on the

00:53:59 ►

property in 1984, you know, I bought this 20 acres for $110,000, 400 feet of waterfront. What a deal.

00:54:08 ►

Now, and I got there and I’m unpacking all my stuff. And week after I got there, a sheriff

00:54:14 ►

showed up. I thought that was awfully quick. I’m still unpacking. And everybody on this inlet was

00:54:21 ►

served a summons saying that you had to put in a certified inspected septic system

00:54:25 ►

or you’d be evicted off your property and you had two years to do it.

00:54:30 ►

Well, I had cows, chickens, and pigs.

00:54:31 ►

I bought the small farm, one horse.

00:54:34 ►

Most of you know cows, chickens, and pigs reproduce more than twice in the next year.

00:54:42 ►

And my property was identified as a point source of pollution

00:54:45 ►

because of the farm animals,

00:54:48 ►

and there’s a little waterfall coming off the property.

00:54:50 ►

So, you know, I had two years to put in a septic system.

00:54:55 ►

I just bought the property.

00:54:56 ►

I couldn’t afford to put in a $25 new certified septic system.

00:55:00 ►

But instead, I put in wood chips and the little swales that led down to the ravines,

00:55:08 ►

the waterfall. A year later, a fleet of government officials show up again. And they said, Paul

00:55:15 ►

Sammis, we have to talk to you. They could look around, they could see all my animals. They said,

00:55:19 ►

did you put in a septic system? And I said, no. And they said, well, this is really extraordinary.

00:55:26 ►

in a septic system? And I said, no. And they said, well, this is really extraordinary. You’re the only outfall on this inlet that we see this result. You have a two log, hundredfold reduction

00:55:33 ►

of E. coli, fecal coliform E. coli coming off your property. What did you do? So I said, well,

00:55:40 ►

I put in these wood chips and I inoculated it with the mycelium of the garden giant mushroom.

00:55:47 ►

This led to an EPA grant, Phase 1, $85,000.

00:55:51 ►

We published now three articles, and we were able to show that putting the garden giant mushroom mycelium in wood chips

00:55:57 ►

selectively pulls out fecal coliform bacteria, E. coli specifically,

00:56:02 ►

and the mycelium digests and eats the E. coli as a food source.

00:56:07 ►

So this became the dawn of microfiltration,

00:56:09 ►

and all these articles are available if you go to our website at fungi.com,

00:56:14 ►

and you can download these articles if you wish.

00:56:17 ►

We were then, prior to that, we did a test,

00:56:22 ►

and this is a logarithmic scale here,

00:56:24 ►

10 to the first power is 10, 10 to the third power ismic scale here. 10 to the first power is 10.

00:56:26 ►

10 to the third power is 1,000.

00:56:28 ►

10 to the sixth is a million.

00:56:29 ►

100 million colonies of bacteria, of E. coli, in a milliliter of water, one gram of water.

00:56:36 ►

So this is incredibly rich.

00:56:38 ►

And then we did extracts of the oyster mushroom, birch polypore, and agaricon,

00:56:43 ►

Fomitopsis fischinalis.

00:56:45 ►

We did 10 different species, I just guessed,

00:56:48 ►

and three of these reduced the E. coli

00:56:53 ►

from more than 100 million down to 1,000 in 24 hours.

00:56:58 ►

I mean, a 10,000 to 1 reduction of E. coli in 24 hours

00:57:02 ►

from the exudates, the little droplets coming from the mycelium. So wow, that was really exciting for us. That led us to the EPA grant that we wrote

00:57:11 ►

and the articles that you saw. So then we started doing something that I hypothesized

00:57:20 ►

that I bet you the mycelium is selecting out a microbiome with beneficial bacteria.

00:57:24 ►

that I bet you the mycelium is selecting out a microbiome with beneficial bacteria.

00:57:29 ►

And the mycelium would condition the microbiota of the ecosystem that would be conducive to the plants that give rise to create the debris field to feed the mycelium.

00:57:35 ►

That these are deterministic in the downstream populations of organisms they’re creating

00:57:39 ►

because it serves their own progeny and their own evolutionary advantage for them to survive

00:57:44 ►

by choosing the members that decompose them over time and how they navigate through the ecosystem.

00:57:50 ►

So we did next-gen sequencing here of the garden giant grown in these wood chips in Urpex lacteus.

00:57:56 ►

This is a polypore mushroom.

00:57:59 ►

This is a big fleshy mushroom you’ll see.

00:58:03 ►

And this is a color heat map.

00:58:05 ►

And basically we found that it was a thousand-fold difference

00:58:09 ►

in the relative abundance of bacterium on the same wood chips.

00:58:13 ►

So we used the same wood chips, and we inoculated one pile here.

00:58:16 ►

We separated the wood chips in half, one pile with a garden giant,

00:58:20 ►

one pile with this polypore mushroom.

00:58:23 ►

And we found that over time

00:58:25 ►

they selected out a thousand

00:58:27 ►

fold relative difference

00:58:29 ►

in the abundance of genera between the two

00:58:31 ►

mycelial mats. Thus proving

00:58:33 ►

that they have different microbiomes that they’re selecting

00:58:35 ►

for. This has never been reported in the

00:58:37 ►

scientific literature.

00:58:40 ►

These mushrooms

00:58:41 ►

have become quite large. The garden giant, this is my

00:58:43 ►

daughter when she was younger and my son.

00:58:45 ►

These are five-pound specimens, which then I fed to salmon,

00:58:49 ►

and I inadvertently discovered that fly larvae grow in these mushrooms,

00:58:53 ►

and you can feed them to salmon,

00:58:54 ►

and they’re very important for the riparian ecosystem

00:58:57 ►

as well as for fish ecosystems.

00:59:01 ►

And so then looking at the mycelium,

00:59:04 ►

there’s the extracellular droplets that we’re so excited about.

00:59:08 ►

And then coinciding the growth of mycelium is bacteria, the majority of which we think are parasitizing,

00:59:14 ►

but we now know there’s commensal bacteria.

00:59:17 ►

The mycelium selects as a partner to say, hey, we will mutualistically let you survive,

00:59:22 ►

but we want you to keep your other pathogenic cousins of yours away from us.

00:59:27 ►

And so this is something that we’re actively involved now

00:59:30 ►

is creating microbiomes of mycelial mats in vitro, in culture,

00:59:35 ►

and then designing microbiomes with the mycelium using nature as a guide

00:59:39 ►

to see if we can fortify the mycelium for being able to project into nature

00:59:43 ►

for bioremediation of toxins, for helping ecosystems respond,

00:59:48 ►

cleaning up water, helping other members of the ecological community.

00:59:52 ►

The mycelium is incredibly tenacious.

00:59:55 ►

It takes physical force to pull this apart.

00:59:59 ►

And this is a rhizomorph of mycelium.

01:00:01 ►

And I measured this, and this one centimeter held more than 30,000 times its

01:00:07 ►

weight. Well I could have made that you know one centimeter into one millimeter one tenth as much

01:00:12 ►

could be over 300,000 times its weight. So mycelium when it grows through a substrate is tenacious

01:00:17 ►

it holds it together it prevents erosion it creates these micro cavities that then swell

01:00:22 ►

with water so they’re spongy habitats that hold water resident within the ecosystem.

01:00:28 ►

So I’m going to jump now to subjects that I think are really interesting.

01:00:34 ►

This is the Chernobyl nuclear power plant in the Ukraine, outside of Kiev, and this is an incredibly radioactive site, as most of you know.

01:00:48 ►

And a group of scientists were looking at video feeds on the inside of the walls of the reactor

01:00:54 ►

where the meltdown occurred. More than a million rads of radioactivity, where nothing should be

01:01:00 ►

growing. And on the cement walls were black molds. They they said how is it possible that anything could

01:01:07 ►

be living in there they went into those and into their into that environment pulled out the molds

01:01:12 ►

and began to grow them in an astonishing breakthrough in science heretofore never known

01:01:19 ►

and this is where it’s an unfortunate science experiment from from these catastrophes and

01:01:24 ►

disasters we have an opportunity of learning a new lesson and what they discovered was and this is where it’s an unfortunate science experiment. From these catastrophes and disasters,

01:01:27 ►

we have an opportunity of learning a new lesson.

01:01:33 ►

And what they discovered was that the fungi exposed to the radiation,

01:01:36 ►

the melanizing fungi, fungi that have melanin,

01:01:37 ►

we have melanin as well,

01:01:42 ►

the melanizing fungi are able to use gamma irradiation as a fuel source for cellular metabolism similar and analogous to the

01:01:48 ►

way that plants use chlorophyll and light so this discovery you know with absence of light fungi are

01:01:57 ►

mineral mineralizing uh the the the walls fungi break and eat down rocks.

