Russell Brand

00:13Welcome to America, Russell. Thank you for making me welcome in your space and your country. My pleasure. How you been, brother? It's been an unusual time. I've not been here for three years. Just went to Los Angeles. I have a house there. Visited it. It was like a sort of a time capsule, you know, like notes for stand-up shows I was doing then. And the graffiti has changed in the city of L.A. And the feeling of that city is altered. And you can tell that some sort of window, some portal has been passed through. And of course, I'm aware of, because it's a global event, I'm aware of what that has been. But it's strange to be back here. Yeah, it's interesting when you go away from something and then you come back and there's like a tangible feeling of change. Yeah, it's... I mean, I guess because I talk about American culture a lot, I come with a degree of anticipation.

01:06But it was a torrential rainstorm in Los Angeles. I'm aware that, like, you've moved out of there, that a lot of significant people in the space that I work in have moved out of there. And there was a feeling of uncanniness and eeriness. Some of the familiar sites for homelessness have been cleansed as if by Travis Bickle's rain. You know, it's sort of like just... Really? They've moved homeless people? For example, Gower Street. The Gower Street Bridge. There would always be sort of like a little tented community there. That seems to have been moved along and may be a perfect metaphor for that problem. You know, moving them rather than... You feel like those homeless people are still somewhere rather than that problem has found a resolution. No one really has a tangible resolution. I haven't heard one resolution that's like, okay, that we could put our fingers on. That's real.

01:57Do you know that in our country during the pandemic, in London especially, but also in other cities, they temporarily housed homeless people as one of the pandemic measures? Like, we can't have people on the streets. They'll cough on someone. Put them all in hotels. Put them in hostels. They solved it. And then when they reached the point where they were happy that the pandemic had leveled out, they kicked them all back out again. Right? That's it. We're not worried anymore. Get back out of there. I wonder why they did that. Do you think it was just too much time and effort to manage those people? Like, they're shooting up in the hotels and causing ruckus. I wonder what was the reason for putting them back on the street because it seemed like if they solved that, they should be like, oh, well, you know, let's just keep dedicating these resources to keep these people housed.

02:41I feel like that the anomaly was the housing rather than the ejecting. I feel like that they, when it was convenient and suitable, they could find a solution to homelessness that was an economic one. And then when it wasn't necessary anymore, they just pulled the rug out from under it. I'm sure, like, yeah, that comes with complexity. When I was first working in media, when I was still using Drug Addict myself, I did these things that I considered to be like psychological jackass. You know, that was a big show at that time. Those amazing guys doing those incredible stunts. And I was like, well, what if you did the psychological version of that? So I had like a boxing match with my dad. I had a homeless guy move in my house. I seduced an octogenarian lady. I jerked off a man in a toilet.

03:25All of these things were the periphery of my limits as a drug using young man, just trying to make my way in media. When I had that homeless guy come live in my house with me, James was his name. God rest his soul. Or like it was interesting to encounter that, you know, there's a reason. Of course, I fully accept and appreciate that that could happen to any of us, that any of us with a few wrong choices could end up destitute and lost without the kind of support and good fortune I've had in various areas of my life. I'm sure it could have happened to me. Of course it could have. But there was a sort of like a gravity pulling him back out into the street. You know, there's a gravity pulling it. It was like he couldn't couldn't deal with being in a house. Admittedly, these were not organic conditions. There was like cameras around and stuff. It was not a high it was not a high budget production.

04:11It was really lo-fi stuff on a lo-fi digital channel. But being around that guy, he was like a heroin user. I was using heroin with him at that time. The sort of peak of the show was when I got into it. We had a bath together. That was like I thought, what's the most intimate thing you could do with a person to sort of overcome the idea that homeless people are somehow dirty or different or, you know, like they should be excluded from society. So I had a bath with this guy. This stuff's still online somewhere, I presume. And, you know, it sort of pushed both of us to our limit. In the end, James decided that he preferred homelessness to live. Competing with you. That's right. He made his choices. In the end, we just got a taxi to nowhere. Just like just got a taxi for him and just let him out anywhere. He'll work his own way in the world. Yeah.

04:55So, like, of course, that problem of vagrancy and destitution, it's a difficult one to tackle. It makes me think that the culture is laid upon the planet. Like all culture, all civilization is laid upon the planet, laid upon Gaia, laid upon the earth. Like, you know, when you have people on here like Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson that talk about the potential for these seismic events and cataclysmic events that have reset civilization. It makes you recognize that all of our reference points, other than biological and cosmological, are cultural reference points and therefore temporal. And so a person living in a tent in the street is, in a sense, living a hunter-gatherer lifestyle in contemporary America or living a post-apocalyptic lifestyle in contemporary America. It makes me think sometimes, Joe, maybe the apocalypse is not a forthcoming event. Maybe the apocalypse has already happened.

05:46Maybe we're living in the sort of the already it's gentle threads are encroaching upon apparent civilization. You know, when you're in comfortable defined and designed spaces, you feel like everything's okay. The end of the world is impossible. And it just seems like entertainment when you hear about nuclear treaties being torn up. But it can't actually happen. But of course it can. It's so temporal. It's happened forever. It's always happened. The people that it happened to then, they never saw it coming. I don't know either. The way you're saying it is very interesting because I think the apocalypse is here on Earth. It's just not here. Like right here in Austin. It's not like right here in the studio. But it's in the Congo. Yeah.

06:28Like if you go to a cobalt mine in the Congo and you see a 19-year-old woman with a baby on her back mining for cobalt and inhaling toxic fumes, you're like, okay, well, that's the apocalypse. They have no electricity. They have no clean water. They make very, very little money. And they work all day. And they work for a company that puts cobalt into lithium-ion batteries that are in everyone's smartphone. So the height of our technology is directly connected to what's essentially slave labor. And that's the apocalypse. I mean, that might as well be the apocalypse. That might as well be Mad Max. That might as well be. I mean, it's just as bad. It's just as horrific. There's a very beautiful bit of investigation. I saw that episode. Siddharth Carr. Yeah, it's – he wrote that – what is the book called? Cobalt Red. Cobalt Red. Yeah.

07:18It's all about cobalt mining in the Congo and his investigation that he did into it. It's very, very – it's inspiring that a person is that selfless and can make that sort of a commitment and risk their life and go to a very dangerous place and expose this. Because he's a real journalist, like a real boots-on-the-ground journalist that wants to show the world some things that are being hidden from them. Because the people that are making enormous amounts of money from this that could fix it don't want to. They want to profit off of it at the exact level they're profiting off of it now, which means paying people a couple cents an hour or whatever they pay them. It's horrific. Yes, and it's a template that is unfortunately imprinted and repeated across cultural life. Yeah. But as you say, there are people right now living in the apocalypse. Yeah, there are. That can't get any worse or lower.

08:17And then even if that was – if you imagine, well, what would justify that? It could only be if we were all on ventilators that were sustaining life in the West. Even then it would be morally dubious. But the idea that it is for some trinket in terms of our phone that's ultimately a facilitator of ongoing commerce and communication at a level that's not sustainable. And I feel like, you know, that when we talk about what are the ideologies that drive us, the ideology of progress, this is why I have sometimes am sceptical, not about technology, the mastery and the geniuses that work in that field, but how technology and science as a subset of our economic ideology can create exactly the conditions that you're describing and that that journalist has exposed. That if your ideology permits that, then what kind of ideology is that? What kind of unconsciousness are we living in?

09:07It's not an awakened culture. And all of the discourse around, like, you know, how we treat one another as individuals and progressivism culturally in domestic territories, hey, people should be allowed to do this and that, it's all – it's nonsense if that is permitted. Not only permitted, required. It's a requirement. You cannot have that economic model without that price being paid. And as a culture, whether it's me as an individual or our entire culture, we've accepted that contract. We've accepted those terms. Well, we have in some areas of our life for sure. You know, hopefully people haven't done that in their interpersonal, intimate relationships, but we certainly have in the way we communicate with others. We've certainly accepted, like, very bizarre ways of communicating online.

09:49And sometimes that bleeds out into real life, like, where someone talks to people in the real world as if they're on Twitter and they get bashed. Like, you see that sometimes. I think it's a very strange time where I don't think people have a lot of faith right now in institutions. And I don't think they have a lot of faith in authority. I don't think they really believe that there is someone who is wiser than them that has a grand plan that's logical, that's workable, where they're looking out for all of us. So I think there's, like, a feeling of chaos that exists today that I don't think has ever existed in my life like this before. Even back during, like, the Bush administration when they thought, you know, everybody thought Bush was a moron. They still thought there's a good cabinet and they're following all the checks and balances, even though they're probably extracting too much money.

10:48And there's probably a lot of cronyism and a lot of undercover deals and a lot of, like, no-bid contracts with Halliburton and that kind of nonsense. He still thought they have things pretty under control. It's a very solid institution. Nobody believes that now. You see Pete Buttigieg and fucking Kamala Harris and Biden can't get a sentence out. Like, this is madness. These people are utter fools. And these are the people that are running everything. And these are the people that are getting us on the brink of war with Russia. And I don't have any faith in them. And I think most people don't. I think you're right. And with that era of the Cheney-Bush-Wolfowitz-Rumsfeld, it felt like, oh, these are the Death Star bods. What's happened is there's this risen-up military-industrial complex, Rand Foundation ideologues from the Republican right,

11:35who were the sanctioned baddies back in those days, are trying to profit from the colonization of the Middle East. It's part of a new American project. We sort of understood it. But from where I'm coming from, it was somehow recognizable. And a million people went on a march to prevent that war taking place because they knew there were no weapons of mass destruction, which we now know to be the truth. And as you say, now the figures that are in that place are sort of posing as the good guys, like affable and avuncular presidents and sort of friendly people across the identitarian spectrum that's meant to feel inclusive and progressive. Yeah, they're wrapping themselves up with progressive identity politics and then promoting a war. Yes. At the same time. It's very wild. Yeah, it feels like a mask and a veil. This is what's interesting for me.

12:23As we navigate this new and emergent space of being able to present counter narratives and continually, like all of us now, have experienced, oh, you're a right-wing conspiracy theorist. You've joined the alt-right. You're a gateway to this, the dark. All of that language that grows up around it. And I've heard you speak about this obviously a lot. But the truth is that who isn't sympathetic? Anyone that's got a family or loves someone is sympathetic to the idea that people are going to have various types of identity around culture and religious expression and racial expression. And this is a conversation that the whole culture has to be involved in together. What my issue is, I don't think they believe in that stuff. I don't think they care. I don't think that they are creating an agenda to advance the interests of vulnerable people.

13:06I think they are using it as a distraction and a veil in order to carry on with the same kind of corporate and financial interests that have always determined what the establishment is. And if there's one thing we can point to in our lifetime, it's that the liberal establishment has become co-opted by the same forces that traditionally we regarded the right to have been co-opted by. Military, industrial complex, financial industry. And there's now palpable evidence for that. And in order to not acknowledge that that transition has taken place, they're able to keep the cultural conversation going. We care about your right to express yourself and your identity. That's a way of not acknowledging we're just the same. We're pro-war. And now when there's that war, you know, like Jimmy Dore and all those guys did that anti-war march in Washington or whatever. It's like 5,000 people go.

13:51Now, I don't know if that's because of the last few years and what the pandemic's done to people accumulating and gathering crowds or whether people have lost their belief and faith that people can have any impact on politics anymore. There's just now this immersive sense of apathy. This, as you say, loss of trust in institutions and authority. But something extraordinary has happened when people that say that, you know, we're the peace and love party, are the party that are advocating for war, won't include some of the complex conditions that have led to this current crisis, which there's clearly a case for, like, you know, NATO's infringement on Russian territory, the 2014 coup. And I'm not telling you anything you don't know. But, like, it's extraordinary that those conversations don't happen. Right.

14:34It's like, actually, like, that post-Trump and post-pandemic, everything sort of enters into that template. There are certain things you're not allowed to say now. If you sort of say, were Russia in any way provoked, is there any legitimacy to their military actions from their perspective? That's the same as saying, oh, I don't think you should take certain medications or maybe masks aren't necessary. And people aren't, it doesn't seem that the culture is learning. It doesn't seem that the, as the evidence is evolving, that people are saying, oh, wow, look, the stuff you were being told two years ago now, the things you couldn't say online two or three years ago, now there's evidence for that. In fact, I've bought documentation in case the conversation went in this direction, Joe, in my new position as a legitimate investigative journalist.

15:19I've got actual papers that I can show you from conspiracy to fact. Well, the lab leak theory, that's the best one. The lab leak theory was openly considered racist. Yeah. And you'd be mocked. Even though legitimate biologists, like when I had Brett Weinstein on my podcast in April of 2020, he was saying back then, there's very clear evidence that this has come from a lab. And he explained it as a biologist who worked on coronaviruses from bats. Like that's literally his expertise, his area of expertise. So he had a deep knowledge of this. So when he was describing it, people were furious at him. They were demonetizing his YouTube videos and going after him and all these progressive people on the left. It's like you're falling into this whole alt-right Trump this and that. They weren't even paying attention to an actual biologist who actually understands and has studied viruses.

16:18And he's saying this has all the indications of a lab-created virus that we would work on. All of those conversations you were having, like Malone and McCullough and Weinstein, when you actually listen to what they're saying, they're talking from a biological perspective. They're scientists and doctors. It's not political rhetoric. At all. They're saying, I believe in this and this is how we should organize culture and these are the hierarchies that should be in place. So it was extraordinary that what they were met with was politically and ideologically driven. At the beginning of it, it seemed like there was such an appetite to frame everything Trump was doing as ridiculous that they sort of highlighted and framed Fauci saying, I think Trump said it could have come from a lab. And Fauci said that's ridiculous and it's implausible.

17:00But like you said, Weinstein was like, oh, no, you can't have that evolutionary step without the intervention of engineering. Have you read The Real Anthony Fauci by Robert Kennedy Jr.? I read some of it. The letters are very small in the book, aren't they? Like I've got it as a physical book. It's very small print. It's challenging. I've been listening to it. I've been listening to the audio book. Who's doing the reading? Not Robert Kennedy himself. No, no, no. No, Robert has a voice issue. Yes, he has that voice issue. You know, ironically got that voice issue from a vaccine injury. Whoa. Yeah, isn't that crazy? It's like it got its revenge in first. It started it off, I think. It was he had a side effect from the flu shot. And that's one of the side effects. It's a very rare side effect. But one of the side effects of the flu shot is people develop some sort of problem with their vocal cords.

17:52These characters that have become so maligned and marginalized, even in my lifetime where I still worked in mainstream media, people like Alex Jones or David Icke, they were like even people that were skeptical about them. Or even people that ridiculed them didn't try to posit them as dangerous. And the same, I'm assuming, with Robert Kennedy. Well, the David Icke one, they always made fun of him for lizard people. Because he always would say that they're shapeshifters and they're lizards and there was no evidence. It just seemed really preposterous. And then in the beginning of the pandemic, he was trying to connect COVID with 5G. There was a lot of weird, like, he's got some squirrely ones. Believe it or not, like, it's hard to say, like, to the general public, Alex Jones is way more reliable than David Icke. But he's way more reliable than David Icke.

18:47Alex made a tremendous mistake with Sandy Hook. And he did that in a time of his life where he's experiencing a psychotic break. He was drinking a lot and he was having a mental breakdown. And he really believed that everything was a conspiracy and that the government is essentially run by these evil demons who are trying to depopulate America and ruin people. And he thought they were trying to take away people's guns. And he was convinced that someone had convinced him. I don't know how he, I don't know what documentaries or what videos he saw. But he was convinced that they were using crisis actors and that they were orchestrating a false flag. He was obviously very wrong. Yes. And he's admitted that he was wrong about that. But he's been right about a lot of things. So many things. And I've talked about this many times. But he was the guy who told me about Epstein's Island more than a decade ago.

19:42And I thought it was the craziest thing I'd ever heard. I was like, what are you saying? There's an island. Like it sounds like a plot in a movie. There's an island where they fly famous rich scientists and politicians. And they compromise them with underage girls and get it on film so they could use it against them. Like what? That sounds like horse shit. That sounds like lizard people. It sounds like, you know, 5G creates COVID. Same thing. Yeah. But turns out it was true. And it's one of many things. He was the first one to warn me about a social credit score system. He's like, they're going to try to implement a social credit score system. And your money is going to be tied. They'll have centralized digital currency. And your money will be tied to your social credit score system. And you step out of line. You won't be able to buy things. You won't be able to travel. You won't be able to do anything.

20:30They're going to try to keep you within a 15-minute radius of your home. And they're starting to do that in places. All of it's real. And in China, the social credit score system is 100% real and implemented. I wonder what our obligation is as people that participate in this conversation to ensure that there is a distinction made between the empirical facts that are discussed. And then you, in particular, with your rather unique cultural space, the joy of speculation. Because when you think about some of the stuff that Alex Jones has said and putting aside Sandy Hook and that acknowledged difficulty and transgression, some of it's as rhetoric is amazing. Yes, there are sort of centralized systems of corruption that bypass democracy. And ultimately, there is an agenda that can bypass administrative change. Policies that come out under the Republicans are pursued by the Democrats.

21:27And the military-industrial complex are able, through lobbying and through their overt and covert connections to government, able to dictate foreign policy, at least influence foreign policy. All of these things you can sort of demonstrate financially. But when you start to describe it in terms of demons and reptiles, the kind of language that even 500 years ago was the ordinary way. You know, he's a preacher, isn't he, Alex Jones? He's somewhere between a shaman and a preacher. He operates in that space. And in a way, you need people on the cultural periphery to be able to say, watch out, watch out, watch the direction we're going in. Because the thing is, is that the way that we're behaving at the moment is all underwritten by rationalism. This is the, you know, follow the science. This is the rational thing. Putin is it. But it's just as inaccurate. It's not true either.

