Russell Brand and Joe Rogan explore societal tensions, from Brand’s critique of superficial political divides like Brexit or Trump to his 12-step impulse control philosophy—clashing with Rogan’s concerns over obsession. They debate masculinity, psychedelics (Brand’s DMT fascination vs. Rogan’s HGH regimen), and stand-up integrity, praising Dave Chappelle’s discipline while dismissing Alex Jones’ fringe theories. Brand links unchecked tech ethics—like China’s CRISPR monkeys—to capitalism’s profit-driven neglect, contrasting it with Rogan’s cautious optimism about innovation. Both condemn systemic failures, from factory farming to homelessness, citing Julian Assange’s imprisonment and opioid crisis exploitation as proof of moral decay. Ultimately, they argue society must prioritize compassion over competition to break cycles of inequality and despair. [Automatically generated summary]
Well I guess what it is is my early life I grew up mostly around my mum and I don't have brothers and sisters and stuff like that so my male role modeling occurred later in life and I think it probably relates to this spiritual thing I think it meant that I was I'm very open to sort of Spiritual experience, meditative experience.
I didn't have a lot of grounding physical experiences or bodily experiences, really, till adolescence and sexuality.
That's the first time I really got into the body.
Didn't do sport as a kid.
Didn't have men going, right, this is what we do, this is how we shave, this is how you treat people.
I didn't really get that kind of education.
So now, still, if I'm around soldiers, UFC fighters, you know I do BJJs primarily as a result of these...
There's a bit of me that's...
I get excited about the analysis of it.
It's not homoerotic because that doesn't happen to be the way that I roll out.
Well, that's what I pick up from you, is that your early encounters with martial arts have meant that you've understood from a young age, it seems to me, physical...
Discipline.
And I think that's a very important thing.
And I'm only learning that now because I've had drugs, then fame, and chaos.
And I've only just emerged from the fog of that madness.
I mean, there's so many people that I disagree with that I have fine conversations with.
I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and I don't think that impulse to have antagonistic engagements with people that you disagree with is correct.
If, like, it's just like, I'm only going to deal with people that see the world roughly how I do.
How are we going to form new tribes, new alliances, new relationships, new systems at a time when, evidently, it feels to me at least, Joe, like things are breaking down.
There's a lot of...
Bitterness, acerbity and confrontation and people don't want to talk to each other.
I mean, I don't know how real that is of actual people.
I'm talking, I suppose, about how the media landscape seems to present information.
I don't know if that's true when you're...
You know, when I'm around people, I don't sense, oh, wow, these guys are really tied up in Brexit or Trump or whatever.
It doesn't seem that relevant to ordinary people.
It seems to me that people are still...
Operating on a personal, how are you today?
You know, people are willing to get on like that.
I mean, how are we supposed to take these ideas on board?
They're sort of almost too vast for us.
These geopolitical ideas that we're asked to identify with.
Right, and then your everyday life hardly ever affects you or affects you very little in comparison to things that you ignore because you're concentrating on Brexit or you're concentrating on Trump or you're concentrating on whatever it is.
Yeah, I start to wonder Who is it that's involved in this stuff?
Where I'm at now is, are we even capable of belonging to groups, units, tribes of 300 million people or 60 million people with so many diverse ideas?
Is this a time to look at federalism differently, to start breaking down, well, you know, I exist within this tribe of people, but I collaborate with all these other people.
I don't know how municipal action gets done.
I don't know how you run an army and build roads if people are starting to operate in smaller units, but I am thinking that we need to have a real sense of community and connection, and we've got to let go of looking for ways to object to and judge other people as some sort of primary way of forming our own identity.
No, I completely agree, and I think we're probably moving towards some sort of understanding that a lot of these boundaries and these clans of states and countries, they were all established without our consent before we were born, and we're a part of a system that we didn't agree to it.
We just all of a sudden found ourselves in it, and we're trying to make it fit us.
I feel a genuine sense of connection and investment.
But if I'm being asked to live according to rules that don't affect me, that affect me financially and don't speak to who I am as an individual, then I'm like, what is this?
And to root for your team and to root against other teams, it's so deep-seated in us.
And it can cause so many unnecessary conflicts for no reason.
It's so escapable, too.
So if you can objectively analyze the way human beings behave and interact with each other and go, well, why do we do this?
Let's just stop doing that.
If we disagree on things, how much...
Are these disagreements actually affecting me on a daily basis?
Not that much.
Can't we just communicate?
Can't someone say what they think and I say what I think and we just decide what makes sense and what doesn't make sense based on our own interpretations?
It seems like that's the direction we've got to head in.
I did, as I know you have done, a podcast with Candice Owens, who, like, on the subject of, you know, individuals, like, when she says stuff like people should get over slavery, or it's as if it didn't happen, I don't agree with that.
I feel like that has a massive social impact, that those statistics are not a coincidence, the number of...
People have certain ethnicities in prisons and in poverty or whatever.
For me, that's not just a coincidence.
So I couldn't agree with her more profoundly on, according to social criteria, some very, very important issues.
But on an interpersonal level, I thought she was absolutely delightful.
So, I cut her a lot of slack with some of the things that she's made, like, missteps on.
And I think sometimes when people say those things, like, people should get over slavery, it's like...
It's almost like you're saying things that you think other people want to hear, more than you're saying things that are really rational.
So whether or not we should get over slavery, sure, slavery was over more than 100 years ago, but the repercussions of slavery, the echoes of slavery still exist.
And they exist in all these different southern states and cities and all these different neighborhoods that had been a part of systemic racism where they had literally It forced black people to live in certain areas and didn't even allow them to buy homes outside of those areas.
They made laws, and those laws were in place in places like Baltimore.
I had this guy, Michael Wood, who was a police officer in the city of Baltimore, and one of the more profound things that he said was that they found papers that were documenting crimes from the 1970s in Baltimore.
And they were in the same area, the same crimes that he was facing in the 2000s when he was a police officer.
So he was looking at this going, what in the fuck?
Am I just a part of something that's never going to be fixed and never going to be changed?
And, you know, as he learned more about the city and the city's laws and how these systems were set up to keep people in certain places and how the crime and the violence and the drugs is all just in this one concentrated area and it's always been there.
And no one does anything to change it.
You realize, like, wow, this is a crazy echo of a horrible past.
I had a couple of conversations that made me recognise how powerful systems and institutions are and their ability to maintain themselves regardless of any individual.
It seems like what happened there with the man you were chatting to is that he's an individual woke up and went, oh my god, hold on a second, I'm in some sort of weird grid.
And I spoke to this fella called Cairn Ross who worked for the British Diplomatic Service at the time of 9-11 and was privy to confidential information about how that was handled on a military and geopolitical level.
And he said, like, he's come away from that, thinking, well, these institutions function and in a totally corrupt way to pursue their own objectives.
Disingenuity and dishonesty is just part of the system.
And it was him that made me think about anarchism in a different way, saying that people...
The assumption that people, if they were not tightly governed with big government and huge control, would go around murdering each other and raping each other is simply not true.
That's one of the means by which the state continues to justify its existence.
People will behave better the closer they are to government.
Self-governing community.
Self-governing community.
And I was interested in that because he's talking from...
This is what I saw on the inside.
This is how I saw it was running.
Like your cop friend there.
And like another person I spoke to that had been inside a system and then woken up within it.
Who was that?
Oh yeah, Yanis Varoufakis, when Greece had that mad revolution, he was like one of the leaders of a party, Syriza.
And for a minute, it was like Syriza said, we ain't paying back all those debts.
You screwed us financially.
You screwed Greece.
So he was there at the EU meetings telling the German chancellery, Greece ain't going to repay those debts.
And he just said that the way that the system reasserted itself was magnificent to watch And he said none of those individuals have any power except the power that that role gives them.
If you are the German finance minister, you've got the power that a German finance minister has.
You can't step outside it and start going, right, listen, why don't we do this and why don't we do that?
It's beyond individual decisions.
It's a self-sustaining system.
It won't come up with ideas or support ideas that threaten it.
And that's why I continually keep hearing, and I'm sure you're having similar conversations, that if you are really interested in changing the world, you have to participate in systems that are outside of it.
Set up new ideas.
Don't worry about trying to smash this one down with a hammer.
It will atrophy on its own as it becomes less and less relevant.
And when you change yourself, it becomes evident to the people around you.
And if your change is beneficial and attractive, people, they gravitate towards that idea that you can improve yourself, and you can change your perspective on things.
Well, that is the one area of your life where you've got some authority and control, and that is what I'm about.
It's like, well, I can stop myself I'm watching pornography.
I can stop myself using drugs if I want to, with some support.
This book here, Mentors, which I talk about you in, only for a paragraph, you know what I mean?
It's not like literary fellatio.
It's a small nod of your influence and impact.
I talk about how we have latent qualities within us that are sometimes hard to realise without support.
But if you find a mentor in an area where you're looking to improve, they can...
Kind of energize, awaken energies within you that on your own you wouldn't be able to use.
I had a really recent experience of it where I was sort of like freaking out about something.
I spoke to like a mentor of mine and like the way that he sort of spoke to me was like sort of aggressive, like a sort of an aggressive, that's not going to happen, you are not afraid!
And like it sort of woke up the part of me that feels that way, that has that kind of, I would say, sort of Male certainty, a kind of grounded energy.
He was able to direct it at me.
And in that moment in myself, all bewildered, I wasn't able to do it.
I needed to resource it externally in a moment.
So this is how I feel like your individual journey.
I'm interested in how, because I'm guessing with your background in martial arts and stuff, mentorship seems pretty much stitched into that.
You must continually be looking at someone, learning from someone, trying to equal them or whatever it is.
Did you first get into, like, you know, I've picked up stuff over the various shows of yours that I've listened to, but would you say that your inaugural interest in martial arts came from kind of domestic distress and stuff?
Were you having a difficult home life and not a good relationship with your stepdad?
Well, young boys are just, they're always looking to impress each other and they have these, if you want to find real toxic masculinity, it exists in teenage boys.
It's mostly exaggerated in men.
The way it's described is mostly exaggerated in terms of the way the media talks about it.
In its purest form, teenage boys, they get together and they start lighting frogs on fire and doing shit.
They do things because they want to one-up each other and they feed off of each other.
What one boy would do is so different than what five boys would do.
What five boys would do could be horrific, but what one boy would do on his own is very rarely there.
You have to think about yourself and think about, is this right?
You objectively analyze the way you're behaving.
People wouldn't be proud of me if I did it this way.
But when you're with five other boys and you're all rambunctious and filled with testosterone and piss and vinegar, you wind up doing crazy things.
When I hear something like that, it's difficult not to think that it's of course relative.
Relative to us, the behavior of adolescent males is reckless and crazy.
It's not impossible to conceive of an intelligence that would look at the behavior of adult human beings and think, oh my god, what's governing these people?
What are you trying to accomplish with your life, with your existence, with your time?
I think if there's a real concern about AI... I think the real concern is AI is going to rationally analyze our behavior and our reliance on emotions and all these human reward systems that we have built in and the way it's affecting our society and the way it's affecting how we govern ourselves and how we behave amongst ourselves.
And it's going to think.
We're unfixable.
It's going to look at it like, well, they have too much monkey in them.
They have so much monkey instincts and monkey DNA, but now they live in this rational, modern world of, you know, 5G internet on your phone and satellite communication and 24-7 news cycle, but yet they have these primate genes.
Artificial intelligence, a subject about which I know very little...
Seems to me that it will on some level have to be derived from a particular aspect of human understanding of rationalism.
So we're representing one aspect of our nature and prioritizing it.
Logic, organization.
But what you refer to as sort of...
Primitive and monkey-ish.
For me, it envelops and involves the most beautiful aspects of our nature.
I'm a little romantic about human beings still.
I still feel that one of the great problems we've had is that philosophically we have overvalued materialism, rationalism, and knowing a little bit about philosophy, primarily from that bloody podcast that you and I tagged a minute ago before we was recording.
So what I understand for that is that post-enlightenment, we've started to prioritize rationalism.
So if you prioritize rationalism and organization, which obviously has a lot to offer, the organization of resources is incredibly and hugely important, you forget that a huge part of the human experience is nothing to do with that.
The other thing we were chatting about before we went live was DMT. Now no artificial intelligence is going to understand that there is access to a realm of consciousness that continually exists that doesn't seem to be bound by physical laws as we understand them and if the physical laws that we abide by are parochial and relevant only to this level of existence Why are we allowing ideas resourced from there to govern all of our systems?
You know, even listening to you talk about DMT and you say, I encountered these gestures, the gestures, I went through this membrane into another realm and checking out Mike Tyson when he was on here.
I took acid when I was a teenager, and even in very unhealthy, not unhealthy, but unbridled, mad teenage boy conditions, I want to be there with a guy in a lab coat with a pen going, well, Mr. Brand, sit down, look at these Rorschach tests, instead of which, I mean, New Cross in a bedsit, Dropping acid and staring at my own hands and recognising, oh my God, I'm not me.
The very idea of me is a construct.
I'm just tuned into a particular aspect.
AI will build systems that are predicated on rationalism, organisation.
And on that basis, I can see why they would at some point, yeah, go all Skynet and annihilate us.
But that is...
I believe the problem with our society is that the materialistic aspect of our nature is not the priority.
It's just one thing we should be doing.
Of course we need good roads, of course we need hospitals, schools, food, etc.
But we need to find a way of honouring the sacred.
And I'm fascinated in the experiences you're having in these psychedelic explorations.
And how it's influencing the rest of your life.
