Raghunath Cappo (Yoga Ray) traces his journey from punk musician in Youth of Today to monk and yoga teacher, influenced by his father’s coma and death, which shifted his focus toward spirituality. He discusses no-gi jiu-jitsu innovation at John Jacques Academy with Joe Rogan and Eddie Bravo, recalling subduing a car thief calmly despite physical vulnerability. Cappo’s teachings—like prashad (food as energy), mantras, and Vedic astrology—blend metaphysics with practical life lessons, including his farm, Super Soul Farm, and near-death experience during a violent attack in Buffalo. Both agree spiritual principles, even if speculative, yield real benefits, critiquing ego-driven dogma while embracing incremental faith. Their conversation highlights how martial arts and yoga foster resilience, connection, and self-reflection beyond mere skill or belief. [Automatically generated summary]
And so I started even noticing in my gi game, I just played open guard, and I was lackadaisical, and I'd always have to tell the guys, hey, do me a favor, just try to slap me, because this is getting a little unreal.
I want a real-life situation, and I'm figuring, okay, I don't want to get caught up in the gi, no gi thing right now, but I always felt like...
And some people, it does not agree with their body.
It's not the optimum way for them to eat.
For some people, when they get off of it and just start eating more paleo, or they start eating grass-fed meat, they feel so much better.
I just don't know if there is a perfect...
No, I do know.
There's not a perfect diet for every single human being on this planet.
There's not one diet that you could lock in, and if you ate that way, you'd be fine.
Everybody's different.
People have all these weird autoimmune disorders and shit.
A lot of them are triggered by certain carbohydrates and plants, and when you eliminate those things from your diet, you find all these skin problems clear up, and people are trying to figure, well, what's that all about?
There's all these people that think that maybe there's certain toxins like oxalates and polyphenols and stuff that exist in plants.
That might trigger your gut sensitivity or autoimmune issues in the gut.
Yeah, these are all points I'm working on in my book I'm working on, which is sort of extracting all these teachings of ancient yoga but not… Not getting lost in just philosophical thought, not getting lost in how to make it relevant and practical, but it's exactly what you're saying.
You approach teachers that resonate with you, that sort of speak to you.
The universe sends you people that speak to you.
I'm sure you've found that in your own life.
There are certain people that explain something better than anybody and might be at different times in your life.
And then the teacher feels you're ready and they want to give you a mantra.
So they give you a mantra and the mantra is...
Mantra is sound.
And the sound is very powerful because sound affects the way we think.
They say as far as transformation in yoga, like we do something very physical and it starts to transform the body.
You're into yoga now, from what I know of you.
We both, I guess, have been researching each other, but...
So, and you have an appreciation for yoga because it radically starts to change your body and then starts to sort of slow down the pace of your thoughts and your mind and helps with your endurance and your cardio and all that stuff.
So the grossest way to change is the change of the body and the breathing start to also change your cardiovascular system, your endurance and And then, of course, the sounds that we hear, they say, are the most transformational.
And it's almost hard to believe, especially coming from the West, because in the West we're thinking, you know, Sounds.
How's that going to make me healthy?
But it's all about sound that creates a healthy mind, a calm mind, a connected mind.
The mind can – the idea behind yoga is it can go to a dark place.
The mind can go to a very dark place very quick.
And those thoughts – we're not our thoughts.
But our thoughts can get us into trouble.
They can get us in jail.
They can get us divorced.
The thoughts create an action.
And so we might have an external cleanliness, but if we don't have that internal cleanliness, you're not actually healthy.
So there's a different metric of what health is in the yoga system.
And we've always taken it in the Western world to be, well, health means fitness.
And so we're going to become fit.
But you could be fit And be angry.
You could be fit and be resentful.
You could be fit and be unforgiving.
And so then the next question is, what is actual health then?
What does full-spectrum health look like?
And that's sort of what I love what yoga addresses.
And I feel like what we are doing there in these great martial arts teachers that we've had teach us is how to be sort of almost like you're fighting this fight.
But there's no rage.
You're not actually even angry at the person.
It's actually just...
You're just doing what you're supposed to do right now.
Me and my buddy Parmananda, who also later moved into an ashram.
So we started this when we were in 16, 17. And...
It was a cool scene, making our own music and stuff like that.
But when we got Youth of Today together, it was about sort of a message of better living, positive mental attitude, these spiritual principles like karma and what goes around comes around, and respect, dignity, controlling your senses and your mind.
You'd find these like easty-westy bookstores that had books on yoga and metaphysics and reincarnation and just plop it down and read books all afternoon by swamis and sadhus and weirdos and palm readers and stuff like that.
That's my idea of what a good time was.
And I always felt like...
Life is meant for our self edification.
That's why we're here.
We're here on a mission of growth.
And when I read books by sages or mystics and things like that I was always like I want to be like that.
That's what I want to be.
That's bigger than anything out there that I want to be.
So truthfully, the band, I never really want – I'm not a musician.
I play a little bit of everything.
I wrote all the songs, but I always looked at myself as more like a seeker and maybe a spokesperson.
But then at a certain point in the success of that band, I started realizing, okay, now we're big.
And there's a lot of people who are following those sort of principles of controlling your sense.
We don't drink, we don't smoke, we don't take drugs, we can care about what we eat.
But that's not the goal.
That's like a doorway to something bigger.
And so for me, I had to step away from that, even though it wasn't Bad or anything.
It wasn't what I wanted to become.
And it was a certain point in my life.
You know, you get to a certain end of a chapter in your life.
