00:00:54.420Hello, my name is Ayanna Young, and I welcome you to Unlearn and Rewild,
00:01:12.200where we explore radical ideas relating to earth renewal.
00:01:16.640Today we welcome back Peter McCoy, who speaks on behalf of the fungi,
00:01:20.900the most overlooked and misrepresented organisms in the web of life.
00:01:26.180A self-taught mycologist with 15 years of accumulated study and experience,
00:01:31.020Peter is an original founder of Radical Mycology,
00:01:34.360a grassroots organization and movement that teaches the skills needed to work with mushrooms
00:01:39.800and other fungi for personal, societal, and ecological resilience.
00:01:45.640Peter is the lead cultivation expert for the Amazon Mycorrenewal Project,
00:01:49.560and open-source ecology, and the primary author behind Radical Mycology, a nearly 700-page book
00:01:57.420on accessible mycology and mushroom cultivation. Apart from his work with fungi, he is also a
00:02:03.900community organizer, street medic, zinester, artist, musician, lecturer, and teacher.
00:02:10.300Thanks for joining us on the show, Peter. Yeah, thanks for having me, Ayanna. I'm super excited
00:02:16.000to be back. Yes, me too. And, you know, we covered a lot of material in our previous interview,
00:02:21.900which I really encourage people to go back and listen to as a foundation for today's interview.
00:02:28.220And there we talked about permaculture applications for fungi, micro-remediation,
00:02:34.080using mushrooms to clean up our messes, with an emphasis on nuclear fallout. We talked about the
00:02:40.400grassroots approach to mycology that puts the tools in the hands of communities. And we touched
00:02:45.880on cultivation and so much more. And since we talked, a lot has transpired. Notably, your much
00:02:53.060anticipated first book, Radical Mycology, a treatise on seeing and working with fungi, was
00:02:59.660published. So congratulations on that. And I must say, laying my hands on it for the first time was
00:03:05.960truly an epic moment for me. And I imagine, of course, for you as well. So I'm wondering if you
00:03:11.800could share what motivated you to take on this book project and how the book diverges from other
00:03:18.920mycology texts out there? Yeah, that's a great question. Well, I've been studying mycology
00:03:25.980for about 15 years. I started as a teenager, just as a curiosity and one of my many side hobbies and
00:03:33.640eclectic things I was interested in. And it's something I've always stuck with. It's something
00:03:37.520It's always held my interest, and the more I've learned about it over the years, the more I've been fascinated, the more I can't put it down.
00:03:46.260But it's really been a hard process to study it to any significant depth.
00:03:51.920You know, it took me many years to really realize how inaccessible of a science it is.
00:03:55.520I feel like the way that knowledge is presented to us or just science is presented to us, you know, people that aren't in the scientific fields,
00:04:03.280we often get the sense that oh somebody's figuring these things out everything we know so much in
00:04:08.220this day and age we're in the information age we you know the internet with the internet we can
00:04:12.000just figure out anything we look up anything but with mycology that's very much not true it's one
00:04:18.420of the least accessible sciences one of the least accessible natural sciences one of the least
00:04:22.480studied natural sciences but also one of the ones with the most potential it's considered a neglected
00:04:28.080mega science so mega science meaning it's huge has vast implications for uh our human lives for
00:04:35.080the life of the planet the life of everything on the planet but very few people are looking at it's
00:04:39.460literally kind of dying in the west before it's even really begun it's one of the youngest natural
00:04:42.980sciences this was a concept that i came across and just sort of came to realize and accept over
00:04:48.600the years that i wanted to learn this thing i knew a lot of people i really wanted to understand
00:04:52.200fungi because they're so interesting but there was no good resources to dive in very few books
00:04:57.740written for the layperson, most of them focusing on identification, a little bit about cultivation,
00:05:01.860which was often presented in sort of a difficult industrial way. Anything beyond that, beyond just
00:05:07.800mushrooms, other types of fungi, their ecological importance, which is interesting. All this stuff
00:05:13.680was just not there or very, very poorly represented. So I came to that conclusion a few years ago and
00:05:19.780then just started realizing, okay, I have to read the primary literature. I have to read these
00:05:23.040textbooks I have to wrap my head around the science even harder which I was willing to do
00:05:27.820because it's because I was held to it but obviously realizing most people don't have that and same
00:05:33.460thing the more I learned on these technical ends the more I dove into the complexity
00:05:36.480even then I was even more engaged more thrilled so I knew that that's the only way to the only
