In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with a good friend of mine who is a martial arts fighter and martial artist. We talk about how he got started in martial arts and what it takes to be a good martial artist and how to deal with the pressures of being a man in a male dominated world. We also talk about his spiritual journey and how he uses martial arts as a tool for self improvement and self improvement. It's a really interesting conversation and I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed recording it. If you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE so you get notified when a new episode is released. You can also support the podcast by becoming a patron patron patron and/or become a patron supporter. Don't forget to leave us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts and we'll read out your comments and thoughts on the next episode. Enjoy & spread the word to your friends about this podcast! Cheers, Joe & Rory. - The Best Man - The Good Men Project xoxo, Russell Crowe Music: "The Good Man Project" by The Good Guy Project - "Goodbye Outer Space" by Fountains of Bakersfield - "Outer Space" - "Incomptech - "The Bad Man" by P.S. - "Feat. Joe" by BJJ - "Thank you, Joe" - "This Is Not Your Day" by , "The Best Man" - "You Are Who I Really Are You?" - "I am I?" by , & "I Am I Am I? (featuring the Good Guy Podcast - "You Don't Need a Man" - ? by & "I'm Yours Truly? , and "I Can't Have It All" by "I Love You, I'm Not Good Enough?" and "Thank You, Joe? "Thank Me, I Can I Can't Wait To See You?" by "You're Great?" - , I'll See You, My Thoughts & I'll Hear Me & I'm Sorry, I'll Think You're Great? - I'll Say So, Thank You, Thank Me, You're Good Enough? (I'll Hear You, And I'll Get More Than That, I Will Think So Much, So I Can Say That, Good Gave Me A Good Thing?"
00:01:21.000Well I guess what it is is my early life I grew up mostly around my mum and I don't have brothers and sisters and stuff like that so my male role modeling occurred later in life and I think it probably relates to this spiritual thing I think it meant that I was I'm very open to sort of Spiritual experience,
00:03:00.000And I've just used discipline and hard work, especially working out, to try to mitigate it.
00:03:06.000Well, that's what I pick up from you, is that your early encounters with martial arts have meant that you've understood from a young age, it seems to me, physical...
00:04:34.000I mean, there's so many people that I disagree with that I have fine conversations with.
00:04:38.000I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and I don't think that impulse to have antagonistic engagements with people that you disagree with is correct.
00:04:48.000If, like, it's just like, I'm only going to deal with people that see the world roughly how I do.
00:04:52.000How are we going to form new tribes, new alliances, new relationships, new systems at a time when, evidently, it feels to me at least, Joe, like things are breaking down.
00:05:03.000Bitterness, acerbity and confrontation and people don't want to talk to each other.
00:05:06.000I mean, I don't know how real that is of actual people.
00:05:08.000I'm talking, I suppose, about how the media landscape seems to present information.
00:05:12.000I don't know if that's true when you're...
00:05:14.000You know, when I'm around people, I don't sense, oh, wow, these guys are really tied up in Brexit or Trump or whatever.
00:05:20.000It doesn't seem that relevant to ordinary people.
00:05:23.000It seems to me that people are still...
00:05:25.000Operating on a personal, how are you today?
00:05:28.000You know, people are willing to get on like that.
00:05:30.000I mean, how are we supposed to take these ideas on board?
00:05:33.000They're sort of almost too vast for us.
00:05:35.000These geopolitical ideas that we're asked to identify with.
00:05:38.000Right, and then your everyday life hardly ever affects you or affects you very little in comparison to things that you ignore because you're concentrating on Brexit or you're concentrating on Trump or you're concentrating on whatever it is.
00:05:52.000Yeah, I start to wonder Who is it that's involved in this stuff?
00:05:57.000Where I'm at now is, are we even capable of belonging to groups, units, tribes of 300 million people or 60 million people with so many diverse ideas?
00:06:12.000Is this a time to look at federalism differently, to start breaking down, well, you know, I exist within this tribe of people, but I collaborate with all these other people.
00:06:21.000I don't know how municipal action gets done.
00:06:23.000I don't know how you run an army and build roads if people are starting to operate in smaller units, but I am thinking that we need to have a real sense of community and connection, and we've got to let go of looking for ways to object to and judge other people as some sort of primary way of forming our own identity.
00:06:40.000No, I completely agree, and I think we're probably moving towards some sort of understanding that a lot of these boundaries and these clans of states and countries, they were all established without our consent before we were born, and we're a part of a system that we didn't agree to it.
00:07:00.000We just all of a sudden found ourselves in it, and we're trying to make it fit us.
00:07:04.000And there's aspects of it that are appealing.
00:07:08.000During a World Cup, I really feel English.
00:07:13.000I feel a genuine sense of connection and investment.
00:07:17.000But if I'm being asked to live according to rules that don't affect me, that affect me financially and don't speak to who I am as an individual, then I'm like, what is this?
00:08:08.000Can't someone say what they think and I say what I think and we just decide what makes sense and what doesn't make sense based on our own interpretations?
00:08:17.000It seems like that's the direction we've got to head in.
00:08:19.000I did, as I know you have done, a podcast with Candice Owens, who, like, on the subject of, you know, individuals, like, when she says stuff like people should get over slavery, or it's as if it didn't happen, I don't agree with that.
00:08:32.000I feel like that has a massive social impact, that those statistics are not a coincidence, the number of...
00:08:38.000People have certain ethnicities in prisons and in poverty or whatever.
00:08:42.000For me, that's not just a coincidence.
00:08:44.000So I couldn't agree with her more profoundly on, according to social criteria, some very, very important issues.
00:08:50.000But on an interpersonal level, I thought she was absolutely delightful.
00:09:24.000So, I cut her a lot of slack with some of the things that she's made, like, missteps on.
00:09:29.000And I think sometimes when people say those things, like, people should get over slavery, it's like...
00:09:35.000It's almost like you're saying things that you think other people want to hear, more than you're saying things that are really rational.
00:09:42.000So whether or not we should get over slavery, sure, slavery was over more than 100 years ago, but the repercussions of slavery, the echoes of slavery still exist.
00:09:50.000And they exist in all these different southern states and cities and all these different neighborhoods that had been a part of systemic racism where they had literally It forced black people to live in certain areas and didn't even allow them to buy homes outside of those areas.
00:10:06.000They made laws, and those laws were in place in places like Baltimore.
00:10:10.000I had this guy, Michael Wood, who was a police officer in the city of Baltimore, and one of the more profound things that he said was that they found papers that were documenting crimes from the 1970s in Baltimore.
00:10:25.000And they were in the same area, the same crimes that he was facing in the 2000s when he was a police officer.
00:10:31.000So he was looking at this going, what in the fuck?
00:10:35.000Am I just a part of something that's never going to be fixed and never going to be changed?
00:10:39.000And as he learned more about the city and the city's laws and how these...
00:11:03.000I had a couple of conversations that made me recognise how powerful systems and institutions are and their ability to maintain themselves regardless of any individual.
00:11:13.000It seems like what happened there with the man you were chatting to is that he's an individual woke up and went, oh my god, hold on a second, I'm in some sort of weird grid.
00:11:20.000And I spoke to this fella called Cairn Ross who worked for the British Diplomatic Service at the time of 9-11 and was privy to confidential information about how that was handled on a military and geopolitical level.
00:11:33.000And he said, like, he's come away from that, thinking, well, these institutions function and in a totally corrupt way to pursue their own objectives.
00:11:41.000Disingenuity and dishonesty is just part of the system.
00:11:44.000And it was him that made me think about anarchism in a different way, saying that people...
00:11:48.000The assumption that people, if they were not tightly governed with big government and huge control, would go around murdering each other and raping each other is simply not true.
00:11:58.000That's one of the means by which the state continues to justify its existence.
00:12:02.000People will behave better the closer they are to government.
00:13:08.000It won't come up with ideas or support ideas that threaten it.
00:13:11.000And that's why I continually keep hearing, and I'm sure you're having similar conversations, that if you are really interested in changing the world, you have to participate in systems that are outside of it.
00:13:29.000And when you change yourself, it becomes evident to the people around you.
00:13:32.000And if your change is beneficial and attractive, people, they gravitate towards that idea that you can improve yourself, and you can change your perspective on things.
00:13:45.000Well, that is the one area of your life where you've got some authority and control, and that is what I'm about.
00:13:52.000It's like, well, I can stop myself I'm watching pornography.
00:13:58.000I can stop myself using drugs if I want to, with some support.
00:14:03.000This book here, Mentors, which I talk about you in, only for a paragraph, you know what I mean?
00:14:10.000It's a small nod of your influence and impact.
00:14:15.000I talk about how we have latent qualities within us that are sometimes hard to realise without support.
00:14:25.000But if you find a mentor in an area where you're looking to improve, they can...
00:14:30.000Kind of energize, awaken energies within you that on your own you wouldn't be able to use.
00:14:37.000I had a really recent experience of it where I was sort of like freaking out about something.
00:14:41.000I spoke to like a mentor of mine and like the way that he sort of spoke to me was like sort of aggressive, like a sort of an aggressive, that's not going to happen, you are not afraid!
00:14:50.000And like it sort of woke up the part of me that feels that way, that has that kind of, I would say, sort of Male certainty, a kind of grounded energy.
00:15:03.000And in that moment in myself, all bewildered, I wasn't able to do it.
00:15:06.000I needed to resource it externally in a moment.
00:15:09.000So this is how I feel like your individual journey.
00:15:13.000I'm interested in how, because I'm guessing with your background in martial arts and stuff, mentorship seems pretty much stitched into that.
00:15:20.000You must continually be looking at someone, learning from someone, trying to equal them or whatever it is.
00:15:26.000Yeah, the good part about that is you get good at learning things.
00:16:01.000Did you first get into, like, you know, I've picked up stuff over the various shows of yours that I've listened to, but would you say that your inaugural interest in martial arts came from kind of domestic distress and stuff?
00:16:16.000Were you having a difficult home life and not a good relationship with your stepdad?
00:17:10.000Well, young boys are just, they're always looking to impress each other and they have these, if you want to find real toxic masculinity, it exists in teenage boys.
00:17:23.000The way it's described is mostly exaggerated in terms of the way the media talks about it.
00:17:27.000In its purest form, teenage boys, they get together and they start lighting frogs on fire and doing shit.
00:17:33.000They do things because they want to one-up each other and they feed off of each other.
00:17:38.000What one boy would do is so different than what five boys would do.
00:17:43.000What five boys would do could be horrific, but what one boy would do on his own is very rarely there.
00:17:49.000You have to think about yourself and think about, is this right?
00:17:53.000You objectively analyze the way you're behaving.
00:17:56.000People wouldn't be proud of me if I did it this way.
00:17:59.000But when you're with five other boys and you're all rambunctious and filled with testosterone and piss and vinegar, you wind up doing crazy things.
00:18:08.000When I hear something like that, it's difficult not to think that it's of course relative.
00:18:12.000Relative to us, the behavior of adolescent males is reckless and crazy.
00:18:17.000It's not impossible to conceive of an intelligence that would look at the behavior of adult human beings and think, oh my god, what's governing these people?
00:18:31.000What are you trying to accomplish with your life, with your existence, with your time?
00:18:35.000I think if there's a real concern about AI... I think the real concern is AI is going to rationally analyze our behavior and our reliance on emotions and all these human reward systems that we have built in and the way it's affecting our society and the way it's affecting how we govern ourselves and how we behave amongst ourselves.
00:18:58.000It's going to look at it like, well, they have too much monkey in them.
00:19:01.000They have so much monkey instincts and monkey DNA, but now they live in this rational, modern world of, you know, 5G internet on your phone and satellite communication and 24-7 news cycle, but yet they have these primate genes.
00:19:19.000Artificial intelligence, a subject about which I know very little...
00:19:23.000Seems to me that it will on some level have to be derived from a particular aspect of human understanding of rationalism.
00:19:31.000So we're representing one aspect of our nature and prioritizing it.
00:19:43.000For me, it envelops and involves the most beautiful aspects of our nature.
00:19:49.000I'm a little romantic about human beings still.
00:19:53.000I still feel that one of the great problems we've had is that philosophically we have overvalued materialism, rationalism, and knowing a little bit about philosophy, primarily from that bloody podcast that you and I tagged a minute ago before we was recording.
