Arthur Cole 0:21

Welcome back to the Newt Podcast. With me, Arthur Cole. Join us for a walk through the estate with our invited guests to the backdrop of the Somerset Landscape and its wildlife bread. This week we head off site and visit the Bristol Fungarian to interview their founder, Tom Baxter. We talk about the evolution story of fungi, including some of the weird and wonderful characteristics of this fascinating kingdom, not to mention the downright macabre methods that some fungi deploy in the wild, including the infamous zombie fungi that manipulate the behavior of insects with chilling precision. Beautiful, bizarre, and occasionally macabre. Fungi challenge almost everything we think we know about life on Earth. So join us as we venture deep into the tangled web of mycelium with Tom Baxter and discover why the hidden kingdom of fungi continues to captivate scientists, naturalists, and anyone curious about the extraordinary complexity of the natural world. Let's jump straight into it. So while talking about history is a good one to get us on to the history of the Bristol Fungarium.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

Yeah, I mean God, the history of the Bristol Fungarium. Well I guess it um where I actually started was uh I'd been in France for quite a few years and came back and I'd set up a forest school and a Montessori nursery school with my uh ex. And um I was looking to not I just didn't want to talk shit anymore for a living basically, and um and I wanted to look after a bit of ground really and just try and um sort of try and live my life in a way that made sense in terms of what I was seeing going on around me in terms of sort of the ecological perspective. Um so I don't want to say that I'd sort of checked out of sort of trying to I had sort of checked out of trying to make money, I just wanted to basically look after some land in a sort of honourable, decent way, um, grow veg, which I've always loved growing things, and so I was lucky I managed after many false attempts, I managed to take over uh what had been an established organic veg farm for 25 years, and so we had you know about nine acres, um massive glass house with heated benches, um 10 hundred-foot polytunnels, a three-acre soft fruit orchard, a couple of tractors, um and initially I took over a tiny amount of it, but by the end I had it all and was paying no rent. I wasn't getting charged any rent for it, um and it's really difficult to make money out of that. Um I hired after about six months, I hired um Vicky, who'd been number two at uh a company called Wessex Plants that had made every year, they've shut down now, but they they used to supply almost all the organic uh bore coals, so like cauliflower, broccoli, um, to all the big organic veg farms in the UK. So she used to basically be responsible for quite literally millions of plug plants every year. And so if you can get you know a healthy plug, even an incompetent man like me can probably bring it on um once it's in the ground. And so yeah, I did that for a couple of years and still had like the farm school trying to get youngsters into um you know, get their hands in the dirt basically. Uh, and then the financial reality of you know having four children and rent and everything uh in my personal life meant that I really needed to earn money in winter as well, and so I started growing mushrooms in shipping containers. Then I heard Henry, who you haven't met, who's sort of uh number two, and he'd been growing corals um and had been uh number two in uh a company called Aquarium Architecture, and he'd put in some multi-million pound private aquariums for the likes of Thierry Henri, the Ecclestons, and he had his sort of moment when uh the Ecclestons had asked for a couple of sharks. Um they put a couple of um dogfish or something in there, but anyway, quite big fish, um a couple of metres long, and then five days later they decided they didn't want them anymore, and uh so he had to get in and take them out, and he was just thinking, what am I doing with my life? Um this is ridiculous. And uh also the the brutality of the aquarium world, where there's just huge amounts of fish being taken out of the corals and huge amount of coral being taken out. Um he just ethically couldn't do it anymore. And so um he'd been growing lots of mushrooms at home. And uh I remember he had um a job offer which was paying him just on contract a couple of hundred quid a day uh to go and work for a fish farm, and he came to see me and you know, need to hire him and I offered him 30 pounds a day, and he was like, I can't afford to uh live on 30 pounds a day, I was like, I can't afford to pay you anymore. Um, and I think we agreed on 50, and so he came to work for me uh on £50 a day. Amazing, um, and yeah, then we started you know basically finding mushrooms, cloning them, and building up our sort of native strain library. Prior to that point, I'd been growing like oysters and stuff off uh straw bales and stuff like that, very low-tech reality, and then with Henry everything became much more serious and much faster. He he works at a thousand miles an hour, relatively organised, but only relatively, and so uh we started growing a lot of yeah, a lot of mushrooms, um, and we were mainly originally supplying restaurants and um in Bristol. We also did uh some work with Farm Drop, I don't know if you remember them. FarmDrop were a heavily financed um sort of they positioned themselves as like a disruptor to the um sort of established uh sort of supermarket chain. They managed to take over 30 million predominantly off one of the Duke of Westminster's agricultural funds, and they their idea was that they would be able to give 75% of the retail price to customers, to um producers, and they could sell online in London and deliver within you know, I don't know, five hours. Um, and it nice idea, um didn't work. Uh they went bankrupt. Um, a lot of farms, especially in the southwest, lost huge amounts of money. It was pretty catastrophic for a lot of people. Like even during COVID, when everyone was locked in their houses, uh, they were only breaking even. Um, and so you know, so anyway, that went down. I was I don't know how much, but quite a lot of money for me back then, like £10,000. So I think I lost, and then I just had to uh come up with you know new things to do. At that time, we're going back six years now, it was sort of the stuff people were becoming aware of mushrooms, and we started um just drying mushrooms and selling dried mushrooms. Um, and then when we started doing more reading about it, realised that was not really what you should do because unfortunately, mushrooms are being made of chitin. It's the sort of molecular structure of chitin is very chitin is what mushrooms are made of, so it's the same as like crustacean shells and that sort of thing. Uh it's very difficult to digest. And so if you just take raw mushrooms, most of it's just gonna pass straight through you. Um, and so that was when we started experimenting with different extractions. You know, we've got a small like um ultrasonic extractor, and then yeah, then it scaled we needed to leave, and we found uh this is quite interesting. We found a lion's mate mushroom about 30 feet up a tree. Um, and then the people cut the tree down, and uh and someone told us, and so we collected up some you know pieces of uh lion's mate and cloned them. And I got in touch with I should find the number for the person that owned the land, and um so I rang him up and um you know had a go at him for cutting the tree down at the lion's mane marijuana. And he was oh we'd always wondered what that was. The white thing at the top of the tree, and I go, Yeah, it's lionswork, it's a protected mushroom, you shouldn't have cut the tree down. But I don't suppose you've got any land to sell. And he was like, We don't sell land, can't make any money off land. What do you want land for? And I said, Well, I'd like to build a barn. He goes, Well, millions of barns, and so we came up, and um it's true he's got a bit under 2,000 acres just outside Bristol, uh, with a lot of disused barns, and uh we uh yeah, and so he turned over, well, changed and rebuilt a uh open-sided um sort of Dutch barn and extended it out for us as well. Um, and then I think the second or third time we came up, he's going, I don't suppose you'd be interested in the farmhouse. No one's lived in it for a couple of years, we can't rent it out commercially, it's pretty fucked. And I was like, Brilliant, yeah, we'll have the farmhouse as well. And so uh, and so now we grow huge amounts of that lion's mane that is literally four, well, 300 metres from here. Uh, and my life has been dominated by that particular mushroom for over half a decade now. Um, and now we've got 14 staff and uh an analytical chemist, uh, a PhD, and yeah, we're still trying to get to the point of I think we've almost reached the point of zero where I've paid off all the debt and we can um start again. So uh it's definitely a um yeah, it's definitely been quite a steep learning curve, and I think as opposed to other farming where it's sort of seasonal and you have sort of ebbs and flows with mushrooms, they're pretty relentless. Um we do grow certain mushrooms at certain times of year. So, for example, Maitaki or Grafoda Fondosa, we grow in May and June and October, November. Um, in the summer we grow more Rishi because they prefer the warmer temperatures. Um, and so that's why you saw so much Rishi in there as opposed to other ones. Barbas, as you know, there's been changes from a regulatory perspective over the last couple of years. Well, no, there haven't been changes, they've been enforcements of regulatory realities, which is why we've had to um cease growing Cordycep Milletaurus and why we've had to reposition uh both the turkey tail and the cordycep Milletaurus as uh pet products. So we've now got a pet feed license, so we can now sell Cordycep Milatauris, the original Cordyceps, uh, but only for dogs, um, which is slightly bizarre. Um, and the same with turkey tail, so we can now sell it again, but for dogs. Do dogs benefit from well, ironically enough, we have actually had a lot of dogs taking it who've had cancer over the years. So um, so yeah, uh previously they were just taking it when it wasn't for dogs, but now, yeah, I mean, there is, you know, people care dearly about their um dogs and uh cats. Uh we've got one dog and one cat sitting by us now. And um, yeah, I mean it's definitely a market, but unfortunately that it's le so with these novel food categorizations, you can still give them to animals as long as you get a pet feed license. So that's the swerve we've had to do on that, but that did take uh take out quite a bit of revenue um a year or so ago. Um but that's the joys of joys of life, isn't it?

