Boom, and we're live. Russell, why is it that when people start getting, like, super spiritual, they start dressing like you? You dress like a guru. We circulate a memo. So it's now time to stop wearing socks, stop shaving, and make eye contact for a bit too long. Oh, uncomfortable eye contact. Give a bit of a stare. How long are you going to go with the beard? I mean, that's like, you're full on, like,
You're a yogi now. I mean, it's gone beyond Jesus and into Moses, and lesser prophets. Or a navy seal. You're in that range too, like you could be some wild man. That's a mistake that wouldn't... If there was an assault course in front of us, the potential for moving a navy seal would start to break down. I once went on an assault course with some US Marines in that place near San Diego. I can't remember the name of that base.
and climbing up that rope using your leg muscles. It was not good value. Didn't enjoy it. I like the camaraderie, and I really like, as I've written about and talked about quite a lot, when I'm around very, in very male environments, I kind of really like it. I really get off in it, but I have to watch myself not getting too excitable. It's even in this environment, as a matter of fact, I have to keep myself a little bit chilled out. What even was it due to you?
Well, I guess what it is is my early life I grew up mostly around my mum and I don't have brothers and sisters and stuff like that so my male role modeling occurred later in life and I think it probably relates to this spiritual thing I think it meant that I was I'm very open to sort of
spiritual experience, meditative experience. So I didn't have a lot of grounding physical experiences or bodily experiences really till adolescence and sexuality. That's the first time I really sort of got into the body. Didn't do sports a kid. Didn't have like men going, right, this is what we do. This is how we shave. This is how you treat people. This, you know, I don't really get that kind of education. So now still, if I'm around like soldiers, UFC, fighters, I go, you know, I do BJJ, but Maryland is a result of these
there's not con confrontation conversations, that's a much nicer term. There's a bit of me that's the guy getting excited about the analysis of it. It's not homoerotic because that doesn't happen to be the way that I roll out. You just enjoy a little too much. There's something about it. Fire it up. What's bad about it? What's bad about getting fired up?
nothing for me except like you know look my as you know my model for life is a sort of a 12 step model about watching my impulses my impulses have got me in a lot of trouble my impulses to take drugs my impulses to sleep around my like my impulses to even eat food I've got a sort of a tendency to get obsessive but you know you would probably argue that if you direct that that energy correctly it can be kind of positive
I think it can, but I agree with you that it can get out of control. And I have similar impulses, I have similar problems. And I've just used discipline and hard work, especially working out to try to mitigate it. Well, that's why I pick up from you is that your early encounters with martial arts have meant that you've understood from a young age, it seems to me, physical
discipline. And I think that's a very important thing. And I'm only learning that like now, because I've had of like, you know, drugs, then fame, then on chaos. And I've only just emerged from like the sort of the fog of that madness.
I love how you've emerged, though, because it's very unique. You've uniquely emerged authentically. This is who you really are. You're not putting on an act. You've found yourself, which is what everybody wants to do. They want to find themselves. It never feels like a completed task. Everyone's a work in progress forever.
That's right, but you are you like you are very comfortable you and you've found what makes you you That's a lovely compliment to get from you Joe I appreciate that because what I think about is like you're a very different type of person to me There's things that in this world in these polemical times you and I would be supposed to I would say take adversarial stances on I'm vegan now
You love hunting, but my personal philosophy is my morality and my spirituality is for me. It's not something I go around inflicting on other people and telling them how they should behave. I know enough now to know people are different. People have different experiences and I don't let those things get in the way of how I evaluate other people.
We should all be more like that. I really believe that. I mean, there's so many people that I disagree with that I have fine conversations with. I don't think there's anything wrong with that, and I don't think that impulse to have antagonistic engagements with people that you disagree with is correct. How else are we going to consolidate?
If like it's just like, I'm only gonna deal with people that see the world roughly how I do. How are we gonna form new tribes, new alliances, new relationships, new systems at a time when evidently it feels to me at least, Joe, like things are breaking down. There's a lot of bitterness, a sub-e and confrontation and people don't wanna talk to each other. I mean, I don't know how real that is of actual people. I'm talking, I suppose, about how the media landscape seems to present information. I don't know if that's true when you're, when I'm around people, I don't sense,
Oh, wow, these guys are really tied up in Brexit or Trump or whatever. They don't seem that relevant toward an every people. It seems to me that people are still operating on a personal. How are you today? People are willing to get on like that. I mean, how are we supposed to take these ideas on board? It's almost too vast for us. These geo-political ideas that we're asked to identify with.
Right, and then your everyday life hardly ever affects you or affects you very little in comparison to things that you ignore because you're concentrating on Brexit or you're concentrating on Trump or you're concentrating on whatever it is. Yeah, that's all. Build that wall, whatever it is. Yeah, I start to wonder...
Who is it that's involved in this stuff? Where I'm at now, are we even capable of belonging to groups, units, tribes of 300 million people or 60 million people with so many diverse ideas?
Is this a time to look at federalism differently, to start breaking down? Well, you know, the eye exists within this tribe of people, but I collaborate with all these other people. I don't know how municipal action gets done. I know you run an army and build roads if people are starting to operate in smaller units, but I am thinking that we need to have a real sense of community and connection and we've got to let go of looking for ways to object to and judge other people as some sort of primary way of forming our own identity.
No, I completely agree. And I think we're probably moving towards some sort of understanding that a lot of these boundaries and these clans of, you know, states and countries, they were all established without our consent before we were born. And we're just, we're a part of a system that we just were, we didn't agree to it. We just all of a sudden found ourselves in it and we're trying to make it fit us.
Yeah, that's right. And there's aspects of it that are appealing, you know, like sort of during a World Cup, I really feel English and like I feel a genuine sense of connection and investment. But if I'm being asked to live according to rules that don't affect me, that affect me financially and don't speak to who I am as an individual, then I'm like, well, what is this? This isn't for my benefit.
Yeah, yeah, and the inclination to form teams.
and to root for your team and a root against other teams it's uh... it's so deep-seated in this it's uh... and it can cause so many unnecessary conflicts for no reason just it's it's it's so it's so escapable too it's it's it's so it's so if you can objectively analyze the way human beings behave and interact with each other well why do we do this let's just stop doing that mmm just to if we disagree on things how much
Are these disagreements actually affecting me on a daily basis? Not that much. Can't we just communicate? Can't someone say what they think and I say what I think and we just decide like what makes sense and what doesn't make sense based on our own interpretations? Isn't that possible?
It seems like it's that's the direction we go ahead in. I did as I know you have done a podcast with Candice Owens, who like on the subject of, you know, individuals like when she says stuff like people should get over slavery or is as if it didn't happen. I don't agree with that. I feel like that has a massive social impact that is that those statistics and not a coincidence, the number of
people are certain ethnicities in prisons and in poverty or whatever. For me, that's not just their coincidence. So I couldn't agree with her more profoundly on, according to social criteria, some very, very important issues. But on a personal level, I thought she was absolutely delightful, and funny, and sweet. She's very young, if you really stop and think about it. She's only 28, which is amazing. Is that correct? She's so much smarter than I was when I was 28.
She's certainly a lot more confident than I was when I was 28 or 29. So when I was 29, I was a fucking moron. And no one would ever listen to my opinions on anything in a world stage. People are listening to her. She's testifying in front of Congress. So I cut her a lot of slack with some of the things that she's made missteps on. And I think sometimes when people say those things, people should get over slavery.
It's almost like you're saying things that you think other people want to hear, more than you're saying things that are really rational. So whether or not we should get over slavery, sure slavery was over more than 100 years ago, but the repercussions of slavery, the echoes of slavery still exist. And they exist in all these different southern states and cities and all these different neighborhoods that had been a part of systemic racism where they literally
forced black people to live in certain areas and didn't even allow them to buy homes outside of those areas. They made laws and those laws are in place and places like Baltimore and you know I had this guy Michael Wood on who was a police officer in the city of Baltimore and one of the more profound things that he said was that they found papers that were documenting crimes from the 1970s in Baltimore.
And they were in the same area, the same crimes that he was facing in the 2000s when he was a police officer. So he was looking at this going, what in the fuck? Am I just a part of something that's never going to be fixed and never going to be changed? And as he learned more about the city and the city's laws and how these
systems were set up to keep people in certain places and how the crime and the violence and the drugs is all just in this one concentrated area. And it's always been there. And no one does anything to change it. You realize like, wow, this is a this is a crazy echo of a horrible past. And that's what it is.
I had a couple of conversations that made me recognize how powerful systems and institutions are and their ability to maintain themselves regardless of any individuals. It seems like what happened there with the man you were chatting to is that he's an individual woke up and went, Oh my God, hold
in some sort of weird grid. And I spoke to this fellow called Ken Ross who worked for the British Diplomatic Service at the time of 9-11 and was privy to confidential information about how that was handled on a military and geopolitical level.
and he said like he's come away from that thinking well these institutions function and in a totally corrupt way to pursue their own objectives this ingenuity and dishonesty is just part of the system and it was him that made me think about anarchism in a different way saying that people
The assumption that people if they were not tightly governed with big government and huge control would go around murdering each other and raping each other simply not true. That's one of the means by which the state continues to justify its existence. People will behave better the closer they are to
self-governing community, self-governing community. And I was interested in that because he's talking from, this is what I saw on the inside. This is how I saw it was running, like your cop friend there. And like another person I spoke to that had been inside a system and then woken up within it, he was like, I have
Janice Varafakis, when Greece had that mad revolution, he was one of the leaders of a party, Saritsa. And for a minute, it was like Saritsa said, we ain't paying back all those debts, you screwed us financially, you screwed Greece. So he was there at the EU meetings telling the German chancellery, we're not going to repay those debts. And he just said that the way that the system reasserted itself
was magnificent to watch in a way. And he said, none of those individuals have any power except the power that that role gives them. If you are the German finance minister, you've got the power that a German finance minister has. You can't step outside it and start going, right, listen, why don't we do this and why don't we do that? The system itself
is beyond individual decisions. It's a self-sustaining system. It won't come up with ideas or support ideas that threaten it. And that's why I continually keep hearing, and I'm sure you're having similar conversations, that if you are really interested in changing the world, you have to participate in systems that are outside of it. Set up new ideas. Don't worry about trying to smash this one down with a hammer. It will atrophy on its own as it becomes less and less relevant.
I think also change yourself, and when you change yourself, it becomes evident to the people around you. And if your change is beneficial and attractive, people, they gravitate towards that idea that you can improve yourself and you can change your perspective on things. Well, that is the one area of your life where you've got some authority and control. And that's, yeah, that is what I'm about. It's like, well, I can stop myself
being like a watching pornography. I can stop myself using drugs if I want to, like, you know, with some support. And that's what that this book here mentors, which I talk about you in only for paragraph, you know what I mean? It's not too. It's not like a like literary fallatio. It's a small nod of your, like, of your influencing impact.
I talk about how we have latent qualities within us that are sometimes hard to realize without support, but if you find a mentor in an area where you're looking to improve, they can
kind of energize awakened energies within you that on your own you wouldn't be able to use I had a really recent experience of it where I was sort of like freaking out about something I spoke to her like a mentor of mine and like the way that he sort of spoke to me was like sort of aggressive like a sort of an aggressive that's not gonna happen you are not afraid and like it sort of woke up the part of me that feels that way that has that kind of I would say sort of
uh, male certainty, a kind of grounded energy. He was able to sort of like direct it at me. And like in that moment in myself or bewildered, I wasn't able to do it. You know, I needed to resource it externally in a moment. So this is how I sort of feel like your individual journey. I'm interested in how, because I'm guessing with your background in martial arts and stuff, mentorship seems pretty much stitched into that. You must continually be looking at someone, learning from someone, trying to equal them or whatever it is.
