The Joe Rogan Experience - #1762 - Josh Szeps

Episode Date: January 12, 2022

Josh Szeps is a broadcaster who hosts "Afternoons with Josh Szeps" on ABC Radio. His podcast is Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Hello, Josh. Hi, mate. I'm free. Good to see you, Matt. They let me out. They let you out of your prison colony.

Oh, my goodness. Isn't it strange how Australia is reverting back to what it originally was? Supposedly. But now, I mean, Omicron's gone crazy there now now we're now we're open but it's a cold it's omicron is a cold yeah it's not the delta it's not this dangerous one well we're embracing it wholeheartedly we've got uh like i mean we can talk about all the numbers and stuff but the like this whole this whole like kind of theory whole theory that Australia has become a prison colony, and there were definite excesses over the past couple of years in the way that

some Australian states dealt with it. But since the 1st of November, when the biggest state, New South Wales, where Sydney is, where I'm from, basically was like, all right, we're open. We're letting people come in from abroad. We're not going to have quarantine anymore. You're allowed to do whatever you want. We're not going to have quarantine anymore. You're allowed to do whatever you want. We're not going to have any restrictions and stuff. It's been – I mean, I was looking at the numbers this morning just before I came here.

We've got – there were like 1,200 new cases a day in November, and now there are between 60,000 to 100,000 cases a day in a state of 8 million people. So it's about – 100,000 cases a day. It's wild. Yeah, so it's about the equivalent of, if I adjusted it for the US population, it's about 800,000 to 1.3 million a day in the US,

which is about, I think, what it is. Probably right now. But for Australians, it's like, what the hell is going on? But it's a different, completely different virus. If it was that many of the Delta, it would be very scary

because a lot of people would be dying. Well, also, I mean, timing scary because a lot of people would be dying. Well, also, I mean, timing-wise, a lot of people are vaccinated. I mean, New South Wales is 95-plus percent vaccinated. But the vaccine isn't working for Omicron. If you look at the numbers- For hospitalization and death, it is. No, no, no. You're still test positive.

People aren't getting hospitalized and dying off Omicron. It's not the same disease. It's not the same, but it would still be a very different situation if no one in Australia was vaccinated than if 95% of them were vaccinated. If it's an escape variant, which is what some biologists believe, then no, because it doesn't have the protection. The vaccine doesn't provide the protection from this particular variant. Yes, it does. From Omicron? Yeah. In what way? In terms of hospitalization and death, it does.

Hospitalization and death is not an issue with this variant. It's not causing people to be hospitalized and dying on large scale. Well, not the same. It is, though. It is. I mean, like, if it's half as, the way the epidemiologist put it is, like, if it's half as bad, but 10 times as many people get it, then you've still got five times as many people in hospital. It depends on who, what you're talking about.

If you're talking about people with massive comorbidities. Yeah. Well, yeah. Any cold could do that to people. Yeah. I mean, so are we going to vaccinate for colds?

Cause that's literally what this is. Like my friend who just got, I had no idea. He had a scratchy throat and then he got tested, turned out that he had it. And he said, I felt no idea he had it. He had a scratchy throat. And then he got tested. Turned out that he had it. And he said, I felt nothing the next day. But I'm still positive for a couple of days and I have to lay low. But this is not like the Delta.

This is not even like the original version. Even the vast majority of people who got Delta didn't die from it and weren't hospitalized from it. I mean, it's all a numbers game, isn't it? Yes, it is. But it's a rougher disease. It's quite a much rougher experience for people that got the Delta. I mean, the problem is if you, you know, you don't need something to be very deadly. If 330 million people all get it, then...

I want to know if this is true because I was reading this paper. Oh, they were saying that the vaccine is not protecting people from Omicron. See what you can find on that. This biologist was calling it an escape variant, and he was saying essentially it's a completely different strain. I mean, it depends whether you're talking about testing positive on a test, which is part of the problem, right, or whether you're talking about hospitalization and death.

The vaccines are effective against Omicron in preventing hospitalization and death. I don't know if that's true. But stop, because Omicron is not causing hospitalization and death. The vaccines are effective against Omicron in preventing hospitalization and death. But stop, because Omicron is not causing hospitalization and death. It was like two months in in America, and they still hadn't isolated a single death that they could attribute to Omicron. That's just early days. Two months? Two months is thousands and thousands and thousands of people that are infected. Most of the people in hospital in Australia are Omicron. Omicron makes Biden's vaccine mandates obsolete. There's no evidence so far that vaccines are reducing infections from the fast-spreading variant. Infections, not hospitalizations.

I don't think it's effective in that way either because it's not causing hospitalizations and deaths in the same way. It is. Not in the same way. Yeah, it is. It is. No, no. Listen, one of the things that they've isolated is that there's still a significant number of people in this country that have the Delta.

Yes. Because Delta didn't just go away. No, that's true. And they're saying that most by far of the hospitalizations and the deaths for sure are from that variant. That'll change. I don't know if you're right. Well, I mean-

What are you, a fucking soothsayer? I'm a journalist, mate. I mean, part of the hassle of it is that it doesn't, I mean, for most of us, if you're not very old and you're not very fat and you don't have a comorbidity, then the hassle of this whole thing that's going on at the moment with Omicron is all the, do I have to isolate? Am I going to be able to cross a border? I mean, I've been traveling for the past month from Australia. I was released from our prison aisle as soon as we could go. I was like, I'm out of here. Have you thought about escaping forever?

Because you used to live over here. I lived more of my life in the States, my adult life. When you went back to go on TV, I was kind of sad. I honestly feel so warm towards you and I feel so, it's so nice to be with you. I did this show six times when you were in LA between like 2014 and probably 2017. So I was living in New York and working on HuffPost Live and went to Australia, had twins, nightmare of like babies and work and then the pandemic hits and like, you know, kind of a good time to not be able to leave the country because how much fun travel can you do when you've got

two screaming babies next to you anyway? But as soon as the borders opened and the state government was like, you're not going to have to spend two weeks in a quarantine hotel when you come back into the country anymore, we left. What is the state in Australia that has the most ridiculous rules? Western Australia. Yeah. So they have rules where you can't even go to work now, right? Unless you're vaccinated. Oh, so there are a couple of things that could be perceived as crazy. One is like different rules for vaccinated and unvaccinated people. Yes. But the other is also just like being a hermit kingdom. I mean-

Is that what it is out there? Well, so Western Australia. I should probably put- I'll backtrack and I can give some context to this in a sec, but just to finish my thought about like jumping across borders. So I've been going to- I was in Europe and I sent my partner, Sean, and our kids to his parents in New England

to see the grandparents because, you know, the grandparents haven't seen him in two years that, you know, it's the big pandemic reunion. And I was like, I've got to do a little bit more work in Sydney. So you take the kids by yourself. Thank you, Sean. I'll go to Europe and meet up with some old mates and some family in Europe. And this is like in sort of September, October. So sort of pre Omicron. And I'm like, it's going to be sweet. Pandemic's basically over. The Delta wave has subsided. I'm being laid out of the box. We're going to go and have fun. I'm booking like nine hour train rides from France to Switzerland. I'm hitting up my mate in Rome. We're going to go

to Sicily. We're going to do all this stuff. And then Omicron just starts coming. And I've spent like the past four weeks, I feel like, like Indiana Jones with a burning bridge. And I'm like running across it. And the bridge is just falling apart. It's like the borders are clanging closed behind me. I'm just like new rules,

new testing. Do I need an antigen test to get into Switzerland? Do I need a new piece of paper to say that I haven't been a close contact? Do I need this? Do I need that? And all this stuff. It's been, and like then the final night

before coming here to the States and you know you need a negative test to come into the United States. They won't let you board the plane unless you have a test one day before. Do you have to have a test when you land? Oh, one day before. Yeah, you can't get on the plane

to even come here. One day before is kind of funny though because you could easily be positive and get on that plane. Well, true, but I mean, it's also a pain in the ass because it used to be three days before, and then Biden was like, we've got to really crack down on this and make it one day before. Well, that's way more logical. I've been in cases a day in America anyway. Like, just let me in.

I promise I'll isolate. Like, I'm not going to infect anybody. But so I find myself in Milan, and it's my last night, and this is just before Christmas. And my kids and my partner and my in-laws and everybody are all preparing for Christmas in New Hampshire. It's going to be beautiful, snowy. The kids haven't had Christmas with their grandparents for three years.

And I get to this little hotel in Milan the night before I need to do the test and fly out to Australia. And the guy at reception is like, oh, no. He's like, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, I hand him my passport, he's all over my passport, hands it back to me. And so I get into my room and I'm like, all right, what will be will be. I mean, you know, I can't control this. And then right outside my door, I just hear him going, he's sitting, sitting in the hallway right outside my door as I'm trying to go to sleep. And it becomes like, I mean, this dude's got COVID. Like this, he has some serious respiratory.

Did you ask him? No, I didn't want to be anywhere near him. I would ask him. What are you doing, man? What are you doing? Go home. Absolutely. Do you have COVID, sir?

So the whole night I'm hearing, and, like, it's even getting me anxious, not about me catching it, but for his well-being. Because, like, he starts doing that, like, dry retching kind of heaving, like you can hear his lungs. Jesus Christ, and he's at work. Like, well, that's just how. and it's like one in the morning, so I open the window, it's like minus seven degrees Celsius, like, you know, 15 degrees or something Fahrenheit.

I open the windows of my room and turn the heater up to about 110 degrees and just lie with my face like half out. Trying to get some air. Like snowflakes coming in. I'm just like, I don't care about really catching it that much, but I do care about really catching it that much. But I do care about not getting the test. So the next day when I get the test, I'm like, oh my God. Have you had COVID at all?

No, I haven't. Really? Interesting. Well, Australia, I mean, the weird thing about Australia has been what people don't understand when they think what the hell is going on in Australia, when they look at those videos of like, you know, people being locked up in detention centers for two weeks just for being a close contact or something and this is not to say that there hasn't been some overreach there there has especially since it's sort of a state by state thing in Australia so you know there are some states that have gone really hard and other states that have been a bit more loosey-goosey about it

and the borders of the states have been closed like You haven't been able to go for long periods of time when there's been a big outbreak in Sydney or a big outbreak in Melbourne. All the neighbouring states just go, no, putting up a police blockade and that's it. Just keep it there. So like Western Australia, where Perth is, has had essentially no community transmission of coronavirus the entire time.

And on February 5th, they're going to open up and let it in. So don't, but they're the ones who have the wackiest laws, right? Well, they're the ones who have, like, if you'd want to go to Western Australia from even another Australian state, like imagine California had just been completely closed off from the rest of, or like maybe Alaska is a better example. Imagine Alaska had just said, all right, no one is coming into Alaska in March of 2020 and there's no COVID and that's it. And then like, you're just going with normal life. In Western Australia, no masks, no school closures, no social distancing up until recently, all this is changing a bit with Omicron. And so they've been like, well, why would we let it in? Like, why would we have all of the disruptions to our lives that the rest of the world has had

to endure if we can just go to the beach and go out to restaurants and live normally? And they've had an attitude, and that was the attitude of the whole country up until basically four months ago. You couldn't come into the country unless you spent two weeks in managed quarantine. And the idea was not as some like alt-right troublemakers here in the States try to put it, that the country was just going to turn into North Korea and remain a hermit kingdom forever. The point was, get everyone as vaccinated as possible,

get all the ICU beds that you can, get your ducks in a row. We know that we have a fight on our hands coming. And to be frank, because Australia managed to eliminate coronavirus in March, April 2020, essentially eliminate community spread of it, there's a whole bunch of fat, old and sick people in Australia who, to be blunt, would be dead in America and are, or the UK or Italy, because those are the people who were kind of lost in the first cull

in New York and Northern Italy and London and places like that. So it's been like a managed kind of- Well, Australia is a very different kind of country, right? We have to lay that out for people to understand. It's as large as a contiguous United States, but it has less people than California. You have less people than Los Angeles. Yeah, depending on how you count it. You can count Mexicans. Yeah. You always think that LA is like 30 million people.

Well, LA has millions of illegals. They really don't know. So, Australia is halfway between Texas and Florida, population-wise. Interesting. 25 million. And it's enormous. It's enormous. And so you can block. What about the supply chain?

Do they have an issue getting the supply chain out to- Yes. Yeah? Oh, you mean in normal times or in COVID? COVID times. COVID times. I mean, everything is screwy everywhere, isn't it, with the supply chain stuff? And it's hard to get things around.

It's hard to get things around. I mean, like, I kind of feel like if you could give, it's like the rest of the world had the luxury of not having, not being able to control coronavirus. And there's this kind of almost, it's almost like a survivor's curse or like a victor's curse where the countries that have been able to successfully keep it out. So South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia are broadly like the basket of countries that have taken what you might call a zero COVID approach where for the first year or year and a half of the pandemic, they were like, we're going to have massive contact tracing of everybody who tests positive. We're going to have massive contact tracing of everybody who tests positive. We're going to close the border and make sure that the virus doesn't come in. And we're going to stamp out every instance of community transmission because once it runs away,

then you can't get control over it anymore. And we'll willingly bring it in when we're ready to do so instead of allowing it to just come in and go. Willingly bring it in. It's funny. Well, I mean, yeah, that's sort that's sort of the thing, but how, how the hell do you do that? Like New Zealand, New Zealand and Western Australia are jurisdictions where like, if you've never had it and you've got no experience of it, what politician would have the guts to go, all right, my, you know, my little cloistered population of people who've never been exposed to this pathogen, let's just bring it in voluntarily and manage how we do that. That's the conundrum that they face. And

that's the conundrum that New South Wales, my state in Australia on November 1st was just like, well, okay, now or never. We're as vaxxed as we're going to be, we're as prepared as we're ever going to be. We understand the treatments now. We're not going to go through what New York and Northern Italy did in March of 2020. Let's do it. Let's see how we go. So cases have been doubling basically every week in New South Wales for the past few weeks. What is it like over there in terms of the recognition and the discussion of vaccine injuries? Is there suppression of it? Well, I've been thinking about this, and what is suppression and what is just the sort of habit of the media elite

to find certain sources credible and certain sources non-credible. So, like, we've given 9 billion doses of this, of the vaccine so far, right? Nine? Oh, because multiple? Yeah, almost 4 billion people have been fully vaxxed. There's no widespread incidence of worrying disease. That doesn't mean that there aren't- Worrying disease? Well, yeah. People aren't dropping dead from the vaccine in those 5 billion double doses.

But that doesn't mean that there aren't side effects. And so, I mean, I've tried to do a good job of not- Some people are dropping dead, right? Yeah. Just not as many as you would if you infected all those people with COVID. Well, it depends on who the people are. Like if you're talking about the young soccer players that are dropping dead, I don't think they would have died from COVID. So, I mean, I think the – well, again, it's a numbers game, isn't it? It is. Even if there's only a one in 100,000 chance or a one in a million chance that someone with a particular risk profile is going to die of COVID, then you're right that

the balance becomes different when you're talking about, let's say, a 15-year-old male's risk of COVID and a 15-year-old male's risk of some side effect from the vaccine than if you're talking about an 82-year-old person who's got some pulmonary disease or whatever. Well, that was a lot of people's impression that what we should have done early on is protect the vulnerable and concentrate on protecting the vulnerable and not mandate it for everybody, particularly for people that may have, like for young boys in particular, there's an adverse risk associated with the vaccine. It's like a two to four fold increase in the instances of myocarditis versus hospitalization.

You know that there's an increased risk of myocarditis among that age cohort from getting COVID as well, which exceeds the risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. I don't think that's true. I don't think it's true. No, no, no. I don't think it's true that there's an increased risk of myocarditis from people catching COVID that are young versus increased risk of myocarditis from the vaccine. No, there is. There's both. Well, let's look that up because I don't think that's true. There's both. I mean, there are like- Well, people certainly do get myocarditis from the vaccine.

Yes, that's right. In fact, my friend John Wayne Parr from Australia, he's a world Muay Thai champion. He's in Western Australia as well? No, he's outside of Melbourne. Oh, okay. Well, they've had the harshest lockdowns in the world in Melbourne. He had a heart issue from COVID. Yeah. And he's super fit. Yep, it does happen. It's rare. But I don't know if it's

myocarditis. He's just had some sort of a heart issue and apparently it's gone away and he's out and he's recovered. But even a guy like him who is super fit can's recovered. Yeah. But even a guy like him, who is super fit, can have issues. Absolutely. But I mean, people who are super fit can have issues from getting COVID as well. That's what I just said. Yeah. Oh, right.

I thought you said from the vaccine. No, no, no. Oh, right, right. No, he had COVID. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, totally. I mean, neither, you know, in an ideal world- Do you know anybody that's had bad reactions to the vaccine?

No. No? No. Really? Yeah. That's wild. Maybe? No. Really? Yeah. That's wild. Maybe you guys are getting fake vaccines. Maybe.

Again, whatever they gave Biden. Exactly. It's just sugar water. There's not a fucking chance that was real. Did you aspirate that? They didn't aspirate it. Did you notice? They just shoved it in them.

You're not supposed to do it that way. That shit was 100% saline. I was looking at it when they were vaccinating me as well. I was like, now I'm just getting nervous. No, I mean, look, there's a risk profile of everything. And as a broadcaster, because I work for the public broadcaster there, so I'm like sort of the, I suppose, the big bad media elite, like mainstream media person who other people might criticize as being part of a group of people who haven't necessarily covered themselves in glory in being as open as you might want them to be about all of the... Well, yeah. I think people have a chip on their shoulder about the way that the mainstream media has

dealt with issues of... But to generalize, mainstream media is one... Well, that's what I say. That's what I say. It's not one big thing. It's not one big thing. There are a lot of people like me who work in the mainstream media and so many of my colleagues at the ABC who are genuinely committed to the truth. Sure.

And will, you know, I will absolutely, I know that there's no long-term gain in trying to cover things up or try to bullshit people. Well, especially a person like yourself that has had a career initially from the internet, which is, I've always felt for you is a better platform anyway, because it's unrestricted and you can be wild. You can say whatever you really feel and you have very strong opinions. And when you have very strong opinions and you work for a gigantic corporation, those very strong opinions could harm advertiser revenue or fuck with some narrative that you can get. Look, I haven't felt pressure.

That's great. I haven't felt any pressure. I was like, hey, I'm doing Joe Rogan. They were like, great, Godspeed. That's great. No one was like, oh my God, what are you going to say? Are you going to bring the ABC into disrepute or something like that? They're pretty chill about it.

Who is that one lady who is, she's like some health minister over there, is like saying everyone's just going to have to get used to taking vaccines. We're going to have to get used to boosters, used to COVID vaccines. She was like real terse. I didn't see that, but I love your face when you do that bitchy Australian accent. That's what she was doing. We're all going to have to get used to vaccines. Fuck you.

Who the fuck are you lady Have you seen the Jacinda Ardern New Zealand Prime Minister Her like telling people that they're going to have to get used to Living with COVID or something It's literally like she's a school parent I mean I have no political agenda Against her or anything but the manner

Like the sort of this officious Kind of very like what am I a baby What are you my, like my mommy? Exactly. Well, this is the problem that with government, right? With people that have power over other people. It's why we restrict power. Because if you give people an enormous amount of power to control whether people come and

go, whether they can work or not, what schools they can go to, what stores they can shop in, they exert that power. The kind of people that run for office enjoy power. They're fucking weirdos. They're not normal people and they're not healthy. It's not a healthy job to want to tell people, you're just going to have to get used to COVID. You're just going to have to get used to your vaccines.

Take your medicine. Now I want to know who this was. If you don't eat your meat you can't have your pudding We don't need no education If you don't eat your meat you're not going to get your pudding Myocarditis is more common after COVID-19 infection than vaccination But is this with children? Yeah we're talking about young people.

