#2243 - Julian Lennon

Speaker 0 Joe Rogan podcast, check it out!

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Speaker 1 Um, I go to see this dermatologist. Oh, yeah,

Speaker 1 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because I have uh I have a birthmark here that you don't really see and there was a mole there

Speaker 1 and I kept as my hair got a little thinner I would I would use a comb and it caught it one time and it opened it up and so I I I I

Speaker 1 I kind of kept picking at it when it became a scab and I kept picking over the course of s like six months. And then I went to see this dermatologist for the first time in LA

Speaker 1 and I said, yeah, I've got a little bit of a,

Speaker 1 you know, I've been trying not to scratch it now. But I'm a bit worried about it.
It's been like six months of me being an idiot because it just was really irritable.

Speaker 1 And so she, you know, cut it out and sent it off. And

Speaker 1 I was at a pretty serious meeting with a whole bunch of people. And

Speaker 1 she called me up at the end of it and said, listen, I'm

Speaker 1 sorry to tell you this, but it's cancerous, you know. Oh, we've got to to cut it out.
We've got to get it.

Speaker 1 And,

Speaker 1 yeah, I just went completely numb at that point and freaked out because I just thought, what does this mean

Speaker 1 in the bigger picture?

Speaker 1 And, you know, I had a lot of friends that have passed from cancer, various kinds, over the years.

Speaker 1 And so it really did freak me out. Anyway, I got the yell clear.
It was cleaned out. And so just anything that just

Speaker 1 looks or feels a little odd. There was something I was, I'd been scratching here a bit

Speaker 1 and something here as well. So, she just

Speaker 1 did a little cutting, and no doubt, I'll hear from her in a few days once she gets the results.

Speaker 1 That's scary because it was in a spot that you don't check, you know, it's covered in hair, you know what's going on back there. Yeah, but it was because of the birthmark, and you know, I just

Speaker 1 kept and the thinning thinner hair, and so I just kept

Speaker 1 you know, brushing it with a comb and and it caught it and then it scabbed and then I it became itchy and so I stepped kept scratching it, you know, pulling it off like a kid, you know, as you do, as you just

Speaker 1 anyway. I'm I'm I'm happy to be here in one piece of piece of piece.

Speaker 1 One piece for the moment, you know.

Speaker 2 I got one of those comprehensive blood panel screens for cancer recently.

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 1 I yeah I I

Speaker 2 haven't

Speaker 1 yeah I have the I have you know I go for a proper checkup like twice a year you know just

Speaker 1 on every front just to make sure I'm gonna be around because I like living I don't I want to be around for a long time that's good

Speaker 1 for sure

Speaker 2 yeah

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I don't like to think about it. I don't like to think about it.

Speaker 1 I'm completely in denial.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. I refuse, you know, because

Speaker 1 I just remember seeing my uncles, you know, on my mother's side, what they were like in their 50s alone, you know, and they'd be sitting there.

Speaker 1 with a big belly in front of the TV with, you know, a couple of packets of cigarettes and drinking tea or beer and watching the TV all day.

Speaker 1 And that was their life in their 50s and 60s until they had a heart attack and died. And I went, no, I'm not doing that one.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 That's good. And that does the trick for me.

Speaker 2 Nothing wrong with that. No.
Walking is one of the best forms of exercise. If you can get it in every day, you'll be much healthier than if you don't.

Speaker 1 Absolutely. That's not hard to do.
No, it's not.

Speaker 2 Listen to a book on tape. Go for a stroll.
Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's great for the body. Yep.
You don't have to fucking kill yourself. No, and I've also, in my time, dealt with a fair amount of depression as well and anxiety.

Speaker 1 I get pretty anxious still. Even, you know, coming here today, I was a bit

Speaker 1 breathed. Yeah, yeah.
So I went for a nice little power walk around the whatever the lake is down there. Ladybird.

Speaker 1 The one where the bats are. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Ladybird. I had no idea.
Have you seen her come out? No. Oh, it's cool.
I had no idea. I'd never even heard of it.
It's really cool.

Speaker 1 The biggest bat population in the world.

Speaker 1 That's true. That's what they're saying.
I don't know if that's true.

Speaker 2 I think the biggest bat population in the world is in Africa. I would say.

Speaker 1 I believe. Or the Amazon.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think it's a really large population, though.

Speaker 1 And it's cool to see.

Speaker 2 They come out. That's what it looks like when they come out.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no, they claim there's signage down there. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, that says it's the biggest bat population in the world.

Speaker 2 Maybe it's a specific kind of bat.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Is this at sunset that this happens? Yes. Yeah, right at nighttime.
It's really cool.

Speaker 2 It's very fun to watch. And you hear them.
If you go onto the bridge, like if you walk on, you hear them.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it was there today.

Speaker 1 I didn't hear that. Yeah, you can hear them in there.
Okay.

Speaker 2 They're just chilling. It's weird.
But they're responsible for keeping the mosquito population down.

Speaker 1 Is that one of the things that they're yeah, they do a great job, those little suckers?

Speaker 2 Fantastic.

Speaker 2 Take care of the mosquitoes.

Speaker 1 Mosquitoes, yeah. I don't.

Speaker 1 What purpose do they have, really?

Speaker 2 Spreading horrible diseases and sucking the blood out of the middle.

Speaker 1 And aubergines.

Speaker 1 I don't understand the aubergines either.

Speaker 2 Well, you know, they tried to develop a genetically modified mosquito that was going to attack the other mosquitoes.

Speaker 2 But that horror movie type shit.

Speaker 2 I hear about that. I'm like, okay, and what happens then?

Speaker 1 Like whenever you start monkeying around with nature in that regard.

Speaker 1 So nothing came of it then.

Speaker 2 I don't know what's been done with that.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's like these people are doing these things and it can affect all of us. And you just read about it on the internet.
And if it wasn't for the internet, you wouldn't even know they were doing it.

Speaker 2 It's like.

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Speaker 2 Are you sure this is going to be okay in the long run?

Speaker 1 Like,

Speaker 2 what's the potential chances for mutations? Like,

Speaker 2 what happens if they carry a very unique disease that, you know, it's...

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 the scary thing is we have no idea what half of these people are up to no we don't covid being an example yeah perfect example did you see what happened in uh australia yesterday there was a laboratory that lost track of oh i i put it on twitter

Speaker 2 lost track of like a bunch of different like really serious diseases how does that happen

Speaker 2 Someone left the door open?

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I went once, me and my friend Duncan,

Speaker 2 we went once to the

Speaker 2 lab in Galveston, Texas.

Speaker 1 The

Speaker 2 Center for Disease Control, I believe the organization, has this enormous bio lab down in Galveston where they take care of

Speaker 2 like some of the most dangerous and deadly viruses in the world.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 Hundreds of vials of deadly viruses have gone missing from a laboratory and scientists warned they could be weaponized.

Speaker 2 So what are 100 vials of Hendavirus, two vials of Hantavirus, 223 vials of glysavirus, all of which are extremely deadly for humans?

Speaker 1 And of course, I love it when the media says

Speaker 1 something along the lines of the end of that statement that

Speaker 1 could be weaponized. So that's great.
Now all the freaks are going to go and try and find that stuff. Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And you would say, well, why are they doing that? Well, surely they're doing that so they can study them and they can cure them.

Speaker 2 Make sure that we don't get sick.

Speaker 2 That's the logic, but they didn't have a cure for it. Lysivirus is rabies.

Speaker 1 Oh, great.

Speaker 2 Lysavirus are responsible for rabies, which is arguably the deadliest encephalotic virus known, a disease known. The prototype rabies

Speaker 2 Lysavirus thought to be able to infect all terrestrial mammals. Yay!

Speaker 1 Yay.

Speaker 2 What a good thing to just have laying around. I mean, that's like the opening of 28 Days Later, right? Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no. There's a new one.

Speaker 2 Have you seen the trailer for the new one?

Speaker 1 There's a new one?

Speaker 2 28 Years Later.

Speaker 1 No, come on. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Cillian Murphy's back.

Speaker 1 Let's go. Yeah, I'm in.

Speaker 2 Cut me in. That's the greatest.
Oh, here it is. It's the greatest zombie movie of all time, for sure.

Speaker 2 Wait, sit here. Sancy, what's going on?

Speaker 1 Do you mean sit still? Keep quiet and do not move from this spot.

Speaker 1 Seven, six, eleven, five, nine, and twenty miles today.

Speaker 3 Four, eleven, seventeen, thirty-two the day before. Boost, boost, boost, boot, moving up and down again.
There's no discharge in the war.

Speaker 1 Don't, don't don't

Speaker 1 shut on the iPhone look at what's in front of you boots they said I mean not with the lenses but

Speaker 3 boot moving up and down again men men men men men go mad with watching them there's no discharge in the war

Speaker 1 drop they will get the top of you Boop, boop, boop, boop.

Speaker 3 Moving up and down again.

Speaker 1 There's no dispos in the wall.

Speaker 1 I was about to stop there. Okay.
Jeez. I woke up relatively calm and peaceful this morning.
A little bit of pre-podcast anxiety.

Speaker 2 And now you're worried about the end of the world.

Speaker 2 Welcome to the show.

Speaker 1 Thank you very much. Thank you.

Speaker 2 I didn't know what to expect, but now 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.

Speaker 2 They shipped, 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, including like, I think, a year before the leak.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And now they're talking about giving Fauci a mass pardon, a preemptive pardon, so he doesn't get charged when the Trump is.

Speaker 1 It's a whole thing.

Speaker 2 And then there's another one today where the Biden administration is keeping the emergency classification of COVID to 2029

Speaker 2 so that they can avoid being attacked for the Emergency Use Authorization Act.

Speaker 2 It's so creepy stuff because there's money. It's all money, right? There's money involved in this.

Speaker 2 These people that are working on viruses, well, the way to get funding is you have to work on viruses.

Speaker 2 So, whether or not they're, 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.

Speaker 2 And what's the best way to study it? You got to actually have to have funding.

Speaker 1 You have to have a lab. And you start doing it.

Speaker 2 And so, who do you do it for? Well, you do it for the Defense Department. You're like, because they want to work on weaponizing viruses.
And this is a real thing.

Speaker 1 That's one of the scariest things.

Speaker 2 It's fucking terrifying.

Speaker 2 I did a television show once where we talked to this guy from Russia and from the former Soviet Union where he was talking about how they had literally like giant vats of anthrax.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 To be honest with you, I'm quite surprised we're still here.

Speaker 2 It's pretty shocking.

Speaker 1 With what's already happened and what the potentials are, it's staggering.

Speaker 2 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 there was an era, they thought that the United States had launched a missile at Russia and they were very close to responding.

Speaker 2 It was just a glitch. And one guy, just one clear-headed person, decided not to launch.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 And this is in the 60s.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 This is all, it's so terrifying. Yeah, we're so close all the time, really.
That's why

Speaker 1 one

Speaker 1 should just try and have a happy life wherever you can. That's for sure.

Speaker 2 The problem with that is if you don't speak up,

Speaker 2 and if no one reacted to any of this COVID-19 stuff, if no one reacted to the Orwellian

Speaker 2 censorship complex that was established to try to silence people who are critical of the narrative that they were pushing,

Speaker 1 we would all be fucked.

Speaker 2 You kind of have to pay attention now, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 I don't want to. No, I agree.
I want to just have fun and live my life and be with my family and my friends and

Speaker 1 enjoy myself. Of course, we all do.

Speaker 1 It's good to be aware, no question about that.

Speaker 2 But

Speaker 2 there's also this part of me that goes, yeah, but

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 No question.

Speaker 2 And there's always going to be both. It just seems like there's always going to be, until we reach some enlightenment, till Jesus comes back, till the aliens land.

Speaker 1 It's that thing called balance, isn't it? Yeah. Trying to do the balancing act as best as you can.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 What do you do? Like, what's your balancing routine? Like, if you feel like you're getting a little sideways,

Speaker 1 I hate to say it,

Speaker 1 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...

Speaker 1 Actually,

Speaker 1 my number one go-to is I'm a biker. I've been on motorcycles since I was like in my early teens.
So

Speaker 1 to really blow the cobwebs out it's kind of getting on the bike and just riding somewhere I've never been before I'll just look at a map and go that looks interesting and I just go and that looks like so fun if I was bulletproof and made out of metal

Speaker 1 have you uh

Speaker 1 you're scared of motorcycles really well it's the other people as they all that's exactly right you know yeah but you have to I believe you have to have a heightened awareness to to be a biker in school most certainly uh do you have a loud bike so people could hear it at least

Speaker 1 yeah i've had a few loud ones in like a harley i i used to have harley i at the moment i ride uh triumph a couple of triumphs oh nice uh one that looks like an old school but actually works and then i thought i was never going to be one of those guys that ever kind of rode one of those fifties uh no the sort of adventure bikes you know with like the saddles with the

Speaker 1 yeah, kind of. Yeah, but the relative half-faring, but but um

Speaker 1 I I when I go for a ride and these random rides, you know, I can be gone up in the mountains for with no signal for

Speaker 1 three and a half, four hours, you know. And that there has been an occasion or several in the past where without a signal the bike has had problems.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it gets pretty scary when you're in the wilderness and you've got no backup plan.

Speaker 1 I had an oil leak with a with a with a brand new bike and no signal and I literally rolling down any hill I could just to survive, make it to whatever little village I could find in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 1 Where were you?

Speaker 1 In France. Oh wow.

Speaker 1 So I tend to go up in the wilds back there. And

Speaker 1 so I decided also my backside after three and a half hours on one of the older style bikes

Speaker 1 is pretty painful.

Speaker 1 So I just happened to look at one of the Triumph Adventure bikes.

Speaker 2 What do they look like? Can you tell us about that?

Speaker 1 Is that it? So that's what my old bike looks like.

Speaker 1 That's actually my old bike with my old friend riding it.

Speaker 1 And that's the one where your ass kills after a couple of hours.

Speaker 1 But so yeah, those are the kind of views I get. Those are in the middle of nowhere.

Speaker 2 Are these your photographs?

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Yeah, these are just quickies on my phone.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And they're kind of on the border with Italy.

Speaker 1 So So it's pretty unique stuff. Where do you live?

Speaker 1 I officially live in Monaco. Oh, wow.

Speaker 2 I was just there.

Speaker 2 You were just there last summer.

Speaker 1 Oh, shit. Okay.
Well, that's. It's really beautiful.

Speaker 1 It's not a bad place to be. It's a weird spot.
It's a weird spot. What's going on here?

Speaker 2 Why is everybody stacked up in apartments?

Speaker 1 It's very transient. You know, people come and go for whatever reason that they do.
And

Speaker 1 I mean, most people like myself, you know,

Speaker 1 we have a kind of summer house getaway so you can go breathe on the weekends.

Speaker 2 Isn't it kind of a tax shelter-y place, too?

