00:01:20.000And please enjoy this extraordinary content.
00:01:24.000I bet you didn't know that this happened.
00:01:28.000We live in a time, I feel, in my country and yours, where there's this sort of, I have sensed a lot of condemnation and criticism of what I might describe as ordinary working people, a kind of offhandedness of like, oh, they're dumb.
00:01:46.000And I don't like to hear it because of my own experiences and my own upbringing, which I'll happily testify are not nearly so dramatic as yours there.
00:01:55.000But like in terms of where I sit in a class grid, it's, you know, like I'm, and I spend enough time with people that are being described in this manner to feel ill at ease with it.
00:02:06.000How do you feel about like that kind of judgment?
00:02:11.000When you talk about these values that you were describing earlier, do you feel that there is a way of meshing together these apparently disparate groups now, these liberal professional classes and these what you might describe as working ordinary people of any color or variety?
00:02:29.000I do think so because what the work I've got to do is defining the science behind why they're valuable, the science behind why they work, the science behind why that doesn't mean you have to now come over.
00:02:44.000And it doesn't mean that you're coming over to the proverbial other side.
00:02:51.000I say this, you know, I say, I'll meet you in the middle.
00:02:55.000I actually think that is more of a dare right now than it's ever been.
00:03:01.000That spot again is not like, oh, no, not going there.
00:03:04.000Somebody said to me that it's, oh, yeah, meet you in the middle.
00:03:06.000You know, you know, it's in the middle of the road, McConaughey.
00:03:12.000I said, let me tell you something, but I said, I'm walking down the yellow line right now and the armadillos are running free, having a great time.
00:03:21.000I said, the other two sides, the two vehicles on either side of the political aisle are so far apart, their fucking tires aren't even on the pavement anymore.
00:03:30.000I mean, so trust me, it's free over here.
00:04:12.000But it had to be reframed in a little bit.
00:04:15.000Look, on the other side, on the far left that would go, well, who do, there is a lot on that illiberal left that absolutely condescend, patronize, and are arrogant towards that other 50%.
00:04:29.000Many people were in, I'm sure you saw it in our industry when Trump was voted in four years ago.
00:04:38.000They were in denial that it was actually, that was real.
00:04:42.000And some of them were in absolute denial.
00:04:45.000And even now, we're going to see how we can stabilize coming out of, looks like Biden's our guy.
00:04:54.000Well, now you've got the right that's in denial because that's fake news.
00:04:59.000And I understand they've been fed fake news.
00:05:01.000No one knows who the hell to believe, right?
00:05:03.000So they're putting down their last bastion of defense.
00:05:09.000So, you know, that left has to see, this is the, this is, this is, I want to stay on topic, but this is where the left misses it for me, just as far as being a marketeer of a political side.
00:05:28.000You, when you say, hey, we want to get out the vote, we want people to go be able to go vote.
00:05:32.000We're going to do a campaign to let people vote.
00:06:04.000And that's, you know, part of why so much of the nation of that 50% looks at us in Hollywood as like going, oh, yeah, another celebrity over there on the West Coasters and the elite in the Northeast.
00:06:16.000And that's what y'all say, because even from just a sales point of view, don't tab that got you on the end.
00:06:23.000And then you have a twice, your audience is twice as big and you're getting what you want.
00:06:29.000Even you're getting twice as much as what you, you're getting double two times as much as you would if you just didn't tab on that little stick it to them at the end.
00:06:40.000It's going to be have to, the left is going to have to understand the science of the values and the meets in the middle.
00:06:47.000The left will have to understand, okay, I understand I can add this up neurologically, scientifically.
00:07:06.000I need to still work on what is that measurement of those values.
00:07:11.000Is that measurement that, say, if I pilot city, my first pilot city is Austin, Texas, is that measurement?
00:07:17.000A friend of mine said this the other day, is a possible measurement that 10 years down the road, Austin is the B Corp capital headquarters of the world.
00:07:25.000That's pretty, that'd be a pretty cool measurement.
00:07:31.000What's the rate of how happy our employers are?
00:07:36.000Can we have a place where businesses also have the same values that Austin, Texas has businesses that have the highest rate of happiness, percentage of happiness for employers that work for somebody?
00:07:46.000So I'm working out those measurements with the value campaign.
00:07:52.000And if I can get those, that's something measurable that I can hand you in the elevator pitch and go, here's what I'm talking about.