01:02:08 ►

And with this understanding now,

01:02:11 ►

this could allow for the interplanetary colonization of space because fungal foods like tempeh could be then grown

01:02:15 ►

using the radioactivity coming from the engines

01:02:20 ►

of the nuclear-powered spaceships.

01:02:23 ►

And one of the big challenges for colonizing space is how do we grow the food?

01:02:28 ►

So in the vacuum of space, it’s very, very difficult to do so,

01:02:31 ►

to grow plants because of the lighting requirements, et cetera.

01:02:34 ►

So this is amazing that these fungi are able to,

01:02:40 ►

these melanizing fungi are able to uptake their radiation

01:02:43 ►

to use it as a metabolic fuel source.

01:02:48 ►

So we started playing around with melanization.

01:02:55 ►

We got lots of turkey tail mushrooms, Terminus versicolor.

01:02:58 ►

And this is under UV lights, and this is under our regular lights.

01:03:03 ►

And so we’re now being able to melanize fungi

01:03:05 ►

by balancing light, the spectra of lights that we’re exposing the mushrooms to.

01:03:13 ►

I’m getting a little bit, I’m venturing into things that are kind of getting proprietary,

01:03:17 ►

but I don’t care because this really inspires me. But so what we’re really focusing now is on wavelengths of light. And you’ll hear

01:03:26 ►

more about this, you know, in the next few minutes. So, but let’s look at some mushrooms

01:03:33 ►

that most of you know about. Inokitake, you’ll find it in the stores. Inokitake mushrooms are

01:03:38 ►

grown, you know, very popular in Asia. They grow here in North America. But enoki mushrooms really made medical

01:03:46 ►

history for the following example. Dr. Ikikawa was the epidemiologist for the National Cancer

01:03:54 ►

Center in Tokyo. I’ve met him several times. He was sent by the National Cancer Center to the

01:04:00 ►

Nagano Prefecture because there was a drop in the cancer rates that was abnormal

01:04:06 ►

for Japan. Mountainous region of Japan, they wanted to know why was there less than the national

01:04:12 ►

average of cancer deaths in that region. He spent several months there, and he determined the reason

01:04:19 ►

being is that it was a center of enoki mushroom cultivation. And because there are so many enoki workers there,

01:04:27 ►

the workers would take home the blemished ones.

01:04:29 ►

Many of you are farmers.

01:04:30 ►

You know, you take home the ones that are perfect.

01:04:32 ►

Too many of those you can sell on the market,

01:04:34 ►

but the ones that have a little wormhole or bacterial blotch on them, you can’t.

01:04:38 ►

But you eat those.

01:04:39 ►

And so the per capita consumption of the workers and their families was eight times greater than other residents in Japan.

01:04:50 ►

So here is the average death per 100,000 people per year in Japan, 160 people.

01:04:57 ►

We have about 190 or 200.

01:04:59 ►

Men are dying sooner because we don’t live as long, one of the reasons.

01:05:11 ►

So it’s age-adjusted, 174,000 people in this data set, high significance.

01:05:16 ►

So this is the background population in Nagano,

01:05:21 ►

and this is the cancer deaths now of the enoki mushroom consumers and their families.

01:05:23 ►

Statistically significant.

01:05:25 ►

This was published then in a Western medical journal,

01:05:28 ►

and this is the first article that I know of that really brought good science to Western medicine,

01:05:34 ►

showing that the consumption of mushrooms reduces your death from cancer.

01:05:39 ►

So here is a lion’s mane mushroom,

01:05:44 ►

which I think is the first smart mushroom,

01:05:47 ►

besides psilocybin, but the first smart mushroom,

01:05:50 ►

and it produces these novel nerve growth factors that causes the regeneration of myelin.

01:05:57 ►

And very interesting articles have come out,

01:06:00 ►

specifically one mouse experiment, which is called a novelty experiment, where they took

01:06:07 ►

mice and they put them into an arena, and they put in a new object, a new toy in the arena,

01:06:15 ►

100 mice, and there were stopwatches and then clickers. They would measure how long and how

01:06:21 ►

many times the mice would encounter this new toy. They then took that group

01:06:26 ►

of mice, they injected an amyloid plaque forming toxin that causes amyloid plaque similar to what

01:06:31 ►

Alzheimer’s victims have, and the demyelination of the myelin sheet on the axons of nerves,

01:06:38 ►

and the amyloid plaques show up, and they interfere with neurotransmission. So if you have a relative

01:06:44 ►

or someone dies from Alzheimer’s upon autopsy,

01:06:47 ►

these amyloid plaques are easily seen.

01:06:49 ►

They can chemically induce this in the mice.

01:06:52 ►

When they did that, after about three weeks,

01:06:55 ►

they put that new object in the arena, the mice had no interest.

01:06:59 ►

They lost their curiosity.

01:07:01 ►

With those mice that had full-blown Alzheimer’s-like symptoms,

01:07:04 ►

they started feeding them

01:07:05 ►

lion’s mane mushrooms, and three to

01:07:08 ►

four weeks, they returned to baseline.

01:07:10 ►

Upon sacrificing the mice,

01:07:12 ►

the amyloid plaque had

01:07:13 ►

been resolved, remyelination

01:07:15 ►

had occurred. And so,

01:07:17 ►

this, I think, is hugely significant.

01:07:20 ►

There’s been two small clinical studies in Japan

01:07:21 ►

on this, but as we get

01:07:24 ►

older, the biggest, one of the greatest tragedies is our elders begin to lose their wisdom,

01:07:30 ►

begin to lose their mind, their memory.

01:07:33 ►

And so I think we all need to be smarter.

01:07:35 ►

And this is something that four years ago when I was here,

01:07:40 ►

I suggested that the combination of lion’s mane mushrooms and low doses of psilocybin, I think, could lead to neurogenesis.

01:07:50 ►

And this could be something that’s incredibly helpful for scientists, people who really want to be at the edge of innovation.

01:07:58 ►

And so that’s something that I know now a number of people here at Burning Man are taking low daily doses of psilocybin with Lion’s Mane.

01:08:07 ►

So we’ll see what happens.

01:08:12 ►

Okay, so here’s the change in deaths between 2000 and 2008.

01:08:17 ►

You know, most of these deaths related to breast cancer, prostate cancer, and heart disease are declining.

01:08:23 ►

But unfortunately, the deaths related to Alzheimer’s-like diseases is increasing.

01:08:29 ►

This is particularly concerning because here’s the population in the world today

01:08:32 ►

that’s over the age of 65, and this is what it is in 2050.

01:08:38 ►

We have a huge aging of our population.

01:08:40 ►

So the next generations are going to be burdened with a lot of elders

01:08:44 ►

who are going to need burdened with a lot of elders who are going to

01:08:45 ►

need a lot of medical attention. Okay, so we have done analysis at Emory Medical School on the

01:08:53 ►

compounds that causes remyelination. They’re called aranacines. And we have variability in

01:08:58 ►

the production of aranacines, which is to be expected. This is why microdiversity, the diversity of fungi is very important.

01:09:07 ►

So we’re working on that and other species in the genus

01:09:10 ►

Euryceum that are like lion’s mane

01:09:11 ►

are ones also that we’re exploring.

01:09:14 ►

This is my brother Bill.

01:09:16 ►

He’s lion’s mane. He’s a very

01:09:17 ►

smart guy.

01:09:21 ►

So I’m going to get

01:09:23 ►

a little bit more into science here,

01:09:25 ►

but this is important for people to come up the learning curve.

01:09:30 ►

The mycelium codes has a lot more genes that are being upregulated at the mycelial state

01:09:37 ►

than at the mushroom formation state.

01:09:40 ►

So the mycelium is coding for a lot more molecules

01:09:43 ►

and is much richer in potential

01:09:47 ►

medicinal compounds than the end stage of the process, the mushrooms, which is the fruit body.

01:09:52 ►

So the activity of the gene sequences being a lot more resplendent gives us a lot more

01:09:59 ►

opportunities for exploring for new medical molecules.

01:10:10 ►

Okay, so 73% of all cancer drugs have origins in natural products.

01:10:11 ►

We all have cancer.

01:10:16 ►

You know, one out of four or five of us in this room are going to die from cancer.

01:10:20 ►

So this is something that, you know, we have to take very seriously.

01:10:28 ►

We received a $2.2 million NIH grant for breast cancer study using turkey tail mushrooms with the Pisteria Medical College and the University of Minnesota Medical

01:10:33 ►

School. And so we grew up the turkey tail mushrooms. And I was a co-PI. I wrote part of

01:10:39 ►

the grant that received the money. And then after we received the money, my co-PI said, well, where did you get the mushrooms?

