Mycological Analytics, Community Science, Entheogenic Genomes | Ian Bollinger

[Music] and like I know for a fact in Japan that this is cons that amonita arear yeah David Aurora tells a great story about that of of a family stepping on Bitz and he was like what is going on and then he saw them with their bags of amonitas he's like what happened to those bit and they're like we wanted to make sure no one got those bad mushrooms and he was like those are poror chinii what are you doing well this is honestly a perfect leadin I started the timer and this is now the show cuz Ia

n started dropping knowledge so we are here we are with Ian Ballinger of Oakland hyy and many other organizations I want to say myologist chemist psychedelic philosopher Pioneer maybe Pokemon Master you know many different titles we are here broadcasting from kpca Studios and Petaluma Public Access in Petaluma Ian thank you so much for joining us in person on the mushroom hour I am blessed to share this space with you this is the first time I got to be here physically I've got to see um a couple

of our mutual friends William Pia Brown come through here Tomas come through here with Mich Zine I I'm really honored to be here man like this is a blessing in so many ways the honor is all mine that you would make the trip I'm excited for everything and like I said we rolled into the show because you were just dropping bomb so let's keep going with it I so last time we spoke we were talking about the hyy cup and that was the that was the first one it's been that long that we were talking about

the first one and obviously you guys have grown exponentially myceliated exponentially since then uh but I know you've got your hands in a couple other pots as well so give us the breakdown since that period what's going on with Oakland hyy what other projects are you started programs you're involved in so right now Oakland Hy is doing I'll tell you I'll talk about what's happening currently and then we can look back at the reflection as to where it was since the last time we were with the firs

t cup okay I like that um so we're actually doing in the midst the final bit of the data crunch like we're getting all the last bit of samples for this year's cup we used to be doing them twice a year now we're doing them once a year we announce in December we're doing a digital event this December I think it's the 19th that we're doing it and for the hyy cup maybe give the the quick synopsis of what that is because we probably have some new listeners AB I'm assuming everyone knows about the Hy

cup of course what is the cup um again talking about insular communities um uh the hyy cup is the first entheogenic mushroom competition I would argue um that we put together back in wow time flies we started this in 2021 at the start of covid wow time flies um and so the way it's worked is we've um asked people to submit entheogenic mushrooms from you know psilocybin containing mushrooms as well as ceps and extracts as well to um have them compared for potency levels and we started conversation

s around what are we talking about when we're talking about these mushrooms as far as dosage because there needs to be conversations around harm reduction and this is one of the biggest things that we've learned and gotten the support from the city of Oakland to be able to continue to pursue and been able to just like we're in a beautiful Public Access um space right now we've been able to move into a similar space for science um slope Labs is an amazing location near the airport in Oakland that

has been uh willing to house not just hi and the cup but also the center for mological analytics which is this new for lack of a better term educational platform that we've put together where we can teach people the skills necessary to go from a dried ceps like dried ceps in their hands and in a lab space go to hlc data and all the steps in between extraction analysis and then furthermore discussion about that data so getting the active compounds that are in your mushroom that kind of chemical

analysis out of your dried specimen that is the dream I know so many people would love to have that super power and be able to do that and we're our goal is to speak to a bunch of different layers of people right now I think we're speaking a lot more to the enthusiasts as far as our educational our ability to apply our educational skills but every time we teach a class we reiterate we try to add some input from the previous courses to be able to make it more accessible and furthermore we're work

ing on getting expanded out into other languages as well that's wow so you guys are getting the format you need to make this kind of like a modular class repeatable class like a template that's the Hope um the idea is again to build these communities so we've built the community in Oakland this past summer yeah we taught three courses out of this space we had I believe a total of 21 in our um students in three different cohorts um we had people who never graduated high school that are cultivator

s to phds from large universities amazing all in the same course my favorite picture is a member from the Richmond Community an indigenous uh young scientist who showed up to lab and was wearing glasses lab coat gloves processing mushrooms wearing a hat that said you are on indigenous land that is an incredibly potent symbol it was and that's everything we want to represent with our space yeah you know it's like we're trying to empower people like my goal is to have somebody be able to say the s

kills you taught me help me get a job well and doesn't that talk about the this potential of science the potential of science is like a liberating force and a a discipline we can all engage in literally does not matter at all what your background is we can all engage in this and this is the idea um behind citizen science yeah you know this idea that we're empowering people to recognize as William Pia Brown likes to say the human body is a scientific instrument yes we are I love that yeah and and

better understanding that We Are Scientists fundamentally and as I mean to to quote Rick and Morty one of my favorite quotes is you know sometimes people forget that there science is more art than science o because it's true science it wraps around it's Ora Boris you know it's eating its own tail kind of a thing like it's an infinite loop again this philosoph philosophizing kind of I just had Brit bunard pop in my head he's like science is just asking questions and there are so many questions w

