The Joe Rogan Experience - #1283 - Russell Brand

Episode Date: April 20, 2019

Russell Brand is an English comedian, actor, radio host, author, and activist. His new book “Mentors” is available now, and his podcast called “Under The Skin” is available on Spotify.

boom and we're live russell why is it then when people start getting like super spiritual they start dressing like you you dress like a guru we circulate a memo so it's now time to stop wearing socks stop shaving and make eye contact for a bit too long oh uncomfortable eye contact a bit scary how long are you gonna go with the beard? I mean, that's like, you're full on, like, you're a yogi now. I mean, it's gone beyond Jesus and into Moses and lesser prophets. Or a Navy SEAL. You're in that range too. Like, you could be some wild man.

That's a mistake that wouldn't, like, if there was an assault course in front of us, that the potential for me being a Navy seal would start to break down i once went on a an assault course with some u.s marines in that place near san diego i can't remember the name of that base and climbing up that rope using your leg muscles it was not good value didn't enjoy it i like the camaraderie and i really like i as i've written about and talk about quite a lot, when I'm around in very male environments, I kind of really like it. I really get off in it. But I have to watch myself not getting too excitable. It's even in this environment, as a matter of fact, I have to keep myself a little bit chilled out. Why? What do you mean? What does it do to you well i guess what it is is my early life i grew up mostly around my mum and i don't have brothers and sisters and stuff like that so my male role modeling occurred later in life and i think it probably relates to this spiritual thing i think it meant that i was i'm very open to sort of spiritual experience meditative experience i

didn't have a lot of grounding physical experiences or bodily experiences really till adolescence until and sexuality that's the first time i really sort of got into the body didn't do sport as a kid didn't have like men going right this is what we do this is how we shave this is how you treat people this is you know i didn't really get that kind of education so now still if i'm around like soldiers ufc fighters i go you know you know i do bJs primarily as a result of these confront, well, let's not call them confrontations. Conversations. Conversations.

That's a much nicer term. So like, there's a bit of me that's, I get excited about the analysis of it. It's not homoerotic because that doesn't happen to be the way that I roll out. You just enjoy a little too much. There's something about it. Yeah, you get fired up. And maybe, what's bad about it? What's bad about it yeah you get fired up and it may be what's bad about it what's what's bad about getting fired up nothing for me except like you know look my as you know my model for

life is a sort of a 12-step model about watching my impulses my impulses have got me in a lot of trouble my impulses to take drugs my impulses to sleep around my like my impulses to even eat food i've got a sort of a tendency to get obsessive but you know you would probably argue that if you direct that energy correctly it can be kind of positive i think it can but i agree with you that it can get out of control and i have similar impulses i have similar problems and i've just used discipline and hard work especially working out to try to mitigate it. Well, that's what I pick up from you is that your early encounters with martial arts have meant that you've understood from a young age, it seems to me, physical discipline. And I think that's a very important thing.

And I'm only learning that now because I've had drugs like you know drugs then fame then and chaos and i've only just emerged from like the sort of the fog of that madness i love how you've emerged though because it's very unique you you you've uniquely emerged authentically like you this is who you really are like you're not putting on an act you've found yourself which is like what everybody wants to do they want to find themselves i mean it never feels like a completed task, right? Everyone's a work in progress forever. That's right. But you are you.

Like you are very comfortably you. And you've found what makes you you. That's a lovely compliment to get from you, Joe. I appreciate that. Because what I think about is like you're a very different type of person to me there's things that in this world in these polemical times you and i would be supposed to i would say take adversarial stances on i'm vegan now you love hunting but my personal philosophy is my morality and my spirituality is for me it's not something i go around inflicting on other people and telling them how they should behave i know enough now to know people are different people have different experiences and i don't

let those things get in the way of how i evaluate other people we should all be more like that i really i really believe that i mean there's so many people that i disagree with that i have fine conversations with i don't think there's anything wrong with that and i don't think that impulse to to have antagonistic engagements with people that you disagree with is correct. How else are we going to consolidate? If it's just like, I'm only going to deal with people that see the world roughly how I do. How are we going to form new tribes, new alliances, new relationships, new systems at a time when evidently it feels to me, at least, Joe, like things are breaking down. There's a lot of bitterness, acerbity and confrontation.

And people don't want to talk to each other. I mean mean i don't know how real that is of actual people i'm talking i suppose about how the media landscape seems to present information i don't know if that's true when you're you know when i'm around people i don't sense oh wow these guys are really tied up in brexit or trump or whatever it doesn't seem that relevant to ordinary people it seems to me that people are still operating on a in a personal how are you today are you okay you know people are willing to get on like that i mean how are we supposed to take these ideas on board it's almost too vast for us these geopolitical ideas that we're asked to identify with right and then your everyday life it hardly ever affects you or affects you very little in comparison to things that you ignore because you're concentrating on brexit or you're concentrating on Brexit or you're concentrating on Trump

or you're concentrating on whatever it is, the wall, build that wall, whatever it is. Yeah, I start to wonder, you know, who is it that's involved in this stuff? I start to, what it's, where I'm at now is, are we even capable of belonging to groups units tribes of 300 million people or 60 million people with so many diverse ideas is this a time to look at federalism differently to start breaking down well you know the i exist within this tribe of people but i collaborate with all these other people i don't know how municipal action gets done i know you run an army and build roads if people are starting to operate in smaller units but i am thinking that we need to have a real sense of community and connection and we've got to let go of looking for ways to object to and judge other people as some sort of primary for way of forming our own

identity no i completely agree and i think we're probably moving towards some sort of understanding that a lot of these boundaries and these clans of, you know, states and countries, they were all established without our consent before we were born. And we're just, we're a part of a system that we just were, we didn't agree to it. We just all of a sudden found ourselves in it, and we're trying to make it fit us. Yeah, that's right. And there's aspects of it that are appealing. You know, like sort of during a World Cup, I really feel English. And, you know, like I feel a genuine sense of connection and investment. But if I'm being asked to live according to rules that don't affect me, except for, you know, that affect me financially and don't speak to who I am as an individual, then I'm like, well, what is this? This isn't for my benefit. Yeah, yeah.

And the inclination to form teams and to root for your team and to root against other teams, it's so deep-seated in us. And it can cause so many unnecessary conflicts for no reason. It's so escapable, too. So if you can objectively analyze the way human beings behave and interact with each other and go, well, why do we do this? Let's just stop doing that. If we disagree on things, how much are these disagreements actually affecting me on a daily basis?

Not that much. Can't we just communicate? Can't someone say what they think and I say what I think and we just decide, like, what makes sense and what doesn't make sense based on our own interpretations? Isn't that possible? It seems like that's the direction we've got to head in. I did, as I know you have done, a podcast with Candice Owens, who like on the subject of, you know, individuals, like when she says stuff like people should get over slavery or it's as if it didn't happen.

I don't agree with that. I feel like that has a massive social impact. Those statistics are not a coincidence. The number of people of certain ethnicities in prisons and in poverty or whatever. For me, that's not just a coincidence. But so I couldn't agree with her more profoundly on, in prisons and in poverty or whatever for me that's not just a coincidence but like so i couldn't agree with her more profoundly on according to social criteria some very very important issues but on an interpersonal level i thought she was absolutely delightful

and like sort of funny and sweet and she's very young if you really stop and think about what's going on she's only 28 which is amazing right is that? She's so much smarter than I was when I was 28. She's certainly a lot more confident than I was when I was 28. Yeah, she's prettier too. 28 or 29? Same thing. So when I was 29, I was a fucking moron, okay? And no one would ever listen to my opinions on anything on a world stage.

Yeah. People are listening to her. I mean, she's testifying in front of Congress. I mean, she's – so I cut her a lot of slack with some of the things mean she's she's testifying in front of congress i mean she's so i cut her a lot of slack with some of the things that she's made like missteps on and i think sometimes when people say those things like people should get over slavery it's like it's almost like you're saying things that you think other people want to hear more than you're saying things that are really rational so whether or not we should get over slavery sure slavery was over more than you're saying things that are really rational. So whether or not we should get over slavery, sure, slavery was over more than 100 years ago.

But the repercussions of slavery, the echoes of slavery still exist. And they exist in all these different southern states and cities and all these different neighborhoods that had been a part of systemic racism where they had literally forced black people to live in certain areas and didn't even allow them to buy homes outside of those areas they made laws and those laws are in place in places like baltimore and you know i had this guy michael wood on who was a police officer in the city of baltimore and one of the more profound things that he said was that they found papers that were documenting crimes from the 1970s in baltimore and they were in the same area the same crimes that he was facing in the 2000s when he was a police officer so he was looking at this going

what in the fuck like this is am i just a part of something that's never going to be fixed and never going to be changed and you know as he learned more about the city and the city's laws and how these systems were set up to keep people in certain places and how the crime and the violence and the drugs is all just in this one concentrated area and it's always been there. And no one does anything to change it. You realize like, wow, this is a crazy echo of a horrible past. And that's what it is. I had a couple of conversations that made me recognize how powerful systems and institutions are and their ability to maintain themselves, regardless of any individuals. It seems like what happened there with the man you were chatting to is that he's an individual woke up. Oh, my God.

Hold on a second. I'm in some sort of weird grid. weird grid and like i spoke to this fella called ken ross who worked for the british diplomatic service at the time of 9-11 and was privy to confidential information about how that was handled on a military and geopolitical level and he said like he's come away from that thinking well these institutions function and in a totally corrupt way to pursue their own objectives disingenuity and dishonesty is just part of the system. And it was him that made me think about anarchism in a different way, saying that people, the assumption that people, if they were not tightly governed with big government and huge control,

would go around murdering each other and raping each other, simply not true. That's one of the means by which the state continues to justify its existence. People will behave better the closer they are to self-governing community self-governing community and this is like and i was interested in that because he's talking from this is what i saw on the inside this is how i saw it was running like your cop friend there and like uh another person i spoke to that had been inside a system and then woken up uh within it who was that oh yeah yannis varoufakis he was

when greece had that mad revolution he was like one of the leaders of a party syriza and for a minute it was like syriza said we ain't paying back all those debts you screwed us financially you screwed greece so he was there at the eu meetings telling like the german chancellery we're not greece ain't going to repay those debts and he just said that the way that the system reasserted itself was magnificent to watch in a way and he said none of those individuals have any power except the power that that role gives them if you are the german finance minister you've got the power that a german finance minister has you can't step outside it and start going right listen why don't we do this and why don't we do that the system itself is beyond

individual decisions you know it's it's a self-sustaining system it won't come up with ideas or support ideas that threaten it and that's why i continually keep hearing i'm sure you're having similar conversations that if you are really interested in changing the world you have to participate in systems that are outside of it set up new ideas don't worry about trying to smash this one down with a hammer it will atrophy on its own as it becomes less and less relevant. I think also change yourself. And when you change yourself, it becomes evident to the people around you. And if your change is beneficial and attractive, people, they gravitate towards that idea that you can improve yourself and you can change your perspective on things.

Well, that is the one area of your life where you've got some authority and control. And that's, yeah, that is what I'm about. It's like, well, I can stop myself being like watching pornography. I can stop myself using drugs if I want to, like, you know, with some support. And that's what this book here, Mentors, which I talk about you in only for a paragraph, you know what I mean? It's not like literary fellatio. It's a small nod of your influence and impact. I talk about how we have latent qualities within us that are sometimes hard to realize without support.

But if you find a mentor in an area where you're looking to improve they can kind of energize awaken energies within you that on your own you wouldn't be able to use i had a really recent experience of it where i was sort of like freaking out about something i spoke to like a mentor of mine and like the way that he sort of spoke to me was like sort of aggressive like a sort of an aggressive that's not gonna happen you are not afraid and like it sort of it woke up the part of me that feels that way that has that kind of i would say sort of uh male certainty a kind of grounded energy he was able to sort of like direct it at me and like in that moment in myself or bewildered i wasn't able to do it you know i needed to resource it externally in a moment so this is how i sort of feel like your individual journey i'm interested in how because i'm guessing

with your background in martial arts and stuff mentorship seems pretty much stitched into that you must continually be looking at someone learning from someone yeah trying to equal them or whatever it is yeah the good part about that is you get good at learning things you get good at listening you know uh as a martial arts student you you don't just listen you listen very intently you bow you say sir you know i mean there's uh there's so much discipline involved in the the act of learning yeah and so much reverence and respect for people who know more than you and appreciation so uh that that helped me with pretty much everything i ever wanted to learn i just would listen very intently and i don't think maybe i could figure it out better i'm very good at listening to people that are good at things that's interesting did you

first get into uh like you know i've picked up stuff over the various shows of yours that I've listened to. But would you say that your inaugural interest in martial arts came from kind of domestic distress and stuff? Were you having a difficult home life and not a good relationship with your stepdad? Am I right in saying? It was that, but it was also moving more than anything. I mean, my stepdad's a nice guy, but it was stepdad's it's always a weird situation you know no one likes the dynamic of someone having sex with their mother i remember having similar feelings about my own stepdad i don't want to like no of course pin him in a bad way it's just what was really hard was moving

a lot and running into bullies that was way harder than anything else so there was a time in your life where you felt very presumably vulnerable yeah and not grounded didn't have any friends constantly moving in new neighborhoods meeting new people and uh you know and when you're a young boy you're a teenage boy teenage boys are fucking dangerous yeah they're the worst they're the worst if you see a group of them now i'm talking about my country 13 14 years old i'll cross the street yeah they're lawless well young boys are just they're always looking to impress each other and they they have these if you want to find real toxic masculinity it exists in teenage boys yeah it's mostly exaggerated in men the way it's described is mostly exaggerated in terms of

the way the media talks about it but in its purest form and teenage boys they get together and they start lighting frogs on fire and doing shit they do things because they want to like one up each other and they feed off of each other like what one boy would do is so different than what five boys would do what five boys would do could be horrific but what one boy would do on his own is very rarely there because what you know you have to think about yourself and think about is this right and you objectively analyze the way you're behaving and like um yeah people wouldn't be proud of me if i did it this way but when you're with five other boys and you're you're all rambunctious and filled with testosterone and piss and vinegar

you wind up doing crazy things this is i you know when i hear something like that it's difficult not to think that it's of course relative relative to us the behavior of adolescent males is reckless and crazy it's not impossible to conceive of an intelligence that would look at the behavior of adult human beings and think oh my god what are what's governing these people what principles are they using right like what's the end goal too like what are you trying to accomplish with your life with your existence with your time i think if there's a real concern about ai i think the real concern is ai is going to rationally analyze our behavior and our reliance on emotions and all these human

reward systems that we have built in the way it's affecting our society and the way it's affecting how we govern ourselves and how we behave amongst ourselves and it's going to think we're unfixable it's going to look at it like well this is this they have too much monkey in them they have so much monkey instincts and monkey dna but now they live in this rational modern world of you know 5g internet on your phone and satellite communication and 24 7 news cycle but yet they have these primate genes artificial intelligence a subject about which i know very little it seems to me that it will on some level have to be derived from a particular aspect of human understanding of rationalism so we're

representing one aspect of our nature and prioritizing it logic uh organization but what you refer to as sort of primitive and monkey ish. For me, it envelops and involves the most beautiful aspects of our nature. I'm a little romantic about human beings still. I still feel that one of the great problems we've had is that philosophically we have overvalued materialism, rationalism, and knowing a little bit about philosophy primarily from that

bloody podcast that you and i tagged a minute ago before we was recording who's that guy philosophize this so like what what i understand for that is like post-enlightenment we've started to prioritize rationalism so if you prioritize rationalism and organization which obviously has a lot to offer the organization of resources is incredibly and hugely important you forget that a huge part of the human experience is nothing to do with that the other thing we were chatting about before we went live was dmt now no artificial intelligence is going to understand that there is access to a realm of consciousness that continually exists that doesn't seem to be bound by physical laws as we understand them and if the physical laws that we abide by are parochial and relevant only to this level of existence why are we allowing

ideas resourced from there to govern all of our systems you know even listen to you talk about dmt and you know i encountered these gestures i the gestures i went through this membrane into another realm and checking out mike tyson when he was on here no no no yeah i love that that moment was amazing um like uh like it like that clearly like you know i only i took acid when i was a teenager and even in very unhealthy not unhealthy but i'm bridled mad teenage boy conditions i you know i want to be there with a guy in a lab coat with a pen going well mr brand sit down look at these rorschach tests instead of which i'm in new cross in a bed sit dropping acid and staring at my own hands and recognizing oh my god i'm not me the very idea of me is a construct i'm just tuned into a particular

aspect ai will build systems that that are predicated on rationalism organization and i on on that basis i can see why they would at some point yeah go all skynet and annihilate us but that is a i believe the problem with our society is that the materialistic aspect of our nature is not the priority it's just one thing we should be doing of course we need good roads of course we need hospitals schools food etc but we need to find a way of honoring the sacred and i'm fascinated in the experiences you're having in these psychedelic explorations and how it's influencing the rest of your life like how you're saying like how you're how does it influence the rest of your decisions the way way you see the world, the way you see relationships, the way you see the vulnerable young man you were prior to building your own, I say, personal religion of martial arts, excellence in your chosen field of stand-up comedy?

How do you incorporate that vulnerable kid? Because I'm still very aware of the vulnerable person I was. I'm going on a rant, man. That's good. vulnerable person i was and like i'm going on a rant man that's good um like when kevin hart was on here who i think is amazing and he was amazing on this i thought fucking hell like what have i got to offer the world when kevin hart has got this kind of force like you don't come in the bubble and i was like my god this guy is so positive what a role model what a lot he's got to offer and then i thought well like any of us what I've got to offer is who I am,

just who I am as a vulnerable, flawed human being that still feels connected to the kid I was when I didn't feel good enough. I still feel that. I can walk in a room and feel that. But I also know that that's not real because I've had spiritual experiences, hallucinogenic experiences that make me feel that the relationships we should be building

have to honour that we are both, we're vulnerable and flawed, but also capable of greatness. There has to be room for all of this. And I feel that part of what we're doing and part of why we're experiencing such superficial polarity in politics and culture is because we're not acknowledging that underneath this surface activity of left, right, left, right. And, you know, from Sam Harris, them little experiments, you stick garbage in front of someone, they become Republican pretty quickly. Or you scare people, they become less democratic. I think all that stuff is pretty superficial.

And at depth, in that realm of the jesters and the membrane of psychedelia, we have access to oneness. And that should be what's influencing the way we set up our tribes, our systems, and our relationships.

Yeah, I think when a guy like kevin hart shows you what a positive and motivational uh impact one person can have just with his words and his deeds and the way he lives his life he's so inspirational that you realize uh that that that is possible that that you can share that energy and that you can have these experiences with people where they literally do actually, they actually uplift you. Like I was uplifted by his conversation. I felt like, wow, that guy is so positive. What a great way to look at the life that we're living. And the more people do that, the better.

And when someone like that does spread a positive message, you know, and obviously he's got, he's materialistic as well. He's got a bunch of cars and a big house and he makes a lot of money and he does a lot of movies. But what he's spreading is this very motivational, very positive message. And that affects people in a very positive way too. And all that left, right shit and all this all the battles that we have politically and ideologically back and forth and all the negative

venom that people spray at each other at the end of the day that this is not benefiting anyone unless you're fighting some major demon that the world needs to conquer. And most of it's not that. Most of it is like finding demons out of innocuous things. And I think when you talk about what you have to offer, what you have to offer is that you are you, that you have this unique perspective. You can affect the way people view their own journey in life because you've been so introspective and so aware of your own pros and cons in terms of your past behavior your current behavior and who you are now

and who you used to be all that stuff is fuel for people because they can relate they hear it i mean maybe they cannot relate to being a movie star and being this famous guy and the struggle but they can relate to the humanity of your struggle they put themselves in your position like what must that have been like and look at this guy who's made these conscious decisions to not be like that anymore and he dresses like a homeless person with a crazy beard that's the real take-home information dress like you live out of doors yeah just like you're a homeless guy in oregon specifically there people respect that yeah it's like dark colors you know it rains a lot yeah yeah i get it i get the reference i understand american culture joe logan yeah so um hey can i do some like yeah emotional activity

tell me what it's called what is it this book is called mentors and actually i read like i read it bits of it again because i knew i was coming here and i think it's called. What is it? This book is called Mentors. And actually, I read bits of it again because I knew I was coming here. And I think it's actually pretty good. Awesome. I wrote quite a lot about Brazilian jiu-jitsu. You really love it, huh? Yeah, I do. My writing is not from a, you'll understand, not from a technical perspective.