00:08:00.000And even within that, this suggestion of alternative metrics is the idea that our entire way of measuring what is valuable has been biased to such an alarming degree that it's created this kind of chasm of mistrust.
00:08:20.000Everyone knows that if you can't participate economically in this system, you are not valuable.
00:08:27.000I think that's fascinating because it sort of does seem in that the type of economic and social systems that we're currently living within are experiencing a sort of end game.
00:08:36.000And people are reluctant to hear alternatives and what that might look like.
00:08:41.000So I think it's, yeah, that sounds real bold work, Matthew, to look into the metrics.
00:08:46.000What do we, especially in America, tell you you're successful for?
00:08:49.000What do we give you a praise on the back?
00:08:51.000What gets you the front seat, the best seat at the table to the front of the line?
00:09:55.000I feel my ego momentarily if I put you down.
00:09:59.000Meaning, not because we're a nation, we're a world that cheers louder when our opponent misses a shot than we are happy when we make a shot.
00:11:01.000The person at the party who gets everyone together and tells you this great thing, little inside joke on Leslie over there, Johnny over there, that they wouldn't say in front of them because it's kind of dirt.
00:11:11.000And in the moment, we all laugh our ass off because it was a great joke.
00:11:16.000But then when we walk away, we inherently lose respect for that guy.
00:11:51.000So it's when there's suddenly an agenda that coincidentally favors the person, you know, it's when people have exactly luckily, God agrees with them.
00:12:45.000I've gone on sort of like the opposite journey in that I feel like I started off atheistic just the same way that I would reject any attempt to impose regulation or control on me for the purposes of domination.
00:12:57.000And as I've you know, gone through my own stuff with you know addiction and mental health or whatever it is.
00:13:05.000And like I know that you're very like, you know, for example, afterlife is about legitimate grief as opposed to some kind of abstract idea of mental illness brought about by a hormonal or neurological balance.
00:13:17.000But myself, my own sense of despair, particularly looking at it from a perspective of mental health issues and addiction, is that there is an unaddressed yearning for a kind of oneness togetherness.
00:13:28.000And like, you know, to your point earlier about Brent, indeed, for love.
00:13:33.000And when like you talk about that sense of awe of like the appreciation of an animal, the love of an animal and the sort of regard and gratitude for having an animal love you and care for you or the beauty of nature or the deep, deep beauty of the cosmos, what I feel like, and my own appreciation, understanding, stroke, belief in God is that there is a kind of in the love of it, in the awareness of rightness itself, there is an indication that there is such a thing as rightness.
00:14:01.000Not that any one particular group or ideology has unique, a particular and special access to it.
00:14:06.000And I really firmly, deeply believe that spirituality is for me, not for me to tell other people, boy, I don't reckon you should be gay, or I don't reckon you should be allowed to do it.
00:14:17.000I feel like it's, I do my Bible, in the Bible, it says you should pray secretly.
00:14:25.000Yeah, like there is something sort of deeply private about it.
00:14:27.000But I also think, Ricky, that there is a social consequence to, I don't necessarily want to say atheism because I completely agree with your point that there's good and bad, you know, in like beyond those kind of limited taxonomies.
00:14:40.000But like, I do feel like when people think there's no purpose or meaning, that and that needn't necessarily be just because of a belief in God, but it creates cultures that are oddly materialistic, nihilistic.
00:14:54.000And I feel like in the last 20 years, we're seeing more and more worship of self, worship of individuals.
00:15:00.000Of course, there's a new narcissism, of course.
00:15:02.000And I don't know why I think social media is partly to blame.
00:15:08.000I think people being rewarded for bad behavior is partly to blame, you know, magazines or TV or whatever.
00:15:16.000I did a speech in the big brother house as Andy Millman in Extras.
00:15:20.000And again, that was at the beginning of it.
00:18:35.000And I think of it, it's like a holiday.
00:18:37.000We don't exist for 13 and a half billion years.
00:18:40.000Then we explode into this mass, this electronic blob of thought, introspection, love, hate, fear, beauty, horror for 80, 90, 100 years if we're lucky.
00:19:31.000When you start thinking about it, why are we here?
00:19:34.000Well, I mean, not even the how, but why.
00:19:39.000Well, to live your life to the fullest and not hurt anyone, to leave the world in a better place than it was when you came into it, to experience everything, all the reasons, all the obvious reasons, you know, love, wine, dogs, learning, all these great things that you can do every minute of every day that you're alive.