e haven't asked so there yeah it is literally I love that it's we're here we are here to engage in science to examine our environment ask questions learn about it um as I like to think about uh comedians are modern philosophers um I mean who else do you pay cash money to go listen to them speak give you some truths yeah and then you get thrown out if you interrupt them that is very Aristotelian it's very and it's and and honestly and I think uh good comedy takes you to the edge of the Absurd MH

and makes you laugh at it right and it shows you the darkness in the world yeah um and I think that that's what makes a good philosopher satire has been known to really draw forth some good philosophy and that being said there's the American philosopher rest in peace Bill Hicks you know we are the universe trying to understand itself subjectively right you know um I think that was his uh his bit from uh a young man has a positive experience on assd a positive drug story whatever happened to thos

e you know it's like a positive drug stories you know on news young man discovered that we are the all energy all matter is energy condensed to a slower vibration that we are the universe understanding itself subjectively right let's do some of the positive trips well so you guys are embodying some of this like wisdom that we just laid down quoted you guys are kind of embodying with the space there at slop L we're trying to empower people because it's no not no it's k n o w not no o and I'm tryi

ng to flip the script on I'm a big script flipper kind of a guy I'm trying to flip the script on this idea of gatekeeping it's not gatekeeping the opposite side of that coin that has like a negative connotation to it the opposite side of that coin to me is Guardianship oo and that is I'm protecting the thing because it can be dangerous and I'm protecting you to make sure that when you come to the thing you have the right knowledge about it right as an Adept you must come forth and learn from som

eone who has gone before into the the unknown territory yeah it's at least a step in the direction I think is important yeah you know it's like and recognizing that you know there is an important necessar like barriers between certain conversations and certain prerequisite knowledge right there's certain levels of discipline and and fundamental knowledge you need to really engage in this process productively and be able to understand like what you're doing and why uh and we were just talking bef

ore the show that's one of the barriers I find in reading some paper sometimes and I think sometimes that's why our ideas around mushroom biology and Community ecology when it involves fungi we start getting almost magical thinking about it and I think it's because people like me people who are interested who come at this just from mology are missing some fundamental knowledge of biology and chemistry that could help demystify that and really give us a better understanding why things are operati

ng the way they are it's beautiful Because the Internet like we were talking earlier allows us to connect and find these people that are just as obsessed about this thing that we are because um I was listening to Hamilton Morris's podcast with Alan Rockefeller list recently and he gave this beautiful intro where he was talking about you know it's like I will never ask Allan how he got into mushrooms it's Obsession yeah you know it's like and we have those people that can share the wealth of that

knowledge like I have my own Obsession about the chemistry the biochemistry the genetics which I'll talk about here in a bit as well with the enogen genome Foundation the nonprofit that we've recently been able to work together with uh Vander University to get a publication out amazing all right so actually I think we can do a through line to that because I would imagine this comes out of the efforts of the hyy cup right I mean a lot of these compounds so when you guys are are putting together

this competition to analyze the active compounds and entheogenic mushrooms it's my understanding we don't have necessarily baselines on some of these compounds on where you know on chromatography and you can correct me if I get things wrong but chromatography we don't have baselines on like what the Peaks are at what times and what compound that translates to for some of these tryptamines right one of the more interesting conversations is to have with a gentleman named uh Jordan Jacobs if you're

not familiar with him he is the gentleman a second author on the publication that I'm referencing work together with Dr Dusty Rose Miller at a Vanderbilt University to work on um a zapa deorum which is uh Salas zapor which is a Central American mountainous uh salasi species okay and looked at how to cultivate it because it's not been known to be able to be very cultivated easily indoors or in in vro versus inv Vivo right and furthermore uh looking at its chemical profiles and its genetics but h

e's got some interesting things interesting things to say about wood lovers because pans Sans can tend to have some interesting Peaks that I see as well that I don't necessarily know what they are you know it's like it's showing up in this interesting range and it may play a role in Wood lovers paralysis but nobody has answers to this right now you know and back up a little bit pan pan panis cyan Essence s okay I I I appreciate you wanting me to I I do I'm going to pretend like this is for the l

isteners but this is also for me no I appreciate you I appreciate you um Panola sin Essence is also a wood loving species of of mushroom not in the soloe Gena so um genus and species saloop is the genus and cubensis would be the species zapot toor would be the species right and so then we also have like panis yes which is another species which have both um psychedelic or entheogenic uh mushrooms and non- entheogenic mushrooms okay and so you're seeing some compounds within that that you don't kn

ow how to place so I would guess it's not I believe you guys had like 17 tryptamines mapped out if I had that right right now we're pushing we have a total of about 20 compounds yeah that were currently 18 guaranteed 20 I just got in and I'm I'm lining up but those are not uh tryptamines they're for muskar and and ibotenic acid I'm just double-checking we got a new method so we might be expanding into we have we've been yeah we've been doing that I actually got a um one fresh one that I'm going

