The Joe Rogan Experience - #571 - Josh Zepps

Episode Date: November 10, 2014

Josh Zepps is the host of HuffPost Live & Point of Inquiry, "a podcast for reason & science" which you can find on Spotify.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Joshua. Hello, sir. Thanks for being here, man. I appreciate it. I really enjoy your show. Oh, thank you.

Your HuffPost show. I've seen it many, many times, and we were just discussing the excellent recent one that you did with Mark Maron, which I really loved. Yeah, had him in on Friday. I came to know you because of the whole, how should we say this, cancel Corbair report thing. Yeah. This ill-advised jump at racism or the idea of racism. Yeah, Colbert, someone at Comedy Central

tweeted something that Colbert had said. Out of context. Out of context. Yeah. And it was taken up as being a racist quip by an internet activist.

Yeah. And I had not really, I wasn't really familiar with her. I'd never heard of her or anything and I had her on HuffPost Live briefly and she didn't like the fact that I was a white man. Then I got myself into all kinds of trouble.

Then I just exploded into one of those Twitter storms. I mean, I think that was partly the precipitating event that then actually forced Colbert to address it. He did a whole segment on his show about her and about the whole Twitter storm on Monday, but it really kind of got traction when I had her on HuffPost Live on, I think it was the Friday morning. And, um, yeah, we should, I should say what the joke was so that people know,

because it was, it was really unbelievably ridiculous. It was unfortunate because if she had seen the actual joke in context, it would not have been offensive. Oh, I don't agree with that. Really? I think she just takes umbrage at things because she likes to i think there is a there is a type of twitter reaction that is just a predict predictable knee jerk it's a choice to take things out of context i agree with that but i think that it would have been almost impossible if she'd actually seen the full clip like she would have had to be on the starting line wanting to launch, but go, fuck, I can't go after him. The out of context was that he's willing to show the Asian community how much I care by introducing the Ching Chong Ding Dong Foundation for Sensitivity to Orientals or whatever. And it was meant to be, it was a satire of the Washington Red redskins original americans foundation so they had come up

with this original americans foundation that's right so dan snyder was trying it was trying to say instead of changing the name of the redskins uh i'm gonna give money to like this african american charity i mean sorry native american charity and colbert satirized the redskins by saying uh because he's been accused of doing some anti-Asian things in the past, like bits where he just kind of impersonates an Asian or something. So he was like, well, I'm going to make that right by setting up this ching-chong-ding-dong charity for Orientals or whatever, right? That was the gag. That was the gag.

Well, his thing is a character. I mean, Colbert is, it's like an Archie Bunker. Of course. I mean, he's not a real guy. This is a role that he plays, a ridiculous, ignorant Republican, and that is like, that's the satire. And to miss that, and to do this cancel Colbert thing, Colbert, I'm saying his name wrong every time, but I never say it. I watch it, I don't say his name. But to do that, it highlights. And the support that he got by the social justice warriors, or the support that she got, rather, by the social justice warriors on this.

It was so maddening. And people who should know better, Joe. They should know. You know, I had Twitter hate campaigns coming at me from left, right, and center, from black comics who I know and like, who should know better because they're comics. It's baffling to me when people engage with one another purely on the basis of their identity and not on the basis of the actual intellectual point at hand,

like where does satire go too far or whatever. I was just roundly prevented from having any opinion about what satire is on the basis of the fact that I'm a white man. Yeah, you got to check your privilege, son. Check your privilege. Did you check it? I didn't check it. You should check it. You should have an app.

I need to check my privilege app. I never know when I'm not alive. Actually, that would be an app that would sell. That is sell. You should create an app where you can just click on it and it gives you a score from 1 to 10 about what your privilege is. Well, it's an interesting thing because it immediately allows someone to marginalise your opinion by virtue of the fact that you are European

or, in your case, Australian or whatever your roots are. You can instantly discount any credible point that you might have. Yeah, and so just to clarify for people who haven't seen the way that the interview with this hashtag activist Twitter person went, I was basically, she basically literally said that I, my opinion is completely worthless because as a white man, I would not be expected to understand the lived experience of, like, women of colour.