I'm not saying this is what I've got to say on open guard to transition. I'm talking about how the psychological impact that it's had on me and also in there about like the protocols of going to a group which as a beginner are very relevant like you touched on how ritualized it is i've got a hunch that the more we emulate and connect to original ways of human behavior whether that's dietary or hierarchies or organization of groups i feel that we will feel a sense of greater connection now the thing i got from going in bjj classes genesis where i go in back in england is like that all the white belts get changed at one end of the room the purple belts and above get changed at the other end of the room which coincidentally or not

is where the control for the timer is and the control for the music is and where the kit is that's all up that room's end of the room so all the control is that end that it begins with sort of dancing around in a circle doing all of those various exercises now lift your knees now do the shrimping and that kind of stuff it's the lower belt shouldn't invite a higher belt to spa or roll you know it's and like as you say the amount of respect the bowing the handshaking at the end of it it's so sort of it provides such a safe environment in which to deal with the primal i can see why it's valuable and it's like you know i should have been taught that shit when i was 14 13 like as mandatorily so that i didn't come across it like you know you're not going to be setting fire

to fields and allotments and putting frogs on fireworks if you've got a way of dealing with that primal energy yeah when when it's coming some people that don't understand that think that you should suppress it somehow you should just ignore it or suppress it they don't understand that think that you should suppress it somehow. You should just ignore it or suppress it. They don't understand that for men, for a biological male, it really needs to be tackled head on. I mean, you really need to embrace what it is to be a physical male, and it frees you in a lot of ways. Do you think this might be a comparable moment to in the 1960s when there was a sort of a sense of sexual repression versus sexual free love? 1960s when there was a sort of a sense of sexual repression versus sexual free love you know the images of woodstock and flowers in their hair and smoking joints and having sort of sex outdoors in mud or possibly wheat that that this time of like a kind of an anger about maleness you know and maleness may not as you said it may be a biological male but it could be the energy of

i don't know assertion or whatever these like you know as in grammar male and female relate to certain words as in french grammar where i don't know cat is female and dog is male i don't know the system i don't speak french but i'm saying that these we have labeled these energies and it does seem that uh that there is a particular what i want to say a condemnation of male energy? Do you think it comes from a misunderstanding? Yeah, and I also think it comes from a big generalization too. It's easy to do, right?

And if you're a woman who's had negative experiences with men, maybe you've dated men that have been physically abusive or maybe you've known men that have been physically abusive and you're around that and you just, it's very convenient and very easy to just generalize and decide that all men are negative. Yeah. Masculine energy is negative, and especially white males. And if you say that, you'll get props online. People go, yes, girl, yes, clap, clap, clap.

People get excited. But those are also people that are short-sighted. Like, you want to make as many people your ally as you can. You want to make as many people your friend as you can. And you have to understand that there's some people that are just wired different than you. There's some girly girls. And there's some really feminine men. And then there's some masculine men.

But everybody is okay as long as they respect you and they're kind to each other. as we associate certain behaviors and characteristics with either negativity or hedonism or a toxic masculinity or someone being a bitch as a man and that's these generalizations are often way more harmful and just it's just too convenient and easy and lazy yeah there is no simple way and when i think about my own attitudes in this area there is a degree of complexity because i've got young daughters i've got a two-year-old and a one-year-old right and they're you know daughters so like but when the other day um because i'm staying in los angeles gabby she's mexican she used to when i first moved out here and lived my entourage lifestyle she used to look after the house and she used to think oh my baby my baby she loved me so and i'd like i'll take a matriarchal figure wherever i can find one and gab she used to look after the house and she used to think oh my baby my baby

she loved me so and i'd like i'll take a matriarchal figure wherever i can find one and gabby used to look after me she adored me and stuff i stayed friends with her yesterday she come around she bought like uh like what i can only describe as a bikini for like my baby daughter like that a two-year-old doesn't need like like a bikini like top and i excuse me burping on the mic i like it for me i thought i don't want to put my daughter in that that's sort of in a way sexualizing the like that child and like coverage so and also a lot of the time like with my daughter i don't like with my wife particularly of our first child i'm like don't dress her up in little dresses and stuff because she won't be able to like run around and i thought my god i'm not that's not that different from like the cliche of a male parent that wanted a son and

i didn't want a son or you know in particular i love this kid i love this kid regardless you know it doesn't mean i love having a daughter adore her but like i am aware that these things of like dress a child this way dress a girl this way are constructs further to what we were talking about again before about michelle fuco we got a lot done before we went live man like when we were talking about michelle fuco what he exposes a lot is that they're and uh deluge gil gil deluge is that a lot of things that we take for granted as being normal are actually constructs and when i say a child's bikini i think there's no reason for any child of any sex or gender to be wearing a bloody bikini so a child with tits is a terrifying idea for all but a very small and terrifying percentage

of the population so like that is an example of the external feminization of a child like so when there's an argument a feminist argument of you know gender is a construct i can see oh yeah to a point it is there is there are constructs kind of like my opinion is you can't argue with biology chromosomes are doing what they're doing in the physical realm but like uh i you know like being a father to a daughter has made me feel like i don't obviously and i know you have daughters or at least a daughter three three daughters like i like i'm certainly very aware of i don't want to push them down some culturally prescribed avenue whether it's about their dress their sexuality or anything so i've got you know where do i where am i on that dial you know yeah you gotta just not put any pressure on them and let them enjoy their

life and let them find their path that That's what's weird, right? It's like I see people, they're getting their daughters to dress very, very feminine with little mini skirts and stuff, and they're five years old and high-heeled shoes. I've seen little kids with high-heeled shoes. It seems very strange to me. I don't like it. Yeah. But for me, that is being sourced from.

We can extrapolate that to, well, then why should a 20-year-old woman wear high heels? I mean, I've read cultural analysis. I'm sure you have of, well, the lipstick is to emphasize the lips because it's redolent of the vagina. The high heels is to make a woman seem more vulnerable and to accentuate aspects of body shape. Now, this can be seen as evidence of the influence of patriarchy.

You know, there's loads of areas where I feel like, why are we looking for shit to argue about in this area? We're just human beings. Most of us, the most important people in our life of the, of the different, of a different gender or sex to us,

you know, why are we looking for arguments? But I can, you can see the influence of cultural forces that are, you know, not neutral. Yeah, you certainly can. But I think it should be up to the choice of the person once they're an adult. The real problem is putting pressure on them to dress one way or another and not letting them find their place. But if a woman becomes, you know, whatever age you decide, and she wants to wear high heels and a skirt because she likes the way it looks, like, there's nothing wrong with that either.

The demonization of sexuality is also a problem you know yes it is almost as much of a problem as people who will prey upon vulnerable people the people people people that think there's something wrong with being sexually attractive or something wrong with being desirable or wanting to be desirable there's something wrong with being sexually attractive or something wrong with being desirable or wanting to be desirable. There's nothing wrong with that either. And that kind of suppression, the suppression of these feelings that you have and this desire that you have, it's very unhealthy as well. It's a normal thing to want to be sexual. It's a normal thing to want to look good. If a girl looks good in a skirt and high heels and she likes to dress like that who the fuck is anyone to say

there's anything wrong with that there's nothing wrong with it it's if that's what she likes that's fine which isn't what's interesting to me is particularly um in really progressive ideology they look down upon women who wear short skirts and high heels and a lot of makeup and, you know, open tops that show their boobs, because they think that they're playing into the patriarchy or that they're somehow or another falling into these gender traps. But yet they celebrate that in transgender people. They celebrate that in men that transition to women, and then they really doll it up. Then they're like, you go, girl. Then they're celebrating the fact that this person is embracing these traditional aspects of womanhood.

You see that a lot with people that are celebrating trans women. So I find it very fascinating. of uh the sort of what would be perhaps could be referred to as sexualized dress or like i suppose in males express it expressive or garish clothing jewelry tattoos in i understand in british culture that these are often indicators of class that like that it's typically the lower down the class structure you are the more likely you are to dress in a way that is exhibitive or like you know women from a blue collar background dress in ways that are exposing revealing men have leery cars and lots of tattoos and jewelry expressive ways of demonstrating wealth the higher you go up the class the more subtle the more dressed down you know labels all

that stuff like you know so in british culture there's a different system of like a different system for referencing it i wonder how that works in american culture with it sort of like it's evident and much discussed racial divisions like certain things it seems like a subtle way of condemning particular types of womanhood that may not just be sourced from dress this way for the male gaze it can also be a way of saying dressing that way is an indication of a lower class background or of a particular type of ethnicity there could be that but there's also the reality of males and females is there's a lot of fucking jealous people and there's a lot of women that just don't have the type of physical body that looks good in a short skirt with high heels and, you know, a low-cut shirt.

And they don't like when they see it in other women because they're not comfortable with their own bodies. There's a reality of that. I mean, women get as much or more hate from women as they ever do from men. they ever do for men and particularly if women find you to be too uh overtly sexual with the way you dress or behave that you're you're you know you're damaging male female relationships you're damaging the dynamic particular office dynamics if there's one girl in the office that likes to tramp it up you know and she's uh and all the guys are paying attention to her women will get mad at her i I did an interview a while ago where I sort of talked about like parenting our kids,

me and my wife, how we parent our kids. And I said like, you know, I have to be honest, my wife is much the more dominant parent. She's much more practical than I am, right? And like stuff that got really negatively written about, people said like, oh, she changes more diapers than I do and stuff, right? Not like I don't change diapers or whatever.

It's just my wife, you know, regardless of our respective sexes, is the more efficient, dominant parent. She's much more likely with me. If my daughter goes, I want that chocolate, the answer from me is, oh, yeah, all right. You know, like, I can't bear to see the the resistance the emotional explosion i concede much too early i tap out very quickly with with my two-year-old my wife is much more no let's play the long game let's bring up a child that's not governed by impulses like you

and i spoke in fact to that gabor mate that expert on addiction he's amazing and he says because of your own anxiety and pain from your own childhood, with no disrespect to my magnificent parents, like you can't handle seeing your kids suffer. So you like straight away you bail and do what she wants and stuff. Now, like so there's so much complexity in the reality of our personal little domestic relationship. I'm certainly not saying and everyone else should run their household in that manner as well. And so help me god any man that changes it up you know but the way it was reported is like that's what happens i think in modern media is they change what you say then you have to defend what they said you said and

that ain't what i meant i'd like you know i'm not saying that because my wife is a woman she should take more domestic i'm just saying that in our household she seems to have a set of attributes and characteristics that make her take control of that aspect of parenting and it's like the the desire to judge condemn and object is the priority as opposed to you know no one's looking to go on who cares or what you know well it's also that they're doing it publicly so they're doing it mostly i mean if you're you're either reading comments or you're reading articles and if you're reading articles they're just looking for something to be upset about. They'll watch you and they'll say, okay, is this a viable target?

Yes, we got confirmation. What he said about changing diapers or his wife being a better parent is a viable target. Let's go after him. And then they just formulate some bullshit argument about who you really are based on what might have been a throwaway or a concession to your wife or even just a compliment to your wife or being self-deprecating to yourself yeah but it doesn't people not they're not looking at things rationally they're just looking at targets particularly people that write articles you know what's the best article it's got to be negative like one of the things that came out of all this Facebook algorithm stuff is you find out that Facebook realized somewhere early on that the way to encourage engagement is to get people upset.

They get way more engaged and they go back and forth and interact with these posts way more if they're upset than they do if they agree with it. If they agree with it, they might give it a like or a thumbs up and say hey that's great and that's it that's where it ends but if you know someone's talking about you know we shouldn't build the wall we should let everyone in and you put that on some fucking trump guy's page and they ah it's crazy i mean you will get thousands and thousands and thousands of interactions and so facebook realized that the way to keep people and you know they could claim that that it's an algorithm and the algorithm just supports whatever the people are really interested in but what they're interested in is conflict that demonstrates my earlier point which i made up on the spot the ai is not a neutral

thing it is resourced from human perspectives and because that is a type of ai you know not as complex as like what we're going to experience and i can't even imagine but what i'm saying is is it's still uh what i want to say resourced from a human from a human perspective and yes of course we are evolved to respond more strongly to negativity than positivity for loads of reasons and i think that's where we can stitch back to what we were saying about taking personal responsibility for who you are like that none of us after sit on social media going fuck you fuck you you know like none of us have to do that we can try and resolve those i i respect that some people don't have any other outlets they don't have the privileges i have of being out go to support groups where people openly talk about

this is the ways that i felt inferior today this is the ways that i'm trying to become a better man and a better father and a better co-worker you know like a lot of people aren't afforded those environments and probably the best shot they got is having a go at someone online and those people you know in a way deserve love and sympathy but until we on some level recognize that we can alter our own behaviors we can alter our own consciousness i don't see how there's going to be well at least then we can create a terrain upon which a better better systems can start to flourish do you read comments no i actually like i'm too sensitive i can just about manage to listen to people's replies to my conversation like you know like sort of like yeah i don't go on to like i have uh like i work

with someone who does my social media and like she gives me stuff like here i'll respond to these things put some output on that because i don't uh i don't want to engage with that i don't want to like walk up and down any street knocking on the door going do you like me do you like me do you like me i don't want to deal with people's responses in various conditions well it's also much like the articles. The way people get a response out of you or the way people get your reaction is to say something really negative. You look at some times when people are not that savvy when it comes to social media. One of the things that you'll notice is they'll interact.

And I've been guilty of this in the past before I sort of realized what I was doing. You would only respond to negative things like people are arguing with people meanwhile people are saying nice things to you and you ignore them yeah it's because you don't you don't you at a certain level you don't have the physical time it doesn't exist to respond to everyone it's not possible there's no if you get 13 000 comments on one of your posts how the fuck does anyone have time to respond to 13 000 people you can't and then you have email and you have twitter and facebook and instagram and just there's no way it's there's not enough time in this world so you would personally would have responded to

things that caused the more visceral i saw someone saying something was untrue like fuck you that's not true but then i realized like what why? Like, what are you doing? Like, this is a new thing for people. There's never been a time where people have had this instantaneous interaction with people, unfiltered, unmoderated, globally. Yeah. I mean, it's very strange to be able to do that and to be able to go back and forth and just just to be able to give your comments on things to be able to talk about things that it's very addictive to people yeah that's right and that's why i'm very cautious with it i have to sort of set my life out like i'm essentially

a monk in a marriage that's basically where i live get up meditate do yoga do exercises do things that are positive for you watch Watch the way that you're thinking. I'm interested in where, again, with your own, do you feel connected to the person you were as an adolescent? Do you notice it in your own parenting? Do you notice it in the type of choices you make? Because the image I have of you from the outside is like that you have literally built something for yourself. The image I have of you from the outside is like that you have literally built something for yourself. You operate within it and you are quite protected and you are independent and not forced to deal with too many negative outside influences.

But in unavoidable dynamics, the unnecessary dynamics like, you know, as a father and dealing with colleagues and stuff like that. Do you experience a lot of tension, anxiety? What has happened to that guy? Do you feel that you have transcended that? Because I do in own life feel like yeah i'm not the adolescent boy i was i've like you know i've learned from that and i still in a very sort of cod psychological way you know when i'm doing uh jibiro that's the bjj classes i'm doing over here with professor ricardo wilke he's an amazing guy like what when i'm when i doing those classes, I have a sense of fathering my child self of like, you know, because I weren't doing those kind of things when I was a kid. I'm like, it's all right, Russell.

We're just in a BJJ class. Just relax. Don't need to panic. Don't need to impress anybody. Right. Just do that. If you don't know, just ask. I've got a voice in myself.

So I chat to Tony Robbins. You know, he's like another obviously high achieving guy who i admire and respect a great deal and like you know when he talks he does like these cold plunges and he says before i get in that plunge you're getting in that fucking punch like he talks my god i don't talk to myself like i'm like right russell we're gonna get in the cold plunge we're gonna relate you know like i have to talk to myself gently what are you doing with that aspect of yourself do you still have a relationship with it how is it like when you're doing all these psychedelic cosmonautic explorations of the psyche are you not encountering aspects of yourself, do you still have a relationship with it? How is it like when you're doing all these psychedelic, cosmonautic explorations of the psyche, are you not encountering aspects of yourself that are undeveloped, unaddressed?

There's always going to be unaddressed and undeveloped aspects of yourself, but I'm very, very, very different to who I was when I was a young boy. I mean, I'm not 100% self-actualized. I don't think anybody is, but I'm just a totally different human being. I remember it, but self-actualized. I don't think anybody is. But I'm just a totally different human being. I remember it, but I remember it with humor. Like I remember it and I laugh. I'm like, wow, so silly.

I was so weird back then. And, you know, with life experience and developing confidence and understanding of who you are and why you had those feelings and why you were insecure and why you had so much self-doubt martial arts helped me with that with that tremendously because it was the first thing that i ever did where i didn't feel like a loser it's like the first thing that

i ever did where people like respected me and they liked me for it you know i'm like wow this is like something that was a feeling that i was completely unused to in the 14 previous years of my life. All of a sudden, there was this feeling that I was unusual. I was unique. I was special. Wow. I was appreciated. You were good at it quick.

Yeah. I had a natural inclination towards it. Oh, amazing. And I was obsessed with it. So I was obsessed with it. So I was training every day, all day long. And then my instructor recognized it really early on so he allowed me to train there for free and just i would teach classes and teaching

classes helped me a lot as well because when you're teaching you're breaking down techniques and you're you know you when you're showing someone how to do it you're really cementing those pathways in your own mind yeah yeah that's, that's right. That must be an important step on the road to mastery. I see that clip where Eddie Bravo gave you your black belt, and you were very moved by that. So for me, moments like that, it must connect you to the beginning of the journey. Yeah, that does.

Yeah, for sure. And still, the journey of jiu-jitsu is a fascinating one because unless you're someone who's, you know, a Salo Hibero or a John Jock Machado or just a true master who's dedicated their entire life to it, the journey's so long. It's so long. It's like if you're a guy who runs, you like to run, I like to run a mile three or four days a week, no big deal. But then, you know, your next door neighbor's an ultra marathon runner is preparing for the the moab 240 where he's going to run 240 miles you're just you're never going to catch up the same amount of times and you should always defer to that person when you have questions about running and that's how it is with jiu-jitsu like is you know yeah i'm a black belt but i'm not a

black belt like john jock machado is a black belt is that there's levels to even to that so i always have questions so the journey is never over it's always long there's always a a better way to get out of an arm bar or a better way to set up a triangle or whatever it is there's the one of the beautiful things about jujitsu is that it's so complex there's so many variables there's so many situations and interactions and exchanges and entries and defenses and and and way to chain moves together and the correct way to set something up two three steps ahead to know that if you grab the lapel this way the guy's going to try to shake it off that way and that exposes this which exposes that

and then the next defense will expose this and then you keep going and going and going and going until you get them it's so beautiful to watch that because it's like as if there's a pre-existing net or grid of interrelated signs that will work together. And like as a white belt, I've got three stripes now. Congratulations. Thanks. I was really hoping that by the time I came back on here, I would have a blue belt. You're closing in on that?

