Comedian and writer Joe Rogan joins Jemele to discuss his new memoir, Put Your Ass Where Your Heart Wants To Be, a memoir about his 27 years in the wilderness and how he was able to get back where he wanted to be. They also talk about his new book, The War of Art, and what it s like being a stand-up comic in New York City. And they talk about how to deal with the pressure of performing in front of a live audience. And they discuss the concept of "the muse" and how it can be a powerful force in your life, especially when it comes from someone you care deeply about. And, of course, there's a little bit of advice for aspiring stand-ups about what to do when you don t feel like you have the time or energy to do what you need to do to keep up with the demands of a day to day life in the comedy world. Joe also talks about the importance of a "spot" and why it s important to have a good night out with friends and family, and why you should do what keeps you sharp and sharp in order to keep pushing yourself to be the best you can be the very best you possible at what you do every single day. Check it out! The Joe Rogans Experience is a podcast by day, by night, all day, and by night. All day, all night, and all the time. -Joe Rogan Experience by day. Thanks for listening and Good To See You, All Day. Cheers, Joe -Josie and Rory -The J.Rogan Experience by Day, by Night, All Night, By Night, All Day, All The Time, All By Night. Thank You, J.J. by Joe and Night by Night by J. Rogan Podcast by Night by Night - All Day All Day by JOE ROGAN by JOGAN PODCAST by JOSIE by THE JOE JORGAN EPISODE by JOCKEYS by R. ROGA by GABBY MCCARTO by P. M. J. R. P. O. ( ) by BOB SCHULTZ & JOSH MILLER by KELLY WELCOME TO THE JOB RYAN (THE JAMES CRYSTANLEY
00:03:04.000I know a lot of comics are really good comics and they're always canceling There's work and then there's spots, okay?
00:03:11.000So the spots are important because the spots are what get you better, tighten your material, and how you create new material that keep you sharp.
00:03:22.000Now, are spots when you actually perform?
00:04:04.000There's the belly room that seats about 70 to 90 people.
00:04:09.000There's the main room that seats about 400 plus people, and then there's the original room that seats, I think it seats about 170. And you do shows in each room, like people do spots, like sometimes people do three spots a night.
00:04:25.000So those don't pay well, but those are the ones people cancel.
00:04:30.000So a lot of comedians, they're like, oh, I don't feel like going up.
00:04:34.000And they'll call in the store, I'm canceling.
00:05:13.000And the idea is that you've crafted all this material on your own, in writing, and then in front of the crowd, doing spots, and doing it around town.
00:05:27.000And then when you go on the road, then you have a show to put on.
00:05:42.000It's either late at night when everyone's asleep in my house, or lately it's been in the morning.
00:05:48.000Lately I've been doing it first thing in the morning, and there's, I don't know, sometimes I have my best ideas first thing in the morning for some reason.
00:06:10.000See, I used to try to just write jokes.
00:06:13.000But it seemed too limiting creatively, like the format is so limited that I was missing out on some ideas.
00:06:24.000And so then I started writing blog posts.
00:06:27.000And one of the things that I realized in blog, when I write blog, which is essentially essays, is that I could extract good ideas from those essays.
00:06:38.000Mm-hmm and so now that's how I write when I write I just sit down and I just like like a Right like I'm doing this idea about riots lately riots and protests and so I just start writing about riots and protests and I'm just writing and I'm writing about what kind of people go and what we know what motivates someone to put a buffalo hat on and try to break it in the capital and and as I'm writing Then I'll go,
00:07:05.000that's a chunk, and I'll take that, I'll pull it out, and I'll copy and paste it in another folder, or another file.
00:07:13.000And then I'll go on stage and try to give those life.
00:07:19.000And so then I take those and I try to figure out the best way to present them.
00:07:23.000And oftentimes, like, you think you have it right, but then you go in front of the crowd and they don't think it's funny.
00:07:30.000Or they think the setup is funny, but the punchline sucks.
00:09:55.000It should be wonderful and celebrated.
00:09:58.000But a lot of them, they do a really poor job of mental management and of assessing their own psychological issues and coming up with real methods of mitigation.
00:10:11.000So why do people bail out on the nights that they're not...
00:10:27.000There's a thing that you described that you just nailed it, and you called it resistance, but there's this feeling that you just don't want to sit and write.
00:12:41.000We got the ego, which is like a little black dot in the middle of a greater thing that we would call the self, like the Jungian self with a capital S. And the self contains the collective unconscious, all the aspects of the unconscious, right?
00:12:57.000The hero's journey, the archetypes of the unconscious, all of the sort of intuitive stuff, right?
00:13:03.000When you, I would imagine, Come up with great comedy material or any kind of material.
00:13:08.000It's coming from that self, coming from that deeper place, right?
00:13:12.000And even when Jung or Joseph Campbell describe the self, I have a little diagram in The War of Art where adjacent to this larger self, they'd have like three arrows and the arrows are coming from what they call the divine ground.
00:13:28.000Which I take to mean whatever greater force is out there, you know, that will come to you.
00:13:34.000So, this is a long way of saying that the ego, which is, right, your I part, the part that identifies with this body and with the ego, wants to be in control, right?
00:13:49.000The ego is where you drive down to the store, you get whatever it is, right?
00:13:54.000But when you're trying to tap into that greater intelligence, like if you're writing, if you're a musician, if you're any kind of creative person, you're trying to surrender to that self, to that greater self.
00:16:42.000But anyway, I respect his thinking on that, but I think it's what I just explained to you.
00:16:49.000What you're saying makes a lot of sense.
00:16:51.000And the ego, whatever that thing is, it's so interesting how it's not able to see that it would actually benefit the ego if you didn't have resistance.
00:17:10.000Yeah, because if the ego was wise and had, like, foresight, it could see the future.
00:17:16.000Oh, if we just, like, just give in and relax and relinquish control, then we're going to come up with better stuff, and our life's going to be better.
00:18:11.000I think that the predominant emotion of the ego, if we're living in the ego, which is 99% of people do, our predominant emotion is fear, right?
00:18:22.000And fear, even though we might not know it, Fear of death, which is kind of why people want to achieve, I think, right?
00:18:30.000Let me make a name for myself, blah, blah, blah.
00:18:32.000Why people want to have children, children will live on.
00:18:35.000Why they have insurance, why they try to succeed and have a big house, and this and that and the other thing, right?
00:18:41.000That's all sort of coming out of a mindset of fear.
00:18:46.000Whereas this giant self, in my opinion, the bigger self that is connected to the thing, Its predominant emotion is love, if you ask me.
00:18:56.000Now the ego, another thing the ego believes is that I am separate from you, right?
00:19:02.000We are all separate individuals, right?
00:19:05.000I could hurt you and it won't hurt me.
00:19:17.000But the self, Believes exactly the opposite.
00:19:21.000Once you get into that deep level, right, that we are not separate from one another, that you and I are bound together in some kind of way along with all of humanity and all of the animal life and all of the planet, all of the oceans and all of that.
00:19:34.000And so the predominant emotion in that self is the emotion of love.
00:19:39.000So the ego, this is my belief anyway, The ego being centered in fear is going to try to hang on to what it's got, right?
00:19:48.000If the ego thinks that it's living our life, it's calling the shots, it's going to hang on to that, you know, out of fear.
00:19:56.000And that's why I think it's so strong.
00:20:01.000When you – the closer you get to moving into that self, into that greater space, like if you're sitting down and trying to write a novel and you get into kind of a flow of it, that's what the ego is really afraid of because it's such a kind of empowering and intoxicating experience.
00:20:19.000The ego says to itself, shit, if this guy stays over here very long, he's never going to go back to – You know, to where I call the shots.
00:20:28.000So I think that's why it makes itself...
00:20:31.000It puts such an intense shot at you to stop you from getting there.
00:21:08.000But one of the things that you know from LSD or from mescaline or anything like that is you suddenly see a whole other world that was not there before.
00:21:24.000Even though you're looking at that wall, all of a sudden that wall becomes so beautiful Right?
00:21:30.000That you can't even say anything except, wow.
00:21:34.000So that, I believe, I was thinking in those moments, this must be the way Jesus sees the world, or the Dalai Lama sees the world, or God sees the world.
00:21:47.000And when I come back to my regular self, And I see this kind of normal, shrunk-down world.
