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Episode: #2243 - Julian Lennon

Author: Joe Rogan
Duration: 02:52:59

Episode Shownotes

Julian Lennon is a Grammy-nominated singer/songwriter, photographer, author, and filmmaker. His new fine art photography coffee table book, “Life’s Fragile Moments," is available now, as is the Spike Stent remix of his 1998 song "I Should Have Known.

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www.julianlennon.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Full Transcript

00:00:03 Speaker_07
The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:15 Speaker_01
I go see this dermatologist. Yeah, a little excision here because it had been bothering me a bit and a couple of years ago I had a bit of a cancer scare on my head because I have a birthmark here that you don't really see.

00:00:33 Speaker_01
And there was a mole there and I kept, as my hair got a little thinner, I would use a comb and it caught it one time and it opened it up. And so I kind of kept picking at it when it became a scab and I kept picking over the course of like six months.

00:00:55 Speaker_01
And then I went to see this dermatologist for the first time in LA. And I said, yeah, I've got a little bit of a, you know, I've been trying not to scratch it now, but I'm a bit worried about it.

00:01:07 Speaker_01
It's been like six months of me being an idiot because it just was really irritable. And so she, you know, cut it out and sent it off.

00:01:18 Speaker_01
I was at a pretty serious meeting with a whole bunch of people, and she called me up at the end of it and said, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but it's cancerous. We've got to cut it out. We've got to get it. And yeah, I just went completely numb.

00:01:36 Speaker_01
at that point and freaked out because I just thought, what does this mean in the bigger picture? And I had a lot of friends that have passed from cancer of various kinds over the years. And so it really did freak me out. Anyway, I got the all clear.

00:01:55 Speaker_01
It was cleaned out. So, just anything that just looks or feels a little odd, and that was something I'd been scratching here a bit, and something here as well.

00:02:07 Speaker_01
So, she just did a little cutting, and no doubt I'll hear from her in a few days once she gets the results.

00:02:16 Speaker_05
That's scary because it's in a spot that you don't check. You know, it's covered in hair. You don't know what's going on back there.

00:02:21 Speaker_01
Yeah. But it was because of the birthmark. And I just kept on the thinner hair. And so I just kept brushing it with a comb. And it caught it. And then it scabbed. And then it became itchy. And so I kept scratching it, pulling it off.

00:02:41 Speaker_01
Like a kid, as you do, as you just Anyway, I'm happy to be here. One piece for the moment, you know.

00:02:53 Speaker_05
I got one of those comprehensive blood panel screens for cancer recently. And then, you know, you wait a while for the results and you're like, geez, like, what if I'm one of those people?

00:03:06 Speaker_01
Yeah, I go for a proper checkup like twice a year on every front just to make sure I'm gonna be around. Because I like living. I want to be around for a long time. That's good. For sure.

00:03:24 Speaker_05
Yeah, it's a weird thing because you know, how old do you know 61? Yeah, I'm 57 and We're getting up there fella. I don't like to think about it.

00:03:36 Speaker_01
I don't I'm completely in denial Absolutely. I refuse. Because I just remember seeing my uncles on my mother's side, what they were like in their 50s alone.

00:03:51 Speaker_01
And they'd be sitting there with a big belly in front of the TV with a couple of packets of cigarettes and drinking tea or beer and watching the TV all day. And that was their life in their 50s and 60s until they had a heart attack and died.

00:04:07 Speaker_01
No, I'm not doing that one. And I've just always been, not that I'm a health freak in any way, shape or form, but I certainly, you know, my regime is try to eat as healthy as you can and do a bit of power walking a couple of times a week. That's good.

00:04:25 Speaker_01
And that does the trick for me.

00:04:26 Speaker_05
Nothing wrong with that. Walking is one of the best forms of exercise. Yeah, if you can get it in every day, you'll be much healthier than if you don't absolutely No, it's not listen to a book on tape go for a stroll. Yeah, exactly.

00:04:39 Speaker_05
Yeah, it's great for the body.

00:04:41 Speaker_04
Yeah, you don't have to fucking kill yourself

00:04:43 Speaker_01
No, and I've also, in my time, dealt with a fair amount of depression as well, and anxiety. I get pretty anxious still. Even, you know, coming here today, I was a bit, breathe. Really? Yeah, yeah.

00:04:58 Speaker_01
So I went for a nice little power walk around the, whatever the lake is down there. Ladybird? The one where the bats are. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Ladybird. I had no idea about that. Have you seen them come out?

00:05:09 Speaker_00
No. Oh, it's cool.

00:05:09 Speaker_01
I had no idea. I'd never even heard of it before. It's really cool. The biggest bat population in the world. Is that true? That's what they're saying.

00:05:17 Speaker_05
I don't know if that's true. I think the biggest bat population in the world is in Africa, I believe. I would say so. Or the Amazon. Yeah, I think it's a really large population, though. And it's cool to see. They come out.

00:05:29 Speaker_05
That's what it looks like when they come out.

00:05:32 Speaker_01
Yeah, no, they claim there's signage down there. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, that says it's the biggest bat population in the world. Hmm, maybe it's a specific kind of bat.

00:05:42 Speaker_04
I don't know.

00:05:43 Speaker_01
Google, where's the big... It's definitely part of it. Is this at sunset that this happens?

00:05:47 Speaker_05
Yes, yeah, right at nighttime. It's really cool. It's very fun to watch. And you hear them. If you go under the bridge, like if you walk on, you hear them.

00:05:56 Speaker_01
Yeah, I was there today. I didn't hear that. Yeah, you can hear them in there. Okay.

00:06:00 Speaker_05
They're just chilling. It's weird. But they're responsible for keeping the mosquito population down.

00:06:06 Speaker_01
Is that? Yeah. They do a great job.

00:06:08 Speaker_05
Those little suckers.

00:06:09 Speaker_01
Fantastic. They take care of the mosquitoes. Mosquitoes, yeah. What purpose do they have, really?

00:06:17 Speaker_05
Spreading horrible diseases and sucking your blood.

00:06:20 Speaker_01
That and aubergines. I don't understand the aubergines either.

00:06:24 Speaker_05
Well, you know, they tried to develop a genetically modified mosquito that was going to attack the other mosquitoes. But that's horror movie type shit. You know, I hear about that. I'm like, OK, and what happens then?

00:06:38 Speaker_05
Like, whenever you start monkeying around with nature in that regard.

00:06:42 Speaker_01
And so nothing came of it then.

00:06:44 Speaker_05
I don't know what's been done with that. I don't know. It's like, these people are doing these things, and it can affect all of us. And you, you know, just read about it on the internet.

00:06:55 Speaker_05
And if it wasn't for the internet, you wouldn't even know they were doing it. It's like... Are you sure this is going to be OK in the long run? What's the potential chances for mutations?

00:07:07 Speaker_05
What happens if they carry a very unique disease that it's something you don't have a cure for?

00:07:14 Speaker_01
The scary thing is we have no idea what half of these people are up to. No, we don't. COVID being an example.

00:07:21 Speaker_05
Yeah, perfect example. Did you see what happened in Australia yesterday? There was a laboratory that lost track of, oh, I put it on Twitter. lost track of a bunch of different really serious diseases. How does that happen? Someone left the door open?

00:07:36 Speaker_05
Yeah. I went once, me and my friend Duncan, we went once to the lab in Galveston, Texas. The Center for Disease Control, I believe the organization has this enormous bio lab down in Galveston where they take care of

00:07:58 Speaker_05
like some of the most dangerous and deadly viruses in the world. So they have like this incredible filtration system and everybody's wearing space suits and they're walking and we're in there going, what are you guys doing?

00:08:09 Speaker_05
Hundreds of vials of deadly viruses have gone missing from a laboratory and scientists warn they could be weaponized. So what are 100 vials of Hendovirus, 2 vials of Hantavirus, 223 vials of Glycevirus, all of which are extremely deadly for humans.

00:08:28 Speaker_01
And of course, I love it when the media says, you know, something along the lines of the end of that statement. It could be weaponized. That's great. Now the freaks are gonna go and try and find that stuff.

00:08:41 Speaker_05
Yeah. Well, it's, you know, we got into this mess in the first place because, and this has now been confirmed, that they were working on these viruses in this laboratory and it got released.

00:08:54 Speaker_05
and that these viruses had been created through gain-of-function research. So these goofballs are down there working on viruses, making them more infectious to humans. And you would say, well, why are they doing that?

00:09:06 Speaker_05
Well, surely they're doing that so they can study them and they can cure them, make sure that we don't get sick. Is that the logic? That's the logic, but they didn't have a cure for it.

00:09:16 Speaker_03
This virus is rabies.

00:09:18 Speaker_05
Oh, great. Lysivirus are responsible for rabies, which is arguably the deadliest encephalotic disease known. The prototype rabies, Lysivirus, thought to be able to infect all terrestrial mammals. Yay! What a good thing to just have laying around.

00:09:40 Speaker_05
I mean, that's like the opening of 28 Days Later, right? Yeah.

00:09:44 Speaker_01
Yeah, no. There's a new one.

00:09:45 Speaker_05
Have you seen the trailer for the new one? There's a new one? 28 years later. No, come on. Yeah, yeah. Cillian Murphy's back. Let's go. Yeah, I'm in. Count me in. That's the greatest, oh, here it is. It's the greatest zombie movie of all time, for sure.

00:10:01 Speaker_07
Wait, sit here. Auntie, what's going on? Debbie, sit still, keep quiet, and do not move from this spot. 7, 6, 11, 5, 9 and 20 miles today, 4, 11, 17, 32 the day before. Boot, boot, boot, boot, moving up and down again. There's no discharge in the war.

00:10:44 Speaker_07
Don't, don't, don't, don't look at what's in front of you.

00:10:49 Speaker_03
Boot, boot, boot, boot, boot, moving up and down again.

00:10:56 Speaker_07
Men, men, men. Men go mad with watching them. There's no discharge in the war. If your eyes drop, they will get the top of you. Boop, boop, boop, boop. Moving up and down again. There's no discharge in the war.

00:11:32 Speaker_01
I woke up relatively calm and peaceful this morning. A little bit of pre-podcast anxiety.

00:11:38 Speaker_05
And now you're worried about the end of the world. Welcome to the show.

00:11:41 Speaker_01
Thank you very much. Thank you.

00:11:43 Speaker_05
I didn't know what to expect, but now I... I'm terrified of these eggheads messing around with all these things. I really am, because it seems like what we know now is that there wasn't a ton of oversight.

00:11:55 Speaker_05
They sort of went with the... So the NIH funds the EcoHealth Alliance, and the EcoHealth Alliance funds the Wuhan lab. The Wuhan lab, which has had many safety violations.

00:12:08 Speaker_05
including like I think a year before the the leak and Then it gets out and then they all lie and then they all trade emails back and forth where they're talking about the lie and they go in front of Congress and they lie.

00:12:20 Speaker_05
And now they're talking about giving Fauci a mass pardon, a preemptive pardon, so he doesn't get charged when the Trump- That's crazy. It's a whole thing.

00:12:29 Speaker_05
And then there's another one today where the Biden administration is keeping the emergency classification of COVID to 2029 so that they can avoid being attacked for the Emergency Use Authorization Act. It's so creepy stuff because there's money.

00:12:52 Speaker_05
It's all money, right? There's money involved in this. There's these people that are working on viruses. Well, the way to get funding is you have to work on viruses.

00:13:00 Speaker_05
So whether or not, I don't think they're evil people, but I think these people, this is what they studied in college. This is what they went to university for. And now they're studying it. And what's the best way to study it?

00:13:09 Speaker_05
You got to actually have to have funding. You have to have a lab and you start doing it. And so who do you do it for? Well, you do it for the defense department because they want to work on weaponizing viruses. This is a real thing.

00:13:20 Speaker_01
That's one of the scariest things.

00:13:23 Speaker_05
Fucking terrifying. I did a television show once where we talked to this guy from Russia and from former Soviet Union where he was talking about how they had literally like giant vats of anthrax.

00:13:36 Speaker_05
They had enough anthrax to literally kill like every fucking human being in America, and that they were working on viruses and all these deadly diseases.

00:13:45 Speaker_01
To be honest with you, I'm quite surprised we're still here. It's pretty shocking. With what's already happened and what the potentials are, it's staggering.

00:13:55 Speaker_05
Well, if you think about all the things that we've gone through where we just barely missed a total disaster, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and then there was the one time where they thought that the United States had launched a missile at Russia, and they were very close to responding.

00:14:11 Speaker_05
It was just a glitch. And one guy, just one clear-headed person, decided not to launch. And this is in the 60s?

00:14:19 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:14:20 Speaker_05
This is all, it's so terrifying.

00:14:23 Speaker_01
They're so close all the time, really. That's why one should just try and have a happy life wherever you can. That's for sure.

00:14:33 Speaker_05
The problem with that is if you don't speak up, and if no one reacted to any of this COVID-19 stuff, if no one reacted to the Orwellian censorship complex that was established to try to silence people who are critical of the narrative that they were pushing,

00:14:52 Speaker_05
We would all be fucked. You kind of have to pay attention now, unfortunately. I don't want to. No, I agree. I just want to have fun. Live my life. Be with my family and my friends.

00:15:03 Speaker_01
Of course. Enjoy myself.

00:15:05 Speaker_05
We all do.

00:15:07 Speaker_01
It's good to be aware. No question about that.

00:15:11 Speaker_05
But there's also this part of me that goes, yeah, but this is what the universe provides you with. The universe provides you with this very unique balance of good and evil. And the evil exists to appreciate the good and to motivate the good.

00:15:25 Speaker_05
No question. And there's always going to be both. It just seems like There's always going to, until we reach some enlightenment, till Jesus comes back, till the aliens land.

00:15:35 Speaker_01
It's that thing called balance, isn't it? Yeah. Trying to do the balancing act as best as you can.

00:15:41 Speaker_05
Yeah. What do you do? Like, what's your balancing routine? Like, if you feel like you're getting a little sideways.

00:15:51 Speaker_01
I hate to say it, but it's back to getting out into the fresh air and walking. Yeah. I mean, that really does, or even photography, you know, just being... Actually, my number one go-to is I'm a biker.

00:16:07 Speaker_01
I've been on motorcycles since I was like in my early teens. So, to really blow the cobwebs out, it's... kind of getting on the bike and just riding somewhere I've never been before.

00:16:21 Speaker_01
I'll just look at a map and go, that looks interesting, and I just go.

00:16:24 Speaker_05
That looks like so fun if I was bulletproof and made out of metal. I'm scared of motorcycles.

00:16:33 Speaker_01
Really? Well, it's the other people, as they always say. That's exactly right. But I believe you have to have a heightened awareness to be a biker.

00:16:44 Speaker_05
Oh, most certainly. Do you have a loud bike so people could hear it, at least?

00:16:49 Speaker_01
I've had a few loud ones in my day. Like a Harley? I used to have a Harley. At the moment, I ride a couple of Triumphs. Oh, nice. One that looks like an old school but actually works.

00:17:01 Speaker_01
And then I thought I was never going to be one of those guys that ever kind of rode one of those 50s...no, the sort of adventure bikes.

00:17:12 Speaker_05
You know, with like the saddles with the boxes.

00:17:15 Speaker_01
Yeah, kind of. Yeah, but the relative half-fairing. But when I go for a ride and these random rides, you know, I can be gone up in the mountains with no signal for... three and a half, four hours, you know.

00:17:33 Speaker_01
And there has been an occasion, or several in the past, where without a signal the bike has had problems. And it gets pretty scary when you're in the wilderness. And you've got no backup plan. I had an oil leak with a brand new bike and no signal.

00:17:55 Speaker_01
And I was literally rolling down any hill I could just to survive, make it to whatever little village I could find in the middle of nowhere. Where were you? I was in France. Oh, wow. So I tend to go up in the wilds back there.

00:18:12 Speaker_01
And so I decided also my backside after three and a half hours on one of the older style bikes is pretty painful. So I just happened to look at one of the Triumph Adventure bikes. What do they look like?

00:18:32 Speaker_04
Can you tell us?

00:18:34 Speaker_01
Is that it? So that's what my old bike looks like. That's actually my old bike with my old friend riding it. And that's the one where your ass kills after a couple of hours. So yeah, those are the kind of views I get. Those are in the middle of nowhere.

00:18:51 Speaker_01
Are these your photographs? Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are just quickies on my phone. Just the places I find myself in in the middle of nowhere. I mean, stunning, stunning, stunning places. And they're not far from where I am on the coast. That's beautiful.

