00:01:12.240We begin with cutting-edge uses of fungi for personalized medicine, which promises
00:01:17.520sweeping advances in healthcare and natural healing.
00:01:20.740We surmise the potentials and the limitations of micro-remediation in confronting industrial
00:01:26.700agriculture, logging, oceanic plastics, and other major pollution. We'll also discuss the imperative
00:01:34.200to preserve fungal diversity and the methods of creating local spore and culture banks.
00:01:40.700Despite being sidelined by academia and the social mainstream, understanding mycology and
00:01:46.240fungal ecology and the universal patterns therein is an essential tool for reigning in the ecological crisis.
00:01:56.700so moving on to the health benefits of mushrooms which i know is a topic of great interest to
00:02:12.080a lot of people um and even more frequently now in the western world so it seems you know even
00:02:18.820though the health benefits of fungi have been well known as you've mentioned in asia for thousands
00:02:23.040of years, particularly for their anti-cancer and immunity-boosting qualities. My philosophy
00:02:30.020is eat fungi daily, which doesn't just mean mushrooms, but krauts, miso, kombucha, ciders,
00:02:38.400yogurts, kefirs, cheeses, etc. And then there are the more fringy uses, such as microdosing
00:02:45.400with poisonous mushrooms, such as the jack-o'-lantern mushroom, which supposedly causes cancer
00:02:51.600cells to self-destruct called apoptosis. So could you say something about the lesser known
00:02:59.360or more cutting edge ways fungi can benefit our health, including a very exciting application
00:03:06.200being developed by a few mycologists, which is personalized antibiotics?
00:03:12.660Yeah, absolutely. So as you mentioned, fungi produce, so fungi are the grand chemists of
00:03:18.540nature they do so much for plants and plant roots and all the you know the fertilizers we give
00:03:23.680plants is just a poor human reproduction of what fungi naturally create through their incredible
00:03:28.760chemical mastery so the same thing we said for medicines probably a lot of the medicines we
00:03:34.840attribute to plants is actually a product of the fungi that live inside of the plants and that might
00:03:39.400be hard to hear for some herbalists out there but the increasing amount of studies are proving that
00:03:44.280100% of all plants are permeated with fungi that trillions of different species can be inside or
00:03:49.940at least colonies can be inside of one plant every plant is a unique quilt of fungi if you will and
00:03:55.780all those fungi producing compounds a lot of them medicinal so that has huge implications for even
00:04:00.480our understanding of natural medicine our history of medicine i think the history of of health is
00:04:05.760really a history of the fungal queendom and so today we're starting to acknowledge that slowly
00:04:10.160a bit more. And some of the easiest medicines to make and the most controllable are those made by
00:04:16.100mushrooms, the more macro fungi that are easier to interact with. But that's not to say that,
00:04:20.580I mean, they're desert fungi from the Sonoran sands that produce anti-cancer compounds. So we
00:04:25.460don't have to look at just mushrooms. And they produce compounds, mostly sugars, complex sugars
00:04:31.220that boost our immune system. 90% of their cell walls is comprised of complex sugars, many of
00:04:36.200which are medicinal so the fungal tissue is vastly medicine in this way depending on the species and
00:04:42.020then they also produce other ones that have anti-inflammatory and soothing effects so and
00:04:46.620then another thing along with that is getting what you're getting is as fungi grow and sort of going
00:04:51.120back to what i said earlier about the autonomy of every hyphal tip is as a hypha encounters say a
00:04:56.960virus or fungus or bacteria in its environment it will sort of war off with that thing and sort of
00:05:02.020go into a little battle mode and if everything works out and it has time and the resources it
00:05:06.440will figure out the correct antibiotic or antifungal compound to produce to fight off
00:05:11.760that organism so that's how fungi survive everywhere that's how they they don't get
00:05:16.480killed by MRSA because they're constantly adapting to all the things that are attacking them
00:05:20.200so we can take advantage of that as humans and we see this all the time in the cultivation lab
00:05:26.100where you grow fungus sterilely on a petri dish some sort of other mold gets in there by accident
00:05:31.200the mushroom you're growing encounters it a couple days or weeks later after warring off and sort of
00:05:37.240figuring out what to do it'll start to just grow right over that you basically figure out what the
00:05:41.460thing to produce to kill it and wins the battle so we can do this with perhaps our own diseases
00:05:46.220if we have again MRSA or some sort of antibiotic resistant microbe theoretically we could swab
00:05:52.220that out of our wounds or mouth or whatever put it in a petri dish let a fungus encounter it the
00:05:57.460fungus will produce the correct compound and then we can extract concentrate and prescribe those
00:06:04.720compounds so it's really custom mycomedicines you know because even a flu right it can mutate in so
00:06:10.600many ways that's why you get a different i don't get the shots but you're supposed to every year
00:06:14.220because the thing's mutating and if we work with the fungi it's going to be much more natural
00:06:17.980compound of course the fungus can have negative compounds it can produce toxins fungi do this
00:06:23.880So I've said in the past that in theory, and certainly the practice is there, we can do what I just described, introduce the fungus to the competitor, and then continually introduce the fungus to that competitor so it keeps producing that compound, and then extract that compound.
