The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Podcast #1949 Russell Brand

00:00:00.000 Welcome to America Russell.

00:00:01.000 Thank you for making me welcome in your space and your country.

00:00:05.000 My pleasure.

00:00:06.000 How you been, brother?

00:00:07.000 It's been an unusual time.

00:00:08.000 I've not been here for three years.

00:00:11.000 Just went to Los Angeles.

00:00:13.000 I have a house there, visited it.

00:00:14.000 It was like a sort of a time capsule, you know, like sort of notes for stand-up shows I was doing then.

00:00:20.000 And the graffiti has changed in the city of LA and the feeling of that city has altered.

00:00:25.000 And you can tell that some sort of window, some portal has been passed through.

00:00:30.000 And of course, I'm aware of, because it's a global event, I'm aware of what that has been.

00:00:34.000 But it's, yeah, it's strange to be back here.

00:00:36.000 Yeah, it's interesting when you go away from something and then you come back and there's like a tangible feeling of change.

00:00:43.000 Yeah, well, it's, I mean, I guess because I talk about American culture a lot, I come with a degree of anticipation.

00:00:52.000 But it was a torrential rainstorm in Los Angeles.

00:00:56.000 I'm aware that, like, you've moved out of there, that a lot of significant people in the space that I work in have moved out of there.

00:01:03.000 And there was a feeling of uncanniness and eeriness.

00:01:07.000 some of the familiar sites for homelessness have been cleansed as if by Travis Bickle's reign, you know, it's sort of like just...

00:01:15.000 Really?

00:01:16.000 They've moved homeless people?

00:01:17.000 For example, Gower Street, the Gower Street Bridge.

00:01:20.000 There would always be sort of like a little tented community there.

00:01:23.000 That 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.

00:01:36.000 No one really has a tangible resolution.

00:01:38.000 I haven't heard one resolution that's like, okay, that we could put our fingers on.

00:01:42.000 That's real.

00:01:43.000 Do 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.

00:01:52.000 Like we can't have people on the streets.

00:01:54.000 They'll cough on someone. 0.73

00:01:55.000 Put them all in hotels, put them in hostels.

00:01:57.000 They solved it.

00:01:58.000 And then when they reached the point where they were happy that the pandemic had leveled out, they kicked them all back out again.

00:02:04.000 Right, that's it.

00:02:05.000 We're not worried anymore.

00:02:06.000 Get back out of there.

00:02:07.000 I wonder why they did that.

00:02:08.000 Do you think it was just too much time and effort to manage those people?

00:02:12.000 Like they're shooting up in the hotels and causing ruckus.

00:02:17.000 I mean, I wonder what was the reason for putting them back on the street?

00:02:20.000 Because 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.

00:02:27.000 I feel like that the anomaly was the housing rather than the ejecting.

00:02:31.000 I feel like that they, when it was convenient and suitable, they could find a solution to homelessness that was an economic one.

00:02:39.000 And then when it wasn't necessary anymore, they just pulled the rug out from under it.

00:02:44.000 But I'm sure, like, yeah, that comes with complexity.

00:02:46.000 When 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.

00:02:54.000 You know, that was a big show at that time, those amazing guys doing those incredible stunts.

00:02:58.000 And I was like, well, what if you did the psychological version of that?

00:03:01.000 So I had like a boxing match with my dad.

00:03:03.000 I had a homeless guy move in my house.

00:03:05.000 I seduced an octogenarian lady.

00:03:08.000 I jerked off a man in a toilet. 0.99

00:03:11.000 All 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.

00:03:20.000 When I had that homeless guy come live in my house with me, James was his name, God rest his soul, like that.

00:03:25.000 It was interesting to encounter that, you know, there's a reason.

00:03:29.000 Of 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.

00:03:39.000 I'm sure it could have happened to me.

00:03:40.000 Of course it could have.

00:03:42.000 But there was a sort of like a gravity pulling him back out into the street.

00:03:46.000 You know, there's a gravity pulling it.

00:03:48.000 It was like he couldn't deal with being in a house.

00:03:52.000 Admittedly, these were not organic conditions.

00:03:54.000 There was like cameras around and stuff.

00:03:55.000 It was not a high, it was not a high-budget production.

00:03:58.000 Really lo-fi stuff on a lo-fi digital channel.

00:04:01.000 But being around that guy, he was like a heroin user.

00:04:04.000 I was using heroin with him at that time.

00:04:06.000 The sort of peak of the show was when I got into, we had a bath together.

00:04:10.000 That 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?

00:04:20.000 So I had a bath with this guy.

00:04:21.000 This stuff's still online somewhere, I presume.

00:04:24.000 And, you know, it sort of pushed both of us to our limit.

00:04:28.000 In the end, James decided he preferred homelessness to living.

00:04:31.000 He was dating with you.

00:04:32.000 He made his choices.

00:04:32.000 That's right.

00:04:34.000 In the end, we just got a taxi to nowhere.

00:04:37.000 Just like, just got a taxi for him and just, yeah, just let him out anywhere.

00:04:40.000 He'd work his own way in the world.

00:04:41.000 Yeah, so like, of course, that problem of vagrancy and destitution, it's a difficult one to tackle.

00:04:47.000 It makes me think that the culture is laid upon the planet.

00:04:50.000 Like all culture, all civilization is laid upon the planet, laid upon Gaia, laid upon the earth.

00:04:55.000 Like, 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.

00:05:15.000 And 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.

00:05:26.000 It makes me think sometimes, Joe, maybe the apocalypse is not a forthcoming event.

00:05:30.000 Maybe the apocalypse has already happened.

00:05:33.000 Maybe we're living in the sort of the already its gentle threads are encroaching upon apparent civilization.

00:05:40.000 You know, when you're in comfortable, defined and designed spaces, you feel like everything's okay.

00:05:46.000 The end of the world is impossible.

00:05:48.000 And it just seems like entertainment when you hear about nuclear treaties being torn up, that it can't actually happen.

00:05:55.000 But of course it can.

00:05:57.000 It's so temporal.

00:05:58.000 It's happened forever.

00:05:59.000 It's always happened.

00:06:00.000 The people that it happened to then, they never saw it coming either.

00:06:04.000 What you're saying is very interesting because I think the apocalypse is here on Earth.

00:06:08.000 It's just not here.

00:06:10.000 Like right here in Austin.

00:06:11.000 It's not like right here in the studio, but it's in the Congo.

00:06:14.000 Like 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.

00:06:27.000 They have no electricity.

00:06:28.000 They have no clean water.

00:06:29.000 They make very, very little money and they work all day.

00:06:32.000 And they work for a company that puts cobalt into lithium-ion batteries that are in everyone's smartphone.

00:06:40.000 So the height of our technology is directly connected to what's essentially slave labor.

00:06:45.000 And that's the apocalypse.

00:06:47.000 I mean, that might as well be the apocalypse.

00:06:48.000 That might as well be Mad Max.

00:06:50.000 It might as well be.

00:06:51.000 I mean, it's just as bad.

00:06:53.000 It's just as horrific.

00:06:54.000 There's a very beautiful bit of investigation.

00:06:55.000 I saw that episode.

00:06:57.000 Siddharth Kara, yeah.

00:06:59.000 He wrote that.

00:07:00.000 What is the book called Cobalt Red?

00:07:04.000 Yeah.

00:07:05.000 It's all about cobalt mining in the Congo and his investigation that he did into it.

00:07:10.000 It's very, very.

00:07:12.000 It'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.

00:07:40.000 They 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.

00:07:48.000 It's horrific.

00:07:49.000 Yes, and it's a template that is unfortunately imprinted and repeated across cultural life.

00:07:57.000 But as you say, there are people right now living in the apocalypse.

00:08:01.000 Yeah.

00:08:02.000 That that can't get any worse or lower.

00:08:04.000 And then even if that was, if you imagine, well, what would justify that?

00:08:07.000 It could only be if we were all on ventilators that were sustaining life in the West.

00:08:11.000 Even then, it would be morally dubious.

00:08:13.000 But 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.

00:08:22.000 And 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.

00:08:46.000 That if your ideology permits that, then what kind of ideology is that?

00:08:51.000 What kind of unconsciousness are we living in?

00:08:53.000 It's not an awakened culture.

00:08:55.000 And 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.

00:09:04.000 It's all nonsense.

00:09:06.000 That is permitted.

00:09:07.000 Not only permitted, required.

00:09:09.000 It's a requirement.

00:09:10.000 You cannot have that economic model without that price being paid.

00:09:13.000 And as a culture, whether it's me as an individual or our entire culture, we've accepted that contract.

00:09:17.000 We've accepted those terms.

00:09:19.000 Well, we have in some areas of our life for sure.

00:09:24.000 You know, hopefully people haven't done that in their interpersonal, intimate relationships, but we certainly have in the way we communicate with others.

00:09:32.000 We've certainly accepted very bizarre ways of communicating online.

00:09:36.000 And 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.

00:09:44.000 You see that sometimes.

00:09:46.000 I think it's a very strange time where I don't think people have a lot of faith right now in institutions.

00:09:56.000 And I don't think they have a lot of faith in authority.

00:10:00.000 I 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.

00:10:14.000 So 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.

00:10:20.000 Even 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.

00:10:43.000 He still thought they have things pretty under control.

00:10:46.000 It's a very solid institution.

00:10:47.000 Nobody believes that now.

00:10:49.000 You see Pete Buttigieg and fucking Kamala Harris and Biden can't get a sentence out. 1.00

00:10:54.000 You're like, this is madness.

00:10:55.000 These people are utter fools.

00:10:57.000 And these are the people that are running everything.

00:10:59.000 And these are the people that are getting us on the brink of war with Russia.

00:11:03.000 And I don't have any faith in them.

00:11:05.000 And I think most people don't.

00:11:06.000 I think you're right.

00:11:07.000 And with that era of the Cheney, Bush, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, if you're like, oh, these are the Death Star bods.

00:11:15.000 What'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.

00:11:29.000 It's part of a new American project.

00:11:31.000 We sort of understood it.

00:11:32.000 But for where I'm coming from, it was somehow recognizable.

00:11:35.000 And 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.

00:11:42.000 And 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.

00:11:57.000 Yeah, they're wrapping themselves up with progressive identity politics and then promoting a war.

00:12:03.000 Yes, at the same time, it's very wild.

00:12:05.000 Yeah, it feels like a mask and a veil.

00:12:08.000 Like, 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.

00:12:26.000 Like, and I've heard you speak about this obviously a lot, but the truth is that who isn't sympathetic?

00:12:32.000 Anyone 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.

00:12:40.000 And this is a conversation that the whole culture has to be involved in together.

00:12:44.000 My issue is, I don't think they believe in that stuff.

00:12:47.000 I don't think they care.

00:12:48.000 I don't think that they are creating an agenda to advance the interests of vulnerable people.

00:12:52.000 I 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.

00:13:02.000 And 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.

00:13:15.000 And there's now, like, there's palpable evidence for that.

00:13:17.000 And in order to not acknowledge that that transition's taken place, they're able to keep the cultural conversation going.

00:13:23.000 We care about your right to express yourself and your identity.

00:13:27.000 That's a way of not acknowledging we're just the same.

00:13:29.000 We're pro-war. 1.00

00:13:30.000 And 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.

00:13:38.000 Now, 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.

00:13:50.000 There's just now this immersive sense of apathy, this, as you say, loss of trust in institutions and authority.

00:13:57.000 But 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.

00:14:21.000 It's like actually like that post-Trump and post-pandemic, everything sort of enters into that template.

00:14:27.000 There are certain things you're not allowed to say now.

00:14:28.000 If you sort of say, were Russia in any way provoked, is there any legitimacy to their military actions from their perspective?

00:14:38.000 That's the same as saying, oh, I don't think you should take certain medications or maybe masks aren't necessary.

00:14:44.000 And people aren't, it doesn't seem that the culture is learning.

00:14:48.000 It 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.

00:14:59.000 In fact, I've bought documentation in case the conversation went in this direction, Joe, in my new position as a legitimate investigative journalist.

00:15:06.000 I've got actual papers that I can show you from conspiracy to fact.

00:15:11.000 Well, the lab leak theory.

00:15:13.000 No, that's the best one.

00:15:14.000 The lab leak theory was openly considered racist.

00:15:17.000 Yeah.

00:15:17.000 And you'd be mocked.

00:15:19.000 Even 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.

00:15:31.000 And he explained it as a biologist who worked on coronaviruses from bats.

00:15:38.000 Like that's literally his expertise, his area of expertise.

00:15:41.000 And so he had a deep knowledge of this.

00:15:44.000 And when he was describing it, people were furious at him.

00:15:47.000 They were demonetizing his YouTube videos and going after him.

00:15:51.000 And all these progressive people on the left was like, you're falling into this whole alt-right Trump this and that.

00:15:58.000 And they weren't even paying attention to an actual biologist who actually understands and has studied viruses.

00:16:04.000 And he's saying this has all the indications of a lab-created virus that we would work on.

00:16:09.000 All 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.

00:16:17.000 They're scientists and doctors.

00:16:18.000 It's not political rhetoric.

00:16:20.000 They'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.

00:16:24.000 So it was extraordinary that what they were met with was politically and ideologically driven.

00:16:31.000 Like 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.

00:16:47.000 But like, you know, like you said, Weinstein's like, oh, no, you can't have that evolutionary step without the intervention of engineering.

00:16:56.000 Have you read The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert Kennedy Jr.?

00:17:00.000 I read some of it.

00:17:00.000 The letters are very small in the book, aren't they?

00:17:03.000 Like, I've got it as a physical book.

00:17:05.000 Very small print.

00:17:06.000 I've been listening to it.

00:17:07.000 I've been listening to the audiobook.

00:17:09.000 It's doing the reading.

00:17:10.000 Not Robert Kennedy in the information.

00:17:12.000 No, Robert has a voice issue.

00:17:14.000 Yes, he has to voice.

00:17:14.000 You know, ironically, he got that voice issue from a vaccine injury.

00:17:18.000 Whoa.

00:17:19.000 Yeah, isn't that crazy?

00:17:20.000 It's like it got its revenge on first.

00:17:23.000 It started it off, I think.

00:17:25.000 It was he had a side effect from the flu shot.

00:17:29.000 And that's one of the side effects.

00:17:31.000 It'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.

00:17:38.000 These 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.

00:17:59.000 And the same I'm assuming with Robert Kennedy.

00:18:02.000 Well 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.

00:18:10.000 It just seemed really preposterous.

00:18:12.000 And then in the beginning of the pandemic, he was trying to connect COVID with 5G.

00:18:19.000 There was a lot of weird, like he's got some squirrely ones.

00:18:23.000 Believe 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.

00:18:33.000 Alex made a tremendous mistake with Sandy Hook, and he did that in a time of his life where he's experiencing a psychotic break.

00:18:41.000 He was drinking a lot and he was having a mental breakdown.

00:18:46.000 And 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.

00:18:56.000 And he thought they were trying to take away people's guns.

00:18:59.000 And he was convinced that someone had convinced him.

00:19:03.000 I 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.

00:19:13.000 He was obviously very wrong.

00:19:15.000 Yes.

00:19:16.000 And it's admitted that he was wrong about that, but he's been right about a lot of things.

00:19:21.000 So many things.

00:19:23.000 And I've talked about this many times, but he was the guy who told me about Epstein's Island more than a decade ago.

00:19:28.000 And I thought it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard.

00:19:30.000 I was like, what are you saying?

00:19:31.000 There's an island.

00:19:33.000 It sounds like a plot in a movie.

00:19:35.000 There'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. 0.73

00:19:47.000 I'm like, what?

00:19:48.000 That sounds like horseshit.

00:19:49.000 That sounds like lizard people.

00:19:50.000 It sounds like, you know, 5G creates COVID.

00:19:53.000 Same thing.

00:19:54.000 But turns out it was true. 0.59

00:19:56.000 And it's one of many things.

00:19:58.000 He was the one that the first one to warn me about a social credit score system.

00:20:01.000 He's like, they're going to try to implement a social credit score system and your money is going to be tied.

00:20:06.000 They'll have centralized digital currency and your money will be tied to your social credit score system and you step out of line.

00:20:12.000 You won't be able to buy things.

00:20:13.000 You won't be able to travel.

00:20:14.000 You won't be able to do anything.

00:20:16.000 They're going to try to keep you within a 15-minute radius of your home.

00:20:19.000 And they're starting to do that in places.

00:20:20.000 Yeah, that's true.

00:20:21.000 All of it's real.

00:20:22.000 And in China, the social credit score system is 100% real and implemented.

00:20:27.000 I 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.

00:20:47.000 Because 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.

00:20:58.000 Like that they, you know, yes, there are sort of centralized systems of corruption that bypass democracy.

00:21:05.000 And ultimately, there is an agenda that can bypass administrative change.

00:21:10.000 Policies that come out under the Republicans are pursued by the Democrats.

00:21:14.000 And 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.

00:21:27.000 All of these things you can sort of demonstrate financially.

00:21:31.000 But 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?

00:21:41.000 He's somewhere between a shaman and a preacher.

00:21:43.000 He operates in that space.

00:21:44.000 And in a way, you need people on the cultural periphery to be able to say, watch out, watch out, watch the direction we're going in.

00:21:50.000 Because the thing is, is that the cult, the way that we're behaving at the moment is all underwritten by rationalism.

00:21:56.000 This is the, you know, follow the science.

00:21:58.000 Putin is, but it's just as inaccurate.

00:21:58.000 This is the rational thing.

00:22:01.000 It's not true either.

00:22:03.000 Now, 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.

00:22:15.000 Now, 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.

00:22:27.000 And of course, they've obviously got an agenda and it's their agenda that is driving the discourse, not the facts of the matter.

00:22:33.000 And I suppose in a way, we should be grateful that they are unwilling to have these open conversations.

00:22:37.000 They'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.

00:22:45.000 Because 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.

00:23:04.000 Those things are there.

00:23:06.000 But 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.

00:23:20.000 But then you become kind of porous and you're like, oh, yeah, no, tell me all of this stuff.

00:23:24.000 And then it's hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff.

00:23:24.000 Right.

00:23:26.000 A little bit, isn't it?

00:23:27.000 And also your credibility suffers.

00:23:29.000 And it's like, you know, you've obviously managed to sort of follow, like, pursue this path saying, I'm a comedian.

00:23:35.000 I've not like got an obligation.