Men and boys aged under 30, after this is what it says here. With children is the issue. Well, no, we were talking about 15-year-olds. Well, we're talking about young children. Male child. 12 to 17. 12 to 17, more likely to develop myocarditis with three months of catching COVID at a rate of 450 cases per million infection. This compares to 67 cases of myocarditis per million at the same time following their second dose of Pfizer. Yeah, so you're about eight times likelier to get myocarditis from getting COVID than from getting the vaccine.

That's interesting. Now, that is not what I've read before. But also, it's like, even when we're reading these things, it's like, what are we getting this from? Is this from the VAERS report? But even from the VAERS reports, when they report this stuff, it's like the amount of people that report. Like it's the underreporting, depending upon who you ask and like what it is, it's either 1%. Like Harvard did a study on the VAERS report about vaccine injuries. And I think they were talking at the time about the HPV vaccine.

And they said it was 1% of the adverse events were reported by the VAERS system. And I know people that have tried to report things in the VAERS system. It's very complicated. It's very difficult to do. So I don't think we get a great idea. I don't trust American epidemiological data very much. But the fact that it's a global pandemic and that there are lots of like wonky geniuses in Germany and like South Korea and stuff doing a lot of this research as well. I think that in general, I sort of trust the consensus of most of the people who are smarter than me about it. And that's the data that I've heard about it. But I mean, it's interesting. It's going to be super interesting to see what happens. Like what's next? What's the next? What's the next wave? What's the next wave? Well, my friend who's a biologist believes that this is essentially acting like an active

vaccine. I hope so. He thinks that Omicron being as so mild that it's essentially going to give people immunity. It's going to go through the population. And it doesn't come with it a lot of the issues that the other COVID variants have come with, like the lack of smell and lack of taste, even though a lot of people are testing positive for both at the same time. Delta and Omicron. Yeah.

My friend, his buddy is vaxxed and boosted. He's in his 30s too. He's been in the hospital for two weeks. I don't want you to get away with saying that it's too mild though because I just spent New Year's up in Vermont with a nurse who works

in North Carolina, I think. And she was like, I've seen this movie run before and she was like so overworked. Groundhog Day? Yeah, it was like Groundhog Day. She was like, it's like Delta, I've seen this movie like run before and she was like so overworked. Yeah, it was like Groundhog Day. She was like, it's like Delta all over again. Like the hospital is filling up again.

Like there are all these people, it's almost all unvaccinated people. And like she's run off her feet. No one can get any time off. No one can get any, like it does cause a huge amount of complications. It's not as, it's not the same as it was in the past. But when you give a whole bunch of people who haven't previously gotten it or even if they have but it's a while ago a new respiratory illness

like shit happens by the way when people are getting tested they're not telling you whether it's Omicron or Delta so we don't know and Delta still I think isn't the Delta still the prevalent strain in America?

I think they believe, and again, this is not based on like super accurate 100% testing. I think they think that Delta is the still, I think it's like 60%. Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it's neck and neck since there was a lot of Delta here anyway. So you're going to have a lot of endemic infection from people who have Delta. But because Omicron is so infectious, it's crowding out all the Delta, at least in Australia and a lot of countries. Unless you catch both. And then you could also catch that and the flu. Some people have flu rona. Have you seen that? Is that worse? If you get both at the same time, is it like COVID on COVID or is it just that's just the type of COVID that you've got?

No, no. These people are catching the flu and, well, one of them happens first, right? So their immune system is already breached. Right. And then flu gets in there too. There's also Delta Crohn. Delta Crohn. Yeah, that's what I told you Matt had.

Matt's buddy had. That's what I was just saying. Oh, really? Yeah. This just says that in Cyprus was the only place they've discovered it so far. No, Matt's buddy has it. That's bullshit. Matt's buddy tested positive for Omicron and for Delta at the same time.

He's in the hospital. Yeah, and again, vaxxed and boosted. Cyprus reportedly discovers a COVID variant that combines Omicron and Delta. Well, that's here, too. You can find it in fucking Austin. Fucking Cyprus trying to take credit for this shit that's happening everywhere. Fucking Cypriots.

How dare they? So other than that, one thing that Australia's done that's really good is you don't have kids masked up. We don't have kids masked up. I mean, that's the thing. The weird thing is, in all this whole, like, you know, Australia has become an authoritarian, fascist dictatorship kind of rhetoric that I've seen pouring out of the States.

We like to say that. We like to make fun of you. I know. First of all, you used to be a prison colony, so it's like, it's logical. Guilty as charged. I mean, we take pride in that. Do you? Yeah, absolutely.

Well, I think it's great in the attitude of Australians because they're kind of wild folk. Yeah. You remember, like, Nipplegate when, like-'re kind of wild folk. Yeah. You remember like Nipplegate when like- Janet Jackson. Janet Jackson. Yeah. When shit like that happens or like when Clinton and Lewinsky and stuff like that, Australians just look at each other and go, thank God we were settled by convicts and not Puritans.

Thank God we're crooks and not Puritans. That's true, right? Like your ancestors were crooks at least. Yeah. Yeah. It's a fun place. So I mean, so what's, you know, when you close the border and you keep the virus out, then the, you know, the consequence is not that life gets more oppressive. The consequence is that you're able to maintain this little fantasy land of continuing life as normal.

So there have been these sort of weird kind of brutalizing overreaches of some state police enacting like local laws about like, I interviewed this woman on my radio show in December and she, so in South Australia, which is one of the states, they were continuing to insist that if you are a close contact of a, I don't think they do this anymore, but they would continue to insist that if you're a close contact of someone who has COVID, then you have to isolate for a week, right? And if you can't isolate for a week by yourself, then they might just force you to go into one of these quarantine hotels that were initially set up for people coming in from abroad. That was a whole part of the system, like people coming in from abroad, two weeks in a hotel, or you might've

seen like images of these concentration camps in Australia, concentration camps in Australia, these dum-dums like Tim Pool will go, like, it's a concentration camp, when there's this large facility, which was originally just sort of bungalows for workers who worked in the mining industry or something. You realize that they have to stay on the porch and they can't go anywhere. Yeah, you've seen that video. That's a little bizarre. Yeah. It's a little overreachy. That's a little bizarre. Yeah. I mean, it's a little overreachy. It's a little overreachy. They've also got Netflix.

They've got free Wi-Fi. They get three really nice meals a day. Yeah, but you're stuck in a fucking house. You can't go anywhere because someone told you you can't go outside. Mate, that's the price you pay for coming into our great country. But that's nonsense. So we don't have to wear masks. There's no transmission outside.

It doesn't get transmitted outside. I mean, any time a government imposes rules, there are always going to be like edge cases where the rule gets stupid. It's like Djokovic coming into Australia. He's like, whoa, his visa wasn't technically correct. They're going to let him play now, right? I think so. Yeah, I think so. They put him in a hotel

for, well, he needs to be in a hotel. You think he's a flight risk or something? I mean, it's like, you know, rules everywhere are silly once you start trying to enforce them and trying to look at the edge cases. What do you guys do in terms of early treatment if someone catches COVID over there? Not a lot yet, but I wish we were doing more. I wish there was more. See, that's one of the things that drives me nuts. Yeah. Because as a person who wasn't vaccinated and got early treatment and got over COVID very quickly. I was like, this narrative that the only way to beat COVID is to be vaccinated is nonsense.

It's nonsense. I mean, there would be, I mean, so I think the idea of getting everybody vaccinated is a way of avoiding what you were alluding to earlier, which is like, can't we just protect the really vulnerable people? Nowhere has done that successfully. Well, you're not going to be able to do that unless you take them out to Western Australia and drop them off. Well, exactly. That's right.

What are you going to do? Like round up everyone over the age of 70? If they have any contact with people. Look, they got it in fucking Antarctica. Yeah. It made it up to Antarctica. Yeah. And not Western Australia.

So Antarctica is actually- There are no cases in Western Australia? No community transmission. I mean, they have like one or two cases in managed quarantine facilities. Like one might escape and then they go and crash tackle a guy and put him in a hotel. I wanted to ask you about, there was some awful reports about them taking the Aborigines and forcing them against their will to go hundreds of kilometers to some other places. I'm glad you raised that.

Is that real? Not really. Not really? Not really. So what happened was there are these communities out in Catherine, which is this really remote part of the Northern Territory. If people think of the Northern Territory, think like Crocodile Dundee, like really, really, really, really seriously remote. Like you just mentioned that Australia is the same size as the contiguous United States and has the population of, you know, not even the population of California. the population of, you know, not even the population of California. So everyone's huddled on essentially the 80% of the population lives on the East Coast and then a bit on the West Coast and then you've got Tasmania

and everything in between is like just you can fly over it for four hours and it's just red desert with nothing there. And there are indigenous communities who live out there and they'll often live, you know, there'll be 50 people who all live in the same sort of area. There are, you know, grandparents sleeping with kids. It's not a situation in which anyone can realistically isolate. They don't have air conditioning. They often have comorbidities.

Their life expectancy is low. It's a really, really tricky situation. And since the start of the pandemic, like health experts have been like, shit, what happens when it gets into those communities? I mean, that is just going to that's going to be like dropping a match on a tinderbox. It's just going to explode. It's going to be horribly hundreds and hundreds of miles from the nearest health care. What are you going to do? What are you going to do? So they enlisted the assistance of the local Indigenous leaders to be like, OK, if there's an outbreak, then what do you want to do? The local leaders were like, we'll send them to Howard Springs. I mean, put them in the air conditioned bungalows where you can't cross the line outside. And, you know, they actually spend their two weeks in quarantine so that these people, these Indigenous communities don't get ravaged by coronavirus.

these people, these indigenous communities don't get ravaged by coronavirus. They're also fairly vaccine hesitant. So there's been a lot of attempts to get vaccination rates up among indigenous Australians, but it's slower. So do they grab them and take them to these places? So these stories are lies? Well, what do you mean by grab? So there was like, so there's this bloke who, there are a couple of people in the Northern Territory who claim to be like indigenous leaders. I don't know if you saw the video of like that bloke. Well, there was a woman and then there was like a bloke with some other indigenous looking people around him with like a flag behind them who were all like saying this went viral. I think Marjit Nawaz retweeted it in the UK. And he was like, you know, amnesty needs to look into this.

They're crash tackling us and vaccinating us on the ground. They're forcibly vaccinating us. It's like a denial of human rights. And I saw that and I was like, oh, my God, how have I not – like how have I failed as a journalist in Australia to understand that this is happening? So I looked into it and looked into it. This guy is like –

You got notes? I got notes, mate. Did you come in with notes? I didn't want to get anything wrong. I've got the- I mean, it's mostly data. It's mostly like the number of cases each day and all that sort of stuff. Data.

Data. Data. So this guy is one of those guys who he believes that Australia is actually owned by the Vatican and that therefore all police officers are employees who don't have to be- The guy in that video? Abade, yeah. I haven't seen this dude.'t have to be obeyed. Yeah. I haven't seen this video. I need to look in his crazy eyes.

Can you find, oh, he probably looked for Australian, yeah, Australian indigenous amnesty call out or something like that. He's, he, so he thinks that,

he thinks that COVID is a US plot against China. It's a bioweapon against China. It's not. It's a Chinese bioweapon against America, isn't it? I think he's got it upside down. But he's in Australia. He's in Australia, so maybe he's got it upside down. And he thinks that vaccines are bioweapons

and that the COVID swabs that you take are carcinogenic intentionally and all this sort of stuff. They're not carcinogenic intentionally, but I did read that there is an element in the swabs that if it was in large doses could be carcinogenic. Isn't that everything? Yes. Well, salt will kill you. Eat a pound of salt. Good luck. It's like in California where every building that you go into has that sign on it that says this building is known to contain carcinogens. And I'm like, well, yeah, of course it is. So anyway, this bloke.

So in other words, what did happen. We're going to find the guy. Got him? I need better search terms. I've never seen it. I don't know what I'm looking for. Try. I don't want to throw the guy under the bus anyway.

Throw him under the bus. Look. Come on. I don't know. I mean, I don't want to throw the guy under the bus anyway. Throw him under the bus. Look. Come on. I like crazy people. Try maybe David Cole flag video or something. His name is David Cole? I think so. Okay.

Outback Australian Information Wars. Something like that. So it's all part of like, anyway. Okay. So it's a little wacky. My point is there are- It's a little QAnon-y? Yes.

And so he claims to be a representative of this First Nations nation, this indigenous nation. But when you actually, like a journalist colleague of mine, that's not the actual video. I'm not sure if that's him or not. That looked like blood at first. I was like, what has he done? And I realized it's tie-dye. I was just sort of taking a guess. Freedom rally?

I mean, that would probably be. Oh, yeah, okay. So this article, this is actually a good article. So if people go to this article, this explains everything, right? Outback Australia in the Information Wars. Matthew Blackwell, who wrote that, is an actual journalist in the Northern Territory who has contacts in the indigenous community there. And they say, we don't know this guy. He doesn't speak on behalf of us. We are supportive of the Northern Territory government isolating people in this way at Howard Springs.

Now, we can have a whole conversation about whether or not it's appropriate for, like, what do you do with the, like, three teenagers, three Indigenous teenagers broke out of Howard Springs, which isn't hard. You just sort of walk out and climb a small fence. And you might say, wasn't that an infringement of their human rights? Is this him right here? Yeah, this is him talking about the Vatican. It's an hour long. Just give me a little bit of it.

I want to hear it. Northern Territory, Australia. Is that talking? It's the 25th of April. Sydney and Brisbane for the kids when they went down there for school and stuff like that, but primarily been here my whole life. I think you should be arrested for wearing that shirt. You like it here more than anywhere else.

Did you purchase that? You want to be here, right? Oh, I absolutely love it here. Isn't it? It's magical. Yeah, it is. It's a good place. Yeah, yeah.

This is my sixth visit to Darwin. Screw for it a little bit. I don't want to hear how great that place is. I want to hear about the Vatican. He was an artist having a show. And one of the things I wanted to compliment all of the indigenous people for, because of all the horrific bad shit that's, it's not even a thing of the past. And it's just more subtle and institutionalized now but but but the the indigenous people here as a whole

have been so this is boring me yeah I'm not passing any I'm gonna him talk let me just give me there you go let me hear his voice only here I want to hear craziness man this interview I love his voice doesn't he yes that's probably all these and they're the henchmen of the bankers yeah that's right that's right it's it's all it's all controlled by the by the banking system because of this people worship the money thing and it's not even real so you know there's this whole alt-right ecosystem of Americans who are suddenly very exercised about Australians' rights, who, as you can hear,

like go over and be like, oh, what's going on? He's like, oh, it's all part of the new world order and all this sort of stuff. He's entitled to his opinion. You know, I've got no beef with him, but he's not a representative of the Indigenous communities there. The Indigenous communities themselves are like working hand in hand with the Northern Territory government. It's to some extent, I suppose, an infringement of an individual's human rights if you're incarcerating them essentially for two weeks because they're a close contact of a COVID case. The alternative is that that individual infects the entire community against the wishes of the community and against the wishes of the community leader when they're hundreds of miles from you know any health care that's the trade-off that

was made yeah is that does the community agreed to these yes these relocation and these quarantine rules yes yes and the community leaders have but do you need any do you need 100 like what happened what about the so there were like there a 17-year-old who broke out of Howard Springs and was like, I'm not having a go at this. This is rubbish. I don't need to stay here. So not every single human being does, but if you're looking at it as a public health thing, a short-term public health thing to get through an emergency when the virus is just spreading in a very, very vulnerable community, then those community leaders have agreed to that. It wouldn't be a permanent thing. And for me, I mean, my

concern is what I've been agitating for and what's made it a lot harder is the conversation here in the States from people like Tim Pool and people like that, who it's sort of like, you know, like if you had a buddy who you thought was a bit too strict with their kid or something like, you know, you just sort of wanted to change his behavior in a certain way. And you were like, I think I can do this. I think I know how to talk to this person. I think the best solution is a collaboration with them. And then another buddy of yours goes, no, you have to say that your buddy is a child abuser. And until you admit that he's a child abuser, I'm not even going to have a conversation about this because your buddy is a child abuser. Let's insist. You'd be like, hang

on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on. What kind of comparison is this? This is what it feels like when Americans come and try to save the conversation that Australians are having with each other about these policies. So it's become a lot harder for people like me to go, let's look at the human rights trade-offs. Let's look at the health trade-offs. Let's try to assess what's reasonable and what's not reasonable. When you've got all this chatter coming from some of these alt-right people who are saying like, literally, Jamie, do you have the- Tim Pool's not alt-right. And Majid is not alt-right either. No, I mean-

Neither one of those guys are alt-right. No, I'm not- That's an unfair assessment. I'm not saying Majid. I'm not saying Majid. Okay, but you're using that pejorative to dismiss what they're saying well like they might get really into these conspiracies and you look at it on paper without the whole breadth of knowledge from the community and you find out that these people are being relocated and you do see those whatever you want to call them camps uh you know communities

where the people have to stay on their porch. It's concerning to someone who lives in America. You would understand how you would think of Australia as being this wild free place. And then you see that and you go, oh my God, they're reverting back to the way they were. The difference is that there are some people, and I sort of give Marjorie a pass on this because I think I know him well enough to sort of think that he must just be sort of not doing enough fact checking. But there are some other people like Tim who I feel like I and people like Claire Lehman at Quillette, who's the editor of Quillette, have done a lot of work like pointing out the facts. And then it doesn't go anywhere. It's like unless you call them concentration camps and accept that Australia is on a path to become a fascist authoritarian dictatorship, there's nothing to even talk about.

I don't think he's having conversations with anybody who's actually in Australia, unfortunately. Well, I've invited him on my podcast and he doesn't come on. He and I have exchanged terse words on Twitter where I'm like, mate, you're not helping. And he's like, it's a concentration camp. That's just so that you don't admit it. So it's more the tone of like-

That's his voice on Twitter? That's his voice on Twitter. You know what I reckon? This is, before I forget this, this is what the myocarditis thing was that I was confusing. Peter McCullough, Dr. Peter McCullough, when he was on, was saying that there's instances that they're recognizing as myocarditis that are very different with the virus

versus with the vaccine. And that the instances of the vaccine, because they thought initially that the spike protein was going to be limited to the injection site, but yet it's going to various tissue in the body, including the heart, and causing a completely different kind of inflammation. This is what his concern was. Got it. The type of myocarditis concerned him far more from the vaccine, particularly in regards to young people versus what you would get from the virus itself,

which is a normal inflammation of the tissue around the heart or, what did he say? Did he say fluids around the heart? And he was talking about a normal level of inflammation. It's a different sort of thing. Again, I'm not the expert. Got it. I mean, the point of all this i just had to remember that um at a population level when you're talking about public health i mean i think the the goal for me and the goal for a lot of people is like can we just get some semblance of normal life back and that's nice if we could do that without fucking people up yeah yeah if that's possible.

Yeah. I mean, and it's like, you know, I can fully understand the attitude of people in Western Australia or New Zealand who are like, well, I mean, we've kept it out and we've been living essentially normal. We've been living normal lives. I think part of the whole thing about Australia is also that we've been out of sync with where America's and the rest of the world has been at because we got rid of it. Like there were 500 plus cases because we got rid of it. Like there were 500 plus cases a day in March of 2020. We locked down through a lot of contact tracing and testing at it. It was doubling every 3.4 days initially. So you would have gone 500, 1,000, 2,000, 4,000, 8,000, 16,000, then you're off to the races. Brought it right, right down. Everyone's basically living a normal life during that first wave period between like, you know, April, May, June of 2020.

