Full transcript: Daniel Livingstone on London Real
0:15 Hello and welcome to London Real. My name is Brian Rose. I’m here, as usual, with Mr. Nick Gabriel and joining us today is Mr. Daniel Livingstone, who is an economist who works for the government.
0:28 As an advisor. As an advisor. And just to give you a really weird background, I met Daniel in a comedy course that we took about a year ago, where we all, after the course was over, got up and did five minutes of stand-up comedy. and you might find this hard to believe but Daniel was funnier than me I had a really hard night that night I mean me my classmates were really cool they’re like I was a lousy crowd Brian and sometimes the crowds are lousy because if people bring their friends and family but man I really bombed I think it’s I started off wrong when I got up there and I got up to the front and I said And hello, I’m Brian Rose, United States of America.
1:10 And it was like, it was like silence. And afterwards, they hated me. Well, yeah, you were preaching to a fundamentally left-wing audience. So they were getting to hear the United States of America and think of negative things and react rather coolly to it. Well, what they think they taught us in the comedy course is that you have to address what people think about you in the first minute or you won’t go anywhere.
1:34 So I had to address the fact I was an American. We had a girl with short hair in the class who looked like a lesbian, God bless her. And if she didn’t address that in the first minute, then people are like, okay, what’s going on with her? Did you address the fact that you’re extremely good looking? That obviously expected for itself, didn’t it?
1:51 I thought you did. How did you have to kind of address that? Because you come across as a, I mean, you know, I don’t know how I would describe you. I might, I would describe you as a backbencher at the Tory party, although you probably will hate me for that. Yes, I probably will, actually, yes.
2:05 You have to kind of, how did you address your first minute of who you are when you were standing up? I never apologized, never explained. That was my philosophy, so I didn’t address it. Yeah, you didn’t, did you? I think I just got away with it, that’s all.
2:17 And I was very lucky because after about 10 or 15 seconds I managed to get the first punch line in, which was essentially just like a half the human race and I got an instant laugh, which is ironic given the audience being a little bit touchy-feely. But you can always say something like, there are too many people in London that get in the way they’re like a pack of vermin and that sort of thing there’s too many of them and perhaps half of them could be killed and that will get a laugh from anyone yeah you were doing into one a really good rant you were saying something like yeah I think they should be cold or something everybody loves rants but they love that yeah yeah you did quite well that night man speaking of stand-up comedy you know what I’ve noticed lately I don’t know if it’s always been this way if I’ve just only become aware of it but when you’re walking in the tube every second poster is for a stand-up comedian for DVDs or for live exactly yeah people just getting like more open to that or I think it’s popular isn’t it yeah well I think people need cheering up on the first hand but also I did think it could be recession proof possibly I just I just think people still have spare time they didn’t know what to do with it and they can’t think of what to do so let’s go and see some comedy what was last time you paid for comedy well I’m not paying for it now so yeah and you you don’t do comedy show
3:27 Dude, I dig comedy. I mean, I’ll, I haven’t been to any live stuff, but I’ll watch stuff on YouTube. And Russell Peters is a favorite of mine. Okay. Have you watched him? I know him, but I couldn’t pick him out of a lineup. I think Dave’s your pal as well. Yeah, he’s pretty funny. He’s one of the funniest. Um, Louis CK. I know your brother likes, YouTube’s quite cheap. I must admit. Yeah. YouTube is the way to go. You know, I told, when I told Nick I was doing this course, Nick was like, Brian, I could never do that.
3:50 And I was like, okay, Nick, you’ve gotten to a ring and beaten guys up in front of thousands of people but you wouldn’t get up on a stage and got beaten up but explain that to me well why wouldn’t you go up on stage for five minutes I don’t think I said that I just didn’t I say I was really impressed maybe you impressed like you should do it and you’re like I don’t know did you see the DVD afterwards didn’t I like to see that though I’m on YouTube I had a second gig afterwards which was much better but I’m anyways secret no that’s that’s up there as well but would you ever do it yeah look dude I mean I’ll try anything once, right? Well, to a point. Yeah, I’ll do that one day. Get up for five minutes and try to make people laugh. We try to make people laugh for an hour each week. Is that what we’re doing? No, I found the course, you know, I don’t know about you, but we were in a room together for three hours with about 12 people that we didn’t know who we were, and our teacher named Keith, who everyone has mixed reactions. At the end of the day, you can say a lot about things about Keith, but he did get almost everyone through the course and on stage. Was he funny at least? It depends on your definition of fame. Honestly, no.
4:59 I think your buddy Dave explained it well. We had a comedy instructor who for six weeks didn’t tell a joke, didn’t make us laugh, and actually did he say anything to us? Not really. All he did was tell us to have a good attitude. He was actually like a professional teacher. He would be cracking jokes left and right, but he wasn’t. How many of these These dudes though in your course went on to become like a professional stand-up comedian?
5:25 I know where there was one. Well. Well. There was one who already was a professional stand-up comedian but he wasn’t funny at least not intentionally. Okay.
5:35 He’d failed to crack the Polish sitcom market. I think he was Polish in origin. We had an interesting half English half Polish guy, a shout out to him and then we had another guy named Matt O’Brien and we had a professional comedian come in and talk to us one class And he said, you’re not a comedian until you do 100 gigs. And this guy in the course named Matt O’Brien, he just got, he was like flipped his switch and he’s like, I’m doing 100 gigs. So last time I checked, he’s at like 70 something.
6:00 And he just went out. Like that’s three times a week. You go to these pubs on a Monday night. So we do a hundred shows, right? You’re right, it’s gonna be two years.
6:07 Yeah, one of these high competitive times. So some guys went on to do it, but it’s a hard racket and you’re doing it for free. And I mean, when I did my first gig outside of the school, I waited three hours on a Monday night in a pub room downstairs until I maybe was gonna get to go up at 11 for five minutes. Where was this pub? It was somewhere in like EC something around there.
6:27 But it was awesome five minutes. And what was the audience like? Dave was there. There was a few people from our class that were there. I don’t know.
6:34 What I learned is you have to, I have to America bash. The Brits love America bashing. So I’d get up as an American and I would just start slamming America. They loved it. Can’t get enough.
6:44 That’s interesting. Can you explain that? Yes, that’s your former self apology. You know what I love is Joe Rogan when he… Did you ever see that he was doing one stand-up thing and some chick starts to heckle him?