00:06:40.280We can do this in a liquid form, so it's a very simple method to grow mycelium in basically sugar water, and we can even introduce this contaminant.
00:06:47.780but at the end of the the growth that liquid will probably be full of this ideal antibiotic but it
00:06:53.120might be full of other nasty stuff too so the challenge is we don't want to just straight drink
00:06:57.500that liquid because it's going to have unknown number of other things in there really that's
00:07:02.000when it gets to more you know the chemistry of it the synthesis or not the synthesis but the
00:07:06.600concentration and extraction some chemistry you know i know it's a scary concept for people and
00:07:11.360it's not my my forte but it's not as complex as we have to again just the science is always
00:07:16.480presented in this inaccessible way and chemistry doesn't have to be presented that way it is a
00:07:22.000challenge for everybody but i think that what i'm speaking to is that my hope is in the future as we
00:07:27.100refine these protocols which are just beginning to even be like looked at or even thought about
00:07:31.640um hopefully we can develop and uh methods for doing what i just described customizing our
00:07:38.400medicine and then extracting it safely and producing it at home for almost next to nothing
00:07:43.740and perhaps even curing largely incurable diseases.
00:07:47.380The last thing I'll say as far as cutting edge goes,
00:07:49.460so that's a huge concept, huge, huge, huge,
00:07:51.840but we're not there yet is sort of the unfortunate takeaway for now.
00:07:55.380I would say another huge topic that I addressed in the book
00:07:58.180that my friend James Weiser developed,
00:08:00.680and he's had some pretty profound anecdotal stories that he's told me,
00:08:04.520you know, nothing documented yet or as far as peer review,
00:08:07.600but, you know, if you're going to believe the stories like I do,
00:08:11.240again. And that's essentially that he's growing mushroom mycelium, medicinal mushroom mycelium
00:08:15.480on grains, which is a normal cultivation practice. And you can do it very cheaply at home in the
00:08:20.960kitchen, no lab, using these liquid methods I just briefly sort of touched on. But long story
00:08:26.260short, he's growing the mycelium on grains and then juicing those grains, basically making a raw
00:08:31.340fungal extract. Most mushrooms or even medicinal mushroom stuff, we have to use alcohol, we have
00:08:37.720use heat, something to break down the cell wall to extract the compounds, which of course is going
00:08:42.400to mess with the medicine and all the enzymes and all the other good juju in there. So he's just
00:08:47.020creating a pure juice, pretty simple concept and getting it all right in there. Doesn't taste super
00:08:52.200great, but it's not horrible. And he's working especially with lion's mane mushroom, which is
00:08:56.980one of the more neurological mushrooms, really helps stimulate your nerve growth, can clear up
00:09:02.320the plaques in the brain associated with Alzheimer's and help rebalance your hormone levels or your
00:09:08.440neurotransmitter levels. And he's told me incredible anecdotes of people with lupus,
00:09:13.060with fibromyalgia, with Parkinson's disease, really significant disabilities. Just after a
00:09:18.440few days of drinking this stuff, they're able to open jar lids. They're able to stand for the
00:09:21.980first time in five years. And I'm not exaggerating. So I do mention this protocol in the book,
00:09:27.320but I do caution. There's always risks with new techniques, but this one, it seems so
00:09:32.080significant, so simple, I definitely encourage more people looking into it. Wow, fungi are so
00:09:39.520generous in aiding our well-being. And I feel really called to reciprocate and support their
00:09:47.460communities either directly or indirectly in my work in forest restoration. So a question I'm
00:09:55.360curious about is the resilience of fungi in this age of ecological instability. After heavy logging,
00:10:03.720the canopy structures of a forest takes hundreds of years to return to a functional state.
