Joe Rogan - Santa Claus Was a Mushroom!

Ground yeah, I'm absolutely fascinated by mushrooms. I had Paul Stamets on the podcast. I saw that one How great is that guy super cool? Gave me two mushroom. That's my what am I gonna do with two case one breaks? Yeah, I have an extra mushroom hat But there's a really cool documentary actually It's called know your mushrooms. I think it's by Ron. I don't know by Ron Mann and he he he travels along with these mushroom hunters I think a lot of it's in Oregon and up the coast of California down in New Mexico But they're they're professional foragers that then go and sell these mushrooms But they track these foragers and it's such a cool movie. That's interesting Um, well, I was gonna say is you better know mushrooms cuz they'll fucking kill you if you don't that that's the thing man It's like, you know what my first experiencing foraging for mushrooms I was like an apprentice chef at this restaurant and the chef comes in and was like hey check these out and I was like Whoa, like what the hell are these and he's like, oh, they're morels Like I found them mountain biking and there's a stigma, you know, like as as a kid like your parents like don't don't eat those Don't touch those they're poisonous. They'll kill you and it's like, okay Well, then you just you just have this idea. Well mushrooms come from the grocery store Well, it's like no they grow they come in the wild and you know That's that's like my thing with meat is I teach my kids like meat doesn't come from the grocery store It's not it's not a styrofoam package. That's not where it comes from. It's an animal. Yeah and and yeah, and it's just like, you know mushrooms that grow in the wild and They're just they're crazy they there's like Michael Michael, Michael Rizal Yeah, it's yeah, Michael Rizal relationship with the animals or with the the trees rather Do you know the story of the Amadita, Mascaria? I know what they are I don't know the story the Amadita, Mascaria is the most fascinating one to me because that's the one that looks like Looks like Santa Claus or the Mario crowd with white. Yeah That is the subject of a book by a guy named John Marco Allegro who was one of the head scholars For deciphering the Dead Sea Scrolls. He deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls for 14 years He was an ordained minister But he was also in his study of theology became agnostic and he sort of when he started realizing that there was all these different Religions that had similar stories and he was you know found all these Different connections and was trying trying to like figure out what the origins of all these stories were well after studying the Dead Sea Scrolls for I think it was 14 years before he wrote this book. He decided that all of Christianity was a massive misunderstanding and what it was originally about was these stories his collection of stories that were about fertility rituals and Psychedelic mushroom use and he traced the word Jesus back to an ancient Sumerian word That was a mushroom covered in God's semen and that when God would come on the earth That's what rain was rain was God coming on the earth and that these mushrooms would rise up out of the ground They would eat them and trip their fucking balls off. Right? That's a crazy story So maybe you got to think yeah people that were foraging for food, especially back when there was no agriculture, right? I mean it was it was touch and go you could easily starve to death you mean a bad winter You know a drought people would starve to death. It was very very common. So they would take Foraging extremely serious and they knew what they could eat and they knew what they couldn't eat well, they knew that there was a relationship between carnivorous trees and coniferous trees would grow these weird looking shiny red and white mushrooms under them That's what coniferous trees is pine trees. That's what we use for Christmas trees. Yeah those red and white packages They they are like the shiny packages underneath the Christmas tree. They are the color of Santa Claus Yeah, they're common in Siberia. They're eaten constantly by caribou caribou are reindeer Reindeer are addicted to these to the point where when people are having psychedelic mushroom rituals and they go outside to take a leak The caribou will knock them over to get to the aminita Mascaria piss in the sand because they smell the aminita, mascara in the piss and One of the ways these guys trip their balls off is they eat the mushroom and then they drink their own urine They have a second process of this Here's where it gets even crazier in the times in Siberia where it become extremely snowy When this the shaman would visit the way they would get into the house is through the fucking chimney Because the door would be snowed in so they would climb in through the chimney I mean there's so many parallels to Santa Claus and to Christianity to this one Mushroom that they think was a massive part of shamanistic rituals. There it is right there. This is this Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer Yeah, oh that is so crazy. I'm sure such a cool story. Oh, dude, it's fucking crazy So he wrote this book called the sacred mushroom in the cross that