The Benefits of Micro-dosing Mushrooms w/Paul Stamets | Joe Rogan

Now, there was for a long time a stigma associated with anything that had anything to do with mushrooms, particularly because of psychedelic mushrooms. Has that alleviated? I know the John Hopkins study on psilocybin has shown some pretty incredible benefits, and there's a lot of people now that are starting to look to it for treatment for people with PTSD or addiction issues. Has that become more mainstream in your experience? No, there's a vast tidal change in medical science. There's a slide. These are just a few of the universities right now that have been approved by the FDA and other agencies for human clinical studies on psilocybin. Wow. Harvard, Stanford. Purdue, Penn, Toronto, University of Toronto. That's amazing. So that's only a few of them. I actually could put up... Department of Veterans Affairs. That's very interesting as well, right? I could put up 20 more, but you couldn't read them because I had to be able to just to be able... So this is a huge shift, and the clinical studies that are coming out for, as you know, PTSD in particular, has been extremely useful, but one of them that came out of John Hopkins for breaking tobacco addiction. 15 patients, small clinical studies, statistically significant, 10 out of 15 people, after one or two heroic doses of psilocybin, 12 months later, had not smoked a cigarette. Wow. So, I mean, to break tobacco addiction, which is one of the most addictive substances on this planet, is phenomenal. That's incredible. And the other research for PTSD, depression, I'm really excited about cognition and creativity. I think we can... There's a lot of smart people out there, a lot of smart people listening to your podcast. I think the idea of microdosing and being able to increase our ability of cognition and creativity to come up with the solutions that can get us out of this mess. Just think of that. If we had hundreds of millions of people thinking about solutions like I've come up with to solve some of the environmental challenges we have today for food biosecurity, the loss of bees is a threat to our national security. Just think about the threat to our economy. So, this microdosing, I think, has enormous potential as well. And when you think about... One of the issues I see right now with the clinical studies is like it almost is too good to be true. Statistically significant, great universities, great science, published in peer-reviewed journals at the top of their game. But these mushrooms have so many benefits for fighting dementia, potentially Alzheimer's. Johns Hopkins has an Alzheimer clinical study ongoing currently for a dose of psilocybin to see if it helps pre-Alzheimer's patients and not go into full-blown Alzheimer's. There's so many different benefits, potentially. It's almost like a chaos of data how it's almost too good to be true. So, my team and Pam Crisco is an MD from British Columbia. We've been working with people. And we have just launched today an app that's at microdose.me, double entendre. Microdose.me is available on the Apple Store. It's available on Android. And this is a quick little... Wait a minute. A microdosing study on Mo... And Apple allowed this on the App Store? Yep. That's a big shift. Because this is a Schedule I drug that they're talking about taking on microdose levels. I mean, I'm just saying what it is, right? I mean, obviously, you know what camp I'm in. I want everybody to do it. But this is really significant. And it measures your ability to hear vision, the tap test, you know, and how quickly you can tap your fingers. It's whether you're stacking it with. Also good for non-psychoactive substance use. What is your baseline? So you're getting older. I'm getting older. I'm getting younger, dude. I have a new thing. Okay. I vote for you. I figured it out. But the idea is to create baselines, you know, and then you create a baseline over time. So you find out how far you deteriorated. Or what your trend line is, versus the general population. So the idea with microdose.me is that we'll create a massive data set, massive amount of data, and then we'll offer this to clinicians for them to see signal from the noise. I suspect, hypothetically, I don't have the evidence, but several doctors have collected case studies of tinnitus, or tinnitus, though both pronunciations are correct, of the buzzing in your ears and being able, and people have resolved that from doing microdosing. Really? And 30% of Americans have hearing loss or more as progressive over time. How much hearing loss leads to depression? Because you can't hear your loved one say things and you get into arguments, and I didn't hear you and you didn't say that. I mean, it just ramifies out. So the ability of being able to have better cognition, better neurological development, and helping hearing vision depression. The interesting thing about the microdosing that we've been collecting