The Mystery of Mushrooms with Bryn Dentinger

Why are some mushrooms delicious, some make you high, and some kill you? Neil deGrasse Tyson and comedian Chuck Nice discover the weird world of mushrooms, psilocybin, and mycelia with mycologist Bryn Dentinger.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Coming up on StarTalk, cosmic queries, all about psilocybin, that hallucinogenic chemical found in mushrooms. I have no particular expertise in this, but we found someone who does, an expert on mushrooms. In the next episode of StarTalk, there is fungus amongst.

• 0:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk, your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. They were doing cosmic queries on none other than psilocybin. Oh my gosh. Oh. Chuck. Nice. We haven't done one of these before. The psilocybin or the queries? Queries on psilocybin. I don't think I've done either, to be honest. That's the voice of Chuck Nice. Chuck, always good to have you, man. Always a pleasure. Yeah, so psilocybin, well, I have no expertise in this. And you may have user's expertise, but we need, this is. Well, I'm intending to. This is a fundamentally academic show.

• 1:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I certainly have no expertise in this subject. And I don't know if Chuck. You do? I intend to. Intend to, okay. So, but we had, since we find the academics wherever they roam, where the expertise can be found, we've got it in Bryn Dentinger. Bryn, welcome to StarTalk. Thank you very much, Neil and Chuck. It's a real pleasure to be here. So you're a curator of mycology, not yourcology, mycology. That's right. At the Natural History Museum in Utah. And you're principal investigator in the Dentinger Lab. What a coincidence there.

• 2:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What are the odds?

• 2:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And you're co-author of a just-published study at the publications of the National Academy of Sciences on the phylogenomics of psilocybin mushrooms.

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Woo!

• 2:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whoa. So, this is... So first, tell me what a mycologist is.

• 2:27Speaker 01

  Sure. Well, I'll start off by saying I'm gonna go with "high."

• 2:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, Chuck.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  Only sometimes.

• 2:35Chuck Nice?

  What is a mycologist? What is a mycologist? A high out of his mind, that's what? No, go ahead.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  But a mycologist is somebody that studies fungi. Fungi is a whole kingdom of life relative to plants and animals. There's the whole fungus kingdom, and we know so much less about them than we do plants and animals. So mushrooms are just a part of all fungi. Many fungi are molds and yeasts, things that you might be more familiar with on your bread or your shower.

• 3:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, when I wasn't looking, fungus became an entire branch of the tree of life, an entire kingdom.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  And that was based on their mode of nutrition, so how they get their food, basically. So animals ingest things and fungi absorb things, and so that was emphasized when they removed them from plants.

• 3:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I see.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Oh, okay.

• 3:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And another thing I learned just recently, like five years ago, that the common ancestor between mushrooms, fungus, and animals parted later than its common ancestor parted with green plants, which logically tells us that we and mushrooms are more genetically alike than either we or mushrooms are to green plants. I think I can say that, isn't that correct?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  That is absolutely true. Yeah, so we share a common ancestor with fungi about a billion and a half years ago. So that's quite a long time. Things have changed quite a bit. Obviously, we don't look...

• 4:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But dude, I'm an astrophysicist.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  Right, okay, yeah, so that's like, that's like a split second.

• 4:05Chuck Nice?

  I was gonna say, yeah, right, right. Drop in the proverbial bucket.

• 4:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We've got this, okay. Yeah, go on.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we've, we look entirely different today. You know, the one track, the animals, they went through this internal absorption, or sorry, digestion. And then the fungi, they, they're sort of the opposite. They're like our stomachs turned inside out. So they just live inside their food, squirt their enzymes out to their environment, they break stuff down and they reabsorb them. And that's why we look so different.

• 4:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Okay. So, so what, what is a sil- silicin?

• 4:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. So this is a small molecule that some mushrooms produce. About 200 species of mushrooms around the world produce this compound. And nobody knows why they make it. But one thing that we do know is, the way they make it is very highly regulated, using a combination of like, four genes that encode enzymes that convert the amino acid tryptophan to silicin, just four, in just four steps. So why they do this is a matter of huge speculation. Um, and of course, you may, you and your viewers may already know that one of the, uh, activities of silicin when it's consumed is to produce, um, altered states of consciousness in humans and, and other animals.

• 5:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. Mammals primarily, or all animals, no matter what?

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Hasn't been tested very widely, so we can't really say. But certainly, all the mammals that's been tested on show behaviors that are consistent with an altered state of consciousness.

• 5:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so there's some mushrooms that are just simply tasty, others take you on mental trips, and others will kill you. So...

• 5:48Chuck Nice?

  Ooh, let's hope they never all get together. Woo, we are in big trouble if they do that.

• 5:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So, this range of things it can do to us, um, is it just random that happens to be that way? I mean, there's a lot of species of fungus, for sure.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  It's not entirely random, at least not in all cases. Um, in, in the case of silicin, it might be what we call a happy accident, that it affects us that way. It might be that that chemical has some other function in nature that we don't yet understand.

• 6:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It traces back to 65 million years?

• 6:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's awfully suspicious timeframe in the history

• 6:25Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  of life on Earth.

• 6:26Chuck Nice?

  Are we, are we to believe that the dinosaurs were high, that's why they didn't realize that they were about to get wiped out? Hey man, look at that thing in the sky. Oh man, that is really, really cool, man.

• 6:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's rad, man.

• 6:40Chuck Nice?

  Look at that. Oh my God, look at the trail on it, man. The colors, the colors.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 6:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a little suspicious. What can you say about that?

• 6:50Speaker 01

  I mean, I couldn't prove Chuck's hypothesis wrong, but.