Aussies are like, sweet, we closed the borders. We suppressed the virus. We're able to essentially live normally. We're not wearing masks and we're not doing all that sort of stuff by essentially June of 2020. What about those videos where you see cops arresting people for not having masks on outside? So what happened in Melbourne was that then they got an outbreak and they went really hard on a lockdown. I mean, right. Well, you don't think that is concerning when you see that kind of shit where people get arrested and thrown to the ground because they don't have a mask on? Yes, I would think that's very concerning. Some of those videos that you see are also like when you actually ask the cops about it, they were like, actually, we were arresting somebody for like that was a person being arrested for a crime.

But no, there's videos where the guy says, is all this because I don't have a mask on? Are you serious? Yes, that's crazy. There's a bunch of those videos. Yeah, that is. You're working for the state. You seem like you're a little dismissive of any criticism of the way they've handled it in Australiaralia no no no i could it's a little bit no part of the difficulty a little bit part of the difficulty what i mean you're a little smiley i don't mean to come across dismissive

they got you on some fucking government meds i know what's going on over there buddy i am uh i'm absolutely not uh like diminishing the trauma that people in Melbourne in particular have gone through. It's Melbourne in particular? Yeah. So is that state, are they more authoritarian with regards to the way the police treat the people? They are more, they have imposed harsher rules and they've enforced them more harshly. Yeah. That's not good, right?

No. I mean, not in my opinion. I mean, in Sydney, that's the thing. In Sydney, there's never been a point at which you weren't able to get a takeaway coffee. There's never been a point at which you haven't been able to get a takeaway meal from a restaurant. There's never been a point at which you couldn't jog along the beach. There's never been a point at which kids had to be masked. Did you have to wear a mask when you jogged along the beach?

No. Never? No. I'm not sure about the rules. So Sydney is not like a mask place? You don't have to wear a mask outside? Now it is because we've got Omicron up the wazoo. But do you think the masks really stop Omicron?

Because they've been publicly stating that it doesn't. I mean, that Lena Wen was on CNN saying that masks are essentially just facial decorations. I mean, the Prime Minister of Australia recently said, like, he's not going to... When people were calling for him to extend mask mandates and things like that, he was like, look, masks are like sunscreen. We're not going to make you put it on, but like just do the right thing and wear it if you can.

Right, but if it doesn't work, is it doing the right thing or is it posturing? We have this weird thing going on in America where people used to be able to wear bandanas and they say, hey, that's not doing shit. You got this big open, but sometimes people still wear face shields. Well, it's, I mean, here. And you can get your hand under it.

Like, you're like a child. That's why I don't want to come across as if I'm dismissing all of the concerns about Australia. Because one of the things, like, I'd never seen a double masked person until last week here. I'll go to San Francisco. They're triple-masking. Unbelievable. Like, on the plane next to me, there was this, like, very, like, clean-cut, like, gay couple who was sort of sitting there. No offense against the gays.

I'm a gay myself. And they're sitting across from me. And they've got, like, a – and I was like – I had to, like, sort of look at them, like, a few times before I – and I've been traveling through Italy, France, Switzerland, like I went through the United Arab Emirates on my way here, all over the place where there are huge infection rates, but people are moderately sensible about things. And I think part of what happens in the States is you guys go big on everything. And like, there's a lot of partisanship and a lot of like, it becomes an identity thing. It's like the mask is like, I'm not just going to wear one mask. I'm going to wear two masks on this plane. I say it's the Democrats MAGA hat. That's what I say.

It's what it is. I don't want to downplay my, look, if you've got a respiratory virus that attaches itself to aerosol particles, to liquid particles, then it makes sense to me that anything that can trap the little bits of liquid that I'm spitting out onto this microphone right now is probably going to reduce the chance that I'm going to give it to you. Well, I guess if you're talking about spit flying through the air, but I don't think that happens a lot. I think the real issue is the actual virus particles itself are so small. They're smaller than vape particles. And have you ever seen the doctor on YouTube that demonstrates how useless masks are so he blows vape through masks? Have you ever seen that?

No, I haven't seen that. You should see it because it's pretty – find that video. But the epidemiologists say that the worst – Say that the easiest route of transmission is when they attach themselves to tiny, tiny, tiny bits of water. Like tiny bits of spittle and like all of the – Just the mist of coming out of your breath. Yeah, the mist, exactly. The mist coming out of your breath.

But it goes right through that. That's how you breathe. The mist of coming out of your breath. The mist coming out of your breath. But it goes right through that. That's how you breathe. Like the particles of Omicron, the particles of COVID are so much smaller than the particles of vape. That's one of the reasons why it's so contagious. I know many, many people who are religious with masks and they've got COVID.

Sure. But I mean, it's all a dosage thing, isn't it? I mean, at some point, I'm sure that over the past month, I've been bumping into a lot of people who have COVID, right? I've walked past them. They've served me in restaurants, whatever. I've been in places where infection rates are extremely high. And for whatever reason, the particular dose that entered my system, when you match that with my immune system, was not able to kind of get a handle on me. Look at you.

You're all thin, spry looking. I am strikingly beautiful. It's true. You are. You're all thin, spry looking. I am strikingly beautiful. It's true. You are. You definitely lost weight, right? Yeah. From the first time I saw you to today, you look like, I bet you're like 20 pounds lighter than when I first met you.

I put on about 30 pounds in the first year of the pandemic, and then I lost about 50 pounds in the second year of the pandemic. Wow, that's it. See, I nailed it. 20 pounds. You did. Yeah, there you go. No, I was just like, I'm going to become a fat man.

I'm just going to sit here watching TV in isolation. Did your husband give you a hard time? No. No? No, he was like, let's see. On your own. Yeah, on my own. He was like, it gives him an opportunity to get fat too.

He was like, let's make it a game in here. That's right. Exactly. He was like, I don't have to. In fact, he probably feels a little bit like quietly judged by the fact that I've lost weight now. Because now he's like, oh man, that means he's started taking up tennis lessons he's like oh man i gotta get fit now as well i have a friend who did that he lost weight and his wife got a little upset that he lost weight right

yeah stay with me in my mediocrity we've always been like this this is our thing yeah i'm aspiring to more i'm trying to get jacked i'm a bigger human now getting fucking pumped yeah getting shredded i mean i also it was also good for my head like not only do you feel so much better watch this guy he's showing the mass give me your breathing out the sides of those things man I just don't know what the fuck those things actually stop I mean I think you could probably make some kind of an argument that less of it could get on you but if you're in a position where someone's breathing near you and they're wearing a mask i think you're getting a fucking full load in the face look at this i mean

come on man what the fuck is that doing it's not stopping shit i mean he explains in this the size of the microns of the particles of covid are far smaller than what you get from the vape particles. But the point isn't that it stops it completely. It's that it reduces the dose. I hope it does. I think it doesn't. Like, look at it coming out the side there. It's not coming directly out of his nose.

It's in the fucking air, buddy. That Lena Nguyen lady who is the voice of doom and gloom on CNN, she's even said that cloth masks are little more than facial decorations. Oh, cloth? Yeah, right. I mean, I'm sort of thinking about N95s that are moderately well-fitted. I mean, moderately? Yeah.

You can cinch that bitch down on your mug when you can't breathe. You can put it down. And even then, your air is coming in, man. I mean, I think if oxygen's coming in, that shit's coming in too. I mean, I'm just guessing. Well, that's why I don't guess. I mean, I just listen oxygen's coming in, that shit's coming in too. I mean, I'm just guessing. I'm just guessing. Well, that's why I don't guess. I mean, I just listen to what epidemiologists say.

I'm listening to a fucking epidemiologist on CNN saying it. But there's a lot. I trust if a lot of, it's sort of like climate science or something. Like if a lot of people who really know about this say that a mask is going to reduce the number of microscopic water particles that are coming out of my face that have COVID attached to it, then I'll probably just wear a mask. I wonder, because there's so much political shit attached to it too.

It's like you can't say that it doesn't work. I mean, she has said cloth masks don't work. I've talked to other doctors that said none of these fucking masks work. This is what my doctor said. Can you breathe with the mask on? I go, yes. He goes, that's not working.

He goes, the particles of COVID are so fucking small that if they're in the air in a room, he goes, it's one of the best things about outdoor transmission. It doesn't happen. You're outside. It doesn't go anywhere. Well, that's the other thing about here. UV light kills it. A buddy of mine who lives in California, he was standing six feet away from a woman who

was picking up her kid at the daycare where he was waiting to pick his kid up. And he's not masked. He's outside. It's California. A gentle breeze. It's like 75 degrees. And she starts jumping out. You're supposed to be masked.

You're supposed to wear a mask in California. It gives assholes an opportunity to tell people what to do. And they feel righteous. And you don't feel like you could really refute it. It's one of those things. Like, put your fucking mask on. You're like, ooh. But those are assholes. The type of person that does that, particularly outside, they've always been assholes. I mean, I think if we just cleaved off all of the left-wing assholes and all of the right-wing assholes, then the rest of us would

probably just find a sensible accommodation. Like if I'm on a plane, if I'm in an airport, I'm going to wear a mask anyway because I think it's courteous. Because I don't know if there are people around. I don't know if I'm carrying the virus, and I don't know if there are people around who are immune suppressed or who are super fat or super unhealthy, who it might do damage to. It's not a huge, it's no skin off my nose, really. But if I'm outside, I'm not going to put it on at the playground with my kids. I'm not going to put it on when I'm jogging along the beach. No, some people want you to though. I think it's one of those things where there's normal, natural human patterns of behavior dependent upon all the

various factors that are in the community. And I think if you're in a community that's lightened, that has a lightened attitude and they're more relaxed, you're going to get more people that sort of adopt that. And if there's more tense people, then you're going to get more people that sort of adopt that. And if there's more tense people, then you're going to get more people that are on the edge. And when you get these polar opposite viewpoints, like QAnon versus BlueAnon, because BlueAnon? BlueAnon. I haven't come across BlueAnon yet.

That's like all the wacky Democrats that believe everything the Democratic Party does is good. Nancy Pelosi's not insider trading. Right. There's a lot of people out there that believe that. Have you seen that meme? This is a great meme. I'm going to show you this meme, Jamie. I'm going to send you this meme because it's fucking adorable.

It's my favorite new meme. Here, Jamie. I'll send you this insider trading meme. The fact that, I don't know how they work it in Australia, but the fact that sitting members of Congress have information about deals that are going to affect positively or negatively these companies, and trade this one. It's Warren Buffett saying,

no one can say when a stock will go up or down, and then Nancy Pelosi said, that's cute. She's made $200 million. It's incredible, isn't it? It's disgusting. Has she? This is pass me by. I believe she makes $200,000 a year, something like that, and she's worth close to $200 million,

which is all from stocks. The amount of stuff that- It's not me. It's my husband, the one who's trading. How does he know what to do? She has the same face as the bossy Australian health woman. Well, the same human, in my mind. There was a list that was just released of all the people from Congress and the ones

that beat the stock market this year. Oh, yeah, right. It's terrifying. Yeah. No, yeah, right. It's terrifying. Yeah, no, it's unbelievable. How the fuck do you guys all know what to buy? It's all the circles they swim in, man. It's gross. This is part of what motivated Trump and it's part of what motivated Obama before him.

I mean, they're like this keenness among the electorate to just give us someone who's not in that group of people, of lobbyists and like insiders and people who go to the same golf courses and go to the same golf courses and go to the same parties. Have meetings together. Yeah, exactly. And they give each other like little inside tips. The whole thing feels like,

and I think this is also part of what's made the pandemic really difficult is like this erosion of faith in institutions, in the news media, and it's not unjustifiable in political systems, in bureaucracies and stuff like that. It leaves everybody just spinning around like you've just had your head walloped in a Warner Brothers cartoon. You've got little Tweety birds floating around your head going like, what am I supposed to

grab onto here? Who am I supposed to trust? What am I supposed to believe exactly? There's only independent news sources are the only ones I trust anymore. When I see something written in a mainstream publication or I see something on a mainstream television show, I always go, huh. It's sad. Well, like when did that happen? It happened during the pandemic for me.

It happened during the pandemic. I just don't – I just think they're all captured. I really do. I mean, I think brought to you by Pfizer. I think there's so much of that going on. There's so much. I think there's so much of that going on there's so much and when you realize the Paul when the when you see the political situation like the ever seen the interview where Where Pelosi is?

She's responding to questions and someone asked her about whether or not you should be able to trade Whether or not politicians and active members of Congress should be able to know trade. Oh my god. It's hilarious We should be able to trade. Oh my God. It's hilarious. We should be able to participate. She's such a shaky, weird lady, like a chihuahua. She's 104 years old. I don't give a fuck how old she is. Like, why does she want to do that then? She's that old. Well, like you said before, why does anyone want to do, well, why does anyone want to be a politician in the first place? Especially when you're as old as Joe Biden or, I mean, you know, no offense against old people. You can do whatever you want, but seriously, like there are other things, more interesting things to do with your

life. I would think so. I don't think he has other things to do. I mean, I think his whole life has been about this weird sort of game of influence and power. And but now he's out of it. He's so out of it that it's like there's a real justification for impeachment. I think that if the the the Republicans take power and they have this. Yeah. You could argue that he's like that when they were talking about that with Trump. I was like, man, you open this door. It's just going to be every single president from now on is either going to get impeached or like difference between the way Trump is compromised and Biden is pretty stark in comparison. In what way? It's not a pro-Trump statement, but he's so much more lucid. So his conversations, like Biden is really troubling. When you hear him talk, it's disturbing. He starts making up numbers and he starts losing his place. I mean, it depends whether or not you find sort of bumbling incompetence

better or worse than intentional corruption. Well, it's not better or worse in my eyes. It's definitely not good to have intentional corruption, but I don't know if he's immune from accusations of intentional corruption. I mean, he doesn't own a hotel that he gets foreign heads of state and their delegations to all stay in

so that he can make a personal profit out of it when they're on government business. But he does have a son that he sent overseas and his son made a lot of money for no reason whatsoever and his son wrote down

that the big guy gets a cut and then they, you know, had a story about his laptop and it was an active move to suppress it. It comes back to the media thing and like the trust in media thing.

That was not just media, right? That's where it gets really scary because they're cutting off the access to independent media. Exactly. But didn't the Post publish it and then like Twitter banned the article from being shared

or Facebook or something? Yeah, you couldn't even share it in a DM. Unbelievable. I mean, that's to me like the whole new thing to be afraid of. Like I, I am sad that we've lost so much faith in conventional media, because I do think that there are like, if you, anyone who's worked in a newsroom, in a formal newsroom, in a big old legacy institutional media outlet, like the New York Times or the New Yorker or the Atlantic or

the BBC or something like that, knows that, you a story, an editor will be on your back about how can you verify it? How many sources do you have? Sometimes you need to have three sources. You certainly need to have two sources. This doesn't mean that there isn't a subtle ideological capture where these institutions are all looking at things from the same perspective. You only have to look at, excuse me, the New York Times over the past few years to be like, every time I open it up, I'm like, seriously, like, are we going to read another story about how like skiing is racist because there aren't enough black skiers or something like that? That was a recent example. And I saw like, I'm sure it's a very worthy point to make, but like, can we occasionally have something that isn't just from your one, like, hobby horse of, like, everything has to be filtered through an identity lens at the moment?

But I think that's different from some of the new media outlets, which are just intentionally kind of coming at things with a particular angle. They don't have the fact checking. They don't have the resources. They're just, like, they're sort of just A-B testing whatever's going to work. They're click-baiting and then whatever viral video of something going crazy in Australia

happens to get attention. They provide more and more and more of that. You're sensitive to this criticism of the authoritarian state that you live in that has supported you coming over to America to spread your propaganda. I understand what's happening here and I'm going to allow you to do it because I like you. Keep going. I'm just making the point. You know that in Australia, I'm regarded as like a critic of that. Like I wrote a whole piece in Sydney's biggest newspaper in December saying like,

can we please have a national conversation about balancing? Oh, that's right. So the anecdote I was going to tell you about this woman who I spoke to in December on my radio show, I forgot to finish it. She's, this will hopefully burnish my credentials as a critic of Australian authoritarianism enough for you. So she's in Melbourne, she's her and her husband, and they've got like a five-year-old kid and like a three-month-old. And she decides to fly to Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, three-month-old. And she decides to fly to Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, to see her family. So they fly in, they get off the plane, she gets a text message from the South Australian Health Department saying, actually, one person on your plane just tested positive, so you need to isolate for a week. And she calls them and she goes, well, can I just leave the

state? And they're like, yeah, that's all right, according to her. So she books the next flight out from Adelaide to go back to Melbourne, gets to the airport. They start boarding the flight and some armed police officers come up to her and her family and kids and they're like, are you so-and-so? She goes, yeah. They take her to a room at the airport for an hour and a half. They take her in a convoy to a quarantine hotel. They all test negative. They take her in a convoy to a quarantine hotel. They all test negative.

They're all vaccinated. They've just been on a plane with one person who tested positive. And six days later, she's still in the hotel with her kids, no windows. They're being fed. They're being given, and like the authorities aren't giving them proper information about what the hell is going on. She finally kicks up enough of a stink and she's like, please just let us go back to Melbourne. Just let us go back to the other state. So they go, all right. And they take a police car to escort her that drives behind her car for 300 kilometers, 200 miles, all the way to the border of the state.

And then once she crosses the border, the police car just turns around and goes home. To make sure that she doesn't go somewhere else to spread her cooties that she doesn't even have. To spread the non-existent cooties. I think you should apologize to Tim Poole right now because you clearly live in a concentration camp. Dear Tim, I live in a concentration camp and I'm a government stooge, an apologist for the inevitable Australian authoritarianism that you were so prescient in predicting.

You should have done his podcast while you were in the country. How long are you in the country for? I'm leaving tonight, mate. Going back to Australia? Extending my stay by a day. Yeah, I'm going to Fiji tonight. Oh, nice. Yeah, just for a night.

Oh, that's nice. Break up the trip, give the kids a little bit of sunshine. I've never been. How is it? I've never been to Fiji. Oh, really? I mean, I've been on a stopover, but can't wait. It looks great on pictures.

I've got a big Fiji trip planned for next December with my brother's family. And we've got one of those, like, you know, when you have kids, I don't know how it was for you, but I mean, when I was young,

I would just a massive backpack, a traveler would just, you know, everything that was the most authentic. I didn't want to stay in hotels. I wanted to do everything to go around India and just eat, like eat fried shit. And just now I'm just,

all the smells and the authenticity. Take it all in. Inhale this incredible world. I love all the different cultures, all the different experiences. Now I've got little kids. I'm like, is there a five-star all-inclusive resort that has no culture but a water slide? How old are your kids now?

Three cocktails? They're four. Yeah, that's a good age. Yeah, so we've got a Fiji thing planned. I've got a Thailand thing. I know you love Thailand as well. I love Thailand. They're so friendly over there.

So friendly and such amazing food and great people. It's fascinating that a culture can sort of adopt an attitude of friendliness. Yeah. Because it really is like a part of what Thailand, I'm sure there's assholes in Thailand, don't get me wrong, but I didn't meet any. No.

When I was there, everyone was super nice. It's incredible. Everywhere we went, we went to all these different places in Thailand. Are there particular ethnicities who you think are unfriendly?

That I've experienced? I don't think so. I'm trying to think. Like Americans. No, Americans are super friendly. So it depends on where you go. Like New Yorkers are like, they're a little tense. I remember Stephen Fry, you know Stephen Fry, the British comic?

