Lukas Nelson, Willie’s son, defies expectations with raw talent and discipline, tracing his musical purpose to Man’s Search for Meaning while critiquing media manipulation through songs like Turn Off the News. Sobriety post-pandemic sharpened his focus, aligning with his stripped-down album—Marcus Dowling’s whiskey-free listening session underscores its emotional clarity. Skeptical yet open-minded on remote viewing and Mars mysteries, he clashes with Joe Rogan’s interstellar survivalism, insisting Earth’s environmental crises demand priority. Their debate ties psychedelics to nature reconnection, contrasting AI’s energy drain with regenerative farming solutions. Nelson’s charity, Music Heals International, proves his belief in direct human impact over abstract fixes, while Rogan’s fitness philosophy—gradual, disciplined progress—mirrors their shared emphasis on resilience. Concluding with UFOs and institutional distrust, they urge deeper engagement with art and purpose amid societal fragmentation. [Automatically generated summary]
I gotta tell you, you know, when I heard Willie Nelson's kid plays music, there's a thing that you always do, and I have to admit it, you do it like when the son of a great man, you always assume, well, he's probably mediocre.
You know what I mean?
And then you performed at McConaughey's that charity function thing, and you fucking killed it, man.
And so in order to get close to him, I figured I needed to speak the same musical language.
And so I learned Young, and I wrote a song, Young, that's on the new album, actually, I got it.
It's called You Were It.
It's the first song I ever wrote when I was 11.
And my dad loved it so much that he covered it at the time, and he put it out on his album back in 2004 called It Always Will Be.
The album was called It Always Will Be.
And that gave me the confidence at a young age.
Chris Christofferson came up to me and he's like, man, you don't have a choice but to be a songwriter.
And so I had all this inspiration at a young age.
Kind of like an athlete at a certain point.
You kind of have to look at like, oh, well, if I have a talent at this, I have connections in the industry, I need to work like I was going to go to the Olympics on this because it's something that I can do that will make it so that I never have to rely on my family or my father for anything.
I think the, you know, Viktor Frankl has a book, a very famous book called Man's Search for Meaning.
And it's about Auschwitz, and he was an Auschwitz survivor, and he wrote about what was the common denominator in terms of people who persevered and survived in these camps.
And dignity and meaning were the common denominators generally.
And so finding what you mean in this life to yourself, it doesn't have to mean anything to anyone else.
And I think that's where, for me, I've lived my whole life trying to discover who I meant to myself so that at the moment of my death, I can look back and say, I did something that I enjoyed, that was meaningful, that gave me a sense of purpose.
You know, like there's a lot of sons of athletes, for instance, that live in their father's shadow, and very few of them ever rise to the level that their father was at.
I think for me, I was never trying to be as great as him.
I was only trying to be close to him.
Because more than anything, my father's a great human being.
He's a well-rounded, kind, empathetic human.
And I'm truly grateful to be his and my mother's son.
You know, because I have a good family.
I'm lucky.
That's awesome.
I have a good parent.
So what I was trying to do was just be closer to him.
And as a little kid, the best thing my mom ever did was when I was like earlier, I was probably five or six years old.
And my brother had just passed away not too long before this, actually.
And I would cry every time my dad would leave, you know.
And my mom sat me down one time and said, it tears him apart when you cry like this because he doesn't want to leave.
He's going out there.
He's making people happy.
He's giving people joy.
And he's doing what he came here on this earth to do.
And he's supporting this family.
And so the support that my mother had for him, at that moment, I never cried again.
I was able to let go of that idea and then just from that point on, work towards creating what would make me happy in my life and give me the same joy and then be able to take care of a family, hopefully.
You know, one of my greatest sources of pride is that I haven't had to ask my parents for anything.
I bought my own house.
I went and did Starsborn and I got, you know, I mean, I've been able to make myself a living and I think that makes my parents proud.
It makes my dad proud.
And that's what I've always wanted to do.
That's been my whole life is wanting to make them proud.
You know, I know a lot of people who have broken homes and grew up, and even I caught dad at a good time.
I mean, my dad was 55 or so when he had me, you know, and so he had already been through a lot of his demons and gotten through them and faced them, you know, and was still going through them at the time that I was born.
But he had come out of, you know, a life of habit and sort of formed the ones that would take him at that point to where he is now at 92 years old.
And so I got a good version of dad, you know, who had grown since.
And so, man, I'm the luckiest guy in the world.
I feel like I was able to be exposed to a lot of great music, a lot of great mentors, you know, in my life.
And I'm also lucky that I, at a young age, I'm grateful to my younger child, to myself as a young child for having the wisdom to say, all right, work hard now, forget about parties, forget about hanging out,
work hard eight hours, ten hours a day, practice your guitar, write all the time, sing all the time, so that when you get to a certain point in life, you'll have something to show for it, you know, something that you can leave behind that's yours.
