May 20, 2017 • 50 mins
In this week's SYSK Select episode, for thousands of years, humans have used hallucinogenic mushrooms for spiritual reasons. Today, however, having them can get you thrown in prison. How do magic mushrooms do what they do? Can they help the mentally ill? Find out in this far out episode.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey everyone, it's Josh and for this week's s Y
s K Selects episode, I picked How Magic Mushrooms Work,
which came out in two thousand and twelve. I think
we're just kind of starting to dip our toe into
um controversial topics maybe who knows. And I think I
remember us being worried we were going to get in
trouble for it. Well we didn't. So here it is again,
(00:23):
enjoy Welcome to Stuff you should Know from house Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast on
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant with me. Uh
(00:45):
and this is the far out podcast Stuff you should know.
That's right. We were kicking off. This is our first
show we're recording in and uh, Josh thought let's kick
it off with the Little Almond Brothers and get psychedelic exactly.
That's how you think of when you think psychedelia. Well,
(01:06):
they were known for having mushrooms on their album covers
and t shirts and it was a very common thing.
Those are peaches, dead mushrooms all over the place. Okay, yeah,
but generally now, of course, you think of like, you know,
the grateful Dead. Jefferson airplane, Yeah, the floor elevators, Yeah, Quicksilver,
(01:27):
messenger service, Moby Grape strawberry, alarm clock, chocolate watchman, Jimi
Hendricks of course. Who yeah, so Chuck Uh, you're familiar
with psychedelia rock and roll? Of course? Are you familiar
with psychedelia as far as psychedelics are concerned. I know
you are, and you want to know how I know
(01:47):
you are because we podcasted on it. That's exactly right,
LSD and Cia. What else? It seems like we've been
psychedelics treatmental illness, that's right. That was a big one
that kind of overlaps with some of this. Um. We're
gonna lay a lot of the blame of all the
lost research, decades of it at the feet of Timothy Leary,
the man who ruined everything, um and what we're talking about.
(02:09):
Pardon my sniffles. By the way, I'm not sick mentally.
I'm not allowing myself to think of me as sick.
I have sniffles. That's that's what I did. I was like, now,
I'm not sick. I'm just not gonna let it happen.
And you look at you. You look fantastic. It was
just a few days I think if I would have
wallowed in it, it would have been more than a week.
I'm not yeah, I'm not letting myself. I hit it hard, man,
(02:29):
like tons of fluids and emergency and airborne and fruits,
and that was fine. Okay, you'll be great airborne. You know.
That's like Holly discredited. It's the same thing as an
emergency pretty much. It's just like vitamins and stuff. Okay,
all right, but it doesn't keep you from getting sick.
I think that's how it's discredited. But it'll it'll help
(02:50):
you out, like in a vitamin any way. Right, alright,
some college, because there's like get to the most room exactly.
So let's get to the mushroom. Chuck, Um, chuck. I've
got no real intro other than I think we should
talk about the history of mushrooms first. What do you think?
I think it sounds great. Um. Apparently there's a lot
(03:14):
of um debate over how long people have been using
magic mushrooms. UM. As far as religious rituals recreationally, who knows,
but the supposition is that it goes back thousands and
thousands of years. For example, there's a cave painting in
Um Algeria that it's nine thousand years old. Um, that
(03:38):
supposedly depicts mushrooms. There's another one in Spain that's six
thousand years old that depicts mushrooms. Um. And I mean
it makes a lot of sense that when you think
of Native American tribes, Amerindian tribes, Mesoamerican tribes. Um, these
people have customarily eaten magic mushrooms all this time. Right. Well,
(04:01):
that's what one camp says is, hey, they've been used
in religious rites for thousands of years and Central American
Northern Africa, Like you said, so, uh, what's the rub?
But then there's another camp that says, hey, you can't
prove that you're just seeing what you want to see
when you look at that ca painting or that Allmond
Brothers cover and uh, just because there's a mushroom on
(04:23):
the wall doesn't mean that they ate magic mushrooms. What
did the Aztecs have? How do you pronounce that? I
don't know. I've never been good at pronouncing Aztec, but
I can take a stab at it if you'd like
me to. Tan un knocked tal right. They called it
the flesh of the gods, and they use the substance
(04:44):
we know that we just don't know what it was,
but a lot of people think that it might have
been quote unquote magic mushrooms. Right. They also made statues
of it, that kind of thing, um, And you generally
only do that back in the day, if you if
it's a very revered sub instance, they're gonna make a
statue of just like whatever. If we can speak in likelihoods,
(05:05):
there were we know there were mushrooms where we assume
that there were these mushrooms growing wild like they are
today in these areas that these people were hunters and
gatherers and foragers so likely tried these mushrooms. If they
did try these mushrooms, they probably wigged out, right, isn't
that the clinical term? I think they call it a trip?
(05:27):
Okay man, Uh, they tripped and um probably started incorporating
it into their cave art you know teas today and
there on their book cover from their notebooks. Uh. It
has been confirmed in contemporary tribes in Central America, including
the mass at Tech, the Mixed Tech, the Nagua, and
(05:49):
the Zappa Tech. So all the texts are way into
it at least these days. Right, So if they eat
it these days, I would say, chances are they probably
ate it back in the day as well. Okay, so um,
as far as the West is concerned. Um, well, I'm
sorry it wasn't. Also, it's not just Middle America, Mesoamerica,
(06:11):
Northern African Spain, you mean like a Middle America like
Ohio and America. It's not just Kansas that's on mushrooms. Um,
the Sammi. Have you heard of the Sami people? So
they're finished. They're like indigenous Finish tribes like be York
clearly has Sami in her. Like her look, it's very Sami. Um. Yeah,
(06:33):
well you'd like the Sammies. Cool looking. Um. They love
mushrooms so much that they are known to drink the
urine of reindeer that have just recently ingested mushrooms. And
there's yeah, there's an art installation and I think Berlin
recently of this guy who had a bunch of magic
mushrooms in this pin, a bunch of reindeer in them,
and he was having the reindeer eat the mushrooms and
(06:55):
then collect him their urine and storing it. Well, my
question to him is why would he go about it
that way? If he has some magic mushrooms. Did it
like increase the potency or something like that. I don't know.
You'd probably be better off asking a sami person than him. Sure,
I don't know. If like, um, it's like that coffee
we failed to mention that's like ferrets and they poop
(07:16):
it out the coffee being and then they roast that
into coffee. Exact it's status. Um. So anyway, people have
probably been eating magic mushrooms for a long time, but
among Westerners it was totally unthought of, unheard of, unknown
until the fifties. Right, yeah. Uh. In nineteen five, a
(07:36):
writer while he's a mycologist who studies mushrooms. His name
was our Gordon Wesson, and he traveled to Mexico a
lot back in the fifties searching out mushrooms. Not for
magic mushroom purposes, but he was just into mushrooms and
he participated in a ritual he and his wife did together, well,
(07:57):
not not at first. Actually, did you read the article? No, yeah,
it's really good. You should read it sometime. He he
took a colleague down there first. Later on he took
his wife and daughter and she was like eighteen, so
he was like, sure, she's old enough, and they all
tripped on these mushrooms. But I'd like to read a
selection if I may Alan as his friend. By the way,
(08:20):
is that allen him? Um? Yeah, I think so. Um.
Alan and I were determined to resist any effects that
they might have to observe better the events of the night,
But her resolve soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms.
Alan felt cold and wrapped himself in a blanket. A
few minutes later, he leaned over and whispered, Gordon, I'm
seeing things. I told him not to worry. I was too.
(08:45):
We were never more wide awake, and the visions came,
whether our eyes were open or closed. They emerged from
the center of our field of vision, opening up as
they came, now rushing, now slowly, at the pace that
our will chose. They began with art motifs. Motifs fractals
is another word angling, such as might decorate carpets or
(09:07):
textiles or wallpaper, or the drawing board of an architect.
Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot.
And then he goes on to describe all sorts of things,
including seeing not an imperfect view of ordinary life, but
the archetypes, the platonic ideas that underlie the imperfect images
(09:29):
of everyday life. So he was tripping hard. It sounds
like a yeah, And that's unusual that he says that
he saw something in a chariot, because mushrooms and lst
are Although they're hallucinogens, they don't cause actual hallucinations. They
tend to just mess with, distort things that are already there. Exactly.
I have an answer for that because I thought the
same thing. He did it in darkness, So I mean,
(09:53):
on drugs or not. If you go and sit in
a dark room long enough, you're gonna start seeing things
in your mind's eye. And I think that's what's going on.
You're just imagining. It's such an our. Gordon Wasson, apologist, Chuck.
He was pretty moved though, and he wrote this article
in Life, and uh, the editor picked out the title
Seeking the Magic Mushroom. Yeah, that's where the name came from.
A Life magazine editor in nineteen fifty seven coined the
(10:16):
term magic mushroom. Um. After that little trip um, Wasson
and Heim recruited Albert Hoffman, who was the chemist who
created LSD isolated LSD and said, hey, man, we know
it's you're into. Take these mushrooms and figure out what's
going on with them. And he did, and he isolated
(10:40):
the active ingredient. A um, what is it a trip
to It's a trip to mine, which is an alkaloid.
Thank you. That's actually related trip to fan. Okay, the
Turkey stuff. Yeah, well you know it happens to in Turkey.
But the trip of mine is the two are psilocybin
and silison. So siloson is uh, that's the metabolite of psilocybin.
(11:02):
Psilocybin is the active ingredient the trip to mind found
in mushrooms. And then when you're when you ingested, your
body breaks down the psilocybin into psilocine. And they're starting
to come to realize that psilocine is probably the culprit
behind everything. Yeah. Um, before we move on, I want
to point out in the article he uh, he did
it quite a few times in Mexico, and then he
said later on, just to test to see if it
(11:25):
was part of just the communal experience of being there,
he went back to New York City and uh and
took some and he said it was even better in
New York City. Also, he disproved that he's like I
love New York UM, so okay. Albert Hoffman isolates psilocybin
UH and Sandoz who he worked for, who also started
(11:47):
mass producing LSD, started mass producing psilocybin as well, and
UM the psychological psychiatry community got his hands on it
and started studying it. We'll talk about some of the
studies later, but as early as the sixth ease they
realized that UM obsessive disorders UM could be treated with
psilocybin until they shut it down. They totally shut it down.