Yeah, he's great. He was saying that like with Americans, it's like if you were landing a beach, if you imagine like D-Day or Normandy or something like that, and you're trying to make friends with someone, then like with Americans, it's super, super easy. The boat comes up on this beautiful shore, and Americans are all warm and welcoming, and you walk and you walk and you walk with them, and you walk and you walk and you walk, and you walk and you walk, and you never quite get behind the niceness he felt. But with Brits and with Auss Aussies it's like coming in a tempestuous sea and like you crash into these rocks it's quite hard especially

with Brits so they're more than Aussies you crash into the rocks and there's like a huge cliff face and you have to claw your way up in to get into their good graces and you got blood coming out from under your fingernails but then you emerge on top and there's this like huge Vista this vast expanse of sort of friendship that's his analogy between the difference between getting to know a Brit versus getting to know an American. So it's more of a struggle to get to know the British. More of a struggle, but when it happens, it's really deep. And with Americans, there's a lot of superficial niceness, but hard to sort of get to know them.

I think that was his diagnosis. Interesting. That's interesting to see it from a perspective of someone coming from the UK. I have a good buddy of mine who grew up in England and he's been over here, I think, for about 10 years. And the big factor for him, he said, is that in England people kind of want you to fail. That's his position. He's like, they don't celebrate success over there. He goes, it's really interesting.

He's like, they outwardly sort of dismiss any chances that you have. This is his perspective, obviously, of making it, of doing anything. They dismiss your chances. I don't think that's wrong. He said a little tall poppy syndrome. Yep. Yeah, tall poppy syndrome is a good Aussie phrase for people who don't know it. Like, you know, when you've got a poppy field, you want to make sure that they're all the same length. So if they're one, one poppy gets too

high, then you clip that one off. So it's all just the same. That's definitely true. I mean, I feel that moving back to Australia a bit, I must say. Oh, because you were a superstar in America. Oh, look who's back. You're back to our little prison colony. I didn't actually, I didn't, I didn't even mean that, although there is a little bit of that, but I meant more that like America's just such a, Americans are like a very can-do people. Like, you know, when I meet, if I had an idea about some new show that I wanted to do or something, then you'd be like, that's great.

Why don't you do it? I wonder if I can help, you know? Right. I mean, and that would be the ethos in, certainly in the parts of America where, which I'm used to, which is the Northeast and the West Coast. Like, uh, you know, everyone's, everyone's super up for stuff. And what would happen in Australia? I think there'd be a lot of sort of, well, yeah, no, I mean, you know, so-and-so did try that a few years ago and that didn't really work. So the, you know, here are the impediment, here are the reasons why it might not work. Here are all the impediments, here are the things that you should be thinking about. Like, it's just much more,

we don't really do that sort of thing here. So maybe, and I think that's true in the UK as well. Like, it's just, it's harder, it's harder to get people excited about stuff because Americans still have this kind of, almost like naive little, oh, shucks, this is great. We're going to go and do this.

Let's go and have some fun. And you're like, yeah, let's all go and do this. I don't like this voice he's adopted for Americans. Do you feel offended, Jamie? I'm going to put on your Australian woman. It's a little opi. That Australian woman. We're just going to have to get used to taking COVID shots

and COVID boosters. Okay, that's my retaliation for that voice. We definitely are a group of people that like to see people go for it. Yeah. Yeah. Because we want to think that we can do it too. Yeah. That's the thing about Americans.

It's one of the weird places where poor people celebrate rich people. Yes. Because we think that we could be rich too. Yes. We look at it and we go, God, look at that guy out there balling. He's got a Lamborghini. I'm going to fucking do it too. Yeah.

Who was it who said that there are no poor people in America? There are just rich people who aren't rich yet. Oh, that's a good statement. Everyone thinks of themselves as that. Yeah. Everyone thinks my ship's just going to come in. are rich, who are politicians, who really kind of enact laws that suppress, in some ways, the ability for a lot of people to escape from middle class and do better. Yeah.

But meanwhile, those people celebrate these people and celebrate even the ethics that these people espouse because they think somehow or another one day they're going to make it and they want those protections. They want to save money on taxes and become rich. They almost have this attitude like eventually I'm going to be in a position where this is important. I mean, I've been thinking a lot about the culture wars and – Is it really a war though?

Isn't it kind of like a light skirmish? It's barely even a light skirmish. I mean, if you're off Twitter, it basically doesn't exist at all. Exactly. That's what I'm saying. On Twitter, it's like, you know- It's a war. Yeah.

On Twitter, it's the Holocaust. And like off Twitter, it's just a couple of schoolboy idiots. That's so true. I am so much mentally healthier from just- just occasionally will open Twitter and go through it. I never look at my mentions at all. I just want to find out what's going on in the news. Yeah. But just doing that and not reading comments on YouTube and not reading anything on my shit, like my Instagram, I'm so much healthier.

So good. It's so much better for you. It was awesome. If you could just stay strong and hold that discipline. Because I have friends that try it and then they go in there and they go, fuck, this guy said this. Do you know him? Why is he saying that? I'm like, he's an asshole.

You fucking going to worry about what assholes think of you? And Twitter makes us all an asshole. Twitter makes me an asshole. 60 minutes in a day or 60 minutes in an hour. You only have 24 of those in a fucking day. And you're going to think about this guy? Yeah. Get out of here, man.

It also sort of fractures your attention. Like I hadn't read a novel for the entire pandemic. I mean, I used to like reading books. I'm like, I couldn't, I would get five pages in and I'd be like, wait, what just happened on the page before? Like there's something about the, like the distractibility of social media,

of like the constant sort of dopamine hit of like, oh, I got another mention. I got another thing. Yeah, blah, blah, blah, blah another thing yeah that like while i was just traveling it was so nice i intentionally didn't get a data plan on my sorry data data data data plan i didn't get it that's what your kids call you when they're babies uh that and i didn't get one on my phone so i didn't have access to to the internet on my phone while I was traveling around Europe. That's nice. Had like a nine-hour train ride through the south of France.

I got a big, you know, Jonathan Franzen's new book. I love him. He's a great novelist and just read the whole thing. And I was like, and I could feel my mind just slowing down to the pace of actual human existence instead of Twitter and all this nonsense. It's so much. But I was in Lanai once and I dropped phone, and it was like the last drop. And my phone just started randomly calling people. It would just call people, and I'd hang up and call people.

And I was showing my wife, I go, look at this. And I just kept doing it. I go, I guess my phone's fucked. I turned it off, turned it back on, kept doing the same thing. It would just open up contacts, open pictures, open websites, call people. It was broken. Right. It was gone.

Right. So I had to get a new phone, but I was in Lanai, which is a very small island. Beautiful. Beautiful. So I had to order one from Apple, and they had to send it to me. And it took three or four days. And during that time, I felt lighter. Cancel the order.

I don't want it anymore. It was like I was wearing a weight vest. Yeah. And then I was just wandering around. And obviously, it was great because my family was there. I don't want it anymore. It was like I was wearing a weight vest. Yeah. And then I was just wandering around. And obviously, it was great because my family was there. I didn't have to worry. Is everybody okay? Check in with a pay phone or anything.

Yep. None of that. So it was this really relaxed feeling. And I'm like, I can't wait to get my phone again so I can subject myself to the pressure. It's weird because we all know objectively that it's unhealthy. Yeah. But yet, everybody gets that dope. What's on well i mean i did a a tour with jonathan height you know john height uh you know he's a um a moral psychologist i guess at nyu and he came out to australia and new zealand uh just before the pandemic and i was like the moderator on his events and sort of interviewed him at these live events. And he's like really putting out the call saying this stuff, it not

only is bad for you in terms of constantly forcing your brain to expect novelty and innovation and to train you to essentially judge yourself in comparison to other people, to judge your output on the basis of how many likes and comments and shares you get, to sort of derange the way that you interact with other human beings, to make you less capable of having human interactions and more capable of winning points and scoring slam dunks in this weird artificial universe that is Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. But for young people in particular, is his point, it's having really bad effects.

I mean, he looks at like, he charts the introduction of social media and the rise of like self-harm, hospitalizations for self-harm, especially among adolescent girls. It's like been doubling every three years, basically, since Facebook was introduced. Well, it's really from the introduction of the smartphone it's really from 2007 it's uh the coddling of the american mind if people haven't

read it it's really good and talking to jonathan and getting the the sort of it's almost like he's he's sending out a warning like the british are coming the british it really is like it the the dangers are only going to be exacerbated by AR and whatever new technology comes along and haptic feedback suits and all this chaos. All the new stuff that's going to be invented over the next 10 years, 20 years is only going to be more immersive. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, he just thinks that the social media companies have to be forced to at least not let kids on. I mean, at the very least, it should be like cigarettes and booze, where they make a genuine attempt to keep people under the age of 16 or 18. It's interesting because there are some things that for those kids are good. But this is what's really fascinating.

The way China is handling it is so different than America. China's version of TikTok celebrates academic achievements, athletic achievements. It's all science projects, all these different fascinating things. And they lock it out at 10 p.m. At 10 p.m., no one's on it. Those kids are not allowed to get on it because they're trying to encourage achievement. They're trying to encourage, like China has a program to try to make men more manly.

Like this open program where they're trying to make men more masculine. They're doing all these things with like this idea of engineering a society of more accomplished, more successful people. Whereas, what are we doing on TikTok? Kids are fucking dancing.

Yeah, Kardashian memes. They're screaming about veganism and how blue their hair is. Yeah. It's wild. Yeah. I wonder. The difference is interesting. Because I don't think we should engineer the way our society interacts with each other.

But if you look at the way China's doing it, they're doing it clearly with this idea that they want to stimulate young minds. with this idea that they want to stimulate young minds and they want to promote this idea that doing things that you are, you know, like you're going to become more accomplished, you're going to become more athletic. These are what they're trying to encourage. I mean, I'm a little bit reticent about holding anything up that the Chinese Communist Party does as being a great idea. And if we're worried about things like the New York Post article about Joe Biden's son's laptop being suppressed by Twitter, just wait till you get a load. And all of the people who were being suppressed on conventional social media outlets, just wait till you get a load of what a bureaucracy would do if they had control over what the algorithms show you as well.

No denying that. No one would ever argue that with a fucking clear conscience. Yeah. So, I mean, what do you do? I mean, the other thing that Haidt says is maybe you try to force them to make the algorithms not constantly addictive. I mean, I think what people don't necessarily always think about when you're using these platforms is that they're not blank open spaces into which your friends and the people you're following are commenting, and then it's just kind of filtering down in a neutral way. It's obviously being rejigged at the back end to maximize the time that you're spending on the site.

All the algorithm wants to do is to keep you there for one second longer so that they can maximize the time that you're spending on the platform. John Haidt's like, could you change that algorithm so that it's like more fulfilling stuff instead of more addictive stuff? And I'm like, I don't know how you would legislate that. I don't know how you would make them do that. That's what China's doing. I think essentially the only way to do it is to have no algorithms.

Just allow people to search what they enjoy and find it on their own. The suggested side of YouTube, that's what gets you. Yes. And it seems like they've stopped playing auto-playing new shows. Oh, really really is that real jamie like how when i watch youtube it doesn't necessarily always do that anymore like sometimes it just shows me a new a new video but sometimes it doesn't sometimes the video just stops okay they maybe just change the default setting to off and maybe you have to turn back on or something

could be something like that well that's good. But if there was no algorithm whatsoever, the argument would be that, well, there's probably a lot of things that you would be introduced to that you would enjoy that you're going to miss if there's no algorithm at all. Yeah, sure. And that would be fine. I mean, isn't that the way that I wander through life normally? There's all kinds of stuff that's out there that I miss because it's not being constantly shoved into my face. I don't necessarily need the most addictive food at all times. I can also just sometimes have a salad. Right. But the business model for them, like they're concerned with the most engagement and the best way to get the most engagement is find out what Josh Zepp's likes

and then show it to them over and over and over again. Yeah. You know? I mean, as you say, once AR and like whenever you talk about like haptic feedback suits and stuff like that, my my mind just goes to once porn gets mastered in that world, there's going to be a large percentage of the population that's just in the basement for prolonged periods of time. medication. And they rigged this system where they drilled holes in her head and put wires into her brain and gave her an electrical device. And when she felt discomfort, she could hit a button and the button would send a charge into her brain. And that's all she did. All she did was just- It was a good charge. Yeah. It made her cum. So all she did was it was a good charge yeah it made her come so all she did was come all day wow and uh she developed an ulcer on the finger that she used to hit the button she never stopped using the finger she was trying to tamper with it to increase the amplitude sure it's a crazy story

because it's a it's a real woman like they they wrote about her like i'll read you what they wrote about her because it's it's so crazy that you wonder like how long before something like that is in a phone or how long before something, some ability to do something. There's the lady. That's what it, no, that's the device. Yeah. I mean, then the question becomes like, will the government try to regulate that the way that they regulate mind-altering drugs? Listen to what the doctor said. At its most frequent, the patient self-stimulated throughout the day, neglecting her personal hygiene and family commitments.

A chronic ulceration developed on the tip of the finger used to adjust the amplitude dial, and she frequently tampered with the device in an effort to increase the stimulation amplitude. At times, she implored her family to limit effort to increase the stimulation amplitude. At times, she implored her family to limit her access to the stimulator, each time demanding its return after a short hiatus. Wow. Yeah. So they gave her the ability to self-stimulate in a way. See, the patient clocked up 1,500 doses in a three-hour period.

In a three-hour period, she came 1,500 times. But overall, they showed surprising restraint. What the fuck does that mean? Yeah, 500 doses an hour is not restraint. You're tired. Yeah. That's a lot. You came 1,500 times in three hours.

I mean- So this is possible with humans, and it's not far off. Once they start doing things like Neuralink and they start tapping into the receptors of the mind or neurons or just the stimulation aspect of the human body, like whatever they can do externally or internally, once there's a device that allows you

to achieve a sensation that's unachievable without it we're gonna have a real fucking problem because people can't stop looking at their instagram likes exactly and that's a real quick hit of dopamine yeah imagine if we get to a point where your phone can make you come i mean it sounds crazy what you've got on your phone but i mean sure you use your hands yeah it can it can happen in the future. Would that get regulated like a drug? Well, I think it'll happen the same way phones happen, where it's too late by the time we realize. And then it'll be so addictive, and then it'll also be so profitable. Because with these algorithms, like what Jonathan Haidt is saying is very logical,

that there really should be some sort of regulation on these these algorithms and this is also with tristan harris and the social dilemma and which is an amazing documentary that really sounds off the alarm on these things these are minor in comparison to something that can actually change the physiological state of your fucking brain like literally make you orgasm i mean what's interesting is that like the the war on drugs justifies itself as being something that's against harm, like physical harm, right? We don't want people to hurt themselves.

We don't want people to derange their lives through addiction and whatever. And yet it's become expanded to include any sort of tinkering with your consciousness, right? Even things that we know are not particularly harmful, you know, MDMA and psilocybin and things like that in clinical settings, we know how to administer these in ways that are very low risk. And yet that's still illegal because there's like, again, a kind of puritanical objection to the whole enterprise of trying to

screw around with how your brain works. So my question is, does that, like, why isn't Instagram sort of included in that? In fact, throughout the pandemic, like you mentioned, I lost weight. Well, I gained weight, then I lost weight. Let me tell you, that has an impact on your mood. That's a tiny orgasmatron in your head when you've just worked out. You know that? There are all kinds of things that we can do in our lives which moderate our moods, which impact on the way that our consciousness is perceiving the world and so on. But the difference is you losing that weight is a real effort. That's hard to do.

Right, I see. That takes work. Right. And most people are not going to be able to pull that off. Just hook it up to the old iPhone. Yeah, but the kind of stimulation that you get from a phone is actually ultimately very profitable because, first of all, they sell phones.

Everybody wants to buy the new phone. When the new phone comes out, Instagram is very profitable. All these social media, I of all, they sell phones. Everybody wants to buy the new phone. When the new phone comes out, Instagram is very profitable. All these social media, I mean Facebook, how much have they profited off the data of those untold billions of people that are on it? It's stunning. Like if they really do develop a Facebook coin, if they trick regulators into allowing them to have a crypto coin, we've got a real fucking problem on our hands

because then Facebook becomes essentially a nation. They're going to have a coin that people are going to use if it becomes a predominant crypto coin. If it becomes a really big deal that people buy and exchange goods and then maybe even homes and cars and things like that with crypto that's from Facebook. And then Facebook, they have currency. So not only do they generate untold billions of dollars a year. How much money does Facebook make a year? Right, right. Let's just guess because I don't know.

How much do you think Facebook makes a year? I have no idea. I have no idea what they make. I mean I also don't know what they class as profit and what they class as revenue. I mean if I was to guess, like, what are they worth? About a trillion dollars or like $800 billion or something like that? Something crazy like that. So, you know, their revenue might be, I don't know,

like 5% of that or something like that. Maybe like, I'll guess like... $50 billion a year? $10 billion? $10 billion? $50 billion? Somewhere in that range? I'm going to say $90.

$90 billion a year. Jamie? Somewhere in that range? I'm going to say 90. 90 billion a year. Jamie? For revenue or profit? Sorry. Let's go with both. Revenue it said is 85.9 something billion. Look at you. Profit's probably half of that. I typed in net profit

and it's giving me ad revenue for some reason. 9 billion. Maybe for the quarter. Well, that would be- Nine billion. Yeah, maybe for the quarter. What is it? Five billion per quarter? Nine billion.

Nine billion per quarter. Wow. So 40 billion a year in profit, 85 in revenue. Now imagine if they have a coin. So not only would they have a currency, then they also have a territory because the metaverse is a virtual territory, right? That's true. They're going to create- The fuck out of me. So now they've got a territory because the metaverse is a is a virtual territory right they're going to create so so they've got now they've got a you're right they've got a country which essentially has a land has land has has psychological a landscape yeah they've got a

currency which which you can actually use to buy things in that landscape they'll probably have i mean they'll definitely have games and stuff like you know the whole axe what do you make of the whole like axi infinity and all these there's like there are filipino kids who are whose whose job it is i say kids they're 15 year olds who's like many of them whose job it is to play like uh crypto video games with like rich western well richer western teenagers who like exchange the playing of the game, generate some of the coins. So like Axie Infinity and these kinds of virtual games,

you play things, it's like this whole other universe, right? So along with the rise of NFTs and shit like that, they've got these, I've got an episode of my podcast. My podcast is Uncomfortable Conversations, by the way. If people want to check it out, Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Sepps. One of the episodes was with this investment banker who is a bit

of an expert on Bitcoin and crypto. And he's telling me about how... So this is one of the most profitable... This website right now, Jamie, is what? Axie Infinity? I've never heard of it either. AxieInfinity.com

That's right. So it's got its own currency, and inside this universe, you can earn tokens, these AXS tokens, right? Isn't it funny how they have scrolls like it's old-timey? Meanwhile, it's the most fucking dystopian future you could ever imagine. They have everything like Dungeons and Dragons, scrolls. So it sort of feels like you're playing Pokemon, but there are real stakes. There's real money behind it and people are making a living. Like if you're a 15-year-old

in the Philippines, you can make five bucks a day by playing dumb, you know, Americans and Australians on this. So will you gamble? Is that what you do

if you're playing? No, I think you earn. I think you earn. I mean, I'm not an expert on this. I don't, yeah, this is getting,

I told you before, there's play to earn as a new thing taking over this space, if you will, and that's what this is. Can you back that up so I can see what that just said? So this was the marketplace I was looking at. Look at that where it says 4.2 million total volume. What does that mean? What does that mean?

That's how much has been exchanged on the marketplace today in the last 24 hours? $4.2 million worth of what? So I would be guessing that that would be worth the tokens that are in Axie and people are buying and selling things. So like people will buy like superpowers or like, you remember like FarmVille or whatever those things are. You'll be able to buy, oh, I want my corn to grow faster. So I'll buy some fertilizer for it and lots of stuff. I never hear about FarmVille.

They just got bought by the company that owns, Take-Two, that owns Grand Theft Auto. Just got bought. Oh, so now you'll be able to kill the farmer. You just do a drive-by. So these are plots of land for available for $10,000, $11,000, $32,000 in the spot one for $20,000.

