Joe Rogan Reacts to Michael Pollan's DMT Story

Did you have a dumb moment? I had a lot of insights. I don't know if I... Yeah, I did actually. How many different trips did you have? Why are you doing that? I had six or seven. So I just... A couple... Two psilocybin trips, one guided, one not. An LSD trip guided. A couple ayahuasca circles. And then I had a really weird psychedelic called 5-MeO-DMT, which is the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad. Who figured that out? She gets some kind of prize. That's a pretty potent one. Very potent and thank God short acting. I'm short-lived. It was actually a horrible experience. Really? That was my worst. I had a great experience on it. You did? Yeah. What was wrong with it? So you take one puff and before you exhale, I was... This is synthetic version too, right? I was taking the venom. You're shot out of a cannon. There's no lead up. There's no warm up. It's like, floom. And I felt like I was actually strapped to the outside of a rocket, going through space and through clouds and the G-forces pulling down my cheeks. And it was just this mental storm without any... Nothing to orient myself. There was no space. There was no time. There was no self. And it was just unendurable, this punishing roar in my ears. And someone who had done it said eventually it's like a take off and you get into orbit and it's very nice at that point. But what happened with me is I had the storm. I mean I felt like it was like... The metaphor I use in the book is like... I said, I can't explain this. You can't tell a story without place, time and character, right? I had none of those. It was just this inchoate energy. And I said it was like before the big bang. You remember that? Well, obviously nobody does. But there was pure energy and no matter yet and no time yet. I mean that's where I was. And it was horrible. It was terrifying. And I thought I was dying. But then you come down. It was kind of a suborbital flight. And then I started coming down and suddenly I could feel, oh, I got a body. I was touching my legs. I have a body. And like, oh, there's a floor. There's space. And then there's time. And the universe kind of reconsolidated. And I had this feeling of incredible gratitude. Not just for being alive, which all of us have had at one point or another, but that anything existed. I was grateful for the fact that there is something and not nothing because I'd seen what nothing was like. And so in that sense, it ended up kind of positive, but you wouldn't want to go there to have that experience. So subsequently somebody said to me, a very experienced psychonaut who I was telling this story to, he said, you didn't have enough. That's what I was just going to tell you. Really? Yeah. Because you only took one hit. You usually take three. You take three and the rocket ride leads you somewhere. It takes you to the center of the universe. You take three, three, three. Three in a row. Three in a row. Take a big one. At the same time. Blow it out. Take a big one. Blow it out. Take a big one. And as you're taking the third one, you're already seeing the world crystallize in front of you. And you're turning into geometric patterns. You put the pipe down, lay back in the chair and shoot off to the center of the universe. The terrifying thing is you cease to exist. It's the one drug that I've ever taken where you're not there anymore. Even NN dimethyltryptamine, which is the difference between 5-methoxy dimethyltryptamine is just an oxygen molecule attached to it. But NN dimethyltryptamine is incredibly visually stimulating. 5-methoxy is not. It's just white. It was white. It was definitely white. I don't know how I could have taken three hits because I hadn't excelled the first one when I was gone. Well, I don't know what you're doing. I only did the synthetic version of it. You're doing this frog version. And the person I know who did the synthetic version had a very different experience and they felt like they were installed in the firmament as this happy star. But I didn't get there. So who knows? I did something wrong. Okay. I don't think you did. I just think you had a different experience. And I mean, obviously there's got to be some sort of chemical difference. You're probably getting other things in that frog venom as well as pure DMT. That's right. That may be it. I don't know the answer to that. It's fucking frog spit. Do you know how to get it to? By the way, no frogs were harmed in the making of this drug. It's excreted on the outside of their body. What most people do is that you rub them on a glass and then let it dry off and then you scrape it off the glass and then you smoke it. It crystallizes. Yeah. You just kind of squeeze them and then it sprays the glass and overnight it turns into it looks like brown sugar. It's an amazing thing. You're the first person who knows anything about it that I've, that who is into doing it. I used to be able to buy it. It was legal until recently. I bought a fucking jug of this shit offline. I bought it from some company, American Chemical Company or something, and they send it to you and I had enough to get the entire state of California high for several days because it doesn't take much. It doesn't. But it's not something you want to do very often. And I don't think it has the same kind of healing properties because you're not bringing back information that's usable. Oh, I brought back a lot. You did? Yeah. I brought back a lot about myself and one of the things that I realized, like as I was, I recorded what I would do is post trip, I would hit a tape recorder right when I became conscious again and start talking about the experience. And what I remember saying about the phi methoxy DMT experience is like, as I'm trying to recount what happened, I feel my ego trying to retake hold the situation and even use words in a way that might impress you with my ability to describe things or as a professional comedian too, I was aware that like a lot of what you're doing, you're saying things in a way that's pleasing to people so that they get excited about hearing you talk. And I was very aware of that while I was doing that. I'm saying I'm trying to explain things that are not possible to explain because the words that we're using were all invented for a world that doesn't exist in the DMT dimension. And once you break through, it is so profoundly alien that any words... And liberating? Yes. Yeah. Well, in a way, I mean, it made me really, truly realize that we are in a soup of atoms and that it's not... There's not like Michael Pollan, Joe Rogan and Jamie Vernon in a room. Here's a wood table. There's oxygen between us. Right. And then a universal stew of particles. Yeah, diffused. Yeah. And it breaks those particles down or at least it gives you a view into that and you cease to exist, which is the most bizarre thing because it's so similar to NN dimethyltryptamine chemically but so different in... Inexperienced. ...the fact that you're not there while you're doing regular... NN dimethyltryptamine, which is the active ingredient in Niohoska. Have you done that, the pure version of it? No, not the pure version. The pure version is like a very short, much more intense Iowhoska experience. I've never done Iowhoska. I've only done the DMT version. But the... By injection or... No, smoking it. Uh-huh. But what you get out of it is you're there while this is happening. Yeah, your present. And you're just blown away and you're like, I can't believe you're seeing... And that's true in Iowhoska too. ...but there's all these entities that are trying to calm you down. Relax, relax, take it in, settle down, settle down. They're all trying to calm you down and alleviate. That's helpful. Yeah, it's weird. And they're also fucking with you like they give you the finger. I had a bunch of jokers that were dancing around me, giving me the finger. Did you have machine elves too? I don't believe in that thing. I don't know what that is. McKenna had those experiences of machine elves. I saw what I described as complex geometric patterns that are made out of love and understanding. This seemed to me to be like the building blocks of the soul all around you all the time. Wow. Like some just gigantic, impossibly large infinite well of souls. Just these things dancing around you and they were never one thing. They would be one thing for a second and they'd change into something else and then they'd change into something different. And the more profound the experience is got, the more profound the next one would be. And they kept saying like, look at this, look at this. But the words weren't real words. That's the other thing. It's like I'm saying the words, look at this. And I would have that in my head, but I never heard anybody say it. It was almost like it was triggering the concept of those words in my mind. Right. Right. It's pre or post linguistic some of these experiences.