00:22:13.000Another aspect of it to me—you would know a lot more about this than I do, being more in the present of this—is that if you're living in that kind of psychedelic world, you really can't drive a car.
00:22:23.000You really can't operate heavy equipment.
00:22:25.000You really can't handle the stuff you have to handle.
00:22:59.000Do you think that this narrowed-down world that you're talking about when the psychedelics wear off Do you think that's an artifact of the cold, hard reality of being an animal living amongst predators and other violent human beings on Earth where in order to survive,
00:23:22.000in order to raise your children and protect your village and provide food to each other, you kind of have to have this very...
00:23:33.000It's simplistic, just, as you said, narrowed down.
00:23:38.000You can't just wax euphorically about the concept of the universe and life and love.
00:24:18.000It's kind of a strange world, isn't it, that God created for us?
00:24:21.000I mean, on the one hand, there's this beautiful...
00:24:24.000Other dimensional reality out there, but then there's this hardcore world of predators, you know, in order to, you know, like what did you just have on Instagram today?
00:24:34.000An alligator taking off the leg off a deer?
00:25:25.000You know, it's one of the things I admire about you, about what you do on this show, that you really go into every direction possible, and you're talking to every kind of people, every kind of person that's got any kind of a theory about anything, which I think is great, because we all need everything that we can possibly bring in here.
00:25:40.000I certainly need as many different points of reference and different perspectives as possible.
00:25:46.000But I'm just very lucky that I'm genuinely curious and then I have a platform to bring in people like yourself or other people and have conversations with them.
00:25:57.000And it's been very enlightening for me to encounter all these different perspectives and to interact with all these different people that think about the world in a different way and it makes me You know, reconsider my own ideas or reformulate or,
00:26:16.000And I think people can be very rigid in how they view the world and very rigid in how they, you know, the rules that they set for themselves and for other people and because it allows you to...
00:26:29.000When you have less options, you have less things to think about, and sometimes you can be more successful that way.
00:26:35.000There's a lot of people that do things very rigidly, and they've found great financial and physical success doing it that way.
00:26:45.000I mean, think about various religions that have such, you know, you can only eat this, you must wear that, and on Wednesday you do this, and it really helps you because you don't have to make any decisions.
00:26:57.000I'm sure it's a happier life in a way, but...
00:27:04.000You know, me and my friends, Tom and Ari and Bert, we do this thing every year called Sober October.
00:27:13.000And generally we come up with, when we do Sober October, we come up with some sort of a challenge.
00:27:18.000And one year was we had to do 15 yoga sessions in the 31 days of October.
00:27:25.000And, you know, 90 minute yoga sessions.
00:27:27.000And then the other, the next time we had to do a fitness contest where We counted up the amount of energy.
00:27:33.000Each one of us, we were using an app and we were trying to compete in the winter, you know, whatever.
00:27:39.000So we did that and then other years we've done different things and then this year we decided what we're gonna do is we're gonna work out seven days a week.
00:27:48.000Every day you have to burn 500 calories.
00:27:51.000So we've kind of decided that a competition is too fucked up because I'm kind of crazy and I get Over-competitive is not fun.
00:27:58.000Not fun for my family, not fun for me because I go crazy.
00:28:02.000So it's way better to not be competitive and just we all are held accountable to this one thing.
00:28:09.000So this one thing was you had to do a hundred push-ups every day and you had to burn 500 calories in a workout.
00:29:04.000So I didn't, but if it was the sober October month, I would have had to.
00:29:08.000Because I had those nights during sober October where I was up late, and I only got like six hours sleep, but I still got that workout in because I had to do it.
00:29:18.000When you have a thing that you must do every day, that's how you get productive.
00:29:23.000And what we found, all of us found, is there's this alleviation of anxiety that comes from doing these workouts every day.
00:29:31.000That was like, we were all talking, I was like, if this was a pill that I could take, I'd take that pill all day.
00:31:09.000If you're doing it every day, like if it's a religion, which is why I understand why people would get up in the morning and you have to pray.
00:31:18.000Get up in the morning, you know, face the East, get on your hands and knees and bow.
00:31:23.000Like, there's something to that that hijacks all of that resistance shit.
00:31:29.000All of the things that hold you back from finding your greater self.
00:31:34.000All the things that hold you back from accomplishing your true potential in this life.
00:31:40.000Yeah, and I think what that is, to me, is an exercise, like a ritualistic exercise, in overcoming resistance.
00:31:52.000When you say wrung out, you're wrung out of every ego thought.
00:31:57.000You're wrung out of all your negative thoughts.
00:32:00.000You're not being jealous of anybody else.
00:32:02.000You're not being competitive of anybody else.
00:32:05.000I'm not a meditator, but I imagine that's what that's all about.
00:32:10.000You get up every morning, and you center yourself, and you do all that sort of thing, and you get to that place.
00:32:17.000I'm a total believer in what you're talking about, Joe.
00:32:20.000Yeah, I think that's probably with people who have—whoever the original writers of various religions, the way they crafted it, I think all of those rules and regulations and not just keeping society order— But keeping you ordered,
00:32:41.000like keeping your mind ordered, like they knew there was something.
00:34:39.000Or even if it has grabbed us from 6 o'clock till 9 o'clock, now we're going to work out and we're going to do our thing and we're going to overcome it, which you can overcome it.
00:35:18.000Just for the sake of survival, like from an evolutionary perspective, when you wake up in the morning, that would be the last thing you would want to do is like lay there.
00:35:39.000That you would be wary and ready to get...
00:35:41.000On the other hand, if you're in the cave and you're under a nice, you know, bearskin thing, you know, and your old lady is there beside you, maybe you don't want to get up and get into that cold world.
00:35:52.000Well, I get that you wouldn't want to, but I would think that, you know, fortune favors the brave.
00:35:59.000Or fortune favors the one who's most active.
00:36:02.000I would imagine in the tribal world, they had somebody standing watch.
00:36:19.000But it just still seems like it doesn't...
00:36:23.000I mean, maybe it's just the puzzle that you have to solve.
00:36:28.000In order to tap into the full potential of the mind because the mind has so many different functions and there's so many different things that it's doing.
00:36:36.000And then we're also living in this world that's entirely unnatural.
00:36:41.000It's like entirely of our creation, the world of society and civilization and cities and cars and buses.
00:36:49.000We're not living in a world that we're engineered for.
00:36:52.000We're engineered for the world of the wild.
00:36:55.000And so for us to exist in this other world, there's this battle between these sort of deep-seated human instincts that are designed to help us survive.
00:37:15.000Versus what we know we can do creatively as a modern human in terms of accomplishing great works of literature and And creating comedy, and creating music, and all the different things that humans can do in this modern era,
00:37:31.000especially when you record things, when you write things down, and then you can spread it to millions of people, like your books.
00:37:38.000Like, it's really an extraordinary ability that didn't exist until fairly recently in human history.
00:37:46.000So we're not really designed for these thoughts and feelings.
00:37:49.000No, it's like where you have two separate We have the animal self that's the evolutionary self.
00:39:16.000I think you may be overly modest here now, because I know that you're, just from the people that you bring on the show, you're exposing yourself to all kinds of different points of view, right?
00:39:28.000But I'm also exposing the world to them.
00:39:30.000That's part of my goal, too, when someone's interesting.
00:39:33.000Like you say, you have a great curiosity.
00:39:35.000You're not doing that because you're not interested in it.
00:40:43.000I think there's an art to being a person.
00:40:45.000And I think that the more things you encounter, the more disciplines you take on, the more you focus on whatever craft it is that you're obsessed with, that you find creatively satisfying,
00:41:01.000the more you do that, the better you get at all the things you do.
00:41:08.000If I had, like, this goal, like, if I had a goal ever, it was the beginning of my comedy career was, like, I want to be a professional.
00:41:17.000I want to be able to make a living telling jokes.
00:41:20.000Because, you know, me and my friend Greg Fitzsimmons, we started out at the same time, like, a week apart from each other in Boston.
00:41:27.000And we would sit around and we'd talk, man, imagine if you could just pay your bills doing stand-up.
00:41:32.000Because he was working in catering, and I was driving limos, and we would get together after shows and just hang out, maybe have some dinner or something, and we'd be just like, someday, man, imagine that?
00:42:01.000But then once we started making a living and then we started doing better and then things started happening, And Greg went on to win Emmys for writing, and he's got comedy specials,
00:42:46.000I'll tell you what I feel about that, how I feel myself.