00:23:36.000 I'm not a journalist.

00:23:36.000 I've got this bill.

00:23:37.000 I'm open to everybody.

00:23:38.000 But 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.

00:23:55.000 And then the commercial power comes and the financial power comes.

00:23:58.000 And suddenly you've got to navigate it.

00:23:59.000 And 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.

00:24:08.000 The culture, that shouldn't be verboten.

00:24:10.000 Well, not just that, but the blatant lies that CNN was telling about it.

00:24:16.000 When 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.

00:24:33.000 It's a drug that saved lives, a drug that's on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines.

00:24:40.000 And 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.

00:24:50.000 And it's used on humans far more than it's used on horses.

00:24:55.000 And 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.

00:25:05.000 And they did not want that narrative out there.

00:25:07.000 And they were beholden to their handlers.

00:25:10.000 They were beholden to the people that give them exorbitant amounts of money in advertising revenue.

00:25:16.000 And they fucking followed in line and they all piled on and they lost a fuckload of credibility from it.

00:25:24.000 I 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.

00:25:31.000 They're just lying.

00:25:32.000 Like, there's no excuse for that.

00:25:35.000 You can't imagine a scenario where they really thought I was taking horse medication.

00:25:41.000 You can't imagine a scenario where they thought that I couldn't get real people medication.

00:25:46.000 You can't imagine it.

00:25:47.000 I'm not poor.

00:25:49.000 I'm not without resources.

00:25:51.000 I'm not confused.

00:25:53.000 I'm not without the recommendations of actual physicians.

00:25:56.000 Like, none of that makes any sense.

00:25:59.000 The idea that they could go on television and say, oh, this conspiracy theorist is taking horse dewormer.

00:26:07.000 And that was the narrative.

00:26:08.000 Not, hey, how'd that guy get better so quick?

00:26:11.000 Yeah.

00:26:11.000 How is it three days after he got COVID, we shut the whole country down for this thing and he looks fine?

00:26:16.000 And then they changed my filter and turned me yellow on television.

00:26:20.000 Like they took the original video of me and ran it through a filter to make me look horrible.

00:26:26.000 It's really, they did some wild shit.

00:26:29.000 But that wild shit that they did cost them their credibility.

00:26:32.000 I just don't think they understood the landscape when they were doing that.

00:26:35.000 I don't think they do at all.

00:26:36.000 I think they took an extreme editorial perspective without realizing that's what they were doing.

00:26:42.000 And 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.

00:27:02.000 They're willing to remain in that territory because financially and economically, they are ultimately aligned.

00:27:08.000 That the most powerful interests in America are happy with either outcome.

00:27:12.000 I 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.

00:27:27.000 And obviously, it was a massive miscalculation because they weren't watching what was happening.

00:27:31.000 They weren't listening to the conversations with McCulloch and Malone and Weinstein and that it is apolitical.

00:27:37.000 And 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.

00:27:51.000 That 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.

00:27:57.000 Like, you'd be in your family around your table.

00:27:59.000 I 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.

00:28:05.000 And it said, far-right journalist Tucker Costa.

00:28:08.000 If 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.

00:28:19.000 Far right, described me as far right.

00:28:22.000 Tattoos on the face, extreme boots, you know, like far-right's not just like, oh, I believe in Christianity, right?

00:28:31.000 Stuff like that.

00:28:32.000 So the rhetoric has become hysterical.

00:28:34.000 And the horse medicine was the same.

00:28:35.000 They 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.

00:28:48.000 No one's doing experiments into natural immunity because natural immunity is not profitable.

00:28:53.000 No one's doing those.

00:28:54.000 Those experiments are not being underwritten.

00:28:56.000 There'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.

00:29:05.000 And then how can you expect to maintain the authority?

00:29:07.000 How can you expect to sit behind those logos of CNN and MSNBC and claim that kind of piety and certainty?

00:29:14.000 And the way that they were like outraged by it was astonishing, like a kind of a how dare you?

00:29:20.000 How dare you have this credibility?

00:29:22.000 How dare people listen to you?

00:29:24.000 And 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.

00:29:32.000 That's how people are now.

00:29:34.000 People don't want that kind of centralized authority.

00:29:36.000 It'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.

00:29:44.000 So now the price of authority is legitimacy.

00:29:47.000 Authority has to be legit.

00:29:48.000 And you can't like the same way as they did that horsewormer stuff with you. 0.94

00:29:52.000 Like if you watch Biden in Poland, he said like this speech is along the lines of Putin thought that Ukraine would roll over.

00:30:00.000 Putin didn't know how brave Ukrainian people are.

00:30:03.000 He is a tyrant.

00:30:04.000 And of course Ukrainian people are brave.

00:30:06.000 Of course it's disgusting that they're suffering under this military invasion.

00:30:10.000 But I could handle it, I think, if the president went, listen, we were involved in that coup in 2014.

00:30:16.000 Even 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.

00:30:23.000 BlackRock are going to profit subsequently from the rebuild of Ukraine.

00:30:27.000 Russia have got their agenda.

00:30:29.000 We've got our agenda.

00:30:30.000 We believe our agenda is more in line with what most American citizens will benefit.

00:30:33.000 But 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.

00:30:46.000 And 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.

00:30:53.000 And they weren't able to have that conversation because of financial imperatives and because they're basically owned by the people.

00:30:58.000 Well, they're a propaganda network.

00:31:00.000 I mean, that's really all they are.

00:31:02.000 They're just a propaganda network.

00:31:04.000 And I used to think they were the news.

00:31:05.000 And I think at one point in time, they were the news.

00:31:08.000 And I think somewhere along the line when pharmaceutical drug companies started spending so much money.

00:31:15.000 I mean, you've seen all those clips brought to you by Pfizer.

00:31:18.000 Anderson Cooper brought to you by Pfizer.

00:31:20.000 There is no way they can be honest.

00:31:22.000 There's no way.

00:31:23.000 If you're accepting money from the very people that you now have to hold criminally liable, and they have been criminally liable.

00:31:32.000 I mean, they have the highest criminal fines of any companies ever for crimes.

00:31:39.000 Like what they've done, lies, lies, covering up evidence, and they just pay a fine and go back to work.

00:31:46.000 And that's what's wild about it.

00:31:48.000 If you killed 60,000 people with your company, and your company, whatever your company made, your company makes peanut butter.

00:31:55.000 And that peanut butter killed 60,000 people, they'd be like, you got to stop making peanut butter.

00:31:59.000 It's delicious.

00:32:00.000 Yeah, but with the drug companies, they're like, oh, your experimental drug where you lied about all the tests killed 60,000 people.

00:32:10.000 Well, we're going to need a small portion of the money that you made as a fine.

00:32:15.000 Like Viox. 0.68

00:32:16.000 I forget what the actual numbers were, but it's something along the lines of Viox made somewhere around $12 billion.

00:32:23.000 It killed somewhere between 50 and 60,000 people, and they had to pay somewhere in the range of $5 billion in fines.

00:32:34.000 Don't quote me on the numbers, but it's pretty close to that.

00:32:37.000 That's wild.

00:32:38.000 Because that means you are allowed to profit, essentially a profit, $7 billion and kill 50,000 plus people.

00:32:47.000 That's okay, and you can still go to work.

00:32:49.000 Yeah, that's a pretty extreme ideology to underwrite a system.

00:32:53.000 And it's the kind of ideology that in the end is going to lose credibility.

00:32:56.000 Because when you do replace it for something like peanut butter, it makes it, it jars with us.

00:33:01.000 We realize, oh, yeah, we are just permitting that.

00:33:03.000 Another 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.

00:33:11.000 We know what Pfizer had done.

00:33:12.000 We know the out-of-court settlements.

00:33:13.000 We know what Johnson and Johnson had done with the alleged casting agends in baby powder.

00:33:17.000 I mean, stories that sound like they're out of a Bill Hicks joke, like actually happening in reality.

00:33:23.000 I 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.

00:33:38.000 Like 20% of people with given placebos, it will be effective under the right conditions or whatever. 0.98

00:33:42.000 And the same with hypnosis.

00:33:43.000 And 20% of people will not be hypnotized and will not respond to placebos. 0.94

00:33:48.000 The middle 60% is where propaganda operates.

00:33:52.000 How many of that middle 60% can you persuade? 0.95

00:33:55.000 And I was just astonished that authoritarianism could suddenly be repackaged in this manner.

00:34:01.000 That authoritarianism could tell you that war is a good thing. 1.00

00:34:04.000 That authoritarianism can tell you that big pharma is a good thing.

00:34:07.000 That being locked in your home is a good thing.

00:34:09.000 And those are all the pieces of evidence sort of fell away from it.

00:34:12.000 Oh, no, natural immunity is effective.

00:34:15.000 Oh, no, there are adverse events.

00:34:16.000 Oh, there are cases of myocarditis.

00:34:18.000 Oh, no, every single bit of our masks aren't working.

00:34:21.000 All of it just started to fall apart.

00:34:22.000 And somehow they're expecting the eligibility of their authority to have maintained in spite of everything, the edifice cracking open.

00:34:31.000 And 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.

00:34:40.000 And one of that, one of the best pieces of evidence for that is vitamin D.

00:34:44.000 And there was a recent study, see if you can find this.

00:34:48.000 There 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.

00:35:00.000 I don't know if that's true.

00:35:02.000 But I remember reading that article going, that is the most insane thing I've ever seen in my life.

00:35:07.000 And when did they know that this was true?

00:35:10.000 Because if they just started handing out vitamin D, it's readily available.

00:35:13.000 So easy to get, so easy to make, so cheap.

00:35:16.000 They just handed out vitamin D to everybody.

00:35:18.000 How many deaths could they have prevented?

00:35:21.000 If 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?

00:35:35.000 And how cheaply could that have been done?

00:35:38.000 When 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.

00:35:49.000 Which is bizarre.

00:35:50.000 Look after and love your body.

00:35:52.000 It's extraordinary the way that that has altered.

00:35:55.000 I feel that in a way what the pandemic did was it revealed the long con of corporatization of government.

00:36:02.000 That 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.

00:36:14.000 Now, 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.

00:36:20.000 It's a global event.

00:36:22.000 The whole thing has been put in place in order to bring about social credit scores and more surveillance and to facilitate lockdowns.

00:36:28.000 And those are the things that are very, very difficult to prove.

00:36:31.000 But 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.

00:36:45.000 And then a crisis event took place and the momentum that carried it through, like governments have a, the governments like control.

00:36:52.000 That's what governments are about is authority.

00:36:55.000 But big corporations like profit.

00:36:57.000 That's what they're at.

00:36:58.000 And those two things came together.

00:36:59.000 So 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.

00:37:07.000 They can benefit.

00:37:08.000 The indemnity that they were granted, it was kind of a perfect storm and perfect revelation.

00:37:13.000 We 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.

00:37:20.000 And he said he was a CIA analyst in 2001.

00:37:22.000 And in 2001, there was as much information published that year as in all human history up to that point.

00:37:28.000 And in 2002, it doubled again.

00:37:30.000 And he said, when you look at those analytics on a screen, it looks like a tidal wave.

00:37:34.000 And he said that that image stayed with him.

00:37:36.000 And 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.

00:37:46.000 Either 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,

00:38:14.000 ten years ago are now not acceptable and are banned.

00:38:18.000 Tolerance 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.

00:38:30.000 Martin Guri, the CIA analyst, offers us that the reason that's happening is because there's a recognition that centralized authority models cannot operate.

00:38:38.000 The elites cannot govern the planet in the same typical way that they've been able to, say, from the 50s or whenever.

00:38:43.000 I'm not an expert in this kind of stuff.

00:38:45.000 But 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.

00:38:52.000 He likes liberal democracy.

00:38:53.000 He's a first-generation immigrant, I think, from Cuba in this country, worked at the CIA.

00:38:56.000 He's not like some sort of pot-smoking radical.

00:38:59.000 He's like a person, but he was saying that what's happened is they've not been able to acknowledge the way that the world has changed.

00:39:06.000 It's changed in an unprecedented way.

00:39:08.000 The first observable sign or one-off being Napster, the second one, the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement.

00:39:13.000 They've not recognized that now there's a different conversation.

00:39:16.000 And 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.

00:39:22.000 But they couldn't because the economics of that, we were already too big in the space for that to happen.

00:39:26.000 So they don't know how to.

00:39:28.000 He said, what's going to happen is even new elites will emerge that understand how technology works.

00:39:32.000 And 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.

00:39:48.000 I think they're also operating with very crude tools currently that will soon change with AI.

00:39:54.000 I think AI is going to completely shift the narrative.

00:39:57.000 And then from then on, you're going to be dealing with disinformation on just a vast scale of impossible to decipher.

00:40:06.000 You're not going to, like I watched a video today of Joe Biden talking about some girl's ass. 0.99

00:40:11.000 It wasn't real.

00:40:12.000 But it's like, here, I'll send it to Jamie so we can play it.

00:40:14.000 Because it's so crazy, like what they can do now.

00:40:17.000 It's just how long before it's absolutely impossible to detect.

00:40:23.000 How long before you have no idea what's real and what's not real?

00:40:27.000 It's not that long from now.

00:40:30.000 And they'll be able to, the people that own these enormous tech companies will be in cahoots with government like they are now.

00:40:37.000 That, you know, they censor narratives, they demonetize people that talk about COVID in the wrong way or even at all.

00:40:45.000 They're going to do that same kind of thing. 0.64

00:40:47.000 And they're going to do that same kind of thing with whatever they want to, whatever they want to highlight.

00:40:54.000 Like any narrative they want to highlight.

00:40:57.000 And you, like as a consumer, as a person on the outside that's just watching things, it's going to be so confusing.

00:41:03.000 And 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.

00:41:12.000 And 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.

00:41:18.000 And then they're going to feed it with fake news and fake video and fake voices.

00:41:24.000 Yeah, I'll play this, Jamie.

00:41:26.000 Here you go.

00:41:28.000 When 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.

00:41:37.000 But how long before it's a video that's completely indiscernible?

00:41:41.000 You're not going to be able to know if it's fake or real.

00:41:43.000 You can have him doing things that he's never done before.

00:41:45.000 Fucking booty I've ever seen.

00:41:47.000 God damn, that shit was huge.

00:41:50.000 I could barely believe my eyes, man.

00:41:52.000 I had to cool myself off with a chocolate chocolate chip ice cream cone from Ben and Jerry's.

00:41:56.000 Shit was actually fire.

00:41:58.000 No pun intended.

00:42:00.000 My buddy Kevin from the Secret Service then brought me to the White House to sign some more shit.

00:42:05.000 It was probably more money for Belensky in Ukraine, but I didn't really give a fuck.

00:42:09.000 Remember to keep it real and vote for me in 2024.

00:42:13.000 How wild is that?

00:42:14.000 Yeah, as has been commented, I wish he was this competent.

00:42:19.000 The most alarming thing is that that's a really cohesive sentence from Joe Biden.

00:42:22.000 He's got a bit sexist, but his faculties are in order.

00:42:25.000 It's bizarre how far he's deteriorated.

00:42:28.000 And 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.

00:42:39.000 And he goes, I can't vote for Trump.

00:42:41.000 And I go, I would vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden.

00:42:43.000 Just because I think with Biden, like, he's no, he's gone.

00:42:46.000 Like, you know, he's gone.

00:42:48.000 You're going to be relying on his cabinet.

00:42:50.000 And I knew his cabinet would be this fucking sideshow of diversity, which is exactly what it is.

00:42:57.000 I 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. 0.98

00:43:05.000 You just said, oh, look at this.

00:43:08.000 A man who dresses like a woman and has a beard and a mustache, but also wears lipstick. 0.95

00:43:12.000 This is perfect for us.

00:43:14.000 I don't give a fuck what this guy's good at or bad at.

00:43:16.000 I don't give a fuck what their credentials are.

00:43:18.000 This makes us look like we're inclusive.

00:43:20.000 This makes us look like we're on the right side.

00:43:22.000 So let's hire this person.

00:43:23.000 And you can't have those kind of people running a Ben and Jerry's.

00:43:29.000 You certainly can't have those kind of people running the fucking most powerful government the world's ever known.

00:43:35.000 It's nonsense.

00:43:36.000 What 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.

00:43:44.000 The 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.

00:43:59.000 We can't just stay in these little camps.

00:44:01.000 Now, 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.

00:44:07.000 This system is over.

00:44:08.000 And for all of the talk of diversity, what have you got?

00:44:12.000 You've got like a career politician, white male that's falling apart before your very eyes.

00:44:18.000 It'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.

00:44:28.000 And 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.

00:44:38.000 It's not going to change the world for any of them.

00:44:41.000 They've managed to turn, make ordinary American people hate one another, like on the basis of a 50-50 split.

00:44:47.000 You 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.

00:44:55.000 These kind of issues oughtn't be what's determining how a country is run.

00:44:58.000 And when they are the issues that determine how a country is run, the powerful run amok.

00:45:02.000 The elites are able to pursue their agenda just fine.

00:45:05.000 Yeah, because they've got us in these ideological camps and they've got people infighting and ignoring real problems.

00:45:13.000 It's such a transparent hustle.

00:45:16.000 It's so obvious to see how it's being set up and how easy it is to get people to fall in line with it.

00:45:22.000 That's one of the most disturbing things that happened during COVID is how easy people rolled over.

00:45:28.000 I was like, this is wild.

00:45:30.000 I expected more pushback.

00:45:31.000 I expected more people to ask about the data.

00:45:34.000 And 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?

00:45:43.000 Or when they were telling people to vaccinate pregnant women?

00:45:46.000 I was like, what data do you have on pregnant women?

00:45:51.000 Because pregnant women, if you like, normal medication, when a pregnant woman is taking normal medication, they have to be very careful. 1.00

00:46:01.000 Because 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.

00:46:11.000 It's a giant issue.

00:46:12.000 You're a father, you know what it's like, like when your wife goes through that.

00:46:16.000 It's kind of crazy because there's real concern.

00:46:18.000 Like you can't take this, you can't drink, you can't smoke, you can't this, you can't that.

00:46:24.000 You shouldn't take stem cells, you shouldn't take nootropics.

00:46:27.000 There's so many different things.

00:46:29.000 But yet this vaccine with zero testing on any pregnant people was fine. 0.99

00:46:33.000 Wasn't it worrying that when you're kind of encouraged?

