Mushrooms Are Alien Mind Control Capsules (ft. Tero Isokauppila)

These mushrooms and bacteria are both ancient beings. You might think of them as a delightful addition to your tagliatelle or as a beautiful accent on top of your pizza, but did you ever think that mushrooms could actually just be aliens? If you were an alien species looking to survive for billions of years and trying to travel intergalactically without dying out, would you choose to look like a foreign invader? Or would you merge with higher life forms and affect the way they act and think in a way that promotes your survival? But let's back up, like two billion years back up. Ancient fungi emerged on Earth at least 2.4 billion years ago. This was before plants and animals even existed. In fact, were descended from mushrooms. Animals split off from fungi about 650 million years ago. A lot of pharmaceuticals use fungi, but we're also super prone to fungal diseases. So it's a blessing and a curse. For this otherworldly topic, I brought in one of my best friends, Taro Isacopla, the founder and CEO of Four Sigmatic, maybe the seminal consumer mushroom brand in the US. So I make Jesse a very simple smoothie. Filtered water, fresh blueberries, and protein powder. Taro is a very interesting guy. A fungi, some might say. We actually met while one of us was on shrooms. Adaptogenic ones, of course. So you might say fungal intelligence brought us together. We've quickly become best friends, and since then I've learned a ton from Taro on life, business, and of course, fungi. That's one of my spirit animals. A whale. They can have sex for 30 hours in a row while singing. That's pretty sweet, man. One of the trippiest things Taro has ever said in my presence that has always stuck with me was in a conversation we had two years ago with the mycologist Merlin Sheldrake, the author of the great bestselling book, Entangled Life. Not just mushrooms, but other really sacred foods tend to live in these, like the beginning of the forest life cycle, or at the end of the forest life cycle, where there's extremely nothing else growing almost, like pioneer. Or at the end of it, when there's massive biodiversity. Can mushrooms essentially act as consciousness capsules, preserving consciousness from the end of one life to the beginning of the next? Why do they show up first in the most harsh environments and after catastrophic destruction? It's almost as if they're zip files with the ability to download life before cataclysmic events, carry it through hostile environments, and reboot it elsewhere. This got me thinking about a book that I've always loved called Chariots of the Gods by Erich von Daniken. The book was released in 1968 and became an international sensation. The premise was that ancient alien astronauts came down to Earth around 10,000 years ago at the time of the agrarian revolution and taught us how to basically start modern civilization. When the extraterrestrials left some thousands of years ago, they promised to our forefathers, we will return. Von Daniken points to astronomically aligned architecture that we could never build without advanced knowledge of the stars, Mayan cave paintings depicting astronauts, and Sumerian artifacts that show the solar system in its proper alignment thousands of years before we developed telescopes. But the idea got laughed off by mainstream academia. These things were built by the men and women who lived at that time in that country. I once organized a lunch with Von Daniken that Joe Rogan attended. I had lunch with Erich von Daniken last week. Oh my god. Yes. What's the real story there? I was wondering. Mostly nonsense. Clearly Rogan was a bit skeptical too. Von Daniken might be wrong, but his book sold so well because it hit a latent, unarticulated sense that the story we tell ourselves about the origins of humanity isn't quite right. Human homo sapiens have been physiologically the same for roughly 200,000 years. So why in the last 5% of our existence, just 10,000 years ago, did we somehow just figure out agriculture, history, religion, and culture? How did this just spontaneously happen all of a sudden? Scientists might call the origin of culture something like an emergent phenomenon. As soon as we figured out agriculture, we just had more time to do other things like write things down, read, tell stories, and start culture. But does more leisure time automatically mean more culture? I'm not so sure. But there are even more unexplainable gaps in human history. The human brain literally doubled in size from homo habilis 2 million years ago to homo sapiens 200,000 years ago. Evolutionary biologists like to explain this away with a phenomenon they call punctuated equilibria. And so as to leave homo sapiens perched smugly on the top run. Eldridge and Gould called their new pattern punctuated equilibria. Okay, maybe alien astronaut theory is too crazy, but these other theories are kind of lame, just placeholder theories that don't actually say or predict anything new. They're just terms we invented to make it seem like we understand anomalous things that we actually don't know the first thing about. Here's an alternative theory. Maybe something has been guiding man's physiological and cultural evolution behind the scenes. A stroke of fungal inspiration. A spore from the heavens. Okay, I know that's a lot to digest, but if you need some adaptogenic assistance, today's American Alchemist and his company might be able to help. You have to try it. In the meantime, please enjoy this episode with my very good friend, Taro Hisakopoulos. Ahhh! Different parts of the brain have different activities. But you know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? I