The Wood Wide Web

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Welcome to the Infinite Monkey Cage.

I'm Professor Brian Cox, President's Medal from the Institute of Physics 2012.

And I'm Robin Entz, Advanced Cycling Proficiency Badge 1987.

One of the great philosophical questions is: if a tree falls in a forest but no one is there to hear it, does it make a sound?

No, it isn't.

What?

You just define sound correctly, and the answer's yes.

Oh, okay.

That took me a lot less time than I imagined.

You could probably be quite useful for the world of philosophy because they've been spending ages on that.

I'll tell you what, I'll give you another one then.

Why is there something rather than nothing?

Well, again, you have to address your unspoken assumptions, don't you?

You're assuming nothing is more likely than something.

Otherwise, it's not surprising.

You're right, so it's really the fault of my pessimism, isn't it?

That's the uh because yeah, I am very much a glass half-empty person, and what is left in the glass is frankly disgusting.

What about is free will an illusion?

Do you think I'd have worked with you for 13 years if I'd had any choice?

It's a good point and delivered with too much truth.

I was hoping they might have more of a comedic way that you did that, but that really was

filled with bitterness.

Right.

Anyway, that is the end of today's Brian Cox philosophy nodule.

Next week, we, well, it's definitely not as much as a module, it's definitely only as far as a nodule.

Next week, we are going to be asking what happens if you throw a book into a black hole.

That is actually what we're asking, by the way.

That's not just that is what next week's show is about.

And of course, for Brian, that is merely just this kind of theoretical idea.

But for me, I've already started to worry about which book it's going to be because that's the different way that we look at the nature of cosmology.

This week's show, though, for many years, people who say that they talk to their plants have been considered to be eccentric.

But what about people who say they can hear the plants talking back?

Today we're talking about the wood-wide web.

Do plants and other species communicate with each other and if so, what are they talking about?

With us to decipher the language of the forest, we're joined by a real professor of forest ecology, a real forensic botanist and a fictional football coach.

And they are.

Suzanne Simard.

Professor of Forest Ecology at the University of British Columbia and I discovered that trees do actually talk to each other.

Dr.

Mark Spencer, I'm a peripatetic botanist specialising in forensics.

And the thing I found out in the woods that's most exciting is the ghost orchid.

In fact, I've never found it because it's one of the most extraordinary things in our woods that parasitizes fungi and nicks food from trees.

Hi, my name is Brendan Hund.

I am an actor and writer, and I co-created the show Ted Lasso, upon which I appear.

I am otherwise remarkably unqualified to be on this dais.

And the best thing I found out, I found rather, in a forest, not to reveal my urban origins, was a parking spot.

It was so dark.

We'd been looking for so long.

That was the magic of the forest.

And this is our panel.

Before the first question, I'd just say Brendan is definitely qualified to be here because he actually called this a dais as well.

So that immediately, the elevation of what this discussion might be,

But that's merely because my college job was as a stagehand.

So, I learned a dais and the difference, most importantly, between a podium and a lectern.

This is my nomenclature.

I'm into it.

Suzanne, you came up with this revolutionary idea at the time that,

well, if you look at a forest, for example, then it's not a series of individual organisms, the trees and the grass and the fungi, but in some sense, it can be considered as a single individual living thing.

Yeah, I mean, I grew up thinking that, and then I was told to unlearn that, and then I went about discovering that it actually was true, what I knew when I was a kid.

So, if that doesn't take you for a loop, I don't know what would.

So, the reason I got really interested in this is because in where I'm come from, which is in Western Canada, there was a war, a war on trees, and that war was trying to get rid of the native plants and I saw the native plants as necessary in these ecosystems

whereas the foresters were trying to get rid of them because they thought they were competing with the coveted and valuable conifer trees like the pines and the firs and so I went about learning and discovering that these trees are actually these weeds what foresters called weeds were actually connected to the firs and the pines and that they formed this enormous web below ground like an internet you can think of it like an internet and through that internet they exchange information and resources like water and nutrients and carbon and they actually help each other out which is the complete opposite of how how these foresters were thinking.

And, you know, it's not a trivial thing that they thought that because they really, over the last half a century, have shaped forests to look like tree farms without these native plants in them so that they could grow these plants, these farms of trees, basically.

