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Mayim Bialik's Breakdown
Part Two: Paul Stamets on Why We’re Not Meant to Be Sick: What Fungi Teach Us About Consciousness & the Future of Human Health
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Hi, I'm Time.
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Carvana.
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My Mbialx breakdown is supported by Mint Mobile.
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I was actually really shocked because I was expecting it to be very bad. I'll be honest, I was expecting it to have drop signal and I was amazed, number one, how EAS it was to switch. Because sometimes I'm like, oh, how am I going to do it? Figured it out and it's so much cheaper and the cell coverage is really, really good.
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And I'm Jonathan Cohen.
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And welcome to part two of our conversation with mycologist Paul Stamets. We hope that you heard episode one of our conversation with Paul. He's an incredible advocate not only for an understanding of fungi, mycelium and mushrooms, but in particular the psychedelic components of these mushrooms and how other traditions have used them for for consciousness expansion and how he believes that it can literally change the world. We're gonna get into all of that and more in Part two of this conversation. Break it down. Why would nature produce something that has these effects? And, I mean, I think the earliest art that shows, you know, mushrooms that we think were possibly used in some sort of ritual, you know, capacity, it's 7,000 years old. And almost every culture that can grow them. Right. Is showing art. And there's mythology, there's literature supporting this for thousands of years. So what. What do you believe is the intelligence of the universe that produced a mushroom that has this transformative capacity?
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Well, let me broaden it. I like that question a lot. And these are all cultural representations of, I think, that have been very helpful for their societies. They're also called vision quest mushrooms. And, you know, they're definitely, you know, make you a more spiritually aware person. But we live in a. In a trip to mean consciousness. Nature is full of triptamines. A thought experiment I'd like to tell people is that if you're living in a farm in Pennsylvania right now, listening to this and on your porch and beautiful. I grew up, I spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania at a prep school there. And you looked at the fields and the trees, and I. If you took away all of the lignin, all the hemicellulose, all of the cellulose, all you could see is tryptamines. What would you see? You'd see the same thing. There are tryptamines in grasses, in trees. There are triptamines throughout nature. We live basically on a foundation of triptamines. So when people ask why, this is just one elaborated triptamine that creates the spark that I think is resident in nature and makes us more nature aware. It goes to the quorum effect that I talked about earlier. If you are more nature aware, you will protect nature better. Isn't that an evolutionary successful strategy for the mushrooms that live in an ecosystem that, dependent upon the biodiversity of the ecosystem? You destroy the biodiversity, destroy the mushrooms.
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And also, just to clarify, triptamines are the chemical class of hallucinogenic compounds, correct? Serotonergic hallucinogenic compounds. And when we say tryptamine, if you've ever seen a chemical description of what caffeine looks like or really anything, it's literally how many nitrogens are there, how many hydrogens are there? You know, I'm looking at the form right now. It shows where the. Where the bonds are, where the kind of free, you know, electrons are like. It's a chemical compound that essentially is the foundation of a tremendous part of our evolutionary destiny.
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D
We are talking right now primarily Using serotonin. You know, serotonin is a trip to mean. Melatonin is a trip to mean all these things are, you know, there's so many triptamines. So we lived in this, in the state of this, in a tryptamine based consciousness. And nature is based on these tryptamines, the, the ebb and flow of these compounds. You know, I, I think there's, you know, this is where if people listening to this podcast think we're a little woo woo. Do not underestimate what we were saying. Once you have this experience, it can be revelatory and many people only have it once in their life, one time. And that's phenomenal. You know, as Michael Pollan said, it's not a very good business model for the pharmaceutical industry. But microdosing is, microdosing is.
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So, you know, we speak to a lot of physicists who are interested in extra sensory ability and expansions of consciousness. We speak to a lot of people who have had near death experiences. And in mime's question, you know, the idea of why would this exist? Why would the universe bring us mushrooms to help us expand our consciousness, for me there's a question of does it want to reveal the larger reality? You know, is it that we're in a game or where we've come here to remember and that this regular reality that most of us live in until we have an awakening, however that might be, whether it's through psychedelics or otherwise, is, you know, just the process that we're all in to sort of reconnect and become more aware of a larger conscious reality.