00:20:16.000But I was struck when you said that by a few things.
00:20:18.000One is like this sort of like the injection of meaning, as in, you know, like meaning would have to be imported externally, fabricated, somehow invented.
00:20:26.000Whereas I think on some level, I feel that there is, that meaning is inherent and that the meaning is in the kind of zeal that you have when you describe the things that give you love, pleasure, you know, connection, whether it's wine or dogs or whatever.
00:20:41.000I've had like some experiences like through meditation.
00:20:45.000And when I took drugs too young, so now I'm not allowed to do ayahuasca or LSD or them things that I would definitely be doing if I wasn't in recovery.
00:20:53.000But I had like those sort of these experiences that were a kind of, I would say, a sort of an evaporation of self and yet a continued awareness.
00:21:02.000I know that my consciousness is connected to my biology, but I have a sense somewhat derived from the sort of the fact that you can't trace how mechanical parts ever become conscious, that consciousness may be elemental somehow.
00:21:19.000Now that doesn't point to a God in a traditional patriarchal or domineering sense, but it sort of points to an element that's very difficult to quantify, whether that's the deep intelligence of nature, the deep mathematics of biochemistry and biology, and the essential mystery of consciousness itself, commonly referred to as the hard problem.
00:21:41.000And through these sort of individual experiences, whilst I've not had anything that you would call typically religious, Jesus emerging out of a tunnel, Ganesh lashing around or any of that sort of stuff, what I've had is like a, well, it's highly bloody interpretive.
00:21:55.000Because say there's this one breath thing I do, you breathe from the abdomen very aggressively and then you sort of take a sharp inhale and you normally, you nearly, well, a medical man would say what you're doing there is hyperventilating and nearly passing out.
00:22:08.000But from the inside, what it feels like is bloody hell.
00:22:11.000For this moment, I'm aware and I am not me.
00:22:16.000Is there a possibility that my awareness, your awareness, the awareness of all animals and an awareness that's impossible to read is somehow present in all nature, in all matter.
00:22:26.000And if that's true, then there's a kind of a real, a genuine cohesion and togetherness between all of the beings of the earth and beyond.
00:22:36.000And those people that can't actually enjoy the lives that we are privileged to have of the red wine or the dogs or whatever, like I'm not saying that's some sort of comfort to them.
00:22:45.000But in fact, those of us that are in privileged position might feel newly incentivized to work towards a different kind of society and system that is more reflective of those values.
00:22:56.000Now, that doesn't necessarily require monotheism, pantheonism, or any of those things, but it is somewhat underwritten by a kind of a sameness and a oneness and how that might relate to justice.
00:23:07.000And also, there is a sort of a personal experience of mystery in it.
00:24:00.000You know, they've mapped the beginning of the universe to, to a fraction of a second, which is pretty close but um so uh I, I think science keeps proving itself and over and over again, and and the fact that we don't understand, you know, the mind body problem completely yet um, that is the beauty.
00:24:21.000And the more we understand, the more questions it throws up.
00:24:25.000It's like um, you know, people say the missing link uh like, there's this fossil and there's this fossil and uh, we find that one and people go, no, there's two missing links.
00:24:38.000So you can't win, you know and um, all science be doing is just keep filling the gaps and finding and finding new gaps.
00:24:50.000Um but yeah, you're right, you know I, I think that um, it is, it is.
00:26:53.000When I see a card trick and I don't know how it's done, and then the magician tells me, I can't wait for him to show someone else who doesn't know how it's done.
00:27:03.000And how it is done is more exciting for me.
00:28:03.000Spirituality, I think, means different things to different people.
00:28:07.000So I don't want to generalize what it might mean, but I can say that if spirituality to you is the sense or the feeling that there's something else going on that you don't otherwise see or experience, that's an interesting state of mind to have.
00:28:30.000And science is still a moving frontier.
00:28:57.000There's so many things you can end up doing with your life in the absence of evidence that you could end up dying from it, for example.
00:29:06.000If someone says, here, rub these crystals and it'll cure your ailments.
00:29:10.000If your ailment is a particular kind of cancer for which we can actually cure you, you will likely die no matter how hard you rub the crystals together.
00:29:19.000That's an exaggeration, but it's the kind of case where evidence-based living can have a very important effect on your longevity.
