- this is such a special pleasure to have paul stamets rejoin us for the 2020 maiden voyage of the bioneers virtual conference. (kenny and nina chuckle) paul first spoke at bioneers in 1996, when he was unknown. he showed up with this wild proposition that mushrooms can save the world and he turned out to be right. (kenny and nina chuckle) it was clear from the outset that he's the rare genius and visionary citizen scientist who can actually manifest his vision in the most practical terms. since that time, paul has earned richly deserved,

major awards and worldwide recognition including the prestigious selection as a national geographic explorer. he's the central protagonist in the recent hit film that originated here at bioneers, "fantastic fungi" by bioneer, louie schwartzberg. we'll show a short clip during the break, after these keynote segment. paul has built a great company, written foundational books on mycelia, i'm sorry, and sparked a global mycelia awakening. his astonishing inventions in microtechnologies are addressing some of the world's most urgent, global ecological and health crises, from remediating toxic sites in farmlands to preventing bee colony collapse disorder to supporting our immune systems in these dangerous times. today, paul will address the deepest underlying crisis of all, the crisis that resides between our ears.

it's a crisis of consciousness, that's precipitating the widespread awakening that we are a part of nature, not apart from it. so please join us in welcoming our beloved friend, colleague and mycelia ambassador, paul stamets, live from british columbia. - yeah, it's been a long journey, folks. i have been on this planet now for 65 years. my first interest in mushrooms was fiing psilocybin mushrooms. and indeed i wrote my first book when i was 23, i just pulled it out and dusted it off. "psilocybe mushrooms & their alli," this contains the genus psilocybe it contains in the majority of this psilocybin mushrooms. there's around 216 species in the genus psilocybe, 116 species are the psilocybin active which means they contain the tryptamine compounds, psilocybin and psilocin.

and some other interesting analogs that i'll speak about. so, there's been a interesting course in my life because i was originally my interest in this subject, when i went to conferences, i was treated like a ler, people avoided me. they felt uncomfortable with the subject. and my, times have rely changed. so i would like to first, i'm just gonna i have a slide deck that will be available to all of you, but i'm gonna first really show you how much those times have cnged. and what i'm gonna show is three slides showing the universities that are currently engaged in research on psychedelics and more specifically on psilocybin mushrooms. so if we have that first slide up, that'd be great. these are the institutions currently doing research on psychedelics. the next slide shows the institutions specifically doing research on psilocybin mushrooms.

now this extraordinary to think that these institutions were approved by the fda and the dea, fda is over the dea for clinical trials because they satisfied several important criteria. one unlikely to do any harm, two being able to address a critical medical need, that's not currently being addressed by conventional medicine. and three, is it scalable? can it be brought in as a medicine at an affordable price? so indeed these benchmarks have been met, there is now up to 40 institutions that are currently doing clinical studies on psilocybin. and even in europe, i think there's around, next slide if we could, we have about 20 institutions in europe also. so this is a global movement, which is astonishing about this is the course of conclusions

all steer towards the same end points that these are some of the most powerful psychoactive, and psychiatric medicines ever been discovered by medicine. but indigenous peoples and we all are indigenous to this planet, but indigenous peoples in greece and spain and north africa and south america, central america, mesoamerica, north america had long ago discovered th these were sacred medicines to be treated with respect and they can help community psychologically. so looking at the toxicity scales of different drugs psilocybin is unique and that is is one of the most extraordinarily non-toxic medicines that the fda has ever considered. so we are now seeing a revolution across the planet literally as nina and kenny like to say,

a revolution from the underground, well, that's exactly what is happening. so many of you know that oaklanwas the rst to decrimize psychoactive plants and psilocybin in particular, it was followed by denver and most recently in washington dc, in the belly of the beast. i think more than 70% of the voters voted for the decriminalization of psychedelics. and then more, most recently, of course in oregon, ballot measures one oh nine and one 10 on the therapeutic use of psilocybin to be legalized and the decriminalization of drugs ballot one 10. so this is the will of the people. so politicians and government officials take note this is the will of the people, the people are voting to decriminalize the sacred substances so they can be responsibly used, for helping people in need.