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D
Well, I mean, we are right now talking and we are alive. And the people who are contemporaneously listening to this are alive. We didn't exist before we were born. Well, wait, we did exist. We existed as atoms and molecules that have assembled into the form that we have now. We're one giant coincidence of nature. And then we will die. We will decompose, make friends with the fungi now because they're going to get you. And then these molecules go out, the atoms that are reformed into new molecules. We're in this stream of a molecular universe that has a continuum that goes through billions of years. I want to give a shout out to Roots to Thrive is the most advanced in my opinion. Nonprofit is in Canada and Dr. Pamela Crisco is one of the co founders as a medical doctor licensed by Canada Health for high doses of psilocybin. What they did that I think is very pertinent to many of the people listening here is they have a program typically with about eight people who have been given a stage four diagnosis, typically cancer or are traumatized, law enforcement officers, soldiers or firefighters. Now, this is really important to me. If you are traumatized and you have ptsd, I met some veterans. He told me some stories about Afghanistan, which I wish I didn't hear. They were traumatized. They made a mistake. Will you be judged by the worst day of your life? And if you are angry at yourself, the potential for you is very likely for you to extrovert that pain that you feel to others because you're angry and you are in an inflammatory state of anger which depresses your immune system, which causes a cascade of other problems at roots to thrive. Eight individuals, lots of therapy preparation on, typically on indigenous land, you know, with indigenous people involved in. Well, in British Columbia. And what has come out of this program is really amazing, is that they're there. They're worried about anxiety, they're depressed because their prognosis, they're going to die soon. Their family is on high alert. They're traumatized by this. What's going to happen when mom and dad or brother and sister die? And typically what happens is they're bonded together because they have the same diagnosis. We're about to die, and they do a high dose of psilocybin in a very carefully constructed environment. And typically what happens is after the experience, the patients become the therapists of their family, saying, I'm okay about dying. I have a better understanding about life and death, my purpose in life. Don't worry. One. One woman had a classic, I'm not going to swear. But she swore on. On her recording of this. And with permission, he says, I don't care about cancer. Effing cancer. I'm going golfing.
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A
I want to touch on something that you indicated is a significant component of the hallucinogenic, the psychedelic and the kind of transcendental components of these higher doses of psilocybin and, you know, therapy, assisted psilocybin journeys. It's becoming more of a thing. We live in Southern California. I always say, you can't swing a dead cat, you know, without finding eight people who have done an ayahuasca journey or a this, that or the other.
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D
Right. I've never heard that phrase before. Swinging a dead cat. I haven't done that yet.
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It's an expression. No, I'm from the 1940s. Anyway, when I hear you talk about, you know, what it is to journey with someone and to be part. Not as a party drug. But to be part of someone's really expansion of consciousness as a guide, as a partner, obviously, I can't help but think about the numerous indigenous cultures that use plant medicine as part of not really even just a therapeutic journey. It's in many cases, it's part of the awakening consciousness of being human is to come of age with an opening that is assisted by plant medicine. And in. In this book, in psilocybin mushrooms in their natural habitats, there's this wonderful map of the world, and it shows the distribution of psilocybin mushrooms. And as Jonathan points out, in all of the places where it's very, very cold, there is no psilocybin. So, you know, Siberia, there's psilocybin mushrooms in Siberia. Remember, those are reports basically, you know, it looks like central, northern Europe, western Europe. Those are very rich with psilocybin mushrooms. Parts of the United States, the west, the east, and some in the middle. But, you know, huge concentration down into Yucatan, you know, that whole peninsula scattered across South America. An interesting concentration in southeastern Australia. Japan has a little cluster there, and some in central and southern Africa. But I wonder if you can talk about, kind of, given that consciousness of where on the map we tend to see these larger concentrations of psilocybin mushrooms, what does that tell us about the cultures where this was used? And what do we know historically about the function of these journeys as transcendental and transformative?