(12:10):
Psilocybin magic mushrooms UM. Any of the silocide mushrooms are
a Schedule one drug, which is kind of unusual because UM,
study after study has shown that mushrooms aren't habit forming
or addictive and that, you know, they kind of do
have a lot of medical uses, which again we'll talk
about in a little bit. But let's talk about the
(12:30):
mushrooms and cells. Chuck. They are a plant, a mineral, fungus,
or an animal. They're an animal. Uh, there are a
fungus and it means it grows from a score and UH,
each little mushroom in the case of psilocybin mushrooms has
(12:52):
anywhere from point two to point four percent psilocybins a
very small amount. Yeah, it sounds like it. And uh,
the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in two
thousand three did a survey and they found that about
eight percent of adults over twenty six, which to me
makes us an invalid study already if they didn't include, um,
(13:15):
eight percent have have tried it at some point. I
saw like teenagers, UM, something like around eight percent, but
it was hallucinogens um other than LSD, which includes like
PCP and stuff like that. Really, it seems kind of
weird to lump those together. Um. But in Europe the
prevalence is probably higher, um between point three percent in
(13:38):
fourteen point one percent of use at least once in
the person's lifetime between point three and fourteen. Yeah, it's
pretty pretty wild. And let's just call it fourteen, okay,
you know. And then for some reason, um, the Czech
Republic in Slovakia report the highest use among teenagers of
magic mushrooms. Not sure why. Interesting, Yeah, it's a nice
(14:01):
place to be. It was about to bag on it
and say you'd do it too, but it's lovely. Yeah,
or maybe that's why they're doing it because it is lovely,
because New York City it's the best. Uh So Timothy Leary,
we failed to mention. But of course obviously he sunk
his teeth into it literally, and like you said earlier,
(14:23):
like all things, he kind of killed the psychedelic movement
in a way as he was actually creating it. Yeah,
by making it, you know, a hippie burnout thing. Well,
he definitely delegitimized it. I mean, there are a lot
of people who were studying um LSD and psilocybin and
um I would gain all those to see how they
(14:46):
can help people with mental illness. And Leary was like, no, man,
let's just completely screw the establishment with this stuff. Well,
and he's the one who established the whole set and
setting thing right which is still in use today, including
in this article from how Stuff Works dot com. Set
and setting are defined in here. Um, do you want
(15:09):
to talk about it, Well, this is the trip as
they call it, The mushroom trip is very dependent on
set and setting, the frame of mind that you have
going into it. Where you are the setting obviously, if
it's you know, some kind of stressful, highly organized thing.
Like if you're in school or you're like in a
(15:30):
train station and somebody's like, you're gonna miss your train.
You're gonna miss your train is probably not a good idea.
Um Or if you're hanging out with friends and you're
camping or you're doing something there where you have no
stress involved and you have the right outlook going in,
Timothy Leary says, that's what you want as far as
going into this whole thing. Right set is mindset and
setting is your environment. Um Also, studies have found that
(15:54):
even um what are called drug naive people can have
a positive experience on psilocybin mushrooms if there is if
what's about to happen to them is explained to them
ahead of time. That that's a big part of it too,
is knowing what you're getting into going into it well.
And that's a big part of these studies we're going
to talk about later on was these people are all
(16:16):
coached ahead of time by people you know, they call
them their guides is what they are now. They're reach
research assistants who have had previous experience with psychotropics, but
they would explain to them what they're about to get
into and that would obviously help them along as they're
going in. But they do mention the guide thing in
(16:37):
here in this article. Uh, they say that a lot
of people, um, because you know, you can have a
bad trip, which the only thing you can do there
is to write it out. Obviously you can't turn off
the effects, which is a very important thing to note.
It doesn't go away, No, it doesn't. Although supposedly, um,
in the emergency room they usually prescribed sedatives and suppose
(17:00):
really helps a bad trip. Yeah, I'm sure it does, um,
But they say in the article here, new users are
often advised to have an experienced friend h guide them
through the experience, Like did you see Flirting with Disaster? Yeah,
Lily Tomlin, Well yeah, they accidentally dosed the cop and
she was like Alan and it's like she's a great guy,
(17:20):
He'll be fine, and that she just kind of coaches
him through the thing. I was looking up movies, um
that have mushrooms in him, and I was having a
lot of job. I found like Altered States. Well this
was LSD, but oh yeah, okay, but I guess that's
a good time to mention that LSD and psilocybin. Mushrooms
are very similar in the effect. Although they say that
(17:41):
mushrooms are generally milder and don't last as long, their
chemical composition is very very similar. Do you know how similar?
I think there's like one um hydroxy really that's different,
but they're pretty close, very close. Would when they made
LSD did they try to synthesize psilocybin? Was that the
(18:01):
way they were after? No, because they didn't know that
psilocybin existed until after LST had been synicide. Interesting because
you know he did LST in and do psilocybin until
like quite a coincidence, isn't it? Yeah? Um, so do
you know what's going on in the brain? Do you
(18:22):
know what the whole secret is behind magic mushrooms? Uh?
Central nervous system. There's some kind of inhibits and inhibits
something right. Uh. No, it does the opposite. It's an agonist,
which I came to realize that agony means that you
feel everything. I'm in. Agony means you're feeling everything. And
agonists UM binds to a receptor like in your brain
(18:47):
that releases a neurotransmitter, and in this case, UM psilocybin
or psil Lowson binds to serotonin receptors. It says, relieve
the serotonin, right, and your synapses are flooded with serotonin
and that's what gives what clinical researchers basically call the
(19:08):
sensation of just being overwhelmed by sensation. Interesting. Yeah, it's
all serotonin, man, although there is evidence that it affects
your dopamine receptors, but not directly, like indirectly, which would
kind of give you a sense of view for you right,
uh so, josh. Some of the side effects when someone
is taking mushrooms include dizziness and nausea UM, muscle weakness,
(19:32):
loss of appetite, and numbness um. Sometimes uh, there could
be vomiting sometimes anecdotally. Experts have said that inducing vomiting
is a way to cease the nausea when you're experiencing
nausea in a mushroom trip, and said they're not considered
(19:53):
to be addictive and you can build up a toleran
it's really quick. Yeah. Um. It says here in the
article that like, for exam ample, taking mushrooms two days
in a row um is going to make the effects
of them on the second day far less pronounced I guess.
And one of the guys in these studies to um,
I believe, takes them for cluster headaches, and he's taken
(20:16):
them so much that they don't have psycho hallucinogenic properties anymore.
It's just like medicine for him, really gross fungal medicine. No,
I think you might take a pill. Okay, I'm not
sure though. UM all the tolerance also, UM, you can
build up across tolerance. So like if you took a
bunch of mushrooms one day and then the next day
(20:37):
took mescalin or LSD, those effects would be dampened as well.
And I think it has to do with the fact
that it's all it's your serotonin. But if you do that,
that means a lot of other things as well about you.
It does you know, yes, I don't know what, but
oh you know what, you have a T shirt that
has an Almond Brothers album cover, it means you're hippie,
(20:59):
a dirty, dirty, melly hippie. So um chuck. Some of
the other effects of tripping on shrooms is um euphoria
or dysphoria, and also sometimes a very rapid shift between
the two. UM basically being really happy and then being
terrified UM and then deep personalization, which is a sense
(21:19):
that you are not yourself, or you belong to somebody
else or there's you, you lose your sense of self,
and then de realization, which is the sense that you
are in a dream or that man, this isn't real,
nothing is real, that kind of thing. The passage of
time is often distorted, whether it's like have we been
(21:43):
talking about this for five hours or five minutes or
the other way around. I think it can go either way.
I found a study that UM showed it basically tested
that it gave people psilocybin and then did like time
interval tests and found two to three seconds is about
the most that a person can it's successfully achieve as
(22:04):
these tests, like beyond three seconds they start to get
really bad at it. And they also found the person's
tapping preference, which I guess is like if you're just
sitting there tapping, you know your fingers, what your preferences,
and it's slower when you're on mushroom really so uh
and like you said that, you don't actually hallucinate, like
(22:26):
you're not going to be sitting there and see pink
elephants dancing across the room. But if there's a painting
of a pink elephant, uh, it might appear as if
the elephant were breathing or moving or shifting. Or if
you hear something like a song or running water or
you know, a creek or something like that, you might
hear other things within that sound, but not completely imagine them. Right. So,
(22:52):
one of the things we were talking about was that, sure,
mushrooms have been around for thousands of years, growing wild
like they do today, and um, that's where a lot
of people get their mushrooms. Apparently is just foraging it
for him. One of the big problems is that, Um,
while there are a lot of mushrooms in the genus Silocybe,
(23:14):
which we probably should have mentioned earlier, that's there's the
big spoiler. All the mushrooms are in the same genus. Um,
there's a lot that look like them two and that
might grow in similar places that will shut down your kidneys. Yeah,
so you have to be very careful when you're foraging
for fresh wild mushrooms if you're into that kind of thing,
(23:37):
which neither Chuck nor i Um suggests should be done. Yeah,
we're not endorsing this, No, I'm just saying like this
is in the article. Yeah, I thought that was implicit,
but it's probably a good time to c o a yeah. Um.
In the article, they also point out that even experienced
mushroom hunters have made mistakes out there in the dark
in the field among the cows. So yeah, it can
(24:01):
be toxic. It's not a good idea to just go
picking mushrooms growing in it pie. And that holds true
for if you're looking for truffles or you know edible mushrooms. Um. Yeah,
you want to kind of know what you're doing. Um.
One way to tell what kind of mushroom you're looking
at is to create a spore print, which apparently you
take a piece of paper and you take the cap
(24:25):
of the mushroom. There's a stem in a cap um
and in the genocilicide. Most of them are fairly small,
so the cap is about one inch tall, the stems
about three inches tall. Um. But you take the cap
and you place a gill side down. If you've ever
looked at the underside of a mushroom, there's the gills.