Now, she's a 23- old korean american who lives at home class who lives at home so i don't know what but so but what's incredible to me about the struggle is real josh zebs what's incredible to me is that you know when you meet somebody and you just get a real sense of like wow this person is interesting they're original they're authentic like this is this person is a isake, I want to, you know, they're a fingerprint, they're like something unique. That's what we should all be hoping for, right? And we should all be hoping to engage with one another

on levels that enable us to bring that out in each other. She was the exact opposite of that. Like it was basically an identity talking to another identity. It was a generic, it was a label talking to a label. Yeah, there's an issue with this need to correct people, to define yourself by correcting people, that I think people, they're looking for people to step out of line so they can check them. And instead of looking at this subtle, nuanced life that we live, where there's so many different variables, especially when it comes to human interaction and communication, when you're throwing in satire as well, and it's a satire television show,

the fact that this isn't all put through some sort of an observational filter before you immediately knee-jerk react and attack. It just shows that there's a real issue with the ability to communicate. The ability to communicate is a wonderful thing. The fact that we all have it. That, you know, you can do your show, I can do my show, we can all tweet. Anybody can tweet. Anybody can go crazy and just write whatever they want on their blog.

It's great in a lot of ways. But it's also ridiculous because people who have not considered they do possess the english language they have the ability to communicate but what they're essentially doing is just piecing together what they think is like an argument based on these predetermined patterns that they've picked up exactly like you know as you as a white male wouldn't understand a woman of color what fucking color are you well like what what how you're white i mean you're you're asian but i mean what when you're talking about the color of your skin you can't say color you just can't you might want to say ethnicity you might want to say you know uh whatever uh background and i mean look let me

clarify there is i completely concede that there is a lived experience of being a minority ethnicity, especially in America or in Australia, new countries, that is different from being a white man. I absolutely concede that. And the thing is, why can't we talk about the actual details of the experience without assuming that there's a homogeneity between that experience as well? Like, not every Asian experience in America is the same. They have certain commonalities in that they're subject to racism in a way that you and I aren't. But they're so wildly different. Let's talk about the details of the experience and what's acceptable and how we want to converse with one another, let's not assume that because a person has a particular bunch of labels attached to them, gay, straight, Asian, white, man, woman, whatever, that that immediately disqualifies them from

having a conversation about these things. Absolutely. And also this idea of check your privilege. What you're doing is just discounting someone's opinion immediately. You're using it as a tool And it's a lazy tool It's a lazy tool that Look, there's some people that you want to just be able to say

Check your privilege You basically want to say shut the fuck up Because you don't have the time to go through all the things That are wrong with their argument Right But there are other people, like yourself You're a very complex dude You talk very well

You're very well spoken You're very measured in the things that you say. I've watched your show many, many times. You're not a knee-jerk, reactionary guy. You're not an asshole. So for someone to say that to you, it just shows that this is something that just gets used. It just gets thrown out there like, here's a weapon that I have. We're in the middle of a conversation.

Instead of having this dialogue where we're considering each other's points of view and the different lives that we've led, he just, boom, throws the smoke bomb on the ground. Check your privilege. Boom. Well, it's also, it's the easiest way to lose good friends. It's a privilege checker app. It exists. It exists.

That's the best. Oh, I need to check it. That's great. I'm going to download it. I will download it and check my privilege. to check it. That's great. I'm going to download it. I will download it and check my privilege. It's also the clearest way to

lose allies in the fight against racism as well. For these self-appointed kind of people who do these kind of Twitter campaigns and online stuff and who the Check Your Privilege Brigade. You know, I am the most

obvious ally for anti-racists i'm like the least racist guy i i should be i should it should be a no-brainer wait i'm the least racist no i'm the least racist guy man you're the second least racist guy i thought i won the race and it's made me i have what i have to keep reminding myself is is the self-appointed spokespeople who are, you know, for race, like this person, they're not the people who I need to be defending when I'm trying to defend minorities. They are doing active harm to the cause. Like, the poor black working mum doesn't have time to get angry on Twitter. Like, I should be defending her, not a 23-year-old Korean-American middle-class girl who's making me, who's basically alienating me and all like-minded people from the legitimate, worthwhile pursuit of fighting racism because it makes me feel like well if i'm if i'm gonna be rejected out of hand regardless of what i do simply on the basis of the fact that i'm a white man fuck you all right cool you've just lost an ally yeah that is true i mean that is a very good point um and

another good point is when you're 23 fuck look she's probably smarter than me when i was 23 i was retarded when i was 23 i was really fucking dumb and that's just something i'm willing to concede and if if you had a video of me explaining my position on anything at 23 at 47 i would have to go oh fuck i'm so sorry i don't know i just didn't know anything yeah i was fucking stupid yeah i have some i have a certain level of empathy for her and uh i mean i don't know the girl. So this really isn't... For me, that whole affair was much less about her than about the easy way in which people jump onto jingoistic bandwagons about things. And also that they demand cancellation.

