In this episode, we take a deep dive into the woods and explore the ideas of shamanism and self-improvement through a look at the ancient wisdom that can be found in fairy tales, fairy tales and folk tales. We also explore the idea of archetypes and the ways in which they can be applied to modern day culture, and how they can help us to understand the world we live in. This episode is brought to you by Droga5, a leading psychedelic and psychotherapeutic company that specialises in providing a safe and legal alternative to psychedelics. To find a list of our sponsors and show-related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/sponsorships and use promo code: CRIMINALS for 10% off your first pack! We hope you enjoy this episode and that it inspires you to get out there and explore your wildest dreams! Cheers, EJ & Rory Music: "Space Junk" by Fountains of Wayne - The White Noise Orchestra Words and Music by Ian Dorsch - "Sonic the Eagle" by Skating in the Woods (feat. John Singleton) Art: "Goodbye Outer Space" by Ian McKellen - "Outer Space Warning" by Robert Ferell - "The White Noise" by Eddy - "Intro to the Woods" by John McDaid - "In The Woods" and "The Little Drummer" by Joe Davenport - "Feat. , "Inner Garden" by David Gilberto - "A Little Drummond - "Let's Talk About It" by Squeezer - "You Can't Have It" - "It's All That" by Jadyn - "I Can't See It?" , & "I'm Yours Truly" - "We're Not Yours (featuring Joe's Song" by Shadydave, "The Realest Thing" by Tom Bell - "No One's Song?" - "How Can I Help You?" - by Joe's Book: "The Good Stuff" by Kevin McElroy - "My Life Is My Story" by Peeves, "No More Than This?" by Mr. & Other Things we'll Be Yours? "Including: "You're Not My Real?" by Jack Williams - "This Is My Song" by
00:00:50.000But as soon as I, like, yeah, as soon as I was sort of submerged in it, that's what, like, you know, because even though it is just, in this case, just an example of me, a man simply jumping in a cold lake, and I do have a tendency to over-poeticise the mundane experiences of my everyday life, but...
00:01:30.000What it is, is in fairy stories, myths and religion, personally, if you're not into him already, I reckon you'd well love, is a man, an American scholar called Joseph Campbell, who is a cultural mythologist, and he studied various religions and folk tales and found corollaries and comparisons and consistencies and sort of...
00:01:49.000It's said that where there are consistencies, there's truth.
00:01:52.000If there's some Icelandic myth and it's telling basically the same story as some African story or some Native American story or some daft Celtic folk tale, why are human beings dislocated all over the world, coming up with the same stories, coming up with the same experiences?
00:02:04.000Well, often in these stories, the forest is used as the unconscious.
00:02:21.000Similarly, also represents unconsciousness.
00:02:23.000And what's interesting about it all, Joe, is not only ancient mythologies and old stories, but also personal dreams.
00:02:30.000If you yourself have a dream, like this is where the work of Joseph Campbell, in its sex with a work of Carl Jung, that good.
00:02:37.000He noticed that people in their personal myths, like Joseph Campbell said, dreams are private myths, myths are public dreams.
00:02:45.000In people's personal dreams, they come up with images, archetypes and stories that can also be found in fairy tales.
00:02:52.000You know, just someone asleep goes, oh, I was just walking and I went into the woods and I met this old woman in the woods and she told me that everything was going to be okay and then she put up a hood and when she took her hood down again, it was my mother's face.
00:03:02.000It's like people are inventing their own mythology.
00:03:06.000Because, of course, all culture is created by consciousness.
00:03:12.000Yeah, Joseph Campbell's work is amazing.
00:03:14.000And when you do look at all the different stories and how they coincide and how many similarities they share, it is really interesting to see what are people trying to accomplish with these archetypes?
00:03:24.000Like what are they trying to sort out?
00:03:26.000Because it seems like that has to be some things.
00:03:28.000Lessons passed down to children, lessons passed down to other people so they can learn things without having to experience the woods themselves.
00:03:34.000But then there's also some sort of archetypes that they're sort of defining the reality around them in a very similar way all over the world.
00:03:41.000I suppose what I reckon, Joe, is the more diverse our culture...
00:03:46.000Because we're experiencing on one level globalisation and homogenisation, where culture through corporatism is coming uniform throughout the world, but also there are many, many, many disparate experiences.
00:03:56.000But on some level, as human beings, If we're anatomically as similar as we are, perhaps it's safe to assume that we're psychologically comparably similar.
00:04:05.000Like, you know, even though you and I are sort of different body types or whatever and look sort of at a glance kind of different, we're both ultimately got the same organs, we're running in pretty much the same way.
00:04:14.000Or perhaps we have the same psychological palette.
00:04:17.000So throughout the world, people are Everyone's having a very similar experience of being human, the anxiety of not being good enough, the fear of death, constantly looking for something in the outside world that's going to solve the problems, that's going to answer your questions.
00:04:31.000In a lot of these ancient texts that I've mostly got at through Joseph Campbell or Hinduism for beginners, that's normally my entry point, I, like you, am an autodidact, self-taught person.
00:04:42.000That's one of the things I like about your podcast.
00:04:45.000You can hear, this is a person educating themselves and continuing to educate themselves Well, one of the things that I picked up in that is that in them very, very ancient texts, there are people that, the same way as in our time that's defined by science and technology,
00:05:00.000there were times where people defined themselves through meditation and experiences in consciousness.
00:05:05.000Those people that wrote, say, the Upanishads, whoever the hell they were, these Rishis, these ancient Indian yogis that went into deep, deep meditative states and came back with mantras and truths.
00:05:17.000Those people are as diligent and as fastidious as a scientist in a laboratory that comes back and goes, well, look, we've, you know, we've broke down, you know, Watson and Crick breaking down the DNA. They come back and go, this is what it is to be a human.
00:05:29.000You need to get, you need to come to terms with the relationship between your contrary self and your material self.
00:05:35.000That's the, for me, that's the stuff like, that's the conversation that I'm into, and that's why whenever I find it, whether it come from Joseph Campbell or Carl Jung or even checking out this podcast, like a lot of the stuff, Hancock, Graham Hancock's into.
00:05:48.000That always, it presses something deep in me.
00:05:50.000That's what I'm always looking for, you know, Joe.
00:05:52.000There are moments where you think, that shudder you get, ooh, there's truth in there, you know.
00:05:57.000Yeah, well those paths that you're talking about, those paths that are carved in, that we sort of normalize all the experiences that we have so they look totally sane.
00:06:07.000If you just stray off those paths and jump into that lake and freeze your dick off and get out and you just, why did I do that?
00:06:14.000You broke your little chain, the little chain of programming that's going on in your brain.
00:06:34.000Whether it's the cryo chambers or the isolation tanks or the experiences...
00:06:41.000Are you into ayahuasca and DMT? I haven't done ayahuasca, but I've done a lot of DMT. The DMT is the more potent, shorter-lasting form, obviously.
00:06:55.000Allegedly things can be arranged if you're in recovery.
00:06:58.000The problem with recovery is, you know, if you want to maintain complete and total sobriety, the only way to allegedly have that experience, and apparently it is possible, is through Kundalini.
00:07:11.000According to people I know that have done both, they've done DMT and they've also done Kundalini, it's virtually the same thing.
00:07:18.000You just have to be completely dedicated to the Kundalini practice and you have to go to a very specific state that's achievable once you have some mastery over the meditation and the meditation.
00:07:55.000It was mostly because Mark Mahoney, the L.A. tattooist, I became somewhat besotted with him because he was kind of like some sort of living skeleton Elvis.
00:08:03.000He was so charming and enchanting that I kept getting myself tattooed just so I could suss him out.
00:08:09.000He appeared briefly in that film Black Mask, that Johnny Depp film.
00:08:37.000God, I wonder if you'd mind me repeating this in the media world.
00:08:40.000When he used to be an intravenous junkie, he was in New York City and he was wandering along on the way to a party and he saw a homeless fella doing paintings and he sort of thought, oh man, I'll get those paintings.
00:08:49.000And he bought these paintings off this homeless guy and then he went on to this party and then he went and shot up in the bathroom and then he heard a flurry of excitement at this New York party because Andy Warhol, the great Andy Warhol, was arriving...
00:09:00.000At the party and Warhol came upstairs and he said he could hear like the acolytes around Warhol and he said he's just banged up and he's getting a hit and his eyes are rolling and he's like feeling fantastic and he hears Warhol outside the room and Mark Mahoney had left some of his paintings out there along with the works of that homeless guy and he hears Warhol go oh my god that's amazing like looking at this stuff and he goes wow look at me I'm the coolest guy in the world says Mark Mahoney I'm laying here banging up smack in a bathroom Warhol's out there digging my work and of course when he went out it was the homeless guy stuff Yeah,
00:09:53.000When I was using drugs, I did psychedelics, and I've never had that kind of like, oh my god, because I loved drugs.
00:09:59.000You never had a breakthrough moment on psychedelics?
00:10:03.000Yeah, I had that realisation that what I considered to be myself was a construction and it wasn't real.
00:10:09.000That my memories and my perception and my desires are just a conglomeration of biochemical impulses that I'm merely a conduit of pure consciousness.
00:10:18.000Now that's too heavy to deal with when you're bloody 16. All my mates were just doing it at school and carrying on.
00:10:24.000Like me, I need to do psychedelics in a hospital with a person monitoring my heart.
00:11:31.000Because there's something about when you you require so much concentration when you're pulling a bow back and anchoring and Relaxing and centering the bow and making sure everything's level and relaxed and there's no excess movement whatsoever as you release the arrow It's all this very very difficult little dance of the synapses that you're doing and in that dance There's no room for any extraneous thought you can't think about your bills your bullshit your life death you don't think about anything but No movement.
00:11:59.000Release that arrow absolutely properly.
00:12:10.000And a lot of people actually get better from not even practicing.
00:12:13.000They get better from visualizing more than practicing.
00:12:17.000They just go over the actual physical mechanics of the shot, visualize it, locking in.
00:12:24.000But it's a big thing with competitive target archers, the visualization aspect.
00:12:28.000They go to hypnotists and they really work on a very specific pattern that they visualize, like a very specific pattern of drawing the bow back, finding your anchor point, perfect release, arrow flying perfectly.
00:12:42.000And in doing that, they sort of condition their mind and their body to make that perfect shot over and over and over again.
00:12:48.000But it's so difficult to do that even the best people fuck up.
00:12:51.000The best ones in the world, in the Olympic archery, they'll occasionally get just out of the line and get a 9 or an 8, and they don't know why.
00:12:58.000They've been doing it 7 hours a day for fucking 20 years.
00:14:00.000It doesn't take any ridiculously coordinated athletic movements, some unusual genetics, some fast twitch muscle fibers.
00:14:08.000No, you just pull the bow back and you release the arrow.
00:14:11.000So to make a living doing that, to decide that I'm going to do something that I could teach anybody to do in a day.
00:14:16.000I could take any regular person and work on their footwork, their stance rather, and their positioning and teach them how to shoot an hour.
00:15:30.000My mate Nick got me into your podcast.
00:15:33.000A lot of people that I hang out with, as you obviously know, but even in the UK, in the mixed martial art world, this is a very central cultural artefact and how it intersects with thinking outside the box and a new vision of what it is to be a man and living outside of state ideals and conditioning.
00:15:55.000It's these new ways of being a man, of having tenderness, awareness, awakeness, but not being afraid or indeed ashamed of the aspects of masculinity that have somehow become cleverly maligned over the last few generations.
00:16:14.000May I say, a shout-out to Dean Northway and Paul Busby, because they're the people that I do.
00:16:48.000Game of Thrones, Gladiator, everybody speaks with an English accent.
00:16:50.000After all of your revolutions, after all of your economic success and global dominion, when it comes to an authority figure, you still go, well, it might have come down from on high.
00:16:59.000You still can't have God go, well, thanks, buddy, it's great.
00:17:31.000Ask you to leave the court because you've really lowered the tone somewhat.
00:17:35.000So it's like the opposite of going off the course.
00:17:38.000It's going so deep into the course that everyone's wearing powdered wigs and they're all aligning with some ancient scrolls that they've pulled out of a jar in a fucking cave in Qumran somewhere and it has been decreed.
