CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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[Cheerful theme music begins] 

This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Psilocybin mushrooms have been used for hundreds, likely thousands of years. Currently, more than 65 universities in North America and Europe have been approved for clinical studies ranging from treating depression and Alzheimer’s to addiction. Psilocybin has clearly risen to the forefront of medical research.  

In this episode, renowned mycologist and medical researcher Paul Stamets provides an illuminating talk covering the psilocybin movement through history into the current modern moment as well as an overview of the most clinically significant studies, the newest research on psilocybin analogues, micro-dosing, and the implications for creating a paradigm shift in the ecology of consciousness. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on December 3rd, 2021. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

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Paul Stamets: Well, thank you so much I am honored to be here. In these times of COVID here too where many of us are so distanced away from each other but we are sharing this space and time figuratively. And we are truly at a time critical in the evolution of our species on this planet and it’s important as citizens that we take responsibility for our actions and downstream consequences. I’m on a remote island in British Columbia and want to acknowledge the unceded territories of this island of the Klahoose people who so graciously and generously opened this environment for us. So, I’m going to be talking about psilocybin mushrooms and mycology of consciousness and this is a talk that expands a lot of time and takes us to the cutting edge of the most current research that’s unfolding. So, I welcome you all and I know there are more than 1000 of you who have come together as our community here.  

So, without further ado I would like to begin my slides. So, I will share screen and hopefully this will work. I think it’s working. Okay.  

So my talk: Psilocybin Mushrooms & The Mycology of Consciousness, is actually an extension of our dear friend Ralph Messner and Ralph Messner, who is a Professor at CIIS who wrote a book, a great book called the Ecology of Consciousness which I love this book and I love the concept  that your consciousness is an ecosystem and in that ecosystem, what are the dynamics, what are the different pathways of nutrition that are feeding thoughts that inform you not only emotionally but inform your intelligence? I think it is time for us to have a higher level of ecological intelligence. And to understand our place not only in our ecosystems, you know, physically, not only on this planet in the context of where we are now in the evolution of life in the universe.  

So, I’m going to go through some history here that I think is important. And there is an unusual and interesting cave art in the Tassili n'Ajjer plateau in Northern Algeria. That plateau was literally called The Plateau of Running Rivers, but because of climate change, note to self, the Sahara Desert has encroached, and the deforestation then subsequently occurred. But over 7000 years ago the artist here wanted to communicate a thing that would cross into the future and into the present. Obviously, the artist was very excited about mushrooms. And mushrooms being put into honey is a common practice really throughout the world. Well-known not only in Mesoamerica but also in Europe as a preservative because of honey's high sugar content and its antimicrobial properties would prevent mushrooms from souring. Well because, when you put Psilocybin mushrooms in honey, it infuses the Psilocybin into the honey and begins a bio fermentation process. So, we think that this may well have led to the creation of psychoactive meads in Europe in particular.  

Now, there was the Bavarian Beer Purity Act in 1516 which specifically banned mushrooms, henbane, and other psychoactive plants from being put into beer. So, the Bavarian Beer Purity Act was an act I think of institutional aggression to suppress Indigenous people of Europe's use of psychoactive substances. This was before Christianity and the orthodox religions, Indigenous people were celebrating in the forests, our life span were not that long and so recoupling of individuals in the forest was common practice during these rituals. How much do we not know? Of course, 99% of this, it is only these threads of knowledge that have persisted throughout history, we have a glimpse of what are ancestors were actually participating in.  

So, this is just the actual cave art on the left and then it was redone by Kat Harrison and then Jonathan Meter, quite true to form, and so the bee person here and the mushrooms adorning them is also in the same cave complex other pictographs were discovered also showing mushrooms. This is important for people to understand that from a mycologist’s point of view the shape of the pileus, the cap, is really, really important. From us looking at this, this is not a porcini, this is not a chanterelle, this is not a shaggy mane. This is a conic capped mushroom which is classically in the genus Psilocybe, the genus of Psilocybin mushrooms. What were these artists trying to portray? Are there spores coming out from the mushroom to fertilize the brain? Are their thoughts being stimulated from the mushrooms and it’s bidirectional? Of course, this is all open to interpretation.  

