[narrator] There's a feeling.
The pulse of eternal knowledge.
When you sense the oneness...
you are with us.
We brought life to Earth.
You can't see us,
but we flourish all around you.
Everywhere.
In everything.
And even inside you,
whether you believe in us
or not.
From your first breath to your last,
in darkness and in the light,
we are the oldest and youngest.
We are the largest and smallest.
We are the wisdom of a billion years.
We are creation.
We are resurrection,
condemnation, and regeneration.
We are mushrooms.
Mushrooms are very clandestine and very much the trickster.
So, they're hiding from you all the time.
We're in Agarikon territory now.
There're some big living Snags up here.
It's always interesting
and exhilarating to be in the old growth forest,
but not always rewarding
In accomplishing our mission
to find a new Agarikon strain,
but nevertheless,
it beats being in the office.
Fungi are the grand molecular decomposers of nature.
Now, what does that mean? Well,
they break down wood,
and here I'm laying in the forest.
I haven't peeked yet,
but here's a piece of wood
laying down on the ground.
If I was laying down on the ground and I died,
fungi would leap up to recycle me.
Well, that's the way of nature.
Mushrooms represent rebirth,
rejuvenation, regeneration.
Fungi generate soil that gives life.
The task that we face today
is to understand the language of nature.
My mission is to discover
the language of nature of the fungal networks
that communicate with the ecosystem,
and I believe nature is intelligent.
The fact that we lack
the language skills to communicate with nature
does not impugn the concept that nature's intelligent.
It speaks to our inadequacy for communication.
lf we don't get our act together
and come in commonality and understanding
with the organisms that sustain us today,
not only will we destroy those organisms,
but we will destroy ourselves.
Mushroom. It's not like a vegetable,
and It's not like a animal, but it's somewhere in between.
The fungus is its own kingdom altogether.
There's over 1.5 million species.
That's six times more than plants.
Of all those species of fungi,
about 20,000 produce mushrooms,
and mushrooms come in an incredible diversity
of shapes and sizes and colors and lifestyles.
There are even bioluminescent mushrooms.
A lot of people are afraid of mushrooms.
People associate mushrooms and fungi-- you know, mold--
with death and decay, which makes sense.
You know, there's a lot of fear
because of fungi's role in the cycle of life.
They decompose dead and dying organisms
and move all those nutrients back into the cycle.
They kind of are at the very end of stuff,
but they're also at the beginning.
[Michael Pollan] Once you start working with mushrooms,
you get drawn in.
A really important difference between plants and fungi
is that plants have evolved to catch your eye.
When a tomato gets red,
it is saying, "Hey, I'm ready. Come get me."
The mushrooms don't give a shit.
They're doing their own thing, and a lot of them are hiding.
Every time you pick up a mushroom,
you are faced with the omnivore's dilemma.
Do I know enough to eat this?
Should I eat this?
Will this kill me?
And that's one of the reasons why
people are freaked out about mushrooms, because yeah,
there are ones that can kill you.
There are some that'll take out your liver or your kidneys,
but to be honest with you,
there's berries in the woods that can kill you too.
So, it's really a matter of knowing your mushrooms.
There's a huge subculture of mycophiles,
of people who are fascinated with mushrooms.
They hunt mushrooms together, and they eat mushrooms together,
and they're sort of bloated pleasure seekers
with a scientific bent.
You know, really my kind of crowd.
[Gary Lincoff] This is a tricholoma.
[Bone] Grifola frondosa.
[Lincoff] This is Cortinarius [indistinct].
[Bone] Agaricus bisporus.
That's a Cladonia lichen.
[Bone] So I started attending these festivals and forays
and learning more and more.
It changed the way I saw everything.
Mushrooms actually were the window by which
I came to understand nature in a deeper way.
[Stamets] lf we didn't have fungi,
we would get this buildup
of plant matter that would choke the Earth.
They really are the key.
They break down plant life and make it usable
for new plant life and for animal life.
[Bone] They are the digestive tracts of the forest.
One of the lifestyles of fungi is as decomposers,
called saprobes or rotters, if you want.
The yeasts and molds used
In making beer and wine and cheese
are all saprobes.
That's actually a penicillin mold
in Gorgonzola and Roquefort.
Bourbon is fungi-fermented corn.
But this ability to break things down
is a talent, if you will,
that can be harnessed
to help us deal with some of our problems like pollution.
These rotters,
they can break down anything that's natural.
That's what they've evolved to do.
Anything that's hydrocarbon-based,
so that includes stuff like oil spills,
pollutant problems.
That's kind of the truth of it.
[Stamets] I was a part of this experiment.
There were four piles saturated with diesel
and other petroleum waste.
One was a control pile,
one pile was treated with enzymes,
one pile treated with a bacteria,
and our pile, we inoculated with mushroom spores.
The fungi absorbs the oil,
so the fungi is producing enzymes for oxidases
that break carbon-hydrogen bonds.
These are the same bonds that hold hydrocarbons together.
So the fungi becomes saturated with oil.
And then when we returned six weeks later,
all the taros were removed.
All the other piles
were dead, dark and stinky.
We came back to our pile.
It was covered with hundreds of pounds
of oyster mushrooms.
Some of these mushrooms are very happy mushrooms.
They were very large,
by showing how much nutrition that they could obtain.
But something else happened,
which was an epiphany in my life.
They sporulated.
The spores attract insects.
Birds then came, bringing in seeds,
and our pile became an oasis of life.
[Bone] Mushrooms are the fruiting bodies of fungi.
So the mushroom is like the apple.
The bulk of the organism is growing underground
and it's composed of these long threads
and these threads grow one cell at a time
and then they branch and rebranch,
growing in every direction they can,
even three-dimensionally.
And that mass of threads is called a mycelium.
When a stick falls onto the ground...
you pull it up...
and there's mycelium.
It is virtually everywhere.
A mycelium has more networks
than our brain has neural pathways,
and works in much the same way,
with electrolytes, electrical pulses.
They're the most common species on Earth.