00:17:51.000And you say everything's got to be proper.
00:17:56.000You can rely on us from now for time immemorial.
00:18:00.000Sorry for burping during that statement.
00:18:03.000I go do jiu-jitsu once a week at a level that, you know, I mean, I don't even know if it would qualify for the term jiu-jitsu at the level that I'm practicing at at the moment.
00:18:12.000I'm doing kickboxing where I had to go to what is called a leisure center.
00:18:16.000Do those words exist in your language?
00:18:49.000If you think of that, and I suppose a simpler way of saying that, is I've lived this life that's been very focused on comedy and the pursuit of individual success.
00:18:56.000Think, what are all the things I've not done as a result of that?
00:18:59.000When I was a kid, I was too shy and too ashamed to get into sport-type things.
00:19:03.000I was embarrassed about that kind of thing.
00:19:06.000I've started to do kickboxing and jiu-jitsu and even football or soccer, as you call it.
00:19:10.000I've started to do all of those things now to start to learn about them as an adult man.
00:19:15.000Well, it's a beautiful thing when you take chances and do things with other people that are taking chances and doing new things because you realize that it's really a lot of it is about the sort of acceptance and the embracing of vulnerability.
00:19:28.000When you learn a new thing, it's very important to learn new things.
00:19:33.000Because I hear you say that, and I know what that means, but do you actually, because I've got certain, yeah, I suppose prejudice is about you as a sort of black belt martial artist and as someone who's embedded in the MMA world.
00:19:46.000You are a person who is happy and accepting of vulnerability.
00:19:49.000Where in your life do you feel that you are embracing that vulnerability, Joe?
00:19:54.000Well, I think every time you try something new, I'm like, in the archery thing, I've only been doing it for four years, but one of the things that I really loved about it is how fucking terrible I was when I first started.
00:20:04.000And I was like, there's something to this that I have to figure out.
00:21:43.000Whereas if you're good at yoga, you're not meant to say you're good at yoga, but by Jove I'm good at it.
00:21:49.000I don't sort of like, when I'm in the MMA gym, start going like, well, you may be strangling me now, my man, but wait till we get to down with dog.
00:22:01.000You know, I sort of feel like, alright, humility in a jiu-jitsu situation for a beginner is an absolute humility.
00:22:08.000You recognize, you know, because I'm doing it with people that are good, and like, you know, they have to do it like they're doing it with a little kid, you know, like, and I'm very aware that they're doing that, you know?
00:22:15.000Well, I think that if you get really good at martial arts, the only way to get really good is to be completely objective about where you are.
00:22:22.000And if you're completely objective about where you are, and learning and trying to improve upon your skills, you apply that same feeling towards everything else.
00:22:31.000So the feeling that you get when you're totally vulnerable in martial arts, you apply that same feeling when you're learning yoga.
00:22:36.000Because that's the only way to get really good at it.
00:22:37.000The only way to really do it, to 100% do it, is not to sit here and go, this doesn't mean shit, because I could choke out everybody in this fucking room.
00:24:13.000I started with recreational drugs, was unable to...
00:24:16.000And the reason is this, because it's not the fault of the drugs themselves.
00:24:19.000There's a component within me that is looking to find a solution that doesn't have...
00:24:24.000You see, when you have that perspective on going into a place and being willing to go in there and be vulnerable, that kind of thing for me, that makes me very sort of what I call hot, you know, like scared.
00:24:34.000So for me, drugs were always a thing that I trusted to make me feel a little bit better.
00:24:39.000And so when I was smoking weed, it was like, oh right, there's that thing I found that makes me feel relaxed when it became coke and heroin and crack.
00:24:47.000It was an attempt to nullify, medicate, And contend with an inner sense of disconnectedness and discontentment, which I think is a thing that comes up a lot on your show in other guises, because I think that's, in some way or another, we're all looking for this sense of connection,
00:25:04.000I think, in fact, the thing that led me to be a drug addict, or sex addict, gambler, whatever kind of addict you are, I think the thing that's driving it is this need for connection, this sense that Is this life?
00:25:16.000Because this don't fucking seem right to me somehow, this system you've got this living by.
00:25:24.000What's the real thing you're not telling me?
00:25:25.000And that's why I'm fascinated by people like Terence McKenna, who says, like, if you, you know, what he called don't stay on the pedestrian levels of consciousness, there's deep shit down there.
00:26:23.000If you do see what you were actually looking for, what do you think is curious?
00:26:28.000Once you're there and you discover it, what do you come back and aren't we just back to all this?
00:26:34.000You know, you're right in a way, Jim, because I have had moments in both sobriety recovery and in active addiction where I've gone, oh my God, I feel truly connected.
00:26:44.000Now, I've had a lot of those moments in what I would call unhealthy highs, like, you know, sort of sexual kind of, oh my God, this is so amazing, I want to live in this moment forever, or moments on drugs where I've felt sort of pure bliss.
00:26:54.000But nowadays, I tend to find it through bloody altruism and kindness and service.
00:27:00.000Sometimes when I think I'm being truly useful, I feel this sense of connection.
00:27:39.000There's positions where you go upside down and stuff.
00:27:42.000If you were just determined to describe things in a material and secular way, you'd say, well, you were just dizzy.
00:27:48.000What I feel is, I go upside down, and when I come up straight again, I feel my own individual consciousness, my sense of myself, I feel it sort of disappear, like I can't remember who I am for a moment.
00:27:58.000And then I feel this secondary awareness in the back of my mind, like a sort of a grid, an awareness, and I sort of think, hold on a minute, I'm not me.
00:28:09.000And the thing that, you know, my big sort of...
00:28:11.000When I was doing that internet series, The Trues, for a while, that got me into all sorts of interesting scrapes and challenges over the last sort of 18 months, two years, it was the idea of, you know, there's someone inside, our own consciousness is not free.
00:28:25.000We are not free within our own consciousness.
00:28:27.000We've been conditioned to the point that we don't know that we're conditioned anymore.
00:28:31.000And I think that that sort of, you know, you notice it in lightning rod moments when there is sort of like an election and you think, oh my God, are people really into this fucking shit?
00:29:10.000Have you, I'm just a question, since you've been putting it out there, have you noticed There's more and more is coming back or it's like, eh, I'm noticing it more.
00:29:25.000It's still like, you know, if you read any bloody, when you read this stuff in religious books, like say in the Bible, like it's sort of, it's going, look, become good and get to the point where even being good, you're not even doing it for that reason anymore.
00:29:38.000You've become detached from outcomes, you know, like in from Buddhist terms, you know, like that you're, you're, No longer about fear and desire.
00:29:45.000You're no longer trying to just fulfil yourself, right?
00:29:50.000You know, me, even if I do something good, like go to a homeless shelter and help out for the day and all that sort of thing, a little bit at the back of my mind's going, look at you, helping out at this homeless shelter.
00:30:45.000You've got to be able to differentiate between your forms of expression, like your art form, like a piece that you're creating, and you yourself as a person.
00:30:54.000And sometimes, I used to think when I was younger, man, I can't be fucking around with meditation or enlightenment because it's going to ruin me.
00:31:01.000All my favorite comedians were junkies and crazy people, you know, like Kinnison and Pryor and Hicks.
00:31:34.000It's like you're creating a piece of art and sometimes the more points of view that you've considered, the more it enhances that work of art.
00:31:42.000You raise a good point there because in certain In the sectors of the art world, that has always been accepted, that, you know, Heronius Bosch doing a triptych of hell don't mean, oh, I mean, this guy's fucking crazy!
00:31:54.000You know, he may have been, I don't know.
00:31:56.000But, like, when in hip-hop, you know, like, people talk about, you know, popping caps and whatnot...
00:32:30.000He would say things to him and let you go, whoa, steady, and then he smacked you in the mouth and then he gently tells you that it's just a ride or whatever it is, now that he's got you where he wants you.
00:32:40.000But people, I think we live in a culture now that's very prohibitive about where we go with those kind of ideas.
00:32:50.000I've myself been on the receiving end of a lot of, what do I want to say, judgment.
00:32:55.000And I'm like, hold on a minute, I'm fucking joking.
00:32:56.000But don't you think that that's also because we live in this new media world of social interaction, this new social media world where anybody can chime in at any point in time?
00:33:06.000And it's the first time ever that that's happened.
00:33:09.000A friend of mine in England made a documentary about what has happened to the idea of the great man.
00:33:15.000You know, like in American literature, like, you know, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth...
00:33:19.000Or like, you know, Muhammad Ali, rest in peace.
00:33:23.000Like, nowadays, people don't rise to that position anymore because there's thousands of Lilliputians pulling them down with tiny arrows as soon as their heads above the parapet, innit?
00:33:35.000You know, people will be, oh, well, Martin Luther King had affairs, oh, Malcolm X, he was inside, he'd done this, that, and the other.
00:33:40.000You know, like, it's, like, yeah, there are so many good things that have come from social media, so many good things, you know, the possibility for communication, the connection, instantaneous, all those things, it's wonderful, but it does, all things in the end become an expression of the dominant consciousness,
00:33:56.000you know, and if people are doubtful, cynical, pessimistic, then that, the palette, you know, that shit ends up on the canvas.
00:34:03.000It also might be a case of, you know, everybody's always worried about wealth inequality in this world.
00:34:09.000There's also a possibility of consciousness inequality, and that these people that have grown up with shitty parents and shitty neighborhoods, they feel left out by even your ability to seek peace and altruism.
00:34:42.000The same kind of anger that you would get at the elite upper class, like the billionaires and the one percenters of the world.
00:34:48.000People will also look at a person like you and, like, there's a consciousness inequality.
00:34:53.000There's also a starting point in equality.
00:34:57.000I'm sure, like you were saying, you were insecure when you were young, and it was difficult, and I certainly was, and Jim and I knew each other when we were young and insecure and starting out as comics.
00:35:06.000But that sort of, this experience where you are you now, and people look at that, and they're upset that, well, why does this guy have so much?
00:35:16.000Why is this guy in this place where you can so conveniently search for truth, where I have to pay my fucking bills?
00:35:22.000And I'm in student loans, and I'm in a shitty neighborhood, and my kids are sick, and my wife's a cunt.
00:36:05.000If you believe that the external world is an illusion, that it's temporary, it's transient, and what's real is your deep connection to your inner self, and you can express that in myriad ways, and we're here to have this experience as an animal, and I'm fascinated by the numerous ways that you're into doing it,
00:36:21.000and it's something that I really want to learn more about, is loads of the stuff that goes on on your show.
00:36:28.000I can well appreciate people seeing, particularly as the way it's presented, seeing me on television thinking, fuck that guy, fuck that guy, because they don't automatically know where I came from or what I had to do to get here, or the fact that I get here and think, hold on a minute,
00:36:43.000this isn't what I thought it would be.
00:36:45.000Almost as soon as I got those things, I was like, this isn't real.
00:36:58.000You cannot resolve those inner issues.
00:37:01.000I now know that, empirically, for a fact.
00:37:02.000I'm really lucky, and that's why I'm fascinated by the addiction model, and that's why I am reluctant to smash my mind to a piece of DMT, although it does sound fun.
00:37:17.000It's because I know I've tried fame, I've tried money, I've tried drugs, I've tried sex, I've tried all of those things to make myself feel better.
00:37:35.000And I would, like, what I am now thinking, Joe, is what is the most, they say that, you know, happiness is where what the world needs meets what you have to offer.
00:37:45.000Well, the world needs what you have to offer.
00:37:47.000And I think, God, is there a way that I can communicate some of the things that I have learned about connecting, about letting go of my flaws, taking responsibility for the problems that I am creating?
00:37:57.000Is there anything about that that I can convey?
00:38:00.000Can I convey it, hopefully, in a comedic and accessible way?
00:38:02.000And that's sort of where my focus is beginning to fall.
00:38:27.000They're quote mining a lot of times in a lot of ways, looking to have a more concentrated form of that That jealous expression that we were talking about?
00:38:35.000Like, there's gotta be something about this guy I don't like.
00:38:44.000You think you're better than these people that are here telling the truth?