22:16Now, of course, you know, like when you start talking about, well, UFOs until very recently, or lizard people or shapeshifters, you're entering into a territory that makes it easy for you to be ridiculed. Makes it easy for you to be taken down. Now, like, you know, so the times that they are accurate or correct, you know, like even because if you think of the way that you were framed around the pandemic period, it's like, has far right people on conspiracy theorists. And, of course, they've obviously got an agenda and it's their agenda that is driving the discourse, not the facts of the matter. And I suppose in a way, we should be grateful that they are unwilling to have these open conversations. They're not willing to get people on with various views, opposing views, to listen to people that they disagree with, to openly criticise the establishment.

22:59Because what I've been able to learn in the last couple of years is you if you start focusing on the relationships between big pharma and the media or big pharma and the government, just by focusing on that, you can really create clear narratives of corruption, hypocrisy, dishonesty. Those things are there. But me, because my background is not a journalist, it's not a conventional education, I'm sort of open to the more extraordinary, exciting, visceral ideas, which once in a while prove to be true, like the example of Epstein Island. But then you become kind of porous and you're like, oh, yeah, no, tell me all of this stuff. Right. And then it's hard to sort out the wheat from the chaff. A little bit, isn't it? And also your credibility suffers. And it's like, you know, you've obviously managed to sort of follow, like pursue this path saying, I'm a comedian. I'm not like got an obligation.

23:50I'm not a journalist. I'm open to everybody. But it seems that as the cultural role changes, as the power and magnetism, because of the needs, because of the necessity, because people just aren't, like you say, the loss of trust in institutions, the loss of trust in authority, being open and willing to have those conversations grants you all power. And then the commercial power comes and the financial power comes. And suddenly you've got to navigate it. And I think it all came together in that it seemed, at least from the perspective of an observer, in the ivermectin moment that the culture should be able to tolerate a conversation. The culture, that shouldn't be verboten. Well, not just that, but the blatant lies that CNN was telling about it.

24:29When you had CNN and MSNBC and all these different cable news network shows calling it horse dewormer, when it was a drug that won the Nobel Prize for the inventor of it, is a drug that has had billions, literally billions of prescriptions filled. It's a drug that saved lives, a drug that's on the World Health Organization's list of essential medicines. And for them to have the gall and to have the sheer audacity to just out and out lie to people about what a medication is. And it's used on humans far more than it's used on horses. And that they were calling that horse dewormer to try to mock me because they knew that I was unvaccinated and I kicked COVID very quickly. And they did not want that narrative out there. And they were beholden to their handlers. They were beholden to the people that give them exorbitant amounts of money in advertising revenue.

25:29And they fucking followed in line and they all piled on and they lost a fuckload of credibility from it. Yeah. I mean, if you look at the way people who saw that, how many people saw that and would go, oh my God, they're just lying. Yeah. They're just lying. Like, there's no excuse for that. You can't imagine a scenario where they really thought I was taking horse medication. You can't imagine a scenario where they thought that I couldn't get real people medication. You can't imagine it. I'm not poor. I'm not without resources. I'm not confused. I'm not without the recommendations of actual physicians. Like, none of that makes any sense. The idea that they could go on television and say, oh, this conspiracy theorist is taking horse dewormer. And that was the narrative, not, hey, how'd that guy get better so quick? Yeah.

26:25How is it three days after he got COVID, we shut the whole country down for this thing and he looks fine. And then they changed my filter and turned me yellow on television. Like, they took the original video of me and ran it through a filter to make me look horrible. It's really, they did some wild shit. But that wild shit that they did cost them their credibility. I just don't think they understood the landscape when they were doing that. I don't think they do at all. I think they took an extreme editorial perspective without realising that's what they were doing. And I think that the entire mainstream culture has actually found itself on a kind of a peninsula. Where there is insignificant variety, in my view, between the two parties, which is why they're so willing to remain engaged in cultural war discourse

27:10and the conventional hot button topics in this country in particular around the pro-life, pro-choice and guns arguments. They're willing to remain in that territory because financially and economically they are ultimately aligned. That the most powerful interests in America are happy with either outcome. I think that what's happened in the media space is they've unwittingly found themselves in a place where there's a kind of a, that incompetence was afforded. That they're not used to being challenged. That the assumption was that you would be sunk by that narrative. That it was an insignificant new space. And obviously it was a massive miscalculation because they weren't watching what was happening. They weren't listening to the conversations with McCulloch and Malone and Weinstein. And that it is apolitical. And that also, in order to make themselves seem distinct from one another,

27:56they have amplified their small differences to the point where they don't recognise actually that that isn't America anymore. That people like that. Even when I was a kid, if someone was just like right wing, that's just like, oh, that's a right wing person. Like you'd be in your family around your table. I read something about Tucker Carlson the other day. Like, you know, because of the release of those January the 6th documents to Fox and to Tucker in particular. And it said, far right journalist Tucker Carlson. If Tucker Carlson's not far right, he's like a normal right wing guy. Far right means marching and red, white and black flags. I've seen me written as far right. Far right. They've described me as far right. Tattoos on the face. Extreme. Boots. You know, like. Boots. Yeah. Far right's not just like, oh, I believe in Christianity. Right. Stuff like that. So the rhetoric has become hysterical.

28:48And the horse medicine was the same. They had the option of saying, look, we don't know that there's no evidence as yet that ivermectin is effective in these spaces because no one's trialing it. Because there's no money in it. Because science is a subset of big pharma and the economic imperatives that are offering. No one's doing experiments into natural immunity because natural immunity is not profitable. No one's doing those. Those experiments are not being underwritten. There's no clinical trials for that. Because no one wants that data for vitamin D or for steroids or for all of the things that came out as ultimately effective once the profits have been gleaned. And then how can you expect to maintain the authority? How can you expect to sit behind those logos of CNN and MSNBC and claim that kind of piety and certainty? And the way that they were, like, outraged by it was astonishing.

29:32Like a kind of a how dare you? How dare you have this credibility? How dare people listen to you? And I think that it's precisely because of a willingness to listen one day to a left-wing person, a right-wing person, some people with some crazy theories. Some people talking about Egypt. Some people talking about MMA. That's how people are now. People don't want that kind of centralized authority. It's over because of the way that technology has afforded people access to a variety of news sources. And a counter-narrative for any story can emerge almost at the same speed as a narrative. So now the price of authority is legitimacy. Authority has to be legit. And you can't, like, the same way as they did that horsewormer stuff with you. Like, if you watch Biden in Poland, he said, like, this speech is along the lines of, Putin thought that Ukraine would roll over.

30:14Putin didn't know how brave Ukrainian people are. He is a tyrant. And, of course, Ukrainian people are brave. Of course, it's disgusting that they're suffering under this military invasion. But there's, like, I could handle it, I think, if the president went, listen, we were involved in that coup in 2014. The kind of, even the sort of people that are, the diplomats that are involved in this are the same diplomats that are involved in stuff like Iraq and Afghanistan. BlackRock are going to profit subsequently from the rebuild of Ukraine. Russia have got their agenda. We've got our agenda. We believe our agenda is more in line with what most American citizens will benefit. But they can't actually say that because it isn't true because what they want is a unipolar hegemonic world. In the same way that CNN don't even consider that what they're saying is dangerous and harmful.

31:00And now we're at a point where it's sort of that their approach to it may have been counterproductive in the most basic medical ways. And they weren't able to have that conversation because of financial imperatives and because they're basically owned. Well, they're a propaganda network. I mean, that's really all they are. They're just a propaganda network. And I used to think they were the news. And I think at one point in time they were the news. And I think somewhere along the line when pharmaceutical drug companies started spending so much money. I mean, you've seen all those clips brought to you by Pfizer. Anderson Cooper brought to you by Pfizer. There is no way they can be honest. There's no way. If you're accepting money from the very people that you now have to hold criminally liable. And they have been criminally liable.

31:46I mean, they have the highest criminal fines of any companies ever for crimes. Like what they've done. Lies. Lies. Covering up evidence. And they just pay a fine and go back to work. And that's what's wild about it. If you killed 60,000 people with your company and, you know, your company, whatever your company made. Your company makes peanut butter. And that peanut butter killed 60,000 people. They'd be like, you've got to stop making peanut butter. It's delicious. Yeah. But with the drug companies, they're like, oh, your experimental drug where you lied about all the tests killed 60,000 people. Well, we're going to need a small portion of the money that you made as a fine. Like Vioxx. I forget what the actual numbers were, but it's something along the lines of Vioxx made somewhere around $12 billion. It killed somewhere between 50,000 and 60,000 people.

32:42And they had to pay somewhere in the range of $5 billion in fines. Don't quote me on the numbers, but it's pretty close to that. That's wild. Yes. Because that means you are allowed to profit, essentially a profit, $7 billion and kill 50,000 plus people. That's okay. And you can still go to work. Yeah. That's a pretty extreme ideology to underwrite a system. And it's the kind of ideology that in the end is going to lose credibility. Because when you do replace it for something like peanut butter, it makes it, it jars with us. We recognize, oh yeah, we are just permitting that. Another thing that was extraordinary is the sudden authority that we were willing to grant to these corporations that had been like the baddies up until 20 minutes before. Exactly. We know what Pfizer had done. We know the out-of-court settlements.

33:27We know what Johnson & Johnson had done with the alleged carcinogens in baby powder. But I mean stories that sound like they're out of a Bill Hicks joke, like actually happening in reality. I heard this thing that that guy, Pavlov of the dogs, you know, like he did other experimentation, the results of which were that 20% of people are highly susceptible to hypnosis and similarly highly susceptible to placebos. Like 20% of people who have been given placebos, it will be effective under the right conditions or whatever. And the same with hypnosis. And 20% of people will not be hypnotized and will not respond to placebos. The middle 60% is where propaganda operates. How many of that middle 60% can you persuade? And I was just astonished that authoritarianism could suddenly be repackaged in this manner. That authoritarianism could tell you that war is a good thing.

34:17That authoritarianism could tell you that big, that big farmer is a good thing. That being locked in your home is a good thing. And all the pieces of evidence sort of fell away from it. Oh, no, natural immunity is effective. Oh, no, there are adverse events. Oh, there are cases of myocarditis. Oh, no, there are like every single bit of masks aren't working. All of it just started to fall apart. And somehow they're expecting the eligibility of their authority to have maintained in spite of everything, the edifice cracking open. And it's so convenient that of all the remedies, that only the ones that are controlled by pharmaceutical companies are the ones that get highlighted. And one of the best pieces of evidence for that is vitamin D. And there was a recent study. See if you can find this.

35:01There was a recent study that estimated somewhere between somewhere in the range of 70% of all hospitalizations and deaths from COVID could have been prevented with vitamin D. I don't know if that's true. But I remember reading that article going, that is the most insane thing I've ever seen in my life. And when did they know that this was true? Because if they just started handing out vitamin D, it's readily available, so easy to get, so easy to make, so cheap. They just handed out vitamin D to everybody. How many deaths could they have prevented? If that really is the case, that high level, high doses of vitamin D, along with, you know, it's great with magnesium and vitamin K. But if they had educated people about nutrients. Yes. And about the value of nutrition, the value of supplementation. Yes. How many people could have been saved? And how cheaply could that have been done?

35:52When you were talking about health at the beginning of the pandemic, which seems like a pretty obvious and rudimentary thing to talk about, exercise, eat well. I feel like even that is getting framed as a kind of a right wing narrative now. Which is bizarre. To look after and love your body. It's extraordinary the way that that has altered. I feel that in a way what the pandemic did was it revealed the long con of corporatization of government. That if over the last 50, 60 years, government has become increasingly corporatized, that democracy has become increasingly hollowed out and irrelevant. It just took a crisis event to reveal the extent to which that had taken place. Now, the people that are in the outreaches and some of the people in the comments below will talk about, no, the whole thing is staged. It's a global event.

36:36The whole thing has been put in place in order to bring about social credit scores and more surveillance and to facilitate lockdowns. And those are the things that are very, very difficult to prove. But what I think you can demonstrate is over the last 50, 60 years, through lobbying and demonstrable means, corporations have had more and more ability to exert influence and downright control government policy, regardless of which party is in power. And then a crisis event took place. And the momentum that carried it through, like governments have a, the governments like control. That's what governments are about is authority. But big corporations like profit. That's what they're about. And those two things came together. So the solution that was suggested is, well, we can exert control through lockdowns and potentially come in as close as, damn it, to mandate in medicines.

37:20They can benefit the indemnity that they were granted. It was kind of a perfect storm and perfect revelation. We spoke to a person. I don't think you've had him because I'm sure I would have been aware if you had this guy, Martin Goury, who was a CIA operative who wrote a book called The Revolt of the Public. And he said he was a CIA analyst in 2001. And in 2001, there was as much information published that year as in all human history up to that point. And in 2002, it doubled again. And he said, when you look at those analytics on a screen, it looks like a tidal wave. And he said that that image stayed with him. And he recognized that power was going to alter radically because if information can be created and exchanged that quickly, centralized authority is going to be massively challenged.

37:59Either the way that we govern communities and nations is going to radically alter with more power being devolved, with more democracy, with more ability to run your own communities, with more feedback and communities such as the online world is starting to suggest, communities forming around subjects or individuals or figures or ideologies. Or, and this seems to be what's happening, centralized authority is going to double down, look for ways to smear dissenters, censor, create new categories like misinformation, disinformation, suddenly find acceptable views of five, ten years ago are now not acceptable and are banned. Tolerance somehow decreasing under the veil of increasing tolerance, literal Orwellianism, changing the meaning of words, going back, editing books, stuff that we've seen in dystopian sci-fi actually happening.

38:44Martin Gurri, the CIA analyst, offers us that the reason that's happening is because there's a recognition that centralized authority models cannot operate. The elites cannot govern the planet in the same typical way that they've been able to, say, from the 50s or whenever. I'm not an expert in this kind of stuff. But he said, unless we're going to lose things that he considers worth saving, because this guy, Mind Gurri, he's not like a radical person. He likes liberal democracy. He's a first-generation immigrant, I think, from Cuba in this country, worked at the CIA. He's not like some sort of pot-smoking radical. He's like a person, but he was saying that what's happened is they've not been able to acknowledge the way that the world has changed. It's changed in an unprecedented way. The first observable sign or one-off being Napster. The second one, the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement.

39:27And they've not recognized that now there's a different conversation. And then, you know, you can add you, actually, to that, because what happened was like, oh, now what we'll do is we'll shut this geezer down. But they couldn't because the economics of that, we were already too big in the space for that to happen. So they don't know how to. He said it was going to happen. Even new elites will emerge to understand how technology works. And I guess that's why we're seeing, you know, have seen the rise of social media, the amount of power those big tech companies have, their ability to evade taxation. The degree to which the Twitter files revealed they work closely with deep state operatives to a point that we just wouldn't know had Elon Musk not made those moves. I think they're also operating with very crude tools currently that will soon change with AI. Right.

40:08I think AI is going to completely shift the narrative. And then from then on, you're going to be dealing with disinformation on just a vast scale of impossible to decipher. You're not going to – like I watched a video today of Joe Biden talking about some girl's ass. It wasn't real. But it's like, here, I'll send it to Jamie so we can play it because it's so crazy like what they can do now. It's just how long before it's absolutely impossible to detect. How long before you have no idea what's real and what's not real. It's not that long from now. Yeah. And they'll be able to – the people that own these enormous tech companies will be in cahoots with government like they are now that, you know, they censor narratives. They demonetize people that talk about COVID in the wrong way or even at all. They're going to do that same kind of thing.

41:00And they're going to do that same kind of thing with whatever they want to – whatever they want to highlight. Yeah. Like any narrative they want to highlight. And you – like as a consumer, as a person on the outside that's just watching things, it's going to be so confusing. And there's going to be narratives that like if you're an inclusive person that believes in equity and fairness for all, you'll believe this narrative. And then if you're a person who believes in liberty and the First Amendment and the Second Amendment and protect our borders, you're going to believe that narrative. And then they're going to feed it with fake news and fake video and fake voices. Here, I'll play this, Jamie. Here you go. When you see these things, they're crude now. Like you know it's fake because you know the actual recordings of Joe Biden talking.

41:51But how long before it's a video that's completely indiscernible? You're not going to be able to know if it's fake or real. You can have him doing things that he's never done before. Fucking booty I've ever seen. God damn, that shit was huge. I could barely believe my eyes, man. I had to cool myself off with a chocolate chocolate chip ice cream cone from Ben and Jerry's. Shit was actually fire. No pun intended. My buddy Kevin from the Secret Service then brought me to the White House to sign some more shit. It was probably more money for Bolensky in Ukraine, but I didn't really give a fuck. Remember to keep it real and vote for me in 2024. Swipe it. How wild is that? Yeah, as has been commented, I wish he was this competent. The most alarming thing is that's a really cohesive sentence from Joe Biden. He's got a bit sexist, but his faculties are in order. It's bizarre how far he's deteriorated.