So go forward to about 400 years BCE and the Eleusinian Mysteries were being practiced from about 1500 BCE to 500 AD. That’s almost 2,000 years and here’s the depiction of Demeter giving her daughter Persephone, a mushroom. The legend goes, the origination of Greek culture is the origination of the seasons when Persephone consumes the mushroom in the fall, and she would go into the underground literally and figuratively and that would be the onset of winter.  And so, during the fall harvest festivals when these mushrooms are common, in this region of Greece and into the Alps the liberty cap is quite common, so I find it extraordinary because this 2000 year period of history here, look again, 1500 BCE to 500 AD, also was largely coincident with the Mesoamerican mushroom stones that were found mostly in Pacific slope of Guatemala. This persisted into 500 AD so for over a thousand years these mushroom stones were made and what did they mean? Were they signifying family’s heritage or were the statues to honor the heavens so the rains would come, so much of the water could collected in catchments? Was it fertility? Again, it begs the imagination but the fact that these exist today speaks to an ancient and deep history and mystery of the use of I think magic mushrooms.  

So, the fact that this was happening in Greece and Mesoamerica at the same time, I see this as a synaptic junction in a sense, the opposite ends of the planet and peoples-Indigenous peoples, who were rejoicing and being informed of the Psilocybin mushrooms. When the conquistadors invaded Mesoamerica, and Central and South America there was a priest who came and in 1529, actually recorded the use of magic mushrooms. Here is one quote I found quite fascinating, “These they ate before dawn with honey, they also drank cacao before dawn. The mushrooms they ate with honey, when they began to get heated from them, they began to dance, and some sang and some wept.  Some cared not to sing but would sit down in their rooms and stayed there pensive-like. Then when the drunkenness of the mushrooms had passed, they spoke one with another about the visions they had seen." 

This was recorded or rerecorded in an excellent monograph by Roger Heim and R Gordon Watson in Les Champignons Hallucinogènes du Mexique, which was basically a treatise on many of the new species that were unknown to science but known to Indigenous peoples and they were recorded. Unfortunately, when Les Champignons Hallucinogènes du Mexique was published, it was published a few weeks after Rolf Singer and Alexander Smith published a monograph in a journal called Mycologia. And because they published these same species first and gave them names, then unfortunately much of the work and the names, that is, were usurped by Singer and Smith. Other species then prevailed in the scientific literature, and this is the way it goes in science but whoever publishes the names first in the scientific literature and deposits specimens, their names prevail.  

It was the graciousness of Maria Sabina, a shaman who introduced Psilocybin mushroom to R Gordon and Valentina Wasson. Now this is important for people to understand. Valentina Wasson was the mycologist, she was a Russian physician, she studied and knew mushrooms in Russia by Latin names, she knew many, many species and she was very much attracted to mushrooms when R Gordon Wasson on their honeymoon, where they have found mushrooms and there was enthusiasm and excitement in finding these beautiful mushrooms. He came from an English perspective of microphobia, and she was microphilic. They invented those two terms microphilia and microphobia because they were astonished at each other’s cultural biases and their affection and reacting to the presence of mushrooms leading them to a lifelong study of ethnomycology of mushrooms. Now it’s important because I met R Gordon Wasson several times, I attended three lectures of him and in every single lecture he gave credit to Tina Wasson. He gave credit to her voluminously and often cried in tears trying to express his gratitude to his wife who unfortunately died in 1957 from cancer.  

So, at that time in 1957, Life Magazine came out and was distributed to millions of Americans primarily on their doorsteps in the middle of the Cold War. And inside Life Magazine, was basically a field guide to the Psilocybin mushrooms of Mexico. In the magazine that disguised the name of Maria Sabina, and her village but the secret did not remain very closed. Soon thousands were flocking to Mexico to find Maria Sabina, it was very disruptive to her culture. Maria Sabina was a practicing Catholic and so it was an interesting convergence of Catholicism and the Mazatec use of Psilocybin mushrooms. The mushrooms were primarily ---There was a disdain-- It was thought that perhaps it came with cattle when the conquistadors came into Mesoamerica.  

A new book has come out, it’s fun. It’s called Mycelium Wassonii, I wrote the forward to it. It is a very interesting re-discussion of portraying the adventures of Tina and R Gordon Wasson and their adventures into Mesoamerica. So, it’s beautifully illustrated, I very much encourage people to check out this book. It is beguiling and interesting, and I think it is largely historically accurate. And again, it also gives enormous credit to Maria Sabina and Tina Wasson, two of the giants in the field of Psilocybin Ethnomycology.   

