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Video Description
Paul Stamets is a mycologist, author and advocate of bioremediation and medicinal fungi. In this animation he describes the incredible properties of fungi as well as an overview of how mushrooms could have played a massive role in the evolution of human consciousness.
Full conversation between Paul and Joe Rogan: Joe Rogan Experience #1035 – Paul Stamets
Paul did want to issue one correction: Folks, On this broadcast, I made a misstatement. Although the divergence of basidiomycota is estimated to be as far back at 1.2 billion years ago, the fossil, Gondwanagaricities magnificus is estimated to be more than 100 million years old. “Molecular clock estimates suggest the divergence of the Basidiomycota around 500 Ma to 1.2 billion years [26] and G. magnificus establishes the earliest calibration point so far for the Agaricales, with a new minimum age of 113–120 Ma.” Source
Full Video Transcript
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, it’s natural for humans to avoid that which they don’t understand out of fear because they don’t know the difference.
Well, 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.
We separated from fungi 650 million years ago.
Maybe you did, dude.
I know some people that are probably still.
Well, basically, we are descendants of fungi.
Yeah.
We share a more common ancestry with fungi than we do with any other kingdom.
And fungi are closer to animals than they are to plants.
Animals came from fungi.
You and I are actually fungal bodies.
I’m speaking to basically another fungal body right now.
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.
And it’s really interesting that 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, you know, the universe was created about 13.8 billion years ago from the Big Bang.
The Earth coalesced out of stardust, about 4.5 billion.
The earliest records of life we have is about 3.8 billion years ago, single-celled organisms.
But just recently, in lava beds in South Africa, they found mycelium infused through the lava 2.4 billion years ago.
Now, we split from fungi 650 million years ago.
And then in Brazil this past year, they found a fully intact, apparently a fossilized mushroom published in Nature, which is a very reputable scientific journal.
And that one is 1.4 billion years old.
So the oldest multicellular organism in the fossil record today is this fungus and lava in South Africa 2.4 billion years ago.
A fully formed mushroom who had its form was growing 1.4 billion years ago.
We separated from fungi 650 million years ago.
Mushrooms have had their form longer than we’ve had our form by more than a billion years.
So think of that.
Mushrooms had their form before we had ours.
These are elders.
These are ancient organisms.
These are really the overlord underlords of our ecosystem.
And I suspect, and as these neural networks, they have more neural connections in the mycelial mass over 1,000 acres than we have in our brain.
They are actually accumulating not only genetic intelligence, but I think that as time goes on, I hope that we will be able to interface with them.
Because I think that there is many benefits of us communicating with mycelium that can give us rapid responses to catastrophia.
That’s how they’ve evolved.
And we’re now the biggest walking catastrophe that I know, walking across the planet.
And we need to engage these fungal allies for the benefits that we need to put into play in order to prevent the loss of biodiversity.
It seems like a communication gap would be very hard to bridge.
the communication gap i mean if we really did find a way to communicate in some form with mushrooms
like the concept of language like you were talking about just the idea of nature and intelligence
and these words that we have that we have these uh sort of uh concrete definitions in our head
that don’t really apply to some things that are very very confusing to us like the idea of fungal
intelligence the idea that you could somehow or another understand the language that these
things we wouldn’t we don’t even understand dolphin language right well one classic example
example japanese are so clever at this they um there’s a slime mold you know um called
polycephalum and they had a and this slime mold is very very good at navigating through
mazes and challenges i mean first of food wins the conservation of energy you know is rewarded so
so how do they set this up they like well a little bit of it they they did several experiments the
fun most fun one is they um they designed a nutrient um basically a nutrient-like maze
replicating tokyo in the japanese subway system and so they started with tokyo and they put
But oats, which is a nutritional source, they inoculated what is on this basically an agri-map with all the major cities, the nodes, around Tokyo.
And each of those nodes had a piece of oat on them, which is a source of nutrition.
The main oat was where Tokyo was.
They inoculated it.
And then they let the slime mold then grow.
And first it grew out randomly, exploratorily, you know, just like you would do if you’re a hunter or something.
