In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, I sit down with singer-songwriter Lucas Miller to talk about growing up in the shadow of his famous father, country music legend Willie Nelson. We talk about the challenges of being the son of such a famous man, and how he overcame them.
00:00:19.000I gotta tell you, you know, when I heard Willie Nelson's kid plays music, there's a thing that you always do, and I have to admit it, you do it like when the son of a great man, you always assume, well, he's probably mediocre.
00:01:42.000It's the first song I ever wrote when I was 11.
00:01:45.000And my dad loved it so much that he covered it at the time, and he put it out on his album back in 2004 called It Always Will Be.
00:01:55.000The album was called It Always Will Be.
00:01:58.000And that gave me the confidence at a young age.
00:02:00.000Chris Christofferson came up to me and he's like, man, you don't have a choice but to be a songwriter.
00:02:05.000And so I had all this inspiration at a young age.
00:02:09.000Kind of like an athlete at a certain point.
00:02:11.000You kind of have to look at like, oh, well, if I have a talent at this, I have connections in the industry, I need to work like I was going to go to the Olympics on this because it's something that I can do that will make it so that I never have to rely on my family or my father for anything.
00:02:31.000You know, my whole goal in life is to discover who I am as an individual.
00:02:39.000Is that a part of the difficulty of growing up with an incredibly famous father?
00:02:45.000I think the, you know, Viktor Frankl has a book, a very famous book called Man's Search for Meaning.
00:02:54.000And it's about Auschwitz, and he was an Auschwitz survivor, and he wrote about what was the common denominator in terms of people who persevered and survived in these camps.
00:03:08.000And dignity and meaning were the common denominators generally.
00:03:14.000And so finding what you mean in this life to yourself, it doesn't have to mean anything to anyone else.
00:03:20.000And I think that's where, for me, I've lived my whole life trying to discover who I meant to myself so that at the moment of my death, I can look back and say, I did something that I enjoyed, that was meaningful, that gave me a sense of purpose.
00:03:38.000Yeah, there's both a blessing and a burden to being the child of someone who's incredibly famous at a thing that you're trying to do.
00:03:50.000You know, like there's a lot of sons of athletes, for instance, that live in their father's shadow, and very few of them ever rise to the level that their father was at.
00:05:06.000And so the support that my mother had for him, at that moment, I never cried again.
00:05:12.000I was able to let go of that idea and then just from that point on, work towards creating what would make me happy in my life and give me the same joy and then be able to take care of a family, hopefully.
00:05:25.000You know, one of my greatest sources of pride is that I haven't had to ask my parents for anything.
00:05:57.000You know, I know a lot of people who have broken homes and grew up, and even I caught dad at a good time.
00:06:04.000I mean, my dad was 55 or so when he had me, you know, and so he had already been through a lot of his demons and gotten through them and faced them, you know, and was still going through them at the time that I was born.
00:06:17.000But he had come out of, you know, a life of habit and sort of formed the ones that would take him at that point to where he is now at 92 years old.
00:06:27.000And so I got a good version of dad, you know, who had grown since.
00:06:33.000And so, man, I'm the luckiest guy in the world.
00:06:37.000I feel like I was able to be exposed to a lot of great music, a lot of great mentors, you know, in my life.
00:06:44.000And I'm also lucky that I, at a young age, I'm grateful to my younger child, to myself as a young child for having the wisdom to say, all right, work hard now, forget about parties, forget about hanging out,
00:07:00.000work hard eight hours, ten hours a day, practice your guitar, write all the time, sing all the time, so that when you get to a certain point in life, you'll have something to show for it, you know, something that you can leave behind that's yours.
00:07:31.000You know, that is something that I've always had growing up, and I think it's because I was, you know, again, I'm grateful to that younger kid.
00:07:39.000Sometimes I feel like he's wiser than I am now.
00:07:42.000You know, that younger self is like almost, you know, and now that I'm sober, I mean, I quit smoking weed.
00:08:03.000The only thing I'll do now is mushrooms every once in a while to check in with myself and just kind of make sure that I'm like mushrooms is like taking a nice good hose to your soul and just kind of like you know clean out all the bullshit.
00:09:27.000You know, even if it's just like small doses, just a little something to alleviate anxiety, bring people closer together, make them understand that there's more to life than conflict and bullshit.
00:09:38.000And most of your conflict is bullshit.
00:10:17.000There was a Buddhist temple in a Buddhist temple right near where I was going to school at the time.
00:10:23.000So after school every day, I'd sit with these monks.
00:10:26.000And just the vibe of that is powerful, the chanting, the energy around that.
00:10:32.000The presence, though, that they have, their whole goal, obviously, is to just be purely present.
00:10:39.000And so while that sounds like a cliche, I truly believe that that's an important thing, to let go of the battle of positive and negative, that in the mental space, that's all that exists, is duality.
00:10:57.000Well, to find a true path, you have to avoid being pushed and pulled in a bunch of directions that are totally unnecessary.
00:11:06.000And sometimes you get sort of preoccupied or captivated by the push and the pull of bullshit.
00:11:14.000Well, and there is a manipulation that happens on purpose.
00:11:21.000I have a song called Turn Off the News and Build a Garden.
00:13:42.000I think local communities are really important.
00:13:44.000I think local town meetings, understanding where you're going, and understanding where your neighborhood is going and getting to know your neighbors, because it's really hard to have any hatred when you understand and know your neighbor.
00:15:32.000And trying to, and then, you know, voting for people that will support local agriculture and properly grown food and properly, you know, like sourced food.
00:15:46.000And these things are very important, you know.
00:15:48.000Yeah, that's certainly important for a community if you know exactly where your food's coming from.