They demand people getting fired. Well, it's so censorious. It's so dictatorial. It's so antithetical to everything that we should value about the great rumbling dialogue of debate. The First Amendment, one of the great things about this country is a whole bunch of crazy people all shouting at each other. And hopefully the best idea wins in the end. You don't shut people down. Without a doubt.

And I think a lot of these people, they respond. I think a lot of people are very sympathetic to someone who's been bullied and they look at marginalized people whether it's uh certain races or genders or sexual orientation and they they immediately stand up for those people because they think those people have been bullied and marginalized but in doing so they often resort to the very same tactics that are often used against these people that are marginalized. They become bullies and they rally the troops. And that's why this term social justice warrior is so apt because they're attacking.

This is like this aggressive campaign. It's not a campaign of psychedelic love where they say like, your perspective is wrong, man. We have to look at this from a different way. And there's no sympathy. This is like a very aggressive sort of movement. And, you know, you could say that I think it's possible to make the argument that there's a necessity to some of that, because I think that the aggression against people that are, have been marginalized, the

aggression against certain races and sexual orientations and certain genders, and you could say that it's necessary to have something equally aggressive in the opposite direction to sort of achieve some type of balance. I could see that. But make sure that what you're targeting is the actual offense. Yes.

Don't just... Yes. That's the thing. I mean, if we want to have an actual conversation about the boundaries of satire, then let's have that conversation, right? Yes. Not cancel Corbair. Yeah. And, you know, that I can't have a... Yeah, you're really having trouble with that name.

Fuck. I'm an idiot. Next time you want to say Colbair, just point at me and I'll say it. Perfect. You know, there's... I don't know. It's so stupid and complicated. And what also frustrates me is the fact that if someone transgresses a certain boundary,

there are certain words that you can say that immediately give the other person the right to disqualify everything that you're talking about. There are ways, like I'll give you an example. I'm constantly dealing with the immigration department, obviously. You can probably tell by my accent that I wasn't born here. And as far as bureaucracies go, I mean, it's like, it's as if the DMV had control over your entire existence. It is just nightmarish.

It's like pulling fingernails just to do the most basic stuff. Like what kind of stuff? Oh, just like renewing your visa and stuff like that. Yeah, I mean, when you're a non-American and you're here and you have to have the right to work here, there are certain hoops that you have to jump through. And the regulations are so arcane and it's so difficult to comply with. And, you know, you fill in a form in triplicate and then it goes through a bazillion different things and then it comes back because one line was wrong. So then you have to go in and you have to wait for ages to get a ticket to see somebody and then you wait for another three hours

and then they tell you that you're at the wrong booth, so you have to go back. I mean, it's just what dealing with bureaucracy is like. It's just a horrible thing to deal with. But I have no recourse against any of that because that's just the power of the state and if I want to be able to be here, then I have to cop that. But last time I came into the country, I was at wit's end about all this stuff.

And the immigration officer at the airport made a joke. He said, I live on a... Well, actually, I can't really tell the story without giving away my address. But that's all right. Just don't hunt me down, people. I live on a street... Don't do it. I won't give the...

Not on this fucking show. Listen, this ain't HuffPost Live this fucking psycho okay all right all right all right all right i'll beat around the bush please do um i live on i live on a street that has the name of a fruit that is named after a fruit okay uh and he and this this guy at the immigration he was like i guess you i guess you got a lot of fruits there, huh? Oh, no. Right. So, okay, stupid, like, kind of anti-gay quip or something. Obviously, I don't come across as super gay, so he obviously didn't know that I was gay.

And I was like, okay, that's fine. I didn't find that particularly offensive. I came out, and as I was standing at the baggage claim, I was like, of all the indignities that the immigration department has put me through which are so much worse than that if i wanted to like get this guy sanctioned i could complain about that and that little thing which was completely harmless and stupid would be the one thing that they would that he would actually get censured for whereas all the other bullshit that i've been put through because it doesn't fit into the box of having been discriminatory, like people can get away with, you know? So if you make a joke that can be perceived as being racist, homophobic, anything like that, all of a sudden, it's the worst fucking thing in the world,

but you can do anything else, and you don't kind of trip the tripwire. You know what I mean? You're not supposed to make any jokes when you're in those situations, especially not a joke. Well, I'm not, but he can. Can he, though? If you complained I'm not, but he can. Can he, though? If you complained, I don't think he can. But why?

