Comedian Russell Russell Peters returns to America after a three-year absence. He talks about his return to his home city of Los Angeles, how he s dealing with homelessness, and what it s like to live with a homeless person.
00:01:17.000For example, Gower Street, the Gower Street Bridge.
00:01:20.000There would always be sort of like a little tented community there.
00:01:23.000That seems to have been moved along and maybe a perfect metaphor for that problem, you know, moving them rather than you feel like those homeless people are still somewhere rather than that problem has found a resolution.
00:01:36.000No one really has a tangible resolution.
00:01:38.000I haven't heard one resolution that's like, okay, that we could put our fingers on.
00:01:43.000Do you know that in our country during the pandemic, in London especially, but also in other cities, they temporarily housed homeless people as one of the pandemic measures.
00:01:52.000Like we can't have people on the streets.
00:02:08.000Do you think it was just too much time and effort to manage those people?
00:02:12.000Like they're shooting up in the hotels and causing ruckus.
00:02:17.000I mean, I wonder what was the reason for putting them back on the street?
00:02:20.000Because it seemed like if they solved that, they should be like, oh, well, you know, let's just keep dedicating these resources to keep these people housed.
00:02:27.000I feel like that the anomaly was the housing rather than the ejecting.
00:02:31.000I feel like that they, when it was convenient and suitable, they could find a solution to homelessness that was an economic one.
00:02:39.000And then when it wasn't necessary anymore, they just pulled the rug out from under it.
00:02:44.000But I'm sure, like, yeah, that comes with complexity.
00:02:46.000When I was first working in media, when I was still a using drug addict myself, I did these things that I considered to be like psychological jackass.
00:02:54.000You know, that was a big show at that time, those amazing guys doing those incredible stunts.
00:02:58.000And I was like, well, what if you did the psychological version of that?
00:03:01.000So I had like a boxing match with my dad.
00:03:03.000I had a homeless guy move in my house.
00:03:11.000All of these things were the periphery of my limits as a drug using young man, just trying to make a way my way in media.
00:03:20.000When I had that homeless guy come live in my house with me, James was his name, God rest his soul, like that.
00:03:25.000It was interesting to encounter that, you know, there's a reason.
00:03:29.000Of course, I fully accept and appreciate that that could happen to any of us, that any of us with a few wrong choices could end up destitute and lost without the kind of support and good fortune I've had in various areas in my life.
00:03:39.000I'm sure it could have happened to me.
00:03:42.000But there was a sort of like a gravity pulling him back out into the street.
00:03:46.000You know, there's a gravity pulling it.
00:03:48.000It was like he couldn't deal with being in a house.
00:03:52.000Admittedly, these were not organic conditions.
00:03:54.000There was like cameras around and stuff.
00:03:55.000It was not a high, it was not a high-budget production.
00:03:58.000Really lo-fi stuff on a lo-fi digital channel.
00:04:01.000But being around that guy, he was like a heroin user.
00:04:04.000I was using heroin with him at that time.
00:04:06.000The sort of peak of the show was when I got into, we had a bath together.
00:04:10.000That was like, I thought, what's the most intimate thing you could do with a person to sort of overcome the idea that homeless people are somehow dirty or different or you know, like they should be excluded from society?
00:04:41.000Yeah, so like, of course, that problem of vagrancy and destitution, it's a difficult one to tackle.
00:04:47.000It makes me think that the culture is laid upon the planet.
00:04:50.000Like all culture, all civilization is laid upon the planet, laid upon Gaia, laid upon the earth.
00:04:55.000Like, you know, when you have people on here like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson that talk about like the potential for like these seismic events and cataclysmic events that have reset civilization, it makes you recognize that all of our reference points other than biological and cosmological are cultural reference points and therefore temporal.
00:05:15.000And so a person living in a tent in the street is in a sense living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in contemporary America or living a post-apocalyptic lifestyle in contemporary America.
00:05:26.000It makes me think sometimes, Joe, maybe the apocalypse is not a forthcoming event.
00:05:30.000Maybe the apocalypse has already happened.
00:05:33.000Maybe we're living in the sort of the already its gentle threads are encroaching upon apparent civilization.
00:05:40.000You know, when you're in comfortable, defined and designed spaces, you feel like everything's okay.
00:06:11.000It's not like right here in the studio, but it's in the Congo.
00:06:14.000Like if you go to a cobalt mine in the Congo and you see a 19-year-old woman with a baby on her back mining for cobalt and inhaling toxic fumes, you're like, okay, well, that's the apocalypse.
00:07:12.000It's inspiring that a person is that selfless and can make that sort of a commitment and risk their life and go to a very dangerous place and expose this because he's a real journalist, like a real boots on the ground journalist that wants to show the world some things that are being hidden from them because the people that are making enormous amounts of money from this that could fix it don't want to.
00:07:40.000They want to profit off of it at the exact level they're profiting off of it now, which means paying people a couple cents an hour or whatever they pay them.
00:08:02.000That that can't get any worse or lower.
00:08:04.000And then even if that was, if you imagine, well, what would justify that?
00:08:07.000It could only be if we were all on ventilators that were sustaining life in the West.
00:08:11.000Even then, it would be morally dubious.
00:08:13.000But the idea that it is for some trinket in terms of our phone that's ultimately a facilitator of ongoing commerce and communication at a level that's not sustainable.
00:08:22.000And I feel like, you know, that when we talk about what are the ideologies that drive us, the ideology of progress, this is why I have sometimes am skeptical, not about technology, the mastery and the geniuses that work in that field, but how technology and science as a subset of our economic ideology can create exactly the conditions that you're describing and that that journalist has exposed.
00:08:46.000That if your ideology permits that, then what kind of ideology is that?
00:08:51.000What kind of unconsciousness are we living in?
00:08:55.000And all of the discourse around like, you know, how we treat one another as individuals and progressivism culturally in domestic territories, hey, people should be allowed to do this and that.
00:09:19.000Well, we have in some areas of our life for sure.
00:09:24.000You know, hopefully people haven't done that in their interpersonal, intimate relationships, but we certainly have in the way we communicate with others.
00:09:32.000We've certainly accepted very bizarre ways of communicating online.
00:09:36.000And sometimes that bleeds out into real life, like where someone talks to people in the real world as if they're on Twitter and they get bashed.
00:09:46.000I think it's a very strange time where I don't think people have a lot of faith right now in institutions.
00:09:56.000And I don't think they have a lot of faith in authority.
00:10:00.000I don't think they really believe that there is someone who is wiser than them that has a grand plan that's logical, that's workable, where they're looking out for all of us.
00:10:14.000So I think there's like a feeling of chaos that exists today that I don't think has ever existed in my life like this before.
00:10:20.000Even back during the Bush administration when everybody thought Bush was a moron, they still thought this is a good cabinet and they're following all the checks and balances, even though they're probably extracting too much money and there's probably a lot of cronyism and a lot of undercover deals and a lot of like no-bid contracts with Halliburton and that kind of nonsense.
00:10:43.000He still thought they have things pretty under control.
00:11:07.000And with that era of the Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, if you're like, oh, these are the Death Star bods.
00:11:15.000What's happening is there's this risen up military industrial complex, Rand Foundation ideologues from the Republican right who were the sanctioned baddies back in those days, are trying to profit from the colonization of the Middle East.
00:11:32.000But for where I'm coming from, it was somehow recognizable.
00:11:35.000And a million people went on a march to prevent that war taking place because they knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, which we now know to be the truth.
00:11:42.000And as you say, now the figures that are in that place are sort of posing as the good guys, like affable and navuncular presidents and sort of friendly people of like, you know, across the identitarian spectrum that's meant to feel inclusive and powerful.
00:11:57.000Yeah, they're wrapping themselves up with progressive identity politics and then promoting a war.
00:12:03.000Yes, at the same time, it's very wild.
00:12:05.000Yeah, it feels like a mask and a veil.
00:12:08.000Like, this is what's interesting for me is as we navigate this new and emergent space of being able to present counter-narratives and continually, like all of us now, have like experienced, oh, you're a right-wing conspiracy theorist, you've joined the alt-right, you're a gateway to this, the dark, all of that language that grows up around it.
00:12:26.000Like, and I've heard you speak about this obviously a lot, but the truth is that who isn't sympathetic?
00:12:32.000Anyone that's got a family or loves someone is simperfected the idea that people are going to have various types of identity around culture and religious expression and racial expression.
00:12:40.000And this is a conversation that the whole culture has to be involved in together.
00:12:44.000My issue is, I don't think they believe in that stuff.
00:12:48.000I don't think that they are creating an agenda to advance the interests of vulnerable people.
00:12:52.000I think they are using it as a distraction and a veil in order to carry on with the same kind of corporate and financial interests that have always determined what the establishment is.
00:13:02.000And if there's one thing we can point to in our lifetime, it's that the liberal establishment has become co-opted by the same forces that traditionally we regarded the right to have been co-opted by military, industrial complex, financial industry.
00:13:15.000And there's now, like, there's palpable evidence for that.
00:13:17.000And in order to not acknowledge that that transition's taken place, they're able to keep the cultural conversation going.
00:13:23.000We care about your right to express yourself and your identity.
00:13:27.000That's a way of not acknowledging we're just the same.
00:13:30.000And now when there's that war, you know, like Jimmy Dore and all those guys did that anti-war march in Washington or whatever, it's like 5,000 people go.
00:13:38.000Now, I don't know if that's because of the last few years and what the pandemic's done to people accumulating and gathering crowds or whether people have lost their belief and faith that people can have any impact on politics anymore.
00:13:50.000There's just now this immersive sense of apathy, this, as you say, loss of trust in institutions and authority.
00:13:57.000But something extraordinary has happened when people that say that we're the peace and love party are the party that are advocating for war won't include some of the complex conditions that have led to this current crisis, which this clearly a case for like, you know, NATO's infringement on Russian territory, the 2014 coup, and I'm not telling you anything you don't know, but like it's extraordinary that those conversations don't happen.
00:14:21.000It's like actually like that post-Trump and post-pandemic, everything sort of enters into that template.
00:14:27.000There are certain things you're not allowed to say now.
00:14:28.000If you sort of say, were Russia in any way provoked, is there any legitimacy to their military actions from their perspective?
00:14:38.000That's the same as saying, oh, I don't think you should take certain medications or maybe masks aren't necessary.
00:14:44.000And people aren't, it doesn't seem that the culture is learning.
00:14:48.000It doesn't seem that as the evidence is evolving, that people are saying, oh, wow, look, the stuff you were being told two years ago now, the things you couldn't say online two or three years ago, now there's evidence for that.
00:14:59.000In fact, I've bought documentation in case the conversation went in this direction, Joe, in my new position as a legitimate investigative journalist.
00:15:06.000I've got actual papers that I can show you from conspiracy to fact.
00:15:19.000Even though legitimate biologists, like when I had Brett Weinstein on my podcast in April of 2020, he was saying back then, there's very clear evidence that this has come from a lab.
00:15:31.000And he explained it as a biologist who worked on coronaviruses from bats.
00:15:38.000Like that's literally his expertise, his area of expertise.
00:15:41.000And so he had a deep knowledge of this.
00:15:44.000And when he was describing it, people were furious at him.
00:15:47.000They were demonetizing his YouTube videos and going after him.
00:15:51.000And all these progressive people on the left was like, you're falling into this whole alt-right Trump this and that.
00:15:58.000And they weren't even paying attention to an actual biologist who actually understands and has studied viruses.
00:16:04.000And he's saying this has all the indications of a lab-created virus that we would work on.
00:16:09.000All of those conversations you were having, like Malone and McCullough and Weinstein, when you actually listen to what they're saying, they're talking from a biological perspective.
00:16:20.000They're not saying, I believe in this, and this is how we should organize culture, and these are the hierarchies that should be in place.
00:16:24.000So it was extraordinary that what they were met with was politically and ideologically driven.
00:16:31.000Like at the beginning of it, it seemed like there was such an appetite to frame everything Trump was doing as ridiculous that, you know, like they sort of highlight and framed Fauci saying that I think Trump said it could have come from a lab and Fauci said that's ridiculous and it's implausible.
00:16:47.000But like, you know, like you said, Weinstein's like, oh, no, you can't have that evolutionary step without the intervention of engineering.
00:16:56.000Have you read The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert Kennedy Jr.?
00:17:31.000It's a very rare side effect, but one of the side effects of the flu shot is people develop some sort of problem with their vocal cords.
00:17:38.000These characters that have become so maligned and marginalized, even in my lifetime where I still worked in mainstream media, people like Alex Jones or David Icke, they were like even people that were skeptical about them or even people that ridiculed them didn't try to posit them as dangerous.
00:17:59.000And the same I'm assuming with Robert Kennedy.
00:18:02.000Well the David Icke one, they always made fun of him for lizard people because he always would say that there's shapeshifters and they're lizards and there was no evidence.
00:18:12.000And then in the beginning of the pandemic, he was trying to connect COVID with 5G.
00:18:19.000There was a lot of weird, like he's got some squirrely ones.
00:18:23.000Believe it or not, like it's hard to say to the general public, Alex Jones is way more reliable than David Icke, but he's way more reliable than David Icke.
00:18:33.000Alex made a tremendous mistake with Sandy Hook, and he did that in a time of his life where he's experiencing a psychotic break.
00:18:41.000He was drinking a lot and he was having a mental breakdown.
00:18:46.000And he really believed that everything was a conspiracy and that the government is essentially run by these evil demons who are trying to depopulate America and ruin people.
00:18:56.000And he thought they were trying to take away people's guns.
00:18:59.000And he was convinced that someone had convinced him.
00:19:03.000I don't know how he, I don't know what documentaries or what videos he saw, but he was convinced that they were using crisis actors and that they were orchestrating a false flag.
00:19:35.000There's an island where they fly famous rich scientists and politicians and they compromise them with underage girls and get it on film so they could use it against them.
00:20:22.000And in China, the social credit score system is 100% real and implemented.
00:20:27.000I wonder what our obligation is as people that participate in this conversation to ensure that there is a distinction made between the empirical facts that are discussed and then you in particular with your rather unique cultural space, the sort of joy of speculation.