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D
Well, first off, we have to look through the filter that these are observations. Sure, right. Observations of scientists who've recorded the presence of these mushrooms. The reason why Siberia doesn't have a lot is there. There's not these reports is from the 1800. There's several thousand reports of suicide mushrooms and specimens that are collected in herbaria that have been deposited. So now, because of this massive awakening, we're finding numerous new species all over the place. And some of these species are really hard to find, and some of them aren't. Slosby cubensis, you can see at 50 miles an hour going down the highway in Louisiana. You know, as they're golden tops, they're huge. Psilocybe pelliculosum in the northwest here, difficult to find. It grows only in the. Pretty much, you know, along trails and whatnot. But it's. It's a nondescript species that looks very similar to a deadly poisonous species. So don't underestimate the intelligence of indigenous people who are in themselves, scientists observe making observations in nature. And that's why, by the way, for the record. I dedicate my book to Maria Sabina, a Mazatech knowledge keeper. Asabia, she said, I'm not a shaman. That's too much work. She's a knowledge keeper. To Kit Skates, who is a renowned mycologist in Idaho who mentored, who mentored me and. And Tina Wasson, R. Gordon Watson's wife, who died in 1958. She was a Russian physician. These are three hugely important women who literally open up the doors that many of us have walked through. Women do not get enough credit for their pivotal influence and the lesson from psilocybin, even from Mazatec shamans recently, I hear this all the time. The message from psilocybin is to share now psilocybin mushrooms are sustainable, they can be grown. And psilocybin mushrooms that are being grown Nowensis, which we think came from the Old World Africa, are being grown and Oaxaca for the Mazatec shamans so they can have access to sulcide mushrooms when it's not the rainy season, so they can continue their practices. So this is a fusion of Western and Eastern coming together. It speaks to something called two eyed seeing, which is something Albert Marshall and, and his wife Moderna came up with this concept of two eyed seeing when they're Eastern Canadian first nations people and they were confronted by a mother who asked, why should I send my indigenous child to a Western school? And Moderna and Albert Marshall came up with this fantastic, you know, analogy saying one eye we can see with Indigenous wisdom and the other eye we can see and help with Western technology. With two eyes we can see better than one. So this is respecting Indigenous wisdom. We don't want to influence it, but we want to help access so they can continue their practices, so they can preserve their culture. You know, this is so important that Indigenous communities are respected and protected. They're not marginalized, but the Western science of being able to grow these things. And my book in particular, I think will go down in history as a book that will support indigenous cultures by allowing them to be able to have a supply of these in an ecologically sustainable way. And moreover, you know, humans migrate, right? You pick your number. 25,0001-000002-00000 years ago there was no humans in the Americas, right? So humans migrated into the Americas. Knowledge threads were frayed, broken, some survived. So exchanging knowledge is the way of humans. We meet someone on a trail. It's much better to be a friend than a foe just from infection. If you get a wound, you're likely to die. But exchanging and the they again, random acts of kindness is what has built our societies, is the foundation of our societies. So sharing and respecting, but not marginalizing, not colonizing their culture. Even though migration is a form of biological colonization, the two are very distinctly different. But the panspermial humans like to travel. We're adventurers, we go to new lands, we take the skills of our ancestors, we go to new lands, hopefully meet a friend, not a foe. You collaborate, you exchange gifts and you both are better for it. And that I think is the lesson of these mushrooms, is that these are so such beautiful peacemakers. We need more peaceful Mayim Bialik's Breakdown.
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Is supported by MSI United States hey everyone, Mayim here.
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Mayim B Alix breakdown is supported by Mud Water.
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Crisis of creativity right now. And these psilocybin mushrooms I believe are Einstein mushrooms. Einstein molecules. They inspire creativity and I think, you know, we this is where artificial intelligence according to Sam Altman can't really create. They can assemble, they can have derivative assemblies. They can do things much better than humans can do. But we need to have a quantum leap in consciousness and I think Psilocybin inspires creativity for that quantum leap. It certainly has been true in my life.
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C
Yeah, it said AI can only do derivative action of what it's been programmed to do, but net new ideas it struggles with.