00:46:35.000 When you're layman speculation, like the speculation of people that have not been to university and they're like, hey, but hold on.

00:46:42.000 You're not going to get pregnant women volunteering for clinical trials. 1.00

00:46:45.000 So there's no way you could have tested this on.

00:46:47.000 Hey, hold on.

00:46:48.000 You 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.

00:46:54.000 In which case, how come you were preparing this thing five years ago?

00:46:57.000 The kind of speculations that were being had conversationally in spaces like this one have proven to be true.

00:47:02.000 You can't validate it.

00:47:04.000 Children aren't conducting clinical trials.

00:47:06.000 Turns out they didn't do clinical trials for transmission or have any viable data that it stopped transmission.

00:47:11.000 It was like that.

00:47:12.000 That'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.

00:47:23.000 I remember the narrative being when the stuff was going on in China.

00:47:25.000 Good luck trying that stuff in the United States.

00:47:29.000 And then they pulled it off.

00:47:30.000 Pulled it off.

00:47:30.000 If you amplify fear, I feel like it might be like with how it is on an individual level.

00:47:35.000 It's always hard to scale what affects you as an individual to what affects a bloody planet.

00:47:38.000 But like if I'm frightened, I become suggestible.

00:47:41.000 When I'm frightened, I'll be like, oh, just give me authority.

00:47:44.000 I'm calling the 911 now.

00:47:46.000 I'm willing to, like, you know, when my wife is sick or whatever, I'm calling, you know, suddenly the Reiki ain't an option no more.

00:47:53.000 They're like, fuck the crystals, get that shit out of here.

00:47:56.000 Get me a position in a white coat with a stethoscope driving to Bentley right now.

00:48:00.000 I want the comfort of that.

00:48:02.000 I'll do whatever I want.

00:48:03.000 Pfizer, give them the money for Christ's sake.

00:48:05.000 You 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?

00:48:15.000 How more like you know, fear and authority go together, I feel.

00:48:18.000 Like when you are frightened, I want someone else to be in control.

00:48:22.000 Yeah, and that's what was one of the scary things about the pandemic: they learned from that.

00:48:27.000 They learned how easy people did roll over.

00:48:29.000 Because it was our first pandemic.

00:48:30.000 It was the first pandemic of our lifetime, the first real genuine pandemic since 1918.

00:48:35.000 And so when that happened, I think there was a real revelation, a real realization that they can do this.

00:48:41.000 And so what's the next one?

00:48:43.000 Is it climate change?

00:48:44.000 Like, what is it?

00:48:45.000 What 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?

00:48:57.000 They're going to do it again.

00:48:58.000 They're going to do it again.

00:48:59.000 I think people are going to be more resistant to it because a lot of people have suffered through this pandemic.

00:49:05.000 A lot of people lost their jobs.

00:49:06.000 A lot of people lost their businesses.

00:49:08.000 A lot of people got alienated from their community.

00:49:11.000 And then it turned out they were right.

00:49:13.000 And now people are upset and bitter.

00:49:16.000 I mean, there's so much talk of not forgiving people that shamed people for not getting vaccinated.

00:49:22.000 There's so much of that going on, like, fuck them.

00:49:24.000 And, you know, my take from the very beginning is like, you can't do that.

00:49:29.000 Like, there's no way you can stop forgiving people.

00:49:31.000 That's the dumbest thing you could ever choose to do.

00:49:34.000 Like, stop forgiving people who were scared, who made mistakes.

00:49:37.000 Like, are you infallible?

00:49:39.000 You know, are we going to deny people one of the most basic behavior characteristics that human beings exhibit when they're pressured?

00:49:48.000 So they make mistakes and they cower and they show fear.

00:49:51.000 So you're going to write these people off forever because they decided to be assholes because they were scared.

00:49:56.000 Like, that's ridiculous.

00:49:57.000 You can't do that.

00:49:58.000 I 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.

00:50:09.000 It's not like there's a set of principles that people have recourse to, a set of binding ideals.

00:50:15.000 It 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.

00:50:24.000 But of course, you can vote for whether you want your city to be a 15-minute city.

00:50:28.000 We're thinking the best thing might be this medication.

00:50:30.000 But of course, you can vote.

00:50:31.000 What 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.

00:50:46.000 Less and less democracy, more and more ability for unelected globalist, I would have to say, globalist organizations to assert political influence over nations.

00:50:55.000 And that's what we saw here.

00:50:56.000 And 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.

00:51:03.000 Again, like stuff that gets called conspiracy theory, but you can look at the evidences there.

00:51:08.000 The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation profited millions of dollars on the vaccines.

00:51:13.000 Millions, millions and millions of dollars.

00:51:15.000 It's all easy to find.

00:51:16.000 And 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.

00:51:32.000 Like, 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.

00:51:47.000 And all that was a lie and he profited off those lies.

00:51:51.000 And everyone wants to pretend that he's just like this amazing philanthropist.

00:51:55.000 Like, no, he made a lot of money.

00:51:58.000 This is motivated by money.

00:51:59.000 And his entire career, he's been motivated by money.

00:52:03.000 He's been a guy who is really good at monopoly.

00:52:06.000 And that was why they went after Microsoft so many times for monopolistic practices.

00:52:11.000 I mean, he's a businessman.

00:52:14.000 And in that time, his business was the business of telling people things that he's not educated in.

00:52:21.000 He's not a scientist.

00:52:22.000 He's not a virologist.

00:52:25.000 He's not a medical doctor.

00:52:27.000 Yet 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.

00:52:39.000 It's really wild that it's that transparent.

00:52:42.000 That it's not like multiple steps and shell corporations and it's really difficult to find out where the money's going.

00:52:46.000 It's like right there.

00:52:47.000 It's like the Nancy Pelosi stock trading thing.

00:52:50.000 It's like, Jesus Christ, it's right there.

00:52:52.000 Like 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.

00:53:01.000 Like, what the fuck is going on?

00:53:02.000 This is crazy how transparent it is.

00:53:04.000 You're not even hiding it.

00:53:06.000 It's right there.

00:53:07.000 I suppose the only way you can prevent those questions being addressed is by making the people asking those questions uncredible, like discrediting those people.

00:53:17.000 Because otherwise, it is plain.

00:53:19.000 Bill Gates ain't Willy Wonka.

00:53:21.000 He ain't doing this for like a competition.

00:53:23.000 There's no golden ticket at the end of this.

00:53:25.000 It's like, yeah, not-for-profit organizations making profit, an incredible amount of influence in areas that he profits from.

00:53:30.000 All 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.

00:53:40.000 The Africa thing is wild, and that's a big part of this The Real Anthony Fauci book.

00:53:46.000 He 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.

00:53:54.000 They've used Africa as a place where they test out. 0.99

00:53:56.000 This is another thing that I learned from Alex Jones.

00:53:58.000 Alex Jones was saying that they were giving kids the polio vaccine in Africa and that Bill Gates was involved in this.

00:54:04.000 They had to stop doing it because it was actually giving kids polio.

00:54:07.000 And I was like, what?

00:54:09.000 And they pull up an AP article.

00:54:11.000 There 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.

00:54:20.000 I'm like, what the fuck, man?

00:54:23.000 They gave kids polio with a vaccine?

00:54:27.000 Even 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.

00:54:38.000 So clearly there's a profit motive.

00:54:40.000 And I saw him publicly talk about that.

00:54:41.000 I'm saying, oh, no, it's not as simple as that.

00:54:42.000 You can't just give people the patterns and stuff.

00:54:44.000 But 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.

00:54:56.000 What 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.

00:55:24.000 You brought printed pieces of paper.

00:55:26.000 You brought paper in here.

00:55:27.000 What has this been like for you as a person to find yourself?

00:55:31.000 Because I think in many ways we both kind of stumbled into this.

00:55:34.000 Yeah, that's exactly what happened.

00:55:36.000 Look, I came on here when I was still like a movie actor.

00:55:38.000 I came on, I think.

00:55:39.000 The first time I came on, it was in your first thousand shows.

00:55:41.000 I can't remember the exact number because that would be almost creepy if I did.

00:55:44.000 But like, I remember just coming on, people like, and I'd not heard of it.

00:55:47.000 Oh, there's this guy, Joe Rogan.

00:55:48.000 It was that sort of time.

00:55:50.000 And I came on and like, I was sort of amazed by it.

00:55:53.000 And do you know what I liked is the amount of personal authority that you had and the lack of compromise.

00:56:01.000 You know, because you've worked in conventional entertainment as well, how much compromise that comes with.

00:56:06.000 That you have to essentially, you know, you have to turn up.

00:56:09.000 Producers and executives and there's all sorts of people pulling the strings and telling you what to do.

00:56:14.000 Because 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.

00:56:21.000 I'm not going to be in a trailer at 4 a.m.

00:56:24.000 And I thought, oh, yeah.

00:56:26.000 Like I loved making like some of those movies.

00:56:28.000 I mean, I'm pretty grateful coming from where I come from that I got to have all of those experiences.

00:56:32.000 And you know, it's like it's giddy.

00:56:33.000 It's exciting.

00:56:33.000 It's amazing.

00:56:34.000 It's euphoric and fulfilling in loads and loads of ways.

00:56:37.000 And actually met some really, really incredible people within that industry.

00:56:40.000 It's not like it's solely awful and solely hollow.

00:56:44.000 It was kind of amazing.

00:56:46.000 But I think like this was significant.

00:56:48.000 I'd done sort of podcasts like they were affiliated with BBC radio shows that I'd done, you know, prior to becoming an actor.

00:56:54.000 So I've always had those kind of conversations.

00:56:56.000 And I suppose what it must be is because where I'm coming from, I come from a place called Essex, which is like the New Jersey of England.

00:57:04.000 It's outside of London.

00:57:05.000 It's blue collar, somewhat trashy.

00:57:08.000 That's the kind of sort of place it is.

00:57:10.000 I became a junkie relatively young, like sort of, you know, like my late teens, early 20s.

00:57:15.000 I was a heroin addict.

00:57:17.000 And I feel like that when I got, I had to get clean because it was getting out of control.

00:57:21.000 And when I got clean, I was full of appetite and ambition and all of that kind of stuff.

00:57:26.000 And 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.

00:57:35.000 And 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.

00:57:41.000 So like once like that period of working, like the people I work with you say you don't like any aspect of this.

00:57:46.000 You don't like dressing up.

00:57:47.000 You don't like putting makeup on.

00:57:48.000 You don't like being told what to do.

00:57:48.000 You don't like getting up early.

00:57:50.000 Like it's like you don't like any aspect of that profession.

00:57:50.000 You don't like being directed.

00:57:54.000 I like stand-up comedy because you live or die on your own merits.

00:57:59.000 So 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?

00:58:10.000 Like I went in a movie with him, then I met Judd Appertale and those people did those movies.

00:58:14.000 And it was aspects of it, as I say, were incredible.

00:58:16.000 And those people in particular, Judd Appetow and Sandler, were like really amazing, lovely people.

00:58:20.000 But after I came on here, and during the past, I used to always talk about, I've always been anti-establishment.

00:58:28.000 I've never trusted authority because of personal reasons.

00:58:31.000 I didn't like school.

00:58:32.000 If you're a drug addict, you get arrested sometimes because shoplifting and because of possession of drugs.

00:58:39.000 So I've always had that kind of relationship with authority.

00:58:42.000 So 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.

00:58:49.000 It really evolved.

00:58:50.000 It started at the beginning of the pandemic.

00:58:51.000 I was just sort of like, like, started commenting on it.

00:58:54.000 I was in Australia when it started and like I do stuff online anyway.

00:58:58.000 So I was like, oh, this is going to be a weird time for all of us.

00:59:01.000 And then it started to become clear that it was a perfect lens to observe how power operates.

00:59:07.000 The inability to question authority, agenda for profit, agenda to assert control, stuff that just didn't feel right for me.

00:59:14.000 We 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.

00:59:23.000 He's, I guess you would call him a conventional liberal.

00:59:25.000 So 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.

00:59:35.000 So 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.

00:59:43.000 And then I was able to sort of stitch those things together, basically using sort of stand-up, really improvising around the news stories.

00:59:49.000 That'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.

00:59:58.000 So it kind of grew quite organically.

01:00:00.000 Then 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.

01:00:06.000 But 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.

01:00:16.000 So 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.

01:00:26.000 And also I'm not going to have to do.

01:00:27.000 Are you live streaming on Rumble?

01:00:29.000 Yeah, I live stream every day, 12 p.m.

01:00:31.000 So it's not edited.

01:00:33.000 It's like you go live and then they could see it as you're doing it.

01:00:36.000 That's right.

01:00:37.000 I do like a, like I guess a sort of a live daily show type feel.

01:00:41.000 But is there a commentary section, like a live commentary where people can comment on it live during the show?

01:00:47.000 Yeah, people stay in the chat and I refer to the comments and stuff.

01:00:50.000 And 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.

01:00:59.000 That'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.

01:01:11.000 Or 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.

01:01:20.000 We're able to then sort of tie together facts in a way that's much more responsible.

01:01:25.000 But in the live show, I'm responding.

01:01:27.000 I'm just reacting to clips, doing essentially an opening monologue, jokes like that.

01:01:32.000 And then we have a guest on for like a 20-minute interview.

01:01:35.000 That's like the daily show that we do on there.

01:01:38.000 And then like there's like a members thing within Rumbles now, locals.

01:01:41.000 That's where you can sort of people can subscribe for additional content.

01:01:44.000 And in particular, actually, my stand-up special.

01:01:46.000 I've got like another stand-up special, which we're going to release on that platform.

01:01:49.000 Because 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.

01:02:01.000 So 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?

01:02:12.000 Like it's like you're investigating the person.

01:02:14.000 If you get someone on here that you're interested in, then you're just you're investigating that story.

01:02:18.000 And then the punditry, the new, it's essentially news commentary.

01:02:21.000 I 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.

01:02:29.000 So it becomes very easy to sort of say, they're telling you this, but this might also be true.

01:02:33.000 And there are these relationships between these organizations.

01:02:36.000 And isn't it weird that that happened?

01:02:38.000 So the space was irresistible, almost comedically irresistible.

01:02:42.000 It's comedically because you have a comedic take on it that's just unavailable anywhere else.

01:02:47.000 Like 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.

01:02:58.000 And how long have you been doing it now?

01:03:00.000 I think it's two years.

01:03:01.000 It started at the beginning of the pandemic.

01:03:02.000 And then I spoke to like the same thing.

01:03:04.000 You got like six million subscribers on YouTube like that.

01:03:07.000 Yeah, it grew really fast.

01:03:09.000 And 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.

01:03:16.000 You 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.

01:03:27.000 But then I like it become repetitive.

01:03:29.000 So I sort of said to my friend, again, Gareth, like, do you want, I'll give you a job.

01:03:33.000 I took a punt that I could handle a salary.

01:03:35.000 So you come on and work and we'll make more current affairs-oriented stuff.

01:03:39.000 And what's good about like the chemistry of that relationship is that he's, I don't mean conservative in a like a right-wing type way.

01:03:47.000 I mean he's careful.

01:03:49.000 He's more careful than me.

01:03:50.000 Whereas me, my tendency is I would go full raw.

01:03:53.000 It's not only that.

01:03:54.000 I'd get into it.

01:03:55.000 And by now I would not be able to work anymore.

01:03:58.000 You know, it'd be over for me.

01:04:00.000 The red pen would have gone through.

01:04:02.000 How much pushback have you experienced?

01:04:05.000 Like, have you had a lot of shows demonetized?

01:04:08.000 Like, what was happening while you were on YouTube that motivated this move to Rumble?

01:04:13.000 We 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.

01:04:22.000 Like, so it was a pretty minute error.

01:04:26.000 And 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.

01:04:35.000 So 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.

01:04:50.000 You still in fact.

01:04:51.000 That's so wild.

01:04:52.000 Yeah, 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.

01:04:58.000 And 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.

01:05:06.000 So there's an obvious hypocrisy, even in organizations that initially, I mean, I guess, do you know what?

01:05:11.000 I bet you can look at it, Joe, like as if it were a physical territory.

01:05:14.000 Like at the beginning, there's a gold rush.

01:05:16.000 In the beginning, YouTube is the Wild West.

01:05:17.000 In the beginning, all sorts of people can inhabit and populate that territory.

01:05:20.000 But after a while, people go, shit, this needs to be shut down and controlled.

01:05:24.000 And it gets corporatized and regulated and controlled in a different way.

01:05:28.000 And I guess I just caught the back end of when it was possible.

01:05:31.000 And we're still trying to navigate that.

01:05:33.000 I think much like television, they receive an enormous amount of money in advertising.

01:05:37.000 And then advertisements that are on YouTube, those people that are spending all that money, they can dictate what they want to be advertised on.

01:05:47.000 And then they say, look, I don't want to be on anything.

01:05:49.000 They talk about COVID or anything where they talk about Ukraine or anything where they don't.

01:05:54.000 So, okay.

01:05:55.000 They just say, oh, well, we've got to stop people from doing that.

01:05:58.000 What's the best way?

01:05:58.000 Well, the best way to self-censor.

01:06:00.000 Oh, how do you get people to self-censor?

01:06:01.000 You impact them economically.

01:06:04.000 How do we do that and not make it look like we're censoring them?

01:06:06.000 We give them strikes, give them strikes, or demonetize certain episodes.

01:06:11.000 Like 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.

01:06:21.000 So we had a 25% increase in revenue because 25% of our episodes were getting demonetized just randomly.

01:06:31.000 They would just decide.

01:06:32.000 And some of them it didn't make any sense.

01:06:33.000 And some of them it was because of a controversial guest or a controversial subject, generally like COVID-related or government related.

01:06:41.000 But 25% was a lot.

01:06:44.000 And then, as soon as they realized that we were going to be gone, they were like, well, we should just make that money.

01:06:49.000 And then they stopped censoring anything.

01:06:53.000 Like all the episodes after, I'm pretty sure all of them.

01:06:57.000 Was there any of the episodes after we took off that got demonetized?

01:07:01.000 It was a giant noticeable leap in revenue, right?

01:07:05.000 Jamie?

01:07:07.000 It's tough.

01:07:08.000 Yes, but it was quite noticeable.

01:07:12.000 It wasn't as simple as we just stopped being controversial because we never changed shit.

01:07:18.000 But they do things to get people to self-censor.

01:07:22.000 Of course.

01:07:22.000 And Rumble doesn't do that.