00:19:10 Speaker_01
And they're kind of on the border with Italy. So it's pretty unique stuff. Where do you live? I officially live in Monaco.

00:19:20 Speaker_05
Oh, wow.

00:19:22 Speaker_02
I was just there. You were? I was just there last summer.

00:19:24 Speaker_05
Oh, shit.

00:19:25 Speaker_02
OK.

00:19:26 Speaker_05
It's really beautiful.

00:19:27 Speaker_02
It's not a bad place to be. But a weird spot. It's a weird spot. It's like, what's going on here?

00:19:31 Speaker_05
Why is everybody stacked up in apartments right here?

00:19:34 Speaker_01
It's very transient. People come and go for whatever reason that they do. And I mean, most people, like myself, we have this kind of summer house getaway. So you can go breathe on the weekends.

00:19:49 Speaker_05
Isn't it kind of a tax shelter-y place, too?

00:19:51 Speaker_01
Yeah. Oh, very much so. Yeah, yeah, no. A lot of real rich folks go there to hoard their cash. Oh, for sure, for sure. But there's a few new places around the world that offer that kind of possibility. Oh, really? Like where else?

00:20:07 Speaker_01
Dubai's offering certain incentives now, Portugal, certain incentives.

00:20:13 Speaker_05
Yeah, Dubai has no income tax, right?

00:20:14 Speaker_01
I've never been there, personally. Is that a fact? I think it is. I'm not 100% sure.

00:20:21 Speaker_05
I have a friend who just moved to Dubai. He's American, and he's a filmmaker, and he says, I feel so safe.

00:20:27 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, that's one element of it. There's no crime. As long as you're not doing anything bad.

00:20:31 Speaker_05
He said you could leave a Rolex on the ground and someone will pick it up and turn it into the police. Yeah, I'm sure. UAE does not levy income tax on an individual. However, it levies a 5% value-added tax on the purchase of goods and services.

00:20:44 Speaker_05
That's pretty reasonable.

00:20:45 Speaker_04
Yeah.

00:20:45 Speaker_05
Levied at each stage of the supply chain and ultimately borne to the end consumer.

00:20:49 Speaker_01
Fairly reasonable. Although it's never inspired me, so far, anyway.

00:20:57 Speaker_05
Well, there's a lot of wild restrictions over there.

00:21:00 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah. And I like a bit of character with where I am. And one of the pleasures I find is, number one, I'm a biker, so I get to ride around a lot. I'm not really a beach guy. After 20 minutes, I start twitching. I need to do something. It's true.

00:21:21 Speaker_01
But I'm also a foodie as well. So, you know, Monaco is half an hour away from Italy. And there's actually a big crossover in the restaurants between French and Italian food. And then you have places like the island of Corsica, which is French now.

00:21:41 Speaker_01
It's been through the mill a few times. It was English at one point. It was Italian at one point. It's, I think, a few other nations too. And I could see it from where I was.

00:21:54 Speaker_01
You can actually see the outline of Corsica from the south of France and from Monaco in certain locations. And I'd seen it for 25, 30 years and had never been. And a couple of years ago, I decided with a friend to hop in.

00:22:10 Speaker_01
I've got a little mini convertible. And that's my little run around. And decided to get the ferry, which is about six hours across, and drive with no bookings, no nothing, and just see if there was a hotel available.

00:22:26 Speaker_01
And drove around the whole island in 10 days. And it was one of the most magical places I've ever, ever been to. It's like 10 countries on one island. The scenery is mind-blowing.

00:22:40 Speaker_01
And the south of it is very much like the Caribbean, crystal clear, turquoise blue waters. But the food, again, is this combination of the best of Italian and the best of French, and just the freshest of the freshest of the fresh.

00:22:58 Speaker_01
And I've only been down there about two or three times because this was only a few years ago, and I couldn't believe that it's... And here's the other thing. Okay, the ferry's six hours, but you can get on what they call a vomit comet.

00:23:12 Speaker_01
It's like a very short flight, you know. You could be there in the south of Cusco from Nice Airport in 45 minutes, and it's a different world. stunning, gorgeous, different world with, again, scenery unlike I've ever seen before.

00:23:35 Speaker_01
And for such a small island, which you can...yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, it's just insanely, insanely beautiful. And that's Bonifacio, yeah. You know, they're renowned for being They can be a bit of a, you know, tough nuts. In what way?

00:23:57 Speaker_01
You know, if they don't like you, if you piss them off, excuse my French, they'll blow up your house.

00:24:04 Speaker_01
I mean, there was a report a couple of years ago that this guy's house, that he was causing some trouble and they didn't want him around and they blew up his house. They set it on fire and blew it up. I'm serious.

00:24:17 Speaker_05
I guess if you live in a small place like that, that's really amazing. You're probably very protective of someone coming along and ruining it.

00:24:23 Speaker_01
They're exactly like that. I mean, if you don't respect them. Yeah, I get that.

00:24:30 Speaker_05
Whenever people say, like, if you go to France, they're very rude. I get it. I've gone to France. I didn't think they were rude, you know, but I get how there's some Americans like hopping right off the cruise ship that are just fat and stupid.

00:24:45 Speaker_01
There's just, you know, I think if you're not prepared to be warm and friendly on the approach and treat them with the respect that they deserve in their own country, Treat like you're a visitor. Don't order them around. Don't tell them what to do.

00:25:05 Speaker_01
Even though they think it's quite funny that you try and speak their language.

00:25:13 Speaker_01
I can understand French pretty well and Italian and a few other things, but, you know, God help me if I try and speak it because they'll just...they don't laugh at you, but they'll speak back to you in English, you know. Right.

00:25:26 Speaker_05
That's the wonderful thing about English.

00:25:28 Speaker_01
But at least make the effort, is what I'm saying. Sure.

00:25:31 Speaker_05
Show them that you're trying.

00:25:32 Speaker_01
Show them that you're trying. Yeah. Say merci. Yeah. Say that. Just thank you. Alone. Don't just order them around, which I've seen many people do, and it's a bit shocking.

00:25:45 Speaker_05
Grazie mille. Si. Grazie mille. Say a few things. Just let them know that you're trying.

00:25:51 Speaker_01
Yeah.

00:25:52 Speaker_05
Absolutely. I try to go to Italy every year. Me and my family, we go there every year and I love it.

00:26:01 Speaker_01
Where do you head?

00:26:03 Speaker_05
My favorite place is Ravello. Where is that? Ravello's on the Amalfi Coast. Okay, okay. It's just so beautiful. But I've liked Rome too. It's a little touristy. The problem with Rome is it's overcrowded and there's a lot of touristy shit going on.

00:26:17 Speaker_01
Yeah, Rome is not my favorite. The reason why it's so appealing to me is because actually my first stepfather was Italian, Roberto Bassanini. That's pretty Italian. Oh, he was very Italian. And he was the black sheep of the family.

00:26:35 Speaker_01
He was the naughty boy. And he was more like an older brother to me, married to mom. after dad, after John. And his family were involved in kind of hotels and restaurants from also London in the heyday of Italian restaurants. It was like the 70s.

00:27:00 Speaker_01
And so they had a few small hotels in different areas. And so whenever I wasn't at school in London at that, you know, or England at that time,

00:27:11 Speaker_01
We'd take these little trips to Cortina or above Milan, there's a little town called Foppolo that I used to go, unknown by most tourists. Locals to go skiing in the winter or Pesaro, which was on the East Coast for summer holidays.

00:27:33 Speaker_01
I spent a lot of time there growing up from the age of five, six, seven. She was only with him for about three or four years, but we stayed in touch. I used to go and visit him all the time because he was a laugh.

00:27:49 Speaker_01
Of course, sadly, his lifestyle killed him with a couple of heart attacks at the end of everything. That's usually how it goes when you're having a good time. Yeah, he was having too much of a good time. I'm afraid. But I miss him dearly.

00:28:02 Speaker_01
He certainly was, you know, one of those characters that you just, you know, you admired.

00:28:08 Speaker_05
When I go to Italy, it feels like almost immediately you have like a decrease in blood pressure.

00:28:15 Speaker_01
Yes.

00:28:15 Speaker_05
Like almost immediately.

00:28:16 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:28:17 Speaker_05
It's like the vibe of the people and the way they live is just

00:28:23 Speaker_01
They can be a bit stressed sometimes, though, with the shouting at each other and the... Yeah, but even that, it doesn't seem like shouting, like American shouting leads to violence. Yes, this is true.

00:28:34 Speaker_05
I hear American shouting, I'm like, let's get the fuck out of here. I hear Italian shouting, what happened? Did someone in the kitchen fuck up? What went wrong?

00:28:42 Speaker_01
Yeah, I mean, I don't want to sound pompous, but it does sound pompous, that, you know, if I have friends come over from the States or London and, you know, I'll say, do you fancy, you know, getting some Italian tonight?

00:28:57 Speaker_01
And we'll get in the car and we'll be on the freeway or the motorway over there. And they'll be saying, where the eff are we going? And I'm going, we're going for Italian.

00:29:07 Speaker_01
And there's a little town about an hour away from Monaco, tiny little medieval town called, well, we'll give it away actually, can't give it away.

00:29:19 Speaker_01
where I'll just go and get the best spaghetti vongole on the planet made by a grandmother who's in a kitchen, you know, 10 by 10 at the best of times, you know.

00:29:31 Speaker_01
And it's down on the water and it's just, you know, it's Italy for me, if you're not in the mountains, if you're by the sea, at its best. And, you know, they all get dressed up at sunset. You know, they all love to walk the promenade.

00:29:46 Speaker_01
you know, in their finest attire and, you know, sit there and watch the world go by and drink their coffee and chat. And I, you know, because I lived in LA for I think it was about eight years and I went back.

00:30:01 Speaker_01
The story of me going back actually was that I flew back to London to see a premiere of a film called Backbeat. It's about the early Beatles. I didn't know anything about it, but I had an invite, so I went to see it.

00:30:16 Speaker_01
And I met this guy who said, who's a line producer, film producer. And he said, you know, have you been to Monaco before? I said, no, I've never even thought about it really. And he said, do you like Grand Prix? I'm not really a Grand Prix kind of guy.

00:30:39 Speaker_01
He said, well, listen, if you got nothing to do this weekend after, you know, we saw the film and the premiere, you know, why don't you come down? I've got an apartment. I've got an extra room. I know the town inside out, you know.

00:30:54 Speaker_01
And I was thinking, oh, what am I going to do? Go back to L.A. and be numb again. And so I literally went down to Monaco the next day.

00:31:05 Speaker_01
And he just showed me around and we went to this very famous restaurant and famous corner called the Rascasse Corner on the Grand Prix Circuit.

00:31:17 Speaker_01
And it's literally where you're having a prawn cocktail and there's a car coming at you at about 180 miles an hour with just a chicken wire fence in front of your face. How far away? I mean, directly in front of you.

00:31:33 Speaker_01
I mean, the car could be... So this is it right here? Yeah. That's not the Rascasse Corner. That's the Lowe's Corner. Rascasse Corner is a very, very famous little spot. There it is. Yeah, that's it. So you'd be behind the chicken wire fence.

00:31:50 Speaker_01
This is a kind of modern version of it. But that's even more protection than it used to have. And you'd have a bit of lunch there and that was the hot spot in Monaco for years and years. There were three brothers that owned it, real troublemakers.

00:32:10 Speaker_01
And it was a blast. So I went, all right, I'm into this. So I spent the summer down there. And I used to have a little bungalow on Mulholland and Coldwater. And I had a caretaker there, because I had a dog at the time. And I just said, hi, Tim.

00:32:37 Speaker_01
pack it up, sell the house, I'm not coming back. And I didn't go back. Did you take your dog? The dog actually died before I, yeah, sadly. It was getting on. But yes. You said, fuck it, I'm moving tomorrow. Yeah, that was it.

00:32:55 Speaker_01
I just put everything in storage. I rented this kind of what could be seen as a Miami Vice kind of apartment on the 30th floor. It just had marble and a mirrored wall with no furniture. And so I bought a couch off of the floor of a store called Habitat.

00:33:25 Speaker_01
because it would take like six weeks to order and I had nothing. And so I bought a couch, I bought a TV, even though there was no English TV back then. This is 30 years ago. And I just had a trunk to put the TV on. Occasionally you get American movies.

00:33:44 Speaker_01
And a mattress on the floor and I lived like that for 10 years and just was really stupid. Did you enjoy it? It was just stupid. I've had two... Well, I've had three major...well, no, four. It's like the Spanish Inquisition, four major incidents.

00:34:05 Speaker_01
Now, I mean, London back in the day used to be a great place to party and enjoy. And then I moved to New York for a few years early in my career, in my early 20s.

00:34:18 Speaker_01
But I think I almost died there with the partying that went on and the clubs back in that...

00:34:25 Speaker_01
hey the heyday then and it was celebrity set central you know with the likes of at the limelight with Alice Cooper and a few other fruitcakes and then and then I really didn't feel like I was you know I could have I could have yeah easily I was bored the line I enjoyed it too much

00:34:50 Speaker_01
And then I went out to LA and a friend of mine had a convertible and we just drove across Mulholland down to Malibu and I went, fuck, this is gorgeous. What the hell am I doing back there? So I moved to LA. I packed up and moved.

00:35:06 Speaker_01
And I did exactly the same thing. I found a place to live and I just was there until I could get myself situated. I think I met you in LA. Are you serious? In 1993. That's a good possibility. That would have been mid to end of my term out there.

00:35:24 Speaker_05
I was doing something for MTV and you were one of the first celebrities that I met. You, I met Rico Suave, and a couple of other people.

00:35:34 Speaker_01
Shut the front door. Yes. Yeah, because I was early in on the MTV stuff. The label I was with was pushing whatever, throw me on whatever was available.

00:35:48 Speaker_05
I was with this woman who was an executive at MTV, and she was taking me around and showing me LA. I'd never been to LA before. once for a martial arts competition when I was young.

00:36:04 Speaker_05
Here I was, and she took me into this nightclub, and you were at the front door about to get in. And I was like, holy shit, that's Julian Lennon.

00:36:12 Speaker_02
Do you remember which one it was?

00:36:13 Speaker_05
No, I don't. I remember very little about it. Was I with some fruitcakes? I'm sure I was. I don't remember. I just remember like, oh, that's a famous guy. John Lennon's son. Crazy. Because, you know, I was coming from New York. Of course.

00:36:27 Speaker_05
I was 25, 26 years old. I didn't know anything. And I was like, this is so strange. It was just strange to me to be in these, like, Hollywood parties with this MTV executive who was taking me around and showing me all this stuff.

00:36:37 Speaker_02
Oh, yeah.

00:36:37 Speaker_05
She was just kind of like introducing, like, this is what it's like. It's what everybody does. They go out. They go out to the clubs and it was just... Yeah.

00:36:45 Speaker_01
The scary thing about LA was that you thought it was all over by 2 o'clock because they literally pull your drinks at 1.30. But then they go to someone's house and they continue till dawn. So that was dangerous too.

00:37:01 Speaker_01
So I was happy that I got away from that.

00:37:05 Speaker_05
Fortunately, I avoided all that.

00:37:06 Speaker_01
Yeah, you're lucky. Yeah. I mean, there was some fun to be had, no question about it, but a lot of it was kind of dark, too.

00:37:16 Speaker_05
Yes, I'm sure. Well, that's when you start adding cocaine to human beings, you get darkness.

00:37:22 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah. And a lot of Jack Daniels, too.

00:37:25 Speaker_05
They go hand in hand. Yeah, I avoided all that, luckily, when I moved to LA. I'm one of those people that's like, I see where that's going. How long were you out there for?

00:37:37 Speaker_05
I guess 30, well, no, not quite 30 years, 26 years, because I've been here for four.

00:37:42 Speaker_02
That's a stretch.

00:37:44 Speaker_05
Yeah, the most of my life, the most I've ever lived anywhere, I lived there. But uh, I only went to parties like a handful very small handful of times.

00:37:54 Speaker_05
It was like I was dragged to him Yeah, you know like the last one I was dragged to was Naomi Campbell's birthday party, which was I'm sure that was it was insane Yeah, it was with Dave Chappelle.

00:38:04 Speaker_05
So Dave and I were at the comedy store and you know, Dave knows everybody. Yes Hey, man, there's a party up in the hills. You want to go? And I was like, I don't want to go to any fucking parties. Yeah, he's like, Come on, man. I want to go alone.