They're just so weird looking, little powdery, powdery gills. Powder
(24:47):
is the spores you press the gills down on the
paper and it should leave an imprint of the spores.
And if you know what you're doing, you can identify
more easily or more um closely. They kind of mush him.
You're dealing with um. So we said that there's like
dozens of species I think of Psilocybe mushrooms. Yeah, there's
(25:07):
tons of them. A couple of really popular ones though
as far as ingestion goes, are the Psilocybe cubensis. It's
one of the most common ones. It's a little larger
as far as magic mushrooms go. It's got a golden cap.
I'm sorry, it's called the Golden cap or Mexican mushroom,
the street name that that's the one that um our
(25:30):
Gordon Wasser probably was probably in Mexico um And it's
got usually a reddish brown cap, white or yellowish stem.
And here's an important thing. When it's bruised or crushed
um it can turn blue. And a lot of people
will say, hey, that's how you know it's a magic
mushrooms if it turns blue when you crush it. And
that's not true because there are toxic varieties that do
(25:53):
the same thing. So that's a good way to get
yourself in trouble. Um. It's also copera philic, which means
that it grows in poop yeah, um, moist environments, very
human environments, and hot yeah, like h South Georgia, let's say,
or Florida. Yeah, which apparently I didn't look to see.
But as of February two thousand nine, at least, um
(26:16):
is the only state in the Union that where it
isn't illegal to I guess pick or possess fresh pilocybe
mushrooms fresh as a non dried out right. Yeah, that's true,
or it was two years ago. I was gonna say,
is it's still you know? I don't know. And when
they say the reasoning is that, hey, it grows in
the wild. People pick mushrooms and might pick them by accident,
(26:37):
so we don't want senior prison if something's an accident.
Plus the rainbow families in Ocala, and we can't we
don't want to screw up their jam. One of the
one of the other more popular ones is the Psilocybe
semi lanciata chuck or the liberty cap and um. It's
(26:57):
also is found in damp grassy fields populated by cattle,
but it doesn't grow directly on the dung. And it's
a little pointy cap, light yellow and brown, and it's
smaller than the golden cap Mexican. Right. And then I
guess one or the other of the big three is
p Bayo sistus or the bluebell or bottle cap? So chuck.
(27:20):
If when we're disposed to, um, take mushrooms, what, according
to the article, would the person do? Well? I mean,
what are what are the people who are taking mushrooms
doing with them? We we talked about foraging. That's one
one way you can buy them, which is illegal and
we don't recommend it obviously. Um. It's illegal even to
(27:44):
have spores, which is surprising because sports don't actually contain psilocybin,
which is what's outlawed. It's a weird loophole, but it's
not a loophole. It's the what's the opposite of loophole
the donut the doughnut part. Okay, that's what the donut
hole is. The munch. I know, I'm familiar with munch,
(28:04):
can't believe me, okay, Um, And then you can grow
your own, obviously, but if you're looking to buy this
kind of thing in the United States. You know, they
sell it much like marijuana, and uh ounces and quarter
ounces and eight ounces and uh, I know the an
eight is defined in this three point five grams in
this article. This is the craziest article on the site,
(28:27):
has to be. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Uh yeah, because
at one point she talks about who wrote this, Shana Freeman.
Shana talks about the ones on the Gulf Coast give
you a mellower high, but the tie mushrooms give you
a much more intense high. Right, it's crazy. It is. Um.
And when they dry out, which is when most people
(28:50):
uh have them, they're dried out, they will lose some
of their psychotropic properties in the drying process, but they
retain these properties. I don't know about them definitely but
for years. Yeah. Well, because you're you're not just drying.
I think you have to freeze dry them or you
have to dry them. There's like a certain way to
(29:12):
dry them. I think that kind of locks in everything favor,
which apparently is very unfortunate. Um. Some mushrooms have a
reported flowery taste that sounds awful, um, sour or bitter,
so it's not very fun, which means that a lot
of people UM do crazy stuff with their mushrooms to
(29:34):
make them more palatable chocolates, mushroom chocolates is one. UM
soaking liquor, soaking their mushrooms in liquor like tequiler rum um,
just basically grinding them up and putting them into capsules
so like you don't taste anything at all, like a
mushroom pill um. Or making mushroom tea, which supposedly if
(29:57):
you cook or um brew mushrooms, it's it's it's supposedly
doesn't have an effect on um the potency, Yeah, the
experience the user has and it reportedly uh comes on
quicker as well. And anecdotally people have even been known
to eat the slimy remains of the tea. Gross. That's
(30:20):
what I think. I mean, everything about mushrooms are gross,
but slimy. I don't like regular mushrooms like it's. I know,
they supposedly don't have much of a taste and they're
put in foods for texture, but I don't like the texture. Yeah,
it's just the whole thing grosses me outright. So um,
about one gram of dry mushrooms is apparently a very
(30:42):
small dose four grams UM is a medium dose for
an adult. I read um medium too large? Yeah, so, uh,
and I guess one P. Cubensis, the Mexican mushroom dried
is about a gram, a decent sized one. And when
the when the one gram or four grams or whatever
(31:05):
the dose is just taken, UM is ingested. Uh. You
apparently within twenty minutes if you take it orally twenty
to thirty minutes, you start to experience symptoms and they
last for something like six hours, depending on like the potency.
I guess, well, yeah, that's what That's what SHANEA. Freeman
says in this article is that, like the there's differences
(31:28):
between from mushroom to mushroom, from person to person. Um. Yeah, that.
I mean, it's not like Sandoz is making this stuff anymore. So.
We mentioned foraging, right, we mentioned uh, buying off the street,
neither of which we recommend. No, again, this is all
highly illegal. I mean, a schedule one drug will get
you a severe prison sense. You might as well be
(31:51):
caught with heroin or um cocaine or PCP like this
is it. This isn't as bad as it's not, just
because you can go out in the cowfield and find
some doesn't mean you should take it lightly. You're right, No,
this is huge, man, that's a huge, huge prison sentence.
Very good. It's like a life ruining prison sentence. It
(32:12):
is very although I guess probably just about any prison
sentences fairly life ruining. But this is like double life ruining.
That's huge. Uh mycology. You can actually grow these things,
and that's what some people do, some cultivators do. This
is also extremely illegal, very much illegal. Uh used to
and even so we're going to tell you how to
(32:33):
do it because this is stuff you should know, okay, okay, uh, yes,
well it's stuff that some people should know. Well, I
guess at the very least, it's part of explaining everything.
It's on our website. Yeah, Jerry's just in there, crack um.
You have to have a spore because that's the first
(32:53):
thing you need for the mushroom to grow. Uh. Spore
grows onto one mushroom, but a mushroom can have that
thousands and thousands of spores on the underside the little
pottery stuff that we're talking about. And remember we talked
about taking spot prints for identification. The same sport prints
are often what you get in the mail when you
mail order UM mushroom kits. Right, you can't just throw
(33:17):
these spores in the ground. They have to be hydrated
with clean water, meaning distilled water. And you can even
buy syringes that are filled pre filled with spores and
sterile water from suppliers if you don't want to make
your own. Right. So you remember in the um Earthworm
episode we talked about duff that that organic, light, spongy
(33:41):
organic material. You have to make your own version of
duff um using brown flower vermiculite, which is the little
white pebbly stuff in like potting soil, um and water.
You just kind of mix it together and it creates
duff a fluffy, kind of spongy layer. And I think
rice flower too, because I think wheat flour might uh,
(34:01):
I think it might mold easier or something. Okay, I
might be wrong. Um. And you create what's called the
substrate cake, which is great. It's a great growing medium
for um mushrooms. It's like your soil, right pretty much. UM.
And you create you put this little substrate cake in
a can like a jar, right, yeah, canning jar, and
(34:24):
then you put it You put the canning jar in
the canning bath or pressure cooker which sterilizes the insides.
That's right. And then I guess you inject the spores.
If you have like a syringe with the spores in it,
you injected into the jar. Yeah, put poke some holes
in the lid, and then that eventually will grow kind
(34:44):
of a white ropey growth called um my celium. Yeah,
it's got to be at a very steady humid environments
about seventy five degrees fahrenheit twenty three celsius. And within
about a week, like you said, you get the mycelium.
And then, uh, if you get mold and stuff like that,
that means you know, it wasn't a good environment. But eventually,
(35:07):
once it's covered my cilium, you're gonna put that into
a plastic container for fruiting. Uh, and under the right humid,
warm conditions and grow mushrooms. And each little cake can
grow a lot of mushrooms, like a thousand or a hundred. Yeah,
not at once, obviously, No, they grow and waves supposedly,
and you harvest, and then more come, and the harvest
(35:27):
and more come, and over the course of a month.
Is where you get your mushrooms from the cake. Again,
very illegal to buy any of this stuff or to
engage in growing any of the stuff. Um. And let's
talk about that, Chuck. I think it's high time we
got to the law part of it. Um. Like we said, mushrooms,
since I think are U a Schedule one drug? Um
(35:52):
And like we said, Schedule one drugs are defined as
drugs that are highly addictive and have no medical use um.
Which is kind of weird to put mushrooms in there,
but they are in there. I don't think you can
argue that with the d A that comes and bust
down your door to break up your mushroom growing operation
that hey man, these things are not addictive and there's
(36:14):
all sorts of medical uses for him. Although it probably
won't be the d n A with mushrooms, is d
A probably gonna be what I say, d n A
did I really, it's not gonna be the d e
A either. You're freaking out. I know it is likely
not going to be the d e A either, because
it's probably gonna be a state Although is there state
(36:34):
d A or there's something like that on the state level? Yeah, Yeah,
I think there's a. Yeah, there's Each state has a
Bureau of investigation that I think kind of acts like
the state d e A. But unless you have like
some big, large operation going on, it's probably not going
to be a federal crime. It's probably gonna be a
state crime, right UM. And time was you could order
(36:57):
kits like the ones we describe UM on the internet
over through the mail. If you do that, now you
are going to get in a lot of trouble. The
d e A probably will come to your house or
intercepted or both. UM. And that was. That's been the
case since two thousand three. For the States, it's been illegal,
(37:17):
but apparently they started cracking down on kits in two
thousand three. UM. In Great Britain UH, in two thousand
and five, it was still legal to have um mushrooms
fresh mushrooms, but that's not the case any longer. UM.