01:10:46 ►

I said, well, definitely get them from us.

01:10:48 ►

There’s so many problems that can occur in this process.

01:10:51 ►

One of the big things that people don’t know

01:10:52 ►

is the mycelium delaminates.

01:10:55 ►

And as it goes over ages, the netting loosens up.

01:10:59 ►

And so you can start out with something that,

01:11:01 ►

and by analogy, it looks like the netting of a nylon sock,

01:11:04 ►

and end up with something with the netting of a tennis net in the same spatial dimension.

01:11:09 ►

So the mycelium begins to unravel and loses integrity.

01:11:13 ►

So if you don’t know this, then when you buy medicinal mushroom products, you know, you

01:11:17 ►

have no clue as to really what you’re getting.

01:11:21 ►

So they said you can’t be a principal investigator and supplier to a conflict of interest, choose one or the other. So I resigned and became a

01:11:29 ►

supplier candidate. They checked five other suppliers against what we were

01:11:34 ►

doing. We came out number one thankfully. So we became the sole source of a

01:11:39 ►

supplier for this breast cancer clinical study. This has now been published in a medical journal.

01:11:46 ►

Pre-radiation, the natural killer cell activity,

01:11:49 ►

post-radiation, it declines

01:11:50 ►

because your immune system is being impaired.

01:11:52 ►

And two to four weeks, we have a dose-dependent increase

01:11:56 ►

in natural killer cells and cytotoxic T cells.

01:11:59 ►

High significance, specifically showing

01:12:01 ►

that T cell augmentation occurs.

01:12:04 ►

Natural killer cells and T cells are your two front lines of immune protection,

01:12:09 ►

causing apoptosis and destroying cancer cells.

01:12:13 ►

So, again, very high significance.

01:12:16 ►

So this is really exciting.

01:12:18 ►

We’re involved in this research.

01:12:20 ►

But there was an age limit.

01:12:21 ►

The selection range was women from the age of 35 to, I think, around 55,

01:12:29 ►

in that range.

01:12:30 ►

Well, this became very important to me

01:12:33 ►

because my mother called me up in June of 2009,

01:12:39 ►

and she was very, very disturbed and shaking on the phone,

01:12:44 ►

and she said, Paul, I’m so worried.

01:12:46 ►

I need to talk to you, but you’re always so busy.

01:12:48 ►

I went, oh, no, what’s wrong?

01:12:51 ►

And she said, you know, she’s a charismatic Christian.

01:12:54 ►

She has not seen a doctor since 1968.

01:12:57 ►

She said, my right breast is five times the size of my left.

01:13:01 ►

I have six angry lymph nodes in my right side.

01:13:04 ►

You know, she started shaking

01:13:06 ►

and crying. And I, you know, I was like, mom, why didn’t you tell me sooner? Well, she’s a

01:13:11 ►

charismatic Christian. She’s part of a Christian community. And they prayed for her. And they

01:13:18 ►

prayed for her. And they said that, you know, after a prayer, they said, well, you’ve been

01:13:23 ►

cured of cancer. Well, of course, that was not true.

01:13:25 ►

So I rushed her to Seattle, to the Swedish Cancer Center, and got her there.

01:13:30 ►

Upon the second visit, we got the worst news that anyone could imagine.

01:13:35 ►

The oncologist said it’s the second worst case of breast cancer that oncologists have seen in 20 years.

01:13:42 ►

It had metastasized across the meridian, went into her liver,

01:13:46 ►

went into her sternum.

01:13:47 ►

The tumor was erupting through her breast.

01:13:51 ►

And the doctor said,

01:13:52 ►

we can’t do a surgery on you.

01:13:54 ►

We can’t do a mastectomy

01:13:55 ►

because you’d like to get an infection.

01:13:57 ►

You know, she’s 83 years of age

01:13:59 ►

at that point in time.

01:14:01 ►

And we can’t give you radiation therapy

01:14:03 ►

because, again, you can get an infection.

01:14:06 ►

But she said, you know,

01:14:07 ►

there’s an interesting turkey tail clinical study

01:14:10 ►

going on at the Steer Medical School.

01:14:11 ►

If your immune system could kick in,

01:14:13 ►

you might be able to fight this.

01:14:15 ►

So that’s when my mother said,

01:14:16 ►

well, my son’s been telling me about that,

01:14:18 ►

but she would not believe,

01:14:20 ►

for me, she had to hear it from a doctor, right?

01:14:22 ►

So my mother started taking turkey tail mushrooms,

01:14:27 ►

and she started taking eight capsules per day of the mycelium.

01:14:32 ►

Then it went back to Ellensburg, Washington, where she lived.

01:14:34 ►

She enrolled in her septum clinic, and she was on Taxol briefly,

01:14:40 ►

had a horrible reaction.

01:14:41 ►

She started taking Herceptin, a wonderful drug,

01:14:43 ►

and then she started taking eight turkey tail capsules per day.

01:14:47 ►

And that was in 2009.

01:14:50 ►

In June, she began.

01:14:52 ►

In January of 2010,

01:14:56 ►

her tumors had shrunk down to the point

01:14:58 ►

that they were barely detectable whatsoever.

01:15:02 ►

And then I think this will work.

01:15:04 ►

Try this. And so here is a message she left me

01:15:08 ►

tony i hope this works all right well so what happened was my mother is um

01:15:15 ►

i just we just celebrated her 90th birthday she’s uh totally cancer free Cancer-free.

01:15:29 ►

And, Tony, I hope this works for the next audios that are coming up.

01:15:34 ►

Okay, so now my mother had been written up in several medical journals as a best-case outcome.

01:15:38 ►

They interviewed her with Julie Smith, her oncologist.

01:15:43 ►

Julie Smith was asked if Patty Stamets had told you she was taking turkey tail mushrooms,

01:15:48 ►

what would you have told her? And Julie Smith, her doctor, said I would have told her to stop taking turkey tail mushrooms immediately. My mother and I and Julie Smith

01:15:51 ►

believe that was a life and death decision that we did not tell the doctor.

01:15:55 ►

Because out of an abundance of caution, doctors want to see if their regimen is going to work.

01:16:00 ►

And they’re not up the learning curve. The NIH peer review scientists

01:16:03 ►

were. We brought them up the learning curve.

01:16:05 ►

But doctors who are not well educated in this subject are going to,

01:16:09 ►

you know, they’re trained to be authoritarian figures.

01:16:12 ►

And I just heard of a doctor, a very well-known doctor,

01:16:15 ►

who told a very well-known musician that all of you know,

01:16:19 ►

and he said, stop taking medicinal mushrooms because you might get an infection.

01:16:23 ►

Are you freaking kidding?

01:16:25 ►

That would be like saying, don’t eat plants because there’s poison oak.

01:16:29 ►

You know, I mean, a person had no knowledge at all.

01:16:33 ►

But, I mean, doctors will give you advice about your car, you know,

01:16:36 ►

just because they get intoxicated by their position of power.

01:16:39 ►

I mean, it makes no freaking sense whatsoever.

01:16:42 ►

So doctors can be also a great liability. But this has been written up in several articles

01:16:47 ►

and then an article came out with Turkey Tail, PSK,

01:16:52 ►

and being joined together with Herceptin that shows that Turkey Tail mushrooms

01:16:56 ►

enhances the activity of Herceptin as an adjunct to conventional

01:16:59 ►

therapy. So, then an

01:17:04 ►

article came out just this past year, For those of you who know about PSK

01:17:08 ►

and Turkey Tail, PSK is a protein-bound polysaccharide on a beta-glucan molecule.

01:17:14 ►

But it turns out, and I’ve been advocating this for a long time, it’s the lipid compound that’s

01:17:20 ►

attached to PSK that causes the immune response. And if you use hot water extraction, lipids are not soluble in hot water.

01:17:29 ►

And if you use hot water, you actually pull out the beta-glucan soluble components,

01:17:37 ►

but you leave the lipid components behind.

01:17:39 ►

So it turns out that hot water extraction of mushrooms partitions the beneficial lipids or fatty acids

01:17:47 ►

that are essential for the immune response. Okay, so there’s different polarities. I need to move

01:17:53 ►

forward on this. So the turkey tail mushrooms pre-select as a prebiotic and two studies here

01:18:02 ►

showing that turkey tail mushroom enhances lactobacillus and bifidobacterium.

01:18:06 ►

These are beneficial bacteria in your microbiome in your stomach.

01:18:09 ►

And downregulate inflammatory bacteria.

01:18:12 ►

So these mushrooms are prebiotics, and they’re compatible with your microbiome.

01:18:16 ►

That’s very important for your immune response.

01:18:20 ►

We wrote an NIH grant.

01:18:21 ►

It did not get funded.

