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14min chapter
Using The Hidden Power Of Mushrooms To Elevate Your Daily Routine w/ Tero Isokauppila
The Greatest Stories Never Told
The Stone Ape Theory and the Magic of Mushrooms
This chapter explores the Stone Ape Theory, proposing that early humans may have enhanced their cognitive abilities through psychedelic mushrooms. It examines the symbiotic relationship between humans and fungi, highlighting mushrooms' ecological significance and intriguing problem-solving capabilities. Additionally, the discussion reflects on the potential cosmic origins of mushrooms and their role in human evolution and ecosystem interactions.
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Speaker 1
But in the more common psychedelic psilocybin family, it not poison that is happening it's quite the opposite one could say that it's the sacrament hmm
Speaker 2
so you I'm sure have heard of Terence McKenna's theory I don't know if he's the first one to talk about it but that the stone dape theory yes for those who don't know what
Speaker 1
is the stone ape theory? The stone ape theory is that humans or pre-humans that had a less developed brain and maybe a smaller prefrontal cortex were not yet able to communicate verbally and express words and maybe some other things that we now take for granted for homo sapiens. But then they stumbled into a pile of shit where there was mushroom growing and those mushrooms are psychedelic. And when you consume psychedelics, your brain function increases quite a bit. Certain neurotransmitters get activated that wouldn't get activated. It actually connects new ones, right? Correct. Uroplasticity. And you would also have a lot more aware and more sensitive and the idea is that with the help of mushrooms we were able to learn how to speak. So that would be like the kind of main part of that theory is that we know that we only use a fraction of our brain capacity and with mushrooms we still use a small amount of our brain capacity but a lot more than normally. And we can see things that don't exist and make connections that we can. And that helped us speak, basically.
Speaker 2
So the theory is that the apes were cruising along. They started eating these mushrooms. They made new brain connections and pretty soon they turned into humans. Correct. Amazing. Do you believe that theory?
Speaker 1
Predominantly. Yes. I think the step one of probably would have been they figured out how to get caloric surplus So with those before learning to speak they figured out how to get more calories and with more calories They figured out how to that would help because I think those new and praying connections alone would not be enough You need carolich. Most of the animals live in constant hunger. And one of the reasons why we were able to proceed is without excessive calories. And we could spend our time on other things versus constantly looking for food and resting.
Speaker 2
But
Speaker 1
I do think that like hunting and other things, psychedelics were used actively to help us hunt better and get more food.
Speaker 2
So there's another theory that because mushrooms are one of the only living organisms that can travel through space, the spores can travel through space without protection. They don't need a space suit or anything like that. And they can survive the journey. And there's evidence that they were here before most other life forms on Earth. Is that correct? Yes. So is there conclusive evidence that mushrooms are literally an alien life form. Yeah
Speaker 1
It's really fascinating because I grew up with a really hippie upbringing. Okay anyways farming hippie and then I spent a few of my years in Switzerland with the with the most Scientific people you can ever imagine at the CERN Scientific laboratory the world's most expensive laboratory on the border between Switzerland and France. And there are these PhDs in particle physics, you know, colliding particles together and figuring out like neutral antimatter and the Higgs boson, the most scientific shit you can ever imagine.
Speaker 2
Right. And they have that large hydron collider, which, if I remember correctly, is a 17-mile tunnel? A circle. 17-mile circle. Where they just launch particles at each other, right?
Speaker 1
Yeah. And yes, so I think what's fascinating about that is that if you are here in Venice Beach, California, and you listen to a crystal babe at Erewhon talk about the universe and then you go and talk to the most scientifically sound particle physicists, they use the exact same words. Universe, energy, vibrations. It's pretty funny actually but to answer your question everything is in the universe is from outer space so
Speaker 2
From space
Speaker 1
and so might be like the iron that helped build you might be from another star system Yeah,
Speaker 2
that's true. So
Speaker 1
So that idea that something is foreign to this earth is not that radical at all. Yeah. As far as mushrooms specifically, it's also known today that if the earth is 4.5 billion years old, the first thing to come from the sea to the dry land was mushrooms. They, for the first billion years, they ate rocks to survive to help build topsoil and later plants and animals and other things could emerge.