00:42:52.000You know, I go from project to project, at least from the time that I finally actually was able to make money as a writer and be a writer.
00:43:00.000I go from one to another, and each one is like an actor that's cast in a movie or something like that, where you're in that world completely, in that lane completely while you're doing it.
00:43:11.000And I never know what the next one is going to be, but that's sort of...
00:43:17.000I'm a believer in a higher dimension of reality.
00:43:21.000I'm a believer in the muse, as we were talking about earlier.
00:43:25.000So I don't have a goal in the future either.
00:43:27.000I don't say to myself, five years from now I want to be this, ten years I want to be that, because you never know what trolley is coming down the track, what the next kind of assignment for me from the muse is going to be.
00:43:52.000So if at any point in my writing career, if you had asked me what I would be doing five years in the future, I would have been completely wrong if I had ever projected.
00:46:02.000They got together with that mindset and they went to work.
00:46:07.000And if you just kind of dilly-dally and you don't have a very specific goal and direction, it's very hard to make real headway.
00:46:15.000It's very hard to really accomplish a thing.
00:46:18.000The other thing to me, and I'm just speaking for myself, is it's not enough to have just a generic goal, a goal that anybody else could do, like I'm going to lose X number of pounds or I'm going to do that.
00:46:31.000I think it needs to be something creative that's coming from with you that only you could do.
00:46:36.000Even if it's a business, you know, if you're going to design motorcycles, you're going to build a motorcycle, whatever it is, because then...
00:46:46.000When you have a project like that, like a book, right?
00:46:49.000You start, you're going to write a book, right?
00:46:58.000And particularly if it's coming out of your heart and your inner self, like for me or for anybody that writes a book, Nobody else could write that book, whatever it is.
00:47:09.000You're in your own lane, tapped into something that's coming from you, from your deepest self, you know?
00:47:15.000And as the weeks and months go by, shit comes into you from all kinds of places that you never knew you had in you.
00:47:24.000And that's an amazing experience, you know?
00:47:26.000And by the end of that book, you look at it and you go, I wrote that.
00:47:31.000Or you even say to yourself, that's not me.
00:47:38.000Or if you start a business, and suddenly it becomes whatever it becomes.
00:47:44.000I think it's more important than just something generic, like lose weight or something like that, or run a marathon.
00:47:52.000Not that there's anything wrong with that, but if you can pull something out of your own heart, that really lives within you, that's tremendous.
00:48:01.000And the other thing I'll say, At least in my experience, When a book comes along and I sort of get the orders from the goddess, it's always a surprise to me, the subject matter of the book, you know?
00:48:15.000Like, my first book was about golf, right?
00:49:38.000Forcing yourself to acknowledge that your life, that there's a thing in your life that you have to address, that it sort of frees up the mind in some sort of a strange way, you know?
00:49:50.000And the concept of the muse, I think, also frees up the mind in a strange way.
00:49:56.000And I love the way you think about it.
00:49:57.000Because you, and I don't want to disrespect it by saying you treat it like it's a god, because you do think it's a god.
00:50:12.000But it does, you know, to a rational person, especially to someone who's an atheist or who doesn't believe in spirits, they would say, well, why do you think about it that way?
00:50:24.000Just take accountability, just show up and go to work.
00:50:27.000But there is a real benefit in thinking of it as a muse.
00:50:33.000Whether or not it's real or not, if you think about it like it's a muse, if you show up at the same time every day and put in the work, it will reward you as if it's a god.
00:51:04.000So he looks at it from a whole other perspective.
00:51:06.000He wants to get out of the ego, leave that behind, and it's psychedelic in a way, too.
00:51:12.000He talks about getting into that world where you are no one and no place and no thing, and the senses are gone, and all that's left is vibration and awareness, you know?
00:51:25.000So that's his way of talking about that.
00:51:41.000So, I mean, but as long as you have a thing that you're concentrating on, that you sort of give up your control of the moment to, and that you respect enough that you're going to show up every day and put in the work and address this thing.
00:51:56.000Like, you actually have, like, a prayer to the goddess.
00:52:41.000I'm getting goosebumps as I'm saying this, of the various-minded man who, after he had plundered the innermost citadel of hallowed Troy, ah, was made to stray grievously about the coasts of men.
00:52:56.000The sport of their customs, good and bad, While his heart, through all the seafaring, ached with an agony to redeem himself and bring his company safe home.
00:53:06.000And it kind of continues through that...
00:53:11.000For his fellows he strove in vain—I'll just skip to the end—make this tale live for us in all its many bearings, oh muse.
00:53:20.000And what's interesting about that, Joe, there's a lot of things interesting about that, but that sort of paradigm of a story of Odysseus, the various-minded man, if you look at almost any novel, any movie, any legend, anyone— That fits,
00:53:38.000And I've found that any novel that I've been working on, I don't know how many have done, 10 or 11 or something like that, I say that prayer and I'm amazed that the story I'm working on fits exactly.
00:53:49.000There's always somebody that's kind of been cast out into exile and is lost and is trying to get home, whatever home means, and is struggling, struggling, struggling.
00:54:01.000And so Homer, I'm sure he did believe in the muse.
00:54:05.000I mean, that was whatever it was, 3,200 years ago, something like that.
00:54:12.000You know, for whatever this is worth, the Spartans, the ancient Spartans, we know they were as hardcore as they could possibly be.
00:54:21.000When their army would march out on a campaign and they got to the frontier of Leketomon, the name of their region of Greece, they would take the omens.
00:54:32.000And if the omens were unfavorable, the whole army would turn around and go home.
00:55:07.000But all I'm saying is they took it really seriously.
00:55:09.000Well, perhaps they were aware of something that we weren't, like that maybe there is something.
00:55:14.000To these signs, and at the very least, maybe there's something to the signs, whereas if they erode your confidence in the mission, and you ignore those signs, then when things go sideways, you won't have conviction in your task.
00:55:33.000But if you do have signs that indicate you're on the correct path, that the gods are with you, then you will have confidence in your conviction.
00:55:43.000But wouldn't it be interesting, Joe, if it really was true?
00:55:47.000I mean, if there really were forces that we couldn't see, that shamans or people like that can see.
00:55:57.000And, I mean, I'm not saying that's true, but it would be, who says that this technological, scientific way that we have of looking at the world is the right way?
00:56:09.000Over all the course of history, the Egyptians, the pyramids, we still can't figure out how they did it, right?
00:56:15.000You had the guests on your show that said that there was a civilization that was destroyed.
00:56:40.000It is all about all of the evidence that points to a lost civilization that was most likely destroyed by a thing called the Younger Drys Impact Theory.
00:56:53.000The younger Jairus impact theory was somewhere around 12,800 years ago we encountered comets and they slammed into earth and probably wiped out most of civilization and reset human history.
00:57:15.000And for the longest time, when he wrote the first book, which was Fingerprints of the Gods, he was widely criticized for it and dismissed as being a charlatan and a crazy person.
00:57:28.000But now there's a lot of real physical evidence in the form of ancient structures and then also in the form of when the comets made impact, when they do core samples and they look through the Earth, at that same time period they find high levels of iridium,
00:57:46.000high levels of nanodiamonds that are formed when things impact the Earth with great force.
00:57:54.000So there's a lot of the Iridium thing is like it's very common in space and very rare on Earth and there's a nice layer of it around 12,000 years ago.
00:58:03.000Which is also the end of the Ice Age and they think that the Ice Age ended because comets slammed into the ice caps.
00:58:11.000And melted everything almost instantaneously, causing massive floods.
00:58:15.000And those are the floods that were talked about in stories, like the Epic of Gilgamesh, Noah's Ark.
00:58:21.000I mean, many, many, many ancient cultures have these catastrophe myths.
00:58:27.000And he thinks that that's what those all came from.
00:58:57.000This idea of like a solid world that you can only measure and put on a scale, well then why is it that when you do call to the muse and you do put in the work, why are you rewarded?
00:59:11.000Is it simply just a matter of because you disciplined yourself to work?
00:59:18.000Or is there something in giving up control to whatever it is that causes people to have wonderful ideas?
00:59:30.000Wonderful ideas are like these little gifts.
00:59:32.000Whenever I have a new idea for a bit or a new punchline, it's like the universe gave me a gift.