is that people tend to be happier, and they're happier and they're more creative, and when they're more creative, they're happier. You're learning a new kata, you're excited the next day, you've nailed it. You're up and going to do it again. You're writing a new book, you're doing an artist's work. So creativity breeds happiness, happiness breeds creativity. And then the opposite is true. Malays and depression. You're not as creative. You're not enjoying life. You're not looking forward to the next day. So I think it's almost a binary choice, and the idea of using microdosing, and the definition of microdosing has sort of variable interpretations. So using the psilocybe cubensis scale, which is the most common psilocybe mushroom in the world, one gram is liftoff. Five grams is what Terrence would say was a hero's journey. And when I was on last, I did, with you, I did 20 grams. You know, that was a little bit much, you might say. But when you do one-tenth of a one gram, you don't feel it. One-twentieth for sure you don't feel it. So the idea is you do microdosing below the threshold of intoxication, but then it benefits neurogenesis. Now there's an extraordinarily interesting study that came out with mice, but I think it's translational medicine, and they were doing microdosing versus macrodosing. So these are some numbers, but basically one gram is almost equivalent to one milligram per kilogram of body weight. Seventy kilos is 152 pounds. And so at one milligram per kilogram with these mice, that's like one gram of cubensis, that's a dose. It's not super high dose, but it's a dose. So what they did with these mice is they had them in an arena with a metal floor, and they gave a tone. Then 40 seconds later, they were shocked. So they had the tone again a few minutes later. And 40 seconds later, they got shocked. After 10 rotations, the mice realized, like Pavlov's dog, when there was a tone, there was going to be a negative consequence, a shock happening. So the mice would cower in fear. So then they dosed them with a microdose, 0.1 milligrams per kilogram versus one milligram per kilogram, one-tenth of a dose versus a full dose. Interestingly, the full dose, it took 10 rotations of no shock, the tone and no shock before they forgot or became reacclimated not to have the fear condition response. With the microdose, one-tenth of that, it only took two rotations, two rotations with a microdose, and they dissociated potentially PTSD. Why do you think it's less? Well, that's a really good question. And the evidence we have so far, and again, this is very early evidence, lots of research is going on in this, it looks like the neurogenic benefits of microdosing are greater than the neurogenic benefits of macrodosing. You flood the receptors, you're having this incredible trip, it's fantastic, it's colorful, it's life-changing. Yes, that is all beneficial for changing your life. But doing microdosing over the long term, because the nerves don't regrow in six hours, but over weeks of regeneration of nerves with microdosing, it seems to me that the microdosing, instead of flooding and overwhelming all the receptors, are feeding these receptors, allowing for neurogenesis. Now, this is, again, a hypothesis. There's so many great people studying this right now, but I'm advocating to all of the clinicians at Johns Hopkins, Stanford, UCLA, at Harvard, please do testing of the patients for hearing and vision and other behavioral tests that aren't not just about emotion and mood in PTSD, but let's actually get some physical measurements. So then you can track prior, during is too complicated, it's too much intervention, you're tripping your brains out, you don't have time to be tested for vision and auditing. But then post-wise, and then looking at the residual effects. Now, Dr. James Fadiman, he has the Fadiman protocol, my protocol, the Stamos protocol. James Fadiman's protocol was microdosing one day on, two days off, one day's on. My protocol that I'm suggesting is four days on, three days off. And James and I are good friends, we talk about this, we laugh, we're just basically, these are hypothetical potential treatments. Are you comparing data between the two of you? This is what microdose, not me, will do. We wanted to say, are you following the Stamos protocol, the Fadiman protocol, your own protocol, are you using it with niacin, are you using it with lion's mane, what are you using it with? Lion's mane, it's phenomenally powerful, neurogenically. And there's two clinical studies out of Japan with mild cognitive decline in dementia showing very positive results, taking two to four grams of lion's mane per day, the mycelium. Interesting, not the fubite, the mycelium is much more powerful. And we just have been contracting with a neurological testing laboratory in France. And we just got some amazing results back showing that when we had lion's mane with extracts of the mycelium exposed to neurons, and the