Arthur Cole 12:23

So Tom, looking back at you know, Montessori, the that beginning of teaching kids, putting their hands in the soil, working with that ex-partner of yours, thinking about going into organic uh veg growing, and let's should we call it pivoting towards farming mushrooms?

SPEAKER_01 12:44

I mean, out of desperation for being able to provide, yeah. I think uh what is it, necessity is the uh mother of all invention or whatever it may be.

Arthur Cole 12:53

What would you say to anybody now who's perhaps looking at the landscape of um of work, someone who is trying to navigate through a changeable world where previous industries which were reliable are no longer going to be there? What would your advice be to somebody who was who was thinking about how do I make ends meet, how do I navigate this world of work?

SPEAKER_01 13:20

I mean it's yeah, I mean it's actually something I give a bit of thought to because I've got five kids and three of them are in their twenties now. Um and obviously I know a lot of their friends, and um some of these people are unbelievably bright, well qualified, you know, first in physics and you know and they can't find work. Um they can, but it's in a bar. Um and so it it is really, really an issue, and I think um fundamentally the it used to be that you know people would always say just find something that you love doing and um you know you'll be able to make a career out of it. I don't think that's necessarily true anymore. I think unfortunately we have to be uh cognizant of what is happening. There are a lot less junior level positions, especially anything that involves any sort of analysis. Um and I think it is a question really of looking at jobs you can do with your hands um or truly creative positions. And for a lot of people, I think we are gonna be entering into a period of a sort of unhappy confluence of two realities. One that the economy is gonna be um the economy is highly likely to be uh contracting at the same time as a lot of more junior positions are going to be disappearing. And unfortunately what's also going to happen is companies are gonna be looking at the bottom line a lot more and that is gonna force them to take the the position of you know lower lower employee costs. Uh it's not helped obviously by the cost of hiring people having risen relatively substantially recently. Um so I would say, you know, if you're in your twenties and looking at work, you need to consider doing something which is actually going to be hands-on. Um and you need to consider doing something which is truly creative. I mean, on the positive, you look historically at periods of sort of economic um decline, you tend to see the arts go into a remarkable sort of period of explosive creative output, and so I am looking forward to that. Um the you know, the other slight concern I have is that if you look from you know, a historical perspective on revolutions, they are always caused by the youth. And if we are going to have high levels of youth unemployment, I'm not saying that you know we don't need a revolution, I'm just saying that we are rapidly entering into a position where the circumstances are highly conducive to people having nothing to lose and therefore choosing to uh revolt. And so we're not there yet, but I think um the English will always be slightly um slower. I mean it's 400 years or whatever since we had our last major one. Although you could argue, you know, that uh we've got very close to a civil war in 1914, 1915 with what was going on in Ireland, and if it hadn't been for the the um First World War, you know, God knows what would have happened there because there were huge quantities of people in the army who would not have followed orders. And so, you know, that is the joy of joy of history. You know, when circumstances change, you know, what occurs differs from what would have occurred had things stayed the same. So I think just try and either be extraordinarily creative or follow a creative impulse or do something with your hands. And in a way, I think those are the most satisfying jobs anyway. So um I am slightly concerned by just the sheer quantity of humans. Uh that's my major, major issue.