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D
I just spoke at the United nations the day before yesterday, and we had the biggest AI people there. There is a Disruptor Audacity conference. It's up on the web. It's 100 disruptors, and I'm one of them who think outside of the box. And again, it's the idea of leapfrogging. And so this, the whole concept of mycelium is a deep well of intelligence of the earth and the universe. It makes so much sense to so many people now. This is one of these aha moments. There are some things in life I think we all would agree with that we just know intuitively are true. You know, you don't have to be convinced with logic. You just have this aha moment where you realize it is true. And I think this is, you know, mushrooms bring that aha moment to the forefront. You know, I think these, these are Einstein molecules that can help build bridges over chasms of division, religion, politics. You know, culturally, the ecosystems want to survive, folks. And we're, we're for better or worse, you know, we are shepherding these ecosystems and we're not doing a very good job of it.
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A
Well, I think one of the things that, that is a challenge for many people. You know, when people look at the world forget about our interpersonal worlds and how many of us are suffering from depression, anxiety, you know, loneliness, in many cases trauma with a lowercase T, and in some cases trauma with a capital T. When we think about what society looks like, when we think about the countless wars and conflict and nonsense and just even in the United States, you know, what goes on in the government and shutdowns and, you know, all of this kind of craziness, what's true is that if more people had an intuitive sense of a desire to share, to be open to more love, more acceptance, more compassion, it could potentially shift the entire landscape of the world that we live in. And in addition, you know, as we talk about with the awakening in the 60s and the 70s, you know, people who have had a sense of an awakened consciousness do not want to put on uniforms and be sent to other countries to fight wars for a government that they don't support. Is that part of the threat that this kind of consciousness expanding medicine holds? Is this why we are not allowed access to it and it's not supported and advertised like what? What is the block to us being able to expand our consciousness and our potential as humans? What doesn't the government want us to have?
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D
It's the inertia of ignorance. You know, so many, I mean dealing with government. We have many examples of this. Bureaucrats don't want to change. There's. It's jeopardizes their career and puts them in danger. Easier for bureaucrats and government to say no than yes. You know, change comes at an expense. But I want to again to give a shout out to, to veterans and law enforcement and to physicians and firefighters. They see the healing properties. Look at Rick Perry, the former governor of Texas. He's had this awakening and, and fun. And then the fundamental Christians in the fundamental Jewish community and Muslim community. I mean it's the golden rule. Do unto others as you wish them to do to you. I mean this is something that. It's the vitriolic extremes and the narrative. I just, I turned off comments off all my social media today because I went to rock Gemini, ChatGPT, all these different things. And you can ask the question how many comments on social media are bots or foreign nation states that are trying to create divisions in America? You know, the number is up to 80%.
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A
I mean we're fighting a war that doesn't even exist in many cases.
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D
I mean when people realize that the comments are there to manipulate you, to cause inflammation that harms your immune system as well as the social fabric of our society. People are being manipulated by AI that's being weaponized in the comments sections. I just, you know, gave a talk on saving the bees and up regular immunity to a huge paradigm shifting discovery and someone make comments about something is totally unrelated. It's just to poke you and to cause reactions. It's a viral infection on our society and this is where we need to fight back. One way to fight back is just turning off the comments and going outside with your children into nature and take photographs of flowers, mushrooms and insects and go to inaturalist and you know, get back into the natural world, folks. That's where we came.
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C
People have to recognize it as a viral infection, as a manipulation, as something that is being done nefariously to them because it's been normalized. And then they just ride this wave and get inflamed and get distracted and don't want to go outside and it's having the intended effect if we are not calling it out and recognizing it.
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D
I'm guilty as well, folks. I'm like why am I Not going for a walk right now because I went down this wormhole, you know, and it's like, I think we're all suffering from that. So. But anyhow, I'm optimistic because this is literally a revolution from the underground. Whether it's gourmet, medicinal or psilocybin mushrooms, it brings parents together with children. It's multi generational, multicultural. It's, it's sweeping the planet. It's, it's, it's the quote, unquote, forbidden fruit that we were told not, not to consume. And weird, edgy science. But all of that now is so much more robust than the foundation of science. And that's, that's. People follow the science. You know, you, you. This is the other thing I heard at this UN conference I was, I was at, is that you want to be the pilot of artificial intelligence. You don't want to be the passenger where. This is where that we need to take control. We need to establish the ethos that artificial intelligence will have its origin story and the best of humanity and kindness, thoughtfulness, cooperation, building guilds of individuals who contribute to the commons. This is our power. We can do this. Now. Don't become subservient, don't become a victim of AI, become a pilot of it. And so I just challenge everybody, ask all AI platforms about the importance of random acts of kindness as the origin story of the human species that gave rise to artificial intelligence.