When I was in the womb, I think I was seven months in my mother's tummy. And so, I was born in a small town in Ohio. There I am, I’m that cowboy on the right. I have a twin brother; you can see over there on the left. So, this began my journey. I remember my first encountering puff balls and throwing them at my twin brother, and they explode upon impact. It was tons of fun, and my mother came out saying “Don't throw puff balls at your twin brother, it may make him blind!” Well, she went back in the house, and I thought “That was good information” so I pelted him with more puff balls. But that was my earliest memories of mushrooms is that they were so much fun to stomp on. And then my life evolved and then I consumed Psilocybin mushrooms, and then this is what I look like. [laughs gently] So here I am, I'm actually 19-20 years of age in this photograph. I was a very hairy young man. So, this is my first run at growing Psilocybin mushrooms in a pressure cooker at my brother John's house in Seattle, Washington.  

Now I want to give thanks and acknowledgments to my father, to my mother, and to my brother John. They have all since passed. My brother John first really got me into Psilocybin mushrooms. He went to Yale, on break he would go down to Central America in Columbia, came back with these fabulous stories of consuming Psilocybin mushrooms. I was the youngest child in a family of five, and so I idolized my older brother John. And we became tight and good tripping buddies, and so John and I journeyed many times on Psilocybin mushrooms, and if you read the forward to one of my books, Psilocybin Mushrooms of the World, you can hear- you can read about our unique escapades like finding one of the largest Psilocybin mushrooms patches I’ve ever seen. Thousands and thousands of Psilocybin mushrooms right in front of the police station near the University of Washington in Seattle.  

So, I progressed to the Evergreen State College, and I was mentored under Dr. Michael Beug, so was Jonathan Ott and Jeremy Bigwood. And the three of us end up studying psychoactive plants and psychoactive mushrooms. Michael Beug wrote an article basically on the proper and accurate analysis of Psilocybin. Which- he was called to the government as a witness for the defense when the government was prosecuting people for possession, so he showed the analytical methods were flawed. He wrote the accurate methodology for detecting Psilocybin. The DA was actually pretty impressed, and Michael applied for a DEA license, which we got. And so, Jeremy Bigwood and myself were covered by the drug enforcement administration license for about 10 years and Jeremy went on but I stayed on longer.  

And so, the Evergreen State College it became a center of research and in the Bay Area, there was Terrence McKenna and in Oregon there is Gary Mentzer, and you’ll see photographs of them. They began a bunch of mushroom conferences. This is a mushroom conference in 1979 in Oregon. There is Jonathan Ott on the right. There is Jeremy Bigwood Dr [audio cut] Dale, Leslie and myself, Jim Jacobs and Stephen Pollock a medical doctor from San Antonio. At this time, there was so much excitement because we discovered these Psilocybin mushrooms were growing in our backyards literally. In Northern California, from San Francisco all the way into Vancouver and north to Northern Canada.  So, the need to trek to Mexico to find Psilocybin mushrooms, was quickly- that narrative changed because there we so many Psilocybin mushrooms growing in the Northwest, in pastures and in areas associated with woodchips. So, then Terrence McKenna and his circle and our circles intersected…there’s my daughter Lydia. This is at Brighton Bush Hot Springs. And then Terrence and, along with Jonathan Ott, other psychonauts and I started putting on some conferences. Ethnobotany conferences that Ralph Metzner attended. And then we started these micro-media conferences, which went on until the early 90s. And these were focused on gourmet and medicinal mushrooms with a heavy emphasis on Psilocybin. Now I cannot emphasize this enough. These were times of incredible paranoia and politicization. Nixon’s war on drugs, gay rights activists, the anti-war movements… African American and Native American movements…we were all marginalized and put in the same silo, with the war against drugs. And so, Richard Nixon found it was politically advantageous to demonize all of us because we were also in opposition to the Vietnam War. So, we were always concerned the federal government would come bust us. And so, we were still pushing through this, and because we had a DEA license, we had an umbrella protection of what we were doing at Evergreen State College. So, we started doing a series of other conferences, this is a conference we did the Millennium Mushroom Conference I knew the Merry Pranksters, I knew a lot of scientists and psychedelics. And so, I brought them both together at the Millennium Mushroom Conference in 1999. And it was an extraordinary event. And then there was the Psychoactivity Conference, and these conferences went to Europe, and there’s of course Alexander Shulgin and Hans Shulgin…there’s Albert Hoffman, Stacy Shaffer…for those of you know about her work with peyote, etc. So, this was a worldwide movement. Really focused in North America and Europe, and also then in Latin America, and then increasingly in South American. 

