00:01

OK, people, let's just get this out of the way. Now, I know this isn't a very comfortable subject for many of you, but I've got to say it. We have to talk about your fungus problem. Now, it's OK, don't be embarrassed. You know who you are. We can work this out. We'll get through it together. Now, call them fungi, "fun-gee," "fun-guy" -- you decide. But what I'd like to impress upon you is this is a new world we need to begin exploring. And I think we can do it in interesting ways.

00:35

But all of us have had an issue with fungi at some point in our lives, right? Maybe even now? We think of fungi, we think of fuzzy stuff that's growing on our yogurt that we forgot in the back of the fridge. Or maybe that itch you developed by wearing that favorite pair of pants, but just got a little bit too tight? Or, you know, maybe you think of death and decay and disease, when you think about fungi?

01:01

But fungi, maybe some of them have a dark side. I mean, who of us doesn't? But I'd like to invite you to see these misunderstood creatures in a new light, and maybe start to appreciate some of the positive and inspirational ways that they behave.

01:20

So if that mold is breaking bad on that yogurt you forgot in the back of the fridge, again, maybe it's not just rotting and spoiling, but maybe it's taking an act of transformation, of renewal and of new possibilities. And it's that very act of transformation that's so central to life on our planet, it’s been important for our own history. And maybe for the future, if we can learn from fungi, we might be able to transform ourselves and our societies in ways that are in greater harmony with nature.

02:00

So what do I mean when I say fungi have been important to our past? I'm not talking about that amazing mushroom trip you took back in university, though that was probably pretty awesome in its own right. What I'm talking about is the way that fungi have been central to the evolution of life on the planet, that virtually all life has a fungal backstory.

02:25

Now, think: fungi have been on the planet for a billion years ... or more. And during that time the Earth was just a rocky, desolate place. There wasn't a lot of life on it. Now, algae would actually escape the waters and come onto land to evolve into land plants, but only by partnering with fungi first, as its root system. Soils would begin to form as fungi ate rock and broke it down to make the nutrients available. So you had this opportunity for new life to spring up. As a result, the evolution of plants would explode across the planet, which would oxygenate the atmosphere and allow the evolution of more complex life-forms, like us, humans. Right?

03:18

So being on the planet for a billion years, fungi have developed all sorts of life strategies to be adaptive and diverse and resilient. Think about it -- they survived a billion years, through great swings in climate, over hundreds of millions of years, lived through all the five great mass extinction events, where the dinosaurs went extinct and the poor little trilobites and countless other forms of life that we don't even know existed. But fungi persisted and thrived, and do to this day.

03:51

And I think that's what drove them to me. It's so endearing, right? I mean, who doesn't love a good survival story? I know I do. But fungi weren't my first love. That was music, actually. And actually, when I was a young, young boy, I was really into grunge music, and I played in a grunge band. And we were awful.

04:15

(Laughter)

04:16

But I didn't know that at the time, and anyhow, I had to follow my passion. So I put everything in my pickup truck and I moved from my childhood home of Kansas City to Seattle, the mecca of grunge music in the ’90s. And I was going to start a new band. And unfortunately, none of the talent of Nirvana or Soundgarden rubbed off on me. It would have been a quite different life had it did. But the splendor of the Pacific Northwest forests really did. And it was the trees and all the life aboveground that drew me there, but it was the fungi and the microbes belowground that kept me coming back.

05:02

I just got even more and more interested about the way that they lived, all these bizarre forms, the fact that fungi are literally everywhere. Right now, they're on your skin, in your gut. With every breath you take, you inhale dozens of fungal spores. Every move you make, you trample mushrooms and molds beneath your feet, in the soil. And their ubiquity ... is a big reason why we know so little about fungi. Despite all the tools we have at our disposal, scientific tools, we know perhaps five percent of all the fungi, some three million species that are thought to exist in the world today. Now that's a massive amount of biodiversity that we know virtually nothing about, how it lives and what it does.

05:52

And that's what really inspired me to continue to study about fungi and ask deeper questions. Could some of this biodiversity help in creating a more resilient future? What could we actually learn from fungi? Were there metaphors that we might apply to how we live, to create a more resilient future together?

06:13

I'd like to share with you some of those metaphors. The first is that fungi are biointelligent. Being on the planet for so long, fungi have created a really great ability to be good at resource efficiency and resilience, and, as it turns out, spatial planning. So researchers in Japan did this super cool experiment where they wanted to see if fungi could help engineers to create more efficient transport networks. So they laid out oatmeal on a petri dish, corresponding to the cities of the Tokyo metropolitan area. And they introduced a slime mold, a type of fungus whose favoritest food ever is oatmeal, and the fungus rapidly went through a process of self-optimization to find the most efficient links between its favoritest-ever food source, represented by a map of the Tokyo metropolitan area. And in a matter of hours, it would recreate, largely, the existing railway map of the Tokyo metropolitan area -- a process it took engineers decades to actually produce. Now the fungus, it has no brain, it has no plan, it was given no instructions or guidance. But still, it created a highly optimized network. And this convinced me and other scientists that maybe fungi could have practical applications to help solve some of our human challenges in ways that are quick and efficient and perhaps even more imaginative than we could do with all of our brains put together.

07:58

Now, another way that fungi can produce a metaphor is being collaborative. Now, there is most evidence in their relationship with plants. Now remember how algae evolved into plants through the help of fungi as their root system? Well, that love affair never ended. Still today, 90 percent of all land plants need to have a mycorrhizal association. This is the plant-fungus-root association. So depicted here, in this highly realisti