Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1035 - Paul Stamets
Uploaded: 2017-11-08T03:20:07.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1035 - Paul Stamets' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-11-08. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1035 - Paul Stamets' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2017-11-08. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1035 - Paul Stamets

and we're live all right paul first of all welcome thank you for coming here
and you are
probably one of the most requested people uh from the internet that i've ever
had so feel good about
that i'm honored and you're the first guy ever to wear a mushroom hat okay that's
really a hat made
out of mushrooms yeah it's made from this amadou mushroom um it's called foamies
fermentarius it
grows on birch trees throughout the world but this is an example of why i think
shamanistically
uh plants mushrooms become significant there's a plurality of benefits so this
mushroom is a fire
starter mushroom it allowed for the portability of fire there's no doubt that
we came from africa
we migrated north we discovered something new called winter oops this allowed
for the portability
of fire you can hollow this mushroom output embers of fire inside and carry
fire for days if your clan
could not rekindle fire in europe in the winter time you would die so when you
this hat is actually
made by some ladies in transylvania can i feel that yeah and it's a hard wood
conch oh wow but when you
soak it in lye water you know ashes and water it delaminates into this fabric
whoa let me feel that
it's very soft it's also called german felt wow it's extremely flammable so it
revolutionized warfare
because during napoleonic napoleonic times this is the the punk that ignited
gunpowder
really even the chinese invented you know uh the chinese invented gunpowder the
europeans invented the
rifle so this allowed flint spark guns to ignite the gunpowder this feels
amazing it is it's how big a piece
can you get that's a great question depending on the size of the conch on beets
trees are much bigger
than birch these trees just naturally get larger so the larger the conch the
the more fabric you can
tear but this mushroom is made of mycelium and basically that fabric is a
cellular fabric called
mycelium and this is it's i have actually i have one that caught on fire
because somebody was smoking
a joint near me and uh the and the embers of the joint got on my hat did it
just immediately go up
no it burns really slowly so it's a fuse oh it's fantastic for delayed
explosions it's because you
can light this thing and beekeepers for hundreds of years use this for smoking
the hives of bees
because it's uh it's just we could we could light it now i mean the whole thing
with one flick of the
bick and this thing will smoke entirely in about 10 minutes and turn nothing
nothing into white ash
wow your fire alarms may go off though yeah probably yeah and so with this
thing this larger piece they
would hollow this out put an ember in there would they have to have to blow on
the ember as they
hiked well you could blow on a little bit and you cap it and then you can put
it in your pocket the
famous ice man that was found in the border of austria he had this tethered to
his right side which is a
a position of significance you know things that you need like your knife you
know and things that
you want to make sure you have right-handed you this on the right side so there's
a this one example
is we have a thread of knowledge of use of mushrooms that goes over millennia
and most of
those threads have been frayed or broken in the in the chain of knowledge but
this is one of the
threads that was not broken and it's significant i think it's we were much more
dependent upon
mushrooms and when we were forest people than we are now seemingly in the
cities but
it's coming full circle very quickly well mushrooms are weird in that some of
them are incredibly
edible and nutritious and other ones will kill you and sometimes they look
really similar to each other
well this is the mystery of mushrooms and i think it speaks to also mycophobia
the fear of mushrooms
not r gordon wasson first coined that term but when you think about it in your
visual landscape with animals
you see them for months years and plants so you have a familiarity factor but
mushrooms that come up
and disappear in four or five days some of them can feed you some can kill you
some can heal you
some can send you on a spiritual journey so to have something so powerful and
yet so ephemeral
uh it's natural for humans to avoid that which they don't understand out of
fear because they don't
know the difference but you know 23 primates consume mushrooms humans being one
of them and so that
speaks to a long ancestral use of mushrooms going back you know in our primate
evolutionary tree for a
very very long time what how many species of mushrooms are there you know that
you asked me that question
five years ago i would have said 1.5 million and now we're up to about five
million is being is being
estimated whoa plant fungi outnumber plants uh five to ten to one um and i just
you know i you know i
speak at ted and i've gone to these ted conferences but it's shocking with the
smartest brains in the world
not until just recently did they realize what us mycologists have known for a
long time
30 percent of the soil mass when you're walking on soil the 30 percent of the
biological carbon is fungal
and the biggest biggest whoa whoa whoa whoa say that again 30 percent 30
percent of soil is fungal mass
living and dead of healthy soil so and this is the biggest repository of carbon
in the world
uh in the ground is related to these fungal networks so there is about 8.3 to
about 10 million species on
the planet about right now about half of those are fungal species the outnumber
plants uh up to eight
to one ten to one by by some estimates a really nice interesting metric and one
meter of a tree root
for every meter of a tree root there's a kilometer of mycelium now think of
that three feet versus
2200 feet so that that the extensiveness of the mycelial network in our
landscapes is vast