00:38:48.000Well, I think the way that works for me is that that is a thing that is called confirmation bias, isn't it?
00:38:52.000You've already feeling something inside yourself, and then you're sort of unconsciously, you're scanning data.
00:38:58.000To get confirmation of, like, so if I feel insecure because you're super good at MMA and have black belts in jiu-jitsu, instead of dealing with my own feeling of, oh, fuck, if this becomes a fight, I'm not going to be able to deal with it, I would rather go, no, this guy's...
00:39:13.000And I'll find something to complete that.
00:39:16.000Oh, he had advantages that I didn't have.
00:39:21.000But really, the feeling is in me, and this is what my personal experience of actually getting clean from drugs has taught me, is that what other people think about me is none of my business, and it's something that's happening in their own consciousness, and they're always looking for some coordinates upon which to project those feelings,
00:39:36.000and I know that because I fucking do it.
00:39:38.000If I start getting jealous about some super successful guy or someone who's super good at fighting or whatever, I'm dealing with something inside myself, so now I try not to bring that shit to the world.
00:39:49.000I try to go, right, Russell, you better deal with this feeling of inadequacy or this feeling of jealousy or this feeling of insecurity because otherwise it's going to ruin your experience of being human instead of going, no, the problem is this guy or that guy or this person having a successful podcast.
00:40:04.000You know, I'm trying not to blame the outside world for my shit anymore.
00:40:08.000Well, I think in a lot of ways, yeah, these are really complicated thoughts that we have and in many ways we're almost a victim of this constant need to evolve.
00:40:17.000Like the body and the brain is set up to constantly be comparing ourselves to others and to feed off of each other, whether it's through jealousy or inspiration to try to achieve higher and higher levels of competency at anything.
00:40:30.000To develop more social credibility, to develop more clout in the community, to feel better about your own existence.
00:40:37.000It's almost like what we're dealing with is some sort of a programming that is constantly set up to innovate and to continue to get better and better at everything.
00:40:46.000So if I see you in some movie, I'm like, How come I'm not in these fucking movies?
00:41:45.000You raise a good point, because what you were talking about there is how biological imperatives, whatever that force was that made us divide from one cell to two cells, to ten cells, to fish, to frog, to To mammals, to cities, to all these architectural Wi-Fi wonders.
00:42:01.000That force, as you say, is still in us.
00:42:03.000Now, these imperatives to grow, as you were saying there, Jimbo, if you're living in a tribal society, it's a necessary function.
00:43:02.000Let's focus down on this, as yet not mentioned, don't be gay.
00:43:07.000And then, of course, the way that meat is consumed, endless abattoirs and slaughterhouses of condensed animals, not consumed as they would be tribally, picked off here and there, eaten once a week.
00:43:21.000So we have fields full of wheat, abattoirs full of meat, And we ourselves are similarly what we eat.
00:43:29.000We have become cells of energy, trapped in cities, not free to be tribal beings anymore.
00:43:34.000We've become so disconnected from what it's supposed to be, to be this primate, that now these biological imperatives, the desire to procreate, the desire to have status, the desire to even get high, all these things have become permutated because they're no longer anchored in a reality for which we were designed.
00:43:51.000And imagine your position, where you're in a completely unique position even in the Western world.
00:44:01.000You become someone when you show up, people have cameras and you walk and they take photos of you.
00:44:06.000You get out of a car and everyone cheers.
00:44:08.000It becomes this really unusual event when you just arrive somewhere.
00:44:13.000So it sets you up for an incredibly high dose of this sort of toxic celebrity feeling that you have to sort of navigate, and you have to navigate it based on the other people that have mostly unsuccessfully navigated it before you.
00:44:27.000If you start and think about how many fucking movie stars wind up in a pool of their own vomit, Or, you know, covered in whatever the fuck they're doing.
00:44:34.000I mean, it's a large number of famous people wind up fucking it all up, but they can't handle it anymore.
00:44:40.000They go Heath Ledger or a million different ways.
00:44:43.000You know, it's pills or just fucking implosion or whatever the fuck it is.
00:44:53.000You start losing your mind in the vanity.
00:44:55.000For anyone that's listening to this podcast just because I'm on it, and I can't imagine there's very many of you, there's a reference there to a giraffe that even I'm struggling with in this moment.
00:45:04.000I just think that your unique perspective, and it's a very unique perspective, because not a lot of people get to become movie stars, is it's...
00:45:12.000Something that the average person is trying to put it into a perspective where they can grasp the amount of pressure and the weird way that you have to interface with the world, where people worship you and everywhere you go people love you and you don't even know them.
00:45:32.000We have to think of problems, I think, in terms of their essence, not of their scale.
00:45:37.000You see, like, because if you, like, how I stop myself, like, you know, when I was more immersed in Hollywood and fame and stuff, like, it isn't, like, you walk in a room and, like, you know, when I was single and I'd get lots of attention from women, obviously that's a short circuit, that, because you do tend to fulfill that one.
00:45:52.000You say, oh my god, I'm able to have sex with people.
00:46:43.000You've decided to step away from all the bullshit, move away from Hollywood, and sort of take a break while you can financially and you can with your position in life and just relax and get a look at this.
00:46:55.000Really ego thing of people giving me lots of attention.
00:46:58.000Quite quickly after I used to get a lot of fame attention, I'd think, if someone else more famous than me came in, then all this attention would go there.
00:47:12.000And even if I don't have that, even if I don't literally have the experience of basking in a spotlight and then Justin Timberlake walking in and see the light disappear from my face and being plunged once again into the shadows of my youth, even if I don't have to actually have that experience, I know that when I get home,
00:47:28.000I'm still just me, that none of it is real, that you can't...
00:48:54.000It's absolutely compelling, but you understand what it is now, so you don't have to do it.
00:48:59.000You don't have to gravitate towards it.
00:49:00.000You know that if you just went and got a bunch of hookers and some coke and you hold yourself up in a hotel room, there'd be some moments that would be pretty goddamn good about that.
00:49:09.000But also there'd be the repercussions, the fact that you've slid back towards addiction, the problems, so you avoid it.
00:49:27.000That's why I live in the abstinence model.
00:49:31.000That's why I try not to press those buttons because that stuff is, you know, you can't mess, don't rattle the cage, don't wake that guy up, leave him alone.
00:49:44.000Yeah, I mean, look, as we've gone over, you're navigating some waters that very few people get to go through and there's no books written about it.
00:49:51.000No one has gone through what you've done and achieved some sort of a yogic state of enlightenment where they've sort of expressed it to everybody else and said, this is the roadmap.
00:51:24.000But he decided, and we've been friends forever, he decided a long time ago, you know what, fuck this, I'm going to live in New Jersey, I'm going to do gigs, and I'm not going to worry about nothing.
00:51:32.000I'm just going to have a good time and perform and not worry about fame at all.
00:51:36.000I'm just going to step the fuck away and just work on my act, work on performing, having a good time, and trying to enjoy my life.
00:51:42.000And that's a very admirable thing, too.
00:51:44.000What you've done is a very admirable thing in a lot of ways.
00:51:47.000But when you first walked in here, you just kind of mentioned that.
00:53:22.000Like you were saying about going back to Jersey and saying, what I'm going to do is my job.
00:53:28.000I'm going to do comedy, and I do the comedy to get the money, to pay for the food, to feed my family, to take care of my life, and I love doing it, and I can bring joy to people.
00:53:37.000If I'm honest about myself, I always had the ingredients for obsessive behaviour.
00:53:43.000The more I look at it, I was trying to resolve something.
00:53:47.000I thought, if I get there, then I'll be worth something.
00:54:00.000There are people, I think, very high-profile, high-level people that are making big contributions.
00:54:06.000Can you sweep away all of mainstream culture?
00:54:09.000Can you say the sole function of pop culture is to keep people bewildered and distracted and intoxicated while a political elite in conjunction with the corporate powers saps the energy of the great and powerful people of this planet?
00:54:27.000But do you think that that's a conscious decision by the cultural elite or is that a conscious decision by the people to avoid reality itself and be distracted by goofy television shows and music?
00:55:12.000You're being lied to about the nature of consciousness.
00:55:13.000You're being lied to about your options.
00:55:15.000On a very simple level, I've had, as I'm sure I've gathered, quite a lot of therapy over the course of my life as a result of the substance misuse addictions and then just out of ongoing bloody curiosity...
00:55:25.000And they say the function of therapy is to increase your choices in life.
00:55:31.000Anyone who's bloody done DMT will know we don't live in reality.
00:55:34.000We live in a narrow, tiny bandwidth of reality.
00:55:38.000So if you just live in a model of reality, not reality itself, then you should take responsibility for remodeling your reality, particularly if you're not bloody happy in it.
00:55:48.000And for me, at the moment, that means quite mundane things.
00:55:50.000It means that when I arrive here and my suitcases don't arrive, I have the choices of, do I now become a cunt and make people's lives fucking miserable, or do I just accept the cases are not here?
00:56:01.000Or when I arrive at the airport and I ain't got my green card and I nearly miss the flight, like all of these, I just go, oh, this is happening now.
00:56:08.000The only choice I have in that moment is the choice of whether or not to start being a dick.
00:58:25.000Please, there is nothing that can be done for you.
00:58:27.000It was fascinating to talk to him because I was having a hard time with a woman that I was seeing and I was like, what am I going to do?
00:58:33.000And she's done this and she's done that.
00:58:34.000And he goes, well, perhaps you will resolve this conflict and you will become married and you will have children and then both of you will die.
00:58:43.000Because he knows that actually you're gonna die.
00:59:39.000Isn't that a good idea to start those thoughts off early?
00:59:42.000Let's accept this and get over these goddamn things.
00:59:44.000Let's figure out what the fuck we're so terrified about that we have to create a land in the clouds that we're definitely all gonna go to and meet up after the fucking show.
00:59:51.000But that put me in check of the whole thing.
01:00:19.000But the thing is, Joe, you know before when we were talking about your DMT experiences and you said it would be like sort of a caveman with a crayon trying to draw God, right?
01:00:41.000When people talk about the kingdom of heaven is within, or in the afterlife there'll be 72 virgins, me personally, I see these things as metaphors.
01:00:51.000It will be as if you will be in such a blissful state when you are free of the shackles of the material realm, when you are liberated from your body.
01:01:17.000And for me, the term learning difficulties was polite because these people were like, you know, fucking seriously mentally ill.
01:01:26.000I mean, they were beautiful human beings and everything.
01:01:29.000But anyway, I had a really fantastic time there.
01:01:32.000It made me feel incredibly grateful for my own life and all the things one would imagine that you'd feel in such a situation.
01:01:37.000And I was chatting to the people, and one person was like, people were getting various certificates for various kind of achievements, whether it was in the art, doing some drawings, or whether it was doing some cooking or whatever.
01:01:47.000And I started to feel this impulse of Sort of a bit of patronisingness of like, oh, you're getting that certificate, are you?
01:01:53.000And then I thought, oh, in a minute, this ain't no fucking different from someone who's doing like a four-year MA in religion in global politics, really.
01:02:00.000I mean, if you can imagine supreme consciousness, if you can imagine the realms experienced on DMT or the realms that are being described with people that have dedicated themselves to meditation or kundalini, have dedicated themselves to, you know, Terrence McKenna, get into them super states of consciousness accessible to individuals, and our birthright, some people say,
01:02:16.000that our little achievements of, I've got myself a giraffe, for example, Or a new car or the things that I'm proud of today.
01:02:23.000You know, like, we similarly are on this little pedestrian level.
01:02:27.000You know, like, we're sweet little darling things, really, with our material achievements, with our accolades and our awards.
01:02:33.000And it changed my perspective of it, of like...
01:02:36.000Bloody hell, the difference between me and someone that's not in what you'd consider being the normal strata of the mental health field, it's not that bloody different.
01:02:46.000Not in infinite space, not with Jupiter sucking in meteors, all that shit going on right now.
01:02:50.000What's the difference between me and someone that life is confined to cooking projects?
01:02:55.000It's not hugely significant, except I'm not that good at cooking.
01:03:00.000I would never have got that certificate.