Speaker 1 Oh, very much so. Yeah, yeah, no.
A lot of real rich folks go there to

Speaker 1 afford their cash.

Speaker 1 But there's a few new places around the world that offer that kind of

Speaker 1 possibility. Oh, really? Like, where else?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 Dubai's offering certain incentives now, Portugal, certain incentives.

Speaker 2 Yeah, Dubai has like no income tax, right?

Speaker 1 I've I've never been there personally. Is that the fact? Is that a fact? I think it is.
I'm not 100% sure.

Speaker 2 I have a friend who just moved to Dubai. He's American and he's a filmmaker, and he says, I feel so safe.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's one element of it. There's no crime.

Speaker 2 As long as you're not doing anything, he said you could leave a Rolex on the ground and someone will pick it up and turn it into the police.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'm sure.

Speaker 2 UAE does not levy income tax on individuals. However, it levies a 5% value-added tax on the purchase of goods and services.

Speaker 1 That's pretty reasonable.

Speaker 2 Levied at each stage of the supply chain and ultimately borne to the end consumer.

Speaker 1 Wow. Fairly reasonable.
Yeah, yeah. So,

Speaker 1 although it's never inspired me so far anyway.

Speaker 2 There's a lot of like wild restrictions over there.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. And I and I I like a bit of character with where I am.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 one of the pleasures I find is, number one, I'm a biker, so I get to ride around a lot.

Speaker 1 I'm not really a beach guy after 20 minutes I start twitching I need to do something it's true

Speaker 1 but I'm also a foodie as well

Speaker 1 so you know Monaco's half an hour away from Italy and there's a there's actually a big crossover uh in the restaurants between French and Italian food and then you have places like um

Speaker 1 the island of Corsica which is French now. It's been through the mill a few times.
It was English at one point. It was Italian at one point, it's uh I think a few other nations too.
Um

Speaker 1 but I I and I could see it from where I was. 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 twenty

Speaker 1 five,

Speaker 1 thirty years and had never been. And a couple of years ago I decided with a friend to hop in.
I've got a little mini convertible and that's my little run around.

Speaker 1 and decided to get the ferry which is about six hours across and drive you know with no bookings no nothing and just see if there was a hotel available and and drove around the whole island in 10 days and it was the one of the most magical places I've ever ever been to it's like 10 countries on one island the the the scenery is mind-blowing um and the the south of it is very much like the caribbean crystal clear turquoise blues blue waters.

Speaker 1 But the food, again, is this combination of it the best of Italian and the best of French

Speaker 1 and just the freshest of the freshest of the fresh.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But you can get um on what they call a vomit comet. It's like a very short flight, you know.
Um

Speaker 1 You could be there in the south of Cosca from Nice airport in 45 minutes. And it's a different world.

Speaker 1 It's an entirely stunning, gorgeous, different world with, again, scenery unlike I've ever seen before.

Speaker 1 And for such a small island, which you can

Speaker 1 sit here, oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean, it's just insanely, insanely beautiful and that's bonifacio yeah um they you know they're renowned for being

Speaker 1 they can be a bit of a you know tough nuts uh in what way

Speaker 1 you know if they don't like you if you piss them off excuse my french they'll blow up your house i mean there was a report a couple of years ago that this guy's house the he was causing some trouble and they didn't want him around and they blew up blew up his house he set it on fire and blew it up.

Speaker 1 I'm serious.

Speaker 2 Well, 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 you.

Speaker 1 They're exactly like that. I mean, if you don't...
I get that. If you don't respect them.
Yeah, I get that. Yeah, no.

Speaker 2 Well, whenever people say, like, if you go to France, they're very rude.

Speaker 1 I get it. I've gone to France.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Don't order them around. Don't tell them what to do.
And,

Speaker 1 you know, even though, you know, they think it's quite funny that you try and speak their language. I mean,

Speaker 1 I can understand French pretty well and Italian and a few other things, but

Speaker 1 God help me if I try and speak it because they'll just

Speaker 1 laugh at you, but they'll speak back to you in English.

Speaker 2 That's the wonderful thing about English.

Speaker 1 But at least make the effort, is what I'm saying.

Speaker 2 Show them that you're

Speaker 1 trying. Yeah.
And then

Speaker 1 you kind of got, yeah. Say that.
Just thank you alone.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, yeah. But don't just order them around, which I've seen many people do, and

Speaker 1 it's a bit shocking.

Speaker 2 Grazi Mile.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 2 you gotta be able to say a few things and just let them know that you're trying.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 I go to Italy. I would try to go to Italy every year.

Speaker 2 Me and my family, we go there every year, and I love it.

Speaker 1 It's just so

Speaker 1 where do you taste?

Speaker 2 My favorite place is Rovello.

Speaker 1 Where is that?

Speaker 2 I don't know. Rovello is on the Amalfi coast.

Speaker 1 Okay, okay.

Speaker 2 It's just so, 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, Rome is not my favorite.

Speaker 1 The reason why it's so appealing to me is because

Speaker 1 actually my first stepfather was Italian,

Speaker 1 Roberto Bassanini. That's pretty Italian.
Oh, he was very Italian. And he was the black sheep of the family.
He was the naughty boy. And

Speaker 1 he was more like an older brother to me.

Speaker 1 Married to mum after dad, after

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so they had a few small hotels in different areas.

Speaker 1 And so whenever I wasn't at school in London at that, you know, or England at that time, we'd take these little trips to, you know, Cortina or or above Milan, there's a little town called Foppolo that I used to go,

Speaker 1 unknown by most tourists, locals to go skiing in the winter or Pesaro, which was on the east coast

Speaker 1 for summer holidays. So

Speaker 1 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, you know.

Speaker 1 And I used to go and and visit him all the time because he was he was a laugh you know of course his uh sadly his lifestyle killed him um with a couple of heart attacks at the end of everything 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 he certainly was you know one of those characters that you just

Speaker 2 yeah you admired when i go to italy it feels like almost immediately you have like a decrease in blood pressure Yes. Like almost immediately.
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 It's like the vibe of the people and the way they live is just relaxed.

Speaker 1 They can be a bit stressed sometimes over the shouting at each other and the mavava vagoule.

Speaker 2 Yeah, but even then, it doesn't seem like shouting. Like American shouting leads to violence.

Speaker 1 Yes, this is true.

Speaker 2 I hear American shouting. I'm like, let's get the fuck out of here.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 I hear Italian shouting. What happened? Someone in the kitchen fuck up?

Speaker 1 Like, what went wrong? Yeah, I mean, I don't want to sound pompous but it does sound pompous that you know I if I have friends come over from the States or London and you know I'll say

Speaker 1 do you

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Speaker 1 Fancy, you know, getting some Italian tonight.

Speaker 1 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 F are we going? You know, I'm going, go for Italian.

Speaker 1 And there's a little town about an hour away from Monaco.

Speaker 1 tiny little medieval town called uh well we'll give it away actually can't give it away um

Speaker 1 where i'll just go and get the best spaghetti vongole on the planet made by a grandmother who's in a ro who's in a kitchen, you know, 10 by 10 at the best of times, you know, with all and

Speaker 1 and it's 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.

Speaker 1 And, you know, they all get dressed up at sunset.

Speaker 1 And, you know, they all love to walk the promenade and, you know, in their finest attire and, you know, sit there and watch the world go by and drink their coffee and chat.

Speaker 1 And I, you know, because I lived in LA for I think it was about eight years, and I went back.

Speaker 1 The story of me going back actually was that

Speaker 1 I flew back to London to see a premiere of a film called Backbeat. It's about the early Beatles.

Speaker 1 I didn't know anything about it, but I had an invite, so I went to see it. And I met this guy who said,

Speaker 1 who's a line producer, film producer? And he he said uh

Speaker 1 you know do you uh have you been to monaco before i said no i've uh

Speaker 1 never even thought about it really and he said uh

Speaker 1 he said do you like grand prix i said uh

Speaker 1 not really a grand prix kind of guy he said well listen if you've got nothing to do this weekend after you know we saw the film and the premiere

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 Yeah, 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. Um and I was thinking, oh, what am I gonna do? Go back to LA and be numb again.

Speaker 1 And so I literally went down to Monaco that after the the next day

Speaker 1 and he he just showed me around and

Speaker 1 we went to this very famous restaurant and famous corner called the Rascas Corner on the Grand Prix circuit.

Speaker 1 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. You're going how far away?

Speaker 1 Shit. I mean directly in front of you.
I mean the car could be so this is it right here? Yeah

Speaker 1 that's not the Rascast Corner. That's the Lowe's Corner.
Rascast Corner is very very famous little spot.

Speaker 1 There it is. Yeah that's it.
So you'd be behind the chicken wire fence. This is a kind of modern version of it

Speaker 1 But that's even more protection than it used to have.

Speaker 1 And you'd have a bit of lunch there. And they would, and that became, that was the hot spot in Monaco for years and years.
There were three brothers that owned it, real troublemakers. And

Speaker 1 it was a blast.

Speaker 1 So you had the car. So I went, all right, I'm into this.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so I spent the summer down there.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I just said, hi, Tim.

Speaker 1 Pack it up, sell the house. I'm not coming back.
And I didn't go back. Did you take your dog?

Speaker 1 The dog actually died before I,

Speaker 1 yeah, sadly. It was getting on.

Speaker 1 But yes.

Speaker 1 Fuck it. I'm moving tomorrow.
market. Yeah, that was it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 I just put everything in storage. I rented this kind of

Speaker 1 what could be seen as a Miami Vice kind of apartment on the 30th floor.

Speaker 1 It just had

Speaker 1 marble and

Speaker 1 a mirrored wall with no furniture. And so I

Speaker 1 bought a couch off of the floor of a store called Habitat because it would take like six weeks to order and I had nothing and so I had I bought like 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 and a mattress on the floor and I lived like that for 10 years and just and just uh was really stupid did you enjoy it I was just stupid did you enjoy it?

Speaker 1 I've had two

Speaker 1 I've had three major, well no, four.

Speaker 1 It's like the Spanish Inquisition, four major incidents. Now, I mean, London back in the day used to be a great place to party and enjoy.

Speaker 1 And then I moved to New New York for a few years early in my career, in my early 20s. But

Speaker 1 I think I almost died there with the partying that went on and the clubs back in that that that that hey the heyday then and it was Celebrity Central, you know,

Speaker 1 with the likes of at the limelight with Alice Cooper and a few other fruitcakes.

Speaker 1 And then and then I really did feel like I was, you know, I could have I could have

Speaker 1 gone off the rails. Yeah, yeah.
Easily. I was borderline.
I enjoyed it too much. And then I went out to LA

Speaker 1 and a friend of mine had a convertible and we just drove across Mulholland

Speaker 1 down to Malibu and I went,

Speaker 1 this is gorgeous. What the hell am I doing? So I moved to LA.
I packed up and moved. And I did exactly the same thing.

Speaker 1 I found a place to live and I just, you know, was there until I could get myself situated.

Speaker 2 I think I met you in L.A.

Speaker 1 Are you sitting here?

Speaker 2 1993.

Speaker 1 That's a good possibility. That would have been mid-to-end of my term out there.

Speaker 2 I was doing something for MTV,

Speaker 2 and you were one of the first celebrities that I met. You, I met Rico Suave and a couple other people.

Speaker 1 I was at the front door.

Speaker 1 Yes, yeah, because

Speaker 1 I was early in on the MTV stuff. The label I was with was pushing whatever, you know, throw me on whatever was available.

Speaker 2 I was with this woman who was an executive at MTV, and she was taking me around and showing me LA. You know, I'd never been to LA before.

Speaker 2 And well, I'd been once for a martial arts competition when I was young.

Speaker 2 Here was, and she took me at this nightclub, and you were at the front door about to get in.

Speaker 1 And I was like, holy shit, that's true. Did you tell me which one it was?

Speaker 2 No, I don't. I remember very little about it.

Speaker 1 Was I with some fruitcakes?

Speaker 2 I'm sure I was. I don't remember.
I just remember, like, oh, that's a famous guy.

Speaker 2 John Lennon's son. Crazy.
Because, you know, I was coming from New York.

Speaker 1 I was

Speaker 2 25, 26 years old. I didn't know anything.
And I was like, this is so strange.

Speaker 2 It was just strange to me to be in these like Hollywood parties with this MTV executive who's taking me around and showing me all the stuff. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 She was just kind of like introduced you, like, this is what it's like. Yeah.
This is what everybody does. They go out, they go out to the clubs, and it was just.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, the sca well, the scary thing about LA was that you thought it was all over by two o'clock, you know, because uh they literally pull your drinks at one thirty.

Speaker 1 But then they go to someone's house

Speaker 1 and they continue till dawn, you know.

Speaker 1 So that was dangerous, too.

Speaker 1 So I was happy that I got away from that.

Speaker 2 Fortunately, I avoided all that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you're lucky. Yeah.
I mean, there was some fun to be had, no question about it. But

Speaker 1 a lot of it was kind of dark, too.

Speaker 2 Yes, I'm sure. Well, that's when you start adding cocaine to human beings, you get darkness.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. And a lot of jack daniels too

Speaker 2 they go hand in hand yes yeah i avoided all that luckily when i moved to l a i i'm one of those people that's like i you were out there that how long were you out there for

Speaker 1 um

Speaker 2 i guess 30 well no not quite 30 years uh 26 years because i've been here for four stretch okay the most 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.

Speaker 2 It was all like I was dragged to them. Yeah.
You know, like the last one I was dragged to was Naomi Campbell's birthday party, which was I'm sure that was

Speaker 2 insane. Yeah.
It was with Dave Chappelle. So Dave and I were at the comedy store and, you know, Dave knows everybody.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2 Hey, man, there's a party up in the hills. You want to go?

Speaker 1 And I was like, I don't want to go to any fucking parties.

Speaker 2 Yeah. He's like, come on, man.
I want to go alone. So I said, okay.
So me and Dave, we drove all the way up. It was like a scene in a movie.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Because like, is me and my super famous friend, and we're my Porsche, and we're in my race car of a GT3.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 I'm like, hi, you know, it's fucking weird. I'm famous lady.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And then we get to the top of this hill and it's just everybody famous.
It's Lenny Kravitz and all these different people. And so

Speaker 2 Naomi Campbell, there's a photograph of her on the side of the hill that's literally 50 feet tall. It's an enormous naked photograph of her.

Speaker 1 Of course. You know, because it's her birthday.
Well, of course.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then Dave pulls me aside.

Speaker 1 He goes, Man,

Speaker 2 I wouldn't want to be this famous.

Speaker 1 I go, hey, man, you're the most famous motherfucker here. He goes, really? Oh, yeah, yeah.
Because we were a little high. He goes, Really? I go, 100%.

Speaker 2 You're the most famous person here. For sure.

