EPISODE 23: JARRETT SLEEPER
JARRETT SLEEPER
On Samurai ethos, what to say to the guy at the airport, and the value of getting your ass kicked.
Jarrett Sleeper is an actor, creator, and podcaster. As an actor, you’ve seen Jarrett all over T.V. on shows for Disney, ABC, NBC, Showtime MTV, and more. You may also know him as co-host of the hugely popular Web talkshow, Totally Clevver. He co-created, wrote, composed, and produced the show The Forth Door for Go90, Verizon’s mobile video platform and he wrote and directed an anthology of spooky stories for Nickelodeon called Don’t Go Alone. He’s also had a bunch of viral video hits, including his satirical Moon Juice Video. He has a collection of poetry coming out, and is a brown belt in jiu jitsu. Recently, Jarrett has been the host of an awesome podcast about mental health. You can hear the second part of our conversation on Jarrett’s podcast, which is called my good bad brain. Which can be downloaded wherever you get your podcasts. Make sure to check it out here.
Jarrett Sleeper on IMDB
QUOTES FROM THIS EPISODE
7:01 ~ "It starts as jokes. As a way to prod at the cool people and the nice people the shiny people and make them uncomfortable. And it just slides and you never face the honest anger you have and you never try to get to the root of it. And so that ironic shittiness leads to true evil, [which] leads to the MAGA shit. And then it's only compounded when they have friends who all wear the red hats too and they're suddenly in public and people are being horrible to them because they're like, 'you're being horrible,' and they go, 'you deserve that' and then they go, 'wow they're being horrible to me just because of this hat. Wow, we really are us versus them.'"
9:18 ~ "If I have a problematic point of view, it's probably because I was raised to think it wasn't. It was like it was just normal. That's how I'm supposed to look at the world. 'We brought civilization to the Western world.' Not ‘we genocided an entire continent and never gave them a chance.’ So if I express something and someone says, 'hey that's fucked up they used that word...' And I go like, 'Oh shit shit shit. I'm in woke jail. Oh fuck. Okay okay I won't say that anymore.' But really I'm like, 'I didn't do anything wrong. That's what they taught me in school. I don't know... It's not my fault I'm a white, straight guy.' Then I stop there, then the resentment grows and you never get anywhere."
18:12 ~ "We are in a life and death struggle every day. Our body only knows the paradigm of I'm living or I'm dying. All of our habits are hard to break... because our body knows that whatever we're doing now - at least the vessel is alive. So why would I change anything? Any change is a risk of the system. So I definitely think it's not an accident that we feel like we're in a life or death situation every day."
24:09 ~ "For sure, the educational system and being raised in the body that I am has been totally shaped by white supremacy, colonial supremacy, Western European supremacy, all that stuff, that's so fucking real. Also, under capitalism, I truly believe, fundamentally... we're only allowed to think in binary ways. Like a ledger. 'Are we good, are we bad today? Are we feeling good or are we feeling bad? Are we doing good or are we doing bad? Is the world good or is the world bad?' And it's only very recently that I've had the term 'dialectic' really, truly presented to me and some of the philosophy explored in some of the things I've read. And I was like, 'fuck I finally found something that is telling me the truth about how things are.'”
24:50 ~ "It's all of the things at once. And the truth and honesty and reality of a situation is some mean of the constant flowing negotiation between infinite forces and whatever the sort of mishmash of that ends up being at the end... And it is never static and it is never one thing."
26:41 ~ "Whatever's happening must be tacitly okay, because it exists. And if I can at least get that foothold, then I can start climbing out or do something."
31:06 ~ “When you start talking about things that are very true, language fails.” - KF
52:58 ~ "I need to be able to acknowledge when my body is giving me some insane fear response and go like, 'I really appreciate what you're doing and I know why you're doing it, but I can't let you have the steering wheel. I've figured it out now.' And... I think of my demon, or my vessel, or whatever, as the wolf. I've negotiated with the wolf. And there periods in my life where I've had these real weird, personal, Gollum-y conversations with it, where... I realized - it wasn't compartmentalizing, in the sense of 'that's not part of me. I'm just this higher being. I'm not this thing that wants to fuck and fight and eat things' - It was appreciating it, like a dog. And petting it like this dog that barks at people that come near me because it's trying to protect me And going like, 'I really know why you're doing it and I know it's because you have you my best interests at heart, but you're hurting people around me. And me.' And it's weird that we can have these two things that are both just as much US."
54:41 ~ "Whenever I feel like I come close to touching something that's capital T true, like TRUTH, I always have that. When you see people... really being people. Or when you think about... Just the impossibility and the wonder of it. It overwhelms me. It's more like truth of some kind then really sad or really beautiful. It's TRUTH. It's hard to hold on to. To me, it just feels like mass... Like I can't contain it in this, so your body just goes, 'wooooauhg.'”
56:17 ~ “Every person is a poem.”
1:05:53 ~ "Any thought I have that's a ‘21 grams thought’ comes through electrons and fucking protons and shit smashing into each other in my brain. They're the source of chemicals and other, I don't know, physics sort of bullshit. So... they're inherently together. And yeah, if you feel love and that's like a big cascade of serotonin and dopamine all these things and it just blossoms in your chest you can feel it - you can feel an adrenaline response just like falling over you like hot tea - It's like, that's physical."
1:10:02 ~ "If we can if we can find a way to shift our consciousness, then that's when spontaneous transformation can occur. Like enough with this 'OK we're trying to change, we're changing.' By the way, wonderful. Let's all try and change let's all grow. Let's all become aware of the things in our lives that make us feel not safe or unhappy and let's try and change those. Wonderful. But the only space in which true transformation is possible - where you can go from one thing to another thing spontaneously - is the space in which our consciousness is open to change." - KF
1:17:14 ~ "I've gotten resentful in the past of other people who seemed disappointed in me for not being successful enough or not being rich enough or something like that... But when I really looked at that, it was that I felt that about myself... really it was me feeling like I'm not living my truth. I'm not in the world doing things that I want to be doing. I'm not being the type of person I would like to be... Usually, I think at the root of things that really hurt us that people say to us, is that we have some sense of truth around that also."
1:33:56 ~ "It's so beautiful what people can be. And the idea that they're like you, but not - like that divinity can live in this fucking animal and that we can create some sort of practice and ritual around truly accessing and sharing this divinity. That to me is the essence of 'it's okay.'”