They're everywhere.
Just to give you an idea
of how much fungi are in the forest,
what you're walking through is about 300 miles of fungi
under every footstep that you take.
And that's all over the world.
And they form these massive links.
It's like a big web just growing through the forest.
Mycelium that can grow out even just this big
can have trillions,
literally trillions, of end branchings.
Almost everyone knows about the computer internet.
The mycelium shares the same network design.
[PollanI]Trees are communicating, using the mycelium as pathways.
They're connecting one tree to another.
They're using the mycelium too to feed one another.
In other words,one tree can swap nutrients with another tree,
using mycelium as the passageway.
[Simard] So we often
think of kin recognition as an animal behavior.
Humans, you know, we love our babies.
We know it's our baby,
and we're going to look after that baby.
Well, we never thought that plants could do that,
but we're finding in our research
that plants can recognize their own kin.
So these mother trees recognize their kin
through their mycorrhizal networks.
The mother tree
and the baby seedlings are sending signals,
talking to each other.
When they're connected together
and carbon is moving between plants,
the trees are supporting the weaker ones.
If she Knows that there's pests around, and that she's under danger,
she will increase her competitive environment towards her own babies,
so that they regenerate further away.
It's a magical thing.
And this could not happen without the fungi.
[Stamets] I'm not this super-idealist tree hugger.
I do hug trees occasionally. I do confess to that,
but I was a logger. I cut the woods.
Damn, we got a two-for-one on that one.
Cutting down these trees and we're going to let them rot,
but we're letting them rot with a purpose.
We're letting them rot with shiitake mushrooms,
which are delicious and medicinal... Yes!
September of '74,
Paul was working as a logger
In Darrington.
I went up to visit him one weekend,
and we were out walking in the woods,
and I started showing him all these mushrooms, you know?
He says, "What are those?"
I said, "You're looking at mushrooms,"
_..for the first time.
We came around a corner and there's this purple mushroom.
I'd never seen one like that before.
It was just like this huge epiphany,
like... Whoo-whoo!
You know? And that's where it began.
He just never stopped.
These are old red belted polypores.
Elegant polyporus. It's got a furry stem.
This is a delicious shrimp russula mushroom,
edible and choice,
and it grows here in the old growth forest.
[Pollan] It's rare in science you have such powerful amateurs.
The meaning of the word "amateur" is a lover,
and he loves his mushrooms.
And he's proven that amateurs can do credible, important research.
And that used to be the case.
The 19th century obviously,
you know, was full of great amateur naturalists,
Darwin being one of them.
[Harman] He's handed over to this universal consciousness.
That's where genius comes from.
Every magnificent thing
that humans have ever achieved
comes from that place.
[Paul Stamets] I grew up in a small town called Columbiana, Ohio.
Very conservative, very religious.
And my brother John went to Yale,
and my brother Bill went to Cornell.
SO we were an academic family.
But I had a severe stuttering habit
that greatly interfered with my ability to express myself.
I went through six years of speech therapy.
I could not speak a single sentence
without stuttering profusely,
and nothing in speech therapy could help me.
I couldn't look at people in their eyes.
So all my life, I stared at the ground.
Anybody came up to me, I'd stare at the ground.
I found fossils and mushrooms.
[wind blowing]
[narrator] We are all of the stars.
My kingdom was born from the heavens
four and a half billion years ago.
We are the pioneers.
We climbed out of the sea to create the fertile soil,
and set the stage for all of life.
[P. Stamens] In South Africa, in the sediments of lava,
they have found fungus-like organisms,
mycelium fossils in the lava 2.4 billion years old.
This is the oldest record of a multicellular organism on Earth.
This year another fossil was found in the sediments of Brazil.
It's 113 million years old
and it's a perfectly shaped mushroom.
We divided from fungi about 650 million years ago.
One branch led to fungi.
The other branch led to animals.
We chose a path of encirculating our nutrients in sort of a sac, the stomach.
The mycelium remained underground,
externally digesting its nutrients.
Biodiversity surged...
until we had these great cataclysmic extinction events,
and when the asteroids impacted the Earth, bam!
Enormous amounts of debris was jettisoned in the atmosphere.
Sunlight was cut off.
Plants die, animals die...
and fungi inherited the Earth.
From these extinction events, there's one lesson.
Those organisms that paired with fungi survived.
We are more closely related to fungi
than we are to any other kingdom.
What this means Is that we are descendants of mycelium.
Mycelium is the mother of us all.
[Pollan] Living creatures like fungi are intelligent
in the sense that they respond to their environment,
they seek out food, and they defend themselves.
They solve problems, and that's intelligence.
[Bone] A mycelium can theoretically live forever
as long as it has food to grow into,
which is why the oldest and largest organism on Earth
is a fungus.
It lives on top of a mountain in Oregon.
It's like thousands of acres,
and It's thousands of years old.
The mushroom is the organ of sexual reproduction
for the spore of the fungus.
Fungi don't have seeds. They have spores.
The spores are extremely tiny,
little lightweight gene-carrying systems.
When they land on something they can eat,
they break down the food that they're on,
and then reabsorb the nutrients
because you need to move on
and find another place where there's food.
The mushroom releases zillions of spores into the atmosphere.
There's so many spore.
I mean, you take one breath...
you just breathed in ten fungal spore.
So they are everywhere. We've evolved with them.
[Harman] When you see what mushrooms do,
it's kind of spooky in the most wonderful way.
I mean, they correct everything on Earth.
They support life,
they convert life,
they carry life.
They're remarkable beings.
If humans become extinct...
what's the next species that will take over the Earth?
Maybe mycelium already are the dominant species,
not just because they're the most common species on Earth.
They're everywhere.
I mean, you look at humans. There's seven billion of us,
but we're just one little creature wandering around,
Incredibly vulnerable,
and don't survive easily if we're assaulted.
[reporter] Hurricane Harvey has started to make landfall
here on the Texas coast.
More than 30,000 people are without power,
and things are only expected to get worse.
