Imagine this. You sit down for a lovely, completely
normal dinner. You have a dish of wild, beautifully
cooked mushrooms. They taste incredibly rich,
nutty, just absolutely packed with umami. Sounds
great so far. Right. So you finish your meal,
you clean up the kitchen, you go to sleep. You
wake up the next day and you go about your morning
routine. It has been... 12 full hours since that
meal. And then suddenly you look down at your
dining room table and there is a bustling, incredibly
detailed society of 33 centimeter tall people
wearing red and green just, you know, marching
straight across the wood. And you are completely
convinced they're real. Yes. Like you can hear
them, you can watch them interact. Your entire
reality has fundamentally shifted and not in
some blurry dreamlike way, but a vivid overlay.
Exactly. A high definition overlay on your actual
environment. And this isn't, you know, the plot
of a fantasy novel. This is a very real, scientifically
documented medical phenomenon. Welcome to today's
Deep Dive. Glad to be here. Our mission today
is to explore the completely baffling, honestly
slightly terrifying and undeniably fascinating
world of hallucinogenic bolete mushrooms. We've
got a massive stack of sources today from 1990s
hospital reports to historical Taoist texts.
All the way up to cutting edge 2025 and 2026
pharmacological research. Right. We are going
to figure out what these mushrooms are, why they
are driving mycologists crazy. and how they are
completely rewriting what we thought we knew
about the human brain. OK, let's unpack this.
Well, to set a baseline for you, it is crucial
to understand what these mushrooms are not. Right,
because everyone immediately jumps to the same
conclusion. Exactly. When most people hear the
phrase magic mushroom, they immediately think
of two things. They either picture classic psilocybin
mushrooms, the little brown ones that bind to
serotonin receptors. The standard psychedelic
trip. Yeah. Or they picture Amanita muscaria.
that iconic red mushroom with the white spots,
which contains a compound called musimil. The
classic video game mushroom. Right, the Mario
mushroom. But the bolete mushrooms we are looking
at today contain neither of those chemicals.
No psilocybin at all. No psilocybin, no musimil.
Instead, these are fleshy, porous mushrooms,
specifically blue -staining boletes, that produce
a highly specific, very unusual medical phenomenon
called Lilliputian hallucinations. Which is the
actual clinical term for seeing visions of tiny
entities globally referred to as little people.
Yeah, it's wild. But before we get into where
these mushrooms grow, we really need to understand
exactly what happens to a person who eats them.
Because the clinical reality of these symptoms
is wildly different from any known psychedelic
we have on record. It really is. The reported
effects are profound sensory distortions. Beyond
seeing the Xiao Ren. Which translates to lots
of little men, right? Or little people. Exactly,
yeah. Beyond seeing them, people report seeing
complex geometric patterns, moving walls, and
these incredibly specific object transformations.
Oh, like the Yes. We read one medical account
where a patient stared at their shoelaces and
the shoelaces literally physically morphed into
butterflies and flew away. That is insane. In
another case, every drop of water from a faucet
turned into a crawling insect. Ugh, horrifying.
It's like these mushrooms don't just take you
on a traditional trip. They install a highly
specific biological augmented reality filter
over your vision. That's a great way to put it.
You aren't just seeing colors breathing, you
know? Your brain is rendering a fully interactive
society of tiny people overlaid onto the real
world. So if it's not psilocybin and the timeline
is so delayed, What exactly is happening in the
body? Well, to ground this in the hard data,
we have to look at the medical literature. Specifically,
a landmark 1991 hospital report from the Yunnan
province of China. Right. Researchers documented
an astonishing 300 cases of poisoning from a
mushroom known locally as xiaomianu gungeon.
And what stands out immediately in that report
is the bizarre timeline. The delay. That was
the wildly fascinating part of the study to me.
Right, because with almost any known psychoactive
substance, you ingest it, it hits your bloodstream,
and you feel the effects within an hour or two.