6:55 And he just shreds her. Like I think she probably ran out of the crowd crying. He’s one of the best when it comes to hecklers. He just shuts them down. We all were kind of ready for it.
7:07 We all tried to have a few things in our back pocket but we just had some dumb one-liners to be ready. Oh, is it the first time, is this your first beer? Something stupid like that. Yeah, I got a hat for it as well. You did, at the night?
7:19 Yeah, well, I was trying to explain why traveling by train in London’s awful. So I asked the crowd, does anybody actually like traveling by train? And somebody said yes. So I just said, well, you’re clearly mentally ill. I did shut them out.
7:34 Well, the ensuing laugh from the audience shut them out, so they got drowned out. See, you got it, their natural talent. Yeah, maybe I’ve thought about this before, like the ability to be funny and to make people laugh and work in general. I wonder if it’s just a highly, highly specialized form of intelligence. Like it’s just reaction speed in your brain.
7:56 How quickly you can process language or something happening and find the humor in it and then express it. I mean, what would you guys say to that? An impromptu basis. Yeah, that sounds plausible, but you’ve got to be confident and your rhetoric’s got to be pretty free-flowing. And on that note, the squeak show is sponsored by?
8:14 Yes, and you use new tropics and artificial stimulants and all that sort of thing as well. Yeah, that’s probably why I didn’t do very good in comedy course, because I wasn’t on Alpha Brain. Exactly. Which is our sponsor, and Daniel’s just taken some. Well, my secret was, for about 10 minutes before, I was doing breathing exercises, kind of yogic breathing exercises.
8:31 You were? Yeah, which are basically- Were you drinking before, by the way? No. You and me were the only ones weren’t drinking everyone else started knocking them back for a good hour before yeah well that’s because they were nervous and it was only gonna make them more nervous time they go on they’d be saying oh my god I might be drunk I don’t know what to say oh no I’m nervous I don’t know you think a couple of drinks would have taken the edge off I noticed a couple of drinks always take the edge off me and anything but this year performing and trying to member remember five minutes of your material and I don’t know Rogan’s always stoned when he goes on stage right he is and he has a beer as well he stoned when he does everything I’ve never met this Rogan but he might be very good, so he might just be able to automatically get into a kind of flow thing where his conscious mind is switched off.
9:11 So when your conscious mind gets in the way of doing something, then you’ll more than likely be trying to remember what you’re doing, you’re not going to do it half as well or even well at all. So if you get onto stage where you’ve done some breathing exercises and you just don’t think, you just know your lines and all that sort of thing, I mean I only actually practiced them twice. I hardly knew what I was going to say by the time I got up there, I was just confident and had faith, if that’s not too extreme a thing to say, that I’d get through it and it worked.
9:39 I got into a flow situation within the first five minutes because I got the first laugh in the first ten seconds and that was it. And the heckler actually helped. I did. The heckler was an instrument for getting an even bigger laugh. Yeah, it’s interesting.
9:50 So when you mentioned that flow state, I read a book, I think it was called The Flow State and it was all about entering into that state and ways to facilitate it. The reason I read it was because I wanted to start entering that state when I was doing martial arts. So fascinating to me that you mentioned wanting to get into that state with comedy. I know, Brian, can you identify any examples in your life of where you’ve entered into the flow state or what you thought was a flow state?
10:23 I think since I started training in martial arts with you, I started knowing my breathing now and I just know now when I’m nervous or even at that night in the comedy club, just first of all stay sober and then just really control my breathing and just try to also convince myself that this is the least most difficult thing I’ve ever had to do. Controlling your breathing effectively switches off your neocortex which is a bit at the very top of your brain so that if any fear or anything like that comes from deep in your unconscious through the stem part of your brain, then the amygdala exactly which is located in there. Then your cerebral cortex won’t magnify that with words because once words are attached to a feeling, it becomes an emotion and then it can dominate you if you’re not careful.
11:03 So you’ve got to prevent it from happening in the first place. So if you do your breathing exercises, if you do your meditation, you actually switch that bit of your brain off, you’re more likely to be in the flow state for basically as long as you can maintain it, as long as you can just focus on your breath and absolutely not worry about anything else, absolutely not worry about anything else. So it’s kind of like having faith. So a lot of people who pray get into this flow state but they think that God’s put in them because of their fakes, so they actually make an error, and then they start thinking about it, preaching to everyone else.
11:32 It sounds like we’re talking to a guru from India, not an economist trained at LSE who works for the government. Is there a disconnect here? Well, I guess so now. Or am I just being stereotypical? Well, I’ll get onto that in a minute, I think.
11:49 There’s a disconnect in the sense that education teaches you, at least in the West, to think in a certain way. What do you, if I were to just interrupt you there, on that same thread, there’s the hypothesis, the dual brain hypothesis, which claims that the left side of the brain controls all verb linguistic processes, and the right side controls all intuitive processes. And one of my favorite spiritual teachers, Osho, he says what happens in the modern West is that we take the child and we train his left brain to such a highly specialized degree that the right brain’s abilities atrophy.
12:29 And eventually he becomes almost schizoid because he doesn’t have access to that half of his being. And he says, what meditation does is it’s starting to engage the right brain again, or the right side of your brain again. And eventually- Yeah, it bores both hemispheres into balance. Do you believe? I don’t know, I’m not a neurologist, but it sounds very plausible.
12:46 I mean, there’s a lot you can say in favor of what Osho says, but there’s a lot of other things about Osho that aren’t too palatable or healthy I won’t go into it like what Some of his followers some of his camps and that sort of thing, okay basically, he preached non-ego, but he then had a cult following and That’s exactly the opposite of non-ego. So contradictions like that can very quickly arise. Hmm. You’ve done some study on Did you meditate and I’ve just read a book it just and I mean, I think just I believe it just qualifies me to talk I don’t know if anybody else believes that.
13:21 Sounds good. So you don’t meditate? I do, yeah, or should I say I try to, but often in the morning I don’t because the first thing I can think of is get that caffeine fix, rush off to work. So my left brain, well in my case my right brain because I’m left handed, kicks into gear before I can stop it. So I actually need a kind of, every so often, a holiday so I can actually stop that process and start the meditation again and switch that bit of my brain off.
