Stay Free - Russel Brand - Science, Spirituality and the Nature of Reality — SF694
Aired: 2026-03-20
Duration: 01:09:47


=== Moving Beyond Fake News (05:33) ===

[00:00:07]  Ladies and gentlemen, Russell Brandon trying to bring real journalism to the American people.
[00:00:17]  Hello there, you Awakening Wonders.
[00:00:18]  Thanks for joining me today for Stay Free with Russell Brand.
[00:00:21]  I'm on a mission.
[00:00:22]  You would love to know what it is because it involves saving people.
[00:00:26]  It's important, it's vital, and it's part of what drives us and motivates us as we move to a new phase and a new stage.
[00:00:32]  Today, therefore, I'm going to be showing you not only this.
[00:00:36]  The stuff that used to make me crazy doesn't touch me.
[00:00:38]  It's not that I'm so great, just I'm well-trained.
[00:00:41]  But also this.
[00:00:42]  If anyone says to me, this is what shouldn't be questioned.
[00:00:45]  Fuck that.
[00:00:46]  No, that's, I'm, no, no, let's question it.
[00:00:49]  And would you believe there's even going to be a little bit of that?
[00:00:52]  I fake my death in front of my fans.
[00:00:57]  Like young fans.
[00:00:58]  I fake my death.
[00:00:59]  So stay with us.
[00:00:59]  And if you're watching this anywhere other than Rumble or Rumble Premium, please get over here.
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[00:01:05]  We do our show Crack On, where we talk about addiction and healing people from addiction and your support in our incredible mission.
[00:01:10]  By the way, give this little guy a shot because it's fueling me.
[00:01:15]  No more lonely nights, baby.
[00:01:17]  No more lonely nights.
[00:01:19]  Thanks for joining us.
[00:01:20]  And please enjoy this extraordinary content.
[00:01:24]  I bet you didn't know that this happened.
[00:01:28]  We live in a time, I feel, in my country and yours, where there's this sort of, I have sensed a lot of condemnation and criticism of what I might describe as ordinary working people, a kind of offhandedness of like, oh, they're dumb.
[00:01:42]  They're voting for Brexit.
[00:01:43]  They're voting for Trump.
[00:01:45]  I don't like it.
[00:01:46]  And I don't like to hear it because of my own experiences and my own upbringing, which I'll happily testify are not nearly so dramatic as yours there.
[00:01:55]  But like in terms of where I sit in a class grid, it's, you know, like I'm, and I spend enough time with people that are being described in this manner to feel ill at ease with it.
[00:02:06]  How do you feel about like that kind of judgment?
[00:02:10]  How do you feel?
[00:02:11]  When you talk about these values that you were describing earlier, do you feel that there is a way of meshing together these apparently disparate groups now, these liberal professional classes and these what you might describe as working ordinary people of any color or variety?
[00:02:28]  That's my hope.
[00:02:29]  I do think so because what the work I've got to do is defining the science behind why they're valuable, the science behind why they work, the science behind why that doesn't mean you have to now come over.
[00:02:44]  And it doesn't mean that you're coming over to the proverbial other side.
[00:02:51]  I say this, you know, I say, I'll meet you in the middle.
[00:02:55]  I actually think that is more of a dare right now than it's ever been.
[00:03:01]  That spot again is not like, oh, no, not going there.
[00:03:04]  Somebody said to me that it's, oh, yeah, meet you in the middle.
[00:03:06]  You know, you know, it's in the middle of the road, McConaughey.
[00:03:09]  Yellow lines and dead armadillos.
[00:03:12]  I said, let me tell you something, but I said, I'm walking down the yellow line right now and the armadillos are running free, having a great time.
[00:03:19]  I said, you know why?
[00:03:21]  I said, the other two sides, the two vehicles on either side of the political aisle are so far apart, their fucking tires aren't even on the pavement anymore.
[00:03:30]  I mean, so trust me, it's free over here.
[00:03:33]  There's plenty of room, you know?
[00:03:34]  And I almost feel like it's a move to say, no, let's get aggressively centric.
[00:03:41]  I dare you.
[00:03:42]  It's not a recession.
[00:03:44]  It's an aggressive move.
[00:03:45]  And if it's framed like that, one, I think that can relate to a lot of people on the right of going, oh, you dared me?
[00:03:54]  You know, it's like this COVID thing.
[00:03:56]  It's like, I had to go, whoa, this enemy doesn't want hand-to-hand combat.
[00:04:03]  Don't run out in the street with your gun and knives to try and fight this one.
[00:04:06]  That's what he wants.
[00:04:07]  You know what I mean?
[00:04:08]  It's actually an aggressive move to actually stay home.
[00:04:11]  You know what I mean?
[00:04:12]  But it had to be reframed in a little bit.
[00:04:15]  Look, on the other side, on the far left that would go, well, who do, there is a lot on that illiberal left that absolutely condescend, patronize, and are arrogant towards that other 50%.
[00:04:29]  Many people were in, I'm sure you saw it in our industry when Trump was voted in four years ago.
[00:04:38]  They were in denial that it was actually, that was real.
[00:04:42]  And some of them were in absolute denial.
[00:04:45]  And even now, we're going to see how we can stabilize coming out of, looks like Biden's our guy.
[00:04:54]  Well, now you've got the right that's in denial because that's fake news.
[00:04:59]  And I understand they've been fed fake news.
[00:05:01]  No one knows who the hell to believe, right?
[00:05:03]  So they're putting down their last bastion of defense.
[00:05:09]  So, you know, that left has to see, this is the, this is, this is, I want to stay on topic, but this is where the left misses it for me, just as far as being a marketeer of a political side.
[00:05:28]  You, when you say, hey, we want to get out the vote, we want people to go be able to go vote.
[00:05:32]  We're going to do a campaign to let people vote.
[00:05:35]  I'm like, 100%.
[00:05:37]  Yes, everyone.
[00:05:38]  Is there anyone who would say no to that?

=== The Science of Values (05:44) ===

[00:05:41]  That's universal.
[00:05:42]  You have 100% of the audience going, I'm in.
[00:05:45]  That's a constitutional right as an American.
[00:05:47]  I'm in.
[00:05:47]  Yes.
[00:05:48]  And then they can't help themselves.
[00:05:49]  At the very end of it, they go, so we don't let those criminal bastards get back.
[00:05:56]  And Austin going, you're like, no, don't say the last part.
[00:06:01]  You lost 50% of your audience.
[00:06:04]  And that's, you know, part of why so much of the nation of that 50% looks at us in Hollywood as like going, oh, yeah, another celebrity over there on the West Coasters and the elite in the Northeast.
[00:06:16]  And that's what y'all say, because even from just a sales point of view, don't tab that got you on the end.
[00:06:23]  And then you have a twice, your audience is twice as big and you're getting what you want.
[00:06:29]  Even you're getting twice as much as what you, you're getting double two times as much as you would if you just didn't tab on that little stick it to them at the end.
[00:06:40]  It's going to be have to, the left is going to have to understand the science of the values and the meets in the middle.
[00:06:47]  The left will have to understand, okay, I understand I can add this up neurologically, scientifically.
[00:06:53]  I see a, you know, I see the supply.
[00:06:56]  I understand the demand.
[00:06:57]  I see the credit sheet.
[00:06:58]  I see the numbers.
[00:06:59]  The numbers work out.
[00:07:01]  It's scientific because it's got to be more than just feel good.
[00:07:04]  I believe there is science to it.
[00:07:06]  I need to still work on what is that measurement of those values.
[00:07:11]  Is that measurement that, say, if I pilot city, my first pilot city is Austin, Texas, is that measurement?
[00:07:17]  A friend of mine said this the other day, is a possible measurement that 10 years down the road, Austin is the B Corp capital headquarters of the world.
[00:07:25]  That's pretty, that'd be a pretty cool measurement.
[00:07:27]  What's the crime rate?
[00:07:29]  What's the divorce rate?
[00:07:31]  What's the rate of how happy our employers are?
[00:07:36]  Can we have a place where businesses also have the same values that Austin, Texas has businesses that have the highest rate of happiness, percentage of happiness for employers that work for somebody?
[00:07:46]  So I'm working out those measurements with the value campaign.
[00:07:52]  And if I can get those, that's something measurable that I can hand you in the elevator pitch and go, here's what I'm talking about.
[00:07:57]  Yeah, that's that's very cool.
[00:08:00]  And even within that, this suggestion of alternative metrics is the idea that our entire way of measuring what is valuable has been biased to such an alarming degree that it's created this kind of chasm of mistrust.
[00:08:20]  Everyone knows that if you can't participate economically in this system, you are not valuable.
[00:08:25]  You will not be heard.
[00:08:27]  I think that's fascinating because it sort of does seem in that the type of economic and social systems that we're currently living within are experiencing a sort of end game.
[00:08:36]  And people are reluctant to hear alternatives and what that might look like.
[00:08:41]  So I think it's, yeah, that sounds real bold work, Matthew, to look into the metrics.
[00:08:46]  What do we, especially in America, tell you you're successful for?
[00:08:49]  What do we give you a praise on the back?
[00:08:51]  What gets you the front seat, the best seat at the table to the front of the line?
[00:08:56]  Fame and money.
[00:08:57]  Fame and money.
[00:08:59]  Boom.
[00:09:00]  You know, there we go.
[00:09:02]  That's one in two.
[00:09:04]  You know, so, you know, there's a, there's, there was a, like 10,000 young 13-year-old girls were interviewed.
[00:09:16]  There was a poll.
[00:09:19]  This is about, I think, 10, 12 years ago.
[00:09:23]  So what, you know, what do you want to do when we be famous?
[00:09:28]  How are you going to get famous?
[00:09:30]  I think over 30% of the answers was, I'm going to make a sex tape.
[00:09:34]  Wow, fucking hell.
[00:09:36]  Now, come on now.
[00:09:37]  I think we can all agree on both sides.
[00:09:39]  Hey, now, wait a minute.
[00:09:40]  We got our values eskewed about what people will do to get there.
[00:09:46]  Again, it's short money.
[00:09:47]  It's today with social media.
[00:09:52]  I raise myself up momentarily.
[00:09:55]  I feel my ego momentarily if I put you down.
[00:09:59]  Meaning, not because we're a nation, we're a world that cheers louder when our opponent misses a shot than we are happy when we make a shot.
[00:10:12]  That's not the way forward.
[00:10:13]  I think we can see that one is affirmative, one's contradictory.
[00:10:18]  One is checking in with self and going, yes, I have an innate ability.
[00:10:24]  I worked at it.
[00:10:25]  I was in the moment.
[00:10:26]  I made the shot.
[00:10:27]  Yes, I can look in the mirror and go, you're responsible for that, as well as a whole bunch of other people.
[00:10:32]  But we don't forget that one.
[00:10:34]  Let's just rubberneck.
[00:10:36]  Let's just rubberneck through life and sit there and just go, yeah, look, they wrecked.
[00:10:40]  Yeah.
[00:10:41]  That's short money.
[00:10:43]  That's not ROI.
[00:10:44]  That's not, that's a battery-powered green light.
[00:10:46]  That ain't a solar-powered green light.
[00:10:48]  That's in a little two-volt battery.
[00:10:50]  It's going to dim real quick and you're going to need another fix.
[00:10:53]  Someone else to put down, someone else to down thumb, someone else to comment, someone else to snide.
[00:10:58]  It's that, person.
[00:10:59]  We've all done it.
[00:11:00]  I've been this guy before.
[00:11:01]  The person at the party who gets everyone together and tells you this great thing, little inside joke on Leslie over there, Johnny over there, that they wouldn't say in front of them because it's kind of dirt.
[00:11:11]  And in the moment, we all laugh our ass off because it was a great joke.
[00:11:16]  But then when we walk away, we inherently lose respect for that guy.
[00:11:21]  It's short money.
[00:11:24]  It's never bothered me.