00:10:09.240And I'm wondering, do fungi become established on much shorter timescales, or do many species
00:10:16.560need the old growth dynamics? How delicate are those ecological webs we've been talking about
00:10:22.900amid excessive human disturbance and what is a reasonable goal for restoration
00:10:28.020well fungi again going kind of back to the balancing or the paradoxes they present is on
00:10:34.320one hand they're so profound so significant so unparalleled and all these fantastic amazing
00:10:39.360things but at the end of the day they are another delicate organism they're like everything else
00:10:43.720they have nutritional needs they they'll die above a certain temperature they need water so we need
00:10:49.680to nurture them just like they nurture us when we work with them so that's a big component of
00:10:55.440understanding good cultivation techniques is just understanding the fungal needs and reflecting
00:10:59.200those and a lot of just comes down to basic biology and ecology just where and how do they
00:11:04.620grow naturally and we're trying to reproduce that and the ecological webs that they produce as a
00:11:10.520part of their work take millennia to produce some of these you know old growth forests take hundreds
00:11:14.780of years to get to climax state fungi are integral to that entire process is sort of touched on
00:11:20.080and when that gets clear-cutted and compacted and churned all those connections are lost the
00:11:26.420mycelial webs are devastated and it can take decades at the very least for them to start to
00:11:30.780stabilize a little bit more there's one study i read and i cited in the book where i think it took
00:11:35.160about 41 years in in a forest for different waves of fungi to sort of stabilize as plants were
00:11:42.640getting more and more established so different fungi have different roles in decomposition you'll
00:11:47.640have successional waves of different things eating different stuff at different times
00:11:51.120same things when the rebirth and the regeneration is occurring you have different fungi coming in
00:11:55.980you know in a bare rock lava flow landscape lichens are the first things to show up these
00:12:01.460lichens are 95 mycelium that mycelium demineralizes the rock powerful acids release the minerals
00:12:07.760providing the first basic soils for plant seeds and everything else to come and eventually you
00:12:12.300get the forest all thanks to the fungi at every step of the way when we're working in reforestation
00:12:17.480practices or regeneration practices we always want to have that fungal component in the forefront of
00:12:23.280our minds really because they are nature's ecologists they're their stewards uh we can
00:12:29.200never restore the environment we can never go back to what it was right and and no habitat even on
00:12:34.480its own if you if you sort of clear-cut two forests that look quite similar they'll never
00:12:38.640recover the same way again it goes back to the chaos everything has its own way of developing
00:12:44.000but we can guide that but we'll never go back to what it was so this is i think one of the reasons
00:12:50.280why in some places we have really low fungal diversity i think we've just lost a lot of the
00:12:54.780fungi because we destroyed the earth so much and they are so delicate and their spores just aren't
00:12:59.000there so we can intentionally bring in species perhaps again of course we want to stay relatively
00:13:04.300bioregional at most and hopefully as most local as possible when we're trying to work with
00:13:10.060fungal species and diversity. We can inoculate those wood chips like you talked about in the
00:13:14.820slash piles, and we can do all kinds of just casual inoculations when we're hiking and even
00:13:19.320in a relatively protected forest. There's always human impact, and we can help encourage fungal
00:13:24.100growth in subtle ways. When we're doing anything with soil, we always want to bring in the soil
00:13:28.380fungi. There are soil fungi that don't produce mushrooms. These are called the arbuscular
00:13:32.980mycorrhizae or endomycorrhizae and they are considered the most ecologically significant of
00:13:38.560all the fungi which is a pretty bold statement and that's because they have a significant influence
00:13:43.080on the structure basically the fluff or tilth a porosity of soil which is important for oxygen
00:13:49.160and water flow for everything else in the soil they do a lot of the chemical mastery that i
00:13:54.520mentioned in the soil so they're huge down there and then all that work directly influences the
00:14:00.680entire assembly of the plants in that entire ecosystem so all the above ground ecology is
00:14:05.580influenced by these fungi and of course the animals depend on the plants so at the core of
00:14:10.760all this is these uh non-mushroom forming sort of cryptic underground hidden fungi that are
00:14:16.360everywhere they associate with 95 of all plants they're found everywhere except antarctica
00:14:20.080they're some of the most globally distributed and again most significant fungi but most people
00:14:24.720never hear about them don't think about them because they don't form mushrooms you don't see
00:14:27.940them where you can easily cultivate them you can easily bring them back into a disturbed habitat
00:14:33.120there's relatively simple protocols that i outlined in the book that you know a little
00:14:38.080learning curve you hop over and then you can do it pretty simply to bring in again these locally
00:14:42.440adapted species locally adapted cultures that are place-based and and you know designed self-designed
00:14:50.600i guess to to regenerate that habitat there are commercial products you can buy these things but
00:14:55.200I've seen studies where those commercial products, even though it's the same species, can actually have a detrimental impact as what might be naturally present.
