Russell Brand joins Joe Rogan to dissect LA’s homelessness shift, comparing it to London’s pandemic-era housing stunts and exposing systemic exploitation—like Congo’s cobalt mines funding smartphones or vaccine controversies tied to Gates’ profits. They critique institutional distrust, from Buttigieg’s incompetence to media censorship of ivermectin and lab-leak theories, with Brand citing Fauci’s redacted emails and 2023 WSJ reports on COVID-19 origins. Rumble’s rise as a platform for unfiltered truth contrasts YouTube’s demonetization tactics, while Brand’s sobriety and spiritual discipline clash with modern disembodiment. Ultimately, they argue crises reveal power structures, urging individuals to reclaim agency through struggle, not passive conformity or profit-driven narratives. [Automatically generated summary]
For example, Gower Street, the Gower Street Bridge.
There would always be sort of like a little tented community there.
That seems to have been moved along and maybe a perfect metaphor for that problem, you know, moving them rather than you feel like those homeless people are still somewhere rather than that problem has found a resolution.
Do you know that in our country during the pandemic, in London especially, but also in other cities, they temporarily housed homeless people as one of the pandemic measures.
Like we can't have people on the streets.
They'll cough on someone.
Put them all in hotels, put them in hostels.
They solved it.
And then when they reached the point where they were happy that the pandemic had leveled out, they kicked them all back out again.
Do you think it was just too much time and effort to manage those people?
Like they're shooting up in the hotels and causing ruckus.
I mean, I wonder what was the reason for putting them back on the street?
Because it seemed like if they solved that, they should be like, oh, well, you know, let's just keep dedicating these resources to keep these people housed.
I feel like that the anomaly was the housing rather than the ejecting.
I feel like that they, when it was convenient and suitable, they could find a solution to homelessness that was an economic one.
And then when it wasn't necessary anymore, they just pulled the rug out from under it.
But I'm sure, like, yeah, that comes with complexity.
When I was first working in media, when I was still a using drug addict myself, I did these things that I considered to be like psychological jackass.
You know, that was a big show at that time, those amazing guys doing those incredible stunts.
And I was like, well, what if you did the psychological version of that?
So I had like a boxing match with my dad.
I had a homeless guy move in my house.
I seduced an octogenarian lady.
I jerked off a man in a toilet.
All of these things were the periphery of my limits as a drug using young man, just trying to make a way my way in media.
When I had that homeless guy come live in my house with me, James was his name, God rest his soul, like that.
It was interesting to encounter that, you know, there's a reason.
Of course, I fully accept and appreciate that that could happen to any of us, that any of us with a few wrong choices could end up destitute and lost without the kind of support and good fortune I've had in various areas in my life.
I'm sure it could have happened to me.
Of course it could have.
But there was a sort of like a gravity pulling him back out into the street.
You know, there's a gravity pulling it.
It was like he couldn't deal with being in a house.
Admittedly, these were not organic conditions.
There was like cameras around and stuff.
It was not a high, it was not a high-budget production.
Really lo-fi stuff on a lo-fi digital channel.
But being around that guy, he was like a heroin user.
I was using heroin with him at that time.
The sort of peak of the show was when I got into, we had a bath together.
That was like, I thought, what's the most intimate thing you could do with a person to sort of overcome the idea that homeless people are somehow dirty or different or you know, like they should be excluded from society?
So I had a bath with this guy.
This stuff's still online somewhere, I presume.
And, you know, it sort of pushed both of us to our limit.
In the end, James decided he preferred homelessness to living.
Yeah, so like, of course, that problem of vagrancy and destitution, it's a difficult one to tackle.
It makes me think that the culture is laid upon the planet.
Like all culture, all civilization is laid upon the planet, laid upon Gaia, laid upon the earth.
Like, you know, when you have people on here like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson that talk about like the potential for like these seismic events and cataclysmic events that have reset civilization, it makes you recognize that all of our reference points other than biological and cosmological are cultural reference points and therefore temporal.
And so a person living in a tent in the street is in a sense living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in contemporary America or living a post-apocalyptic lifestyle in contemporary America.
It makes me think sometimes, Joe, maybe the apocalypse is not a forthcoming event.
Maybe the apocalypse has already happened.
Maybe we're living in the sort of the already its gentle threads are encroaching upon apparent civilization.
You know, when you're in comfortable, defined and designed spaces, you feel like everything's okay.
The end of the world is impossible.
And it just seems like entertainment when you hear about nuclear treaties being torn up, that it can't actually happen.
The people that it happened to then, they never saw it coming either.
What you're saying is very interesting because I think the apocalypse is here on Earth.
It's just not here.
Like right here in Austin.
It's not like right here in the studio, but it's in the Congo.
Like if you go to a cobalt mine in the Congo and you see a 19-year-old woman with a baby on her back mining for cobalt and inhaling toxic fumes, you're like, okay, well, that's the apocalypse.
They have no electricity.
They have no clean water.
They make very, very little money and they work all day.
And they work for a company that puts cobalt into lithium-ion batteries that are in everyone's smartphone.
So the height of our technology is directly connected to what's essentially slave labor.
It's all about cobalt mining in the Congo and his investigation that he did into it.
It's very, very.
It's inspiring that a person is that selfless and can make that sort of a commitment and risk their life and go to a very dangerous place and expose this because he's a real journalist, like a real boots on the ground journalist that wants to show the world some things that are being hidden from them because the people that are making enormous amounts of money from this that could fix it don't want to.
They want to profit off of it at the exact level they're profiting off of it now, which means paying people a couple cents an hour or whatever they pay them.
And then even if that was, if you imagine, well, what would justify that?
It could only be if we were all on ventilators that were sustaining life in the West.
Even then, it would be morally dubious.
But the idea that it is for some trinket in terms of our phone that's ultimately a facilitator of ongoing commerce and communication at a level that's not sustainable.
And I feel like, you know, that when we talk about what are the ideologies that drive us, the ideology of progress, this is why I have sometimes am skeptical, not about technology, the mastery and the geniuses that work in that field, but how technology and science as a subset of our economic ideology can create exactly the conditions that you're describing and that that journalist has exposed.
That if your ideology permits that, then what kind of ideology is that?
What kind of unconsciousness are we living in?
It's not an awakened culture.
And all of the discourse around like, you know, how we treat one another as individuals and progressivism culturally in domestic territories, hey, people should be allowed to do this and that.
It's all nonsense.
That is permitted.
Not only permitted, required.
It's a requirement.
You cannot have that economic model without that price being paid.
And as a culture, whether it's me as an individual or our entire culture, we've accepted that contract.
You know, hopefully people haven't done that in their interpersonal, intimate relationships, but we certainly have in the way we communicate with others.
We've certainly accepted very bizarre ways of communicating online.
And sometimes that bleeds out into real life, like where someone talks to people in the real world as if they're on Twitter and they get bashed.
You see that sometimes.
I think it's a very strange time where I don't think people have a lot of faith right now in institutions.
And I don't think they have a lot of faith in authority.
I don't think they really believe that there is someone who is wiser than them that has a grand plan that's logical, that's workable, where they're looking out for all of us.
So I think there's like a feeling of chaos that exists today that I don't think has ever existed in my life like this before.
Even back during the Bush administration when everybody thought Bush was a moron, they still thought this is a good cabinet and they're following all the checks and balances, even though they're probably extracting too much money and there's probably a lot of cronyism and a lot of undercover deals and a lot of like no-bid contracts with Halliburton and that kind of nonsense.
He still thought they have things pretty under control.
It's a very solid institution.
Nobody believes that now.
You see Pete Buttigieg and fucking Kamala Harris and Biden can't get a sentence out.
You're like, this is madness.
These people are utter fools.
And these are the people that are running everything.
And these are the people that are getting us on the brink of war with Russia.
And with that era of the Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, if you're like, oh, these are the Death Star bods.
What's happening is there's this risen up military industrial complex, Rand Foundation ideologues from the Republican right who were the sanctioned baddies back in those days, are trying to profit from the colonization of the Middle East.
It's part of a new American project.
We sort of understood it.
But for where I'm coming from, it was somehow recognizable.
And a million people went on a march to prevent that war taking place because they knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, which we now know to be the truth.
And as you say, now the figures that are in that place are sort of posing as the good guys, like affable and navuncular presidents and sort of friendly people of like, you know, across the identitarian spectrum that's meant to feel inclusive and powerful.
Like, this is what's interesting for me is as we navigate this new and emergent space of being able to present counter-narratives and continually, like all of us now, have like experienced, oh, you're a right-wing conspiracy theorist, you've joined the alt-right, you're a gateway to this, the dark, all of that language that grows up around it.
Like, and I've heard you speak about this obviously a lot, but the truth is that who isn't sympathetic?
Anyone that's got a family or loves someone is simperfected the idea that people are going to have various types of identity around culture and religious expression and racial expression.
And this is a conversation that the whole culture has to be involved in together.
My issue is, I don't think they believe in that stuff.
I don't think they care.
I don't think that they are creating an agenda to advance the interests of vulnerable people.
I think they are using it as a distraction and a veil in order to carry on with the same kind of corporate and financial interests that have always determined what the establishment is.
And if there's one thing we can point to in our lifetime, it's that the liberal establishment has become co-opted by the same forces that traditionally we regarded the right to have been co-opted by military, industrial complex, financial industry.
And there's now, like, there's palpable evidence for that.
And in order to not acknowledge that that transition's taken place, they're able to keep the cultural conversation going.
We care about your right to express yourself and your identity.
That's a way of not acknowledging we're just the same.
We're pro-war.
And now when there's that war, you know, like Jimmy Dore and all those guys did that anti-war march in Washington or whatever, it's like 5,000 people go.
Now, I don't know if that's because of the last few years and what the pandemic's done to people accumulating and gathering crowds or whether people have lost their belief and faith that people can have any impact on politics anymore.
There's just now this immersive sense of apathy, this, as you say, loss of trust in institutions and authority.
But something extraordinary has happened when people that say that we're the peace and love party are the party that are advocating for war won't include some of the complex conditions that have led to this current crisis, which this clearly a case for like, you know, NATO's infringement on Russian territory, the 2014 coup, and I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but like it's extraordinary that those conversations don't happen.
It's like actually like that post-Trump and post-pandemic, everything sort of enters into that template.
There are certain things you're not allowed to say now.
If you sort of say, were Russia in any way provoked, is there any legitimacy to their military actions from their perspective?
That's the same as saying, oh, I don't think you should take certain medications or maybe masks aren't necessary.
And people aren't, it doesn't seem that the culture is learning.
It doesn't seem that as the evidence is evolving, that people are saying, oh, wow, look, the stuff you were being told two years ago now, the things you couldn't say online two or three years ago, now there's evidence for that.
In fact, I've bought documentation in case the conversation went in this direction, Joe, in my new position as a legitimate investigative journalist.
I've got actual papers that I can show you from conspiracy to fact.
Even though legitimate biologists, like when I had Brett Weinstein on my podcast in April of 2020, he was saying back then, there's very clear evidence that this has come from a lab.
And he explained it as a biologist who worked on coronaviruses from bats.
Like that's literally his expertise, his area of expertise.
And so he had a deep knowledge of this.
And when he was describing it, people were furious at him.
They were demonetizing his YouTube videos and going after him.
And all these progressive people on the left was like, you're falling into this whole alt-right Trump this and that.
And they weren't even paying attention to an actual biologist who actually understands and has studied viruses.
And he's saying this has all the indications of a lab-created virus that we would work on.
All of those conversations you were having, like Malone and McCullough and Weinstein, when you actually listen to what they're saying, they're talking from a biological perspective.
They're not saying, I believe in this, and this is how we should organize culture, and these are the hierarchies that should be in place.
So it was extraordinary that what they were met with was politically and ideologically driven.
Like at the beginning of it, it seemed like there was such an appetite to frame everything Trump was doing as ridiculous that, you know, like they sort of highlight and framed Fauci saying that I think Trump said it could have come from a lab and Fauci said that's ridiculous and it's implausible.
But like, you know, like you said, Weinstein's like, oh, no, you can't have that evolutionary step without the intervention of engineering.
These characters that have become so maligned and marginalized, even in my lifetime where I still worked in mainstream media, people like Alex Jones or David Icke, they were like even people that were skeptical about them or even people that ridiculed them didn't try to posit them as dangerous.
Well the David Icke one, they always made fun of him for lizard people because he always would say that there's shapeshifters and they're lizards and there was no evidence.
It just seemed really preposterous.
And then in the beginning of the pandemic, he was trying to connect COVID with 5G.
There was a lot of weird, like he's got some squirrely ones.
Believe it or not, like it's hard to say to the general public, Alex Jones is way more reliable than David Icke, but he's way more reliable than David Icke.
Alex made a tremendous mistake with Sandy Hook, and he did that in a time of his life where he's experiencing a psychotic break.
He was drinking a lot and he was having a mental breakdown.
And he really believed that everything was a conspiracy and that the government is essentially run by these evil demons who are trying to depopulate America and ruin people.
And he thought they were trying to take away people's guns.
And he was convinced that someone had convinced him.
I don't know how he, I don't know what documentaries or what videos he saw, but he was convinced that they were using crisis actors and that they were orchestrating a false flag.
He was obviously very wrong.
Yes.
And it's admitted that he was wrong about that, but he's been right about a lot of things.
So many things.
And I've talked about this many times, but he was the guy who told me about Epstein's Island more than a decade ago.
And I thought it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard.
I was like, what are you saying?
There's an island.
It sounds like a plot in a movie.
There's an island where they fly famous rich scientists and politicians and they compromise them with underage girls and get it on film so they could use it against them.
I'm like, what?
That sounds like horseshit.
That sounds like lizard people.
It sounds like, you know, 5G creates COVID.
Same thing.
But turns out it was true.
And it's one of many things.
He was the one that the first one to warn me about a social credit score system.
He's like, they're going to try to implement a social credit score system and your money is going to be tied.
They'll have centralized digital currency and your money will be tied to your social credit score system and you step out of line.
You won't be able to buy things.
You won't be able to travel.
You won't be able to do anything.
They're going to try to keep you within a 15-minute radius of your home.
I wonder what our obligation is as people that participate in this conversation to ensure that there is a distinction made between the empirical facts that are discussed and then you in particular with your rather unique cultural space, the sort of joy of speculation.
Because when you think about some of the stuff that Alex Jones has said and putting aside Sandy Hook and that acknowledged difficulty and transgression, like that some of it's as rhetoric is amazing.
Like that they, you know, yes, there are sort of centralized systems of corruption that bypass democracy.
And ultimately, there is an agenda that can bypass administrative change.
Policies that come out under the Republicans are pursued by the Democrats.
And then it's the military-industrial complex are able through lobbying and through their overt and covert connections to government, able to dictate foreign policy, at least influence foreign policy.
All of these things you can sort of demonstrate financially.
But when you start to describe it in terms of demons and reptiles, the kind of language that like even 500 years ago was the ordinary way that, you know, he's a preacher, isn't he, Alex Jones?
He's somewhere between a shaman and a preacher.
He operates in that space.
And in a way, you need people on the cultural periphery to be able to say, watch out, watch out, watch the direction we're going in.