00:38:17 Speaker_05
So I said, Okay, so me and Dave, we drove all the way up. It was like a scene in a movie.

00:38:22 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:38:22 Speaker_05
Because like, here's me and my super famous friend. And we're my Porsche. And we're my race car of a GT three.

00:38:31 Speaker_05
We're driving up in the hills and then we have to stop at this place and then you have to get on a shuttle and then you get to the house and then you get on an elevator, an outside elevator that takes you from the main house to the party house.

00:38:46 Speaker_05
So they had a party house on the top of this hill. So we're up in this elevator with Demi Moore, which is weird as it is. I'm like, hi. It's fucking weird. Yeah, and then we get to the top of this hill and it's just everybody famous.

00:39:00 Speaker_05
It's Lenny Kravitz and all these different people and so Naomi Campbell, there's a photograph of her on the side of the hill. That's literally 50 feet tall It's enormous naked photograph of her. Of course, because it's her birthday.

00:39:14 Speaker_05
Well, of course, she's unbelievably beautiful still as old as she is I don't know how old she is, but she looks sensational. So we get to the top of this place. We're hanging out It's very weird. It's very weird. And then Dave pulls me aside. He goes man

00:39:27 Speaker_05
I wouldn't want to be this famous. I go. Hey, man, you're the most famous motherfucker here. He goes, really? Oh, yeah. Yeah, because we're a little high. He was really I go a hundred percent. You're the most famous person.

00:39:37 Speaker_02
Sure.

00:39:38 Speaker_05
We're just laughing like this is so crazy. And then we got out of there and went right back to the comedy store. I can't do this.

00:39:46 Speaker_01
It's just too strange. The scenes are pretty weird out there, that's for sure.

00:39:51 Speaker_05
Well, it's also these celebrities, they can't hang out with regular people, I think. They feel too weird. So I think they try to get together.

00:39:58 Speaker_01
Yeah. And so we were in like a- That's absolutely spot on. A vampire den of famous people. Yes, you are absolutely spot on.

00:40:06 Speaker_05
They call it, he said it was like an eyes wide shut party. I'm like, that's what it feels like.

00:40:10 Speaker_01
It feels like you're in a secret fraternity. Yeah, there's a few that I've left that I felt very uncomfortable being at. Like what? I mean, I couldn't tell you exactly where and when, but certainly some weird ones up in the hills.

00:40:25 Speaker_01
I just went, nah, this just doesn't feel good.

00:40:27 Speaker_05
There's something about the act of going up into the hills, like you're going to the lair, the dragon's lair.

00:40:33 Speaker_01
Well, one of the things was the fact that, well, I mean, now you've got Ubers all over the place. But back in my day, there was no taxis around either. So you'd get trapped. And then you'd figure, well, I'm here anyway. Might as well have another drink.

00:40:57 Speaker_01
And that's what would happen more often than not. But yeah, so it's kind of better not to.

00:41:05 Speaker_05
Definitely better not to, but maybe go a couple of times.

00:41:08 Speaker_01
Yeah, go and check it out. Go and see what that's all about. Yeah.

00:41:14 Speaker_05
Many people have lost their time.

00:41:15 Speaker_01
It's messy, though.

00:41:16 Speaker_05
Oh, yeah. They've lost their time to those places.

00:41:19 Speaker_01
It's very messy.

00:41:20 Speaker_05
It becomes a part of your life and your lifestyle. It's deeply unhealthy, both It's physically unhealthy, but it's also spiritually unhealthy. Yeah. It's a weird way to spend your time.

00:41:32 Speaker_01
Been there, done that. Thank you very much.

00:41:34 Speaker_05
You look fine. You got through it.

00:41:36 Speaker_01
I did. I did get through it.

00:41:38 Speaker_05
Don't you think it's good to just know, though?

00:41:40 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah.

00:41:41 Speaker_05
Yeah, not the way to do it.

00:41:43 Speaker_01
I think if you don't know, you can't you can't talk about it, you can't understand that weird journey that you go through. I think you have to do certain things sometimes just to realize what it's all about.

00:42:00 Speaker_01
It's that balance thing, it's the light and the dark.

00:42:04 Speaker_05
LA's so particularly odd too because everyone's chasing this very specific goal of notoriety. It's success, but success is it's quantified by notoriety. Like, the more famous you are, the more popular, the bigger your song is.

00:42:22 Speaker_01
Even now, you know, all you've got to have is a bloody iPhone or whatever to earn an account and that's it. Very strange. Yeah, really, really odd. I can't quite get to grips with all of that, to be honest with you.

00:42:39 Speaker_05
I don't think anybody can. And I think it's essentially being captured by a form of technology that has leveraged our desire for this attention, our desire for this notoriety.

00:42:52 Speaker_01
But it's also being known for nothing. Yeah, that's the scary thing. And having this element of what seems to be the latest generation of this privilege, you know, where they believe that, you know...

00:43:11 Speaker_01
Everything is owed to them right and I type that entitled.

00:43:14 Speaker_05
Yeah, and I find that shocking, you know Well that comes along with the quest right if the quest is just notoriety like if you're an artist and you happen to get famous because everybody loves your music or loves your photography or loves your

00:43:27 Speaker_05
your books or whatever it is. That's a different sort of a relationship because people love you for what you've made, what you've produced.

00:43:35 Speaker_02
Yeah, there's a purpose to it.

00:43:36 Speaker_05
Yeah, and I love people like that because I'm fascinated by people that are able to create things that resonate with everybody or resonate with an enormous amount of people. It's fascinating to be around them.

00:43:49 Speaker_05
I know a lot of famous people now, and I know some of them are just fantastic people. They're just really interesting people.

00:43:56 Speaker_01
You have very interesting people on your show, that's for sure. That's what intrigued me, from Professor Brian Cox, who I'm an absolute fan of. He's amazing. Such a nice guy. Lovely guy, mind-blowing. Just too much information for my good.

00:44:15 Speaker_05
It's so funny, I was talking about him with a friend of mine the other day, and my friend wasn't aware of him, and I had just done a podcast with him.

00:44:22 Speaker_05
And I had gone to the club from the podcast, I'm like, oh my god, I had the greatest podcast, this guy blew my mind. I've had him on several times, and he's always amazing. And my friend looks at the photo, he goes, what does he look like?

00:44:34 Speaker_05
I pull up, he's like, is that guy in a fucking band or something? I go, yeah, he was in a band. He's like, no way, he was in a success He's an actual brilliant scientist who was in a successful band.

00:44:45 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. Mind-boggling. I mean, I... doesn't comprehend. Because he looks like a rock star. He does. He does. Yeah, he's not changed his look since the beginning. And he's such a great science communicator. Well, that's the thing.

00:45:00 Speaker_01
See, I love science, but I get lost in it sometimes. But he is probably the closest I'll ever get to really trying to have an insight into what it's all about, you know, as best as he can describe it.

00:45:13 Speaker_05
He's really good at explaining to people that don't have the proper understanding of all the terminology and all the ways they discover it. He can lay it out for the layperson.

00:45:26 Speaker_01
Which is why he's so fascinating, which is why everybody should know him.

00:45:30 Speaker_05
Yeah. His show is wonderful, too. Have you ever seen his show? They do a live performance.

00:45:35 Speaker_01
No, I have not.

00:45:35 Speaker_05
Enormous screens, and they show you, like, history of the universe and stellar nurseries and all this wild stuff. It's really incredible stuff.

00:45:44 Speaker_01
No, fantastic. Fantastic stuff.

00:45:46 Speaker_05
Yeah. I've been very fortunate in that way, that I've had a chance to talk to so many extraordinary people. And it's great. But it makes talking to boring people almost painful. Like you're just holding your breath.

00:46:02 Speaker_01
I don't know which category I'm in. You're not in the boring kind. No.

00:46:06 Speaker_05
No.

00:46:07 Speaker_01
Well, I can be. I think we all can be, I guess, at some stage.

00:46:11 Speaker_05
Well, just the fact that you're willing to do what you've done just to take these trips and just move to a place, I think that's great. I think people need more of that in their life.

00:46:20 Speaker_05
I think you could see the world from your neighborhood and from where you live and get a really distorted sense of this experience, this very unique experience of these bizarre thinking creatures interacting with each other on this isolated planet that's hurling through the universe.

00:46:37 Speaker_05
And you could think that you kind of understand the experience until you go to other places.

00:46:41 Speaker_01
I see you're a big fan of Bourdain as well. And I loved his shows. I still watch them all the time because it's just what he discovered and how he entrenched himself with the people that he went to meet.

00:46:58 Speaker_01
And the conversations and the food, that's my cup of tea right there. How can you not want to do that, learn and love that experience?

00:47:09 Speaker_05
Well, he had such an infectious passion for different cultures and their food and the art of food. Like, he was the first guy that made me consider that cooking is actually an art form. Like, I kind of knew it, but I didn't think of it.

00:47:25 Speaker_05
I kind of just said, oh, delicious food, awesome. Oh, this guy's a really great chef. Awesome. And then I watched his first show, No Reservations, like, oh. Okay, duh, it's art. It's art. Do you eat? Oh, yeah.

00:47:38 Speaker_05
Oh, that's why they're all weird and now have tattoos and fucking weird earrings Yeah, okay. They're artists.

00:47:43 Speaker_05
Okay, that makes so much sense And I was like, oh you ignorant fuck you like you had never put it in that category for I just like decided No, that's just food

00:47:52 Speaker_02
But no, there's an art to food. It's another level.

00:47:55 Speaker_05
Yeah, like that place you were talking about, linguine with clams, linguine vongole, which is my favorite dish of all time.

00:48:01 Speaker_01
Spaghetti vongole. When it's done right. I promise that if you ever come back to Monty, as we call it, I'll drive you.

00:48:09 Speaker_05
Oh, I'll go.

00:48:11 Speaker_01
I'll go. We'll go for spaghetti vongole and hope the dear grandmother's still alive.

00:48:16 Speaker_05
It also makes me angry, because when I eat pasta and pizza over in Italy, I don't feel like shit. And then I come to America and I eat the same supposed things, and I feel- Listen, I can eat a friggin' salad here and put on weight.

00:48:31 Speaker_01
I don't know what's going on. I'm serious, though. Yeah, it's seed oils. Absolutely. Seed oils in the salad dressing and sugar and- Yep, all of that. Yeah, I agree. It's a much healthier lifestyle over there without question. The food hasn't been violated.

00:48:47 Speaker_05
Yeah, that's true. It's generally organic.

00:48:50 Speaker_01
You can eat pizza every day and pasta every day. And also, I think the other real big thing here is the portion control as well. Yeah, we're gluttons. I mean, you can have one plateful of food here, and it'll serve four people in Europe.

00:49:06 Speaker_05
Yeah. Literally. Oh, yeah. That's a fact. I think, you know, I was poor when I was young. And I think because of that, I'm even more of a glutton.

00:49:17 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:49:17 Speaker_05
Because I just want more food. I want all the food.

00:49:19 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah.

00:49:20 Speaker_05
And then I work out a lot, so I'm always hungry.

00:49:22 Speaker_02
Yeah.

00:49:22 Speaker_05
So then I have a real overeating.

00:49:24 Speaker_02
That's a different thing, though.

00:49:26 Speaker_05
Yeah. The only thing that keeps me from being fat is my exercise routine and discipline. Because if I was just giving in to my whims, I'd be 500 pounds in a fucking while. I just love food. Especially when you go to a different culture.

00:49:42 Speaker_05
If you go to somewhere, like you can go to Thailand and eat authentic Thai food in Thailand, it's like, oh man.

00:49:48 Speaker_01
There's something special about it. It's great when you've got friends who have that same appreciation that while you're eating lunch, you're talking about dinner. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's how excited you are about food.

00:50:03 Speaker_05
And it's also it just realigns your priorities. Like what what really are you trying to get out of life. You're trying to get out of life memorable experiences with people you care about. Those are like the best moments in life.

00:50:15 Speaker_01
No question, no question about it. Yeah, I long for that because also I go on these very long working time periods and I don't get to see a lot of friends quite often. And so I really try and work out and look at my schedule these days.

00:50:36 Speaker_01
I'm taking some time out here for a couple of days. I want to see my friends. I want to say hello. I want to share some time and stories and food with them.

00:50:46 Speaker_01
So it's become a key thing to have that included in running around like a headless chicken all the time.

00:50:53 Speaker_05
Is that what inspired your photography? Because this book is really excellent. Your photography is great.

00:50:57 Speaker_01
Thank you. Thank you. You know, it was a dear friend, Timothy White, who's a celebrity photographer. And he'd done my second and third album.

00:51:11 Speaker_01
And we were doing a charity single called Lucy, which was about Lucy Voden, who was the Lucy in the Sky with Diamond that I grew up with. who died from lupus. And then I became the lupus, the ambassador for the Lupus Foundation of America.

00:51:35 Speaker_01
We were doing a single to raise money called Lucy and we were doing with another great artist called James Scott Cook. And we were doing a photo shoot and he'd sent me some pictures and I started screwing around with his pictures.

00:51:51 Speaker_01
And he said to me, and you don't, you actually don't do that with another photographer's work. He said, what the fuck are you doing with my pictures? He said, where did you learn how to do this? I said, well, I didn't.

00:52:05 Speaker_01
I'm intuitively inspired to play around with stuff. I'm still a big kid. And he said, well, do you have other photos? Do you actually have photos yourself that you've taken and worked on? I said, well, I've got bits and bobs, but nothing.

00:52:23 Speaker_01
So he and I sat down and looked through all the photos I had and I think there was maybe a thousand at that time, which isn't much at all. I'm now over 120,000 photos. It's mind-boggling. That's why this was difficult.

00:52:43 Speaker_01
Yeah, so he said, Jules, why don't you do something with this stuff? And I said, what? What am I going to do? He said, listen, you should do an exhibition. You've got some really beautiful things here.

00:52:55 Speaker_01
And I said, listen, I'll do it if you mentor me through the whole process. which he did. And I was probably more petrified at the first exhibition that I did, which was in New York at the old CBGBs, which turned into the Morrison Hotel Gallery.

00:53:22 Speaker_01
And that was in 2010, I think. And I was more petrified the three days leading up to that than I was ever going on stage.

00:53:33 Speaker_01
Well, probably my first ever stage performance, which I did in Dallas at a rehearsal space that was down here for the first ever tour. Now, again, the anxiety, you know, it's the unknown. I don't know what

00:53:49 Speaker_01
You know, the worry of what people are going to think because, you know, not just being you, but John Lennon's son, being the second John, so to speak, was always an issue for me. You know, feeling like you have to doubly prove yourself.

00:54:06 Speaker_01
So, and literally an hour or two before the opening as well, there was the most horrendous storm and downpour in New York. And I thought, well, that's it. Nobody's coming.

00:54:21 Speaker_01
But to my utter delight, I had reviews from fine art photography magazines, et cetera, et cetera, that gave me nothing but praise. And I was shocked.

00:54:35 Speaker_00
Wow.

00:54:35 Speaker_01
Absolutely shocked. So I just continued doing that. I'm now over, I think, 42 exhibitions worldwide, and I just finished my biggest one in Venice at a museum over the last three months.

00:54:55 Speaker_01
And the book, in fact, I had approached other publications before, but been pretty much turned down by everybody.

00:55:05 Speaker_01
And then out of the blue, earlier this year, this company out of Berlin called Tenoise said, listen, do you want to do a photography book? And I said, hell yeah. And they said, why haven't you done one before?

00:55:19 Speaker_01
I said, because nobody gave me the opportunity. Excuse my French.

00:55:25 Speaker_05
Do you think that's because you're John Lennon's son? There's a burden that is very unique to you.

00:55:31 Speaker_01
Listen, I certainly recognize that there's walls up, without question.

00:55:37 Speaker_05
What is that like? What are the walls? Do you think it's just they dismiss you?

00:55:44 Speaker_01
Something's going on. I mean, I've discussed this with Rebecca, who you met, my manager, and a few other people.

00:55:50 Speaker_01
There's occasions where I'll be totally blanked, like with the last album I came out with, Jude, which took between five and 30 years to write and record. It was old songs and new songs that I wanted to balance the sound.

00:56:08 Speaker_01
And it was at a time when I'd gone through a lot of changes myself and I had decided to finally call myself, be Julian. I'd been John Charles Julian Lennon all my life.

00:56:25 Speaker_01
But everybody had always known me as Julian, even mum, mum and dad called me Julian. So I'm like, you know, I want to be, I want to be me finally. So by deed poll in 2020, I said, right, I'm going to be Julian now.