• 6:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck is good at those kinds of hypotheses, by the way.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  But I'll say two things. One is our ability to precisely pinpoint the origin of this in absolute time is pretty poor. So, you know, there's a huge range of, of, of possible dates that this originated. We call this a confidence interval. And so, you know, the 65 million just happened to be sort of in the middle of that range. It was the mean, but it doesn't mean that that was precisely the time at which this molecule appeared. That said, an interesting consequence of the asteroid hitting Earth is that it created a nuclear winter, which blocked out sunlight and sunlight is necessary for plants to grow. So there were no plants around and therefore there was nothing that could eat plants, right? They were going to go extinct.

• 7:44Speaker 01

  Things that needed to eat plants, they're, they're going to go extinct as well. But things that don't rely on live plants to feed and survive could thrive under those conditions. And that happens to be mushrooms that decompose dead organic material and things like slugs and snails that eat decomposing material. So those kinds of organisms, they actually did well after the asteroid impact.

• 8:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. You know, I hadn't put two and two together there to make that, draw that conclusion. Makes perfect sense. So, so there's, is the great dying of organic matter. And this is a happy day for mushrooms and snails.

• 8:22Speaker 01

  It does appear that mushrooms diversified very rapidly after the asteroid impact in many groups. So yeah, it may have been an opportunity for them.

• 8:29Chuck Nice?

  The world is ours.

• 8:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Just a couple more questions before we go to the, to our Q and A. Chuck, you loaded up with the Patreon questions?

• 8:37Chuck Nice?

  I do, I have them.

• 8:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. So how did we discover this chemical in them? Is just, is it people grazing mushrooms until? I mean, they can't have been motivated to expect this.

• 8:49Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I guess was it just random and do we have a, can we date that in the history of culture?

• 8:54Speaker 01

  We don't know about prehistory and what kind of interactions our ancestors had with these mushrooms. Because it's not recorded, but we do know that Mesoamericans.

• 9:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Astronomically, history goes back to the Big Bang. So you mean history in the historian sense, where we actually have records of people, places, events and things?

• 9:13Speaker 01

  Our history.

• 9:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  We also don't have a history of its use at the time of the Big Bang.

• 9:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Who knows? Maybe, maybe it is the reason for the Big Bang.

• 9:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody.

• 9:24Chuck Nice?

  Somebody hook it and.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  But in all seriousness, the first people that were documented to use it were Mesoamericans. And this was discovered when Europeans first arrived in Mesoamerica and, and wrote it down. And then proceeded to ban its use, of course, because it was total sacrilege.

• 9:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 9:47Speaker 01

  So that the knowledge was suppressed for hundreds of years until it was sort of rediscovered by an American ex-banker, Thornton Wasson, who traveled down to Mexico on these rivers. That they were still being used for rituals, ritualistic ceremonies. And he documented it and published an article in Life magazine in 1957. And that is the source of modern understanding of the use of magic mushrooms. That's when he coined the term, in fact, magic mushrooms, 1957.

• 10:14Chuck Nice?

  Wow.

• 10:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Life magazine.

• 10:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 10:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Who would have thought? And so, so I presume there are uses for this chemical besides just taking a head trip?

• 10:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So unfortunately, we haven't been able to explore that efficiently for the last 50 years. Thanks to suppression of research by Richard Nixon after he passed the Controlled Substances Act in 1971.

• 10:40Chuck Nice?

  I don't want these people getting hot.

• 10:42Speaker 01

  Well, it was, it was a form of social control. So he was concerned about the subculture subverting his, his political dominance. So he created all these challenges for people to explore freely in their, in their world. But we don't need to get into politics.

• 10:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But, but once the hippie, I think the hippies.

• 10:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 11:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Were considered counter-cultural to what the political agendas were.

• 11:05Speaker 01

  Exactly. Right.

• 11:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right? So, and if, and if they're using psilocybin and they're not. Otherwise harming other people and you make that illegal, then you can arrest hippies and get them out of your way.

• 11:15Speaker 01

  Exactly, yep.

• 11:18Chuck Nice?

  Well, that's basically the story behind marijuana, too.

• 11:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. But, but today, we're now having a resurgence of interest in its medical applications and it's showing to have profound therapeutic value for a wide range of mental illnesses from depression to PTSD, end of life, care, all types of things.

• 11:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, sad, well, we could have, we might have known this decades ago and it's only coming out now. That's very unfortunate.

• 11:48Chuck Nice?

  That's a shame. And what are some of the benefits when you talk about depression, PTSD, which are, you know, slightly related, but then you say end of life. Is that the acceptance of end of life? Is that a pain management? Is what, what exactly is it for end of life?

• 12:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, I mean, I should, I should say that I'm not a medical doctor, so I can just tell you what I've read.

• 12:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You could sell to the doctors.

• 12:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You show up on their doorstep, open your trench coat. Right, okay.

• 12:21Speaker 01

  Not, not quite, not yet.

• 12:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Not yet, okay.

• 12:26Speaker 01

  And it is really about accepting your death and coming to terms with that.

• 12:31Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it doesn't provide any pain relief.

• 12:35Chuck Nice?

  Right. Well, I mean, well, that was gonna say, that's a, that's a psychological pain reliever.

• 12:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, in a way, yeah, in a way.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  I'm Kais from Bangladesh and I support StarTalk on Patreon. This is StarTalk with Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 13:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Chuck, you've got a question. I think we've laid some good groundwork here.

• 13:09Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 13:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To see where these questions come in.

• 13:12Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely. Let's jump right into it. This is Patrick Weglinski. Patrick Weglinski from Salt Lake City, Utah. And he says-

• 13:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, another Utah person.

• 13:26Chuck Nice?

  Another Utah person.

• 13:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Utah, I'm worried now. You all gathering together or something?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Well, this is the place. That's what Brigham Young said when he arrived.

• 13:37Chuck Nice?

  Right. So this is the place.

• 13:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I got it. And plus Joseph Smith, to have had the visions he had.

• 13:43Speaker 01

  There might have been some mushrooms involved.

• 13:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Might have been. It might have been some mushrooms. It just might have been. I'm just saying.

• 13:49Chuck Nice?