The only thing I'll do now is mushrooms every once in a while to check in with myself and just kind of make sure that I'm like mushrooms is like taking a nice good hose to your soul and just kind of like you know clean out all the bullshit.
Well, that was the part of the conversation that we had.
You know, we're like, is there a thing that could really help the world?
And it sounds so cliche and hippie, especially someone who's never done mushrooms.
But I think that might be the thing.
You know, even if it's just like small doses, just a little something to alleviate anxiety, bring people closer together, make them understand that there's more to life than conflict and bullshit.
There was a Buddhist temple in a Buddhist temple right near where I was going to school at the time.
So after school every day, I'd sit with these monks.
And just the vibe of that is powerful, the chanting, the energy around that.
The presence, though, that they have, their whole goal, obviously, is to just be purely present.
And so while that sounds like a cliche, I truly believe that that's an important thing, to let go of the battle of positive and negative, that in the mental space, that's all that exists, is duality.
Being a part of your community, being a part of decisions that are made.
I think that's huge.
I think local communities are really important.
I think local town meetings, understanding where you're going, and understanding where your neighborhood is going and getting to know your neighbors, because it's really hard to have any hatred when you understand and know your neighbor.
You know what I mean?
And you know the people that are around you.
And so I think that, yeah, that's kind of where I come from.
I just think like, you know, it's important to get out there.
And I put my, I usually try not to stand on soap boxes, though, you know, man.
If I have something to say, I'll put it in my music, you know, and I'll put it out there.
You know, and build, you know, that's why I think regenerative farming is really important.
And trying to, and then, you know, voting for people that will support local agriculture and properly grown food and properly, you know, like sourced food.
And I think that really I'm just like I don't know where I stand on half the issues that are out there because I'm I'm I you know I see a lot of I have to sift through most of the bullshit to find it like so really where it ends up happening is that by the time I get to the voting booth I'm hoping that I'm properly informed.
It says Medicare Medicaid Services also announced successfully prevented over $4 billion from being paid in response to false and fraudulent claims and that it suspended or revoked the billing privilege of 205 providers in the month leading up to the takedown civil charges against 20 defendants for $14.2 million in alleged fraud, as well as civil settlements with over 106 defendants totaling at 34.3 million.
I do think it's important to know, but at the same time, what I do know is that there's a lot of marginalized communities, whether it's a class issue or it's a, you know, I just see that there's a lot of people who don't have a lot of money who are suffering.
I want to know what based on if I get conflicting information, I have to make a decision on which one's going to sway the decisions I make going forward.
It's tough.
It's not easy.
In this world, it's really not easy.
But back in the day, interestingly, I think they had more of an ability to manipulate us back in the day because we only had one or two sources of information.
Yeah, I think that, you know, I think the only thing that I think I worry about with that is that the pendulum swings so far in either direction in response to certain things.
in response to perceived censorship in one way, then it becomes...
And so I think that the censorship just continues to be like, okay, well, it just goes back and forth.
And so I have a hard time understanding, and that's why I don't really feel like I have an ability to form a proper opinion on a lot of this shit.
So Daryl is a musician, and Daryl, through the course of his travels, met, he told me the whole story.
The first guy he met, he didn't really believe him that the guy was actually in the KKK.
Daryl's a black man.
And so this guy pulls out his KKK membership card or whatever the fuck it is, right?
And he couldn't believe it, and he's like, Well, you're not like the other ones, and he's like, Well, what do you mean?
Do you know everyone that's black?
Like, what is this?
And so, he becomes friends with this guy, has dinner at his house, and then the guy gives him, over the course of their friendship, gives him his robe.
He says, I quit, man.
Obviously, what I'm doing is wrong because you're my best friend.
You know, like I love you, and so it can't be true that the black man is my enemy if you are such a cool person.
But they don't know until they're able to – I love a great example.
Paul Simon played a show in South Africa just after apartheid.
When he did the Graceland album, he went down there and he worked with local African musicians and created, in my opinion, one of the greatest albums of all time.
I mean, with Lady Smith Black Mambazzo doing the vocals on that, Vincent Nguini, the most incredible musicians.
And at the time, that was a culturally powerful thing because there's a show online.
You can watch it.
You should probably pull it up.
It's amazing.
There's like Paul Simon playing for tens of thousands of black and white people right after apartheid ends.
Or you may even be during apartheid.
And they're all dancing and bobbing up and down.
It's the most joyful thing ever.
Music is powerful.
It can bring people together.
But because what it does is it reaches everybody's heart and it cuts through all the bullshit, the mind stuff, you know, and everyone can relate to having their heart broken.
You know, maybe it happened for some at a young age.
Maybe it happened, maybe some people had their heart broken at age four to the point where they closed their hearts off nearly completely.
But even Darth Vader had a little bit.
You know what I mean?