01:18:22 ►

We wrote an NIH grant, did not get funded,

01:18:27 ►

but we wrote this specifically to sort of lay out for everyone how you can do analyses of all medicinal mushrooms.

01:18:31 ►

It’s a great paper.

01:18:32 ►

We have it available for any other researchers who want to read it.

01:18:35 ►

But unfortunately, because of sequester, it was not funded.

01:18:39 ►

So this led me into oncoviruses.

01:18:43 ►

I am very interested in the viral to cancer connection.

01:18:46 ►

There are seven oncoviruses that have been identified thus far.

01:18:49 ►

There’s probably a lot more.

01:18:50 ►

HPV being one with cervical cancer and other types of carcinomas.

01:18:56 ►

I’m going to accelerate this talk right now.

01:19:01 ►

So a person in Seattle, Washington, had Merkel cell carcinoma.

01:19:07 ►

The death rate for Merkel cell carcinoma is about 99.99999%.

01:19:12 ►

Only 10 people in the world have ever survived.

01:19:14 ►

If you have a cancer that is caused by a polyomavirus and your certain genetic composition,

01:19:20 ►

you will get Merkel cell carcinoma as a death sentence.

01:19:23 ►

This patient did not tell the doctors what medicinal mushrooms he was taking.

01:19:28 ►

They called him back saying, you’re the only survivor we know of.

01:19:31 ►

There are only 10 people in the world who have ever survived.

01:19:33 ►

What did you do?

01:19:34 ►

We have no treatment whatsoever.

01:19:36 ►

There’s no surgery.

01:19:37 ►

There’s no gene therapy.

01:19:39 ►

There’s no immune therapies that they’re aware of.

01:19:42 ►

And he said, well, it’s interesting because what we did is I was taking a seven-species mushroom blend,

01:19:50 ►

and he ended up beating Merkel cell carcinoma.

01:19:54 ►

He’s been written up now in the medical journals.

01:19:57 ►

And clinical studies like this are very, very difficult because it’s a nutraceutical,

01:20:02 ►

and the FDA will not allow clinical studies,

01:20:05 ►

plus you have to have them funded.

01:20:06 ►

So it’s very, very expensive,

01:20:08 ►

especially in this economic climate today.

01:20:11 ►

So Dr. Paul Nim from the University of Michigan,

01:20:13 ►

the University of Washington,

01:20:15 ►

Fred Hutch gave me these micrographs.

01:20:17 ►

This is of that 58-year-old man.

01:20:19 ►

It’s called immune evasion.

01:20:22 ►

Your immune system is active when you have cancer,

01:20:25 ►

but the tumors cloak themselves from immune discovery.

01:20:29 ►

And then after this person was taking this regimen of medicinal mushrooms,

01:20:33 ►

then you had tumor disaggregation.

01:20:37 ►

The white blood cells were able to find docking points on the stroma of the tumors,

01:20:41 ►

come in, and be able to tear the tumors apart.

01:20:44 ►

And so this is called immune invasion versus immune evasion.

01:20:49 ►

So it decloaks the tumors for immune discovery.

01:20:51 ►

This is why a lot of scientists are pretty excited about this

01:20:54 ►

because it looks like it uncloaks the tumors

01:20:56 ►

and to make other medical treatments more likely to be successful.

01:21:03 ►

So the agaricon mushroom is one that we’re really excited about. more likely to be successful. So I have to…

01:21:05 ►

The agaricon mushroom is one that we’re really excited about.

01:21:08 ►

It’s the longest-living mushroom in the world.

01:21:10 ►

One out of 100 times in the woods, I’ll find it.

01:21:13 ►

We now have 73 strains of agaricon

01:21:15 ►

from different regions of Washington, Oregon,

01:21:18 ►

Northern California, and British Columbia.

01:21:21 ►

And one of our ventures went up to the Desolation Sound in British Columbia. We rented a

01:21:26 ►

motor sailor and we went up Desolation Sound and a National Geographic photojournalist came with us.

01:21:33 ►

And I got this National Nat Geo Award and they want to do a story on a Garakon. So I said,

01:21:38 ►

we’ll come out in the summertime. We’ll take you up on a voyage. And the photojournalist said,

01:21:43 ►

well, I want to know, I want to go and find an original one.

01:21:47 ►

I don’t want you to go to a place

01:21:48 ►

you’ve already seen it before.

01:21:50 ►

So how likely would you find that?

01:21:53 ►

And I go, 50-50.

01:21:55 ►

But I had good reasons for saying that.

01:21:57 ►

It was really one out of 100 chances.

01:22:00 ►

But I didn’t want to dissuade them, right?

01:22:01 ►

It was exciting to have a Nat Geo story being written on us.

01:22:07 ►

So I took ten of my friends with high-powered binoculars,

01:22:10 ►

and we scanned the horizon,

01:22:12 ►

and we looked for basically bald eagles.

01:22:14 ►

A garracon grows in living snags, also dead snags,

01:22:18 ►

but they look like big beehives on the horizon.

01:22:23 ►

We looked, and we looked, and and looked for four or five hours,

01:22:25 ►

and we got a retina burn because, you know,

01:22:27 ►

looking at tree after tree after tree after tree,

01:22:29 ►

and he was getting very dissatisfied and impatient.

01:22:32 ►

And then our skipper said, well, let’s go to have lunch over here,

01:22:35 ►

and here’s an overhang rock with some pictographs by First Peoples.

01:22:39 ►

We don’t know what they mean,

01:22:41 ►

but it’s a good place for us to get off the boat and stretch our legs.

01:22:44 ►

So we motor over there

01:22:46 ►

and at this shamanic

01:22:47 ►

site of these first peoples,

01:22:50 ►

we are over there and then, bam,

01:22:52 ►

we see one in a tree.

01:22:54 ►

And actually it was attached to an upper branch.

01:22:56 ►

It fell. It then

01:22:58 ►

balanced on this branch

01:23:00 ►

here and the mycelium

01:23:01 ►

reconnected and then

01:23:04 ►

it grew two legs. so this is really unusual

01:23:07 ►

so that was a great success we’re there we’re really excited and scott fransval who’s a friend

01:23:13 ►

of mine we’ve become friends he’s the director of the tuberculosis research institute

01:23:17 ►

garakon was described by diascorides as elixirium ad longum vitam, the elixir of long life, specifically treating respiratory diseases,

01:23:26 ►

consumption as it was known back then, now known as tuberculosis.

01:23:31 ►

So Scott knew of this ethno-mycological history and knew of my research,

01:23:35 ►

so we connected over e-mail,

01:23:37 ►

and Scott came out being the director and funded by the Gates Foundation.

01:23:41 ►

And after five years, we found an anti-tubercular compound.

01:23:47 ►

We published this in the Journal of Natural Products.

01:23:49 ►

A chlorinated coumarin.

01:23:52 ►

These coumarins become very important.

01:23:54 ►

Okay, so we found this,

01:23:56 ►

and we were able to find

01:23:57 ►

that it was very active against mycobacterium tuberculosis,

01:24:00 ►

you know, with our other colleagues here.

01:24:04 ►

So, but, you know, now we’re going to go back to where we, where they made that first discovery, with our other colleagues here.

01:24:08 ►

But now we’re going to go back to where they made that first discovery.

01:24:11 ►

This is the pictograph.

01:24:13 ►

And we’re there, and we see this rock.

01:24:15 ►

So there’s the rock.

01:24:18 ►

Wow, what’s that rock doing?

01:24:19 ►

There’s a garracon.

01:24:20 ►

There’s a rock.

01:24:21 ►

There’s a garracon.

01:24:22 ►

There’s a rock.

01:24:23 ►

There’s a garracon.

01:24:23 ►

There’s a rock.

01:24:24 ►

You get the story here. So how likely is it we’d find a Garakon?

01:24:27 ►

One out of a hundred.

01:24:28 ►

How likely is it finding a Garakon where there’s a pictographic site

01:24:31 ►

that looks like it was used shamanistically as a healing site?

01:24:38 ►

And there’s more to the story than that, that some of you have heard.

01:24:42 ►

Well, I don’t know, one in 10,000.

01:24:44 ►

How likely is it we’d find a rock

01:24:46 ►

that looks suspiciously like a Garakon

01:24:48 ►

at the same location?

01:24:50 ►

I don’t know, make up a number.

01:24:51 ►

One out of 100,000.

01:24:53 ►

How likely is it we’d find it on my birthday?