42:42And when I was talking about it during the election, and people were like, I was actually talking about it with Eric Weinstein. And he was like, I mean, I can't vote for Biden. And he goes, I can't vote for Trump. And I go, I would vote for Trump before I'd vote for Biden. Just because I think with Biden, like, he's gone. Like, you know he's gone. You're going to be relying on his cabinet. And I knew his cabinet would be this fucking sideshow of diversity, which is exactly what it is. I mean, that one person who stole all the women's clothes that Sam Brinton we highlighted on the podcast yesterday. Like, that's a diversity hire. You just said, oh, look at this. A man who dresses like a woman and has a beard and a mustache but also wears lipstick. This is perfect for us. I don't give a fuck what this guy's good at or bad at. I don't give a fuck what their credentials are.

43:32This makes us look like we're inclusive. This makes us look like we're on the right side. So let's hire this person. And you can't have those kind of people running a Ben and Jerry's. You certainly can't have those kind of people running the fucking most powerful government the world's ever known. It's nonsense. It's nonsense. What they've been able to do is introduce contentious issues to the forefront of the culture that prevent the kind of alliances that are necessary taking place. The reason that when I'm over here, I'm having conversations, in addition to the great privilege of coming on your show with, like, you know, going on Bill Maher or going on Tucker or Ben Shapiro is because I feel like there's got to be a new conversation around politics. We can't just stay in these little camps.

44:15Now, like, I feel sometimes that Joe Biden is the perfect president for the time because he's got the perfect metaphor of what it is. This system is over. And for all of the talk of diversity, what have you got? You've got like a career politician, white male that's falling apart before your very eyes. It's telling you that it's bullshit and that they'll put people in positions in order to carry that narrative. But for no other reason, because I don't truly believe that they deeply care about those ideas. And even if they do deeply care, the decisions they're making are decisions that are in alignment with the agenda of Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, with a centralized banking authority. It's not going to change the world for any of them. They've managed to turn, make ordinary American people hate one another, like on the basis of a 50-50 split.

45:01You can't criminalize half of a country and say that they're far right fascists anymore than you can say that, in my view, extreme leftists. These kind of issues oughtn't be what's determining how a country is run. And when they are the issues that determine how a country is run, the powerful run amok, the elites are able to pursue their agenda just fine. Yeah, because they've got us in these ideological camps and they've got people infighting and ignoring real problems. It's such a transparent hustle. It's so obvious to see how it's being set up and how easy it is to get people to fall in line with it. That's one of the most disturbing things that happened during COVID is how easy people rolled over. I was like, this is wild. I expected more pushback. I expected more people to ask about the data. And particularly when they started saying they were going to vaccinate children.

45:51I expected more people to go, hey, hey, hey, what's the fucking data on kids? Or when they were telling people to vaccinate pregnant women. I was like, what data do you have on pregnant women? Because pregnant women, if you like normal medication, when a pregnant woman is taking normal medication, they have to be very careful. Because stuff that you can take when you're not pregnant with very little concern all of a sudden becomes a real issue if you have a developing fetus in your body. It's a giant issue. You're a father. You know what it's like when your wife goes through that. It's kind of crazy because there's real concern. Like you can't take this. You can't drink. You can't smoke. You can't this. You can't that. You shouldn't take stem cells. You shouldn't take nootropics. There's so many different things. But yet this vaccine with zero testing on any pregnant people was fine.

46:47Wasn't it worrying that when you're kind of— And encouraged. When you're layman speculation, like the speculation of people that have not been to university. And they're like, hey, but hold on. You're not going to get pregnant women volunteering for clinical trials. So there's no way you could have tested this on— Hey, hold on. You can't know what's going to happen five years down the line because you've not had a five-year time frame unless you were preparing this thing five years ago. In which case, how come you were preparing this thing five years ago? The kind of speculations that were being had conversationally in spaces like this one have proven to be true. You can't validate it. Children aren't doing clinical trials. Turns out they didn't do clinical trials for transmission or have any viable data that it stopped transmission.

47:25It was like that's one of the things that alarmed me most is, yeah, how easy people rolled over to an authoritarian edict in countries like mine and yours where it was assumed that that wouldn't happen. I remember the narrative being when the stuff was going on in China. Good luck trying that stuff in the United States. Right, right, right. And then they pulled it off. Pulled it off. If you amplify fear, I feel like it might be like with how it is on an individual level. It's always hard to scale what affects you as an individual to what affects a bloody planet. But like if I'm frightened, I become suggestible. When I'm frightened, I'll be like, oh, just give me authority. I'm calling the 911 now. I'm willing to, like, you know, when my wife is sick or whatever, I'm calling, you know, suddenly the Reiki ain't an option no more. Fuck the crystals. Get that shit out of here.

48:09Get me a physician in a white coat with a stethoscope driving a Bentley right now. I want the comfort of that. I'll do whatever I want. Pfizer, give them the money for Christ's sake. You know, and I feel like if you do that, if you, as they say, gaslight an entire nation, if people are operating at a state of fear, I mean, what does that do to us biochemically? What does it have more like, you know, fear and authority go together, I feel. Like when you are frightened, I want someone else to be in control. Yeah, and that's what was one of the scary things about the pandemic was they learned from that. They learned how easy people did roll over. Because it was our first pandemic. It was the first pandemic of our lifetime. The first real genuine pandemic since 1918. And so when that happened, I think there was a real revelation, a real realization that they can do this. And so what's the next one?

48:57Is it climate change? Like, what is it? What is going to be the reason why they decide to implement the same sort of lockdowns or the same sort of authoritarian control tactics that they used in the last couple of years? They're going to do it again. They're going to do it again. I think people are going to be more resistant to it because a lot of people have suffered through this pandemic. A lot of people lost their jobs. A lot of people lost their businesses. A lot of people got alienated from their community. And then it turned out they were right. And now people are upset and bitter. I mean, there's so much talk of not forgiving people that shamed people for not getting vaccinated. There's so much of that going on like, fuck them. And, you know, my take from the very beginning is like, you can't do that. Like, there's no way you can stop forgiving people.

49:45That's the dumbest thing you could ever choose to do. Like, stop forgiving people who are scared, who made mistakes. Like, are you infallible? You know, are we going to deny people one of the most basic behavior characteristics that human beings exhibit when they're pressured? So they make mistakes and they cower and they show fear. So you're going to write these people off forever because they decided to be assholes because they were scared? Like, that's ridiculous. You can't do that. I suppose this is where it's a requirement to have some genuine values like clemency, compassion, forgiveness, things that also seem to be getting extracted out of the culture. It's not like there's a set of principles that people have recourse to, a set of binding ideals.

50:29It feels to me like that the only safeguard at this point is some sort of resolute democracy to say, we're thinking that the best thing would be 15 minute cities. But of course, you can vote for whether you want your city to be a 15 minute. We're thinking the best thing might be this medication. But of course, you can vote. What you don't want is the WHO determining that in the next pandemic, they have the right to implement by their votes contained within the WHO lockdown measures, medication measures, which is something that they're lobbying for currently. I understand less and less democracy, more and more ability for unelected global is I would have to say globalist organizations to assert political influence over nations. And that's what we saw here.

51:10And when you know that the WHO's second biggest funder is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and he invests so heavily into these vaccines. Again, like stuff that gets called conspiracy theory. But you can look at the evidence is there. The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation profited millions of dollars on the vaccines. Millions. Millions and millions of dollars. It's all easy to find. And then once he dumped the stock, then he completely changed his narrative and he started talking about how ineffective the vaccines were and about how the virus wasn't as bad as we thought it was. And about how the virus was mostly targeting old and obese people. Like this is fucking wild because this is the same guy that through the entire pandemic was talking about how great these vaccines are and these vaccines are so effective and they stopped the virus and they stopped transmission. They stopped infection.

52:00And all that was a lie. And he profited off those lies. Yes. And no, everyone wants to pretend that he's just like this amazing philanthropist. Like, no, he made a lot of money. This is motivated by money. And his entire career, he's been motivated by money. He's been a guy who is really good at monopoly. And that was why they went after Microsoft so many times for monopolistic practices. I mean, he's a businessman. And in that time, his business was the business of telling people things that he's not educated in. He's not a scientist. He's not a virologist. He's not a medical doctor. Yet he was this public health advocate on television telling everybody to go out and get this medical intervention that he would profit from, which is fucking wild. It's really wild that it's that transparent.

52:55That it's not like multiple steps and shell corporations and it's really difficult to find out where the money's going. It's like right there. It's like the Nancy Pelosi stock trading thing. It's like, Jesus Christ, it's right there. Like, you knew. And so you did that and sold. And you did that and bought. And you've made hundreds of millions of dollars off of a $100,000 a year salary. Like, what the fuck is going on? This is crazy how transparent it is. You're not even hiding it. It's right there. I suppose the only way you can prevent those questions being addressed is by making the people asking those questions uncredible. Like, discrediting those people. Because otherwise, it is plain. Bill Gates ain't Willy Wonka. He ain't doing this for like a competition. There's no golden ticket at the end of this. It's like, yeah, not-for-profit organizations making profit.

53:41An incredible amount of influence in areas that he profits from. All sorts of peculiar business practices like in India and on the continent of Africa that have led to palpable suffering and profit in his case. The Africa thing is wild. And that's a big part of this, the real Anthony Fauci book. He talks about Bill Gates quite a bit. And one of the things he talks about is how they've always used Africa as a place where they test out medicines. They've used Africa as a place where they test out. And this is another thing that I learned from Alex Jones. Alex Jones was saying that they were giving kids the polio vaccine in Africa and that Bill Gates was involved in this. And they had to stop doing it because it was actually giving kids polio. And I was like, what? And they pull up an AP article. There was an AP story about this. And it shows this terrified little African baby.

54:30And they're dropping the polio vaccine in his mouth. Like, squeezing his face, dropping his mouth. I'm like, what the fuck, man? They gave kids polio with a vaccine? Even when you accept everything that they say at this late point when it appears impossible to do that, they wouldn't release patents so that African nations could recreate the vaccines over there. So clearly there's a profit motive. And I saw him publicly talk about that and say, oh, no, it's not as simple as that. You can't just give people the patents and stuff. But it seems like if you recognize that what drives them always is power, finance and dominion, if you always look at that and then track their actions, you hardly ever see a disruption in that pattern. What has this been like for you to go from this guy who was this loved comedic actor,

55:18this stand-up comic, and then you kind of just sort of start walking on this path of talking about things. And walking on this path where now, you know, you have printed pieces of paper. And you're standing there, you're reading things, and you're showing videos, and you're mocking this stuff. You brought printed pieces of paper with you? What has this been like for you as a person to find yourself? Because I think in many ways we both kind of stumbled into this. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. Look, I came on here when I was still like a movie actor. I came on, I think, the first time I came on, it was in your first thousand shows. I can't remember the exact number because that would be almost creepy if I did. But like I remember just coming on, people were like, and I'd not heard of it. Oh, there's this guy Joe Rogan. It was that sort of time.

56:03And then I came on, and like I was sort of amazed by it. And do you know what I liked is the amount of personal authority that you had and the lack of compromise. You know, because you've worked in conventional entertainment as well, how much compromise that comes with. That you have to essentially, you know, you have to turn up on time. Producers and executives, and there's all sorts of people pulling the strings and telling you what to do. Because like when you said that thing, I remember when Kevin Smith came on and he'd offered you a part in a movie, and you went, nah, man, like I ain't getting up. I'm not going to be in a trailer at 4 a.m. And like, and I thought, oh, yeah. Like I loved making like some of those movies. I mean, I'm pretty grateful coming from where I come from that I got to have all of those experiences. And you know, it's like, it's giddy. It's amazing. It's exciting.

56:48It's euphoric and fulfilling in loads of those ways. And actually met some really, really incredible people within that industry. It's not like it's solely awful and solely hollow. It was kind of amazing. But I think like this was significant. I've done sort of podcasts like they were affiliated with BBC radio shows that I'd done, you know, prior to becoming an actor. So I've always had those kind of conversations. And I suppose what it must be is because where I'm coming from, I come from a place called Essex, which is like the New Jersey of England. It's outside of London. It's blue collar, somewhat trashy. That's the kind of sort of place it is. I became a junkie relatively young, like sort of, you know, like my late teens, early 20s. I was a heroin addict. And I feel like that when I got, I had to get clean because it was getting out of control.

57:35And when I got clean, I was full of appetite and ambition and all of that kind of stuff. And it just was natural to become a stand-up comedian was an easier fit than an actor because of the collaborations and the requirements of it and the cooperation. And I love acting. But like they're having to do what you're told, actually. It's not really who I am. So like that period of working, like the people I work with you say, you don't like any aspect of this. You don't like dressing up. You don't like putting makeup on. You don't like getting up early. You don't like being told what to do. You don't like being directed. Like it's like you don't like any aspect of that profession. I like stand-up comedy because you live or die on your own merits. So like, so I had like both of those competing things, but no one, like I didn't have the strength of character to resist the allure of when I did an MTV show.

58:19Sandler came on it, Adam Sandler, and liked me and said, do you want to be in a movie more or less? Like I went in a movie with him. Then I met Judd Apatow and those people did those movies. And it was aspects of it, as I say, were incredible. And those people in particular, Judd Apatow and Sandler were like really amazing, lovely people. But like after like I came on here and like during the past, like I'd done, I used to always talk about, I've always been anti-establishment. I've never trusted authority because of personal reasons. You know, like I don't, I didn't like school. If you're a drug addict, you get arrested sometimes because shoplifting and because of possession of drugs. So I've always had that kind of relationship with authority. So when I started to be able to have my own voice, when this technology kind of opened up, when I realized, oh my God, I can just sort of do this.

59:03It really evolved. It started at the beginning of the pandemic. I was just sort of like, like started commenting on it. I was in Australia when it started. And like I do stuff online anyway. So I was like, oh, this is going to be a weird time for all of us. And then it started to become clear that it was a perfect lens to observe how power operates, sort of the inability to question authority, agenda for profit, agenda to assert control, stuff that just didn't feel right for me. We started doing the stuff. And like the guy I worked with, Gareth, who's out there actually, who reduces the show. He's not the same as me in terms of he's not like a radical anti-establishment person. He's, I guess you would call him a conventional liberal.

59:39So like in our preparation of the content, he was always like, we won't use anything unless it's already been, even if in a, even moderately used in a mainstream media source. So he started to like look at like mainstream media sources that were saying stuff that was counter to the dominant narratives that we were getting. And then I was able to sort of stitch those things together, basically using sort of stand up, really improvising around the news stories. That's all I was really doing, like the stuff with Stelter, Brian Stelter or whatever, you know, that stuff around you or like then with the war narratives and the things that's happening now. So it kind of grew quite organically. Then like the YouTube audience got really big and I started to, you know, we started to become like, oh my God, I can just do this for a job now.

60:20But then when I reached out to you and you said, that's a shady platform, like YouTube is your primary platform. I was suggesting that you criticize YouTube in any untoward way. Like, but like, so when like Rumble came to me with an offer, like we'll, if you make us your primary home, if you do an hour a day streaming, you know, like I thought, right, okay, I'm going to do this. And also I'm not going to have to do. Are you live streaming on Rumble? Yeah, I live stream every day, 12 p.m. So it's not edited. It's like you go live and then they could see it as you're doing it. That's right. I do like a, like I guess a sort of a live daily show type feel. And is there a commentary section, like a live commentary where people can comment on it live during the show? Yeah, people stay in the chat and I refer to the comments and stuff.

61:04And when we, those videos that you've watched before and I've seen you watch on this show, like we still do one of those and we drop a pre-rekt video which has been edited into it. That's like, you know, where we take a deeper look at something like, oh, look, BlackRock have just done a deal with the Ukrainian government. Or look at what the, some of the legislation that was passed prior to the Ohio train wreck or whatever. Or look at how that shows a disjunct between the language around climate change and caring about the ecology and what happens when there's a legitimate environmental disaster. We're able to then sort of tie together facts in a way that's much more responsible. But in the live show, I'm responding, I'm just reacting to clips, doing essentially an opening monologue, jokes like that. And then we have a guest on for like a 20 minute interview.

61:49That's like the daily show that we do on there. And then like, there's like a members thing within Rumbles now, Locals. That's where you can sort of, people can subscribe for additional content. And in particular, actually, my stand-up special, I've got like another stand-up special which we're going to release on that platform. Because I mean, looking at ways that, how do you do stand-up now because of what Schultz done, what Luby's done, like more direct to, like direct to the audience type ways of doing stand-up is like what I've been like working on. So, hey, it happened very, the truth is it happened organically because I guess all of the ingredients were in me anyway because of like, because it's essentially analogous to stand-up comedy, isn't it? Like it's like you are, you're investigating the person.

62:28If you get someone on here that you're interested in, then you're just, you're investigating that story. And then the punditry, it's essentially news commentary. I guess because there's so much space has opened up, so much space has opened up because the mainstream media will only comment on a limited amount of stories. So it becomes very easy to sort of say, they're telling you this, but this might also be true. And there are these relationships between these organizations. And isn't it weird that that happened? So the space was irresistible, almost comedically irresistible to much of anything else. Well, comedically because you have a comedic take on it that's just unavailable anywhere else. It's like when you're talking about the news, you're laughing and mocking it openly while you're talking about these obvious connections between finances and rules and laws and the way things get done.

63:12And how long have you been doing it now? I think it's two years. It started at the beginning of the pandemic. And then I spoke to like the... I think it's like six million subscribers on YouTube like that. Yeah, it grew really fast. And you know what it's like in this business when you... Because you've got access to the metrics and the data and you start to see bloody hell, this is growing quickly, this thing. You start to recognize like... The thing I did near the beginning, I was just doing stuff more about wellness and well-being and talking about... Because of like my background in recovery, talking about meditation, wellness, all those kind of things that I'm interested in as well. But then I like it become repetitive. So I sort of like said to my friend again, Gareth, like, do you want... I'll give you a job. I took a punt that I could handle a salary.

