May 28, 2026
You can buy Lanmaoa asiatica at a food market in Yunnan. Cook it thoroughly and it's just a bolete. Undercook it, and roughly 12 to 24 hours later you may spend the next three to seven days seeing hyper-realistic miniature people moving through your environment — documented across three independent cultures, mechanism completely unknown. Ethnobotanist Colin Domnauer (Dentinger Lab, Natural History Museum of Utah) is one of the few people actively trying to understand why.
Colin and I get into what's actually documented about Lanmaoa asiatica — the three independent cultural accounts, the unusual onset and duration, and what the phenomenology of the hallucinations themselves suggests about mechanism. We talk about why this mushroom has received almost no formal scientific attention, what studying it would even look like, and what it might reveal about how psychedelic effects are produced in fungi more broadly. There's also a lot we just don't know — and we sit in that honestly.
🌀 Episode Show Notes and other Relevant Links
- 📚 Read Colin's Article on Lanmaoa asiatica - The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans
- Follow Colin on Instagram: @eating_gaia — where he posts research updates and mushroom photos
- The Dentinger Lab at the Natural History Museum of Utah — for anyone interested in pursuing research in the field
FULL TOPICS BREAKDOWN BELOW
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Episode Breakdown
- (00:00) Opening
- (02:35) Ad Break
- (03:11) Interview Begins
- (03:19) From Astrophysics to Ethnomycology: An Unusual Path Into Psychedelic Research
- (07:44) Discovering Lanmaoa Asiatica: The Hallucinogenic Bolete of Southeast Asia
- (13:03) Lilliputian Hallucinations: The Psychiatric Phenomenon of Seeing Tiny People
- (16:37) Seeing Little People for Days: Cultural Attitudes & the Duration of Effects
- (20:26) Delirium or Psychedelic? What fMRI Data & Eyewitness Reports Reveal
- (23:53) More Real Than a Dream: The Uncanny Stability of These Hallucinations
- (30:12) Mushrooms, Fairies & Ancient Folklore: The Deep Connection to Little People
- (32:53) Patreon Thanks
- (35:23) Is This Mushroom Dangerous? Safety Data from ~1,000 Hospital Cases
- (45:00) Hunting for the Active Compound: Why It's Not Psilocybin or Ibotenic Acid
- (50:04) Ad Break
- (51:55) Are There More Hallucinogenic Bolete Species Around the World?
- (55:03) Why Psychoactive Compounds Evolve in Nature
- (1:00:36) Future Research, a 3rd-Century Taoist Text & How to Follow Colin's Work
- (1:08:03) Follow up links and socials
- (1:09:55) Outro