Because the thing is, is that the cult, the way that we're behaving at the moment is all underwritten by rationalism.
This is the, you know, follow the science.
This is the rational thing.
Putin is, but it's just as inaccurate.
It's not true either.
Now, of course, like when you start talking about, well, UFOs until very recently, or lizard people or shapeshifters, you're entering into a territory that makes it easy for you to be ridiculed, makes it easy for you to be taken down.
Now, like, you know, so the times that they are accurate or correct, you know, like even because if you think of the way that you were framed around the pandemic period, it's like, I has far-right people on, conspiracy theorists.
And of course, they've obviously got an agenda and it's their agenda that is driving the discourse, not the facts of the matter.
And I suppose in a way, we should be grateful that they are unwilling to have these open conversations.
They're not willing to get people on with various views, opposing views, to listen to people that they disagree with, to openly criticize the establishment.
Because what I've been able to learn in the last couple of years is if you start focusing on the relationships between big pharma and the media or big pharma and the government, just by focusing on that, you can really create clear narratives of corruption, hypocrisy, dishonesty.
Those things are there.
But me, because my background is not a journalist, it's not a conventional education, I'm sort of open to the more extraordinary, exciting, visceral ideas, which once in a while prove to be true, like the, you know, the example of Epstein Island.
But then you become kind of porous and you're like, oh, yeah, no, tell me all of this stuff.
And it's like, you know, you've obviously managed to sort of follow, like, pursue this path saying, I'm a comedian.
I've not like got an obligation.
I'm not a journalist.
I've got this bill.
I'm open to everybody.
But it seems like as the cultural role changes, as the power and magnetism, because of the needs, because of the necessity, because people just aren't, like you say, the loss of trust in institutions, the loss of trust in authority, being open and willing to have those conversations grants you all power.
And then the commercial power comes and the financial power comes.
And suddenly you've got to navigate it.
And I think it all came together in that it seemed at least from the perspective of an observer in the Ivermectin moment that the culture should be able to tolerate a conversation.
Well, not just that, but the blatant lies that CNN was telling about it.
When you had CNN and MSNBC and all these different cable news network shows calling it horse dewormer, when it was a drug that won the Nobel Prize for the inventor of it, is a drug that has had billions, literally billions of prescriptions filled.
It's a drug that saved lives, a drug that's on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines.
And for them to have the gall and to have the sheer audacity to just out and out lie to people about what a medication is.
And it's used on humans far more than it's used on horses.
And that they were calling that horse dewormer to try to mock me because they knew that I was unvaccinated and I kicked COVID very quickly.
And they did not want that narrative out there.
And they were beholden to their handlers.
They were beholden to the people that give them exorbitant amounts of money in advertising revenue.
And they fucking followed in line and they all piled on and they lost a fuckload of credibility from it.
I mean, if you look at the way people who saw that, how many people saw that and would go, oh my God, they're just lying.
They're just lying.
Like, there's no excuse for that.
You can't imagine a scenario where they really thought I was taking horse medication.
You can't imagine a scenario where they thought that I couldn't get real people medication.
You can't imagine it.
I'm not poor.
I'm not without resources.
I'm not confused.
I'm not without the recommendations of actual physicians.
Like, none of that makes any sense.
The idea that they could go on television and say, oh, this conspiracy theorist is taking horse dewormer.
I think they took an extreme editorial perspective without realizing that's what they were doing.
And I think that the entire mainstream culture has actually found itself on a kind of a peninsula that where there is insignificant variety, in my view, between the two parties, which is why they're so willing to remain engaged in cultural war discourse and the conventional hot-button topics in this country in particular around the pro-life, pro-choice, and guns arguments.
They're willing to remain in that territory because financially and economically, they are ultimately aligned.
That the most powerful interests in America are happy with either outcome.
I think that what's happened in the media space is they've unwittingly found themselves in a place where there's a kind of incompetence was afforded, that they're not used to being challenged, that the assumption was that you would be sunk by that narrative, that it was an insignificant new space.
And obviously, it was a massive miscalculation because they weren't watching what was happening.
They weren't listening to the conversations with McCulloch and Malone and Weinstein and that it is apolitical.
And that also, in order to make themselves seem distinct from one another, they have amplified their small differences to the point where they don't recognize actually that that isn't America anymore.
That people like that, even when I was a kid, if someone was just like right-wing, that's just like, oh, that's a right-wing person.
Like, you'd be in your family around your table.
I read something about Tucker Carlson the other day, like, you know, because of the release of those January the 6th documents to Fox and to Tucker in particular.
And it said, far-right journalist Tucker Costa.
If Tucker Costa's not far-right, at least like a normal right-wing guy, far-right means marching and red, white, and me written as far-right.
Tattoos on the face, extreme boots, you know, like far-right's not just like, oh, I believe in Christianity, right?
Stuff like that.
So the rhetoric has become hysterical.
And the horse medicine was the same.
They had the option of saying, look, we don't know that there's no evidence as yet that ivermectin is effective in these spaces because no one's trialing it because there's no money in it because science is a subset of big pharma and the economic imperative is the right thing.
No one's doing experiments into natural immunity because natural immunity is not profitable.
No one's doing those.
Those experiments are not being underwritten.
There's no clinical trials for that because no one wants that data for vitamin D or for steroids or for all of the things that came out as ultimately effective once the profits have been gleaned.
And then how can you expect to maintain the authority?
How can you expect to sit behind those logos of CNN and MSNBC and claim that kind of piety and certainty?
And the way that they were like outraged by it was astonishing, like a kind of a how dare you?
How dare you have this credibility?
How dare people listen to you?
And I think that it's precisely because of a willingness to listen one day to a left-wing person, a right-wing person, some people with some crazy theories, people talking about Egypt, some people talking about MMA.
That's how people are now.
People don't want that kind of centralized authority.
It's over because of the way that technology has afforded people access to a variety of news sources and a counter-narrative for any story can emerge almost at the same speed as a narrative.
So now the price of authority is legitimacy.
Authority has to be legit.
And you can't like the same way as they did that horsewormer stuff with you.
Like if you watch Biden in Poland, he said like this speech is along the lines of Putin thought that Ukraine would roll over.
Putin didn't know how brave Ukrainian people are.
He is a tyrant.
And of course Ukrainian people are brave.
Of course it's disgusting that they're suffering under this military invasion.
But I could handle it, I think, if the president went, listen, we were involved in that coup in 2014.
Even the sort of people that are the diplomats that are involved in this are the same diplomats that are involved in stuff like Iraq and Afghanistan.
BlackRock are going to profit subsequently from the rebuild of Ukraine.
Russia have got their agenda.
We've got our agenda.
We believe our agenda is more in line with what most American citizens will benefit.
But they can't actually say that because it isn't true because what they want is a unipolar hegemonic world in the same way that CNN don't even consider that what they're saying is dangerous and harmful.
And now we're at a point where it's sort of that their approach to it may have been counterproductive in the most basic medical ways.
And they weren't able to have that conversation because of financial imperatives and because they're basically owned by the people.
Yeah, that's a pretty extreme ideology to underwrite a system.
And it's the kind of ideology that in the end is going to lose credibility.
Because when you do replace it for something like peanut butter, it makes it, it jars with us.
We realize, oh, yeah, we are just permitting that.
Another thing that was extraordinary is the sudden authority that we were willing to grant to these corporations that had been like the baddies up until 20 minutes before.
We know what Pfizer had done.
We know the out-of-court settlements.
We know what Johnson and Johnson had done with the alleged casting agends in baby powder.
I mean, stories that sound like they're out of a Bill Hicks joke, like actually happening in reality.
I heard this thing that that guy, you know, Pavlov of the dogs, you know, like he did other experimentation, the results of which were that 20% of people are highly susceptible to hypnosis and similarly highly susceptible to placebos.
Like 20% of people with given placebos, it will be effective under the right conditions or whatever.
And the same with hypnosis.
And 20% of people will not be hypnotized and will not respond to placebos.
The middle 60% is where propaganda operates.
How many of that middle 60% can you persuade?
And I was just astonished that authoritarianism could suddenly be repackaged in this manner.
That authoritarianism could tell you that war is a good thing.
That authoritarianism can tell you that big pharma is a good thing.
That being locked in your home is a good thing.
And those are all the pieces of evidence sort of fell away from it.
Oh, no, natural immunity is effective.
Oh, no, there are adverse events.
Oh, there are cases of myocarditis.
Oh, no, every single bit of our masks aren't working.
All of it just started to fall apart.
And somehow they're expecting the eligibility of their authority to have maintained in spite of everything, the edifice cracking open.
And it's so convenient that of all the remedies, that only the ones that are controlled by pharmaceutical companies are the ones that get highlighted.
And one of that, one of the best pieces of evidence for that is vitamin D.
And there was a recent study, see if you can find this.
There was a recent study that estimated somewhere between somewhere in the range of 70% of all hospitalizations and deaths from COVID could have been prevented with vitamin D.
I don't know if that's true.
But I remember reading that article going, that is the most insane thing I've ever seen in my life.
And when did they know that this was true?
Because if they just started handing out vitamin D, it's readily available.
So easy to get, so easy to make, so cheap.
They just handed out vitamin D to everybody.
How many deaths could they have prevented?
If that really is the case, that high-level, high doses of vitamin D, along with, you know, it's great with magnesium and vitamin K, but if they had educated people about nutrients and about the value of nutrition, the value of supplementation, how many people could have been saved?
When you were talking about health at the beginning of the pandemic, which seems like a pretty obvious and rudimentary thing to talk about, exercise, eat well, I feel like even that is getting framed as a kind of a right-wing narrative now.
I feel that in a way what the pandemic did was it revealed the long con of corporatization of government.
That if over the last 50, 60 years, government has become increasingly corporatized, that democracy has become increasingly hollowed out and irrelevant, it just took a crisis event to reveal the extent to which that had taken place.
Now, the people that are in the outer reaches and some of the people in the comments below will talk about, no, the whole thing is staged.
It's a global event.
The whole thing has been put in place in order to bring about social credit scores and more surveillance and to facilitate lockdowns.
And those are the things that are very, very difficult to prove.
But what I think you can demonstrate is over the last 50, 60 years, through lobbying and demonstrable means, corporations have had more and more ability to exert influence and downright control government policy regardless of which party is in power.
And then a crisis event took place and the momentum that carried it through, like governments have a, the governments like control.
That's what governments are about is authority.
But big corporations like profit.
That's what they're at.
And those two things came together.
So the solution that was suggested is, well, we can exert control through lockdowns and potentially coming as close as damn it to mandate in medicines.
They can benefit.
The indemnity that they were granted, it was kind of a perfect storm and perfect revelation.
We spoke to a person, I don't think you've had him because I'm sure I would have been aware if you had this guy, Martin Guri, who was a CIA operative, who wrote a book called The Revolt of the Public.
And he said he was a CIA analyst in 2001.
And in 2001, there was as much information published that year as in all human history up to that point.
And in 2002, it doubled again.
And he said, when you look at those analytics on a screen, it looks like a tidal wave.
And he said that that image stayed with him.
And he recognized that power was going to alter radically because if information can be created and exchanged that quickly, centralized authority is going to be massively challenged.
Either the way that we govern communities and nations is going to radically alter with more power being devolved, with more democracy, with more ability to run your own communities, with more feedback and communities such as the online world is starting to suggest, communities forming around subjects or individuals or figures or ideologies, or, and this seems to be what's happening, centralized authority is going to double down, look for ways to smear dissenters, censor, create new categories like misinformation, disinformation, suddenly find acceptable views of five,
ten years ago are now not acceptable and are banned.
Tolerance somehow decreasing under the veil of increasing tolerance, literal Orwellianism, changing the meaning of words, going back, editing books, stuff that we've seen in dystopian sci-fi actually happening.
Martin Guri, the CIA analyst, offers us that the reason that's happening is because there's a recognition that centralized authority models cannot operate.
The elites cannot govern the planet in the same typical way that they've been able to, say, from the 50s or whenever.
I'm not an expert in this kind of stuff.
But he said, either there's, unless we're going to lose things that he considers worth saving, because this guy, Martin Guri, he's not like a radical person.
He likes liberal democracy.
He's a first-generation immigrant, I think, from Cuba in this country, worked at the CIA.
He's not like some sort of pot-smoking radical.
He's like a person, but he was saying that what's happened is they've not been able to acknowledge the way that the world has changed.
It's changed in an unprecedented way.
The first observable sign or one-off being Napster, the second one, the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement.
They've not recognized that now there's a different conversation.
And then, you know, you can add you actually to that because what happened with like, oh, now what we'll do is we'll shut this geezer down.
But they couldn't because the economics of that, we were already too big in the space for that to happen.
So they don't know how to.
He said, what's going to happen is even new elites will emerge that understand how technology works.
And I guess that's why we're seeing, you know, have seen the rise of social media, the amount of power those big tech companies have, their abilities to evade taxation, the degree to which the Twitter files revealed they work closely with deep state operatives to a point that we just wouldn't know how Elon Musk made those.
I think they're also operating with very crude tools currently that will soon change with AI.
I think AI is going to completely shift the narrative.
And then from then on, you're going to be dealing with disinformation on just a vast scale of impossible to decipher.
You're not going to, like I watched a video today of Joe Biden talking about some girl's ass.
It wasn't real.
But it's like, here, I'll send it to Jamie so we can play it.
Because it's so crazy, like what they can do now.
It's just how long before it's absolutely impossible to detect.
How long before you have no idea what's real and what's not real?
It's not that long from now.
And they'll be able to, the people that own these enormous tech companies will be in cahoots with government like they are now.
That, you know, they censor narratives, they demonetize people that talk about COVID in the wrong way or even at all.
They're going to do that same kind of thing.
And they're going to do that same kind of thing with whatever they want to, whatever they want to highlight.
Like any narrative they want to highlight.
And you, like as a consumer, as a person on the outside that's just watching things, it's going to be so confusing.
And there's going to be narratives that, like, if you're an inclusive person that believes in equity and fairness for all, you'll believe this narrative.
And then if you're a person who believes in liberty and the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and the Protect Our Borders, you're going to believe that narrative.
And then they're going to feed it with fake news and fake video and fake voices.
Yeah, I'll play this, Jamie.
Here you go.
When you see these things, and they're crude now, like you're, you're, you know, it's fake because you know the actual recordings of Joe Biden talking.
But how long before it's a video that's completely indiscernible?
You're not going to be able to know if it's fake or real.
You can have him doing things that he's never done before.
And I, you know, when I was talking about it during the election, and people were like, I was actually talking about with Eric Weinstein, and he was like, I mean, I can't vote for Biden.
And he goes, I can't vote for Trump.
And I go, I would vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden.
Just because I think with Biden, like, he's no, he's gone.
Like, you know, he's gone.
You're going to be relying on his cabinet.
And I knew his cabinet would be this fucking sideshow of diversity, which is exactly what it is.
I mean, that one person who stole all the women's clothes, that Sam Brinton we highlighted on the podcast yesterday, like that's a diversity hire.
You just said, oh, look at this.
A man who dresses like a woman and has a beard and a mustache, but also wears lipstick.
This is perfect for us.
I don't give a fuck what this guy's good at or bad at.
I don't give a fuck what their credentials are.
