In a recent conversation with actor Ethan Hawke on The Joe Rogan Experience, podcast host Joe Rogan shared a transcendent experience that fundamentally altered his perspective on existence itself.
The moment occurred during a visit to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii, where Rogan witnessed what he describes as one of the most profound visual experiences of his life.
During their discussion about art, performance, and the human experience, Rogan recounted driving up to the observatory on Hawaii’s Big Island with his young daughter, who was only five or six at the time.
The journey presented an initial disappointment as clouds obscured their path during the hour-and-a-half drive up the mountain. However, what awaited them at the summit exceeded anything Rogan had imagined.
“We drive through the clouds because it’s really high. And you get up to the top and you’re above the clouds. And we got out of the car and my f**king jaw dropped,” Rogan explained to Hawke. “It was nuts. It was the craziest image and I’ve been there three times since. Never recreated it.”
Rogan described the scene as nothing short of otherworldly. Standing above the cloud layer with an unobstructed view of the cosmos, he experienced what he calls a life-changing shift in consciousness. “It felt like I was in a spaceship, like a convertible spaceship, and I was looking through the windshield, and we were flying through the cosmos, and there was an impossible amount of stars in the sky,” he said.
The experience was so overwhelming that Rogan characterized it as “psychedelic” without any substances involved—purely the result of witnessing the universe in its full majesty. “There wasn’t a spot in the sky that wasn’t filled with stars. The Milky Way was clear as day. It was f**king bananas,” he recalled with unmistakable awe still present in his voice years later.
This encounter sparked a conversation between Rogan and Hawke about humanity’s disconnection from the cosmos due to modern urban living. Rogan lamented how light pollution has robbed contemporary society of an experience that all human ancestors inherently observed.
“When nighttime came around, everybody realized, well, you’re a part of the infinite cosmos, and there’s magic to the universe,” he reflected.
The podcast host argued that this nightly reminder of our place in the universe may have been crucial to the human spirit, even during history’s most brutal periods. Ancient peoples, despite living in times of constant danger as hunter-gatherers or members of warring tribes, were presented each night with “this impossible majesty of the cosmos above your head every night.”
Rogan contrasted this with modern existence, where people stare at screens instead of stars. “Now, today we have f**king social media. This is your sun. This is your star. You’re staring at a stupid f**king screen and when you look up, you just see nothing but blackness because there’s all these city skyscrapers,” he said, noting how urban development has blinded out “one of the most important humbling like grounding experiences peering at the cosmos.”
The conversation resonated deeply with Hawke, who shared his own transformative experience witnessing the Aurora Borealis while filming in Alaska at age nineteen. The actor described spending six months in near-isolation and seeing the northern lights ripple across the sky night after night, an experience that made him laugh at the cosmic absurdity of human concerns.
Rogan’s Keck Observatory experience remains so significant that he’s attempted to recreate it three times, though cloud cover at higher altitudes has prevented him from witnessing that perfect view again.