00:29:33.000There's no question that in medicine and these areas cannot be contested, but I feel that rationalism and materialism bump up against certain limits.
00:29:45.000And if we are to have conversations based on evidence, then in a sense, we can track what materialism, commerce, capitalism lead to.
00:29:56.000They are currently like, you know, this is, I don't want to be like apocalyptic or anything, Neil though, I get the sense you're going to handle it.
00:30:20.000This is what I feel like: that human beings have this relationship with the unknown and potentially unknowable, not least through our intimate relationship with experience and consciousness.
00:30:31.000Whilst there's definitely a trackable progress in the fields of science and the benevolent miracles that have been bestowed upon us by the scientific method are foundational in what we recognize as society and civilization, it seems to me that there's another aspect to human nature that's dealing with subtler forces that are difficult to know.
00:30:53.000And again, as a man that's dedicated to science, I'm not anticipating that this is the conversation we go, yeah, why don't we just believe in fairies and ghosts and that kind of stuff.
00:31:02.000But the same way that invisible constructs and concepts such as the idea of the United Kingdom or the idea of America or the idea of class or to a degree gender and race can be used to control and separate, I feel that people need narratives and stories to help them access the kind of perspective that Edgar Mitchell is talking about, a passionate sense that there is something that unifies us.
00:31:31.000And I would never, with a religious person or a non-religious person, say, hey, I think that you should regard the sublime in this way.
00:31:37.000But it seems important to me, and I've had a comparable conversation with Brian Cox, who know that you're friendly with me, like, because you are both, it seems to me, very passionate men who love the cosmos, love the universe.
00:31:48.000And so much of your book is talking about, it comes from a place of love and kindness and together.
00:31:54.000And I think that, you know, we've got more in common, those of us that believe that love and compassion should define our experience here on earth and in the outer reaches of space, have more in common than those of us that are trying to pursue materialistic, individualistic, selfish goals, although I'm capable of being both of those people.
00:32:08.000I feel that where is the upon what terrain mentally do we afford the possibility of negotiation with the unknown when there are still such great mysteries like the formation of consciousness?
00:32:22.000Every time I see an article saying, you know, new evidence about the configuration of consciousness on neurological pathways, it always leads to we don't believe it.
00:32:29.000It's the evidence that we know nothing about it, that people keep publishing books on consciousness, attempting to explain it.
00:32:35.000The more, if you just look at the progress of knowledge, when people are actively publishing on a topic, generally it means that it's not settled.
00:32:48.000When the results are in and everyone can agree, then people stop publishing on it.
00:32:52.000So the fact that you can go to a bookstore or a library and see shelf upon shelf of people's books saying that they explain consciousness, and those books continue to appear even to this day, is just evidence of that.
00:33:07.000Whereas if you go to the shelf of the books on gravity, there's like four books.
00:33:45.000We like standing within the perimeter of the circle that is known and staring out into an abyss and saying, wow, I don't understand what that is.
00:33:57.000So there's a difference between not knowing something because the circle hasn't expanded large enough to encompass it and declaring something is in principle unknowable.
00:34:10.000And the history of what it is to know stuff does not support the contention that there are things that are unknowable.
00:34:26.000The Jesus arms, just for those only listening.
00:34:31.000But even from things that I've heard you explain, one of the things that you said that I really loved is you say when dealing with people that are, I suppose, pedagogical or evangelical, is there anything I could say to you that would change your mind?
00:34:45.000And if the person says no, then you don't bother.
00:34:47.000kind of done with the conversation, right?
00:34:49.000Here's something that I'd like to say, though, and because I'm well up for learning always, I hope that surely consciousness as we understand it, and our experience as human beings limited as it is by our sensory instruments is contained within certain parameters whilst we can amplify and magnify in all sorts of directions.
00:35:08.000There is a sort of a basic limitation to our understanding.
00:35:11.000And even from watching your program on the cosmos, when you talked about multiverses, and even from hearing you talking about neutrinos and how inconceivably low down the sub-particular world goes, in this scope, the unknowable in terms of the human experience upon that which can be proved, that must be a vast, vast territory, because we can never know the multiverses.
00:35:37.000We can never know from a sort of a century perspective the neutrino world.
00:35:42.000I'm just not going to say that because the moving frontier delivers all manner of new surprises to things that you thought were either fully known or partially known or unknowable in a previous time.
