Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1385 - Paul Stamets
Uploaded: 2019-11-15T20:00:07.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1385 - Paul Stamets' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-11-15. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1385 - Paul Stamets' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-11-15. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1385 - Paul Stamets

three two one and we're live hello paul hey it's happening how are you sir very
well how are you
and you have newfangled mushroom hats these are surprisingly durable so think
about these mushroom
hats they're that you would think oh it's gonna fall apart in your fingers but
no it's got like
it's quite pliable it's quite pliable and it's known as german felt and this um
allowed the
iceman otzi to be able to travel into the alps it was a fire starter mushroom
really and this
were actually revolutionized warfare because it helped flint's spark guns
ignite the gunpowder
really so it's amadou and uh it comes from a birch polypore mushroom which is a
subject of
much of our research these days now when this grows in the wild what does it
look like because this is
uh you you've fashioned it into this hat or had someone fashion some ladies
that's what it looks
like yeah some ladies in transylvania yeah yeah it's called uh foamy's fomentarius
it allowed for the
portability of fire there's no doubt we all came from africa and we went north
and we discovered
winter this allowed for fire to be carried for days and so your clan was
absolutely dependent upon fire
starting in order to survive the winter and this mushroom allowed and enabled
people to survive
wow it's very light um is it edible excellent question um hippocrates first
described it in 400 bce
as a tree as an anti-inflammatory so in teas yes but you know that's very very
tough when you put it in
ash and water it delaminates into mycelium and so some ladies in transylvania
still make these and
it's a fabric that you pull and that mushroom there will become one hat or
maybe more because it just
keeps on elongating and it's made of mycelium and so explain the process how
would you take this slab of
mushroom that i have that looks like sort of like an enormous hershey's kiss
and then you would put
that in water with ash from a fire from a fire why why ash what is that because
it's highly alkaline
and then it helps it separate it begins to delaminate and literally you start
pulling us
and it's a fabric that you keep on felting and so it's called german felt and
it's been used for
literally thousands of years and beekeepers actually use this for smoking hives
if we could but it would
be kind of it would be kind of bizarre we could flick a bick and you'd burn up
one of these things
and there's a it's just amazing how much this is a fuse and one spark on this
you know can ignite this
entire thing over 15 20 minutes really yeah and so beekeepers use it for a
smoking so if i lit this
right now with this lighter not that if you lit this the the powder was so you
this the ash the powder
powdered ash and then the water and then how does it flatten out and become
what the because it soaks
up and mycelium makes mushrooms mushrooms make mycelium and so when you soak
this and then it gets soggy
and then it tenderizes and then you start breaking it and pulling it apart this
is actually probably
first discovery because our ancestors noticed when insects were born to the
mushroom yeah is that like
the unprocessed version of it this is so this is what it's like on one side
well it's just made into a
little table table thing but it's the same thing basically so is this stitched
together how did they
make it like this actually it's using a wood glue um and but that's all the
natural colors nothing's been
added to it um and uh these and so they just pull it apart pull it apart and it
eventually gets flat
yeah i really want to make a coat i'm that's my goal is to have somebody make a
coat would it tear
easily it's an amazingly strong tensile fabric it's it um absorbs water um but
you have to be careful
someone smoking a joint or near a fire or smoking a cigarette it happened to me
i got a big hole in one
of mine and i was smelling the smoke my head my head was on fire more more than
once how many folks are
out there wearing mushroom hats these days uh just a few hundred and we've been
trying to actually keep
the the industry alive by just inundating the there was like 25 or 30 of these
hat makers
in transylvania um 10 15 years ago and then it shrunk down to four or five and
a friend of mine
david summerland visited and said paul this this hat making technology is on
the verge of extinction and
so we just sort of inundated them with orders in order to build the industry
and keep it alive so how
could someone contribute to that if they wanted to if people are listening to
this how could they buy one
of these hats well if you go to my facebook.com slash paul stamets um i think
his name is uh mako
actually you know squatted on my page to sell the hats and more power to them
so okay yeah cool
interesting but this hat this mushroom is figuring to be very prominently
important for saving uh bees
and that's where our research has been astonishingly um interesting lately and
where is that thing that
you brought in what is that what this is this is um i so so to get some context
to this
you know i think shamanistically mushrooms plants animals become important
because of a plurality a
multiplicity of benefits this is one example not only revolutionized warfare
not only allowed for the
portability of fire for us to save ourselves from the coldness and you know we
migrated into europe from
africa not only did beekeepers use it for smoking but fly fishermen use it also
for drying flies but we have
found that this mushroom is extremely powerful for reducing viruses that harm
bees and and we are it's
been described today in cnn a bee uh insect apocalypse forty percent of bee of
insects are under threat
um this just came out and this is a really an all hands on deck moment um but i'm
optimistic because
i think we can find solutions in nature so with my colleagues and when i was
