The Joe Rogan Experience - #1901 - Steven Pressfield

Episode Date: November 22, 2022

Steven Pressfield is the author of numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, and multiple screen plays, including "The War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles," and "The Legend of Bagger Vance." His latest is "Govt Cheese a memoir" releases on December 6.  www.stevenpressfield.com

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night, all day. Good to see you, man. What's happening? It's good to see you, Joe. With a nice stack of books here. What do we got here? Government cheese, a memoir.

Is this your memoir? This is my memoir, yeah. Oh, exciting. Of my 27 years in the wilderness. And Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants to Be. That's sort of like a war of art type of book, as you can tell from the size of it and everything. After writing The War of Art, because you also wrote Turning Pro, right? Yeah, and a few others.

Yeah, but on the same, along the same vein. Yeah, yeah. You just felt like you have more to squeeze out of that. It's like, it's such an important subject for artists and for creative people. I mean, that book, The War of Art, changed so many people. Let me ask you, Joe, why did that resonate with you? Well, there was some stuff that he talked about that it was almost like unspoken. And one of them is the concept of resistance. And that the fact that you treated the muse as if it was like a real living entity. Which I think it is. Yeah, she is.

She is. like you which i think it is yeah she is she is whatever it is that thing where if you show up and you put in the work creativity just sort of it sort of gives birth it sort of erupts it comes out it manifests it there's something to it and and just i kind of always had this like inkling that that was a thing or this thought that that was a thing but until i read your book it was it's like you had you you made it real you're like you you just like you laid it out and like here's the problem this is what's going on and this is what you got to do you just got to show up every day and put in the work and be a damn professional and so many people that i gave that book to i used to have a stack of them in my old studio and i would just hand them to people dude just read this trust me and

it wasn't a hard read you know it wasn't a giant book but it was so valuable because it just like i guarantee you there's so many people there were so many days where people sat in front of their computer or notepad where they wouldn't have because of that book. Like it got people to where they needed to go. Whether they stayed there, whether they kept up the – no, that's not your – Did you yourself, let me ask you, like as a comic, did you experience resistance to getting, say, up in front of people or in the writing of the material? Or was that an area where you could relate to it? Yes. All of the above. You could, you know, you experience resistance and like, oh, I want to take a day off.

You know, like, oh, I don't feel like going up today. Like, I know a lot of comics are really good comics and they're always canceling. There's work and then there's spots. Okay. So the spots are important because the spots are what get you better, tighten your material and how you create new material. Now, are spots when you actually perform? Is that what a spot is? Okay.

So this is what I mean. A spot is, say, if you're going to go to the comedy store and on regular night in the comedy store, there might be 15 comedians and each one of them is doing 15 minutes. So there's just, it's a long running show. It starts from 8 PM. It goes on all night. When you're doing that, that's a spot. It doesn't pay very well. I think it pays from 8 p.m it goes on all night when you're doing that that's a spot doesn't pay very well i think it pays like 50 so you just go down there and it's really there's a lot of camaraderie we're all hanging around with each other and joking around in the parking lot and in the hallway and uh you're really just trying to stay sharp and work on new material and you might in the comedy store has three rooms there's the belly room that seats about 70 to 90 people.

There's the main room that seats about 400 plus people. And then there's the original room that seats, I think it seats about 170. And you do shows in each room. Like people do spots. Like sometimes people do three spots a night. Those don't pay well, but those are the ones people cancel. So a lot of comedians,

they're like, oh, I don't feel like going up. And they'll call in the store, I'm canceling. I'm going to cancel. I'm not feeling well. I'll cancel. And it's really just resistance. It's this thing that keeps you from showing up. But the resistance for writing is way stronger. That's this thing that keeps you from showing up. But the resistance for writing is way stronger. That's really strong.

That's the work that you're talking about. The spot and then the work. Well, no, no. Spots are short sets that you do in town. Work is when you're on the road. So the work is, say if you do a weekend at a comedy club. Now, that pays well. That's where the majority of comedians make their living is doing weekends on the road or maybe even weekdays on the road.

So then you're doing a show. And the idea is that you've crafted all this material on your own in writing and then in front of the crowd, doing spots and doing it around town. And then when you go on the road, then you have a show to put on. And that's work. What's interesting to me, here's my question. When do you actually sit down and write the thing? For me, it's two times. It's either late at night when everyone's asleep in my house, it's lately it's been in the morning. Lately, I've been doing it first thing in the morning. And there's I don't know, sometimes I have my best ideas first thing in the morning for some reason. like a theme that you think is funny that you're going to work on? No, I just sit in front of the computer and write about subjects. I just have like essays. See, I used to try to just write jokes, but it seemed too limiting creatively. Like, like the format is so limited that I was missing out on some ideas. And so then I started writing blog posts.

And one of the things that I realized in blog, when I write blog, which is essentially essays, is that I could extract good ideas from those essays. And those would become my bits. And so now that's how I write. When I write, I just sit down and I just like, uh, like, uh, or right. Like I'm doing this idea about riots lately, riots and protests. And so I just started writing about riots and protests and I'm just writing and then I'm writing about what kind of people go and what, you know, what motivates someone to put a Buffalo hat on and try to break it into the Capitol. And, and as I'm writing, then I'll go, that's a chunk.

And I'll take that, I'll pull it out and I'll copy and paste it in another folder or another file. And then I'll go on stage and try to like give those life. And so then I take those and I try to figure out the best way to present them. And oftentimes, like, you think you have it right, but then you go in front of the crowd and they don't think it's funny. Or they think the setup is funny, but the punchline sucks. It's weird. Or they think, you know, maybe the way they laugh makes you think there's another layer to this. And you come up with more stuff on the fly. So you really create in front of them as well as by yourself.

You need them. You can't create comedy in a vacuum. You really need an audience. What's the feeling like when you're on stage? Are you scared? Is it fun? No, it's fun. It's fun. Maybe it would be scary if I hadn't done it a lot. It was definitely scary when I first started doing it, but, it's fun. It's fun. And maybe it would be scary if I hadn't done it a lot.

It was definitely scary when I first started doing it. But now it's fun. It's just fun. Like, they're all paying to see you. It's fun. It's a good time. As long as you've done the work. That's, you know, as long as you're prepared, it shouldn't be scary.

It should be really a good time. You're there to make them laugh. Ah. You know? But it's, but I've also been doing it 33 years. You know, 34 years. It's a long ass time.

I mean, I know that my accountant always tells me that his comedians are, he, they all write off their psychotherapy bills.

In other words, he's saying to me that these are the ones that it's not easy being a comic. Yeah. I mean, is that, I don't know. No? It's not easy. You seem like you enjoy it easy being a comic. Yeah. I mean, is that?

I don't know, man. No? You seem like you enjoy it and it's fun. Yeah. It's different. I mean, what does that mean? It's not easy being a soldier. Okay?

It's not easy being an EMT. It's not easy being a police officer. It's not easy being a school teacher in an inner city school. It's not easy being a heart surgeon. Comedy is not that fucking hard. There's this old expression, the hardest, I don't know who the fuck said this, but I've repeated it ad nauseum. The hardest thing that's ever happened to you is the hardest thing that's ever happened

to you. Or the worst thing that's ever happened to you is the worst thing that's ever happened to you. And that worst thing could be you're a little kid and your toy breaks. Or it could be your family got killed in a war you know it really depends and so what level of resilience you have is entirely dependent upon what your life experiences are and what you've come to expect and there's a lot of people that are comedians that really seem to think that what they're doing is so goddamn difficult. And, yeah, it's not the easiest thing in the world.

But, Jesus Christ, what a great life. You know, you're telling jokes. You're making people laugh. It should be wonderful and celebrated. they do a really poor job of mental management and of like assessing their own like psychological issues and and coming up with like real methods of mitigation so why do people bail out on the nights that they're that they're not resistance it's they're what are they're afraid of bombing they're afraid of getting up there and no they're just not being pros that's really what it is it's like it's that's one of the reasons why your book resonated so much.

It's because, like, it's just there's a thing that you describe that you just nailed it, and you called it resistance. But there's this feeling that you just don't want to sit and write. You don't want to work. You know, like, when I get in front of my computer, there's, like, an urge. Like, hey, let's go see what's in YouTube. Hey, let's go work and roam around. Let's go to dig.com, see what the wackiest stories are.

Let's go to CNN. That is part of the resistance. It keeps you from just sitting down and working. And I don't know what that is because you know in the back of your head that if you do the work you'll have more ideas if you have more ideas you'll have more material if you have more material you'll be able to pick the best material and your show will be better and then the audience will have a better time your career will go better and all these things and yet that doesn't matter you know i mean you still feel it right yeah and it's totally universal i can tell you from the emails that i get from the letters that i get and it's not only is it universal and everybody experiences it, but they all seem to experience it with the same script.

You know, you're not worthy. You're too old, too young, too fat, too thin, whatever. Or let's do something else. Let's distract ourselves with something else. So everybody gets the same thing. else. Let's distract ourselves with something else. So everybody gets the same thing. I mean, I always say that it's a force of nature, you know? It's not personal. It's not specific to you, even though that voice in your head sounds like it is specific to you. It's saying, Joe, and then it's hitting you right in the points that are your sore points, you know?

But it's really not personal. Everybody seems to experience the same thing. What do you think it is? When did you write The War of Art? 2002. And in that time after writing that, I'm sure it's obviously been a very successful book. So you've had time to think about this. Like what do you think is going on?

Like why are people why why is that a force of nature what is it um i'll get this is my lengthy explanation but i'll give you my theory if we think of the human so everybody's gonna bear with me this takes a minute or two if you think of the human psyche we got the ego which is like a little black dot in the middle of a greater thing that we would call the self, like the Jungian self with a capital S. And the self contains the collective unconscious, all the aspects of the unconscious, right? The hero's journey, the archetypes of the unconscious, all of the sort of intuitive stuff, right? When you, I would imagine, come up with great comedy material or any kind of material, it's coming from that self, coming from that

deeper place, right? And even when Jung or Joseph Campbell describe the self, I have a little diagram in the War of Art where adjacent to this larger self, they'd have like three arrows, and the arrows are coming from what they call the divine ground, which I take to mean whatever greater force is out there, you know, that will come to you. So this is a long way of saying that the ego, which is, right, your I part, the part that identifies with this body and with the ego wants to be in control. The ego is where you drive down to the store, you get it, whatever it is. But when you're trying to tap into that greater intelligence, like if you're writing, if you're trying to come up to – if you're a musician, if you're any kind of creative person, you're trying to surrender to that self, to that greater self. And I feel like the ego hates that. The ego knows if you make that

shift to identify with that greater self, then the ego is out of business. So I think, this is my theory, that the ego produces resistance to try to stop you from connecting and trusting and believing. Because it is a leap of faith, right, to get to that other level, wherever it is. So the ego says to you, who do you think you are to try to tap into that thing? Who do you think you are to come up with this idea? It's been done a million times better than you'll ever do it. You don't have the chops to do this. You're going to fall on your ass, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

Or let me distract you. Why don't we chase some women? Why don't we get drunk? Why don't we hang out with our buddies? Whatever it is. But so I think that what the ego wants is to maintain its control, right? And if you make that shift into that greater self, that's when you really are starting to tap into great stuff. That's where the great stuff comes from. And that puts the ego out of a job. At least that,

this is my theory, Joe. So I think that the ego produces it. I mean, it's interesting sort of animals don't experience resistance. I'm sure they don't, right? Right. But they also don't really experience creativity. True. But they're in that greater world, I think, naturally, you know? Right. They're free. They're in that God energy, you know? An eagle or somebody that's flying, you know, you watch like the tiniest little wings or feathers even, you know, control it.

They're not thinking about anything, right, when they're hunting or whatever it is. So anyway, that's my theory on what resistance is. Now, Seth Godin, you know who he is. He's a believer that it's the— Who is Seth Godin? I do not know who he is. Seth Godin is a kind of a marketing guru, one of the earliest guys on the internet from way back when, when it first began. And is a great teacher of marketing and stuff like that. And also a wonderful guy. There he is. In the sense that he

is highly ethical dude. Like when he talks about businesses, startups, and all the things that he's kind of helping people with, ethics is a huge part of it. So I really respect the guy. And he's a great deep thinker too. Now he thinks it's what he calls the lizard brain, the amygdala, which I'm not even sure what that is. I guess it's the reptile brain at the back of your head, that that's what's producing something. It wants producing resistance. But anyway anyway I respect his thinking on that but I think it's what I just explained to you or what you're saying makes a lot of sense and the the ego whatever that thing is that it's it's so

interesting how it's not able to see that it would actually benefit the ego if you didn't have resistance. Yes. Which is really weird. Yeah, it's weird, isn't it? Yeah, because if the ego was wise and had foresight, it could see the future, go, oh, if we just give in and relax and relinquish control, then we're going to come up with better stuff and our life's going to be better. Be able to buy a nicer house.

Yeah. You know, maybe be able to go on trips. Your work will do well. Everything will be good. It's a deep subject because also if you think about the ego's view of what life is, you know, I'm going to go into some deep stuff

for you to mark this stuff, right? You don't have to clarify. Just feel free. The ego has a whole view. The ego believes that this material world is all there is, right? Yeah. The ego believes in death. The ego believes that when this body dies, we die, right?

The ego believes that this flesh can be hurt, you know, can be maimed, can be broken, et cetera, et cetera. So the ego is naturally lives in fear. I think that the predominant emotion of the ego, if we're living in the ego, which is 99% of people do, our predominant emotion is fear, right? And fear, even though we might not know it, fear of death, which is kind of why people want to achieve, I think, right? Let me make a name for myself, blah, blah, blah. Why people want to have children, children will live on. Why they have insurance, why they try to succeed and have a big house and this and that and the other thing, right? That's all sort of coming out of a mindset of fear.

Whereas this giant self, in my opinion, the bigger self that is connected to the thing, its predominant emotion is love, if you ask me. Now the ego, another thing the ego believes is that I am separate from you, right? We are all separate individuals, right? I could hurt you and it won't hurt me. That's what the ego you, right? We are all separate individuals, right? I could hurt you and it won't hurt me. That's what the ego thinks, right?

That's why so much of the evil that happens in the world comes out of that, right? We can torture these sons of bitches and it won't happen to us, right? Nothing bad will happen to us. But the self believes exactly the opposite. Once you get into that deep level, right, that we are not separate from one another, that you and I are bound together in some kind of way along with all of humanity and all of the animal life and all of the planet, all of the oceans and all of that. And so the predominant emotion in that self is the emotion of love. So the ego, this is my belief anyway, the ego being centered in fear is going to try to hang on to what it's got, right?

If the ego thinks that it's living our life, it's calling the shots, it's going to hang on to that, you know, out of fear. And that's why I think it's so strong. Resistance is so strong. The closer you get to moving into that self, into that greater space, like if you're sitting down and trying to write a novel and you get into a kind of a flow of it, that's what the ego is really afraid of because it's such a kind of empowering and intoxicating experience. The ego says to itself, shit, if this guy stays over here very long, he's never going to go back to, you know, to where I call the shots. So I think that's why it makes itself, it puts such an intense shot at you to stop you from getting there.