00:20:47.000Because when you think about some of the stuff that Alex Jones has said and putting aside Sandy Hook and that acknowledged difficulty and transgression, like that some of it's as rhetoric is amazing.
00:20:58.000Like that they, you know, yes, there are sort of centralized systems of corruption that bypass democracy.
00:21:05.000And ultimately, there is an agenda that can bypass administrative change.
00:21:10.000Policies that come out under the Republicans are pursued by the Democrats.
00:21:14.000And then it's the military-industrial complex are able through lobbying and through their overt and covert connections to government, able to dictate foreign policy, at least influence foreign policy.
00:21:27.000All of these things you can sort of demonstrate financially.
00:21:31.000But when you start to describe it in terms of demons and reptiles, the kind of language that like even 500 years ago was the ordinary way that, you know, he's a preacher, isn't he, Alex Jones?
00:21:41.000He's somewhere between a shaman and a preacher.
00:22:03.000Now, of course, like when you start talking about, well, UFOs until very recently, or lizard people or shapeshifters, you're entering into a territory that makes it easy for you to be ridiculed, makes it easy for you to be taken down.
00:22:15.000Now, like, you know, so the times that they are accurate or correct, you know, like even because if you think of the way that you were framed around the pandemic period, it's like, I has far-right people on, conspiracy theorists.
00:22:27.000And of course, they've obviously got an agenda and it's their agenda that is driving the discourse, not the facts of the matter.
00:22:33.000And I suppose in a way, we should be grateful that they are unwilling to have these open conversations.
00:22:37.000They're not willing to get people on with various views, opposing views, to listen to people that they disagree with, to openly criticize the establishment.
00:22:45.000Because what I've been able to learn in the last couple of years is if you start focusing on the relationships between big pharma and the media or big pharma and the government, just by focusing on that, you can really create clear narratives of corruption, hypocrisy, dishonesty.
00:23:06.000But me, because my background is not a journalist, it's not a conventional education, I'm sort of open to the more extraordinary, exciting, visceral ideas, which once in a while prove to be true, like the, you know, the example of Epstein Island.
00:23:20.000But then you become kind of porous and you're like, oh, yeah, no, tell me all of this stuff.
00:23:24.000And then it's hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff.
00:23:38.000But it seems like as the cultural role changes, as the power and magnetism, because of the needs, because of the necessity, because people just aren't, like you say, the loss of trust in institutions, the loss of trust in authority, being open and willing to have those conversations grants you all power.
00:23:55.000And then the commercial power comes and the financial power comes.
00:23:58.000And suddenly you've got to navigate it.
00:23:59.000And I think it all came together in that it seemed at least from the perspective of an observer in the Ivermectin moment that the culture should be able to tolerate a conversation.
00:24:08.000The culture, that shouldn't be verboten.
00:24:10.000Well, not just that, but the blatant lies that CNN was telling about it.
00:24:16.000When you had CNN and MSNBC and all these different cable news network shows calling it horse dewormer, when it was a drug that won the Nobel Prize for the inventor of it, is a drug that has had billions, literally billions of prescriptions filled.
00:24:33.000It's a drug that saved lives, a drug that's on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines.
00:24:40.000And for them to have the gall and to have the sheer audacity to just out and out lie to people about what a medication is.
00:24:50.000And it's used on humans far more than it's used on horses.
00:24:55.000And that they were calling that horse dewormer to try to mock me because they knew that I was unvaccinated and I kicked COVID very quickly.
00:25:05.000And they did not want that narrative out there.
00:25:07.000And they were beholden to their handlers.
00:25:10.000They were beholden to the people that give them exorbitant amounts of money in advertising revenue.
00:25:16.000And they fucking followed in line and they all piled on and they lost a fuckload of credibility from it.
00:25:24.000I mean, if you look at the way people who saw that, how many people saw that and would go, oh my God, they're just lying.
00:26:36.000I think they took an extreme editorial perspective without realizing that's what they were doing.
00:26:42.000And I think that the entire mainstream culture has actually found itself on a kind of a peninsula that where there is insignificant variety, in my view, between the two parties, which is why they're so willing to remain engaged in cultural war discourse and the conventional hot-button topics in this country in particular around the pro-life, pro-choice, and guns arguments.
00:27:02.000They're willing to remain in that territory because financially and economically, they are ultimately aligned.
00:27:08.000That the most powerful interests in America are happy with either outcome.
00:27:12.000I think that what's happened in the media space is they've unwittingly found themselves in a place where there's a kind of incompetence was afforded, that they're not used to being challenged, that the assumption was that you would be sunk by that narrative, that it was an insignificant new space.
00:27:27.000And obviously, it was a massive miscalculation because they weren't watching what was happening.
00:27:31.000They weren't listening to the conversations with McCulloch and Malone and Weinstein and that it is apolitical.
00:27:37.000And that also, in order to make themselves seem distinct from one another, they have amplified their small differences to the point where they don't recognize actually that that isn't America anymore.
00:27:51.000That people like that, even when I was a kid, if someone was just like right-wing, that's just like, oh, that's a right-wing person.
00:27:57.000Like, you'd be in your family around your table.
00:27:59.000I read something about Tucker Carlson the other day, like, you know, because of the release of those January the 6th documents to Fox and to Tucker in particular.
00:28:05.000And it said, far-right journalist Tucker Costa.
00:28:08.000If Tucker Costa's not far-right, at least like a normal right-wing guy, far-right means marching and red, white, and me written as far-right.
00:28:35.000They had the option of saying, look, we don't know that there's no evidence as yet that ivermectin is effective in these spaces because no one's trialing it because there's no money in it because science is a subset of big pharma and the economic imperative is the right thing.
00:28:48.000No one's doing experiments into natural immunity because natural immunity is not profitable.
00:28:54.000Those experiments are not being underwritten.
00:28:56.000There's no clinical trials for that because no one wants that data for vitamin D or for steroids or for all of the things that came out as ultimately effective once the profits have been gleaned.
00:29:05.000And then how can you expect to maintain the authority?
00:29:07.000How can you expect to sit behind those logos of CNN and MSNBC and claim that kind of piety and certainty?
00:29:14.000And the way that they were like outraged by it was astonishing, like a kind of a how dare you?
00:29:24.000And I think that it's precisely because of a willingness to listen one day to a left-wing person, a right-wing person, some people with some crazy theories, people talking about Egypt, some people talking about MMA.
00:29:34.000People don't want that kind of centralized authority.
00:29:36.000It's over because of the way that technology has afforded people access to a variety of news sources and a counter-narrative for any story can emerge almost at the same speed as a narrative.
00:29:44.000So now the price of authority is legitimacy.
00:30:04.000And of course Ukrainian people are brave.
00:30:06.000Of course it's disgusting that they're suffering under this military invasion.
00:30:10.000But I could handle it, I think, if the president went, listen, we were involved in that coup in 2014.
00:30:16.000Even the sort of people that are the diplomats that are involved in this are the same diplomats that are involved in stuff like Iraq and Afghanistan.
00:30:23.000BlackRock are going to profit subsequently from the rebuild of Ukraine.
00:30:30.000We believe our agenda is more in line with what most American citizens will benefit.
00:30:33.000But they can't actually say that because it isn't true because what they want is a unipolar hegemonic world in the same way that CNN don't even consider that what they're saying is dangerous and harmful.
00:30:46.000And now we're at a point where it's sort of that their approach to it may have been counterproductive in the most basic medical ways.
00:30:53.000And they weren't able to have that conversation because of financial imperatives and because they're basically owned by the people.
00:32:38.000Because that means you are allowed to profit, essentially a profit, $7 billion and kill 50,000 plus people.
00:32:47.000That's okay, and you can still go to work.
00:32:49.000Yeah, that's a pretty extreme ideology to underwrite a system.
00:32:53.000And it's the kind of ideology that in the end is going to lose credibility.
00:32:56.000Because when you do replace it for something like peanut butter, it makes it, it jars with us.
00:33:01.000We realize, oh, yeah, we are just permitting that.
00:33:03.000Another thing that was extraordinary is the sudden authority that we were willing to grant to these corporations that had been like the baddies up until 20 minutes before.
00:33:13.000We know what Johnson and Johnson had done with the alleged casting agends in baby powder.
00:33:17.000I mean, stories that sound like they're out of a Bill Hicks joke, like actually happening in reality.
00:33:23.000I heard this thing that that guy, you know, Pavlov of the dogs, you know, like he did other experimentation, the results of which were that 20% of people are highly susceptible to hypnosis and similarly highly susceptible to placebos.
00:33:38.000Like 20% of people with given placebos, it will be effective under the right conditions or whatever.
00:34:22.000And somehow they're expecting the eligibility of their authority to have maintained in spite of everything, the edifice cracking open.
00:34:31.000And it's so convenient that of all the remedies, that only the ones that are controlled by pharmaceutical companies are the ones that get highlighted.
00:34:40.000And one of that, one of the best pieces of evidence for that is vitamin D.
00:34:44.000And there was a recent study, see if you can find this.
00:34:48.000There was a recent study that estimated somewhere between somewhere in the range of 70% of all hospitalizations and deaths from COVID could have been prevented with vitamin D.
00:35:02.000But I remember reading that article going, that is the most insane thing I've ever seen in my life.
00:35:07.000And when did they know that this was true?
00:35:10.000Because if they just started handing out vitamin D, it's readily available.
00:35:13.000So easy to get, so easy to make, so cheap.
00:35:16.000They just handed out vitamin D to everybody.
00:35:18.000How many deaths could they have prevented?
00:35:21.000If that really is the case, that high-level, high doses of vitamin D, along with, you know, it's great with magnesium and vitamin K, but if they had educated people about nutrients and about the value of nutrition, the value of supplementation, how many people could have been saved?
00:35:35.000And how cheaply could that have been done?
00:35:38.000When you were talking about health at the beginning of the pandemic, which seems like a pretty obvious and rudimentary thing to talk about, exercise, eat well, I feel like even that is getting framed as a kind of a right-wing narrative now.
00:35:52.000It's extraordinary the way that that has altered.
00:35:55.000I feel that in a way what the pandemic did was it revealed the long con of corporatization of government.
00:36:02.000That if over the last 50, 60 years, government has become increasingly corporatized, that democracy has become increasingly hollowed out and irrelevant, it just took a crisis event to reveal the extent to which that had taken place.
00:36:14.000Now, the people that are in the outer reaches and some of the people in the comments below will talk about, no, the whole thing is staged.
00:36:22.000The whole thing has been put in place in order to bring about social credit scores and more surveillance and to facilitate lockdowns.
00:36:28.000And those are the things that are very, very difficult to prove.
00:36:31.000But what I think you can demonstrate is over the last 50, 60 years, through lobbying and demonstrable means, corporations have had more and more ability to exert influence and downright control government policy regardless of which party is in power.
00:36:45.000And then a crisis event took place and the momentum that carried it through, like governments have a, the governments like control.
00:36:52.000That's what governments are about is authority.
00:36:59.000So the solution that was suggested is, well, we can exert control through lockdowns and potentially coming as close as damn it to mandate in medicines.
00:37:08.000The indemnity that they were granted, it was kind of a perfect storm and perfect revelation.
00:37:13.000We spoke to a person, I don't think you've had him because I'm sure I would have been aware if you had this guy, Martin Guri, who was a CIA operative, who wrote a book called The Revolt of the Public.
00:37:20.000And he said he was a CIA analyst in 2001.
00:37:22.000And in 2001, there was as much information published that year as in all human history up to that point.
00:37:30.000And he said, when you look at those analytics on a screen, it looks like a tidal wave.
00:37:34.000And he said that that image stayed with him.
00:37:36.000And he recognized that power was going to alter radically because if information can be created and exchanged that quickly, centralized authority is going to be massively challenged.
00:37:46.000Either the way that we govern communities and nations is going to radically alter with more power being devolved, with more democracy, with more ability to run your own communities, with more feedback and communities such as the online world is starting to suggest, communities forming around subjects or individuals or figures or ideologies, or, and this seems to be what's happening, centralized authority is going to double down, look for ways to smear dissenters, censor, create new categories like misinformation, disinformation, suddenly find acceptable views of five,
00:38:14.000ten years ago are now not acceptable and are banned.
00:38:18.000Tolerance somehow decreasing under the veil of increasing tolerance, literal Orwellianism, changing the meaning of words, going back, editing books, stuff that we've seen in dystopian sci-fi actually happening.
00:38:30.000Martin Guri, the CIA analyst, offers us that the reason that's happening is because there's a recognition that centralized authority models cannot operate.
00:38:38.000The elites cannot govern the planet in the same typical way that they've been able to, say, from the 50s or whenever.
00:38:43.000I'm not an expert in this kind of stuff.
00:38:45.000But he said, either there's, unless we're going to lose things that he considers worth saving, because this guy, Martin Guri, he's not like a radical person.
00:39:08.000The first observable sign or one-off being Napster, the second one, the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement.
00:39:13.000They've not recognized that now there's a different conversation.
00:39:16.000And then, you know, you can add you actually to that because what happened with like, oh, now what we'll do is we'll shut this geezer down.
00:39:22.000But they couldn't because the economics of that, we were already too big in the space for that to happen.
00:39:28.000He said, what's going to happen is even new elites will emerge that understand how technology works.
00:39:32.000And I guess that's why we're seeing, you know, have seen the rise of social media, the amount of power those big tech companies have, their abilities to evade taxation, the degree to which the Twitter files revealed they work closely with deep state operatives to a point that we just wouldn't know how Elon Musk made those.
00:39:48.000I think they're also operating with very crude tools currently that will soon change with AI.
00:39:54.000I think AI is going to completely shift the narrative.
00:39:57.000And then from then on, you're going to be dealing with disinformation on just a vast scale of impossible to decipher.
00:40:06.000You're not going to, like I watched a video today of Joe Biden talking about some girl's ass.
00:40:30.000And they'll be able to, the people that own these enormous tech companies will be in cahoots with government like they are now.
00:40:37.000That, you know, they censor narratives, they demonetize people that talk about COVID in the wrong way or even at all.
00:40:45.000They're going to do that same kind of thing.
00:40:47.000And they're going to do that same kind of thing with whatever they want to, whatever they want to highlight.