01:00:02.000You're showing up and you're getting out of the way.
01:00:05.000You're getting out of the way and then the stuff comes through you and then you write it all out.
01:00:13.000I mean we're sort of – again, we're kind of talking about to me the greater self or the unconscious or that thing.
01:00:17.000I mean what is it like – I know sometimes I – let's say I've been working all day on something and I go and I take a walk at the end of the day and my mind is emptying and I'm going along.
01:00:29.000And suddenly it'll come into my mind, there's a typo on page 178. And I'll go, what?
01:00:59.000Going back to what you were just saying a couple of minutes ago, Joe, that there's sort of two halves of it.
01:01:03.000The one half is sort of the airy-fairy half that talks about something coming from somewhere we don't know.
01:01:09.000But the other half is a disciplined half.
01:01:11.000The other half is, you know, it's the right brain, left brain, right?
01:01:14.000Where we've kind of made that instrument, our body, our mind, ready to accept that.
01:01:21.000You know, to tune into the cosmic radio station and whatever's coming in, To remember it, to take it seriously, you know, to put it down, and then to work with it, you know?
01:01:33.000So, to me it's like a symphony exists on another dimension of reality, but it takes Beethoven here, who knows how to do it, Knows how to bring it in,
01:01:48.000knows how to open himself to it, but also has the chops, has the musical chops and the intellectual chops to put it together into a form that you and I can listen to.
01:02:01.000So to me, it's kind of right brain analytics.
01:02:58.000And I think this emerging sense is evolving, just like our ability to see things and hear things and our ability to speak.
01:03:05.000All these things are helping us understand that there's maybe more to life and that we are somehow or another connected.
01:03:15.000And one of the beautiful things about your work That I think you'll probably agree with, is that there's a great satisfaction in the fact that your work has helped people.
01:03:26.000Like, me reading The War of Art has absolutely motivated me and helped me, and helped me understand things.
01:03:34.000And because of that, you, by your work and by thinking and by getting out of your own way and summoning the muse, you've created this thing that is then everybody else's experience too.
01:04:11.000People are all trying to give something to somebody.
01:04:14.000And a lot of that gift is the alleviation of pain, I think, you know?
01:04:18.000Of broken hearts, of fear, of self-destructive things that you read a book or you listen to a piece of music and you go, you know, I'm not alone.
01:04:27.000I'm not the only person that's dealing with this shit, you know?
01:04:30.000So-and-so actually, there's meaning to it.
01:04:34.000And I hope you're right that we are evolving the human race.
01:04:38.000On the other hand, I would wonder if when we go back to primitive people, if they had somehow a deeper understanding or a more direct understanding of God or whatever.
01:04:51.000Who knows what, you know, Jesus in the wilderness and the desert, what, you know?
01:04:57.000There's probably something to this deeper understanding because they were less burdened down by dogma.
01:05:06.000If you really only had the culture of the people that you were surrounded by...
01:06:05.000But he had this bit about CNN, that you'd watch CNN and it was war, death, famine, disease, and he'd go outside and birds are chirping, and you're like, where is this shit?
01:06:17.000He's like, Ted Turner's making all this shit up.
01:06:58.000And why are they, like, they're almost dead.
01:07:00.000They're 80 years old, and they're still concentrating on the same goddamn thing That people were concentrated on when they were cave people just acquiring resources and dominating the other cultures and like we're overrun by so much extraneous data and I think that if we were not and we were living in these sort of tribal environments I think it's more in a line with a natural way of life,
01:07:30.000and maybe being more in line with a natural way that the human animal evolved to exist in, that maybe you have more freedom to think about the very source of life,
01:07:46.000the very source of these thoughts, the source of love, the source of Yeah, I think of sometimes like 10,000 years ago, the first yogis in the Indus Valley or wherever the hell they were,
01:08:08.000And they could just work postures and poses and study, you know, what happens when this little – when you release this little muscle here and when your spine is aligned in exactly the right way.
01:08:21.000And they had like generation after generation after generation, right?
01:08:24.000Father to son, mother to daughter, whatever.
01:09:53.000That's the argument against that, is that we do live in a complex and ever-connected world, and you should be informed of all of the things that are dangerous.
01:11:17.000Well, it certainly is a thing that could get away from you and you could just get completely absorbed with all the negative aspects of the world and not concentrate on your own life.
01:11:30.000Not concentrate on the things that you actually can control.
01:11:33.000But the thing is, like, should you be a civic-minded person who's, like, concerned about the world and stewards of the land and all that good stuff?
01:12:16.000We kind of all know that in some countries kids work in factories, but when you see a video of these Chinese kids working in a factory and you look at them like, how old's that kid?
01:12:33.000And you see them doing this hard labor, often 16, 18 hours a day in this factory.
01:12:40.000It's very disturbing because then it makes you think like, oh my goodness, what products am I buying that are being made in this factory and what am I contributing to?
01:12:50.000And you can be overwhelmed with grief and with guilt.
01:13:17.000He was given a talk to a bank group at the Marriott.
01:13:22.000So it's one of those ballrooms, you know, where there are tables, tables, tables, and there's probably 250, 300 people, and they're executives, you know, men and women.
01:13:31.000And I'm thinking to myself, thank God I'm not one of these guys.
01:13:37.000And I feel – but that is – in modern industrial society, What the fuck is that?
01:14:02.000Because we're brainwashed from day one in kindergarten.
01:14:07.000But if Plato were to walk onto this scene, or an ancient Spartan or somebody would appear, they'd look around and go, what the fuck is this?
01:14:20.000Yeah, well, you know, one of the things that I, when I was reading a bunch of, I got into a kick for about a year and a half where I read many books about Native American culture and what happened when the settlers made their way across the United States.
01:14:36.000And one of the things that's fascinating is there was a bunch of people Whether they were trappers or soldiers or just regular civilians that gave up on modern life and were incorporated into Native American cultures.
01:14:52.000They wound up living with the Native Americans.
01:14:55.000Some of them were even kidnapped by the Native Americans when they were young and then recaptured by the Americans and brought back to You know, quote-unquote, civilization.
01:15:11.000No one from that tribe wanted to join modern civilization.
01:15:16.000But everyone from modern civilization wanted to be a part of that tribe.
01:15:20.000Once they were incorporated in it, and they lived that life for a while, there's something about it that was far more satisfying and far more...
01:15:30.000It resonated with them in a way that...
01:15:32.000And even then, I mean, this is a very primitive society.
01:16:24.000So you're rewarded for being successful at that with not just food, but also with this rush of endorphins and these great feelings.
01:16:32.000And that's what people pursue when they go fishing.
01:16:35.000And it's so much so that there's like a perversion of it.
01:16:39.000Where people do catch and release fishing just to get a thrill.
01:16:44.000So there's tournaments and these guys go out there and they cast a line and they even have a live well on their boat where they take the fish and they put it in this aerated pool on their boat where the fish stay alive so they can weigh them and win the tournament and then they release them back into the lake,
01:17:07.000They've hijacked this feeling that you get that is a part of being a person because that feeling was to reward you with being able to feed your family.
01:18:18.000You hear about people with an island, that's ultimate balling.
01:18:21.000He's got a jet, got an island, got a boat, got a this, got a that, and you just, you know, Tyler Perry's obviously creative.
01:18:27.000I'm not talking about him, but when talking about someone who's a person who's just acquiring numbers, just acquiring currency, and then what's your reward?
01:19:12.000This biological trick that's forcing them to keep slaving away under fluorescent lights for 16 hours a day.
01:19:20.000I mean, I don't know if we're ever going to evolve to some way where we can kind of get back to something like that in some sort of form.
01:19:27.000Not literally, but, you know, I mean, sports in some way, when they're not perverted into these giant things like the NFL and everything like that, are at least a way of Of artificially acting out the chase,
01:19:46.000you know, or the tribals, you know, the team, you know.
01:19:50.000I mean, that's a modern way that sort of taps into those ancient needs, those evolutionary needs.
01:19:57.000I wonder if we can ever get to that on some culture-wide scale.
01:20:05.000There's billions and billions of people and, you know.
01:20:09.000Well, it seems like there's so many people that are living that way.
01:20:12.000More people are living that way than not living that way.