  Okay, that's hilarious. He says, "Hello, Dr. Dentinger. I've been trying to get into mycology, and it can be very difficult. I find it much harder than growing plants. Why are mushrooms so difficult to grow on purpose or by accident? Why do mushrooms need to have a super sterile condition in order to grow in an artificial environment, but can grow in the nastiest conditions in the wild?"

• 14:17Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's right.

• 14:19Chuck Nice?

  That's so true.

• 14:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In fact, I saw a crack in the pavement and the mushroom was popping up through the crack in the pavement.

• 14:24Chuck Nice?

  Absolutely.

• 14:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So what's up with that?

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it turns out that unlike plants, they have to compete for resources that already exist. And there's a lot of things competing for the same resources. And so it's just through competition that you get a lot of contamination, the things that can grow better faster.

• 14:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, just to be clear, green plants do compete for sunlight.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 14:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But there's an abundance of sunlight.

• 14:51Speaker 01

  Right.

• 14:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Whereas you're describing resources in the environment-

• 14:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That it's one person gets it, the other doesn't.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  Right. And when you're growing a plant, you're not going to grow it in the shade of another plant, right? You're going to manipulate its environment to make it thrive. But to do that with a fungus, the only way you can manipulate the environment is to make sure there's no other organisms present that can outcompete it. So you have to sterilize it. But why they occur in nature? Well, this is just a numbers game. So every mushroom, just for example, will produce maybe up to a trillion spores.

• 15:27Speaker 01

  Those trillion spores have to find a mate. They're not a full seed, so they haven't mated yet. But there's half a trillion possible individuals, reproductively mature individuals that results.

• 15:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you don't see all the failed mushrooms?

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. A much more concise way of putting it.

• 15:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So it's a statistical bias.

• 15:47Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 15:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So if, so if your guy Chuck had a trillion pots.

• 15:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 15:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  He'll get mushrooms in some of them.

• 15:58Chuck Nice?

  He'll get some mushrooms with no problem, right? Or he could just keep a very dirty shower.

• 16:06Chuck Nice?

  All right. Well, that's cool. That's a, that's a, that's a great thing. That's a cool answer, too. Uh, this is Stone Courier and Stone says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Dentinger and Lord Nice. This is Stone from Boston, Massachusetts. And yes, Chuck, that's my real name. Hey, man.

• 16:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You know, I was gonna say it sounded very, very Hollywood, but okay.

• 16:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly.

• 16:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  With your name Stone Courier.

• 16:27Chuck Nice?

  A Stone Courier. Exactly.

• 16:31Chuck Nice?

  Sounds like an anchor.

• 16:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, I know, I know.

• 16:34Chuck Nice?

  Right. Today's top story. I'm Stone Courier.

• 16:41Chuck Nice?

  He says, I've heard that the largest living organism is one big circuitry of mushrooms. This is incredible. It makes me wonder, is this one organism or just a way for multiple mushrooms to talk? Also, since they're talking, where do mushrooms lie on the consciousness scale? More than my tree, but less than my dog. And finally, is there any evolutionary benefit that some mushrooms give psychedelic hallucinations when eaten?

• 17:09Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Bryn, this question better be true about mushrooms being the largest organism because I wrote about that in my, a book I put out a couple of years ago. So, I'm listening.

• 17:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is true, Neil. It is true. So as far as we know, the largest by area, the largest individual organism by area is a fungus that grows in the Blue Mountains of eastern Oregon. And it covers an area of above three and a half square miles. Now, it may not be the largest in biomass. That may be topped by a cloned aspen called Pando in Utah. Uh, but it's certainly many times larger than a blue whale. And that's kind of surprising to a lot of people.

• 17:49Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but what makes it one organism? It's not just interconnected multiple organisms that happen to have

• 17:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that manage to figure out how to

• 17:59Chuck Nice?

  Have a network.

• 18:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, network.

• 18:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, so it appears based on genetic evidence that it is a single individual that's connected throughout this three and a half square miles of forest through a network of hyphae, which we call the mycelium. That's the mass of hyphae that makes up an individual. And the mushrooms get produced on the edges of this mycelium whenever conditions are right or it need or there's some stimulus that that causes it to bank the mushrooms. But they're simply the reproductive structures. So the the metabolically active organism, the what some people call the vegetative organism. This is just the mycelium in the soil.

• 18:36Chuck Nice?

  Right, which, by the way, is an excellent story propagator in the HBO series The Last of Us, which is so cool. Because it's they're mushroom zombies.

• 18:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, right, right.

• 18:52Chuck Nice?

  And they all talk to one another through a mycelial network.

• 18:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So they, and of course, in James Cameron's Avatar, he was highly inspired by the connectivity of multiple organomistic

• 19:06Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 19:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  elements. So everybody had like a USB ponytail to connect into the into the plant that went into the animals.

• 19:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, because the whole planet is connected by one network.

• 19:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 19:19Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, which, wow, that'd be so great.

• 19:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 19:22Chuck Nice?

  Cool. What about the hallucinogenics and evolution? Is there any link between the two of them?

• 19:29Chuck Nice?

  What when it comes to eating mushrooms?

• 19:31Speaker 01

  We don't know what link there is between evolution and these hallucinogenic chemicals. But if we take a lesson from plants, those chemicals are there to protect the plants from being eaten. And we think that that's probably the case with the mushrooms as well.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  So it's more of a defense than...

• 19:52Chuck Nice?

  It's a defense. No, wait, wait, wait. Until we came along and then it became a very poor defense.

• 20:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm skeptical. Florins will prevent me from reaching into a flower bush, okay? Um, there are things that'll prevent me. You know, a bee sting prevents me from getting closer to the bees. A chemical that takes time to have an effect on my brain is too late. I already ate the mushroom. So how is it? How can that be thought of as a defense?

• 20:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's an excellent point, Neil. And we think that it's not the chemical that's responsible for the defense, but a conversion of that chemical into something that would cause your stomach to burn. That's, that's defense.