00:40:54.000Like any narrative they want to highlight.
00:40:57.000And you, like as a consumer, as a person on the outside that's just watching things, it's going to be so confusing.
00:41:03.000And there's going to be narratives that, like, if you're an inclusive person that believes in equity and fairness for all, you'll believe this narrative.
00:41:12.000And then if you're a person who believes in liberty and the First Amendment, the Second Amendment, and the Protect Our Borders, you're going to believe that narrative.
00:41:18.000And then they're going to feed it with fake news and fake video and fake voices.
00:41:28.000When you see these things, and they're crude now, like you're, you're, you know, it's fake because you know the actual recordings of Joe Biden talking.
00:41:37.000But how long before it's a video that's completely indiscernible?
00:41:41.000You're not going to be able to know if it's fake or real.
00:41:43.000You can have him doing things that he's never done before.
00:42:14.000Yeah, as has been commented, I wish he was this competent.
00:42:19.000The most alarming thing is that that's a really cohesive sentence from Joe Biden.
00:42:22.000He's got a bit sexist, but his faculties are in order.
00:42:25.000It's bizarre how far he's deteriorated.
00:42:28.000And I, you know, when I was talking about it during the election, and people were like, I was actually talking about with Eric Weinstein, and he was like, I mean, I can't vote for Biden.
00:42:48.000You're going to be relying on his cabinet.
00:42:50.000And I knew his cabinet would be this fucking sideshow of diversity, which is exactly what it is.
00:42:57.000I mean, that one person who stole all the women's clothes, that Sam Brinton we highlighted on the podcast yesterday, like that's a diversity hire.
00:43:36.000What they've been able to do is introduce contentious issues to the forefront of the culture that prevent the kind of alliances that are necessary taking place.
00:43:44.000The reason that when I'm over here, I'm having conversations in addition to the great privilege of coming on your show with like, you know, going on Bill Maher or going on to Tucker or Ben Shapiro is because I feel like there's got to be a new conversation around politics.
00:43:59.000We can't just stay in these little camps.
00:44:01.000Now, like, every day, I feel sometimes that Joe Biden is the perfect president for the time because he's like the perfect metaphor of what it is.
00:44:08.000And for all of the talk of diversity, what have you got?
00:44:12.000You've got like a career politician, white male that's falling apart before your very eyes.
00:44:18.000It's telling you that it's bullshit and that they'll put people in positions in order to carry that narrative, but for no other reason, because I don't truly believe that they deeply care about those ideas.
00:44:28.000And even if they do deeply care, the decisions they're making are decisions that are in alignment with the agenda of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, with centralized banking authority.
00:44:38.000It's not going to change the world for any of them.
00:44:41.000They've managed to turn, make ordinary American people hate one another, like on the basis of a 50-50 split.
00:44:47.000You can't criminalize half of a country and say that they're far-right fascists any more than you can say that, in my view, extreme leftists.
00:44:55.000These kind of issues oughtn't be what's determining how a country is run.
00:44:58.000And when they are the issues that determine how a country is run, the powerful run amok.
00:45:02.000The elites are able to pursue their agenda just fine.
00:45:05.000Yeah, because they've got us in these ideological camps and they've got people infighting and ignoring real problems.
00:45:31.000I expected more people to ask about the data.
00:45:34.000And particularly when they started saying they were going to vaccinate children, I expected more people to go, hey, hey, hey, what's the fucking data on kids?
00:45:43.000Or when they were telling people to vaccinate pregnant women?
00:45:46.000I was like, what data do you have on pregnant women?
00:45:51.000Because pregnant women, if you like, normal medication, when a pregnant woman is taking normal medication, they have to be very careful.
00:46:01.000Because stuff that you can take when you're not pregnant with very little concern all of a sudden becomes a real issue if you have a developing fetus in your body.
00:46:48.000You can't know what's going to happen five years down the line because you've not had a five-year timeframe unless you were preparing this thing five years ago.
00:46:54.000In which case, how come you were preparing this thing five years ago?
00:46:57.000The kind of speculations that were being had conversationally in spaces like this one have proven to be true.
00:47:12.000That's one of the things that alarmed me most is how easy people rolled over to a authoritarian, like an authoritarian edict in countries like mine and yours, where it was assumed that that wouldn't happen.
00:47:23.000I remember the narrative being when the stuff was going on in China.
00:47:25.000Good luck trying that stuff in the United States.
00:48:03.000Pfizer, give them the money for Christ's sake.
00:48:05.000You know, and I feel like if you do that, if you, as they say, gaslight an entire nation, if people are operating at a state of fear, I mean, what does that do to us biochemically?
00:48:15.000How more like you know, fear and authority go together, I feel.
00:48:18.000Like when you are frightened, I want someone else to be in control.
00:48:22.000Yeah, and that's what was one of the scary things about the pandemic: they learned from that.
00:48:27.000They learned how easy people did roll over.
00:48:45.000What is going to be the reason why they decide to implement the same sort of lockdowns or the same sort of authoritarian control tactics that they used in the last couple of years?
00:49:58.000I suppose this is where it's a requirement to have some genuine values like clemency, compassion, forgiveness, things that also seem to be getting extracted out of the culture.
00:50:09.000It's not like there's a set of principles that people have recourse to, a set of binding ideals.
00:50:15.000It feels to me like that the only safeguard at this point is some sort of resolute democracy to say, we're thinking that the best thing would be 15-minute cities.
00:50:24.000But of course, you can vote for whether you want your city to be a 15-minute city.
00:50:28.000We're thinking the best thing might be this medication.
00:50:31.000What you don't want is the WHO determining that in the next pandemic, they have the right to implement by their votes contained within the WHO lockdown measures, medication measures, which is something that they're lobbying for currently, I understand.
00:50:46.000Less and less democracy, more and more ability for unelected globalist, I would have to say, globalist organizations to assert political influence over nations.
00:50:56.000And when you know that the WHO's second biggest funder is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, and he invests so heavily into these facts.
00:51:03.000Again, like stuff that gets called conspiracy theory, but you can look at the evidences there.
00:51:08.000The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation profited millions of dollars on the vaccines.
00:51:13.000Millions, millions and millions of dollars.
00:51:16.000And then once he dumped the stock, then he completely changed his narrative and he started talking about how ineffective the vaccines were and about how the virus wasn't as bad as we thought it was and about it was mostly targeting old and obese people.
00:51:32.000Like, this is fucking wild because this is the same guy that through the entire pandemic was talking about how great these vaccines are and these vaccines are so effective and they stop the virus and they stop transmission, they stop infection.
00:51:47.000And all that was a lie and he profited off those lies.
00:51:51.000And everyone wants to pretend that he's just like this amazing philanthropist.
00:52:27.000Yet he was this public health advocate on television telling everybody to go out and get this medical intervention that he would profit from, which is fucking wild.
00:52:39.000It's really wild that it's that transparent.
00:52:42.000That it's not like multiple steps and shell corporations and it's really difficult to find out where the money's going.
00:52:47.000It's like the Nancy Pelosi stock trading thing.
00:52:50.000It's like, Jesus Christ, it's right there.
00:52:52.000Like you knew, and so you did that and sold, and you did that and bought, and you've made hundreds of millions of dollars off of a $100,000 a year salary.
00:53:07.000I suppose the only way you can prevent those questions being addressed is by making the people asking those questions uncredible, like discrediting those people.
00:53:21.000He ain't doing this for like a competition.
00:53:23.000There's no golden ticket at the end of this.
00:53:25.000It's like, yeah, not-for-profit organizations making profit, an incredible amount of influence in areas that he profits from.
00:53:30.000All sorts of peculiar business practices like in India and on the continent of Africa that have led to like palpable suffering and profit in his case.
00:53:40.000The Africa thing is wild, and that's a big part of this The Real Anthony Fauci book.
00:53:46.000He talks about Bill Gates quite a bit, and one of the things he talks about is how they've always used Africa as a place where they test out medicines.
00:53:54.000They've used Africa as a place where they test out.
00:53:56.000This is another thing that I learned from Alex Jones.
00:53:58.000Alex Jones was saying that they were giving kids the polio vaccine in Africa and that Bill Gates was involved in this.
00:54:04.000They had to stop doing it because it was actually giving kids polio.
00:54:11.000There was an AP story about this, and it shows this terrified little African baby in there dropping the polio vaccine in his mouth, like squeezing his face and dropping his mouth.
00:54:27.000Even when you accept everything that they say at this late point when it appears impossible to do that, they wouldn't release patents so that African nations could recreate the vaccines over there.
00:54:40.000And I saw him publicly talk about that.
00:54:41.000I'm saying, oh, no, it's not as simple as that.
00:54:42.000You can't just give people the patterns and stuff.
00:54:44.000But it seems like if you recognize that what drives them always is power, finance, and dominion, if you always look at that and then track their actions, you hardly ever see a disruption in that pattern.
00:54:56.000What has this been like for you to go from this guy who was this loved comedic actor, this stand-up comic, and then you kind of just sort of start walking on this path of talking about things and walking on this path where now you have printed pieces of paper and you're standing there, you're reading things and you're showing videos and you're mocking this stuff.
00:55:50.000And I came on and like, I was sort of amazed by it.
00:55:53.000And do you know what I liked is the amount of personal authority that you had and the lack of compromise.
00:56:01.000You know, because you've worked in conventional entertainment as well, how much compromise that comes with.
00:56:06.000That you have to essentially, you know, you have to turn up.
00:56:09.000Producers and executives and there's all sorts of people pulling the strings and telling you what to do.
00:56:14.000Because like when you said that thing, I remember when Kevin Smith came on and he'd offered you a part in a movie and you went, nah, man, like I ain't getting up.
00:56:21.000I'm not going to be in a trailer at 4 a.m.
00:57:17.000And I feel like that when I got, I had to get clean because it was getting out of control.
00:57:21.000And when I got clean, I was full of appetite and ambition and all of that kind of stuff.
00:57:26.000And it just was natural to become a stand-up comedian was an easier fit than an actor because of the collaborations and the requirements of it and the cooperation.
00:57:35.000And I love acting, but like the having to do what you're told actually is not, it's not really, it's not really who I am.
00:57:41.000So like once like that period of working, like the people I work with you say you don't like any aspect of this.
00:57:54.000I like stand-up comedy because you live or die on your own merits.
00:57:59.000So I had both of those competing things, but no one, like I didn't have the strength of character to resist the allure of when I did an MTV show, Sandler came on it, Adam Sandler, and liked me and said, do you want to be in a movie more or less?
00:58:10.000Like I went in a movie with him, then I met Judd Appertale and those people did those movies.
00:58:14.000And it was aspects of it, as I say, were incredible.
00:58:16.000And those people in particular, Judd Appetow and Sandler, were like really amazing, lovely people.
00:58:20.000But after I came on here, and during the past, I used to always talk about, I've always been anti-establishment.
00:58:28.000I've never trusted authority because of personal reasons.
00:58:32.000If you're a drug addict, you get arrested sometimes because shoplifting and because of possession of drugs.
00:58:39.000So I've always had that kind of relationship with authority.
00:58:42.000So when I started to be able to have my own voice, when this technology kind of opened up, when I realized, oh my God, I can just sort of do this.
00:58:50.000It started at the beginning of the pandemic.
00:58:51.000I was just sort of like, like, started commenting on it.
00:58:54.000I was in Australia when it started and like I do stuff online anyway.
00:58:58.000So I was like, oh, this is going to be a weird time for all of us.
00:59:01.000And then it started to become clear that it was a perfect lens to observe how power operates.
00:59:07.000The inability to question authority, agenda for profit, agenda to assert control, stuff that just didn't feel right for me.
00:59:14.000We started doing the stuff and like the guy I worked with, Gareth, who's out there actually, who produces the show, he's not the same as me in terms of he's not like a radical anti-establishment person.
00:59:23.000He's, I guess you would call him a conventional liberal.
00:59:25.000So like in our preparation of the content, he was always like, we won't use anything unless it's already been, even if in a, even moderately, used in a mainstream media source.
00:59:35.000So he started to like look at like mainstream media sources that were saying stuff that was counter to the dominant narratives that we were getting.
00:59:43.000And then I was able to sort of stitch those things together, basically using sort of stand-up, really improvising around the news stories.
00:59:49.000That's all I was really doing, like the stuff with stealth, Brian Steelt or whatever, you know, that stuff around you or then with the war narratives and the things that's happening now.
01:00:00.000Then like the YouTube audience got really big and I started to, you know, we started to become like, oh my God, I can do this for a job now.
01:00:06.000But then when I reached out to you and you said, that's a shady platform, like YouTube as your primary platform, I'm not suggesting that you criticize YouTube in any untoward way.
01:00:16.000So when like Rumble came to me with an offer, like we'll, if you make us your primary home, if you do an hour a day streaming, you know, like I thought, right, okay, I'm going to be able to do this.
01:00:37.000I do like a, like I guess a sort of a live daily show type feel.
01:00:41.000But is there a commentary section, like a live commentary where people can comment on it live during the show?
01:00:47.000Yeah, people stay in the chat and I refer to the comments and stuff.
01:00:50.000And when we, those videos that you've watched before and I've seen you watch on this show, we still do one of those and we drop a pre-reked video, which has been edited into it.
01:00:59.000That's like, you know, where we take a deeper look at something like, oh, oh, look, BlackRock have just done a deal with the Ukrainian government or look at what some of the legislation that was passed prior to the Ohio train wreck or whatever.
01:01:11.000Or look at how that shows a disjunct between the language around climate change and caring about the ecology and what happens when there's a legitimate environmental disaster.
01:01:20.000We're able to then sort of tie together facts in a way that's much more responsible.
01:01:27.000I'm just reacting to clips, doing essentially an opening monologue, jokes like that.
01:01:32.000And then we have a guest on for like a 20-minute interview.
01:01:35.000That's like the daily show that we do on there.
01:01:38.000And then like there's like a members thing within Rumbles now, locals.
01:01:41.000That's where you can sort of people can subscribe for additional content.
01:01:44.000And in particular, actually, my stand-up special.
01:01:46.000I've got like another stand-up special, which we're going to release on that platform.