So, this is Psilocybe cubensis. This is a simplified lifecycle, just to bring everybody up to the same level here. Mushrooms produce spores. The spores typically are sexual in that two spores have to come together, and they mate. There’s one nucleus in each spore and they merge, they mate and form mycelium. And the mycelium have two nuclei per cell. And fertile mycelium is capable of reproducing a fruit body, a mushroom. Literally in a just few days. So, mycelium can be resident for weeks, months, even years. And then under the influence of a drop in temperature, the introduction of water, the mycelium wicks to the surface and exhales carbon dioxide, inhales oxygen and then needs light, those four stimuli stimulate the mycelium to create a reproductive structure called a fruit body, otherwise known as a mushroom.  

Now I love this photograph, it is one that’s recent. This is Psilocybe cyanescens in a garden. It’s called a wavy cap. Now if you look closely, you’ll see a bluing reaction on the stem. And then, these, when we take a spore print, and the spores fall apart in radiating the symmetry of the gills, but in the field of mycology spore color is really important. So, I came up with a simple rule, it’s generality that if a mushroom has a purple brown to black spore print and it bruises blueish in color, that it's almost certainly a Psilocybin mushroom.   

Now, with every rule there are exceptions for those of you who want to know the exceptions, there are other species that are bluish in color, have a bluish or purple-brown spore print, but are not psychoactive, but they are not deadly nor poisonous. But generally speaking, this rule stands true today. If mushroom bruises bluish, a gilled mushroom, not a pored mushroom, mushrooms with gills, and the spore print is purplish brown to black, it’s almost 95% certain it is a Psilocybin mushroom. Of course, you must be able to identify mushrooms accurately in the wild, and so please be careful, consult an expert and be sure you know what you are doing.   

This is the Psilocybe zapotecorum, these are associated with landslides. Many of these Psilocybin mushrooms are associated with disturbed grounds, which is interesting. A mushroom that was indeed used for sacred purposes is Psilocybe mexicana. And Psilocybe mexicana does not bruise bluish. So here is a really interesting one that Indigenous people figured this out. There are many mushrooms with this shape. This mushroom is full of Psilocybin but no psilicin, psilicin is what enters into your bloodstream.   

I went on several new species, this is Psilocybe azurescens on the left. Psilocybe liniformans varitey ameriana, Psilocybe cyanofibrillosa, and Psilocybe weilii. So, these are the four species that are new to science that I discovered and named in scientific literature along with my co-authors. So, some of these species, for those of you from Washington and Oregon and British Columbia, also around the world in southern Chile etc. there are these interesting long-stem conic capped Psilocybes and this is Psilocybe pelliculosa, a Psilocybin active mushroom and does not bruise bluish very much. It’s pretty weak, so a threshold dose may be 20 to 30 specimens. You have to eat quite a few of these.   

Psilocybe semilanceate, the liberty cap, grows in grasslands, especially around ponds where there’s sheep or there’s cattle, in cool areas. This one in the photograph on the right is from Scotland. It also grows in Washington state, Oregon. It grows in Nova Scotia, it grows in cold wet grassland environments. It’s very high in Psilocybin but low in psilocin. So, this one rarely bruises bluish also. So the rule that I gave you is for the bluing Psilocybes, but there are many other of these species that do not turn blue. And this is one I showed that was in the garden, Psilocybe cyanescens, the wavy cap, and it is a potent Psilocybin mushroom. And this Psilocybe cyanofibrillosa, it is associated with rhododendrons. So, a really good place to find Psilocybin mushrooms is in rhododendron gardens in October. And any place rhododendrons are planted, oftentimes, mulching wood chips are used, and you can see it creates the perfect microclimate for the Psilocybin mushroom.   

On the lower left, you will see Psilocybe cyanofibrillosa, the mushrooms froze. About two days before I took this photograph. So, upon freezing the mushrooms turned strongly bluish. And another species, Psilocybe baeocystis on the right, it is a very unique species that is becoming increasingly rare and seems to be associated with Douglas fir cones and, I can’t explain and other mycologists can’t explain why this is becoming less found.   

