TV INTERVIEW: JOE ROGAN & RICK OVERTON

Mixing the Heavy & the Light to Expand the Mind of a Brilliant Animal

In high school, Joe Rogan was a four-time state Taekwondo champion, and at age 19, he won a Grand Championship at US Open. As an entertainer, he has never pulled his punches, whether live on stage as the host of the phenomenally successful NBC show Fear Factor, or in completing a personal circle of sorts by becoming a color commentator for the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC).  He recently added another belt to his collection when his weeklyJoe Rogan Experience was named one of iTunes' ‘Best of 2010’ podcasts. At The Vanguard in Hollywood, California, Joe sat down for the Buzzine cameras and a chat with fellow thinker, comic, and psychedelic experimenter Rick Overton about life as an animal, what it takes to write great comedy, and the power of some of the natural tools available to expand the human mind…

 

Rick Overton: We were just downstairs watching an astounding episode of the new season of The Green Room for Showtime, and I’m here with Joe Rogan, who was astoundingly insightful on the show….

 

Joe Rogan: Thank you. I’ve got gum in my mouth. I’m self-conscious. I don’t want to make chewing noises. I’ll put it right here. How brave.

 

RO: You know about brave, man. You do material that’s generally an invitation for people to go after you, but thank God you’re balls-out and an MMA champion, and…

 

JR: I was never an MMA champion. I did martial arts, but not MMA.

 

RO: But it certainly is as if you are, and your confidence in taking a really brave concept forward, that usually people can pound on it, but they won’t pound on it, but they leave following a good alpha lead, the way you plant it in their heads. You change people en masse with that tactic. I think it’s great. Whenever I watch you talk about anything from drug legalization or UFOs or whatever it is – things people usually spit on – they can’t when you do it.

 

JR: As long as you’re honest and as long as you look at things rationally, and as long as you’re not afraid of ridicule…because there are a lot of subjects that people just won’t breech because simply even talking about the subject, whether it’s conspiracy theories or anything else, you just talk about the subject and you fall into this predetermined category of being a silly person – a person who is not a serious person, being a dunce, and I say – no!

 

I say there are a lot of subjects that you can tell me all day that I’m silly to explore them, but why do they seem so compelling? Especially when you get into the subject of government conspiracies or things that the government has done – people refuse to acknowledge any possibility of conspiracy, and then you just bring up the overwhelming evidence from the past – all the different things that they’ve done and gotten away with…

 

RO: And you make it funny, man…sometimes it’s so heavy, you don’t know where a joke goes in that s***, but Rogan finds where the funny is in it…

JR: It’s usually involving dicks. You say what you do, and then you throw some dicks in there, and dicks are getting sucked, and dicks… [Laughs]… I’m very juvenile in my sense of humor, so even if I have a serious point, it always winds up that someone’s getting fucked by some dude and they didn’t really want it to happen and they feel uncomfortable about it. [Laughs] It always becomes some silly gay thing.

 

RO: [Laughs] You mix the heavy with the light, which is good…

 

JR: It’s important too because I don’t want to be all just doom and gloom all day.

 

RO: You’re at the edge of what’s the next new thing to start thinking about. You notice what’s really next, as opposed to more dating s*** or whatever. You really know… let’s spin the Lazy Susan to the wedge we haven’t tried on the platter yet.

 

JR: But all I do is just talk about what I think about, and all I think about is things that I read on the internet and research, and look at the trends of humanity and where our society is going…

 

RO: YouTube can hip you to stuff. Sometimes it’s the last uncensored network.

 

JR: If not YouTube, DailyMotion… there’s a bunch that actually really are uncensored, where they’ll show you real violence and real crazy shit from all around the world. Especially animal attacks and shit…

 

RO: We have human attacks – when humans attack here.

 

JR: Those are animal attacks too, right?

 

RO: That’s right. We forget that we’re animals. But an animal can be brilliant.

 

JR: Sure. Well it’s all brilliant. We’re really temporary beings in a strange existence, and no one really understands why we’re here in the first place, so it’s all brilliant. Even if you die, it’s still brilliant. It’s brilliant for everybody else. If a guy gets killed by a bear, it’s not brilliant for him, it sucks for him – but it’s brilliant if you watch that. It’s some amazing expression of nature, and why is it okay if the bear does that to a moose and not a person? Because you’re on Team People, but also because you don’t want to think about yourself getting eaten.

 

RO: And it’s great for the bear’s reel. It’s great footage.

 

JR: It’s great footage if it’s real.

 

RO: The bear is just building up a reel of human attacks, and his agent says, “I need a couple of campers.”