01:01:49.000Because I mean, looking at ways that how do you do stand-up now because of what Schultz done, what Louis' done, like more direct to like direct to the audience ways of doing stand-up is like what I've been like working on.
01:02:01.000So hey, it happened very, the truth is it happened organically because I guess all of the ingredients were in me anyway because of like because it's essentially analogous to stand-up comedy, isn't it?
01:02:12.000Like it's like you're investigating the person.
01:02:14.000If you get someone on here that you're interested in, then you're just you're investigating that story.
01:02:18.000And then the punditry, the new, it's essentially news commentary.
01:02:21.000I guess because there's so much space has opened up, so much space opened up, because mainstream media will only comment on a limited amount of story.
01:02:29.000So it becomes very easy to sort of say, they're telling you this, but this might also be true.
01:02:33.000And there are these relationships between these organizations.
01:02:36.000And isn't it weird that that happened?
01:02:38.000So the space was irresistible, almost comedically irresistible.
01:02:42.000It's comedically because you have a comedic take on it that's just unavailable anywhere else.
01:02:47.000Like when you're talking about the news, you're laughing and mocking it openly while you talk about these obvious connections between finances and rules and laws and the way things get done.
01:02:58.000And how long have you been doing it now?
01:03:09.000And you know what it's like in this business when you, because you could have got access to the metrics and the data and you start to see, bloody help, this is growing quickly, this thing.
01:03:16.000You start to recognize like the thing I did near the beginning, I was just doing stuff more about wellness and well-being and talking about, because of like my background in recovery, talking about meditation, wellness, all those kind of things that I'm interested in as well.
01:04:02.000How much pushback have you experienced?
01:04:05.000Like, have you had a lot of shows demonetized?
01:04:08.000Like, what was happening while you were on YouTube that motivated this move to Rumble?
01:04:13.000We got an Ivermectin strike for something pretty minor, for saying that something was being, for saying it was being, that it had been endorsed when it was in fact being clinically trialed.
01:04:22.000Like, so it was a pretty minute error.
01:04:26.000And you started to, and because, of course, as you know, I assume that YouTube take their guidelines on global issues from organizations like the WHO.
01:04:35.000So even after it comes out that there has been a 30% increase in heart disease in people in their 30s, that's just like a fact, or that there's been an increase in excess deaths over the world and the amount of adverse events that have been reported, you still can't say it.
01:04:52.000Yeah, once, even like once it's in made, you know, talking about New York Times, MSNBC, once it's been on those places, you still can't say it.
01:04:58.000And of course, there are still mainstream figures like Fauci or figures from the sort of liberal establishment saying, if you take this vaccine, it's not going anywhere else.
01:05:06.000So there's an obvious hypocrisy, even in organizations that initially, I mean, I guess, do you know what?
01:05:11.000I bet you can look at it, Joe, like as if it were a physical territory.
01:05:14.000Like at the beginning, there's a gold rush.
01:05:16.000In the beginning, YouTube is the Wild West.
01:05:17.000In the beginning, all sorts of people can inhabit and populate that territory.
01:05:20.000But after a while, people go, shit, this needs to be shut down and controlled.
01:05:24.000And it gets corporatized and regulated and controlled in a different way.
01:05:28.000And I guess I just caught the back end of when it was possible.
01:05:31.000And we're still trying to navigate that.
01:05:33.000I think much like television, they receive an enormous amount of money in advertising.
01:05:37.000And then advertisements that are on YouTube, those people that are spending all that money, they can dictate what they want to be advertised on.
01:05:47.000And then they say, look, I don't want to be on anything.
01:05:49.000They talk about COVID or anything where they talk about Ukraine or anything where they don't.
01:06:04.000How do we do that and not make it look like we're censoring them?
01:06:06.000We give them strikes, give them strikes, or demonetize certain episodes.
01:06:11.000Like when we were over at YouTube, before we left for Spotify, we announced that we were leaving for Spotify, and then magically all of our episodes stopped getting demonetized.
01:06:21.000So we had a 25% increase in revenue because 25% of our episodes were getting demonetized just randomly.
01:07:57.000I understand it from their perspective.
01:07:58.000But from a content creation perspective, you just couldn't trust them.
01:08:03.000This is what Rumble have fundamentally offered.
01:08:06.000They gave me a good deal and the assurance that we're not going to censor you.
01:08:11.000Now, obviously, coming from where I come from politically and in terms of my background, even as a person that's been in the public for a while, I know how Rumble's being portrayed.
01:08:20.000It's being portrayed as a right-wing, like, you know, far-right place, conspiracy theorist.
01:08:25.000Yeah, you and Glenn Greenwald, super far-right.
01:08:28.000Yeah, like this married, gay, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.
01:08:38.000It's just anything alternative to the censorship model they'll talk of as right-wing.
01:08:43.000Because what happens is, like, when you create something new as a response to the censorship that people experience on Facebook, when people are banned from Facebook and banned from Twitter, the problem is so many of those people that do get banned go over to these new platforms, whether it's Gab or Getter or, you know, True Social.
01:09:04.000And then it just becomes QAnon headquarters.
01:09:06.000And they just start talking about lizard people and Pizzagate.
01:09:10.000Yeah, and a peculiar tendency towards suicide of former associates of powerful American families.
01:09:18.000You know, I went to the opening of Rumble the other day, and it's weird.
01:09:22.000As a person that's been, you know, part of liberal establishment, Hollywood movie parties, those kind of things.
01:09:27.000And even in Britain, British media, there's a certain flavor to it.
01:09:30.000But I've got to tell you, like being around like in Florida with all these people from Rumble and local dignitaries and officials and mayors and stuff like that, everyone's like just adorable and so sweet.
01:09:40.000And I wonder if it is, like, as a person that's always traditionally identified with what you would call cultural left-wing positions, right?
01:09:47.000Like, to find how just sweet everybody is.
01:09:50.000Like, you meet Donald Trump Jr., he's absolutely lovely.
01:09:54.000You meet that woman, Kimberly, that's off Fox News, who I've seen sort of say, you know, Russell Brahman, he's a scumbag.
01:10:02.000And plus, it didn't hurt that she described me so despicably in the past that I wasn't immune to that kind of flirtation, let me tell you.
01:10:08.000Meet these people, and they're like, absolutely delightful and so sweet.
01:10:12.000And like one of the people that I'm working with said, maybe it's because like that conventional libertarian perspective is, I don't care what you, you can think whatever you like.
01:10:21.000And I'm starting to wonder if there is the possibility of an emergent sort of political ideology that's sort of, in a sense, part libertarian, because it's like, I just want to be left alone to live my own life, part anarchist in the literal sense of anarchy as in self-governing communities, as much democracy as possible, as much, not as little, as much ability to control your own community, as much.
01:10:42.000I sometimes think, Joe, and I know that, like, Jordan Pearson has been on here as well, talking about decentralized models on a sort of a slightly more global scale, I figure.
01:10:49.000But I sometimes feel like if you take contentious issues and allow them to be resolved at as a local level as possible, it diffuses a lot of these cultures.
01:10:58.000Because at this point in history, you're going to have people that want to live an Orthodox Jewish or an Orthodox Christian or an Orthodox Muslim life.
01:11:04.000You're going to have people that want to have progressive lives that are very sort of gender-fluid.
01:11:08.000And I think if you sort of say, Well, yeah, do what you want in your community, then isn't that the only way that this is going to be diffused?
01:11:18.000You can't impose that on people anymore.
01:11:19.000You can't tell people that they can't express themselves sexually, consensually, in any way that they want to.
01:11:24.000You can't tell people that they can't have conservative and traditional values.
01:11:28.000And I don't see why the culture should be tearing itself apart in order to achieve that.
01:11:31.000And so, like, you know, finding myself on Rumble and how what the at least how it's being labeled by the external media that have an agenda to do is destroy new emergent forces is like something I've like, okay, I'm here now.
01:11:45.000You know, I'm going to be going on those shows and talking to people that in the past I would have regarded with you know enmity.
01:11:51.000And people say, Oh, you've been red-pilled or whatever, but I've never trusted the establishment.
01:12:00.000But I've always also felt compassionate and like there's an obligation and duty for us to take care of like sort of what I would call Sesame Street values of kindness and compassion.
01:12:08.000That those things need to be in the mix somewhere.
01:12:11.000And I suppose those are the kind of conversations I guess I'm interested in having when, you know, because I always watch Tucker Carlson, and when you see him attacking the establishment, I'm like, yeah, go for it.
01:12:20.000And then maybe he'll say something about homelessness.
01:12:23.000You know, like, and I guess these are the conversations that I'll have when I'm in those spaces.
01:12:27.000And because something new has got to emerge.
01:12:29.000There's got to be, I think, Joe, like when populism first emerged, it was assumed that it would be affiliated with the union movement, that it would be a working man's or working person's movement, populism.
01:12:41.000Over time, it's come to be regarded, you know, perhaps even most latterly through the rise of a figure like Donald Trump.
01:12:48.000Populism is regarded as it's right wing.
01:12:52.000But you can't really have, because populism is people power.
01:12:55.000The people have the power to run their own lives as much as possible, not as little as possible.
01:12:58.000People can't just be like little arse-end nodes in their own life with just such a that their choice is limited to consumer choice and opining online, real choice in their community.
01:13:09.000I think if you're happy with your life and if you have personal sovereignty and you're a kind person, you want people to live their life in a way that makes them happy.
01:13:20.000I think there are many, many people out there that do not have those characteristics.
01:13:25.000There's many people out there that are not happy.
01:13:33.000They don't feel accepted or appreciated or respected in their community.
01:13:37.000And those are the people that lean towards these authoritarian perspectives, these authoritarian ideas of control and telling people what to do because they don't feel in control of their own life.
01:13:52.000And you find it from the weakest people.
01:13:55.000The physically, morally, ethically weakest people are the ones that are so adamant that everybody follow in lockstep to whatever this ideological narrative is that's being pushed on social media, particularly from the left, but also from the right.
01:14:10.000It's feeble, weak people that are very angry.
01:14:14.000The kind, successful, open-minded, ethical, moral people, they want people to just be happy.
01:14:23.000And I want, I don't look, there's so many different styles of everything.
01:14:29.000There's so many different styles of music, different styles of architecture, different styles of living your life, different styles of just sexual orientation and monogamy and polyamory.
01:14:50.000I try to control my kids as little as possible.
01:14:53.000I try to guide them and have conversations with them and tell them all the things that I fucked up on.
01:14:59.000Whenever I talk to my kids about anything, if I have to kind of like give them some regulations or give them some rules on things, I always talk about how badly I fucked everything up.
01:15:09.000And I always talk about how they're so much more fortunate than me because they're so much smarter than me.
01:15:13.000They're so much more educated than me.
01:15:15.000They have so much more access to information.
01:15:17.000And I talk about how when I was a kid, you didn't really know anything.
01:15:20.000Like, I can ask my daughter a question and she'll know the answer to it because she can Google it like instantaneously and she'll know for a fact what really happened in 1774 or what really happened when this happened or why they put this and that and why this is an ingredient and that.
01:15:35.000Like the access to information they have is unprecedented.
01:15:38.000I feel like if we don't just relax and let people be themselves and stop people from imposing whether it's imposing laws or imposing behavior that we would like to see people exhibit if we don't stop doing that and just let people figure out what makes them happy.
01:16:06.000Because some people are happy just fucking hiking.
01:16:09.000There's some people that just want to get up in the morning and have granola and go for a walk and that's what makes them happy.
01:16:14.000And there's other people that want to lock themselves in an office and write a book and that's what makes them happy.
01:16:19.000And there's some people that just want to go to the gym.
01:16:21.000They just want to have a good job and then take yoga all day.
01:16:26.000But you got to leave everybody else alone.
01:16:29.000And so many people want to control other people because they don't have control of their own life.
01:16:34.000And this is a characteristic that you see from the ideological left on social media and from the ideological right.
01:16:42.000You see it from the right with wanting to control women's access to abortions.
01:16:46.000You see it from, you know, wanting to limit access to this country and immigration.
01:16:52.000You see it from wanting to restrict guns and wanting to restrict drugs.
01:16:57.000You see it from all sorts of different ways that people want to control people and control people's behavior.
01:17:05.000And that creates these ideological rifts that creates these tribal sort of like mentality borderlines that you cannot cross.
01:17:15.000And this is a problem when we have so many variations, so much variety of human beings, but just two choices.
01:17:25.000You're either a Democrat or you're a Republican.
01:17:28.000And if you're a Democrat, then you think men can get pregnant.
01:17:31.000And you think that, you know, there's too much inequity and there's too much racism.
01:17:37.000And if you're on the right, you think that we got to close the borders and you think that abortion is murder.
01:17:42.000It's like, isn't there some sort of like a compromise where there's a like a rational center where people recognize that like, no, there's a lot of this behavior is just because people are scared and weak and you should just leave people the fuck alone.
01:18:21.000If I don't think it's right to not be kind, then I have to be kind.
01:18:26.000I don't like look around to check if other people are being kind and prod them and make sure they're doing shit.
01:18:31.000I get on with my own conduct because that is usually the problem anyway, is that I'm normally suffering as a result of stuff that I ain't doing right.
01:18:40.000I'm normally suffering because I'm not taking care of myself.
01:18:44.000I'm not living by the standards I would set myself as a father, as a person that's involved in my working life.
01:18:51.000And that's where my unhappiness normally stems from.
01:18:54.000I also recognize that I have to be willing to take a hit once in a while that I'm going to talk to people that disagree with me on things that are kind of fundamental.
01:19:03.000And if I'm going to just cast them on the other side of some imaginary line of vilification as a result of that, I'm contributing to the ongoing bifurcation and generation of more and more conflict.
01:19:16.000The only thing I can really do, and in a sense, there's something comforting in this, that if I, like, when I came on your show before and we talked about hunting, I go, yeah, I'm a vegan, and I just wouldn't be able to kill an animal because I don't think I could live with that.
01:19:28.000But I completely, I live in the countryside in England and it's bang, it's all the time.
01:21:22.000You can deep fake your way into a reality that's convenient for the interests of the powerful.