00:20:11.000So what I understand for that is that post-enlightenment, we've started to prioritize rationalism.
00:20:16.000So if you prioritize rationalism and organization, which obviously has a lot to offer, the organization of resources is incredibly and hugely important, you forget that a huge part of the human experience is nothing to do with that.
00:20:28.000The other thing we were chatting about before we went live was DMT. Now no artificial intelligence is going to understand that there is access to a realm of consciousness that continually exists that doesn't seem to be bound by physical laws as we understand them and if the physical laws that we abide by are parochial and relevant only to this level of existence Why are we allowing ideas resourced from there to govern all of our systems?
00:20:56.000You know, even listening to you talk about DMT and you say, I encountered these gestures, the gestures, I went through this membrane into another realm and checking out Mike Tyson when he was on here.
00:21:14.000I took acid when I was a teenager, and even in very unhealthy, not unhealthy, but unbridled, mad teenage boy conditions, I want to be there with a guy in a lab coat with a pen going, well, Mr. Brand, sit down, look at these Rorschach tests,
00:21:30.000instead of which, I mean, New Cross in a bedsit, Dropping acid and staring at my own hands and recognising, oh my God, I'm not me.
00:21:55.000I believe the problem with our society is that the materialistic aspect of our nature is not the priority.
00:22:02.000It's just one thing we should be doing.
00:22:04.000Of course we need good roads, of course we need hospitals, schools, food, etc.
00:22:07.000But we need to find a way of honouring the sacred.
00:22:10.000And I'm fascinated in the experiences you're having in these psychedelic explorations.
00:22:16.000And how it's influencing the rest of your life.
00:22:19.000How does it influence the rest of your decisions, the way you see the world, the way you see relationships, the way you see the vulnerable young man you were prior to building your own, I say, personal religion of martial arts, excellence in your chosen field of stand-up comedy.
00:23:14.000But I also know that that's not real because I've had spiritual experiences and Hallucigenic experiences that make me feel that the relationships we should be building have to honour that we are both, we're vulnerable and flawed, but also capable of greatness.
00:23:29.000There has to be room for all of this, and I feel that part of what we're doing and part of why we're experiencing such superficial polarity in politics and culture is because we're not acknowledging that underneath this surface activity of left-right, left-right, and you know from Sam Harris, them little experiments, you stick garbage in front of someone,
00:23:45.000They become Republican pretty quickly, or you scare people, they become less Democratic.
00:23:50.000I think all that stuff is pretty superficial, and at depth, in that realm of the jesters and the membrane of psychedelia, we have access to oneness, and that should be what's influencing the way we set up our tribes, our systems, and our relationships.
00:24:03.000Yeah, I think when a guy like Kevin Hart shows you what a positive and motivational impact one person can have, just with his words and his deeds and the way he lives his life, he's so inspirational.
00:24:18.000That you realize that that is possible.
00:24:46.000You know, and obviously he's materialistic as well.
00:24:50.000He's got a bunch of cars and a big house and he makes a lot of money and he does a lot of movies.
00:24:54.000But what he's spreading is this very motivational, very positive message.
00:25:00.000And that affects people in a very positive way too.
00:25:03.000And all that left-right shit and all the battles that we have politically and ideologically back and forth and all the negative venom that people spray at each other.
00:25:14.000At the end of the day, it's not benefiting anyone.
00:25:18.000Unless you're fighting some major demon that the world needs to conquer.
00:25:36.000That you have this unique perspective.
00:25:38.000You can affect the way people view their own journey in life because you've been so introspective and so aware of your own pros and cons in terms of your past behavior, your current behavior, and who you are now and who you used to be.
00:25:55.000All that stuff is fuel for people because they can relate.
00:26:54.000My writing is not from a, you'll understand, not from a technical perspective.
00:26:58.000I'm not saying this is what I've got to say on open guard to transition.
00:27:03.000I'm talking about how the psychological impact that it's had on me and also in there about the protocols of going to a group, which as a beginner are very relevant.
00:27:15.000I've got a hunch that the more we emulate and connect to original ways of human behaviour, whether that's dietary...
00:27:22.000Or hierarchies or organisation of groups, I feel that we will feel a sense of greater connection.
00:27:30.000Now, the thing I got from going to BJJ classes, Genesis, where I go back in England, is that all the white belts get changed at one end of the room.
00:27:40.000The purple belts and above get changed at the other end of the room, which coincidentally or not is where the control for the timer is and the control for the music is and where the kit is.
00:27:49.000That's all at that end of the room, so all the control is that end.
00:27:53.000But it begins with sort of dancing around in a circle, doing all of those various exercises.
00:27:57.000Now lift your knees, now do the shrimping and that kind of stuff.
00:28:01.000It's that a lower belt shouldn't invite a higher belt to spa or roll.
00:28:07.000And as you say, the amount of respect.
00:28:09.000The bowing, the handshaking at the end of it.
00:28:13.000It provides such a safe environment in which to deal with the primal.
00:28:22.000I should have been taught that shit when I was 14, 13, mandatarily, so that I didn't come across it.
00:28:29.000You're not going to be setting fire to fields and allotments and putting frogs on fireworks if you've got a way of dealing with that primal energy when it's coming.
00:28:39.000Some people that don't understand that think that you should suppress it somehow.
00:28:42.000You should just ignore it or suppress it.
00:28:44.000They don't understand that for men, for a biological male, it really needs to be tackled head on.
00:28:50.000I mean, you really need to embrace what it is to be a physical male, and it frees you in a lot of ways.
00:28:57.000Do you think this might be a comparable moment to in the 1960s when there was a sort of a sense of sexual repression versus sexual free love?
00:29:05.000You know, the images of Woodstock and flowers in their hair and smoking joints and having sort of sex outdoors in mud or possibly wheat.
00:29:12.000LAUGHTER This time of, like, a kind of an anger about maleness.
00:29:17.000And maleness may not, as you said, it may be a biological male, but it could be the energy of, I don't know, assertion or whatever.
00:29:25.000These, like, you know, as in grammar, male and female relate to certain words, as in French grammar, where, I don't know, cat is female and dog is male.
00:29:52.000And if you're a woman who's had negative experiences with men, maybe you've dated men that have been physically abusive, or maybe you've known men that have been physically abusive, and you're around that, And you just, it's very convenient and very easy to just generalize and decide that all men are negative.
00:30:32.000And then there's some masculine men, but everybody is okay as long as they respect you and they're kind to each other.
00:30:39.000But the problem is we associate certain behaviors and characteristics with either negativity or hedonism or toxic masculinity or someone being a bitch as a man.
00:30:52.000And these generalizations are often way more harmful and it's just too convenient and easy and lazy.
00:31:12.000But the other day, because I'm staying in Los Angeles, Gabby, she's Mexican.
00:31:17.000When I first moved out here and lived my entourage lifestyle, she used to look after the house and she used to think, oh, Oh, my baby, my baby.
00:31:45.000For me, I thought, I don't want to put my daughter in that.
00:31:48.000That's sort of, in a way, sexualising that child.
00:31:54.000And also, a lot of the time, with my daughter, with my wife, particularly with our first child, I'm like, don't dress her up in little dresses and stuff because she won't be able to run around.
00:32:16.000But I am aware that these things of dress a child this way, dress a girl this way, are constructs.
00:32:24.000Further to what we were talking about again before, about Michelle Foucault.
00:32:26.000We got a lot done before we went live, man.
00:32:28.000When we were talking about Michel Foucault, what he exposes a lot is that a lot of things that we take for granted as being normal are actually constructs.
00:32:39.000And when I say a child's bikini, there's no reason for any child of any sex or gender to be wearing a bloody bikini.
00:32:47.000A child with tits is a terrifying idea.
00:32:50.000For all but a very small and terrifying percentage of the population.
00:32:54.000So that is an example of the external feminization of a child.
00:32:59.000So when there's an argument, a feminist argument of gender is a construct, I can see, oh yeah, to a point, it is.
00:33:14.000But being a father to a daughter has made me feel like I don't, obviously, and I know you have daughters or at least a daughter, three daughters, I'm certainly very aware of, I don't want to push them down some culturally prescribed avenue,
00:33:30.000whether it's about their dress, their sexuality or anything.
00:33:45.000It's like I see people, they're getting their daughters to dress very, very feminine with little mini skirts and stuff and they're five years old and high heel shoes.
00:33:56.000I've seen little kids with high heel shoes.
00:34:01.000Yeah, but for me, that is being sourced from.
00:34:05.000We can extrapolate that to, then why should a 20-year-old woman wear high heels?
00:34:09.000I mean, I've read cultural analysis, I'm sure you have, of like, well, the lipstick is to emphasise the lips because it's redolent of the vagina.
00:34:18.000The high heels is to make a woman seem more vulnerable and to accentuate aspects of body shape.
00:34:23.000Now, this can be seen as evidence of the influence of patriarchy.
00:34:27.000There's loads of areas where I feel like Why are we looking for shit to argue about in this area?
00:34:32.000Most of us are the most important people in our life of a different gender or sex to us.
00:34:38.000You know, why are we looking for arguments?
00:34:40.000But you can see the influence of cultural forces that are, you know, not neutral.
00:34:47.000Yeah, you certainly can, but I think it should be up to the choice of the person once they're an adult.
00:34:51.000The real problem is putting pressure on them to dress one way or another and not letting them find their place.
00:34:56.000But if a woman becomes whatever age you decide and she wants to wear high heels and a skirt because she likes the way it looks, there's nothing wrong with that either.
00:35:07.000The demonization of sexuality is also a problem.
00:35:10.000It is almost as much of a problem as people who will prey upon vulnerable people.
00:35:18.000People that think there's something wrong with being sexually attractive or something wrong with being desirable or wanting to be desirable.
00:35:26.000There's nothing wrong with that either.
00:35:27.000And that kind of suppression, the suppression of these feelings that you have and this desire that you have, it's very unhealthy as well.
00:35:34.000It's a normal thing to want to be sexual.
00:35:37.000It's a normal thing to want to look good.
00:35:39.000If a girl looks good in a skirt and high heels and she likes to dress like that, who the fuck is anyone to say is there anything wrong with that?
00:35:53.000Particularly in really progressive ideology, they look down upon women who wear short skirts and high heels and a lot of makeup and, you know, open tops that show their boobs because they think that they're playing into the patriarchy or that they're somehow or another falling into these gender traps.
00:36:16.000But yet they celebrate that in transgender people.
00:36:19.000They celebrate that in trans men that transition to women, and then they really doll it up.
00:36:39.000The aesthetics of what perhaps could be referred to as sexualised dress, or I suppose in males, expressive or garish clothing, jewellery, tattoos.
00:36:53.000I understand in British culture that these are often indicators of class.
00:36:58.000That it's typically the lower down the class structure you are, the more likely you are to dress in a way that is exhibitive or like, you know, women from a blue collar background dress in ways that are exposing and revealing men have leery cars and lots of tattoos and jewellery.
00:37:17.000Expressive ways of demonstrating wealth.
00:37:19.000The higher you go up, the class, the more subtle, the more dressed down, no labels, all that sort of stuff.
00:37:24.000In British culture, there's a different system for referencing it.
00:37:29.000I wonder how that works in American culture with its evident and much-discussed racial divisions, like certain things.
00:37:37.000It seems like a subtle way of condemning particular types of womanhood that may not just be sourced from dress this way for the male gaze.
00:37:46.000It can also be a way of saying dressing that way is an indication of a lower class background or of a particular type of ethnicity.
00:37:54.000There could be that, but there's also the reality of males and females.
00:37:58.000There's a lot of fucking jealous people.
00:38:00.000And there's a lot of women that just don't have the type of physical body that looks good in a short skirt with high heels and a low-cut shirt.
00:38:10.000And they don't like when they see it in other women because they're not comfortable with their own bodies.
00:38:17.000I mean, women get as much or more hate from women as they ever do from men.
00:38:21.000And particularly if women find you to be too overtly sexual with the way you dress or behave, that you're damaging male-female relationships.
00:38:33.000You're damaging the dynamic, particularly office dynamics.