How often do you train? I'm training three times a week privates and i'm attending two classes and what i've done that's great thanks a lot and what's a significant step for me is like now in the classes when i'm sparring people i don't try just in the handshake to manipulate them into going easy god you look so lovely today all right off we go then will you try to manipulate people yeah like just a subtle gesture or something like that. Right, right, right. Just try to take it easy on me.

Come on, don't hurt me. Come on, look at me. Do you avoid big people? Yeah, sometimes. I try and stay down that white belt end of the room, but now the more I do it, the more they coax me up there. Great big giant men. Like there's a guy that goes,

like the hard end of purple belt and dave uh paul busby and like there's people like their hands and their feet look different to my hands and feet as different than their hands and feet are as different from mine as mine are to my daughters right and i feel like how am i supposed to ever do anything with these people like hard water like drowning in hard water the way they move and fold around me i'm like oh well i just think what i'm supposed to do and my breathing goes like but the thing is with other white belts is that uh what i feel is like there is my ego comes back in because there's i feel like no i should be getting something the first time i got choked out by another white belt i like i was i felt like i went into a room I'd not been in since I was 16,

getting my head kicked in in bus stops, you know, and stuff like this. I felt like I was quiet for 24 hours just sitting and reflecting on, oh, shit. And I had to speak to other people. This is a combat sport. This happens. You're going to experience. Right, right. So it doesn't mean I'm a bad person, that I've failed.

No, no, you're going to have to get used to that if you're going to be doing this. Yeah, you get used to humiliation. You get used to defeat, but that humbling is very good for you. I don't know how many times I've been tapped out in my life, but it's probably more than a thousand. Probably thousands. Yeah, and you sit there while I tell you about jiu-jitsu and the other and the other thing that's been good about it is like when it is the other way like i remember like a guy that was a big guy on top of me and like i was he oh he was in mount

right and like he weren't actually applying a submission but there's just the sheer discomfort of having someone there their body their sweat their hair their abdomen their reproductive organs their digestive system feces in their bowel on top of me i just nearly tapped out of that but then he went to move to get an arm bar i thought hang on a second there's a moment and i managed to escape from that and like the amount of energy that that releases fuck you justice now i win justice that's hilarious yeah yeah it's a very satisfying feeling it's also very satisfying to defend against something that someone used to catch you with like say if someone's a really good at taking your back yeah it choked you a couple times and then one time they take your back but

you defend and you get out. You're like, I got out. Yes. Like, oh, there's an escape. I can make this. I'm getting better. I love being in the cave, that mental space, because what my technique was, oh, I'm not good at that.

Never bother trying. I'm not good at that kind of stuff. Never bother trying. So for me at this stage in my life to go and do something that I'm not good at, that's with other men, that's competitive, that involves so much vulnerability and failure and learning. I'm thinking, well, you're growing. You've got to be growing. So you're doing stuff that you never would have done before.

Even turning up at a new place like I'm doing here in L.A. and making those new relationships and doing that. You know, it's amazing for me. Another thing I'm into is the integrity of it. Right. And doing that, you know, it's amazing for me. Another thing I'm into is the integrity of it, right? Because Chris Clear, a black belt under Hodja Gracie, right, in the UK, my teacher, like, if he gave me a blue belt, that would look good, man.

It would be videoed. I would tweet it. It would be everywhere. Oh, Russell Brand got a blue belt. This shit must work. But no, he doesn't do it out of integrity and respect for that. You know, it means more to him evidently than the act of kindness you know so like what is nice to belong to something that has protected and valuable systems you did say to me you keep going by the end of the year blue belt i think but like uh you

know it's not dished out like it's nice to know that there's some kind of order an area where celebrity manipulation charm human none of those things, all redundant. All redundant. No, in jujitsu, it's very protected. Anyone that gives out a bad belt, it's very bad for their integrity. The school would lose face so badly in the community. And you meet someone who's a Hicks and Gracie brown belt. That motherfucker is a Hicks and Gracie brown belt. He's as legit as they get they don't get any more legit like if you got to that point of hicks and gracie gives you a brown

belt it's just it's irrefutable and that's how it should be and it's a beautiful thing about the art form is that it has this self-correcting sort of aspect to it that when you roll when you spar with each other it your ability or lack of is exposed and there's no other way around it yeah that's good to not avoid that it's good to avoid that reality but you'll be better you know you're you're a fit guy you're a healthy guy if you just keep going get off that fucking vegan diet and keep going i watched a documentary um called what the health have you seen it yeah it's filled with a lot of propaganda propaganda damn those guys again like the nazis i remember that it's

they used a lot of discredited studies and there's a lot of epidemiology studies that'll connect things that epidemiology does that what does that mean like an epidemic well you know we could pull up what the actual it's about time time Jamie pulled something up in this episode. But the way I would describe it is they would do these studies, and essentially they would ask you what you eat on a daily basis, how often you eat meat, and it's basically a survey. And in that survey they would say, well, there's a direct correlation between people that eat meat and diabetes.

So let's pull up the definition. Oh, I see. But the problem is what is causing here? A branch of medicine which deals with incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health. So when they're dealing with incidence, right? They're dealing with how often do you eat red meat? How often do you eat this? How often do you eat that?

And then they find, oh, well, there's more instances of diabetes in people that eat meat. Okay. But is it people that eat meat and vegetables? Or is it people that eat meat and vegetables and Diet Coke and sugary sodas and ice cream and French fries? And how are they eating their meat? Are they eating cheeseburgers for some bullshit fast food place? Or are they eating grass-fed steak? Are they eating grass-fed steak and vegetables?

And there's very little evidence that shows there's anything wrong with eating meat if you follow a normal, healthy, what they would call a primal diet. Yeah. Meaning cut out all the grains, cut out all the sugar, cut out all the bullshit, eat vegetables and meat, and there's almost nothing. I mean, unless you have some very unusual, rare condition where you're either allergic to meat or you have some very strange digestive system

where you have allergies to it or you have real problems digesting it or you have real problems with high cholesterol foods, which is very rare as well. Most of what you're getting is vegan propaganda, people that want other people to be convinced that the way that they're living is the correct way and that eating meat is physically bad for you and is causing all these harms. What's causing all the harm for people physically is the modern American diet and it's causing all these harms. What's causing all the harm for people physically is the modern American diet. And that's been pretty established. Yes, that's right. And there are clear ethical reasons to be vegan

in that it takes you out of the exploitation of animals. But that documentary, What Health, that I watched was like, and I've been vegetarian for years, and I've gone back and forth to veganism because I feel, God, Jesus Christ, man, there's enough things in my life I'm not doing without not being able to have an egg without feeling guilty for fuck's sake.

But you could have pasture-raised eggs if you get them from a good farm. The chickens are just hanging out. I've got chickens in my garden. I'm not confident in these animals. Why? Well, one by one, slowly, my dogs eliminate in the gift of life. Oh, I've had that a few times. Terrible feeling.

I lost nine of them to coyotes just last month, maybe two months ago. That's a pretty heavy death toll. It was a heavy toll, yeah. Well, we had a fire out here, and the chicken coop burnt down. just last month maybe two months ago that's a pretty heavy it was a heavy toll yeah well we had a fire out here and the chicken coop burnt down we got a smaller chicken coop and the coyotes figured out how to get into it when we weren't home and we came home to just feathers everywhere it was disgusting oh it's brutal they're brutal little monsters those coyotes yeah yeah you know ungovernable they're the reason why we don't have rats everywhere too all right so yeah it's the circle of life the lion king was right so like hey though um the thing that about that vegan

documentary mate is that it it tuned in to my pre-existing belief when it said stuff like oh the diabetes association they are funded by these meat and dairy organizations and these pharmaceutical companies the cancer organization similarly accepts donations from these organizations and it made me reckon like my pre-existing idea that i come to it with is you know like that whole pyramid of these are the things you should eat bread milk you know just were the things that it was easy and cheap to produce and that were profitable they used to think that they really did used to think that bread and grains were the most important thing. Do you think they felt that?

I think they did. I think they thought it was, it was filling and it provided energy and I don't think they understood. Well, there was no talk of gluten intolerance when we were young. It didn't exist. And there was no understanding of excess carbs and excess carbs leads to excess body weight and it makes you,

it makes you store fat. People didn't think about it that way. They didn't understand. The thing about nutrition is that nutrition science is a body of knowledge that's constantly added to. Yeah. In fact, perhaps most things are. Who knows what misapprehensions and ignorance we toil under that will be revealed to us.

Do you do any, I feel like i've heard you talk about hormone stuff yeah yeah i do hormone replacement therapy what type of things testosterone and human growth hormone so you have to give yourself a jab in the ass yeah you get in the thigh thigh you won't do the ass out of simple pride no it doesn't matter that's for mrs rogan i don't touch that your thighs right there. It's easy to grab. When you're reaching back to put in your ass, it's just like an awkward thing. Too vulnerable.

Yeah, but they also have... You're taking growth hormone. You've not noticed any negative side effects or instability? Well, you have to get your blood monitored. When you're doing something like that, this is also if you're a person that has addictive problems, addiction problems, which I don't necessarily have them as much with substances. What do you have them with?

Well, you saw with video games. You got here the video game problem that I have. Yeah, you're frantic. You emerged out of that dark room. You and your pals. Sweaty and pie-eyed and baffled by the real world. Well, it's very fun, too. Martial arts. I've been addicted to martial martial arts i've been addicted to playing pool i get addicted to getting good at

things i get very addicted to things if there's something that i get obsessed with like jujitsu or whatever it is i get obsessed and that's all i think about all day long i just had i just you know it's not healthy but with um hormones you want to make sure that you don't overdose yourself. You want to make sure that you stay within a very narrow range where you're, you know, you have, what are the healthy levels of a person that's in their, you know, late 20s. Right. That's really what you want. You don't want to have hyperhuman levels, which some people do do.

Hyperhuman, you're going to create an odd ecosystem. Well, you're fucking up your body, man. You're just jolting yourself with all this extra shit. What are you about to take? Sweet lady thyroid. Is that part of your system? Yeah. I take armor thyroid.

It's actually made from pig's thyroids. What do you mean pig's thyroids now? Yeah. Hold on. What's happened to the pig? Dead, dead. They're long gone. They're not sort of struggling with a lack of thyroid.

Yeah, that's a wrap. They're chattering about all emasculated. Well, this is like, so, yeah, I'm interested in this hormone stuff. I'm interested in that. But, you know, me, I've got to be very very like cautious about mood or in yes stuff yeah but if you have the exercise regimen that you're talking about i don't think you're gonna have got to get that blue belt i'm gonna do what it takes man yeah bring me the pig i'll suck that thyroid out of it directly you should eat eggs though man you

really should you should eat you should eat some animal protein without i mean if you oppose the moral aspect of killing an animal which i totally understand and appreciate and that's what led me to become a hunter in the first place is that i was really uncomfortable watching these animal rights videos of factory farming i thought it was disgusting i was like i don't want to participate in this yeah it's reprehensible hunting is a different thing man to me hunting is this intense it's very spiritual in a way i mean people don't get it because they see you celebrating when it's over because it's very very very difficult to close in on a wild animal what are you hunting mostly elk well elk's my favorite for two reasons one it's very delicious super nutritious also if i shoot one elk i can eat it for like eight months

what you're freezing them yeah yeah freezing them? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Freezing them. Freezing them. So you're out stalking an elk on the plains. Yeah. Where are you? Like near where you live? You just go out?

Utah is great. Do you travel on bikes or something? How do you follow them? You can. Yeah, we do travel on bikes if you're a whitetail hunt. A lot of times you'll go into the woods with bikes because they don't leave a scent the way your feet do. Mm-hmm. into the woods with bikes because they don't leave a scent the way your feet do you know and um animals don't associate the sound of a bike the way they associate it with like the sound of stepping bipedal hominids stepping towards evolved bipedal yeah they see you on a bike they don't

even freak out as much delightful never seen that before what's that oh my brain what are these things yeah yeah elk are they like herd animals you see like a herd of them yeah yeah you see a herd of them and you try to figure out which way the wind's blowing and you try to get close to them is this a video of us yeah this is a video of us from uh what a beautiful place i mean i can see the harmony of nature yeah so that's an elk now the thing is with me i see that elk there and i sort of feel like a sort of i've watched too much disney yeah um you know like i see that elk and i feel like i'm bambi literally you know like i don't have it like is that early in the morning you

look yeah tired not tired might be late afternoon actually can you tell if it was late afternoon yeah like say like i from that position i couldn't like i would love the game of being able to aim because actually i've had to go down gun ranges. It turns out I'm a pretty good shot. You know, it's nice to see that thing come back with, like, holes around its abdomen and its head. I think satisfied there. You've been dealt with, paper man.

But, like, the elk, I couldn't, I've got too much empathy in me that I couldn't deal with the feeling of after it was shot. I, like, almost thinking about it, the sentimentality of it. I've sentimentalized it. Now, you know, at least I don't eat meat and stuff like that. So it's not like I have all those feelings but can handle it in a packaged, portioned off way. It's just I feel too much like, oh, that creature. So what in your head when you're doing it, when you're pulling the trigger, you're not having what's going on in your mind?

it when you're doing it when you're pulling the trigger you're not having what's going on in your mind well you you only are hunting these mature animals that have already passed on their genes you also are recognizing that if you're not killing these things they're not it's not like they're going to live forever they are they live a short life a short life with a very violent death it's either wolves or mountain lions or bears or something's going to take them out yeah what you're doing is essentially dipping your toe into the natural world and i've heard the argument that well this is ridiculous because everyone can't do that you know if everyone went out and hunted all the animals there'd be no animals left which is true but um i'm not everyone and so i don't you know i can't really use that if

everyone did the argument it's a good argument because you if you're encouraging people to hunt it is kind of a good argument because it's not realistic it's not sustainable but the other thing to recognize is that the reason why most of this wildlife exists in the first place a lot of it was wiped out in the early 20th century from what they call market hunting. In the late 19th century, early 20th century, they didn't have refrigeration, and it was hard to get food, and we didn't have the same sort of large-scale agriculture that we have today.

And so when someone would want meat, someone would either have to hunt it for you, and you would go to the market and get that hunted food or uh you would go out and do it yourself and they basically wiped out most of the wildlife in north america to the point of extinction white tail deer elk they've been extirpated from the majority of their range in north america and only been replaced in a few other places but the places where they've been replaced, it's all through money that was generated through hunting tags, all through billions and billions of dollars. There's a thing called the Robertson-Pickman, I think that's what it's called, Act, where 10%, if you buy hunting gear and equipment, 10% of that money goes to habitat restoration, making sure that rangers and forest people get funded,

so the fish and game department gets funded, and also population conservation, making sure that the populations are healthy, repopulating certain areas with elk and deer. And this has all been done through the money that's generated through hunting yeah i can see that there's a looking at my own feelings towards it i can see that there's a potentially i'm bringing a sentimentality to the idea of animals that's like anthropomorphic yes like i'm like oh you can't kill that it what about its babies you know i mean like i'm thinking about things like that um but what i you know i live in a rural area in britain where like hunting is normal and i wouldn't and agriculture is normal and i wouldn't get very far if i was sort of like you can't shoot those

pheasants look at their feathers they're beautiful you know i mean like it wouldn't it's not a helpful attitude so whilst i like record like in myself i couldn't do that because like i don't it messes me up on a sort of a feels like a very sort of deep visceral level you know like but i feel that this is precisely the kind of territory where we have to look at acknowledging and tolerate indifference between us this is where i feel like the sort of these ossified polarized positions between right and left are starting to take root because if someone like me who don't eat meat don't eat animal products and wouldn't hunt for ethical reasons starts trying to impose on other people now you shouldn't hunt because of this that have you not watched bambi you know like that's going to mean that people aren't able to

explore who they are and so my i've let go of judging people around things that i don't agree with because i reckon i don't know everything you know i mean i'm this this is like this is about my morality is about how i behave and if people said to me i'm thinking about going hunting i'd go well these are my feelings about it however though i just heard that hunting does contribute apparently to the survival of some species and there is an argument that it's quite natural and indigenous and it's probably a way of getting in contact with who we are originally as hunting people it's an important part of our anthropological history and possibly a lot of the condemnation of hunting is part of the rejection of who we used to be as we become overly civilized and more and more detached from

what it is to be human whether that's sacred or pragmatic we don't know what human beings are anymore we reject our own sexuality we reject our own bodies we reject you know we're trying to turn ourselves into these sort of cyborgs these emotionless sexless meaningless creatures where is our passion where is our connection with the sacred they would go hold on i only asked you about hunting when are you going to stop talking never you gave me an in i will pummel you with my belief system on all things like you know like so i don't feel like that ain't where i get into judging people um but like i'm interested as well with this i keep bringing up the subject of dmt uh like what I guess what I want to know about is, like, because I'm, you know, obviously a person in recovery. I don't drink.

I don't take drugs. Haven't done for a long time. And I recognize for certain people that they can't do it safely. Psychedelics and hallucinogens seem to me exist in a realm outside of that because they're not about, they're not pleasure seeking. They seem to me like it's a spiritual portal however i'm a crafty bastard when it comes to this stuff and i'm always looking for an in you know when i see your cannabis treasure trove over there i mean that is some yeah as you said like raiders of the lost ark stuff and i'm holding in my hand now the cbd rich soft gels, clasping it.

So I'm fascinated. So you're worried that that is a gateway, that CBD, which is not necessarily psychoactive. As long as it's not psychoactive. It's not, but it does help you with anxiety. It helps a lot of people because it alleviates a lot of inflammation, which tends to have a corresponding impact on your anxiety. Hold on. So this says here 11 milligrams of THC. Does that mean? It says THC? It does say that at the bottom. It this says here 11 milligrams of THC. Does that mean...

It says THC? It does say that at the bottom. It's probably a 1 to 1. Is this a 1 to 1? Might be. Or it's like an 18 to 1. Or 11.

It says there's an 11 and a 1. There's a couple different ones in that box. Oh, I almost gave you the wrong one. Joe, what's next? A bag of smack. Don't take that.

This one goes back in. Don't take this one. This one's way more powerful. That's 1 to 1. You seem very relaxed and free from anxiety oh great i will say that um but like so like what i suppose i'm interested in because i look listen i'm meditating the whole like i meditate a lot i'm doing all these things i'm experiencing transcendent states i'm experiencing what it's like to not feel attached to my identity as russell who are you before you are russell who are you before you identify yourself as a man in england who are you who is the person who is the consciousness who is the awareness now when i listen to say terence mckenna talking about his

experiences in psychedelia at such length and with such lucidity and with so many philosophical connotations and the way that he uses the information he's getting from hallucinogenic experiences to speculate on how we should organize society what it what the implications are for freedom his refusal to accept that there are certain kind of experiences that should be prohibited that it's ridiculous that adults should be prevented from having that i i'm fascinated but i'm also i suppose part of my bias is i love anything that gets me out of my head i feel a tremendous sense of relief whether it's through meditation or even sport or sex being relieved of the burden of the constantly thinking mind but when i hear like those um vivid descriptions of dmt realm or our west i think something in me hungers for that

hungers for it do you worry that you're trying to get intoxicated you worry that you're but you're trying to find a loophole yeah because i am doing that i'm loop i'm looking for a loophole it's like i'm going around like a sort of a trash lawyer looking for some way to get into this there hold on a second what about this lawyer that's a great way of putting it yeah Yeah, I mean, I know people that have problems with addiction that have done psychedelics and didn't have a problem. But I'm sure some people have had problems, and I don't know about them.