[reporter 2] Puerto Rico has had the worst storm
in about a century,
and it's struggling
to Understand the new normal
of months ahead without basic services.
[man] Climate change is one
of the biggest threats to our present world,
to the future of our planet.
[Simard] CO2 is our biggest greenhouse gas.
As plants photosynthesize,
they literally inhale CO2 while exhaling oxygen.
CO2 is what plants photosynthesize,
and they take that carbon, and they put it in different places.
They put it in their leaves, in their trunks,
but they put 70% of it, we're finding, below ground.
And the root systems trade that carbon for nutrients.
The carbon ends up in the fungal cell walls, where it's stored.
This fuels the microbial community
and all the other parts of the food web,
like the mites and nematodes,
and they start cycling nutrients
through that eating process.
So the fungi are really important
in stabilizing carbon in soils.
Once the carbon is stable,
it can stay there stored for thousands of years.
We know, for example,
that carbon can move from plant to plant,
and it evens out the distribution of carbon in that system.
They're working really hard.
If we maintain the plant,
the forest, and the natural fungal community,
we've got a natural engine
that's just storing carbon below ground.
So it's essential.
You know, it's there for us, right?
It's right in front of us.
[narrator] We do more than make mushrooms.
We have the ability to do so much more than just breakdown matter.
Like the fruit of our labor,
most of you have only scratched the surface of our usefulness.
We are the changers.
[P. Stamets] I was 14 or 15 years of age, I believe,
when my brother John gave me a book...
called Altered States of Consciousness.
And within that book,
Andy Weil was referenced
on expanded consciousness,
and I got really excited.
I was going to charismatic Christian revival meetings
and seeing people being saved,
but it kind of was cool from my perspective
that they're achieving this altered state of consciousness.
So I thought that was part of all the same idea here.
I really owe credit to Andrew Weill.
[Andrew Weil] I think he read one of my early books
in which I wrote about mushroom hunting
and psychedelic mushrooms
and made some reference to medicinal mushrooms as well.
It was like a turning point.
You know, I certainly was awakened.
Other people were thinking about expanding consciousness.
And so I gave this book to my friend Ryan Snyder.
So Ryan took it home and a few days later,
I said, "Ryan, where's my book?"
And he told me his dad had burned it.
I said, "Burned my book’?"
Rather than giving it back to me or calling my parents,
he actually took the initiative to burn this book.
I owe Ryan Snyder's father a deep debt of gratitude
because that single act galvanized my interest
saying, "If this is so powerful
to cause a person to do such a bizarre act,
then I should examine what this subject's all about."
[Charles Grob] Human existence on this Earth goes back
an extraordinarily long period of time,
most of which we have no identifiable information.
It's entirely plausible,
given that the indigenous people all around the world
know intimately all the plant life,
and will know the different combinations of plant life
that our prehistoric ancestors,
they had come across the plants that do alter consciousness.
[Dennis McKenna] In about two million years,
the human cortex tripled in size,
and the brain exploded over a ridiculously short span
of evolutionary time.
Two million years is nothing when it comes to evolution.
What triggered that?
[P. Stamens] In the late 1970s,
Terrence McKenna and his brother Dennis McKenna
were the first that proposed the Stoned Ape hypothesis.
It is Known now that 22 primates--
23, including us-- consume mushrooms.
And the idea Is our ancestors, they came out of the trees
and went across the savannah,
would be tracking animals
that were pooping.
Well, in the subtropics,
the most common mushroom
coming out of those cow patties
is Psilocybe cubensis, a potent magic mushroom.
[McKenna] One thing that mushrooms
and other psychedelics do reliably
is they induce a synesthesia.
synesthesia Is the perception of one sensory modality
In another,
hearing colors, for example,
or seeing music.
You have these profound experiences
and you have to put yourself in their place
and imagine what the impact of such an experience
must have been on an early hominid.
These magic mushrooms open up
the floodgates of information you receive.
Basically, you can think of it as a contact fluid
between the synapses within the brain-- Wow!
What a competitive advantage,
especially if you're working
with a geometry of weapons,
or having to put together something
that will give you a better chance of survival.
The fact that this happened not once, not twice,
but millions upon millions of times
over millions of years
Is a very plausible explanation
for the tripling of the brain two million years ago.
[McKenna] It's not so simple to say that they ate psilocybin mushrooms
and suddenly the brain mutated.
I think it's more complex than that,
but I think it was a factor.
It was like a software
to program this neurologically modern hardware to think,
to have cognition, to have language
because language is essentially synesthesia.
Language is just association
with apparently meaningless sound
except that it's associated with the complex of meaning.
A great deal of the brain's real estate, you might say,
is devoted to the generation
and/or the comprehension of language.
Those neural structures are not found in our ancestors.
That's a human trait to have so much physiology
devoted to generating and understanding language,
and that's a reflection of evolutionary advance
that made us what we are.
[P. Stamens] I couldn't get these mushrooms for the longest time.
When I was in Ohio,
I actually purchased a bag of magic mushrooms,
but I had no guide.
I had no recommendations for how much to consume.
So I had a bag about this big, so I thought,
“Well, that's probably one dose."
So I consumed the bag!
Now, for those of you who don't know,
this is like ten times more
than you probably need to consume.
It was a warm Summer day,
and there was a beautiful big, big tree,
an oak tree,
and then I noticed
the black clouds on the horizon,
and I realized there was a storm coming.
And I thought, "This is great.
There's great visual. The storm coming."
And I thought,
“Fm going to climb to the top of the tree."
So I'm starting to feel the effects.
I'm getting waves where the air becomes a liquid,
and...
you'd have this distortion field go through the visual landscape.
I've never seen that before,
and go, "Oh wow, this is what they were talking about."
And I see the boiling clouds are coming closer,
but they're looking angry now.
And then the lightning strikes would go...
[imitating lightning strikes]
and then all these geometrical fractals
would emanate out of the lightning strikes.
