Zachary Levi and Joe Rogan explore systemic greed in capitalism, comparing it to Succession’s corporate dysfunction, while linking comedy success to overcoming generational trauma. They debate external inspiration—aliens, God, or neuroplasticity—and critique fear-driven drug policies, praising psychedelics like psilocybin for trauma healing. Rogan’s skepticism about Jesus clashes with Levi’s reverence for ancient wisdom, but both agree modern wellness industries are corrupt, from FDA-approved pelvic mesh to Vioxx’s withdrawal. Levi’s therapy breakthrough and Shazam casting highlight how self-love reshapes lives, urging mental health normalization to dismantle societal isolation. [Automatically generated summary]
Yeah, and it's, one of the things I love about it is how well nature is protected here, like Barton Springs, for example, or even like I can't think of another major city I've been to anyone in the world that has a river that goes through the middle of the city that anyone is playing on.
Austin is the only place I've ever been to where there's a river in the middle of the city and there's people kayaking and paddleboarding and doing all of the things.
You're like, that's what we should be doing in all of our rivers.
You know, one of the comedy clubs that I was going to buy, there was a problem with it, and the problem was there was a parking lot.
Yeah.
was at the bottom of a long hill.
And if it rained, the rainwater would come down and get all the oil and all the bullshit from people's cars from the parking lot and then take it over the hill into the creek.
Physically know people like that who got all their money from their parents and they're just batshit crazy and doing blow and wearing $50,000 watches and just...
I mean, I've seen some dudes with some, again, Gucci or Fendi things that they're wearing around their belt that are basically like a little purse, essentially.
Amy Sherman Palladino and her husband Dan, they are, and really everybody involved in that show, but they are, I think they're geniuses.
I think that the way they write, direct, produce so much of that, the two of them, plus lots of other talented people, obviously, that come in and direct and produce and write and all of the incredible actors.
But it's one of those things where...
It's just delightful.
You watch the show and you're just delighted from the beginning to the end.
And Rachel and Tony, the whole cast are just so charming and the writing is so smart and it moves and it's funny and you're like, fuck yeah, I'm going to watch this all the time.
Yeah, I think my funniest friends are not actually in entertainment like that.
They're these snipers, man.
Every single day, at any given moment, they're about to say something, something's about to come out of their mouth, and everyone's going to be like, bah!
And they're not like, you know, they're regular people.
And I would also add, though, that how cool of you to give this cool girl a bit of a spotlight to give that and the encouragement that you gave her and that she would take that.
I mean, that goes a long way.
When Joe Rogan is saying, you got something there, go work on that.
But there's also I guess that, you know, you have to have some kind of inherent Confidence and also insanity to go up and do stand-up and just, you know, be there working without a net and just literally saying, hey, this is me and these are my words that I think are funny.
I hope you do too.
I mean, that's...
So sometimes even very, very, very funny people have put into that spotlight.
They're not always necessarily totally capable, I guess, but...
Yeah, well, it's a skill, and you've got to learn how to do it.
But the thing is, some people really can't ever do it.
But if you can do that, like what that girl did when she went on stage at my show, or you could do what Mrs. Maisel does in that show, you could actually do stand-up.
It's just a matter of learning the rest of it.
It becomes more comprehensive.
What are my bits supposed to be about?
Are they just being silly?
Am I trying to say something?
Am I sacrificing funny to try to make myself seem smart?
There's a lot of weird games you play with your mind to try to get the material right.
But the point is that show is one of the best shows ever for stand-up.
Because it really did a great job of capturing the time.
It really did a great job of capturing Lenny Bruce.
Like, there's a part of me that just wishes that nobody would really care about any of that drama as it unfolds, because it's not pertinent to anybody's life, really, or making the world a better place.
But I think things like that, though, ultimately, I don't know, man.
I feel like it's making us...
Less empathetic, ultimately.
We all get to look at these people, literally, you know, like you're saying, they're having a marital dispute.
We're all getting brought in on their nonsense, not nonsense, their shit, their traumas, all that stuff.
And everyone just gets to sit around eating popcorn and judging the entire fiasco because it's entertainment now.
It's like everything is content and everything is entertainment.
But the more we do that kind of stuff, I do feel like we're pulling farther apart from being able to look at either her or him and say, You both have issues and you both need to work on some shit.
And, you know, however the jury and all that founded, ultimately I saw little bits and pieces.
It seemed like he was more in the right than she was.
I would have gone with that too.
But the point is, they're still human beings, both of them, at the end of the day.
And they're just a circus when we see it like that.
I don't see him as being innocent in that at all, but Rodney King had just gotten beaten on a freeway, and there was a lot of anger and a lot of pain and frustration.
And again, not that that should...
Make the other right or whatever, but it's still just I think we got to come back and be like, you know, I don't know.
And what I didn't know was that my whole life, my parents, my mom and stepdad particularly, were very...
Psychologically abusive types of people, you know, because they were also super psychologically abused by their respective parents, right?
But your parents' voice More often than not, in my humble opinion, the voice that you have for yourself, that's you just echoing the way they talked to you.
So that's why no matter what I may look like or what I've accomplished in my life, and even up to the point at 37, when I moved out here to Austin, I had this whole breakdown.