Yeah, but it frustrates me that that is such a bad thing. I don't know. Like, when did we all get together and decide that some stupid guy, he's probably, you know, he grew up in a neighborhood where you make a joke about fruits. It's not like, I mean, yes, it's a stupid thing to do he shouldn't do it but why is that the worst thing that has been that has been foisted upon me by the immigration department in the past three years well and what if you were both gay and you were making jokes about straight people like yeah breeders yeah yeah you know or he thought you were gay and it turned out you were straight

and you know He assumed that he could make a joke About heterosexual people Yeah And then you're like This guy's a fucking asshole He thought I was heterosexual I think everyone just has to

Take a chill pill As we say in Australia Do you say that here? Take a chill pill? We have We invented it And we sent it over there Sorry I'm so sorry

And then you recycled it back here It's pretty new for you I'm sure We kind of abandoned it in the 80s Yeah we abandoned it Once we invented cars I We kind of abandoned it in the 80s. Yeah, we abandoned it once we invented cars. I was saying, you invented cars in the 80s? We did, the 1880s.

Oh, right. Ford. Yeah. I'm pretty sure it was the 1880s. I think it was pretty close. It's funny. I still don't know which vernacular is Australian and which vernacular is American. Oh, chill pill? I mean, I'll often say things and people are like, they have no idea.

What did I say the other day? Oh, that's right. We were able to leave work early and I was like, oh, we get an early mark. And everyone was like, what? An early mark? Oh, wow. I never heard of that. Yeah.

But I've basically been in the States for like 10 years and I still, because you don't notice what you're not hearing, right? Right, right. You don't notice that people aren't saying early mark. My English friends always say taking the piss. Yeah, sure. Are you taking the piss? Yeah. sure. Are you taking the piss? I'm like, what the fuck?

That means that you're fucking with somebody. Like if you say, are you fucking with them? You're making a joke. Yeah. Yeah, I think we just have to take a chill pill and just let ourselves joke about it. I remember that you had, when Greg Fitz was on, he made some joke that was like, could have been construed as being homophobic or something. He was, oh, that's right.

It's saying, does the first guy who asks another guy out get to fuck him and then he was like oh that's terrible i shouldn't have said that and i was like i was screaming into my podcast going no that's fine that is a that is a joke right it's obviously a joke it's obviously it's kind of a parody of the sort of stupid thing that a straight person who doesn't know Yeah, well people are People worried even about a joke that is not mean like a joke about like a Joe you can make a joke about black guys having big dicks and someone could say that's racist. Yep

Like but isn't it a good thing never big? make a joke about black guys having big dicks and someone could say that's racist yep like but isn't it a good thing to have a big dick like it's racist in a positive way yeah so even racist in a pot it's and it's what we're talking about earlier people are just at the starting block looking to get upset but sarah silverman has a bit about that she was on uh yeah i think she was on conan years ago and she was like um is it racist to say like I love chinks and she had the bit she had wanted to do

but the producers had nixed it was she wanted to be like I love the n-word I love like and she would have actually said it on the air said it

nigger can't believe you said it you can get in trouble just for that I know and I hate saying the n-word I think it's so stupid and facile

but it's great if you're black and you can just call your friends it. Well, listen, I do have some empathy for minorities being able to reclaim terminology. And I do think that a black person has the right to say it. Like, we've screwed you for 400 years. The least we can do is let you say the word that we can't say. Well, it wasn't we, but I agree with you. I mean, you say we, but I mean, really, I had nothing to do with it. You had nothing to do with it. I'm pretty sure Jamie's never owned any slaves. Yeah, but we still...

You know what I mean? We benefit from an institutional system that took advantage of that. Right, so check your white privilege, Josh Sepps. Do we have the app yet? Can I check the app? I reckon I'm around a four. Yeah. I reckon we're around a four. Four as far as your privilege? Yeah. Out of ten? Who's at ten? Can I check the app? I reckon I'm around a four. Yeah. I reckon I'm around a four.

Four as far as like your privilege? Yeah. Out of ten? Who's at ten? Like Dick Cheney? Yeah, yeah. Sean Hannity? Rockefellers?

Oh, Sean Hannity. You know, those guys. Yeah. Where they're just like, they're so privileged that they're not even aware of how privileged they are. I would love to get Sean Hannity fucked up on mushrooms. What would come out? Cry.

Cry. Tears. A lot of tears. a lot of sadness, a lot of reality. Yeah. Or would he just peel away like an invisible onion and there's nothing underneath the shell? Most likely. I mean, essentially, he's Colbert in a real life form. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's what he is.

I said it right. Yeah, that's good. I'm getting better. Good boy. Thank you. He's a parody. He's a parody without knowing that he's a parody. And it's a lot of the way Bill O'Reilly is.

