Sawbones: Mushrooms

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Tommy is about to books.

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We came across a pharmacy with its windows blasted out.

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The medicine, the medicine,

the medicine fall for the moon.

Hello, everyone.

Welcome to Sawbones, Meryl Drewer of Misguided Medicine.

I'm your co-host, Justin McElroy.

And I'm Sidney McElroy.

You didn't even leave a gap for my.

So sure were you there would be no applause for me.

You didn't even leave a gap for one.

Wow.

I was distracted by how much warmer it is out here.

It was so cold downstairs.

Yeah.

Wow, Sid.

Okay, I don't know how we recover from that though, hon.

I mean, you just.

Can we do it one more time?

Just one more.

I'm Justin McElroy.

And

you can do another one, too.

And I'm Sydney McElroy.

There.

Thank you.

Thank you.

I need 70% as much love as Sydney gets, or I can't do this show.

Welcome, Cleveland.

It's such a pleasure to be back here.

Hello.

Thank you.

That was Charlie, our daughter, doing the intro.

I thought I should give her some credit.

She did such a great job, didn't she?

Yeah.

Paul didn't have the version that had dad's intro in it.

I think it's so moving to see the next generation covering up for Paul's screw-ups.

Just seeing it passed down.

Sorry, Paul.

Moving.

Okay, so when we do live shows, when we're touring, I try to find something relevant to the area where we're doing a show.

I'm usually looking looking for something in their medical history, in your city's medical history, that is like bad or not the brightest.

But here's the problem with that.

We like a non-zero percent chance that somebody's going to be like, that's my grandpa.

How dare you?

I mean, you've got some recent stuff, but those people are still alive, and that's not, that's not fun.

You might know them.

But here's the problem with you, Cleveland.

You've got like a lot of good stuff in your history.

I have, do you know how many hours I spent poring over medical history in Cleveland looking for just something, just something really

dumb that somebody did and I keep finding things like you did the first coronary artery bypass.

That's great.

And like looking at the history of your institutions, like Cleveland Clinic was founded by like four, you know, World War I returning veteran doctors who were like, we need a nonprofit medical institution that will combine patient care and science and teamwork.

Snore.

That's not funny.

That's it.

Unless the next part is, and spells.

Like,

where are the bodies buried, Cleveland?

Where are they?

Whoa.

Well, listen, thank you for all your contributions to our nation.

I mean, you're really great city.

I wish you'd messed up more for my wife's sake, but hey.

It really was hard.

I found myself looking at Justin saying, there was a fire once in Cleveland Clinic back in the 1920s that was really bad.

That's not funny.

It's interesting.

It's not funny.

So instead, we had to find inspiration elsewhere.

I'll tie it back together, but this is 20 fungalore.

And

this is also our 500th episode of Sawbones.

I know.

I don't know how that's possible,

but we have never talked about mushrooms and medicine.

Somehow.

Yeah, I don't know how that's possible.

So I thought we would focus on mushrooms.

I'll bring it back together.

Don't worry, Cleveland.

But you're just too good.

You're too good at medicine

to get bashed in a whole live episode of songs.

There are a lot of other cities who would love to be in your shoes right now.

Now, we don't have a lot of concrete scientific evidence on, because mushrooms and medicine, like used medicinally, there's a huge history, and I'm going to go through it.

But spoilers.

Do we have a lot of evidence to say if they work or not?

Not a ton.

And I was reading all these studies on medicinal mushrooms, and I think this kind of sums up why it's hard to tell, even though we've used them medicinally so much throughout history.

I mean, time and place, different cultures, different countries.

Why don't we know for sure if they work?

And I found this quote, and it says, the lag in time for modern science to explore mushrooms for their medicinal properties is probably due to their nature.

Mushrooms are ephemeral.

They may be in our experiential view for just a few days, whereas our encounters with plants and animals can last months or years.