00:05:42.600way to get that information out was to translate it and I did that a few years ago with a zine
00:05:47.520called radical mycology we talked about in the last talk but that was just a tiny primer and
00:05:52.700intro what i knew eight years ago um so a couple years ago did a crowdfunding campaign to turn that
00:05:58.540small thing into a book originally i thought it'd be about maybe 400 pages but as again when i
00:06:04.400started researching for the book and and diving into even more literature i found even more things
00:06:08.940i didn't know about so many topics so many concepts that i'd never even heard about regarding
00:06:14.240fudge and i talked a lot of people over the years and met people as i teach and travel
00:06:17.720there was so much that had not come to the surface and then as i worked on it there were
00:06:22.220so many connections I was making drawing between not just concepts within mycology, but I'm also
00:06:27.900very interested in many other topics, sociology, psychology, philosophy, history, cultural
00:06:34.000perspectives from around the world. And there were so many connections that I was able to draw based
00:06:38.660on my own experience and knowledge in regards to fungi that I had not seen written elsewhere that
00:06:43.920I thought was really pertinent, especially when trying to develop a dialogue around how mycology
00:06:49.660can influence our lives today and help address many of the issues in the world, which is
00:06:54.860sort of the underlying theme behind all of my work and the people that I work with.
00:06:58.660And so those are also the perspectives that I was not seeing represented in these very
00:07:01.640technical, very dry scientific literature.
00:07:04.980And so I wanted to bring some life into these topics, put some relevance and context to
00:07:08.960them, but also hopefully some depth and some emotion to move people to feel something about
00:07:13.660fungi that we often are never given the chance to feel in our society where they're so often
00:07:18.060derided and pushed to the side and ignored and mocked and ridiculed and all these kind of silly
00:07:22.600things when we consider how important they are in the environment and how ubiquitous they are so
00:07:26.780there's a lot of motivating factors I think I say in the preface it was really a challenge to
00:07:31.160myself even as I thought about it more that I was literally just working through all the cycles of
00:07:35.080life and learning about them and seeing how fungi influence everything as I was trying to synthesize
00:07:39.960this information for people it was really mind-blowing for me really life-changing eye
00:07:44.000opening. And as best I could, I'd try to translate that and make it accessible. A lot of the book is
00:07:49.700reference in just kind of how-tos, so it's not super dense in the way that you have to really
00:07:54.900study every page. Most of it's there for later kind of reference and doing things. But in between
00:07:59.780all that, I'm trying to build the bridge and the connections and put, again, the relevance to it
00:08:03.880and introducing the whole book with all the context, the ecological context, the cultural
00:08:08.420context, and why these things are important today, why these skills are needed. Again, I wasn't seeing
00:08:13.600that, you know, beyond the basic things of just growing mushrooms for food, growing natural
00:08:18.380medicine, which is obviously very great. But for me, it's much deeper than that. I think fungi are
00:08:22.580embedded in our cultural legacy, our human story. And most people don't know that. And I think
00:08:27.780there's many benefits to come from reintegrating with them to bringing them back into the human
00:08:31.900story today, along with all the natural processes and elements of our world, which many things about
00:08:37.680our temporary society distances us from that fungi perhaps being the most ostracized in many ways
00:08:43.740so it's kind of a long answer to a simple question but for me it's it was sort of a
00:08:49.840culmination of my life's work a lot of my art and photography and other things are in there
00:08:54.100because it's something that i've held on to i think the longest in my life
00:13:10.480It's very different from the psilocybin mushrooms that people are familiar with today is the psychedelic recreational drug.
00:13:17.360The aminemoscari was really the one, hands down, that influenced cultures and religions and customs throughout the world for thousands of years.
00:13:25.640So when you look at it in that context, it is more interesting and perhaps slightly plausible that she was eating that mushroom.
00:13:56.280You can actually take some of the tissue inside and make simple clothing and hats out of it like a felt.
00:14:01.680And so humans in Europe were using that for at least 11,000 years.
00:14:05.600About 5,000 years ago, 5,500, a man named Otsi died and or was perhaps ceremonially buried in the Alps, just like the red lady from Spain that I just talked about.
00:14:16.800She's called the red lady because of the red paint.