01:21:26.000And I suppose the thing that I believe in that might diffuse this, because I feel that we're in some edgeland, and I know every generation does.
01:21:34.000And I know personally, all of us are going to experience an apocalypse anyway, because we're all going to die.
01:21:38.000And does it matter whether when you die, everyone else dies or not?
01:21:42.000Maybe not, because your reality is shutting down into whatever follows this.
01:21:45.000But I feel that unless some new ideas enter the conversation about how to manage this ossification and tribalized conflict-driven culture, something very ugly is going to happen.
01:22:00.000It's already ramped up and considerably ramped up during the pandemic because of all the anxiety and the fear.
01:22:05.000And when the governments did impose lockdowns and they did tell people they have to stay home and they did stop people from working and traveling.
01:22:13.000It just, it ramped everything up, ramped all the anxiety up and ramped people's susceptibility to some sort of a solution.
01:22:20.000And if you just give into the authoritarian control, then we can all get back to work.
01:22:24.000Then we go back to get it back up to normal.
01:22:26.000And that's what scares the shit out of me is how easy people just rolled over and let that happen.
01:22:32.000And how the ideological rift, the divide between the left and the right got wider.
01:22:39.000And people got less compassionate and less apologetic.
01:22:44.000And just let people just be themselves.
01:22:50.000Be more, you know, look at things in a way that you could understand what it would be like if you were living that person's life and doing that.
01:23:00.000Like you could see yourself falling into all the same traps.
01:23:03.000And if you just, you know, this like the thing about forgiving people, forgiving people that were so mad and they called people who wouldn't get vaccinated plague rats.
01:23:13.000Like, you know, like, I could have been them.
01:23:16.000If you were in those same circumstances, if you're that kind of a feel for fearful person, and if you were that kind of a person that really was terrified and filled with anxiety and you thought there were people out there that weren't doing the right thing, because that was the narrative.
01:23:29.000You were being told that those people weren't doing the right thing and that was going to get us all in danger.
01:23:34.000Completely illogical because you're doing the right thing, which is to protect you from a disease.
01:23:38.000You're taking a shot that's supposed to protect you.
01:23:40.000What do you give a fuck if someone's not getting protected?
01:25:15.000What set of beliefs would lead to that behavior?
01:25:18.000And the inability to see that we saw in the opioid crisis of just a few years before that doctors were being persuaded to prescribe opioids that they knew would be addictive and dangerous to an alarming degree.
01:25:53.000And that's what they've done with everything.
01:25:55.000And, you know, you could get real cynical, but I think that's what they've always done.
01:26:00.000I think that's what they did with Viox.
01:26:02.000That's what they did with the opiate crisis.
01:26:04.000I think that's what they've did with many, many different ways where they could justify making enormous amounts of profit at the expense of a bunch of people dying.
01:26:15.000I've heard a few things about systems that helped me to understand why such a thing might be possible.
01:26:20.000I heard one time that the CIA, no one person knows what's going on.
01:26:26.000There are so many operations, so many things running concurrently that there isn't a person like the head of the CIA that you can go to and say, well, what's going to be like it's too diffuse.
01:26:34.000I also heard a person, Yanis Varoufakis, he was like the lead, one of the leaders of Saritsa, when after 2008, Greece had some wacky moment where they elected an extremist party, a left-wing extremist party, actually, considered extreme, that said, we're not paying back all of that banking debt.
01:27:01.000And this guy, Yanis Varoufakis, who's like, you know, a left-wing politician, said that he realized that the person at the EU that he was talking to didn't have any power.
01:27:10.000They only have the power that that role affords them.
01:27:13.000The system is essentially functioning on its own.
01:27:16.000There is no individual that can go, oh, yeah, all right, then don't pay back the money.
01:27:19.000There is no person that can tell you exactly what the CIA is doing.
01:27:22.000So it's like a sort of a set of coordinates which behind it has an energy that's pushing towards a particular agenda, the kind of ones that all of us can identify, financial agenda, dominion, those kind of identifiable agenda.
01:27:33.000But the system is self-sustaining, self-maintaining.
01:27:37.000The system excludes the possibility for disruption.
01:27:40.000It's almost like it already functions how an algorithm would function.
01:27:45.000It doesn't afford the intervention of democracy.
01:27:48.000When people's will is expressed, the will is delegitimized.
01:27:52.000When a figure, like when there is a sort of a popular uprising, then the uprising itself is discredited.
01:27:57.000You know, 20, 30 years ago, it would have been the left in Latin America, Central America, like the deposing and destabilizing nations there.
01:28:03.000Now it's like even domestically, like the figures from the presumed right, like Trump, are discredited.
01:28:09.000You know, so like, and again, like, I've got, just to clarify, of course, this is not someone that I would ally myself with enormously.
01:28:14.000But what I'm saying is that the system has clearly become more allied with a particular aspect of the establishment.
01:28:20.000Let's call it the liberal establishment.
01:28:22.000Although it feels to me that it can function perfectly well regardless of which political parties you're in.
01:28:28.000I mean, it was during the Bush administration, it was the right.
01:28:31.000During the Bush administration, all the fears about election tampering were about the right.
01:28:37.000There was an HBO documentary called Hacking Democracy, and it was all about the Bush administration stealing the vote.
01:28:43.000And it was all about the diebold voting machines.
01:28:46.000And they had shown in this documentary that there was a third-party access.
01:28:50.000So instead of just like, you vote and I count your vote, there was actually room for a third party to put information in that would manipulate the number.
01:28:59.000And they showed it, and they demonstrated it on the show, and everybody was terrified.
01:29:02.000Oh, my God, the Republicans are stealing the vote.
01:29:04.000And now it's like Katie Hobbs and Carrie Lake in Arizona.
01:29:09.000It's like the Democrats are stealing the vote.
01:29:30.000And that's kind of what the fuck is going on.
01:29:32.000And we get caught up in these ideological battles.
01:29:36.000And all the while, they're inching us closer to nuclear war.
01:29:41.000They're pushing dangerous pharmaceutical drugs into our lives.
01:29:45.000They're instituting a centralized digital currency and a credit score system and controlling people and locking people down and establishing narratives that are not based on fact at all.
01:29:56.000But if you don't follow lockstep with that narrative, you're fucked and you're out of a job.
01:30:00.000And so everybody doesn't know what to do.
01:30:02.000Next thing you know, we have something that's very similar to what's going on in China.
01:30:07.000We're not that far away from something like that happening here.
01:30:10.000All it would take is a large disaster, some sort of an attack, some sort of a terrible scenario where a bunch of people died and they had to change the rules in order to protect us.
01:30:22.000And next thing you know, you're fucked.
01:30:28.000And one of those tropes of the kind of avowed conspiracy theorist that we mentioned earlier was that crisis is used to induce measures that they want to induce anyway.
01:30:40.000And one of the things that was spoken about in the pandemic was, oh, look, they had this agenda anyway.
01:30:46.000They were looking to introduce this kind of technology.
01:30:48.000They just took advantage of a situation.
01:30:50.000I don't go as far as saying that I think that people orchestrate these things.
01:30:55.000I don't think anybody orchestrated the pandemic.
01:30:57.000I think the pandemic came out of that Wuhan lab.
01:31:31.000But I don't believe in these grand orchestrated conspiracies as much as I believe in people taking advantage of an opportunity in a moment and that there's a very clear pattern of them doing that forever.
01:31:47.000Opportunistic seems easier to explain and it is also in alignment with the way that we understand that model that it exploits opportunity to advance itself.
01:31:57.000I feel like that the credibility took its biggest hit in 2008 when the banks were bailed out, when ordinary people suffered at a point when it was clear that the economic model couldn't function anymore and needed radical revision and it was kept alive.
01:32:13.000And what happened, I feel like, is that the liberal establishment ceded that territory and meant that now the only anti-establishment rhetoric is coming out of Bright Barton Bannon and Trump.
01:32:24.000And they're the only people that are attacking the establishment and the authoritarianism that's coming out of there and the exploitation.
01:32:29.000There's no voices and the voices on the left have become kind of muted.
01:32:33.000It feels to me that during the 2016 election that they would rather have Trump win than have the Democrats win under Bernie Sanders.
01:32:40.000They made a bunch of like odd decisions that shows you that, yeah, that Hicks' metaphor stays ultimately true.
01:32:48.000And in a way, doesn't it make sense that if you want to maintain that, the number one thing you have to prevent is a broad alliance and a willingness of people to accept their differences.
01:32:57.000As long as you've got people willing to kill each other, whether it's online or in person, over cultural values, rather than accept, I'm willing to accept that that's how you live, as long as you accept that's how I live.
01:33:28.000And the more people you're around that have a good time, the better the quality of your life is going to be as well.
01:33:32.000The better the quality of life in your entire neighborhood.
01:33:35.000And if you have this mentality of great fortune and not a famine mentality, not have this mentality that all the success has to come to me and all these other people can go fuck themselves and it's a doggy dog world.
01:33:48.000If instead you go, wouldn't it be better if we all just like kind of like did our best to work together as a community and just accept people for their differences and recognize that most of these differences are kind of bullshit.
01:34:12.000And if you think about your own life and your own pursuit of happiness and your own interests and concentrate on that more than you do stopping people from behaving in a way that you're ideologically opposed to.
01:34:26.000That ideology you're probably you've probably been manipulated in some way shape or form You've probably fallen into some fucking Rachel Maddow narrative or some Bill O'Reilly narrative And you're just you're just like at the throats of the people that are different than you Because somehow or another diminishing them you think is going to empower you and yeah You know, that's the weirdness of it all.
01:34:51.000I think you're right that we become parasited.
01:34:53.000You know, I know you admire Terence McKenna, his famous thing, the culture is not your friend.
01:34:59.000And it feels like many of us have been parasited in our minds, that we are on rails, parroting and citing views that are not ours, that we don't know how that opinion got in there.
01:35:10.000And this is why the individual does have power.
01:35:12.000I've always found it hard to hold, Joe, the simultaneous fact that I am infinitesimally small and my reality is irrelevant on the cosmic scale.
01:35:22.000But at the same time, all reality takes place only in my consciousness, as far as I can tell.
01:35:30.000I am ultimately omniscient as far as my own individual reality is concerned.
01:35:35.000I feel that there has to be the introduction of sort of spiritual or maybe even psychedelic values into this conversation so that we can defuse this cultural tension that is continually being stoked.
01:35:47.000Because as long as people are willing to go at a mat on cultural issues rather than saying, yeah, this has been complicated.
01:35:53.000A country like America has a complicated history.
01:35:55.000Definitely people have been disadvantaged.
01:35:57.000Definitely there have been biases and prejudices in a particular direction.
01:36:00.000If there is the facility to alter that, that could be done.
01:36:02.000But the best way to do it is not centralized, top-down imposition of authority.
01:36:07.000I suppose one of the other tensions is, if you have small state, what regulates corporate power?
01:36:13.000Those are like, you know, there are big questions that once you sort of say, this don't work no more, I want something different.
01:36:20.000Yeah, you are confronted with, oh, how do you do that?
01:36:22.000How do you regulate behemoths like Apple and these new Titans that put the steel and energy giants of a century ago in the shadows with their might?
01:36:32.000And again, with their, as you cited earlier, their ability to create exploitation and something akin to slavery in the modern world.
01:36:41.000What is the collective force that opposes that?
01:36:43.000And I can't help but feel that this technology, if we were released of the need for relentless progressivism and advancement only in order to fuel endless consuming, that this technology could be used to create more democracy, more freedom, more ability to interact in how your community is run.
01:37:01.000If not, the kind of universal credit society and the kind of atrophy that that suggests and the kind of apathy that that suggests and the disconnection that suggests, some more leisurely form of awakened, technologically advanced,
01:37:14.000leisure-led society where people have more time to create truly reflective culture, where the kind of the tropes that are used in the conversation around diversity of like genuinely different cultures cohabit in a genuine and real melting pot where you accept that people eat different food, have different sex lives, have different beliefs.
01:37:38.000I suppose that in a way, the amount of authority that was asserted during the pandemic, the amount of effort that's put into censoring, censoring mainstream narratives, the amount of effort that's put into creating terms, new language to control, smear, and censor opposing voices, suggests that they consider it a legitimate threat that alternative views could take hold, that new alliances could take place, that people would consider different ways of being.
01:38:01.000There's a brilliant philosopher, he's dead now, Mark Fisher, he was off the left.
01:38:06.000He coined the term capitalist realism, that we have been taught that this is the only model of reality there is.
01:38:13.000He said it's people find it easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism.
01:38:18.000There could be a new economic system that we could live within.
01:38:21.000And we all know now that capitalism, as it was intended, doesn't exist anymore anyway.
01:38:25.000Certainly not after what happened in 2008.
01:38:27.000Simple, you know, I make this thing, trading, it growing, ingenuity, entrepreneurship.
01:38:31.000It's such a cronyist support in energy companies, supplementing them, ensuring that they make profits.
01:38:38.000How can you have energy companies that profit when there's an energy crisis, military industrial complex that profits when it's a war, pharmaceutical companies that profit when there's a pandemic?
01:38:47.000You're creating the necessity for ongoing crisis.
01:38:50.000If the elites in the society benefit from situations that are detrimental to everybody else, that's what reality is going to become.
01:39:28.000And especially if they can find some sort of way to justify these horrific acts, in some way, shape, or form, they could have this diffusion of responsibility where it's not their call and not their fault.
01:39:47.000And the only way we're going to get out of this is if we, the collective all of us, whether you're on the left or whether you're on the right, recognize this stupid game that people are playing.
01:40:00.000Recognize this hustle and don't get sucked into it.
01:40:03.000Do you ever feel that your power that you have evidently organically accrued, even if it is strategic, you seem to have done it in a very sort of natural way, has potential beyond cultural power, beyond persuasive power.
01:40:19.000You don't seem like you think like that to me.
01:40:21.000You don't seem like you think, fucking hell, I'm at the center of a movement.
01:40:47.000And then eventually it becomes what it is.
01:40:49.000Yeah, it's a great advocacy for authenticity because there are a lot of things that you wouldn't typically think would sit together, kind of culturally liberal views in terms of tolerance and openness, quite traditional male ideas around hunting, martial arts, and a background in entertainment and a standard.
