#863 - Duncan Trussell

Duncan Trussell (0:06)

So, God is dead.

Joe Rogan (0:10)

Why did you say that?

What about a bunch of people that had a birthday cake for God? They're like, well, what the fuck do I do with this now? And it's infinity candles.

Duncan Trussell (0:18)

Do you know how fucking badass Nietzsche felt when he said that for the first time, where he was like, God is dead, when it meant something? Like now you say it, and people are like, whatever, who cares, yeah, no shit. But like back then, it was like a fucking, it was like a nuclear bomb going off, the declaration, God is dead, do you not understand, he's dead.

Joe Rogan (0:41)

When did Nietzsche write that?

Duncan Trussell (0:42)

I don't know, man. I don't actually, you know, I have no idea. It must have been the 1900s or so. I don't know when he was, Nietzsche was around.

Joe Rogan (0:51)

He's in my Carl Jung pile. Well, I'm always like, one day I'm gonna really get into his work.

Duncan Trussell (0:56)

Oh, man, he's good, because he gets into your fucking head, man, because he like, Carl Jung will get in your head, but it's more subtle, whereas like Nietzsche, like, you're reading.

You ever read any Philip K. Dick?

Joe Rogan (1:07)

Yes.

Duncan Trussell (1:08)

So you know how, like, you're getting on top of 1882

With Philip K. Dick, he was kind of crazy, but he was a genius. So when you read his fiction, it's like you stop reading it, and you feel a little crazy for a second, because something about the way he's writing just isn't normal. There's something off, man. Nietzsche, it's the same way. It's like when you stop reading him, you're going to spend the next few days like, fuck.

Joe Rogan (1:34)

Or like Burroughs.

Duncan Trussell (1:36)

Yeah, same thing. Outsider artists, kind of.

Joe Rogan (1:39)

I remember reading some of Burroughs' stuff and thinking, I might get high just reading this. Like Naked Lunch, that was him, right?

Duncan Trussell (1:50)

Terrence McKenna, the same thing.

Joe Rogan (1:51)

Oh yeah.

Duncan Trussell (1:52)

You just start tripping when you start reading his writing, like you just start tripping. God, I wish I could write like that, man.

Joe Rogan (1:58)

You could. How dare you?

Duncan Trussell (1:59)

Well, I mean, you would have to spend a lot of time writing.

Joe Rogan (2:02)

That's all it is. That's the only thing that's holding you back, is the amount of time that you would have to spend writing.

You would love it. You would enjoy it. He saw it. McKenna had some fascinating books, Food of the Gods.

He had some crazy fucking theories that he pitched, that I've seen scientists, especially the doubling of the human brain size one. That was a really fascinating theory that he had, that he connected it. See, I'm not sure if he was right in terms of the climatological data, but his contention, for those of you who are aware of it, was that monkeys had come down from the trees and they experimented with new food sources and they started flipping over cow patties to get to bugs, because that's what they do. And along the line, they discovered psilocybin mushrooms. And he thinks that the grasslands, the rainforest becoming grasslands, the changing climate led to these chimps, these monkeys, whatever our ancestors were, led to them becoming more experimental.

And that could be coincided with a bunch of different things that they know about mushrooms or it could be sort of confirmed with a bunch of different things. One with that mushrooms increase visual acuity. And they've shown this in actual tests with real scientists who are experimenting with it. Who was the other guy? There was one German guy, a straight guy too, that experimented with this. God damn it, trying to remember his name, but he had a really funny line.

Duncan Trussell (3:31)

What do you mean the straight guy?

Joe Rogan (3:33)

Straight guy meaning he wasn't a drug guy. He wasn't a drug culture guy. I don't mean straight, like homosexual, heterosexual.

I mean, he wasn't like Timothy Leary or McKenna or any of these guys who are clear proponents of psychedelics. He was just a researcher. And they had found out that in low doses of psilocybin, like say if you changed an angle, if you had two parallel lines, and you made one, just varied it ever so slightly, with the psilocybin, they could tell when the angle was ever so slightly varied quicker than they could naturally.

Duncan Trussell (4:07)

Yeah, I can remember, yeah, it's visual acuity in the periphery, right? So it's like expanding your peripheral vision by a tiny, tiny little bit.