Speaker 1 We were just laughing.

Speaker 2 Like, this is so crazy. And then we got out of there and went right back to the comedy store.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, I can't do this. Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's just too strange.

Speaker 1 The scenes are pretty weird out there. That's for sure.

Speaker 2 Well, it's also these celebrities, they don't, they can't hang out with regular people, I think. They feel too weird.
So I think they try to get together. Yeah.
And so we were in like a

Speaker 1 spot on. A vampire dance of famous people.
You are absolutely spot on.

Speaker 2 They call it like, he said it was like an eyes wide shut party.

Speaker 1 I'm like, that's what it feels like. It feels like you're in a secret fraternity.
No, that's, yeah, there's

Speaker 1 a few that I've left that I felt very uncomfortable being at. That's what,

Speaker 1 I mean, I couldn't tell you exactly where and when, but certainly some weird ones up in the hills that I just went, nah, this just doesn't feel good.

Speaker 2 There's something about the act of going up into the hills, like you're going to the lair, the dragon's lair.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 one of the things was the fact that, well, I mean, now you've got Ubers all over the place, but yeah,

Speaker 1 back in my day,

Speaker 1 there was no taxis around either. So you'd get trapped.
Ooh.

Speaker 1 And then you'd figure, well, I'm here anyway. You know.
Yeah, you can't get it. Might as well have another drink.

Speaker 1 And that's what would happen more often than not. But

Speaker 1 yeah, so it's

Speaker 1 kind of better not to.

Speaker 2 Definitely better not to, but maybe go a couple times. Yeah,

Speaker 1 go and check it out. Yeah,

Speaker 1 go and see what that's all about. Yeah.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 Many people have lost their time.

Speaker 1 It's messy, though. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 They've lost their time to those places.

Speaker 1 It's very messy.

Speaker 2 It becomes a part of your life and your lifestyle. It's deeply unhealthy, both

Speaker 2 it's physically unhealthy, but it's also like spiritually unhealthy.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's a weird way to spend your time.

Speaker 1 Been there, done that. Thank you very much.
You look fine. You got through it.
No, I did. I did get through it.

Speaker 2 But don't you think it's good to just know, though? Oh, yeah. Yeah, not the way to do it.

Speaker 1 I think if you don't know, you know, you can't.

Speaker 1 You can't talk about it.

Speaker 1 You can't understand

Speaker 1 that weird journey that you go through.

Speaker 1 I think you have to do certain things sometimes just to realize what it's all about. Well, LA is a very good idea.
It's that balance thing. It's the light and the dark, you know.

Speaker 2 LA's so particularly odd too because everyone's chasing this very specific goal of notoriety. Like it's success, but success is it's quantified by notoriety.

Speaker 2 Like the more famous you are, the more popular, the bigger your song is.

Speaker 1 Even now, you know, all you've got to have is a bloody iPhone or whatever. TikTok

Speaker 1 to earn an account, and that's it.

Speaker 1 Very strange. Yeah, really, really odd.

Speaker 1 I can't quite get to grips with all of that, to be honest with you. I don't think anybody can.

Speaker 2 And I think it's essentially we're being captured by a form of technology that has leveraged our desire for this attention, our desire for this notoriety.

Speaker 1 But it's also being known for nothing. Right.
Yeah, that's the scary thing.

Speaker 1 And having this element of what seems to be the latest generation of this privilege. Right.
You know,

Speaker 1 where they believe that, you know,

Speaker 1 everything is owed to them. Right.
And I

Speaker 1 entitled, yeah. And I find that shocking, you know.

Speaker 2 Well, that comes along with the quest, right?

Speaker 2 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 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 for you.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there's a purpose to it.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 It's fascinating to be around them and to like to kind of just, you know, I know a lot of famous people now and I know some of them are just fantastic people. They're just really interesting people.

Speaker 1 You have very interesting people on your show, that's for sure. I mean, that's what intrigued me, you know, from, you know, Professor Brian Cox, you know, who I'm an absolute fan of.
I had this.

Speaker 1 He's amazing.

Speaker 1 Such a nice guy. Lovely guy.
Mind-blowing. Mind-blowing.
Too much information for my good.

Speaker 2 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. And so yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And my friend looks at the photo.

Speaker 1 He goes, What does he look like?

Speaker 2 I pull up. He's like, is that guy in a fucking band or something?

Speaker 1 I go, yeah, he was in a band.

Speaker 2 That's right. He's like, no way.
Yeah, he's in a successful band.

Speaker 2 He's an actual brilliant scientist who is in a successful band.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.
Mind-boggling.

Speaker 1 I mean, I

Speaker 2 doesn't comprehend. Because he looks like a rock star.

Speaker 1 He does. He does.

Speaker 1 Yeah, he's not changed his look since the beginning.

Speaker 2 And he's such a great science communicator.

Speaker 1 Well, that's the thing. See, I love science, but I get lost in it sometimes.
But he is probably

Speaker 1 the closest I'll ever get to really trying to have an insight into what it's all about. You know, as

Speaker 1 best as he can describe it.

Speaker 2 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 lay person.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Which is why he's so fascinating, which is why everybody should know him.

Speaker 2 Yeah. His show is wonderful too.
Have you ever seen his show? They do a live performance

Speaker 2 enormous screens and they show you like history of the universe and stellar nurseries and all this wild stuff. It's really incredible stuff.

Speaker 1 No, fantastic. Yeah.
Fantastic stuff.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Like, like,

Speaker 1 like you're just holding your breath.

Speaker 1 I don't know which category I'm in.

Speaker 2 You're not in the boring kind.

Speaker 1 No. No.

Speaker 1 Well, I can be. I think we all can be, I guess, at some stage.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Yeah. And you could think that you kind of understand the experience until you go to other places.

Speaker 1 Well, I see, I see you're a big fan of Bourdain as well. Yeah,

Speaker 1 and I loved his shows. I still watch them all the time because it's just

Speaker 1 what he discovered and how he entrenched himself with the people that he went to meet and

Speaker 1 the conversations and the food are just that's my cup of tea right there.

Speaker 1 I think, how can you not

Speaker 1 want to do that, learn and love that experience?

Speaker 2 Well, he had such a

Speaker 2 infectious passion for different cultures and their food and the art of food.

Speaker 2 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.
I kind of just said, oh, delicious food. Awesome.

Speaker 2 Oh, this guy's a really great chef. Awesome.
Yeah. And then I watched his first show, no reservations.
Like, oh, okay.

Speaker 1 Duh.

Speaker 2 It's art.

Speaker 1 It's art that you eat. Oh, yeah, yeah.
Oh, that's why they're all weird and they all have tattoos and fucking weird earrings.

Speaker 1 Okay, they're artists. Okay, that makes so much sense.

Speaker 2 And I was like, oh, you ignorant fuck. You had never put it in that category for so I just like decided, no, that's just food.

Speaker 2 But no, there's a there's an art to food.

Speaker 1 It's another level.

Speaker 2 Yeah, like the place you were talking about, linguine with clams, linguine vangoli, which is my favorite dish of all time.

Speaker 1 Spaghetti vangoli. When it's done, right? I promise that if you ever come back to Monty, as we call it,

Speaker 1 I'll drive you. Oh, I'll go.

Speaker 1 I'll go. We'll go for spaghetti vongolé and hope the dear grandmother's still alive.

Speaker 2 It also makes me angry because when I eat

Speaker 2 pasta and pizza over in Italy, I don't feel like shit. shit.

Speaker 2 And then I come to America and I eat the same supposed things.

Speaker 1 I can eat a friggin' salad here and put on weight. I don't know what's going on.
I'm serious, though. Yeah, it's seed oils.
Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Seed oils in the salad dressing and sugar.

Speaker 1 Yep. All of that.
All of that. Yeah, I agree.
I live, it's a much healthier lifestyle over there without question. Oh, yeah.
The food hasn't been violated. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 2 It's generally organic.

Speaker 1 You can eat pizza every day and pasta every day.

Speaker 1 And also,

Speaker 1 I think the other real big thing here is the portion control as well.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we're gluttons.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 you can have one plate full of food here and it'll serve four people in Europe. Yeah.
Literally.

Speaker 2 Oh, yeah. That's a fact.
I think,

Speaker 2 you know, I was poor when I was young, and I think because of that, I'm even more of a glutton because I just want more food.

Speaker 1 I don't want all the food. Yeah, yeah.
And then I work out a lot, so I'm always hungry.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So then

Speaker 1 have a really good thing.

Speaker 2 But yeah, I mean, 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.
Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 For sure.

Speaker 1 I just love food. Yeah.
It's, it's, you know, it's, especially when you go to a different culture.

Speaker 2 You know, if you go to somewhere, like, you can go to Thailand and eat authentic Thai food in Thailand. It's like, oh, man.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. It's something special.

Speaker 1 It's great when you've got friends who have that same appreciation that, you know, while you're eating lunch, you're talking about dinner. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 1 That's how excited you are about food.

Speaker 2 And it's also, it just realigns your priorities. Like, what are 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.

Speaker 2 Those are like the best moments in life.

Speaker 1 No question. No question about it.
Yeah. Yeah, I I long for that.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Because also I I go in these very long working time periods and I don't get to see a lot of friends quite often, you know.

Speaker 1 And so

Speaker 1 I really try and work out and look at the shed my schedule these days to go. I'm taking some time out here for a couple of days.

Speaker 1 I want to see my friends. I want to say hello.
I want to share some time and stories and food with them.

Speaker 1 You know, so it's become a key thing to have that included in running around like a headless chicken all the time, you know?

Speaker 2 Is that what inspired your photography because this book is really excellent your photography is great thank you um

Speaker 1 i you know it was a dear friend timothy white who's a celebrity photographer and um

Speaker 1 he'd done my second and third album 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

Speaker 1 and then I became the lupus

Speaker 1 the ambassador for the

Speaker 1 lupus foundation of America and we were doing a single to raise money called Lucy and we were doing with

Speaker 1 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 and and he said to me and you don't you actually don't do that with another photographer's work you know he said what what what the fuck are you doing with my pictures I said he said where did you learn how to do this I said well I didn't I just you know I I'm intuitively inspired to to play around with stuff you know it's I'm still a big kid so and he said well do you have any other do you have other phot do you actually have photos yourself that you've taken and worked on I said well I've got bits and bobs but nothing so

Speaker 1 he and I sat down and looked through all the photos I had.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I think there was maybe a thousand at that time, which isn't much at all. I'm now over 120,000 photos.

Speaker 1 It's mind-boggling.

Speaker 1 That's why this was difficult. But

Speaker 1 yeah, so he said,

Speaker 1 Jules, why don't you do something with this stuff? And I said,

Speaker 1 what?

Speaker 1 What am I going to do? He said, listen, you should do an exhibition. You've got some really beautiful things here.
And I said,

Speaker 1 I said, listen, I'll do it I'll do it if if if you mentor me through the whole process, which he did. And

Speaker 1 I was probably more petrified at the first exhibition that I did, which was in New York at the old CBGB's,

Speaker 1 which turned into the Morrison Hotel Gallery.

Speaker 1 And that was in 2010, I think. And

Speaker 1 I was more petrified the three days leading up to that than I was ever going on stage. Well, probably my first ever stage performance, which I did in Dallas at

Speaker 1 a rehearsal space that was down here for the first ever tour.

Speaker 1 Now, again, the anxiety, you know, it's the unknown.

Speaker 1 I don't know what, you know, the worry of what people are going to think because, you know, not just being you, but John Lennon's son, you know, being the second John, so to speak, was always an issue for me.

Speaker 1 You know, it's feeling like you have to doubly prove yourself.

Speaker 1 So,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 Nobody's coming.

Speaker 1 But to my utter delight, I had

Speaker 1 reviews from fine art photography magazines, etc., etc., that gave me nothing but praise. And I was shocked.
Wow. Absolutely shocked.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 I just continued doing that.

Speaker 1 I'm now over,

Speaker 1 I think, 42 exhibitions worldwide. And I just finished my biggest one in Venice at a museum

Speaker 1 over the last three months. And the book, in fact,

Speaker 1 it I had approached other publications before, but been pretty much turned down by everybody. And then out of the blue, the earlier this year, this company out of Berlin called Tennoise

Speaker 1 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? I said, because nobody gave me the upper opportunity.
Excuse my French.

Speaker 2 Do you think that's because you're John Lennon's son? Like, there's a burden that is very unique to you.

Speaker 1 Not people like that. I certainly recognise that there's walls up.

Speaker 1 Without question.

Speaker 2 What is that like?

Speaker 1 Like, what are the walls? Like, do you think it's just

Speaker 2 they dismiss you?

Speaker 1 Because something's going on. I mean, I've discussed this with Rebecca, who you met, my manager, and a few other people.
You know, there's occasions where I'll be totally totally blanked.

Speaker 1 Like with the last album I came out with, Jude, which took

Speaker 1 between five and thirty years to write and record. It was old songs and new songs that I wanted to balance the sound.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it was at a time when

Speaker 1 I'd gone through a lot of changes myself. And I had decided

Speaker 1 to finally call myself be Julian. I'd been John Charles Julian Lennon all my life,

Speaker 1 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 Deedpoll in 2020, I said, right,

Speaker 1 I'm going to be Julian now. And the album's going to be called Jude.

Speaker 1 And the reason I called it Jude was it was finally

Speaker 1 not only an acceptance, but

Speaker 1 actually,

Speaker 1 what's the terminology um

Speaker 1 it's i'm i'm actually taking ownership should i say of the name dude and and what that represented for all these years um

Speaker 1 to other people and to me right so anyway so i i you know that was the album was a biggie for me calling the album dude for a starters inciting

Speaker 1 right

Speaker 1 hopefully positive things

Speaker 1 but the weird thing was you know I did

Speaker 2 I put this whole band together and I I wanted to as an as a starter to go on all the the the TV shows that I'd always ever wanted to appear on this episode is brought to you by Takovas anywhere worth going is worth going in good boots to covas craft quality western boots for everyone so bring it home this holiday season with a gift from the West.

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Speaker 1 for instance in England like

Speaker 1 Jules Holland

Speaker 1 late later with Jules Holland which is the only live music show that I've watched all my life literally

Speaker 1 there's Graham Norton which and I've and I'd done their radio shows, which is really, really weird. And we got on like a house on fire.
And I performed live, and that all went down well.

Speaker 1 And then it was kind of like CEO on the real show.

Speaker 1 Producers turned me down.

Speaker 1 And, you know, and

Speaker 1 same with a lot of the late-night American shows.

Speaker 1 Got just didn't, they weren't interested.

Speaker 1 And I, you know, I had, I had,

Speaker 1 you know, I'd done the name change. I'd been away for ten years, I'd I'd called the album Jude.
Um, you know, there was there was a lot to talk about, you know,

Speaker 1 and a great deal more than I'm presenting right now.