Arthur Cole 17:14

We we've met a couple of your the guys that are working here at Bristol Fungarium, Jerry and Emma, and um it feels like they are specialists in a field which I mean, well hey look, they're gamefully employed. Yeah, they've they are they're specialists in that field. Do you think that industries like yours, which is producing a product that is, it seems to me, practically every aspect of that product and the supply chain is is UK sourced from the wood.

SPEAKER_01 17:49

That was that was like a conscious decision of mine then. Right. Um so you know, one of the reasons I wanted to become a farmer originally was from a control of the supply chain perspective. So I've done other businesses before. Um and in times of change, you need to control, you need to be as vertically integrated as possible. Um, and so it was a conscious decision we've made. We pay more for certain things because they're from the UK or they're local, and so yeah, I mean, all of that is not an accident. It's a decision we don't buy our bottles from Germany, you know. Everything we do, we don't get our packaging done in in China. You know, we could bring down the unit costs a little bit if we were to look for the cheapest you know printer, but everything we do, even you know, the bottling's done in Bristol, our printers are in Bristol, everything is local as much as we can get it. I guess the only there's a couple of things that aren't local, and that's some of the strains of mushrooms, but we try and grow as much about 75% of the mushrooms we grow are originate within sort of four miles of here. And so we we are desperately trying to be as conscious ecologically as we can because obviously we are releasing spores into the atmosphere. Fortunately, with the Rishi, we tend to harvest it before it releases any spores. There's a couple, as you saw in the fruiting chamber, that are spore-relating, but we'll harvest those soon. And so uh we're not really causing too much pressure on um sort of from an ecological perspective in terms of introducing um non-native species. Whereas a huge amount of the sort of um companies that are doing, you know, fruit-at-home sort of mushroom locks, they're doing pink oysters, yellow oysters, all these that are very aggressive strains and are released huge amounts of spores. And we're all already seeing it, especially in the US, where the yellow oyster um is taking over. And there have been a few sightings now in the UK of yellow oysters in woodland, uh, where it's obviously got out from someone's fruiting bag. And so, you know, I think the trouble is with a lot of these things from an ecological perspective, the time frame is sort of beyond my lifetime, so you'll never really know what the impact is until potentially two, three hundred years down the line. And so, you know, you can make a lot of people make the argument that you know if they're not going to see it, then what's the issue? I think we need to be slightly more Arab-like in our perspective of time, and um maybe not so keen on holding blood feuds for generation upon generation, but certainly look at things from a longer perspective. Um, and I think with the Vista Fungarian, you know, one thing that we have tried to do, and I think the reason why hardly anyone has ever left us, um we've had one one person. Yeah, one person left us in six years, um, is you know, be conscious of who we're buying stuff from, where we're sourcing stuff, and our position from an ecological perspective. Um and I think we're seeing that play out, you know, quite aggressively at the moment. I mean, my brother, for example, one of my brothers, for example, he literally in the last uh 72 hours he's had to move twice, he had to quickly get out of his house. He lives in Spain, west of Madrid. Uh, moved to his sister-in-law's house, then they had to leave that one, and so they're now in the third house in sort of 72 hours. And whilst obviously due to the wildfires. Yeah, due to the fires that are taking place at the moment, and he's um he's a natural builder, so he builds straw bale and adobe houses um all over the southern Mediterranean. And um yeah, so I mean it's uh and he's again consciously chosen to try and live uh yeah, sort of vertically integrated existence, and I think you know, fundamentally we're not in control of much as humans, um, but hopefully we if we're slightly more conscious of uh the future, we can maybe live uh a little bit more. Peacefully in the present. But yeah, I mean it's you know it's been a big a big concern of mine many years ago when I first uh had a few businesses and sold them. I spent a couple of years working with um some climate scientists and organising uh European speaking tours and some guys from Cambridge, um some guys from the US, and uh yeah, so I was sort of 20 years ago, well not you know 15, 20, fucking hell, yeah, 15 years ago, wow, conscious of um you know this sort of potential uh happening. Um and so it's always been sort of a part of my um sort of broader perspective, and so I think for all of us, if we can try and do something in our day-to-day which is in line with how we view things in a sort of bigger picture perspective, it's sort of you know you won't find peace, but at least you won't hate yourself.

SPEAKER_00 22:58

So yeah, no, I'm not hating myself as much as I used to, so that's a positive. I think if we can all that share a tiny amount of self-love, uh life might be a little bit more tolerable.

