Duncan Trussell shares his eerie GPS detour to a moon-like landscape and admiration for off-grid Alaskans, sparking debate with Joe Rogan on self-sufficiency versus societal progress. They explore Hare Krishna’s Bhagavad Gita-based mantra chanting, Duncan’s psychedelic experience during Jamastami, and "OM" as cosmic vibration, while Joe muses on CERN’s neutrino anomaly and panspermia theories. Rogan criticizes drug prohibition, citing DMT and mushrooms’ potential for wisdom, and mocks a Tomorrow Show ad linking marijuana to terrorism before abruptly cutting to Graham Hancock’s arrival. [Automatically generated summary]
The Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is brought to you by The Fleshlight.
If you go to JoeRogan.net and click on the link for The Fleshlight and enter in the code name ROGAN, you will get 15% off the number one sex toy for men.
Why do people assume that, but it is a strange thing, why do people assume that when someone wants to be away, that they want some space between you and them, there's something creepy about them.
Oh, they're out there fucking cooking meth, and you automatically assume, why is that cabin by itself with that chimney blowing smoke?
What the fuck are they cooking in there?
You know, you don't look at it and go, look at that guy.
He's out there just doing it by himself, chopping wood.
No, you assume automatically that some creepy thing is going on out there if he's by himself.
And they went and visited this guy who lives in like northern eastern Alaska.
He lives like way the fuck up there.
They have to drop him off supplies.
And he lives in this little tiny shack.
And he's like one of the few people that's allowed to live there.
And he's been there for like 20 years.
This dude never even saw 9-11.
He never saw the towers go down.
He'd like heard that something had happened.
He's so removed from everything.
He's got, like, a little generator.
Sometimes he powers up a TV, and he's got movies that they watch.
But, dude, this guy's living in the woods in a tiny one-room house with his wife, who looks like some sort of an Eskimo type of woman, and they're fucking happy as shit up there.
He says that hunting and gathering is, like, what keeps you happy, and that's what keeps him happy.
He's out there shooting caribou and following them.
He had to shoot a bear on one of the episodes, because the bear had came too close to his house, and the bears killed their dogs and shit.
So it's the middle of the night, they're running after this guy with a camera, and he's running through the woods with a fucking shotgun, and cha-ba-boom!
Cha-ba-boom!
He's just blowing holes into this fucking bear and chasing it down, while they're all chasing after him with cameras in the middle of the night in the woods in Alaska.
Dude, it's gnarly.
It's amazing footage, too.
It's such an interesting insight to someone who would choose to live that life, you know?
Which seems so horrifying to us, but to him, our life is just fucking mundane.
There's nothing to it, and he just can't get excited about it.
About being self-sufficient that seems like it would feel so incredibly good to be completely off the grid and know that if everything fell apart, your life would barely shift at all.
But is that like instincts to not join the system?
Is that what that is?
Is that some sort of a resistance of the hive that would feel good to not need all these people?
Isn't that ridiculous?
Because the reason why everything is so awesome, the reason why society in general is so awesome is because millions of people contributed to make this one colossal thing that relies on millions of people.
But because all these other people are involved, it's fucking awesome.
It's amazing.
It's got some terrible parts about it too, but the idea itself and what can be accomplished with it is fucking amazing.
So why do we want to not need that?
Do we want to keep the option open to be a cunt so you can just fucking fuck off?
I'm just going to go live off caribou in the middle of nowhere.
I've had that thought in my head about monks, you know, like, what kind of a loser just wears a fucking orange robe and never beats off and just hides and chants all day.
And the monks, you're missing out on astral projection.
You can't send your spirit to the higher dimensional planes to communicate with the supreme gods.
Your third eye is sealed, shut.
You have no idea about what it feels like to be completely in tune, vibrating with the harmony of the universe.
You're You're just humping.
You're just leg-humping down there in the city while I'm floating around through the eternal paradise outside of time and space in pure transcendent bliss.
Yeah, well, I think theoretically what may happen is that as you evolve and begin to open your chakras up, and this is purely theoretical, but I think that you begin to extinguish the desire to tour You extinguish the desire to perform.
Well, I know for a fact that I have achieved at least bizarre states of consciousness just from yoga.
I remember one time I was in New York and I was real nervous.
I had to do...
The Howard Stern Show the next day.
It was the first time I ever did it and I was genuinely nervous and I couldn't sleep.
So I was in my hotel room reading off of this ancient yoga book and doing these poses and I did yoga for like an hour and a half.