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And I associate that bad feeling with having eaten the mushroom.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  And that would, and that would be immediate, yeah.

• 20:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, oh my gosh.

• 20:45Chuck Nice?

  That'd be immediate, okay.

• 20:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We can totally.

• 20:47Chuck Nice?

  And, and when people, when human beings take, um, psilocybin, do they experience this kind of burn? Or is that part of the experience? Feel the burn. Feel the burn.

• 21:00Speaker 01

  No, because it, it, it functions at a much smaller scale than humans. So these chemicals didn't evolve in response to humans. We know that because they predate humans by sixty-five and a point nine million years, at least. So we know that. So they evolved in response to something else. And probably it's invertebrates. Those are the, those are the kinds of animals that cause a lot of damage to mushrooms, particularly land mollusks, slugs and snails. So that's why we think that that chemical evolved as a defense against slugs and snails.

• 21:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But are insects invertebrates? Are they counted as invertebrates?

• 21:37Speaker 01

  They are, they are.

• 21:37Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, they are. Cause they have an exoskeleton.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, right, yeah.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but they probably have skeleton. I mean, I think of vertebrate or invertebrate. When I think of invertebrate, I think of like jellyfish. But that doesn't have an inner or outer skeleton. It seems to me exoskeleton ought to count for something in the, in the nomenclature, but...

• 21:57Speaker 01

  It does, but it doesn't have bones on the inside. It doesn't have a vertebrae.

• 22:01Chuck Nice?

  Right. It's a, it's a, it's a mush on the inside.

• 22:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Total mush.

• 22:06Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You step on a water bug, you see all the mush pop out.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Or when you bite it with your chopsticks, right?

• 22:14Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 22:15Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I do that all the time. Yeah, that's how I eat. That's where I get my protein. It's good for the planet.

• 22:22Chuck Nice?

  This is from me. What is the difference between salicyl and ayahuasca? And if you had a friend who owns a resort in Costa Rica who offered you the ability to come down and do ayahuasca,

• 22:39Chuck Nice?

  is that a safe thing to do?

• 22:40Speaker 01

  I can't speak to the safety of ayahuasca, other than it's been used for probably thousands of years by indigenous peoples in the Amazon Basin. But it is different. The chemistry is different. So one thing about ayahuasca is in order for it to be active, you have to mix two chemicals together. One chemical inhibits the enzyme in your stomach that would normally deactivate the other chemical. So this is called a monoamine oxidase inhibitor, and monoamine oxidases are enzymes that are there to protect us from getting poisoned when we eat things, primarily plants. So you're causing that enzyme to no longer function, which if there are other chemicals involved

• 23:21Speaker 01

  other than the one in ayahuasca that makes you high, that could be really dangerous. So sometimes people who have antidepressants, if you take an MAO inhibitor with that antidepressant, that can cause real problems. So I would recommend you seek some medical advice from a trusted practitioner before you engage in that. Ayahuasca is also from mushrooms? No, ayahuasca is from plants. So it's usually two plants, but often there's a mixture of other plants. But the two plants that are really important are a source of DMT, dimethyltryptamine, which is very closely related in structure to psilocybin, but pharmacologically has a slightly different action.

• 24:05Speaker 01

  And the other compound is just this MAO inhibitor, which can come in a variety of flavors.

• 24:13Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay, all right. So it's...

• 24:17Chuck Nice?

  It's really, you have to deactivate a part, a system in your body to allow the active ingredient to go to work. Otherwise, it just won't work.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, DMT, DMT is widespread in nature, particularly plants. It's in many, many different plants. But do people do administer DMT intravenously, or more commonly, they vaporize it and inhale it? And that bypasses the digestive system.

• 24:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay, okay. Got you. All right.

• 24:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Keep it coming.

• 24:49Chuck Nice?

  All right, here we go. This is Angus McNeil, and Angus says, hello Neil, Bryn, and Chuck. I was wondering that since mushrooms have some medicinal purposes, and you can eat most of them, would it make more sense to start farming mushrooms instead of traditional crops like wheat? Thanks, Angus, and I'm 13.

• 25:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, wow.

• 25:14Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 25:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, is there an environmental difference between harvesting mushrooms and harvesting green plants? And I'm not talking about the mushrooms you dig up and they charge $400 an ounce.

• 25:26Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah. And, right, that they have to enslave pigs.

• 25:32Chuck Nice?

  Doggone pig labor force, unfortunately.

• 25:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So, yeah, we're not talking about truffles.

• 25:39Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 25:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But if mushrooms are nutritious, and of course, they taste meaty, which is something no one ever accused kale of tasting. What? I would eat a bowl of mushrooms over a bowl of lettuce any day of the week.

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Me too.

• 25:57Chuck Nice?

  It's true. Yeah, I gotta admit, yeah. And nobody has a kale burger. People have definitely had a portobello burger, so.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:07Chuck Nice?

  Kale burger.

• 26:10Speaker 01

  I mean. That'd be a sad universe right there. That's all it. I'd say, don't knock it till you try it.

• 26:18Speaker 01

  So cultivating mushroom, I would say you can't, it would be a replacement for traditional crop plants. And that's because the form of nutrition they provide is not complete. They're not very full of carbohydrates, for example, which our bodies. Well, neither are green. Well, like, like corn, right? Corn or wheat. Okay.

• 26:41Chuck Nice?

  Wheat.

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Or potatoes.

• 26:42Chuck Nice?

  All the grains. Right? Potatoes.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Greens, rice and potatoes. Yeah.

• 26:46Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 26:46Speaker 01

  Um, so I suppose, you know, you could go on. Not kale. Not kale.

• 26:51Chuck Nice?

  Not.

• 26:52Speaker 01

  Sorry, kale. No carbohydrates in kale. Definitely. What is in kale?

• 26:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah. Marketing. That's what's in kale. A bunch of marketing.