00:56:40 Speaker_01
And the album's going to be called Jude. And the reason I called it Jude was it was finally not only an acceptance but actually...what's the terminology?

00:56:57 Speaker_01
I'm actually taking ownership, should I say, of the name Jude and what that represented for all these years. to other people and to me. So anyway, the album was a biggie for me, calling the album Jude for starters, inciting, hopefully positive things.

00:57:26 Speaker_01
But the weird thing was, I put this whole band together and I wanted to, as a starter, to go on all the TV shows that I'd ever wanted to appear on.

00:57:43 Speaker_01
For instance, in England, like Jools Holland, later with Jools Holland, which is the only live music show that I've watched all my life, literally. There's Graham Norton. And I'd done their radio shows, which is really, really weird.

00:58:05 Speaker_01
And we got on like a house on fire, and I performed live. And that all went down well, and then it was kind of like see you on the real show. Producers turned me down. And same with a lot of the late night American shows. They weren't interested.

00:58:26 Speaker_01
And I had done the name change, I'd been away for 10 years, I'd called the album Jude. There was a lot to talk about, and a great deal more than I'm presenting right now. Anyway, I was turned down and that still happens to me.

00:58:54 Speaker_01
Which saddens me because just when you feel like you want to open up, you know, and answer any question you can throw at me, I've not been allowed to.

00:59:09 Speaker_01
That's what it's felt like, that I've not been allowed to speak my piece, whatever that is, you know. on whatever subject matter. It's weird.

00:59:19 Speaker_05
It's like the gatekeeper aspect of it is weird, but it's also weird, like, why not? Like, what would be the hesitance?

00:59:26 Speaker_01
I don't understand.

00:59:27 Speaker_05
It's the idea of the son of a great man, you know, and there's this weird, we have a dismissal, and I'm very guilty of it myself, the son of a great man, I would assume, like, that guy's fucked.

00:59:38 Speaker_02
Yeah, yeah. He's fucked.

00:59:40 Speaker_05
The burden's too high. Your dad was John Lennon.

00:59:42 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. Iconic. Well, and I think with a lot of people, they don't want anybody to interfere with that. I mean, how dare the sun come along and even try and be better in any way, shape, or form, or be as good as, or whatever.

01:00:01 Speaker_05
Or whatever. Yeah, you're immediately dismissed.

01:00:03 Speaker_01
Which is why, to a certain degree, photography really appealed to me. And the reality is I prefer it behind the camera. I don't mind being a goofball once in a while doing in front of the camera things, but I'm not really comfortable there.

01:00:23 Speaker_01
But behind the camera and traveling is what I... I have a foundation called the White Feather Foundation.

01:00:34 Speaker_01
You know, we try to help people all over the world, and it started... I know that you have interest in indigenous cultures, and I don't know if you know the backstory to this, to the White Feather Foundation at all. I don't. Okay, so here we go. Okay.

01:00:51 Speaker_01
I was on tour with probably my most at least outside of America, most well-known song. It was at number one and top 10 in countries all over the world except for America. And it was called Saltwater.

01:01:09 Speaker_01
And Saltwater is about environmental and humanitarian issues. And I was number one in Australia. I was doing all kinds of shows. I was doing promo and tour as well. And I found myself in Adelaide.

01:01:25 Speaker_01
And I got this call from the hotel management saying, excuse me, Mr. Lennon, but there's an Aboriginal tribe down here with TV crews who want to say hi. And I thought it was like an on-the-road prank. I said, yeah, sure.

01:01:41 Speaker_01
Sure, why would they be coming to see me? And they called back and they said, no, no, no, no, this is serious. Can you come down, please? And so I think TV crews, Aboriginal tribe, what's this about?

01:01:59 Speaker_01
And so I kind of get dolled up a little bit because I don't know what the TV shows are or cameras are. So I go down and in the lobby, there's a little platform and about 30 people, half of them indigenous, TV crews, bunch of other stuff.

01:02:19 Speaker_01
And I honestly have no idea what it's about. And this woman who was the elder of this particular tribe called the Murning people,

01:02:30 Speaker_01
walked up to me and presented me with a male swan's white feather, which is about yay big, and said, you know, can you help us? You have a voice. Can you help us? And I just kind of went,

01:02:47 Speaker_01
Well, you know, do I just continue being the rock and roller or do I step up to the plate? Whatever that means.

01:02:56 Speaker_05
And so... What specifically did they want help with?

01:02:59 Speaker_01
Well, I'll tell you. I didn't know what their problems were. I imagined that it would be the same as most other indigenous tribes around the world that have had issues, you know. And they said, you know, can you help us?

01:03:17 Speaker_01
And I said, you know, I'll do it for the children. So I guess what I was saying is the next generation I can, you know, try and Anyway, so this woman was called Irish. She was the eldest. She's since passed in the last year or so.

01:03:40 Speaker_01
But I spent 10 years making a documentary with a best friend, Kim Kindersley, who initiated this whole thing. And we made a documentary called Whale Dreamers, independent. We had no money really behind it, no sponsorship.

01:03:57 Speaker_01
We won about eight international independent film awards, which was great. But the backstory to this is that dad had said to me, and I couldn't tell you when or where, just was one of those times that we were together.

01:04:18 Speaker_01
He just said that, you know, if something ever happens to me, that I'll let you know that I'm okay or that we're all going to be okay. We'll be in the form of a white feather. Whoa.

01:04:37 Speaker_01
When that woman presented me with a white feather, the goosebumps came on heavy. I get them now every time I talk about the story. I'm getting them right now. So yeah, there she is. There's Iris, and there's Bunna, who's one of the other guys.

01:04:57 Speaker_01
That is so crazy. I still have that. I still have that in the original envelope that she gave it to me. in a very special place at home. I mean, you can talk all about coincidences. No, listen.

01:05:13 Speaker_01
For me, I'm sorry, that was undeniable, regardless of where my faith or spirituality or religion was. To me, that was, this is real. This is as real as it gets.

01:05:28 Speaker_05
It's funny because people love to dismiss these things. Like, oh, hogwash. Oh, it's just coincidence. Oh, it could have been a variety of different things. But the reality is, mathematically, what are the odds?

01:05:45 Speaker_05
Just what are the odds that you would be contacted by an indigenous tribe and they would bring you the very thing that your father said he would provide you as proof?

01:05:54 Speaker_01
Yeah, and I was in Australia, number one at the time, with Saltwater, the most environmental humanitarian song I've ever written and performed, you know. Yeah, so I said, yeah, I'll do what I can.

01:06:11 Speaker_01
So we did make the film, and then with the advent of, of course, the internet, I thought, okay, we'll put a website together to sell the film. And I'd also said to my business manager, I said, if we make anything on this,

01:06:32 Speaker_01
I said, I want everything to go back to the moaning people. And he said, the only way that that can happen is if you have a foundation. So initially, the foundation was just a vehicle just to pass money along.

01:06:50 Speaker_01
But I started the White Feather Foundation to have, again, a vehicle to sell the film. And then slowly but surely I would start getting these emails from people over the years, you know, over time, sorry, saying, well, you know, can you help us?

01:07:09 Speaker_01
And I'm going, well, I'm not really a foundation. I'm just, I did this project and I thought that was it. Anyway, there were a few other, there was lots of emails and I finally said, well, you know, all right, this is a platform. Let me see if I can

01:07:25 Speaker_01
Okay, what am I interested in? What can I do? You know, there's plenty of other charities out there, there's plenty of other people doing other things, but what can I do? What's most important to me?

01:07:39 Speaker_01
indigenous tribes were the first, so the Moaning People. And then, in fact, in the film itself, in Whale Dreamers, Kim, my director, friend and director, had already done a segment of a film where he grouped 80 of the elders of the world

01:08:02 Speaker_01
world's indigenous tribes, 80 from around the world, around a fire and just film them to talk about their plight and what they had in common and the fact that their cultures and land were being taken away from them, being destroyed, etc., etc.

01:08:23 Speaker_01
So that became one of the first orders of the day, protect the mining, protect indigenous tribes around the world, try to buy back their lands and protect their cultures and their people and try and support them in whatever way we can, which is what we continue to do.

01:08:41 Speaker_01
And I was in Kenya going to different schools and health clinics, mostly girls schools. I set up a scholarship in my mom's name, the Cynthia Lennon Scholarship for Girls.

01:09:02 Speaker_01
And so we send them to college and universities where they go to learn how to protect their people and their families and cultures.

01:09:15 Speaker_01
And so we support, you know, we build health clinics and dormitories and we do it because, I mean, the stories that I heard from these girls about having to walk to and from schools that took three to six hours and they'd be exhausted by the time they got to home or to school.

01:09:35 Speaker_01
And that they, in order to, you know, get ahead, they had to pass, you know, certain exams, but they had the threat pretty much every day of being either raped or murdered.

01:09:47 Speaker_01
And they would literally stay in their own schools, sleep in the classrooms, and convert them to dormitories at night so that they felt protected.

01:09:57 Speaker_01
I mean, when they went home, they were doing three hours of chores every night before they could do any homework, and then go to sleep, and then walk to school again. So you'd hear these incredible stories that you just realize how lucky you are.

01:10:13 Speaker_01
And so we try to help, again, the indigenous. We do help with health and education as far as young kids, young girls cross Africa.

01:10:27 Speaker_01
Kenya and Ethiopia and also my last trip was to Colombia, to South America to visit the Koji tribe who were these insane, people that chewed the cocoa leaves.

01:10:46 Speaker_01
But they used to be fishermen years ago before the Spanish arrived in the 1600s and chased them off into the Sierra Nevada mountains. Is it cocoa leaves or cat? Yeah, it's cocoa leaves. Cocoa leaves. Yeah, and they chew it and mix it with spit. Oh, boy.

01:11:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, they're all off their heads really. But they still have this beautiful culture, and I was only there for a few days, and we were up in the mountains with them.

01:11:14 Speaker_01
There's another group, there's an NGO, another group called the Amazon Conservation Team, who the White Feather Foundation worked with, and we went down there and was able to buy back some of their land, and we did a couple of ceremonies with them, which were very, very beautiful, but one of the most

01:11:35 Speaker_01
Probably one of the happiest moments of my life, and I've only mentioned this once or twice, was that we came back down from the mountains, and we came to the sea where we were staying in huts, and the Koji tribe came down with us.

01:11:53 Speaker_01
It lit a fire on the beach, sun was just going down, and there was no phones, no computers, no nothing.

01:12:03 Speaker_01
And we're just sitting on the beach, and the fire's between myself and the Koji tribe, and the sun's just going down, and the waves are right in front, and it's just very beautiful.

01:12:15 Speaker_01
Nobody on the beach, old, beautiful, beaten-up tree trunks that have washed up on the shore, and just a little haze from the water and the sand being blown. And there was a piece that I can't explain.

01:12:35 Speaker_01
I looked over at them and through the flames of the fire and we just smiled. There was no words. some level of peace that had been found just living in that moment, that present moment.

01:12:58 Speaker_01
And then the sun going down and then because there's no streetlights or anything else around, you saw every star in the sky possible.

01:13:08 Speaker_01
And so with that transition, hanging out with this, one of the oldest tribes in South America, with the fire, with the sea, with the sky and the stars. I can't even describe it.

01:13:24 Speaker_01
It was one of the most loving and most peaceful moments of my entire life. The simplicity of it. It was actually the simplicity of it all and just the human heart and the appreciation

01:13:40 Speaker_01
for the world that we live in and it's like well that's partly why I do what I do you know even with the photography is capturing those moments those once-in-a-lifetime moments and the other thing was is that how I started doing photography is when I was on the road a lot you do these real long-haul flights you know to to America or to Asia or wherever and back in the day you only had

01:14:09 Speaker_01
one movie on a projector, that was it. You didn't have TV screens or the iPhones or anything to watch anything. So once the movie was done and you'd have a bit of food or whatever, that was it. Most people would go to sleep.

01:14:24 Speaker_01
I would always be twitching, of course. So I'd be looking out the window and staring at the clouds. And I realized that what I was seeing was literally just moments and they would never be again. They would be gone, fleeting, that's it.

01:14:47 Speaker_01
Whatever that cloud, that light, that shade, that shadow, the color, the beauty of that, the enormity of it as well was

01:14:56 Speaker_01
So I started taking pictures of clouds and I just thought that at these moments while everybody else was asleep on the plane, I'd be sitting there looking out either thinking about everything that was on my mind in the world, yeah, or I'd be thinking of nothing at all and I'd just be at peace and again like that moment in Columbia just...

01:15:25 Speaker_01
absorbing everything that I found to be beautiful that was surrounded me. So clouds were my thing at first. That was my moment to either get away or think about everything.

01:15:39 Speaker_01
But mostly that kind of element of freedom and space and just, am I the only one seeing this? Everybody else is asleep.

01:15:50 Speaker_04
Everyone's distracted.

01:15:51 Speaker_01
Yeah. pictures of clouds. And then, you know, I knew a few rock and rollers so I started taking pictures of those too.

01:16:00 Speaker_01
And then one thing led to another because I'd go on these trips to Ethiopia with great organizations like Charity Water and again Kenya and South America and a number of other places. I just would take a camera with me

01:16:22 Speaker_01
Because I have to confess, and I've said this a few times, I have the worst memory of anybody I know. Absolute terrible, absolutely terrible. And so, in a way, this was taking a camera with me was to catalog what was going on.

01:16:43 Speaker_01
And it was only when I got back home, I put them on the screen and I go, oh, that's quite a nice picture. Oh, that's not so bad. What if I just did this, that, and the other?

01:16:51 Speaker_01
And so I started making collections of my journeys, which eventually became my website and my photography. You know, I've never done a paid gig as such and I've never used nothing that was natural light or present light. So I've never set anything up.

01:17:09 Speaker_01
I've always tried to, again, get that moment, whatever it was. And then I had the opportunity, I know I've gone in a bit of a roundabout circle, but the publishers came to me earlier this year saying, do you want to do a book?

01:17:27 Speaker_01
And I'm thinking, well, yes, and how do I do this? And because a lot of people don't know I'm a photographer in any way, shape, or form, I thought, OK, can I make it a retrospective? Can I make it all the stuff that I'm interested in?

01:17:44 Speaker_01
Because often as a photographer or even a musician, you get, well, what is your favorite thing? What do you take pictures of? What are your songs about? Everything. The idea of being pigeonholed in any way, shape, or form horrifies me. Me too.

01:18:04 Speaker_01
So this was a way for me to show my work. And it was a bit of a nightmare, too, because

01:18:14 Speaker_01
I had decided with the onset of this exhibition I'd been offered in Venice at this museum alongside Helmut Newton, no less, why don't I try and marry the two so I have the book come out at the same time as the exhibition?

01:18:33 Speaker_01
Now, that meant working on the book like an absolute fruitcake madman on crack.

01:18:38 Speaker_01
I mean, we were doing 9 to 12 hours a day virtually because he was based in...the guy who I was working with from the publishers was based in Berlin and I was where I was. So, this would be virtual back and forth trying to figure out.

01:18:58 Speaker_01
what makes a photography book great. It was something else. We did it in a couple of weeks. It was insane. And the hardest job of it all was, because I used to shoot anywhere between 50 and 100 pictures for a collection.

01:19:21 Speaker_01
I was never one of those that had like a limited edition of four or 10 pictures. You know, again, this was just a catalog of the work of what I'd seen and the charity stuff.

01:19:35 Speaker_01
But then I had to, you know, in those moments, I had to learn how to make a collection of 50 pictures, five pictures. I'm going, well, how the hell do I do that? How am I gonna do that?

01:19:48 Speaker_01
So it's being able to tell the same story of 50 pictures in five pictures.

01:19:55 Speaker_02
The problem is you know about the other 90 pictures.

01:19:58 Speaker_01
Well, of course. And as I keep saying, they're all my babies. So, you know, it's... And what it makes you realize is, okay, what's the truth? What's the really, really, really important message I'm trying to get across here? What am I trying to say?

01:20:14 Speaker_01
What am I trying to express here? Because half the time I just feel like a messenger, really. I'm just capturing something and I'm sharing it.

01:20:25 Speaker_01
And the reason I say that is because once I started getting into this, a lot of the earlier emails I had were from disabled people or people that didn't have money that couldn't travel around the world.

01:20:40 Speaker_01
And they would say, well, you're bringing this to us. You know, by taking these photos, you're showing us your journey and where you've been and these indigenous tribes and this and that. I'm going, that's really quite special.