Speaker 1 Anyway,

Speaker 1 I was turned down and still and that still happens to me. Um,

Speaker 1 which which uh saddens me because just when you feel like you want to open up, you know,

Speaker 1 and answer any question you can throw at me,

Speaker 1 I've not been allowed to,

Speaker 1 that's what it's felt like, that I've not been allowed to speak my piece, whatever that is, you know,

Speaker 1 on whatever subject matter. It's weird.

Speaker 2 It's like the gatekeeper aspect of it is weird, but it's also weird, like, why not? Like, what would be the hesitance? I don't understand.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 The son of a great man, I always say, that guy's fucked.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. He's fucked.
It's like, the burden's too high.

Speaker 2 Your dad was John Lennon. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Like, he's iconic. Well,

Speaker 1 and I think with a lot of people, they don't want anybody to interfere with that.

Speaker 1 You know, I mean, how dare the

Speaker 1 son come along and even try and be better in any way, shape, or form or be as good as or whatever.

Speaker 1 whatever or whatever yeah you're immediately dismissed which is what which is why you know to a certain degree photography really appealed to me number one because

Speaker 1 and the reality is i prefer it behind the camera you know 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.

Speaker 1 But behind the camera

Speaker 1 and traveling is what I've... I have a foundation called the White Feather Foundation.
And,

Speaker 1 you know, we try to help people all over the world. And it started.

Speaker 1 I know that you have interest in indigenous cultures.

Speaker 1 And I don't know if you know the backstory to this, to the White Feather Foundation at all.

Speaker 1 Okay, so here we go. Okay.

Speaker 1 I was on tour with probably my most

Speaker 1 at least outside of America, most well-known song. It was a number one and top 10 in countries all over the world, except for America.

Speaker 1 And it was called Saltwater.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And I found myself in

Speaker 1 Adelaide.

Speaker 1 And I got this call from the hotel management saying,

Speaker 1 excuse me, Mr. Lennon, but there's uh an aboriginal tribe down here with tv crews who want to say hi

Speaker 1 and i thought it was like an on-the-road prank i said yeah sure sure why would they be coming to see me you know

Speaker 1 and they called back and they said no no no no this is serious um can can you come down please

Speaker 1 and so

Speaker 1 I think TV crews, Aboriginal tribe, what's this about?

Speaker 1 And so I kind of get doled up a little bit because I don't know what the TV shows are or cameras yeah so I go down

Speaker 1 and in in the lobby there's a little platform and about 30 people half of them indigenous TV crews bunch of other stuff

Speaker 1 and I honestly have no idea what it's about and this this woman who was the elder of this particular tribe called the Merning People,

Speaker 1 walked up to me and presented me with a male swan's white feather, which is about yay big,

Speaker 1 and said, you know, can you help us?

Speaker 1 You have a voice. Can you help us?

Speaker 1 And I just kind of went,

Speaker 1 well, you know, do I just continue being the rock and roller? Or do I step up to the plate? Whatever that means.

Speaker 1 And so I...

Speaker 2 What specifically did they want help with?

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 I'll tell you, initially, you know,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And they said, you know, can you help us? And I said,

Speaker 1 you know, I'll do it for the children.

Speaker 1 So I guess what I was saying is the next generation, I can, you know, try and.

Speaker 1 Anyway, so

Speaker 1 that this woman was called Irish. She was the eldest.
She's since passed in the last year or so.

Speaker 1 But I spent ten years making a documentary with a best friend, Kim Kindersley, who

Speaker 1 initiated this whole thing. And we made a documentary called Whale Dreamers.

Speaker 1 independent. We had no money really behind it, no sponsorship.
We won about eight international independent film awards, which was great.

Speaker 1 But the backstory to this is that

Speaker 1 dad had said to me,

Speaker 1 and I couldn't tell you when or where, just was one of those times that we were together. He just said that, you know, if something ever happens to me, that I'll let you know that

Speaker 1 to let you know that I'm okay

Speaker 1 or that we're all going to be okay

Speaker 1 will be in the form of a white feather. Whoa.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 when that woman presented me with a white

Speaker 1 feather, sorry.

Speaker 1 Yeah,

Speaker 1 the goosebumps came on heavy. I get them now every time I talk about the story.

Speaker 2 I'm getting them right now.

Speaker 1 So, yeah, there she is. There's Iris and there's Bunner, who's one of the other guys.

Speaker 2 That is so crazy.

Speaker 1 I still have that.

Speaker 1 I still still have that in the original envelope that she gave it to me in. It's, you know, it's

Speaker 1 in a very special place at home.

Speaker 2 I mean, you can talk all about coincidences.

Speaker 1 Oh, no, listen,

Speaker 1 for me, I'm sorry, that was undeniable.

Speaker 1 Regardless of where my faith or spirituality or religion was, to me, that was...

Speaker 1 This is real. This is as real as it gets.

Speaker 2 It's funny because

Speaker 2 people love to dismiss these things.

Speaker 1 Like, oh, hogwash.

Speaker 2 Oh, it's just coincidence. Oh,

Speaker 2 it could have been a variety of different things.

Speaker 2 But the reality is, mathematically, like, what are the odds?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and I was in Australia

Speaker 1 number one at the time with Saltwater, the most environmental humanitarian song I've ever written and performed.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so

Speaker 1 I said, yeah, I'll do what I can. So we did make the film.
And then with the advent of, of course,

Speaker 1 the internet,

Speaker 1 I thought, okay,

Speaker 1 we'll put a website together to

Speaker 1 sell the film.

Speaker 1 And I also said to my business manager, I said, if we make anything on this, I said, I want everything to go back to

Speaker 1 the moaning people.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 But I started the White Feather Foundation to have, again, a vehicle to sell

Speaker 1 the film. and then slowly but surely I would start getting these emails from people over the years you know over time sorry

Speaker 1 saying well you know can you help us and I'm going well I'm not really a foundation I'm just I did this project and I thought that was it

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 okay what am I interested in what can I do what I you know there's plenty of other charities out there, there's plenty of other people doing other things, but what can I do?

Speaker 1 What's most important to me?

Speaker 1 Indigenous tribes were the first, so the Moaning People, and then,

Speaker 1 in fact, in the film itself, in Whale Dreamers,

Speaker 1 Kim,

Speaker 1 my director, friend and director, had already done

Speaker 1 a segment of a film where he grouped 80 of the elders of the world

Speaker 1 world's indigenous tribes,

Speaker 1 80 from around the world, around a fire and just filmed them to

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So that were that became one of the first orders of the day.

Speaker 1 Protect the Mering, 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.

Speaker 1 And I was in

Speaker 1 Kenya going to

Speaker 1 different

Speaker 1 schools and health clinics, mostly girls' schools.

Speaker 1 I set up

Speaker 1 a scholarship in my mum's name, the Cynthia Lennon Scholarship for girls. And so we send them to college and universities where they go to learn how to protect

Speaker 1 their people and their families and cultures.

Speaker 1 And so we support, you know, we build health clinics and dormitories and we do it because I mean

Speaker 1 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 to home or to school 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 um and they would literally stay in their own schools, sleep in in the classrooms and convert them to dormitories at night so that they felt protected.

Speaker 1 I mean it was and when they went home they were doing you know three hours of chores every night before they could do any homework and then go to sleep and then walk to school again.

Speaker 1 So you'd hear these incredible stories that you just

Speaker 1 realize how lucky you are. And so

Speaker 1 we try to help, again, the Indigenous. We do help with health and education as far as

Speaker 1 young kids, young girls across Africa,

Speaker 1 Kenya and Ethiopia. And also

Speaker 1 my last trip was

Speaker 1 to Colombia, to South America, to visit the the Koji tribe who were these insane

Speaker 1 people that chewed the cocoa leaves.

Speaker 1 But they used to be fishermen years ago before the Spanish arrived in the sixteen hundreds and chased them off into the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Is it coca leaves or cats? Yeah, it's coca leaves.

Speaker 1 Coca leaves. Yeah, yeah, and they did they chew it and s and um mix it with spit.
Oh, boy. Yeah,

Speaker 1 they're all off their heads, really.

Speaker 1 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.
And

Speaker 1 there's another group,

Speaker 1 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 bo buy back some of their land.

Speaker 1 And we did a couple of ceremonies with them,

Speaker 1 which were very, very beautiful. But one of the most

Speaker 1 I 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

Speaker 1 the Koji tribe came down with us.

Speaker 1 It lit a fire on the beach.

Speaker 1 The sun was just going down and

Speaker 1 there was no phones, no computers, no nothing.

Speaker 1 And we're just sitting on the beach,

Speaker 1 and the fire's between myself and the Koji tribe.

Speaker 1 And the sun's just going down, and the waves are right in front, and it's just very beautiful. Nobody on the beach.

Speaker 1 Old, beautiful, beaten-up tree trunks that have washed up on the shore, and just a little haze from the from the the the the the water uh and the sand being blown

Speaker 1 And there was a peace that I can't explain. That

Speaker 1 I it was I looked over at them and through the fire, you know, the flames of the fire, and we just smiled. There was no words.

Speaker 1 It was just

Speaker 1 some level of peace that had been found, just living in that moment, that present moment, and then the sun going down, and then because there's no street lights or anything else around

Speaker 1 you saw every star in the sky possible

Speaker 1 and so with that transition hanging out with this one of the oldest tribes in South America

Speaker 1 with the fire with the sea with the sky and the stars

Speaker 1 There was, I can't even describe it. It was one of the most

Speaker 1 loving and most peaceful moments of my entire life. Wow.
The simplicity of it. It was actually the simplicity of it all and just the human heart and the appreciation for the world that we live in.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 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 America or to j to Asia or wherever.

Speaker 1 And back in the day, you only had

Speaker 1 one movie on a projector. That was it.
You know, you didn't have T V screens or the iPhones or anything to watch anything, you know.

Speaker 1 So once the movie was done and you'd have a bit you know, a bit of food or whatever, that was it. Most people would go to sleep.
I would always be twitching, of course.

Speaker 1 So I'd be looking out the window and staring at the clouds.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I would I realized that,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 what I was seeing was literally just moments.

Speaker 1 And they would never be again. They would be gone, fleeting.
That's it. Whatever that cloud, that light, that shade, that shadow, the colour, the beauty of that,

Speaker 1 the enormity of it as well was.

Speaker 1 So I started taking pictures of clouds. And I just thought

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 or

Speaker 1 I'd be thinking of nothing at all. And I'd just be at peace and again, like that moment in Colombia, just

Speaker 1 absorbing everything that I found to be beautiful that was surrounded me.

Speaker 1 So clouds were my thing at first.

Speaker 1 That was my moment to either get away or think about everything.

Speaker 1 But mostly

Speaker 1 that kind of element of freedom and space and just,

Speaker 1 am I the only one seeing this?

Speaker 1 Everybody else is asleep.

Speaker 1 I feel distracted. Yeah, so I started taking pictures of clouds.
And then, you know, I knew a few rock and rollers, so I started taking pictures of those two.

Speaker 1 And then one thing led to another because I'd go on these trips to Ethiopia with their

Speaker 1 great organizations like Charity Water

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 again, Kenya and South America and a number of other places. I just would take a camera with me

Speaker 1 because for the I and 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.

Speaker 1 And so in a way this was taking a camera with me was to catalogue what was going on. And it was only when I got back home I put them on the screen and I'd go, oh that's quite a nice picture.

Speaker 1 Oh, that's not so bad. What if I just did this, that and the other? And so I started making collections of my journeys, which eventually became my website and my photography.

Speaker 1 You know, I've never done a paid gig as such, and I've never used nothing that wasn't natural light or present light. So I've never set anything up.

Speaker 1 I've always tried to, again, get that moment, whatever it was.

Speaker 1 And then, you know, I had the opportunity, I know I've gone in a bit of a roundabout circle, but

Speaker 1 the publishers came to me earlier this year saying, do you want to do a book? And I'm thinking, well, yes, and how do I do this? And

Speaker 1 because a lot of people don't know I'm a photographer in any way, shape, or form, I thought, okay,

Speaker 1 can I make it a retrospective?

Speaker 1 Can I make it all the stuff that I'm interested in? You know, because often as a photographer or even a musician, you get, oh, what is your favorite thing? What do you take pictures of?

Speaker 1 What are your songs about? They're about everything.

Speaker 1 Why do they, you know, that's that, you know, the idea of being pigeonholed in any way, shape, or form

Speaker 1 horrifies me. Me too.

Speaker 1 So this was

Speaker 1 a way for me to

Speaker 1 show my work.

Speaker 1 And it was a bit of a nightmare, too, because I had decided with the onset of this exhibition I'd been offered

Speaker 1 in Venice at this museum, alongside Helmut Newton, no less.

Speaker 1 Why don't I try and marry the two so I have the book come out at the same time as the exhibition. Now that meant working on the book like an absolute fruitcake madman on crack.

Speaker 1 I mean, we were doing nine to twelve hours a day virtually because he was based in the

Speaker 1 guy who I was working with from the publishers

Speaker 1 was based in Berlin and I was where I was. So this would be virtual, back and forth trying to figure out what makes a photography book great.

Speaker 1 It was something else. We did it in a couple of weeks.
It was insane. And

Speaker 1 the hardest job of it all was

Speaker 1 because I used to shoot anywhere between 100 and 50 and 100 pictures for a collection. I was never one of those that had like a limited edition of four or ten pictures.

Speaker 1 You know, again, this was just a catalogue of the work of what I'd seen and

Speaker 1 the charity stuff.

Speaker 1 But then I had to, you know, in those moments, I had to learn how to make a collection of 50 pictures,

Speaker 1 five pictures. I'm going, well, how the hell do I do that? How am I going to do that? So it's being able to tell the same story of...
50 pictures in five pictures.

Speaker 2 The problem is you know about the other 90 pictures.

Speaker 1 Well, of course.

Speaker 1 And as I keep saying, they're all my babies.

Speaker 1 So, you know, it's

Speaker 1 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? What am I trying to express here?

Speaker 1 You know, because half the time I just feel like a you know, a messenger really. I'm just

Speaker 1 capturing something and I'm sharing it.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 that's pretty, that's really quite special. That's really,

Speaker 1 you know, really quite special because you're taking on another role

Speaker 1 because I try not to I've 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.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And what happened was that when we got the go-ahead for this exhibition, which was only earlier this year,

Speaker 1 I was thinking, how am I going to do that? And that was going to, I decided to make that a retrospective too.

Speaker 1 But how do I then chop that many pictures down to that of this exhibition?

