In this episode, comedian Aubrey Marcus joins us to talk about his new book, "The War of Art" and how he and his brother, Joe Pressfield, have been doing stand-up comedy for years. They talk about how they got their start in comedy, how they came to comedy, and what it's like to be a writer and a comedian. They also talk about what it takes to be funny, and how to deal with the pressure of being a writer in a world where it's hard to get anything done. We hope you enjoy this episode and that it gives you some insight into what it means to be an artist and a writer, and why it's important to do what you do in order to get stuff done! Thank you to Aubrey, Joe, and Mr. Pressfield for coming on the pod to talk to us. We had a lot of fun, and we hope you have a great rest of your week. We'll see you next week for a live show at the Comedy Cellar Comedy Club in Los Angeles! -Joe Pressfield -Aubrey Marcus -The War Of Art" -The Song of the Week - The War of Arts" - The Song Of The Day - The Best Thing I've Been Working On This Day - The Other Side Of Me - (feat. Aubrey's Book of the Day: Joe's Book: "The Best Thing He's Been Working on This Day" - The War Of The Week: The Song of The Day - Aubreypressfield - Thank you, Aubrey and Joe's Dad: The Book of The Week, The Best Book I've been Working on My Life? and much, much, Much, Much More! - The Worst Thing He Has Been Doing? - and much more! - and so much more. -and much more, we hope that you enjoy it! We'll be back next week with a new episode of Comedy Central's New Year's Day, coming soon! and we'll get back to you all in the next episode of the podcast, so don't forget to check us out! . . . . - And don't miss it. , and stay tuned in next week's episode of Comedians Who Care About Comedy Central! , & much more in the coming weeks! (and we'll be on the road next week!
00:00:48.000I was reading his Twitter, and he said a long time ago something about, if you're really into, for creative types, there's a great book called The War of Art.
00:00:56.000And then someone else brought it up, too.
00:00:57.000So I said, alright, let me check out this book and see what the fuck is going on.
00:01:00.000And it's so good, I bought a stack of them, and I kept it in my office, and when podcast guests would come over, I would go, come here, you lazy bitch, take this.
00:02:04.000I think there's a lot of lessons in that about...
00:02:07.000What you talk about, the term resistance, is a great way of describing it because it sort of names this fog that a lot of people have gone through.
00:02:17.000This weird thing that people have where sometimes I wake up in the morning and I'll just, I'll get online and then I'll say, what do I have to do today?
00:03:08.000So that's not something that anybody resists, but they do resist the writing.
00:03:13.000The solitary sitting by yourself with your thoughts, the going over the ideas and trying to make them work and trying to restructure stuff to make it quicker or have more impact.
00:03:27.000Sometimes you go over a bit and you'll practice it on stage and you'll try to work it out on stage and you'll eventually get there, but really what you need to do is do the real work.
00:03:38.000Sit by yourself in front of a computer or a notepad, whatever you prefer, and actually write.
00:03:43.000You know, it's interesting to me as just an audience member, because when you watch a comic that's really rolling, you figure they're just winging it.
00:03:50.000It's just coming out of the moment, but it's not true, is it?
00:03:54.000I mean, it's really hard work behind the scenes doing it.
00:04:13.000If your mind is troubled, that's another thing that I've found as I matured as a man, especially over the last 10-15 years, I realized the less clutter I have in my life, the better my mind works.
00:04:28.000It's a very valuable thing to keep your mind free of bullshit.
00:04:33.000So whether it's people, or things you do that you don't like that you do, or habits that you can't break, If you can get rid of those, your whole thing will work better.
00:04:43.000Like, your mind will actually function better.
00:04:46.000It'll function without the regret of not being able to take care of whatever it is, whether it's a gambling issue or...
00:04:52.000I think I've heard you describe, too, when you're in the zone and doing your best comedy, it's like the comedy goes through you.
00:04:58.000You're just a passenger, and that's very much how you describe the muse in many of your books.
00:05:06.000Yeah, that's a very important thing that you brought up in that book, and you said it in sort of a matter-of-fact way about what's this ethereal sort of whimsical topic, the topic of a muse.
00:05:19.000But my best stuff, I have no idea where it came from.
00:05:22.000Everything that I've ever written, every time I've ever been on stage, at my best, I'm like a passenger.
00:05:28.000It's like the muse takes you over when you're actually on stage.
00:05:32.000Do you find, Joe, over time, when you look back on what you did, a set here or a set a year ago, that you're discovering who you are as you go along?
00:06:12.000And then it's also, it's like, if you're self-critical, which I'm very self-critical, it can be agonizing.
00:06:18.000You know, there's parts of it that you don't like, that just like drive you fucking crazy.
00:06:22.000But it's a good way to, for creative, for like structuring acts, it's a really good way to realize what bits are working and what bits aren't working.
00:06:32.000It's to listen to them without having to do them so you can actually hear them take place in front of an audience.
00:06:38.000It's actually an invaluable resource that a lot of comedians don't take advantage of for just the reasons I stated.
00:06:44.000They get embarrassed or they get weirded out.
00:06:47.000But there's that thing that you talked about in your book.
00:08:06.000But what you were being honest about is, I believe, a psychological or a mental state that you're in when creativity, whatever that is, Well,
00:08:39.000you, like him, are dreamy, so you might as well be.
00:09:42.000I'm a huge fan of history over the last few years, especially, but I'm a big fan of history podcasts now, and we had Greg Proops here yesterday that schooled us on Columbus.
00:09:53.000Proops is a huge history buff, especially when it comes to Columbus, and he's a brilliant guy, so he's rattling off the history of what an asshole Columbus was.
00:10:02.000It's really embarrassing that there's still a Columbus day.
00:10:27.000Really cool book, especially for writers, I think, because it really goes through his process of writing The Legend of Bagger Vance and talking about that.
00:10:35.000Really cool to see you kind of refine some of those same, you know, concepts.
00:10:39.000And for me, as you were talking about the muse and getting really ethereal, for me, one thing that you kind of drove home here is that the muse can be that higher part of ourself that we're just tapping into.
00:10:50.000And for me, that's been one of the key things in my life is finding the ways to tap into that, you know, and I have a bunch of tricks and tools like, you know, crazy psychedelic medicine in the jungles of South America.
00:11:01.000Things like that that helped me get there.
00:11:02.000But really, the muse can be finding that highest part of yourself, that part of yourself that's tapped into everything else around you and that kind of quantum soup, as you call it, the magic, the source of the universe itself.
00:11:15.000And I thought that was a really kind of cool way to draw that in.
00:11:17.000Well, maybe we'll get Joe to read that and he'll still get it.
00:11:53.000And so you wind up Trying, trying, trying so hard that nothing comes, you know?
00:11:58.000And finally, like over time, I'm sure this is the same for everybody, you kind of say to yourself, man, I just have to lighten up a little bit because when good things happen is when I'm not trying so hard.
00:12:09.000And in many ways, I think that's the hardest thing of all.
00:12:12.000I mean, Aubrey, what you're saying about being in the jungle, you know, a psychedelic jungle, what that's really all about is not trying.
00:12:19.000It's like the hardest thing in the world is to say, somebody says to you, relax.
00:12:28.000And yet, I think as we become more professional and better at what we're doing, when somebody says to you, be yourself, you can.
00:12:39.000You're not burdened by these false selves and these things that you think you ought to be or what you ought to say or how you ought to look or what you ought to be.
00:12:48.000You've kind of gotten rid of those over time Deliberately, very deliberately, and I certainly have, you know, I mean, I've very deliberately tried, you know, when I feel myself going that way, to pull back and let go.
00:13:04.000But, and I think in many ways, that's what any artist does as they become a professional at what they do.
00:13:10.000They learn to kind of get out of their own way, and it's the hardest thing of all, I think.
00:13:14.000And the people, we talk about resistance or the way people screw themselves up, right?
00:13:19.000That's how they screw themselves up, is they're getting in their own way, right?
00:13:24.000They're listening to their own bullshit, they're believing it, and they're blocked from whatever they're trying to do.
00:13:32.000I'm sure that's with the comics, right?
00:13:34.000When they get on stage and they bomb, right?
00:13:36.000Yeah, that definitely is a big part of it.
00:13:40.000What I think you're doing that I think is really cool is that by living your life and figuring things out and then documenting and sharing them, sharing them in a really honest way, we are all providing together what's basically a direction manual on how to live your life And avoid a lot of bullshit that most people get involved with.
00:14:00.000This is the stuff they don't teach you in school.
00:14:05.000The real problem is the human body and the human mind is probably the most complicated vehicle That the world has ever seen.
00:14:15.000Forget about all the rocket ships and all the different things that you have to go through years and years of school before they let you fuck with.
00:14:23.000Whether it's F.A. 18 fighter jets or helicopters.
00:14:27.000I watched a friend get his pilot's license just studying all aerodynamics and all these different things you have to know to take the test and winds and...