01:07:24.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:07:25.000 What was difficult for us when YouTube was our primary platform is something we would look at your content.

01:07:29.000 All right, that's the title of this Rogan video.

01:07:32.000 This is the content.

01:07:33.000 Okay, well, we can try that.

01:07:34.000 And then we would get demonetized.

01:07:36.000 And it becomes like a weird algebra.

01:07:38.000 You change this word, you change that word, you have to order it.

01:07:40.000 You have there's certain things you just know that you can't say.

01:07:43.000 And you still get some money from like YouTube Red.

01:07:46.000 Yeah.

01:07:46.000 You still get, but it was like they were doing things.

01:07:50.000 And I mean, they're running a business.

01:07:53.000 I understand from their perspective.

01:07:54.000 Of course.

01:07:55.000 You know, they're running a business.

01:07:56.000 They have advertisers.

01:07:57.000 I understand it from their perspective.

01:07:58.000 But from a content creation perspective, you just couldn't trust them.

01:08:03.000 This is what Rumble have fundamentally offered.

01:08:06.000 They gave me a good deal and the assurance that we're not going to censor you.

01:08:11.000 Now, 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.

01:08:20.000 It's being portrayed as a right-wing, like, you know, far-right place, conspiracy theorist.

01:08:25.000 Yeah, you and Glenn Greenwald, super far-right.

01:08:28.000 Yeah, like this married, gay, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

01:08:33.000 Tulsi Gabbard, super right-wing.

01:08:36.000 It's nuts what people call it.

01:08:36.000 Like, it's nuts.

01:08:38.000 It's just anything alternative to the censorship model they'll talk of as right-wing.

01:08:43.000 Because 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.

01:09:04.000 And then it just becomes QAnon headquarters.

01:09:06.000 And they just start talking about lizard people and Pizzagate.

01:09:10.000 Yeah, and a peculiar tendency towards suicide of former associates of powerful American families.

01:09:18.000 You know, I went to the opening of Rumble the other day, and it's weird.

01:09:21.000 It's a weird space for me.

01:09:22.000 As a person that's been, you know, part of liberal establishment, Hollywood movie parties, those kind of things.

01:09:27.000 And even in Britain, British media, there's a certain flavor to it.

01:09:30.000 But 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.

01:09:40.000 And I wonder if it is, like, as a person that's always traditionally identified with what you would call cultural left-wing positions, right?

01:09:47.000 Like, to find how just sweet everybody is.

01:09:50.000 Like, you meet Donald Trump Jr., he's absolutely lovely.

01:09:54.000 You meet that woman, Kimberly, that's off Fox News, who I've seen sort of say, you know, Russell Brahman, he's a scumbag. 0.97

01:09:59.000 What a sleazeball. 0.97

01:10:00.000 And I meet her.

01:10:01.000 Oh, my God, she's gorgeous.

01:10:02.000 And 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.

01:10:08.000 Meet these people, and they're like, absolutely delightful and so sweet.

01:10:12.000 And 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.

01:10:21.000 And 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.

01:10:42.000 I 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.

01:10:49.000 But 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.

01:10:58.000 Because 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.

01:11:04.000 You're going to have people that want to have progressive lives that are very sort of gender-fluid.

01:11:08.000 And 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?

01:11:15.000 You can't impose from above.

01:11:18.000 You can't impose that on people anymore.

01:11:19.000 You can't tell people that they can't express themselves sexually, consensually, in any way that they want to.

01:11:24.000 You can't tell people that they can't have conservative and traditional values.

01:11:28.000 And I don't see why the culture should be tearing itself apart in order to achieve that.

01:11:31.000 And 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.

01:11:45.000 You 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.

01:11:51.000 And people say, Oh, you've been red-pilled or whatever, but I've never trusted the establishment.

01:11:55.000 I've never trusted corporate power.

01:11:57.000 I've never wanted to be told what to do.

01:11:59.000 That's always how I've been.

01:12:00.000 But 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.

01:12:08.000 That those things need to be in the mix somewhere.

01:12:11.000 And 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.

01:12:20.000 And then maybe he'll say something about homelessness.

01:12:21.000 And I think, ah, no, no, not that.

01:12:23.000 You know, like, and I guess these are the conversations that I'll have when I'm in those spaces.

01:12:27.000 And because something new has got to emerge.

01:12:29.000 There'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.

01:12:41.000 Over time, it's come to be regarded, you know, perhaps even most latterly through the rise of a figure like Donald Trump.

01:12:48.000 Populism is regarded as it's right wing.

01:12:51.000 That's what it is fundamentally.

01:12:52.000 But you can't really have, because populism is people power.

01:12:55.000 The people have the power to run their own lives as much as possible, not as little as possible.

01:12:58.000 People 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.

01:13:09.000 I 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.

01:13:20.000 I think there are many, many people out there that do not have those characteristics.

01:13:25.000 There's many people out there that are not happy.

01:13:28.000 They do not feel fulfilled.

01:13:29.000 They don't feel like they're doing what they should be doing.

01:13:31.000 They don't feel loved.

01:13:33.000 They don't feel accepted or appreciated or respected in their community.

01:13:37.000 And 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.

01:13:52.000 And you find it from the weakest people.

01:13:55.000 The 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.

01:14:10.000 It's feeble, weak people that are very angry.

01:14:14.000 The kind, successful, open-minded, ethical, moral people, they want people to just be happy.

01:14:23.000 And I want, I don't look, there's so many different styles of everything.

01:14:29.000 There'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.

01:14:41.000 Fucking cares?

01:14:43.000 Just live your life and be happy.

01:14:45.000 I want to control no one.

01:14:47.000 I barely can control myself.

01:14:50.000 I try to control my kids as little as possible.

01:14:53.000 I try to guide them and have conversations with them and tell them all the things that I fucked up on.

01:14:59.000 Whenever 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.

01:15:09.000 And I always talk about how they're so much more fortunate than me because they're so much smarter than me.

01:15:13.000 They're so much more educated than me.

01:15:15.000 They have so much more access to information.

01:15:17.000 And I talk about how when I was a kid, you didn't really know anything.

01:15:20.000 Like, 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.

01:15:35.000 Like the access to information they have is unprecedented.

01:15:38.000 I 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.

01:16:06.000 Because some people are happy just fucking hiking.

01:16:09.000 There'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.

01:16:14.000 And there's other people that want to lock themselves in an office and write a book and that's what makes them happy.

01:16:19.000 And there's some people that just want to go to the gym.

01:16:21.000 They just want to have a good job and then take yoga all day.

01:16:24.000 Fucking do whatever you want to do.

01:16:26.000 But you got to leave everybody else alone.

01:16:29.000 And so many people want to control other people because they don't have control of their own life.

01:16:34.000 And this is a characteristic that you see from the ideological left on social media and from the ideological right.

01:16:42.000 You see it from the right with wanting to control women's access to abortions. 0.66

01:16:46.000 You see it from, you know, wanting to limit access to this country and immigration. 1.00

01:16:52.000 You see it from wanting to restrict guns and wanting to restrict drugs.

01:16:57.000 You see it from all sorts of different ways that people want to control people and control people's behavior.

01:17:05.000 And that creates these ideological rifts that creates these tribal sort of like mentality borderlines that you cannot cross.

01:17:15.000 And this is a problem when we have so many variations, so much variety of human beings, but just two choices.

01:17:25.000 You're either a Democrat or you're a Republican.

01:17:28.000 And if you're a Democrat, then you think men can get pregnant. 0.97

01:17:31.000 And you think that, you know, there's too much inequity and there's too much racism.

01:17:37.000 And if you're on the right, you think that we got to close the borders and you think that abortion is murder.

01:17:42.000 It'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.

01:17:59.000 Yeah.

01:17:59.000 It's also normalizing that as a mentality.

01:18:02.000 Like what's become normalized is having an assertive and judgmental position.

01:18:06.000 Yes.

01:18:07.000 When that's like, that's a very extreme way to go through life, thinking that you know what's best for other people.

01:18:12.000 Because of my experience in recovery, it's meant that I have to have a practical spirituality.

01:18:17.000 It means that my spirituality has to be about my conduct.

01:18:19.000 That's what my spirituality is.

01:18:21.000 If I don't think it's right to not be kind, then I have to be kind.

01:18:26.000 I don't like look around to check if other people are being kind and prod them and make sure they're doing shit.

01:18:31.000 I 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.

01:18:40.000 I'm normally suffering because I'm not taking care of myself.

01:18:42.000 I'm not fulfilling my obligations.

01:18:44.000 I'm not living by the standards I would set myself as a father, as a person that's involved in my working life.

01:18:51.000 And that's where my unhappiness normally stems from.

01:18:54.000 I 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.

01:19:03.000 And 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.

01:19:16.000 The 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.

01:19:28.000 But I completely, I live in the countryside in England and it's bang, it's all the time.

01:19:31.000 Guns are going off all over the time.

01:19:33.000 They're shooting birds out of the sky.

01:19:34.000 I wouldn't get very far in my life if I had decided that those people were doing something fundamentally wrong.

01:19:39.000 And I actually get a different kind of ease from going like, I don't know everything.

01:19:45.000 I don't know what it's like to be you.

01:19:47.000 And as a stand-up comedian, I like comfort comes from this as well.

01:19:50.000 Like I look at them and I feel them, Joe, you know, the way you do.

01:19:53.000 Like they're like, in some ways, they are like me in that they want to be left alone.

01:19:58.000 They don't like being spoken to as if you think you're better than them.

01:20:01.000 And that's become like almost the media rhetoric and default position has become, we're better than you.

01:20:07.000 shut up yeah like you know and and i feel like that what happened people respond to that That's the problem. 0.79

01:20:13.000 They feel insecure.

01:20:14.000 They get told what to do at work.

01:20:16.000 You don't like that.

01:20:16.000 You don't like being told what to do.

01:20:18.000 You're a rebellious person.

01:20:19.000 And a lot of people aren't.

01:20:20.000 A lot of people like going to an office where they give you a task, they tell you what to do.

01:20:24.000 There's a hierarchy.

01:20:26.000 You want to move your way up the corporate ladder.

01:20:27.000 It's all very structured and set up in front of you.

01:20:30.000 And they like to talk to you like you don't know anything.

01:20:35.000 And people like it.

01:20:36.000 They accept it because they have a daddy.

01:20:38.000 They went from having a dad at home to now they have a dad in the office place.

01:20:42.000 That's a normal thing for people.

01:20:43.000 Right, that they have their psychological templates that underwrite relationships that are recognizable.

01:20:49.000 Yeah, like a leader is fundamentally behaving as a father.

01:20:49.000 Followers.

01:20:53.000 But there's nothing in human evolution that would suggest that we can have centralized models of this scale.

01:20:58.000 It's a weird thing to do.

01:21:00.000 Agriculture, centralized food production.

01:21:03.000 Industrialization, centralized manufacture.

01:21:06.000 Technology is centralizing attention.

01:21:08.000 And reality itself, reality is being described.

01:21:11.000 And like you said, with the new AI revolution, you know, now you just have Malcolm X saying, I'm a paedophile.

01:21:16.000 Malcolm X is a paedophile.

01:21:18.000 He's out.

01:21:19.000 Bobby Kennedy.

01:21:20.000 I killed someone.

01:21:22.000 You can deep fake your way into a reality that's convenient for the interests of the powerful.

01:21:26.000 And 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.

01:21:34.000 And I know personally, all of us are going to experience an apocalypse anyway, because we're all going to die.

01:21:38.000 And does it matter whether when you die, everyone else dies or not?

01:21:42.000 Maybe not, because your reality is shutting down into whatever follows this.

01:21:45.000 But 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.

01:21:56.000 It's already happening.

01:21:57.000 It's already happening.

01:21:58.000 Truth is already a victim of it.

01:22:00.000 It's already ramped up and considerably ramped up during the pandemic because of all the anxiety and the fear.

01:22:05.000 And 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.

01:22:13.000 It just, it ramped everything up, ramped all the anxiety up and ramped people's susceptibility to some sort of a solution.

01:22:20.000 And if you just give into the authoritarian control, then we can all get back to work.

01:22:24.000 Then we go back to get it back up to normal.

01:22:26.000 And that's what scares the shit out of me is how easy people just rolled over and let that happen.

01:22:32.000 And how the ideological rift, the divide between the left and the right got wider.

01:22:39.000 And people got less compassionate and less apologetic.

01:22:44.000 And just let people just be themselves.

01:22:48.000 Be more charitable.

01:22:50.000 Be 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.

01:23:00.000 Like you could see yourself falling into all the same traps.

01:23:03.000 And 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.

01:23:13.000 Like, you know, like, I could have been them.

01:23:15.000 We all could have been them.

01:23:16.000 If 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.

01:23:29.000 You were being told that those people weren't doing the right thing and that was going to get us all in danger.

01:23:34.000 Completely illogical because you're doing the right thing, which is to protect you from a disease.

01:23:38.000 You're taking a shot that's supposed to protect you.

01:23:40.000 What do you give a fuck if someone's not getting protected?

01:23:43.000 It's not going to change anything.

01:23:44.000 And so then there was fake narratives like they're the reason why the variants are coming about.

01:23:50.000 It's because these unvaccinated people, which is completely the opposite of what the science shows. 0.97

01:23:55.000 I mean, there's literally vaccine-resistant variants.

01:24:00.000 And they think that that is just a normal part of vaccinating people during a pandemic.

01:24:05.000 Geert Vanderbosch talked about that.

01:24:07.000 I don't know if you've ever seen him talk.

01:24:09.000 No.

01:24:10.000 He was one of the people that was, he was on Brett Weinstein's podcast, and he's been on many podcasts, but he is a vaccine expert.

01:24:20.000 And he was talking about how the standard model is that you never vaccinate during a pandemic because you just encourage variants.

01:24:30.000 But somehow or another, doctors were saying something that was counter to that narrative.

01:24:34.000 Like they were just spouting off this thing that the problem is the unvaccinated.

01:24:39.000 So people in their mind filled with anxiety, even though they had done the thing that was the right thing in their mind.

01:24:45.000 They got vaccinated, they got protected.

01:24:47.000 They didn't feel protected because these other people weren't listening.

01:24:51.000 And because they weren't listening, there was variants and the variants are now going to get me.

01:24:55.000 And you motherfuckers are ruining it for everybody. 1.00

01:24:58.000 And it was just this wild, frothy panic.

01:25:02.000 Yeah, it created hysteria.

01:25:05.000 Generation of hysteria.

01:25:06.000 It's sometimes interesting to look at what the underlying emotion is that is causing the behavior.

01:25:13.000 What would lead to that behavior?

01:25:15.000 What set of beliefs would lead to that behavior?

01:25:18.000 And 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.

01:25:31.000 So that's the modality.

01:25:33.000 They knew people were going to die.

01:25:33.000 They didn't die.

01:25:35.000 They knew it.

01:25:36.000 They had a number.

01:25:37.000 They knew it.

01:25:38.000 There's like a certain percentage of these people are going to die.

01:25:41.000 So let's keep doing it.

01:25:42.000 Let's keep selling it and let's profit off these people dying.

01:25:46.000 Let's profit off these people's despair because we have a product and that product is going to make us a lot of money.

01:25:52.000 And that's what they did.

01:25:53.000 And that's what they've done with everything.

01:25:55.000 And, you know, you could get real cynical, but I think that's what they've always done.

01:26:00.000 I think that's what they did with Viox. 0.88

01:26:02.000 That's what they did with the opiate crisis.

01:26:04.000 I 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.

01:26:15.000 I've heard a few things about systems that helped me to understand why such a thing might be possible.

01:26:20.000 I heard one time that the CIA, no one person knows what's going on.

01:26:24.000 Like, it's so diffuse.

01:26:26.000 There 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.

01:26:34.000 I 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.

01:26:50.000 We're not going to pay it back.

01:26:51.000 And the people, of course, of Greece voted for him.

01:26:52.000 And then the EU called in that government once they won the election and said, you fucking well are paying back that money.

01:26:59.000 You can't make that decision.

01:27:00.000 You don't have that authority.

01:27:01.000 And 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.

01:27:10.000 They only have the power that that role affords them.

01:27:13.000 The system is essentially functioning on its own.

01:27:16.000 There is no individual that can go, oh, yeah, all right, then don't pay back the money.

01:27:19.000 There is no person that can tell you exactly what the CIA is doing.

01:27:22.000 So 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.

01:27:33.000 But the system is self-sustaining, self-maintaining.

01:27:37.000 The system excludes the possibility for disruption.

01:27:40.000 It's almost like it already functions how an algorithm would function.

01:27:44.000 It doesn't afford radicalism.

01:27:45.000 It doesn't afford the intervention of democracy.

01:27:48.000 When people's will is expressed, the will is delegitimized.

01:27:52.000 When a figure, like when there is a sort of a popular uprising, then the uprising itself is discredited.

01:27:57.000 You know, 20, 30 years ago, it would have been the left in Latin America, Central America, like the deposing and destabilizing nations there. 0.88

01:28:03.000 Now it's like even domestically, like the figures from the presumed right, like Trump, are discredited.

01:28:09.000 You 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.

01:28:14.000 But what I'm saying is that the system has clearly become more allied with a particular aspect of the establishment.

01:28:20.000 Let's call it the liberal establishment.

01:28:22.000 Although it feels to me that it can function perfectly well regardless of which political parties you're in.

01:28:27.000 I think it's interchangeable.

01:28:28.000 I mean, it was during the Bush administration, it was the right.

01:28:31.000 During the Bush administration, all the fears about election tampering were about the right.

01:28:37.000 There was an HBO documentary called Hacking Democracy, and it was all about the Bush administration stealing the vote.

01:28:43.000 And it was all about the diebold voting machines.

01:28:46.000 And they had shown in this documentary that there was a third-party access.

01:28:50.000 So 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.

01:28:59.000 And they showed it, and they demonstrated it on the show, and everybody was terrified.

01:29:02.000 Oh, my God, the Republicans are stealing the vote.

01:29:04.000 And now it's like Katie Hobbs and Carrie Lake in Arizona.

01:29:09.000 It's like the Democrats are stealing the vote.

01:29:12.000 And they're stuck.

01:29:13.000 Oh, the mail-in ballots.

01:29:14.000 The Democrats are rigging the vote.

01:29:17.000 It's a puppet show.

01:29:18.000 It's the old Bill Hicks joke.