This makes us look like we're inclusive.
This makes us look like we're on the right side.
So let's hire this person.
And you can't have those kind of people running a Ben and Jerry's.
You certainly can't have those kind of people running the fucking most powerful government the world's ever known.
What they've been able to do is introduce contentious issues to the forefront of the culture that prevent the kind of alliances that are necessary taking place.
The reason that when I'm over here, I'm having conversations in addition to the great privilege of coming on your show with like, you know, going on Bill Maher or going on to Tucker or Ben Shapiro is because I feel like there's got to be a new conversation around politics.
We can't just stay in these little camps.
Now, like, every day, I feel sometimes that Joe Biden is the perfect president for the time because he's like the perfect metaphor of what it is.
This system is over.
And for all of the talk of diversity, what have you got?
You've got like a career politician, white male that's falling apart before your very eyes.
It's telling you that it's bullshit and that they'll put people in positions in order to carry that narrative, but for no other reason, because I don't truly believe that they deeply care about those ideas.
And even if they do deeply care, the decisions they're making are decisions that are in alignment with the agenda of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, with centralized banking authority.
It's not going to change the world for any of them.
They've managed to turn, make ordinary American people hate one another, like on the basis of a 50-50 split.
You can't criminalize half of a country and say that they're far-right fascists any more than you can say that, in my view, extreme leftists.
These kind of issues oughtn't be what's determining how a country is run.
And when they are the issues that determine how a country is run, the powerful run amok.
The elites are able to pursue their agenda just fine.
Yeah, because they've got us in these ideological camps and they've got people infighting and ignoring real problems.
It's such a transparent hustle.
It's so obvious to see how it's being set up and how easy it is to get people to fall in line with it.
That's one of the most disturbing things that happened during COVID is how easy people rolled over.
I was like, this is wild.
I expected more pushback.
I expected more people to ask about the data.
And particularly when they started saying they were going to vaccinate children, I expected more people to go, hey, hey, hey, what's the fucking data on kids?
Or when they were telling people to vaccinate pregnant women?
I was like, what data do you have on pregnant women?
Because pregnant women, if you like, normal medication, when a pregnant woman is taking normal medication, they have to be very careful.
Because stuff that you can take when you're not pregnant with very little concern all of a sudden becomes a real issue if you have a developing fetus in your body.
It's a giant issue.
You're a father, you know what it's like, like when your wife goes through that.
It's kind of crazy because there's real concern.
Like you can't take this, you can't drink, you can't smoke, you can't this, you can't that.
You shouldn't take stem cells, you shouldn't take nootropics.
There's so many different things.
But yet this vaccine with zero testing on any pregnant people was fine.
Wasn't it worrying that when you're kind of encouraged?
When you're layman speculation, like the speculation of people that have not been to university and they're like, hey, but hold on.
You're not going to get pregnant women volunteering for clinical trials.
So there's no way you could have tested this on.
Hey, hold on.
You can't know what's going to happen five years down the line because you've not had a five-year timeframe unless you were preparing this thing five years ago.
In which case, how come you were preparing this thing five years ago?
The kind of speculations that were being had conversationally in spaces like this one have proven to be true.
You can't validate it.
Children aren't conducting clinical trials.
Turns out they didn't do clinical trials for transmission or have any viable data that it stopped transmission.
It was like that.
That's one of the things that alarmed me most is how easy people rolled over to a authoritarian, like an authoritarian edict in countries like mine and yours, where it was assumed that that wouldn't happen.
I remember the narrative being when the stuff was going on in China.
If you amplify fear, I feel like it might be like with how it is on an individual level.
It's always hard to scale what affects you as an individual to what affects a bloody planet.
But like if I'm frightened, I become suggestible.
When I'm frightened, I'll be like, oh, just give me authority.
I'm calling the 911 now.
I'm willing to, like, you know, when my wife is sick or whatever, I'm calling, you know, suddenly the Reiki ain't an option no more.
They're like, fuck the crystals, get that shit out of here.
Get me a position in a white coat with a stethoscope driving to Bentley right now.
I want the comfort of that.
I'll do whatever I want.
Pfizer, give them the money for Christ's sake.
You know, and I feel like if you do that, if you, as they say, gaslight an entire nation, if people are operating at a state of fear, I mean, what does that do to us biochemically?
How more like you know, fear and authority go together, I feel.
Like when you are frightened, I want someone else to be in control.
Yeah, and that's what was one of the scary things about the pandemic: they learned from that.
They learned how easy people did roll over.
Because it was our first pandemic.
It was the first pandemic of our lifetime, the first real genuine pandemic since 1918.
And so when that happened, I think there was a real revelation, a real realization that they can do this.
And so what's the next one?
Is it climate change?
Like, what is it?
What is going to be the reason why they decide to implement the same sort of lockdowns or the same sort of authoritarian control tactics that they used in the last couple of years?
They're going to do it again.
They're going to do it again.
I think people are going to be more resistant to it because a lot of people have suffered through this pandemic.
A lot of people lost their jobs.
A lot of people lost their businesses.
A lot of people got alienated from their community.
And then it turned out they were right.
And now people are upset and bitter.
I mean, there's so much talk of not forgiving people that shamed people for not getting vaccinated.
There's so much of that going on, like, fuck them.
And, you know, my take from the very beginning is like, you can't do that.
Like, there's no way you can stop forgiving people.
That's the dumbest thing you could ever choose to do.
Like, stop forgiving people who were scared, who made mistakes.
Like, are you infallible?
You know, are we going to deny people one of the most basic behavior characteristics that human beings exhibit when they're pressured?
So they make mistakes and they cower and they show fear.
So you're going to write these people off forever because they decided to be assholes because they were scared.
I suppose this is where it's a requirement to have some genuine values like clemency, compassion, forgiveness, things that also seem to be getting extracted out of the culture.
It's not like there's a set of principles that people have recourse to, a set of binding ideals.
It feels to me like that the only safeguard at this point is some sort of resolute democracy to say, we're thinking that the best thing would be 15-minute cities.
But of course, you can vote for whether you want your city to be a 15-minute city.
We're thinking the best thing might be this medication.
But of course, you can vote.
What you don't want is the WHO determining that in the next pandemic, they have the right to implement by their votes contained within the WHO lockdown measures, medication measures, which is something that they're lobbying for currently, I understand.
Less and less democracy, more and more ability for unelected globalist, I would have to say, globalist organizations to assert political influence over nations.
And that's what we saw here.
And when you know that the WHO's second biggest funder is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he invests so heavily into these facts.
Again, like stuff that gets called conspiracy theory, but you can look at the evidences there.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation profited millions of dollars on the vaccines.
Millions, millions and millions of dollars.
It's all easy to find.
And then once he dumped the stock, then he completely changed his narrative and he started talking about how ineffective the vaccines were and about how the virus wasn't as bad as we thought it was and about it was mostly targeting old and obese people.
Like, this is fucking wild because this is the same guy that through the entire pandemic was talking about how great these vaccines are and these vaccines are so effective and they stop the virus and they stop transmission, they stop infection.
And all that was a lie and he profited off those lies.
And everyone wants to pretend that he's just like this amazing philanthropist.
Like, no, he made a lot of money.
This is motivated by money.
And his entire career, he's been motivated by money.
He's been a guy who is really good at monopoly.
And that was why they went after Microsoft so many times for monopolistic practices.
I mean, he's a businessman.
And in that time, his business was the business of telling people things that he's not educated in.
He's not a scientist.
He's not a virologist.
He's not a medical doctor.
Yet he was this public health advocate on television telling everybody to go out and get this medical intervention that he would profit from, which is fucking wild.
It's really wild that it's that transparent.
That it's not like multiple steps and shell corporations and it's really difficult to find out where the money's going.
It's like right there.
It's like the Nancy Pelosi stock trading thing.
It's like, Jesus Christ, it's right there.
Like you knew, and so you did that and sold, and you did that and bought, and you've made hundreds of millions of dollars off of a $100,000 a year salary.
I suppose the only way you can prevent those questions being addressed is by making the people asking those questions uncredible, like discrediting those people.
Because otherwise, it is plain.
Bill Gates ain't Willy Wonka.
He ain't doing this for like a competition.
There's no golden ticket at the end of this.
It's like, yeah, not-for-profit organizations making profit, an incredible amount of influence in areas that he profits from.
All sorts of peculiar business practices like in India and on the continent of Africa that have led to like palpable suffering and profit in his case.
The Africa thing is wild, and that's a big part of this The Real Anthony Fauci book.
He talks about Bill Gates quite a bit, and one of the things he talks about is how they've always used Africa as a place where they test out medicines.
They've used Africa as a place where they test out.
This is another thing that I learned from Alex Jones.
Alex Jones was saying that they were giving kids the polio vaccine in Africa and that Bill Gates was involved in this.
They had to stop doing it because it was actually giving kids polio.
And I was like, what?
And they pull up an AP article.
There was an AP story about this, and it shows this terrified little African baby in there dropping the polio vaccine in his mouth, like squeezing his face and dropping his mouth.
Even when you accept everything that they say at this late point when it appears impossible to do that, they wouldn't release patents so that African nations could recreate the vaccines over there.
So clearly there's a profit motive.
And I saw him publicly talk about that.
I'm saying, oh, no, it's not as simple as that.
You can't just give people the patterns and stuff.
But it seems like if you recognize that what drives them always is power, finance, and dominion, if you always look at that and then track their actions, you hardly ever see a disruption in that pattern.
What has this been like for you to go from this guy who was this loved comedic actor, this stand-up comic, and then you kind of just sort of start walking on this path of talking about things and walking on this path where now you have printed pieces of paper and you're standing there, you're reading things and you're showing videos and you're mocking this stuff.
Because like when you said that thing, I remember when Kevin Smith came on and he'd offered you a part in a movie and you went, nah, man, like I ain't getting up.
I'm not going to be in a trailer at 4 a.m.
And I thought, oh, yeah.
Like I loved making like some of those movies.
I mean, I'm pretty grateful coming from where I come from that I got to have all of those experiences.
And you know, it's like it's giddy.
It's amazing.
It's exciting.
It's euphoric and fulfilling in loads and loads of ways.
And actually met some really, really incredible people within that industry.
It's not like it's solely awful and solely hollow.
It was kind of amazing.
But I think like this was significant.
I'd done sort of podcasts like they were affiliated with BBC radio shows that I'd done, you know, prior to becoming an actor.
So I've always had those kind of conversations.
And I suppose what it must be is because where I'm coming from, I come from a place called Essex, which is like the New Jersey of England.
It's outside of London.
It's blue collar, somewhat trashy.
That's the kind of sort of place it is.
I became a junkie relatively young, like sort of, you know, like my late teens, early 20s.
I was a heroin addict.
And I feel like that when I got, I had to get clean because it was getting out of control.
And when I got clean, I was full of appetite and ambition and all of that kind of stuff.
And it just was natural to become a stand-up comedian was an easier fit than an actor because of the collaborations and the requirements of it and the cooperation.
And I love acting, but like the having to do what you're told actually is not, it's not really, it's not really who I am.
So like once like that period of working, like the people I work with you say you don't like any aspect of this.
You don't like dressing up.
You don't like putting makeup on.
You don't like getting up early.
You don't like being told what to do.
You don't like being directed.
Like it's like you don't like any aspect of that profession.
I like stand-up comedy because you live or die on your own merits.
So I had both of those competing things, but no one, like I didn't have the strength of character to resist the allure of when I did an MTV show, Sandler came on it, Adam Sandler, and liked me and said, do you want to be in a movie more or less?
Like I went in a movie with him, then I met Judd Appertale and those people did those movies.
And it was aspects of it, as I say, were incredible.
And those people in particular, Judd Appetow and Sandler, were like really amazing, lovely people.
But after I came on here, and during the past, I used to always talk about, I've always been anti-establishment.
I've never trusted authority because of personal reasons.
I didn't like school.
If you're a drug addict, you get arrested sometimes because shoplifting and because of possession of drugs.
So I've always had that kind of relationship with authority.
So when I started to be able to have my own voice, when this technology kind of opened up, when I realized, oh my God, I can just sort of do this.
It really evolved.
It started at the beginning of the pandemic.
I was just sort of like, like, started commenting on it.
I was in Australia when it started and like I do stuff online anyway.
So I was like, oh, this is going to be a weird time for all of us.
And then it started to become clear that it was a perfect lens to observe how power operates.
The inability to question authority, agenda for profit, agenda to assert control, stuff that just didn't feel right for me.
We started doing the stuff and like the guy I worked with, Gareth, who's out there actually, who produces the show, he's not the same as me in terms of he's not like a radical anti-establishment person.
He's, I guess you would call him a conventional liberal.
So like in our preparation of the content, he was always like, we won't use anything unless it's already been, even if in a, even moderately, used in a mainstream media source.
So he started to like look at like mainstream media sources that were saying stuff that was counter to the dominant narratives that we were getting.
And then I was able to sort of stitch those things together, basically using sort of stand-up, really improvising around the news stories.
That's all I was really doing, like the stuff with stealth, Brian Steelt or whatever, you know, that stuff around you or then with the war narratives and the things that's happening now.
So it kind of grew quite organically.
Then like the YouTube audience got really big and I started to, you know, we started to become like, oh my God, I can do this for a job now.
But then when I reached out to you and you said, that's a shady platform, like YouTube as your primary platform, I'm not suggesting that you criticize YouTube in any untoward way.
So when like Rumble came to me with an offer, like we'll, if you make us your primary home, if you do an hour a day streaming, you know, like I thought, right, okay, I'm going to be able to do this.
Yeah, people stay in the chat and I refer to the comments and stuff.
And when we, those videos that you've watched before and I've seen you watch on this show, we still do one of those and we drop a pre-reked video, which has been edited into it.
That's like, you know, where we take a deeper look at something like, oh, oh, look, BlackRock have just done a deal with the Ukrainian government or look at what some of the legislation that was passed prior to the Ohio train wreck or whatever.
Or look at how that shows a disjunct between the language around climate change and caring about the ecology and what happens when there's a legitimate environmental disaster.
We're able to then sort of tie together facts in a way that's much more responsible.
But in the live show, I'm responding.
I'm just reacting to clips, doing essentially an opening monologue, jokes like that.
And then we have a guest on for like a 20-minute interview.
That's like the daily show that we do on there.
And then like there's like a members thing within Rumbles now, locals.
That's where you can sort of people can subscribe for additional content.
And in particular, actually, my stand-up special.
I've got like another stand-up special, which we're going to release on that platform.
Because I mean, looking at ways that how do you do stand-up now because of what Schultz done, what Louis' done, like more direct to like direct to the audience ways of doing stand-up is like what I've been like working on.
So hey, it happened very, the truth is it happened organically because I guess all of the ingredients were in me anyway because of like because it's essentially analogous to stand-up comedy, isn't it?
Like it's like you're investigating the person.
If you get someone on here that you're interested in, then you're just you're investigating that story.
And then the punditry, the new, it's essentially news commentary.
I guess because there's so much space has opened up, so much space opened up, because mainstream media will only comment on a limited amount of story.
So it becomes very easy to sort of say, they're telling you this, but this might also be true.
And there are these relationships between these organizations.