00:15:01.760Because, again, going back to the idea that every bicellum does adapt to its immediate needs.
00:15:06.900So you have these local subspecies or strains or cultivars, whatever you want to call them.
00:15:13.240Those are the ones we want to work with.
00:15:14.280And, again, we can harvest some of those spores with very little impact to the environment, boost them up through cultivation, and then reapply them.
00:15:21.060And then there's many other practices throughout the book where we can bring in lichens.
00:15:25.760Lichens are completely overlooked by pretty much any ecological assessment.
00:15:29.400Lichens are a huge component to nutrient input, especially nitrogen.
00:15:33.120They fix 50% of the nitrogen in a forest is provided by decomposing lichens.
00:19:38.440So it wasn't too surprising that these fungi helped out the plants.
00:19:41.560What I think is more interesting is what we're going to be doing at this year's Convergence,
00:19:45.660which we have yet to announce, but is going to be announced quite shortly at RadicalMycology
00:19:49.600convergence.com and we're planning out the installations there one of which is likely
00:19:54.360going to be taking the soil from the nearby woodlot where it's been less disturbed for the
00:20:00.180last few decades you take that soil you screen it through some simple sieves get all the dirt
00:20:06.360out of the way and at the bottom sieve you're left with the spores of these arbuscular mycorrhizae
00:20:10.860you clean out the spores you separate them under a scope you can identify them and count them so
00:20:16.640It's a little bit boring, but that way you can get a baseline about what their diversity is and their abundance per, say, kilogram of soil.
00:20:24.580Take those spores, which we're trying to do pretty soon, grow them over the season, over the next few months with quick-growing plants like grasses, and they will associate with the grass roots in a pot.
00:20:35.680And at the end of the season, you'll have this soil filled with roots that are infused with mycelium, the mycelium itself, and also spores from the fungus.
00:20:42.920And all of that is viable inoculum of this local place-based culture.
00:20:47.420And then we're going to take that and put it back into the land and re-inoculate the new plants.
00:20:51.420And they're doing a lot of restoration efforts and regeneration efforts.
00:20:55.080And then they can come back in a year or two, resample the soil, see if that diversity has increased, changed, et cetera.
00:21:01.900So it's a good way to quantify what you're doing and actually know that you're actually doing something of benefit.
00:21:07.680And then, of course, see how it impacts the plants.
00:32:16.200and it really just gets back to basic cultivation concepts
00:32:18.240and really getting the best species for the job.
00:32:21.120So a great anecdote is some Yale students were growing endophytic fungi from the Amazon.
00:32:26.180These are fungi that live inside of plants that I've been speaking about,
00:32:29.320studying these symbiotic kind of cryptic hidden fungi
00:32:33.060that you would never think have encountered a human industrial pollutant deep in the jungle.
00:32:39.500They're growing these fungi on petri dishes, and one day they notice that the fungus is breaking down the petri dish, the plastic petri dish.
00:32:45.740So then they grow that mycelium in a liquid form that I've sort of mentioned.
00:32:49.020They introduce the plastic in a liquid form just to make things simple on themselves.
