Joe Rogan | The Mythology of "The Portal" w/Eric Weinstein

Maybe, maybe this is a good segue. I hadn't thought about it this way, but, um, so can we use this format to announce that I am in fact starting the podcast. I've recorded a couple. Boom. Episodes already, uh, that are in the canon. It is, it is called the portal. The portal. Yeah. Hmm. The portal is, um, refers to this, this very interesting, uh, thing that I, I thought everyone was aware of, but very often people wouldn't react to it. When I was a kid, I read all of these stories that I thought were known to be the same story, but different versions of it. And I called it the portal story. And it was always the same. Dorothy is trapped in a humdrum existence in an ordinary world until some sort of magical portal accidentally or on purpose enters their life. And either they go through a wardrobe, they go through a rabbit hole, looking glass platform, nine and three quarters. Um, or, you know, Dorothy famously, uh, was used to introduce technicolor where she, the first part of the film, she's in Kansas and it's in sort of grayscale black and white. And then she lands an Oz and they opened the door and it's technicolor. And there's this transitional scene, um, where you see technicolor for the first time. Was that the first time I ever ended up moving? I believe so. Wow. And so, and so the question is, um, where's the portal? Like why do we tell the same story over and over and over again with different protagonists, but it's always the same formula. Somebody is trapped in an ordinary world. They're sort of, they're around normies. They find the portal and the portal becomes the call to adventure and they spend time in the alternate universe. And then somehow they're able to live. Very often they return. Uh, if you remember the Phantom toll booth, Milo gets this present of a car and a toll booth and he goes through the toll booth and he, what is that from? Uh, Norton Jester was the author and Jules Pfeiffer was, did the illustrations. It was just this brilliant book, uh, where there's like the land of letters and the land of numbers. So it's arts and sciences. And you know, like there's a, there's a person who starts from his head and grows down until his feet reach the ground and there's a numbers mine and he has to rescue the princesses of rhyme and reason in order to restore order between the two kingdoms of, you know, like left and right hemisphere. It's some incredibly, uh, exciting story. And the idea is that after he goes and does all of these, like there's an island called conclusions and when you make an assumption, you leap to conclusions. So you suddenly jump. I mean, it's all very clever word play and stuff. At the end of the adventure, the toll booth disappears because it has to go to the next kid who needs it, you know? And so my question was always why, why on earth would we tell the same story over and over and over and over and over again? It has the same format and it's always a different context. And I came to believe that the story is actually this unkempt promise for most people that in their adult lives, they don't find these portals. So for example, have you ever been to Barcelona, Spain? No. There is a church in Barcelona, Spain, which is plenty impressive from the outside. When you go inside, I've been looking at pictures of it my entire life called La Sagrada Familia. It is a psychedelic drug trip and a half like you've never seen. It is the most bizarre interior space I've ever seen in my life. Can you bring up the interior of this thing? And on the one hand, it induces like a hallucinogenic state. On the other hand, it's an idea of what this architect Gaudi, now Gaudi is very famous. He did a lot of buildings around Barcelona. There is nothing like the inside of this church on this planet. And whoa, fuck, that's beautiful. And if you look up at the roof, wow. Most things you're sort of prepared for them your whole life and then you see it and you think, eh, I guess that's cool. I've been seeing this thing my whole life and I had no concept of what a genius this human being was because nothing he did. Look at the outside of it. The outside of it. I mean, look, this guy. Fuckism. If he never did the inside of this church, he would be a very famous and idiosyncratic architect. Wow. Are they doing work on it there? They haven't finished it yet. And in fact, he's such a genius that they can't finish it in the style that he started because nobody knows. It's like an unfinished symphony. What would you do? Nobody's smart enough to finish this church. Wow. Look at the roof on that place. Okay. Now that is a portal. That is a portal. Right? And when I was on this program before, I thought long and hard, what is it that I could push out to the planet to let people know how wonderful and beautiful the world that we live in is? And we pushed out the hop vibration and suddenly, if you recall, I said to people, this is the most important object in the universe, not the hop vibration in particular, but the class called the principle bundle, which people have no idea it's out there and it is the basis of the construct in which we live. So how is it that a normal human being can make contact with real physics, with real beauty of biology or just understanding order, symmetry, all of these things that are beyond normal experience? And what I hope to do with the podcast is to have amazing guests and interesting conversations. But to, oh, thank you for that, James. That guy was on drugs. That guy was... He was drunk. Well, that's, you know, remember that's what Dolly said. Somebody said, Dolly, do you take drugs? He said, I am drunk. Right? Another Spaniard. Spaniards are really something. But that is very similar to psychedelic states. Well, maybe some people have access to them all the time. Right? In part. Well, there's actually an illustration that sits above our sink out there from a guy who has a tumor in his pituitary or his not pituitary gland, his... What is the one that the one that they think produces DMT? What the fuck is it called? Not the pituitary gland. No. Pineal? Pineal. Thank you. He has a tumor in his... Thank you. A tumor in his pineal gland. And so he, he accesses these states all the time. So this guy has... It's a hundred percent DMT inspired artwork. I mean, if you look at it, that's like what you see when you do DMT trips. It's like, it's a version, you know, in his style of art, but you can see the signature of DMT. There it is. There's his artwork. What is his name? Sean Thornton. Sean Thornton. Thank you, Sean. Thanks for the artwork. It's fucking awesome. And it sits in our kitchen. I'll take a picture of it later and put it online. But that's his stuff. Like, that's super DMT like. Oh, that's amazing. I mean, that's a thing, a tryptamine type experience. Like you could say like Alex Gray is probably the most representative. I would say he's the most representative in terms of artists in the DMT space in terms of like tryptamines and psilocybin and things on those lines. And so if you think about psychoactive chemicals, some of them are stupefying, but some of them are portals. And this concept of if you look at a wall, how do you know that the wall doesn't have a door? How do you know that there's a panic room behind the bookcase if you just pull out the right book? We are, we learn to stop looking for the portal. And I think what I do differently than other people is that I became obsessed with exits, that there are other worlds and they're real. That this mythology of the looking glass and the rabbit hole and the matrix is metaphor for very real things.