01:24:57 ►

And this is when the photojournalist

01:24:59 ►

started getting nervous

01:25:00 ►

and realizing what was going on

01:25:02 ►

and said, you know,

01:25:03 ►

does this happen to Paul often? And my friends looked going on and said you know does this happen to paul often

01:25:06 ►

and my friends looked at him and said yes and i think this is the new convergence

01:25:13 ►

of spirituality and science i am not religious but i’m deeply spiritual and i believe that you

01:25:21 ►

walk in science with good intentions with good heart

01:25:25 ►

with respect for nature

01:25:27 ►

with respect for your ancestors

01:25:29 ►

with a dedication to helping future generations

01:25:32 ►

that nature will reward you

01:25:35 ►

and so what you’re going to see

01:25:37 ►

coming up next

01:25:38 ►

is a direct derivative of that belief

01:25:41 ►

so agaricon is hard to get

01:25:46 ►

with climbed trees.

01:25:47 ►

We leave them in the forest if we can

01:25:50 ►

unless it’s going to be logged, in which case we take

01:25:51 ►

the conch, the big wood conch.

01:25:53 ►

Longest living mushroom in the world. This one’s about

01:25:55 ►

60 years of age.

01:25:58 ►

This one is from

01:25:58 ►

classic Northern California kind of guy.

01:26:02 ►

This one’s probably 100 years

01:26:04 ►

old. This is the biggest one we’ve ever seen.

01:26:07 ►

We asked him to send us a small chunk.

01:26:08 ►

He sent us a chunk the size of a cantaloupe.

01:26:12 ►

So we were able to get this one in the culture.

01:26:13 ►

I think this is strain number 68.

01:26:15 ►

We have it in culture.

01:26:17 ►

The idea is different strains will have different potencies

01:26:19 ►

against bacteria like tuberculosis,

01:26:21 ►

and we started working against viruses.

01:26:25 ►

We GPS code them.

01:26:27 ►

We take a small piece of tissue, not much.

01:26:30 ►

We get them in the culture.

01:26:31 ►

It’s part of our strain library.

01:26:34 ►

And then just prior to 9-11, I published this article in Herbogram.

01:26:38 ►

It’s a literature survey of all the articles that talk about the antiviral properties of mushrooms.

01:26:44 ►

And then 9-11 occurred, All the articles talk about the antiviral properties of mushrooms.

01:26:56 ►

And then 9-11 occurred, and a doctor with a BioShield biodefense program set up by Congress after 9-11, funded by more than a billion dollars, contacted me. He said, Paul, we saw this article, and we’re wondering if you will contribute samples of some of your mushrooms for the BioShield biodefense program.

01:27:05 ►

We did.

01:27:06 ►

We submitted over 200 samples over a period of four years.

01:27:11 ►

And the selectivity index, SI index here,

01:27:15 ►

is a measure of selectivity that harms the virus

01:27:17 ►

without harming the human cell.

01:27:20 ►

Anything over 2 is active.

01:27:22 ►

Anything over 10 or more is considered very active.

01:27:25 ►

So the SI of 10, just remember that.

01:27:28 ►

Anything more than 10 is highly active by virology tests established by the National Institute of Health

01:27:35 ►

in combination with US AMRED and NIAID.

01:27:41 ►

So we submitted these samples.

01:27:44 ►

We hit huge home runs

01:27:45 ►

against pox viruses first

01:27:48 ►

you can hear an interview with myself on national public radio

01:27:52 ►

the director of the BioShield program

01:27:54 ►

the deputy director of the FDA

01:27:55 ►

there was a press release that said we have the best of more than 200,000 samples

01:28:00 ►

the majority of which were pharmaceutical molecules

01:28:04 ►

and our natural extracts

01:28:06 ►

diluted 100 to 1

01:28:08 ►

because they had ethanol in them that diluted

01:28:09 ►

them to 0.35% from 35%.

01:28:12 ►

100 to 1 dilutions and

01:28:14 ►

we had extremely high activity.

01:28:16 ►

In fact, the activity

01:28:17 ►

against ribavirin

01:28:20 ►

which is the positive control against flu viruses

01:28:22 ►

is agaricon,

01:28:24 ►

reishi, and chaga, and it’s a combination of three species.

01:28:29 ►

So here’s rivivirin against these flu viruses, flu A, H5N1, H5N1, H3N2, flu B.

01:28:37 ►

And here is our natural extracts diluted 100 to 1.

01:28:42 ►

Here are the SI numbers, greater than 10, so they look active.

01:28:46 ►

And those are our numbers.

01:28:48 ►

We’re more than 10 times, in many cases,

01:28:50 ►

more active than the positive pharmaceutical control.

01:28:54 ►

So this led to a patent that I received last year.

01:28:58 ►

It got hijacked by the Department of Defense because of national security.

01:29:02 ►

We had to do an intergovernmental agency trace to pull the patent because

01:29:05 ►

after five years it didn’t show up.

01:29:07 ►

I told my patent attorney what’s going on.

01:29:10 ►

So the patent office says

01:29:11 ►

national security pulled it

01:29:13 ►

out of the patent office. For the same

01:29:15 ►

reason you can’t write a patent on

01:29:17 ►

a nuclear weapon. The government can

01:29:19 ►

take it. So we had to do an intergovernmental

01:29:22 ►

trace. We brought it back.

01:29:23 ►

Ended a patent examination. We got these ridiculous declines. We had to intergovernmental trace we brought it back into the patent examination we got these

01:29:26 ►

ridiculous declines we had to do an appeal and 10 examiners unanimity of opinion approved this patent

01:29:33 ►

after about 10 years a group of russians at the vector institute which is like our fort dietrich

01:29:40 ►

in russia also found eight years later what what I had discovered earlier, that agaricon

01:29:46 ►

mushrooms were highly active against viruses. And then part of my research, you know, another

01:29:53 ►

article came out from Vector showing that highly active against flu viruses.

01:30:02 ►

So we are in an age of viral storms. We’ll have a convergence of more than one

01:30:07 ►

pathogenic virus. This is what’s very scary that’s happening out there right now.

01:30:13 ►

And as it turns out, this article just came out in the past few months, and it turns out that

01:30:21 ►

blue light on mycelium produces shikimic acid,

01:30:26 ►

which is currently coming from the star anise that makes Tamiflu.

01:30:31 ►

But star anise can only be grown once a year in the Middle East primarily,

01:30:36 ►

and has incredibly toxic to make the compounds that lead to Tamiflu.

01:30:42 ►

And it turns out that blue light specifically upregulates the production of shikemic acid,

01:30:49 ►

and we can grow the mycelium 24-7 under blue light conditions.

01:30:54 ►

So I’ve got blue light.

01:30:55 ►

It’s coming back into my mindscape here.

01:30:58 ►

So I got really excited about this.

01:30:59 ►

Well, maybe this explains why our mushrooms were active against H5N1 and influenza viruses.

01:31:07 ►

Well, going back to pox viruses,

01:31:09 ►

we actually identified the two molecules active against pox viruses,

01:31:14 ►

sulfuric acid and ebukoyic acid,

01:31:17 ►

that beat the positive drug control, Sadofavir.

01:31:20 ►

This is called bioguided fractionation.

01:31:23 ►

We did this at the University of Mississippi.

01:31:25 ►

And bioguided fractionation means We did this at the University of Mississippi. And bioguided fractionation means that basically

01:31:27 ►

you have the natural product here. You

01:31:29 ►

take one solvent, you go down this branch,

01:31:31 ►

another solvent, you go down this branch.

01:31:33 ►

You retest to see which one

01:31:35 ►

got more potent or less potent.

01:31:37 ►

The one that’s more potent, then you go down the

01:31:39 ►

next branch of solvents. This is called

01:31:41 ►

bioguided fractionation with a standard in the

01:31:43 ►

pharmaceutical industry. It takes tens of millions of dollars, many, many years to find the active molecule

01:31:50 ►

because from the extracts, there’s more than 200,000 molecules in these extracts.

01:31:56 ►

So this is where it gets kind of weird. So in the course of our work with NIH virology,

01:32:04 ►

we contacted them a year and a half ago. And at NIH virology, we contacted them a year and a half ago, and

01:32:07 ►

at NIH virology, when I contacted them again, they said, Paul, we’d love for you to submit

01:32:12 ►

samples, but you cannot submit natural products.

01:32:17 ►

We want pure molecules.

01:32:22 ►

How am I going to do that?

01:32:24 ►

200,000 molecules.

01:32:25 ►

These are pharmaceutical companies that spend tens of millions of dollars

01:32:28 ►

to find one molecule.

01:32:30 ►

I don’t have the resources.

01:32:32 ►

So I guessed.

01:32:37 ►

Truly, I guessed.

01:32:41 ►

200,000 molecules.

01:32:42 ►

I chose 20 molecules.

01:32:45 ►

And there’s a good reason why I chose those molecules.

01:32:48 ►

As you’ll see from one point of view, it’s kind of abstract.