=== Craving Oneness and Mystery (11:50) ===

[00:11:25]  It's never someone believe in God has never bothered me.
[00:11:28]  It's what do you do with it?
[00:11:30]  If you start saying to me, you know, I love this prophet or that prophet.
[00:11:35]  I love God.
[00:11:35]  I'll go, fine, yeah.
[00:11:37]  And I do this and I believe I'm great.
[00:11:39]  Yeah, put it.
[00:11:40]  And I think we should throw homosexuals off buildings.
[00:11:42]  Well, no, now we've got to talk.
[00:11:46]  Now we've got to talk, right?
[00:11:49]  Just, you know.
[00:11:51]  So it's when there's suddenly an agenda that coincidentally favors the person, you know, it's when people have exactly luckily, God agrees with them.
[00:12:02]  Dogma is the problem.
[00:12:03]  I think dogma is the real problem.
[00:12:06]  It's not just in religion anymore.
[00:12:08]  It's creeping into everything.
[00:12:10]  It's creeping into politics and it's creeping, you know, identity politics.
[00:12:14]  It's creeping into just social structures and opinions.
[00:12:20]  It's, it's, you know, if anyone says to me, this is what shouldn't be questioned, fuck that.
[00:12:26]  No, let's, I'm, no, no, let's question it.
[00:12:29]  That's the red rag to evolve.
[00:12:31]  You know what?
[00:12:32]  Don't quit.
[00:12:32]  I've always been like that.
[00:12:34]  I've always met teachers.
[00:12:35]  Someone said that I'll always, even a board game, I think, what are the rules?
[00:12:39]  Can I get out of my wind within the rules?
[00:12:44]  Yeah.
[00:12:45]  I've gone on sort of like the opposite journey in that I feel like I started off atheistic just the same way that I would reject any attempt to impose regulation or control on me for the purposes of domination.
[00:12:57]  And as I've you know, gone through my own stuff with you know addiction and mental health or whatever it is.
[00:13:05]  And like I know that you're very like, you know, for example, afterlife is about legitimate grief as opposed to some kind of abstract idea of mental illness brought about by a hormonal or neurological balance.
[00:13:17]  But myself, my own sense of despair, particularly looking at it from a perspective of mental health issues and addiction, is that there is an unaddressed yearning for a kind of oneness togetherness.
[00:13:28]  And like, you know, to your point earlier about Brent, indeed, for love.
[00:13:33]  And when like you talk about that sense of awe of like the appreciation of an animal, the love of an animal and the sort of regard and gratitude for having an animal love you and care for you or the beauty of nature or the deep, deep beauty of the cosmos, what I feel like, and my own appreciation, understanding, stroke, belief in God is that there is a kind of in the love of it, in the awareness of rightness itself, there is an indication that there is such a thing as rightness.
[00:14:01]  Not that any one particular group or ideology has unique, a particular and special access to it.
[00:14:06]  And I really firmly, deeply believe that spirituality is for me, not for me to tell other people, boy, I don't reckon you should be gay, or I don't reckon you should be allowed to do it.
[00:14:17]  I feel like it's, I do my Bible, in the Bible, it says you should pray secretly.
[00:14:23]  Oh, wow.
[00:14:24]  So, yeah.
[00:14:25]  Yeah, like there is something sort of deeply private about it.
[00:14:27]  But I also think, Ricky, that there is a social consequence to, I don't necessarily want to say atheism because I completely agree with your point that there's good and bad, you know, in like beyond those kind of limited taxonomies.
[00:14:40]  But like, I do feel like when people think there's no purpose or meaning, that and that needn't necessarily be just because of a belief in God, but it creates cultures that are oddly materialistic, nihilistic.
[00:14:54]  And I feel like in the last 20 years, we're seeing more and more worship of self, worship of individuals.
[00:15:00]  Of course, there's a new narcissism, of course.
[00:15:02]  And I don't know why I think social media is partly to blame.
[00:15:08]  I think people being rewarded for bad behavior is partly to blame, you know, magazines or TV or whatever.
[00:15:16]  I did a speech in the big brother house as Andy Millman in Extras.
[00:15:20]  And again, that was at the beginning of it.
[00:15:23]  And now it's got worse.
[00:15:24]  But a couple of points.
[00:15:27]  I do think there's a people crave a oneness.
[00:15:30]  Even if we don't go about understanding about why we're here, because again, that's very human.
[00:15:34]  We're inquisitive.
[00:15:35]  We want to know why.
[00:15:36]  We want the answer why.
[00:15:37]  And some people don't accept, well, we don't know yet, but we're on the way.
[00:15:40]  They don't, they've got, no, well, that's no, you know, the God of the gaps.
[00:15:44]  We understand that.
[00:15:45]  Well, if I look, if you don't know, explain it, God did it.
[00:15:47]  Okay, well, it doesn't really solve anything.
[00:15:49]  Down to the, I put a joke in afterlife where Kat's bothering me, and she says, where did it all come from?
[00:15:56]  Somewhat from nothing.
[00:15:57]  And I go, well, where did it all come from?
[00:16:00]  Then God made it.
[00:16:01]  I go, okay, where did God come from?
[00:16:03]  She went, He's always been around.
[00:16:04]  I go, Simple as that, innit?
[00:16:06]  So, you know, it doesn't answer the question, but I get it.
[00:16:10]  And I think, I think, apart from people wanting there to be some sort of divine justice, because that would be great.
[00:16:19]  Good people would be rewarded, and bad people would be punished.
[00:16:22]  Brilliant.
[00:16:23]  Okay, it doesn't work like that.
[00:16:25]  You know, you only have to look at children in Africa being born with cancer.
[00:16:34]  We know that's not, we know mysterious ways isn't an explanation.
[00:16:39]  Okay.
[00:16:41]  That to me is someone who doesn't know the answer and says mysterious ways.
[00:16:45]  But apart from that, you're right.
[00:16:48]  We're seeking the answer.
[00:16:49]  Why are we here?
[00:16:51]  I think we think that, hold on, well, it's too good.
[00:16:54]  It's too good to be chance.
[00:16:57]  Everything's perfect.
[00:16:57]  Well, it seems that way.
[00:16:59]  You know, it's like Douglas Adams' puddle, you know, when it imagines this, I fit this whole perfectly.
[00:17:08]  But I think you're right.
[00:17:11]  We are scared and alone.
[00:17:13]  And the idea of death is horrible.
[00:17:17]  What you'll never exist again.
[00:17:19]  What was the point?
[00:17:22]  And again, I talk about this in Afterlife One, where I say, Kath's saying that if there's no heaven, why don't you kill yourself?
[00:17:37]  And I say, so if you're watching a really good film, but you know it's going to end, you might as well just stop it.
[00:17:42]  She went, no, because I'm going to watch it again.
[00:17:45]  And I say, I think that's the amazing thing about life.
[00:17:47]  You can't watch it again.
[00:17:49]  You know, one day you'll hug your mum for the last time.
[00:17:53]  You'll smell your last flower.
[00:17:55]  You'll eat your last meal.
[00:17:56]  You won't know it's your last, but it will be your last.
[00:18:00]  And so you've got to make the most of everything.
[00:18:01]  And it is a terrifying prospect.
[00:18:04]  It is quite sad that we'll never exist again, I think.
[00:18:09]  But it doesn't mean it's not true.
[00:18:12]  You know, the bottom line is, I can't believe something I don't believe.
[00:18:16]  And so how do I find meaning?
[00:18:18]  Well, we are here.
[00:18:20]  We are here.
[00:18:21]  The chances of us being us, you being you and me being me, existing now, that sperm hitting that egg is 400 trillion to one.
[00:18:30]  You know, we're not special, but we are lucky.
[00:18:32]  We do exist.
[00:18:33]  It's incredible.
[00:18:35]  And I think of it, it's like a holiday.
[00:18:37]  We don't exist for 13 and a half billion years.
[00:18:40]  Then we explode into this mass, this electronic blob of thought, introspection, love, hate, fear, beauty, horror for 80, 90, 100 years if we're lucky.
[00:18:58]  Then we die and we never exist again.
[00:18:59]  We return, our atoms return, and it carries on.
[00:19:03]  And that's not scary because I think people are scared of death because they don't know what's beyond.
[00:19:12]  And someone said to me, what do you think it feels like when you die?
[00:19:16]  And I say, like the 13 and a half billion years before I was born.
[00:19:20]  And that was all right.
[00:19:23]  So, but we, but the big thing is injecting meaning.
[00:19:28]  I think you're totally right.
[00:19:29]  I think you're totally right.
[00:19:31]  When you start thinking about it, why are we here?
[00:19:34]  Well, I mean, not even the how, but why.
[00:19:39]  Well, to live your life to the fullest and not hurt anyone, to leave the world in a better place than it was when you came into it, to experience everything, all the reasons, all the obvious reasons, you know, love, wine, dogs, learning, all these great things that you can do every minute of every day that you're alive.
[00:20:06]  And then you check out.
[00:20:08]  You go, I'm done.
[00:20:10]  Thanks.
[00:20:11]  And it's done.
[00:20:12]  And it's beautiful.
[00:20:13]  It's fucking beautiful.
[00:20:15]  It is beautiful.
[00:20:16]  But I was struck when you said that by a few things.
[00:20:18]  One is like this sort of like the injection of meaning, as in, you know, like meaning would have to be imported externally, fabricated, somehow invented.
[00:20:26]  Whereas I think on some level, I feel that there is, that meaning is inherent and that the meaning is in the kind of zeal that you have when you describe the things that give you love, pleasure, you know, connection, whether it's wine or dogs or whatever.
[00:20:41]  I've had like some experiences like through meditation.
[00:20:45]  And when I took drugs too young, so now I'm not allowed to do ayahuasca or LSD or them things that I would definitely be doing if I wasn't in recovery.
[00:20:53]  But I had like those sort of these experiences that were a kind of, I would say, a sort of an evaporation of self and yet a continued awareness.
[00:21:02]  I know that my consciousness is connected to my biology, but I have a sense somewhat derived from the sort of the fact that you can't trace how mechanical parts ever become conscious, that consciousness may be elemental somehow.
[00:21:19]  Now that doesn't point to a God in a traditional patriarchal or domineering sense, but it sort of points to an element that's very difficult to quantify, whether that's the deep intelligence of nature, the deep mathematics of biochemistry and biology, and the essential mystery of consciousness itself, commonly referred to as the hard problem.
[00:21:41]  And through these sort of individual experiences, whilst I've not had anything that you would call typically religious, Jesus emerging out of a tunnel, Ganesh lashing around or any of that sort of stuff, what I've had is like a, well, it's highly bloody interpretive.
[00:21:55]  Because say there's this one breath thing I do, you breathe from the abdomen very aggressively and then you sort of take a sharp inhale and you normally, you nearly, well, a medical man would say what you're doing there is hyperventilating and nearly passing out.
[00:22:08]  But from the inside, what it feels like is bloody hell.
[00:22:11]  For this moment, I'm aware and I am not me.
[00:22:14]  What is this?
[00:22:15]  What is this?
[00:22:16]  Is there a possibility that my awareness, your awareness, the awareness of all animals and an awareness that's impossible to read is somehow present in all nature, in all matter.
[00:22:26]  And if that's true, then there's a kind of a real, a genuine cohesion and togetherness between all of the beings of the earth and beyond.
[00:22:36]  And those people that can't actually enjoy the lives that we are privileged to have of the red wine or the dogs or whatever, like I'm not saying that's some sort of comfort to them.
[00:22:45]  But in fact, those of us that are in privileged position might feel newly incentivized to work towards a different kind of society and system that is more reflective of those values.
[00:22:56]  Now, that doesn't necessarily require monotheism, pantheonism, or any of those things, but it is somewhat underwritten by a kind of a sameness and a oneness and how that might relate to justice.
[00:23:07]  And also, there is a sort of a personal experience of mystery in it.
[00:23:12]  I wonder what you feel about that.
[00:23:13]  And if you're curious about psychedelics and awkward states and that.