01:29:19.000 It's like, I believe in the puppet on the left.

01:29:22.000 Well, the puppet on the right is more to my liking.

01:29:25.000 Like, hey, here's one guy holding both puppets.

01:29:28.000 Like, that's the old Bill Hicks joke.

01:29:30.000 And that's kind of what the fuck is going on.

01:29:32.000 And we get caught up in these ideological battles.

01:29:36.000 And all the while, they're inching us closer to nuclear war.

01:29:41.000 They're pushing dangerous pharmaceutical drugs into our lives.

01:29:45.000 They'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.

01:29:56.000 But if you don't follow lockstep with that narrative, you're fucked and you're out of a job.

01:30:00.000 And so everybody doesn't know what to do.

01:30:02.000 Next thing you know, we have something that's very similar to what's going on in China.

01:30:05.000 And that can happen.

01:30:07.000 We're not that far away from something like that happening here.

01:30:10.000 All 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.

01:30:22.000 And next thing you know, you're fucked. 0.95

01:30:23.000 Yeah, like 9-11 led to surveillance.

01:30:26.000 The pandemic led to compliance.

01:30:28.000 And 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.

01:30:40.000 And one of the things that was spoken about in the pandemic was, oh, look, they had this agenda anyway.

01:30:46.000 They were looking to introduce this kind of technology.

01:30:48.000 They just took advantage of a situation.

01:30:50.000 I don't go as far as saying that I think that people orchestrate these things.

01:30:55.000 I don't think anybody orchestrated the pandemic.

01:30:57.000 I think the pandemic came out of that Wuhan lab. 0.99

01:31:00.000 I think they fucked up.

01:31:01.000 There's clear evidence that in 2018, they already have safety violations.

01:31:05.000 It wasn't well done.

01:31:07.000 The people in the lab got sick.

01:31:09.000 They know who the people were that got sick.

01:31:11.000 They know one of the spouses, one of the people that worked in the lab died from something that seems very similar to COVID.

01:31:16.000 They know the history.

01:31:17.000 They know what happened.

01:31:18.000 But the way they took advantage of that situation reminds me of the way they took advantage of 9-11.

01:31:24.000 Because I don't think they orchestrated 9-11 either.

01:31:26.000 I could be wrong on both counts.

01:31:28.000 I want to be really clear about that.

01:31:29.000 I don't know how things work.

01:31:31.000 But 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.

01:31:46.000 Yeah.

01:31:47.000 Opportunistic 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.

01:31:57.000 I 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.

01:32:13.000 And 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.

01:32:24.000 And they're the only people that are attacking the establishment and the authoritarianism that's coming out of there and the exploitation.

01:32:29.000 There's no voices and the voices on the left have become kind of muted.

01:32:33.000 It feels to me that during the 2016 election that they would rather have Trump win than have the Democrats win under Bernie Sanders.

01:32:40.000 They made a bunch of like odd decisions that shows you that, yeah, that Hicks' metaphor stays ultimately true.

01:32:48.000 And 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.

01:32:57.000 As 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.

01:33:07.000 Exactly.

01:33:08.000 Then it's over.

01:33:09.000 As long as you can keep people at each other's throats, then you can continue to manipulate them.

01:33:13.000 Then it's an easy chess game.

01:33:14.000 As soon as people come together and they realize like, hey, we have way more in common than we do difference.

01:33:19.000 What do we really want?

01:33:20.000 Everyone wants a safe neighborhood.

01:33:22.000 You want good education.

01:33:23.000 You want healthy food.

01:33:25.000 You want people to be able to pursue their dreams.

01:33:26.000 You want people to have a good time.

01:33:28.000 And the more people you're around that have a good time, the better the quality of your life is going to be as well.

01:33:32.000 The better the quality of life in your entire neighborhood.

01:33:35.000 And 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.

01:33:48.000 If 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.

01:33:58.000 Like it doesn't matter.

01:33:59.000 I don't give a fuck what music you like, what movies you enjoy or how you like to dress.

01:34:03.000 I don't care.

01:34:04.000 I want you to be happy.

01:34:05.000 If you like to wear pink all day and fucking you like to put braids in your hair, good. 0.99

01:34:09.000 Who cares?

01:34:10.000 Who gives a fuck?

01:34:11.000 I don't care.

01:34:12.000 And 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.

01:34:26.000 That 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.

01:34:51.000 I think you're right that we become parasited.

01:34:53.000 You know, I know you admire Terence McKenna, his famous thing, the culture is not your friend.

01:34:58.000 The culture isn't your friend.

01:34:59.000 And 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.

01:35:10.000 And this is why the individual does have power.

01:35:12.000 I'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.

01:35:22.000 But at the same time, all reality takes place only in my consciousness, as far as I can tell.

01:35:28.000 So I am creating all reality.

01:35:30.000 I am ultimately omniscient as far as my own individual reality is concerned.

01:35:35.000 I 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.

01:35:47.000 Because as long as people are willing to go at a mat on cultural issues rather than saying, yeah, this has been complicated.

01:35:53.000 A country like America has a complicated history.

01:35:55.000 Definitely people have been disadvantaged.

01:35:57.000 Definitely there have been biases and prejudices in a particular direction.

01:36:00.000 If there is the facility to alter that, that could be done.

01:36:02.000 But the best way to do it is not centralized, top-down imposition of authority.

01:36:07.000 I suppose one of the other tensions is, if you have small state, what regulates corporate power?

01:36:13.000 Those are like, you know, there are big questions that once you sort of say, this don't work no more, I want something different.

01:36:19.000 So what does work?

01:36:20.000 Yeah, you are confronted with, oh, how do you do that?

01:36:22.000 How 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?

01:36:32.000 And again, with their, as you cited earlier, their ability to create exploitation and something akin to slavery in the modern world.

01:36:39.000 Forget historic slavery.

01:36:41.000 What is the collective force that opposes that?

01:36:43.000 And 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.

01:37:01.000 If 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,

01:37:14.000 leisure-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.

01:37:34.000 Like that is a possibility.

01:37:38.000 I 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.

01:38:01.000 There's a brilliant philosopher, he's dead now, Mark Fisher, he was off the left.

01:38:06.000 He coined the term capitalist realism, that we have been taught that this is the only model of reality there is.

01:38:13.000 He said it's people find it easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

01:38:18.000 There could be a new economic system that we could live within.

01:38:21.000 And we all know now that capitalism, as it was intended, doesn't exist anymore anyway.

01:38:25.000 Certainly not after what happened in 2008.

01:38:27.000 Simple, you know, I make this thing, trading, it growing, ingenuity, entrepreneurship.

01:38:31.000 It's such a cronyist support in energy companies, supplementing them, ensuring that they make profits.

01:38:38.000 How 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?

01:38:47.000 You're creating the necessity for ongoing crisis.

01:38:50.000 If the elites in the society benefit from situations that are detrimental to everybody else, that's what reality is going to become.

01:38:58.000 That's what reality has become.

01:39:00.000 That's such an important point because that's almost undeniable.

01:39:04.000 And to say that they wouldn't do that because they value human life and morals and ethics over profit, that's never been exhibited.

01:39:11.000 That's not true.

01:39:12.000 That's not a true statement.

01:39:14.000 No, the opposite is true.

01:39:15.000 The opposite is provable.

01:39:17.000 The opposite is provable whether it's Halliburton or whether it's pharmaceutical companies or whether it's politicians or bankers.

01:39:25.000 The opposite has always been true.

01:39:27.000 We are profit-driven.

01:39:28.000 And 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.

01:39:39.000 They're part of a corporation.

01:39:40.000 The corporation has to do this.

01:39:42.000 And this is just what we do.

01:39:43.000 You got to crack a few eggs to make an omelet.

01:39:46.000 That's where we find ourselves.

01:39:47.000 And 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.

01:40:00.000 Recognize this hustle and don't get sucked into it.

01:40:03.000 Do 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.

01:40:19.000 You don't seem like you think like that to me.

01:40:21.000 You don't seem like you think, fucking hell, I'm at the center of a movement.

01:40:24.000 I could do whatever I want.

01:40:25.000 Woohoo! 1.00

01:40:26.000 Let's go nuts.

01:40:27.000 If I thought like that, I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing.

01:40:29.000 Right.

01:40:29.000 And it's all been totally organic.

01:40:32.000 It's never been calculated at all.

01:40:34.000 Not one step of the way.

01:40:35.000 In fact, none of the podcast has.

01:40:36.000 I've never even advertised the podcast.

01:40:38.000 I never even told people to listen to it.

01:40:40.000 It just grew 100% from word of mouth.

01:40:43.000 That's all it was.

01:40:44.000 Just me doing it, keep doing it.

01:40:47.000 And then eventually it becomes what it is.

01:40:49.000 Yeah, 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.

01:41:05.000 The only thing that ties it together is authenticity, in a sense.

01:41:08.000 That'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.

01:41:18.000 But to get to that place of like, no, just trust yourself.

01:41:20.000 Do what you believe in.

01:41:22.000 There are situations when you don't know.

01:41:24.000 That Maharishi Ha, the Maharishi said, do what you know to be right.

01:41:28.000 Don't do what you know to be wrong.

01:41:30.000 And that will cover most things.

01:41:31.000 It's not that often where you're like, oh, God, this is a genuine dilemma.

01:41:35.000 A lot of times I know I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing.

01:41:38.000 I'm not participating in a way that I ought to.

01:41:40.000 I'm not doing the best that I could do.

01:41:44.000 And that requires discipline, actually.

01:41:45.000 And again, it comes down to the individual.

01:41:47.000 In 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.

01:41:54.000 And in a sense, part of your story is a demonstration of that by sort of just being, this is what I believe in.

01:42:00.000 This is what I'm interested in.

01:42:01.000 These are the conversations I want to have.

01:42:03.000 Like that when it hit the crisis of the pandemic, that authenticity and integrity served you.

01:42:08.000 I think if up until that point, if you'd have been like, I want to be a star, I think maybe you'd have to be able to do it.

01:42:11.000 Yeah, I would have been fucked.

01:42:12.000 Yeah.

01:42:13.000 Well, I've been very fortunate that I have been able to do this without anybody's input.

01:42:17.000 So 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.

01:42:30.000 And 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.

01:42:40.000 And then the next day I'll have an MMA fighter on.

01:42:42.000 And 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.

01:42:49.000 Like it doesn't, the only thread through the whole thing is I find this interesting.

01:42:56.000 These people are interesting to me.

01:42:56.000 That's it.

01:42:58.000 I had a woman who was a beekeeper. 1.00

01:42:59.000 Like, how do you raise bees?

01:43:01.000 You know, like, I had a guy who was a bat scientist who has been studying bats his whole life.

01:43:06.000 Like, oh, like, how'd you get into that?

01:43:09.000 That's the only thread through the whole thing.

01:43:12.000 So, like, they're interesting to me.

01:43:14.000 I have a wide range of interests, and I think most people do.

01:43:17.000 And I think most people like to hear people that are passionate about what they do.

01:43:22.000 And most people are fairly curious.

01:43:25.000 Yes.

01:43:25.000 You 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.

01:43:38.000 This is what Russell thinks about things.

01:43:40.000 There's no one getting to him, telling him to do it this way.

01:43:43.000 This 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.

01:43:50.000 He might not be right, but at least he'll tell me the truth.

01:43:53.000 And if he's not right, and if he finds out that he was not right, he's going to tell me that too.

01:43:57.000 Yeah, that's that's what people need.

01:43:59.000 If 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.

01:44:07.000 I am not infallible.

01:44:08.000 I'm really flawed, but I do believe in these things.

01:44:11.000 Then 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.

01:44:18.000 When 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.

01:44:30.000 They would have using their own modality prevented it from ever coming into existence.

01:44:35.000 It's only, in a sense, where the authenticity meets the technology and the possibility that the whole project takes off.

01:44:43.000 Yeah, I'm wondering how that's sort of going to apply.

01:44:44.000 I don't suppose the only way I can apply it is by a continuum of the authenticity.

01:44:47.000 I've got your president.

01:44:48.000 Do you want to?

01:44:48.000 Yeah, please.

01:44:49.000 But yeah, you just got to keep doing it the way you're doing it.

01:44:49.000 Sure.

01:44:51.000 There's no if-ands or ways.

01:44:53.000 And you're a good person.

01:44:54.000 And your morals and ethics are in line.

01:44:57.000 And you're just doing what you think is a good thing to do and pursuing things you're fascinated by.

01:45:06.000 That's admirable.

01:45:07.000 And it's relatable.

01:45:09.000 Like, people, they lock into that.

01:45:11.000 They enjoy it.

01:45:12.000 That's what's missing in mainstream television.

01:45:15.000 Yeah, I'm really glad to hear you say that.

01:45:17.000 And I'm happy you said it because sometimes when I feel like I'm talking about something like, you know, thank fuck.

01:45:22.000 Sometimes someone comes on the show, like someone like Seymour Hirsch and you know, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist or talked about the Nord Stream pipeline.

01:45:29.000 And because I said, because you know how it is, look at where you work, even impressive though it is, a somewhat incubated kingdom.

01:45:36.000 You think, like, I read all this stuff, but I read the kind of stuff that I'm interested in.

01:45:40.000 And so I was thinking, oh my God, have I gone fucking mad?

01:45:42.000 Like, 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.

01:45:51.000 And then someone comes on with a lot more experience and expertise than me or like that, you know, Jeffrey Sachs.

01:45:56.000 And you'll go, this is what happened in 2014.

01:45:58.000 This is what happened after Gorbachev.

01:45:59.000 This is what happened at that industry.

01:46:00.000 And you're like, fuck.

01:46:01.000 It's right.

01:46:02.000 That's where the authentic that then, if you can start to trust yourself, hold on, yeah.

01:46:05.000 My 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.

01:46:21.000 What a genius this guy is.

01:46:22.000 He's the best.

01:46:23.000 He's untouchable.

01:46:25.000 He's untouchable, and he never gets whispered at in the dead of night, apparently across the pillow.

01:46:29.000 Like, like in the end, you start to see, oh no, like it's right.

01:46:32.000 I'm actually right.

01:46:33.000 And it starts to reassure you.

01:46:34.000 But one of the things I feel is like, oh man, is that all the bridges burned?

01:46:37.000 You know, I'm like, am I ever going again?

01:46:40.000 Like, you care about that.

01:46:41.000 I don't care about it in the same way I once did, but I consider it more, I reckon, than you.

01:46:45.000 Like, oh, wow, is that it?

01:46:46.000 I'm never going to be in a movie.

01:46:49.000 I'm never going to be in a universal movie again.

01:46:52.000 Or like on Don't, you know, not that, you know, as I said to you, I had complicated feelings about it anyway.

01:46:56.000 Lovely people, but difficult times.

01:46:58.000 I'm not sure for me personally, I guess it's just not a good fit.

01:47:01.000 But 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.

01:47:10.000 And, you know, fortunately, I don't think like that.

01:47:13.000 Yeah, you don't see, you don't care, do you?

01:47:15.000 No.

01:47:15.000 Once I got Fear Factor money, I was like, I have some money.

01:47:18.000 I'm good now.

01:47:19.000 Like, I don't give a fuck anymore.

01:47:20.000 Yeah, that's true.

01:47:21.000 That was the first thing I thought when I started making money and I got like real money put away.

01:47:27.000 I was like, good.

01:47:28.000 I make a good living.

01:47:29.000 You know, I make a good living doing stand-up.

01:47:31.000 I make a good living doing UFC commentary.

01:47:34.000 I don't have to do shit.

01:47:35.000 Like, I'm not doing anything I don't want to do from now on.

01:47:37.000 I'm just going to pursue the things I enjoy doing, and hopefully I can make a living doing those things.

01:47:41.000 And that's all I've done.

01:47:43.000 And so I just keep doing what I'm doing.

01:47:46.000 And I think that what you're doing is so much more valuable than movies.

01:47:51.000 It's so much more rare and so much more difficult to do.

01:47:55.000 Like, there's a lot of people that are good comedic actors.

01:47:58.000 I'm not saying they could replace you, but I'm saying there's a lot of people that can do that thing.

01:48:02.000 There's not a lot of people that can do what you do when you do your show.

01:48:05.000 There's not.

01:48:06.000 There's very few.

01:48:07.000 You do it different than I do it.

01:48:08.000 You have your very own unique style.

01:48:10.000 You have a very unique perspective, a humorous take on horrible corruption and these terrible atrocities that are happening all through the world.

01:48:19.000 But it's fun to watch.

01:48:20.000 It's fun to watch you talk about those things.

01:48:22.000 That's not available anywhere else.

01:48:25.000 And that's why people are resonating with it.

01:48:26.000 And that's why it resonates with people.

01:48:28.000 And that's why people are gravitating towards you.

01:48:30.000 And I think that it's more important to just stay on that.

01:48:33.000 It's very valuable.

01:48:34.000 And this idea that, like, oh, maybe I should keep myself open to this stream of revenue that's always been available to me.

01:48:41.000 Like, no, fuck that stream.

01:48:44.000 And also, you can get so big that they want you anyway.

01:48:48.000 Like, even though he's crazy, he talks about the Nord Stream pipeline and Iver Mecton.

01:48:53.000 Like, hey, he's still Russell Brand.

01:48:56.000 He's still very popular.

01:48:57.000 Let's get him, get him in our movie.

01:48:59.000 And then you'll do that movie and you'll be like, fuck these movies.

01:49:02.000 I'm going to go back to doing my show where I don't have to listen to anybody.

01:49:04.000 I can just rant and rave with my stack of papers and my bird farting.

01:49:10.000 You've carved out a very unique thing.

01:49:13.000 And there's not a lot of people that do that.

01:49:16.000 And it's very inspirational to other people because it gives people this thing in their head.

01:49:21.000 Like, here's this guy that was in all these fucking amazing movies.

01:49:24.000 And he was this giant star.

01:49:26.000 And he seems better and happier doing this thing that I can do.

01:49:30.000 He's just got a desk and he's sitting in front of it with a fucking plant behind him and shit.

01:49:34.000 And he's just ranting and raving.

01:49:36.000 Like, my God, you, Russell Brand, are doing the thing that thousands and thousands of independent YouTube content providers are doing.

01:49:46.000 These 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.

01:49:54.000 You're doing the same thing as them.

01:49:57.000 And 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.

01:50:14.000 It's really kind of wild.

01:50:16.000 Thanks for putting it like that.