DMT is interesting in that, first of all, it's very quick. The experience is only about 15 minutes, 20 minutes max. And it's also, it's not necessary, it's not intoxicant in the way that you would think about traditionally. You are still you in the face of this experience. And I think it's some sort of a chemical gateway. That's what I think. I think there's a gateway in your mind that can lead to some other dimension that's probably there all the time.

that's probably there all the time if there is a uh omnipresent continually existing realm that human beings aren't accessing because of the particular biochemical formulation of consciousness as it is in this point in our evolution yeah and that we can get there and it seems as like you know i've heard terence mckenna say it's more real you know it's more real there's stuff in there you know and excuse me and when he talks about them beings you know like that he describes as self-dribbling basketballs creating like fabergé egg like you know devices through vibration i didn't see that i never saw i would i want that he's called the machine elves he's called them all sorts of different things the way i've described them is they're the geometric patterns made out of love and understanding that's what they seem

like so you read you can look at a geometrical pattern and read meaning into it it had an emotional quality they're made out of something and they move they change like they don't stay what they are they're constantly evolving in front of you into something more and more beautiful it's very weird what did it make you feel like i knew nothing that was the most profound aspect like all of this stuff that you concentrate on every day is nonsense and there is some other thing that's connected that's probably influencing this world yeah and it's probably what with people see when they have near-death experiences the depictions of the afterlife i mean it's probably what it all is and religious experiences when prophets are talking about oh my god i went into this realm

there's these beings they've told me we're all one we have to love each other scholars in jerusalem are connecting moses's experience with the burning bush to the acacia tree the acacia tree which is rich in dmt the burning bush is what god was to Moses. And that through this burning bush, he came out with these 10 commandments of how people should live their lives. I mean, that easily could have been just a very convoluted sort of translation of a DMT trip. Certainly.

And also when you think of, certainly there are archetypal images that seem to be repeated throughout ancient cultures and archaic stories that seem to refer to the potential for plant experiences to affect consciousness. Even the Garden of Eden. Do not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge. Otherwise, you will become as gods. You know, I sense that now if if there is some realm that we can reach through that experience that puts into perspective everything else we experience on the material realm, and that thing seems to, in your words, be emanating love and understanding while ever-changing, completely formless and communicating love and understanding,

it i can't help but think that that should become our priority to have a relationship with that realm and to bring about that experience i don't even mean in a literal way because even terence mckenna said there are some people vulnerable souls he was probably referring to people like me that probably shouldn't mess around with that kind of stuff really talking about people with schizophrenia right which he believed he had, by the way. Did he? Yeah, he had some very unique perspectives on schizophrenia and the way people interact with the world itself. I think if we lived in a healthy world, a healthy civilization that had a healthy relationship with psychoactive substances, we'd probably have centers where you would have a legitimate shaman a medical advisor and someone would take you through a guided experience we're doing that now with ketamine there's a lot of people that are very depressed that are having uh these physician controlled ketamine experiences that have had a

profound effect on their depression my friend neil brendan's gone through several of them and he was he's a comedian, a very funny comedian. So when he was describing it, it was hilarious. He was going to a doctor's office and tripping his fucking balls off. And the doctor's shooting him up with intramuscular ketamine. Oh, my God. Yeah, and he's having these insane... I go, so you're having psychedelic experience.

He's like, oh, yeah. The way he's describing it was really funny. Um, I mean, tripping his fucking balls off in these, whatever states that ketamine, I've never experienced ketamine. I don't know what it does,

but it's apparently profoundly, uh, hallucinogenic and you have wild, crazy experiences on it. And for whatever reason, it has a great impact on depression for a lot of people i think it's a perspective enhancer but it also does something to rewire the mind well what some of this suggests is that mental illness is a response to our material

conditions whether that whether that mental illness is schizophrenia depression or addiction it's like it's like people are going on hang on a minute this isn't how we're supposed to live i took that ketamine one time towards the end of my using and as usual it's not in the right type of environment you should be doing stuff like that in a nightclub you need to be under that shamanic conditions white coat guy or whatever whoever you nominate as a shaman but i felt like it was like going into a tunnel made of sound and like having to navigate oh shit i'm still in reality what am i going to do is it as my sort of consciousness becomes a noise yeah instead of a string of words and signs how am i going to get out of this place you know so like for me it's clear that drugs were never

meant to be recreational in fact they never were i was never hey man this is crazy i was always like i'm in fucking pain i need some shit to help me out otherwise i'm gonna probably kill myself yeah you know so like it was a way of holding that stuff at arm's length so i guess my renewed curiosity around dmt and i and ayahuasca and other sort of plant medicines and like you know that do you know daniel pinchbeck and like them guys that are sort of part of that i'm curious about it because i guess i'm continually trying to find a way where someone go right here's a way where we can do it where it's sort of safe and i've heard of other people in recovery doing it and when i think about what my motivation is is when i hear people talking about and my own and my own recollections of experiencing what felt like god and by god i mean a sense of oneness

and that my individual identity isn't my real identity and i'm connected to everything and love is the most important thing you know i i i want a real experience of that so that when i'm out in the world i can remember when i'm driving or when i'm dealing with people or if i'm buying something or if i'm feeling inferior or feeling superior that like you said this is bullshit this is like a secondary reality don't let it govern you you know as someone that's been seduced by fame a person like if i get this part in this film then everyone's gonna love me oh if this stand-up set goes well you know like a person that's placed all of my well-being outside of myself, the certain knowledge that there is an inner connection that will take care of you, that's accessible.

I guess I'm, you know, hungry to sort of feel it in a way that's like, oh my God, now there is no doubt. So in a sense, it's a crisis of faith, not a crisis of faith. There are psychedelic states that you could achieve without taking anything. I mean, you could certainly get there in a flotation tank. You could get there through holotropic breathing. I've never done kundalini yoga, but apparently the people that get really deep into kundalini yoga can literally have DMT trips. I have friends that have done DMT and have experienced DMT trips through Kundalini. But you have to be really dedicated.

I mean, there's a lot of time, a lot of time, a lot of energy. And you have to really understand the methods and follow them to a T. And you can achieve these altered states of consciousness that are apparently, you know, not from my personal experience but from people tell me incredibly profound yeah i mean i've had comparable things i guess that what it's you know the difference between feeling something that's that overwhelming that gives you no choice you know like there's like it's not like you know kundalini you've got to do these breaths correctly you've got to sit there you've got to try again have you done it yeah i've done quite a bit of kundalini well what for me it felt like what i felt quite a lot yogically and meditatively is a cessation

of what i would call my individual consciousness like oh i'm not this this isn't who i am this is just a temporary experience and all of the value systems of our world are built upon these primal drives in collaboration with a culture that likes to stratify people and manage people and operates like a massive farm where it's easier to keep people together operating in these kind of ways systemically i've sort of felt rushes of that like a certain wordless clarity if you can imagine me having anything that was wordless even for a moment and like and in that space you know there is there is great peace so i suppose get like what's turning me on about the like the dmt and iowesca thing is that the way it's

narrativized that you're going to meet characters and stuff like that and it's and it's going to be plain and beyond doubt you know because i suppose what prophets do you know like whether it you know when a prophet returns from the whether it's the burning bush or the cave they come back and they say all this stuff that you're taking seriously is not real there's this other realm start prioritizing it or you are going to live in hell on earth you're going to be governed by your materialistic drives your sexual drives and it's going to imprison you and it turns out that they're right and so like you know i suppose what i'm after because i'm partly you know on a super like on one level influenced by what you're doing and how

you've created your own, like you create your own business and your own success, like this, this symbiosis of standup and the podcast. And like, it's become like a sort of a lifestyle brand in a sense, Joe, like, you know, I'm sort of like, yeah, I don't, I don't want to be continually dragged into these, like working within institutions. Like, you know, I'm over here doing a bloody, I'm doing ballers and I'm bloody glad i'm over here doing a bloody i'm doing ballers and i'm bloody glad to be over here doing ballers and working with the rock and i've got a funny story about that if you want it like um but like uh you know like really what interests me is like can i be and can i dedicate my life to humorously communicating spiritual information and indeed

starting to live it so like that and i suppose what that would mean is you know i'm getting better that i'm not a person who's obsessed with porn or sex or drugs or whatever like you know to become it to become what you actually are to recognize that we're all different your perfect realization of you is going to involve hunting and all of these things that you've created through your gift and that my perfect version of me is going to involve all of this. And not everyone needs to build sort of empires or entertainment industries or whatever,

but all of us are on some journey to self-actualization and realization as individual as our fingerprints and as natural as a seed turning into a tree. And if we don't have a way of accessing that, no wonder we're dissatisfied. No wonder there's an opioid epidemic. No wonder people are bored and angry and lonely. Well, I think what you can do is be yourself.

And what you can do is express yourself. And what you can do is constantly seek to improve and grow. And you're doing those things. So if you're saying, can I do these things? Can I be comedic and spiritual? Well, you're doing it. Right. So it can be done.

So you're doing it right so it can be done so it's don't you're doing it you know it's all just a matter of what whether or not you're satisfied with your progress and where you are and who you are and how you express yourself so your pursuit for excellence when you're saying i've got to get better at bjj or archery or hunting or whatever that isn't coupled with a sort of sense because you're not fucking good enough see that's the that's the deal that i've got there's wonderment i love it joy that's so cool joy in it and there's enthusiasm i mean in everything and archery in particular it's very you know there's that book zen and the art of archery which is uh it's an interesting book uh it's you know i mean i think there's some real great points to it but that state of mind that

you get when you release an arrow and that arrow perfectly finds its mark really is Zen. It requires so much concentration and focus and technique that you really don't think about other things. Beautiful. And it's cleansing in a lot of ways. It's mind cleansing. I find jiu-jitsu to be very similar in that way too,

that it's so all-encompassing. There's so much on the line. It's so difficult to do that while it's happening,-encompassing it's so there's so much on the line it's so difficult to do that while it's happening you're freeing your mind up i mean i think of video games in the same way all of these things that's bizarre but like all of those things suggest a transmission between the inner and outer world isn't it you're looking at the bullseye and then oh my god i've made this thing traverse time and space or bjj i've been shown again and again how to execute this triangle and i've just actually done it against resistance it's amazing

to feel that it's amazing to feel that that your inner life can express itself in the material world whatever or wherever you're looking to explore that and to test yourself and when you test yourself and you have to figure your way through something or change the path because the path you were on was unsuccessful when you're doing that it's it's really good for the mind and for the i don't i hesitate to say the spirit because i think that word spirituality is so beaten down and abused you know what do you mean it's become commodified yeah it's like yeah it's like when people call themselves a healer. Like, are you really? Yeah, I've just done some healing

on the way here. We're all healing. I mean, we really are all healing each other. But I think there's something to doing difficult tasks that it makes life easier. I really believe that. I think it makes life more enjoyable.

I think it makes the bright colors brighter and it makes the dull colors, even them, even the bad moments. If you have real positive experiences with difficult things that you choose to do on your own, I think it mitigates

most of the hassle of life. Yes, I agree with that. That is again, and I'm not particularly promoting this book because I'm all right with however things do. But the point of this mentorship yes i agree with that that is again and i'm not particularly promoting this book because i'd like uh i'm all right with however things do but the point of this mentorship is the idea that someone will exhibit qualities that you recognize you don't haven't fully realized in yourself and that you can sort of model them and realize them because laterly you have those qualities oh like

kevin hart we were talking about how admirable i find his positivity to be. It made me think. It's so real. It's unbelievable. On a practical level, the way he's building his stand-up, that guy's fucking diligent. And the amount of when he talked through his work schedule. You fetishize hard-working men, I think. I've heard you talk about Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. You like the idea of men, I'm up at those people. I'm up at two. I'm in the cryo chamber.

I don't do that, though. I sleep in. I can't do that though i sleep in i can't do a lot of things that they don't do like i but i also you know unlike uh the rock at least i do stand up i mean kevin does stand up too obviously i don't know if he does it as much or as often as i do but because i do the clubs I have a philosophy about what's required to develop great stand-up, that you have to do a lot of sets. You have to do a lot of numbers, a lot of different places, different environments. And I found that out the hard way through my best performances and my less good performances. Like what was missing and what did I gain? You, like, this I think is a sort of an interesting debate.

You know, I don't know if it's in stand-up world at large but it's something i've thought about a lot is like that as soon as i was able to have an audience that would come and see me i was like i'm out thank you god you know i'm not putting myself through that shit ever again doug stanhope feels the same way by the way he's one of the best yeah he's amazing he's amazing. He's absolutely fantastic. I completely agree. And like, because I thought like, because what I feel like is that the comedy club environment

warps your material because you've got to appeal to them. And I think you ain't the fucking arbiters of truth. You've drunk and crazy 2am motherfuckers. So I get like, I perform. Oh, what I'll do is like, and what I'm doing say at the moment is I'll book the UCB like or like places 100, 200

or go Largo or put on events and I'm doing events while I'm in LA because I think oh these people come and they love me and they bring me beads

and they here's some vegan cookies you gotta come to the comedy store man and go on after Joey Diaz fuck you because I feel like I'm like a nurturing environment because i've done that i've done those fucking clubs and like you know an even comedy store and late at night comedy store in la you know as well as london and i feel like oh jesus thank god and

after so like i'm interested to you that's part of that what i think some people could reductively refer to as machismo in you. Like that you go, no, I'm going in there. Well, you know what it is? It's that guy that mounted you and went for the armbar and you escaped. Right. It's worth it because it was hard. You realize if a child got on top of you and went for an armbar and you escaped,

you'd feel nothing. So when you're at Lar at largo you're performing for children you're doing child stand-up it's like you're wrestling with 100 pound women who just started yesterday it's like the make a wish foundation go on russell then tell us your stories well if you noticed amazing you're wonderful we brought you flowers thank you thank you children but but like look the counter argument to that is that therefore i'm in an environment that is sympathetic and it is my audience and i'm not biasing i what you know the idea of overcoming a greater obstacle i completely

appreciate what you're saying but say you believe in the purity of stand-up as being some real expression of yourself as in the arrow hitting the bullseye. I feel like I have a vision of what I'm trying to achieve. And increasingly, it's becoming about I want my stand-up. I want to hang on, you know, like as I've always done, stories where I feel embarrassed and humiliated. But I want to hang off it, ruminations on what I believe to be the nature of truth. And I want people to come out of those things feeling loved, validated, accepted and that they're good enough

and that they can explore themselves. So it's more of a one-man show? In a sense, it's that. But I don't want to sacrifice the laughs. I love the laughs. The laughs is where we're at. But you don't have to sacrifice in a one-man show. You can certainly do a one-man show

that would be really funny. But say you start going into... Yeah, that's what I'm doing. I'm trying to build things around 12 steps and trying to like doing things that people have some takeaway value from now like you know like trying to develop that after joey diaz in the store it's not gonna happen there's gonna be some resistance you you're aware of hannah gadsby and the controversy of this what do you think about that i haven't seen it yeah i'm gonna see it but what, the end of comedy

and all that kind of thing? That's silly. It's no end of comedy, but what she's doing, people like. And there's nothing wrong... I don't know. Call it whatever you want. Sometimes it's funny.

I mean, maybe it's stand-up comedy. Maybe it's her version of stand-up comedy. Some of my mates watch it and they tell me towards the end it would become quite aggressive towards the audience. Yeah. It became like a TED Talk almost,

I guess, apparently. I'm interested. You know, that's... Yeah, there's enough room for everyone to yeah to do whatever they're doing but like see at the beginning of my uh let's call it career like i i used to not prepare at all i was still drinking and using i'd go up on stage i'd chop shit up i'd get into confrontate like when i say chop shit up i'd take up animals shit part animal parts i'd got from butchers like like a skull with all meat and stuff and sinew on it chop it up frame they would release locusts get into confrontations and like

so yeah exactly the reaction you're having is the reaction they were having like so some of the front row would i had like uh fights i've got scars on my body from bad stand-up gigs from a time where i've gone to a confrontation like i was making a point about pedophilia saying oh we're all one cultural mind so when a particular pedophile is transgressed against a child we're all responsible people are like what the fuck you know i got the shit kicked out with that time you know i've still got the scar on my leg that happened in edinburgh in scotland people didn't take it well like so but what i was trying to do was like create i didn't have the skills the chops the experience the jokes so i was so under equipped but like what i was trying to do was create environments that felt you know i'm much better at doing that now i can create a kind of an

uncertainty in a room a kind of a sense of chaos and what's happening and then bring it back i hope to a humorous conclusion where people feel safe and amused and all of that kind of stuff now i think it's you you can't like because i did try and do that in comedy clubs and yeah it was confrontation it's not what people want so don't you think that by prepping your stand-up in those uh environments that it biases you towards a type of stand-up comedy that is in is limited no because you can do that other stuff too you could always perform to your crowd and you could always expand on things to your crowd but to really put it together without any fluff without any nonsense without being self-indulgent with respecting the attention span of the audience

that may or may not even be there to see you most likely is not if you go to a comedy club and there's a large you know if you go to the comedy store any night of the week there's 15 plus people on the marquee or on the the list and the show starts at 8 p.m or 9 p.m depending on the night and it goes to two o'clock in the morning and you know you catch waves in there and there's different types of comedy and in that that, you're going to deal with sometimes tired audiences, sometimes enthusiastic people. It's all different. It varies widely. And I think that in doing that, you cut all the nonsense out of your act and you develop an economy of words.

You understand how to captivate people's attention and keep them engaged and to respect their time, respect their point of view, respect that these people have an attention span. They want to be engaged in the best possible way that you can do it. And sometimes you develop that through these really difficult sets or distracted people and drunks and all that stuff. You can develop those qualities. You're always going to have your crowd. And your crowd, I mean, if you have this vision of how you want to put things together, you can put that kind of thing together at a comedy club.