01:41:05.000The only thing that ties it together is authenticity, in a sense.
01:41:08.000That's the only, and I suppose that as a person that's had sometimes cause for self-doubt, because I've done a lot of things that are self-destructive around like being a drug addict, for example.
01:41:18.000But to get to that place of like, no, just trust yourself.
01:41:31.000It's not that often where you're like, oh, God, this is a genuine dilemma.
01:41:35.000A lot of times I know I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing.
01:41:38.000I'm not participating in a way that I ought to.
01:41:40.000I'm not doing the best that I could do.
01:41:44.000And that requires discipline, actually.
01:41:45.000And again, it comes down to the individual.
01:41:47.000In a sense, part of the ongoing cultural arguments that we have is an abdication of personal responsibility for how much we are in control of our own bloody lives.
01:41:54.000And in a sense, part of your story is a demonstration of that by sort of just being, this is what I believe in.
01:42:13.000Well, I've been very fortunate that I have been able to do this without anybody's input.
01:42:17.000So no one would have ever let me say, okay, I want to have a bunch of guys like we do the show Protect Our Parks, where we all do mushrooms and get drunk and just, it's four comedians just being completely ridiculous.
01:42:30.000And then the next day I'll have like a legitimate psychologist on and I'll talk about fear and anxiety and what goes on in the brain and what causes trauma.
01:42:40.000And then the next day I'll have an MMA fighter on.
01:42:42.000And then the next day I'll have some world traveler on or some guy who likes to climb mountains or some person who's walked around the earth.
01:42:49.000Like it doesn't, the only thread through the whole thing is I find this interesting.
01:43:25.000You know, and I think that when you just put something together like this, and I think you're experiencing a very similar version of it, that people see when they watch your show, like, oh, this is what Russell is interested in.
01:43:38.000This is what Russell thinks about things.
01:43:40.000There's no one getting to him, telling him to do it this way.
01:43:43.000This is like, it's so clearly from a unique and individual perspective that that's what makes people say, oh, I could trust that guy.
01:43:50.000He might not be right, but at least he'll tell me the truth.
01:43:53.000And if he's not right, and if he finds out that he was not right, he's going to tell me that too.
01:43:59.000If it's, I suppose that comes back to that authenticity perspective, that if you stitch into this, I have, I, as a person, have got some values.
01:44:08.000I'm really flawed, but I do believe in these things.
01:44:11.000Then you've got some, whether it's believe in or I'm interested in, then you've, then you've got a North Star of some description.
01:44:18.000When it becomes governed by committee, which ultimately will default to economic imperatives, when you describe that thing, beekeeper one week, Egyptologist the next, you know, I mean, they're like, that's not going to, we're not going to be able to sell advertising on that.
01:44:30.000They would have using their own modality prevented it from ever coming into existence.
01:44:35.000It's only, in a sense, where the authenticity meets the technology and the possibility that the whole project takes off.
01:44:43.000Yeah, I'm wondering how that's sort of going to apply.
01:44:44.000I don't suppose the only way I can apply it is by a continuum of the authenticity.
01:45:12.000That's what's missing in mainstream television.
01:45:15.000Yeah, I'm really glad to hear you say that.
01:45:17.000And I'm happy you said it because sometimes when I feel like I'm talking about something like, you know, thank fuck.
01:45:22.000Sometimes someone comes on the show, like someone like Seymour Hirsch and you know, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist or talked about the Nord Stream pipeline.
01:45:29.000And because I said, because you know how it is, look at where you work, even impressive though it is, a somewhat incubated kingdom.
01:45:36.000You think, like, I read all this stuff, but I read the kind of stuff that I'm interested in.
01:45:40.000And so I was thinking, oh my God, have I gone fucking mad?
01:45:42.000Like, maybe just Putin is an evil tyrant and like we should just do whatever Raytheod and Lockheed Martin and the military, we should just do what they want.
01:45:51.000And then someone comes on with a lot more experience and expertise than me or like that, you know, Jeffrey Sachs.
01:45:56.000And you'll go, this is what happened in 2014.
01:45:58.000This is what happened after Gorbachev.
01:45:59.000This is what happened at that industry.
01:46:02.000That's where the authentic that then, if you can start to trust yourself, hold on, yeah.
01:46:05.000My general cynicism about centralized power and the kind of way that politics in your country, for example, is funded, the amount of money that's spent on lobbying, the amount of people that will own stocks and shares in energy companies and the military-industrial complex, Paul Pelosi's remarkable knack for investing in things exactly that are so good.
01:46:58.000I'm not sure for me personally, I guess it's just not a good fit.
01:47:01.000But it's a weird thing to feel yourself move away from the culture, especially if you've been in the middle of it, you know, to sort of feel like, oh, I'm a person that would be on those late shows and stuff.
01:47:10.000And, you know, fortunately, I don't think like that.
01:47:13.000Yeah, you don't see, you don't care, do you?
01:48:10.000You have a very unique perspective, a humorous take on horrible corruption and these terrible atrocities that are happening all through the world.
01:49:36.000Like, my God, you, Russell Brand, are doing the thing that thousands and thousands of independent YouTube content providers are doing.
01:49:46.000These content creators, these independent people that just have a camera in front and they're rent, whether they're talking about technology or they're talking about sports, whatever they're doing.
01:49:57.000And you're showing that this is like, through your endorsement of that sort of format, you're showing that here's this mainstream, very successful star who has chosen to do this thing that's accessible to everybody.
01:50:18.000Because it's even not so much the idea of revenue.
01:50:21.000It's the idea of, I suppose, like on a psychological level, I reckon I felt like probably as a kid craving acceptance, you know, and then sort of celebrity is a type of acceptance.
01:50:35.000Then when you feel that, oh, man, this ain't actually who I am and move back to the kind of cultural criticism, anti-establishment rhetoric, taking the piss out of all that stuff.
01:50:48.000When obviously I'm aware of how those issues are being discussed in the mainstream, even in entertainment products.
01:50:53.000Like sometimes I see one of those things on the TV and I can't believe how they talk.
01:50:56.000I can't believe they are not aware that like half of the country is also there.
01:51:00.000The marketing and the demographic study has become the driving force so much that they don't even care that loads of people are not going to agree with that stuff anymore.
01:51:08.000I suppose they've accepted that audience is gone.
01:51:11.000Well, the people that are saying those words don't have a say.
01:51:44.000When you have an open-ended timeframe, like you have on your show and like I have on this show, and so many people who do YouTube shows and podcasts have on their shows, then you can sort things through.
01:53:45.000I was having a conversation with Eric Weinstein the other day where he's explaining to me the reality of other dimensions and the measurable reality of other dimensions that we absolutely know that they exist.
01:53:57.000And do other beings have access to them?
01:54:04.000Imagine if that becomes at the forefront of the zeitgeist.
01:54:10.000If people recognize that not only are there other dimensions, multiple other dimensions that are recognizable, measurable, you know where they are, you know how to get to them, but beings are coming from those dimensions and visiting us on a regular basis.
01:54:27.000Are you still going to give a shit about a trans woman using the female bathroom?
01:54:34.000Are you still going to give a shit about whether or not someone has pink hair or blue hair or who does this or who comes across what border?
01:54:44.000You're going to go, holy shit, there's a bigger thing going on.
01:54:49.000There's something that transcends all physical reality as we know it.
01:54:54.000It's beyond our imagination and it is reality.
01:54:58.000Yes, we're fetishizing, understandably, the only measurable part of our reality while knowing even deeply personally for our own subjectivity that there's something else within us.
01:55:10.000There is our experience of rational thought.
01:55:13.000There's our experience of bodily sensation.
01:55:17.000I've been unable, of course, because of my recovery, to get into the sort of psychedelic space when it's, you know, now that it's become wellness and now that it's become acceptable.
01:55:25.000I've not been able to attain those ideas.
01:55:31.000But I would like to know, what is it about a psychedelic experience that makes you think that if you engage, that you will somehow or another regress, lose all control, start doing heroin, your life is going to fall apart.
01:55:49.000You're clearly not the same person, even though you've experienced the same traumas that led you into heroin addiction in the first place.
01:55:58.000You have clearly gotten a certain control over your life, an understanding of yourself, a personal sovereignty that you didn't possess when you were an addict.
01:56:12.000So what makes you think that this entheogen, this literal psychedelic connection to a higher realm would ruin your life?
01:56:24.000Yeah, I know, because the thing is, I really, really want to.
01:56:28.000Like when I was still using, I took psychedelics in the same way all kids take psychedelics.
01:56:33.000For fun, in a park, at a bus stop, you know, and knowing that there's something ontologically profound happening.
01:56:59.000So, beyond like all that stuff, I was aware that this was profound.
01:57:02.000But also, I was doing it on my own with like just kids drinking cider at a bus stop in Essex.
01:57:06.000I wasn't doing it like with a shaman or a doctor or Aldous Huxley or Terrace McKenna, or like some Brazilian guy with feathers and stuff.
01:57:14.000I was like, at a bus stop in the rain in the grimness of graves where I'm from.
01:57:19.000So, like, I've maintained this fascination because I feel, well, I'm a 12-step person, and 12-steps is about that there's a spiritual deficiency that causes addicts to become addicts.
01:57:29.000They're looking for something that they can't find in the world.
01:57:51.000Yeah, we all have a certain level of it.
01:57:53.000Yeah, and for some reason, the addict type, according to this analysis, and there's only one analysis, and it's the one that I've got clean with, so it's the one I sort of advocate for.
01:58:01.000It's the only one I'm qualified to advocate for.
01:58:03.000The principle is: if you replicate, or not even replicate, if you create those spiritual conditions, like you belong to a community, you think about helping others, you're willing to look at what the reasons you drink and take drugs for in the first place.
01:58:18.000But fundamentally, this is the key thing: is it what it argues most of all, and it's like an ingenious piece of American theology, really, I would say, the 12 steps.
01:58:27.000It was informed by William James, the theologian.
01:58:29.000It's influenced by Carl Jung, of course.
01:58:47.000And so even once you stop drinking and taking drugs, you're still going to have that problem and you're going to have to address that problem.
01:58:52.000And when you do, you won't feel the need to drink or take drugs anymore.
01:58:55.000Now, so what becomes sort of central to the whole ideology of the 12 steps is, in a sense, the abstinence is significant and it's pivotal.
01:59:02.000You can't drink or take drugs one day at a time.
01:59:04.000But more important than that is, you've surrendered.
01:59:06.000You're not in charge of your life anymore.
01:59:44.000None of those guys, there hadn't been that much time, which makes you think about vaccine tests.
01:59:47.000How do they know what it's going to do in 10 years?
01:59:49.000If you hadn't had fucking 10 years, so like, you know, they didn't know how those things were going to pan out.
01:59:54.000So the reason I have this ayahuasca hesitancy, a lot of people are ayahuasca hesitant.
02:00:00.000What are we going to do about that hesitancy?
02:00:02.000The reason I have it is because I can't take back personal authority for what I do.
02:00:07.000And the idea is, is because I've achieved, I've been given something that's quite delicate.
02:00:12.000Like when I was using I was destroying my life and now I've been granted a different perspective, I shouldn't mess with that shit by doing something that would necessarily involve I'm in charge, even though I really want it.
02:00:23.000When I hear you and other people on your show and Dunka Troll talk about smoking DMT and you're meeting orbs of pure consciousness, I think the whole reason I came a drug addict, remember, was because I was looking for that.
02:00:32.000I'm looking for this, this isn't reality.
02:01:20.000And again, like, you know, I enjoy marijuana and I've enjoyed psychedelics and, but I cannot have anything for long periods of time and I'm fine.
02:01:39.000I could find myself, I think, if I did start doing a lot of Coke or if I was at a different stage in my life and I wasn't concentrating on being productive and concentrating on being like being healthy, being physically healthy, being physically fit, and also using exercise as a means to mitigate anxiety and for just to keep my mind straight.
02:02:04.000And that if I didn't have those things and maybe I was drinking every day or doing Coke or doing something, I could see myself falling apart.
02:02:13.000I could see myself, because I think it's just a natural human characteristic.
02:02:17.000But right now, like if someone said, hey, are you worried that you would get hooked on something?
02:02:34.000But I'm like, I guess what we're analyzing is that, you know, one of the areas of distinction between our two natures, there are some things that are quite similar.
02:02:40.000It sounds like we're from pretty similar types of background.
02:02:42.000It sounds like that we both had negative experiences of a step parent.
02:02:48.000I don't know if that's true, actually.
02:02:58.000There was a lot of stuff along those lines.
02:03:01.000But it's just, everybody that seeks exorbitant amounts of attention is fucked up.
02:03:07.000And if you want to go on stage, like, why would you want to go on stage?
02:03:10.000Like, what kind of a person wants that amount of attention?
02:03:14.000What kind of psychopath metabolizes childhood trauma into, even though I'm really frightened of this, I'm going to go and do it.
02:03:22.000I'm going to stand up there and I'm going to trust that what I've got to say.
02:03:25.000It's like this fucking weird idea that somehow or another, not having a lot of attention when you were younger can all be fixed by getting a shitload of attention when you're older.
02:03:36.000My house weren't warm enough when I was a kid.
02:03:38.000I always keep the heating up high now.
02:03:46.000Yeah, and like, so, but it feels like somehow or another, one way or another, you metabolize that suffering into some kind of form of discipline and control is how it looks from the outside.
02:03:55.000And for me, I collapsed into chemical dependency as soon as it, as soon as it came into my life, like I was, that was my religion.
02:04:04.000Well, I found martial arts at a very young age.
02:04:07.000And so discipline became my addiction.
02:04:10.000And I got very, very, very fortunate that I went in that direction because I grew up with a lot of guys that drank a lot and did a lot of drugs and they went off in their way.
02:04:32.000I was a very weird kid in that regard.
02:04:35.000Like socially, I was kind of an outcast.
02:04:37.000But I found through that path, it was like there was a clear road where I could be a better person and a happier person.
02:04:52.000My wife pointed out something that wouldn't have been obvious to me as an outsider of martial arts that a lot of martial arts people have a geeky component.