00:15:52.000I think we're just so, it's not, you know, in the Bill Hicks days, it was just the news.
00:15:57.000But now I think the real problem that people have today is social media.
00:16:02.000And, you know, I never, I very rarely, if I post things, I just post them and then get out of there.
00:16:10.000And I very rarely read social media anymore.
00:16:13.000And since making that decision to kind of stay away from it, I think occasionally I have to dip in just to see what's, because I'm a comedian.
00:17:09.000And I think that really I'm just like I don't know where I stand on half the issues that are out there because I'm I'm I you know I see a lot of I have to sift through most of the bullshit to find it like so really where it ends up happening is that by the time I get to the voting booth I'm hoping that I'm properly informed.
00:17:30.000Yeah, it's hard to be properly informed because it's hard to know who's telling the truth.
00:18:56.000And so, you know, that's kind of how controlled opposition works to, you know, you just sort of, you know.
00:19:04.000It says Medicare Medicaid Services also announced successfully prevented over $4 billion from being paid in response to false and fraudulent claims and that it suspended or revoked the billing privilege of 205 providers in the month leading up to the takedown civil charges against 20 defendants for $14.2 million in alleged fraud, as well as civil settlements with over 106 defendants totaling at 34.3 million.
00:20:34.000I don't want to waste my day going through all that freaking out about the world.
00:20:37.000I do think it's important to know, but at the same time, what I do know is that there's a lot of marginalized communities, whether it's a class issue or it's a, you know, I just see that there's a lot of people who don't have a lot of money who are suffering.
00:21:35.000I want to know what based on if I get conflicting information, I have to make a decision on which one's going to sway the decisions I make going forward.
00:21:53.000But back in the day, interestingly, I think they had more of an ability to manipulate us back in the day because we only had one or two sources of information.
00:22:55.000Yeah, I think that, you know, I think the only thing that I think I worry about with that is that the pendulum swings so far in either direction in response to certain things.
00:23:07.000in response to perceived censorship in one way, then it becomes...
00:23:24.000And so I think that the censorship just continues to be like, okay, well, it just goes back and forth.
00:23:29.000And so I have a hard time understanding, and that's why I don't really feel like I have an ability to form a proper opinion on a lot of this shit.
00:23:39.000Well, that's an intelligent perspective, because the reality is so many people that have really strong opinions aren't informed.
00:26:07.000And so, he becomes friends with this guy, has dinner at his house, and then the guy gives him, over the course of their friendship, gives him his robe.
00:27:48.000Paul Simon played a show in South Africa just after apartheid.
00:27:56.000When he did the Graceland album, he went down there and he worked with local African musicians and created, in my opinion, one of the greatest albums of all time.
00:28:09.000I mean, with Lady Smith Black Mambazzo doing the vocals on that, Vincent Nguini, the most incredible musicians.
00:28:18.000And at the time, that was a culturally powerful thing because there's a show online.
00:28:47.000But because what it does is it reaches everybody's heart and it cuts through all the bullshit, the mind stuff, you know, and everyone can relate to having their heart broken.
00:28:57.000You know, maybe it happened for some at a young age.
00:29:00.000Maybe it happened, maybe some people had their heart broken at age four to the point where they closed their hearts off nearly completely.
00:29:08.000But even Darth Vader had a little bit.
00:29:12.000Darth Vader, everyone forgets that Darth Vader, at the end of Star Wars, redeemed himself.
00:29:21.000It's the Carl Jung, the archetype, right?
00:29:23.000The dark knight of the soul, and then being able to come through that.
00:29:27.000And like, and really, like, you know, and you can judge.
00:29:33.000You can not want to be around, like, I think Carl Jung actually talks about, like, there are certain people and things that you can't allow to exist because they're dangers to everyone else.
00:29:43.000But at the same time, you don't have to judge their humanity.
00:30:50.000And we have to recognize that your unique situation in life, your unique community, family, life experiences, all the things you've gone through that made you who you are today didn't have to be that way.
00:31:04.000You could have been in the worst circumstances, and there's people that are in the worst circumstances, and they're a product of that.
00:31:27.000I think you need that, unfortunately, too.
00:31:29.000We need to know that that exists in order to grow.
00:31:34.000When people, you know, ask, you know, and I'm a very lucky human.
00:31:40.000So, like, I say all these things with hopefully the right perspective that I am as far as I'm in like the top 1% of the luckiest people, or probably even higher than that, you know, with access to clean water.
00:31:58.000I don't have to worry about when I'm pulled over being shot.
00:32:01.000I don't, you know, there's not, there are a lot of things that I can be very grateful for.
00:32:06.000And so when I make comments about these things, you know, I can only come from my own perspective.
00:33:43.000We other an entire group of humans, they're the other.
00:33:48.000And I think this is tribal society behavior that developed because at one point in time, when you saw someone from another tribe that was invading, they were coming to steal your resources and kill people.
00:34:04.000And again, that also, there's an exception to that in the sense that, like, for example, in Germany, you know, there were clear-cut decisions that people had to make about survival and about, you know, like, I'm sorry, but the Nazis had to go.
00:34:24.000You know, we can't just say that, you know, they're good people.
00:35:15.000Mushrooms were made illegal during the Nixon administration because they wanted to figure out a way to stop the anti-war protests.
00:35:22.000They wanted to figure out a way, they turned everything Schedule I. They took all the psychedelics and lumped them into a Schedule I because they wanted to go after civil rights activists and anti-war activists.
00:35:41.000I mean, I think that, you know, right, because the thing is, is that there are a lot of studies about marijuana now that say, oh, it could be harmful, right?