and it's a it's a it's i call it earth's natural internet this is a these are
membranes that are literally
sensitive i think they're sentient they respond to every footprint that we take
on this planet
and as you walk across landscapes you're breaking wood and that makes new
nutrition available so the
competition of fungi to find that new new nutrition is fierce and so first to
the menu wins uh so this
is something that we are now understanding how essential they are for
preserving biodiversity and
for the health of the ecosystems as well as our own personal health so when you
say you think they're
sentient to to what degree i mean and you're not talking about just like psilocybin
you're yeah yeah we're kind of intellectually provincial in that we are using
language and
we've entered terms in order to describe concepts that we're trying to we're
struggling with so the
let me describe it this way that we separated from fungi 650 million years ago
maybe you did dude i know
some people that are probably still well basically we we are descendants uh of
fungi yeah um we share a more
common ancestry with fungi than we do with any other kingdom and fungi are
closer to animals in the art of
plants animals came from fungi you and i are actually fungal bodies i'm
speaking to basically another fungal
body right now so joe rogan i mean whether you know it or not you you're
basically a fungal mass
and from a cellular point of view under the microscope human cells animal cells
and fungal cells are very
very similar we exhale carbon dioxide we inhale oxygen as do fungus as the
fungus does we separated from
fungi basically we chose about to encapsulate our nutrients in a cellular sac a
stomach digesting our
nutrients within the fungal systems digest their nutrients externally they
exhale oxygen inhale carbon dioxide and
um their network like design allows them to respond to catastrophe and what i
mean by that is that
the mycelial networks they're so dense in the soil and they have literally
hundreds of billions of tips
and as these tips are growing out they tend to be polynucleate at the tips and
it allows them to
upregulate new enzymes acid sequences etc so if there's a new ecological
challenge a new food source
a new toxin or something the these fungal networks are so uh have great plasticity
and being able to
code for new sequences from their dna so all you need is one of those hundreds
of billions of tips
to find a new enzyme to break down a toxin or a new food source and what
happens then is that information
then is incorporated genetically into the mycelial network and the mycelium
then surges because it has
new food logically and so when it surges then creates a new uh what's called a
sector of mycelium
we now know there's evidence that the mycelial network then that it benefits
from that tip exploration
and discovery so these are like massively resilient adaptive organisms um that
have a network-based design
not dissimilar from that of our neural networks not dissimilar from the
computer internet and more
and more that i explore this the more i'm convinced that we will find network-based
organisms throughout
the cosmos probably uh fungal systems and fungal systems uh ultimately give
rise in our case animals
and it's more likely we'll find fungal animal relationships all all throughout
the universe do you
think that there's some unknown way that animals are connected in some sort of
a similar way as well that
if if animals came from fungus and fungus has this incredible way of
communicating with each other
do you think that there's something like that with it in the animal kingdom
that we haven't discovered
well um that stimulates my thought into and uh um talking about the microbiome
the mycelial landscapes
networks they don't live live by themselves they select a microbiome of
bacteria and other organisms
that rest upon the mantle these fungal networks are the foundation of the food
web
well similarly um we have a microbiome and it's really interesting that the the
many of the bacterial
diseases that infect fungi also infect us our best antibiotics against bacteria
come from fungi
penicillin being the obvious example but we have found now doing next gen
sequencing and this has never
been published before that the mycelial mats growing in the very same uh wood
chips in our case that have
been fermented we had a thousand fold difference in the relative abundance of
genera of bacteria
from the very same wood chips two different mushroom species planted on those
wood chips and the microbiomes
that were created and selected for by the mycelium were vastly different this
really strongly supports
the concept this is the hypothesis with quickly becoming a theory i'll explain
the difference in a
minute but this really supports the concept that i've long believed and espoused
that these mycelial
networks are not just happenstance they are just they're creating the habitats
and the flora and then
ultimately the fauna um that are resident within the ecosystem to guarantee the
plurality and the
biodiversity of the ecosystem by creating the plants that grow up that feed the
animals the insects to
create the debris fields and then feed the mycelium for the benefit of the progeny
of the mushrooms
that'll form thereafter so these are deterministic organisms that are setting
the stage for ecological
evolution and you think that they're doing this in a conscious manner well see
again we're a victim of
our consciousness trying to define what is conscious and what is smart and one
of the best arguments
i've had my brother bill is a super genius is far smarter than myself and he
was editing one of my
books mycelium running how mushrooms can help save the world and and he goes paul
you cannot say that
mycelium is is intelligent and then you can't say nature is intelligent i go
wait bill i respect you
but you didn't realize the hypocrisy of the statement that you're giving me you're
telling me
nature is not intelligent and yet you are born of nature using the mind to
conceive the concept to
challenge the idea that nature is not intelligent when you are part of nature i
rest my case yeah
that's that's indefensible so yeah so we're you know we