So this greater self, what is, if, like, what do you think that is? What do you think that is? If the greater self is all about love and the greater self is what recognizes the connection between all of us, what is the greater self? Okay, it's a great question. I know that you're a guy that's into psychedelics to a certain extent, right? Now, my only experience with psychedelics is back in the 60s, you know? So I haven't done any of the stuff that people are doing now. You want some? No, thank you. I'm too old for that.

You're not too old. But one of the things that you know- You have resistance. That's resistance to psychedelics. Maybe so. But one of the things that you know from LSD or from mescaline or anything like that, right, is you suddenly see a whole other world that was not there before, right? Even though you're looking at that wall, all of a sudden that wall becomes so beautiful, right, that you can't even say anything except, wow, right? So that, I believe, I was thinking in those moments, this must be the way Jesus sees the world or the Dalai Lama sees the world or God sees the world. And when I come back to my regular self and I see this kind of normal shrunk down world, that's not the real world, right?

There's another world that's greater. And so that's sort of my feeling about it, Joe, that when the self, when you enter that, there is a greater world. We're living in that greater world right now. We just can't see it, you know. We just see what's in front of us. And I think another aspect of it to me, you would know a lot more about this than I do, being more in the present of this, is that if you're living in that kind of psychedelic world, you really can't drive a car.

You really can't operate heavy equipment. You really can't handle the stuff you have to handle. You can't do your taxes, right? So in order to kind of live, you do have to sort of shrink that world down, right? To, you know, push all the beauty aside and all the amazing shit aside. But that doesn't stop the fact that that stuff is there. Right. I always wonder, what was it like before we were born? And what's it going to be like after we die? Are we going to live in that world? Are we going to enter that world again? And what is that? What will that be like? Do you think that this narrowed down world that you're talking about when the psychedelics wear off, do you think that's an artifact of the cold, hard reality of being an animal,

living amongst predators and other violent human beings on Earth, where in order to survive, in order to raise your children and protect your village and provide food to each other, you kind of have to have this very simplistic, just as you said, narrowed down, just different. You can't just wax euphorically about the concept of the universe and life and love. I do. I do believe that. Yes. And I think that's why, again, like what I was saying about the ego being dominated by the emotion of fear, right? And also our parents, right, and our society, our school, everything for our own good as we're kids growing up tells us all that, right? It kind of indoctrinates us into that world for our own good, right?

It wants to protect us, you know? On your way walking to school, nobody's going to beat you up, blah, blah, blah. So yeah, I do think that's the case. It's kind of a strange world, isn't it, that God created for us? I mean, on the one hand, there's this beautiful other dimensional reality out there. But then there's this hardcore world of predators, you know, in order to, you know, like, what did you just have on Instagram today? An alligator taking off the leg off a deer. I mean, that's that.

Did I? You don't even know if what was there, but it's there. We just saw it a few minutes ago. I had it on Instagram? Yeah, I think so. Diana had it showed it to me. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, there was a crocodile that took a pig and snapped it in half.

Oh, is that what it was? Like that. Yeah, I didn't see it. It's a terrifying video. But that's the world, right, that God gave us, right? Yeah, predators and prey and monsters. Yeah. So here you are, Joe. I mean, you're a fighter, right? You're a UFC MMA that's that in that world of predator versus prey,

but you're also a comic and you're also a podcaster where you're reaching out into this other world, you know, the greater world of who knows what it is. Yeah. You're, you know, it's one of the things I admire about you, about what you do on the show, that you really go into every direction possible. And you're talking to every kind of people, every kind of person that's got any kind of a theory about anything, which I think is great because we all need everything that we can possibly bring in here. Well, I think I certainly do. I certainly need as many different points of reference and different perspectives as possible. But I'm just very lucky that I'm genuinely curious and that I have a platform to bring in people like yourself or other people and have conversations with them.

to encounter all of these different perspectives and to interact with all these different people that think about the world in a different way. And it makes me, you know, reconsider my own ideas or reformulate or, you know, just sort of reevaluate, you know, and I think, um, people can be very rigid in how they view the world and very rigid and how they, you know, the rules that they set for themselves and for other people. And because it allows you to, when you have less options, you have less things to think about. And sometimes you can be more successful that way. You know, there's a lot of people that do things very rigidly and they have found great financial and, you know, physical success doing it that way. I mean, think about various religions that have such, you know, you can only eat this. Yes.

You must wear that. Yes. And on Wednesday you do this. And it really helps you because you don't have to make any decisions. I'm sure it's a happier life in a way. But what is it, you know? Yeah, there's something to it. You know, me and my friends, Tom and Ari and Bert, we do this thing every year called Sober October.

And generally we come up with, when we do Sober October, we come up with some sort of a challenge. And one year was we had to do 15 yoga sessions in the 31 days of October, and you know, 90-minute yoga sessions. And then the next time we had to do a fitness contest where we counted up the amount of energy. Each one of us, we were using an app and we were trying to compete in the winter, you know, whatever. So we did that. And then other years we've done different things.

And then this year we decided what we're going to do is we're going to work out seven days a week every day you have to burn 500 cowers so we've kind of decided that a competition is too fucked up because i'm kind of crazy and i get over competitive it's not fun not fun for my family not fun for me because i go crazy so it was it's way better to not be competitive and just we all are held accountable to this one thing. So this one thing was you had to do 100 pushups every day and you had to burn 500 calories in a workout. And so everyone did it. We sent each other screenshots of our apps and we all talked about it. And one of the things we all came out of at the end of it

was like knowing that you had to do this thing was so different than just going, I probably should work out today. Maybe I won't. Maybe I'll fuck off. Like today, for instance, I was up late last night. I got home from the comedy show. I did a little mushrooms. And then I did a little writing. And I didn't go to bed until like

233 o'clock and so I woke up at 10 as I gotta should work out, but I don't fucking feel like working out I go Let me just get in the sauna and do the cold plunge which is my minimum amount of I do every day But then after I did that I was like you should have worked out man, but I didn't right so I didn did that, I was like, you should have worked out, man. But I didn't, right? So I didn't. But if it was the sober October month, I would have had to. Because I had those nights during sober October where I was up late and I only got like six hours sleep. But I still got that work in because I had to do it. When you have a thing that you must do every day, that's how you get productive.

do every day that's how you get productive and what we found all of us found is there's this alleviation of anxiety that comes from doing these workouts every day that was like I was we were all talking I was like if this was a pill that I could take I take that pill all day if it had no side effects in fact this pill makes you healthier but instead of a pill it's an hour to an hour and a half of arduous physical work like very difficult physical work you're pouring sweat and and when it's over you're exhausted but healthier and then the anxiety level is like nil like nothing bothers you you feel so good you've you've took in your tension tension like your body's a wet rag and just

rang out all the tension, just dripped it out. And the fact that you have to do it every day, it kind of eliminates this whole resistance thing because you can't entertain it. And because we're all accountable and we're all texting each other and we're in a group text. It was great. It's great. So why not do it 12 months of the year? I don't know if it's sustainable, but what I am doing is five days a week. So five days a week I do it now.

So instead of seven days a week, I do it five days a week. Which is because I travel, do stuff. It's more sustainable, But it seems very effective. So today I bitched out. So now I know that I only have six more days. Well, I worked out yesterday. But there's only a certain amount of days in the week. So now I've got three more days that I must get in.

No ifs, ands, or buts. Those have to be done. Because I did Monday and Tuesdayuesday and then i fucked off today so i've got other days but i gotta but it's not the same if if you if you're doing it every day like if it's a religion which is why i understand why people would get up in the morning and you have to pray get up in the morning you know face the east get on your hands and knees and bow. Like there's something to that that hijacks all of that resistance shit, all of the things that hold you back from finding your greater self, all the things that hold you back from accomplishing your true potential in this life.

Yeah, and I think what that is to me is an exercise, like a ritualistic exercise in overcoming resistance and in getting into that other, that greater place, right? When you say wrung out, that's you're wrung out of every ego thought, right? You're wrung out of all your negative thoughts, right? You're not being jealous of anybody else. You're not being competitive of anybody else. So I think, I mean, I'm sure that I'm not a meditator, but I imagine that that's what that's all about, right? You get up every morning and you center yourself and you do all that sort of thing and you get to that place. So I'm a total believer in what you're talking about, Joe. Yeah. I think that's probably with people who have the whoever the original writers of various religions, the way they crafted it. I think all of those rules and regulations and not just keeping society order, but keeping you ordered, like keeping your mind ordered. Like they knew there was something, there's

like a disconnect between what you can do and what you're going to do, what your potential is and, you know, where are you going to actually find yourself fall. Yeah. They know there's a devil out there. The devil, I would call it resistance, but it's those negative thoughts that you can spiral into, right? And never, nothing good ever came out of that, you know? No. It's always, it's hate the other guy, create the other and hate them or take our own selves down. I mean, I fight it myself. I'm lying in bed in the morning, you know, and those thoughts come to my mind.

I mean, I don't know if you're, are you familiar with Paramahansa Yogananda's stuff at all? No. From Self-Realization Fellowship. I mean, he's one of the great gurus. He actually died in like 1952 or something like that. So he's not a contemporary dude. But one of the things that he says is, when you wake up in the morning, get out of bed right away. Do not lie there thinking any kind of thoughts, because those thoughts only are negative and only taking you bad, you know.

He says, get up, start your day. And I'm definitely a believer in that, too. Why are they negative when you wake up and you just lay there? Why do you think that is? I don't know where it is, but somebody asked me, when in your day do you first experience resistance? And my answer is the minute I open my eyes. It's right there, you know, which is also really interesting. I don't know the answer to this. If you think about the sleep state, whatever that is, there's no resistance in that state. You know, I don't know

why. Maybe we're in that greater world, you know, that unconscious. It's only when we come into consciousness, all of a sudden that resistance thing is there. The devil is there. Those shitty thoughts are there. Those negative thoughts are there, which is why like your sober October is really let's do something to counteract that shit right away before it grabs us, you know, or even if it has grabbed us from six o'clock till nine o'clock, now we're going to work out and we're going to do our thing and we're going to overcome it, which you can overcome it. Yeah. Thank goodness.

It also has that aspect of religion where you're all in it together. Yeah, that's true. Because it's ritualistic. You can also do it alone, you know? Yeah. Oh, you definitely could do it alone. But we had real camaraderie in the fact that we were all doing it together. Yeah.

It's like the military in a way, right? Yeah. And we were accountable to each other, too. Yeah. So we knew that we were accountable to each other. Yeah. Wouldn't you think that just for the sake of survival, like from an evolutionary perspective, when you wake up in the morning, that would be the last thing you would want to do is like lay there, just stay put. Like you think

that evolution would favor thoughts that like immediately launch you into action. Yeah, you would think so, that you would be wary and ready to get. On the other hand, if you're in the cave and you're under a nice, you know, bearskin thing, you know, and your old lady is there beside you, maybe you don't want to get up and get into that cold world. Well, I get that you wouldn't want to, but I would think that, you know, fortune favors the brave or fortune favors the one who's most active. I would imagine in the tribal world, they had somebody standing watch 24 hours a day, you know. And even if you or I might be asleep, there would be some young kid that was at the mouth of the cave, you know, keeping his eyes open. Yeah, before they figured out doors, they probably had to do that. Yeah.

But it just still seems like it doesn't. I mean, maybe it's just the puzzle that you have to solve in order to tap into the full potential of the mind. Because the mind has so many different functions and there's so many different things that it's doing. And then we're also living in this world that's entirely unnatural. It's like entirely of our creation. The world of society and civilization and cities and cars and buses. And we're, we're not living in a world that we're engineered for. We're engineered for the world of the wild. And so for us to exist in this other world, there's this battle between these sort of deep-seated human instincts that are designed to help us survive versus what we know we can do creatively as a modern human in terms of

accomplishing great works of literature and creating comedy and creating music and all the different things that humans can do in this modern era, especially when you record things, when you write things down and then you could spread it to millions of people like your books. Like it's really an extraordinary ability that didn't exist until fairly recently in human history. So we're not really designed for these thoughts and feelings. No, it's like where you have two separate selves, right? We have the animal self that's the evolutionary self. We're still cavemen, right?

We still have the same thing, but yet we have this other potential. Let me ask you something, Joe. Like where do you see yourself in five years or ten years? Or let me put it a different way. It's clear to me that you are exploring something and you're trying to project your mind into another greater realm. What exactly – how do you see this odyssey that you're on right now? What are you aiming for? What are you hoping to achieve five years, ten years from now?

Who do you hope to be? I don't. I don't think like that. You don't? No, I just do things that I like to do. I'm very simple. No, legitimately, I don't have goals like that. I try to do better at everything that I do like I

would like to be better at archery I would like to be better at playing pool I'd like to be better at stand-up comedy I'd like to be better at being a podcast host I'd like to be better at doing UFC commentary so every time I do a thing I assess my performance I think about it I write things down I work hard at it and I do the same with being a father I do the same with being a husband I do the same being a friend I do the same with being an employer

I think you may be overly modest here now because I know that you're just from the people that you bring on the show you want you're exposing yourself to all kinds of different points of view, right? But I'm also exposing the world to them. That's part of my goal too, when someone's interesting. Like you say, you have a great curiosity. You're not doing that because you're not interested in it. You're interested in it, right? I'm definitely interested,

yes. And you're also exploring kind of inner worlds, your own inner world, you know, with the help of chemicals or whatever it is. So it's more than just getting better at something, isn't it? Yes, but I'm genuinely not trying. I don't have a goal. I genuinely don't have a goal is what I mean. My goal is to just get better at all the things I'm doing and to understand life, which is probably impossible. But I'm trying to understand it better than I do and I definitely understand it better now than I did five years ago ten

years ago 15 years ago 20 years ago like I feel like every year I get better at it uh-huh and I think as long as you don't define yourself like some people say well I'm you know 46 years old this is about as smart as i'm ever gonna get this is about as this is me if i'm you know still smoking cigarettes and drinking every night this is me like i don't buy into that i feel like you're a living human being if you're alive you can get better at everything you do you get get better at being a person. I think there's an art to being a person. And I think that the more things you encounter, the more disciplines you take on, the more you focus on whatever craft it is that you're obsessed with, that you find creatively satisfying, the more you do that, the better you get at all the things you do.