Darth Vader, everyone forgets that Darth Vader, at the end of Star Wars, redeemed himself.
It's the Carl Jung, the archetype, right?
The dark knight of the soul, and then being able to come through that.
And like, and really, like, you know, and you can judge.
You can not want to be around, like, I think Carl Jung actually talks about, like, there are certain people and things that you can't allow to exist because they're dangers to everyone else.
But at the same time, you don't have to judge their humanity.
That's the thing about today's access to information is you could see so many different cautionary tales.
You could see so many different people that went down the absolute wrong road.
And you get to see them and you get to shine a light on them in this very strange time.
You get to see, like, this is, you could have been that person.
Anybody could have been that person.
We're so easily.
We have so many similarities.
All of us do.
And we have to recognize that your unique situation in life, your unique community, family, life experiences, all the things you've gone through that made you who you are today didn't have to be that way.
You could have been in the worst circumstances, and there's people that are in the worst circumstances, and they're a product of that.
When people, you know, ask, you know, and I'm a very lucky human.
So, like, I say all these things with hopefully the right perspective that I am as far as I'm in like the top 1% of the luckiest people, or probably even higher than that, you know, with access to clean water.
I don't have to worry about when I'm pulled over being shot.
I don't, you know, there's not, there are a lot of things that I can be very grateful for.
And so when I make comments about these things, you know, I can only come from my own perspective.
And, you know, to demonize people is that's the instinct, right?
That's how wars get started.
We other an entire group of humans, they're the other.
And I think this is tribal society behavior that developed because at one point in time, when you saw someone from another tribe that was invading, they were coming to steal your resources and kill people.
And again, that also, there's an exception to that in the sense that, like, for example, in Germany, you know, there were clear-cut decisions that people had to make about survival and about, you know, like, I'm sorry, but the Nazis had to go.
Mushrooms were made illegal during the Nixon administration because they wanted to figure out a way to stop the anti-war protests.
They wanted to figure out a way, they turned everything Schedule I. They took all the psychedelics and lumped them into a Schedule I because they wanted to go after civil rights activists and anti-war activists.
That was the main reason.
Like, this is the best way to lock these people up.
I mean, I think that, you know, right, because the thing is, is that there are a lot of studies about marijuana now that say, oh, it could be harmful, right?
That come out.
But then at the same time, the way that that's harmful and then comparatively to the other things that are legal and allowed to just propagate.
You get addicted to that feeling that you get You know, like Goggins, he talks about, you know, all carrot, no stick, right?
Or all stick, no carrot.
Can't remember which one it is.
Right?
But the thing is, is that for me, the reward is the high that I get from having discipline.
And I get a, it's a dopamine hit, you know, and it's just vastly more rewarding than whatever temporary thing I'll get from having a drink.
I don't know like drinking that much, but smoking weed was cool because it put me into a very creative spot and kind of gave me this surge of inspiration, if you will.
But it's bad for my lungs.
And there were a lot of ups and downs emotionally.
I'd get high and I'd get low and I'd get high and I'd get low.
And now this clarity that I have is just, it's incredible.
It's just this steady, you know, it's this steady sort of joy that I have, I mean, because I had to face myself too.
When you get clear, things come up and then you look at them and you're like, and things that maybe you didn't want to look at before.
Habits that you had or things in your past that you have to forgive yourself for, but you didn't really, they're like floating in the back of your mind as unfinished thoughts.
And so without it, all of that masking, I was able to sit and, I mean, look, I was able to sit and write this record, which is the most clear album I've ever, you know, I wanted to know who I was throughout the, without all the, you know, I didn't want to chase a six-minute guitar solo.
I didn't want to chase, I wanted to just figure out who I was stripped away from all that.
It's funny, there's this guy, Marcus Dowling.
He's a, he writes for the Tennessean, and I was sitting talking to him in Nashville.
And he said that when I put, he was ready to listen to my record, and he was about to have a whiskey.
And he, the first song comes up, and he puts his whiskey down.
He's like, oh, I don't want to drink for this.
And I think that music puts you in the state of mind that the artist is in when they recorded it or when they wrote it.
So it's kind of almost like interesting that he decided to put his drink down when he heard this album, like the first song, because that's where I'm at, you know.
And so I wonder if there's that feeling of like this kind of like, it's less of a jam-band thing and more of just like straight songs.
A lot of them, and that's again, that's a thing that I have to get over because I was around so many of them in LA that were fools that I just immediately associate acting with these empty vessels that are just struggling for attention and trying to say the things that they think will get them to the best spot.
I think that, look, I mean, to become an entertainer, there's a level of self-absorption that you have to sort of accept.
All right, I got a big ego.
Now, can I keep my ego in check for my whole life?
Like I think my dad has, you know.
I mean, I see my dad as a great example.
I see Paul Simon as a great example.
I see Neil.
I see these people that like that just are just artists through and through.