And then in Amsterdam, even Amsterdam I was surprised to
(37:38):
learn of this. UH in two thousand one they outlawed
UM dried mushrooms, and then in two thousand and eight
they outlawed fresh mushrooms. So you can't have any mushrooms
in the Netherlands. But in Mexico they do have exceptions
for indigenous people's and being used in ceremonies and such.
We do in the United States as well, um, but
(37:59):
not necessarily for pilocide mushrooms. Um more. For I think
payote is the one that's got the big exception. Yeah,
the Native American Church is allowed to use payote, so, Josh,
we said that for many years, about thirty five years
(38:21):
or so, it was shut down as far as research
goes as you know, potential medical benefits. Uh. Since I
don't know when they said you can again, but I
know in two thousand six Johns Hopkins started a long
term research study along with some other places, but Johns
Hopkins really has headed this up, and they found a
(38:43):
lot of really interesting things like you said, O C
D uh, and some eating disorders, some compulsive eating disorders,
so basically any compulsion. Yeah, they found that. Uh. In
the in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, it was written
that uh study proved well, not proved, indicated that for
a period of about four to twenty four hours they
(39:06):
remained symptom free for that period and sometimes it was
even for days, and that they said that there was
no treatment that eases the symptoms as fast because it's
pretty much immediate of the compulsive disorders. Yeah, I would
imagine it's your you have a compulsion, or your compulsion
is exacerbated by a lack of serotonin. You take mushrooms
(39:28):
and all of a sudden your brain is flooded with
silicide or serotonin. Cluster headaches, Yeah, this one was interesting.
I read about this as well. Cluster headaches are pretty
much the worst pain you can have in your head.
They liken it to childbirth without anesthesia and um in England.
This was in The Guardian that I read this. They're
(39:49):
about six thousand people in England that suffer these attacks um,
sometimes daily with no more than a couple of weeks remission.
And it's called the cluster period with the remission or
like these these periods where you have them, yeah, r period.
Apparently psilocybin helps us out a lot. And this one guy,
(40:09):
Richard alf says that he's tried conventional treatments in everything
his whole life and the only thing that brought him
relief was the magic mushrooms and even by some longer
periods of remission between attacks. So there's another treatment. Um.
There's also you know, whenever you hear of um H,
(40:31):
mushrooms or psychedelics or hallucinogens in general, like the whole
idea of religious epiphany or feeling like you're a one
with a universe or something a mystical experience. Right early
on in the West, the West study of um mushrooms this,
this was kind of noted. And there is this famous
study in nineteen sixty three where they gave psilocybin to
(40:55):
a group of Divinity students and send them to church.
Really yeah, and um, they of course reported like all
sorts of wonderful mystical feelings and connections with God and
religion and um, just every enlightenment basically is what they reported. Um,
which is not that surprising because you know, I think
(41:17):
you could have called that one right. But what's very
surprising is that twenty five years later they've they've surveyed
the participants again, um, and the people who had received
psilocybin UM reported a great greater number of positive life
changes than people who hadn't been given psilocybin, like the
(41:38):
controls who've gotten placebo instead. Well that's what JOHNS. Hopkins
has found so far too. They did, uh a study
on eighteen adults is just one of them, and ninety
four percent said that it was one of the top
five most meaningful experiences in their lives, said it was
a single most meaningful experience. And then they interviewed them
(41:59):
again a year later and found that they still felt
that way and had these changes in UH empathy, greater
understanding of people, less judgment, and their family members even
noticed that they were calmer, happier, and kinder. Because Griffith's
Dr Griffiths is the guy leading this. He thinks that
(42:19):
they found the sweet spot, which is just enough to
get you to that place, but not so much that
it could have an adverse effect. I got one more too,
if you're up for it. A web MD. This is
just a couple of months ago we conducting philocybin stuff. No,
they were just reporting on Johns Hopkins again, which is
(42:39):
party central. I guess um personality and humans is generally
pretty fixed after the age of thirty, they say, And
it takes something like a a job change or a
big move, or a death in the family or a divorce,
like something really big to affect your personality in any
meaningful way generally, unless you take mushrooms once. Really is
(43:03):
what they found. UH openness decreases across decades very slightly,
and people generally become rigid and less creative. But the
fifty two adults that volunteered to eat psilocybin um from
the ages of sixty four had transcendent mystical experiences while
taking the drug, and they said measurable increases in openness,
(43:28):
which is one of five key parts of your personality,
and it did not affect the other four parts, which
is interesting, which is neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. But
apparently it makes people more open and creative. What's crazy
to me is looking at like the studies and what
they're doing in the studies like UM, they found that uh,
(43:52):
I think, like UM, two milligrams or five milligrams, some
ridiculously large amount of psilocybin injected intravenously through an ivy
drip was UM like too much? Patients started um started
reporting that the experiences were a little overwhelming and terrifying.
Can't you imagine some poor sap in like a hospital
(44:13):
room getting like three milligrams of psilocybin delivered intravenously UM.
And then there's also, uh, there's been a lot of
cats dogs, rabbits, um, monkeys, cats, I think I said rats, mice, cats, um,
that have been given psilocybin over the course of time. Uh,
(44:35):
in the name of research or eating in the wild. Imagine, well,
have you ever seen The Bear, the documentary that follows
the Two Bears. The bear eats mushrooms and they have
this big like scene where it's like just tripping and
flowers are blooming and the skies just moving with the
stars and everything. And we were looking closely, you mean,
(44:55):
I were checking it out last night, UM that it's
clearly person dressed as a bear tripping. So we went
and did a little researcher, like this is a documentary, right,
And yeah, they had somebody dress up as a bear
for that part, but the actual bear did actually eat mushrooms.
They just the director was taking a lot of artistic life.
(45:17):
But you and it's you have to imagine, like what's
it like for an animal? Like how can we even tell?
Apparently mice mice show that they're hallucinating through head twitches.
And then monkeys who um have been taught to self
inject psilocybin um tend to zone out. Fixed staring is
(45:38):
what that's called or they'll grasp at unseen objects. You
imagine some poor monkey doing that. I can uh, oh,
it would be fair to that. The UM web md
report you know six said they had these transcendent mystical experiences,
but a lot of people also had bad trips at
(46:01):
hiring abouts of fear and anxiety. So you know, we're
not saying that it's like, take mushrooms and everything's great
for your life. They found that it can go one
of two ways, good or bad. Yeah. I guess there's
probably no such thing as a neutral mushroom experience. I
don't think so. I think it's gonna affect you profoundly
in one way or the other. Um, if you want
(46:24):
to know, you've got anything else, I got nothing else, sir.
If you want to know more about mushrooms, you can
read this article on the site this crazy article on
the site UM how magic mushrooms work. By typing that
into the search bar at how stuff works dot com.
And that means that it is time for listener mail.
(46:46):
And I think I think we proved that we can
cover other stuff like this. We will find out if
we get in a lot of trouble for this one,
whether we could cover stuff like this one, and it's
a big part of the world, and we're out to
explain everything exactly, not just flowers and blue birds. We
have to cover the dark underbelly as well. Jack all right,
(47:06):
I'm gonna call this um uh from Max. Okay, longtime listener,
first time emailer. I've sent email lots of times, but
just not to you, guys. Max is a funny guy.
I've listened to the show religiously at work, but since
I was laid off in May, I'd fallen far behind
hustling to get that dollar, left little time for length
(47:28):
lengthy dissections on cheesemaking arts or why we get zits.
I posted the details of my sad, unemployed s y
s k less experience on Twitter, and you, guys retweeted
it to your adoring throngs. You did that. Yeah, it's nice.
I got many well wishers, a couple of people who
asked for my CV. What does that stand for? Curriculum vite.
(47:52):
I've never heard that. I mean, I've seen it, but yeah,
but I just never knew exactly what it stood for.
It's like the debbie you see when you walk in there,
the water closet. You're gonna find a toilet because it's
a water close. But they even called the toilet the
water closet. It's not even just the room. It refers
also to the toilet for some reason, which makes no
sense to me. It's a closet, there's water. Uh where
(48:16):
was I? I got many well wishes, a couple asked
for my CV, and several new followers. H I got
out of this retweet people actually following this back busy.
Not much came of that alone, but it was awesome
that you guys did that for me. Really cheered me
up when that job search had been in vain for
such a long while. So I wanted to send you
dudes a heads up that after four lengthy interviews with
(48:37):
the same company, I've been hired. I was vetted more
thoroughly than Sarah Palin. It's an office gig and a
nice neighborhood about ten minutes from my home, which is
a real perk that's hard to come by here in
the San Francisco Bay Area. I'll be making more money
than ever before working with a friend of mine, and
and now I had plenty of time to catch up
on your fine program. So huzzah to that. That is awesome.
(49:00):
Thanks for your help, dudes. If I ever find myself
in Atlanta where you find yourself by the Bay, I
owe you many beers. And that is Max in Martinez, California,
who you can follow at Wicked Machine if you're so interested.
That's awesome, and I guess he'll be tweeting about his
great new job working with his buddy, sleeping late, making
(49:20):
more most of rolling. Indough, that's nice. Good for Max, Um,
thanks a lot, Max for writing in. Yeah, I was
wondering actually like a week or so ago, how he
was doing. But yeah, like right away somebody was like, hey,
sa me or cbe. It's your curriculum vitae. People are
gonna be every unemployeed person on the planet. Now, it's
gonna see Josh help. We'll retweet them. Apparently it doesn't
(49:42):
do a whole lot, but we'll we'll give it a shot. Um,
if you want to, I guess let us know that
your own employee on Twitter, you can tweet to us
at s y s K podcast. You can go hang
out with us on Facebook, uh facebook dot com, slash
stuff you should Know, or you can send us a
good old fashioned email at Stuff Podcast. At how stuff
(50:05):
works dot com For more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com, m
Hey everyone, it's Josh and for this week's s Y
s K Selects episode, I picked How Magic Mushrooms Work,
which came out in two thousand and twelve. I think
we're just kind of starting to dip our toe into
um controversial topics maybe who knows. And I think I
remember us being worried we were going to get in
trouble for it. Well we didn't. So here it is again,
(00:23):
enjoy Welcome to Stuff you should Know from house Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast on
Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant with me. Uh
(00:45):
and this is the far out podcast Stuff you should know.