01:20:15.000If you, like, did a survey of all the people and their occupation and the enjoyment level of their job and what they look forward to, I would imagine the majority of people do not enjoy what they're doing and they're sort of stuck and they're just doing a thing for money and they don't find it rewarding.
01:20:39.000And they probably have a hobby or a pastime or a love that they're working to be able to do whatever that is, you know?
01:20:48.000Yeah, that's the thing that excites them.
01:20:51.000They get off work and they go fucking axe throwing or something, like whatever the thing that they're into.
01:20:57.000But what is sort of interesting to me, and it is kind of hopeful to be on some level, Joe, is that there are a lot of people that are taking those individual passions and making them businesses, you know?
01:21:07.000Like, I'll go back to the idea of designing motorcycles, you know?
01:21:10.000I'm sure that, you know, there are guys that love making up some crazy kind of motorcycle.
01:21:39.000There's a lot of kind of mom and pop people following their dreams, even if they're kind of, they're not, you know, global dreams, but they're certainly dreams that satisfy the soul.
01:21:51.000Yeah, I mean, they certainly don't have to be global.
01:21:54.000If you're making motorcycles and, you know, you start doing it in your garage, and then you post a few on social media, and someone says, hey, I'd love to buy one of your motorcycles, then all of a sudden you've got a project to sell.
01:22:05.000I've got a feeling that must be the first one you sell, you know?
01:22:08.000Yeah, and then because of the internet, I mean, this is like probably one of the more positive things about the internet.
01:22:13.000Because of the internet, people can find you, and you actually can move from having this very unsatisfactory job to doing something that you truly enjoy.
01:22:24.000Maybe you start off as a, you know, you're making woodwork, you're making tables and, you know, Various projects and you post them on Instagram and all of a sudden people want to buy them.
01:22:45.000Well, I'll tell you what, let's give ourselves six months and I'm going to work on it part-time on nights and weekends and it'll be worth the sacrifice.
01:22:54.000I think I could really get to a point where we can have a real way of life that is very satisfying.
01:23:01.000Like if you go from being a person who works in a bank, this boring, unsatisfying version of reality that so many people are trapped in, to all of a sudden you're painting and your paintings are selling.
01:23:16.000And you have a gallery opening and your stuff is selling and you're like, oh my goodness, I think I can make a living painting.
01:23:22.000Like, what a much more satisfying and exciting way of life that is.
01:23:28.000I mean, I'm a believer, as you know from what I've talked about, the muse and stuff like that, that through each of us, Is flowing an underground river and that river is unique to us and it's our creativity.
01:23:44.000Let's say it's the guy with the motorcycles or it's a guy that wants to paint lowrider cars that just has or design lowrider cars or something like that and that is flowing through us and if we Don't do it if we stay working in the bank or doing whatever it is.
01:24:04.000If we yield to our resistance, And our fear, and we don't do that, that river doesn't go away.
01:24:13.000That underground river doesn't go away.
01:24:15.000It flows into another channel, flows into a negative channel, right?
01:24:19.000And it starts to fuck us up, physically, emotionally, psychologically.
01:24:23.000But if we do let it flow, and pretty soon the whole family gets involved in it, right?
01:24:30.000And we've now created now this energy What you could call God energy, it's coming from some other place, right?
01:24:40.000And I'm encouraged that there are more people doing that than I think there ever were.
01:24:47.000Because of the internet, like you say, because of the fact that you can find a market, you can let people be aware of what you're doing, and people will come to you and will buy your shit.
01:24:58.000So, God bless everybody that's doing that, you know?
01:25:31.000She's never had a job, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
01:25:33.000But I realized watching her life that her calling is she's like one of those people that of her extended family and friends, she's the one that holds everything together.
01:25:45.000She's the one that when somebody gets pregnant over here, an unwanted pregnancy, they go to my friend.
01:25:52.000And she kind of pulls them together somehow.
01:25:54.000If there's a death in the family, if there's something like that, right?
01:26:25.000I mean, if you're a person that's in a troubled spot and there's a person who's really good at navigating troubled spots in the community, that's a very valuable position.
01:26:34.000And for that person who is that person, it's probably very satisfying to be able to help all those people.
01:28:42.000The role of a counselor, someone who can counsel you through things, the role of someone who can sort of coach you through life because they've gone through the same shit that you've gone through and they have some valuable information they can share to make your journey quicker and easier.
01:28:58.000And maybe you can now impart that to young people that you see coming up that are struggling in a very similar way.
01:29:05.000What do you see for yourself, Joe, like on your podcast?
01:29:08.000Do you feel like you're performing a kind of a service like that?
01:29:35.000In fact, there's just nothing but pitfalls.
01:29:38.000There's value in, and I have the same issue myself, you know, but there's value in valuing what you are giving and what you are doing and really just not inflating it but seeing it for what it is, you know?
01:30:17.000I, you know, say, okay, I'm doing a little something good here, so, you know, okay.
01:30:22.000I think the reason—well, I know I'm not doing bad, which is nice, but I think the value is in— When I do my best is when I just think about the thing I'm doing and try to do it my best.
01:31:18.000Oh, maybe I should have taken more time with that, or maybe I should have thought that out better, or maybe I should have looked at it from other perspectives.
01:31:24.000And you can genuinely learn and grow from that, no doubt.
01:31:27.000But at a certain point in time, it's too much, and it gets in the way.
01:31:32.000The positive or the negative, and I've seen people crippled by negative critiques and negative comments and all these people with their emotional poison just spraying it on everybody they come into contact with.
01:31:45.000And those are not necessarily the type of people.
01:31:48.000The type of people that do that are not the type of people that you would be happy to interact with.
01:31:53.000Those people that say hateful things to people online, they're genuinely like damaged and unhealthy people.
01:32:01.000That's the only way you're capable of saying horrible things to people you don't even know online.
01:32:21.000And when people are, you know, leaving horrible comments on someone's YouTube video or Horrible comments on Twitter like they're damaged people They're deeply damaged people and they're trying to like get you to feel the way they feel they feel like shit so they want you to feel like shit and You can just simply not take that in hmm.
01:32:44.000Don't don't get involved in that But also don't get involved in the praise either don't start believing the bullshit and believe in your own hype and I just concentrate on doing things.
01:32:54.000I concentrate on just trying to get better, and it's nice when people show up for my shows, and it's nice that the podcast is successful.
01:33:46.000And so they really hate themselves and they project that outward.
01:33:50.000And I know this is true because I've gotten those shitty letters, you know, from people and shitty emails from people.
01:33:56.000And when I've engaged with them at all, which I rarely do, It's only one or two exchanges before they'll admit, you know, I really felt I really hated you because I thought you were doing something.
01:34:08.000I've got a book in me and I wish I had written and I hadn't written and that's why.
01:34:12.000And then they'll actually will become friendly, you know, and I'm so sorry I wrote that to you.
01:34:18.000I really didn't mean writing it to you.
01:34:20.000So I think that if you think about the phenomenon of resistance on a sort of national or global level, like It's a big thing.
01:36:07.000Now, I would take it a step beyond that.
01:36:09.000And it seems like when you say an unmet need, that the person is waiting for someone else or some other force to supply their quote-unquote need.
01:36:19.000I would say they aren't addressing that need themselves.
01:36:26.000They aren't aware of it, and they aren't doing anything about it.
01:36:30.000And that's where that anger and that hatred comes from.
01:36:33.000Click there where it says the top 25 because it goes even further.
01:36:39.000There's another, at the root of every tantrum and power struggle are unmet needs.
01:36:45.000And that's another Marshall Rosenberg quote.
01:36:48.000I don't like the whole phrase, unmet needs, because it feels to me like we're projecting out to somebody else, expecting them to come and satisfy us in some way.
01:37:20.000But it's just what is going to address that?
01:37:23.000Well, that's one of the things that makes me feel like when I'm on the right path that all I'm thinking about is what I'm doing and I'm not even remotely concerned With getting praise or getting anything else for it.
01:37:38.000Because all I'm thinking about is doing the thing because I don't have unmet needs.
01:37:43.000So my cup is full, so all I'm thinking about is the work.
01:38:16.000But now I don't think about it at all.
01:38:17.000Instead of like living in that world of constantly trying to get more and more and more praise and becoming megalomaniac, I go the other way.
01:38:26.000All I think about is just what I'm doing.
01:38:31.000I'm definitely a believer from that the work is its own reward.
