#1035 - Paul Stamets

Joe Rogan (0:07)

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 from the internet that I've ever had. So, feel good about that.

Paul Stamets (0:17)

I'm honored.

Joe Rogan (0:17)

And you're the first guy ever to wear a mushroom hat. That's really a hat made out of mushrooms?

Paul Stamets (0:22)

Yeah, it's made from this ommadoo mushroom. It's called Fomis fominteria, so it grows on birch trees throughout the world.

But this is an example of why, I think, shamanistically, plants' mushrooms become significant. There's a plurality of benefits. So this mushroom is a firestarter 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 out, put embers of a fire inside, and carry fire for days. If your clan could not rekindle fire in Europe in the wintertime, you would die.

So this hat is actually made by some ladies in Transylvania.

Joe Rogan (1:03)

Can I feel that?

Paul Stamets (1:04)

Yeah, and it's a hard wood conk. But when you soak it in lye water, you know, ashes and water, it delaminates into this fabric.

Joe Rogan (1:14)

Whoa, let me feel that.

Paul Stamets (1:16)

It's very soft. It's also called German felt. It's extremely flammable. So it revolutionized warfare because during the Napoleonic times, this is the punk that ignited gunpowder.

Even the Chinese invented gunpowder, the Europeans invented the rifle. So this allowed flint spark guns to ignite the gunpowder.

Joe Rogan (1:40)

This feels amazing.

Paul Stamets (1:41)

It is.

Joe Rogan (1:42)

How big a piece can you get?

Paul Stamets (1:44)

That's a great question. Depending on the size of the conch. On beech trees, they're much bigger than birch. Beech trees just naturally get larger. The larger the conch, 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, I actually have one that caught on fire because somebody was smoking a joint near me, and the embers of the joint got on my hat.

Joe Rogan (2:08)

They just immediately go up?

Paul Stamets (2:10)

No, it burns really slowly, so it's a fuse. 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 just, we could light it now. I mean, the whole thing would, one flick of the beak, and this thing will smoke entirely in about ten minutes and turn nothing into white ash.

Your fire alarms may go off, though.

Joe Rogan (2:37)

Yeah, probably. And so with this thing, this larger piece, they would hollow this out, put an ember in there. Would they have to blow on the ember as they hiked?

Paul Stamets (2:45)

Well, you could blow on it a little bit, and you cap it, and then you can put it in your pocket. The famous iceman that was found on the border of Italy and Austria, he had this tethered to his right side, which is 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 if you're right-handed, it's on the right side. So 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 chain of knowledge, but this is one of the threads that was not broken.

And it's significant, I think. We were much more dependent upon mushrooms when we were forest people than we are now, seemingly, in the cities, but it's coming full circle very quickly.

Joe Rogan (3:27)

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.

Paul Stamets (3:36)

Well, this is the mystery of mushrooms, and I think it speaks to also mycophobia, the fear of mushrooms.

Joe Rogan (3:44)

R.

Paul Stamets (3:44)

Gordon Watson 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, it's natural for humans to avoid that which they don't understand out of fear, because they don't know the difference.