Joe Rogan | America’s #1 Problem w/Russell Brand

Yeah, I don't know if capitalism is the problem, or maybe it's how people engage with capitalism. Maybe it's what people choose to focus on. If you're just about acquiring wealth and money, some people are, yeah, they're going to be very deeply unhappy, and it's going to be this weird game of acquiring influence and power until you just have this insurmountable mound of money that you live on top of, right? I don't think that's a good way for them either. I think if we're going to really, we're going to look at this country fairly, we have to look at, think of all the poor neighborhoods, and imagine being born in those poor neighborhoods, and imagine being born in a place where there's no resources, there's no how you live in the fucking mountains of West Virginia, those coal mining communities, or people, it's all just mobile homes and pills, and it's chaos, and just extreme poverty. What do you do if you're stuck in there? What if you're born into that clan? That's the group you're born into. You're fucked, man. You're fucked. We have to take our resources and concentrate on parts of America the same way we concentrate on many other problem spots in the world, and look at them as like, hey, man, there's a spot where people are fucked. We should unfuck them. We should figure out a way to go into every single horrible community in this country, on this planet, ones that are just as bad as some that you see in third world countries, they exist right here in America. Fix that. Don't ignore that. That's crazy. If they're in Detroit, if they're in, wherever the fuck they are, whatever the horrible community is, why isn't there a concerted national effort to eliminate that? That's a major source of crime. It's a major source of, people feel like they got fucked over in life, so they want to get at you and take from you because you got that easy road. Hey, man, you're born in the fucking suburbs. Hey, man, your mom and dad are still together. Hey, man, your dad has a job and your mom's at home baking and shit. You live like a motherfucker Norman Rockwell movie. Fuck you, man. My mom's on crack. My mom's a prostitute. My life is hell. My dad beats me. I've been sexually molested since I was a little kid. This is the reality that people exist in. They don't feel like anybody's coming to help them. We need to concentrate on that. The government, if the government really cares about us, if they're really involved in social engineering and making America better again, make those places better. Those are the places you need to concentrate on, not tax breaks for fucking super rich corporations that get you in place. They make enough money, man. That's not the problem. Where the money goes, what's it being allocated towards? The biggest problem in our country is these impossible to escape communities that so many people just get sucked into this trap. And for every person that gets out and becomes a basketball player or a successful business person, and they have this story about the poverty that they grew up in, they are so rare. And then it's not to be applauded that they got through that. It is. But it's more to be, we should understand, like, hey, we've got a real fucking problem that we're churning out all these people that live with... They start out in life with a massive deficit. Start out in life emotionally fucked, physically abused. They start out with everybody around them's a loser. Everybody's going to jail. Everybody is constantly doing pills or this or that. It's all negative. And to ask them to develop their own positive mindset uniquely in a vacuum is preposterous. So all these pull them up by your boot traps, all those assholes, hey, you got to pull yourself up by your bootstraps. They don't even have boots, man. You don't understand. You don't know what you're talking about. You've never seen it. You've never been involved in that kind of poverty. It's not fair. It's not fair at all. If we care about people, that's what we should fucking care about. Yes, I couldn't agree more. The number one problem, and it's everywhere in the world, all the crime and poverty. Imagine if everyone, the lowest you could live is like a middle class existence. Yes. Boy, everybody would all be a lot more fucking relaxed. Immediately. If you always had meals, you always had food, you always had a roof over your head. Everyone lives middle class. Holy shit. Obviously, that's way past the expectations that we have right now for the world because like $34,000 a year globally puts you in the world, 1%. If you make $34,000 a year, which is hard to live on, man, you're in the 1% of the world. But that standard that you've so very eloquently described is, I think, achievable and that ought be the aim. And when you give just one example of how legislate, the bias of legislation is continually to support the powerful while making the, just making nominal gestures to poverty. Yes. It's a good way of putting it. Nominal gestures. I like the way you put that. Yeah. And like, so if there is a point to nation, if there is a point to a flag and our belief and this idea that there is an America and there is a Britain and we're all together and we're all one and we've got a common destiny and a common past, then if we're not, if we're ignoring and neglecting those communities, then I say that is what defines us. And until there are systems, codes, regulations that prioritize that, we will continue to live in something heading to, if not a dystopia, something moving in the direction of dystopia, where the priorities and dreams are sort of owned really by the kind of mad evil insect robot images that we've seen discussed earlier. People do get very concerned when someone reaches a point of excessive power and influence like a Jeff Bezos type character. When you see some guy who's not, he doesn't have a million dollars. Like, wow, guys got a million dollars. Like he must be so relaxed. He's got so much money. No, he's got 150 billion and he works every day maniacally. And he's constantly doing new projects and new things and buying out whole foods. And that's like pinnacle capitalism is one of the things that scares people the most when someone