• 27:03Speaker 01

  Um, so, you know, they are, they're a good source of proteins and one important thing is that they have a complete, uh, they're complete with their amino acids. So unlike vegetables, which are missing amino acids that animals need, fungi have all of the same amino acids. And that of course refers back to our shared ancestry from a billion and a half years ago. That's why they have the same amino acids we do. So that's important. And they have some other vitamins, but you wouldn't be able to survive on mushrooms. A lot of the cell walls that they have are indigestible, like cell walls of plants. So they're not.

• 27:38Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  They couldn't subsist in mushrooms.

• 27:40Chuck Nice?

  You're just passing them. You're, you're passing them. You're not, they're not, you're not extracting anything from them. You know, but, but then they, it's, but, but the protein is a good thing. So, I mean, so for, for vegetarians, mushrooms should be a, a really great addition to their diet for that reason.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Yeah. But you have to eat a lot of them because they're 90% water. And that's one of the other challenges with using mushrooms in place of meat or other foods.

• 28:10Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha. Okay. Oh, that's a great question there for, for a 13 year old Angus McNeil. Way to go.

• 28:35Chuck Nice?

  Uh, this is Troy, um, who said, that's all he says. He's Troy.

• 28:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 28:42Chuck Nice?

  He's like Cher.

• 28:45Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Madonna.

• 28:46Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, Madonna. You gotta know who Troy, if you don't know who Troy is, then you're missing out, okay? Cause I'm Troy, okay? So there you go. He says, uh, "Hey, everybody, Dr. Tyson, Chuck, Bren, Troy from Virginia here. Do you think plant life have any similarities that relate to the frameworks of the universe? I often feel like trees, mushrooms, and plant life have specific traits that model and attribute of the universe. What do you think that might be for mushrooms or for fungi?"

• 29:23Chuck Nice?

  So, is there any parallels that you can draw between the universe and fungi? I think this might be a question for Neil.

• 29:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I officially don't understand the question.

• 29:40Chuck Nice?

  Well, I think what he's saying is, when you look at the human brain and there are trillions of connections, and then you look at the universe and there's trillions of stars, and, you know, that there seems to be, there really is no correlation, but there seems to be some kind of correlation, you know? Is there any correlation between plant life and fungi and the universe itself in either its structure, its composition, uh, or anything that you might be able to draw a parallel?

• 30:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I'm gonna say no.

• 30:12Chuck Nice?

  Okay.

• 30:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  For the following reason. So, what we learned, when we looked out in the, beyond Earth, we found planets orbiting the sun, eventually when we put the sun back in the middle of the known universe. That was kinda cool, okay? And then we looked into the atom, and we found electrons orbiting a nucleus. We say, "That's just like the planets orbiting the sun. It's just like it," we said to ourselves, we thought to ourselves. So, but the more we looked at it, the less... It resembled it. We even called the paths of the electrons orbitals, named after the planets orbiting the sun, orbitals. An orbital is, is a region of space where you'd find the electron. Point is

• 30:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  that different laws of physics apply for smaller gatherings of matter than for a larger gathering. Different laws of physics. So you can't sort of linearly go from one scale to another. And then expect to have any clue what's happening in that other scale.

• 31:14Chuck Nice?

  Gotcha. That's cool. You know, I, I, okay. How about Andrew Gendro, who says, or Gendro, who says, uh, hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Dentinger, and Chuck Nology.

• 31:34Chuck Nice?

  I don't know what that is, but he says, what is it chemically or biologically that makes rare prized mushrooms so delicious? And why are they so damned rare? Can't we just grow them like potatoes? We have mushrooms and we've got the dirt. What's the big holdup?

• 31:56Speaker 01

  So I, I guess, I guess he's referring to truffles. Truffles, yeah. So truffles are just a strategy that many mushrooms and non-mushrooms have taken to get their spores dispersed by animals. So this has evolved many times, hundreds of times, actually. But the one, the truffles that we typically eat as humans, they, they're in the genus tuber, which is a reference to the potato, as it turns out. And they have to be collected in the wild or sometimes grown in orchards. But it can take years for those to mature and be harvestable. And the reason is complex. So one is that they rely on the living roots of trees to grow.

• 32:41Speaker 01

  And we haven't yet been able to figure out how to mimic a live tree in a lab. So.

• 32:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're basically parasitic to the tree.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  You could look at it that way, but most people have viewed it as a mutualism. So they benefit the tree by giving the tree nutrients and water from the soil. And in exchange, the tree feeds the fungus with sugar that it makes through photosynthesis. And this is persistent, this allowed land to be colonized by plants 300, uh, 450 million years ago, and has persisted to this day in 90% of all land plants. So it's kind of an amazing partnership between plants and fungi that has transformed the Earth's landscape and make, made it hospitable to animals like us.

• 33:24Chuck Nice?

  Wow. So we, we kind of owe our existence to, to, to mushrooms. Wow. That's a, that is a just terribly fascinating little factoid. That's awesome. All right. Uh, this is Abram Pousada. And Abram says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Dentinger, Lord Nice. As we live in an exciting era of rapidly growing space industry, can you speak to the role of fungi in something like a Mars settlement, which aims to be self-sustaining? Could it play some part in making soil from regolith? If so, what else would it need to accomplish that? Also, assuming that there are some time, uh, assuming that at some time, some

• 34:09Chuck Nice?

  amount of soil is present on Mars, do you expect it will be a vital food source for the settlers? So, and are we taking, are we taking mushrooms to space? Do they make a good space food?