=== Limits of Human Understanding (15:11) ===

[00:23:16]  Well, you know, I love a good mystery and you're right.
[00:23:21]  It is a mystery.
[00:23:22]  Science, all science, it does, it's a discipline that follows the evidence.
[00:23:27]  And what science keeps saying, and some people say this is a flaw, but it's been wrong before.
[00:23:33]  Well, science never been wrong before.
[00:23:35]  Interpretation.
[00:23:35]  Scientists were wrong, for you know it.
[00:23:38]  And science is just a way to look and understand the physical, um universe and what science says.
[00:23:48]  It keeps saying okay, this is the least wrong theory we've got so far, and then the next day it goes, okay, we're even less wrong today.
[00:23:58]  We were, we were less wrong today.
[00:24:00]  You know, they've mapped the beginning of the universe to, to a fraction of a second, which is pretty close but um so uh I, I think science keeps proving itself and over and over again, and and the fact that we don't understand, you know, the mind body problem completely yet um, that is the beauty.
[00:24:21]  And the more we understand, the more questions it throws up.
[00:24:25]  It's like um, you know, people say the missing link uh like, there's this fossil and there's this fossil and uh, we find that one and people go, no, there's two missing links.
[00:24:38]  So you can't win, you know and um, all science be doing is just keep filling the gaps and finding and finding new gaps.
[00:24:50]  Um but yeah, you're right, you know I, I think that um, it is, it is.
[00:24:56]  It's amazing what intelligence is.
[00:24:58]  What you know I, i'm a determinist which changes nothing.
[00:25:02]  I, I believe that free will is an illusion.
[00:25:05]  So be it.
[00:25:06]  If it feels like it, it might as well be.
[00:25:09]  Um, but then to analyze it and go well uh we're we're, we're machines, we are machines, we are machines.
[00:25:19]  Um, we're machines trying to understand ourselves, and that's hard will.
[00:25:24]  Will there one day be a computer that is suffering from anxiety?
[00:25:30]  I reckon so.
[00:25:32]  I reckon so.
[00:25:33]  I reckon there'll be a genius computer that's worried about.
[00:25:37]  I really do.
[00:25:42]  Yeah, that's the science.
[00:25:44]  We're, we're lumps of meat we're, we're chimps with brains the size of a planet.
[00:25:48]  Of course we go mad and try and kill each other and worry about what's the point?
[00:25:53]  Of course we do.
[00:25:54]  It's, it's overwhelming, and the more you think about it, the more frightening it is.
[00:26:01]  So, um it it.
[00:26:03]  I just think that.
[00:26:05]  Um, you know my new, my new show, Supernature.
[00:26:09]  I start with saying it's called Supernature for two reasons.
[00:26:12]  One, I want to debunk the supernatural.
[00:26:14]  I don't believe in anything supernatural.
[00:26:16]  I think that anything that that exists is, by definition, part of nature and is explainable, if not now, then eventually.
[00:26:23]  And also supernature, because nature is super enough.
[00:26:27]  We don't need angels in unicorns.
[00:26:29]  We've got the octopus and then I go into.
[00:26:33]  You know, we don't, we don't need to look.
[00:26:36]  I feel we don't need to look elsewhere.
[00:26:39]  That doesn't mean i'm not in awe of poetry and intelligence, and you know I I just don't think that unweaving The Rainbow spoils it.
[00:26:50]  I think it makes it more exciting.
[00:26:53]  When I see a card trick and I don't know how it's done, and then the magician tells me, I can't wait for him to show someone else who doesn't know how it's done.
[00:27:03]  And how it is done is more exciting for me.
[00:27:09]  Do you know what I mean?
[00:27:10]  Yes.
[00:27:11]  Yes, I do.
[00:27:12]  And I also sort of don't believe in magic, you know, that kind of stuff.
[00:27:24]  Yeah, that dude, he's amazing, isn't he?
[00:27:26]  Like, I spoke to him about the sort of...
[00:27:27]  Well, fun and physics, all bets are off.
[00:27:29]  We can...
[00:27:30]  We can talk like this till we're blue in the face, and then quantum physics comes along.
[00:27:36]  And there's that saying, if you think you understand quantum physics, you don't understand quantum physics.
[00:27:42]  It's magic.
[00:27:43]  It might, quantum physics, by all our definitions of science and nature, right?
[00:27:49]  And we're intelligent people.
[00:27:51]  We've read a bit.
[00:27:52]  We think.
[00:27:53]  We've got a good brain.
[00:27:54]  We've got as good a brain as anyone.
[00:27:57]  But fuck quantum physics.
[00:27:59]  It's mental.
[00:28:03]  Spirituality, I think, means different things to different people.
[00:28:07]  So I don't want to generalize what it might mean, but I can say that if spirituality to you is the sense or the feeling that there's something else going on that you don't otherwise see or experience, that's an interesting state of mind to have.
[00:28:30]  And science is still a moving frontier.
[00:28:33]  Space is still a moving frontier.
[00:28:36]  There's probably more to be discovered than we have yet discovered that awaits us.
[00:28:41]  So I'm not going to say that there isn't something there that you could be tapping into.
[00:28:48]  I prefer hard evidence.
[00:28:50]  Why?
[00:28:51]  I prefer it.
[00:28:55]  Because evidence is a good thing.
[00:28:57]  There's so many things you can end up doing with your life in the absence of evidence that you could end up dying from it, for example.
[00:29:06]  If someone says, here, rub these crystals and it'll cure your ailments.
[00:29:10]  If your ailment is a particular kind of cancer for which we can actually cure you, you will likely die no matter how hard you rub the crystals together.
[00:29:19]  That's an exaggeration, but it's the kind of case where evidence-based living can have a very important effect on your longevity.
[00:29:32]  Yes, yes.
[00:29:33]  There's no question that in medicine and these areas cannot be contested, but I feel that rationalism and materialism bump up against certain limits.
[00:29:45]  And if we are to have conversations based on evidence, then in a sense, we can track what materialism, commerce, capitalism lead to.
[00:29:56]  They are currently like, you know, this is, I don't want to be like apocalyptic or anything, Neil though, I get the sense you're going to handle it.
[00:30:04]  It seems that at least.
[00:30:05]  But your hands are coming out like this.
[00:30:07]  You do look a little bit like Jesus, right?
[00:30:10]  So this combination is feeling a little apocalyptic to me.
[00:30:13]  Go on.
[00:30:13]  I'm flinging the palms out to the extremes of the crucifix.
[00:30:19]  Even as I talk.
[00:30:20]  This is what I feel like: that human beings have this relationship with the unknown and potentially unknowable, not least through our intimate relationship with experience and consciousness.
[00:30:31]  Whilst there's definitely a trackable progress in the fields of science and the benevolent miracles that have been bestowed upon us by the scientific method are foundational in what we recognize as society and civilization, it seems to me that there's another aspect to human nature that's dealing with subtler forces that are difficult to know.