A species named after Dr. Daniel Stuntz is Psilocybe stuntzii. It’s got a membranous ring around the stem; the rim turns blue. Whereas you may take only four or five of Psilocybe cyanescens, you would have to take 40 or 50 of Psilocybe stuntzii to have the same activity level. When I wrote my first book, Psilocybe Mushrooms and Their Allies, I wrote this after finding this cluster on the left. We have Psilocybe stuntzii side-by-side with one of the most deadly poisonous mushrooms in the world, Galerina marginata, also known as Galerina autumnalis. The one on the right has rusty brown spores and the one on the left has purple brown spores. Now, they are growing so close they are touching and in fact for Psilocybin mushroom hunters in wood chips, we are looking for this deadly mushroom as an indicator species, meaning the habitat is suitable for producing Psilocybin mushrooms. On the right you see them side-by-side and you have to be really careful.  Psilocybin mushrooms can be a dangerous activity for those uninitiated and are not careful. You can become killed, folks. You can die from eating these mushrooms.  Galenrina marginata has the same peptides as the amanita phalloides, many of you have heard about the death caps in New England, these are deadly poisonous mushrooms found in the Bay Area, Pacific Northwest regions of North America.   

So, this is why the majority of people that are consuming Psilocybin mushrooms are consuming those that have been grown and the easiest one to grow by far is Psilocybe cubensis, which has about 1% Psilocybin. It equates to about 10 mg of pure Psilocybin. And the micro dosing protocols, there’s a low dose, medium dose, and high dose. As illustrated here. In a survey that we did recently, about 72% of the respondents are in the medium dose range. They are eating 1/10 to 1/3 of a dried gram of Psilocybe cubensis. So, with 1 gram being a threshold dose, 1/10 to 1/3 is a micro-dose of an active dose, a dose that you can feel. So, if you take a small amount of Psilocybin mushrooms and you feel it, that’s not a micro-dose. A micro-dose you should not actually feel. So, Psilocybin mushroom cultivation became popular, especially because of Terrence and Dennis McKenna, who wrote a book called Magic Mushroom Growers Guide on growing these mushrooms on grain and in jars and trays, very easily done. So, this is by far the most highly consumed Psilocybin mushrooms in the world. I suggest it is probably in the 98th percentile of all Psilocybin mushrooms consumed is the Psilocybe cubensis.  

Now it’s important that you know that Psilocybe cubensis is a very rapidly growing mushroom. So, these are in ideal stages for consumption, the veils are closed the veil extends from the cap edge to the stem. It protects the gills. But what you’re seeing, these beautiful specimens right here, with closed veils. In a matter of two to six hours, the caps expand. And even though the caps may look larger, the mushroom looks larger, there is no increase in amounts. In fact, the flesh of the mushroom thins, and the gills get broader, and the gills have spores in them, but there is no psilocybin in the spores, so actually the potency of the mushroom declines and the mass of the mushroom does not increase. So, this is a big concern because some people are very allergic to spores. 

And in fact, in a study of asthmatic children, 50 children, 100% of them were allergic to Psilocybe cubensis spores. That’s an extraordinarily high number of asthmatic children. Now, asthmatic children become asthmatic adults, a good friend of mine unfortunately, his wife died from an asthma attack. So, people should be concerned about harm reduction and safety, and this is a big concern I have because after these mushrooms get large like this and they have the appearance of being more, which might incentivize growers to produce larger mushrooms, the immune system of the mushroom declines rapidly so they are not as strong in their ability to prevent contaminants and bacteria and other molds from growing. So, co-occurring with the maturation of these mushrooms is unfortunately contamination. So, this is something that we’re extremely concerned about.  

A number of methods are used for being able to ingest these mushrooms and they are commonly ingested via the Aztec tradition in chocolate. So, mushrooms are ground up and put into chocolate and chocolate really masks the flavor and some of these mushrooms are very unappetizing. So, this is a common way micro-dosing or even macro-dosing.  Very important that you label these, so you do not have someone having an accidental ingestion which has happened all too often. Again, please be very careful if you know of anyone who is doing this or if you are participatory, you should do it where it is legal, that is what I want to emphasize as the absolute bottom line. But if you notice anybody making micro or macro doses it is important they are properly labeled so you do not have children or adults unsuspectingly consuming these and may not be ready for the experience.  

Another interesting vehicle for ingesting Psilocybin mushrooms is that they are water-soluble, but it took me a long time to figure this out. If you take Psilocybin mushrooms, fresh ones, the bluing ones and you put it in a jar and you put ice cubes on it and you let it melt in the refrigerator about 2° C, 34° F and as the ice cubes slowly melt, then you create blue juice and you can extract that and it is a simple water extraction method, hot water does not work. Room temperature does not work, it’s just a very slow ice cube melting over mushrooms does.   