And for me, at the time, it was the height of the band's career as well.
We started touring internationally and stuff like that.
But I realized there was no amount – and by the way, this was 80s in New York, which is a very cool time.
Run DMC, Madonna, the Beastie Boys.
You never knew like what was about to like blow up and you were with all these other people that they were your inspiration and they were your friends and stuff like that.
So – At that height and excitement, I just said, there is no amount of like material success I want that's going to fill sort of like a God-shaped hole in my heart.
There's nothing out there that I want.
And it was also a very precarious time in my life where – not precarious, but – A time where my father went into a coma for three years.
Is it from, you know, people nowadays, they collect houses, they collect cars, they collect so many things.
I collected records.
I collected rare punk records.
And in my brain, I thought, Oh man, you gotta understand what the music scene was like that if you're unfamiliar with it.
There was a band that was great and they put out 1,007-inch records.
And then the band broke up, yet the punk scene always grew.
So these records you bought for two bucks are now worth, people pay $100 for that record.
And so me and my guitar player Purcell, we had like thousands of incredibly rare punk records that if you remember the world of records, no one played their records because you could damage them.
What you did was you put everything on a cassette.
And so I started thinking about this quote by the Swami who said, Where am I getting my pleasure from?
I'm thinking, well, my records are pleasurable.
I was like, well, actually, the music's pleasurable.
The records are only pleasurable when somebody comes over to my house and says, oh my god, you got that record!
That record's so impossible to get!
And so once I've read that, it was the first shattering of...
My concept of self and what is joy and what is pleasure based on my ego and all those records that I really valued and I have really valuable records.
And we started our own record company at the time.
So we would basically print limited editions of our band.
We put out all our friends' records, Sick of It All, Gorilla Biscuits.
These were all bands that we grew up with.
Our own band, Youth of Today.
And so we'd put out these records, we'd make limited edition, and then we'd trade these.
It's like printing your own currency basically.
To make a long story short, after I read that one quote, my whole concept of pleasure changed.
And I took all those records and I threw them out on stage to all fans, record collector fans.
It was like maybe the first attempt of shedding my ego.
That was a roundabout story, but the second part that Swami wrote was...
And I'm paraphrasing this, of course.
The diseases of the soul are not new.
They're ancient.
The soul is pure.
The spirit is pure.
But it gets covered by lust, greed, anger, and envy.
And I started thinking...
Well, not me.
Lusty.
I'm not greedy.
I'm not angry.
I'm in a band.
I have no money.
You know?
And if you've ever been in a band, it costs money to buy a guitar.
Got a guitar?
It costs money to buy strings.
Got strings?
It costs money to buy an amp.
So it's just like a money pit to be in a band.
You get paid 50 bucks or whatever.
So I was thinking...
Not me.
But as my band got more successful, I realized, man, I do have...
There is money out there that I want.
And I remember I got offered money for the first time being in a band.
I can get money.
I wrote these songs.
I should get more of that money.
Then you get in a fight with the drummer.
No, I should get that money.
We should split it four ways.
No way.
I do so much more.
I book everything.
And I realized, wow, I wasn't not greedy.
I just had no money.
I'm covered with greed.
All these people hate the greedy, hate the rich, hate the 1%.
You got to see what would happen if you were in that position.
Yeah.
So that was like my first lesson in like, actually I'm complete.
I thought I was above it because I didn't drink, because I didn't smoke, because I was a vegetarian.
Big deal.
Big deal.
And it was this, and spirituality starts to work on these subtle things that are plaguing me.
And, you know, the people who really want social justice out there, it's very easy to point the finger at everybody and watch what everybody else is doing wrong.
But on the yogic path, it's about like putting the microscope on ourself.
Where am I wrong?
If I really want to change, how can I start to really do some psychic surgery of my own ego, of all these other things that are baked onto the spirit?
People talk about that kind of stuff all the time, like getting spiritual or being on a spiritual quest, but you legitimately went on this quest, and that's why I found it so fascinating.
That was what was so appealing to me.
It's like, okay, this is a real one.
Because there's not a lot of real ones.
There's a lot of people that pretend to be on these spiritual clubs, but really they just want everybody to think they're spiritual.
It's like you were talking about the pleasure.
What's the pleasure of owning records?
Well, the big pleasure was people coming over your house to think you're cool because you have these records.
Yes, but it's also, there's an issue where people want people to think that you're this brilliant, erudite, interesting person because you have all these books in your house.
And you become like what you store in that garage.
So the thoughts, the thoughts that we put in the mind, we've got to be careful with.
The words.
Just we were talking about mantras before.
The mantras are like repetitive sounds.
But they're considered transcendental sounds.
So I chant the Hare Krishna mantra.
So the Krishna mantra...
You might have known it from the soundtrack of Hair.
Hare Krishna, Hare Krishna, Krishna Krishna, Hare Hare, Hare Rama, Hare Rama, Rama Rama, Hare Hare.
It's considered a transcendental sound for the mind.
And it sort of connects the soul with divinity.
It doesn't matter what religion you are.
It's considered a mantra, a sound vibration that has a potency on the man.
That's where they get the word mantra from.
It delivers the man or the mind.
So what we store in the mind starts to create our external being.
And if you don't believe in it, It's one of those things.
We have mantras in our mind anyway.
I have things on loop running through my mind that have been handed to me from parents, from elementary school teachers, from a crazy uncle, for whatever.
We get things handed to us and we play them on repeat.
And sometimes they're mantras of self-deprecation, self-loathing, you're not good enough.