Even up to that point, I still felt like I was failing my life entirely.
I had accomplished so many things and I still felt like I was failing because my self-talk was garbage.
To some, looking from the outside, it'd be like, that guy's got it all, or whatever.
Absolutely, totally.
Which makes you feel even fucking worse, because now you feel like a sad...
I was in major depression and anxiety, and I'm like, why can't I be happy and love myself wherever I'm at right now?
And then you go, oh, yeah, and you have all this stuff, you shithead.
And then you just start shitting on yourself.
I mean, it's a horrible downward spiral that you go down, you know?
But that's why...
That's thinking thinking.
That's why you've got to go to therapy and have professionals just walk you through like, hey, let's help you see yourself, the world, and how you fit into it more clearly.
Let's do that.
Let's unpack these ideas.
Let's talk about trauma.
Let's be able to tell the person like, hey, it's not your fault.
You're responsible 100%.
No matter what happens in your life, if you've done it, you're responsible for that.
So we just hold everybody accountable.
And responsible while simultaneously not dehumanizing them at the same time.
That's the push and the pull, I think.
And it's just easy.
We all want to dehumanize because we've all been taught in other, us and them, our whole lives, our nations, our tribes, our faiths, our whatever.
I mean, all of these things are, I mean, fuck, man.
We're so divided.
The country, the world is so, so, so divided right now.
Like, we've told the story about this guy Richard Jenny, who's like a really huge comedian in the 80s and 90s, and he wound up killing himself.
And he always wanted to be like Jim Carrey.
He wanted to be a movie star.
It just never really happened.
But for comics, he was like one of the best comics alive.
Like he was a guy who would, comics would go and sit in the back room to watch his set.
And you'd leave going, fuck, he's good.
Goddamn, that guy's good.
But he, that wasn't enough.
Like he, for whatever chemical imbalance he had, whatever, you know, bad self-talk, whatever life trauma and whatever he was going through, it was just too much.
Well, a lot of people, I mean, genuinely a lot of people are programmed with some form of you're not good enough programming, you know?
I take it, having listened to many of your conversations, you're somebody who has always had a really innate self-worth about you.
You invest in yourself on a high rate and have been doing it for a really long time.
Myself, lots of other people I know, we're not.
There's that self.
If you are still always chasing because nothing is ever ultimately a good enough thing to finally say, I accomplished enough to silence the voices in my head that are telling me I'm not good enough.
Yeah.
You'll be forever chasing that.
And seemingly, that's probably what happened to him.
Something happened in his growth, either as a child or even later on as an adult or both or whatever, and that was something that he could never get that monkey off his back.
I think sometimes people also get in these patterns of thinking like really negative Patterns of thinking and they can't get off the tracks like they're stuck in a groove the way they think about things They're always thinking that everything's going bad for them.
They're always thinking everything's Everything's gonna be worse in the future and everything's falling apart and they can't get it out of their head They can never go look on the bright side.
It's like it's almost like it's not available to them anymore Well, but there's a lot of evidence to the fact that that's really neuroplasticity.
So when traumas or when memories or whenever they, you know, those galvanize in our head, well, now it's like a circuit.
It's a root.
And so when you like, you know, putting a deeper groove into a record, you're just, the more you think about that same trauma or that same thing that's holding you back, the more it's going to hold you back.
And I think one of the things about prayer is prayer is very similar to meditation in that they're both like...
Really good.
They're both really good for you.
Certainly.
Meditation, where you're literally thinking about nothing, and prayer, where you're praising God, or thinking about the energy of the universe, or whatever it is.
What you're doing is you're putting out gratitude, you're putting out this feeling of appreciation, and all of those things are really good ideas.
But I do think that we are, yes, we are these bags of meat that walk around in this physical world.
I fully believe that there's a soul in us, and that is something that is other than physical, and whatever that is operates in a slightly different way.
You know, what we're calling the soul, it's like consciousness that's untethered from language and untethered from life experience.
It's just whatever your essence is.
And then everything else you're doing.
Like, we're talking about the way these ideas get sort of carved into your mind and how people can help you manipulate your mind to get rid of some of these bad ideas and bad self-talk.
And it begs the question, like, what are we really?
Some weird combination of life experiences and noises that we can make with our mouths.
But at the center of it all, there's a thing.
We all believe that we're navigating through words and having conversations through language, but what is we?
We are using this language, but what is that thing?
I do think it is, but I think that that's a life energy, soul, that is connected to God energy.
We are all little conduits of life.
The only actual miracle in the universe that we know of right now, this place right here, this little blue dot, spinning ball of mud, that we're all on together...
That's a pretty spectacular thing.
And I think all of that is just God energy.
You know, people are kind of saying, oh, God, the universe.
I'm not trying to even define it for anybody other than just saying, absolutely, that is, I think, absolutely, that is a thing.
And absolutely, that thing, I think, operates in love.
I think that when we...
When we're going after love and loving people, we're walking closer to God.
Like, Nature is Metal, the Instagram, I think you follow them too.
They're one of my favorites.
They're so good.
I tell everybody.