Yeah, the good part about that is you get good at learning things. You get good at listening. As a martial arts student, you don't just listen. You listen very intently. You bow. You say, sir. I mean, there's so much discipline involved in the act of learning.
Yeah. And so much reverence and respect for people who know more than you and appreciation. So that helped me with pretty much everything I ever wanted to learn. I just would listen very intently. I don't think maybe I could figure it out better. I'm very good at listening to people that are good at things.
That's interesting. Did you first get into, like, you know, I've picked up stuff over the various shows of yours that I've listened to, but would you say that your inaugural interest in martial arts came from kind of domestic distress and stuff? Yeah. With a difficult home life and not a good relationship with your stepdad, am I right in saying? There was that, but it was also moving more than anything. I mean, I'm a stepdad's a nice guy, but it's always a weird situation, you know?
No one likes the dynamic of someone having sex with their mother. I remember having similar feelings about my own step. I don't want to like know, of course, pin him in a bad way. It's just what was really hard was moving a lot and running into bullies. That was way harder than anything else.
So there was a time in your life where you felt very presumably vulnerable and not grounded. Didn't have any friends constantly moving in new neighborhoods, meeting new people. And, you know, when you're a young boy, you're a teenage boy, teenage boys are fucking dangerous. Yeah, they're the worst. They're the worst. If you see a group of them now, I'm talking about my country, 13, 14 years old, across the street, they're lawless.
Well, young boys are just, they're always looking to impress each other and they have these, if you want to find real toxic masculinity, it exists in teenage boys. It's mostly exaggerated in men.
The way it's described is mostly exaggerated in terms of the way the media talks about it, but it's purest form and teenage boys. They get together and they start lighting frogs on fire and doing shit. They do things because they want to like one up each other and they feed off of each other. Like what one boy would do is so different than what five boys would do. What five boys would do could be horrific. But what one boy would do on his own is very rarely there. Because you know you have to think about yourself and think about is this right and
You objectively analyze the way you're behaving. People wouldn't be proud of me if I did it this way. But when you're with five other boys and you're all rambunctious and filled with testosterone and piss and vinegar, you wind up doing crazy things. We're not here something like that. It's difficult not to think that it's of course relative. Relative to us, the behavior of adolescent mouths is reckless and crazy.
It's not impossible to conceive of an intelligence that would look at the behavior of adult human beings and think, oh my God, what's governing these people? What principles are they using? What's the end goal too? What are you trying to accomplish with your life, with your existence, with your time? I think if there's a real concern about AI,
I think the real concern is AI is going to rationally analyze our behavior and our reliance on emotions and all these human reward systems that we have built in the way it's affecting our society and the way it's affecting how we govern ourselves and how we behave amongst ourselves and it's going to think.
We're unfixable. It's going to look at them like, well, they have too much monkey in them. They have so much monkey instincts and monkey DNA, but now they live in this rational, modern world of 5G internet on your phone and satellite communication and 24-7 news cycle. But yet they have these primate genes. Artificial intelligence are subjects about which I know very little.
It seems to me that it will on some level have to be derived from a particular aspect of human understanding of rationalism. So we're representing one aspect of our nature and prioritizing it, logic, organization. But what you refer to as sort of
primitive and monkey-ish. For me, it envelops and involves the most beautiful aspects of our nature. I'm a little romantic about human beings still. I still feel that one of the great problems we've had is that philosophically we have overvalued materialism, rationalism, and knowing a little bit about philosophy primarily from that bloody podcast that you and I tagged a minute ago before we was recording.
So like what, why I understand for that is that post enlightenment, we've started to prioritize rationalism. So if you prioritize rationalism and organization, which obviously has a lot to offer, the organization of resources is incredibly and hugely important. You forget that a huge part of the human experience is nothing to do with that. The other thing we were chatting about before we went live was DMT.
Now, no artificial intelligence is going to understand that there is access to a realm of consciousness that continually exists, that doesn't seem to be bound by physical laws as we understand them. And if the physical laws that we abide by are parochial and relevant only to this level of existence,
why are we allowing ideas resourced from there to govern all of our systems? You know, even listen to you talk about the MT, you know, I encountered these gestures, the gestures, I went through this membrane into another realm and checking out Mike Tyson when he was on here. No, no, no, yeah!
I love that and I'm amazing. But clearly, I took acid when I was a teenager and even in very unhealthy, not unhealthy, but unbridled mad teenage boy conditions. I want to be there with a guy in a lab coat with a pen going, well, Mr. Bran, sit down, look at these Rorschach tests, instead of which I'm in new cross in a bed set.
dropping acid and staring at my own hands and recognizing, oh my god, I'm not me. The very idea of me is a construct. I'm just tuned into a particular aspect. AI will build systems that are predicated on rationalism, organization. And on that basis, I can see why they would at some point, yeah, go all skynet and annihilate us. But that is
I believe the problem with our society is that the materialistic aspect of our nature is not the priority, it's just one thing we should be doing, cause we need good roads, cause we need hospitals, schools, food, etc. But we need to find a way of honouring the sacred.
I'm fascinated in the experiences you're having in these psychedelic explorations and how it's influencing the rest of your life. How does it influence the rest of your decisions, the way you see the world, the way you see relationships, the way you see the vulnerable young man you were prior to building your own, I say, personal religion of martial arts, excellence in your chosen field of stand-up comedy.
incorporate that vulnerable kid because I'm still very aware of the vulnerable person I was and like I'm going on a rant man. Like when Kevin Hart was on here who I think is amazing and he was amazing on this I thought fucking hell like what have I got to offer the world when Kevin Hart has got this kind of
Force! You don't come in the bubble and I was like, my God, this guy is so positive, what a role model, what I like, he's got to offer. And then I thought, well, like any of us, what I've got to offer is who I am, just who I am, as a vulnerable floor to human being that still feels connected to the kid I was when I didn't feel good enough. I still feel that. I can walk in a room and feel that.
But I also know that that's not real because I've had spiritual experiences, hallucinogenic experiences that make me feel that the relationships we should be building have the honor that we are both vulnerable and flawed but also capable of greatness. There has to be room for all of this and I feel that part of what we're doing and part of why we're experiencing such superficial polarity in politics and culture is because we're not acknowledging that underneath this surface activity of left, right, left, right, and you know from Sam Harris,
then little experiments, you stick garbage in front of a person, they become Republican pretty quickly, or you scare people, they become less democratic. I think all that stuff is pretty superficial, and at depth, in that realm of the gestures and the membrane of psychedelia, we have access to oneness, and that should be what's influencing the way we set up our tribes, our systems, and our relationships.
Yeah, I think when a guy like Kevin Hart shows you what a positive and motivational impact one person can have just with his words and his deeds and the way he lives his life. He's so inspirational.
that you realize that that is possible that you can share that energy and that you can have these experiences with people where they literally do actually they actually uplift you like I was uplifted by his conversation I felt like wow that guy is so positive what a great way to look at the life that we're living and the more people do that the better and when someone like that does
spread a positive message. You know, and obviously he's got, he's materialistic as well. He's got a bunch of cars and a big house and he makes a lot of money and he does a lot of movies. But what he's spreading is this very motivational, very positive message and that affects people in a very positive way too. And all that left, right shit and all this, all the battles that we have politically and ideologically back and forth and all the negative venom that people spray at each other.
At the end of the day, it's not benefiting anyone. Unless you're fighting some major demon that the world needs to conquer, most of it's not that. Most of it is like finding demons out of innocuous things. I think when you talk about what you have to offer, what you have to offer is
that you are you, that you have this unique perspective. You can affect the way people view their own journey in life because you've been so introspective and so aware of your own pros and cons in terms of your past behavior, your current behavior and who you are now and who you used to be.
All that stuff is fuel for people because they can relate. They hear it. I mean, maybe they cannot relate to being a movie star and being this famous guy. But they can relate to the humanity of your struggle. They put themselves in your position like, what must that have been like? And look at this guy who's made these conscious decisions to not be like that anymore. And he dresses like a homeless person with a crazy beard.
That's the real take-home information. Dress like you live out of doors. Yeah, just like you're a homeless guy in Oregon. Specifically there, people will respect that. Yeah, it's like a dark colors, you know, it rains a lot. Yeah, I get it. I get the reference. I don't understand American culture, Joe Rogan. Yeah. So, hey, can I do some, like, most of my activity? Tell me about your book. Tell me what it's called. What is it? This book is called Mentors, and actually I wrote, like,
I read it bits of it again because I knew I was coming here. I think it's actually pretty good. I wrote quite a lot about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. I really love it, huh? Yeah, I do. My writing is not from a technical perspective. I'm not saying this is what I've got to say on open guard.
to transition. I'm talking about how the psychological impact that it's had on me and also in there about like the protocols of going to a group which as a beginner are very relevant like you touched on how ritualized it is. I've got to hunch that the more we emulate and connect to original ways of human behavior whether that's dietary or hierarchies or organization of groups I feel that we will
feel a sense of greater connection. Now the thing I got from Gunning BJJ classes, Genesis, where I go, back in England, is that all the white belts get changed at one end of the room, the purple belts and above get changed at the other end of the room, which coincidentally or not is where the control for the timer is and the control for the music is, and where the kit is, that's all up that end of the room, so all the control is that end.
that it begins with sort of dancing around in a circle doing all of those various exercises, now lift your knees, now do the shrimp, and that kind of stuff. It's that lower belt shouldn't invite a higher belt to spar or roll. And as you say, the amount of respect.
the bowing, the hand shaking at the end of it. It's so sort of, it provides such a safe environment in which to deal with the primal. I can see why it's valuable and it's like, you know, I should have been taught that shit when I was 14, like a mandatorily so that I didn't come across it. Like, you know, you're not going to be setting fire to fields and allotments and putting frogs on fireworks if you've got a way of dealing with that primal energy when it's coming.
Some people that don't understand that think that you should suppress it somehow. You should just ignore it or suppress it. They don't understand that it's a man that really a biological male it really needs to be tackled head-on. I mean you really you really need to embrace what it is to be a physical male and it frees you in a lot of ways.
Do you think this might be a comparable moment to in the 1960s when there was a sort of a sense of sexual repression versus sexual free love? You know, the images of woodstock and flowers in the hair and smoking joints and having sort of sex outdoors in mud or possibly wheat.
that this time of like a kind of an anger about maleness. And maleness may not, as you said, it may be a biological male, but it could be the energy of, I don't know, assertion or whatever. These like, you know, as in grammar, male and female relate to certain words, as in French grammar, where I don't know, cat is female and dog is male, I don't know, the system, I don't speak French, but I'm saying that these, we have labeled these energies. And it does seem that there is a particular
What I want to say a condemnation of male energy. Do you think you think it comes from a misunderstanding? Yeah, and I also think it comes from a big generalization too. It's easy to do, right? And if you're a woman who's had negative experiences with men, maybe you've dated men that have been physically abusive or maybe you've known men that have been physically abusive and you're around that.
And you just, it's very convenient and very easy to just generalize and decide that all men are negative. And then masculine energy is negative and especially white males. And if you say that, you'll get props online. People go, yes, girl, yes, clap, clap, clap. People get excited. But those are also people that are short-sighted. Like you want to make as many people your ally as you can. You want to make as many people your friend as you can. And you have to understand that there's some people that are just wired different than you. There's some girly girls and there's some really feminine men.
and then there's a masculine man, but everybody is okay as long as they respect you and they're kind to each other. But the problem is we associate certain behaviors and characteristics with either negativity or hedonism or toxic masculinity or someone being a bitch as a man. These generalizations are often way more harmful and it's just too convenient and easy and lazy.