00:14:36.000You don't have to do shit to be a person.
00:14:50.000And it's a ridiculous sort of a thing to try to manage with no help.
00:14:55.000And by you writing this book and people sharing their own personal experiences and I mean, that's one of the things that young men appreciate the most about old men, is an old man who will tell you what he did wrong.
00:15:07.000Like, when I meet young kids, I'm always like, dude, listen to me.
00:15:10.000I'm not going to bullshit you, but don't do that.
00:15:13.000Whatever you do, don't do this one, because that one's stupid.
00:15:27.000I thought one of the concepts that you brought up that I really like as well is that, you know, it's not so much learning new things, it's remembering what we've decided to forget upon, you know, upon birth.
00:15:38.000You know, you come from, if you have that kind of paradigm of belief, I don't even think you need it, though.
00:15:42.000So let's say you come from source, some kind of near-perfect knowledge, and then you're born, and through whatever reason you decide, all right, I'm going to forget the rules of this game.
00:15:51.000And Alan Watts talks about it in a really interesting way of You know, if you did have omnipotence, what would become interesting?
00:15:57.000Well, interesting would be to figure it out all over again.
00:16:31.000You know, this thing on our upper lip, this little indentation, where does that come from?
00:16:35.000The myth is that before birth, we knew everything, and an angel, just before we were born, touched us right there, and nothing came out again.
00:16:47.000We're a bunch of self-hating assholes.
00:16:49.000In the Greek world, there's the thing that when you had to cross the...
00:16:54.000Into the underworld, you had to cross the river that the ferryman took you across.
00:16:58.000And when you were born again, you had to drink of the river, the river Lethe, L-E-T-H-E. And from that, where lethargy, the word comes from, as soon as you drank that, you forgot everything.
00:17:09.000It was like men in black when they flashed a little thing in front of your eyes, you know?
00:17:12.000Well, that's probably analogous to psychedelic experiences, because certain psychedelics, especially DMT, one of the aspects of it is that your memory of it goes away almost instantly.
00:17:24.000You have this incredible trip, and then trying to remember it is really difficult.
00:17:28.000And one of the ways you remember it is actually you remember the way you described it before.
00:17:32.000You don't necessarily even remember the experience itself, which is one of the most incredible experiences of your life.
00:17:37.000But there's some mechanism that's erasing that memory in the human mind.
00:17:41.000It's the same one that works on dreams.
00:18:06.000That are practitioners of lucid dreaming, this interesting combination of nutrients.
00:18:11.000You can control your dream as it's happening?
00:18:12.000Yeah, apparently they say that what they can do, that lucid dreamers say that what they can do is when they get in a dream, then it's like, the people that are really good at it, they're basically in a movie.
00:18:23.000They can fly, they're one of the Avengers, they're fighting off aliens, they control the entire show.
00:19:12.000We like messing with our minds in a healthy way.
00:19:16.000Once you find out that there's stuff that actually allows you to think a little crisper.
00:19:20.000I started looking into it many years back because I read about Bill Romanowski, who's a football player, who was getting a lot of concussions, obviously, when he was playing football, and then he was having issues afterwards.
00:19:31.000And he developed this supplement called Neuro One, and that's his supplement.
00:19:34.000It's added to water, and it's this interesting mixture of things.
00:19:39.000And I took it, and I was like, wow, this is kind of crazy.
00:19:41.000Like, this is really having some sort of an effect.
00:19:43.000But the point being that that's the only thing that I've ever found that can counteract that sort of legendary thing of erasing the memory of the fantastic event.
00:21:15.000And if you let more in, more of that stuff from the beyond, the quantum soup, as you say, you let more of that in, well, you can get a little bit closer.
00:21:23.000That's because you guys are shutting off your brain like a bunch of fucking morons.
00:21:27.000What you're doing is you're still listening to you over there.
00:21:29.000You're taking this fucking mushroom and shuts your brain off and you think that's good.
00:22:10.000We're trying to push for a promotion at work, so we're putting in extra hours, and I've got to bring home some of my projects, and your kids are growing older, and they're in daycare, and you don't see them.
00:22:19.000But you gotta, you know, eventually we're gonna get that vacation house and then everything's gonna come together.
00:22:23.000And we complicate our lives deeper and deeper and deeper as we get older, almost as if to avoid silence.
00:22:30.000You know, we claim to all be looking for it.
00:22:33.000But we're just fucking avoiding it at all costs.
00:22:36.000You feel so much lighter after a flotation tank experience.
00:22:39.000It's just like you can peel off some of these layers and recover just a fragment of those child's eyes, that kind of light-hearted sense of the soul.
00:22:48.000In a way, to me, this is sort of what...
00:23:35.000And it's like it was in you, but you didn't know it was in you.
00:23:39.000And you don't know it's in you until you see it on the page or it's on a song or something like that.
00:23:44.000And what's kind of weird to me here, I've written like, whatever, five or six books about ancient Greece, but yet I'm not remotely interested in ancient Rome.
00:24:18.000It might be an incredible combination of your genetics, your life experiences, your atmosphere, your personal experiences that you've Sort of developed your personality around.
00:24:30.000There's so many different variables that could lead you to be really...
00:25:23.000We're not like beetles, where we essentially move the same way, and there's no explosive, weird actions.
00:25:29.000Humans are constantly varying, varying whether or not you're enjoying your interactions with other people or in pain because of them, varying whether or not you're in ecstasy because of your movements or just terribly stressed out and stuck in traffic and coming from a job that sucks to a marriage that's fucking poisoning you.
00:25:52.000So because of that, the possibilities of each individual interaction that you have with people It's crazy.
00:25:58.000So you could run into someone that feels like a wild animal, and you know that that's a part of people, and you know that you vary, and that if someone threatens your children or something, shit does come out of you that's so primal that it doesn't even have a language attached to it.
00:26:13.000The movements have nothing to do with morality or ethics or law.
00:26:17.000They have to do with primal DNA seeking to stay around, seeking to stay alive.
00:26:28.000If you've ever had an interaction with an animal, a real interaction, even if it's a fucking squirrel that wants to kick your ass, it's scary as shit.
00:26:35.000Because we were talking yesterday about baboons and about how evil baboons are, and Greg Proops is saying that they'll rush women in Africa where they're local.
00:26:47.000And they'll rush women at the grocery store and just fucking steal their shit and look at them.
00:26:52.000And like, you're looking at a monster.
00:26:55.000And just because it hasn't decided to kill you and eat you doesn't mean it's because it can't.
00:27:09.000That's this thing of having this interaction with something that has no law to it, and that it comes out of a person.
00:27:17.000I've seen that sort of anthropomorphic side of a thing, like we have this idea that the wolves are clever like a person as well, because wolves are really fucking smart.
00:27:27.000Like they set up people, like one wolf will come out and actually walk with a fake limp so they can get other people or predators close to it.
00:27:56.000Yeah, the werewolf and a gorilla were having sex, and I was trying to get out of the room before anybody noticed, and I was creeping around the edge of the walls really slowly.
00:28:05.000And then someone actually sent me a wolf and a gorilla having sex.
00:28:10.000They put it together in this structure.
00:28:14.000But the weirdest dream that I ever had...
00:28:17.000It was, I don't know if I was a wolf or some sort of an animal, but there was some sort of another animal next to me.
00:28:23.000You know, it's weird to try to remember exactly what it looked like.
00:28:26.000It was like something canine, something like canine, not a cat.
00:28:30.000And we're walking through this rainforest and water's dripping everywhere and water's like hitting my nose.
00:28:36.000And I can smell shit that I have never smelled before.
00:29:25.000That kind of savage beast of the animal that's inside of us that not many of us get to explore at all or release at all.
00:29:34.000Years ago, as you know, in these tales, there was opportunity for almost every adult male to enter this hand-to-hand combat where you could unleash this whatever beast was inside of you.
00:29:52.000So do you think that there's something, you know, if you're going to diagnose the male species in particular, and then probably another one for the female, that's kind of we're struggling with because we don't have that outlet in our society?
00:30:08.000I'm just reading a book about the Comanches, you know, and whatever it was, 1860 in Texas.
00:30:15.000And the incredible horror that these cruelty and also incredible endurance, cleverness, cunningness, rapaciousness, you know, that they exhibited...
00:31:33.000One of his deals was, you know the old windjammer ships that like would require a crew of 150 to go up in the sails and sail around Cape Horn and it was like, you know, adventure, wild.
00:31:46.000He had an idea to have like a hundred of these ships And just get young, testosterone-crazed kids out of the bad environments that they were in and get them, you know, facing real shit out there in the real world.
00:31:59.000And he thought that, you know, that would be very interesting for them and for everybody.
00:32:41.000They respond to the concept of a code of honor, the concept of the warrior ethos, and in fact what's frustrating to them about the military, unless they're in really elite units, is that they don't get that.
