This growing organism is considered the world's oldest intoxicant.
Yeah, right there is the Amanita.
It predates alcohol by 10,000 years. Yet not many use it anymore. The big question is why not.
Today Jonas and I are on a hunt for Amanita muscaria,
which is arguably the most famous mushroom in the world.
I think everybody should know a lot about it and if you don't well stay tuned
because by the end of this you will.
The fly Agaric - if you're unfamiliar, well the
Smurfs live in one and it is the famous Mario Brothers mushroom that helps Mario
grow and get more powerful and this is more than just a fairy tale.
It is mushroom season in Sweden. This is like a sharp wall into the troll forest. It's dark and dense.
I saw my first one 20 years ago in alaska and the owner of the hostel i was staying in
told me a story about it it went something like this it's the powerful psychotropic
mushroom of the reindeer herders from siberia in northern europe you see the reindeer can't
get enough and by feeding it to them they dance and jump about as if they're flying
the cultures would pick the mushrooms in the fall dry them in the spruce trees and then the
shaman of the tribe would distribute them as presents over the winter solstice in december
from there they'd all partake in the mushroom and laugh and be joyful rest and be merry and if the
snow is heavy well you couldn't go through the door so they'd come in through the roof
i had never heard any of this but i could see how people could make the connection between
this mushroom and the legends of santa claus and the flying reindeer but it didn't stop there he
said the mushroom had multiple compounds in them and the body would convert the bad chemicals to
the good and here is the weird part you don't hear in holiday stories apparently you can collect the
pee of both reindeer and people who had eaten the mushroom to how do we say this recycle the
chemicals ew that led me to research it a lot i actually studied it in grad school when i was
in hawaii as well doing an ethnobotany program and it's because it has these unique chemicals
within its tissues and i'll get to all that in a sec first let's go find the mushroom
and of course there's not just amanitas we're finding all sorts of other mushrooms in this
forest one of these kind of unwritten rules that you don't tell people where they are
and you don't even ask people where they are because you know they're not going to answer you
i should note here that maybe the best thing about learning about the fly aggregate 20 years ago
was that it instilled a deep interest in learning about fungi well that's a very cool one this
is the inky cat drink alcohol they're poisonous finding edibles my dad used to love picking these
and do mushroom time lapses here we go turn on every two minutes
now i want to note that this mushroom is mycorrhizal which means that it forms a
relationship with the roots of the trees around us now not every tree forms microrhizal associations
with fungi spruce does and they're also very specific sometimes which mushrooms are which you
got to look around and see which trees you're in this beautiful spruce forest is a great place to
find these you can also find them in birch and in pine this is kind of cool because the mushroom is
helping the plant get nutrients and in exchange the tree through its roots is giving sugars
to this this beautiful mushroom of course most of the mushroom is underground it's a
mycelial mat and then these little things are just the fruiting body these are like
the fruits you don't see them all the time but the mushroom mass is all underground all the time
even though this mushroom is highly psychotropic and actually amazingly safe if prepared right
the real danger is mistaking it for something else fortunately this is not a hard mushroom
to identify okay let's talk identification this is an amanita other amanitas include some very
deadly and toxic varieties like the destroying angel and the death cap in other words you need
to know at the very basics how to identify a nominee so if you look at this one
you can see it has this ring around it's like a little skirt
around the stalk or stipe as it's called that is where the cap used to be connected
and then other aminos will also have a bulbous base so they have a vulva around the bottom now
and that's why when you identify them sometimes you'll want to dig it down a little bit deeper
and cut it out because you don't want to mistake it for anything else now on this particular one
you have a red cap that's very distinguishable but sometimes i've seen them yellow or yellow orange
and then you have these little white flecks on the top and those are a remnants of when
it used to be a little tiny growing mushroom like a little egg-like thing and then as it grew that
that container just separated and your remains with that in fact we saw some over there and you
can very easily see how it started and why these flecks look like they do now now the chemistry
if you know a bit about mushrooms you may know that some amanitas are very dangerous the biggest
danger comes from amitoxins these mushrooms along with a few others contain the compounds that are
responsible for 95 of mushroom deaths amitoxins you see cause acute liver and renal failure
in other words we stay away from any mushroom that has these in it however amonina muscaria does not
contain amitoxins instead it contains isoxysol toxins that can cause alterations to mental status
but no liver or renal injury thank goodness now here's what's interesting the two main compounds
are ibutainic acid and muscomol look how similar they are some people consider ipotenic acid to be
the bad compound because it's the one responsible for nausea vomiting and a really uncomfortable
experience muscular is often considered the good one and that might be over simplifying it but
given the ibutanic acid can cause some sickness we'll go with it for now through a process called
decarboxylation you can convert ibutinic acid to muscomol you can first dry it between 165
and 195 degrees fahrenheit to convert about 30 percent adding an acid like lemon juice converts
more and fermenting it in milk and yogurt that has bacteria could convert over 90 percent so
interestingly the name fly aggregate comes from the fact that people reportedly added it to milk
for what everybody thought was to kill flies my suspicion is that they were actually trying to
convert ibutenic acid to muskemol so they could ingest these mushrooms and the aggregation of
flies was just a byproduct oh wow see that one has a little bit of the yellowy orange on the cap
a young young one one that just came up over there at this point in the video you might be wondering
what does this mushroom do to understand that i talked to amanita dreamer an expert on this topic
in doing so i realize this needs an entire video which i'm exploring in the next episode but the
short is that in small amounts it acts a bit as a sedative and can be very relaxing and calming
yet please note i am not encouraging any experimentation but this tidbit was fascinating
i think it's the limitless drug and if you take it in the right doses you will see for yourself
that it is i've been on it i know what it does because my mission with this channel is to help
rekindle an appreciation for things our ancestors once knew this statement by amanita dreamer
really seems to point to why we don't use it much these days through attrition and generation after
generation the knowledge got lost and now there's this resurgence of mushroom knowledge and trying
to learn again not to fear mushroom medicine you just prepare it properly and it could be
the best medicine that the world needs amenities are here so as i lay in this scandinavian forest
looking face to face with the fly agaric i think i finally figured out why it isn't used much anymore
it's not because it's actually deadly and it isn't because it has no useful compounds it actually
does instead it seems that our fear of other mushrooms and a general lack of societal knowledge
about what you can and can't eat has led us to be overly cautious look how cool this is fortunately
we are in the resurgence and if you care about this you can also be very happy that we are
rediscovering and hopefully taking advantage of in a healthy way the medicine that comes from this
the mario brothers mushroom known to us now as amanita muscaria before i end this episode
i want to throw to what i'm doing next week which is i'm here with amanita dreamer we have
dried amanitas and we are learning all about the misconceptions of this mushroom so stay tuned for
that i hope that you're learning through this series things that you can better appreciate
in the great outdoors we wrote a book recently called mother nature is not trying to kill you
which has this exact same theme the flyagrac is in the book you can actually pick it up if
you go support us on patreon for cheaper than you can get it on amazon that's one of the perks that
we have over there i'm also doing postcards the amanita mushroom is one of the ones that i'm doing
for the next series so that might be something to get before christmas also that book is a fantastic
thing for kids that's kind of why we wrote it until next time stay safe enjoy the woods