composite control was the brain-derived nerve growth factor, nerve factor, and it was used as a baseline for measuring neurogenic compounds comparatively. And the neurogenesis benefits from, this is where pluripotent stem cells, stem cells that then differentiate into the neurons. And the BDNF clearly shows that, it's a standard protocol. With a lion's mane, it also increased the number of neurons. And then we started looking at analogs of psilocybin. And the analogs, when we added the lion's mane mycelium with psilocybin analogs, which are perfectly legal, they're not schedule one substances. Psilocybin analogs are not? What is exactly a psilocybin analog? There's a number of them that have been reported in the literature. There's biosystem and norbiosystem are two of the more prominent ones. Now, I'm a psychonaut, and in 1960, biosystem, a report of a child died outside of Kelso, Washington, from eating mushrooms in his yard. The family ingested the mushrooms. They went to the hospital. The child developed a fever, eventually had renal failure, and died. A chemist by the name of Lung, and then Benedict and Tyler picked up on this. They analyzed the mushrooms, looking for a new toxin. The mushrooms were identified as being psilocybin biosystems. It is a mushroom that goes in Washington state and Oregon, sometimes in British Columbia, but not in Northern California. It's a very rare species, but grows in yards. When they analyzed the mushroom looking for a new potential toxin, they found this alkaloid, this is a dimethylene-triping base compound. They named it biosystem after psilocybin biosynthesis. So, biosystem had the reputation of potentially being a deadly poisonous toxin. It's present in cubensis. It's present in many psilocybin mushrooms. My book, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, has charts that show how much biosystems in these things, but no one had ever consumed biosystem because of this reputation. Biosystem is legal. I obtained some pure biosystem from a laboratory legally. I have no psilocybin. Nature provides. I don't, people, make this very clear. But I can possess these psilocybin analogs. Since there was no reports in the scientific literature of whether this was truly toxic or not, I, with a doctor friend of mine, an MD, that measured my vitals and hooked me up to blood pressure, ECG, did all the biometrics that are needed. So, we did an N of 1 study. I decided that even though it had a history of potentially killing this child, I think that's a false positive. I think it was bad science. I couldn't find no one who ever ingested this. So, I decided I would ingest it. Now, my friend Pam, she's an MD that goes into Antarctica. She's the only doctor on a research vessel. So, she goes down there and she gets to bring a roommate. It was me. So, Pam and I were working really hard. We had all of our plane tickets. We're ready to go to Antarctica. We had been planning this for months. And then we decided, well, just before we go, Paul, let's do the Bay of Assistant test. We've been talking about this for months. We finally got the time to do this. But the next day, we're going to Antarctica. So, Pam looks at her cell phone and this Russian research vessel crashed into a reef, tore a hole in it. And it's like it's now – the trip is canceled. I mean, I have American Express, plane tickets, hotels. I got 24 hours to try to recapture all this money because we can't go. The trips are canceled. So, I had super high anxiety. And I told my doctor friend, I have too much anxiety. I can't go. This is too crazy. And then she kind of looked at me and said, we've been planning this for months. You know, please. And I listened to her. And so, I did 10 milligrams of Bay of Assistant. She measured my heartbeat, blood pressure, all those metrics. My eyes did dilate. She said that was good. So, I was able to talk like a fact. And then she checked in with me every 10, 15 minutes. 20 minutes a year, you have liftoff, one hour, you're full blown into it. And she checked with me. And she checked with me. And she asked – and I didn't get high. I'm not at all. She goes, how do you feel? And I said, I feel great. I have no anxiety. Everything with this trip is going to be fine. So, here we found a analog of psilocybin that does not get you high, that's legal, that reduced anxiety. I think this is the tip of the proverbial iceberg because all the clinical studies are proved right now for pure psilocybin. What about the analogs? They activate other receptor sites, you know, in your field – in your neurological field. And that's why I think this is why looking at the natural form of these mushrooms, standardized psilocybin, a certain concentration versus the pure molecule, I think that is the way of the future because pure psilocybin is up to $6,000, $7,000 a gram. And you can translate that into growing psilocybin mushrooms for $2 a gram. Now there are people out there listening saying, well, the