Mushrooms can feed you, they can heal you, some can kill you, and some can send you on a spiritual journey.

Speaks of their diverse chemical constituents.

From an evolutionary and survival point of view, it is safer to avoid that which is poorly understood, yet so powerful.

All we want in life is for someone to love us.

As much as this author, Paul Stamitz, who's a mycologist, and Heather Zwicky, the co-author of this article, love mushrooms.

People who study mushrooms love mushrooms in a way that I don't know most of us experience love.

I have read a lot of articles from people who study mushrooms, and oh my gosh, these people are into mushrooms.

Wait, they said plants and animals.

Are you telling me mushrooms are neither of those?

No, they're fungi.

They're a whole other thing, but.

No.

You know that a mushroom is mushrooms are fungus, right?

They're plants?

They're fungus.

They're plants?

They're fungus.

They're animals?

They're fungus.

Is this not something you knew?

Is it different?

They're fungus.

Don't mess with me.

I know they're fungus.

Stop saying they're fungus.

Watermelon are fungus, but they're still plants, right?

I'm saying...

They're fungus.

No, they're fungus.

I don't mean watermelon or fungus.

I mean watermelon or plants.

No, not watermelons.

Watermelons are plants.

Mushrooms are fungus.

Are you telling me fungus aren't plants?

Yeah, they're fungus, honey.

I don't know how many more ways to tell you it's fungus.

Okay.

So here's the the thing about mushrooms.

Some of the stuff they produce might be good for us.

Some of it might kill us.

And that's because they didn't adapt to nourish us,

which is kind of cool.

They evolved to survive and we adapted to mushrooms.

Is the idea

that like it's harder to rely on them because it's like all of a sudden it's like, oh my god, mushrooms, where'd you come from?

And then a few hours later, it's like, oh, dang, where'd they go?

Well, I mean, you just don't know what to do.

You can't like count on the, you can't be like, oh, you got a headache?

No sweat.

Come over.

Oh, man.

They were just right.

I just saw them, the headache ones.

Yeah.

I mean, it is, okay, so not like a few hours, but generally speaking, like, mushrooms don't, you know, a tree just, it's there a long time.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It doesn't move at all.

Well, I'm not saying that the mushrooms move per se, but they're not, I mean, they don't last as long.

Yeah, right.

I understand what you're saying.

You can't count on them as a medicinal source.

It's like, what's the point of researching them?

They're going to be gone tomorrow.

They'll be over there.

They'll be George's.

Then it's his deal.

Well, and I mean,

it has to have also been the risk-benefit, right?

Because it's like, should I eat it?

I don't know.

It might heal you.

You might die.

So,

so, and then you, and when you think about mycelium, which is, okay, mycelium is like kind of the root system of mushrooms.

It's like this big network of threads or hypha that the mushrooms use to like communicate with each other and to digest things like other animals and materials.

Yes.

And they're essential to our planet and like taken all together, they can be like 10 kilometers in size, these fields of mycelium.

It's like the largest living organism.

Mushrooms are kind of scary if you think about them too much.

Yeah.

Imagine if you didn't know a lot about them, apparently.

You're quite a trip.

You just figured out they're fungus.

Yeah.

No, I know they're fungus.

It's not.

Oh my gosh, this is going to make me so mad.

I know that they're fungus.

I understand that fungus is a thing.

I thought fungus was part of plants as a group because they weren't animals.

And I figured everything is animal, plants, or rocks, because that's how you play 20 questions.

I'm just saying.

You had to take like some science in school, right?

Like just like in

elementary or middle school.

I'm saying in 20 questions

animal vegetable mineral right so I figured I guess I was kind of figuring not like science wise but like I was kind of putting everything into those categories in my head right because if you were thinking fungus and they were like animal vegetable mineral

there's nothing right you're lost you already lost the game well and I understand why like you would think of them as plant adjacent.

Especially the way that we think of them in our lives, like we eat them.