That's what I think. Okay. so I feel like if I had like this goal like my if I had a goal ever it was the beginning of my comedy career was like I want to be a professional I want to be able to make a living telling jokes cuz uh-huh you know me and my friend Greg Fitzsimmons we started out at the same time like a week apart from each other in in Boston And we would sit around we talked man Imagine if you could just pay your bills doing stand-up because we bought he was working in catering and I was driving Hamos and we would get together like after shows and just hang out maybe you know have some dinner or something

And we'd be just like someday man imagine that just being just nothing but a comedian like that's how you make your living that'd be so amazing so that was the the only goal we ever had and then once that like the idea of a career seems so preposterous like what career like what does that mean like it didn't didn't it didn't so but but then once we started making a living and then we started doing better and then things started happening and greg went on to win emmys for writing and you know like he's got comedy specials he tours all over the world like it it did eventually become a thing where you are a professional and then you have these sort of goals inside that profession like i'd like to do a new comedy special within the next 12 months i think my

material's ready so we talk like that but i don't i don't ever say like in 10 years i want to be this and that 15 years i want this i don't think like that i I just keep going. I keep on trucking. That's what I do. I'll tell you what I feel about that, how I feel myself. I go from project to project, at least from the time that I finally actually was able to make money as a writer and be a writer. I go from one to another, and each one is like an actor that's cast in a movie or something like that, where you're in that world completely, in that lane completely while you're doing it. And I never know what the next one is going to be, but that's sort of, I'm a believer in a higher dimension of reality. I'm a believer in the muse, as we were talking about earlier. And I sort of, so I don't have a goal in the future either. I don't say to myself, five years from now,

I want to be this, 10 years, I want to be that, because you never know what trolley is coming down the track, what the next kind of assignment for me from the muse is going to be. What's the next book that's going to be? All I know is I'm on the lookout for it. I'm waiting for the, you know, the cosmic radio station to send me a message and then I'll do that. So if at any point in my writing career, if you had asked me what I would be doing five years in the future, I would have been completely wrong if I had ever projected, completely wrong. in the future, I would have been completely wrong if I had ever projected, completely wrong. So I never know what's coming up ahead. But I do know, just like you, that you can't stand Pat at any point, you know? Then you start getting old. And then you start going, you know, down the

grease thing, you know? But I think as long as you're still following that impetus, that creative impetus, whatever it is, which is scary, right? It's always a risk. You never know what's going to happen. Then you're okay. So that's all I want to do is be able to keep doing that. That's my, if I make any money, I say, okay, that's enough so that I can keep doing it, you know? And I never would have thought that when I was 20 years old or 40 years old,

but that's how I feel now. What would you have thought then, you think? Of course, then I was struggling. I was just trying to, you know, stop, you know, driving a cab for a living, you know? Yeah. I think projects are really important for people because things to concentrate on that's like a solid, tangible thing. Yeah. It's like your sober October. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Or a book, right? Or a comedy special. I think if people just have sort of open-ended things and just like, oh, I'm trying to eat healthy. I'm trying to lose weight. Like how are you trying to lose weight? Like what are you doing specifically? What's the program you're on? Show me the program.

Well, you know, I try to get to the gym more. No, no, no, no, no. Every fucking day. Show me what you're doing. Let's go. Show me what you're doing. Let's go well Show me what you're doing like let's let's let's form a real program And if you do that then you see the real changes That's when you see people lose a hundred pounds and start getting really healthy or write a book like you finish the book

And then you read the book like holy shit. This is great. Yeah, realize they had a goal Yeah, got together with that that mindset and they went to work. And if you just kind of dilly-dally and you don't have a very specific goal and directions, very hard to make real headway. It's very hard to really accomplish a thing. The other thing to me, and I'm just speaking for myself, is it's not enough to have just a generic goal, a goal that anybody else could do, like I'm going to lose X number of pounds or I'm going to do that. I think it needs to be something creative that's coming from with you that only you could do. Even if it's a business, you know, if you're going to design motorcycles, you're going to

build a motorcycle, whatever it is. Because then when you have a project like that, like a book, right? You start, you're going to write a book, right? That book has a life of its own. Or you make a movie or you start a business or whatever it is. That thing has a life of its own. And particularly if it's coming out of your heart and your inner self, like for me or for anybody that writes a book, nobody else could write that book, whatever it is.

You're in your own lane, tapped into something that's coming from you, from your deepest self, you know? And as the weeks and months go by, shit comes into you from all kinds of places that you never knew you had in you. And that's an amazing experience, you know. And by the end of that book, you look at it, you go, I wrote that. That's, or you even say to yourself, that's not me, you know. Where did that come from?

But it is you because you did it, you know, or if you start a business and suddenly it becomes, you know, whatever it becomes. I think it's more important than just something generic becomes, you know, whatever it becomes. I think it's more important than just something generic like, you know, lose weight or something like that or run a marathon. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if you can pull something out of your own heart, out of, you know, that really lives within you, that's tremendous. And the other thing I'll say is, at least in my experience, when a book comes along and I sort of get the orders from the goddess, it's always a surprise to me, the subject matter of the book. You know, like my first book was about golf, right?

The Legend of Bagger of Hands. Then what came after that was Gates of Fire, a book about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. And what came after that was Gates of Fire, a book about the 300 Spartans at Thermopylae. I would have never have thought of either of those books coming out of me. Those subjects were – it wasn't like I dreamt of that my whole life. So I say to myself when that happens, where is this coming from? What is this all about? Why did that come out of me followed by that, followed by that? And I still don't know what it means, but it's fascinating.

You look back at a thing like Bruce Springsteen's albums. If you could write them all down on a page, you go, why did that come after Tom Jode and the river and the darkness at the edge of town? And how did they – it's a mystery to me. I don't know. But projects are great things, you know. Yes. Because they really show you who you are. Yeah.

And they give you something to concentrate your creative energy on. Absolutely. They do something. They ground you completely. And they give you something to concentrate your creative energy on. They do something. They ground you completely. And even just physical fitness projects, you wouldn't think that that would be a creative endeavor. But there's something about forcing yourself to acknowledge that your life, that there's a thing in your life that you have to address, that it sort of frees up the mind in some sort of a strange way. And the concept of the muse, I think, also frees up the mind in a strange way.

And I love the way you think about it. Because you, and I don't want to disrespect it by saying, you treat it like it's a god. Because you do think it's a god. You think it's like a goddess. I do. Right, so I'm not saying you treat it like it's a god but because you do think it's a god you think it's like a goddess like i'm not i do right so i'm not saying you're silly no it seems like i'm saying you're silly like no i don't feel that at all but it does you know to like a rational person or especially to someone who's an atheist or who doesn't believe in spirits or uh-huh they would say well why are you thinking about it that way? Just take accountability.

Just show up and go to work. But there is a real benefit in thinking of it as a muse. Whether or not it's real or not, if you think about it like it's a muse, if you show up at the same time every day

and put in the work, it will reward you as if it's a god. It will. It really will. It will. It really will. It will. Which is wild. Do you know who Dr. Joe Dispenza is?

Yeah, I've heard of that guy. Ring a bell. Now, he talks about this in a whole other vocabulary. He talks about the quantum world, whatever that is, which is what I would call the muse. It's that greater self, right? So he looks at it from a whole other perspective. He wants to get out of the ego, leave that behind, and it's psychedelic in a way too.

He talks about getting into that world where you are no one and no place and no thing, and the senses are gone, and all that's left is vibration and awareness. So that's his way of talking about that. For me, I kind of – I'm sort of anthropomorphic. I like to imagine something with a human face, a goddess with that little Greek hairstyle. That's what you think of? Yeah, definitely.

So, I mean, but as long as you have a thing that you're concentrating on that you sort of give up your control of the moment to and that you respect enough that you're going to show up every day and put in the work and address this thing. Like you actually have like a prayer to the gods. I do, yeah. Yeah. What is the prayer? Can you tell us what it is? Yeah, sure. It's actually a mentor of mine, a guy named Paul Rink, gave me this, printed this out, typed this out. It's the prayer from Homer's Odyssey,

the opening invocation of the muse. As Homer himself was sitting, if you look at the first 12 lines of the Odyssey, that's his kind of prayer to the muse. And do you want me to say it out loud? Sure. Okay. And I say this every morning out loud. Paul taught me this., I'm getting goosebumps as I'm saying this, of the various minded man who after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy, ah, was made to stray grievously about the coasts of men, the sport of their customs, good and bad, while his heart through all the seafaring ached with an agony to redeem himself and bring his company safe home. And it kind of continues through that, you know, for his fellows he strove in vain.

I'll just skip to the end. Make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, O muse. So, and what's interesting about that, Joe, there's a lot of things interesting about that, but that sort of paradigm of a story of Odysseus, the various-minded man, if you look at almost any novel, any movie, any legend, anyone, that fits, you know? And I've found that any novel that I've been working on, I don't know how many I've done, 10 or 11 or something like that, I say that prayer. And I'm amazed that the story I'm working on fits exactly. There's always somebody that's kind of been cast out into exile and is lost and is trying to get home, whatever home means, and is struggling, struggling, struggling. And so Homer, I'm sure he did believe in the muse. I mean, that was whatever it was, 3,200 years ago, something like that.

Those gods and goddesses were real. You know, for whatever this is worth, the Spartans, the ancient Spartans, we know they were as hardcore as they could possibly be. when their army would march out on a campaign and they got to the frontier of Lakedamon, the name of their region of Greece, they would take the omens. And if the omens were unfavorable, the whole army would turn around and go home. So they took it pretty seriously. And, you know, I do too. That seems a little ridiculous. That's just superstitious. I mean it's like, but that's the dance.

It's like how much control are you going to give to this idea? Are you going to give it when it benefits you or are you going to give it to the point where you run the risk of becoming paranoid? True. True. And then you can sabotage. Probably they should have marched out on Sir. Perhaps. But all I'm saying is they took it really seriously.

Yeah. Well, perhaps they were aware of something that we weren't, like that maybe there is something to these signs. And at the very least, maybe there's something to the signs. Whereas if they erode your confidence in the mission and you ignore those signs, then when things go sideways, you won't have conviction in your task. But if you do have signs that indicate you're on the correct path, that the gods are with you, then you will have confidence in your conviction. Yeah. But wouldn't it be interesting, Joe, if it really was true? I mean, if there really were forces that we can't see that shamans or people like that can see. Yeah.

And I mean, I'm not saying that's true, but it would be who says that this technological, scientific way that we have of looking at the world is the right way. I mean over all the course of history, the Egyptians – but the pyramids, we still can't figure out how they did it, right? Right. All that like the – you had the guests on your show that said that, right, that civilization – there was a civilization that was destroyed. Graham Hancock. Yeah. What if that was true? Those civilizations were tapped into... Who knows? Well, it seems very likely that it was true.

I don't know if you've seen his Netflix series. It's out now. It's really amazing. I haven't. What's it called? It's called Ancient Apocalypse. Ah, right, right, right. And it is all about all of the evidence that points to a lost civilization that was most likely destroyed by a thing called the Younger Dryas Impact Theory. The Younger Dryas Impact Theory was somewhere around 12,800 years ago we encountered comets. And they slammed into Earth and probably wiped out most of civilization and reset human history. I mean, I'm open to an idea like that. Well, there's real physical evidence. It's an interesting idea.

And for the longest time, he, you know, when he wrote the first book, which was Fingerprints of the Gods, he was widely criticized for it and dismissed as being, you know, a charlatan and a crazy person. But now there's a lot of real physical evidence in the form of ancient structures. And then also in the form of when the comets made impact, when they do core samples and they look through the earth at that same time period they find high levels of iridium high levels of uh nano diamonds that that are formed when things impact the earth with great force so there's a lot of uh the iridium thing is like it's very common in space and very rare on earth and there's a a nice layer of it around 12,000 years ago, which is also the end of the Ice Age. And they think that the Ice Age ended because comets slammed into the ice caps and melted everything almost instantaneously, causing massive floods.

And those are the floods that were talked about in stories like the Epic of Gilgamesh, Noah's Ark. And I mean, many, many, many ancient cultures have these catastrophe myths and he thinks that that's what those all came from they all come from a very true thing so we're talking about things that we can't prove like the flying saucer

up there that maybe they are there's something to that yeah well Jung had theories about like what flying saucers were, too. They were manifestations, I think, of the human mind. And that might be real, too. Like, whatever... This idea of a solid world that you can only measure and put on a scale.

Well, then why is it that when you do call to the muse and you do put in the work why are you rewarded is it simply just a matter of because you you disciplined yourself to work or is there something in giving up control to whatever it is that causes people to have wonderful ideas. Like wonderful ideas are like these little gifts. Like whenever I have a new idea for a bit or a new punchline, it's like the universe gave me a gift. Yeah, isn't it? Like I have a punchline and I say it and the audience laughs so loud.

You're like, like wow the universe is giving me a gift yeah like how what is that like where's that coming from yeah i could say oh it's just me just me in my mind but there's a benefit in some strange way to saying no no no no you're you're you you're just showing up you're showing up and you're getting out of the way you're just showing up. You're showing up and you're getting out of the way. You're getting out of the way and then the stuff comes through you and then you ride it all out. I mean we're sort of, again, we're kind of talking about, to me, the greater self or the unconscious or that thing.

I mean what is it like? I know sometimes I, let's say I've been working all day on something and I go and I take a walk at the end of the day, and my mind is emptying as I'm going along. And suddenly, it'll come into my mind, there's a typo on page 178. And I'll go, what? And of course, it's right. As soon as I go back, I look at it, it's there. So some mind, some level of consciousness is operating, right?

So below our level of consciousness. So maybe it's just as simple as tapping into that. I think there's more to that, though. I would say, going back to what you were just saying a couple of minutes ago, Joe, that there's sort of two halves of it. The one half is sort of the airy-fairy half that talks about something coming from somewhere we don't know, but the other half is a disciplined half. The other half is, you know, it's the right brain, left brain, right? Where we've kind of made that instrument, our body, our mind, ready to accept that, you know, to tune into the cosmic radio station and whatever's coming in to remember

it, to take it seriously, you know, to put it down and then to work with it, you know? So it's, to me, it's like a symphony exists on another dimension of reality, but it takes Beethoven here, who knows how to do it, knows how to bring it in, knows how to open himself to it, but also has the chops, has the musical chops and the intellectual chops to put it together into a form that you and I can listen to. So to me, it's kind of right brain analytics, two things. Well, there's a thought too, right? And this thought is, why have people throughout time, why have they gravitated towards these ideas of deities? Is it just because we don't know? We see lightning in the sky and we assume it's God's, but there's more to it than that, right? There's a moral structure that these things give us.

There's a thing that we get out of them that doesn't exist in the animal world. The world of that crocodile snapping that pig in half. The world doesn't, they don't have any of that. They're just kill or be killed. It's tooth, fang, and claw the whole way. But we elevate. We are somehow or another even though we are nature and we are animals and we are creatures of life and of the universe we somehow

or another have a sense that there's more i think it's an emerging sense and i think this emerging sense is evolving just like our ability to see things and hear things and our ability to speak. All these things are helping us understand that there's maybe more to life and that we are somehow or another connected. And one of the beautiful things about your work that I think you'll probably agree with is that there's a great satisfaction in the fact that your work has helped people. Your work has helped me. Like me reading The War of Art has absolutely motivated me and helped me and helped me understand things. And because of that, you, by your work and by thinking

and by getting out of your own way and summoning the muse, you've created this thing that is then everybody else's experience too. And it helps us all rise up. There's something to that. I think there is. I mean, not forgetting about myself, I do think that there is some force. If you think of all the music that's been written, right? Or all the books or all the podcasts or all the information that's been brought out, there's got to be a payoff for that somewhere, right? Because it's all a gift. People are all trying to give something to somebody.