And isn't it weird that that happened?
So the space was irresistible, almost comedically irresistible.
It's comedically because you have a comedic take on it that's just unavailable anywhere else.
Like when you're talking about the news, you're laughing and mocking it openly while you talk about these obvious connections between finances and rules and laws and the way things get done.
And you know what it's like in this business when you, because you could have got access to the metrics and the data and you start to see, bloody help, this is growing quickly, this thing.
You start to recognize like the thing I did near the beginning, I was just doing stuff more about wellness and well-being and talking about, because of like my background in recovery, talking about meditation, wellness, all those kind of things that I'm interested in as well.
But then I like it become repetitive.
So I sort of said to my friend, again, Gareth, like, do you want, I'll give you a job.
I took a punt that I could handle a salary.
So you come on and work and we'll make more current affairs-oriented stuff.
And what's good about like the chemistry of that relationship is that he's, I don't mean conservative in a like a right-wing type way.
We got an Ivermectin strike for something pretty minor, for saying that something was being, for saying it was being, that it had been endorsed when it was in fact being clinically trialed.
Like, so it was a pretty minute error.
And you started to, and because, of course, as you know, I assume that YouTube take their guidelines on global issues from organizations like the WHO.
So even after it comes out that there has been a 30% increase in heart disease in people in their 30s, that's just like a fact, or that there's been an increase in excess deaths over the world and the amount of adverse events that have been reported, you still can't say it.
Yeah, once, even like once it's in made, you know, talking about New York Times, MSNBC, once it's been on those places, you still can't say it.
And of course, there are still mainstream figures like Fauci or figures from the sort of liberal establishment saying, if you take this vaccine, it's not going anywhere else.
So there's an obvious hypocrisy, even in organizations that initially, I mean, I guess, do you know what?
I bet you can look at it, Joe, like as if it were a physical territory.
Like at the beginning, there's a gold rush.
In the beginning, YouTube is the Wild West.
In the beginning, all sorts of people can inhabit and populate that territory.
But after a while, people go, shit, this needs to be shut down and controlled.
And it gets corporatized and regulated and controlled in a different way.
And I guess I just caught the back end of when it was possible.
I think much like television, they receive an enormous amount of money in advertising.
And then advertisements that are on YouTube, those people that are spending all that money, they can dictate what they want to be advertised on.
And then they say, look, I don't want to be on anything.
They talk about COVID or anything where they talk about Ukraine or anything where they don't.
So, okay.
They just say, oh, well, we've got to stop people from doing that.
What's the best way?
Well, the best way to self-censor.
Oh, how do you get people to self-censor?
You impact them economically.
How do we do that and not make it look like we're censoring them?
We give them strikes, give them strikes, or demonetize certain episodes.
Like when we were over at YouTube, before we left for Spotify, we announced that we were leaving for Spotify, and then magically all of our episodes stopped getting demonetized.
So we had a 25% increase in revenue because 25% of our episodes were getting demonetized just randomly.
They would just decide.
And some of them it didn't make any sense.
And some of them it was because of a controversial guest or a controversial subject, generally like COVID-related or government related.
But 25% was a lot.
And then, as soon as they realized that we were going to be gone, they were like, well, we should just make that money.
And then they stopped censoring anything.
Like all the episodes after, I'm pretty sure all of them.
Was there any of the episodes after we took off that got demonetized?
They gave me a good deal and the assurance that we're not going to censor you.
Now, obviously, coming from where I come from politically and in terms of my background, even as a person that's been in the public for a while, I know how Rumble's being portrayed.
It's being portrayed as a right-wing, like, you know, far-right place, conspiracy theorist.
It's just anything alternative to the censorship model they'll talk of as right-wing.
Because what happens is, like, when you create something new as a response to the censorship that people experience on Facebook, when people are banned from Facebook and banned from Twitter, the problem is so many of those people that do get banned go over to these new platforms, whether it's Gab or Getter or, you know, True Social.
And then it just becomes QAnon headquarters.
And they just start talking about lizard people and Pizzagate.
Yeah, and a peculiar tendency towards suicide of former associates of powerful American families.
You know, I went to the opening of Rumble the other day, and it's weird.
It's a weird space for me.
As a person that's been, you know, part of liberal establishment, Hollywood movie parties, those kind of things.
And even in Britain, British media, there's a certain flavor to it.
But I've got to tell you, like being around like in Florida with all these people from Rumble and local dignitaries and officials and mayors and stuff like that, everyone's like just adorable and so sweet.
And I wonder if it is, like, as a person that's always traditionally identified with what you would call cultural left-wing positions, right?
Like, to find how just sweet everybody is.
Like, you meet Donald Trump Jr., he's absolutely lovely.
You meet that woman, Kimberly, that's off Fox News, who I've seen sort of say, you know, Russell Brahman, he's a scumbag.
What a sleazeball.
And I meet her.
Oh, my God, she's gorgeous.
And plus, it didn't hurt that she described me so despicably in the past that I wasn't immune to that kind of flirtation, let me tell you.
Meet these people, and they're like, absolutely delightful and so sweet.
And like one of the people that I'm working with said, maybe it's because like that conventional libertarian perspective is, I don't care what you, you can think whatever you like.
And I'm starting to wonder if there is the possibility of an emergent sort of political ideology that's sort of, in a sense, part libertarian, because it's like, I just want to be left alone to live my own life, part anarchist in the literal sense of anarchy as in self-governing communities, as much democracy as possible, as much, not as little, as much ability to control your own community, as much.
I sometimes think, Joe, and I know that, like, Jordan Pearson has been on here as well, talking about decentralized models on a sort of a slightly more global scale, I figure.
But I sometimes feel like if you take contentious issues and allow them to be resolved at as a local level as possible, it diffuses a lot of these cultures.
Because at this point in history, you're going to have people that want to live an Orthodox Jewish or an Orthodox Christian or an Orthodox Muslim life.
You're going to have people that want to have progressive lives that are very sort of gender-fluid.
And I think if you sort of say, Well, yeah, do what you want in your community, then isn't that the only way that this is going to be diffused?
You can't impose from above.
You can't impose that on people anymore.
You can't tell people that they can't express themselves sexually, consensually, in any way that they want to.
You can't tell people that they can't have conservative and traditional values.
And I don't see why the culture should be tearing itself apart in order to achieve that.
And so, like, you know, finding myself on Rumble and how what the at least how it's being labeled by the external media that have an agenda to do is destroy new emergent forces is like something I've like, okay, I'm here now.
You know, I'm going to be going on those shows and talking to people that in the past I would have regarded with you know enmity.
And people say, Oh, you've been red-pilled or whatever, but I've never trusted the establishment.
I've never trusted corporate power.
I've never wanted to be told what to do.
That's always how I've been.
But I've always also felt compassionate and like there's an obligation and duty for us to take care of like sort of what I would call Sesame Street values of kindness and compassion.
That those things need to be in the mix somewhere.
And I suppose those are the kind of conversations I guess I'm interested in having when, you know, because I always watch Tucker Carlson, and when you see him attacking the establishment, I'm like, yeah, go for it.
And then maybe he'll say something about homelessness.
And I think, ah, no, no, not that.
You know, like, and I guess these are the conversations that I'll have when I'm in those spaces.
And because something new has got to emerge.
There's got to be, I think, Joe, like when populism first emerged, it was assumed that it would be affiliated with the union movement, that it would be a working man's or working person's movement, populism.
Over time, it's come to be regarded, you know, perhaps even most latterly through the rise of a figure like Donald Trump.
Populism is regarded as it's right wing.
That's what it is fundamentally.
But you can't really have, because populism is people power.
The people have the power to run their own lives as much as possible, not as little as possible.
People can't just be like little arse-end nodes in their own life with just such a that their choice is limited to consumer choice and opining online, real choice in their community.
I think if you're happy with your life and if you have personal sovereignty and you're a kind person, you want people to live their life in a way that makes them happy.
I think there are many, many people out there that do not have those characteristics.
There's many people out there that are not happy.
They do not feel fulfilled.
They don't feel like they're doing what they should be doing.
They don't feel loved.
They don't feel accepted or appreciated or respected in their community.
And those are the people that lean towards these authoritarian perspectives, these authoritarian ideas of control and telling people what to do because they don't feel in control of their own life.
And you find it from the weakest people.
The physically, morally, ethically weakest people are the ones that are so adamant that everybody follow in lockstep to whatever this ideological narrative is that's being pushed on social media, particularly from the left, but also from the right.
It's feeble, weak people that are very angry.
The kind, successful, open-minded, ethical, moral people, they want people to just be happy.
And I want, I don't look, there's so many different styles of everything.
There's so many different styles of music, different styles of architecture, different styles of living your life, different styles of just sexual orientation and monogamy and polyamory.
Fucking cares?
Just live your life and be happy.
I want to control no one.
I barely can control myself.
I try to control my kids as little as possible.
I try to guide them and have conversations with them and tell them all the things that I fucked up on.
Whenever I talk to my kids about anything, if I have to kind of like give them some regulations or give them some rules on things, I always talk about how badly I fucked everything up.
And I always talk about how they're so much more fortunate than me because they're so much smarter than me.
They're so much more educated than me.
They have so much more access to information.
And I talk about how when I was a kid, you didn't really know anything.
Like, I can ask my daughter a question and she'll know the answer to it because she can Google it like instantaneously and she'll know for a fact what really happened in 1774 or what really happened when this happened or why they put this and that and why this is an ingredient and that.
Like the access to information they have is unprecedented.
I feel like if we don't just relax and let people be themselves and stop people from imposing whether it's imposing laws or imposing behavior that we would like to see people exhibit if we don't stop doing that and just let people figure out what makes them happy.
Because some people are happy just fucking hiking.
There's some people that just want to get up in the morning and have granola and go for a walk and that's what makes them happy.
And there's other people that want to lock themselves in an office and write a book and that's what makes them happy.
And there's some people that just want to go to the gym.
They just want to have a good job and then take yoga all day.
Fucking do whatever you want to do.
But you got to leave everybody else alone.
And so many people want to control other people because they don't have control of their own life.
And this is a characteristic that you see from the ideological left on social media and from the ideological right.
You see it from the right with wanting to control women's access to abortions.
You see it from, you know, wanting to limit access to this country and immigration.
You see it from wanting to restrict guns and wanting to restrict drugs.
You see it from all sorts of different ways that people want to control people and control people's behavior.
And that creates these ideological rifts that creates these tribal sort of like mentality borderlines that you cannot cross.
And this is a problem when we have so many variations, so much variety of human beings, but just two choices.
You're either a Democrat or you're a Republican.
And if you're a Democrat, then you think men can get pregnant.
And you think that, you know, there's too much inequity and there's too much racism.
And if you're on the right, you think that we got to close the borders and you think that abortion is murder.
It's like, isn't there some sort of like a compromise where there's a like a rational center where people recognize that like, no, there's a lot of this behavior is just because people are scared and weak and you should just leave people the fuck alone.
When that's like, that's a very extreme way to go through life, thinking that you know what's best for other people.
Because of my experience in recovery, it's meant that I have to have a practical spirituality.
It means that my spirituality has to be about my conduct.
That's what my spirituality is.
If I don't think it's right to not be kind, then I have to be kind.
I don't like look around to check if other people are being kind and prod them and make sure they're doing shit.
I get on with my own conduct because that is usually the problem anyway, is that I'm normally suffering as a result of stuff that I ain't doing right.
I'm normally suffering because I'm not taking care of myself.
I'm not fulfilling my obligations.
I'm not living by the standards I would set myself as a father, as a person that's involved in my working life.
And that's where my unhappiness normally stems from.
I also recognize that I have to be willing to take a hit once in a while that I'm going to talk to people that disagree with me on things that are kind of fundamental.
And if I'm going to just cast them on the other side of some imaginary line of vilification as a result of that, I'm contributing to the ongoing bifurcation and generation of more and more conflict.
The only thing I can really do, and in a sense, there's something comforting in this, that if I, like, when I came on your show before and we talked about hunting, I go, yeah, I'm a vegan, and I just wouldn't be able to kill an animal because I don't think I could live with that.
But I completely, I live in the countryside in England and it's bang, it's all the time.
Guns are going off all over the time.
They're shooting birds out of the sky.
I wouldn't get very far in my life if I had decided that those people were doing something fundamentally wrong.
And I actually get a different kind of ease from going like, I don't know everything.
I don't know what it's like to be you.
And as a stand-up comedian, I like comfort comes from this as well.
Like I look at them and I feel them, Joe, you know, the way you do.
Like they're like, in some ways, they are like me in that they want to be left alone.
They don't like being spoken to as if you think you're better than them.
And that's become like almost the media rhetoric and default position has become, we're better than you.
unidentified
shut up yeah like you know and and i feel like that what happened people respond to that That's the problem.
Yeah, like a leader is fundamentally behaving as a father.
But there's nothing in human evolution that would suggest that we can have centralized models of this scale.
It's a weird thing to do.
Agriculture, centralized food production.
Industrialization, centralized manufacture.
Technology is centralizing attention.
And reality itself, reality is being described.
And like you said, with the new AI revolution, you know, now you just have Malcolm X saying, I'm a paedophile.
Malcolm X is a paedophile.
He's out.
Bobby Kennedy.
I killed someone.
You can deep fake your way into a reality that's convenient for the interests of the powerful.
And I suppose the thing that I believe in that might diffuse this, because I feel that we're in some edgeland, and I know every generation does.
And I know personally, all of us are going to experience an apocalypse anyway, because we're all going to die.
And does it matter whether when you die, everyone else dies or not?
Maybe not, because your reality is shutting down into whatever follows this.
But I feel that unless some new ideas enter the conversation about how to manage this ossification and tribalized conflict-driven culture, something very ugly is going to happen.
It's already ramped up and considerably ramped up during the pandemic because of all the anxiety and the fear.
And when the governments did impose lockdowns and they did tell people they have to stay home and they did stop people from working and traveling.
It just, it ramped everything up, ramped all the anxiety up and ramped people's susceptibility to some sort of a solution.
And if you just give into the authoritarian control, then we can all get back to work.
Then we go back to get it back up to normal.
And that's what scares the shit out of me is how easy people just rolled over and let that happen.
And how the ideological rift, the divide between the left and the right got wider.
And people got less compassionate and less apologetic.
And just let people just be themselves.
Be more charitable.
Be more, you know, look at things in a way that you could understand what it would be like if you were living that person's life and doing that.
Like you could see yourself falling into all the same traps.
And if you just, you know, this like the thing about forgiving people, forgiving people that were so mad and they called people who wouldn't get vaccinated plague rats.
Like, you know, like, I could have been them.
We all could have been them.
If you were in those same circumstances, if you're that kind of a feel for fearful person, and if you were that kind of a person that really was terrified and filled with anxiety and you thought there were people out there that weren't doing the right thing, because that was the narrative.
You were being told that those people weren't doing the right thing and that was going to get us all in danger.
Completely illogical because you're doing the right thing, which is to protect you from a disease.
You're taking a shot that's supposed to protect you.
What do you give a fuck if someone's not getting protected?
It's not going to change anything.
And so then there was fake narratives like they're the reason why the variants are coming about.
It's because these unvaccinated people, which is completely the opposite of what the science shows.