00:14:19.580Otsi, this guy in the Alps, might have been a high leader in his class as well or his society because he was – it's argued that he just died by accident, but he had so many strange things with him.
00:14:30.480It seems sort of unreasonable to cross mountains with all this stuff.
00:14:34.160So it seems to have potentially been ceremonial, which also makes this story even more interesting
00:14:39.260because he, among his many tools, had two different types of mushrooms.
00:14:44.560One was Peptopterus betulinus, the birch polypore, which he might very well have been using
00:14:51.660This mushroom has really potent antiparasitic oils, and it was perhaps the only antiparasitic
00:14:56.000medicine for thousands of years in the old world.
00:14:58.660And he also had the amadou mushroom, the one I just talked about, the burning mushroom.
00:15:02.120and that mushroom is usually just said oh he was probably starting his fires with it or something
00:15:07.720but what's also interesting about Otzi is that he had on his body tattoos that corresponded to
00:15:13.500acupuncture points for a certain meridian that would have been used to treat his arthritis that
00:15:18.140he clearly suffered from but what's interesting about Otzi is he died about the same time the
00:15:22.940first publications about acupuncture meridian systems were produced in China where did he get
00:15:28.440that knowledge did it come from the east did it come from somewhere else we don't really know but
00:15:31.620It's usually assumed that that knowledge of meridians came from the east because that's where it's first written down.
00:15:35.940But else he had it on his body at the same time.
00:15:37.700So perhaps he was an inheritor of this knowledge from some sort of past that we don't understand.
00:15:42.640But what's also most people don't know is that this mushroom, the amadou, the burning mushroom,
00:15:47.380was said by Hippocrates, the father of Western medicine, to be one of the best things to use for moxibush and for heating up acupuncture points.
00:15:54.320Today we use mugwort in traditional Chinese medicine to warm these meridians and it stimulates energy flow.
00:16:00.020But in the past, they would use this mushroom.
00:16:02.860Today, the Sami, the Laplanders, what you want to call them of northern Scandinavia,
00:16:07.300still use it as a traditional practice for heating their meridians.
00:16:10.960So what I propose in the book is perhaps knowledge of using these mushrooms medicinally
00:16:15.700as an energetic type medicine, perhaps vastly predated Otsi.
00:16:20.280Perhaps he was a carrier of this knowledge going back to the Magelanian culture.
00:16:25.100And I propose that he might have been using this mushroom not only to start its fires,
00:16:28.220but even to stimulate his meridian points so you know these are different concepts these are some
00:16:33.760of the connections that i put in the book that i hadn't seen other people placing and so if that's
00:16:37.800the story perhaps our knowledge of mushrooms perhaps even energetic medicine could have come
00:16:42.160from west to east i think at the very least the mushroom usage concept seems to come from west
00:16:47.380east if the maglidian people if the red lady wasn't using the mushroom she ate for food or
00:16:52.700for medicine, I would assume that within the 13,000 years between her and Oatsi, that knowledge
00:16:59.740of edible and medicinal mushrooms did arise within whatever culture and was transmitted.
00:17:04.700So it's pretty significant, especially for any listeners of Western or of European descent,
00:17:10.120our history with that goes back so far. And same in Asia too, it wasn't starting to be documented
00:17:14.680until about 5,000, 6,000 years ago, but there it's incredibly well documented. I mean, hats are off
00:17:19.500to, you know, a lot of the old Chinese doctors and things like that, that have been holding0.99
00:17:22.840on to that knowledge and really refining it in the Middle East and in Africa and things
00:17:28.160that the knowledge has been more oral.
00:17:30.360So it's just not really well documented, unfortunately.
00:17:32.820And so most of the books you read on ethnomycology, which is this history of human fungal relations,
00:17:37.380usually just doesn't even mention that significant part of the world.
00:17:41.260But what is known is that some of the cultures there, like say what we call the Bushmen or
00:17:45.560the Khan people, they would carry certain mushrooms as protection.
00:17:49.240Some mushrooms were used for invisibility or they thought that it would induce invisibility when they were hunting.
00:17:54.900Some mushrooms, like the cramp balls, were brewed into different concoctions as a douche for infections in the birth canal.
00:18:02.620But there's very few of these interactions documented.
00:18:04.560In North Africa, in the Middle East, and also Mediterranean region, what we call desert truffles today,
00:18:10.000these are mushrooms that associate with desert plants and they form kind of large potato-like fungal bodies under the sand, under the dirt.