You're doing it in these 15-minute chunks. You just have to figure out a way to grab them. Yes. And make them really interested in what you have to say. You're right, because there's a, obviously, in, like, the comedy store, between the hours you just described, there's a contract. We're here not only to's a contract we're here not we ain't here to see you we're here to laugh every 15 seconds and like you know comics like

you know like robin williams or chapelle's the the you know the all-time greats they went they go in and accept those conditions and you know you've seen stuff i'm sure like of robin williams he's just like walking around in the crowd in that very room do it's like he's like he's doing the thing i'm talking about and he's doing it there yeah that's when you think yeah if like i suppose i do get at that you're road testing it to a it's durability to an incredible degree if you can pull it off yeah well think about every time you're saying something when you're you have a subject i say if you want to do uh you want to talk about the mentors that you have in life there's it's an open-ended approach you have no idea what the correct way to say something is you try it you how you write it out you say this seems feasible let me try it this way and

oftentimes people never correct it or they never they never adjust it they never go back and improve it they just say it in a certain way and figure out how to do it when you're doing it in front of a crowd you're developing these things while also feeling the way people are reacting to them and feeling their attention span and it makes you with proper reflection and truly objective listening to your material it makes you change and shift and adjust things you know hopefully in a positive way get in and the more you do it the more you get a sense of maybe this is clunky here and maybe i figure out a better way to say it and i agree but the counter argument could be that it could bias you to a sort of a lowest common denominator area say with that bit where you talk about the sun and you know it's you know you need it it's

trying to kill you it gives you cancer you know like something like what was the journey of that bit of stand-up is it's like like for me it's like oh i think of before i try and make sure there's a tag so i know where i'm going when i'm out there and then it's a comparable process to yours you're trying to your best to get rid of fluff or whatever so can you recall like what it's like you know are you night after night going in with new bits of material packaged within things that you're a little more confident in yeah and i put that bit on a special i can do it better now i know a better way to do it and that's part of the problem with doing bits it's like sometimes you release them on a special you have a better version of it now but my point of that was to a perspective enhancer to let people know that bit was about like understand what's happening here you are literally floating in infinity and it's almost never

discussed you're hurling through forever there's a fireball in the sky it's a million times bigger than earth if you stare at it you'll go blind it's trying to give you cancer and if it's not there you get sad yeah you live in a dream like this is madness your life is madness it's beautiful yeah it is but i wanted there's something about that particular way of see because i figured out a way to express it short in short doses and short bursts if you know if you stare it'll go blind it's trying to give you cancer and if it's not there you get sad so in that short burst like it's you know like wow yeah that is all those things are true like this is crazy there really is a fireball floating in the sky and we're just used to it we live because of a floating million

times bigger than the earth fireball and i when you say if you could say something like that and make someone laugh you can actually change the way they look at things you can actually affect at least the way they look at things if you just say something sometimes it's profound sometimes it registers but if you could say something and it forces someone to laugh even if they disagree with you if they're laughing, I don't even fucking agree with this, but holy shit, this is funny. You put that thought deep into someone's head and you allow them to think about your thought process and how your creative process and what you're doing to sort of bring these things out. Yes. I like the way you just describe the architecture of that you've

got to basically have these are some facts about the sun are irrefutable yeah now here is how that affects the way we look at the world and exposes to us that we're just ignorant we're not awake to reality we can't hold reality in our minds because it's too vast to handle i am like it and i agree with you that you know that with laughter comes access to kind of deeper truths and i've heard some uh therapist in fact say that uh like that laughter is to shame what grief is to sadness that laughter is helping to expel shame and to process shame there's something very important about people coming together and laughing together i i like to exist comedically in a world where it's like starts from a deeply personal perspective

and admissions and acknowledgments of humiliation and shame and vulnerability and travels out to the universal and hopefully archetypal that you can sort of travel between those points with a comedian that i think we both admire bill hicks what i think is fascinating is because like you know like if you've loved Bill Hicks for a long while, then you discover, man, that guy works material a lot. You know, like, oh, I watched this interview of him on the Australian TV. He's doing like a bit that I've seen him do, you know, in multiple incarnations. But I have also seen him do interviews where he's spontaneously talking about gigs,

terrible gigs that have gone badly, and he is hilarious. But it it's very interesting to me and perhaps it's because of that background and that practice of doing clubs that hicks is very much a comedian that's no i'm drilling this fucking thing and i'm staying with it no he was a writer i mean he he did ad lib and he did he was capable of going on these rants spontaneous rantsants, but he was a writer. He wrote these things out, and he was aiming to have an impact with his commentary. I mean, that was what he was doing. He was not just trying to make you laugh. He was aiming to enhance your perspective on whatever he was talking about. Yeah, and it seems very disciplined as a practitioner of it,

whereas, say, a Chappelle, it feels like he's just going, blah, after like an hour. Well, he's got a very unique process chapelle does and he can turn over an hour like no one i've ever seen before and i was talking to donnell wrongs about it recently who you know was on the chapelle show with him he's like we both agreed like he's the best ever at turning over a new hour he could have a new he could release a netflix special and then have a new hour within a couple of weeks it doesn't even make sense i don't i don't understand how he's doing it he must just flood in he's just he's in a great space you know he's in a great mindset to do comedy you know if you pay attention to how you know when when people

study like if you read outliers um and you read how people when people study why people are great at what they do and what makes them exceptional there's always a variety of factors and whatever the factors are with dave he's got this easygoing personality this like very carefully carefree way of looking at things he's also gone through a lot of bullshit in his career with you know the leaving the chapelle show and you know abandoning 50 million dollars and going to africa and really understanding what his real motivation were he was caught up in that world where they were trying to change him and commercialize his television show and he handled it as good as anybody that's ever handled it yeah he handled

fame and temptation i think better than anyone i've ever heard of he just said fuck you and he just went away he went away and then didn't do gigs for years people don't understand he would show up and do stand-up places but he wouldn't book anything so like he wasn't getting paid of places but he wouldn't book anything so like he wasn't getting paid he was just he did stand up dave chapelle did stand up in the park in seattle he brought like a little amplifier and a microphone set up and just started doing stand-up and people just gathered around and he did this just to sort of get him back in touch with his roots because he used to do a lot of street performing in new york and i saw him do street performing in Montreal. We did a club. And then we came out of the club.

And Dave, I think Dave was like 18 or 19 at the time, just started doing stand-up on the street and put his hat out. And people would put money in his hat. I mean, he was constantly sharpening that sword. And he stopped doing stand-up for a long time in terms of booking gigs. And then after a while, I said, fuck it, I'm going to come back again. And long time in terms of booking gigs. And then after a while, I said, fuck it, I'm going to come back again. And then he started doing these gigantic gigs.

And then, of course, he did his two recent Netflix specials were amongst his best work ever. And now he's working all the time. He's constantly popping into the comedy store and the comedy cellar and all these different clubs all across the country and constantly doing stand-up. No social media. He's not involved in any of that stuff doesn't do anything just just performs just does his stuff yeah that's interesting when it's like i i feel that some people have like found their essence and found their path and live it like and like they you

know that like they're a yogi or a priest or something that's right he's just got a devotional this is who i am i'm not doing anything that's not that and yeah that's exhibited even in earlier stuff prior to the cry that you know what you would you know the crisis of the 50 million walk away thing like by then if he was at 18 doing them clubs he was hardened like what that what seemed so loose on stage was something that had been refined as a person who's comfortable yeah he was always good he was good when i first met him when he was like 18. i think he was 18 i was 21 so it was somewhere in that range maybe i was a little older maybe he was uh maybe it was like how old's dave 46 47 I think he's five years younger than me. Is that correct?

46 or 47? 45. Okay, so he's more. So six years. Six years younger than me. So, you know, I was probably 25 and he was probably 18-ish. 25, 26. 18, 17. But he was so calm and he was very – you were attracted to listening to him.

It was like, look at this guy. This guy is so comfortable in his own skin and so friendly and easygoing and hilarious. But who he was then and then who he became is all the work that he put in you know it's like he had this base of this really you know this curious young very wise person who saw things that other people didn't see in the world and then he just kept going and just kept going and then of course the chapelle show which is in my opinion the greatest sketch comedy show of all time even though it was only two seasons. It was the best ever.

And then after that, I mean, he's basically just done stand-up and done it completely outside of the system. He's done some parts in movies and shit like that, but for the most part, what he's doing is just stand-up, completely outside of the Hollywood system, completely free. Just goes up, just talks some shit shit has a couple of drinks laughs and and and and it's incredibly compelling he's found his groove you know and that's it's a beautiful thing to watch as a fellow stand-up comedy practitioner when someone he achieves this mastery level like

you know we were talking about like this hicks and gracie of stand-up comedy level because that's where he's at right now yeah i agree with you become who you are yeah he's yeah he's become himself and he doesn't have things that are getting in the way of that you know that's what's really interesting like you don't see him he's like he's not on social media he's not on anything twitter or facebook he's not on any of that shit he doesn't pay attention to any of it he's just just being a person just being a person and doing stand-up you know it's uh and he doesn't have to which is unique too you know he doesn't have to promote things they just sell out yeah what an amazing example what an amazing example i've got to promote some things oh what do you got

i've really learned some powerful lessons there from the story of the apotheosis of comedy that Dave Chappelle's achieved. Here's these obligations. Now, I'm booked here to promote Luminary. My podcast has gone behind a paywall on a platform called Luminary, aiming to be the Netflix of podcasts, meaning that your model will, I imagine, triumph further. So from this week my podcast will be on luminary as part of their premium content is an app through which you'll get all podcasts but my podcast is like you've got to subscribe that's launched because i know yeah i know that was in the process of being created are you happy with that so far because

it's not launched i don't know but you know you know like that you're going to leave listeners behind because it's gone behind a paywall but i spoke to sort of like sam harris about like what sam harris actually told me about it me too yeah right right and i spoke to like and what i recognized is because like the advertising model works obviously in your case and i thought wow like there it was like a good deal it was a good deal i meant oh i can carry on doing podcasts for two three years that's you know what this you know this and it's supporting a lot of other content and essentially not yielding any creative control if people just if people subscribe they get the premium content my stuff how much it was like only like five bucks

a month like that yeah you get like trevor noah lena dunham mine how many different podcasts i don't know i think like when they're premium content there's like 40 or 50 premium pod good like you know pieces of content so like so for me i thought like you know it felt like otherwise podcast wouldn't be something that i could continue to do forever i would every you know because i do films or TV shows or stand up or whatever it felt like a difficult for me it wasn't a viable thing to pay for

to pay for people to run it to pay for guests to even get to me and all that kind of stuff do you do ads on your podcast? I did before but after this it's an ad free model like that's there's a benefit to that for sure you know and a lot of people choose to go ad free and then they use

patreon or something like that for yeah listener supported stuff sam harris was doing that for a long time but then he they had an issue with patreon about certain censorship of certain individuals and certain ideological perspectives where they were you know leaning towards left-wing things and you know being being restrictive towards right-wing things and then you know they policing the way people behave outside of patreon and some people found that objectable so he left and some other people left like jordan Peterson left. Ah. I've never entered into Patreon, into those waters, but I know Burr does it. I think Burr has, like, one a week that he does. Oh, Bill Burr's one?

Yeah. Really? Yeah. He's astonishing. He's one of the best. Yeah, so, like, I feel like it's an all right thing to do, but even in, like, just with using things like YouTube and social media and, you know, like spotify itunes or

whatever like you know as we have seen there's a point where there is sort of censorship is a possibility like as you discussed on the jack like that run of episodes mate as i said to you by text between the jack dorsey the reaction to that your response to the reaction through alex jones and all that's important i thought that was a spate of podcasts that's like, this is where this medium can be. The Alex Jones podcast, I thought, was the godfather of podcasts. It was un-hit the air. I was going to put it out tomorrow.

He just gave it to me. Do it right now. We're going to watch it right now. You want to watch it? Yeah, we have a guy who's hilarious. His name is Pauly Toon. And Pauly Toon makes animated clips for us of the podcast and he's fantastic i couldn't believe one of the alex jones eddie bravo uh incident they're choking yeah well they were

there no not when he's asking him to choke him here i went to flat earth no this one it's so ridiculous. Here, we'll play it for you. Oh, here. What's going on? What's the matter? My audio cut off. Oh, okay.

Back it up for the beginning there. It was an exception. It even looks like him. Here we go. The guy does awesome artwork, too. Listen, we're going to get to this next. And I respect you. Hey, I want you guys to yell at each other for three minutes while I go pee.

I got to pee, too. Okay. We'll do it in shifts. We'll do it in shifts. I'll go first. Okay. Anyways. You are someone that I could talk to about the Flat Earth conspiracy. You don't believe in Flat Earth, but you can kind of understand where I'm coming from.

What if I finance a research ship and make a documentary? I can't go away for three months. I will pay. How much money can you raise? We're going to need a... Are you guys going to the moon or into orbit? Okay, you raise the money for a trip to South America. No, there's no raise the money.

I got the money. Okay, you got the money. I got the money. Listen, this is the deal. This is the deal. This is the deal. Go pee. Go pee, man.

We're going to do this. We'll send Joe Rogan. No, no. We're going to do this. Joe, it's beyond astronauts. You're going to find the edge of the world. Big ice caps, cats that are knocking things off. I'm going to film the drop off with my iPhone.

Yes. Yes. Go pee, man. Go pee. Don't you have to go? We're going to send someone else, Alex. We're going to do this. Hey.

You know what? We're going to do this. I don't know what? We're going to do this. I don't have to be the one that goes. I don't have to be the one that goes. I'll be in a minute. Let me tell you something right now. Come on. Let me tell you something right now.

I came here and I proved they're keeping babies alive and taking them to the radios. How did you prove that? Actually, they're admitting it. Jamie pulled some shit up on Google. No, no, no. They admit it now. That's you two. They're normalizing it.

No, the governor. Listen to me. That's you two. No, the governor. Listen to me. You really think there's people out there campaigning for late-term abortions? You think that shit's real? You think that shit's real?

Who would do that? Who would do that? Who would campaign? They fucking did it, Bravo. You can't fucking admit they're fucking killing Arnie Moore kids. So you're telling me it isn't real when they had a fucking vote in the goddamn fucking Senate. That's a conspiracy theory.

I am ready to beat your fucking ass. That's a conspiracy theory. You think you're fucking tough? You're about to get it. Bullshit. They're killing Arnie Moore babies. Stop fucking lying. God fucking damn it.

I'm getting pissed now. Don't get pissed. Go pee. No. I mean, you saw the... Dude, it's going to... fucking with you hold on alex i'm in right now the fucking senate voted to kill babies and they're fucking born i was just playing with you of course i believe that we went into a long conversation about that we played i I heard it. Okay, you heard it. I heard the whole podcast. I'm playing with you. Okay, okay.

But imagine, my psychosis is this. Think about what I said. Reality is so crazy that I always thought I was so tough. I can't believe he doesn't have to pee anymore.

I'm going to piss a little bit. The point is, the point is, the point is, is that, why are we debating whether the earth is flat? Dude, they're keeping,

they have human-animal hybrids. Yeah, that's good stuff. That's what I mean. I feel like that is the pinnacle of where this medium can take us. Yeah. Watching, like, he was in an extreme state. What about when he could go, I'll buy you a big comfortable.

I'll keep the buy you a big comfortable. And that was, this is, like, I listened to that podcast. Like, I go and run and runs i'd listen to this and i thought the fucking hell man where else are you gonna get this content where is that well there's no one would ever agree to it anywhere else that's the thing you'd never get a group of people whose jobs depended upon keeping the show on the air whether they're producers or executives they would never agree to that they'd be like you can't have that crazy fucker on you can't have this on you can't have eddie fucker on. You can't have this on.

You can't have Eddie Bravo on all the time. He thinks the world is flat. Stop this. Stop it. You're traveling between such diverse and unusual ideas. And sort of the thing with Alex Jones as well is that he's like he demonstrates to a point that there's veracity in what he's saying. Some things. Yeah. He's right about a lot of things

you know when he's talking about animal human hybrids we started pulling up these studies where they actually have done studies where they've tried to create animal human hybrids non-viable animal human embryos they're trying to grow human organs in different animals and there's all sorts of weird scientific shit that we're doing imagine what they're doing in china behind walls look at this china's latest cloned monkey experiment is an ethical mess they use crisper to add human genes into monkey genes and there's like five monkeys this happened back in january and i don't know this is a fucking horror movie this is a horror movie this is how the horror movie begins why do you think that once if that's what's being revealed, the truth is darker. Yes, for sure.

For sure they're trying to create super soldiers. Someone is trying to create some super soldier, some half-chimp, half-human, super intelligent, murderous thing that's powered by remote control. That is not a good objective. No. I don't see a good outcome for this super intelligent murderous remote control chimp being. But what if you could send those super intelligent murderous chimps to go kill ISIS? Now we've got a reason to start designing. Get them out there.

Now we need, look, we've got a nice contract with this defense contractor and they're going to. That's how we lubricate the passage to the murderous monkeys is isis that's the function of isis in the cultural conversation is to justify the monkey soldiers you know what one scared me more than anyone that i've ever read i read about this thing that um darpa was putting together it's a a robot called the eater robot e-a-t-r robot It's a robot called the Eater Robot, E-A-T-R Robot. It's a robot that fuels itself on biological matter. So it essentially can eat bodies.

So you've got a murderous robot that eats people. It's like the… That's its fuel. Worst kind of things that human beings could achieve. It's like people are sat around trying to yeah come up with them well they're the you know they they're responsible for a lot of really crazy innovation in terms of like military stuff you know but boston dynamics you know they're the ones that make those crazy robots and they work with darpa and those are the ones that make those robots that you can't kick over right you know i mean that's what you need one of those that eats people and you send them to

the battlefield kick it over no that's the first thing we established is you can't kick it over i just think that's that's the big fear is that future warfare will be our robots versus their robots you know if we're starting to bring about the worst aspects uh the worst things that a human being can conceive of let's channel them through into reality yeah it does make you feel that the apocalypse is real i thought it was bad enough when in the malaise of my younger days i like uh for a while imagine if there was a cleaning service where the person would come around and clean dressed scantily they do that they do that whatever devious shit you can

dream up someone's trying to turn a buck off it and they've taken it to the extent of the non-kick over robot flesh-eating robots yeah yeah what is this is this a new one it's a new video today watch this this is so scary is this boston dynamics yeah there's something very eerie about that type of motion. You know, like the way the movement of a snake is deeply coded to be unpleasant when you see it. They say, but you think that movement, you think that ain't good. Enter the truck it's towing. Wow.

Oh, my God. They're pulling a truck. And it's tiny little tootsies. They're that strong to pull a truck? Ten little robots. That's a giant-ass truck. I mean, it is also just a husky sled made out of expensive robots and a truck they've spent a lot of time and endeavor to go backwards i i guess kinda but to an evil santa claus they're showing how strong these

things are i don't like i don't like their gate joe that's an unpleasant gate yeah you should be on you should be uncomfortable with be Uncomfortable with it Yeah that's I'm not at ease With that Well it's not human It's not animal And there's no compassion

In it It's It's Feelingless But that's what You gotta worry about Have you ever seen That episode of Black Mirror

Where the lady gets Chased down by the drones I've not seen that What are they One where they're bees No there's a woman Who's being haunted She's being hunted by a robot.

And it's terrifying. Because of its remorseless lack of humanity and empathy. Yes, and it looks just like that. It looks just like those things. Those are real. Charlie Brooker, he's plugged into it. That man's got good imagination. He's amazing.

He's amazing. That show is fantastic. But these things, what we have to worry about is once artificial intelligence becomes sentient and you can somehow or another attach it to these objects that move and they they run on solar power or they have you know nuclear fuel cells or some crazy shit that allows them to exist for a long period of time i mean you don't have to worry about them contaminating environments if you plan on killing everybody in the environment oh man and also there's no means of regulation is there because this because this is the apex of human endeavor they're in what what can govern that what can regulate it and like you say there'll be a chinese equivalent for any of this stuff there's nothing that's above it going is this a good idea

should we pull back what did he he just pulled up a thing that said they're making that now. That one I just showed you. A hundred different models of it are going to be available starting production this summer. It doesn't say how much they're going to cost. Wow. But available for people to buy. Well, it says a hundred different models. It says produce a hundred models.

That probably means it'll produce a hundred of them. Like a hundred different companies are going to want them. But I bet it's more than that. Depending on how much they cost. It doesn't say how much it's going to cost. They're going to announce that later. But they showed a robot arm coming out. Oh, that looks so creepy. Look at that thing. Imagine we have one of those things in the room

filming. We should get one. No. What if it takes over? One day we come here and it's got red eyes. It's like, fuck you. Fuck you. What if it likes us because we're the first ones to help it? Don't and befriend it jimmy listening to us like alexa that's how it begins isn't it yeah there's something arachnoid and eerie about that it's almost like you know see if this tunes into the dmt component of what we've been talking about it's almost as if we've already experienced this reality we've already been through the version where those evil insectoid robots take over.

So when we see it on the screen, we think, oh, no, we're doing that thing. We're doing that thing where we create those things that bring about our destruction. And I believe it's because we've become biased to commerce and a particular type of progress. But one narrative has succeeded because we necessarily had to throw off religion but you know at the dawn of the secular age because religion was becoming systems of bias and systems of oppression and what and systems of uh what do i want to say elevating certain types of power and supporting it at least let's go hang on a minute this religion a lot of it seems like bullshit what we've done is we've abandoned the sacred and i think if you abandon the sacred

meaning there is more to life than what we can understand i listened to the brian cox episode and i've spoke to brian cox the british physicist astrophysicist on my show as well and when he talks about like he said that you know we know that there's not some additional component to a human being because we can break down everything that happens when you move an arm you know whatever and i feel like we only have limited instruments we only have limited instruments there's certain frequencies that we simply cannot read what else is going on when people are having these transcendent psychedelic experiences we're accessing elements of consciousness energies and frequencies that we are not able to access while we're in this state and everything we're achieving and everything we're building,

we're building on this platform. And the bias of this platform is towards progress and materialism. And I think the result is flesh-eating robots and those evil monkey warrior soldiers. I want to calm down and have a little talk about what it is we're trying to design. Yeah, I don't know if I agree with Brian on that particular point that we think we know everything about where consciousness emanates i don't think that's necessary but i like the fact that he thinks that way because he's such a rigid hardliner for science

and yeah the guy works at cern i mean he's a brilliant brilliant man so of course he thinks that way i also don't think he's ever had a dmt experience that's right i wonder that yeah there's some people i think give him a quick dose, you know, because I, as well, I respect Brian and it's further to my point, similar to the hunting argument.