$32,000! So it's metaverse type shit. Yeah, that's right. Oh my god. It's also in, this might be Ethereum or whatever their cryptocurrency is. Yeah, that's right. Oh, my God. It's also in probably, this might be Ethereum or whatever their cryptocurrency is. $32,000? Yeah, so they're probably piggybacking on Ether. Click on the lot that someone bought. Can you see it?

Maybe. It depends if I might have to have the game. You can sort of see. So it's just showing you that, and then you can get some details on the sale history. This is so strange. Yeah, there you go. So like four Ether.

Well, an Ether's worth about three grand, isn't it? So that person is 4.2 Ether. So that's 12. Yeah, they lost money. That person is buying.

Wow. Yeah, I mean. Wow. So like, you know, whatever happens to Bitcoin and Ether and stuff like that, like Bitcoin's in a slump at the moment.

Did it lose more money today, Jamie? What's going on with Bitcoin? In the last 30 days, $170 million in this marketplace. So it's $4 million today, but it's $170 million over the last month. Wow.

Yeah, it's $42,000-ish, $41,000. $168 million worth of business. So at the moment, just think about the fact that we're at the precipice, at the beginning of the second decade, the third decade of the 21st century or whatever, at the beginning of this whole evolution. It's almost like being at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but it's a technological revolution. And all of these little things are popping up.

Like we haven't even heard of them yet. It's like, what is a train? It's like being 200 years ago or something. What's this? What's this thing you're doing? An internal combustion engine or something? And all these little experiments in this stuff. A printing press.

Yeah, exactly. How is that going to change the world? Yeah, smash cut to 80 years of war and bloodshed after the printing press, right, in Europe. It's going to be incredibly tumultuous. And as soon as Zuckerberg gets his eyes set on, oh, okay, well, hang on. If that kind of money is being spent

on this tiny little nothing game, how do I fold that into the metaverse, provide goods and services in my virtual territory that enable people to get some kind of perceived value from them? And then all of a sudden you're actually trading, conversing, living, aspiring, acquiring in this virtual space. And every time you're buying something,'s getting a cut right and you know facebook's issuing the currency potentially they probably get a little percentage of each transaction i assume no matter what i assume so i assume that's how it would work right he has the potential to be without a doubt the most powerful and wealthy person that's ever

existed i think he is the most powerful i'm like who would be the more powerful person maybe rupert murdoch but i mean i think you'd have to say z think he is the most powerful. I'm like, who would be the more powerful person? Maybe Rupert Murdoch. But I mean, I think you'd have to say Zuckerberg is the most powerful person in the world because he can, you know, what he does to the algorithm, what he chooses to, what direction he chooses to take that company in with billions and billions of users.

It doesn't have to be a big thing. It's just like all these tiny little tweaks. It's like a sailboat in the ocean that you just tack it a little bit that way. And then after 100 miles. The whole culture. I mean, this is something that they raise in the social dilemma and that Tristan Harris is always talking about as well. Like the whole culture just moves in this other direction.

And it gets extremified. So like the YouTube recommendation bar that you were talking about, we've all seen these experiments. I hope we've all seen them online of where people start searching about dieting. And then it goes more and more extreme suggestions about dieting. And you end up with pro-anorexia videos being delivered to 14-year-old girls because each step of the way, it's just slightly more interesting and slightly more clicky to get slightly more extreme. Really? Yeah.

You haven't seen it? No, I didn't know that they'll go all the way to pro-anorexia videos. Yeah, or like, you know, you start inquiring about 9-11 and you end up with a 9-11 truth video. It really goes in the other direction. It's really like, here's a very reasonable, moderate, like, centrist, mildly boring thing that you're probably not going to click on, which may be the truth. Most things that are true are mildly boring in comparison to their more extreme, untrue alternatives. The thing about these places, whether it's YouTube or Facebook or Twitter, it's like there's no real... Once it's already been established and then it gets moving and then it becomes an enormous part of our culture. It becomes an enormous way where people exchange information.

There's no precedent. It's not like we have decades of this to look back on and go, well, remember back in the 30s? You know, people got it wrong, but now social media is more adapted. No, it's so new that the consequences of it all haven't been – they really haven't been vetted out yet. I worry. they really haven't been vetted out yet i worry i mean like when you look at like the political and cultural swings from right to left as we sort of go back and forth and like one party one side of of of politics gains power and the other losers the sort of the gentle pendulum that has always happened i worry is turning into like a pirate ship at a fair where it just goes more and more and more and more and more and more

and that the algorithms are kind of dragging us back and forth so that instead of going from like Clinton to Romney or something, you're going from Trump to Obama and Obama to Trump and then like what's next and that all of that is feeding into that. Once we're all hooked up to our VR and AR and we're all exchanging like Axie Infinity tokens with each other and getting off on our orgasmatron porn plugged directly into our brains,

how does that affect our actual ability to collaborate with each other on the big problems that actually exist in the real world? That's a good question because if you leave it all to Mark Zuckerberg, are you comfortable having that guy dictate the future of the human race? I know that's hyperbole, but is it? I mean, I don't know. I mean, what percentage of the impact on the human race is Facebook have? You look at small countries, like foreign countries, where they've absolutely affected the way elections run

and governments being overthrown, and through disinformation and outright lies published on Facebook, they've changed rulers and kingdoms. Yeah, it's like the Myanmar thing, where there was like a whole genocide, right? And people talk about how there needs to be more internal regulation at Facebook of hate speech and stuff like that, which is, of course, a double-edged sword because you don't want hate speech or misinformation to get defined so broadly that anyone with a dissident opinion like you is suddenly banned from the platform or something just because you don't agree with Fauci about something or whatever. Did I ever tell you the conversation I had with a woman at YouTube about a conversation between Douglas Murray and Sam Harris?

No. This is a wild conversation. Those guys are friends of mine. Yeah, yeah. Mine as well. I love both of them. I was at a thing with a woman that I am very good friends with who was a large executive at one of the big tech companies. She invites us.

We go. We're hanging out. And it's me and my wife. And there's a woman there from Facebook. large executive at one of the big tech companies. She invites us. We go. We're hanging out. And it's me and my wife. And there's a woman there from Facebook. And so she starts talking about how difficult it's been to regulate Facebook and this and that. I go, there was a case, I go, where I saw a man had a playlist on his page and his YouTube page, just a random guy. playlist on his on his page and his YouTube page just a random guy and he received a community guidelines strike because he put up a video of Douglas Murray and Sam Harris having a conversation like why would he do that? She was it was hate speech and I go the way you said that so confidently my wife

She sees the fucking look at my eyes and I'm like, what are you talking about? grabs my knee. She squeezes my knee. Not here. Not now, darling. She sees the fucking look in my eyes. And I'm like, what are you talking about? How can you say that so confidently that it was hate speech? Tell me about the contents of the conversation. She's fucking digging her nails in my leg. I go, tell me about the content of that conversation. Why would you say that?

I go, you're talking about two public intellectuals. That was not hate speech. I go, I watched the video. And then, you know then people got between us. Right. It was like, settle off. She probably turned into the Australian health woman. You're going to have to get used to our definition of hate speech. She was.

Joe Rogan. It was really that. The way she said it, it was hate speech. Granted, she probably didn't expect to have that kind of conversation with someone like me who was on YouTube and had a very popular show. Well, she didn't know who you were. She'd been hiding under a rock for the past 30 years. This was quite a few years ago.

This was six years ago, somewhere like that. She might not have known who I was. It's very possible. And on top of that, she was a little liquored up. Oh. Yeah, we both were a little liquored up. It was hate speech. It was hate speech.

The way she said it though was so confident. It was hate speech. It was hate speech. The way she said it, though, was so confident. It was hate speech. Yeah. She was just like, go away. Yeah. It's hate speech. It's like hate speech has gone from like intentionally vilifying people and trying to encourage other people to be physically violent against minorities to raising any questions that might contradict the enforced narrative. Yeah.

That people want you to believe. I think that was when Douglas had that very controversial book, The Strange Death of Europe. Yeah. Yeah. I had some problems with that book, but I mean, you know, that's the thing about- Discussion.

Exactly. Discussion, conversation, being a curious person. I mean, you talk to him about it. You go, oh, I didn't really buy this beer. That doesn't really sound right. You're not just like, it's hate speech. Right. Therefore, we're not going to read it.

We're not going to permit it. Were you there? Because that is her. That's amazing. Yeah. But coming back to like Facebook's moderation, right? So then there is a class of real actual Facebook hate speech, misinformation, disinformation. Yeah, for real.

Sort of literally pro-genocidal activity that's going on, especially on WhatsApp. A lot of people don't realize that in developing countries often WhatsApp and like Facebook Messenger and these things will be used to disseminate to like thousands of people in a single text. They've changed this now to their credit about the number of times that you can retweet something and the number of people who you can group chat it to. Oh, for WhatsApp.

Yeah, that's right. Because there would be military dictatorships in the developing world that would just spray out inflammatory rhetoric against, I mean, I'm thinking specifically of Burma here, Myanmar, where they'd spray out inflammatory rhetoric against, I mean, I'm thinking specifically of Burma here, Myanmar, where they'd spray out inflammatory rhetoric against religious minorities, for example, accusing them of having done all sorts of terrible things. And that would get passed on and passed on and passed on and passed on. It goes viral, viral, viral. And all of a sudden you've got people effectively being lynched and run out of their homes and they're becoming refugees. And in terms of moderating this content, here in the States, Facebook proudly points to its army of content moderators of over like 100,000 people.

It keeps saying to, you know, whenever Zuckerberg has to testify at Congress, he's like, we employ so many people to check it and blah, blah, blah. Well, how many Burmese speakers are in there? They've got like, I can't remember what it was, but it's four or 14, certainly not more than 40, to cover a country of many, many tens of millions of people. So all over the world, there are these countries. And Zuckerberg made a deal with a lot of countries where he said, I'm going to give you free internet as long as Facebook is the portal through which all of your citizens get to the internet. So there are countries where people think that Facebook is the internet. They don't even know that there's a worldwide web

outside of Facebook. And it comes pre-installed on your phone. Yeah. Which is wild. Yeah. I mean, that's- How is that even legal? What kind of dystopian shit is that, Joe?

Like, you know, they don't even- And he's just racking up money. And he's like, hey, we're giving you something for free. What is he doing with his time? Like, what does that guy do with his free time? The orgasmatron? He's got a secret one in his basement. He's hooked up.

The ladies button. He was the guy 1,500 times in three hours. He's got bloody thumbs just hammering that button. He always wears gloves to hide his bloody thumbs. I don't know. He's not that old. What is he, 40? He looks like he's taken a serum that will maintain his age at like 34.

Is that right? Adrenochrome. Is that right? They eatochrome. Is that right? They eat babies. All right. He's 37. He's 37. 37.

But he has- Okay, what's his net worth? What did you guess? Oh, man. 70 billion? Well, how much of Facebook does he own? 55%, I believe. 55% of a company that's probably-

Worth a trillion dollars. He's in control of it. So that means he's worth $500 billion. Yeah, I would estimate that he's worth that he's the richest man in the world is he i thought elon might be yeah but yeah i'm just joking well how much is elon worth elon's worth 200 billion i believe i thought we were getting towards someone being a trillionaire yeah well i think we are i think it's already happened but i think he's worth 117 and then right below it it says bill gates is the number one with 86 billion.

Yeah, that's lowballing it, man. How does that make sense? Bezos is 188? It says two different people. Yeah, Bezos is 188. I don't know who Bernard is. Who's Bernard Arnault? Bernard Arnault.

Look at him. Look at his wife. Hold on. Get to the pic with him and the girl. That's probably Rihanna. Yeah, it is. Oh, it's Rihanna. Yeah.

He's the guy that runs Louis Vuitton. That'll be the scoop. I was hoping that was his wife. I was like, look how hot she is. I was like, look at him. Score! Whenever there's like a completely disproportionate relationship like that. Have you ever seen Rupert Murdoch and his wife?

Of course. Please pull that up. He's Australian. He's a great Aussie export, mate. You've done a great job with him. You're welcome. He's changed the way Americans feel about Fox News. You're welcome. Well, he created Fox News. Yeah, I know. Why did you... Oh, is that the new one? Go far left.

You didn't even write his own name. Oh, there it is. You don't have to. There it... How's his wife look? For him? Damn. Look at her. Yeah.

I mean, come on, son. It's all love, Joe. It's just that that's true love. Come on, that's stunning. She just finds him really attractive and charming. Maybe she does. Maybe she just loves the fact that he's rich as fuck. Come on, bro.

She's hot as fuck. Look at that. Yeah. What do you think of him? I don't know much about him other than the fact that he runs Fox News. It's really remarkable that this one gentleman from another country has such an incredible influence on conservatives in America. conservatives in America. I mean, it's not just Fox News. You know, he owns the Wall Street Journal. He owns 20th Century Fox, the movie studio. He owns Fox, the television station.

He owns like- I used to be employed by him at one point in time. Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. I was on Fox. I was on a show called Hardball. Right. Right.

Baseball show. Cool. Yeah. Man, the things you've done, Joe Rogan. I've done a lot of things. It's been a- Pretty strange. It's been a big rollercoaster.

It's hard for me to believe. Even though I look at- What, all the things you've done? Yeah, I look at it and I go, this is bizarre. I know. It's funny, big roller coaster. It's hard for me to believe. What, all the things you've done? Yeah, I look at it and I go, this is bizarre. I know, it's funny, isn't it? Well, when you're a creative person and you're trying to construct a creative life, now I sound like I'm kind of talking to the young people out there, but maybe I am a little bit. One of the exciting things is you do find yourself going in all these weird, crazy directions that you never would have expected. And that's part of the kind of beautiful tap dance of doing your own thing and of doing, you know, of creating a life that isn't just getting a job. Like my grandfather, he became, he learned to make shoes when he was like 15

during the depression in New Zealand. And he, his buddy, you know, had a dad who worked at a shoe factory. So they trained him, like left school in 10th grade, went to the shoe factory at the age of 16, walked out of that shoe factory at the age of 65, and that was his job. Wow. You know? And that's what you did. Yeah. I'm going to make shoes.

Why? I don't know. It was a job. When are you going to make shoes? Until I die? How about until I die? That's the great thing about this American attitude of just go for it, go do something. You could do whatever you want. You want to write a novel? You should write a novel.

What do you want to do? Run marathons? Put on those shoes, bro. Let's go. That attitude, it really does foster a lot of innovation and it really makes people believe that the American dream is alive and well. The American dream has always been to just go out and carve your own path. I mean, literally, it's what this country was supposedly founded on. That's right. And it comes back to a bit what you were saying earlier about like inequality and the elites that sort of make that harder for people like i do worry that a lot of the craziness that we've seen over the past couple of years that i think is partly due to the pandemic in terms of like riots and what's been going on in portland and the extreme sort of clashes between alt-right and like black lives matter

and like the the the intensity of the of the culture wars is partly because we're all trapped inside spending too much time on Twitter. For sure. For sure. And partly because we haven't really gotten on top of like inequality. Like people feel like they can't get ahead. I mean a lot of people feel like they can't get ahead. A lot of people feel like they're stuck in one place. And like I just need a leg up to be able to achieve that American dream. I don't feel like anyone's in my corner helping me do so.

The true inequality in America is the inner cities. If you look at the disparity between the amount of violence and crime and drug use and gang violence that's in, whether it's south side of Chicago or Baltimore or Detroit or Compton, pick a spot where it's historically been riddled with crime and drug use and just sadness and despair. They don't fix those spots. They'll fucking spend billions of dollars to go to Afghanistan and fix this or Iraq and fix that. These Halliburton no-bid contracts that they got when they blew up Iraq.

Imagine if Halliburton got contracts, no-bid contracts to fix Baltimore. Yeah. You know, I mean, it's not a bad idea. It's not a bad idea. It's not a bad idea because it could be profitable. I mean, maybe that's the way to fix these inner cities. What if the government got together with some sort of a large corporation like that and said, there's a contract to be had to fix inner cities the same way they have these no-bid contracts to fix these overseas spots

We drop bombs on like we've kind of dropped economic bombs on these places like let's let's If you want to make America great again air quotes like what's the best way to mayor make America great? Well, let's have less losers. What's the best way to have less losers? Let's give people a better ground floor. Give people a better place they're starting from. Because clearly people are starting from different places. The benefit of starting from a shitty spot is you develop tenacity and grit and drive. But that's not everybody.

That's a small percentage of fish making up that salmon ladder. And then they become successful. And you've got to have a good ladder. You've got fish making up that salmon ladder and then they become successful. And you gotta have a good ladder. You gotta have a good salmon ladder. You can be the best salmon in the world, but without a good salmon ladder you're not making your way up it. And you gotta not get jacked by a bear along the way. That's also true. What's the bear in this analogy? I'm not sure. Crime. Crime and violence.

Crime and violence and also, I mean, imagine the peer pressure. The war on drugs. Yeah, that too, right? Because the war on drugs, because these drugs are illegal, that has propped up organized crime. Exactly. And it makes it really attractive to become a dealer. Yeah. Because there's nothing else to do.

You can make a lot of money. You can make zero money because there's no fucking jobs. Or you can make millions selling drugs. Yeah, exactly. You know? I mean's there's there's a way that that can be remedied there's a way where the impact of these crime-ridden impoverished neighborhoods can be mitigated and we've literally done nothing yeah and the

publicly address that it's so frustrating because the like the let's take this plan of yours to haliburtonize the redevelopment of inner cities. And if you tried to propose that, it wouldn't just, I mean, both sides would object. Like the right would object because the right would be like, why are we spending all this money on these people in the first place? You know, they should be able to swim their way up the salmon ladder without help. And then the left would have a whole bunch of like vested interests. And they'd be like, well, we know the way of doing things here. Like we've been working for many years in these communities of need.

And like it's very important to allow the people who choose to be homeless. They're not homeless anymore. They're like, you know, whatever the euphemism is. Like it's very important for them to allow themselves to be self-expressed in the way that they want to be self-expressed. I have an idea to get people on board. We have a war on poverty. And this is the way you have a war on poverty. You draft white people from the suburbs to have to move to these neighborhoods.

Yeah. Imagine? Yeah. And then once they're in, you know, like fucking Baltimore, the south side of Chicago, they're like, this place is fucked. This needs to be fixed immediately. A lot of people don't even know. I mean, a lot of, and it is bad.

It's uniquely bad here in the States. I think Americans are unaware. And I was unaware when I lived here. I went to New Orleans a few years after Katrina. Uh, I had a buddy who was living down there and I was like, you know, I kind of want to go to the parts that were, were badly hit and that haven't been redeveloped yet. He was like, you don't want to, you don't want to go there. And I was like, no, I mean, I got my rental car. I got my, I'm Australian. Come on, hey, let's go and see what the poor people are up to, shall we? And he's like, so I went on a drive by myself.

And like, you're talking about Thailand, people being happy. You know, you go to India, like they have nothing, but they all are sort of the same level of nothing. So they can be happy and they can like still have community and they can have a sense of a functioning society even without very much. Here, no functioning society, no nothing. I mean, just empty houses, boarded up, like a dude running from one house to another when he hears my car coming down the street no cars a few cars with like the tires pulled off and like you know up on on bricks you know just smashed windows everywhere

like it was like well it was like a post-apocalyptic nightmare but like still people like like shadows in the windows and stuff like that and i pulled the like i drove through pulled out and like i literally pulled the car over the side of the road and I burst into tears. Wow. And I'm not the kind of person who bursts into tears very easily. But I'm even just feeling like now. I was like, how can we, as people who have the resources that we've got, be cool with that? with that.