00:35:51.000But then at the same time, the way that that's harmful and then comparatively to the other things that are legal and allowed to just propagate.
00:38:04.000But the thing is, is that for me, the reward is the high that I get from having discipline.
00:38:11.000And I get a, it's a dopamine hit, you know, and it's just vastly more rewarding than whatever temporary thing I'll get from having a drink.
00:38:23.000I don't know like drinking that much, but smoking weed was cool because it put me into a very creative spot and kind of gave me this surge of inspiration, if you will.
00:38:35.000And there were a lot of ups and downs emotionally.
00:38:38.000I'd get high and I'd get low and I'd get high and I'd get low.
00:38:41.000And now this clarity that I have is just, it's incredible.
00:38:47.000It's just this steady, you know, it's this steady sort of joy that I have, I mean, because I had to face myself too.
00:38:57.000When you get clear, things come up and then you look at them and you're like, and things that maybe you didn't want to look at before.
00:39:05.000Habits that you had or things in your past that you have to forgive yourself for, but you didn't really, they're like floating in the back of your mind as unfinished thoughts.
00:39:14.000And so without it, all of that masking, I was able to sit and, I mean, look, I was able to sit and write this record, which is the most clear album I've ever, you know, I wanted to know who I was throughout the, without all the, you know, I didn't want to chase a six-minute guitar solo.
00:39:38.000I didn't want to chase, I wanted to just figure out who I was stripped away from all that.
00:39:42.000It's funny, there's this guy, Marcus Dowling.
00:39:45.000He's a, he writes for the Tennessean, and I was sitting talking to him in Nashville.
00:39:51.000And he said that when I put, he was ready to listen to my record, and he was about to have a whiskey.
00:39:58.000And he, the first song comes up, and he puts his whiskey down.
00:40:02.000He's like, oh, I don't want to drink for this.
00:40:04.000And I think that music puts you in the state of mind that the artist is in when they recorded it or when they wrote it.
00:40:11.000So it's kind of almost like interesting that he decided to put his drink down when he heard this album, like the first song, because that's where I'm at, you know.
00:40:20.000And so I wonder if there's that feeling of like this kind of like, it's less of a jam-band thing and more of just like straight songs.
00:40:29.000There's probably definitely something to that because I think that's something that happens when someone's on stage performing.
00:40:34.000It's like you let them take over your mind.
00:41:24.000A lot of them, and that's again, that's a thing that I have to get over because I was around so many of them in LA that were fools that I just immediately associate acting with these empty vessels that are just struggling for attention and trying to say the things that they think will get them to the best spot.
00:41:49.000I think that, look, I mean, to become an entertainer, there's a level of self-absorption that you have to sort of accept.
00:42:22.000And for better or worse, not perfect people, but they are who they are.
00:42:27.000And for the most part, I know my dad has an ego, but he has a good relationship with it because the ego is just the representation of who we are to the rest of the world.
00:46:48.000I think you can keep your body covered up to the end of time and never be proud of it, and you will benefit greatly from the struggle of exercise.
00:46:56.000Because I think the struggle of exercise is mental.
00:47:00.000As much as it is physical, there's a dance.
00:47:04.000When I talk to Goggins about it, he's the most bizarre of all cases.
00:48:03.000What was the part of the brain that gets enlarged that Huberman was talking about that gets enlarged when you do things you don't want to do?
00:48:13.000I always forget the name of it, but Jamie will pull it up.
00:48:51.000Doing things you don't want to do can strengthen your brain, particularly the anterior mid-cingulate cortex, which is associated with willpower and tenacity.
00:48:59.000That's incredible, the idea that it actually grows.
00:49:03.000So willpower is not just, it's not like an airy fairy concept.
00:50:06.000But here's the thing, is that it becomes a philosophical question because when you say you have to, you know, there are people who get by life, you know, and they, there is a Tibetan tradition that the monks do where they spend months and they take these little like flute things and they and they have colored sand, right?
00:50:29.000And it takes them months sometimes to create this beautiful, intricate sand art.
00:50:36.000And they chant while they do it, and it's this most incredible thing.
00:50:38.000And at the end, they go, and they blow it all away.
00:50:45.000And it's meant to represent the impermanence of life.
00:50:49.000But then it's meant to also pose the question, why make something so beautiful when it's going to be, when you know it's impermanent?
00:50:58.000And I believe it goes back to the first thing we started talking about today, which is that meaning is everything in life.
00:51:05.000And nothing really in life inherently has any meaning except the meaning we give it, right?
00:51:11.000So you could go, you could go through life as sand on the beach that blows in the wind.
00:51:17.000And it wouldn't really mean much when you blow one way or another.
00:51:25.000But if you choose to give your life meaning and build a sand castle and make it as intricate and beautiful as you can and make it as detailed as possible, knowing that one day it's going to get washed away, the only person that it matters to is you and knowing that you did the best you could at that moment that the wave comes.
00:51:48.000If that's true, they should never let anybody film them making those things.
00:51:53.000They should never let anyone film them making those things because then it becomes permanent.
00:52:28.000But I think it's an interesting question because something that lives in our subjective reality, if you see a video of that happening, and then you grasp the concept of it, and then that makes you consider that concept in yourself, understanding that the meaning is a subjective experience anyways, then now you understand, like, okay, it just causes one to ask the question to themselves.
00:52:55.000And I think that's the purpose that the monks are, you know, they're there as sort of like, in a way, they're teachers, you know.
00:53:02.000So they show you something that then you ask, you know, inside.
00:53:06.000Yeah, so what you were saying was that in response to the idea that everyone should exercise and discipline.
00:53:13.000Yeah, well, but it's like you don't have to do that, but your life will have, you will experience a different sense of meaning.