to be teaching hopefully doing an extract with the class in December that we're teaching with the center for mological analytics and so it's like the 17 uh tryptamines that we're looking at and I'm including uh beta carbolines as because they are tryptamines as well and that's a different conversation to have it's like a subset of tryptamines if you will got it um and then we including those we also have nucleotides like cypin okay and adenosine okay and then we also have the compounds that we w

ould find in amonita muscaria ibotenic acid and muskol musin is a little bit more interesting because of its structure it has a unique unique charge state to it and so it tends not to be very easily analyzable with our current method to touch back on what you said earlier we don't really have a good Baseline about what this conversation is and so this is why I love being able to work with people like Jordan Jacobs or uh our sister lab that high Labs has been working with in Colorado tript Tomic

to be able to not just duplicate our analysis on the same samples yeah but also to be able to have conversations about what is a better extraction method what is the best analysis method and then furthermore how can we make this a baseline available to people which was missing from like the Cannabis space and how can we make sure that the people that are moving into the mushroom space have the skill sets to not have the wool pulled over their eyes as scientists I've heard this that the testing s

pace in cannabis got overrun with people that were not necessarily fudging results but giving results that you know they know certain people wanted potentially um so that's really interesting you said on past episodes on how much you learn from that and actually the process you know so many people have heard about psychoactive mushroom decriminalization and it's in the collective Consciousness now and you were very clear that look the next step if we're going to do this responsibly as a society

the next step is identifying compounds and levels and being able to test it because individuals within a species obviously could vary wildly uh so it's almost like it would be nice to have this kind of testing to be widespread because you are going to have so much variation sample to sample as this kind of moves out so uh really really interesting and for again just to define a couple terms or give a little context all of what we're talking about we're talking about identifying compounds taking

a dried specimen is it all through a chromatography processor just talk about like the equipment a little bit just that overview the equipment and what the output is cuz I think some people have seen the colors the spikes of different colors on a chromatographer and and time is like a necessary dimmension at different times certain things trigger a result so give I don't want that could take episodes and episodes I'll do my best elevator pitch on it um so the biggest concept that we're going fro

m is a dried mushroom um so like we'll get our ceps fruits and we're going to break them up into as much of a similar powder as we can like we want to make the powder what we call homogeneous homogeneous make the same and so once we homogenize the mushroom into a nice powder we're then going to extract it out and in the class we do three different extraction Solutions so we can allow the people to be able to look at how each of those Solutions extract the same compounds from the same fruit diffe

rently I see that's one of those aha moments that we like to add in because it's like if you're a cultivator and you want to make a tincture or you're uh you're trying to do analysis those are two different questions that might require two different extractions and so by doing the three different extraction methods we can say oh well if our goal is to get everything out so we can analyze everything and make sure we are not leaving stuff behind in our analysis or if we're just trying to make some

thing that's human consumable interesting so there's a different extraction technique for each okay so this is evolved and you talked about baselines it is it correct to say that you know for some for these tryptamines yeah there is no Baseline so and I don't want to ask a question that reveals like well that's our secret sauce that's the whole you won't you trust me you won't you'll back me you'll back me down you'll be like no I can't tell you that but just yeah how do you go about that how ca

n you say well that's this compound when looking at a a result like that so once we have our powdered mushroom and our extraction solution what we're going to do is we're going to filter that extract and then we're going to take a very very very very small amount like three microl leers 10 Micro leers like itty bitty bitty bits of this and then we're going to inject that into what I like to think of as like a solvent River have you ever been to a water park and gone to like a lazy river yes you

know you get in and it just takes you around and eventually it takes you back to the beginning okay well if you can imagine a unidirectional one like you're at the top of the hill and you make it down to the bottom of the hill okay and then you have to walk the way back up if you want to do it again so you get in at the top and if you have an inner tube and I don't we both get in at the same time you're going to be slowed down by other people in inner tubes right I'm not I'm going to slip throug

h and that's one form of how we can separate things in in the system so we're going to inject our sample in and the compounds are going to get separated either by size or by interaction like like like interacts with like so like people in in tubes are going to bounce off of each other and they're going to interact with each other more versus me I don't have an in tube I can just slip through I see so some of these compounds you do have baselines I would imagine to be able to isolate okay some ye

ah we see we see you know this compound this compound this com this one's a mystery let's figure out you said 16 that's 1617 we're talking about when people run these uh samples on high-end instrumentation yeah they see a thousand Peaks a thousand individual compounds that could be looked at individually and we're looking at 18 yeah well what are you so you're looking at is there like a grouping of tryptamines then there is um and we're looking specifically at the ones that are typically found i

n enth theogenic mushrooms okay um because our biggest goal is to bridge the gap between research being done on depression or PTSD at like John Hopkins they're utilizing pure cybin in their research the issue is is that's hard to translate to actual fruit mushrooms um as and so our goal is to help bridge that Gap in some kind of meaningful way so it's like we can tell a person there's this many milligrams of psilocybin in your fruit or in your extract so now you know that if I consume this many