[00:30:53]  And again, as a man that's dedicated to science, I'm not anticipating that this is the conversation we go, yeah, why don't we just believe in fairies and ghosts and that kind of stuff.
[00:31:02]  But the same way that invisible constructs and concepts such as the idea of the United Kingdom or the idea of America or the idea of class or to a degree gender and race can be used to control and separate, I feel that people need narratives and stories to help them access the kind of perspective that Edgar Mitchell is talking about, a passionate sense that there is something that unifies us.
[00:31:31]  And I would never, with a religious person or a non-religious person, say, hey, I think that you should regard the sublime in this way.
[00:31:37]  But it seems important to me, and I've had a comparable conversation with Brian Cox, who know that you're friendly with me, like, because you are both, it seems to me, very passionate men who love the cosmos, love the universe.
[00:31:48]  And so much of your book is talking about, it comes from a place of love and kindness and together.
[00:31:52]  I'm not sure.
[00:31:53]  Yeah, that's definitely there.
[00:31:54]  And I think that, you know, we've got more in common, those of us that believe that love and compassion should define our experience here on earth and in the outer reaches of space, have more in common than those of us that are trying to pursue materialistic, individualistic, selfish goals, although I'm capable of being both of those people.
[00:32:08]  I feel that where is the upon what terrain mentally do we afford the possibility of negotiation with the unknown when there are still such great mysteries like the formation of consciousness?
[00:32:22]  Every time I see an article saying, you know, new evidence about the configuration of consciousness on neurological pathways, it always leads to we don't believe it.
[00:32:29]  It's the evidence that we know nothing about it, that people keep publishing books on consciousness, attempting to explain it.
[00:32:35]  The more, if you just look at the progress of knowledge, when people are actively publishing on a topic, generally it means that it's not settled.
[00:32:45]  That's why people keep publishing.
[00:32:46]  The results aren't in yet.
[00:32:47]  They're not in yet.
[00:32:48]  That's correct.
[00:32:48]  When the results are in and everyone can agree, then people stop publishing on it.
[00:32:52]  So the fact that you can go to a bookstore or a library and see shelf upon shelf of people's books saying that they explain consciousness, and those books continue to appear even to this day, is just evidence of that.
[00:33:07]  Whereas if you go to the shelf of the books on gravity, there's like four books.
[00:33:12]  That's kind of it.
[00:33:13]  You know, we got to the moon, we got to Mars, we got the gravity thing.
[00:33:18]  All right, we got that worked out.
[00:33:20]  But let me get back to your point about the unknown.
[00:33:28]  The unknown is one of the most powerful forces of inquiry to the scientist.
[00:33:38]  We thrive in the unknown.
[00:33:43]  We love the unknown.
[00:33:45]  We like standing within the perimeter of the circle that is known and staring out into an abyss and saying, wow, I don't understand what that is.
[00:33:55]  Let me get back to work.
[00:33:57]  So there's a difference between not knowing something because the circle hasn't expanded large enough to encompass it and declaring something is in principle unknowable.
[00:34:10]  And the history of what it is to know stuff does not support the contention that there are things that are unknowable.
[00:34:23]  Outgo the arms again.
[00:34:25]  The arms have gone up.
[00:34:26]  The Jesus arms, just for those only listening.
[00:34:31]  But even from things that I've heard you explain, one of the things that you said that I really loved is you say when dealing with people that are, I suppose, pedagogical or evangelical, is there anything I could say to you that would change your mind?
[00:34:45]  And if the person says no, then you don't bother.
[00:34:47]  kind of done with the conversation, right?
[00:34:49]  Here's something that I'd like to say, though, and because I'm well up for learning always, I hope that surely consciousness as we understand it, and our experience as human beings limited as it is by our sensory instruments is contained within certain parameters whilst we can amplify and magnify in all sorts of directions.
[00:35:08]  There is a sort of a basic limitation to our understanding.
[00:35:11]  And even from watching your program on the cosmos, when you talked about multiverses, and even from hearing you talking about neutrinos and how inconceivably low down the sub-particular world goes, in this scope, the unknowable in terms of the human experience upon that which can be proved, that must be a vast, vast territory, because we can never know the multiverses.
[00:35:37]  Would that be fair to say?
[00:35:37]  We can never know from a sort of a century perspective the neutrino world.
[00:35:42]  I'm just not going to say that because the moving frontier delivers all manner of new surprises to things that you thought were either fully known or partially known or unknowable in a previous time.
[00:35:58]  Take a look.
[00:35:59]  This is a medium good example.
[00:36:02]  In the day when sort of religious philosophies were deeply embedded, and let's look at Europe for a moment, and someone bends over and writhes on the ground and froths at the mouth.
[00:36:18]  It's really obvious what's going on there.
[00:36:20]  The devil has infused the body of this person.
[00:36:23]  Clearly.
[00:36:24]  So we need an exorcism.
[00:36:26]  So the priest comes, brings the holy water, exorcises the person, and then the symptoms fade away, and clearly the devil left the body.
[00:36:36]  That was the explanation, in the absence of the methods and tools of science.
[00:36:41]  And now we know, of course, that's an epileptic fit.
[00:36:44]  And it does run its course, giving the illusion that removing the devil by holy water and other encantations by the priests is what actually solved the problem.
[00:36:58]  So back then, that was something that they thought they understood, but in fact did not.
[00:37:04]  Maybe there might still be people today who think that's what's necessary.
[00:37:09]  But the medical profession tells us that this is an ailment that afflicts some human brains.
[00:37:15]  Very unfortunate, rapid, uncontrolled firing of synapses.
[00:37:20]  And so that's an example of something that may have been unknowable or even divine at a time that we solved and we're onto other problems.
[00:37:30]  There's no question that superstition thrives in ignorance and institutions that crave power will exploit that void.
[00:37:41]  But what I'm talking about is even based on what I've learned from watching your TV shows, that the scope, the sheer scope, that it is, put simply, the capacity for human understanding must be finite.
[00:37:58]  The capacity for knowledge infinite.
[00:38:00]  Let me agree and disagree with you.
[00:38:02]  Okay?
[00:38:03]  So first, a lot of what you described, our consciousness, our personal experience, what we feel, in science, I don't even care.
[00:38:15]  Because the human senses are demonstrably ill-equipped to take measure of the totality of the physical universe.