And a lot of that gift is the alleviation of pain, I think, you know, of broken hearts, of fear, of self-destructive things that you read a book or you listen to a piece of music and you go, you know, I'm not alone. I'm not the only person that's dealing with this shit. You know, so-and-so actually, there's meaning to it. It isn't just meaningless. And I hope you're right that we are evolving the human race.

The other hand, I would wonder if, when we go back to primitive people, if they had somehow a deeper understanding or a more direct understanding of God or whatever. Who knows what, you know, Jesus in the wilderness, in the desert, what, you know? There's probably something to this deeper understanding because they were less burdened down by dogma. because they were less burdened down by dogma. And, you know, if you really only had the culture of the people that you were surrounded by, you know, that's all you had. Maybe you had less things to consider about, like, I think we're very much burdened by media and the outside world.

I mean, think about all the fear mongering that goes on in the news because if it bleeds, it leads. Whatever's scary is the thing that gets the headlines. So you're constantly taking in all this data that's scaring the shit out of you. Like Bill Hicks used to have a great, do you know who Bill Hicks was? No, no. Great stand-up comedian who died young

and was one of the most influential stand-up comedians maybe ever um so much so that there was a there was a green room at the punch line in georgia in atlanta and when you'd work there in the green room before you go on stage someone had written on the walls quit trying to be hicks because so many comedians were so they were so blown away by him that they kind of imitated him. It was really common. But he had this bit about CNN that you'd watch CNN and it was war, death, famine, disease. And he'd go outside and birds are chirping. Where is this shit?

He's like, Ted Turner's making all this shit up. Like in your life, this didn't exist. And that you really need to be concerned with the things you actually encounter. But now we're not. Now we're encountering these enormous problems like global war or the temperature, the climate's changing and it's human beings and we have to change how we extract energy and information. And what are we doing? Like, totally. And why is there so much crime?

And why is there so much poverty? And why is education so fucked? And why do these terrible people want to run the planet? And why are they extracting money? And why are they, like, they're almost dead. They're 80 years old and they're still concentrating on the same goddamn thing that people were concentrated on when they were cave people just acquiring resources and dominating the other cultures and like we're overrun by so much extraneous data and i think that if we were

not and we were living in these sort of tribal environments i I think it's more in a line with a natural way of life and maybe being more in line with a natural way that the human animal evolved to exist in that maybe you have more freedom to think about the very source of life, the very source of these thoughts, the source of love, the source of creativity and of progress and what all that means. Yeah. I think of sometimes like 10,000 years ago, the first yogis in the Indus Valley or wherever the hell they were, right? Where they had infinite time, you would think, right? They were okay, and they could just work postures and poses and study, you know, what happens when this little – when you release this little muscle here and when your spine is aligned in exactly the right way. And they had like generation after generation after generation, right?

Father to son, mother to daughter, whatever. What did they get to? You know, the energy coming up, the spine, the shock was all, where does all that? I have no idea what that is. I just have a, you know, a kind of a layman's knowledge of that. But think about hundreds of years of doing that, of just focusing inward or the great, you know, meditating people that would get, God only knows where they got to. You know, and it's, you know, no CNN, nothing to distract them. It's, and the other thing, the news, CNN and all that sort of stuff is really the voice of resistance. You couldn't define it more, you know, than what's coming out. It's all fear, fear, fear, fear, fear.

It's all us versus them. You're alone. I'm alone. These motherfuckers are trying to take what you've got. That sort of thing. And because we're all weak and we give and resistance is like our native tongue, we, and I'm guilty of this shit too. You know, it comes in and I, you know, I'm hooked on it. It's washing over me. And I always feel dirty when every, when it's done, you know, like I need to,

you know, take a shower, get something out of that. The 24-hour news cycle is another horrible thing, you know. It used to be just Walter Cronkite for a half hour in the evening, you know. But we're uninformed then. That's the argument against that is that we do live in a complex and ever-connected world, and you should be informed of all of the things that are dangerous. I don't know about that. I mean, what are we being informed of all of the things that are dangerous? I don't know about that. I mean, what are we being informed of? It's a very limited stuff, you know? It's like, oh, a missile landed in Poland or there was an explosion in Poland yesterday. And you could tell, I'm sure in the newsrooms and the

executives, oh, they were ecstatic when they heard that, right? Oh, this will scare the fuck out of everybody, right? Do you think they think like that? Absolutely. Because like you say, if it bleeds, it leads, right? Right. But do you think they think like that or do they think it's imperative that we get this information out? They may have brainwashed themselves to believe that as a self-justification, but they know it's gold to them. Right.

Another mass shooting. But they know, you know, it's gold to them. Right. You know? Right. You know, another mass shooting. That's another thing that gets me. Or why does that dominate the news for days, right? Right. And it's always the same stuff. Or even in, like, I live in L.A., freeway chases, right? A guy stole a car. The helicopter's following him as he goes

through, you know, all the communities and the cops are after him. And like everything else that's on the air, it's like blown off the air completely while we watch that. I don't know. It's just resistance, if you ask me. Well, it certainly is a thing that could get away from you and you could just get completely absorbed with all the negative aspects of the world and not concentrate on your own life not not concentrate on the things that you actually can control but the thing is like should you be a civic-minded person who's like concerned about the world yes stewards of the land and all that how much right how much to the dominance of of whatever it is isn't that maybe what's emerging this understanding of the land and all that good stuff. How much? Right. How much? But that's the balance, right? To the dominance of whatever it is.

But isn't that maybe what's emerging, this understanding of the world as a whole? Maybe it's a part of a thing where we're not quite good at it yet. Maybe. But we're getting an understanding. We're overwhelmed by it now. Yeah. Yeah. But that we are all connected in this way.

And, you know, there's also an awareness. Like, if you buy – like like someone sent me a video yesterday my friend David Lucas sent me a video yesterday of these kids working in a factory and you you we kind of all know that in some countries kids work in factories but when you see a video of these Chinese kids working in a factory and you look at them like, how old's that kid? Is that kid 12? Are they 11? What's going on there? And you see them doing this hard labor, often 16, 18 hours a day in this factory. It's very disturbing because then it makes you think like, oh, my goodness, what products am I buying that are being made in this factory?

And what am I contributing to? And you can be overwhelmed with grief and with guilt. But should you? Or should you just be blissfully unaware and buy your iPhone? Take it beyond that and forget about just the children. What about the grownups that are in factories? Or I was just,

earlier today, I was hanging out with Ryan Holiday and he was giving a talk. I love Ryan. He's a great guy. He was here just a little. Yeah. He was giving a talk

to a bank group at the Marriott. So it's one of those ballrooms, you know, where there are tables, table, tables, and there's probably 250,'s one of those ballrooms, you know, where there are tables, table, tables, and it's probably 250, 300 people and they're executives, you know, men and women. And I'm thinking to myself, thank God I'm not one of these guys. And I feel, but that is, in modern industrial society, what the fuck is that? You know? What is that? What is that?

I mean, what is that? Thank God that you have your podcast and all your other stuff, right? You would never sit still for that in your own life. You would never do that, right? Well, I mean, maybe I would if I was raised that way and I fell into that path, which I think— It's a fucked situation. We take it for granted, right? Because we're brainwashed from day one

in kindergarten, you know? But if Plato were to walk onto this scene or an ancient Spartan or somebody would appear, they'd look around and go, what the fuck is this? You know, let me get back to where I was, you know? Yeah. Well, you know, one of the things that I when I was I was reading a bunch of I got into a kick for about a year and a half where I read many books about Native American culture and the what happened when the settlers made their way across the United States. people, whether they were trappers or soldiers or just regular civilians that gave up on modern life and were incorporated into Native American cultures. They wound up living with the Native Americans. Some of them were even kidnapped by the Native Americans when they're young. Yeah, yeah. And then recaptured by the Americans and brought back to, you know, quote unquote civilization, they all wanted to go back. They all wanted to go back to a man. No one from that tribe

wanted to join modern civilization, but everyone from modern civilization wanted to be a part of that tribe. Once they, you know, were incorporated in it and they lived that life for a while there's something about it that was far more satisfying and far more it resonated with them in a way that you know and even then i mean this is a very primitive society we're talking about 1860s america but that that was not exciting that was not satisfying that was not what they wanted to do they wanted to live off the land. They wanted to be traveling, hunting buffalo. Can we go back to that? I don't know if we can go back to that. I don't think there's any going back. But it does seem to be the way that the human being is the happiest.

I think it's the way we evolved. And these human reward systems are just sort of ingrained in the fiber of our being. Yeah. And the reward systems are there's a feeling that you get when you catch a fish. You ever go fishing? I have, but I'm not good at it. You don't have to be good at it. But there's a feeling that you get when you get a big fish on the line. It's so exciting.

Well, what is that feeling? The feeling is you're going to be able to feed your family. So you're rewarded for being successful at that with not just food, but also with this rush of endorphins and these great feelings. And that's what people pursue when they go fishing. And it's so much so that there's like a perversion of it where people do catch and release fishing just to get a thrill. So there's tournaments and these guys go out there and they cast a line and they even have a live well on their boat where they take the fish and they put it in this aerated pool on their boat where the fish stay alive so they can weigh them and win the tournament. And then they release them back into the lake, which is kind of crazy. Yeah.

and then they release them back into the lake, which is kind of crazy. Yeah. But they've hijacked this feeling that you get that is a part of being a person because that feeling was to reward you with being able to feed your family. Yeah. And within the tribe where it's your uncle and your cousin and your daughter and your mom and everybody's together everybody's together yeah like the movie dances with wolves exactly really got it really they'll really hit that one the nail on the head with that one yes yeah that's a great example of

that with that movie what but you know that react the reality of that that life is so much more satisfying than the life of being a banker. When you're a banker, I mean, I'm not a banker, but I would imagine your reward is you're always looking for new things to buy. So you're making enough money that one day you're going to get a yacht. One day you're going to get that Ferrari. One day you're going to get that jet. One day you're going to get that Ferrari one day you're gonna get that jet one day you're gonna get that bigger house you're gonna get to a point where you know hey you make enough money maybe you

buy an island crazy like that's like if you got an island like Tyler Perry has an island oh he's balling you know that guy's got an island you hear about people with an island that's ultimate balling yeah he's got a jet got an island got, got a boat, got a this, got a that. And you just, you know, Tyler Perry is obviously creative. I'm not talking about him. But when talking about someone who's a person who's just acquiring numbers, just acquiring currency. And then what's your reward? What do you get out of that?

Maybe you get to play golf on the weekend. And what do you do when you play golf? You're talking about your objects and your things and the things you're acquiring. And, you know, have you seen the newest that, oh, I'm trying to get one on the waiting list, you know, and that, that's where there's, there are good feelings come from. That is the subversion. That's the hijacking of those, those positive feelings of accomplishment. Like you get when you're fishing. Like for them, it's accomplishing something even more difficult to get, like a yacht. And then it's just this trick, this biological trick that's forcing them to keep slaving away under fluorescent lights for 16 hours a day. I mean, I don't know if we're ever going to evolve to some way where we can kind of get back to something like that in some sort of form. Not literally, but, you know, I mean, sports in some way, when they're not perverted into these giant things like the NFL and everything like that, are at least a way of artificially acting out the chase, you know, or the tribals, you know, the team, you know,

we're all, I mean, that's a modern way that sort of taps into those ancient needs, those evolutionary needs. I wonder if we can ever get to that on some culture-wide scale. We certainly don't seem to be. It doesn't seem like it. As billions and billions of people. Well, it seems like there's so many people that are living that way. More people are living that way than not living that way. If you did a survey of all the people and their occupation and the enjoyment level of their job and what they look forward to.

I would imagine the majority of people do not enjoy what they're doing. And they're sort of stuck. And they're just doing a thing for money. And they don't find it rewarding. I would agree. And they probably have a hobby or a pastime or a love that they're working to be able to do whatever that is, you know? Yeah. Yeah. That's the thing that excites them. Yeah. You know, they get off work and they go fucking axe throwing or something, like whatever the thing that they're into. But what is sort of

interesting to me, and it is kind of hopeful to be on some level, Joe, is that there are a lot of people that are taking those individual passions and making them businesses, you know? Like, I'll go back to the idea of designing motorcycles, you know? I'm sure that, you know, there are guys that love making up some crazy, you know, kind of motorcycle. They're artists, right? And they somehow find a way to have that garage and to do it and to sell it and to make it, you know, and usually the whole family is part of it, right? The mom, the daughters, everybody gets into it. And I think there's a lot of that going on now. It's kind of a, on an underground level, it doesn't get into the papers or anything, but I think that, uh, that gives me some hope. There's a lot of kind of mom

and pop people following their dreams, even if they're kind of they're not you know global dreams but they're certainly dreams that that satisfy the soul yeah i mean they certainly don't have to be global if you're making motorcycles and you know you you start doing it in your garage and then you post a few on social media and someone says hey i'd love to buy one of your motorcycles then all of a sudden you've got a project to sell. What a feeling that must be in the first one you sell, you know? Yeah. And then because of the internet, I mean, this is like probably one of the more positive

things about the internet. Because of the internet, people can find you and you actually can move from having this very unsatisfactory job to doing something that you truly enjoy. Maybe you start off as a, you know, you're making woodwork. You're making tables and, you know, various projects, and you post them on Instagram, and all of a sudden people want to buy them. Now you've got orders. You're like, oh, my God, I'm thinking of quitting the job.

Then you and the wife have to have a conversation like, is this sustainable? Can we really do this? And, well, I'll tell you what, we're going to, let's give ourselves six months and I'm going to work on it part time on nights and weekends and it'll be worth the sacrifice. And I think I could really get to a point where we can have a real way of life that is very satisfying. Like if you go from being a person who works in a bank, this boring, unsatisfying version of reality that so many people are trapped in, to all of a sudden you're painting and your paintings are selling and you have a gallery opening and your stuff is selling and you're like, oh my goodness, I think I can make a living painting. Like what a much more satisfying and exciting way of life that is.