01:50:16.000 Yeah, thanks.

01:50:18.000 Because it's even not so much the idea of revenue.

01:50:21.000 It'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.

01:50:33.000 You're being celebrated.

01:50:34.000 This guy's great.

01:50:35.000 Then 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.

01:50:48.000 When obviously I'm aware of how those issues are being discussed in the mainstream, even in entertainment products.

01:50:53.000 Like sometimes I see one of those things on the TV and I can't believe how they talk.

01:50:56.000 I can't believe they are not aware that like half of the country is also there.

01:51:00.000 The 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.

01:51:08.000 I suppose they've accepted that audience is gone.

01:51:11.000 Well, the people that are saying those words don't have a say.

01:51:14.000 Right.

01:51:15.000 That's part of what's going on.

01:51:16.000 Is the people that are saying those words, they're just like actors on a sitcom.

01:51:20.000 They just sit there and they have this thing that they're supposed to say and they're going to talk about.

01:51:25.000 They don't have a unique individual perspective and they're not allowed to.

01:51:29.000 And also their format is so limited that even if they did, it wouldn't even shine through because you have five minutes.

01:51:34.000 You have five minutes to talk about the Nord Stream pipeline.

01:51:37.000 You have five minutes to talk about the Chinese drones.

01:51:39.000 You have five minutes to talk about Putin.

01:51:42.000 You don't have enough time.

01:51:43.000 You don't have enough time.

01:51:44.000 When 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.

01:51:55.000 Then you can talk things out.

01:51:56.000 Then you could figure, then you could look at, you could steel man other people's arguments.

01:52:01.000 You should try to imagine your own perspective if you were in that state.

01:52:05.000 What would I do if I was the head of a pharmaceutical company?

01:52:07.000 How would I stop?

01:52:08.000 I mean, if I was already making hundreds of millions of dollars, what would I do?

01:52:12.000 Would I just stay on this train and just watch all the destruction take place and watch all these people die from opiate addiction?

01:52:19.000 What would I do?

01:52:20.000 I don't know.

01:52:21.000 I don't know what I would do.

01:52:22.000 But I know that you would never have that conversation on CNN.

01:52:25.000 Yeah.

01:52:27.000 Rachel Mano's not going to have that fucking conversation with you. 1.00

01:52:29.000 She's going to look at that camera and she's going to lie. 0.99

01:52:32.000 And she's going to say the things that she's supposed to say because they pay her X amount of dollars per year and it's a great job.

01:52:38.000 Like it's inconvenient to believe something that's at odds with that.

01:52:42.000 You can't allow yourself to believe that.

01:52:43.000 And people will allow you to lie.

01:52:45.000 They'll allow you to push that false narrative and they'll celebrate you for doing it.

01:52:50.000 Thank you.

01:52:51.000 Thank you for everything you said about the vaccine.

01:52:54.000 Thank you for everything you said about the vaccine.

01:52:57.000 Like, ooh.

01:52:58.000 We forget that it's an end, like that news is a TV show.

01:53:02.000 Like it presents itself at you.

01:53:03.000 Hello.

01:53:04.000 Like it comes at you with authority and certainty and all of these sort of tropes that we've come to like.

01:53:11.000 And we've seen it all our lives.

01:53:12.000 It evolves a little bit.

01:53:13.000 They always look more or less the same.

01:53:15.000 The background looks more or less the same.

01:53:16.000 The tone, the pomposity of the music.

01:53:20.000 You forget that this is just a commercial product that's giving you information that's salient to its own objectives.

01:53:27.000 It's a great way to put it, commercial product.

01:53:28.000 It can't tell you, hey, shit, we don't know anything.

01:53:32.000 The only bit of reality we can observe is a minute portion of all potential realities.

01:53:36.000 We've got to radically reevaluate everything.

01:53:38.000 I'm being told stuff by Pfizer back there.

01:53:40.000 Ah, they can't afford that kind of latitude.

01:53:43.000 They've got us down the rail.

01:53:45.000 I 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.

01:53:57.000 And do other beings have access to them?

01:54:00.000 Can they travel through these things?

01:54:02.000 Is that what we're dealing with?

01:54:04.000 Imagine if that becomes at the forefront of the zeitgeist.

01:54:10.000 If 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.

01:54:27.000 Are you still going to give a shit about a trans woman using the female bathroom? 0.98

01:54:34.000 Are 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?

01:54:44.000 You're going to go, holy shit, there's a bigger thing going on.

01:54:49.000 There's something that transcends all physical reality as we know it.

01:54:54.000 It's beyond our imagination and it is reality.

01:54:58.000 Yes, 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.

01:55:10.000 There is our experience of rational thought.

01:55:13.000 There's our experience of bodily sensation.

01:55:15.000 But there's something else within us.

01:55:17.000 I'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.

01:55:25.000 I've not been able to attain those ideas.

01:55:28.000 Can you explain that to me?

01:55:29.000 Because I'm not an addict.

01:55:31.000 But 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.

01:55:46.000 You're clearly not the same person.

01:55:49.000 You're clearly not the same person, even though you've experienced the same traumas that led you into heroin addiction in the first place.

01:55:58.000 You 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.

01:56:12.000 So what makes you think that this entheogen, this literal psychedelic connection to a higher realm would ruin your life?

01:56:24.000 Yeah, I know, because the thing is, I really, really want to.

01:56:28.000 Like when I was still using, I took psychedelics in the same way all kids take psychedelics.

01:56:33.000 For fun, in a park, at a bus stop, you know, and knowing that there's something ontologically profound happening.

01:56:33.000 For fun.

01:56:40.000 Like, most observably, and I'm talking about myself as a 16-year-old, like, hold on a minute.

01:56:44.000 I'm not real.

01:56:46.000 Like, I am not my memory of myself.

01:56:49.000 I am not my projections.

01:56:50.000 I am the consciousness that is observing that set of data.

01:56:55.000 I'm observing my feelings.

01:56:57.000 I'm observing my thoughts.

01:56:59.000 I'm beyond it.

01:56:59.000 So, beyond like all that stuff, I was aware that this was profound.

01:57:02.000 But also, I was doing it on my own with like just kids drinking cider at a bus stop in Essex.

01:57:06.000 I 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.

01:57:14.000 I was like, at a bus stop in the rain in the grimness of graves where I'm from.

01:57:19.000 So, 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.

01:57:29.000 They're looking for something that they can't find in the world.

01:57:33.000 They're looking for connection.

01:57:34.000 They're looking for a deeper purpose and for meaning.

01:57:38.000 They're also looking for escape.

01:57:40.000 Right?

01:57:41.000 From the anxiety of being alive, just the existential angst that most people carry around with them.

01:57:47.000 Yeah, it's unlivable with.

01:57:48.000 But as you say, most people carry around with them.

01:57:50.000 Like, we all have that.

01:57:51.000 Yeah, we all have a certain level of it.

01:57:53.000 Yeah, 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.

01:58:01.000 It's the only one I'm qualified to advocate for.

01:58:03.000 The 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.

01:58:18.000 But 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.

01:58:27.000 It was informed by William James, the theologian.

01:58:29.000 It's influenced by Carl Jung, of course.

01:58:32.000 And like, what?

01:58:32.000 So it's a sort of a fusion of religious and spiritual ideas and psychiatry, which obviously was in a much more formative state back then.

01:58:39.000 And what it's fundamentally offering you is the drugs and the alcohol are not the problem.

01:58:43.000 The problem is you are self-centered and egoic.

01:58:46.000 You've got caught in yourself.

01:58:47.000 And 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.

01:58:52.000 And when you do, you won't feel the need to drink or take drugs anymore.

01:58:55.000 Now, 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.

01:59:02.000 You can't drink or take drugs one day at a time.

01:59:04.000 But more important than that is, you've surrendered.

01:59:06.000 You're not in charge of your life anymore.

01:59:08.000 You've given the ego a break.

01:59:10.000 Yeah, like it's like I can't run on that.

01:59:12.000 You know the story of Alcoholics Anonymous, though, and then Bill W, the fact that he was into LSD.

01:59:18.000 Yes, I'm aware of that because I'm sort of an amateur historian of it because it's an important sort of part of my wellness.

01:59:24.000 It seems like a contradiction.

01:59:26.000 That dude was out there.

01:59:27.000 I mean, like, he's a prophet.

01:59:28.000 Like, the guy was a stockbroker, apparently a womanizer, and yes, indeed, took LSD while in recovery.

01:59:34.000 And of course, all of the materials around that fellowship are very, they're like 50, 60 years old.

01:59:39.000 No one had 10 years clean then.

01:59:41.000 No one had 20 years.

01:59:42.000 I'm 20 years clean as ever.

01:59:43.000 No one had that.

01:59:44.000 None of those guys, there hadn't been that much time, which makes you think about vaccine tests.

01:59:47.000 How do they know what it's going to do in 10 years?

01:59:49.000 If you hadn't had fucking 10 years, so like, you know, they didn't know how those things were going to pan out.

01:59:54.000 So the reason I have this ayahuasca hesitancy, a lot of people are ayahuasca hesitant.

02:00:00.000 What are we going to do about that hesitancy?

02:00:02.000 The reason I have it is because I can't take back personal authority for what I do.

02:00:07.000 And the idea is, is because I've achieved, I've been given something that's quite delicate.

02:00:12.000 Like 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.

02:00:23.000 When 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.

02:00:32.000 I'm looking for this, this isn't reality.

02:00:34.000 This can't be it.

02:00:35.000 You can't expect me to just stay alive for decades more based on this bullshit.

02:00:39.000 I know there's something else.

02:00:40.000 The culture won't give you it.

02:00:41.000 The culture won't give you.

02:00:42.000 You are divine.

02:00:43.000 You are connected to limitless.

02:00:44.000 And there are other dimensions.

02:00:45.000 There are other beings.

02:00:45.000 The culture's just telling you, get a job, you're going to work in a call center or a factory.

02:00:50.000 And you are craving the mystic.

02:00:52.000 You're craving it.

02:00:53.000 But you know, you're not the same guy you were when you were an addict, right?

02:00:58.000 You're a different, much more mature, much more experienced person.

02:01:01.000 You know the old expression, no man can ever step into a river twice because you're not the same man.

02:01:07.000 That's not the same river.

02:01:09.000 Yeah.

02:01:10.000 I do that.

02:01:11.000 I just want to get in that river and I would try to drink it.

02:01:14.000 Fucking drink.

02:01:15.000 Why do you think?

02:01:16.000 But why do you think you would do that?

02:01:17.000 Don't you think you've learned?

02:01:18.000 This is what I don't understand.

02:01:20.000 And 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.

02:01:30.000 Because you ain't an addict, huh?

02:01:31.000 You're not an addict.

02:01:32.000 You've never known that you've never taken cocaine.

02:01:34.000 No, I've never taken cocaine, but I do get addicted to video games.

02:01:37.000 I do get addicted to.

02:01:39.000 I 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.

02:02:03.000 So important to me.

02:02:04.000 And 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.

02:02:13.000 I could see myself, because I think it's just a natural human characteristic.

02:02:17.000 But right now, like if someone said, hey, are you worried that you would get hooked on something?

02:02:22.000 I'd be like, no.

02:02:24.000 No, I wouldn't.

02:02:24.000 Because if I thought I was getting hooked on it, I would just stop because I'm not interested in doing anything that's detrimental to me.

02:02:30.000 I'm not interested in doing anything that's going to tank my life.

02:02:33.000 No, and neither am I, really.

02:02:34.000 But 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.

02:02:40.000 It sounds like we're from pretty similar types of background.

02:02:42.000 It sounds like that we both had negative experiences of a step parent.

02:02:48.000 I don't know if that's true, actually.

02:02:49.000 My stepdad's actually a good guy.

02:02:50.000 Right.

02:02:51.000 Like, but at the time, I didn't even know that.

02:02:52.000 But I did have negative experiences of my biological father.

02:02:56.000 There was a divorce when I was very young.

02:02:57.000 We moved around a lot.

02:02:58.000 There was a lot of stuff along those lines.

02:03:01.000 But it's just, everybody that seeks exorbitant amounts of attention is fucked up. 0.78

02:03:07.000 And if you want to go on stage, like, why would you want to go on stage?

02:03:10.000 Like, what kind of a person wants that amount of attention?

02:03:14.000 What kind of psychopath metabolizes childhood trauma into, even though I'm really frightened of this, I'm going to go and do it.

02:03:22.000 I'm going to stand up there and I'm going to trust that what I've got to say.

02:03:25.000 It'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.

02:03:36.000 My house weren't warm enough when I was a kid.

02:03:38.000 I always keep the heating up high now.

02:03:39.000 You still live in a sauna.

02:03:41.000 I'm staying in it.

02:03:42.000 Still, that's already happened.

02:03:44.000 Not time travel.

02:03:44.000 It's not a time traveling sauna.

02:03:46.000 Yeah, 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.

02:03:55.000 And 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.

02:04:04.000 Well, I found martial arts at a very young age.

02:04:07.000 And so discipline became my addiction.

02:04:10.000 And 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.

02:04:19.000 And I didn't.

02:04:21.000 I avoided all that throughout all high school.

02:04:23.000 I barely partied in high school.

02:04:24.000 I got drunk a couple times.

02:04:26.000 I smoked pot a couple of times and that was it.

02:04:28.000 All throughout high school.

02:04:29.000 My high school was filled with discipline.

02:04:31.000 And all I did was train.

02:04:32.000 I was a very weird kid in that regard.

02:04:35.000 Like socially, I was kind of an outcast.

02:04:37.000 But I found through that path, it was like there was a clear road where I could be a better person and a happier person.

02:04:52.000 My 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.

02:04:58.000 There's something geeky about it.

02:05:00.000 Like you've got to study movement.

02:05:01.000 You've got to understand it.

02:05:03.000 There's a lot of art you can nerd out on the moves, nerd out, or even on the kit and the aesthetics.

02:05:08.000 And 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.

02:05:22.000 All of those things have been able to have been targeted.

02:05:25.000 I, like, again, because of coming on here, you do, you're the first person I heard talk about Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

02:05:31.000 Like, I got into it.

02:05:32.000 It'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.

02:05:42.000 That's an amazing accomplishment.

02:05:44.000 So congratulations on that.

02:05:46.000 Because it's very difficult to start at 40.

02:05:48.000 It's very difficult to get a purple belt.

02:05:49.000 Getting a purple belt is like you're basically a black belt.

02:05:52.000 You just need to put the time in.

02:05:54.000 The difference between a white belt and a blue belt, the blue belt is like, okay, you're learning things.

02:06:01.000 You now have an understanding of moves that's not just a beginner's understanding.

02:06:07.000 Like, you know a path.

02:06:09.000 When 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.

02:06:17.000 It's natural.

02:06:17.000 It's automatic.

02:06:18.000 When you get to a purple belt, it's like you've got some serious shit.

02:06:22.000 When you get to a purple belt level, you know how to set things up. 0.95

02:06:25.000 You know how to set traps.

02:06:27.000 You know how to use defensive tactics to initiate offense.

02:06:32.000 The only difference between that and a black belt is honing the edge and continuing to put in the time. 0.98

02:06:39.000 The 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.

02:06:58.000 And that got me to black belt.

02:07:00.000 But you're at purple belt level, which is the that's the great divide. 0.99

02:07:04.000 That's what separates someone who just starts Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu with someone who gets to black belt.

02:07:08.000 Can you get to purple belt?

02:07:10.000 You're in the great divide.

02:07:11.000 Oh, that's the threshold, is it?

02:07:12.000 Because I found it a difficult place to be and I'll give a shit.

02:07:15.000 Difficult.

02:07:16.000 My teacher, Chris Clear, he's a very dedicated teacher.

02:07:18.000 He's a black belt under Roger Gracie.

02:07:23.000 For me, I move in and out of it, you know, like not necessarily even because of injuries, because of time.

02:07:28.000 And sometimes because part of me still holds on to the idea of not being crushed under somebody's shoulder.

02:07:34.000 And like, you know, when you sort of, as well, when you're like my build, I weigh probably, I guess I weigh 80 kilograms.

02:07:39.000 Like I roll with maybe a blue belt that's like 10 or 15 kilograms more than me.

02:07:43.000 I can get so smashed up, you know.

02:07:45.000 And 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.

02:07:56.000 But like I still have a reluctance to face the business end of jiu-jitsu, the grind, the harshness of that stuff sometimes, I guess.

02:08:05.000 So my competence inhales and exhales, you know, like when I when I'm doing it a lot, I feel very good about myself.

02:08:14.000 It 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.

02:08:21.000 It's like why I like doing the hot and cold stuff as well, like experiencing soreness and cold punches.

02:08:25.000 But oh, this is what it's like to feel really uncomfortable and just to deal with it.

02:08:29.000 It's okay.

02:08:29.000 You're not dying.

02:08:31.000 And then, but like with the thing is, is that it's abstract with hot and cold.

02:08:35.000 When 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.

02:08:43.000 That's what it's like to be smashed.

02:08:45.000 To get smashed, to be the nail and not the hammer.

02:08:48.000 You know, that like I still deal with that.

02:08:50.000 The 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.

02:08:57.000 I needed therapy.

02:08:58.000 Somebody's going, this is a hobby that you're doing.

02:09:00.000 Oh, no, I've got to write a poem about this shit.

02:09:02.000 This is bad.

02:09:03.000 What happened to me in that game?

02:09:05.000 Did you ever read Sam Harris when he started doing Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu?

02:09:08.000 He wrote those, I think it was called The Joys of Drowning.

02:09:12.000 I never read that, but he introduced me to Huron Gracie also.

02:09:16.000 What did he say about that, Joyce?

02:09:18.000 Just what he's learning about his pursuit of this thing.

02:09:22.000 And, you know, also, I think, similar age when he started doing jiu-jitsu.

02:09:26.000 I think he was in his 40s as well.

02:09:28.000 And 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.

02:09:40.000 But what a fucking amazing tool it is.

02:09:45.000 I love rolling with people when, like, it's exciting.

02:09:50.000 Like, jiu-jitsu is exciting.

02:09:52.000 But 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.

02:10:00.000 Like, 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. 1.00

02:10:07.000 Like, I've done all these numbers.

02:10:09.000 I've put in all these fucking constant days of training, like, for so many years.

02:10:17.000 I trained since 19, I started training in 1996.

02:10:20.000 It's like, I've been doing it for so long that it's such a beautiful thing to have.

