Apple podcast title, The Mystery of the Little
People, Mushrooms, The Deep Dive, Apple podcast
description. Uncover the bizarre and unsolved
world of hallucinogenic belete mushrooms in this
deep dive. We explore the elusive Lanmaiowa Asiatica.
A psychoactive fungus known to cause Lilliputian
hallucinations, vivid visions of tiny, colorful
people and animals. From historical accounts
of mushroom madness in Papua New Guinea and ancient
Chinese Taoist texts, to modern -day poisonings
in Yunnan, and a surprising dinner with U .S.
Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen, we unpack the
science, culture, and mystery behind these psychedelic
fungi. Perfect for curious minds eager to learn
about ethnomycology, undiscovered chemical constituents,
and the fascinating history of edible boletes.
SEO keywords. Hallucinogenic Bolete Mushrooms,
Lanmoa Asiatica, Lilliputian Hallucinations,
Psychoactive Fungi, Psychedelic Mushrooms, Ethnomycology,
Yunnan Edible Boletes, Mushroom Madness, Apple
Podcast Description. Imagine you sit down at
a fantastic, really high -end restaurant for
this sprawling dinner. Sounds pretty good to
me. Right, and you're presented with this incredibly
fragrant, just umami -rich mushroom hot pot.
It's delicious. It's earthy, perfectly textured.
You finish your meal, you head home, and you
go to sleep. Normal night. Exactly, a normal
night. Hours later, you wake up, you wander into
your kitchen, and you look at a dripping water
faucet. Suddenly, you watch as each individual
drop of water turns into a tiny insect, hits
the sink, and physically crawls away. Wow. You
blink, right? You look over at your dining room
table, and you notice an entire regiment of two
-centimeter -tall soldiers. Two centimeters?
Yeah, tiny. Just perfectly detailed, marching
in strict formation right across your tablecloth.
It sounds, honestly, it sounds like a scene pulled
straight out of some surrealist film or, I don't
know, a strange cartoon. It really does. But
for a highly specific subset of people, this
is a very real, thoroughly documented medical
and pharmacological phenomenon. Yeah, it is.
Welcome to the Deep Dive. Today, we are exploring
the bizarre, unsolved, and just highly specific
world of hallucinogenic bolete mushrooms. A truly
wild topic. It is. We're zeroing in on a group
of fungi that are widely known in China as Xiao
Ren Ren, which translates directly to the little
people mushrooms. Which is such a fitting name.
Our source material for today's analysis is this
incredibly comprehensive, heavily cited Wikipedia
article. Right. It maps out the taxonomy of these
fungi, the historical and anthropological records
of their use, and the really cutting -edge chemical
research currently trying to decode them. And
our mission today is to unpack the rich ethnomycological
history, the cultural culinary practices, and
this ongoing scientific race to identify the
entirely unknown active... It's a race that is
still very much active today. It is. Okay, let's
untack this, because looking at the clinical
data, the presentation of these hallucinations
completely breaks the mold of what we expect
from psychoactive feng shui. Oh, completely.
Like, when you look at the pharmacology of traditional
tryptamines, you know, you expect shifting colors.
Geometric overlay. Yeah, geometric overlay, an
altered default mode network. But seeing tiny
soldiers... Drops of water metamorphosing into
bugs. It's so weird. It is remarkably specific
and weirdly consistent across completely disparate
demographics. What's fascinating here is that
despite that consistency, modern science remains
Entirely in the dark. Entirely. Unlike the classic
tryptamines like psilocybin or the isoxazoles
like musmol, you know, the stuff found in the
Amanita muscaria, we still have absolutely no
idea what molecular mechanism makes these beliefs
psychoactive. None. Zero. We have centuries of
epidemiological evidence that they do it, but
the actual chemistry is a total blank spot in
our biological knowledge. Which means we are
looking at a genuine scientific frontier. So
today we're taking you on a global journey. We're
going to travel from the high -end culinary scene
of modern China to the ancient highlands of Papua
New Guinea. A serious global footprint. Definitely.
