Russell Brand and Joe Rogan explore consciousness through cold plunges, psychedelics, and meditation, revealing how biochemical impulses shape perceived identity—Brand’s 13-year sobriety and fleeting yoga enlightenment moments mirror this. They critique materialism, comparing it to evolutionary distortions like status-seeking, while Jim Breuer argues for spiritual growth alongside tech progress. Rogan’s "fuck you money" freedom contrasts with Brand’s systemic barriers, yet both agree on following authenticity over societal pressures, echoing Joseph Campbell’s follow your bliss. Ultimately, the discussion frames human fulfillment as a rebellion against imposed reality, not just personal choice. [Automatically generated summary]
But as soon as I, like, yeah, as soon as I was sort of submerged in it, that's what, like, you know, because even though it is just, in this case, just an example of me, a man simply jumping in a cold lake, and I do have a tendency to over-poeticise the mundane experiences of my everyday life, but...
Why not?
What else are we going to do while we're here?
It did make me think we are living on narrow lines, narrow train tracks of existence, never to have heard myself go, an animal noise.
I'm capable of that.
It's almost like an anti-orgasm, like a negative orgasm.
What it is, is in fairy stories, myths and religion, personally, if you're not into him already, I reckon you'd well love, is a man, an American scholar called Joseph Campbell, who is a cultural mythologist, and he studied various religions and folk tales and found corollaries and comparisons and consistencies and sort of...
It's said that where there are consistencies, there's truth.
If there's some Icelandic myth and it's telling basically the same story as some African story or some Native American story or some daft Celtic folk tale, why are human beings dislocated all over the world, coming up with the same stories, coming up with the same experiences?
Well, often in these stories, the forest is used as the unconscious.
Not only...
The forest represents the unconscious.
Often in mythology, when a character has to go into the woods, that means you've got to go into yourself.
You're going to have to go into new territory.
And also, under the water.
Similarly, also represents unconsciousness.
And what's interesting about it all, Joe, is not only ancient mythologies and old stories, but also personal dreams.
If you yourself have a dream, like this is where the work of Joseph Campbell, in its sex with a work of Carl Jung, that good.
He noticed that people in their personal myths, like Joseph Campbell said, dreams are private myths, myths are public dreams.
In people's personal dreams, they come up with images, archetypes and stories that can also be found in fairy tales.
You know, just someone asleep goes, oh, I was just walking and I went into the woods and I met this old woman in the woods and she told me that everything was going to be okay and then she put up a hood and when she took her hood down again, it was my mother's face.
It's like people are inventing their own mythology.
Because, of course, all culture is created by consciousness.
And when you do look at all the different stories and how they coincide and how many similarities they share, it is really interesting to see what are people trying to accomplish with these archetypes?
Like what are they trying to sort out?
Because it seems like that has to be some things.
Lessons passed down to children, lessons passed down to other people so they can learn things without having to experience the woods themselves.
But then there's also some sort of archetypes that they're sort of defining the reality around them in a very similar way all over the world.
I suppose what I reckon, Joe, is the more diverse our culture...
It's weird, isn't it?
Because we're experiencing on one level globalisation and homogenisation, where culture through corporatism is coming uniform throughout the world, but also there are many, many, many disparate experiences.
But on some level, as human beings, If we're anatomically as similar as we are, perhaps it's safe to assume that we're psychologically comparably similar.
Like, you know, even though you and I are sort of different body types or whatever and look sort of at a glance kind of different, we're both ultimately got the same organs, we're running in pretty much the same way.
Or perhaps we have the same psychological palette.
So throughout the world, people are Everyone's having a very similar experience of being human, the anxiety of not being good enough, the fear of death, constantly looking for something in the outside world that's going to solve the problems, that's going to answer your questions.
In a lot of these ancient texts that I've mostly got at through Joseph Campbell or Hinduism for beginners, that's normally my entry point, I, like you, am an autodidact, self-taught person.
That's one of the things I like about your podcast.
You can hear, this is a person educating themselves and continuing to educate themselves Well, one of the things that I picked up in that is that in them very, very ancient texts, there are people that, the same way as in our time that's defined by science and technology, there were times where people defined themselves through meditation and experiences in consciousness.
Those people that wrote, say, the Upanishads, whoever the hell they were, these Rishis, these ancient Indian yogis that went into deep, deep meditative states and came back with mantras and truths.
Those people are as diligent and as fastidious as a scientist in a laboratory that comes back and goes, well, look, we've, you know, we've broke down, you know, Watson and Crick breaking down the DNA. They come back and go, this is what it is to be a human.
You are going to die.
You need to get, you need to come to terms with the relationship between your contrary self and your material self.
That's the, for me, that's the stuff like, that's the conversation that I'm into, and that's why whenever I find it, whether it come from Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung or even checking out this podcast, like a lot of the stuff, Hancock, Graham Hancock's into.
That always, it presses something deep in me.
That's what I'm always looking for, you know, Joe.
There are moments where you think, that shudder you get, ooh, there's truth in there, you know.
Yeah, well those paths that you're talking about, those paths that are carved in, that we sort of normalize all the experiences that we have so they look totally sane.
If you just stray off those paths and jump into that lake and freeze your dick off and get out and you just, why did I do that?
You broke your little chain, the little chain of programming that's going on in your brain.
You did something completely unusual.
And sometimes just little things like that, little deviations off of that path will take you into a completely different place.
Allegedly things can be arranged if you're in recovery.
The problem with recovery is, you know, if you want to maintain complete and total sobriety, the only way to allegedly have that experience, and apparently it is possible, is through Kundalini.
According to people I know that have done both, they've done DMT and they've also done Kundalini, it's virtually the same thing.
You just have to be completely dedicated to the Kundalini practice and you have to go to a very specific state that's achievable once you have some mastery over the meditation and the meditation.
It was mostly because Mark Mahoney, the L.A. tattooist, I became somewhat besotted with him because he was kind of like some sort of living skeleton Elvis.
He was so charming and enchanting that I kept getting myself tattooed just so I could suss him out.
He appeared briefly in that film Black Mask, that Johnny Depp film.
As a cameo in the beginning of that, he's sort of got a blue rings over his head.
He's sort of a fascinating guy and a literal, you know, artist.
A proper tattoo artist.
People have, you know, he's tattooed like gangster crime overlords, you know, presidents, everybody.
He's done sort of like a lot of people, but he's got a very easy way and a sort of gentle kindness.
He told me this story once...
God, I wonder if you'd mind me repeating this in the media world.
When he used to be an intravenous junkie, he was in New York City and he was wandering along on the way to a party and he saw a homeless fella doing paintings and he sort of thought, oh man, I'll get those paintings.
And he bought these paintings off this homeless guy and then he went on to this party and then he went and shot up in the bathroom and then he heard a flurry of excitement at this New York party because Andy Warhol, the great Andy Warhol, was arriving...
At the party and Warhol came upstairs and he said he could hear like the acolytes around Warhol and he said he's just banged up and he's getting a hit and his eyes are rolling and he's like feeling fantastic and he hears Warhol outside the room and Mark Mahoney had left some of his paintings out there along with the works of that homeless guy and he hears Warhol go oh my god that's amazing like looking at this stuff and he goes wow look at me I'm the coolest guy in the world says Mark Mahoney I'm laying here banging up smack in a bathroom Warhol's out there digging my work and of course when he went out it was the homeless guy stuff Yeah,
he's a man with an anecdote or two.
I love that guy.
Your coffee's good, mate.
I'm buzzing my tits off.
I've only been here five seconds and I don't even know what I'm saying anymore.
Because there's something about when you you require so much concentration when you're pulling a bow back and anchoring and Relaxing and centering the bow and making sure everything's level and relaxed and there's no excess movement whatsoever as you release the arrow It's all this very very difficult little dance of the synapses that you're doing and in that dance There's no room for any extraneous thought you can't think about your bills your bullshit your life death you don't think about anything but No movement.
And a lot of people actually get better from not even practicing.
They get better from visualizing more than practicing.
They just go over the actual physical mechanics of the shot, visualize it, locking in.
But it's a big thing with competitive target archers, the visualization aspect.
They go to hypnotists and they really work on a very specific pattern that they visualize, like a very specific pattern of drawing the bow back, finding your anchor point, perfect release, arrow flying perfectly.
And in doing that, they sort of condition their mind and their body to make that perfect shot over and over and over again.
But it's so difficult to do that even the best people fuck up.
The best ones in the world, in the Olympic archery, they'll occasionally get just out of the line and get a 9 or an 8, and they don't know why.
They've been doing it 7 hours a day for fucking 20 years.
My exercise regimen changed not entirely unrelated to listening to your podcast.
Now I do kickboxing once a week.
I do jujitsu once a week.
Honestly, it's influenced me.
My mate Nick got me into your podcast.
A lot of people that I hang out with, as you obviously know, but even in the UK, in the mixed martial art world, this is a very central cultural artefact and how it intersects with thinking outside the box and a new vision of what it is to be a man and living outside of state ideals and conditioning.
That's what I'm fascinated about.
It's these new ways of being a man, of having tenderness, awareness, awakeness, but not being afraid or indeed ashamed of the aspects of masculinity that have somehow become cleverly maligned over the last few generations.
May I say, a shout-out to Dean Northway and Paul Busby, because they're the people that I do.
After all of your revolutions, after all of your economic success and global dominion, when it comes to an authority figure, you still go, well, it might have come down from on high.
You still can't have God go, well, thanks, buddy, it's great.
So it's like the opposite of going off the course.
It's going so deep into the course that everyone's wearing powdered wigs and they're all aligning with some ancient scrolls that they've pulled out of a jar in a fucking cave in Qumran somewhere and it has been decreed.
I go do jiu-jitsu once a week at a level that, you know, I mean, I don't even know if it would qualify for the term jiu-jitsu at the level that I'm practicing at at the moment.
I'm doing kickboxing where I had to go to what is called a leisure center.
Yeah, like a gym, but like a community one to do my...
Like a YMCA? Yeah, like a YMCA. I was lined up with 10-year-olds to get my white belt just to get on the ladder, do you know what I mean?
I've done that quite recently.
And as well as that, I do yoga.
So I'm using this time where I've stepped out of the madness of Los Angeles, the madness of media, the intensity of it.
And during the time, I thought, Another thing that Jung talks about is the shadow self.
All that I am not, I also am.
If you think of that, and I suppose a simpler way of saying that, is I've lived this life that's been very focused on comedy and the pursuit of individual success.
Think, what are all the things I've not done as a result of that?
When I was a kid, I was too shy and too ashamed to get into sport-type things.
I was embarrassed about that kind of thing.
I've started to do kickboxing and jiu-jitsu and even football or soccer, as you call it.
I've started to do all of those things now to start to learn about them as an adult man.
Well, it's a beautiful thing when you take chances and do things with other people that are taking chances and doing new things because you realize that it's really a lot of it is about the sort of acceptance and the embracing of vulnerability.
When you learn a new thing, it's very important to learn new things.
Because I hear you say that, and I know what that means, but do you actually, because I've got certain, yeah, I suppose prejudice is about you as a sort of black belt martial artist and as someone who's embedded in the MMA world.
You are a person who is happy and accepting of vulnerability.
Where in your life do you feel that you are embracing that vulnerability, Joe?
Well, I think every time you try something new, I'm like, in the archery thing, I've only been doing it for four years, but one of the things that I really loved about it is how fucking terrible I was when I first started.
And I was like, there's something to this that I have to figure out.