How does it influence the rest of your decisions, the way you see the world, the way you see relationships, the way you see the vulnerable young man you were prior to building your own, I say, personal religion of martial arts, excellence in your chosen field of stand-up comedy.
How do you...
Incorporate that vulnerable kid, because I'm still very aware of the vulnerable person I was.
I'm going on a rant, man.
That's good.
When Kevin Hart was on here, who I think is amazing, and he was amazing on this, I thought, fucking hell.
What have I got to offer the world when Kevin Hart has got this kind of Force!
Like, you know, you don't come in the bubble.
And I was like, my God, this guy is so positive.
What a role model.
What a lot he's got to offer.
And then I thought, well, like any of us, what I've got to offer is who I am.
Just who I am as a vulnerable, flawed human being that still feels connected to the kid I was when I didn't feel good enough.
I still feel that.
I can walk in a room and feel that.
But I also know that that's not real because I've had spiritual experiences and Hallucigenic experiences that make me feel that the relationships we should be building have to honour that we are both, we're vulnerable and flawed, but also capable of greatness.
There has to be room for all of this, and I feel that part of what we're doing and part of why we're experiencing such superficial polarity in politics and culture is because we're not acknowledging that underneath this surface activity of left-right, left-right, and you know from Sam Harris, them little experiments, you stick garbage in front of someone, They become Republican pretty quickly, or you scare people, they become less Democratic.
I think all that stuff is pretty superficial, and at depth, in that realm of the jesters and the membrane of psychedelia, we have access to oneness, and that should be what's influencing the way we set up our tribes, our systems, and our relationships.
Yeah, I think when a guy like Kevin Hart shows you what a positive and motivational impact one person can have, just with his words and his deeds and the way he lives his life, he's so inspirational.
That you realize that that is possible.
That you can share that energy.
And that you can have these experiences with people where they literally do actually...
They actually uplift you.
Like, I was uplifted by his conversation.
I felt like, wow, that guy is so positive.
What a great way to look at the life that we're living.
And the more people do that, the better.
And when someone like that does...
Spread a positive message.
You know, and obviously he's materialistic as well.
He's got a bunch of cars and a big house and he makes a lot of money and he does a lot of movies.
But what he's spreading is this very motivational, very positive message.
And that affects people in a very positive way too.
And all that left-right shit and all the battles that we have politically and ideologically back and forth and all the negative venom that people spray at each other.
At the end of the day, it's not benefiting anyone.
Unless you're fighting some major demon that the world needs to conquer.
Most of it's not that.
Most of it is like finding demons out of innocuous things.
I think when you talk about what you have to offer, what you have to offer is...
That you are you.
That you have this unique perspective.
You can affect the way people view their own journey in life because you've been so introspective and so aware of your own pros and cons in terms of your past behavior, your current behavior, and who you are now and who you used to be.
All that stuff is fuel for people because they can relate.
They hear it.
I mean, maybe they cannot relate to being a movie star and being this famous guy.
But they can relate to the humanity of your struggle.
They put themselves in your position.
Like, what must that have been like?
And look at this guy who's made these conscious decisions to not be like that anymore.
And he dresses like a homeless person with a crazy beard.
My writing is not from a, you'll understand, not from a technical perspective.
I'm not saying this is what I've got to say on open guard to transition.
I'm talking about how the psychological impact that it's had on me and also in there about the protocols of going to a group, which as a beginner are very relevant.
You touched on how ritualised it is.
I've got a hunch that the more we emulate and connect to original ways of human behaviour, whether that's dietary...
Or hierarchies or organisation of groups, I feel that we will feel a sense of greater connection.
Now, the thing I got from going to BJJ classes, Genesis, where I go back in England, is that all the white belts get changed at one end of the room.
The purple belts and above get changed at the other end of the room, which coincidentally or not is where the control for the timer is and the control for the music is and where the kit is.
That's all at that end of the room, so all the control is that end.
But it begins with sort of dancing around in a circle, doing all of those various exercises.
Now lift your knees, now do the shrimping and that kind of stuff.
It's that a lower belt shouldn't invite a higher belt to spa or roll.
And as you say, the amount of respect.
The bowing, the handshaking at the end of it.
It provides such a safe environment in which to deal with the primal.
I can see why it's valuable.
I should have been taught that shit when I was 14, 13, mandatarily, so that I didn't come across it.
You're not going to be setting fire to fields and allotments and putting frogs on fireworks if you've got a way of dealing with that primal energy when it's coming.
Do you think this might be a comparable moment to in the 1960s when there was a sort of a sense of sexual repression versus sexual free love?
You know, the images of Woodstock and flowers in their hair and smoking joints and having sort of sex outdoors in mud or possibly wheat.
LAUGHTER This time of, like, a kind of an anger about maleness.
And maleness may not, as you said, it may be a biological male, but it could be the energy of, I don't know, assertion or whatever.
These, like, you know, as in grammar, male and female relate to certain words, as in French grammar, where, I don't know, cat is female and dog is male.
I don't know the system.
I don't speak French.
But I'm saying that we have labelled these energies.
Yeah, and I also think it comes from a big generalization, too.
It's easy to do, right?
And if you're a woman who's had negative experiences with men, maybe you've dated men that have been physically abusive, or maybe you've known men that have been physically abusive, and you're around that, And you just, it's very convenient and very easy to just generalize and decide that all men are negative.
And that masculine energy is negative, and especially white males.
And if you say that, you'll get props online.
People go, yes, girl, yes, clap, clap, clap.
People get excited.
But those are also people that are short-sighted.
Like, you want to make as many people your ally as you can.
You want to make as many people your friend as you can.
And you have to understand that there's some people that are just wired different than you.
There's some girly girls.
And there's some really feminine men.
And then there's some masculine men, but everybody is okay as long as they respect you and they're kind to each other.
But the problem is we associate certain behaviors and characteristics with either negativity or hedonism or toxic masculinity or someone being a bitch as a man.
And these generalizations are often way more harmful and it's just too convenient and easy and lazy.
And when I think about my own attitudes in this area, there is a degree of complexity because I've got young daughters.
I've got a two-year-old and a one-year-old, right?
And they're, you know, daughters.
But the other day, because I'm staying in Los Angeles, Gabby, she's Mexican.
When I first moved out here and lived my entourage lifestyle, she used to look after the house and she used to think, oh, Oh, my baby, my baby.
She loved me.
I'll take a matriarchal figure wherever I can find one.
Gabby used to look after me.
She adored me and stuff.
I stayed friends with her.
Yesterday, she'd come around.
She bought what I can only describe as a bikini for my baby daughter.
A two-year-old doesn't need a bikini top.
Excuse me, burping on the mic.
For me, I thought, I don't want to put my daughter in that.
That's sort of, in a way, sexualising that child.
And also, a lot of the time, with my daughter, with my wife, particularly with our first child, I'm like, don't dress her up in little dresses and stuff because she won't be able to run around.
And I thought, my God, that's not that different from the cliché of a male parent that wanted a son.
And I didn't want a son.
I love this kid.
I love this kid.
I love having a daughter.
I adore her.
But I am aware that these things of dress a child this way, dress a girl this way, are constructs.
Further to what we were talking about again before, about Michelle Foucault.
We got a lot done before we went live, man.
When we were talking about Michel Foucault, what he exposes a lot is that a lot of things that we take for granted as being normal are actually constructs.
And when I say a child's bikini, there's no reason for any child of any sex or gender to be wearing a bloody bikini.
A child with tits is a terrifying idea.
For all but a very small and terrifying percentage of the population.
So that is an example of the external feminization of a child.
So when there's an argument, a feminist argument of gender is a construct, I can see, oh yeah, to a point, it is.
There are constructs.
My opinion is you can't argue with biology.
Chromosomes are doing what they're doing in the physical realm.
Yeah.
But being a father to a daughter has made me feel like I don't, obviously, and I know you have daughters or at least a daughter, three daughters, I'm certainly very aware of, I don't want to push them down some culturally prescribed avenue, whether it's about their dress, their sexuality or anything.
Yeah, you gotta just not put any pressure on them and let them enjoy their life and let them find their path.
That's what's weird, right?
It's like I see people, they're getting their daughters to dress very, very feminine with little mini skirts and stuff and they're five years old and high heel shoes.
Yeah, you certainly can, but I think it should be up to the choice of the person once they're an adult.
The real problem is putting pressure on them to dress one way or another and not letting them find their place.
But if a woman becomes whatever age you decide and she wants to wear high heels and a skirt because she likes the way it looks, there's nothing wrong with that either.
It is almost as much of a problem as people who will prey upon vulnerable people.
People that think there's something wrong with being sexually attractive or something wrong with being desirable or wanting to be desirable.
There's nothing wrong with that either.
And that kind of suppression, the suppression of these feelings that you have and this desire that you have, it's very unhealthy as well.
It's a normal thing to want to be sexual.
It's a normal thing to want to look good.
If a girl looks good in a skirt and high heels and she likes to dress like that, who the fuck is anyone to say is there anything wrong with that?
There's nothing wrong with it.
If that's what she likes, that's fine.
Which is interesting to me is...
Particularly in really progressive ideology, they look down upon women who wear short skirts and high heels and a lot of makeup and, you know, open tops that show their boobs because they think that they're playing into the patriarchy or that they're somehow or another falling into these gender traps.
But yet they celebrate that in transgender people.
They celebrate that in trans men that transition to women, and then they really doll it up.
Then they're like, you go, girl.
Then they're celebrating the fact that this person is embracing these traditional aspects of womanhood.
You see that a lot with people that are celebrating trans women.
The aesthetics of what perhaps could be referred to as sexualised dress, or I suppose in males, expressive or garish clothing, jewellery, tattoos.
I understand in British culture that these are often indicators of class.
That it's typically the lower down the class structure you are, the more likely you are to dress in a way that is exhibitive or like, you know, women from a blue collar background dress in ways that are exposing and revealing men have leery cars and lots of tattoos and jewellery.
Expressive ways of demonstrating wealth.
The higher you go up, the class, the more subtle, the more dressed down, no labels, all that sort of stuff.
In British culture, there's a different system for referencing it.
I wonder how that works in American culture with its evident and much-discussed racial divisions, like certain things.
It seems like a subtle way of condemning particular types of womanhood that may not just be sourced from dress this way for the male gaze.
It can also be a way of saying dressing that way is an indication of a lower class background or of a particular type of ethnicity.
I did an interview a while ago where I sort of talked about, like, parenting our kids, me and my wife, how we parent our kids, and I said, like, you know, I have to be honest, my wife is much the more dominant parent.
She's much more practical than I am, right?
And, like, stuff that got, like, really negatively written about.
People say, like, oh, she changes more diapers than I do and stuff, right?
Not like I don't change diapers or whatever.
It's just my wife, you know, regardless of our respective sexes, is the more efficient, dominant parent she's much more likely with.
Like, with me, if my daughter goes, I want that chocolate, the answer from me is, oh, yeah, all right.
You know, like, I can't.
I see the resistance, the emotional explosion.
I concede much too early.
I tap out very quickly with my two-year-old.
My wife is much more, no, let's play the long game, let's bring up a child that's not governed by impulses like you.
And I spoke, in fact, to that Gabor Mate, that expert on addiction.
He's amazing.
And he says, because of your own anxiety and pain from your own childhood, with no disrespect to my magnificent parents, like, you can't handle seeing your kid suffer.
So you, like, straight away, you bail and do what she wants and stuff.
Now, like, so there's so much complexity in the reality of our personal little domestic relationship.
And I'm certainly not saying, and everyone else should run their household in that manner as well.
And so help me God, any man that changes it up.
You know, but the way it was reported is like, that's what...
What happens, I think, in modern media is they change what you say, then you have to defend what they said you said.
And you go, well, that ain't what I meant.
I'm not saying that because my wife is a woman, she should take more domestic...
I'm just saying that in our household, she seems to have a set of attributes and characteristics that make her take control of that aspect of parenting.
And it's like the desire to judge, condemn, and object is the priority as opposed to...
I mean, you're either reading comments or you're reading articles.
And if you're reading articles, they're just looking for something to be upset about.
They'll watch you and they'll say, okay, is this a viable target?
Yes, we got confirmation.
What he said about changing diapers or his wife being a better parent is a viable target.
Let's go after him.
And then they just formulate some bullshit argument about who you really are based on what might have been a throwaway or a concession to your wife or even just a compliment to your wife or being self-deprecating to yourself.
They're not looking at things rationally.
They're just looking at targets.
Particularly people that write articles.
What's the best article?
It's got to be negative.
One of the things that came out of all this Facebook algorithm stuff is you find out that Facebook realized somewhere early on that the way to...
Encourage engagement is to get people upset.
They get way more engaged, and they go back and forth and interact with these posts way more if they're upset than they do if they agree with it.
If they agree with it, they might give it a like or a thumbs up and say, hey, that's great, and that's it.
That's where it ends.
But if, you know, someone's talking about, you know, we shouldn't build the wall, we should let everyone in, and you put that on some fucking Trump guy's page, and they, ah!
It's crazy.
I mean, you will get thousands and thousands and thousands of interactions.
And so Facebook realized that the way to keep people...
And, you know, they could claim that it's an algorithm, and the algorithm just supports whatever the people are really interested in.
That demonstrates my earlier point, which I made up on the spot, that AI is not a neutral thing.
It is resourced from human perspectives, because that is a type of AI, not as complex as what we're going to experience, and I can't even imagine.
But what I'm saying is it's still...
What I want to say, resourced from a human perspective.
And yes, of course, we are evolved to respond more strongly to negativity than positivity for loads of reasons.
And I think that's where we can stitch back to what we were saying about taking personal responsibility for who you are.