13:49 Obviously I need it at work during the day because I’ve got to think about things, do numbers, do computations, give advice on the best available evidence and work out and calculate every single possibility and blah, blah, blah. But that overstimulation needs to be offset. And the only way of doing it is meditation, to actually switch that bit of the brain off and let the other hemisphere actually have a chance to speak. Yeah, my whole being have a chance to be if you want to use that kind of language Now you talked about what you do during the week and I mean, I just have to ask so what do you actually do for the government?
14:27 What do people say when you say you work for the government? And why do we need you working for the government if you can give me a two minute or three minute? Okay, sounds like an essay test or a job interview. Well, what do you do? Well, I’m an economic advisor so I advise on what’s good value, what’s best value, what’s likely to be good value, what’s likely to be bad value. I mean it’s all really a matter of judgment and it’s a matter of relaying theology of economics as it currently stands or is currently accepted and injecting it into government decision-making. Wow. So that’s the economic aspects of a decision can be taken into account. For example, if I used to work in rails so I’d give advice on rail investment schemes and that’s often summarised by a single number so I’d explain all the different numbers benefit cost ratios they call them and give a view as to which is the best one and your information is used by the Prime Minister or by both parties to make economic decisions it goes everywhere it spreads throughout the government machine and informal decision-making in general Wow the best way what if another economist has a different view and he puts forth a different figure for like a budget decision I mean where does your input stand in the hierarchy of like that all these different advisers or how does how does it work could you well there were basically set sorts of rules so actually going about this so the
16:01 Treasury accepts a certain level of economic theology which is basically the best available information on how the economy operates at this point in time. It’s not to be seen as an absolute truth written in tablets of stone, although some people behave as if this is the case. So there’s quite a lot of room for interpretation around the margins, because, you know, I’m the economist of advice, doesn’t mean I know everything, I wouldn’t want people to think that, otherwise they’d be asking for advice all the time.
16:35 So if there’s a disagreement, it can usually be resolved. But it usually doesn’t get to that, quite frankly. OK. That’s a fine right or a design. Does the government also use?
16:44 I mean, is there an argument that they should use private contractors as opposed to the government public employees? Or do you take those things into account? Because there’s obviously lots of economists working in the city that might have conflicting views. But then again, maybe they’re acting in their own interest to a certain extent. Do you see that?
17:03 Private contractors do act in their own interest. The only justification of using a private contractor is if they can do it cheaper than a set of government employees, whether that means they’re incentivized to do it more efficiently or come down on the price or whatever. It’s a matter of then demonstrating that, and it’s not always easy to do that because sometimes the indicators of what they’re going to deliver, like, for example, if you try to get private contractors to deliver a real efficiency.
17:35 How do you actually measure that? Okay, you can measure that in output per unit of cost, but you don’t know what would happen otherwise if you had government employees doing it. So it’s always going to be subjective, but it’s going to be a well-informed subjective decision. Are we heading to a recession? Is it all bad?
17:49 You’re always asking me this, right? Nick’s like, what’s gonna happen, in my opinion? Yeah, it’s the ego’s fear of the future. Was it? But anyway, I’d like to know, yeah, if you have any opinion.
17:59 Well, how bad is it going to be? How bad is the European banking sector? Is the euro going to crush the sterling if it fails? It depends on whether the Germans actually relent and allow money to be printed en masse and get over their psychological fear and what happened in 1923 repeating itself. They have a horror.
18:21 It’s a pretty well-funded feeling. They have a big fear of inflation because what was after it was in the early 20s after the Second World War. First World War. We’ll browse for money, and if you have any savings, I mean, well, that just gets killed, right, with any kind of inflation. Yeah, but the Germans seem to see economics, and the euro as some kind of Calvinist morality tale.
18:40 So the idea is not to print money, because somehow that’s wrong. Even if it is a mechanism for popping up the euro, even under the circumstances. And that’s the essential rigidity in their position, which means that banks can’t be quickly recapitalized. They don’t want to give in on that. And this is possibly an example of decision-making or democracy even having its flaws.
19:06 Because if everybody in Germany believes this Calvinistic morality tale, you’ll get into debt, you’ll deserve to pay it back and you must go bankrupt and all that sort of thing. Then everybody goes bankrupt, including the person actually making that statement. So it’s all about confidence. Well, I suppose that translates into confidence, yeah. So maybe you can clarify something for me.
19:27 It’s my understanding from the various stuff I’ve read and been exposed up until this point that the global economy has got this bubble in it or this diseased portion that basically just keeps being shuffled around through things like quantitative easing and things like that. And the expression I’ve heard used is that we’re kicking the can down the road and that we have to pay the price sooner or later. I mean, do you think there’s any truth to that? or is that just this Calvinistic erroneous view or?
20:00 I would say it is the Calvinistic view, yeah. The bubble was basically caused by banks lending too much and they did that because interest rates were kept low for a long period of time. The reason interest rates were kept low for a long period of time was China was artificially depressing its currency so it could export to the rest of the world. So it could keep its population in work. So instead of them- Just still doing.
20:22 Which it’s still doing. So instead of them basically killing off the Communist Party and having a revolution, they worked hard for not very much. And the currency value was kept low. Now China then accumulated a huge surplus of money. And the Western countries accumulated a deficit.
20:37 Now obsessive free market economists and those of the so-called Austrian school, which basically believes does not believe in quantitative easing and thinks that high interest rates are usually a good thing in order to allocate capital effectively. And this is where they’re wrong. Chinese basically recycled that money back to the West. And it went back into banks, so they could do even more lending. But Western central banks, all of them had inflation targets.
21:13 But this extra money did not manifest itself, particularly in Britain, as higher inflation. And there were two reasons for this. The cost of Chinese goods didn’t increase because the renminbi or whatever they call it didn’t increase in value against sterling I don’t know what that is called the renminbi Yeah renminbi, right? The dong is the Vietnamese council gets a snigger out of me Well, yeah, they mean the Chinese had their interest. They’ve got a billion 1.1 billion people They don’t want to revolt and so the economies are very rich on the coastal regions and on the interior They’re not and so they need everybody to keep working So they loan money for projects not even worried about return on capital. They just want to keep people working I mean, I was worried about China taking over the world like and I always used to believe in the threat of Chinese imperialism and then a friend of mine Big shout out to dr. Khalil hubby, but yeah, we need to get him on chef He said to me like China is the biggest bubble waiting to burst. He was explaining how Well, I can’t remember if it was directly or indirectly, but 30% of China’s GDP comes from Walmart.