Yoga's a big one.
I've been really serious into yoga, like where I go several times a week, at least once a week, for about...
A year and a couple months, a year and like two months or something like that.
And one of the things that I really enjoy about it is that I'm not very good.
And I still get nervous before classes.
Fuck yeah, man.
Yeah, it's weird.
It's one of those weird places.
Like a yoga class is one of those weird places where...
There's almost a sacredness to it.
Like, you go in there, and no one can leave until the class is over.
Like, they tell you.
They lock the front door.
No one comes in to visit the studio.
Everything's locked in.
No one watches.
You go in there, and we don't talk.
No one talks.
You don't talk for 90 minutes, and you go through this...
Series of poses that are incredibly difficult, you're sweating like pounds and pounds of water up.
I mean, I'll weigh myself before and after, and I'll be down like four or five pounds, just from one class.
And it's very difficult, but it makes me nervous, you know?
I do get nervous before I do it, because it has this...
I think it's difficult to do.
I think I don't necessarily physically enjoy it while it's happening, but I enjoy the effects after it's over.
But I think it definitely imparts a feeling of vulnerability.
Because I always assume that if you are really good at...
This is perhaps because of where I come from.
I always assume that if you are dead good at some sort of fighting thing, that that is a highly transferable skill.
And I don't mean in a practical way, if you're good at kickboxing, you will also be good at yoga.
I just mean that if you're good at kickboxing, you don't give a shit that you're not good at yoga.
That would be right.
That's always...
That's been my assumption.
Whereas if you're good at yoga, you're not meant to say you're good at yoga, but by Jove I'm good at it.
I don't sort of like, when I'm in the MMA gym, start going like, well, you may be strangling me now, my man, but wait till we get to down with dog.
You know, I sort of feel like, alright, humility in a jiu-jitsu situation for a beginner is an absolute humility.
You recognize, you know, because I'm doing it with people that are good, and like, you know, they have to do it like they're doing it with a little kid, you know, like, and I'm very aware that they're doing that, you know?
Well, I think that if you get really good at martial arts, the only way to get really good is to be completely objective about where you are.
And if you're completely objective about where you are, and learning and trying to improve upon your skills, you apply that same feeling towards everything else.
So the feeling that you get when you're totally vulnerable in martial arts, you apply that same feeling when you're learning yoga.
Because that's the only way to get really good at it.
The only way to really do it, to 100% do it, is not to sit here and go, this doesn't mean shit, because I could choke out everybody in this fucking room.
Kids, don't smoke pot or you will become a heroin addict.
That's literally what I did.
I started with recreational drugs, was unable to...
And the reason is this, because it's not the fault of the drugs themselves.
There's a component within me that is looking to find a solution that doesn't have...
You see, when you have that perspective on going into a place and being willing to go in there and be vulnerable, that kind of thing for me, that makes me very sort of what I call hot, you know, like scared.
Like, oh, fuck, fuck.
So for me, drugs were always a thing that I trusted to make me feel a little bit better.
And so when I was smoking weed, it was like, oh right, there's that thing I found that makes me feel relaxed when it became coke and heroin and crack.
It was the same reason.
It was an attempt to nullify, medicate, And contend with an inner sense of disconnectedness and discontentment, which I think is a thing that comes up a lot on your show in other guises, because I think that's, in some way or another, we're all looking for this sense of connection, this sense of completion.
I think, in fact, the thing that led me to be a drug addict, or sex addict, gambler, whatever kind of addict you are, I think the thing that's driving it is this need for connection, this sense that Is this life?
Because this don't fucking seem right to me somehow, this system you've got this living by.
Like, give me the real deal.
What's the real thing you're not telling me?
And that's why I'm fascinated by people like Terence McKenna, who says, like, if you, you know, what he called don't stay on the pedestrian levels of consciousness, there's deep shit down there.
There's fascinating stuff.
There's machine elves.
There's corridors of kaleidoscopic wonder to explore.
You know, you're right in a way, Jim, because I have had moments in both sobriety recovery and in active addiction where I've gone, oh my God, I feel truly connected.
Now, I've had a lot of those moments in what I would call unhealthy highs, like, you know, sort of sexual kind of, oh my God, this is so amazing, I want to live in this moment forever, or moments on drugs where I've felt sort of pure bliss.
But nowadays, I tend to find it through bloody altruism and kindness and service.
Sometimes when I think I'm being truly useful, I feel this sense of connection.
But you are right.
It is not sustainable.
There is no Viagra for enlightenment.
You can't stay hard.
You feel like, oh, that's it.
I understand it.
Right, from this moment forth, I'm enlightened.
That's it.
I'm never going to be anybody's bitch again.
I'm never going to do anything straight for the money.
I'm never going to care what other people think about me ever again.
That shit's behind me.
But then someone will say something or someone will do something and I feel like, oh, I'm back here again.
Capture the Divine.
I've had in my life moments of it.
I practice yoga on my own.
I practice yoga this morning.
There's positions where you go upside down and stuff.
If you were just determined to describe things in a material and secular way, you'd say, well, you were just dizzy.
What I feel is, I go upside down, and when I come up straight again, I feel my own individual consciousness, my sense of myself, I feel it sort of disappear, like I can't remember who I am for a moment.
It all goes away.
And then I feel this secondary awareness in the back of my mind, like a sort of a grid, an awareness, and I sort of think, hold on a minute, I'm not me.
I'm not me.
There's something else inside of me.
And the thing that, you know, my big sort of...
When I was doing that internet series, The Trues, for a while, that got me into all sorts of interesting scrapes and challenges over the last sort of 18 months, two years, it was the idea of, you know, there's someone inside, our own consciousness is not free.
We are not free within our own consciousness.
We've been conditioned to the point that we don't know that we're conditioned anymore.
And I think that that sort of, you know, you notice it in lightning rod moments when there is sort of like an election and you think, oh my God, are people really into this fucking shit?
What is...
What's going on?
unidentified
Despite all my rage, I'm still just a rat in a cage.
Have you, I'm just a question, since you've been putting it out there, have you noticed There's more and more is coming back or it's like, eh, I'm noticing it more.
It's still like, you know, if you read any bloody, when you read this stuff in religious books, like say in the Bible, like it's sort of, it's going, look, become good and get to the point where even being good, you're not even doing it for that reason anymore.
You've become detached from outcomes, you know, like in from Buddhist terms, you know, like that you're, you're, No longer about fear and desire.
You're no longer trying to just fulfil yourself, right?
I'm not bloody there yet.
You know, me, even if I do something good, like go to a homeless shelter and help out for the day and all that sort of thing, a little bit at the back of my mind's going, look at you, helping out at this homeless shelter.
You've got to be able to differentiate between your forms of expression, like your art form, like a piece that you're creating, and you yourself as a person.
And sometimes, I used to think when I was younger, man, I can't be fucking around with meditation or enlightenment because it's going to ruin me.
All my favorite comedians were junkies and crazy people, you know, like Kinnison and Pryor and Hicks.
Crazy people and junkies.
You can't get enlightened.
You just gotta fucking be a wild man.
That's how you get comedy.
I'm not so convinced anymore.
And I think the creating of these memes and these characters that you can mock and make fun of inside your act is a piece of art.
You're doing something.
Just like a painting doesn't make you a madman.
You could paint a Frazetta, Conan the Barbarian painting.
It doesn't make you a mass murderer.
You know what I'm saying?
It's like you're creating a piece of art and sometimes the more points of view that you've considered, the more it enhances that work of art.
You raise a good point there because in certain In the sectors of the art world, that has always been accepted, that, you know, Heronius Bosch doing a triptych of hell don't mean, oh, I mean, this guy's fucking crazy!
You know, he may have been, I don't know.
But, like, when in hip-hop, you know, like, people talk about, you know, popping caps and whatnot...
It's taken a lot more literally.
You're not afforded it.
And it's a comedic persona.
Comedians get it a lot.
British comedians as well.
There's a few comedians.
Myself.
There's a Scottish comedian called Frankie Boyle.
When people are very shocking...
I can tell sometimes that comics are saying things to detonate territories of consciousness.
Fucking hell!
Bill Hicks did that a lot, I think.
He would say things to him and let you go, whoa, steady, and then he smacked you in the mouth and then he gently tells you that it's just a ride or whatever it is, now that he's got you where he wants you.
But people, I think we live in a culture now that's very prohibitive about where we go with those kind of ideas.
So people are very quick.
I've myself been on the receiving end of a lot of, what do I want to say, judgment.
And I'm like, hold on a minute, I'm fucking joking.
But don't you think that that's also because we live in this new media world of social interaction, this new social media world where anybody can chime in at any point in time?
And it's the first time ever that that's happened.
A friend of mine in England made a documentary about what has happened to the idea of the great man.
You know, like in American literature, like, you know, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth...
Or like, you know, Muhammad Ali, rest in peace.
Like, nowadays, people don't rise to that position anymore because there's thousands of Lilliputians pulling them down with tiny arrows as soon as their heads above the parapet, innit?
No one's allowed to be.
You know, people will be, oh, well, Martin Luther King had affairs, oh, Malcolm X, he was inside, he'd done this, that, and the other.
You know, like, it's, like, yeah, there are so many good things that have come from social media, so many good things, you know, the possibility for communication, the connection, instantaneous, all those things, it's wonderful, but it does, all things in the end become an expression of the dominant consciousness, you know, and if people are doubtful, cynical, pessimistic, then that, the palette, you know, that shit ends up on the canvas.
It also might be a case of, you know, everybody's always worried about wealth inequality in this world.
There's also a possibility of consciousness inequality, and that these people that have grown up with shitty parents and shitty neighborhoods, they feel left out by even your ability to seek peace and altruism.
Like, who are you, this guy?
Why are you so lucky?
You're financially fortunate, you have beautiful jeans, you're handsome, you have a wonderful...
Why is he allowed to have this happiness come to him so easily?
So there's anger at that.
The same kind of anger that you would get at the elite upper class, like the billionaires and the one percenters of the world.
People will also look at a person like you and, like, there's a consciousness inequality.
There's also a starting point in equality.
I'm sure, like you were saying, you were insecure when you were young, and it was difficult, and I certainly was, and Jim and I knew each other when we were young and insecure and starting out as comics.
We've been friends forever.
But that sort of, this experience where you are you now, and people look at that, and they're upset that, well, why does this guy have so much?
Why is this guy in this place where you can so conveniently search for truth, where I have to pay my fucking bills?
And I'm in student loans, and I'm in a shitty neighborhood, and my kids are sick, and my wife's a cunt.
You know, this is like...
And then they get on Twitter, and they're like, FUCK YOU RUSSELL! You fucking cunt!
I can actually understand that level of discontentment because, to be honest, I'm subject to jealousy and envy myself.
I spot it when it comes up, when I feel myself go, oh, why is that not me?
I should be having that.
But now I try not to justify feeling shit.
As soon as I start feeling bad, I don't think, well, this is why I feel bad, and I'd like to stay feeling bad.
I try and go, hold on a minute.
If you believe that the external world is an illusion, that it's temporary, it's transient, and what's real is your deep connection to your inner self, and you can express that in myriad ways, and we're here to have this experience as an animal, and I'm fascinated by the numerous ways that you're into doing it, and it's something that I really want to learn more about, is loads of the stuff that goes on on your show.
But, like...
I can well appreciate people seeing, particularly as the way it's presented, seeing me on television thinking, fuck that guy, fuck that guy, because they don't automatically know where I came from or what I had to do to get here, or the fact that I get here and think, hold on a minute, this isn't what I thought it would be.