price is coming down. Indeed it is. It's down maybe to $1,000 to $500 a gram. But how many people in the urban lower income, you know, impoverished population suffering from PTSD who don't – can't afford to go to Johns Hopkins to spend tens of thousands of dollars to have a clinical treatment? I think this democratizes the use of psilocybin and microdosing that could be a benefit across our society. And then why I'm proposing is you stack it with niacin. The reason why you stack it with niacin is you take one-tenth of a gram of sloshed-bicubensis, a microdose, you add 100 to 200 milligrams of niacin. Now if someone tries to get high by taking 10 times as much, they'll have like two grams of niacin. This is flushing niacin, vitamin B3. And that flushing niacin will give you such an irritable reaction of skin-to-chewing of people who have taken vitamin B3. They know this. So it becomes the ant abuse for microdosing. But moreover, it excites the nerves at the end of the peripheral nervous system. And neuropathies oftentimes present themselves as the deadening of the fingertips – the nerves of the fingertips and toes. And it's also a vasodilator. So there's three attributes of stacking niacin with psilocybin mushrooms. It prevents abuse, becomes the ant abuse. It dilates the blood vessels to deliver the neurogenic benefits of psilocybin to the endpoints of the peripheral nervous system and the central nervous system. And then it also excites the nerve endings. So I think those three reasons this could – I hope to see in the future psilocybin mushrooms being over-the-counter vitamins approved by the FDA, stacked with niacin that allows for the universality of use, for the benefit of our culture. We were talking last time – Can I pause here for a second? Is there any other evidence of people taking these analogs and having this anti-anxiety effect other than you? I mean, this seems – it's a very small sample size, right? It's just one person. Yes, there are. As an antidepressant, as far as anxiety and depression are interrelated, there are reports. James Fadiman and his studies – he has population study, which admittedly small, did not see an anti-anxiety component. But other clinical studies, like John Hopkins, also the anxiety of dying from cancer. Right, but that was actually psilocybin. That was actually psilocybin. But what I'm saying with you is also you had a very profoundly stressful situation happening, something you had prepared for for a long time, then all of a sudden it was gone, and all this money's gone, you've got to try to figure out how to get it back. It's immediate, right? Maybe with these other people, they didn't have such an immediate anxiety moment, and maybe their anxiety was harder to measure whether it was coming or going. Well, absolutely. It's the end of one study. This is just – How many people? Me. No, the other one, the other people that have experienced it but didn't experience any anti-anxiety. There's no one else that we know in the scientific literature. Johann Gartz mentions – I published psilocybin azurestins with him, the most potent psilocybin mushroom in the world. Johann Gartz says in one thing that he was asked, and he said that the biosystem was equal to that of psilocybin. I don't have high confidence in that statement. I consumed the biosystem. I was ready for liftoff. I was hoping for liftoff. I know what liftoff feels like, and I didn't get it. So this is – what happens in science so much is the scientists, when you can't do a clinical study, we bioassay. This is very common. This is how Albert Hothmann discovered LSD. He bioassayed it. Didn't he do it accidentally though? He did it accidentally, right. He got in one for this famous bike ride, but then he did it purposely after that. But nevertheless, this is what our scientific psychonauts must do sometimes. Sasha Shulgin. Yeah, Sasha Shulgin's famous for it. The most famous of all and the most revered. And he bioassayed based on his knowledge of chemistry. He wasn't going to try to commit suicide. So this is really an area that I think has enormous value and several meta studies have come out. One that I had mentioned before is a population of several hundred thousand prisoners and there was an 18 percent reduction in violent crime and 22 percent or so reduction in larceny and theft. In a population where they reported they had one psilocybin mushroom experience and statistically significant. Now association may not be causation, but it can be, but a more recent study from British Columbia which I find to be so fascinating is that they did a large population set and partnered a partner of violence. If your male partner had done one psilocybin trip to statistically significant reduction of the probability of that partner being violent towards their other partner. Statistically significant. So I always thought if there's a dating app, maybe you should have the dating app. Have you tripped on