00:55:15.000You know, so it's like, you know, that's the great paradox of the spiritual self and understanding what that means.
00:55:26.000Well, that becomes readily apparent after you have a psychedelic experience.
00:55:30.000I remember one of my first ones that I had, I realized when I was trying to describe it, like I'm trying to impress people with the way I use my words.
00:56:18.000Lorenzo from Psychedelic Salon, who had been on the podcast before back in the day, he's collected like the greatest assembly of McKenna, Alan Watts, Timothy Lee.
00:56:49.000So it is psychedelic salon.com, and there's Lorenzo.
00:56:55.000And Psychedelic Salon is like this incredible resource of all the McKenna lectures.
00:57:03.000Because it's such a great resource, so many people who were there at like, you know, some talk that he gave in Hawaii at some conference room somewhere recorded it and then they would send that to Lorenzo and then he'd put it online and have it available for everybody.
00:57:18.000And, you know, some amazing insights and conversations.
00:57:24.000He lived not too far from where I live in Maui.
00:57:29.000So I went on a whale watch with him one time.
00:59:57.000I think it'll be, I think it'll be, because even now we're uploaded into the AI system, you know, so like something will survive, you know, something.
01:00:07.000Yeah, well, whatever we are will lead to whatever comes next.
01:00:11.000There's a great episode of Star Trek called The Inner Light.
01:00:43.000Because they're exploring space, obviously, if you don't know Star Trek, they're exploring space and their whole mission is to go where no man has gone before.
01:00:52.000And so they find this probe, and as they're scanning the probe, it zaps Picard, and he goes unconscious, and he wakes up on this world where he remembers the spaceship.
01:01:04.000He remembers where he was, but he's got a wife and a family and kids, and this world is being threatened by an exploding sun.
01:01:12.000And so he's got a lot of scientific knowledge.
01:01:15.000So he, over the next 20 years in this world, he eventually grows old and accepts his fate that he has no idea how he got here, but he's got to live this life now.
01:01:27.000And he starts to love his wife and his kids.
01:01:29.000He starts to try and save this planet from the exploding sun.
01:01:35.000And then as he dies, he wakes up back on the spaceship with only 20 seconds having gone by on the spaceship.
01:01:45.000And the probe had been sent by that civilization.
01:01:50.000They knew they were going to be destroyed, so they uploaded this thing that would let Picard experience what happened to their civilization and tell their story.
01:02:04.000He experienced a lifetime of 40 years or 25, whatever years before he died in the span of 20 seconds and then woke up at the moment of his death in that other life and then was able to now tell the story of this forgotten civilization in space.
01:04:15.000And one of the reasons why I say that is like they found recent, they've recently found structures on Mars that are so obviously man-made that it's almost impossible to deny.
01:04:28.000I showed it to Elon, and he's like, oh, we should go look at it.
01:04:30.000Okay, but here's the thing about like...
01:05:27.000When I looked up remote viewing, for example, and I really looked and did research on it, the studies that were done were kind of discredited about how the effectiveness of those actually were.
01:05:39.000So if you really dive in, there's literature that says that it wasn't really the reason that they, you know, apparently, now this is all like conflicting information.
01:05:53.000I had Hal put off on who was a remote viewer and who was involved in the remote viewer pro the Stargate.
01:07:02.000I just know that when I looked up UFO experiences and this disclosure stuff that's happening lately and I'm a huge, I'm not just a believer.
01:07:17.000I pray that there is someone out there disarming nuclear missiles, especially right now.
01:07:25.000My great hope is that there is someone just trying to not step in, but oversee it to the point where hopefully we can survive to a point of having an interstellar civilization.
01:07:39.000It's the great dream of humanity, right?
01:07:42.000Sure, but we have to be a different civilization than we are now.
01:07:44.000Oh, otherwise we could do the same shit.
01:07:46.000That's the thing is that, and that's what I, I was always, even before Elon was as famous as he is now, when I was like 15, I read his book.
01:07:57.000And the one thing that I, I'm a friend of He read, it was like a book about him, maybe.
01:08:37.000But then if we go somewhere else, we're just going to do the same thing, like you're saying.
01:08:40.000So like all of the resources, in my opinion, should be focused on like, like there's devices that they have invented that can be put in river mouths around the world to filter out pollution and plastics going into the ocean, right?
01:08:58.000And it's like this incredible technology.
01:09:01.000If the budgets were spent towards these innovations, you know, and maybe AI will help it.
01:09:08.000You know, right now AI is kind of a tax on the planet in terms of like, you know, it's not very good for it.
01:09:15.000But maybe the AI technology itself will then invent something that makes itself more efficient for the planet.
01:09:22.000Well, because the energy required for the servers and all of that is so, you know, it drains a lot of resource.
01:09:30.000And so, but what AI may do is help us create an ion battery or something that like that like makes energy give off less, you know, you can have this much more energy with way less heat and way less.
01:09:44.000And so then you can create, you know, instead of having to have giant warehouses full of servers, you can have just, you know, like, I mean, like, it's the same stuff that happened with the computer, where the computer required a giant building when it was first created.
01:10:01.000And now you have computers smaller than a Just to be clear, Elon's position is not that Earth is like, that humans are helpless or hopeless and we have to just leave Earth.
01:12:22.000And then, yes, extinctions, events happen, and then things die out.
01:12:27.000But there has never been a creature on the planet with the ability like we have to take as much resource as we can without replenishing that or balancing that out.
01:12:42.000So we, I think, have a responsibility as humanity to understand how to balance ourselves and harmonize with nature.
01:12:51.000And I think that's where my great hope is, is that we figure out how to find a cyclical arrangement with nature where we, just like photosynthesis, just like plants give us oxygen and then the carbon dioxide we breathe and the plants then sequester.