Almost as soon as I got those things, I was like, this isn't real.
You can't make yourself happy.
I don't want to be poor again.
I'll be straight about that, because I hated it.
It was really frightening.
You cannot resolve those inner issues.
I now know that, empirically, for a fact.
I'm really lucky, and that's why I'm fascinated by the addiction model, and that's why I am reluctant to smash my mind to a piece of DMT, although it does sound fun.
And I would, like, what I am now thinking, Joe, is what is the most, they say that, you know, happiness is where what the world needs meets what you have to offer.
Well, the world needs what you have to offer.
And I think, God, is there a way that I can communicate some of the things that I have learned about connecting, about letting go of my flaws, taking responsibility for the problems that I am creating?
Is there anything about that that I can convey?
Can I convey it, hopefully, in a comedic and accessible way?
And that's sort of where my focus is beginning to fall.
I think everybody who's trying to better themselves is attempting some form of that.
But it's also what you're dealing with when you're talking about the criticism of you.
They're trying to define you based on one interview or one article or one thing that you said in response to one piece of current event.
So it's real.
They're quote mining a lot of times in a lot of ways, looking to have a more concentrated form of that That jealous expression that we were talking about?
Like, there's gotta be something about this guy I don't like.
That's it.
I don't like how he went on Fox News and mocked America.
Yeah, you're mocking the journalism?
Yeah?
You think you're better than these people that are here telling the truth?
Well, I think the way that works for me is that that is a thing that is called confirmation bias, isn't it?
You've already feeling something inside yourself, and then you're sort of unconsciously, you're scanning data.
To get confirmation of, like, so if I feel insecure because you're super good at MMA and have black belts in jiu-jitsu, instead of dealing with my own feeling of, oh, fuck, if this becomes a fight, I'm not going to be able to deal with it, I would rather go, no, this guy's...
And I'll find something to complete that.
Oh, he had advantages that I didn't have.
If I had this, I would have been...
But, like, you know, like...
But really, the feeling is in me, and this is what my personal experience of actually getting clean from drugs has taught me, is that what other people think about me is none of my business, and it's something that's happening in their own consciousness, and they're always looking for some coordinates upon which to project those feelings, and I know that because I fucking do it.
If I start getting jealous about some super successful guy or someone who's super good at fighting or whatever, I'm dealing with something inside myself, so now I try not to bring that shit to the world.
I try to go, right, Russell, you better deal with this feeling of inadequacy or this feeling of jealousy or this feeling of insecurity because otherwise it's going to ruin your experience of being human instead of going, no, the problem is this guy or that guy or this person having a successful podcast.
I try to go, no, no, Russell.
Connect with yourself.
You know, I'm trying not to blame the outside world for my shit anymore.
Well, I think in a lot of ways, yeah, these are really complicated thoughts that we have and in many ways we're almost a victim of this constant need to evolve.
Like the body and the brain is set up to constantly be comparing ourselves to others and to feed off of each other, whether it's through jealousy or inspiration to try to achieve higher and higher levels of competency at anything.
To develop more social credibility, to develop more clout in the community, to feel better about your own existence.
It's almost like what we're dealing with is some sort of a programming that is constantly set up to innovate and to continue to get better and better at everything.
So if I see you in some movie, I'm like, How come I'm not in these fucking movies?
You raise a good point, because what you were talking about there is how biological imperatives, whatever that force was that made us divide from one cell to two cells, to ten cells, to fish, to frog, to To mammals, to cities, to all these architectural Wi-Fi wonders.
That force, as you say, is still in us.
Now, these imperatives to grow, as you were saying there, Jimbo, if you're living in a tribal society, it's a necessary function.
But what's happened to our species?
Do you know that cliche, you are what you eat?
And it means if you eat shit food, you'll be shit, and I 100% agree with that.
But in a different way, you are what you eat.
If you look at what we eat now, we eat monoculture foods, like we're in a Swathees, endless fields of wheat across...
God, I drove through...
What state would that have been that I drove through?
Yeah, a lot of people have missed the point with this be cool thing.
It's don't be gay.
Let's focus down on this, as yet not mentioned, don't be gay.
And then, of course, the way that meat is consumed, endless abattoirs and slaughterhouses of condensed animals, not consumed as they would be tribally, picked off here and there, eaten once a week.
I'm a vegetarian myself.
So we have fields full of wheat, abattoirs full of meat, And we ourselves are similarly what we eat.
We have become cells of energy, trapped in cities, not free to be tribal beings anymore.
We've become so disconnected from what it's supposed to be, to be this primate, that now these biological imperatives, the desire to procreate, the desire to have status, the desire to even get high, all these things have become permutated because they're no longer anchored in a reality for which we were designed.
And imagine your position, where you're in a completely unique position even in the Western world.
You become a media superstar.
You become a movie star.
You become someone when you show up, people have cameras and you walk and they take photos of you.
You get out of a car and everyone cheers.
It becomes this really unusual event when you just arrive somewhere.
So it sets you up for an incredibly high dose of this sort of toxic celebrity feeling that you have to sort of navigate, and you have to navigate it based on the other people that have mostly unsuccessfully navigated it before you.
If you start and think about how many fucking movie stars wind up in a pool of their own vomit, Or, you know, covered in whatever the fuck they're doing.
I mean, it's a large number of famous people wind up fucking it all up, but they can't handle it anymore.
They go Heath Ledger or a million different ways.
You know, it's pills or just fucking implosion or whatever the fuck it is.
For anyone that's listening to this podcast just because I'm on it, and I can't imagine there's very many of you, there's a reference there to a giraffe that even I'm struggling with in this moment.
I just think that your unique perspective, and it's a very unique perspective, because not a lot of people get to become movie stars, is it's...
Something that the average person is trying to put it into a perspective where they can grasp the amount of pressure and the weird way that you have to interface with the world, where people worship you and everywhere you go people love you and you don't even know them.
We have to think of problems, I think, in terms of their essence, not of their scale.
You see, like, because if you, like, how I stop myself, like, you know, when I was more immersed in Hollywood and fame and stuff, like, it isn't, like, you walk in a room and, like, you know, when I was single and I'd get lots of attention from women, obviously that's a short circuit, that, because you do tend to fulfill that one.
You say, oh my god, I'm able to have sex with people.
You've decided to step away from all the bullshit, move away from Hollywood, and sort of take a break while you can financially and you can with your position in life and just relax and get a look at this.
Really ego thing of people giving me lots of attention.
Quite quickly after I used to get a lot of fame attention, I'd think, if someone else more famous than me came in, then all this attention would go there.
So what is it really?
What is it really?
I can't feed on that.
And even if I don't have that, even if I don't literally have the experience of basking in a spotlight and then Justin Timberlake walking in and see the light disappear from my face and being plunged once again into the shadows of my youth, even if I don't have to actually have that experience, I know that when I get home, I'm still just me, that none of it is real, that you can't...
There's no nutrition in it.
You can't get any...
It's not like, oh, right, this amount of fame hasn't worked.
I'll try and get even more famous.
It's because the essence is the thing.
The essence is the thing.
It's to try to connect what I am doing or what you are doing or what one is doing to something that is...
That feels beautiful to you.
That feels nutritional to you.
And for me, that is really, really hard.
Because it's very hard to enjoy those pat on the back things.
It's absolutely compelling, but you understand what it is now, so you don't have to do it.
You don't have to gravitate towards it.
You know that if you just went and got a bunch of hookers and some coke and you hold yourself up in a hotel room, there'd be some moments that would be pretty goddamn good about that.
But also there'd be the repercussions, the fact that you've slid back towards addiction, the problems, so you avoid it.
That's right.
But the pull is always going to be there, especially when the girls have big tits and little waists and big asses.
That's why I try not to press those buttons because that stuff is, you know, you can't mess, don't rattle the cage, don't wake that guy up, leave him alone.
Like Hulk, innit?
Don't make me angry, he won't like me when I'm angry.
Yeah, I mean, look, as we've gone over, you're navigating some waters that very few people get to go through and there's no books written about it.
No one has gone through what you've done and achieved some sort of a yogic state of enlightenment where they've sort of expressed it to everybody else and said, this is the roadmap.
Maybe not on his level, but Jim was on Saturday Night Live.
He's one of the best comedians in the country.
He's one of the best stand-up comics in the world, really.
He fucking crushes.
He's so goddamn funny.
But he decided, and we've been friends forever, he decided a long time ago, you know what, fuck this, I'm going to live in New Jersey, I'm going to do gigs, and I'm not going to worry about nothing.
I'm just going to have a good time and perform and not worry about fame at all.
I'm just going to step the fuck away and just work on my act, work on performing, having a good time, and trying to enjoy my life.
And that's a very admirable thing, too.
What you've done is a very admirable thing in a lot of ways.
Like you were saying about going back to Jersey and saying, what I'm going to do is my job.
I'm going to do comedy, and I do the comedy to get the money, to pay for the food, to feed my family, to take care of my life, and I love doing it, and I can bring joy to people.
If I'm honest about myself, I always had the ingredients for obsessive behaviour.
The more I look at it, I was trying to resolve something.
I thought, if I get there, then I'll be worth something.
I can get that thing.
But when I got there, I thought, hold on, this isn't even real.
It doesn't feel right to me.
It doesn't feel right.
And that's not like...
There are people, I think, very high-profile, high-level people that are making big contributions.
Can you sweep away all of mainstream culture?
Can you say the sole function of pop culture is to keep people bewildered and distracted and intoxicated while a political elite in conjunction with the corporate powers saps the energy of the great and powerful people of this planet?
But do you think that that's a conscious decision by the cultural elite or is that a conscious decision by the people to avoid reality itself and be distracted by goofy television shows and music?
But like you said, implied or said even earlier, we are still evolving.
Evolution is still happening.
It's not over, is it?
No.
So what I feel like is...
What information can we impart?
How can we...
This is an extremely successful, as I said before, cultural artefact.
You can just keep pumping alternative ideas into people's heads.
If people start to hear again and again, you're being lied to about civilisation.
It's much older.
You're being lied to about the nature of consciousness.
You're being lied to about your options.
On a very simple level, I've had, as I'm sure I've gathered, quite a lot of therapy over the course of my life as a result of the substance misuse addictions and then just out of ongoing bloody curiosity...
And they say the function of therapy is to increase your choices in life.
Because none of us lives in reality.
Anyone who's bloody done DMT will know we don't live in reality.
We live in a narrow, tiny bandwidth of reality.
So if you just live in a model of reality, not reality itself, then you should take responsibility for remodeling your reality, particularly if you're not bloody happy in it.
You can change it.
You can change your consciousness.
And for me, at the moment, that means quite mundane things.
It means that when I arrive here and my suitcases don't arrive, I have the choices of, do I now become a cunt and make people's lives fucking miserable, or do I just accept the cases are not here?
This is the reality.
Or when I arrive at the airport and I ain't got my green card and I nearly miss the flight, like all of these, I just go, oh, this is happening now.
The only choice I have in that moment is the choice of whether or not to start being a dick.
Isn't that a good idea to start those thoughts off early?
Let's accept this and get over these goddamn things.
Let's figure out what the fuck we're so terrified about that we have to create a land in the clouds that we're definitely all gonna go to and meet up after the fucking show.
But the thing is, Joe, you know before when we were talking about your DMT experiences and you said it would be like sort of a caveman with a crayon trying to draw God, right?