You know what I mean?
And for better or worse, not perfect people, but they are who they are.
And for the most part, I know my dad has an ego, but he has a good relationship with it because the ego is just the representation of who we are to the rest of the world.
Doing things you don't want to do can strengthen your brain, particularly the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, which is associated with willpower and tenacity.
That's incredible, the idea that it actually grows.
So willpower is not just, it's not like an airy fairy concept.
But here's the thing, is that it becomes a philosophical question because when you say you have to, you know, there are people who get by life, you know, and they, there is a Tibetan tradition that the monks do where they spend months and they take these little like flute things and they and they have colored sand, right?
And they all sit in a circle.
And it takes them months sometimes to create this beautiful, intricate sand art.
And they chant while they do it, and it's this most incredible thing.
And at the end, they go, and they blow it all away.
And it's meant to represent the impermanence of life.
But then it's meant to also pose the question, why make something so beautiful when it's going to be, when you know it's impermanent?
And I believe it goes back to the first thing we started talking about today, which is that meaning is everything in life.
And nothing really in life inherently has any meaning except the meaning we give it, right?
So you could go, you could go through life as sand on the beach that blows in the wind.
And it wouldn't really mean much when you blow one way or another.
But if you choose to give your life meaning and build a sand castle and make it as intricate and beautiful as you can and make it as detailed as possible, knowing that one day it's going to get washed away, the only person that it matters to is you and knowing that you did the best you could at that moment that the wave comes.
But I think it's an interesting question because something that lives in our subjective reality, if you see a video of that happening, and then you grasp the concept of it, and then that makes you consider that concept in yourself, understanding that the meaning is a subjective experience anyways, then now you understand, like, okay, it just causes one to ask the question to themselves.
And I think that's the purpose that the monks are, you know, they're there as sort of like, in a way, they're teachers, you know.
So they show you something that then you ask, you know, inside.
Well, that becomes readily apparent after you have a psychedelic experience.
I remember one of my first ones that I had, I realized when I was trying to describe it, like I'm trying to impress people with the way I use my words.
I was very aware.
I was like, oh, I'm trying to impress people with my grasp of language that I'm using to describe an experience.
Lorenzo from Psychedelic Salon, who had been on the podcast before back in the day, he's collected like the greatest assembly of McKenna, Alan Watts, Timothy Lee.
So it is psychedelic salon.com, and there's Lorenzo.
And Psychedelic Salon is like this incredible resource of all the McKenna lectures.
Because it's such a great resource, so many people who were there at like, you know, some talk that he gave in Hawaii at some conference room somewhere recorded it and then they would send that to Lorenzo and then he'd put it online and have it available for everybody.
And, you know, some amazing insights and conversations.
Because they're exploring space, obviously, if you don't know Star Trek, they're exploring space and their whole mission is to go where no man has gone before.
And so they find this probe, and as they're scanning the probe, it zaps Picard, and he goes unconscious, and he wakes up on this world where he remembers the spaceship.
He remembers where he was, but he's got a wife and a family and kids, and this world is being threatened by an exploding sun.
And so he's got a lot of scientific knowledge.
So he, over the next 20 years in this world, he eventually grows old and accepts his fate that he has no idea how he got here, but he's got to live this life now.
And he starts to love his wife and his kids.
He starts to try and save this planet from the exploding sun.
He ends up not being able to.
And then as he dies, he wakes up back on the spaceship with only 20 seconds having gone by on the spaceship.
And the probe had been sent by that civilization.
They knew they were going to be destroyed, so they uploaded this thing that would let Picard experience what happened to their civilization and tell their story.
Wow.
And he did it.
He experienced a lifetime of 40 years or 25, whatever years before he died in the span of 20 seconds and then woke up at the moment of his death in that other life and then was able to now tell the story of this forgotten civilization in space.
And one of the reasons why I say that is like they found recent, they've recently found structures on Mars that are so obviously man-made that it's almost impossible to deny.
I showed it to Elon, and he's like, oh, we should go look at it.
When I looked up remote viewing, for example, and I really looked and did research on it, the studies that were done were kind of discredited about how the effectiveness of those actually were.
So if you really dive in, there's literature that says that it wasn't really the reason that they, you know, apparently, now this is all like conflicting information.
I just know that when I looked up UFO experiences and this disclosure stuff that's happening lately and I'm a huge, I'm not just a believer.
I pray that there is someone out there disarming nuclear missiles, especially right now.
My great hope is that there is someone just trying to not step in, but oversee it to the point where hopefully we can survive to a point of having an interstellar civilization.
That's the thing is that, and that's what I, I was always, even before Elon was as famous as he is now, when I was like 15, I read his book.
And the one thing that I, I'm a friend of He read, it was like a book about him, maybe.
Okay.
And I don't remember.
But what I really wanted the focus to be on was, let's put all these resources into getting this planet right first.