Like that none of us after sit on social media going, fuck you, fuck you.
None of us have to do that.
We can try and resolve those.
I respect that some people don't have any other outlets.
They don't have the privileges I have of being able to go to support groups where people openly talk about, this is the ways that I felt inferior today.
This is the ways that I'm trying to become a better man and a better father and a better co-worker.
A lot of people aren't afforded those environments and probably the best shot they got is having a go at someone online and those people, in a way, deserve love and sympathy.
But until we...
On some level, recognize that we can alter our own behaviors.
We can alter our own consciousness.
I don't see how there's going to be...
Well, at least then we can create a terrain upon which better systems can start to flourish.
Yeah, if I saw someone saying something that was untrue, I'd be like, fuck you, that's untrue.
But then I realized, why?
What are you doing?
This is a new thing for people.
There's never been a time where people have had this instantaneous interaction with people, unfiltered, unmoderated, globally.
I mean, it's very strange to be able to do that and to be able to go back and forth and Just to be able to give your comments on things, to be able to talk about things.
I have to sort of set my life out like I'm essentially a monk in a marriage.
That's basically where I live.
Get up, meditate, do yoga, do exercises, do things that are positive for you, watch the way that you're thinking.
I'm interested in where, again, with your own...
Do you feel connected to the person you were as an adolescent?
Do you notice it in your own parenting?
Do you notice it in the type of choices you make?
Because the image I have of you from the outside is like that you have literally built something for yourself.
You operate within it and you are quite protected and you are independent and not forced to deal with too many negative outside influences.
But in unavoidable dynamics, the unnecessary dynamics, like, you know, as a father and dealing with colleagues and stuff like that, do you experience a lot of tension, anxiety?
What has happened to that guy?
Do you feel that you have transcended that?
Because I do, in my own life, feel like, yeah, I'm not the adolescent boy I was.
I've, like, you know, I've learned from that, and I still, in a very sort of COD psychological way, you know, when I'm doing Hibiro, that's the BJJ classes I'm doing over here with Professor Ricardo Wilk.
He's an amazing guy.
Like, when I'm doing those classes, I have a sense of fathering my child self, of like, you know, because I weren't doing those kind of things when I was a kid.
I'm like, it's all right, Russell, we're just in a BJJ class.
You know, he's like another, obviously, high-achieving guy who I admire and respect a great deal.
And like, you know, when he talks, he does like these cold plunges.
And he says, before I get in that plunge, I'm like, You're getting in that fucking plunge!
My god, I don't talk to myself.
I'm like, right, Russell, we're going to get in the cold plunge.
I have to talk to myself gently.
What are you doing with that aspect of yourself?
Do you still have a relationship with it?
When you're doing all these psychedelic, cosmonautic explorations of the psyche, are you not encountering aspects of yourself that are undeveloped, unaddressed?
There's always going to be unaddressed and undeveloped aspects of yourself, but I'm very, very, very different to who I was when I was a young boy.
I mean, I'm not 100% self-actualized.
I don't think anybody is.
But I'm just a totally different human being.
I remember it, but I remember it with humor.
Like, I remember it and I laugh.
I'm like, wow, so silly.
I was so weird back then.
And, you know, with life experience and developing confidence and understanding of who you are and why you had those feelings and why you were insecure and why you had so much self-doubt, martial arts helped me with that tremendously.
Because it was the first thing that I ever did where I didn't feel like a loser.
It's like the first thing that I ever did where people respected me and they liked me for it.
I'm like, wow.
It was a feeling that I was completely unused to in the 14 previous years of my life.
And still, you know, the journey of jiu-jitsu is a fascinating one because unless you're someone who's, you know, a Salo Hibero or a John Jock Machado or just a true master who's dedicated their entire life to it, the journey's so long.
It's so long.
It's like if you're a guy who runs...
I like to run a mile three or four days a week.
No big deal.
But then your next door neighbor is an ultra-marathon runner who's preparing for the MOAB 240 where he's going to run 240 miles.
You're never going to catch up the same amount of times.
You should always defer to that person when you have questions about running.
And that's how it is with jiu-jitsu.
Yeah, I'm a black belt, but I'm not a black belt like John Jack Machado is a black belt.
There's levels even to that.
So I always have questions.
So the journey is never over.
It's always long.
There's always a better way to get out of an arm bar or a better way to set up a triangle or whatever it is.
One of the beautiful things about jiu-jitsu is that it's so complex.
There's so many variables.
There's so many situations and interactions and exchanges and Entries and defenses and a way to chain moves together and the correct way to set something up two, three steps ahead to know that if you grab the lapel this way, the guy's going to try to shake it off that way and that exposes this which exposes that and then the next defense will expose this and then you keep going and going and going and going until you get them.
And what's a significant step for me is like now in the classes when I'm sparring people I don't try just in the handshake to manipulate them into going easy.
Yeah, sometimes I try and stay down that white belt end of the room, but now the more I do it, the more they coax me up there.
Great big giant men, like there's a guy that goes, the hard end purple belt and above, Dave, Paul Busby, and there's people, their hands and their feet look different to my hands and feet.
Their hands and feet are as different from mine as mine are to my daughter's.
And I feel like, how am I supposed to ever do anything with these people?
Like hard water.
Like drowning in hard water.
The way they move and fold around me.
What am I supposed to do?
And my breathing goes.
But the thing is with other white belts is that what I feel is like there is my ego comes back in.
Because there's how I feel like, no, I should be getting something.
The first time I got choked out by another white belt, I felt like, I went into a room I'd not been in since I was 16, getting my head kicked in in bus stops, you know, and stuff like that.
I felt like I was quiet for 24 hours, just sitting and reflecting on, oh shit, and I had to speak to other people, like, this is a combat sport, this happens, you're going to experience, right, right, so it doesn't mean I'm a bad person.
That I've failed.
unidentified
No, no, you're going to have to get used to that if you're going to be doing this.
Yeah, and you sit there while I'll tell you about Jiu Jitsu.
And the other thing that's been good about it is when it is the other way.
I remember a guy that was a big guy on top of me, and he was in Mount, right?
And he wasn't actually applying a submission, but just the sheer discomfort of having someone there, their body, their sweat, their Their hair, their abdomen, their reproductive organs, their digestive system, feces in their bowel on top of me.
I just nearly tapped out of that.
But then he went to move to get an arm bar and I thought, hang on a second.
There's a moment and I managed to escape from that.
And like the amount of energy that that released was like, fuck you!
It's also very satisfying to defend against something that someone used to catch you with.
Like, say, if someone's really good at taking your back and they choked you a couple times, and then one time they take your back, but you defend and you get out.
I love being in the cave, that mental space, because my technique was, oh, I'm not good at that.
Never bother trying.
I'm not good at that kind of stuff, never bother trying.
So for me, at this stage in my life, to go and do something that I'm not good at, that's with other men, that's competitive, that involves so much vulnerability and failure and learning, I'm thinking, well, you're growing.
You've got to be growing because you're doing stuff that you never would have done before.
Even turning up at a new place like I'm doing here in LA and making those new relationships and doing that, you know, it's amazing for me.
Another thing I'm into is the integrity of it, right?
Because Chris Clear, a black belt under Roger Gracie, right, in the UK, my teacher, like, if he gave me a blue belt, that would look good, man.
It would be videoed, I would tweet it, it would be everywhere.
Oh, Russell Brand got a blue belt, this shit must work.
But no, he doesn't do it out of integrity and respect for that.
You know, it means more to him, evidently, than the act of kindness.
It's nice to belong to something that has protected and valuable systems.
He did say to me, you keep going by the end of the year.
Blue belt, I think.
But it's not dished out.
It's nice to know that there's some kind of order.
An area where celebrity, manipulation, charm, humor, none of those things, all redundant.
No, we could pull up the actual definition of epidemiology, but the way I would describe it is they would do these studies and essentially they would ask you what you eat on a daily basis, how often do you eat meat, and it's basically a survey.
And in that survey, they would say, well, there's a direct correlation between people that eat meat and diabetes.
But the problem is, what is causing, here, a branch of medicine which deals with incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health.
So when they're dealing with incidents, right?
They're dealing with how often do you eat red meat?
How often do you eat this?
How often do you eat that?
And then they find, oh, well, there's more instances of diabetes in people that eat meat.
Okay.
But is it people that eat meat and vegetables?
Or is it people that eat meat and vegetables and Diet Coke and sugary sodas and ice cream and french fries?
And how are they eating their meat?
Are they eating cheeseburgers from some bullshit fast food place?
Or are they eating grass-fed steak?
Are they eating grass-fed steak and vegetables?
And there's very little evidence that shows there's anything wrong with eating meat if you follow a normal, healthy, what they would call a primal diet.
Yeah.
Cut out all the grains.
Cut out all the sugar.
Cut out all the bullshit.
Eat vegetables and meat.
And there's almost nothing.
I mean, unless you have some very unusual, rare condition where you're either allergic to meat or you have some very strange digestive system where you have allergies to it or you have real problems digesting it or you have real problems with high cholesterol foods, which is very rare as well.
Most of what you're getting is vegan propaganda, people that want other people to be convinced that the way that they're living is the correct way and that eating meat is physically bad for you and is causing all these harms.
What's causing all the harm for people physically is the modern American diet, and that's been pretty established.
Yes, that's right, and there are clear ethical reasons to be vegan in that it takes you out of the exploitation of animals, but that documentary, Water Health that I watched was like, you know, and I've been vegetarian for years, and this, and I've gone back and forth to veganism because I feel, God, Jesus Christ, man, there's enough things in my life I'm not doing without not being able to have an egg Without feeling guilty for fuck's sake.
So, hey, though, the thing about that vegan documentary, mate, is that it tuned in to my pre-existing belief when it said stuff like, oh, the Diabetes Association, they are funded by these meat and dairy organizations and these pharmaceutical companies.
The cancer organization similarly accepts donations from these organizations.
And it made me...
My pre-existing idea that I come to it with is that whole pyramid of these are the things you should eat.
Bread, milk, just were the things that were easy and cheap to produce and that were profitable.
When you're doing something like that, this is also if you're a person that has addictive problems, addiction problems, which I don't necessarily have them as much with substances.
What do you have them with?
Well, you saw it with video games.
You got here with the video game problem that I have.
You should eat some animal protein without, I mean, if you oppose the moral aspect of killing an animal, which I totally understand and appreciate, and that's what led me to become a hunter in the first place, is that I was really uncomfortable watching these animal rights videos of Factory farming.
Yeah, we do travel on bikes if you whitetail hunt.
A lot of times you'll go into the woods with bikes because they don't leave a scent the way your feet do.
You know, and animals don't associate the sound of a bike the way they associate it with, like, the sound of stepping, bipedal hominids stepping towards them.
Like, see, like, I, from that position, I couldn't, like, I would love the game of being able to aim, because actually I've had to go down gun ranges, it turns out I'm a pretty good shot, and it's nice to see that thing come back with, like, holes around its abdomen and its head, and I think, satisfied there.
You've been dealt with, paper man.
But, like, the elk, I couldn't, I've got too much empathy in me that I couldn't deal with the feeling of...
After it was shot, almost thinking about it, the sentimentality of it.
I've sentimentalised it.
Now, at least I don't eat meat and stuff like that, so it's not like I have all those feelings but can handle it in a packaged, portioned-off way.
It's just I feel too much like, oh, that creature.
So in your head, when you're doing it, when you're pulling the trigger, you're not having...
It's a good argument because if you're encouraging people to hunt, it is kind of a good argument because it's not realistic.
It's not sustainable.
But the other thing to recognize is that the reason why most of this wildlife exists in the first place, a lot of it was wiped out in the early 20th century.
From what they call market hunting.
In the late 19th century, early 20th century, they didn't have refrigeration and it was hard to get food and we didn't have the same sort of large-scale agriculture that we have today.
And so when someone would want meat, somebody would either have to hunt it for you and you would go to the market and get that hunted food or you would go out and do it yourself.
And they basically wiped out most of the wildlife in North America to the point of extinction, white-tailed deer, elk.
They've been extirpated from the majority of their range in North America and only been replaced in a few other places.
But the places where they've been replaced, it's all through money that was generated through hunting tags, all through billions and billions of dollars.
There's a thing called the Robertson-Pickman, I think that's what it's called, Act, where 10%, if you buy hunting gear and equipment, 10% of that money goes to habitat restoration, making sure that rangers and forest people get funded, so that the Fish and Game Department gets funded, and also population conservation, making sure that the populations are healthy, repopulating certain areas with elk and deer.
And this has all been done through the money that's generated through hunting.
Yeah, I can see that there's a, looking at my own feelings towards it, I can see that there's a, potentially, I'm bringing a sentimentality to the idea of animals that's, like, anthropomorphic.
Like, I'm like, oh, you can't kill that, what about, it's babies!
Thinking about things like that.
But what I... I live in a rural area in Britain where hunting is normal and agriculture is normal and I wouldn't get very far if I was like, you can't shoot those pheasants, look at their feathers, they're beautiful.
It's not a helpful attitude.
So whilst I... In myself, I couldn't do that because it messes me up on a...
It feels like a very...
But I feel that this is precisely the kind of territory where we have to look at acknowledging and tolerating difference between us.
This is where I feel like these ossified, polarised positions between right and left are starting to take root.
Because if someone like me, who don't eat meat, don't eat animal products and wouldn't hunt for ethical reasons, Starts trying to impose on other people now you shouldn't hunt because of this that have you not watched Bambi you know like that's gonna mean that people aren't able to explore who they are and so my I've let go of judging people around things that I don't agree with because I reckon I don't know everything.