So, taking an old-growth forest, and an old-growth forest is like a wild primary forest where there hasn't been harvesting before, that are full of huge trees, and basically taking them all out, clear-cutting them, and planting them to these little, kind of like corn fields, but they're, you know, instead of corn, they're pines, and weeding out these native plants and making them look like little rows of sticks, really.

And I realized that they needed their neighbors.

They needed these weeds

because they were all connected together in this below-ground internet and chattering to each other constantly and helping each other out, cooperating, sending messages, telling them, Hey, I'm your brother, or I'm your sister, I need some resources, or I've got something extra to give, and learning that this was this big cooperative network.

I'm always fascinated that many scientists have a kind of origin story for their fascination.

And I believe that your origin story of your fascination comes basically from your dog falling into a latrine.

It's true.

Yeah, we had a dog, Jiggs, and Jiggs was a beagle.

And we were, you know, on a family vacation at, well, at this lake where my grandparents lived, which is a rainforest.

And Jiggs was always getting into trouble.

And of course, so was I.

And speaking of Pig Pen,

Pig Pen was, I always kind of think of myself as Pig Pen because I grew up eating dirt and having these fluffs of dirt around me all the time.

And when jigs fell in the outhouse, I was like the first one up there looking in the soil in this, you know, this column of poop, basically, you know, and there's jigs down at the bottom.

And my grandfather, my uncle, Wilfred, and my dad, and all the uncles were there, and they're digging jigs out of this outhouse.

And I was just like, whoo, the more poop, the better.

I loved it.

And

I got to know soil really well at that point.

Brendan, it's rare for a scientist to become a cultural reference in many ways, but one of the reasons that we asked you on the show is because your character in Ted Lasso references Suzanne's work directly.

So how did that come about?

Yeah, so it was an episode in season two, late on the season, and a member of the coaching staff is starting to desire things more individualistic than team-oriented, if I can go spoiler-free there.

And then my character is asked about that.

And the episode was written by Sasha Guerin, and she was looking for a metaphor for that moment.

And then she asked, not me, Phoebe Walsh, who is also on our staff.

She plays my girlfriend Jane on the show.

She's a great stand-up as well.

And Phoebe Walsh is a fan of yours already.

And also, the thing about our writing staff on this football show is basically none of them like football.

So any opportunity they can find to shoehorn something else they're interested in into the show, they come running through that portal.

And so, yeah, Phoebe had immediately this description of your work in summary form.

And, you know, my character is supposed to know a bunch of stuff.

And

I'm handy on a pub trivia night, don't get me wrong.

But even just reading that couple of sentences is like,

are you kidding me?

The trees work together?

Like,

it's a pretty amazing concept.

And it was very cool to be able to include it in the show.

Well, as you said as well, it is one of those concepts that you have to keep rereading it.

Because

it means that the moment you go into any area of countryside, it really does feel like there's a tangible change in your experience.

Yeah.

And

you saying in that that like they used to think that trees competed with each other.

Like I didn't know that either, so that kind of blows my mind too.

Like what did that exactly entail in thinking, like let's talk about what was wrong.

Let's talk about the wrong thinking real quick first, now that we apparently don't have that anymore.

But like they literally thought they were fighting for water or something?

Yeah, so

foresters kind of simplified the whole ecosystem into light, water, and nutrients and that everything needs those three things.

And it's kind of of like this dog-eat-dog world, or jigs-eat-jigs, or biggle-eats beagle world.

And so, if a tree is shading another tree, it's essentially competing for light.

It's that simple.

Or if the roots can grow wide and big, they're deep, they're gonna get all the nutrients and water for themselves and grow into big trees.

And the thinking was that the, you know, I always think the ecosystem is like a pie, and you want to get the biggest piece of pie for yourself.

That's how foresters viewed ecosystems.

And whereas my view of an ecosystem was there's all these plants that make the pie bigger and bigger and bigger, because when they work together, they actually create more than just each one as an individual.

And so that completely changes how we see ecosystems.

Instead of competing for a piece of pie that's only going to be so big, it's like, let's actually create something that's a bigger pie.

That's what they do when they cooperate.