And these are the mantras running through the mind.
So the yoga system says, notice those mantras.
That's part of self-edification or self-realization.
You notice what's playing in the mind and you replace those mantras with transcendental sound.
Or at the very least, training the mind to see greatness in people.
That's a big thing.
Because the material mind wants to see, what are Joe's shortcomings?
Because if I find your shortcomings, it makes me feel better about myself.
That's crazy thinking.
If you've got thousands of shortcomings, that doesn't make me better at all.
So the material mind, which sees one as so insecure that I have to lash out at other people to make myself feel whole.
And it's just crazy thinking, stinking thinking.
Whereas the yogi trains, I specifically teach bhakti yoga, which is called the yoga of connection or the yoga of the heart, and starts to deal with all the essence of the teachings of the Gita, which is you train yourself to see greatness in other people.
And if I start to note, it's good.
You could take this from a micro, like my relationship with you.
I want to notice all of Joe's great qualities.
Now, when you hear that, you might think, well, he doesn't really know me.
I got some bad qualities.
Immediately makes you a little vulnerable and you start to think, well, but you appreciate it.
And anybody in our life who appreciates us...
Sometimes they even see things in us we can't see in ourselves.
We want to become like that.
That's why this idea of changing the world really starts with your self-connection as I am a spiritual being.
Joe is a spiritual being.
And I start to train myself in not seeing what Joe does wrong, seeing everything he does right.
And it's a great exercise for the brain.
What does that person do right?
What is the good in this person that I'm overlooking?
Because I've got this lens.
It's a lens that we wear of trying to find shortcomings in people.
And it screws people up tremendously, even so-called spiritual people.
I definitely would feel a tangible effect if I walked outside that line.
So for years, I'd only eat food cooked by Brahmins, like the priests of the ashram.
Or I would cook it myself.
Or later...
I have a very weird story, which was I became a bunch of my friends that were monks.
We started our own band and we started a record label, a second record label in the ashram.
I kid you not.
It's almost an unbelievable story and perhaps the first time historically there was a celibate rock and roll band.
But this band ended up becoming bigger than the second band.
This was my band Shelter.
And so what happened was, this band, when we started, though, we were all monks.
And we would take a candy stove on tour with us, and we'd pull over to the side of the road, and we'd make kitchery with rice and dal and, you know, fanagreek and coriander and cumin.
And we'd just cook, because we wouldn't eat outside food.
For example, a home-cooked meal definitely feels, tastes better, tastes different, or feels different, as opposed to some guy just making burgers at White Castle or whatever.
We've definitely divorced ourselves from our food, but even agriculture, I'm sure if you raised cattle and then killed them and ate them, you would feel differently than buying it in a supermarket.
But there's something even more intense about the quest of acquiring a wild animal.
You're going into this world.
The first time I ever saw a wild deer that I was going to shoot, I swear to God, it was like a psychedelic experience.
I was looking in the eyes of this thing in its world, this wild world in Montana, and I realized, whoa, this is a different dimension.
I'm entering into this wild.
This thing might not have ever seen a person ever.
And it's looking at me and I'm going to take its life and I'm going to eat it.
I was encountering this thing because it was so intense and there was so many...
It was nerve-wracking.
It was difficult.
I was exhausted.
We're in the mountains.
We're trekking for hours and hours and hours to try to get close to a deer.
But the locking eyes with the deer, I was like, oh, I didn't expect this.
there was a an acceptance of the roles that we both had that made me realize that this is his life this is how he does every day every day he's looking at mountain lions and there's a wolf over there and there's a bear over here I get the fuck out of here like this is the existence and that bringing that meat home was infinitely more enjoyable than getting something from a store and And also just felt differently.
It gave me gratitude.
I had a connection to that animal.
It made me think about it.
Every bite I took, I didn't take any of it for granted.
I lived in the mountains outside of Boulder for a while, and when you're driving up there...
You're confronted with undeniable, spectacular beauty that really is...
Fuck every painting that everyone's ever made.
You see snow-capped mountains with a lake and just trees, and you see a deer bouncing across the road.
You see a fox, like...
Fuck, this is amazing.
I mean, it just changes your physical state to look at it.
You're like, whoa, like no artwork could ever do.
But we don't think of it like that.
We just think of, oh, there's the mountains.
Well, there's something about beauty, right?
There's physical beauty in terms of, like, you see a woman that's beautiful, and you're looking at symmetry, and you're looking at genetics, and there's something that's attractive about that because of your DNA, right?
You want to breed with this person.
Because this person has beautiful symmetry.
But there's another kind of beauty.
There's a physical beauty in nature that's spectacular that doesn't serve any real purpose for you.
Why do you feel that way?
Why are you enamored by the vision of this glacial river running down through these mountains and seeing these birds fly around and an eagle soars over?
Why is that so spectacular?
Why is it so attractive?
I don't know.
But whatever it is, there's a feeling that you get when you encounter those things that's unlike any other feeling.
And we are divorced from that feeling.
It's one of the best feelings that a human being can get.
When you can sit down, like, one of the best things about hunting is just sometimes, like, you take a break, and you sit down on a ridge, and you're just drinking water, and you're just looking out like, Right.
It has done multiple times throughout history, and they're constantly recognizing these new areas where impact craters happened 70,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago.
Yeah, they're always finding them.
They're always finding them, and they're like, oh, geez, look at this.
You know, there's still these reductionist scientists, these guys, you'll talk to them like, we have a solution, we could stop it, we could do this, we could do that.