Obviously. But with these beliefs, the symptoms
do not start until 6 to 24 hours after eating
them. That is a massive delay. I mean, you could
eat them for dinner and not start hallucinating
until you are sitting at your desk at work the
next afternoon. Exactly. And the duration is
just as alarming. The 1991 report noted that
while most cases resolved in a few days, the
hallucinations could last for weeks, months,
and in a few rare severe cases, up to half a
year. Half a year of shoelaces turning into butterflies.
I cannot even fathom the psychological toll of
that. How are the hospitals even treating these
patients? Well, in the most severe cases, patients
entered a state of complete stupor. The researchers
actually performed EEG brain scans on these stuporous
patients. And what did they find? They found
changes in their brainwaves that looked strikingly
similar to the effects of LSD. Interestingly,
the medical staff found that they could effectively
manage these severe symptoms using chlorpromazine.
Which is a standard antipsychotic medication,
right? Usually used for schizophrenia. Yeah,
exactly. But why does that work? If this isn't
psilocybin or LSD, why does a schizophrenia drug
shut down a mushroom trip? What's fascinating
here is that chlorpromazine works primarily by
blocking dopamine and serotonin receptors in
the brain. The fact that it dampens the little
people hallucinations gives us a vital clue about
the unknown chemical in these mushrooms. Ah,
so it targets the same pathways. It suggests
the compound, whatever it is, is severely disrupting
those same neural pathways. The actual mechanism
is completely unknown, but we have some strong
theories. Like Dennis McKenna's theory. Right.
Dennis McKenna, a prominent ethnopharmacologist,
has suggested that these effects do not mirror
a standard serotonergic trip. Instead, the effects
closely mirror an anticholinergic delirium. I
know anticholinergics are found in plants like
Datura. But for someone listening who isn't a
pharmacologist, what is the mechanical difference
between a standard trip and this kind of delirium?
It comes down to reality testing. With a classic
psychedelic like psilocybin, you might see the
walls breathing, but a part of your brain knows
you're under the influence of a substance. Right,
you know you took a drug. Exactly. Your reality
testing is intact. Anticholinergics, on the other
hand, block the neurotransmitter acetylcholine.
This creates a true delirium, like a waking dream
state, a dream state where your reality testing
is completely shattered. You cannot distinguish
the hallucination from reality, which perfectly
matches the reports of people trying to hold
actual conversations with the Xiao Ren Ren. And
the delayed onset. How does that fit in? The
delays suggest the active compound might not
be psychoactive itself. It might be a precursor
compound. Oh, meaning your body has to change
it first. Exactly. Your liver has to slowly metabolize
it into a hallucinogen over many hours before
it crosses the blood -brain barrier. So if modern
chemistry couldn't explain this in 1991, and
we still don't have the molecule, we have to
look at whether this is purely a biological reaction
or just a massive cultural placebo. Right, checking
for cultural bias. Because to test that, we need
to see if cultures completely disconnected from
China experience the exact same thing. And surprisingly,
They do. They do. The first Western reports of
this phenomenon actually emerged between the
1930s and the 1960s, thousands of miles away
from China. Down in Papua New Guinea, right?
Yes, among the Kuma people in the Western Highlands.
Missionaries and anthropologists noted a phenomenon
they called mushroom madness, where locals would
consume certain elite mushrooms and interstates
of frenzy or delirium. And that caught the attention
of some pretty famous mycologists. It did. Gordon
Wasson and Roger Haim traveled to Papua New Guinea
to investigate. They zeroed in on a specific
mushroom the locals were eating called Boletus
manicus. And they actually sent samples to Albert
Hoffman, didn't they? They did. The Swiss chemist
who famously discovered LSD. Wow. But Hoffman's
analysis was a dead end. He ran the samples and
found only trace amounts of three unidentified
indelic compounds. Wait, indelic compounds. What
does that actually mean in this context? So an
indole is a specific ring -shaped molecular structure.