You know what I mean?
I'm this.
This is about my morality.
It's about how I behave.
And if people said to me, I'm thinking about going hunting, I'd go, well, these are my feelings about it.
However, though, I just heard that hunting does contribute, apparently, to the survival of some species.
And there is an argument that it's quite natural and indigenous.
And it's probably a way of getting in contact with who we are originally as hunting people.
It's an important part of our anthropological history.
History and possibly a lot of the condemnation of hunting is part of the rejection of who we used to be as we become overly civilised and more and more detached from what it is to be human, whether that's sacred or pragmatic.
We don't know what human beings are anymore.
We reject our own sexuality.
We reject our own bodies.
We're trying to turn ourselves into these sort of cyborgs, these emotionless, sexless...
Meaningless creatures.
Where is our passion?
Where is our connection with the sacred?
They would go, hold on, I only asked you about hunting.
When are you going to stop talking?
Never!
You gave me an in, I will pummel you with my belief system on all things.
So I don't feel like, that ain't where I get into judging people.
But I'm interested as well, with this, I keep bringing up the subject of DMT, like, what I guess what I want to know about is, like, because I'm, you know, obviously a person in recovery, I don't drink, I don't take drugs, haven't done for a long time, and I recognise for certain people that they can't do it safely.
Psychedelics and hallucinogens seem to me exist in a realm outside of that because they're not about, they're not pleasure.
Seeking.
It seems to me like it's a spiritual portal.
However, I'm a crafty bastard when it comes to this stuff, and I'm always looking for an in.
You know, when I see your cannabis treasure trove over there, I mean, that is some, yeah, as you said, Raiders of the Lost Ark stuff, and I'm holding in my hand now the CBD-rich cannabis soft gels, clasping it.
What I suppose I'm interested in, because I'm meditating a lot.
I'm experiencing transcendent states.
I'm experiencing what it's like To not feel attached to my identity as Russell.
Who are you before you are Russell?
Who are you before you identify yourself as a man in England?
Who is the person?
Who is the consciousness?
Who is the awareness?
Now, when I listen to, say, Terence McKenna talking about his experiences in psychedelia at such length and with such lucidity and with so many philosophical connotations and the way that he uses the information he's getting from hallucinogenic experiences...
To speculate on how we should organise society, what the implications are for freedom.
His refusal to accept that there are certain kind of experiences that should be prohibited, that it's ridiculous that adults should be prevented from having that.
I'm fascinated, but I'm also, I suppose, part of my bias is I love anything that gets me out of my head.
I feel a tremendous sense of relief, whether it's through meditation or even sport.
Or sex, being relieved of the burden of the constantly thinking mind.
But when I hear like those vivid descriptions of DMT realm or our Wesker, I think something in me hungers for that, hungers for it.
If there is an omnipresent, continually existing realm that human beings aren't accessing because of the particular biochemical formulation of consciousness As it is in this point in our evolution.
And that we can get there.
I've heard Terrence McKenna say, it's more real.
It's more real.
There's stuff in there.
Excuse me.
And when he talks about them beings, you know, like that he describes as self-dribbling basketballs, creating like Faberge egg, like, you know, devices through vibration.
Certainly there are archetypal images that seem to be repeated throughout ancient cultures and archaic stories that seem to refer to the potential for plant experiences to affect consciousness.
Even the Garden of Eden, do not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, otherwise you will become as gods.
You know, I sense that.
Now, if...
If there is some realm that we can reach through that experience that puts into perspective everything else we experience on the material realm, and that thing seems to, in your words, be emanating love and understanding while ever-changing, completely formless and communicating love and understanding, I can't help but think that that should become Our priority to have a relationship with that realm and to bring about that experience.
I don't even mean in a literal way, because even Terence McKenna said there are some people, vulnerable souls, he was probably referring to people like me, that probably shouldn't mess around with that kind of stuff.
Yeah, he had some very unique perspectives on schizophrenia and I think if we lived in a healthy world, a healthy civilization that had a healthy relationship with psychoactive substances, we'd probably have centers where you would have a legitimate shaman, a medical advisor, and someone would take you through a guided experience.
We're doing that now with ketamine.
There's a lot of people that are very depressed that are having these Physician-controlled ketamine experiences that have had a profound effect on their depression.
My friend Neil Brennan's gone through several of them.
And he's a comedian, a very funny comedian.
So when he was describing it, it was hilarious.
He was going to a doctor's office and tripping his fucking balls off.
And the doctor's shooting him up with intramuscular ketamine.
I mean, tripping his fucking balls off in these whatever states that ketamine, I've never experienced ketamine, I don't know what it does, but it's apparently profoundly hallucinogenic.
And you have wild, crazy experiences on it.
And for whatever reason, it has a great impact on depression for a lot of people.
I think it's a perspective enhancer, but it also does something to rewire the mind.
Well, what some of this suggests is that mental illness is a response to our material conditions.
Whether that mentally is schizophrenia, depression, or addiction, it's like people are going, hang on a minute, this isn't how we're supposed to live.
I took that ketamine one time towards the end of my using, and as usual, it's not in the right type of environment.
You shouldn't be doing stuff like that in a nightclub.
You need to be under that shamanic conditions white coat guy or whatever, whoever you nominate as a shaman.
But I felt like it was like going into a tunnel made of sound and having to navigate.
I was like, oh shit, I'm still in reality.
What am I going to do?
Is it...
As my sort of consciousness becomes a noise instead of a string of words and signs, how am I going to get out of this place?
For me, it's clear that drugs were never meant to be recreational.
In fact, they never were.
I was never, hey man, this is crazy.
I was always like, I'm in fucking pain.
I need some shit to help me out, otherwise I'm going to I'd probably kill myself.
So it was a way of holding that stuff at arm's length.
So I guess my renewed curiosity around DMT and ayahuasca and other sort of plant medicines.
Do you know Daniel Pinchbeck and them guys that are part of that?
I'm curious about it because I guess I'm continually trying to find a way where someone goes, right, here's a way where we can do it, where it's sort of safe.
And I've heard of other people in recovery doing it.
And when I think about what my motivation is, is when I hear people talking about and my own recollections of experiencing what felt like God and by God I mean a sense of oneness and that my individual identity isn't my real identity and I'm connected to everything and love is the most important thing.
You know, I want a real experience of that so that when I'm out in the world, I can remember when I'm driving or when I'm dealing with people or if I'm buying something or if I'm feeling inferior or feeling superior that, like you said, this is bullshit.
This is like a secondary reality.
Don't let it govern you.
You know, as someone that's been seduced by fame, a person like, oh, if I get this part in this film, Then everyone's going to love me.
Oh, if this stand-up set goes well, you know, like a person that placed all of my well-being outside of myself, the certain knowledge that there is an inner connection that will take care of you, that's accessible.
I guess I'm, you know, hungry to sort of feel it in a way that's like, oh my God, now there is no doubt.
So in a sense, it's a crisis of faith, not a crisis of faith.
But there's some psychedelic states that you could achieve without taking anything.
I mean, you can certainly get there in a flotation tank.
You can get there through holotropic breathing.
I've never done kundalini yoga, but apparently the people that get really deep into kundalini yoga can literally have DMT trips.
I have friends that have done DMT and have experienced DMT trips through kundalini.
But you have to be really dedicated.
I mean, there's a lot of time, a lot of time, a lot of energy, and you have to really understand the methods and follow them to a T, and you can achieve these altered states of consciousness that are apparently, not from my personal experience, but from what people tell me, incredibly profound.
Yeah, I mean, I've had comparable things, I guess, that what is, you know, the difference between feeling something that's that overwhelming, that gives you no choice, you know, like, it's not like, you know, Kundalini, you've got to do these breaths correctly, you've got to sit there, you've got to try it again and again.
Well, what, for me, it feels, like, what I've felt quite a lot, yogically and meditatively, is a cessation of what I would call my individual consciousness.
like oh i'm not this this isn't who i am this is just a temporary experience and all of the value systems of our world are built upon these primal drives in collaboration with a culture that likes to stratify people and manage people and operates like a massive farm where it's easier to keep people together operating in these kind of ways systemically I've sort of felt rushes of that, like a certain wordless clarity, if you can imagine me having anything that was wordless, even for a moment.
And in that space, there is great peace.
So I suppose what's turning me on about the DMT and Ayahuasca thing is the way it's narrativised, that you're going to meet characters and stuff like that, and it's going to be plain...
And beyond doubt.
You know, because I suppose what prophets do, you know, like whether, you know, when a prophet returns from the, whether it's the burning bush or the cave, they come back and they say, all this stuff that you're taking seriously is not real.
There's this other realm.
Start prioritizing it or you are going to live in hell on earth.
You're going to be governed by your materialistic drives, your sexual drives, and it's going to imprison you.
And it turns out that they're right.
And so, like, you know, I suppose what I'm after, because I'm, Partly, you know, on a super...
Like, on one level, influenced by what you're doing and how you've created your own...
Like, you've created your own business and your own success.
Like, this symbiosis of stand-up and the podcast.
And, like, it's become, like, a sort of a lifestyle brand, in a sense, Joe.
Like, you know, I'm sort of like, yeah, I don't...
I don't want to be continually dragged into these, like, working within institutions.
Like, you know, I'm over here doing a bloody, I'm doing ballers, and I'm bloody glad to be over here doing ballers and working with The Rock, and I've got a funny story about that if you want it.
But, like, you know, like, really what interests me is, like, can I be, can I dedicate my life To humorously communicating spiritual information and indeed starting to live it.
And I suppose what that would mean is, you know, I'm getting better, but I'm not a person who's obsessed with porn or sex or drugs or whatever.
Like, you know, to become it.
To become what you actually are.
To recognize that we're all different.
Your perfect realization of you is going to involve...
Hunt in and all of these things that you've created through your gift and that my perfect version of me is going to, you know, involve all of this and not everyone needs to build sort of empires or entertainment industries or whatever but all of us are on some journey to self-actualization and realization as individual as our fingerprints and as natural as a seed turning into a tree and if we don't have a way of accessing that no wonder we're dissatisfied no wonder there's an opioid epidemic no wonder people are bored and angry and lonely Well, I think what you can do Is be yourself.
So your pursuit for excellence, when you're saying, I've got to get better at BJJ or archery or hunting or whatever, that isn't coupled with a sort of sense, because you're not fucking good enough!
There's joy in it and there's enthusiasm, I mean, in everything.
Archery in particular, it's very, you know, there's that book, Zen and the Art of Archery, which is, it's an interesting book.
I think there's some really great points to it, but that state of mind that you get when you release an arrow and that arrow perfectly finds its mark really is Zen.
It requires so much concentration and focus and technique that you really don't think about other things.
And it's cleansing in a lot of ways.
It's mind cleansing.
I find jujitsu to be very similar in that way too, that it's so all-encompassing.
There's so much on the line, it's so difficult to do, that while it's happening, you're freeing your mind up.
And when you test yourself and you have to figure your way through something or change the path because the path you were on was unsuccessful, when you're doing that, it's really good for the mind and for the...
I hesitate to say the spirit because I think that word spirituality is so beaten down and abused.
That is, again, and I'm not particularly promoting this book because I'm alright with however things do.
But the point of this mentorship is the idea that someone will exhibit qualities that you recognize you haven't fully realized in yourself and that you can sort of model them and realize them because latently you have those qualities.
And, like, because I thought, like, because what I feel like is that the comedy club environment warps your material because you've got to appeal to them.
And I think you ain't the fucking arbiters of truth, you drunk and crazy 2am motherfuckers.
Like, like, So I get, like, I perform, what I'll do is, like, and what I'm doing to say at the moment is I'll book the UCB, like, or, like, places 100, 200, or go Lago, or put on events, and I'm doing events while I'm in LA, because I think, oh, these people come, and they love me, and they bring me beads, and here's some vegan cookies.
Therefore, I'm in an environment that is sympathetic and it is my audience and I'm not biasing.
The idea of overcoming a greater obstacle, I completely appreciate what you're saying.
But say you believe in the purity of stand-up as being some real expression of yourself, as in the arrow hitting the bullseye, I feel like I have a vision of what I'm trying to achieve.
And increasingly, it's becoming about, I want my stand-up, I want to hang on, you know, like, as I've always done, stories where I feel embarrassed and humiliated, but I want to hang off it, ruminations on what I believe to be the nature of truth, and I want people to come out of those things feeling loved, validated, accepted, and that they're good enough and that they can explore themselves.
I didn't have the skills, the chops, the experience, the jokes.
So I was so under-equipped.
But what I was trying to do was create environments that felt...
I'm much better at doing that now.
I can create that kind of an uncertainty in a room, a kind of a sense of chaos and what's happening, and then bring it back, I hope, to a humorous conclusion where people feel safe and amused and all of that kind of stuff.
Now, I think it's...
Because I did try and do that in comedy clubs, and yeah, it was conversation.
It's not what people want.
So don't you think that by...
Prepping your stand-up in those environments that it biases you towards a type of stand-up comedy that is limited.
You could always perform to your crowd, and you could always expand on things to your crowd, but to really put it together without any fluff...
Without any nonsense, without being self-indulgent, respecting the attention span of the audience that may or may not even be there to see you.
Most likely it's not if you go to a comedy club and there's a large...
If you go to the comedy store any night of the week, there's 15 plus people on the marquee or on the list.
And the show starts at...
8pm or 9pm, depending on the night, and it goes to 2 o'clock in the morning.
You catch waves in there, and there's different types of comedy.
In that, you're going to deal with sometimes tired audiences, sometimes enthusiastic people.