• 34:23Speaker 01

  Uh, I think we will have to do that. Yes. Um, so yeah, they're really good at decomposing things. So if you think of your compost bin, if you have that, one of those in your yard, um, that's essential for breaking down dead organic material and turning it into new forms of nutrients to grow plants. So if you imagine first trying to establish a colony in Mars, you're not going to be ordering up fertilizer off Amazon, right? You're going to have to make your own while you're there and

• 34:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Amazon delivers to Mars. It just keeps scrolling.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. I missed that. So, so maybe fungi are obsolete to colonizing, colonizing Mars. I don't know. But I also think, referring to our earlier question about, um, their nutritive properties, this would be a good source of protein for early colonizers. When there aren't large herds of cattle yet roaming Mars. See, I think, I think they're essential. And one other fun fact about fungi, a lot of fungi can, are resistant to high levels of radiation. And in fact, some fungi can actually convert radiation energy into their own metabolism. So there's good reason why fungi are going to be probably a critical component of a, of establishing a settlement on Mars for humans.

• 35:39Chuck Nice?

  That's so cool. So now, wait a minute. You say they're highly resistant to radiation?

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Some, yeah.

• 35:46Chuck Nice?

  Is that, is that because they're 90% water? Or is it because they have some properties that are resist, you know, just, you know, whatever properties that might be? And then, could we be able to take that and make a skin for a spaceship? As a shield?

• 36:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I like where you're going with that. I, I'm not the one to help out with that, but um, somebody should definitely look into that. I don't know exactly why they are, some fungi are highly resistant to radiation. I, there's probably some biochemical basis to it. Um, but I'm not familiar, that familiar with it.

• 36:23Chuck Nice?

  Interesting, interesting. Oh man, that'd be kind of.

• 36:26Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Part of it would be just complexity. I mean, mushrooms are pretty simple, aren't they?

• 36:31Speaker 01

  Well, simple in, in what, in what sense? Because.

• 36:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, structurally simple.

• 36:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay.

• 36:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If, if you have a lot of complex things going on, then any kind of pulse of radiation can do severe damage to what you are.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're simple.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think.

• 36:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You don't know any better.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  I think you're right. Um, the, the life form, the sort of vegetative phase is very simple. It hasn't changed in 400 and some odd million years, maybe even longer. Um, because it's a very successful strategy. But when you get to the reproductive phases, those get to be quite complex. There's some very sophisticated mechanisms that would easily be disrupted through mutation. So I, I would say they're, they're complex at a different scale. But yeah, you're right, generally speaking, the, kind of the growth habit is pretty simple.

• 37:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 37:17Chuck Nice?

  Okay. All right, this is Paul Patsova. And Paul Patsova from Slovakia says, hello, Dr. Tyson, Dr. Dentinger, Lord Nice. I would like to know, how do the interactions between fungi and the human microbiome influence health and disease? What are the possible beneficial roles of fungi and human health? So is there, are there any medicinal applications? We know about psilocybin, but that's more, you know, mental. Are there any medicinal applications for fungi?

• 37:54Speaker 01

  There are some, there's a long history of use of some mushrooms in traditional Chinese medicine primarily. The jury's out, I would say, on just how, you know, useful they are in, in modern medicine. But potentially, there's, there's something there. In reference to the microbiome, however, we do have fungi that live inside of us that are commensal, that is, they live there, they don't seem to have an impact on us, but probably they're doing something for us and we just haven't yet understood it fully. But we have yeasts that live in our guts. These can get out of control sometimes and cause, cause conditions like autobrewery syndrome,

• 38:39Speaker 01

  where you have yeast.

• 38:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that, that sounds delightful. Autobrewery?

• 38:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so you're walking around drunk all the time because the yeasts are fermenting the food you're eating and turning it into alcohol, and then you're drunk. This is a pretty rare thing, but it happens multiple times.

• 38:57Chuck Nice?

  That is amazing. Dude, you want to go get a drink? Dude, I am drunk all the time. You keep your drinks, sir. I am always drunk.

• 39:12Speaker 01

  Wow. I mean, it's much, it's much cheaper. Yes, that's for sure. But there's emerging, I'll just say this very quickly. There's emerging evidence that fungal infections have a wide range of impacts on human health from Alzheimer's disease to cancer. And there's one fungus that's been implicated in causing the accelerated growth of pancreatic cancer. And there's a mechanism that's been established for this.

• 39:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's not the fungus you've eaten, it's a fungus that's just somehow thriving inside of you?

• 39:44Speaker 01

  It's a fungus that grows commensally on our skin. It's actually the cause of dandruff. It's called malassezia. And sometimes people can get systemic infections of it. And when it gets into the pancreas, either causing or during cancerous growth of the pancreas, it can, that's what rapidly, seems to rapidly cause rapid growth of the cancer cells in the pancreas. Wow.

• 40:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Jeez.

• 40:08Speaker 01

  That's crazy. So we're just starting to understand the impact of fungi on, on human health.

• 40:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So again, if this had been a branch of the academy at the turn of the century, for example, we would have been far more along than we are right now in the academic understanding of its uses and pitfalls.

• 40:29Speaker 01

  Perhaps, but you know, these organisms are super hard to study. They're, they're mostly microscopic. They're hard to get into culture and to, to look at and manipulate. And it's really only with recent advances in technology that we've had the tools to really interrogate in a real way, some of these associations like with the human microbiome. So I'm not sure we really would be that much further ahead had, yeah, had there been more mycologists than ornithologists, but we'll never know.

• 40:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, plus there's the tandem advance of other technologies that gives you the power to do the analysis that would not have existed decades ago.

• 41:05Speaker 01

  Exactly, right.

• 41:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, okay. But Chuck, time for like a couple more, like half a minute questions.

• 41:11Chuck Nice?

  All right, actually, this is Boagert Dieter, and just dovetailing on what you just said. He says, "Hi, I'm from Belgium. Humans have consumed psychedelic substances for thousands of years, and many known cases of animals getting drunk and high. Do you think that making mind-altering substances illegal has stunted our growth and our wisdom? I'm worried about this. We're not allowed to get high, but we're allowed to consume ungodly amounts of advertisements every day? I'm worried that we'll stop thinking and stop being creative or revolutionary if we stay sober for long periods of time. Do you have any thoughts on this, please?" This is a guy who really wants to get high.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Well, maybe he should relocate to Amsterdam. It's not that far away.