Arthur Cole 23:08

I would like to talk now a little bit about uh not how Bristol Fungire got here, but how the fungi got here on this, you know, where are we with fungi? What is it as an organism?

SPEAKER_01 23:23

Can you give us a little bit of that brief brief mushroom 101? Um so fungi are quite interesting. So it was only about 120. Well no, actually, that's a lie, actually. It was even more recently than that. I think it was the 1960s where they're recognised as you know being within their own um sort of kingdom and not um and not a part of the plant kingdom. So yeah, so if we go back sort of into the uh you know the period of time that um some right-wing religious folk will tell you uh didn't exist, will will land up in say the actually there's a study last year done in South Africa looking at uh the fossil record, and we think potentially, obviously it's very difficult. The issue we have with fungi is they they don't fossilise. Um there are a couple that have fossilized from about 1.4 billion years ago, but so you're always guessing, but there are a couple of uh recent finds um from South Africa, which is potentially pushing the date of um the first sort of evidence for fungi on Earth to about 2.4 billion years ago. But let's it's accepted that it's around 1.4, so we won't won't go that far back. So fungi are sort of instrumental to life on Earth. They were fundamentally the reason why we were able to turn rock into compounds that could be used by plants and and obviously later higher life forms. So fungi originally were able to um establish themselves and create enzymes that could eat the rock, which would then secrete a product which was broken down into carbon, various things that could be used. And so we think around about you know 1.4 million years ago, and originally they were in the water, so much like all life on Earth, it starts, you know, subaqueously. And then over time they were able to then, these would be very, very simple life forms. Um similar to um what sort of fungi does similar to slime moulds actually, which are very basic. Slime moulds, interestingly, sort of take a they're sort of to the left of the fungi kingdom. They are fungi, but they're not actually directly in line with fungi. Um and there was actually there was an interesting experiment done with the Japanese subway system using slime moulds, where they put a slime mould into the uh model of the Japanese subway system and it managed to find its most the most efficient way out of the subway system. So, you know, it begs the question in terms of what level of cognizance is going on in these um things because it obviously couldn't see over the walls, so how did it actually know that that was going to be the most efficient way to get out of that maze? Um but yeah, so about 1.4 billion years ago, fungi seemed to appear on the scene. They are uh instrumental in breaking down the sort of volcanic rock into compounds that other things could uh use. They definitely predate the uh plant kingdom, and some of the earliest plants formed a um mycorrhizal, so a sort of symbiotic relationship with fungi. So fungi were uh breaking down things like carbon, feeding that to the plants. There are still various plants, I'm sure you can name numerous ones of them in the woodlands here, which have no roots and they are entirely dependent upon mycelium to feed them. And you know, the exchange that takes place is that um the plants will then hopefully do some photosynthesis and be able to, you know, shift some compounds back, some nitrogen and stuff back into um back into the the fungi, and so a lot of mycorrhizal fungi, so fungi that you see, for example, in the woods or in the grasses, there is that symbiotic relationship that occurs. And one of the reasons, for example, why a lot of people don't see as many puffable mushrooms around anymore is because of the amount of nitrogen that we're putting on fields. That used to be the niche that these uh mycorrhizal fungi would provide the nitrogen and the potassium and the phosphorus to the um to the plants, and then they would return in favour with like sugars and basic carbohydrates. But obviously, when you're putting huge amounts of MPK down, uh there's no need for that relationship to occur, and the poor fungi suffer. Um, but going back to 1.4 billion years ago, you have fungi which are popping up all over the place and breaking down um predominantly the rock at the time. Um, and interestingly, so many sidelines I can go on here. There is actually a company at the moment that's developed a mycorrhizal, um mycelium product to try and pull uh gold out of uh ore, basically. Um, how effective it is, I don't know, but they've raised lots of money, so uh I'm sure they'll pay themselves nice salaries for a few years. Um and then around about uh sort of about 800 million years ago, you started getting uh mushrooms that instead of breaking down the rock and stuff, were breaking down the wood. Um, and then later on into the Carboniferous period, obviously, that where we put down a huge amount of you know, all the oil and coal, you know, which came from the woodlands that were the carbon that wasn't actually broken down by fungi. So um the ones that were obviously nowadays if there were no fungi, we'd be like, I don't know how many tens of feet under all the carbon that's been put down by the trees over time. Uh, and that was when they started to uh develop the ability to break down wood. Um, so that those are the type of mushrooms that we grow now, which is sapotrophic mushrooms, uh, and they were predominantly like bracket fungus, so just these big conchs that you see, like the Ganiderma that we've we've growing here. Um, and then around about 600 million years ago, I think that's when we started to get the sort of classic mushroom shape, um, the ones with the like the cap and the stem. Um, and then we about 400 million years ago, we got the sort of new type of fungus, which was this parasitic fungus. And so you've probably seen TV shows about it, which is like the cordyceps, the uh um the whole family. And what we think happened there is that um the mushrooms recognised that uh these ants or insects were were basically predicating upon their food source, and they decided that a good solution here would be to you know turn the tables on them and start infecting the predators basically and using them as their um as their uh sort of food source. And it's fascinating because you see various different mushrooms that seem to have so even oyster mushrooms they create like a little hook, um, like a noose in their mycelium. And if um nematodes uh are sort of walking through whatever it is they're breaking down, so quite often wood in this case, or on the edge of soil, the noose will then um close on the uh nematode, and then the hyphal node of the uh mycelium will then sort of like a syringe inject itself into the nematode, express the enzymes out of it, that will then uh decompose the nematode, and then they'll suck up the sort of detritus that's left. And with the test. So that's not even a parasitic mushroom, that's just a normal mushroom. Well, not normal, normal sapotrophic mushroom. Um, but then the parasitic mushrooms, they will then use, for example, I don't know if we look at um well, the one that we used to grow, cordycep minotauris, which is a very common cordycep, uh grows in the UK. Um it's like looks like a it's also known as orange club fungus. Um you quite often see it in uh sort of meadows around streams and stuff. It it eats the well, it doesn't eat, it would does it consumes uh various pupae of lots of different types of butterfly and moth. And so um the most valuable fungus on earth is cordycepsis, which is harvested in the Himalaya, so lots of them in China, um Pakistan, Tibet, and at the moment, like the commercial um price for like a kilo of the highest grade, and it's graded purely on size and uniformity of size. We found out when we were out there, it's got nothing to do with what's actually in it, is around about 50,000 US a kilo at the moment, though it was a few months ago, so it's unbelievably valuable. And whole villages on the in the sort of uh the plateau, um, the Himalayan plateaus are you know that is their whole income for the year. I think um I think it was 7.6 billion, they reckon, was going back into various different, you know, harvesting communities all across the Himalaya. Uh, and what is interesting is when you actually test the compounds in those wild harvested senenses, you know, it has lower levels of one of the ones called