63:49So you come on and work and we'll make more current affairs oriented stuff. And what's good about like the chemistry of that relationship is that he's... I don't mean conservative in like a right wing type way. I mean... He's careful. He's more careful than me. Whereas me, my tendency is I would go full... I'd get into it and by now I would not be able to work anymore. You know, it'd be over for me. The red pen would have gone through me. How much pushback have you experienced? Like, have you had a lot of shows demonetized? Like, what was happening while you were on YouTube that motivated this move to rumble? We got an ivermectin strike for something pretty minor. For saying that something was being... For saying it was being... That it had been endorsed when it was in fact being clinically trialed. Like, so it was a pretty minute error. And it started to...

64:40And because, of course, as you know, I assume, that YouTube take their guidelines on global issues from organizations like the WHO. So even after it comes out that there has been a 30% increase in heart disease in people in their 30s, that's just like a fact, or that there's been an increase in excess deaths over the world, and the amount of adverse events that have been reported, you still can't say it. You still in fact... That is so wild. Yeah, once it's in... You know, talking about New York Times, MSNBC, once it's been on those places, you still can't say it. And, of course, there are still mainstream figures like, you know, Fauci or figures from the sort of liberal establishment saying, if you take this vaccine, it's not going anywhere else. So there's an obvious hypocrisy, even in organizations that initially... I mean, I guess... Do you know what?

65:25I bet you can look at it, Joe, like as if it were a physical territory. Like, at the beginning, there's a gold rush. In the beginning, YouTube is the Wild West. In the beginning, all sorts of people can inhabit and populate that territory. But after a while, people go, shit, this needs to be shut down and controlled. And it gets corporatized and regulated and controlled in a different way. And I guess I just caught the back end of when it was possible. And we're still trying to navigate that. I think much like television, they receive an enormous amount of money in advertising. And then advertisements that are on YouTube, those people that are spending all that money, they can dictate what they want to be advertised on. And then they say, look, I don't want to be on anything. They talk about COVID or anything where they talk about Ukraine or anything.

66:07And so, OK, they just say, oh, well, we've got to stop people from doing that. What's the best way? Well, the best way is to self-censor. How do you get people to self-censor? You impact them economically. How do we do that and not make it look like we're censoring them? We give them strikes. Give them strikes or demonetize certain episodes. Like when we were over at YouTube, before we left for Spotify, we announced that we were leaving for Spotify. And then magically, all of our episodes stopped getting demonetized. So we had a 25% increase in revenue. Because 25% of our episodes were getting demonetized just randomly. They would just decide. And some of them, it didn't make any sense. And some of them, it was because of a controversial guest or controversial subject. Generally, like COVID-related or government-related. But 25% was a lot. And then as soon as they realized that we were going to be gone,

67:00they were like, well, we should just make that money. And then they stopped censoring anything. Like all the episodes after that, I'm pretty sure all of them. Was there any of the episodes after we took off that got demonetized? It was a giant noticeable leap in revenue, right? Jamie? It's tough. Yes. But it was quite noticeable. It wasn't as simple as we just stopped being controversial. Because we never changed shit. But they do things to get people to self-censor. Of course. And Rumble doesn't do that. It was difficult. Exactly. What was difficult for us when YouTube was our primary platform is we would look at your content. All right, that's the title of this Rogan video. This is the content. Okay, well, we can try that. And then we would get demonetized. And it becomes like a weird algebra. You change this word. You change that word. You have to alter it. You have certain things you know that you can't say.

67:56And you still get some money from YouTube Red. Yeah. But it was like they were doing things. And I mean, they're running a business. I understand from their perspective. Of course. You know, they're running a business. They have advertisers. I understand it from their perspective. But from a content creation perspective, you just couldn't trust them. This is what Rumble were fundamentally offered. They gave me a good deal and the assurance that we're not going to censor you. Now, obviously, coming from where I come from politically and in terms of my background, even as a person that's been in the public for a while, I know how Rumble's being portrayed. It's being portrayed as a right wing, like, you know, far right place, conspiracy theorist. Yeah. You and Glenn Greenwald. Super far right. Yeah. Like this married, gay, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist. Tulsi Gabbard. Super right wing. Yeah. It's nuts.

68:50It's nuts what people call it. It's just anything alternative to the censorship model they'll talk of as right wing. Yeah. Because what happens is, like, when you create something new as a response to the censorship that people experience on Facebook, when people are banned from Facebook and banned from Twitter, the problem is so many of those people that do get banned go over to these new platforms, whether it's Gab or Getter or, you know, True Social. And then it just becomes QAnon headquarters. And they just start talking about lizard people and Pizzagate. Yeah. And a peculiar tendency towards suicide of former associates of powerful American families. I mean, you know, I went to the opening of Rumble the other day and it's weird. It's a weird space for me as a person that's been, you know, part of liberal establishment, Hollywood movie parties, those kind of things.

69:41And even in Britain, British media, there's a certain flavor to it. But I've got to tell you, like being around, like, in Florida with all these people from Rumble and local dignitaries and officials and mayors and stuff like that. Everyone's like just adorable and so sweet. And I wonder if it is like as a person, it's always traditionally identified with what you would call cultural left wing positions. Right. Like to find how just sweet everybody is. Like you meet Donald Trump Jr. He's absolutely lovely. You meet that woman, Kimberly, that's off Fox News, who I've seen sort of say, you know, Russell Brand, he's a scumbag. What a sleazeball. And I meet her. Oh, my God, she's gorgeous. And plus, it didn't hurt that she described me so despicably in the past that I wasn't immune to that kind of flirtation. Let me tell you. Meet these people. And they're like absolutely delightful and so sweet.

70:26And like one of the people that I'm working with said, maybe it's because like that conventional libertarian perspective is, I don't care what you, you can think whatever you like. And I'm starting to wonder if there is the possibility of an emergent sort of political ideology that's sort of in a sense part libertarian, because it's like I just want to be left alone to live my own life, part anarchist in the literal sense of anarchy as in self-governing communities, as much democracy as possible, as much, not as little, as much ability to control your own community, as much. Because I sometimes think, Joe, and I know that like Jordan Peterson has been on here as well, talking about decentralized models on a sort of a slightly more global scale, I figure. But I sometimes feel like if you take contentious issues and allow them to be resolved as a local level as possible,

71:10it diffuses a lot of these cultures. Because at this point in history, you're going to have people that want to live an orthodox Jewish or an orthodox Christian or an orthodox Muslim life. You're going to have people that want to have progressive lives that are very sort of gender fluid. And I think if you sort of say, well, yeah, do what you want in your community, then isn't that the only way that this is going to be diffused? You can't impose from above. You can't impose that on people anymore. You can't tell people that they can't express themselves sexually, consensually in any way that they want to. You can't tell people that they can't have conservative and traditional values. And I don't see why the culture should be tearing itself apart in order to achieve that. And so, you know, finding myself on Rumble and how what the,

71:49at least how it's being labelled by the external media that have an agenda to destroy new emergent forces, is like something I've like, OK, I'm here now. You know, I'm going to be going on those shows and talking to people that in the past I would have regarded with, you know, enmity. And people say, oh, you've been red-pilled or whatever. But I've never trusted the establishment. I've never trusted corporate power. I've never wanted to be told what to do. That's always how I've been. But I've always also felt compassionate and like there's an obligation and a duty for us to take care of it. Like sort of what I would call Sesame Street values of kindness and compassion, that those things need to be in the mix somewhere. And I suppose those are the kind of conversations I guess I'm interested in having when, you know,

72:29because I always, I watch Tucker Carlson and when you see him attacking the establishment, I'm like, yeah, go for it. And then maybe he'll say something about homelessness. And I think, ah, no, no, not that, you know. And I guess these are the conversations that I'll have when I'm in those spaces. Because something new has got to emerge. There's got to be, I think, Joe, like when populism first emerged, it was assumed that it would be affiliated with the union movement, that it would be a working man's or working person's movement, populism. Over time, it's come to be regarded, you know, perhaps even most latterly through the rise of a figure like Donald Trump, populism is regarded as its right wing. That's what it is fundamentally. But you can't really have, because populism is people power. The people have the power to run their own lives as much as possible, not as little as possible.

73:12People can't just be like little arse end nodes in their own life with just such a lot that their choice is limited to consumer choice and opining online. Real choice in their community. I think if you're happy with your life and if you have personal sovereignty and you're a kind person, you want people to live their life in a way that makes them happy. I think there are many, many people out there that do not have those characteristics. There's many people out there that are not happy. They do not feel fulfilled. They don't feel like they're doing what they should be doing. They don't feel loved. They don't feel accepted or appreciated or respected in their community. And those are the people that lean towards these authoritarian perspectives, these authoritarian ideas of control and telling people what to do, because they don't feel in control of their own life.

74:05And you find it from the weakest people. The physically, morally, ethically weakest people are the ones that are so adamant that everybody follow in lockstep to whatever this ideological narrative is that's being pushed on social media, particularly from the left, but also from the right. It's feeble, weak people that are very angry. The kind, successful, open-minded, ethical, moral people, they want people to just be happy. And I want, look, there's so many different styles of everything. There's so many different styles of music, different styles of architecture, different styles of living your life, different styles of just sexual orientation and monogamy and polyamory. Who fucking cares? Just live your life and be happy. I want to control no one. I barely can control myself. I try to control my kids as little as possible. I try to guide them and have conversations with them

75:10and tell them all the things that I fucked up on. Whenever I talk to my kids about anything, if I have to kind of like give them some regulations or give them some rules on things, I always talk about how badly I fucked everything up. And I always talk about how they're so much more fortunate than me because they're so much smarter than me. They're so much more educated than me. They have so much more access to information. And I talk about how when I was a kid, you didn't really know anything. Like I can ask my daughter a question and she'll know the answer to it because she can Google it like instantaneously. And she'll know for a fact what really happened in 1774 or what really happened when this happened or why they put this in that and why this is an ingredient in that. The access to information they have is unprecedented. I feel like if we don't just relax and let people be themselves

76:00and stop people from imposing, whether it's imposing laws or imposing behavior that we would like to see people exhibited, if we don't stop doing that and just let people figure out what makes them happy. Because some people are happy just fucking hiking. There's some people that just want to get up in the morning and have granola and go for a walk. And that's what makes them happy. And there's other people that want to lock themselves in an office and write a book. And that's what makes them happy. And there's some people that just want to go to the gym. They just want to have a good job and then take yoga all day. Fucking do whatever you want to do. But you've got to leave everybody else alone. And so many people want to control other people because they don't have control of their own life. And this is a characteristic that you see from the ideological left on social media

76:53and from the ideological right. You see it from the right with wanting to control women's access to abortions. You see it from wanting to limit access to this country and immigration. You see it from wanting to restrict guns and wanting to restrict drugs. You see it from all sorts of different ways that people want to control people and control people's behavior. And that creates these ideological rifts. That creates these tribal sort of mentality borderlines that you cannot cross. And this is a problem when we have so many variations. So much variety of human beings. But just two choices. You're either a Democrat or you're a Republican. And if you're a Democrat, then you think men can get pregnant. And you think that there's too much inequity and there's too much racism. And if you're on the right, you think that we've got to close the borders. And you think that abortion is murder.

77:56It's like, isn't there some sort of like a compromise where there's like a rational center where people recognize that like, no, there's a lot of this behavior is just because people are scared and weak. And you should just leave people the fuck alone. Yeah. It's also normalizing that as a mentality. Like what's become normalized is having an assertive and judgmental position. Yeah. When that's like, that's a very extreme way to go through life thinking that you know what's best for other people. Because of my experience in recovery, it's meant that I have to have a practical spirituality. It means that my spirituality has to be about my conduct. That's what my spirituality is. If I don't think it's right to not be kind, then I have to be kind. I don't like look around to check if other people are being kind and prod them and make sure they're doing shit. I get on with my own conduct

78:47because that is usually the problem anyway is that I'm normally suffering as a result of stuff that I ain't doing right. I'm normally suffering because I'm not taking care of myself. I'm not fulfilling my obligations. I'm not living by the standards I would set myself as a father, as a person that's involved in my working life. And that's where my unhappiness normally stems from. I also recognize that I have to be willing to take a hit once in a while. I'm going to talk to people that disagree with me on things that are kind of fundamental. And if I'm going to just cast them on the other side of some imaginary line of vilification as a result of that, I'm contributing to the ongoing bifurcation and generation of more and more conflict. The only thing I can really do, and in a sense there's something comforting in this, that if I, like when I came on your show before and we talked about hunting,

79:37I go, yeah, I'm a vegan and I just wouldn't be able to kill an animal because I don't think I could live with that. But I completely, I live in the countryside in England and then it's bang, it's all the time. Guns are going off all over the time. They're shooting birds out the sky. I wouldn't get very far in my life if I had decided that those people were doing something fundamentally wrong. And I actually get a different kind of ease from going like, I don't know everything. I don't know what it's like to be you. And as a stand-up comedian, I like, comfort comes from this as well. Like I look at them and I feel them, Joe, you know, the way you do. They're like, in some ways they are like me in that they want to be left alone. They don't like being spoken to as if you think you're better than them. And that's become like almost the media rhetoric and default position has become, we're better than you. Shut up.

80:22And I feel like that what happened in- People respond to that. That's the problem. People, they feel insecure. They get told what to do at work. You don't like that. You don't like being told what to do. You're a rebellious person. And a lot of people aren't. A lot of people like going to an office where they give you a task. They tell you what to do. There's a hierarchy. You know, you want to move your way up the corporate ladder. It's all very structured and set up in front of you. And they like to talk to you like you don't know anything. And people like it. They accept it because they have a daddy. They went from having a dad at home to now they have a dad in the office place. That's a normal thing for people. Right. That they have, there are psychological templates that underwrite relationships that are recognizable to them. Leaders and followers. Yeah. Like a, and a leader is fundamentally behaving as a father.

81:07But there's nothing in human evolution that would suggest that we can have centralized models of this scale. It's a weird thing to do. Like agriculture, centralized food production. Industrialization, centralized manufacture. Right. Technology is centralizing attention. And reality itself, reality is being described. And like you said, with the new AI revolution, you know, now you just have Malcolm X saying, I'm a pedophile. Malcolm X is a pedophile. He's out. Right. Bobby Kennedy. I killed someone. Right. You can deep fake your way into a reality that's convenient for the interests of the powerful. And I suppose, the thing I believe in that might diffuse this, because I feel that we're in some edge land and I know every generation does. And I know personally, all of us are going to experience an apocalypse anyway, because we're all going to die. And does it matter whether when you die, everyone else dies or not? Maybe not,

81:56because your reality is shutting down into whatever follows this. But I feel that unless some new ideas enter the conversation about how to manage this ossification and tribalized conflict-driven culture, something very ugly is going to, it's already happening. It's already happening. Truth is already a victim of it. It's already ramped up and considerably ramped up during the pandemic because of all the anxiety and the fear and that when, you know, the governments did impose lockdowns and they did tell people they have to stay home and they did stop people from working and traveling. It just, it ramped everything up, ramped all the anxiety up and ramped people's susceptibility to some sort of a solution. And if you just give in to the authoritarian control, then we can all get back to work. Then we go all back to, get back up to normal. And that's what scares the shit out of me is how easy people just rolled over

82:45and let that happen and how the ideological rift, the divide between the left and the right got wider and people got less compassionate and less apologetic and just let people just be themselves. Let everyone, be more charitable, be more, you know, look at things in a way that you could understand like what it would be like if you were living that person's life and doing that. Like you could see yourself falling into all those same traps. And if you just, you know, this is like the thing about forgiving people, forgiving people that were so mad and they called people who wouldn't get vaccinated plague rats. It's like, I could have been them. We all could have been them. If you were in those same circumstances, if you're that kind of a fearful person and if you were that kind of a person that really was terrified and filled with anxiety and you thought there were people out there that weren't doing the right thing

83:42because that was the narrative. You were being told that those people weren't doing the right thing and that was going to get us all in danger. Completely illogical because you're doing the right thing which is to protect you from a disease. You're taking a shot that's supposed to protect you. What do you give a fuck if someone's not getting protected? It's not going to change anything. And so then there was fake narratives like they're the reason why the variants are coming about is because these unvaccinated people which is completely the opposite of what the science shows. I mean, there's literally vaccine resistant variants and they think that that is just a normal part of vaccinating people during a pandemic. Geert Vanderbosch talked about that. I don't know if you've ever seen him talk. No. He was one of the people that was he was on Brett Weinstein's podcast and he's been on many podcasts but he is a vaccine expert

84:33and he was talking about how the standard model is that you never vaccinate during a pandemic because you just encourage variants. But somehow or another doctors were saying something that was counter to that narrative. Like they were just spouting off this thing that the problem is the unvaccinated. So people in their mind filled with anxiety even though they had done the thing that was the right thing in their mind. They got vaccinated. They got protected. They just didn't feel protected because these other people weren't listening and because they weren't listening there was variants and the variants are now going to get me and you motherfuckers are ruining it for everybody. And it was just this wild frothy panic. Yeah. It created hysteria. Yes. It's a generation of hysteria. It's sometimes interesting to look at what the underlying emotion is that is causing the behaviour. What would lead to that behaviour? What set of beliefs

85:30would lead to that behaviour? And the inability to see that we saw in the opioid crisis of just a few years before that doctors were being persuaded to prescribe opioids that they knew would be addictive and dangerous to an alarming degree. So that's the modality. They knew people were going to die. They knew it. They had a number. They knew it. There's like a certain percentage of these people are going to die. So let's keep doing it. Let's keep selling it and let's profit off these people dying. Let's profit off these people's despair because we have a product and that product is going to make us a lot of money. And that's what they did. And that's what they've done with everything. And you know, you could get real cynical but I think that's what they've always done. I think that's what they did with Vioxx. That's what they did with the opiate crisis. I think that's what they did with many, many different ways

86:22where they could justify making enormous amounts of profit at the expense of a bunch of people dying. I've heard a few things about systems that help me to understand why such a thing might be possible. I heard one time that the CIA, no one person knows what's going on. Like it's so diffuse. There are so many operations, so many things running concurrently that there isn't a person like the head of the CIA that you can go to and say, well, what's going on? He's too diffuse. I also heard a person, Yanis Varoufakis, he was like the lead, one of the leaders of Syriza when after 2008, Greece had some wacky like moment where they elected an extremist party, left-wing extremist party actually, you know, considered extreme, that said, we're not paying back all of that banking debt. We're not going to pay it back. And the people, of course, of Greece voted for him and then the EU called in that government once they won the election and said,

87:09you fucking well are paying back that money. You can't make that decision. You don't have that authority. And this guy, Yanis Varoufakis, who's like, you know, a left-wing politician, said that he realised that the person at the EU that he was talking to didn't have any power. They only have the power that that role affords them. The system is essentially functioning on its own. There is no individual that can go, oh yeah, all right, then don't pay back the money. There is no person that can tell you exactly what the CIA is doing. So it's like a sort of, a set of coordinates which behind it has an energy that's pushing towards a particular agenda, the kind of ones that all of us can identify, financial agenda, dominion, those kind of identifiable agenda. But the system is self-sustaining, self-maintaining. The system excludes the possibility for disruption. It's almost like it already functions how an algorithm would function.