 

JR: After a while they’ll arrest him. They don’t let you keep eating people. You can eat one or two people and get away with it…

 

RO: You get away with two and then they forgive the bear because it was the guy’s fault…

 

JR: They did – there was a bear that was used for a bunch of TV shows and movies and stuff, and he turned on his trainer’s brother or cousin – I forget which – but out of nowhere, he grabbed the guy by the neck, ripped his throat out, and killed him. Completely unprovoked, it had never happened before…

 

RO: Is this Brutus?

 

JR: I don’t know what the bear’s name was. It was just a trained bear.

 

RO: Brutus was the one with Anthony Hopkins in the mountains. It was called The Bear.

 

JR: I think you’re right. I think it is the bear from that. He wound up killing somebody.

 

RO: I went into a pen with Brutus and pet him.

 

JR: No you didn’t. Why did you do that?

 

RO: We were shooting a movie nearby, and they said, “Do you want to go see Brutus?” and I said, “Sure.” [Laughs]

 

JR: And they just have you convinced that the bear is not gonna kill you. That’s so crazy that they think they can ever really truly contain a wild animal like that. And this video you can see online of this poor guy… the poor guy is standing there, dead straight because they asked him to stay in position, and the bear just looks at him and gets shaky, and then just launches himself on him and just rips this guy’s throat out. It was horrendous. They couldn’t stop him; they couldn’t pull the bear off…

 

RO: It’s like there’s a new set of instructions for all animals that are being kept in captivity. Elephants… There’s new instructions from the universe on them to go get your trainers now. They’re stomping trainers left and right, and… it’s like a cosmic signal going into their heads. Lions, all the larger predator animals that have been kept in captivity, they’re all en masse…they’re starting to, more and more often… Chimps… The rate of attacks is going up, even though the abuse to them is going down.

 

JR: Really? Wow. Well they say that if you teach a rat in India how to get through a maze, a rat in New York will get through that same maze quicker because another rat has already figured it out. It’s called a morphic field or something like that.

 

RO: That’s right. Morphic field – one ape figures out how to take a branch, pull the sticks off and get ants out of a thing, and the other guy immediately picks up the tool concept.

 

JR: Exactly. And I think there’s some sort of a connection between all beings – maybe all beings of all species, but certainly, as far as learning, they can show that if you teach a chimpanzee on one side of the country something, chimpanzees on the other side of the country that had never exhibited the same behavior can learn it very quickly.

 

RO: It’s like one studio has a ‘meteroite is gonna hit the world’ movie, another studio somehow crazily comes up with a ‘we gotta stop the meteorite’ movie.

 

JR: Exactly. And it’s a rush to get your s*** out quicker. Wasn’t there a year like that? There was Armageddon and then there was another one…

 

RO: Deep Impact, yeah.

 

JR: Look at you. Nice.

 

RO: What’s next, Joe?

 

JR: This stuff. Everything the same. That’s what’s next.

 

RO: You got a show coming up?

 

JR: Just comedy – a lot of stand-up. Putting together a new special that I’ll be doing in Toronto.

 

RO: What’s the new special?

 

JR: Just a stand-up special, my next hour. And then I go into panic mode because I have to write a new hour.

 

RO: How long does that take you? You’re a writing machine, man.

 

JR: It takes some time, though. You gotta do a lot of mushrooms. That’s what you gotta do. That’s very important. If you want to write a new hour, you need at least one big mushroom trip in the mix.

 

RO: Do you ever do those blinking glasses with the beeping tones on the headsets? The mind machines?

 

JR: No. Do you do that?

 

RO: Yeah. Sometimes I try that. I’m quitting… I’m not doing drugs. I’m all f***ed up on life now, Joe.

 

JR: Have you ever tried sensory deprivation tanks?

 

RO: I have, yeah.

 

JR: That’s the move because that’s completely natural. You don’t have to worry about taking anything.

 

RO: That’s right. Your own pharmacopeia busts open when you’re sitting like that.

 

JR: Your brain opens up and explores its own psychedelic supply – it starts administering out doses.

 

RO: I used to hang out with Leary and John Lilly who invented the tank.

 

JR: Oh, so you did a lot.

 

RO: Back then, I did your share, and I’m sorry about that, man. [Laughs]

 

JR: I appreciate it. John Lilly – he’s a fascinating character, huh?

 

RO: Yeah, he figured out the whole dolphins are really just talking at 25 times the speed of a human…

 

JR: He used to take acid and set up a tank right next to a tank of dolphins, and he would take the acid and climb in the tank, and communicate through the water to the dolphins. He felt like he was understanding their language. He couldn’t quantify it; he couldn’t break it down and bring it back and decipher it, but he really felt like he was communicating with them.