Speaker 2
Mushrooms ate the rocks and
Speaker 1
that's what made soil. They're extremophiles, so they can survive in the nuclear reactor in Chernobyl or the Sahara Desert, but also in extreme heat, extreme cold. Mushroom spores can, like you said, survive in every level of atmosphere, including in space. So there's a lot of thoughts that the mushroom seeds would have come here from somewhere else. How do you kill a mushroom spore? Fire?
Speaker 2
It's
Speaker 1
really, really difficult, depending on the mushroom spore, practically impossible to kill it. It's more like- That could be a science fiction movie. Yeah, it could be. How to Kill a Mushroom Spore. It's a good one. You're breathing in right now, every breath you take, you get about six to 10 mushroom spores inside of your body.
Speaker 2
Wow. So we are, in a sense, walking mushrooms. And bacteria. And the mushrooms live in there with the bacteria. Correct. The yeast, the fungus. That's why there's microbiome,
Speaker 1
but there's also mycobion. Myco. My-co. Okay, what's that mean? Mycobion. Mushroom biome. Mushroom biome.
Speaker 2
And everyone. Yeah, and everyone.
Speaker 1
Is that why these
Speaker 2
mushrooms that we hear about Chaga, Rishi, Lion's Mane, do so well with humans is because the other mushrooms are like, and there's the homies are coming in.
Speaker 1
Yes. There's a DNA similarity between them. So the mushroom medicine or healing properties of mushrooms is more bi-available to us, but also like the bad mushrooms are more easy to hurt us because of that DNA similarity. We can't survive without the good mushrooms. Correct, correct. So we have a symbiotic relationship
Speaker 2
with fungi. Exactly. Which are mushrooms. Yeah.
Speaker 1
And...
Speaker 2
So for those at home, listen to this, you're a shroom. Yeah. You're up to 50%.
Speaker 1
You're half mushroom. Half mushroom. Yeah. DNA wise. By cell count? Is that? DNA. DNA similarities. Really? But to do the mushroom... Do you think that the mushrooms are in control That's a great question same as the the space question is the answers we don't fully know but it would make sense that there's some sort of they're very different form of life being that many others and they have a lot of wisdom and we've able to prove that mushrooms can if you put a even the slim plus simplest mushroom Slime mold and they you put it on a maze Slime mold find its way out of the maze what and they've done they put this this slime mushroom again the simplest form of a mushroom They've given it the all the stops in the UK and Tokyo, and they said it's allowed it to recreate the metro subway system of Tokyo and the train system, the railway network of UK. What they found out, this mushroom could create it better than humans could with the efficiency of a computer
Speaker 2
of how could a subway system they build. how do you speak to the mushroom and be like hey, man I want to see you replicate the subway system Like how do you communicate that to the full you put it
Speaker 1
on the map you put all the stops where there's a town where? You want to stop okay, and you put it in the center and the mycelium will and the mushroom will help create The subway system in the most efficient form possible. It doesn't know it's making a subway system. It just knows the pathways. The pathways that is the best possible pathway.
Speaker 2
Oh, and what you're saying is we figured out the best pathways when we were designing these subway systems. No, we didn't.
Speaker 1
We did a horrible system. Oh, okay. But then the mushrooms created a new, a better system.
Speaker 2
Because that's what they use, make pathways. And some of the biggest organisms
Speaker 1
on earth are giant mushrooms, right? The largest living and the oldest living organism that we know of today is in Oregon and it's a mushroom size of 20,000 basketball
Speaker 2
courts. Oh, wow. Have you met this mushroom? I have been, yes, I've. Did you speak with? I communicated with it, yeah. What did you speak of? You
Speaker 1
know, it's like kind of like going to the church, you know, it's, there's a, you know. Does it have a name in this organism? Yeah, honey mushroom.
Speaker 2
Honey mushroom.
Speaker 1
Yeah, just honey.
Speaker 2
And do you how do you speak with this mushroom? Do you take some? I'm guessing you really did this. Yeah.