01:13:14.000Well, our disconnection to nature might be a part of our disconnection to psychedelics.
01:13:19.000That might be one of the reasons why we're disconnected is we're lacking a crucial element that's there to humble the human species.
01:13:32.000And I think that these monsters that were trying to silence the anti-war and the civil rights movement in the 1970s by making those things illegal, they essentially hampered our development, but not all of it, right?
01:13:47.000So our technological development continued, but our spiritual development ceased.
01:13:51.000Yeah, and intellect devoid of wisdom is dangerous.
01:14:08.000Everyone justifies their behavior when they think they're doing good.
01:14:13.000I mean, with the exception of, like I said, a few sociopathic, completely devoid of empathy individuals.
01:14:21.000But for the most part, everyone justifies their behavior for themselves.
01:14:28.000They judge themselves and then they somehow make it, well, because I'm doing this, because I'm doing this, I can sleep at night.
01:14:36.000And so they let themselves sleep at night.
01:14:38.000And a lot of times they should be looking at themselves and changing, but they don't.
01:14:44.000So that's why my policy is I try to just always look at myself and see, is this actually beneficial for not just me, but for the people around me?
01:14:54.000And music has been one of the great things in life that is a win-win.
01:15:56.000Because he's the only one that I can listen to where I go, yeah, yeah, this is like a Stevie Ray version of Voodoo Child.
01:16:02.000Well, and he was a disciple of Hendrix.
01:16:06.000He really sat and really lived that life.
01:16:10.000And the thing that I've learned that was the best lesson I learned, it goes back to why I am sober now and where I'm at, is because I think the greatest lie I ever believed for so long, I did 15 years on the road, 250 shows a year.
01:16:26.000And I told myself I had to live like my heroes in order to be, you know, and I think that's what, it didn't kill Stevie Ray, but it derailed him for a long time before he got sober.
01:16:41.000Stevie Ray died in a tragic accident, obviously.
01:16:49.000Yeah, I was driving limousines for this limousine company in Boston, and he was supposed to take a limousine, but he wouldn't take limousines.
01:18:22.000Some of the best conversations I've ever had have been in like Ubers or Lyfts or whatever, just sitting and chatting about where they're from and how they got there.
01:18:33.000And there's a lot of incredible stories that perseverance.
01:18:58.000You know, there's something like, there's something that just makes people, I think, really drop their defenses when you submit yourself with humility to learn their language.
01:20:24.000You got to wonder, like, what caused them to develop that kind of language, you know?
01:20:28.000It's like they're all developing it in a vacuum, right?
01:20:32.000Because they're all the people in that area, in that community, generation after generation after generation, all agree to communicate in this certain way.
01:20:58.000But I remember me like learning Italian in college, and it was so different than the way that they were speaking Italian.
01:21:08.000Well, and I think, I'm not certain, but Dean Martin had a specific, and it may have been Sicilian or maybe a specific Northern Italian or Napoli, maybe it's certainly.
01:21:22.000But the way that he would sing Domenico Modugno's song, you know, volare tenso que un sonio cosino ne toni ma pio.
01:26:51.000But it's just weird, you know, to just accept that they're human beings because you see them on television, you see them in all these things, and you grow to realize, like, oh, we're all just human beings.
01:27:03.000And that's part of the lesson of it is to meet someone who you don't think is just a human being.
01:27:08.000And you realize, like, oh, all of us are human beings.
01:27:13.000I mean, and when I think that I was able to understand fame and its trappings at a young age, and that's something I'm also very grateful for, that I, you know, I was able to see, like, okay, a lot of dad's friends, a lot of the people that I grew up around, didn't make it very long because they got into this or they got into that.
01:27:35.000And I see it all happening a lot to a lot of young people that are unable to handle fame.
01:27:42.000And fame is not inherently a good thing.
01:27:45.000I think it's actually probably a net negative, although it's a necessary thing if you want your art to get out to as many people as possible or if you want to create a living.
01:27:54.000Like, I don't depend on my parents, so I want my music to get out there so that I'll have a career when I'm 90.
01:28:00.000I want to be playing, you know, I don't want to, I don't, I mean, eventually I have to keep making a living, you know.
01:28:07.000I have to, you think there's a part of you that, you know, part of the entertainment world where you have to make sure, you have to put yourself out there.
01:28:17.000And that's kind of despite knowing that when you put yourself out there, then all the, you know, that you get unwanted attention too.
01:28:26.000I think one of the worst things about it is the scammers on the internet.
01:28:30.000There's so many scammers now on Instagram and Facebook and everyone, and they prey on elderly people.
01:28:43.000And they go out there, and these people are, I think they're the lowest form on this planet, really.
01:28:50.000Because these are people that have dementia issues.
01:28:53.000They have, you know, they're elderly, you know, and they prey on that demographic specifically because they know that they're more gullible and don't understand technology.
01:29:05.000And they think that I'm talking to them and they'll give, in some cases, thousands and thousands of dollars of their own savings in my name.
01:29:13.000And that has almost made me get off the internet many times.
01:29:17.000But even so, what happens when I get off is then they just run rampant.
01:29:22.000You know, they create new accounts and then the people that are, you know, sort of, and they don't want to believe it's not me.
01:29:41.000And there's this guy who's this lonely man who's in his 60s and he had this girlfriend that he was communicating with in Europe that was non-existent.
01:29:51.000And he flew over there twice to meet her and every time she conveniently couldn't meet him.
01:30:17.000I played a show with Eric Church at Chiefs, and I had a bunch of friends there and everything.