Yeah, there is no simple way. And when I think about my own attitudes in this area, there is a degree of complexity because I've got young daughters. I've got a two year old and a one year old, right? And they're, you know, daughters. So like, but when the other day, because I'm staying in Los Angeles, Gabby, she's Mexican. She used to be when I first moved out here and lived my entourage lifestyle, she used to look after the house and she used to think I'd
Oh, my baby, my baby. She loved me. And I'll take a matriarchal figure wherever I can find one. And Gabby used to look after me. She adored me and stuff. I stayed friends with her yesterday. She'd come around. She bought what I can only describe as a bikini for my baby daughter. Now what a two-year-old doesn't need a bikini top.
And I excuse me, burping on the mic. For me, I thought, I don't want to put my daughter in that. That's sort of, in a way, sexualizing that child. And also, with my daughter, I don't like, with my wife, particularly with our first child. I'm like, don't dress her up in little dresses and stuff, because she won't be able to run around. And I thought, my god, that's not that
different from like the cliche of a male parent that wanted a son. And I didn't want a son who would be like, I love this kid. I love this kid. You know, it doesn't mean I love having a daughter, a daughter. But like, I am aware that these things of like dress a child this way, dress a girl this way are constructs further to what we were talking about again before about Michelle Foucault. We got a lot done before we went live, man.
When we were talking about Michelle Foucault, what he exposes a lot is that they're deloos, gill deloos, is that a lot of things that we take for granted as being normal are actually constructs. And when I say a child's bikini, there's no reason for any child of any sex or gender to be wearing a bloody bikini. So a child with tits is a terrifying idea.
For all but a very small and terrifying percentage of the population so like that is an example of the external feminization of a child like so when there's an argument a feminist argument of you know gender is a construct I can see oh yeah to a point it is there is there are constructs kind of like my opinion is you can't argue with biology chromosomes are doing what they're doing in the physical realm.
But like, you know, like, having a father to a daughter has made me feel like I don't, obviously, and then you have daughters or at least they do three daughters. Like, I'm certainly very aware of, I don't want to push them down some culturally prescribed avenue, whether it's about their dress, their sexuality or anything. So I've got, you know, where do I, where am I on that dial, you know?
Yeah, you gotta just not put any pressure on them and let them enjoy their life and let them find their path. That's what's weird, right? It's like I see people, they're getting their daughters to dress very, very feminine with little mini skirts and stuff and they're five years old and high heel shoes. I've seen little kids with high heel shoes. His name is very strange to me. I don't like it.
Yeah, but for me, that is being sourced from. We can extrapolate that to then why should a 20 year old woman wear high heels? I mean, I've read cultural analysis. I'm sure you have of, well, the lipstick is to emphasize the lips because it's a redder than of the vagina. The high heels is to make a woman seem more vulnerable and to accentuate aspects of body shape. Then this can be seen as evidence of the influence of patriarchy. There's loads of errors where I feel like,
Why are we looking for shit to argue about in this area? We're just human beings. Most of us are the most important people in our life of a different gender or sex to us. Why are we looking for arguments? But you can see the influence of cultural forces that are not neutral.
Yeah, you certainly can, but I think it should be up to the choice of the person once they're an adult. The real problem is putting pressure on them to dress one way or another and not letting them find their place. But if a woman becomes, you know, whatever age you decide and she wants to wear high heels and a skirt because she likes the way it looks, like there's nothing wrong with that either.
The demonization of sexuality is also a problem. It is almost as much of a problem as people who will prey upon vulnerable people. The people that think there's something wrong with being sexually attractive or something wrong with being desirable or wanting to be desirable.
There's nothing wrong with that either. And that kind of suppression, the suppression of these feelings that you have and this desire that you have is very unhealthy as well. It's a normal thing to want to be sexual. It's a normal thing to want to look good. If a girl looks good in a skirt, a skirt and high heels and she likes to dress like that, who the fuck is anyone to say is there anything wrong with that? There's nothing wrong with it. If that's what she likes, that's fine. Which is interesting to me is
Particularly in really progressive ideology, they look down upon women who wear short skirts and high heels and a lot of makeup and open tops that show their boobs. Because they think that they're playing into the patriarchy or that they're somehow or another falling into these gender traps. But yet they celebrate that in transgender people.
They celebrate that and men that transition to women, and then they really doll it up, and then they're like, you go girl, then they're celebrating the fact that this person is embracing these traditional aspects of womanhood. You see that a lot with people that are celebrating trans women.
I find it very fast. The aesthetics of what would be perhaps could be referred to as sexualized dress, or like I suppose in males, expressive or garish clothing, jewellery, tattoos. I understand in British culture that these are often indicators of class.
It's typically the lower down the cloth structure you are, the more likely you are to dress in a way that is exhibitive, or women from a blue collar background, dress in ways that are exposed and revealing. Men have leery cars and lots of tattoos and jewelry.
expressive ways of demonstrating wealth. The higher you go up the class, the more subtle, the more dressed down labels, all that stuff. In British culture, there's a different system for referencing it. I wonder how that works in American culture with its evident and much discussed racial divisions. Certain things
It seems like a subtle way of condemning particular types of womanhood that may not just be sourced from dress this way for the male gaze. It can also be a way of saying dressing that way as an indication of a lower class background or of a particular type of ethnicity.
There could be that, but there's also the reality of males and females is there's a lot of fucking jealous people. And there's a lot of women that just don't have the type of physical body that looks good in a short skirt with high heels and a low cut shirt. And they don't like when they see it in other women because they're not comfortable with their own bodies. There's a reality of that. I mean, women get as much or more hate from women as they ever do for men.
And particularly if women find you to be too overtly sexual with the way you dress or behave that you're damaging male-female relationships, you're damaging the dynamic. Particular office dynamics, if there's one girl in the office that likes to tramp it up and all the guys are paying attention to her, women will get mad at her.
I, um, did an interview a while ago where I sort of talked about, like, parent in our kids, me and my wife, how we parent our kids. And I said, like, uh, you know, it goes, I have to be honest, my wife is much the more dominant parent. She's much more practical than I am, right?
And like stuff that got that got like really negatively written about people said like I go she changes more diapers than I do and stuff right. Like not like I don't change diapers or whatever it's just my wife you know regardless of our respective sexes is the more efficient dominant parent she's much more likely with like me if my door goes. I want that chocolate the answer to them from is you're right you know like I can't.
Bear, I see the resistance, the emotional explosion. I concede much too early. I tap out very quickly with my two-year-old. My wife is much more known. It's played a long game. That's bring up a child that's not governed by impulses like you. And I spoke, in fact, to that Gabor Maté, that expert on addiction. He's amazing.
And he says, because of your own anxiety and pain from your own childhood, with no disrespect to my magnificent parents, like you can't handle seeing your kid suffer. So you like straight away, you bail and do what she wants and stuff. Now, there's so much complexity in the reality of our personal little domestic relationship. And I'm certainly will not saying, and everyone else should run their household in that manner as well. And so help me God, any man that changes, you know, but the way it was reported is like that's what,
happens, I think in modern media, is they change what you say, then you have to defend what they said you said. And you know, well, that ain't what I meant. I'd like, you know, I'm not saying that because my wife is a woman, she should take more domestic, I'm just saying that in our household, she seems to have a set of attributes and characteristics that make her take control of that aspect of parenting. And it's like the desire to judge, condemn an object is the priority as opposed to, you know, no one's looking to go on as who cares or what, you know,
Well, it's also that they're doing it publicly. So they're doing it mostly. I mean, if you're, you're either reading comments or you're reading articles and if you're reading articles, they're just looking for something to be upset about. They'll watch you and they'll say, okay, is this a viable target? Yes. We got confirmation. What he said about changing diapers or his wife being a better parent is a viable target. Let's go after them. And then they just formulate some bullshit argument about who you really are based on what might have been a throw or a concession to your wife or even just a compliment to your wife.
self-deprecating to yourself. They're not looking at things rationally, they're just looking at targets, particularly people that write articles. What's the best article? It's got to be negative. One of the things that came out of all this Facebook algorithm stuff is you find out that Facebook realized somewhere early on that the way to
encourage engagement is to get people upset. They get way more engaged and they go back and forth and interact with these posts way more if they're upset than they do if they agree with it. If they agree with it, they might give it a like or a thumbs up and say, hey, that's great. And that's it. That's where it ends. But if, you know, someone's talking about, you know, we shouldn't build the wall. We should let everyone in and you put that on some fucking Trump guys page and they, it's crazy. I mean, you will get thousands and thousands and thousands of interactions.
And so Facebook realized that the way to keep people, and they can claim that it's an algorithm, and the algorithm just supports whatever the people are really interested in, but what they're interested in is conflict. That demonstrates my earlier point, which I made up on the spot. The AI is not a neutral thing. It is resourced from human perspectives, because that is a type of AI. Not as complex as what we're going to experience, and I can't even imagine. But what I'm saying is it's still,
I want to say, resourced from a human perspective. And yes, of course, we are evolved to respond more strongly to negativity than positivity for loads of reasons. And I think that's where we can stitch back to what we were saying about taking personal responsibility through you are, like that none of us have to sit on social media going, fuck you, fuck you.
None of us have to do that. We can try and resolve those. I respect that some people don't have any other outlets. They don't have the privileges I have of being out go to support groups where people openly talk about this is the ways that I felt inferior today. This is the ways that I'm trying to become a better man and a better father and a better co-worker. A lot of people aren't afforded those environments and probably the best shot they got is having a go. It's someone online and those people in a way deserve love and sympathy.
on some level recognize that we can all our own behaviors, we can all our own consciousness. I don't see how there's going to be. Well, at least then we can create a terrain upon which a better systems can start to flourish. Do you read comments?
No, I actually like, I'm too sensitive. I can just about manage to listen to people's replies to my conversation. Like, you know, like, yeah, I don't go on to like, I have like, I work with someone who does my social media and like, she gives me stuff like, here, I'll respond to these things, put some output on that. Because I don't, I don't want to engage with that. I don't want to like walk up and down any street knocking on the door going, do you like me? Do you like me?
You're like me, I don't want to deal with people's responses in various conditions. Well, it's also much like the articles, the way people get a response out of you or the way to people to get your reaction is to say something really negative. You look at some, sometimes when people are not that savvy, when it comes to social media, one of the things that you'll notice is they'll interrupt, and I've been guilty of this in the past before I sort of realized what I was doing, you would only respond to negative things. I mean, people are arguing with people. Meanwhile, people are saying nice things to you and you ignore them.
It's because at a certain level you don't have the physical time. It doesn't exist to respond to everyone. It's not possible. If you get 13,000 comments on one of your posts, how the fuck does anyone have time to respond to 13,000 people? You can't. And then you have email and you have Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and just there's no way. There's not enough time in this world.
So you would have personally would have responded to things that caused them more visible. Yeah, I saw someone saying something was untrue, but like fuck you, that's untrue. But then I realized like, what do you why? Like what are you doing? Like this is a new thing for people. There's never been a time where people have had this instantaneous interaction with people unfiltered, unmoderated globally.
I mean, it's very strange to be able to do that and to be able to go back and forth and just to be able to give your comments on things, to be able to talk about things. It's very addictive to people. Yeah, that's right. And that's why I'm very cautious with it. I have to sort of set my life out like I'm essentially a monk in a marriage. That's basically where I live. Get up, meditate, do yoga, do exercises, do things that are positive for you. Watch the way that you're thinking.