01:38:37.000And when you're doing it right, whatever it is, making motorcycles, whatever it is, because it's tapped into that other level, you're getting a salary that In some coin that the gods have minted,
01:39:19.000When you say, I know exactly what you mean, but can you articulate that?
01:39:24.000What does it mean when you're in your own way?
01:39:27.000Well, your ego and your perception of yourself and how you're viewed by the world...
01:39:36.000Is this like fluctuating thing and you think about it too often and it gets in the way and maybe it flavors your art in a way where you're actively trying to get more respect or trying to change other people's perceptions of you and alter it.
01:41:21.000Like, I have to really understand what that is and why it's coming up and then figure out...
01:41:26.000And luckily for me, because I'm a physical fitness enthusiast and I'm so obsessed with that, I have, like, these anxiety alleviation methods.
01:44:35.000Those psychedelics, one of the best things that they do is they dissolve whatever that gross id is inside of you that makes you You know, get in your own way.
01:44:48.000They help you see things in a far more introspective, a far clearer perspective, and they let you look at things from a top-down view.
01:44:59.000Now, do you ever think, Joe, that when you're in that state, that prior civilizations, if we think of them as advanced civilizations like the ancient Egyptians or somebody like that, that they somehow were able to live in that world?
01:45:15.000Or at least in more time per day than we do today?
01:45:20.000Well, there's clear evidence that that's the case, yeah.
01:45:24.000I mean, we talked about it with Graham Hancock the other day on the podcast, and he was talking about the Blue Lotus.
01:45:29.000And the Blue Lotus is documented that the ancient Egyptians used this particular psychedelic There's much evidence that the ancient Greeks, in fact, Brian Murorescu, who's been on the podcast before,
01:45:45.000wrote a book called The Immortality Key.
01:45:47.000It's a great book about how these ancient societies and the Elucidian mysteries We're good to go.
01:46:18.000From that Enlightenment period, this is the birth of democracy.
01:46:22.000This is the birth of modern civilization as we know it.
01:46:26.000It came from these wise people getting together and having these rituals.
01:46:32.000And that this has now opened up a field of study at Harvard because of his book and because of the success of the book and his discussions of it.
01:46:42.000But it points to that people throughout human history, in order to gain great insight and wisdom, have turned to these what they call plant medicines.
01:46:53.000You know, in my Greek books, Of course, you read about and research the hallucinian mysteries.
01:46:59.000And it's so, I mean, maybe you know more about, I think they were such, so secret that it's not like there's any book that you can read.
01:47:09.000That what they did, who knows what they did.
01:47:11.000Well, because it was all squashed by the Romans.
01:47:14.000They squashed all that, and they wound up moving to other countries in Europe.
01:47:19.000There's great evidence that they moved out of Greece, they moved into Spain, and that they had these rituals in other countries as well.
01:47:26.000So they found these similar type of reliefs and similar pottery.
01:47:33.000And inside the vessels, they've also found this ergot and wine and various psychedelics that were, you know, there's trace residue of them.
01:47:41.000Have you studied the Hermetics at all?
01:47:58.000It's where the Freemasons came from and the alchemists and the people in the Middle Ages who preserved, you know, the culture when the Dark Ages came.
01:48:08.000And the Hermetics comes from Hermes Trismegistus, Hermes Thrice Great, who was supposedly the wisest man or avatar or god from the Egyptian period.
01:49:36.000And that the difference between fear and courage is entirely in the vibration.
01:49:41.000And so, this is where the alchemy came in.
01:49:44.000They believed that if they could change their vibration, or change the vibration of lead, that they could change it into gold.
01:49:52.000And they had, their other things was, you know, everything vibrates.
01:49:56.000The other thing was that everything swings on a pendulum.
01:50:00.000Everything goes back and forth from one thing to another.
01:50:03.000And they also believe that everything is male and female, that everything that's created comes from the union of male and female in the highest levels.
01:50:23.000And it somehow got wiped out or just held on in various little pockets of the occult knowledge and stuff like that.
01:50:32.000So it's the ancient hermetics, and the book is the Kabbalion, K-Y-B-A-L-I-O-N. Fascinating shit.
01:50:41.000I think there are many cultures that were tapping into this at some point in time.
01:50:46.000Even Joe Dispenza that I was talking about before, what he talks about is when you get to that state of no mind, no thing, no presence, that the only thing that exists is vibration and consciousness.
01:51:01.000And that would be straight out of hermetic philosophy.
01:51:07.000Yeah, those reoccurring themes, they exist in so many cultures.
01:51:11.000And, you know, one of the things that Graham Hancock brings up that's really fascinating is that as we develop more of an understanding of human evolution, we realize that anatomically similar humans We go far back,
01:51:28.000back far further than we originally thought.
01:51:31.000With the original assessment was that like we, I think remember when I was in high school, they thought it was like 50,000 years ago.
01:51:38.000Like that anatomical human sort of emerged 50,000 years ago and then human civilization emerged like 6,000 years ago.
01:51:44.000And now They're finding all this evidence of advanced civilization like Gobekli Tepe, which is this uncovered site in Turkey, this massive structure that existed 11,000 something years ago.
01:51:57.000And this was the first ever thing that they could date that they know for sure is older than the pyramids by quite a bit, at least older than the conventional dating of the pyramids.
01:52:09.000And so there was advanced civilization that was capable of building these immense, huge structures, giant pillars with these huge stone things that had cut into them reliefs of animals that were three-dimensional, which is very complicated because instead of carving them into the stone,
01:52:56.000If anatomically similar humans existed half a million years ago, that gives them so much time to evolve and become that.
01:53:05.000And this catastrophe theory sort of makes sense because there was probably some really advanced thinking and really advanced science that we don't totally understand because our science has gone in this sort of Industrial age,
01:53:22.000technological direction, whereas their science probably went in a completely different direction, concentrating on vibrations of things and sound and probably some lost technology that we don't understand yet, but we may in the future.
01:53:38.000And it'll probably put the pieces together, but it's taken us thousands and thousands of years to relearn things that perhaps these people that lived 10,000, 20,000 years ago had already figured out.
01:53:50.000I mean, if you think about somebody like LeBron James, somebody that is at a level, right?
01:53:57.000What if there were guys like this that were thinkers and philosophers or meditators or whatever they were, and they were at that level of being able to tap into whatever it is, vibration?
01:54:07.000We don't know anything about it, right?
01:55:17.000Remains of fish teeth at an archaeological site in Israel appear to have been cooked with controlled heat rather than directly exposed to fire.
01:55:25.000So that's very advanced in our sense of what people were capable of doing.
01:55:33.000We've developed a methodology that allows us to identify cooking in relatively low temperatures as opposed to burning.
01:55:40.000She says you cannot immediately correlate the control of fire with cooking unless you show that the food has been cooked.
01:55:48.000Wow, researchers have previously suggested that humans were cooking meat 1.5 million years ago, based on the discovery of charred animal remains, but that doesn't necessarily mean people were heating food before eating it, says Zohar.
01:56:02.000Evidence of charred material doesn't mean cooking, it just means the food was thrown into the fire.
01:56:08.000Zohar and her colleagues have studied a 780,000-year-old settlement in Gesher-Bano-Yal...
01:56:17.000In Israel's northern Jordan River Valley, no human remains have been found there, but based on its age and the stone tools at the site, the inhabitants are most likely to have been Homo erectus.
01:56:42.000Whatever it was, it gives us a lot of room to learn things and figure things out before, you know, natural catastrophes wipe civilization back to the Stone Age again.
01:56:53.000The other thing I was just saying was that if you think about what we know about these civilizations is stone seems to have a lot to do with this shit, right?
01:57:02.000Whether it's South America, Mesoamerica, whatever, it's stone pyramids and stone this and stone that.
01:57:08.000And stone supposedly is a vibrational material like something that could be the equivalent of a battery.
01:57:28.000But, you know, every time something is disproved, like when they said Homer's description of Troy in the Iliad was a bunch of bullshit, right?
01:57:39.000It couldn't have been that big, right?
01:57:41.000And then Schliemann digs up the remains of Troy, and it's exactly like Homer said, right?
01:57:47.000The gate is right here, the other gate is here.
01:58:13.000Well, I mean, human beings are constantly innovating and constantly improving.