Speaker 1
Okay. Yeah, do you take
Speaker 2
them this psilocybin and then? The is there a chant or is it just putting your hands on the ground or something? I believe in intuitive wisdom so if you want to experience it we can go
Speaker 1
there and you can meet the mushroom and then... No,
Speaker 2
no, I really want to do it. I believe in this stuff. Yeah, yeah. No, you can have a prison. I'm not mocking. I really want to go meet honey mushroom. Yeah.
Speaker 1
And I assume you really did. Yeah, it is. Yeah, it's an... Because I've done the psilocybin, man, and I've
Speaker 2
met some interesting things. Yeah. Yeah.
Speaker 1
Yeah, it's a really big mushroom
Speaker 2
you can walk on top of it. So you can just be in the presence then. Yeah. On Silsiben. Yeah. And then you can start. And have a relationship with it.
Speaker 1
You know? Have a little... little convo. Maybe you can do a podcast with the world's largest and I was the one getting sick. Sweet!
Speaker 2
Yes, I bet it has a story to tell. There is a machine. There is a machine. What pronoun does it go by because there's 16 pronouns now. Oh, um, you got to ask Yeah, the mushy should we just say they
Speaker 1
they they? Yeah, what if they don't want to commit to anything specifically they're asexual mushrooms are asexual okay,
Speaker 2
they don't they don't have sex So
Speaker 1
but what are animals and there's our symbiotic with fungi? I'm just saying there's a machine where you can pluck it into the honey mushroom and it will create vibrations and sounds. So if you want to do a podcast with a honey mushroom, you could put that machine in and you can hear, you could ask it a question and it would reply in music. No shit. How about that? That would be the first podcast ever created with a mushroom.
Speaker 2
Will you do this with me? Yeah, we can go do this. All right. So if you're listening to this podcast, let us know if you want us to have this podcast with the honey mushroom, and we will go and make this episode. Yeah. Can you interpret what it's saying? We can together interpret
Speaker 1
it. Right.
Speaker 2
I feel like we would intuitively know.
Speaker 1
Yeah. Yeah. That's it.
Speaker 2
I don't know what else to talk about. I don't
Speaker 1
know, limerians? What's next? That's
Speaker 2
it. Great. We've just discovered that human life itself is based around fungi. Yeah, important And other life too, that was my other question. Plants and animals, is it all symbiotic with fungi? I mean plants certainly because of the soil, right?
Speaker 1
Yeah. Almost all plants, something like over 95% of plants require mushrooms to collect water and nutrients, and all animals will have bacteria and fungi in their digestive tract and skin. So yes, there's a symbiotic relationship.
Speaker 2
What other animals take psychedelic mushrooms on purpose, like seek them out? You mentioned, do the reindeer seek them out themselves? Yeah. Yeah. And what other... Well, the hard
Speaker 1
part is that we don't know how psychedelic those psychedelic mushrooms to them, but bears, deer, rabbits. I've seen some
Speaker 2
bears that look pretty high. Yeah. Trippy. Yeah. Bears, rabbits, you said? Yeah, deer, different kinds of caribou. And we know that they experience the intoxication? Not fully.
Speaker 1
We don't know their experience, but when you see a reindeer on trippy
Speaker 2
mushrooms, it looks very trippy. So... And are they doing them... There's also... Are they seeking them out at the type of interval where you would think that something is happening? For example, let's say you give a bear a bunch of psychedelic mushrooms one day. And the next day he walks past some and maybe he'd be like, oh man, I'm good. A few days
Speaker 1
ago. I heard from a vet here in Westside of Los Angeles that there's a particularly high amount of incidents where dogs are brought at late hours, if not middle of the night to this vet because they have consumed psychedelics by accident from their owners. That would make sense. That happens, apparently, exceptionally a lot in this part of this nickel to the woods. Yeah, or mushroom
Speaker 2
chocolates too. Yeah. Because you got to bring your
Speaker 1
dog in if your dog eats chocolate. Yeah. So chocolate is not good for dogs, but also a lot of dogs here in the west side of LA who've consumed copious amounts of psychedelics.
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