00:36:02.000In the day when sort of religious philosophies were deeply embedded, and let's look at Europe for a moment, and someone bends over and writhes on the ground and froths at the mouth.
00:36:18.000It's really obvious what's going on there.
00:36:20.000The devil has infused the body of this person.
00:36:26.000So the priest comes, brings the holy water, exorcises the person, and then the symptoms fade away, and clearly the devil left the body.
00:36:36.000That was the explanation, in the absence of the methods and tools of science.
00:36:41.000And now we know, of course, that's an epileptic fit.
00:36:44.000And it does run its course, giving the illusion that removing the devil by holy water and other encantations by the priests is what actually solved the problem.
00:36:58.000So back then, that was something that they thought they understood, but in fact did not.
00:37:04.000Maybe there might still be people today who think that's what's necessary.
00:37:09.000But the medical profession tells us that this is an ailment that afflicts some human brains.
00:37:15.000Very unfortunate, rapid, uncontrolled firing of synapses.
00:37:20.000And so that's an example of something that may have been unknowable or even divine at a time that we solved and we're onto other problems.
00:37:30.000There's no question that superstition thrives in ignorance and institutions that crave power will exploit that void.
00:37:41.000But what I'm talking about is even based on what I've learned from watching your TV shows, that the scope, the sheer scope, that it is, put simply, the capacity for human understanding must be finite.
00:38:03.000So first, a lot of what you described, our consciousness, our personal experience, what we feel, in science, I don't even care.
00:38:15.000Because the human senses are demonstrably ill-equipped to take measure of the totality of the physical universe.
00:38:27.000So what science has done, basically since the invention of the microscope and telescope, which happened within 10 years of each other, by the way, back around the year 1600, then the race was on.
00:38:40.000I can now enhance your view with a telescope.
00:38:43.000I can improve your view downward with a microscope.
00:38:46.000Your senses had no access to those places in the universe until I came up with those instruments.
00:38:52.000And the run of science over the past 400 years has been all about developing instruments so that you can see beyond the five senses you are biologically endowed with.
00:39:04.000So when someone comes up to me and says, I think I have a sixth sense, I have ESP, I say, fine, but in science, we have 12 senses.
00:39:12.000I can measure things your body doesn't even know is going on in front of you right now.
00:39:18.000And so that is a power over ignorance that science has brought to us over all of these centuries.
00:39:31.000Who is to say that humans, who by our own definition are the first intelligent species there ever was on Earth, who's to say we have just the right amount of intelligence to figure out the entire universe?
00:40:43.000The smartest of us would accomplish what their toddlers can do.
00:40:48.000And I joke that they take Stephen Hawking, roll him forward at their human study conferences and say this human, Stephen Hawking, is slightly smarter than the rest because he can do astrophysics calculations in his head, like little Timmy over here who just came home from preschool.
00:41:07.000So our most, their simplest thoughts would transcend our most complex thoughts.
00:41:14.000To them, the universe might be just a trivial exercise that you learn all about in an afternoon.
00:41:20.000Yet we are struggling, requiring the most brilliant among us scattered over centuries with information shared and incremented upon one rung of a ladder at a time, trying to see over the hill.
00:41:33.000And we can't yet, whatever that hill is, we don't even know how tall the hill is, how tall the hill is.
00:41:39.000So I don't know if we're smart enough to figure out the universe, but we're still progressing and I'm happy with that.
00:41:47.000You know, when art or music, and I suppose in your case, science, and in my case, because sometimes like watching your stuff or Neil de Grasse Tyson's or, you know, like Carl Sagan and stuff, when you're taken to that point of absolute wonder, when you think, oh my God, I actually can't hold that in my head anymore.
00:42:05.000And like that could happen, though, in a beautiful animation or a beautiful piece of music where you're taken to that place that's sort of beyond me.
00:42:14.000You feel that sense of this is beyond my faculties to know this, but I feel something greater, whether that is, you know, and however you want to define that.
00:42:25.000This place, this place, this precipice that can be reached through art and through just observation, really, observation and expression of the beauty of our reality.
00:42:35.000It has become increasingly excluded, I feel, from our cultural and social life.
00:42:39.000And I feel, Brian, that you and you know, some of the other, you, this just about you, you don't seem to me typical of, you know, not that there's a it's not really a crowded field, is it sort of a science entertainer communicators?