And we'll dive into a mystery that continues
to baffle some of the best analytical chemists
in the world. So let's start at the epicenter
of this phenomenon, the Yunnan province in southwestern
China. Right. So Yunnan is internationally recognized
as a global hotspot for fungal diversity. Yeah.
And foraging for wild mushrooms isn't just a
hobby there. It's a foundational part of the
local culture and the regional economy. So these
aren't some rare hidden thing. Not at all. The
boletes we are focusing on today, primarily species
like Landmaua asiatica and Butera boletus rosaflavus.
They aren't treated as illicit substances. They
aren't sold in back alleys. Exactly. They are
highly prized, premium culinary ingredients sold
right out in the open in local markets. The locals
actually refer to them as jian shou king, which
roughly translates to turning blue when bruised
or cut. Right, that rapid oxidation. Yeah. If
you take a knife to the stem. The flesh almost
instantly oxidizes. It turns this vivid, deep
blue -green color. And here's the absolute crucial
detail for anyone encountering these in a kitchen.
You have to cook them. You have to cook them
thoroughly. The strict local wisdom dictates
boiling them for at least 15 to 25 minutes at
a rolling boil. And that intense thermal processing
relies on sustained heat to break down and denature
the psychoactive compounds. It cooks the trip
right out of them. Exactly. If you adhere to
the culinary rules, you're rewarded with a delicious
porcini -like dish. But if a chef rushes the
order or the temperature drops even a little
bit, the active metabolites survive. And the
little people show up. The little people show
up. And the historical precedent for this specific
interaction goes back incredibly far. How far
are we talking? Around 300 CE, the Chinese Taoist
scholar Ge Hong wrote a foundational text called
The Master Who Embraces Simplicity. In it, he
details something he called a flesh spirit mushroom.
That is an intense name. It is. Gahang was deeply
focused on alchemy and the pursuit of immortality,
so his documentation of local flora is incredibly
detailed. Okay. He explicitly noted that if you
consume this flesh spirit mushroom raw, you might
literally see a tiny person riding in a carriage.
A tiny person in a carriage from 300 CE. Yeah.
And he wrote that the experience would grant
immediate transcendence. So we have this highly
specific visual hallucination of tiny, detailed
figures documented in the regional literature
for roughly 1 ,700 years. It's a remarkable piece
of continuous ethnobotanical history. It really
is. But the phenomenon is not geographically
isolated to China. Let's shift the map a bit.
Let's do it. Imagine you are in the western highlands
of Papua New Guinea sometime between the 1930s
and 1950s. Okay, totally different environment.
Completely. Anthropologists and missionaries
operating in the region began reporting that
the indigenous Kuma people were consuming local
bolete mushrooms, specifically a species known
as Boletus manicus. Right. And these mushrooms
triggered a temporary state of what observers
termed madness. The anthropological reports described
a form of collective mania. The individuals who
consumed the mushrooms would experience Lilliputian
hallucinations. Again, the tiny people. Again,
the hallmark symptom of seeing tiny people and
animals alongside this really erratic behavior.
And this caught the attention of the broader
scientific community in the 1960s. Because it
sounded like a massive psychedelic discovery.
Exactly. It drew in the legendary mycologists
Gordon Wasson and Roger Heim. They traveled to
Papua New Guinea, surveyed roughly 400 local
mushrooms, and eventually narrowed the culprits
down to six species, driving this localized mushroom
madness. And remember, they were fresh off their
groundbreaking work with Maria Sabina in Mexico.
The psilocybin discovery. Right. So they were
primed to discover another massive... paradigm
-shifting psychoactive compound. They gathered
samples of Boletus manicus and sent them directly
to Albert Hoffman's lab in Switzerland. You'd
expect the team that isolated psilocybin and
synthesized LSD to find the smoking gun instantly.
You really would. But the mass spectrometry and
the chromatography results were, well, entirely
anticlimactic. Yeah, Hoffman found only trace
amounts of three unidentified indolic compounds.