22:15 Like, it’s attributed to Walmart in one way or another. It comes from Walmart. Say again? Well, how do you mean? You mean it goes through Walmart?
22:22 Yeah, well, it’s… This is the essence of the problem. So they recycled this money to the west. Interest rates remained low, particularly in Britain, where mortgage rates actually fed through into the inflation numbers. So as interest rates fall, inflation falls, and then interest rates go lower and inflation falls further, therefore more irresponsible lending fented by China.
22:45 When the bubble finally burst in 2008, the West was left with these huge debts, government debts, consumer debts, individuals, and essentially bank debts. But China could not pull the plug out and not object to the West lowering interest rates to zero and printing money, because otherwise it’d have a revolution on its hand. So it’s basically put itself in a situation where, because it’s wanted its population to work and not have a revolution, they are doomed to continue with that. Therefore, if the deficit is just simply inflated away and printed away, and if you’re in a flexible exchange rate regime, i.e. sterling not being in the euro, then there is actually a chance of getting a free ride off the rest of the world economy. That’s why quantitative easing is a good idea and that’s why it’s not exactly the same as the Calvinistic morality tale, not only beloved of the Germans and the Austrian schools, but also it’s a deep strain in conservative common sense thinking. John Maynard Keynes himself said in the 1930s that we don’t want a granny wisdom to rural economic decision making. What does that mean? Right, what he meant was, what he meant was in a recession or a depression, it’s better for the government to spend money. He said go into debt, but going into debt in quantitative easing in the current context is a similar thing. A granny would say yes, but it’s like a household, isn’t it? You cut your cloth to suit your needs and make your own men, all this kind
24:12 Of thing. Well, that might be right for an individual, but on a group scale, it’s absolutely wrong. So you disagree with the austerity measures being imposed on economies like Greece right now? They’re only necessary to prop up the euro and to also assuage the German Calvinistic sensibility. The Germans are playing a poker hand to a certain extent though as well. I mean they’re they’re almost have to bluff every week to try to see if these individual countries economies are gonna get their act together right? Because the Greeks do you need to show a little bit of austerity because they’ve been on this this 50-year long party. Yeah.
24:46 Yeah, I think the Germans need to bail them out to some extent, but they don’t want to do it too much. They say, you will not think you’re expressals, and you will pay us back as you money. I’ve always wondered what would happen if- The German impressions are free. Absolutely. What do you think would happen if starting tomorrow, I mean, it’s a hypothetical situation that will never take place, but everything was just reset back to zero.
25:12 It’s an interesting point. Erase the debt, erase assets. Erase third world debt to the first world, erase everyone’s credit card debt, erase everything. Just start from zero. What do you think will happen?
25:22 I have heard this answer. That’s the premise of Fight Club at the end when you’re breaking all the buildings out. Exactly. Well, probably would be inflation. I wouldn’t like to forecast how much.
25:34 I don’t know, it might be a good idea because it’s impossible to say what happened if you did that. It’s a good one though. I quite like it. The thing that blows my mind about money is, I mean, I’ve looked into it like on a very shallow level, but from what I can understand, the whole global economy is all built on a house of cards, like fractional reserve banking, like for example, when you hear about these numbers like Greece owes, what is it, $8 billion or $8 trillion, whatever it is, all these things are just numbers sitting on a piece of silicone somewhere.
26:10 It’s not like actually- We’re not even sitting on a piece of silicon, they’re actually the dynamic properties of communication between bits of silicon, so they don’t actually exist in a spot of terms. But that money was spent, they did spend 80 billion on train tracks up into the rocks and on all these other things. There’s just agreement that this amount exists as an amount of money, which reflects the net worth of a country or an organization. And it’s not an actual physical, I mean, these countries don’t have huge vaults that that are piled high with dollars or whatever it is.
26:43 It’s just an abstraction. It’s a complete abstraction. Is that correct? Well, the concept of money is an abstraction. It’s just something that emerges from the human brain as a result of exchange, which is what human societies have done since the dawn of agriculture.
26:57 So it’s hardly surprising that money is an abstraction. It, in fact, always has been. It’s just in the old days, it was an abstraction related to the fact that people wanted to accumulate gold. And that itself is just something that’s contingent human sensibilities at a particular historical period. So it always has been.
27:15 It’s just that the abstractions are perhaps a little bit bigger these days. Well, a fine book I read. I think I mentioned this too, Brian, once. This guy was explaining how money is becoming a progressively finer form of energy. Originally it was cattle, like that’s how people traded. They bartered or they held their wealth in cattle and then it was seashells or blocks of salt and then it was coins and then it was paper money and now it’s like electronic money it’s becoming a finer and finer form of energy and I thought that was kind of interesting do you have any any thoughts on that I always avoid arguments by metaphor and analogy yeah I was just thinking of something if I just took the tour of the Bank of England has a museum and you can go in there and you can walk through and learn about the creation of the Bank of England and how It started off with the gold standard and you can learn all about how it moved off of that It’s really interesting. I encourage you to go but they talk about I never knew that a pound that the British pound was a pound of silver Based on and then you can see how the Bank of England was actually created. It was really bank of England I think was originally created to fund a war against France Yeah, it was like a small little bit partnership 1690 it was 1694. Yeah, it’s um, I mean maybe um, I don’t know I don’t, maybe I worked in finance, I think it’s interesting, but I thought it fascinating.
28:34 It was the Rockefellers, the Oppenheimers were one of those famous things that did the, that created that, that financed that war, right? Or Cook, who did that? What you just mentioned about that? The war against France. Yeah.
28:46 This was the English. Oh no, this is, this was in the end of the 17th century. Oh right. Yeah, so 1690s or something. No, you’re talking, I think you’re talking about the polyonic wars.
28:54 Okay, no, there was some, I watched some documentary and there was some family war. Not sure about the Rockefellers, I think it was a little bit later. They were in the 19th century, or the 20th century in the States, right, the Rockefellers? Yeah, basically. I mean, some of the rich families in the state, I mean, J.P. Morgan had bailed out the U.S.
29:09 Government at one point in the early 1900s, I think it was. Yeah, but in those days, the U.S. government hardly borrowed anything. That’s probably true, and the families were, they were thieving capitalists. In those days, everybody was self-sufficient, so there was none of this sort of state intervention of state income tax or the state guaranteeing equality or anything like that.