• 42:01Chuck Nice?

  That's true. Now, are mushrooms, or hallucinogenics, are they

• 42:10Chuck Nice?

  legal in the Netherlands?

• 42:13Speaker 01

  Mushrooms have been legal.

• 42:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, marijuana and hashish is, yeah.

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and mushrooms were for a while, and now they're no longer legal, but there's some loopholes. People have found that they can still sell hallucinogenic mushroom products that aren't mushrooms, so it is still possible to get them there.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  But, yeah, how do I answer that question, though? I mean, I do think that altered states of consciousness, in whatever form they take, whatever the cause of them is, is important for humans to understand better their place in the world and to come up with new ideas that can result in innovation. And there have been some very high-profile cases of people that have attributed their mushroom trips or LSD trips to their success, like Steve Jobs, for example. So, you know, I wouldn't say that it's necessary for every individual, per se, but I do think it's a tool in our toolkit that we shouldn't just disregard out of hand.

• 43:17Chuck Nice?

  Cool. I'm for it.

• 43:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So it's a access point? An entry.

• 43:23Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An entry.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  Yes, it's one, one tool, one access point, yeah.

• 43:28Chuck Nice?

  Cool. Uh, this, this is Theresa Anoski. And she says, hi folks, I'm allergic to mushrooms. This seems to be an unusual allergy. What could it be about mushrooms that make me allergic? It's Theresa from Long Beach, Mississippi.

• 43:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Somebody else who wants to get high and can't, okay.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I don't, I don't know what the cause of it would be. And I don't know if it's all mushrooms or just a mushroom. Um, but they do, you know, they're, they're, they're complex organisms, um, cellularly, biochemically, uh, fudge are, you know, biochemical wizards, as one of my colleagues has put it, um, because they, they compete in an environment where, um, their only interaction is through chemicals. That's how they communicate. And so they make a lot of chemicals. And so there's a good chance that there's a chemical in there that somebody's going to react to, but, um, could very well just be proteins or, or even the components of the cell walls, which are indigestible to us. They're, they have cell walls made out of chitin, which is the same structure found

• 44:31Speaker 01

  in insects, uh, exoskeletons and crab shells. Um, and then they have something that's very much like cellulose in plants, which is what we call fiber. Um, so, uh, you know, it could be just that as well.

• 44:44Chuck Nice?

  Okay. I actually have one last question from Kevin LeSallemaier, who is a friend of the show. And Kevin says, are there any new species of mushrooms popping up? And if there are.

• 44:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Popping up, I see what he did there.

• 44:57Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, did you see that? Yeah. Uh, and if there are, is there a telltale sign of which ones that send you on a trip or kill you?

• 45:05Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, there's a label on the side.

• 45:07Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah. He said, or is it all trial and error? Also, in the spirit of mushrooms, Pinot Noir is a classic pairing for any mushroom dish, risotto being my favorite. I would select anything produced by Louis Lautour from Burgundy.

• 45:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mmm.

• 45:23Chuck Nice?

  Oh.

• 45:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mmm. See, we get free wine advice this way.

• 45:28Chuck Nice?

  That's why I read it, yeah.

• 45:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But let me broaden the question there. The. Um, there's, there's, I think at our museum, at the American Museum of Natural History, there's a group, there are people who have gone through Central Park, right there in the middle of Manhattan, and have identified species of plants previously unidentified, all right, which is what, when you get a new species, that's of course what that means. And I haven't read up close on that, whether they, these have evolved since we've had Manhattan, or whether just no one looked hard enough. So, there seems to be so many species of fungus, you must be discovering them every day.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  Practically, yes. Um, but it's, it's so overwhelming, we just don't have the time, because that's not necessarily valued, just describing new diversity, uh, today. We don't necessarily have the time to focus on doing that.

• 46:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  You hear that Chuck? He's not into diversity. You heard that?

• 46:24Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, I heard it, yeah. There's, there's a big, there's a big attack on DEI right now. Big attack on DEI.

• 46:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Here's an example of it. Mushroom is trying to have identity.

• 46:34Chuck Nice?

  Exactly.

• 46:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Equity, trying to get inclusion, and you say, oh, it's not worth it.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Yeah. You, you do know I live in the state of Utah.

• 46:50Chuck Nice?

  Oh, that was great. Okay.

• 46:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so, um, so I, let me, let me help you bail out of this. But I think what you're saying is that the behavior of mushrooms is more interesting and important than simply identifying every single one that's out there.

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Right, right. And, and so, you know, I'll throw some numbers out at you. Ninety-five percent of fungal diversity has never been documented. Ninety-five percent. So, we've, we've described about a hundred and fifty thousand species of fungi, but the estimates range from two point two to twelve million species that are out there. Um, just fungus of all kinds. And mushrooms represent a small portion, but a fairly diverse, um, group of fungus.

• 47:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  They're the most visible.

• 47:39Speaker 01

  They're the most visible, yeah. They're the most charismatic, um, if I'm allowed to, to call.

• 47:43Chuck Nice?

  Yes, exactly. Hello, I'm a mushroom. How's it going? Uh, do you come to this tree, Rudolph? Nice to see you.

• 47:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Pick up lines in the mycelium.

• 47:59Chuck Nice?

  I've been told I'm very charismatic.

• 48:03Chuck Nice?

  Got a lot of riz.

• 48:04Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, so, uh, so the question was, are you identifying new species of fungus? So the answer is just plum yes.

• 48:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, we encounter them all the time. I would say every time I go out, I, I can't identify something that I've picked up. Regardless of where I am, whether it's a well documented place like parts of North America or Europe, or somewhere where nobody's ever collected a fungus before, um, in many cases, there's something there that I don't recognize. Now that doesn't always translate into a new species, but, um, often it does, especially when you're outside of the well documented areas.

