Joe Rogan - What is the Purpose of Life?

But you as an intelligent person who's also an atheist who thinks very deeply about things, what do you cling to as a purpose for life? Do you have one? Do you have like a... when you sit and think like what's the point of all this? Do you... do you? I don't have a single one. I don't have a monolithic purpose. I have plenty of intermediate-sized purposes, right? Otherwise, you know, why continue living? I think that there's plenty of things I want to do, to achieve, to experience, to share, to give to the world, right? That's a big feature, right? To give to the world. That you are... the way you interact with other human beings and your effect on other human beings gives you... gives you purpose. Yeah, and even if I think that when I die I will no longer exist and my feelings won't matter, I have feelings right now about what the world will be like even after I'm not here anymore, right? So I can still be motivated to make the world a better place in ways that will outlive me even if I think that when I die it's really the end for me. And do you get down sometimes? Do you ever... do you get like these periods of like you're like what is the purpose of all this? Especially if you see some ridiculous thing in the news or some horrific tragedy and... I'm pretty... I mean, so for horrific tragedies, no. You know, I'm just, you know, fortunate enough to be pretty even-keeled when it comes to that stuff. I don't have... I don't struggle with depression or despair or existential anxiety or anything like that. When I was a kid, when I was, you know, first starting to think about the universe and science and things like that, I would start wondering about well what if the universe hadn't existed at all? What if I weren't... wasn't here? And that made me lose sleep that night. And I think like many people there was a very definite moment when I realized that I and everyone I knew would die, right? And that... so I woke up crying and my mom had to, you know, comfort me because like I was like, you know, grandmom's gonna die and you're gonna die and I'm gonna die and, you know, yeah. But, you know, as a grown-up, no. I think that, you know, I'm more or less... so one again, one of the future podcast guests that I'll be next week's podcast will be by a woman who's part of the death positive movement. Have you heard about this? Yeah, this is real stuff. So don't distinguish, don't confuse it. There is a whole movement like an anti-natalist move or something like that. I forget what they call themselves, but there's a whole movement that wants human beings not to exist. That's crazy. Yeah. But there are people who like that. The death positive movement is the following. Like we're gonna die, we should face up to it. We should accept it and we should deal with it in a personally and culturally positive way. So, for example, like right now, especially in the United States, even compared to Europe or other countries, we're terrible at dealing with death. We put people in hospitals, we take them away from their families, away from their homes. We refuse to admit that they're gonna die. So we treat it as if the whole purpose of the game is to squeeze out as many more hours of life as possible, no matter what the quality of that life is. And all that is just rubbish and we should be much more grown up about it. We should plan ahead. You know, when Obama suggested that in the healthcare system there should be, you know, some planning for what happens when you die, Sarah Palin came along with death panels. That was a very effective rhetorical strategy. We don't want to think about the fact that we're gonna die. We don't want to plan for it. If we did plan for it, it could be better. We could die at home. We could die with less pain. We might not live as long as we don't like do every single medical intervention possible just to squeeze out a few more breaths. But it could be a much more life-affirming experience to die because the people around us who are there come across with an acceptance of what's going on rather than the feeling that we should just do everything we can to prevent it. I had a similar situation happen recently with a dog of mine who's a mastiff who reached 13 years old and for mastiffs that's very old and we had to put him down because he couldn't walk anymore. And he was, it was brutally painful to watch him try to get up and fall down and you know. But one of the things I was thinking was that if this was my grandfather and not my dog, I would have to watch him suffer until the bitter end. I knew this dog wasn't going to go backwards in time and become a puppy again. And knew his days were numbered. He couldn't do anything. Most days he just slept all day until it was time to eat. But it was getting to the point where I had to carry him to his food. And I knew that it was over. There's no quality of life. There's no quality of life. In some sense it's even harder with the dog because you can't talk to them, right? You can't explain to them what's going on. They can't explain to you what their wishes are. So you have to be the responsible one. But yeah, so everything legally and culturally in the United States is we're not allowed to relieve that pain or that despair that you have in the end of your life. Some states, including California, are passing death with dignity laws where basically it's what used to be called assisted suicide, but we don't call it that anymore. A doctor is allowed to give you the means to end your own life when you're near. You have to be near a point of no return but still clearly thinking enough to be able to make that decision for yourself. And there's also an issue with our real concern is their fear and their, this experience being this terrifying sort of step into the great beyond. And there's a tool to mitigate that. And the tool that has been shown to mitigate that is psychedelics, one of the big ones being psilocybin. Psilocybin has a remarkable effect on people that are going through stage four cancer and Johns Hopkins has studied it. There's there's there's quite a few studies that have shown that people when you give them psilocybin they they're much more relaxed and much more comfortable with this idea of ending this life of this life. You know it's gone through its course and it's it's an inevitable thing and it's really our biological limitations that are terrified and sparking up all these intense primal fears of the end. Yeah, I'm actually 100% in agreement there. My wife Jennifer Willett who is a science writer wrote a book called Me, Myself and Why, Searching for the Science of Self. And one of our friends said, Oh, if you're gonna write a book about the self, you gotta do LSD. And so we did and she researched it and it's a fascinating history, right? And Elvis Huxley, I don't know if you know about Elvis Huxley's story and he took LSD to do exactly this. He had throat cancer and it completely helped. It's never fun to die, right? But it absolutely helped ease that journey in a very simple way. But just as we are a sort of immature society that doesn't want to phase up to the reality of our eventual deaths, we're also very culturally conservative and squeamish about drugs, right? And so we don't even let people do research on some of these drugs. And so I think that yeah we have a lot of growing up to do when it comes to not just living a good life but also having a good death. And also paying attention to actual scientists who have studied these compounds and really understand what the effects of them are and have researched them deeply and have personal experiences with them and are saying, well these things have been demonized and there are tools that we can use to sort of mitigate a lot of the real issues that we have whether it's culturally or personally with these transitionary times. Like death is inevitable so now that we know it's inevitable you tell me what the main problem would be with someone taking psilocybin before they die and letting them ease their way through this. But you know it's the same reaction that doesn't want people to have a basic income, right? There is a sort of moral...