know that, don't you? The questions remain. This is a journey into sound. Do you think they spawned modern human civilization? They definitely were here before, they definitely have intelligence, and they've definitely been part of the story from humanity from day one. Panspermia is the idea that life on Earth was germinated by microbes from outer space. In fact, in 1973, Francis Crick, who discovered the double helical structure of DNA, decided to write a paper on directed panspermia. I'm going to take this theory one step further and say that mushrooms not only seeded humanity, but they've been guiding our evolution until today. Before you accuse me of madness, consider these three facts. Number one, mushrooms have dramatic effects on our bodies and minds. Number two, mushroom spores can travel through space. Number three, and perhaps the most important point, is that mushrooms provide a way better explanation for those questions I brought up earlier about the dramatic doubling in size of the human brain, as well as the origin of human culture. We know there's a very strong mind-gut connection. In fact, we call the gut our second brain. It contains 500 million neurons. Microbes in the gut create many essential neurotransmitters. In fact, 95% of our serotonin actually lives in the gut. And the vagus nerve communicates between the gut and the brain all the time. It's scientifically conventional and mainstream at this point to say that the microbiome has a profound effect on our mental state. But the microbiome cannot exist without a mycobiome. Everyone has fungus in their gut accompanying bacteria. If you don't think mushrooms can influence the minds of their hosts, look no further than this video. Spores from a parasitic fungus called cordyceps have infiltrated their bodies and their minds. Bullet ants in the Amazon eat cordyceps mushrooms, which co-op their brains and movements, and literally mind control them onto higher ground where a fruiting body sprouts from the head of the ants. Cordyceps can wipe out entire ant colonies. I mean, it's easy to say things in nature like that are completely autonomic. They're not conscious. But it does feel like there's some sort of intentionality around sustainability. You have slime mold sort of, if you put scat in the shape of the Japanese subway system, the slime mold can figure out a more efficient route than the actual Japanese subway system. Do we know whose agenda is it? Is it the mushrooms agenda? Is it a more holistic being? And mushrooms are the servants of that higher being? I do think that they're selfish, but at the same time they're selfish through a lens of like harmony. Next, we can look at magic mushrooms or psilocybin. Ego dissolution, which some refer to as the mystical experience. I actually think they're pretty much the same thing. One is a spiritual vocabulary, one is a psychodynamic vocabulary. We all know that psilocybin has profound effects on our consciousness and lingering ones on our thought process and neural patterns too. We know that it lowers activity in the default mode network, which is the anterior and posterior cingulate of your brain. This inhibits connections made by other parts of your brain. Reports of selflessness correlate with reports of lower activity in this part of the brain. But having had a taste of that other form of consciousness where you're not the victim of your loops of destructive thought can be liberating. Couldn't other ones, even non-psychedelic mushrooms, have similar mental effects? Four Sigmatic has served like more than 100 million servings of mushrooms to the world. There's a common theme when a new person starts to use things like chaga and reishi. Within like six months they make a major life change. Remember those bad placeholder theories that we had to explain away the stepwise leap in brain size that humans have seen over the last two million years? And the crazy spontaneous origin of human culture? Mushrooms explained both of these open questions way better. For this explanation we should again refer back to ethnobotanist and fungal philosopher Terence McKenna. He basically posited that human hunter gathering tribes a couple million years back in Africa would have to follow animal poop in order to find their prey. And what grew on this animal poop? You guessed it. Psilocybin. I believe that God left certain drugs growing naturally upon our planet to help speed up and facilitate our evolution. Psilocybin substitutes the serotonin, becomes a better neurotransmitter, activates neurogenesis. Give up your mycophobia or even your what I call xylophobia and just look at it as a serious scientific analysis. So hunter gatherers probably took a lot of magic mushrooms leading to neurogenesis, new neural pathways, and epigenetic changes in their brain which they probably passed down to their offspring. Could this have accounted for the doubling in brain size that humans have seen over the last two million years? Maybe. But what about the creation of modern culture? 