But then you talk to the real hardcore people that actually study the complications involved in deflecting asteroids and they're like, no, we need years.
We need years and years and years of planning.
If we find something coming our way, we know it's coming at us, we need all the best minds in the world and it still might take a decade to figure out how to do something about this.
And then we might see the other one that's coming behind the sun.
We might not see one that's coming from a direction that we're not observing.
And so sometimes these old houses in upstate New York or Massachusetts have water that's just coming up and they build a tank in the house to hold this water.
There's people in Pennsylvania that I was just reading a story about recently where they can't drink their water, they can't shower with their water, they have to get bottled water or they travel to someone else's house to shower.
I had this girl on the podcast, this woman on the podcast yesterday.
She's an MMA fighter.
Her name was Angela Hill.
She was a couple days ago, actually.
This badass MMA fighter.
And at the end of the podcast, she goes, I forgot to bring this up.
My grandfather is Barney Hill.
I was like, that guy.
I'm like, no fucking way.
That guy, Barney Hill, was the very first really public UFO abductee.
And he describes his craft that's eerily similar to the crafts that Bob Lazar has described and different people described.
And he and his wife lost time while they were driving and then woke up with these Bizarre horrific memories that they both shared of this Encounter with these space beings and that they were abducted and they were Medical examinations were run on them then they were replaced with missing time and It's crazy if you listen the recordings of him being hypnotized and going through it like Screaming in fear that they're touching him and where
are they taking him?
What are they doing to him?
It's not like a guy acting it's not like a scene right movie where someone's screaming in fear it sounds like The teachings of ancient India is that life exists on all planets.
When I start to teach a bigger training, like a yoga training in philosophy, that's one of the things I do mainly, I start with this concept of this is how you understand.
Like when I first approached teachers when I went to India, I would say things like, you know, I'm reading this Mahabharata.
I think it's a great book, a lot of great lessons here.
But come on, we're adults.
Am I supposed to understand that an elephant-headed man scribed this entire book?
Can't we just extract a useful lesson?
And the answer was very good that I got was, and it was very sweet.
You have a certain amount of animals and animals that you keep, animals that you ride, animals that you hunt, foods you eat, and then one of you goes on a boat to Africa.
And you come back and you think, you're never going to believe what I saw.
I saw a striped horse.
You're thinking, well, I've seen striped horses.
White head, black neck.
No, no, no, no.
I saw a striped horse.
If you've never seen a zebra, it's almost unbelievable if all you know is ponies.
Or I saw this horse with a really long neck that ate the leaves on the trees.
But that doesn't mean it doesn't – so to really understand the Vedas, the teachings of ancient India, you have to go into it like – not that it's all real.
I'm not saying to just blind faith, but I'm not saying don't be a blind doubter.
You understand that you're separate than your – we are separate than our bodies.
Like you said earlier, we're separate from our thoughts.
We're separate from our subtle body, our mind.
So you take on a different Rogan machine, a Raghunath machine.
And sometimes the machines are good at warfare, fighting.
Sometimes the machines are good at art.
Sometimes the machines, they're just like a different vehicle you would drive.
You got a Porsche or you got an 18-wheeler.
They're both good for different things.
So in the same way, we have some karma.
These are karmatizing.
You have some karma to have this body that has such good fortune or poor fortune or some great success.
And it's the karma of the body, but you have to leave that body.
So Ganesha is also a post.
Brahma is also a post.
You could have been a Brahma in a previous life or could be one in a previous life.
And you get a body just like you get a body in this life according to how you act.
And how you behave and how you think and the people you associate with, they give you a body.
For example, if you and I grow up together and all we talk about is martial arts, we got pictures of Arnold Schwarzenegger on our wall, we start to create a body that emulates those heroes.
And if we couldn't care less and we just like watching TV and doing nothing, we get a body according to – so in this lifetime, we're making bodies and we're making our minds.
We're making our intelligence.
But the yogis say that everything that we do is a practice.
Just like I just found out today that you were a Taekwondo champion.
You know, Shankaracharya, another great teacher of India, age eight.
He renounced the world at 8, initiated 10,000 disciples, changed the course of all of India.
At 8, he wrote commentaries.
You can go to Columbia University, read commentaries on the Gita by this person who at age 8 walked away from his mother and said, I'm leaving for the forest.
It's unbelievable.
This stuff's real.
You find this.
And I tell you, when you go to – one of the fun things I do usually is – I do that school in January, the academy.
But in October and autumn time, I do a pilgrimage where we go to holy places.
And I take students, like 30 or 40 students, to holy places.
And we just meet interesting, cool people.
We go to temples.
We'll go to – Sacred places.
We sing.
It's fun.
At the very least, it's like a fun experience, but it's also like very transformational.
And you just meet the most fascinating people.
It's still there.
India has changed dramatically since I went there in 88. How so?
If you want a phone, you go to the village, there's one phone in the village.
And also because when the internet came, if you think about India, it's such an interesting place.
Like when Greece was in its infancy, India was like a respected hub of learning, metaphysics, spirituality, etc.
So India, it's been invaded by Mughals, by British, by Portuguese.
So many different cultures came there and they can never really quite change it.
It was so woven into their DNA what they were.
Nothing changed it until my lifetime.
And I watched it.
I watched when cable TV hit India.
And it was paradigm shifting.
Because you got to think, you know, people dress, you know, you go to Germany in the 80s, people dress different.
You go to Italy in the 80s, people dress different.