01:30:21.000And we had someone show up at the door saying that they had been put on the list by me, that I was in a relationship with that person.
01:30:31.000You said they weren't just schizophrenic?
01:30:33.000Well, these people are, in some cases, schizophrenic, or they have Alzheimer's or dementia or memory issues or whatever.
01:30:40.000But a lot of times they're just being catfished, you know, or just like, you know, like, I mean, I've seen, there is that show Catfish that was on TV not too long ago.
01:30:51.000I don't know if it's still around, but like these are otherwise sort of normal people that get tricked into believing they're in a relationship and they have a girlfriend and they're online and they get to the place.
01:31:00.000And these are like sometimes younger people that even get – For sure.
01:31:11.000yeah, well, it's just the perils of dealing with this non-material world, yeah, dealing with the internet world.
01:31:19.000I mean, and I'm sure it happened in some ways back in the day, you know, with letters and things like that.
01:32:42.000Yeah, and trying to diminish you as a person.
01:32:45.000And then you meet someone who's not like that, and you're like, oh, if I didn't know someone who sucked, maybe I wouldn't appreciate this person.
01:33:54.000I think you need shitty people so that you appreciate good people.
01:33:57.000And I think when you meet someone who's gaslighty and someone who tries to ruin your life, those people exist so that you can appreciate people that aren't like that.
01:35:09.000I feel like I think the people, and I've read this, that the people who actually sort of drink and become happy or the life of the party or whatever are the ones who are more likely to become addicted, obviously.
01:35:24.000You know, because there are two types of people that when they drink, like for me, when I drink, it kind of makes me think more and I get kind of depressed and I get kind of down.
01:36:59.000And what's fascinating to me is I watch all these people try to dismiss it, and all these people try to say, you know, it's foolish and silly.
01:37:06.000The one thing that those people all have in common, the dismissers, is they all lack discipline.
01:37:12.000They all are fighting it intellectually.
01:37:14.000They're fighting whatever that fucking mid-cingulate cortex.
01:39:24.000This makes sense in our sedentary, weird world where people are just sitting and staring at a screen all day and, you know, and not doing things.
01:39:34.000So you're not, you don't have, you don't have meaning, right?
01:40:30.000That's why I try not to make concrete statements unless I know at least where I err on is like, okay, this is the compassionate thing to support or do.
01:40:43.000I have a charity that I work with called Music Heals International.
01:40:48.000And it's a music school in Haiti, in Venezuela, in India.
01:41:14.000And we were discussing that it's almost more powerful to be at a hospital and go and talk to the kids that you're supporting in this hospital rather than to donate to that hospital.
01:41:29.000I think there's just something so spiritually significant about being with the people that you're helping and the joy in that being reciprocated and that feeling of being at the, you know, just giving is joy, you know, ultimately.
01:44:42.000I want to be giving and taking with the land.
01:44:44.000And I want to be able to understand the planet that I live on by working with the earth and working with, and that community in Maui there is a really special place.
01:44:56.000Well, I think Hawaii in general is a very special place because it's surrounded by ocean.
01:45:01.000And I think there's something about the ocean that gives you humility.
01:45:05.000And it lets you understand that you're a part of nature.
01:45:27.000Other than, you know, yeah, I mean, anywhere there's nature, but I really like, being in the mountains of Montana and being on Hawaii, there's only a few places in life that I actually am sad when I leave.
01:46:03.000And I hear like when I was 11, I wrote this song called You Were It.
01:46:12.000And I was on the school bus and I started hearing this song in my head.
01:46:16.000And I realized that it hadn't been written yet.
01:46:19.000It was something that was coming from, I guess, my own experiences, but also filtered through somewhere else.
01:46:26.000It felt like it came from somewhere, like it was a download.
01:46:30.000And I think that I look at writing as if there's a beautiful muse sitting there, and she's giving me these gifts every once in a while, and that she sends them to me.
01:46:44.000And if I'm open and clear and not in my own way, and I'm, you know, if I get like something that hits me, like a clever line, like there's a song I have called Find Yourself, and I hope you find yourself before I find somebody else to be my love.
01:46:59.000And I start singing that in my head, and I start like, oh, the melody comes, and it's a gift.
01:47:05.000And wherever I'm at, if I got one right now, I'd have to write it down while we were talking.
01:47:37.000It's like these ideas are out there, but you're so in your own head and so worried about yourself and your own bullshit that sometimes like you block them.
01:48:01.000I think a lot of people get caught up in like, well, you know, like this latest record, you know, people, like, I didn't want to be too flowery with it.
01:48:11.000I wanted to write simply what came to me.
01:48:34.000I'm trying to be as simple as I can be in terms of just only putting out what comes to me at the moment.
01:48:41.000And sometimes people aren't going to like it because they're used to me rocking and jamming and doing all that or they're used to me doing that.
01:49:18.000And I prefer, I mean, when I listen to my heroes, you know, Hank Williams, Dad, Merle Haggard, Stevie Ray and Jimmy are, look, what came to Jimmy was an explosion of color and sound.
01:49:35.000I mean, when I hear his music, I see colors that are like I can't even describe in real life.
01:49:41.000It might have something to do with the psychedelics that I also took.
01:49:44.000But at the same time, I think that other people— And that's the thing, is that he, it goes back to what we're saying, like the state of mind that he was in.
01:50:23.000So every now and then you check them out.
01:50:24.000A couple hundred songs in there, more probably now, because I write them all the time, you know.
01:50:28.000And, yeah, it's like, it's just kind of, it just looks like...
01:50:33.000sometimes it's like, God, I wrote another one, it's going to go there.
01:50:36.000And then that one shoots to the top of the list of the one you're interested in because you just wrote it.