Let's put everything we have.
And, you know, it felt at the time like, okay, well, yes, we're spending all this money to go off and maybe we're hopeless.
It's possible that we're hopeless.
And it sounds like that's where they err on this.
You know, it's like, oh, well, humanity on Earth is just over.
We just have to go somewhere else.
But then if we go somewhere else, we're just going to do the same thing, like you're saying.
So like all of the resources, in my opinion, should be focused on like, like there's devices that they have invented that can be put in river mouths around the world to filter out pollution and plastics going into the ocean, right?
And it's like this incredible technology.
If the budgets were spent towards these innovations, you know, and maybe AI will help it.
You know, right now AI is kind of a tax on the planet in terms of like, you know, it's not very good for it.
But maybe the AI technology itself will then invent something that makes itself more efficient for the planet.
And so, but what AI may do is help us create an ion battery or something that like that like makes energy give off less, you know, you can have this much more energy with way less heat and way less.
And so then you can create, you know, instead of having to have giant warehouses full of servers, you can have just, you know, like, I mean, like, it's the same stuff that happened with the computer, where the computer required a giant building when it was first created.
And now you have computers smaller than a Just to be clear, Elon's position is not that Earth is like, that humans are helpless or hopeless and we have to just leave Earth.
It's not that.
It's that life is so fragile here because of the possibility, not just of us fucking it up, but of natural disasters.
And that we need to become interstellar in order to propagate life and to survive.
And so we can carry on this growth that we're involved in as a human species.
Because there's, I mean, they just, what was the number that they just found?
A bunch of new asteroids?
Like, the possibility of us being hit by a near-Earth object is extremely high over the next X amount of hundreds of years.
It's extremely high.
And these things might not wipe everything out, but they'll start civilization all over again.
They'll bring us back to cave people.
So the idea was that the more places that we are, the more likelihood that the human race survives.
No, but the lions, everyone who, all the natural world works cyclically.
The way that the lion kills the gazelle and the way that the alligator takes the tourists.
Yeah, exactly.
Everything works with balance in nature.
You have just enough give and take.
It's worked that way for years.
And then, yes, extinctions, events happen, and then things die out.
But there has never been a creature on the planet with the ability like we have to take as much resource as we can without replenishing that or balancing that out.
So we, I think, have a responsibility as humanity to understand how to balance ourselves and harmonize with nature.
And I think that's where my great hope is, is that we figure out how to find a cyclical arrangement with nature where we, just like photosynthesis, just like plants give us oxygen and then the carbon dioxide we breathe and the plants then sequester.
And I think that these monsters that were trying to silence the anti-war and the civil rights movement in the 1970s by making those things illegal, they essentially hampered our development, but not all of it, right?
So our technological development continued, but our spiritual development ceased.
And the thing that I've learned that was the best lesson I learned, it goes back to why I am sober now and where I'm at, is because I think the greatest lie I ever believed for so long, I did 15 years on the road, 250 shows a year.
And I told myself I had to live like my heroes in order to be, you know, and I think that's what, it didn't kill Stevie Ray, but it derailed him for a long time before he got sober.
Some of the best conversations I've ever had have been in like Ubers or Lyfts or whatever, just sitting and chatting about where they're from and how they got there.
And there's a lot of incredible stories that perseverance.
You know, there's something like, there's something that just makes people, I think, really drop their defenses when you submit yourself with humility to learn their language.
You got to wonder, like, what caused them to develop that kind of language, you know?
It's like they're all developing it in a vacuum, right?
Because they're all the people in that area, in that community, generation after generation after generation, all agree to communicate in this certain way.
Well, and I think, I'm not certain, but Dean Martin had a specific, and it may have been Sicilian or maybe a specific Northern Italian or Napoli, maybe it's certainly.
But the way that he would sing Domenico Modugno's song, you know, volare tenso que un sonio cosino ne toni ma pio.
But it's just weird, you know, to just accept that they're human beings because you see them on television, you see them in all these things, and you grow to realize, like, oh, we're all just human beings.
And that's part of the lesson of it is to meet someone who you don't think is just a human being.
And you realize, like, oh, all of us are human beings.
I mean, and when I think that I was able to understand fame and its trappings at a young age, and that's something I'm also very grateful for, that I, you know, I was able to see, like, okay, a lot of dad's friends, a lot of the people that I grew up around, didn't make it very long because they got into this or they got into that.
And I see it all happening a lot to a lot of young people that are unable to handle fame.
I think it's actually probably a net negative, although it's a necessary thing if you want your art to get out to as many people as possible or if you want to create a living.
Like, I don't depend on my parents, so I want my music to get out there so that I'll have a career when I'm 90.
I want to be playing, you know, I don't want to, I don't, I mean, eventually I have to keep making a living, you know.
