Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1565 - Gary Laderman
Uploaded: 2020-11-17T00:00:00.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1565 - Gary Laderman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-17. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1565 - Gary Laderman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-11-17. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1565 - Gary Laderman

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Gary.
Hey, how you doing?
What's up, man? Thanks for coming. Appreciate it.
I'm happy to be here.
Why don't you tell everybody what you do?
Well, for work?
Yeah, I teach at Emory University.
So I'm a professor.
I've been there for about 25 years, and I also write some books and teach a
variety of classes.
But you study, like, what I've read of your study is some of it is on death and
some of it is on drugs.
That is correct.
Those are two very heavy subjects.
Maybe the heaviest.
Yeah.
Well, the other course I teach is religion and sexuality.
So, I mean, that's another really heavy one.
You look like a guy who would study both death and drugs.
So it fits.
Well, this is the pandemic hair.
I mean, really, I'm usually a much more, you know, well, I'm not really.
You never thought of doing this?
Just doing the full buzz?
One of my students told me I should do it before I came in here.
I'm telling you, man, once you do it, it's so freeing, not having to go to a
barbershop or a hairdresser.
Well, what's weird is I feel really free with all this hair.
Yeah.
Well, again, the hair fits the subjects that you studied.
How did you get involved in what, when you talk about drugs, like you studied
all sorts of psychedelic drugs, but also common drugs, like caffeine, like we
were talking about before.
I was telling you before that I make some ridiculous French press coffee with
far too much coffee in it.
And it's become a bit of a problem lately.
Well, but it's probably keeping you healthy and keeping you going.
I don't know if it is.
I don't know.
At the end of the day, I'm really tired and I'm not usually really tired.
And I think it's because I've been on speed all day.
It can tire you out.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
But yeah, I mean, my interest in studying the connection between religion and
drugs, I'm in a department of religion at Emory, really spans the spectrum.
So I'm interested, yeah, for sure, in psychedelics, but also, as you're saying,
in the more ordinary psychoactive drugs that bring order to our lives and, you
know, allow us to tap into our true identity, maintain some semblance of
stability in our lives.
You know, things that religion often can do.
It's the subject of religion and drugs is, it's really fascinating to me, but
it's something that I never even really considered until, you know, 10, 15
years ago.
And I was introduced to Jack Harer and he was, do you know who he is?
The cannabis advocate, recently deceased, not so recently anymore.
Great guy, but wrote, was writing a book about the connection between psychedelics,
particularly psilocybin and religion and Christianity.
And he had this amazing collection of artwork that connected, like ancient
Christian artwork with a lot of these dancing naked figures that looked like
they were in ecstasy, shrouded by this translucent mushroom.
Yeah, though, that's not uncommon.
There are a lot of theories out there that connect early Christianity,
especially to different kinds of, you know, hallucinogenic, psychedelic drugs
of some form.
But I think the connections are much more widespread.
People have been using psychoactive substances for religious ritual, for
religious experience, for forms of transcendence and journey, in all kinds of
different cultural settings and through history.
What got you into the subject?
Well, I've been interested in the topic of drugs for a while, but I think what
really, you know, led me to see this would be quite a fruitful topic to pursue
in terms of research was I wrote a short little essay on LSD and religion,
talked about my own experience as a young man, tripping.
Talking about the ways in which when I had that experience in the late 70s, and
people more and more were, you know, enjoying psychedelics coming out of the
decade of the 60s, I started to see that they would often use words like
spiritual or mystical to describe their experiences.
And to talk about how their religious views, and to talk about how their
religious views are being reoriented.
And I saw that in my own experience and wrote about that as a way to talk about
what is probably the most significant shift in religion in America.
And that's the rise of the rise of the nones, those who don't affiliate with
any religion, and who, many who claim to be spiritual but not religious.
And I want to tie that back to people's experiences with psychedelics.
There's a lot of people that are in the nones that don't have any experience
with psychedelic.
They just, psychedelics, they just seem to want to have like a deeper meaning
to life, you know, and they'll say, I'm not religious, but I'm spiritual.
Right.
And a lot of people get really annoyed when people talk like that.
Yeah.
Well, it can be annoying.
And also, you know, I think, as you say, it's very much becoming quite common
for people to identify in that way.
And that's also about a very strong kind of negative understanding of
traditional religion, institutional religion, and so on.
Yeah, I feel like for a lot of these people that don't have psychedelic
experiences that are spiritual, that sort of dismiss religion, I never want to
tell people to do psychedelics.
But I feel like if they did it, they would relax a little with this idea that
they really have an understanding of what happens when you die.
I think they would really let that go.
Most people would.
Right.
You'd go, well, I didn't know this was real, and this is around, and this has
been around for thousands of years, psychedelics.
And then you have these experiences that are so profound.
Right.
And you're like, okay, maybe I'm just full of shit, and I've been posing this
whole time.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
Well, I think, again, it's not just you who have these views.
What we're seeing is a lot of medical research around psychedelics also.
We're pointing to the same thing, a decrease in fear of death.
Mm-hmm.