I mean, there's literally vaccine-resistant variants.
And they think that that is just a normal part of vaccinating people during a pandemic.
Geert Vanderbosch talked about that.
I don't know if you've ever seen him talk.
No.
He was one of the people that was, he was on Brett Weinstein's podcast, and he's been on many podcasts, but he is a vaccine expert.
And he was talking about how the standard model is that you never vaccinate during a pandemic because you just encourage variants.
But somehow or another, doctors were saying something that was counter to that narrative.
Like they were just spouting off this thing that the problem is the unvaccinated.
So people in their mind filled with anxiety, even though they had done the thing that was the right thing in their mind.
They got vaccinated, they got protected.
They didn't feel protected because these other people weren't listening.
And because they weren't listening, there was variants and the variants are now going to get me.
And you motherfuckers are ruining it for everybody.
It's sometimes interesting to look at what the underlying emotion is that is causing the behavior.
What would lead to that behavior?
What set of beliefs would lead to that behavior?
And the inability to see that we saw in the opioid crisis of just a few years before that doctors were being persuaded to prescribe opioids that they knew would be addictive and dangerous to an alarming degree.
There's like a certain percentage of these people are going to die.
So let's keep doing it.
Let's keep selling it and let's profit off these people dying.
Let's profit off these people's despair because we have a product and that product is going to make us a lot of money.
And that's what they did.
And that's what they've done with everything.
And, you know, you could get real cynical, but I think that's what they've always done.
I think that's what they did with Viox.
That's what they did with the opiate crisis.
I think that's what they've did with many, many different ways where they could justify making enormous amounts of profit at the expense of a bunch of people dying.
I've heard a few things about systems that helped me to understand why such a thing might be possible.
I heard one time that the CIA, no one person knows what's going on.
Like, it's so diffuse.
There are so many operations, so many things running concurrently that there isn't a person like the head of the CIA that you can go to and say, well, what's going to be like it's too diffuse.
I also heard a person, Yanis Varoufakis, he was like the lead, one of the leaders of Saritsa, when after 2008, Greece had some wacky moment where they elected an extremist party, a left-wing extremist party, actually, considered extreme, that said, we're not paying back all of that banking debt.
We're not going to pay it back.
And the people, of course, of Greece voted for him.
And then the EU called in that government once they won the election and said, you fucking well are paying back that money.
You can't make that decision.
You don't have that authority.
And this guy, Yanis Varoufakis, who's like, you know, a left-wing politician, said that he realized that the person at the EU that he was talking to didn't have any power.
They only have the power that that role affords them.
The system is essentially functioning on its own.
There is no individual that can go, oh, yeah, all right, then don't pay back the money.
There is no person that can tell you exactly what the CIA is doing.
So it's like a sort of a set of coordinates which behind it has an energy that's pushing towards a particular agenda, the kind of ones that all of us can identify, financial agenda, dominion, those kind of identifiable agenda.
But the system is self-sustaining, self-maintaining.
The system excludes the possibility for disruption.
It's almost like it already functions how an algorithm would function.
It doesn't afford radicalism.
It doesn't afford the intervention of democracy.
When people's will is expressed, the will is delegitimized.
When a figure, like when there is a sort of a popular uprising, then the uprising itself is discredited.
You know, 20, 30 years ago, it would have been the left in Latin America, Central America, like the deposing and destabilizing nations there.
Now it's like even domestically, like the figures from the presumed right, like Trump, are discredited.
You know, so like, and again, like, I've got, just to clarify, of course, this is not someone that I would ally myself with enormously.
But what I'm saying is that the system has clearly become more allied with a particular aspect of the establishment.
Let's call it the liberal establishment.
Although it feels to me that it can function perfectly well regardless of which political parties you're in.
I mean, it was during the Bush administration, it was the right.
During the Bush administration, all the fears about election tampering were about the right.
There was an HBO documentary called Hacking Democracy, and it was all about the Bush administration stealing the vote.
And it was all about the diebold voting machines.
And they had shown in this documentary that there was a third-party access.
So instead of just like, you vote and I count your vote, there was actually room for a third party to put information in that would manipulate the number.
And they showed it, and they demonstrated it on the show, and everybody was terrified.
Oh, my God, the Republicans are stealing the vote.
And now it's like Katie Hobbs and Carrie Lake in Arizona.
It's like the Democrats are stealing the vote.
And they're stuck.
Oh, the mail-in ballots.
The Democrats are rigging the vote.
It's a puppet show.
It's the old Bill Hicks joke.
It's like, I believe in the puppet on the left.
Well, the puppet on the right is more to my liking.
Like, hey, here's one guy holding both puppets.
Like, that's the old Bill Hicks joke.
And that's kind of what the fuck is going on.
And we get caught up in these ideological battles.
And all the while, they're inching us closer to nuclear war.
They're pushing dangerous pharmaceutical drugs into our lives.
They're instituting a centralized digital currency and a credit score system and controlling people and locking people down and establishing narratives that are not based on fact at all.
But if you don't follow lockstep with that narrative, you're fucked and you're out of a job.
And so everybody doesn't know what to do.
Next thing you know, we have something that's very similar to what's going on in China.
And that can happen.
We're not that far away from something like that happening here.
All it would take is a large disaster, some sort of an attack, some sort of a terrible scenario where a bunch of people died and they had to change the rules in order to protect us.
And one of those tropes of the kind of avowed conspiracy theorist that we mentioned earlier was that crisis is used to induce measures that they want to induce anyway.
And one of the things that was spoken about in the pandemic was, oh, look, they had this agenda anyway.
They were looking to introduce this kind of technology.
I don't go as far as saying that I think that people orchestrate these things.
I don't think anybody orchestrated the pandemic.
I think the pandemic came out of that Wuhan lab.
I think they fucked up.
There's clear evidence that in 2018, they already have safety violations.
It wasn't well done.
The people in the lab got sick.
They know who the people were that got sick.
They know one of the spouses, one of the people that worked in the lab died from something that seems very similar to COVID.
They know the history.
They know what happened.
But the way they took advantage of that situation reminds me of the way they took advantage of 9-11.
Because I don't think they orchestrated 9-11 either.
I could be wrong on both counts.
I want to be really clear about that.
I don't know how things work.
But I don't believe in these grand orchestrated conspiracies as much as I believe in people taking advantage of an opportunity in a moment and that there's a very clear pattern of them doing that forever.
Opportunistic seems easier to explain and it is also in alignment with the way that we understand that model that it exploits opportunity to advance itself.
I feel like that the credibility took its biggest hit in 2008 when the banks were bailed out, when ordinary people suffered at a point when it was clear that the economic model couldn't function anymore and needed radical revision and it was kept alive.
And what happened, I feel like, is that the liberal establishment ceded that territory and meant that now the only anti-establishment rhetoric is coming out of Bright Barton Bannon and Trump.
And they're the only people that are attacking the establishment and the authoritarianism that's coming out of there and the exploitation.
There's no voices and the voices on the left have become kind of muted.
It feels to me that during the 2016 election that they would rather have Trump win than have the Democrats win under Bernie Sanders.
They made a bunch of like odd decisions that shows you that, yeah, that Hicks' metaphor stays ultimately true.
And in a way, doesn't it make sense that if you want to maintain that, the number one thing you have to prevent is a broad alliance and a willingness of people to accept their differences.
As long as you've got people willing to kill each other, whether it's online or in person, over cultural values, rather than accept, I'm willing to accept that that's how you live, as long as you accept that's how I live.
As long as you can keep people at each other's throats, then you can continue to manipulate them.
Then it's an easy chess game.
As soon as people come together and they realize like, hey, we have way more in common than we do difference.
What do we really want?
Everyone wants a safe neighborhood.
You want good education.
You want healthy food.
You want people to be able to pursue their dreams.
You want people to have a good time.
And the more people you're around that have a good time, the better the quality of your life is going to be as well.
The better the quality of life in your entire neighborhood.
And if you have this mentality of great fortune and not a famine mentality, not have this mentality that all the success has to come to me and all these other people can go fuck themselves and it's a doggy dog world.
If instead you go, wouldn't it be better if we all just like kind of like did our best to work together as a community and just accept people for their differences and recognize that most of these differences are kind of bullshit.
Like it doesn't matter.
I don't give a fuck what music you like, what movies you enjoy or how you like to dress.
I don't care.
I want you to be happy.
If you like to wear pink all day and fucking you like to put braids in your hair, good.
Who cares?
Who gives a fuck?
I don't care.
And if you think about your own life and your own pursuit of happiness and your own interests and concentrate on that more than you do stopping people from behaving in a way that you're ideologically opposed to.
That ideology you're probably you've probably been manipulated in some way shape or form You've probably fallen into some fucking Rachel Maddow narrative or some Bill O'Reilly narrative And you're just you're just like at the throats of the people that are different than you Because somehow or another diminishing them you think is going to empower you and yeah You know, that's the weirdness of it all.
You know, I know you admire Terence McKenna, his famous thing, the culture is not your friend.
The culture isn't your friend.
And it feels like many of us have been parasited in our minds, that we are on rails, parroting and citing views that are not ours, that we don't know how that opinion got in there.
And this is why the individual does have power.
I've always found it hard to hold, Joe, the simultaneous fact that I am infinitesimally small and my reality is irrelevant on the cosmic scale.
But at the same time, all reality takes place only in my consciousness, as far as I can tell.
So I am creating all reality.
I am ultimately omniscient as far as my own individual reality is concerned.
I feel that there has to be the introduction of sort of spiritual or maybe even psychedelic values into this conversation so that we can defuse this cultural tension that is continually being stoked.
Because as long as people are willing to go at a mat on cultural issues rather than saying, yeah, this has been complicated.
A country like America has a complicated history.
Definitely people have been disadvantaged.
Definitely there have been biases and prejudices in a particular direction.
If there is the facility to alter that, that could be done.
But the best way to do it is not centralized, top-down imposition of authority.
I suppose one of the other tensions is, if you have small state, what regulates corporate power?
Those are like, you know, there are big questions that once you sort of say, this don't work no more, I want something different.
Yeah, you are confronted with, oh, how do you do that?
How do you regulate behemoths like Apple and these new Titans that put the steel and energy giants of a century ago in the shadows with their might?
And again, with their, as you cited earlier, their ability to create exploitation and something akin to slavery in the modern world.
Forget historic slavery.
What is the collective force that opposes that?
And I can't help but feel that this technology, if we were released of the need for relentless progressivism and advancement only in order to fuel endless consuming, that this technology could be used to create more democracy, more freedom, more ability to interact in how your community is run.
If not, the kind of universal credit society and the kind of atrophy that that suggests and the kind of apathy that that suggests and the disconnection that suggests, some more leisurely form of awakened, technologically advanced,
leisure-led society where people have more time to create truly reflective culture, where the kind of the tropes that are used in the conversation around diversity of like genuinely different cultures cohabit in a genuine and real melting pot where you accept that people eat different food, have different sex lives, have different beliefs.
Like that is a possibility.
I suppose that in a way, the amount of authority that was asserted during the pandemic, the amount of effort that's put into censoring, censoring mainstream narratives, the amount of effort that's put into creating terms, new language to control, smear, and censor opposing voices, suggests that they consider it a legitimate threat that alternative views could take hold, that new alliances could take place, that people would consider different ways of being.
There's a brilliant philosopher, he's dead now, Mark Fisher, he was off the left.
He coined the term capitalist realism, that we have been taught that this is the only model of reality there is.
He said it's people find it easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
There could be a new economic system that we could live within.
And we all know now that capitalism, as it was intended, doesn't exist anymore anyway.
Certainly not after what happened in 2008.
Simple, you know, I make this thing, trading, it growing, ingenuity, entrepreneurship.
It's such a cronyist support in energy companies, supplementing them, ensuring that they make profits.
How can you have energy companies that profit when there's an energy crisis, military industrial complex that profits when it's a war, pharmaceutical companies that profit when there's a pandemic?
You're creating the necessity for ongoing crisis.
If the elites in the society benefit from situations that are detrimental to everybody else, that's what reality is going to become.
That's such an important point because that's almost undeniable.
And to say that they wouldn't do that because they value human life and morals and ethics over profit, that's never been exhibited.
That's not true.
That's not a true statement.
No, the opposite is true.
The opposite is provable.
The opposite is provable whether it's Halliburton or whether it's pharmaceutical companies or whether it's politicians or bankers.
The opposite has always been true.
We are profit-driven.
And especially if they can find some sort of way to justify these horrific acts, in some way, shape, or form, they could have this diffusion of responsibility where it's not their call and not their fault.
They're part of a corporation.
The corporation has to do this.
And this is just what we do.
You got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.
That's where we find ourselves.
And the only way we're going to get out of this is if we, the collective all of us, whether you're on the left or whether you're on the right, recognize this stupid game that people are playing.
Recognize this hustle and don't get sucked into it.
Do you ever feel that your power that you have evidently organically accrued, even if it is strategic, you seem to have done it in a very sort of natural way, has potential beyond cultural power, beyond persuasive power.
You don't seem like you think like that to me.
You don't seem like you think, fucking hell, I'm at the center of a movement.
Yeah, it's a great advocacy for authenticity because there are a lot of things that you wouldn't typically think would sit together, kind of culturally liberal views in terms of tolerance and openness, quite traditional male ideas around hunting, martial arts, and a background in entertainment and a standard.
The only thing that ties it together is authenticity, in a sense.
That's the only, and I suppose that as a person that's had sometimes cause for self-doubt, because I've done a lot of things that are self-destructive around like being a drug addict, for example.
But to get to that place of like, no, just trust yourself.
Do what you believe in.
There are situations when you don't know.
That Maharishi Ha, the Maharishi said, do what you know to be right.
Don't do what you know to be wrong.
And that will cover most things.
It's not that often where you're like, oh, God, this is a genuine dilemma.
A lot of times I know I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing.
I'm not participating in a way that I ought to.
I'm not doing the best that I could do.
And that requires discipline, actually.
And again, it comes down to the individual.
In a sense, part of the ongoing cultural arguments that we have is an abdication of personal responsibility for how much we are in control of our own bloody lives.
And in a sense, part of your story is a demonstration of that by sort of just being, this is what I believe in.
This is what I'm interested in.
These are the conversations I want to have.
Like that when it hit the crisis of the pandemic, that authenticity and integrity served you.
I think if up until that point, if you'd have been like, I want to be a star, I think maybe you'd have to be able to do it.
Well, I've been very fortunate that I have been able to do this without anybody's input.
So no one would have ever let me say, okay, I want to have a bunch of guys like we do the show Protect Our Parks, where we all do mushrooms and get drunk and just, it's four comedians just being completely ridiculous.
And then the next day I'll have like a legitimate psychologist on and I'll talk about fear and anxiety and what goes on in the brain and what causes trauma.
And then the next day I'll have an MMA fighter on.
And then the next day I'll have some world traveler on or some guy who likes to climb mountains or some person who's walked around the earth.
Like it doesn't, the only thread through the whole thing is I find this interesting.
That's it.
These people are interesting to me.
I had a woman who was a beekeeper.
Like, how do you raise bees?
You know, like, I had a guy who was a bat scientist who has been studying bats his whole life.
