From terraforming the Earth for life to protecting against climate change, Fungi have played a critical role in our past, our present and our future. Fungi Researcher Dr. Gordon Walker joins us to talk fungi, the best mushrooms for your health, microbiology, Mycelium technology and magic mushrooms. Then, we countdown the Top 5 underrated candies.

Dr. Gordon Walker: 01:35ish

Pointless: 37:48

Top 5: 49:51ish

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Interview with Fungi Researcher Dr. Gordon Walker

Nick VinZant 0:12

Hey everybody, welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant Coming up in this episode, fascinating fungi, and underrated candy.

Dr. Gordon Walker 0:22

So they're cryptic. They're absolutely everywhere. You have fungi on every surface of everything in your house. We have a beginning and an end in many ways. Fungi don't mycelium lives in, plurality incarnate. It is constantly moving, growing in all different directions. There's no central bank brain, there's no central decision making center. And so like life as we know it on this planet, was essentially terraforming by plants and fungi. So they don't just take over the world. They are the world.

Nick VinZant 0:52

I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, like, download, subscribe, share, leave a review, we really appreciate it really helps us out. So our first guest is fascinated by fungi. And I have to admit, going into this. I knew fungi were important, right? Like anybody else. I could look at a mushroom and say, I don't really know what that thing is doing. But it has to be doing something important. I never realized how fascinating and how important fungi are in our past, in our present, and for our future. Our first guest is fungi expert, Dr. Gordon Walker. So why are fungi important?

Dr. Gordon Walker 1:38

Fungi are incredibly important. And they're at everywhere on our planet, every interface of life. And it's something that people don't think about because they're generally microscopic, you often can't see them. And even if they're not microscopic, if it's mycelium, it's hidden down in soil, and inside of wood. So they're cryptic, they're absolutely everywhere. They're omnipresent. You have fungi on every surface of everything in your house. And yet you don't see them. And you don't notice them until they create the fruiting bodies, their reproductive structures, generally. So that's the little molds you would see on food, or it's the mushrooms you'd see out in your lawn. Or maybe it's like, you know, some other weird growth, you'd see somewhere and be like, what is that, and yet fungi are all around us constantly. And we have really no idea what they're doing, at least from like a layperson point of view. In essence, what fungi do and why they are so important, is they're specialists at recycling carbon. So in our ecosystems, there's a lot of leftover plant matter, especially. And if that would build up, you would just have like huge deposits of compacted plant matter, that would never really turn into soil. And so fungi have evolved a suite of really powerful enzymes to help break down complex polysaccharide linkages and carbon into smaller units, which then other microbes can go ahead and eat. So they are sort of a keystone species in the first step towards creating soils. And that's part of why they're so important, especially in terrestrial ecosystems. The thing

Nick VinZant 3:07

that I always wonder is right, I see a mushroom on the forest. Like, what is that thing? I guess? Like, I know, it's a mushroom, but what what is it?

Dr. Gordon Walker 3:17

So what is it? I mean, I get this question a lot. And it's, it's a great question, because it's still something that people misunderstand. You know, people think that oh, mushrooms are plants, and they're all these other things like No, mushrooms are fungi. Mushrooms very specifically, are the reproductive structures of the mycelium or the the body of the fungus that is usually below that part of that cryptic hidden part I was talking about. And the mushroom is the visible reproductive organ of that mycelium. So it's like the fruit or a flower. And it's analogous in that it is producing sexual spores to help disperse the range of that mushroom and sort of see the next generation of mycelium and continue the fungus cycle in the soil.

Nick VinZant 4:00

Are they so the bigger part of it then is below ground?

Dr. Gordon Walker 4:04

Yeah, I mean, it's tough to say because you can't ever really see how big the Mycelium is, you know, like the the world's biggest organism is this giant patch of Armillaria or honey mushroom mycelium that's out in Oregon. I'm going to go visit in a couple of months. And it's a it's I don't know, something like 10 miles or more like it's an enormous organism. It's all contiguous. But it's like a couple centimeters deep in the soil. So it's absolutely massive, but it's not like it doesn't have that much biomass. The biggest heaviest organism on the world is this giant stand of aspen trees. That probably also has mycorrhiza with it, but like this giant chunk of honey fungus is just the mycelium in the soil. It's not the mushrooms themselves, right? So the mushrooms themselves are just the reproductive organs of this huge patch of one giant piece of mycelium that spreads out you know, over like a giant National Park kind of thing. So

Nick VinZant 4:55

are they alive in the way that plants are alive or alive in the way that animals are? alive.