And at the end of it, I felt fucking great.
I mean, I didn't just feel great.
I felt high.
I felt tingly.
My body was like, I felt tingles, like a glowing tingle.
I mean, I did this intense yoga routine for an hour and a half.
And when it was over, my body had just stretched everything out.
up all the whatever the fuck it is.
You want to call it chakras, you want to call it senses, you want to call it whatever, your ability to tune in to what's around you was all that was just cranked to 10.
I was like, wow, if this was a drug, this feeling like an intense yoga workout, it can feel very much like a real mild pot. - Yeah. - Like, ooh.
Nothing that's going to make you fucking drive shitty or forget your keys, but something that's going to make you just a little, whoa, I feel a little better.
Yeah, well, I felt that too from yoga, and I felt that from chanting, and I felt that from any kind of ritualistic thing that has spiritual undertones to it, which I think yoga does.
And it's hardcore organized religion that recommends...
You know, renouncing the world.
Like, it doesn't tiptoe around the fact, like, it's hardcore into the idea that the way to live, if you really want to be happy, is to let go of all the things of the world and start chanting the Hare Krishna Maha Mantra.
But it's very important to realize that that mantra is not owned by ISKCON, which is the Hare Krishna.
That's like the Catholic Church for this sect of Hinduism, which is known as Bhakti Yoga.
So there's a lot of different schools of thought in it, and it's a very deep philosophy that has its roots in the idea that There is that God, everything comes from God.
And so the word Krishna means, translates into the reservoir of all pleasure.
So it's, the idea is like all pleasure, all opulence, all happiness, everything springs from some source, like the Big Bang except the spiritual Big Bang.
And this is a, they believe that this is an intelligent force in the universe that has specific qualities.
And so People are kind of born with this case of amnesia where they've forgotten that this even exists, and so they begin to become attracted to these qualities and different things.
So people are attracted to beauty, people are attracted to intelligence, people are attracted to wealth, people are attracted to strength.
But they say that these are just the sort of what people are seeing as the qualities of the supreme being reflected through the material universe, and that's what people are attracted to.
And so by this specific process of bhakti yoga, you begin to turn your senses back towards the original source of all this stuff through this very, very strict...
Discipline of chanting, not eating meat.
The monks that wear the robes, it's called the four regulative principles.
You don't eat meat.
You don't use any intoxicants.
No sex.
And no gambling.
You wake up at 4 every morning, 4.30 every morning.
You chant, I think, 16 rounds of this mantra, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, and you study and you live in a temple, and that's how you spend your life.
And you're studying the Bhagavad Gita.
You're studying the Vedas, the Bhagavad Gita and the Srimad Bhagavatam and all these other religious texts.
And you get deep, deep, deep into it to the point where you complete...
I mean, they recommend...
As I recall, even your family is just your karma, your attachment to your family, it's just your karma.
It's like, let go of all those attachments, surrender to this...
Higher force, and then you'll experience transcendent happiness.
And the ultimate goal in life is to try to connect with God.
That's the only reason to be alive.
And if you're not engaged in that activity, then you're miserable.
Then you're not really experiencing the type of happiness.
And even if you think you're experiencing happiness, it's nothing compared to what you can obtain from living a spiritual life and chanting this mantra.
Well, what happened was, when I got into the Hare Krishnas, what happened to me was...
Because, you know, if you have an experience, you've had an experience.
There's no way around it.
If you have an experience, you have to accept that the experience happened, and you have to tell the truth about the experience one way or the other.
So, for me to not talk about that part of my life or to pretend that I wasn't...
I had a conversion experience where I was in this temple on Jamastami, which is what they call the appearance date of Krishna.
It's like Christmas, basically.
And...
What had just happened before that is someone had gotten me really high, like really stoned.
So I was sitting in the temple, and they're like ringing bells, and they have these deities that they worship, and they're pouring this, I believe they pour milk on the deities, and it's like all your senses are being overwhelmed.
They're burning incense, they've got everything, It has flowers everywhere.
So the whole place is garlands of flowers.
So it's just the smell of flowers and incense and monks, you know, like the guys with the shaved heads and the necklaces that they wear and like bells ringing.
So your senses are completely overcome.
And I've never had this experience before or since, but...
I was looking at these symbols, and all of a sudden the symbols, it felt like I was seeing past the symbols into something deeper than what those symbols were.
The symbols were just a human's attempt to try to embody this greater thing that exists in the universe.