00:38:36.000If there's one girl in the office that likes to tramp it up and all the guys are paying attention to her, women will get mad at her.
00:38:43.000I did an interview a while ago where I sort of talked about, like, parenting our kids, me and my wife, how we parent our kids, and I said, like, you know, I have to be honest, my wife is much the more dominant parent.
00:38:56.000She's much more practical than I am, right?
00:38:58.000And, like, stuff that got, like, really negatively written about.
00:39:02.000People say, like, oh, she changes more diapers than I do and stuff, right?
00:39:05.000Not like I don't change diapers or whatever.
00:39:08.000It's just my wife, you know, regardless of our respective sexes, is the more efficient, dominant parent she's much more likely with.
00:39:16.000Like, with me, if my daughter goes, I want that chocolate, the answer from me is, oh, yeah, all right.
00:39:40.000And he says, because of your own anxiety and pain from your own childhood, with no disrespect to my magnificent parents, like, you can't handle seeing your kid suffer.
00:39:49.000So you, like, straight away, you bail and do what she wants and stuff.
00:39:53.000Now, like, so there's so much complexity in the reality of our personal little domestic relationship.
00:39:59.000And I'm certainly not saying, and everyone else should run their household in that manner as well.
00:40:03.000And so help me God, any man that changes it up.
00:40:06.000You know, but the way it was reported is like, that's what...
00:40:09.000What happens, I think, in modern media is they change what you say, then you have to defend what they said you said.
00:40:14.000And you go, well, that ain't what I meant.
00:40:16.000I'm not saying that because my wife is a woman, she should take more domestic...
00:40:20.000I'm just saying that in our household, she seems to have a set of attributes and characteristics that make her take control of that aspect of parenting.
00:40:27.000And it's like the desire to judge, condemn, and object is the priority as opposed to...
00:40:34.000No one's looking to go, oh, who cares or what, you know.
00:41:06.000Well, it's also that they're Self-deprecating to yourself.
00:41:10.000They're not looking at things rationally.
00:41:19.000One of the things that came out of all this Facebook algorithm stuff is you find out that Facebook realized somewhere early on that the way to...
00:41:29.000Encourage engagement is to get people upset.
00:41:32.000They get way more engaged, and they go back and forth and interact with these posts way more if they're upset than they do if they agree with it.
00:41:42.000If they agree with it, they might give it a like or a thumbs up and say, hey, that's great, and that's it.
00:41:46.000But if, you know, someone's talking about, you know, we shouldn't build the wall, we should let everyone in, and you put that on some fucking Trump guy's page, and they, ah!
00:41:55.000I mean, you will get thousands and thousands and thousands of interactions.
00:41:59.000And so Facebook realized that the way to keep people...
00:42:02.000And, you know, they could claim that it's an algorithm, and the algorithm just supports whatever the people are really interested in.
00:42:08.000But what they're interested in is conflict.
00:42:11.000That demonstrates my earlier point, which I made up on the spot, that AI is not a neutral thing.
00:42:17.000It is resourced from human perspectives, because that is a type of AI, not as complex as what we're going to experience, and I can't even imagine.
00:42:52.000I respect that some people don't have any other outlets.
00:42:54.000They don't have the privileges I have of being able to go to support groups where people openly talk about, this is the ways that I felt inferior today.
00:43:01.000This is the ways that I'm trying to become a better man and a better father and a better co-worker.
00:43:06.000A lot of people aren't afforded those environments and probably the best shot they got is having a go at someone online and those people, in a way, deserve love and sympathy.
00:45:08.000There's never been a time where people have had this instantaneous interaction with people, unfiltered, unmoderated, globally.
00:45:17.000I mean, it's very strange to be able to do that and to be able to go back and forth and Just to be able to give your comments on things, to be able to talk about things.
00:46:11.000But in unavoidable dynamics, the unnecessary dynamics, like, you know, as a father and dealing with colleagues and stuff like that, do you experience a lot of tension, anxiety?
00:46:24.000Do you feel that you have transcended that?
00:46:26.000Because I do, in my own life, feel like, yeah, I'm not the adolescent boy I was.
00:46:29.000I've, like, you know, I've learned from that, and I still, in a very sort of COD psychological way, you know, when I'm doing Hibiro, that's the BJJ classes I'm doing over here with Professor Ricardo Wilk.
00:46:41.000Like, when I'm doing those classes, I have a sense of fathering my child self, of like, you know, because I weren't doing those kind of things when I was a kid.
00:46:50.000I'm like, it's all right, Russell, we're just in a BJJ class.
00:47:18.000What are you doing with that aspect of yourself?
00:47:21.000Do you still have a relationship with it?
00:47:22.000When you're doing all these psychedelic, cosmonautic explorations of the psyche, are you not encountering aspects of yourself that are undeveloped, unaddressed?
00:47:32.000There's always going to be unaddressed and undeveloped aspects of yourself, but I'm very, very, very different to who I was when I was a young boy.
00:47:55.000And, you know, with life experience and developing confidence and understanding of who you are and why you had those feelings and why you were insecure and why you had so much self-doubt, martial arts helped me with that tremendously.
00:48:10.000Because it was the first thing that I ever did where I didn't feel like a loser.
00:48:13.000It's like the first thing that I ever did where people respected me and they liked me for it.
00:49:20.000And still, you know, the journey of jiu-jitsu is a fascinating one because unless you're someone who's, you know, a Salo Hibero or a John Jock Machado or just a true master who's dedicated their entire life to it, the journey's so long.
00:50:18.000There's so many situations and interactions and exchanges and Entries and defenses and a way to chain moves together and the correct way to set something up two, three steps ahead to know that if you grab the lapel this way, the guy's going to try to shake it off that way and that exposes this which exposes that and then the next defense will expose this and then you keep going and going and going and going until you get them.
00:50:41.000It's so beautiful to watch that because it's like as if there's a pre-existing net or grid of interrelated signs that will work together.
00:50:51.000And like as a white belt, I've got three stripes now.
00:50:54.000I was really hoping that by the time I came back on here, I would have a blue belt.
00:51:08.000And what's a significant step for me is like now in the classes when I'm sparring people I don't try just in the handshake to manipulate them into going easy.
00:51:33.000Yeah, sometimes I try and stay down that white belt end of the room, but now the more I do it, the more they coax me up there.
00:51:39.000Great big giant men, like there's a guy that goes, the hard end purple belt and above, Dave, Paul Busby, and there's people, their hands and their feet look different to my hands and feet.
00:51:53.000Their hands and feet are as different from mine as mine are to my daughter's.
00:52:12.000But the thing is with other white belts is that what I feel is like there is my ego comes back in.
00:52:19.000Because there's how I feel like, no, I should be getting something.
00:52:21.000The first time I got choked out by another white belt, I felt like, I went into a room I'd not been in since I was 16, getting my head kicked in in bus stops, you know, and stuff like that.
00:52:30.000I felt like I was quiet for 24 hours, just sitting and reflecting on, oh shit, and I had to speak to other people, like, this is a combat sport, this happens, you're going to experience, right, right, so it doesn't mean I'm a bad person.
00:53:01.000Yeah, and you sit there while I'll tell you about Jiu Jitsu.
00:53:05.000And the other thing that's been good about it is when it is the other way.
00:53:10.000I remember a guy that was a big guy on top of me, and he was in Mount, right?
00:53:16.000And he wasn't actually applying a submission, but just the sheer discomfort of having someone there, their body, their sweat, their Their hair, their abdomen, their reproductive organs, their digestive system, feces in their bowel on top of me.
00:53:54.000It's also very satisfying to defend against something that someone used to catch you with.
00:53:59.000Like, say, if someone's really good at taking your back and they choked you a couple times, and then one time they take your back, but you defend and you get out.
00:54:18.000I'm not good at that kind of stuff, never bother trying.
00:54:20.000So for me, at this stage in my life, to go and do something that I'm not good at, that's with other men, that's competitive, that involves so much vulnerability and failure and learning, I'm thinking, well, you're growing.
00:54:31.000You've got to be growing because you're doing stuff that you never would have done before.
00:54:34.000Even turning up at a new place like I'm doing here in LA and making those new relationships and doing that, you know, it's amazing for me.
00:54:41.000Another thing I'm into is the integrity of it, right?
00:54:44.000Because Chris Clear, a black belt under Roger Gracie, right, in the UK, my teacher, like, if he gave me a blue belt, that would look good, man.
00:54:53.000It would be videoed, I would tweet it, it would be everywhere.
00:54:56.000Oh, Russell Brand got a blue belt, this shit must work.
00:54:58.000But no, he doesn't do it out of integrity and respect for that.
00:55:02.000You know, it means more to him, evidently, than the act of kindness.
00:55:08.000It's nice to belong to something that has protected and valuable systems.
00:55:12.000He did say to me, you keep going by the end of the year.
00:56:17.000If you just keep going, get off that fucking vegan diet and keep going...
00:56:21.000I watched a documentary called What the Health, have you seen it?
00:56:25.000Yeah, it's filled with a lot of propaganda and nonsense.
00:56:28.000Ah, propaganda, damn, those guys again, like the Nazis, I remember them.
00:56:31.000Well, they used a lot of discredited studies, and there's a lot of epidemiology studies that'll connect things.
00:56:39.000Epidemiology, what does that mean, like an epidemic or something?
00:56:42.000No, we could pull up the actual definition of epidemiology, but the way I would describe it is they would do these studies and essentially they would ask you what you eat on a daily basis, how often do you eat meat,
00:57:08.000But the problem is, what is causing, here, a branch of medicine which deals with incidence, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health.
00:57:20.000So when they're dealing with incidents, right?
00:57:24.000They're dealing with how often do you eat red meat?
00:57:50.000Are they eating grass-fed steak and vegetables?
00:57:53.000And there's very little evidence that shows there's anything wrong with eating meat if you follow a normal, healthy, what they would call a primal diet.
00:58:10.000I mean, unless you have some very unusual, rare condition where you're either allergic to meat or you have some very strange digestive system where you have allergies to it or you have...
00:58:42.000For people physically is the modern American diet, and that's been pretty established.
00:58:46.000Yes, that's right, and there are clear ethical reasons to be vegan in that it takes you out of the exploitation of animals, but that documentary, Water Health that I watched was like, you know, and I've been vegetarian for years, and this, and I've gone back and forth to veganism because I feel, God, Jesus Christ, man, there's enough things in my life I'm not doing without not being able to have an egg Without feeling guilty for fuck's sake.
00:59:04.000But you could have pasture-raised eggs if you get them from a good farm.
00:59:06.000The chickens are just hanging out, man.
00:59:45.000So, hey, though, the thing about that vegan documentary, mate, is that it tuned in to my pre-existing belief when it said stuff like, oh, the Diabetes Association, they are funded by these meat and dairy organizations and these pharmaceutical companies.
01:00:02.000The cancer organization similarly accepts donations from these organizations.
01:01:41.000Well, you have to get your blood monitored.
01:01:42.000When you're doing something like that, this is also if you're a person that has addictive problems, addiction problems, which I don't necessarily have them as much with substances.
01:02:22.000But with hormones, you want to make sure that you don't overdose yourself.
01:02:27.000You want to make sure that you stay within a very narrow range where you have what are the healthy levels of a person that's in their late 20s.
01:03:41.000You should eat some animal protein without, I mean, if you oppose the moral aspect of killing an animal, which I totally understand and appreciate, and that's what led me to become a hunter in the first place, is that I was really uncomfortable watching these animal rights videos of Factory farming.
01:04:36.000Yeah, we do travel on bikes if you whitetail hunt.
01:04:39.000A lot of times you'll go into the woods with bikes because they don't leave a scent the way your feet do.
01:04:43.000You know, and animals don't associate the sound of a bike the way they associate it with, like, the sound of stepping, bipedal hominids stepping towards them.
01:05:36.000Like, see, like, I, from that position, I couldn't, like, I would love the game of being able to aim, because actually I've had to go down gun ranges, it turns out I'm a pretty good shot, and it's nice to see that thing come back with, like, holes around its abdomen and its head, and I think,
01:06:09.000Now, at least I don't eat meat and stuff like that, so it's not like I have all those feelings but can handle it in a packaged, portioned-off way.
01:06:16.000It's just I feel too much like, oh, that creature.