Dr. Gordon Walker 5:00

They're alive in a way that fungi are alive. It's a separate kingdom, right? So, so they're all eukaryotes. So we have in backing out towards the tree of life, right, we have archaea, which is sort of like weird extreme final things. We have bacteria, which are prokaryotes. And those are just tiny little single celled things. And then we have all of eukaryotes, which is stuff like amoebas. And protozoa is we have animals, we have plants, and we have fungi. So those are different kingdoms, the plant, animal and fungi. Fungi are really under their own special thing, because they don't move around like animals. But they also don't do photosynthesis like plants. Ultimately, they're a little bit closer to animals in the sense that they are catabolic. So they are breaking down organic matter to produce sugars. And then they breathe co2 and water the same way that we do. But that's kind of where the similarities end. Fungi use a polysaccharide called chitin, which is present in a lot of bugs and like arthropods, so they're like there's a little bit of a relationship there. But like, generally the way that fungi live is so different from the way that animals and plants live. Like plants have a defined structure, right? That grew up their stems, there's leaves, there's parts that do photosynthesis, there's there's roots, so they sort of define structures. Human beings have heads, fingers, toes, we are we have sort of a top and a bottom and we know where our constraints are. You know, we are we have a beginning and an end in many ways. Fungi don't mycelium lives in plurality incarnate. It is constantly moving, growing in all different directions. There's no central bank brain, there's no central decision making center, every single leading tip is like its own little brain. And somehow these 1000s of little tips growing through the soil are are all able to communicate and talk to each other at the same time and coordinate their behavior enough to then produce a mushroom when the rain comes. So it's a little mind blowing, but it's you know,

Nick VinZant 6:56

so then is an individual mushroom that I see pop poking out of the forest floor. That's not one organism that's is one one isn't a separate one or each one is.

Dr. Gordon Walker 7:08

So think of the mycelium below. There's a let's say there's a big patch under usually what we're talking about are called Ecto mycorrhizal fungi. So these are mushrooms that are associated with trees. So you can think of like think of a really big oak tree, and all around that oak tree, maybe under the drip line of where the sort of the leaves are, you'll find like a bunch of mushrooms in a big circle or something around that tree. So those mushrooms are all related. They're often mycelium that's connected to that tree. If you have another oak tree 50 feet away, you might have a completely different mixture of mushrooms coming up under that oak tree because that oak tree has a different set of associations. And the thing too is mycelium. isn't like I said it's plurality. And so you can have mycelium kind of mixed all mesh together. And so there's like a larger body of fungus where you have like a bunch of people that have kind of forgotten where the beginning and end and they're all down. They're like sharing nutrients vibing with a tree, and then they're producing mushrooms that are the mushrooms are producing their own distinct spores for that particular mycelium. But like everything underground is kind of messy, because they're all sort of linked. And there can be there can be competition, there can be mutualism, there can be all sorts of weird stuff going on.

Nick VinZant 8:22

Man, so they are they taken over the world. That's what I feel like, it's gonna happen. I feel like this is the next eventual thing is that they then take over the world,

Dr. Gordon Walker 8:30

I would say they already control the world. And I'd say that we just haven't realized it because like I said, they're kind of cryptic, they're kind of hidden. But like if we got rid of fungi, like life wouldn't exist as we know it. And the thing that I think a lot of people don't realize the importance of fungi is that plants as we know them, basically would not exist without fungi. Plants when they came to land as little tiny algae things, how do they colonize? How could How could algae colonize land? Algae needs to be in water, right? One of the first steps was for fungi and algae to team up and become symbiotic. Where the fungi would help them keep water in and provide structure and the algae would do the photosynthesis to make sugars. And that's basically what lichen is. And like him as like the one of the first land organisms, the fungus is able to produce little tiny threads that will creep down into the rock kind of intercalating between cracks in the rock. And then when it rains, those threads swell they crack the rock. And then you just created little shards of rock which over time become dust become soil. And so like life as we know it on this planet was essentially terraforming by plants and fungi. So they don't just take over the world. They are the world. How come

Nick VinZant 9:43

the best thing we figured out so far to do with them then is just eat them.