01:03:01.000Well, it might not be hugely significant in your perspective when you look at the infinite, but it's very significant in terms of the two of you relating to each other and trying to work this life out and trying to be sort of compatible, try to communicate, try to be friendly with each other and work out all the weird cultural differences between everybody and try to get to the essence of what it means to be a person.
01:03:21.000And we're all going through some weird sort of struggle.
01:03:45.000And he's saying his girlfriend is fucking...
01:03:48.000Doug Stanhope's getting sued because he wrote a whole article saying that he's really good friends with Johnny Depp.
01:03:52.000And Doug Stanhope wrote a whole article about how the woman has been blackmailing Johnny and threatening him, and he brought it up before the whole thing came out in the news that she wanted...
01:04:01.000She had certain demands if he didn't reach...
01:04:03.000Who knows who's fucking right and who's wrong.
01:04:06.000But at the end of the day, you know, whether Johnny's telling him the truth or not, but at the end of the day, even Johnny Depp can't escape.
01:07:23.000We're looking at, in his situation, whether he's navigating it successfully or not, he's definitely in a strange path of the river.
01:07:31.000He's in a strange, deep, wide channel with incredible rapids, and he's riding on a fucking inner tube down this stretch of river that nobody gets to ride.
01:07:40.000The Johnny Depp stretch is like the Tom Cruise stretch or the Samuel Jackson stretch.
01:08:25.000Right, he's gotta block out the streets.
01:08:27.000If he went to the movies, he would leave the movie theater and people would be trying to grab him as he was walking out of the theater just to touch him and take pictures with him.
01:08:33.000It's not like you can't just interact with people.
01:09:42.000You know, you arrive in a situation and you think, right, here are my prejudices about Tom Cruise, all the things I've read, all the things I've heard.
01:09:49.000But, like, we meet him, he blasted me with such affability and charm that they melted away, like ice cones, the pure heat of the man's sweetness.
01:09:59.000Like, on the sort of, like, it was my birthday during that film, I've got a big basket full of, like, you know, yoga-related things and stuff like that, these sort of thoughtful presents.
01:10:07.000You remember, you know, he shakes your hand, remembers your name, sort of remembers details about you.
01:10:11.000He's like, if you mention your auntie or something in the conversation, the next conversation, he'll mention that auntie.
01:10:16.000I went round his house for dinner, I was really, really late, because of that fucking monkey, actually.
01:10:19.000It was playing up, like he was not working that day.
01:10:22.000I went round his house, when he was married to Katie Holmes, and there was that little famous Tom Cruise, Suri Cruise was there and all, all lined up.
01:10:29.000I went there, I was very, very late, and they'd all eaten.
01:10:33.000And they goes, oh, well, do you want to still eat?
01:10:36.000And I had to, like I'm sat with you now, Joe, opposite Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes and the little darling one, I was fucking eating spaghetti.
01:10:45.000And that's a complicated thing to eat in front of Tom Cruise as well.
01:10:50.000And I was trying to meet that lady in the tramp, shoving that shit in.
01:10:53.000And then the next course, I think, was lasagna, which was weird, because that's two pasta courses.
01:10:56.000Then I think there was cupcakes and stuff involved.
01:10:59.000All the way through it, just sat opposite Tom Cruise talking about communism, which I brought up as a topic, which in retrospect was a mistake.
01:11:32.000I goes, that's like being born an aristocrat.
01:11:34.000The thing that you've got, that drive or whatever, people aren't like you.
01:11:39.000I tried to explain it to Tom, but it was hard for him to take me seriously because I had spaghetti down my shirt and all that kind of shit.
01:11:46.000But I had a good go of saying it's probably different to be Tom Cruise than other people.
01:12:13.000Because all of these political ideas and religious ideas, it's supposed to just be, we're here, we're going to die, should we try and make it as nice as possible?
01:12:19.000And part of that's going to be not being out of order to each other.
01:12:23.000But all of them interface with our problems, the problems we've described, those biological and mechanical drives.
01:12:29.000All I've said is, like, the communism...
01:12:32.000There's a socialism and communism that's different from the depiction of communism that a lot of Americans and English people would have because we were on the other side of the Cold War.
01:12:44.000So we got a very, very negative impact.
01:12:47.000A version of communism that's pretty fucking brutal in places, as is capitalism, you know?
01:12:51.000So I'm sort of like trying to kick around these...
01:12:52.000I'm saying like, yeah, but really, all communism is a sort of a version of Christianity in that it's saying we are all brothers here and all of us have rights and we should be trying to build a society where we love each other.
01:13:37.000Anyway, but my point I was trying to make is...
01:13:41.000Look, things get convoluted and complicated by, you know, bureaucracy, ideology, and demagoguery, but ultimately, we're just meant to be sharing.
01:13:51.000It's not a bloody complicated idea, really.
01:13:53.000Yeah, the dictatorship aspect of it is almost like that same inescapable drive that causes someone to want to be the monkey with the five monkeys that it could fuck any time it wants.
01:14:03.000There's always someone going, I'm going to be the monkey that's fucking fine.
01:14:06.000Whether it's any sort of religious extremism, there's always some guy at the end of it going, I'm going to be fucking five monkeys in my trailer.
01:14:14.000And that person's ruining it for the rest of us.
01:14:16.000Because whenever you see a religious cult, I've started a religious cult, we all live here together and we grow our own vegetables, everything's organic.
01:15:28.000That in chimpanzee societies, they have about 75 chimps, right?
01:15:33.000And once it gets to about 80 or 90, things get edgy.
01:15:36.000And they normally break off and go, fucking hell, we better have Another little breakaway chimp community, because this is getting too heavy over here.
01:15:43.000And so the assumption is that we, as great apes ourselves, similarly should be living in manageable communities.
01:16:17.000But again, since we've lived in this monoculture where people are like little cells, batteries, all sort of stacked up together in cities and suburbs, then how do you access that?
01:16:25.000We're not having an authentic human experience.
01:16:34.000And I've tried to figure out what it is we're actually doing, but it seems to me that everything is getting more and more connected, right?
01:16:40.000So what we're doing in these cities is we're connecting 20 million people into this mass of buildings.
01:16:45.000And then we're connecting them all with the internet.
01:16:47.000And we're connecting those 20 million people with the 10 million people in this state and 5 million people in that state, and we're all becoming one sort of weird, gigantic group that's very, very dissimilar from the original tribal groups that allowed one alpha male To run things,
01:17:03.000one alpha female community, everybody knowing and understanding each other.
01:17:07.000And when you talk to archaeologists, have you ever read Sex at Dawn, Dr. Chris Ryan?
01:17:38.000But the polyamorous thing also speaks to this idea that before we understood genetics and we understood DNA, we didn't know whose children they were.
01:17:46.000So if you had a child, if a woman had a child and I fucked her and you fucked her and you fucked her, we all would assume it's our kid.
01:18:01.000That kid's straggling a lot of people.
01:18:05.000Well that's a weird thing too, is how children maintain some sort of talent traits that their parents have.
01:18:11.000Like there's things that get passed on through children, through DNA. Obsessive behaviors, like desire to grow and learn, people like have kids that are very similar in personality, that seem to be like inherent to the child, that seems to come through the DNA. Yeah,
01:18:28.000but wouldn't that be a little bit too of the kid that's all he knows growing up, and if he's watching a parent that's obsessive, he's either going to go, I am not being that, or I'm that.
01:21:42.000I think you're absolutely right about that.
01:21:44.000The image that I've been using is like of circuits, like how it must be neurologically.
01:21:49.000Of course, I'm speculating about neurology, which is probably not something that someone who knows nothing about neurology should do.
01:21:54.000Lucky none of us do either, so we'll just follow you on this.
01:21:59.000You know, if you're continually activating certain neurological pathways or creating synaptic relationships, then that's going to fire up more regularly.
01:22:07.000I mean, I notice it with some of these new things I'm doing.
01:22:09.000Like, initially, when people were explaining stuff about getting out of half-guard and how even to shuffle on the floor, you know, that shrimpy stuff, I was like, I ain't ever going to be able to do this.
01:22:19.000Because soon it seems like it's making its way behaviourally into a different aspect of my consciousness.
01:22:26.000And I suppose when you talk about happiness or misery or addiction, if you're continually living in that circuit, people talk about programming.
01:22:34.000I feel like when I'm aware of my programming, there's certain things that if people say them to me, I can't help the reaction I have.
01:22:41.000Obvious ones, if I'm exposed to certain sexual images, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang.
01:22:45.000I feel all those feelings before I make any decisions.
01:22:48.000If someone makes me feel insecure or says something, I have to really watch that moment, because otherwise, before I know it, I've gone down a path of behaviour.
01:22:55.000And I think that perhaps what we can do on an individual level is learn, and this is hard for people who are living in total fucking crisis and dreadful poverty, and like you said before, I personally am in a privileged position where I can begin to bring my consciousness to those kind of things, of like, right,
01:23:14.000I don't always want to feel fearful in these moments.
01:23:17.000I want to learn to plough that neurological pathway so that it's easier for me to stay there.
01:23:23.000Programming is necessary and if you're not living on a program that you've taken control of individually, you're living on someone else's program, you're living on that program that's out there, that constant bombardment of negativity and fear and anxiety and division and you're different from people and you're not good enough and by this otherwise you're not going to be good enough.
01:23:42.000You're going to need pretty strong defences, I think.
01:23:45.000With the diminished role of religion in our life, with the diminished role of political ideologies that we can trust, what are people supposed to do about being alive and not feeling good?
01:24:35.000Now, do you think we could introduce to that a kind of a compassion?
01:24:39.000Because, like, you know, earlier on we were talking about, like, we can understand people's sort of jealousy or irritation at, like, people being famous or rich.
01:25:02.000So I went in the shop, and this is a problem of great privilege, but I went along to a pretty cool shop in Los Angeles, and the security fella goes, oh, the shop ain't open yet.
01:25:12.000Then he recognised me, and he goes, oh, no, no, no, the shop is open, right?
01:25:16.000And I was like, oh, thank you, mate, and I felt all special for a moment.
01:25:19.000Then we got to the doorway of the shop, and the guy that was inside the shop, he, I don't know, he's having a bad day or whatever, and he goes, oh, you know, maybe you can't come in, right?
01:25:26.000And I immediately thought, you fucking...
01:25:43.000I had so many little things sort of triggered in me in that sort of short momentary interaction and feeling of like, oh great, the security guy recognises me.
01:30:41.000You see what I mean about the liquid around the mouth?
01:30:43.000Anyway, but I suppose people that are Scientologists will say this is our religion and you're taking the piss out of our religion.
01:30:50.000It's an ideology that is also a very positive one in the sense that it's dedicated towards self-improvement and eliminating all these psychological barriers that are holding you back.
01:31:01.000And in that way, people find a lot of benefit in being a part of that religion.
01:31:05.000And I think when they find a lot of benefit in being a part of it, then, you know, they can justify all the other nonsense and just sort of ignore it.
01:31:11.000Because what L. Ron Hubbard, according to the Going Clear book, Lawrence Krauss book was trying to do was self-medicate.
01:31:19.000He had a lot of psychological issues himself, and he was trying to cure his own issues.
01:31:24.000And in using these methods to cure his own issues, he translated them into a religion.
01:31:32.000This is a big part of what Scientology initially was, was his own attempts to self-diagnose and treat his own psychological ailments.
01:31:41.000Quite a good idea, really, in the beginning, and sort of worked really well.
01:31:45.000And there are, I suppose, people that it's working for.
01:31:49.000A quote I heard that I liked was, be quick to see where religious people are right.
01:31:54.000It's all really obvious where religious people are wrong, because we hear about it on the news.
01:31:59.000But where religious people are right, togetherness, selflessness, It's a relationship with a deeper self, acceptance of death, and the possibility of transcendence of the, you know, human primal self.
01:32:10.000Those things are all really beautiful ideas that have kind of lost their way in a science, you know, that term scientism, the idea that science has got into territories that science can't really handle, because we come to a judging full stop at certain points, you know, like, what happened on the Tuesday before the Big Bang,
01:32:30.000Materialism and individualism are hard things to overcome.