Speaker 1 Again, I, funnily enough, the book became my guideline. So what I'd learnt 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

Speaker 1 in a larger scale in a museum,

Speaker 1 which was bonkers, you know. And this all happened this year.
So it's like,

Speaker 1 okay, all right. You know, I'm going for the ride with her.
You know, I obviously want it, but,

Speaker 1 you know, when it all hits you at once, it's it's quite something else. Um,

Speaker 1 it's it's been a full-on, full-on, busy, busy year. And there's been music involved too, and other

Speaker 1 documentary film projects, which

Speaker 1 you'll probably hear about next year. So, it's it's it's probably been one of weirdly one of my busiest years.

Speaker 2 It seems like you're enjoying yourself, though.

Speaker 1 I'm alive,

Speaker 1 you know. That's, I think that's for me, that's you you know, people say, how are you? I'm alive.

Speaker 1 And I

Speaker 1 have always gone with things that have been presented to me organically.

Speaker 1 Any time I've ever fought that or or

Speaker 1 been pushed into situations

Speaker 1 never generally never works out. I think for everybody that's yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 So I you know, I I feel fortunate in that

Speaker 1 these things have have come along and I've been in the right headspace, thankfully, to go, yes,

Speaker 1 I want to do this, you know?

Speaker 2 When you started shooting,

Speaker 2 did you take classes in the technical aspects of photography?

Speaker 1 I don't have a clue.

Speaker 2 So did you, what kind of cameras are you using?

Speaker 2 How did you learn how to use them?

Speaker 1 I didn't. I didn't.

Speaker 2 I just figured out how to focus them.

Speaker 1 Same with music. I play by ear not a clue how to read or write music really yeah um and this i tell you this is one of my fears is that and i'll come back to this but um

Speaker 1 i 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 um if i'm not on the road and i'm not practicing and I've got a terrible memory, I forget.

Speaker 1 And so,

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 I couldn't, even if you gave me a million bucks tomorrow. I couldn't do it.

Speaker 1 My memory just doesn't work that way.

Speaker 1 And so if I and 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

Speaker 1 this is a lot of work for me.

Speaker 1 I have to relearn how to play my own songs and my lyrics. And I kid you not.
Wow.

Speaker 2 So, but you also have to relearn self-taught.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Yeah.

Speaker 2 So what would you do? Like, have you done that in the past where you had to relearn?

Speaker 1 Yeah. Well,

Speaker 1 yeah. I mean, the last tour I did with the album, Everything Changes.

Speaker 2 How do you scale it? Like, how do you get yourself?

Speaker 1 You just have to get in the room. So you just get in the room and start getting in the room with the guys.
You know,

Speaker 1 the band that you put together, generally I'll have one or two friends in the band, you know, and

Speaker 1 I have generally played

Speaker 1 rhythm guitar

Speaker 1 or a bit of piano for a couple of songs. But I have to relearn everything.
I mean, it's

Speaker 1 and then

Speaker 1 lyrics.

Speaker 1 How long does it take to relearn what you play? When

Speaker 1 we were actually setting up, as I said, to do a bunch of TV shows to promote the album.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 So that means, again, I have to step up to the plate.

Speaker 1 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, when I'm

Speaker 1 all this stuff that we were going to perform was all new material. Because when I write a song,

Speaker 1 you know, if I've written the basics of a song in an hour or two, you know, 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 couple of times that I'll have ever played it.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 it's almost a new song to me every time I come back to it it it's it's a real weird one so for the photography you know i just took along basically well uh a really good quality automatic camera that you know took the shots did you know what you were buying or did you just go buy one no 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 and uh

Speaker 1 and uh so i took their advice and uh i started with a very very simple camera that was auto-focused and all compact and I didn't have to change lenses and that's one I did for a trip around the

Speaker 1 South China Seas on a boat trip. I just took this one camera in my backpack and

Speaker 1 hope for the best and

Speaker 1 I had a show here at Leica in LA because it was a Leica camera

Speaker 1 which was about 50 images of the trip that I did.

Speaker 1 So but I

Speaker 1 think where my strength lies in photography is

Speaker 1 weirdly not on the technical side, obviously, but

Speaker 1 capturing that moment.

Speaker 1 I tell you the one thing about

Speaker 1 the woman that's on the cover of the book. So that's she is now the

Speaker 1 Princess of Monaco.

Speaker 1 Charlene, originally Charlene Whitstock. And I'd met her a couple of times, and I'd met Prince Albert a couple of times.
And I got this call, literally,

Speaker 1 the day before they were getting married, from a mutual friend saying,

Speaker 1 Charlene loves your photography.

Speaker 1 She wants you to come and shoot the show.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Yeah, she wants you to come down to

Speaker 1 where she is getting ready for the civil wedding tomorrow, and she wants you to take pictures. Wow.

Speaker 1 I mean, you want to talk about anxiety and crapping yourself?

Speaker 1 Excuse me.

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Speaker 1 I arrive at the hotel where she and all the maids of honors 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.

Speaker 1 I don't know what's going to happen. I had to go through several layers of security, you know, road blocks and all this to get there.

Speaker 1 which was

Speaker 1 nerve-wracking to say the least anyway. And then the likes of Patrick de Machelier, you know, one of the best photographers in the world, walks in with,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 the suitcase trolleys, you know, those ones at the hotel that aren't the big ones on wheels with all his equipment on.

Speaker 1 Three or four trolleys and there's, I've got a backpack, you know.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 the hairdresser the hairdresser's assistant and their assistant the makeup artist the makeup artist assistant is that you yeah that's me yeah oh wow yeah so i i'm in the book a few times that'll be a quite questionnaire at one point that'll be a quiz at one point how many times am i in the book um

Speaker 1 i don't even know myself to be honest um

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And they put me on this little poof next to her. I'm sitting next to her and she's...
And I'm saying,

Speaker 1 are you okay? You know,

Speaker 1 should I just take pictures? She said, Jules,

Speaker 1 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?

Speaker 1 She says, she said, no, no, Jules,

Speaker 1 the photos,

Speaker 1 I said, listen, this is historic. This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to record what's going to happen to you.

Speaker 1 you know and exciting for me too to be a part of that as a photographer and so i said listen i'll keep out the way i'm a fly on the wall you know, I won't be anywhere.

Speaker 1 And I was thinking, how am I going to do this? How do I do this?

Speaker 1 And so I just start. I just let people get on and I'm taking pictures.
And I get a

Speaker 1 message from Vogue, Vogue.com, who want a photo from me

Speaker 1 the moment she's married. And I'm thinking, ah, okay.

Speaker 1 I'll just keep snapping away at whatever I do.

Speaker 1 And I watch the civil wedding, and then I

Speaker 1 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.
I can't, this looks like crap to me.

Speaker 1 And this happens to me every time, every fucking time.

Speaker 1 And I'm looking at the pictures going, they look terrible. They really, really look terrible, blurred and fucked and this and that and badly positioned.
And

Speaker 1 I'm cursing myself. And

Speaker 1 the one thing that I remembered that she said to me is that, look, whatever you do, don't let any picture have me

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 1 And the one picture where she was smiling and

Speaker 1 she had champagne in her hand and she had a cigarette. And I'm going, for fuck's sake.

Speaker 1 So, okay, I was not a Photoshop kind of guy, but I managed to get rid of the cigarette. And I'm thinking, okay, how do I deal with the champagne shit?

Speaker 1 And then the one thing occurred to me,

Speaker 1 I thought, okay, I'll do it.

Speaker 1 I'll desaturate it. Not black and white, but it'll have an...
There'll be elements of tones. I'll make it, you know, so you can't see that it's champagne.

Speaker 1 And I did that and I cropped it in a certain way and I went,

Speaker 1 that's it.

Speaker 1 Why didn't I think of this before?

Speaker 1 You know, 1930s, 40s, 50s, Princess Grace, black and white,

Speaker 1 old school. So then I turned every picture I had black and white.
Well, desaturated. version similar to black and white of

Speaker 1 the whole collection I had of her

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 Was she okay with the champagne being in the photo?

Speaker 1 Well, it didn't look like champagne. It just looked like fizzy water.
And because

Speaker 1 on the side, there had been bottles of fizzy water and still water. So I went,

Speaker 1 that's cool.

Speaker 1 She had to give me

Speaker 1 the okay to do that. You know, know when we decided that should be the cover of this book, you know, I had to get her approval.

Speaker 1 I mean, I already had approval for you know having her pictures in a collection or a box set, but not on the front cover of a book that

Speaker 1 may do well, you know.

Speaker 2 Have you ever been to Disneyland? Yeah, oh god. Do you know all the pictures of Walt Disney have his cigarette photoshopped out of his hand?

Speaker 1 No, I did not know that.

Speaker 2 In every picture, you see him like this.

Speaker 1 Is that so? Yeah.

Speaker 2 See if you can find some of those pictures because it's really interesting. Once you know that they photoshopped it,

Speaker 2 there's a guy that we've had as a tour there. Shout out to Flander.
Awesome guy who works there. And he gave us this sort of history of Walt Disney.
Well, Walt Disney died of lung cancer.

Speaker 1 Right.

Speaker 2 Which you would think it would be probably a good thing to have the cigarette so people could know, oh, that poor guy, that's what killed him.

Speaker 2 But instead, they've decided to whitewash it and Photoshop. So all of his photographs.

Speaker 1 That's too

Speaker 2 his fingers are always in a position where he would have a cigarette.

Speaker 1 All of them. That's

Speaker 1 so funny.

Speaker 2 Those

Speaker 2 real moments of him having a cigarette are lost forever.

Speaker 1 Whose idea was it? To get rid of the cigarette?

Speaker 2 Disneyland. You know, Disneyland did not.

Speaker 1 All that fact. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I mean, let's see. There's a person it says there.

Speaker 2 It says, the action's seemingly innocuous at first, but it's apparently a murky tribute to Walt Disney's smoking habits, with the company sidestepping around the reason as to why the icon pointed that way, writes HuffPost.

Speaker 2 It's been long speculated about the anonymous employee was informed by a lead that the strange gesture from the cast members of Disney Park is actually based on Walt's old smoking habit.

Speaker 2 So people do that two-finger gesture to each other? Yeah.

Speaker 2 That's crazy. Allegedly began training employees to do the same thing, part tribute to the great man, part rewriting history.

Speaker 2 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.
He was a cigarette smoker,

Speaker 2 like a constant cigarette smoker.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah. I was one of those.

Speaker 2 Is there any photos of him with a cigarette?

Speaker 1 You're talking about it in 2014.

Speaker 2 No, that's me. That's funny.
Well, that's when I found out about it. That's when Flander gave us a bunch of people.

Speaker 4 I thought they stopped doing it then, right around then.

Speaker 1 Oh, I gotcha.

Speaker 2 I got you, bitch. I got them all to stop doing it.

Speaker 1 Because it's fucking stupid. Like, the guy smoked cigarettes.

Speaker 2 Yeah, smoking cigarettes is bad for you. He died from smoking cigarettes.
You should probably let people know it's you're doing a disservice to the whole world.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You know, for sure. And also, it's,

Speaker 2 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. And it's so insanely addictive.

Speaker 1 You'd have to be an insane smoker. Yeah.

Speaker 2 How'd you quit?

Speaker 1 Cold turkey. Wow.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I'd be one of those guys that would wake up at four four in the morning and light up a cigarette and then go back to sleep.

Speaker 1 Wow. Or I'd take

Speaker 1 about two or three packs out with me of an evening. Really? Oh, yeah, because I knew half of the people would nick half of my cigarette.
Of course. So I wanted to have backup.
Oh, boy.

Speaker 1 Now, when the whole no-smoking law came in, you know, Italy was one of the first. Really? And Ireland.
Yeah, it was, I think it was California that initiated it.

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 Ireland in the pubs,

Speaker 1 and for it to be a smoke-free environment.

Speaker 1 And I that was just so weird because it was part of the norm of back in the day that you'd be

Speaker 1 in a cloud of stinky cigarette smoke. Yeah, that was any of those locations.

Speaker 2 Our norm at comedy clubs. Yeah.
Yeah, I would go home from comedy clubs every night smelling like cigarettes always. For sure.
The whole audience would be smoking.

Speaker 1 And as a smoker, you don't think, you're not conscious of how other people, how you stink as well. Right.

Speaker 1 Which, you know,

Speaker 1 because it was funny,

Speaker 1 when I quit Cold Turkey,

Speaker 1 I did it. I did it because

Speaker 1 I didn't want anybody to tell me I couldn't smoke. I was such a brat.

Speaker 2 That's why you quit Cold Turkey?

Speaker 1 I quit Cold Turkey because

Speaker 1 I wanted to tell myself I couldn't smoke, not for you to tell me I couldn't smoke.

Speaker 2 How rough was it?

Speaker 1 That's what

Speaker 1 brought me down into a depression for a couple of years. Oh, yeah, because I...

Speaker 1 Listen, I started smoking at the age of probably 11 or 12 as part of my local gang, you know, that I used to be in as a kid.

Speaker 1 That's what you did. You know, you nicked

Speaker 1 ciggies from your parents and you'd

Speaker 1 ban the back of the school, and that was part of the initiation, you know, the part of growing up. So,

Speaker 1 and I loved it because for me, when I became

Speaker 1 noticed

Speaker 1 as

Speaker 1 a

Speaker 1 musician,

Speaker 1 again with my anxiety, and I was a very shy kid, very, very shy kid, still can be at times, depending on how I feel that day. But

Speaker 1 I would, yeah, I would, cigarette for me was my best friend.

Speaker 1 You know, I'd go to a bar and I'd be able to, I'd be the, you know, not the cool guy at the bar, but certainly that would be my way of not having to interact with people. Right.

Speaker 1 You know, I'd just sit there and, you know, be a rocker and smoke my ciggy and down my Jack Daniels. And it's like, leave me the fuck alone, you know.

Speaker 1 Unless I, you know, wanted, wanted to talk. So that was the groove back then.
And then when I gave that up, you know, instantly, it was like, oh, shh, what do I do? How do I fill in that void?

Speaker 1 Well, I actually have to speak to people.

Speaker 1 That would cause the depression. Well, no, no, no, it was actually, I feel it was definitely a chemical thing because again,

Speaker 1 I was smoking a couple of packs a day.

Speaker 1 I loved smoking.

Speaker 2 Did you consider going back just to alleviate the depression?

Speaker 1 I was actually a business manager friend of mine at the time

Speaker 1 saw me at one stage and said, Jules, pick up a fucking cigarette, please. Seriously.
He said,

Speaker 1 you're going to die the way you're going.

Speaker 2 Wow. Pick up a cigarette because you're going to die without it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 That was literally his sentiment.

Speaker 1 Wow. And it was a few years where it was very, very dark.
And it was the cigarettes. No question.

Speaker 2 Did you try patches or

Speaker 1 yeah, I did all of that stuff. Did you help?

Speaker 1 Not really. You know, I loved that deep inhale.
And it's the delivery method. Yeah.
It's different than anything else. And the thing was, I would still challenge most

Speaker 1 good singing friends friends of mine

Speaker 1 that I could

Speaker 1 hold my breath or do

Speaker 1 lengths in a swimming pool underwater and hold my breath better than anybody else, which I was able to.