Yeah. I mean, I'm a believer, as you know from what I've talked about, the muse and stuff like that, that through each of us is flowing an underground river. And that river is unique to us, and it's our creativity. And that river is unique to us and it's our creativity. Let's say it's the guy with the motorcycles or it's a guy that wants to paint lowrider cars that just has our design lowrider cars or something like that. And that is flowing through us. And if we don't do it, if we stay working in the bank or doing whatever it is, if we if we yield to our resistance and our fear and we don't do it. If we stay working in the bank or doing whatever it is, if we yield to our resistance and our fear and we don't do that, that river doesn't go away. That underground river doesn't go away. It flows into another channel, flows into a negative channel, right? And it starts

to fuck us up physically, emotionally, psychologically. But if we do let it flow, and pretty soon the whole family gets involved in it, right? And we've now created now this energy, which you could call God energy. It's coming from some other place, right? Is helping everybody. Everybody's feeding off of it. And I'm encouraged that there are more people doing that than I think there ever were because of the internet. Like you say, because of the fact that you can find a market, you can let people be aware of what you're doing and people will come to you and we'll buy your shit. So God bless everybody that's doing that. You know, everybody that does it. Don't stop. Yeah. I don't know if it's for everybody,

because there's some people out there that truly don't have interests. They don't have a thing that excites them, which is very unfortunate. What is that? Is that nature or nurture? I'm not so sure about that. I kind of believe that maybe not everybody has a specific art that they want to do, but they have some gift. I'm thinking about a friend of mine, a woman who's been a really good friend of mine forever and has never really worked. She's always been married. She's never had a job. But I realized watching her life that her calling is she's like one of those people that of her extended family and friends, she's the one that holds everything together. She's the one that when somebody gets pregnant over here, an unwanted pregnancy, they go to my friend.

And she kind of pulls them together somehow. If there's a death in the family, if there's something like that, right? So that's her calling. Maybe she's not making movies or something like that. But that's her gift. And it's not making movies or something like that, but that's her gift. And it's a real gift, you know? And so I do believe that everybody's got something like that. Well, that was just probably a traditional role in communities. Yeah, probably was. They probably had a name for it, you know? Maybe she'd be the shamaness

or something like that. Yeah. And it's very valuable. I mean, if you're a person that's in a troubled spot and there's a person who's really good at navigating troubled spots in the community, like that's a very valuable position. And for that person who is that person, it's probably very satisfying to be able to help all those people. Yeah. And the weird, what's sort of a little sad about that for my friend is that she really doesn't get the credit that she deserves. She should get a lot of credit. They should have a dinner for her once a year, you know.

They should come to her house. And I know even she has saved me at least three times from bad shit, you know, by just intervening, you know, and just coming in and saying, don't worry. I'll take care of this. I'll take care of it. And she has. And I know she's done it for many, many others. Nice. Yeah, that's a thing.

Yeah. And it doesn't have to be a thing that you get a paycheck for. Yeah. It doesn't have to be a thing where you get a little plaque on your desk. Yeah. And it's probably a tribal thing, right? In Dances with Wolves, there probably was one of the women that was doing that thing or a man, whatever. you know one of the women that was doing that thing or a man whatever yeah well uh this the title of uh my last tour was a sacred clown because there's a there's a role in the people

called the the heyoka and the heyoka their job was to make fun of all the things that were there, whether it was the biggest warrior or the chief or everything. They made fun of everything because the idea was that anything that could not be mocked was bullshit. And you had to figure out what was bullshit. That's great. It was important to know what was real and what was important and what was truly significant. And if you couldn't make fun of it, it was like, hey, don't make fun of that. Don't make fun of me. Like, you knew that person was inflated by ego.

And there was a way of, like, letting out the hot air and, you know, all the windbags and sort of letting them know that, you know, they're kind of full of shit. That was a valuable role in the culture. Yeah. So now you have, you know, they're kind of full of shit. That was a valuable role in the culture. Yeah. So now you have, you know, comedians. Yeah. Stephen Colbert, somebody like that, right? That takes the piss out of somebody. That's great.

Yeah. That's a role. It's definitely a role. That's a role that's not often acknowledged and rewarded and should be. Yeah. The role of a counselor, someone who can counsel you through things, the role of someone who can sort of coach you through life because they've gone through the same shit that you've gone through and they have some valuable information they can share to make

your journey quicker and easier. And maybe you can now impart that to young people that you see coming up that are struggling in a very similar way. What do you see for yourself, Joe, like on your podcast? Do you feel like you're performing a kind of a service like that? I don't think so. I think you are. Well, that's very nice of you. I think you absolutely are. I'm sure people benefit from it. I benefit from it. Don't be too modest. No, but I'm not. But I don't think of it that way. I generally don't. I think if I did, it would just get in the way. You might be inflated. It would just get in the way.

There's no value for me pondering what great things I've done. There's zero value in that. In fact, there's just nothing but pitfalls. There's value in, and I have the same issue myself, but there's value in valuing what you are giving and what you are doing and really just not inflating it but seeing it for what it is, you know. God bless you. You are doing a lot of good shit. Well, thank you. But I don't think that's something to concentrate on.

With my mind and my ego and who I am as a human, how that works, there's no value in that. I'm the same way. I mean, I know that I'm helping people, you know, with my sort of war of art and stuff like that. But I also don't want to think about that. And I certainly don't want to be in that role. Yeah. But I must acknowledge, you know, if I, you know, say, okay, I'm doing a little something good here. So, you know, okay.

I think the reason, well, I know i'm not doing bad which is nice but i think the the value is in where where i when i do my best is when i just think about the thing i'm doing and try to do my best that's it to think about like look how good you've done that shit is no good that That's no good. That's like reading. I tell comedians in particular, I say stop reading comments. Don't read comments. And don't even read positive comments. Because positive comments you think are good, but they're not good. Because now you're, like, captured by other people's praise and opinions of you and all that.

Like, that's just wasted time. You're just getting in your own way. Like, you should know if you're doing good work. And you should know if, you know, there's a little bit of feedback is good. A little bit of positive or negative. You get to, oh, people didn't like that. Why didn't they like that? You know what? They were right. This is why they didn't like it. Yeah. It was kind of sloppy. Oh, maybe I should have taken more time with that. Or maybe I should have thought that out better. Or maybe I should have looked at it from other perspectives. And you can genuinely learn and grow from that, no doubt. But at a certain point in time, it's too much. And it gets in the way, the positive or the

negative. And I've seen people crippled by negative critiques and negative comments and all these people with their emotional poison, just spraying it on everybody they come into contact with. And those are not necessarily the type of people, the type of people that do that are not the type of people that you would be happy to interact with. Those people that say hateful things to people online, they're genuinely like damaged and unhealthy people. That's the only way you're capable of saying horrible things to people you don't even know online you have to be damaged like you were saying that we wanted to pretend that we're separate and

That when you do something evil to a person that has no effect on you, but that's not true it most certainly has an effect where we are all connected and When people are you know leaving horrible comments on someone's YouTube video or horrible comments on Twitter, like they're damaged people, they're deeply damaged people. And they're trying to like, get you to feel the way they feel. They feel like shit. So they want you to feel like shit. And you can just simply not take that in. Don't get involved in that. But also, don't get involved in the praise either. Don't start believing the bullshit and believe in your own hype. I just concentrate on doing things. I concentrate on just trying to get better.

And it's nice when people show up for my shows. And it's nice that the podcast is successful. That's great. But I don't think about it at all. I just work. Ah. Now, I would say, just as a sidebar here about the people that write hateful things, Well, that's great. But I don't think about it at all. I just work. Now, I would say, just as a sidebar here about the people that write hateful things, that that's their own resistance. That's where that's coming from. Like if they see a comic that's succeeding or anybody else, what's really happening is they have a dream, whether they could articulate it or not, and they're not enacting it in any way. They're not doing a sober October in any way. So they see you or they see somebody else succeeding, and it's like a terrible reproach to them. It's like, how can Joe do that? They don't, it's on the unconscious level. They're not aware of it, right? Yeah. He's doing something and I'm not.

And so they really hate themselves and they project that outward. And I know this is true because I've gotten those shitty letters, you know, from people and shitty emails from people. And when I've engaged with them at all, which I rarely do, it's only one or two exchanges before they'll admit, you know, I really felt, I really hated you because I thought you were doing something. I've got a book in me and I wish I had written it and I hadn't written it and that's why. And then they'll actually, will become friendly, you know, and I'm so sorry I wrote that to you. I really didn't mean writing it to you. So I think that's, if you think about the phenomenon of resistance on a sort of national or global level, like it's a big thing. You know, a lot of polarization, what we call that shit,

really comes on an individual level from that sort of thing, from people that know they have a gift or a dream or something and know, even unconsciously, that they're not doing it. And they hate themselves for that. They feel bad, you know, as anybody would, right? I'm drinking too much. I'm getting fat. I'm not doing, you know. And so, but it's impossible for most people to accept that about themselves and say, oh, I'm really fucking up. So they project it onto some other group, immigrants, you name it, right? Yeah, they just don't have the tools yet. No one has provided them with the tools.

There's a great quote. I forget who said it, but I've said it ad nauseum, that all criticism is the tragic result of unmet needs. There's like something more to that. Who wrote that quote? Someone wrote that. See if we can find that. Because there's more to it. But that resonates.

That that's the reason why people get shitty. It's like I always say, like, the people that are killing it in life, they're not. You think LeB james is leaving youtube quotes you think lebron james is going on comments and and fucking with people every criticism judgment diagnosis and diagnosis and expression of anger is the tragic expression of an unmet need and this is marshall rosen Ah. What a great quote. That is such a great quote. Now, I would take it a step beyond that.

And it seems like when you say an unmet need, that the person is waiting for someone else or some other force to supply their quote-unquote need. I would say they aren't addressing that need themselves. They aren't aware of it and they aren't doing anything about it. Yeah. And that's where that anger and that hatred comes from. Click there where it says the top 25 because it goes even further. There's another, at the root of every tantrum and power struggle are unmet needs. And that's another Marshall Rosenberg quote. I don't like the whole phrase unmet needs because it feels to me like we're projecting out to somebody else, expecting them to come and satisfy us in some way.

You know? And that's not the answer, I don't think. No, I don't think it's- The answer is sober October and you yourself addressing that need, whatever it is. Oh, most certainly that's the answer. But I think by saying unmet needs, it's like they feel like they're supposed to get something that they're not getting. True, I agree with that. Yeah.

But it's just what is going to address that? Well, that's one of the things that makes me feel like when I'm on the right path that all I'm thinking about is what I'm doing. And I'm not even remotely concerned with getting praise or getting anything else for it. Because all I'm thinking about is doing the thing because I don't have unmet needs. So my cup is full. So all I don't have unmet needs. So my cup is full. So all I'm thinking about is the work. I don't want to be recognized. I'd rather not be recognized.

I'd rather be able to sneak through a restaurant and have no one know who I am. That's one of the things I like about traveling overseas. It's nice. I can just slip around. So that is because I've been doing the thing that I want to do for so long. All my needs are met in that regard. The accomplishments have been cemented and all the praise and all the success.

It's all great. But now I don't think about it at all. Instead of living in that world of constantly trying to get more and more and more praise and becoming megalomaniac, I go the other way. All I think about is just what I'm doing. Uh-huh. Yeah. I'm the same way. I'm definitely a believer from that the work is its own reward. And when you're doing it right, whatever it is,

making motorcycles, whatever it is, because it's tapped into that other level, you're getting a salary in some coin that the gods have minted. Yes. And you don't need a salary from the regular world. Well, it's also from a resource management perspective, it's much more efficient to think that way. I never thought about it that way. You'll get more things done and you'll get out of your own way. And that's a big issue. The getting out of your own way is a big issue. How would you define that, Joe? When you say, I know exactly what you mean, but can you articulate that? What does it mean when you're in your own way?

Well, your ego and your perception of yourself and how you're viewed by the world is this, like, fluctuating thing. And you think about it too often. And it gets in the way and maybe it flavors your art in a way where you're actively trying to get more respect or trying to change other people's perceptions of you and alter it. You're getting in your own way and it's transparent to other people. It makes your art poor. to other people. It makes your art poor. It makes your ego leaks over into whether it's your

music or your writing. Whatever it is you're making. And you get in your own way. There's nothing sadder than someone who's brilliant at something. They're really good. Say they're great at making automobiles. They make the best cars. But when you talk to them about it, they

brag about it so much it grosses you out. You don't to buy their car like fuck that guy in his car uh-huh you know he's a genius but you know i don't want to talk to him he's annoying like that you're getting in your own way let me ask you joe were you at any stage of your life in your own oh yes and yes how did you was there a moment when you got out of your own way? I am, uh, my worst critic. That's the best aspect about, I don't hate myself, but I am 100% my worst critic. So I don't allow myself to bullshit myself. And so if I have like mediocre results or unfavorable results I take long hard looks at like what's causing that and if you do that long enough you'll get to the thing you're like oh I'm gross like I did this that's gross I said that that's gross like why did I say it like that

like what's wrong with me I can't do that, I have to really understand what that is and why it's coming up and then figure out. And luckily for me, because I'm a physical fitness enthusiast and I'm so obsessed with that, I have like these anxiety alleviation methods that are tried and true. And in doing that and taxing the body in the way that I do it allows me this great insight because those moments of physical like exercise and martial arts training they're so uncomfortable so difficult that it makes the other things seem much more trivial and it makes them seem more – the stakes are lower. They seem more clear for what the actual issue is.

And then I assess. I figure out what I'm doing wrong and I try to do it better. And over time, I've realized there's certain patterns. And one of those patterns is you get in your own way. You rely on your own ego. You boost up your ego. You're looking to brag. You're looking to do this.

You're looking to like – you get in your own way. Everybody knows when they're in their own way. So if I'm hearing you right, it's introspection in a way, right? Yes. hearing you right, it's introspection in a way, right? You're looking at yourself when you say gross and saying, I'm in my own way. My ego is taken over here. And so that sort of witness mentality is saying, I got to stop that, right? How can I stop that? So that's how you did it, or do it. So there wasn't any like specific breakthrough moment or anything where you. Psychedelics help tremendously for sure.

How? Because they dissolve the ego. When you do a very strong psychedelic trip, one of the most profound aspects of it is the ego is completely dissolved you're faced with such beauty and and wisdom of undeniable power that whatever that thing is that you encounter in the psychedelic dimension is so humbling and it dissolves your ego and brings you into it. And for whatever amount of time while you're tripping, you relinquish your grip on the material world. And you take into account all these ideas. There's this overwhelming theme of love and connectivity that most people have from these

experiences. And then when you come out of them, the idea of bragging or the idea of like dwelling on your accomplishments or looking for praise seems so preposterous. It seems so ridiculous. Because you've got such an expansive perspective on things now that you, your own self, looks really tiny and ridiculous, right? It's expansive, but it's also there's a physical act of dissolving the ego. It really does take the ego away. Those psychedelics, one of the best things that they do is they dissolve whatever that gross id is inside of you that makes you, you know, get in your own way.

They help you see things in a far more introspective, a far clearer perspective, and they let you look at things from a top-down view. Now, do you ever think, Joe, that when you're in that state, that prior civilizations, if we think of them as advanced civilizations like the ancient Egyptians or somebody like that, that they somehow were able to live in that world in a – or at least in a more time per day? Oh, there's clear evidence. There's clear evidence that that's the case. Yeah. day. Oh, there's clear evidence. There's clear evidence that that's the case. Yeah. I mean, we talked about it with Graham Hancock the other day on the podcast, and he was talking about the blue Lotus and the blue Lotus is, uh, is documented that the ancient Egyptians use this particular

psychedelic. Um, there's, there's much evidence that the ancient Greeks, uh, in fact, uh, Brian Murerescu, who's been on the podcast before, wrote a book called The Immortality Key. It's a great book about how these ancient societies and the elucidated mysteries, they drank wine that was laced with psychedelics. And this has all been proven now because they found the vessels of these wines and they tested positive for ergot. And so they didn't just, when we think of wine, we think of just alcohol, but no, there's this wine actually had psychedelics mixed in. And if you think about it, like from those, those, that enlightenment period, this is the birth of democracy. This is the birth of modern civilization as we know it.