01:32:35.000If we have as our dominant mindset, I'm only going to believe shit that I can prove, then you are just an individual and you may as well just do it.
01:32:44.000Why not just spend your life fucking as many people as you can and accumulate in as much material as you can because nothing exists unless you can see it, measure it, weigh it, contain it and fuck it.
01:32:54.000If that is the dominant belief system, which...
01:32:57.000Sort of materialism, consumerism, capitalism, I think all dovetail on that premise.
01:33:35.000On an individual level and on a cultural level, if something is possible, you should be trying to fucking do it.
01:33:38.000So as soon as people realise, hold on a minute, that's having a negative impact, or hey, this is a better way of using our resources and our utilities, as soon as you realise it, you should be moving towards it.
01:33:48.000They say wisdom is acting on knowledge.
01:33:50.000Once you've recognised, oh, fossil fuels are running out, it's like right...
01:33:53.000Fucking hell, we better start working on the basis that we're fucked.
01:33:56.000We better start looking at alternative energy sources.
01:33:58.000We better look at different alliances.
01:34:02.000Knowing those things and not doing them, it makes me very, very uneasy.
01:34:06.000Because it makes me think, who benefits from ignoring this stuff?
01:34:11.000If it's creating all this rage, all this unease, all this fear in your country and in my country now, times of great, great disease and uncertainty for people, really looking for something.
01:34:24.000And these institutions are just saying, just, you know, carry on.
01:34:31.000No one now is going to see himself as part of a religious community in the same way or as one of the dead ideologies of the last century.
01:34:37.000And meanwhile, we're in this sort of peculiar state of looming crisis that feels kind of fucking mad to me.
01:34:44.000Well, we're definitely in a state of looming crisis, but to unpack this whole thing, you started off with this idea of what happened the Tuesday before the Big Bang and how science can't really answer that.
01:34:54.000The problem is, once they gather more data, it might be a hundred years from now or a thousand years from now, they can say, oh, well here, we've done the calculations and we understand now that it's an infinite cycle of birth and death and the universe is constantly expanding and contracting and this is the process that we're a part of.
01:35:10.000It's infinite and it's never started and it's never ending.
01:35:25.000So when we fucked off religion 100 years ago because it was causing too much arseache, we kicked out of some of the ideas that are only now just being discovered.
01:35:35.000Right, but those ideas are just to be contemplated right now and to be considered, whereas science is trying to find definitive evidence that they do or don't represent the reality of our timeline.
01:35:44.000And once they do, then they'll be able to talk about it.
01:35:47.000But right now, what they're doing is they're examining the evidence that the Big Bang exists and what could have possibly caused that.
01:36:12.000No one knows why consciousness impacts It doesn't matter in the way it does in the sub-quantum world.
01:36:18.000We've come to a point where it's like, oh fuck!
01:36:21.000The famous double-slit theory that an observed particle behaves differently.
01:36:27.000A particle and wave can change its essential nature depending on whether or not it's Misrepresented, though, when it's been explained to me by people who actually understand it, what it really is is that we're measuring these particles, and in the act of measuring, you're changing the results because you're using something to measure it.
01:36:47.000But it gets represented as all this woo-woo craziness.
01:36:52.000But what I think is interesting, Joe, is somewhere between this woo-woo craziness and the kind of a flat, mundane, look, this is life, you're born, you die, you eat food, shit comes out your arsehole territory.
01:37:05.000Somewhere in there is a mystery that behind your eyes, behind Jimbo Jamie's eyes and my eyes, there is a constant, there is this consciousness, there is this awareness, there's this inexplicable experience that you've had on DMT, Right.
01:37:24.000That suggests to me that consciousness itself is the dominant force.
01:37:28.000Consciousness is not just one more phenomena, it is the seat of all phenomena.
01:37:32.000And when people are saying, oh, there's this thing that's God, what they are saying is there is an absolute consciousness and all is contained within it.
01:37:39.000All matter at some point has come from consciousness.
01:37:42.000These realms that are experienced through psychedelic or extreme, you know, personal experiments like your cryogenic things or your flotation tanks all suggest a A phenomenon beyond individual consciousness.
01:38:11.000It means that reality is only reality when you look at it.
01:38:15.000That's what it's kind of getting towards.
01:38:17.000A bloody good book that I reckon your listeners will be banging to is called Biocentrism by a man called Robert Lanza, who he did the best breakdown I've ever read of that double-slit experiment and made me understand for the first time that reality is happening within your own consciousness.
01:38:35.000It's not an external phenomena at all.
01:38:37.000He explained it in very ways that I could understand.
01:38:42.000Think of something totally mundane, he went, like the experience of going into your kitchen in the night and turning the light on.
01:38:48.000Is your kitchen fridge still there when you go back downstairs?
01:38:51.000He goes, well, when you do go into your kitchen and turn the light on, parcels of photons come down, they interact with the optic nerve, they're inverted in your consciousness.
01:39:02.000So whatever it is that's in your kitchen when you're not looking at it, it ain't the same as when you are looking at it.
01:39:09.000And one of the ways that I've sort of reduced this down from my own simple understanding is this, that if none of us had a sense of smell, if you didn't, I didn't, Jamie didn't, and then how would the concept of smell make sense?
01:39:20.000How would you go, oh, there's paint, there's bacon?
01:39:21.000None of us would have the instrument to receive it.
01:39:24.000So that whole thing would be off the agenda.
01:39:28.000Streams of energy, streams of data for which we do not have the instruments to receive, so we totally discount it because we simply don't have the instruments to receive it.
01:39:36.000And I said once in my stand-up, as a matter of fact, my cat doesn't know there's an internet.
01:39:42.000The internet does not enter the realm of my cat's consciousness.
01:39:46.000We're out here having all these fucking experiences and like all those realms that we're experiencing in these various sort of psychedelic states or you know however they're achieved is an indication to me there's another reality.
01:39:56.000Now where does that become fucking relevant to what we're talking about?
01:39:58.000For me what it does is one of the continual ideas that keeps re-emerging to connect us back to where we were with Joe Campbell at the beginning is there is this fucking sense of oneness and believing ourselves to be individual and believing that the dominant thing in our lives to be material That fucks us up because people will kill each other over that material.
01:40:18.000And once we sort of realise, no, the true thing about us is the consciousness, is the inner self.
01:40:26.000We're all going to do shit and we're all going to make mistakes.
01:40:27.000But let's not have the material idea as the dominant social idea.
01:40:32.000Because everyone's agreed with that, whether they're communists or capitalists or fascists or whatever.
01:40:36.000Everyone's saying, no, the main thing is this shit that's out here.
01:40:39.000And it's like, that connects to those primal drives.
01:40:41.000Because, you know, if that taps into your sexual drive, you can never have enough pussy.
01:40:44.000If that gets into your status drive, you can never have enough status and power.
01:40:48.000You know, so, like, we're all going to still feel those things.
01:40:50.000I'm still going to be a cunt 25 times a day.
01:40:52.000But it would be nice if the cultural ambience was, oh, don't worry, Russell, you'll be back to your normal self in a minute of feeling that we're all one and we're all connected.
01:41:02.000Yeah, well, of course, I'd feel like that.
01:41:04.000And that's what frightens me about the culture of our countries at the moment, is it's endorsing the worst aspects of our nature.
01:41:11.000It's acculturating the worst aspects of our nature instead of the best aspects of our nature.
01:41:16.000And for me, there's no fucking difference between left and right in the current political sphere, because they're all making the same argument.
01:41:21.000They're all saying, come and live out here in the material world.
01:41:25.000Yeah, it seems to me that the material world and this idea that we should be accumulating possessions and status and all these different things is universal.
01:41:34.000It almost seems like it's a natural progression from ancient tribal civilization life to this weird city life to this integration of electronics in our life and this symbiotic relationship that we have to computers and the internet and information itself.
01:41:48.000It seems like this is One of the things that drives that is this desire for material possessions.
01:41:53.000Because when you have a desire for material possessions, it ensures that you're going to continue to innovate and come up with newer and greater and better.
01:42:00.000Because you always want to keep up with the Joneses.
01:42:01.000You always want to have the newest Tesla because it goes zero to 60 in two seconds.
01:42:05.000And you want to have the coolest fucking house with the biggest TV and the fastest internet.
01:42:08.000And all those things sort of compound this technological innovation cycle that we're on.
01:42:14.000So my thought has been, for a long time, that what we are is some sort of an electronic caterpillar that's going to give birth to some artificial life.
01:42:22.000And that all of our desire for material possessions and status and all these different things is really just us pushing forth this electronic agenda.
01:42:31.000And that this innovation and the construction of artificial intelligence that's inevitable Hmm.
01:42:53.000Flipping over cow patties looking for mushrooms, that we are a part of a process.
01:42:58.000And then if you look at it objectively, all these traps that you or I or Tom Cruise or Jim Brewer have been caught up in, whether it's traps of ego or jealousy, all these things sort of ensure movement.
01:43:08.000They ensure movement, they ensure interactivity, and that is going to ensure innovation and progress and competition.
01:43:15.000And all those things that even when we look at it, we go, this is so pointless, this is so foolish, but yet it's so incredibly prevalent.
01:43:22.000Not glorifying it or saying it's definitely the way to go, but objectively, if you weren't a human and you're stepping outside of this thing, looking at it from a distance, you're like, these fuckers are making something.
01:43:32.000They might not even know they're making something, but they're making something.
01:43:35.000I understand the same way that bees or ants may not be...
01:43:38.000We're aware of the hive consciousness and the common drive.
01:43:41.000But where I disagree with you, Joe, is that you see the end point as being the materialisation of a super consciousness through technology.
01:43:50.000I see the end point as being a realisation amongst us as a species.
01:44:24.000Pick a dog for a walk, you come up with good ideas, you rub his belly, you feel good.
01:44:27.000That's fair enough, I do love my dog Bear.
01:44:31.000But, hold on, what was my point there?
01:44:35.000Well, I think you want to pump the brakes.
01:44:37.000What you're saying is we should pump the brakes.
01:44:39.000We should pump the brakes of this possession and this idea that we're trying to accomplish these great things by accumulating things and status, and it's all bullshit, and it's really about consciousness more than anything.
01:45:18.000The very fact that people bloody hear us, I don't understand anything, it's fucking wonderful.
01:45:22.000But the dominant idea behind it, one of profit, that dominating idea.
01:45:29.000Profit in itself is not necessarily negative, but profit at all costs, profit at any cost.
01:45:34.000So, like, really, I'm not saying we should as a species fucking slow down and dress in felt and fucking, you know, like, grow around vegetables.
01:45:41.000But what I'm saying is that our bias towards this one particular materialistic idea is preventing us from realising that glory because part of our consciousness has been ignored.
01:47:03.000We're not designed to be connected with seven billion people all over the world.
01:47:07.000We're not designed to seeing a camera placed on someone that doesn't have anything good to say.
01:47:11.000Anything interesting to say at all, but they're constantly on camera, and they're editing it in the way that your short attention span is sort of connected to this thing, because every 15 seconds they're giving you a new camera angle, and that's by design.
01:47:22.000It's like it interfaces, like, they figured out how to do these reality shows Where they edit the shows, like a music video, where you're constantly changing the angle, so you're constantly stimulated.
01:47:32.000If you just had Kim Kardashian sitting across the fucking table from her mom, and they were just sitting there for like three hours talking like a podcast, you would want a fucking meteor to come from Jupiter and slam right into that goddamn house.
01:47:50.000But if you keep them going back and forth, and then you cut to a single of them by themselves, bitching about my mom, as always, and then going back to her, well, she thinks that she can do this.
01:48:59.000You know how many women want to get fat shot into their ass so they look like Kim Kardashian?
01:49:03.000There's like a whole trend where women are waist training, where they're wearing these corsets and tightening down their fucking organs, and then they're having fat shoved into their ass.
01:49:13.000They're extracting fat from areas of their body and then reintroducing it into their ass.
01:49:19.000In order to develop this round, ridiculous thing that looks like you're wearing a fucking diaper.
01:49:34.000They don't necessarily have to make sense, but we're this weird animal that sort of imitates what our surroundings are.