 

RO: A lot of today’s pseudoscientific skeptics say, “Prove it to me.” Sometimes you’ve got to say, “Maybe you’re not smart enough for it to be proven to. I’m not gonna jump through your hoop just because you need proof.”

 

JR: Certain psychedelic substances, like harmine – before they knew it was harmine, some people had discovered it in the jungles of Peru and the Amazon, and when they came to break it down chemically, they found out it was something that had already been named harmine. But before they named it harmine, they were gonna call it telepathine because when they tried it all, they were reading each other’s minds, so they were gonna call this stuff telepathine. But because of the rules of scientific nomenclature, if you say something first, it’s called harmine already, so you can’t rename it. It’s the same thing.

 

RO: Scientists – most of their careers are based on “I answered it and you can’t make my answer better or I lose my office.”

 

JR: That’s true for a lot of people, yeah. But just the idea that they were going to name it telepathine – that was going to be the actual scientific name because of their trials with it, and they found that people really could communicate without words.

 

RO: They named heroin because originally it was just an opiate that made you feel heroic.

 

JR: Really? Whoa. Really?!

 

RO: Yeah. By Germans.

 

JR: Well I’ve never done heroin, so I don’t know what the effects…

 

RO: I’ve never thought about it. I hate needles, and I don’t like the white powder. I don’t like anything that had to be shipped away to be made into something else. That’s why I don’t think pot is a drug. Pot’s not a drug because you didn’t send it somewhere to become something else. You just kept it and it dried out. It’s still just a plant.

 

JR: Sure. Well the things you do extract from plants, when you extract them, you make everything more complicated because really they exist in sort of a symbiotic environment with a bunch of other compounds, and we just take out what you want and turn that into a drug. Like with cocaine – the people in Peru have been chewing coco leaves with no problem for forever.

 

RO: Well, dental problems come up a little bit.

 

JR: Do they get dental problems? It rots their teeth away?

 

RO: Teeth go out.

 

JR: It’s worth it for a little coco leaf here and there. Get them some f***in’ toothpaste. But they never had problems like they did when they started breaking it down and turning it into cocaine and chemically processing it. That’s when it became a real issue with people.

 

RO: I’m on the good behavior right now. I’m just gonna see how much the brain can make all on its own right now.

 

JR: You can trigger all those things in your own mind: I’ve never been higher than after a big yoga class. I’ve taken a million classes, and after an hour and a half of yoga, I swear to God I’m high as f***. I’m seeing things differently, my brain is swimming with s***…

 

RO: Isn’t it amazing? Breathing…

 

JR: Kundalini Yoga is all about releasing psychedelic chemicals in the brain. It’s all about the third eye. It’s all about your chakras and your pineal gland, and expressing the body’s natural psychedelic chemicals. I have a friend who does Kundalini Yoga and has been doing it for years and years and years, and they swear that they can travel to other dimensions. They swear that when they’re doing it like six hours a day, five days a week, they reach some sort of a plane where they can open up doors of consciousness in their minds that sober people just don’t have access to. That it’s like a muscle like anything else, like a gymnastics muscle or a rock-throwing muscle… You build it up, and you build up that ability to control your own androgynous psychedelic chemicals.

 

RO: That’s right. We’re sold the software in a laptop… Like, do you know everything your laptop does?

 

JR: No, of course not.

 

RO: We don’t know most of what the body does.

 

JR: It’s true. Well, to understand the placebo effect… The placebo effect is real. We know that if you give a person a pill and they think it’s gonna heal them, there’s a good percentage of them actually show recovery because of this.

 

RO: It’s like telling a man with a headache that it’s all in his head…

 

JR: …for a lot of people. It’s like the body has some sort of weird ability to heal itself, but we can’t access it unless we trick ourselves. It’s real strange. So then you have to say, in every psychedelic experience, what’s the Hallmark Moment? What’s the thing that you always realize? Well… the ego is a problem. Your ego is not allowing you to see the world for what it really is. That seems to be the exact same thing that is responsible for the placebo affect. You have to trick your ego into thinking that you gave it medicine, because it can’t figure out how to heal itself on its own. There’s too much resistance from the biological being that’s trying to stay alive. You can’t really totally access all the magical properties that the body possesses.

 

RO: That’s a lot to handle. And go shopping.

 

JR: That is a lot to handle and go shopping, and pay your mortgage and get gas and…

 

RO: And think about the other half and your whole head is going, “Whoa, wait, we’ve got to get back to the audition at 3:00 or whatever.”

 

JR: Exactly. That’s too much, right?

 

The second season of ‘The Green Room with Paul Provenza’ premieres new episodes on Showtime every Thursday night at 11:00 p.m. ET/PT beginning July 14, 2011.