00:32:52.880But then they did a bunch of tests, and they were able to show that this endophytic plant-inhabiting fungus was able to eat this one type of plastic as its only carbon source with or without oxygen.
00:33:04.080So essentially fermenting it inside of a landfill is this idea,
00:33:08.120like deep in the landfill it could be eating these types of plastic.
00:33:11.440So that's just one species that they found randomly.
00:33:13.480And that made headlines in the fungal mycological world.
00:33:16.320It's pretty good news, pretty amazing discovery.
00:33:18.780But nothing's happened with it as far as I know.
00:33:21.200And who knows how many other endophytes, all these other cryptic fungi,
00:33:25.800and some of the fungi live in really extreme environments.
00:33:29.720We have no idea how many endophytic species there are in the world.
00:33:32.620it's one of the least studied ecological niches of fungi even though it's one of the most ubiquitous
00:33:37.620let alone their their remediated potential their plastic eating potential so we might first think
00:33:44.300about okay the mushrooms because that's where a lot of the remediation research has gone into
00:33:48.500breaking down petroleum products and other nasty chemicals humans produce pcbs all these things we
00:33:53.640don't like many mushrooms many wood decomposing mushrooms especially have been thoroughly
00:33:58.080researched for the last 50 years to show definitively that many mushrooms can break
00:34:02.300this stuff down you know no problem depending on the species depending on the chemical
00:34:06.240not as much the same with plastics and i guess what i'm getting at is we also need to start
00:34:12.260thinking about beyond the mushrooms we think about the whole fungal kingdom it could be some
00:34:16.020sonoran desert fungus that uh is kick butt at breaking down you know plastic number five or
00:34:21.600whatever so and that's the type of stuff that anybody could mess around with at home so a great
00:34:27.580anecdote is tom volk a mycological professor in wisconsin one of the universities there
00:34:33.100worked with a grad student trying to figure out how to get a fungus to break down bakelite bakelite
00:34:37.660was one of the first basic types of plastic it's basically made from phenol and formaldehyde
00:34:41.720so it's pretty different than today but it was it's technically considered type of plastic
00:34:45.960they tried 84 different experiments to get the fungus to eat the plastic and the one that worked
00:34:51.360was when they just straight stuck a chunk of the plastic into the mycelial network and then the
00:34:56.020fungus just started breaking it down dissolving it they were able to test that and they actually
00:34:59.720got a $64,000 grant because of you know the photos they were able to get of this working
00:35:04.540so the money's out there because there's significant implications but it just gets
00:35:09.000into people that needed to know about fungi you know how to cultivate them you need to kind of
00:35:13.000wrap your head a little bit around the chemistry which all of which i detail and try to simplify
00:35:16.940or at least make accessible in the book not watering it down as i say in many ways to do
00:35:22.580good cultivation remediation you're best served to understand fungal biology and ecology because
00:35:26.940that's what you're trying to mimic so so many of these implications beyond plastic remediation
00:35:31.140all the other remediation many people everybody could do to some degree smaller large scale kinds
00:35:35.940of experiments have yet to be done but again i think people just assume that other people are
00:35:40.280doing it we also are busy you know in our lives um and the lack of knowledge is uh i think the
00:35:45.440biggest hurdle um so the plastics it's a huge it's one of the things i've looked at for a long
00:35:50.600time. I wrote a paper a bunch of years ago with some friends looking at this, did a big research
00:35:54.720project. I touch on it in the book briefly. Basically, the state of affairs is that we
00:35:58.980know fungi can do that. Nobody's really dedicating it to it, even though it's a global issue.
00:36:05.100You mentioned the endophytic species living in the absence of oxygen. So I'm wondering what the
00:36:11.980massive plastic islands in the ocean, could this fungus or perhaps marine fungus be put to work
00:36:18.740there well you know as far as i've seen nobody's really looking at that the issue with the gyres
00:36:25.120as they call them in the middle of the oceans is it's not just some big island of plastic water
00:36:30.080bottles or something like that which is what i initially imagined when i was thinking about
00:36:33.000these things the problem is that it's the uv from the sun and the waves are breaking down these
00:36:37.760plastics into tiny tiny you know almost microscopic particles so it's becoming this thick plastic soup
00:36:43.880that's up to 30 feet deep and plankton's eating it and it's going up the food chain and obviously
00:36:49.300there's a lot of issues there and so when you get really deep 30 feet down into the ocean it's
00:36:54.340really cold there's not a lot of yeah dissolved oxygen so it's hard for it could be hard for a
00:36:59.980of course fish are living all the way at the bottom of the ocean then we actually don't even
00:37:03.100know how to explain that which is a separate topic but as far as i've read i mean i've wondered i'm
00:37:09.220sure that there's fungi involved i'm sure that if they tested that that plastic there's probably
00:37:12.820some sort of fungal component that is common or more abundant than others. There's probably a
00:37:17.180whole bunch of species because there are yeasts and all kinds of fungi, microfungi in the oceans.