01:32:51 ►

But we submitted the molecules, and our molecules then beat

01:32:57 ►

the pure positive drug controls, NH virology,

01:33:01 ►

of these positive drugs against flu, herpes, norovirus, hepatitis, pox, Ebola,

01:33:08 ►

and I just received this in the past two weeks, and this is against HPV.

01:33:19 ►

This is a direct report from NIH virology, which the screen doesn’t show it here.

01:33:30 ►

Highly active.

01:33:34 ►

One, two, three, four, five.

01:33:40 ►

Five of the molecules that I chose on my second set of ten beat the positive drug controls.

01:33:42 ►

There’s really no good anti-HPV.

01:33:45 ►

HPV is a human papillomavirus that causes cervical cancer. There’s a vaccine out for it. Many of you men have HPV, and you give it to women. A lot of

01:33:52 ►

the women then develop various types of cancer, but specifically cervical cancer. So this is a

01:34:01 ►

quantitative polymerase chain reaction test. This is actually counting this.

01:34:05 ►

Remember, anything over 10 is active, and this has a 12.

01:34:11 ►

So here’s the next step.

01:34:12 ►

Remember, anything over 10 is active.

01:34:14 ►

So Sadafavir, the positive drug control against the HPV virus, has a 12.

01:34:20 ►

And here is our results here against the HPV virus.

01:34:27 ►

I have to turn this over again.

01:34:34 ►

And so our selectivity indexes are 60, 109, 30, 125, 125.

01:34:41 ►

Highly active. Of the 20 molecules that I submitted,

01:34:46 ►

nine of them are better than the pharmaceutical drug controls.

01:34:50 ►

How do you explain that?

01:34:57 ►

So the past four weeks,

01:35:00 ►

I’ve been spending four to eight hours a day

01:35:02 ►

writing another patent.

01:35:04 ►

I’m trying to submit the patent tomorrow.

01:35:06 ►

I’d like to submit it for Burning Man.

01:35:09 ►

It’d be great if I could.

01:35:11 ►

But this is paradigm shifting.

01:35:13 ►

I want to create a new entity called the Microverse

01:35:16 ►

and a new company called Micro Pharmaceuticals.

01:35:19 ►

And one branch of that Microverse is IAM, the Institute of Applied Mycology,

01:35:25 ►

which is a nonprofit, open-source, multigenerational foundation

01:35:29 ►

that will help the research continue of this,

01:35:31 ►

because I think I found keys to a door to a kingdom of new active molecules,

01:35:36 ►

and they’re all resident inside these extracts.

01:35:39 ►

So these extracts are a new reservoir of unexplored, highly active antiviral agents

01:35:46 ►

that are orally active and which are non-toxic.

01:35:51 ►

So I don’t know how to explain this.

01:35:55 ►

I mean, is it, you know, as Lewis Mephester said,

01:35:59 ►

chance favors the prepared mind?

01:36:01 ►

Is it scientific intuition?

01:36:03 ►

Is it from all the psilocybin I’ve consumed in my life?

01:36:09 ►

But this quantum leap is what needed now.

01:36:13 ►

We are experiencing the edge of 6X.

01:36:16 ►

We need to be able to have paradigm-shifting discoveries

01:36:19 ►

that are executable, that are deliverable,

01:36:22 ►

that can be expanded as soon as possible.

01:36:25 ►

I spent all my life doing this.

01:36:27 ►

So some people are concerned about patents.

01:36:29 ►

Well, if you write a book or build a house,

01:36:31 ►

do you want somebody else to take ownership of your book or move into your house?

01:36:36 ►

No.

01:36:36 ►

You spend all your time on it.

01:36:38 ►

I want to control the intellectual property of this as we move forward.

01:36:43 ►

But, I mean, this is freaking incredible. So, but I mean,

01:36:46 ►

this is freaking incredible. How do

01:36:48 ►

you intuit 200,000 molecules

01:36:50 ►

to nine active new

01:36:51 ►

pharmaceuticals? And before NIH would

01:36:53 ►

accept any of these new molecules I submitted,

01:36:56 ►

they had to jury them to make sure they’d never

01:36:57 ►

been studied before because they didn’t want to repeat somebody

01:37:00 ►

else’s research. And they had to make sure

01:37:02 ►

the cytologists believed that this made sense.

01:37:04 ►

These molecules actually, you know, makes sense that you know they’re they’re they’re

01:37:09 ►

cell wall permeable you know so we made all those criteria okay so i want to finish on another

01:37:17 ►

epiphany that’s occurred this goes back to deforestation which is what i’m talking about

01:37:23 ►

all these forest fungi.

01:37:30 ►

And 70% of our soils are composed of microbial mass, of which 40% of the mass is fungal.

01:37:33 ►

So we cut down the forests.

01:37:35 ►

We interrupt the carbon chain.

01:37:38 ►

The decomposition cycles are interrupted.

01:37:40 ►

Soil lenses are made thinner.

01:37:45 ►

Monocropping of trees, you know causes, we’re denaturing nature.

01:37:51 ►

So a friend of mine heard about my research with insects and said,

01:37:53 ►

Paul, what can you do about the bees?

01:37:55 ►

His name is Louis Schwartzberg.

01:37:58 ►

He’s a really well-known filmmaker, a good buddy of mine.

01:38:01 ►

In the colony collapse disorder, the bees abandon the nest,

01:38:04 ►

and they just don’t come back. And the worker bees, the foraging bees,

01:38:08 ►

when you see bees on flowers, it’s the last days of their lives.

01:38:13 ►

The average lifespan of the foraging bees is between 2 and 17 days.

01:38:20 ►

The average lifespan is 8.8 days.

01:38:23 ►

Because of neonicotinoids, glyphosates, because of pesticides and insecticides,

01:38:29 ►

that 8.8 average has been reduced to four days.

01:38:33 ►

And when the bees don’t come back, the nurse bees, which are newly hatched bees,

01:38:37 ►

are taking care of the brood.

01:38:38 ►

They end up being prematurely recruited to become foraging bees,

01:38:43 ►

so they leave the brood behind to go get pollen.

01:38:46 ►

Because, you know, I have enough pollen coming back to make honey to feed the brood.

01:38:51 ►

So it’s a doubling down.

01:38:53 ►

So I’m going to show you next now, and I told you I hope this is going to work, okay?

01:38:58 ►

This is showing on hundreds of PBS stations this week.

01:39:03 ►

So you’re getting kind of an advanced copy of it.

01:39:04 ►

It showed on Oregon Public Television about four or five days ago. on hundreds of PBS stations this week. So you’re getting kind of an advanced copy of it.

01:39:07 ►

It showed on Oregon public television about four or five days ago.

01:39:09 ►

So we’re going to watch a little movie.

01:39:11 ►

It’s five minutes long,

01:39:12 ►

but it talks about our research with bees

01:39:15 ►

because I had this idea that,

01:39:18 ►

well, if my extracts are antiviral

01:39:20 ►

and the mites are the big problem

01:39:23 ►

injecting viruses into bees what what if our

01:39:27 ►

our mushroom extracts that are helpful reducing viruses in humans can be helpful in virus reducing

01:39:33 ►

viruses in bees so i went to several universities but i went to washington state university

01:39:39 ►

and they said paul don’t go anywhere else this is too cool of an idea. So Dr. Steve Shepard, you’ll meet here.

01:39:45 ►

He is the chief scientist.

01:39:48 ►

Been studying bees for 45 years, as long as I’ve been studying fungi.

01:39:53 ►

And so here’s a five-minute movie on PBS

01:39:56 ►

that’s showing all over the country in the next few days.

01:40:12 ►

Well, they sort of got it right. they made a few little technical errors but so this is what the vera destructor looks like and this is an analogy of like a pancake on your back feeding is very

01:40:17 ►

appropriate and quite scary and the uh they inject viruses so the more mites the more viruses the

01:40:23 ►

more lethargy the the immunologically depressed.

01:40:26 ►

If you’re sick, you’re not washing dishes, not cleaning the house, you know.

01:40:29 ►

So things, you know, the hive in this case is not being kept as clean.

01:40:35 ►

And, again, it’s a doubling down.

01:40:38 ►

So I was growing that garden giant mushroom that eliminated E. coli right on my property.

01:40:43 ►

And I had this garden bed out there in 1984,

01:40:47 ►

and I had two beehives, and I came out one time in July,

01:40:53 ►

and I looked down, and I couldn’t believe what I saw,

01:40:57 ►

which was these bees were all over,

01:41:00 ►

specifically my two garden giant beds of mycelium,

01:41:04 ►

and they moved the wood chips

01:41:06 ►

aside to be like you moving a truck, you know, or a vehicle, and they exposed the mycelium.