I'm interested in where, again, with your own, do you feel connected to the person you were as an adolescent? Do you notice it in your own parenting? Do you notice it in the type of choices you make? Because the image I have of you from the outside is like that you have literally built something for yourself. You operate within it and you are quite protected and you are independent and not forced to deal with too many negative outside influences.
But in unavoidable dynamics and necessary dynamics, like as a father and dealing with colleagues and stuff like that, do you experience a lot of tension, anxiety? What has happened to that guy? Do you feel that you have transcended that? Because I do in my own life feel like, yeah, I'm not the adolescent boy I was. I've learned from that. And I still, in a very sort of cod psychological way, when I'm doing Hibero, that's the BJJ classes I'm doing over here with Professor Ricardo Wilk, he's an amazing guy.
Like, when I'm doing those classes, I have a sense of fathering my child self, because I weren't doing those kind of things when I was a kid. I'm like, it's all right, Russell. We're just in a BJJ class. Just relax. Don't need to panic. Don't need to impress anybody. Just do it. If you don't know, just ask. I've got a voice in myself. Because I chat to Tony Robbins. He's like another, obviously, high achieving guy who I admire and respect a great deal. And when he talks, he does these cold plunges. And he says, before I get in that plunge,
You're getting in that fucking punch. Like, you talk, that's my God, I don't talk to myself, like, oh, like, Russell, we're gonna get in the cold plunge. We're gonna relate, you know? Like, I have to talk to myself gently. What are you doing with that aspect of yourself? Do you still have a relationship with it? How is it, like, when you're doing all these psychedelic, cosmonautic explorations of the psyche, are you not encountering aspects of yourself that are undeveloped and addressed?
There's always going to be unaddressed and undeveloped aspects of yourself, but I'm very, very, very different to who I was when I was a young boy.
I'm not 100% self-actualized. I don't think anybody is, but I'm just a totally different human being. I remember it, but I remember it with humor. I remember it in a laugh. I'm like, wow, so silly. It was so weird back then. With life experience and developing confidence and understanding of who you are and why you had those feelings and why you were insecure and why you had so much self-doubt,
Martial arts helped me with that tremendously because it was the first thing that I ever did where I didn't feel like a loser. So the first thing that I ever did were people respected me and they liked me for it. I'm like, wow, it was a feeling that I was completely unused to in the 14 previous years of my life. All of a sudden there was this
this feeling that I was unusual, I was unique, I was special. I was appreciated. You were good at it quick. Yeah. I had a natural inclination towards it. And I was obsessed with it. So I was obsessed with this. I was training every day, all day long. And then my instructor recognized it really early on. So he allowed me to train there for free and just I would teach classes and teaching classes helped me a lot as well because when you're teaching,
You're breaking down techniques and when you're showing someone how to do it, you're really cementing those pathways in your own mind. Yeah, that's right. That must be an important step on the road to mastery. I see that clip where Eddie Bravo gave you your black belt and you were very moved by that. So for me, moments like that,
it must connect you to the beginning of the journey. Yeah, that does. Yeah, for sure. And it's still, you know, the journey of Jiu Jitsu is a fascinating one because unless you're someone who's, you know, a saluhi baro or a john jock machado or just a true master who's dedicated their entire life to it, the journey's so long. It's so long. It's like if you're a guy who runs
You like to run, I like to run a mile three or four days a week, no big deal. But then, you know, your next-door neighbor is an ultra marathon runner who is preparing for the Moab 240, where he's going to run 240 miles. You're just never going to catch up the same amount of times, and you should always defer to that person when you have questions about running.
And that's how it is with Jiu Jitsu. Yeah, I'm a black belt, but I'm not a black belt like John Jack Machado is a black belt. There's levels to even to that. So I always have questions. So the journey is never over. It's always long. There's always a better way to get out of an armbar or a better way to set up a triangle or whatever it is. One of the beautiful things about Jiu Jitsu is that it's so complex. There's so many variables. There's so many situations and interactions and exchanges and entries and defenses and
and way the chain moves together and the correct way to set something up, two, three steps ahead to know that if you grab the lapel this way, the guy's gonna try to shake it off that way and that exposes this which exposes that and then the next defense will expose this and then you keep going and going and going and going until you get them. It's so beautiful to watch that because it's like as if there's a pre-existing net or grid of interrelated signs that will work together and like as a white belt,
I've got three stripes now. I was really hoping that by the time I came back on here, I would have a blue belt and I could be out. You close it and all right? I'm really in. I'm training three times a week private and I'm attending two classes and what I've done is- That's great. Thanks a lot and what's a significant step for me is like now in the classes, when I'm sparring people, I don't try just in the handshake to manipulate them into going easy.
Do you feel so lovely? Oh, Ralph, we go then. Please try to manipulate people. Yeah, like just a subtle gesture or something like that. Just try to take it easy on me. Come on, don't hurt me. Do you avoid big people?
Yeah sometimes i try to stay down that white belt into the room but like now the more i do it like the more they coax me out there great big giant men like a like there's a guy that like the soft ones up our like the hard end purple belt above. Dave Paul Busby and like there's people like their hands and their feet.
look different to my hands and feet as different, their hands and feet are as different from mine as mine are to my daughters. And I feel like, how am I supposed to ever do anything with these people like hard water, like drowning in hard water? The way they move and fold around me. I'm like, I feel like what I'm supposed to do and my breathing goes. But the thing is with other white belts is that what I feel is like there
is my ego comes back in, because there's, I feel like, no, I should be getting something. The first time I got choked out by another white belt, I felt like I went into a room, I'd not been in since I was 16, getting my head kicked in in bus stops and stuff like that. I felt like I was quiet for 24 hours, just sitting and reflecting on, oh shit, and I just picked up people like, this is a combat sport, this happens, you're gonna experience right, right, so it doesn't mean I'm a bad person.
that I've failed. No, you're going to have to get used to that if you're going to be doing this. You get used to humiliation. You get used to defeat, but that humbling is very good for you. I don't know how many times I've been tapped out in my life, but it's probably more than a thousand, probably thousands.
You sit there while I tell you about jujitsu. And the other thing that's been good about it is when it is the other way. I remember a guy that was a big guy on top of me, and he was in Mount. He wasn't actually applying a submission, but there's just the sheer discomfort of having someone there. They're body, they're sweat.
Here, they're abdomen, they're reproductive organs, they're the jestive system, theses in their bowel on top of me. I just nearly tapped out at that. But then he went to move to get an umbrella for, hang on a second. There's a moment and I managed to escape from that. And like the amount of energy that that releases, fuck you! Justice! Now I win! Justice.
That's hilarious. Yeah, it's a very satisfying feeling. It's also very satisfying to defend against something that someone used to catch you with. Like say, if someone's a really good at taking your back, you're going to choke you a couple of times. And then one time they take your back, but you defend and you get out. You're like, I got out. Oh, there's an escape. I can make this. I'm getting better. I love being in the cave, that mental space, because what my technique was, oh, I'm not good at that.
Never bother trying. I'm not good at that kind of stuff. Never bother trying. So for me, at this stage in my life, to go and do something that I'm not good at, that's with other men, that's competitive, that involves so much vulnerability and failure and learning, I'm thinking, well, you're growing. You've got to be growing. So you're doing stuff that you never would have done before, even turning up at a new place like I'm doing here in LA and making those new relationships and doing that. It's amazing for me. Another thing I into is the integrity of it, right?
Because Chris Clear, a black belt under Hodger Gracie, right in UK, my teacher, like, if he gave me a blue belt, that would look good, man. It would be video, it would be everywhere. Russell Brand got a blue belt, this shit must work. But no, he doesn't do it out of integrity and respect for that. You know, it means more to him, evidently, than the act of kindness.
So what is nice to belong to something that has protected and valuable systems. You did say to me, you keep going by the end of the year, blue belt, I think. But it's not dished out. There's nice to know that there's some kind of order. An area where celebrity, manipulation, charm, human, none of those things, all redundant, all redundant. No, in jujitsu, it's very protected. Anyone that gives out a bad belt, it's very bad for their integrity. The school would lose face so badly in the community.
And you meet someone who's a Hicks and Gracie Brownbelt. That motherfucker is a Hicks and Gracie Brownbelt. He's as legit as they get. They don't get any more legit. Like if you got to that point of Hicks and Gracie gives you a Brownbelt, it's irrefutable. And that's how it should be. And this beautiful thing about the art form is that it has this self-correcting sort of aspect to it that
When you roll when you spar with each other, your ability or lack of is exposed and there's no other way around it. Yeah, that's good to not avoid that. It's good to avoid that reality. But you'll be better. You're a fit guy, you're a healthy guy. If you just keep going, get off that fucking vegan diet and keep going.
I watched a documentary called What the Health. Have you seen it? Yeah, it's filled with a lot of propaganda. Those guys are gay like the Nazis. I remember it. Well, they used a lot of discredited studies and there's a lot of epidemiology studies that will connect things.
What does that mean, like an epidemic? No, we could pull up what the actual definition of... It's about time changing pulled something up in this episode. The way I would describe it is they would do these studies and essentially they would ask you what you eat on a daily basis, how often do you eat meat, and it's basically a survey.
And in that survey, they would say, well, there's a direct correlation between people that eat meat and diabetes. So let's pull up the definition. I see. But the problem is what is causing here, a branch of medicine which deals with incidents, distribution, and possible control of diseases and other factors relating to health.
So, when they're dealing with incidents, right, they're dealing with how often do you eat red meat? How often do you eat this? How often do you eat that? And then they find, oh, well, there's more instances of diabetes in people that eat meat. Okay.
people that eat meat and vegetables or is it people that eat meat and vegetables and diet coke and sugary sodas and ice cream and french fries and how are they eating their meat? Are they eating cheeseburgers for some bullshit fast food place or are they eating grass fed steak? Are they eating grass fed steak and vegetables? And there's very little evidence that shows there's anything wrong with eating meat if you follow a normal healthy, what they would call a primal diet. Yeah.
Cut out all the grains, cut out all the sugar, cut out all the bullshit, eat vegetables and meat. And there's almost nothing. I mean, unless you have some very unusual rare condition where you're either allergic to meat or you have some very strange digestive system where you have allergies to it or you have
Real problems digesting in or you have real problems with high cholesterol foods, which is very rare as well. Most of what you're getting is vegan propaganda. People that want other people to be convinced that the way that they're living is the correct way and that eating meat is physically bad for you and is causing all these harms. What's causing all the harm for people physically is the modern American diet and that's been pretty established.
Yes, that's right, and there are clear, ethical reasons to be vegan in that it takes you out of the exploitation of animals, but that documentary, What The Health That I Watched was like, you know, and I've been vegetarian for years, and this, like, and I've gone back and forth to veganism, because I feel, God, Jesus Christ, man, there's enough things in my life I'm not doing without not being able to have an egg.
We're out feeling guilty. But you could have pasture-raised eggs. If you get them from a good farm, the chickens are just hanging out. I've got chickens in my garden. I'm not confident in these animals in the winter. Well, one by one, slowly my dogs eliminate in the gift of life. Oh, I've had a few taps.
