2243 - Julian Lennon

High-Level Overview

Musician, photographer and filmmaker Julian Lennon sits down with Joe Rogan for a relaxed, wandering conversation that ranges from a recent skin cancer scare to life in Monaco, the dark side of Hollywood parties, and the strange burden of being John Lennon's son. The heart of the episode is Lennon's second career as a fine art photographer, which led to more than 40 exhibitions and his new coffee table book, Life's Fragile Moments, and the remarkable story behind his White Feather Foundation: a sign his father promised to send him that arrived, years later, from an Aboriginal elder in Australia. Along the way the two talk about anxiety and depression, quitting smoking, Italian food and seed oils, COVID lockdown absurdities, UFO sightings, Google's quantum computing chip, free will and the simulation hypothesis.

The tone is warm, gentle and often funny, with Lennon candid about his shyness and anxiety and Rogan in an expansive, philosophical mood. The conversation drifts easily between travel stories, personal revelations, spiritual experiences and big cosmic questions.

The Discussion Explores:

• Health scares, aging well, and Lennon's struggles with anxiety and depression
• Lab leaks, gain-of-function research and the fragility of modern life
• Motorcycles, Monaco, Corsica and the slower pace of Italian and French life
• Hollywood parties, fame and a culture chasing notoriety for its own sake
• How Lennon fell into photography, and the walls he faces as John Lennon's son
• The white feather story and the work of the White Feather Foundation
• Quitting smoking cold turkey, COVID restrictions in France, and nature as medicine
• UFOs, ghosts, quantum computing, the multiverse and free will

Deep Dive into Main Ideas

Health Scares, Aging and Anxiety

Lennon opens by explaining a small bandage on his head: a dermatologist had just removed a spot, and a couple of years earlier a mole on a birthmark he kept catching with a comb and picking at turned out to be cancerous. The call came at the end of a serious meeting and left him numb, especially since he has lost friends to cancer. He now gets a thorough checkup twice a year, saying he wants to be around for a long time. At 61 he refuses to follow the path of his uncles, who sat in front of the TV in their 50s with cigarettes and beer until heart attacks took them. His regime is simple: eat as healthily as he can and power walk a couple of times a week, which Rogan (57) endorses as one of the best forms of exercise.

Lennon admits he has dealt with a fair amount of depression and anxiety, and was anxious even about coming on the show, so he took a walk around Austin's Lady Bird Lake beforehand. When things go sideways, his go-to fixes are fresh air and walking, photography, and above all his motorcycle. A biker since his early teens, he likes to pick a spot on a map that looks interesting and just ride, often into the mountains above Monaco near the Italian border, sometimes with no phone signal for hours. He recalls an oil leak on a brand-new bike in the French wilderness, coasting down any hill he could to reach a village.

Lab Leaks, Pandemics and Choosing a Happy Life

A news story about hundreds of vials of dangerous viruses, including Hendra, Hantavirus and lyssavirus, going missing from a laboratory in Australia sends Rogan into a discussion of gain-of-function research. He describes visiting a biolab in Galveston, argues that COVID came from a lab where viruses were being made more infectious to humans, and criticizes the chain of funding from the NIH through EcoHealth Alliance to the Wuhan lab, along with what he sees as officials lying to Congress. He also recalls a former Soviet scientist describing vats of anthrax, and near-miss moments like the Cuban missile crisis and a false missile alert that one clear-headed person refused to act on.

Lennon's reaction is honest: "I need to be honest with you, I'm quite surprised we're still here," and he just wants to have a happy life with his family and friends. Rogan agrees but argues that if nobody had pushed back against COVID policies and censorship "we would all be fucked," so paying attention has become necessary. They settle on the idea of balance: Rogan suggests the universe provides a mix of good and evil, and the evil exists partly to help us appreciate and motivate the good.

Monaco, Corsica and the Mediterranean Way of Living

Lennon lives in Monaco, which he describes as transient and admits is a tax haven for rich people. He is not a beach person ("After 20 minutes, I start twitching"), but he is a foodie, and Monaco is half an hour from Italy. He raves about Corsica, which he had seen on the horizon for 25 or 30 years before finally taking a ferry over with a friend, no bookings, and circling the island in ten days: "It's like 10 countries on one island," with Caribbean-like water in the south and a blend of the best Italian and French food. He warns that Corsicans can be tough if you disrespect them, and says visitors to France do better when they make the effort to be warm and try a few words of the language.