And for me, the term learning difficulties was polite because these people were like, you know, fucking seriously mentally ill.
I mean, they were beautiful human beings and everything.
But anyway, I had a really fantastic time there.
It made me feel incredibly grateful for my own life and all the things one would imagine that you'd feel in such a situation.
And I was chatting to the people, and one person was like, people were getting various certificates for various kind of achievements, whether it was in the art, doing some drawings, or whether it was doing some cooking or whatever.
And I started to feel this impulse of Sort of a bit of patronisingness of like, oh, you're getting that certificate, are you?
And then I thought, oh, in a minute, this ain't no fucking different from someone who's doing like a four-year MA in religion in global politics, really.
I mean, if you can imagine supreme consciousness, if you can imagine the realms experienced on DMT or the realms that are being described with people that have dedicated themselves to meditation or kundalini, have dedicated themselves to, you know, Terrence McKenna, get into them super states of consciousness accessible to individuals, and our birthright, some people say, that our little achievements of, I've got myself a giraffe, for example, Or a new car or the things that I'm proud of today.
You know, like, we similarly are on this little pedestrian level.
You know, like, we're sweet little darling things, really, with our material achievements, with our accolades and our awards.
And it changed my perspective of it, of like...
Bloody hell, the difference between me and someone that's not in what you'd consider being the normal strata of the mental health field, it's not that bloody different.
Not in infinite space, not with Jupiter sucking in meteors, all that shit going on right now.
What's the difference between me and someone that life is confined to cooking projects?
It's not hugely significant, except I'm not that good at cooking.
Well, it might not be hugely significant in your perspective when you look at the infinite, but it's very significant in terms of the two of you relating to each other and trying to work this life out and trying to be sort of compatible, try to communicate, try to be friendly with each other and work out all the weird cultural differences between everybody and try to get to the essence of what it means to be a person.
And we're all going through some weird sort of struggle.
Doug Stanhope's getting sued because he wrote a whole article saying that he's really good friends with Johnny Depp.
And Doug Stanhope wrote a whole article about how the woman has been blackmailing Johnny and threatening him, and he brought it up before the whole thing came out in the news that she wanted...
She had certain demands if he didn't reach...
Who knows who's fucking right and who's wrong.
But at the end of the day, you know, whether Johnny's telling him the truth or not, but at the end of the day, even Johnny Depp can't escape.
We're looking at, in his situation, whether he's navigating it successfully or not, he's definitely in a strange path of the river.
He's in a strange, deep, wide channel with incredible rapids, and he's riding on a fucking inner tube down this stretch of river that nobody gets to ride.
The Johnny Depp stretch is like the Tom Cruise stretch or the Samuel Jackson stretch.
Like, whoa!
These motherfuckers can't go anywhere.
Yeah.
Stan Hope told me he hangs around with Johnny Depp and they can't go anywhere.
If he went to the movies, he would leave the movie theater and people would be trying to grab him as he was walking out of the theater just to touch him and take pictures with him.
It's not like you can't just interact with people.
You know, you arrive in a situation and you think, right, here are my prejudices about Tom Cruise, all the things I've read, all the things I've heard.
Go Prejudice.
But, like, we meet him, he blasted me with such affability and charm that they melted away, like ice cones, the pure heat of the man's sweetness.
Like, on the sort of, like, it was my birthday during that film, I've got a big basket full of, like, you know, yoga-related things and stuff like that, these sort of thoughtful presents.
You remember, you know, he shakes your hand, remembers your name, sort of remembers details about you.
He's like, if you mention your auntie or something in the conversation, the next conversation, he'll mention that auntie.
I went round his house for dinner, I was really, really late, because of that fucking monkey, actually.
It was playing up, like he was not working that day.
I went round his house, when he was married to Katie Holmes, and there was that little famous Tom Cruise, Suri Cruise was there and all, all lined up.
I went there, I was very, very late, and they'd all eaten.
And they goes, oh, well, do you want to still eat?
I went, yeah, yeah, and I will eat.
And I had to, like I'm sat with you now, Joe, opposite Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and the little darling one, I was fucking eating spaghetti.
And that's a complicated thing to eat in front of Tom Cruise as well.
It's long, isn't it?
And I was trying to meet that lady in the tramp, shoving that shit in.
And then the next course, I think, was lasagna, which was weird, because that's two pasta courses.
Then I think there was cupcakes and stuff involved.
All the way through it, just sat opposite Tom Cruise talking about communism, which I brought up as a topic, which in retrospect was a mistake.
I think anything, as soon as people start to implement ideas, it gets into fucking trouble, doesn't it?
Power!
Yeah, the power, of course, mate.
Because all of these political ideas and religious ideas, it's supposed to just be, we're here, we're going to die, should we try and make it as nice as possible?
And part of that's going to be not being out of order to each other.
But all of them interface with our problems, the problems we've described, those biological and mechanical drives.
So I'm trying to...
All I've said is, like, the communism...
There's a socialism and communism that's different from the depiction of communism that a lot of Americans and English people would have because we were on the other side of the Cold War.
So we got a very, very negative impact.
And, of course, that was...
A version of communism that's pretty fucking brutal in places, as is capitalism, you know?
So I'm sort of like trying to kick around these...
I'm saying like, yeah, but really, all communism is a sort of a version of Christianity in that it's saying we are all brothers here and all of us have rights and we should be trying to build a society where we love each other.
That's sort of what he's saying.
You know, where it goes wrong is it doesn't allow room for individualism and the myriad distinctions between different human beings.
Yeah, the dictatorship aspect of it is almost like that same inescapable drive that causes someone to want to be the monkey with the five monkeys that it could fuck any time it wants.
There's always someone going, I'm going to be the monkey that's fucking fine.
Whether it's any sort of religious extremism, there's always some guy at the end of it going, I'm going to be fucking five monkeys in my trailer.
And that person's ruining it for the rest of us.
Because whenever you see a religious cult, I've started a religious cult, we all live here together and we grow our own vegetables, everything's organic.
Yeah, alright, that's lovely, mate.
Are you fucking everyone?
Oh, look, I don't get into that.
A little bit, yeah.
A little bit.
I've got a monkey trailer that I'm spunking up in.
That in chimpanzee societies, they have about 75 chimps, right?
And once it gets to about 80 or 90, things get edgy.
And they normally break off and go, fucking hell, we better have Another little breakaway chimp community, because this is getting too heavy over here.
And so the assumption is that we, as great apes ourselves, similarly should be living in manageable communities.
We're so overstimulating.
When we're joking about the power of women and femininity, you're not meant to be exposed to that kind of stuff.
You're not meant to be exposed to that kind of imagery that is present in pornography.
You're not meant to be exposed to that kind of variety.
We're meant to be like there's 50 or 60 of us.
All right, these people are good warriors.
These people are good fishermen.
These people are good at...
You know what I mean?
You just find mysticism.
You find little roles in it.
But again, since we've lived in this monoculture where people are like little cells, batteries, all sort of stacked up together in cities and suburbs, then how do you access that?
Well, it's an authentic human experience, but it's a very new one.
It's a very different thing.
And I've tried to figure out what it is we're actually doing, but it seems to me that everything is getting more and more connected, right?
So what we're doing in these cities is we're connecting 20 million people into this mass of buildings.
And then we're connecting them all with the internet.
And we're connecting those 20 million people with the 10 million people in this state and 5 million people in that state, and we're all becoming one sort of weird, gigantic group that's very, very dissimilar from the original tribal groups that allowed one alpha male To run things, one alpha female community, everybody knowing and understanding each other.
And when you talk to archaeologists, have you ever read Sex at Dawn, Dr. Chris Ryan?
Really interesting book.
But what he maintains is that this idea even of monogamy that didn't exist in these tribal cultures, they shared sexuality.
Everybody swapped around, and people banged everybody.
And that's one of the reasons why they stayed intimate, is that they all probably were polyamorous.
Well that's a weird thing too, is how children maintain some sort of talent traits that their parents have.
Like there's things that get passed on through children, through DNA. Obsessive behaviors, like desire to grow and learn, people like have kids that are very similar in personality, that seem to be like inherent to the child, that seems to come through the DNA. Yeah, but wouldn't that be a little bit too of the kid that's all he knows growing up, and if he's watching a parent that's obsessive, he's either going to go, I am not being that, or I'm that.
Sure, it's possible.
It's totally possible, but there's also a pattern that they follow.
My middle daughter is obsessed with things.
She gets obsessed with things.
She's read six Harry Potter books.
She's eight.
She just keeps reading them.
She'll read hours and hours every night, and then all she wants to talk about is Harry Potter.
She's all fucking totally Harry Potter'd out, like, all day long.
She'll explain something to me.
I'm like, is that a Harry Potter thing?
She's like, yes, it is.
And then she'll...
She's just obsessed with Harry Potter, or gymnastics, or whatever the fuck it is.
She's very much like me, like, where she gets something.
She's just doing cartwheels in the living room all day long, and fucking back handsprings.
She never stops.
She's just obsessed, and she gets on these things and just rides them out.
And she doesn't even necessarily know that that's how I am.
I don't think she sees that, because I'm not like that when I'm around her, really.
You know, if you're continually activating certain neurological pathways or creating synaptic relationships, then that's going to fire up more regularly.
I mean, I notice it with some of these new things I'm doing.
Like, initially, when people were explaining stuff about getting out of half-guard and how even to shuffle on the floor, you know, that shrimpy stuff, I was like, I ain't ever going to be able to do this.
Because soon it seems like it's making its way behaviourally into a different aspect of my consciousness.
And I suppose when you talk about happiness or misery or addiction, if you're continually living in that circuit, people talk about programming.
I feel like when I'm aware of my programming, there's certain things that if people say them to me, I can't help the reaction I have.
Obvious ones, if I'm exposed to certain sexual images, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
I feel all those feelings before I make any decisions.
If someone makes me feel insecure or says something, I have to really watch that moment, because otherwise, before I know it, I've gone down a path of behaviour.
And I think that perhaps what we can do on an individual level is learn, and this is hard for people who are living in total fucking crisis and dreadful poverty, and like you said before, I personally am in a privileged position where I can begin to bring my consciousness to those kind of things, of like, right, I want to live on that circuit now.
I don't want to always have...
I don't always want to feel fearful in these moments.
I want to learn to plough that neurological pathway so that it's easier for me to stay there.
Programming is necessary and if you're not living on a program that you've taken control of individually, you're living on someone else's program, you're living on that program that's out there, that constant bombardment of negativity and fear and anxiety and division and you're different from people and you're not good enough and by this otherwise you're not going to be good enough.
You're going to need pretty strong defences, I think.
With the diminished role of religion in our life, with the diminished role of political ideologies that we can trust, what are people supposed to do about being alive and not feeling good?
Now, do you think we could introduce to that a kind of a compassion?
Because, like, you know, earlier on we were talking about, like, we can understand people's sort of jealousy or irritation at, like, people being famous or rich.
Because, you know, there's no doubt.
There's too much inequality.
There's too much injustice.
It's not something that can really be questioned.
And, like, so what I'm trying to do is bring bloody compassion and tolerance to places where I find it hard.
Today, someone's...
Like, you know, I told you I didn't bring no clobber.
I left my suitcase.
I fucked up.
So I went in the shop, and this is a problem of great privilege, but I went along to a pretty cool shop in Los Angeles, and the security fella goes, oh, the shop ain't open yet.
Then he recognised me, and he goes, oh, no, no, no, the shop is open, right?