just acquires just insane position of power and wealth. Like a Bill Gates type character who is very altruistic, very, very generous. Bill Gates is, he is one of the better examples of someone who gains a lot of money and then does a lot to help people, especially in his retirement. All they do is focus on charitable organizations. Yeah, which is brilliant, but like, you know, marvelous and, you know, I'm not criticizing the great achievements of brilliant people, but like, really for me, that demonstrates the limitations come from the type of systems we live in that you can't, through charity, affect every impoverished community in America. You know, like we, the systems that we have are, oh, well, if you're poor like that, you know, the bootstrap model, well, this guy did it. Look at this great guy who overcame the odds, you know, until like, I feel like in a sense, charity has become a kind of valve that allows people like you and I who aren't poor to feel like, well, I do a bit, you know, I'm sort of involved. I can wash my hands of it. You know, like what these, unless we, there's, there is no America, there is no England unless we have integral relationships with one another, where we support one another. We're on a team. If we really are on a team, we see someone who's completely downtrodden, who's on our team and we ignore them. Well, that's not much of a fucking team, is it? No. I mean, that's what I feel like when I come to red lights and I see homeless people, I feel terrible. I'm like, I feel like, you know, I mean, there's part of you is like, don't give them any money because they, you know, they're going to just buy drugs. You know, let them figure it out. But then they're not going to figure it out. They have mental health issues and they're stuck out here and they're supposedly on the team. They probably were born in America. They probably have national citizenship here. You know, they, this is our team and no one gives a fuck that they're camped out under the bridge. It's like the diffusion of responsibility that comes with these massive numbers, 20 million in LA, 300 and plus whatever it is now, what is like 320 in America? Yeah, it's unbelievable. I think there's 90,000 in the general California, like a city's worth of homeless people. Isn't it? It's not difficult for me to envisage that when we talk about the transcendent states that can be achieved through meditation and psychedelics, meaning that beings like us can access them. It's not difficult to envisage human, like a type of creature, a type of being a little more evolved than us that would look back and say, oh my God, they allowed homelessness. They allowed those impoverished communities. Oh, why was it? Oh, cause they had this belief in competitive systems and survival of the fittest that were resourced from ideas that weren't really meant to be translated into that. When you were talking before about like the natural world is fraught with competition and threat. Of course, that is animals. I'm not disputing what you're saying there, but we can't transpose that into an economic system. Survival of the fittest is you ain't got enough hustle and muscle. Fuck you. You're down by the wayside. Here we have an obligation to aspire to the better parts of our nature, not to continually use materialism and rationalism to justify that 20% of the population, or whatever his energy is, are just garbage or just waste. And that's affordable. We can live with that. For me, it's that's why would we, once we have the knowledge that, oh yeah, we shouldn't be farming in that way. Oh, we shouldn't have social systems. All of the, the answer is always the same because if you were to change in that area, it will affect the interests of the powerful. It will affect, impede the ability of certain organizations to make profit. Now I'm near, I'm not talking about, you know, I don't know the lexicon enough around socialism and capitalism and Marxism and various forms of social organization. I'm just talking about my assumption that we're all resourced from the same basic material and phenomena. We all have compassion and love in us. And if we on an individual level can achieve some level of access to that, then we can start to organize ourselves on that basis, not on the basis of, well, what's the most I can get as an individual. It's rational for me to, I'm not involved in that. That doesn't affect me personally. You know, and I think it's a hard thing for us to hold. I think the reason we all do just live with homelessness and the only decision we make is do we put a couple of dollars out the window at the light or not. Then like, it's hard to hold that. It's hard to love more than a hundred people. There's no fix. Like there's no, not one person and even collectively as a group, when you have mental health issues, unless you want to institutionalize those people. Yeah. But then who, here's the thing, right? If everyone has a unique and if everyone has their own ideas about what to do with their life and everyone has freedom, what if you just don't have enough people that are interested in mental health of the homeless people? You just don't have enough. There's no resources. The resources, yeah, that's a big question because our systems are biased in a particular direction. What if they have government funding? Do you think that they could cure homelessness? One of the advantages I've got of being a drug addict is it means I have to help other drug addicts as part of my own recovery. This puts me into areas, institutions, groups, facilities where I'm meeting drug addicts and always what you'll find, the people that work there, there's always someone like a man or a woman, most often in my personal experiences, a woman, some matriarchal woman full of mother energy that just will do this shit for her. For free, for nothing, that just loves it, that's just put herself like my grandmother did or my mother did or like these women do between people in the gutter that are just willing to say, I'll be the person, I'll be the person. In LA at Friendly House, it was a woman called Peggy Albrecht that used to run a play, Friendly House was for women that have got drug addiction and abuse issues. And like this