as uh called a sep in. Um does have quite high levels of adenosine sometimes, but they are like wildly different. So I think that's the thing with forage mushrooms. The variety in compound profile is unbelievable. So I know that people aren't necessarily buying these things necessarily to um for what's actually in them. It's more you know, it's part of the sort of culture, in particular in China, at springtime, to buy to use this cordycep sinensis um to give you you know qi for the rest of the year. Anyway, so these cordycep mushrooms they decided to start using their what was uh predating on them as their carrier, and so there are huge, there are huge numbers, there's about nine at the moment, there's about nine hundred different cordycep species that we know of, and they tend to have specific hosts that they um colonize. So, for example, there's ones that colonise leafcutter ants, there's ones that colonise cockroaches, and what is extraordinary the cockroaches are the most bizarre things to see. So, what will happen is this spore will land on this cockroach, for example, and it'll slowly get within into the body of the cockroach, and it'll slowly start eating the entirety of the carapace. And so, and at the end, once it's consumed all that energy, you see this thing walking, and it just has a single fungi, generally, sometimes two, but generally one, just coming out of the sort of, I'm not sure what the name for the head of the insect is, um, coming out of the head of it, but the body, the body isn't there, the actual mat, and it is just the legs, and it is walking around, being controlled by this fungus. Uh, I mean it's extraordinary. The leaf cutter one, you know, there's so many different ones, but the leaf cutter one's quite interesting because it does the same. Uh, but what it does is it controls uh the end of its life. Uh, this one actually, the carapace is in place, but it climbs up a tree above one of the um ants' nests, and it makes it lock its jaw onto a leaf, and then it literally explodes and releases spores all on top of where the ant's nest is, and there's other ones which drive the ants into the ant's nest and then get them to explode. I mean, there's the level of I mean I don't want to say intelligence, but the level of knowledge or the level of the intuitive sort of I mean the capacity, I think. It's very difficult to know what word to use when it is fundamentally a fungus which is controlling an invertebrate for its own benefit, and it's such a complex, like how does it, yeah, I mean it boggles the mind to think how did it go about, you know, deciding I need this particular invertebrate to behave in this particular way to optimise my chances of reproduction. I mean it's kind of extraordinary. It just increasingly, you know, I think as we all get older we we become far more aware of the sort of small details in life and how there are so many more relationships at a you know infinitesimally small level that build up to this complexity we're seeing now. And I imagine it's you know one of the main reasons why you know religion was such a you know such a sort of compelling element of society for millennia because it offers that joined up, you know, solution to it, or to it all we're all lusting after from a sort of um animal spiritual perspective. And um yeah, I mean I'm perpetually amazed at how fungi have played such an integral part in the sort of history of life on Earth and how they have been completely sort of written out of it until really, you know, maybe 120 years ago, but even into this century. And I think as we continue to sort of explore from our perspective, we're exploring obviously specific compounds from a human health perspective, but I think the unfortunate reality is the tools we're using to do it are far more sort of pharmaceutical, and the the truth of the matter is, like in life, there's a huge variety of compounds in mushrooms, and the reason why a lot of the compounds in the mushrooms we grow are relevant from a human health perspective is because of where fungi sit from an uh ecological perspective. The animal kingdom, in essence, comes from the fungal kingdom. The reason we've got enzymes in our tummy is because mushrooms developed enzymes. The reason we exhale CO2, not the reason we exhale CO2, fungi exhale CO2. Um, we're far closer to fungi from a sort of uh biomechanics perspective or biochemistry perspective than we are plants. And the reason why a lot of the compounds in fungi are relevant from a human health perspective is because of the molecular structure of them being so similar to the molecular structure of the compounds that our bodies make from an immune perspective, from a from a steroid perspective, and so it's that similarity in molecular structure which is what causes the systems within our body to you know work with the compounds in the mushrooms, and so you know, from anything from like phytoestrogenic compounds from um certain types of acid that are very similar to um or have a similar shape to to steroids, basically cortisone, cortisol in that case with ganoderic acid H. And so I think um we like to try and break everything down to the you know to a finite um compound, a finite reaction to that compound. But with mushrooms, there's like 200 of them in each mushroom. We're doing a relatively competent job of extracting them, not by no means doing an amazing job, but we're doing a pretty good job. And and so it's gonna be like an entourage effect. We're never actually going to understand which compound it is that is doing this and why are people experiencing this change when they take our products. Um we've got a bit of an idea. So, for example, we had um a bunch of people that were injecting insulin a couple of years ago commenting that they were injecting a lot less insulin when they started taking some of our products, and we spoke to um Tim, who's the professor of neuroscience, uh, that our PhD works under in Bristol, and he'd been at Oxford doing diabetes research for 11 years before him. So I spoke to him, he had a cell line that they use for a huge amount of diabetes research that he got running again. And we tested three of our tinctures charger, lion's mane, and mitarki. And along this particular pathway, which is interestingly a very big pathway for a lot of mechanisms in the body, especially a lot of cancer research is done along this particular pathway. But anyway, from a insulin perspective, it lion's mane and charger doubled insulin sensitivity along this pathway, and mitarchy tripled it. So it is uh uh likely that the reason why these people were injecting less insulin, so instead of five times a day, three or something, one guy was only injecting once a day, and he'd be injecting three or four times a day beforehand, is it probably was because of the tinctures, and we probably do know the pathway under which it was operating. Um but again, we also know that this mitarchy for example changes the mucosity of the layer intestine where a lot of the insulin um transfer takes place, but it doesn't appear the other two do, so we don't actually, although we know the pathway, we don't actually know physiologically where in the body that that was actually taking place. And so I think there are things like that where we probably are going to be able to answer a few questions, but fundamentally I'm never gonna be able, and also I'm never gonna be able to sell a product and claim it does X or Y or Z, because from a regulatory perspective, mushrooms are not recognised as having any benefits from a human health perspective, so we cannot make any claims about anything. And although we do have a clinical trial running at the moment looking at Rishi with sleep, and we've partnered with a sleep app, a sleep app company. And so it's been running about three months now, so hopefully we should get some data back, you know, in the next probably the next month actually. But again, we're not going to be able to use that uh to make any claims. So, you know, even the even the the research we fund with the PhD, you know, we've been told by both the MHRA, and we recently had an inspection from the trading standards, and they're like, we you cannot talk about that. You're like, well, what's the point in funding it? You know, if we're not allowed to use it or talk about it. So I think it's uh, yeah, I mean I think um fungi on the positive, fungi will definitely be here when we're all gone. They predate us by billions of years, and they will definitely outlive us probably by billions of years as well. So um, yeah.