01:20:55 Speaker_01
That's really, you know, really quite special because you're taking on another role. Because I try not to...

01:21:07 Speaker_01
In whatever profession I've done, whether it's documentary work or books or children's books or music, I never try and shove things down people's throats. I just present things and you take what you want from them.

01:21:21 Speaker_01
So the idea was to put a book together that just showed the world as I'd seen it through those journeys that I've been on. And what happened was,

01:21:33 Speaker_01
that when we got the go-ahead for this exhibition, which was only earlier this year, I was thinking, how am I going to do that? And I decided to make that a retrospective too. But how do I then chop that many pictures down to that of this exhibition?

01:21:57 Speaker_01
Again, I, funnily enough, the book became my guideline. So what I'd learned in the editing process of putting the book together, I now looked to that and the book to see how I could present the work in a larger scale in a museum, which was bonkers.

01:22:19 Speaker_01
And this all happened this year. Okay. All right. You know, I'm going for the ride whether, you know, I obviously want it. But, you know, when it all hits you at once, it's quite something else. It's been a full-on, full-on busy, busy year.

01:22:38 Speaker_01
And there's been music involved too and other documentary film projects which you'll probably hear about next year. So it's probably been, weirdly, one of my busiest years.

01:22:53 Speaker_04
It seems like you're enjoying yourself, though.

01:22:56 Speaker_01
I'm alive. I think that's, for me, people say, how are you? I'm alive. And I have always gone with things that have been presented to me organically. Anytime I've ever fought that or been pushed in situations, generally never works out.

01:23:23 Speaker_01
I think for everybody, that's true. Yeah. So, I feel fortunate in that these things have come along and I've been in the right headspace, thankfully, to go, yes, I want to do this.

01:23:39 Speaker_05
When you started shooting, did you take classes in the technical aspects of photography? No, I don't have a clue. So what kind of cameras are you using?

01:23:52 Speaker_01
How did you learn how to use them? I didn't. I didn't. You just figured out how to focus them? Same with music. I play by ear. Not a clue how to read or write music. Really? Yeah. And I'll tell you, this is one of my fears. And I'll come back to this.

01:24:14 Speaker_01
Because I'm not a practicing musician, well I haven't been for years anyway because of all the other work that I do, so if I'm not on the road and I'm not practicing and I've got a terrible memory, I forget.

01:24:29 Speaker_01
And so, you know, I've been cornered a few times and people say, come on, pick up the guitar or play the piano, give us a song. I couldn't. I couldn't even if you gave me a million bucks tomorrow, I couldn't do it. My memory just doesn't work that way.

01:24:48 Speaker_01
And so, this is why my manager and I, Rebecca, we keep having chats about going on the road. I said, listen, if we're going to do this, then this is a lot of work for me. I have to relearn how to play my own songs and my lyrics. And I kid you not. Wow.

01:25:12 Speaker_05
But you also have to relearn self-taught.

01:25:15 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:25:16 Speaker_05
So what would you do? Have you done that in the past where you had to relearn?

01:25:20 Speaker_01
Yeah. The last tour I did with the album, everything changes.

01:25:26 Speaker_04
How do you scale it? How do you get going? You just have to get in the room.

01:25:30 Speaker_01
So you just get in the room and start fucking around with the guitar? Get in the room with the guys, the band that you put together.

01:25:36 Speaker_01
Generally, I'll have one or two friends in the band, you know, and I have generally played, you know, rhythm guitar or a bit of piano for a couple of songs, but I have to relearn everything. I mean, it's, and then lyrics.

01:25:54 Speaker_01
How long does it take to relearn how to play? Well, when we were, we were actually setting up, as I said, to do a bunch of TV shows to promote the album.

01:26:06 Speaker_01
And I was quite surprised about how quickly, because the band was so good, I walked into the room, they had the songs down already, and I just went, oh, fuck, shit, I'm screwed. So that means, again, I have to step up to the plate.

01:26:23 Speaker_01
And it was just a question of being in there every day, remembering, learning the chords, going over it, over it, over it again. And of course, all this stuff that we were gonna perform was all new material.

01:26:37 Speaker_01
Because when I write a song, if I've written the basics of a song in an hour or two, and it's all there, and then written the lyrics, and then produced it, recorded it, and it's done, that's the one and only or couple of times that I'll have ever played it.

01:26:55 Speaker_01
So it's almost a new song to me every time I come back to it. It's a real weird one. So, for the photography, you know, I just took along basically a really good quality automatic camera that, you know, took the shots.

01:27:14 Speaker_01
Did you know what you were buying or did you just go buy one? Did someone help you? No, I'd ask a few friends like Timothy White. I'd say, you know, what could I use if I'm running around?

01:27:26 Speaker_01
And so I took their advice, and I started with a very simple camera that was autofocus and all compact, and I didn't have to change lenses. And that's one I did for a trip around the South China Seas on a boat trip.

01:27:45 Speaker_01
I just took this one camera in my backpack and hoped for the best. And I had a show here at Leica in LA, because it was a Leica camera. which was about 50 images of the trip that I did.

01:28:01 Speaker_01
So, but I think where my strength lies in photography is weirdly not on the technical side, obviously. but capturing that moment. I tell you the one thing about the woman that's on the cover of the book. So that's, she is now the princess of Monaco.

01:28:33 Speaker_01
Charlene, originally Charlene Whitstock. And I'd met her a couple of times and I'd met Prince Albert a couple of times.

01:28:40 Speaker_01
And I got this call literally the day before they were getting married from a mutual friend saying, Charlene loves your photography. She wants you to come and shoot the show. What? Yeah, she wants you to come down to...

01:29:02 Speaker_01
where she is getting ready for the civil wedding tomorrow, and she wants you to take pictures.

01:29:09 Speaker_00
Wow.

01:29:11 Speaker_01
I mean, you want to talk about anxiety and crapping yourself? So, excuse me. I arrive at the hotel where she and all the maids of honor are. I'm sitting in the lobby and I've got a backpack and one camera and I've tried to dress myself up a little bit.

01:29:36 Speaker_01
I don't know what's going to happen. I had to go through several layers of security, roadblocks and all this to get there, which was nerve-wracking to say the least anyway.

01:29:49 Speaker_01
The likes of Patrick de Mauchely, you know, one of the best photographers in the world, walks in with, you know, the suitcase trolleys, you know, those ones at the hotel, the big ones on wheels with all his equipment on, three or four trolleys, and there's, I've got a backpack, you know.

01:30:12 Speaker_01
Anyway, I go upstairs, I'm placed in front of her in a room probably about similar to this size, and she's sitting there completely blanked out in front of the mirror with the hairdresser, the hairdresser's assistant, and their assistant, the makeup artist, the makeup artist's assistant.

01:30:34 Speaker_01
Is that you? Yeah, that's me, yeah.

01:30:36 Speaker_02
Oh, wow.

01:30:37 Speaker_01
Yeah. So I'm in the book a few times. That'll be a questionnaire at one point. That'll be a quiz at one point. How many times am I in the book? I don't even know myself, to be honest.

01:30:50 Speaker_01
So I sit next to her, and you've got all these people, 20 people in a room this size doing things, trying to get her ready, 10 minutes before she's getting married. And they put me on this little poof next to her.

01:31:03 Speaker_01
I'm sitting next to her, and I'm saying, Are you okay? Should I just take pictures?" She said, Jules, I'm not sure what to do. I don't know what to do. I'm going, what do you mean? You don't know what to do about... the marriage or me taking pictures.

01:31:26 Speaker_01
She said, no, no, Jules, it's the photos. I said, listen, this is historic. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to record what's gonna happen to you. And exciting for me too to be a part of that as a photographer.

01:31:45 Speaker_01
And so I said, listen, I'll keep out the way. I'm a fly on the wall. I won't be anywhere. And I was thinking, how am I going to do this? How do I do this? And so I just start. I just let people get on, and I'm taking pictures.

01:32:03 Speaker_01
And I get a message from Vogue, Vogue.com, who want a photo from me the moment she's married. And I'm thinking, okay, I'll just keep snapping away at whatever I do.

01:32:20 Speaker_01
And I watch The Civil Wedding, and then I get on my bike, go home, and I start putting things up on the screen. And I'm looking at pictures going, I've got fuck all. I've got shit. This looks like crap to me. And this happens to me every time.

01:32:39 Speaker_01
Every fucking time. And I'm looking at the pictures going, they look terrible. They really, really look terrible. Blurred and this and that and badly positioned. I'm cursing myself.

01:32:52 Speaker_01
And the one thing that I remembered that she said to me is that, look, whatever you do, don't let any picture have me drinking or smoking in it. And I went, oh, okay. And the one thing that Vogue said to me is we want to see her smiling.

01:33:14 Speaker_01
And the one picture where she was smiling, And she had champagne in her hand and she had a cigarette. So, okay, I was not a Photoshop kind of guy, but I managed to get rid of the cigarette. I'm thinking, okay, how do I deal with the champagne shit?

01:33:37 Speaker_01
And then the one thing occurred to me, I thought, okay, I'll desaturate it. Not black and white, but there'll be elements of tones. I'll make it so you can't see that it's champagne.

01:33:53 Speaker_01
And I did that and I cropped it in a certain way and I went, that's it. Why didn't I think of this before? You know, 1930s, 40s, 50s, Princess Grace, black and white, old school.

01:34:09 Speaker_01
So then I turned every picture I had black and white, well, desaturated version, similar to black and white, of the whole collection I had of her.

01:34:21 Speaker_01
and cropped it in a way that it was like 1950s magazines, you know, it's just certain angles and a different look and a different feel. Was she okay with the champagne being in the photo?

01:34:32 Speaker_01
Well, it didn't look like champagne, it just looked like fizzy water, because on the side there had been bottles of fizzy water and still water, so that's cool. So, she had to give me the okay to do that.

01:34:50 Speaker_01
When we decided that should be the cover of this book, I had to get her approval. I mean, I already had approval for having her pictures in a collection or a box set, but not on the front cover of a book that may do well.

01:35:10 Speaker_05
Have you ever been to Disneyland?

01:35:11 Speaker_01
Yeah.

01:35:11 Speaker_05
Oh god. Do you know all the pictures of Walt Disney have his cigarette photoshopped out of his hand?

01:35:17 Speaker_01
No, I did not know that.

01:35:18 Speaker_05
Yeah, in every picture you see him like this. Is that so? Yeah. See if you can find some of those pictures because it's really interesting once you know that they photoshopped it. There's a guy that we've had as a tour there. Shout out to Flander.

01:35:31 Speaker_05
Awesome guy works there. And he gave us this sort of history of Walt Disney. Walt Disney died of lung cancer, which you would think it would be probably a good thing to have the cigarettes so people could know, oh, that poor guy. That's what killed him.

01:35:46 Speaker_05
But instead, they've decided to whitewash it and Photoshop. So all of his photographs That's too funny. Look at his fingers. They're always in a position where he would have a cigarette. All of them.

01:36:01 Speaker_02
That's so funny.

01:36:02 Speaker_05
And so those real moments of him having a cigarette are lost forever.

01:36:07 Speaker_02
Whose idea was it to get rid of the cigarettes?

01:36:09 Speaker_05
Disneyland. You know, Disneyland did not want. After the fact. Yeah. I mean, let's see. There's a person. It says there. It says, the action is seemingly innocuous at first, but it's apparently a murky tribute to Walt Disney's smoking habits.

01:36:21 Speaker_05
with the company sidestepping around the reason as to why the icon pointed that way, writes HuffPost. It's been long speculated about.

01:36:28 Speaker_05
The anonymous employee was informed by a lead that the strange gesture from the cast members at Disney Park is actually based on Walt's old smoking habit. So people do that two-finger gesture to each other?

01:36:41 Speaker_05
That's crazy alleged began training employees to do the same thing part tribute to the great man part rewriting history So they tried to pretend that that thing that he was doing like Tom Hanks when he played him He did that thing with his finger, but it's all bullshit.

01:36:55 Speaker_05
It was a cigarette smoker like like a constant cigarette smell Yeah, I was one of those. Is there any photos of him with a cigarette? No, that's me, that's funny. Well, that's when I found out about it That's when Flandre gave us the tour.

01:37:10 Speaker_03
They stopped doing it then, right around then.

01:37:12 Speaker_05
Oh, gotcha. I gotcha, bitch. I got them all to stop doing it. Because it's fucking stupid. Like, the guy smoked cigarettes. Yeah, smoking cigarettes is bad for you. He died from smoking cigarettes. You should probably let people know.

01:37:27 Speaker_05
You're doing a disservice to the whole world. Yeah, for sure. And also, it's... You know, it's a part of history and the fact that so many people were unaware of the dangers of smoking cigarettes all day.

01:37:40 Speaker_01
And it's so insanely addictive. I used to be an insane smoker. Yeah. How'd you quit? Cold turkey. Wow. Yeah, I'd be one of those guys that would wake up at four in the morning and light up a cigarette and then go back to sleep. Wow.

01:37:53 Speaker_01
Or I'd take about two or three packs out with me of an evening. Oh, yeah, because I knew half of the people would nick half of my cigarette, so I wanted to have backup.

01:38:06 Speaker_01
Now, when the whole no smoking law came, you know, Italy was one of the first and Ireland. Yeah, I think it was California that initiated it.

01:38:19 Speaker_01
And then Europe took it on board and it was actually Italy and Ireland and I was in both of those places and it was extremely weird to go into any, especially in Italy and Ireland in the pubs, and for it to be a smoke-free environment.

01:38:41 Speaker_01
That was just so weird because it was part of the norm of back in the day that you'd in a cloud of stinky cigarette smoke in any of those locations.

01:38:52 Speaker_05
Our norm at comedy clubs. Yeah. I would go home from comedy clubs every night smelling like cigarettes, always. For sure. The whole audience would be smoking.

01:39:00 Speaker_01
And as a smoker, you're not conscious of how other people, how you stink as well. Right. Because it was funny, when I quit cold turkey, I did it. I did it because I didn't want anybody to tell me I couldn't smoke. I was such a brat.

01:39:24 Speaker_01
That's why you quit cold turkey? I quit cold turkey because I wanted to tell myself I couldn't smoke, not for you to tell me I couldn't smoke.

01:39:35 Speaker_05
How rough was it?

01:39:37 Speaker_01
That's what brought me down into a depression for a couple of years. Listen, I started smoking at the age of probably 11 or 12 as part of my local gang that I used to be in as a kid. That's what you did. You nicked ciggies from your parents.

01:40:00 Speaker_01
and the back of the school, and that was part of the initiation, you know, the part of growing up. And I loved it because for me, when I became noticed as a musician, again, with my anxiety, and I was a very shy kid, very, very shy kid.

01:40:24 Speaker_01
Still can be at times, depending on how I feel that day. The cigarette for me was my best friend. I'd go to a bar and I'd be not the cool guy at the bar, but certainly that would be my way of not having to interact with people.

01:40:46 Speaker_01
I'd just sit there and be a rocker and smoke my ciggy and down my Jack Daniels and it's like, leave me the fuck alone. Unless I, you know, wanted to talk. So that was the groove back then.

01:40:59 Speaker_01
And then when I gave that up, you know, instantly, it was like, what do I do? How do I fill in that void? Well, I actually had to speak to people. Is that what caused the depression? Well, no, no, no.

01:41:16 Speaker_01
It was actually, I feel it was definitely a chemical thing because again, I... I was smoking a couple of packs a day. I loved smoking. Did you consider going back just to alleviate the depression?

01:41:32 Speaker_01
Actually, a business manager friend of mine at the time saw me at one stage and said, Jules, pick up a fucking cigarette, please. Seriously. And he said, you're going to die the way you're going. Wow.

01:41:46 Speaker_05
Pick up a cigarette because you're going to die without it.

01:41:49 Speaker_01
Yeah. That was literally his sentiment. Wow. And it was a few years where it was very, very dark. And it was the cigarettes. No question about it. That's crazy. Did you try patches or gum? Yeah, I did all of that stuff. Did it help? Not really.

01:42:05 Speaker_01
I loved that deep inhale.

01:42:10 Speaker_04
It's the delivery method.

01:42:12 Speaker_01
It's different than anything else. And the thing was, I would still challenge most good singing friends of mine. that I could hold my breath or do lengths in a swimming pool underwater and hold my breath better than anybody else, which I was able to.

01:42:36 Speaker_01
And it's because I was such a deep, deep smoker. When I inhaled, I really, really inhaled.

01:42:43 Speaker_05
So it was like lung exercises?