And pretty soon,
I have these overlying mosaics
of mathematical patterns
and geometric figures of multiple colors
that are swimming in this field of vision
that these waves were flying through.
I've never in my life seen anything like that before.
Wind's increasing and the rains would come,
and I became extremely scared.
And then also I realize I'm on the top of a hill,
I got a lightning storm in the tallest tree.
Not the best place to be
when you're going to choose
a spiritual experience.
And so I held onto the tree
for dear life,
and that tree was my pillar,
back into the core of the Earth.
And I felt secure as long as I held onto the tree.
Lightning strikes all around. Thunderclaps.
One second between the lightning strike and a thunderclap.
You knew it was coming closer and closer.
I was terrified that I wouldn't survive,
And through this "terr-rific’ experience,
terrifying and terrific at the same time,
I'm up in this tree and I'm saying,
"Well, what should I focus on?"
I said, "Well, Stamets, you're not stupid.
But you stutter all the time.”
And so I thought I need to stop stuttering.
And so I said to myself, "Stop stuttering.
Stop stuttering now."
A little inner voice in my head.
"You hear me? Stop stuttering now."
I started saying that.
"Stop stuttering now. Stop stuttering now."
Hundreds, hundreds, hundreds, thousands of times.
After the storm had passed,
I came down from the tree drenched,
soaked to the bone,
you know, in love with life,
with nature, in love with that tree.
That tree was so important to me.
And I went home,
and I went to bed.
I didn't see anybody.
And the next morning I woke up,
and there was a really attractive lady
that I liked a lot,
but I could never stare at her in the eyes,
because I was afraid to stutter and embarrass myself.
So better to avoid social contact than have social contact,
even though I was really attracted to her.
And she liked me,
but I didn't Know what to do with it,
with that tension.
And so she was walking past me,
and she looked at me,
and she said, "Good morning, Paul."
And for the first time
I looked her straight in the eye
and I said, "Good morning. How are you?"
And I stopped stuttering in one session.
[electronic rap playing in the truck]
This is the newest thing my employees are listening to.
My employees are my best source of new music.
We love loud music for the mushrooms in the laboratories.
It causes everyone to be synchronized.
We have a lot of nonverbal Communication in laboratories.
You're not allowed to talk.
Your mouth spreads bacteria.
So we try to minimize talking.
So a lot of it is done by gestures and knowing.
So, why not have it with loud music?
My dad was a businessman.
I swore I'd never become one,
but I wanted to be independent,
so I created a little mail-order business
in order to supply myself and other people who had like interest in mushrooms.
When we started the business,
it was extremely difficult back then,
and we didn't have the resources.
We were putting little advertisements
In Organic Gardening magazine
back when there was only three television stations.
I invented this business
so I could buy equipment
for my laboratory wholesale.
Amazing to me, we have nearly 100 employees
and thousands of media outlets.
These mushrooms were so powerful to me
that I realized that I wanted to study them.
This mushroom that's Known as reishi, or lingzhi,
the mushroom of immortality.
And it's one of the most amazing and interesting mushrooms
that we've ever grown.
This mushroom helps the immunity of not only people, but bees.
Up this hill here,
we have a quarter section of property,
160 acres,
and we have a large mycological experiment.
We planted 33,000 trees,
half with mycorrhizal fungi attached to the roots,
half without,
and this is year nine.
SO, we are putting into an Excel spreadsheet,
or have put in 1,100 trees
to compare the treatments.
I came into a chunk of change
from licensing one of my patents,
and so when the political climate of the USA changed
to be adverse to environmentalists,
we bought land in Canada.
[Pollan] I think the fact
that he didn't come up on a conventional academic pathway
Is part of the reason he's as willing
to really explore ideas that...
are not on anyone else's radar.
[P. Stamens] I'm really honored that I discovered a few things
that no one else had yet discovered.
So, I have now five patents on entomopathogenic fungi.
These are fungi that infect insects,
and in particular, termites.
The biggest problem in the commercialization
of biopesticides from fungi
has been the spore repellency property.
The insects avoid the spores of these fungi.
In fact, SO concerned are termites
that if a worker goes out and encounters this fungus,
when the worker returns back to the nest,
guards, they'll capture that worker
that's infected with these spores,
take the worker to a graveyard,
and they cut off the worker's head,
and then the two guards commit suicide.
They're trying to protect the queen and the nest
and the colony from infection.
And I discovered something
that no one else had ever reported
in the scientific literature.
I found a biological switch that delayed sporulation,
and then the insects were not repelled.
But they were super attracted,
which means one finds the fungus now, and others follow,
and it ends up being a Trojan horse.
The same fungi now are taken past the guards,
given to the queen,
the queen feeds it to the brood.
The whole colony becomes mummified with this mycelium,
and, whoosh! The whole colony is infected and dies.
And then the spore repellency properties
protects your house from subsequent invasions.
This is a huge discovery.
And then I tried it with carpenter ants,
with fire ants, fungus gnats,
and then mosquitoes,
and now werre working with bed bugs,
and we've had successes across the board.
The entire ecosystem is infused with fungi.
So, I see these deep reservoirs of the ecology all around us.
[narrator] In a world of invention,
the answer to our greatest problems
may be hiding right under our feet.
[Bone] There are mushrooms
that have been used in Western medicine.
Penicillin, for example,
is a really effective antibiotic.
Before it was synthesized, during the Civil War,
when a soldier would get wounded,
they would slap a piece of moldy bread on his wound
to benefit from those antibiotic properties,
so he wouldnt get an infection.
[P. Stamens] Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1927.
The problem was that
they couldn't find strains
that could be commercialized,
that could produce enough of it
in a commercially economic fashion.
We fast forward,
and in 1942,
a group of researchers in Chicago went shopping,
and a lab assistant found a cantaloupe that was rotting
with a beautiful golden mold,
and from that strain,
we got the first hyper-producing strain of penicillium.
Penicillin literally saved
tens of thousands of soldiers’ lives.
The Brits had this,
but the Germans and the Japanese did not.