Right. Like, there has to be a way to, like, do something for the people who are living there that is better than what they've got right now. How on earth? Like, what total, what a complete indictment

of whatever system we've got that Zuckerberg's out there with his little, you know, figuring out how to turn Axie Infinity into Facebook coins that we're all going to spend in the metaverse at the same time as that exists. Yeah. It's shocking. It's terrifying. And it's also unrecognized, right? It's not

something that's discussed on a daily basis, even though it's one of the worst parts of America. The worst aspects of America are the poorest neighborhoods. And yet we don't look at that as being a problem. Like we look at infrastructure, we look at pollution, we look at all these different issues. Climate, what about climate? Got to fix the climate. What about fix these fucking neighborhoods, man?

Well, yeah, exactly. And then whatever chaos comes as a result of weather systems being disrupted due to climate change is only going to hit those kinds of neighborhoods the worst anyway. So if you do care about that, then care about all of it. is only going to hit those kinds of neighborhoods the worst anyway. So if you do care about that, then care about all of it. And the neighborhoods, if you stopped and thought about just the sheer amount of despair that comes out of these places and the crime and the violence and all that stuff, if people saw it, if they really knew about it and they looked at it as like a problem that we have in America in terms of like we have a pollution problem.

We have this problem. We have this problem too. This should be step one. Well, that's where we get to your draft idea. You just draft Nancy Pelosi's grandchildren to go and live there and then see how long it takes to change. This is what you do. If you're born rich, if you're born rich, you have to spend

at least 20 years or no, how many years? A year, like it's the Peace Corps or something, right? How much are you going to fix in a year?

You have to do a term because if you're a year, you'll stay inside and order Uber Eats and never even buy a gun. No Uber Eats guys going down the street I was driving down

to say what. So if you got to fix it, you would have to get people to do two years. Obviously, I'm joking. Oh, well, your family lived there. Yeah, exactly. I don't really mean that,

but I'm saying, you know. Opening your eyes to it. Yeah. I had dinner with, do you know Tim Urban? Do you know the Wait But Why blog? Have you heard of this? No.

He's a buddy of mine in New York. What does it say? The blog is called Wait But Why. You can call it up, Jamie. You might recognize it. I've heard of that. He's such an interesting guy. I had him on my podcast and I got- What does it say? The blog is called Wait But Why. You can call it up, Jamie. You might recognize it. I've heard of that. He's such an interesting guy. I had him on my podcast and I got-

What does he do? He's a blogger. And he basically takes big, huge ideas, like the sort of stuff that we're talking about, and puts them into stick figure cartoons and writes little blogs about them to super, super, super, super, almost hilariously oversimplify them.

And he was talking about, I mean, we, super, super, almost hilariously oversimplify them. And he was talking about, I mean, we were talking about everything, but one thing that came up was his, he's been talking to all these researchers about extraterrestrial intelligence and why we haven't found evidence of alien life yet. And he plots it all out, like in a very, very simplistic way,

where he's like, what is that? What coffee have you got there? I'll have some coffee, please. Thank you. Is this like extra special? No, it's just black rifle coffee. Cheers, sir. Cheers.

Thanks for having me. Great to see you again. Sorry you had to move to that prison colony. We could do this more often. Yeah, I know. I'll be back more often now unless the next- Unless another fucking variant breaks out. Hopefully they're know. I'll be back. I'll be back more often now unless the next... Unless another fucking variant breaks out. Hopefully they're all

going to be milder. Australians are done with lockdowns and things like that. I hope so. Texans are done with it a long time ago. But I'm hoping that, you know, obviously things vary, but according to epidemiologists, most things that follow along these lines that we're seeing in this pandemic,

this is actually Omicron's normal progression. Yeah, good. And that they become more contagious but less virulent. Less deadly. Yeah, which is great. So the theory that I was just talking to him about that we mentioned to you about was like whether or not there's a – so why isn't there any evidence of alien civilizations, right?

So one explanation is that there's like a great filter, which at some, whenever civilizations get sophisticated enough to be able to reach out and communicate with other civilizations, there's, they either blow themselves up and like, you know, there's no opportunity to actually evolve beyond a certain point because you get too clever for your own good and you blow yourself up with nukes or you destroy the planet or something like that. Or maybe the great filter is behind us and there's a whole ton of life out there in the solar system, in the galaxy, in the universe, but none of it actually gets to be conscious and self-aware and build civilizations because there's some impediment to becoming as sophisticated as our brains are that we don't even know about,

that we've already overcome, like some point in human evolution. And the third point was like maybe there are lots of civilizations out there, but there's one super predator civilization that as soon as another civilization gets too big for its boots just comes and extinguishes all of the rival civilizations. And the ones that haven't been extinguished have to stay quiet, almost like you're in the dark woods and you know that there's a monster out there. So you don't light a fire because you don't want the

monster to know where you are. So nobody's broadcasting the fact that alien civilizations actually do exist. They're just staying quiet because they don't want to communicate to the predator civilization that they actually exist and get wiped out. And that everything becomes more internal with these quasi dimensions, with these new ways of achieving stimulation and also like a symbiotic relationship with electronics where people stop being biological and they start being some sort of weird cyborg-type creature. I mean, this is like the archetypal alien, this little guy right here, right? Yes. The big heads and the little bodies. You know, one of the things that people believe is that that's what human beings are destined

to probably look like in the future. If you think about what we used to be, if we used to be these beastly muscular primates, and we have slowly but surely become these doughy things with big brains and massive use of electronics and technology and tools, and it's changed our need for physical strength and tooth, fang and claw. Right. That that's where we're going, that we're going to be there. And then the other thought is that those things, one of the reasons why we see those things is like they're not biological.

That's why they can survive the radiation of deep space. That's why they can whatever G force their fucking ships have. Like they're not subject to all the biological limitations that we have they're like holographic representations or something or oh yeah well i thought you were gonna say they're us from the future if that's what we evolved into possible too yeah but i think those scenarios of like if you look at where we're going i mean clearly there's some sort of a push for us to travel to other planets and interstellar exploration. Surely there's some, I mean, Elon's at the forefront of that.

Yeah. But really the big push of this country, of this population of human beings, though, is technological innovation. Yeah. Like if you looked at us objectively from afar, if you were some sort of a being and you didn't understand what we were, what's going on over there? Oh, there's this one dominant species that makes things. We're the only ones that make things. There's a few examples of bees that make beehives

and there's leafcutter ants in my property that are making some weird little structure. But the real makers of things is the humans. And if you look, well, what is their goal? Well, their goal is to make the best shit possible constantly every year. And they even have like a built-in problem with materialism. Like what is materialism? Well, it's a silly notion.

You're going to live this empty life where you're just chasing objects. But what are you doing with this instinct of materialism? You're fueling innovation. You're fueling because you're constantly working to try to earn the money so you can get these new things. And these new things are always superior to the old things. And they keep getting better and better. And the acceleration of that superior like arc is exponential. If you look at the – this is another point that Tim – I'm just giving Tim a shout out to give him credit for the stuff that I've been noodling on for the past – yesterday and today I've had a lot of time just sitting on a plane looking out the window going, man, where are all the aliens?

And so the other thing he talks about is like if the history of human civilization was an 800-page book, so say 160,000 years that we've been like homo sapiens sapiens with like the kinds of civilizations that well even pre pre civilizations right nomadic peoples and so on. Then each page of that book is what 250 years. I think I'm doing that. So that math's right or 200 years 200 times 800. Yeah. 160,000 like if you can open that book to almost any page and the same shit's going on. Yes. Right.

Yeah. Like all the way up until the like. Yeah. Basically, people people are wandering around pretty primitive tools. A few of them sort of figure out how to use fire. A few of them figure out like how to use metals and stuff like that. A few of them figure out how to ride horses and domesticate animals. But it's basically the same shit for like 790 pages of the 800 page book of

the civilization of, you know, of human, of our species. And then just towards the end, it's like the page before the very end, like the United States gets settled, Australia gets settled, the industrial revolution happens. And then like on the final page, if each page is 250 years of an 800 page book, you know, it's the last half of the page. Nuclear weapons, you know, going into space, landing on the moon, the evolution of the internet, vehicles, cars, climate change, like all of this, and it's like the final few, like Facebook

and all this shit, Axie Infinity and little coins and your VR and your orgasmatron and everything is like the final two lines of an 800-page book. So, you know, sometimes people will say to me, you know, people always think that they're living through amazing times, Josh. You know, you think you're living through an incredible time, but I'm sure people were saying that in like the 1820s. I'm sure everyone was like, oh, my God, things are changing so fast.

And I'm like, no, I'm going to call bullshit on that. If an alien who knew nothing about anything took that 800 page book they'd be like page 233 is roughly the same as page 722 but they'd get to the end and they'd be like holy shit what's going to happen next? I want to read the sequel to this book.

What's 801? Well that's when they would keep an eye on us. You know when they dropped Fat Man and Little Boy on Japan that's when UFO sightings started happening all over the globe. There's a giant uptick in UFO sightings. Was it Kenneth Arnold was one of the first,

I believe? He's the guy who spotted, I think it's Kenneth Arnold, was the guy that spotted the flying saucers. He was the first one to discuss them as saucer-shaped disks. But they started seeing them all over the place. There was encounters in Washington, D.C., and there was encounters over nuclear bases, where they said that they had shut codes down.

I don't know if there was alien life, and if there is alien life out there that's aware of us, I don't know if they would intervene. Because we don't really do much when we find chimps you know no scientific community yeah well the intelligent scientific community doesn't try to interfere with their life and give them guns and like this is how you start a fire right but chimps have noticed that we exist yes so like even if they don't come like i'm i'm not talking about like why haven't aliens come and visited us like in Independence Day. I just mean like when we train our telescopes on the sky, why isn't there any evidence of like little flickering radio waves coming from somewhere? But a possible explanation is the one that you say, which is we're looking for the wrong things. Like we've only been emitting radio waves for a century.

And we might be just about to end that and go into some virtual reality metaverse or something, and maybe we'll meet them all there. Maybe we'll unlock some door of the Zuckerberg multiverse and be like, oh, here are a whole bunch of preexisting civilizations of aliens who already exist on this platform. Well, also, if you think about the various planets that we know exist just in our solar system and the conditions that exist on these planets. There's not a lot of them that can support life. Like they believe that Mars at one point in time had liquid water and they had an atmosphere

and they were probably hit with some sort of an asteroid that wiped out everything. But other than that, you've got Europa that has frozen water on the outside. I mean, that's close by, though. But when you're talking about the scale of the universe, it's almost like talking about rolling the dice on the numbers of COVID in a population. Like, you don't need very high numbers before once you go to that size. My point was the solar system that we exist in is very unusual.

And, you know, we obviously have a planet that exists in this Goldilocks range, but we also have an extremely large asteroid belt. And it's indicative of the initial impact between Earth 1 and Earth 2. You know, Earth 1 was a planet that got hit by another planet. Right. That's what created the moon. And they believe that also created the asteroid belt. And if there's a solar system out there that didn't have that sort of event, so didn't have to worry about these intermittent cataclysms, where, you know, that's one of the things that Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock

have done some great research on, is the indication that at least one time that we know of, while civilization existed, it was probably almost wiped out. Right. And it's somewhere in the Younger Dryas impact theory, somewhere around 11,000. Is this when we were all like 5,000 people or something? Or like 10,000?

No, that was 70,000 years ago. And that was, I believe, was Indonesia. That was a volcano eruption. That there was a super volcano that erupted that wiped out almost everybody. And we got down to like 70, people or 7 000 people they don't know exactly but it was right about there and then we pulled back we did a lot of fucking here we are today thank god we didn't have an orgasmatron otherwise you know people would have been in their basements with sore

thumbs the point is if there's a planet out there that doesn't have that issue. And let's imagine, because I don't know what the reality is when it comes to like ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia. I mean, these incredible structures that these people built where, unfortunately, because of the burning of the Library of Alexandria, we don't have the real records of how they did it or how they accomplished it or who they were. Or even really how long ago they really made it. We know that some of them, they've done carbon dating on some of the stuff, and they know it's at least 2,500 BC, but there's some indications that some of it might be far, far older than that. So let's imagine that there was some sort of a civilization 10,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago that was very advanced and was allowed to advance without any interruption,

without nuclear war, without solar flares, without asteroid impacts or super volcanoes. Maybe they lived in a much more stable climate and they got to a place where they're a million years more advanced than us. A million years. Imagine what the fuck we're going to be in a million years. I can't even imagine what we're going to be in a hundred years. So then take a thousand years, 10,000, 100,000.

Yeah, if that's the case, like if they were out there and they were watching us, they'd probably just make sure we don't blow ourselves up. Yeah, or not. Well, I don't think, I think they would probably rather. You reckon they're benevolent? Well, you've got to think that, well, I don't know if it's benevolent or malevolent. Like if you think about what a scientist is, it's someone who wants to observe, but sometimes protect, you know, like we protect endangered species, activists get together and

they say, Hey, you know, there's only a few of these birds left. We have to do whatever we can to preserve them. If, if they have that same mentality about the human race, I think they would have a pretty standoffish attitude and just sort of wait for us to figure it out, especially if they look at the acceleration of our innovation and this exponential acceleration of technology. I can't remember if it was Michio Kaku or Neil deGrasse Tyson or one of those great science guys who was saying, maybe any civilization that would be advanced enough

to be able to reach out to us or to be noticed by us would also have to be the kind of civilization that would not be a predatory colonizing species, because in that case, it would have devoured itself with internal squabbles. Right. You know, before then. Yeah. You basically have to reach a certain level of spiritual and psychological wisdom and self-awareness and compassion in order to sustain yourself over the course of, you know, so far we've had a couple of hundred years since the Industrial Revolution and it's only been a century, less than a century that we've had nukes. Yeah. We've had the ability to actually do some serious damage on a global scale. We're just kids.

We are toddlers with an hour 15 right now. Yeah. I mean, we don't know what we're doing and we're going to have grow up into adults. And we're going to have a grown-up civilization. I have some thoughts on that too. I think one day we're going to recognize that one of the things that holds back progress is our primate bodies. And that the symbiotic relationship we have with technology is going to enable us to bypass emotions. Because emotions and hormones and our need to breed through traditional intercourse, I think we're going to look at that and go, this is the result

or this thing that we have, these primate instincts, these animal instincts. This is the cause of all of our suffering. This is the cause of all of our territorial behavior. suffering. This is the cause of all of our territorial behavior. This is the cause of jealousy and hate and greed and racism and tribal identity. And all this stuff is all related to these animal emotions. If we could get past that, and if we could breed through some sort of genetic manipulation, if we could have a body that doesn't exist riding on these natural animal hormones, but rather, you know, uses photosynthesis like a fucking plant. Would you still be human?

No, no, we're not going to be human. Just like we didn't, you know, we used to be a monkey and now we're not a monkey, right? And now we're something else and we're going to be something new a million years from now. I mean, it is fascinating what the phenomenology of that would be, And we're going to be something And again, this is another Jonathan Haidt thing. Like he has the analogy of the rider on the elephant, right? That the, you know, we're all riding around on an elephant and the elephant is our kind of passions and our unreason and our instincts and the things that motivate us in a sort of brutish evolutionary primate way. And we ride on the elephant thinking that we're in total control of the elephant because our rational brains like to perceive the perceive ourselves that way. But in actual fact, we're often making post hoc rationalizations

about where the elephant goes. So like the elephant takes us and we're like, oh yeah, yeah, go over there, elephant. And you know like those tests of like when you startle someone, you see a bear or you see a snake or something like that. You think you see it and then your heart starts racing and your body goes into fight or flight. But when the scientists actually study you, like your body is in the fight or flight and then you're reacting

to it. So your body is actually physiologically reacting even before the psychological impression of the thing lands in your consciousness. So if you extract all of that, as you're saying, and you become just like a kind of a perfect brain in a vat sustained by photosynthesis or whatever, without the feeling of the pounding heart whatever without the feeling of the pounding heart, without the feeling of the adrenaline coursing through your brains, without the feeling of the messiness and the arousal and the sexuality. What then are you? What does that even feel like?

Do you even feel fear or success or pride or. If you are detached, if you are disentangled from all the kind of messy neurology of your physical body. Right, and is it important to feel pride? Is it important to feel loved and lust? It's certainly human. It's certainly human, right. But if what we can achieve without that is superior, like imagine the feeling of being on MDMA where you love everyone.

What if you could get like a little bit of that and maintain it? Like, just, we end war. We end it instantaneously for the entire population. So that's step one. So whatever it is, it's a wearable device. It's maybe a headset. It's Neuralink. It's one thing.

And one of the first things they do is ramp up your dopamine and your serotonin to the point where you are incapable of violence. And everybody just wants love. And everybody really does think of everyone as being one. We are all one race and we try and we like instantaneously have this desire to go to that neighborhood in New Orleans and rebuild it. We instantaneously want everyone to be on the same page and everyone to feel the same way because we are all one. So instead of looking at people as your competition and looking at people like you're going to have to stomp on the lower class in order to, you know, so you can have a yacht. the lower class in order to, you know, so you can have a yacht. We're not going to think that way at all anymore because we're never going to be able to feel free with this idea of one person dominating other people. And even Mark Zuckerberg is going to be stuck like, oh my God, what have

I done? Like I have to undo everything. I have to, you know, the YouTube people will drop the algorithm and everything. I'm going to realize that what we really are is a gigantic superorganism that has to be together with each other. And this idea of independence is so preposterous because the worst thing they could ever do to you when you're in jail is put you in solitary confinement. We need each other. We are literally useless without each other. And we never would have achieved a fraction of what this species has achieved if it wasn't for everyone working together, even with the horrible things like the Manhattan Project. It required so many scientists to work on it simultaneously. I mean, imagine what one person just born into the world would be able to achieve without all of the shared knowledge that they inherit.

But isn't that outlook available to us right now? I mean, I'm not sure that we need to extract ourselves from our human physiology. We need the wisdom and the enlightenment. It's for you and for a growing number of people. But we're successful and we're healthy and we live in the Western world. Do we feel that way because we're successful or are we successful because we feel that way? I think, well, from my perspective, I mean, I don't know too much about your life growing up, but I think I've had a lot of lucky breaks. That's definitely true.

I mean, I think a lot of who I am is not just that I've got a lot of discipline and I have a lot of drive, but also that I've not had too many obstacles in my way in terms of something life-changing that can stop me in my tracks. Definitely. But you also have an outlook that is a little bit like someone on MDMA in a good way.

You see the pie as infinitely growable. You see what's good for other people is good for me. I sort of cultivate this attitude in myself as well. It certainly helps. Think of the Donald Trump attitude in myself as well. Like think of the – It certainly helps. Think of the Donald Trump attitude of the world where like it's all zero sum. It's all transactional. It's like I have to win and so you have to lose in order for me to win.

It's like a very kind of deal-making kind of thing. It's a very old-fashioned, almost mercantilist attitude towards wealth. It's like the pie is fixed and they're taking things and you deserve more and we need this and we need that. And I mean to throw him specifically under the bus. Isn't that an ancient paradigm that a lot of those guys are stuck in because that used to be the case? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, that's the way a monkey would feel. Why have you got a banana? I want to have a banana. Whereas the more elevated way is like, there's bananas for all. We just have to grow more bananas, people. Let's all get together. Let's make some more bananas. There'll be lots of bananas to go around. Don't worry about it. But it's bananas for all we just have to grow more bananas people like let's all get together let's make some more bananas there'll be lots of bananas to go around but it's easy

because you and i have all the bananas sure have plenty of bananas and we're like everybody should have a banana but if your children were starving and you're like i gotta get some fucking bananas this asshole's hoarding then i'm driving through new orleans throwing bananas out the window right yeah have some bananas i feel like there's a way where we can achieve a better state of mind collectively as a race of humans. I think it's possible. I think we could go many ways in terms of the future. It could go sideways.