00:32:54.000It's just the bullshit of, you know, whatever it is.
00:32:57.000And they're not called on to really perform at the high, high level that they know they wish they could.
00:33:04.000And you guys are into that with your supplementation and the stuff that you do.
00:33:07.000You're trying to get to some level that's, you know, beyond...
00:33:12.000I think to summarize what we're saying here is that the problem with the world is weak bitches.
00:33:17.000There's a lot of dudes out there that are weak bitches.
00:33:19.000And we all could have been a weak bitch or could have been at one point in our lives a weak bitch.
00:33:24.000And the lack of discipline, the lack of quality character...
00:33:30.000That's the one thing that we find most distasteful in other people.
00:33:34.000When you see some weaselly guy that's gonna sell his friends down the river.
00:33:37.000I remember I was watching Punk'd once, and we don't have to say anybody's name, but somebody got Punk'd and they sold their friends out to this fake FBI guy.
00:33:47.000And I watched that and I go, that guy is a bitch!
00:33:50.000To this day, if I ever see that guy, I don't say hi to him.
00:35:04.000This is one of those things that sort of made itself.
00:35:07.000We knew of a few friends that had a podcast that they did.
00:35:12.000My friend Anthony Cumia, who's on the show Opie and Anthony, he has a basement in his house where he set up a full studio with HD professional cameras and a green screen.
00:35:23.000And he'll put space behind him or New York City behind him.
00:35:58.000We were looking for something to do for Joe's fans.
00:36:03.000Because Joe had so many fans and we would make these videos.
00:36:05.000They were nice, but it was so hard to edit all this video and it only came out once a month.
00:36:09.000So we were kind of looking for something so Joe could interact with his fans faster.
00:36:13.000For someone who's on the outside looking at the podcast, because you guys are right in it, and I've obviously been a part of it, I think what has happened there is Joe is one of the best examples I've ever seen of somebody living his authentic self.
00:36:27.000In all of my travels and journeys everywhere, have I ever met a person who I could count on to be 100% Joe fucking Rogan, himself, always, at any point in time.
00:36:40.000And so I think even without a plan, his authentic self, what he was bringing, what's inside his heart and his spirit, was going to play out on this stage regardless.
00:38:07.000And then there's other people who are very philosophical.
00:38:10.000There's people that I don't necessarily even agree with, but they have a very well-thought-out opinion, and I like to explore other opinions.
00:38:43.000That, like, that part of my life made me go, you know what?
00:38:48.000I have a feeling that I've just been shit out into this world that no one knows how the fuck anything works, and everybody's just bumping into walls, and as a five-year-old, I remember looking around, because I just...
00:39:01.000I just started going to Catholic school, which I realized was utter horseshit.
00:39:04.000I'm like, oh great, religion's not real either.
00:39:06.000And then my family's not real, religion's not real.
00:39:09.000So being like five, six years old, I think it made me just start thinking about things constantly.
00:39:28.000There's too many things going on in my head all the time.
00:39:33.000Because of that, the best way to exercise that...
00:39:36.000Is to find something like a podcast where you can have a conversation with people for three hours and just sit down and shoot the shit about things and then explore subjects and no one looks at their phone.
00:41:45.000Just from your natural self, but you also work at it too.
00:41:49.000Your meditation, your flotation, different things that kind of peel off the weights that can kind of hold you down and keep those perceptions there.
00:42:11.000No matter who you are, no matter what you do, if you stop working on everything, if you stop being aware, if you stop being present, it'll all go away and you'll be a shithead again.
00:42:23.000I think we all battle with finding our optimum self.
00:42:30.000And I think, for me, having things like the podcast, having things like stand-up comedy, having things like martial arts, There have all been these avenues where I can figure out how to channel my energy to be my optimum self.
00:42:44.000There's a quote that I read when I was a young boy when I was doing Taekwondo.
00:42:49.000Because they had like a little pamphlet they gave out at the school.
00:42:52.000I got really lucky and I went to this Jae Kim Taekwondo Institute in Boston, which is like one of the best Taekwondo schools nationwide ever.
00:43:00.000It was a really amazing school because this one guy who was the main instructor, he was this brilliant guy, Jae Hun Kim, and that's where I got my black belt from.
00:43:44.000It's something you can plug yourself into to find out what you're capable of.
00:43:49.000And to find out how to optimally be yourself.
00:43:52.000And to do battle with your own resistance on a microcosmic level.
00:43:58.000You're going to have so many things weighing on you the day before a match.
00:44:01.000All these different voices and doubts and superstitions and fears and things that you can battle and try to overcome so that when it really matters in life, you get these bigger challenges ahead.
00:44:14.000You're like, oh, I've seen that old foe and I slayed him a hundred times.
00:44:18.000What's great about something like that, I think, like martial arts, is it's a structure.
00:44:23.000It's an entire culture that has rules, rituals, orders, and a young man or a boy comes into that with just this amorphous energy exploding out of his ear, his eyeballs and everything,
00:44:45.000Learn to do this one move and then when you've learned that I'll teach you the next move and it kind of channels everything and I think We don't get that in society these days.
00:44:56.000Certainly young men don't get that, you know?
00:44:58.000You go to school, it's basically a kind of a feminized environment, right?
00:45:02.000Other than the football team or whatever that is, which is, again, a structure.
00:45:07.000And again, that's why people join the army, I think, because they're young guys, because they're desperate for some kind of a way to channel that into something that means something, that kind of provides significance to something.
00:45:23.000And I think, like it or not, and most people I would say not, we have caveman DNA. I mean, it's just in our system, period.
00:45:32.000And you either accept that and manage it, or you deny it and go fucking crazy in traffic and wonder why you're screaming and sticking your finger at somebody.
00:45:40.000Because their car got in front of your car.
00:45:42.000Like, you find yourself lost in the wave of rage.
00:46:04.000When you're just zero, and you see that blind rage, it's...
00:46:08.000Here's the other side of that, at least what I was just saying about a structured thing like learning martial arts, is something that an individual can join, and there are others who are also students, and there's a teacher who's teaching them and telling them what to do.
00:46:27.000Is trying to produce whatever it is you're trying to produce, a movie, a painting, a book, or something like that.
00:46:35.000This is where, at least in my opinion, you go as an individual and where there are no rules.
00:46:44.000Or there are rules, but you have to discover them yourself.
00:46:48.000And so this is what we're talking about before, about entering into another dimension of reality or tapping into another dimension of reality, which is the dimension of potentiality.
00:47:00.000Like this podcast existed before you and Brian put it together.
00:47:04.000It just existed on another level in potentiality.
00:47:08.000And on it and the stuff that you guys do, that also existed.
00:47:12.000Or a book that I might write or a movie that somebody might do.
00:47:16.000And so I think that is a kind of, without trying to sound too phony baloney here, it's a warrior pursuit.
00:47:24.000It's something that taps into that wolf energy or that pure testosterone energy, only it's not channeled In a path that already exists, you, the artist or the comedian or whatever,
00:47:41.000discover that path one footstep at a time.
00:47:45.000And you sort of put your foot out and you go wrong.
00:47:48.000You go into a puddle or you step on a punji stake or something.
00:48:02.000You are kind of in the dark, like somebody moving through the dark, trusting your instincts, trusting whatever little starlight you can see.
00:48:11.000And when you finally get to the end of that forest, you turn around, you look back at the path you took.
00:48:55.000I... You know, I think what you're saying is also like what Michelangelo said about creating sculpture, is that he finds the sculpture in the thing.
00:49:41.000Because if they can show me two random things that they're incredible at, they're excellent at, I know that they've learned to apply their authentic self.
00:49:48.000Because you can't truly be excellent at anything without tapping into that aspect.
00:49:53.000Or even less than that, just what do you love?
00:50:04.000That idea that there's something that you tap into, and it manifests itself in a number of different ways, in athletics, in artistic, whatever it is.
00:50:13.000But what you're doing is you're tapping into the same thing, and that is excellence.
00:50:16.000You're tapping into the real thing, the way.
00:50:19.000And then when you're on the path that's going to give you the fruits of your destiny, so to speak, whatever it is that's that channel that's going to bring you to the ultimate higher level, you already have practice being excellent.
00:50:30.000And that's another key thing that I love about that you always go back to is just you know how to do the work.
00:50:35.000You know how to take the initial steps, that one foot in front of the other, to get there and to see progress and to apply yourself in that way.
00:50:43.000Yeah, I'm definitely a believer in just doing the mundane thing.
00:50:48.000Walk into the room, sit down at the keyboard, or walk into the dojo, start to do whatever the first thing is.
00:51:34.000Was that I really did have tremendous ambition and tremendous aspiration, but I had buried it under layers of fear, you know, as if if I would ever admit to myself that I wanted to be excellent at something,
00:51:50.000that that would be more than I could I could take.
00:51:53.000Failure would be more than I could take.