I think for me as a fellow scientist and not a specialist in your field, is there are several incredibly important things in what you've just said, and

the work that your community of scientists have done.

And I think for me, first off, was your experience to talk about mud-you know, that's my own experience of childhood grappling with mud and dirt and grime.

And I think we are in a point in our society at the moment where we're terrified of grime.

We isolate ourselves from it and

we view the soil as dangerous, which I think is catastrophic for us as individuals and culturally.

And also, you know, we we talk about your science in this kind of, in almost a sort of field laboratory way, but there's this incredibly important and powerful message in the work of your community is which is about a huge fundamental shift in how we perceive plants.

Plants make up 60% of the biomass of this planet.

They rule, but it's more than just them being big and out there all the time.

The fact that they communicate and share resources means that we should shift our comprehension about plants.

There are questions about sentience, what they do, the meaning of what they're about, and so it's an incredibly important philosophical question for how we relate to plants themselves, but also how we address really, really challenging and terrifying questions on our planet at the moment.

So, this work is extraordinary in terms of how we view plants, but is potentially groundbreaking in how we can actually deal with some of the challenges in the future.

Can I just say though, I'm glad that we got a bit of your origin story there with you digging around in the mud because I was thinking, right, so your dog fell on the latrine, you became an ecologist, and then you became a forensic botanist, which is your dog fell on the latrine and didn't survive.

Well,

I did nearly kill the cat with a mud pie.

We're going to come back to that.

Or we can have it now if you're a cat.

I accidentally poisoned our lovely tabby cat, Tiger Smooth.

Is the accidental from a forensic botanist?

I see everything as research.

I'm not sure.

I made this mud,

I was kind of in detention because I'd been naughty at home and I was in the background.

I poisoned some other children.

So I poisoned the cat by accident.

I collected all these berries and sort of made it into a weird mud pie for my own entertainment.

And then a few hours later, I noticed the cat rigorously vomiting in the corner, having eaten some of it.

So I think it was a mixture of the cat's stupidity and me being overly excitable.

Brendan, I'm going to go to you now.

So as the jury, I accidentally collected some berries.

What do you think?

Guilty or not guilty?

100% guilty.

And that's why he's in the field he's in now.

It's to try to, you know, find all the data around a crime scene, geological crime scene, if I have my terms right.

And

what's the word when you find someone innocent?

It's not abdicate, it's absolve.

Absolve, he's absolving himself.

But it's the correct word.

It is a crime.

The cat wasn't impressed, definitely.

Well, like many physicists as well.

They're always

putting those darn cats in those boxes.

Sorry, we've somehow moved away from the trees talking,

which I think might also be because I keep getting Clint Eastwood in my head now because there's that song I talk to the trees and they don't listen to me from Paint Your Wagon.

Terrible B-side.

But anyway, let's...

Does anyone get that reference?

A B-side.

Yes, someone over there.

Paint Your Wagon was a very successful film from the late 1960s.

Oh, yeah, he might understand the secrets of the universe, but when it comes to show tunes of the late 60s, no, no, no, no, no.

I think you'll find only one of us on this panel has one celebrity mastermind.

Anyway.

Give us a line.

Clint.

Give us a line of the song.

It's great, right?

So Clint Eastwood, Clint Eastwood, I will do him as he says he can't sing.

He sings to you, and he's not got a great voice.

He goes, I talk to the trees,

but they don't listen to me.

I'm not familiar.

Don't look at me.

I do recognize.

And when he he says I'm not familiar, that's a really all-encompassing I'm not familiar.

He's saying he's rejecting you, Brian.

Shall I just take over?

No, I'll be fine.

Suzanne, I'm fascinated to know how do trees communicate?

In English and French.

When a Canadian knows how to keep the audience on their side, just in case.

Those are the two national languages of Canada, so that's what they know.

They communicate in resources, water, nutrients, and carbon.

So that's, think of that like a language.

If you think of carbon, photosynthate is a bunch of, like six carbon molecules hooked to six oxygen molecules hooked to, I think, eight hydrogen molecules.

And that's like a word, right?

It's a compound.

And then there's a whole bunch of other compounds, a bunch of amino acids, which are other words in the language.

So you can think of the language of carbon.

And then nitrogen, there's different amino acids like glutamate and alanine and

you know there's other ones too.