I mean, there was no, like, globalization of, now it doesn't matter, you go to Paris, Beverly Hills, Scranton, Pennsylvania, there's the same Victoria's Secret, there's the same Gap.
You don't want to dress like Gap?
Well, we got this other store you could dress like.
And they're just selling us sort of the same thing.
People used to go places for spices, places for silk, places, right?
India was sort of like that too.
You went there and you feel like, I'm on another freaking planet.
And now, you gotta dig a little deeper to find that.
That's why I recommend people go as soon as possible because everything is gonna...
I mean, we're in the valley right now.
And there's one point up on one of these streets up here.
How much of what these people are experiencing and talking about in the Bhagavad Gita and all the texts has to do with soma and has to do with psychedelic rituals that they were participating in while they were doing these things?
So, someone could say, well, you know, you're really going to believe in the wind god?
Come on!
But we say, hey, look, there's an ant on the table, and I blow on the ant.
The ant runs for his life.
In the ant's brain, he's not thinking, oh, Ragu is blowing on me.
He's just thinking, danger, danger, danger.
Yet, I'm a being.
I'm a being with a family, with ideas, with thoughts, with a home.
So the yogis say, you don't know.
But they say that everything is a personality.
Not just you.
Because in one sense, if I look at you, you're just a big lump of earth.
And flesh, you know, water, blood, whatever lens you want to look at, the periodic table, earth, Chinese elements, Indian elements, however they're going to look at matter.
But you're not.
The yogis say you're not that.
You just have that.
So they say the earth itself is a being.
It's a living being.
And all the animals are living beings.
And outside of the earth...
There are living forces.
All the planets are beings.
That's why there's...
Get ready for a detour.
That's why if you study Jyotish or Vedic astrology, there's different mantras to the different planets because the planets affect your karma.
So some people want to...
They realize, man, I would love to get your chart done.
Because when you have people like yourself or even myself on a lesser level where we have some types of extremes in our life, you can read it in their chart.
It becomes very obvious.
Same with criminals.
It's in their chart.
If you really knew how little control we have of our life, it's shocking.
Am I scared of the eternity of this existence when I'm not scared of the temporary nature of it?
That doesn't make any sense.
Why would I be scared of something that's ultimately very pleasurable?
I enjoy life.
I enjoy my children and my wife.
I enjoy my friends.
I enjoy my occupation.
I enjoy reading.
I enjoy watching documentaries.
I enjoy encountering new things.
I enjoy these things.
Why would I be upset if this went on forever?
Why would I be upset if I'm going to be reborn again and then I'm going to be confronted with the exact same problems that maybe I fucked up when I was 10 and And 20 and 30 and 40, but this time I'll have a better insight.
I'll have a subtly better perception of what is the correct thing to do, what's the best thing to do for everybody, what's the moral, the ethical thing to do, you know, and...
I don't know why that's terrifying to people, but it is.
It's terrifying, the idea of doing it over and over and over again.
Elio Gracie believed that.
Elio Gracie believed that you must do the exact right thing at all moments in your life, or you're going to live your life over and over and over again until you get it right.
I mean, it's one of the most spectacular families that's ever walked the face of the earth.
I mean, you want to talk about a contribution.
The contribution that the Gracies have made to martial arts, including our instructor, John Jacques Machado, who is a cousin of the Gracies.
They're all trained together.
They're all together.
That family, Elio, Carlos, Carlson, all those people, they created this most spectacular martial art.
Out of the origins of Japanese Jiu Jitsu and Judo and then introduced it to the whole world and literally changed hundreds of millions of people's perceptions about fighting out of this small family in Brazil.
You get it when people think that you're really good at something, and you don't have a lot of self-worth, or you have this perception of yourself that you're not worthy.
Maybe as an artist, that's a big one that you have it as an artist.
I had it forever as a comedian, and I probably still have it a little bit, but less so than I used to because I'm just more accomplished and more understanding of what it is and more engrossed in the process.
I know what it is now more than I did before.
When I meet famous people, if they know who I am, I'd be like, oh my god, I've got to get out of here.
Imposter syndrome is often more prevalent in people who are legitimately talented.
And for some strange reason, because when you're legitimately talented, one of the ways you become legitimately talented is to be ruthlessly self-critical.
Because that's how you get really good at something.
And in ruthless self-critical...
I remember Cat Williams was talking about himself once.
And Cat Williams, who's a crazy person, but a brilliant comedian.
And he said something that I have always thought.
And he's like, I'm not a fan of me.
And he goes, I don't particularly like me.
I was like, that is why he's great.
Because that makes you work so hard.
The worst thing a comedian can be in the beginning is sure of themselves and then incompetent at the same time.
It's horrible.
It's horrible.
Because you're not good, but you think you're amazing.
And then you understand.
You don't know why the world doesn't think you're amazing.
Because you think you're good.
Because you're delusional.
You have this sort of artificial...
It's the image of the world that you've put up.
And in the world, you are the center.
You are the center and you want everything to evolve around you.
And the worst thing in terms of, for comedy, people have to enjoy what you're doing.
They have to enjoy, and not everyone's gonna, you're always gonna have some people that don't enjoy no matter what.
But you're trying to make it an enjoyable experience for the people watching you.
Now, if you are delusional and clueless and if you don't understand how people see you, You have a distorted perception of reality, distorted perception of your own presence.
It fucks up the vibe for the audience.
They recognize it too quickly.
Because comedy, in a weird way, Is a spiritual pursuit for the person who's making it.
Because you're putting together thoughts and ideas and you're trying to get it into these people's minds in a way that elicits a response that makes them feel good.