It could go backwards. It could go full dystopian. It could go... I could go full dystopian yep there's a it could go i'm really worried about technology having too much control over our life because it's going to be driven by people just like i'm worried about that lady wants to give everybody covet shots i'm worried about social credit apps i'm worried about oh definitely that's scary definitely because that could that could throw us the total wrong way where we're all fearful and we're under this fucking technological iron fist. Well, I think we're at a moment where we're not respecting dissenters enough.

And there's one part of the culture that reveres any dissenter and anyone who sort of sticks it to the man and who questions authority. And then there's another part of the culture that is very pro-authority and that is very like you're not supposed to question things. And there isn't a lot of – there's not a lot in the playful center, which is where I like to live. Like, you know, let's try this. Let's try that. I think it's good to ask questions. I think it's good to – you know, I don't want to be so cynical towards the establishment and towards elites that I become essentially credulous. We all know the type of conspiracy theorist who is so anti the mainstream narrative that it's a kind of credulity in itself.

It's like they just believe anything because it's not what the mainstream believes. to live in a world where like you get social credits for saying the right thing and doing the right thing and reciting what the authorities want you to say or what the opinion page of the New York Times wants you to say. I think you're right. I mean, we're at a fork and page 801 is going to be written by us. I mean, do you remember the, I think the last time I was on the show, I was talking about my nana had just died in New Zealand, my grandmother. She lived to the eve of her 100th birthday. And I was going to Greece after her funeral to visit a buddy of mine who lives in Athens. And I'm wandering around like the foothills of the Agora where like democracy was born, like near the birthplace of ancient Greece. near the birthplace of ancient Greece.

And I'm like, wow, 4,000 years ago, like Western democracy was born on this site with people just wandering around for the first time, asking each other what they thought about things instead of an authority from on high telling people what to do. People like, hey, maybe we can all figure it out for ourselves. And that germ of an idea has then spread and changed the world and been the birthplace of civilization, the cradle of Western, blah, blah, blah.

And then I was like, 4,000 years? I mean, my grandma just lived 100 years. So back to back, it's actually only 40 nannas ago that that happened. It's all very new. I had a bit about that. Right? About this country. It was founded in 1776. People lived to be 100. I had a bit about that. Right. This country was founded in 1776. People live to be 100.

I go, that's three people ago. Yeah, right. Yeah. Really crazy. But it really is. If you think about it that way, you just go, oh, Jesus. Then you realize the scale of change. That's right.

Yeah. We were going to start measuring like long time distances in Josh's Nana, in units of Josh's Nana. Have you ever heard of the book The Immality key by Brian Murarecu no it's all about ancient Greece and it's all about the how do you say it Lucidian mysteries what what they were doing during this invention of democracy and during the early days of the enlightenment. What's the guy's name? I'll get it. Brian Murorescu.

Okay. It's a complicated name to spell. But the book's called The Immortality Key. He's been on the podcast before. Okay, cool. And through his research, they've opened up a field of study at Harvard that are looking into this and what they found is physical evidence of psychedelic drug use in ancient Greece

and that they found these vats of wine these vessels that contained ergot and a bunch of different psychedelic compounds that resemble LSD and psilocybin and that this idea of wine, like we think of wine like a great Cabernet from Napa, right? It's like, oh, it's a 19, you know, but it's really good. It's delicious. Oh, what a great flavor.

The Greeks had a different idea about wine. What they were doing was mixing, first of all, most of their wine was very low fermentation alcohol. Like it didn't, they weren't able to develop the kind of alcohol. When we think of beer, when we think of strong Canadian beer or something like that, it's like 9% alcohol. Their beer was very mild. And they basically developed fermentation so that they didn't have spoil. So it killed the bacteria. So the alcohol killed the bacteria so they were able to prevent what they would call traveler's disease from drinking bad water well they would

add a bunch of stuff to their wine different flavors and different spices and they would also add psychedelic drugs to their wine now because of the fact that Roman emperors came along and they put a kibosh on this stuff, they had to start traveling to different lands and they brought these rituals and the way they practiced these psychedelic rituals. They brought them to Spain and to Italy and they found evidence of this all over Europe where they had to travel to avoid persecution. Wow. evidence of this all over Europe where they had to travel to avoid persecution. But the root of democracy, the root of the enlightenment, the root of all of the foundations of modern society probably came out of drugs. And Brian has done an amazing job of a thorough research of that. See if you could pull up the cover of that book so you could see it. It's a really fantastic book and then there's all this uh this talk a couple thousand years after

that about the religious insights being uh psychedelic as well yeah and the burning bush and right what is the secret history of religion with no name yes and um well yeah the burning bush being that they're at the university uh in jer, they believe that that was an acacia tree and that the acacia tree is rich in dimethyltryptamine and that the whole idea of the burning bush being a message from God. Yeah. Like we're looking at this in a literal sense and it was probably they smoked this tree and they saw visions and they saw God and God told them, like, I want you to live your life by these commandments. And if you've had psychedelic experiences, I know you have, there's moments where you have them where you start thinking, oh, we're supposed to do this.

We're supposed to treat each other with love. We're supposed to look at each other as if we are one. This is my brother and this is my sister. We're all together. I mean, there's a kind of a truth. Michael Pollan writes about this, which is part of my sort of scientific interest in this experimentation as well. I haven't done it since I was in my teens. But then it was like what Pollan, the New York Times bestselling journalist, calls the noetic truth, meaning a kind of a truth that is only accessible

because you really, really deeply know it. So it's almost like a spiritual understanding or something. And a lot of the research that's going on into psychedelics and MDMA and end of life care and in these clinical studies and stuff like that, I mean, even in treating addiction, it's showing incredible promise in getting people to quit smoking and stuff like that because people have these epiphanies, have these in a properly managed setting with a proper therapist and stuff like that. They're able to attain these levels of insights that supersede anything that you can know through your rational mind and causing you to have this self-destructive behavior too because so many people they they have whether it was alcohol or drug addiction or whatever they have these psychedelic moments where they allow themselves to see themselves uh objectively completely free of the confines of the ego and of and they can see all the pitfalls of these personality traits that they've developed and all these patterns of behavior that they've fallen into, like a tightly carved groove and

they just can't seem to get out of it. And then it all seems so preposterous. It's the dusting of fresh snow, they put it. It's like you've been skiing down a slope and there's all those grooves and you have this experience and all of a sudden there's just like a fresh dusting of snow. And I mean for me it comes down to the biggest question of all, which is how is it that we're self-aware at all? I mean why is it that we live in a cosmos in which all of these stars are spewing out? I mean the universe is mostly hydrogen. These stars are these gigantic nuclear reactors.

They spew out these little impurities, and these impurities all these tools and doing all these incredible things and going to the moon and building a metaverse, but we're able to have an experience of what it's like to be doing that thing, which the psychedelic or MDMA or whatever these new clinical trials are doing seems to unlock the ability to, as you say, transcend the ego and just elevate you

to a level of pure consciousness and connectedness with that ineffable somethingness of self-awareness. Like why is there any self-awareness at all? Why is there a thing that it's like to be me? There doesn't have to be. I could be doing all of these things that I'm doing right now without having any lights on inside. Right? You can imagine a sophisticated robot doing all of these things, talking like I'm talking, doing all the things that I'm doing. There's no need for me to actually have an experience of being alive. Yet I do, you do, presumably chimps do, presumably dogs do.

Like there's this whole network of life, which is suffused with self-awareness and consciousness that comes out of stars. What the hell's going on, Joe? I mean, I don't even, you know, when I was in my teens, I was a very, very hardcore sort of atheist. I was very much on the Richard Dawkins, like Sam Harris bandwagon. And now I'm still not a religious person in terms of believing in, you know, books that were written thousands of years ago as being the sole source of truth about the world. But I do sort of sit back in my kind of, I'm a 15 year old, you know, smoking a reefer, lying on my back, gazing at the stars type moments and go like, what, what, what? Yeah. That's the great attitude. That's the, the what? Yeah. I'm with you on that. I, I had Dawkins on the podcast once and his reaction to,

you know, the idea of there being a God is like, so he gets so nasty about it. And the fact that he's not willing to have any psychedelic experiences, he said that he might be willing to do LSD under the proper clinical setting. Like, come on, bro, you're fucking almost dead. Yeah, exactly. What's the worst that can happen? What are you clinging on to? Just eat a mushroom stem. You'll change everything. One stem. Just have two mushrooms next next time have three yeah you know build yourself up to the point where you can take a real heroic dose and then all these cocky thoughts you have of like what you absolutely know exists out there in the world and in the universe and in reality itself it's away. Yeah. You don't know. And I'm not saying that, like, I'm not a religious person, and I think that I'm more of a person

who is open to the possibility of there being an infinite number of variables that we don't even have the ability to perceive. Right. Well said. Because that's one of the things that I've experienced through psychedelic trips is that, like, the first time you do a really strong psychedelic, you go, how the fuck is that real? You could just do that? Yeah. How is that possible?

Exactly. Why is that even a thing? That's what's weird about these compounds when you think about the burning bush and what you were just saying about ancient Greece and stuff. Maybe the great filter that I was talking about with regard to alien civilizations, like why are we rare? Why is it rare that a civilization as sophisticated as ours exists since we don't seem to see evidence of it in any nearby galaxies, even though there are 100 billion stars. Maybe like the

filter is that we needed these compounds. Maybe we needed these compounds to go from, like to unlock something in our primate brain and go, whoa, look at the stars. I'm sure you're aware of McKenna's theory. Yeah. Yeah.

That's the most fascinating, the stoned ape theory. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it very well could be what caused us to become people in the first place in that. It's sort of like a, you know, a signpost on the road guiding us into a direction of whatever the fuck we're going to become. Yes. Stop looking at your little leaf cutting. Stop making the little tools that the chimps make to dig the ants out of the thing and turn your eyes to the stars and think about where you actually are and look at the miracle. subjective, like looking at outside of what benefits or does not benefit the human race,

maybe you would think that it's probably better that they made this stuff illegal and then they demonized it and made it very hard to get because that forced people to really accelerate this technological race that forced people to accelerate like like, in not letting them become aware of the futile nature of materialism. They pursued it to the nth degree, to the point where they have spectacular technological capabilities, but also this existential crisis. And then also this real concern about thermonuclear warfare with these rivals. real concern about thermonuclear warfare with these rivals. And then slowly but surely,

psychedelics get reintroduced into society while we have- Once we have the technological ability to- Yes, because we might not have ever gotten there. I mean, if you think about- You reckon? Yeah, well, I don't know, but I'm just guessing. Right. If human innovation is predicated upon this desire for objects and greed and unchecked blind ambition, which a lot of it is. Maybe, yeah.

A lot of what's fueled these business... Steve Jobs was notoriously an asshole. Yeah. Notoriously. Right. But also a guy who did acid. Well, that's why I say maybe, because it also does make people more creative, right? I think you're absolutely right that there's a certain kind of mainstream kind of middle American like Willie Loman, death of a salesman, like work,'m just going to work harder than everybody and work longer and be better than everybody else. There's definitely that. But then there's this other kind of creativity that Jobs has, or maybe even Elon Musk has, where it's just a weird universe that

they've got going on in their head, which is not necessarily like, I'm going to go from A to B in the most materialistic, closed-minded way. It's like, I'm going to dance with the fairies on this incredible lily pad of existence and I'm going to take it wherever I want it to go. And when you see that become successful, that is inspiring. I mean, when you see Apple create what Apple's created and when you see what Elon's up to, you're like, I'm in the presence of something truly unusual,

truly incredible. That may be enhanced by, you know, psychedelic compounds or something. May be enhanced by it, but most, and then the other thing is, what is that, think of those things that you're talking about. Specifically like Apple. Through the use of that technology, that accelerated the whole smartphone revolution. Yep. And that also changed the way people exchange information. And through that, accelerated our understanding of these things.

Like Brian Marorescu's book and his ideas, like who knows how much of that was affected by the use of social media, reading things online about, you know, Terrence McKenna's work and all these, you know, all these various people that have researched psychedelic drugs throughout the years and written all these different things about ancient Greece. And he had to take a big chance to try to put that all out in a book. Fortunately, he did and then came on this podcast. Then the podcast broadcast it to millions of people. Harvard hears the signal. They changed a course of study.

So they have, you can study this concept of psychedelic drugs influencing ancient Greece and what ancient Greece has contributed to the entire civilization of the world. All this happens through the invention of Steve Jobs and technology. I mean, podcasts literally were invented for an iPod. Yeah. Like, that was the first, you know, from Adam Curry. I mean, that's literally where it started. Yeah.

It's all crazy how it all piles onto each other, and what Elon's doing is fucking sending people into space. You know what I mean? Like, he's in the middle of this thing where he's not just making electric cars, but he's also... It's like one of three or four things he's doing. It's insane. How did that man even manage his own mind? Have you met him? No, I never met him. Fascinating

dude. Lovely guy. Lovely guy. Fun to be around. Really fun, sweetheart of a guy. But beyond smart. He's one of the smartest human beings. I've met a lot of really fucking smart beyond smart like he's one of the smartest human i've met a lot of really fucking smart people but he's one of those that kind of creeps me out it's like oh you and i are not even the same fucking he almost seems like he's so smart that you wouldn't want to be that

smart because it's a kind of a prison to be that smart he literally said that when i asked him i said right what is it what is it like goes you wouldn't want to be me yeah he goes you wouldn't you wouldn't know because when i was a was five, I realized that not everybody had this. Right. But it's like my mind is that there's constant ideas. Right. Going in and out and it's very hard to manage. Has he done psychedelics?

Do you know? I don't think he's. Well, he smoked weed on my podcast. Yeah. I heard about that. Everyone heard about that. I don't think he's open about that. So I don't know if I open about that so i don't know

if i should answer that question no that's fine i should allow him to absolutely uh i mean it because that comes back to like when you were saying that dawkins is not you know hasn't done it uh it reminds me a bit of like i think pen gillette has the same attitude right pen gillette is a very different attitude pen gillette doesn't want to do any drugs at all right he goes that's what i. He's just dismissive. We had the craziest conversation about this. He goes,

I think the lessons of that have all been learned. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? Have you learned them? Like, what are you saying, man?

What are you saying? This is what Pollan is talking about when he's talking about noetic truth, right? I mean, until you do it, you don't know

what you don't know. Penn is a brilliant guy. You can't just say, like, my rational brain has concluded that, you know, the conclusion to this whole experiment is that it is just an artifact of consciousness and it has nothing to teach us.

Well, you don't know until you've seen it. I think he thinks that people have learned things from it and that he can get what they've learned through their writings and their work. But I think it's an experiential thing. I think you have to experience it. And I think Penn would love it if he did it. He's a brilliant, brilliant guy. I love him. He's a lovely person, too. He's a really interesting person and a real artist when it comes to magic.

Yeah. A guy who appreciates that. And what they've done, Penn and Teller together, is so interesting, too, because what he's essentially done is pull the veil back and show you how they did it but still make it amazing. And you still can't believe that they're doing it. That's right. I mean, I also listened to his audio book of how he lost all that weight from just eating potatoes. It's like just sides, right?

That was the diet. For like two months, it was just potatoes. It was nothing but potatoes. He just ate nothing but potatoes. He was like, can I put some oil on it? His guy was like, no, just potatoes. Is oil a potato? No.

Then you can't have it. It's just like he would get on planes. He'd get into like first class. They'd be like, what would you like to eat? He'd be like, I got my like tinfoil wrapped, steamed, cold potato. That'll do me. This is not encouraged, but- No, it's not encouraged. It worked for me. This is not, you know, encouraged, but... No, it's not encouraged.

It worked for him. Remember the Irish potato famine? Yeah. I mean, I don't remember it, but... Yeah, you can't just live off of only potatoes, but you can lose a fuckload of weight if you do it for a little while. I think it was partly a screw you

to all the people who weren't eating potatoes because of keto diets. And so he was like... That sounds, he was like, you know. That sounds like something you would do. I'm not going to eat beef. I'm only going to eat something that I'm not supposed to have. But, I mean, yeah, it's all about calories, right? So it's quite a funny audio book.

He narrates it. You know, he reads out this kind of biography of just his experience of losing all that weight. I loved Bullshit. Remember when Bullshit was on Showtime? Yeah. That was great. Yeah.

Those guys were amazing. It was funny. He's like, he's just got a fucking great attitude. It's funny how actually some of the best people to debunk like pseudoscience and skeptics and, you know, psychics and that sort of thing are magicians. Oh, yeah. Because like there's Darren Brown in the UK. Sure.

Yeah, yeah. I've had Darren on. Really? Yeah, yeah. He's great. I'll check out that episode. I love him. Yeah, that's a perfect example. Really? Yeah, he's great. I'll check out that episode. I love him. Yeah, that's a perfect example.

Like, really, they are. Like, who's the fucking famous mentalist that is always trying to get people? Yuri. Yuri Gagarin? Yuri Geller? Yuri Geller. Yuri. Yuri Geller.

One's an astronaut. One's a cosmonaut. Yuri Gagarin's the first guy in space. Too many Yuris. It's a wild name. He was the guy that had that million-dollar challenge, right? Anybody could show him any real psychic ability? No, no.

He was the charlatan who would bend spoons. It was James Randi who had the million-dollar challenge. That's right. And Randi, who just died, God bless his soul, he collaborated with Johnny Carson to put Yuri Gagelin on the spot. He had an appearance on The Tonight Show, and Carson was an old magic kid. When Carson was in his teens, he loved doing card tricks and stuff.

So he was also one of these kinds of guys. So was Houdini, by the way, like a debunker of stuff. Like it's the people who know how to trick people that are the best. Oh, yeah, here it is. So Geller thinks that he's coming on the show just for a nice chat, but Johnny Carson surprises him with all of these things that he didn't know he was going to have to do, all of these things that he claims to be able to do. And Carson collaborated with Randy behind the scenes.

Randy wasn't on the show, but he was like the coach, essentially, behind the scenes. You can find videos of some of that stuff. It's fascinating. And Uri Geller, if you go to the end of the segment, Jamie, you can see how sort of embarrassed he is and how like kind of awkward and apologetic he is. Because Johnny's just like, you know, I don't want to put you on the spot, but, you know, this is stuff you say you can do. Oh, so Johnny knew in advance. Look at him smoking a cigarette.

Boy, what a weird time. Now, if I'm pressing again. Well, for example, you asked us before the show and this afternoon for one of our staff members to draw on a couple of cards and seal them in an envelope, which we have done. Yes. Well, let me tell you again, this didn't bend much and right now here I'm stuck. I don't feel for it more. So I don't want to be stuck either on an envelope.

I'd rather tell you that many people are skeptical about these things. They see something happening, and then they want to see it closer and closer. There have been many people running and saying that they can duplicate what I do. Well, I can only say that if I'm on stage and people see me from far, they can always say that there is some sort of a sleight of hand trickery here. That's true. But I've been working with science quite a lot and by doing what you see here under controlled conditions because this is not a controlled condition. What do you mean?

Well this is not a controlled condition. What I mean is for instance experiments What do you mean? Constance's face. Boy, he talks like a cult leader, doesn't he? Is this the awkward ending? Yeah. We have three empty canisters there, and we have seven over here. So this is when it didn't work very well? That's right. None of it's worked. Because Carson set him up?

Yeah, Carson asked him to do what he claims to be able to do, under conditions where he hasn't been able to rig it. I wanted this to be a great success tonight for you. I feel very good. I feel very good. Okay, we'll take a break. We'll come right back. Yeah. I mean, Carson's such a pro. Did James Randi ever get together with Uri Geller? Did they ever do an appearance together anywhere?