Dr. Gordon Walker 9:48

We do a lot more than just eat them. I think the promise of eating them is something that like attracts most people because that's your first experience with most mushrooms as many people eat a mushroom they you know Some people like them, some people don't like them like, I got lucky I found a puffball at age five and my mom was like, that's a mushroom, we can eat that and I took it home was like what is the savory marshmallow it's incredible. And that left a big impression on me like wow, that was a cool mushroom. I want to try more. And and so food definitely led me into trying more mushrooms. In terms of like applications for mushrooms, there's there's lots of them we're looking at are sort of poised on the edge of what people are calling a Miko Cultural Revolution. And the idea is essentially that we can start using fungi for a lot more than just food. They are sustainable protein. They can be building materials. You can use mycelium to make shipping packing materials that are biodegradable, that are sustainable, you can use it to make insulation for houses. I've seen people make like canoes and coffins and all sorts of like kitschy things out of it. There's several companies right now that are working on textiles, fabrics, sort of mushroom leather type products, where they want to put them on leather coats and couches and all this stuff. There's tremendous potential in like the space of medicine, therapeutics, because there's all sorts of novel antibiotics. Cytotoxic like cancer drugs, there's like a huge class of molecules that are being explored, explored within fungi, as potential, you know, cures for various diseases. I mean, like statins that people use to control blood pressure, those came from mushrooms, there's all these like lectins and things involved in immune immunity and immune response. So there's a tremendous like, potential for these in the field of health. And there's also mental health and using philosophy to like help people overcome trauma and, and things like that in their lives. So there's a lot more than just eating them.

Nick VinZant 11:34

If to kind of crystallize it for me, on a scale of one to 10, one being like, we don't even know what this thing sticking out of the ground is 10. We've got this figured out any question anyone can imagine we have the answer to it. And then where would you say we are in our knowledge of them? Right now?

Dr. Gordon Walker 11:53

I don't know if I gave you the most authoritative answer on this. But I would say we're somewhere around like five or six. Like we know a lot. I think in the in the overall estimation, we know about 14,000 species of mushrooms right now. It's estimated that there's about 40,000 species of mushrooms. And then in the world of fungi, in general, it's estimated that there's somewhere between like 2.3 and 3.8 million species of fungi out there that like we haven't necessarily gotten a handle on. Because there's, there's mushrooms. And then there's also the yeast and the lichens, and the filamentous. fungi, and there's just in mold. There's like such a vast variety of the different kinds of fungi and most of them are microscopic, so you would never see them as a mushroom necessarily. Mushrooms are clearly sort of like the vanguard of the of the fungal world because they produce these like beautiful fruiting bodies, and they're very, like engaging and you can eat them, you can learn all the stuff about them, it's harder to get interested in something that's like a microscopic mole that you can never really see, you know, but those things can be just as important because they can cause rusts cause like massive amounts of damage in agriculture and caused like huge crop losses all over the world. At the same time, like we spray all these fungicides in our fields to keep fungus away, without realizing that there's this this fungus called weed like Kobe or ustilago made us corn Smite, it's a it's a thing that infects corn kernels. And in America, we think it's nasty. It turns these corn into like sort of big, fleshy, gray looking gall things. And in Mexico, they love it. It's a delicacy. And here in America, we spend fungicides all over the place to get rid of it. And it's like, a fungus is actually making corn more nutritious. It's upping the protein content. It's making it taste better. And yet, like it's this this weird dichotomy of how like, we love to hate fungus, and especially in agriculture and other cultural practices, like people like do all they can to keep it away with sort of forgetting that, you know, this might actually be of benefit to us if we thought about how to better control it and use it as an ally.

Nick VinZant 13:53

So I guess it's just because I kind of think about about it as being like, not clean.

Dr. Gordon Walker 13:58

Yeah, I mean, but nothing is like, quite frankly, like if you have something clean, if you were if you took a baby and brought them up in a clean place, that would be the sickest kid in the world. They would every single allergy, every single like sensitivity. There is something to be said for like letting kids crawl around the dirt. And like, you know, you want to generate an immune response. And like it helps if you get exposure to you know, I frequently when I'm feeling kind of sick, I'll be like, I'm going to go mushroom hunting just because I like that's my happy space. And I'll be like, snotty and feeling awful when I get out there. And then after a couple hours of digging around the soil and smelling mushrooms and touching stuff and being covered in dirt, you'd think I'd feel worse, actually feel better. I come home and I'm like, my stuffy nose is gone. I feel great. My immune system went through the roof.

Nick VinZant 14:41

Okay, so I don't think there's mushrooms living inside of us necessarily, but there are fungi and that kind of stuff that are in us, right.