01:58:18.000And if there was a time in history where we had achieved some immense level of, through some method that we don't understand, of advanced civilization, and then, you know, it all got wiped out, and this is the new manifestation of human creativity and ingenuity and innovation,
01:58:37.000it's become this thing that we see now.
02:01:02.000And I also believe, for whatever this is worth, That we don't go through previous lives just as solitary individuals.
02:01:10.000I believe that we might have like a group of four or five souls that are kind of migrating with us through these lives, you know, and have this, you know, like a constellation of souls that have a same—we might have a mentor that's with us You know, through various lives.
02:02:43.000And I think what you were talking about earlier, Joe, about you don't want to get in that place of I'm listening to praise or blame or anything like that.
02:04:06.000And do you think that they came to that conclusion from the same sort of process of when you think about it or you contemplate it and write about it, it seems to resonate, and then when you say it to other people, they're like, Yeah,
02:04:24.000I mean, if you bring in psychedelics or what you were talking about, about who knows what the ancient Incas and all these cultures, whatever they used, right, to get to that state where they were seeing, you know, the global thing beyond everything,
02:04:45.000Maybe they could travel back and relive those lives, you know?
02:04:50.000You know, in the Bhagavad Gita, there's one great stanza where Krishna, who's God, is saying to Arjuna, the great warrior who's his protege, he says, you and I have had many lives, Arjuna.
02:05:05.000I remember all of mine, but thou dost not.
02:05:15.000I was having a conversation with someone when we were talking about this concept of imagine if you lived the same life over and over and over again until you got it right.
02:05:25.000Because some people do believe in that.
02:05:26.000And this person I was talking to was like, God, that's terrifying.
02:05:32.000Like, if you're living this life right now, like all throughout your life you've been living this life and just having fun and doing things and having fun with your friends and living your life and having a family, doesn't it...
02:05:58.000Like you want it to go on while you're alive, but the concept of it going on forever and ever and ever and ever until you get it right is terrifying to people.
02:06:22.000But why are you scared of living the same life over and over and over again until you get it right, if you're not scared of living this life right now?
02:06:31.000I mean, I guess you're scared of the idea of sort of stasis, that it never changes, right?
02:06:42.000If you have an issue that you're working on, the idea that it takes a few lifetimes to do it, I don't think there's anything scary about that.
02:06:51.000It's kind of a story that has a season one and a season two and a season three.
02:06:56.000Yeah, but there's a terrifying connection.
02:07:00.000There's a terrifying feeling when you contemplate infinite time.
02:07:05.000And infinite time being Steven Pressfield.
02:08:11.000I mean, when you go over human history and think of the horrible people that have succeeded and lived long lives, you think of Genghis Khan and what he did.
02:08:25.000There didn't seem to be a lot of negative karma coming his way.
02:08:34.000Maybe he lives his life over and over again until he becomes a monk.
02:08:37.000I mean, the Greeks, the ancient Greeks, they certainly believed that there were the fates, you know, and that there were these gods and goddesses that were enacting justice, you know, one way or another.
02:09:05.000I definitely feel like from an individual's perspective, if you do something, like say if you steal money from someone you know, If you're not a sociopath, you're going to feel guilt from that.
02:09:23.000If you lie and you're constantly repeating that lie and trying to get people to be convinced of that lie, that is gonna haunt you.
02:09:32.000And I think it's going to rob you of the present.
02:09:36.000It's gonna rob you of being in the moment.
02:09:38.000You're always going to be burdened down by this feeling that you have That you are a fraud, or you are a thief, or you're a bad person.
02:09:50.000You have done bad things, but you stealing that person's money ruined the fact that they've worked really hard and saved it, and you just came along and snatched it.
02:10:00.000So you've done this horrible, selfish thing, and maybe you feel justified because the world has fucked you over, you know?
02:10:07.000And so you feel like it's okay to break the window of that store and jump in there and loot Take everything that you feel like I want that why don't I get that and everyone else gonna do it?
02:12:04.000I say there's clear evidence to me in my life That when I'm kinder and nicer and more friendly and doing things in a better way, that things work out better.
02:12:15.000And it seems like my interactions with people are better, I feel better, I feel better about myself, and I feel genuinely like I'm on the right path.
02:12:25.000When I'm more disciplined, when I get work done, when I show up and respect the muse, I feel better.
02:12:32.000So I feel like my life resonates correctly with me.
02:12:38.000I feel like the universe is saying, exactly, that's how you're supposed to do it.
02:12:59.000I think there's probably something to that, that people throughout history have gravitated towards these sort of inherent life lessons that exist in And moving through this world the right way,
02:13:15.000And that's probably why all of these religions have a moral structure.
02:13:22.000They have an ethical structure and they're teaching you how to live your life with the least amount of harm to others and the most amount of service to God and service to the people around you.
02:13:33.000Now what I wonder sort of is, are those religions that teach that, which is every religion, Inculcating that into kids and into everybody as they grow because the human being by nature is savage and evil and selfish.
02:13:53.000And so this needs to be indoctrinated or conditioned or raised or socialized.
02:14:07.000As a teller of stories, movies, books, whatever, books and movies all have a moral dimension, right?
02:14:15.000There's always something, there's payback, or if there isn't payback, when you walk, if the bad guy prevails in the end, you walk out and you go, oh boy, that's, you know.
02:14:28.000But then the question sort of is, Are the artists who are writing these things because they know that human beings are basically rotten and don't have that moral dimension?
02:14:46.000I think human beings are most certainly capable of being rotten and human beings are most certainly capable of being great and being kind and being generous.
02:14:58.000And we're aware of both of those things.
02:15:02.000We admire the Martin Luther King Juniors of the world.
02:15:05.000We admire the philosophers and the poets and the musicians that inspire us and the people that live their lives in a moral and ethical way.
02:15:30.000It's not attractive to a healthy person.
02:15:33.000A healthy person is attractive to the person who is succeeding and who is...
02:15:39.000They're improving and they're representing an admirable life that you can aspire to try to live in a similar manner.
02:15:50.000That's what resonates with most healthy people.
02:15:54.000But then also there's people that grow up in entirely unhealthy ways.
02:15:58.000If you're living in some sort of a war-torn, terrifying country that's run by dictators and all you've ever seen is violence, it's probably very, very, very difficult to develop this sort of moral structure and ethical structure.
02:16:12.000I guess the story of Job in the Bible is that, right?
02:16:15.000Where the bet is, you know, if we break this guy Job's balls badly enough, you know, he will turn against you, God, and he will curse you.
02:17:08.000If we didn't exist in a physical material world and there was a drug that you could take that allowed you to exist in a physical material world and interact with modern society, it would be such a trip.
02:17:23.000Oh my god, this is so difficult to navigate.
02:17:46.000Why is it so extra weird if you've lived a thousand lives and that every time you're born you are picking up where you left off?
02:17:55.000Or you are born into a new situation where you are now going to be the victim Of all the injustices that you caused in the world.
02:18:08.000And then you'll have a chance in the life after that to live a more righteous life.
02:18:13.000But you're going to have to now go through this and try to find peace in the lessons that like say if you're a banker and you stole everybody's money.
02:18:20.000You're going to come back as a person who gets fucked over by the government, gets fucked over by banks, and you're going to experience this immense frustration.
02:18:28.000I mean, there's a lot of people that believe that, that people that are living terrible lives right now that just get awful rolls of the dice and their life sucks.
02:18:35.000It's because of what you've done in past lives.
02:18:38.000And the people that are extremely fortunate is because of the positive seeds that you sowed in your past life, which is very convenient.
02:18:46.000I don't know if I believe that, but it's interesting, too.
02:19:03.000But I do know like what makes you feel good, right?
02:19:06.000What makes you feel good is community, love, friendship, and then the satisfaction of work, the satisfaction of overcoming what you call resistance, of having discipline in your life.
02:19:20.000My friend Jocko, he has this quote, discipline equals freedom.
02:19:29.000And that's a whole other sort of mystery is why did God or whoever designed the universe make it such that in order for you to feel good about yourself and whatever, you have to do something that's hard, you know?
02:19:41.000And if you do something that's easy, if you eat sugar, if you do whatever it is, You're not going to fail.
02:19:52.000It certainly does physically with humans.
02:19:55.000You know, the people that I know that are the most miserable are obese, sedentary, indulgent, and they are emotional messes.
02:20:04.000They're just a wreck of angst and anxiety, and they're filled with medications, and they're constantly going to the doctor for a new thing.