In fact, particularly I tell my vegan friends and all that stuff.
They're like, you know, animal, animal.
Like, I got you.
I'm like, go follow that account and tell me that we are somehow these horrible creatures that are going and mowing down all these animals when they are ripping each other's limbs off, literally.
It's so satisfying.
Anyway, but nature is a metal, that's a great example of, yeah, this is the wild world out there.
So what about that?
How do you explain that?
Well, I think that perhaps a lot of other species of animal, just we evolved super fast into whatever our reasoning, the fact that we even ask why, right?
Like all that, we're set apart.
I don't think those animals have literally just evolved or matured long enough to be able to have some of that.
But I will say this, and this is, hear me out, hear me out.
I fully believe, this is how much I believe in the power of love.
And I think because of that, you see dogs becoming better versions of themselves that aren't so wild, that don't want to just go and fucking kill.
Not that that stuff's still not in there somewhat, but this is my theory.
I really believe it.
And I think that the more we would do that...
I mean, also, have you ever seen videos of...
Like animal sanctuaries, where they have all kinds of different animals, like owls and cats and tigers and little, you know, like docks and dogs.
And they're like best friends.
They're best fucking friends.
These little teeny dogs and these huge tigers, or a cat and an owl in a tree.
They would be sworn enemies on any other day.
This should not happen.
But because they have been taken care of, literally, in this beautiful sanctuary by human beings that are loving them all the time, could that perhaps then spill out and be like, oh, that is how we do that?
That we have taken so much time and so much energy and so much effort.
And we treat them with...
I mean, dude, humans love dogs more than they love other human beings.
So what are we even fucking talking about?
How often you're like sitting in an outdoor cafe or something like somebody's walking by with a dog or you're walking your dog and there's somebody sitting there and it's not high.
They look at you for half a second.
They go, oh my God, what's its name?
They go straight down to the dog.
They're asking the breed, the age, where is it from?
What is it like to do?
And those all your fucking dogs, happy hobbies and everything.
And that's a thing of the person that's got the dog.
And you just go, oh, thank you so much.
Have a great day.
Because all you wanted to do was be with their dog.
Yeah, but if you let them go and they have to fend for themselves, they turn right back into dogs and they get sketchy and they even kill people sometimes.
Sure, but I think that's all tied to the same place.
I think ignorance comes out of that fear, ultimately.
You know what I mean?
You're afraid of whatever.
I mean, pick your poison.
But those ladies and gentlemen who are legislators, who are still operating in whatever their fear is, that's what they're choosing.
Instead of...
I mean, look, Rick Perry, he was a conservative dude here in Texas.
He's now, like, he's a...
Huge proponent of psychedelic work with anxiety and depression and all that stuff because I think it affected him personally in his life.
Maybe not him, but somebody in his life.
So it changed him.
And then instead of leading in this fear that he may have led in before, now he's leading in the love of, hey, actually, this can help people and we need it to help people.
Yeah, it's really beneficial for soldiers, really beneficial for people that have been through extreme trauma, car accidents, assaults, that kind of shit.
It helps a lot of people, changes your perspective.
I mean, look, man, God has given us so many cool things on this planet.
We just, as human beings, we get crooked.
And so then we make it crooked.
But the thing, I mean, look at opium.
One of the greatest pain relievers that's, I mean, basically still is, right?
All of the synthetics are all basically still being made to simulate something like opium.
It just grows out of the ground.
And we can use that to help people if they have amputations and all the ways that we've been using it.
But if all of a sudden you're super smacked out all the time because you're hooked on some fucking, you know, opioids and that crisis and the fentanyl crisis and why?
I've been to some really interesting grow houses before.
Oklahoma actually has...
It's medically cool there.
I think they're going to be working toward making it recreational as well.
Which I hope they do.
I think it would be great for the state, for taxes, for all of the things that could be done with that.
And allowing people to have more liberty in that regard.
Because I think we ought to have that.
I think it's...
It's preposterous that we're all allowed to drink booze, which has some of the worst, you know, ultimate effects in our bodies and the decision making that we do.
And yet these other things are still seen with so much stigma.
It's like, guys, come on again, choosing fear, fear, fear, fear.
And it's like, guys, there's some of this stuff is really good for you.
He was the dude that was putting his neck out in the 90s when it was like, is this really legal?
Because I know a guy, my friend Todd McCormick got arrested for growing medical weed in accordance to California state law, but he got arrested on federal charges.
And they wouldn't even let him bring up the fact that it was medical weed that was legal in the state of California, because in federal law, there's no such thing as legal weed.
And you literally were not allowed to bring up the fact that it was legal in California and that it was medical marijuana for people who have prescriptions.
All of your ideas could be coming from that sort of life force that created the universe.
Because I've always said this, that the one thing that's weird about ideas is that it's the only way that things get made.
So what is an idea?
An idea is literally like a thing that enters into your mind and causes you to create things.
If you were an alien thought, like an alien life form, and the way you made things work is you got into this creature's brain and you put thoughts in there as to what to do and what not to do.
And if you're Nikola Tesla, They put thoughts in there about, oh, you need to fucking figure it out or just spray electricity through the air to everybody.