Dr. Gordon Walker 14:48

There are some kinds of yeast and things. Yeah, we have a fair number of yeast and fungi that live on our skin. And for the most part, they're they're not harmful. We do know about like fungal infections. Everyone's familiar with like a yeast infection that women have to deal with. And like there's various topical skin infections, ringworm and different things you can get on your skin. Most of those are caused not by some awful fungus that's invading you. It's simply something that was there already. And like the balance of your microbial ecosystem got thrown off because there's a change in pH or maybe we're too sweaty for too long, or what you know, there's some growth of bacteria or something that caused a shift and then the fungus fungi are ultimately opportunists. So, mushrooms, and molds and all these things will do what they do best in their environment. But if their environment drastically changes, they're going to do what's best for them. They're not going to keep doing what you want them to do. They're going to keep doing what they want to do. And so that's like coming from the world of winemaking. That's something you see all the time, because that's dependent on a fungus yeast Saccharomyces servicio, where you have this like, giant vat of sugar, and you put the yeast and you want them turn it all the alcohol. The yeast, though, are smart, they're like, you know, we realize if we turn all of the sugar and alcohol, we're going to die. So sometimes the conditions are a little weird, the yeast will shift and say, Yeah, we're not going to finish that last little bit of alcohol, we're going to like, concentrate on trying to survive for like the next round. And winemakers don't like that winemakers like No, no, we want you to finish all of that we want you to blow through, then not leave a bunch of sugar in our wine, because then it's open for spoilage kind of thing. So, again, yeah, yeast are honest, we have it part of our microbiome, but it's all about opportunity and the balance of the ecosystem. So

Nick VinZant 16:26

do they seem to have any kind of an intelligence,

Dr. Gordon Walker 16:29

there's definitely intelligence, it's what they call network intelligence. So it's not intelligence in the way that we think about it, that we have a central brain. But like I said, they have all those little hyphal tips that are growing in the soil, and somehow they're able to all coordinate. So you know, imagine like some sort of like massive transit system that is like self regulating, and like, you know, imagine, you know, the New York subway system, but somehow all the trains know when and where to go kind of on their own. That's an example of like network intelligence. And that's kind of what fungi and slime molds exhibit. So you've heard of slime molds. They're, they're not fungi, technically, they're other little organisms that, you know, you've seen time lapse of them growing through mazes and stuff, they can like navigate mazes and find food and avoid light. They have all these sort of like, examples of intelligence. But they still you know, they can do simple problems, like solve a puzzle and do these various things. But they don't have they don't have a brain. Their effects on molds are one giant cell slime molds, mycelium are different organisms that behave in similar manners. And they both exhibit this this network intelligence and ability to coordinate decisions across you know, distances, without like neuron potentials, or anything else that we understand as thought.

Nick VinZant 17:38

So is that kind of the difference between like actively thinking versus responding to just external stimuli? The fungi don't get together and be like, hey, you know what, there's this property down there. We go down there, there's some great soil for us. Well, I just think they can

Dr. Gordon Walker 17:53

sense because they can be like, Oh, we can tell that there's some good stuff for us to eat down there. So they might intentionally move down there because they're, that's closer chemotaxis they're moving towards something that they want. So they can sense that. Are they making like a conscious decision? Maybe not. I like to think of it as like, you know, you see one of those like producer music boards from like, a studio, and there's all the little like levels and dials and stuff like that. Yeah, I think for me, that's kind of how I think about it's like, there's some level of like, messing with the dials, where they're like, Okay, we've hit enough, you know, the levels are up, we're gonna go, we're gonna go for it. Right? If they have enough of the stimuli that says, do this thing or move away from this thing, they'll start doing that in an active way you can even like, there's examples of where if you put like a fungi on a plate, and you give it a food source, it'll move towards the food source. And because what it does is mycelium grows in all directions equally until it finds food and then it concentrates all its resources on the food. Right? So it's growing all equally until it finds something and then it puts everything into that that food source because it's like there's food there. If you then pick up the food source, clean away the mycelium and put the food source back. Mycelium will remember where the food source was and grow towards it again. So like it has memory, even though it doesn't have a brain, which I think is really cool. Yeah, I'm

Nick VinZant 19:08

going back to they're taking over the world man.

Dr. Gordon Walker 19:12

They already took over the world. We live in their world. It's we just don't see them.

Nick VinZant 19:17

Um, are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions? Sure shoot. Best fungi slash mushroom.