And the only way that you could really do it is you have to hit those notes.
You have to reach that resonance.
You have to find that frequency.
Whatever it is that works on them.
And you can't You can't be thinking about yourself too much.
You can't be pleased with yourself.
You can't be happy with yourself.
You always have to be analyzing.
You're the sculptor.
You have to be critical.
And so in doing that, it's really easy to develop imposter syndrome.
Because even when you're doing well, I've had like, I don't know, nine or ten comedy specials.
And so when you get these teachers in your life, spiritual teachers, who sort of, like, give you a loving slap or a loving hay, and they turn you on in some way, they take what you already have and they redirect that north instead of south.
Everything I was doing was just snowballing devastation.
And now you don't give up those qualities that you have, but you use them in a way that brings people up instead of brings them down.
That's what we were saying about movies too, or any entertainment or sounds in our mind.
I would notice – this is humiliating to mention, but I will – if I wasn't doing it in a mood of service as an offering, if I got off stage and that wasn't my motivation, I'd be depressed.
And I – I don't know if this is true, but I think this is why people who are entertainers can move towards addiction or ways to mask that loneliness that comes with being the center, where the whole world is trying to convince you of the Maya.
By the way, Joe, this is an interesting thing I want to talk to you, mention to you too, because you brought up this point where like, I like living my life.
I live a great life.
Why wouldn't you want to do that again?
Because, and I don't know, and I didn't sort of challenge it a little because you were saying in retrospect to Helio, Helio said, why would you want to do that?
Because the whole Buddhist and Hindu thing is that I don't want to take birth again.
And since we were talking about these higher planets and higher beings, they say that planet like Earth, and they say there's other ones like this as well, there is some pleasure and some pain.
There's people who live in a penthouse, and there's people who are sleeping on the streets.
Or you can be on the 100th whatever floor it was of the World Trade Center and be a CEO, and then a plane can be wrapped, you know, two floors underneath you.
You can go from pleasure and pain, the most excruciating plane, and the most incredible highest of pleasure in a moment.
So in this sort – I mean we've got places that are like – places in the world that are like the rape capital of the world.
And then you've got places that are sort of like – go to Switzerland or Norway where the currency is strong and the people are beautiful and everything you see is like – it's from like a postcard.
So we have like great amounts of pain and great amounts of pleasure on this planet.
In such a condition, you could start to question, like, why am I here?
What is life about?
It gives you a window to even ask those questions.
Now, if there's just so much pleasure in your life, they say that higher beings don't have the impetus to evolve because there's so much pleasure.
Did you choose to push forward in the understanding of the push and pull?
The understanding of the discipline and the work and then the kindness and the generosity and that all these things are connected together and then also the expression, the ability to express yourself through podcasts or through stand-up comedy.
That all these things are enjoyable and that there's a pursuit in that and that the real benefit of it is that other people get entertainment out of it.
Yeah, there were bands before Green Day, like the Buzzcocks from the 70s, who, in my opinion, was better than Green Day, but they just weren't at the right time historically to be that popular.
I think Helio obviously was a great warrior as well as a great jiu-jitsu teacher, but he had this philosophy on existence and that you had to live your life and do the right things always.
And if you didn't, you would come back again and do it all over again.
Well, the Vedic system is similar, but it's not the exact – you don't get born as Joe Rogan again living a parallel life and like, oh, I didn't take out the garbage that day.
I should have taken out the garbage.
It'd more be like according to your desires and your activities and your thoughts and the people you associate with, you moved up psychically.
When you think of yourself and your fortune and the interesting life you've carved out, do you feel like your past life has had some sort of an impact on who you are right now?
So when you see people, you look at their life and you think this person, where they are right now, is directly connected to what they've done in their past life.
And if I just want to blame the circumstance, here's your option.
You can either be free from that, be acceptance and accept that there's benevolent forces that are trying to teach us lessons to get out of the birth and death, or you can just be bitter at the world.
So this idea of benevolent forces that are trying to teach us, do you feel that This spiritual quest is almost like a divine puzzle that human beings are proposed and that you are given this infinite series of options and in choosing the right way of thinking and behaving you can carve out the righteous path as best you can.
You will make mistakes but that there's a spiritual undertaking That is a part of operating this puzzle correctly.
And that this is what all these teachings are about.
And we're all trying to relay what we've learned and what we've experienced personally.
And we're trying to relay it to other people so that they can relate.
And so that they can also make choices that will allow them to more refine their approach to life to achieve better spiritual balance.
It's not – some people confuse it with, well, doing what you're born to do because I don't think it's just doing what you're good at because you could be good at leadership and be a dictator.
It's leading a person towards connection so that your activity has a benevolent effect on everyone it touches.
That's dharma.
That's dharma in its true sense.
And that's the dharma of your body.
Like your dharma is you entertain.
You could say a warrior.
You could also say dharma as a father.
So that's a...
These are all type of like...
You're carved out for that.
If you weren't doing that, you'd always feel like a little lack in your life.
But then there's like a nitya dharma or what you...
And the Nitya Dharma is actually the Dharma of the soul.
And that's why in the Vedic system, it's not like you're trying to convert somebody to be of your religion.
It's not like a home run to say, okay, I got a Christian to become a Hindu.
That's not what it is.
The idea is that everybody is a spirit soul.
You can change.
It's not about joining the same church or the same ashram.
It's like a soul is a soul.
It's like truth.
Truth is truth.
There's no – no one's got a monopoly on truth.