And I was like, oh, thank you, mate, and I felt all special for a moment.
Then we got to the doorway of the shop, and the guy that was inside the shop, he, I don't know, he's having a bad day or whatever, and he goes, oh, you know, maybe you can't come in, right?
And I immediately thought, you fucking...
The reaction I feel inside myself.
Like rage, actually.
And the security guy, to his eternal credit, overrode the guy in the show.
Just let him in.
Just let him in.
And then I got in the show and I felt better about myself.
But in that moment, I felt special.
I'm allowed in.
I had so many little things sort of triggered in me in that sort of short momentary interaction and feeling of like, oh great, the security guy recognises me.
Oh no, this guy don't let me in.
And it's very hard for me, actually, because I'm still in my mind judging that guy that didn't want to let me in a little bit.
I'm carrying I've got the perfect thing like a silver bullet.
It's an ideology that is also a very positive one in the sense that it's dedicated towards self-improvement and eliminating all these psychological barriers that are holding you back.
And in that way, people find a lot of benefit in being a part of that religion.
And I think when they find a lot of benefit in being a part of it, then, you know, they can justify all the other nonsense and just sort of ignore it.
Because what L. Ron Hubbard, according to the Going Clear book, Lawrence Krauss book was trying to do was self-medicate.
He had a lot of psychological issues himself, and he was trying to cure his own issues.
And in using these methods to cure his own issues, he translated them into a religion.
This is a big part of what Scientology initially was, was his own attempts to self-diagnose and treat his own psychological ailments.
Quite a good idea, really, in the beginning, and sort of worked really well.
And there are, I suppose, people that it's working for.
A quote I heard that I liked was, be quick to see where religious people are right.
It's all really obvious where religious people are wrong, because we hear about it on the news.
But where religious people are right, togetherness, selflessness, It's a relationship with a deeper self, acceptance of death, and the possibility of transcendence of the, you know, human primal self.
Those things are all really beautiful ideas that have kind of lost their way in a science, you know, that term scientism, the idea that science has got into territories that science can't really handle, because we come to a judging full stop at certain points, you know, like, what happened on the Tuesday before the Big Bang, you know?
Materialism and individualism are hard things to overcome.
If we have as our dominant mindset, I'm only going to believe shit that I can prove, then you are just an individual and you may as well just do it.
Why not just spend your life fucking as many people as you can and accumulate in as much material as you can because nothing exists unless you can see it, measure it, weigh it, contain it and fuck it.
If that is the dominant belief system, which...
Sort of materialism, consumerism, capitalism, I think all dovetail on that premise.
You know, this is all that's real.
That's how you can have the chronic ecological disrespect is because it doesn't matter what happens after you're dead.
Well, what about my fucking children?
Even just on a practical level, I've got to live on this fucking pebble in infinite space.
But if you're just like, well, we've not really thought about that.
You know, sort of an inability to accept, you know, like certain...
And I know that you're sort of like a...
I don't wholesale buy any dominant theory, but it's clear to me that...
Do you know what I believe in?
On an individual level and on a cultural level, if something is possible, you should be trying to fucking do it.
So as soon as people realise, hold on a minute, that's having a negative impact, or hey, this is a better way of using our resources and our utilities, as soon as you realise it, you should be moving towards it.
They say wisdom is acting on knowledge.
Once you've recognised, oh, fossil fuels are running out, it's like right...
Fucking hell, we better start working on the basis that we're fucked.
We better start looking at alternative energy sources.
We better look at different alliances.
Knowing those things and not doing them, it makes me very, very uneasy.
Because it makes me think, who benefits from ignoring this stuff?
Who's running this show?
If it's creating all this rage, all this unease, all this fear in your country and in my country now, times of great, great disease and uncertainty for people, really looking for something.
And these institutions are just saying, just, you know, carry on.
There's no sort of alternative.
No one now is going to see himself as part of a religious community in the same way or as one of the dead ideologies of the last century.
And meanwhile, we're in this sort of peculiar state of looming crisis that feels kind of fucking mad to me.
Well, we're definitely in a state of looming crisis, but to unpack this whole thing, you started off with this idea of what happened the Tuesday before the Big Bang and how science can't really answer that.
Well, they can't answer it yet.
The problem is, once they gather more data, it might be a hundred years from now or a thousand years from now, they can say, oh, well here, we've done the calculations and we understand now that it's an infinite cycle of birth and death and the universe is constantly expanding and contracting and this is the process that we're a part of.
It's infinite and it's never started and it's never ending.
But that idea that you just espoused is in 5,000-year-old fucking documents called the Upanishads.
Those ideas are there already.
So when we fucked off religion 100 years ago because it was causing too much arseache, we kicked out of some of the ideas that are only now just being discovered.
Right, but those ideas are just to be contemplated right now and to be considered, whereas science is trying to find definitive evidence that they do or don't represent the reality of our timeline.
And once they do, then they'll be able to talk about it.
But right now, what they're doing is they're examining the evidence that the Big Bang exists and what could have possibly caused that.
A particle and wave can change its essential nature depending on whether or not it's Misrepresented, though, when it's been explained to me by people who actually understand it, what it really is is that we're measuring these particles, and in the act of measuring, you're changing the results because you're using something to measure it.
But what I think is interesting, Joe, is somewhere between this woo-woo craziness and the kind of a flat, mundane, look, this is life, you're born, you die, you eat food, shit comes out your arsehole territory.
Somewhere in there is a mystery that behind your eyes, behind Jimbo Jamie's eyes and my eyes, there is a constant, there is this consciousness, there is this awareness, there's this inexplicable experience that you've had on DMT, Right.
That suggests to me that consciousness itself is the dominant force.
Consciousness is not just one more phenomena, it is the seat of all phenomena.
And when people are saying, oh, there's this thing that's God, what they are saying is there is an absolute consciousness and all is contained within it.
All matter at some point has come from consciousness.
These realms that are experienced through psychedelic or extreme, you know, personal experiments like your cryogenic things or your flotation tanks all suggest a A phenomenon beyond individual consciousness.
There's something else there.
And the very fact that consciousness, even by the process of measuring, is influencing and impacting reality.
I'm not taking that to the extremes.
I know what you mean, mate.
Some people go, oh, that means your mind can control shit.
I don't think it means that.
It means that reality is only reality when you look at it.
That's what it's kind of getting towards.
A bloody good book that I reckon your listeners will be banging to is called Biocentrism by a man called Robert Lanza, who he did the best breakdown I've ever read of that double-slit experiment and made me understand for the first time that reality is happening within your own consciousness.
It's not an external phenomena at all.
He explained it in very ways that I could understand.
He went...
Think of something totally mundane, he went, like the experience of going into your kitchen in the night and turning the light on.
Is your kitchen fridge still there when you go back downstairs?
He goes, well, when you do go into your kitchen and turn the light on, parcels of photons come down, they interact with the optic nerve, they're inverted in your consciousness.
So whatever it is that's in your kitchen when you're not looking at it, it ain't the same as when you are looking at it.
It's an interpretive reality.
And one of the ways that I've sort of reduced this down from my own simple understanding is this, that if none of us had a sense of smell, if you didn't, I didn't, Jamie didn't, and then how would the concept of smell make sense?
How would you go, oh, there's paint, there's bacon?
None of us would have the instrument to receive it.
So that whole thing would be off the agenda.
So I think that there are...
Streams of energy, streams of data for which we do not have the instruments to receive, so we totally discount it because we simply don't have the instruments to receive it.
And I said once in my stand-up, as a matter of fact, my cat doesn't know there's an internet.
The internet does not enter the realm of my cat's consciousness.
We're out here having all these fucking experiences and like all those realms that we're experiencing in these various sort of psychedelic states or you know however they're achieved is an indication to me there's another reality.
Now where does that become fucking relevant to what we're talking about?
For me what it does is one of the continual ideas that keeps re-emerging to connect us back to where we were with Joe Campbell at the beginning is there is this fucking sense of oneness and believing ourselves to be individual and believing that the dominant thing in our lives to be material That fucks us up because people will kill each other over that material.
And once we sort of realise, no, the true thing about us is the consciousness, is the inner self.
That's the real thing.
Now, we're all out here.
We're all in the game.
We're all going to do shit and we're all going to make mistakes.
But let's not have the material idea as the dominant social idea.
Because everyone's agreed with that, whether they're communists or capitalists or fascists or whatever.
Everyone's saying, no, the main thing is this shit that's out here.
And it's like, that connects to those primal drives.
Because, you know, if that taps into your sexual drive, you can never have enough pussy.
If that gets into your status drive, you can never have enough status and power.
You know, so, like, we're all going to still feel those things.
I'm still going to be a cunt 25 times a day.
But it would be nice if the cultural ambience was, oh, don't worry, Russell, you'll be back to your normal self in a minute of feeling that we're all one and we're all connected.
Not...
Yeah, well, of course, I'd feel like that.
And that's what frightens me about the culture of our countries at the moment, is it's endorsing the worst aspects of our nature.
It's acculturating the worst aspects of our nature instead of the best aspects of our nature.
And for me, there's no fucking difference between left and right in the current political sphere, because they're all making the same argument.
They're all saying, come and live out here in the material world.
Yeah, it seems to me that the material world and this idea that we should be accumulating possessions and status and all these different things is universal.
It almost seems like it's a natural progression from ancient tribal civilization life to this weird city life to this integration of electronics in our life and this symbiotic relationship that we have to computers and the internet and information itself.
It seems like this is One of the things that drives that is this desire for material possessions.
Because when you have a desire for material possessions, it ensures that you're going to continue to innovate and come up with newer and greater and better.
Because you always want to keep up with the Joneses.
You always want to have the newest Tesla because it goes zero to 60 in two seconds.
And you want to have the coolest fucking house with the biggest TV and the fastest internet.
And all those things sort of compound this technological innovation cycle that we're on.
So my thought has been, for a long time, that what we are is some sort of an electronic caterpillar that's going to give birth to some artificial life.
And that all of our desire for material possessions and status and all these different things is really just us pushing forth this electronic agenda.
And that this innovation and the construction of artificial intelligence that's inevitable Hmm.
Hmm.
Hmm.
Flipping over cow patties looking for mushrooms, that we are a part of a process.
And then if you look at it objectively, all these traps that you or I or Tom Cruise or Jim Brewer have been caught up in, whether it's traps of ego or jealousy, all these things sort of ensure movement.
They ensure movement, they ensure interactivity, and that is going to ensure innovation and progress and competition.
And all those things that even when we look at it, we go, this is so pointless, this is so foolish, but yet it's so incredibly prevalent.
Not glorifying it or saying it's definitely the way to go, but objectively, if you weren't a human and you're stepping outside of this thing, looking at it from a distance, you're like, these fuckers are making something.
They might not even know they're making something, but they're making something.
In fact, Bill Hicks, I think, already said it when he said that we can explore space in and out together in peace.
That idea that if we looked at our common drives, it's like Hancock all the time.
I've heard him on your show saying that really what's happened is a bias towards a particular aspect of our own consciousness, the problem-solving brain.
And those drives are amazing.
They're trying to get us somewhere.
Technology is amazing.
The very fact that people bloody hear us, I don't understand anything, it's fucking wonderful.
But the dominant idea behind it, one of profit, that dominating idea.
Profit in itself is not necessarily negative, but profit at all costs, profit at any cost.
So, like, really, I'm not saying we should as a species fucking slow down and dress in felt and fucking, you know, like, grow around vegetables.
There's no fun in that.