I just can't remember what they are right now.

And so that's the language of amino acids.

And then water is just water and things are dissolved in water.

That's another part of the language.

And then there's a whole other stream of words that's just about information.

So I'm just using these metaphors of words and language because basically they're communicating with the things that they need.

And some of the other information they communicate is about their relationship with each other.

For example, do you want to marry me, Coach Beard?

We've only just met.

And I'm not saying no.

It's very forward of me, it's true.

Or, you know, if you're my brother or if you're my sister.

Well, sidebar, then,

when they communicate that with each other, do they say, I think you might be my brother, because I've recently been on a genealogy website called

ancestry.com.

I know

their leaves are all over the fingerprints.

No, that doesn't make sense.

Is this communication, though?

Are they just reacting to

concentrations of various molecules and so on, as you said, water?

Or

can it be defined as real communication?

It's real communication because one that's talking to the other one, it's a back and forth conversation, so it goes back and forth.

And then the tree or the plant that is sending the communication, there's a response of the receiver, and then the communicator, the donor, we call them, also changes its behavior according to the messages that are going back and forth.

So there's an actual receipt of information and then a conveyance back again and a change in behavior.

So yeah, it's not just a transmission of resources, it's actually this conversation going on that changes how they behave.

Only between single species or is it in communication across species?

All across species.

And they communicate through these, as I said, these fungal networks.

So all of the plants in England and the UK and where I'm from in Canada,

almost all plants form these mycorrhizas.

And mycorrhizas is a symbiosis between the plant and the fungus.

They can't survive without joining in this togetherness.

And so when you're in the forest and you see all those herbs in the understory, they're all linked together in this network.

And you see the oak trees, they're all linked together in a separate network.

And you can even have networks that are linking different species together.

So the oaks and the firs and the pines are all linked together.

That idea of communication, again, we tend to think of

plants, diversity, and then, oh, we hear the word fungi, but actually within the fungal network in there, there are dozens and dozens of species actually participating in these communication systems.

And supplementary and auxiliary to that, you've got bacterial communities which are affecting the fungal populations.

So, you've got incredible complexity, which is about nutrient sharing, about diversity of organisms, but also sharing other pieces of information, not just right, I'm hungry, give me some food, but things like, you know, there's a predator about, watch out, you know, there's grazing pressure, or there's a pathogenic bacteria in the environment, and we need to actually shift our protective chemicals to ensure that we don't die, and all these kind of things.

So, the complexity of the plant communications and the complexity of the fungal and bacterial communication is absolutely extraordinary.

This isn't a kind of sort of ping, ping, ping of information.

It's

a huge burst of biological chemical signalling passing billions and billions of pieces of data across these organisms.

And for people who are listening and find it sort of almost fantastical, you'd said to me earlier, actually, actually, if someone had said this to you as a professional a couple of decades ago, I would have laughed.

Frankly, I think I probably would have laughed, probably rolled my eyes.

The idea that, you know, whispering grass, the trees don't need to know, I've been waiting to do that.

That they, that actually, that complexity and communication, you'd rolled your eyes.

You know, most biologists, the idea that plants had,

well, not concepts, but recognised kinship and were sharing resources and communicating is something that would have been absolutely extraordinary within the biological community 30, 40 years ago.

It's extraordinary to you now, but that extraordinariness is also immensely important.

So, when you were over here laughing 30 years ago, I was over there being laughed at because I was the one that was doing all the crazy stuff.

No, that's okay.

I knew it was all.

Well, that's an interesting.

By the way, Brendan, just so you know, it's your turn next to do the song based around a plant.

Great, I'll be ready.

Yeah, just

as Mark was saying there, you had to really fight for this idea, didn't you?

When I first read your story, it reminded me of Jane Goodall coming back from Gombe and

fighting with all the information that she'd found out about chimpanzees, communities.

And it must have been very, very difficult.

Yeah, it was.

That's why I'm kind of weird now.

The trouble is, you're on this show in the kind of weird.

We only like the weird.

And we have Brian as a kind of control.

We've got such a profound belief that plants are passive in our society and they're not dynamic and aggressive.

They attack each other if they're fighting for resources or

they're competing.

But

they warn each other.