00:37:22.960They actually think that the recent paper from April postulated based on what we currently know
00:37:28.260that the entire ocean floor could very well be permeated by fungal mycelium, which is in the
00:37:33.480ocean floor is the largest habitat in the world. So they're literally at the bottom of the ocean
00:37:38.420at the bottom of the entire food chain because that's where everything comes. And they're the
00:37:42.280one's churning the nutrients down there bringing all the dead fish that fall down it's the fungus
00:37:46.400that's eating it which is what they do everywhere else and they're recreating life uh so there are
00:37:50.800ocean fungi marine fungi again one of these huge topics plants 70 percent water 70 oceans we hardly
00:37:58.180know anything about the focal component of the oceans and as far and especially the ones that
00:38:02.800are able to eat the plastic there or or survive in chemical plumes or something like that tons of
00:38:09.720research i mean these are these so many of these topics it's each of these questions it's like a
00:38:13.460phd it's 20 phds waiting to happen if people kind of dedicate you know it doesn't have to be a true
00:38:18.880phd but it's it's a huge thing that nobody's looking at something i'm totally compelled by
00:38:24.720but you know i only have some years in the day myself as well it's really um enticing to hear
00:38:32.360a little bit of this information and get the ignition for us individually to go deeper into
00:38:38.060these thought processes and experiments. And another thing that the mainstream media and
00:38:44.340politicians deny and don't talk about is that the drought is the logical outcome of the misuse of
00:38:52.780land. And, you know, there's all these deep patterns and dots to be connected on this topic
00:38:58.960as well. For example, we only have 10% of the wood debris left in the forest compared to a few
00:39:05.540hundred years ago, and considering mycelium is 90% water and holds water in the soil, a major
00:39:12.760byproduct of mycelium decomposing wood is water. And so decomposition is like drip irrigation for
00:39:21.020the other organisms of the forest. Also, the great forest drew in the rains and stored water.
00:39:27.660Do you think it's possible to reintroduce or boost fungi in ecosystems to help retain and
00:39:33.600replenish groundwater and ultimately to alleviate droughts that are inevitably going to get worse
00:39:39.140as climate changes? Well, I strongly lean away from ever making hyperboles about or stating
00:39:47.100hyperboles about fungi or putting all of the world's problems onto their backs because that's
00:39:54.140how they can be presented. And I think for some people that I've met, myself included, many years
00:39:58.760ago, when you don't fully understand them and you hear about these really incredible things,
00:40:02.760it's easy to want to put all of our hope into this mystery and to say, well, if they can fix
00:40:09.660this, then they must be able to fix this. And hey, they can fix every problem in the world,
00:40:12.800right? And we see this in many ways that fungi, I think, are abused and misrepresented. And it's
00:40:18.760something that I sometimes have to burst bubbles around and be more, I think, respectful of the
00:40:23.040fungi. And again, there are limits and also take some ownership about what we are contributing as
00:40:27.800individuals and what else needs to be done more systemically so i mean i think you sort of answered
00:40:35.020your question that these fungi are clearly an integral component they provide all these answers
00:40:39.200they provide all these benefits to the larger system so they're not doing everything i mean
00:40:43.420plants do stuff animals do stuff insects do stuff bacteria do stuff all these functions are important
00:40:48.560to the whole ecological web fungi are central to that they're keystone species but they can't do
00:40:53.580alum so we always want to bring them in we always want to consider them more we want to advocate for
00:40:58.700fungi actually a friend of mine juliana ferci in chile she runs a non-profit ngo called the fungi
00:41:04.260foundation and she basically travels the world trying to get government agencies to implement
00:41:09.440fungal analyses into ecological surveys because it's most places are just looking at the floor
00:41:15.660and fauna but not looking at the funga i mean sort of restating stuff i've already said
00:41:20.440But if we're going to try to do any restoration and we're trying to protect an ecological habitat, we want to, of course, protect the fungal component, advocate for it, strengthen it, bring in perhaps species that have been eradicated through human interventions, reproduce and diversify and expand the species that are there.