It's all different.
It varies widely.
And I think that in doing that, you cut all the nonsense out of your act, and you develop an economy of words.
You understand how to captivate people's attention and keep them engaged, and to respect their time, respect their point of view, respect that these people have an attention span.
They want to be engaged in the best possible way that you can do it.
Obviously, in the comedy store, between the hours you just described, there's a contract We're here, we ain't here to see you, we're here to laugh every 15 seconds.
And comics like Robin Williams or Chappelle's, the all-time greats, they go in and accept those conditions.
You've seen stuff like Robin Williams.
He's just walking around in the crowd in that very room.
It's like he's doing the thing I'm talking about and he's doing it there.
That's when you think...
I suppose I do get that, that you're road-testing its durability to an incredible degree, if you can pull it off.
When you have a subject, say if you want to talk about the mentors that you have in life, it's an open-ended approach.
You have no idea what the correct way to say something is.
You try it.
You write it out.
You say, this seems feasible.
Let me try it this way.
And oftentimes people never correct it or they never adjust it.
They never go back and improve it.
They just say it in a certain way and figure out how to do it.
When you're doing it in front of a crowd, you're developing these things while also feeling the way people are reacting to them and feeling their attention span, and it makes you, with proper reflection and truly objective listening to your material, it makes you change and shift and adjust things, hopefully in a positive way.
And the more you do it, the more you get a sense of, maybe this is clunky here, and maybe I figure out a better way to say it.
I figured out a way to express it In short doses, in short bursts, if you stare at it, it'll go blind.
It's trying to give you cancer, and if it's not there, you get sad.
So in that short burst, it's like, wow, yeah, all those things are true.
It's crazy.
There really is a fireball floating in the sky, and we're just used to it.
We live because of a floating, million times bigger than the earth fireball.
If you can say something like that and make someone laugh, you can actually change the way they look at things.
You can actually affect, at least, the way they look at things.
If you just say something...
Sometimes it's profound.
Sometimes it registers.
But if you could say something and it forces someone to laugh, even if they disagree with you, if they're laughing, like, I don't even fucking agree with this, but holy shit, this is funny.
You put that thought deep into someone's head and you allow them to think about your thought process and how your creative process and what you're doing to sort of bring these things out.
Yes, I like the way you describe the architecture of that.
You've got to basically have, these are some facts about the sun that are irrefutable.
Now here is how that affects the way we look at the world and exposes to us that we're just ignorant.
We're not awake to reality.
We can't hold reality in our minds because it's too vast to handle.
I like it and I agree with you that with laughter comes access to kind of deeper truths and I've heard some therapists in fact say that laughter is to shame what grief is to sadness.
That laughter is helping to expel shame and to process shame.
There's something very important about people coming together and laughing together.
I like to exist comedically in a world where it starts from a deeply personal perspective and admissions and acknowledgements of humiliation and shame and vulnerability and travels out to the universal and hopefully archetypal.
You can sort of travel between those points.
A comedian, I think we both admire, Bill Hicks.
What I think is fascinating is because if you've loved Bill Hicks for a long while, then you discover, man, that guy worked...
It's material a lot.
You know, like you go, I watched this interview of him on Australian TV. He's doing like a bit that I've seen him do, you know, in multiple incarnations.
But I have also seen him do interviews where he's spontaneously talking about gigs, terrible gigs that have gone badly, and he is hilarious.
But it's very interesting to me, and perhaps it's because of that background and that practice of doing clubs, that Hicks is very much a comedian that's, no, I'm drilling this fucking thing, and I'm staying with it.
You know, if you pay attention to how, you know, when people study, like if you read Outliers, and you read how people, when people study why people are great at what they do and what makes them exceptional, there's always a variety of factors.
And whatever the factors are with Dave, he's got this easygoing personality, this very carefree way of looking at things.
He's also gone through a lot of bullshit in his career with leaving the Chappelle show and abandoning $50 million and going to Africa and really understanding what his real motivation were.
He was caught up in that world where they were trying to change him and commercialize his television show.
And he handled it As good as anybody that's ever handled it.
He handled fame and temptation, I think, better than anyone I've ever heard of.
He just said, fuck you!
And he just went away.
He went away and then didn't do gigs for years.
People don't understand.
He would show up and do stand-up places, but he wouldn't book anything.
So, like, he wasn't getting paid.
He did stand-up.
Dave Chappelle did stand-up in the park in Seattle.
He brought, like, a little amplifier and a microphone, sat up, and just started doing stand-up, and people just gathered around.
And he did this just to sort of get him back in touch with his roots, because he used to do a lot of street performing in New York, and I saw him do street performing in Montreal.
We did a club, and then we came out of the club, and Dave, I think Dave was like 18 or 19 at the time, just started doing stand-up on the street.
And put his hat out and people would put money in his hat.
I mean, he was constantly sharpening that sword.
And he stopped doing stand-up for a long time in terms of booking gigs.
And then after a while, he said, fuck it, I'm going to come back again.
And then he started doing these gigantic gigs.
And then, of course, he did his two recent Netflix specials.
They were amongst his best work ever.
And now he's working all the time.
He's constantly popping into the Comedy Store and the Comedy Cellar and all these different clubs all across the country and constantly doing stand-up.
He was good when I first met him when he was like 18. I think he was 18 and I was 21, so it was somewhere in that range.
Maybe I was a little older.
Maybe he was like, how old is Dave?
46, 47?
I think he's five years younger than me.
Is that correct?
46 or 47?
45. Okay, so he's more.
So he's six years.
Six years younger than me.
So, you know, I was probably 25 and he was probably 18-ish.
25, 26. 18, 17. But he was so, like, calm and, like...
He was very...
You were attracted to listening to him.
It was like, look at this guy.
This guy's so comfortable in his own skin and so friendly and easygoing and hilarious, but...
Who he was then and then who he became is all the work that he put in.
You know, it's like he had this base of this really, you know, this curious, young, very wise person who saw things that other people didn't see in the world.
And then he just kept going and just kept going.
And then, of course, The Chappelle Show, which is, in my opinion, the greatest sketch comedy show of all time, even though it was only two seasons.
It's the best ever.
And then after that, I mean, he's basically just done stand-up and done it completely outside of this system.
He's done some parts in movies and shit like that, but for the most part, what he's doing is just stand-up.
Completely outside of the Hollywood system.
Completely free.
Just goes up, you know, just talks some shit, has a couple of drinks, laughs, and it's incredibly compelling.
He's found his groove, you know, and that's...
It's a beautiful thing to watch as a fellow stand-up comedy practitioner when someone achieves this mastery level, like we were talking about this Hicks and Gracie of stand-up comedy level, because that's where he's at right now.
I've really learned some powerful lessons there from the story of the apotheosis of comedy that Dave Chappelle's achieved.
Here's these obligations.
Now, I'm booked here to promote Luminary.
My podcast has gone behind a paywall on a platform called Luminary, aiming to be the Netflix of podcasts, meaning like But, you know, your model will, I imagine, triumph further.
So, like, from, like, this week, my podcast will be on Luminary as part of their premium content.
It's an app through which you'll get all podcasts.
But my podcast is, like, you've got to subscribe to that thing.
A lot of people choose to go ad-free, and then they use Patreon or something like that for listener-supported stuff.
Sam Harris was doing that for a long time, but then they had an issue with Patreon about certain censorship of certain individuals and certain ideological perspectives where they were leaning towards left-wing things and being...
Being restrictive towards right-wing things, and then, you know, policing the way people behave outside of Patreon, and some people found that objectable.
So he left, and some other people left, like Jordan Peterson left.
I've never entered into Patreon, into those waters, but I know Burr does it.
So, like, I feel like it's an alright thing to do, but even in, like, just with using things like YouTube and social media and, you know, like Spotify, iTunes or whatever, like, you know, as we have seen, there's a point where there is sort of censorship is a possibility like as you discussed on the jack like that run of episodes mate as i said to you by text between the jack dorsey the reaction to that your response to the reaction through alex jones and all that's important i thought that was a spate
of podcasts that's like this is where this medium can be the alex jones podcast i thought was the godfather of podcasts we've seen the I was going to put it out tomorrow.
You know, when we were talking about animal-human hybrids, we started pulling up these studies where they actually have done studies where they've tried to create animal-human hybrids.
Non-viable animal-human embryos.
They're trying to grow human organs in different animals.
And there's all sorts of weird scientific shit that we're doing.
Imagine what they're doing in China, behind walls.
Look at this.
China's latest cloned monkey experiment is an ethical mess.
That's how we lubricate the passage to the murderous monkeys is ISIS. That's the function of ISIS in the cultural conversation is to justify the monkey soldiers.
Well, they're responsible for a lot of really crazy innovation in terms of military stuff.
But Boston Dynamics, they're the ones that make those crazy robots, and they work with DARPA, and those are the ones that make those robots that you can't kick over.
If we're starting to bring about the worst aspects, the worst things that a human being can conceive of, let's channel them through into reality, it does make you feel that the apocalypse is real.
I thought it was bad enough when, in the malaise of my younger days, I thought, oh wow, imagine if there was a cleaning service where the person would come around and clean, dressed scantily.
Whatever devious shit you can dream up, someone's trying to turn a buck off it, and they've taken it to the extent of the non-kickover robot, flesh-eating robots.
But these things, what we have to worry about is once artificial intelligence becomes sentient, and you can somehow or another attach it to these objects that move, And they run on solar power, or they have nuclear fuel cells or some crazy shit that allows them to exist for a long period of time.
You don't have to worry about them contaminating environments if you plan on killing everybody in the environment.
It's almost like, you know, see if this tunes into the DMT component of what we've been talking about.
It's almost as if we've already experienced this reality.
We've already been through the version where those evil insectoid robots take over.
So when we see it on the screen we think oh, no, we're doing that thing We're doing that thing where we create those things that bring about our destruction And I believe it's because we've become biased to Commerce and a particular type of progress but one narrative has succeeded because we necessarily have
We had to throw off religion, you know, at the dawn of the secular age because religion was becoming systems of bias and systems of oppression and systems of, what do I want to say, elevating certain types of power and supporting elites.
Hang on a minute.
This religion, a lot of it seems like bullshit.
What we've done is we've abandoned the sacred.
And I think if you abandon the sacred, meaning there is more to life than what we can understand.
i listened to the brian cox episode and i've spoke to brian cox the british physicist uh astrophysicist on my show as well and when he talks about like he said that you know we know that there's not some additional component to a human being because we can break down everything that happens when you move an arm you know whatever and i feel like we only have limited instruments we only have limited instruments there's certain frequencies that we simply cannot read what else is going on when people are having these transcendent psychedelic experiences
we're accessing elements of consciousness energies and frequencies that we are not able to access while we're in this state And everything we're achieving and everything we're building, we're building on this platform.
And the bias of this platform is towards progress and materialism.
And I think the result is flesh-eating robots and those evil monkey warrior soldiers.
I want to calm down and have a little talk about what it is we're trying to design.
Yeah, I don't know if I agree with Brian on that particular point that we think we know everything about where consciousness emanates.
I don't think that's necessary, but I like the fact that he thinks that way because he's such a rigid hardliner for science and the guy works at CERN. I mean, he's a brilliant, brilliant man, so of course he thinks that way.
I also don't think he's ever had a DMT experience.
I wonder that, yeah, some people, I think, give him a quick dose.
Because, as well, I respect Brian, and it's further to my point, similar to the hunting argument.
I happen to believe in God, but when I talked to Brian Cox, I got to the point where I was saying, all right, even though I believe in God and you are an atheist, although he said I don't call myself an atheist, well, I felt like we both got to the point where we said compassion, kindness, and love are the most important things.
I believe that that state of oneness and transcendence that you're talking about through your DMT experiences that says, you know, love and kindness and love and awareness, I believe that is the most real thing.
I think that preceded all matter.
And I think that we can interact with it.
So I don't believe God in just a Gaia way, that the whole world is like an interactive, biological, living, breathing goddess.
I believe, yes, that, and that we can commune with it.
And furthermore, the relevance of it for me is that it suggests to me that we should be acting kindly and lovingly.
And when we're thinking about how do we organise our systems, that our awareness of that energy, accessible to all of us, Should be paramount in our understanding of how we organise.
So, like, what I think is, like, that we should look at, you know, like, we've been through it as human beings, so many advents, the agriculture, technology, industry, thinking that we were, that the, you know, the sun went round the earth, thinking that the earth was flat, with all due respect to Eddie Bravo.
And before each of these realisations and each of these changes, we always think we're at the summit.
We never know what's going to be the thing that's going to change.
My suspicion is that what's going to change is the way we relate to consciousness and the way we see ourselves as individuals, that we start to have an understanding that what...
That becomes a priority.
That thing you described of like, when I have come back from DMT trips, I recognise this is just an illusion and it's not real.
I think that will start...
I believe that we need to prioritise that and progressing along that line.
What are the implications of this not being the most real frequency there is?
How do we organise society on that basis?
How does that affect how we relate to one another?
What kind of...
How should we be governing?
How does that affect justice?
That that should be in the mix instead of...
How many fucking terrifying arachnoid weird gate robot motherfuckers can we cook up?
That's the way we're going.
The progressive technological route, because it's created medicine, because it's saved so many lives, because it's given us wonderful technology, the spirit of entrepreneurship, but all of that energy, it all gets pushed in one direction.
It all goes that way, and I feel that we need to invite that back.
The sacred and the divine need to be back in the conversation.
Well, there's certainly going to be pros and cons with everything.
There's definitely pros and cons with the creation of technology.
I think of human beings as...