I lost nine of them to coyotes just last month, maybe two months ago. That's a pretty heavy, heavy toe. Well, we had a fire out here and the chicken coop burnt down. We got a smaller chicken coop and the coyotes figured out how to get into it when we were in home and we came home to just feathers everywhere. It was disgusting.
brutal. They're brutal little monsters coyotes. Yeah, yeah. You know, ungovernable. They're the reason why we don't have rats everywhere, too. All right. So yeah, it's the circle of life. The Lion King was right. So like, hey, though, the thing about that vegan documentary, mate, is that it tuned in to my pre-existing belief when it said stuff like, oh, the diabetes associated
They are funded by these meat and dairy organisations and these pharmaceutical companies. The cancer organisation similarly accepts donations from these organisations. My pre-existing idea that I come to it with is that whole pyramid of these are the things you should eat. Bread, milk, just were the things that it was easy to produce and that were profitable.
uh... they used to think that they really did use to think that bread with and grains are the most important do you think they felt that i think they did i think they thought it was it was filling and it provided energy and i don't think they understood well there's no talk of gluten tolerance when we were young it didn't exist and there was no understanding of excess carbs and our excess carbs leads to excess body weight and it makes it makes you store fat did people didn't think about it that way they didn't understand it was
The thing about nutrition is that nutrition science is a body of knowledge that's constantly added to. Yeah, in fact, perhaps most things are, who knows what misapprehensions and ignorance we toil under that will be revealed to us. Do you do any, I feel like I've heard you talk about hormone stuff?
Yeah, yeah, I do hormone replacement. What type of things testosterone and human growth hormone? Do you have to give yourself a jab in the ass? Yeah, in the thigh. You won't do the ass. Have simple pride. That's for Mrs. Rogen. I don't touch that.
It's eyes right there, it's easy to grab. When you're reaching back to putting your ass, it's just like an awkward thing. It's too vulnerable. Yeah, but they also have, like so you're taking growth hormone. You're not noticed any negative side effects or instability. No, well you have to get your blood monitored. When you're doing something like that, this is also, if you're a person that has addictive problems, addiction problems, which I don't necessarily have them as much with substances. What do you have them with?
Well, you saw it with video games. You got here the video game problem that I have. Yeah, you frantic. You emerged out of that dark room. You and your pal's sway empire. I didn't baffled by the real world. Well, it's very fun, too. Martial arts. I've been addicted to martial arts. I've been addicted to playing pool. I get addicted to getting good at things. I get very addicted to things. If there's something that I get obsessed with, like Jiu Jitsu or whatever it is, I get obsessed. And that's all I think about all day long.
I just, you know, it's not healthy. But with hormones, you want to make sure that you don't overdose yourself. You want to make sure that you stay within a very narrow range where you're, you know, you have, what are the healthy levels of a person that's in their, you know, late 20s. That's really what you want. You don't want to have hyper-human levels, which some people do do.
The hyperhuman you're going to create is an odd ecosystem. You're fucking up your body, man. You're just jolting yourself with all this extra shit. What are you about to take?
of the sweet lady thyroid. Is that part of your system? Yeah, I have, I take armor thyroid. It's actually made from pigs' thyroids. What do you mean pigs' thyroids now? Like, hold on, how about what's happened to the pig? Dead, dead. They're long gone. They're not sort of struggling with a lack of thyroid. Yeah, that's right. Teetering about all emasculated. Well, this is like, so yeah, I'm interested in this hormone stuff. I'm interested in that. But, you know, me, I've got to be very, very, like,
cautious about mood or in stuff. But if you have the exercise regimen that you're talking about, I don't think you're going to have much more. Got to get that blue belt. I'm going to do what it takes.
Yeah. Bring me the pig. It'll suck. That's the way I thought I wrote it out of it directly. You should eat eggs though, man. You really should. You should eat, you should eat, you should eat some animal protein without, I mean, if you oppose the moral aspect of killing an animal, which I totally understand and appreciate. And that's what led me to become a hunter in the first place is that I was really uncomfortable watching these animal rights videos of factory farming. I thought it was disgusting. I was like, I don't want to participate in this. Yeah, it's reprehensible. Hunting is a different thing, man. To me, hunting is this intense
It's very spiritual in a way. I mean, people don't get it because they see you celebrating when it's over because it's very, very, very difficult to close in on a wild animal. What are you hunting? Mostly elk. Well, elk's my favorite. For two reasons. One, it's very delicious, super nutritious. Also, if I shoot one elk, I can eat it for like eight months. Well, you can freeze in them. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Freezing them.
So you're out stalking an elk on the plains. Where are you? Like near where you live. You just go out and travel on bikes. How do you follow them? Yeah, we do travel on bikes if you're a whitetail hunt. A lot of times you go into the woods with bikes because they don't leave a cent the way your feet do.
You know and animals don't associate the sound of a bike the way they associate it with like the sound of stepping bipedal hominid Stepping to evolve to a whole bipedal. Yeah, they see you on a bike. They don't even freak out as much delightful never seen that before my brain. What are these things? Yeah?
So, elk, are they like herd animals? Do you see like a herd of them? Yeah, you see a herd of them and try to figure out which way the wind's blowing and you try to get close to them. Is this a video of us? Yeah, this is a video of us from a beautiful place. I mean, I can see the harm and if nature. Yeah, so that's an elk.
Now the thing is with me, I see that elk there and I sort of feel like I've watched too much Disney. I see that elk and I feel like I'm Bambi literally. I don't have it. Is that early in the morning? You look tired, not tired. Might be late afternoon actually. I think that was late afternoon.
Like, see, like, I, from that position, I couldn't, like, I would love the game of being able to, because actually I've had to go down gun ranges. It turns out I'm pretty good shot. You know, it's nice to see that thing come back with like holes around its abdomen and its head. I think satisfied there. You've been dealt with paper, man. But, but like the elk, I couldn't, I've got too much empathy in me that I couldn't deal with the feeling of,
after it was shot. I like almost thinking about it, the sentimentality of it. I've sentimentalised it. Now, you know, at least I don't eat me and stuff like that. So it's not like I have all those feelings of buck and handle it in a packaged portioned off way. It's just I feel too much like, oh, that creature. So what in your head, when you're doing it, when you're pulling the trigger, you're not having what's going on in your mind.
Well, you only are hunting these mature animals that have already passed on their genes. You also are recognizing that if you're not killing these things, it's not like they're going to live forever. They live a short life with a very violent death. It's either wolves or mountain lions or bears or something's going to take them out.
Yeah. And what you're doing is essentially dipping your toe into the natural world. And I've heard the argument that, well, this is ridiculous because everyone can't do that. You know, if everyone went out and hunted all the animals, there would be no animals left, which is true. But I'm not everyone. And so I don't, you know. You can't really use that if everyone did the argument. It's a good argument because if you're encouraging people to hunt, it is kind of a good argument because it's not realistic. It's not sustainable.
But the other thing to recognize is that the reason why most of this wildlife exists in the first place, a lot of it was wiped out in the early 20th century.
from what they call market hunting. In the late 19th century, early 20th century, they didn't have refrigeration and it was hard to get food and we didn't have the same sort of large scale agriculture that we have today. And so when someone would want meat, somebody would either have to hunt it for you and you would go to the market and get that hunted food or you would go out and do it yourself.
and they basically wiped out most of the wildlife
10% of that money goes to habitat restoration, making sure that rangers and forest people get funded. So there's a Fish and Game Department gets funded and also population conservation, making sure that the populations are healthy, repopulating certain areas with elk and deer. And this has all been done through the money that's generated through hunting.
Yeah, I can see that there's a, looking at my own feelings towards it, I can see that there's a, potentially I'm bringing a sentimentality to the idea of animals that's like anthropomorphic. Yes. Like I'm like, oh, you can't kill that. It, what about its babies? You know, like a,
thinking about things like that but what I you know I live in a rural area in Britain where like hunting is normal and I wouldn't and agriculture is normal and I wouldn't get very far if I was sort of like you can't shoot those pheasants look at their feathers they're beautiful you know I mean like it wouldn't it's not a helpful attitude so whilst I like record like in myself I couldn't do that because like I don't it messes me up on a sort of a feels like a very
deep visceral level. But I feel that this is precisely the kind of territory where we have to look at acknowledging and tolerating difference between us. This is where I feel like the sort of these ossified polarized positions between right and left are starting to take root because if someone like me who don't eat meat, don't eat animal products and wouldn't hunt for ethical reasons,
Start trying to impose on other people now you shouldn't have because of this that have you not watched bambi you know like that's gonna mean that people aren't able to explore who they are it's a and so my i've let go of judging people around things that i don't agree with because.
I reckon I don't know everything. I mean, I'm this. This is about my morality, is about how I behave. And if people said to me, I'm thinking about going hunting, I'd go, well, these are my feelings about it. However, though, I just heard that hunting does contribute, apparently, to the survival of some species. And there is an argument that it's quite natural and indigenous. And it's probably a way of getting in contact with who we are originally as hunting people. It's an important part of our anthropological
history and possibly a lot of the condemnation of hunting is part of the rejection of who we used to be as we become overly civilized and more and more detached from what it is to be human whether that's sacred or pragmatic we don't know what human beings are anymore we reject our own sexuality we reject our own bodies we reject you know we're trying to turn ourselves into these sort of cyborgs these emotionless sexless
meaningless creatures. Where is our passion? Where is our connection with the sacred? They would go, hold on. I only asked you about hunting. When are you going to stop talking? Never. You gave me an end. I will pummel you with my belief system on all things. So I don't feel like that ain't where I get a judging people. But I'm interested as well with this. I keep bringing up the subject of DMT.
I guess what I want to know about is because I'm, you know, obviously a person in recovery, I don't drink, I don't take drugs, haven't done for a long time and I recognise for certain people that they can't do it safely. Psychedelics and hallucinogens, it seemed to me, exist in a realm outside of that because they're not about, they're not pleasure.
There's like, seem to me like it's a spiritual portal. However, I'm a crafty bastard when it comes to this stuff and I'm always looking for an inn. You know, when I see your cannabis treasure trove over there, I mean, that is some, yeah, as you said, the rate is at a lost arc stuff and I'm holding in my hand now the CBD rich cannabis soft gels clasping it. You know, so like, I'm so worried that that is a gateway that CBD, which is not necessarily psychoactive. It's not psychoactive.
It's not, but it does help you with anxiety. It helps a lot of people because it alleviates a lot of inflammation, which tends to have a corresponding impact on your anxiety. So this says here 11 milligrams of THC. Does that mean it says THC? It does say that at the bottom. It's probably a one to one. Is this a one to one? Might be. Or it's like a 18 to one. Or 11, it says there's an 11 and a one. Oh, there's a couple of different ones in that box. Oh, I give you, I almost give you the wrong one. What's next? A bag of smack. Don't take that.
This one goes back into this one. This one's way more powerful. That's one to one. Yeah, you seem do seem very relaxed and free from anxiety. Great. I will say that. But like, so like what I suppose I'm interested in, because I look, listen, I'm meditating the whole, like I meditate a lot. I'm doing all these things. I'm experiencing transcendent states. I'm experiencing what it's like.
to not feel attached to my identity as Russell. Who are you before you are Russell? Who are you before you identify yourself as a man in England? Who is the person? Who is the consciousness? Who is the awareness? Now, when I listen to say Terrence McKenna talking about his experiences in psychedelia at such length and with such lucidity and with
so many philosophical connotations, and the way that he uses the information he's getting from hallucinogenic experiences to speculate on how we should organise society, what the implications are for freedom. He's refusal to accept that there are certain kinds of experiences that should be prohibited, that it's ridiculous that adults should be prevented from having that.
fascinated, but I'm also, I suppose, part of my bias is I love anything that gets me out of my head. I feel a tremendous sense of relief, whether it's through meditation or even sport, or sex, being relieved of the burden of the constantly thinking mind. But when I hear like those vivid descriptions of DMT realm or our west ground, I think something in me hungers for that, hungers for it. Do you worry that you're trying to get intoxicated? You worry that you're trying to find a loophole?