02:10:25.000 And 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.

02:10:42.000 Through the struggle of the physical struggle, the wanting to quit and not quitting, the developing the ability to overcome adversity, developing the mental fortitude.

02:10:53.000 It'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.

02:11:08.000 Or 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.

02:11:19.000 You know, there's magic to it.

02:11:22.000 It's just like there's very few things that are like jiu-jitsu in this life that can give you those kind of lessons.

02:11:29.000 Also, the trend of our time is more and more disembodying.

02:11:33.000 There's more and more like strap a helmet on your head and life yourself off into the metaverse.

02:11:39.000 And 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.

02:11:50.000 It would have been normal to play with like and establish hierarchy in that way and to know what your body is capable of.

02:11:57.000 Like 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.

02:12:04.000 Also, other people are capable of doing things with my body.

02:12:07.000 I 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.

02:12:13.000 I don't know because people surprise you.

02:12:15.000 Especially today.

02:12:16.000 God, with the UFC, how many people know how to fight today?

02:12:20.000 It's so much more dangerous.

02:12:22.000 You get out of your car in 1970 and you see a guy who's just wearing shorts and a t-shirt and no gun, no knife.

02:12:28.000 You're like, I don't want to fuck this guy up.

02:12:30.000 But now, who the hell knows?

02:12:33.000 Some 140-pound guy might arm drag you and take your back and strangle you unconscious in the middle of the road. 0.94

02:12:39.000 Like, you really can't take those chances anymore.

02:12:42.000 That's your people.

02:12:43.000 Actually, you've popularized that.

02:12:44.000 They were condemning you for ivermectin.

02:12:46.000 What they should have said is, because of this guy, people everywhere know how to rear naked choke.

02:12:50.000 It's a menace.

02:12:51.000 It's a menace in the highway.

02:12:52.000 There's a lot of people out there that know, and a lot of women too, that know how to do it. 1.00

02:12:55.000 There's a lot of people that know how to strangle people.

02:12:57.000 And I think that's a beautiful skill to know.

02:13:00.000 It's always good to have that.

02:13:02.000 It's always good to know what to do if a conflict emerges.

02:13:06.000 Because 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.

02:13:16.000 So 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.

02:13:24.000 You really are.

02:13:25.000 So a lot of times when you're sparring, you're holding back because you're protecting your opponents.

02:13:29.000 So it's not the same anxiety level as a full-blown conflict.

02:13:33.000 But jiu-jitsu is a full-blown conflict.

02:13:37.000 If 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.

02:13:50.000 You're giving 100% effort.

02:13:53.000 And if you get in a compromising position, you get caught, you tap and you're okay and you keep going.

02:13:58.000 I mean, the ability to tap and the ability to submit someone and then keep going is amazing.

02:14:05.000 The 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.

02:14:05.000 Yeah, you're right.

02:14:15.000 Also, 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.

02:14:38.000 The 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.

02:14:45.000 Like 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.

02:14:52.000 I just jumped in a really cold lake once because I once had a girlfriend that was an aristocrat.

02:14:56.000 She had rolling estates. 0.97

02:14:57.000 It was amazing.

02:14:58.000 It was like we're falling into Wonderland, frankly.

02:15:01.000 And one time I jumped into this freezing cold lake and I heard the noise that come out of my body.

02:15:04.000 I kind of go, and I thought, oh, wow, I can make that noise and my body can handle freezing cold.

02:15:11.000 Like, you know, if you think about it, we're disembodying ourselves.

02:15:14.000 We're turning ourselves into atrophying little beings that don't know how to inhabit a body.

02:15:19.000 And 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.

02:15:31.000 That sort of thing gets meted out.

02:15:33.000 It gets like, as my teacher told me, that sort of stuff gets taken out of the culture pretty quickly.

02:15:37.000 When 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.

02:15:48.000 That's probably one of the best ways that they could stop bullying is to teach everybody how to fight.

02:15:51.000 And it sounds so counterintuitive.

02:15:53.000 That sounds so counterintuitive.

02:15:55.000 But 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.

02:16:09.000 Yoga.

02:16:10.000 Difficult 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.

02:16:23.000 You have to have almost like a third part of you.

02:16:26.000 You have a physical, you have a mental, and then you have the discipline.

02:16:31.000 And the discipline is almost a thing in and of itself.

02:16:34.000 It's a thing that you know the mental wants to quit.

02:16:38.000 So how do you tell your own mind not to quit?

02:16:45.000 But it's you.

02:16:46.000 I want to quit.

02:16:47.000 So I should just quit.

02:16:48.000 No, no, no.

02:16:49.000 You have to tell you not to quit.

02:16:52.000 So who's telling me?

02:16:53.000 Who is that that's deciding this for me?

02:16:56.000 I don't think you get that without physical struggle.

02:17:01.000 And again, it could be running.

02:17:04.000 It can be yoga.

02:17:04.000 It's like physical struggle teaches you to be solid inside your thoughts and to maintain the path.

02:17:14.000 Stay on the path, even though it's hard to do, which is so important in life.

02:17:19.000 So 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.

02:17:31.000 And the only way you trust this process is if you participated in it.

02:17:35.000 You're talking, I believe, about the spirit.

02:17:37.000 And the word spirituality and the word discipline have been continually paired.

02:17:42.000 Christ's followers are the disciples.

02:17:45.000 It's a discipline.

02:17:47.000 You have to marshal the spirit.

02:17:48.000 The spirit has to be controlled, otherwise, the spirit will not be your friend.

02:17:53.000 And I feel like the commodification, and perhaps you could even argue, feminization of spirituality.

02:17:58.000 Either you have Orthodox spiritualities that tend to be patriarchal.

02:18:01.000 I'm talking about the sort of the desert faiths, the Christianity, the Judaism, and the Islam.

02:18:05.000 Certainly, many people would argue that there's, if not misogynistic, then patriarchal aspects to that.

02:18:10.000 It's interesting that New Age spirituality is regarded as somewhat feminine and is certainly, by and large, commodified.

02:18:16.000 It becomes about, you know, purchasing a pair of leggings, purchasing a dream catcher or a crystal.

02:18:21.000 It doesn't have that aspect of discipline that is about the ability to prioritize your spiritual state over your physical state.

02:18:28.000 This is the deeper reality.

02:18:30.000 What's happening in here?

02:18:31.000 And when you start bringing up interdimensional travel and psychedelics, you start to recognize, yeah, no, this is an important space for me.

02:18:37.000 Interesting, too, the way that the arguments around sex and gender have altered.

02:18:41.000 Because 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.

02:18:54.000 If 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.

02:19:06.000 Rather than looking at the masculinity isn't solely ugly.

02:27:07.000 It just shouldn't be connected to misogyny it did.

02:27:11.000 Masculinity and misogyny, it shouldn't be that somehow or another you, in order to be masculine, you have to hate women.

02:27:18.000 That's just so ridiculous.

02:27:19.000 That's so dumb.

02:27:20.000 That's not real masculinity either.

02:27:23.000 That's a foolish version of it that is set up for children.

02:27:27.000 It's set up for dullards. 1.00

02:27:29.000 It doesn't make any sense.

02:27:30.000 Like true masculinity.

02:27:32.000 Like, first of all, what does that even mean?

02:27:34.000 Like, just being whoever the fuck you are.

02:27:37.000 And if you happen to be a man, there is going to be certain things that you have.

02:27:42.000 You're going to have a certain amount of aggression.

02:27:44.000 You have a certain amount of anxiety.

02:27:46.000 You have protection instincts.

02:27:47.000 And you've got to have control over as much of your body and mind as you can.

02:27:54.000 And what's the best way to do that?

02:27:56.000 Well, you have to experience adversity.

02:27:58.000 And you have to execute with discipline.

02:28:00.000 You have to be able to do that on a regular basis.

02:28:02.000 If you don't, you're not going to trust yourself.

02:28:04.000 You're not going to count on yourself.

02:28:05.000 You're always going to have anxiety.

02:28:07.000 You're always going to have to wonder whether or not you could pull through it.

02:28:10.000 Like, one of the things about cold or sauna or exertion, physical exercise, is knowing you can force yourself to do it.

02:28:20.000 Knowing you can force yourself to do it.

02:28:21.000 These little battles of forcing yourself to do something.

02:28:24.000 There's so many people out there that don't do that.

02:28:28.000 They don't know whether they can force themselves to do something.

02:28:31.000 They don't know how to not quit.

02:28:33.000 They don't know how to push themselves when they don't want to.

02:28:37.000 Yeah, that's why there has to be a spiritual component to life.

02:28:41.000 And that's why a culture that abdicates that responsibility and abstracts that reality becomes kind of nihilistic and celebrates meaninglessness.

02:28:50.000 It becomes only about furniture and an aesthetic.

02:28:53.000 There's nothing real.

02:28:54.000 It's got nothing behind it.

02:28:55.000 We can sort of feel that now, I think, that it's been hollowed out from within.

02:28:59.000 The institutions are hollow because there's no values there.

02:29:02.000 And 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.

02:29:13.000 Look, it's falling apart.

02:29:14.000 There are no real values behind it.

02:29:15.000 They'll say that a war is humanitarian when we know that most likely the imperatives are economic imperatives.

02:29:21.000 And one way to find out would be to extract the economic imperatives.

02:29:24.000 Then you would find out.

02:29:25.000 So 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.

02:29:37.000 What you believe in, the way you treat yourself, the way you talk to yourself, the practices you undertake.

02:29:41.000 I 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. 0.91

02:29:59.000 And I suppose that what must be happening, as well as like the identity, where you come at odds with the culture, it's observable.

02:30:05.000 Like, you know, like the I've mechtin' moment.

02:30:06.000 It's like, oh shit, what you said there, the mainstream don't like that, push back and crackle.

02:30:12.000 But 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.

02:30:20.000 Masculinity and femininity can co-habit successfully. 0.98

02:30:24.000 It should never be about misogyny.

02:30:25.000 All 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.

02:30:34.000 But people have to act on those signals.

02:30:36.000 And that's the difference.

02:30:37.000 There'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?

02:30:44.000 The 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.

02:31:00.000 It's so hard to actually do something.

02:31:02.000 It's one of the great problems that people have.

02:31:05.000 And it's one of the reasons why there's so many hucksters out there that are selling motivation.

02:31:09.000 There's so many people out there that are, they're motivational speakers.

02:31:13.000 And meanwhile, they've done nothing.

02:31:15.000 They've done nothing of great note, nothing of great accomplishment.

02:31:17.000 And all they're doing is they're finding this thing that people desire and they're feeding it to people.

02:31:24.000 Like either giving a motivation.

02:31:26.000 Those people, oftentimes you'll check in on them five years from now, 10 years from now, they're not doing anything any different.

02:31:32.000 Yeah, that's right.

02:31:33.000 Action.

02:31:34.000 You have to take action.

02:31:35.000 You have to take the action and it usually involves suffering and sacrifice.

02:31:39.000 Yes.

02:31:39.000 And that's a hard thing to say.

02:31:41.000 People don't want that now, do they?

02:31:43.000 They don't want that information.

02:31:44.000 Like 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.

02:31:58.000 Or, 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.

02:32:06.000 I'm going to do it again.

02:32:07.000 Like that is unavoidable.

02:32:09.000 And 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.

02:32:23.000 But 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.

02:32:32.000 Yeah, you got to do something.

02:32:33.000 You got to take action.

02:32:34.000 And so many people are just stagnant and they don't know how to act and they don't have experience doing it.

02:32:40.000 And so they just stay home.

02:32:42.000 And again, the disembodiment thing.

02:32:45.000 They 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.

02:32:52.000 And you're going to be depressed.

02:32:53.000 That's not good for you.

02:32:54.000 It's not a natural, normal way for people to behave.

02:32:57.000 And this thing that people do, they avoid discomfort.

02:33:02.000 It sounds ridiculous, but then it just creates more discomfort.

02:33:05.000 You 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.

02:33:22.000 You can do that.

02:33:23.000 It's one of the reasons why I've been able to mitigate all the stress and issues that come with success and with fame.

02:33:29.000 It's like I fucking torture myself.

02:33:31.000 I torture myself physically.

02:33:33.000 I'm always working out.

02:33:34.000 I'm always exhausted.

02:33:36.000 I'm always taking ice baths.

02:33:38.000 I was in the sauna before I got here today.

02:33:40.000 I'm always doing something.

02:33:42.000 Always.

02:33:42.000 I never have a day where there's not some kind of struggle.

02:33:45.000 If I have a day where I just lay around, I'm like, this is weird.

02:33:49.000 Like one day, like it's one of the things that I have to do on vacation.

02:33:52.000 When I get up in the morning, whenever I'm on vacation, the first thing I do is work out.

02:33:56.000 I'm like, I got to do this.

02:33:57.000 Otherwise, I'm not going to be able to enjoy this time off with my family.

02:34:01.000 I got to get up before everybody else and I got to work out hard.

02:34:04.000 What is the feeling that you have?

02:34:05.000 Is it anxiety?

02:34:07.000 Like, if you don't, yeah, yeah, yeah.

02:34:08.000 I get anxiety.

02:34:10.000 I just feel like stressed.

02:34:13.000 I feel like, and I always describe this, like your body is almost like a battery.

02:34:18.000 And when you don't use it, it's almost like the juice runs over the side and it becomes unmanageable.

02:34:24.000 But when you use it, you have a certain amount of a certain requirement that your body has to go through every day.

02:34:32.000 Because I think we evolved in a very specific way.

02:34:36.000 I think we evolved running away from predators, protecting ourselves from invading tribes.

02:34:41.000 And this is just a natural part of being a human being, every human being.

02:34:46.000 And I think that if you don't give your body something to do, it fucks with your brain.

02:34:52.000 And I think that's where a lot of people's anxiety comes from.

02:34:54.000 It's a lot of people's insecurities.

02:34:56.000 And a lot of the weirdness of life comes from this energy surplus that your body has.

02:35:03.000 It's like, ah!

02:35:04.000 So what do you do?

02:35:05.000 You eat terrible food and then you're exhausted because you're poisoned.

02:35:08.000 And then you're sitting in front of the television, you're sedated.

02:35:11.000 Like, fuck, man, there's no way to live your life.

02:35:14.000 Yeah, 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.

02:35:39.000 W.B. Yates, the Irish poet, said, each artist must create their own religion.

02:35:43.000 And 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.

02:35:57.000 This is who I am.

02:35:58.000 This is how I'm going to make my life.

02:35:59.000 Now, 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.

02:36:09.000 What you are as an individual is the most important thing because actually that isn't true.

02:36:13.000 It's your value, it seems to me, your value to other people.

02:36:17.000 Like 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.

02:36:26.000 Like someone's not wanting to, to call someone else to deal with their stuff, to listen to them.

02:36:31.000 And afterwards, I feel better about it because I haven't.

02:36:34.000 Otherwise, my religion is what I want.

02:36:35.000 My religion becomes my preferences.

02:36:37.000 I become devoted to it, dedicated to it.

02:36:39.000 Similar to you, I'm not good on vacations.

02:36:41.000 On 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.

02:36:52.000 That's hilarious.

02:36:54.000 How did you mean that?

02:36:55.000 Did you just like find you being paid enough here?

02:36:57.000 Listen, and then I got the message.

02:36:59.000 How did you even ask them how much they were being paid?

02:36:59.000 How did you find out?

02:37:01.000 Like just casual conversations with them.

02:37:03.000 I mean, it was a luxury holiday as well.

02:37:04.000 It's my honeymoon.

02:37:05.000 Like with like a butler guy, and then I've met with the man.

02:37:08.000 Where were people?

02:37:09.000 Where were you?

02:37:10.000 St. Lucia.

02:37:11.000 I think it was a place called Sugar Reef.

02:37:13.000 It probably used to be a slave plantation.

02:37:15.000 It was like, I was like, probably.

02:37:16.000 Where is St. Lucia?

02:37:17.000 What's that?

02:37:18.000 It's like the Caribbean island.

02:37:19.000 Oh, my God.

02:37:19.000 It's incredible.

02:37:20.000 It's such a beautiful, beautiful place.

02:37:22.000 It was a good holiday once I relaxed.

02:37:24.000 But I don't like, I'm like that battery thing you said.

02:37:26.000 It spills out of me.

02:37:27.000 If I don't find something to live my energy, I become a problem.

02:37:29.000 I had to go to a soup kitchen.

02:37:31.000 I had to do all sorts of stuff just to keep my self together.

02:37:34.000 I'm very fortunate that my wife works out too.

02:37:37.000 And so it's easy that we both do it together in the mornings.

02:37:40.000 And then we got the kids doing it too.

02:37:42.000 And we'll give the kids screen time.

02:37:44.000 Look, you have screen time, but you got to do the stepmaster for an hour.

02:37:47.000 And we'll let them earn stuff.

02:37:50.000 And they always feel better afterwards.

02:37:52.000 Like, even they don't want to do it.

02:37:53.000 They don't admit it.

02:37:54.000 But afterwards, like, everybody's more relaxed.

02:37:56.000 We're eating breakfast.

02:37:57.000 We're laughing.

02:37:58.000 It's like, it's good for you.

02:38:00.000 It's good for you.

02:38:01.000 And it's like people have associated physical exercise with shitty male behavior.

02:38:08.000 And that's one of the things you were talking about, like exercise being associated with people on the right.

02:38:13.000 It's such a dumb thing.

02:38:14.000 It's like it's great for everybody.

02:38:15.000 It's part of being a human being.

02:38:17.000 It doesn't being like working out, lifting weights or running or whatever.

02:38:21.000 It's not going to make you a bad person.

02:38:22.000 It's like, that's so dumb.

02:38:23.000 No, I think the equation that's being made is, oh, it's about supremacy.

02:38:27.000 It's about being a supreme being.

02:38:28.000 But 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.

02:38:39.000 And I suppose a way of making it universal, even though the idea of the universal is something that people query now.

02:38:44.000 Oh, there isn't just one ideal that we can all conform to.

02:38:46.000 But I feel, God, we've all got skeletons, we've all got kidneys, we've all got fingers.

02:38:49.000 We all need nutrients for God.

02:38:51.000 We all need water.

02:38:52.000 Yeah.

02:38:53.000 There's some universal requirements, and I think movement is one of them.

02:38:56.000 If you can move, if you are privileged enough, you're not injured, you're not disabled, and you can move.

02:39:02.000 God, I really think you should move.