I can, but you know, I happen to believe in God, but like I, when I talked to Brian Cox, I got to the point where I was saying, all right, even though I believe in God and you are an atheist,

although he said, I don't call myself an atheist. Well, I felt like we both got to the point where we said compassion, kindness, and love are the most important things. So in a way, who cares how you get there? So when you say you believe in God, do you believe in the traditional God of Christianity?

Do you believe in God as a concept? Do you have your own definition for it? I believe that that state of oneness and transcendence that you're talking about when you through your DMT experiences that says, you know, love and kindness and love and awareness. I believe that is the most real thing. I think that preceded all matter. And I think that we that we can interact with it. So I don't believe God in a sort of in just a guy away that the whole world is like an interactive by biological

living breathing goddess i believe that we i believe yes that and that we can commune with it and i and furthermore the relevance of it for me is that it it suggests to me that we should be acting kindly and lovingly and when we're thinking about how do we organize our systems that our awareness of that energy accessible to all of us should be paramount in our understanding of how we organize so like what i think is like that we should look at you know like we've been through as human beings so many advents that agriculture technology industry thinking that we were that the you know the sun went around the earth thinking that the earth was flat with all due respect to eddie bravo and like you know and we and before each of these

realizations and each of these changes we always think we're at the summit we never know what's going to be the thing that's going to change my suspicion is that what's going to change is the way we relate to consciousness and the way we see ourselves as individuals that we start to have an understanding that what that that becomes a priority that thing you described of like when i have come back from dmt trips i recognize this is just an illusion and it's not real i think that will start like i believe that we need to prioritize that and progressing along that line what are the implications of this not being the most real frequency there is how do we organize society on that basis how does that affect how we relate to one another there is, how do we organise society on that basis?

How does that affect how we relate to one another? What kind of, how should we be governing? How does that affect justice? That that should be in the mix instead of how many fucking terrifying, arachnoid, weird, gay robot motherfuckers can we cook up? You know, like that's the way we're going.

The progressive technological route, because it's created medicine, because it's saved so many lives, because it's given us wonderful technology, the spirit of entrepreneurship. But all of that energy, it all gets pushed in one direction. It all goes that way. And I feel that we need to invite that. The sacred and the divine need to be back in the conversation. Well, there's certainly going to be pros and cons with everything.

You know, there's definitely pros and cons with the creation of technology. I think of this, I think of human beings as if you go back to single-celled organisms, they have very little awareness of their environment. And then as it became primitive bugs, you know, as, as,

as things evolved, they developed more awareness, but even us in comparison to certain animals, certain animals have heightened senses of smell and survival instincts but they're also colorblind you know and they they don't see things they see edge detection like that's one of the things about deer um they see movement so like if you wear camouflage and you know your your pattern is broken up with a grid and then you stay put they don't see you yeah they just it doesn't mean it

doesn't register to them they see movement so we have a far more complex system of recognition than they do in terms of like visually the way we see things and i think that whatever skills or whatever senses that we've evolved i don't think that's it i don't think that we've reached the pinnacle of it and i think that as beings become more and more evolved they'll probably gain more and more senses and that could be directly related to technology it's totally possible that what's going on with technologies that we're also developing totally possible that what's going on with technologies that we're also developing through external means a way for us to see the world a way for us to view like what they've done with the large hadron colliders like the best example of it right what they do with the hubble space

telescope and other telescopes you're using technology to gain awareness and to see more things and that this is the good side of technologies that it's allowing us to have a far greater understanding of all the variables that surround us that we might not be able to detect with our senses yes that this is a part of who we are and then i think when you're talking about things like psychedelic experiences that's probably another realm of understanding that we haven't really achieved yet because we're we're still evolving as as a as a species as a thing what i think is interesting is that the continual bias along that technological path is towards profit you know when we see those machines the end point is always how do we make

how do we maximize profit there is no like the influence of how do we do what's right that's like a sort of a a person like a sort of a general ethical uh what i want to say sort of code is not being introduced there is no regulation like you know ultimately you know ultimately people will create the warrior monkeys or the most profitable machines people will because the the counter argument isn't being made no one is like what i'm saying no one's making it there's just there's no union of uh you know there's no sort of clear opinion of hang on a minute where could we be going no there is no body or ideology that's able to oppose the relentless march of capitalism i'm not sort of like a flat out of capitalism is'm not sort of like a flat

out of capitalism is bad here i am promoting a book using an iphone oh you know i mean i'm we're all swimming in it right but what i'm saying is that if we acknowledge there are transcendent realms there there is information date and data that exists beyond what we're able to receive with our senses how are we going to incorporate that in the way we organize because otherwise the sort of the magnetism the pull the g-force of what's most profitable what's going to continue to suit the uh requirements of the powerful that will always the bias will always fall in that direction and it seems like where that's heading is certain kinds of ecological disaster certain kinds of economic inequality certain kinds of ecological disaster, certain kinds of economic inequality, certain kinds of conflict. You know, and like when one of the simple experiments that I apply is, you know, if we, you know, if we people say, oh, what's wrong with the world? The world's so fucked, all this polarity.

I sometimes think, well, who is benefiting from how it is now? Are there is anyone benefiting? Are there any groups, institutions or individuals for whom this current state is beneficial? individuals for whom this current state is beneficial and if the answer to that question is yes then look at who those institutions are and they are most likely to a degree involved in establishing and maintaining these systems and there are you know institutions and individuals and organizations that this works just fine for but are they just capitalizing on it or are they organizing it and is a normal part of the way human beings operate with this constant desire for innovation constant desire for improvement we

always want to push further no one's comfortable where they are they always want to be in a better place and this is almost like it's built into capitalism right i agree that this materialism which is built into capitalism also is what fuels innovation yes because you want the newest iphone so they have to design it and build it and make it i agree when new things come out like this new robot that apparently you're gonna 100 models whatever that means what that is is this is they're gonna sell it so there's like it's fueling innovation someone else will come along and compete with Boston Dynamics, and then there will be innovation wars. If these innovation wars weren't in place right now, our phones would look nothing like the iPhone X. It just wouldn't. It wouldn't look like the SX. It would look like,

who knows what it would look like. But there would be no incentive for them to compete against all these Samsung devices and Huawei devices, and all that stuff is fueling this innovation, but it's all being fueled by capitalism. You're quite right that innovation is one of the benefits of maintaining this system. But it seems to me that we are excluding other factors that recur throughout human cultures. We all have an idea of fairness, of justice.

And yeah, I don't want some clunky weird sort of eastern block phone made out of gray plastic with only one button on it like but like we have to i suppose examine as a society and as individuals what is important to us now where i think you know we've taught touched several times upon you know the fact that as an individual you're more likely to bias yourself towards negative information online you know like we do have a degree of individual power and individual responsibility and i feel like if enough people awaken to the possibility of different narratives that that the capitalist idea of innovation and success and progress that all of these words can be examined what do you mean progress that assumes a teleology a purpose a destination if all time is happening

at once if space is infinite like you know that bit of yours of like you know to try and fathom for a moment the limitlessness that we're existing within then all these things are constructs this is a construct and it is good to have technology but it's possible to like at points times of crisis such as what it feels like we're at now and although people have said oh we always feel that every generation thinks that they're the one because they know their own impending death is coming and they narrativize that into something social and global well regardless there's got to be a time where we start to introduce different ideas into our systems it seems like there's room for that now because we do live in a truly global culture that there is the possibility for monoliths to introduce new innovation and

there is nothing that can oppose it or regulate it we're starting to see this kind of breakdown so i'm interested in how we can individually prepare ourselves to organize society differently to be able to overcome pretty superficial differences like oh you go hunting i don't go hunting we ain't who gives a fuck let's start talking about how we can organize the size where people who go hunting or don't go hunting can live peacefully in different ways not entirely governed by a small cabal you know and i'm sure power is more complex than that that seem to be hugely biasing the direction of this so-called progress i think you answered your own previous questions when you're talking about whether or

not you can be spiritual and funny and like what are you doing can you carve that path out for yourself that what you're doing there by explaining that would influence people would give people a perspective that allows them to say yeah like why are we doing this and what is the purpose of this and if enough people hear those words and have that perspective introduced to them it'll change the way they interact with the world and that changes the world it really does and that's one of the more powerful things about discussions when someone like you says something like that and it resonates with people and they start thinking like why am i living like this like what if i only have if i really do only have 50 years to live why am i living these 50

years in some really unproductive bullshit way that's not satisfying at all because i just want a bigger house like what is it do i want a faster car do i want a expensive piece of jewelry like what is what is the purpose of this path that i'm on now versus a path that i could be on and what is the real conflict that we all experience between each other is it how much of it is due to a lack of communication how much of is due to a lack of real listening and understanding one of the things i've said about like comments and podcasts and stuff like that i think one of the reasons why a lot of people get mad and i've tried to think this through like why some people some of the response is so negative to things that don't that seem innocuous on the outside

i think it's because it's frustrating when you don't have a say yeah like if two people like you and i are talking about something there's probably some guy right now going, well, just fucking stop with all your spiritual bullshit. Here's what you do. You wake up when your fucking alarm clock goes off. You never hit snooze. You get out the door. You put your hours in.

Eventually, you get better. You take care of your family. You act like a fucking man. And there's probably people like that that are upset. They feel like we're pontificating too much. this is all just you know just mental masturbation you're right in ways it is but that's part of how you dissolve these things and think these things through i believe they deserve their say as well and that's one of the things that you know of being a person that goes to sort of 12-step support groups is you recognize that everyone's individual

experience that is valuable yes so it's not like that and i've got over the idea that you recognize that everyone's individual experience that is valuable yes so it's not like that and i've got over the idea that you know that there's some external thing can be imposed and like you know whilst there are like many people that are you know we could say not using their 50 years to maximum effect because they're you know pursuing odd material goals there are you know many many more people that have never been introduced to the idea of freedom because from the moment they're born, they're economically tyrannized and told that you're only,

if you are not economically valuable to this system, you are not valuable at all. And that isn't, that's only an idea. But, you know, if you don't, you know, if you can't become a lawyer or, you know, a comedian or whatever, fuck you. Well, so many of us are trapped in the expectations and values of our parents too that's a real problem with people don't let their children

become an individual you know they force their children to follow their own rigid ideology and they shame them when they don't i agree with that but do you not imagine that a fair degree of that stuff is unconscious do you think that you and i are probably unconsciously imposing things on our kids 100 but not with guilt and i mean if your kid comes to you and say dad you know i know you wanted me to be a doctor but fucking i want to play bongos i just want to be the best bongo player of all time i bet you'd probably be like hey learn the fucking bongos give me a hug hug. Go get those bongos. Get out there. Become the best damn bongo-er you can. Or even mediocre.

Sure. But there are fathers out there who'd be like, the fuck you are. You're going to be a goddamn doctor. Stop being a pussy. And you're going to go back to medical school and you're going to pick up your studies. We're going to get you a tutor. And you're going to perform because we're a Wilson. You're a Wilson.

And this Wilson family has been physicians since 1820. Your grandfather. Time immemorial for Wilsons have been physicians. He made people bite down on a leather strap before amnesia

and he sawed off legs and he kept those people alive. You want to play bongos, you little fuck. Yeah, people get mad. But my biases towards my kid, like when we was back

in England, like I was aware of like grandparents or whatever reacting to spiders and stuff going oh spiders are scary i'm like don't fucking teach them that spiders are scary i don't want her to think of things as scary tell her like these spiders are cool they're all right there's nothing you know like so and you're aware of familial influence like that they want the hair to be a certain way they want them to wear certain things they want them to like yeah part of the veganism is like if you make these kids vegan at least now i know wherever they go there's gonna be so many restrictions on their food i've not made the kids vegan they you know they eat what the hell they want it's up to them

yeah thank you where's my gold star where's my ticker tape parade um but like uh so but like you know but i don't know what you know we don't know our own biases we don't know what where we've been institutionalized you know because how you know the very nature of the unconscious is we are not aware of it you know so i suppose in a sense a continued open-mindedness and a willingness to change must be part of any dialogue to go into these situations you know i might not actually know what's that's why i'm not when i was 20 if you'd have said about the hunt in i'd be like oh no man like now i'm like yeah jesus there's so many ways of seeing the world there's so many ways of looking

at what's natural and what's correct i'm you know what do i know i think with hunting hunting is like many things and that there's no real clean answer there's no yes or no good or bad because you could think there is but then you find circumstances like wild pigs or invasive species like i go hunting on a place called lanai it's one of the small islands of hawaii there's somewhere in the neighborhood of 3 000 people and 20 000 deer it is so overpopulated with deer and they have to kill them they kill them every day they hire snipers they hire people to kill people are slamming in with their cars i mean they're fucking everywhere and they're access deer they're not even from there they're from uh someone brought them over from india to give to king kamehameha

in like the 1800s. They're animals actually that evolved to get away from tigers. So there's this insanely fast, beautiful deer that are everywhere. They're forced to kill. Well, the good news is the people that are low income people of the island always have meat. There's meat everywhere. Everyone can hunt. It's really easy to find them. You can, you could find them. And if you, you know, if you want, you can go kill them. Yeah. I've got no moral judgment about that. that you know if there's rats in my house what i'm not going to put down poison i'm going to go oh but that's the thing right as a vegan flourish you should probably feel bad about killing a rat right as a vegan i do feel bad you feel bad i feel

bad about everything i'm hungry what about yeah i wouldn. I wouldn't swat a mosquito. You won't? Even the Dalai Lama. Even the Dalai Lama, though, I see him. He went, like, the first time, a gentle brush. The second time, a harder one. Third time, smack. The Dalai Lama gives him free chances. Joe, can I?

But then you're out. You might be reincarnated or something. Can I go for a pee, please? Yeah, sure, sure. Go ahead, man. It's almost 3 o'clock already, believe it or or not oh god like when standing up pressure my bladder was under he's such a character isn't he he's got these incredibly long rants you know but he's so um self-aware and introspective he's like always analyzing himself trying to find if he's so self-aware and introspective. He's always analyzing himself, trying to find if he's doing right.

I get a kick out of these celebrity dudes doing jiu-jitsu, too. I think it's hilarious. It's awesome. It's cool. It's cool to hear them talk about it. You can tell the struggles with it. I just saw someone else said they just started it, and I can't remember who it was. Someone famous?

Yeah, it might not be relevant at all, but I'm trying to know trying to i think demi lovato is like a purple belt or some shit she's been into it for a long time uh russell who you know i've trained with it russell's a legit blue belt i rolled with russell and i was like wow russell really knows jujitsu he's actually doing the right stuff here it's hard it's hard for someone to go from a place of where a guy like russell brand is handsome beautiful famous man who has got some strange plumber sitting on his face yanking on his arm his description of it is awesome yeah filled with bowel feces in his bowels and yeah that veganism stuff's for the birds though sorry vegan people to eat eggs if you don't want to kill any animals please just find find a good farm that has pasture-raised

eggs and see how much better you feel or eat eat animals that are assholes. Find animals that are assholes in the woods. Only eat the assholes. Somebody sent me this horrible video that I've seen many times before of a bear killing a deer in a backyard and the deer's screaming and the bear's tearing it apart. I'm sure you've seen that before, right?

And he sent it to me and he goes, okay, now I get it. Like, I didn't think, I thought like if a bear got a deer that it would be just oh hey this is just how nature works like no this is horrific violent act of this animal tearing this other animal apart now would you prefer that than a hunter because 99 times out of 100 when a hunter kills an animal it's way quicker there that's the video it's horrible it's a horrible video this animal i think it's actually a black bear i think it's either a grizzly or a color phase black bear

but it takes a long time too if you if you haven't seen the video, it's a long one. And the animal makes some horrible noises. We're talking about Russell Returns. We're talking about a video that I've seen before about this bear that kills this deer in this guy's yard. And the guy films it, and the deer's making these horrible noises. And this guy sent it to me, and he goes, now I get it. He goes, I get what the wild is actually all about. Because you don't really see it that much.

It's very rare that you actually see an animal kill an animal. So we have these romantic Disney-fied ideas of what the food chain looks like out there. Yeah, nature's brutal. I mean, I don't try and impose on my dog the kind of conditions that I would hold myself to. You should have an organic garden if you really want to do it right because if you're getting into large-scale agriculture you're buying food from people that grow it they're running over fucking rabbits and mice and killing things with pesticides and there's no there's no removing yourself from death but just by eating vegetables

it's just you don't they have to read also they have to like when with large-scale agriculture they're that ground all those animals get displaced yeah you know it fucks the whole ecosystem up whatever area they're planting on and then when they roll over it with those gigantic combines and pull up that grain they're chewing up everything that's why vultures always circle where combines are as soon as they have fresh cut the vulture starts showing up because they know there's going to be something that got jacked see once you know that that monoculture is unhealthy their only resistance to altering it to having like permaculture and healthier better agricultural models is commerce and profit that's no no no no you communes what you could have as community gardens yes yes you could but the only really but like if you start if we start saying

hey why don't we not have monoculture anymore because it's uh unfair and it's unreasonable they go we can't because uh it's profitable to have it and people won't be able to afford food but all of that is like a you know a an interrelated system that's sort of gridlocked into protecting itself. You know, like there's a spiritual maxim, wisdom is acting on knowledge. And that is not the world we live in. We know things and then we just ignore it, you know, like as individuals or as corporations and as groups. And like what I feel like I'm trying to do as an individual is hold myself to that standard like i know that's not good for me to do that anymore i'm not going to do that i'm going to

do like i'm going to watch myself and i'm going to watch that behavior and i'm going to try and improve you know like i don't want to go like when my first impulse and heading down to the hibiro jujitsu places i feel nervous i don't feel confident doing it i don't want to go or whether it's like giving up me or whatever but i'm doing these things in a sense as i think these are the kind of improvements i can make now like when you we almost don't expect that of politics anymore you don't expect a sort of a political figure to say well listen monoculture is having a terrible impact they'll make some gestural thing wouldn't they they go look we're going to try and control facebook and

google a little bit we're going to try and reduce emissions this amount now i'll go listen we know that's wrong we're not going to do that anymore because there's too many powerful interests that's why i was susceptible to the vegan documentary you know of course there's the ethical reasons in my opinion for becoming vegan but because it's like the reason that these kind of foods are promoted is because these powerful groups lobby government and lobby the the group the organizations that set the standards until they shut up and comply you could sort of say that about vegetable based foods too i mean do you think there's powerful vegan lobbies they still see no no vegetables no vegetables just corn just

growing definitely i mean that that's i agree with you that's the same that is the same you know like you're saying that the reason that is continuing is because it's profitable and but these ideas aren't going to get explored because we're on one path one teleological journey like that's sometimes what i feel like when people talk about the threats of different cultural influence e.g islam for example right i feel like well we already live in a kind of fundamentalism that's invisible to us because it's all we know we live in a culture that if something isn't profitable it will not survive and i don't think that's how human beings are set up to exist i have this rather lovely anecdote about like i was coming

back from a gig and there was a woman like a car broke down the side of the road i had a driver forgive me forgive me i'm not poor anymore forgive me i had a driver and we see this woman she's by the car side of the road her car's broke down and different like it's a night time and like a few different people stop and help her the first guy is like this is in england it's like a polish immigrant guy comes and helps you know my driver is a muslim geezer he's helping i'm trying to help pretty inefficient may i say because you know like if you're a famous person when you go into a situation that sometimes you don't want to be recognized there's other times it's kind of good

to be recognized when you're not recognized at all i always think oh i'm not being at all recognized in this situation no one recognized me in that time so i was just a weird geezer at the side of the road trying to help someone who had a minor accident without any relevant skills. Then someone stopped with relevant skills. He was like a paramedic. He took control of the situation. He was ordering people around. You stand here.