He explains his love of Italy through his first stepfather, Roberto Bassanini, whose family ran hotels and restaurants, and with whom he spent childhood holidays skiing and at the seaside. Rogan says his blood pressure drops the moment he lands in Italy, and notes that Italian shouting never sounds like it will turn violent. Both marvel that they can eat pasta and pizza in Italy without feeling terrible; Rogan blames seed oils and sugar in American food, and Lennon adds that American portions would feed four people in Europe. Lennon also describes moving to Monaco on a whim about 30 years ago: after a London film premiere, a producer invited him down for the Grand Prix weekend, he watched cars fly past the famous Rascasse corner, and he phoned his caretaker in LA to sell the house. He then lived for ten years in a bare apartment with a couch, a TV on a trunk and a mattress on the floor.

Hollywood Parties, Fame and Notoriety

Lennon says he nearly went off the rails in the New York club scene of his early 20s and found Los Angeles dangerous too, because the bars closed at 1:30 but the parties moved to someone's house until dawn. Rogan, who remembers first seeing Lennon at a nightclub door in 1993, says he mostly avoided that world. He tells a funny story about being dragged by Dave Chappelle to Naomi Campbell's birthday party in the hills, reached by shuttle and an outdoor elevator shared with Demi Moore, with a 50-foot naked photograph of Campbell on the hillside. Chappelle whispered that he wouldn't want to be this famous, and Rogan had to tell him he was the most famous person there; the two fled back to the Comedy Store.

They agree that fame for its own sake has become the goal for many, amplified by phones and TikTok. Lennon worries about "being known for nothing" and a sense of entitlement in younger generations. Rogan distinguishes that from artists who become famous because people love what they made. They praise Professor Brian Cox as someone who can explain the cosmos to lay people, and Anthony Bourdain, whom Rogan credits with making him realize cooking is an art form.

Becoming a Photographer and the Burden of the Name

Lennon's photography began almost by accident. His friend Timothy White, a celebrity photographer who shot two of his album covers, caught him reworking White's photos from a charity shoot for a single called "Lucy, about Lucy Vodden, the inspiration for Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds, who died of lupus. White asked if he had his own photos and pushed him to exhibit. Lennon agreed on condition White mentor him, and says he was more petrified before his first show in New York in 2010 than before his first ever stage performance, because of the fear of what people would think of the second John." Despite a downpour on opening night, fine art reviews were glowing. He now has over 120,000 photos and more than 42 exhibitions, most recently a large museum show in Venice alongside Helmut Newton.

He has no technical training, in photography or music. He started with a simple autofocus compact camera on friends' advice, shoots only in natural or available light, never stages anything, and says his strength is capturing the moment. His terrible memory means he must relearn his own songs before any tour. Photography began on long-haul flights, where he photographed clouds while everyone else slept, sensing each view was a moment that would never come again. The book's cover shows Charlene Wittstock, now Princess of Monaco, on the day of her civil wedding: she asked him to photograph her at the last minute, and with only one camera beside star photographers with trolleys of gear, he found the only smiling shot included a cigarette and champagne. He removed the cigarette, desaturated the image in a 1950s magazine style, and turned the whole set into that look.

Rogan asks whether being John Lennon's son creates walls. Lennon says it does: publishers turned down a photo book for years, and when he released his album Jude, after legally changing his name in 2020 from John Charles Julian Lennon to simply Julian ("I want to be me finally"), major TV shows in the UK and US declined to book him even after good rehearsals. He feels he has "not been allowed to speak my piece," and suspects people do not want anyone to interfere with his father's legacy. Part of photography's appeal is that "I prefer it behind the camera."

The White Feather

The emotional center of the episode is the origin of the White Feather Foundation. Lennon explains that his father once told him that if anything ever happened to him, he would let Julian know he was okay in the form of a white feather. Years later, while his environmental and humanitarian song "Saltwater was number one in Australia, hotel staff in Adelaide called to say an Aboriginal group had arrived with TV crews to see him. He thought it was a prank. In the lobby, an elder named Iris presented him with a male swan's white feather and asked him to help, saying he had a voice. I'll do it for the children," he answered, and he says he gets goosebumps every time he tells the story. He still keeps the feather in its original envelope.