I want human beings to be glorious.
But what I'm saying is that our bias towards this one particular materialistic idea is preventing us from realising that glory because part of our consciousness has been ignored.
We're not designed to be connected with seven billion people all over the world.
We're not designed to seeing a camera placed on someone that doesn't have anything good to say.
Anything interesting to say at all, but they're constantly on camera, and they're editing it in the way that your short attention span is sort of connected to this thing, because every 15 seconds they're giving you a new camera angle, and that's by design.
It's like it interfaces, like, they figured out how to do these reality shows Where they edit the shows, like a music video, where you're constantly changing the angle, so you're constantly stimulated.
If you just had Kim Kardashian sitting across the fucking table from her mom, and they were just sitting there for like three hours talking like a podcast, you would want a fucking meteor to come from Jupiter and slam right into that goddamn house.
End this now!
Stop this before it spreads!
What are they doing?!
But if you keep them going back and forth, and then you cut to a single of them by themselves, bitching about my mom, as always, and then going back to her, well, she thinks that she can do this.
And then, look at my shoes.
Look at that watch.
Oh, premiere.
Cameras.
And constant changing of angles, and constant fucking introducing of a new thing to pay attention to.
You know how many women want to get fat shot into their ass so they look like Kim Kardashian?
There's like a whole trend where women are waist training, where they're wearing these corsets and tightening down their fucking organs, and then they're having fat shoved into their ass.
They're extracting fat from areas of their body and then reintroducing it into their ass.
In order to develop this round, ridiculous thing that looks like you're wearing a fucking diaper.
We've adapted to a sort of a mutated state, and that's what we were trying to say earlier with the influences, the paradigm, the template that we're moving towards is too predicated on the material to the point where, yeah, it's ludicrous things.
I do like you drawing the comparison between the neck things and the earring things and the Kardashian ass things.
That power that we're harnessing all seems to center around innovation.
When we're pursuing material possessions, when we're pursuing physical items, we're not talking about vintage things.
I'm really into handmade things.
I love a handmade bag or a handmade knife.
I love the idea that someone created something and crafted something.
But those things are the same...
Like, if you buy a knife that some guy made hammering in one of those vats of fucking fire and bang, bang, bang...
He's doing it the same way people have done it for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
There's something fascinating about that and interesting about that.
But in terms of like...
Progression and innovation.
It's like you can't compete with these goddamn laptops or phones or any of these things.
Those things are getting better and better at this staggering exponential rate.
And at the end of that line, if you extrapolate, if you look at it from a distance, you pull yourself away from culture and civilization and look down.
What is this super-being, called the human race, what is this super-organism doing?
Well, it's creating better and better things.
Well, why is it doing that?
Why is it ignoring the very ocean that surrounds it?
Why is it sucking all the fish out of the ocean and shitting all the fucking dirt and dust up into the air, but ignoring that while concentrating on the possession and the innovation of all these electronic gadgets?
Well, it's got to be something to do with that.
It's like a pull.
And McKenna used to call it an attractor.
That we're being pulled towards some future attractor, some singularity event, some moment that we are creating, whether we're aware of it or not, but that part of all of our ridiculous behavior in terms of our ego and our drive for success and attention and love and affection, all these different things, is really sort of pushing this innovation further and further and quicker and quicker.
One of the things I was thinking when you're saying that is like...
Every time that's happening, the creativity, where are these things before they exist?
Things exist in this unrealised realm, what Plato referred to as the realm of ideas, that there's an idealised form of all things before they are realised in the material world.
Someone designing a knife has to consciously conceive of the knife before bringing it into the material world.
There's this constant need to pull from this unrealised...
Whenever I see babies now, I want to go, where were you?
Where were you before?
Where was your consciousness?
Tell me what it's like.
I was friendly, and hopefully still am, friendly with David Lynch, the filmmaker, and he told me that a friend of his were outside their kid's nursery and they had a three-year-old kid and a six-month-old kid, and they heard their three-year-old go to the six-month kid, I need you to tell me about heaven again because I'm beginning to forget heaven.
As a person, and Jim, you can back me up on this, as a person who has kids, one of the most bizarre aspects of child raising is that when you have them and they're babings, these moments when they're little and tiny, you think, I'm never going to forget this.
This is the most powerful moment of my life.
This is amazing being around them when they're so little and their first words and they're talking to you, but you fucking forget it.
You forget it all because you know them as the them they are now at six or at eight or at 10 or at 14.
And those incredibly powerful moments, you forget.
But, meanwhile, you remember some cunt who cut you off in traffic 14 years ago and you're like, I should have kicked that fucking guy's ass.
I saw him at the red light and I didn't get out of my car and it haunts me to this day.
I want to drag him out of his car and feed him his fucking teeth.
You remember that.
But you won't remember your daughter being too dancing to some music...
That's on television and everybody laughing and cheering along.
You have to see it.
You have to look at a fucking video that you saved on your iPhone and watch it and you go, oh yeah, that's right.
Oh my god, what an amazing moment.
Somehow or another, almost like dreams, those ideas are erased from the accessible memory in some strange way, or many of them are.
So when you hear a three-year-old saying that to a six-month, that is fucking crazy because it makes you wonder.
Because that's one of the properties of DMT, by the way, which is the psychedelic that's created by your own brain.
One of the major properties of that dream is how profound the visions are, incredibly powerful, but then they slip through your hands.
They are gone.
They're gone just like a dream.
When you wake up from a dream and you try to explain it to somebody, you have a very small window where you can explain that dream.
Yes, but there's also powerful, really good moments that I've had with each one of my kids that I can literally, out of all the moments that I've said, I don't remember this.
I have forgotten most, but there's a handful That I remember as if it was yesterday that was on a deeper, spiritual, conscious level where we just locked eyes, and it was a moment, and we just knew everything about each other at that moment.
Maybe I wanted that moment, but that's how it felt, and I can count that with each one of my kids where I always go back to going, wow, I really know who you really are, and I'm trying to get you back to that.
It correlates to what we were talking about with the old chimpanzees and anthropology, that there is an ideal size for a community before it becomes like, oh, this is too hard to deal with.
But those things you were talking about with your children there are like transcendent moments.
You're talking about moments where it didn't matter that you're individual A and that's individual B, that there's a clear connection, that something passes between us.
And on some level, that can be broken down, I'm sure, to sort of oxytocin and like, oh, this hormone was triggered by that.
There There is a sort of mechanical or material component to even the most beautiful experiences of a sunset or whatever it is.
But to return to what you were saying, Joe, before, of how we favour negative information, there's a clear evolutionary bias for negative information has to be stored because, you know, is that a tree or is that a lion?
You know what I mean?
Yes.
It's a lion, so negative information does have priority.
But where you say about this continued technological evolution, what I think is that there's an imperative to have a comparable spiritual evolution revolution.
How I think that can occur is, like, the more that I meditate and spend time doing that sort of stuff, it gives me more of an awareness of the kind of phenomenon you're talking about, about the positive things, and, like, you know, about, oh, my God, I must hold this moment in my heart, the moment where my dog done that, or the moment I found out my girlfriend was pregnant.
Don't fucking let this go.
Make this part of who you are as a character and try to prioritise it over negative things or when someone hurts you.
And I think that one has more determination over that, more authority over that if you have meditation as part of your life, if you have a spiritual component.
When I was a teenager, I noticed that my mates...
When I was hanging out with my mates, we were smoking loads of drawers, then we'd get in the car, we'd go out, they'd go to work, my mate worked in a car factory, and then he'd go and work doors, doing security.
And I thought, this guy never ever is just in reflection.
Still.
Yeah, he's never still.
He's never in reflection.
He's always engaged with some external thing.
He was a really lovely guy, as a matter of fact, he was.
But I became aware then that that's myself.
Part of my addiction was these uncontrolled drives always wanting something.
Approval, sex.
I was unable to be still and be in the cell.
And so many fucking things.
I'm not a Christian, but there's so many biblical things.
You know, the kingdom of heaven is spread upon the earth, but man sees it not.
The kingdom of heaven is within.
Be still and know that I am God.
You know, sort of like, for me, all the fuzzy fucking rapture cloud kingdom bullshit, you know, that's no use to anybody.
But when people are saying to you, it's in there, it's in there, it's there already.
You know, like, there's no...
Of course we are also living in a material world, and I am a material girl, so we can't sort of like...
We can't drop the drive to continue to create great achievements as a species, but a part of it has got to be learn how to connect to yourself, learn how to connect to your emotions, learn how to store positive experiences and learn how to let go of negative ones.
If that data isn't out there, we've all got our paths, haven't we?
We've all got our individual attributes and skills, like you said if we were on communism island.
You know, you need people to be realising what is their part of the divine.
What is the little part of you that's trying to realise itself but life's kept fucking knocking you back and the systems kept breaking you down and you've not got to realise that thing that you can feel like a tree you're trying to grow into.
That's the part of it that I think can only happen as part of a spiritual evolution.
And I think you can only get the ticket to the spiritual evolution if you learn to deal with this fucking mad stimulating bullshit that we're jacked up on.
I also think that that's where the compelling feeling to gravitate towards that comes from, a dissatisfaction with the material world, dissatisfaction with this idea of possessions, and that there is some sort of a weird ebb and flow and a yin and yang to the world, and sometimes you have to see the fucking disastrous effects of just giving in to material possessions and the compelling feeling of wanting attention and nonsense and just gathering up items and living in the biggest house.
You have to almost...
Feel the emptiness of that to gravitate towards a spiritual approach.
And I think that's one of the reasons why those things are there.
It's almost like people who do horrible things, like sometimes I feel like horrible things when they're manifested by the human race, they sort of, they can give birth to a lot of positive reactions because people don't ever want to be like that.
And they see that and they go, well this is definitely not the way to go because we're kind of all going through it together.
One of the things about the human mind and the human experience, like being a conscious human, is we assume that we're this static thing.
Meanwhile, we're very well aware that evolution exists all throughout the natural world, and we're also well aware that we've only really been this thing for like, what, a half a million, quarter of a million years?
It's not been that long that you could go back and find an ancient human, and they look like you could put it in your clothes and put it in a movie theater and we wouldn't freak out.
It's not that long.
It's a short amount of time.
So if you think about the fact that we know that these animals and these things are constantly evolving and changing and adapting all around us, why would we assume that we're in some sort of a static state?
I think that our own gravitation towards material possessions And our own use of this new form of interacting with each other through social media and the internet and movies.
But all those things are new.
We have to understand that mass media is fucking new as shit.
All of it.
Newspapers are new as fuck.
Everything's a couple hundred years old.
The oldest shit is a couple hundred years old.
Photographs, couple hundred years old.
We're dealing with really, really, really new influences on the mind.
And the mind is developing and expanding and reacting to all these new things.
And sometimes it reacts in a very negative way.
Like it gravitates towards the Kardashians.
And it goes towards fucking possessions.
And it wants the shiniest new thing to show everybody that you've arrived.
And it's a part, a cog, an unconscious cog in this machine that's just producing new items.
And then sometimes there's a guy like you who sees that and goes, there is no soul to that.
I'm going to jump in the fucking lake near this royals house and I'm going to experience what it's like to freeze my dick off and I'm going to carve a new path.
And I'm gonna separate, and I'm gonna try domesticity, and I'm gonna try abstinence, and I'm gonna try to find some sort of a new way of addressing my dissatisfaction with the current state of the world that I find myself in.