Speaker 1 And it's because I was such a deep, deep smoker. When I inhaled, I really, really inhaled.
So it was like lung exercises?

Speaker 1 Literally, literally. And I, you know, I went...
I remember going for my certain.

Speaker 1 Yeah, seriously, I consider myself a shallow breather now in comparison, except for when I go on these kind of power walks, you know,

Speaker 1 trying to trying to get it all in anymore. But yeah, no, I bought a little apparatus, which I've, I still haven't, I've been procrastinating about it.
But

Speaker 1 it's an exercise.

Speaker 1 You have one of those. Yeah, the two exercises.

Speaker 1 Yeah, there you go. So I haven't done that.

Speaker 2 Do you put like little lenses on it or little you just change the inhalation

Speaker 1 volume? Yeah, it's less. And back and forth.

Speaker 1 So you just train to.

Speaker 2 My friend Boss Rutan created one.

Speaker 1 Very good.

Speaker 1 I mean, I I know that they work. I just haven't gotten around to it.

Speaker 2 But you know, that's. Well, just breathing exercises alone are great.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You can achieve some very bizarre altered states of consciousness through breathing exercises.

Speaker 1 Well, when I was I mean, I um

Speaker 1 you know, the the COVID experience was very, very different for very many people.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 where I was in

Speaker 1 Monaco in France,

Speaker 1 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 kilometre unless you were going to get groceries where you could only go out for a limited amount of time.

Speaker 1 If you didn't have the paperwork with you, you'd be fined. And

Speaker 1 so I, you know,

Speaker 1 I started doing

Speaker 1 using quite a few apps to calm myself and take on a deep breath and a deep focus because

Speaker 1 I felt trapped, especially as someone who loved walking, who loved biking, who loved exploring, all of that stuff. And I couldn't move.
And

Speaker 1 here's the really

Speaker 1 annoying thing, was that

Speaker 1 where I was was quite close to the sea,

Speaker 1 a couple of hundred yards away.

Speaker 1 But as I said, I could only be in a one-kilometre circle from where I was. But half of that was in the sea.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 so I could walk left and right.

Speaker 1 to try and get 5k in back and forth, you know, at least 5k to try and get a good walk in.

Speaker 1 But you weren't allowed on the beach,

Speaker 1 which was the most to sit there and contemplate and breathe and just you know try and relax.

Speaker 2 One of the healthiest things you can do.

Speaker 1 Yeah, you couldn't, you weren't allowed to do that. Everyone lost their fucking mind.

Speaker 2 And it was really strange. In California, they were arresting people.
The Coast Guard was arresting people for surfing.

Speaker 1 Like, I know. It's

Speaker 1 insane.

Speaker 1 I remember going on my first

Speaker 1 power walk along a peninsula that's about 15 minutes out of Monaco.

Speaker 1 And it's somewhere I go every once in a while. And it was a really quite blustery day.
And it's right along the coastline, rocks, high winds, the whole thing.

Speaker 1 And I'm walking a lot, power walking along, thinking, I'm finally free. I'm finally free.

Speaker 1 Anyway, so along the path

Speaker 1 ahead of me, about a quarter of a mile, I see a number of bobbing heads.

Speaker 1 Okay. And I wasn't wearing a mask.
You had to wear a mask even when you're out power walking on your own.

Speaker 2 Because of science.

Speaker 1 Of course. Genius.

Speaker 1 Well,

Speaker 1 let's not get into that. But

Speaker 1 yeah, and so over the ridge they come, and I noticed that one of the

Speaker 1 person at the front front is wearing a police hat. Oh great.
And so

Speaker 1 I'm trying to scramble putting my mask on

Speaker 1 and he's taking out going for a run with a bunch of trainers, trainees, you know,

Speaker 1 about eight other people from the police force. And they're all gunned up and truncheoned and everything else.
And the guy's going off on me in French saying,

Speaker 1 wear your fucking mask, you know,

Speaker 1 and I'm going and I'm 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 I

Speaker 1 he said who are you with

Speaker 1 and I'm I'm looking around

Speaker 1 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 I'm in the middle of nowhere yeah

Speaker 1 on a a rocky peninsula and he's asking me who I'm with and there's nobody and you know if to put my mask back on otherwise I'd be in trouble.

Speaker 1 And it was just the most surreal, peculiar circumstance to be, you know.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Not being able to go to the beach, illogical.

Speaker 1 I still love the fact that you see people sitting on their own in cars today wearing a mask. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Like, it's very.

Speaker 2 First of all, if you haven't read the house, the 500-page

Speaker 2 synopsis on what all went wrong with COVID,

Speaker 2 everyone should read it just to understand that the whole six-feet distance, all that stuff is all made up. It's all bullshit.

Speaker 1 Masks don't work.

Speaker 1 They don't work.

Speaker 2 Unless you have like a face-fitting mask, and even that, you're getting oxygen in the particle, like viral particles in the oxygen are smaller than vape particles.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Like, this is not real.

Speaker 2 You're pretending. 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.

Speaker 2 How many people were yelling at other people? It gave people a wonderful opportunity to be assholes where they could yell at people for not having a mask on.

Speaker 1 But outside? Like, really? No, the logic.

Speaker 2 It was out the window, but it was also really fascinating to watch human nature. The human nature of, first of all, that people really do enjoy controlling people.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then also watching people comply, knowing it's illogical and being upset at everyone that points out that it's illogical. It just doesn't make any sense.

Speaker 2 Like, you're the enemy because you're not going along with it. You're making it harder for us.

Speaker 1 We have to get through this. Like,

Speaker 1 is this real? Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 Strange.

Speaker 1 Yeah, no.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Stay away from everybody.
That's the only solution.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 Everybody was all in, all in on the public narrative that was being expressed in the mainstream media.

Speaker 2 All in on, you know, everybody who denies it is an anti-science person, and you're anti-this and anti-that.

Speaker 2 And 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.

Speaker 2 And if you don't comply, and if your neighbors aren't complying, here's a number you can call.

Speaker 2 People started ratting out their neighbors.

Speaker 2 It was like a, it was a program that the mayor of Los Angeles ran. Like, normally snitches get stitches, but this way, snitches get rewards.
Like, they were giving you money.

Speaker 2 They're giving people money to rat out their neighbors for having parties.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's beyond messed up. Oh,

Speaker 2 so strange. And it doesn't seem real.
Like my friend Assan.

Speaker 1 Some people are eager as well to join that club. Eager.
So happy they're part of it.

Speaker 2 My friend Assange

Speaker 2 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, when was the last time I wore these? Yeah.
There's a mask.

Speaker 2 And when you see a mask, like, and you realize, like, I had a mask that was in my truck that was in like one of the

Speaker 2 little compartments on the side. It just happened to be sitting there, and I was cleaning the truck.
I'm like, look at this fucking stupid thing.

Speaker 2 This was just two years ago.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You had to have these things if you want to get on a plane.

Speaker 1 Seems like a bad dream.

Speaker 2 It does. It's like Disney and the fucking cigarettes.
Like, are they going to Photoshop out all these people's masks?

Speaker 1 It's all a bit surreal. I mean, so strange.
It really is. It's all a bit odd.
Well, hopefully.

Speaker 1 I still don't get it. I don't get any of it.

Speaker 2 You shouldn't. Hopefully these viruses that

Speaker 2 released don't wind up becoming the next one. I used to think there's no way that people would want that to happen.

Speaker 1 I'm not so sure anymore. No.

Speaker 2 After this last go-around, I'm like, boy, there might be like sinister factors at work here that I don't understand.

Speaker 1 Oh, without question.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I'm sure of.
Sure of that.

Speaker 2 And I was unwilling to ever think that way before. I was like, come on, that's stupid.
No one's that evil.

Speaker 2 No one would do that just for profit.

Speaker 1 And now I'm like, I don't know. Of course they are.
They probably would. Oh, they would.
Yeah. They would, no question.

Speaker 2 So strange.

Speaker 1 It's so strange.

Speaker 2 And then, you know, that, I think, the frustration of the over-complicated, over-regulated, over-controlled world.

Speaker 2 is probably what accentuates the experience of you being in South America with a fire looking at the stars. Yeah.
You know, because

Speaker 2 there's a purity to that that, especially no phones, no computer, no screens, no nothing, just human beings.

Speaker 1 I love an experience on the planet. It's funny because I'm in the process of

Speaker 1 moving.

Speaker 1 I mean, I still have my base in Monaco, but the place, a little place I had outside,

Speaker 1 a lot of my

Speaker 1 later teenage years were

Speaker 1 mum

Speaker 1 uh

Speaker 1 remarried a couple of times, but we were uh we were in uh North Wales. I don't know if you're familiar with North Wales or Wales in general.
No. It's mountains, you know, sheep and mountains.
And uh

Speaker 1 so um

Speaker 1 yeah, I I we lived in farmland, on farmland, and uh I used to work on a farm too.

Speaker 1 So I I loved and that's where I actually learnt how to ride a motorbike you know on farmland and through rivers and enduros and stuff like that

Speaker 1 and uh so i've always loved that element of of countryside i always like the the excitement of a city and the people and the energy but there's also that that other side of peace and quiet and birdsong and

Speaker 2 running water yeah yeah so i'm the keys like a little bit of new york city a little bit of mountains yeah that's That's the key to life.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so I'm in the process of I've just and I hate this terminology, forever, home.

Speaker 1 But

Speaker 1 I certainly think it's a place that I'll be for a while.

Speaker 2 Do you hate the terminology of home?

Speaker 1 No, the forever.

Speaker 1 This is going to be my forever home. Oh, yeah.

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 yeah.

Speaker 1 I like moving.

Speaker 2 I really enjoyed moving here. I like getting up and just being in a new place.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 I think it's good for the brain.

Speaker 1 I I think

Speaker 1 I'd been at the same place for over 26 years through some

Speaker 1 very good things, but some pretty dark moments as well, whether that's relationships or friendships and things like that. And I finally decided a few years ago I need a change.
Where are you going?

Speaker 1 I'm very close by. I mean, I'm literally 15 minutes away, but it's just a different environment up in the mountains.
Okay.

Speaker 1 Surrounded by, you know,

Speaker 1 beautiful old oak trees and walking paths. And, I mean, I know I sound like I'm

Speaker 1 turning old all of a sudden.

Speaker 2 No, you sound like someone who appreciates beautiful things.

Speaker 1 I just want,

Speaker 1 you know, the funny thing is when I went to see this place for the first time, my shoulders just dropped.

Speaker 1 I just,

Speaker 1 and it was, I don't want to leave here.

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 know and the rest of the world seemed very alien after walking onto this property i just went okay a couple of acres of land surrounded by beautiful old trees and uh peace and quiet and

Speaker 1 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 you're like oh this is what i was missing i mean that also the whole you know tree hugging earthing thing yeah is real I believe absolutely 100%.

Speaker 1 It's real. It's real.
It made you feel better. I mean,

Speaker 1 scientifically proven that it.

Speaker 2 Yeah, we have a connection to Earth that's been muted by our shoes.

Speaker 1 Correct. This is very, very true.

Speaker 2 Yeah, it's weird. It's weird to think that way, but it's absolutely correct.

Speaker 1 You know, you can,

Speaker 1 and I have done this too, that you can get earthing sheets

Speaker 1 that you can sleep on.

Speaker 1 I don't know.

Speaker 1 I sleep on one. I don't know if it works or not.

Speaker 2 It probably does something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, but what? That's the. I don't know.

Speaker 2 Just get outside. Yeah.
And then get outside is the move. And if you can get outside barefoot, it's even better.

Speaker 1 This is very, very trusty.

Speaker 2 The other day I was playing with my dog in the backyard, and I was throwing the ball for him. And he just decided, sometimes he's kind of lazy, sometimes he just decides to lay down.

Speaker 2 So I just sat down with him. And it was just this amazing moment of him just wagging his tail, you know, me petting him, and just sitting in the yard, yard, just trees and birds and just

Speaker 1 beautiful. That's it.

Speaker 2 It was a beautiful, peaceful moment that I just experienced with my dog. That's it.
Two of us chilling.

Speaker 1 That's it.

Speaker 2 Really, 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,

Speaker 2 Most people are probably not going to get it. Okay, yeah, you're in your dog.
You love your dog.

Speaker 1 Like, no, it's not it.

Speaker 2 No. 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.

Speaker 1 Not thinking about Gaza. Yeah.
Not thinking about Ukraine.

Speaker 1 It's about that little moment of appreciation here and now, thank you very much. And

Speaker 1 how that can be beyond beneficial to you.

Speaker 2 But then even explaining that, unfortunately, has been co-opted by the term mindfulness, which is so often used by grifters and like fake gurus and dorks, and just it's one of those words that you say it and you're like, ugh, mindfulness.

Speaker 1 Ugh.

Speaker 2 I hate saying it. I'm a spiritual person.
Oh, shut the fuck up.

Speaker 2 Shut the fuck up. I can't take it.
You know, it's like, I get it. But those terms are valuable.
It's like the term God. It's like, it's a valuable term.
Love is a valuable term. Yes.

Speaker 2 But so often they just get ruined just by

Speaker 2 insincerity or just by people who use it as a way to define themselves

Speaker 1 hijacked is hijacked they've been hijacked hijacked yeah that's it

Speaker 1 for yeah which is very sad actually because it just yeah we could take it back

Speaker 2 probably we can take it back from those hijackers fuck them

Speaker 1 I mean I mean

Speaker 2 yeah I mean

Speaker 2 there's do you know Alex Gray is no Alex Gray is a visionary artist he does a lot of like very very intricate psychedelic pieces that are like iconic. He's very famous in like the psychedelic world.

Speaker 2 His stuff is really

Speaker 1 good. I'm sure you have.

Speaker 2 He's very, very famous.

Speaker 1 Oh, yeah.

Speaker 2 But we were talking about this, and he said that he took

Speaker 2 the term God back.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 It would be good to. Yeah.
Well, I think he kind of has.

Speaker 2 He actually has a church.

Speaker 1 He has a church. Really?

Speaker 2 Yeah, yeah, yeah. And it's like he had 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.

Speaker 2 So it looks like some insane, like magical spiritual retreat that you would find somewhere. Like, see if we can find

Speaker 2 Chapel of Sacred Mirrors.

Speaker 1 Where is this?

Speaker 2 Upstate New York.