There are so many research institutions that are excited about Psilocybin, but they were all excited about the molecule, not the mushroom except until recently. But there are now institutions from Harvard, Stanford, University of California, Imperial College in England, so a massive amount of research as most of you know in the therapeutic benefits of Psilocybin. Just yesterday on clinicaltrials.gov, there were 77 registered clinical trials using Psilocybin. I have to check my time here. Yes. OK. 

So, I'm really interested in these meta-studies. This is one that particularly caught my attention. It’s a retroactive study of prisoners by the US Department of Health and Human Services. 480,000 people surveyed. Now, association is not causation, but it can be. They found a strong correlation, the authors did of 27% decreased odds of past larceny of theft, if you had one experience of Psilocybin, 22% decreased odds for property crime and 18% decreased odds for violent crime. Think about it. Psilocybin reduces crime in society. Psilocybin is nonaddictive.  And so, for those of you who have not journeyed on it, for us who are deeply experienced in this, it is common after a deep and strong dose of Psilocybin that the next day when you look at the mushrooms you say, “no way, I am not touching these for months!” Because you are processing. And the experience is so profound and moreover, even if you wanted to take them several days in a row, you build up a tolerance extremely quickly. So, day one would not have the same experiences of day two in terms of what is happening to you in perceived psycho-activity.   

Another study analyzed this and found a significant reduction in partner-to-partner violence. If one partner experienced the Psilocybin mushrooms, they there was a statistically significant reduction in violence. Psilocybin mushrooms reduce crime, reduce violence. This potentially a game changer for society. Now, there's a lot- of course, controlled clinical studies are important, and we have to be able to disambiguate all the cofactors. You know, is this association with the lifestyles? Or a subset of people that are using psychedelics that are just prone to less criminality? But the preponderance of evidence is steering towards this narrative that Psilocybin reduces crime. Like a pebble in a pond, if there is a person who has experienced violent trauma against themselves, it is not just themselves it is their immediate family, it is their neighbors, oh my gosh did you hear about so and so next-door, it emanates out through the cousins in the family, the villages and the cities and the state and country to the world truly. We are living in a time of massive trauma, Indigenous peoples to this very day. But the opposite is true. The benefit of Psilocybin in reducing trauma reducing violence and helping people heal also is a pebble in the pond. It is a pebble in the pond of positivity. And so, you hear about the person who had this amazing turnaround experience, they are a better person, they come to terms with the traumatic events, or they are working on a pathway to resolve their trauma. That becomes the story and the narrative. So, we, all of us who are using Psilocybin mushrooms we are pebbles in the pond of the ecology of consciousness. We can make a difference.   

So, I want to talk about micro-dosing. So, I came up with this formula around 2015 or 14 and it's a combination of Psilocybin lion's mane mushrooms and niacin, nicotinic acid, and I've been working a lot with lion's mane mushrooms for many, many decades. There’s a lot of great research on it on the regeneration of myelin, in this research on the presence of myelin in neurons in treating Alzheimer's, Parkinson's. And I got really excited about this, and then I thought about niacin. Well, it was well-reported in the 60s and 70s that if you want to come down from a bad trip, you take niacin. It was common knowledge and even my brother John told me about this. He had the federalies in Columbia coming up the mountainside and they took a bunch of niacin and immediately came down. They would probably come down anyhow, I think. But in any event, I said they did not quite get it right. I think niacin potentiates Psilocybin in a micro-dose. The idea being that the vasodilator, meaning more blood flow. If you take niacin, in about 15 minutes you will itch and get red. I thought by stimulating the end points of the peripheral nervous system, neuropathy shows up as a tingling of the fingers and toes, but if you can get a dilating effect from niacin, then you can deliver the neurogenic compounds, Psilocybin and the active ingredient of the lion's mane to the endpoint of the nervous system. Moreover, because of the itching and flushing effect if you are to take not a 100 mg of niacin but maybe a gram and take 10 times more Psilocybin so you could get high it would be aversive. It would be like the antabuse with alcoholics. So, it would then allow them, for hopefully for the FDA to approve this, because this has such an adverse reaction from trying to misuse a micro-dose into macro-dose. That this would prevent Psilocybin from being used at high doses and then micro-dosing again you’re not feeling and effect. So, this is the rational that I had coming up with this formula. Folks, I never suspected it would turn out as well as it did.  