By the way, I should just say while we're doing this, one of the reasons why I really got into doing a podcast, there's a bunch of them, Opie and Anthony were a big one, but your fucking show was a big one, man.
When I did your show, and we did it at that joke place on Ventura Boulevard, remember you were in LA? Yeah.
And you were in town, and I had done your show calling in before, but we'd never done together.
Well, what I loved about that one, too, is what that thing allowed me to do is, believe it or not, thought-provoke and let other people...
To me, one of the greatest moments ever was you called in...
And we wrote we were all sitting there and I think you went into this whole thing of these are the times of truth and this and that and I think you spoke for 45 minutes straight and I just kept looking everyone going don't just let him go this is this is this is fascinating let him go where else can you have this and one of my guys Made like this whole Pink Floyd music and he put it on the internet.
I said, you got to get that on the internet.
And I think I remember calling you or telling you going, Joe, this is...
That was the most fascinating thing I ever heard in my life.
Well, they were kind of compromised in some sort of a weird way, whether they wanted to be or not, because they were making a fuckload of money.
And as soon as a company is paying you X amount of money every year, and they get upset about something, or they feel like the advertising revenue is going to dry up because you guys have said something crazy.
But because it was on their show, they pulled the show.
And it was probably because of political pressure or pressure from the Bush administration.
This is also, coincidentally, during the time where, I mean, Howard Stern, it was just after the time of Howard Stern getting sued over and over again by the government.
Remember, they would give these massive lawsuits and that drove him to satellite radio.
Yeah, see, that's a beautiful thing about the time that you were involved in it, too, because you were involved in it back when I was on Fear Factor because the stunt guys fucking loved your show, man.
I had to do this thing where I got in the truck.
We had to drive to some location and was hanging out with these stunt guys, and they were playing your show when it was on Raw Dog.
You bounce things off of each other and they make more sense that way.
If I trust you and your instincts and your mind and I tell you something that I believe and you refute it and I go, oh, okay, I have to consider his point of view.
Because if I trust your point of view, and your point of view differs from mine, well, how did he come to this conclusion, and why is it so different than my own?
And by absorbing a bunch of different points of view like that, it gives you a much more nuanced perspective of this existence.
But it's like all those other things that we're talking about.
I mean, like you saying that you have this gravitation towards expelling all of these ridiculous notions that everybody's just sort of accepted as fact and truth and trying to connect with a much more spiritual life.
Well, that means you've got to think about it.
It's got to be a conscious thing.
And the same thing with...
Not holding on to your ideas and not being married to them and not being invested in being correct or incorrect, but just sort of accepting them as just ideas and be able to go, yeah, I think you're right.
And I thought, if you just want to sit back, you just want to see things better, And you really can change it for the better, but you don't have to worry about going, you know, so-and-so said that, or so-and-so set that up, or so-and-so did that, because now you're doing it for a different reason.
Like you said, the fast-moving, fast-cut soundbite TV just bombarded with an artillery of mostly erroneous information.
You don't get to hear people hour after hour talking, examining, discarding, as you said, who really knows, and returning to that point.
It's sort of encouraging, because I've had like...
You know, like, as I, like, I've always thought, like, you know, I don't, like, agree with, like, Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity or those guys, but I've always kind of thought, I bet I'd think they were alright if I hung out with them.
Yeah, but the lack of discourse, like we're talking about being one of the more important things about podcasts or one of the best things about podcasts.
I mean, I'm really hoping that that's the trend of the future.
That people understand that there might not be a right way or a wrong way to do a lot of these things.
And that your point of view, whether you strongly believe it or not, might not really work for the way I see the world.
It doesn't mean that you're right or I'm wrong.
It doesn't.
I mean, there's some certain truths like, hey, don't rape people.
Hey, don't murder people.
Those things are obvious.
But there's some other things that aren't obvious.
There's other things that are not obvious.
Like, maybe you shouldn't hurt people's feelings.
Maybe you should mock them.
Because what they're doing is preposterous, and in hurting their feelings, you actually elevate all of us to realize the humor and their folly.
And I'm a big fan of folly.
I enjoy human folly.
It's one of the things I enjoy most about humans.
I'm the quickest to make fun of my own self, so if I can't make fun of them, what kind of a fucking goofy-ass world are we running?
We run in some super-sensitive world where everyone's a perfect snowflake and we can't shit on them?
I heard John Cleese talking about comedy and he said that people are very anti-humour because they know it's powerful and they often use the idea that, hey, don't joke around, this is serious.
But you're supposed to joke around about things that are serious.
And he said they have mistaken seriousness for solemnity.
And the reason they want to be all solemn about stuff is because they know it prevents people that have got that comedic switchblade from getting into the argument where you can detonate shit.
So if you come in and you deflate their argument with a quick switchblade, oh, this piece of shit, why are you joking around about something really important?
Maybe your white privilege is showing.
Maybe you should consider the fact that your humor is offensive to a lot of people.
And what you're doing is bullshit, and it's not helping.
Here's one of the real problems with the left, and especially the regressive left and the people that think that they're going to change things.
They're fucking unbelievably mean when they're mocking the right.
You're talking about compassion.
I've seen some of the least compassion, meanest, angriest shit, come out of people that consider themselves to be liberal and progressive.
And their idea is to close down discourse.
What they're going to do is going to shit on you and insult you and then gang up in some sort of a weird bully pulpit to attack all the people that don't agree with them.
When I got involved in politics in my country, doing that thing, The Truth, and I wrote a book as well called Revolution, and in that book I talked about it was basically a book that was meant to be for younger people, and it was like, this is my perspective on why I don't believe in this stuff and why I believe in this.
It was relatively simple, and again, I'm a self-taught person, so it's not a book by a fucking academic, right?
The worst vitriol and the worst condemnation came from the kind of newspapers and liberal organisations that I would think would be supportive of such, of like, you know, it's good that this guy from the world of popular entertainment, who's not classically educated, is trying to do that.
No, they came in like Get the fuck out of our territory!
Well, you gotta realize, what is the mechanism that they're distributing this information with?
What are they doing?
They're writing their own stories, they're promoting their own blogs, they're doing their own radio shows, and, in fact, feeding their own ego, like we were talking about before.
That green monster of envy that sees this fucking guy with a beautiful bone structure and a beautiful accent, now all of a sudden he's philosophizing.
He had the wherewithal and the power to go on a sexual rampage, chose to back off of it, and realized he was like, all these fucking goddamn things he's got going for him, he's a fucking movie star?
Fuck this guy!
Fuck this guy, I'm tearing him down!
I'm tearing him down, honey, and he's sitting there with his potbelly, fucking taking his antidepressants, and tapping away mean shit on the keyboard, hoping.
I'm hoping that these mean words hit your mind and they enter into your consciousness and he can affect you in some sort of a horrible way.
The extreme lack of compassion from some people on the left and the green light to attack this fact that, oh, here's this guy and I don't agree with him and I think that what he's doing is sex.
And it's misogynistic, and it's enabling, and let's get him!
We got a fucking target right on his back.
Attack!
Oh, he's doing press?
Oh, well, I'm gonna be involved in this press.
I'm gonna throw my fucking hat into the ring as the arbiter of intelligent ideas to dismay, or dismantle, rather, all these fucking stupid thoughts that this shithead with his perfect bone structure and man-bone is pumping out.
Yeah, I mean, there's definitely some real conspiracies, but I think that there's just a natural emphasis or a natural inclination to shit on people that are doing better than you or shit on people that have something good going on.
And also, when you're writing a story about something, how much fun is it writing a story that's positive?
And how much more satisfying is it to unhappy people to write a negative review about something?
It's much more exciting.
It's much more fun.
I've seen people distort people's ideas in really horrific ways because that's the old way.
Because the old way, you could write a blog about something or an article in a magazine or whatever about someone and distort it in horrible ways, and they really didn't have any recourse.
He rants for like, he'll just sit down for a fucking hour and a half and just go off about this and that, and it's a stream of consciousness.
He goes from football to his wife or his fucking dog and baking, and his internet sucks, and he's tired of construction workers, and his driveway's a piece of shit, and he just, he'll go on and on and on.
And not imposing, like, right, coming right up in five seconds.
We've got to do the, you know, like, all of those things, like having a boss and having a structure and having, like, commercial interests that you constantly...
I've been on their show, and I can see what you mean, that that was sort of part of the transition, and like Howard Stern, surely you would say as well, like someone that was...
And now, if I just discovered you, I'm gonna go, I wanna hear more, I wanna hear, oh, you gotta listen to one of his first ones, where he wasn't even ready, he didn't know what he was doing, you gotta listen to where he went from here to here.
Once they're in, they're in, they love you, they know you, they feel like they're...
What experiences have you had that you've, like, were hard?
Or, like, you know, like, seeing because you've not got bosses or anything, was there ever times you've gone off, we should never have had that guy on, that was a mistake?
So, in learning how to broadcast in air quotes, learning how to do that, you're kind of learning by feedback and also by listening to yourself and listening to other people's podcasts.
You'll see other, like, things that grate on you about what other people do.
We all shouldn't, but we all have an idea that we want to get out.
We don't know when to do it.
It's hard to figure out because we're all freeballing when to jump in and when not to.
Also, some people don't listen to the things that other people say.
They just wait for their turn to talk.
That is a real issue.
That's a giant issue because then you ask them about what you just said and they're like, I wasn't listening.
Like, how can you not be listening when we're talking?
Like, this is, okay, well then now we're not really having a conversation.
We're just exchanging rants.
You know, and I'm waiting for you to get your completely non sequitur rant in and then you're gonna impress people with your quotes and how much you know about this guy or that guy and that's a real common thing is like using it as an ego springboard instead of looking at it in a podcast is really essentially a piece of art.
I mean, it's a grandiose term, but you're creating something.
And you want to create it the best way you can.
And you could fuck it up by being loud and stupid and saying a bunch of dumb shit that doesn't feel good to anybody to hear.
Or you could say some cool shit that when they listen to this podcast after it's over, they go, Fuck, that Russell Brand said something that's going to change the way I look at the rest of my fucking life.
Yeah, I feel like if you have fuck you money, you don't say fuck you, you're wasting fuck you money.
So if I have some real thoughts and I don't express them because I'm worried about job opportunities, like I'm already in prison, whether I like it or not.
If there's something important that I have to say, and then the jobs that you do get or the employment opportunities that you do get, they'll be looking for your authentic self.
Unless it's some, like, the same sort of situation with some crazy woman who likes to take some guy and change him.
Oh, he's a fixer-upper.
Like, they're not going to grab you and go, I know this Russell Brand is talking a lot of crazy revolution type shit.
Once we get him in the network, we put him in a nice suit.
I like doing stuff that has nothing to do with work.
I like doing yoga, and I like doing archery.
I like writing comedy.
I like performing stand-up.
I like doing podcasts.
I like just doing stuff.
I don't want to do someone else's stuff.
If some movie came along and it was really interesting, and for whatever reason, it was a short amount of time I would have to work, I would consider it.
Yeah, well, I'm doing what I actually want to do instead of when, you know, and Jim and I were in a pilot for the very first TV show that I did in 1993, and we've been friends for longer before that, way long before that, but...
You come here and you think, now I'm going to do this project.
Oh boy, I'm in.
I'm on a TV show.
And then you get on the TV show and you go, you know what?
I don't even like this that much.
I like doing stand-up.
Why am I doing this?
But you're doing this because they keep coming to you.
unidentified
Like, hey, we've got a game show and they're going to eat animal dicks and you're going to shoot them out of a rocket.