87:58It doesn't afford radicalism. It doesn't afford the intervention of democracy. When people's will is expressed, the will is delegitimised. When a figure, like when there is a sort of a popular uprising, then the uprising itself is discredited. You know, 20, 30 years ago it would have been the left in Latin America, Central America, like the deposing and destabilising nations there. Now it's like even domestically, like figures from the presumed right, like Trump, are discredited. You know, so like, and again, like I've got, just to clarify, of course, it's not someone that I would ally myself with enormously. But what I'm saying is that the system has clearly become more allied with a particular aspect of the establishment. Let's call it the liberal establishment, although it feels to me that it can function perfectly well regardless of which political parties. I think it's interchangeable. I mean, it was during the Bush

88:43administration, it was the right. During the Bush administration, all the fears about election tampering were about the right. There was an HBO documentary called Hacking Democracy, and it was all about the Bush administration stealing the vote. And it was all about the Diebold voting machines. And they had shown in this documentary that there was a third party access. So instead of just like you vote and I count your vote, there was actually room for a third party to put information in that would manipulate the number. And they showed it, and they demonstrated it on the show, and everybody was terrified. Oh my God, the Republicans are stealing the vote. And now, it's like Katie Hobbs and Carrie Lake in Arizona. It's like the Democrats are stealing the vote, and all the mail-in ballots, the Democrats are rigging the vote. Like, it's a puppet show. It's the old Bill Hicks joke. It's like, I believe in the puppet on the left. Well,

89:36the puppet on the right is more to my liking. Like, hey, there's one guy holding both puppets. Like, that's the old Bill Hicks joke, and that's kind of what the fuck is going on. And we get caught up in these ideological battles, and all the while, they're inching us closer to nuclear war. They're pushing dangerous pharmaceutical drugs into our lives. They're instituting a centralized digital currency and a credit score system and controlling people and locking people down and establishing narratives that are not based on fact at all. But if you don't follow lockstep with that narrative, you're fucked and you're out of a job. And so everybody doesn't know what to do. Next thing you know, we have something that's very similar to what's going on in China. And that can happen. We're not that far away from something like that happening here. All it would take is a large disaster, some sort of an attack,

90:27some sort of a terrible scenario where a bunch of people died and they had to change the rules in order to protect us. And next thing you know, you're fucked. Yeah, like 9-11 led to surveillance. The pandemic led to compliance. Yes. And one of those tropes of the kind of avowed conspiracy theorists that we mentioned earlier was that crisis is used to induce measures that they want to induce anyway. And one of the things that was spoken about in the pandemic was, oh, look, they had this agenda anyway. They were looking to introduce this kind of technology. They just took advantage of a situation. I don't go as far as saying that I think that people orchestrate these things. I don't think anybody orchestrated the pandemic. I think the pandemic came out of that Wuhan lab. I think they fucked up. There's clear evidence that in 2018, they already have safety violations. It wasn't well done. The people in the lab got sick.

91:23They know who the people were that got sick. They know one of the spouses of one of the people that worked in the lab died from something that seems very similar to COVID. They know the history. They know what happened. But the way they took advantage of that situation reminds me of the way they took advantage of 9-11. Yeah. Because I don't think they orchestrated 9-11 either. I could be wrong on both cast. I want to be really clear about that. I don't know how things work. But I don't believe in these grand orchestrated conspiracies as much as I believe in people taking advantage of an opportunity in a moment and that there's a very clear pattern of them doing that forever. Yeah. Opportunistic seems easier to explain and it is also in alignment with the way that we understand that model that it exploits opportunity to advance itself. I feel like that the credibility took its biggest hit in 2008

92:14when the banks were bailed out, when ordinary people suffered, at a point when it was clear that the economic model couldn't function anymore and needed radical revision and it was kept alive. And what happened, I feel like, is that the liberal establishment ceded that territory and meant that now the only anti-establishment rhetoric is coming out of Breitbart and Bannon and Trump and they're the only people that are attacking the establishment and the authoritarianism that's coming out of there and the exploitation. There's no voices and the voices on the left have become kind of muted. It feels to me that during the 2016 election that they would rather have Trump win than have the Democrats win under Bernie Sanders. They made a bunch of, like, odd decisions that shows you that, yeah, that Hicksey's metaphor stays ultimately true. And in a way, doesn't it make sense that if you want to maintain that, the number one thing

93:06you have to prevent is a broad alliance and a willingness of people to accept their differences. As long as you've got people willing to kill each other, whether it's online or in person over cultural values rather than accept, I'm willing to accept that that's how you live as long as you accept that's how I live. Exactly. Then it's over. As long as you can keep people at each other's throats, then you can continue to manipulate them. Then it's an easy chess game. As soon as people come together and they realize, like, hey, we have way more in common than we do difference. What do we really want? Everyone wants a safe neighborhood. You want good education. You want healthy food. You want people to be able to pursue their dreams. You want people to have a good time and the more people you're around that have a good time, the better the quality of your life is going to be as well. The better the quality of life

93:47in your entire neighborhood. If you have this mentality of great fortune and not a famine mentality, not have this mentality that all the success has to come to me and all these other people can go fuck themselves and it's a dog-eat-dog world, if instead you go, wouldn't it be better if we all just kind of did our best to work together as a community and just accept people for their differences and recognize that most of the differences are kind of bullshit. Like, it doesn't matter. I don't give a fuck what music you like, what movies you enjoy, how you like to dress. I don't care. I want you to be happy. If you like to wear pink all day and fucking, you like to put braids in your hair, good. Who cares? Who gives a fuck? I don't care. And if you think about your own life and your own pursuit of happiness and your own interests and concentrate on that more than you do stopping people from behaving in a way

94:37that you're ideologically opposed to and that ideology, you've probably been manipulated in some way, shape, or form. You've probably fallen into some fucking Rachel Maddow narrative or some Bill O'Reilly narrative and you're just, you're just like at the throats of the people that are different than you because somehow or another diminishing them you think is going to empower you. Yeah. You know, that's the weirdness of it all. I think you're right that we become parasited. You know, I know you admire Terence McKenna. He's famous saying the culture is not your friend. Yes. The culture isn't your friend and it feels like, yeah, that many of us have been parasited in our minds that we are on rails parroting and citing views that are not ours that we don't know how that opinion got in there and this is why the individual does have power. I've always found it hard to hold, Joe, the simultaneous facts that I am infinitesimally small

95:32and my reality is irrelevant on the cosmic scale but at the same time all reality takes place only in my consciousness as far as I can tell. So I am creating all reality. I am ultimately omniscient as far as my own individual reality is concerned. I feel that there has to be the introduction of sort of spiritual or maybe even psychedelic values into this conversation so that we can diffuse this cultural tension that is continually being stoked because as long as people are willing to go at a mat on cultural issues rather than saying yeah this has been complicated a country like America has a complicated history definitely people have been disadvantaged definitely there have been biases and prejudices in a particular direction if there is the facility to alter that that could be done but the best way to do it is not centralised top down imposition of authority. I suppose one of the other tensions is if you have small state

96:24what regulates corporate power? There are big questions that once you say this don't work no more I want something different So what does work? You are confronted with oh how do you do that? How do you regulate behemoths like Apple and these new titans that put the steel and energy giants of a century ago in the shadows with their might and again as you cited earlier their ability to create exploitation and something akin to slavery in the modern world forget historic slavery what is the collective force that opposes that and I can't help but feel that this technology if we were released of the need for relentless progressivism and advancement only in order to fuel endless consuming that this technology could be used to create more democracy more freedom more ability to interact in how your community is run if not the kind of universal credit society and the kind of atrophy that that suggests and the kind of apathy that that suggests

97:22and the disconnection that suggests some more leisurely form of awakened technologically advanced leisure led society where people have more time to create truly reflective culture where the kind of the tropes that are used in the conversation around diversity of like genuinely different cultures cohabiting a genuine and real melting pot where you accept that people eat different food have different sex lives have different beliefs like that is a possibility I suppose that we I suppose that in a way the amount of authority that was asserted during the pandemic the amount of effort that's put into censoring mainstream narratives the amount of effort that's put into creating terms new language to control smear and censor opposing voices suggest that they consider it a legitimate threat that alternative views could take hold that new alliances could take place that people would consider different ways of being there's a brilliant philosopher

98:16he's dead now Mark Fisher he was off the left he coined the term capitalist realism that we have been taught that this is the only model of reality there is people won't he said it's people find it easier to envisage the end of the world than the end of capitalism that there could be a new economic system that we could live within and we all know now that capitalism as it was intended doesn't exist anymore anyway certainly not after what happened in 2008 simple you know I make this thing trading it growing ingenuity entrepreneurship it's such a cronyist supporting energy companies supplementing them ensuring that they make profits how can you have energy companies that profit when there's an energy crisis military industrial complex that profits when it's a war pharmaceutical companies that profit when there's a pandemic you're creating the necessity for ongoing crisis if the elites in the society benefit from situations

99:07that are detrimental to everybody else that's what reality is going to become that's what reality has become that's such an important point because that's almost undeniable and to say that they wouldn't do that because they value human life and morals and ethics over profit that's never been exhibited that's not true that's not a true statement no the opposite is true the opposite is provable the opposite is provable whether it's Halliburton or whether it's pharmaceutical companies or whether it's politicians or bankers the opposite has always been true that we are profit driven and especially if they can find some sort of way to justify these horrific acts in some way shape or form if they could have this diffusion of responsibility where it's not their call or not their fault they're part of a corporation the corporation has to do this and this is just what we do you gotta crack a few eggs to make an omelet that's where we find ourselves

100:02and the only way we're gonna get out of this is if we the collective all of us whether you're on the left or whether you're on the right recognize this stupid game that people are playing recognize this hustle and don't get sucked into it do you ever feel that your power that you have evidently organically accrued even if it is strategic you seem to have done it in a very sort of natural way has a potential beyond cultural power beyond persuasive power you don't seem like you think like that to me you don't seem like you think fucking hell I'm at the center of a movement I can do whatever I want woohoo let's go nuts if I thought like that I wouldn't be doing what I'm doing right and it's all been totally organic it's never been calculated at all not one step of the way in fact none of the podcast has I've never even advertised a podcast I never even told people to listen to it it just grew 100% from word of mouth that's all it was just me doing it

100:59keep doing it and then eventually it becomes what it is yeah it's a great advocacy for authenticity because there are a lot of things that you wouldn't typically think would sit together kind of culturally liberal views in terms of tolerance and openness quite traditional male ideas around hunting martial arts and a background in entertainment and stand up the only thing that ties it together is authenticity in a sense that's the only and I suppose that as a person that's had sometimes cause for self-doubt because I've done a lot of things that are self-destructive around being a drug addict for example to get to that place of like no just trust yourself do what you believe in there are situations when you don't know that Maharishi the Maharishi said do what you know to be right don't do what you know to be wrong and that will cover most things it's not that often where you're like oh god this is a genuine dilemma a lot of times

101:50I know I'm doing something I shouldn't be doing I'm not participating in a way that I ought to I'm not doing the best that I could do and that requires discipline actually and again it comes down to the individual in a sense part of the ongoing cultural arguments that we have is an abdication of personal responsibility for how much we are in control of our own bloody lives and in a sense part of your story is a demonstration of that by just being this is what I believe in this is what I'm interested in these are the conversations I want to have I haven't like when it hit the crisis of the pandemic that authenticity and integrity served you I think if up until that point if you'd been like I want to be a star I think maybe yeah I would have been fucked yeah well I've been very fortunate that I have been able to do this without anybody's input so no one would have ever let me say okay I want to have a bunch of guys like we do this show

102:36protect our parks where we all do mushrooms and get drunk and just it's four comedians just being completely ridiculous and then the next day I'll have like a legitimate psychologist on and I'll talk about fear and anxiety and what goes on in the brain and what causes trauma and then the next day I'll have an MMA fighter on and then the next day I'll have some world traveler on or some guy who likes to climb mountains or some person who's walked around the earth like it doesn't the only thread through the whole thing is I find this interesting that's it these people are interesting to me I had a woman who was a beekeeper like how do you raise bees you know like I had a guy who was a bat scientist who has been studying bats his whole life like oh how'd you get into that that's the only thread through the whole thing so like they're they're interesting to me I have a wide range of interests and I think most people do

103:31and I think most people like to hear people that are passionate about what they do and most people are fairly curious yes you know and I think that when you just put something together like this and I think you're experiencing a very similar version of it that people see when they watch your show like oh this is what Russell is interested in this is what Russell thinks about things there's no one getting to him telling him to do it this way this is like it's so clearly from a unique and individual perspective that that's what makes people say oh I could trust that guy he might not be right but at least he'll tell me the truth and if he's not right and if he finds out that he was not right he's gonna tell me that too yeah that's that's what people need if it's I suppose that comes back to that authenticity perspective that if you stitch into this I have I as a person have got some values I am not infallible I'm really flawed

104:23but I do believe in these things then you've got some whether it's believing or I'm interested in then you've then you've got a north star of some description when it becomes governed by committee which ultimately will default to economic imperatives always when you describe that thing beekeeper one week Egyptologist the next you know I mean they're like that's not gonna we're not gonna be able to sell advertising on that they would have using their own modality prevented it from ever coming into existence it's only in a sense the where the authenticity meets the technology and the possibility that the whole project takes off yeah I'm wondering how that's sort of gonna apply I don't suppose the only way I can apply is by continuing with the authenticity I've got your present do you want to yeah please sure but yeah you just gotta keep doing it the way you're doing it there's no if ands or ways and you're a good person and your morals

105:10and ethics are in line and you're just doing what you think is a good thing to do and pursuing things you're fascinated by that's admirable and it's relatable like people they lock into that they enjoy it that's what's missing in mainstream television yeah I'm really glad to hear you say that and I'm happy you said it because sometimes when I feel like I'm talking about something like you know thank fuck sometimes someone comes on the show like someone like Seymour Hersh and you know Pulitzer Prize winning journalist who talked about the Nord Stream pipeline and because you know how it is look at where you work even impressive though it is a somewhat incubated kingdom you think I read all this stuff but I read the kind of stuff that I'm interested in and someone's saying oh my god have I gone fucking mad like it may be just Putin is an evil tyrant and like we should just do whatever Raytheon and Lockheed Martin and the military

106:03we should just do what they want and then someone comes on with a lot more experience and expertise than me or like that you know Jeffrey Sachs and you go this is what happened in 2014 this is what happened after Gorbachev this is what happened and you think oh fuck it's right that's where the authentic then if you you can start to trust yourself hold on yeah my general cynicism about centralised power and the kind of way that politics in your country for example is funded the amount of money that's spent on lobbying the amount of people that all own stocks and shares in energy companies and the military industrial complex Paul Pelosi's remarkable knack for investing in things exactly he's so good what a genius this guy is he's the best he's untouchable he's untouchable and he never gets whispered at in the dead of night apparently across the pillow like in the end you start to see oh no it's right I'm actually right

106:47and it starts to reassure you but one of the things I feel is like oh man is that all the bridges burned you know I'm like am I ever going you care about I don't care about it in the same way I once did but I consider it more I reckon than you like oh wow is that it I'm never going to be in a no more movies no more movies I'm never going to be in a universal movie again or like you know not that you know as I said to you I had complicated feelings about it anyway lovely people but difficult times for me personally I guess it's just not a good fit but it's a weird thing to feel yourself move away from the culture especially if you've been in the middle of it you know to sort of feel like oh I'm a person that would be on those late shows and stuff and you know fortunately I don't think like that yeah you don't see you don't care do you no once I got fear factor money I was like I have some money I'm good now I don't give a fuck anymore

