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, 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 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, 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, 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 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. 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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? 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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. 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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, 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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. 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, 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 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. 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 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 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. 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 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 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 works dot com For more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com, m