Many classic psychedelics, like psilocybin and
LSD, are indolic compounds because their structure
closely resembles human serotonin. Oh, okay,
so finding that sounds like a big deal. Finding
trace -indulant compounds was exciting, sure,
but the quantities were so infinitesimally low
that they couldn't possibly cause hallucinations.
Unless they were super potent. Right, unless
those specific compounds happened to be as staggeringly
potent drop for drop as LSD itself. Which they
couldn't prove. So Haim actually tries eating
tiny amounts of the mushroom himself to test
it. Yeah, plain guinea pig. And all he gets are
some strange dreams. Nothing conclusive. And
because they couldn't isolate the chemical, Hyman
Waston just...they gave up. Pretty much. They
concluded that mushroom madness wasn't a pharmacological
effect at all. They wrote it off as mere social
catharsis, basically arguing that the indigenous
locals were just being theatrical and acting
out cultural expectations. It is a rather dismissive
conclusion. I have to push back on their logic
entirely. That is such a classic mid -century
scientific blind spot. Just because your 1960s
laboratory equipment can't isolate a highly unstable
molecule, and just because you didn't eat enough
of it to cross the threshold dose doesn't mean
an entire culture is faking a psychiatric event.
They gave up on the puzzle way too soon. Well,
modern science actually validates your skepticism.
We can look at the incredible 2024 findings of
ethnobiologist Colin Domnauer. to prove it. Yes,
the Philippines study. Right. Don Nowar traveled
to SCADA, up in the Philippine Cordilleras, investigating
local reports of blue staining beliefs that the
indigenous people call C. distem. OK. He found
that locals regularly ate these mushrooms, and
irregularly they would cause severe visual hallucinations,
specifically visions of what they call the ansicit.
Are the Anzats the Philippine equivalent of the
Little People? That is their local term for them,
yes. So you have isolated indigenous cultures
in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, the remote
mountains of the Philippines, and the valleys
of China. All independently reporting the exact
same thing. Yes. All independently reporting
that eating these specific blue -staining beliefs
summons visions of tiny people. That cross -cultural
consistency completely shatters the social theater
theory Wasson and Heim propose. Absolutely. It
proves beyond a doubt that the phenomenon is
driven by a shared hardwired pharmacology, not
a shared cultural script. The hallucination is
literally baked into the mushroom, which brings
us to a really fascinating pivot, because having
established that this pharmacological phenomenon
is very real, we have to look closely at how
people interact with it today. Right. Going back
to China. Yunnan province in China is the only
place in the world where these hallucinogenic
mushrooms aren't just a mysterious ritual or
an isolated tribal practice. They are a mainstream,
highly sought -after culinary staple. It is a
profound cultural paradox. You have species like
Lanmaua asiatica and Buddha rubuletus rosa flavus
sold openly in massive wet markets. You're sitting
next to the cabbage. Yeah. People pay premium
prices for them because they're considered umami
-laden delicacies, supposedly tasting even better
than the finest gruccini. But the catch is sanity
or insanity. To eat them safely, you must cook
them at a rolling boil for a minimum of 15 to
25 minutes. The sustained high heat presumably
denatures the unknown hallucinogenic proteins
or compounds. Denature's meaning? When a compound
is denatured by heat, its complex molecular structure
physically unwinds and breaks apart, rendering
it inert. Once that happens, the mushroom is
perfectly safe and delicious. But the risk, I
mean, it is like trying to defuse a biological
bomb where time and temperature are your only
wire cutters. Like a culinary fugu fish. Exactly.
One undercooked batch of Lanmo Asiatica because
you pulled the pan off the stove three minutes
too early and you are trapped in a fairy tale
for weeks. And this high -stakes culinary tradition
has a massive footprint in China that goes back
millennia. The Taoist scholar, Jay Hong, wrote
a text around 300 CE, where he described flesh,
spirit, mushrooms. 300 CE. Wow. He wrote that
if you eat them, you will see little people,
about seven to eight cun. which translates to
roughly 3 to 33 centimeters riding on carriages.
