Name: Joe Rogan Experience #2347 - Paul Stamets
Uploaded: 2025-07-09T17:01:03.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2347 - Paul Stamets' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-09. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #2347 - Paul Stamets' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2025-07-09. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #2347 - Paul Stamets

Joe Rogan podcast check it out the Joe Rogan experience train by day Joe Rogan
podcast by
night all day we up yeah put them headphones on it's rock and roll Paul good to
see you sir
good to see you Joe what's happening how you doing book number eight huh book
number eight
yeah who would have known there's so many books to be written on mushrooms well
this is state-of-the-art
taxonomy psilocybe mushrooms are natural habitat covers 60 species all over the
world but it also
shows not only historical use which people are surprised they've been used in
India and Europe
and South Africa a new species was just found so lost to be Maluti but the Bisuthu
and the Suthu and
province have been using and obviously hundreds of years we know this because
they have songs so it's
really interesting when indigenous people have using psilocybe mushrooms and
scientists quote discover
them I give them a Latin binomial but the psilocybin mushroom revolution is
happening all over the
world right now I never expected it to be this big and the Rand report came out
this past year three
percent of Americans tripped on psilocybin in 2023 that's only three three
percent as eight million I
know what I would agree with you because how many people would admit it right
right probably under
reporting not for sure yeah for sure so it seems to be I think a revolution for
the freedom of
consciousness and it's crossing all political boundaries all religious
boundaries well it's
happening here in Texas for sure because of the Ibogaine initiative and what's
happening with
governor Rick Perry who was former Republican governor of Texas who was all in
on this he's a he's a great
guy I've talked to him backstage a few times and he's the type of person that I
really admire because even
though we may have political differences or different cultural backgrounds
there's we're joined together
with a common purpose of trying to help people yeah well he's not ideologically
ideologically captured like
he realized that he was wrong and then his position on this was based on
ignorance so he educated himself and
completely turned around did a 180 and and now is an advocate and it's helped a
lot of people there's I mean
it's tremendous benefit to veterans and people with PTSD and you know coming
back from the war and it's one of the only things that's been shown to really
get these people straight
that and psilocybin and yeah my heart really goes out and this is I'm sort of
low left of center so
my friends will be surprised but my heart goes out to law enforcement can you
imagine stopping a car on
a stormy night at two in the morning right and the window the window comes down
and you have two seconds
to make a decision yeah you do that hundreds of times mm-hmm the likelihood of
having one mistake is
very high and having one very bad day to find your life for the rest of your
life is not right no because
then if you can't resolve those issues as a soldier as a law enforcement as a
doctor who makes a mistake if
you can't get through that that's turmoil that stress right the anger that then
can emanate out from your
anger at yourself to other people yeah then this is what psilocybin and ibogaine
and other psychedelics I
think really do they help people forgive themselves and become better people
and once you forgive
yourself and become a better person then everyone is excited about the fact
that you've changed and yeah
and imagine the world that we could be living in if this experience was
available to so many of the
people that are committing crimes so many of these people who have never had
excited any kind of a
psychedelic experience have never really confronted their own reality in that
way how many of them would
change their ways I would imagine a great deal you bring up a very important
point that I've been
thinking about a lot we talk about using psychedelics and psilocybin other
substances for treating people who
have trauma you know mental illness you know addiction issues but what about
the near normals all of us are
somewhat on the spectrum and we go back and forth depending on your daily
monthly yearly activities
events etc but what about prevention yeah if the return on investment is to
reduce addiction and crime
and all the other collateral damage that's associated with it then it will save
hundreds of billions of
dollars hundreds of billions of dollars yeah psilocybin should be made free I
think you know as a
citizens right to have access and the government should pay for it it would
massively reduce our national
debt it would make our better society but that's not going to happen right that's
a dream well I don't
know if that's not going to happen it's just not going to happen tomorrow you
know I think we're on a path
if you look at where we stand with marijuana for instance like look at las vegas
is a great example
because I remember in the 90s and when we would go to las vegas for the ufc in
the i guess i guess
actually was in the 2000s it was highly illegal and you know I'd remember the
stories from the 70s where
people were locked up for their entire lives for you know like an ounce of
marijuana in vegas they had zero
tolerance for it and I always wondered what that was about whether that was an
anti-hippie thing or
whether it was in response to the alcohol lobby vegas obviously sells a lot of
alcohol and anything
that would cut back on their profits you know this is we talked about this the
other day the study showed
that amongst young people alcohol consumption is down significantly isn't it
down by like 25 percent
which by the what's that it's down i just don't know the number which by the
way a great thing you
know that's that's a good thing but it's not a good thing for profits and so
but my point is that
how many states now have cannabis as completely legal i think it's like 19.