29:32 So in those days, the state didn’t spend as much. I’m not saying I’m against these things, by the way, I’m just describing it. Well, what do you say to the common guy on the street? When you’re, I ask a lot of people I meet, I’m like, do you, are you going to vote and this and that? And they’re going to say this, this stuff doesn’t matter to me. I don’t need to know about the sterling.
29:48 I don’t even know about Calvinist policies. You know, what’s the point of all this? What do you tell them? Do they need to know what’s going on right now? I don’t know. I rarely engage in such conversation with such people.
30:01 Well, if you did, what would you say? Hypothetically. I’d probably say you have a point. It’s not a metaphor. You don’t need to understand everything and too much information can be very, very bad for you.
30:09 Yeah, that’s so true. You can… There was one philosopher who read himself insane. Really? Yeah, it was at Schopenhauer.
30:15 I think it was. Yeah, I liked it. Do you just… Can you imagine? He didn’t have to read very much to get that far.
30:20 So, let’s… Although he did have a point, he ended up in a flat on his own. disavowing all relations with women and just with his dog for company. Perfect. I’ll drink to that.
30:30 I want to join him. He took his views to the obvious conclusion. At least he was intellectually consistent so he obeyed his intellectual conscience pretty much automatically. Let’s flip the switch. Flip it.
30:44 A little bird told me that you may or may not have taken ayahuasca. I wouldn’t use the word taken. I have been to an ayahuasca retreat. Yeah. Okay. Could you tell us a little bit about that?
30:57 In fact, could you tell us a lot about that? I’ll describe. I’ll do I’ll describe some of it some of it’s actually beyond description. Okay basically, the idea of the retreat an ayahuasca retreat is that You go and you take the ayahuasca and you see things from a different perspective in a sense, it helps open up your left brain when my case my right brain left-handed and And for a while you just see everything differently but the main reason I did it was it looked to be a very good cure for all sorts of bad habits like smoking, drinking and that kind of thing. And it absolutely does stop addictions, absolutely does for quite a long period of time. I’m not quite sure how it does it. You see the world differently through the whole process and as a result seeing the world differently you’re kind of more creative but without having to think a bit like meditation though I think it’s probably best if you do the boat the two of them in conjunction what the the Native Americans say is Ayahuasca is actually a plant god or spirit god and it speaks to you so in a sense what they’re saying is it actually conveys information about the planet I must admit when I was taking it I had this feeling that plants were the only intelligence on the planet, or the greatest one, but they are collective intelligence.
32:18 So it’s all plants speaking, so it’s not just one blade of grass or one irascivine, it’s a whole lot of them. It’s like a hive mind. A higher mind, you could put it that way. No, a hive mind. A hive mind, yes, that’s exactly it, yes.
32:30 Something, a type of mind that goes beyond the human conception of mind, that is not the mind of an individual. Is that like an antiive? Is that what you’re saying? Like a collective consciousness that goes beyond an individual? Collective consciousness, yes.
32:42 Well, where were you when you did this? Sussex, that’s where it was. Okay, so you did it in England. Oh, yeah Yeah, yeah, and you said Native Americans or is it named in the name Americans ticket or is the native South Americans? Mexico maybe by Americans. I mean And what I when did you do this That do you think wow Okay, I recommend it to anyone. Well, was it?
33:09 People have told me that it can be incredibly scary Yeah, but I have such a boring life, I enjoy being scared. Had you had any experience with anything like this before? I mean, is it, you, okay, so I offer when somebody slips a magic mushrooms into my food, my stagnant. Yeah. Because some, okay.
33:31 Because some people say you should have one way of seeing three dimensional TV. Yeah. I mean, there’s a lot of classes free. The guys say that you should experience some mushroom trips before you go to a DMT ayahuasca because you should be a little bit familiar with a psychotic before you go for the nine yards of ayahuasca. I think they might have a point, but the use of the word psychotic is unfortunate because a psychotic is somebody whose brain and whose ego is effectively compartmentalized and split into bits. So it actually implies that your brain would compartmentalise and you’d suffer psychotic episodes. That’s not what happens.
34:11 Psychedelic with the word, right? Psychedelic, sorry. My mistake. That’s a big mistake, but my mistake. But you have to go along with the learning and the understanding. So what it kind of says is that most of what the human race does is silly and pointless. All of the economics, all of the politics and all of the rushing around and having your first cappuccino and in your second, in your third, and then do whatever work it is, then rushing home and driving in your car and living for the weekend and consuming and sustainability of the planet’s resources and there’s no tomorrow, and then perhaps every so often salving your conscience by voting green or recycling, or more likely in my case, ordering other people to recycle.
34:49 That’s a great little diatribe. Daniel, I’d love to see how you’d respond to… Brian and I were chatting about something on another episode of London Real. We kind of have a different perspective on whether the planet’s running out of resources. What are your thoughts on that? Do you think this current level of consumption and production is sustainable or do you think we’re pretty much showing the seeds of our own destruction?
35:17 Well nothing lasts forever, does it? No species in the past have lasted forever. lot of societies have died out and if you agree with what Jared Diamond says it’s often because they’ve consumed their own resources. So yeah I would generally go along with that. Who is Jared Diamond? He’s an anthropologist. I can’t remember the name of the book but he basically looked at past extinctions of various societies like the Aztecs and the Incas. Okay in that case there’s a complication of the Spanish arriving but other ones as well and the marshaled some compelling evidence suggests that they basically went out of resources because they consumed them too much, they’d reproduce too much, there were too many of them and then in a localized setting their environmental footprint was so great that they couldn’t, they basically couldn’t grow enough food to eat so they started arguing each of each other and war came to them as a sign of resource depletion. Well I mean that’s what’s happening with oil pretty much. Pretty much analogous yeah. Yeah it took us to a certain extent yeah everyone protects that resource. But it’s a matter of when this is going to happen. Like 250 years ago or whatever it was, Malthus said that people would starve on mass because eventually the capacity of agriculture to feed a growing world population would be exceeded by that population’s needs. Hasn’t happened so far. It hasn’t happened so far but the grass he
36:40 Produced he didn’t bother labelling the axes so we don’t know when. Of course the population is considered as going to be tapering off in the next 50 years around nine billion Yeah, I didn’t know that. I read that the other day and I’m surprised. I thought like it just carried it. Yeah, we see Western Europe, you know, it’s it’s not even just sustaining itself at this point. I’m as far as reproduction But um, I just want to get a few more details on what happened in Sussex as far as how long did it take you?