Like, oh, like, how'd you get into that?
That's the only thread through the whole thing.
So, like, they're interesting to me.
I have a wide range of interests, and I think most people do.
And I think most people like to hear people that are passionate about what they do.
You know, and I think that when you just put something together like this, and I think you're experiencing a very similar version of it, that people see when they watch your show, like, oh, this is what Russell is interested in.
This is what Russell thinks about things.
There's no one getting to him, telling him to do it this way.
This is like, it's so clearly from a unique and individual perspective that that's what makes people say, oh, I could trust that guy.
He might not be right, but at least he'll tell me the truth.
And if he's not right, and if he finds out that he was not right, he's going to tell me that too.
If it's, I suppose that comes back to that authenticity perspective, that if you stitch into this, I have, I, as a person, have got some values.
I am not infallible.
I'm really flawed, but I do believe in these things.
Then you've got some, whether it's believe in or I'm interested in, then you've, then you've got a North Star of some description.
When it becomes governed by committee, which ultimately will default to economic imperatives, when you describe that thing, beekeeper one week, Egyptologist the next, you know, I mean, they're like, that's not going to, we're not going to be able to sell advertising on that.
They would have using their own modality prevented it from ever coming into existence.
It's only, in a sense, where the authenticity meets the technology and the possibility that the whole project takes off.
Yeah, I'm wondering how that's sort of going to apply.
I don't suppose the only way I can apply it is by a continuum of the authenticity.
And I'm happy you said it because sometimes when I feel like I'm talking about something like, you know, thank fuck.
Sometimes someone comes on the show, like someone like Seymour Hirsch and you know, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist or talked about the Nord Stream pipeline.
And because I said, because you know how it is, look at where you work, even impressive though it is, a somewhat incubated kingdom.
You think, like, I read all this stuff, but I read the kind of stuff that I'm interested in.
And so I was thinking, oh my God, have I gone fucking mad?
Like, maybe just Putin is an evil tyrant and like we should just do whatever Raytheod and Lockheed Martin and the military, we should just do what they want.
And then someone comes on with a lot more experience and expertise than me or like that, you know, Jeffrey Sachs.
And you'll go, this is what happened in 2014.
This is what happened after Gorbachev.
This is what happened at that industry.
And you're like, fuck.
It's right.
That's where the authentic that then, if you can start to trust yourself, hold on, yeah.
My general cynicism about centralized power and the kind of way that politics in your country, for example, is funded, the amount of money that's spent on lobbying, the amount of people that will own stocks and shares in energy companies and the military-industrial complex, Paul Pelosi's remarkable knack for investing in things exactly that are so good.
What a genius this guy is.
He's the best.
He's untouchable.
He's untouchable, and he never gets whispered at in the dead of night, apparently across the pillow.
Like, like in the end, you start to see, oh no, like it's right.
I'm actually right.
And it starts to reassure you.
But one of the things I feel is like, oh man, is that all the bridges burned?
You know, I'm like, am I ever going again?
Like, you care about that.
I don't care about it in the same way I once did, but I consider it more, I reckon, than you.
Like, oh, wow, is that it?
I'm never going to be in a movie.
I'm never going to be in a universal movie again.
Or like on Don't, you know, not that, you know, as I said to you, I had complicated feelings about it anyway.
Lovely people, but difficult times.
I'm not sure for me personally, I guess it's just not a good fit.
But it's a weird thing to feel yourself move away from the culture, especially if you've been in the middle of it, you know, to sort of feel like, oh, I'm a person that would be on those late shows and stuff.
unidentified
And, you know, fortunately, I don't think like that.
And then you'll do that movie and you'll be like, fuck these movies.
I'm going to go back to doing my show where I don't have to listen to anybody.
I can just rant and rave with my stack of papers and my bird farting.
You've carved out a very unique thing.
And there's not a lot of people that do that.
And it's very inspirational to other people because it gives people this thing in their head.
Like, here's this guy that was in all these fucking amazing movies.
And he was this giant star.
And he seems better and happier doing this thing that I can do.
He's just got a desk and he's sitting in front of it with a fucking plant behind him and shit.
And he's just ranting and raving.
Like, my God, you, Russell Brand, are doing the thing that thousands and thousands of independent YouTube content providers are doing.
These content creators, these independent people that just have a camera in front and they're rent, whether they're talking about technology or they're talking about sports, whatever they're doing.
You're doing the same thing as them.
And you're showing that this is like, through your endorsement of that sort of format, you're showing that here's this mainstream, very successful star who has chosen to do this thing that's accessible to everybody.
Because it's even not so much the idea of revenue.
It's the idea of, I suppose, like on a psychological level, I reckon I felt like probably as a kid craving acceptance, you know, and then sort of celebrity is a type of acceptance.
You're being celebrated.
This guy's great.
Then when you feel that, oh, man, this ain't actually who I am and move back to the kind of cultural criticism, anti-establishment rhetoric, taking the piss out of all that stuff.
When obviously I'm aware of how those issues are being discussed in the mainstream, even in entertainment products.
Like sometimes I see one of those things on the TV and I can't believe how they talk.
I can't believe they are not aware that like half of the country is also there.
The marketing and the demographic study has become the driving force so much that they don't even care that loads of people are not going to agree with that stuff anymore.
Is the people that are saying those words, they're just like actors on a sitcom.
They just sit there and they have this thing that they're supposed to say and they're going to talk about.
They don't have a unique individual perspective and they're not allowed to.
And also their format is so limited that even if they did, it wouldn't even shine through because you have five minutes.
You have five minutes to talk about the Nord Stream pipeline.
You have five minutes to talk about the Chinese drones.
You have five minutes to talk about Putin.
You don't have enough time.
You don't have enough time.
When you have an open-ended timeframe, like you have on your show and like I have on this show, and so many people who do YouTube shows and podcasts have on their shows, then you can sort things through.
Then you can talk things out.
Then you could figure, then you could look at, you could steel man other people's arguments.
You should try to imagine your own perspective if you were in that state.
What would I do if I was the head of a pharmaceutical company?
How would I stop?
I mean, if I was already making hundreds of millions of dollars, what would I do?
Would I just stay on this train and just watch all the destruction take place and watch all these people die from opiate addiction?
What would I do?
I don't know.
I don't know what I would do.
But I know that you would never have that conversation on CNN.
Yeah.
Rachel Mano's not going to have that fucking conversation with you.
She's going to look at that camera and she's going to lie.
And she's going to say the things that she's supposed to say because they pay her X amount of dollars per year and it's a great job.
I was having a conversation with Eric Weinstein the other day where he's explaining to me the reality of other dimensions and the measurable reality of other dimensions that we absolutely know that they exist.
And do other beings have access to them?
Can they travel through these things?
Is that what we're dealing with?
Imagine if that becomes at the forefront of the zeitgeist.
If people recognize that not only are there other dimensions, multiple other dimensions that are recognizable, measurable, you know where they are, you know how to get to them, but beings are coming from those dimensions and visiting us on a regular basis.
Are you still going to give a shit about a trans woman using the female bathroom?
Are you still going to give a shit about whether or not someone has pink hair or blue hair or who does this or who comes across what border?
You're going to go, holy shit, there's a bigger thing going on.
There's something that transcends all physical reality as we know it.
Yes, we're fetishizing, understandably, the only measurable part of our reality while knowing even deeply personally for our own subjectivity that there's something else within us.
There is our experience of rational thought.
There's our experience of bodily sensation.
But there's something else within us.
I've been unable, of course, because of my recovery, to get into the sort of psychedelic space when it's, you know, now that it's become wellness and now that it's become acceptable.
But I would like to know, what is it about a psychedelic experience that makes you think that if you engage, that you will somehow or another regress, lose all control, start doing heroin, your life is going to fall apart.
You're clearly not the same person.
You're clearly not the same person, even though you've experienced the same traumas that led you into heroin addiction in the first place.
You have clearly gotten a certain control over your life, an understanding of yourself, a personal sovereignty that you didn't possess when you were an addict.
So what makes you think that this entheogen, this literal psychedelic connection to a higher realm would ruin your life?
For fun, in a park, at a bus stop, you know, and knowing that there's something ontologically profound happening.
Like, most observably, and I'm talking about myself as a 16-year-old, like, hold on a minute.
I'm not real.
Like, I am not my memory of myself.
I am not my projections.
I am the consciousness that is observing that set of data.
I'm observing my feelings.
I'm observing my thoughts.
I'm beyond it.
So, beyond like all that stuff, I was aware that this was profound.
But also, I was doing it on my own with like just kids drinking cider at a bus stop in Essex.
I wasn't doing it like with a shaman or a doctor or Aldous Huxley or Terrace McKenna, or like some Brazilian guy with feathers and stuff.
I was like, at a bus stop in the rain in the grimness of graves where I'm from.
So, like, I've maintained this fascination because I feel, well, I'm a 12-step person, and 12-steps is about that there's a spiritual deficiency that causes addicts to become addicts.
They're looking for something that they can't find in the world.
They're looking for connection.
They're looking for a deeper purpose and for meaning.
Yeah, and for some reason, the addict type, according to this analysis, and there's only one analysis, and it's the one that I've got clean with, so it's the one I sort of advocate for.
It's the only one I'm qualified to advocate for.
The principle is: if you replicate, or not even replicate, if you create those spiritual conditions, like you belong to a community, you think about helping others, you're willing to look at what the reasons you drink and take drugs for in the first place.
But fundamentally, this is the key thing: is it what it argues most of all, and it's like an ingenious piece of American theology, really, I would say, the 12 steps.
It was informed by William James, the theologian.
It's influenced by Carl Jung, of course.
And like, what?
So it's a sort of a fusion of religious and spiritual ideas and psychiatry, which obviously was in a much more formative state back then.
And what it's fundamentally offering you is the drugs and the alcohol are not the problem.
The problem is you are self-centered and egoic.
You've got caught in yourself.
And so even once you stop drinking and taking drugs, you're still going to have that problem and you're going to have to address that problem.
And when you do, you won't feel the need to drink or take drugs anymore.
Now, so what becomes sort of central to the whole ideology of the 12 steps is, in a sense, the abstinence is significant and it's pivotal.
You can't drink or take drugs one day at a time.
But more important than that is, you've surrendered.
Like, the guy was a stockbroker, apparently a womanizer, and yes, indeed, took LSD while in recovery.
And of course, all of the materials around that fellowship are very, they're like 50, 60 years old.
No one had 10 years clean then.
No one had 20 years.
I'm 20 years clean as ever.
No one had that.
None of those guys, there hadn't been that much time, which makes you think about vaccine tests.
How do they know what it's going to do in 10 years?
If you hadn't had fucking 10 years, so like, you know, they didn't know how those things were going to pan out.
So the reason I have this ayahuasca hesitancy, a lot of people are ayahuasca hesitant.
What are we going to do about that hesitancy?
The reason I have it is because I can't take back personal authority for what I do.
And the idea is, is because I've achieved, I've been given something that's quite delicate.
Like when I was using I was destroying my life and now I've been granted a different perspective, I shouldn't mess with that shit by doing something that would necessarily involve I'm in charge, even though I really want it.
When I hear you and other people on your show and Dunka Troll talk about smoking DMT and you're meeting orbs of pure consciousness, I think the whole reason I came a drug addict, remember, was because I was looking for that.
I'm looking for this, this isn't reality.
This can't be it.
You can't expect me to just stay alive for decades more based on this bullshit.
I know there's something else.
The culture won't give you it.
The culture won't give you.
You are divine.
You are connected to limitless.
And there are other dimensions.
There are other beings.
The culture's just telling you, get a job, you're going to work in a call center or a factory.
No, I've never taken cocaine, but I do get addicted to video games.
I do get addicted to.
I could find myself, I think, if I did start doing a lot of Coke or if I was at a different stage in my life and I wasn't concentrating on being productive and concentrating on being like being healthy, being physically healthy, being physically fit, and also using exercise as a means to mitigate anxiety and for just to keep my mind straight.
So important to me.
And that if I didn't have those things and maybe I was drinking every day or doing Coke or doing something, I could see myself falling apart.
I could see myself, because I think it's just a natural human characteristic.
But right now, like if someone said, hey, are you worried that you would get hooked on something?
I'd be like, no.
No, I wouldn't.
Because if I thought I was getting hooked on it, I would just stop because I'm not interested in doing anything that's detrimental to me.
I'm not interested in doing anything that's going to tank my life.
But I'm like, I guess what we're analyzing is that, you know, one of the areas of distinction between our two natures, there are some things that are quite similar.
It sounds like we're from pretty similar types of background.
It sounds like that we both had negative experiences of a step parent.
It's like this fucking weird idea that somehow or another, not having a lot of attention when you were younger can all be fixed by getting a shitload of attention when you're older.
Yeah, and like, so, but it feels like somehow or another, one way or another, you metabolize that suffering into some kind of form of discipline and control is how it looks from the outside.
And for me, I collapsed into chemical dependency as soon as it, as soon as it came into my life, like I was, that was my religion.
And I got very, very, very fortunate that I went in that direction because I grew up with a lot of guys that drank a lot and did a lot of drugs and they went off in their way.
And I didn't.
I avoided all that throughout all high school.
I barely partied in high school.
I got drunk a couple times.
I smoked pot a couple of times and that was it.
All throughout high school.
My high school was filled with discipline.
And all I did was train.
I was a very weird kid in that regard.
Like socially, I was kind of an outcast.
But I found through that path, it was like there was a clear road where I could be a better person and a happier person.
My wife pointed out something that wouldn't have been obvious to me as an outsider of martial arts that a lot of martial arts people have a geeky component.
There's something geeky about it.
Like you've got to study movement.
You've got to understand it.
There's a lot of art you can nerd out on the moves, nerd out, or even on the kit and the aesthetics.
And I feel like to have this, to have discovered that early in life, it's kept you within lines, I assume, where even the potentially combustible, violent impulse has had somewhere to go.
All of those things have been able to have been targeted.
I, like, again, because of coming on here, you do, you're the first person I heard talk about Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
Like, I got into it.
It's a difficult thing to start when you're 40 years old and you don't have an, like, I don't have an athletic background, but I'm a purple belt in jujitsu now.
Getting a purple belt is like you're basically a black belt.
You just need to put the time in.
The difference between a white belt and a blue belt, the blue belt is like, okay, you're learning things.
You now have an understanding of moves that's not just a beginner's understanding.
Like, you know a path.
When someone, when you get into someone's side control and you trap an arm with your neck, you know how to slide into that head and arm choke.
It's natural.
It's automatic.
When you get to a purple belt, it's like you've got some serious shit.
When you get to a purple belt level, you know how to set things up.
You know how to set traps.
You know how to use defensive tactics to initiate offense.
The only difference between that and a black belt is honing the edge and continuing to put in the time.
The difference between my game when I was a purple belt versus my game when I'm a black belt is that I just learned more moves and became more consistent and then trained more and then got a better understanding of what to do and what not to do and was much more responsible defensively and just got better condition and stronger.
And that got me to black belt.
But you're at purple belt level, which is the that's the great divide.
That's what separates someone who just starts Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu with someone who gets to black belt.
My teacher, Chris Clear, he's a very dedicated teacher.
He's a black belt under Roger Gracie.