01:06:19.000So in your head, when you're doing it, when you're pulling the trigger, you're not having...
01:07:15.000But the other thing to recognize is that the reason why most of this wildlife exists in the first place, a lot of it was wiped out in the early 20th century.
01:07:26.000In the late 19th century, early 20th century, they didn't have refrigeration and it was hard to get food and we didn't have the same sort of large-scale agriculture that we have today.
01:07:38.000And so when someone would want meat, somebody would either have to hunt it for you and you would go to the market and get that hunted food or you would go out and do it yourself.
01:07:50.000And they basically wiped out most of the wildlife in North America to the point of extinction, white-tailed deer, elk.
01:07:57.000They've been extirpated from the majority of their range in North America and only been replaced in a few other places.
01:08:03.000But the places where they've been replaced, it's all through money that was generated through hunting tags, all through billions and billions of dollars.
01:08:11.000There's a thing called the Robertson-Pickman, I think that's what it's called, Act, where 10%, if you buy hunting gear and equipment, 10% of that money goes to habitat restoration, making sure that rangers and forest people get funded,
01:08:29.000so that the Fish and Game Department gets funded, and also population conservation, making sure that the populations are healthy, repopulating certain areas with elk and deer.
01:08:41.000And this has all been done through the money that's generated through hunting.
01:08:46.000Yeah, I can see that there's a, looking at my own feelings towards it, I can see that there's a, potentially, I'm bringing a sentimentality to the idea of animals that's, like, anthropomorphic.
01:09:04.000But what I... I live in a rural area in Britain where hunting is normal and agriculture is normal and I wouldn't get very far if I was like, you can't shoot those pheasants, look at their feathers, they're beautiful.
01:09:30.000But I feel that this is precisely the kind of territory where we have to look at acknowledging and tolerating difference between us.
01:09:39.000This is where I feel like these ossified, polarised positions between right and left are starting to take root.
01:09:45.000Because if someone like me, who don't eat meat, don't eat animal products and wouldn't hunt for ethical reasons, Starts trying to impose on other people now you shouldn't hunt because of this that have you not watched Bambi you know like that's gonna mean that people aren't able to explore who they are and so my I've let go of judging people around things that I don't agree with because I reckon I don't know everything.
01:10:15.000And if people said to me, I'm thinking about going hunting, I'd go, well, these are my feelings about it.
01:10:20.000However, though, I just heard that hunting does contribute, apparently, to the survival of some species.
01:10:25.000And there is an argument that it's quite natural and indigenous.
01:10:27.000And it's probably a way of getting in contact with who we are originally as hunting people.
01:10:32.000It's an important part of our anthropological history.
01:10:34.000History and possibly a lot of the condemnation of hunting is part of the rejection of who we used to be as we become overly civilised and more and more detached from what it is to be human, whether that's sacred or pragmatic.
01:10:46.000We don't know what human beings are anymore.
01:11:08.000You gave me an in, I will pummel you with my belief system on all things.
01:11:12.000So I don't feel like, that ain't where I get into judging people.
01:11:16.000But I'm interested as well, with this, I keep bringing up the subject of DMT, like, what I guess what I want to know about is, like, because I'm, you know, obviously a person in recovery, I don't drink, I don't take drugs, haven't done for a long time,
01:11:33.000and I recognise for certain people that they can't do it safely.
01:11:37.000Psychedelics and hallucinogens seem to me exist in a realm outside of that because they're not about, they're not pleasure.
01:11:44.000It seems to me like it's a spiritual portal.
01:11:46.000However, I'm a crafty bastard when it comes to this stuff, and I'm always looking for an in.
01:11:52.000You know, when I see your cannabis treasure trove over there, I mean, that is some, yeah, as you said, Raiders of the Lost Ark stuff, and I'm holding in my hand now the CBD-rich cannabis soft gels, clasping it.
01:12:04.000So you're worried that that is a gateway?
01:12:08.000That CBD, which is not necessarily psychoactive?
01:13:11.000Now, when I listen to, say, Terence McKenna talking about his experiences in psychedelia at such length and with such lucidity and with so many philosophical connotations and the way that he uses the information he's getting from hallucinogenic experiences...
01:13:26.000To speculate on how we should organise society, what the implications are for freedom.
01:13:31.000His refusal to accept that there are certain kind of experiences that should be prohibited, that it's ridiculous that adults should be prevented from having that.
01:13:39.000I'm fascinated, but I'm also, I suppose, part of my bias is I love anything that gets me out of my head.
01:13:45.000I feel a tremendous sense of relief, whether it's through meditation or even sport.
01:13:49.000Or sex, being relieved of the burden of the constantly thinking mind.
01:13:54.000But when I hear like those vivid descriptions of DMT realm or our Wesker, I think something in me hungers for that, hungers for it.
01:14:05.000Do you worry that you're trying to get intoxicated?
01:14:07.000Do you worry that you're trying to find a loophole?
01:14:55.000I think there's a gateway in your mind that can lead to some other dimension that's probably there all the time.
01:15:01.000If there is an omnipresent, continually existing realm that human beings aren't accessing because of the particular biochemical formulation of consciousness As it is in this point in our evolution.
01:15:23.000And when he talks about them beings, you know, like that he describes as self-dribbling basketballs, creating like Faberge egg, like, you know, devices through vibration.
01:17:00.000Certainly there are archetypal images that seem to be repeated throughout ancient cultures and archaic stories that seem to refer to the potential for plant experiences to affect consciousness.
01:17:12.000Even the Garden of Eden, do not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge, otherwise you will become as gods.
01:17:22.000If there is some realm that we can reach through that experience that puts into perspective everything else we experience on the material realm, and that thing seems to, in your words, be emanating love and understanding while ever-changing, completely formless and communicating love and understanding,
01:17:40.000I can't help but think that that should become Our priority to have a relationship with that realm and to bring about that experience.
01:17:51.000I don't even mean in a literal way, because even Terence McKenna said there are some people, vulnerable souls, he was probably referring to people like me, that probably shouldn't mess around with that kind of stuff.
01:18:00.000I think he was really talking about people with schizophrenia, which he believed he had, by the way.
01:18:05.000Yeah, he had some very unique perspectives on schizophrenia and I think if we lived in a healthy world, a healthy civilization that had a healthy relationship with psychoactive substances, we'd probably have centers where you would have a legitimate shaman,
01:18:23.000a medical advisor, and someone would take you through a guided experience.
01:18:31.000There's a lot of people that are very depressed that are having these Physician-controlled ketamine experiences that have had a profound effect on their depression.
01:18:42.000My friend Neil Brennan's gone through several of them.
01:18:44.000And he's a comedian, a very funny comedian.
01:18:47.000So when he was describing it, it was hilarious.
01:18:49.000He was going to a doctor's office and tripping his fucking balls off.
01:18:52.000And the doctor's shooting him up with intramuscular ketamine.
01:19:03.000The way he's describing it was really funny.
01:19:06.000I mean, tripping his fucking balls off in these whatever states that ketamine, I've never experienced ketamine, I don't know what it does, but it's apparently profoundly hallucinogenic.
01:19:19.000And you have wild, crazy experiences on it.
01:19:22.000And for whatever reason, it has a great impact on depression for a lot of people.
01:19:27.000I think it's a perspective enhancer, but it also does something to rewire the mind.
01:19:31.000Well, what some of this suggests is that mental illness is a response to our material conditions.
01:19:36.000Whether that mentally is schizophrenia, depression, or addiction, it's like people are going, hang on a minute, this isn't how we're supposed to live.
01:19:44.000I took that ketamine one time towards the end of my using, and as usual, it's not in the right type of environment.
01:19:50.000You shouldn't be doing stuff like that in a nightclub.
01:19:51.000You need to be under that shamanic conditions white coat guy or whatever, whoever you nominate as a shaman.
01:19:57.000But I felt like it was like going into a tunnel made of sound and having to navigate.
01:20:02.000I was like, oh shit, I'm still in reality.
01:20:20.000I was always like, I'm in fucking pain.
01:20:21.000I need some shit to help me out, otherwise I'm going to I'd probably kill myself.
01:20:25.000So it was a way of holding that stuff at arm's length.
01:20:28.000So I guess my renewed curiosity around DMT and ayahuasca and other sort of plant medicines.
01:20:35.000Do you know Daniel Pinchbeck and them guys that are part of that?
01:20:39.000I'm curious about it because I guess I'm continually trying to find a way where someone goes, right, here's a way where we can do it, where it's sort of safe.
01:20:45.000And I've heard of other people in recovery doing it.
01:20:47.000And when I think about what my motivation is, is when I hear people talking about and my own recollections of experiencing what felt like God and by God I mean a sense of oneness and that my individual identity isn't my real identity and I'm connected to everything and love is the most important thing.
01:21:01.000You know, I want a real experience of that so that when I'm out in the world, I can remember when I'm driving or when I'm dealing with people or if I'm buying something or if I'm feeling inferior or feeling superior that, like you said, this is bullshit.
01:21:17.000You know, as someone that's been seduced by fame, a person like, oh, if I get this part in this film, Then everyone's going to love me.
01:21:22.000Oh, if this stand-up set goes well, you know, like a person that placed all of my well-being outside of myself, the certain knowledge that there is an inner connection that will take care of you, that's accessible.
01:21:32.000I guess I'm, you know, hungry to sort of feel it in a way that's like, oh my God, now there is no doubt.
01:21:38.000So in a sense, it's a crisis of faith, not a crisis of faith.
01:21:42.000But there's some psychedelic states that you could achieve without taking anything.
01:21:46.000I mean, you can certainly get there in a flotation tank.
01:21:50.000You can get there through holotropic breathing.
01:21:52.000I've never done kundalini yoga, but apparently the people that get really deep into kundalini yoga can literally have DMT trips.
01:22:00.000I have friends that have done DMT and have experienced DMT trips through kundalini.
01:22:08.000I mean, there's a lot of time, a lot of time, a lot of energy, and you have to really understand the methods and follow them to a T, and you can achieve these altered states of consciousness that are apparently, not from my personal experience, but from what people tell me,
01:22:25.000Yeah, I mean, I've had comparable things, I guess, that what is, you know, the difference between feeling something that's that overwhelming, that gives you no choice, you know, like, it's not like, you know, Kundalini, you've got to do these breaths correctly, you've got to sit there, you've got to try it again and again.
01:22:40.000Well, what, for me, it feels, like, what I've felt quite a lot, yogically and meditatively, is a cessation of what I would call my individual consciousness.
01:23:08.000I've sort of felt rushes of that, like a certain wordless clarity, if you can imagine me having anything that was wordless, even for a moment.
01:23:15.000And in that space, there is great peace.
01:23:19.000So I suppose what's turning me on about the DMT and Ayahuasca thing is the way it's narrativised, that you're going to meet characters and stuff like that, and it's going to be plain...
01:23:31.000You know, because I suppose what prophets do, you know, like whether, you know, when a prophet returns from the, whether it's the burning bush or the cave, they come back and they say, all this stuff that you're taking seriously is not real.
01:23:57.000And so, like, you know, I suppose what I'm after, because I'm, Partly, you know, on a super...
01:24:02.000Like, on one level, influenced by what you're doing and how you've created your own...
01:24:06.000Like, you've created your own business and your own success.
01:24:09.000Like, this symbiosis of stand-up and the podcast.
01:24:12.000And, like, it's become, like, a sort of a lifestyle brand, in a sense, Joe.
01:24:15.000Like, you know, I'm sort of like, yeah, I don't...
01:24:17.000I don't want to be continually dragged into these, like, working within institutions.
01:24:22.000Like, you know, I'm over here doing a bloody, I'm doing ballers, and I'm bloody glad to be over here doing ballers and working with The Rock, and I've got a funny story about that if you want it.
01:24:31.000But, like, you know, like, really what interests me is, like, can I be, can I dedicate my life To humorously communicating spiritual information and indeed starting to live it.
01:24:45.000And I suppose what that would mean is, you know, I'm getting better, but I'm not a person who's obsessed with porn or sex or drugs or whatever.
01:24:55.000To recognize that we're all different.
01:24:56.000Your perfect realization of you is going to involve...
