"You're just an organism who is trying to find normalcy by repeating patterns."

How Joe Rogan Went From UFC Announcer to 21st-Century Timothy Leary | Rolling Stone: ""...you're not supposed to be a psychedelic proponent and a cage-fighting commentator at the same time. Those two things joined are just too fucking weird, you know? I mean, I don't get it. And I'm me. I just—" He stops talking, cuts that one thought short, finds another. "You know what you figure out in the middle of a trip? That all these assumptions and preconceived notions of who you are, they're all bullshit. You're just an organism who is trying to find normalcy by repeating patterns." Unless, of course, you're him, in which case patterns are made to be broken. He doesn't say this about himself, though. But it is understood. A pattern-driven mind doesn't often stumble onto a goat's vagina. But his does...

...his podcast is one of the greatest things going. It's like a journey around the known universe, as well as the unknown, the suspected and the highly suspect. So far, there've been 705 episodes. He started it five years ago, with friend and fellow comic Brian Redban, 41, just the two of them smoking weed and chewing the fat, nothing much going on, no grand ambitions. Early guests were largely confined to friends from MMA and comedy. But then Rogan started to haul in the more far-flung: marijuana activists, former porn stars, believers in the sanctity of shrooms, four-hour-work-week proselytizers, rappers, former LAPD cops, outdoorsmen, futurists, neuroscientists, Egyptologists, Tommy Chong, triathlete vegans, whistle-blowers, mind coaches, insomniacs, experts on toxoplasmosis, comics with nicknames like the Machine, Neil deGrasse Tyson, former CIA operatives, a woman who lives in Kavik (197 miles north of the Arctic Circle), former UFC great Georges St-Pierre half admitting to alien abduction, and conspiracy theorists of all kinds (Bigfoot, UFOs, chemtrails, JFK, 9/11, the Apollo moon landing). Not a lot of rhyme or reason there, but that's just how Rogan likes it, and he does have his logic. "Everything we do or try to do, we try to do a better version of it all the time. We're constantly looking to improve. It's a big part of being a human being. And I think the podcast improves people, not only the people who listen to it, but me as well..."

"This is a moose heart," he says, happily. "I like moose. I like moose steaks, moose stew, and moose burgers are delicious." He closes that freezer, opens another. "This is from a wild pig. This is a sausage from something. This is more moose. This is deer. This is bear. And all this I killed myself." Stepping back, he says, "Yes, I get some grief for it. But you know what's unexpected to me? How little rational thought comes from vegans who own pets and feed them murdered animals...

It's time to wrap up the podcast and move on to other matters. Caitlyn Jenner, for instance, which don't get Rogan started, because he won't stop. He's fine with her being transgender and all. He goes on, "I'll call her a woman if she wants to be a woman. I'll call you whatever you want. I don't care. But you can't tell me she's beautiful and that because I disagree I'm a piece of shit....I mean, I don't understand the mindset of an ultramarathon runner, or an asexual person, or a person who wants to have sex with animals — by the way, I'm not connecting zoophilia to transgender people. What I'm saying is, I don't give a fuck. And I think it's kinda ridiculous that everybody is forcing the fact that she's beautiful down everybody's throat. And that heroic thing is just outrageous. These are vampires of attention. The patriarch of this family becomes a woman and there's virtually no conversation about the fact that she killed someone while driving. There's no talk of that. That's been dissolved." 

Rogan pauses. Finally, he says, "I mean, there's a lot of nutty shit with this, but ultimately, you know, for the human race, I think this is all for the good.""