So that's like plants, right?

You can be, you're being very generous as this plant-adjacent nonsense.

No, I'm saying if they're an umbrella of plants, there's a smaller umbrella underneath it, and it's mushrooms.

They're shaped like an umbrella.

I get it now, Sydney.

I so clearly see the error in my ways.

I think I now know this better than most people know their first names.

I'm just saying before,

earlier,

before I felt like I do now in public, I thought privately that mush that fungus was part of plants because of 20 questions how did you name your whole tour after mushrooms and you didn't know anything about mushrooms

I'm so sorry they they are telling me not to say anything else I am being invited

yeah I'm sorry I'm not supposed to comment on this any further I'm sorry that okay so the use of mushrooms in medicine dates back a really long time a lot of what we understand today and like if you read about mushroom supplements, because I mean, it really is like in the wellness industry, mushrooms and like powdered mushroom supplements, it's a big industry.

A lot of it comes from traditional Chinese medicine.

But even before that, we have evidence.

So, do you remember when they discovered Otzie the Ice Man?

Yeah.

Do you remember that?

It was back in, what, 91?

They found a mummy, and it was, you know, thousands of years.

It was a very old mummy.

And they were like, whoa, we found a very old mummy.

And this was a big deal in 90 like I remember this in 91

we found it yeah we found an ice man

one of the things they found on his person was a was a bag of mushrooms so it yeah so I know I'm for medicine for medicine

medicinal mushrooms and so the thought was that well actually part of them were used at the time for like worms and we studied the remains of this ice man and found that like yes he he he was infected with worms so so they didn't work so they didn't work yeah that's too bad that's too bad or he was in the middle of his course of treatment maybe clearly maybe he wasn't diligent about taking his worms and there was another kind of mushroom that was used for like tender for fires so like not as exciting medicinally yeah you just burn these mushrooms but anyway it just kind of highlights the idea that mushrooms it's weird because I look at mushrooms and I do you ever look at foods and think who was the first person to look at it and go, I'm going to eat it?

I don't feel that about mushrooms.

You don't feel that about mushrooms?

I grew up in the 80s, so it's like Super Mario, you got

like Willy Wonka.

We watched a lot.

You know, them getting the whipped cream out of the top of the mushroom.

Like, they look very delicious to me.

Alice in Wonderland, when they eat part of it and there's like cake nearby.

Okay, I'm talking like before there were like pop culture references to mushrooms for you to appreciate.

Like the first person to like point at a mushroom and be like I'm gonna eat it that's true just gonna eat it it's like you I always think that with like artichokes right somebody was like that one's that one that part not this not that part just keep eating something's got to be good

has anybody invented butter

Call me back when they do.

There's no phone.

So there are Egyptian hieroglyphics that reference mushrooms.

So we know that like these were very, and in a lot of cultures, mushrooms were, and probably because of this sort of ephemeral nature, they were the food of royalty.

They were the food of the upper class.

It wasn't something that you would necessarily have if you were a common person because there were only so many.

And so they were connected to this sort of like elite.

They must do something special for you.

They were used in particular by Romans, not just for like the elite, but also as some sort of like superfood for like soldiers.

Like this is what you would feed the soldiers before they would go out to, you know.

That's what Super Murray Brothers Brothers is based on, actually.

Gladiators.

Gladiators eating mushrooms before, but going into battle.

Yeah, it's the exact same idea.

There's a great story when it comes to the Romans and mushrooms that actually your dad, Clint, gave me a book about famous poisoners throughout history.

I don't know why,

I don't know what that says about me.

He was like, you would love this book about women who poison people.

I don't love it.

But it's a great story about the fact that Emperor Claudius was more than likely poisoned by mushrooms because he was a huge fan of mushrooms.

So this

made him ripe for poisoning with mushrooms, right?

If you let people know that, I really love these mushrooms.

Just bring me a pile of the things.