10,000 years ago is really when modern history, religion, writing, and stationary living began. For answers as to why all these things popped up so quickly, we might have to look to a little book called The Immortality Key by my friend and past American alchemist Brian Morescu. Was Dionysus the god of wine or was Dionysus the god of psychedelics? Brian writes about the Eleusinian mystery rituals, sacred hermetic rituals performed by the fathers of Western civilization. People like Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Pythagoras. Brian collects a lot of convincing evidence that the psychedelic potion consumed in these rituals called the Kekion probably contained ergot, a psychedelic fungus. But here's the crazy part. Ergot is a substance that specifically infects wheat and barley. Two crops that we definitely grew in the agrarian revolution. It makes sense that we'd start consuming ergot after we started growing these crops. So maybe psychedelics played an instrumental role in the creation of Western philosophy, governance, and rationality. But Brian also mentions archaeologically excavated chalices at Gobekli Tepe, which dates back to 12,000 years ago, right before the agrarian revolution. He hypothesizes that ancient burial rituals probably went on at Gobekli Tepe, and that these chalices might have been involved in those rituals and contained ergot too. So maybe agriculture did have something to do with the origins of culture. It just wasn't necessarily the extra time that farming freed up that allowed culture to flourish. It was literally the fungus growing on the agriculture that affected our consciousness in profound ways. The fact that psychedelics or mind-altering substances have not been part of pretty much every ancient civilization would be really weird. And then there's a lot of weird connections that got washed. This is Tara's latest book. A lot of people think Santa Claus is Saint Nicholas, but it's clearly not. If you follow the roots, like how it came to the U.S. through New York, through the Dutch, the Dutch had Sinti Klaas, their own version of Santa Claus. The Dutch got it from the Germans, the Germans got it from Italians. The Italians stole the grave of Saint Nicholas, who was again Turkish. There's no reindeers in Turkey. And the Turkish then got it from the Slavics. And the Slavic got it from this semi-nomadic reindeer herders called the Sami, which are the people that live with the reindeer. So it's very logical. Some connections between the Sami people and the story of Santa Claus are the following. Christmas presents are always presented under the tree. Under the trees in Lapland, where the Sami people live, grows one of the most famous mushrooms in psychedelic history, the Amanita muscaria. That you used when you text with emojis and that you've seen many times in Mario Kart. And then this shaman or this healer would travel with reindeer to collect these mushrooms and he would ride over a fireplace. The Sami would consume these mushrooms and do a ritual of death during the winter solstice, the same time as Christmas. And they live in these semi-permanent teepees with a hole in the center. And if it snows in, which happens a lot in Lapland where a lot of these Sami people live, you might have to enter through the chimney. Not to mention the Sami wore red and white. Their shoes are pretty damn near elf shoes and they lived very close to the North Pole. And there's all these like connection points with the Santa Claus story, but fundamentally has traveled through multiple generations. It's like probably eight to ten thousand years old and at the core of it is taking a psychedelic and thinking about death. Hey, hey, hey! Merry Christmas, you filthy animals! But finally, for mushrooms to be aliens, they have to be able to travel through space, which is impossible, right? Wrong! They've actually been found growing on the International Space Station and on the Russian Mir space station. Mushroom spores are incredibly resilient. They're extremophiles that can withstand high radiation environments. In fact, an intact fossil of a 1.4 billion year old mushroom was found in northeastern Brazil. So if an alien civilization wanted to send some mushroom spores our way across space, it wouldn't necessarily be impossible. The great Carl Sagan, knowing that mushrooms could travel through space, was actually somewhat skeptical that they could travel intergalactically and remain viable. But if they hybridized themselves with higher life forms everywhere, maybe they came here on a spaceship. This was Francis Crick's top candidate for a most likely explanation of panspermia in his paper. He thought that a high-tech spaceship with blue algae, CO2, and water for sustenance could have been sent with mushrooms on board to spawn life on Earth. Perhaps mushrooms have been grooming us since day one, subtly influencing our technological progress so that we, in turn, can take them to other planets. Take a look at this passage from Terence McKenna's True Hallucinations where he recounts to the best of his abilities what the mushrooms are trying to communicate to him. Within my memory is the knowledge of hyper-light drive ships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns less forsaken. So are mushrooms guiding us to the stars? Do they want to use us as chauffeurs to help them germinate elsewhere? Maybe mushroom cosmic wisdom took root in our brains and were their best shot at a galactic hitchhike. So what the hell does all this mean? For starters, as a society we should do far more research into the mycobiome and its effect on human consciousness and performance. On a personal level, we should cut out and be cognizant of bad mushrooms like candida and mold and try to ingest more good mushrooms like chaga, reishi, and lion's mane. This is Tarot's Enforcingmatics mission. When it comes to life on Earth, fungi are the OG. They're the overlords, the landlords, and the janitors of the planet. We should heed their ancient wisdom if we wish to renew our tenancy on this rock. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. Tell me what you think. Did mushroom spores spawn human life on Earth? Are mushrooms consciousness capsules that transcend human mortality? Leave a comment and hit subscribe for more crazy content like this. Until next time, I'm Jesse Michaels and this is American Alchemy.