It came from these wise people getting together and having these rituals. And that this has now opened up a field of study at Harvard because of his book and because of the success of the book and his discussions of it. It's really amazing stuff. But it points to that people throughout human history, in order to gain great insight and wisdom, have turned to these, what they call, plant medicines. You know, in my Greek books, of course, you read about and research the Eleusinian mysteries. And it's so, I mean, maybe you know more about, I think they were such, so secret that it's not like there's any book that you can read. Right. That what they did, who knows what they did.

Well, because it was all squashed by the Romans. They squashed all that and they wound up moving to other countries in Europe. There's great evidence that they moved out of Greece. They moved into Spain and that they had these rituals in other countries as well. So they found these similar type of reliefs and similar pottery. And inside the vessels, they've also found this ergod and wine and various psychedelics that were, you know, there's trace residue of them. Have you studied the hermetics at all? No.

Ah. Are you interested? Yes. Have you the Hermetics at all? No. Ah. Are you interested? Yes. Have you heard about them at all, of this thing? Please. Have you heard of a book called The Kabbalion? No. Well, this should be right up your street.

The Hermetics were Egyptians. It's where the Freemasons came from and the alchemists and the people in the Middle Ages who preserved the culture when the Middle Ages who preserved, you know, the culture when the Dark Ages came. And the Hermetics comes from Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes Thrice Great, who was supposedly the wisest man or avatar or god from the Egyptian period and they the kabbalion was their book i don't know if the actual kabbalion still exists there are sort of i have like one little short book of it but they had a whole deep philosophy that is a lot like this you want me to talk about this for a second because yeah please i mean they were like i think the hermetics had like seven principles. I'll see if I can remember what they are.

The first one is that you and I have no physical existence as entities. We exist entirely as thoughts in the mind of the all or God. Sort of like the analogy they use is like in the mind of Dickens is Mr. McCauber and Pip and David Copperfield and all that. And that you and I only exist as thoughts in the mind of God. And, oh, they believe that the universe was entirely mental. That's what this was. That there really is no physical existence. And that it was all vibrational. And that one of the things they

believed was that there's no such thing as opposites. Heat and cold are not opposites. Fear and courage are not opposites. They are just points on a continuum and that the difference between fear and courage is entirely in the vibration. And so this is where the alchemy came in. They believed that if they could change their vibration or change the vibration. And so this is where the alchemy came in. They believed that if they could change their vibration or change the vibration of lead, that they could change it

into gold. And they had, uh, the other things was, you know, everything vibrates. The other thing was that everything swings on a pendulum. Everything goes back and forth from one thing to another. And they also believe that everything is male and female, that everything is created, comes from the union of male and female in the highest levels. Anyway, it's great shit. And, you know, at one point, apparently, in ancient Egypt or before that, this was, you know, this was what they believed. And it somehow got wiped out or just held on in various little pockets of the occult knowledge and stuff like that. So it's the ancient hermetics. And the book is The Kabbalion, K-Y-B-A-L-I-O-N. I think they're fascinating shit.

I think there are many cultures that were tapping into this at some point in time. Even Joe Dispenza that I was talking about before, what he talks about is when you get to that state of no mind, no thing, no presence, that the only thing that exists is vibration and consciousness. And that would be straight out of hermetic philosophy. of human evolution, we realize that anatomically similar humans, we go far back, back far further than we originally thought. With the original assessment was like, we, I think, remember when I was in high school, they thought it was like 50,000 years ago, like that anatomical humans sort of emerged 50,000 years ago, and then human civilization emerged like 6,000 years ago. And now, they're finding all this evidence of advanced civilization, like Gobekli Tepe, which is this uncovered site in Turkey, this massive structure that existed 11,000 something

years ago. And this was the first ever thing that they could date that they know for sure is older than the pyramids by quite a bit at least older than the Conventional dating of the parents and so there was advanced civilization that was capable building these immense huge structures giant pillars with these these these huge Stone things that had cut into them reliefs of animals that were three-dimensional Which is very complicated because instead of carving them into the stone, they carved the stone around them. So they had like these lizards and these creatures that were crawling up these stones

that they had cut the stone out. And we're talking about like 20-foot tall, massive, hundreds of tons. I mean, I don't know how much these things weighed. Huge things, like very advanced people that were capable of construction methods. And they did these concentric circles with these things and they don't know why they did it. They don't know what they were doing with them. But that if human anatomically similar humans existed half a million years ago, that gives them so much time to evolve and become that. And this catastrophe theory sort of makes sense

because there was probably some really advanced thinking and really advanced science that we don't totally understand because our science has gone in this sort of industrial age, technological direction, where their science probably went in a completely different direction, concentrating on vibrations of things and sound and probably some lost technology that we don't understand yet, but we may in the future. And that'll probably put the pieces together, but it's taken us thousands and thousands of years to relearn things that

perhaps these people that lived 10,000, 20,000 years ago had already figured out. Yeah. I mean, if you think about somebody like LeBron James, somebody that is at a level, right? An amazing level. What if there were guys like this that were thinkers and philosophers or meditators or whatever they were, and they were at that level of being able to tap into whatever it is, vibration. We don't know anything about it, right? The elite of the elite of thinkers.

Yeah. What could they do? Right. Particularly, I mean, it always seemed to me crazy that the human race only goes back 150,000 years or 300,000. Can't be right. Can't be right that there was, you know, just only the great apes and all of a sudden 300,000 years ago or 150,000 years ago. It doesn't make sense.

Well, there was a recent discovery. I'll send this to Jamie. They found evidence that human beings were cooking fish 700,000 plus years ago. Ah. Which is really wild. That makes a lot of sense. Oh, yeah. Here, I'll send this to Jamie.

It's really wild because- And it was trout almondine. That's the amazing shit. No, it was Chilean sea bass. No, that's not really a sea bass. 780,000 years ago. That's the evidence. Yeah, it's fascinating stuff.

Yeah. The other thing is how much of those ancient civilizations were about. Oh, you found it. Jamie found it. Early humans may have cooked fish in ovens 780,000 years ago. Remains of fish teeth. That cheers me up. Remains of fish teeth at an archaeological site in Israel appear to have been cooked with controlled heat rather than directly exposed

to fire. So that's very advanced in our sense of like what people were capable of doing 780,000 years ago. We've developed a methodology that allows us to identify cooking in relatively low temperatures as opposed to burning. She says, you cannot immediately correlate the control of fire with cooking unless you show that the food has been cooked. Wow. Researchers have previously suggested that humans were cooking meat 1.5 million years ago based on the discovery of charred animal remains.

But that doesn't necessarily mean people were heating food before eating it, says Zohar. Evidence of charred material doesn't mean cooking, it just means the food was thrown into the fire. Zohar and her colleagues have studied a 780,000 year old settlement in Gesher Benot Yal... How do you say that? I don't know.

Yal... In Israel's northern Jordan River Valley. No human remains have been found there, but based on its age and the stone tools at the site, the inhabitants are most likely to have been Homo erectus. Wow. Amazing. Amazing stuff.

Yeah. So, you know, if you think of those early humans and, like, when did they become anatomically modern humans? Was it half a million years ago? Whatever it was, it gives us a lot of room to learn things and figure things out before, you know, natural catastrophes wipe civilization back to the Stone Age again. Yeah. The other thing I was just saying was that if you think about these,

what we know about these civilizations is there was stone seems to have a lot to do with this shit, right? Whether it's South America, you know, Mesoamerica, whatever, it's stone pyramids and stone this and stone that and stone, supposedly, is a vibrational material like something that could be the equivalent of a battery that could hold, you know, at least I've heard that.

You know, we're talking about, you know, imaginative stuff here. But who knows what they knew about, you know? It gets very woo-woo without it does but it's you know every time something is disproved like uh when uh they said oh uh homer's description of troy and in the iliad was a bunch of bullshit right it couldn't have been that big right and then schlieman digs up the remains of Troy, and it's exactly like Homer said, right? The gate is right here. The other gate is here. So every time we think,

oh, these previous generations couldn't have known that, and then we finally dig it up, we go, they were way beyond what we thought. Yeah, the discovery of Troy was very eye-opening, because now you have to take into account, well, what about Atlantis? We talked about Atlantis. Was that real, too? Was there really an advance? We're getting out there, Joe. Yes, yeah. Why are we going to this place?

I don't know. Well, I mean, human beings are constantly innovating and constantly improving. And if there was a time in history where we had achieved some immense level of through some method that we don't understand of advanced civilization and then you know it all got wiped out and this is the new manifestation of human creativity and ingenuity and innovation it's become this thing that we we see now but we think this is the only way. Oh, this is as good as people have ever been. Yeah. But we're just ignorant to the past. Yeah. Very possible.

Yeah. Yeah. And interesting. Very, very, very interesting. Like that show that Graham Hancock has made, I believe it's the number two show on Netflix now, which is giant. I mean, that's pretty crazy. That an educational show about an ancient catastrophe has become the number two show on Netflix. And it makes you wonder why do contemporary audiences

respond to that so much, you know? I think it resonates with us. I think it makes sense, you know? Yeah, we hear it and we go, there's something to this, you know? Yeah. Or at least there could be. He describes us as a species with amnesia. Ah.

Yeah. Sometimes it feels like that, doesn't it? Yeah. I mean, I'm a believer in previous lives while we're getting far out here. So I sort of sometimes think that that amnesia is from lives that we've lived, you know? Maybe it's that too. Maybe it's history and from lives that we live. Maybe they're all combined in some sort of a strange and unknown way.

Yeah. Now, when you say you're a believer in unknown lives, what specifically do you mean? I mean past lives, rather. I just sort of feel like, you know, if you look at, let's say you have three kids in your family. Each one comes out of the womb as a fully formed personality. Wouldn't you agree with that? Yeah. It's not like you can mold them into whatever it is, right? They already are something. And you also feel, and I feel this about myself, like they come into the world with their own issues,

right? There's something, you know, one of them may be be angry one of them may be very peaceful you know but so where does that come from i mean it would just pop out of nowhere yeah i mean uh so i mean i love this shit just because it's stories you know i love to make up stories right but like in my book the legend of bagger vance it really was about previous lives. It was about – it went back to the continent of Mu and all that sort of stuff. And as I'm writing this and it's coming out of me, I don't even know I believe it until I see it on the page. So it does – by the time I was still writing that, I sort of felt like, you know, I believe in this. I think there's something to it. in this. I think there's something to it. And I also believe, for whatever this is worth,

that we don't go through previous lives just as solitary individuals. I believe that we might have like a group of four or five souls that are kind of migrating with us through these lives, you know, and have this, you know, like a constellation of souls that have a same, we might have a mentor that's with us, you know, through various lives. Again, I can't prove this in any way, but I sort of, I sort of have that, have that feeling, you know? Where does that feeling come from? When you say you have that feeling, how does that feeling manifest itself in your mind? I find myself writing it, right? And I don't know where it's coming from. And as I'm writing it, I feel like that makes sense to me. This doesn't sound like bullshit to me. This sounds like, you know,

reality. And so again, I can't base this on anything other than I'm sort of inspired with it from somewhere. You're just saying it resonates. It resonates with me. It rings true to me. What do you think the soul is? Boy, that's a great question. I mean, it's that, it's that, it certainly exists, right? There is such a thing as a soul, even though we can't weigh it, right? We can't find it. We can't put it under a microscope, but there's certainly something there other than the ego, right? And everything I've been talking about today about that underground river and the greater dimension, that to me is soul. And if we live by soul, we're going to be happy and we're going to be productive. And if we dismiss soul, we're fucked. You know, if we stay in that ego, we're fucked. fucked. You know, if we stay in that ego, we're fucked. And, you know, I think what you were talking about earlier, Joe, about you don't want to get in that place of I'm listening to praise or blame or anything like that. That's our instinct. The soul, I think, doesn't have anything to do with that. It doesn't give a shit about that, right? Just as operating, you know, it's

got its own North Star that it's going toward, you know? That's what it seems like to me. And it seems like it's much wiser than we are. I mean, I think when we tap into that, we tap into like 0.0001 and it blows our mind. It's so much to it, It blows our mind. It's so much to it. You know, I think there's, you know, it's some greater cosmic unity. I don't know what. But it just seems to you.

So when you write, this is like a repeating theme that resonates in your mind. Yes. That leads you to believe there's truth to this. Yes. Or at least it's a great story. You know? Yeah. It makes a story. It's truth to this. Yes. Or at least it's a great story, you know? Yeah. It makes a story. It's certainly a great story.

But it also exists throughout human culture for some strange reason. It's something that we've concentrated on. It's part of Hinduism. Great civilizations and religions that have been around for tens of thousands of years believe it absolutely. It's not airy-fairy to them. And do you think that they came to that conclusion from the same sort of process of when you think about it or you contemplate it and write about it, it seems to resonate. And then when you say it to other people, they're like, yeah, there's something there. I mean, if you bring in psychedelics or what you were talking about, about who knows what the ancient Incas and all these cultures, whatever they used, right, to get to that state where they were seeing, you know, the global thing beyond everything.

Maybe they really experienced that, you know. Maybe they could travel back and relive those lives, you know? You know, there's a – in the Bhagavad Gita, there's one great stanza where Krishna, who's God, is saying to Arjuna, the great warrior, who's his protege. He says, you and I have had many lives, Arjuna. I remember all of lives, Arjuna. I remember all of mine, but thou dost not. So I don't know. I mean, it's a great religion.

It's been around a long time. They believed it. I was having a conversation with someone when we were talking about this concept of imagine if you lived the same life over and over and over again until you got it right. And because some people do believe in that and this person i was talking to was like god it's terrifying and i go is it though like if you're living this life right now like and it's all throughout your life you've been living this life and just having fun and doing things and having fun with your friends and living your life and having a family. Does it, doesn't it, isn't, don't you like it? You like it, right? If you're doing it right, you should enjoy it.

So why would it bother you if that goes on forever? Isn't that weird? Like you want it to go on while you're alive, but the concept of it going on forever and ever and ever and ever until you get it right it's terrifying to people but why why is it terrifying if the current existence if you're living in the moment your current existence like you don't want this to end like most people are scared of dying so you don't want this to stop but why we why are you scared of living the same life over and over and over again until you get it right if you're not scared of living this life right now i mean

i guess you're scared of the idea of sort of stasis that it never changes right that you're not getting anywhere because you get better but the idea of if you have an issue that you're working on, the idea that it takes a few lifetimes to do it, I don't think there's anything scary about that. It's kind of a story that has a season one and a season two and a season three. Yeah, but there's a terrifying connection. There's a terrifying feeling when you contemplate infinite time and infinite time being Steven Pressfield. You know? That's scary. Yeah, see?