00:41:42.000And with any of these restoration efforts, we always want to be slow and use simple solutions.
00:41:47.140We want to be like mycelium and assess really thoroughly and also see what the environment is doing.
00:41:52.180That's a pretty basic permaculture concept.
00:41:54.460And we always want to learn from the fungi and see what they're doing, see what species have come in,
00:41:58.560and never assume that we as humans, with our very limited awareness,
00:42:02.740have all the answers to nature's 3.8 billion years of knowledge acquisition that we call evolution.
00:42:09.900So, yeah, like I said, I think you answered your question.
00:42:12.540I mean, so much of what I do is just trying to say they're not the silver bullet.
00:42:16.120You know, every Haifa can seem like one, but they're an incredible tool that most people just don't know is in the hardware store.
00:42:24.160And they fit right in with all the other tools in the toolbox.
00:44:37.440well thank you for bringing that full circle back to our responsibility as humans and not putting
00:45:01.240all of the pressure on the fungi but realizing that we actually have to change the way we live
00:45:10.000and really have a reciprocal relationship with nature and not just expect that there is a silver
00:45:17.100bullet or a magic answer out there. I think that's really important while we're talking about all of
00:45:22.660these really exciting tools and all of these possibilities when we ally with the natural world
00:45:28.480and so in that spirit i'm wondering if you can suggest any projects or calls to action
00:45:36.080or other ways radical mycology could start transforming our communities right now
00:45:41.940well i mean the great thing about mycology is it does touch everything and as i've been saying and
00:45:51.220so the ways to apply it are almost innumerable i mean you can get as large or small as you have
00:45:57.520time and capacity for it's the knowledge gap it's the access to to information that's the
00:46:03.380biggest hurdle i think the initial initially the biggest hurdle then it gets into resources and
00:46:07.040just you know funds and time and stuff but even then um once you have the knowledge once you have
00:46:11.740the awareness some of these skills are pretty simple whether it's cultivating mushrooms for
00:46:16.480your own food recycling some newspaper waste in your neighborhood kind of like the reverse
00:46:20.260newspaper boys how my friend calls it instead of giving out newspapers pick them back up and turn
00:46:24.440into food and medicine. It's a pretty cool application of these concepts. If you want
00:46:29.680to get top down, if you're that type of person, you want to work with your local bureaucracy,
00:46:33.780whatever, I'm not going to harsh that. If you're trying to mitigate waste streams and you're trying
00:46:37.800to reduce pollution because fungi are the loop closers, they're nature's grand recyclers,
00:46:42.800and we can ally with them and bring them into our human systems to close our loops a lot tighter.
00:46:48.720Then it gets into local medicine. Cultivating the local natural medicine from your environment is
00:46:53.420better than importing it. And that clearly aligns with a lot of our herbal movements. There's a
00:46:58.480whole radical herbalism movement that's a bit underground. And a big part of that is advocating
00:47:03.240for free natural medicine for folks. In Olympia, where I used to live, there's a free herbal
00:47:07.420medicine clinic. It's an incredible community resource of volunteers that are passionate about
00:47:12.420healing those around them with natural medicines. Funja obviously aligned right with that. They're
00:47:17.940natural medicine and we can bring them into our discussions around these day-to-day needs.
00:47:21.860And then if we have more time, resources, tons of potential with the remediation stuff, as I've been saying, there's so many ways to integrate fungi into a damaged or disturbed habitat to try to assist the natural process that is already occurring to come back from those shocks, whether it's a natural or human cause shock.
00:47:40.980Again, given some geological timescale, five years or 5,000, a habitat that's been incredibly impacted will recover.
00:47:50.100All the radiation we've dropped will go away in a bunch of thousands of years.
00:47:54.340It'll go away at some point. It's going to take a long time.