00:51:55.000And so When I finally sort of admitted to myself—and actually it's in the authentic swing, I think, or maybe it's not—but when I admitted to myself that I did have ambition, I did want to do something, suddenly everything changed.
00:52:10.000And then enthusiasm did come, but it was fear.
00:52:14.000So I think when we're running into people that are not—don't have enthusiasm, don't have that fire— I don't believe it's not there.
00:52:25.000And I think that's why great teachers, coaches, will put a young person in a position where they can exceed their expectations or their belief about themselves, where they thought they couldn't do it, and then the guy kicks them in the ass enough time they actually do it,
00:52:42.000and they go, wow, how did that happen?
00:52:44.000And then that's the spark that can then burst into flame if it's guided properly.
00:52:51.000And I see that everywhere, I'm sorry to say.
00:52:54.000You know, in this country, it's everywhere.
00:52:55.000Well, I'm glad that you brought up that it was you at one point and you passed it because one of the really important things about your book, I think, is your really objective assessment of your own life at one point in time when you were like 40 years old.
00:53:11.000You know, you were talking about this...
00:53:42.000That there was something I wanted, that I wanted to be a writer, which I had refused to admit to myself because I was so afraid of failing at it.
00:53:51.000Then I just sort of said, well, you know, there was a moment, it's actually in The War of Art, where I just sort of realized the way you get there is one step at a time.
00:54:02.000You know, like an alcoholic, you know, one day at a time.
00:54:13.000It wasn't airy-fairy waiting for inspiration.
00:54:16.000It was just sit the fuck down, put a piece of paper in a typewriter and start, you know, and then do that the next day and do it the next day.
00:55:05.000I mean, for me, you know, it's like the way The War of Art kind of started for me was that, and I'm sure you guys get this too, is like friends will come to you and they see that you're getting it together.
00:55:17.000You're doing something, you know, and they'll say, you know, I've got a business in me or a book in me or a movie in me.
00:55:25.000I found myself sitting up with friends, you know, until 2 in the morning, kind of psyching them up, saying, you know, you can do it, you know, and explaining what the negative force was of resistance and how it was all bullshit.
00:55:37.000You could overcome it, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:55:39.000And after doing that about 10 times, and of course, nobody listens to you, finally, I just said, I had like a two-month break, and I just said, I'm going to write this down on paper, and then when somebody comes to me, I'll just say, here, read this, and, you know, shut up, you know?
00:55:54.000That's sort of how that came out, but it was very clear in my mind from experiencing it and talking about it for years.
00:56:03.000I don't know if that answers your question.
00:56:04.000No, I think you're honest with yourself and anyone who's honest with themselves, after enough information comes in, that's sort of the conclusion they all draw.
00:56:12.000Like, I'm kind of fucking myself here.
00:56:35.000Like, with this thing, it's a weird little struggle you've got going on.
00:56:38.000There's people out there that are struggling for real, and I think in the absence of that, you know, there's something to be said about these hunter-gatherer cultures and the happiness in the hunter-gatherer cultures.
00:57:54.000In the absence of that real day-to-day struggle that these people have, we're like waiting for something to come along and kick us in the ass.
00:58:04.000It's almost like we only react by nature instead of act in some ways.
00:58:08.000Well, you know, I'm actually fascinated by that stuff too, Joe.
00:58:45.000Also, if you look at Afghanistan, which is a great place for us to study because we see it in the news and we've had seen it, which is like in Pashtunistan, you get kind of pretty much tribal culture the way it was way, way, way back when.
00:58:59.000And I'm also, like when I was reading about the Comanches a little while ago, the other thing, one of the things about tribes is they are unbelievably cruel to whoever, if they capture anybody else or if there's anyone who violates the tribe,
00:59:15.000It's not such an idyllic world when you get into that side of it.
00:59:19.000Wait a minute, you mean it's not like Avatar?
00:59:22.000Yeah, that was the side they left out of in Avatar.
00:59:26.000It's almost a cheat code to happiness, that kind of simple life where you're doing, you're constantly out there doing.
00:59:33.000This world where it's just, we don't know what the hell to do, and we don't have action as this kind of through line in our life of, okay, got to go achieve that next goal, which is meat, that next goal, which is fish, that next goal, which is shelter.
00:59:45.000It's just this amorphous world, and we got to figure it out.
00:59:48.000And I think one of the things you said is really important is you've got to just do the work, but at the start, it's always a leap of faith, whatever that is.
00:59:57.000You don't know exactly how it's going to turn out, but you know you take that first step and then just trust that if you stay and you show up and you do that every time, then some momentum is going to start going.
01:00:13.000It's that old Maslow pyramid, you know, of where the basic needs of hunger or, you know, clothing, da-da-da.
01:00:19.000And then when you get to the top, which is where we are, the needs become, you know, because we have grocery stores, you know, there's no bombs going off in the street.
01:00:27.000So now it becomes self-actualization or asking the questions, you know, who am I, why am I here, da-da-da-da, all those tough questions, right, that the tribesmen don't have to ask because they're too busy.
01:00:40.000To me, this is where something like martial arts or any kind of a discipline or art, period, the production of art, this podcast, your comedy, whatever it is, is...
01:00:51.000And I can't really put my finger on why, but I think it's an answer to this...
01:00:58.000The thing of being alone, being an individual, being unfettered from the tribal structure or from any structure where we're kind of floating in space, you know, like George Clooney and, you know, trying to figure out, you know,
01:01:35.000The variables that we encounter on a day-to-day basis are so beyond our genetic capabilities.
01:01:41.000The idea of keeping track of seven billion people's lives, that's insane, but that's where we're headed.
01:01:47.000And I feel like in the industrial age, from the creation of the machines to today, we're essentially entering into, slowly but surely, into a completely new dimension of reality.
01:02:00.000It's like what we've created in just this short amount of time that we've had electricity, is staggeringly crazy.
01:02:07.000The idea of the internet, the idea of computers, big-screen TVs, projections, the things that we can do today, Wi-Fi in a plane, Insane, insane stuff.
01:02:19.000And I think that what we're facing and what we're gonna face over the next hundred years, two hundred years, is essentially gonna be like a new dimension.
01:02:27.000Like some sort of a virtual reality where we exist symbiotically with computers and the internet and with each other.
01:02:33.000I think that our puny brains, the three or four or five of us in this room, we're not designed for this new world.
01:02:40.000Our brains are gonna have to catch up, just much like The apes who spoke in grunts had to catch up with these clever motherfuckers that figured out how to talk with a slippery tongue and actually say names.
01:02:56.000The human race, this is not the finished product.
01:02:59.000This is one step on a long road, probably an infinite road, and our creations are a part of what's enhancing or changing or altering the world itself.
01:03:23.000You find that like only the last one-tenth of an inch is when we were civilized.
01:03:28.000And it's like, you know, 8,000 miles, the rest of it, when we were tribal people.
01:03:33.000So we come into this world, I believe, with this tribal template in our mind, you know, where it's important to us what our friends think of us.
01:03:43.000We act to please others, like in high school where you have to be in the right clique and this and that.
01:03:49.000And it's only in these last few seconds before midnight that we discover that we're individuals and we're not wired to be individuals.
01:04:00.000And that's where, to me, resistance and stuff like that comes in.
01:04:05.000That's what sort of pushes back to being in the tribe, in the mass mind and that kind of thing.
01:04:13.000As opposed to going forward each morning one step at a time in that dark forest, finding out where we are, what we think, what we believe.
01:04:24.000I think it's a very important point you said about people not being designed to be individuals.
01:04:28.000And it's very ironic that the people that live in cities are way lonelier when there's 20 million people around than the people that live in a tribe where there's 20 people around.
01:05:46.000Plug in new software and new operating system when you plug it back in.
01:05:51.000I think that's what's going to help us navigate this path.
01:05:54.000We've got to plug back into the mother code, the source code, and then download new instructions for this meat vehicle that we're all walking around in.
01:06:04.000In doing so, you'll have all kinds of ancillary benefits, not only of how to fit into society, but as you said, define your authentic swing, your authentic self.
01:06:13.000You know, because that's there in that code, too.
01:06:15.000And you've just got to find the ways to plug back in.
01:06:18.000I mean, the flip side to what you were saying, Joe, is like you were saying that isn't it a shame that we're all isolated?
01:06:27.000And, you know, there's a big element of truth in that in our heart.
01:06:31.000But the flip side of that is, and I feel this a lot, is I want to be alone.
01:06:37.000You know, when I'm in a group and I got to do shit that other people want to do or I have to conform to what their expectations of me are, fuck that.
01:06:48.000And the other thing is, and I'll just blow it up if I have to, you know, and the other thing that's really a mystery, kind of what you were saying, Aubrey, is nobody's ever figured out why we have this big brain.
01:07:59.000It's almost impossible in this day and age to get it right.