And all of a sudden I felt, the only way I can explain it is it felt like I was, sounds so crazy, felt like I was on a spaceship.
I thought, oh, this is what an advanced intelligence is like.
I was looking at something that was a billion times smarter than I was, and that it was being somehow tuned into in this ritual that if you were outside the ritual, it would just look like a lot of pomp and maybe some brainwashed people going through the motions of something.
But inside of it, it felt like this incredible blast of super intelligence.
And that happened to me, and I It changed me.
For the rest of my life, I'll be changed because of that.
the thing about harry krishna is you don't have to be a um harry krishna to chant harry krishna and that's that's the thing that they always said it's the the thing that uh uh prabhapad the founder of the harry krishna said is just chant it you have nothing to lose chant it what the fuck does it do you you're saying this specific sync synchronized series of sounds yeah this chant has an effect that actually puts you in a psychedelic state oh yeah absolutely that's That's why all the hippies loved it, man.
Yoga is specific movements that you do, that if you do these movements, you go into, like what you said, this mild psychedelic state.
Well, that's just one form of, you know, that's hatha yoga or whatever particular type of yoga you were doing.
But in the same way, these mantras that they have induce a very specific...
Experience that if you do it enough, the only way to explain it is your mood will lighten.
You know that heaviness, man?
There's a heaviness that...
People get that I get.
And if I'm deeply in this state, it's what I consider the road rage state.
You know what I mean?
Where I'm likely to scream at a car cutting me off or something.
If you chant Hare Krishna or any of the others, a lot of other mantras out there, and you do it regularly just for a week, then you will experience a change in your consciousness.
If I'm alone by myself and chanting, I chant fast.
So it's like...
Well, Ram Dass talked about this and said that it's like kind of the way you chant is just an indication of where you are in life.
If I'm more relaxed, the chanting will slow down, but because of just the way I am, I end up chanting fast.
And I'll try to slow myself down, but it just ends up going fast again.
I just was watching a video of Prabhupada chanting, and he chants relatively fast.
So it creates this sound.
It creates this weird, trippy sound.
in your if you do it do like you're for real intentions how do you get sunny guess and I guess and I guess and I got it on my mom and I get it I guess and I guess and I get it on my mom and I get it because I guess and I guess and I get Sonny Eddie I did on when it on Romanoi it it is nine years and I guess and I get it on when it I'm wrong when I get it and I guess and I guess and I guess and I get it I did on when it I'm wrong when I get it it is 90 is that's easily the weirdest human Bust that out like that.
But what's cool about it is if you listen to the chant, it has the OM in it.
but he gets an ignition is negative it's not a good at all wrong wrong and some people will just chant the home or some people will just chant wrong that's another chant wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong wrong all of these are no matter what you think and I know I people are going to think I'm a you know a new age freak or whatever but I'm not I'm just telling the truth.
It's helped me immensely in my life.
I don't think anyone should do anything more than what they're comfortable with, but if you're having a bad trip...
If you're freaking out in your life, but especially if you're having a shitty trip, and you start chanting Hare Krishna, you will feel better.
If you can remember how it goes, if you're really blitzkrieged out of your mind, talking to the Lucky Charms guy at the top of the world, you're not going to remember it.
The Big Bang is the shittiest theory ever, and I'm not a scientist, and clearly I'm retarded, and I know that there's some evidence, supposedly, that some big explosion happened 14 billion years, but they have no idea why everything was smaller than the head of a pin.
What are you talking about?
So wait a minute, wait a minute.
Everything was smaller than the head of the pin.
Why was it smaller than the head?
We don't know.
We don't know.
But we do believe that there was an infinite point where the whole universe was smaller than the head of a pin.
They don't even know why.
It's the weirdest fucking conversation ever.
Someone said it best.
It might have been McKenna.
I think Terrence McKenna said it's as if they're asking you just believe in magic only once.
Time travel is the big implication because once they figure out how to actually...
It would require an immense amount of power.
But just think about what powers your cell phone today and what it was like to have those Apollo 11 computers when they filled entire rooms and they weren't nearly as powerful as your cell phone.
They blasted some neutrinos or something, and the neutrinos were, they reached where they were supposed to reach a few milliseconds before they should have reached it or something?
The research clearly shows that when a total of 15,000 beams of neutrinos were fired, the tiny particles traveled the 730 kilometer, 2.43 millisecond trip, roughly 60 nanoseconds faster than light.
Fucking incredible, gigantic particle collider that is supposed to uncover this thing called the Higgs-Boson particle, which they call, or excuse me, Boson.