milligrams of it I will get this like I can consume 100 milligram of my mushroom right that's micro do it's not going to be oh if I took 200 well that's a little bit much and I know that because I can see how many milligrams of psilocybin it is yeah an absolutely essential element and that's why it always begs the question for me there must be institutional Labs looking at this I would imagine there are and most of the for-profit U Labs keep a lot of that information to themselves I know field t

rip was doing research on this at one point in Jamaica um I mean there's a number of can companies they're keeping a lot of stuff under lock and key because it's intellectual property um and so there's a lot of I mean I know that there are other people doing work Denver had a recent um entheogenic cup and they had 500 samples come in and they tested theirs and they put all the data out for Public Access that's the way like that's this is what needs to be available because somebody that's going t

o go somewhere in Denver or wherever these people are getting the mushrooms from need to know oh if I get this from this person like if I get a um ape I'm not going to say the full name cuz Public Access um but you're welcome if I'm going to get an ape it's going to be far more likely to be highly potent and I would want to take less of it compared to something that's like a golden teacher which is very much of a typical potency and that's somewhere in the realm of about like seven milligram 6 m

illigrams per gram yeah and if you think about that okay well if I have something that's six milligrams per gram I'm going to take uh I'm going to take about 100 milligram of that yeah that's somewhere in the room with like one one and a half milligrams of psilocin right there yeah and that's the ideal starting point that's a good micro do that's a good entry point and that's kind of what we built our High Spectrum for the high cup these different categories are buckets by which we can talk abou

t use there's people that might want to get into micro doing they don't want to ever macro dose their micro do you know there are people that just want to go to museum or a concert and enjoy themselves but they don't want to question Universal math yeah I think there is an element of that the Cannabis industry pushed us to let's get the highest amount of whatever the most psychoactive compound is and I love that you guys I I've used that so many times talking about the hyy Spectrum like flip thi

s hierarchy on its side and let's look at everything for its own properties and not try to create like a Primacy or a supremacy of one of the other uh so I think that's very interesting and of course course the context of this as you've already laid out is all safety and responsible use as these things get more public I mean you can't go anywhere now without hearing someone talking about micro doing you bring up the word mushroom it's like some P some middle-aged mom You' never expect is like al

l over it so this is really important to have this be the center of the conversation if we're going to do this responsibly literally um I know there was a showing of our data that we produced on Dr Phil there was I saw that yeah yeah yeah it made me so happy moms who micro do I think was it um but that being said also we've discussed about the Spectrum from the entheogenic side we also are talking about things from the cep side yeah um there's a conversation to have about dosage use categories u

m and sometimes there is something to be said for levels of of cypin so we have a theoretical spectrum that we've based off of number of Publications that have done work on you know people consuming ceps mushrooms in specific quantities according to specific regimes and there are cases of increased you know aerobic activity so being able to in be able to hold more air in our lungs and not feel exhausted this is the 1990 women's Chinese track team Olympic story that got corep so famous in the wes

tern world yeah and so our our preliminary spectrum that we've been working for ceps is something that it's not relased yet we're still we're going to be talking about it um in this December um and releasing that information out to the public because it's a again just like the original Spectrum for uh cubensi or for uh entheogenic compounds was hopefully a conversation starter I'm not claiming that this is it I'm claiming that this is where we should at least start the conversation I think that

there's some used categories that we can talk about um sometimes you just want to have um aerobic capacity but sometimes you also want immuno activity you want incre immune response being able to handle things better if you're getting sick and there is certain research that's been done with ceps in that way as well and so we're increasing that information putting that information out there and this is something that we want to be able to tie back together based off of we're taking research just

like we did with the John's Hopkins research tied it to quantifiable data yeah and then brought this information to the public saying we're not saying this is the This Is The Answer we're saying this is a place where we can start this is a nice intersection of experience and data that we can at least provide for the community and I think that's the goal of not just what we did with the cup but also what we're trying to do with because I mean High Labs help found the center for mological analytic

s and and what we're trying to teach people it's like the Next Generation like the people came into the Cannabis industry as a scientist that's what I started at I didn't know I had no experience working with a plant because you can't get experience working right you know unless you're doing it illicitly it's federally regulated yeah and so because there are spaces where there has been decriminalization there are spaces for us to be able to offer people the opportunity to get exposed to this sci

ence and that is the idea again like if somebody can say you know I got a job because I took the course I learned something in this course that gave me the knowledge and the confidence in my ability to be able to say no I can do this I know what's the best to use in this instance I oh we're making a tincture your company's making a ceps tincture I can tell you I've done the work I've got first principal data you know it's not just theoretical you know and that's the idea is to empower people it'