He spent ten years with his friend Kim making an independent documentary, Whale Dreamers, which won around eight international awards, and set up the foundation initially just as a vehicle to pass money back to the Mirning people. It grew as requests arrived. The foundation now works to protect Indigenous cultures and buy back land, and supports health and education in Africa, including the Cynthia Lennon Scholarship for girls, named for his mother. He describes girls in Kenya walking hours to school under daily threat of assault and sleeping in classrooms for safety. On a trip with the Amazon Conservation Team to the Kogi people in Colombia's Sierra Nevada, he shared a silent fire on the beach at sunset under a sky full of stars, which he calls "one of the most loving and most peaceful moments of my entire life." A favorite photo in the book, titled Hope, shows an Ethiopian girl he turned and snapped on instinct at a well opening.

Quitting Smoking, Lockdowns and Nature as a Vitamin

The story of Walt Disney's cigarette being edited out of photos leads Lennon to his own smoking. He started at 11 or 12 as a gang initiation, smoked two or three packs a day, and used cigarettes as a shield for his shyness at bars. He quit cold turkey, partly out of stubbornness because he did not want anyone else telling him he could not smoke, and it plunged him into a depression for a couple of years; a friend even told him, "Jules, pick up a fucking cigarette." Oddly, deep smoking gave him great breath-holding ability, and he now considers himself a shallow breather.

He describes lockdown in France and Monaco, where you needed written paperwork to leave home for an hour within one kilometer, half of which was sea, and the beach was off-limits. On his first walk out, a police officer leading trainees on a run berated him for not wearing a mask on an empty peninsula and demanded to know who he was with. Rogan argues that outdoor masking and distancing rules were illogical forced compliance and that the episode revealed how much some people enjoy controlling others. Lennon is now moving to a quiet property in the hills near Monaco surrounded by old oak trees, where "my shoulders just dropped." Rogan responds that "nature is a vitamin that we don't know we need," and recalls a simple, perfect moment sitting in the grass with his dog. They lament how words like mindfulness and God have been hijacked, and Rogan describes Alex Grey's Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in upstate New York as an attempt to reclaim them.

UFOs, Ghosts, Quantum Computing and Free Will

Lennon says he has always felt "the UFOs were us coming back for history lessons." His father reported seeing a UFO over New York, and Lennon describes his own sighting as a child of about 8 to 11 on a TWA flight to visit his dad: a classic silver disc ringed with lights, about 50 feet from the wing, that rose over the plane, reappeared on the other side, then shot forward and vanished at sunrise while everyone slept. He also recounts seeing see-through Mayan figures dancing around a fire at a house in Mexico, then being told by his hostess the next morning that the property was built on a Mayan burial ground and being shown a book with the exact headdresses he had seen.

Rogan suggests abilities like telepathy may be emerging properties of consciousness, and that technology may push humans forward faster than biology. He and producer Jamie dig into Google's Willow quantum chip, which reportedly performed a benchmark in five minutes that would take a classical supercomputer 10 septillion years, and whose lead, Hartmut Neven, suggested it lends credence to a multiverse. Both men admit they cannot really grasp it. Rogan says the most humbling thing about podcasting is realizing how little we understand, and muses, "I think we're the last of the regular people." On free will, Rogan says he sees a mix of determinism and genuine choice, referencing Robert Sapolsky's pure determinism, and they agree manifesting may be a factor but only works with a lot of energy and work behind it.

Conclusion

This is a gentle, reflective conversation about living well in a strange world. Julian Lennon comes across as shy, curious and deeply grateful, a man who stepped out of an enormous shadow by finding his own voice behind the camera and through charitable work sparked by one uncanny white feather. His habits (walks, long motorcycle rides, time in nature, travel with no plan, and savoring simple moments with people he loves) echo Rogan's own theme that balance, presence and open-mindedness are what make life rich, even amid lab leaks, lockdowns and quantum puzzles no one fully understands. When asked how he is, Lennon's answer sums up the spirit of the episode: "I'm alive."

This is a summary of "2243 - Julian Lennon" from The Joe Rogan Experience, giving you the GIST so you can decide if you want the REST. Listen to the full episode.