01:50:40.000And then something that might be really great just gets kind of pushed down.
01:50:45.000And then like, so what really, you really have to do is each project that comes up, you have to say, what am I trying to get across right now?
01:50:54.000And it's not about whether a song is better or worse.
01:50:56.000It's about what am I trying to say and how do I present that?
01:51:01.000And so I have to collect 10 or 12 or 14 songs that kind of fit in a narrative that you're trying to put out there.
01:51:11.000And do you write pen to paper or do you write on a computer?
01:51:15.000Like, how do you do it for the most part?
01:51:57.000But when you make a voice note, it can transcribe it now.
01:52:01.000So like what I'll do is I'll record sets.
01:52:05.000And sometimes we do this show at the Comedy Mothership called Bottom of the Barrel where you have like a whiskey barrel and inside is all suggestions from the audience.
01:52:13.000You just put your hand in there and pick out a piece of paper and pull it out.
01:52:37.000I didn't realize that was a feature, and I'm going to start using it.
01:52:40.000Yeah, it's pretty dope because you can just talk and it'll transcribe it, and then you can copy and paste that transcription into voice note or into notes.
01:52:54.000So if you go to just when you're in notes on an iPhone, you can actually make a voice memo, voice note from that, and it'll transcribe that for you.
01:53:03.000When you're doing a set, do you have people put their phones away?
01:54:04.000It depends on what type of song it is, too.
01:54:06.000If it's a song that requires focus on the lyrics, you know, then sometimes it feels weird because a lot of people, when they listen to music, they don't hear a lot of lyrics.
01:54:18.000It takes a certain type of listener to listen to lyrics and be able to internalize them.
01:54:23.000A lot of people take the song as a whole and the melody and they hear it and they're like, oh, this song makes me feel good.
01:54:29.000And then later on, if they like the song, they'll go in and listen to the lyrics.
01:54:32.000I've found a lot of people listen to music that way.
01:54:34.000And then it takes them a while to actually hear what, you know, unless it's a stripped down me and a guitar with no band around.
01:54:45.000And then it forces the listener to then listen to the words, you know, which I actually, I really like doing that.
01:54:52.000Sometimes I like just playing just me because then there's no distraction around and it's sort of just me, a guitar, and the words that I'm saying.
01:55:01.000And I think they have more impact sometimes that way.
01:55:33.000And Stephen Wilson Jr., not only is he a great writer, he used to be a food scientist.
01:55:38.000So he was a food scientist and he wrote songs kind of as a hobby on the side, but he was responsible for what percentage of what sort of goes into making dog food and things like that.
01:58:47.000I mean, you have to look at, I mean, there's a lot of exercise scientists that I'm sure would have arguments one way or the other, which is interesting.
01:58:59.000And it also depends on what kind of exercise you're doing.
01:59:02.000You know, are you a weightlifter or are you a marathon runner?
01:59:05.000You know, because we had Courtney Dowalter on the podcast once, and she does ultra marathons.
01:59:10.000And, you know, my friend Cam Haynes, who also does ultra marathons, says she's one of the toughest human beings he's ever met in his fucking life and she exists on sugar.
01:59:24.000Like it's not, she's not like formed in a lab.
01:59:29.000Like whatever willpower that she has that allows her to, you know, she's beaten people where she does like these 250 mile runs where the second place person is like eight hours behind her.
02:01:25.000It's like, you know, like if someone wants to work out tomorrow and they never worked out, like I've done this with a lot of my comedian friends.
02:04:12.000And apparently, you know, they would also run, which was interesting, they would run happily.
02:04:21.000They would have smiles on their faces and they'd be light.
02:04:23.000And they said that that helped them sort of lightly grace themselves through the mindset that they had when they ran helped them to outperform everyone else.
02:04:32.000Well, they're probably doing it all the time.
02:04:35.000In order to be able to run that much, again, you're building.
02:04:38.000Slowly but surely building on top of what you had before.
02:04:44.000It's like if someone wants to just get out today and run a marathon, don't fucking do it.
02:04:48.000You're going to blow your ankles apart.
02:06:16.000Well, it's like you can get a knee replacement now, right?
02:06:19.000And you'll be in significantly less pain.
02:06:21.000But once science comes around, well, they're getting closer and closer every day to be able to completely regenerate cartilage, meniscus, and all that tissue that you have inside your knee that keeps it healthy.
02:06:34.000If you decide that you want to get a knee replacement, that kind of stops all that because now you have an artificial knee and you can't regrow a knee once you've cut your knee out.
02:07:29.000You know what I did, which I loved, is that really helped me was wherever I would walk, just in general, I would just do a little like jog instead of walking somewhere.
02:09:28.000He thinks that they're not visiting from somewhere else, that they've always been here, and that there's some sort of spiritual aspect to like the UFO encounter, UAP phenomenon.
02:10:03.000There's no other stuff that you're in that thing that's fantastical.
02:10:07.000Everything else is like an accurate representation of life at that time, except for these people that are in these flying things in the sky.
02:10:58.000Ryan Graves, he's another fighter pilot, and that was off the East Coast.
02:11:03.000So the Nimitz is off the coast of San Diego.
02:11:05.000But off the East Coast, they upgraded their sensors in 2014 on the fighter jets and then immediately started encountering these things that defied known physics that were in the sky.
02:11:17.000And these guys had these encounters with these things that were like a cube inside of a sphere that's like motionless at 120 knot winds and no heat signature moving through the sky.
02:11:30.000They don't know what the fuck they are.
02:11:32.000What do you say to the theory of the possibility that that is sort of black ops?
02:11:39.000Like the idea that the SR-71, I think, the Blackbird, there's a company called Skunkworks, right?