Speaker 1 Upstate New York.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But the 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

Speaker 2 like multiple sides of faces all connected together and this is like this oh wow yeah so this is the outside of his building it's really incredible

Speaker 2 that's the building isn't that amazing so the building is very very much like his type of tryptamine inspired art where like you know have you all these third eyes like in a fractal form there's this geometric pattern on the roof and everything is like that it's really amazing phenomenal and you know he's been working on it forever what is

Speaker 1 is he professing anything

Speaker 1 I don't know

Speaker 2 what his keep phone is there an order as such I mean

Speaker 2 that's Alex when he was very young yeah

Speaker 2 but he's been you know in the sort of psychedelic space and psychedelic art space forever and he had this uh incredible place in new york city and then he decided to do this whole church just click it right there and just like play it out

Speaker 1 i don't really know what the video is okay it's 20 minutes long

Speaker 1 i see

Speaker 2 so a lot of his

Speaker 1 so that's his wife is this derived from

Speaker 2 yeah like yeah acid and magic magic mushroom says it right there it comes out of the psychedelic experience okay yeah yeah he's been a long time proponent of

Speaker 2 psychedelics. Just a very, very interesting guy.

Speaker 1 And his artwork is just incredible.

Speaker 2 Like really...

Speaker 2 But like probably the most accurate encapsulation of these experiences in, you know, in an artistic form.

Speaker 1 Really wild stuff.

Speaker 2 And again, this is, you know, he's the way he's got it set up now. He's in the woods.
So he's in this beautiful, like, rural area. And then he's got this incredible chapel that's up there.

Speaker 1 So it's pretty fucking cool.

Speaker 1 Well, I'm certainly a believer in other realms that we don't see on a daily basis basis.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 I mean,

Speaker 1 I've had a few experiences that would.

Speaker 1 Whether that's a dream within a dream or whether it's reality, I don't actually know.

Speaker 2 Well, one of the things that I've talked to about

Speaker 2 with some pretty insanely brilliant people is quantum computing.

Speaker 1 Oh, yes.

Speaker 2 And this new Google quantum computer that can do essentially the way a quantum computer works, a problem that would take thousands of years

Speaker 2 for every computer on Earth to solve.

Speaker 2 It can solve in a second.

Speaker 2 Something that can take more years than you literally can understand.

Speaker 2 It can be solved in 15 minutes.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I read that.

Speaker 2 It's insane. And this is where it gets really weird.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But the idea is that they're pulling answers from different universes simultaneously. They don't even completely understand

Speaker 2 how this is working.

Speaker 2 But the amount of power in computing is incomprehensible.

Speaker 2 Incomprehensible. Like you're only looking at it, and there's numbers, you could write all those numbers out, but your brain's not capable of grasping really what's going on.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 So see if you can Google an explanation of how quantum computers work.

Speaker 2 Was it Mark Andreessen that was explaining to us that it's pulling from different universes?

Speaker 4 No, no, that

Speaker 4 was being talked about in the wording of the Willow description. Right.

Speaker 4 But I also, just to add, when I was reading about this, they said that these benchmark numbers are coming off of Google's own data.

Speaker 4 Like, they're the ones that set the scale of

Speaker 4 what some of the quantum are you skeptical?

Speaker 1 Is that what you're saying? I'm just not. Do you call it bullshit on Google?

Speaker 2 No, not at all. Not at all.
Not at all.

Speaker 4 No, no, I'm just a grain of salt. Like, just to say that, like, except I think they used tillions is the number or something except that.

Speaker 4 No one even can grasp that. Yeah.
That's just based, but that's a number based off of their formula, too. Right.

Speaker 2 That's all. Right.
What is the definition of how it works?

Speaker 2 The way it pulls from multi-universes.

Speaker 4 I think 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. You'd have to have more than one.
And that's just...

Speaker 1 Like, what does that mean? I don't know what that is.

Speaker 2 Exactly.

Speaker 1 What does that mean?

Speaker 2 What is that thing that they have? And if you've ever seen the chip itself, the chip itself is very small.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 It's like the size of a saltine cracker.

Speaker 2 And then this entire mechanism around it is just the insane amount of cooling.

Speaker 1 Okay.

Speaker 2 Google's quantum AI founder said the performance gains lead lend, excuse me, the performance gains lends credence to the idea that we live in a multiverse.

Speaker 2 The idea is that Willow might be communicating with parallel universes to finish calculations faster.

Speaker 2 Like what what does that mean?

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 And then it says, excuse me?

Speaker 2 This obviously has caused a bit of a stir and isn't, and it isn't exactly clear on how he made that leap.

Speaker 2 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 still in the theoretical research phase of this journey.

Speaker 2 This is very weird stuff. An evolving scientific field that even people working on it don't fully understand.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 2 Okay, here's what is a quantum computer. Let's explain this.

Speaker 2 The computer we use every day

Speaker 2 and have been iterating on for the past several decades are known are what is known as a classical computer. Essentially, a classical computer utilizes binary as its language of choice.

Speaker 2 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 zero or one.

Speaker 2 Computers track data based on the language of bits. 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.

Speaker 2 If you're familiar with the concept of superposition or Schrödinger's cat, 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.

Speaker 2 Rather than only recording a 1 or a 0, it records both because it can be both.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 So let's boil it down to a very small example. If you have two bits which can return a value value of one or zero, there are four potential states that it can be recorded.
0, 0, 0, 1, 1, 1, and 1, 0.

Speaker 2 If each of these states takes one second to record, it would take a classical computer four seconds to record every position permutation, every possible permutation.

Speaker 2 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 positions, all four possible states in one second.

Speaker 2 The real power here

Speaker 2 is achieved when you add a much higher number of qubits together and try to record every possible state.

Speaker 2 Once again, something that would take a classical computer far longer can be achieved quickly because a quantum computer can record a number of potential states at once rather than one of a time.

Speaker 2 Okay, we basically don't know what the fuck we're saying here. This is just too weird.

Speaker 2 Okay, so this is what it is. One of the world's most advanced classical computers.

Speaker 2 Okay, here it is with

Speaker 2 this problem. So AI's founder and lead, Hartmut Nevin, said that the new chip had performed a purposefully complicated exercise called a random circuit sampling benchmark in five minutes.

Speaker 2 One of the world's most advanced classical supercomputers, on the other hand, it would take 10

Speaker 2 and then 3 0s, 3 0s, 3 0s 3 0s 3 0s 3 0 3 0 3 0 3 0 0

Speaker 2 years to perform the same exercise.

Speaker 2 That's 10 septillion years which exceeds known time scales in physics and vastly exceeds the age of the universe so it can do more time than vastly exceeds the entire age of the universe and it can do it in five minutes And the reason it could achieve such a monumental improvement in calculating capacity is because Willow is made above 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.

Speaker 2 So, like, what is happening?

Speaker 1 That's too much information. What is? What do you mean? I get it, but I don't get it.

Speaker 2 I don't get how does that prove the multiverse or provide evidence that the multiverse is real? Like, and that it's getting it from parallel universes.

Speaker 1 Like, what are we even saying?

Speaker 1 It couldn't come up with those answers within the allotted time span that's

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 What?

Speaker 1 Fuck, I can't even. I can't even explain.
I mean, funnily enough, this is that my brother's into

Speaker 1 all of this stuff, Sean.

Speaker 1 In simpler language.

Speaker 1 He would probably be able to explain it to you. Sean is probably.

Speaker 1 Well, he would give it a shot. He would, certainly.

Speaker 2 I think he was the one that was probably explaining it to us.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 What the fuck does that mean? How are they sharing data between universes? I don't know. Ask Nevin.

Speaker 2 Remember, this is all theoretical and doesn't prove anything, but Nevin is saying that the fact that a chip can

Speaker 2 outperform our best supercomputers by such a wide margin means that it might have broken Newton's theory of physics.

Speaker 1 Yo. What does it say under that, Jamie?

Speaker 2 What does this mean for me? Keep that going.

Speaker 2 Put that back on. Scroll up a little bit.

Speaker 1 It's right here.

Speaker 2 Okay, this is what I want to look at. At this point,

Speaker 2 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, incredibly specific chambers.

Speaker 2 Yeah, this is the thing.

Speaker 2 Cooler than, 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, etc., for fear of that noise leading to potential mistakes, and have specific signals delivered by purpose-built wires.

Speaker 2 Who figured this out?

Speaker 1 Where are those eggheads?

Speaker 1 Jesus. How did they even come up with that if that has to be the case?

Speaker 2 I don't know. How did they figure out that you have to do that?

Speaker 1 All of it.

Speaker 1 That's just brain-damn.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 No question.

Speaker 2 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,

Speaker 2 people just living in Rovello, just having an espresso and a cigarette and getting a slice of pizza.

Speaker 1 Maybe they realize and they just say, fuck it.

Speaker 2 But it seems like the human race desires all things.

Speaker 2 The human race desires people like yourself who enjoy photography and travel and this beautiful experience of life, 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.

Speaker 1 Like all those things.

Speaker 1 It hurts my brain.

Speaker 1 I mean, I'd love to know more.

Speaker 1 Well, just think about what we're doing right now.

Speaker 2 Just think about what we're doing.

Speaker 1 Actually, we're taught how a TV works

Speaker 1 or the radio. I'm still not.

Speaker 1 I'm still back there.

Speaker 2 What makes this louder? What makes the microphone carry our voice? How is this being encoded into

Speaker 2 a form that's going to be instantaneously delivered to millions of people?

Speaker 2 So millions of people who are hearing this right now, like as it gets to them, not right now, but once it gets released, the millions of people that are hearing this are getting it through the sky on their phone.

Speaker 1 I resign.

Speaker 1 I truly resign on that level. I can't.
I can't. It doesn't.

Speaker 2 No, I can't either, but it's pretty amazing. It's pretty amazing.
It's

Speaker 2 an amazing time to be alive.

Speaker 1 I'm fascinated by it every day, and that's why with

Speaker 1 subjects that are happening with AI right now, I find it 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.

Speaker 2 I think we're the last of the regular people.

Speaker 1 It's quite possible.

Speaker 2 I think this experience that we're we're having, this experience that you're having like on a motorcycle with no signal, just driving through the countryside, like just being alive.

Speaker 1 I think we're the last of those people. I think what's even that sounds like a dream, though.
I know. You know, I mean, just

Speaker 1 the whole concept of that is dreamworthy.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I d

Speaker 1 I mean, I I have a number of theories on who we are and where we came from and

Speaker 1 UFOs.

Speaker 1 What do you think?

Speaker 1 Well, I you know, to some degree I'd always felt even as a as a young kid that that the UFOs were us coming back for history lessons

Speaker 1 basically and that the the

Speaker 1 the vehicles were driven by

Speaker 1 our minds anyway

Speaker 1 but I I mean I've I've seen as dad had also seen a UFO I've clearly seen a UFO

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 Upper East Side in an apartment that I visited. I went to see him at.

Speaker 1 He's standing on the roof of this apartment where

Speaker 1 he was living at the time. And,

Speaker 1 you know,

Speaker 1 it's on film. He clearly says this thing came along.
I can tell you exactly what it looked like, went up the Hudson, went under the bridge, and then zapped off.

Speaker 1 My experience, I've had two experiences, but the most profound was, funnily enough, was one of those flights on good old TWA.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I was in the front part of the plane and I was had been given, because I was quite young,

Speaker 1 maybe

Speaker 1 anywhere between eight and ten. I don't know, eleven maybe.

Speaker 1 And I was going to see Dad

Speaker 1 for for one of the first times in the US.

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 the guy that was escorting me over

Speaker 1 gave me a one of those first time I'd ever seen them one of those books that had blank pages. I thought wow those are weird.

Speaker 1 You know I quite unusual I'd never seen them over in England before just these hardback black covered books with nothing inside. So

Speaker 1 I had one of those and a colouring set so I was I guess relatively young.

Speaker 1 Everybody had watched the movie, everybody had gone to sleep. I was staring out the bloody window as I normally do.

Speaker 1 And I was in front of the wing on the right-hand side.

Speaker 1 And I'm just staring out at the stars, literally.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I kid you not,

Speaker 1 um,

Speaker 1 all of a sudden I I I see your archetypal UFO with the lights around,

Speaker 1 light on top. It was silver,

Speaker 1 or, you know, have a

Speaker 1 reflective

Speaker 1 metal

Speaker 1 with white lights all the way, pulsating white lights all the way around.

Speaker 1 It stayed there. I can't tell you how long.

Speaker 1 How far away from the plane was there? It was right there. It was.

Speaker 1 50 feet.

Speaker 2 50 feet from the wing of the plane.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. In front of the wing of the plane.

Speaker 2 Did anybody else notice it?

Speaker 1 Nobody else was there. Everybody else was asleep.

Speaker 1 There was no stewardesses. There was no, nobody was away.

Speaker 2 What about the pilots?

Speaker 1 That I don't know. All I know is what I saw.
I would have wanted to ask them.

Speaker 1 I just, I guess I was kind of freaked out or just okay with it. I can't even.
How old were you at the time?

Speaker 1 You know,

Speaker 1 8, 9, 10, 11, something like that.

Speaker 2 And how big do you think it was?

Speaker 1 I would say it seemed about the radius would be about the width of this room.

Speaker 1 But what happened was,

Speaker 1 so I watched it for a few seconds, but I knew we were going along at somewhere in between

Speaker 1 three and five hundred miles an hour. I think the old, big, old 747s used to reach that kind of speed.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 it just started doing this,

Speaker 1 going up at the same speed.

Speaker 1 And I'm watching it through the window going up and over. And there was nobody in the seats on the other side.
And so I ran to the other side and was at the window like this. And

Speaker 1 I was at a seat or two in front of where I actually wasn't here.

Speaker 1 And it came down the other side.

Speaker 1 This is on my mother's life. It came down on the other side

Speaker 1 and sort of pitched itself there for a few seconds.

Speaker 1 Proceeded to move forward

Speaker 1 what looked like relatively quite slow. And then literally just went

Speaker 1 and disappeared forward. And that was there.
And I and

Speaker 1 that was

Speaker 1 at

Speaker 1 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? Fuck it, no, damn.

Speaker 1 Tell me about it. I don't know what happened to that, but

Speaker 1 as clear as day, as clear as day.

Speaker 1 On my life, my mother's life.

Speaker 2 Did you, and this is going to sound crazy. Did you

Speaker 2 have a sense that that was for you?

Speaker 2 That you weren't just seeing something, but that maybe that was for you?

Speaker 1 I could have taken that

Speaker 1 angle.

Speaker 1 I mean, there's been moments in in my life, certainly, that I felt things have happened at a particular time for me to notice things

Speaker 1 that it was related to my life experience.

Speaker 1 I mean, half of the things I couldn't tell you what they were, but I mean,

Speaker 1 White Feather was an example of that. Right.

Speaker 1 Where for me,

Speaker 1 that was

Speaker 1 undoubtedly a sign,

Speaker 1 a relevant sign that made me

Speaker 1 certainly feel that

Speaker 1 and I'd had other experiences, that that was

Speaker 1 a real connection, a real message,

Speaker 1 indirectly.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 the white feather is so profound.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 They're like,

Speaker 2 it's just, it's a coincidence.