Arthur Cole 41:24

You've spoken about the we have to call it anecdotal um evidence here. Um we've I mean I've I know a a large proportion of people who have noticed a beneficial change for whatever reason it was, maybe energy, might be sleep. My wife really loves the Rishi because she finds herself sleeping. I think it comes down to that thing of if whether it's a placebo or not, if it works, it works.

SPEAKER_00 41:53

And the placebo does work 30% of the time. So you know, it may well be the placebo.

Arthur Cole 41:59

But uh we are also there has just been a piece of legislation passed over in the States, I believe, or at least it's going through at the moment, it's been proposed, which also looks at the um therapeutic medicinal benefits psychologically for a group of mushrooms that a lot of people would know purely on a recreational basis as magic mushrooms, but we're seeing more movement now towards the psilocybin compound in certain mushrooms being used therapeutically for various different things. Can you tell us a little bit about that?

SPEAKER_01 42:34

Yeah, so um I think what's interesting if we look, you know, potentially where psilicin originated, it looks to the best of our knowledge at the moment, we think what happened was that uh it wasn't a mushroom that made it initially, it was a bacteria. And we think back in the anals of history, potentially what happened is a mushroom was uh probably as a lot of them do, especially the psychedelic ones, growing out of some type of shit, and there was a bacteria in that shit which created psilickin because it from a molecular structure perspective, apparently it's very similar to a lot of the other compounds that um are made when you have excrement and various other things, uh, and that somehow managed to coagulate with the um secondary metabolites that the mushroom makes, and that somehow got into the fruiting body through the mycelium, and then you know, we now have this particular compound, psilicin. I mean, there are a lot of other, you know, psychoactive compounds that come from mushrooms, so you know, probably the most well-known one would be the one that was originally isolated from ergot, which is an alkaloid from ergot, which is basically LSD. And ergot is a type of fungus. Ergot is a type of fungus on wheat mainly. And so actually you can see it earlier this year, actually, there was quite a bit about on um it's like a black blackening of of the wheat, and um, yeah, I mean earlier. It's too dry now for it to be to be about. But yeah, earlier this year there was a lot more about than I'd seen for years. And there's lots of other, you know, there's there's a compound from that, which is given to um pregnant women after they've uh given birth to try and um uh basically one stem the bleeding and um sort of coagulate the blood. Interestingly, when it was offered to Elle, I'll my partner after Aubrey was born. And how Aubrey being your son, who's now two and two and a half. Uh I I she said what it was called. I was like, hang on a second, is that like from the ergot fungus? And she was like, I don't know. So I looked it up and it was an alkaloid from the ergot fungus, and these are some of the most powerful, powerful alkaloid. I mean, we all know what LSD or psilocyin can do, and I was thinking, well, that's a lot to give someone at this particular stage. And so I turned it down, or L turned it down, just because it seemed unnecessary, and obviously I'd been through this a few times before, and I'd never been offered this, and it turned out that it's you know, it is a thing that is offered in policy in certain hospitals. And I do wonder giving something that powerful to someone at that particular moment in time, I'm sure there are benefits, but any of that gets into the milk. I mean, it is one of the most powerful compounds you can get from mushrooms, and I think, you know, I'm sure it's very useful in certain regards, but I'm sure there is, there's got to be, I can't believe that that doesn't come out in the milk uh initially.

