Joe Rogan | The Discipline of Learning w/Russell Brand

Well, that is the one area of your life where you've got some authority and control. And that's, yeah, that is what I'm about. It's like, well, I can stop myself being like a watching pornography. I can stop myself using drugs if I want to, like, you know, with some support. And that's what that this book here mentors, which I talk about you in only for a paragraph. You know what I mean? It's not to it's not like a like literary fellatio. It's a small nod of your like of your influence and impact. I talk about how we have latent latent qualities within us that are sometimes hard to realize on without support. But if you find a mentor in an area where you're looking to improve, they can kind of energize, awaken energies within you that on your own, you wouldn't be able to use. I had a really recent experience of it where I was sort of like freaking out about something. I spoke to like a mentor of mine and like the way that he sort of spoke to me was like sort of aggressive, like sort of an aggressive. That's not going to happen. You are not afraid. And like it sort of it woke up the part of me that feels that way that has that kind of, I would say, sort of male certainty, a kind of grounded energy. He was able to sort of like direct it at me. And like in that moment in myself or bewildered, I wasn't able to do it. I needed to resource it externally in a moment. So this is how I sort of feel like your individual journey. I'm interested in how, because I'm guessing with your background in martial arts and stuff, mentorship seems pretty much stitched into that. You must continually be looking at someone, learning from someone, trying to equal them or whatever it is. Yeah, the good part about that is you get good at learning things and you get good at listening. You know, as a martial arts student, you don't just listen. You listen very intently. You bow, you say, sir, you know, I mean, there's there's so much discipline involved in the the act of learning. Yeah. And so much reverence and respect for people no more than you and appreciation. So that helped me with pretty much everything I ever wanted to learn. I just would listen very intently. And I don't think maybe I could figure it out better. I'm very good at listening to people that are good at things. That's interesting. Did you first get into like, you know, I've picked up stuff over the various shows of yours that I've listened to. But would you say that your inaugural interest in martial arts came from kind of domestic distress and stuff? Yeah. But a difficult home life and not a good relationship with your stepdad, am I right in saying? It was that, but it was was also moving more than anything. I mean, I stepped as a nice guy, but it was stepped out. It's always a weird situation, you know. No one likes the dynamic of someone having sex with their mother. I remember having similar feelings about my own stepdad. What are they doing? I don't want to like, no, of course, paint him in a bad way. It's just what was really hard was moving a lot and running into bullies. That was way harder than anything else. So there was a time in your life where you felt very presumably vulnerable and not grounded. Didn't have any friends, constantly moving in new neighborhoods, meeting new people. And, you know, when you're a young boy, you're a teenage boy, teenage boys are fucking dangerous. Yeah, they're the worst. They're the worst. If you see a group of them now, I'm talking about my country, 13, 14 years old, I cross the street. Yeah. They're lawless. Well, young boys are just, they're always looking to impress each other and they have these, if you want to find real toxic masculinity, it exists in teenage boys. Yeah, and it's pure and full. It's mostly exaggerated in men. The way it's described is mostly exaggerated in terms of the way the media talks about it. But in its purest form and teenage boys, they get together and they start lighting frogs on fire and doing shit. They do things because they want to like one up each other and they feed off of each other. Like what one boy would do is so different than what five boys would do. What five boys would do could be horrific. But what one boy would do on his own is very rarely there. Because, you know, you have to think about yourself and think about, is this right? And you objectively analyze the way you're behaving. And like, oh man, people wouldn't be proud of me if I did it this way. But when you're with five other boys and you're all rambunctious and filled with testosterone and piss and vinegar, you wind up doing crazy things. This is, you know, when I hear something like that, it's difficult not to think that it's, of course, relative. Relative to us, the behavior of adolescent males is reckless and crazy. It's not impossible to conceive of an intelligence that would look at the behavior of adult human beings and think, oh my God, what's governing these people? What principles are they using? Right. What's the end goal, too? Like what are you trying to accomplish with your life, with your existence, with your time?