00:42:52.000I mean, there's not loads of you really out there, but but but generally speaking, you know that there's this you'll be familiar with the term scientism.
00:42:59.000You'll be familiar, of course, with a type of scientific understanding that's used to underwrite certainty.
00:43:03.000You'll be familiar too that recently, politically, scientific understanding has been to some degree necessarily been used to underwrite policy.
00:43:13.000When it comes to conversations about gender, when it comes to the conversation about governments mandating stuff, can you see sometimes when it comes to the field of chemistry and pharmacology and this sort of the irresponsibility irresponsibility?
00:43:25.000And I think we're on legally safe territory when we say with the opioid crisis, that science is occasionally a subset of corporatism.
00:43:34.000Science is occasionally a subset of power.
00:43:37.000Science is sometimes a subset of politics, vis-Ã -vis gender conversations and sexuality conversations.
00:43:48.000How do you retain your own, presumably, your own disgust in the same way as that I would be disgusted by anyone using religion as a way of reaching being dogmatic, certain, condemnatory?
00:44:01.000How do you manage the misuse, I would call it, of science?
00:44:06.000And, you know, be as specific as you want, obviously.
00:44:09.000Well, I mean, a very good example is the pandemic, because what you saw there was science in action in real time in a very serious situation.
00:44:22.000So if you go back, you know, three years, then we don't know anything about this virus at all.
00:44:30.000It may have been in some animal reservoir, you know, in bats or something.
00:46:25.000And then, on top of that, you're right, the undercurrent of your question is that people who are disingenuous, who are not practicing what we've been speaking about, which is humility and just trying to understand nature and understand a new thing,
00:46:41.000be it a pandemic disease or the evolution of the universe, that disingenuous people can just take the one piece of advice that backs up their prejudice and then use it vocally in order to justify their actions.
00:46:59.000So it's not, it all goes back to this.
00:47:05.000We've got to understand that science is not a belief system.
00:47:11.000It's not, we're not, scientists don't sit on a mountain passing down stone templates to the people at the bottom saying, this is it.
00:47:20.000As I just said, you know, go back to what I said about Feynman and Oppenheimer.
00:47:24.000Science is a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance.
00:47:27.000And so I think the problems occur that they can occur sometimes.
00:47:33.000The scientists can, you know, it's very hard.
00:47:35.000I had great respect for the scientists that were working during the pandemic, you know, the public facing scientists, because they're not people necessarily who understand the nuance of communicating with the public, right?
00:47:58.000But then they might not even say, because it's kind of obvious to them that actually we might discover something tomorrow and then we're going to say you should do the other thing.
00:48:07.000So, so it's very, very, very difficult, especially in a serious situation like a pandemic, to communicate that.
00:48:18.000It's an argument for science education, actually.
00:48:21.000Because you need to, from being a child, from very young, if you can just understand that this is contingent knowledge, it's constantly evolving.
00:48:45.000It's the point is, it's the method we have of acquiring reliable knowledge.
00:48:53.000In the earlier chat, you told me that they put all that athletic monitoring equipment on you and said that you burned 11,000 calories in nine hours and your heart's doing this and your heart's doing that.
00:49:03.000Like, you know, I believe that in the ability of consciousness and will to alter anatomy and to or material to a degree, but the simple fact is that ultimately that you're a man.
00:49:13.000Where are you going with that vulnerability?
00:49:21.000What's really beautiful in my life, the grace of my life, is I've been called to help others and they look at me as their coach, but I'd be an idiot, the kind of people I have the privilege of coaching to think I'm just coaching them.
00:49:35.000And fortunately, you wanted to chat with me too, which I was grateful for.
00:49:38.000But I wanted to reach you because I feel you have a very special voice when it comes to recovery that I have not seen anywhere else.
00:49:44.000You have a passion and a truth and a vulnerability.
00:49:47.000And I have a lot of that, but I'm only one person.
00:49:49.000So I'm good at finding brilliant people and then helping to pull out so other people can see, at least the people that I have an audience for.
00:49:56.000You know, I have 20 million people on social media and they talk to people.
00:50:26.000I built muscle over the years so that it's not that I don't have feelings, I don't get hurt, I don't feel sad, I don't feel tired, I feel all those things, but they're not the dominant force in my life.
00:50:57.000You can talk about rebounder, more crazy shit I do is every morning in my life, if I'm near any of my homes, and some places I have cryotherapy.