01:42:45 Speaker_01
Literally, literally.

01:42:47 Speaker_01
And I, you know, I went, I remember going for my certain, yeah, seriously, I consider myself a shallow breather now in comparison, except for when I go on these kind of power walks, you know, trying to trying to get it all in anymore. But

01:43:03 Speaker_01
Yeah, no, I bought a little apparatus, which I still haven't, I've been procrastinating about it, but it's an exercise, Ed, that's like a. I have one of those. Yeah, to expand. It's an O2 trainer. Yeah, there you go. So I haven't done it yet.

01:43:18 Speaker_05
Yeah, you put like little lenses on it, or little wheels.

01:43:20 Speaker_01
Well, you just change the inhalation volume. Yeah, it's less. Back and forth. Less of an opening. So you just train to.

01:43:28 Speaker_05
My friend Bas Rutten created one.

01:43:30 Speaker_01
Very good. I mean, I, I know that they work, I just haven't gotten around to it.

01:43:35 Speaker_05
But, you know, just breathing exercises alone are great. Yeah, you can achieve some very bizarre altered states of consciousness through breathing.

01:43:43 Speaker_01
Well, when I was, I mean, I, you know, the COVID experience was very, very different for very many people. And I

01:43:55 Speaker_01
Where I was in Monaco and France, you weren't allowed to leave your house without written paperwork to the police that you were going out for one hour and you could only go within one kilometer unless you were going to get groceries where you could only go out for a limited amount of time.

01:44:17 Speaker_01
If you didn't have the paperwork with you, you'd be fined.

01:44:21 Speaker_01
So, I started using quite a few apps to calm myself and take on deep breath and a deep focus because I felt trapped, especially as someone who loved walking, who loved biking, who loved exploring, all of that stuff and I couldn't move.

01:44:48 Speaker_01
annoying thing was that where I was was quite close to the sea, a couple of hundred yards away. But as I said, I could only be in a one-kilometer circle from where I was, but that half of that was in the sea.

01:45:10 Speaker_01
And so I could walk left and right to try and get 5K in back and forth, you know, at least 5K to try and get a good walk in.

01:45:22 Speaker_01
But you weren't allowed on the beach, which was the most to sit there and contemplate and breathe and just, you know, try and relax. One of the healthiest things you can do.

01:45:33 Speaker_02
Yeah.

01:45:34 Speaker_01
You weren't allowed to do that.

01:45:35 Speaker_05
everyone lost their fucking mind. And it was really strange in California, they were arresting people, the Coast Guard was arresting people for surfing.

01:45:45 Speaker_01
Like, I know, it's insane. I remember going on my first power walk along a peninsula that's about 15 minutes out of Monaco. And it's somewhere I go every once in a while. And it was a really quite blustery day.

01:46:06 Speaker_01
And it's right along the coastline, rocks, high winds, the whole thing. And I'm power walking along thinking, I'm finally free. I'm finally free. Anyway, so along the path ahead of me, about a quarter of a mile, I see a number of bobbing heads.

01:46:28 Speaker_01
And I wasn't wearing a mask. You had to wear a mask, even when you're out power walking on your own. Because of science. Of course. Genius. Well, yeah, let's not get into that. But yeah, and so over the ridge, they come.

01:46:45 Speaker_01
And, and I noticed that one of the person at the front is wearing a police hat. Oh, great.

01:46:53 Speaker_01
And so I'm trying to scramble putting my mask on and he's taking out, going for a run with a bunch of trainers, trainees, you know, about eight other people from the police force. They're all gunned up and truncheoned and everything else.

01:47:14 Speaker_01
And the guy's going off on me in French saying, And I'm going, and he says to me, you know, I understand a little bit, a good amount of French and I can speak a little bit, but he said, who are you with? And I'm looking around.

01:47:35 Speaker_01
There's nobody for half a mile anywhere near me, and he's asking me, who am I with? And I'm thinking, what's that about? This is the weirdest scenario.

01:47:45 Speaker_01
I'm in the middle of nowhere on a rocky peninsula, and he's asking me who I'm with, and there's nobody. And, you know, to put my mask back on, otherwise I'd be in trouble. And it was just the most surreal, peculiar circumstance to be, you know.

01:48:08 Speaker_05
Well, you could have never imagined it before the pandemic. You could have never imagined a scenario where people would be that illogical. Wearing a mask outside, illogical. Not being able to go to the beach, illogical.

01:48:19 Speaker_01
I still love the fact that you see people sitting on their own in cars today wearing a mask. Oh, yeah.

01:48:25 Speaker_05
Well, if you go to Los Angeles, my friend just went to a party and he sent me a photograph. He's like, I'm at a Hollywood party. Everyone's wearing a fucking mask. These people are in a cult. Like, it's very... First of all,

01:48:38 Speaker_05
If you haven't read the House, the 500-page synopsis on what all went wrong with COVID, everyone should read it just to understand. The whole six-feet distance, all that stuff is all made up. It's all bullshit. Masks don't work.

01:48:56 Speaker_05
Yeah, don't work unless you have like a face-fitting Mass and even that you're getting oxygen in the the particle like viral Particles in the oxygen are smaller than vape particles, right?

01:49:11 Speaker_05
like if you vape with one of those things on then put it out and Then or you take a big deep breath put the mask on the vape will come right through the fucking mask So will the virus right? Like, this is not real. You're pretending.

01:49:26 Speaker_05
And it's forced compliance, illogical forced compliance, which was very disturbing. It was very disturbing for me to see how many people were reinforcing that, too. How many people were yelling at other people.

01:49:39 Speaker_05
It gave people a wonderful opportunity to be assholes, where they could yell at people for not having a mask on. But outside? Really? It was out the window. But it was also really fascinating to watch human nature.

01:49:54 Speaker_05
The human nature of, first of all, that people really do enjoy controlling people. They really do enjoy telling people what the rules are and punishing people who disobey the rules, even if they don't make any sense.

01:50:06 Speaker_05
And then also watching people comply, knowing it's illogical, and being upset at everyone that points out that it's illogical. It doesn't make any sense. Like you're the enemy because you're not going along with it. You're making it harder for us.

01:50:20 Speaker_05
We have to get through this. Is this real? Yeah.

01:50:23 Speaker_01
Yeah. Strange. Yeah. No. Stay away from everybody. That's the only solution.

01:50:32 Speaker_05
Or go to a place. Well, I came here. They didn't embrace any of that. Like, I was in Los Angeles, which is like the most compliant place.

01:50:41 Speaker_05
Everybody was all in, all in on the public narrative that was being expressed in the mainstream media, all in on, you know, everybody who denies it as an anti-science person, and you're anti this and anti that.

01:50:55 Speaker_05
You just get that vaccine and just get on board with this beautiful little thing we're going to do. We're going to get through this together as long as everyone complies.

01:51:04 Speaker_05
And if you don't comply and if your neighbors aren't complying, here's a number you can call. People started ratting out their neighbors. It was a program that the mayor of Los Angeles ran.

01:51:14 Speaker_05
Normally snitches get stitches, but this way snitches get rewards. They were giving them money. Giving people money to rat out their neighbors for having parties.

01:51:23 Speaker_01
Yeah, it's beyond messed up.

01:51:24 Speaker_05
Oh, so strange and it doesn't seem real like my friend people are eager as well Club eager so happy they're part of it.

01:51:33 Speaker_05
My friend is on Found a pair of pants that he was in his apartment and he pulled out a mask out of the pocket It's like fuck was last time I wore these. Yeah, there's a mask and when you see a mask

01:51:44 Speaker_05
Like, and you realize, like, I had a mask that was in my truck that was in, like, one of the back little compartments on the side, just happened to be sitting there. And I was cleaning the truck, and I'm like, look at this fucking stupid thing.

01:51:57 Speaker_05
This was just two years ago. You had to have these things if you wanted to get on a plane.

01:52:02 Speaker_01
Seems like a bad dream.

01:52:03 Speaker_05
It does. It's like Disney and the fucking cigarettes. Are they going to Photoshop out all these people's masks in the future?

01:52:10 Speaker_01
It's all a bit surreal. So strange. It really is. It's all a bit odd. I still don't get it. I don't get any of it.

01:52:18 Speaker_05
You shouldn't.

01:52:19 Speaker_01
Hopefully these viruses... No, especially those.

01:52:24 Speaker_05
Don't wind up becoming the next one. I used to think there's no way that people would want that to happen. I'm not so sure anymore. No.

01:52:32 Speaker_05
After this last go around, I'm like, boy, there might be like sinister factors at work here that I don't... Oh, without question. Yeah.

01:52:40 Speaker_01
I'm sure of that.

01:52:42 Speaker_05
And I was unwilling to ever think that way before. I was like, come on, that's stupid. No one's that evil. No one would do that just for profit.

01:52:51 Speaker_02
And now I'm like, I don't know. Of course they are. They probably would. Oh, they would. Yeah. They would, no question.

01:52:57 Speaker_05
So strange. So strange. And then, you know, that I think the frustration of the overcomplicated, overregulated, overcontrolled world is probably what accentuates the experience of you being in South America with a fire looking at the stars. Yeah.

01:53:18 Speaker_05
You know, because There's a purity to that, that especially no phones, no computer, no screens, no nothing, just human beings enjoying an experience on the planet.

01:53:30 Speaker_01
It's funny because I'm in the process of moving. I mean, I still have my base in Monaco, but the little place I had outside, a lot of my later teenage years were... Mom remarried a couple of times, but we were in North Wales.

01:53:55 Speaker_01
I don't know if you're familiar with North Wales or Wales in general. It's mountains, you know, sheep and mountains. So, yeah, we lived in farmland, on farmland, and I used to work on a farm too.

01:54:15 Speaker_01
So, I loved...and that's where I actually learned how to ride a motorbike, you know, on farmland and through rivers and enduros and stuff like that. And so I've always loved that element of countryside.

01:54:33 Speaker_01
I always like the excitement of a city and the people and the energy, but there's also that other side of peace and quiet and birdsong and running water.

01:54:45 Speaker_05
The key is like a little bit of New York City, a little bit of mountains. That's the key to life.

01:54:51 Speaker_01
I'm in the process of, and I hate this terminology, forever home. But I certainly think it's a place that I'll be for a while.

01:55:03 Speaker_04
You hate the terminology of home?

01:55:05 Speaker_01
No, forever. This is going to be my forever home.

01:55:11 Speaker_05
Yeah, I like moving. I really enjoyed moving here. I like getting up and just being in a new place.

01:55:18 Speaker_01
I think it's good for the brain. I'd been at the same place for over 26 years through some very good things, but some pretty dark moments as well, whether that's relationships or friendships and things like that.

01:55:33 Speaker_01
And I finally decided a few years ago, I need a change. Where are you going? I'm very close by. I mean, I'm literally 15 minutes away, but it's just a different environment.

01:55:44 Speaker_01
It's up in the mountains, surrounded by beautiful old oak trees and walking paths. I mean, I know I sound like I'm turning old all of a sudden.

01:55:59 Speaker_05
No, you sound like someone who appreciates beautiful things.

01:56:04 Speaker_01
You know, the funny thing is when I went to see this place for the first time, my shoulders just dropped. And it was, I don't wanna leave here. You know, the rest of the world seemed very alien after walking onto this property.

01:56:24 Speaker_01
I just went, okay, a couple of acres of land surrounded by beautiful old trees and peace and quiet.

01:56:34 Speaker_05
I have thoughts on that. I think that nature is a vitamin that we don't know we need. Absolutely. No question about it. Yeah. You get it and then you're filled up and you're like, oh, this is what I was missing.

01:56:45 Speaker_01
I mean, that also the whole, you know, tree-hugging, earthing thing. Yeah. It's real. I believe absolutely 100%. It's real.

01:56:53 Speaker_02
It's real.

01:56:53 Speaker_01
You feel better.

01:56:54 Speaker_02
I mean, scientifically proven.

01:56:58 Speaker_05
We have a connection to Earth that's been muted by our shoes.

01:57:02 Speaker_01
Correct. This is very, very true.

01:57:04 Speaker_05
Yeah, it's weird.

01:57:05 Speaker_01
It's weird to think that way, but it's absolutely correct. I have done this too, that you can get earthing sheets that you can sleep on. I don't know. I sleep on one. I don't know if it works or not. It probably does something. Yeah, but what?

01:57:25 Speaker_01
I don't know.

01:57:26 Speaker_05
Just get outside. I think get outside's the move. And if you can get outside barefoot, it's even better. This is very, very true.

01:57:33 Speaker_05
The other day, I was playing with my dog in the backyard, and I was throwing the ball for him, and he just decided—he's kind of lazy—sometimes he just decides to lay down, so I just sat down with him.

01:57:43 Speaker_05
And there was this amazing moment of him just wagging his tail. You know, me petting him and just sitting in the yard, just trees and birds and just, it's beautiful. That's it. It was a beautiful, peaceful moment that I just experienced with my dog.

01:57:57 Speaker_05
That's it. Two of us chilling. That's it.

01:58:00 Speaker_01
Really?

01:58:00 Speaker_05
Really? It was a beautiful moment. I was thinking in that time, like, this is so simple. It's just a simple, beautiful moment. And, you know, if you try to explain it to people, Most people are probably not going to get it. OK, yeah, you and your dog.

01:58:14 Speaker_05
You love your dog. Like, no, it's not it. It's like, it was just life. It was just like this moment of life, just recognizing. And also, not thinking about anything else, which is also beautiful.

01:58:25 Speaker_01
Not thinking about Gaza. Not thinking about Ukraine. It's about that little moment of appreciation here and now. Thank you very much. And how that can be beyond beneficial to you.

01:58:39 Speaker_05
But then even explaining that, unfortunately, has been co-opted by the term mindfulness, which is so often used by grifters and fake gurus and dorks. It's one of those words that you say and you're like, ugh. Mindfulness. I hate saying it.

01:58:58 Speaker_05
I'm a spiritual person. Oh, shut the fuck up. Shut the fuck up. I can't take it. I get it. But those terms are valuable. It's like the term God. It's a valuable term. Love is a valuable term.

01:59:11 Speaker_05
But so often they just get ruined just by insincerity or just by people who use it as a way to define themselves in a positive way.

01:59:21 Speaker_01
Hijacked. They've been hijacked.

01:59:23 Speaker_05
Hijacked. Yeah, that's it.

01:59:26 Speaker_01
Yeah, which is very sad actually because... Yeah, we can take it back.

01:59:31 Speaker_05
Probably. We can take it back from those hijackers. Fuck them. I'm in.

01:59:36 Speaker_01
I'm in.

01:59:38 Speaker_05
Yeah, I mean, do you know who Alex Gray is?

01:59:41 Speaker_01
No.

01:59:42 Speaker_05
Alex Gray is a visionary artist. He does a lot of very, very intricate psychedelic pieces that are iconic. He's very famous in the psychedelic world. His stuff is really, really beautiful.

01:59:58 Speaker_01
I'm sure you have.

01:59:59 Speaker_05
He's very, very famous.

02:00:01 Speaker_01
Oh, yeah.

02:00:01 Speaker_05
But we were talking about this and he said that he took the term God back because he's like, I think the term God has been co-opted by this idea of these totalitarian religions that impose very strict rules and dogma on people.

02:00:19 Speaker_05
He's like, I don't think we should stop using that word just because of that. I think we can kind of take that word back.

02:00:26 Speaker_02
It would be good to. Yeah.

02:00:28 Speaker_05
Well, I think he actually has a church.

02:00:32 Speaker_02
Really?

02:00:33 Speaker_05
Yeah. And it's like you got to go through a whole thing to acquire tax exempt status. But his church is this insane building that is all 3D printed with his type of psychedelic artwork. So it looks like

02:00:49 Speaker_05
some insane, like, magical, spiritual retreat that you would find somewhere. Like, see if we could find, it's called the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

02:00:58 Speaker_00
Where is this?

02:00:59 Speaker_05
Upstate New York. Upstate New York. So it's not that far from the city. You can get there fairly quickly. And it's, you know, a completely different world. And he's got this church up there that's filled with his insane artwork.

02:01:12 Speaker_05
But this church itself is a piece of artwork, like the outside of it, the way, you know, he has a lot of these images of these faces that are like multiple, like multiple sides of faces all connected together. And this is like this. Oh, wow. Yeah.

02:01:31 Speaker_05
So this is the outside of his building. It's really incredible. That's the building. Whoa. Isn't that amazing?