It's a creative thought process, and it's something that we don't see.
Not that other animals don't display some levels of creativity, because they do, but by and large, they're not sitting around being like, how do I make my day easier?
What can I do?
They're all just still living, by the way, until they're totally torn up by some predator or whatever, they're living pretty great lives.
They're in constant state of parasympathetic.
You know, they'll jump into sympathetic for moments at a time, like when you're hunting down an elk or whatever.
And then they get, and they're like, all right, come back to life now.
I'm just going to go right back into chilling.
I'm not worrying about my taxes.
I'm not worrying about my relationships.
I'm not worrying about work or anything else.
It's either I'm worrying about surviving or I'm living my life.
You know?
It's fascinating.
But...
I think with Tesla, yeah, I think that creative thinking, which seems to be very, you know, not singularly, but almost singularly human being, that is a difference in these crazy, amazing, special brains that we have.
And I think that, yeah, they tap into something greater.
It definitely is very capable, the human being, the human animal, is very capable of making new things.
And new things all come out of ideas.
I mean, we like to think that ideas are our own, but imagine if they really are just out there and you're tuning into them, and it's just a matter of like sitting down and clearing your schedule to tune into them, or occasionally driving your car and you tune into them.
I mean, that's a meditative state, essentially, you know?
I've absolutely had so many...
When I was first starting in acting, I grew up in Ventura, California, and about an hour, you know, northwest from L.A., and the first three years I commuted down to L.A. for all my auditions, so I was on the 101 all the time.
There were so many mornings where I'd get in my car, I would, you know, start the day with like a prayer or something like that.
And not only does the trip, you know, you ever driving some long distance and, but you know the distance and it feels like you blink and 30 miles went by.
They like to write and then go for a walk and bring a tape recorder.
And just like to just record their ideas as they're walking because sometimes just the process of walking around after writing is like a meditative state.
It's like you're focusing so much on whatever business is going on in that phone call and you're just putting yourself in this kind of like autopilot of a move.
But again, that's still, yes, 100%, but that's still them, ultimately, they're fearing the other side of the conversation because their ego is kicking on, their fight or flight is literally kicking in.
They're like, I don't know enough about whatever this is that I'm talking about to be able to even allow for that conversation to come in because it could totally destroy the scaffolding of what my identity is pinned on.
So we have to be empathetic to people in that regard and be like, okay, I understand why you're being so cross.
I understand why you're pushing back so much.
But ultimately, if we can point out to everybody, hey, work on yourself.
Love yourself so that you feel like you can invest in yourself.
And as you love yourself better, you'll recognize how to love other people outside of you better because in order to love yourself, you gotta give yourself a fucking break, man.
You gotta give yourself a break.
And we don't give anybody a break.
Nobody's giving anybody a fucking break anymore.
Like, guys, we're human beings.
We're fucked up.
We're all a little broken and messed up.
And if we can't just acknowledge that and see each other, you know, it doesn't mean, again, it doesn't mean that people aren't assholes on the other side and doing things that need to have boundaries.
Loving is not just liking times a thousand.
To like something is to like something, but to love something means just recognizing the miracle in the soul across from you.
Recognizing that they exist and they are worthy of existing.
They are worthy of being in this space that they're inhabiting, even if they're a fucking asshole.
And then having boundaries with those people so that, you know, it's not a matter of just giving.
People say, like, how do I forgive this person and make sure that they don't do this to me again?
I go, no, no.
Forgiveness isn't just being like, and we're cool.
That's not forgiveness.
Forgiveness is recognizing that they didn't do anything to you personally.
They did something.
They're acting out of their shitty trauma, their programming, more often than not, you know?
I just also think we have to kind of reward an ethic of trying to be nice and sort of do our best to not reward people that are just constantly being shitty.
Because there's just so many people that are getting attention from being shitty, constantly being shitty.
They're just putting this thing out there.
It's like, alright.
That's really what you want to do.
You're putting out this negative energy like constantly, and you're complaining about things, and you're finding reasons to be mean about people, to shit on people.
Yeah, but deep down, they're very afraid of whatever it is on the other side of that conversation.
They're just terrified.
And by the way, it's on both sides of the aisle.
Oh, yeah.
Terrified of these ideas this side terrified of these not being able to just come together man.
I wish we had I wish we had some like Jedi council of just the smartest deepest most enlightened Deeply empathetic, genius people, symposium, whatever, 20 people, and just allow them to get together and all just agree on like, can we just decide some of these things that we're all fighting about?
Can we just come together and make some really neutral ground so we can do this?
Do you know of nine people whose opinion you would value so highly that they wouldn't say something so egregiously stupid that you'd go, what the fuck, man?
But that thing is like, that transgender thing riles people up, man.
That is one of the ones that riles people up.
Like, everybody's in favor of everybody doing whatever they want to do as long as it doesn't hurt anybody and Until it gets to gender, and then people start getting weird.
They start thinking it's a mistake.
They start thinking, why are you doing that?
They start thinking all kinds of things.
It's like, we're so cool with people making all kinds of changes to their body.
Being a person is just such a fucking strange enterprise.