01:49:40.000We imitate our atmosphere in some strange way, and we can sort of create our own hell.
01:49:47.000We reproduce this thing around us that's not just unsuccessful, it's unsatisfying, it's weird, it's depressing, and we do the goddamn same thing.
01:49:59.000We've adapted to a sort of a mutated state, and that's what we were trying to say earlier with the influences, the paradigm, the template that we're moving towards is too predicated on the material to the point where, yeah, it's ludicrous things.
01:50:09.000I do like you drawing the comparison between the neck things and the earring things and the Kardashian ass things.
01:50:13.000That power that we're harnessing all seems to center around innovation.
01:50:19.000When we're pursuing material possessions, when we're pursuing physical items, we're not talking about vintage things.
01:50:56.000It's like you can't compete with these goddamn laptops or phones or any of these things.
01:51:00.000Those things are getting better and better at this staggering exponential rate.
01:51:06.000And at the end of that line, if you extrapolate, if you look at it from a distance, you pull yourself away from culture and civilization and look down.
01:51:14.000What is this super-being, called the human race, what is this super-organism doing?
01:51:19.000Well, it's creating better and better things.
01:51:22.000Why is it ignoring the very ocean that surrounds it?
01:51:25.000Why is it sucking all the fish out of the ocean and shitting all the fucking dirt and dust up into the air, but ignoring that while concentrating on the possession and the innovation of all these electronic gadgets?
01:51:37.000Well, it's got to be something to do with that.
01:51:40.000And McKenna used to call it an attractor.
01:51:43.000That we're being pulled towards some future attractor, some singularity event, some moment that we are creating, whether we're aware of it or not, but that part of all of our ridiculous behavior in terms of our ego and our drive for success and attention and love and affection,
01:52:01.000all these different things, is really sort of pushing this innovation further and further and quicker and quicker.
01:52:08.000One of the things I was thinking when you're saying that is like...
01:52:11.000Every time that's happening, the creativity, where are these things before they exist?
01:52:17.000Things exist in this unrealised realm, what Plato referred to as the realm of ideas, that there's an idealised form of all things before they are realised in the material world.
01:52:27.000Someone designing a knife has to consciously conceive of the knife before bringing it into the material world.
01:52:33.000There's this constant need to pull from this unrealised...
01:52:37.000Whenever I see babies now, I want to go, where were you?
01:52:44.000I was friendly, and hopefully still am, friendly with David Lynch, the filmmaker, and he told me that a friend of his were outside their kid's nursery and they had a three-year-old kid and a six-month-old kid, and they heard their three-year-old go to the six-month kid, I need you to tell me about heaven again because I'm beginning to forget heaven.
01:53:14.000As a person, and Jim, you can back me up on this, as a person who has kids, one of the most bizarre aspects of child raising is that when you have them in their babings, Yeah.
01:53:43.000Those incredibly powerful moments, you forget.
01:53:46.000But, meanwhile, you remember some cunt who cut you off in traffic 14 years ago and you're like, I should have kicked that fucking guy's ass.
01:53:53.000I saw him at the red light and I didn't get out of my car and it haunts me to this day.
01:53:57.000I want to drag him out of his car and feed him his fucking teeth.
01:55:03.000Yes, but there's also powerful, really good moments that I've had with each one of my kids that I can literally, out of all the moments that I've said, I don't remember this.
01:55:13.000You've stored them in the museum of your mind.
01:55:15.000I have forgotten most, but there's a handful That I remember as if it was yesterday that was on a deeper, spiritual, conscious level where we just locked eyes, and it was a moment, and we just knew everything about each other at that moment.
01:55:31.000Maybe I wanted that moment, but that's how it felt, and I can count that with each one of my kids where I always go back to going, wow, I really know who you really are, and I'm trying to get you back to that.
01:56:23.000I forget, what is the fucking, I know, it's not Bode's Law is the size of planets.
01:56:27.000It's, uh, I forget the principle, but the principle is 100, whatever the word is, it's 150 people.
01:56:32.000And you keep those 150 people in your head, and that's it.
01:56:35.000It correlates to what we were talking about with the old chimpanzees and anthropology, that there is an ideal size for a community before it becomes like, oh, this is too hard to deal with.
01:56:45.000But those things you were talking about with your children there are like transcendent moments.
01:56:52.000You're talking about moments where it didn't matter that you're individual A and that's individual B, that there's a clear connection, that something passes between us.
01:56:59.000And it was overpowering and beautiful just for that moment.
01:57:03.000And that keeps me going in certain moments of time, even though I'm 15 years later and 20. No one can describe it to me.
01:57:11.000I just know, wow, that was a deeper moment.
01:57:13.000And on some level, that can be broken down, I'm sure, to sort of oxytocin and like, oh, this hormone was triggered by that.
01:57:20.000There There is a sort of mechanical or material component to even the most beautiful experiences of a sunset or whatever it is.
01:57:27.000But to return to what you were saying, Joe, before, of how we favour negative information, there's a clear evolutionary bias for negative information has to be stored because, you know, is that a tree or is that a lion?
01:57:39.000It's a lion, so negative information does have priority.
01:57:43.000But where you say about this continued technological evolution, what I think is that there's an imperative to have a comparable spiritual evolution revolution.
01:57:56.000How I think that can occur is, like, the more that I meditate and spend time doing that sort of stuff, it gives me more of an awareness of the kind of phenomenon you're talking about, about the positive things, and, like, you know, about, oh, my God, I must hold this moment in my heart, the moment where my dog done that, or the moment I found out my girlfriend was pregnant.
01:58:13.000Make this part of who you are as a character and try to prioritise it over negative things or when someone hurts you.
01:58:19.000And I think that one has more determination over that, more authority over that if you have meditation as part of your life, if you have a spiritual component.
01:58:29.000When I was a teenager, I noticed that my mates...
01:58:33.000When I was hanging out with my mates, we were smoking loads of drawers, then we'd get in the car, we'd go out, they'd go to work, my mate worked in a car factory, and then he'd go and work doors, doing security.
01:58:43.000And I thought, this guy never ever is just in reflection.
01:59:29.000Of course we are also living in a material world, and I am a material girl, so we can't sort of like...
01:59:33.000We can't drop the drive to continue to create great achievements as a species, but a part of it has got to be learn how to connect to yourself, learn how to connect to your emotions, learn how to store positive experiences and learn how to let go of negative ones.
01:59:49.000If that data isn't out there, we've all got our paths, haven't we?
01:59:52.000We've all got our individual attributes and skills, like you said if we were on communism island.
01:59:58.000You know, you need people to be realising what is their part of the divine.
02:00:03.000What is the little part of you that's trying to realise itself but life's kept fucking knocking you back and the systems kept breaking you down and you've not got to realise that thing that you can feel like a tree you're trying to grow into.
02:00:15.000That's the part of it that I think can only happen as part of a spiritual evolution.
02:00:20.000And I think you can only get the ticket to the spiritual evolution if you learn to deal with this fucking mad stimulating bullshit that we're jacked up on.
02:00:33.000And then your mind will have a chance to grow.
02:00:35.000I also think that that's where the compelling feeling to gravitate towards that comes from, a dissatisfaction with the material world, dissatisfaction with this idea of possessions, and that there is some sort of a weird ebb and flow and a yin and yang to the world, and sometimes you have to see the fucking disastrous effects of just giving in to material possessions and the compelling feeling of wanting attention and nonsense and just gathering up items and living in the biggest house.
02:01:05.000Feel the emptiness of that to gravitate towards a spiritual approach.
02:01:09.000And I think that's one of the reasons why those things are there.
02:01:11.000It's almost like people who do horrible things, like sometimes I feel like horrible things when they're manifested by the human race, they sort of, they can give birth to a lot of positive reactions because people don't ever want to be like that.
02:01:25.000And they see that and they go, well this is definitely not the way to go because we're kind of all going through it together.
02:01:30.000One of the things about the human mind and the human experience, like being a conscious human, is we assume that we're this static thing.
02:01:37.000Meanwhile, we're very well aware that evolution exists all throughout the natural world, and we're also well aware that we've only really been this thing for like, what, a half a million, quarter of a million years?
02:01:48.000It's not been that long that you could go back and find an ancient human, and they look like you could put it in your clothes and put it in a movie theater and we wouldn't freak out.
02:02:00.000So if you think about the fact that we know that these animals and these things are constantly evolving and changing and adapting all around us, why would we assume that we're in some sort of a static state?
02:02:11.000I think that our own gravitation towards material possessions And our own use of this new form of interacting with each other through social media and the internet and movies.
02:02:31.000Everything's a couple hundred years old.
02:02:32.000The oldest shit is a couple hundred years old.
02:02:35.000Photographs, couple hundred years old.
02:02:37.000We're dealing with really, really, really new influences on the mind.
02:02:40.000And the mind is developing and expanding and reacting to all these new things.
02:02:46.000And sometimes it reacts in a very negative way.
02:02:49.000Like it gravitates towards the Kardashians.
02:02:51.000And it goes towards fucking possessions.
02:02:52.000And it wants the shiniest new thing to show everybody that you've arrived.
02:02:56.000And it's a part, a cog, an unconscious cog in this machine that's just producing new items.
02:03:04.000And then sometimes there's a guy like you who sees that and goes, there is no soul to that.
02:03:09.000I'm going to jump in the fucking lake near this royals house and I'm going to experience what it's like to freeze my dick off and I'm going to carve a new path.
02:03:17.000And I'm gonna separate, and I'm gonna try domesticity, and I'm gonna try abstinence, and I'm gonna try to find some sort of a new way of addressing my dissatisfaction with the current state of the world that I find myself in.
02:04:24.000I've drank two in one and I've got to piss like a horse.
02:04:27.000And I can hold this shit in for another day.
02:04:31.000It takes a strong bladder to do a podcast, Jim.
02:04:34.000By the way, I should just say while we're doing this, one of the reasons why I really got into doing a podcast, there's a bunch of them, Opie and Anthony were a big one, but your fucking show was a big one, man.
02:04:44.000When I did your show, and we did it at that joke place on Ventura Boulevard, remember you were in LA? Yeah.
02:04:51.000And you were in town, and I had done your show calling in before, but we'd never done together.
02:05:00.000Well, what I loved about that one, too, is what that thing allowed me to do is, believe it or not, thought-provoke and let other people...
02:05:09.000To me, one of the greatest moments ever was you called in...
02:05:14.000And we wrote we were all sitting there and I think you went into this whole thing of these are the times of truth and this and that and I think you spoke for 45 minutes straight and I just kept looking everyone going don't just let him go this is this is this is fascinating let him go where else can you have this and one of my guys Made like this whole Pink Floyd music and he put it on the internet.
02:05:40.000I said, you got to get that on the internet.
02:05:42.000And I think I remember calling you or telling you going, Joe, this is...
02:05:46.000That was the most fascinating thing I ever heard in my life.
02:07:46.000It'd be nice to know that someone that's never even heard of you, and 20 years down the road, they're going, you need to listen to this conversation.
02:07:54.000You know, Russell Brand was in there on this day.
02:08:03.000This is the great part of social media.
02:08:06.000Well, it's also that it's all free and that they're all available.
02:08:09.000You can get 800 plus episodes of this thing anytime you want it.
02:08:12.000And when things are free, you can be more honest and more passionate about what you're putting out there because no one's paying you to say anything.
02:08:20.000Well, did you ever get any pressure when you were doing the satellite show?
02:08:23.000Did anybody ever come to you and go, Hey, Jim, we listened to that show and you guys are, you got to fucking tone it down.
02:08:51.000You know, it was all over Fox News, like, you don't do that.
02:08:54.000Well, they were kind of compromised in some sort of a weird way, whether they wanted to be or not, because they were making a fuckload of money.
02:09:00.000And as soon as a company is paying you X amount of money every year, and they get upset about something, or they feel like the advertising revenue is going to dry up because you guys have said something crazy.
02:09:10.000Remember when they had that homeless guy on?
02:09:13.000Who said some crazy shit about Condoleezza Rice?
02:09:44.000But because it was on their show, they pulled the show.
02:09:47.000And it was probably because of political pressure or pressure from the Bush administration.