And you do it after a while and you go, hey, you know, that's not what I enjoy doing.
What do I actually enjoy doing?
Well, I'm just trying to do the things I enjoy doing.
What I enjoy doing, I like doing podcasts.
I like doing stand-up.
I like doing all those extracurricular things that I do.
The things that I do that are just interests in life.
And then I don't want to differentiate between interests that I do for financial gain or interests that I do for mental exercises or for spiritual growth or whatever.
You have to have an absolute game plan and you have to have an actual thing that you enjoy doing.
Like, say if you're some guy that's trapped in some job, but, you know, like, to bring up something we talked about before, you enjoy making homemade knives, and you think, you know, I would love to just be able to make arts and crafts, to be able to create something that people buy, maybe pottery or something along those lines that would really feel, like, spiritually and creatively satisfying to me, to be able to express myself in an art form.
To do that for a living would be amazing.
And there's a lot of people that start off in regular jobs and they figure out a way to get to that place.
And it's not easy.
And people will fucking bitch and moan at you and tell you how not easy it is.
Yeah, you're saying it's making it seem like it's easy.
It's not easy.
A lot of us have problems.
We got mortgages and children and I need a health care package and...
Everybody has resistance.
There's always resistance to anything that you're trying to achieve in life, and everybody's setup might be different.
Everybody's needs and requirements might be different.
They're all different.
But if you find whatever the fuck it is that you can do, I guarantee you, you have some time in your day that you can dedicate towards making that a reality.
It's a matter of making that time a priority to try to change your current state of existence.
How do you do it?
I don't know.
I don't know what your existence is, and I can't tell you anyway.
Because the way I do things and the way you do things is fucking totally different.
I'm like, let's get out of here, let's quit, you know?
But I've always been like that.
I've always been the burn the fucking house down, you have to make another one.
My thought has been just abandon ship.
Let's get out of here and find the fucking new thing.
But you can't do that when you have a wife and children.
Luckily for me, when I was young and taking crazy chances and moving towards a career and doing something I actually wanted to do, I didn't have anybody else that counted on me.
Once you do, it becomes much more difficult, but not insurmountable and completely dependent upon what it is you're trying to achieve.
What I mean is that if we didn't have a culture that was entirely dominated by one economic idea, that more people would be able to sit around making art and crafts.
Think of the things that keep coming up again and again in this conversation.
People should live in small tribes.
Why the fuck are we not trying to do that shit now?
Why are we not going?
Another word for tribe is Soviet, and people did have a go at that.
It went terribly, terribly wrong.
But what I'm saying is that these kind of ideas, I mean, look now.
I wonder if that's the template.
What's the next level of this?
It's like, right, well, let's try and work on that then.
Let's try and bring some of these ideas like you have as an individual.
Like, can this be collectivised?
Can this be brought forward?
So that more people, like, you know, do you take that leap of faith that, fuck me, if we did get 150 people together, of course there's going to be problems and challenges.
There's problems and fucking challenges now.
We're not competing with perfection, we're competing with a defunct system that's really causing a great deal of negativity and problems.
What would happen if people did start to try and create alternatives?
You don't think you'd be Waco'd right out if you went, right, we're setting up a system, 150 people, this is our new podcast experiment, we're setting up a utopia.
And expressing yourself in a way that makes sense.
You know, like, I think one of the things that's most interesting about McKenna's lectures, where he was in sort of the infancy of the internet, where he did a lot of them, is he expressed himself in a way that's kind of really similar to, like, podcast rants.
But way before their time.
He was doing it in front of these groups of people, and someone recorded it.
So he would have these meetings.
You know, the people come to hear him speak, and he would have these meetings, and a lot of times he would open up the room for questions, and he would just sort of rant.
And, you know, he was a consummate consumer of cannabis.
So he's high as fuck, and he's having these bizarre conversations, these rants, where he's exploring these ideas, and he got better and better and better at them all throughout these rants.
When he's doing these, he's essentially doing a podcast that takes a long time to hear.
Do you think of him as sort of a modern, secular prophet?
Because if you've been into the comedy of Bill Hicks and then you listen to Terence McKenna, you can see, like, oh, fuck, he's clearly influenced Hicks.
First time I saw him I went to see some comedians that were like local Boston guys and Hicks had come in from out of town and I don't know if he was supposed to be there the next night or what it was but no one was there to see him they didn't know who he was and he went up on stage And was just so weird.
He was doing this bit about Tiffany meeting Jimi Hendrix at the mall.
You know, like this music that they're promoting, this pop culture bullshit music.
And he was at the Comedy Connection in Boston.
I think I saw him there first, and I saw him at Nick's and a couple other places.
But he was doing some new thing.
I was like, okay, this is a new kind of comedy.
This is like Sam Kinison, but...
With like much more of an emphasis on the realization that the patterns that we're all following into, whether it's pop culture patterns or that these things are actually detrimental.
These things are a foolish way to approach this world.
This world is incredibly complex and we can all look at it together.
I saw him bomb horribly, but bomb with grace that I've never achieved.
He bombed like he didn't give a fuck about bombing.
I've never been able to do that.
He bombed like a guy who almost knew the future, knew he was going to have some sort of an impact on the culture, and knew that this was just a footnote in that incredibly impactful experience on the art form of stand-up comedy, and also knew that eventually he'd find his own audience, which he did not have at the time.
Because he was at a small comedy club, Nick's Comedy Stop in Boston, which is a couple hundred people.
And there was a guy who went on before him who was a real hack.
Nice guy, but just hacky, hacky, bullshit, cop donut jokes, that kind of shit.
Just everything you've already heard before.
Nothing original.
And he was killing.
Killing with all this simple stupid shit and then Hicks went on afterwards with this like really bizarre Interpretation of modern civilization ever is like fuck this guy and people were getting up and leaving in droves and Kept going through the whole thing and me and Greg Fitzsimmons was there and a bunch of other comedians watching him bomb were laughing our asses off so he was Playing to the back of the room, the comedians that were still there laughing were laughing hard in support, but people were getting up in giant chunks and leaving.
At the end of the show, you know, the show was whittled down from like 250 people to like 40 people in 15 or 20 comics.
That was all that was left, and we were howling, laughing.
Yeah, he's the one who introduced me to McKenna by that joke, just by saying that.
And then in hearing Hicks' references, there was a few other guys that he sort of referenced their ideas, like Noam Chomsky was another one.
One of the things that Hicks was famous for saying was actually a Chomsky line, was about the Iraq War, that it's only really a war when two armies are fighting.
You know, I watched it with this girl I was dating at the time in like 1993-ish, something like that.
And she was like, yeah, he's not really funny, but he's really fascinating to listen to.
Like she didn't find like some of the things he was saying were funny.
But I think that was also the Revelation show, which he filmed in London, which was one of those weird shows where you're doing an HBO special and you have one show ready go.
And there's some weird pressure that's involved with that and it doesn't necessarily always come off loose and like the feeling that you see him when he's at a club where he's expressing himself in a much more free way.
There's so much mythology involved in him now because he's passed on and he died young and we always sit back and wonder, like, what would it be like if that guy was alive today?
Kinnison opened the door for Hicks because he was one of the outlaws.
And Kinnison had a lot of bits that were like that, but...
They were more humor-based than point of view-based.
Like, he had points of view, but the points of view had to be really funny.
Whereas Hicks had a lot of points of view that was like, there's gotta be a way to introduce these ideas into people in the form of stand-up comedy that maybe not even aren't that funny, but are very important.
Whereas, like, Kinison was, everything was, I mean, he had some ridiculously funny bits, and he did it in this totally unapologetic way that I think Hicks kind of absorbed.
And when I first saw Hicks, it was one of the things, he had a lot of Kinison in him.
Like, we all have influences, and when we're starting out, we, like, you hear other comedians that you really love come out of your own mouth, almost like with the intonations and the inflections, and you almost kind of mimic them in your delivery.
And Hicks did a lot of that.
When I first saw him, he was doing a lot of Kinnison.
And it was interesting.
It's like, this guy's clearly influenced.
You don't know whether or not he was influenced by Kinnison or Kinnison was influenced by Hicks, but most likely it's probably a little bit of both, but more Kinnison than anything.
Because Kinnison...
Was much more successful earlier on, like several years before Hicks really took off and was revolutionary.
When Kinison came on the scene, he was completely revolutionary.
So I think him taking Hicks with him, you know, because they were part of that Houston group that originally expanded and then came to LA, I think he just showed that there's just some undeniable power in being that controversial but on point.
Because stand-up is one of the original American art form, isn't it?
It's precedent prior to being in the United States.
That art form didn't exist in the same way.
It's got gestures and musical.
It didn't exist.
We can exist in that kind of way.
Podcasting is a very natural medium for a comedian because it grants you that long form.
I've always thought that the more...
It can be that the more truthful you are and the more articulate it becomes, the more you reduce your audience.
When you think of hitting up rooms of 2,500 people or 5,000 arena gigs, if you want to go in and wade in there with fucking Noam Chomsky bloody quotes...
That's the thing I think about keeping the ball above a certain level.
In a way, this medium, you are relieved of that.
You are allowed, it's like, Yeah.
Just sit back for a while, listen for ages.
The aspect of comedy that I think is so important of authenticity, you know, when you're a start-up comic, people go, oh, you've got to find your voice, you've got to find your authenticity.
And like you were saying, that you hear the musicality of comedians you admire in your own voice.
When you're doing five-minute sets or tens or twits, it's extremely difficult, isn't it, to become robust enough with that.
But here, I guess, you get to...
Really explore what you are authentically in a kind of a long, safe form.
Especially 10-minute sets, those little short sets you do, you can get a bit out or a series of funny things that you can say.
But as far as any real depth, and part of what comes out that's really funny is if you watch someone like Jim Part of what his comedy is, is you'll understand after you see him for 15 or 20 minutes, this is how he makes fun of things.
This is his personality.
So you kind of get his vibe.
And then another subject comes up, and you're laughing before he even starts talking about it, because you're kind of following where he's going to take this.
And that was one of the best examples like people always like this is a fucking trend now but good comedy should always punch up Comedy should always punch up bullshit bullshit bullshit nonsense comedy should be comedy It's it's it's just like rap music or fucking gangster movies.
It's indecipherable You cannot decide what's funny and what's not funny and that is one of the best examples of it that African bit.
There's so much sanctimony that you're weighed down and you're not able to have an authentic reaction.
There's so much of yourself that you're repressing and it takes him.
You see, again, to return to that archetypes conversation we had, that the trickster, the role of the trickster that comes up in Native American myth is like the coyote or the raven, or they say that even Christ is a trickster in moments in the Bible.
People that go, that's not reality anymore.
That's a trickster function to go like, you know, you know that there's a prescribed way that you're supposed to respond to that African commercial.
Well, look, there's this alternative way of responding to it and to present it comedically.
Look, I've dealt with a lot of brain trauma, because I know a lot of people that have gotten fucked up from fighting.
You know, there's a real thing that happens to people, and you hear about all the time when they do these shows on NFL players who become explosive, and they get crazy and impulsive, and they get very violent, and some of that has to do with repeated trauma to the head.
Well, just one event, one car accident, one thing like that, can literally change your personality.
Because there's a very fragile dynamic of synapses and personality, neurochemicals, the brain's actual, like, the flow of chemicals, of neurochemistry, and the physical body itself, and the way your personality manifests itself.
All those things are directly connected.
And an event, like what happened to Sam Kinison, literally reshaped an art form.