Those traces. Just traces. And while indoles
share structural similarities with serotonin,
and many classic psychedelics, the quantities
present in the boletes were just minuscule. So
it didn't make mathematical sense. Right. For
those trace amounts to trigger the dramatic behavioral
shifts reported among the Kuma people, the unidentified
compounds would need to possess a binding affinity
and potency essentially on par with pure LSD.
Which was a pharmacological leap the scientific
community at the time simply refused to make.
It was too much for them to accept. Haim even
attempted to self -experiment. He consumed small
amounts of the mushroom himself. Brave guy. Yeah,
but he only noted some unusually vivid dreams,
nothing resembling the full -blown Lilliputian
delirium the locals experienced. And because
they couldn't isolate a definitive, high -concentration
active chemical, Haim, Wasson, and the anthropologist
Marie Ray ultimately concluded that the mushroom
madness wasn't pharmacological at all. Wait,
they just dismissed it. They wrote it off entirely
as a form of social catharsis. They essentially
argued that the indigenous population was just
engaging in a ritualistic theatrical acting out,
that it was influenced by cultural expectation
rather than actual chemistry. Wow. It's a classic
frustrating example of mid -century scientific
hubris. They effectively said, our lab equipment
didn't flag a massive alkaloid concentration,
therefore your cultural experience must be psychosomatic.
This raises an important question about how Western
scientific paradigms have historically marginalized
indigenous knowledge systems. By dismissing the
phenomenon as mere theater, they effectively
closed the book on the research for decades.
Just shut it down. Completely. Giorgio Sammarini,
a contemporary psychedelic researcher, has published
extensive critiques on how premature and damaging
that dismissal was. And there's a real measurable
fallout from that, right? There is. When researchers
finally returned to survey the Kuma villages
in 2006, they discovered that much of the local
knowledge about these mushrooms had been completely
lost to time. That is heartbreaking. It is. The
last documented instance of someone in the area
intentionally consuming them for their hallucinogenic
properties was way back in the mid -1980s. Because
Western science closed the book on this in the
60s, we almost lost the thread entirely. It took
over 50 years for researchers to realize this
wasn't an isolated cultural quirk. It was a global
botanical puzzle. A massive one. Which brings
us to a major breakthrough in 2024. Researcher
Colin Domnauer launched an expedition to the
Cordillera Mountains in the northern Philippines.
Right. And he found that the indigenous populations
there regularly consume a blue staining bolete
they call seedsdom. And when it's undercooked,
it irregularly triggers vivid visions of entities
they call the ancestors, which translates yet
again to little people. So we are looking at
three entirely distinct cultures in China. Papua
New Guinea, and the Philippines. These populations
are separated by massive geographical, historical,
and linguistic barriers. Yet they all report
the exact same, highly specific visual hallucination
from related blue -standing blitz. It's undeniable
at that point. From a pharmacological standpoint,
that points overwhelmingly toward a shared objective
chemical trigger. It completely rules out that
old cultural suggestion theory. So let's look
at the clinical profile of that trigger. If you
ingest undercooked Lanmalo Asiatica in Yunnan,
what exactly is happening to your nervous system?
It's intense. Very. The clinical term for the
primary symptom is Lilliputian hallucinations.
Patients consistently report seeing swarms of
tiny humans, sometimes brightly colored, sometimes
wearing elaborate little outfits. But the visions
aren't strictly humanoid, right? No, they see
tiny animals too. Rabbits, squirrels, insects,
all interacting with their environment like it's
totally normal. In addition to the Lilliputian
figures, patients frequently experience geometric
patterning. They get macropsia and micropsia,
where objects appear wildly distorted in size.
Alice in Wonderland syndrome, basically. Exactly.
And the sensation that stationary walls are breathing
or physically shifting. There's a fascinating
medical case documented from 1997 where a young
woman reported watching her shoelaces physically
detached from her shoes, transform into butterflies,
and fly out of the room. That is so wild. The
subjective effects are incredible. It's incredibly
profound, but the pharmacokinetics are what really
stand out to me. The timeline is strange. Very.