Dr. Gordon Walker 19:24

It's a tough one because I have to qualify it like I have so many favorites and it shifts constantly based a little bit on season. I definitely do have a few favorites. morels are excellent. There's this thing called butter blades that are incredible. I get one here in Napa called emanate of Llosa that I absolutely love. Those are some of my favorite edibles. There's also really cool mushrooms I just like take photos of there's things called high nelum which are a little tough, bitter sort of polypore to fungi but they have these droplets of what's called quotation or liquid on them. You might have seen like the bleeding tooth fungi, it just looks absolutely unreal and crazy. and really cool. So those are some of my favorites. And I know there's there's so many things out there that can just be utterly mind blowing because you come across them. You don't even recognize them as a mushroom. And then you find out later like, Oh, that was fungus like, whoa. So

Nick VinZant 20:12

most overrated like, ah, somebody's talking about portabello. Again, everybody, so great, but it's a jerk or something like that.

Dr. Gordon Walker 20:22

I mean, just just as a side note, I like Agaricus bisporus is what portabello cremini and but mushrooms are all the same species of mushroom. They're just grown in slightly different ways or slightly different strain of the same thing. I think like the fact that everybody thinks that's what mushrooms are, that makes them a little overrated because it's like, there's like, hundreds of delicious mushrooms. There's hundreds of bad mushroom soup, there's like, you know, something like 40,000 mushrooms and only like a couple 100 on each end are gonna be edible or poisonous. And everything else in between is just a mushroom. I'd say maybe overrated mushroom, like, people absolutely love Shawn trails, and they're good. But they're not like, they're not the best. You know, I think people tend to hold things in certain regard because they are familiar with them. Even porcine people really, really like this sort of big kimberlites and porcini. But some of my favorite mushrooms are ones that people aren't necessarily aware of. Because they're not as highly regarded. They're not as highly touted. So I think certain things kind of get over represented. emanate a muscaria is another one that like, I think people get so stoked on it, because it's that classic red little white dots on it. It's poisonous, but it's not deadly toxic. And so there's just a lot of like misconceptions out there around certain mushrooms.

Nick VinZant 21:39

Dem. Which one do you think of like you look at and you say, Oh, that one has a lot of potential?

Dr. Gordon Walker 21:45

I mean, are you talking like for biotechnology, you're talking for food, you're talking for environmental restoration. But well, the potential all of the

Nick VinZant 21:52

above I guess, and the asking really hard like, okay, however you want to define potential?

Dr. Gordon Walker 21:58

Sure. So I think right now, some of the most interesting mushrooms are what are called White rot fungi. So those are mushrooms that have evolved to digest wood. And there's several levels of mushrooms that digest wood, there's white rot, brown rot and then like composters. So this is like first secondary and tertiary SAP probes. White rot fungi are things that can break down lignin, which is a really complex polymer in wood, that crosslinks cellulose and gives it wood its structure, its its density. And why rot fungi have these very advanced enzymes to break down lignin because it's a super complex molecule. And so we've been harnessing the power of white rot fungi, and this is stuff like oyster mushrooms, Ganoderma, reishi, mushrooms, Lion's Mane, these kinds of things, to mine enzymes to do making biofuels to do other like industrial processes. We've also been looking at them to do like bio remediation of like carbon compounds. So like, certain people out there have shown that in a lab, you can get like an oyster mushrooms, eat like cigarette butts, or potentially eat hydrocarbons and oil pollution, it's really difficult to actually translate that kind of practice into a wild situation, because they've tried to like take oyster mushrooms and put them on an oil spill. They don't do what you want them to do, because oyster mushrooms do what they want to do, not what you want them to do. But I do think there's tremendous potential, as you said, to capture the power and chemistry of some of these white rot fungi and use them as allies and fighting climate change and trying to sort of make sense of the mess we've made of the world.

Nick VinZant 23:35

follow this up with a lighthearted one. Do you consider Toad from Mario to be a mushroom?

Dr. Gordon Walker 23:42

Yeah, I think he's pretty clearly an avenue to muscaria. You know, he's a little guy. So

Nick VinZant 23:47

is he the most famous mushroom based character?

Dr. Gordon Walker 23:51

Oh, he might be you know, I mean, the Mario Mushroom is definitely like the one that everybody knows. And that's part of why ama muscaria is so well. You know, recognized around the world.

Nick VinZant 24:01

I guess I can't think of any other famous mushrooms.