psilocybin? Yes. Well, that may be a better candidate for dating. So I think psilocybin makes nicer people. And I think we need a lot more nicer people that are more creative, that are dedicated to helping the community. And I think this is a potential paradigm shifting drug. Unquestionably, and here's the other thing, this could be profit. These companies that are seeking to profit off of pharmaceutical drugs, you can profit off this stuff, particularly with the protocol that you just described with adding niacin to it to ensure that people are doing only microdosing. Look, man, this could be a very profitable enterprise for some company. And the benefits, if people can mirror the benefits that you had of this alleviation of anxiety, my God, that's like most of what people struggle with. So many people out there listening to this right now are like, fuck, I wish there was something that didn't get me high, but just alleviated this fucking angst that so many people are struggling with every day. I'd say it's a massive disease complex that swept our societies. Yeah. And facing all these problems, how could you not become depressed? Well, you cannot become depressed by becoming creative. And I think that psilocybin and microdosing enables the creative pathways for ingenuity for us to feel that we have meaning. We can make a meaningful difference. It's really important. We've entered into 6X, the sixth greatest extinction event known in the history of life on this planet. We've had two other extinction events from asteroid impacts, 250 million years ago, 65 million years ago, but we're now involved in a massive extinction event. And the research that came out today and the other resources come out with 75% of the insect population, 40% in immediate jeopardy. The research article came out, said in Europe and North America, they have good data collection and Amazon, they don't. So we haven't measured the insect loss in the Amazon. But if you're a trout, if you're a bird, if you like drinking coffee and you like chocolate and you like almonds, I mean these are all dependent upon pollinators. So if we lose these flying insects, we lose the pollination services and it threatens worldwide food biosecurity. This is one of the biggest threats to our ecosystem now. I think we can invent our ways out of this if we creatively expand our ability to come up with novel solutions. And I think the solutions are literally underfoot and all around us today. We just have to wake up like I woke up to helping the bees. There's so many smart people out there. If they just started realizing that nature is a deep well of evolutionary knowledge and that we have evolved within this complexity, then to delve into that library of knowledge and pulling out applicable solutions vetted by science, controlled studies, but not looking at these pharmaceutical pure molecules as the way of the future, but looking upon the complexity of the microbiome, the complex interrelationships and selecting out microbiomes that then create guilds of solutions that are applicable to the problems that we face today. All right. I like that idea. All of it. It's just so it's beautiful that there are these natural solutions that, you know, maybe if we could just shift people's ideas about how we view psilocybin, how we view the analogues, how we view the interaction with people in nature, that you can, you know, we can make a real change, make a change that's tangible inside of our lifetime. And again, selling this stuff, like if, look, we're seeing what's happening right now with medical marijuana and then shifting to commercial marijuana and now hemp. It's giant. I mean, it's a huge industry through it's changed Colorado, Colorado, Denver's real estate's gone through the roof. People are moving there so much that they've got traffic problems. Now they never conceived of in the past. It's changed their economy and it's changed their economy due to just a really obvious shift. Here's the shift. Marijuana is not bad for you. It's not. We thought it was. It's not. We're sorry. You could have it now and now you could sell it and now it's legal. But federally, we're still dealing with Schedule I. So it's, it's there. These shifts are happening. These companies are investing money. There's a lot of profit to be made and a lot of people are profiting, but it's still in this weird transitionary stage. It is, but this is a people's revolution. When you have decriminalized nature coming out of Oakland, which I'm fully in favor of, how dare we make a species illegal? That makes no sense to me. What is Oakland specifically? They've made ayahuasca, psilocybin. What else? All natural products with psychoactive properties, to the best of my understanding. Both Denver and Oakland, they remove the funding of the, for prosecutors and judges in the courts so you can't use public funds in order to prosecute people for possession. So this is a very- Can you still arrest them for