It's been suggested that the discovery
of this hyper-producing strain of penicillin
was a significant influence in winning World War Il.
Alexander Fleming then received the Nobel Prize in 1945,
in recognition of the huge impact
that penicillin had on human health.
[Bone] Here's how medicinal mushrooms are thought to work:
A fungus will produce all kinds of enzymes--
it's like a chemical warfare--
in order to fight off competition for food,
like other microbes,
other fungi, bacteria, virus.
That's what makes antibiotics work.
Chemicals that are produced by fungus,
like the one that penicillin is made from,
the fungus produces it
to kill bacteria that are competition,
and when we take penicillin, it kills our bacteria.
[Weil] There's a long tradition of using mushrooms
as medicines in East Asia,
especially in Korea, China, and Japan.
They appear to be able to enhance
and protect the body's innate defensive mechanisms.
The uses for them fill niches
for which we really don't have anything in Western pharmacology.
In Western medicine, all of our effort
is on identifying agents of disease
and eliminating them.
That has its place,
but we do almost nothing
about supporting the good.
[P. Stamets] Shamans would treat patients
and the diseases were thought to be
elements of the spirit world.
Well, physicians today treat infections,
and their spirits are bacteria,
or a pathogenic, or viruses.
So, whether the shamans called them spirits
or whether the scientists call them microbes,
with the invention of microscopes
we get to see the microscopic universe and landscape
that we thunder upon with every footstep.
The fact that these fungal networks
are seemingly invisible,
but then represent themselves
In a big flourishing mushroom
In a matter of a few days,
give us a window into the invisible landscape
underneath our feet.
Fungal networks have defended themselves
against vectors of disease for millions of years.
Viral pandemics occur periodically.
two percent of the world population died.
Millions upon millions of people.
I think everyone is aware of the threat of bioterrorism,
but few people may know that
Europeans were actively involved,
consciously or unconsciously,
in bioterrorism against indigenous peoples,
especially in the New World, in Meso-America.
They brought in diseases,
and when you're extremely sick,
you can't fight off an invader.
It's an irony of history that now,
the US government is interested
in protecting people from viral pandemics.
[man] Paul Stamets cultured numerous strains
in his lab, and prepared natural extract.
He then submitted samples
to the Defense Department's BioShield program for testing.
[P. Stamets] And Ironically,
I have a debt of gratitude
to Dick Cheney and George W. Bush.
It is vital that our nation discuss and address the threat
of pandemic flu now.
[P. Stamets] Their funding of that research
led to some very novel discoveries,
to which we're still elaborating today.
And what we know about these mycelium networks
is they're learning membranes.
They are self-learning and network-based organisms
that can share and store knowledge.
The mycelium is vaccinating itself
against pathogens in the ecosystem.
We can capitalize on this
because many of the same bacterial pathogens
that infect fungi, also can infect animals.
We have found novel molecules
highly active against pox viruses,
novel molecules highly active
against HPV, the human papillomavirus.
Many scientists are trying to come up
with the next antibiotic, the next penicillin,
but we have barely tapped into the fungal genome,
especially the mushroom form of fungi.
Think of it: our old-growth forests that contain these ancient fungi
are deep reservoirs
of potential compounds that can fight pandemic viruses.
We should save the old-growth forest as a matter of national defense.
[Weil] I recommend mushrooms
and mushroom products frequently to patients
and I teach other doctors about their uses.
Mushrooms have molecules not found elsewhere in nature.
There're some that have totally unusual properties
like Lion's Mane mushroom.
[P. Stamets] The Lion's Mane mushroom
is a globular cascading icicle-formed mushroom.
Tastes like lobster or shrimp when you cook it,
but a researcher in Japan by the name of Kara-Jishi
discovered in around 1993,
and I don't have the foggiest idea how you discover this,
but he discovered that this mushroom stimulates nerves to regrow
and he postulated it could be an effective treatment against Alzheimer's.
[Weil] Since we don't have anything for Alzheimer's
and since this Is nontoxic, we should test it.
Mushrooms are completely unusual organisms
and they're ignored by so many people
and yet they're a vital interface
between all forms of life.
[P. Stamets] At the University of Southern Florida,
a very interesting study came out.
Mice were trained to have a conditioned fear response
and so when there's a sound that is associated with a pain,
later on when they just heard the sound,
they cowered in fear.
When they treated the mice with psilocybin,
the compound of magic mushrooms,
the mice dissociated that link.
The mice overcame the fear-conditioned response.
[Sanchez-Ramos] We started with very low doses
to as high a dose as one milligram per kilogram.
Now what was interesting,
if you look at double-labeled cells,
in other words, the birth of new neurons,
we saw an increase in neurogenesis.
Neurogenesis literally means "neuro" for nerves
and "genesis," rebirth or beginning of.
The regrowing of neurons.
They were not using the same
neurological pathways they have in the past.
This is really exciting
because It means that the brain has a plasticity about it,
is able to heal, is able to grow.
It just needs the right compounds
to help it develop new neurological pathways.
We're all getting older.
We'll all suffer some degree of dementia.
What compounds can we take
that enhances and preserves neurogenesis?
I Know many, many people
who would not dare take a psilocybin mushroom trip,
but the concept of them taking one 50th of a dose,
something like that, and it causes neurogenesis
that might make them smarter or in a better mood or happier?
That's a whole different subject.
[narrator] We are on a never-ending search for partners,
life-affirming relationships,
or at the very least,
nourishment for the next leg of our journey.
We have flourished side by side with your species
symbiotically for centuries.
[Harman] Many shamanic cultures
relied on mushrooms
for their transcendental experiences.
This is pre-religion all over the world.
It was all about the individual's connection
to the spiritual world,
or the mystery that is our context for living.
These are ancient artifacts from the Mayan culture.
These are called mushroom stones.
This may be the largest collection
of mushroom stones in the world.
The Mayan culture was very mycophillic
and they revered mushroom stones for divination,
for spirituality.
Also to be able to predict incoming armies,
and how to strategize against them.