With classic psilocybin mushrooms, you expect
the onset of effects within maybe 30 to 60 minutes,
and it resolves entirely in about four to six
hours. Right. But with these Belites, the onset
time is drastically delayed. Patients typically
don't experience the first hallucinations until
six to 24 hours post -ingestion. Which is an
agonizingly long metabolic runway. You've digested
the meal hours ago. And you've probably gone
to sleep. Exactly. And once the intoxication
begins, it is incredibly persistent. Symptoms
routinely last for days. In more severe toxicity
cases, the psychiatric effects have been documented
lingering for months. Which really highlights
the severe human impact here. While the idea
of seeing tiny colorful people sounds whimsical
in a vacuum, a multi -day inescapable hallucination
is a severe medical event. It's a crisis. It
is. The sources highlight a profoundly tragic
case from 2014. A woman in Union who had recently
lost her daughter somehow discovered that the
delirium in induced by these mushrooms, allowed
her to hallucinate visions of her deceased child.
Oh, wow. Yeah. So she intentionally and repeatedly
consumed the toxic undercooked boletes for eight
years, subjecting her brain to constant chemical
stress just to experience those specific visions.
It's a sobering demonstration of the psychological
weight these compounds carry. And from a public
health perspective, these poisonings represent
a major logistical burden for regional hospitals.
I'm sure. Consider the massive epidemiological
report published in Yunnan back in 1991. It analyzed
300 individual cases of bolete poisoning. With
a data set of 300 clinical cases, you would think
doctors could isolate a clear toxological profile
that the earlier Western researchers missed.
What did the clinical presentation look like
at that scale? It was severe. While most patients
experience the classic Lilliputian hallucinations,
the acute case is presented with severe psychosis
-like symptoms, intense auditory hallucinations,
profoundly disorganized thinking, and what the
attending physicians described as personality
disintegration. That sounds terrifying. It gets
worse. Many patients descended into a prolonged
stupor. When doctors ran electroencephalograms,
or EEGs, On those stuporous patients, the brainwave
abnormalities strongly resemble the cortical
changes typically seen in patients administered
massive doses of LSD. How does an emergency room
manage 300 patients experiencing that level of
neurological disruption without even knowing
what the target receptor is? Empirically, they
discovered that administering chlorpromazine
was highly effective. What's that? It's a first
-generation antipsychotic medication that acts
primarily as a dopamine antagonist. It was really
effective in stabilizing the patients and managing
the acute symptoms. Okay, that's a relief. Yeah,
and the reassuring data point here is that across
these massive case series, including a more recent
2024 study tracking 81 patients, there were zero
fatalities. Wow, zero? Zero fatalities. With
proper supportive care, almost all patients made
a full neurological recovery within one to five
days. Okay, here's where it gets really interesting,
especially in the context of global diplomacy.
The Yellen story. Yes. This highly localized,
incredibly potent mushroom phenomenon recently
crashed right into the middle of international
geopolitics. Such a bizarre crossover. In the
summer of 2023, U .S. Treasury Secretary Janet
Yellen traveled to Beijing for high stakes diplomatic
talks. Shortly after arriving, she and her delegation
dined at a highly regarded Yunnan restaurant
chain. Right. And she purposefully ordered a
dish featuring Lanmao Asiatica. The exact hallucinogenic
beliefs we're analyzing today. It triggered an
immediate international media frenzy. Yeah. Janet
Yellen ate magic mushrooms became a massive headline
across global news outlets. It's a surreal intersection
of macroeconomics and ethnobotany. Yeah. But
it really highlights the cultural disconnect
we talked about earlier. The restaurant's culinary
team knew exactly how to handle the ingredient.
They subjected the mushrooms to the precise thermal
processing required, entirely denaturing the
psychoactive metabolite. And the result. Secretary
Yellen experienced a fantastic umami rich meal
and zero hallucinations. It perfectly encapsulates
the. dichotomy in how these fungi are perceived.