For me, I move in and out of it, you know, like not necessarily even because of injuries, because of time.
And sometimes because part of me still holds on to the idea of not being crushed under somebody's shoulder.
And like, you know, when you sort of, as well, when you're like my build, I weigh probably, I guess I weigh 80 kilograms.
Like I roll with maybe a blue belt that's like 10 or 15 kilograms more than me.
I can get so smashed up, you know.
And there are other purple belts in our club that are similar size to me and it's sort of like it's elegant and flow-based and there's some nice open gardens, some things that are sort of pretty.
But like I still have a reluctance to face the business end of jiu-jitsu, the grind, the harshness of that stuff sometimes, I guess.
So my competence inhales and exhales, you know, like when I when I'm doing it a lot, I feel very good about myself.
It feels good to articulate and physicalize something that for me as a quite cerebral man could just be conceptual to feel what struggle is like.
It's like why I like doing the hot and cold stuff as well, like experiencing soreness and cold punches.
But oh, this is what it's like to feel really uncomfortable and just to deal with it.
You're not dying.
It's okay.
And then, but like with the thing is, is that it's abstract with hot and cold.
When you're like looking into another person's eyes and there's the idea of combat and like I've obviously got some ego, you know, and when I experience, oh man, look at that.
That's what it's like to be smashed.
To get smashed, to be the nail and not the hammer.
You know, that like I still deal with that.
The first time I got, even as a white belt, when someone like guillotine choked me out a couple of times, I was like transported back to childhood.
I needed therapy.
Somebody's going, this is a hobby that you're doing.
Just what he's learning about his pursuit of this thing.
And, you know, also, I think, similar age when he started doing jiu-jitsu.
I think he was in his 40s as well.
And just trying to reconcile like this desire to learn this thing and just getting smashed by people and how difficult it is to get good at it.
But what a fucking amazing tool it is.
I love rolling with people when, like, it's exciting.
Like, jiu-jitsu is exciting.
But there's something very fascinating about being a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt and rolling with someone and knowing they can't do anything to you.
Like, if I roll with some white belt and then they kind of spazz out of me or something, and I just grab them and clinch them, it's like, I'm in control of this.
Like, I've done all these numbers.
I've put in all these fucking constant days of training, like, for so many years.
I trained since 19, I started training in 1996.
It's like, I've been doing it for so long that it's such a beautiful thing to have.
And one of the beautiful things about Jiu-Jitsu is, I mean, the real lessons or the real, the real value in it is that you overcome adversity and it becomes a tool for developing your human potential.
Through the struggle of the physical struggle, the wanting to quit and not quitting, the developing the ability to overcome adversity, developing the mental fortitude.
It's just this incredible tool for managing the stress of life because the regular life out there in the world is nothing compared to some big guy sweating in your mouth who's trying to fucking strangle you, which is like what happens.
Or when someone gets you in a triangle and you got your fucking arm is here and the leg is here and like, ah, like it's so much worse than most life, yet still somehow enjoyable.
You know, there's magic to it.
It's just like there's very few things that are like jiu-jitsu in this life that can give you those kind of lessons.
Also, the trend of our time is more and more disembodying.
There's more and more like strap a helmet on your head and life yourself off into the metaverse.
And like if you think of how apes and comparable advanced mammals live in their bodies and such a short period of time ago, evolutionarily, we would have been in our bodies like that.
It would have been normal to play with like and establish hierarchy in that way and to know what your body is capable of.
Like I suppose for me, one of the things I've got is that paradox of thinking, oh man, I'm capable of doing these things with my body.
Also, other people are capable of doing things with my body.
I don't know next time I open my mouth in a moment of rage at a traffic light who's going to step out of that car.
There's a lot of people out there that know, and a lot of women too, that know how to do it.
There's a lot of people that know how to strangle people.
And I think that's a beautiful skill to know.
It's always good to have that.
It's always good to know what to do if a conflict emerges.
Because one of the beautiful things about jiu-jitsu as well is that unlike karate or a lot of other martial arts, you do it full blast.
So the thing about sparring and kickboxing is like, man, if you spar full blast all the time, you're going to get brain damage pretty fucking quick.
You really are.
So a lot of times when you're sparring, you're holding back because you're protecting your opponents.
So it's not the same anxiety level as a full-blown conflict.
But jiu-jitsu is a full-blown conflict.
If it's you and some other purple belt and you guys get heated and it starts getting after it and he's arm-dragging you and he's got your leg and he's stacking you and trying to pass your guard, it's like, ah, this is a real battle.
You're giving 100% effort.
And if you get in a compromising position, you get caught, you tap and you're okay and you keep going.
I mean, the ability to tap and the ability to submit someone and then keep going is amazing.
The tap is beauty because the tap is the consent and the tap shows that the underlying thing is a camaraderie and that this is a collegiate thing that we're undertaking together.
Also, when you were talking about how much of the online hatred and angst likely comes from living a life where you don't express things, to know that I have as part of my routine, experiencing trauma, experiencing another person's aggression, experiencing another person's strength, even though my ego don't like it when I'm submitted or bested, at least for me, it's not abstract.
The idea of the experience of physical combat, like it was for most of my life, other than sort of normal fights when I was a kid.
Like it's a lived experience in the same way of when I very first experienced cold, it was before I met Wim Hoff or before the popularization of these ideas.
I just jumped in a really cold lake once because I once had a girlfriend that was an aristocrat.
She had rolling estates.
It was amazing.
It was like we're falling into Wonderland, frankly.
And one time I jumped into this freezing cold lake and I heard the noise that come out of my body.
I kind of go, and I thought, oh, wow, I can make that noise and my body can handle freezing cold.
Like, you know, if you think about it, we're disembodying ourselves.
We're turning ourselves into atrophying little beings that don't know how to inhabit a body.
And that it's, you know, of course, as a martial arts expert, the thing that accompanies it usually is a respect for opponents, a respect for the body, not kind of showboating, aggressive, intimidating, bullying.
That sort of thing gets meted out.
It gets like, as my teacher told me, that sort of stuff gets taken out of the culture pretty quickly.
When someone comes into the environment that exhibits those traits, that it's managed and perhaps in a way that you might imagine among primates those kind of behaviors would be managed.
That's probably one of the best ways that they could stop bullying is to teach everybody how to fight.
And it sounds so counterintuitive.
That sounds so counterintuitive.
But I think the thing you're saying about being disembodied is so important too, because I think that whatever you do that's physically difficult, and it doesn't have to be jiu-jitsu, it could be marathon running, it could be CrossFit, whatever you want to do.
Yoga.
Difficult things force the mind and the body to work together because the mind has to control the body while the body is screaming to stop and the mind is screaming to stay.
You have to have almost like a third part of you.
You have a physical, you have a mental, and then you have the discipline.
And the discipline is almost a thing in and of itself.
It's a thing that you know the mental wants to quit.
So how do you tell your own mind not to quit?
But it's you.
I want to quit.
So I should just quit.
No, no, no.
You have to tell you not to quit.
So who's telling me?
Who is that that's deciding this for me?
I don't think you get that without physical struggle.
And again, it could be running.
It can be yoga.
It's like physical struggle teaches you to be solid inside your thoughts and to maintain the path.
Stay on the path, even though it's hard to do, which is so important in life.
So many times in life, real progress comes from grinding it out when you don't want to, when you want to quit, and you must understand that there's a process and trust this process.
And the only way you trust this process is if you participated in it.
And the word spirituality and the word discipline have been continually paired.
Christ's followers are the disciples.
It's a discipline.
You have to marshal the spirit.
The spirit has to be controlled, otherwise, the spirit will not be your friend.
And I feel like the commodification, and perhaps you could even argue, feminization of spirituality.
Either you have Orthodox spiritualities that tend to be patriarchal.
I'm talking about the sort of the desert faiths, the Christianity, the Judaism, and the Islam.
Certainly, many people would argue that there's, if not misogynistic, then patriarchal aspects to that.
It's interesting that New Age spirituality is regarded as somewhat feminine and is certainly, by and large, commodified.
It becomes about, you know, purchasing a pair of leggings, purchasing a dream catcher or a crystal.
It doesn't have that aspect of discipline that is about the ability to prioritize your spiritual state over your physical state.
This is the deeper reality.
What's happening in here?
And when you start bringing up interdimensional travel and psychedelics, you start to recognize, yeah, no, this is an important space for me.
Interesting, too, the way that the arguments around sex and gender have altered.
Because for what, you know, like the Andrew Tate phenomena has been an interesting one, but I've heard you talk about the sort of, you know, and certainly while there are outstanding crimes, I've certainly wouldn't comment on any of those things and how they might play out.
If you leave a space in the culture of where masculinity can be sort of embraced, loved, revered, celebrated, then different models are going to emerge from that territory.
Rather than looking at the masculinity isn't solely ugly.
Yeah, that's why there has to be a spiritual component to life.
And that's why a culture that abdicates that responsibility and abstracts that reality becomes kind of nihilistic and celebrates meaninglessness.
It becomes only about furniture and an aesthetic.
There's nothing real.
It's got nothing behind it.
We can sort of feel that now, I think, that it's been hollowed out from within.
The institutions are hollow because there's no values there.
And like I alluded to earlier, the idea of a sort of a potentially senile and decaying president is like the culture is unconsciously telling you what it is.
Look, it's falling apart.
There are no real values behind it.
They'll say that a war is humanitarian when we know that most likely the imperatives are economic imperatives.
And one way to find out would be to extract the economic imperatives.
Then you would find out.
So like the service that I suppose that I don't pay enough attention to and sometimes give enough credence to is the possibility that you can reach individuals through a media like this and say that actually what you do is important.
What you believe in, the way you treat yourself, the way you talk to yourself, the practices you undertake.
I mean, when you bring in one of the Goliaths from that space, like Goggins, Dave Goggins, someone who transformed themselves in ways I don't even understand, still from a 300-pound person on a couch to at the absolute ultimate end of what is possible to be militarily, is demonstration of that.
And I suppose that what must be happening, as well as like the identity, where you come at odds with the culture, it's observable.
Like, you know, like the I've mechtin' moment.
It's like, oh shit, what you said there, the mainstream don't like that, push back and crackle.
But like elsewhere, there must be thousands, millions of messages about self-discipline, awakening, do things for your body, eat healthily, awaken, take responsibility for yourself.
Masculinity and femininity can co-habit successfully.
It should never be about misogyny.
All these ideas are reaching out there and they're reaching people that wouldn't typically be getting, I would say, such nuanced takes on the sound of the skills.
There's a lot of those messages that are getting out there, but how many of them reach a person to the point where that person decides to act?
The acting is what's most important because the only lessons that you really generate from this stuff is actually engaging, actually taking the yoga class, actually going for the run, actually doing the CrossFit, actually doing jiu-jitsu, actually doing something.
It's so hard to actually do something.
It's one of the great problems that people have.
And it's one of the reasons why there's so many hucksters out there that are selling motivation.
There's so many people out there that are, they're motivational speakers.
And meanwhile, they've done nothing.
They've done nothing of great note, nothing of great accomplishment.
And all they're doing is they're finding this thing that people desire and they're feeding it to people.
Like either giving a motivation.
Those people, oftentimes you'll check in on them five years from now, 10 years from now, they're not doing anything any different.
Like you can tell people there's a quick fix in an easy way, but whether it's getting off drugs, becoming a stand-up comedian or doing like accomplishing stuff in a martial art, normally it means like incrementally day by day, hour by hour, session by session, you are going to experience a degree of suffering, whether it's physical.
Or, you know, like early stand-up when you can't do it and you have to stand in front of an audience and be shit and bomb in front of people and then like, oh, I'm going to do it again.
I'm going to do it again.
Like that is unavoidable.
And like, I suppose I don't want to only use the markers that are sanctioned as success, things that might bring you financial success because God knows there are other ways of succeeding in this world and truly, truly great people that don't enjoy the accolades of a culture that celebrates many, many things I think are pretty vacuous.
But on the level of the individual, as you say, if you're not willing to go to the mat or to the open mic or to the wherever it is practice.
And so many people are just stagnant and they don't know how to act and they don't have experience doing it.
And so they just stay home.
And again, the disembodiment thing.
They put on headsets or they sit in front of the computer or they sit in front of the television or they sit in front of their phone and they don't act.
And you're going to be depressed.
That's not good for you.
It's not a natural, normal way for people to behave.
And this thing that people do, they avoid discomfort.
It sounds ridiculous, but then it just creates more discomfort.
You don't realize that in embracing discomfort and forcing yourself to do something very uncomfortable that you can control, like an ice bath, like a sauna, like a run, like a workout, you are eliminating another form of discomfort.
You can do that.
It's one of the reasons why I've been able to mitigate all the stress and issues that come with success and with fame.
It's like I fucking torture myself.
I torture myself physically.
I'm always working out.
I'm always exhausted.
I'm always taking ice baths.
I was in the sauna before I got here today.
I'm always doing something.
Always.
I never have a day where there's not some kind of struggle.
If I have a day where I just lay around, I'm like, this is weird.
Like one day, like it's one of the things that I have to do on vacation.
When I get up in the morning, whenever I'm on vacation, the first thing I do is work out.
I'm like, I got to do this.
Otherwise, I'm not going to be able to enjoy this time off with my family.
I got to get up before everybody else and I got to work out hard.
Yeah, because if you think a lot of those behaviors are about trying to replicate a primal behavior, like eating food excessively, or pornography and masturbation to replicate sexuality, or numbing activities like screens on narcotics rather than becoming harmonized with the evolutionary threads that transcend us as individuals and have carried our species from when we were a priori from much simpler mechanisms.
W.B. Yates, the Irish poet, said, each artist must create their own religion.
And I feel like in a culture where there is no discipline, religion, ideology other than your role is to be a passive consumer to consume information, to consume product, to not question, then almost every individual has to have like, right, this is what I believe in.
This is who I am.
This is how I'm going to make my life.
Now, I don't mean this in an individualistic way because otherwise then you've unconsciously fallen into one of what I believe is the unspoken ideologies of our time, materialism, progressivism, individualism.
What you are as an individual is the most important thing because actually that isn't true.
It's your value, it seems to me, your value to other people.
Like again and again, I have found like I have to, the same way you talk about exercise, I impose upon myself doing things for other people as part of the 12-step stuff, part of the program I have.
Like someone's not wanting to, to call someone else to deal with their stuff, to listen to them.
And afterwards, I feel better about it because I haven't.
Otherwise, my religion is what I want.
My religion becomes my preferences.
I become devoted to it, dedicated to it.
Similar to you, I'm not good on vacations.
On my honeymoon, I tried to organize the hotel workers into a union against their management because I couldn't cope with relaxing or the guilt of affluence.
That's hilarious.
How did you mean that?
Did you just like find you being paid enough here?
No, I think the equation that's being made is, oh, it's about supremacy.
It's about being a supreme being.
But it is obviously a ridiculous argument because anyone would benefit from there are behaviors and tendencies that the human body has, regardless of what your body is.
And I suppose a way of making it universal, even though the idea of the universal is something that people query now.
Oh, there isn't just one ideal that we can all conform to.
But I feel, God, we've all got skeletons, we've all got kidneys, we've all got fingers.