A great ethnomycologist by the name of R. Gordon Wasson
came up with the phrase mycophilia,
the love of mushrooms that the Mayans shared.
Mycophobia is a classically--
the English had a fear of mushrooms
because they're enigmatic.
You know, these mushrooms can get you high,
they can heal you, they can feed you, they can kill you.
And so that which is so powerful is naturally feared.
[Nicholas Cozzi] Wasson was an amateur mycologist,
a person who studies mushrooms
and was invited to participate in a ceremony by a curandera,
Maria Sabina in 1955.
He took these mushrooms
and had a psychedelic experience...
[P. Stamets] And when R. Gordon Wasson came out with this research
that was published in Life magazine in 1957...
that was basically a field guide to psilocybin mushrooms
delivered to tens of millions of Americans
on their doorstep, during the peak of the Cold War.
This then was quickly noticed by academics at Harvard
and other lvy League schools and then the cognoscenti,
including Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, and Dr. Andrew Weil.
Why do mushrooms produce molecules
that fit receptors in the human brain and body?
What does that say? What does that mean?
I mean, does that mean that we're supposed to be using these things?
Psychedelics during the '50s and '60s
were the cutting edge of psychiatric research.
There were remarkable studies
with very, very promising findings.
[Ross] Psychedelics became part of research in psychiatry for 30 years.
and there were several
very interesting indications that they were researched.
The best data was actually for alcoholism.
[Grob] We found that having a mystical experience
during the course of one session
was the strongest predictor of positive outcome,
meaning maintaining sobriety over the long follow-up period.
It was very impressive.
[Pollan] Some of these drugs,
they had "escaped the lab,” as the phrase goes.
Millions of people were using them
and you have to realize
that this was a radical force unleashed in the West.
[Timothy Leary] The kids who take psychedelics aren't going to fight your wars.
They're not going to join your corporations,
they wont buy it.
[Bill Richards] A lot was going on back in the '6Os.
It was a time of rapid cultural change.
There was irrational fears
about too much cultural change too fast.
President Nixon called Timothy Leary
the most dangerous man in America.
We must wage what I have called total war
against public enemy number one in the United States,
the problem with dangerous drugs.
When everyone says "shrooms" to me,
it invokes this whole idea
of using psilocybin mushrooms as a party drug,
They are so much more important than just getting high.
The movement to marginalize the major psychedelics
is incredibly complex.
I mean, it plugged into a counterculture movement,
an anti-war movement, an anti-establishment movement.
There are many, many forces that were at play.
[Richards] Somehow the fuse blew
and one of the victims was
the medical research with psychedelics.
There was a very irrational and anti-scientific climate
that was fueled even in government pamphlets,
really had distorted information
that was not scientifically accurate.
It was a bad trip, instant insanity.
[Ross] The research came to a halt in 1970.
War was declared on drugs.
The Controlled Substances Act was passed
and the research essentially was erased
from being taught in psychiatry.
[Richards] I think I may have the dubious distinction of being the last
to give psilocybin to a cancer patient
at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center.
And then the research became completely dormant.
In our evolution as a species,
we're at a point of coming to terms
with a major paradigm change.
A change in how we view what we call reality.
And that always evokes tension and fears.
The culture wants to cling to the old view of the universe.
[P. Stamets] You realize that you've been limited all this time
with your perspective of reality.
Had reality been known to you at this level early on,
how much more evolved would we be as beings?
A lot of people would be afraid of that.
This is very dangerous territory.
People want to give up the responsibility of being able to understand
and because they can't understand, then they have faith.
and they put their faith in other people
who say they can understand.
And I think it's a situation
that is ripe for a predatory relationship.
[Bob Jesse] Anyone who's had one of those experiences
in a country where it's not legal to have them
is stuck in this position
where something really precious...
and really giving a great gift to you
is not understood by the culture at large
and furthermore, puts you or other people or/and other people
at risk of prosecution.
And one response to that
is to get angry,
and to want to fight that.
And another response to it is to say,
We've just got to explain to people what's going on here.
And when people understand it,
then there will be accommodation and respect.
There are a number of elders living in the Bay Area
who've devoted some part of their career
in psychology or religious studies
who ended up being invited
to a small invitational conference at Esalen
called the Pacific Symposium on Psychedelic Drugs.
As we went around the room making introductions,
most of the people who were clinicians
were excitedly talking about
what kind of clinical trial they would run
If they could use one of these substances
to treat PTSD...
or to treat depression.
[Richards] We wrote the best design we could.
We submitted it to the FDA and they approved it.
This was 1999,
and it reactivated psychedelic research
after basically a 22-year dormancy in the United States.
It's like a Rip Van Winkle effect.
You know, it's waking up 20 years later.
The methodologies,
the questions that we can ask on so many different levels.
[Tony Head] I had been diagnosed with prostate cancer.
My diagnosis was so bad that...
You know, they weren't giving me any chance whatsoever.
[Judith Goedeke] My diagnosis was kidney cancer.
Finding out that you may want to get your affairs in order.
[Head] I first found out about the study
when my oncologist gave me a pamphlet.
He said, "Here's something that
might be able to help you with the anxiety."
And I was accepted into the study.
The most important thing
is to remember that you're always safe.
And a recommendation is that whatever is coming up,
that you allow it,
that you don't have to like it,
but you say okay,
rather than trying to run away from it.
Once a volunteer is enrolled in the study,
they're with us for the preparation,
the psilocybin sessions
and the integration follow-ups after.
I have been a guide for around 350 psilocybin sessions
and then about a thousand
of the preparatory and integration meetings.
Alright.
Okay, lift your head up.
It's really just about experiencing what comes up
as the psilocybin takes effect.
[Head] In the intense part of this journey,
this world and things that matter to most people,
family and all that,
that wasn't even what it was about.
They say anything mystical can't be explained.
It's something like that.
It's a feeling of such immense power
that you can't even imagine.
I've never felt anything like it before.
It was about being in a place of infinite space
and just being there.