01:24:59.000Hunt in and all of these things that you've created through your gift and that my perfect version of me is going to, you know, involve all of this and not everyone needs to build sort of empires or entertainment industries or whatever but all of us are on some journey to self-actualization and realization as individual as our fingerprints and as natural as a seed turning into a tree and if we don't have a way of accessing that no wonder we're dissatisfied no wonder there's an opioid epidemic no wonder people are bored and angry and lonely Well,
01:25:25.000I think what you can do Is be yourself.
01:25:28.000And what you can do is express yourself.
01:25:30.000And what you can do is constantly seek to improve and grow.
01:25:43.000You know, it's all just a matter of whether or not you're satisfied with your progress and where you are and who you are and how you express yourself.
01:25:51.000So your pursuit for excellence, when you're saying, I've got to get better at BJJ or archery or hunting or whatever, that isn't coupled with a sort of sense, because you're not fucking good enough!
01:26:06.000There's joy in it and there's enthusiasm, I mean, in everything.
01:26:10.000Archery in particular, it's very, you know, there's that book, Zen and the Art of Archery, which is, it's an interesting book.
01:26:19.000I think there's some really great points to it, but that state of mind that you get when you release an arrow and that arrow perfectly finds its mark really is Zen.
01:26:28.000It requires so much concentration and focus and technique that you really don't think about other things.
01:27:22.000And when you test yourself and you have to figure your way through something or change the path because the path you were on was unsuccessful, when you're doing that, it's really good for the mind and for the...
01:27:35.000I hesitate to say the spirit because I think that word spirituality is so beaten down and abused.
01:28:04.000I think it makes the bright colors brighter, and it makes the dull colors, even them, even the bad moments.
01:28:12.000If you have real positive experiences with difficult things that you choose to do on your own, I think it mitigates most of the hassle of life.
01:28:22.000That is, again, and I'm not particularly promoting this book because I'm alright with however things do.
01:28:27.000But the point of this mentorship is the idea that someone will exhibit qualities that you recognize you haven't fully realized in yourself and that you can sort of model them and realize them because latently you have those qualities.
01:30:06.000And, like, because I thought, like, because what I feel like is that the comedy club environment warps your material because you've got to appeal to them.
01:30:14.000And I think you ain't the fucking arbiters of truth, you drunk and crazy 2am motherfuckers.
01:30:19.000Like, like, So I get, like, I perform, what I'll do is, like, and what I'm doing to say at the moment is I'll book the UCB, like, or, like, places 100, 200, or go Lago, or put on events, and I'm doing events while I'm in LA, because I think, oh, these people come, and they love me, and they bring me beads,
01:31:44.000But look, the counter-argument to that is...
01:31:46.000Therefore, I'm in an environment that is sympathetic and it is my audience and I'm not biasing.
01:31:54.000The idea of overcoming a greater obstacle, I completely appreciate what you're saying.
01:31:59.000But say you believe in the purity of stand-up as being some real expression of yourself, as in the arrow hitting the bullseye, I feel like I have a vision of what I'm trying to achieve.
01:32:09.000And increasingly, it's becoming about, I want my stand-up, I want to hang on, you know, like, as I've always done, stories where I feel embarrassed and humiliated, but I want to hang off it, ruminations on what I believe to be the nature of truth, and I want people to come out of those things feeling loved, validated,
01:32:25.000accepted, and that they're good enough and that they can explore themselves.
01:33:16.000Some of my mates watch it and they tell me towards the end it become quite aggressive towards the audience.
01:33:21.000Yeah, it became like a TED Talk almost, I guess, apparently.
01:33:24.000I'm interested in, you know, that's, you know, yeah, there's enough room for everyone to do whatever they're doing.
01:33:29.000But, like, see, at the beginning of my, let's call it, career, like, I used to not prepare at all.
01:33:34.000I was still drinking and using, I'd go up on stage, I'd chop shit up, I'd get into confrontation, like, when I say chop shit up, I'd take up animals.
01:33:41.000Animal parts that I'd got from butchers.
01:33:43.000Like a skull with all meat and stuff and sinew on it.
01:34:34.000I can create that kind of an uncertainty in a room, a kind of a sense of chaos and what's happening, and then bring it back, I hope, to a humorous conclusion where people feel safe and amused and all of that kind of stuff.
01:34:53.000Prepping your stand-up in those environments that it biases you towards a type of stand-up comedy that is limited.
01:35:00.000No, because you can do that other stuff too.
01:35:03.000You could always perform to your crowd, and you could always expand on things to your crowd, but to really put it together without any fluff...
01:35:13.000Without any nonsense, without being self-indulgent, respecting the attention span of the audience that may or may not even be there to see you.
01:35:22.000Most likely it's not if you go to a comedy club and there's a large...
01:35:25.000If you go to the comedy store any night of the week, there's 15 plus people on the marquee or on the list.
01:35:49.000And I think that in doing that, you cut all the nonsense out of your act, and you develop an economy of words.
01:35:58.000You understand how to captivate people's attention and keep them engaged, and to respect their time, respect their point of view, respect that these people have an attention span.
01:36:07.000They want to be engaged in the best possible way that you can do it.
01:37:42.000They just say it in a certain way and figure out how to do it.
01:37:45.000When you're doing it in front of a crowd, you're developing these things while also feeling the way people are reacting to them and feeling their attention span, and it makes you, with proper reflection and truly objective listening to your material,
01:38:02.000it makes you change and shift and adjust things, hopefully in a positive way.
01:38:07.000And the more you do it, the more you get a sense of, maybe this is clunky here, and maybe I figure out a better way to say it.
01:38:15.000I agree, but the counter-argument could be that it could bias you to a sort of a lowest common denominator area.
01:38:20.000Say with that bit where you talk about the sun and, you know, it's, you know, you need it, it's trying to kill you, it gives you cancer.
01:38:27.000You know, like, something like, what was the journey of that bit of stand-up?
01:38:32.000Is it like, like, for me, it's like, oh, I think of a thought, I try and make sure there's a tag so I know where I'm going when I'm out there.
01:40:20.000But if you could say something and it forces someone to laugh, even if they disagree with you, if they're laughing, like, I don't even fucking agree with this, but holy shit, this is funny.
01:40:28.000You put that thought deep into someone's head and you allow them to think about your thought process and how your creative process and what you're doing to sort of bring these things out.
01:40:41.000Yes, I like the way you describe the architecture of that.
01:40:45.000You've got to basically have, these are some facts about the sun that are irrefutable.
01:40:49.000Now here is how that affects the way we look at the world and exposes to us that we're just ignorant.
01:40:57.000We can't hold reality in our minds because it's too vast to handle.
01:41:02.000I like it and I agree with you that with laughter comes access to kind of deeper truths and I've heard some therapists in fact say that laughter is to shame what grief is to sadness.
01:41:16.000That laughter is helping to expel shame and to process shame.
01:41:20.000There's something very important about people coming together and laughing together.
01:41:24.000I like to exist comedically in a world where it starts from a deeply personal perspective and admissions and acknowledgements of humiliation and shame and vulnerability and travels out to the universal and hopefully archetypal.
01:41:37.000You can sort of travel between those points.
01:41:39.000A comedian, I think we both admire, Bill Hicks.
01:41:42.000What I think is fascinating is because if you've loved Bill Hicks for a long while, then you discover, man, that guy worked...
01:41:50.000You know, like you go, I watched this interview of him on Australian TV. He's doing like a bit that I've seen him do, you know, in multiple incarnations.
01:41:59.000But I have also seen him do interviews where he's spontaneously talking about gigs, terrible gigs that have gone badly, and he is hilarious.
01:42:05.000But it's very interesting to me, and perhaps it's because of that background and that practice of doing clubs, that Hicks is very much a comedian that's, no, I'm drilling this fucking thing, and I'm staying with it.
01:42:31.000He was not just trying to make you laugh.
01:42:33.000He was aiming to enhance your perspective on whatever he was talking about.
01:42:38.000Yeah, and it seems very disciplined as a practitioner of it, whereas, say, Chappelle, it feels like he's just going, blah, after like an hour.
01:42:46.000Well, you know, he's got a very unique process, Chappelle does, and he can turn over an hour like no one have ever seen before.
01:42:53.000And I was talking to Donnell Wrongs about it recently, who was on the Chappelle show with him.
01:42:57.000We both agreed he's the best ever at turning over a new hour.
01:43:01.000He could release a Netflix special and then have a new hour within a couple of weeks.
01:43:17.000You know, if you pay attention to how, you know, when people study, like if you read Outliers, and you read how people, when people study why people are great at what they do and what makes them exceptional, there's always a variety of factors.
01:43:34.000And whatever the factors are with Dave, he's got this easygoing personality, this very carefree way of looking at things.
01:43:43.000He's also gone through a lot of bullshit in his career with leaving the Chappelle show and abandoning $50 million and going to Africa and really understanding what his real motivation were.
01:43:56.000He was caught up in that world where they were trying to change him and commercialize his television show.
01:44:01.000And he handled it As good as anybody that's ever handled it.
01:44:26.000Dave Chappelle did stand-up in the park in Seattle.
01:44:29.000He brought, like, a little amplifier and a microphone, sat up, and just started doing stand-up, and people just gathered around.
01:44:36.000And he did this just to sort of get him back in touch with his roots, because he used to do a lot of street performing in New York, and I saw him do street performing in Montreal.
01:44:44.000We did a club, and then we came out of the club, and Dave, I think Dave was like 18 or 19 at the time, just started doing stand-up on the street.
01:44:52.000And put his hat out and people would put money in his hat.
01:44:55.000I mean, he was constantly sharpening that sword.
01:44:59.000And he stopped doing stand-up for a long time in terms of booking gigs.
01:45:04.000And then after a while, he said, fuck it, I'm going to come back again.
01:45:07.000And then he started doing these gigantic gigs.
01:45:09.000And then, of course, he did his two recent Netflix specials.
01:45:17.000He's constantly popping into the Comedy Store and the Comedy Cellar and all these different clubs all across the country and constantly doing stand-up.
01:46:51.000This guy's so comfortable in his own skin and so friendly and easygoing and hilarious, but...
01:47:00.000Who he was then and then who he became is all the work that he put in.
01:47:05.000You know, it's like he had this base of this really, you know, this curious, young, very wise person who saw things that other people didn't see in the world.
01:47:15.000And then he just kept going and just kept going.
01:47:17.000And then, of course, The Chappelle Show, which is, in my opinion, the greatest sketch comedy show of all time, even though it was only two seasons.
01:47:40.000Just goes up, you know, just talks some shit, has a couple of drinks, laughs, and it's incredibly compelling.
01:47:48.000He's found his groove, you know, and that's...
01:47:51.000It's a beautiful thing to watch as a fellow stand-up comedy practitioner when someone achieves this mastery level, like we were talking about this Hicks and Gracie of stand-up comedy level, because that's where he's at right now.
01:48:49.000Now, I'm booked here to promote Luminary.
01:48:52.000My podcast has gone behind a paywall on a platform called Luminary, aiming to be the Netflix of podcasts, meaning like But, you know, your model will, I imagine, triumph further.
01:49:03.000So, like, from, like, this week, my podcast will be on Luminary as part of their premium content.
01:49:09.000It's an app through which you'll get all podcasts.
01:49:11.000But my podcast is, like, you've got to subscribe to that thing.
01:50:48.000A lot of people choose to go ad-free, and then they use Patreon or something like that for listener-supported stuff.
01:50:54.000Sam Harris was doing that for a long time, but then they had an issue with Patreon about certain censorship of certain individuals and certain ideological perspectives where they were leaning towards left-wing things and being...
01:51:08.000Being restrictive towards right-wing things, and then, you know, policing the way people behave outside of Patreon, and some people found that objectable.
01:51:18.000So he left, and some other people left, like Jordan Peterson left.
01:51:23.000I've never entered into Patreon, into those waters, but I know Burr does it.
01:51:28.000I think Burr has, like, one a week that he does.