02:01:39 Speaker_05
So the building is very, very much like his type of tryptamine-inspired art, where, like, you know, you have all these third eyes, like, in a fractal form, this geometric pattern on the roof, and everything is like that. It's really amazing.

02:01:56 Speaker_05
Phenomenal. And, you know, he's been working on it forever.

02:02:01 Speaker_01
Is he professing anything?

02:02:03 Speaker_05
I don't know what his... Is there an order as such? I mean... That's Alex when he was very young. Yeah. But he's been, you know, in the sort of psychedelic space and psychedelic art space forever. And he had this incredible place in New York City.

02:02:23 Speaker_05
And then he decided to do this whole church. Just click it right there and just like play it out.

02:02:28 Speaker_03
I don't really know what the video is.

02:02:31 Speaker_05
It's 20 minutes long. I see. So that's his wife.

02:02:38 Speaker_01
Is this derived from acid and magic mushrooms?

02:02:44 Speaker_05
It says it right there. It comes out of the psychedelic experience. Yeah, he's been a longtime proponent of psychedelics. Just a very, very interesting guy and his artwork is just incredible.

02:02:58 Speaker_05
Like really, but like probably the most accurate encapsulation of these experiences in, you know, in an artistic form. Really wild stuff. And again, this is, you know, he's the way he's got it set up now, he's in the woods.

02:03:18 Speaker_05
So he's in this beautiful, like rural area. And then he's got this incredible chapel that's up there. So it's pretty fucking cool.

02:03:30 Speaker_01
Well, I'm certainly a believer in other realms that we don't see on a daily basis. Yeah. Well, you probably should be. I've had a few experiences that would—whether that's a dream within a dream or whether it's reality, I don't actually know.

02:03:50 Speaker_05
Well, one of the things that I've talked to about with some pretty insanely brilliant people is quantum computing.

02:03:57 Speaker_01
Oh, yes.

02:03:58 Speaker_05
And this new Google quantum computer that can do, essentially, the way a quantum computer works, a problem that would take thousands of years for every computer on Earth to solve. I've read that. It can solve in a second.

02:04:16 Speaker_05
Something that can take more years and you literally can understand It could be solved in 15 minutes. Yeah, it's insane. And this is where it gets really weird

02:04:28 Speaker_05
The way it was explained to me, and we should have to Google how quantum computers work and why people connect them to the multiverse so I don't fuck this up, but the idea is that they're pulling answers from different universes simultaneously.

02:04:48 Speaker_05
They don't even completely understand how this is working. But the amount of power in computing is incomprehensible. Incomprehensible. You're only looking at it. There's numbers. You could write all those numbers out.

02:05:05 Speaker_05
But your brain's not capable of grasping really what's going on. And it's probably the biggest breakthrough technologically in human history by a long stretch. And it's all happening without most people even being aware of what the implications are.

02:05:24 Speaker_05
So see if you can Google an explanation of how quantum computers work. Was it Marc Andreessen that was explaining to us that it's pulling from different universes?

02:05:33 Speaker_03
No, no that was being talked about in the wording of the willow description, right? But I also just to add when I was reading about this.

02:05:41 Speaker_03
They said that these benchmark numbers are coming off of Google's own data Like they're the ones that set like the scale of mm-hmm what some of the quantum numbers... Are you skeptical? Is that what you're saying? I'm just... No, no, no.

02:05:55 Speaker_05
Are you calling bullshit on Google? No, not at all, not at all, not at all.

02:05:57 Speaker_03
I feel like you are. No, no, I'm just a grain of salt, like, just to say that, like, except, I think they use, uh, tillions is the number or something like that. Yeah, except tillion. No one even can grasp that. Yeah.

02:06:07 Speaker_03
That's just based, but that's a number based off of their formula, too. Right. That's all.

02:06:11 Speaker_05
Right. What is the definition of how it works?

02:06:15 Speaker_03
The way it pulls from multi multi universe, I think the I'm trying to find it But I think the understanding I got from it was it's just too powerful to get From our universe alone.

02:06:26 Speaker_03
You'd have to have more more than one and I don't like that's just like what is that? Exactly. What does that mean?

02:06:35 Speaker_05
What is that thing that they have? And if you've ever seen the chip itself, the chip itself is very small. It's like the size of a saltine cracker. And then this entire mechanism around it is just the insane amount of cooling.

02:06:48 Speaker_05
Okay, Google's quantum AI founder said the performance gains lends credence to the idea that we live in a multiverse. The idea is that Willow might be communicating with parallel universes to finish calculations faster. Like, what does that mean?

02:07:10 Speaker_05
The announcement led Google's already high stock price to surge, which isn't that shocking, but perhaps most surprisingly for us lay people that Google's quantum AI founder and lead, Harmut Nevin, said that the chip's performance lends credence to the notion that quantum computation occurs in many parallel universes in line with the idea that we live in a multiverse.

02:07:33 Speaker_05
And then it says, excuse me? This obviously has caused a bit of a stir, and it isn't exactly clear on how he made that leap.

02:07:42 Speaker_05
It sounds a bit like something out of a sci-fi movie, and I'm definitely not going to pretend I'm an expert, but it's worth pointing out that Google is very much still in the theoretical research phase of this journey. This is very weird stuff.

02:07:55 Speaker_05
An evolving scientific field that even people working on it don't fully understand. What? OK, here's what is a quantum computer. Let's explain this.

02:08:06 Speaker_05
The computer we use every day and have been iterating on for the past several decades are what is known as a classical computer. Essentially, a classical computer utilizes binary as its language of choice.

02:08:21 Speaker_05
A bit in the smallest unit of data that a computer can store and process is like a light switch. Each bit can only be in a single state at a time, on or off. which is represented by 0 or 1. Computers track data based on the language of bits.

02:08:37 Speaker_05
Literally anything our computers do is based on a network of on-off switches sending a particular signal. A quantum computer is a bit different. If you're familiar with the concept of superposition or Schrodinger's cat,

02:08:50 Speaker_05
This won't be too far of a stretch, but a quantum bit or qubit is capable of representing the potential of multiple states at once. Rather than only recording a 1 or a 0, it records both because it can be both.

02:09:04 Speaker_05
This allows a chip like Willow, which has 105 qubits, to perform incredibly complicated analytics in a fraction of the time a classical computer could. And how does it work? So let's boil it down to a very small example.

02:09:17 Speaker_05
If you have two bits which can return a value of 1 or 0, there are four potential states that it can be recorded. 0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, and 1, 0.

02:09:26 Speaker_05
If each of these states takes one second to record, it would take a classical computer four seconds to record every possible permutation.

02:09:36 Speaker_05
A quantum computer made up of two qubits, however, would be able to send to record the potential of each qubit at once, meaning it could record all four possible states in one second.

02:09:50 Speaker_05
The real power here is achieved when you add a much higher number of qubits together and try to record every possible state. Once again, something that would take a classical computer far longer can be achieved quickly

02:10:02 Speaker_05
because a quantum computer can record a number of potential states at once rather than one at a time. Okay, we basically don't know what the fuck we're saying here. This is just too weird. Okay, so this is what it is.

02:10:13 Speaker_05
One of the world's most advanced classical computers. Okay, here it is with this problem.

02:10:20 Speaker_05
So, AI's founder and lead, Hartmut Neven, said that the new chip had performed a purposefully complicated exercise called a random circuit sampling benchmark in five minutes.

02:10:31 Speaker_05
One of the world's most advanced classical supercomputers, on the other hand, it would take 10 and then three zeros, three zeros, three zeros, three zeros, three zeros, three zeros, three zeros, three zeros, three zeros.

02:10:46 Speaker_05
years to perform the same exercise. That's 10 septillion years, which exceeds known time scales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe.

02:10:59 Speaker_05
So it can do more time than vastly exceeds the entire age of the universe and it can do it in five minutes.

02:11:07 Speaker_05
And the reason it could achieve such a monumental improvement in calculating capacity is because Willow is made up of 105 qubits and can track the potential of each of those at once, allowing it to record potential data much faster and come to the right answer sooner.

02:11:23 Speaker_05
So like, what is happening?

02:11:26 Speaker_01
That's too much information. What is? What do you mean? I get it, but I don't get it.

02:11:30 Speaker_05
What I don't get, how does that prove the multiverse or provide evidence that the multiverse is real? And that it's getting it from parallel universes?

02:11:41 Speaker_01
What are we even saying here? That it couldn't come up with those answers within the allotted time span that's... Yeah. What? I can't even explain. I mean, funnily enough, my brother's into all of this stuff, Sean. In simpler language.

02:12:03 Speaker_01
He would probably be able to explain it to you, Sean. Probably.

02:12:07 Speaker_05
Well, he would give it a shot.

02:12:08 Speaker_01
He would, certainly.

02:12:09 Speaker_05
I think he was the one that was probably explaining it to us.

02:12:12 Speaker_05
In simpler language, Willow is doing one calculation while an unknown number of Willows in other universes, parallel to our own, are doing their own calculations and they are sharing that data to avoid needing to individually do every possible calculation to finish the equation.

02:12:31 Speaker_05
What the fuck does that mean? How are they sharing data between universes? I don't know. Ask Nevin.

02:12:39 Speaker_05
Remember, this is all theoretical and doesn't prove anything, but Nevin is saying that the fact that a chip can outperform our best supercomputers by such a wide margin means that it might have broken Newton's theory of physics.

02:12:54 Speaker_05
Yo, what does it say under that, Jamie? Keep that going. Put that back on. Scroll up a little bit.

02:13:01 Speaker_06
It's right here.

02:13:02 Speaker_05
OK, this is what I want to look at. At this point, it's an exciting look at what computing might take one day, but it isn't something you're going to see in your next Pixel phone, quantum chips. You'd be isolated in incredibly specific chambers.

02:13:12 Speaker_05
Yeah, this is the thing.

02:13:14 Speaker_05
It has to be cooled to a point where it's colder than outer space, sealed away from any possible signals, such as microwaves, radiation, radio signals, et cetera, for fear of that noise leading to potential mistakes, and have specific signals delivered by purpose-built wires.

02:13:31 Speaker_05
Who figured this out? Where are those eggheads?

02:13:36 Speaker_01
Jesus Christ. How did they even come up with that if that has to be the case? I don't know.

02:13:40 Speaker_05
How did they figure out that you have to do that? All of it?

02:13:44 Speaker_01
That's just brain damage.

02:13:46 Speaker_05
That's one of the most humbling things that I've found about doing this podcast is realizing how genuinely dumb we are in comparison to the amount of information that's available.

02:13:55 Speaker_01
No question.

02:13:56 Speaker_05
And dumb and I'm saying is like not just uninformed but incapable even if given the information of grasping exactly what these Apex minds are thinking and working on right now along with at the same time people just living in Ravello just having an espresso and a cigarette and getting a slice of pizza and

02:14:21 Speaker_01
Maybe they realize and they just say, fuck it.

02:14:25 Speaker_05
But it seems like the human race desires all things. The human race desires people like yourself who enjoy photography and travel and this beautiful experience of life.

02:14:37 Speaker_05
But it also sort of requires people to be at this bizarre cutting edge of science where it seems to be violating the known laws of physics.

02:14:47 Speaker_01
Like, all those things... It hurts my brain. I mean, I'd love to know more. Well, just think about what we're doing right now. Just think about what we're doing. I still don't get how a TV works. Or the radio. I'm still nuts. How's this work?

02:15:03 Speaker_01
I'm still back there.

02:15:05 Speaker_05
What makes this louder? What makes the microphone carry our voice? What how is this being encoded into?

02:15:11 Speaker_05
Like a form that's going to be instantaneously delivered to millions of people so millions of people are hearing this right now Like as it gets to them not right right now But once it gets released the millions of people that are hearing this are getting it through the sky.

02:15:26 Speaker_05
Yes on their phone I resign

02:15:32 Speaker_01
I truly resign on that level. I can't I can't doesn't know I can't either but it's pretty amazing It's pretty amazing time to be alive fascinated by every day and that that's why with

02:15:47 Speaker_01
subjects that are happening with AI right now, I find massively intriguing because there is an element to that that may allow me to understand a great deal more, you know, before it's too late.

02:16:00 Speaker_05
I think we're the last of the regular people. It's quite possible.

02:16:04 Speaker_05
I think this experience that we're having, this experience that you're having on a motorcycle with no signal, just driving through the countryside, just being alive, I think we're the last of those people.

02:16:16 Speaker_01
I think what's next... Even that sounds like a dream, though. I know. I mean, just the whole concept of that is dream worthy. Yeah, I mean, I have a number of theories on who we are and where we came from and UFOs. What do you think?

02:16:38 Speaker_01
Well, to some degree, I'd always felt even as a young kid that the UFOs were us coming back for history lessons, basically, and that the vehicles were driven by our minds anyway. But, I mean, I've seen, as Dad had also seen, a UFO.

02:17:05 Speaker_01
I've clearly seen a UFO. What did you see? I was actually, here's the weird thing, I was actually on my way to, I think, visit Dad in New York. I think it was New York, which is where he'd seen one on the Upper East Side in an apartment that I visited.

02:17:23 Speaker_01
I went to see him at. He's standing on the roof of this apartment where he was living at the time. And yeah, it's on film. He clearly says, this thing came along. I can tell you exactly what it looked like.

02:17:41 Speaker_01
Went up the Hudson, went under the bridge and then zapped off. My experience, I've had two experiences, but the most profound was, funnily enough, was one of those flights on good old TWA.

02:17:58 Speaker_01
And I was in the front part of the plane and I had been given, because I was quite young, anywhere between 8 and 10. I don't know, 11 maybe. And I was going to see dad for one of the first times in the US.

02:18:19 Speaker_01
And the guy that was escorting me over gave me one of those, first time I'd ever seen them, one of those books that had blank pages. I thought, wow, those are weird.

02:18:34 Speaker_01
You know, quite unusual, I'd never seen them over in England before, just these hardback, black-covered books with nothing inside. So I had one of those in a colouring set, so I was, I guess, relatively young.

02:18:51 Speaker_01
Everybody had watched the movie, everybody had gone to sleep. I was staring out the bloody window as I normally do. And I was in front of the wing on the right-hand side, and I'm just staring out at the stars, literally.

02:19:09 Speaker_01
And I kid you not, all of a sudden I see your archetypal UFO with the lights around, light on top, it was silver, reflective metal with pulsating white lights all the way around. It stayed there, I can't tell you how long.

02:19:40 Speaker_02
How far away from the plane was it?

02:19:41 Speaker_01
It was right there. It was 50 feet.

02:19:48 Speaker_05
50 feet from the wing of the plane?

02:19:49 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. In front of the wing of the plane.

02:19:51 Speaker_05
Did anybody else notice it?

02:19:53 Speaker_01
Nobody else was there. Everybody else was asleep. There was no stewardesses. There was no...nobody was around. What about the pilots? I don't...that I don't know. All I know is what I saw. God, I would have wanted to ask them.

02:20:08 Speaker_01
I guess I was kind of freaked out or just okay with it. I can't even... How old were you at the time? You know, 8, 9, 10, 11, something like that. And how big do you think it was?

02:20:26 Speaker_01
I would say it seemed about, the radius would be about the width of this room. But what happened was, so I watched it for a few seconds, but I knew we were going along at somewhere in between 300 and 500 miles an hour.

02:20:45 Speaker_01
I think the old big old 747s used to reach that kind of speed. And it just started doing this. going up at the same speed. And I'm watching it through the window going up and over. And there was nobody in the seats on the other side.

02:21:09 Speaker_01
And so I ran to the other side and was at the window like this. And I was at a seat or two in front of where I actually wasn't here. And it came down the other side. This is on my mother's life.

02:21:27 Speaker_01
It came down on the other side and sort of pitched itself there for a few seconds, proceeded to move forward. what looked like relatively quite slow and then literally just went and disappeared it forward and that was there.

02:21:46 Speaker_01
And that was at sunrise, literally just turning to sunrise because I actually, the book I had, I drew the whole thing and the light and what it looked like. Do you still have those drawings? Okay, no. Tell me about it.

02:22:05 Speaker_01
I don't know what happened to that but As clear as day as clear as day My life my mother's life.

02:22:14 Speaker_05
I did you and this is gonna sound crazy Did you welcome have a sense that that was for you? That you aren't just seeing something but that maybe that was for you I Could have taken that Yeah angle

02:22:36 Speaker_01
I mean, there's been moments in my life, certainly, that I felt things have happened at a particular time for me to notice things, that it was related to my life experience.