It's so strange because, you know, when we're thinking about all these different things about human beings, about transgender rights and the Council of Jedis and We've only been around for a short amount of time.
We're going to keep having new things and new things and new things and new things.
I just wish that we did it not because it's all status, which is so much of what it has become.
It's not because the thing actually has a great utility, although there's that as well.
But like these little black mirrors, man, I mean, they are...
They are the greatest Swiss army knife ever created in the history of mankind.
You can do more things with that one thing.
I mean, it's insane what you can do.
And it's also the deepest narcissist pool to stare into because you just get lost in all of that nonsense that you're comparing yourself to all the time, which then drives that consumerism even more.
You're like, I gotta have the thing, the thing, the thing.
There's an Israeli spyware called Pegasus, and another government, the Saudi Arabian government, tapped into his phone, and they sent him a WhatsApp link.
And the WhatsApp link, he clicked on it.
And when he clicked on it, it downloaded malware into his phone.
What is the world going to be like in 10 years if these technologies are not just very real, but very much being implemented, and they're just the tip of whatever this particular iceberg is?
When people are really angry and they lash out, it's almost always, like, if we looked at love like a quantitative thing, like, oh, look at there, Zach, you're low in vitamin D. If they could say, oh, you have, like, 10% love, this is not good.
Ultimately, at 37, I talk about it in the book, but at 37, when I moved out to Austin, I had a whole meltdown.
And thank God, I was surrounded by some friends and family that helped kind of pick me up and get me to this program that's up.
And they operate out of...
Southern California, Connecticut, and I chose to go to Connecticut for three weeks of this super intensive, life-changing, life-saving therapy.
I threw the psychological kitchen sink at it.
It was three weeks, every day, at least three or four appointments that were one of either a psychiatrist, psychotherapist, Dialectic behavioral therapist, art therapist, meditation therapist, life coach, nutritionist, gym four days a week, yoga twice a week, Pilates twice a week.
And that helped me tremendously, and I learned a lot of modalities and things from all of that.
But that wasn't until, you know, five years ago.
The rest of my life, I'd been coping by fucking...
Boozing and drugging and sexing, you know what I mean?
I didn't realize how much self-medicating I was doing for so long.
And I wish that there would have been some way for anyone to be able to be like, I'm just going to see what your levels are.
Because I didn't even know.
I didn't know that what I was constantly feeling all the time.
Well, anxiety, I was constantly feeling all the time.
Depression would hit me in these moments where...
Basically, I'd have massive dopamine crashes, as I think I've come to find out.
I would finish a job, or I'd get out of a relationship, or I wouldn't be working for a while, and all of a sudden it's like, I'm worthless, I'm worthless, I'm worthless.
Work always kept me buoyed.
If I'm at work, it's dopamine all day long.
Particularly on a movie set or whatever.
It's all just a bunch of little puzzles.
You're just solving little problems all day long.
Dopamine, dopamine, dopamine, dopamine.
Being on a Broadway stage.
You got a thousand people.
I mean, you understand the rush of a live audience.
Fuck, you're feeding off of that energy.
You know and you're playing jazz with this crowd.
I mean it's incredible so much dopamine and I would get off you know doing a Broadway show I'd be flying after the show and then I would go to the bar with some of my cast mates and I would be drinking whiskey gingers like Till 3 in the morning because I didn't even have to be at work the next day until 6 p.m.
Or whatever and it was all just a ton of Self-medicating because I didn't love myself and I didn't know that I didn't love myself and Wow, so you just thought you were partying.
No, it was like, you know, I had this big dream, still do, of moving out here, buying a bunch of land, building a movie studio slash arts commune slash resort.
And I came out, but I had, like, my work life wasn't great at the moment.
Like, the jobs I was doing, I wasn't stoked with.
I was, again, feeling like a failure.
I had just broken up with this girl, wonderful girl, who was from Austin, who probably would have moved here with me, but I self-sabotaged it all and was like, no, I don't think this is going to work.
And I came out here, I had no real support structure, and my friends and family had a beautiful community in Los Angeles, but I was like, I gotta go.
I feel compelled, I gotta go do this, I gotta go buy this land.
And I'm really grateful that I did, but I didn't do it in the healthiest of ways.
And so I ended up out here, and I was alone.
And I was deeply, deeply feeling like, oh, I've blown up my life.
I don't feel support.
I didn't feel like I felt like a lot of my friends and family were watching me Go in this kind of almost manic state of like I gotta fuck you know like just if I don't do it now I'm not gonna do it and I knew I had to get out of California like California was has been broken for so long and I'd love California I'm from California, but it's it's just so busted in so many ways But so I came out had nobody had no real support structure work wasn't great love life wasn't great all these things were just like falling down on me and so Massive just Spiral into darkness.
I mean, I was definitely considering killing myself, and it wasn't the first time that I'd ideated on certain thoughts like that.
If ultimately committing suicide is like a 10-rung ladder, I was at rung 9 a couple of times.
A couple of times in my life, yeah.
It was gnarly.
But I didn't realize that the reason why you get there is because your hormones are all completely out of whack.
My dopamine, my serotonin, my norepinephrine, all these things that are typically, you know, and me going and drugging and boozing doesn't help balance those things either.