what is so extraordinary about these medicines is that they're widespread effects, address many issues currently that are not being addressed by conventional medicines, especially with ptsd, with trauma associated, with other challenges that we face in life, with addiction, with opioids, with tobacco, a more recent study from johns hopkins, showing that a heroic dose of psilocybin combined with therapy shows up to greater than 60% reduction not only in their tobacco use but in the two-year window, subsequently people were able to break their tobacco addiction. the one and the most addictive sutances that we're aware of. and so i want to just, emphasize the importance

that the tides are changing. we have come to a point w to recognize that psilocybin and psilocybin mushrooms are appropriate medicines for our time. we all suffer from some form of trauma right now because of covid, we are stressed many of us to our limits, we've never had these challenges like this before. many my indigenous peoples have suffered from much greater challees than that which most of us are suffering from now. so this is unfortunately, the road has been unfortunately paid by the trauma that many people before we've seen covid. but we are all on this earthship together. so it's important that we act in unity and with compassion. one of the things that's so interesting about the psilocybin mushrooms is that when they experience psilocybin mushrooms

there's a enormous reduction in depression and anxiety. we have actually launched a app at xmicrodose.me is for the apple platform, it's been, it's anonymized, it's ge through a board review to make sure that it conforms to health professionaltandards, and we have had over 14,000 subscribers to xmicrodose.me. it measures, mood, anxiety, depression, agility, there's a tap test, that's important for determining if someone has pre parkinson's like symptoms, the ability your being able to tap your fingers as quickly as possib, in0 seconds. it's got hearing, it's got sight, it's got memory. and we have now just uncovered some of the data sets. and the data sets from microdosing with psilocybin mushrooms are revealing profound results.

although many of these institutions, in fact all of them that i know of have been using pure psilocybin or psilocin psilocybin dephosphorylates into psilocin, so when you take plocybin, either a pure substance or in a mushroom, it becomes psilocin and that crosses into the blood-brain barrier is a five ht two a agonist, which means a substitute for serotonin your most prominant urotransmitter. so in looking at the clinical studies using pure psilocybin orsilocin is the clearlyhows tremendously positive effects and offsetting depression with long-te positive results. what's interesting about some of the jns hopkins studies with ptsd is that with the psilocybin experience, an intensive one with therapy, with follow-up therapeutic consultations, many of these patients have resolved their ptsd trauma.

and what's so interesting about it is re remembering the curative session with psilocybin appears to supplant the ptsd experience. and so the very active re remembering it has a therapeutic benefit. now, this is really interesting because it suggests that there are different chain of neurons, a neurological sequences that become then resonant. and this becomes a predominant reflection upon your life, you'll remember how wonderful it was to have that resolution of your trauma through a high dose guided psilocybin trip. now, this also brings into focus some other issues that i want to bring up is thatre psilocybin mushrooms less equal or more beneficl than psilocybin in pure form.

there is a rush right now to commercialize psilocybin. at least 20 companies have been created for the commercialization of psilocybin into a pharmaceutical drug. and though i do applaud everyone's effort to be able to use psilocybin to resolve many of the issues i just described, i'm also very, very concerned about the commercialization of a sacred subsnce. with the microdose.me app, it was not with psilocybin, it was with psilocybin mushrooms and our results thus far using the dass scale which is a depression and anxiety index the standard practic by psyiatrists and the panas scale which is another scale that measures mood and positive mood, negati mood with both these ales using microdosing and microdosing is defined as taking a sub sensorium dose

for psilocybin, at means below a threshold that you would experience it. so if you take some lls out of mushrooms and you feel them, that's not a microdose. so a microdose with psilocybe cubensis is around one 10th of a gram. i have lifto of myself, i'm pretty experienced in this but i have lift off around a third to a half a gram. there is normalization over time, so if you take a dose of psilocybin even if you ve a xliftoff dose later on, you're normalized. but the sub seorium microdose translates into about one 10th of a gram of psilocybe cubensis, the most commonly availae in psilocybin mushroom currently. and with those micro doses, which is done periodically through the week and in our xmicrodose.me app, there's three confounders to our data that i want to underscore. number one, you have variability in the potency of the plocybin mushrooms you're obtaining. are they're a year-old? how were they grown?