Many studies have shown how, you know, if a deer comes into a wood and starts grazing, the plant will actually feel the impact impact of the grazing, it will affect its physiology and it will produce chemicals that are warning signals which get passed to other plants in the community.

That warning signal enables the other plants in that community to ramp up their toxins.

So when the deer moves to another location to have another snack, the plant is unpalatable, it's grazed less, and the deer moves on.

So the plants are actually profoundly regulating the behavior of the deer, not the other way around.

I have a good question about these messages.

So they send each other warnings.

Do they ever send each other just like compliments?

Hey Larry.

Larry the Elm Tree, you look great today, buddy.

What are you doing?

Kind of.

Yeah.

Like if you were my sibling, for example, and I knew you were my sibling, because I can detect through these chemical messages that you're my sibling.

What we're finding is that they'll send more

carbon, more water, and my sibling will create bigger networks, they'll take up more nutrients, and they'll be like, hey, I'm doing better.

More confidence, generally carrying themselves better as a tree.

That's great.

That's how it should be.

There's a bright golden haze on the matter.

There's a bright golden haze on the matter.

Yeah.

Also, exactly the right length for us not to have to pay copyright, so that is the act of it.

You know, you were saying before about a lot of the writers for Ted Lasso that they're not really into football.

And I think there's that interesting, which it doesn't matter because Ted Lasso is great.

It's the story.

It is the human story.

And this, to me, is one of the things which seems to be so important with what Mark's talking about with Suzanne's work, which is these things that we can now.

Suddenly, you look at woodlands, suddenly you look at the ground beneath it, and there is a story going on.

And I think, you know, I just wondered as a writer, finding that story to sometimes deliver an idea which people may not think that they were actually interested in in the first place.

Yeah, I mean, also, like, a thing that we're getting at in these stories on the show is that, you know, we're all kind of the same, and we're all together more than we think, you know,

certainly more together than we are apart.

And so to find out about, you know, whole forests working together and being one organism

is pretty perfect, frankly.

But I'm kind of the wrong guy to ask because I'm the guy in the writer's writer's room who loves the football, and I think all the lovey-dovey stuff is garbage.

Give me scores and goals.

What about the darts scene?

I'm a big darts fan.

It's one of the strongest darts scene I've seen on television.

Well, I can tell you this.

I was not there that day, but Jason rewrote that whole speech the night before and then put it in the show.

It's a whole thing where he refers to a phrase accredited to Walt Whitman, but is probably not him, called

Be Curious, Not Judgmental.

But I will say that Jason and I became Darts fans at the same time when we were living in Amsterdam, and the only English language programs that were available on Dutch television were Darts related.

And so our favorite words to say to each other, and we would pretty much say this like hello or even aloha, it had so many different meanings, but you know, walk into a room there's Jason, 180!

180!

So we love darts.

There is something fantastic about being in Amsterdam and watching the Barnsley Metrodome, which is one of the great venues.

I'm kind of intrigued.

I mean, as a writer, do you find there's sometimes you think, how am I, I've got, you know, something that you love.

It might not be football, you know, whatever the idea, and you think, I want to turn this into something which people, you know, didn't realize they wanted to know more about.

Yeah, and actually, football is a big part of it because I don't know if you've heard, but in America, they don't care for it so much.

But I, you know, largely by dent of having lived in Europe for a spell, like, I think it's great.

I was not really really exposed to it at all as a kid, and I found out living there, you know, already a sports fan, sure, but not a football fan at all, and finding out, like, no, it's actually great.

And part of what's great about it is there's so many stories and so much drama and history, and like every match these two clubs play, and I think more so than for like old baseball teams, are informed by stuff that happened like 50 years ago because the people in the stands remember the thing that happened 50 years ago and they are still angry about it.

No, that was beautifully answered.

Before you came on, you know, so when Robin said he has those questions where his brain starts off somewhere, in this case, the subject of the show, and wanders off through three different things and ends up asking something that's

unintelligible.

And he felt mad and mad.

I was trying to be

able to answer that because I had no idea what he'd asked.

But you did a great job.

Fantastic.

Don't do that, Brian, because it means that then I asked the non-expert guests really lengthy questions about the nature of fungus.