You’re hunting on the landscape looking for things.
And then after about 28 hours, it reorganized itself in the most efficient way possible and reorganized the Japanese subway system in a more efficient manner than it’s designed today.
Thus, they said, not me, not Paul Stamets, this is a demonstration of cellular intelligence.
Whoa.
So this is the tip of the proverbial mycelial iceberg.
This has broad implications.
And I just want people to suspend their disbelief.
And this goes into actually the evolution of human consciousness.
And Terence McKenna was a good friend of mine.
I love Terence.
I especially love him the last five years of his life because he made fun of himself so much.
Terence and Dennis both came up with a stoned ape theory.
Now, it’s not a theory.
It’s a hypothesis.
A hypothesis is speculative but cannot necessarily be as not yet proven.
A theory is a hypothesis that has been tested and proven with facts.
So I disagree with them in saying it’s not a theory, it’s a hypothesis.
But the hypothesis of the stone ape, which I think you’ve alluded to before,
is that with climate change and as the savannas increase
and our primate ancestors came out of the forest canopies,
they’re tracking across the savanna.
If you’re a hunter, what do you look?
You look for footsteps and you look for scat.
And the most significant fleshy mushroom going out of poop in Africa, hippopotamus, elephant, deer, antelope, et cetera, is psilocybe cuvensus.
It’s a very large mushroom.
You’re hungry.
You’re with your clan.
You consume it.
And then 20 minutes later, you are catapulted in this extraordinary experience.
Psilocybin substitutes as serotonin, becomes a better neurotransmitter, activates neurogenesis.
It causes new neurons to form, new pathways of knowledge.
So that’s the stone-date hypothesis, and it speaks to a mystery that the human brain, basically the brain cavity, doubled in size in about 2 million years.
Some people say it’s less than 200,000.
Less than 200,000 years?
Yeah.
Homo sapiens arrived 200,000 to 300,000 years ago.
That’s a big gap, right?
It’s a big gap.
Well, the science is like that.
So to be scientifically accurate here, I need to show the extreme margins of what’s been estimated.
So if we accept 2 million years, and it’s been shown in the fossil record this is true, the oldest Homo sapiens fossils are 300,000 years old now.
But we have a suddenly doubling of the human brain.
And with that, our language centers increased our ability to prognosticate, to plan.
And there’s no explanation for this currently.
And even though we may not be able to prove it, I ask people to suspend their disbelief for a second.
Now, think of this.
Our primate ancestors are going across the savanna.
They ingest these mushrooms as a clan.
Massive input for anyone who’s eaten these mushrooms.
Huge amounts of data is coming in.
fractal patterns, geometrical landscapes occur. You have empathy. You have greater courage.
You’re fighting a saber-toothed tiger. One day, you have a fear of it. We know now from
neurogenesis and the extension of the fear response that has been clinically proven,
psilocybin allows you to reset and have different neurological pathways to respond to fear,
overcoming the fear of conditioned response, potentially PTSD. And there’s a lot of research
on this currently. So, but this wouldn’t happen one time with one hominid group. Wouldn’t happen
two times, 10 times. It happened millions and millions and millions and millions of times
over millions and millions of years. This leads to what I think is called, uh, that should be
called epigenetic neurogenesis. We know that there’s a regeneration of neurons. We know that
psilocybin substitutes the serotonin. It opens the floodgates of the senses. You have a lot more
data coming in, and we know that it has extinction of the fear response. So if you’re the leader of
your clan, you’ve had this traumatic event, either war or cataclysm from earthquakes, whatever the
case may be, or encounter a saber-toothed tiger, whatever. If you’re the leader of that clan and
you can overcome your fear response, you have courage and you have empathy. Those are leadership
skills. I think people should take note of it. People like to follow leaders who are courageous
and yet kind who they can trust they’ll have their best interests in mind so i think this propelled
i think it’s a lot it’s a very good explanation it’s an unprovable hypothesis but now we’re at
a junction and for the net and we’re ready for the next quantum leap in human consciousness
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Source: After Skool