There's no such thing as – it's like math.
It's not Jewish math or Hindu math or Christian.
It's like math is math.
So we want to apply truth to the life, to the vehicle.
And that's going to give direction to the vehicle.
That's going to be the food for the soul.
And that's what the genuine meaning of yoga.
People say it's to balance the mind.
It's not to balance.
It's to connect the atma or the soul with divinity, with Bhagavan.
That's the real yoga.
Yoga means to come together, but in the original text, in the original ancient teachings of Upanishads, Bhagavad Gita, it's all about is here I am lost in the crazy planet.
This is going to sound crazy, but not any crazier than all the other shit we've said so far.
I feel like this show made itself.
I feel like I'm the person who's been granted the curator position on this show.
I feel like this show, all the challenges that I've had through this show, have sort of all the fuck-ups and all the things that I've said that were stupid, those almost like were put in front of me to make me understand the consequences of not respecting it.
Or of not treating it with the proper focus and concentration.
And that this thing is almost like it's always been here.
And I'm like an archaeologist who's just brushing the dirt away.
And I'm the curator.
And I have to show up every day and turn the lights on.
When I come up with a good bit, like I have this new bit that I've only had for like four or five days now and I've been working on it, I feel like it was a gift.
Yes, from me, from my bullshit, so that I can find these thoughts better, so that I can go on stage, and then my reward is this strange feeling that you get when you know everyone's laughing.
This is wild, but the better I get at it, the less I enjoy it in the moment, because I'm not thinking, this is great, I'm killing.
Because things come up that I don't know that I'm going to say.
And then I say it and then I start laughing.
But it has to be organic.
I'm not going to fake laugh on stage, but I will laugh on stage.
My goal is always to just hit that frequency.
The goal is to hit that frequency where people are laughing and say it with the right economy of words and the right order and find the best way to get it into people's heads.
And that's the crazy thing is the better you get at it, the more effect it has on people, but the less effect it has on me.
I'll do an arena, and I'll crush, and I'll get a standing ovation in front of an arena, and I barely feel it.
I barely feel it like me, like I just did something.
I don't want to tell too much about the details because I'm going to keep it private.
And we're only doing it to 200 million people.
I had a person, an astrologer at my teacher training.
And I was training people to be teachers.
And one of the ladies was from a very wealthy family.
She was older than me.
Her kids went to school together.
And...
He did this interesting – astrology did this interesting class where he did this class on karma where he shows how karma is actually scientific and predictable.
So everyone would have to give their – like I said earlier, longitude, latitude, date and time of birth.
I was born on January 11th, 3.30 a.m.
1966 and you'd have to give that all in.
So he doesn't know anybody and he's calling – okay, who was born on 1983, February 6th?
He called the person forward and they said – And he wouldn't do their whole chart, but he'd show some big hiccup in their chart.
And he'd say, it seems like in October you experience great loss.
And the person would be like, oh my God, my father died in October.
And every person he was calling up, he would just read the hiccup.
So one particular lady, she said, that was so good.
Can you do my entire chart?
So he had it done.
Now this lady, I knew her.
She grew up With somebody world famous.
I won't mention who it is, but it's something, a household name.
And they were best friends.
And she grew up in a very wealthy family.
But as she got older, she just became a simple artist.
But that famous person was always in her life.
And then that person died a tragic death.
And so she never had much after that financially.
So a particular magazine, like a gossip tabloid, found out that she was friends with this person.
And on the anniversary of this person, famous person's death, they were going to put out a special issue.
And they found that she had all these intimate photos of this person.
So they offered her a massive amount of money for these photos.
So I know the story and I'm standing there with the astrologer and the astrologer is saying, okay, it seems like in July you're going to have more money than you've ever had in your life.
And she was just like, she looks at me and we look at each other like, oh my God.
And She told him the whole story.
She said, yeah.
And in July, they're cutting me the check.
In July, how did you know that?
And the astrologer very humbly just goes, it's been known since your birth.
And by me associating with people who are connected, by being associating with people who are a little bit more in tune, then when something happens to me, some great life reversal, some incredible loss, some chronic disease, whatever, I might react to it in a different way.
And that's going to create a whole new pathway for me.
After the show, it was about 2 in the morning, and everybody's getting out of the club, and I'm in the alley getting interviewed for some magazine, and our van is parked.
You could drive the car in the van in the club, and all the doors and windows are open, and our guys were unloading all the gear, and basically only a few people left in the club breaking down the club, and I was outside getting interviewed.
And all of a sudden, this car pulls up with these massive...
Dudes who weren't from the punk scene.
They looked like just sort of ghetto dudes.
And they were ripped and they were big.
And they just grabbed one of the younger kids.
I mean, our shows, everyone was 17, 19, 20. They grabbed one kid and just beat the living crap out of them.
There's always a cause of something, but I have no idea what the cause was.
But miraculously, and you read these stories in the Mahabharata, in the Ramayana, all these epics of India, the great sage leaves his body, he calls Lord Krishna's chariot in front of him, then he chants these mantras, and I'm thinking, oh my god, I'm chanting these mantras at the time of death.
I'm chanting at the time of death.
This is the perfection of my life!
That was what was going through my head.
I kid you not.
And I was like outside of my body and I wasn't fearful.
And then all of a sudden, to wrap up the story, everything stopped.
And I didn't really know what happened, but what was happening was all the guys in the band jumped in our car, our van, and plowed through their car and took off.
And I can't remember how, but I ended up in the street, in some ghetto street, carrying this Indian clay drum.