=== Senses vs The Universe (03:19) ===

[00:38:27]  So what science has done, basically since the invention of the microscope and telescope, which happened within 10 years of each other, by the way, back around the year 1600, then the race was on.
[00:38:40]  I can now enhance your view with a telescope.
[00:38:43]  I can improve your view downward with a microscope.
[00:38:46]  Your senses had no access to those places in the universe until I came up with those instruments.
[00:38:52]  And the run of science over the past 400 years has been all about developing instruments so that you can see beyond the five senses you are biologically endowed with.
[00:39:04]  So when someone comes up to me and says, I think I have a sixth sense, I have ESP, I say, fine, but in science, we have 12 senses.
[00:39:12]  I can measure things your body doesn't even know is going on in front of you right now.
[00:39:18]  And so that is a power over ignorance that science has brought to us over all of these centuries.
[00:39:27]  Now, let me now agree with you.
[00:39:31]  Who is to say that humans, who by our own definition are the first intelligent species there ever was on Earth, who's to say we have just the right amount of intelligence to figure out the entire universe?
[00:39:44]  That's kind of egocentric.
[00:39:46]  Yes.
[00:39:47]  Think about, and I give this example often.
[00:39:49]  I'll do it for you here on your show.
[00:39:51]  You take the closest genetic relative, so the chimpanzee.
[00:39:55]  It's a trifling difference in DNA between us, 2%, somewhere around there.
[00:40:01]  Well, if you're a human lover, you would say, what a difference that 2% makes.
[00:40:07]  We have podcasts.
[00:40:09]  We have the Hubble Telescope.
[00:40:10]  We have philosophy.
[00:40:11]  We have art.
[00:40:12]  We have music.
[00:40:13]  And the chimp does not.
[00:40:15]  What can the chimp do?
[00:40:16]  They can stack boxes and reach a banana.
[00:40:19]  Our toddlers can do that.
[00:40:21]  So that's a smart chimp.
[00:40:23]  What our toddlers can do?
[00:40:26]  So we're sitting pretty happy about ourselves, right?
[00:40:30]  Now, imagine some other life form 2% beyond us in the same vector that we are 2% beyond the chimp.
[00:40:40]  What would we look like to them?
[00:40:43]  The smartest of us would accomplish what their toddlers can do.
[00:40:48]  And I joke that they take Stephen Hawking, roll him forward at their human study conferences and say this human, Stephen Hawking, is slightly smarter than the rest because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head, like little Timmy over here who just came home from preschool.
[00:41:05]  Alien Timmy.
[00:41:07]  So our most, their simplest thoughts would transcend our most complex thoughts.
[00:41:14]  To them, the universe might be just a trivial exercise that you learn all about in an afternoon.
[00:41:20]  Yet we are struggling, requiring the most brilliant among us scattered over centuries with information shared and incremented upon one rung of a ladder at a time, trying to see over the hill.
[00:41:33]  And we can't yet, whatever that hill is, we don't even know how tall the hill is, how tall the hill is.
[00:41:39]  So I don't know if we're smart enough to figure out the universe, but we're still progressing and I'm happy with that.

=== Power Within Scientific Research (06:08) ===

[00:41:47]  You know, when art or music, and I suppose in your case, science, and in my case, because sometimes like watching your stuff or Neil de Grasse Tyson's or, you know, like Carl Sagan and stuff, when you're taken to that point of absolute wonder, when you think, oh my God, I actually can't hold that in my head anymore.
[00:42:05]  And like that could happen, though, in a beautiful animation or a beautiful piece of music where you're taken to that place that's sort of beyond me.
[00:42:12]  And you feel, yeah, that Nounism.
[00:42:14]  You feel that sense of this is beyond my faculties to know this, but I feel something greater, whether that is, you know, and however you want to define that.
[00:42:24]  Course.
[00:42:25]  This place, this place, this precipice that can be reached through art and through just observation, really, observation and expression of the beauty of our reality.
[00:42:35]  It has become increasingly excluded, I feel, from our cultural and social life.
[00:42:39]  And I feel, Brian, that you and you know, some of the other, you, this just about you, you don't seem to me typical of, you know, not that there's a it's not really a crowded field, is it sort of a science entertainer communicators?
[00:42:52]  I mean, there's not loads of you really out there, but but but generally speaking, you know that there's this you'll be familiar with the term scientism.
[00:42:59]  You'll be familiar, of course, with a type of scientific understanding that's used to underwrite certainty.
[00:43:03]  You'll be familiar too that recently, politically, scientific understanding has been to some degree necessarily been used to underwrite policy.
[00:43:13]  When it comes to conversations about gender, when it comes to the conversation about governments mandating stuff, can you see sometimes when it comes to the field of chemistry and pharmacology and this sort of the irresponsibility irresponsibility?
[00:43:25]  And I think we're on legally safe territory when we say with the opioid crisis, that science is occasionally a subset of corporatism.
[00:43:34]  Science is occasionally a subset of power.
[00:43:37]  Science is sometimes a subset of politics, vis-à-vis gender conversations and sexuality conversations.
[00:43:44]  How do you retain your own purity?
[00:43:48]  How do you retain your own, presumably, your own disgust in the same way as that I would be disgusted by anyone using religion as a way of reaching being dogmatic, certain, condemnatory?
[00:44:01]  How do you manage the misuse, I would call it, of science?
[00:44:06]  And, you know, be as specific as you want, obviously.
[00:44:09]  Well, I mean, a very good example is the pandemic, because what you saw there was science in action in real time in a very serious situation.
[00:44:22]  So if you go back, you know, three years, then we don't know anything about this virus at all.
[00:44:30]  It may have been in some animal reservoir, you know, in bats or something.
[00:44:34]  We really didn't know about it.
[00:44:36]  We had no knowledge about this virus.
[00:44:39]  And then we discover it.
[00:44:41]  And then we start to do science in order to understand it, understand how it transmits, develop vaccines, and so on.
[00:44:49]  So what you saw there was real-time research.
[00:44:53]  And I think that many people and politicians are just in general not scientists, they're just people, right?
[00:45:01]  They didn't know, they misunderstood that process.
[00:45:06]  It's very easy in politics to say, well, we heard it, right?
[00:45:12]  This is the science.
[00:45:13]  We are following the science.
[00:45:15]  As if there is a little book that you can open and there's a list of things and it says, right, do this.
[00:45:22]  This is what you should do.
[00:45:23]  You should wear masks in enclosed spaces or you should do this and that and so on.
[00:45:28]  When actually what was happening was people were doing research and then finding out that, okay, so is this thing airborne or not?
[00:45:36]  We didn't know actually, initially.
[00:45:39]  Does it spread mainly in droplets?
[00:45:41]  Does it spread on surfaces?
[00:45:43]  So as you find out more about the thing, then the advice changes.
[00:45:49]  And that's where I think there can be a problem because the advice changes.
[00:45:56]  A lot of people, I think, tend to think that if advice changes, then the previous advice was wrong.
[00:46:04]  It undermines the authority of the people that gave the advice.
[00:46:08]  That's not the case in science.
[00:46:11]  The best way to look at science is that we never claim that we're right.
[00:46:16]  All we're saying is that this is the best snapshot of our opinion at some time.
[00:46:23]  And it will change.
[00:46:25]  And then, on top of that, you're right, the undercurrent of your question is that people who are disingenuous, who are not practicing what we've been speaking about, which is humility and just trying to understand nature and understand a new thing,
[00:46:41]  be it a pandemic disease or the evolution of the universe, that disingenuous people can just take the one piece of advice that backs up their prejudice and then use it vocally in order to justify their actions.
[00:46:57]  And that's where it goes wrong.
[00:46:59]  So it's not, it all goes back to this.
[00:47:05]  We've got to understand that science is not a belief system.
[00:47:11]  It's not, we're not, scientists don't sit on a mountain passing down stone templates to the people at the bottom saying, this is it.
[00:47:20]  As I just said, you know, go back to what I said about Feynman and Oppenheimer.
[00:47:24]  Science is a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance.
[00:47:27]  And so I think the problems occur that they can occur sometimes.
[00:47:33]  The scientists can, you know, it's very hard.
[00:47:35]  I had great respect for the scientists that were working during the pandemic, you know, the public facing scientists, because they're not people necessarily who understand the nuance of communicating with the public, right?
[00:47:50]  They're scientists.
[00:47:51]  And so they're likely to say, well, at the moment, we don't know everything, but we know this.