02:09:52.000This is also, coincidentally, during the time where, I mean, Howard Stern, it was just after the time of Howard Stern getting sued over and over again by the government.
02:10:00.000Remember, they would give these massive lawsuits and that drove him to satellite radio.
02:11:03.000This politician, I'm just going to be a dick.
02:11:05.000Yeah, see, that's a beautiful thing about the time that you were involved in it, too, because you were involved in it back when I was on Fear Factor because the stunt guys fucking loved your show, man.
02:11:15.000I had to do this thing where I got in the truck.
02:11:17.000We had to drive to some location and was hanging out with these stunt guys, and they were playing your show when it was on Raw Dog.
02:13:31.000You bounce things off of each other and they make more sense that way.
02:13:33.000If I trust you and your instincts and your mind and I tell you something that I believe and you refute it and I go, oh, okay, I have to consider his point of view.
02:13:40.000Because if I trust your point of view, and your point of view differs from mine, well, how did he come to this conclusion, and why is it so different than my own?
02:13:46.000And by absorbing a bunch of different points of view like that, it gives you a much more nuanced perspective of this existence.
02:14:17.000But it's like all those other things that we're talking about.
02:14:19.000I mean, like you saying that you have this gravitation towards expelling all of these ridiculous notions that everybody's just sort of accepted as fact and truth and trying to connect with a much more spiritual life.
02:14:32.000Well, that means you've got to think about it.
02:14:37.000Not holding on to your ideas and not being married to them and not being invested in being correct or incorrect, but just sort of accepting them as just ideas and be able to go, yeah, I think you're right.
02:15:20.000And I thought, if you just want to sit back, you just want to see things better, And you really can change it for the better, but you don't have to worry about going, you know, so-and-so said that, or so-and-so set that up, or so-and-so did that, because now you're doing it for a different reason.
02:16:05.000Like you said, the fast-moving, fast-cut soundbite TV just bombarded with an artillery of mostly erroneous information.
02:16:12.000You don't get to hear people hour after hour talking, examining, discarding, as you said, who really knows, and returning to that point.
02:16:22.000It's sort of encouraging, because I've had like...
02:16:24.000You know, like, as I, like, I've always thought, like, you know, I don't, like, agree with, like, Bill O'Reilly or Sean Hannity or those guys, but I've always kind of thought, I bet I'd think they were alright if I hung out with them.
02:17:21.000Yeah, but the lack of discourse, like we're talking about being one of the more important things about podcasts or one of the best things about podcasts.
02:17:29.000I mean, I'm really hoping that that's the trend of the future.
02:17:32.000That people understand that there might not be a right way or a wrong way to do a lot of these things.
02:17:37.000And that your point of view, whether you strongly believe it or not, might not really work for the way I see the world.
02:17:43.000It doesn't mean that you're right or I'm wrong.
02:18:00.000Because what they're doing is preposterous, and in hurting their feelings, you actually elevate all of us to realize the humor and their folly.
02:18:40.000I heard John Cleese talking about comedy and he said that people are very anti-humour because they know it's powerful and they often use the idea that, hey, don't joke around, this is serious.
02:18:56.000But you're supposed to joke around about things that are serious.
02:18:58.000And he said they have mistaken seriousness for solemnity.
02:19:01.000And the reason they want to be all solemn about stuff is because they know it prevents people that have got that comedic switchblade from getting into the argument where you can detonate shit.
02:19:21.000So if you come in and you deflate their argument with a quick switchblade, oh, this piece of shit, why are you joking around about something really important?
02:19:29.000Maybe your white privilege is showing.
02:19:31.000Maybe you should consider the fact that your humor is offensive to a lot of people.
02:19:34.000And what you're doing is bullshit, and it's not helping.
02:19:39.000And they always try to use humor, though, huh?
02:19:42.000They always stitch it into political discourse.
02:19:46.000Here's one of the real problems with the left, and especially the regressive left and the people that think that they're going to change things.
02:19:53.000They're fucking unbelievably mean when they're mocking the right.
02:19:59.000I've seen some of the least compassion, meanest, angriest shit, come out of people that consider themselves to be liberal and progressive.
02:20:06.000And their idea is to close down discourse.
02:20:09.000What they're going to do is going to shit on you and insult you and then gang up in some sort of a weird bully pulpit to attack all the people that don't agree with them.
02:20:18.000When I got involved in politics in my country, doing that thing, The Truth, and I wrote a book as well called Revolution, and in that book I talked about it was basically a book that was meant to be for younger people, and it was like, this is my perspective on why I don't believe in this stuff and why I believe in this.
02:20:35.000It was relatively simple, and again, I'm a self-taught person, so it's not a book by a fucking academic, right?
02:20:41.000The worst vitriol and the worst condemnation came from the kind of newspapers and liberal organisations that I would think would be supportive of such, of like, you know, it's good that this guy from the world of popular entertainment, who's not classically educated, is trying to do that.
02:20:56.000No, they came in like Get the fuck out of our territory!
02:21:25.000They're writing their own stories, they're promoting their own blogs, they're doing their own radio shows, and, in fact, feeding their own ego, like we were talking about before.
02:21:34.000That green monster of envy that sees this fucking guy with a beautiful bone structure and a beautiful accent, now all of a sudden he's philosophizing.
02:21:43.000He had the wherewithal and the power to go on a sexual rampage, chose to back off of it, and realized he was like, all these fucking goddamn things he's got going for him, he's a fucking movie star?
02:21:57.000I'm tearing him down, honey, and he's sitting there with his potbelly, fucking taking his antidepressants, and tapping away mean shit on the keyboard, hoping.
02:22:06.000I'm hoping that these mean words hit your mind and they enter into your consciousness and he can affect you in some sort of a horrible way.
02:22:14.000The extreme lack of compassion from some people on the left and the green light to attack this fact that, oh, here's this guy and I don't agree with him and I think that what he's doing is sex.
02:22:27.000And it's misogynistic, and it's enabling, and let's get him!
02:22:32.000We got a fucking target right on his back.
02:22:36.000Oh, well, I'm gonna be involved in this press.
02:22:39.000I'm gonna throw my fucking hat into the ring as the arbiter of intelligent ideas to dismay, or dismantle, rather, all these fucking stupid thoughts that this shithead with his perfect bone structure and man-bone is pumping out.
02:23:35.000Yeah, I mean, there's definitely some real conspiracies, but I think that there's just a natural emphasis or a natural inclination to shit on people that are doing better than you or shit on people that have something good going on.
02:23:49.000And also, when you're writing a story about something, how much fun is it writing a story that's positive?
02:23:54.000And how much more satisfying is it to unhappy people to write a negative review about something?
02:24:03.000I've seen people distort people's ideas in really horrific ways because that's the old way.
02:24:08.000Because the old way, you could write a blog about something or an article in a magazine or whatever about someone and distort it in horrible ways, and they really didn't have any recourse.
02:24:16.000But that old way doesn't really work anymore.
02:25:04.000He rants for like, he'll just sit down for a fucking hour and a half and just go off about this and that, and it's a stream of consciousness.
02:25:11.000He goes from football to his wife or his fucking dog and baking, and his internet sucks, and he's tired of construction workers, and his driveway's a piece of shit, and he just, he'll go on and on and on.
02:25:59.000It's a fascinating way to understand how people think and to just chunk data, just chunk data about how people react and talk and communicate.
02:26:09.000How has it evolved from your original vision of doing podcasting to how it is now?
02:26:15.000Have you become more free with it, less formulated?
02:26:18.000Yeah, I don't think it was ever formulated, but I've been better at it.
02:27:59.000And not imposing, like, right, coming right up in five seconds.
02:28:02.000We've got to do the, you know, like, all of those things, like having a boss and having a structure and having, like, commercial interests that you constantly...
02:28:08.000And you're an intelligent person and people like listening to the real you.
02:28:13.000And you don't get that opportunity a whole lot.
02:28:39.000I've been on their show, and I can see what you mean, that that was sort of part of the transition, and like Howard Stern, surely you would say as well, like someone that was...
02:30:59.000Like, in seconds, you're in your car and you're playing it, and it's free.
02:31:02.000And now, if I just discovered you, I'm gonna go, I wanna hear more, I wanna hear, oh, you gotta listen to one of his first ones, where he wasn't even ready, he didn't know what he was doing, you gotta listen to where he went from here to here.
02:31:12.000Once they're in, they're in, they love you, they know you, they feel like they're...
02:31:17.000What experiences have you had that you've, like, were hard?
02:31:20.000Or, like, you know, like, seeing because you've not got bosses or anything, was there ever times you've gone off, we should never have had that guy on, that was a mistake?
02:32:14.000So, in learning how to broadcast in air quotes, learning how to do that, you're kind of learning by feedback and also by listening to yourself and listening to other people's podcasts.
02:32:24.000You'll see other, like, things that grate on you about what other people do.
02:32:58.000You know, and I'm waiting for you to get your completely non sequitur rant in and then you're gonna impress people with your quotes and how much you know about this guy or that guy and that's a real common thing is like using it as an ego springboard instead of looking at it in a podcast is really essentially a piece of art.
02:33:17.000I mean, it's a grandiose term, but you're creating something.
02:33:21.000And you want to create it the best way you can.
02:33:23.000And you could fuck it up by being loud and stupid and saying a bunch of dumb shit that doesn't feel good to anybody to hear.
02:33:29.000Or you could say some cool shit that when they listen to this podcast after it's over, they go, Fuck, that Russell Brand said something that's going to change the way I look at the rest of my fucking life.
02:34:33.000I don't give a fuck, so it doesn't really matter.
02:34:35.000Yeah, I feel like if you have fuck you money, you don't say fuck you, you're wasting fuck you money.
02:34:40.000So if I have some real thoughts and I don't express them because I'm worried about job opportunities, like I'm already in prison, whether I like it or not.
02:34:49.000If there's something important that I have to say, and then the jobs that you do get or the employment opportunities that you do get, they'll be looking for your authentic self.
02:34:57.000Unless it's some, like, the same sort of situation with some crazy woman who likes to take some guy and change him.
02:36:13.000I don't want to do someone else's stuff.
02:36:15.000If some movie came along and it was really interesting, and for whatever reason, it was a short amount of time I would have to work, I would consider it.
02:36:24.000You've taken control of your life through this.
02:36:27.000Yeah, well, I'm doing what I actually want to do instead of when, you know, and Jim and I were in a pilot for the very first TV show that I did in 1993, and we've been friends for longer before that, way long before that, but...
02:36:42.000You come here and you think, now I'm going to do this project.
02:37:18.000I like doing all those extracurricular things that I do.
02:37:21.000The things that I do that are just interests in life.
02:37:24.000And then I don't want to differentiate between interests that I do for financial gain or interests that I do for mental exercises or for spiritual growth or whatever.
02:37:32.000I just want to do things that I enjoy doing.
02:37:56.000Find the thing in you that you're connected to and follow it.
02:37:58.000And when I think of how many times in my life I've lived out other people's ideas, as you say, like, oh, right, no, this is, Hold on a minute.
02:38:12.000Because you're bombarded with it and then you realise, oh my God.
02:38:15.000So if you are lucky enough to get to a position where you can just do things that you enjoy.
02:38:19.000Do you think that idea that you've applied to your own creative lives can be applied if you're...
02:38:26.000Fucking living a normal life and you're trapped in a job that you don't fucking like.
02:38:31.000How do you think you get out of that situation?
02:38:33.000Well, I think it's like everything else.
02:38:35.000It takes small baby steps to move out.
02:38:38.000You've got to move towards that direction.
02:38:40.000You have to have an absolute game plan and you have to have an actual thing that you enjoy doing.
02:38:44.000Like, say if you're some guy that's trapped in some job, but, you know, like, to bring up something we talked about before, you enjoy making homemade knives, and you think, you know, I would love to just be able to make arts and crafts, to be able to create something that people buy, maybe pottery or something along those lines that would really feel,
02:39:00.000like, spiritually and creatively satisfying to me, to be able to express myself in an art form.
02:39:07.000To do that for a living would be amazing.
02:39:09.000And there's a lot of people that start off in regular jobs and they figure out a way to get to that place.