00:18:17.460Those foods are protein-rich foods, but they're also incredibly medicinal.
00:18:21.620And the Prophet Muhammad is actually quoted to talk about using them as an eyewash
00:18:25.820and saying that they're a gift from Allah.
00:18:27.560So it goes very far back in that culture, but again, just not really well-documented
00:18:31.500beyond just a few citations, at least as far as I've come across.
00:18:35.740And then the last thing I'll say is in Central America and South America,
00:18:39.260well, especially Central America, that's another huge part of the world0.98
00:18:42.540that has a significant fungal history dating back to at least the Maya
00:18:46.460if not the Olmec, which was sort of one of the first major civilizations in Mesoamerica.
00:18:51.820They were working with mushrooms probably as food today.
00:18:54.140The people in Central America, especially Mexico, eat hundreds of species of mushrooms.0.99
00:18:59.180You go to the markets there, and many of the women are wildcrafting these mushrooms as a generational practice.0.85
00:19:06.260But going back to the psychoactive fungi, it seems that in Central America, many of these older cultures,0.57
00:19:11.100perhaps the Olmecs, even starting again with the Amanita muscaria, working with that as a
00:19:15.700psychoactive mushroom, perhaps later transitioning through either during the Maya era or the Aztec
00:19:21.660era to psilocybin mushrooms. Mexico has the highest number of psilocybin-containing species
00:19:26.700per country in the world, and so they're very psilocybin-rich. So the Aztecs or the Maya1.00
00:19:32.560figure that out sooner than later. Those mushrooms are more consistent than the Amanita muscaria,
00:19:36.660so they've probably transitioned practices into working with that species.
00:19:40.500And so it's a really rich history there, best documented with the Aztecs and when the Conquistadors came.
00:19:45.580And then in South America, again, there's just really poor documentation.
00:19:48.740Much of that history, of course, in that part of the world is oral, apart from the Conquistadors.
00:19:53.220And even what they wrote, there didn't seem to be a very strong mushroom practice there.
00:19:56.620They're, of course, working with other plants for medicine and psychoactive purposes.
00:22:05.280As an interest in mushrooms has grown alongside the consciousness movements,
00:22:13.040some theories have emerged about fungi in the development of culture and human intelligence.
00:22:19.200In his book, The Food of the Gods, Terence McKenna wrote,
00:22:22.640I believe that the use of hallucinogenic mushrooms on the grasslands of Africa
00:22:28.060gave us the model for the religions to follow.
00:22:31.000And when, after long centuries of slow forgetting, migration, and climactic change, the knowledge of the mystery was finally lost, we in our anguish traded partnership for dominance, traded harmony with nature for rape of nature, traded poetry for the sophistry of science.
00:22:50.120In short, we traded our birthright as partners in the drama of the living mind of the planet for the broken pot shards of history, warfare, neuroses, and if we do not quickly awaken to our predicament, planetary catastrophe, end quote.
00:23:07.400you critique McKenna and you point to a contrasting theory by Julian Jaynes that
00:23:14.540mushroom use was more recent and arose from our disconnection from mystery and the subconscious
00:23:20.900realm where do you stand on that argument McKenna's thought is a pretty popular one
00:23:27.820and I think it comes the popularity of it largely comes from people that are initially already very
00:23:33.920fascinated by psychoactive fungi. They are, the experience on them is quite compelling and quite
00:23:39.540interesting and quite unusual. And so there's a lot to speculate about its importance, its
00:23:44.640significance, why these fungi even exist, etc. And a lot has been written on that, a lot of
00:23:50.080speculation. And Terrence McKenna's idea about this human evolution, that it was this sort of
00:23:55.340growth spurt for our brain when we ate psychedelic mushrooms, has been broken down by other researchers
00:24:01.060showing flaws in it as far as a scientific theory and sort of why it falls apart as a
00:24:05.640as a truth if you're trying to present it as a true scientific theory it doesn't really hold
00:24:09.120water but it's an interesting thought so to contrast with that and also to provide a very
00:24:14.680i think much deeper and much richer and a much more honorable perspective of human capacity
00:24:20.220is one that julian james presents about that the altered states of being an altered means of
00:24:28.000perceiving and receiving information that are different from our everyday beta state mind
00:24:34.240awareness mental awareness that we usually hold to navigate our our day-to-day civilized world
00:24:38.780that's only one means and that the alternate routes have come in a vast array of directions
00:24:45.860many cultures have built many means to access altered states psychoactive plants and fungi
00:24:51.300have just been one of them but our ability to enter these states and receive information and to
00:24:56.240perceive a future where our artworks can have impact generations later. These kinds of more
00:25:02.060complex and abstract thinking very likely goes back thousands of years, many years before McKinney
00:25:07.160even proposes his initial idea. So it's hard to say when those states initially arose. We can
00:25:13.640point to the cave paintings in LaSalle, France, where some of the first abstract cave paintings
00:25:18.360came out. And it's been argued that that was a sudden outgrowth of humans accessing altered states.