If you go back to single-celled organisms, they have very little awareness of their environment.
And then as it became primitive bugs, as things evolved, they developed more awareness.
But even us in comparison to certain animals.
Certain animals have heightened senses of smell and survival instincts, but they're also colorblind.
They don't see things.
They see edge detection.
That's one of the things about deer.
They see movement.
So if you wear camouflage and your pattern is broken up with a grid and then you stay put, they don't see you.
It doesn't register to them.
They see movement.
So we have a far more complex system of recognition than they do in terms of visually, the way we see things.
And I think that whatever skills or whatever senses that we've evolved, I don't think that's it.
I don't think that we've reached the pinnacle of it.
And I think that as beings become more and more evolved, they'll probably gain more and more senses.
And that could be directly related to technology.
It's totally possible that what's going on with technologies that we're also developing through external means, a way for us to see the world, a way for us to view...
Like what they've done with the Large Hadron Collider is like the best example of it, right?
What they do with the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes.
You're using technology to gain awareness and to see more things.
And that this is the good side of technology, is that it's...
Allowing us to have a far greater understanding of all the variables that surround us that we might not be able to detect with our senses.
That this is a part of who we are.
And then I think when you're talking about things like psychedelic experiences, that's probably another realm of understanding that we haven't really achieved yet because we're still evolving as a species, as a thing.
What I think is interesting is that the continual bias along that technological path is towards profit.
You know, when we see those machines, the end point is always how do we maximize profit?
There is no, like, the influence of how do we do what's right.
That's like a sort of a general, ethical...
What do I want to say?
Code is not being introduced.
There is no regulation.
Ultimately, people will create the warrior monkeys or the most profitable machines.
Because the counter-argument isn't being made.
No one is making it.
There's no union of...
There's no sort of clear opinion of, hang on a minute, where could we be going?
There is no body or ideology that's able to oppose the relentless march of capitalism.
I'm not sort of like a flat out of capitalism is bad.
Here I am promoting a book, using an iPhone.
We're all swimming in it.
But what I'm saying is that...
If we acknowledge there are transcendent realms, there is information, date and data that exists beyond what we're able to receive with our senses, how are we going to incorporate that in the way we organise?
Because otherwise, the magnetism, the pull, the g-force of what's most profitable...
What's going to continue to suit the requirements of the powerful, the bias will always fall in that direction.
And it seems like where that's heading is certain kinds of ecological disaster, certain kinds of economic inequality, certain kinds of conflict.
One of the simple experiments that I apply is, if people say, oh, what's wrong with the world?
The world's so fucked, all this polarity.
I sometimes think, well, who is benefiting from how it is now?
Is anyone benefiting?
Are there any groups, institutions or individuals for whom this current state is beneficial?
And if the answer to that question is yes, then look at who those institutions are and they are most likely to a degree involved in establishing and maintaining these systems.
And there are, you know, institutions and individuals and organisations that this works just fine for.
And when new things come out, like this new robot that apparently you're going to 100 models, whatever that means, what that is is they're going to sell it.
So it's fueling innovation.
Someone else will come along and compete with Boston Dynamics, and then there will be innovation wars.
If these innovation wars weren't...
In place right now, our phones would look nothing like the iPhone X. It just wouldn't.
It wouldn't look like the SX. Who knows what it would look like?
But there would be no incentive for them to compete against all these Samsung devices and Huawei devices.
All that stuff is fueling this innovation, but it's all being fueled by capitalism.
You're quite right that innovation is one of the benefits of maintaining this system.
But it seems to me that we are excluding other factors that recur throughout human cultures.
We all have an idea of fairness, of justice.
And yeah, I don't want some clunky, weird, sort of, eastern block phone made out of grey plastic with only one button on it.
But like...
We have to, I suppose, examine as a society and as individuals what is important to us.
Where I think we've touched several times upon the fact that as an individual you're more likely to bias yourself towards negative information online.
We do have a degree of individual power and individual responsibility, and I feel like if enough people awaken to the possibility of different narratives, that the capitalist idea of innovation and success and progress, that all of these words can be examined.
What do you mean, progress?
That assumes a teleology, a purpose, a destination.
if all time is happening at once if space is infinite like you know that bit of yours of like you know to try and fathom for a moment the limitlessness that we're existing within then all these things are constructs this is a construct and it is good to have technology but it's possible to like at points times of crisis such as what it feels like we're at now
and although people have said oh we always feel that every generation thinks that they're the one because they know their own impending death is coming and they narrativize that something social and global well regardless there's got to be a time where we start to introduce different ideas into our systems it seems like there's room for that now because we do live in a truly global culture that there is the possibility for monoliths to introduce new innovation and there is nothing that can oppose it or regulate it we're starting to see this kind of breakdown
so i'm interested in how we can individually prepare ourselves to organize society differently to be able to overcome pretty superficial differences like oh you go hunting i don't go hunting i Who gives a fuck?
They start talking about how we can organise ourselves where people who go hunting or don't go hunting can live peacefully in different ways, not entirely governed by a small cabal, and I'm sure power is more complex than that, that seem to be hugely biasing the direction of this so-called progress.
I think you answered your own previous questions when you're talking about whether or not you can be spiritual and funny and like, what are you doing?
Can you carve that path out for yourself?
What you're doing there by explaining that would influence people, would give people a perspective that allows them to say, yeah, like, why are we doing this and what is the purpose of this?
And if enough people hear those words and have that perspective introduced to them, it'll change the way they interact with the world, and that changes the world.
It really does.
That's one of the more powerful things about discussions.
When someone like you says something like that and it resonates with people and they start thinking like, why am I living like this?
If I really do only have 50 years to live, why am I living these 50 years in some really unproductive bullshit way that's not satisfying at all?
Because I just want a bigger house?
What is it?
Do I want a What is the purpose of this path that I'm on now versus a path that I could be on?
And what is the real conflict that we all experience between each other?
How much of it is due to a lack of communication?
How much of it is due to a lack of real listening and understanding?
One of the things I've said about comments and podcasts and stuff like that, I think one of the reasons why a lot of people get mad, and I've tried to think this through, why some people, Some of the responses so negative to things that seem innocuous on the outside.
I think it's because it's frustrating when you don't have a say.
You and I are talking about something.
There's probably some guy right now going, well, just fucking stop with all your spiritual bullshit.
Here's what you do.
You wake up when your fucking alarm clock goes off.
You never hit snooze.
You get out the door.
You put your hours in.
Eventually, you get better.
You take care of your family.
You act like a fucking man.
And there's probably people like that that are upset.
They feel like we're pontificating too much.
And this is all just, you know, just mental masturbation.
And that's one of the things that, you know, being a person that goes to sort of 12-step support groups is you recognize that everyone's individual experience is valuable.
And I've got over the idea that, That some external thing can be imposed.
And whilst there are many people that are, we could say, not using their 50 years to maximum effect because they're pursuing odd material goals, there are many, many more people that have never been introduced to the idea of freedom because from the moment they're born, they're economically tyrannized.
Part of the veganism is like, if you make these kids vegan, at least now I know wherever they go, there's going to be so many restrictions on their food.
I've not made the kids vegan.
It's up to them.
Thank you.
Where's my gold star?
Where's my ticker tape parade?
We don't know our own biases.
We don't know where we've been institutionalized.
The very nature of the unconscious is we are not aware of it.
So I suppose, in a sense, a continued open-mindedness and a willingness to change must be part of any dialogue to go into these situations.
Do you know what?
I might not actually know what's...
That's why I'm not...
When I was 20, if you'd have said about the hunting, I'd be like, oh, no, man.
Now I'm like...
Yeah, Jesus, there's so many ways of seeing the world.
There's so many ways of looking at what's natural and what's correct.
If you don't want to kill any animals, please just find a good farm that has pasture-raised eggs and see how much better you feel.
Or eat animals that are assholes.
Find animals that are assholes in the woods.
Only eat the assholes.
Somebody sent me this horrible video that I've seen many times before of a bear killing a deer in a backyard and the deer screaming and the bear's tearing it apart.
I'm sure you've seen that before, right?
And he sent it to me and he goes, okay, now I get it.
Like, I didn't think...
I thought, like, if a bear got a deer, that it would be just, oh, hey, this is just how nature works.
Like, no, this is a horrific, violent act of this animal tearing this other animal apart.
Now, would you prefer that than a hunter?
Because 99 times out of 100, when a hunter kills an animal, it's way quicker.
There, that's the video.
It's horrible.
It's a horrible video, this animal.
I think it's actually a black bear.
I think it's either a grizzly or a color-phase black bear, but it takes a long time, too.
If you haven't seen the video, it's a long one, and the animal makes some horrible noises.
We're talking about Russell Returns.
We're talking about a video that I've seen before about this bear that kills this deer in this guy's yard.
The guy films it, and the deer's making these horrible noises.
And this guy sent it to me and he goes, now I get it.
He goes, I get what the wild is actually all about.
Because you don't really see it that much.
It's very rare that you actually see an animal kill an animal.
So we have these romantic, Disney-fied ideas of what the food chain looks like out there.
You should have an organic garden if you really want to do it, right?
Because if you're getting into large-scale agriculture, you're buying food from people that grow it, they're running over fucking rabbits and mice and killing things with pesticides.
Yeah.
There's no removing yourself from death just by eating vegetables.
You don't.
Also, with large-scale agriculture, that ground, all those animals get displaced.
It fucks the whole ecosystem up, whatever area they're planting on, and then when they roll over it with those gigantic combines and Pull up that grain.
They're chewing up everything.
That's why vultures always circle where combines are.
As soon as they have fresh cut, the vultures start showing up because they know there's going to be something that got jacked.
See, once you know that monoculture is unhealthy, the only resistance to altering it, to having permaculture and healthier, better agricultural models, is commerce and profit.
But if we start saying, hey, why don't we not have monoculture anymore because it's unfair and it's unreasonable, they go, we can't because it's profitable to have it and people won't be able to afford food.
But all of that is like an interrelated system that's sort of gridlocked into protecting itself.
You know, like there's a spiritual maxim, wisdom is acting on knowledge and that is not the world we live in.
We know things and then we just ignore it, you know, like as individuals or as, you know, corporations and as groups.
And like what I feel like I'm trying to do as an individual is hold myself to that standard.
Like, I know that's not good for me to do that anymore.
I'm not going to do that.
I'm going to watch myself and I'm going to watch that behaviour and I'm going to try and improve.
You know, like I don't want to go...
Like, when my first impulse and heading down to the Hibiru Jiu-Jitsu places, I feel nervous.
I don't feel confident doing it.
I don't want to go.
Or whether it's, like, giving up me or whatever.
But I'm doing these things in a sense that I think these are the kind of improvements I can make.
Now, like...
We almost don't expect that of politics anymore.
You don't expect a political figure to say, well, listen, monoculture is having a terrible impact.
They'll make some gestural thing, wouldn't they?
They'll go, look, we're going to try and control Facebook and Google a little bit.
We're going to try and reduce emissions, this amount.
They'll go, listen, we know that's wrong.
We're not going to do that anymore because there's too many powerful interests.
That's why I was susceptible to the vegan documentary.
Of course, there's the ethical reasons, in my opinion, for becoming...
Vegan, but because it's like the reason that these kind of foods are promoted is because these powerful groups lobby government and lobby the group, the organizations that set the standards until they shut up and comply.
That's the same, that is the same, you know, like you're saying, that the reason that is continuing is because it's profitable, but these ideas aren't going to get explored because we're on one path, one teleological journey.
Like, that's sometimes what I feel like when people talk about the threats of different cultural influence, e.g.
Islam, for example, right?
I feel like, well, we already live in a kind of fundamentalism that's invisible to us because it's all we know.
We live in a culture that if something isn't profitable, it will not survive.
And I don't think that's how human beings are set up to exist.
I have this rather lovely anecdote about, like, I was coming back from a gig and there was a woman, like, she had a car broke down the side of the road.
I had a driver.
Forgive me.
Forgive me.
I'm not poor anymore.
Forgive me.
I had a driver, and we see this woman, she's by the side of the road, her car's broke down, and different, like, it's a night time, and a few different people stop and help her.
The first guy is like, this is in England, it's like a Polish immigrant guy, comes and helps.
You know, my driver is a Muslim geezer, he's helping.
I'm trying to help.
Pretty inefficient, may I say, because you know, like, if you're a famous person, when you go into a situation, there's sometimes you don't want to be recognised, there's other times it's quite good to be recognised.
When you're not recognised at all, I always think, oh, I'm not being All recognised in this situation.
No one recognised me in that time.
So I was just a weird geezer at the side of the road trying to help someone who had a minor accident without any relevant skills.
Well, listen, when you go hunting, one of the things that happens is you're in the woods, and when it happens when the sun goes down, you can't see where the fuck you're going.
I've had experiences where I've ran into predators in the wild Particularly one time in Canada I ran into a grizzly bear And looking in the eyes It wasn't even a big one It was like a six foot bear It wasn't huge But it looks right through you It looks right through you When you run into an animal that's killing shit every day And it looks at you There's like a demonic look in its eyes I've seen black bears before You don't see that look A grizzly bear which is more predatory They have a crazy look in their eyes
So their idea of what the wild is, is really based on two things.
One, their actual love of animals they know, right?
It's like dogs and cats.
So the animals that we know, we have this connection with them, so we think that these are animals.
They're science projects, man.
Those are not animals.
Real animals don't give a fuck about you.
They're either indifferent to you or they're scared of you or they want to eat you.
That's real animals.
The relationship that you have with a dog is like a child.
Like, my dog is more like a child to me than he is like an animal.