was bought out by the Catholic Church This I have to verify but I do know that they stopped production of it I don't know if it was bought out by the Catholic Church. That's always been what's been told to me But I do know that they stopped production of it forever He came out with another book called the Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian myth, which is still available Then more recently like really recently within the last decade a guy named Yann Irvin republished the John Marco Allegro books with permission from his family I think it might have actually been one of those things were when a book is over 25 years old It becomes like public domain or something like that, too But this this book and this this story behind it is incredibly fascinating And what he's basically saying is that and it makes sense if you were living Thousands of years ago and you stumbled upon these psychedelic mushrooms and you took them you would experience God you literally would think that Psychedelic state was you communicating with God they would want to hide those from the Romans so they hid them in parables and stories and he explains what the original meaning of all these parables and stories are because of Course you're going from ancient Hebrew, which is an extremely complicated language that also involves numbers The letters are also numbers and then that's translated to Latin and to Greek and then eventually to English So a lot is lost in that translation So it really takes a linguist and a biblical scholar to kind of understand whether or not what this guy is saying is correct I'm obviously not one of those so I'm just talking shit, but it's a there's so many parallels It's almost like how could it be just coincidental that Santa Claus is red and white that Santa Claus likes reindeers that the Christmas tree is Something that we use in the presence or under the Christmas tree that Santa Claus lives in the fucking North Pole Which is Siberia, which is where caribou live and which is where these mushrooms are very common. I mean, there's so many parallels It's really kind of fucking crazy. That's cool. Yeah, it's a great book Anybody I really highly recommend it because it's one of those books. We just gotta you read a few chapters You got to go. I think I may have to go back over that again. Yeah, go over again So it's it's so freaky very cool, but I've stumbled upon those in the wild those aminita I've never found those and there's like those there's like you have to cook them first. You can't eat them wrong You have to boil them. Yeah, we made tea out of them will make you sick. Apparently. Yeah, I'll do it, right But yeah, no, I forged more for more. Oh, my favorite Shantrails obviously awesome like awesome culinary mushroom What's that yellow one that grows on trees? It's like a thick Chicken of the woods. Yes that one's right and it tastes like chicken. It is unbelievable. That one's amazing It's really funky We found I was walking with the kids in a park downtown Toronto and I look over and there's this massive some Instagram Massive yellow kind of looks like goo growing on this tree and it was a premature Chicken of the woods and it just looked like this blob and then if I were to leave it it would start to kind of Shelf out into like shelf kind of mushrooms And so I left it for like a week and went back and harvested it and it's like it's like tender juicy chicken flavor It is bizarre. Oh, that's kind of cool. So you were just like hoping nobody else saw it Yeah, and it was thinking it was in like a really public Park and I was like, oh man, like I better get this before someone else finds it Well, how many people would know in a public park in Toronto? There's a few there's there's definitely feel I've kind of walked up to ladies like picking herbs and stuff and I was like Hey, like what are you doing? And they just kind of looked at me and kind of went away They didn't want to share their knowledge with me. There it is. So that's the it's bizarre man. You Zookier That's hilarious, oh, that's so cool. Oh, so there's like a little tiny one, you know below it So on trees, I don't know. I think well that one you can see the bark is like deteriorating So again, it's it's it's feeding off the decaying Tree. Wow, look how badass that so if that if you actually go and I found ones like that, too If you go in and harvest those they're really woody by that time and they're kind of a little too tough to really So yeah, you want to you want to get them when they're kind of younger like that. So is there a color change? I guess I guess when they when they're older they get a bit more orange Yeah from that kind of yellow premature. See that one where there's like yellow. Yeah, those are like perfect. Yeah, right there. Perfect Yeah, oh wow. That looks almost like cauliflower. Totally. Yeah, it's really really neat Wow It's fascinating. You know the the mushroom world is is super cool. Do you know they breathe air? I did not know that they breathe air and they breathe out carbon dioxide. Yeah, they're closer to animals and they're out of vegetables That's really cool. Yeah, they're weird fungus is a weird thing, man. Yeah, well a lot of it's like Misunderstood. Well, I guess