Um, people's, um, sense of compassion and love, you know, really can blossom.
Uh, people's lives are, are transformed in a lot of these more controlled
medical studies, you know, with people who are taking, um, psilocybin or MDMA.
Yeah.
But, but the main focus of all that, of course, is, is, is the therapeutic
benefits.
But, you know, as we're saying, it's, it's all, it's all about spirituality.
And, and those therapeutic benefits can't be separated out from a kind of
spiritual sense of, of that experience.
It gives me a little bit of hope that in this time of, of great strife and
struggle, and especially, uh, in terms of the way, uh, human beings are, are
dealing with each other.
You know, that this is, this is a time where people are also rediscovering
psychedelics in record numbers.
And they're, they're looking for some sort of a way to make sense of this life
because, you know, we're obviously in some strange transitional moment in
history where, uh, our confidence and systems and government and, and even
education for certainly news and media is eroding at an unprecedented rate.
But it's also at the same time, all drugs are now legal in Oregon.
You know, like these things are happening where people go, you know what, come
on, Colorado's like mushrooms.
Go ahead, do mushrooms.
Right.
And, uh, you know, God bless Texas.
They fucking need all that shit right here.
And Georgia too.
Yeah.
All these places, the whole world needs it.
Well, they need the option.
Right.
You know, cause the, uh, the idea that human beings are somehow or another
preventing other human beings from having non-lethal experiences that have
proven to be incredibly transcendent.
Right.
And change people's lives for the better.
Just en masse.
Like if you see the John Hopkins study, the people that one psilocybin
experience, the, the, the, the majority of them listed as the most profound
experience of their life.
Right.
Right.
And non-addictive.
Yes.
I mean.
And non-lethal.
I mean, the LD50 is like what?
You have to eat like two pounds of it or something crazy.
Right.
And, and we know that the stories of addiction and a lot of the dangers are so
overblown.
Yeah.
But, um, uh, I think, again, this is just a moment as you're saying.
Yeah.
That's why I feel I'm, I'm onto something.
I think you are too.
With this book that I'm writing, um, which is, you know, going to make the
argument that drugs are going to, are really the sort of source of spiritual
life in, in America.
That's, that's the future as well as the past.
I mean, again, you know, um, the, uh, the influence of psychoactive substances
in the Americas, you know, pre-Columbus, um, was pervasive and just a part of
everyday life.
And, and as you say, we've, for whatever historical reasons and changes that
have happened in our society, um, have lost touch with those resources of
spiritual meaning.
Yeah.
And religious life.
And, um, as you're saying, um, I, I, and I believe it too, we are in a moment
when things are really transforming and drugs will be, I think, quite important
in terms of how we come out on the other side.
I hate the word drugs.
It's just such a blanket word.
It's so unfortunate that, you know, like heroin and opiates and meth is lumped
in with psilocybin all under one blanket.
Well, yeah, you're not alone.
I mean, I, I'm, I'm intentional with drugs.
I like to be provocative and, um, try to confuse a lot of the categories that
we use and thinking about some of these things that are so central, um, in our
lives and so potent, especially in terms of our
religious lives, um, yeah, there's entheogens, um, psychedelics and, and, you
know, obviously all different kinds of, um, uh, other kinds of, again,
substances that we use that, um, um, have an effect.
And, and, and for me that in some cases, in many cases have religious meanings
and connections.
Have you ever experimented with, uh, holotropic breathing or any of the non-psychedelic
methods of achieving these certain states of consciousness?
No, no, no.
I mean, no, but, um, I think they're important as well.
Yeah.
People is achieving a mystical state through non-psychedelic means is, is
another, uh, avenue, um, in thinking about the importance of those mystical
states, um, and, and how people get there.
Um, but also I would say, as you said, it's what are the results?
What kind of transformations are, are made in people's lives?
And I think what we're seeing is whether it's a psychedelic induced experience
or, or non-psychedelic, it's, there are lots of similarities.
Yeah.
I mean, a lot of people get it, get there through near death experience.
There's a lot of people, well, this is another thing where the mind is capable
of producing psychedelic compounds and in near death experiences, although it's
very difficult to measure, right?
Because you would actually have to open up someone's brain while they're in the
middle of a near death experience, which is probably not the healthiest thing
for someone who almost died.
Yeah.
But that's, as far as we know, that's the best way to measure it now.
But these people who experience, uh, these, uh, near death moments have these
incredible, profound visions.
And many people think that what's happening is some sort of endogenous dump of
psychedelic chemicals.
We know the brain is capable of making the most potent one psychedelics, uh, in
terms of like, you know, what happens and how they do it.
It's still a bit of a mystery they're trying to solve, but.
Yeah, uh, that connection is fascinating.
Yeah.
And, and, um, as I mentioned, or, um, you may know, I teach a death and dying
course as well.
And so near death experiences are, are, are pretty much an important part of
that class.
And the kinds of, of research and findings that are, are beginning to appear in
terms of looking at those connections are fascinating.
Um, and tie into this question of, of, of what is our relationship to death?
How do we understand, you know, the reality of death in our lives?
And, and, and, you know, w