That's right. We were kicking off. This is our first
show we're recording in and uh, Josh thought let's kick
it off with the Little Almond Brothers and get psychedelic exactly.
That's how you think of when you think psychedelia. Well,
(01:06):
they were known for having mushrooms on their album covers
and t shirts and it was a very common thing.
Those are peaches, dead mushrooms all over the place. Okay, yeah,
but generally now, of course, you think of like, you know,
the grateful Dead. Jefferson airplane, Yeah, the floor elevators, Yeah, Quicksilver,
(01:27):
messenger service, Moby Grape strawberry, alarm clock, chocolate watchman, Jimi
Hendricks of course. Who yeah, so Chuck Uh, you're familiar
with psychedelia rock and roll? Of course? Are you familiar
with psychedelia as far as psychedelics are concerned. I know
you are, and you want to know how I know
(01:47):
you are because we podcasted on it. That's exactly right,
LSD and Cia. What else? It seems like we've been
psychedelics treatmental illness, that's right. That was a big one
that kind of overlaps with some of this. Um. We're
gonna lay a lot of the blame of all the
lost research, decades of it at the feet of Timothy Leary,
the man who ruined everything, um and what we're talking about.
(02:09):
Pardon my sniffles. By the way, I'm not sick mentally.
I'm not allowing myself to think of me as sick.
I have sniffles. That's that's what I did. I was like, now,
I'm not sick. I'm just not gonna let it happen.
And you look at you. You look fantastic. It was
just a few days I think if I would have
wallowed in it, it would have been more than a week.
I'm not yeah, I'm not letting myself. I hit it hard, man,
(02:29):
like tons of fluids and emergency and airborne and fruits,
and that was fine. Okay, you'll be great airborne. You know.
That's like Holly discredited. It's the same thing as an
emergency pretty much. It's just like vitamins and stuff. Okay,
all right, but it doesn't keep you from getting sick.
I think that's how it's discredited. But it'll it'll help
(02:50):
you out, like in a vitamin any way. Right, alright,
some college, because there's like get to the most room exactly.
So let's get to the mushroom. Chuck, Um, chuck. I've
got no real intro other than I think we should
talk about the history of mushrooms first. What do you think?
I think it sounds great. Um. Apparently there's a lot
(03:14):
of um debate over how long people have been using
magic mushrooms. UM. As far as religious rituals recreationally, who knows,
but the supposition is that it goes back thousands and
thousands of years. For example, there's a cave painting in
Um Algeria that it's nine thousand years old. Um, that
(03:38):
supposedly depicts mushrooms. There's another one in Spain that's six
thousand years old that depicts mushrooms. Um. And I mean
it makes a lot of sense that when you think
of Native American tribes, Amerindian tribes, Mesoamerican tribes. Um, these
people have customarily eaten magic mushrooms all this time. Right. Well,
(04:01):
that's what one camp says is, hey, they've been used
in religious rites for thousands of years and Central American
Northern Africa, Like you said, so, uh, what's the rub?
But then there's another camp that says, hey, you can't
prove that you're just seeing what you want to see
when you look at that ca painting or that Allmond
Brothers cover and uh, just because there's a mushroom on
(04:23):
the wall doesn't mean that they ate magic mushrooms. What
did the Aztecs have? How do you pronounce that? I
don't know. I've never been good at pronouncing Aztec, but
I can take a stab at it if you'd like
me to. Tan un knocked tal right. They called it
the flesh of the gods, and they use the substance
(04:44):
we know that we just don't know what it was,
but a lot of people think that it might have
been quote unquote magic mushrooms. Right. They also made statues
of it, that kind of thing, um, And you generally
only do that back in the day, if you if
it's a very revered sub instance, they're gonna make a
statue of just like whatever. If we can speak in likelihoods,
(05:05):
there were we know there were mushrooms where we assume
that there were these mushrooms growing wild like they are
today in these areas that these people were hunters and
gatherers and foragers so likely tried these mushrooms. If they
did try these mushrooms, they probably wigged out, right, isn't
that the clinical term? I think they call it a trip?
(05:27):
Okay man, Uh, they tripped and um probably started incorporating
it into their cave art you know teas today and
there on their book cover from their notebooks. Uh. It
has been confirmed in contemporary tribes in Central America, including
the mass at Tech, the Mixed Tech, the Nagua, and
(05:49):
the Zappa Tech. So all the texts are way into
it at least these days. Right, So if they eat
it these days, I would say, chances are they probably
ate it back in the day as well. Okay, so um,
as far as the West is concerned. Um, well, I'm
sorry it wasn't. Also, it's not just Middle America, Mesoamerica,
(06:11):
Northern African Spain, you mean like a Middle America like
Ohio and America. It's not just Kansas that's on mushrooms. Um,
the Sammi. Have you heard of the Sami people? So
they're finished. They're like indigenous Finish tribes like be York
clearly has Sami in her. Like her look, it's very Sami. Um. Yeah,
(06:33):
well you'd like the Sammies. Cool looking. Um. They love
mushrooms so much that they are known to drink the
urine of reindeer that have just recently ingested mushrooms. And
there's yeah, there's an art installation and I think Berlin
recently of this guy who had a bunch of magic
mushrooms in this pin, a bunch of reindeer in them,
and he was having the reindeer eat the mushrooms and
(06:55):
then collect him their urine and storing it. Well, my
question to him is why would he go about it
that way? If he has some magic mushrooms. Did it
like increase the potency or something like that. I don't know.
You'd probably be better off asking a sami person than him. Sure,
I don't know. If like, um, it's like that coffee
we failed to mention that's like ferrets and they poop
(07:16):
it out the coffee being and then they roast that
into coffee. Exact it's status. Um. So anyway, people have
probably been eating magic mushrooms for a long time, but
among Westerners it was totally unthought of, unheard of, unknown
until the fifties. Right, yeah. Uh. In nineteen five, a
(07:36):
writer while he's a mycologist who studies mushrooms. His name
was our Gordon Wesson, and he traveled to Mexico a
lot back in the fifties searching out mushrooms. Not for
magic mushroom purposes, but he was just into mushrooms and
he participated in a ritual he and his wife did together, well,
(07:57):
not not at first. Actually, did you read the article? No, yeah,
it's really good. You should read it sometime. He he
took a colleague down there first. Later on he took
his wife and daughter and she was like eighteen, so
he was like, sure, she's old enough, and they all
tripped on these mushrooms. But I'd like to read a
selection if I may Alan as his friend. By the way,
(08:20):
is that allen him? Um? Yeah, I think so. Um.
Alan and I were determined to resist any effects that
they might have to observe better the events of the night,
But her resolve soon melted before the onslaught of the mushrooms.
Alan felt cold and wrapped himself in a blanket. A
few minutes later, he leaned over and whispered, Gordon, I'm
seeing things. I told him not to worry. I was too.
(08:45):
We were never more wide awake, and the visions came,
whether our eyes were open or closed. They emerged from
the center of our field of vision, opening up as
they came, now rushing, now slowly, at the pace that
our will chose. They began with art motifs. Motifs fractals
is another word angling, such as might decorate carpets or
(09:07):
textiles or wallpaper, or the drawing board of an architect.
Then I saw a mythological beast drawing a regal chariot.
And then he goes on to describe all sorts of things,
including seeing not an imperfect view of ordinary life, but
the archetypes, the platonic ideas that underlie the imperfect images
(09:29):
of everyday life. So he was tripping hard. It sounds
like a yeah, And that's unusual that he says that
he saw something in a chariot, because mushrooms and lst
are Although they're hallucinogens, they don't cause actual hallucinations. They
tend to just mess with, distort things that are already there. Exactly.
I have an answer for that because I thought the
same thing. He did it in darkness, So I mean,
(09:53):
on drugs or not. If you go and sit in
a dark room long enough, you're gonna start seeing things
in your mind's eye. And I think that's what's going on.
You're just imagining. It's such an our. Gordon Wasson, apologist, Chuck.
He was pretty moved though, and he wrote this article
in Life, and uh, the editor picked out the title
Seeking the Magic Mushroom. Yeah, that's where the name came from.
A Life magazine editor in nineteen fifty seven coined the
(10:16):
term magic mushroom. Um. After that little trip um, Wasson
and Heim recruited Albert Hoffman, who was the chemist who
created LSD isolated LSD and said, hey, man, we know
it's you're into. Take these mushrooms and figure out what's
going on with them. And he did, and he isolated
(10:40):
the active ingredient. A um, what is it a trip
to It's a trip to mine, which is an alkaloid.
Thank you. That's actually related trip to fan. Okay, the
Turkey stuff. Yeah, well you know it happens to in Turkey.
But the trip of mine is the two are psilocybin
and silison. So siloson is uh, that's the metabolite of psilocybin.
(11:02):
Psilocybin is the active ingredient the trip to mind found
in mushrooms. And then when you're when you ingested, your
body breaks down the psilocybin into psilocine. And they're starting
to come to realize that psilocine is probably the culprit
behind everything. Yeah. Um, before we move on, I want
to point out in the article he uh, he did
it quite a few times in Mexico, and then he
said later on, just to test to see if it
(11:25):
was part of just the communal experience of being there,
he went back to New York City and uh and
took some and he said it was even better in
New York City. Also, he disproved that he's like I
love New York UM, so okay. Albert Hoffman isolates psilocybin
UH and Sandoz who he worked for, who also started
(11:47):
mass producing LSD, started mass producing psilocybin as well, and
UM the psychological psychiatry community got his hands on it
and started studying it. We'll talk about some of the
studies later, but as early as the sixth ease they
realized that UM obsessive disorders UM could be treated with
psilocybin until they shut it down. They totally shut it down.