01:51:35.000So, like, I feel like it's an alright thing to do, but even in, like, just with using things like YouTube and social media and, you know, like Spotify, iTunes or whatever, like, you know, as we have seen, there's a point where there is sort of censorship is a possibility like as you discussed on the jack like that run of episodes mate as i said to you by text between the jack dorsey the reaction to that your response to the reaction through alex jones and all that's important i thought that was a spate
01:52:05.000of podcasts that's like this is where this medium can be the alex jones podcast i thought was the godfather of podcasts we've seen the I was going to put it out tomorrow.
01:56:45.000You know, when we were talking about animal-human hybrids, we started pulling up these studies where they actually have done studies where they've tried to create animal-human hybrids.
01:57:57.000Look, we've got a nice contract with this defense contractor and they're gonna...
01:58:02.000That's how we lubricate the passage to the murderous monkeys is ISIS. That's the function of ISIS in the cultural conversation is to justify the monkey soldiers.
01:58:13.000Do you know what one scared me more than anyone that I've ever read?
01:58:31.000So you've got a murderous robot that eats people.
01:58:35.000It's like the worst kind of things that human beings could achieve.
01:58:41.000It's like people are sat around trying to come up with them.
01:58:46.000Well, they're responsible for a lot of really crazy innovation in terms of military stuff.
01:58:52.000But Boston Dynamics, they're the ones that make those crazy robots, and they work with DARPA, and those are the ones that make those robots that you can't kick over.
01:59:06.000No, that's the first thing we established, is you can't kick it over.
01:59:10.000I just think that's the big fear, is that future warfare will be our robots versus their robots, you know?
01:59:17.000If we're starting to bring about the worst aspects, the worst things that a human being can conceive of, let's channel them through into reality, it does make you feel that the apocalypse is real.
01:59:29.000I thought it was bad enough when, in the malaise of my younger days, I thought, oh wow, imagine if there was a cleaning service where the person would come around and clean, dressed scantily.
01:59:44.000Whatever devious shit you can dream up, someone's trying to turn a buck off it, and they've taken it to the extent of the non-kickover robot, flesh-eating robots.
02:01:20.000But these things, what we have to worry about is once artificial intelligence becomes sentient, and you can somehow or another attach it to these objects that move, And they run on solar power, or they have nuclear fuel cells or some crazy shit that allows them to exist for a long period of time.
02:01:38.000You don't have to worry about them contaminating environments if you plan on killing everybody in the environment.
02:01:43.000And also there's no means of regulation, is there?
02:01:46.000Because this is the apex of human endeavour, what can govern that?
02:03:26.000We had to throw off religion, you know, at the dawn of the secular age because religion was becoming systems of bias and systems of oppression and systems of, what do I want to say, elevating certain types of power and supporting elites.
02:03:42.000This religion, a lot of it seems like bullshit.
02:03:44.000What we've done is we've abandoned the sacred.
02:03:46.000And I think if you abandon the sacred, meaning there is more to life than what we can understand.
02:03:51.000I listened to the Brian Cox episode and I've spoke to Brian Cox, the British physicist, Yeah.
02:04:16.000We're accessing elements of consciousness, energies and frequencies that we are not able to access while we're in this state.
02:04:23.000And everything we're achieving and everything we're building, we're building on this platform.
02:04:27.000And the bias of this platform is towards progress and materialism.
02:04:31.000And I think the result is flesh-eating robots and those evil monkey warrior soldiers.
02:04:36.000I want to calm down and have a little talk about what it is we're trying to design.
02:04:41.000Yeah, I don't know if I agree with Brian on that particular point that we think we know everything about where consciousness emanates.
02:04:48.000I don't think that's necessary, but I like the fact that he thinks that way because he's such a rigid hardliner for science and the guy works at CERN. I mean, he's a brilliant, brilliant man, so of course he thinks that way.
02:04:59.000I also don't think he's ever had a DMT experience.
02:05:02.000I wonder that, yeah, some people, I think, give him a quick dose.
02:05:06.000Because, as well, I respect Brian, and it's further to my point, similar to the hunting argument.
02:05:11.000I happen to believe in God, but when I talked to Brian Cox, I got to the point where I was saying, all right, even though I believe in God and you are an atheist, although he said I don't call myself an atheist, well, I felt like we both got to the point where we said compassion, kindness, and love are the most important things.
02:05:37.000Do you have your own definition for it?
02:05:39.000I believe that that state of oneness and transcendence that you're talking about through your DMT experiences that says, you know, love and kindness and love and awareness, I believe that is the most real thing.
02:05:55.000And I think that we can interact with it.
02:05:59.000So I don't believe God in just a Gaia way, that the whole world is like an interactive, biological, living, breathing goddess.
02:06:07.000I believe, yes, that, and that we can commune with it.
02:06:12.000And furthermore, the relevance of it for me is that it suggests to me that we should be acting kindly and lovingly.
02:06:19.000And when we're thinking about how do we organise our systems, that our awareness of that energy, accessible to all of us, Should be paramount in our understanding of how we organise.
02:06:30.000So, like, what I think is, like, that we should look at, you know, like, we've been through it as human beings, so many advents, the agriculture, technology, industry, thinking that we were, that the, you know, the sun went round the earth, thinking that the earth was flat, with all due respect to Eddie Bravo.
02:06:48.000And before each of these realisations and each of these changes, we always think we're at the summit.
02:06:53.000We never know what's going to be the thing that's going to change.
02:06:56.000My suspicion is that what's going to change is the way we relate to consciousness and the way we see ourselves as individuals, that we start to have an understanding that what...
02:07:41.000The progressive technological route, because it's created medicine, because it's saved so many lives, because it's given us wonderful technology, the spirit of entrepreneurship, but all of that energy, it all gets pushed in one direction.
02:07:52.000It all goes that way, and I feel that we need to invite that back.
02:07:56.000The sacred and the divine need to be back in the conversation.
02:07:59.000Well, there's certainly going to be pros and cons with everything.
02:08:02.000There's definitely pros and cons with the creation of technology.
02:08:48.000So we have a far more complex system of recognition than they do in terms of visually, the way we see things.
02:08:57.000And I think that whatever skills or whatever senses that we've evolved, I don't think that's it.
02:09:05.000I don't think that we've reached the pinnacle of it.
02:09:08.000And I think that as beings become more and more evolved, they'll probably gain more and more senses.
02:09:14.000And that could be directly related to technology.
02:09:19.000It's totally possible that what's going on with technologies that we're also developing through external means, a way for us to see the world, a way for us to view...
02:09:29.000Like what they've done with the Large Hadron Collider is like the best example of it, right?
02:09:33.000What they do with the Hubble Space Telescope and other telescopes.
02:09:36.000You're using technology to gain awareness and to see more things.
02:09:40.000And that this is the good side of technology, is that it's...
02:09:45.000Allowing us to have a far greater understanding of all the variables that surround us that we might not be able to detect with our senses.
02:09:55.000And then I think when you're talking about things like psychedelic experiences, that's probably another realm of understanding that we haven't really achieved yet because we're still evolving as a species, as a thing.
02:10:07.000What I think is interesting is that the continual bias along that technological path is towards profit.
02:10:15.000You know, when we see those machines, the end point is always how do we maximize profit?
02:10:21.000There is no, like, the influence of how do we do what's right.
02:10:25.000That's like a sort of a general, ethical...
02:11:14.000If we acknowledge there are transcendent realms, there is information, date and data that exists beyond what we're able to receive with our senses, how are we going to incorporate that in the way we organise?
02:11:25.000Because otherwise, the magnetism, the pull, the g-force of what's most profitable...
02:11:29.000What's going to continue to suit the requirements of the powerful, the bias will always fall in that direction.
02:11:37.000And it seems like where that's heading is certain kinds of ecological disaster, certain kinds of economic inequality, certain kinds of conflict.
02:11:45.000One of the simple experiments that I apply is, if people say, oh, what's wrong with the world?
02:11:52.000The world's so fucked, all this polarity.
02:11:53.000I sometimes think, well, who is benefiting from how it is now?
02:11:58.000Are there any groups, institutions or individuals for whom this current state is beneficial?
02:12:03.000And if the answer to that question is yes, then look at who those institutions are and they are most likely to a degree involved in establishing and maintaining these systems.
02:12:14.000And there are, you know, institutions and individuals and organisations that this works just fine for.
02:12:21.000But are they just capitalizing on it or are they organizing it?
02:12:24.000It is a normal part of the way human beings operate with this constant desire for innovation, constant desire for improvement.
02:12:49.000And when new things come out, like this new robot that apparently you're going to 100 models, whatever that means, what that is is they're going to sell it.
02:13:53.000We have to, I suppose, examine as a society and as individuals what is important to us.
02:14:00.000Where I think we've touched several times upon the fact that as an individual you're more likely to bias yourself towards negative information online.
02:14:09.000We do have a degree of individual power and individual responsibility, and I feel like if enough people awaken to the possibility of different narratives, that the capitalist idea of innovation and success and progress, that all of these words can be examined.
02:14:27.000That assumes a teleology, a purpose, a destination.
02:14:30.000If all time is happening at once, if space is infinite, like that bit of yours to try and We're good to go.
02:15:19.000I'm interested in how we can individually prepare ourselves to organise society differently, to be able to overcome Pretty superficial differences like, oh, you go hunting, I don't go hunting.
02:15:35.000They start talking about how we can organise ourselves where people who go hunting or don't go hunting can live peacefully in different ways, not entirely governed by a small cabal, and I'm sure power is more complex than that, that seem to be hugely biasing the direction of this so-called progress.
02:15:52.000I think you answered your own previous questions when you're talking about whether or not you can be spiritual and funny and like, what are you doing?
02:15:58.000Can you carve that path out for yourself?
02:16:01.000What you're doing there by explaining that would influence people, would give people a perspective that allows them to say, yeah, like, why are we doing this and what is the purpose of this?
02:16:10.000And if enough people hear those words and have that perspective introduced to them, it'll change the way they interact with the world, and that changes the world.
02:16:21.000That's one of the more powerful things about discussions.
02:16:24.000When someone like you says something like that and it resonates with people and they start thinking like, why am I living like this?
02:16:29.000If I really do only have 50 years to live, why am I living these 50 years in some really unproductive bullshit way that's not satisfying at all?
02:16:42.000Do I want a What is the purpose of this path that I'm on now versus a path that I could be on?
02:16:53.000And what is the real conflict that we all experience between each other?
02:16:59.000How much of it is due to a lack of communication?
02:17:01.000How much of it is due to a lack of real listening and understanding?
02:17:04.000One of the things I've said about comments and podcasts and stuff like that, I think one of the reasons why a lot of people get mad, and I've tried to think this through, why some people, Some of the responses so negative to things that seem innocuous on the outside.
02:17:17.000I think it's because it's frustrating when you don't have a say.
02:17:21.000You and I are talking about something.
02:17:23.000There's probably some guy right now going, well, just fucking stop with all your spiritual bullshit.
02:17:49.000In ways it is, but that's part of how you dissolve these things and think these things through.
02:17:53.000I believe they deserve their say as well.
02:17:56.000And that's one of the things that, you know, being a person that goes to sort of 12-step support groups is you recognize that everyone's individual experience is valuable.
02:18:05.000And I've got over the idea that, That some external thing can be imposed.
02:18:11.000And whilst there are many people that are, we could say, not using their 50 years to maximum effect because they're pursuing odd material goals, there are many, many more people that have never been introduced to the idea of freedom because from the moment they're born,
02:20:22.000They want the hair to be a certain way.
02:20:24.000They want them to wear certain things.
02:20:26.000Part of the veganism is like, if you make these kids vegan, at least now I know wherever they go, there's going to be so many restrictions on their food.
02:20:47.000We don't know where we've been institutionalized.
02:20:51.000The very nature of the unconscious is we are not aware of it.
02:20:54.000So I suppose, in a sense, a continued open-mindedness and a willingness to change must be part of any dialogue to go into these situations.
02:24:49.000Somebody sent me this horrible video that I've seen many times before of a bear killing a deer in a backyard and the deer screaming and the bear's tearing it apart.
02:24:58.000I'm sure you've seen that before, right?
02:25:00.000And he sent it to me and he goes, okay, now I get it.
02:26:17.000I mean, I don't try and impose on my dog the kind of conditions that I would hold myself to.
02:26:23.000You should have an organic garden if you really want to do it, right?