Given that Robin had just about brought us back by mentioning the word fungus, I thought I would ask about the role of fungi because this communication isn't, I think you alluded to it, is not necessarily or even slightly direct between the trees, let's say.

Fungi are involved at a fundamental level.

Absolutely.

So fungi, the kingdom fungi, there are millions of species.

So the fungal diversity is enormous.

A typical oak tree in a woodland in southern England is probably could have, if the woodland is old, is ancient and healthy, could have dozens of species of these associated fungi with it.

If you go to a new planted woodland that's just been plonked on the British landscape by HS2, you will probably find the fungal associates with those trees are probably in the twos or threes.

So there is massive complexity in ancientness in fungal communities.

What was it?

But before we came on, you were talking about something primary woodland.

So there's an idea in this country, you know, and it's slightly different because woodland history is different all around the world, of you know, primary forest woodlands that has not been cut down, although it can be critiqued now when we increase and we understand more about woodland and forest history around the world.

But in general, there is this idea in England that we've got one tiny piece of woodland left that has never been felled.

It's called Wistman's Wood in Devon, and it's about the size of a postage stamp.

There are probably a few other tiny scraps, but most of our ancient woodlands, as we refer to them, are woodlands that have been profoundly managed over the last 5,000 years or so by human beings in this country and over much of Europe and, frankly, other parts of the world.

And we tend to refer to those as ancient.

And those are the kind of woodlands we need to protect, not planting plantations.

Suzanne, what would happen if you've got an older woodland and you've got this network underneath?

If you then replanted a tree, you brought it from somewhere else, what do we know about how that communication starts?

Or is there initially, I mean, is there a rejection of something which is then placed in the same way, you know,

if something is grafted in that is alien?

You know, one of the most common things that an ecologist says is, it depends.

It depends on the context.

But if you're in England and you're in a moor that's been there for thousands of years and the woodland has been

you know, taken off thousands of years ago, the whole soil microbial community has changed.

And so, the mycorrhizae, the fungi and the bacteria, and all the soil food web, all the organisms in that soil food web will have changed.

So, if you try to put an oak tree back in a grassland or a meadow that's been there for thousands of years, they're not going to have the mycorrhizas that they need.

And so, it's really hard to re-establish, you know, to bring back trees into a whole soil that's been changed.

And so,

often what you have to do is bring those fungi and that whole, or sorry, fungi.

You British say fungi, we say fungi.

We're the odd ones out, I think, probably globally.

Again.

There's a song in this somewhere.

Yeah, I know.

I'm not going to sing.

So we bring soil with the plants sometimes, or bring inoculum and then reintroduce them.

And then they start out really simply, but they do connect in time.

They will connect with their neighbours if there's compatible neighbours nearby.

Yeah, it almost reminds me of

when we think of termite termite colonies or ant colonies,

there's not a great deal of suggestion that

the individuals themselves are particularly intelligent, but they exhibit this collective behavior, this emergent behavior, which looks intelligent.

When you see termite mans, they're air-conditioned and they're quite remarkable structures.

So is there a similarity here?

There is.

And you know,

so the whole idea of intelligence is kind of fraught with

human expectations.

But let's put that aside for a minute.

And when I look at these networks in our ancient forests in Canada, and these are primary forests, so they haven't been logged before,

and they've got trees of all different sizes and ages, we find that they form a network that's a neural network, a biological neural network.

And that means that it's just shaped like the networks in our own brains, where there are big nodes that we call hubs, and smaller nodes, satellite nodes, and they're linked together.

And you can think of it like, you know, the airport system, for example, where Heathrow is a hub, and then all the little towns around it are little nodes, and they're linked together by the flights that go back and forth.

And you start, out of that emerges this complex pattern that's a biological neural network.

And so then you start to think, well, does it behave like a brain?

It turns out that some of those compounds that move through those networks,

from airport to airport, if you will, or tree to tree, are actually neurotransmitters.

There's actually glutamate is the main compound that moves from tree to tree, and that is one of our neurotransmitters.

And so now we've got the structure of a brain below ground, and we also have the chemicals moving

from tree to tree that are the same as our neurotransmitters, and it emerges out of it intelligent behavior, which is the regenerative aspects of a forest.

And so to me, all of those things add up together to an intelligent system.