[Griffiths] There's a experience of positive mood,
sometimes openheartedness, love,
a transcendence of time and space,
and then finally, it's thought to be ineffable.
People say, "I can't describe that experience."
[Goedeke] In my mind I said, "Okay, hold it.
If I give myself over to you...
can you promise me
that I will be in at least as strong a shape
as when I entered this room?"
And I felt a voice that I needed to heed.
"Do you think I would disrespect my own handiwork?"
This is the voice from on high saying,
"Do you think I would disrespect my child?"
And I felt so beautiful.
I felt like I have never felt before.
My sense of being loved,
of being worthy of love, of being cared for,
of being important to someone.
It's huge.
You're going into it, you're doing beautifully.
[Griffiths] One-third of individuals in the study
said it's the single most
spiritually significant experience of their lives.
About 70% say
it's among the five most personally meaningful experiences of their lives.
Then you say, "Well, so what does that mean?"
You know? And initially I thought,
I wonder if they don't have pretty dull lives.
But no, people would say,
you know, when my firstborn came into this world,
Il never forget that.
And life has never been the same since.
Or my father passed away. That was deeply moving to me.
I'm different now in the world.
They say, you know, it's kind of like that.
[Head] The most glorious part was that
it made me feel more comfortable with living,
you know, because, uh...
you're not afraid of dying.
[Griffiths] Frankly, I'm just a laboratory scientist
and I wasn't prepared for that.
[Richards] From the memory
of the transcendental state of consciousness,
many people report less anxiety, less depression,
less preoccupation with pain,
closer interpersonal relationships,
and perhaps most impressive,
they claim to have a loss of the fear of death.
It recalibrates how they see death.
[Anthony Bossis] It's been amazing hearing them talk about this idea of love.
Many of them spoke about
how nature itself is something like
this substance called love.
And having touched that,
They've recalibrated and reshaped how they die differently.
[Jesse] The Johns Hopkins psilocybin research team
has completed or has underway a total of nine studies
and it got the world's attention.
When we finally released the results of our first experiment
In a peer-reviewed scientific journal,
it was very gratifying to see
how the daily press responded to it.
A little bit of health news for you.
A single dose of psychedelic magic mushrooms
can make people with severe anxiety and depression
feel better for months.
[Richards] It changes the way they view themselves,
other people in the world...
from a single experience,
not Prozac that you have to keep taking day after day.
[Pollan] These are not chronic drugs,
and that's where most of the research
and development in Big Pharma goes.
The treatments that are being explored for psilocybin
involve one, two, maybe three pills.
That's tt.
That's not a very good business model.
You can't make a lot of money that way.
The core of this mystical experience Is, um...
Is a mystery, frankly.
It's the existential mystery
of what are we really doing here?
What's the meaning of all this?
and that is a very uplifting kind of experience to have.
[Richards] As a whole,
there's a sense of being part
of a larger network.
And somehow, that's more real after a mystical experience.
You feel that you really are connected
In some meaningful way
with every atom of the universe.
[Griffiths] From my perspective,
this core experience then forms
all of the religious, ethical and moral traditions.
I mean, that is the core of "Love thy neighbor as thyself."
If we don't get some of these priorities straight
with respect to how we treat other people,
how we treat our environment,
we're going to cease to exist.
I could see this as being critical
to the evolution of the species, frankly.
[P. Stamets] You wouldn't go hiking the Himalaya mountains
without any preparation.
Well, this is a journey.
These are sacraments and medicines
that should be treated with respect
and caution.
Consider it to be going to your own personal church.
You're going to sit in awe of the universe.
[Bossis] We have a new study, which is kind of remarkable.
It's work with religious leaders.
These are ordained clergy who have many traditions.
Christianity, Buddhism, Judaism, Hinduism.
Since these experiences are at the core
of the major religions,
why not bring in religious leaders
who spent their careers studying this landscape
to have the experience?
-[phone vibrating] -[Stamets] You guys hear that?
-You didn't? -[man] Vibrating?
Vibrating. Phone call was coming in.
There she goes.
Message from Mom.
Inbound message from Mother.
I think I had the best of all mothers.
My mother was extremely kind.
[cheering and applause]
So another mushroom empowers the immune system
and this is turkey tails.
and turkey tail mushrooms have also been used
for more than a thousand years.
This hit home to me very personally, in June of 2009
when my 84-year-old mother called me up
and said, "Paul,
I have something very serious to talk to you about."
She said, "My right breast is five times the size of my left.
I have six swollen lymph glands the size of walnuts,"
and her voice started shaking
and I'm not ashamed to admit that I started crying.
She had stage four breast cancer.
But then the doctor said, "You know,
you're too old to have radiation therapy.
You can't have your breasts removed.
But there's an interesting study on turkey tail mushrooms
at Bastyr Medical School.
You might want to try taking those."
And that's when my buddy goes,
"Well, my son's supplying those."
So she was put on Taxol and Herceptin, wonderful drugs.
And then she started taking
eight turkey tail capsules a day.
Four in the morning and four in the evening,
and that was in June of 2009.
And today, my mother has no detectable tumors.
And I'd like to bring my mother up.
You have to live through it to believe it.
Hey, by the way, thank you for giving birth to me.
I really appreciate that.
Oh, you haven't thanked me lately?
[P. Stamets] It has been reported in literature that
medicinal mushrooms like turkey tail
help chemotherapeutic agents work better.
And I think she's a living example of that.
One can argue with me on the statistics,
but my mother's alive,
and all the doctors that saw her
did not believe that she would survive.
[man] It is my great honor...
to introduce Paul Stamets.
[cheering and applause]
I have brought a fungal friend of mine
from the old-growth forest
and I present to you... agarikon.
[cheering and applause]
Agarikon was described in 65 A.D.
as elixirium ad longam vitam.
The elixir of long life.
So I want to take you
on a magical mushroom mystery tour.
and I'm going to push the envelope here, folks.
Microdiversity is biodiversity.
You will decompose. I'm going to decompose.
We're all going to die.