I'll eat whichever ones you put in front of me.

No questions asked.

I'm wild about these guys.

His son, Britannicus, was next in line for the throne, but his wife, who, okay, she was his fourth wife.

and also in writings, she's referred to as his terminal wife.

Who uses that?

Like, I mean, okay, yeah, then he died.

I get it, but terminal wife, am I your terminal wife?

That's a wild statement.

Terminal wife.

Sweetheart.

I know.

Honey, 20 minutes ago, I thought that mushrooms were plants.

I can't run the calculus on what's the right answer of are you my terminal wife or not in this kind of setting right now.

Yes.

Yes.

I'm going to go with yes.

No?

Dang it.

So she hired a poisoner to come and poison Claudius.

And like it was all this very secretive plan where like they had to get the food taster distracted for a minute.

You know, because that was part of it.

Like he had one job and he really messed it up because he didn't taste the mushrooms.

I can't mess that up enough.

And Claudius was, I mean, he died.

And then her son became the next emperor and he would take the name Nero.

It was shocking, I know.

Whoa, I know.

They love that one in the New York Times crossword.

That's always in there.

If it's a Roman emperor, it's Nero.

It's like the E and the O's in there.

They love all the vowels.

Yeah.

Which he went on to employ the same poisoner, by the way, to then just kill Britannicus, which like he was already emperor.

He didn't need to do it.

You know?

Wait, what?

Who killed Britain?

Nero went on to go ahead and employ that same poisoner and like made her like the royal poisoner.

Yeah, like you know how you have a royal poisoner.

Man, I would hate to get hurt at the secret center of

because the obvious just had no whim.

What's weird is that we've done a lot of studies to show that in our bodies we have a lot of receptors that interact with things mushrooms make.

So when I said that, like mushrooms didn't evolve to be anything to us, but we have evolved to adapt to mushrooms, which is probably why scientists and researchers have done so much work to try and investigate what could they do for us.

Because we have receptors that interact with the stuff mushrooms do.

In particular, they produce these beta-glucans, which interact with a lot of elements of our immune system and can kind of get cells ramped up and make things happen in an immune response.

And so the thought has been for a long time: could mushrooms be good for our immune system?

Maybe, we don't know.

So I want to go through some of the different, because there's lots of mushrooms.

Lots of them.

And there's lots of mushrooms we can eat, but there are certain ones that we've actually done studies to look and see, which before I go into that, I did have a,

the mushroom that was used to kill Claudius is a death cat mushroom, which I have a picture of that, yeah.

and it is commonly, I feel like this is just a public service.

Which one is edible?

Do you want to be the judge?

Wait, can I actually guess?

Because I'm going to say not the death cap.

No, the other one.

Easy.

The other one is supposedly delicious.

I'm never going to take this gamble.

Look at those.

I would never know.

That is, okay.

You said that about who would eat it first, and I didn't necessarily get what you were saying, but I'm sitting here thinking about it.

There's a weird triumphant here of like, so it's a what is this it's a mushroom oh cool okay what does it do well if you eat it it either kills you

gets you stoned out of your mind or is delicious

there's almost no instance where I'm in the mood for one of those where I would be okay with the other two right

And then there's this.

But you run the numbers, they're already a losing bet almost any way you slice it, right?

Without a helping hand.

There's this fourth column, which is maybe boosts your immune system and is healthy.

Super ones, maybe

Mario ones, obviously.

I don't know.

Here is my advice: if you're not an expert in mushrooms, just don't eat any of this that you're looking at.

You don't know.

I don't know.

I wouldn't eat these.

Don't eat these.

But one of them is delicious, apparently.

That's so tempting.

One of these is delicious.

Come on.

Take the risk.

Only the bravest will enjoy.

The medicines, the medicines that escalate macabre for the mouth.

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I see what you did there.

So some mushrooms that have been studied.

Let's get into, are they helpful and what do we know about them?