(12:10):
Psilocybin magic mushrooms UM. Any of the silocide mushrooms are
a Schedule one drug, which is kind of unusual because UM,
study after study has shown that mushrooms aren't habit forming
or addictive and that, you know, they kind of do
have a lot of medical uses, which again we'll talk
about in a little bit. But let's talk about the
(12:30):
mushrooms and cells. Chuck. They are a plant, a mineral, fungus,
or an animal. They're an animal. Uh, there are a
fungus and it means it grows from a score and UH,
each little mushroom in the case of psilocybin mushrooms has
(12:52):
anywhere from point two to point four percent psilocybins a
very small amount. Yeah, it sounds like it. And uh,
the National Survey on Drug Use and Health in two
thousand three did a survey and they found that about
eight percent of adults over twenty six, which to me
makes us an invalid study already if they didn't include, um,
(13:15):
eight percent have have tried it at some point. I
saw like teenagers, UM, something like around eight percent, but
it was hallucinogens um other than LSD, which includes like
PCP and stuff like that. Really, it seems kind of
weird to lump those together. Um. But in Europe the
prevalence is probably higher, um between point three percent in
(13:38):
fourteen point one percent of use at least once in
the person's lifetime between point three and fourteen. Yeah, it's
pretty pretty wild. And let's just call it fourteen, okay,
you know. And then for some reason, um, the Czech
Republic in Slovakia report the highest use among teenagers of
magic mushrooms. Not sure why. Interesting, Yeah, it's a nice
(14:01):
place to be. It was about to bag on it
and say you'd do it too, but it's lovely. Yeah,
or maybe that's why they're doing it because it is lovely,
because New York City it's the best. Uh So Timothy Leary,
we failed to mention. But of course obviously he sunk
his teeth into it literally, and like you said earlier,
(14:23):
like all things, he kind of killed the psychedelic movement
in a way as he was actually creating it. Yeah,
by making it, you know, a hippie burnout thing. Well,
he definitely delegitimized it. I mean, there are a lot
of people who were studying um LSD and psilocybin and
um I would gain all those to see how they
(14:46):
can help people with mental illness. And Leary was like, no, man,
let's just completely screw the establishment with this stuff. Well,
and he's the one who established the whole set and
setting thing right which is still in use today, including
in this article from how Stuff Works dot com. Set
and setting are defined in here. Um, do you want
(15:09):
to talk about it, Well, this is the trip as
they call it, The mushroom trip is very dependent on
set and setting, the frame of mind that you have
going into it. Where you are the setting obviously, if
it's you know, some kind of stressful, highly organized thing.
Like if you're in school or you're like in a
(15:30):
train station and somebody's like, you're gonna miss your train.
You're gonna miss your train is probably not a good idea.
Um Or if you're hanging out with friends and you're
camping or you're doing something there where you have no
stress involved and you have the right outlook going in,
Timothy Leary says, that's what you want as far as
going into this whole thing. Right set is mindset and
setting is your environment. Um Also, studies have found that
(15:54):
even um what are called drug naive people can have
a positive experience on psilocybin mushrooms if there is if
what's about to happen to them is explained to them
ahead of time. That that's a big part of it too,
is knowing what you're getting into going into it well.
And that's a big part of these studies we're going
to talk about later on was these people are all
(16:16):
coached ahead of time by people you know, they call
them their guides is what they are now. They're reach
research assistants who have had previous experience with psychotropics, but
they would explain to them what they're about to get
into and that would obviously help them along as they're
going in. But they do mention the guide thing in
(16:37):
here in this article. Uh, they say that a lot
of people, um, because you know, you can have a
bad trip, which the only thing you can do there
is to write it out. Obviously you can't turn off
the effects, which is a very important thing to note.
It doesn't go away, No, it doesn't. Although supposedly, um,
in the emergency room they usually prescribed sedatives and suppose
(17:00):
really helps a bad trip. Yeah, I'm sure it does, um,
But they say in the article here, new users are
often advised to have an experienced friend h guide them
through the experience, Like did you see Flirting with Disaster? Yeah,
Lily Tomlin, Well yeah, they accidentally dosed the cop and
she was like Alan and it's like she's a great guy,
(17:20):
He'll be fine, and that she just kind of coaches
him through the thing. I was looking up movies, um
that have mushrooms in him, and I was having a
lot of job. I found like Altered States. Well this
was LSD, but oh yeah, okay, but I guess that's
a good time to mention that LSD and psilocybin. Mushrooms
are very similar in the effect. Although they say that
(17:41):
mushrooms are generally milder and don't last as long, their
chemical composition is very very similar. Do you know how similar?
I think there's like one um hydroxy really that's different,
but they're pretty close, very close. Would when they made
LSD did they try to synthesize psilocybin? Was that the
(18:01):
way they were after? No, because they didn't know that
psilocybin existed until after LST had been synicide. Interesting because
you know he did LST in and do psilocybin until
like quite a coincidence, isn't it? Yeah? Um, so do
you know what's going on in the brain? Do you
(18:22):
know what the whole secret is behind magic mushrooms? Uh?
Central nervous system. There's some kind of inhibits and inhibits
something right. Uh. No, it does the opposite. It's an agonist,
which I came to realize that agony means that you
feel everything. I'm in. Agony means you're feeling everything. And
agonists UM binds to a receptor like in your brain
(18:47):
that releases a neurotransmitter, and in this case, UM psilocybin
or psil Lowson binds to serotonin receptors. It says, relieve
the serotonin, right, and your synapses are flooded with serotonin
and that's what gives what clinical researchers basically call the
(19:08):
sensation of just being overwhelmed by sensation. Interesting. Yeah, it's
all serotonin, man, although there is evidence that it affects
your dopamine receptors, but not directly, like indirectly, which would
kind of give you a sense of view for you right,
uh so, josh. Some of the side effects when someone
is taking mushrooms include dizziness and nausea UM, muscle weakness,
(19:32):
loss of appetite, and numbness um. Sometimes uh, there could
be vomiting sometimes anecdotally. Experts have said that inducing vomiting
is a way to cease the nausea when you're experiencing
nausea in a mushroom trip, and said they're not considered
(19:53):
to be addictive and you can build up a toleran
it's really quick. Yeah. Um. It says here in the
article that like, for exam ample, taking mushrooms two days
in a row um is going to make the effects
of them on the second day far less pronounced I guess.
And one of the guys in these studies to um,
I believe, takes them for cluster headaches, and he's taken
(20:16):
them so much that they don't have psycho hallucinogenic properties anymore.
It's just like medicine for him, really gross fungal medicine. No,
I think you might take a pill. Okay, I'm not
sure though. UM all the tolerance also, UM, you can
build up across tolerance. So like if you took a
bunch of mushrooms one day and then the next day
(20:37):
took mescalin or LSD, those effects would be dampened as well.
And I think it has to do with the fact
that it's all it's your serotonin. But if you do that,
that means a lot of other things as well about you.
It does you know, yes, I don't know what, but
oh you know what, you have a T shirt that
has an Almond Brothers album cover, it means you're hippie,
(20:59):
a dirty, dirty, melly hippie. So um chuck. Some of
the other effects of tripping on shrooms is um euphoria
or dysphoria, and also sometimes a very rapid shift between
the two. UM basically being really happy and then being
terrified UM and then deep personalization, which is a sense
(21:19):
that you are not yourself, or you belong to somebody
else or there's you, you lose your sense of self,
and then de realization, which is the sense that you
are in a dream or that man, this isn't real,
nothing is real, that kind of thing. The passage of
time is often distorted, whether it's like have we been
(21:43):
talking about this for five hours or five minutes or
the other way around. I think it can go either way.
I found a study that UM showed it basically tested
that it gave people psilocybin and then did like time
interval tests and found two to three seconds is about
the most that a person can it's successfully achieve as
(22:04):
these tests, like beyond three seconds they start to get
really bad at it. And they also found the person's
tapping preference, which I guess is like if you're just
sitting there tapping, you know your fingers, what your preferences,
and it's slower when you're on mushroom really so uh
and like you said that, you don't actually hallucinate, like
(22:26):
you're not going to be sitting there and see pink
elephants dancing across the room. But if there's a painting
of a pink elephant, uh, it might appear as if
the elephant were breathing or moving or shifting. Or if
you hear something like a song or running water or
you know, a creek or something like that, you might
hear other things within that sound, but not completely imagine them. Right. So,
(22:52):
one of the things we were talking about was that, sure,
mushrooms have been around for thousands of years, growing wild
like they do today, and um, that's where a lot
of people get their mushrooms. Apparently is just foraging it
for him. One of the big problems is that, Um,
while there are a lot of mushrooms in the genus Silocybe,
(23:14):
which we probably should have mentioned earlier, that's there's the
big spoiler. All the mushrooms are in the same genus. Um,
there's a lot that look like them two and that
might grow in similar places that will shut down your kidneys. Yeah,
so you have to be very careful when you're foraging
for fresh wild mushrooms if you're into that kind of thing,
(23:37):
which neither Chuck nor i Um suggests should be done. Yeah,
we're not endorsing this, No, I'm just saying like this
is in the article. Yeah, I thought that was implicit,
but it's probably a good time to c o a yeah. Um.
In the article, they also point out that even experienced
mushroom hunters have made mistakes out there in the dark
in the field among the cows. So yeah, it can
(24:01):
be toxic. It's not a good idea to just go
picking mushrooms growing in it pie. And that holds true
for if you're looking for truffles or you know edible mushrooms. Um. Yeah,
you want to kind of know what you're doing. Um.
One way to tell what kind of mushroom you're looking
at is to create a spore print, which apparently you
take a piece of paper and you take the cap
(24:25):
of the mushroom. There's a stem in a cap um
and in the genocilicide. Most of them are fairly small,
so the cap is about one inch tall, the stems
about three inches tall. Um. But you take the cap
and you place a gill side down. If you've ever
looked at the underside of a mushroom, there's the gills.
They're just so weird looking, little powdery, powdery gills. Powder
(24:47):
is the spores you press the gills down on the
paper and it should leave an imprint of the spores.