02:39:04.000 And I don't even mean in something that strong.

02:39:06.000 I mean, walk around the block.

02:39:08.000 Just fucking do something.

02:39:10.000 And 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.

02:39:17.000 And he says the way that he talked to himself before he does that, you're getting in that fucking ice bath.

02:39:21.000 Couldn't you be more like, okay, we're getting in the ice bath now?

02:39:25.000 This exercise and discipline stuff, sometimes it does require aggression or assertiveness.

02:39:30.000 Does it though?

02:39:30.000 Because I don't do that.

02:39:32.000 I just go, get in there, bitch. 1.00

02:39:33.000 Just go.

02:39:34.000 But it's not even aggressive.

02:39:36.000 It's almost like a joke with me.

02:39:37.000 It's laughing.

02:39:38.000 Okay, 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.

02:39:54.000 Of course it is.

02:39:56.000 And probably, and I don't want to say the cause of anyone's individual depression because there's no way I can know.

02:40:01.000 But I think probably a lot of people are depressed because they're not moving.

02:40:05.000 Yeah.

02:40:06.000 I really think it's a requirement.

02:40:07.000 It's a physical requirement.

02:40:08.000 You find new ways of getting in your body otherwise.

02:40:11.000 You find like what is this epidemic of pornography obsession?

02:40:15.000 Of course, it is the availability of pornography now, but people are not in their body correctly.

02:40:19.000 It's procrastination, too.

02:40:20.000 It's like having this ability to distract yourself.

02:40:23.000 It's like there's so many things that you should be doing, and people get overwhelmed with these tasks and with a path that they're on.

02:40:31.000 They get overwhelmed with the idea of progress.

02:40:33.000 They get overwhelmed with the idea of accomplishing goals.

02:40:36.000 And so they distract themselves with YouTube videos or with pornography or with something.

02:40:40.000 They just put it in front of them.

02:40:43.000 And it's not good.

02:40:44.000 And I think that any ground you can make against that is good for you.

02:40:51.000 And I think one of the best ways to make ground against that is to do difficult things.

02:40:54.000 And whether it's ice baths and saunas or exercise, and I really think you should do all of them.

02:40:59.000 I really do.

02:41:00.000 I mean, if you can, if you, if you, I mean, a lot of people can't afford a cold plunge, but, you know, I mean, how much does ice cost?

02:41:07.000 I don't know how much ice costs, but all you really need is cold, especially if you live in a great place that's cold.

02:41:12.000 Like if you live in Boston, I used to do taekwondo with this guy.

02:41:15.000 His name was Bob Caffarella, and I was always scared of him because he was, he would take cold showers.

02:41:20.000 In the middle of January, this motherfucker would take cold showers. 0.97

02:41:23.000 We're all terrified of him.

02:41:24.000 He lived in the gym and he trained there.

02:41:27.000 And he was just like this super dedicated guy.

02:41:31.000 And after training, he would train really hard.

02:41:33.000 And after training, he would take like a five-minute freezing cold shower.

02:41:37.000 And he would get out of there.

02:41:38.000 And, you know, he wouldn't make a noise, wouldn't make a peep.

02:41:41.000 And he wasn't an aggressive guy, like a mean guy.

02:41:43.000 He was always smiling and very friendly, but ferocious in his efforts to conquer his inner bitch. 0.90

02:41:52.000 And he would get into that fucking cold shower.

02:41:54.000 And I was like, geez, that guy scares the shit out of me.

02:41:56.000 I don't want to get in a fucking cold shower.

02:41:58.000 Now I do it every day.

02:41:59.000 Like now I get in that freezing fucking cold water every it's a normal part of my morning.

02:42:04.000 I hate it every time I do it.

02:42:06.000 Right before I'm doing it, there's these little tiny voices in me like, oh, don't do it.

02:42:10.000 I'm like, shut, da, Shut the fuck up.

02:42:13.000 But it's not an aggressive shut the fuck up.

02:42:15.000 So it's just like, shut the fuck up.

02:42:17.000 Just get in there.

02:42:18.000 This is what you do.

02:42:19.000 And you climb in and you do it.

02:42:21.000 And the more I do it, the better I feel.

02:42:23.000 The more grounded I feel, the happier I feel.

02:42:26.000 And there's also a physical increase in dopamine levels.

02:42:28.000 It raises your dopamine by 200%.

02:42:31.000 And norepinephrine, it lasts for hours.

02:42:34.000 And it's like so good for you neurochemically.

02:42:37.000 And Andrew Huberman is the best at describing that.

02:42:39.000 And Susannah Soberg, the Soberg principle that she's developed for cold water immersion.

02:42:46.000 It's so fucking good for you to do hard things.

02:42:50.000 And I know people don't want to do it.

02:42:52.000 And because just working is a hard thing.

02:42:55.000 Just getting up and commuting is a hard thing.

02:42:57.000 You don't want to do it.

02:42:58.000 The alarm clock goes off.

02:42:59.000 You want to stay in bed.

02:43:00.000 I fucking get it.

02:43:01.000 But 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.

02:43:11.000 You'll be better off.

02:43:12.000 I like the people that have a scientific approach that can demonstrate the efficacy of these methods.

02:43:17.000 But the reason I love Wim Hoff is because I can feel in him that it is shamanic.

02:43:22.000 Wim Hoff is not a normal guy, is he?

02:43:24.000 And you know, he's when his wife took her own life is when it was the big moment of transition for him.

02:43:30.000 And 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.

02:43:48.000 Like he made like a mainstream TV show in our country, like where they got celebrities for getting ice and that kind of thing.

02:43:53.000 You know, like they did a reality show.

02:43:55.000 I 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.

02:44:03.000 You 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.

02:44:21.000 No 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.

02:44:31.000 Oh my God, I had that guy come on.

02:44:33.000 I don't know if you know, I can't remember.

02:44:34.000 Casey means Callie means this dude that used to work at Coke Coca-Cola.

02:44:38.000 He said like I saw that on your show.

02:44:41.000 Yeah, like you like if you eliminated processed foods, you wouldn't have diabetes, heart disease or cancer to nearly like possibly eliminating it.

02:44:50.000 So we're the like that systemically we're eating things.

02:44:53.000 Systemically we're not doing we're not using the body correctly.

02:44:56.000 I don't believe like as Carlin used to say, you don't need a conspiracy where interests converge.

02:45:02.000 And 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.

02:45:13.000 If enough people's interests coalesce around that, that will become the culture.

02:45:18.000 And 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.

02:45:29.000 It's like the whole thing has become plastic and has organized around some of our lower nature.

02:45:36.000 And when they talk about in yoga, an age of darkness, I feel that that's what it is, a grossness.

02:45:41.000 Kali Yuga, that we're in the grossness, the darkness is without light.

02:45:41.000 Kali Yuga.

02:45:45.000 Thank God that, you know, like think about how ideas that are emerging are often arcane ideas.

02:45:50.000 Like they were always a shamanic interest in plants was always going on.

02:45:54.000 Breath work was always considered to be important and necessary.

02:45:58.000 People 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.

02:46:12.000 One 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.

02:46:21.000 That the true well, this is what this guy's offering.

02:46:24.000 I interviewed him, this man called John Higgs on the show.

02:46:26.000 This book here, here, I'll give it to you now.

02:46:28.000 We've got along with the cigars.

02:46:29.000 Thank you very much.

02:46:29.000 It's called The Death and Resurrection Shows.

02:46:31.000 This 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.

02:46:40.000 There would have been a point where there were settled cultures, and yet there still would have been nomadic cultures.

02:46:45.000 The nomadic people would have traveled to the settlements and performed there, and their performances would have been derived from shamanic rites.

02:46:53.000 And shamanic rites include things like death and resurrection, transcendence of levels, awareness of different dimensions.

02:47:00.000 Through this book, he posits that the profession of show business maintains within it the idea of the mystical experience.

02:47:07.000 And he cites very popular examples of like what looks like shamanism in popular culture.

02:47:13.000 Many 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.

02:47:24.000 The 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.

02:47:48.000 One 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.

02:47:58.000 And 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.

02:48:13.000 In 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.

02:48:21.000 But then it argues that the role of the shaman becomes the role of the clergy, and it's a kind of castrated role.

02:48:27.000 Like 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.

02:48:40.000 In my country in particular, religion has become very neutralized, neutered.

02:48:44.000 It's about just flat, banal morality, mostly speaking.

02:48:48.000 There's not a lot of radical religion, which is about we're going to prioritise spiritual values over material values, otherwise we're fucked.

02:48:54.000 Why did that happen in England?

02:48:56.000 What's the history behind that?

02:48:57.000 The history of it was that the rise of Protestantism comes from Calvinism and Lutheranism.

02:49:02.000 Like there was a lot of corruption in the Catholic Church and these Protestant breakaway movements happened in the UK.

02:49:07.000 It 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.

02:49:18.000 And Protestantism, they say, in Northern Europe, where it's colder, that Protestantism took off.

02:49:23.000 It's a bit more disciplined.

02:49:24.000 It's work, it places moral and ethical values on work.

02:49:28.000 And the southern European countries were more family-oriented, more socially-oriented.

02:49:33.000 Italy'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.

02:49:49.000 So, 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.

02:49:58.000 And it talks about how figures emerge through show business continually that represent values that are not really about entertainment.

02:50:05.000 What is it you're going into the cinema for?

02:50:07.000 Why 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?

02:50:16.000 Because the culture isn't going to give it to them because the culture, as McKenna says, is not their friend.

02:50:21.000 The culture wants them little blobs with a visor on, consuming endlessly. 0.97

02:50:26.000 And if you can't participate in the economic system, we don't care what happens to you.

02:50:29.000 You're going to prison or you're going to sleep in the street or you're going to die of an opioid overdose.

02:50:34.000 That's the arse end of the type of capitalism we live within now.

02:50:37.000 And 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.

02:50:53.000 And all of our lives are going to require faith.

02:50:54.000 Even 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.

02:51:01.000 Yeah, there's faith in that.

02:51:03.000 Yeah, there's faith in the understanding of the process.

02:51:05.000 And 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.

02:51:15.000 If you accept those as the driving ideas, then in the end, the only things that matter are the things that you can measure.

02:51:20.000 And there's no doubt that science, technology, medicine are marvelous, magnificent tools, metrics, ways, lenses for observing the miracles of nature and the cosmos.

02:51:29.000 But 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.

02:51:37.000 You can't make the same claim.

02:51:38.000 They're only looking at what they're looking at.

02:51:40.000 Who's paying for it?

02:51:41.000 Who's paying for those studies?

02:51:42.000 How are those clinical trials conducted?

02:51:44.000 How much of the information is released?

02:51:46.000 And I think that that's really what the pandemic was: a lens that showed us a lot.

02:51:50.000 It showed us stuff that's always happening, but it concentrated it and showed us it in an observable timeline.

02:51:56.000 Normally, it's too diffuse and across too many issues.

02:51:58.000 Hey, 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?

02:52:11.000 And I suppose that the reason that I'm fascinated with spirituality in particular is because that is your private little haven.

02:52:17.000 That is your sacred cathedral within yourself where you do have sovereignty there still.

02:52:22.000 And 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.

02:52:29.000 And then in my life, I'm like still, you know, an affluent but normal guy.

02:52:33.000 I'm getting, you know, doing a talk at my kids' school, getting kicked out of Legoland for non-compliance at a theme park.

02:52:40.000 I'm not dealing with the bloody WEF on a daily basis.

02:52:44.000 I'm not challenging Klaus Schwab face to face.

02:52:47.000 You know, I mean, I'm living a normal person life.

02:52:49.000 And I'm aware.

02:52:49.000 And I sometimes think, fuck, am I wrong?

02:52:51.000 Am I wrong?

02:52:51.000 But 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.

02:53:01.000 And you think, oh shit, this is actually true.

02:53:03.000 This is true.

02:53:05.000 And most people's lives, they're living it.

02:53:07.000 They're living like with that kind of adversity.

02:53:10.000 And I've been poor.

02:53:10.000 I grew up without money.

02:53:11.000 So I like, you know, I have the memory of it also.

02:53:14.000 But like, it's not just abstract.

02:53:16.000 This is not just some theory about how life should be organized.

02:53:20.000 This 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.

02:53:33.000 I 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.

02:53:43.000 It'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.

02:53:50.000 And we can see now what the trends are.

02:53:53.000 We can see now how it's affecting people.

02:53:55.000 And I feel like, well, where is it that people are going to get the courage to change from?

02:54:00.000 Even if that's that courage about how are you going to make your life within this system better?

02:54:05.000 Or even how are you going to participate in challenging and even overthrowing these systems by the great resources that are within you?

02:54:14.000 And that's, I suppose, one of the things, because I have good faith in people.

02:54:17.000 Like, mine is not a bad faith analysis.

02:54:19.000 Oh, people are bad, they're selfish, fuck them.

02:54:21.000 Mine 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.

02:54:27.000 Because I believe in those things we've discussed, forgiveness, I feel like, no, actually, the resources are there.

02:54:33.000 It's possible.

02:54:34.000 That's where for me the evangelicism lives.

02:54:37.000 And that's why I'm interested in themes and ideas that are not curtailed within any individual culture.

02:54:44.000 And shamanism is a good one because it predates monotheism.

02:54:48.000 It predates nationalism.

02:54:51.000 It was there already.

02:54:52.000 Human beings have a tendency to seek out mystical experiences, to have a relationship with the divine.

02:54:59.000 Yeah, you're clearly right.

02:55:01.000 And humans can be wonderful.

02:55:05.000 We know that.

02:55:06.000 That is one of the possibilities.

02:55:08.000 We just have to figure out a way to make it so that they're encouraged to be wonderful most of the time.

02:55:13.000 And we're all capable of being shitheads and we're all capable of being the best version of ourselves that we can be.

02:55:20.000 But this has to be sort of established as a narrative that you should probably be the best version of a person as you can be.

02:55:28.000 And one of the things you're going to have to do if you want to do that, you're going to have to be compassionate.

02:55:33.000 You're going to have to be kind.

02:55:35.000 You're going to have to be charitable.

02:55:37.000 You're going to have to recognize that people make mistakes.

02:55:40.000 And you're going, like if this post-pandemic show, you're going to have to forgive people.

02:55:45.000 You're going to have to forgive them.

02:55:46.000 You're going to have to let things go.

02:55:47.000 And you forgive people not just for them, you also do it for yourself.

02:55:50.000 Yeah, that's principles you've described.

02:55:52.000 And I suppose principle is a belief that transcends circumstance.

02:55:55.000 It's not just, I have this principle until it's inconvenient, then I fuck it off and have another principle.

02:55:59.000 Yeah, and it's because it's so easy to be the coffee.

02:56:04.000 Thank you.

02:56:05.000 It's so easy to be the person who, you know, is like, fuck them.

02:56:09.000 They can eat shit.

02:56:10.000 I fucking told them and I was right.

02:56:12.000 And like, okay.

02:56:13.000 Do you feel better when you do that?

02:56:15.000 I never feel better when I do that.

02:56:15.000 Because I don't.

02:56:17.000 I feel better when I forgive people.

02:56:19.000 If I'm right, great.

02:56:20.000 I'm great.

02:56:21.000 I was on the right path.

02:56:21.000 Great.

02:56:23.000 So what?

02:56:23.000 So they were wrong?

02:56:24.000 So I don't care.

02:56:25.000 I'm not mad that they were wrong.

02:56:27.000 I've been wrong before.

02:56:28.000 There's no value in extracting a big cultural apology.

02:56:32.000 It's just sort of bleeding out gradually and slowly.

02:56:34.000 In fact, here is some research.

02:56:37.000 Yeah, they're notes.

02:56:38.000 I've bought papers to wrap this up soon.

02:56:40.000 Okay, we'll write some notes.

02:56:42.000 I'll wrap it up on this if you want to, or even prior because you're.

02:56:46.000 I mean, I'll see what that says in Neil.

02:56:48.000 Of course, I've got to write notes.

02:56:49.000 This is an important appearance.

02:56:51.000 All 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.

02:57:00.000 In April, Anthony Fauci refutes Donald Trump's claim of the possibility of a lab leak.

02:57:05.000 January 2023, redacted NIH emails from January 2021 involving Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins show efforts to rule out the lab origin of COVID.

02:57:15.000 February 2023, the Wall Street Journal reports the virus that drove the COVID-19 pandemic most likely emerged from a laboratory leak.

02:57:22.000 That is just one example of from conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact.

02:57:27.000 There are several other here.

02:57:29.000 That is very detailed in the book, The Real Anthony Fauci.

02:57:34.000 I mean, I don't know, obviously, there's references in that book, and I don't know how much of it is accurate.

02:57:40.000 But he's not being sued.

02:57:42.000 Not that I'm aware of.

02:57:44.000 I mean, and you would think that with the claims that he makes, you would be sued.

02:57:47.000 And 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.

02:58:01.000 We're going to have to do work about this.

02:58:03.000 And they conspired.

02:58:05.000 They 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.

02:58:18.000 He's like, you do not know what you are talking about.

02:58:23.000 He's slowing the conversation down to an almost unfollowable level.

02:58:31.000 The way he talks and the way he utilizes words, Senator, Senator, you do not know what you are talking about.

02:58:47.000 Who the fuck talks like that?

02:58:49.000 It's like a switch-up pitch in baseball.

02:58:52.000 It's like he's throwing you a pitch, like, why is it coming at me 50 miles an hour?

02:58:55.000 This doesn't make any sense.

02:58:57.000 Like, you almost don't know what to do.

02:58:59.000 You just want to interrupt him and just badger and beat him down.

02:59:02.000 And when you do that, that gives into his, that's what he wants.

02:59:06.000 He wants chaos.

02:59:07.000 He wants you to be yelling at him so he can get out of there.

02:59:09.000 Yeah, that's the loyally monotony of bureaucracy.

02:59:14.000 With all due respect, you do not know what you are talking about.

02:59:23.000 Yeah, 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.

02:59:33.000 But he sounds like a normal person.

02:59:35.000 Yes, just like, I mean, obviously, Fauci's not a political figure.

02:59:40.000 It's more complicated.

02:59:41.000 He's a civil servant, of course.

02:59:42.000 It'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.

02:59:50.000 And also, he was, when he was at the head, he was the guy that was responsible for giving out grants.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 07, 2023

Joe Rogan Podcast #1949 Russell Brand

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