I mean, he's like my little friend that doesn't get to speak.
He doesn't talk, but, you know...
An animal in the wild is a competing organism.
They're competing amongst all the various organisms in whatever ecosystem they're in.
And either they're at the top or they're somewhere below that.
And that's just how it goes.
And every deer is looking around because there's cats.
And the cats are slowly sneaking up on them every fucking day of the week.
And if you go in a place where there's deer, you best believe there's going to be mountain lions there, because that's how it operates.
And when you see that in the wild, it's so rare.
It's so rare to be around that.
But when you see that in the wild, then you get a deeper understanding of what it means to be an animal.
What's horrific is factory farming.
What's perverse and disgusting is the way animals are treated when these livestock companies...
Pump these animals in these warehouses and make them stand in their own shit all day and then abuse them and the horrific nature in which they're raised.
Yeah, all that should be illegal.
Ag gag laws, those laws where whistleblowers get arrested, those should be illegal.
Those are immoral.
They're letting people know what goes into your food.
And those people are being punished for that?
All that shit is...
And they're being punished because it hurts business?
You're doing something that we all think is immoral.
That's how I feel about it I don't think there's anything wrong with even if they if if there should be standards and how cows are raised how chickens are raised Let them live like actual cows.
That's beautiful And there's a way that they can do that where people like Chris Pratt.
Yeah from Guardians getting great guy he has he raises sheep and And he eats them.
And he even gives them out to people.
He has butchers that take care of it.
These sheep are treated like they're loved.
They're not scared of people.
And then literally, they get walked into this room.
They have no idea what's going to happen.
A bolt gets put on the top of their head.
Bang!
And the lights go out.
Now you could say, that should never happen.
And those sheep should just live forever.
Okay.
I could understand that argument.
Or you could say, boy...
If you're going to eat meat, and you're going to eat the meat of an animal that you know how it lived, and there was no horrific moments in its life, it's just one day the lights went out.
That seems like the best, most ethical way to do it.
But someone could turn around on me and say, you could do that same thought experience with people.
Like, why don't you just eat people?
Like, hey, the person who lived a perfect life, you put a bolt on the top of their head and bang, shut the lights out, and then they turn into barbecue.
Look, yeah, that's a very pronounced and vivid way, but I would say that in a sense we're being commodified, imprisoned, enclosed.
The very fact that a law has been made to prevent people regulating or revealing the truth around that shows where the true bias of this system is.
In a way, I think that one of the cultural jobs this podcast has performed, and this is whether deliberately or not, Is it demonstrates that the old political lines that we used to comfortably abide within are starting to sort of break down.
Because, you know, like something, like an obvious signifier of a particular type of person, i.e.
I go hunting, now we have to accept is coupled with your view that the agricultural industry needs to be regulated and it's disgusting.
Now, there we have complete and total agreement, and we both can see that the way that legislation is set up is biased towards corporate interests, commercial interests, and profit.
And so for me, bloody, whether Chris Pratt having his own sheep, I think, yeah, no problem, man.
I don't need to spend my time worrying about that.
I'm a little bit like Alex Jones, like with the...
Why are we worrying about Flat Earth if they've got them babies and all of that stuff?
Why don't we focus on the things that are making a genuine difference to the way people are living lives?
And it seems to me that one of the priorities is in a new global landscape that we're living with, what are the dominant forces and what are the goals of the dominant forces and how detached are those goals from the lives of What you might say are ordinary people, or the majority of people, to use a less complex term.
And what's probably most horrific about reforming the system is that the people that are going to suffer the most are the people that are the poorest.
So if you think of fast food in particular, there's a lot of really poor people that rely on fast food because it's very inexpensive.
If you go and you can get a lot of calories for a small amount of money, But if you go from the fast food restaurant and then you go down the line to factory farming, and then somehow or another they eliminate factory farming, and they say, no, no, no, if you're going to raise animals, you have to have the same sort of standards that we would expect if we knew you, if we were there, we want pastures, we want animals living in the wild, I mean, you know, fenced in, but like living like an actual animal.
Not this crazy warehouse bullshit you guys are running.
Well, that's going to up our operation costs.
Well, then that's how it's going to be.
So then the beef becomes far more expensive.
Now, if the beef becomes far more expensive, then what a fast food, what do the restaurants do?
Well, they're going to have to make things more expensive, too.
So who's going to suffer?
The poor people.
Who's going to suffer with cheap meat in supermarkets?
No, but I think what happens, Joe, is you have started to pull a thread that reveals how the fabric of our culture is corrupted, because it shouldn't be more expensive.
The only reason it's more expensive is because everything is put into a capital-based ideology.
We're already, I've heard many times on this show, you're discussing universal basic income.
This is at the beginning of looking at alternative economic models.
And there's an argument for saying everyone has the right to a nutritious diet.
Everyone has the right to a safe home.
If we start prioritising those ideas above these organisations have the right to maximise profit, then maximising profit, that's getting taken off the table, and then comes your counter-argument about innovation.
Well, I would say, if innovation slows, no problem, because we've decided as a culture to prioritise housing and nutrition for the majority of people.
Now, you can say that's kind of socialism, and I don't think that that can work on a continental scale.
I think we have to break down centralised systems, whether those are corporate centralised systems or national.
I feel that the time has gone where there's too much diversity.
There probably always was diversity.
People are different.
We're influenced by our cultures, our schools, our education, our class, our races, all these factors.
And then to expect us all to live in this sort of single bandwidth of this is what America is or this is what France is or this is what England is, people are too different now.
But what it does, it seems like the standards we're adhering to, unconsciously or otherwise, is these groups have the right to make as much money as they can and to interfere with that is It's un-American, or un-British, or whatever it was, because, you know, it's beyond national ideas, I'm sure.
So, you know, for me, you pull that thread, oh, it's the poor that will suffer.
Well then, no, we have to rule out the poor suffer.
So what happens?
In the end, you start to get into redistribution of resources, managing and regulating the power of the most powerful people.
And whenever that conversation starts, it gets shut down, because they want to conserve.
There's an argument, like getting into organic gardening.
If you have your own garden, man, that is one of the most karma-free things ever.
If you can figure out a way to have your own compost, your own garden, and you don't ever have to rely on anybody else for your food, well then you're not participating in that shit at all.
Do you think that the spirit of entrepreneurship could be...
Sure.
Do you think the only thing that incentivizes people is maximum profit?
I do too.
I think it is possible that people would sit around and go, how do we organize a society that's fairer and just, that doesn't kill people's individualism or creativity or right to pursue different goals or to be who they are and believe who, you know.
But, like, I feel like there's so much fog in the air.
People don't know what they actually believe in because there's so much powerful cultural influence, so much toxin, physical toxin, literal toxins and toxicity, cultural toxicity.
You know, how am I to protect my children from cultural influences that tell them you have to look this way, be this way, behave that way.
These are the things that are cool.
If you're not this, you're not a man.
If you're not this, you're not a woman.
You know, like, you know, as a parent, I feel the obligation to create an environment where they can grow up to be who they are, in inverted commas.
And then when you sort of scale that up to a society, you know, how can we start to recognize, look, is this time to look at different systems for living And what I feel is people want to be involved in the power systems that affect them.
If you have a group of 100 people, they want to be able to run their own schools, run their own care systems, be in charge of their own lives, not just be some little beam of energy flicked about by cultural forces that they can't reach or touch.
It's alienating.
And one of the things in Marxism, and I know very little about this subject, is he says that when capitalism reaches a certain point, people will be lost, alienated.
They'll feel like a cog in a machine.
No one will have no pride in their work.
No one will know what it's like to make a whole bicycle and think, look, I made that.
You're just, you're the guy that makes the pedals.
Now, fuck off, home.
I've listened to enough Jordan Peterson to understand that there are limitations to what socialism and Marxism can achieve.
But just because capitalism is better than feudalism, that doesn't mean that's the end of the conversation, that we shouldn't be looking for fairer, better, more just ways of living.
Yeah, I don't know if capitalism is the problem, but maybe it's how people engage with capitalism.
Maybe it's what people choose to focus on.
If you're just about acquiring wealth and money, some people are, yeah, they're going to be very deeply unhappy, and it's going to be this weird game of acquiring influence and power until you just have this insurmountable mound of money that you live on top of, right?
I don't think that's a good way for them either.
I think if we're going to really...
We're going to look at this country fairly.
We have to look at...
Think of all the poor neighborhoods.
And imagine being born in those poor neighborhoods.
And imagine being born in a place where there's no resources.
There's no...
You live in the fucking mountains of West Virginia.
Those coal mining communities.
People are...
It's all just...
Mobile homes and pills and it's chaos and just extreme poverty.
What do you do if you're stuck in there?
What if you're born into that clan?
That's the group you're born into.
You're fucked, man.
You're fucked.
We have to take our resources and concentrate on parts of America the same way we concentrate on many other problem spots in the world and look at them as like, hey man, there's a spot where people are fucked.
We should unfuck them.
We should figure out a way to go into every single horrible community in this country, on this planet.
Ones that are just as bad as some that you see in third world countries.
They exist right here in America.
Fix that.
Don't ignore that.
That's crazy.
If they're in Detroit, if they're in wherever the fuck they are.
Whatever the horrible community is.
Why isn't there a concerted national effort to eliminate that?
That's a major source of crime.
It's a major source of problem.
People feel like they got fucked over in life so they want to get at you and take from you because you got that easy road.
Hey man, you're born in the fucking suburbs.
Hey man, your mom and dad are still together.
Hey man, your dad has a job and your mom's at home baking and shit.
You live like a motherfucking Norman Rockwell movie.
Fuck you, man.
My mom's on crack.
My mom's a prostitute.
My life is hell.
My dad beats me.
I've been sexually molested since I was a little kid.
This is the reality that people exist, and they don't feel like anybody's coming to help them.
We need to concentrate on that.
If the government really cares about us, if they're really involved in social engineering and making America better again, Make those places better.
Those are the places you need to concentrate on.
Not tax breaks for fucking super rich corporations that get you in place.
They make enough money, man.
That's not the problem.
Where the money goes, what's it being allocated towards?
The biggest problem in our country is these impossible to escape communities.
That so many people just get sucked into this trap.
And for every person that gets out and becomes a basketball player or a successful business person and they have this story about the poverty that they grew up in, they are so rare.
Yes.
And then it's not to be applauded that they got through that.
It is.
But it's more to be, we should understand, like, hey, we've got a real fucking problem that we're churning out all these people that live, they start out in life with a massive deficit.
Right.
Start out in life emotionally fucked, physically abused.
They start out with everybody around them's a loser.
Everybody's going to jail.
Everybody's constantly doing pills or this or that.
It's all negative.
And to ask them to develop their own positive mindset uniquely in a vacuum is preposterous.
So always pull them up by your bootstraps.
All those assholes.
Hey, you gotta pull yourself up by your bootstraps.
They don't even have boots, man.
You don't understand.
You don't know what you're talking about.
You've never seen it.
You've never been involved in that kind of poverty.
It's not fair.
It's not fair at all.
If we care about people, that's what we should fucking care about.
I mean, obviously, that's way past the expectations that we have right now for the world, because like $34,000 a year globally puts you in the world 1%.
You know, I mean, if you make $34,000 a year, which is hard to live on, man, you're in the 1% of the world.
If there is a point to nation, if there is a point to a flag and our belief and this idea that there is an America and there is a Britain and we're all together and we're all one and we've got a common destiny and a common past, Then if we're ignoring and neglecting those communities, then I say that is what defines us.
Until there are systems, codes, regulations that prioritize that, we will continue to live in something heading toward, if not a dystopia, something moving in the direction of dystopia, where the priorities and dreams are sort of owned, really, by the kind of mad, evil insect robot images that we've seen discussed.
People do get very concerned when someone reaches a point of excessive power and influence, like a Jeff Bezos type character.
When you see some guy who's not, he doesn't have a million dollars.
Like, wow, a guy's got a million dollars.
He must be so relaxed.
He's got so much money.
No, he's got $150 billion, and he works every day, maniacally.
And he's constantly doing new projects and new things and buying out Whole Foods and That's like pinnacle capitalism is one of the things that scares people the most when someone just acquires this insane position of power and wealth.
Like a Bill Gates type character who is very altruistic, very, very generous.
Bill Gates is one of the better examples of someone who gains a lot of money and then does a lot to help people.
Especially in his retirement, all they do is focus on charitable organizations.
Yeah, which is brilliant, and marvellous, and I'm not criticising the great achievements of brilliant people, but really for me that demonstrates that the limitations come from the type of systems we live in.
That you can't, through charity, affect every impoverished community in America.
The systems that we have are, well, if you're poor like that, the bootstrap model, well, this guy did it.
Look at this great guy who overcame the odds.
I feel like, in a sense, charity has become a kind of valve that allows people like you and I, who aren't poor, to feel like, well, I do a bit.
I'm sort of involved.
I can wash my hands of it.
Unless we...
There is no America, there is no England, unless we have integral relationships with one another where we support one another.
If we really are on a team and we see someone who's completely downtrodden, who's on our team, and we ignore them, well, that's not much of a fucking team, is it?
I mean, that's what I feel like when I come to red lights and I see homeless people.
I feel terrible.
I'm like, I feel like, you know, I mean, there's part of you who's like, don't give them any money because you know they're going to just buy drugs.
You know, let them figure it out.
But then they're not going to figure it out.
They have mental health issues, and they're stuck out here, and they're supposedly on the team.
They probably were born in America, they probably have national citizenship here, you know, this is our team, and no one gives a fuck that they're camped out under the bridge.