I have to, you think there's a part of you that, you know, part of the entertainment world where you have to make sure, you have to put yourself out there.
And that's kind of despite knowing that when you put yourself out there, then all the, you know, that you get unwanted attention too.
I think one of the worst things about it is the scammers on the internet.
There's so many scammers now on Instagram and Facebook and everyone, and they prey on elderly people.
And they go out there, and these people are, I think they're the lowest form on this planet, really.
Because these are people that have dementia issues.
They have, you know, they're elderly, you know, and they prey on that demographic specifically because they know that they're more gullible and don't understand technology.
And they think that I'm talking to them and they'll give, in some cases, thousands and thousands of dollars of their own savings in my name.
And that has almost made me get off the internet many times.
But even so, what happens when I get off is then they just run rampant.
You know, they create new accounts and then the people that are, you know, sort of, and they don't want to believe it's not me.
Well, these people are, in some cases, schizophrenic, or they have Alzheimer's or dementia or memory issues or whatever.
But a lot of times they're just being catfished, you know, or just like, you know, like, I mean, I've seen, there is that show Catfish that was on TV not too long ago.
I don't know if it's still around, but like these are otherwise sort of normal people that get tricked into believing they're in a relationship and they have a girlfriend and they're online and they get to the place.
And these are like sometimes younger people that even get – For sure.
Like, one time, me and my friend Brian, we went on this hunting trip with my friend Steve Ranella to this island in Alaska.
And we were there for a week, getting rained on every day.
It was miserable.
Just freezing, shivering every day for a week.
Then I came back to L.A. and the sun felt so good.
It never felt that good.
I've been living in L.A. for 25 fucking years.
It never felt that good.
But I appreciated the sun.
Why did I appreciate the sun?
Because I had just been rained on for a week.
I had taken it for granted.
This beautiful, amazing sunlight that I just go, oh, it's a fucking sunny day.
Where's my sunglasses?
Let me drive to work and get inside real quick because it's too fucking bright out.
But because of the rain for a week of rain, I really felt it.
And I remember calling my friend Steve.
I have never been happier.
And that's why, is because it sucked for a week.
And I think you need that.
I think you need shitty people so that you appreciate good people.
And I think when you meet someone who's gaslighty and someone who tries to ruin your life, those people exist so that you can appreciate people that aren't like that.
I feel like I think the people, and I've read this, that the people who actually sort of drink and become happy or the life of the party or whatever are the ones who are more likely to become addicted, obviously.
You know, because there are two types of people that when they drink, like for me, when I drink, it kind of makes me think more and I get kind of depressed and I get kind of down.
It's important that you don't let your emotions be manipulated.
I think that's one of the great lessons in this wild world that we're in.
I mean, that's what I try the most.
That's why I try not to make concrete statements unless I know at least where I err on is like, okay, this is the compassionate thing to support or do.
I have a charity that I work with called Music Heals International.
And it's a music school in Haiti, in Venezuela, in India.
I think there's a presence here too.
And it's just, I know that I can, in concrete, create ways, make someone's life more joyful on a face-to-face basis.
David Blaine was telling me about, I met David Blaine one time, and he's a cool guy.
Very cool guy.
And we were discussing that it's almost more powerful to be at a hospital and go and talk to the kids that you're supporting in this hospital rather than to donate to that hospital.
I think there's just something so spiritually significant about being with the people that you're helping and the joy in that being reciprocated and that feeling of being at the, you know, just giving is joy, you know, ultimately.
I think that's a really cool thing.
You know, like there's a great quote, a man slept and dreamt that life was joy.
Here's what I think about Los Angeles is Los Angeles is like the cave in Star Wars, an Empire Strikes Back.
And when Luke asks Yoda, what's in there, and he says, only what you take with you.
Because you can go to LA and find any type of energy.
You can go to LA and find any type of person.
There's groups of really amazing people, and there's groups of people who are lost, you know.
And there's different areas, and there's different places where these different types of people congregate.
But LA is a very powerful place.
It's a lot of moving place, you know, and I prefer to be in places that there's less movement.
I live in Maui.
I have my friends in Maui.
My best buddy, Matt Miola, is a professional surfer, and he's a bow hunter.
And my friend Ollie works construction.
And when I go home to Maui, I like a simple life.
They're all fishermen.
I like to go out there and that's how I want to raise my kids.
I want to be out there in nature.
I want to be giving and taking with the land.
And I want to be able to understand the planet that I live on by working with the earth and working with, and that community in Maui there is a really special place.
Other than, you know, yeah, I mean, anywhere there's nature, but I really like, being in the mountains of Montana and being on Hawaii, there's only a few places in life that I actually am sad when I leave.
Like I get really upset when I leave.
You know, it's like breaking up with someone, you know, when you have to leave.
And I hear like when I was 11, I wrote this song called You Were It.
And I was on the school bus and I started hearing this song in my head.