02:05:03.000There's a lot of art you can nerd out on the moves, nerd out, or even on the kit and the aesthetics.
02:05:08.000And I feel like to have this, to have discovered that early in life, it's kept you within lines, I assume, where even the potentially combustible, violent impulse has had somewhere to go.
02:05:22.000All of those things have been able to have been targeted.
02:05:25.000I, like, again, because of coming on here, you do, you're the first person I heard talk about Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
02:05:32.000It's a difficult thing to start when you're 40 years old and you don't have an, like, I don't have an athletic background, but I'm a purple belt in jujitsu now.
02:06:09.000When someone, when you get into someone's side control and you trap an arm with your neck, you know how to slide into that head and arm choke.
02:06:27.000You know how to use defensive tactics to initiate offense.
02:06:32.000The only difference between that and a black belt is honing the edge and continuing to put in the time.
02:06:39.000The difference between my game when I was a purple belt versus my game when I'm a black belt is that I just learned more moves and became more consistent and then trained more and then got a better understanding of what to do and what not to do and was much more responsible defensively and just got better condition and stronger.
02:07:45.000And there are other purple belts in our club that are similar size to me and it's sort of like it's elegant and flow-based and there's some nice open gardens, some things that are sort of pretty.
02:07:56.000But like I still have a reluctance to face the business end of jiu-jitsu, the grind, the harshness of that stuff sometimes, I guess.
02:08:05.000So my competence inhales and exhales, you know, like when I when I'm doing it a lot, I feel very good about myself.
02:08:14.000It feels good to articulate and physicalize something that for me as a quite cerebral man could just be conceptual to feel what struggle is like.
02:08:21.000It's like why I like doing the hot and cold stuff as well, like experiencing soreness and cold punches.
02:08:25.000But oh, this is what it's like to feel really uncomfortable and just to deal with it.
02:08:31.000And then, but like with the thing is, is that it's abstract with hot and cold.
02:08:35.000When you're like looking into another person's eyes and there's the idea of combat and like I've obviously got some ego, you know, and when I experience, oh man, look at that.
02:08:45.000To get smashed, to be the nail and not the hammer.
02:08:48.000You know, that like I still deal with that.
02:08:50.000The first time I got, even as a white belt, when someone like guillotine choked me out a couple of times, I was like transported back to childhood.
02:09:28.000And just trying to reconcile like this desire to learn this thing and just getting smashed by people and how difficult it is to get good at it.
02:09:40.000But what a fucking amazing tool it is.
02:09:45.000I love rolling with people when, like, it's exciting.
02:09:52.000But there's something very fascinating about being a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu black belt and rolling with someone and knowing they can't do anything to you.
02:10:00.000Like, if I roll with some white belt and then they kind of spazz out of me or something, and I just grab them and clinch them, it's like, I'm in control of this.
02:10:09.000I've put in all these fucking constant days of training, like, for so many years.
02:10:17.000I trained since 19, I started training in 1996.
02:10:20.000It's like, I've been doing it for so long that it's such a beautiful thing to have.
02:10:25.000And one of the beautiful things about Jiu-Jitsu is, I mean, the real lessons or the real, the real value in it is that you overcome adversity and it becomes a tool for developing your human potential.
02:10:42.000Through the struggle of the physical struggle, the wanting to quit and not quitting, the developing the ability to overcome adversity, developing the mental fortitude.
02:10:53.000It's just this incredible tool for managing the stress of life because the regular life out there in the world is nothing compared to some big guy sweating in your mouth who's trying to fucking strangle you, which is like what happens.
02:11:08.000Or when someone gets you in a triangle and you got your fucking arm is here and the leg is here and like, ah, like it's so much worse than most life, yet still somehow enjoyable.
02:11:22.000It's just like there's very few things that are like jiu-jitsu in this life that can give you those kind of lessons.
02:11:29.000Also, the trend of our time is more and more disembodying.
02:11:33.000There's more and more like strap a helmet on your head and life yourself off into the metaverse.
02:11:39.000And like if you think of how apes and comparable advanced mammals live in their bodies and such a short period of time ago, evolutionarily, we would have been in our bodies like that.
02:11:50.000It would have been normal to play with like and establish hierarchy in that way and to know what your body is capable of.
02:11:57.000Like I suppose for me, one of the things I've got is that paradox of thinking, oh man, I'm capable of doing these things with my body.
02:12:04.000Also, other people are capable of doing things with my body.
02:12:07.000I don't know next time I open my mouth in a moment of rage at a traffic light who's going to step out of that car.
02:12:13.000I don't know because people surprise you.
02:13:02.000It's always good to know what to do if a conflict emerges.
02:13:06.000Because one of the beautiful things about jiu-jitsu as well is that unlike karate or a lot of other martial arts, you do it full blast.
02:13:16.000So the thing about sparring and kickboxing is like, man, if you spar full blast all the time, you're going to get brain damage pretty fucking quick.
02:13:25.000So a lot of times when you're sparring, you're holding back because you're protecting your opponents.
02:13:29.000So it's not the same anxiety level as a full-blown conflict.
02:13:33.000But jiu-jitsu is a full-blown conflict.
02:13:37.000If it's you and some other purple belt and you guys get heated and it starts getting after it and he's arm-dragging you and he's got your leg and he's stacking you and trying to pass your guard, it's like, ah, this is a real battle.
02:13:53.000And if you get in a compromising position, you get caught, you tap and you're okay and you keep going.
02:13:58.000I mean, the ability to tap and the ability to submit someone and then keep going is amazing.
02:14:05.000The tap is beauty because the tap is the consent and the tap shows that the underlying thing is a camaraderie and that this is a collegiate thing that we're undertaking together.
02:14:15.000Also, when you were talking about how much of the online hatred and angst likely comes from living a life where you don't express things, to know that I have as part of my routine, experiencing trauma, experiencing another person's aggression, experiencing another person's strength, even though my ego don't like it when I'm submitted or bested, at least for me, it's not abstract.
02:14:38.000The idea of the experience of physical combat, like it was for most of my life, other than sort of normal fights when I was a kid.
02:14:45.000Like it's a lived experience in the same way of when I very first experienced cold, it was before I met Wim Hoff or before the popularization of these ideas.
02:14:52.000I just jumped in a really cold lake once because I once had a girlfriend that was an aristocrat.
02:14:58.000It was like we're falling into Wonderland, frankly.
02:15:01.000And one time I jumped into this freezing cold lake and I heard the noise that come out of my body.
02:15:04.000I kind of go, and I thought, oh, wow, I can make that noise and my body can handle freezing cold.
02:15:11.000Like, you know, if you think about it, we're disembodying ourselves.
02:15:14.000We're turning ourselves into atrophying little beings that don't know how to inhabit a body.
02:15:19.000And that it's, you know, of course, as a martial arts expert, the thing that accompanies it usually is a respect for opponents, a respect for the body, not kind of showboating, aggressive, intimidating, bullying.
02:15:33.000It gets like, as my teacher told me, that sort of stuff gets taken out of the culture pretty quickly.
02:15:37.000When someone comes into the environment that exhibits those traits, that it's managed and perhaps in a way that you might imagine among primates those kind of behaviors would be managed.
02:15:48.000That's probably one of the best ways that they could stop bullying is to teach everybody how to fight.
02:15:55.000But I think the thing you're saying about being disembodied is so important too, because I think that whatever you do that's physically difficult, and it doesn't have to be jiu-jitsu, it could be marathon running, it could be CrossFit, whatever you want to do.
02:16:10.000Difficult things force the mind and the body to work together because the mind has to control the body while the body is screaming to stop and the mind is screaming to stay.
02:16:23.000You have to have almost like a third part of you.
02:16:26.000You have a physical, you have a mental, and then you have the discipline.
02:16:31.000And the discipline is almost a thing in and of itself.
02:16:34.000It's a thing that you know the mental wants to quit.
02:16:38.000So how do you tell your own mind not to quit?
02:17:04.000It's like physical struggle teaches you to be solid inside your thoughts and to maintain the path.
02:17:14.000Stay on the path, even though it's hard to do, which is so important in life.
02:17:19.000So many times in life, real progress comes from grinding it out when you don't want to, when you want to quit, and you must understand that there's a process and trust this process.
02:17:31.000And the only way you trust this process is if you participated in it.
02:17:35.000You're talking, I believe, about the spirit.
02:17:37.000And the word spirituality and the word discipline have been continually paired.
02:18:31.000And when you start bringing up interdimensional travel and psychedelics, you start to recognize, yeah, no, this is an important space for me.
02:18:37.000Interesting, too, the way that the arguments around sex and gender have altered.
02:18:41.000Because for what, you know, like the Andrew Tate phenomena has been an interesting one, but I've heard you talk about the sort of, you know, and certainly while there are outstanding crimes, I've certainly wouldn't comment on any of those things and how they might play out.
02:18:54.000If you leave a space in the culture of where masculinity can be sort of embraced, loved, revered, celebrated, then different models are going to emerge from that territory.
02:19:06.000Rather than looking at the masculinity isn't solely ugly.
02:27:07.000It just shouldn't be connected to misogyny it did.
02:27:11.000Masculinity and misogyny, it shouldn't be that somehow or another you, in order to be masculine, you have to hate women.
02:28:33.000They don't know how to push themselves when they don't want to.
02:28:37.000Yeah, that's why there has to be a spiritual component to life.
02:28:41.000And that's why a culture that abdicates that responsibility and abstracts that reality becomes kind of nihilistic and celebrates meaninglessness.
02:28:50.000It becomes only about furniture and an aesthetic.
02:28:55.000We can sort of feel that now, I think, that it's been hollowed out from within.
02:28:59.000The institutions are hollow because there's no values there.
02:29:02.000And like I alluded to earlier, the idea of a sort of a potentially senile and decaying president is like the culture is unconsciously telling you what it is.
02:29:25.000So like the service that I suppose that I don't pay enough attention to and sometimes give enough credence to is the possibility that you can reach individuals through a media like this and say that actually what you do is important.
02:29:37.000What you believe in, the way you treat yourself, the way you talk to yourself, the practices you undertake.
02:29:41.000I mean, when you bring in one of the Goliaths from that space, like Goggins, Dave Goggins, someone who transformed themselves in ways I don't even understand, still from a 300-pound person on a couch to at the absolute ultimate end of what is possible to be militarily, is demonstration of that.
02:29:59.000And I suppose that what must be happening, as well as like the identity, where you come at odds with the culture, it's observable.
02:30:05.000Like, you know, like the I've mechtin' moment.
02:30:06.000It's like, oh shit, what you said there, the mainstream don't like that, push back and crackle.
02:30:12.000But like elsewhere, there must be thousands, millions of messages about self-discipline, awakening, do things for your body, eat healthily, awaken, take responsibility for yourself.
02:30:20.000Masculinity and femininity can co-habit successfully.
02:30:25.000All these ideas are reaching out there and they're reaching people that wouldn't typically be getting, I would say, such nuanced takes on the sound of the skills.
02:30:34.000But people have to act on those signals.
02:30:37.000There's a lot of those messages that are getting out there, but how many of them reach a person to the point where that person decides to act?
02:30:44.000The acting is what's most important because the only lessons that you really generate from this stuff is actually engaging, actually taking the yoga class, actually going for the run, actually doing the CrossFit, actually doing jiu-jitsu, actually doing something.
02:31:00.000It's so hard to actually do something.
02:31:02.000It's one of the great problems that people have.
02:31:05.000And it's one of the reasons why there's so many hucksters out there that are selling motivation.
02:31:09.000There's so many people out there that are, they're motivational speakers.
02:31:44.000Like you can tell people there's a quick fix in an easy way, but whether it's getting off drugs, becoming a stand-up comedian or doing like accomplishing stuff in a martial art, normally it means like incrementally day by day, hour by hour, session by session, you are going to experience a degree of suffering, whether it's physical.
02:31:58.000Or, you know, like early stand-up when you can't do it and you have to stand in front of an audience and be shit and bomb in front of people and then like, oh, I'm going to do it again.
02:32:09.000And like, I suppose I don't want to only use the markers that are sanctioned as success, things that might bring you financial success because God knows there are other ways of succeeding in this world and truly, truly great people that don't enjoy the accolades of a culture that celebrates many, many things I think are pretty vacuous.
02:32:23.000But on the level of the individual, as you say, if you're not willing to go to the mat or to the open mic or to the wherever it is practice.
02:32:45.000They put on headsets or they sit in front of the computer or they sit in front of the television or they sit in front of their phone and they don't act.
02:32:54.000It's not a natural, normal way for people to behave.
02:32:57.000And this thing that people do, they avoid discomfort.
02:33:02.000It sounds ridiculous, but then it just creates more discomfort.
02:33:05.000You don't realize that in embracing discomfort and forcing yourself to do something very uncomfortable that you can control, like an ice bath, like a sauna, like a run, like a workout, you are eliminating another form of discomfort.
02:35:05.000You eat terrible food and then you're exhausted because you're poisoned.
02:35:08.000And then you're sitting in front of the television, you're sedated.
02:35:11.000Like, fuck, man, there's no way to live your life.
02:35:14.000Yeah, because if you think a lot of those behaviors are about trying to replicate a primal behavior, like eating food excessively, or pornography and masturbation to replicate sexuality, or numbing activities like screens on narcotics rather than becoming harmonized with the evolutionary threads that transcend us as individuals and have carried our species from when we were a priori from much simpler mechanisms.
02:35:39.000W.B. Yates, the Irish poet, said, each artist must create their own religion.
02:35:43.000And I feel like in a culture where there is no discipline, religion, ideology other than your role is to be a passive consumer to consume information, to consume product, to not question, then almost every individual has to have like, right, this is what I believe in.
02:35:58.000This is how I'm going to make my life.
02:35:59.000Now, I don't mean this in an individualistic way because otherwise then you've unconsciously fallen into one of what I believe is the unspoken ideologies of our time, materialism, progressivism, individualism.
02:36:09.000What you are as an individual is the most important thing because actually that isn't true.
02:36:13.000It's your value, it seems to me, your value to other people.
02:36:17.000Like again and again, I have found like I have to, the same way you talk about exercise, I impose upon myself doing things for other people as part of the 12-step stuff, part of the program I have.