It's like, the diffusion of responsibility that comes with these massive numbers, 20 million in LA, 300 and plus, whatever it is now, what is it like, 320 in America?
I think there's 90,000 in the general California, like a city's worth of homeless people.
Isn't it?
It's not difficult for me to envisage, like when we talk about the transcendent states that can be achieved through meditation and psychedelics, meaning that beings like us can access them.
it's not difficult to envisage human like a type of creature a type of being a little more evolved than us that would look back and say oh my god they allowed homelessness they allowed those impoverished communities oh why was it oh because they had this belief in competitive systems and survival of the fittest that were resourced from ideas that weren't really meant to be translated into that when you were talking before about like the natural world is fraught with competition and of course it is that is animals so you know i'm not disputing what you're saying there but we can't transpose that into an economic system survival of the fittest
if you ain't got enough hustle and muscle fuck you you're you're down by the wayside you're You know, here we have an obligation to aspire to the better parts of our nature, not to continually use materialism and rationalism to justify that 20% of the population, you know, or whatever percentage it is, are just garbage, are just waste, and that's affordable.
Live with that.
For me, once we have the knowledge that, oh yeah, we shouldn't be farming in that way, oh, we shouldn't have social systems, the answer's always the same, because if you were to change in that area, it will affect the interests of the powerful.
It will impede the ability of certain organisations to make profit.
Now, I'm not talking about...
I don't know the lexicon enough around socialism and capitalism and Marxism and various forms of social organisation.
I'm just talking about my assumption that we're all resourced from the same basic material and phenomena.
We all have compassion and love in us, and if we, on an individual level, can achieve some level of access to that, then we can start to organise ourselves on that basis, not on the basis of, well, what's the most I can get as an individual?
It's rational for me to...
I'm not involved in that.
That doesn't affect me personally.
You know, and I think it's a hard thing for us to hold.
I think the reason we all do just live with homelessness and the only decision we make is do we put a couple of dollars out the window at the light or not, then, like, it's hard to hold that.
Not one person and even collectively as a group when you have mental health issues.
Unless you want to institutionalize those people, yeah, but then here's the thing, right?
If everyone has a unique...
And if everyone has their own ideas about what to do with their life and everyone has freedom, what if you just don't have enough people that are interested in mental health of the homeless people?
One of the advantages I've got of being a drug addict is it means I have to help other drug addicts as part of my own recovery.
This puts me into areas, institutions, groups, facilities where I'm meeting drug addicts and always what you'll find, the people that work there, there's always someone, like a man or a woman, most often in my personal experience is a woman, some matriarchal woman full of mother energy that just will do this shit forever forever.
For free, for nothing, that just loves it, that's just put herself like my grandmother did, or my mother did, or like these women do, between people and the gutter, that are just willing to say, I'll be the person, I'll be the person.
In LA at Friendly House, it was a woman called Peggy Albrecht that used to run a play, Friendly House, it was for women that have got drug and addiction and abuse issues.
And like this woman, she was from Chicago, she was 90 years old by the time I met her.
And she was so rude and brilliant and beautiful and entirely willing to dedicate herself.
And I think every community everywhere, everyone knows people like that.
And I feel that the same way as like if it is someone that's got a great capacity to play basketball or be a comic.
Like I think when you spot those people that you encourage.
All of those organisations that help people with addiction issues, they are maligned.
And the people that profit from the opioid crisis, they are supported.
They are able to conceal, as John Oliver brilliantly revealed.
They're able to conceal their practices.
Continually, the invisible bias is in the direction of profit.
And the failure of...
Certain types of socialism doesn't mean that's the end of the argument.
I think we have an obligation to look for ways of accessing our own higher nature, better nature, kinder nature, call it what you will, and seeing how we can organise that.
As an individual, you couldn't do so much.
I mean, if Bill Gates can, you know, fucking hell, I don't know, cure malaria and make significant charitable, you know, these impressive, powerful people can't make a meaningful difference, then clearly this is a systemic problem.
Well, there's also the problem with homeless people in that they're adults.
When you become an adult and you develop from the time you're a child, it's probably very likely that the damage was all done while they were young.
They were probably abused and neglected, and there's a lot of issues that led them to either Have mental health problems or they had mental health problems already.
Maybe they have genetic problems.
Then on top of that, there's drug abuse.
For each one of those people to get well, you're going to need a massive amount of folks.
You're not going to have one old lady who's rude, who's fun and brilliant.
No, you're right, there's limitations to the individual, but let's not, like, crash this optimism in the crib now, Joe, because I feel like if there was systemic change...
Once a person is developed, once they're a human, it's very difficult to turn that train around.
If we can save the community and save the future, like help less people get through fucked, help more people get through with hope and with a real possibility for improving their life.
That's like, that's just, if someone looked at it from a social engineering standpoint, it almost seems like the only way that would ever have to happen would be there be some fucking catastrophe that forced people to act.
We sometimes need something that's shoved in our face to force us to act.
But if someone brilliantly calculated the amount of resources that it would require and then also brilliantly calculated how much less crime it would have, how much less, how many more innovations because people didn't waste their lives.
In fact, they got through life and used one of the most valuable resources we have, which is the human imagination and creativity and ingenuity.
And we're missing that on these people that are growing up in these horrible environments where they can't escape.
They're so fucked.
They're in gangs.
The crime and poverty and violence.
They're so fucked that whatever genius they have is wasted on this nonsensical existence.
If they could just show that and quantify how much that would be, how valuable that would be to the overall culture and community of the continent and ultimately of the earth, you would have a reason to engineer and think about that.
Yeah, it's a beautiful, that is really beautiful, and it's interesting that the way that I agree with you, that it almost has to at some point be translated into monetary value, because otherwise people don't seem to read it.
For them who live in these horrible communities, wouldn't it be great, again, if everybody lived like a middle class person?
The idea that that's impossible seems so insane.
It almost seems like, well, then nobody should live like that then.
Either everybody should be able to live like that or nobody should be able to live like that.
That's what everybody really wants.
You want to be comfortable in terms of your ability to exist.
And then all the things you're doing that you struggle with should be a good percentage of them, other than emotional and friendship type things, should be of your own choosing.
You choose to take a difficult path.
You choose to take an adventure.
You choose to try to enrich yourself with this difficult experience and the challenge of it and try to overcome that challenge.
Your challenge is not to get killed by a gang.
You know, your challenge is not get fucked by your uncle again.
You know what I mean?
I mean, this is what people have to deal with.
And you're missing these brilliant minds that don't get this chance to come through and sneak through that fucking salmon ladder, you know?
It's very beautiful that you're passionate about this and I think popularizing these ideas is important because I feel that then people will be familiar with this kind of language and will recognize that when there is political discourse how phatic and empty it is that people will say you know like I think in the last election in your country it was It's clear that there was...
No one is saying that.
No one is standing on a political platform of...
Do you know what?
Everyone should basically be able to live a middle-class lifestyle.
There's no reason.
There's enough resources.
We can do this.
We could organise society on that basis because that's considered...
It's outlandish and crazy.
There's so much I can, again, with your imaginary listener that would consider this pontification, there's so much anger.
I feel that a lot of political events that have occurred in the last five years are the manifestation of Of a social rage.
Of people that are pissed off with not being heard.
Are pissed off with a cultural conversation that didn't include them.
And that they feel angry.
I don't want to help other people.
Fuck those people.
That resource is becoming nurtured and grown.
And I feel people would feel tremendous relief.
To let go of that.
To feel like, listen, it's alright for you to be you, but could we be a little more aspirational?
And consider what our goals are.
Consider what progress looks like to us.
Is progress the terrifying robots?
Or is progress considering elevating the lowest among us to raise the standards?
If people could just understand that this is not forever.
There is no such thing as forever.
This is a temporary thing.
You've got to try to eek as much good out of this as you can.
And to go against my point, there's a real problem with people being lazy.
People are lazy.
There's not an equality of effort.
The idea of equality of outcome, like people want income equality.
Well, there's no effort equality.
That's just a fact.
There's people out there that are just, they work harder, they're smarter, they're more focused, they're less distracted, they're more dedicated, they have a better plan.
They've thought it through better, and they become more successful.
And the idea that they become more successful than you, because somehow or another there's some nefarious actions afoot, well that negates another possibility, which is you're a lazy cunt.
But think about how we were talking about Dave Chappelle, about one of the reasons why he's so great, other than the fact that he's smart and just talented and all these good things, is that he knows what he does and he does it.
That's his wheelhouse.
He stays in there.
Trump's wheelhouse is making giant gold buildings with his name on them.
And spray tan.
He knows what the fuck to do, and he knows how to make money.
And he doesn't give a fuck about all that other stuff, because that other stuff is wasted energy for him.
His energy is in focusing on how you get more buildings with those giant gold Trump letters on it.
Listen, to return to my point, I wouldn't waste time judging anyone as an individual, because I imagine if I were to spend time examining Donald Trump's past, his relationship with his father, the conditions he grew up in, what he felt he had to do to be a good person, I would imagine I'd go, yeah, of course.
But what I would query is a system that elevates people like that.
He exploits it.
And, you know, again, I believe that it's systems that need to change, not individuals.
And I think we've overly fetishised politics.
I don't live in this country, so I don't know if it's much worse under Trump.
I've heard some things that sound really bad than it was under Barack Obama.
But my general belief is don't fetishise individuals and get distracted.
Think about changing the system, because you're not getting that middle-class lifestyle for everyone.
No one's offering that.
Bernie Sanders isn't offering that.
No one's offering that.
And unless someone's offering that, why should we get involved?
Have you ever talked to economists about what is the problem?
People that are more socialistic-minded.
They'd be more socialist-minded, I guess.
But understanding of capitalism to the point where they could point out the flaws in allowing this infinite growth model where someone gets to a point like a Jeff Bezos or something like that.
What would they do to mitigate that?
You're not going to put a cap.
When people say that...
You're going to pay 70% in taxes over $10 million.
And I feel that the problems are broader than that.
I think that the...
Like, did you ever see...
Like, you know, have you ever watched Steve Bannon talk?
That is a man.
Like, you know, someone I would, again, not politically...
I agree with for what it's worth.
But when his description of what happened in that economic crash of 2008 and the decisions that were made for the, you know, American taxpayer to bail out the financial industry, and I've subsequently seen a documentary that said, look, this is why we had to do that.
These were the options.
But, like, for me, that is a demonstration of capitalism's inherent failings and limitations, that we're not talking about a system that is flawless and perfect, it's pretty fucking flawed, aside from the human collateral damage that you have, again, described, the communities that are impoverished and without hope and living in poverty and a kind of slavery.
You know, it even in itself doesn't work according to its own rules.
It has to be artificially sustained and rebooted when it inevitably fails.
They got bonuses even if the bank got bailed out and they said the bonuses were part of their contracts and if they didn't honor their contracts, they'd have a hard time hiring these people and there would be chaos.
They just made a reason why they had to give them millions of dollars in bonuses when they failed.
You get a bonus and you failed?
Your bank failed and you still get a bonus?
You knew about those predatory loans?
You knew about those?
You knew about the subprime mortgage bullshit that was going down in your business?
Did you see in Citizen Four, there's a bit like in that film about Abel Snowden, Citizen Four, there's a bit where he's just come out and he's talking to the journalists or filmmakers that are making the film and he's going, they can fucking watch you with this phone!
You can't leave that.
He's like in this sort of state of mad enlightenment where he's just seen the truth of, they're listening to us now, you can't fucking have that on.
It's terrifying to watch someone because, you know, obviously now he's calmed down, he's dealt with it, he understands that, you know, but he was like a person that was emerging from having seen the other side of the Matrix.
What he did was revealed things that everyone wanted to know about that we felt were crimes It makes me feel that it's as simple as if you knew what we do in order to keep shit running You would revolt so we are never gonna let you know well that for me in a sense is a pass the stuffing will hold on fuck Well, who are you?
When you look at the balance, the imbalance between what his crime is and the crimes that he's revealed, I mean, he's revealed some staggering crimes, and no one's concentrating on that.
Under the veil of patriotism, a lot can be concealed.
And that is an incident that passes through several administrations.
It's been there for seven years.
You think, well, what are the differences?
You know, like, I kind of, you know, sort of, I've been on Bill Maher's show.
I like Bill Maher.
I'm, you know, very sympathetic to left, you know, I'm ultimately beyond left left wing.
I'm, you know, trying to, my belief is that we should try and organise a system based on hallucinogenic experience, for fuck's sake.
There's no party for me, and I'm not even allowed the fucking hallucinogens.
So I'm not a right-wing person, it's safe to say.
But I feel that many of the problems that we're experiencing now is because the democratic, left-wing, liberal organisations stopped serving the people they were, in the case of the British Labour Party, designed, set up.
To surf.
They neglected them.
They abandoned them.
You know, the white working class in Britain were 50, 60 years ago told, hey, there's this thing called Britain.
We want you to go out there and fight and die for it.
Give up your sons.
Get out there.
Oh, and now they're told, hey, there's no such thing as Britain.
And like, yeah, no wonder people are confused.
No wonder people are baffled.
No wonder there are abandoned constituencies and despair and rage.
And I feel that in a way, it's like, what is patriotism resourced from?
A sense that we all need to belong, that we want to be together, that we're willing to believe in a fictional idea A flag and a story about, you know, the origin of a nation, whether that's an old one like mine or a new one like this one.
You know, we're willing to participate in that.
But if those values aren't real, if they aren't, like if it is, we are going to support the most powerful, we will lie to you whenever necessary.
When our lies are revealed, we'll imprison, punish and lie about those people.