And I realized that it hadn't been written yet.
It was something that was coming from, I guess, my own experiences, but also filtered through somewhere else.
It felt like it came from somewhere, like it was a download.
And I think that I look at writing as if there's a beautiful muse sitting there, and she's giving me these gifts every once in a while, and that she sends them to me.
And if I'm open and clear and not in my own way, and I'm, you know, if I get like something that hits me, like a clever line, like there's a song I have called Find Yourself, and I hope you find yourself before I find somebody else to be my love.
And I start singing that in my head, and I start like, oh, the melody comes, and it's a gift.
And wherever I'm at, if I got one right now, I'd have to write it down while we were talking.
You know what I mean?
I have to sit down.
I'll be like, hold on, let's write a song.
But I try not to, I can't force her to send me because they're gifts.
And it's like my dad always says, like waiting for the rain to fill up the well.
You can't force the rain to come.
You just have to wait.
And the real stuff comes when you just allow yourself to receive it.
It's like these ideas are out there, but you're so in your own head and so worried about yourself and your own bullshit that sometimes like you block them.
I think a lot of people get caught up in like, well, you know, like this latest record, you know, people, like, I didn't want to be too flowery with it.
I wanted to write simply what came to me.
And sometimes the songs are simple.
And I think that simplicity for some people can be like, oh, well, what about the intricate arrangements?
And what about the long jams and the exploration?
Like, that's not what came to me.
And I can't cater to those people.
Right now, where my heart is, is Zen.
I'm trying to be as simple as I can be in terms of just only putting out what comes to me at the moment.
And sometimes people aren't going to like it because they're used to me rocking and jamming and doing all that or they're used to me doing that.
But that'll come back.
It'll come back around.
There's a time and a place for everything.
And right now, I have to be open to it as it comes, not as I want it to be or as I think other people will want it to be.
And I prefer, I mean, when I listen to my heroes, you know, Hank Williams, Dad, Merle Haggard, Stevie Ray and Jimmy are, look, what came to Jimmy was an explosion of color and sound.
I mean, when I hear his music, I see colors that are like I can't even describe in real life.
It might have something to do with the psychedelics that I also took.
But at the same time, I think that other people— And that's the thing, is that he, it goes back to what we're saying, like the state of mind that he was in.
So when you, it works on both Android and on iPhones.
Yeah.
But when you make a voice note, it can transcribe it now.
So like what I'll do is I'll record sets.
And sometimes we do this show at the Comedy Mothership called Bottom of the Barrel where you have like a whiskey barrel and inside is all suggestions from the audience.
You just put your hand in there and pick out a piece of paper and pull it out.
Yeah, it's pretty dope because you can just talk and it'll transcribe it, and then you can copy and paste that transcription into voice note or into notes.
If it's a song that requires focus on the lyrics, you know, then sometimes it feels weird because a lot of people, when they listen to music, they don't hear a lot of lyrics.
It takes a certain type of listener to listen to lyrics and be able to internalize them.
A lot of people take the song as a whole and the melody and they hear it and they're like, oh, this song makes me feel good.
And then later on, if they like the song, they'll go in and listen to the lyrics.
I've found a lot of people listen to music that way.
And then it takes them a while to actually hear what, you know, unless it's a stripped down me and a guitar with no band around.
And then it forces the listener to then listen to the words, you know, which I actually, I really like doing that.
Sometimes I like just playing just me because then there's no distraction around and it's sort of just me, a guitar, and the words that I'm saying.
And I think they have more impact sometimes that way.
And Stephen Wilson Jr., not only is he a great writer, he used to be a food scientist.
So he was a food scientist and he wrote songs kind of as a hobby on the side, but he was responsible for what percentage of what sort of goes into making dog food and things like that.
I mean, you have to look at, I mean, there's a lot of exercise scientists that I'm sure would have arguments one way or the other, which is interesting.
And it also depends on what kind of exercise you're doing.
You know, are you a weightlifter or are you a marathon runner?
You know, because we had Courtney Dowalter on the podcast once, and she does ultra marathons.
And, you know, my friend Cam Haynes, who also does ultra marathons, says she's one of the toughest human beings he's ever met in his fucking life and she exists on sugar.
She eats like candy and drinks beer.
Like it's not, she's not like formed in a lab.
Like whatever willpower that she has that allows her to, you know, she's beaten people where she does like these 250 mile runs where the second place person is like eight hours behind her.
And apparently, you know, they would also run, which was interesting, they would run happily.
They would have smiles on their faces and they'd be light.
And they said that that helped them sort of lightly grace themselves through the mindset that they had when they ran helped them to outperform everyone else.
Well, it's like you can get a knee replacement now, right?
And you'll be in significantly less pain.
But once science comes around, well, they're getting closer and closer every day to be able to completely regenerate cartilage, meniscus, and all that tissue that you have inside your knee that keeps it healthy.