One is called the cordyceps mushroom.

You may have heard of this mushroom.

It's the one that it's a parasitic fungi.

It looks like somebody left corn on the cobbler and girl too long is what it looks like.

I was already pretty hungry after the mushrooms, but now I'm starting to get a little bit more worked up.

It grows out of like the heads of caterpillars.

That's what you're looking at.

Okay.

That's what you're looking at.

Less appetizing, I think we can all agree.

Long, like, fungal

arms just extending from the dead.

Like it grows out of larva.

Typically, it'll infect like the larva of an insect, but it can, I mean, it can infect something and it replaces the tissue with itself.

It really has very little to do with delicious griddled street corn now that I think about it.

It's not even like corn that much at all now.

The long, slender stems is how they're described.

Again, somebody looked at this and was like, health food.

This is health food.

And it's true.

This has been used.

Cordyceps is one of the most commonly used, not just in traditional Chinese medicine, but in a lot of different medical traditions as like something that is,

I mean, for really everything.

You will find studies that say it's anti-aging, that it kills tumors, that it's good for cholesterol, that it's good for heart disease, diabetes, kidney disease, that kind of like catch-all inflammation.

Right.

Which, I mean, that's like very common in the wellness industry.

They'll tell you, like, this is good for inflammation, which just means, like, I don't know,

something doesn't feel well, does it?

Well, take this.

It's good for that.

There are like 400 different species of it.

There are two, the senenses and the militaris, that are the most commonly used in medicine.

And we do, like, in terms of bodies of evidence, the most studies have been done on this specific fungus.

The problem is, I don't know, one, like getting people to eat it.

I don't know.

Once you've ground it up in a powder, it's probably not as hard.

But

the supplements that you will find have really been studied in small groups.

When they say claims like it's anti-aging, that was done in fruit flies, which

I don't know if you've ever taken a genetics class,

fruit flies reproduce really quickly.

I don't know why we need them to live longer, personally.

Yeah.

Because they just keep on going.

They're doing fine.

So like there's no real evidence in humans.

There's been a lot of lab stuff that's interesting.

There's been some animal studies that are interesting.

But it's kind of like a lot of the supplement world and the herbal medicine world where

I mean we don't have like big high quality double-blind studies that we can hang our hat on and say, like, yes, this works or not.

Another mushroom that has been studied are the Reishi mushrooms.

So, I know they're beautiful, aren't they?

Look, those are lovely.

You know those cookies?

You know, the cookies that look just like, yeah, okay, thank you for the cries of recognition from my cookie friends.

They do.

They do look like those cookies, J-Man.

Coco!

Like,

what are those cookies?

Like, elephant ear cookies?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah.

They do.

Everybody's yelling.

Everybody's yelling names of cookies.

I love it.

They're not cookies.

They're mushrooms.

If you learn one thing tonight.

They're not plants.

They're fungus.

You know, Sid, tragedy plus time does equal comedy, but I don't think there's been quite enough time for us to all laugh about it.

And it's the same kind of thing.

Like, these mushrooms have been tested.

So there's a lot of research on whether it's cancer or like anti-inflammatory or antioxidant.

And it's basically putting stuff in petri dishes or in test tubes in a lab and kind of seeing like what does it do.

And just because it works in that setting doesn't necessarily mean it translates to the human body.

And so that's kind of where we are with these mushrooms.

We've done some stuff in a lab to see specifically a lot of mushrooms are being studied to fight cancer.

That seems to be the main, I mean, everything.

Great place to start.

I mean.

But, like, right now, we don't have any evidence in humans.

Another one is the lion's mane mushroom.

You can probably guess why it's...

I know.

They're beautiful, aren't they?

I get why people who

study these, why mycologists get so into them, because there's such a huge variety.

They all look so different.

They're beautiful.

And I do like the independence of the fact they don't live for us.

They don't care about us.

They're just doing their thing.