yeah it's more than a
dozen yeah i think it's not somewhere around then and then you have medical use
which is in many many
more states it's just a matter of time before the people in the federal
government realize this is a losing
battle indeed and think about the guilt that those law enforcement officers
must feel and certainly
they must feel i would hope so that they know they put somebody in prison for
30 years for an ounce
of marijuana when it's now legal in those states right how do they reconcile
that how do they yeah
well i mean ptsd amongst law enforcement is something that's very rarely
discussed we talk about it a
lot with soldiers but one of my friends who was a former austin pd told me that
you see more in your line of
duty in a police department than more death more terrible terrible things than
he ever did when he
was in combat and it's just it's like every day every day you're dealing with
shootouts every day you're
dealing with stabbings every day you're dealing with horrific crimes and it's
just your brain is just
overrun with this and with firefighters you know they're the oftentimes the
first responders are their first
my partner's a medical doctor in canada but she used to be a firefighter and um
yeah they oftentimes the
police may now show up for 20 minutes and they're there and the things they
witness i mean things that
no no one should ever witness but i mean this is where it's so important that
we come together as a
society because i really believe that 98 of people are good and two percent of
people are assholes and i think the
assholes can become good people if they have a psychedelic experience i really
think there's
progress right now so much of the media and clickbait journalism they amplify
the extraordinary and
things that get eyeballs and attention but more and more i think people are
they become more
have greater wisdom about how they're being manipulated by the media right
people come together and you know
it's that's why i like mushroom hunting mushroom hunting brings people together
you go out hunting
you have this eureka experience you don't talk politics you're excited about
the species that you
hope to find and you find ones you don't but they become like friends after a
while when you find a
chanterelle you find a shaggy mane you find a psilocybin mushroom they're you
know they're that chance
encounter that eureka experience and sharing it then sharing eating the
mushrooms whether edible or
otherwise i mean it brings a community of interest together it's just a really
fun thing to do and
there's something i want to mention joe that's really important i have been to
a lot of conferences
i just came back from the psychedelic science conference in denver our friend rick
doblin 8 500 people there
um but what i really find an extraordinary way of taking the iphones and droids
and all these kids are
just addicted to their phones right they're not going out in nature so there is
a called nature deficit
syndrome it's actually affecting people but there's a there is an app that i'm
just in love with called
i naturalist it was stopped by a created by a guy named scott he just gave a
ted talk that was released
yesterday i naturalist you can take a phone and you can go out and you collect
a flower a frog a mineral
a mushroom you photograph it you upload it into the cloud of i naturalist and
they have all these
experts amateurs trying to tell you what it is it's a great little debate going
back and forth no you're
right no you're right and then when it hits research grade it's when a group of
experts come together
and says yep you have corpranus comedus yep you have belitis edulis they agree
on identification but it
has fueled the scientific community with all sorts of these citizen scientists
finding new species and
it brings people into nature it gets kids excited and they and then you can go
to i naturalist right
now and you can look around your house or this place to see the reports of
birds and
mushrooms and things i just wanted our naturalist yesterday and celosia cubensis
the golden tops
grow around austin who knew you know because they've been reported now you have
zones of privacy so
you don't have to tell them exactly where the mushroom is and that's probably
not a good thing to do if
it's this whole cyber mushroom but you can make a peripheral zone of anonymity
it can be within two
miles five miles ten miles you know and that way you can do the report but some
of them have high
specificity with lat longs within a few inches but it's so exciting in the
field of biology
in mineralogy and ornithology etc they have all these citizen scientists out
there with their phones
and then every year all over the world now there's called uh bio blitzes where
several hundred people
literally come together they'll go into a park they have all their iphones and
droids and they all they
photograph everything and they upload it to i naturalist to look at species
diversity this has
revolutionized the field of biology i think it's revolutionizes bringing
children and young people
back into nature and you then you build a community you're not talking about
politics you're talking
about nature and what did you find and holy moly i never knew there's a blue
mushroom or something like
that so it's um it's inspiring to see the kids get so excited about this and
adults and so this is you
know that's very cool yeah very how many new species get discovered well
thousands every year thousands
every year now really thousands and thousands there's 223 known species of sulciben
mushrooms and about
wow i'd say 10 10 of them in the past two years has come from uh citizen
scientists quote-unquote amateurs
who found it they uploaded it to i naturalist and so if they find a new species
like what how do they
determine what if it's a completely new species how do they determine that it's
psilocybin how do they
determine where it's from excellent question um the psilocybin species
localized in the genus psilocybe which
has has the most psilocybin species we just know from genetic associations of
either in the clade
the group tha