=== Maturity in Communication (15:20) ===

[00:47:56]  And so we think you should do this.
[00:47:58]  But then they might not even say, because it's kind of obvious to them that actually we might discover something tomorrow and then we're going to say you should do the other thing.
[00:48:06]  Right.
[00:48:07]  So, so it's very, very, very difficult, especially in a serious situation like a pandemic, to communicate that.
[00:48:18]  It's an argument for science education, actually.
[00:48:21]  Because you need to, from being a child, from very young, if you can just understand that this is contingent knowledge, it's constantly evolving.
[00:48:31]  You can't be told what to do.
[00:48:34]  Science is not going to tell you what to do because with certainty, because we might find something else out tomorrow.
[00:48:44]  But I said it before.
[00:48:45]  It's the point is, it's the method we have of acquiring reliable knowledge.
[00:48:53]  In the earlier chat, you told me that they put all that athletic monitoring equipment on you and said that you burned 11,000 calories in nine hours and your heart's doing this and your heart's doing that.
[00:49:03]  Like, you know, I believe that in the ability of consciousness and will to alter anatomy and to or material to a degree, but the simple fact is that ultimately that you're a man.
[00:49:13]  Where are you going with that vulnerability?
[00:49:16]  What are you doing?
[00:49:16]  Have you got like a mentor, someone that you can call?
[00:49:19]  I haven't.
[00:49:20]  I have many.
[00:49:21]  What's really beautiful in my life, the grace of my life, is I've been called to help others and they look at me as their coach, but I'd be an idiot, the kind of people I have the privilege of coaching to think I'm just coaching them.
[00:49:31]  I go there just like I did with you.
[00:49:33]  I wanted to interview.
[00:49:35]  I reached out to you.
[00:49:35]  And fortunately, you wanted to chat with me too, which I was grateful for.
[00:49:38]  But I wanted to reach you because I feel you have a very special voice when it comes to recovery that I have not seen anywhere else.
[00:49:44]  You have a passion and a truth and a vulnerability.
[00:49:47]  And I have a lot of that, but I'm only one person.
[00:49:49]  So I'm good at finding brilliant people and then helping to pull out so other people can see, at least the people that I have an audience for.
[00:49:56]  You know, I have 20 million people on social media and they talk to people.
[00:49:59]  So hopefully it reaches even more.
[00:50:01]  So I'm always on the hunt for human excellence.
[00:50:03]  I'm in the hunt for someone who's real.
[00:50:05]  My vulnerability is absolutely there, but I've trained myself like an athlete.
[00:50:09]  Like the most common question I've been asked by the media my entire life that always makes me laugh is, well, don't you have bad days?
[00:50:14]  Don't you have days when you're like frustrated and excited and pissed off and you watch TV and you eat Cheetos and watch pornography?
[00:50:21]  And I said, well, I do some of those things.
[00:50:23]  And of course they do.
[00:50:24]  But it's like an athlete.
[00:50:26]  I built muscle over the years so that it's not that I don't have feelings, I don't get hurt, I don't feel sad, I don't feel tired, I feel all those things, but they're not the dominant force in my life.
[00:50:34]  It's a muscle.
[00:50:35]  The mind is a muscle.
[00:50:37]  Emotion is a muscle.
[00:50:37]  I mean, I think the most powerful muscles are the invisible force muscles.
[00:50:41]  It's your spiritual, emotional muscles.
[00:50:42]  Like courage unused doesn't grow, it shrinks.
[00:50:45]  So I put my ass on the line regularly so that it grows.
[00:50:48]  And when it keeps growing, then pretty soon the stuff that used to make me crazy doesn't touch me.
[00:50:52]  It's not that I'm so great, just I'm well trained.
[00:50:55]  I train this mind.
[00:50:56]  I get up every morning in my life.
[00:50:57]  You can talk about rebounder, more crazy shit I do is every morning in my life, if I'm near any of my homes, and some places I have cryotherapy.
[00:51:05]  But my homes, I have these cold plunges, and they're 56 degrees.
[00:51:08]  And the first thing I do is jump in that cold punch.
[00:51:10]  So there's not a fucking morning where I want to jump in that.
[00:51:13]  I can't remember mornings.
[00:51:14]  I can't wait to jump in that thing.
[00:51:16]  But I don't negotiate with myself.
[00:51:18]  I do it for two reasons.
[00:51:19]  One, there's a physical health component.
[00:51:20]  It moves your lymph system.
[00:51:22]  The blood flushes through your whole body.
[00:51:24]  But the main reason I do it, even more than that, is when I go up there, I don't, you know, people negotiate, well, I'm going to do it tomorrow.
[00:51:29]  I'm going to do this.
[00:51:30]  Or let me wait two more minutes till I'm ready.
[00:51:32]  There's none of that shit with me.
[00:51:33]  For decades, I go, I say we do.
[00:51:36]  I'm not here to discuss this shit with my mind.
[00:51:39]  There's mind and then there's soul and spirit.
[00:51:41]  And soul and spirit, my soul fucking knows.
[00:51:43]  And when I say jump, you fucking jump.
[00:51:45]  I'm not here to have a discussion with you.
[00:51:47]  Now, does that happen with my water every day?
[00:51:49]  Yes, because I've conditioned it.
[00:51:51]  Does it happen every year of my life?
[00:51:52]  No.
[00:51:52]  And when I find it's not working, and I step back up and condition it.
[00:51:55]  And unless I'm willing to take 100% responsibility for what I feel and what I experience, then I'm always going to be a victim to someone because there's always going to be somebody upset in the world we live in today about something you said or did or didn't say or didn't do or go.
[00:52:07]  There is no victory in the world where everyone has a voice and not everybody's voice is necessarily designed to make somebody feel loved.
[00:52:14]  It's designed to meet whatever their needs are in that moment.
[00:52:16]  They might want certainty and you're being a certain way makes them uncertain or they think you're significant.
[00:52:21]  You may think they're totally significant, but they don't.
[00:52:23]  So they're mad.
[00:52:24]  So I can't live my life that way.
[00:52:26]  So I live my life where I keep learning, I keep growing, I keep loving, I keep laughing, and I'm trying to leave a decent legacy of a meaningful life by constantly looking for ways I can be helpful.
[00:52:37]  And my prayer, a simple prayer, before I walk on every stage, is use me.
[00:52:41]  Use me, Lord.
[00:52:42]  And when you do that, it's like if you get out of the way, my greatest gift is getting out of the way.
[00:52:46]  I know that sounds silly to some people, but it's really true.
[00:52:49]  I'm not an ultra-religious person, but I'm extremely spiritual and I believe the force of life comes through me.
[00:52:55]  It comes through you, comes through all of us.
[00:52:56]  And the only thing that gets in the way is all the beliefs we have of how it's supposed to be, all the expectations we have.
[00:53:01]  And I have them too.
[00:53:03]  But I keep leading them out.
[00:53:04]  So I'm not, I don't want to give you the impression that I don't have challenges and any of that nature, but I have a hell of a lot fewer.
[00:53:10]  It takes a lot more.
[00:53:12]  When something happens like this happened, I go, oh, we're the opponent.
[00:53:15]  Because in every story of a person's life, they have what they want and desire, and then they have these needs that they're unaware of.
[00:53:21]  You know, character things that need to be developed.
[00:53:23]  And how do those get developed?
[00:53:25]  Well, if what you wanted, you just took action and happened, A, you'd be bored, B, you'd never develop spiritually or your character.
[00:53:31]  And so what happens is opponents show up.
[00:53:33]  And the opponent can be you with yourself.
[00:53:35]  The opponent can be somebody close to you that feels like an opponent.
[00:53:38]  It could be an external force.
[00:53:39]  But if you do battle with this, eventually you battle with yourself.
[00:53:44]  Because if you can solve it within yourself, you can, regardless of what happens in the outside world, you can have that sense that your life is meaningful.
[00:53:50]  And so I've done battle for 58 years and I'm going to keep doing battle the rest of my life.
[00:53:55]  But I'm doing better because I've done battles so often.
[00:53:57]  It's like, why is LeBron James who he is?
[00:54:00]  It's not because he's lucky.
[00:54:01]  You know, I'm going to say, you know, he's lucky.
[00:54:03]  Shit, you may have certain physical factors.
[00:54:05]  Or Michael Jordan.
[00:54:05]  I remember I interviewed him years ago.
[00:54:07]  And I said, what makes you the best in the world?
[00:54:09]  Is it skill?
[00:54:10]  Is it talent?
[00:54:10]  Is it ability?
[00:54:11]  Is it background?
[00:54:12]  Is it training?
[00:54:13]  And he was so awesome.
[00:54:13]  He said, Tony, I can tell you the truth and it won't sound like hyperbole or false modesty.
[00:54:18]  He said, I didn't even make the high school basketball team my sophomore year.
[00:54:22]  I was cut.
[00:54:23]  He said, What it is, is every day I demand more from myself than anybody else could possibly expect.
[00:54:28]  I don't compete with other people, I compete with what I'm capable of.
[00:54:31]  And it's just like that kind of standard is inspiring.
[00:54:34]  This reminds me: I had this conversation with Tom Cruise, right?
[00:54:38]  He's like another American sort of great square-jawed superstar.
[00:54:42]  And like he was sort of saying about how he made his success himself.
[00:54:45]  But I goes, No, but you were born with the Tom Cruise shit.
[00:54:48]  Like you had that, even the will, like the will.
[00:54:51]  You know, there's not that.
[00:54:53]  Where do you think will come from?
[00:54:56]  Where did your will come from?
[00:54:59]  I don't know.