When the Western press covered the dinner, the
narrative was entirely focused on the psychedelic
novelty, the implicit danger, the whole magic
mushroom framing. Exactly. Whereas for the millions
of people living in Yunnan and the indigenous
groups in the Philippines that Colin Daum now
are embedded with, the psychoactive potential
isn't the draw at all. It's actually an annoyance.
Right. They value the mushroom purely for its
flavor profile, which is incredibly rich and
savory. The hallucinogenic properties are viewed
as a punishing consequence of poor culinary technique,
not a recreational feature. It functions very
similarly to the culinary culture surrounding
fugu, or pufferfish, in Japan. Oh, that's a great
comparison. The appeal lies entirely in the delicacy
of the meat. The deadly tetrodotoxin is simply
a biological obstacle. that a highly trained
chef must carefully navigate. Which brings us
to the core scientific void at the center of
this deep dive. We have a wildly popular culinary
dish that doubles as a potent multi -day hallucinogen.
What is the active constituent? The million dollar
question. What is this specific molecule crossing
the blood brain barrier and generating these
Lilliputian visions? The reality is that as of
2025 and 2026, the global scientific community
still doesn't know. We really don't. But we have
definitively ruled out the usual suspects. Okay.
What do we know it isn't? Rigorous liquid chromatography
and mass spectrometry have confirmed it does
not contain psilocybin or psilocin. So no classic
magic mushrooms. Right. It also does not contain
muscle or ibotenic acid. Okay. Because of this
massive blind spot, researchers like Colin Domnauer
and mycologist Bryn Dentinger, who is widely
considered one of the world's preeminent experts
on bleak taxonomy, they have dedicated their
current research to isolating the compound. They've
been running advanced animal assays using chemical
extracts pulled directly from landmawa Asiatica.
They started with behavioral studies on a rhesus
monkey several years ago and have recently scaled
down to testing murine models. Mice, basically.
And the behavioral outputs in the lab closely
mirror the clinical presentations in the human
hospital data. What do the mice do? When the
mice are administered the Belete extract, their
locomotor activity spikes drastically. They exhibit
intense, erratic hyperactivity. Interesting.
But that is quickly followed by a prolonged,
highly uncharacteristic physical stupor that
can last for up to two days. So the laboratory
assays prove the extract is biologically active,
but isolating the specific molecule from that
chemical soup is proving incredibly complex.
Very complex. One of the initial hypotheses that
gained traction among geneticists was horizontal
gene transfer. Right, horizontal gene transfer.
It's a fascinating mechanism where organisms
essentially swap genetic material outside of
traditional reproduction. Like stealing code
from your neighbor. Exactly. Researchers hypothesize
that millions of years ago, these boletes might
have absorbed the biosynthetic gene clusters
responsible for producing hallucinogens directly
from a neighboring psilocybe mushroom sharing
the same soil ecosystem. That makes so much sense.
It's an elegant theory. Genetic absorption happens
in the fungal kingdom more frequently than you
might expect. It makes logical sense. If it causes
hallucinations, maybe it stole the blueprint
for hallucinations from a known psychedelic.
Exactly. However, a comprehensive genomic analysis
published in 2023 entirely dismantled that theory.
Back to square one. Yep. Researchers sequenced
the genomes of 12 of the 13 accepted species
of Landmilla. They specifically hunted for the
known gene clusters that synthesize psilocybin
and ibotenic acid. And the results were completely
negative. The genetic architecture just isn't
there. Which means we can entirely rule out the
stolen gene hypothesis. Yes. Dennis McKenna,
a prominent pharmacognosist and psychedelic researcher,
proposed an alternative pharmacological model.
He theorized that the clinical presentation,
specifically the true hallucinations where the
user interacts with entities that aren't there,
coupled with the extended stupor, closely resembles
an anticholinergic delirium. If we connect this
to the bigger picture, McKenna's theory is highly
compelling. How so? When he suggests an anticholinergic
delirium, he's pointing away from the classic
serotonin 5 -HT2A pathways we see with tryptamines.