01:41:12 ►

I looked very carefully, and I could see them sipping on the little droplets of mycelium.

01:41:17 ►

Well, I got real excited about this. I thought, well, maybe they’re getting for the sugars

01:41:21 ►

that are, you know, the polysaccharides, the mycelium. This is published in Harris Smith Magazine.

01:41:26 ►

I put it in one of my books, 1994, Growing Gourmet Medieval Mushrooms.

01:41:30 ►

Virtually everybody ignored me.

01:41:31 ►

One beekeeper from Ontario, Canada, wrote me and said,

01:41:35 ►

maybe that’s why bees go to saunas piles in the summertime.

01:41:38 ►

So, Louis Schwartzberg, the filmmaker, said, Paul, what can you do about the bees?

01:41:43 ►

I said, well, you know, i have this very strange experience with these bees and i’m doing all this research with a bio shield and nih

01:41:49 ►

reducing viruses there maybe there’s a connection here so that was my epiphany and i highly recommend

01:41:56 ►

i have found that laying in bed in the morning before you get out of bed, and you’re in that ether state between sleep

01:42:05 ►

and wakefulness, that is a fertile time for invention. That is a fertile time to spend a

01:42:12 ►

few more moments, and you have these random thoughts, like dreams don’t make sense,

01:42:16 ►

but in between that dream state and consciousness, you know, is a fertile time to come up with cool

01:42:22 ►

ideas, and that’s what I did. I lay in bed going, oh my

01:42:26 ►

God, I think I have a solution for colony collapse disorder.

01:42:28 ►

Let me pursue this.

01:42:30 ►

So, we then

01:42:32 ►

01:42:34 ►

this is

01:42:36 ►

a, okay

01:42:37 ►

so this is from a use of

01:42:40 ►

a pesticide but

01:42:42 ►

the bees are dying for all the reasons that you heard

01:42:44 ►

but loss of foraging

01:42:45 ►

habitat, deforestation I think is a big one, and the bee nutrition, the parasites and the mites,

01:42:51 ►

and the exposures of toxins. So here’s a photo from Whole Foods, this is what your foods look

01:42:57 ►

like with bees, and if we had no bees, that’s what your dairy selection would look like.

01:43:03 ►

The bees are under, the value of the contribution of

01:43:06 ►

bees is underestimated economically,

01:43:08 ►

you know, considering what the bees really do.

01:43:11 ►

So,

01:43:12 ►

thus

01:43:14 ►

they are in the old growth forest.

01:43:16 ►

Now I’m going to put together three or four

01:43:17 ►

seemingly disparate experiences,

01:43:20 ►

but this is how epiphanies occur.

01:43:22 ►

We’re in the old growth forest

01:43:24 ►

and bears scratch trees well the

01:43:27 ►

timber industry killed hundreds of bears because they’d be a bear scratching trees led into poly

01:43:33 ►

poor mushrooms and so the bears scratch the trees and then the bees come after the resin for propolis

01:43:41 ►

so there’s all lots of bees here going after the bear scratches

01:43:45 ►

on young firs and in the

01:43:47 ►

populace, willows in particular,

01:43:50 ►

and birch trees.

01:43:52 ►

So willows, birch trees, and young firs

01:43:54 ►

are what bees go after

01:43:55 ►

to get propolis,

01:43:57 ►

especially when there’s a wound in the tree, and especially

01:44:00 ►

from bear scratches.

01:44:01 ►

So Dusty and I are hiking in the old growth forest.

01:44:04 ►

We go around the corner, and she sees us first and says, oh my god, it’s a bear scratches. So Dusty and I are hiking in the old growth forest. We go around the corner

01:44:05 ►

and she sees this first and said, oh my, oh my God, it’s a, it’s a bear strike on a tree. And

01:44:11 ►

that’s the best bear strike I’ve ever seen. You know, I took a photograph of the deep in the

01:44:15 ►

whole rainforest of Washington state. And then I said, wow, Dusty, you know, you know, this is what

01:44:21 ►

the hunters were killing the bears because from theitopsis mushrooms come out of the bear scratches.

01:44:28 ►

So we found that interesting.

01:44:29 ►

So three years later, we’re hiking with our good friend David Price.

01:44:34 ►

It took us forever to find this.

01:44:36 ►

So this is the tree three years later.

01:44:39 ►

There’s that same bear scratch.

01:44:41 ►

And this is actually the tree’s broken off now.

01:44:43 ►

And sure enough, Fomitopsis uh panicula

01:44:47 ►

the red delta polypore which is a sister species to agaricon is growing out of that tree so well

01:44:53 ►

the forest service sort of got right bare scratches cause fomitopsis polypore mushrooms to grow

01:44:58 ►

so okay well fomitopsis i know is antiviral against viruses that harm humans.

01:45:10 ►

So we started making extracts of 20 different mushroom species of the mycelium,

01:45:14 ►

the artist conch, Ganoderma appellatum, Ganoderma ressonatium.

01:45:16 ►

This is Andy Weil. He’s not ressonatium.

01:45:19 ►

But we started making extracts. And then I’m a voracious reader thanks to Google Scholar Alerts.

01:45:25 ►

Half my life is reading scientific articles now.

01:45:28 ►

I put too many keywords in our search engines.

01:45:31 ►

And so then this article comes out on acumerin.

01:45:35 ►

Well, remember against tuberculosis, agaricon?

01:45:38 ►

So P-cumeric acid, it turns out,

01:45:41 ►

when they analyzed the honey from beehives that had

01:45:45 ►

been abandoned from colony collapse disorder,

01:45:48 ►

uniquely, in the honey,

01:45:50 ►

there is no P. chimeric acid.

01:45:53 ►

P. chimeric acid

01:45:54 ►

comes from mycelium.

01:45:56 ►

Mycelium is rotting wood.

01:45:59 ►

P. chimeric acid

01:45:59 ►

upregulates the genes coding for the cytokine

01:46:01 ►

P450 pathway. All animals use it.

01:46:04 ►

It’s what

01:46:05 ►

detoxifies compounds mostly in your liver but the bees only have 47 end genes coding for a cytochrome

01:46:13 ►

p450 most insects have 80 humans have have 60 so without p chimeric acid they would hyper accumulate

01:46:22 ►

the toxins and they get malaise mites are are biting them, injecting viruses in them.

01:46:27 ►

Deforestation on freeways to the almond orchards in the middle of the desert

01:46:31 ►

in California are going hundreds of miles.

01:46:33 ►

All these other stressors.

01:46:36 ►

So P-chimeric acid comes from mycelium.

01:46:39 ►

And then looking at the other compounds,

01:46:43 ►

glyphosates are interfering with the microbiome inside the bee gut.

01:46:49 ►

And so the fungicide contamination that the farmers have been using reduces the beneficial fungi

01:46:55 ►

because the fungicides are killing the fungi otherwise the bees would have access to.

01:47:00 ►

So they’re not getting the P-cameric acid also in that habitat.

01:47:04 ►

So the majority of beekeepers feed sugar water, 50% sugar, 50% water,

01:47:09 ►

to the bees to keep them alive.

01:47:16 ►

And so we started making extracts,

01:47:18 ►

and then we came up with an extract which is called mycohoney,

01:47:22 ►

all made from mycelium no sugar added and

01:47:26 ►

It’s this incredibly delicious

01:47:29 ►

syrup or honey that we’ve made from mycelium

01:47:33 ►

So then we started then with Steve Shepard

01:47:36 ►

We did 20 species we narrowed down to seven and these are the sugar water being given to the bees

01:47:44 ►

And we did it at one percent 1%, and 0.1%.

01:47:49 ►

And so the bees are sipping on this mushroom mycelium honey water.

01:47:57 ►

And this is from the artist conch, Ganoderma aplanatum, at 10%.

01:48:01 ►

The bees love it.

01:48:03 ►

Steve was very concerned because I didn’t want to make sure I didn’t kill the bees.

01:48:07 ►

So there’s a longevity

01:48:08 ►

stress test in captivity.

01:48:11 ►

And so

01:48:12 ►

the results of this

01:48:13 ►

are incredibly

01:48:16 ►

cool. This is very spiritual

01:48:18 ►

I think. The

01:48:20 ►

best fungi are all those that

01:48:22 ►

grow on birch trees.

01:48:24 ►

And they are Fomitopsis panicula,

01:48:27 ►

the one you saw that grew in the old growth forest of the Ho,

01:48:30 ►

grows on deciduous trees and conifer trees,

01:48:34 ►

chaga, which grows on birch trees,

01:48:38 ►

amadou, and the red reishi,

01:48:42 ►

and these two were involved in the BioShield program

01:48:46 ►

that had the production of the flu viruses and the relative of this one, agaricon.