00:51:05.000But my homes, I have these cold plunges, and they're 56 degrees.
00:51:08.000And the first thing I do is jump in that cold punch.
00:51:10.000So there's not a fucking morning where I want to jump in that.
00:51:22.000The blood flushes through your whole body.
00:51:24.000But the main reason I do it, even more than that, is when I go up there, I don't, you know, people negotiate, well, I'm going to do it tomorrow.
00:51:52.000And when I find it's not working, and I step back up and condition it.
00:51:55.000And unless I'm willing to take 100% responsibility for what I feel and what I experience, then I'm always going to be a victim to someone because there's always going to be somebody upset in the world we live in today about something you said or did or didn't say or didn't do or go.
00:52:07.000There is no victory in the world where everyone has a voice and not everybody's voice is necessarily designed to make somebody feel loved.
00:52:14.000It's designed to meet whatever their needs are in that moment.
00:52:16.000They might want certainty and you're being a certain way makes them uncertain or they think you're significant.
00:52:21.000You may think they're totally significant, but they don't.
00:52:26.000So I live my life where I keep learning, I keep growing, I keep loving, I keep laughing, and I'm trying to leave a decent legacy of a meaningful life by constantly looking for ways I can be helpful.
00:52:37.000And my prayer, a simple prayer, before I walk on every stage, is use me.
00:53:39.000But if you do battle with this, eventually you battle with yourself.
00:53:44.000Because if you can solve it within yourself, you can, regardless of what happens in the outside world, you can have that sense that your life is meaningful.
00:53:50.000And so I've done battle for 58 years and I'm going to keep doing battle the rest of my life.
00:53:55.000But I'm doing better because I've done battles so often.
00:53:57.000It's like, why is LeBron James who he is?
00:55:23.000Six years ago, I was a student in college and I thought I was going to be an engineer for the rest of my life, industrial and systems engineer.
00:56:04.000Like you kind of mentioned it, this weird path that myself, as well as a bunch of other influencers, creators, like whatever you want to call them, it had never been done before.
00:56:17.000We were like trailblazers in many ways.
00:56:19.000And I've never had a mentor, which is actually why I was excited to sit down with you.
00:56:22.000Like you mentioned, the fame, the controversy, the ups and downs of this weird Hollywood industry.
00:56:28.000And just being able to pick your brain about stuff that maybe I didn't have direction on, it excites me.
00:56:36.000Well, I'm flattered that you consider me in such a way.
00:56:38.000And I'll be obviously honored to help you.
00:56:40.000It's interesting because even though online spaces and the people that create content on them, that's a sort of a novelty in the world of fame and celebrity.
00:56:50.000And I'm thinking about, say, when the music industry would have been transformed by the transistor radio or by vinyl or by the advent of television.
00:56:58.000But you know, like that, that always creates sort of iconic figures.
00:57:02.000Like, so in some ways, you're unconventional.
00:57:04.000So, oh, I just was going to be an engineer.
00:57:06.000But in another way, it's very recognizable.
00:57:08.000You're a good-looking man, you're charismatic, you're sweet as candy, aren't you?
00:57:13.000So, in a sense, it's like a very recognizable sort of path.
00:57:16.000What's weird, I suppose, is the amount of control you have over your content.
00:57:20.000Tell me how you got into creating the stuff you create.
00:57:24.000That's the thing I think I might be most addicted to about what I do.
00:57:29.000Being a creator, essentially, the control is in my hands.
00:57:34.000And it was fascinating to come to Hollywood.
00:57:36.000And I came to Hollywood wanting to do what you did.
00:59:12.000And I thought, even though what they're doing is all skate culture and hurting themselves and beating up on themselves, I thought there's something real punk and prankster about what they're doing.
00:59:22.000And I feel like possibly you're interested in that kind of thing, creating sort of, well, in French artistic, recent French artistic history, it called situationism, creating unusual situations that in themselves show up the absurdity of the everyday.
01:00:19.000I've always been late to mature in my content.
01:00:22.000I mean, when you go back four or five years ago, a lot of it is like cringe.
01:00:28.000It's fun, but it's just like this cringe, weird version of myself that when I look back at, and I'm sure you feel like this too when you look back at your old stuff, I'm really cool.
01:01:17.000My evolution over a year, two years, five years is absolutely mind-boggling to me.
01:01:25.000Yeah, it must be changing quite radically because, again, even relating to the content, you can create all this content.