02:36:26.000Like someone's not wanting to, to call someone else to deal with their stuff, to listen to them.
02:36:31.000And afterwards, I feel better about it because I haven't.
02:36:34.000Otherwise, my religion is what I want.
02:36:37.000I become devoted to it, dedicated to it.
02:36:39.000Similar to you, I'm not good on vacations.
02:36:41.000On my honeymoon, I tried to organize the hotel workers into a union against their management because I couldn't cope with relaxing or the guilt of affluence.
02:38:28.000But it is obviously a ridiculous argument because anyone would benefit from there are behaviors and tendencies that the human body has, regardless of what your body is.
02:38:39.000And I suppose a way of making it universal, even though the idea of the universal is something that people query now.
02:38:44.000Oh, there isn't just one ideal that we can all conform to.
02:38:46.000But I feel, God, we've all got skeletons, we've all got kidneys, we've all got fingers.
02:39:10.000And perhaps, like, as an action of self-love, you know, I'm friends with Tony Robbins, and he was one of the first people that told me about jumping in ice baths and all that.
02:39:17.000And he says the way that he talked to himself before he does that, you're getting in that fucking ice bath.
02:39:21.000Couldn't you be more like, okay, we're getting in the ice bath now?
02:39:25.000This exercise and discipline stuff, sometimes it does require aggression or assertiveness.
02:39:38.000Okay, University of South Australia researchers are calling for exercise to be a mainstay approach for managing depression as a new study shows that physical activity is 1.5 times more effective than counseling or the leading medications.
02:43:01.000But if you can force yourself to do something else on top of the things that you are mandated to do because of your work or life and whatever, just force yourself.
02:43:24.000And you know, he's when his wife took her own life is when it was the big moment of transition for him.
02:43:30.000And for Wim, it seems as well that accompanying his deep belief in the effectiveness and power of cold and breath work techniques is a kind of broad open-mindedness, a total sort of loving perspective on reality and a very anti-establishment.
02:43:48.000Like he made like a mainstream TV show in our country, like where they got celebrities for getting ice and that kind of thing.
02:43:53.000You know, like they did a reality show.
02:43:55.000I said, they must have been cutting all sorts of shit from Wim Hoff because I know what that guy believes about mainstream media, about big pharma.
02:44:03.000You know, if they got five words out of him without him saying like, you know, Pfizer, this or because, you know, because ultimately, as even that piece of data there from Australia demonstrated, whenever the interests of people are at odds with the interests of corporations, the corporate interest will win.
02:44:21.000No one can monetize the idea that if you stay healthy, if you eat well, there's no, I don't think there are serious reasons why we couldn't organize the entire way that food is provided for people and what our modalities are.
02:44:41.000Yeah, like you like if you eliminated processed foods, you wouldn't have diabetes, heart disease or cancer to nearly like possibly eliminating it.
02:44:50.000So we're the like that systemically we're eating things.
02:44:53.000Systemically we're not doing we're not using the body correctly.
02:44:56.000I don't believe like as Carlin used to say, you don't need a conspiracy where interests converge.
02:45:02.000And if there is an interest in people staring at screens, eating bad food, taking lots of medication, not personally and individually awakening, not being able to take on opposing views and listen to the validity of opposing views.
02:45:13.000If enough people's interests coalesce around that, that will become the culture.
02:45:18.000And I feel that's where we find ourselves a celebration of stuff that seems vacuous and not impactful and misusing of important ideas around equality and individuality being repurposed.
02:45:29.000It's like the whole thing has become plastic and has organized around some of our lower nature.
02:45:36.000And when they talk about in yoga, an age of darkness, I feel that that's what it is, a grossness.
02:45:41.000Kali Yuga, that we're in the grossness, the darkness is without light.
02:45:45.000Thank God that, you know, like think about how ideas that are emerging are often arcane ideas.
02:45:50.000Like they were always a shamanic interest in plants was always going on.
02:45:54.000Breath work was always considered to be important and necessary.
02:45:58.000People that had yogic practices, some are like that's why I think like Wim's interesting, even though they've done the clinical trials and showed the effectiveness of his method, he is clearly coming at it from what I would say a kind of a role that's being extracted from our culture, and that pertains to this present that I bought you.
02:46:12.000One is just simply some very fine cigars, in my view, and the other one is this book on like how show the profession of show business emerges from shamanism.
02:46:21.000That the true well, this is what this guy's offering.
02:46:24.000I interviewed him, this man called John Higgs on the show.
02:46:26.000This book here, here, I'll give it to you now.
02:46:29.000It's called The Death and Resurrection Shows.
02:46:31.000This out-of-print book that's tricky to get, that I've become very has affected me since I read it because it says, This is the argument, the riot he takes you on.
02:46:40.000There would have been a point where there were settled cultures, and yet there still would have been nomadic cultures.
02:46:45.000The nomadic people would have traveled to the settlements and performed there, and their performances would have been derived from shamanic rites.
02:46:53.000And shamanic rites include things like death and resurrection, transcendence of levels, awareness of different dimensions.
02:47:00.000Through this book, he posits that the profession of show business maintains within it the idea of the mystical experience.
02:47:07.000And he cites very popular examples of like what looks like shamanism in popular culture.
02:47:13.000Many of the figures that adorn your establishment, Jimi Hendrix, there's a shamanic vibe, he sets fire to shit and does Bowie and the androgyny, the tendency for them to die young.
02:47:24.000The shamanism, the earliest form of religion, usually connected to plant medicines, is like it suggests and embraces that the shaman is an unusual figure, that they're going to say crazy shit from time to time, that they don't live in the main part of the settlement because there can be off-key people with their communing with animals, with their taking of plants, with their visions and their ability to come back.
02:47:48.000One of the sort of archetypes that's within this thing, I guess it's the architecture and archetypes of shamanism, which it is arguing all religions are derived from.
02:47:58.000And all religions include things, or some, like of death and resurrection, particularly agricultural religions need their God to die, go into the ground, and then come back again, the same way you require your crop to go into the ground and come back again.
02:48:13.000In a sense, it's a way of, you know, that you could say that religion is a way of navigating the unknown and the unknowable, and the shaman is the person that can travel between those levels.
02:48:21.000But then it argues that the role of the shaman becomes the role of the clergy, and it's a kind of castrated role.
02:48:27.000Like a clergyman, except for in like some American traditions, like evangelicism, you know, and some of the figures like, you know, like say Kinnison is an example, and like even Alex Jones, as we're discussing, the evangelism is trying to bring you to a promised land.
02:48:40.000In my country in particular, religion has become very neutralized, neutered.
02:48:44.000It's about just flat, banal morality, mostly speaking.
02:48:48.000There's not a lot of radical religion, which is about we're going to prioritise spiritual values over material values, otherwise we're fucked.
02:48:57.000The history of it was that the rise of Protestantism comes from Calvinism and Lutheranism.
02:49:02.000Like there was a lot of corruption in the Catholic Church and these Protestant breakaway movements happened in the UK.
02:49:07.000It was because Henry VIII wanted to get divorced, essentially, so they built the Church of England so that he could legitimately divorce wives, even though sometimes he did just chop off their heads as a way of resolving the same problem.
02:49:18.000And Protestantism, they say, in Northern Europe, where it's colder, that Protestantism took off.
02:49:24.000It's work, it places moral and ethical values on work.
02:49:28.000And the southern European countries were more family-oriented, more socially-oriented.
02:49:33.000Italy's France, and Spain, where they're still Catholic, and the northern European countries, Germany countries, northern European countries, Germany, England, etc., have a little more, and generally more economically prosperous now, perhaps because that religion fits more with capitalist models.
02:49:49.000So, but I guess what this book is arguing is that the reason that show business has always been attacked by the church is because it's dealing with the same forces.
02:49:58.000And it talks about how figures emerge through show business continually that represent values that are not really about entertainment.
02:50:05.000What is it you're going into the cinema for?
02:50:07.000Why are people listening to your podcast a lot of the time for hope, for a different perspective, because they find something here that they don't find anywhere else?
02:50:16.000Because the culture isn't going to give it to them because the culture, as McKenna says, is not their friend.
02:50:21.000The culture wants them little blobs with a visor on, consuming endlessly.
02:50:26.000And if you can't participate in the economic system, we don't care what happens to you.
02:50:29.000You're going to prison or you're going to sleep in the street or you're going to die of an opioid overdose.
02:50:34.000That's the arse end of the type of capitalism we live within now.
02:50:37.000And I suppose what this book is, what fascinated me about it is saying that without the divine, without the sacred, without some personal relationship to what you might call God, you know, that which is beyond material, that is which is beyond what you can know, that which requires faith.
02:50:53.000And all of our lives are going to require faith.
02:50:54.000Even what you've said about Brazilian jiu-jitsu and personal discipline is the faith that I'm going to feel better if I do this.
02:51:03.000Yeah, there's faith in the understanding of the process.
02:51:05.000And part of the problem, I think, if you live in a materialistic and rationalistic culture, which is what, you know, as my understanding is, is post-Enlightenment culture is about individualism, materialism, rationalism.
02:51:15.000If you accept those as the driving ideas, then in the end, the only things that matter are the things that you can measure.
02:51:20.000And there's no doubt that science, technology, medicine are marvelous, magnificent tools, metrics, ways, lenses for observing the miracles of nature and the cosmos.
02:51:29.000But when they start to drive economic models, you can't make the same claims for objectivity of science when the science is a subset of an economic model.
02:51:42.000How are those clinical trials conducted?
02:51:44.000How much of the information is released?
02:51:46.000And I think that that's really what the pandemic was: a lens that showed us a lot.
02:51:50.000It showed us stuff that's always happening, but it concentrated it and showed us it in an observable timeline.
02:51:56.000Normally, it's too diffuse and across too many issues.
02:51:58.000Hey, are these guys all cooperating, collaborating, and conspiring with one another to ensure that their mutual agendas are being met at the level of global corporatism, bypassing national sovereignty, not putting ordinary people's interests first?
02:52:11.000And I suppose that the reason that I'm fascinated with spirituality in particular is because that is your private little haven.
02:52:17.000That is your sacred cathedral within yourself where you do have sovereignty there still.
02:52:22.000And like, you know, sometimes I worry because the stuff I talk about, you know, I talk about these bloody, you know, global conspiracies, corruption, war, pandemic.
02:52:29.000And then in my life, I'm like still, you know, an affluent but normal guy.
02:52:33.000I'm getting, you know, doing a talk at my kids' school, getting kicked out of Legoland for non-compliance at a theme park.
02:52:40.000I'm not dealing with the bloody WEF on a daily basis.
02:52:44.000I'm not challenging Klaus Schwab face to face.
02:52:47.000You know, I mean, I'm living a normal person life.
02:52:51.000But then I talk to people, you know, like either you with the amount of information you've amassed through your own work or, you know, Jeffrey Sachs or fucking Glenn Greenwald or whoever.
02:53:01.000And you think, oh shit, this is actually true.
02:53:16.000This is not just some theory about how life should be organized.
02:53:20.000This is the slow grind, oppression, and centralizing of all resources at a level that's totally undemocratic, that's annihilating people's lives while telling them that it's somehow benefiting people that I don't think it benefits either.
02:53:33.000I think it's a and so yeah, but it's useful to remember that this is an experiential actual thing, not just something I do on the internet and talk about.
02:53:43.000It's, you know, because you go out in Austin, you will talk to a cab driver that will tell you, oh, all of the music venues shut down during the pandemic.
02:53:50.000And we can see now what the trends are.
02:53:53.000We can see now how it's affecting people.
02:53:55.000And I feel like, well, where is it that people are going to get the courage to change from?
02:54:00.000Even if that's that courage about how are you going to make your life within this system better?
02:54:05.000Or even how are you going to participate in challenging and even overthrowing these systems by the great resources that are within you?
02:54:14.000And that's, I suppose, one of the things, because I have good faith in people.
02:54:17.000Like, mine is not a bad faith analysis.
02:54:19.000Oh, people are bad, they're selfish, fuck them.
02:54:21.000Mine is, no, I think people might be beautiful, even though all the time I know that I do things that are corrupt and I make mistakes and I know that other people have wronged me and all of that.
02:54:27.000Because I believe in those things we've discussed, forgiveness, I feel like, no, actually, the resources are there.
02:56:51.000All right, so March 2020, a group of scientists sign an open letter condemning the conspiracy theory, suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.
02:57:00.000In April, Anthony Fauci refutes Donald Trump's claim of the possibility of a lab leak.
02:57:05.000January 2023, redacted NIH emails from January 2021 involving Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins show efforts to rule out the lab origin of COVID.
02:57:15.000February 2023, the Wall Street Journal reports the virus that drove the COVID-19 pandemic most likely emerged from a laboratory leak.
02:57:22.000That is just one example of from conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact.
02:57:44.000I mean, and you would think that with the claims that he makes, you would be sued.
02:57:47.000And one of the claims that he makes is that there was a concerted effort to diminish the possibility of this lab leak hypothesis being mainstream and that they went out of their way and there was phone calls at midnight and like get near your phone.
02:58:01.000We're going to have to do work about this.
02:58:05.000They conspired to push this narrative that also, like, when you see him getting grilled by Rand Paul about gain of function research, and he's just, his hands are shaking and you can see he's lying.
02:58:18.000He's like, you do not know what you are talking about.
02:58:23.000He's slowing the conversation down to an almost unfollowable level.
02:58:31.000The way he talks and the way he utilizes words, Senator, Senator, you do not know what you are talking about.
02:59:07.000He wants you to be yelling at him so he can get out of there.
02:59:09.000Yeah, that's the loyally monotony of bureaucracy.
02:59:14.000With all due respect, you do not know what you are talking about.
02:59:23.000Yeah, when their administrations and their public servants behave like that, how they can't understand why people would be attracted to Donald Trump, who talks like a normal person, who says crazy, weird stuff all the time.
02:59:42.000It's more complicated, but it's also really complicated when you find out that he holds patents on some of these drugs and he makes exorbitant amounts of profit off of these drugs.
02:59:50.000And also, he was, when he was at the head, he was the guy that was responsible for giving out grants.