Try wrapping your head around something that's that dense.
Think about, like, a fat person.
You look at, like...
Think about Fat James from the comedy store.
You know Fat James?
Love Fat James.
Great guy.
Calls himself Fat James, folks.
It's his nickname.
It's Fat James who calls you out.
Hey, it's Fat James.
You think about him as a human.
He's not a tall fellow, but he's fairly heavy.
And you look at him and go, wow, that's a lot of weight right there.
Now think about if he was a quark gluon plasma.
You know what I'm saying?
Can you even wrap your head around that?
If a sugar cube is 40 billion or 400 billion fucking pounds, whatever the hell it is, whatever insane...
When you say 40 billion or 400 billion, I know that there's a big difference in those two numbers, but to me, none of them even register.
I'm just making noises with my mic.
I don't know what 40 billion means or 400 billion means.
That to me is like, it's too abstract.
It's too big.
I'm not assimilating that, you know?
But to think of a Fat James made out of this stuff, you can't even, like, how is that even possible that there could be two types of matter that are both so far different from each other that they could be the same size and one of them would be literally the weight of the fucking earth?
They dress up like the Half-Life dudes and they've taken pictures of them pretending to be the characters in Half-Life.
Because if you don't know, the video game Half-Life was all about scientists cracking a hole in the universe and aliens come over and fuck everybody up.
You know, I'm 100% for marijuana legalization, but I think you should at least have to read a book or watch a documentary before you eat one of those cookies.
That's funny, though, that thing you just said about how that part of your mind, the part of your mind that clicks back in, no matter how deep the psychedelic experience is, there is a part of your mind.
Yeah, it's very strange how your mind can do that no matter how far out you get.
It's a curiosity.
There's a story that Ram Dass talks about.
This lady called him because she was on Orange Sunshine, which was apparently back in the 60s.
It was like the ultimate LSD. It was like this legendary acid.
And she called him and said, you know, I've took too much orange sunshine.
I'm going completely insane.
I don't know what to do.
And he's like, okay, well, can you put the person on who...
Thought that they should call me and picked up the phone and dialed it, because that's who I want to talk to right now.
Because it's like, she was logical enough to know how to dial a phone and call and talk.
She was making logical decisions.
She had just decided to allow herself to be the crazy person for a second.
You know, there's always...
What I'm saying is, it's like...
There's always the observer.
There's always the part of yourself that's watching you go into whatever the experience is that you're going into, whether it's a psychedelic experience, whether it's a traumatic life experience.
There's always the part of you that's just kind of watching.
It just depends on who you want to identify with at any given moment.
I've talked to you on the phone when I'm way too high, and you've inevitably made me feel better just from talking to you, because I'll call and I'll...
If I'm freaking out, I don't remember the specific time, but I know that I've called you and just started talking about some terrible idea I'd have about an imminent war or something, like some awful thing I'm getting paranoid about, and you're really good at being like, that's not going to happen.
You're fine.
Everything's fine.
And it just takes that.
It's just one confident person being like, dude, everything's going to be really great.
You don't have to worry about anything, and you'll feel better.
And, you know, when you talk about giant superorganisms, the whole Pacific Northwest, apparently there's some giant mushroom colony in the Pacific Northwest.
It's all considered, you know, it's mycelium or whatever the fuck it is.
It's considered one large organism.
And it's one of the biggest organisms on the planet.
And McKenna had this rap about mushrooms that not only did he think that mushrooms were the catalyst for humans evolving from lower primates, but he also thought that mushrooms came from another planet because the fact that spores could survive in a vacuum.
Yeah, in four positions, you're the only one like it on the planet.
There's nothing like that mushroom on the planet, and yet it mimics human neurochemistry.
And dimethyltryptamine is produced in the human body, and it's in the blood-brain barrier, and they think it's responsible for dreams and all that shit, and this stuff has it in it.
That is part of what it is.
And if it really did come from another planet, imagine if all of our ideas about intelligent life are based on the ability to manipulate carbon, the ability to manipulate carbon matter.
But what if a mushroom is a life form that has evolved so far that it doesn't need a form anymore?
It doesn't need to move, and the way it gets you is you eat it.
And you can't kill it.
It fucking flies through space on an asteroid.
It gets knocked off of one planet and travels four billion light years to another one and lands there.
And it starts up a new fucking colony of mushrooms.
And they grow.
And they grow where people are.
They don't grow in the middle of nowhere.
They're not hard to find.
They're on grass lawns.