02:26:26.000Because if you're getting into large-scale agriculture, you're buying food from people that grow it, they're running over fucking rabbits and mice and killing things with pesticides.
02:26:42.000Also, with large-scale agriculture, that ground, all those animals get displaced.
02:26:50.000It fucks the whole ecosystem up, whatever area they're planting on, and then when they roll over it with those gigantic combines and Pull up that grain.
02:26:59.000That's why vultures always circle where combines are.
02:27:02.000As soon as they have fresh cut, the vultures start showing up because they know there's going to be something that got jacked.
02:27:07.000See, once you know that monoculture is unhealthy, the only resistance to altering it, to having permaculture and healthier, better agricultural models, is commerce and profit.
02:27:28.000But if we start saying, hey, why don't we not have monoculture anymore because it's unfair and it's unreasonable, they go, we can't because it's profitable to have it and people won't be able to afford food.
02:27:40.000But all of that is like an interrelated system that's sort of gridlocked into protecting itself.
02:27:46.000You know, like there's a spiritual maxim, wisdom is acting on knowledge and that is not the world we live in.
02:27:52.000We know things and then we just ignore it, you know, like as individuals or as, you know, corporations and as groups.
02:28:01.000And like what I feel like I'm trying to do as an individual is hold myself to that standard.
02:28:05.000Like, I know that's not good for me to do that anymore.
02:28:31.000We almost don't expect that of politics anymore.
02:28:34.000You don't expect a political figure to say, well, listen, monoculture is having a terrible impact.
02:28:39.000They'll make some gestural thing, wouldn't they?
02:28:41.000They'll go, look, we're going to try and control Facebook and Google a little bit.
02:28:45.000We're going to try and reduce emissions, this amount.
02:28:48.000They'll go, listen, we know that's wrong.
02:28:49.000We're not going to do that anymore because there's too many powerful interests.
02:28:53.000That's why I was susceptible to the vegan documentary.
02:28:55.000Of course, there's the ethical reasons, in my opinion, for becoming...
02:28:58.000Vegan, but because it's like the reason that these kind of foods are promoted is because these powerful groups lobby government and lobby the group, the organizations that set the standards until they shut up and comply.
02:29:12.000You could sort of say that about vegetable-based foods, too.
02:29:16.000I mean, do you think there's powerful vegan lobbies that you still seem so vulnerable?
02:29:26.000That's the same, that is the same, you know, like you're saying, that the reason that is continuing is because it's profitable, but these ideas aren't going to get explored because we're on one path, one teleological journey.
02:29:37.000Like, that's sometimes what I feel like when people talk about the threats of different cultural influence, e.g.
02:29:45.000I feel like, well, we already live in a kind of fundamentalism that's invisible to us because it's all we know.
02:29:51.000We live in a culture that if something isn't profitable, it will not survive.
02:29:55.000And I don't think that's how human beings are set up to exist.
02:29:58.000I have this rather lovely anecdote about, like, I was coming back from a gig and there was a woman, like, she had a car broke down the side of the road.
02:30:09.000I had a driver, and we see this woman, she's by the side of the road, her car's broke down, and different, like, it's a night time, and a few different people stop and help her.
02:30:17.000The first guy is like, this is in England, it's like a Polish immigrant guy, comes and helps.
02:30:21.000You know, my driver is a Muslim geezer, he's helping.
02:30:26.000Pretty inefficient, may I say, because you know, like, if you're a famous person, when you go into a situation, there's sometimes you don't want to be recognised, there's other times it's quite good to be recognised.
02:30:35.000When you're not recognised at all, I always think, oh, I'm not being All recognised in this situation.
02:32:15.000If anything happens, you should have a headlamp.
02:32:17.000This is the kind of person that you want pulling over.
02:32:19.000Well, listen, when you go hunting, one of the things that happens is you're in the woods, and when it happens when the sun goes down, you can't see where the fuck you're going.
02:34:07.000The shark was little, and apparently it's not the kind of shark that eats you, but even the eye contact, it's little and it's fucking teeth.
02:34:52.000I don't want to look at something that's got, like, that you can't negotiate with.
02:34:56.000That you can't, I feel like, look at me, even with the jiu-jitsu, like, I've got that little moment where I go, hey, come on, it's old Russ.
02:36:40.000What's perverse and disgusting is the way animals are treated when these livestock companies...
02:36:47.000Pump these animals in these warehouses and make them stand in their own shit all day and then abuse them and the horrific nature in which they're raised.
02:38:03.000If you're going to eat meat, and you're going to eat the meat of an animal that you know how it lived, and there was no horrific moments in its life, it's just one day the lights went out.
02:38:12.000That seems like the best, most ethical way to do it.
02:38:15.000Maybe even perhaps more ethical than hunting.
02:38:50.000Like, hey, the person who lived a perfect life, you put a bolt on the top of their head and bang, shut the lights out, and then they turn into barbecue.
02:38:56.000Look, yeah, that's a very pronounced and vivid way, but I would say that in a sense we're being commodified, imprisoned, enclosed.
02:39:03.000The very fact that a law has been made to prevent people regulating or revealing the truth around that shows where the true bias of this system is.
02:39:13.000In a way, I think that one of the cultural jobs this podcast has performed, and this is whether deliberately or not, Is it demonstrates that the old political lines that we used to comfortably abide within are starting to sort of break down.
02:39:30.000Because, you know, like something, like an obvious signifier of a particular type of person, i.e.
02:39:36.000I go hunting, now we have to accept is coupled with your view that the agricultural industry needs to be regulated and it's disgusting.
02:39:45.000Now, there we have complete and total agreement, and we both can see that the way that legislation is set up is biased towards corporate interests, commercial interests, and profit.
02:39:57.000And so for me, bloody, whether Chris Pratt having his own sheep, I think, yeah, no problem, man.
02:40:03.000I don't need to spend my time worrying about that.
02:40:05.000I'm a little bit like Alex Jones, like with the...
02:40:07.000Why are we worrying about Flat Earth if they've got them babies and all of that stuff?
02:40:12.000Why don't we focus on the things that are making a genuine difference to the way people are living lives?
02:40:18.000And it seems to me that one of the priorities is in a new global landscape that we're living with, what are the dominant forces and what are the goals of the dominant forces and how detached are those goals from the lives of What you might say are ordinary people,
02:40:34.000or the majority of people, to use a less complex term.
02:40:37.000And what's probably most horrific about reforming the system is that the people that are going to suffer the most are the people that are the poorest.
02:40:44.000So if you think of fast food in particular, there's a lot of really poor people that rely on fast food because it's very inexpensive.
02:40:52.000If you go and you can get a lot of calories for a small amount of money, But if you go from the fast food restaurant and then you go down the line to factory farming, and then somehow or another they eliminate factory farming, and they say, no,
02:41:07.000no, no, if you're going to raise animals, you have to have the same sort of standards that we would expect if we knew you, if we were there, we want pastures, we want animals living in the wild, I mean, you know, fenced in, but like living like an actual animal.
02:41:21.000Not this crazy warehouse bullshit you guys are running.
02:41:24.000Well, that's going to up our operation costs.
02:41:25.000Well, then that's how it's going to be.
02:41:27.000So then the beef becomes far more expensive.
02:41:29.000Now, if the beef becomes far more expensive, then what a fast food, what do the restaurants do?
02:41:35.000Well, they're going to have to make things more expensive, too.
02:41:43.000No, but I think what happens, Joe, is you have started to pull a thread that reveals how the fabric of our culture is corrupted, because it shouldn't be more expensive.
02:41:52.000The only reason it's more expensive is because everything is put into a capital-based ideology.
02:41:57.000We're already, I've heard many times on this show, you're discussing universal basic income.
02:42:02.000This is at the beginning of looking at alternative economic models.
02:42:06.000And there's an argument for saying everyone has the right to a nutritious diet.
02:42:11.000Everyone has the right to a safe home.
02:42:14.000If we start prioritising those ideas above these organisations have the right to maximise profit, then maximising profit, that's getting taken off the table, and then comes your counter-argument about innovation.
02:42:26.000Well, I would say, if innovation slows, no problem, because we've decided as a culture to prioritise housing and nutrition for the majority of people.
02:42:36.000Now, you can say that's kind of socialism, and I don't think that that can work on a continental scale.
02:42:44.000I think we have to break down centralised systems, whether those are corporate centralised systems or national.
02:42:51.000I feel that the time has gone where there's too much diversity.
02:42:59.000We're influenced by our cultures, our schools, our education, our class, our races, all these factors.
02:43:03.000And then to expect us all to live in this sort of single bandwidth of this is what America is or this is what France is or this is what England is, people are too different now.
02:43:11.000But what it does, it seems like the standards we're adhering to, unconsciously or otherwise, is these groups have the right to make as much money as they can and to interfere with that is It's un-American, or un-British, or whatever it was, because, you know, it's beyond national ideas, I'm sure.
02:43:27.000So, you know, for me, you pull that thread, oh, it's the poor that will suffer.
02:43:31.000Well then, no, we have to rule out the poor suffer.
02:44:11.000Then, a lot of those supermarkets and a lot of those fast food stores that rely on that factory farm food, they're going to be in a bad situation.
02:44:22.000Things are going to be much more expensive.
02:45:32.000There's an argument, like getting into organic gardening.
02:45:35.000If you have your own garden, man, that is one of the most karma-free things ever.
02:45:39.000If you can figure out a way to have your own compost, your own garden, and you don't ever have to rely on anybody else for your food, well then you're not participating in that shit at all.
02:45:48.000Do you think that the spirit of entrepreneurship could be...
02:46:41.000And then when you sort of scale that up to a society, how can we start to recognise, look, is this time to look at different systems for living?
02:46:52.000And what I feel is people want to be involved in the power systems that affect them.
02:46:57.000So if you have a group of 100 people, they want to be able to run their own schools, run their own care systems, be in charge of their own lives, not just be some...
02:47:32.000I've listened to enough Jordan Peterson to understand that there are limitations to what socialism and Marxism can achieve.
02:47:39.000But just because capitalism is better than feudalism, that doesn't mean that's the end of the conversation, that we shouldn't be looking for fairer, better, more just ways of living.
02:47:50.000Yeah, I don't know if capitalism is the problem, but maybe it's how people engage with capitalism.
02:47:56.000Maybe it's what people choose to focus on.
02:47:59.000If you're just about acquiring wealth and money, some people are, yeah, they're going to be very deeply unhappy, and it's going to be this weird game of acquiring influence and power until you just have this insurmountable mound of money that you live on top of, right?
02:48:14.000I don't think that's a good way for them either.
02:48:49.000We have to take our resources and concentrate on parts of America the same way we concentrate on many other problem spots in the world and look at them as like, hey man, there's a spot where people are fucked.
02:50:01.000If the government really cares about us, if they're really involved in social engineering and making America better again, Make those places better.
02:50:09.000Those are the places you need to concentrate on.
02:50:11.000Not tax breaks for fucking super rich corporations that get you in place.
02:50:27.000That so many people just get sucked into this trap.
02:50:29.000And for every person that gets out and becomes a basketball player or a successful business person and they have this story about the poverty that they grew up in, they are so rare.
02:50:44.000But it's more to be, we should understand, like, hey, we've got a real fucking problem that we're churning out all these people that live, they start out in life with a massive deficit.
02:51:51.000I mean, obviously, that's way past the expectations that we have right now for the world, because like $34,000 a year globally puts you in the world 1%.
02:52:01.000You know, I mean, if you make $34,000 a year, which is hard to live on, man, you're in the 1% of the world.
02:52:08.000But that standard that you've so very eloquently described is, I think, achievable, and that ought be the aim.
02:52:17.000And when you give just one example of how the bias of legislation is continually to support the powerful while just making nominal gestures Yes.
02:52:35.000If there is a point to nation, if there is a point to a flag and our belief and this idea that there is an America and there is a Britain and we're all together and we're all one and we've got a common destiny and a common past, Then if we're ignoring and neglecting those communities, then I say that is what defines us.
02:52:52.000Until there are systems, codes, regulations that prioritize that, we will continue to live in something heading toward, if not a dystopia, something moving in the direction of dystopia, where the priorities and dreams are sort of owned,
02:53:08.000really, by the kind of mad, evil insect robot images that we've seen discussed.