it though? Well you, the law enforcement officer is not getting paid. He's not doing his job. He's violating his code of conduct. You arrest him and you take him to a prosecutor. A prosecutor goes, I have no funding for this. You're wasting our time. You're just coming here is wasting my time. I have murders to solve. What if someone's selling it? Decriminalization does not, it doesn't prevent you from being prosecuted for selling a schedule one substance, right? That's a really, really good question and I have thoughts on it. That's controversial because this speaks to the ability of some people having access and not. If you want, I only trip on suicide mushrooms once or twice a year. That's all I need. As Terrence McKenna and I think Alan Watts say, when you get the message from the phone, hang it up. So if you just have these suicide mushrooms growing in your backyard or you know how to collect them, then you only need one or two doses a year and even microdosing, you know, you get a lot more extension of that. But my view and I've never had any problem with law enforcement. In Washington, Oregon, in British Columbia and Canada in particular, law enforcement has a very pretty mature attitude towards this. If you have a small amount and you're not trafficking and you're for individual use, this just doesn't raise the level of the need for enforcement. No, I understand that, but I just wish there was no incentive at all. There was nothing there. Like, just the idea that you have to rely on the good grace of a cop who understands that there's no incentive to arrest you. That seems like horseshit to me. Like, we're grown adults in 2019 with a mountain of evidence. We're not living in the dark ages anymore. And the fact that it's still a possibility that you get arrested or you could face some sort of criminal charges for having something that's only been demonstrated to be good. This is why the citizens movement, the federal government, I mean, the Republicans and conservatives and libertarians are all about state rights. This is a people's movement. They should get behind this because individual community rights against the big man, against the federal government. The federal government, it needs to be a title change. And how do we do that? Because we have decriminalized nature in Oregon. We have the Denver initiative, other cities around the country. It's now spreading throughout the entire country. There's probably 20 cities in the next 16 months they're going to have decriminalization at the city councils. I also think it's a significant solution to this problem that we're facing with pills and a lot of destructive drugs. There's a lot of self-destructive drugs that people are taking because these people are hurting. Psilocybin gives you that these drugs don't. It gives you a potential to heal. It gives you a moment to reflect. It gives you a change in the way you think and you interface with the world. And that just doesn't exist in those other drugs. Those drugs are escape drugs. And the need to escape is what we got to eliminate. And I think that's one of the things that psilocybin can help. It can help alleviate the need to escape. And a shout out to Rick Doblin and Eliana Golluli of MAPS, MAPS.org, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. MAPS.org and MAPS.ca in Canada have been instrumental in bringing forward psychedelic drugs for PTSD and clinical studies. MAPS is now on phase three. With MDMA. With MDMA. You've had Rick on a couple of times. I love that guy. Yeah. So yeah, he's a real pioneer in this. And so what's interesting in getting now from three different groups I've heard who've sat down with FDA scientists, there's been a new turnover within the FDA. And these scientists are looking at just pure science without politics. They don't care about politics. They want to help people. And several of them have said they've never seen, with psilocybin in particular, a safer drug with such a dramatic impact. So it's infrequency of use one or two times. And so there is a movie that just came out called Fantastic Fungi. And Michael Pollan's in there. I'm in there. Louis Schwartzberg has put it out. He spent 12 years working on this movie. It's fantasticfungi.com. It's a grassroots movement. Theaters are selling out all over the country. They book it in New York City for one night. They have to keep it in for a week because they're standing room, long lines to get into the theater. And it's all about the use of mushrooms and the John Tompkins studies with end-of-life patients. It's very, very well done. But it speaks to this, is that this is literally a, quote unquote, underground movement that's welling up. And the attraction that people have for this is a reflection of the title change that is happening now. This is a worldwide movement that is sweeping through the mycelial underground and through a connection. So something I'd very much encourage you to see, Fantastic Fungi.