So, the hypothesis that I had, it was speculative but to give credit where it is due, James Fadiman, the father of micro-dosing, let me actually put that back into context. In iIdigenous cultures, from Mesoamerica to Europe, it is very common for foragers to taste the mushrooms they find as they forage. It is a natural consequence. I think all foragers do this but many of you can relate to this. And so, by taking what we knew with liberty cap mushrooms in the 70s. If you took just a few the liberty caps, then they would jump out of the landscape, you would have better pattern recognitions and you could memory map the shape of the mushrooms and then look out at the environment and they would sort of jump out at you. So, it was a useful way of enhancing the discoveries.  

James Fadiman came up with the Fadiman protocol, which is a micro-dose. And it’s one day on, two days off, and one day on, and then you repeat. I thought well, I grow a lot of mycellium in culture and they take time to divide. Cells take time to divide. I thought to myself by having the stimulus of four days on and two or three days off, so it doesn’t normalize, so you re-sensitize. That that will build the neurogenic pathway, allowing the nerves to regrow. That was also my hypothesis.  

So here is the dosage ranges using Psilocybe cubensis. One dry grams, ten milligram. Low dose, medium dose, and high dose. Our survey we found that 72% of the participants who were in that 1/10 to 1/3 a gram. And we partnered with Quantified Citizen, who developed app for Apple devices, a Droid device app is coming out, and it is at microdose.me and we have 14,000 participants who are surveying what their micro-dose is, what they are taking, are they using it with chocolate, or lion's mane, niacin? How often are they taking it? Also goes into your age, income level, all these demographics. To try to characterize because my partner and I had many conversations, and she would say the problem is that they only look at 100, 50 people but what if we looked at thousands of people would we receive signal from the noise? This is something, this is all vetted through the boards to make sure they are ethical. And so, we have now published our research about two weeks ago in Nature Scientific Reports it’s in the top 1% of all articles published in nature and physics and top 1% in Scientific Reports this is interesting because there was criticism that there was no placebo, but this is an observational study how you do do a placebo in an observational study? Placebos are done in control studies with cause and effect with the drug and then a placebo. This is asking people to self-report.  We do agree that there could be a bias, response bias because we found in the survey that people who were more depressed were more motivated to micro-dose. We had over 4000 people who were non-micro-dosers with 4000 people that were micro-dosers we were surprised that so many non- micro-dosers would go to microdose.me to also report their activity. It was a very nice balanced data set and we found interestingly major observational trends. Again, these are self-reported.   

We have a second paper that we have submitted and the question about placebo is very well discussed you might say as well as expectancy bias. In this study we found with the mood in mental health on the PANAS and DASS schedules there was a mass reduction in the report of depression and anxiety. Hugely significant that people who micro-dose with Psilocybin in any form had a reduction in depression and anxiety. An improvement in positive mood and reciprocal but not a significant reduction in negative mood, or the amplitude of which. This was okay. We still have this problem, disambiguating what is going on here. Is it people have a proclivity to micro-dose, they feel active in their treatment? We have the placebo effect without a control study you do not know but we thought, what in our microdose.me study is there something that would be independent of the placebo argument. And we found something truly extraordinary.  

It was based on the tap test for Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, traumatic brain injury, and dementia. Parkinson is an example, there was no increase in this tap test, which is alternating fingers, this can be finger to thumb but because of the iPhone and the app that had been developed we did a specific test for the iPhone so that you can have a double tap alternating back and forth but how many times can you tap in 10 seconds. So, we had everybody including the non-micro-dosers who participated, thousands of people engage in the tap test. All this data was blind to us, we had about eight co-authors on this. We looked at age-related neuropathy. We looked at people under 55 and over. People unfortunately your neurological health declines as you get older. Over 55 taking Psilocybin in any form, there was a significant although not that greatly significant, increase in test results.  

We started carving into this more deeply and found out something really amazing. When you took the stackers, that is the people using niacin and lion's mane and Psilocybin micro-dosing, away from the general population that use Psilocybin in any form, the chart you see on the left became insignificant and in fact the significance was because over the age of 55, using niacin Psilocybin and lion's mane, but the group that use those was so strong in the signal that it made the other population look significant but not that significant.  I ask you, I ask anyone who is a critic or skeptic what placebo could code for increasing the tap test in a population of 55-plus-year-olds? It would be a very unique placebo. In fact, it's almost irrational to presume it is a placebo. That is because we believe there is a cycle motor benefit. And I want to show you the cellular data giving evidence for this behavioral data. These tap testers went from 43 taps to 73 taps in 30 days. The data speaks for itself there is something going on here, a psycho-motor benefit. We think it is related to neuro-generation. And this is just the beginning, folks. We are just opening up the door to this. 