02:53:14.000People do get very concerned when someone reaches a point of excessive power and influence, like a Jeff Bezos type character.
02:53:21.000When you see some guy who's not, he doesn't have a million dollars.
02:53:25.000Like, wow, a guy's got a million dollars.
02:53:30.000No, he's got $150 billion, and he works every day, maniacally.
02:53:35.000And he's constantly doing new projects and new things and buying out Whole Foods and That's like pinnacle capitalism is one of the things that scares people the most when someone just acquires this insane position of power and wealth.
02:53:49.000Like a Bill Gates type character who is very altruistic, very, very generous.
02:53:55.000Bill Gates is one of the better examples of someone who gains a lot of money and then does a lot to help people.
02:54:01.000Especially in his retirement, all they do is focus on charitable organizations.
02:54:06.000Yeah, which is brilliant, and marvellous, and I'm not criticising the great achievements of brilliant people, but really for me that demonstrates that the limitations come from the type of systems we live in.
02:54:18.000That you can't, through charity, affect every impoverished community in America.
02:54:24.000The systems that we have are, well, if you're poor like that, the bootstrap model, well, this guy did it.
02:54:29.000Look at this great guy who overcame the odds.
02:54:32.000I feel like, in a sense, charity has become a kind of valve that allows people like you and I, who aren't poor, to feel like, well, I do a bit.
02:54:56.000If we really are on a team and we see someone who's completely downtrodden, who's on our team, and we ignore them, well, that's not much of a fucking team, is it?
02:55:08.000I'm like, I feel like, you know, I mean, there's part of you who's like, don't give them any money because you know they're going to just buy drugs.
02:55:16.000But then they're not going to figure it out.
02:55:17.000They have mental health issues, and they're stuck out here, and they're supposedly on the team.
02:55:21.000They probably were born in America, they probably have national citizenship here, you know, this is our team, and no one gives a fuck that they're camped out under the bridge.
02:55:30.000It's like, the diffusion of responsibility that comes with these massive numbers, 20 million in LA, 300 and plus, whatever it is now, what is it like, 320 in America?
02:55:47.000It's not difficult for me to envisage, like when we talk about the transcendent states that can be achieved through meditation and psychedelics, meaning that beings like us can access them.
02:55:57.000It's not difficult to envisage a type of creature, a type of being, a little more evolved than us, that would look back and say, oh my God, they allowed homelessness.
02:56:31.000You know, here we have an obligation to aspire to the better parts of our nature, not to continually use materialism and rationalism to justify that 20% of the population, you know, or whatever percentage it is, are just garbage, are just waste, and that's affordable.
02:56:47.000For me, once we have the knowledge that, oh yeah, we shouldn't be farming in that way, oh, we shouldn't have social systems, the answer's always the same, because if you were to change in that area, it will affect the interests of the powerful.
02:56:59.000It will impede the ability of certain organisations to make profit.
02:57:04.000I don't know the lexicon enough around socialism and capitalism and Marxism and various forms of social organisation.
02:57:11.000I'm just talking about my assumption that we're all resourced from the same basic material and phenomena.
02:57:17.000We all have compassion and love in us, and if we, on an individual level, can achieve some level of access to that, then we can start to organise ourselves on that basis, not on the basis of, well, what's the most I can get as an individual?
02:57:33.000You know, and I think it's a hard thing for us to hold.
02:57:35.000I think the reason we all do just live with homelessness and the only decision we make is do we put a couple of dollars out the window at the light or not, then, like, it's hard to hold that.
02:57:45.000It's hard to love more than 100 people.
02:58:05.000And if everyone has their own ideas about what to do with their life and everyone has freedom, what if you just don't have enough people that are interested in mental health of the homeless people?
02:58:25.000One of the advantages I've got of being a drug addict is it means I have to help other drug addicts as part of my own recovery.
02:58:31.000This puts me into areas, institutions, groups, facilities where I'm meeting drug addicts and always what you'll find, the people that work there, there's always someone, like a man or a woman, most often in my personal experience is a woman, some matriarchal woman full of mother energy that just will do this shit forever forever.
02:58:46.000For free, for nothing, that just loves it, that's just put herself like my grandmother did, or my mother did, or like these women do, between people and the gutter, that are just willing to say, I'll be the person, I'll be the person.
02:58:57.000In LA at Friendly House, it was a woman called Peggy Albrecht that used to run a play, Friendly House, it was for women that have got drug and addiction and abuse issues.
02:59:04.000And like this woman, she was from Chicago, she was 90 years old by the time I met her.
02:59:56.000Certain types of socialism doesn't mean that's the end of the argument.
02:59:59.000I think we have an obligation to look for ways of accessing our own higher nature, better nature, kinder nature, call it what you will, and seeing how we can organise that.
03:00:09.000As an individual, you couldn't do so much.
03:00:11.000I mean, if Bill Gates can, you know, fucking hell, I don't know, cure malaria and make significant charitable, you know, these impressive, powerful people can't make a meaningful difference, then clearly this is a systemic problem.
03:00:22.000Well, there's also the problem with homeless people in that they're adults.
03:00:26.000When you become an adult and you develop from the time you're a child, it's probably very likely that the damage was all done while they were young.
03:00:33.000They were probably abused and neglected, and there's a lot of issues that led them to either Have mental health problems or they had mental health problems already.
03:01:22.000No, you're right, there's limitations to the individual, but let's not, like, crash this optimism in the crib now, Joe, because I feel like if there was systemic change...
03:01:29.000No, no, I'm not crashing the optimism, but I'm saying the logistics of it would almost be insurmountable, and it's very hard to...
03:01:35.000But what we refer to logistics is not an objective thing.
03:01:37.000It's a thing that's been biased over time.
03:01:40.000Once a person is developed, once they're a human, it's very difficult to turn that train around.
03:01:45.000If we can save the community and save the future, like help less people get through fucked, help more people get through with hope and with a real possibility for improving their life.
03:02:24.000If someone brilliantly calculated the amount of resources that it would require and then also brilliantly calculated how much less crime it would have, how many more innovations because people didn't waste their lives.
03:02:37.000In fact, they got through life and used one of the most valuable resources we have, which is the human imagination and creativity and ingenuity.
03:02:45.000And we're missing that on these people that are growing up in these horrible environments where they can't escape.
03:02:56.000They're so fucked that whatever genius they have is wasted on this nonsensical existence.
03:03:02.000If they could just show that and quantify how much that would be, how valuable that would be to the overall culture and community of the continent and ultimately of the earth, you would have a reason to engineer and think about that.
03:03:16.000Yeah, it's a beautiful, that is really beautiful, and it's interesting that the way that I agree with you, that it almost has to at some point be translated into monetary value, because otherwise people don't seem to read it.
03:03:48.000You want to be comfortable in terms of your ability to exist.
03:03:52.000And then all the things you're doing that you struggle with should be a good percentage of them, other than emotional and friendship type things, should be of your own choosing.
03:04:22.000I mean, this is what people have to deal with.
03:04:23.000And you're missing these brilliant minds that don't get this chance to come through and sneak through that fucking salmon ladder, you know?
03:04:34.000It's very beautiful that you're passionate about this and I think popularizing these ideas is important because I feel that then people will be familiar with this kind of language and will recognize that when there is political discourse how phatic and empty it is that people will say you know like I think in the last election in your country it was It's clear that there was...
03:06:38.000There's people out there that are just, they work harder, they're smarter, they're more focused, they're less distracted, they're more dedicated, they have a better plan.
03:06:46.000They've thought it through better, and they become more successful.
03:06:48.000And the idea that they become more successful than you, because somehow or another there's some nefarious actions afoot, well that negates another possibility, which is you're a lazy cunt.
03:09:09.000But think about how we were talking about Dave Chappelle, about one of the reasons why he's so great, other than the fact that he's smart and just talented and all these good things, is that he knows what he does and he does it.
03:10:11.000Listen, to return to my point, I wouldn't waste time judging anyone as an individual, because I imagine if I were to spend time examining Donald Trump's past, his relationship with his father, the conditions he grew up in, what he felt he had to do to be a good person,
03:10:27.000I would imagine I'd go, yeah, of course.
03:10:29.000But what I would query is a system that elevates people like that.
03:11:04.000And unless someone's offering that, why should we get involved?
03:11:07.000Have you ever talked to economists about what is the problem?
03:11:11.000People that are more socialistic-minded.
03:11:15.000They'd be more socialist-minded, I guess.
03:11:18.000But understanding of capitalism to the point where they could point out the flaws in allowing this infinite growth model where someone gets to a point like a Jeff Bezos or something like that.
03:12:00.000But when his description of what happened in that economic crash of 2008 and the decisions that were made for the, you know, American taxpayer to bail out the financial industry, and I've subsequently seen a documentary that said, look, this is why we had to do that.
03:12:14.000But, like, for me, that is a demonstration of capitalism's inherent failings and limitations, that we're not talking about a system that is flawless and perfect, it's pretty fucking flawed, aside from the human collateral damage that you have, again, described, the communities that are impoverished and without hope and living in poverty and a kind of slavery.
03:12:32.000You know, it even in itself doesn't work according to its own rules.
03:12:36.000It has to be artificially sustained and rebooted when it inevitably fails.
03:12:42.000Well, the pure sign of it is the fact that no one went to jail for the subprime mortgage crisis.
03:13:08.000They got bonuses even if the bank got bailed out and they said the bonuses were part of their contracts and if they didn't honor their contracts, they'd have a hard time hiring these people and there would be chaos.
03:13:18.000They just made a reason why they had to give them millions of dollars in bonuses when they failed.
03:15:17.000I think he was on Neil deGrasse Tyson's podcast.
03:15:20.000They talked to him via Skype or however they did it, but...
03:15:24.000Did you see in Citizen Four, there's a bit like in that film about Abel Snowden, Citizen Four, there's a bit where he's just come out and he's talking to the journalists or filmmakers that are making the film and he's going, they can fucking watch you with this phone!
03:15:34.000He's like in this sort of state of mad enlightenment where he's just seen the truth of, they're listening to us now, you can't fucking have that on.
03:15:41.000It's terrifying to watch someone because, you know, obviously now he's calmed down, he's dealt with it, he understands that, you know, but he was like a person that was emerging from having seen the other side of the Matrix.
03:16:28.000If you look at what information he leaked and what it did, well, you know...
03:16:35.000What he did was revealed things that everyone wanted to know about that we felt were crimes It makes me feel that it's as simple as if you knew what we do in order to keep shit running You would revolt so we are never gonna let you know well that for me in a sense is a pass the stuffing will hold on fuck Well,
03:16:58.000But no, you're above us to the point where if someone leaks information about your crimes, they get locked in this embassy for seven years?
03:17:06.000Like, what is their crime exactly in comparison to the crimes that he's revealed?
03:17:13.000When you look at the balance, the imbalance between what his crime is and the crimes that he's revealed, I mean, he's revealed some staggering crimes, and no one's concentrating on that.
03:17:56.000I'm, you know, very sympathetic to left, you know, I'm ultimately beyond left left wing.
03:18:00.000I'm, you know, trying to, my belief is that we should try and organise a system based on hallucinogenic experience, for fuck's sake.
03:18:06.000There's no party for me, and I'm not even allowed the fucking hallucinogens.
03:18:09.000So I'm not a right-wing person, it's safe to say.
03:18:14.000But I feel that many of the problems that we're experiencing now is because the democratic, left-wing, liberal organisations stopped serving the people they were, in the case of the British Labour Party, designed, set up.
03:18:47.000No wonder there are abandoned constituencies and despair and rage.
03:18:52.000And I feel that in a way, it's like, what is patriotism resourced from?
03:18:57.000A sense that we all need to belong, that we want to be together, that we're willing to believe in a fictional idea A flag and a story about, you know, the origin of a nation, whether that's an old one like mine or a new one like this one.
03:19:11.000You know, we're willing to participate in that.
03:19:13.000But if those values aren't real, if they aren't, like if it is, we are going to support the most powerful, we will lie to you whenever necessary.
03:19:20.000When our lies are revealed, we'll imprison, punish and lie about those people.
03:19:24.000We don't care about the most vulnerable.
03:19:26.000What the fuck is the flag that we're waving?