107:34yeah that's good that was the first thing I thought when I started making money and I had like real money put away I was like good I make a good living you know I make a good living doing stand up I make a good living doing UFC commentary I don't have to do shit like I'm not doing anything I don't want to do from now on I'm just going to pursue the things I enjoy doing and hopefully I can make a living doing those things and that's all I've done and so I just keep doing what I'm doing and I think that what you're doing is so much more valuable than movies it's so much more rare and so much more difficult to do like there's a lot of people that are good comedic actors I'm not saying they can replace you but I'm saying there's a lot of people that can do that thing there's not a lot of people that can do what you do when you do your show there's not there's very few you do it different than I do it you have your very

108:23your own unique style you have a very unique perspective a humorous take on horrible corruption and these terrible atrocities that are happening all through the world but it's fun to watch it's fun to watch you talk about those things that's not available anywhere else and that's why people are resonating with it and that's why it resonates with people and that's why people are gravitating towards you and I think that that it's more important to just stay on that it's very valuable and this idea that like oh maybe I should keep myself open to this stream of revenue that's always been available to me like no fuck that stream fuck that stream and also you can get so big that they want you anyway like even though he's crazy he talks about the Nord Stream pipeline and Ivermectin like he's still Russell Brand he's still very popular let's get him in our movie and then you'll do that movie and you'll be like fuck these movies

109:15I'm gonna go back to doing my show where I don't have to listen to anybody I can just rant and rave with my stack of papers and my bird farting you know like like you you've carved out a very unique thing and that there's not a lot of people that do that and it's very inspirational to other people because it gives people this thing in their head like here's this guy that was in all these fucking amazing movies and he was this giant star and he seems better and happier doing this thing that I can do he's just got a desk and he's sitting in front of it with a fucking plant behind him and shit and he's just ranting and raving like my god you Russell Brand are doing the thing that thousands and thousands of independent YouTube content providers are doing these content creators these independent people that just have a camera in front and they're ranting whether they're talking about technology or they're talking about sports

110:07whatever they're doing you're doing the same thing as them and you're showing that this is like through your endorsement of that sort of format you're showing that here's this mainstream very successful star who's chosen to do this thing that's accessible to everybody it's really kind of wild yeah thanks thanks for putting it like that because it's even not so much the idea of revenue it's the idea of I suppose like on a psychological level I reckon I felt like probably as a kid craving acceptance you know and then sort of celebrity is a type of acceptance you're being celebrated this guy's great then when you feel that oh man this ain't actually who I am and move back to the kind of cultural criticism anti-establishment rhetoric taking the piss out of all that stuff when obviously I'm aware of how those issues are being discussed in the mainstream even in entertainment sometimes I see one of those things on the TV and I can't believe

111:09how they talk I can't believe they're not aware that half of the country is also there the marketing and the demographic study has become the driving force so much that they don't even care that loads of people are not going to agree with that stuff anymore I suppose they've accepted that audience is gone well the people that are saying those words don't have a say right that's part of what's going on is the people that are saying those words they're just like actors on a sitcom they just sit there and they have this thing that they're supposed to say and they're going to talk they don't have a unique individual perspective and they're not allowed to and also their format is so limited that even if they did it wouldn't even shine through because you have five minutes you have five minutes to talk about the Nord Stream pipeline you have five minutes to talk about the Chinese drones you have five minutes to talk about Putin

111:55you don't have enough time you don't have enough time when you have an open ended time frame like you have on your show and I have on this show and so many people who do YouTube shows and podcasts have on their shows then you can sort things through then you can talk things out then you could figure then you could you could look at you could steel man other people's arguments you should try to imagine your own perspective if you were in that say what would I do if I was the head of a pharmaceutical company how would I stop I mean if I was already making hundreds of millions of dollars what would I do would I would I just stay on this train and just just watch all the destruction take place and watch all these people die from opiate addiction what would I do I don't know I don't know what I would do but I'd I know that you would never have that conversation on CNN yeah you're not Rachel Mano's not gonna

112:41have that fucking conversation with you she's gonna look at that camera and she's gonna lie and she's gonna say the things that she's supposed to say because they pay her X amount of dollars per year and it's a great job like it's inconvenient to believe something that's at odds with that you can't you can't allow yourself to believe that and people will allow you to lie they'll allow you to push that false narrative and they'll celebrate you for doing it thank you thank you for what everything you said about the vaccine thank you for everything you said about the vaccine like oh we forget that it's and then like that news is a TV show like it presents itself at you hello like it comes at you with authority and certainty and all of these sort of tropes that we've come to like and we've seen it all our lives so it evolves a little bit they always look more or less the same the background looks more or less the same the tone

113:31the pomposity of the music you forget that this is just a commercial product that's giving you information that's salient to its own objective it's a great way to put it commercial product it can't tell you hey shit we don't know anything the only bit of reality we can observe is a minute portion of all potential realities we've got to radically re-evaluate everything I'm being told stuff by Pfizer back there they can't afford that kind of latitude they've got to stay on the rail I was having a conversation with Eric Weinstein the other day where he's explaining to me the reality of other dimensions and the measurable reality of other dimensions that we absolutely know that they exist and do other beings have access to them can they travel through these things is that what we're dealing with imagine if that becomes at the forefront of the zeitgeist if people recognize that not only are there other dimensions

114:28multiple other dimensions that are recognizable measurable you know where they are you know how to get to them but beings are coming from those dimensions and visiting us on a regular basis are you still going to give a shit about a trans woman using the female bathroom are you still going to give a shit about whether or not someone has pink hair or blue hair or who does this or who comes across what border you're going to go holy shit there's a bigger thing going on there's something that transcends all physical reality as we know it it's beyond our imagination and it is reality yes we're fetishizing understandably the only measurable part of our reality yeah while knowing even deeply personally for our own subjectivity that there's something else within us there is our experience of rational thought there's our experience of bodily sensation but there's something else within us I've been unable of course because of my recovery

115:33to get into the sort of psychedelic space when it's you know now that it's become wellness now that it's become acceptable I've not been able to attain that to me can you explain that to me because I'm not an addict but I would like to know what is it about a psychedelic experience that makes you think that if you engage that you will somehow or another regress lose all control start doing heroin your life is going to fall apart you're clearly not the same person you're clearly not the same person even though you've experienced the same traumas that led you into heroin addiction in the first place you have clearly gotten a certain control over your life an understanding of yourself a personal sovereignty that you didn't possess when you were an addict so what makes you think that this entheogen this literal psychedelic connection to a higher realm would ruin your life yeah I know because the thing is I really really want to

116:41when I was still using I took psychedelics in the same way all kids take psychedelics for fun in a park at a bus stop and knowing that there's something ontologically profound happening most observably and I'm talking about myself as a 16 year old hold on a minute I'm not real I am not my memory of myself I am not my projections I am the consciousness that is observing that set of data I'm observing my feelings I'm observing my thoughts I'm beyond it so beyond all that stuff I was aware that this was profound but also I was doing it on my own with kids drinking cider at a bus stop in Essex I wasn't doing it with a shaman or a doctor or Aldous Huxley or Terence McKenna or some Brazilian guy with feathers and stuff I was at a bus stop in the rain in the grimness of grace where I'm from so I've maintained this fascination because I'm a 12 step person and 12 steps is about that there's a spiritual deficiency that causes addicts to become addicts

117:43they're looking for something that they can't find in the world they're looking for connection they're looking for a deeper purpose and for meaning they're also looking for escape right escape from the anxiety of being alive just the existential angst that most people carry around with them yeah it's unlivable with but as you say most people carry around with them like we all have that yeah we all have a certain level of it yeah and for some reason the addict type according to this analysis and there's only one analysis and it's the one that I've got clean with so it's the one I sort of advocate for it's the only one I'm qualified to advocate for the principle is if you replicate or not even replicate if you create those spiritual conditions like you belong to a community you think about helping others you're willing to look at what the reasons you drink and take drugs for in the first place and you but fundamentally

118:33this is the key thing is what it argues most of all and it's like an ingenious piece of American theology really I would say the 12 steps because it was informed by William James the theologian it's influenced by Carl Jung of course and like what so it's a sort of a fusion of religious and spiritual ideas and psychiatry which obviously was in a much more formative state back then and what it's fundamentally offering you is the drugs and the alcohol are not the problem the problem is you are self-centered and egoic you've got caught in yourself and so like even once you stop drinking and taking drugs you're still going to have that problem and you're going to have to address that problem and when you do you won't feel the need to drink or take drugs anymore now so what becomes sort of central to the whole ideology of the 12 steps is in a sense the abstinence is significant and it's pivotal you can't drink or take drugs

119:17one day at a time but more important than that is you've surrendered you're not in charge of your life anymore you've given the ego a break yeah like it's like I can't run on that you know the story of Alcoholics Anonymous though and Bill W the fact that he was into LSD yes I'm aware of that because I'm sort of an amateur historian of it because it's an important sort of part of my wellness it seems like a contradiction that dude was out there I mean like he's a prophet like the guy was a stockbroker apparently a womanizer and yes indeed took LSD while in recovery and of course all of the materials around that fellowship are very they're like 50-60 years old no one had 10 years clean then no one had 20 years I'm 20 years clean as a man no one had that none of those there hadn't been that much time which makes you think about vaccine tests how do they know what it's going to do in 10 years if you hadn't had fucking 10 years

120:04so like you know they didn't know how those things were going to pan out so the reason I have this ayahuasca hesitancy a lot of people are ayahuasca hesitant what are we going to do about that hesitancy like the reason I have it is because I can't take back personal authority for what I do and the idea is is because I've achieved I've been given something that's quite delicate like when I was using I was destroying my life and now I've been granted a different perspective I shouldn't mess with that shit by doing something that would necessarily involve I'm in charge even though I really want to when I hear you and other people on your show and Duncan Trudel talking about smoking DMT and you're meeting orbs of pure consciousness I think the whole reason I came a drug addict remember was because I was looking for that I'm looking for this isn't reality this can't be it you can't expect me to just stay alive for decades more

120:51based on this bullshit I know there's something else the culture won't give you it the culture won't give you you are divine you are connected to limitless there are other dimensions there are other beings the culture is just telling you get a job you're going to work in a call centre or a factory and you are craving the mystic you're craving it but you know you're not the same guy you were when you were an addict right you're a different much more mature much more experienced person you know the old expression no man can ever step into a river twice because you're not the same man that's not the same river yeah yeah I do that I just wonder I would get in that river and I would try to drink it or fuck it but why do you think but why do you think you would do that don't you think you've learned this is what I don't understand and again like you know I enjoy marijuana and I've enjoyed psychedelics but I can not have anything

121:42for long periods of time and I'm fine because you ain't an addict you're not an addict you've never taken cocaine no I've never taken cocaine but I do get addicted to video games I do get addicted to I could find myself I think if I did start doing a lot of coke or if I was at a different stage in my life and I wasn't concentrating on being productive and concentrating on being like being healthy being physically healthy and being physically fit and also using exercise as a means to mitigate anxiety and for just to keep my mind straight so important to me and that if I didn't have those things and maybe I was drinking every day or doing coke or doing something I could see myself falling apart I could see myself because I think it's just a natural human characteristic yeah and but but right now like if someone said hey are you worried that you would get hooked on something I'd be like no no I wouldn't because if I thought

122:39I was getting hooked on it I would just stop because I'm not interested in doing anything that's detrimental to me I'm not interested in doing anything that's going to tank my life no and neither am I really but I'm like I guess what we're analyzing is that like one of the areas of distinction between our two natures there are some things that are quite similar it sounds like we're from pretty similar types of background sounds like that we both had negative experiences of a step parent and like I don't know if that's true actually my step dad's actually a good guy right but at the time I didn't get on very but I did have negative experiences with my biological father there was a divorce when I was very young we moved around a lot there was a lot of stuff along those lines but it's just everybody that seeks exorbitant amounts of attention is fucked up and if you want to go on stage like why would you want to go on stage

123:23like what kind of a person wants that amount of attention what kind of psychopath metabolizes childhood trauma into even though I'm really frightened of this I'm going to go and do it I'm going to stand up there and I'm going to trust that what I've got to say it's like this fucking weird idea that somehow or another not having a lot of attention when you were younger can all be fixed by getting a shitload of attention when you're older my house weren't warm enough when I was a kid I always keep the heating up high now but it's too late I'm staying in here that's already happened not time travel it's not a time traveling sauna yeah but it feels like somehow or another one way or another you metabolize that suffering into some kind of form of discipline and control is how it looks from the outside and for me I collapsed into chemical dependency as soon as it as soon as it came into my life like I was that was my religion

124:18well I found martial arts at a very young age and so discipline became my addiction and I got very very very fortunate that I went in that direction because I grew up with a lot of guys that drank a lot and did a lot of drugs and they went off in their way and I didn't I avoided all that throughout all high school I barely partied in high school I got drunk a couple times I smoked pot a couple of times and that was it all throughout high school my high school was filled with discipline and all I did was train I was a very weird kid in that regard like socially I was kind of an outcast but I found I found through that path it was like there was there was a clear road where I could be a better person and a happier person my wife pointed out something that wouldn't have been obvious to me as an outsider of martial arts that a lot of martial arts people have a geeky component there's something geeky about it like you've got to study movement

125:15you've got to understand it you've got it like there's a lot of art you can nerd out on the moves nerd out even on the kit and the aesthetics and I feel like to have discovered that early in life it's kept you within lines I assume where even the potentially combustible violent impulse has had somewhere to go all of those things have been able to have been targeted I like again because of coming on here you're the first person to talk about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu I got into it it's a difficult thing to start when you're 40 years old I don't have an athletic background but I'm a purple belt in Jiu Jitsu now that's an amazing accomplishment so congratulations on that thanks because it's very difficult to start at 40 it's very difficult to get a purple belt getting a purple belt is like you're basically a black belt you just need to put the time in the difference between a white belt and a blue belt the blue belt is like okay you're learning

126:13things you now have an understanding of moves that's not just a beginner's understanding like you know a path when someone when you get into someone's side control and you trap an arm with your neck you know how to slide into that head and arm choke it's natural it's automatic when you get to a purple belt it's like you've got some serious shit when you get to a purple belt level you know how to set things up you know how to set traps you know how to use defensive tactics to initiate offense the only difference between that and a black belt is honing the edge and continuing to put in the time the difference between my game when I was a purple belt versus my game when I'm a black belt is that I just learned more moves and became more consistent and then trained more and then got a better understanding of what to do and what not to do and was much more responsible defensively and just got better conditioned and stronger and that got me

127:13to black belt but you're at purple belt level which is the that's the great divide that's what separates someone who just starts Brazilian Jiu Jitsu with someone who gets to black belt can you get to purple belt you're in the great divide oh that's the threshold is it because I found it a difficult place to be and I'll give a shout difficult my teacher Chris Clear he's a very dedicated teacher he's a black belt under Roger Gracie like like I've for me I've moved in and out of it you know like not necessarily even because of injuries because of time and sometimes because part of me still holds on to the idea of not being crushed under somebody's shoulder and like you know when you sort of as well when you're like my build I weigh probably I guess I weigh 80 kilograms like I roll with maybe a blue belt that's like 10 or 15 kilograms more than me I can get so smashed up you know and there are other purple belts in our club that are similar size

128:02to me and it's sort of like it's elegant and flow based and there's some nice open guard and some things that are sort of pretty but like I still have a reluctance to face the business end of jiu-jitsu the grind the harshness of that stuff sometimes I guess so my competence inhales and exhales you know like when I'm doing it a lot I feel very good about myself it feels good to articulate and physicalize something that for me as a quite cerebral man could just be conceptual to feel what struggle is like it's like why I like doing the hot and cold stuff as well like experiencing saunas and cold plunges oh this is what it's like to feel really uncomfortable and just to deal with it you're not dying it's okay and then but like with the thing is is that it's abstract with hot and cold when you're like looking into another person's eyes and there's the idea of combat and like I've obviously got some ego you know and when I experience

128:56oh man look at that that's what it's like to be to get smashed to get smashed to be the nail and not the hammer you know that like I still deal with that the first time I got even as a white belt when someone like guillotine choked me out a couple of times I was like transported back to childhood I needed therapy someone like it's just a hobby that you're doing oh no I've got to write a poem about this shit this is bad what happened to me in that guillotine chute it shouldn't have happened I did you read Sam Harris when he started doing Brazilian Jiu Jitsu he wrote those I think it was called The Joys of Drowning I never read that but it was him that introduced me to Huron Gracie who I tried with also but what did he say about that Joys of Drowning just what he's learning about his pursuit of this thing and you know also I think similar age when he started doing Jiu Jitsu I think he was in like his 40s as well and just trying to reconcile

129:45like this desire to learn this thing and just getting smashed by people and how difficult it is to get good at it you know but what a fucking amazing tool it is I mean I love rolling with people when like it's exciting like Jiu Jitsu is exciting but there's something very fascinating about being a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belt and rolling with someone and knowing they can't do anything to you like if I roll with some white belt and then they kind of spaz out of me or something and I just grab them and clinch them it's like I'm in control of this like I've done all these numbers I've been putting all these fucking constant days of training like for so many years I trained since 19 I started training in 1996 it's like I've been doing it for so long that it's such a beautiful thing to have and one of the beautiful things about Jiu Jitsu is I mean the real lessons or the real the real value in it is that you overcome adversity and it becomes a tool