You do this. Go and get that. Go and get my head torch, he said at one point. He had a fucking head torch. This guy's serious. He brilliantly resolved the situation. What was he doing with the head you mean like a light he had a head torch like a light yeah okay not a torch like a light

is he burning is he welding what is he doing it didn't emit heat all right fair enough yeah this didn't emit heat so it's a light right right i just wanted to clarify in my country you british people are so strange even the way you spell tires. What's that Y doing in there? That's necessary. That's for Queens. Why? Why does color have a U in it? You need that U to round off the second syllable of color.

You savage yank brutes with your color. It's a diphthong. Color. We can't even say snooker. We say snooker. We can't even say snooker. We say snooker. We can't even pronounce a sport that we don't even play. Birmingham. Yeah, I mean, it's a...

We burn ham? Catastrophe, the way you talk. How do we burn ham? Burning, oh no, burning ham. Birmingham. Birmingham. Birmingham. Birmingham.

That's right. Listen, this guy had what you would evidently Call a headlight But even that doesn't Sound right Headlamp Headlamp Yeah That's an odd thing To have in your vehicle No no no

I have one What you got a headlamp In your car Yes What are you anticipating If you get stuck somewhere man If anything happens You should have a headlamp

This is the kind of person That you want pulling over Well listen When you go hunting One of the things that happens Is you're in the woods And when it happens When the sun goes down You can't see where the fuck you're going.

You have to have a headlamp. How much distance? Every hunter has a headlamp. Very far. I have a really good one. Honestly? Yeah, I have a really good one. So you're lighting stuff up.

Isn't that going to alert the... Well, you don't hunt at night. Right. It's illegal. Once the sun goes down, there's no hunting. You have to be able to see what you're shooting at. Otherwise, you shoot a person. So you have these fucking sorts of rules lights on your head are just to help you navigate through the woods and to spot predators because of course if you're

vulnerable you know and you see giant eyes ahead that are nine feet off the ground you're like oh fuck it's a bear it's a two-way street yeah hunting it's like hold on the hunters become yeah that happens i've had experiences where i've ran into predators in the wild uh particularly uh one time in canada i ran into a grizzly bear and uh looking in the eyes it wasn't even a big one it was like a six foot bear wasn't huge but it looks right through you it looks right through you and so when you run into an animal that's killing shit every day and it looks at you yeah there's like a demonic look in its eyes i've met i've seen black bears before you don't see that look a grizzly bear which is you know more

predatory they have a crazy look in their eyes it's really interesting i made eye contact with a couple of predators a shark once in a shark cage on like when i was doing that film sarah marshall that i've done years ago or when in a shark cage and right and they lower you down and you see a shape a shark come towards you it's like it's swimming through time it's like it's come from another area it looks at you like you think whoa fucking hell and like and i was terrified in that cage and like like ed norton was there and with the arlson they were on that island as well they were mates with people that were on the movie they got in the water outside of the cage oh they're out of their fucking mind that's insane isn't it the shark was little and apparently it's not the kind of shark that eats you but even the eye contact and its

fucking teeth i don't even look at it and then another thing i looked at once i was in a tiger sanctuary in india and i like uh i didn't like the vehicle i was in oh this is a i should i should have made me suck with that, actually. This ain't comfortable. There's a better Jeep over there. So I got out of it to transition, and my mate goes, you want to get in the car now, mate?

There's a fucking tiger over there. And there was a tiger, like, only 10 foot away. Just this... Maybe I'm exaggerating. Hold on. A 20-foot maximum. Like, it was near. And the way that that thing looked...

I mean, because it's so beautiful as well, the intensity of being looked at by that fucking creature that was some powerful shit you don't want eye contact with that i don't want to look at something that's got like that you can't negotiate with that you can't i feel like look at me even with the jujitsu like i've got that little moment where i go hey come on this old russ yeah with a tiger negotiating he doesn't care about your mortgage yeah neither does that grizzly bear doesn't care they look through i've got kids yeah they don't care no it's just but that's all it's doing all day long is killing things it's unbelievable because that's as true as everything we reflect on it just to us who gives a shit about your theories don't know what that is so their idea of what the wild is is really based on two things one

their their actual love of animals they know right it's like dogs and cats so they get animals that we know we we have this connection with them so we think that these are animals they're science projects man those are not animals real animals don't give a fuck about you they they're in either indifferent to you or they're scared of you or they want to eat you. That's real animals. The relationship that you have with a dog is like a child. Like, my dog is more like a child to me than he is like an animal. I mean, he's like my little friend that doesn't get to speak.

He doesn't talk, but, you know, an animal in the wild is a competing organism they're competing amongst all the various organisms in whatever ecosystem they're in and either they're at the top or they're they're somewhere below that and that's just how it goes and every deer is looking around because there's cats and the cats are slowly sneaking up on them every fucking day in the week and if you go in a place where there's deer, you best believe there's going to be mountain lions there because that's how it operates. And when you see that in the wild, it's so rare.

It's so rare to be around that. But when you see that in the wild, then you get a deeper understanding of what it means to be an animal. What's horrific is factory farming. What's perverse and disgusting is the way animals are treated when these lives these livestock companies pump these animals in these warehouses and make them stand in their own shit all day and then abuse them and the horrific nature in which they're raised yeah all that should be

illegal yeah ag gag laws those laws where whistleblowers get arrested those should be illegal those are immoral they're letting people know what goes into your food and those people are being punished for that all that shit is and they're being punished because it hurts business yes well it should fucking hurt business you're doing something that we all think is immoral that's how i feel about it i don't think there's anything wrong with even if they if if there should be standards and how cows are raised, how chickens are raised, let them live like actual cows. That's beautiful. And there's a way that they can do that where people, like Chris Pratt from Guardians of the Galaxy, great guy.

He raises sheep and he eats them and he even gives them out to people. He has butchers that take care of it. These sheep are treated like they're loved. They're not scared of people and then literally they get walked into this room they have no idea what's going to happen a bolt gets put on the top of their head bang and the lights go out now you could say that should never happen and those sheep should just live forever okay you could i could understand that argument or you could say boy if you're going to eat meat and you're going to eat the meat of an animal that you know how it lived and there was no horrific moments in its life, it just one day the lights went out.

That seems like the best, most ethical way to do it. Maybe even perhaps more ethical than hunting. Yes. Because when I'm hunting an animal, it's out there this this crazy state where it's always looking to get eaten these sheep have no idea they can be eaten they think that everybody's their buddy and then one day they die yeah man i agree with that you know like yeah there's it's difficult to bring ethics to that that's clearly in my view a matter of opinion some people think that's okay but someone could say that they could turn it

around on me and say you could do that same like thought experiment with people like why don't you just see people want like hey the person led a perfect life you put a bolt on the top of their head and bang shut the lights out and then they turn into barbecue look yeah that's a very pronounced and vivid way but i would say that in a sense we're all like we're being commodified imprisoned enclosed in like the very fact that a law has been made to prevent people regulating or revealing the truth around that shows where the true bias of this system is. In a way, I think that one of the cultural jobs this podcast has performed, and this is like whether deliberately or not,

is it demonstrates that the old political lines that we used to comfortably abide within are starting to sort of break down. Because, you know, like something like an obvious signifier of a particular type of person, i.e. I go hunting. Now we have to accept is coupled with your view that the agricultural industry needs to be regulated and it's disgusting. that the agricultural industry needs to be regulated and it's disgusting now there you know there we have complete and total agreement and we both can see that the way that legislation is set up is biased towards corporate interests commercial interests and profit yeah and so for me bloody whether you know chris pratt having his own sheep i think you're no problem man well that's not i don't need to spend my time worrying about that i'm a little bit like alex jones like with the why are we worrying about flat earth if they've got them babies and all of that stuff it's like why don't

we focus on the things that are making a genuine difference to the the way people are living lives yeah yeah and it seems to me that the one of the priorities is in a new global landscape that we're living with what are the dominant forces and what are the goals of the priorities is in a new global landscape that we're living with what are the dominant forces and what are the goals of the dominant forces and how detached are those goals from the lives of what you might say are ordinary people or the majority of people to use a less complex term and what's probably most horrific about reforming the system is that the people that are going to suffer the most are the people that are the poorest so like if you think of like fast food in particular right there's a lot of like really poor people that rely on fast food because it's very inexpensive if you go and you can get a

lot of calories for a small amount of money right but if you go from the fast food restaurant and then you go down the line to factory farming and then somehow or another they eliminate factory farming and they say no no if you're going to raise animals you have to have the same sort of standards that we would expect if we knew you if we were there we want pastures we want animals living in the wild we want i mean you know fenced in but like living like an actual animal not this crazy warehouse bullshit you guys are running. Well, that's going to up our operation costs. Well, then that's how it's going to be. So then the beef becomes far more expensive.

Now, if the beef becomes far more expensive, then what a fast food, what do the restaurants do? Well, they're going to have to make things more expensive too. So who's going to suffer? The poor people. Who's going to suffer with cheap meat in supermarkets? Poor people that can't afford it. No, but I think that what happens, Joe,e is you start to you have started to pull a thread that reveals the how the fabric of our culture

is corrupted because it shouldn't be more expensive the only reason it's more expensive is because everything is put into a capital-based ideology we're already i've heard many times on this show you discuss in universal basic income this is that the beginning of looking at alternative economic models and there's an argument for saying everyone has the right to a nutritious diet everyone has the right to a safe home you know so like you know if we start prioritizing those ideas above these organizations have the right to maximize profit we're holding a sec then maximizing profit that's getting taken off the table and then there comes your counter argument about innovation well i would say if innovation slows no problem because we've are we've decided as a culture to prioritize housing and nutrition for the majority of people

now you can say that starts to you know that's that's kind of socialism but and i don't think that that can work on a on a continental scale think we have to break down centralised systems, whether those are corporate centralised systems or national. I feel that the time has gone where there's too much diversity. There probably always was diversity. People are different. We're influenced by our cultures, our schools, our education, our class, our race. There's all these factors. And then to expect us all to live in this sort of single bandwidth of this is what america is or this is

what france is or this is what england is people are it's too different now but what you know that does it seems like the standards we're adhering to unconsciously or otherwise is these groups have the right to make as much money as they can and to interfere with that is un-american or un-british or whatever it was because you know this is it's beyond national ideas, I'm sure. So, you know, for me, you pull that thread, oh, it's the poor that will suffer. Well, then, no, we have to rule out the poor suffer. So what happens?

In the end, you start to get into redistribution of resources, managing and regulating the power of the most powerful people. And whenever that conversation starts, it gets shut down because they want to conserve. Even in a capitalist system, wouldn't it be more ethical if everybody started from the same starting block? Well, that's what's wrong with the world, right? What's wrong with the world is some people, they have a terrible hand of cards they've been dealt. And my point about food is that the people that are going to they're going to suffer the most are the people that rely on the cheap food yes your point is that cheap food gets pulled

away then a lot of those supermarkets and a lot of those um fast food stores that rely on that factory farm food you know they're going to be in a bad situation things are going to be much more expensive and if things are much more if they make animals live like, what is that guy's name? Polyface Farms, Joel Salatin. Yeah. He's a fascinating cat. I had him on my podcast before. He's sort of a farm reformist. And what he believes is that these animals should live just like animals. When he has pigs, he puts them in a fenced area, but he moves the fenced area every day. So like the pigs move to a different spot. And so they're just constantly foraging and eating acorns.

But they're, you know, they're living like a pig. They're living in a natural, they're not living in some crazy warehouse. Yes. He does the same with his chickens. He has this mobile chicken coop, and he moves it from pasture to pasture, and this is how he operates his entire farm. Yes, it seems, again, a point that we've talked about earlier, that we ought to, like, if we look at that, no one knows what's right.

So perhaps what we could try and do is replicate what we do naturally. So there is an argument that naturally we naturally and so there is an argument that naturally we do hunt there is a an argument that naturally we do eat meat there is an actually grope food too though right there's an argument that like i was saying like getting into organic gardening if you have your own garden man i mean that is like one of the most karma free things ever if you can figure out a way to have your own compost your own garden and you don't ever have to rely on anybody else for your food well then you're not participating in that shit at all do you think that the spirit of entrepreneurship could be turned to designing these systems do you think

the only thing that incentivizes people is maximum profit i i do too i think that it is possible that people would sit around and go how do we organize a society that's fairer and just that doesn't kill people's individualism or creativity or right to pursue different goals or to be who they are and believe who, you know. But, like, I feel like there's so much fog in the air. People don't know what they actually believe in because there's so much powerful cultural influence, so much toxin, physical toxin, literal toxins and toxicity, cultural toxicity. toxicity cultural toxicity you know how are how am i to protect my children from cultural influences they're telling them you have to look this way be this way behave that way these are things that call if you're not this you're not a man if you're not this you're not a woman you know like like you know as a parent i feel the obligation to create an environment where they can grow up to

be who they are in inverted commas and then when you sort of scale that up to a society you know how can we start to recognize look is this time to look at different systems for living and i what i feel is people want to be involved in the in the power systems that affect them so if you have a group of 100 people they want to be able to run their own schools run their own care systems run be in charge of their own lives not just be some little beam of energy flicked about by cultural forces that they can't reach or touch. It's alienating. And one of the things in Marxism, and I know very little about this subject, is he says that when capitalism reaches a certain point, people will be lost, alienated.

They'll feel like a cog in a machine. No one will have no pride in their work no one will know what it's like to make a whole bicycle and think look i made that you're just you're the guy that makes the pedals now fuck off home you know now like you know like i listen to enough jordan peterson to understand that there are limitations to what socialism and marxism can achieve but just because you know capitalism is better than feudalism that doesn't mean that's the end of the conversation that we shouldn't be looking for fairer, better, more just ways of living. Well, yeah, I don't know if capitalism is the problem, but maybe it's how people engage with capitalism.

Maybe it's what people choose to focus on. If you're just about acquiring wealth and money, some people are, yeah, they're going to be very deeply unhappy. acquiring wealth and money, some people are, yeah, they're going to be very deeply unhappy. And it's going to be this weird game of acquiring influence and power to you just have this insurmountable mound of money that you live on top of, right? I don't think that's a good way for them either. I think if we're going to really, we're going to look at this country fairly, we have to look at, think of all the poor neighborhoods. And imagine being born in those poor neighborhoods. And imagine being born in a place where there's no resources. There's no hell.

You live in the fucking mountains of West Virginia. Those coal mining communities. It's all just mobile homes and pills. And it's chaos. And just extreme poverty. What do you do if you're stuck in there? What if you're born into that clan? That's the group you're born into.

You're fucked, man. You're fucked. We have to take our resources and concentrate on parts of America the same way we concentrate on many other problem spots in the world and look at them as like, hey, man, there's a spot where people are fucked.

We should unfuck them. We should figure out a way to go into every single horrible community in this country, on this planet. Ones that are just as bad as some that you see in third world countries. They exist right here in America. Fix that. Don't ignore that. That's crazy. If they're in Detroit, if they're in wherever the fuck they are, whatever the horrible community is.

Why isn't there a concerted national effort to eliminate that? That's a major source of crime. It's a major source of problem. People feel like they got fucked over in life, so they want to get at you and take from you because you got that easy road. Hey, man, you're born in the fucking suburbs. Hey, man, your mom and dad are still together. Hey, man, your dad has a job, and your mom's at home baking and shit. You live like a motherfucking Norman Rockwell movie.

Fuck you, man. My mom's on crack. My mom's a prostitute. My life is hell. My dad beats me. I've been sexually molested since I was a little kid. This is the reality that people exist in. They don't feel like anybody's coming to help them.

We need to concentrate on that. If the government really cares about us, if they're really involved in social engineering and making america better again make those places better those are the places you need to concentrate on not tax breaks for fucking super rich corporations that get you in place they make enough money man that's not the problem the money where the money goes what's it being allocated towards the biggest problem in our country is these impossible-to-escape communities. Yes. That so many people just get sucked into this trap. And for every person that gets out and becomes a basketball player or a successful business person,

and they have this story about the poverty that they grew up in, they are so rare. Yes. And that it's not to be applauded that they got through that. It is. But it's more to be, we should understand, like, hey, we've got a real fucking problem that we're churning out all these people that live, they start out in life with a massive deficit,

start out in life emotionally fucked, physically abused. They start out with everybody around them's a loser. Everybody's going to jail. Everybody's constantly doing pills or this or that. It's all negative and to do to ask them to develop their own positive mindset uniquely in a vacuum is preposterous yes all these pull them up by your bootstraps all those assholes hey you got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps like they don't even have boots man you don't understand like you don't know what you're talking

about you've never seen it you've never been involved in that kind of poverty it's not fair it's not fair. It's not fair at all. If we care about people, that's what we should fucking care about. Yes, I couldn't agree more. It's a really beautiful problem. The number one problem. And it's everywhere in the world. All the crime and poverty.

Imagine if everyone, the lowest you could live is like a middle class existence. Yes. Boy, everybody would be a lot more fucking relaxed. Immediately. If you always had meals, you fucking relaxed immediately if you always had meals you always had food you always had a roof over your head everyone lives middle class holy shit i mean obviously that's way past the expectations that we have right now for the world because like thirty four thousand dollars a year globally puts you in the world one percent you know i mean that's the if you make thirty four thousand dollars a year which is hard to live on man yes you you're in the one percent of the world but that standard that you've

so very eloquently described is i think achievable and that ought be the aim and when you give just one example of how legislate the bias of legislation is continually to support the powerful while making the just making nominal gestures to poverty good way of putting it yeah nominal gestures i like where you put that yeah and like so that the if there is a point to nation if there is a point to a flag and our belief and this idea that there is an america and there is a britain and we're all together and we're all one and we've got a common destiny and a common past then if we're not if we're ignoring and neglecting those communities then I say that is what defines us you know and until there are systems codes regulations that prioritize that we will continue to live in something heading to what if not a

dystopia something moving in the direction of dystopia, where the priorities and dreams are sort of owned, really, by the kind of mad, evil insect robot images that we've seen discussed earlier. People do get very concerned when someone reaches a point of excessive power and influence, like a Jeff Bezos-type character. When you see some guy who's not, he doesn't have a million dollars like you know wow guy's got a million dollars like he must be so relaxed he's got so much money no he's got 150 billion and he works every day maniacally and he's constantly doing new projects and new things and buying out whole foods and that's like pinnacle capitalism is one of the things that

scares people the most when someone just acquires this insane position of power and wealth, like a Bill Gates type character, who is very altruistic, very, very generous. Bill Gates is accused of one of the better examples of someone who gains a lot of money and then does a lot to help people, especially in his retirement. All they do is focus on charitable organizations and yeah which is brilliant but like and you know marvelous and you know i'm not criticizing the great achievements of brilliant people but like but if really for me that demonstrates the limit that the limitations come from the type of systems we live in that you can't through charity affect every impoverished community in america you know like we the systems that we have are are well if you're poor like that you know the bootstrap model well this guy did it look at this

great guy who overcame the odds you know until like i feel like in a sense charity has become a kind of valve that allows you know people like you and i who aren't poor to feel like well i do a bit you know i'm sort of involved i can wash my hands of it when you know like what these unless we there's there is no america there is no england unless we have integral relationships with one another where we support one another we're on a team if we really are on a team and we see someone who's completely downtrodden who's on our team and we ignore them well that's not much of a fucking team is it no i mean that's what i feel like when i come to red lights and i see homeless people i feel terrible i'm like i feel like you know i mean there's part of you is like don't give them any money because you know they're

gonna just buy drugs you know let them figure it out but then they're not gonna figure it out they have mental health issues and they're stuck out here and they're supposedly on the team they probably were born in america they probably have national citizenship here you know they this is our team and no one gives a fuck that they're camped out under the bridge it's like the the diffusion of responsibility that comes with these massive numbers 20 million in la 300 and plus whatever it is now what is like 320 in america yeah it's unbelievable i think there's 90 000 in the general california like a city's worth of homeless people isn't it it's not difficult for me to envisage like when we talk about the transcendent states that can be achieved through meditation and psychedelics meaning that

beings like us can access them it's not difficult to envisage human like a type of creature a type of being a little more evolved than us that would look back and say oh my god they allowed homelessness they allowed those impoverished communities oh why was it because they had this belief in competitive systems and survival of the fittest that were resourced from ideas that weren't really meant to be translated into that when you were talking before about like the natural world is fraught with competition and threat of course that is animals so you know i'm not disputing what you're saying there but we can't transpose that into an economic system survival of the fittest if you ain't got enough hustle and muscle fuck you you're down by the wayside you know here we have an

obligation to aspire to the better parts of our nature not to continually use materialism and rationalism to justify that 20 of the population you know or whatever percentage is are just garbage or just waste and they're that's affordable we can accord we can live with that it's for me it's that's why would we once we have the knowledge that oh yeah we shouldn't be farming in that way oh we shouldn't have social systems all of the the answer is always the same because if you were to change in that area it will affect the interests of the powerful it will affect impede the ability of certain organizations to make profit now i'm you know i'm not talking about you know i don't know the lexicon enough around socialism and capitalism and marxism and various forms of social organization i'm just talking about my assumption that we're all resourced

from the same basic material and phenomena we all have compassion and love in us and if we on an individual level can achieve some level of access to that then we can start to organize ourselves on that basis not on the basis of well what's the most i can get as an individual it's rational for me to i'm not involved in that that doesn't affect me personally you know and i think it's a hard thing for us to hold i think the reason we all do just live with homelessness and the only decision we make is do we put a couple of dollars out the window at the light or not then like it's hard to hold that it's hard to love more than 100 people there's no fix like there's no as an individual but not as

not one person and even collectively as a group when you have mental health issues unless you want to institutionalize those people yeah but then who here's the thing right if everyone has a unique and if everyone has their own ideas about what to do with their life and everyone has freedom, what if you just don't have enough people that are interested in mental health of the homeless people? You just don't have enough. There's no resources guaranteed. Resources, yeah, that's a big question because our systems are biased in a particular direction. What if there's money?