If you decide that you want to get a knee replacement, that kind of stops all that because now you have an artificial knee and you can't regrow a knee once you've cut your knee out.
You know what I did, which I loved, is that really helped me was wherever I would walk, just in general, I would just do a little like jog instead of walking somewhere.
He thinks that they're not visiting from somewhere else, that they've always been here, and that there's some sort of spiritual aspect to like the UFO encounter, UAP phenomenon.
Ryan Graves, he's another fighter pilot, and that was off the East Coast.
So the Nimitz is off the coast of San Diego.
But off the East Coast, they upgraded their sensors in 2014 on the fighter jets and then immediately started encountering these things that defied known physics that were in the sky.
And these guys had these encounters with these things that were like a cube inside of a sphere that's like motionless at 120 knot winds and no heat signature moving through the sky.
I just am curious as to what in 25 years, based on the technology that we've been able to see that makes it to the modern society, how much is held back and what we don't see.
It just interests me.
And I don't know.
I don't have an answer.
I'm not asking myself whether I actually believe that it's almost unlikely that we have that technology, because I feel like it would just take so much more than we may be capable of to cover it up.
Yeah, well, there may be sort of just, you know, trillions of alternate sort of, you know, momentum shifts in the outside protective layer that balance out whatever's happening on the inside to the point where, you know, they're using just crazy technology.
When I was in Maui, twice I've seen something that I could not explain.
The one time I looked up and about nine of us were hanging out and we all looked up at the same time to see an orange orb.
And it was probably, it looked like it was 100 yards away, maybe 200, just floating, kind of observing.
And then I swear it seemed like as soon as enough people saw it, it went whoosh, and then it went whoosh, and it moved like nothing else I thought possible at the time.
It went out of the atmosphere.
And it was crazy, faster than any drone.
And this was back in like 2004, 2003, five, maybe.
We were all young.
I was maybe a little teenager, so it was probably like 2006, but it was like, it was crazy.
And another one, I was out on Lanai, and we were hanging out with some friends, and we were laying down on the lawn, and when you're out in Lanai on the backside of Lanai, there's no light pollution at all.
And so you have just this big, giant fishbowl of stars, and it's the most incredible.
And you feel that you're on spaceship Earth at the time, you know, like you are on that rock hurtling through space at that point.
And I saw this, we all, it scared the girls.
We all saw this pulsing colored thing go from one side of the horizon to the other, but in a very, like, it was like pulsing different colors, and it was like really interesting.
And so, you know, who knows what that could have been, but it was quite interesting.
And so this is the theory is that if you were going to set up a base here to observe human beings, if you came from somewhere else, you would probably do it in the ocean, especially if you have the kind of technology that allowed them to travel here from other star systems would also allow them to not be intimidated whatsoever.
Or are they doing something that allows them to not interact with any physical thing on Earth?
Like, some sort of a void that they travel through.
So they can go through the trees.
This is like part of Jacques Valley's research, too, in one of his books that was really fascinating was this woman observed this like egg-shaped thing.
And when it took off, it went through the trees.
But it didn't hurt the trees.
But it was on the ground, like as a physical object.
You know, where you're just like warping space and time around a centralized location.
You sort of have to be, you know, use sort of the, you know, these different sort of exotic forms of matter and having an understanding of exotic matter, which we're now just starting to understand that there are these exotic matter types that, you know, that work in these weird ways.
But as we, if you read about it now, the only information available is that we're only cracking the surface of the understanding of these types of matter and hundreds of thousands of years away from understanding that.
But yeah, I mean, if you're looking at something from a thousand years from now, it would seem like magic.
I mean, if we continue, we don't blow ourselves up and science and AI continue to figure out more compelling uses of universal energy, like whatever background energy that we have.
Who knows?
Who knows what human beings will be capable of?
So you've got to imagine if something's visiting us from somewhere else, especially if they have artificial superintelligence.
If they've traversed this journey that we're on, if they've gotten to the point where whatever we're currently investigating, whatever they're working on right now in terms of super intelligent AI, what if they've gone through that and they're a thousand years more advanced?
All that stuff would be probably simple for them to be able to go through the water, to have these trans-medium crafts that are capable of flying in the air, through the water.
Well, the interesting question for ourselves is how do we get to a place as a society to where we can trust in our science, we can trust to say that we trust it enough to fund it.
And so understanding and trusting and figuring out how to restore faith in certain institutions that we have because we need them to survive and to keep going.
So it's like not tearing down the airplane while it's falling.
You have to repair the airplane from inside and then keep it flying if you can.
So is there a way to write the ship while we're in it?
I'm like, how do we switch it so that we can have people in power that really are looking out for the future of humanity and then have people that actually want that?
Because some people are going to have to take sacrifices for that.
And I mean, people high up are going to have to say, well, I'm going to have to get paid a little less because this, you know.