Dr. Gordon Walker 24:04

There's there's plenty in like animaIs. And like, I'm amazed once you start recognizing mushrooms, you start noticing them everywhere, because it's like, I've talked to people who are like their hikers, professional hikers or something like that. And they've gone like the whole Pacific Crest Trail and stuff like that. Like do you see any mushrooms? They're like, No, didn't notice any ever. And then you're like, well here, look at my Instagram. Look at these pictures of mushrooms. And the next thing I know for like, weeks on end, people are just DMing me pictures of mushrooms every day. And I'm like, Yeah, I know. I told you they're everywhere. You just like have to key into it. And I feel like it's kind of the same thing with media you you've watched shows and movies and things where there's mushrooms in them and not realize it was a mushroom until you're like oh my gosh, that's a mushroom.

Nick VinZant 24:41

Best place to find them

Dr. Gordon Walker 24:44

in the woods, after rain. You know the mushrooms do grow everywhere. You can find them in the desert. You can find them in the Arctic you can find them pretty much anywhere you can imagine. But you there's a few basic things that really help if you have plants around so they have carbon to eat. and you have lots of water you're going to need rain or at least some snow, melt, moisture, humidity etc. to to get the mushrooms to grow because that is the biggest trigger right is the Mycelium is down in the soil. If it doesn't have any water, it's not going to swell. If the water goes down and mycelium swells up, that's when it says okay, now is an appropriate time to previous to the fruiting body. And that's because mushrooms need moisture to develop. And the spores when they come out, need moisture to kind of germinate nucleate and go down into the soil and start growing again to continue the mycorrhizal network.

Nick VinZant 25:33

Does that always happen super fast like I you know, 1000 Boom, there they are, or is it just you don't notice it until they're done.

Dr. Gordon Walker 25:41

So there's some mushrooms that like come up and disappear within like 24 hours, there's this class of mushrooms called Ink caps, which are like generally little tiny things will grow in which ships there's some bigger ones too. But they'll come up and essentially melt. They don't they don't even disperse their scores by when they just like they come up in their cap turns to black goo and it melts and drops all over the ground. And that can happen in like 24 or 48 hours. That's that's a really fast cycle. A lot of mushrooms will be they'll come up and kind of exist for about a week or two. And then they'll get moldy and rotting and full of bugs and to kind of just like disappear into the forest floor. And then there's stuff like poly pores that can you know, persist for an entire year, maybe five years, you know, there's this one called the Gary con, which can live for like 80 to 100 years on a tree. It's parasitic on the tree, but very, very weakly so. So it's like year after year, it's building layers on layers on layers, which is one of the things you can go to the forest and you'll see lots of stuff that are like conks on trees, and more often on if they're on the side of trails, some will come by and knock it off. And that always upsets me because I'm like, you know, that comp could live for another like 20 years. But somebody just thought to be clever to like whack it off.

Nick VinZant 26:46

Like I didn't know they had such a long lifespan.

Dr. Gordon Walker 26:49

Some of them. Yeah, I mean, that's that's so he's talking about the medical potential for fungi along those poly pores because they're so long lives are full of antibiotics, of cytotoxic compounds that can fight cancers, they have really complex like polysaccharide linkages that can help stimulate our immune system. And that's because those things are built to last right? They're mushrooms that have evolved to not get molded over eaten by bugs, they're going to exist for like 2030 4050 years. So they're full of stuff that's really good at keeping the mushroom whole, and we can take those compounds and use them as medicines and therapeutics.

Nick VinZant 27:25

How can I tell if they're poisonous? That's what I've always wanted to like pick one up.

Dr. Gordon Walker 27:32

Okay, so So behind me, I have two posters, can you tell which ones poisonous?

Nick VinZant 27:36

The one on the bottom?

Dr. Gordon Walker 27:40

The one on top, actually, but that's kind of my point is I get this question. A lot of people say, hey, how do you tell what's poisonous? What's not? And I say you don't? Everyone just wants a rule of thumb. And for fungi, there is no such thing. And I know that's a disappointing answer, but try rephrasing it as this. The way you learn what's edible, and what's toxic is by learning one mushroom at a time. And the way I like to think about this is it's like playing an RPG. When you start an RPG, you have one spell you have fireball and all you can do is spam fireball, you know, you kill the zombie spam fireball, but eventually you level up because you're other killing zombies you gain experience. And then suddenly, wow, I just learned lightning now you can cast fireball and lightning. And then as your other casting fireball and lightning you like pick up another spell. And so mushroom hunting is very much the same thing. You got to learn like one good edible mushroom to start. And there's a few really easy ones you can learn something like chicken the woods is this big orangey yellow poly core, it grows on trees. If you find a big orange ELA Polyvore growing on a tree, it's the only thing that looks like that it's going to be a tip or a certificate the woods. If you learn that, then maybe you can learn a Shawn Trail, which is a little bit more complicated. It does have a few look alikes, but you can kind of like, as you get along in your mushroom journey, you learn more and more spells more and more mushrooms. And you also as you're learning the edible ones, you start to learn the toxic ones. And that's how you kind of start to build this repertoire.