02:11:51.000And they were responsible for the declassification of that aircraft.
02:11:56.000And then I think the F-111 or the stealth bombers.
02:12:02.000But since then, and that was like 25 years ago or more, there have not been any more declassifications.
02:12:09.000I just am curious as to what in 25 years, based on the technology that we've been able to see that makes it to the modern society, how much is held back and what we don't see.
02:12:32.000I'm not asking myself whether I actually believe that it's almost unlikely that we have that technology, because I feel like it would just take so much more than we may be capable of to cover it up.
02:14:34.000But then you go back to the 1960s, if they're really working on anti-gravity technology back then, it's possible that they could have created a drone.
02:14:43.000The thing is, like, could a human being survive inside of those things at those extreme speeds?
02:14:48.000Well, the question is, like, what are they experiencing in that?
02:14:52.000Because if it's a gravity device, if it's moving, if it's manipulating gravity, so it might not have g-forces at all.
02:15:01.000It might be operating in a completely different paradigm.
02:15:04.000Yeah, well, there may be sort of just, you know, trillions of alternate sort of, you know, momentum shifts in the outside protective layer that balance out whatever's happening on the inside to the point where, you know, they're using just crazy technology.
02:15:23.000That's also why the argument is that they're blurry.
02:15:26.000Like, so a lot of the photographs of these things are blurry.
02:15:28.000It might be because they're actually existing in some sort of a gravity void.
02:15:42.000When I was in Maui, twice I've seen something that I could not explain.
02:15:49.000The one time I looked up and about nine of us were hanging out and we all looked up at the same time to see an orange orb.
02:15:58.000And it was probably, it looked like it was 100 yards away, maybe 200, just floating, kind of observing.
02:16:05.000And then I swear it seemed like as soon as enough people saw it, it went whoosh, and then it went whoosh, and it moved like nothing else I thought possible at the time.
02:16:43.000well, a lot of them happen near the ocean, too, which is interesting.
02:16:47.000And another one, I was out on Lanai, and we were hanging out with some friends, and we were laying down on the lawn, and when you're out in Lanai on the backside of Lanai, there's no light pollution at all.
02:16:57.000And so you have just this big, giant fishbowl of stars, and it's the most incredible.
02:17:02.000It's like you're sitting in a spaceship.
02:17:06.000And you feel that you're on spaceship Earth at the time, you know, like you are on that rock hurtling through space at that point.
02:17:13.000And I saw this, we all, it scared the girls.
02:17:16.000We all saw this pulsing colored thing go from one side of the horizon to the other, but in a very, like, it was like pulsing different colors, and it was like really interesting.
02:17:29.000And so, you know, who knows what that could have been, but it was quite interesting.
02:17:33.000Well, the vast majority of the ocean floor is unexplored.
02:17:38.000And so this is the theory is that if you were going to set up a base here to observe human beings, if you came from somewhere else, you would probably do it in the ocean, especially if you have the kind of technology that allowed them to travel here from other star systems would also allow them to not be intimidated whatsoever.
02:18:34.000This is like part of Jacques Valley's research, too, in one of his books that was really fascinating was this woman observed this like egg-shaped thing.
02:18:42.000And when it took off, it went through the trees.
02:19:08.000You know, where you're just like warping space and time around a centralized location.
02:19:14.000You sort of have to be, you know, use sort of the, you know, these different sort of exotic forms of matter and having an understanding of exotic matter, which we're now just starting to understand that there are these exotic matter types that, you know, that work in these weird ways.
02:19:33.000But as we, if you read about it now, the only information available is that we're only cracking the surface of the understanding of these types of matter and hundreds of thousands of years away from understanding that.
02:19:46.000But I mean, you know, that's that old saying that any technology that's sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic.
02:19:56.000But yeah, I mean, if you're looking at something from a thousand years from now, it would seem like magic.
02:20:03.000I mean, if we continue, we don't blow ourselves up and science and AI continue to figure out more compelling uses of universal energy, like whatever background energy that we have.
02:20:20.000Who knows what human beings will be capable of?
02:20:22.000So you've got to imagine if something's visiting us from somewhere else, especially if they have artificial superintelligence.
02:20:31.000If they've traversed this journey that we're on, if they've gotten to the point where whatever we're currently investigating, whatever they're working on right now in terms of super intelligent AI, what if they've gone through that and they're a thousand years more advanced?
02:20:48.000All that stuff would be probably simple for them to be able to go through the water, to have these trans-medium crafts that are capable of flying in the air, through the water.
02:20:58.000Well, the interesting question for ourselves is how do we get to a place as a society to where we can trust in our science, we can trust to say that we trust it enough to fund it.
02:21:38.000And so understanding and trusting and figuring out how to restore faith in certain institutions that we have because we need them to survive and to keep going.
02:21:51.000So it's like not tearing down the airplane while it's falling.
02:21:56.000You have to repair the airplane from inside and then keep it flying if you can.
02:22:01.000So is there a way to write the ship while we're in it?
02:22:05.000I think the problem is a lot of this stuff is military funding.
02:22:10.000So a lot of the applications for any sort of super advanced technology is going to be weapon systems.
02:22:16.000And that's what everybody's terrified of.
02:22:18.000What they're terrified of is that you're going to develop more efficient ways to kill people.
02:22:24.000And that's really the only way these things get funded.
02:22:30.000I'm like, how do we switch it so that we can have people in power that really are looking out for the future of humanity and then have people that actually want that?
02:22:43.000Because some people are going to have to take sacrifices for that.
02:22:50.000And I mean, people high up are going to have to say, well, I'm going to have to get paid a little less because this, you know.