It’s an almost-too-warm California spring morning at Lightning in a Bottle, one of the preeminent music festivals for eco-conscious, EDM-loving millennials. You’re under shade, mercifully, chatting in camper chairs with an older guy with a big bushy salt-and-pepper beard. He wears round specs and a utilikilt, and talks real fast. The conversation starts with the guy talking about how he was the influence for a major character in the latest Star Trek show.

“I was in the woods, building a cabin in the shape of the Starship Enterprise,” says the guy in the kilt, “and then I got this call from CBS and they said ‘listen, a bunch of writers from Star Trek want to talk to you, they’re really stuck, do you have any ideas?’ I said, ‘turn on your tape recorder.’” He gave them so many ideas, he says, that they named a character after him.

Uh huh, you might think. Riiiight.

Indeed, it soon becomes clear that ideas are in no short supply with kilt guy. The conversation veers through half a dozen of them at hyperspeed. The idea that a universal web of dark matter, plus our more familiar World Wide Web, plus the human brain, all mimic the “mycelial networks” of mushrooms under our feet that bind and feed all of Earth’s soil. The idea that this network, an enormous mass of fungus that branches and communicates underground, is in some way sentient. The idea that human brains went through an evolutionary growth spurt after we encountered poop-grown psilocybin (“magic”) mushrooms on the savannah of Africa.

The flurry of ideas suggest that mushrooms could not only cure many diseases (just like penicillin, derived from a fungus) and depression, clean up industrial waste and oil spills and save the bees, but they can also store carbon in vast quantities underground, and thus save us all from climate change.

By this point, you may be wondering whether kilt guy has just ingested a heroic dose of magic mushrooms himself. But he hasn’t (well, not on this fine morning, anyway). This is Paul Stamets, internationally-renowned mushroom expert, and yes, a man who bequeathed his name and ideas to a lead character in Star Trek: Discovery (Lt. Cmdr. Paul Stamets, played by Anthony Rapp).