But you don't know that.
You're just chasing.
Like, I got to be happy.
I don't know how else to get through all this stuff, you know?
But I will also mention, though, that It gave me a lot of understanding of my own psychology and just psychology in general, I suppose.
But I'm learning all these things about how to, like, love yourself more.
That's great.
You can learn all that knowledge.
But if you still don't believe that you are worthy of being loved, you won't apply any of it.
You don't care about any of it.
You don't see the value in yourself to want to put that work in, you know?
And so, thank God, there was this woman...
Her name is Beth in the book.
She was...
We had these, like...
Like, companions, basically.
Like, house moms.
Because if somebody's not in a very good place, you can't depend on them to, like, get up and, like, make themselves breakfast and get to your appointments and all that kind of jazz.
It was a very nice place that really took care of you.
It was built for, like, CEOs that were having massive burnout and all that jazz.
Like, lots of depression and things of that nature.
But anyway, we had these companions and they would rotate through.
Lovely women, all of them.
But there was one, Beth, who...
Was a mom of three kids, just like me and my sisters, middle boy between two girls.
And her son also struggled with mental health.
And she turned out to be this angel, man.
Like this total God loved me through that woman in the most intense, amazing ways.
And she doesn't take credit like she did it.
She knows she was just a vessel.
She was just a tool that God got to show me.
Mother's love like really kind of for the first not the first time I know my mom loved me and tried to do her best particularly I've done I've done all the therapy I know that my mom did her best but it still left me with so many holes Particularly with that maternal you know trauma and so this woman ended up at least like just lighting the the pilot light you know just getting me started so that I could didn't you know take that journey on and go go about it more on my own and There's real people like that out there, right?
That term healer is a gross word because a lot of people use it when they're just crazy charlatans.
But there are people out there that are capable of helping you heal because they're so kind and so loving that the feeling you get when you're around them is like a medicine.
Yeah.
It's like how we were talking about if you could register love, like if you could look in your blood and go, oh, your zinc levels are good, but your love is down.
If that was a real thing, I bet we would think about it differently, because then we would think about it as something, because now that we can measure it, we would think about it as something that's actually a tangible physical thing that's necessary.
But it is.
We know it, in fact, in terms of the way people feel.
They sell some for your home, though, that have a smaller footprint and they're still, like if it's just going to be you using it, you don't have to worry about people What if I want that, Joe?
I mean, by the way, that's another thing that terrifies me, which is the whole save soil and what's going on with our top soil everywhere in the world.
When you don't have regenerative practices of farming, you're supposed to...
Farmers forever have been taking their compost and they've been taking food scraps and all these different things and using them to create healthy bacteria and then using that on their soil.
They've been doing that forever and we don't do that anymore.
And this is the problem with people, even people that think that they're doing well by only eating plants.
Well, you're definitely probably contributing to some factors less, but you're also contributing to monocrop agriculture, which is one of the most degenerative practices we know of.
To get thousands and thousands of acres and just plant one crop is kind of fucking crazy.
But going back to people who are more plant-based in their diets, One of the other things I find fascinating, which is I think I actually learned it on this podcast, which was how now we recognize that plants are way more intelligent than we've given them credit for for so long and communicate with each other and help each other.
But because it moves like that, we consider it an animal.
And then if you look at the protein and the amino acid, if you look at the content of an actual oyster, it's much more like an animal or a fish than it is like a plant.
So it's not a plant, but it's dumber than a plant.
I'll tell you what, Michelob got me with a fucking advertisement back in the day where a bunch of guys were eating stone crabs and drinking Michelobes, and to this day, I think of beer with crabs.
The first time I ever got drunk, I was living up in the Seattle area.
My family moved up there for a little while when I was in middle school.
And my older sister was in her first year of high school.
And she and her friends were loading up into...
One of her, you know, older friends' vans, like panel van with like, there was like a mesh gate from like the, you know, front seats to the back and there was no seats in the back.
It was like a couch or like two couches and just boxes of naughty ice, natural ice beer.
But if you can learn physical tasks, yeah, I feel bad for people that don't do anything physical and then they try to pick it up when they're 45 and their body's all uncoordinated and deteriorated.
It's really weird that if you think about how long human beings have been around, that we're just learning this in the last couple of generations, that it's important to use your body to take care of your mind.
Yeah, I follow his Stoic Instagram, and it's always fascinating.
It's also so cool to me, though, that if you really drill down into all of the Stoicisms, there's such universal wisdoms and truths, which to me just says, like, You know, like, that's the difference between information and wisdom.
Like, information is information, but sometimes information changes.
In fact, oftentimes information changes, but wisdom is universal truth.
It is something that has been riding through our minds and hearts and DNA as human beings and has been passed down and passed down and passed down.
I mean, gosh, who's the awesome dude you had on that talks about meteors and, you know...
Marcus Aurelius' book, Meditations, is really, really interesting because it's almost 2,000 years old.
And when you read it, you're like, wow, this guy had some really fascinating insight as to what it means to be a person, how to be forgiven, how to forgive people.
Marcus Aurelius, who's the head of Rome, was really into forgiving people.
He's a fascinating guy.