This is you forever. Like what is that? Why does that freak people out? But it does. I got a question for you, Joe. Do you believe that there's a moral dimension to the universe? A moral dimension. A moral dimension.

Is there justice somewhere? Now, this goes along with previous lives, right? If you think about previous lives, you think usually that there's maybe a crime. You committed a crime 25 lives ago, and you're sort of paying coming to an understanding you know and hopefully you evolve to a point where you reach forgiveness or whatever it is right but that would imply that there was a moral dimension to the universe that it couldn't you actions have consequences right there's karma do you believe that or do you believe that everything is just, you know, you do what you do and it doesn't matter? I don't know. You know, I mean, when you go over human history and think of the horrible people that have succeeded and lived long lives, you know, you think of Genghis Khan and what he did.

There didn't seem to be a lot of negative karma coming his way. Maybe not in that lifetime. Maybe, right? Maybe in the next life he suffers. Maybe he lives his life over and over again until he becomes a monk. The ancient Greeks, they certainly believed that there were the fates, you know, and that there were

these gods and goddesses that were the fates, you know, and that there were these gods and goddesses that were enacting justice, you know, one way or another. So I'd like to think that's true. But that gives us a feeling of order. Yeah. There's rules to things. But are we just making it up or is it real? I mean, what do you think?

I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. I definitely feel like from an individual's perspective, if you do something, like say if you steal money from someone you know, if you're not a sociopath, you're going to feel guilt from that. It's going to haunt you. If you lie and you're constantly repeating that lie and trying to get people to be convinced of that lie, that is going to haunt you. And I think it's going to rob you of the present. It's going to rob you of being in the moment.

You're always going to be burdened down by this feeling that you have that you are a fraud or you are a thief or you're a bad person. You have done bad things, but you stealing that person's money, you've ruined the fact that they've worked really hard and saved it and you just came along and snatched it. So you've done this horrible, selfish thing. And maybe you feel justified because the world has fucked you over. And so you feel like it's okay to break the window of that store and jump in there and loot and take everything that you feel like, I want that. Why don't I get that? And everyone else is going to do it.

Let's go. Let's go do it. I think in doing that, you can't appreciate yourself as like an accomplished product. You're not a finished thing. You're not what you wish you were. You're not admirable. You're not anything that people would look at and go, wow, I wish I was that guy. Nobody's like, wow, I wish I was that thief. I wish I was that liar.

Nobody thinks like that. They want to be someone who other people admire. Now, I wonder, is that because we were taught that by our parents or by our schools? Or is that natural? that by our parents or by our schools? Or is that natural? You know, do we naturally feel if we hurt some other kid that, oh, I did something wrong? You know, I wonder, I don't know. I think it goes back to this thing that we are all connected and that in doing something hurtful or evil to someone, you are causing pain. And again, unless you're a sociopath, that pain, you feel. You feel that pain. And you get this lesson out of that. And you're supposed to get

that as your child. You say something mean to someone, and then they feel bad, then you feel bad. Like, why did I say that? And then you learn, like, don say that and then you learn like don't do that because you're you're spreading negativity you're pushing out this emotional poison on people and it does affect the quality of your own life and because we are connected and that's the evidence that we're connected but I don't know you know it's it's just it's I I can't say I believe anything. I say there's clear evidence to be in my life that when I'm kinder and nicer and more friendly and doing things in a better way, that things work out better. And it seems like my interactions with people are better. I feel better. I feel better about myself.

And I feel genuinely like I'm on the right path when I'm more disciplined when I get work done When I show up and respect the muse I feel better. So I feel like my life Resonates correctly with me. I feel like I'm like like the universe saying exactly that's how you supposed to do it That's what you do. You know, you do the eat the right foods, get your sleep, live healthy, be nice, put in the work, overcome resistance, get your creativity going. You feel better in living like that. think there's probably something to that, that people throughout history have gravitated towards these sort of inherent life lessons that exist in moving through this world the right way, the correct way. And that's probably why all of these religions have a moral structure.

They have an ethical structure, and they're teaching you how to live your life with the least amount of harm to others and the most amount of service to God and service to the people around you. Now, what I wonder sort of is, are those religions that teach that, which is every religion, inculcating that into kids and into everybody as they grow because the human being by nature

is savage and evil and selfish and so this it needs to be uh indoctrinated or conditioned or raised or socialized i'm just a. I don't know the answer. Because I certainly, as a teller of stories, movies, books, whatever, books and movies all have a moral dimension, right? There's always something, there's payback, or if there isn't payback, when you walk, if the bad guy prevails in the end,

you walk out and you go, oh, boy, that's, you know. Right. You know, they're just trying to. Unsatisfying. You know. So, but then the question sort of is, are the artists who are writing these things, is it to, because they know that human beings are basically rotten and don't have that moral dimension. I don't know the answer. It's a really good question. I think human beings are most certainly capable of being rotten. And human beings are most certainly capable of being great and being kind and being generous.

And we're aware of both of those things. And one, we admire. We admire the Martin Luther King juniors of the world we admire the philosophers and the the poets and the musicians that inspire us and the people that live their lives in a moral and ethical way those are the people that we admire those are the people that we aspire to be like no one's aspiring to be like Hitler you know like the the people that live their life in a horrible way. Well, they're probably fucked up, too. Yeah.

But you know what I'm saying? Like, it's not, like, it's not attractive to a healthy person. A healthy person is attracted to the person who is succeeding and who is, they're improving and they're representing an admirable life that you can aspire to try to live in a similar manner. That's what resonates with most healthy people. But then also there's people that grow up in entirely unhealthy ways. If you're living in some sort of a war-torn, terrifying country that's run by dictators, and all you've ever seen is violence, it's probably very, very, very difficult to develop this sort of moral structure and ethical structure. I guess the story of Job in the Bible is that, right?

Where the bet is, you know, if we break this guy Job's balls badly enough, you know, he will turn against you, God, and he will curse you. Let's put him to the test. Right? So I don't know. It's an issue that we don't know what the end, but it does connect to the idea of previous lives. Are we working something out over various lifetimes to try to come to some understanding? Or is there only this one life? I don't know. But just the fact that we have this one life, just the fact that this one life itself is so bizarre, so bizarre and so – I always say that if life wasn't real, if life was a psychedelic trip, it would be the wildest psychedelic trip ever. It'd be so bizarrely strange. If we didn't exist in a physical material world and there was a drug

that you could take that allowed you to exist in a physical material world and interact with modern society, it would be such a trip. Oh. Oh, my God, this is so difficult to navigate. What a bad trip I'm having. But we do exist, at least as far as we're aware. We do. So the idea that this is the only life you get, like, says who? Like, this is weird enough as it is. Like, why is it so extra weird if you've lived a thousand lives

and that every time you're born, you are picking up where you left off? Yeah. Or you are born into a new situation where you are now going to be the victim of all the injustices that you caused in the world. And then you'll have a chance in the life after that to live a more righteous life. But you're going to have to now go through this and try to find peace in the lessons that like, say, if you're a banker and you stole everybody's money, you're going to come back as a person who gets fucked over by the government. It's fucked over by banks. And you're going to come back as a person who gets fucked over by the government. It's fucked over by banks and you're going to experience this immense frustration. I mean, there's a lot

of people that believe that, that people that are living terrible lives right now, they just get awful rolls of the dice and their life sucks. It's because of what you've done in past lives. And the people that are extremely fortunate is because of the positive seeds that you sowed in your past life, which is very convenient. I don't know if I believe that, but it's interesting too. I don't know what I believe. I mean, it's fun to talk about, but so much of it is just like, who the fuck knows? Maybe it'll all come clear at some point.

Hopefully. I don't know. I don't know either. But I do know like what makes you feel good, right? What makes you feel good is community, love, friendship, and then the satisfaction of work, the satisfaction of overcoming what you call resistance, of having discipline in your life. My friend Jocko, he has this quote, discipline equals freedom. Ah, yes. It's a great quote.

That's his book. Yeah. Well, it's true. Yeah, it is true. Yeah. And that's a whole other sort of mystery is why did God or whoever designed the universe make it such that in order for you to feel good about yourself and whatever, you have to do something that's hard.

Yeah. You know? And if you do something that's easy, if you eat sugar, if you do whatever it is, you're not going to feel good. Why does it work that way? But it's true. That's an absolute rule. It certainly does physically with humans. The people that I know that are the most miserable are obese, sedentary, indulgent, and they are emotional mess messes they're just a wreck of angst and anxiety and they're filled with medications and they're constantly going to the doctor for a new thing and they they haven't made that connection they just live this awful anxiety-ridden life and they think that this is life because that's their baseline. They don't know what it's like to live a life that's free of that.

And even those who have overcome that, that temptation is always there. Always there. That cliff is always there. It's like an alcoholic, one drink and it's over, you know? And not even for people that have just people that have overcome that, but for people like myself that have never fallen prey to it. Like I've never had a sedentary life, but still to me, like every time I go to the gym, I'm like, oh boy, here we go. Like I know now that I just have to do it. And I just, it doesn't matter how I feel.

I'm going to do the work. And cause I've just established that when I get there, as soon as I get there, it's go time. Let's go. And then once I get moving and once I'm three sets in and four sets in and I'm covered in sweat, now we're fine. Now we know what to do. And now I embrace the exertion and all is good, but I have to do it all over again the next day and the next day is the same thing my friend

David Goggins is probably one of the most disciplined humans that's ever lived he talks about he goes he goes he goes it ain't easy he goes when I see my shoes in the morning sometimes I stare at those motherfuckers for a half hour but even he even he even he stare at his sneakers for half hour, but then he'll go run 50 miles. Uh-huh. And that's the difference between a person who can overcome and a person who gives in to those feelings. And some people have never overcome, so they don't even know the beautiful feeling of accomplishing something that's difficult because they've never done it. They've sort of embraced the idea that it's fun to be lazy.

It's great to be a slob. It's great to live in this world. And that's the last thing I'd ever want to do is exercise. Get the fuck out of here. And they'll pretend that they're wise in their choice, that there's some sort of frivolous nature to physical activity. But physical activity is mental activity. You just don't think of it that way because your mind is forcing your body to do the work. You just don't think of it that way. You think of it as being physical brute grunt work for cavemen. But the reality is it's the mind that forces the body to do that. And you must have a strong mind in order to get that done.

So a strong mind is not just one that can do calculus. A strong mind is not just one that can write books. A strong mind is one that controls the body and all of its inherent weaknesses and all of its urges to be lazy and sedentary and self-destructive. That's a strong mind. So if we put it back into terms of resistance, let me try and phrase it in that sense. Again, the body doesn't want to, the body wants to stare at those gym shoes for half an hour, right?

The body doesn't want to do it. That's the force of resistance that, in my opinion, is spawned by the ego, right? The body doesn't want to do it. That's the force of resistance that, in my opinion, is spawned by the ego, right? So as we overcome that and go to the gym and get that sweat going or whatever it is that we're going to do, we defeat the ego and we're allowed to move into that greater, into the soul, into the self. And so that's the battle in my terms of resistance that we fight every day. We wake up in the ego, right? Our eyes open, oh, fuck, I'm in this body. I don't want to go to the gym. I don't want to work hard. I don't want to do anything. But we know that we have to do that, right? That that's the path to getting out of this thing that will spiral down into the

toilet bowl, right? So we do it. We go to the gym, we work out, whatever it is, and we get into the self. We get into the greater mind. We've defeated that demon for that day. But it will come back again. And that seems to be, at least to me, that's what life sort of is, you know, at least in terms of our own, you know, our own physical body. Forget about the family or the community, or that's a whole other thing. But at least within our own little physical envelope of the body, that's the nature of the game every day, and it never ends. Yeah, you're in a constant state of struggle mentally and physically every day. And you can take steps to mitigate that struggle and make it manageable and make your experience better as a human being on earth. But it requires work. And the same work that you discuss in the war of art with resistance, I think that applies to many, many things that people do during the day. How many people are out there that want to start a business? They have a desire to do this thing, but there's something that keeps them from doing it. There's this little thing, they get lazy,

they want to watch TV, they eat Ho-Hos and drink Coca-Cola and just don't ever do it. And then maybe tomorrow, maybe one day, well, in 2023, as soon as January comes around, that's my New Year's resolution. Why do New Year's resolutions exist? They exist because you're not living right now. If you were living correctly right now, you wouldn't need a New Year's resolution. You would just live. Yeah. You would just keep on trucking.

Yeah. That's what you would do. Yeah. But we all have it inside of us. We just just keep on trucking. That's what you would do. But we all have it inside of us. We just have varying levels of it. No one is a fully actualized, 100% realized potential. No one. You do the best you think you can do given what you're available, what you have available in terms of resources right now, but maybe you could have been better. And if you don't think that way, you're not going to get better. Now, the positive side of that is if the positive side of our resistance that makes us want to fuck off and eat ho-hos or whatever it is, the positive side of that, as I was saying, is that there is this underground river flowing inside of us, which is our own creativity and our own

soul's expression, whatever that is, which could be, you know, painting lowriders or doing your own motorcycles or writing a book or making a movie or having a podcast or whatever it is. And I think that all that resistance, that negative thing doesn't come out of nowhere. It comes to me out of a response to a dream that is not being fulfilled or not being addressed, not being taken care of, whatever that is. So that the doing the work is not generic or not random. That doing the work is not generic or not random. It should be something towards something really specific that we, a dream that we have, a creative dream that only we could do. You know, only you can do what you're doing, Joe, and only I can do what I'm doing.

Nobody else can do it. But that's there, that creative seed. You know, it's that river that's flowing towards the ocean. And so if we can just believe in that river and then take the steps, like you say, whatever, you know, and it's always difficult because it's always in the teeth of resistance. Whatever positive force there is, resistance is like an equal and opposite force trying to push us back. So if we can just keep that, you know, believe in that positive force, believe in that dream, that creativity, and push resistance out of the way, it's like we were talking before about project by project, whatever that project is, to surrender to it, believe in it, and do it. Yeah, there's a real value in that.

And there's also a real value in the way you've sort of defined it and laid it out so people could see it. It's like that old expression, it's okay to have a snake in the room as long as you have the lights on. I've never heard that before. Yeah. Well, there is going to be a snake, that's for sure. Yeah, but you turn the lights on. Like, look, there it is. Like, it's always going to be there, but let's get over this fucking thing. Like, and you can do that. And you can do it by showing up every day and putting in the work. And then in your other book about it, Turning Pro, be a professional.

Like, this is what I do. Here's the guidelines for how to become a professional. But you can apply that to so many different things. Everything. Yeah. It's a weird thing about the human mind, that resistance thing. The other crazy part about resistance is that it really has no strength of its own. It's not like we're going up against a dragon or a lion or whatever it is.

Once we confront it, just like you get that third set and you start to sweat, it just goes away. It just dissolves. Yeah. Right? So we become afraid of it and the fear stops us from doing it. Yeah. But all it really needs to be is just dismissed, you know?