130:53for developing your human potential through the struggle of like like the physical struggle the wanting to quit not quitting the developing the ability to overcome adversity developing the mental fortitude it's just this like incredible tool for managing the stress of life because the regular life out there in the world is nothing compared to some big guy sweating in your mouth who's trying to fucking strangle you which is like what happens when somebody gets you in a triangle and you got your fucking arm is here and the leg is here and you're like ah like it's so much worse than most life yet still somehow enjoyable you know there's magic to it it's just like there's very few things that are like Jiu Jitsu in this life that can give you those kind of lessons also the trend of our time is more and more disembodying there's more and more like strap a helmet on your head and life yourself off into the metaverse and like if you think of how

131:54apes and comparable advanced mammals live in their bodies in such a short period of time ago evolutionarily we would have been in our bodies like that it would be normal to play and establish hierarchy in that way and to know what your body is capable of like I suppose for me one of the things I've got is that paradox of thinking oh man I'm capable of doing these things with my body also other people are capable of doing things with my body I don't know next time I open my mouth in a moment of rage at a traffic light who's going to step out of that car I don't know because people surprise you especially today god with the UFC how many people know how to fight today it's so much more dangerous you get out of your car in 1970 and you see a guy who's just wearing shorts and a t-shirt no gun no knife you're like I don't want to fuck this guy up but now who the hell knows some 140 pound guy might arm drag you and take your back and strangle you

132:52unconscious in the middle of the road like you really can't take those chances anymore that's your fault actually you've popularized that they were condemning you for ivermectin what they should have said is because of this guy people everywhere know how to rear naked choke it's a menace it's a menace in the highway there's a lot of people out there that know and a lot of women too that know how to do it there's a lot of people that know how to strangle people and i think that's a beautiful skill to know it's always good to have that it's always good to know what to do if a conflict emerges because one of the beautiful things about jiu-jitsu as well is that unlike karate or a lot of other martial arts you do it full blast so the thing about sparring and kickboxing is like man if you spar full blast all the time you're gonna get brain damage pretty fucking quick you really are so a lot of times when you're sparring you're holding back

133:41because you're protecting your opponents so it's not the same anxiety level as a full-blown conflict but jiu-jitsu is a full-blown conflict if it's you and some other purple belt and you guys get heated and it starts getting after it and he's arm dragging you and he's got your leg and he's stacking you and trying to pass your guard it's like ah this is a real battle you're giving a hundred percent effort and if you get in a compromising position you get caught you tap and you're okay and you keep going I mean that the ability to tap and the ability to submit someone and then keep going is amazing yeah you're right the tap is the beauty because the tap is the consent and the tap still shows that the underlying thing is a camaraderie and that this is a collegiate thing that we're undertaking together also when you were talking about how much of the online hatred and angst likely comes from living a life where you don't express things

134:37to know that I have as part of my routine experiencing you know trauma experiencing another person's aggression experiencing another person's strength even though my ego don't like it when I'm submitted or bested at least for me it's not abstract the idea of the experience of physical combat like it was for most of my life other than like you know sort of normal fights when I was a kid like it's it's a lived experience in the same way of when I very first experienced cold it was before I met Wim Hof or before the popularisation of these ideas I just jumped in a really cold lake once because I once had a girlfriend that was an aristocrat she had rolling estates it was amazing it was like falling into wonderland frankly and one time I jumped into this freezing cold lake and I heard the noise that come out of my body it kind of like oh wow I can make that noise and my body can handle freezing cold like you know if you think about it

135:26we're disembodying ourselves we're turning ourselves into atrophying little beings that don't know how to inhabit a body and that it's you know of course as a martial arts expert the thing that accompanies it usually is a respect for opponents a respect for the body not kind of showboating aggressive intimidating bullying that sort of thing gets meted out it gets like as my teacher told me that sort of stuff gets taken out of the culture pretty quickly when someone comes into the environment that exhibits those traits that it's managed and perhaps in a way that you might imagine among primates those kind of behaviors would be managed if someone is overly aggressive that's probably one of the best ways that they could stop bullying is to teach everybody how to fight and it sounds so counterintuitive that sounds so counterintuitive but I think the thing you're saying about being disembodied is so important too because I think that

136:13whatever you do that's physically difficult and it doesn't have to be jujitsu it could be marathon running it could be crossfit whatever you want to do yoga difficult things force the mind and the body to work together because the mind has to control the body while the body is screaming to stop and the mind is screaming to stop you have to have almost like a third part of you you have a physical you have a mental and then you have the discipline and the discipline is almost a thing in and of itself it's a thing that you know the mental the mental wants to quit so how do you how do you tell your own mind not to quit like there's but it's you I want to quit so I should just quit no no no you have to tell you not to quit so who's telling me who is that that's deciding this for me I don't think you get that without physical physical struggle and again it can it can be running it can be yoga it's like physical struggle teaches you to be solid

137:23inside your thoughts and to maintain the path stay on the path even though it's hard to do which is so important in life so many times in life real progress comes from grinding it out when you don't want to when you want to quit and you must understand that there's a process and trust this process and the only way you trust this process is if you participated in it you're talking I believe about the spirit and the word spirituality and the word discipline have been continually paired Christ's followers are the disciples it's a discipline you have to you have to marshal the spirit the spirit has to be controlled otherwise the spirit will not be your friend and I feel like the commodification and perhaps you could even argue feminization of spirituality either you have orthodox spiritualities that tend to be patriarchal I'm talking about the sort of the desert faiths the Christianity the Judaism and the Islam certainly many people

138:20would argue that there's a if not misogynistic then patriarchal aspects to that it's interesting that new age spirituality is regarded as somewhat feminine and is certainly by and large commodified it becomes about purchasing a pair of leggings purchasing a dream catcher or a crystal it doesn't have that aspect of discipline that is about the ability to prioritize your spiritual state over your physical state this is the deeper reality what's happening in here and when you start bringing up interdimensional travel and psychedelics you start to recognize yeah no this is an important space for me interesting too the way that the arguments around sex and gender have altered because you know like the Andrew Tate phenomena has been an interesting one but I've heard you talk about the sort of you know and certainly while there are outstanding crimes I certainly wouldn't comment on any of those things and how they might play out

139:07but if you leave a space in the culture where masculinity can be sort of embraced loved revered celebrated then different models are going to emerge that take up that territory rather than looking at the masculinity isn't solely ugly it just shouldn't be connected to misogyny masculinity it shouldn't be that in somehow or another in order to be masculine you have to hate women that's just so ridiculous that's so dumb that's not real masculinity either that's a foolish version of it that is set up for children it's set up for dullards it doesn't make any sense like true masculinity like first of all what does that even mean like just being whoever the fuck you are and if you happen to be a man there is going to be certain things that you have you're going to have a certain amount of aggression you have a certain amount of anxiety you have protection instincts and you've got to have control over as much of your body and mind as you can

140:10and what's the best way to do that well you have to experience adversity and you have to you have to execute with discipline you have to be able to do that on a regular basis if you don't you're not going to trust yourself you're not going to count on yourself you're always going to have anxiety you're always going to have to wonder whether or not you could pull through it like one of the things about cold or sauna or exertion physical exercise is knowing you can force yourself to do it knowing you can force yourself to do it these little battles of forcing yourself to do something there's so many people out there that don't do that they don't know whether they can force themselves to do something they don't know how to not quit they don't know how to push themselves when they don't want to yeah that's why there has to be a spiritual component to life and that's why a culture that abdicates that responsibility and abstracts that reality

141:01becomes kind of nihilistic and celebrates meaninglessness it becomes only about furniture and an aesthetic there's nothing real it's got nothing behind it we can sort of feel that now I think that it's been hollowed out from within the institutions are hollow because there's no values there like I alluded to earlier the idea of a sort of a potentially senile and decaying president is like the culture is unconsciously telling you what it is look it's falling apart there are no real values behind it they'll say that a war is humanitarian when we know that most likely the imperatives are economic imperatives and one way to find out would be to extract the economic imperatives then you would find out so like the service that I suppose that I don't pay enough attention to when someone's given enough credence to is the possibility that you can reach individuals through a media like this and say that actually what you do is important what you believe in the way you

141:54treat yourself the way you talk to yourself the practices you undertake I mean when you bring in one of the Goliaths in that space like Goggins Dave Goggins someone who transformed themselves in ways I don't even understand still from a 300 pound person on a couch to a at the absolute ultimate end of what is possible to be militarily is demonstration of that and I suppose that what must be happening as well as where you come at odds with the culture it's observable like the Ivermectin moment it's like oh shit what you said there the mainstream don't like that push back and crackle but like elsewhere there must be thousands millions of messages about self-discipline awakening do things for your body eat healthily awaken take responsibility for yourself masculinity and femininity can cohabit successfully it should never be about misogyny all these ideas are reaching out there and they're reaching people wouldn't typically be getting I would say such nuanced takes

142:48on complicated ideas there's signals but people have to act on those signals and that's the difference there's a lot of those messages that are getting out there but how many of them reach a person to the point where that person decides to act the acting is what's most important because the only lessons that you really generate from this stuff is actually engaging actually taking the yoga class actually going for the run actually doing the crossfit actually doing jujitsu actually doing something it's so hard to actually do something it's one of the great problems that people have and it's one of the reasons why there's so many hucksters out there that are selling motivation there's so many people out there that are they're motivational speakers and meanwhile they've done nothing they've done nothing of great note nothing of great accomplishment and all they're doing is they're finding this thing that people desire and they're feeding it to people

143:40they're giving a motivation those people often times you'll check in on them five years from now ten years from now they're not doing anything any different yeah that's right it's action you have to take action you have to take the action and it usually involves suffering and sacrifice and that's a hard thing to tell people don't want that now they don't want that information you can tell people there's a quick fix in an easy way but whether it's getting off drugs becoming a stand up comedian or doing accomplishing stuff in a martial art normally it means incrementally day by day hour by hour session by session you are going to experience a degree of suffering where it's physical or the early stand up when you can't do it and you have to stand up for an audience and be shit and bomb in front of people and then like I'm going to do it again I'm going to do it again that is unavoidable and I suppose I don't want to only use the markers that are sanctioned

144:28as success things that might bring you financial success because God knows there are other ways of succeeding in this world and truly truly great people that don't enjoy the accolades of a culture that celebrates many many things I think are pretty vacuous but on the level of the individual as you say if you're not willing to go to the mat or to the open mic or to the wherever it is you practice wherever it is yeah you got to do something you got to take action and so many people are just stagnant and they don't know how to act and they don't have experience doing it and so they don't they just stay home and again the disembodiment thing they put on headsets or they sit in front of the computer or they sit in front of the television or they sit in front of their phone and they don't act and you're going to be depressed that's not good for you it's not a natural normal way for people to behave and this thing that people do where they avoid

145:16discomfort it sounds ridiculous but then it just creates more discomfort you don't realize that in embracing discomfort and forcing yourself to do something very uncomfortable that you can control like an ice bath like a sauna like a run like a workout you are eliminating another form of discomfort you can do that it's one of the reasons why I've been able to mitigate all the stress and issues that come with success and with fame it's like I fucking torture myself I torture myself physically I'm always working out I'm always exhausted I'm always taking ice baths I was in the sauna before I got here today I'm always doing something always I never have a day where there's not some kind of struggle if I have a day where I just lay around I'm like this is weird like one day like it's one of the things that I have to do on vacation when I get up in the morning whenever I'm on vacation the first thing I do is work out I'm like I gotta do this

146:13otherwise I'm not gonna be able to enjoy this time off with my family I gotta get up before everybody else and I gotta work out hard what is the feeling that you have is it anxiety like if you don't yeah yeah yeah I get anxiety I get I just feel like stressed I just I feel like and I always describe this that like your body is almost like a battery and when you don't use it it's almost like the juice runs over the side and it becomes unmanageable like but when you use it you have a certain amount of a certain requirement that your body has to go through every day because I think we evolved in a very specific way I think we evolved running away from predators protecting ourselves from invading tribes and this is just a natural part of being a human being every human being and I think that if you don't give your body something to do it fucks with your brain and I think that's where a lot of people's anxiety comes from it's a lot of people's

147:11insecurities and a lot of the weirdness of life comes from this energy surplus that your body has where it's like so what do you do you eat terrible food and then you're exhausted because you're poisoned and then you're sitting in front of the television you're sedated like fuck man there's no way to live your life yeah because if you think a lot of those behaviours are about trying to replicate a primal behaviour like eating food excessively or pornography and masturbation to replicate sexuality or numbing activities like screens or narcotics rather than becoming harmonised with the evolutionary threads that transcend us as individuals and have carried our species from when we were our priori from much simpler mechanisms WB Yeats the Irish poet said each artist must create their own religion and I feel like in a culture where there is no discipline religion ideology other than your role is to be a passive consumer to consume information

148:07to consume product to not question then almost every individual has to have like right this is what I believe in this is who I am this is how I'm going to make my life now I don't mean this in an individualistic way because otherwise then you've unconsciously fallen into one of what I believe is the unspoken ideologies of our time materialism progressivism individualism what you are as an individual is the most important thing because actually that isn't true it's your value it seems to me your value to other people like again and again I have found like I have to the same way you talk about exercise I impose upon myself doing things for other people as part of the 12 step stuff part of the program I have like sometimes not wanting to to call someone else to deal with their stuff to listen to them and afterwards I feel better about it because I haven't otherwise my religion is what I want my religion becomes my preferences

148:53I become devoted to it dedicated to it similar to you I'm not good on vacations on my honeymoon I tried to organize the hotel workers into a union against their management because I couldn't cope with relaxing or the guilt of affluence that's hilarious how did you do that did you just like find are you being paid enough here listen and then I got the manager how did you find out how did you even ask them how much they were being paid like just casual conversations I mean it was a luxury holiday as well it was my honeymoon like with like a butler guy and then I met with the management people where were you St. Lucia I think it was a place called Sugar Reef it probably used to be a slave plantation oh boy where is St. Lucia what's that it's like the Caribbean island oh my god it's incredible it's such a beautiful beautiful place it was a good holiday once I relaxed but I don't like I'm like that battery thing you said it spills out of me

149:43if I don't find something to live with my energy I become a problem I had to go to a soup kitchen I had to do all sorts of stuff just to keep myself together I'm very fortunate that my wife works out too and so it's easy that we both do it together in the mornings and then we got the kids doing it too and we'll like give the kids screen time look you have screen time but you gotta do the step master for an hour and we'll like let them like earn stuff and they always feel better afterwards like they don't want to do it they don't admit it but afterwards like everybody's more relaxed we're eating breakfast we're laughing it's like it's it's good for you it's good for you and it's like people have associated physical exercise with shitty male behavior and that's one of the things we were talking about like exercise being associated with people on the right it's such a dumb thing it's like it's great for everybody

150:31it's part of being a human being it doesn't being like working out lifting weights or running it's not going to make you a bad person it's like that's so dumb no I think the equation that's being made is oh it's about supremacy it's about being a supreme being but it's obviously a ridiculous argument because anyone would benefit from there are there are behaviors and tendencies that the human body has regardless of what your body is and I suppose a way of making it universal even though the idea of the universal is something that people query now oh there isn't just one ideal that we can all conform to but I feel God we've all got skeletons we've all got kidneys we've all got fingers we've all got blood we all need nutrients for God's sake we all need water yeah there's some universal requirements and I think movement is one of them if you can move if you are privileged enough you're not injured you're not disabled

151:16and you can move God I really think you should move and I don't even mean in something that's I mean walk around the block just fucking do something and perhaps like as an action of self love you know I'm friends with Tony Robbins and he was one of the first people that told me about like jumping in ice baths and all that and he says the way that he talked to himself before he does that you're getting in that fucking ice bath couldn't you be more like okay we're getting in the ice bath now this exercise and discipline stuff sometimes it does require aggression or assertiveness but like does it though because I don't do that I just go get in there bitch I just go but it's not even aggressive it's almost like a joke with me it's laughing okay University of South Australia researchers are calling for exercise to be a mainstay approach for managing depression as a new study shows that physical activity is 1.5 times more effective

152:06than counseling or the leading medications of course it is and probably and I don't want to say the cause of anyone's individual depression because there's no way I can know but I think probably a lot of people are depressed because they're not moving yeah I really think it's a requirement it's a physical requirement you find new ways of getting in your body otherwise you find like what is this epidemic of pornography obsession of course it is the availability of pornography now but people are not in their body correctly it's procrastination too it's like having this ability to distract yourself it's like there's so many things that you should be doing and people get overwhelmed with these tasks and with a path that they're on they get overwhelmed with the idea of progress they get overwhelmed with the idea of accomplishing goals and so they distract themselves with YouTube videos or with pornography or with something they just

152:56they put it in front of them yeah and it's not good and I think that any ground you can make against that is good for you and I think one of the best ways to make ground against that is to do difficult things and whether it's ice baths and saunas or exercise and I really think you should do all of them I really do I mean if you can if you I mean a lot of people can't afford a cold plunge but you know I mean how much does ice cost I don't know how much ice costs but all you really need is cold especially if you live in a great place that's cold like if you live in Boston I used to do taekwondo with this guy his name was Bob Caffarella and I was always scared of him because he was he would take cold showers in the middle of January this motherfucker would take cold showers we're all terrified of him he lived in the gym and he trained there and he was just like this like super dedicated guy and after training

153:47he would train really hard and after training he would take a five minute freezing cold shower and he would get out of there and you know he wouldn't make a noise wouldn't make a peep and he wasn't an aggressive guy like a mean guy he was always smiling and very friendly but ferocious in his efforts to conquer his inner bitch and he would get into that fucking cold shower and I was like jeez that guy scares the shit out of me I don't want to get in a fucking cold shower now I do it every day like now I get in that freezing fucking cold water every it's a normal part of my morning I hate it every time I do it right before I'm doing it there's these little tiny voices in me like oh don't do it I'm like shut shut the fuck up but it's not an aggressive shut the fuck up it's just like shut the fuck up just get in there this is what you do and you climb in and you do it and the more I do it the better I feel the more grounded I feel