And if you know what you're doing, you can identify
more easily or more um closely. They kind of mush him.
You're dealing with um. So we said that there's like
dozens of species I think of Psilocybe mushrooms. Yeah, there's
(25:07):
tons of them. A couple of really popular ones though
as far as ingestion goes, are the Psilocybe cubensis. It's
one of the most common ones. It's a little larger
as far as magic mushrooms go. It's got a golden cap.
I'm sorry, it's called the Golden cap or Mexican mushroom,
the street name that that's the one that um our
(25:30):
Gordon Wasser probably was probably in Mexico um And it's
got usually a reddish brown cap, white or yellowish stem.
And here's an important thing. When it's bruised or crushed
um it can turn blue. And a lot of people
will say, hey, that's how you know it's a magic
mushrooms if it turns blue when you crush it. And
that's not true because there are toxic varieties that do
(25:53):
the same thing. So that's a good way to get
yourself in trouble. Um. It's also copera philic, which means
that it grows in poop yeah, um, moist environments, very
human environments, and hot yeah, like h South Georgia, let's say,
or Florida. Yeah, which apparently I didn't look to see.
But as of February two thousand nine, at least, um
(26:16):
is the only state in the Union that where it
isn't illegal to I guess pick or possess fresh pilocybe
mushrooms fresh as a non dried out right. Yeah, that's true,
or it was two years ago. I was gonna say,
is it's still you know? I don't know. And when
they say the reasoning is that, hey, it grows in
the wild. People pick mushrooms and might pick them by accident,
(26:37):
so we don't want senior prison if something's an accident.
Plus the rainbow families in Ocala, and we can't we
don't want to screw up their jam. One of the
one of the other more popular ones is the Psilocybe
semi lanciata chuck or the liberty cap and um. It's
(26:57):
also is found in damp grassy fields populated by cattle,
but it doesn't grow directly on the dung. And it's
a little pointy cap, light yellow and brown, and it's
smaller than the golden cap Mexican. Right. And then I
guess one or the other of the big three is
p Bayo sistus or the bluebell or bottle cap? So chuck.
(27:20):
If when we're disposed to, um, take mushrooms, what, according
to the article, would the person do? Well? I mean,
what are what are the people who are taking mushrooms
doing with them? We we talked about foraging. That's one
one way you can buy them, which is illegal and
we don't recommend it obviously. Um. It's illegal even to
(27:44):
have spores, which is surprising because sports don't actually contain psilocybin,
which is what's outlawed. It's a weird loophole, but it's
not a loophole. It's the what's the opposite of loophole
the donut the doughnut part. Okay, that's what the donut
hole is. The munch. I know, I'm familiar with munch,
(28:04):
can't believe me, okay, Um, And then you can grow
your own, obviously, but if you're looking to buy this
kind of thing in the United States. You know, they
sell it much like marijuana, and uh ounces and quarter
ounces and eight ounces and uh, I know the an
eight is defined in this three point five grams in
this article. This is the craziest article on the site,
(28:27):
has to be. Yeah, it's pretty crazy. Uh yeah, because
at one point she talks about who wrote this, Shana Freeman.
Shana talks about the ones on the Gulf Coast give
you a mellower high, but the tie mushrooms give you
a much more intense high. Right, it's crazy. It is. Um.
And when they dry out, which is when most people
(28:50):
uh have them, they're dried out, they will lose some
of their psychotropic properties in the drying process, but they
retain these properties. I don't know about them definitely but
for years. Yeah. Well, because you're you're not just drying.
I think you have to freeze dry them or you
have to dry them. There's like a certain way to
(29:12):
dry them. I think that kind of locks in everything favor,
which apparently is very unfortunate. Um. Some mushrooms have a
reported flowery taste that sounds awful, um, sour or bitter,
so it's not very fun, which means that a lot
of people UM do crazy stuff with their mushrooms to
(29:34):
make them more palatable chocolates, mushroom chocolates is one. UM
soaking liquor, soaking their mushrooms in liquor like tequiler rum um,
just basically grinding them up and putting them into capsules
so like you don't taste anything at all, like a
mushroom pill um. Or making mushroom tea, which supposedly if
(29:57):
you cook or um brew mushrooms, it's it's it's supposedly
doesn't have an effect on um the potency, Yeah, the
experience the user has and it reportedly uh comes on
quicker as well. And anecdotally people have even been known
to eat the slimy remains of the tea. Gross. That's
(30:20):
what I think. I mean, everything about mushrooms are gross,
but slimy. I don't like regular mushrooms like it's. I know,
they supposedly don't have much of a taste and they're
put in foods for texture, but I don't like the texture. Yeah,
it's just the whole thing grosses me outright. So um,
about one gram of dry mushrooms is apparently a very
(30:42):
small dose four grams UM is a medium dose for
an adult. I read um medium too large? Yeah, so, uh,
and I guess one P. Cubensis, the Mexican mushroom dried
is about a gram, a decent sized one. And when
the when the one gram or four grams or whatever
(31:05):
the dose is just taken, UM is ingested. Uh. You
apparently within twenty minutes if you take it orally twenty
to thirty minutes, you start to experience symptoms and they
last for something like six hours, depending on like the potency.
I guess, well, yeah, that's what That's what SHANEA. Freeman
says in this article is that, like the there's differences
(31:28):
between from mushroom to mushroom, from person to person. Um. Yeah, that.
I mean, it's not like Sandoz is making this stuff anymore. So.
We mentioned foraging, right, we mentioned uh, buying off the street,
neither of which we recommend. No, again, this is all
highly illegal. I mean, a schedule one drug will get
you a severe prison sense. You might as well be
(31:51):
caught with heroin or um cocaine or PCP like this
is it. This isn't as bad as it's not, just
because you can go out in the cowfield and find
some doesn't mean you should take it lightly. You're right, No,
this is huge, man, that's a huge, huge prison sentence.
Very good. It's like a life ruining prison sentence. It
(32:12):
is very although I guess probably just about any prison
sentences fairly life ruining. But this is like double life ruining.
That's huge. Uh mycology. You can actually grow these things,
and that's what some people do, some cultivators do. This
is also extremely illegal, very much illegal. Uh used to
and even so we're going to tell you how to
(32:33):
do it because this is stuff you should know, okay, okay, uh, yes,
well it's stuff that some people should know. Well, I
guess at the very least, it's part of explaining everything.
It's on our website. Yeah, Jerry's just in there, crack um.
You have to have a spore because that's the first
(32:53):
thing you need for the mushroom to grow. Uh. Spore
grows onto one mushroom, but a mushroom can have that
thousands and thousands of spores on the underside the little
pottery stuff that we're talking about. And remember we talked
about taking spot prints for identification. The same sport prints
are often what you get in the mail when you
mail order UM mushroom kits. Right, you can't just throw
(33:17):
these spores in the ground. They have to be hydrated
with clean water, meaning distilled water. And you can even
buy syringes that are filled pre filled with spores and
sterile water from suppliers if you don't want to make
your own. Right. So you remember in the um Earthworm
episode we talked about duff that that organic, light, spongy
(33:41):
organic material. You have to make your own version of
duff um using brown flower vermiculite, which is the little
white pebbly stuff in like potting soil, um and water.
You just kind of mix it together and it creates
duff a fluffy, kind of spongy layer. And I think
rice flower too, because I think wheat flour might uh,
(34:01):
I think it might mold easier or something. Okay, I
might be wrong. Um. And you create what's called the
substrate cake, which is great. It's a great growing medium
for um mushrooms. It's like your soil, right pretty much. UM.
And you create you put this little substrate cake in
a can like a jar, right, yeah, canning jar, and
(34:24):
then you put it You put the canning jar in
the canning bath or pressure cooker which sterilizes the insides.
That's right. And then I guess you inject the spores.
If you have like a syringe with the spores in it,
you injected into the jar. Yeah, put poke some holes
in the lid, and then that eventually will grow kind
(34:44):
of a white ropey growth called um my celium. Yeah,
it's got to be at a very steady humid environments
about seventy five degrees fahrenheit twenty three celsius. And within
about a week, like you said, you get the mycelium.
And then, uh, if you get mold and stuff like that,
that means you know, it wasn't a good environment. But eventually,
(35:07):
once it's covered my cilium, you're gonna put that into
a plastic container for fruiting. Uh, and under the right humid,
warm conditions and grow mushrooms. And each little cake can
grow a lot of mushrooms, like a thousand or a hundred. Yeah,
not at once, obviously, No, they grow and waves supposedly,
and you harvest, and then more come, and the harvest
(35:27):
and more come, and over the course of a month.
Is where you get your mushrooms from the cake. Again,
very illegal to buy any of this stuff or to
engage in growing any of the stuff. Um. And let's
talk about that, Chuck. I think it's high time we
got to the law part of it. Um. Like we said, mushrooms,
since I think are U a Schedule one drug? Um
(35:52):
And like we said, Schedule one drugs are defined as
drugs that are highly addictive and have no medical use um.
Which is kind of weird to put mushrooms in there,
but they are in there. I don't think you can
argue that with the d A that comes and bust
down your door to break up your mushroom growing operation
that hey man, these things are not addictive and there's
(36:14):
all sorts of medical uses for him. Although it probably
won't be the d n A with mushrooms, is d
A probably gonna be what I say, d n A
did I really, it's not gonna be the d e
A either. You're freaking out. I know it is likely
not going to be the d e A either, because
it's probably gonna be a state Although is there state
(36:34):
d A or there's something like that on the state level? Yeah, Yeah,
I think there's a. Yeah, there's Each state has a
Bureau of investigation that I think kind of acts like
the state d e A. But unless you have like
some big, large operation going on, it's probably not going
to be a federal crime. It's probably gonna be a
state crime, right UM. And time was you could order
(36:57):
kits like the ones we describe UM on the internet
over through the mail. If you do that, now you
are going to get in a lot of trouble. The
d e A probably will come to your house or
intercepted or both. UM. And that was. That's been the
case since two thousand three. For the States, it's been illegal,
(37:17):
but apparently they started cracking down on kits in two
thousand three. UM. In Great Britain UH, in two thousand
and five, it was still legal to have um mushrooms
fresh mushrooms, but that's not the case any longer. UM.