Yeah, because I am doing that. I'm looking for a loophole. It's like I'm going around like a sort of a trash lawyer looking for some way. Hold on a second. What about this? That's a great way of putting it. Yeah, I mean, I know people that have problems with addiction that have done psychedelics and didn't have a problem. But I'm sure some people have had problems and I don't know about them.
DMT is interesting in that first of all it's very quick the experience is only about 15 minutes 20 minutes max and it's also it's not necessary it's not an intoxicant in the way that you would think about traditionally you are still you in in the face of this experience and I think
I think it's some sort of a chemical gateway. That's what I think. I think there's a gateway in your mind that can lead to some other dimension that's probably there all the time. If there is a omnipresent, continually existing realm that human beings aren't accessing because of the particular biochemical formulation of consciousness
as it is in this point in our evolution. And that we can get there. And it seems as like, you know, I've heard Terrence McKenna say, it's more real. You know, it's more real. There's stuff in there.
Excuse me. And when he talks about them beings, you know, like that he describes a self dribbling basket balls creating like Faberge egg like, you know, a device is through vibration. I didn't see it. I never saw it. I want that. He's called the machine elves. He's called them all sorts of different things. The way I've described them is they're the geometric patterns made out of love and understanding.
So you read, you can look at a geometrical pattern and read meaning into it had an emotional quality. They're made out of something and they move. They change like they don't stay what they are. They're constantly evolving in front of you into something more and more beautiful. It's very weird. What did it make you feel like I knew nothing.
That was the most profound aspect. Like, all of the stuff that you concentrate on every day is nonsense. And there is some other thing that's connected that's probably influencing this world. And it's probably what people see when they have near-death experiences, the depictions of the afterlife. I mean, that's probably what it all is. And religious experiences, when prophets are talking about, oh my God, I went into this realm, there's these beings, they've told me, we're all one, we have to love each other.
Scholars in Jerusalem are connecting Moses' experience with the burning bush to the acacia tree, the acacia tree which is rich in DMT. The burning bush is what God was to Moses and that through this burning bush he came out with these 10 commandments of how people should live their lives. I mean that easily could have been just a very convoluted
sort of translation of a DMT trip. Certainly. And also when you think of, certainly there are archetypal images that seem to be repeated throughout ancient cultures and archaic stories that seem to refer to the potential for plant experiences to affect consciousness. Even the garden of Eden do not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge that otherwise you will become as gods. You know, I sense that. Now, if
If there is some realm that we can reach through that experience that puts into perspective everything that else we experience on the material realm and that thing seems to in your words be emanating love and understanding while ever changing completely formless and communicating love and understanding. I can't help but think that that should become
our priority to have a relationship with that realm and to bring about that experience. I don't even mean in a literal way, because even Terrence McKenna said there were some people, vulnerable souls, he was probably referring to people like me, that probably shouldn't mess around with that kind of stuff. I think he was really talking about people with schizophrenia, which he believed he had, by the way. Did he? Yeah, he had some very unique perspectives on schizophrenia and
the way people interact with the world itself. I think if we lived in a healthy world, a healthy civilization that had a healthy relationship with psychoactive substances, we'd probably have centers where you would have a legitimate shaman, a medical advisor, and someone would take you through a guided experience. We're doing that now with ketamine. There's a lot of people that are very depressed that are having these
Physician controlled ketamine experiences that have had a profound effect on their depression. My friend Neil Brendan's gone through several of them and he was, he's a comedian, a very funny comedian. So when he was describing it, it was hilarious. He was going to a doctor's office and tripping his fucking balls off. You know, and the doctor is shooting him up with intramuscular ketamine. Oh my God. Yeah. And he's having these insane, I go, so you're having psychedelic experiences like, oh yeah.
he's describing it was really funny um... you mean tripping his fucking balls off in these whatever states that ketamine i've never experienced ketamine i don't know what it does but it's apparently profoundly uh... hallucinogenic
And you have wild, crazy experiences on it. And for whatever reason, it has a great impact on depression for a lot of people. I think it's a perspective enhancer, but it also does something to rewire the mind. Well, what some of this suggests is that mental illness is a response to our material conditions.
whether that mentally, honestly, schizophrenia, depression, or addiction, it's like people are going, hang on a minute, this isn't how we're supposed to live. I took that chem in one time towards the end of my using, and as usual, it's not in the right type of environment, you should be doing stuff like that in a nightclub, you need to be under that shamanic conditions, white coat guy, or whatever, whoever you nominate as a shaman. But I felt like it was like going into a tunnel made of sound, and like having to navigate, I was like, oh shit, I'm still in reality, what am I gonna do?
There's my sort of consciousness becomes a noise instead of a string of words and signs. I'm in a get out of this place. So for me, it's clear that drugs were never meant to be recreational. In fact, they never were. I was never, hey, man, this is crazy. I was like, I'm fucking pain. I need some shit to help me out. Otherwise, I'm going to probably kill myself.
You know, so like it was a way of holding that stuff at arm's limb. So I guess my renewed curiosity around DMT and I wasca and other sort of plant medicines and like, you know, that, you know, Daniel pinch bear and like them guys that are sort of part of that. I'm curious about it because I guess I'm
continually trying to find a way where someone would go, right, here's a way where we can do it, where it's sort of safe. And I've heard of other people in recovery doing it. And when I think about what my motivation is, is when I hear people talking about and my own, and my own recollections of experiencing what felt like God and by God, I mean a sense of oneness and that my individual identity isn't my real identity. And I'm connected to everything and love is the most important thing.
You know, I want a real experience of that. So that when I'm out in the world, I can remember when I'm driving or when I'm dealing with people or if I'm buying something or if I'm feeling inferior or feeling superior that like you said, this is bullshit. This is like a secondary reality. Don't let it govern you. You know, as a someone that's been seduced by fame, a person like, if I get this part in this film, then everyone's going to love me.
Oh, if this stand-up set goes, well, you know, like a person that's placed all of my well-being outside of myself, the certain knowledge that there is an inner connection that will take care of you that's accessible, I guess I'm, you know, hungry to sort of feel it in a way that's like, oh my God, now there is no doubt. So in a sense, it's a crisis of faith, not crisis of faith. There's some psychedelic states that you could achieve without taking anything.
I mean, you can certainly get there in a flotation tank. You can get there through holotropic breathing. I've never done Kundalini yoga, but apparently the people that get really deep into Kundalini yoga can literally have DMT trips. I know I have friends that have done DMT and have experienced DMT trips through Kundalini.
But you have to be really dedicated. I mean, there's a lot of time. A lot of time, a lot of energy, and you have to really understand the methods and follow them to a T. And you can achieve these altered states of consciousness that are apparently not from my personal experience, but from what people tell me, incredibly profound.
Yeah. I mean, I've had comparable things. I guess that what it's, you know, the difference between feeling something that's that overwhelming that gives you no choice, you know, like, it's like, it's not like, you know, Kundalini, you've got to do these breasts correctly. You've got to sit there. You've got to try again. Have you done it? Yeah. I don't know. Quite a bit of Kundalini. Well, what for me, it felt like what I felt quite a lot yogicly and meditatively is a cessation of what I would call my individual consciousness. Like, Oh, I'm not
This, this isn't who I am, this is just a temporary experience and all of the value systems of our world are built upon these primal drives in collaboration with a culture that likes to stratify people and manage people and operates like a massive farm where it's easier to keep people together operating in these kind of ways systemically.
I've sort of felt rushes of that, like a certain wordless clarity, if you can imagine me having anything that was wordless even for a moment. And in that space, there is great peace. So I suppose what's turning me on about the DMT and iOS could think is that the way it's narrow advised.
that they're going to meet characters and stuff like that, and it's going to be plain and beyond doubt. Because I suppose what profits do, like whether when a profit returns from the burning bush or the cave, they come back and they say, all this stuff
that you're taking seriously is not real there's this other realm start prioritizing it or you are going to live in hell on earth you're going to be governed by your materialistic drives your sexual drives and it's going to imprison you and it turns out that they're right and so like you know I suppose what I'm after because I'm
Partly, on one level, influenced by what you're doing and how you've created your own business and your own success, this symbiosis of stand-up and the podcast, and it's become a lifestyle brand, in a sense, Joe. I'm sort of like, yeah.
I don't want to be continually dragged into these like working within institutions. Like, you know, I'm over here doing a bloody doing ballers and I'm bloody glad to be over here doing ballers and working with the rock. And I've got a funny story about that if you want it. But like, you know, like really what interests me is like, can I be and that can I dedicate my life?
to humorously communicating spiritual information and indeed starting to live it. So like, and I suppose what that would mean is, you know, I'm getting better that I'm not a person who's obsessed with porn or sex or drugs or whatever, like, you know, to become it, to become what you actually are, to recognize that we're all different. Your perfect realization of you is going to involve
hunting and all of these things that you've created through your gift and that my perfect version of me is going to involve all of this and not everyone needs to build empires or entertainment industries or whatever but all of us are on some journey to self-actualization and realization as individual as our fingerprints and as natural as a seed turning into a tree and if we don't have a way of accessing that, no wonder we're dissatisfied, no wonder there's an opioid epidemic, no wonder people are bored and angry and lonely. Well, I think what you can do
is be yourself and what you can do is express yourself and what you can do is constantly seek to improve and grow and you're doing those things. So if you're saying, can I do these things? Can I be comedic and spiritual and what you're doing it? So it can be done. So you're doing it.
You know, it's all just a matter of what, whether or not you're satisfied with your progress and where you are and who you are and how you express yourself. So you're pursuit for excellence when you're saying I've got to get better at BJJ or archery or hunting or whatever. That isn't coupled with a sort of sense because you're not fucking good enough. So that's the deal that I've got. This is wonderment.
Yeah, I love it. That's so cool. Yeah, there's joy in it and there's enthusiasm. I mean, in everything, in archery in particular, it's very, you know, there's that book Zen in the art of archery, which is, it's an interesting book.
I mean, I think there's some really great points to it, but that state of mind that you get when you release an arrow and that arrow perfectly finds its mark really is and it requires so much concentration and focus and technique that you really don't think about other things. Beautiful. And it's cleansing in a lot of ways. It's mind cleansing.
I find Jiu Jitsu to be very similar in that way too, that it's so all encompassing. It's so, there's so much on the line, it's so difficult to do, that while it's happening, you're freeing your mind up. I mean, I think of video games in the same way. All of these things, that's bizarre.
All of those things suggest a transmission between the inner and outer world, isn't it? You're looking at the bullseye and then, oh my God, I've made this thing traverse time and space or BJJ. I've been shown again and again how to execute this triangle and I've just actually done it against resistance. It's amazing to feel that. It's amazing to feel that your inner life can express itself in the material world, whatever, wherever you're looking to explore that.
to test yourself and when you test yourself and you have to figure your way through something or Change the path because the path you were on was unsuccessful when you're doing that It's it's really good for the mind and for the I hesitate to say the spirit because I think that word spirituality is so beaten down and abused you mean it become commodified. Yeah, it's like yeah, it's like when people call themselves a healer and
Like are you really? Yeah, I've just done some healing on the way. We're all healing. I mean, we really are all healing each other. But I think there's something to doing difficult tasks that it makes life easier.
I really believe that. I think it makes life more enjoyable. I think it makes the bright colors brighter, and it makes the dull colors even them, even the bad moments. If you have real positive experiences with difficult things that you choose to do on your own, I think it mitigates most of the hassle of life.