02:22:52 Speaker_01
I mean, half of the things I couldn't tell you what they were, but I mean, white feather was an example of that. Where for me, that was undoubtedly a sign, a relevant sign that made me certainly feel

02:23:16 Speaker_01
And I'd had other experiences that that was a real connection, a real message indirectly.

02:23:26 Speaker_05
Yeah. Well, the white feather is so profound. It's so intensely on the nose that it's very difficult to dismiss. And I know there's a lot of hyper-rational people that would like to dismiss it. It's a coincidence. My question is, are you sure?

02:23:46 Speaker_05
Are you sure? I don't think we are. I think this concept of the divine, this concept of being something else, has existed throughout the entirety of human beings.

02:24:00 Speaker_01
There's all kinds of stuff going on. I mean, I've seen... I was invited to the location where I was staying. And I had this experience where I saw quite clearly, I was on my own again, of course, and I was looking out to the sea.

02:24:27 Speaker_01
This was down in Mexico. And I was literally just kind of drifting off, and I, without question, at least I believe so, I saw, to me, what looked like Mayan Indians, see-through, dancing around a fire. And I went, what the fuck?

02:24:52 Speaker_01
I mean, I really kind of got a little scared. I went, what am I seeing? How am I seeing this? Why? Anyway, it was all a bit weird. at the breakfast table the next day, and I'd never been to this place before.

02:25:12 Speaker_01
I was invited down as a guest, and the hostess said, you know, how did you sleep? Is everything all right? I said, well, I don't want to say anything, but I think I saw some see-through Mayan Indians last night.

02:25:32 Speaker_01
Oh, you didn't know that this was built on a Mayan Indian burial ground? I said, shut the front door. She said, that freaked me out, firstly.

02:25:44 Speaker_01
Then, of course, she comes back into the room with a tray of artifacts, spearheads and a few other things and other tools that they use. But then she came, she did one better.

02:25:59 Speaker_01
She came, goes and brings in a book that's a very, very thick book with the generations of Mayan and civilizations that have been there before. And so she says, you know, have a look.

02:26:18 Speaker_01
and I'm flipping through the books, the book, and I see the exact headdress and skirt that they were wearing and the exact colours of those headdresses. It was two-tone, it was like an earth colour and a sky blue, kind of that color.

02:26:42 Speaker_01
And that's in a particular arrangement on their headdresses and on the skirts. And I said, that's them. And they said, oh yeah, that was a particular era, and that's where the property was built on. And I just went, well, OK. All right. To me, I'm sorry.

02:27:09 Speaker_01
That just says between that and the white feather, Yeah. And there's one or two other incidences. I just went, yeah, there's so much more shit that we don't know that lives and breathes and exists around.

02:27:26 Speaker_01
And there was something written the other day also, whether it's today or yesterday, saying that, you know, our ears and our eyes can only see so much, you know, humans, that there exists so much more that we don't have a clue about.

02:27:43 Speaker_01
So I'm just going, okay. There's, if only.

02:27:49 Speaker_05
Well, you have to go back to the idea that eyes didn't exist at one point in time. They were single-celled organisms.

02:27:54 Speaker_02
Yeah.

02:27:55 Speaker_05
Right? And so then they became multi-celled organisms, and then they developed simultaneous eyesight in the ocean and on land. And then this idea that your eyes allow you to see, so therefore you're seeing everything, is kind of silly.

02:28:10 Speaker_05
Because before the eyes existed, there was no perception Not using light there was no way you could see things. Yeah, so why would we?

02:28:21 Speaker_05
Assume that this is all that the senses could potentially interact with That maybe we just don't have them and maybe this is what I've said a lot about like psychic communication and telekinesis all these different things.

02:28:36 Speaker_05
Yeah, I think they're emerging Emerging properties of human consciousness that haven't achieved like a full-blown integration yet. Yeah, and my my real suspicion is that

02:28:50 Speaker_05
the biological evolution is not going to make it there in time and that the technological evolution is going to intervene and push us just like that UFO disappeared in space, just took off.

02:29:04 Speaker_05
I have a feeling that the next leap of change that's going to happen with human beings is going to be technologically driven and monumental in a way that you won't be able to even imagine life without it.

02:29:19 Speaker_05
It's scary, but it's also like it's scary to not be a monkey anymore and to be in a taxi cab. You know, it's scary to not have to walk everywhere and then also when you're flying in a plane.

02:29:32 Speaker_01
I would love to be a fly on the wall.

02:29:36 Speaker_05
Oh my god. For me, flying the wall would be like ancient Egypt. I would love to see what was going on when they were making the pyramids. That's my number one place. The next would be, what was it like when Genghis Khan was running through Asia?

02:29:54 Speaker_05
What was that like? You know, those are two.

02:29:56 Speaker_01
Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of unanswered things out there, but I make the odd documentary, so I'm a documentary watcher whenever I can, really.

02:30:13 Speaker_01
It's either Anthony Bourdain or a documentary that puts me to sleep most evenings, after watching them, not during. Right. But yeah, no, so I thirst for information half the time.

02:30:28 Speaker_01
Whether I retain it or not's another thing, but I certainly am driven to absorb what I can.

02:30:35 Speaker_05
As am I. I think that I try to, especially as I get older, to be more open-minded and less dismissive of all this bizarre stuff like ghosts. Like I think essentially- Yeah, what's your take?

02:30:51 Speaker_05
I think certain memories are so potent and that the energy that's created by these moments is so potent that sometimes it lingers and sometimes it's available and sometimes it's not. And it depends on the state of the people.

02:31:07 Speaker_05
the state of consciousness that they've acquired, the level of anxiety they're currently experiencing, the level of stress, where they are in the world, the solar cycles, the fucking... I think all these factors come into play and occasionally people see whispers of the past.

02:31:24 Speaker_05
Or maybe it's not even that it's the past. Maybe it's those things are happening, they're just not happening in this level of the multiverse.

02:31:35 Speaker_05
And that all things that have ever happened are happening simultaneously, all at once, in this very bizarre structure that the universe is actually made out of.

02:31:46 Speaker_05
But we're only capable of seeing 3D space, what's currently available, what's in front of me right now, what am I going to eat for dinner? You know, like we have a very limited view of this thing that is impossible to grasp.

02:31:58 Speaker_05
Just like those numbers of septillion, whatever. It's impossible. You can't grasp it. I have a feeling that's everything. I think everything, like that Kung Fu movie, everything all at once. I think there's probably a lot to that.

02:32:12 Speaker_05
There's probably a lot to that this isn't a binary experience. This probably is a quantum experience. I just hope we get to understand some of it. It's kind of fun to not, and kind of fun to speculate.

02:32:24 Speaker_01
One day?

02:32:24 Speaker_05
Yeah. But the question is, once you do know, would that be better? Would it be better? Or is there something?

02:32:30 Speaker_01
I mean, do you have to know everything? Just give us a hint. You might. Give us a clue.

02:32:34 Speaker_05
The problem is you might know everything.

02:32:37 Speaker_01
Well, that's what they say. That's what many say, that you're just remembering things.

02:32:43 Speaker_05
Well that's true too, right? That information is essentially you're pulling it out of the air. You're like ideas, you're pulling ideas out of the air.

02:32:51 Speaker_01
Correct, it's all in the ether, it's who gets there first.

02:32:54 Speaker_05
Yeah, well do you feel like that way with your music sometimes? Like that ideas just sort of come to you from the muse?

02:32:59 Speaker_04
Sure, absolutely.

02:33:01 Speaker_05
I think everybody does, right? No question about it. Even with photography? I think so, too. The idea that there's something that tells you to capture this thing that's going to resonate with people?

02:33:10 Speaker_01
No question about it. One of my favorite pictures in the book is one called Hope, and it's of this little girl in Ethiopia. I was actually there to take a photograph of this person who was cutting the ribbon to open

02:33:29 Speaker_01
new freshwater well and I just heard this noise behind me and we were under a plastic cover it was sweltering out there. And again, because I'm shy and I don't set things up, maybe it's like a guerrilla street shot, you know.

02:33:50 Speaker_01
And I just had this feeling that I needed to turn around. And I did turn around and I just saw this young girl just kind of looking at me like, anything I can say is that, again that everything's going to be all right.

02:34:16 Speaker_01
For this little girl there to kind of go, it's okay. We're going to be okay. That's the impression I got from her. It was just this look. It's kind of like that Nat Geo moment. And I literally span around.

02:34:34 Speaker_01
snapped the shot and turned around and never looked back again. And when I did, she'd gone. She was with a group of friends.

02:34:42 Speaker_01
And I didn't actually know if I'd got the shot because, again, my eyesight's not the best and I certainly couldn't see it properly on the back of my camera in the middle of a bloody desert.

02:34:54 Speaker_01
So it was only when I got back to the hotel and put it into the computer that I went, oh. But the face to me was just like this, we're going to be okay. Yeah. Yeah. And I don't know, those kind of moments.

02:35:17 Speaker_01
give me some kind of, as I called it, hope that we'll do okay at the end of the day. But that's a very human element and a very warm embrace, which I choose to take on board as opposed to think that it's anything other than that, really.

02:35:45 Speaker_05
I share that thought. I think we're going to be OK. But I think that there has to be the possibility that we're not going to be OK for us to appreciate that we're going to be OK.

02:35:54 Speaker_01
Correct. Correct. It's the yin and yang. It's the balance thing again.

02:36:00 Speaker_05
horrors of the world to recognize the beauty. Correct.

02:36:04 Speaker_01
And I think quite a few people are recognizing that too.

02:36:08 Speaker_01
I mean, there's obviously some horrible stuff going on right now, but at the other end of it, there's also recognition that we should take care of each other and we should look after this place that we call home.

02:36:22 Speaker_01
And I don't mean in that soppy hippie way either. It's like genuine, you know, concern and love and respect for where we are. And this is...we are so lucky. I mean, we're so, so lucky. You know, I think it was actually...

02:36:44 Speaker_01
Professor Brian Cox that just goes, this is insane that we're here now having this experience. I mean, if you can, take that on board, try to appreciate that and feel that wonder of the fact that we exist in this time, you know, if we do.

02:37:06 Speaker_05
Well, I think we do. Yeah. I think, well, at least in our experience, we do, you know, whatever this is. You know, there's people that believe this is a simulation.

02:37:15 Speaker_01
Yes, I know that one too.

02:37:16 Speaker_05
It's also, yeah, boy, that's a, when it's explained to you by brilliant people, it becomes hard to ignore the possibility that maybe they're correct. Like Elon is, He said that the odds of us not being in a simulation are in the billions.

02:37:36 Speaker_05
Ouch, that hurts. But wouldn't you think that, though, if you're simultaneously running Tesla and a rocket company? He seems like he's in a simulation.

02:37:46 Speaker_05
And you're also the richest man in the world, and you're also the number one Diablo player in the world. He's in a simulation.

02:37:53 Speaker_01
Well, he's certainly thinking he's you want to talk about a multiverse going on at the same times He's already there. That's for sure.

02:38:01 Speaker_05
Yeah, and if I was him, I would think that this is a simulation, too It's just because he's got a really good level of the simulation.

02:38:08 Speaker_02
Yeah, that levels fun. Yeah for sure. Oh

02:38:11 Speaker_05
Yeah. But it's also, it's like, what do you do with that information? Like, if you know, like, if you've decided this is a simulation, what are, what are you experiencing? Are these experiences real? Or is it, it's still real. So,

02:38:28 Speaker_05
Real feelings and real moments still do exist. So, does it cheapen it?

02:38:35 Speaker_01
But does that change your purpose also?

02:38:38 Speaker_05
Does it? Does it change how you feel? Does it change the people you love?

02:38:41 Speaker_01
Does it change, you know... But, I mean, you certainly look at him and go, you want to talk about being a go-getter, making things happen. Yeah. He believes it's possible, so he does it. Yeah. And, you know,

02:38:58 Speaker_01
I think that's the same with a lot of people, obviously not to that extreme. But I think we do make our own fortune in life. Yeah.

02:39:12 Speaker_05
In some weird way.

02:39:13 Speaker_01
I think we are responsible partly for our destiny, for our paths in life.

02:39:21 Speaker_05
Do you believe in free will? It's a tricky one, right? It's a tricky one. Yeah. There's something there that is free will. I believe in determinism as well.

02:39:37 Speaker_01
You have choices.

02:39:39 Speaker_05
Yeah. You do have choices, but how much of your choices are shaped by your past, your biology, life experiences, genetics?

02:39:48 Speaker_05
You know, how much of it is, you know, there's that argument like Sapolsky makes the argument that that's going to be the one of the things that we look back on in the future as being one of the most preposterous concepts that people attach themselves to is the concept of free will.

02:40:03 Speaker_01
Right.

02:40:04 Speaker_05
And Sapolsky is like, he's pretty much a pure determinism guy. And I don't know if that's really true. I feel like it's both.

02:40:14 Speaker_05
I feel like there are decisions that you can make and you make these decisions and change your life, you can change the life of other people and you know that you can do it and you're doing it through will.

02:40:26 Speaker_05
There's something about focusing your energy and your desires and your life goal, your path to something.

02:40:38 Speaker_01
That's a real thing. Yeah, and things happening at a particular time.

02:40:45 Speaker_05
I think it's very foolish to pretend that you know, whether it's determinism or whether it's free will. I think it's foolish.

02:40:53 Speaker_05
I think also there's so many factors to take into consideration to dismiss any of them, like to dismiss the concept of the simulation I think is silly. but to dismiss the concept of the multiverse also equally silly.

02:41:07 Speaker_05
To dismiss this idea that you have no free will. It's like, I'm not sure, because there's something you know guides you in a particular direction that you don't necessarily always go with. So what is that? Is that pure determinism?

02:41:24 Speaker_05
If like, sometimes you make mistakes and you recognize you made those mistakes and you recalibrate and then you get to that fork in the road again, you go, I fucked this up before, this time I'm not going to. This time I'm going to move forward.

02:41:37 Speaker_05
Is that free will? Because it certainly seems like it to me. And that's not discounting the impact of determinism, which is all the events of your life and your biology. It has to be shared. It's a lot of different stuff going on simultaneously.

02:41:52 Speaker_01
Yeah. I don't think you can say it's one or the other. No, I don't think so either. But people love to do that, though.

02:41:58 Speaker_05
They want to put a stamp on something.

02:42:00 Speaker_01
Yeah, well, pigeonholing.

02:42:02 Speaker_05
Yeah, they just love to, like, I want to put this in a narrow window of understanding and dismiss all the other things that are contrary.

02:42:10 Speaker_01
Open-mindedness is something that is a necessity in this strange, weird world that we live in. It's fun though, right? Yeah. Oh, no. Absolutely. Absolutely.

02:42:21 Speaker_01
I certainly have enjoyed the process, but it's funny that what you're saying, how you're saying things, because it makes... As you're discussing this, I'm thinking about certain choices that I've made because of certain things that have happened and certain things in the past and where I believe I should be in the future.

02:42:43 Speaker_01
Yeah. I mean, that's quite... I find quite an interesting one that this whole also concept of – well, my mind is going blank, not enough coffee today – that you're – what do you call it when you're putting it out there? I'm really brain dead right now.

02:43:12 Speaker_01
When you're visualizing the future and the possibilities, manifesting your dreams, is there some truth to that? Because that does seem to happen to a degree.

02:43:31 Speaker_04
It just doesn't always happen.

02:43:32 Speaker_01
No, not at all. I think it's a factor. That's a possibility. I agree with you on that. But there's something definitely to that, I definitely think.

02:43:45 Speaker_01
I certainly feel that I can relate certain things happening to me because of manifesting or the will to move things in a particular direction.

02:43:56 Speaker_05
You put your energy and your focus into something and the thing becomes real and you're like, oh my God, I manifested this thing.

02:44:02 Speaker_01
Yeah. How did that happen without that?

02:44:05 Speaker_05
But it's also work. For sure. People get this bizarre thing that if you just manifest something that it'll just occur.

02:44:13 Speaker_01
No, that's never the case. No, there's a ton of energy behind it. It's a weird process. That comes into that, for sure.

02:44:22 Speaker_05
Julian, I've really enjoyed talking to you. It was a lot of fun.

02:44:25 Speaker_01
Thank you, likewise. Back at you.

02:44:27 Speaker_05
And I really enjoy your photography. Thank you. And the book is available, Life's Fragile Moments. It's an awesome coffee table sized. It's, yeah, it's heavy.

02:44:37 Speaker_02
Let's do this again sometime, man. Thank you, my absolute pleasure. My pleasure as well. Thank you very much.