how were they stored? et cetera, et cetera. then you also have the variability in the receptivity ofhe individuals that are taking this psilocybin mushrooms. some people are non-responders, this is hugely important. and then the third, which i just sort of alluded to itas a frequency of how often you're taking them. are you taking them once a week, three times a week five times a week? despite those three confounders when we unveiled the data, we found that the p-values of significance and many of you know what this is, but for those that you don't, the p value is a statistical meurement of predict significance. and the p-value is point zero five, you have 95% confidence. our p-value is 0.00001, unambiguously significant. so the fact that psilocybin mushrooms are giving such positive results that are competitive or comparative depending on your point of view the pure psilocybin being promoted

by these new pharmaceutical startup companies i think is an example of people medicine versus profit medicine. now, i would like to take both sides of the fence here in this argume, what is people medicine? well, people medicine is p psilocybin mushrooms are available for the people, people can grow them at home, you can grow them in your backyard. there's lots of opportunities for acquiring them without having a physici permission or prescripti. so the problem with psilocybin mushrooms as i mentioned is the variability, the problem so is the fact that you d't know the chain of custody, where it came from. you have an adverse reaction, who do you talk to and then the standardization not being certain means that the variability, it could be substantia from one experience to another. so there's obviously quality control problems. and another one that's a big issuwith me is taxes.

the underground psilocybin mushroom economy is not paying their fairhare of taxes. they use the rds, they use the fire department, the police department, all the social benefits from the post office, et cetera, and they are basically doing commercial transactions tax rate. i think that can be solved through the decriminalization and the licensing of quality controlled psilybin musoom suppliers, that i think will be happening in oregon first. so, but the other side of the coin and in defense or in favor of the pharmaceutical-grade psilocybin is the fact that you can get a standardized amount. you do know the chain of custody, where it came from. you do know wherto go, if you have an adverse reaction. and of course it is taxable. there is a tax revenue going back for the sale of these substanc. but nevertheless, i think the benefits of psilocybin mushroom far outweigh the benefits of psilocybin,

and that specificay because of the entourage effect. the past several years, we've been looking at the psilocybin analogs, psilocybin mushrooms contain veral othe tryptamines that are metabolically in the chain of production of psilocybin or its degration, baeocystin, norbaeocystin nor psilocin. we have found that baeocystin, norbaeocystin nor psilocin, which are not psychoactive, they won't get you high, but they produce strong neurogenesis. and in the slides that you can see, we do experiments compared to controls serum controls, brain-derived neurotrophic factors, bdnf, and then when we spike these neurons from (indistinct) tent st cells rung in vitro with aliquots of baeocystin, norbaeocystin nor psilocin, all those compounds are legal. and we found something extraordinary, not only did it stimulat neurons that grow within seven to 12 days, but when we started stacking them

and especially with lion's mane we had greater than the arithmetic predicted effect. and what that means is when se of these neurons increased by 8% or 12% within that sample the additive effect would be 20%, you would think. no, we've got (indistinct) 36% increase. so the entourage effect of these naturally occurring cells psilocybin analogs, and we have found stacking up with lion's mane mhroom mycelium products then creates an entourage effect of neurogenesis. this is so important, because i think psilocybin is an einstein molecule. psilocybin makes you srter. psilocin makes you kinder. psilocybin makes you more courageous. anthe slide decks that you'll e there are several (indistinct) studi that are extraordinary. a single dose of plocybin is really is closely correlated with a reduction to partner-to-partner violence, reducing larceny by more than 20%, violent crime by 18%.

now association is not causation, but it can , and the more these studies progress, it looks lik psilocybin mushrooms do make for better citizens, better people. when someone (indistinct) is traumatized it not only traumatize themselves and the victim, but it traumatizes that their families of both and not only their familie but their neighbors and their communities and their cities and their countries. this is a worldwide uprising, i think when people realize that psilocybin mushrooms can resolve trauma. and so i hope all of you come to understand that these need to be used responsibly, it's very important that we don't lose this opportunity in the 1960s, it was lost. we have to treat this substance as a sacred medicines, we have a panel later on today, we'll talk about the indigenous use of the sacraments.

and how does psilocybin mushrooms fit into that context with this indigenous history of the use of these sacred substances. so with that, because time is so short i want tsay, thank you very much, kenny and nina, i'm just speaking in a box here (paul laughs). so thank you so much for everything you've done f the community, thank you for giving me this voice, and i hope all of us survive this shared crisis together, and we come out as a better people, kinder people and more courageous and with greater wisdom. thank you.