37:06 Did you do it in a group setting? No, no, I did it on my own. I did it in the ceremony I did it with a specialist. Is it shaman? She’s a shaman. Yes. Okay Queen mother. That’s what she called herself That’s what she was to be addressed by Queen mother. Yeah. Okay. That sounds like that sounds ego gone rampant If yeah, no, no, no, no, no, that’s that’s a technical. That’s a technical name So it is it seems like there’ll be no ego allowed in the room for I’m sure she’s gone. Hey and in origin When I spoke to her on the phone, I thought she was English. She had such a well-cut accent when I met her I didn’t really I couldn’t put two and two together immediately to realize it was the same person But she then explained where it came from. It came from her culture. In her case, a boga, not ayahuasca, that’s from South America.
37:53 A boga, yeah. A boga is kind of a different version, but often stronger. I’ve heard, you might find this interesting, Brian, that a boga is a psychedelic, similar in action to DMT, but apparently it’s even stronger, and apparently when a heroin addict is serious about quitting heroin, He takes Iboga because what it does is it’s equivalent to five years worth of intensive psychotherapy. It takes you to the root of the addiction, the disease in your mind that causes you to destroy yourself through heroin.
38:27 And once that’s been illuminated to you, you’re free of it. And you’ll feel very, very empty afterwards as well. Really? For a period of time. Like weeks?
38:38 Well, after the ayahuasca, I was empty for weeks. Why did she give you ayahuasca instead of Iboga? I think it’s because I only went because I thought it was a detox retreat. I didn’t realize about the ayahuasca bits Oh, I should have prepared and she told me about it. So I said me I got give it a go Well, I discovered it entirely by accident respect to you for having the courage to do that I wouldn’t like that how long this was a weekend I’ll never taking a risk is taking a risk itself as I heard earlier every time I try to explain this That’s to someone who doesn’t take risks. They look at me. Like they don’t know what I’m talking about That is the riskiest of all behaviors to stay in your little shell it is and it’s impossible to try to explain to someone I think so you went alone for a weekend or a week. It’s five days Okay, and you just take the ayahuasca once. Yeah once there’s one ceremony. Did you purge it all? Did you puke?
39:25 Yeah, that’s part of it. Yeah, where were you were you in a room? Yep, we’re back it. Okay, and just her. Yep. How long were you there for?
39:35 Doing vomiting. It was a few hours But that’s that’s so it sort of takes better. I was just prepared to try it. Yeah open to everything and it was very good And I’m going again as well. Well, really when you’re going in Sometime next year because I know I’m going to that was on next year to do it Well, actually you can do it in Sussex if you want. Yeah, I just want the authentic experience You know, some people say you should go to the jungle and do that You should go. If you want yourself purged, you want the benefits. The authentic experience is probably not the right way of looking at it. It’s not there to be an experience. It’s there as part of a process of personal growth. If you commodify it and call it an experience, you’re treating it just like a never-consumption good. And that is the mentality, which is part of the problem. So the ayahuasca subverts all that. So all of these ideas from culture which have been around for thousands of years and are reaching their apotheosis now and the high mass consumption or not given the recession are basically subverted by the ayahuasca so you can see the world without that. So if you actually start commodifying it and treat it as an experience then you won’t get most of the benefits.
40:53 See I don’t look at it that way, the way I see it is that we could get on a train and go to Sussex and sure, I’m sure, and take hours and I’m pretty certain that we’d learn a lot and there’d be a lot of personal growth, but by embarking on the journey, going to the place where this plant is from, taking ourselves out of the comfort zone. The journey is in your mind, it’s not in a location on the planet. That’s interesting. That’s a really interesting counter argument to that.
41:22 Although taking the physical journey could have meant the mental journey. It probably, it could have meant the journey, yeah. But it’s actually, the whole point of it is the internalized experience. And in the setting of the retreat where you’re taken through everything, you get all of that anyway. You could be in Antarctica, you could be in Sussex, you could be in Northamptonshire, or you could be in the jungles of Peru or whatever. That bit’s irrelevant. It’s actually how you respond to the treatment, and actually treatment’s even the wrong word as well. Ceremony is the word.
41:59 Ceremony? Yeah. But the ceremony without the ayahuasca would just be a ceremony. So is it more than a ceremony? Yes, but you can get the ayahuasca in Sussex, that’s the point.
42:07 Okay, I think I understand. Why go to the jungles of the Amazon? Just sounds cool. Yeah, well, that’s the point. You’re the victim of all of this commodification package and the conversion of experience into a form of hardened reality and that’s part of the problem of the problematic mindset that has led to the over-consumption of the planet’s resources.
42:32 I just, I think you have a point Daniel, but I also think that if I was in the Amazon and walking through the jungle and looking at these vines and like communing with Mother Nature on that level and I’d have a much greater respect for the plant and I think there’d be a lot more sanctity to that sermon that’s my opinion I could be wrong but that’s the way I look at it. What what people call nature is a little bit of a myth and a fabrication because everything is nature we’re part of nature this tables nature this radio show is nature all the buildings out there in nature it’s just they don’t look like a jungle they don’t look at it like an environment in which humans evolved, so it doesn’t ring as many bells for them, so they don’t relate to it in the same way.
43:22 Would you say that there’s a difference between nature and natural, because… Well, everything’s natural, because the laws of nature, if you say the laws of physics, then everything’s natural, so it’s a meaningless distinction. A lot of distinctions are meaningless, they’re just the product of platonic sort of mindset. I definitely see… What are your essences?
43:44 I think when Nick talks about it as being an experience when I think about it I’m terrified because I know we’re not going down to Rio to go for a jiu-jitsu camp I know we’re going down to in my opinion explore the deep deep dark inner inner ness in my face the demons And that’s what scares me and I was just you don’t have to go to Peru to do that Okay, were you um, were you scared did some did some things happen? You didn’t want to happen Did you regret taking it during? during the ceremony No, nothing happened. I didn’t want to happen. There were some surprising and very strange things which you tell us some of those Yeah at one point There was a tape recorder on and I didn’t want it on and I just thought Turn it off and it didn’t work and there was a washing machine on and I thought turn it off and it didn’t work They didn’t work the following day and I thought turn it back on again and it turned itself back on so some other level of consciousness was being accessed as a result of that it was a typical quarter on like recording your experience no oh no I can’t prove it I just knew it happened to me okay and it sounds odd but there are perhaps other dimensions that are incomprehensible you know what about the addiction thing as well I just want to you said that you You went in, you went to a detox week.