01:01:30.000It can evolve and it can change quite quickly.
01:01:32.000How did you get from the early prank jackass inspired slapping your brother with, I think what you said was a ham, a joint of pork-based meat.
01:02:22.000That was significant in my life for many reasons, but mainly because it took that for me to realize that what I was doing was so fucking wrong in that social media was creating a person that was just not me.
01:03:21.000Because like I said, it was just like everything I did was even bad behavior was reinforced by people that wanted to see it, whether they liked it or hated it.
01:03:28.000They would come and they'd say, oh, this.
01:03:56.000And I like jumped in my boxers naked in the middle of Venice, Italy.
01:04:00.000And then even a couple days before Japan, we were running around dressed in like Pokemon costumes, just like throwing Pokeballs at people.
01:04:06.000Just like just like a complete and utter disrespect of both people and specifically the culture of Japan, which at the time, it just, I don't know how that didn't cross my mind, which is why I look back at those videos and I'm like, it is very clear to see the very negative side of me that I believe.
01:04:28.000And, you know, I don't want to create excuses.
01:04:30.000It's probably, there's probably a handful of childhood trauma that caused me to be the way I am.
01:04:37.000But it was very easy to see the negative side of me that social media had probably helped forge.
01:04:46.000Like the stuff you did, because like pranks require a degree of transgression, but I suppose there's a difference between, you know, like the stuff where it's your friends or your brother or whatever.
01:04:55.000You know, when you dislocate yourself into Venice or into Tokyo or whatever, then you might be making cultural errors that you're not aware of.
01:05:03.000Especially when we're traveling all the time.
01:05:49.000And in a way, a lot of the stuff we were doing was entertainment for children ages like eight to maybe like 24, people who didn't really maybe understand respect and culture and like a worldly knowledge of what is right and wrong.
01:06:12.000But adults who saw our content are like, what the fuck is this?
01:06:15.000And I'm telling you right now, like, I tried to watch a video last night that I made from like three, four years ago.
01:07:08.000I was on the eighth floor and across the way was I think a five-story parking garage.
01:07:13.000And I started vlogging and I had a very quick come up on YouTube.
01:07:17.000And so fans realized where I lived and they would stand on top of the parking garage across the way and just wait for me to appear in the window.
01:07:26.000So eventually, since I was, I put them in videos and they thought it was cool to show up and they wanted to be on camera and to be in the vlog.
01:07:36.000And eventually there was like 50 to 100 kids that would stand me on the parking garage.
01:07:39.000And so I was like, one day I was like, I'm going to teach them a lesson not to spy on people.
01:07:42.000Because mind you, I'm on the eighth floor, but there's also eight floors of people, a whole built like 50 to 100 people who are being watched by 50 to 100 kids a day.
01:07:52.000So I had my friend come up to me, up behind me as I was waving at my fans one day in a burglar mask, and he had a shotgun.
01:08:00.000And he cocked the shotgun and pulled the trigger, and I hired a guy to, like, splatter, like, a gallon of blood on the, it was, I, the more I talked, the more I realized how blatantly inappropriate this is, but.
01:08:14.000But yeah, I'm going to stand up for myself for one second.
01:08:17.000If the fans and people across the way weren't so young, I don't think this would have been that bad.
01:08:23.000But the fact that there are children, like, it's not great.
01:08:28.000I was just thinking while you were saying that, that if you were a performance artist, that would be like, whoa, that's pretty transgressive idea.
01:08:37.000But because I suppose the rules of the medium you were working in are yet to be established.
01:08:45.000So it becomes kind of amorphous and a little bit confusing because some of the stuff you were saying there about respect, of course, respect is very important, but it's also an idea that's used to create dominion and control oppression of, say, women or different, like, you know, the idea of respect and institutionalization.
01:09:04.000It can be, it's something that can be challenged and should be challenged because otherwise there will be no progress.
01:09:10.000But, you know, like, but I suppose when you're, I recognize what you were saying, it was like a near culprit.
01:09:14.000I shouldn't have done that thing and I shouldn't have.
01:09:16.000So, but it's a really, it's a very unique and interesting journey you're on because you're not working as a straightforward, like a stand-up like Kevin Hart, where people go, oh, 10 years ago you did these tweets, or you're not working even as a visual artist or a musician, where you're, where there's a tact on narrative that people can go, this is how you're supposed to behave.