They're on lawns where people always are.
They're always around people, man.
There's people, there's mushrooms.
That's a weird thing.
That's a weird thing.
The idea that it's a life form.
A life form from another planet that came in on an asteroid.
It's the theory of pansperia.
That's how life is seeded throughout the universe.
Yeah, that idea, I've heard McKenna's idea, and when you're tripping, it definitely does seem like you are getting some kind of transmission from something.
To me, when I'm really gone, it feels like I'm in something, like I'm a part of it.
It's not a transmission.
Whatever your consciousness truly is, outside of cells and fingernails, whatever your inner consciousness is, this thing took me to another place.
And so the physical body that I exist and move around in literally didn't exist, and I was inside this other place.
It's an experience that's not like a transmission.
like more like a chemical gateway feeling and you know we talked about this before the podcast that it could just be your senses fucking with you when you're whacked out on drugs it could be it could be that your senses everybody's senses work the same way you take this whacked out drug and everybody gets a reaction the same way but i don't think it is um and even if it is it's more fun to think that it's not and there's no evidence to prove otherwise exactly so i'm gonna stick with because it's more empowering.
It's more fascinating.
I like to believe in magic.
I don't like to believe in too much magic, but I like to believe that mushrooms are magic.
I like to believe that DMT is magic.
I like to believe that weed is magic.
I really believe weed is magic.
It sounds stupid, but listen, I'm talking about it in a silly utilitarian way, in a way that's functional and easy to use without delving too deeply into what the weed is.
When I smoke weed, all of a sudden I get ideas.
I smoke weed and all of a sudden I have ideas.
What is that?
If that's not magic, I don't know what the fuck is.
Introspective thoughts, start worrying about your own behavior, studying yourself, looking at the world differently, thinking about clouds, how strange clouds are, man.
That fucking pig in New York who maced those women he netted.
did you see that shit that fucking beefy piece of shit there's like these two apparently out there there's these two uh distinctions in the police they're and they're calling uh the white collar police and the blue collar police the guys in the blue suits are apparently just being police and they're cool but they're these violent kind of like uh thug pigs out there who have been like grabbing people who aren't doing anything and i saw the video of the girls getting maced did you
It's on, you can look at, what's the name of that thing?
It's Occupy Wall Street, is that what it's called?
On that site, OccupyWallStreet.org, I think, there's a picture of the guy.
They got a picture of him and they're trying to find him because they've got lawyers who are volunteering to help the people get out of jail and help the people who are, like, they've already arrested a hundred people.
See, the idea is they're protesting the fact that 1% of the people on the planet control all their resources and they're going to Wall Street because that seems to be the locus of all this greed.
There's great video.
There's video of these really rich people sitting out on a balcony drinking champagne and toasting the protesters.
All these super richy riches out there just watching them.
Right, and the idea is that, look, at the end of the day, you're using up the Earth's resources, especially if you're talking like some big, gigantic corporation.
You're using up a gigantic chunk of the Earth's resources, which, you know, really, in all fairness, should be distributed equally amongst all the people on the planet.
Yeah, we just don't have the technology yet to do it.
And also, a lot of the people who the resources would get distributed to are fucking idiots.
So that is a real problem, because a lot of people are not...
Because our education system is crap.
So people have been being brought up through a really crappy education system.
Not all schools are terrible, but a lot of them...
These kids, they have way too many kids.
How are you going to teach a classroom with 60 fucking kids, many of them who are living in poverty and their parents are drug addicts?
How are you going to do that?
You'd have to be Superman to pull that off.
So it's like you're dealing with people who haven't been educated and people who are hopeless.
And so the real question is, let's imagine that all the 1% that these people are protesting suddenly were like, you know what, we're going to distribute our wealth.
I don't know, but they're saying we have to do something.
That's what they're saying.
They're right.
They're right.
The system is completely fucked up.
It doesn't work.
It doesn't make sense that you – the whole idea of a financial system, the whole idea of when you start talking about banks and economics and numbers and manipulating things, and then things get so weird.
You talk about interest rates, and then you talk about taxes, and you talk about the distribution of the money.
Where is the tax money going?
When you break all these numbers down, then you realize that these numbers only represent numbers.
They don't represent a fucking bag of – They don't represent anything of real value.
It's like numbers.
So then when someone has fucking $18 billion or something crazy, and then you examine them and you go, what did you do?
Well, I moved numbers.
I moved numbers around and I made billions of dollars moving all these numbers and buying and selling numbers and agreeing and...