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C
I did this last night, actually. I went and I had that prompt and I put it into ChatGPT and it gave me five paragraphs, asking me if I also would like visions and scenarios in which it could be applied to AI in hospitals, AI in the workplace, AI in communities, and where algorithmic acts of kindness could change measurably health outcomes. So it is moving in that direction.
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A
I would like to say. I've never used any of these platforms. I don't even know where to find them if you. I never have done any of these things, but I did want to give a shout out. I don't know much. I can't speak to the Christian community or the Muslim community, but there is a growing Jewish psilocybin community. And there's an organization called Shefa that a friend of mine runs, and they cater psilocybin journeys therapeutically, but specifically coded for the cultural specificity of the Jewish experience. Because for many of us that were raised in a traditional way, we have different imagery, we have different language. You know, there's a lot of, you know, Hebrew as an important language for many components of a mystical experience. Anyway, so just wanted to give a shout out that that is something that exists and is growing. Again, I can't speak to it. For Christians and Muslims.
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D
Well, the conservative Christian community, it's, it's a very big right now. It's very big with the Mormons. It's, there's an, for law enforcement people out there, it's a great model. It's called the Healing Warrior Church out of San Antonio, Texas. I mean, I'm sorry, out of Austin, Texas. It's a non profit. They take veterans, law enforcement officers, SEALs, Special Forces, etc, who've been living traumatized. They have such high suicide rates and it's been very, very helpful to them. And so both in the religious, you know, subsets and the professional services subsets, we need better law enforcement. Imagine if you're a law enforcement officer at 2 in the morning that you pull over a car and you have two seconds to make a decision whether this person is dangerous or not. You do that 100, 200, 300 times. Are you going to make the right decision every time? No, no instant. But that wrong decision, should that determine the rest of your life? And then because the insular community of law enforcement, they share the stories with themselves, but they don't want other people. So it becomes more closeted. Be able to break the shackles of shame, to forgive yourself and realize, I'm really a good person. I screwed up, but I'm going to do extra better now. I'm going to pay it forward. I'm going to make sure I'm the best law enforcement officer I can be. That's who we need. That's what we need with doctors, firefighters.
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A
Well, and also people who lead with compassion and people who are looking to find the best part of people so that we can maintain also this. I mean, my children, God bless them, they have very negative perceptions of all helpers in society. You know, people that we grew up, you know, I mean, I still wave at firefighters still as a grown woman, but you know, we grew up that like, these are the heroes, these are the protectors. And I completely understand why that has shifted. But I also think of the amount of time they spend on social media and what's being fed to them. And I said there are still good people. But just the notion that we want to have more people in those positions of power. Right, Meaning they're in situations where they have the ability to make these kind of decisions. Leading with compassion.
- [34:49]
D
I, I was at Burning Man, Mudman. I've been there 19 times. I got lost in the play on my way out at three in the morning and and I saw a law enforcement officer way in the distance and I drove up to him and said hey man, I'm lost. I don't know where I am. And he routed me the right way and I just said hey, I just want to say, you know, you folks have a difficult job. I really respect and appreciate what you do But I believe 99% of people are basically good. They looked at me and smiled and he said 97. But he said now that's his experience too is, you know there's not the most extreme negative experiences be amplified into the commons to create a viral infection of our society of inflammation that then foments anger and retaliation. You know this is really important. These are these I really believe the functionally people are good and we should not let extremists steer the future of our society.
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C
I'd love to touch on your 2005 book and also talk about what's changed since then because a lot of people talk about the health benefits. We're talking about PTSD recovery and all the other areas in which it can help us physically, but I think less people understand the implications to all the different industries that it can benefit and that the like, I, I forget the number, but I heard the number of patents that you have and it's like, wait a second, there's something else going on here. For far beyond the story of just ingesting psilocybin or.