[00:55:00]  Where do you think it comes from?
[00:55:01]  I think that'll be better.
[00:55:02]  There's something you have to push against, or you don't develop it.
[00:55:05]  How do you build the muscle?
[00:55:06]  You don't build muscle because you were born with it.
[00:55:07]  We're all born with muscle.
[00:55:09]  But if it's developed, you trained it.
[00:55:11]  And that means you had to find something that you valued more than your pain.
[00:55:15]  You had to get beyond your pain or you had to use your pain and say, I'm going to use it to become more.
[00:55:19]  That's what my life's been about.
[00:55:23]  Six years ago, I was a student in college and I thought I was going to be an engineer for the rest of my life, industrial and systems engineer.
[00:55:31]  I'm a nerd.
[00:55:32]  I like to pride myself.
[00:55:33]  I like to pride myself on studying and getting the best grades I could in school.
[00:55:38]  I got a full academic ride to college, stroke of my ego for a sec.
[00:55:41]  Full academic gride to college.
[00:55:42]  Well done.
[00:55:43]  Thank you.
[00:55:43]  For engineering.
[00:55:44]  So, yeah, I thought I was going to invent products and revolutionize efficiency in factories for the rest of my life.
[00:55:53]  That's what I thought was going to be.
[00:55:54]  Engineering.
[00:55:54]  You were going to engineer.
[00:55:55]  Oh, look, we can do this in a much more efficient way.
[00:55:58]  Yeah.
[00:55:59]  Yeah, wild, right?
[00:56:00]  And I've never had a mentor.
[00:56:04]  Like you kind of mentioned it, this weird path that myself, as well as a bunch of other influencers, creators, like whatever you want to call them, it had never been done before.
[00:56:16]  So we kind of like forged it.
[00:56:17]  We were like trailblazers in many ways.
[00:56:19]  And I've never had a mentor, which is actually why I was excited to sit down with you.
[00:56:22]  Like you mentioned, the fame, the controversy, the ups and downs of this weird Hollywood industry.
[00:56:28]  And just being able to pick your brain about stuff that maybe I didn't have direction on, it excites me.
[00:56:36]  Well, I'm flattered that you consider me in such a way.
[00:56:38]  And I'll be obviously honored to help you.
[00:56:40]  It's interesting because even though online spaces and the people that create content on them, that's a sort of a novelty in the world of fame and celebrity.
[00:56:50]  And I'm thinking about, say, when the music industry would have been transformed by the transistor radio or by vinyl or by the advent of television.
[00:56:58]  But you know, like that, that always creates sort of iconic figures.
[00:57:02]  Like, so in some ways, you're unconventional.
[00:57:04]  So, oh, I just was going to be an engineer.
[00:57:06]  But in another way, it's very recognizable.
[00:57:08]  You're a good-looking man, you're charismatic, you're sweet as candy, aren't you?
[00:57:13]  So, in a sense, it's like a very recognizable sort of path.
[00:57:16]  What's weird, I suppose, is the amount of control you have over your content.
[00:57:20]  Tell me how you got into creating the stuff you create.
[00:57:24]  That's the thing I think I might be most addicted to about what I do.
[00:57:29]  Being a creator, essentially, the control is in my hands.
[00:57:34]  And it was fascinating to come to Hollywood.
[00:57:36]  And I came to Hollywood wanting to do what you did.
[00:57:39]  I wanted to hop industries.
[00:57:40]  I wanted to be an actor.
[00:57:41]  I don't know what your original goal was, and I'd love to know.
[00:57:44]  But when I came to Hollywood, it was I wanted to be a big actor.
[00:57:49]  And then you get on set, you have absolutely no control.
[00:57:52]  It's hurry up and wait.
[00:57:53]  And the creativity is no longer from here.
[00:57:58]  And with the stuff that I do, I became addicted with addicted to just producing whatever I wanted whenever I wanted.
[00:58:07]  Like that, that isn't that is an undeniable thing that I was attracted to with social media.
[00:58:12]  And I think that's why I stuck with it for so long.
[00:58:14]  And I'm still on it.
[00:58:15]  So you can just have an idea and then you can realize it.
[00:58:19]  Do you have like what we would recognize as conventional production?
[00:58:22]  Do you work with writers or producers?
[00:58:24]  Do you brainstorm and go, I think we'll do something in them suicide woods or whatever?
[00:58:28]  Oh, no, is that a bad thing to mention?
[00:58:30]  I know that was a controversy.
[00:58:31]  I know it was a controversy.
[00:58:34]  Is it an unmentionable thing?
[00:58:35]  No, no, no.
[00:58:35]  I actually wanted to dive into that with you, but just the way you said it, I mean, you know, you're funny.
[00:58:40]  You're a comedian.
[00:58:41]  Like, yeah, there's just the way you said it was.
[00:58:43]  Was it good?
[00:58:44]  It was pretty funny.
[00:58:46]  That's good.
[00:58:48]  With the generation of content Something like that How do you come to that idea?
[00:58:53]  Because I love the pranks that you've watched.
[00:58:54]  Do you know the thing that I wanted to mention to you is like jackass.
[00:58:56]  Like when jackass, all like them lads, Johnny Voxville and all them, when they all came to Knoxville, sorry.
[00:59:02]  When they all come to England, like I was working for MTV, I was still a crack and heroin addict then, but I was like working on MTV.
[00:59:08]  So I did like loads of promo for their show.
[00:59:10]  Oh, really?
[00:59:12]  And I thought, even though what they're doing is all skate culture and hurting themselves and beating up on themselves, I thought there's something real punk and prankster about what they're doing.
[00:59:20]  It's disruptor.
[00:59:21]  It's like very disruptive.
[00:59:22]  And I feel like possibly you're interested in that kind of thing, creating sort of, well, in French artistic, recent French artistic history, it called situationism, creating unusual situations that in themselves show up the absurdity of the everyday.
[00:59:36]  Absolutely.
[00:59:36]  Absolutely.
[00:59:37]  It's funny.
[00:59:37]  The jackass guys were quite literally my inspiration as an eight-year-old to start making content.
[00:59:43]  Like my first ever YouTube video was called Logan Does Stunts.
[00:59:46]  And it was me like jumping off of refrigerators and slapping my brother in the face with like a ham inspired by the jackass guys.
[00:59:53]  And it's ironically enough, like they've, in a way, bred a jackass.
[00:59:57]  Like, you know, I like to consider myself an evolved jackass.
[01:00:01]  What are the points of evolution?
[01:00:03]  How is it?
[01:00:03]  How do you think it's moved on?
[01:00:05]  Other than the medium, obviously, and the fact that you're creating and controlling the content.
[01:00:08]  Skate culture, they would have, I guess, been doing a version of that always.
[01:00:11]  But just on VHS, he's passed around.
[01:00:14]  I think, honestly, it's a maturity thing.
[01:00:18]  I've always been a late bloomer.
[01:00:19]  I've always been late to mature in my content.
[01:00:22]  I mean, when you go back four or five years ago, a lot of it is like cringe.
[01:00:28]  It's high energy.
[01:00:28]  It's fun, but it's just like this cringe, weird version of myself that when I look back at, and I'm sure you feel like this too when you look back at your old stuff, I'm really cool.
[01:00:38]  Yeah, I know.
[01:00:39]  You've always been cool.
[01:00:39]  You must be fucking nice, bro.
[01:00:41]  He's got a lot of people.
[01:00:41]  I regret things I've done this morning.
[01:00:44]  No, you've always been great.
[01:00:45]  Not me.
[01:00:46]  I wasn't born great.
[01:00:47]  I wasn't the kid who was born with an innate talent or with a golden spoon in his mouth.
[01:00:54]  I had to learn and forge my way to become this likable guy.
[01:01:00]  And years and experience, and again, I'm only 24, so the 26-year-old Logan watching this interview will probably not recognize this kid.
[01:01:11]  I was so innocent back then.
[01:01:13]  I mean, maybe.
[01:01:14]  I'm serious, though.
[01:01:17]  My evolution over a year, two years, five years is absolutely mind-boggling to me.
[01:01:25]  Yeah, it must be changing quite radically because, again, even relating to the content, you can create all this content.
[01:01:30]  It can evolve and it can change quite quickly.
[01:01:32]  How did you get from the early prank jackass inspired slapping your brother with, I think what you said was a ham, a joint of pork-based meat.
[01:01:44]  What were your next steps?
[01:01:45]  And when did you notice that it was starting to have an impact?
[01:01:50]  Way too late, to be honest with you.
[01:01:52]  Way too late.
[01:01:54]  I was not focused on the impact of my content so much as just producing the next piece of crazy content I could.
[01:02:05]  I legitimately did not think about the impact.
[01:02:08]  Also didn't really care.
[01:02:09]  I think that was part of the Tokyo problem and the Japan problem.
[01:02:14]  Right, that's what we call it.
[01:02:15]  Not suicide, but Kokyo Pro.
[01:02:18]  No, but that's what it is.
[01:02:19]  I mean, we can call it whatever.
[01:02:20]  Yeah, that's what it is.
[01:02:21]  What happened there?
[01:02:22]  That was significant in my life for many reasons, but mainly because it took that for me to realize that what I was doing was so fucking wrong in that social media was creating a person that was just not me.
[01:02:42]  I was my only motivator was views.
[01:02:45]  I wanted views because views equated to money, views equated to subscribers, which equated to success.
[01:02:52]  And I started to skew the person that was Logan Paul.
[01:02:58]  Like that kid that was on Vine, Logan, was now becoming this influencer who all he cared about was making the most noise that he could.
[01:03:07]  And so the bigger, the louder, the faster, the better.
[01:03:10]  And there was no forethought or foresight that went into the content we were creating.
[01:03:14]  What short videos do you think I shouldn't have done that?