And then in Amsterdam, even Amsterdam I was surprised to
(37:38):
learn of this. UH in two thousand one they outlawed
UM dried mushrooms, and then in two thousand and eight
they outlawed fresh mushrooms. So you can't have any mushrooms
in the Netherlands. But in Mexico they do have exceptions
for indigenous people's and being used in ceremonies and such.
We do in the United States as well, um, but
(37:59):
not necessarily for pilocide mushrooms. Um more. For I think
payote is the one that's got the big exception. Yeah,
the Native American Church is allowed to use payote, so, Josh,
we said that for many years, about thirty five years
(38:21):
or so, it was shut down as far as research
goes as you know, potential medical benefits. Uh. Since I
don't know when they said you can again, but I
know in two thousand six Johns Hopkins started a long
term research study along with some other places, but Johns
Hopkins really has headed this up, and they found a
(38:43):
lot of really interesting things like you said, O C
D uh, and some eating disorders, some compulsive eating disorders,
so basically any compulsion. Yeah, they found that. Uh. In
the in the Journal of Clinical Psychiatry, it was written
that uh study proved well, not proved, indicated that for
a period of about four to twenty four hours they
(39:06):
remained symptom free for that period and sometimes it was
even for days, and that they said that there was
no treatment that eases the symptoms as fast because it's
pretty much immediate of the compulsive disorders. Yeah, I would
imagine it's your you have a compulsion, or your compulsion
is exacerbated by a lack of serotonin. You take mushrooms
(39:28):
and all of a sudden your brain is flooded with
silicide or serotonin. Cluster headaches, Yeah, this one was interesting.
I read about this as well. Cluster headaches are pretty
much the worst pain you can have in your head.
They liken it to childbirth without anesthesia and um in England.
This was in The Guardian that I read this. They're
(39:49):
about six thousand people in England that suffer these attacks um,
sometimes daily with no more than a couple of weeks remission.
And it's called the cluster period with the remission or
like these these periods where you have them, yeah, r period.
Apparently psilocybin helps us out a lot. And this one guy,
(40:09):
Richard alf says that he's tried conventional treatments in everything
his whole life and the only thing that brought him
relief was the magic mushrooms and even by some longer
periods of remission between attacks. So there's another treatment. Um.
There's also you know, whenever you hear of um H,
(40:31):
mushrooms or psychedelics or hallucinogens in general, like the whole
idea of religious epiphany or feeling like you're a one
with a universe or something a mystical experience. Right early
on in the West, the West study of um mushrooms this,
this was kind of noted. And there is this famous
study in nineteen sixty three where they gave psilocybin to
(40:55):
a group of Divinity students and send them to church.
Really yeah, and um, they of course reported like all
sorts of wonderful mystical feelings and connections with God and
religion and um, just every enlightenment basically is what they reported. Um,
which is not that surprising because you know, I think
(41:17):
you could have called that one right. But what's very
surprising is that twenty five years later they've they've surveyed
the participants again, um, and the people who had received
psilocybin UM reported a great greater number of positive life
changes than people who hadn't been given psilocybin, like the
(41:38):
controls who've gotten placebo instead. Well that's what JOHNS. Hopkins
has found so far too. They did, uh a study
on eighteen adults is just one of them, and ninety
four percent said that it was one of the top
five most meaningful experiences in their lives, said it was
a single most meaningful experience. And then they interviewed them
(41:59):
again a year later and found that they still felt
that way and had these changes in UH empathy, greater
understanding of people, less judgment, and their family members even
noticed that they were calmer, happier, and kinder. Because Griffith's
Dr Griffiths is the guy leading this. He thinks that
(42:19):
they found the sweet spot, which is just enough to
get you to that place, but not so much that
it could have an adverse effect. I got one more too,
if you're up for it. A web MD. This is
just a couple of months ago we conducting philocybin stuff. No,
they were just reporting on Johns Hopkins again, which is
(42:39):
party central. I guess um personality and humans is generally
pretty fixed after the age of thirty, they say, And
it takes something like a a job change or a
big move, or a death in the family or a divorce,
like something really big to affect your personality in any
meaningful way generally, unless you take mushrooms once. Really is
(43:03):
what they found. UH openness decreases across decades very slightly,
and people generally become rigid and less creative. But the
fifty two adults that volunteered to eat psilocybin um from
the ages of sixty four had transcendent mystical experiences while
taking the drug, and they said measurable increases in openness,
(43:28):
which is one of five key parts of your personality,
and it did not affect the other four parts, which
is interesting, which is neuroticism, extroversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. But
apparently it makes people more open and creative. What's crazy
to me is looking at like the studies and what
they're doing in the studies like UM, they found that uh,
(43:52):
I think, like UM, two milligrams or five milligrams, some
ridiculously large amount of psilocybin injected intravenously through an ivy
drip was UM like too much? Patients started um started
reporting that the experiences were a little overwhelming and terrifying.
Can't you imagine some poor sap in like a hospital
(44:13):
room getting like three milligrams of psilocybin delivered intravenously UM.
And then there's also, uh, there's been a lot of
cats dogs, rabbits, um, monkeys, cats, I think I said rats, mice, cats, um,
that have been given psilocybin over the course of time. Uh,
(44:35):
in the name of research or eating in the wild. Imagine, well,
have you ever seen The Bear, the documentary that follows
the Two Bears. The bear eats mushrooms and they have
this big like scene where it's like just tripping and
flowers are blooming and the skies just moving with the
stars and everything. And we were looking closely, you mean,
(44:55):
I were checking it out last night, UM that it's
clearly person dressed as a bear tripping. So we went
and did a little researcher, like this is a documentary, right,
And yeah, they had somebody dress up as a bear
for that part, but the actual bear did actually eat mushrooms.
They just the director was taking a lot of artistic life.
(45:17):
But you and it's you have to imagine, like what's
it like for an animal? Like how can we even tell?
Apparently mice mice show that they're hallucinating through head twitches.
And then monkeys who um have been taught to self
inject psilocybin um tend to zone out. Fixed staring is
(45:38):
what that's called or they'll grasp at unseen objects. You
imagine some poor monkey doing that. I can uh, oh,
it would be fair to that. The UM web md
report you know six said they had these transcendent mystical experiences,
but a lot of people also had bad trips at
(46:01):
hiring abouts of fear and anxiety. So you know, we're
not saying that it's like, take mushrooms and everything's great
for your life. They found that it can go one
of two ways, good or bad. Yeah. I guess there's
probably no such thing as a neutral mushroom experience. I
don't think so. I think it's gonna affect you profoundly
in one way or the other. Um, if you want
(46:24):
to know, you've got anything else, I got nothing else, sir.
If you want to know more about mushrooms, you can
read this article on the site this crazy article on
the site UM how magic mushrooms work. By typing that
into the search bar at how stuff works dot com.
And that means that it is time for listener mail.
(46:46):
And I think I think we proved that we can
cover other stuff like this. We will find out if
we get in a lot of trouble for this one,
whether we could cover stuff like this one, and it's
a big part of the world, and we're out to
explain everything exactly, not just flowers and blue birds. We
have to cover the dark underbelly as well. Jack all right,
(47:06):
I'm gonna call this um uh from Max. Okay, longtime listener,
first time emailer. I've sent email lots of times, but
just not to you, guys. Max is a funny guy.
I've listened to the show religiously at work, but since
I was laid off in May, I'd fallen far behind
hustling to get that dollar, left little time for length
(47:28):
lengthy dissections on cheesemaking arts or why we get zits.
I posted the details of my sad, unemployed s y
s k less experience on Twitter, and you, guys retweeted
it to your adoring throngs. You did that. Yeah, it's nice.
I got many well wishers, a couple of people who
asked for my CV. What does that stand for? Curriculum vite.
(47:52):
I've never heard that. I mean, I've seen it, but yeah,
but I just never knew exactly what it stood for.
It's like the debbie you see when you walk in there,
the water closet. You're gonna find a toilet because it's
a water close. But they even called the toilet the
water closet. It's not even just the room. It refers
also to the toilet for some reason, which makes no
sense to me. It's a closet, there's water. Uh where
(48:16):
was I? I got many well wishes, a couple asked
for my CV, and several new followers. H I got
out of this retweet people actually following this back busy.
Not much came of that alone, but it was awesome
that you guys did that for me. Really cheered me
up when that job search had been in vain for
such a long while. So I wanted to send you
dudes a heads up that after four lengthy interviews with
(48:37):
the same company, I've been hired. I was vetted more
thoroughly than Sarah Palin. It's an office gig and a
nice neighborhood about ten minutes from my home, which is
a real perk that's hard to come by here in
the San Francisco Bay Area. I'll be making more money
than ever before working with a friend of mine, and
and now I had plenty of time to catch up
on your fine program. So huzzah to that. That is awesome.
(49:00):
Thanks for your help, dudes. If I ever find myself
in Atlanta where you find yourself by the Bay, I
owe you many beers. And that is Max in Martinez, California,
who you can follow at Wicked Machine if you're so interested.
That's awesome, and I guess he'll be tweeting about his
great new job working with his buddy, sleeping late, making
(49:20):
more most of rolling. Indough, that's nice. Good for Max, Um,
thanks a lot, Max for writing in. Yeah, I was
wondering actually like a week or so ago, how he
was doing. But yeah, like right away somebody was like, hey,
sa me or cbe. It's your curriculum vitae. People are
gonna be every unemployeed person on the planet. Now, it's
gonna see Josh help. We'll retweet them. Apparently it doesn't
(49:42):
do a whole lot, but we'll we'll give it a shot. Um,
if you want to, I guess let us know that
your own employee on Twitter, you can tweet to us
at s y s K podcast. You can go hang
out with us on Facebook, uh facebook dot com, slash
stuff you should Know, or you can send us a
good old fashioned email at Stuff Podcast. At how stuff
(50:05):
works dot com For more on this and thousands of
other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com, m
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