#2134 - Paul Stamets

Joe Rogan (0:12)

What is going on, my friend? How are you? Good to see you again.

Paul Stamets (0:15)

Good to see you, brother.

Joe Rogan (0:16)

It's been a while.

Paul Stamets (0:17)

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

Joe Rogan (0:23)

The never-ending story of mushrooms.

Yeah. So this giant one that you brought me, explain this again? Because you were telling me out there, I'm like, let's save this for the show, because this is crazy.

Paul Stamets (0:32)

Sure. This is the best gift that I can give from a mycologist to a friend. This is a rare old-growth mushroom called a garracon. Only grows in the old-growth forest. It's now on the red list of threatened species in Europe. This one was found on the ground, folks, so it's important that people don't pick these. They're very rare. Literally, one out of a hundred times in the old-growth forest, I'll find one.

So this is really important that people understand how important biodiversity, microdiversity, we're talking about fungi, a garracon was first described by Diascorites over 2,000 years ago as Elexirium ad Longum Vitum, the elixir of long life, is also revered by the Haida and the Cliquet in the Northwest First Nations as a mushroom very important for their own pharmacopeia. So 2,000 years history of use, other sides of the world, and directly after 9-11, I was approached by the BioShield, the biodefense department, and they ran over 2,200 assays. The concern was weaponizable viruses. So they saw an article I wrote in Herbogram called Novel Antivirals from Mushrooms, a whopping one page long. That's all there was in the scientific literature.

So I knew in my intuition this rare species could have some properties.

Of more than 2 million samples tested by the US. Defense Department, US. AMRID, US. Army Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and NIH, in collaboration, of more than 2 million samples, synthetics and natural compounds, we were in the top 10 of all samples active against, in this case, pox viruses, and we were the only natural product. So there's a vetted press release that talks about this that came out in 2004 So I have dedicated my life, you know, I have a company, and fortunately, I've put a lot of my resources, I've literally spent millions of dollars collecting strains from the old growth forest, and I'm happy to announce that we have more than 107 strains of agaricon isolated from Northern California, even Northern Arizona, British Columbia, and Europe. I have now the largest culture library of agaricon in the world. And so people go, why is this important? Well, it's not only important because the old growth forests are declining. I mean, it's less than 1 percent. But I believe the old growth forests are cultural libraries that will be essential for bio-defense.

And from the research that we did with the BioShield program in 2004, then I have a TED Talk in 2008 that talks about this, and then I'm very thankful that we have completed a COVID-19 clinical trial. The results of which was presented at the Georgetown University of Medicine School of Medicine on September 23, 2023 And what we looked at, and my colleagues and superb physicians and researchers led by a great team at the Crop Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of California San Diego. And it was a double-blind placebo-controlled study. And in that study, the idea was to look at vaccine enhancement. So before mRNA vaccines, there was just so much noise and confusion and, you know, the sense that dust hadn't settled enough. But the mRNA enhancement vaccine, which is called Mach 19, they gave half the patients a placebo, which was mycelium grown on rice, I'm sorry, just rice, and agaricon and turkey tail combined that were grown on rice. So one, the control of the placebo is just rice, neutral, and the other one is agaricon and turkey tail, that turkey tail is the most well-studied medicinal mushroom in the world. We populate a website for physicians at mushroomreferences.com, no branding, just pure science. People can go to mushroomreferences.com and see this. So double-line placebo control, and they literally recruited people directly out of the vaccination lines for people getting Pfizer or Moderna vaccines, and said, hey, do you want to be involved in a medicinal mushroom vaccine study, enhancement study?

And people then signed up. And so they got, they consumed agaric on a turkey tail or the placebo for four days.

And then they measured symptoms post-vaccination and then six months out. And so there are two slides that I have that I sent on to that I'm allowed to show.