here before i talked about
work with the bio shield biodefense program and these wood conks are very
strong and antiviral properties
against flu viruses and herpes etc i use these ideas and actually had a waking
dream and i realized that
the bees were being infected by mites with viruses and the deformed wing virus
in particular is the worst
virus and so i contacted washington state university we started doing some
research and i'm really really
happy because i love skeptics who become my supporters we published in nature
only seven percent of the
articles submitted the nature get published the nature publication ecosystem to
this day are articles
in the top one percent of all articles ever published in the nature publication
ecosystem now that's
phenomenal because that's the most credible scientific uh journal in the world
there it is right that
extracts of polypore mushroom mycelia reduce viruses in honeybees and the this
mushroom the amadu reduces
the deformed wing virus 800 times to one with one treatment and and then the reishi
mushroom mycelium
reduces the lake sinai virus more than 45 000 to one now these are wood conks
that grow in trees
and we all grew up with winnie the pooh but no one made the connection before
me apparently that
bees are attracted to rotted wood because of immunological benefit so amadu and
reishi mushrooms
we found and we published in this article that high significance and i think
the reason why this
article is in the top one percent of all nature articles is that i've been able
to present the theory
with proof now that a natural product can have a broader bioshield of benefits
than a pure pharmaceutical
up to this time there's been no agents to reduce viruses in bees now the deformed
wing virus
is being vectored by the varroa mite came in 1984 and it injects viruses into
bees and so it's like a
dirty syringe and these viruses debilitate the bees and shorten their their
ability to fly look at that
poor bumblebee oh wow that's crazy i mean that i have that is so sad because
that bumblebee can't fly
now bees can pollinate up to a thousand flowers a day and the average flight
time of like honeybees
was used to be nine days a thousand flowers a day every almond you eat was
visited by a bee
so one bee can pollinate a thousand flowers a day nine days was our pollination
flight time now it's been
reshortened to four days so we lost by 50 percent and the cnn article that we
just showed uh in china
now they're hand pollinating flowers you know with paint brushes a paint of
apples yeah so apples
cherries almonds strawberries because of the lack of bees because the absence
of bees so it's really
it's it's all hands on deck um this is you know i'm really optimistic about the
future because we have
solutions in nature that we can now amplify and be able to deploy and so one of
my inventions and i'm
giving these away the 10 000 of these for free i've come up with a citizen
scientist bee feeder that
puts these extracts into sugar water and we have a sign up uh sheet up this all
is for free it says
fungi.com bees um and we're going to give away the first 10 000 of these um and
this basically allows
uh citizen scientists to help wild bees um because wild bees were given about
80 of the benefits if
you scroll down there's a really we just got the cgi done if you go all the way
down and then click on
the click on that video and we just um so here's the bee feeder and this is
available on youtube folks it
says bee mushroomed feeder bee mushroomed all one word uh and then feeder yeah
now watch that's the
bees visiting and they're taking the sugar water look how much they're sucking
out of it those little
greedy bastards yeah and that's crazy how it goes away so quickly and this is a
maze and bees are
better at navigating mazes and so you can see the bees going in and out my
grandson was afraid of bees
was really fascinated by this so i i got him to do this and so these are
something that we're going
to make these available all over and then i want to create vertical gardens in
in apartment buildings
so the bees only fly up 200 feet you create ladders then ecological ladders and
then this is
where the citizen scientists all over the world can take action to be able to
help bees from collapsing
and then you station these um in neighborhoods for bumblebees for other types
of bees and then we
have it with a wi-fi enabled device with solar panels and then we upload into
the cloud all this data about
bee pollination visits so we can create a metric on the baseline of bee pollination
services so if you see a
bees that are declining and suddenly below a baseline in oklahoma two years ago
84 of the beehives died
now think if you're a cattle rancher and you lost 84 of your cattle so the idea
is to help bees immune
system and the if we create baselines with bee feeders upload the data and this
becomes a new form
of internet because they have wi-fi ability so it's a distributed network as
well but they where is the
wi-fi on that well we don't have this is in development right now we're working
with a very
very large computer company who's making all the instrumentation and they're
into big data so we have
a solar panel going in here we have blue led lights because bees are attracted
to blue light and they'll
count the number of bees going in and out and since bees are only flying that
daytime we don't need a
battery and so the solar power will then upload the data into the cloud then we'll
create mega data sets and
then we can look at africa indonesia how's it going to upload into the cloud
what is it using is it using
lte lte oh so it's using like a cellular cellular system or low frequency long
range um communication
systems can we help can we contribute is there's a way that this podcast can
help a lot is this i want
to enable people with solutions that they can teach their children the
importance of natural systems and
they can take action this seems like a great one i mean i love this idea i
think it's awesome i can afford to give
away 10 000. um i talked to this computer company that everybody knows but they
asked me not to use
their name and they asked how many do we need i said about