01:08:02.000But back in the happy, the Taiga days, you know, if you were one of those crazy guys living in Siberia, I mean, there's some shit you gotta learn.
01:08:09.000Yeah, don't go in the river when it's frozen.
01:08:29.000I'd figure out a way to start my own cult, and I'd just make up a bunch of shit and see who's with me.
01:08:33.000You know, speaking of tribes, it's a little off-topic, but one of the coolest collections of photographs I've ever seen, it's from this artist called BeforeThey.com, and check it out.
01:08:44.000It's like all the tribes, and the idea is BeforeThey.com.
01:10:09.000But as far as the humans, it's perfectly safe.
01:10:12.000So that, you know, when the Native Americans would look at the white man, they thought we were just a bunch of idiots because we were not tapped into that other dimension at all.
01:10:23.000If I was a dick, I'd go, how'd that work out for you?
01:10:25.000Yeah, that's because of the invention of the Winchester rifle.
01:10:41.000Yeah, I was in Peru, and some of the old shamanistic traditions, those cultures still exist, and they still have the words for the Spaniards and the people that came.
01:10:51.000And in their mind, part of the reason for the rainbow flag is that's the colors of the chakras that they see, like visually see inside a person who's connected.
01:11:00.000And then these other people came in and invaded their culture, and they called them the gray ones because they didn't see that shit.
01:11:26.000Yeah, see, there's a different reality when you're consistently altering your neurochemistry with psychedelic drugs.
01:11:35.000I've had moments, there's the last moment that I did DMT where I said, yeah, time to take a break, where reality got super slippery for about two weeks.
01:11:47.000The psychedelic experience was so profound and it was changing my regular everyday mind so much that I felt like a different person who had to relearn life.
01:11:58.000Like I was thrown into this life with a manual of this is what you've done so far.
01:12:04.000It doesn't matter, that's what you did.
01:12:05.000And this is who you are now and ready, go.
01:12:08.000Like it felt so unreal for a while that I'm convinced that there was some sort of a permanent change In the structure of my brain, or the way my brain accepts certain chemicals.
01:12:20.000It seems like it produces ones in a different way now.
01:12:23.000And I think that if you're doing that on a regular basis, every day, day in, day out, these people are almost unrecognizable.
01:12:32.000I mean, their reality is they're probably seeing flow.
01:12:50.000Yeah, you're normally used to seeing one layer of the onion, and then all of a sudden you get to pierce through all the layers and see all these layers.
01:13:14.000It's not fried because you're only putting something in that already exists.
01:13:19.000The real issue with psychedelic drugs or anything that's a non-native chemical that you're introducing into your body, you have LD50 rates.
01:13:30.000You have rates of toxicity where it becomes deadly to 50% of the people that take it.
01:13:34.000What is it for DMT? No one even knows because it's a human neurotransmitter.
01:13:39.000It's a part of your natural human brain chemistry.
01:13:41.000That's what they're doing when they're doing ayahuasca.
01:13:43.000They're doing an orally active version of this DMT. So if he's seeing fucking floating snakes, maybe they're there, we're just not seeing them.
01:13:51.000Maybe we're not getting enough DMT on a regular basis.
01:14:00.000No, I mean, like, you're saying because it's from your body, it's not bad, because you're putting something that's already in your body back in your body.
01:14:06.000Well, that's, you know, more than you had before, you know?
01:14:57.000What happens with guys when they do steroids, if you see bodybuilders, after they stop doing steroids, they usually have to take a bunch of different drugs to try to boost back up their body's production of testosterone.
01:15:10.000Because they just shoot themselves up with so much, and they become the Hulk.
01:15:15.000They're taking hyperhuman levels, 10, 15 times what a person would be You know, putting into their, or just having their body grow.
01:15:24.000They're just pumping this shit into their body all the time, all sorts of different.
01:15:27.000So the balls just go, you don't need us.
01:16:17.000And then he takes something that pries open his door's perception temporarily, you know, turns the Venetian blind sideways for a while.
01:16:24.000And then all of a sudden, maybe his brain decides, you know what?
01:16:28.000I don't really need to turn them back closed again.
01:16:31.000I can leave them open just a little bit, because I'm going to be fine, and there's a lot of cool information and visions and things out there.
01:16:37.000So I think, to me, that's the alternate explanation.
01:16:40.000That's a possible explanation, but he might be right, too.
01:16:52.000If we're trying to imagine ourselves into tribal cultures that are seeing visions on a regular basis, like if it happens to you, Joe, you're just an individual without any structure around you.
01:17:03.000There's no teacher, there's no shaman, there's nobody who can guide you.
01:17:08.000How do we know that in these tribal cultures, I mean, for hundreds and hundreds, thousands of years, you know, the elders have known how to navigate it.
01:17:17.000And, you know, when you enter that crazy space, you know, if your uncle is there and he can teach you and show you how to do this and your brother, maybe that's the way it goes.
01:17:28.000And maybe they're living in that world all the time.
01:17:31.000And seeing the dragons and seeing all that stuff, you know, it wouldn't surprise me.
01:17:35.000I know my ayahuasca shaman pretty well, Maestro Orlando Chuandama down from Peru.
01:17:40.000And he drinks ayahuasca in ceremony probably five, six nights a week.
01:18:02.000And so they drink this brew and you have a DMT experience that lasts for, you know, four to six hours.
01:18:09.000DMT is killed in the gut by monoamine oxidase.
01:18:12.000So when you take, like if you're eating grass, like Phalaris grass, it has DMT in it.
01:18:18.000And if you were eating that grass, you would just start tripping your balls off if your stomach didn't produce this stuff, this monoamine oxidase that keeps the DMT from being orally active.
01:18:30.000So when they combine the two of them, when they combine the harmine and the...
01:18:33.000The inhibitor of that compound that breaks it down.
01:18:36.000You guys are deep into this shit, huh?
01:18:40.000It's one of my tools in the show that I use to tap into my authentic self.
01:18:45.000To me, it almost makes me sad when someone doesn't know about it because it's so crazy and it's so real and so vivid and so memorable and so life-changing.
01:18:58.000Amber Lyon, who is our friend, she used to work for CNN and now she's become a crazy psychedelic adventurer, from the podcast.
01:19:07.000We were on the podcast and she asked me about ways to change the world.
01:19:10.000She's seen a lot of shit and she's been all over the world and been involved in covering some intense conflicts.
01:19:42.000And like Aubrey said, a lot of them aren't even drug-related.
01:19:45.000You can have a naturally occurring psychedelic trip in an isolation tank.
01:19:49.000And that's what Terence McKenna believed when we were talking about the growth of the human brain.
01:19:54.000The doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years.
01:19:57.000Terence McKenna had a whole theory about that, having to do with climate change and primates experimenting with psychedelic mushrooms.
01:20:06.000That the rainforest receded into grasslands and that these chimps started following around, or our ancient hominid ancestors, started following around these cows And the wild cows and eating the mushrooms that grew on their shit.
01:20:35.000And it's poo-pooed because it involves psychedelic mushrooms.
01:20:38.000But the reality is anybody who poo-pooed psychedelic mushrooms has simply not done psychedelic mushrooms.
01:20:45.000Because if you've done them and you blow your mind out and have this crazy Egyptian icons dancing in front of your eyes in fluorescent colors and explaining to you the nature of life through a voice that you can understand but you know isn't English.
01:21:00.000Once that experience has happened, you'd go, okay, that exists.
01:21:27.000Looking like a big dinner plate sitting in the middle of a field because it wants you to eat it so you can tell you things.
01:21:33.000And increasing visual acuity, he had a whole bunch of points that led to this idea.
01:21:40.000The stimulation of male genitalia, increased erections when they're eating psilocybin mushrooms.
01:21:48.000In small doses, measurable increase in visual acuity, which would lead them to be better hunters, which would lead them to survive better.
01:21:56.000All these different points, besides the psychedelic experience, all these different points lead to this idea that the animals that embrace that into their diet would have a better chance of surviving.
01:22:07.000You know, to bring this kind of back to some of the stuff that you wrote, I know for myself and the psychedelic experience for me, you wrote in your book, The Authentic Swing, if we find ourselves lost or tormented or in pain, the reason is that we have somehow become estranged from who we really are,
01:22:23.000from the ground of our individual being.
01:22:25.000And for me, when I find myself in those kind of states where I'm a little sad or a little lost or a little depressed, for me, the psychedelic experience, like I said, with or without drugs, could be a deep meditation, could be anything, It shows me back to my true self and then it can allow me to be happy again and fulfilled and full of life again.
01:22:45.000Can you define, Aubrey, your true self?
01:22:58.000I had a long experience that actually allowed me to see the differentiating parts of myself, the highest self, then the mind, which I called Mind Boy because it was very juvenile in the way that it loved puzzles.
01:23:17.000And all of those things were all kind of coalescing together.