When Ryan Holiday sort of lays out his life and talks about how he was sort of betrayed and what all went wrong with him.
Well, Seneca, I think Seneca was another, like, incredible example of someone with such, I mean, all of them, but, you know, he had incredibly deep, I think, caring, empathetic wisdom as well.
But also Jesus.
I mean, like, you know, speaking of a manuscript from 2,000 years ago, there's so much incredibly accurate, real deep wisdom in the Bible.
However you want to chop it up, Old Testament, New Testament, whatever, I have found there to be such power, by the way, particularly when it comes to love.
Particularly listening to what Jesus will talk about when it comes to love.
These are leaders of countries that need to figure out how to love themselves so they don't need to keep conquering everybody else and taking everything else.
There's a lot of crooks out there, and these people have been co-opted by these enormous corporations, so these people can make decisions that benefit the corporations, and it benefits their career, and then they move on to get jobs in those corporations, and meanwhile everybody else is Isn't it often times that the head of the FDA at any time was a former CEO of one of the pharmaceutical companies and then will also return to them?
It's about the financial crisis of 2008. I don't know.
It's a really good documentary.
But one of the things that's really good about it is that the guy who's the host of it, they think that they're going to be able to just respond to his questions and they'll just paint a rosy picture of what went wrong and what we need to do next and And so he starts calling them out on all the various regulatory decisions that were made,
and then he points out that these people oftentimes that are setting economic policy, these people that they're getting recommendations from are these mathematicians that work for these universities.
And then these mathematicians, they set these standards that the government uses, and then they get jobs in these major corporations afterwards.
So they set standards that benefit these major corporations, and then they leave their job at the university to make millions of dollars working for these corporations.
So they'll set these financial pathways where these corporations can profit.
But it's just disheartening to know that there's so many fucking creeps that are so fucking corrupt that are in charge of making decisions that all of us have to live with.
But a lot of this stuff about the FDA, I learned from that because there are all these, like, not just drugs, but medical devices and things that are constantly being okayed that are fucking people up.
Meshes that they would put inside women who had like hysterectomy like major problems with these Faulty products, but they were all just nobody decided to give it enough testing because they had a little fucking you know side deal like we know I used to work for them They're gonna we're gonna get this in there.
I mean, I wish to God I could look to one field and feel like it's being run with integrity.
It's being run in a way where The corporation, the industry are valuing the lives of the people that run their entire situation and also valuing the lives of the user downstream with whatever they're providing.
Yeah, most of the people that understand nuclear in terms of, like, when they're looking at our potential to make clean energy, like, what's the most likely scenario?
Like, nuclear's a great one.
Because...
They have better methods of developing those power plants with better fail-safes.
And they also have the ability to build sites, plants, where you can recycle the waste.
So it's not just immediately put into a barrel and then it's buried for a million years.
You actually can take that same waste and recycle it through and get more and more out of it until it becomes even more inert.
And then you go and dispose of it in a very safe way.
But again, how...
If we don't do that, like I'm all about regenerative everything, but there's a lot of people that still don't have really good power sources in this world, and we're just going to not go with a thing that could help the most amount of people with the least amount of impact.
Yeah, when you think about how many coal plants we have running, that should stop.
We did this podcast once where we watched a documentary about this one town in Indiana that has a series of coal plants around it that's so bad that all their cars are covered in this fine coal dust.
Hey man, you're fucking breathing that.
You gotta get out of there.
They all have lung ailments and asthma and diseases and shit.
Battery components are getting out of rare earth and all of that practice, which is horrible for the environment, even to make a lot of these electric cars that are helpful for the environment.
So it's like, where is the moral high ground in all of this?
Can't we all come together?
Again, get this Jedi Council of nine people and be like, can we just be fair about all of the pros and cons here and figure out how we can all move forward and everybody can actually have energy and power, which is one of the greatest What's the word I'm looking for?
There was a lot we didn't accomplish as human beings until all of a sudden we had lamps.
And then we had kerosene lamps, and that was like, oh my god, we can stay up a lot, and we can put kerosene all through the streets, and we have lights, and then all of a sudden electricity.
It's like, oh my gosh, look at all the things we accomplished as human beings just because we have this.
And how many people who live in this world who don't have any of that?
They're still struggling.
And that's not to mention, obviously, just having lights on, but powering wells for water and all of the things that these people would be able to benefit from.
This is the guy who invented a supposed water-powered car, and he goes to meet someone to discuss this water-powered car, and he starts gasping, goes to meet someone to discuss it, like someone from the automobile industry or something like that, and his last words, he's running out of the place saying, they poisoned me.
But see, it would not, and I'm not casting any aspersions, but it wouldn't surprise me at all.
Because again, why stop at sabotage?
If you're a massive industry, if you're a massive corporation, and you know that gas, oil is your commodity, and you need people buying this oil, you don't want somebody coming up with a new technology that is going to make oil, at least gas for cars, obsolete.
The crime scene is in Grove City, Ohio, Franklin County, with all the ingredients of setting in the American province that is dear to crime writers.
It's 21st March 1998, the first day of spring, and four men are having a lunch in a restaurant.