00:25:23.440100,000 years went by between the development of modern humans and our first creative expressions,
00:25:29.340our first artistic representation, our representative art, I should say. And it
00:25:33.720kind of all came about at once. And the thought is, how did that happen? What was going on? And
00:25:37.940there's speculation. And one of the ideas is that somehow somebody developed the means to
00:25:42.920access altered states. And that could have been through psychoactive mushrooms, but it could have
00:25:46.340been through fasting, through drumming, through dancing, all these alternative practices through
00:25:50.880spinning it's hard to really say what i think though what julian james gets at and i think
00:25:56.700what's more profound about all these concepts is that we have this innate capacity to access these
00:26:01.560states with or without you know substances without chemical inputs and what james presents is that
00:26:07.960this was perhaps a very innate component of human cultures and way of life for the vast history of
00:26:14.220human existence and that only perhaps three thousand years ago when we became incredibly
00:26:19.500more civilized, more industrial, more machine dependent, less abstract and symbolic thinking,
00:26:25.460we transitioned out of that intuitiveness, that connection to our right side of our brain,
00:26:31.040our higher selves, our subconscious, whatever you want to call it, our knowing.
00:26:35.640And that was just increasingly silenced and shut out in preference for the ego mind, the
00:26:41.460conscious, literal, logical, analytical thinking that's so touted today.
00:26:45.520when that transition was happening there was probably a breakdown in society and probably a
00:26:50.220lot of what we would consider mental disorders today people having really difficult time dealing
00:26:54.780with this significant transition from hearing you know quote-unquote voices in their heads
00:26:59.460again this sort of deeper knowing and being in touch with that and as time went on trying to
00:27:03.660figure out ways to reconnect with that and that the use of psychoactive substances was sort of
00:27:07.340this bandage to try to keep that connection to this innate human capacity and when I first read
00:27:13.000that i found that really really profound and it really spoke to me i i'm an artist and i know what
00:27:19.520it's like to be in that sort of the right side of my brain when everything goes away and something's
00:27:24.600coming through me right or just something it's another part of yourself and i feel like many
00:27:28.420artists can resonate with that as a feeling and even if you're not a traditional artist you know
00:27:33.620even in the garden when you're in your zone you know what it's like the world falls away and
00:27:37.780you're sort of in this different place of quiet and inner reflection and ideas come up and that's
00:27:42.400when we have these brilliant moments in our in-between state right and so many advances in
00:27:46.320science didn't come through just analytical processing a lot of them is by mistake some of
00:27:51.300them is when you're in that half asleep state almost falling falling into your dreams is when
00:27:55.360you have the realization that the benzene ring looks like a you know coiled serpent or something
00:27:59.920like that so i think there's quite significance to that aspect of our minds we all have it we've
00:28:05.460all experienced it in different ways but it's so overlooked and undervalued and i think it's an
00:28:10.080incredible thought to say what if that was a significant portion of our day-to-day existence
00:28:14.280how would our culture look different how would our lives be different how would we treat each
00:28:17.960other differently how we treat ourselves differently i think that's something we can
00:28:21.420still tap into i think it's still very much a part of the human condition just something we
00:28:25.200need to intentionally cultivate these days because there's so many things trying to silence it and
00:28:30.080sure mushrooms and these other substances can kind of point in that direction and say hey there's
00:28:34.340other options possible. But I always caution against putting all the emphasis into these
00:28:40.300externalities. Why not cultivate the internal capacities and strengthen ourselves so that
00:28:45.400we're not dependent on external inputs in whatever form? And I think that your own mental state is
00:28:51.260one of the most significant ones to have control over. So yeah, James's book is great. It's a
00:28:58.220pretty compelling read. He was a Stanford psychologist, so he wasn't just some random
00:29:01.900person. You had a pretty solid background in these topics. Well, it's enticing to think about
00:29:07.660having that kind of mental mastery for sure, considering we all suffer from a cultural legacy
00:29:15.400of suppressed intuition. And stemming from that kind of mental handicap, we see a deep suppression
00:29:22.780of nature, of life's creative feminine powers. And I'd like to hear about how fungi can help us
00:29:32.260perceive and counteract that dark force in our world. As far as psychoactive mushrooms go,
00:29:40.060which I know isn't your question exactly, but as many people have known, myself included,
00:29:44.060your eyes open, your life changes when you have a pretty significant experience on psychoactive
00:29:48.420substances, whether it's a fungus or something else. These things open your capacities. They