Nick VinZant 28:59

Where do you think this goes? Like? What do you think the future holds?

Dr. Gordon Walker 29:02

I think the future is hopefully bright for our partnership with fungi. I think there's a lot of challenges that we have to face with what's happened with our climate. And I think like the human influence on this planet is being felt more and more and it's like the people who are still saying that the climate change hasn't occurred are they're going to become in the minority. Because as the world fundamentally changes as our food system changes, the weather changes, we're going to have to adapt, or we're going to die as a species and I think fungi because they were some of the original terraforming of this planet are going to be one of the main pillars of how we actually try to recapitulate ecosystems, we have to go to Superfund sites and reforest them we have to sink massive amounts of carbon to stop our planet from becoming too hot to be habitable, basically, and fungi are a huge part of how we're gonna be able to buffer the environment. We're gonna be able to like use them to help reseed plants we're going to be producing sustainable foods you know, there's there's too much animal agriculture. You're going on right now I'm I'm an omnivore. I don't think that we should all go vegan. But I do think it would help if everybody in the country could cut their meat consumption in half, and supplement that with mushrooms. I think the other big thing we'd get out of that wouldn't be just like a positive boon for the climate, we'd see a huge improvement in health too, because fungi have a massive amount of dietary fiber in them. And that's the thing people don't realize how little fiber they're getting in their diet. And like when I say fiber, I don't mean go and eat a box of Wheaties and like have a very uncomfortable BM like I'm talking about like fiber that we need to live and feel full feel satiated, to stock good bacteria in our guts. And I think fungi are absolutely essential source of nutrients that had been largely ignored because people kind of just look at them like the cheap Agaricus by sports a little button mushrooms you buy in a store are not appealing to enough people who have them want to eat them every meal. And so like what I'd love to see is a much larger selection of edible fungi become more available become you know, easier to access in terms of price and availability. And and really see people eat more mushrooms because I think health would improve. And I think we could really help our environment by shifting some of our protein needs to to fumble bass stuff.

Nick VinZant 31:11

This isn't, you know, your area of specialization necessarily, but I think the question is an obvious one whenever we're talking about mushrooms. Right now, there seems to be a big push to kind of move into the was it the psychedelic ones? Do you do you see potential there? Is this kind of a fad?

Dr. Gordon Walker 31:29

I think it's a lot more than a fad. I mean, I think the sad thing is that like we were there in the 70s. And then it was like Nixon for very racist reasons decided to shut down, you know, start a war on drugs that was like, essentially just an excuse to put people in prison. Certainly, if you look at the history of it. Right now, what we're seeing is, you know, stuff like Michael Pollan's book, The Johns Hopkins studies are some really major momentum moving towards showing the value and efficacy of psilocybin and psychedelics in general towards mental health. We certainly have a mental health crisis in this country, you know, the number of people who had issues and can't find proper help, you know, if you've tried to look for a therapist or some like that, it's very difficult and most people can't afford it, don't have the time don't have the access, etc. I don't think psychedelics are a silver bullet, I think that there's a little bit too much kind of projected onto them that they can somehow solve all your problems you still need to go through like the work and the effort of actually tackling your problems. And I think taking psychedelics in a therapeutic setting is going to be where they're going to be most effective, rather than people just kind of like going off on like, Vision quests in the desert kind of thing that because that can be dangerous, and like certainly, like psychedelics are very powerful and they can cause like a mental break, they can they could make you very unwell. Although they are generally very safe drugs compared to like other drugs out there, you can't really OD on one, but you can have a mental psychotic break as a result of taking them in inappropriate setting, or inappropriate dosage or you know, without proper support kind of thing. So I think there is massive potential for it. And I'm really excited to see like Oregon passes 109 measure, so they're gonna actually there's not in place yet. But within like the next two years, they have to have a system for there to be assisted psychedelic therapy appointments happening in Oregon. And there's a lot of places that are decriminalizing. So like, Oakland and Berkeley have done it, Denver's done it and arbour Santa Cruz, there's a number of cities and municipalities and even counties around the country that have started decriminalizing psychedelics, and specifically psilocybin to because it has a lot of potential to help people. And from what we've seen, it has very little downside, right? If you can cure someone's alcoholism in one or two sessions, that's a lot better for society than letting that person continue to like, you know, relapse in and out of stuff until they eventually get in a car accident, kill somebody, you know, so there's, there's real potential,