02:39:40.000But if you find whatever the fuck it is that you can do, I guarantee you, you have some time in your day that you can dedicate towards making that a reality.
02:39:49.000It's a matter of making that time a priority to try to change your current state of existence.
02:40:13.000I've always been the burn the fucking house down, you have to make another one.
02:40:17.000My thought has been just abandon ship.
02:40:20.000Let's get out of here and find the fucking new thing.
02:40:23.000But you can't do that when you have a wife and children.
02:40:26.000Luckily for me, when I was young and taking crazy chances and moving towards a career and doing something I actually wanted to do, I didn't have anybody else that counted on me.
02:40:35.000Once you do, it becomes much more difficult, but not insurmountable and completely dependent upon what it is you're trying to achieve.
02:41:52.000What I mean is that if we didn't have a culture that was entirely dominated by one economic idea, that more people would be able to sit around making art and crafts.
02:42:00.000Think of the things that keep coming up again and again in this conversation.
02:42:33.000So that more people, like, you know, do you take that leap of faith that, fuck me, if we did get 150 people together, of course there's going to be problems and challenges.
02:42:40.000There's problems and fucking challenges now.
02:42:41.000We're not competing with perfection, we're competing with a defunct system that's really causing a great deal of negativity and problems.
02:42:48.000What would happen if people did start to try and create alternatives?
02:42:51.000I tell you what would happen, you'd be killed.
02:42:56.000You don't think you'd be Waco'd right out if you went, right, we're setting up a system, 150 people, this is our new podcast experiment, we're setting up a utopia.
02:43:03.000Only when you become a threat, and you have to become a threat financially, or you have to become a threat militarily.
02:43:09.000One of the things about these fucking Waco type dudes, they always gather guns.
02:43:13.000They fuck everybody's wives and they have a stockpile of ammunition.
02:43:33.000You don't think it's a threat to expound those ideas and spread those ideas?
02:43:38.000It's controversial, but I don't think anybody looks at it and says, you know what, this motherfucker is going to take money out of my bank account.
02:43:44.000I think people are so engrossed in their own life, in their own progress, in their own path of conquering.
02:43:51.000I don't think they think about it that way unless you cross them.
02:43:54.000Unless you say, you know what, goddammit, this Rupert Murdoch is fucking up the world and I'm going to expose him and I'm going to let the world...
02:45:03.000And expressing yourself in a way that makes sense.
02:45:06.000You know, like, I think one of the things that's most interesting about McKenna's lectures, where he was in sort of the infancy of the internet, where he did a lot of them, is he expressed himself in a way that's kind of really similar to, like, podcast rants.
02:45:26.000You know, the people come to hear him speak, and he would have these meetings, and a lot of times he would open up the room for questions, and he would just sort of rant.
02:45:35.000And, you know, he was a consummate consumer of cannabis.
02:45:38.000So he's high as fuck, and he's having these bizarre conversations, these rants, where he's exploring these ideas, and he got better and better and better at them all throughout these rants.
02:45:49.000When he's doing these, he's essentially doing a podcast that takes a long time to hear.
02:45:54.000Do you think of him as sort of a modern, secular prophet?
02:45:59.000Because if you've been into the comedy of Bill Hicks and then you listen to Terence McKenna, you can see, like, oh, fuck, he's clearly influenced Hicks.
02:46:32.000First time I saw him, it was an accident.
02:46:35.000First time I saw him I went to see some comedians that were like local Boston guys and Hicks had come in from out of town and I don't know if he was supposed to be there the next night or what it was but no one was there to see him they didn't know who he was and he went up on stage And was just so weird.
02:46:59.000He was doing this bit about Tiffany meeting Jimi Hendrix at the mall.
02:47:03.000You know, like this music that they're promoting, this pop culture bullshit music.
02:47:08.000And he was at the Comedy Connection in Boston.
02:47:12.000I think I saw him there first, and I saw him at Nick's and a couple other places.
02:47:24.000With like much more of an emphasis on the realization that the patterns that we're all following into, whether it's pop culture patterns or that these things are actually detrimental.
02:47:35.000These things are a foolish way to approach this world.
02:47:38.000This world is incredibly complex and we can all look at it together.
02:47:41.000And I was like, this is a new kind of comedy.
02:47:58.000He bombed like a guy who almost knew the future, knew he was going to have some sort of an impact on the culture, and knew that this was just a footnote in that incredibly impactful experience on the art form of stand-up comedy, and also knew that eventually he'd find his own audience, which he did not have at the time.
02:48:14.000Because he was at a small comedy club, Nick's Comedy Stop in Boston, which is a couple hundred people.
02:48:19.000And there was a guy who went on before him who was a real hack.
02:48:23.000Nice guy, but just hacky, hacky, bullshit, cop donut jokes, that kind of shit.
02:48:33.000Killing with all this simple stupid shit and then Hicks went on afterwards with this like really bizarre Interpretation of modern civilization ever is like fuck this guy and people were getting up and leaving in droves and Kept going through the whole thing and me and Greg Fitzsimmons was there and a bunch of other comedians watching him bomb were laughing our asses off so he was Playing to the back of the room,
02:48:56.000the comedians that were still there laughing were laughing hard in support, but people were getting up in giant chunks and leaving.
02:49:02.000At the end of the show, you know, the show was whittled down from like 250 people to like 40 people in 15 or 20 comics.
02:49:09.000That was all that was left, and we were howling, laughing.
02:49:12.000And he got off stage like nothing happened.
02:49:18.000So that's what he kicks you off into the McKenna realm.
02:49:22.000Yeah, he's the one who introduced me to McKenna by that joke, just by saying that.
02:49:26.000And then in hearing Hicks' references, there was a few other guys that he sort of referenced their ideas, like Noam Chomsky was another one.
02:49:35.000One of the things that Hicks was famous for saying was actually a Chomsky line, was about the Iraq War, that it's only really a war when two armies are fighting.
02:51:07.000And sometimes they didn't even make people laugh.
02:51:09.000You know, I watched it with this girl I was dating at the time in like 1993-ish, something like that.
02:51:15.000And she was like, yeah, he's not really funny, but he's really fascinating to listen to.
02:51:20.000Like she didn't find like some of the things he was saying were funny.
02:51:23.000But I think that was also the Revelation show, which he filmed in London, which was one of those weird shows where you're doing an HBO special and you have one show ready go.
02:51:33.000And there's some weird pressure that's involved with that and it doesn't necessarily always come off loose and like the feeling that you see him when he's at a club where he's expressing himself in a much more free way.
02:51:47.000I felt that a lot of his comedy high points across his content came from his ability to do characterisation.
02:51:55.000He'd do a long bit that used to be like, oh my god, this guy's just hitting me with data.
02:51:59.000But when he said, I believe God created me in one day, those things were always like, ah!
02:52:42.000There's so much mythology involved in him now because he's passed on and he died young and we always sit back and wonder, like, what would it be like if that guy was alive today?
02:53:12.000Kinnison opened the door for Hicks because he was one of the outlaws.
02:53:16.000And Kinnison had a lot of bits that were like that, but...
02:53:19.000They were more humor-based than point of view-based.
02:53:22.000Like, he had points of view, but the points of view had to be really funny.
02:53:25.000Whereas Hicks had a lot of points of view that was like, there's gotta be a way to introduce these ideas into people in the form of stand-up comedy that maybe not even aren't that funny, but are very important.
02:53:36.000Whereas, like, Kinison was, everything was, I mean, he had some ridiculously funny bits, and he did it in this totally unapologetic way that I think Hicks kind of absorbed.
02:53:46.000And when I first saw Hicks, it was one of the things, he had a lot of Kinison in him.
02:53:50.000Like, we all have influences, and when we're starting out, we, like, you hear other comedians that you really love come out of your own mouth, almost like with the intonations and the inflections, and you almost kind of mimic them in your delivery.
02:54:13.000It's like, this guy's clearly influenced.
02:54:15.000You don't know whether or not he was influenced by Kinnison or Kinnison was influenced by Hicks, but most likely it's probably a little bit of both, but more Kinnison than anything.
02:54:25.000Was much more successful earlier on, like several years before Hicks really took off and was revolutionary.
02:54:32.000When Kinison came on the scene, he was completely revolutionary.
02:54:36.000So I think him taking Hicks with him, you know, because they were part of that Houston group that originally expanded and then came to LA, I think he just showed that there's just some undeniable power in being that controversial but on point.
02:54:51.000Because stand-up is one of the original American art form, isn't it?
02:54:56.000It's precedent prior to being in the United States.
02:55:01.000That art form didn't exist in the same way.
02:55:19.000It can be that the more truthful you are and the more articulate it becomes, the more you reduce your audience.
02:55:25.000When you think of hitting up rooms of 2,500 people or 5,000 arena gigs, if you want to go in and wade in there with fucking Noam Chomsky bloody quotes...
02:55:36.000You better have a dick joke to finish with.
02:55:56.000Just sit back for a while, listen for ages.
02:55:59.000The aspect of comedy that I think is so important of authenticity, you know, when you're a start-up comic, people go, oh, you've got to find your voice, you've got to find your authenticity.
02:56:08.000And like you were saying, that you hear the musicality of comedians you admire in your own voice.
02:56:13.000When you're doing five-minute sets or tens or twits, it's extremely difficult, isn't it, to become robust enough with that.
02:56:22.000Really explore what you are authentically in a kind of a long, safe form.
02:56:27.000Especially 10-minute sets, those little short sets you do, you can get a bit out or a series of funny things that you can say.
02:56:36.000But as far as any real depth, and part of what comes out that's really funny is if you watch someone like Jim Part of what his comedy is, is you'll understand after you see him for 15 or 20 minutes, this is how he makes fun of things.
02:56:52.000And then another subject comes up, and you're laughing before he even starts talking about it, because you're kind of following where he's going to take this.
03:01:53.000And that was one of the best examples like people always like this is a fucking trend now but good comedy should always punch up Comedy should always punch up bullshit bullshit bullshit nonsense comedy should be comedy It's it's it's just like rap music or fucking gangster movies.
03:02:09.000It's indecipherable You cannot decide what's funny and what's not funny and that is one of the best examples of it that African bit.
03:03:00.000It's releasing you from the sanctimony.
03:03:03.000There's so much sanctimony that you're weighed down and you're not able to have an authentic reaction.
03:03:07.000There's so much of yourself that you're repressing and it takes him.
03:03:11.000You see, again, to return to that archetypes conversation we had, that the trickster, the role of the trickster that comes up in Native American myth is like the coyote or the raven, or they say that even Christ is a trickster in moments in the Bible.
03:03:26.000People that go, that's not reality anymore.
03:03:28.000That's a trickster function to go like, you know, you know that there's a prescribed way that you're supposed to respond to that African commercial.
03:03:37.000Well, look, there's this alternative way of responding to it and to present it comedically.
03:04:14.000Impulsiveness, fearlessness, and rage.
03:04:17.000These are constant themes that come out of head trauma.
03:04:21.000So it's interesting, like, one of the most important figures in the history of stand-up comedy might have literally been birthed because of trauma.
03:04:41.000Like, before that, he was, like, quiet and shy and a normal kid, and then, bam, he gets hit by a car, fucked up, put in a hospital, the whole deal.
03:04:49.000Comes out of that, and he doesn't give a fuck.
03:05:23.000Look, I've dealt with a lot of brain trauma, because I know a lot of people that have gotten fucked up from fighting.
03:05:30.000You know, there's a real thing that happens to people, and you hear about all the time when they do these shows on NFL players who become explosive, and they get crazy and impulsive, and they get very violent, and some of that has to do with repeated trauma to the head.
03:05:45.000Well, just one event, one car accident, one thing like that, can literally change your personality.
03:05:52.000Because there's a very fragile dynamic of synapses and personality, neurochemicals, the brain's actual, like, the flow of chemicals, of neurochemistry, and the physical body itself, and the way your personality manifests itself.
03:06:08.000All those things are directly connected.
03:06:10.000And an event, like what happened to Sam Kinison, literally reshaped an art form.
03:06:16.000What about them people that get head trauma and suddenly can speak perfect French?