154:40the happier I feel and there's also a physical increase in dopamine levels it raises your dopamine by 200% and norepinephrine it lasts for hours and it's like so good for you neurochemically and Andrew Huberman is the best at describing that and Susanna Soberg the Soberg principle that she's developed for cold water immersion it's so fucking good for you to do hard things and I know people don't want to do it because just working is a hard thing just getting up and commuting is a hard thing you don't want to do it the alarm clock goes off you want to stay in bed I fucking get it but if you can force yourself to do something else on top of the things that you are mandated to do because of your work or life and whatever just force yourself you'll be better off I like the people that have a scientific approach that can demonstrate the efficacy of these methods but the reason I love Wim Hof is because I can feel in him

155:36that it is shamanic Wim Hof is not a normal guy is he and you know that when his wife took her own life is when it was the big moment of transition for him and for Wim it seems as well that accompanying his deep belief in the effectiveness and power of cold and breath work techniques is a kind of broad open mindedness a total sort of loving perspective on reality and a very anti-establishment like he made like a mainstream TV show in our country like where they got celebrities to get in ice and that kind of thing you know like they did a reality show they must have been cutting all sorts of shit from Wim Hof because I know what that guy believes about mainstream media about Big Pharma you know if they got five words out of him without him saying like you know Pfizer this or because you know because ultimately as even that piece of data there from Australia demonstrated whenever the interests of people are at odds with the interests

156:33of corporations the corporate interest will win no one can monetize the idea that if you stay healthy if you eat well I don't think there are serious reasons why we couldn't organize the entire way that food is provided for people and what our modalities are oh my god I had that guy come on I don't know if you know I can't remember Casey Means Cali Means this dude that used to work at Coke Coca-Cola he said like I saw that on your show yeah like if you eliminated processed foods you wouldn't have diabetes heart disease or cancer to need like possibly eliminating it so we're systemically we're eating things systemically we're not using the body correctly I don't like as Carlin used to say you don't need a conspiracy where interests converge and if there is an interest in people staring at screens eating bad food taking lots of medication not personally and individually awakening not being able to take on opposing views and listen to the

157:27validity of opposing views if enough people's interests coalesce around that that will become the culture and I feel like that's where we find a celebration of stuff that seems vacuous and not impactful and misusing of important ideas around equality and individuality being repurposed it's like the whole thing has become plastic and has organised around some of our lower nature and when they talk about in yoga an age of darkness I feel that that's what it is a grossness Kali Yuga Kali Yuga that we're in the grossness the darkness it's without light thank god that you know think about how ideas that are emerging are often arcane ideas that they were always a shamanic interest in plants was always going on breath work was always considered to be important there were people that had yogic practices that's why I think Wim's interesting even though they've done the clinical trials and showed the effectiveness of his method he is clearly

158:21coming at it from what I would say a kind of a role that's being extracted from our culture and that pertains to this present level one is just simply some very fine cigars in my view and the other one is this book on how the profession of show business emerges from shamanism really? well this is what this guy's offering I interviewed him this man called John Higgs on the show this book here I'll give it to you now what is it called? thank you very much it's called the Death and Resurrection show it's this out of print book that's tricky to get that has become very it's affected me since I read it because it says this is the argument the ride he takes you on there would have been a point where there were settled cultures and yet there still would have been nomadic cultures the nomadic people would have travelled to the settlements and performed there and their performances would have been derived from shamanic rites and shamanic rites

159:10include things like death and resurrection transcendence of levels awareness of different dimensions through this book he posits that the profession of show business maintains within it the idea of the mystical experience and he cites very popular examples of like what looks like shamanism in popular culture many of the figures that adorn your establishment jimmy hendrix there's a shamanic he sets fire to shit and does with stuff bowie and the androgyny the tendency for them to die young the shamanism the earliest form of religion usually connected to plant medicines is like it suggests and embraces that the shaman is an unusual figure that they're gonna say crazy shit from time to time that they don't live in the main part of the settlement because there can be off-key people with their communing with animals with their taking of plants with their visions and their ability to come back one of the sort of archetypes that's within this thing

160:06because I guess it's the architecture and archetypes of shamanism which it is arguing all religions are derived from and all religions include things not all some like a death and resurrection particularly agricultural religions need their god to die go into the ground and then come back again the same way you require your crop to go into the ground and come back again in a sense it's a way of you know that you could say that religion is a way of navigating the unknown and the unknowable and the shaman is the person that can travel between those levels but then it argues that the role of the shaman becomes the role of the clergy and it's a kind of castrated role like a clergyman except for in like some American traditions like evangelicism you know and some of the figures like you know like say Kinison is an example and like even Alex Jones as we're discussing the evangelism is trying to bring you to a promised land in my country in particular

160:56religion has become very neutralized neutered it's about just flat banal morality mostly speaking there's not a lot of radical religion which is about we're going to prioritize spiritual values over material values otherwise we're fucked why did that happen in England what's the history behind that the history of it was that the rise of Protestantism comes from Calvinism and Lutheranism like there was a lot of corruption in the Catholic church and these Protestant breakaway movements happened in the UK it was because Henry VIII wanted to get divorced essentially so they built the Church of England so that he could legitimately divorce wives even though sometimes he did just chop off their heads as a way of resolving the same problem and Protestantism they say in Northern Europe where it's colder that Protestantism took off it's a bit more disciplined it's work it places moral and ethical values on work and the Southern European countries

161:45where it's more family oriented more socially oriented Italy's France and Spain where they're still Catholic and the Northern European countries Germany countries Northern European countries Germany England etc have a little more generally more economically prosperous now perhaps because that religion fits more with capitalist models but I guess what this book is arguing is that the reason that show business has always been attacked by the church is because it's dealing with the same forces and it talks about how figures emerge through show business continually that represent values that are not really about entertainment what is it you're going into the cinema for why are people listening to your podcast a lot of time for hope for a different perspective because they find something here that they don't find anywhere else because the culture isn't going to give it to them because the culture as McKenna says is not their friend the culture

162:37wants them little blobs with a visor on consuming endlessly and if you can't participate in the economic system we don't care what happens to you you're going to prison or you're going to sleep in the street or you're going to die of an opioid overdose that's the arse end of the type of capitalism we live within now and I suppose what this book is what fascinated me about it is that it's saying that without the divine without the sacred without some personal relationship to what you might call God that which is beyond material that which is beyond what you can know that which requires faith and all of our lives are going to require faith even what you've said about Brazilian Jiu Jitsu and personal discipline is the faith that I'm going to feel better if I do this yeah there's faith in that there's faith in the understanding of the process and part of the problem I think if you live in a materialistic and rationalistic culture which is what

163:25my understanding is post enlightenment culture is about individualism materialism rationalism if you accept those as the driving ideas then in the end the only things that matter are the things that you can measure and there's no doubt that science technology medicine are marvellous magnificent tools metrics ways lenses for observing the miracles of nature and the cosmos but when they start to drive economic models you can't make the same claims for objectivity of science when the science is a subset of an economic model you can't make the same claim they're only looking at what they're looking at who's paying for it who's paying for those studies how are those clinical trials conducted how much of the information is released and I think that that's really what the pandemic was was a lens that showed us a lot it showed us stuff that's always happening but it concentrated it and showed us it in an observable timeline normally it's too diffuse and across

164:13too many issues these guys all cooperating collaborating and conspiring with one another to ensure that their mutual agendas are being met at the level of global corporatism bypassing national sovereignty not putting ordinary people's interests first and I suppose that the reason I'm fascinated with spirituality in particular is because that is your private little haven that is your sacred cathedral within yourself where you do have sovereignty there still and sometimes I worry because the stuff I talk about I talk about these bloody global conspiracies corruption war pandemic and then in my life I'm still an affluent but normal guy I'm doing a talk at my kids school getting kicked out of Legoland for non-compliance like a theme park I'm not dealing with the bloody WEF on a daily basis I'm not challenging Klaus Schwab face to face I'm living a normal person life and I'm aware and I sometimes think fuck am I wrong am I wrong but then I talk to people like

165:08either you with the amount of information you've amassed through your own work or Jeffrey Sachs or fucking Glenn Greenwald or whoever and you think oh shit this is actually true this is true and most people's lives they're living it they're living like with that kind of adversity and I've been poor I grew up without money so I like you know I have the memory of it also but like it's not just abstract this is not just some theory about how life should be organised this is the slow grind oppression and centralising of all resources at a level that's totally undemocratic that's annihilating people's lives while telling them that it's somehow benefiting people that I don't think it benefits either I think it's a so yeah it's useful to remember that this is an experiential actual thing not just something I do on the internet and talk about it's you know because you go out in Austin you'll talk to a cab driver that will tell you oh all of the music venues

166:04shut down during the pandemic and we can see now what the trends are we can see now how it's affecting people and I feel like well where is it that people are going to get the courage to change from even if that's is that courage about how are you going to make your life within this system better or even how are you going to participate in challenging and even overthrowing these systems by the great resources that are within you and that's I suppose one of the things because I have good faith in people like mine is not a bad faith analysis oh people are bad they're selfish fuck them mine is no I think people might be beautiful even though all the time I know that I do things that corrupt and I make mistakes and I know that other people have wronged me and all of that because I believe in those things we've discussed forgiveness I feel like no actually the resources are there it's possible it's possible that's where for me the

166:52evangelism lives and that's why I'm interested in themes and ideas that are not curtailed within any individual culture and shamanism is a good one because it predates monotheism it predates nationalism it's it was there already human beings have a tendency to seek out mystical experiences to have a relationship with the divine yeah and you you're you're clearly right and humans can be wonderful that we know that that is one of the possibilities we just have to figure out a way to make it so that they're encouraged to be wonderful most of the time and we're all capable of being shitheads and we're all capable of being the best version of ourself that we can be like this just but this has to be sort of established as a narrative that you should probably be the best version of a person as you can be and one of the things you're going to have to do if you want to do that you're going to have to be compassionate

167:48you're you're going to have to be kind you're you're you're you're going to have to be charitable you're going to have to recognize that people make mistakes and you're you're going like if this post pandemic show you're going to have to forgive people you're going to have to forgive them you're going to have to let things go and you forgive people not just for them you also do it for yourself yeah that's principles you've described and I suppose principle is a belief that transcends circumstance it's not just I have this principle until it's inconvenient and I fuck it off and have another principle yeah and it's because it's so easy to be the the the you want some coffee yeah please thank you it's so easy to be the person who you know it's like fuck them they can eat shit I fucking told them and I was right and like okay do you feel better when you do that because I don't I never feel better when I do that I feel better

168:33when I forgive people yeah if I'm right great I'm great great I was on the right path so what so they were wrong so I don't care I'm not mad that they were wrong I've been wrong before there's no value in extracting a big cultural apology it's just sort of bleeding out gradually and slowly in fact right here is some research yeah they're notes I've bought papers to okay so we're gonna wrap this up soon okay we'll wrap some notes I'll wrap it up on this if you want to or even prior because sure I mean I see what that says in neon of course I got notes it's an important appearance all right so March 2020 a group of scientists sign an open letter condemning the conspiracy theory suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin in April Anthony Fauci refutes Donald Trump's claim of the possibility of a lab leak January 2023 redacted NIH emails from January 2021 involving Fauci and NIH director Francis Collins

169:27show efforts to rule out the lab origin of COVID February 2023 the Wall Street Journal reports the virus that drove the COVID-19 pandemic most likely emerged from a laboratory leak that is just one example of from conspiracy theory to conspiracy fact there are several other here that is very detailed in the book the real Anthony Fauci I mean I don't know obviously there's references in that book and I don't know how much of is accurate but he's not being sued not that I'm aware of I mean and you would think that with the claims that he makes you'd be sued and one of the claims that he makes is that there was a concerted effort to diminish the possibility of this lab leak hypothesis being mainstream and that they went out of their way and there was phone calls at midnight like get near your phone we're gonna have to do work about this and they they had they conspired they conspired to push this

170:23narrative that also like when you see him getting grilled by Rand Paul about gain-of-function research and he's just his hands are shaking and you see he's lying he's like you do not know what you are talking about he's slowing the conversation down to an almost unfollowable level the way he talks and the way he utilizes words senator senator you do not know what you are talking about who the fuck talks like that it's like us it's like a switch-up pitch in baseball it's like he's throwing you a pitch like why is it coming at me 50 miles an hour this is doesn't make any sense like you almost don't know what to do you just want to interrupt him and just badger and beat him down and when you do that that gives into his what that's what he wants he wants chaos he wants you to be yelling at him so he can get out of there yeah that's the loyally monotony of bureaucracy with all due respect you do

171:33not know what you are talking about yeah when their administrations and their public servants behave like that how they can't understand why people would be attracted to Donald Trump who talks like a normal person who says crazy weird stuff all the time but he sounds like a normal person yes just like yeah but I mean obviously Fauci is not a political figure it seems like it's more complicated civil servant yeah it's more complicated but it's also really complicated when you find out that he holds patents on some of these drugs and it makes exorbitant amounts of profit off of these drugs and also he was when he was at the head he was the guy that was responsible for giving out grants so he was the guy that was responsible for sending money to thousands of doctors and organizations he was the head of all that he was the guy that was like the fucking top of the food chain when it came to medical science and the

172:28the ability to dispatch a narrative and to put out there put that put out a narrative and to make sure that everybody was moving in the same direction like oh the this drug does this we're gonna push it for that and even though some of these drugs turned out to be horribly toxic and very dangerous for people there's no repercussion that remdesivir shit like you know when they were pushing remdesivir as like being this this treatment for COVID it's not effective it kills your kidneys it's like there's a lot of like negative aspects of what are the side effects of remdesivir and do they even do they even promote the use of remdesivir anymore because I think they stopped doing it I think it's like AZT with AIDS you know they just stopped they're like this is killing people we gotta stop doing this but well what the fuck what were you doing that led you to think that people should take AZT should take a fucking

173:29chemotherapy drug forever as a treatment for HIV like what the fuck were you doing then yeah you can't expect to extract what has been the prevailing mentality in this particular from this particular case you did you hear them talk about that obesity drug that they're sort of pushing now that there's a semi-glutide oh man that's like a lifelong you take it forever it like it's that what it is semi-glutide you take that forever I don't know man it's that that what I heard that Cali means talk about on my show that that is potentially the most profitable drug in history that's being pushed now and it's being patented and approved that semi-glutide but that's that there's a couple different wag of the I think they call it and there's a there's a couple different like brand names for it but semi-glutide is a it's a peptide that causes you to lose your appetite but it also

174:16causes you to lose when people talk about the weight loss some crazy number of like 34 percent of the weight loss is bone mass and muscle tissue mass and connective tissue loss get rid of your skeleton I mean maybe you can mitigate that with weight training maybe they're just saying that that's like part of the loss of not eating much like if you don't eat much and your body mass drops like maybe that's a natural byproduct of maybe that could be mitigated with weight training I don't know you know but that doesn't sound good to me like what you could just actually just eat less you don't have to take this stuff everything externalized everything becoming commodity all times it seems like a war against nature a war against the traits that human beings have a war against their natural ability of people to organize it all seems to migrate in in one direction in that book that Kennedy

175:08book one thing I liked is that you know we had initially the war wars between nations then the war against drugs and terror more abstract ideas and finally the war against germs unwinnable wars in the end in the end it becomes just the perpetual war that again is an a wellian cliche becomes realized when you when the enemy becomes as abstract as that yeah it's a it's a terrifying book if it's accurate you know and I'm waiting for someone to accurately debunk it I'm waiting to see it maybe maybe someone has I just haven't found it yet I'm slowing down because you told me that you wanted to finish the

175:46conversation I can gear up at any time I gotta get out of here unfortunately but uh it was a lot of fun we did three hours we did three hours then yeah that was good I was focused and I've got a lot of for a guy who doesn't do drugs you sure seem like you're on drugs yeah you're fucking hyped up but that's being healthy that's what it's focused energy all I need to do is every day do tapping breath work cold plunge meditation yoga Brazilian jiu-jitsu and then I can have a normal conversation like a fucking adult can you though I mean you have conversations like that that's not normal it's kind of hyper normal yeah yeah it's better it's better it's better than normal I can see that this is how you socialize yeah your mo it's easier for you to do this in normal life I figure it certainly is for me sometimes it is yeah because sometimes normal life is uh it's too sedated

176:36it's not as exciting you know there's the thing about conversations on podcasts where you're locked in with headphones on you're talking into a microphone and there's the the understanding that millions of people are going to listen to it it makes it it's like juices it up more yeah you know listen brother I appreciate you very much I've loved watching this path that you're on and I think you're really sensational at what you do and I'm really glad you're doing it I'm glad you're out there thank you appreciate you very much thanks you too thanks for the hospitality and inspiration my pleasure all right my man um and you're available on rumble pretty much uh five days a week 12 est is that est is that what you call it that seaboard eastern standard time the one that's got a seaboard in it like yeah every single day on rumble where you can access right-wing conspiracy theories

177:26uncensored and you yeah I'm on there as well with those guys just propping it up and uh that's been fun for you you enjoying that yeah I love it man beautiful I love it it's been a big change I think it's the right choice thanks I'm glad I'm glad you're in there all right goodbye everybody you