01:23:20.000But the highest self, that part of me, which is my authentic self, is very clear to me.
01:23:26.000And it's something that I try to get it to run the ship as often as possible and push the mind out of the way because the mind constantly wants to take over.
01:23:52.000You know, the highest self for me is very happy and it's very content.
01:24:01.000It loves the creation that it's in, first of all, and it loves the people of this creation.
01:24:06.000And part of what it's here for is, and I'm saying it, it's me, and it's kind of weird to separate it like that.
01:24:14.000But part of what it's here for is to, you know, I had a vision of it being a nutcracker of sorts, to just kind of go through and roll along and spread ideas and tools and different tactics and things that people can kind of open their shells a little bit too.
01:24:30.000So I saw myself, my highest self, cast like a bowling ball, just a bowling ball of light that just kind of rolls around through the earth and And that, to me, I know when I'm in that mode, not only can I feel it, not only can I see it, you know, visually in my mind's eye,
01:24:45.000but I know that that's what I'm here for.
01:24:48.000That's my authentic swing, is when I'm that bowling ball that rolls through and says, hey guys, have you heard about this thing called ayahuasca?
01:24:55.000Hey guys, have you tried, you know, working out with a kettlebell?
01:24:58.000Or whatever it is, you know, part of that opening up the horizons to other people is my highest self.
01:25:06.000Is it content with the way the world is, or does it want to help it evolve to something else?
01:25:13.000No, it wants to fight like hell to help it evolve.
01:25:15.000It feels that it's off track a little bit.
01:25:19.000And there's some beautiful things, and I'm not disparaging the world, but we've taken a veer to the wrong way, and it's ready to roll up.
01:25:30.000Because the Earth itself is in natural harmony, but the human race puts the Earth's harmony out of balance as well as the harmony amongst it.
01:25:37.000So to bring it back into balance, it wants to fight like hell.
01:25:41.000And it's only happy when it's fighting like hell.
01:25:43.000And when it doesn't want to fight, it's like, what the hell am I doing here?
01:25:47.000I think we're in the middle of it, so we can't see it.
01:25:49.000I think it's a giant mathematical equation.
01:25:51.000The pros, the cons, the good, the bad, the...
01:25:54.000The sucky, the awesome, it's all together and the resistance almost battles you to make you appreciate when you accomplish something even more so.
01:26:06.000The worst thing that can ever happen to you is you win the lottery.
01:26:10.000Win the lottery at 21. Good luck, fuckface.
01:26:13.000You're never going to figure out shit.
01:26:14.000You have $500 million and you're 21. You're going to be a dummy for the rest of your life.
01:26:19.000You have no opposing force to apply your strength against.
01:26:22.000There was something I read yesterday or today earlier about the prince of one of those, Brunei or something like that, who pissed away $18 billion.
01:26:55.000And I think that we, as a human race, in the macro, from the microcosm of the individual to the human race itself, it almost seems like all that stuff is necessary.
01:27:17.000What is it and what's going on really?
01:27:18.000If you were objective and you weren't attached to the life and death of the individuals that were a part of this race we call humans, if you weren't a part of that and you were looking at it objectively, if you were an alien from another planet that wasn't even made of flesh, you might be going, oh, I see what they're doing.
01:27:34.000They're forcing themselves to do things.
01:27:35.000They're battling over the fucking blood of the earth.
01:27:38.000They're forcing themselves to accomplish more and more amazing technological feats so they can kill each other quicker.
01:27:45.000They're doing these crazy fucks, and the whole while they're shitting out kids at an alarming rate, doubling, tripling the population like rats on a sinking ship, hanging onto every piece of floating wood.
01:31:54.000What you're saying parallels comedy in so many ways, because you get in comedy shape as well.
01:32:00.000Like stand-up comedy shape, it's really critical to get to.
01:32:03.000You can get along without it, but I've had periods where I've gotten out of comedy shape, and even though I'm capable of killing still, there can be a moment where it just, ooh, this is a little off, and it's because I'm not in comedy shape, because I'm not doing comedy four or five shows a week.
01:32:58.000When I train, if I'm not training on a regular basis, then I go train.
01:33:01.000Even if I'm physically in shape, all that extra thinking that I have to do, if it's not coming completely natural, It might look natural to someone who's watching it, but to me, I'm thinking like an extra one-eighth of a second more than I should be.
01:33:16.000Whereas if I was in shape, I would be thinking it all.
01:33:19.000When you're doing jujitsu, it's just like doing comedy, just like writing, where when you're in it, you're in it and you just flow.
01:33:26.000Everything moves together and you're a passenger.
01:33:30.000All your training sort of manifests itself in the experience of rolling.
01:33:35.000Going back to what you were saying, Aubrey, about seeing your higher self and then your mind boy, how would you apply that to what Joe just said?
01:33:43.000Well, the mind boy wants to think about everything, wants to think about the moves, plan it out, think about your opponent, or just be distracted and think about what you're going to do when you're finished rolling or what you're going to do the next day or about some old injury or something like that.
01:33:57.000And you need to kick that guy out and roll with that.
01:34:01.000I play songs in my head when I'm rolling.
01:34:54.000Well, that used to maybe make some sense, but to me, the warrior is, it's a constant battle with your own mind, with the parasite of that part of your mind that constantly wants to be active.
01:35:56.000The key is deciding that, okay, I'm going to be a warrior, and I'm not going to accept that part of myself that is deficient, that is lacking.
01:36:04.000But still, and another concept that I think is important is to have what I call ruthless self-love.
01:36:10.000And that's just not this coddling self-love of a spoiling grandmother.
01:38:14.000And you could have fucked up your entire life, but right now you wake up, and the way I always describe it to people, pretend that you are a hero in your own movie.
01:39:11.000And I think going back to you and your books, it's one of the things that I found really refreshing about your book is that you were really honest about how you felt about yourself at that time and that you knew you needed to make changes.
01:39:22.000And when people read that, it inspires people to get things moving.
01:39:27.000Did you know you were going to do that when you made that book?
01:39:29.000Did you have any idea it was going to have the kind of impact that it's had?
01:39:36.000Those little anecdotes that are sort of stories on myself of like, you know, the most excruciating moments, da-da-da-da, those are the things that people respond to the most, you know?
01:39:46.000It's like the worst shit that you can tell on yourself, the more people can relate to it because we've all experienced that same thing ourselves.
01:41:16.000And that's one of the things that we see involved in politics.
01:41:20.000It's one of the things that we see in the corporate world and the impact on the environment that corporations are having, the impact on societies that they're having by going into third world countries and setting up shop and, you know, what's going on in China where they're making iPhones in a factory that has nets around it to keep people from jumping off the fucking roof.
01:41:38.000Like, there's gotta be a way to do this better.
01:41:41.000Somewhere along the line, someone put humanity out of the picture, put morals out of the picture, and took advantage of the diffusion of responsibility that comes from people acting in gigantic groups, where they don't feel responsible for their actions.
01:41:53.000Each individual feels like they're a part of something much bigger than them.
01:41:57.000It's why people don't mind throwing cigarettes out the window.
01:42:17.000So what do you think between The War of Art and Turning Pro when I'm recommending these books?
01:42:22.000Do you still recommend The War of Art?
01:42:24.000Or what are the distinctions for different people who want to read one of these books?
01:42:27.000Well, I think The War of Art is probably the one to read first, because it was written first, for one thing, but also it really sort of explains the basic kind of principles of this theory, whatever it is, you know, what is resistance, what is...
01:42:43.000And Turning Pro is sort of the answer, my answer, to how you deal with this negative force in your life, you know, rather than blaming yourself or, you know, passing judgment on yourself.
01:43:42.000But Gates of Fire is a really simple story with good and evil, and it's the kind of story that psychs people up, and when you're done, you're ready to go out and kill somebody.
01:43:53.000And it's a very popular book with the Marine Corps and with elite military units because it's about kind of the warrior ethos.
01:44:02.000Whereas Tides of War is a story that's full of ambiguity, and the characters are not Yeah.
01:44:28.000Let me ask you this then, as an author and as a creative writer, what is it about people that want that good guy, bad guy, all the Joseph Campbell stuff, the ancient archetype or the ancient structure of the hero tale?
01:44:46.000I think that's exactly it, Joe, because each of us is in a battle With that internal monster, whatever it is, or in our real life, and we're usually being overwhelmed by that battle.
01:44:58.000You know, we don't understand what's going on or we're flagging in our passion for it.
01:45:04.000So if we can see a great movie, you know, where Rocky comes out, you know, hangs in there against Apollo Creed or, you know, you name it, we kind of come out at it.
01:45:14.000We say to ourselves, you know, it is possible, you know.
01:45:16.000If I can suck it up, if I can, you know, be like, you know, like you were just saying, be the hero of the movie of my life, you know, starting right now.
01:45:23.000And that's why it's a harder sell to do something that's more ambiguous.