Brenda, this is an astonishing astonishing idea, isn't it?

It is.

And it reminded me of another book I read that kind of talked about this, which is a book by a guy named Michael Poland.

It's called How to Change Your Mind.

And it brings us back to the

question of both fungi and fungi.

At one point,

did mushrooms say, oh, hey, there's some humans coming, they're going to eat us.

If they do, let's make them trip.

When did that happen?

Because that might be evolutionary as well.

It's chance.

There's no evidence that

the toxins in fungi, for example, or the interesting compounds that are found in some of the fungi which cause human beings to hallucinate, are there to do those things in us.

It just so happens that when we eat certain types of mushroom, we go off our heads.

Not because of any kind of evolutionary thing.

Have you read The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross?

That's a good one.

Are there two books?

No, no, it's just

it can be.

No, that's that's the whole thing about that this guy had this theory that this is where

religion came from, that the communion was originally that you would be given a mushroom and then you would see God.

And stuff like that is in this Michael Pullen book for sure.

And talking about how, you know, the neural networks of mushrooms are kind of, you know, like the neural networks in our brain.

And it just goes a long way toward like, I don't know, justifying what I was doing in college

and legitimizing a lot of otherwise infantile behavior.

So if you've got that on your conscience, I really recommend this book.

Micropolin, get into it.

So this is great.

So he's found a way of justifying trying to kill the cat.

You found a way of wasting the three or four years when you were tripping off your hair.

Try seven.

It's all research.

To be honest, do you really know?

And I just want, we've run out of time, essentially, but I just want you to pick up something you you said right back at the start, which you mentioned the philosophy word, but you said that we are

these ecosystems, these organisms, these forests, they're complex.

And you kind of, I think, were suggesting that sometimes the way we think about animals and the way we think about plants is different because we kind of think of animals as somehow, I don't know, sentient or whatever it is, and plants are just things that grow.

And you sort of suggested that we should perhaps begin to change our view.

Well, it's fair to say being a botanist, I'm always going to be somewhat partisan on this view.

But yes, I mean, we've seen revolutions in our perspective around animal sentience.

I believe this kind of research shows that we need a revolution around how we perceive plants.

And I think it is incredibly important.

And also, now I've completely forgotten what the question was.

My brain went blame.

Well, is the philosophical point of view?

What I was trying to say is: are we saying, has it changed from throwing a stick for a dog?

Are we now talking about throwing a dog for a stick?

That was rightly what you were saying.

What I'm saying is, you know, you don't seem to care about poisoning a cat, but should you care about that?

Oh, come on, be careful, there is definitely some, at least semblance of regret.

Maybe, Susanna, I'd ask you that question.

How complex should we perceive these systems to be?

Very much, right?

We should be thinking of these creatures, the plants, the trees, the bugs, as our kin.

You know, we've evolved from the same soup, basically.

We share 25% of our genes with trees.

They're our kin.

And in fact, a lot of the communities, the native communities in Canada, call trees the tree people and the salmon people and the wolf people like their own brothers and sisters and treat them and care for them the same way.

And if we can start doing that as a global community, we'll be so much better off because we'll have healthy ecosystems that will bring the earth back in balance.

So it's absolutely crucial that we change the way we see nature and the environment.

I'm just going to finish momentarily with a really weird random piece of information is that one small group of flowering plants have done something really weird and they've divested themselves of this relationship and that's members of the cabbage family.

They are not mycorrhizal.

We've found no evidence of it.

So cabbages just went, nah, not doing that.

And they've ditched this relationship, which is most peculiar.

So we shouldn't feel bad about eating cabbage.

So you're not going to be eating, as far as we know, any mycorrhizal associates, but there are probably endophytes as we call them, lurking in the foliage doing other strange things.

So that's the end message for the show.

Kill the cabbages, those turncoats.

There are more questions.

We haven't quite finished with you yet, but there will be more questions, but we do also ask the audience a question as well every show.

And today we ask the audience, if you could talk to trees, what do you think they would say to you?

I've got from John Dredge, I'm several thousand years old, and not once has anyone remembered my birthday.

The other trees, we've made the case that perhaps the forest remembers, haven't we?

Tom and Zoe come up with, stop cutting us down, you're making us unsappy.