=== Transgression for Views (05:10) ===

[01:03:17]  And tell me where you went wrong with that Japan thing.
[01:03:19]  You can totally see the build up.
[01:03:21]  Because like I said, it was just like everything I did was even bad behavior was reinforced by people that wanted to see it, whether they liked it or hated it.
[01:03:28]  They would come and they'd say, oh, this.
[01:03:30]  What like?
[01:03:30]  Can you give us a couple examples?
[01:03:32]  Examples?
[01:03:32]  Yeah, sure.
[01:03:34]  we went to sicily italy uh sicily is the um no not sicily uh what's the What's the water?
[01:03:40]  Venice?
[01:03:40]  Right.
[01:03:41]  The water, yeah.
[01:03:42]  My brother and I, we jumped into the river in Venice, and it was just kind of like a disrespectful, like ignoring the culture.
[01:03:51]  And like someone was yelling at us in Italian.
[01:03:53]  He's like, yo, you can't be doing that.
[01:03:55]  And I was like, yeah, okay, great.
[01:03:56]  And I like jumped in my boxers naked in the middle of Venice, Italy.
[01:04:00]  And then even a couple days before Japan, we were running around dressed in like Pokemon costumes, just like throwing Pokeballs at people.
[01:04:06]  Just like just like a complete and utter disrespect of both people and specifically the culture of Japan, which at the time, it just, I don't know how that didn't cross my mind, which is why I look back at those videos and I'm like, it is very clear to see the very negative side of me that I believe.
[01:04:28]  And, you know, I don't want to create excuses.
[01:04:30]  It's probably, there's probably a handful of childhood trauma that caused me to be the way I am.
[01:04:37]  But it was very easy to see the negative side of me that social media had probably helped forge.
[01:04:44]  Right.
[01:04:44]  It started to become transgressive.
[01:04:46]  Like the stuff you did, because like pranks require a degree of transgression, but I suppose there's a difference between, you know, like the stuff where it's your friends or your brother or whatever.
[01:04:55]  You know, when you dislocate yourself into Venice or into Tokyo or whatever, then you might be making cultural errors that you're not aware of.
[01:05:03]  Especially when we're traveling all the time.
[01:05:05]  The word is disrespect.
[01:05:08]  It was we believed.
[01:05:12]  And my brother did this too.
[01:05:13]  Like he got, he got, it was a mutual embarkment from the Disney channel.
[01:05:18]  I don't know how much you know about Jake, but he was on a Disney show for two years.
[01:05:22]  And he was vlogging at the time.
[01:05:23]  And he just did some disrespectful shit.
[01:05:25]  And he got let go from, it was a mutual like, hey, I don't want to be in your show anymore.
[01:05:30]  And yo, you can't be on our show anymore.
[01:05:32]  They shook hands.
[01:05:32]  They left.
[01:05:35]  Yeah.
[01:05:36]  Just blatant and utter disrespect.
[01:05:39]  This is the stuff that you were doing together, the both of you.
[01:05:41]  It was even worse.
[01:05:42]  You can imagine you thought, I'm bad.
[01:05:45]  There's fucking two of me.
[01:05:49]  And in a way, a lot of the stuff we were doing was entertainment for children ages like eight to maybe like 24, people who didn't really maybe understand respect and culture and like a worldly knowledge of what is right and wrong.
[01:06:12]  But adults who saw our content are like, what the fuck is this?
[01:06:15]  And I'm telling you right now, like, I tried to watch a video last night that I made from like three, four years ago.
[01:06:21]  I just, I can't do it.
[01:06:22]  What is it?
[01:06:23]  I can't watch my old vlogs.
[01:06:24]  This one was bad.
[01:06:26]  This one is bad.
[01:06:28]  You've had to have a little drink to...
[01:06:30]  I had to remove it from YouTube, actually.
[01:06:34]  I faked my...
[01:06:35]  I faked my death.
[01:06:36]  Of course.
[01:06:37]  I faked my death in front of my fans.
[01:06:41]  Like young fans.
[01:06:42]  I faked my death.
[01:06:43]  Hey, you're a pioneer.
[01:06:45]  I was about to say you're sort of YouTube Elvis, but in a sense, it's like YouTube Johnny Rotten.
[01:06:52]  It wasn't good.
[01:06:52]  Yeah, it wasn't good.
[01:06:54]  What technique?
[01:06:56]  Asphyxiation.
[01:06:57]  So this is what makes it bad.
[01:06:59]  You can't do that.
[01:07:01]  I'm just kidding.
[01:07:04]  I had my friend.
[01:07:05]  Okay, so I lived in an apartment.
[01:07:08]  I was on the eighth floor and across the way was I think a five-story parking garage.
[01:07:13]  And I started vlogging and I had a very quick come up on YouTube.
[01:07:17]  And so fans realized where I lived and they would stand on top of the parking garage across the way and just wait for me to appear in the window.
[01:07:24]  And I wave at them, Logan, hey, what?
[01:07:26]  So eventually, since I was, I put them in videos and they thought it was cool to show up and they wanted to be on camera and to be in the vlog.
[01:07:36]  And eventually there was like 50 to 100 kids that would stand me on the parking garage.
[01:07:39]  And so I was like, one day I was like, I'm going to teach them a lesson not to spy on people.
[01:07:42]  Because mind you, I'm on the eighth floor, but there's also eight floors of people, a whole built like 50 to 100 people who are being watched by 50 to 100 kids a day.
[01:07:52]  So I had my friend come up to me, up behind me as I was waving at my fans one day in a burglar mask, and he had a shotgun.
[01:08:00]  And he cocked the shotgun and pulled the trigger, and I hired a guy to, like, splatter, like, a gallon of blood on the, it was, I, the more I talked, the more I realized how blatantly inappropriate this is, but.
[01:08:14]  But yeah, I'm going to stand up for myself for one second.
[01:08:17]  If the fans and people across the way weren't so young, I don't think this would have been that bad.
[01:08:23]  But the fact that there are children, like, it's not great.

=== Challenging Performance Art (01:20) ===

[01:08:27]  I see.
[01:08:28]  I was just thinking while you were saying that, that if you were a performance artist, that would be like, whoa, that's pretty transgressive idea.
[01:08:37]  But because I suppose the rules of the medium you were working in are yet to be established.
[01:08:42]  No rules.
[01:08:44]  Doesn't matter.
[01:08:45]  So it becomes kind of amorphous and a little bit confusing because some of the stuff you were saying there about respect, of course, respect is very important, but it's also an idea that's used to create dominion and control oppression of, say, women or different, like, you know, the idea of respect and institutionalization.
[01:09:04]  It can be, it's something that can be challenged and should be challenged because otherwise there will be no progress.
[01:09:09]  There would be no change.
[01:09:10]  But, you know, like, but I suppose when you're, I recognize what you were saying, it was like a near culprit.
[01:09:14]  I shouldn't have done that thing and I shouldn't have.
[01:09:16]  So, but it's a really, it's a very unique and interesting journey you're on because you're not working as a straightforward, like a stand-up like Kevin Hart, where people go, oh, 10 years ago you did these tweets, or you're not working even as a visual artist or a musician, where you're, where there's a tact on narrative that people can go, this is how you're supposed to behave.
[01:09:33]  It's sort of pioneering, innit?
[01:09:36]  Because the territory is all new.
[01:09:40]  Well, thank you very much.
[01:09:41]  I hope you enjoyed this content.
[01:09:43]  Remember, we will be back next time.
[01:09:45]  Not with more of the same, but with more of the different.
[01:09:46]  Until then, if you can, stay