s that teach a man to fish you know it's like 100% And this is the teach a person to fish is the community it's like you're teaching your community these skills so our idea is education no not no and this is empowering on a lot of levels because we're looking at Lion's man as well there's a number of different groups that are interested in answering some of these questions that you know sesquiterpenoids what a fun word but it's just uh it's it's it's um it's a fun thing to think about it's like

all of these compounds we talk about flavonoids or tpen tpin right and these are the things that we're just now talking about in cannabis like we're just now it's like oh it took us 10 years to get here but we're finally having this conversation thankfully people are also having this conversation about mushroom tpin Y and this is something that we need to play a role because honestly and this is something Alan Rockefeller is a genius for pointing out that some of these mushroom tpin are inhibito

ry to the experience that you might have on enens and the same is true about um inhibitory of cordyceps well and I've heard we had Robert Rogers on the show years ago now but he talked about tpin as being critical to uh raising the immune response of HK cells HK white blood cells remember lening in the body which I thought was fascinating because we hear so much about immune boosting immune boosting these mushrooms are immune boosting walk around the grocery store that's like mushrooms are immun

e boosting it's like what how are they boosting immun system it's like uh this is an antioxidant this is an antioxidant it's just like what is it yeah but like what is it doing to do that and so it's interesting to hear about yeah there's the primary metabolites just fancy sugars that break down into pie our white blood cells can use to build more but then the chirpin is the secondary metabolite as oh this raises the vigilance response of HK cells super super interesting it's beautiful because u

m again dose dependent responses there's something to be said for stimulating our immune system not getting sick yeah but stimulating it in a way as if we were sick kind of a thing it's not like you're not getting the illness cuz you have something producing compounds but you're introducing these things that stimulate these systems just like a muscle you gain better muscle by working that muscle by stimulating that the same is true about thinking as well you obsess about a thing you get better a

t that thing to tie it kind of back together you know as above so below as within so without so these lessons that we can learn from mushrooms can also translate to our own life lesson well I'm thinking about it I mean what you guys are doing is yeah this is kind of the future because so much of when you think about the medicinal space and I talked about all the store shelves How many of these companies are really testing their compounds you know you go to that wholesaler bringing in mushrooms f

rom overseas which is understandable because a huge portion of mushrooms are grown overseas uh specifically in China and it's like do we have the QC do people have the chemical analytical capacity to say is what you're giving me what you say how potent is it really and I mean that's going to be so important I already it's hard for me now to take medicinal supplement stuff seriously just because once you learn enough you're like I don't know that you really verified any of this so this would seem

to be the next step not only we're talking about safety in using ethens but for the commercial element of using mushrooms as a medicinal or as a supplement needs this to kind of reach legitimacy specifically like there are people that are in the Lion's main space again that are trying to push these conversations forward because there are some people that are like I'm only producing a a water extract I'm doing an alcohol extract I'm doing a combo dual extract I'm using a socklet extractor I mean

all of these different methods or means of extraction that people are choosing to choose the go down the paths we are still in the infancy of again remember that 18 compounds versus a thousand unknowns we're literally in the very similar space with Lion's man and cordyceps like there there is so there are so many unanswered questions and so much loow hanging fruit yeah but the issue is is there's not real big money in science like I'm praying for the day that Alan Rockefeller gets a private inv

estor that like like an oldw world like Renaissance Patron which just like here's a million dollars every year build a lab fund a team make it work for 10 years you know it's like that would be beautiful because I know whatever comes out of that is GNA be hint hint to all the angel investors listening if there isn't one already going that should happen right um and that being said it's just like looking at other people in the space like um you could talk about you know private companies investin

g into individ into into individuals I think that's important because now that individual while they're funded privately are able to still do their own thing well and this is interesting because this has such a tangible output I would think for a profit-driven investor driven like we have thousands of compounds we're staring at that we don't know what they are don't you want to know what this I mean the next level of bioprospecting is here and you could be a part of have you guys ever thought of

that with hyy Labs I mean I'm sure you've thought of it but has that what's been the conversation around that so hyy Labs has always been centered around providing data for the cultivator and the individual center from mological analytics is going to be the space where we want to reach down and do this like vetting like uh the there's papers that come out on mushrooms we want to be like okay well let's look at the methods that we're teaching people and the methods explained in this paper yeah l

et's do a side by side and then let's actually say oh well our method is better at getting these compounds out than these compounds or their method is better at doing this one thing like less time less solvent waste you know it's like these are interesting things that we're trying to bring together in inform conversations around with the center for mological Analytics iy Labs is very much centered around providing the data to the people that is accessible and necessary not many people care about

these bosy noroy these psilocybin like compounds that are in um entheogenic mushrooms people really like they are geared to only care about just like with cannabis THC and it took a long time for the conversation to expand to these other compounds our hope is to just because at a base level we do that like we give everybody the full profile of everything that we're testing we're not like oh you have to you know selectively pay more for that full profile no you get everything upfront because tha