00:29:52.280make you feel things differently and perceive things differently and that can be really really
00:29:56.200profound and i know it is for many people so i don't i never want to belittle that or say that
00:30:00.820it's not valuable i just always want to paint the larger picture so that we can broaden our horizons
00:30:06.000and challenge ourselves to go further and along with that and then yeah more generally like you're
00:30:11.500asking about fungi how can they influence our health and healing and even just again perception
00:30:16.460of environment perception of nature perception of our relationship to nature is incredibly
00:30:21.420significant the fungal kingdom or you know fungal queendom as i call it in the book is the largest
00:30:27.740group of multicellular organisms bacteria we can't really count them they're huge but as far
00:30:33.220as the bigger things go fungi vastly outnumber animals and plants um they're everywhere in the
00:30:39.060environment you know we can talk maybe more about their ecology but they influence everything around
00:30:43.220us they're filling every plant they're probably communicating with each other in this incredibly
00:30:47.340complex network. And most people completely ignore them, don't even think about them because
00:30:54.280they're so off our radar. We never hear about them, never learn about them. So first, my question is,
00:30:59.640what does that mean to be disconnected from and ignore and even fear one of the biggest aspects
00:31:05.480of our natural environment? Everything around us is influenced by fungi, everything. So that's a
00:31:11.340pretty, I think, profound question for me to ask myself. And then I wonder what would it mean to
00:31:15.780integrate with fungi what are the lessons that can come from that not just the benefits of food
00:31:19.840medicine and these more sort of immediate topical things what are the deep implications of reintegrating
00:31:25.300with our environment reintegrating with ecological webs and not just say one plant or one mushroom
00:31:30.820or one animal but seeing everything as the whole which is what fungi do they create the whole they
00:31:35.780maintain the whole and when you study them you see the whole for its part you see the mycelium
00:49:31.120While humanity is limited to strict binaries for reproduction,
00:49:35.160you know male female gender is an area where we might be able to apply some of the lessons
00:49:41.900of the fungal queendom the topic of sex and gender in mycology is really fascinating
00:49:48.260speaking of not boxing things in some fungi are pansexual with thousands of mating types
00:49:56.080or genders what's the biological reason for this and how could we adopt some of that
00:50:02.760brilliance culturally if not biologically well again yeah i mean this is just this is one of
00:50:09.840the many topics where fungi are just so profoundly different than everything else and so compelling
00:50:15.280one of them is fungal sex fungal sex is significantly more complex than the animals
00:50:22.260plants and bacteria they have within the fungal queendom there are you know innumerable means for
00:50:27.800mating many even within just sort of broad categories or phyla of the fungal kingdom
00:50:33.380different species within there can all have quite complex and different forms of mating so
00:50:37.840you know within animals we all more or less procreate in a relatively similar way of course
00:50:42.600like sea creatures have different methods but land animals it's pretty pretty common practice
00:50:46.860at least amongst mammals i guess i could say within even the mushrooms or you know other
00:50:53.140types of fungi there's a huge range of just methods to go about swapping gametes you know
00:50:58.380swapping genetics around within the mushrooms though where i'd say probably the most research
00:51:03.260has gone into for purposes of cultivation and obviously ease of study as they're big we find
00:51:09.220a huge range so real quickly much mushrooms reproduce they produce a bunch of spores each
00:51:15.640spore has half the genetics of the parents kind of like a sperm and an egg and they go into the
00:51:20.180environment and two of them that are compatible need to find each other and their mycelium will
00:51:25.140fuse together and then at that point they'll be genetically whole. The mating occurs through
00:51:31.760chemical signaling. There's no genitalia with mycelium or with spores so they only recognize
00:51:36.220each other through pheromones. These pheromones can be very similar to if not identical to the
00:51:41.300pheromones we produce as animals and also they have the same receptors so there's a huge a very
00:51:45.880close connection there going back to our common ancestry. They recognize each other through these
00:51:49.940chemical signaling and in mate um along the way and oh and i should say that for some species there
00:51:57.800can be uh say four different sexes sometimes even just two but sometimes four different sexes or
00:52:05.260mating types as we call them basically different combinations uh again they're the way that they
00:52:10.140recognize each other and the genetics of it i won't get into the details but it's just more
00:52:13.180complex than animals that's why they can have multiple mating types some species there's eight
00:52:17.980Some there are 16. One species in particular, one of the most globally distributed mushrooms, Schizophilum commune, or the split gill, a highly medicinal mushroom that's used for cervical cancer in Japan, has over 23,000 mating types.