So, I want to end talking about the consumption of mushrooms by primates. I looked into this a number of years ago. There are 22 primates that are known to consume mushrooms as food. Well 23, when you add humans, we’re primates. So here are the Goeldi’s monkey, consumes 12 times its body weight. That's a phenomenal number of- Americans consume may be 3 pounds of mushrooms per year. Can you imagine consuming 12 times your body weight in mushrooms?   

So, there is a long and interesting history in the co-evolution of primates in the consumption and identification of mushrooms that are helpful and edible. Well, this is why I think we need to re-examine the stoned ape theory. This is not a theory; it is a hypothesis which I talk about a lot, but Terrence McKenna and Dennis McKenna came up with this. Definitely a stoner kind of conversation. But many of the greatest scientists in history have been made fun of and mocked. We know a lot of examples like Galileo and Copernicus, a lot of scientists are made fun of, and we find out later they were way ahead of their time.   

So, there was a sudden increase in the cranium, in the brain. About 2 million years ago, and then 200,000 years ago homosapiens suddenly appear. Terrence postulated with Dennis that our brains became larger and smarter and became better at survival which gave us a competitive edge with Homo erectus and the Neanderthals. We still have some of their DNA.  And many of you do also if you go to your 23 and Me test you can see your lineage with the androphile DNA but this is interesting because now we have the cellular data and I think we should re-examine with Dennis and Terrence, who were ridiculed for this. We are experiencing massive climate changes they did, and this is an image by Alex Gray and the elocution of thought, the bonding. When the primate ancestors were walking across the plains, here's an animation from my friend. Thank you, Louis, for this. Primates come out of savanna, look for poop and footprints, these mushrooms are growing out of the poop of ungulates, and you consume this. You share this with your friend and your family and suddenly in 20 minutes you begin this amazing experience. You have this shared experience of a super consciousness.  Suddenly you see yourself in the context of the ecosystem. Stimulating neurons to grow.  

And so, we I think are at a time critical in the evolution of the human species. I think Psilocybin can help us evolve into a new species. We are not the Homo sapiens of 200,000 years ago. We better not be. Look at where we are today, it is time for a quantum leap in the evolution of the human species into new species that celebrates our diversity, protects our ecosystems, that acknowledges Indigenous wisdom, because things that Psilocybin teaches us is the unanimity of being. That we share this Earthship together and we have a responsibility to protect it. 

And the thing about Psilocybin mushrooms that is warming to my heart is a bridge across cultures and continents literally. Psilocybin mushrooms, 116 species that are active in the genus and they grow from Madagascar to the Arctic to the tips of Chile to northern Europe throughout the subtropics. These are all over the place. So, humans have had ready access to Psilocybin for a long time. It is time for us to unify in our mission as Earth citizens to protect the ecosystem that has given us birth and protect the heritage of our ancestors and protect the future of our descendants.   

So, I like to say that chance favors the Psilocybin mind, it certainly has helped me, and I want to welcome you all aboard the starship. Let us journey together we need you. The paradigm shift is now most importantly to be kind, be courageous. Let's be stronger together. Let us be respectful to each other. Let's act at a higher level. Let us not throw spears at each other. Let's extend the hand of friendship. To be able to help heal us. And if we can heal our ecology of consciousness through mycology, I think we will have a much better chance for our collective future, so I want to thank CIIS and all of you.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
Podcast production is supervised by Kirstin Van Cleef at CIIS Public Programs. Audio production is supervised by Lyle Barrere at Desired Effect. The CIIS Public Programs team includes Kyle DeMedio, Alex Elliott, Emlyn Guiney, Jason McArthur, and Patty Pforte. If you liked what you heard, please subscribe wherever you find podcasts, visit our website ciis.edu, and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 
 
CIIS Public Programs commits to use our in-person and online platforms to uplift the stories and teachings of Black, Indigenous, and other people of color; those in the LGBTQIA+ community; and all those whose lives emerge from the intersections of multiple identities.  

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