t's important to dosage like understanding it's like oh well if we think about these psilocybin like compounds if they don't have an entheogenic effect which is what is science is showing yeah they can interfere with the breakdown of the entheogenic compound they replace I see like the mono aing oxidase is going to look for psilocybin like compounds well it's going to have if it has three options of nor bosy and bosis and zybin it's going to select each one even mono immun oxidase is getting fil

led up with yeah interesting it's the mucking up the gears right and so having amounts of those other compounds at bare minimum play a role in that yeah and I mean that's again it's like we're talking about something that is far more complex yeah than we're again infancy of this but maybe a process that is kind of integral to the experience of your micro do and your medicinal experience so yeah a lot of conversations to be had around that I remember I asked that in our last interview uh to you a

nd Tomas and Reggie like do you guys think there's a cohort effect with other compounds in the mushrooms you're like yes of course of course that's the case but we don't fully understand that and that's part of this work so yeah talk a little bit about then this offshoot the center for mological analytics uh and I just butchered the name you didn't that's it that it that's it mical analy yeah it's it's a long it is a tongue twisted we call it SEMA SEMA CMA SEMA for short yeah okay Center for oka

y perfect yeah yeah how did the center come together Who's involved in that is it like the whole Hy crew or yeah talk about that um so Reggie Emily Davis um and myself founded it Emily and I are the instructors and the board right now we are working together to we've taught classes in Oakland um we are working to start teaching these classes around um we're trying to get funding to be able to support an instrument that we can bring into other communities both to teach around and to show people l

ike if we can build a space for you with this kind of instrument we will teach your people how to do the work and now you can provide the data for your community kind of a thing like building these spores in different communities decentralized Network yeah testing our goal is to create like this network of education and platforms of people that have learned how to do this and that there's space that is educational like in decriminalized spaces we're talking to groups in Detroit um to hopefully b

e able to bring this there um our goal is to hopefully expand out to places like Portland where that's going to be needed like there are people that are going to be working for labs out there that would benefit greatly from having the skill set at least having at least a baseline of what the conversation's around and as places decriminalized we want to be able to help inform and educate the communities there as to what testing could look like so you're informing people in the communities where d

ecriminalization has happened so these substances psychoactive mushrooms are out there you're informing them getting but then you're also training a generation of analytical chemists I mean that's so cool for people have chosen the professional track already they like well I really want to get into this but yeah I there's no way I can work with it boom suddenly they've got an Avenue but then on the other side to flip the script you're also going to be teaching people who are like I have no inter

est in being a chemist but I love these mushrooms I'm a cultivator I've been working with ceps for the past year and a half and I've been making this food product out of this one thing I want to know is our food product actually have active compound in it right and then suddenly they're like I am an analytical chemist now I love this so cool and it's beautiful because um the group that we worked with U melio Mass which is based out of slope Labs yeah um they are working on a um different product

s like different ceps based things that are all ceps like entirely just different parts of the ceps and those different things that they make they're they can now test like we can they have the space we've taught the people how to do it we can work together to make sure it gets on the instrument the analysis happens we can discuss it and now they have an informed process there are other people that are doing this as well through high Labs that are informing like their entire products are informe

d by the data that we provide and that's the idea is we're trying to grow Community knowledge and Empower people people to it's like you're a cultivator and you would to understand how to read the report well we'll help you make one yeah and in that process you'll learn how to read it for any of us who see the potential both in entheogenic mushrooms as medicinal but then mushrooms more broadly again this is the key piece I feel that is missing is like all right this is now legitimate we've done

testing we know what's actually going on we can tie those compounds to effects instead of kind of marketing puffery you say my Celio Mass my brain gets triggered is Seth involved in this or any team from apply mology I so I know there's two people I'm not sure the history of these things I know there's two people that I can speak to that are directly involved um Mario giaba yes okay Mario was doing stuff with bam as well okay yeah yeah and then heart singer and Har is shout out heart heart is a

blessing and a hardworking of a of a bioinformatician he's a lab scientist that does teaches DNA barcoding has learned taught himself how to do high-end DNA barcoding works for this amazing uh group called fundus The fungal diversity survey who has he's allowed me to work with them as well it's been beautiful to be able to support some of their bioinformatics work but Hart is one of those people that has supported you know Mario melio Mass enome like he's just an amazing human being and I just w

ant to give him a huge shout out huge shout out to Heart huge shout out to fundus we've had them on the show before what an amazing organization and always what's in need is more chemistry more people who can practice the chemistry if we're going to discover new mushrooms if we're going to find out I mean 2.5 million species do you think we've mapped out a fraction of what is in any of these mushro so blessed to be able to speak to I I hope I'm not butchering his name because it's a very fun spe

lling um Scott ostuni oh out of Florida um just recently discovered a new species of cocy incredible yeah and and I mean Allan's doing it left and right I think he's got he makes it look easy people think like I'm going to discover a mushroom cuz he did like well and and and it's just one of those you know Scott was observing that you know it looked like I think I think he were saying looked like salosa natalensis but when they ran the DNA on it it did came out as a completely different uh speci

es and so they're like oh well we need to do this thing so he worked together to get funding and got funding to support its full genome through the enen genome Foundation which is a nonprofit that I've helped work with with um Victor mosty from Mexico as well as a Jason slot at Ohio State Alan Rockefeller and a Cain Barlo in Australia who's an amazing human being if you're not familiar with Kane and Alistair I will see if I can't get you in touch with him that's a fun conversation well you're it