So specific. Right. And he actually believed
these specific visions were a path to attaining
spiritual transcendence. People have been seeing
the Jiao Ren Ren for nearly 2 ,000 years and
it's still happening right now. Oh, absolutely.
The local and national media in China frequently
cover poisoning outbreaks today. Between 2022
and 2024 alone, there were a major series of
poisoning reports with dozens of hospitalizations.
Just from people undercooking their dinner. Yeah.
And while most cases are accidental undercooking,
some are intentional and deeply tragic. In 2014,
there was a widely reported case of a Yanan woman
who intentionally ate undercooked hallucinogenic
beliefs continuously for eight years. She did
that specifically so she could hallucinate visions
of her deceased daughter. Yeah. When I read that
in the sources, it completely recontextualized
this for me. It highlights the profound emotional
reality these hallucinations can create. They
aren't just blurry shapes. They are fully realized
emotional experiences that people can interact
with. It's incredibly sad, but it really emphasizes
how real the delirium is. The culinary popularity
of these mushrooms is so mainstream that it actually
created a massive international news story recently.
Oh, the Janet Yellen incident. Right. In 2023,
U .S. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen was visiting
China on a diplomatic trip. She went to a very
popular hot pot restaurant in Yunnan, and she
and her team ordered these exact mushrooms. Lunmawa
Asiatica, widely known locally as Jian Shaoking,
which translates to sea hand blue, because the
mushroom violently bruises blue the second you
touch it. That's the one. Now, of course, the
restaurant was incredibly high end. The chefs
knew exactly what they were doing and the mushrooms
were boiled properly, nobody got high, nobody
saw little people. Right, totally safe. But the
media frenzy when reporters realized she had
just eaten a plate of famous hallucinogenic mushrooms
was incredible. It completely sold out the dish
across the province. And again, if you're listening,
we're just looking at the cultural surrealism
here. We aren't taking any political stance on
the trip. It's just a wild example of how normalized
this extreme culinary risk is in Yunnan. Which
brings us to the most frustrating question for
the scientific community. Why we don't know what
the chemical is. Exactly. If high profile diplomats
are eating them. If thousands of locals are eating
them, and if hundreds of people are ending up
in hospitals with identical symptoms, why hasn't
modern science isolated the exact molecule yet?
Here's where it gets really interesting to me.
We have mass spectrometers. We have AI -driven
chemical analysis. How do we still not know what
the chemical is? Well, if we connect this to
the bigger picture, you have to understand the
sheer difficulty of studying these fungi. It
is a true taxonomic nightmare. The primary issue
is a concept called convergent evolution. Meaning
different species evolved to look identical over
time because they were adapting to the same environmental
pressures. Precisely the problem. In the dense
forests of Yunnan, there are dozens of different
blue -staining bulete mushrooms that are visually
indistinguishable to the naked eye. So you don't
even know which one you're picking. Right. Even
the world's top experts struggle to categorize
them without a DNA sequencer. The primary culprit
for these poisonings, Lanmoa asiatica, wasn't
even officially described in name as a distinct
species until 2015. That recently? Yes. Before
that, it was just lumped in with other generic
boletes. When researchers recently sequenced
the genetics of the Lanmoa genus, they found
massive cryptic diversity, multiple undescribed
species masquerading as one. Ah, I see. So when
a patient comes into the hospital hallucinating,
the mushroom they ate is usually already digested.
Even if they have a leftover scrap of the kitchen,
identifying the exact species they consumed is
incredibly difficult. OK, but once you do manage
to isolate a guaranteed specimen of Lanmua asiatica,
why is the chemical so hard to find inside it?
I was reading one hypothesis in the sources that
I found fascinating. A gene transfer idea. Yeah,
because we already know the chemical structure
of psilocybin, right? Did these beliefs just,
like, steal the genetic code for making hallucinogens
from psilocybe mushrooms? You're referring to
horizontal gene transfer. It was a leading hypothesis
for a while. Could you explain how horizontal
gene transfer works in fungi? Because it sounds
like sci -fi. It kind of is. Unlike humans, who
only pass genes down vertically from parent to
child, fungi living in the soil can sometimes
swap DNA sideways. Trading genes with their neighbors.