01:45:29.000We like our fiction, like with tidy endings.
01:45:32.000Like, No Country for Old Men pissed me off.
01:46:34.000They don't like to live in the reality of the past?
01:46:36.000But, you know, for someone like you who knows the Spartan code, you know, the answer is pretty simple.
01:46:41.000You could say what a Spartan would do in each one of these situations, and that's some part of us admires that, because we have such an ambiguous kind of life, that strict adherence to a code.
01:46:52.000Well, we do respond in stories to archetypes, right?
01:46:56.000To the knight or the Merlin-like character or something like that.
01:47:00.000But of course, and that's why we love them in stories, the gunslinger, whatever it is.
01:47:05.000But of course, in real life, you know, we're a little bit of this and a little bit of that, and, you know, it's not quite so simple.
01:47:12.000That's the one that everybody loves when it comes to martial arts, the ronin.
01:47:18.000You know, the one lone person who lives by a very strict code, and we like to watch them practice because we like to watch their discipline.
01:47:26.000Like in every Steven Seagal movie, there'd be a scene where he was practicing.
01:47:30.000Like there's one where he's in a coma for seven years, and he gets out all of a sudden, he's fucking running up hills and throwing punches in the air, and you're like, damn, he's back, he's practicing.
01:47:38.000Like leaving cigarettes out that burn more time underwater.
01:47:42.000That samurai mindset that we know that the samurai will hold up in combat.
01:47:51.000We know that their character will be bulletproof.
01:47:59.000And I think why we like that samurai, I'm with you on that, Joe, is that samurai is an individual.
01:48:06.000As opposed to the Spartans that are a group or any other kind of things.
01:48:10.000Because we know that we're alone in the world.
01:48:13.000At least that's how I experience the world.
01:48:17.000When we can see the samurai train and have that discipline, when there's nobody cracking a whip over his head, nobody's paying him, nobody's patting him on the back, nobody's encouraging him.
01:48:26.000He's doing it all entirely self-disciplined, self-generated, self-reinforced, self-validated.
01:48:32.000That's very inspiring to us because we say, well, shit, maybe I can do it.
01:48:37.000And I can tell from talking to you guys, that's how you live your lives.
01:48:41.000Do you fight that internal battle from the morning you wake up and the minute you wake up through the whole day?
01:48:46.000One of the things I like to do, I like to train myself.
01:48:49.000I write down, like I have a workout routine, I write down all the things that have to get done.
01:48:55.000You know, this is all that's going to get done today.
01:49:41.000That's something that you exercise, just like creativity, just like your ability to write.
01:49:45.000And the stakes are high, too, because when you actually succeed and you do it, you start to build that personal power and that knowing that you can put something down and you will do it.
01:49:54.000But then if you pull up short or you cheat yourself a little bit, you start to build the other.
01:50:17.000I know because we were doing this podcast, I was thinking back to the warrior ethos, and I know one of the things the Spartans had to do is they had to run a marathon with a mouthful of water, and then they had to spit the water back out at the end of the marathon.
01:50:30.000And that was part of the training thing.
01:52:34.000Was there a moment for you at In your life, your lives, when you understood this?
01:52:41.000Or is this, in other words, did you not understand this at a certain point or have this concept and then you suddenly learned it?
01:52:49.000I learned it slowly but surely through a lifetime of struggle and failure and some success and every success cling to it like it's a new log that you found after you were swimming in the ocean to the point where you thought you were going to drown and boom you find a log.
01:53:07.000And then jump off that log and keep going and make yourself through another log that slowly but surely I accumulated all this information along with a lot of books, a lot of documentaries, a lot of talking to people that I found inspirational, a lot of martial arts, a lot of talking to instructors that explained what it's about to get through a hard training session,
01:53:27.000what it's about to achieve your black belt, what it's about to be a champion, what it's about to To hit the highest levels.
01:53:40.000You cannot have any bullshit when you're throwing your bones at people.
01:53:44.000When you're involved in whatever it is with some other trained killer and you're both really good at knocking people unconscious and you're planning on doing it to each other.
01:55:13.000It's like you think you know and you think you get it, and then all of a sudden you'll be on this weird path and you'll be like, how did I forget so much just now?
01:55:21.000Where am I? What is this strange place I find myself in?
01:55:28.000You have to retrace your steps back and realize that, you know, things go in cycles, you know, where it's at the top of the cycle.
01:55:34.000You may feel like you have a good grasp, but then you'll swing back down again to some lesser state of forgetfulness, really, where you have to learn that, you know, relearn some things back and be reminded of some other things.
01:55:46.000But for me, I think the process, one of the defining moments for me actually happened from a movie in this process.
01:55:52.000It was actually when I saw Braveheart as a kid.
01:55:54.000And I remember at that point, it really like struck me that the impracticality of going through all that torture just to say the word freedom, you know?
01:56:05.000And I started, I kind of got, I was like, I kind of got that there was something, you know, something else that some other kind of level that you could push yourself through.
01:56:15.000And I remember I would go running and before I would work out and stuff, I was an active kid.
01:56:19.000I loved playing around, loved every sport I could.
01:57:31.000On some nights, I still believe that a car with the gas needle on empty can run about 50 more miles if you have the right music very loud on the radio.
01:57:43.000I find that, not just in music, but in conversations like this, that if I could download this and listen to it as a podcast, if I weren't a part of it, I'd be so fucking psyched.
01:58:40.000Or even beyond the idea of like whipping yourself or anything like that, the idea of like being kind to yourself, being gentle to yourself.
01:58:47.000Like if you're training a thoroughbred racehorse, you're not going to beat the crap out of that horse.
01:58:52.000You're going to make it fun for that horse, right?
01:59:20.000And then also, like you guys say, you get it from other people, you get it from books, you get it from conversations, you get it from music.
01:59:25.000It reinforces itself, like this conversation now is reinforcing it for me, and I'm sure it's reinforcing it for you guys, too.
01:59:32.000It's like, what's interesting to me is it doesn't matter what pursuit you're in, the laws seem to be the same.
01:59:40.000I'm sure that if we had a weaver in here or a potter or somebody that made furniture, they would say the exact same thing.
01:59:50.000I get a piece of wood in and that piece of wood is telling me it wants to be a couch.
01:59:58.000So it's interesting that there are laws, and we're just sort of learning them and uncovering them as we go.
02:00:05.000And again, this is what Musashi spoke of, and this is one of the things that Musashi...
02:00:11.000Put in his book where he described his pursuit of calligraphy, his pursuit of poetry, art.
02:00:20.000In a pursuit of when you're writing poetry or when you're drawing something or painting something, you're still trying to get at that same source, that pure source.
02:00:30.000Whatever it is, whether it's a cartoon or whether it's a Steven Pressfield novel about Greek history, whatever it is, it's the same thing.
02:01:27.000And somehow when we became civilized, we shrunk it down to the ego that knows how to build a wall or something like that but doesn't know how to access.
02:01:39.000And then what you guys are talking about, what I'm talking about, is breaking through those walls and trying to get, even for just a minute at a time, To that.
02:01:50.000That thing that's got some magic to it.
02:01:57.000I mean, even if it's creating at your job, whether you're a carpenter or someone who puts things together, there's something about making something that wasn't there before and now it's there.
02:02:09.000There's something about that, whether it's even just a performance or a song or whatever.
02:02:13.000There's something about that that's one of the few magical things in life.
02:06:50.000Because otherwise, I think, maybe Stephen King is a genius and he can just kind of plunge in and just throw shit against the wall and it'll stick.
02:06:58.000But I think most of us, for me, I'll get lost if I do that.
02:07:03.000I'll just write this scene and that scene and the other scene and there's no...
02:10:08.000Is it the Hollywood machine that takes something and can take your ideas, which are, like as you were talking about the tides of war, there's some ambiguous characters.
02:10:32.000And then there's the sort of the politics of Hollywood where, like, if you're casting the character of Bagger Vance, let's say, and you want to cast Morgan Freeman, who seems like he would be the perfect guy,
02:10:47.000but they run the numbers and they say, well, Morgan Freeman is not going to justify a budget of X, Y, Z, so maybe we need to – so we can't cast him.
02:10:56.000We have to cast – you know, in other words, decisions are driven by factors other than – Other than instinct, you know?
02:14:27.000So the reader is kind of the protege and you're the mentor?
02:14:31.000Or the reader follows along rooting for you, even if your character is only salted in there a little bit here and there, going from one fiasco to another to another.
02:14:41.000But it all sort of If you do it right, it has a flow to it and it builds to a climax.
02:14:47.000The War of Arts starts kind of out with...
02:15:29.000A victory over this resistance thing and achieving this state of mind that there's no nonsense, cut out all the nonsense and get to it, state of mind.
02:18:43.000You've got to walk around the land, you know, and if it rains, you're fucked, you know?