What if they have government funding? Do you think that they could cure homelessness one of the advantages i've got of being a drug addict is it means i have to help other drug addicts as part of my own recovery this puts me into areas institutions groups facilities where i'm meeting drug addicts and always what you'll find the people that work there there's always someone like a man or a woman most often in my personal experience is a woman some matriarchal woman full of mother energy that just will do this shit forever for free for nothing that just loves it that's just put herself like my grandmother did or my mother did or like these women do between people in the gutter they're just willing to say i'll be the person i'll be the person in la at friendly house it was a woman called peggy albrecht

that used to run a play friendly house was up for women that have got drug and addiction and abuse issues and like this woman she was from chicago she was 90 years old by the time like i met she was so rude and brilliant and beautiful and entirely willing to dedicate herself and i think every community everywhere everyone knows people like that and i feel like the same way as like if it is someone that's got a great capacity to play basketball or be a comic like i think when you spot those people that you encourage them talented and helping people yeah the talent of compassion and you know but we don't value that unless it's like unless it can be turned to a profit fuck off all of those organizations like those organizations that help people with addiction issues you know like they are maligned and like the the people that profit from the opioid crisis

they are supported they are able to conceal as john people that profit from the opioid crisis, they are supported. They are able to conceal, as John Oliver brilliantly revealed, they're able to conceal their practices. Continually, the invisible bias is in the direction of profit. And the failure of certain types of socialism doesn't mean that's the end of the argument.

I think we have an obligation to look for ways of accessing our own higher nature, better nature, kinder nature, call it what what you will and seeing how we can organize that as an individual you can do so much i mean if bill gates can you know fucking hell i don't know cure malaria and make the significant charitable you know these impressive powerful people can't make a meaningful difference then clearly this is a systemic problem well there's also the problem with homeless people and that they're adults um when you become an adult and you develop from the time you're a child it's probably very likely that the damage was all done while they were young they're probably abused and neglected and there's a lot of issues that led them to either

have mental health problems or they had mental health problems already maybe they have genetic problems then on top of that there's drug abuse for each one of those people to get well you're going to need a massive amount of folks you're not going to have one old lady who's rude who's fun and brilliant that's a cute movie no but that's 20 people but i think there's another yeah it's a good movie write it down write it down i could be rich yeah who would be the woman i would like the one that was uh out of golden girls estelle getty she's still available i don't oh god that's a rap betty white's still around betty white's still hanging in there yeah but would you book

a movie around her stink hanging around i don't know that this is gonna work how are we gonna fund this yeah it's um no you're right look there's limitations to the individual but let's not like crash this optimism in the crib now joe because i'm not crashing the optimism but i'm saying the logistics of it would almost be insurmountable and it's very hard to refer to logistics is not an objective thing it's a thing that's been biased over time sort of once a person is developed once they're a human it's very difficult to turn that train around yeah if we can save the community and save the future like help like less people get through fucked help let help more people get through with hope and with a real possibility for improving

their life versus have this sense of hopelessness that many are confronted with that's gonna make less crime i agree that's like that's just if they if someone looked at it from a social engineering standpoint it almost seems like the only way that would ever have to happen would be there's be some fucking catastrophe that forced people to act we sometimes need something that's shoved in our face to force us to act but if someone brilliantly calculated the amount of resources that it would require and then also brilliantly calculated how much less crime we would have how much less how many more innovations because people didn't waste their lives in fact they got through life and used one of the most valuable resources we have

which is the human imagination and creativity and ingenuity. And we're missing that on these people that are growing up in these horrible environments where they can't escape. They're so fucked. They're in gangs. They're, you know, the crime and poverty and violence. They're so fucked that whatever genius they have is wasted on this nonsensical existence.

If they could just show that and quantify how much that would be how valuable that would be to the overall culture and community of the of the continent and then ultimately of the earth i mean you would have a reason to engineer and think about this yeah it's a beautiful that is really beautiful and it's interesting that the way that i agree with you that it almost has to at some point be translated into monetary value because otherwise people don't seem to read it yeah and safety for everybody for them who live in these horrible communities wouldn't be great again if everybody lived like a middle class person the idea that that's impossible seems so insane it's almost seems like well then nobody should live like that then like either everybody should be able to live like

that or nobody should be like that that was Like either everybody should be able to live like that or nobody should be able to live like that. That was like, that's what everybody really wants, right? You want to be comfortable, right? In terms of like your ability to exist. And then all the things you're doing that you struggle with should be a good percentage of them other than emotional and friendship type things should be of your own choosing. You choose to take a difficult path you choose to take an adventure you choose to try to enrich yourself with this difficult experience and the challenge of it and try to overcome that challenge instead of you your challenge is not to

get killed by a gang you know your challenge is not get fucked by your uncle again you know what i mean i mean this is what people have to deal with and you're you're missing these brilliant minds they don't get this chance to come through and and sneak through that fucking salmon ladder you know get up to the top this is very uh beautiful that you're passionate about this and i think popularizing these ideas is important because i feel that then people will be familiar with this kind of language and will recognize that when there is political discourse how phatic and empty it is that people will say you know like i think in the last election in your country it was clear that there was no one no one is saying that no one no one is standing on a political platform of do you know what everyone should basically be able to live a middle class uh lifestyle there's no one, no one is saying that no one, no one is standing on a political platform of,

do you know what? Everyone should basically be out of a middle class lifestyle. There's no reason there's enough resources. We can do this. We could organize society on that basis because that's considered outlandish and crazy. And we're so, there's so much I can, again,

you know, with your imaginary listener that would consider this pontification, you know, there's so much anger i can i feel that a lot of political events that have occurred in the last five years are the manifestation of a social rage of people that are pissed off with not being heard are pissed off with a cultural conversation that didn't include them and that they feel angry and i don't want to help other people fuck those but you know that that that resource is becoming sort of nurtured and grown and it i feel people would feel tremendous

relief to let go of that to feel like listen it's all right for you to be you but could we be a little more aspirational and a little and consider what our goals are consider what progress looks like to us is progress the terrifying robots or is progress considering elevating the lowest among us to raise the standard? If people could just understand that this is not forever. There is no such thing as forever. This is a temporary thing. And you've got to try to eke as much good out of this as you can. And to go against my point, there's a real problem with people being lazy.

People are lazy. There's not an equality of effort. The idea of equality of outcome, like people want, you know, income equality. Well, there's no effort equality. That's just a fact. There's people out there that are just, they work harder. They're smarter. They're more focused.

They're less distracted. They're more dedicated. They have a better plan. They've thought it through better and they become more successful and the idea that they become more successful than you because somehow or another there's some nefarious actions afoot well that negates another possibility which is you're a lazy cunt that's a possibility and what do we do about those people I tell you this I've got a plan for the lazy what I do lazy island you're all gonna lazy it's a bit like pinocchio's donkey land no arcade games though they're too lazy i feel like um well i consider this that people that don't have a lot

of life force like i feel like it's a gift to be a person that's got a lot of drive to be a person that's like i'm fucking going to achieve this shit you know like some people are a little lethargic and don't have a lot of energy i feel that's a kind of despondency we could break that down in a thousand different ways is it poor diet is it poor role models is it poor social conditioning who are these lazy people weak genes could be weak genes could be even weak genes so then we're like in the territory of disability so however you look at it i think you end up at a point of compassion i think you i think we should start at the point of compassion because i thought like what is tolerance if it isn't the tolerance of people that we sort of can't understand as long as they carry their own weight we usually don't have a problem with it but when they're so

lazy they just juke the system and screw people over and figure their way to scam through life. Yeah, but I think those people don't exist only at the bottom of the social ladder. I think they exist at the top, and the effect there is worse. Are you talking about the President of the United States? This is my country, motherfucker. You better be a little bit more polite. I actually met your President, and I found him to be delightful. Really?

Yeah, he's very sweet. Again, like I i say i don't judge people on there i interviewed him about five years ago i was doing before he was the president before he was the president let me near him and he's president is he i wouldn't be i'd get over the fence or there alone the wall and like it like he um yeah he was sort of sweet but i remember thinking what i felt was why you don't have no intellectual curiosity that's what i felt well remember thinking what i felt was why you don't have no intellectual curiosity that's what i felt well that's what i felt i felt like i was sort of liked him he was nice and his staff at that big tower they all loved him but maybe you don't have much curiosity and i don't think he's been very genuine with that great make america great again do you i don't like

where's that everyone should be middle class we're going to start reorganizing society reaching out into detroit and into crushed mining towns in west virginia where's that other than the wise you ain't making america great again that's true that's true but think about how we were talking about dave chapelle about one of the reasons why he's so great other than the fact that he's smart and just talented and all these good things is that he knows what he does and he does it that's his wheelhouse he stays in there trump's wheelhouse is making giant gold buildings with his name on them and spray tan he knows what the fuck to do and he knows how to make money and he doesn't give a fuck about all that other stuff because that other stuff is wasted energy

for him his energy is in focusing on how you get more buildings with those giant gold trump letters on it and no one can argue that it's been a tremendous success i've stayed in one of those hotels the water bottle had his face on it you know i mean he's amazing incredible what an achievement i was drinking the inside of his face but that's his thing right it's like why is it okay for your thing to be tennis and that's all you know about i don't even pay attention to the politics why is is that? Okay. But when we see a guy like him, we have a problem with it because he's not his intellectual curiosity is only about money. So it's even grosser. I agree. Listen, this show to return to my point.

I wouldn't waste time judging anyone as an individual because I imagine if I were to spend time examining Donald Trump's past, his relationship with his father, the conditions he grew up in, what he felt he had to do to be a good person i would imagine i'd go yeah of course but what i would query is a system that elevates that people like that and i you know the two positions of incredible power like and you know again i believe that it's systems that need to change not individuals and i think we've overly fetishized politics i don't live in this country so i don't know if it's much worse under trump i've heard some things that sound really bad than it was under barack obama but what my more my general belief is you don't fetishize individuals and get distracted to think about changing the system because you're not getting that middle-class lifestyle for everyone neither no one's offering that bernie sanders isn't offering that no one's offering that and unless someone's offering that

why should we get involved? Have you ever talked to economists about what is the problem people that are more socialistic minded they'd be more socialist minded I guess but understanding of capitalism to the point where they could point out the flaws

in allowing this infinite growth model where someone gets to a point like a Jeff Be bezos or something like that what would they do to mitigate that you're not going to put a cap like let's when people say that like you're going to pay 70 percent in taxes over 10 million dollars i was like one of the ones that was banded about people just start laughing like you're out of your fucking mind no one's going to do that they'll get to 10 million dollars and then they'll stop yeah it's stupid it's that's i think a very limiting system and i feel that the problems are broader than that i think that the like did you ever say like you know if you ever watch steve bannon talk that he's a man like you know someone i would again not politically agree with for what it's worth

but when his description of what happened in that economic crash of 2008 and the decisions that were made for the American taxpayer to bail out the financial industry. And I've subsequently seen a documentary that said, look, this is why we had to do that. These were the options. But for me, that is a demonstration of capitalism's inherent failings and limitations that we're not talking about a system that is flawless and perfect. It's pretty fucking flawed aside from the human collateral damage and that you have again described the the communities that are impoverished and without hope and living in poverty in a kind of slavery you know it even in itself doesn't work according to its own rules it has to be artificially sustained and rebooted when it inevitably fails so the pure sign of it is the fact that no one

went to jail for the subprime mortgage is the fact that no one went to jail for the subprime mortgage crisis. Those guys didn't go to jail. All those guys with real financial analysis were looking at it from a distance. They were going, I see where this is going. This is going to blow up, and a lot of people are going to lose their houses. You guys are assholes. And there was a lot of people that engaged in those predatory loans,

and they didn't get punished. Those guys, the craziest thing is a lot of them got bonuses yes that's right they got bonuses even if the bank got bailed out and they said the bonuses are part of their contracts and if they didn't honor their contracts they'd have a hard time hiring these people and there would be chaos and they just made it a reason why they had to give them millions of dollars in bonuses yeah when they failed like you get a bonus and you failed like your bank failed and you still get a bonus like you knew about those predatory loans you knew about those you knew about the subprime mortgage bullshit that

was going down in your business yeah you just let it ride and now you're gonna get a you're gonna get a bonus what's the bonus for yeah what would you have to do to be fined if that's yeah that's the bonus system to be jailed yeah i mean just think about what they're doing to julian assange right they're throwing that guy in a jail somewhere that didn't look good that embassy move no but i mean the fact that what he did was release information that everybody found very interesting and what they did is crash the whole fucking economy. Right. It's pretty good that he was able to ride that embassy

idea for as long as he... Because it's not actually in another country, is it? It's in London. I know where it is. I went and visited him in there. As a matter of fact, just briefly popped in. What do you think is going to happen with him? I think he's going to end up serving a pretty lumpy prison sentence somewhere, isn't he? What do you think they're going to get him on, though? what are they going to charge him on they're charging him on like

hacking charges or some shit now which they didn't charge him on before right is that what's emerged and he's going to be extradited to this country is that true i don't know i don't know well i mean again i suppose this is what happens if you challenge the interest of the powerful if trump was really if trump really wanted to get people on his side, he'd pardon them. Do you think that that would be popular? Because someone like that, Edward Snowden, obviously I think don't put the lives of people at risk that are in compromised military positions.

That seems like a fairly obvious thing. I don't think they did that, though. What I understood was they got hacked and someone else released the documents without the names redacted. Yeah, it seems to me that... WikiLeaks never did that. Ed Snowden seems to qualify for a hero in pretty much any way you look at it. He's a 26-year-old person making that decision.

Yeah, and very brilliant. I've heard him, I think he was on Neil deGrasse Tyson's podcast. They talked to him via Skype or however they did it. Did you see in citizen four there's a bit like in that film about abel snowden citizen four there's a bit where he's just come out and he's talking to the journalists or filmmakers that are making the film and he's going they can fucking watch you with this phone you can't leave that like he's like in a sort of a state of mad enlightenment where he's just seeing the truth of they're listening to us now you can't fucking

have that on you got like it's terrifying to watch someone because you know obviously now he's calmed down he's dealt with it he understands that you know but he was like a person that was emerging from having seen the other side of the matrix yeah i mean i mean he was deep into it and then when he revealed all the information they had a they were had a manhunt for him the guy had a hideout in russia he had to seek asylum in our enemy yes the whole thing is so strange yeah so who do our power structures actually support if someone tells the truth to the population they have to flee to russia if someone talks about improper agricultural practices that's against the law they can be in prison that it starts to reveal

that the state itself the very thing that we revere the very thing that we identify is the tool of our oppression they want to discourage people from leaking information that makes them look horrible it's that simple yeah it's just it's that simple if you look at what information he leaked and what what it did well it you know what he did was revealed things that everyone wanted to know about that we felt were crimes it makes me feel that it's as simple as, if you knew what we do in order to keep shit running, you would revolt. So we are never going to let you know.

Well, that for me, in a sense, is a pass. The stuff, well, hold on to fucking hell. Well, who are you? I thought you are elected officials. You're one of us. But no, you're above us to the point where if someone leaks information about your crimes, they get locked in this embassy for seven years?

Like, what is their crime exactly in comparison to the crimes that he's revealed? Yes. Like, that's where it's crazy. When you look at the balance, the imbalance between what his crime is and the crimes that he's revealed, I mean, he's revealed some staggering crimes,

and no one's concentrating on that the government is not freaking out we've got a we've obviously uh we have work to do we have corrections to make there's none of that talk there's get that guy talk yeah that's right and you know like it's sort of under the veil of patriotism a lot can be concealed and and that is a an incident that passes through several administrations. So like you, it's been there for seven years. Yeah.

So it makes you think, well, what is the, what are the differences? You know, like I kind of, you know, sort of,

I been on Bill Maher show. I like Bill Maher. I'm, I'm, you know, very sympathetic to left. You know, I'm ultimately beyond left,

left wing. I'm, you know, trying to, my belief is that we should try and organize a system based on hallucinogenic experience for fuck's sake there's there's no party for me and i'm not even allowed to fucking hallucinogens so like you know so like i'm like you know i'm not a right-wing person it's safe to say but like i feel that so many of the problems that we're experiencing now is because the the democratic left-wing liberal organizations stopped serving the people they

were in the case of the british labor party designed or set up to serve they neglected them they abandoned them you know the white or the white working class in britain were 50 60 years ago told hey there's this thing called britain we want you to go out there and fight and die for it give up your sons get out there oh and now they're told hey there's no such thing as uh britain and like yeah no wonder people are confused no wonder people are baffled no wonder there are abandoned constituencies and despair and rage and i i feel that in a way it's like what is patriotism resourced from a sense that we all need to belong that we want to be together that you know that we're willing to believe in a fictional idea a flag and a story

about you know the origin of a nation whether that's an old one like mine or a new one like this one you know we're willing to participate in that but if those values aren't real if they aren't like if it is we are going to support the most powerful we will lie to you whenever necessary when our lies are revealed we'll imprison punish and lie about those people we don't care about the most vulnerable what the fuck is the flag that we're waving who is it for it's a good point and on that note let's wrap this bitch up good we went out high we went that was a good one it was a good way to end it russell you're awesome man i love you joe i always appreciate you always like being around you yeah me and uh too. And your book, Mentors, it's out now. Your podcast will be available on Luminary starting... 23rd.

23rd of this month, so just a few days. Ladies and gentlemen, that's the end of the show. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.