Arthur Cole 45:33

And powerful as in so powerful as a blood coagulant, but also powerful. Yeah, exactly.

SPEAKER_01 45:37

Powerful is not necessarily psychoactive, but just very good at suppressing a lot of other functions within the body in terms of the nervous system.

SPEAKER_03 45:46

Oh yeah.

SPEAKER_01 45:46

Um and I do, yeah, I did one day I decided I did a little bit of a dive into it. Yeah, I I do wonder whether or not it's having um other effects uh because you're giving it to literally after childbirth, and um a lot of those effects potentially would play out further down the line, not necessarily immediately, so you you could quite easily give it not notice anything. And with babies, you're not really gonna notice anything anyway, because you know they're just a baby, and after six or nine months, they're still not really able to communicate with you, and so you know, anyway. So we turned that down. But in terms of the psychedelic side, I mean I think what is fascinating again, if you look at all the research that was done, and far more research was done in the 1950s than has been done to date now. You know, and interesting, it was a doctor in Canada and in uh America that are the two main ones, both ironically, British. So the people that did, I think it was about 75,000 people, went through um sort of psychedelic testings in the 1950s, it was sort of stopped in the early 60s. But most recently, what is interesting is I think undeniably, for certain conditions like PTSD, for like acute depression where it just doesn't seem to react to any medication, um, having a high dose has a profound impact on people, and I think all of us that have sort of done it recreationally can entirely appreciate why that would be. I think what's quite interesting at the moment with the way it's sort of playing out, I noticed recently that the uh the Beckley Institute had uh merged with um one of the pharma companies that's making a lot of money out of uh Wegovy, the GLP one, and I think they've obviously got a lot of cash on their hands, and they've just joined forces with um Beckley and in a merger for I don't know, whatever, two billion pounds or something. And it was quite interesting. I was looking at the compounds they have in their sort of pipeline to bring through, and one of them was uh 5 ACO DMT, and this is why I find it quite interesting because a lot of the sort of mushroom tincture that's sold now in the UK is not actually mushroom tincture, it's 4 ACO DMT, which was a a um chemical synthesized previously to be used. A guy was trying to come up with a something akin to a mushroom experience, and that seems to be one of the flotilla of different compounds that that seem to have justified this multi-billion pound company's existence and merger of the Beckley Institute. And so I am 100% of the belief that it can have profound impacts on people who are suffering from, you know, especially vets. And I think one of the reasons why it's got through in the US, even in really Republican-dominated, like federal states, is because uh it's to do with the VETs, and it's one of these bizarre realities where you're actually seeing in the US a relatively uh progressive approach taken for drugs. And a lot of these are you know, ketamine, MDMA, 4ACO or 5ACO DMT, um psilicin. Um, and it's because of the fact that it does benefit so many vets who've been through brutal experiences that you're able to get this sort of coalescing from the right wing Republican side and the slightly more left-wing democratic side to actually push through this legislation. And I think if it wasn't benefiting veterans as much as it has been, I don't think this would even be happening. And so Texas was actually one of the first states to to vote it through, would you believe it? And I mean it is kind of extraordinary that some of these true red states are leading the way in allowing people access to what only 10 years ago would have been unthinkable, you know, giving psychoanalysis. The one area I'm slightly, the jury's slightly out on, I think, is well not slightly, I mean, the evidence today on um from a microdosing perspective, and I, you know, circumstantially I know lots of people who claim that it it really helped them, but it does appear some of the sort of metadata analysis that again these are using, one of them was using um mushrooms, one of them was using LSD, but again it was all self-reported on the LSD one, which was actually done in the UK, but it was a decent grouping, it was hundreds. But when you look at these four um four studies done together, it appears that you know the people that do microdose do report lower levels of anxiety, more focus, uh generate you know better sense of well-being. But the group that are on the placebo also report exactly the same, and so the belief that you're taking something, and we know that you know quite often belief is half the medication. I mean, if you look back historically, actually being able to spend, and even we know it now, just being able to talk about what's wrong with you, it's one of the issues the NHS has now that the doctors have so little time with each individual. Um, you know, being able to express to someone who is listening to you is medicine in itself. Um, we are inherently, you know, we are communal animals, and I think one of the big issues with society as it's progressing and has progressed, you know, in the last 20 years, in particular 30 years, is that we're becoming far more atomized and far less connected, and even in our health service, you know, people just don't have the time to give to people, and so you know, the ability to feel heard is quite often as valuable as whatever it is you put in your mouth, especially if the person that you feel like has heard you is giving it to you, then that is like a sort of double placebo, as it were. And so, um, so yeah, I think I think it's fantastic that it's happening. I think that how it's gonna play out is um, you know, there'll be large companies that are trying to structure the um, you know, the buying and you know and medicating and personally from you know personal experience and also from how it would have been taken, because bearing in mind in the UK at least, uh there is actually a reference in Herodotus, I believe, to um the druids in the UK. So there's very little reference, unfortunately, post-Roman about any of our sort of until sort of Culpepper in the sort of 12th century, well, 14th century Culpepper, but there's we don't really have any real uh written evidence of psychedelic use in the UK. But what is mentioned in um Herodotus is that the druids took mushrooms before battle, at least that's what he thinks, and he said that the uh they were probably interestingly, they were probably taking Amonita Muscaria, if we were to have a guess, um which may well have been the case because that we've lost that sort of relationship with our sort of past history and with the medicines of this island, and that was one of the reasons for trying to keep everything as like local as possible because people will have been using these things uh for millennia, and I think potentially what happened was sort of with the birth of um sort of Christianity, in particular in in England, um we sort of lost the uh need for understanding you know what was in the apothecary in the in the forest, because if you're told that you know there is this one all-seeing, all-knowing, kind spirit that can cure all evils and all ills, then you suddenly don't need anything else because you know, fundamentally, if you show contrition uh and you're clean of heart, you're told, you know, you'll be fixed. And so we lost, you know, what would have been thousands of years of well, at least a few thousand years, depending on how far you want to go back and you know, with the ice ages and everything else. Um, but yeah, certainly a few millennia of knowledge, and um I think it's fantastic that the psychedelic option is going to be there. I just think that it will be available in with a profit motive at heart, and um yeah, hopefully we can get back to I mean, I don't know if you can remember, I think it was in 2012, 2013 when you had all the um head shops, yeah, and you could buy fresh mushrooms in Camden and stuff.