02:20:14.000And they haven't made that connection.
02:20:17.000They just live this awful, anxiety-ridden life, and they think that this is life, because that's their baseline.
02:20:23.000They don't know what it's like to live a life that's free of that.
02:22:14.000And they'll pretend that they're wise in their choice, that there's some sort of Frivolous nature to physical activity, but physical activity is mental activity.
02:22:26.000You just don't think of it that way because your mind is forcing your body to do the work.
02:22:34.000You think of it as being physical brute grunt work for, you know, for cavemen.
02:22:39.000But the reality is it's the mind that forces the body to do that and you must have a strong mind in order to get that done.
02:22:48.000So a strong mind is not just one that can do calculus.
02:22:51.000A strong mind is not just one that can write books.
02:22:53.000A strong mind is one that controls the body and all of its inherent weaknesses and all of its urges to be lazy and sedentary and self-destructive.
02:23:06.000So if we put it back into terms of resistance, let me try and phrase it in that sense, again, the body wants to stare at those gym shoes for half an hour, right?
02:23:22.000That's the force of resistance that, in my opinion, is spawned by the ego, right?
02:23:28.000So as we overcome that and go to the gym and get that sweat going or whatever it is that we're going to do, We defeat the ego, and we're allowed to move into that greater, into the soul, into the self.
02:23:41.000And so that's the battle, in my terms of resistance, that we fight every day.
02:23:50.000Our eyes open, oh, fuck, I'm in this body, you know, I don't want to go to the gym, I don't want to work hard, I don't want to do anything like that.
02:23:57.000But we know that we have to do that, right?
02:24:00.000That that's the path to getting out of this thing that will spiral down into the toilet bowl, right?
02:24:56.000And the same work that you discuss in The War of Art with Resistance, I think that applies to many, many things that people do during the day.
02:25:04.000How many people are out there that want to start a business?
02:25:07.000They have a desire to do this thing, but there's something that keeps them from doing it.
02:25:12.000There's this little thing, they get lazy, they want to watch TV, they eat ho-hos and And drink Coca-Cola and just don't ever do it.
02:25:20.000And then maybe tomorrow, maybe one day.
02:25:22.000Well, in 2023, as soon as January comes around, that's my New Year's resolution.
02:25:55.000You do the best you think you can do given what you have available in terms of resources right now, but maybe you could have been better.
02:26:04.000And if you don't think that way, you're not going to get better.
02:26:08.000Now, the positive side of that is, if the positive side of our resistance that makes us want to fuck off and eat ho-hos or whatever it is, the positive side of that, as I was saying, is that there is this underground river Flowing inside of us,
02:26:25.000which is our own creativity and our own soul's expression, whatever that is, which could be, you know, painting lowriders or doing your own motorcycles or writing a book or making a movie or having a podcast or whatever it is.
02:27:21.000You know, it's that river that's flowing towards the ocean.
02:27:25.000And so if we can just believe in that river And then take the steps, like you say, whatever, you know, and it's always difficult because it's always in the teeth of resistance.
02:27:38.000Whatever positive force there is, resistance is like an equal and opposite force trying to push us back.
02:27:44.000So if we can just keep that, you know, believe in that positive force, believe in that dream, that creativity, and push resistance out of the way, it's like we were talking before about project by project, whatever that project is, To surrender to it, believe in it,
02:31:17.000I like them in that I actually do enjoy some aspects of it.
02:31:21.000But there's always this part because I think we do need a mental reset, especially if you're a person like me that's really kind of burning the candles at both ends all the time.
02:31:31.000Like sometimes I just need to sit on a beach with a margarita and just relax.
02:34:21.000And in fact, I'll go a little farther than that.
02:34:24.000While you're finishing book number six, let's say, you should already be starting book number seven.
02:34:33.000Outline it or whatever you need to do so that there's not ever that day when you look at the page and you go, what the fuck am I going to do now?
02:34:44.000Get something started so you've got, you know, 20 pages, 40 pages, whatever.
02:35:21.000Yeah, a lot of guys, like, say if you have a, like, I was just talking to Chris Rock, and he has a new special that he's working on, and he's currently doing sets where he's doing as much as, like, I think when he was in Austin, he did an hour and 40 minutes.
02:35:38.000But his special will only be one hour.
02:35:40.000So what he's going to do is he's going to tighten that down and edit that down to the very best one hour that's possible out of that hour and 40 minutes of material.
02:35:51.000But once that hour special comes out, now Chris has 40 solid minutes of other material that he can tour with and that he could add on to.
02:36:01.000And so for a guy like Chris Rock, adding 20 minutes onto that, not that hard.
02:36:05.000And then he'll probably do the same thing.
02:36:08.000We'll probably develop an hour and a half, hour and 45 minutes of new stuff, then film a special, and then still have another 45 minutes of stuff.
02:36:16.000So you've always got bread in the oven.
02:36:42.000But for someone that's like in the middle of the creative process, like if you did that with a Gary Clark Jr. or something like that, like, why are you playing that?
02:37:59.000Those are basically patches of fertile ground.
02:38:03.000You need to come up with these patches of fertile ground and then you can grow things in them.
02:38:07.000So when I have a premise, like whatever the premise is about, now it's just once I know that things are growing in it, I'm like, okay, good.
02:38:18.000But to think about a thing to talk about and to have that thing worthy of an extraordinary amount of time.
02:38:24.000Because if I'm going to develop a bit, like I used to have this bit about a guy who broke into the White House.
02:38:30.000And that big took months of my time to figure out how to say it right and all the twists and turns and saying it in a way that it's the most palatable to people that are listening to it and the funniest.
02:39:16.000I have benefited from the fact that he existed and that Bill Hicks existed and that these guys who kind of had that similar sort of rambunctious, energetic, introspective, brilliant Set this this this this way of doing stand-up that was very different than say Bob Hope or Jerry Seinfeld observational comedians like these
02:39:46.000guys already carved the path and So maybe for guys that came up like myself after Kinison, it's not as difficult.
02:39:57.000You can kind of see how to do it better.
02:40:07.000Like sometimes there's an interesting thing that is in the news or that I've encountered or seen in a museum or read an article about, and then I'll just, like again, I'll write essays.
02:40:20.000I'll write essays and from that essay I'll extract something and that something is actually viable.
02:40:28.000Sometimes it's just an encounter in the real world.
02:40:31.000It's like something that's happened to me.
02:40:32.000Sometimes it's from a discussion I've had with a friend and then I'll say something and they start laughing and I'm like, I gotta write that shit down.
02:40:41.000So do you feel like you're sort of always on the lookout for premises?
02:40:45.000Yeah, particularly like now because I just recorded something.
02:40:48.000So particularly now, now I'm like in that period where I'm just constantly searching around.
02:40:52.000And then once I develop like a real set, then it transitions to concentrating on those bits all the time.
02:42:45.000Dave Chappelle's not teaching any comedy classes.
02:42:48.000You can learn things from other comedians, but generally they don't share those things with you unless you've achieved a certain level of competence.
02:43:00.000One thing that comedy classes do, though, even if they're taught by people who aren't that funny, is they give you an opportunity to get on stage.
02:43:08.000Most comedy classes, what they'll do is they'll, you go through a course for a few weeks, and then you practice, and then one day you'll go to a show, and you'll have like a showcase.
02:43:17.000Well, everybody invite family and friends, and there'll be, you know, 50, 100 people in the audience, and then every student will go up and do five minutes.
02:43:25.000And that's very valuable because then you get your feet wet and you start thinking about it like, I think I can do this.
02:43:32.000And then it goes on to be something you do regularly and then you get better at it, just like everything else, like playing golf or writing books.
02:43:41.000But if you don't have the spark, you can't make a fire.
02:46:01.000Like, they have to figure it out on their own.
02:46:03.000But I think what you've done, Particularly with the War of Art is you've given people tools.
02:46:09.000You've given people an understanding of the landscape and you've given people some tools that they can use to better themselves and to create better art and to create a better life for themselves, to get over the bullshit that holds a lot of us back.
02:46:28.000I think the medium of a book, and actually a podcast like we're doing now, is a good way to expose a new idea to somebody because they can absorb it in the privacy of their own mind.
02:46:44.000Nobody's pointing at them and say, do this, right?
02:46:46.000So they can read in a page and say, you know, that's me.