And I'm sure that's what the Dalai Lama does or any great avatar just, I dismiss you. I dismiss you, you know. Yeah. And it goes away. But yet, if we don't do that, it'll defeat us and run us right into the grave. It's wild, right? Yeah. Out of all your years of discussing this and talking about it, isn't it fascinating, though though that it still has a grip on you?

Absolutely. I mean, it's not fascinating, but it absolutely, it's true. I mean, I'm facing just as much. I don't think it ever goes away. It's a law of nature. It's a force of nature, like gravity. If I lift this thing, it's going to fall. When you get up to right and you have the – what is the feeling like to you, the resistance feeling? I'm afraid to do it. It's just like going to the gym. It's like I have all the excuses. I don't feel like doing it today.

I haven't got enough time, blah, blah, blah. I have all the distractions. I have fear. I say to myself, this thing you're working – you're going to work three years on this thing. You're only going to embarrass yourself. It's a piece of shit. You know, it's that kind of thing, all that sort of stuff. But I will say, having done it for 30 years or so, like you at the gym or whatever, I know if I do the work, I'm going to feel good at the end of the day. I know it because I've done it so many times.

And so I just have to keep reminding myself of that. And then I have my various little tricks to help me, you know, get over it. But it doesn't go away ever. You know, I don't think it ever does for anybody. It's a force of nature. It's there. Yeah. And momentum really helps. Momentum is tremendous. Yes. It's everything. Yeah. Momentum and habit, which are the same thing, really. Habit is just momentum, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Yeah. That's why I hate vacations. Yeah, me too. Me too.

I like them in that I actually do enjoy some aspects of it. But there's always this part because there i think we do need a mental reset especially if you're a person like me that's really kind of burning the candles at both ends all the time like sometimes i just need to sit on a beach with a margarita and just relax yes but that's the part there's this is a little fucking demon in my head is like what are you doing you ain't doing shit you ain't doing shit you're not getting nothing done and then i it's hard to get right back to work again yeah it's hard to like once i'm working all the time then it's almost like i wake up and i'm just ready to go to work i'm ready to go but if i just take a long time off and i'm not doing it it's like

oh it's difficult did you ever know ed Giuliani? No. The bodybuilder? No. Who just tragically died a couple of years ago. He's from Arnold's generation. And he was a sort of a protege of Jack LaLanne. And he said that Jack LaLanne used to say to him, it's okay to take a day off from training, but on that day, you're not allowed to eat. day off from training, but on that day, you're not allowed to eat. Oh, Jesus. And he also said, every day that you take off equals six days once you get back on it. So that's probably why, whether that's right or not. That's ridiculous.

When we take vacations, you know, we feel it, right? Yes. You know? What a psycho. You can take a day off training, but you're not allowed to eat? You're not allowed to eat. Wow. Well, Jack LaLanne was such an animal to eat? You're not allowed to eat. Wow. Well, Jack LaLanne was such an animal.

That's the guy right there? Yeah. That's Eddie Giuliani. Shredded. Yeah. Yeah, he's shredded. But the thing about Jack LaLanne is like when he, I think he was 90, he was pulling boats. Yeah, tug boats with his teeth.

Yeah. How old was he when he was doing that? Something like that. Something crazy. Yeah. Like he basically did that until his body like with his teeth. Yeah. How old was he when he was doing that? Something like that. Something crazy. Yeah. Like he basically did that until his body like went, enough. Yeah. Check, please.

Here's my theory on vacations, for whatever it's worth. And I'm like the worst vacation taker in the world. I feel like people ask me sometimes, what do you do between books? And my theory is there should never be a between books. You should, on the day that you finish this one book, you start the next one, call it whatever project, whatever, whatever. But what I feel is like, say I've started a new one, right? I just want to keep working until I've got some momentum going. Like I've got a beach yet on that new book. And I say, okay, I've got my toes on the ground. I know I can, then I've got a beachhead on that new book and I say, okay, I've got my toes

on the ground. I know I can, then I'll take a vacation. You know, when I know I've sort of got enough momentum that if I stop for a week or I stop for a period of time, that momentum will still be there, you know, but I feel guilty every day that I'm on that vacation. It's crazy. I know it's crazy. I do too, but I've gotten way better at it. My wife's helped me with that. She doesn't feel guilty at all. Women definitely help you. Yeah, right. Yeah. I don't know why women don't feel bad about that, but they don't. I don't know. So your thing is finish the book, start a new book, get it going,

and then you can take a vacation. Yeah, exactly. That makes sense. And in fact, I'll go a little farther than that. While you're finishing book number six, let's say, you should already be starting book number seven, you know, outline it or whatever you need to do. Oh, really? So that there's not ever that day when you've got, look at the page and you go, what the fuck am I going to do now? You know, You've got to look at the page and you go, what the fuck am I going to do now? Get something started.

So you've got 20 pages, 40 pages, whatever. So you feel, okay, no problem. I've already been working on it. I've already got a beachhead. I'll just keep going. That's the same thing that most comedians do. Oh, do they? Yeah.

When I'm writing a special, like if I'm finishing a special, I already have like five or ten minutes for the next special. Ah, that's great. Or five or ten minutes for the next act. Uh-huh. So I'm not starting from like, what am I going to talk about? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. There's something, and then from there I've got a scaffolding, and then I'll build off of that. Yeah. Yeah.

Oh, I didn't know that. That's interesting. Well, I certainly agree with that. Yeah. Well, I certainly agree with that. Yeah, a lot of guys, like, say if you have a, like, I was just talking to Chris Rock, and he has a new special that he's working on, and he's currently doing sets where he's doing as much as, like, I think when he was in Austin, he did an hour and 40 minutes. But his special will only be one hour.

So what he's going to do is he's going to tighten that down and edit that down to the very best one hour that's possible out of that hour and 40 minutes of material. But once that hour special comes out, now Chris has 40 solid minutes of other material that he can tour with and that he could add on to. And so for a guy like Chris Rock, adding 20 minutes onto that, not that hard. And then he'll probably do the same thing. He'll probably develop an hour and a half, hour and 45 minutes of new stuff. Then film a special and then still have another 45 minutes of stuff. And then so you always got bread in the oven.

You always got something cooking. Boy, it would be a fascinating documentary to, like, put the camera over Chris Rock's shoulder. Sure. And ask, you know, why did you pick that one? Why? How did you structure this? What were you thinking?

Yeah. Yeah. It would be intrusive, though, I think. Like, probably. I don't know. Maybe. But it'd be fascinating. It'd be fascinating for us.

But for someone that's, like, in the middle of the creative process, like if you did that with a Gary Clark Jr. or something like that, like, why are you playing that? Like, get the fuck out of here. I'm trying to play. I think for a lot of artists, they're in the moment, right? Yeah. To stick a camera in their face while they're doing it

would kind of like fuck with the thing. Probably. You know, it's like when they talk about quantum physics right talk about the observing of the thing changes the thing it's probably a quality of that with everything maybe there'd be a way to film it and have him not talk about it in the moment but afterwards yeah perhaps perhaps but even just the presence of cameras filming him would probably be. Be self-conscious. Your ego would get in there and you'd start to fuck yourself up. You get in your own way.

Yeah, you need a certain amount of real freedom in that regard. Oh, I know what I meant to ask you, Joe. I heard a thing with Sam Kinison when he was talking about writing his material. And he said the hardest part was the transitions. Could you talk to that for a second? Do you agree with that? Yeah. I don't think that's the hardest part.

No, not for me. The hardest part for me is the initial premise. Those are the hardest. Those are basically patches of fertile ground. You need to come up with these patches of fertile ground, then you can grow things in them. So when I have a premise, like whatever the premise is about, now it's just once I know that things are growing in it, I'm like, okay, good. We got something. Now let's formulate it.

But to think about a thing to talk about and to have that thing worthy of an extraordinary amount of time. Because if I'm going to develop a bit, like I used to have this bit worthy of an extraordinary amount of time. Because if I'm going to develop a bit, like I used to have this bit about a guy who broke into the White House, and that bit took months of my time to figure out how to say it right and all the twists and turns and saying it in a way that it's the most palatable to people that are listening to it and the funniest. And you got to find a premise. But once you find a premise like but once you find a premise in that premise you like smile when you're thinking about it then you got fertile

ground and the transitions i mean it just requires some creativity i don't think it's that hard to transition from one thing to another thing i don't think it's that but you know sam's time was, he's from the late 80s, right? And Sam Kinison really became famous in like 86. And there was no one like Sam Kinison before Sam Kinison. So his style of comedy was very new. I have benefited from the fact that he existed and that Bill Hicks existed and that these guys who kind of had that similar sort of rambunctious, energetic, introspective, brilliant set, this way of doing stand-up that was very different than, say, Bob Hope or a lot of the Jerry Seinfeld observational comedians like these guys already carved the path. So maybe for guys that came up like myself after Kinison, it's it's not as difficult. You can kind of see how to do it better. They've trailed. They've blazed the trail.

You know, how do you come up with a premise? It depends. Sometimes there's an interesting thing that is in the news or that I've encountered or seen in a museum or read an article about, and then I'll just, again, I'll write essays. I'll write essays, and from that essay, I'll extract something and that something is actually viable. There's something there. Sometimes it's just an encounter in the real world. It's like something that's happened to me. Sometimes it's from a discussion I've had with a friend and then I'll say something and they start laughing and I'm like, I gotta write that shit down. So do you feel like you're sort of always on the lookout for premises? Yeah. Particularly like now, because I just recorded something. So particularly now,

now I'm like in that period where I'm just constantly searching around. And then once I develop like a real set, then it transitions to concentrating on those bits all the time, try to make them as good as possible like to always think is that the right way am i doing it the right way maybe i should change it maybe i should shorten it maybe i should lengthen it maybe i should put it in the beginning so sometimes a bit changes when you move it around your set like sometimes of a bit that's like you're doing 40 minutes into your act it does well but if you did it 10 minutes into your act it does even better ah it's weird yeah yeah it's weird it's. Yeah, it's weird

It's like things have their place and you don't know where that place is until you move them around like you ever Rearrange your office like I think my desk over here put my plant here and then and you do it like I like this better I don't know why you know, what is that? You know something can you teach comedy? You can't teach someone who's not funny. I don't think you can. But you can show people there's certain principles of comedy, like the economy of words, surprise, the way you say things. Jokes are not just a joke.

It's the way the joke sounds sounds just like a song is not just the words of the song it's the sound of the voice yeah that's true yeah there's something to the way things sound and the pacing and the timing and you can get better at that but unfortunately some people that just aren't funny uh-huh and i don't think you could teach them that, and I don't know why. I don't know why. It's just a thing. The problem with comedy classes is the vast majority are taught by people who aren't funny. I think that's true, yeah.

It's true. So Chris Rock's not teaching any comedy classes. Every time he's working on his own stuff. Dave Chappelle's not teaching any comedy classes. Every time he's working on his own stuff. Dave Chappelle's not teaching any comedy classes. You can learn things from other comedians, but generally they don't share those things with you unless you've achieved a certain level of competence. One thing that comedy classes do, though,

even if they're taught by people who aren't that funny, is they give you an opportunity to get on stage. Most comedy classes, what they'll do is you go through a course for a few weeks, and then you practice, and then one day you'll go to a show, and you'll have like a showcase. Well, everybody will invite family and friends, and there'll be 50, 100 people in the audience. And then every student will go up and do five minutes. And that's very valuable because then you get your feet wet and you start thinking about it. And like, I think I can do this. I think I could be a comedian. And then it goes on to be something you do regularly and then you get better at it just like everything else, like playing golf or writing books.

But if you don't have the spark, you't make a fire and i don't know what that spark is i don't think anybody knows because everybody's is different were you always a funny kid not necessarily no i don't think i was um i i learned how to be funny mostly during my martial arts time because uh i was like it was like gallows humor. Like I was the one who was making everybody laugh when we were riding a bus to a tournament. We're all going to compete in this martial arts tournament. Or when we were all about the spar, I was the one who would be cracking jokes to cut the tension. And then one of my friends, my friend Steve Graham was still a good friend of mine today. He talked me into doing it when i was i was like 19 when he first said it to me he's like you should be a comedian ah

i was like really i was like you think i'm funny like my my sense of humor is only good for psychos i'm like you you think you think i'm funny because you like me i go if you didn't like me you just think i'm an asshole like like he was like, I'm telling you, man. Like the way you can do impressions, the way you fuck with people. He's like, you're really – you should be a comedian. And I never even considered it. I always loved comedy, but I never considered it until he brought it up. Well, that's a big leap.

I mean, that's not something that your mom and dad say to you unless you're like the class clown. My mom was the opposite. Everybody. My mom said I wasn't funny. Yeah. She's like, I never thought you were very funny. I'm like, Mom, come on. You know, this is when I was like 21, just starting out, and she was worried for me.

She was worried that I was trying to become a comedian. She was like, wow, you're already successful as a martial artist. She didn't want you to be disappointed. Yeah. Yeah. Stick with what you're doing. Yeah, yeah. doing yeah that's always parents or they always want to play it safe yeah they always want their child to have a safe life yeah yeah it's hard it's you know it's hard to give people advice because you don't know their mind you don't know their life you don't know even if you know it you really only know a little you know what you've seen and what they show you you don't know what it feels

like to be them you don't know how their mind works and so to give someone advice on i think you should go start a business about x like says who like who knows like they have to figure it out on their own yeah but i think what you've done, particularly with the war of art, is you've given people tools. You've given people an understanding of the landscape and you've given people some tools that they can use to better themselves and to create better art and to create a better life for themselves. To get over the bullshit that holds a lot of us back. Well, I hope that's true. It's true. But certainly, I think the medium of a book and actually a podcast like we're doing now

is a good way to expose a new idea to somebody because they can absorb it in the privacy of their own mind. Nobody's pointing at them and say, do this, right? Yes. So they can read in a page and say, you know, that's me. I'm fucked, you know, and say to themselves, you know what? I got to change that. I got to, you know, and nobody has to see that.

Nobody, they're not embarrassed by that. They can, you know, maybe make a decision and say, okay, I'm going to do a sober October. I'm going to do something like that. So a book is a great way to do that because it's such a private medium. Yeah, that's a good point. Well, thank you very much, sir. It's always good to see you. I really appreciate you.

I appreciate everything you've done. And I'm glad we got to do this again. Hey, thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Keep me in the Rolodex. I will. If we haven't exhausted everything that we do. No, we'll do it again. We'll do it again. We'll certainly do it again. Hey, thanks, Joe. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. Keep me in the Rolodex. I will.

If we haven't exhausted everything that we know. No, we'll do it again. We'll do it again. We'll certainly do it again. But seriously, like I say, if it wasn't for you, the war of art would not have, you know, reached the level that it could. Every time you say something nice about it, you know, it sells a few more copies. So thank you very much. And thanks for your faith in that and in me. Thanks for everything you've done. I appreciate it. All right. Likewise. What you're doing, don't be so modest. What you're doing is a great thing. Thank you. All right. Bye, everybody.