The usual psychedelic route. Right. Instead,
he's suggesting the presence of compounds that
block the neurotransmitter acetylcholine, similar
to the tropane alkaloids found in Datura or deadly
nightshade. Okay, that is a very different kind
of trip. Very different. That mechanism induces
a true waking dream state where the user completely
loses the ability to distinguish the hallucination
from baseline reality. But even with McKenna's
hypothesis, the exact molecule remains elusive.
The absence of known biosynthetic pathways and
the failure to match the pharmacological effects
to any currently cataloged compound leads us
to a thrilling conclusion. we are almost certainly
looking at an entirely novel, previously undiscovered
class of hallucinogenic molecules. That is amazing.
This isn't just a new species of mushroom. It
represents a completely new branch of psychoactive
chemistry hiding in plain sight. And this isn't
an obscure mystery strictly confined to the high
altitudes of Asia and the South Pacific. Not
at all. Closely related landmallow species, specifically
fungi like landmallow paludorosia and landmallow
flavoruber, grow wild right across North America.
Which immediately begs the question. If these
related species are growing in our local forests,
why aren't emergency rooms in the U .S. or Europe
fielding reports of hikers experiencing Lilliputian
hallucinations? Right. If they're in our backyard,
why aren't people seeing tiny soldiers? It fundamentally
comes down to deeply ingrained cultural foraging
habits. In North America and Europe, there is
a profound pervasive mycophobia, a cultural fear
of wild mushrooms. We don't really forage the
way they do in Yunnan. We don't. And there is
a very specific, taut stigma against consuming
any wild mushroom that rapidly changes color,
especially those that oxidize to a vivid blue
when bruised. In Western foraging traditions,
that rapid blue staining is widely taught as
a universal warning sign for toxicity. So because
Western foragers are explicitly taught to avoid
these specific blue -staining boletes, nobody's
taking them home and undercooking them. Any psychoactive
properties they might possess have simply flown
completely under the radar. Precisely. The cultural
filter is so strong that the data simply doesn't
exist. They've been missed entirely by Western
recreational foragers and clinical toxicologists
alike. It really makes you wonder how many times
you might have stepped right over a completely
uncatalogued, mind -altering compound on a casual
weekend hike. Probably more times than you'd
think. So let's recap the breadth of this incredible
deep dive. We started with a widely enjoyed premium
culinary delicacy in Yunnan that requires exact
thermal processing to prevent a multi -day psychological
break. We traced the ethnobotanical records back
to ancient Taoist texts promising transcendence
via visions of tiny figures and carriages. We
analyzed how Western scientific hubris prematurely
dismissed the mushroom madness of indigenous
tribes in Papua New Guinea only for those exact
same highly specific visions to be corroborated
by populations. in the Philippines decades later.
The pattern is undeniable. It is. And sitting
at the center of all this data is a completely
novel pharmacological mystery that continues
to baffle the world's most advanced analytical
chemists. Looking at the sheer scope of the sources
we've unpacked today, I always come back to the
same thought. What stands out to you? For me...
It's the profoundly humbling realization that
despite our advanced genome sequencing, our mass
spectrometry, and our predictive protein models,
modern science has barely scratched the surface
of the natural world. We think we know everything,
but we don't. Not even close. A completely novel,
highly potent, mind -altering compound isn't
buried in ice in Antarctica. It's sitting in
a popular culinary dish, being served to global
diplomats in major metropolitan restaurants.
So what does this all mean? I want to leave you
with a final thought to mull over as you process
all of this. If a heavily commercialized, widely
popular edible mushroom has successfully hidden
a radically novel, hallucinogenic compound from
the world's best scientific mind, for over a
century? What other everyday foods, native plants,
or common fungi growing right in our own backyards
might possess hidden, profound, pharmacological
properties? That's a fascinating question. Properties
that are just waiting for the exact right, or
exactly wrong, preparation to unlock them. The
next time you're standing at the stove cooking
dinner, just remember, the line between a delicious,
savory meal and a multi -day visit from the little
people might just be a matter of three minutes
on the burner.