• 48:40Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you're going to decide whether it's tasty, healthy, will send you on a brain trip or kill you, do you give it to mice first?

• 48:49Speaker 01

  We should. Um, so we use phylogenetic, uh, prediction to inform whether or not to try a new mushroom to eat. And I am not somebody that's very, I'm pretty risk averse when it comes to eating mushrooms, just because I don't like things that taste bad. I'm not worried about getting poisoned, but I have a, a delicate palate. So I'm pretty, you know, I, I use that rationale to say if I'm in the jungle of Africa and I see something that looks like a European chanterelle, I'm going to give it a try because I know all chanterelles are edible. At least all the ones that we know about so far, and they're usually delicious.

• 49:35Speaker 01

  Whereas if I'm in the forest in Cameroon and I see a brown mushroom that stains blue. When I scratch it, that's a hallmark of mushrooms that have psilocybin, but is not unique to them. And so I wouldn't take the risk, even if I really wanted to get high in the jungle. Because there's a reasonable chance that that blue discoloration is a convergent trait, something that evolved independently.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  And so I could get very sick from that.

• 50:06Chuck Nice?

  Oh, okay.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Okay, alright.

• 50:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we're gonna call, next time we go mushroom hunting, we're calling you.

• 50:11Speaker 01

  Please do.

• 50:11Chuck Nice?

  Yes, exactly. Next time I'm out with my pig.

• 50:16Speaker 01

  You can't use pigs because the pigs will dig the truffle up and eat it before you can get it.

• 50:21Chuck Nice?

  Eat them.

• 50:21Speaker 01

  Yes, you gotta.

• 50:22Chuck Nice?

  Well, the idea is.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  You gotta train a dog.

• 50:23Chuck Nice?

  The idea is, yeah, the dog is the way to go. That's, yeah. I saw a great little documentary about, I believe they're in Italy, where there's a, um, community of elderly Italian men and their dogs. And all they do is hunt truffles. That's all they do, is hunt truffles. And it's, it's very, it's a very, you know, touching little documentary.

• 50:49Speaker 01

  I, I saw that one.

• 50:51Chuck Nice?

  More, more because, but more because of the relationship between the men and their dogs.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Seems like a very peaceful life.

• 50:58Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 50:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So have you seen, let, let, end on this then. Have you seen the, the Last of Us, or what's the name of that show?

• 51:05Chuck Nice?

  The Last of Us.

• 51:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Have you, can you comment on its authenticity? Sorry. Comment on its plausibility? No, its authenticity. Is it a clever use of fungus in storytelling versus bad use of fungus?

• 51:21Speaker 01

  I mean, I think it's clever, uh, but it's not plausible, given our current understanding of those types of fungi and the hosts that they parasitize.

• 51:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's why it's called science fiction. So what I mean, given what they've shown, have they been, did they have one of you, one of you, a mice, a mycelopic person on, on staff?

• 51:42Speaker 01

  Not that I'm aware of, but they can call me up anytime.

• 51:48Chuck Nice?

  Well, there you go, the gauntlets thrown down.

• 51:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, because the better it's sci-fi movies, they have someone on staff, where at least you begin in an authentic place. And then your creativity takes the storytelling beyond that. And, uh, that's, that reminds me of the Mark Twain quote, first get your facts straight, then distort them at your leisure. And it always makes for a stronger story, especially in a world where you have scientifically literate Comic Coners, who are gonna talk about your movie if you don't get it right, you know, they'll tell you what's, what's going down.

• 52:19Speaker 01

  Well.

• 52:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So.

• 52:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, HBO can offer me up a bottle of Latour Pied au Noir and I'll be there in a minute.

• 52:29Chuck Nice?

  You'll be there trouble in hand.

• 52:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  There'll be Louis Latour.

• 52:34Chuck Nice?

  Yes.

• 52:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  In Burgundy, there's a Chateau Latour in Bordeaux.

• 52:37Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 52:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  To, I don't know if they're related, but, um, but I, it's been great, it's been great to have you here. Just to even know that, I'm glad somebody's on top of the situation. And the, what is the title of your, of this submission to the National Academy of Sciences? Which it's already published. What's, what's the title of it?

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yes, Philogenomics of Psilocybe and Evolution of the Psilocybin Biosynthetic Gene Cluster.

• 53:03Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, so you, you went for the short title.

• 53:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, so this is, so this is an important place for people to turn if they want to know what psilocybin is doing, or what it's about, or what its future might hold, right? I mean, this is reviews, this is a review paper, which is what the National Academy of Sciences is good at, which is the, the, the summation of years, sometimes decades of research of many, to come up with some understanding of it. And just for those who don't remember or never knew, the National Academy of Sciences was founded by Abraham Lincoln in 1863, when he clearly had other things he needed to think about. Uh, he wanted an arm of science to exist, independent of government,

• 53:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  but, uh, responsive to government when the government had questions and needs and needed, and had to seek advice. So, um, publication, the publication series, I say is one of the most important, uh, uh, shelves of science you could ever assemble. Uh, the review papers of the National Academy of Sciences. So, there it is. That's my shout out for objective truths. Rather than your favorite person on YouTube who tells you whether or not you should get vaccinated, you know?

• 54:24Chuck Nice?

  Right. As, as they're teaching you how to make sourdough.

• 54:32Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that was during, during COVID.

• 54:33Chuck Nice?

  During COVID, yeah.

• 54:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Chuck, if you experiment with more mushrooms, give us a call. We'll, we'll invite Bryn back and we'll get a full analysis.

• 54:40Chuck Nice?

  Oh, yeah. Well, now I have homework. That's great.

• 54:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's not.

• 54:43Chuck Nice?

  That's fantastic. I love it. I'm up to the challenge.

• 54:48Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. This has been StarTalk Cosmic Queries, the, the, everything you needed to know about psilocybin and more. I'm Neil deGrasse Tyson, your personal astro physicist, as always. Keep looking up.