I get this one though, Stray Moose 101, just said, it's a relief to find someone new to talk to.

That's more my level.

I've got, don't even think about touching my plums.

See, now that now we've moved on to the area where everyone's comfortable.

The erotic.

Is a plum a tree?

It's a tree?

It is, isn't it?

Yes, plum trees, isn't it?

Yes.

What are you looking at me for?

Brian has told me off for not asking you the expert questions, and now you're the plum guy.

Oh, no, don't say that.

That's terrible.

This is from Steve.

I'd ask them about their favourite branch of mathematics and hope they'd say geometry.

But we decided it was such a good question to finish.

We'd ask the panel.

So the question was, if you could talk to the trees

or mushrooms,

what would you ask?

So why don't we finish with that?

So why don't I start with if you could talk to the trees, what would you ask?

Would you think of us as humans?

And

would you like us to help you out?

I mean, my default question when I meet someone is:

if you were a tree, what kind of tree would you be?

I can't best Suzanne's answer, actually.

I think, absolutely, it's so important.

What kind of tree, though, is the answer you're looking for?

So, that's your opening date line.

What are you hoping for?

I guess a sex tree

scenario?

Fertility plums, the whole thing.

That's where I wanted it to go, and I'm glad that he did.

Because I think they were both very sage points that were made.

But at the same time, I also felt that we needed some kind of moment just to really plumb the depths after everything else that we had.

So that's.

I think it says sage point.

And plumb the depth.

Oh my god.

This is a very, I'll tell you what, I wish I had a brain that worked as well as actually basically the soil of a woodland floor because this one is all over the shop.

My neural connections are barely that of a group of termites.

Could we introduce some fungal networks into brain?

Well, fungi do that already.

Well, for example, you know, the infamous Ophiocordyceps, the zombie fungus, which the spores get into the body of its host, eat inside the host, overtake its physiology, and command, in advert in commons, the poor, benighted insect to climb to a top of a stem where the fungus then kills its prey and then bursts out of its head and releases spores into the air to spread its life around.

So, yeah, fungi are already doing that.

There's a lot of evidence that fungi do actually control the physiology of their hosts.

But we shouldn't do that to Robin then.

Robin, what do you think?

Do you want to?

I'm not great on heights.

I'm not saying

in physical education, I never got far up the rope.

So there's a possibility my spores are just going to end up all over you, Brian, and

one of your Italian jackets.

So, thank you very much to our panel, Suzanne Simard, Mark Spencer, and Brendan Hunt.

Next week, we are finally back to cosmology.

I cannot believe, in fact, that we've done three shows in a row which have basically been about biology and I don't know how we've managed to get away with that.

Well we did talk about the entropy of a bat.

Not in the edit we didn't.

That did not make it.

Well in oceans we talked about the polar nature of water molecules.

Yeah again not in the edit.

Never makes it through.

This is one of the reasons we're glad you don't listen to the show.

You have no idea how the fact we're always cutting out the physics.

Next week though I win because we are talking about one of the most important ideas in theoretical physics which is the black hole information paradox.

If a black hole forms in a pure quantum state it does evolve through the emission of Hawking radiation into a mixed state.

That won't be making the edit.

We'll see you again in a fortnight.

That's what's going to happen.

Goodbye.

In the infinite monkey cage.

Till now, nice again.

Hi, I'm Russell Kane, and I want to tell tell you about my podcast, BBC Radio 4's Evil Genius.

You can find it on BBC Sounds.

Although, I don't know whether you should or not.

It's one of the most confusing, exciting, surprising, infuriating, wonderful, enlightening listens you can have.

Why?

Because we take people from history you thought you had the facts about and let off fact bombs around them.

If you think you know everything about Prince, Elizabeth I, Freud, Frida Carlo, Alan Ginsburg, you don't.

If you want to hear uncomfortable comedians squirming in their seats when they're forced to make a vote one way or the other, evil or genius, because that's what this show is about, cancel or keep, then hit subscribe straight away.

However, if you find it might be triggering and you can't handle it, just forget you've ever heard this.

Anyway, I do hope you come along with me, Russell K.

Right, I'm off to ruin everyone's life who likes Prince.

Sucks!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to be quality!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs!

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.