00:52:31.980So it's one of the most sexually promiscuous and also successful species out there.
00:52:40.380It can mate with over 98% of the other spores in its environment of the same species,
00:52:44.700which lends itself to greater adaptability.
00:52:48.460Part of the reason that fungi do this is their spores can travel on air currents across whole oceans,
00:52:53.080land in totally different environments than where they were originally produced.
00:52:57.340And that might be on a different type of food and a different climate.
00:53:00.200And having this huge genetic diversity gives them greater resilience and ability to rapidly adapt.
00:53:06.220They also have very short life cycles, or they can, which also speeds up evolution.
00:53:11.580So having this great genetic and quote-unquote gender diversity leads to greater ability to adapt to new circumstances and to greater reflect the environment around yourself.
00:53:24.040And nothing, as far as I'm aware, has, again, outside the fungal kingdom, has such complexity.
00:53:28.340how humans can reflect on that i think one of the interesting things and my friend willoughby
00:53:33.120has a nice little essay in the book talking about not so much that but just how within the fungal
00:53:39.480kingdom especially amongst mushrooms there are habits that really closely mirror human sexual
00:53:46.080patterns so there's close parallels to homosexuality so two mating types can come together
00:53:51.140and they can never reproduce they can never produce sexual offspring but they can live a
00:53:56.140happy life and coexistence and be really successful and you know build a home essentially
00:54:00.780you can have polyamorous fungi where instead of just two you can have three or four perhaps even
00:54:06.800more species coming together to form the mycelium network what he doesn't talk about in the book
00:54:12.780but something i sort of thought about later was you can also have a mushroom so a mushroom that
00:54:17.980we see that we pick and we eat and stuff that's just condensed mycelium it's not different tissue
00:54:22.720even though it looks very different than the white stuff underneath a rock or log,
00:54:26.920you can have, and normally that mushroom is just the condensed mycelium of one of these networks,
00:54:31.120but you can actually have up to nine different networks coordinate together to form a single mushroom,
00:54:37.980which is pretty incredible when you think about it.
00:54:40.040They're basically fusing together in this, well, they're not really fusing,
00:54:42.300they're weaving together to form this mushroom.
00:54:44.840And maybe that has some sort of parallel, I don't know, between, I guess, polyamorous stuff
00:54:48.740for, I don't know, sort of a short-lived sexual encounter amongst multiple people.
00:54:54.500But fungi do this, and it's all to their success and benefit,
00:54:57.640and it doesn't seem to be detrimental.
00:54:59.920And perhaps it has functions for the fungus or even the environment that we don't understand.
00:55:04.400So again, you know, science is so linear and so reductionistic
00:55:07.940that if we don't understand it right off the bat, you know,
00:55:10.360it's often dismissed or shelved until some sort of theory is developed that simplifies the thing.
00:55:15.120But maybe these patterns in fungi have a higher purpose.
00:55:18.740If anything, the metaphor there and sort of the reflection on human patterns is nice to see that it's not some anomalous thing that people might say that humans do certain activities.
00:55:28.740We see these things in various ways throughout nature.
00:55:48.740Highlands, tall western cedar, drifting on the wind, through the mountains like a river.
00:56:18.740of Maria Sabina in a Masatec mushroom ceremony, Garifuna singing and drumming from the 1952
00:56:27.080album The Black Caribs of Honduras, Patti Smith sang Waiting Underground, and Sarah Webster Fabio
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