Nick VinZant 33:51

staying kind of in that similar area, but also more entertainment, the broader topic of it, do a lot of mushrooms have that chemical or genetic makeup or whatever that is that or is that unique to that specific kind of mushroom?

Dr. Gordon Walker 34:06

It's not unique. So it's, I mean, psilocybin is just an alkaloid. And there's a lot of different like mushrooms contain a lot of alkaloids and plants due to alkaloids are compounds that some of them are bitter and poisonous, and some of them are trippy. Some of them are just, you know, whatever they are. Psilocybin is mostly present in philosophy mushrooms, which is the the genre of mushrooms, there's a bunch of different species of philosophy and they grow all over the place. The most common one is one called Philosophy cubensis. That's what people are generally growing in, you know, things as as magic mushrooms. The native range of those is like Florida, Cuba, sort of the south east, they like really tropical warm regions. And so if you see philosophy elsewhere, it's probably a different species, the majority of philosophy or little wood decay fungi that are growing in like witchy pet so like all around the Bay Area, we get philosophy growing, but it's outside of like a Bank of America or like a apartment complex or something like that. It's like well watered woodchip beds where they occur, which is hilarious to me because I'm like, the legality of those things is a very weird gray area because you can't make a mushroom you can't make a plant that exists in nature illegal, it's it's there. It's only illegal if we go pick it with the intention of consuming it as a drug, if you picked it without knowing what it was, if you're like a landscaping guy, and you're like, oh, I want to get rid of all these mushrooms. That's not illegal. It's only illegal once you pick it with the intention. And that's the weird, legal gray area, right? Because if you're out hunting around a Bank of America and a cops like what are you doing? You're like, I don't know, I'm, I don't know what I'm doing. It's not illegal. But if you're like, I know what I'm doing, then it's illegal. Right? There are there are other genre of mushrooms that contain psilocybin, there's some pinellia species, there's some gianopolous species, there's actually a fair number of mushrooms that contain very, very, very small amounts of psilocybin. But usually psilocybin is peat, not heat stable. So if you cook a mushroom, you've cooked, you know, this is a good reason do you want to cook most emotion because you want to cook the toxins out? More often than not, there's bad stuff that could hurt you, if you you know, are eating a mushroom raw, so it's a really good idea to cook all your mushrooms. So lots of it would be an exception, because you actually want the psilocybin intentionally but it could also be quite upsetting if you were to eat something, not knowing that there's psilocybin and that would not that would be you know, getting that's where the mental break comes in. Because you think you're just having dinner. Next thing, you know, you're tripping.

Nick VinZant 36:20

Um, that's all the questions I got, man. Is there anything you think that we missed? Or what's kind of coming up next for you? Oh, geez.

Dr. Gordon Walker 36:25

Well, I do social media on Instagram and YouTube and tick tock, and I think my main goal is to present visually engaging mushroom content that stirs up people's emotions. And I do some I don't know, if you've seen what I do. I know you talked to some risque people, but I have some sort of risque mushroom videos as well. I even have an only fun guy. And I think you know where to find that it is a it's only fun guy. But I have I put some of my more risky things on there. I realized that like me, making videos of talking about mushrooms, takes a lot of effort out of me and I had to like add them, put them together and stuff like good on camera and make a video work. Or sometimes I find a jelly fungus. And I can kind of just squish my finger around in it. And it makes a very intimate sounding noise and people like that or, or hate it. Either way, it causes an emotional response. And the whole point is to get them to stick around long enough to actually read the caption and hopefully learn some information. So I kind of have fun being a little subversive on social media and pushing people's buttons just a slight bit. So

Nick VinZant 37:26

I want to thank Dr. Walker so much for joining us. If you want to connect with him and learn even more about fungi, we have linked to him on our social media accounts. We're Profoundly Pointless on Twitter and Instagram. And we have also included his information in the episode description. Okay, now, let's go ahead and bring in John Shaw. Do you feel like people generally listen to you?