Joe Rogan on Bad Trips

And I had no experience of psychedelics until I was in my late 20s, and then it was pretty mild. I had a couple mushroom experiences that I now describe as aesthetic experiences, right? Small doses, one gram, something like that. Yeah, I never even measured it. It was probably one gram. So I'd never had a big trip. And there was another reason. I didn't feel psychologically sturdy enough. And I came of age just when the scare stories about psychedelics were everywhere in the culture. They would scramble your chromosomes. You'd stare at the sun until you went blind. The person who took all the orange sunshine and thought he was an orange for the rest of his life. These stories were out there. And I was afraid to. I was just afraid. Yeah. Well, it's not an unfounded fear. Oh, no. People can really get into psychological trouble. I think it's really important that people understand that it's a profound, powerful, destabilizing experience. And depending on your mindset and the situation in which you take it, set and setting, it can be ecstatic or horrific. And there are many people who had a series of very good trips, and then they have that one bad trip. So, yeah, I had heard enough stories about that to stay away. So discovering this kind of later in life, you know, I was certainly not something I planned on or expected. It's a great tragedy, in my opinion, that our culture has demonized these substances and put them in this category of forbidden fruit to the point where you're so nervous about doing them. You have to get them from some shady character. And you don't know what you're getting. Yeah, you have to do them in secrecy. You have to be really careful. But we also at the same time are aware of all these incredibly positive benefits from them. And then if we just had professional places where we could go to, and then we have these rehab facilities that are available for people trying to kick opiates and people trying to get their life together. But if we had something similar, like a psychedelic facility with registered professionals who understand this and who could evaluate you psychologically, understand if you were perhaps taking medication that would adversely affect your trip, try to find out who you are, like where, what state you're at in your life. Have you had any experiences before? Maybe you should put you on a low dose THC. Let's ramp it up slowly. Let's try something small and see how you react to it. And then I think I don't think people like myself or pot smokers or people who have done psychedelics, I don't think we do it any favors either because we're always trying to pretend that there is no adverse effects and that there's like, you know, people, when they get into something, they want everybody to do it. And I've been guilty of this myself. Yeah, people tend to, there's a occupational hazard of irrational exuberance. You know, this is what happened to Timothy Leary, right? I mean, people have an amazing experience. And the first thing they think is everybody's got to do this. But it isn't for everybody. And I think you're absolutely right. I think that, look, there are risks, but these are not drugs of abuse. They're non-addictive. They're anti-addictive. The first thought after having a big psychedelic trip is not, when can I do this again? Right. It's whoa. I mean, the last one I had, I was like, I don't know if I could do that again. I felt that way every time. It's like childbirth or how we hear childbirth is. You can't imagine doing it again. And eventually you do do it again. So I do think that we have to find the proper context in which to do it. And I think your point is really important. We need trained guides. The experience is completely different when it's guided. Because you have a sense of safety. There's someone looking out for your body while your mind is traveling. And this allows you to essentially surrender to the experience. And most bad trips, in my experience, are the result of people resisting what is happening. Their ego is dissolving and it's scary. It feels like a death. And they try to stop it. And that can make you very anxious. And so all the guides I worked with and interviewed, they were all like, relax your mind and float downstream. If you see a door, open it. If you see a staircase, go down it. Surrender. Trust and let go. And this kind of advice changes everything. The chances of a bad trip, I think, in a guided situation are substantially less because they know how to help you deal with it and what to tell you when it's happening. So I do think that by forcing these drugs underground and into this very kind of unregulated use, there were not... Reports of bad trips were much fewer before the moral panic about LSD in 1965 and when it was still legal. You didn't hear about bad trips. You started hearing about it when the culture did this 180 and turned against psychedelics. So I think you can create situations where the risks are really mitigated. Well, I think also the fear, like you were talking about right before the podcast, or right as we started, some people were worried that they were going to turn into an orange or think they're an orange, all those fears. If you take something and those things are in the back of your head and you can literally manifest extreme anxiety that might not have been there if you just relax and just had the experience alone, on its own, without all the cultural hysteria attached to it. Yeah, or episodes of paranoia. That's common too. But a good guide can work you through this. And actually, they don't even like the term bad trip. They call it a challenging trip because often very interesting material comes up that you then can work on later. It's like having a nightmare and analyzing it with your shrink. It actually may be very productive. So I was kind of a nervous Nellie going into this and I really looked at the whole risk profile. And on the physiological side, your body, the risks are remarkably low. And I'm speaking here of the classic psychedelics. I'm not talking about MDMA or even pot. I'm talking about LSD, psilocybin, which is magic mushrooms, DMT, mescaline. They are much less toxic than many of the over-the-counter drugs you have in your medicine cabinet. There is no lethal dose, which is remarkable. There was one elephant that was killed with LSD once. They wanted to see what it would take. And it was this, they gave it a massive dose, but to get it to the point where they could administer it, they had to give it a massive dose of tranquilizer. So it isn't actually clear that the LSD killed it. It may have been the benzos or whatever they were giving it. I know, what a horrible thing, right? Go online and look up the elephant who died from LSD. What a crazy idea. Yeah, animal cruelty. I wonder what was going through the elephant's mind before it died. Well, animals don't like psychedelics that much. So, I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. So, I'm going to go to the next slide. So, I'm going to go to the next slide. So, I'm going to go to the next slide. So, I'm going to go to the next slide. 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