02:18:48.000It's a crazy sport where you need a giant piece of land and so, like, influential as far as, like, business meetings and, you know, people that love to, like...
02:19:02.000I think for business it reveals something about the person you're playing with that's pretty unique because it will bring to the surface those parts of themselves that are a little ugly or a little weird or noble and good.
02:19:15.000When you play with somebody, you get to know more than just your conversation.
02:19:19.000Because you see if they're going to fudge it, if they're going to cheat a little bit, if they're going to get really self-critical and get all mad at them.
02:19:27.000Brian Callen had an instance when his father was playing golf with this man, and his mother was there, and his mother watched the guy playing golf with his dad cheat.
02:19:39.000And then told him, do not go into business with this guy.
02:20:07.000It's an interesting argument that there's a patriarchy thing about these men's club meetings on golf courses that they could never get in on this.
02:20:15.000And that they would never be, even if they were in that circle, they would almost be the white elephant in the room.
02:20:23.000You know, and that they would have to learn how to play golf in order to have an equal stake in the companies and an equal stake in the future.
02:20:31.000You have to kind of be a part of this little goofy club of these fuckers chasing after a ball.
02:22:01.000And doing this, it's the practice for life.
02:22:05.000I think that's why I always innately, people who've been in athletics, male or female, have such a much greater affinity towards and trust.
02:22:13.000When they've been to a high level and they've felt that pressure of fans and obligations and expectations and pushed through.
02:22:20.000I know the feeling when some days in these biggest games in high school we'd get a couple thousand people as Texas sports.
02:22:34.000But then you get out there and you feel the rush and you put your forearm into somebody on that first play and get your first hard drive to the basket and then this feeling just kind of explodes in you and you're in it.
02:22:46.000But making it through that process without folding.
02:22:48.000There was also other games where I never got that kind of restrictive energy out and I played like shit.
02:23:56.000I can do, you know, I'm a fairly athletic guy.
02:23:59.000But as soon as I go to do it on a trampoline, which is fairly soft, my body just freezes up and I lock.
02:24:04.000And I was talking to my friend about it, and for me, you know, when you allow these fears that are disproportionate away from the actual danger to take hold, it's almost giving credence, you know, giving resistance like this little bit of victory that can apply to other things.
02:24:20.000Or if you're, you know, so afraid of spiders you can't even look at it.
02:24:24.000Just by doing that, it's acknowledging that you have some certain limitations, and it's giving that other force that's going to limit you in life and deny you from achieving your goal just a little bit more power.
02:24:36.000So even for me, and this is something I'm just recently playing with, These little trivial fears that we just kind of avoid, like, ah, this doesn't matter.
02:27:46.000And we just completely take it for granted.
02:27:49.000When you're inside that tank, Nothing comes in.
02:27:52.000You're floating in space completely weightless and in the absence of sensory input the mind becomes supercharged because the mind has all these resources that all of a sudden are available that it thought it was going to have to deal with the weight of the body and moving along the ground and avoiding objects and Social cues and all that stuff that it doesn't have to deal with right now.
02:28:11.000So the mind has all these resources free.
02:28:13.000And it becomes a very self-examining, self-objective analysis of your life.
02:28:50.000Yeah, it's a really interesting experience.
02:28:52.000I think the same for these fears are superstitions, I've realized too, that you allow these superstitions to persist, and that's just another head on the resistance hydra.
02:29:24.000So you were thinking that if you got the wrong one, you'd have a bad time on the show?
02:29:28.000Yeah, maybe not all that far, but I was like, this one has better juju than the other one.
02:29:32.000And then I just stopped myself and I was like, just because there's a pressure to vent, all these little things will come out.
02:29:39.000Normally, I just rip that thing off the shelf, never think about it.
02:29:42.000But because, as you said, you're moving from lower to higher, and I'm trying to bring my best self to this show, I was stressed about these little things, and then I had to stop myself and say, hey, this is bullshit.
02:29:54.000You can't allow these trivial things to bother you.
02:29:58.000It's just another form of resistance in this point because the pressure's on.
02:30:02.000So your mind's like, oh, there's luck and omens, and if the birds fly this way or that way, you got to get rid of that shit, too.
02:30:09.000These trivial fears and these trivial superstitions, I really think that you got to cut those out, just ruthlessly.
02:30:45.000Because it's going to be either lucky, it'll be lucky for them, or like when you're naming a child.
02:30:50.000And you're trying to say, well, what name am I going to give this child, right?
02:30:54.000Don't you, whether you think so or not, you feel like, shit, if I give this, my daughter, the wrong name, it's going to fuck up her entire life.
02:31:07.000So, I mean, you're saying that- I never think like that.
02:31:09.000We were saying before, right, that there are dragons possibly flying through the air that we just can't see right now because we're not in a psychedelic state.
02:32:12.000There's some guys who, when you play nine ball, I play in a lot of tournaments, and nine balls, there's a lot of luck involved in nine ball.
02:32:19.000There's a lot of skill because you play from one to nine, but any ball that goes in, even if you don't make it on purpose, it counts, including the nine ball, which is the game-winning ball.
02:32:29.000So there's some guys that just ride the nine ball.
02:32:31.000Like, they get ball in hand when they scratch, so they'll set up a ball behind another ball and just whack that ball into the nine ball.
02:32:36.000Hoping it bounces around the table and falls in somewhere.
02:32:59.000And I've seen it happen, and I've seen this where people go, Motherfucker!
02:33:04.000This guy just won again, and he won by just total luck, just crashing the balls together, and that nine ball finds a way into a hole somewhere.
02:33:16.000And to me, the distinction is you're putting out your own intent.
02:33:20.000And I think there is a key in the universe there.
02:33:24.000There's kind of an access point where if you put your intent and put your belief into that, whether you're rolling dice, I do, and it gets a little fuzzy here, but I believe that there are some forces at work, this kind of momentum force that causes seemingly chance events to more line up in your way.
02:33:40.000And I know this is a very controversial topic, but it just feels, that's the way, I couldn't prove it, of course, but that's the way It feels to me when I'm in those moments, you know, where it feels like you can control things that you would think are out of your control by the will of your own intent and belief.
02:33:55.000And that's, you know, not just my belief.
02:33:57.000That's the belief of many of the shamanistic cultures.
02:34:44.000If you were going to measure people who are on the roll in pool and measuring it by, okay, the person who after they run four or five balls.
02:34:51.000Well, it could have been an easy run that you just hit five balls.
02:34:54.000When you're in the zone and you're really feeling it, it's a different thing.
02:36:57.000Because there's information that's coming back from the cue, there's information that's coming back from your arm, your hands, and then when you process that information over a long period of time, then you get so much data that you really understand the dynamics of the table.
02:37:12.000You really understand the mechanics of your arm, You really understand how hard exactly you have to hit that ball to make it travel exactly as far as you want it to.
02:37:21.000There's this weird thing that goes on.
02:37:24.000But there's this tipping point moment where you're accumulating, accumulating, maybe it's gradual, more data, and then all of a sudden it hits a tipping point where you're there.
02:39:23.000You'll get way better than you used to be, but as long as you're pushing yourself, as long as you're still trying to create, as long as you're still trying to get movement going, it's not going to work all the time.
02:39:45.000Every time I fuck something up, like, I can look back in my career as a comedian, and my biggest growth periods came after I fucking ate a plate of shit on stage.
02:39:53.000And I'm like, ooh, I don't want to do that ever again.
02:39:57.000And even, like, weird sets today, like, that are, it was, like, mediocre, or I don't like, things didn't come together right, or I was tired, or I wasn't in comedy shape.
02:40:05.000Ooh, those things fucking fire me up, man.
02:40:08.000Nothing makes me want to write more, nothing makes me want to perform more.
02:40:40.000People have said to me, hey, Joe, he's always talking about your books you've got to get on the show, you know?
02:40:44.000And then I think there have been a few times when we've sort of tried to or I've tried to reach out and something got in the way or something.
02:40:58.000It's a pleasure to be here with the Werewolves, Aubrey.
02:41:00.000If you ever have a book that's coming out that you want to promote, we would be happy to have you on again.
02:41:05.000I would love it and we'll promote the shit out of it and I guarantee you a lot of people are going to buy them just from listening to this.
02:41:10.000The War of Art is the one that I recommend if you're looking for a book that's a great book on motivation, a great book on overcoming resistance and the creative process.
02:41:19.000I haven't read The Authentic Swing but I certainly will and I'm going to get into Gates of Fire tonight.
02:42:53.000Friday night, I'm at the Bayou Music Center with the great Tom Segura.
02:42:58.000And then, of course, Saturdays at UFC. Lots of good shit coming up, including lots of really cool podcast guests that we've got on the horizon.
02:43:08.000Anna Kasparian from The Young Turks is going to be here next week.
02:43:15.000And coming up soon, we have Sam Harris at the end of the month and a lot of other good guests as well.