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D
Yeah, let's put patents in perspective. We wouldn't be having this conversation with them for patents, you know, and 17 years, actually is less than 17 years. It's usually about 12 to 14 years. It all becomes open sourced. Right. So it's to give people a competitive advantage so they can make the investment and take the risk. It's risk reduction. I have many patents that have expired. They're open sourced. One that could replace the majority of exercise folks, look it up. You know, it's open sourced. You can't protect yourself against competitors with intellectual property. That's what open source means. So, but the novelty factor, which means it's, it is unexpected, is not logically sequential. It's not obvious. It's called unobviousness. But so much of that is open source.
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C
Now I only use patents to say that there's breakthroughs and great things that have been discovered. I don't mean to sort of have any negative connotation to it. I, I, I'm like, wow, there's a lot of people.
- [39:07]
D
I have a knee jerk reaction and one person, one person challenged me and I said, do you know you're challenging me on a phone? This, if you didn't have patents, you.
- [39:17]
C
Wouldn'T have the phone.
- [39:18]
D
Yeah, let's roll back the clock. We wouldn't have this conversation. You know, it would be disappear or it's set back society by a decade. All patents should be open sourced. All patents should be benefiting the commons. It just gets a head start for a small group of people. So, but that just means there's, there's a deep well of unexpected knowledge that humans, you know, I, I frankly think nature owns everything. You know, I just said it's temporary custodian of knowledge trying to advance this forward and so many other people. You know, that's, that's wonderful. We need to culture the, the, you know, invention and so we need to incentivize people to have invention. But there's so much stuff now that's coming out and you alluded to it is it's fundamentally changing insulation materials, packaging materials, building materials, fermented foods. I was interviewed, I met an editor of Scientific American. I go, I Have an idea, but you'll never publish it. He goes, what's your idea? I said, well, two things. One, if you go to Mars, build an igloo made of mycelium. They're mostly nanofibers of carbon, 85% of mycelium is carbon. Then you put solar panels on top and your igloo can only insulate, but be a battery. I said, someone should take this and run with it. And he goes, I said, but there's a problem. He goes, what's the problem? I go, people will be sad, they'll be depressed. They'll look back at our blue planet going, why am I living in this tiny little building and I can't smell flowers or go in the woods and swim in the oceans. I said, elon Musk, if you're watching Elon, you go to Mars first, okay, you tell us about it. You, six months to get there, you can send us, you know, 15 minutes, you can send us a message back to us, whatever it is. But I said, if they took psilocybin with them, they would have this incredible spiritual experience. They look into the cosmos, it'll be back on mission. So I think psilocybin in space is important for the psychological health of astronauts. And lo and behold, they published it. I couldn't believe it. So, but that, that's one thing is the interplanetary colonization of space. You know, you only have to take two spores of a sulcide mushroom to grow sulci mushrooms in space. It's a very low payload, you know, and two spores of oyster mushrooms, you know. You know, obviously you can take test tube cultures, but the payload mass is very low. And then you can exponentially expand it on agricultural waste, human waste, you know, debris fields created from construction, et cetera, et cetera. So this is a paradigm shifting technology for helping us leap into the cosmos.
- [42:10]
C
I mean, fascinating. I want to circle about crops for a second. In agriculture, you know, there was recently a article that says, oh yeah, eating Roundup is totally fine, no problem. Which is a little baffling. Can you talk about some alternatives of helping crops grow and stay safe without chemical treatment?