Literally. They can absorb functional genetic
blueprints from completely different fungal species
living next to them. Researchers wondered if
Lanmo has simply absorbed the genetic code for
psilocybin from a neighboring mushroom. Make
sense. But in 2023, genomic analyses were conducted
to check exactly that. The researchers looked
for the specific biosynthetic gene clusters responsible
for creating psilocybin and the gene clusters
responsible for creating ibutenic acid, the compound
in the red Amanita mushrooms. And what did the
DNA show? They were completely absent. The lano
mushrooms lack the genetic blueprints for every
known fungal hallucinogen. That is mind -blowing.
So nature just independently invented a completely
novel chemical key using totally different evolutionary
blueprints to unlock the exact same neurological
door in the human brain. That is exactly what
the evidence suggests. We are looking at an entirely
novel, undiscovered class of psychoactive compounds.
Wow. But the good news is we are closer than
ever to unlocking that door. As of late 2025
and early 2026, we are sitting on the absolute
frontier of this research. Ethnobiologist Colin
Domnauer and mycologist Bryn Dentinger, who is
considered one of the world's leading experts
on boletes, have finally made a breakthrough.
How close are they to cracking it? They're actively
zeroing in on the molecule. They have successfully
extracted different chemical fractions from Lanomo
Asiatica and administered them to animal models.
But wait, how do you know if a mouse is hallucinating
little people? You can't ask it what it's seeing.
You can't. But you can look for the physiological
markers that match the human hospital reports.
Oh, like the stupor. Exactly. They found that
these extracts produce identical behavioral and
neurological effects in mice as they do in the
human poisonings. The mice exhibit extreme hyperactivity,
followed by that same long pronounced stupor
we saw in the 1991 hospital patients. That's
a huge step. It is. By isolating which specific
extracts cause these reactions and discarding
the ones that don't, they're eliminating variables.
As of late 2025, they're actively preparing their
findings for publication, meaning the identity
of the active constituents could be revealed
any day now. That is incredible. We are literally
watching scientific history being written right
now. Think about the journey we just took. It's
been wild. We started with a Daoist text from
300 CE talking about spirits and carriages. We
traveled to the remote highlands of Papua New
Guinea, where researchers arrogantly thought
it was all just theater. We validated the reality
of the visions in the mountains of the Philippines.
And we ended up in a bustling modern hotpot restaurant
in Yunnan, China. All connected. All of it linked.
by this one mysterious, completely unidentified
molecule that somehow reliably summons tiny people
into our field of vision. So what does this all
mean? Well, it leaves us with a profound, almost
uncomfortable philosophical question regarding
the human brain. Think about what we've established.
You have people from completely different cultures,
completely different eras, with entirely different
mythologies and languages. Yet when they ingest
this specific novel chemical, they don't just
see random visual noise. They reliably induce
the exact same highly structured archetype. The
ansicit. The xiao ren ren. the 33 centimeter
tall people. It forces you to look at history
completely differently. If a single unmapped
fungal molecule can reliably generate a bustling
society of tiny people in our minds across all
these different cultures, it makes you wonder
about the origins of our folklore. Yes. If you
think about. European fairy tales, you know,
Irish leprechauns, Scandinavian gnomes, Germanic
elves. We have always assumed these were just
imaginative stories invented around campfires.
But what if they weren't myths at all? What if
these ancient stories were actually just undocumented
encounters with local fungi sharing this exact
same chemical key? What if the little people
have always just been a latent software program
hidden deep within the human psyche, waiting
for a mushroom to boot them up? That is the question.
Next time you're out walking in the woods or
even just sitting at your dining room table,
you might look at a wild mushroom and wonder
exactly what kind of world it's capable of unlocking.
A completely different world right under our
noses. Thank you for joining us on this deep
dive. We'll catch you next time.