Speaker 1 It's this.

Speaker 2 My question is, are you sure? Are you sure? You know,

Speaker 2 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

Speaker 1 stuff going on. I mean, I've seen.

Speaker 1 I was invited to a location where I was staying.

Speaker 1 And I had this experience where I saw

Speaker 1 quite clearly, I was on my own again, of course,

Speaker 1 and I was looking out to the sea. This was down in Mexico.
And

Speaker 1 I was literally just kind of drifting off. And I, without question,

Speaker 1 at least I believe so, I saw

Speaker 1 to me what looked like Mayan Indians, see-through,

Speaker 1 dancing around a fire.

Speaker 1 And I went, What the fuck? I mean, I really

Speaker 1 kind of got a little scared. I went,

Speaker 1 What am I seeing?

Speaker 1 How am I seeing this? Why?

Speaker 1 Anyway, it was all a bit weird. And

Speaker 1 at the breakfast table the next day, and I'd never been to this place before, I was invited down as a guest, and I

Speaker 1 and the host hostess said,

Speaker 1 You know, how did you sleep? Is everything all right?

Speaker 1 I said, well, I don't want to say anything, but

Speaker 1 I think I saw some

Speaker 1 see-through Mayan Indians last night. Oh, you didn't know that this was built on a Mayan Indian burial ground? I said, shut the front door.

Speaker 1 She said,

Speaker 1 that freaked me out. firstly.
And then,

Speaker 1 of course,

Speaker 1 she comes back into the room with a tray of artifacts, you know,

Speaker 1 uh,

Speaker 1 spearheads and a few other things and other tools that they use.

Speaker 1 But then she came, she did one better. She came, goes and brings in a book that's

Speaker 1 a very, very thick book with the generations of Mayan

Speaker 1 and civilizations that have been there

Speaker 1 before.

Speaker 1 And so she says, you know, have a look.

Speaker 1 And I'm flipping through the books, the book,

Speaker 1 and I see the exact

Speaker 1 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

Speaker 1 sky blue. Kind of that

Speaker 1 colour.

Speaker 1 And that's

Speaker 1 in a particular

Speaker 1 arrangement on their headdresses and

Speaker 1 the skirts and

Speaker 1 and I said that's them and they said oh yeah that would that was the particular era and that's where we got where the where the property was built on and

Speaker 1 and I just went well okay all right that just to me I'm sorry that just says between between the between that and the white feather

Speaker 1 yeah and there's one or two other incidences I just went, yeah, there's so much more shit that we don't know

Speaker 1 that lives and breathes and exists around. And there was something written the other day also,

Speaker 1 whether it's today or yesterday, saying that, you know, our ears and our eyes can only see so much,

Speaker 1 you know, humans,

Speaker 1 that there exists so much more that we don't have a clue about.

Speaker 1 So I'm just going, okay, there's

Speaker 1 if only.

Speaker 2 Well, you have to go back to the idea that eyes didn't exist at one point in time. They were single-celled organisms.
Yeah. Right?

Speaker 2 And so they became multi-celled organisms, and then they developed simultaneous eyesight in the ocean and on land.

Speaker 2 And then this idea that your eyes allow you to see, so therefore you're seeing everything, is kind of silly. Because before the eyes existed, there was no perception,

Speaker 2 not using light. There was no way you could see things.

Speaker 2 So, why would we assume that this is all that the senses could potentially interact with?

Speaker 2 That maybe we just don't have them, and maybe this is what I've said a lot about like psychic communication and telekinesis and all these different things.

Speaker 2 I think they're emerging

Speaker 2 properties of human consciousness that haven't achieved like a full-blown integration yet.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 my real suspicion is that that the biological evolution is not going to make it there in time and that the technological evolution is going to intervene and push us

Speaker 2 just like that UFO disappeared in space, just

Speaker 2 took off. 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

Speaker 2 in a way that you won't be able to even imagine life without it.

Speaker 2 It's scary, but it's also

Speaker 2 scary to not be a monkey anymore and to be in a taxicab. You know, it's scary when that happened.

Speaker 2 You know, it's scary to not, you know, have to walk everywhere and then all of a sudden you're flying in a plane. Oh, that is kind of scary.

Speaker 1 I would love to be

Speaker 1 a fly in the wall. Oh, my God.

Speaker 2 I would have loved...

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 That's my number one place in history. The next would be, what was it like when Genghis Khan was running through Asia? What was that like? You know, those are two.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 There's there's a lot of unanswered things out there, but I s I s I'm a

Speaker 1 you know, I make the odd documentary, so I'm I'm a documentary watcher

Speaker 1 whenever I can, really. That's sometimes it's either Anthony Bourdain or a documentary that puts me to sleep most evenings.
Oh, I don't know. After after watching them, not during them.

Speaker 1 But yeah, no, so

Speaker 1 I thirst for information half the time. Whether I retain it or not, it's another thing, but I certainly am driven to absorb

Speaker 1 what I can.

Speaker 2 As am I.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 what's your take?

Speaker 2 I think certain memories are so potent and 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.

Speaker 2 And it depends on the state of the people,

Speaker 2 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...

Speaker 2 I think all these factors come into play and occasionally people see whispers of the past. Or maybe it's not even that it's the past.
Maybe it's those things are happening.

Speaker 2 They're just not happening in this level of the multiverse and that all things that have ever happened are happening simultaneously all at once.

Speaker 2 in this very bizarre structure that the universe is actually made out of.

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 You know, like we have a very limited view of this thing that is impossible to grasp. Just like those numbers of septillion, whatever.
It's impossible.

Speaker 1 You can't grasp it.

Speaker 2 I have a feeling that's everything. I think everything, like that, that Kung Fu movie, Everything All At Once.

Speaker 2 I think that's there's probably a lot to that. There's probably a lot to that this isn't a binary experience.

Speaker 1 This is this probably is. I just want to hope we get to understand some of it.

Speaker 2 It's kind of fun to not and kind of fun to like speculate. One day.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 But the question is once you do know, would that be better? Would it be better? Or is there something?

Speaker 1 Well, I mean, do you have to know everything?

Speaker 1 Just give us a hint.

Speaker 2 You might exactly. The problem is you might know everything.
You know, you know, it's probably

Speaker 1 remembering that's what many say, that it's you're just remembering things.

Speaker 2 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 there.

Speaker 1 Correct. It's all in the ether.
It's who gets there first. Yeah.

Speaker 2 Do you feel like that way with your music sometimes? Like that ideas just sort of come to you from the museum?

Speaker 1 Absolutely.

Speaker 2 Yeah, I think everybody does.

Speaker 1 No question about it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 Even with photography?

Speaker 2 I think

Speaker 2 there's something that tells you to capture this thing that's going to resonate with you.

Speaker 1 No question about it.

Speaker 1 I mean, one of my favorite pictures in the book is one called Hope, and it's of this little girl in Ethiopia. that

Speaker 1 I was actually there to take a photograph of this person who was cutting the ribbon to open

Speaker 1 a new freshwater well

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I just

Speaker 1 heard this noise behind me and we were under a plastic cover it was sweltering out there

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 again because I'm shy and I don't set things up. I

Speaker 1 maybe it's like a gorilla street shot you know

Speaker 1 And I just

Speaker 1 had this feeling that I needed to turn around.

Speaker 1 And I did turn around, and I just saw this young girl just kind of

Speaker 1 looking at me like

Speaker 1 the only thing I can say is that,

Speaker 1 again,

Speaker 1 that everything's going to be alright.

Speaker 1 For this little girl there

Speaker 1 to kind of go,

Speaker 1 it's okay we're gonna be okay you know that's that's the impression I got from her it's it was just this look it's kind of like that Nat Geo moment you know and I literally span around

Speaker 1 snapped the shot and turned around and never looked back again and when I did

Speaker 1 she'd gone she was with a group of friends and I didn't actually know if I'd got the shot because because again my eyesight's not the best and and I certainly couldn't see it properly on the back of my camera in the middle of a bloody desert.

Speaker 1 So it was only when I got back to the hotel and put it into the

Speaker 1 computer that I went,

Speaker 1 oh, but

Speaker 1 that face to me was just like this,

Speaker 1 we're gonna be okay. Yeah,

Speaker 1 and

Speaker 1 I don't know, those kind of moments

Speaker 1 give me some kind of, as I called it, hope, you know, that

Speaker 1 that

Speaker 1 we'll do okay at the end of the day, you know.

Speaker 1 But that's a very human element and a very, you know,

Speaker 1 warm embrace,

Speaker 1 which I choose to,

Speaker 1 you know, kind of take on board as opposed to think that it's uh it's anything other than that, really.

Speaker 1 I I share that thought. I think we're going to be okay.

Speaker 2 But I think that there has to be the possibility that we're not going to be okay for us to appreciate that we're going to be okay.

Speaker 1 Correct. Yeah.
Correct. It's the yin and yang.
It's the balance thing again.

Speaker 2 It's the horrors of the world to recognize the beauty.

Speaker 1 Correct. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And I think quite a few people are recognizing that too.

Speaker 1 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 you know yes um and i don't mean in that soppy hippie way either it's like genuine you know um

Speaker 1 concern and love

Speaker 1 and respect for where we are yeah and this is we are so lucky i mean we're so so lucky you know i think i think it was actually

Speaker 1 Professor Brian Cox that just goes, this is insane that we're here now. Yeah.
having this experience.

Speaker 1 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,

Speaker 1 if we do.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so we know that one.

Speaker 2 It's also, yeah, boy, that's a, when it's explained to you by brilliant people,

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 Yeah. Ouch, that hurts.

Speaker 2 But wouldn't you think that, though, if you're simultaneously running Tesla and a rocket company and fucking,

Speaker 2 I mean, he's just, he seems like he's in a simulation, you know, 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.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 Well, he's certainly thinking he's, you want to talk about a multiverse going on at the same time.

Speaker 1 He's already there. That's for sure.
Yeah.

Speaker 2 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.
Yeah. I think that level's fun.

Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2 But it's also, it's like, what do you do with that information? Like, if you know, like, if you've decided this this is a simulation,

Speaker 2 what are you experiencing? Are these experiences real or is it

Speaker 2 still real? So real feelings and real moments still do exist. So does it keep the nitrogen?

Speaker 1 But does that change your purpose also? Does it?

Speaker 2 Does it change how you feel? Does it change the people you love? Does it change, you know?

Speaker 1 But I mean, you certainly look at him and go,

Speaker 1 you want to talk about being a go-getter, making things happen.

Speaker 1 He believes it's possible. So he does it.
Yeah.

Speaker 1 And, you know,

Speaker 1 I think that's the same with a lot of people, obviously not to that extreme.

Speaker 1 But, you know, I think we do make our own fortune in life. Yeah.

Speaker 1 In some weird way. I think we are responsible partly for our destiny, for

Speaker 1 our paths in life.

Speaker 2 Do you believe in free will?

Speaker 2 It's a tricky one, right? Fuck.

Speaker 2 It's a tricky one.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 2 There's something there that is free will.

Speaker 2 I believe in determinism as well.

Speaker 1 You have choices. Yeah.

Speaker 2 You do have choices, but how much of your choices are shaped by your past, your biology, life experiences, genetics?

Speaker 2 You know, how much of it is, you know, there's that argument, like Sapolsky makes the argument that that's going to be 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.

Speaker 2 Right. 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.

Speaker 2 I feel like there's there are decisions that you can make and you make these decisions and change your life.

Speaker 2 You and you can change the life of other people, and you know that you can do it, and you're doing it through will. There's something about focusing your energy and

Speaker 2 your desires and

Speaker 2 your life

Speaker 2 goal, your path to something.

Speaker 2 That's a real thing. Yeah.

Speaker 1 And things happening at a particular time.

Speaker 2 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.
I think also

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 2 But to dismiss the concept of the multiverse, also equally silly.

Speaker 2 To dismiss this idea that you have no free will. It's like, I'm not sure because

Speaker 2 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?

Speaker 2 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've fucked this up before.

Speaker 2 This time I'm not going to. This time I'm going to move forward.
Is that free will? Because it certainly seems like it to me.

Speaker 2 And that's not discounting the impact of determinism, which is all the events of your life and your biology and all that stuff.

Speaker 1 It's something shared.

Speaker 2 It's a lot of different stuff going on simultaneously. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1 I don't think you can say it's one or the other.

Speaker 2 No, I don't think so either. But people love to do that, though.
They want to put a stamp on something.

Speaker 1 Yeah, well, pigeonholing.

Speaker 2 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.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 open-mindedness is...

Speaker 1 something that is a necessity in this strange, weird world that we live in. It's fun though, right? Yeah.
Oh, no, absolutely. Absolutely.

Speaker 1 I certainly have enjoyed the process, but it's funny that what you're saying, how you're saying things, because

Speaker 1 it makes it I 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

Speaker 1 where I believe I should be in the future. Yeah, I mean that's you know, quite uh

Speaker 1 I find quite an interesting one that

Speaker 1 this whole

Speaker 1 also concept of

Speaker 1 my mind's going blank, not enough coffee today,

Speaker 1 that you're

Speaker 1 what do you call it when you're putting it out there?

Speaker 1 I'm really brain dead right now.

Speaker 1 When you're visualizing

Speaker 1 the future and the possibilities

Speaker 1 manifesting your dream studies

Speaker 1 But,

Speaker 1 you know, is there some truth to that? I mean, does it

Speaker 1 because that does seem to happen

Speaker 1 to a degree?

Speaker 2 It just doesn't always happen.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 1 I don't think it's a factor. Not at all.

Speaker 2 I think it's a factor.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a possibility. I agree with you on that.

Speaker 1 But there's something definitely to that.

Speaker 1 I definitely think.

Speaker 1 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.

Speaker 2 You put your energy and your focus into something and the thing becomes real and you're like, oh my God,

Speaker 2 I'm manifested.

Speaker 1 Yeah.

Speaker 1 How did that happen without that?

Speaker 2 But it's also work.

Speaker 1 Like this is

Speaker 2 people get this bizarre thing that if you just manifest something, that it'll just occur.

Speaker 1 No, that's never the case.

Speaker 1 No, there's a ton of energy behind it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 It's a weird process. that comes into that, for sure.

Speaker 2 Julian, I've really enjoyed talking to you. This is a lot of fun.

Speaker 1 Thank you, likewise. Back at you.

Speaker 2 And I really enjoy your photography. And your book is available.
Life's Fragile Moments. It's an awesome coffee table-sized

Speaker 1 collection.

Speaker 2 Let's do this again sometime, man.

Speaker 1 Thank you. My absolute pleasure.

Speaker 2 My pleasure as well. Thank you very much.
All right.

Speaker 1 Bye, everybody. Bye-bye.