's funny you're laying out this ecosystem of people that I hadn't heard of yet that are like core figures in mapping out I mean I would say the genetic conversation the entheogen conversation I mean what what I talked about a few years ago on the mushroom hour is like oh there are these Community science groups that are going to come up and support I don't want to say surpass but support or directly collaborate with institutional science and all the professor side had spoken with they're like ye

p totally we see it it's already happening about Happ prophesied it friend like you saw it well I I listened to what smarter people were saying which is a gift um but yeah that's amazing to hear that this is it's happening m and I mean I'm very very very thankful we've done enthum has done two trips down to Mexico um where we've invited people together to go out and do wild forages with the community down there so it's just as many International members we try to bring in uh local uh community m

embers as well and our goal is to not just go out and find these mushrooms but do DNA work on them as well amazing and um one of the things that we're very thankful for Dusty rosem Miller Jordan Jacobs Hart myself Alan Rockefeller Dr Jason slot were all able to I don't that's not even the full list I don't believe were able to work together on a publication specifically on slos zapo deorum um which was supported by the enen genome foundation's full genome that we were able to run to support them

like that's the thing it's it's beautiful to be able to get this data out there in a public good you know to make this available and and some of the insights that were getting you know I could talk about all of the different fingerprints that are different amongst you know zapo torum is close to Mexicana but they're different than cubensis um tampanensis which comes from Tampa is closer to Mexicana than it is to cubensis you know it's like and there are interesting fingerprints and that's just

having to do with the gene clusters that are associated with entheogenic the philogyny of cilos and there's and I even look at other species so we talked about panis yes um that has its own unique fingerprint which is different than gymnopus which is another entheogenic containing mushroom all of these in agaricales you know which are agaricus basically any uh B any amonita like mushroom okay for all intents and purposes for interestingly enough I don't know if I mentioned this before one of the

most interesting things about these entheogenic compounds um musim or mushrooms you know muskol tinic acid musin all of those mushrooms that have that that's a very large family of mushrooms Genetically speaking are the ancestors of all of the mushrooms that contain psilocybin no way so all the mushrooms that contain psilocybin that we're aware of right now lost um muskol and ibotenic acid production at some point genetically historically and then develop something else instead that's insane so

they said we're going to produce this alkaloid called tryptamine uh instead of we're going to lean on this this novel compound that we found instead of this other thing you know like that's insane I've never heard that it's that that was mapped before me that was that before me this is already extant knowledge yes that was actually the first thing that uh I did my first blog post on for critical consulting which is uh the blog that I did understanding entheogens for a little bit um and that was

the first thing that I put out was just looking at this paper and trying to like distill this very weird complex phog gentic paper into a tldr too long didn't read you know yeah and that's the tldr is the amonita the agaric that contain ibotenic acid of musal eventually evolved into the mushrooms today that contain psilocybin that's insane I don't know how I haven't heard this before I've talked to Kevin feny who wrote Fly grick I've talked to people about so no one's it's in the weeds it's ver

y much in the the Weeds on the genetics and there is unsung heroes doing this science that have not emerged yet from the melal underground why I had to shout out heart singer yes you know I mean the the the colony of people just doing this work and putting out results and so I mean there is a key role then in translating it and it sounds like I mean Oakland hyy is kind of that translation to the masses the events that Reggie puts on are undeniably the most diverse and the most Community oriented

um the conversations we're bringing in people from high level conversations we're blessed to have the the Shan Foundation come talk at some of my panels but we were also blessed to have people like shumy walkabouts you know Tony Alvarez come and and and um deol hongos U Rob Lopez come and talk as well like both sides of the community there are coming in like you know the the hippie burning man um shulan Farm Folk are also coming in and meeting the let's walk in nature forage folk and those are

the people that are coming together I mean that's one of the things I love about Rob is every time you know Rob and Tomas go out foraging or I go out with them too it's like it's always a community meal yeah like it's never not a thing that was funny hearing tomas's story he's like I wasn't even about this foraging and now I am like this is my new what I am addicted to this is my path so I love that I love that it's grounded in community but then you've also you have taken ownership of kind of s