This was part of my gamer blend, blend, wasn't it?

Lions Mane is one that's used in the pro gamer blends to try to increase your gamer proteins or whatever.

I think Lions Mane was in your gamer blend.

Did it help you with your gaming ever?

We had a very limited sample size.

I can't ever test these because I'm not sure.

Okay, with the limited sample sizes, because I did it once, and the burps were so bad, I could never do it again.

So the research just stalled.

You know, the human cost is just too terrible.

I couldn't get the board to clear it.

The ethics of it were just unfair.

I can't burp like that around my kids for science.

Or me.

Or you, obviously, hon, but you've been with me through thick and thin.

I can't, you know.

I only play Animal Crossing, so I don't know that you need Lion's Mane to get better at that.

So anyway, it's been used mainly for like Alzheimer's disease.

And so that, you know, improving improving cognitive function So that's why you would put it in something like a gamer's blend or some other kind of performance enhancing honey medication as we've said before when you do the air quotes with your voice You don't also need to do them with your fingers.

It starts to get demeaning It feels like every time you say gamer, but I'm sure there's other times I'm just not noticing I do this when we're recording too and nobody can see me, but I'm still like

Gamer's blend.

There are studies on it that are things like, okay, to test if it could be good for depression, a study was carried out on Japanese women with many health conditions, including menopause.

Some were given cookies made with lion's mane, and others were not.

And then the one who got the lion's mane cookies did better with depression.

So see, wait, these are not exactly.

I need to clarify something, Dr.

McElroy.

Did the people who didn't get lion's mane cookies get any cookies?

Because

I think I understand the source of their depression.

I think they...

That would only, oh no, my condition has been terribly exacerbated by my participation in this research.

Look at them across the room.

They could have been bees.

They have the health condition of menopause and they got cookies.

Oh, man.

Stupid.

Shiitake mushrooms, which a lot of us have probably had at some point or another, are another very popular health food.

They do have a lot of like different vitamins vitamins and minerals in them, just naturally.

And that's the thing: like, a lot of mushrooms are kind of digesting other things on earth.

That's like their purpose.

That's what they're doing constantly.

So they contain all of these other trace elements of the things they've digested.

That's a good thing.

These look, I hate eating mushrooms.

These look so good, though, right?

They do.

They look crispy and kind of salty a little bit.

Oh, man.

They have.

I'd love to eat these guys.

They have a lot of minerals.

They have a ton of copper.

Oh, yeah.

Nice.

If you need that, couldn't hurt, right?

Get it in there, see what it does.

Um,

I mainly focus on the salt and the crunch over here, Sith.

These guys are delicious

in my imagination, it is, which you can get deficient in copper, especially if you use denture cream that has a lot of zinc in it, because then you absorb all the zinc and it replaces the copper and you get rid of the copper, and then you get copper deficiency.

This really happens.

Think about it,

anyway.

Cool.

It does come away.

I did that presentation.

That was a real case report I did.

I got an award for it.

It really happened.

I love you.

I cracked that case.

It was very house.

So

you can be allergic to these mushrooms.

Well, actually, you can be allergic to almost anything, right?

But like, there's a specific condition.

If you're sensitive to shiitake mushrooms, you can get shiitake skin,

which is just dermatitis, but like it's just inflammation of the skin.

It's like eczema, basically, but they call it shiitake skin which sounds like really bad like even if shiitake skin I'm not hungry anymore you have mushroom skin

the other mushroom that's been extensively studied is the turkey tail mushroom I know it's beautiful isn't it I you I get don't let it trick you

Why?

You love showing us delicious mushrooms and telling us the problems with them.

The studies, again,

this one has been studied quite a bit for anti-cancer properties.

And again, it's just, it's the same kind of thing where like in a lab, a lot of things can kill cancer cells in a lab that we can't put in our human bodies, right?

Like, I don't know, a very powerful light or cancer, or bleach, perhaps.