- [42:33]
D
Well, it's a dance right now. I mean, the, you know, better living through chemistry, you know, it's a single molecule, you know, targeted approach which is, has this usefulness. You can argue against it in some ways, you know, protecting crops so there's better yields and there's more food to feed the world. That narrative is a little bit dated now because we know the after consequence and the non intended effects can be deleterious for the long term. So when you're looking at short term gains versus long term benefits, that's the balancing act that we're facing now. The chemical industry has inflicted so much harm to biodiversity, it's unraveling the very foundation of the ecosystems in which we've evolved. So the short term grab for money is the incentive for a lot of these chemical industries and they inflict harm in the ecosystem for the commons of your descendants. Do you have the right to rob your children's future? Some people will say, I don't care about my children, I'm not going to have children, I want it all now. It's kind of adversarial to the health of the commons. So what the fungi do is they eliminate the need and the necessity and the intensity of using these chemical solutions. This is why conventional medicine and conventional agricultural practices and mycelium based solutions can marry together. And what it does, it lowers the need for toxicity or increasing the innate immunity of the ecosystem. And we see this in agriculture, we see this in medicine. This is what I'm so excited about. There's a, there is a shift going in my, I come from wheat farmer, a wheat farmer family. My family had 10,000 acres of wheat in Eastern Washington. I inherited 200 when I was talking to my uncle. And this is the Palouse country in eastern Washington that used to have 20ft deep topsoils that blew from eastern Oregon, you know, over 10,000 years, you know, from the volcanoes and the winds deposited the Palouse beautiful hills. And now that 20ft of topsoil shrunk to about, you know, 12 inches, 10 inches because of repetitive farming. So he went to no till. My cousin actually did, went to no till and he said in the no till practice, basically you're not, you're not plowing the fields. He said there was a loss of production for the first few years until the carbon was built up. And now because of no till farming, he's regenerating. So rent gen agriculture is a key, but you have to pay the expensive investment of actually having fewer returns in profitability for a period of time until you hit that sustainable threshold where it becomes more economical. I think that's a general rule, is that we have to have patient capitalism, patient investors. We need to look beyond the time horizon of our immediate return on investment and accept a longer time horizon.
- [45:39]
C
Is there like ways to introduce mycelium into farming practices?
- [45:44]
D
Not just happening all the time. Yeah, happening all the time. You, it happens in forestry too. You can't go to a nursery without getting mycorrhizal fungi in soils. I mean go to go any. Go out into your local nursery and get a bale of soil. It's all with mycorrhiza. So that's, that's wonderful because with the mycorrhizae and these other fungi that are introduced, it increases the host defense immunity of the plant. So it's not susceptible to insect characterization. There's a fungus called Metarizium that's in grasses. Why aren't all grasses consumed by insects? Because this entomopathogenic fungus, that's a fungus that kills insects, is also an endophyte that's growing inside of grasses. So using the endophytic fungi that have a natural anti insect predation property means you don't have to use as many ASO sites. This story I'm telling you, repeats a thousand times. And this is why the field of mycology, I believe, should be funded as much as the field of the computer sciences. This is why we need a huge new generational shift towards environmental science using fungi. Because as applicable, it's sustainable, it's scalable and it's immediate. That, that to me is not something that's a pie in the sky concept. It says a deliverable that we can deliver, you know, literally this next, next season.
- [47:03]
C
Does it have applications to clothing?
- [47:06]
D
Yeah, Stella McCartney is really big on that. Stella, Paul McCartney's daughter. So, yeah, they're also clothing. And look at my hat. My hat's made from this Amadou mushroom. This is called German felt. You put this mushroom into water with ashes for two weeks and you can pull it apart to make this hat. And this hat was made by some people in Transylvania. So it's a tradition that's gone over several hundred years. This allowed for the portability of fire. So this was an appropriate technology. Can put embers of fire in this mushroom and carry it for days. So by the way, if there's a spark that gets onto this hat, it's like a fuse. The whole hat will burn up.
- [47:50]
C
Whoa.
- [47:51]
D
So it's Amadou is the name. So it revolutionized warfare, Napoleonic times. This was the. When the spark from the flint went into the punk, it was made of Amadou. That's where fuses came from. So Amadou has a history going back to all the way back to Hippocrates, 420 BC as an anti inflammatory. Again, these mushrooms have a multiplicity of benefits. So as an anti inflammatory for carrying fire to making garments. And it's also used for Smoking around beehives to subdue the bees for hundreds of years. Amadou was used also for being able to calm bees down. And we found that extremely strong immuno benefiting properties that reduces the deformed wing virus which is sweeping the planet. I published in my colleagues from the USDA and Washington State University in Nature Scientific Reports. The title of the article is Extracts of polypore mushrooms reduce viruses and honeybees. The altmetric score is extremely high. But that is a natural product that's not an antiviral drug that upregulates innate immunity. So look it up. Nature Scientific Reports. Extracts of polypore mushrooms reduce viruses and honeybees. That's the tip of the proverbial iceberg of how these can upregulate your innate immunity to be able to fight fight diseases.