45:08 The addiction was just an addiction to eating, in my case, a very minor, drinking too much coffee, smoking, eating bread and this sort of thing. These are just things I felt compelled to do, so you might as well call them addictions. It was a mental component and a physical component. What the ayahuasca did was, firstly I was taken away from those, then what the ayahuasca did was it made me see things differently and it just simply took away those desires.
45:36 When you noticed that when you got back you were just taking you were thinking through before you were doing these same actions more it just won’t even doing those I think thoughts happened I just didn’t think about doing these these unhealthy practices interesting yeah it’s kind of like a computer I suppose so it’s a control or delete button reset what do your friends say when you tell them about this I’m guessing that none of your friends decided to do this after you told them about it. I kept them very interested, the rest of them think I’m nuts, but there again that category thought I was nuts before. I’ve got to be honest, like if I had met you at a dinner party or something and no one mentioned the ayahuasca thing, I never in a million years would have thought of you as the kind of person would do something, never in a million million years. It shows the limitation of my own stereotyping mind, like that’s what it is. Also I think when we think of ayahuasca we always do think of it as a psychedelic when in In fact, maybe it’s a ceremony or, you know, maybe it’s is the way Dan describes it.
46:37 It’s it’s not. Well, you have to be you have to take it with a another tutelage of somebody who’s a trained shaman. Did she speak with you during the ceremony? Was it very important that she was there? Yeah.
46:49 And you trusted her. Yeah. Okay. Well, I had faith and the faith was repaid. Okay.
46:54 So yes, I do trust her. I still trust her. Okay. Yeah. Wow.
46:59 And you’re going back. Yeah. Amazon that they think they say that you should be with the ayahuasca like once every three months or six months I mean it’s something you live with I think they say it’s not something you just do once yeah that’s probably that’s probably true are you excited to do it again
47:16 I suppose I am yes do you think that if you bought in my case it’s going to be a boga oh you’re going to switch up wow and what’s what’s what’s different about that what will be The Iboga cleanses your system absolutely thoroughly. What does that mean? If you’ve got toxins in your body, which everybody has, those which are accumulated over a long period of time, from the moment you’re born, possibly intergenerationally, from a natural food, cooked food, food without its preservatives, or you’re absorbing heavy metals from the environment. The Iboga can take us out very very fast indeed. And when are you going to do this?
48:00 Sometime next year. Okay, maybe we should go. I read a first hand account of someone who had done Iboga and what it is is it’s a third person observation of your psyche or that that’s one of the experiences. As in you’re the third person. Yeah and you’re looking at your own mind and your soul from from an outside vantage point and he said…
48:23 The ego is suspended and you have a holiday from yourself and you experience something like the perfect freedom but with that freedom you enjoy and you gain knowledge that’s interesting you don’t use it to consume experiences or anything like that so yeah so the thing he he was saying that terrified me is he was delving into these deep memories and and the formative aspects of his psyche and the thing that stuck with him that made the biggest impression of him was how much of it was made up of advertising from his childhood and it was then and then that he realized how invasive all this corporate stuff that we see and have like beamed into us 24 hours a day from the moment we were born. I think of kids, like how much TV did you watch as a kid? I know I watched a hell of a lot.
49:10 Yeah, nonsense information. And it’s all there sitting right inside. Of course, the diamond lasts forever. All the pictures of the models, all the guy with the new car and the- and Scooby-Doo. It’s Scooby-Doo.
49:23 And think how much that, like, we’re all sitting here, right? And we’ve made certain decisions in our life that have led us down different branching parts to arrive at this point right now. Think how much of those decisions were influenced by things we watched on TV or a picture we saw on a bus or a radio advert. There’s no doubt about it. A lot of it was.
49:41 No doubt. And you think you’re doing it your way. Yeah. And you’re the pioneer. I guess a lot of that.
49:46 Yes. The delusion of free will. Yeah. It is the delusion. empty afterwards for a couple of weeks.
49:51 Yeah, it’s a positive empty though. It was. See, when you guys talk about this, when Nick’s brought it, I was a couple of times, it fucking terrifies me. And I don’t know why I should be scared of myself because that’s what it is. But I just hear of some of these trips where these guys have got snakes coming inside their body, eating everything inside, they’re confronting all of their fears, speaking with their parents that they haven’t talked to in years.
50:13 I don’t know. For me, it just seems really scary. You never go to where the fear is. Sounds like your benefit. Yeah.
50:18 Go to where the fear is, Brian. Thank you. Did you experience any of that? No. I think there’s something wrong with my brain.
50:26 I can remember absolutely everything, particularly from an early age. So I didn’t really need to re-experience any of that because I hadn’t really repressed or forgotten anything. But as far as I know, maybe I have repressed things. I don’t know what I don’t know and all of that. So I was quite open to it.
50:41 So when information came to me, I saw things differently. It was a little bit sad and all that sort of thing. But not massive amounts of emotional pain. No, not at all. In fact, it was a beliefs.
50:53 In fact, it was quite novel feeling sad for a few days rather than feeling blank or empty. Okay, so he felt sad for a few days. I enjoyed that, yeah. So he did feel sad for a few days. It was probably necessary for me to feel sad if I blocked that feeling earlier on.
51:07 Emotions like sadness, this is something that became clear to me. Emotions like sadness and anger, like the first thing we do in our modern society is we medicate those away. There’s a reason for them, right? Or we repress them, yeah. Yeah, I don’t want to be angry.
51:21 Stop being angry. Why am I sad today? What’s wrong with me? I’m not supposed to be sad. Well, yeah.
51:26 I mean, they’re getting better at medicating feelings away. Like I’ve been reading lately that they’re experimenting on beta blockers. They initially gave them to soldiers in the Iraq war. And when they were given after a traumatic event to soldiers, they didn’t suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. So the beta blockers effectively blocked the formation of traumatic memories.
51:46 That’s incredible. And then some psychiatrists in Holland experimented on people who had suffered from traumas, recreated the traumas in those people through hypnosis, then applied the beta blockers. Then they found they could actually wipe these memories out in effect. And they are beginning to understand the biochemical basis of this. It would appear that memories have to be formed along with an emotion.
52:08 So if you split the link between the two of them, they cannot actually be recreated. That is fascinating. Well, it’s actually led to a lot of belligerents and conservative type commentators saying that this is morally wrong. Yeah. People do not have a right to this.