I look like, ever see that movie Carrie?
The girl is covered in blood.
I was covered in blood from my head all the way down, all over the drum, and I'm walking in the streets trying to flag down a car.
The cars would slow down, see me, and then speed away because I looked like a zombie or something.
And then I realized, oh man, something...
And you know, you're running sort of high on adrenaline.
I remember being very lucid.
And I went over to some light I saw.
It looked like a garage where they fix cars or house buses or something.
And it was open.
And there was a man in a booth.
And I said, sir, you have to call the police.
Because I thought my friends now were getting beat up or killed or whatever.
And I said, you have to call the police.
My friends are in trouble.
And the guy literally looked at me and just said...
I'm busy.
And I said, listen, you got to call the police right now.
And if you don't mind, I'm just going to hide in this booth because I think these guys might come back and kill me.
And so I'm kneeling down in this dirty garage at two in the morning.
And the first thing in my mind is no one knows where I am.
My mother doesn't know where I am.
Friends don't know where I am.
My band members don't know where I am.
They could be getting killed.
And everything was so good today.
Like, I had a great day.
And now it's over, like a dream.
And I even have these lyrics that were like, this world's like a dream.
It's not what it seems.
We think it's solid, but it fades.
I was like, I even...
My self-talk became a prayer.
And I started saying, I really wasn't expecting to die tonight.
But that's what the dream is.
It seems real and now it's over.
And I started to think like, oh my god.
I was sort of like in a state of like samadhi when I was getting beat up.
I was focused.
I was connected.
And I was chanting at that time.
I said, but now, maybe my, if I got, I'm just trying to think my, you know, Boy Scout first aid is like, I might have a concussion.
My brain's going to swell.
I'm going to fall asleep.
And then I won't be in meditation.
And I started saying, I said, I said, I started praying sincerely, Krishna, I wasn't expecting to die tonight.
But you were so kind, considering I'm not evolved, to enter my lips so I could just chant.
So please don't let me die with a concussion.
If you want to take me, please take me right now.
And with all sincerity, I started chanting these prayers that I had memorized, these very beautiful prayers from an ancient book.
But there were prayers.
I focused a picture of Krishna in my mind, and I started chanting these prayers.
That meditation in general achieves certain states of consciousness and you can actually, with fMRI, you can actually monitor the changes in the way the brain is...
Subtle sciences and then you find hard evidence for these things and just hearing that thing with James Wilk and breaking all these things down.
I'm more of a simpler guy.
I find people where I trust the way they live and they've applied stuff and walked the – It's more like I can tell time, but I don't know how to take apart a clock and put it back together.
I'm like that with a lot of things, and I'm always impressed when you dig into it with people like this.
But truthfully, if you want to know the honest truth, I was like, oh man, I hope Joe doesn't dig into it with me because I'm not that kind of hard science guy.
That's enough to make me move forward towards this.
Just for example, the idea of faith.
Because especially in America, we don't like the concept of blind faith.
But if I saw you walking in downtown – let's take it the other way.
You saw me – you're driving your Porsche and you saw me walking in Manhattan.
And you say, hey, Raghu, how do you get to Times Square?
And I say – so the first step is I could lie to you.
People lie all the time when you ask them for directions.
But you have some reasonable faith.
I know him.
He's a friend.
Why would he give me bad directions?
So there's a reasonable amount of faith.
But even still, people get into their egos and they just want to be the knower of directions.
But I say you go up to 14th Street and you're going to see a McDonald's, you take a right.
Then you're going to go down all the way to...
Whatever.
I can't remember Manhattan anymore.
Union Square and take a left and go up third.
And then at Union Square, you're going to see a park.
At that park, you take a hard left.
So, again, you have some type of extended faith towards me.
Not blind faith.
But you'd go up to 14th Street and there's that McDonald's.
As you go to McDonald's or that next signpost, you realize...
Okay, maybe he does know where he's going.
Then you go farther, there's Union Square.
Okay, I think he actually knows what's going on.
And all of a sudden you see Times Square in the distance.
So faith isn't just like, I believe.
And if anyone was to say, I believe this, I believe in these Vimanas, I believe in mantras, I'd start to question them.
But it happens with small degrees of things being just shown to you.
That you want to take, all right, what's the next step here?
What do they say about this?
What do they say about that?
And then you apply and see, well, does that work with me?
And like I said, sometimes things didn't make sense.
I remember when I first met monks and they said a question about, or not even monks, but people were just like following very strict with their sexuality, even in family.
And the guy said, I don't have sex.
I was 17. And I was like, you don't have sex with your wife?
Are you crazy?
He's like, no, we do other things.
And I just couldn't understand that as a 17-year-old boy or 18-year-old boy.
I couldn't understand why would you be with a person if not for that.
Whether or not you break it down scientifically and objectively and try to analyze each and every word and whatever the translation is, you could actually apply those truths, air quotes, to your life and have real benefits.
Everyone's on a type of path, and I appreciate them trying to surrender.
And the only thing that's going to get in their way, because people say things like this all the time, it's religion that caused all the problems in this world.
And it's not religion, it's the ego that goes with joining a particular church, synagogue, ashram, etc., that we have it our way.
And everybody else, they're a problem, and we've got to fix it.
That's what gets in the way.
Because you could say materialism causes lots of problems as well in the world.
So I don't think it's...
The ego's sneaky.
It'll sneak into your diet.
It'll sneak into your God.
It'll sneak in.
And that's why there's an appreciation instead of a condemnation of people that are different than us.