- [49:14]
C
I mean it's amazing. Last question on this topic. Any application for fuel as a bio available and renewable fuel source.
- [49:28]
D
I went down that rabbit hole. We produced what I call micronol, like ethanol micronol. But I have to admit it was not as efficient as other fermentation technologies using like Saccharomyces cervaceae, you know, mixed beer, alcohol, yeast. There's many other microorganisms that are more from my limited experience prove me wrong. There could be some out there that are superstars and that's what the importance of micro diversity. So yeah, I was not able to. I couldn't uncover the species that was a hyper producer of alcohol or hydrocarbon based fuels, not just alcohol. So that's again there's just not enough time in life to do all these things to explore.
- [50:18]
A
Before we let you go, you know, we'd love to just ask you to as concisely as you'd like to, what is the message that you believe you were placed here to share with people?
- [50:33]
D
Well, the message I'd like to share is that we are born into this beautiful life that we share. Kindness and forgiveness and cooperation builds communities that are healthier, stronger. Our descendants are depending upon us to make the best decisions. Our ancestors gave us this opportunity. We're all part of one giant consciousness. All religions are steering towards the same unanimity of being. It makes me feel better about my own mortality that I'm going to enter into the state of unanimity and whatever religious or spiritual discipline that you're following, we're all in this together and it's a great thing.
- [51:34]
A
It's absolutely beautiful. As I said, I've been waiting a long time to get to meet you and it's Just such a pleasure. And I think you're the greatest spore that has ever been produced by this planet. So thank you so much for being here with us.
- [51:50]
D
Well, bless you both and thank you all and, you know, be kind. Random acts of kindness are really important and they're practical in the long run. Be forgiving, you know, take a deep breath, go out in nature, enjoy life.
- [52:07]
A
We brought mushroom hats that Valerie gave us just to show our love for you. I'm so curious what he would talk to us about if we spoke to him again. He was dropping little, little hints. What did he say about his 80 milligram microgram macrogram? I don't know. His hero dose, Superhero dose?
- [52:32]
C
Growing new neurons with a therapist I know.
- [52:35]
A
No, but it sounds like there was more going on in there.
- [52:38]
C
He's pretty much a believer that there's life on other planets, might be mycelium life.
- [52:45]
A
I mean, yes, I think the thing that we didn't really get to, which I think rounds out a little bit more of the person who is Paul Stamets is, you know, a tremendous amount of the. The work that he does is in understanding mycelium fungi and mushrooms. Psilocybin is one part of that. But he believes that there's basically a pharmaceutical cabinet that nature has provided us that can help with. With arthritis, with aging, with depression, with anxiety, even at low doses. I mean, even outside of the journey experience. These mushrooms are nature's medicine. And that's a huge component of the work that he does. The company that he has as well.
- [53:34]
C
We have a friend of the podcast who wants to come back on and talk about new breaking research on the impact of and how inflammation is really at the core root of all the afflictions basically that anyone can have, whether it be depression, anxiety, irritable bowel syndrome, arthritis, even links to dementia and Alzheimer's disease, all related to an underlying inflammation. And what he was talking about is using mycelium and natural approaches to. To addressing that core underlining inflammation. Also the emotional inflammation. This idea of the virus, a societal virus that has really been at the underpinning of how technology has been developed and how by better understanding that, we can remove ourselves. And what is the alternative? You know, feeling what it feels like to go out and be in nature, not in a reactive state. How impactful that can be.
- [54:34]
A
Oh, we've got some great content on Substack from this episode.
- [54:37]
C
Check us out on substack Mind be Alex Breakdown on Substack Exclusive content. There a lot of practical tools to improve your life Come check us out.
- [54:46]
A
From our breakdown to the one we hope you never have. We'll see you next time. I'm wearing my mushroom hat.
- [54:52]
D
It's Maya Bialik's breakdown. She's gonna break it down for you she's got a neuroscience PhD or 2:1 fiction now she's going to break down to break down she's going to break it down.