Where have we heard this before?

There are a lot of substances.

That we use out in the world that we can't necessarily inject in our body.

So it doesn't always translate, right?

That's interesting.

It's a basis for further research, but it doesn't tell us anything.

It It has been shown to be well tolerated, so you can eat it.

So that's nice.

It's important to know that in general, the problem with a lot of these like mushroom supplements in the US is that they are regulated as supplements, not as medications.

And I think it's always important to remember that they're not held up to the same standards in terms of do they work.

They are held to some standards in terms of safety, for sure, but they don't necessarily contain what they say they contain.

Good.

They don't have to.

And so the amount of different, in a dietary supplement, the amount of actual active ingredient from bottle to bottle, pill to pill, you know, run of bottles to run of bottles can be dramatically different.

And so I think that's always important when you're talking about any kind of, you know, supplement in the U.S.

The one mushroom we haven't talked about yet that I feel like everybody wants to know about in terms of its medical properties are the psilocybin mushrooms.

The magic mushrooms, if you will.

And this, so the reason.

Are you sure you're not a cop?

You're like positive.

We figured out that this active ingredient existed in these mushrooms a really long time ago.

Like, I found this article from Time magazine.

This was from June 16th, 1958.

And, like, back then, researchers would take the mushrooms and then just like, there's so many articles of scientists describing what it's like to be high in in scientific ways.

And so the scientist who like isolated psilocybin the first time, Albert Hoffman, wrote, I am losing my normal bodily sensations.

My perception of space and time is changing.

Your faces appear strange.

Now as I close my eyes, I see a wonderful but indistinct kaleidoscope train of visions.

They are vividly colored.

There are so many, if you're interested, there's so many articles like this of just like researchers very straight laced in their white coats taking drugs and then writing about it.

So,

there is a lot of interest now in psilocybine, as in that family, this whole family of mushrooms.

What can we do with this active ingredient that interacts with our serotonin receptors similarly to a lot of antidepressants that do that, that we have made, you know, synthesized, to do exactly that?

They also increase our amount of dopamine.

So, there's a lot of interest in: could we treat anxiety, depression?

There's been some interest in alcohol use disorder or other sorts of substance use disorders.

Could this be a way to help people stop using other substances?

We really didn't move forward until it could be reclassified in 2019.

So the research on this is still relatively new.

And the same researchers who write so eloquently earlier about mushrooms, I found in articles recently, like...

Dr.

Stamet saying, you know, this is going to be, this is the next frontier are these mushrooms and all the things we can do.

And we're just beginning to unlock their potential.

and he said in this CNN article I'm going to say something provocative but I believe it to my core psilocybine makes nicer people psilocybine will make us more intelligent and better citizens but I think it's important

I think we're more cheering for that would be nice just

Whatever was it mushrooms?

Yeah, sure, whatever you say give us all you got But it's important that we take a scientific approach just like we do with all of these other mushroom compounds that may or may not do something for us, as Matthew Johnson, who's a professor in psychedelics and consciousness at Johns Hopkins, who answered this by saying, well, people like being on it, but that doesn't validate the claims of micro-dosing.

People like being on cocaine, too.

Okay.

All right.

All right, smart Alex, sure.

But there's a lot of potential.

All right, well, here's hoping.

In fungi, not plants.

Thanks so much for coming to our show.

We've really enjoyed our time with you.

We want to thank the taxpayers for using their song Medicines as the intro and outro of our program.

We're about to take a brief break.

There will be an intermission during which you can feel free to use the facilities that maybe purchase a beautiful poster featuring some Primo fungus.

Oh, yeah, there's some fungus.

Some fungus right there.

Thank you so much for being here with us.

That is going to do it for us for this week on Sawbones.

Be sure to join us again next time.

Until then, I'm Justin McElroy.

I'm Sidney McElroy.

And as always, don't drill a hole in your head.

All right.

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