52:21 This will probably be a subject of cultural wars in the near future. I saw something similar to this where they had two mice and then they were trying to show this mice was drowning in water where the platform was and they found if they injected him with a little bit of adrenaline, when he got that information, then he remembered it. And if he didn’t, then he wouldn’t. Yeah. It must be something there.
52:41 I’ve heard of a similar experiment where they took a leech and they got it to go through this maze to… A leech. A leech, yeah. They got to see it. They used a leech.
52:52 I don’t know why they use mice. They said they got the leech to go through this maze to this little bit of blood. And then what they did was they did this with a bunch of different leeches and saw how long it took, on average, for the leech to get there. Then they liquidized the leeches that had already done it and fed them to a new leech. And it went through the maze a lot more quickly than all the previous ones.
53:12 So the whole theory was something to do with cellular memory and how that was transferred through the… That’s crazy. I thought that was interesting. I haven’t heard about these beta blockers. No?
53:22 No. You should go online. Look at it. There’s a whole debate that’s beginning to age about this one. A lot of political philosophy and moral philosophy is being aimed precisely at this.
53:33 There are some people saying that it won’t make you human if you don’t have a traumatic memory, i.e. the meaning of being human is to suffer. I suspect the same Calvinistic morality we’ve been discussing earlier has been behind us. There’s like a fine line because they say without all the suffering you won’t grow as a person, but if you have post-traumatic stress disorder, you come where you can’t function as a person. Well, you can’t function, you shrink as a person.
53:57 Right, so there’s a point where that which does not kill me doesn’t make you stronger. What this comes down to is there are some people in the world who see intrinsic value in the suffering of others. It actually makes them feel better. So when something from science comes along, and it’s often people who hate science, religious people who say this, which can alleviate that, they become very, very upset, agitated, and angry, and they seek to produce any form of distortion, fabrication, or fairy story, e.g. it goes against what it means to be human, or even worse, it’s against human dignity.
54:33 This is something that alleviates suffering, and they’re against that. Well, that’s what they’re effectively saying, yeah. So it is human to learn from your mistakes and learn from society’s mistakes, and to do that, there must be pain and there must be trauma. If these things were taken away, and everybody was happy all the time and didn’t live such traumatic lives, then things would be different in a bad way. And what they actually fear is people enjoying a form of freedom, which they interpret as hedonism or license and it’s probably something which they themselves have always been programmed to fear so you’ll often find it’s often it’s religious people or people who are shall we say conservative by the way I mean conservative with a capital C not members of the Conservative Party people who are ideological conservatives who fetishize the idea of individuality and choice who fetishize the idea of the freedom of the individual who will be against that because what this sort of medication would demonstrate is there’s no such thing as a choice. It’s all to do with the random experience and the way your brain has wired itself. Anything that takes away that undermines one of their foundations of their belief. Also it undermines all for their self satisfaction and it also takes away their ability to have power over others to lecture them make them suffer and to some extent and I’m out on a limb here
55:51 Enjoy the suffering of others. Wow, that’s an interesting theory. That is very interesting. Why do you think the elements of the Republican Party that hate this? What do I think? Why do you think that? George W Bush set up his presidential council on bioethics with some awful person called Leon Cass in charge of it. He was aware of these therapists and he was lobbying very, very hard for not only no federal funding for such research, and he succeeded in that, but he also lobbied very, very hard for no private funding into such research, and actually looking for a worldwide ban.
56:30 So it wasn’t just abortion on bioengineering, all these sort of mainstays of the cultural war, which you’ve probably heard all about, being bored to death on the subject, it’s this. And that is a fundamental about what it is to be human, which they are fighting over. Which is why I believe in the future There’ll be very belligerent cultural wars. Because that’s the religious right as well in the US. It’s very powerful.
56:54 It is, but it’s not just the religious right or religious people. It’s just the right. There are actually humanists who take this view as well. That’s interesting. Guys, I hate to say it, but we’re basically pushing our hour here.
57:06 I think we might need to have some supplemental episodes in the future, like we’re doing an extra half hour or something with people that want to keep listening. You know what, Daniel, every now and then you meet someone who just expands your, your view of the world. That was definitely that hour was that for me? People often say that to me and then they say you got to talk about a load of shit. Well, I hope they’ll be happy about it.
57:27 I’m just going to, I’m going to drop our sponsor in here just at the end because we didn’t mention them, but we all have some alpha brain today. It’s a new tropic. I’m going to give Daniel something to take with him so he can tell me what he thinks of it. But if you guys want to check it out, it’s on onit.com. That’s O-N-I-T.
57:42 Actually the CEO who you’ve had some chats with on email, Aubrey Marcus, He changed his name after he went to the Amazon and tried ayahuasca and came back and was a completely different person. And then he made this company on it.com and now he is selling Neutropics. So this stuff was actually inspired by that. I wonder if he’s gonna bring out a beta blocker soon. Maybe he will.
58:03 A lot of beta consciousness, yeah. And there’s some of the other products. One’s called New Mood and then they have something called Shroom Tech. I haven’t tried New Mood, what’s it like? Yeah, it’s got L-Trip Defen in it and I think it tries to synthesize serotonin in different ways in a natural form in your brain.
58:18 I’m going to pop a couple of these. Yeah, a couple of those. We’re also going to ship in something called Shroom Tech, which is something I think, it’s called Shroom Tech. I think the Chinese Olympic team started using it and it’s this special mushroom that grows up in Nepal. Is it the Cordyceps?
58:32 Yes, the Cordyceps mushroom. Oh yeah, I’ve just given that by an acupuncturist. They give you a lot more energy. Okay, well I’m going to ship some of that in and I’m going to try it. There’s one for immune system and there’s one for high-kevy training, Which I don’t know Joe Rogan said he likes it for a jujitsu session So anyways morning tropics to come and I think we get a Daniel back on in 2012 Maybe right before the world’s gonna end maybe right after the bogey in session Or maybe you’re two weeks after maybe we do a before and after
59:05 Maybe I will yeah. All right. Go man. Okay challenge. Yeah, I like that good. All right. Just kidding, but sure that’s cool Daniel Thanks for coming on.
59:12 Yep, you’re welcome. And Nick. Nice one. It’s about the journey. Yep.
59:16 Indeed. See ya. Take care guys, bye.