01:48:53 ►

And so the longevity tests, and we found that when we added the extract,

01:48:59 ►

1% solution of this amadou mushroom, look at the significance factor here. The fact that this many more bees are

01:49:06 ►

alive means that they can forage more. And so statistically highly significant is Steve Shepard

01:49:14 ►

said in 39 years of experience studying bees, I’m unaware of any reports to extend the life

01:49:18 ►

of bees this much. So we are activating the cytochrome p450 pathway we are extending the livelihood of the bees

01:49:26 ►

and so we started doing a viral analysis well let me so here’s another chart showing the effect of

01:49:34 ►

the other one was amadu this is phomitophis panicula this one here again high significance

01:49:40 ►

and the more that we diluted it 0.1 percent uh this is uh one gram per thousand grams of our

01:49:48 ►

extract incredibly potent it tremendously increased the lifespan of the bees and so then we looked at

01:49:55 ►

bee viruses with chaga and sure enough the control the uh the bee viruses go up and then with our

01:50:02 ►

extract and a stepwise fashion you know the bee viruses go down, and then with our extract, in a stepwise fashion, you know, the B viruses go down.

01:50:07 ►

The second week is where the sky rockets.

01:50:10 ►

The fact that it’s going down substantially is very, very important.

01:50:14 ►

And then looking at the red ratio on the viral burden, we had a similar effect.

01:50:18 ►

The controls go up, and they highly go down, especially in the week two, you know, giving the extract of the mycelium.

01:50:27 ►

So the synopsis of this is that we’re able to,

01:50:30 ►

the controls, the viruses go up,

01:50:33 ►

and the bee viruses plummet from exposure

01:50:36 ►

of all these wood rotting mushrooms that grow on birch trees.

01:50:40 ►

So that’s where also the bees go for propolis,

01:50:44 ►

into birch trees.

01:50:46 ►

So we all grew up with Winnie the Pooh.

01:50:49 ►

And I think I found something that I know.

01:50:52 ►

I’ve given talks at the National Bee Conference in front of a thousand mycologists.

01:50:58 ►

And I asked them, has anybody here ever heard anyone mention that bees go to rotted logs because of mycelium we all grew up

01:51:07 ►

with winnie the pooh we all knew that bears go after bees beehive bee colonies and rotted logs

01:51:12 ►

but we did a vast literature search and i filed a huge patent on this the european patent agency

01:51:19 ►

we paid one of their employees three or,000 or $4,000 for three months to use every search engine out there

01:51:27 ►

and every language to see if anyone has ever mentioned that bees go to mycelium.

01:51:33 ►

The only person they found was me.

01:51:36 ►

Hiding in plain sight.

01:51:39 ►

We don’t know the way of the bee.

01:51:42 ►

Bees go to logs because of immunological benefit.

01:51:46 ►

Upregulating cytochrome P450 pathway, the sugars, being able to reduce the viruses.

01:51:52 ►

So humans, trees, bears, mushrooms, all terrestrial organisms that may be involved with the mycelial web of life.

01:52:06 ►

Earth’s natural internet.

01:52:10 ►

And so we came up with a new sort of logo.

01:52:14 ►

Let’s be mushroom. Let’s be friendly.

01:52:16 ►

Scientists across disciplines need to work together.

01:52:19 ►

Biodiversity is our biosecurity.

01:52:22 ►

Thank you very much.

01:52:39 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:52:41 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:52:45 ►

Now do you see what I mean about the magic of mycelium?

01:52:49 ►

The work that Paul and the other great mycologists of the world are working on is truly amazing.

01:52:55 ►

In fact, during the week of Halloween in 1999, in Brighton Bush, Oregon,

01:53:01 ►

there was a gathering of most of the current leaders in the field.

01:53:06 ►

Bush, Oregon, there was a gathering of most of the current leaders in the field. And during the week of Halloween in 1999, in Brighton Bush, Oregon, there was a gathering of most of the then current

01:53:13 ►

leaders in that field. Paul and Dusty were the primary organizers of the conference, and their

01:53:19 ►

instructions for items to bring included a sleeping bag, rain gear, hat and good hiking boots,

01:53:26 ►

mushroom hunting basket, coffee, and a costume for the Halloween ball.

01:53:32 ►

We were assigned four to a cabin, a one-room cabin,

01:53:36 ►

and Bill Radizinski and his wife Maggie shared one with Mary C. and me.

01:53:40 ►

It was cold and damp much of the time, but the sun did come out for a few mushroom hunts.

01:53:46 ►

What I remember best about Brighton Bush, however, is the food that they served. It was,

01:53:52 ►

it was without a doubt the worst food I can ever remember trying to eat, but that’s another story.

01:53:59 ►

However, the conference itself was really amazing. There were presentations to our relatively small crowd by Andrew Weil,

01:54:08 ►

Christian Roche, Gary Linkoff, David Arora, Claudia Mueller,

01:54:13 ►

Jonathan Ott, Ken Kesey, Rick Strassman,

01:54:16 ►

Ann and Sasha Shulgin, Manuel Torres, and of course, Paul Stamets as well.

01:54:23 ►

And as for the costume party on Saturday night,

01:54:26 ►

well, I do remember having a good time,

01:54:29 ►

but the details are a bit fuzzy.

01:54:31 ►

You see, a few months earlier,

01:54:33 ►

after a hurricane in the south of the U.S.,

01:54:36 ►

a new species of psychedelic mushroom was discovered.

01:54:40 ►

And if I remember correctly,

01:54:42 ►

it was given a Latin name that sounded something like

01:54:45 ►

Andrei Wileye or something like that.

01:54:48 ►

Anyway, as I was told, it was named in honor of Dr. Andrew Wild,

01:54:54 ►

with whom we had just been on a mushroom hunt the day before.

01:54:57 ►

At the party, the mushroom punch was alleged to have been made from those very same mushrooms.

01:55:03 ►

Now, I have no knowledge of who spiked, or made, I should say, the mushroom punch.

01:55:09 ►

There certainly were enough suspicious characters among the presenters themselves,

01:55:13 ►

not to mention the rest of us.

01:55:15 ►

But for the most part, for a while at least,

01:55:18 ►

that was the end of Paul Stamets’ semi-public association with the psychedelic side of mushrooms.

01:55:25 ►

And while based on where society is today in relation to psychedelic medicines,

01:55:30 ►

well, back in 1999, we were all very far from being able to openly talk about our attraction to this spiritual medicine.

01:55:39 ►

In fact, in January of that year, it was at the Entheobotany Conference in Palenque, Mexico, where I first met Paul.

01:55:46 ►

And yet, even back then, there was only one person where I worked that even had a hint of where I was and what I was interested in.

01:55:55 ►

And that person was actually with me at the time.

01:55:59 ►

Those not-very-long-ago days were quite strange indeed.

01:56:05 ►

not very long ago days were quite strange indeed, and for a good number of people, not just here in the U.S., but all over the planet, it is still sometimes dangerous to express

01:56:11 ►

an interest in psychedelic experiences.

01:56:13 ►

So we need to always be supportive and discreet when it comes to others, their need to remain

01:56:19 ►

in the psychedelic closet for the time being.

01:56:23 ►

Anyway, I had kind of forgotten about that great mushroom conference

01:56:26 ►

back in 1999 when I received an email from Paul asking if I could send him a better copy of a

01:56:33 ►

picture that was taken at the conference with all of us on and around Ken Kesey’s bus further.

01:56:39 ►

He said that he wanted to use it in the presentation that he was going to be giving at the upcoming

01:56:45 ►

Psychedelic Science 2017 conference. And I replied that the copy on my website, which you can see in

01:56:52 ►

today’s program notes at psychedelicsalon.com, well, that’s the only copy I have. But with a

01:57:00 ►

smile on my face, I also told him that I received the original from him.

01:57:11 ►

However, it was while searching for that photo for Paul on an old backup drive that I also found the talk that we just listened to.

01:57:14 ►

And when I discovered that it was a talk that Paul gave at Palenque Norte,

01:57:18 ►

which, when my wife and I first began that lecture series at Burning Man,

01:57:22 ►

we named after the original Palenque conference,

01:57:25 ►

the one where I first met Paul. Well, that seemed like enough of a synchronicity for me to play it

01:57:30 ►

today. I hope that you’ll listen to this talk at least one more time, and please share it with your

01:57:36 ►

young friends who may have an interest in biology. We can use all of our best minds joining in the

01:57:42 ►

work that Paul and many others have now begun.

01:57:47 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo,

01:57:49 ►

signing off from cyberdelic space.

01:57:51 ►

Be well, my friends.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

544 - Biodiversity Is Biosecurity

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Program Notes

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