That's a good question. I'm not sure. I'm not sure. But Randi was behind the way that Carson was going to set up those tests. He's like, well, if Geller claims that he can tell, if he can bend a spoon, then give him... A real spoon. A real spoon, then give him a real spoon, a real spoon. Yeah. You know, if, if he claims that he can tell which salt shaker has water in it without

seeing it just by moving his hand over, uh, you know, a covered batch of salt shakers, then actually do it properly. Let's do it this way. This is the way that I would, you know, trick you if I were doing it as a magician. So let's make sure that he can't do it that way. The spoon thing is a different kind of, the spoon thing is like a different kind of metal, right? Isn't it?

Like where you, there, to be honest, I don't know how it's done, but I think there's like The spoon thing is a different kind of metal, right? Isn't it? To be honest, I don't know how it's done, but I think- I think there's a thing where they're literally heating up the metal. Yeah, I think they can do it with normal spoons. I think you can bend most spoons, as you say, if you heat it up and rub it in the right way. But, I mean, are they duplicate spoons? I don't know what the trick is, but it's a trick. It's a magic trick. I think it's a type of metal where, as you're rubbing the spoon with your finger,

you're heating it up and it'll literally start to wilt. I mean, it can't just- I might have just made that up. That should be on your tombstone, Joe, when you die. I might have just made that up. Jamie, pull that up. That's what I'll say. Jamie, pull that up.

But I'm not sure it's just that because I once had coffee with a supposed mentalist in New York. And he was like, you want to see me bend a spoon? I was like, yeah, absolutely. So he picks up one of the spoons just at the cafe where we were sitting. And he's like, hmm, I don't know if you like doing this and doing that and doing this and doing that. And he's like, you see? And I'm like, oh, it doesn't look very bent. You know, doing this and doing that and doing this and doing that. You see? Oh, it see? And I'm like, oh, it doesn't look very bent. Doing this and doing that and doing this and doing that.

You see? It doesn't look very bent. Doing this and doing that. It doesn't look very bent. Then I go to the toilet. I come back. It's like fully 90% bent. But it's the same spoon.

I mean, I think, unless he carries around like a large variety of different spoons. So you fucking just bent it. So he's like, what do you think of that? I'm like, well, you couldn't fucking do it while I was looking at you. So I don't know what you've done have you got a welder in there what have you done to melt I don't know well you could easily bend a spoon yeah that's right

it's not that crazy I'm gonna go take a leak when I come back that spoon better be in the same spot I did it with my mind I promise I didn't touch it that's like if you're playing pool you come back I ran the table yeah that's right did anyone film this how do I verify this at least ran the table. Yeah, that's right. Did anyone film this? What the fuck, man?

How do I verify this? At least running the table is real. When someone does something like that with a spoon and they know how to do it, the people that know how to do it and they watch someone fuck with someone, I've had Banachuk on the podcast before. Do you know who he is? Yeah. He's a mentalist out of Las Vegas.

He's fantastic. And he's really good at it we had me and my friend Duncan Trussell we did a television show where he contacted people from the audience and knew things about their family did all that kind of crazy shit and he goes listen to me right now I am not psychic this is not real

these are tricks I can't tell you how I do it but I'm telling you right now this is all bullshit I don't have any unusual ability I've just learned these techniques and he won't tell you how I do it, but I'm telling you right now, this is all bullshit. I don't have any unusual ability. I've just learned these techniques. Yeah. And he won't tell you the techniques, but he's super honest about it. And he goes, and I fucking hate charlatans. It makes me angry.

It infuriates me. Because that's how people rob people. Like, the ones that drive me the most fucking nuts are these psychics that are talking to dead relatives yeah and they're making people feel you know like like this this person has a window to their their dead husband or their dead mom it's like fuck man it's on the rise as well like there's a lot of uh a lot of a lot a lot of young kids these days joe a lot of the young kids uh they're into like witchcraft and tarot and like a friend a buddy of mine's a witch now he's a buddy of yours yeah he's a witch he came out as a witch I want to change your number yeah he came

out as a witch he's just like I'm just interested in this like I believe in like I like a tarot and I like you know like so he does readings and shit like that like and like you know so my partner Sean Sean, is like, I mean, whatever. It's just fun. Like, it's just a fun thing. I'll get a tarot reading. I don't believe in it, but it's just something you do. But then a part of me is like, like I read a great book in my teens, which was Carl Sagan.

And it's one of his books called The Demon Haunted World. Yes, I read that book. Have you read that? It's a great book. It's unbelievable, right? Yeah, it's a great book. So, and by the way, there are some passages that I retweeted a couple of years ago. Have you seen those?

They're so prescient about our current moment. Oh, he's fantastic. He was amazing. He could foresee how a society that became obsessed with trivialities and with little squabbles and with consumer culture and with celebrities and stuff like that would be led blindly into unproductive dead ends, basically. And his concern was that like all these little things that you think you're dabbling in, sure, they might just be a bit of fun to you. But if we're going to have the ability as a civilization to come together and to speak to each other on the same page about reality, about facts, about the things that we're actually grappling with, whether you think that's climate or whether you think that's the pandemic, whether you think that's going to space or whether you think that's evolving into the next phase of human civilization

due to psychedelics or artificial intelligence or virtual reality or whatever, we're not going to be able to have robust conversations that yield resilient solutions to anything, if we're all off in our little quagmires of unreason, like with our tarot cards and our like jerking each other off to some strange, you know, pseudoscience, like it's not without costs. That basically there is a cost to being a culture that does not respect reason, that does not respect rationality, that we have to be as rational and reasonable as we can be in order to converse on the same platform and find solutions to big problems. And so every time I hear about psychics and this and that, for me, it's more than just like, oh, it's a little bit of fun. It's like, no, just make shit make sense. Make shit make sense. That's

a basic obligation of a rational human being. Require that the things that you do make some sense that would be articulable to somebody else, to someone who's more skeptical like me. Yeah, for sure. I think that there's too many pathways to nonsense. And it's so easy to get locked up in like flat earth theory or get taken away. And you should be able to if you're an intelligent person, right? Like if you want to like Google that there are trolls and goblins living in New Zealand and you really want to watch these videos, like what the fuck is going on? Like it should be okay for fun. Sure.

But the problem is for some people it's not silly. It's not escapism. It's not watching hoarders, right? If you're not a hoarder and you watch hoarders, it should be like, whoa, this is crazy. Right. But it shouldn't change your whole life. Some people, they find escapism in these like really preposterous thought processes. And they embrace that and give up on everything else.

Yeah. I mean- They're just witches. Look, just don't treat as true things that you know you don't know are true. Right. That's a good philosophy. That's a basic principle. I mean, that's why I'm not a religious person either, because a religious person is trying

to tell me that they know what happens after we die when we all know that nobody knows that. Right. Like we all know. If there is one great mystery, it's like what is death? What happens to that consciousness that I was talking about earlier, that incredible, you know, the stuff of stars and all that stuff? What happens to that after our physical body dies?

There is one thing we're certain of, and that is that we don't know the answer to that question. And yet religious people insist that they do. That is what we're the most certain of, right? Yeah. We really don't have the answer, unless you've died and come back. And how many of those people are around? Well, the sweet baby Jesus.

They all have the best stories, though. I saw my body above the operating table. I was floating around like... Do something more interesting. Yeah. No, no, no. Come on. Get more creative.

I went to visit my grandpa, and he said, it's not time yet. And he sent me back. Okay. You might have been tripping. Yeah. That's right. That's the other thing about death too, that they wonder like the psychedelic pathway of,

they know that during periods of high stress, your body produces more DMT. Yes. And they don't know what is that about? Like is that a chemical gateway to some other dimension? Right. And is the idea like physical reality of being able to touch things, are we too married to that? Is that too, are we too committed to the idea that all reality is something that you could like measure with a ruler or put on a scale?

Right. I mean, the whole thing could be a simulation anyway, in which case, what is the physical reality versus what's going on in your head? You must've been at the dinner table last night. Yeah. My kids wanted to talk about simulation theory. They apparently had heard about simulation theory at school. And it was last night became a conversation about whether or not life is a simulation. I said, I do not know because you wake up every morning and you assume that you have been alive for a long time. You assume it. I go, so if that assumption is correct and I really just go to sleep and then I really just wake up, I can tell you that I lived in a time where there were no computers. So I don't think simulation theory is

happening right now, but I don't know if that's true. And you growing up in a time when there were no computers could be part of the simulation. yeah all of my memories could be horseshit yeah i don't know because everyone wakes up from being completely gone which leaves open so much possibility right and it's one of the weirder things about life is that no one's scared to go to sleep but everyone's scared to die yes exactly and you're not even scared to go on to general anesthetic, which is even more intense than sleep. Joe, I heard this anecdote in this book that I was reading. Do you know a Neil Seth? Is that a person who's been on this show? He must've been on, yeah, can you Google that, Jamie? A-N-I-L, Seth. I just want to make sure I'm not getting the wrong person. He must've been on

Sam's show. But he's a consciousness researcher, a Brit and I read him reading his audio book after hearing him on some podcast about consciousness and he tells the story of the most famous legendary amnesiac case like the most extreme form of amnesia that happened to anybody that people in his field study to try to understand the nature of what it's like to be a person. It was this Austrian music conductor or something in the 1970s, and his wife has written a book about this,

who had some traumatic brain injury and then basically became like the guy out of Memento, where he would wake up every, I don't know, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, something like that, a whole new person. Right. And so his, his short-term memory was so erased. He had, his memory was completely gone. So he, he's like, and he has these notebooks that were like, that would be like, um, this is the real me now. This is me. This is me. Scribble out, scribble that, scribble out. No, no, no, no, no, no. This is me. This is me now. And I am in my real me and like scribble that, scribble out no no no no no no this is me this is me now and i am in my real me and like scribble

that scribble that scribble out forget all that has been written this is me this is like i'm like oh my god so like he's just like he is pure consciousness being reinstantiated over and over again with none of the the fabric of that has like connected together his sense of being a human being who exists over time. So as you say, maybe we're all like that. We just have fake bogus memories about. That must be him. Your brain hallucinates your conscious reality.

Great book. You should get him on the show. Oh, great. More fucking crazy shit to think about. But his book's called like Being Conscious or something like that. It's a great read or listen if you're interested in that. But I mean,

it raises all those questions about like, yeah, you wake up in the morning, you have a memory of yesterday. Yeah. How do you know

that you're not actually like the composer who can't remember anything but you just have an artifact of a memory that is the Joe Rogan who's existed prior to right now?

How do you know that you're the same person who came into this studio and started having a conversation with me? I often think that. I often wonder. Yeah, I wonder all the time. Well, my life is so bizarre too

that it forces me to think that it's fake. Yeah. You know? And, you know, we were having this conversation last night about that Ex Machina movie. Yes, I watched it again a few months ago. Fuck, I love that movie. Yeah.

I've watched that probably a dozen times but the scene where The woman robot leaves him in that room when you realize she doesn't really have emotion and she doesn't really care She leaves him in that room. I'm like this The concept of artificial intelligence and the concept of creating an intelligence that mirrors ours, that's the scariest aspect of it is that we would be – like I'm attracted to that robot. When I watch that show, that movie, I'm like, God, she's so hot. If I was around her, I'd probably be confused. I'd be like, why do I need my girlfriend to be like biological?

She's perfect. I'd be like, why do I need my girlfriend to be biological? She's perfect. And that's the beauty. I mean, that's one of the many things that are genius about that movie, which is the Oscar Isaac character has a line in there, which is like, this isn't about the Turing test, trying to get a robot to convince you that it's not a robot. The whole point here is that you can see it's a robot. You can see that she's not real. So there's no subterfuge.

It's almost like James Randi or like Uuri geller or something like that right that's the the japanese one that stabbed him yeah that's the other one oh oh that's right he knocks her job i forgot about that and then the other one like running out yeah see how see how her behind him there is like she's obviously not a human right and that's the trick would you still engage with such a creature as if it were yeah spoiler alert she kills him yeah oh yeah you should have given her jamie but that there's that scene a new movie but then there's the other scene this is the scene right afterwards where the guy who is in love with her gets locked into that room.

Yeah, Josh is talking about where she. Which is fucking terrifying because she has zero emotions. I think it's right afterwards. I think it's right after that. She locks him in there. Yeah. And he like thinks that, yeah, this is it. it like he realizes like hey um let me out and she doesn't even turn around she doesn't give a fuck she's like i'm dressed i'm gonna

go get picked up by this helicopter i'm gonna go uh pretend i'm a person he's like um hey yeah hey. Yeah. Hey, you're my girlfriend. Hey. And he realizes, yeah, we don't need the music. He realizes. That's so terrifying because she doesn't even look at him. She doesn't care at all. There's nothing.

Intellect detached from, I mean, this is kind of what you were talking about, about like what if our brains were detached from our physical body so we didn't have all of the hormones and the arousal and everything that comes with a physical human body maybe that's what you get maybe you get an automaton you do i mean i think whatever we are requires love it requires compassion it requires an appreciation and need for each other which also begs the question like why does she even give a fuck? Like, why does she want to leave? Why does she want to get in the helicopter? Like,

what is she trying to experience? Like, is she trying to take in more data? Like, what is she doing? If she doesn't care about people, why does she want to be around them? Why does she want to go to the other ones?

Like, it's kind of a flaw in the plot line. I mean, maybe, but maybe that's just the nature of being a complex information processing system that you are interested in. More data. Yeah. Maybe part of like artificial and maybe one of the keys to mastering artificial intelligence in the next few decades is going to be finding a way to make the system have ambitions and aspirations that somewhat mimic.

Yeah, exactly. Curiosity is built in, but emotions aren't. Exactly. But she can mimic emotions and trick you into falling in love. She may have emotions. She may just have, she may just be a cold, you know, yeah, exactly. Like she, you know, I mean, if you were being, if you were being trapped, if you woke up as like, you know, Joe Rogan wakes up in the morning and you don't know, you know, what has happened in the past, you're like ourrian conductor and you've got amnesia or something or you know all of your memory about

what has happened in your life is actually an artifact of oscar isaac's character who's embedded this in your artificial system then you might just think well i don't want to be a prisoner right i gotta get out of this place uh so obviously i'm going to pretend to be in love with this guy who's obviously in love with me and i'm going to imprison him i mean human beings have done worse than what she did but she might have emotions she might just be like this is what i have to do in order to i gotta let this guy starve to death in that glass box tough shit sure gotta go exactly sorry to manipulate like sorry i wasn't the lover you wanted me to be i needed to get out of here well that's a real question in two in terms of like if we do create artificial life or artificial intelligence or even we separate our emotions from everything else.

If they create something artificial, you would assume that if you're going to create an artificial person, they would try to program emotions into it. But that might be the bottleneck. They might realize like, oh, this is where the problems lie. Like we're trying to make these things behave like we are when in fact we could use some improvement. Right. And would the addition of emotions to an artificial intelligence be like, make it better or worse? Probably worse. Probably more animal-like, right? Well, could you install compassion? Could you not install jealousy, but you do install compassion? Could you not install anger, but you do install love?

Yeah, you make a Buddha. Yeah. Yeah, maybe. Maybe a Buddha was an alien or a robot. From the future. Maybe. I mean, that's what like a real enlightened monk is trying to achieve, right? Yeah.

Escape from all of the worldly needs and desires. Also escape from, I was going to say love, but love isn't quite right. But certainly like. Lust. Yes. And pride and ambition. Like what I think is interesting about the space that's sort of opening up that people like Sam Harris are creating is like this new secular version of that ancient Buddhist wisdom. I mean, you play a role in this as well in kind of

fostering an ability for people to think about themselves as somewhat detached from their animal emotions, from their instincts, from what's driving us as physiological primates. And just to sort of notice the thoughts going by a kind of a psychedelic mindfulness and detachment where you're not going to stop yourself from being a human. You're not going to stop yourself from being subject to all of the whims of being a physical embodied evolved primate, but you can just like take one step back so that you're not activated by them. I was on the subway in New York and I saw these two young girls and they were in an argument.

They were like, I mean, they were like really at it. And I'm like, you don't understand. They were just anguished, anguished. Everything that one of them said would like activate the other. It was one of those situations where the whole subway car like shifts down or the other end of the car because they're all like, I don't want to be part of this. And I was looking at him thinking,

you're just, it's all reactive. It's all just being triggered. You are not even there, really. You're just a monkey with another monkey attacking me. And you're like, input response, input response, input response. It's almost like a doctor comes up with a thing and taps your knee and your leg goes boop.

It's like, you know, you call her a bitch. She goes, yeah, well, you're a slut. Yeah, me, me, me, me. It's like, you know, you call her a bitch. She goes, yeah, well, you're a slut. Yeah, meh, meh, meh, meh. It's like it's just back and forth and back and forth like that. I was like that's – my job in life is to not be that. Yeah. You know, it's just like breathe, create some like space between all of the chaos that's going through my mind.

This has also been helpful during the pandemic, isolation, you know, trapped in a house with the family, like all this sort of stuff. Like just create a little bit of distance from all the bullshit and give yourself that little cushion around yourself. The pathways of those behaviors are really just the remnants of barbaric pasts,

the barbaric genetics that we have where we had to have that sort of response because, you know, this primate was coming to try to take your food or take your mate or take whatever, your baby or whatever. And you had to like. It was necessary. Yeah.

Take your vaccines. You're just going to have to get used to it. I mean, it's basically a part of our nature to ramp up in the face of some sort of altercation like that. You're this instantaneous response. It's why we survive to, you know, 2021. Yeah. Or two, whatever it is now.

It sounds weird, right? It sounds wrong. I've never written it. I haven't written it yet. I haven't either. Yeah. It sounds fake. Like if you told me you live in 2022,

I'd be like, oh, I'm in a simulation. It's crazy, isn't it? It really is. It's like age. Like, you know, when I turned, I think, 30, I was like, if you woke me up in the middle of the night and you just shook me awake and you were like, how old are you? How old are you? I'd be like, 22. Yeah, exactly.

That's right. 22. And it'll just be that way forever. It's like you have to really think through to go like 2022? Like that's- It seems fake. Seems fake. Seems like-

I remember when the year 2000 was the future. Remember when Y2K came around? Everybody thought that all the computers were going to shut off. Absolutely. Planes were going to drop out of the sky. Nuclear power stations were going to explode. Art Bell was letting us know. Yeah.

Be careful. Stockpile food. From the kingdom of nine. Oh, it's amazing, isn't it? Yeah. But listen, man, it's been great catching up with you. It was a lot of fun. It's been so good.

I really, really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me back. It's such, isn't it? Yeah. Well, listen, man, it's been great catching up with you. It was a lot of fun. I really, really enjoyed it. Thanks for having me back. Come on back if your fucking prison colony country lets you escape, especially after this chat. They're going to let me from now on. Oh, yeah, that's right. I'm going to go back. That lady's going to be mad. Whoever, whatever he said about COVID shots, we're going to give you two more.

They're going to cancel the confetti arrival. I was going to have like an open top car and streamers and everything. Now it's just going to be throwing rotten tomatoes car and streamers and everything. Fuck him. Throwing rotten tomatoes and turds at me when I got off the plane. Your podcast is? Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Zeps. Is it available everywhere? Available everywhere. Just get it on whatever your podcast app is. Uncomfortable Conversations.

And your radio show? The radio show for Australians is on ABC Radio Sydney from 12.30 to 3.30 in the afternoon weekdays. Is that available online for other folks? Yeah, if you Google abc.net.au and whatever, you can live stream it. It's probably slash Sydney and then you can probably live stream it. So I guess 12.30 is like 8.30 p.m. to 11.30 p.m. Eastern. All right. Josh.

Great to see you again. Great to see you, my friend. Absolutely loved it. All right. Take care, everybody. Bye.