That's okay,
because we will enter into the micro-verse.
We will forever exist together
within the micromolecular matrix.
[Lincoff] When he talks the way he does,
he Is...
channeling the mycelium.
And this is a marvelous thing.
Brain neurons,
mycelium,
the computer internet,
the organization of the universe all shares the same archetype.
I believe matter begets life.
Life becomes single cells.
Single cells form chains.
Chains forms branches.
Matrices form interlocking, intercepting mosaics of mycelium
and mycelium-like organisms ebb and flow
not only on this planet,
on other planets into the future.
Thank you very much.
Paul was wonderful in bringing us information
about all these aspects of mushrooms
and that it inspired all these young people.
Now we have people like Tradd Cotter
carrying on the great work that Paul started,
talking about biopesticides,
talking about the ways you could detoxify oil.
All of these amazing things were started
because people like Paul
brought that to the culture at large
and young people now have taken up the cause
and are really expanding our insights
into what the world of mushrooms can do for us.
Hi, my name's Peter
and I'm with the radical mycology project.
I recently trained a mushroom
to digest used cigarette filters.
Paul Stamets's book Mycelium Running
got my mind sort of in a whirl.
That was when I first discovered that
there was much more to mushrooms
than just food.
If you would have seen me
when I dropped out of high school,
I was just making rap music.
I knew very little about the natural world.
I had never even went on a hike until I was 18,
but finding Paul Stamets's TED talk video
was one of the biggest inspirations that pushed me
Into the wonderful world of mycology.
My first mushroom book
was [he Mushroom Cultivator
by Paul Stamets.
I will be eternally thankful to him
for showing me that it's okay to be mushroom mad.
[Lori Cariss] We really don't even know most fungi.
We're discovering new species on a daily basis
and you dont have to go to exotic locations
to discover them.
[McCoy] Anybody can add to the science,
from identifying a new species
to developing a new micro-mediation protocol.
[Cariss] There is a great need for more people to study fungi
and there's lots of opportunities.
[Cotter] It's amazing what we don't know about mushrooms.
They really are a frontier of knowledge.
They probably can help us solve all sorts of problems
if we look a little deeper.
Anyone, anyone can help
by going and walking in the woods
and contributing to mycology.
You may have found a species that has never been found.
We need these mushrooms.
We work together as a community to solve problems.
We could be the community that heals the planet.
[P. Stamets] It's been estimated two-thirds of our food supply
Is bee-pollinated-dependent.
Unfortunately, we're losing bees across the world
in a dramatic die-off that is very dangerous
for the biosecurity of this planet.
So I started exploring ways to help save the bees
and I noticed in the summertime
there's a continuous convoy of bees
going from my beehives to my mycelium.
But then it dawned on me,
maybe the bees are benefiting from the mycelial extracts
because they have antiviral properties.
And so I cultured the most aggressive strains
and then submitted them.
We started testing the effects of these extracts
In helping bees survive.
[Nicholas Naeger] Some of these fungal extracts are really good
at reducing viral levels in the bee.
So here we have a fungus
that is helping fight viruses
in an insect.
[man] We're using mushrooms to create
an entirely new class of materials
which are totally compostable at the end of their lives.
[woman] The researchers found that
when they heated
a portobello mushroom skin
to roughly 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit,
it became a lattice of carbon nano ribbon
that could be used in battery design
because it allows a good amount of surface area
for storing energy.
[Cotter] You can filter water.
You can create medicinal compounds almost on demand.
We've worked In Haiti,
and they look at you like I have super powers.
Well, I tell them, I said,
"You are about to have superpowers too."
[Brown] Coming from the background of not having any training,
getting myself into the lab was very empowering.
I felt like a Superhero. I felt like I could do anything.
You're officially a mushroom farmer.
Sporulating. Sporgasm.
[Lincoff] I see my species as part of a larger whole.
Rather than being at the top of the pyramid,
being one of the organisms with inside the circle.
and the circle is made up of mycelium,
holding us all together.
[Simard] We've always thought of plants as these inert objects,
these things that don't actually interact with each other
and build things,
and what my work is showing, and other people's work as well,
it's saying actually, they need each other.
They need each other to grow in a community
so that they can start sharing the load.
You do this, I'll do that, and together,
we can make a beautiful resilient community.
They have incredible capacity
to make things change very, very quickly.
So if we can work with them,
if we get it, you know? lf humans get it,
we can change this thing really fast.
So I am super hopeful.
We just got to get busy and help nature do its thing.
Evolution never stops.
There's not one point that it happens
and then it doesn't happen again.
It's continuously happening.
The core concept of evolution
is that through natural selection,
the strongest and the fittest survive.
But moreover,
communities survive better than individuals.
Communities rely upon cooperation,
and I think that's the power of goodness.
Evolution is based
on the concept of mutual benefit,
and the extension of generosity.
[Simard] When we see it, we understand it.
And when we understand it, we care about it.
And when we care about It,
we'll do something to help save it.
We need to have a paradigm shift in our consciousness.
What will tt take to achieve that?
We are not an individual.
We are a vast network
of molecules and energies and wavelengths.
The interconnectedness of being is who we are.
[narrator] This world of ours is always changing,
not for the better or for the worse,
but for life.
If the storms come and the water rises,
if fire scorches the land,
or darkness descends,
we will be here
working,
as we always have.
Extending the network.
Building community.
Restoring balance.
One connection at a time.
It may take a million years,
or a hundred million,
but we will still be here.
Lieutenant Paul Stamets.
I became an astral mycologist because of awe.
Awe at the miracle of life.
[TV host] How did you feel
seeing a fictional character on Star Trek
that is inspired by your science?
I'm super honored.
I tuned into Star Trek when I was about 12 years old.
Spores by their nature travel through the cosmos.
When they germinate, some mushrooms form.
Some magic mushrooms help you bend time and space.
[TV host] So, uh, if I were to visit you...
could we have some of these magic mushrooms?
[P. Stamets] Nature provides. I don''t.
[laughter]
♪ ♪