woman, she was from Chicago, she was 90 years old by the time like I met her, she was so rude and brilliant and beautiful and entirely willing to dedicate herself. And I think every community everywhere, everyone knows people like that. And I feel that the same way as like if it is someone that has got a great capacity to play basketball or be a comic, like I think when you spot those people that you encourage them and support them. Yeah, the talent of compassion and you know, but we don't value that unless it's like unless it can be turned to a profit fuck off. All of those organizations like those organizations that help people with addiction issues, you know, like they are maligned and like the people that profit from the opioid crisis, they are supported, they are able to conceal, as John Oliver brilliantly revealed, they're able to conceal their practices. Continually, the invisible bias is in the direction of profit. And like the failure of certain types of socialism doesn't mean that's the end of the argument. I think we have an obligation to look for ways of accessing our own higher nature, better nature, kinder nature, call it what you will, and seeing how we can organize that. As an individual, you can do so much. If Bill Gates can, you know, fucking, you know, cure malaria and make significant charitable data, these impressive, powerful people can't make a meaningful difference, then clearly this is a systemic problem. Well, there's also the problem with homeless people and that they're adults. When you become an adult and you develop from the time you're a child, it's probably very likely that the damage was all done while they were young. They were probably abused and neglected. And there's a lot of issues that led them to either have mental health problems or they had mental health problems already. Maybe they have genetic problems. Then on top of that, there's drug abuse. For each one of those people to get well, you're going to need a massive amount of folks. You're not going to have one old lady who's rude, who's fun and brilliant. That's a cute movie. No, but that's 20 people. But I think that's a good movie. Write that down. Write it down. I could be rich. Yeah, who would be the woman? Who would you play? I would have liked the one that was out of Golden Girls. It's still Getty. She's still available. I don't think that's a wrap. Betty White's still hanging in there. Yeah, but would you book a movie around her stink? Hang on. I don't know that this is going to work. How are we going to fund this? Yeah, it's... No, you're right. There's limitations to the individual. But let's not like crash this optimism in the crib now, Joe, because I feel like if there was a systemic change... I'm not crashing the optimism, but I'm saying the logistics of it would almost be insurmountable. But what we refer to logistics is not an objective thing. It's a thing that's been biased over time. Sort of. Once a person is developed, once they're a human, it's very difficult to turn that train around. Yeah, definitely. If we can save the community and save the future, like help less people get through fucked, help more people get through with hope. And with a real possibility for improving their life versus have this sense of hopelessness that many are confronted with. That's going to make less crime. I agree. That's just... If someone looked at it from a social engineering standpoint, it almost seems like the only way that would ever have to happen would be there's be some fucking catastrophe that force people to act. We sometimes need something that's shoved in our face to force us to act, but if someone brilliantly calculated the amount of resources that it would require and then also brilliantly calculated how much less crime it would have, how many more innovations because people didn't waste their lives. In fact, they got through life and used one of the most valuable resources we have, which is the human imagination and creativity and ingenuity. And we're missing that on these people that are growing up in these horrible environments where they can't escape. They're so fucked from... They're in gangs, they're... You know, the crime and poverty and violence, they're so fucked that whatever genius they have is wasted on this nonsensical existence. They could just show that and quantify how much that would be, how valuable that would be to the overall culture and community of the continent and then ultimately of the earth. I mean, you would have a reason to engineer and think about this. Yeah, it's beautiful. That is really beautiful. And it's interesting that the way that I agree with you that it almost has to at some point be translated into monetary value because otherwise people don't seem to read it. Yeah, and safety for everybody, for them who live in these horrible communities, wouldn't it be great again if everybody lived like a middle class person? The idea that that's impossible seems so insane. It almost seems like, well, then nobody should live like that then. Like either everybody should be able to live like that or nobody should be able to live like that. That was like, that's what everybody really wants, right? You want to be comfortable in terms of like your ability to exist. And then all the things you're doing that you struggle with should be a good percentage of them other than emotional and friendship type things should be of your own choosing. You choose to take a difficult path. You choose to take an adventure. You choose to try to enrich yourself with this difficult experience and the challenge of it and try to overcome that challenge. Instead of your challenge is not to get killed by a gang. Your challenge is not get fucked by your uncle again. You know what I mean? I mean, this is what people have to deal with and you're missing these brilliant minds. They don't get this chance to come through and sneak through that fucking salmon ladder, you know? Get up to the top. This is very beautiful that you're passionate about this. And I think popularizing these ideas is important because I feel that then people will be familiar with this kind of language and will recognize that when there is political discourse, how phatic and empty it is.