ome of the more deep analytical chemistry education so we've only got a few minutes left but what is next directionally for you I mean this is already a lot of irons on the fire to keep these and grow these Concepts so is it just pour more into this is there any other little pet projects you got Brewing or anything else you want to share the biggest thing that I'm going to be pouring into for 2024 yeah is going to be um Center myological analytics um teaching courses we're going to continue to t

each out of Oakland probably going to be teaching in in the summer and the fall we're going to be trying to teach in other locations next year as well so again working in Detroit during summertime I think we're looking at May right now tentatively um we'll if you're interested um Center for mological Center foric analytics.com is uh the website you can find out more information about that the enen genome Foundation we're going to be doing a number of different Publications um but we are currentl

y actively looking to produce another research station so we do research stations down in Mexico and we've done popups where we literally do DNA barcoding in the jungle like oh solar powered battery powered starlink internet you know in a rainstorm it's beautiful it's gorgeous and it's Community Building we're going out on and if you know anything about Alan Rockefeller man goes hard in the paint when it comes to foraging like you will lose him or he will spend 3 hours in one spot taking 500 lay

er of of a single mushroom um and so an theen genome foundations um we're going to be doing research stations where we're going to be inviting in members of the community to come with us to certain locations this year I believe we're going to be talking about um looking at working with our friends in Australia for station two station one has been centered in Mexico okay and station two um is likely going to be centered in Australia because there's a number of different um I'm gonna I believe the

correct term is Polynesian species okay Solas woa is uh from New Zealand and it's an interesting species because there are people there that specifically state that if you consume enough of this you will get wood lovers paralysis every time wood lovers paralysis which is a whole thing that's associated with entheogenic mushrooms where you're in a in a psychedelic State yeah but you're inable to physically move and we have no idea what compound is doing it we don't we have no idea and so our goa

l is with this research station is to get a better understanding of the diversity of different fungi that are uh entheogenic in the in the Polynesian area specifically based out of Tasmania initially because weoa occurs throughout the Polynesian area but centered in New Zealand um but then there's also sub arenosa and all these other different wood mother species like aleni or cyanin which are very likely sub of sub aragosa according to one gentleman who's based out of Australia's research who w

as going to lead a lot of this discussion and of course you guys picking you know Islands in Oceania is the spot for fun I had an interview with Brian Perry who talked about that his career spanning those islands and what was left to be discovered super exciting so we've only had a couple minutes left for kpca listeners for podcast listeners you know Ian you know Oakland Hy for kpca listeners highly recommend you check out their work if mushrooms especially the idea of Psych adelic mushrooms Pea

ks are interest at all to me this is kind of the bleeding edge of this community conversation of the science as well around this so definitely go check out Oakland hyy Center for mological analytics but for Ian as a wrap up what has this journey been like for you because when we first spoke I don't know if you were LinkedIn with Alan Rockefeller going to research stations in Mexico so to turn from kind of chemist to now you're embedded in like culture and doing exciting it what's that been like

uh surreal I can honestly say that like I remember watching um people like listening to Dr Carl Hart on other podcasts and then having him come up to me after a talk in Minnesota at big pses uh uh psychedelics event where we were able to present after I gave my presentation he come up to me to talk to me about it and it was mindboggling to have somebody have that kind of input and and then taking it to heart you know I mean pun unintended um but listening to what he had to say and and really doi

ng my best to embody the different perspectives it's been surreal to meet people I never thought I would meet and to be able to have them know who I am and have respect for the work I do my hope is to build a framework for people to feel as empowered yeah as I've been able to feel which is why I'm blessed to sit across from you in this gorgeous space this community-built space that I've seen you grow from you know it's amazing to see I met Reggie he sat next to Tomas at a decrim nature meeting t

hat I convinced Tomas to go to back when I was still working in the Cannabis industry and it's been a roller coaster ride from Jamaica to the cups to seeing companies rise and fall from the work that we helped build to us succeed in the ways that we have been yeah and then I mean I know Reggie's currently in La in Las Vegas right now at remind talking to people again it's like it's a it's a roller coaster ride to see the people that the community that we've uplifted Tomas yeah to see my my my br

other go from I convinced to go to this meeting to now having the MOs Zine yeah you know it's surreal yeah to see Community grow to literally sit across from you again I remember when we were doing something similar to this in the back house you know it's like something to be said about watching each other grow yeah and sticking around for it like I'm on I'm on everything I'm on B time like I'm on extra time right now I feel like I'm blessed to be able to be alive in this moment and blessed to h

ave been able to accomplish the things I've been able to do but I I stand on the shoulders of giants you know it's like and this is the biggest thing that I want to uplift people on my shoulders next what a beautiful message and mology is such an amazing space to find people doing just that and giving deference and appreciating those that came before and to steal a little wisdom from will Pia's last interview to work with people from the past and in the future consciously building something it's

an amazing thing to be a part of and it is my great joy to get to speak with people like yourself Ian thank you so much for coming on the mushroom hour love it and appreciate it [Music] friend [Music]