A waiter serves one of them some cranberry juice, perhaps, but we will never know for sure, chosen for dessert.
This man, immediately after his first sip, Suddenly gets up as if he's gone crazy, holds his hand around his neck, he loses his breath, runs out into the parking lot, collapses to the ground, and pronounces his last words, they poisoned me.
And it's right there, right in front of us, and yet we still just kind of allow these things to go on, because we're not collectively enough angry about it.
I mean, even the ones that I like or want to like, I don't trust that they have the ability to navigate all of that political scene and not end up fucking contorted by compromise by the time they get to a place of actual leadership where they can do things.
There's probably people out there that are hypersensitive.
There might be, like, a gene expression that, you know, they should probably keep away from mushrooms because of this or because of that.
Like, we don't know any of those things, unfortunately, because it's all in the dark.
But all we do know is that, like, the John Hopkins studies and all these different studies where people are showing beneficial results from giving psilocybin to people in these clinical settings, it's really interesting, man.
It's really interesting stuff because it's like changing the way people interface with life.
And almost all of them report at least some alleviation of the anxiety that was evolved and the trauma that they were trying to work through.
But I think it's because people are waking up to that and not being as afraid, I guess.
I don't know.
I don't think we should be...
Constantly judging and shaming and judging and shaming and judging and shaming, which is what we've been doing for way too long about far too many things.
Well, it's also pharmaceutical companies don't want you to have things that are going to cut into their profits, just like somebody would want to destroy that water machine because they're selling water.
Ibogaine is what Hunter S. Thompson accused Was it Humphreys?
Yeah, it was Humphreys during the presidential race.
He made Humphreys go crazy because he wrote all these stories about them bringing in Brazilian witch doctors and that he had a serious Ibogaine addiction.
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And if you've ever heard anything- He was accusing Humphreys of having an Ibogaine addiction?
On the heels of going to this life-saving therapy, like literally as I was finishing up my treatment in Connecticut, I got my agency.
I told, hey, I'm going to be off-grid for a little while.
So, you know, don't send me any auditions or anything like that.
I got to do some healing.
Cool, cool, cool.
And then, of course, two and a half weeks later, I get an email.
Hey, so there's a role in Shazam, which, by the way, I had already passed on an audition for that role of Shazam.
I never thought I had a chance in hell of getting that job.
But also, I was in a very dark place and not loving myself.
So months prior, I'd passed on that audition.
Now, I've done some fucking hard work.
I'm seeing some light at the end of the tunnel.
And I get this email from my agency.
And they're like, hey, there's another role in Shazam.
It's a supporting role.
It's like one scene.
No pressure.
And I just had this breakthrough.
And I was like, you know what?
I'm going to choose to love myself.
And I'm basically finishing up my treatment right now.
I feel good.
I feel like I'm back on my feet a bit.
And I came back from the gym one day, put my phone up, did one take, sent it to my agency.
And I'm not going to allow that to define, whether it happens or not, it's not going to define who I am moving forward.
By, you know, a couple hours later, my phone's blowing up, and my agent's like, hey man, they liked you so much for that role, but they think you could be their Shazam, they haven't cast it yet.
And so, long story shorter, a week later, through all these different things, I wrapped up my therapy, I end up flying to LA, I camera test, and one week from the day of doing that first tape, I was cast as Shazam.
So, all of that, none of that would have happened.
I fully believe that that door opened for me in my life because I first chose to go do the real hard work, which was to go and love myself, to figure out why I was not operating in a clear and healthy way, right?
And that was going to this therapy and, you know, really investing in myself in that way.
And that changed energetically, spiritually, it shifted things, and this presented itself and it came into my life.
One of the greatest gifts I've ever been given as an actor.
Such a fun role and totally changed the trajectory of my career.
The career that I was feeling like a total failure in.
So when I'm promoting the movie, I tell my publicist, like, listen, I can't talk about the movie without adding, but I only got to do this because of this work and going to therapy.
And so I talked about that on a couple of different podcasts, and HarperCollins saw that, and they're like, hey, we think that this could be a book.
I never intended to set out to write a book.
I have a hard enough time reading books, let alone sitting down to write a book.
And I had wonderful help from the folks at HarperCollins, and we made it through.
But ultimately, the book is about those three weeks in Connecticut and all of the traumas and things that happened to me throughout my life that put me in that place.
And a lot of that is familial.
My mom and stepdad, I go into a lot of that.
My dad himself and my relationship with him, my relationship with other family, going through school, being bullied relentlessly, all these things.
It's just a real raw vulnerable take of my life, but it's something that I felt like if we people like myself who have a platform and who have also struggled greatly can just keep normalizing this shit, so many other people will feel not alone. so many other people will feel not alone.
Because with mental health, I mean, that's one of the hardest things you have to fight through because you really feel alone.
You feel like nobody else is going to understand this.
Nobody has ever understood whatever this feeling is right now, which is a total lie because people have been experiencing some form of depression and anxiety and sadness and anger and all these things since the beginning of man.
But the lies are very real.
Your mind is lying to itself.
I love that quote, you're not the voice of your mind, you are the one who hears it.
That was one of the biggest things I ever learned in all this.