And perhaps, like, as an action of self-love, you know, I'm friends with Tony Robbins, and he was one of the first people that told me about jumping in ice baths and all that.
And he says the way that he talked to himself before he does that, you're getting in that fucking ice bath.
unidentified
Couldn't you be more like, okay, we're getting in the ice bath now?
Okay, University of South Australia researchers are calling for exercise to be a mainstay approach for managing depression as a new study shows that physical activity is 1.5 times more effective than counseling or the leading medications.
Of course it is.
Of course it is.
And probably, and I don't want to say the cause of anyone's individual depression because there's no way I can know.
But I think probably a lot of people are depressed because they're not moving.
It's like having this ability to distract yourself.
It's like there's so many things that you should be doing, and people get overwhelmed with these tasks and with a path that they're on.
They get overwhelmed with the idea of progress.
They get overwhelmed with the idea of accomplishing goals.
And so they distract themselves with YouTube videos or with pornography or with something.
They just put it in front of them.
And it's not good.
And I think that any ground you can make against that is good for you.
And I think one of the best ways to make ground against that is to do difficult things.
And whether it's ice baths and saunas or exercise, and I really think you should do all of them.
I really do.
I mean, if you can, if you, if you, I mean, a lot of people can't afford a cold plunge, but, you know, I mean, how much does ice cost?
I don't know how much ice costs, but all you really need is cold, especially if you live in a great place that's cold.
Like if you live in Boston, I used to do taekwondo with this guy.
His name was Bob Caffarella, and I was always scared of him because he was, he would take cold showers.
In the middle of January, this motherfucker would take cold showers.
We're all terrified of him.
He lived in the gym and he trained there.
And he was just like this super dedicated guy.
And after training, he would train really hard.
And after training, he would take like a five-minute freezing cold shower.
And he would get out of there.
And, you know, he wouldn't make a noise, wouldn't make a peep.
And he wasn't an aggressive guy, like a mean guy.
He was always smiling and very friendly, but ferocious in his efforts to conquer his inner bitch.
And he would get into that fucking cold shower.
And I was like, geez, that guy scares the shit out of me.
I don't want to get in a fucking cold shower.
Now I do it every day.
Like now I get in that freezing fucking cold water every it's a normal part of my morning.
I hate it every time I do it.
Right before I'm doing it, there's these little tiny voices in me like, oh, don't do it.
I'm like, shut, da, Shut the fuck up.
But it's not an aggressive shut the fuck up.
So it's just like, shut the fuck up.
Just get in there.
This is what you do.
And you climb in and you do it.
And the more I do it, the better I feel.
The more grounded I feel, the happier I feel.
And there's also a physical increase in dopamine levels.
It raises your dopamine by 200%.
And norepinephrine, it lasts for hours.
And it's like so good for you neurochemically.
And Andrew Huberman is the best at describing that.
And Susannah Soberg, the Soberg principle that she's developed for cold water immersion.
It's so fucking good for you to do hard things.
And I know people don't want to do it.
And because just working is a hard thing.
Just getting up and commuting is a hard thing.
You don't want to do it.
The alarm clock goes off.
You want to stay in bed.
I fucking get it.
But if you can force yourself to do something else on top of the things that you are mandated to do because of your work or life and whatever, just force yourself.
I like the people that have a scientific approach that can demonstrate the efficacy of these methods.
But the reason I love Wim Hoff is because I can feel in him that it is shamanic.
Wim Hoff is not a normal guy, is he?
And you know, he's when his wife took her own life is when it was the big moment of transition for him.
And for Wim, it seems as well that accompanying his deep belief in the effectiveness and power of cold and breath work techniques is a kind of broad open-mindedness, a total sort of loving perspective on reality and a very anti-establishment.
Like he made like a mainstream TV show in our country, like where they got celebrities for getting ice and that kind of thing.
You know, like they did a reality show.
I said, they must have been cutting all sorts of shit from Wim Hoff because I know what that guy believes about mainstream media, about big pharma.
You know, if they got five words out of him without him saying like, you know, Pfizer, this or because, you know, because ultimately, as even that piece of data there from Australia demonstrated, whenever the interests of people are at odds with the interests of corporations, the corporate interest will win.
No one can monetize the idea that if you stay healthy, if you eat well, there's no, I don't think there are serious reasons why we couldn't organize the entire way that food is provided for people and what our modalities are.
Oh my God, I had that guy come on.
I don't know if you know, I can't remember.
Casey means Callie means this dude that used to work at Coke Coca-Cola.
Yeah, like you like if you eliminated processed foods, you wouldn't have diabetes, heart disease or cancer to nearly like possibly eliminating it.
So we're the like that systemically we're eating things.
Systemically we're not doing we're not using the body correctly.
I don't believe like as Carlin used to say, you don't need a conspiracy where interests converge.
And if there is an interest in people staring at screens, eating bad food, taking lots of medication, not personally and individually awakening, not being able to take on opposing views and listen to the validity of opposing views.
If enough people's interests coalesce around that, that will become the culture.
And I feel that's where we find ourselves a celebration of stuff that seems vacuous and not impactful and misusing of important ideas around equality and individuality being repurposed.
It's like the whole thing has become plastic and has organized around some of our lower nature.
And when they talk about in yoga, an age of darkness, I feel that that's what it is, a grossness.
Kali Yuga, that we're in the grossness, the darkness is without light.
Thank God that, you know, like think about how ideas that are emerging are often arcane ideas.
Like they were always a shamanic interest in plants was always going on.
Breath work was always considered to be important and necessary.
People that had yogic practices, some are like that's why I think like Wim's interesting, even though they've done the clinical trials and showed the effectiveness of his method, he is clearly coming at it from what I would say a kind of a role that's being extracted from our culture, and that pertains to this present that I bought you.
One is just simply some very fine cigars, in my view, and the other one is this book on like how show the profession of show business emerges from shamanism.
That the true well, this is what this guy's offering.
I interviewed him, this man called John Higgs on the show.
This out-of-print book that's tricky to get, that I've become very has affected me since I read it because it says, This is the argument, the riot he takes you on.
There would have been a point where there were settled cultures, and yet there still would have been nomadic cultures.
The nomadic people would have traveled to the settlements and performed there, and their performances would have been derived from shamanic rites.
And shamanic rites include things like death and resurrection, transcendence of levels, awareness of different dimensions.
Through this book, he posits that the profession of show business maintains within it the idea of the mystical experience.
And he cites very popular examples of like what looks like shamanism in popular culture.
Many of the figures that adorn your establishment, Jimi Hendrix, there's a shamanic vibe, he sets fire to shit and does Bowie and the androgyny, the tendency for them to die young.
The shamanism, the earliest form of religion, usually connected to plant medicines, is like it suggests and embraces that the shaman is an unusual figure, that they're going to say crazy shit from time to time, that they don't live in the main part of the settlement because there can be off-key people with their communing with animals, with their taking of plants, with their visions and their ability to come back.
One of the sort of archetypes that's within this thing, I guess it's the architecture and archetypes of shamanism, which it is arguing all religions are derived from.
And all religions include things, or some, like of death and resurrection, particularly agricultural religions need their God to die, go into the ground, and then come back again, the same way you require your crop to go into the ground and come back again.
In a sense, it's a way of, you know, that you could say that religion is a way of navigating the unknown and the unknowable, and the shaman is the person that can travel between those levels.
But then it argues that the role of the shaman becomes the role of the clergy, and it's a kind of castrated role.
Like a clergyman, except for in like some American traditions, like evangelicism, you know, and some of the figures like, you know, like say Kinnison is an example, and like even Alex Jones, as we're discussing, the evangelism is trying to bring you to a promised land.
In my country in particular, religion has become very neutralized, neutered.
It's about just flat, banal morality, mostly speaking.
There's not a lot of radical religion, which is about we're going to prioritise spiritual values over material values, otherwise we're fucked.
The history of it was that the rise of Protestantism comes from Calvinism and Lutheranism.
Like there was a lot of corruption in the Catholic Church and these Protestant breakaway movements happened in the UK.
It was because Henry VIII wanted to get divorced, essentially, so they built the Church of England so that he could legitimately divorce wives, even though sometimes he did just chop off their heads as a way of resolving the same problem.
And Protestantism, they say, in Northern Europe, where it's colder, that Protestantism took off.
It's a bit more disciplined.
It's work, it places moral and ethical values on work.
And the southern European countries were more family-oriented, more socially-oriented.
Italy's France, and Spain, where they're still Catholic, and the northern European countries, Germany countries, northern European countries, Germany, England, etc., have a little more, and generally more economically prosperous now, perhaps because that religion fits more with capitalist models.
So, but I guess what this book is arguing is that the reason that show business has always been attacked by the church is because it's dealing with the same forces.
And it talks about how figures emerge through show business continually that represent values that are not really about entertainment.
What is it you're going into the cinema for?
Why are people listening to your podcast a lot of the time for hope, for a different perspective, because they find something here that they don't find anywhere else?
Because the culture isn't going to give it to them because the culture, as McKenna says, is not their friend.
The culture wants them little blobs with a visor on, consuming endlessly.
And if you can't participate in the economic system, we don't care what happens to you.
You're going to prison or you're going to sleep in the street or you're going to die of an opioid overdose.
That's the arse end of the type of capitalism we live within now.
And I suppose what this book is, what fascinated me about it is saying that without the divine, without the sacred, without some personal relationship to what you might call God, you know, that which is beyond material, that is which is beyond what you can know, that which requires faith.
And all of our lives are going to require faith.
Even what you've said about Brazilian jiu-jitsu and personal discipline is the faith that I'm going to feel better if I do this.
And part of the problem, I think, if you live in a materialistic and rationalistic culture, which is what, you know, as my understanding is, is post-Enlightenment culture is about individualism, materialism, rationalism.
If you accept those as the driving ideas, then in the end, the only things that matter are the things that you can measure.
And there's no doubt that science, technology, medicine are marvelous, magnificent tools, metrics, ways, lenses for observing the miracles of nature and the cosmos.
But when they start to drive economic models, you can't make the same claims for objectivity of science when the science is a subset of an economic model.
You can't make the same claim.
They're only looking at what they're looking at.
Who's paying for it?
Who's paying for those studies?
How are those clinical trials conducted?
How much of the information is released?
And I think that that's really what the pandemic was: a lens that showed us a lot.
It showed us stuff that's always happening, but it concentrated it and showed us it in an observable timeline.
Normally, it's too diffuse and across too many issues.
Hey, are these guys all cooperating, collaborating, and conspiring with one another to ensure that their mutual agendas are being met at the level of global corporatism, bypassing national sovereignty, not putting ordinary people's interests first?
And I suppose that the reason that I'm fascinated with spirituality in particular is because that is your private little haven.
That is your sacred cathedral within yourself where you do have sovereignty there still.
And like, you know, sometimes I worry because the stuff I talk about, you know, I talk about these bloody, you know, global conspiracies, corruption, war, pandemic.
And then in my life, I'm like still, you know, an affluent but normal guy.
I'm getting, you know, doing a talk at my kids' school, getting kicked out of Legoland for non-compliance at a theme park.
I'm not dealing with the bloody WEF on a daily basis.
I'm not challenging Klaus Schwab face to face.
You know, I mean, I'm living a normal person life.
And I'm aware.
And I sometimes think, fuck, am I wrong?
Am I wrong?
But then I talk to people, you know, like either you with the amount of information you've amassed through your own work or, you know, Jeffrey Sachs or fucking Glenn Greenwald or whoever.
And you think, oh shit, this is actually true.
This is true.
And most people's lives, they're living it.
They're living like with that kind of adversity.
And I've been poor.
I grew up without money.
So I like, you know, I have the memory of it also.
But like, it's not just abstract.
This is not just some theory about how life should be organized.
This is the slow grind, oppression, and centralizing of all resources at a level that's totally undemocratic, that's annihilating people's lives while telling them that it's somehow benefiting people that I don't think it benefits either.
I think it's a and so yeah, but it's useful to remember that this is an experiential actual thing, not just something I do on the internet and talk about.
It's, you know, because you go out in Austin, you will talk to a cab driver that will tell you, oh, all of the music venues shut down during the pandemic.
And we can see now what the trends are.
We can see now how it's affecting people.
And I feel like, well, where is it that people are going to get the courage to change from?
Even if that's that courage about how are you going to make your life within this system better?
Or even how are you going to participate in challenging and even overthrowing these systems by the great resources that are within you?
And that's, I suppose, one of the things, because I have good faith in people.
Like, mine is not a bad faith analysis.
Oh, people are bad, they're selfish, fuck them.
Mine is, no, I think people might be beautiful, even though all the time I know that I do things that are corrupt and I make mistakes and I know that other people have wronged me and all of that.
Because I believe in those things we've discussed, forgiveness, I feel like, no, actually, the resources are there.
It's possible.
It's possible.
That's where for me the evangelicism lives.
And that's why I'm interested in themes and ideas that are not curtailed within any individual culture.
And shamanism is a good one because it predates monotheism.
It predates nationalism.
It was there already.
Human beings have a tendency to seek out mystical experiences, to have a relationship with the divine.
I'll wrap it up on this if you want to, or even prior because you're.
I mean, I'll see what that says in Neil.
Of course, I've got to write notes.
This is an important appearance.
All right, so March 2020, a group of scientists sign an open letter condemning the conspiracy theory, suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
In April, Anthony Fauci refutes Donald Trump's claim of the possibility of a lab leak.
January 2023, redacted NIH emails from January 2021 involving Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins show efforts to rule out the lab origin of COVID.
February 2023, the Wall Street Journal reports the virus that drove the COVID-19 pandemic most likely emerged from a laboratory leak.
That is just one example of from conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact.
That is very detailed in the book, The Real Anthony Fauci.
I mean, I don't know, obviously, there's references in that book, and I don't know how much of it is accurate.
But he's not being sued.
Not that I'm aware of.
I mean, and you would think that with the claims that he makes, you would be sued.
And one of the claims that he makes is that there was a concerted effort to diminish the possibility of this lab leak hypothesis being mainstream and that they went out of their way and there was phone calls at midnight and like get near your phone.
We're going to have to do work about this.
And they conspired.
They conspired to push this narrative that also, like, when you see him getting grilled by Rand Paul about gain of function research, and he's just, his hands are shaking and you can see he's lying.
He's like, you do not know what you are talking about.
He's slowing the conversation down to an almost unfollowable level.
The way he talks and the way he utilizes words, Senator, Senator, you do not know what you are talking about.
Who the fuck talks like that?
It's like a switch-up pitch in baseball.
It's like he's throwing you a pitch, like, why is it coming at me 50 miles an hour?
This doesn't make any sense.
Like, you almost don't know what to do.
You just want to interrupt him and just badger and beat him down.
And when you do that, that gives into his, that's what he wants.
He wants chaos.
He wants you to be yelling at him so he can get out of there.
Yeah, when their administrations and their public servants behave like that, how they can't understand why people would be attracted to Donald Trump, who talks like a normal person, who says crazy, weird stuff all the time.
It's more complicated, but it's also really complicated when you find out that he holds patents on some of these drugs and he makes exorbitant amounts of profit off of these drugs.
And also, he was, when he was at the head, he was the guy that was responsible for giving out grants.