Yes, I agree with that. That is again, and I'm not particularly promoting this book because I'm all right with how many things do, but the point of this mentorship is the idea that someone will exhibit qualities that you recognise, you don't fully realise in yourself and that you can sort of model them and realise them because later you have those qualities.
Oh, like Kevin Hart, we were talking about how I remember a boy, I find his positivity. It made me think it's all real. It's unbelievable. On a practical level, I thought the way he's building his stand-up, that guy's fucking diligent. And the amount that when he talked through his work schedule, you've fetishized hardworking men, I think. I've heard you talk about Dwayne Johnson and Kevin Hart. You like the idea of men, I'm up at those people. I'm up at two. I'm in the cryo chamber. I don't do that though. I sleep in.
I can't agree to you. I can do a lot of things that they don't do. But I also, unlike the rock, at least, I do stand up. Kevin does stand up too, obviously. I don't know if he does it as much or as often as I do, because I do the clubs. I have a philosophy about what's required.
to develop great stand-up that you have to do a lot of sets. You have to do a lot of numbers, a lot of different places, different environments. And I found that out the hard way through my best performances and my less good performances, like what was missing and what did I gain? You, like, I think is a sort of an interesting debate, you know, I don't know if it's in stand-up world at large, but it's something I've thought about a lot is like that as soon as I was able to have an audience that would come and see me, I was like,
I'm out. Thank you, God. I'm not putting myself through that shit ever again. Those den hop feels the same way by the way. He's one of the best. Yeah, he's amazing. He's absolutely fantastic. I completely agree. And like, cause I thought like, cause what I feel like is that the comedy club environment warps your material because you've got a appeal to them. And I think you ain't the fucking arbiters of truth. You've drunk crazy two a.m. motherfuckers.
So i get like i perform all what i'll do is like and what i'm doing say at the moment is i'll book the ucb like or like places hundred two hundred or go lago or put on events and i'm doing events while i'm in la because i think all these people come and they love me and they bring me beads and they piss me and cookies you gotta come to the comedy store and go on after joey dears
because I feel like I like a nurturing environment because I've done those fucking clubs and like you know an even comedy store and late at night comedy store in LA you know as well as London and I feel like oh Jesus thank God and I've done so like I'm interested to you that's part of that what I think some people could reductively refer to is machismo in you like that you go no I'm going in now
You know what it is? It's that guy that mounted you and went for the armbar and you escaped. It's worth it because it was hard. You realize if a child got on top of you and went for an armbar and you escaped, you'd feel nothing. So when you're at Largo, you're performing for children.
You're doing child stand-up. It's like you're wrestling with a hundred pound women who just started yesterday. It's like the Make-A-Wish Foundation. Come on Russell then, tell us your stories. Amazing. You're wonderful. We've been flowers. Thank you. Thank you children. But look, the counter-argument to that is...
that therefore i'm in an environment that is sympathetic and is my audience and i'm not biasing what you know the idea of overcoming a greater obstacle i completely appreciate what you're saying but say you believe in the purity of stand up as being some real expression of yourself as in the arrow hitting the bullseye
I feel like I have a vision of what I'm trying to achieve and increasingly it's becoming about I want my stand up. I want to hang on, you know, like as I've always done stories where I feel embarrassed and humiliated, but I want to hang off it, ruminations on what I believe to be the nature of truth. And I want people to come out of those things feeling loved, validated, accepted and that they're good enough and that they can explore themselves. You know, that's what's more of a one man show.
In a sense, it's that I don't want to like sacrifice the laughs, you know, I mean, I love the loss. What is where we're at? You know, that's a game to sacrifice in a one man show. I mean, you can certainly do a one man show that'd be really funny. But say you start going into, yeah, that's what I'm doing. And I'm sort of like, I'm trying to build things like around 12 steps and trying to like doing things that people have some takeaway value from now, like, you know, like trying to develop that after Joey Diaz in the store.
There's going to be some resistance. You're aware of Hannah Gatsby and the controversy of this. What do you think about that? I haven't seen it. I still say I'm going to see it. Because what the end of comedy and all that kind of thing. Silly, it's no end of comedy. But what she's doing, people like. And there's nothing wrong. I don't know. You call it whatever you want.
Sometimes it's funny. I mean, maybe it's stand-up comedy. Some of my mates watching, they still have a comedy. Sometimes they end it, like it would become a sort of quite aggressive towards the audience. Yeah, it became like a TED talk almost, I guess, apparently. I'm interested in it. You know, that's, you know, yeah, there's enough room for everyone to do whatever they're doing. But like, see, at the beginning of my career, like, I used to not prepare at all. I was still drinking and using, I'd go up on stage, I'd chop shit up, I'd get into confrontation, like when I say chop shit up, I'd...
take up animals shit part animal parts I've got from butchers like like a skull with all meat and stuff and sin you want it chop it up for anyone's release locusts get into confrontation to fight like so yeah exactly the reaction you're having is the reaction they were having like so some of the front road I had like a
Fights I've got scars on my body from bad stand-up gigs from a time where I got into a confrontation Like I was making a point about pedophilia saying oh, we're all one cultural mind So when a particular pedophile is transgressed against a child we're all responsible be like what the fuck I got the shit kicked out with that time, you know I've still got the scar on my leg that happened here Edinburgh in Scotland people didn't take it well and
But what I was trying to do was create, I didn't have the skills, the chops, the experience, the jokes. So I was so under equipped. But what I was trying to do was create environments that felt much better at doing that now. I can create an uncertainty in a room, a sense of chaos and what's happening and then bring it back, I hope.
to a humorous conclusion where people feel safe and amused and all of that kind of stuff. Now I think it's, you cut, like I did try and do that in comedy clubs and yeah it was a conversation, it's not what people want. So don't you think that by prepping your stand up in those environments that it biases you towards a type of stand up comedy that is limited?
No, because you can do that other stuff too. You could always perform to your crowd and you could always expand on things to your crowd. But to really put it together without any fluff, without any nonsense, without being self-indulgent, with respecting the attention span of the audience that may or may not even be there to see you most likely is not
If you go to a comedy club and if you go to the comedy store any night of the week there's 15 plus people on the marquee or on the list and the show starts at 8 p.m. or 9 p.m. depending on the night and it goes to 2 o'clock in the morning and you catch waves in there and there's different types of comedy and in that you're going to deal with sometimes tired audiences, sometimes enthusiastic people. It's all different. It varies widely.
And I think that in doing that, you cut all the nonsense out of your act and you develop economy of words. You understand how to captivate people's attention and keep them engaged and to respect their time, respect their point of view, respect that these people have an attention span. They want to be engaged in the best possible way that you can do it. And sometimes you develop that
through these really difficult sets or, you know, or distracted people and drunks and all that stuff. You can develop that, those qualities. You're always going to have your crowd and your crowd, I mean, if you have this vision of how you want to put things together, you can put that kind of thing together at a comedy club. You're doing it in these 15 minute chunks. You just have to figure out a way to grab them and make them really interested in what you have to say.
You're right, because there's obviously in the comedy store between now as you just described, there's a contract, we're here, not we ain't here to see you, we're here to laugh every 15 seconds. And comics like Robin Williams or Chappelle's, they all time great, they go in and accept those conditions.
You've seen stuff like Robin Williams, he's just walking around in the crowd in that very room. He's like, he's doing the thing I'm talking about, and he's doing it there. That's when you think, yeah, I suppose I do get that, that you're road testing it to an incredible degree if you can pull it off in. Well, think about every time you're saying something.
When you have a subject, like say if you want to talk about the mentors that you have in life, it's an open-ended approach. You have no idea what the correct way to say something is. You try it. You write it out. You say, this seems feasible. Let me try it this way. And oftentimes people never correct it or they never adjust it. They never go back and improve it. They just say it in a certain way and figure out how to do it.
When you're doing it in front of a crowd, you're developing these things while also feeling the way people are reacting to them and feeling their attention span. And it makes you with proper reflection and truly objective listening to your material. It makes you change and shift and adjust things in a hopefully in a positive way. And the more you do it, the more you get a sense of maybe this is clunky here and maybe I figure out a better way to say it.
I agree, but the counter argument could be that it could bias you to a sort of a lowest common denominator area. Say with that bit where you talk about the sun, and you know, it's, you know, you need it. It's trying to kill you. It gives you cancer. You know, like something like, what was the journey of that bit of standup? Is it like, for me, it's like, oh, I think of a thought. I try and make sure there's a tag so I know where I'm going when I'm out there.
And then it's a comparable process to yours. You're trying your best to get rid of fluff or whatever. So can you recall what it's like? Are you night after night going in with new bits of material packaged within things that you're a little more confident in? Yeah, and I put that bit on a special. I can do it better now. I know a better way to do it. And that's part of the problem with doing bits. So sometimes you release them on a special. You have a better version of it now.
But my point of that was to a prospective enhancer, to let people know that bit was about, like, understand what's happening here. You are literally floating in infinity, and it's almost never discussed. You're hurling through forever. There's a fireball in the sky. It's a million times bigger than Earth. If you stare at it, you'll go blind. It's trying to give you cancer, and if it's not there, you get sad.
You live in a dream. This is madness. Your life is madness. It's beautiful. Yeah. There's something about that particular way of... See, because I figured out a way to express it.
in short doses, in short bursts. If you stare it, it'll go blind. It's trying to give you cancer, and if it's not there, you get sad. So in that short burst, it's like, wow, yeah, that is all those things are true. It's crazy. There really is a fireball floating in the sky, and we're just used to it. We live because of a floating million times bigger than the Earth fireball.
And when you say, if you can say something like that and make someone laugh, you can actually change the way they look at things. You can actually affect at least the way they look at things. If you just say something,
Sometimes it's profound, sometimes it registers, but if you could say something and it forces someone to laugh, even if they disagree with you, if they're laughing, like, I don't even fucking agree with this, but holy shit, this is funny, you put that thought deep into someone's head and you allow them to think about your thought process and how your creative process and what you're doing to sort of bring these things out.
Yes, I like the way you describe the architecture of that. You've got to basically have these are some facts about the sun irrefutable. Now here is how that affects the way we look at the world and exposes to us that we're just ignorant. We're not awake to reality. We can't hold reality in our minds because it's too vast to handle.
I am likely, and I agree with you, that with laughter comes access to kind of deeper truths, and I've heard some therapists, in fact, say that laughter is to shame what grief is to sadness, that laughter is helping to expel shame and to process shame, that it's very important about people coming together and laughing together.
I like to exist comedically in a world where it's like starts from a deeply personal perspective and admissions and acknowledgments of humiliation and shame and vulnerability and travels out to the universal and hopefully archetypal that you can sort of travel to in those points. With the comedian nothing we both admire Bill Hicks. What I think is fascinating is because like you know like if you love Bill Hicks for a long while then you discover man that guy worked
material a lot, you know, like, oh, I watched this interview on the Australian TV. He's doing like a bit that I've seen him do, you know, in multiple incarnations. But I have also seen him do interviews where he's spontaneously talking about gigs, terrible gigs have gone badly. And he is hilarious. But it's very interesting to me. And perhaps it's because of that background and that practice of doing clubs that Hicks is very much a comedian that's, no, I'm drilling this fucking thing and I'm staying with
He was a writer. He did ad lib, and he was capable of going on these spontaneous rants, but he was a writer. He wrote these things out, and he was aiming to have an impact with his commentary. That was what he was doing. He was not just trying to make you laugh. He was aiming to enhance your perspective on whatever he was talking about.