00:47:56.960So nature has its ways, but we can help with our knowledge, our hands, our thumbs.
00:48:01.640We can actually speed up that process and work with it.
00:48:05.100And that's what I detail in the book, the remediation chapter.
00:48:07.540So even there, there are small little things.
00:48:09.240So a couple of years ago, I made a video about how you can grow mushrooms on your old cigarette butts.
00:48:13.220Cigarette butts are like a sponge full of the nasty chemicals from the cigarette.
00:49:32.800you know if we want to stay civilized we can do it a lot better certainly and there's a lot of
00:49:37.020ways to do it we don't have to get rid of all the comforts we've developed so that you know
00:49:41.840obviously that's a different direction that maybe not everybody listening will want to go in if you
00:49:45.800want just immediate solutions for fungi provides so many i mean creating better food and medicine
00:49:50.060is the initial ones that most people jump on or can kind of get behind easiest and it's most
00:49:54.960accessible but cultivating these soil fungal cultures creating the spore and culture banks
00:50:00.080like you're talking about, advocating for fungi in a variety of forms, de-stigmatizing them,
00:50:05.120and then from there, having fun and learning with others.
00:50:07.980I've always advocated for forming radical mycology groups or whatever you want to call them.
00:50:12.200I don't really care if you use that term.
00:50:13.680Just people getting together around this really niche topic that is obscure and kind of hard to access,
00:50:20.080learning together, and then figuring out what's most immediate for your needs.
00:50:23.160I mean, that gets into every hypo tip.
00:50:25.640You know what you need for your environment.
00:50:26.940You know what you need for your home and for your life.
00:50:28.600And if you work in your community, what the community needs, mycelium, fungi, mycology can all benefit and support any of our efforts to whatever capacity we can give them.
00:50:38.480wow Peter well thank you so much for gosh just an incredible analysis of the fungal queendom
00:50:48.980so many different benefits and uses and ways to ally and I am deeply moved by your relationship
00:50:57.580with the natural world and how you have chosen to stand with the mushrooms and the mycelium
00:51:06.160and the world around you and making it accessible for wider groups of people and it's an incredible
00:51:10.980life's purpose and I'm so grateful for all that you do and I know a lot of the audience members
00:51:18.140will feel so similar and will want to learn from you and be a part of what you're doing so if you
00:51:25.280could just mention where people could find you online where you'll be teaching next where to get
00:51:31.100this incredible resource, the Radical Mycology book. Yeah, just where we can keep in contact with
00:51:37.740you. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I really appreciate such great questions. You know, I usually don't
00:51:44.360get such probing things. And these are really where my mind goes with these topics. I'm always
00:51:47.980happy to meet people where they're at, but I love your show for this reason. Yeah, the book is
00:51:53.920available through the publisher. It's actually my own publishing company, self-publishing,
00:51:58.500working with a friend or two to help but um you can support that and the website is c-h-t-h-a-e-u-s
00:52:05.980cathayas.com cathayas is a word i made up it means both underground and the highest state of matter
00:52:11.840before it becomes ether and so it's a combination of those two which i think fungi embody
00:52:16.040so you can buy the book there if you go to radicalmycology.com you can check out some
00:52:20.940free resources we have on there we're always hoping to update the website never enough time
00:52:25.560but we're working on that and actually we are making a headway to revitalize the site sooner
00:52:29.920than later but there's some good stuff there now and you can also on the radical mycology site
00:52:34.360check out the book tour going for three months around the whole country and as a part of that
00:52:39.680i'll be doing in about 11 different cities weekend long cultivation courses so more in-depth
00:52:44.980courses going into a lot of cultivation practices remediation stuff a little bit medicine a bit
00:52:50.440so the descriptions for those courses are at the website and then in between those courses
00:52:55.540the day events are all free readings and presentations I'm going to be trying to make
00:52:59.700my vehicle into like a fungal road show so I'll be trying to bring a bunch of stuff and make it
00:53:03.660interesting so check that out I'm coming to like 40 different cities and then as I mentioned in
00:53:08.660October in New York we're having the fourth radical mycology convergence and that's at
00:53:14.380radicalmycologyconvergence.com so hopefully folks can make it up to that should be really amazing