Arthur Cole 54:22

Yeah, I was up in Edinburgh at that time, and um everything from philosopher's stones to all sorts of things going on.

SPEAKER_01 54:29

We actually had Richard, who was the um head grower at the largest um, I think they had 12 shops in the UK, and when we were starting out like a few years ago, uh he came down and he had like an ultrasonic extractor, a small one, like a 15,000 pound one, and he would bring that in, and that would that would be how we'd first do like our ultrasonic extractions. But yeah, I mean I think at the moment with the mental health crisis, I mean it's not the mental health crisis, I think is a system of a symptom of um sort of all the other systems not really um working. I think it will help people profoundly. I mean, I know from personal experience and you know the feeling you get afterwards of just how inconsequential you are, of how you know there is you are just so small in the greater scale of things. Your I your fears about your personal situation are just completely without value when you realise how everything is connected, and you are just here for an infinitesimal, and you are of no significance whatsoever. And I think that sort of ability to um give yourself a sense of place um takes so much pressure off you. I mean it doesn't change the need to pay bills and everything else, but at least you get that sort of that that genuine feeling within you that actually you're not that important, and that's fine. You know, you can be you can you can be who you are. It takes a load off, doesn't it? It takes a massive load off, and it's I think we used to get the same experience through going to church, being able to sing and be with all the people that are around us and know that we sort of had the same sort of moral values, and uh you sort of felt of place, and you know, I we we have lost a huge amount from church not really existing anymore, um, and not being able to come together and be in awe of anything or have any ritual, and I think that you know, potentially the psychedelics again it's an individual experience, so it's not quite the same, but um it will be able to relate replace certainly some of that awe that you feel, and also that that that sort of humbleness that you will get that we used to get from going to church and just having quiet moments, and um you see it's an individual experience, and of course it is.

Arthur Cole 56:59

Every every this is backed up by so many written experiences and told experiences, but they are also similar enough to suggest that there is that is a shared experience as well.

SPEAKER_01 57:12

I mean, you know, definitely if you want to talk about sort of uh you know the DMT and that sort of side of things, there definitely does appear to be a very, very similar experience when people are taking certain things which is indicative of us all not being that different. And I know we all like to think we're all remarkable, remarkably bright, remarkably novel thoughts and extraordinary ideas, but actually, you know, fundamentally, I mean I'm always reminded reading some Italian, uh, what was his name? Anyway, I can't remember his name, but um, you know, if we look at northern Europeans, if you go back, I think it's around about around about I could be wrong on this, about 11,000 years, you can trace 94% of our existences back to 10 women. And so we're really not that different, you know, in relatively, you know, near time. Like we are genetically not that different at all. And it is interesting, I think, from a genetic perspective, you can look at um, you know, all the different people in the world, but if you and the genetic variety that exists between, I don't know, uh an Aboriginal, um an Aboriginal uh Australian and I don't know, uh whatever, an Inuit, um, but there's more genetic diversity in uh a village in sub-Saharan Africa, which is ten miles away from each other than there is in the entirety of the world, because we came out in maybe three or four now different um sort of movements of people out of Africa, out of you know the Rift Valley mainly, uh, and there was not very many of them. And so, you know, in terms of outside of sub-Saharan Africa, there is very little genetic diversity, which always makes me laugh when everyone's talking about the great replacement theory or whatever, and you're like, you have no idea about genetics, mate. It's uh we are all if you want to, you know, if you want different genetics, we need to uh we need to start getting people out of Africa again. And that might might, you know, I mean, ironically enough, from potentially with any um massive uh, you know, if we have another issue with the virus that seems to affect us, I'm sure there'll be um much more genetic diversity south of the Sahara, so that's probably where the next set of humans is going to emanate from again. But yeah, I mean I think I think that there is a a human condition and we're all suffering from it. And uh and it can be beautiful and um it can be heavy, but the psychedelics offer one avenue um to make yourself feel less of a burden, and uh you know there's other ways of doing it. Pint in the pub.

SPEAKER_00 59:57

It's been a bit lighter after a couple of pints, but all of these things seem to be out of favour now. I mean at least psychedelics are coming back in. But uh yeah, so anyway, wonderful having you off here. Thanks for coming up.

Arthur Cole 1:00:08

Baxter from Bristol Fungarium. Here's to the future of the mushrooms.

SPEAKER_01 1:00:14

And fungi, and uh here's the future of um, you know, getting invited back to the nude.

Arthur Cole 1:00:32

Thank you for listening. Subscribe and tune in for more episodes from the estate every month. See you next time.