Yeah, and it seems very disciplined as a practitioner of it, where it's like, say, a Chappelle, it feels like he's just going bluh, like an hour. Well, you know, he's got a very unique process, Chappelle does, and he can turn over an hour, like no one have ever seen before. And I was talking to Don L. Rong's about it recently, who, you know, was on the Chappelle show with him. And he's like, we both agreed, like he's the best ever at turning over a new hour. He could have a new, he could release an Netflix special and then have a new hour within a couple of weeks.
It doesn't even make sense. I don't understand how he's doing it. It must just flood in. He's in a great space. He's in a great mindset to do comedy. If you pay attention to how, when people study, like if you read outliers and you read how people, when people study, why people are great at what they do and what makes them exceptional, there's always a variety of factors.
and whatever the factors are with Dave, he's got this easygoing personality, this very carefree way of looking at things. He's also gone through a lot of bullshit in his career with the leaving the Chappelle show and abandoning $50 million and going to Africa and really understanding what his real motivation was. He was caught up in that world where they were trying to change him and commercialize his television show and he handled it
as good as anybody that's ever handled it. He handled fame and temptation, I think, better than anyone I've ever heard of. He just said, fuck you, and he just went away. He went away and then didn't do gigs for years. People don't understand. He would show up and do stand-up places, but he wouldn't book anything.
So like he wasn't getting paid. He was just, he did stand up, Dave Chappelle did stand up in the park in Seattle. He brought like a little amplifier and a microphone set up and just started doing stand up and people just gathered around. And he did this just to sort of get him back in touch with his roots because he used to do a lot of street performing in New York and I saw him do street performing in Montreal. We did a club and then we came out of the club and Dave, I think Dave was like 18 or 19 at the time, just started doing stand up on the street.
and put his hat out and people put money in his hat. I mean, he was constantly sharpening that sword. And he stopped doing stand up for a long time in terms of like booking gigs. And then after a while, I said, fuck it, I'm going to come back again. And then he started doing these gigantic gigs. And then of course, he did his two recent Netflix specials were amongst his best work ever.
And, you know, and now he's working all the time. He's constantly popping into the comedy store and the comedy seller and all these different clubs all across the country and constantly doing stand-up. Yeah. No social media. He does not, not involved in any of that stuff. He doesn't do anything. Just, just performs. Just does the stuff. Yeah, that's interesting. When it's like,
I feel that some people found their essence and found their path and live it. And like they're a yogi or a priest or something. That's right. But he's just got a devotional, this is who I am, I'm not doing anything that's not that. And that's exhibited, even in earlier stuff prior to the crisis of the 50 million walk away thing. By then, if he was 18 doing them clubs, he was hardened.
It's like what seemed so loose on stage was something that had been refined. That's a person who's comfortable. Yeah, he was always good. He was good when I first met him when he was like 18. I think he was 18. I was 21. So it was somewhere in that range. Maybe I was a little older. Maybe he was maybe it was like, how old is Dave? 46, 47. Are these five years younger than me?
Is that correct? 46 or 47? 45. Okay, so there's more. It's six years. Six years younger than me. So, you know, I was probably 25 and he was probably 18-ish, 25, 26, 18, 17. But he was, he was so like calm and like,
He was very late was you're attracted to listening to him It was like like look at this guy like this guy is like so comfortable in his own skin and so Friendly and easygoing and hilarious, but
who he was then, and then who he became is all the work that he put in. You know, it's like he had this base of this really, you know, this curious, young, very wise person who saw things that other people didn't see in the world, and then he just kept going, and just kept going. And then, of course, the Chappelle Show, which is, in my opinion, the greatest sketch comedy show of all time, even though it was only two seasons. It's the best ever.
And then after that, I mean, he's basically just on stand up and done it completely outside of this system. He's done some parts and movies and shit like that. But for the most part, what he's doing is just stand up completely outside of the Hollywood system, completely free. Just goes up, you know, just talk some shit, has a couple of drinks, laughs, and it's incredibly compelling. He's found his groove, you know, and that's
It's a beautiful thing to watch as a fellow stand up comedy practitioner when someone he achieves this mastery level like we know we're talking about like this Hicks and Gracie of stand up comedy level because that's where he's at right now. Yeah, I agree with you become who you are. Yeah, he's become himself.
And he doesn't have things that are getting in the way of that. You know, that's what's really interesting. Like, you don't see him. He's like, he's not on social media. He's not on anything Twitter or Facebook. He's not on any of that shit. He doesn't pay attention to any of it. He's just, just being a person, just being a person and doing stand up, you know? So it doesn't have to, which is unique to, you know, he doesn't have to promote things. They just sell out. Yeah, to put an amazing example, what an amazing example. I've got to promote some things. Oh, what do you got?
I've really learned some powerful lessons there from the story of the apotheosis of comedy that Dave Chappell's achieved. Here's these obligations. I'm booked here to promote Luminary. My podcast has gone behind a paywall on a platform.
called Luminary, aiming to be the Netflix of podcasts, meaning like that, you know, your model will, I imagine, triumph further. So like from like this week, my podcast will be on Luminary as part of their premium content is an app through which you'll get all podcasts. But my podcast is like, you've got. Is that launched now? That's launched. Yeah. I know that was in the process of being created. Are you happy with that so far?
Because it's not launched, I don't know. You know that you're going to leave listeners behind because it's gone behind a paywall. But I spoke to Sam Harris about it. Sam Harris actually told me about it. Yeah, right. And I spoke to, and what I recognized is because the advertising model works obviously in your case, and I thought,
Well, it was like a good deal. It was a good deal. I mean, I can carry on doing podcasts for two, three years. And it's supporting a lot of other content and essentially not yielding any creative control. If people subscribe, they get the premium content. My stuff.
It was like only like five bucks a month, right? And you get like, Trevor, Noah, Lena, Ben and mine. How many different podcasts are there? I don't know. I think like when the premium content is like 40 or 50 premium, like, you know, pieces of content. So for me, I thought like, you know, it felt like otherwise.
Podcast wouldn't be something that I could continue to do forever, because I'd do films or TV shows or stand up or whatever. For me, it wasn't an admirable thing to pay for, to pay for people to run it, to pay for guests to even get to me and all that kind of stuff.
No, no, no. Do you do ads on your podcast with them? I never did before but after this right? It's an ad-free model like that's there's a benefit to that for sure You know and a lot of people choose to go ad-free and then they use patreon or something like that Yeah, or supported stuff Sam Harris was doing that for a long time But then they they had an issue with patreon about certain censorship of certain individuals and certain ideological perspectives where they were you know leaning towards left wing things and you know being
being restrictive towards right wing things. And then they policing the way people behave outside of Patreon. And some people found that objectionable. So he left and some other people left like Jordan Peterson left. I've never entered into Patreon into those waters, but I know Burr does it. I think Burr has like one a week that he does. He's astonishing. He's one of the best.
But I feel like it's an all right thing to do. But even just with using things like YouTube and social media and Spotify, iTunes or whatever, as we have seen, there's a point where there is sort of
censorship is a possibility like as you discussed on the Jack like that run of episodes mate as I said to you by text between the Jack Dorsey the reaction to that your response to the reaction through Alex Jones and all that simple I thought that was a spate of podcasts that's like this is where this medium can be the Alex Jones podcast I thought was the godfather of podcasts we've seen the
it was not as i have put out tomorrow he just gave it to me so i put it up to right now watch it right now you watch it on that we have a guy who's hilariously his name is polytune and polytune makes animated clips for us with the podcast and he's fantastic i can believe one of the alix jones eddy bravo uh... incident
They're choking. No, not when he's asking him to choke him here. I went to Flat Earth. No, this one. It's so ridiculous. Here, we'll play it for you. I don't hear it. What's going on? What's the matter? Oh, okay. Back it up for the beginning, then. It was an exception. It even looks like a... Here we go.
The guy does awesome artwork, dude. We're going to get to this next, and I respect you. I want you guys to yell at each other for three minutes, so I go pee. I got a pee, too. OK. We'll do it in shifts. We'll do it in shifts. I'll go first.
Okay. Anyways, you are someone that I could talk to about the flat earth conspiracy. You don't believe in flat earth, but you can kind of understand where I'm coming from. What if I finance a research ship and make a documentary? I can't go over it for three months. I will pay. What kind of money can you raise?
We're gonna need uh, are you guys going to the moon or in orbit? Okay, you raised the money for a trip. No, there's no race the money. I got the money. I got the money. I got the money. This is the deal. This is the deal. This is the deal. Go pee, go pee, man. So I'm gonna we're gonna do this. We'll shut Joe Rogan. No, no, we're gonna do this Joe. I'm gonna send someone else. You're gonna find the edge of the world. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Big ice caps. They're knocking things off. I'm gonna film the drop off with my iPhone. Yes.
Yes. Go pee, man. Go pee. Don't you have to go? We're going to send someone else. Alex, we're going to do more. You know what? We're going to do this in a minute. I want to be the one that goes. I want to be the one that goes. Let me tell you something right now. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on.
Listen to me! You really think there's people out there campaigning for late-term abortions? You think that shit's real?
Who would kill that? Who would campaign for that? They fucking did it! That's a place against you! They're fucking killing Arnie Borkat! So you're telling me it isn't real? When they had a fucking vote and the goddamn fucking Senate! That's a conspiracy theory! You think you're fucking tough? You're about to get it! They're killing Arnie Bork, babies! Stop fucking lying! God fucking dead! I'm getting pissed now!
Don't get pissed, go- No! I mean, you saw the- Dude, it's- Don't just fucking- We really- Hold on, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex, Alex,
We went into a long conversation about that. We played... I heard it! Okay, you heard it. I heard the whole podcast! I'm playing with it! Okay. Don't imagine my psychosis as this. The reality is so crazy that I always thought I was so tough. I can't believe I didn't have to pee anymore. That I had an opus a little bit. The point is, is that... Why are we debating whether the earth is flat, dude? They're keeping... They have human animal hybrids!
Yeah, that's good stuff. That's what I mean. I feel like that is the pinnacle of where this medium can take us. Yeah, it's watching like that's it. He was in an extreme state. What about when you kick a buy a be comfortable? Keep the buy a be comfortable. Yeah, Chris is
Like, I listen to that podcast, like I go and run, so I'd listen to this and I thought, Fucking hell, man. Where else are you gonna get this content? Where is that? Well, there's no one would ever agree to it anywhere else. That's the thing. You'd never get a group of people whose jobs depended upon keeping the show on the air, whether they're producers or executives. They would never agree to that. They'd be like, you can't have that crazy fucker on. You can't have this on. You can't have Eddie Bravo on all the time. He thinks the world is flat. Stop this.
because he's traveling between such a diverse and unusual ideas, and sort of the thing with Alex Jones as well, is that he's like, he demonstrates to a point that there's veracity in what he's saying. Some things, yeah, he's right about a lot of things.
You know, when we were talking about animal human hybrids, we started pulling up these studies where they actually have done studies where they've tried to create animal human hybrids. Non-viable animal human embryos. They're trying to grow human organs in different animals. And there's all sorts of weird scientific shit that we're doing. Imagine what they're doing in China, behind walls. Look at this. China's latest cloned monkey experiment is an ethical mess.
They use CRISPR to add human genes into monkey genes, and there's like five monkeys. This happened back in January, and I don't know. Dude, this is a fucking horror movie. This is a horror movie. This is how the horror movie begins. Why did you think that once, if that's what's being revealed, the truth is darker.
Yes, for sure, for sure, they're trying to create super soldiers. Someone is trying to create some super soldier, some half champ, half human, super intelligent, murderous thing that's powered by remote control. That is not a good objective. No, don't see a good outcome for this super intelligent, murderous, remote control giant beam. But what if you could send those super intelligent, murderous champs to go kill ISIS?