It's like they play to these people with nine volt brains. They have these people that live in this very small box of ideology. And this box only contains a few you know support our troops and fucking i need to keep my guns and uh you know gays are trying to fucking marry and that's going to ruin the and obama is a fucking muslim you know it's like this is box these people live in yeah and if you can fit into that box project that frequency you can make a lot of money it's the same as what we're talking about the labels. You know, they're basically, they live in a world of labels and order.

Yeah. And, you know, especially Sean Hannity. I think Bill O'Reilly is a smarter guy than Sean Hannity and sometimes diverges from the orthodoxy. But Hannity is literally a puppet for a grab bag of pre-packaged ideas that come from Roger Ailes. And that's it he's a spokes he's just a spokesperson there's no independent thinking going on there yeah and he profits from that yeah and i mean i think that happens on the other side as well going back to

the whole cancel colbert thing like the people who are who are doing that are also just plucking out of a preset um you know it's a jigsaw puzzle box of when they've got all the little pieces of things that they believe. And they're not open to listening to other people or considering new ideas. What is this? Something that Suey Park tweeted during that time period. Racism and whiteness go together. Only white people can be racist.

I mean, that's just prima facie thoughts. That is so awesome. What is the question? You're assuming that whites are more racist than others and that racism by whites is worse than racism by... Versus whites. Versus whites. Dumb question.

Racism and whiteness go together. Only white people can be racist. That is awesome. I mean, it just depends on you. Then she's just not using the term racist. She's a female Colbert, is what she is. Yeah. She's a Colbert on the other side. Sean Hannity, you mean? Well, both.

I mean, she's a female parody. Yeah. Oh, you mean the Colbert the character? Yes. I mean, that is, without willingfully doing it? Yeah. Or without consciously doing it? She's doing that. Yeah. That's what that was. Saying that only white people can be racist? Jesus christ that's so crazy did you i mean any anybody that has seen the the riots in la when they pulled white people out of cars and hit him in the head

with bricks i'm pretty sure that's kind of racist what about what they did to the korean community in a way so fucking loot she's korean exactly absolutely not racism exactly i mean it's just a child it's a child with ideas that don't really vet out under scrutiny what offends me more frankly about that particular tweet than how than how stupid it is is just the mangling of the english language in abusing the word racism so much like i'm an english major she's just not using the word racism in the meaning of the word if racism means that you judge people on the basis of their race, rather than on the basis of their individual attributes, then, of course, just definitionally,

anyone can be racist of any race. Of course. Not only that, there's many people inside of a race that are racist towards others that vary in that race. There are many black people that are racist against darker black people. Right.

That is a fact. Yep. That's a fact often discussed in the African-American community. And it happens in Asian communities. It happens in India a lot. There are, you know, there are 7-Elevens in India that are full of face creams that make your skin whiter. Yes, absolutely.

Well, in the Philippines, glutathione, which is an amino acid or an antioxidant rather they inject glutathione and they they use it as a way of bleaching the skin it's a very common practice it's bizarre and its roots are not just in it's not a cosmetic thing it's a race thing because look there's a lot of white people that are fucking tanning themselves so they look like orange you know i mean what is that that's an aesthetic right they're trying to look different. These people, they're trying to be whiter. Yeah. It's a really creepy thing.

Yeah. And if you want to end up with a world, I mean, something that I'm passionate about working towards and I hope will eventually happen is a world in which we have basically ignored race to the greatest possible extent, where we are all just treating each other as individual human beings trying to find what's special about one another giving people giving

each other the benefit of the doubt and not teaming up against each other how do you best foster that how do you best bring about that you don't do it i don't think by hunkering down into your tribe and throwing pot shots at other people because of their race or gender. I mean, give me a break. Yeah, I agree. I think it's actually happening now. And I think that what we're seeing in this Cancel Colbert thing and what we're seeing with these social justice warriors, although I think it's ill-advised, I think what it is is the adolescent stage of this growth, this social growth that we're undergoing right now.

And I think that we're in this process of understanding each other that is unprecedented. This process of exchanging information that is unprecedented. And I think that the negative aspects of it is that, yeah, you know, you have to deal with some people that do have limited patterns of thinking. And they'll just, you know, hashtag cancel Colbert and Stewie Park's my hero. And you get all that kind of shit. But I think this is a long process of hundreds of years. But in this process, the time that, you know, I've been alive, I was born in 1967. So between 67 and 2014 where we're at right now has been an epic change in culture i mean unbelievable when i was

a child um i i was born in new jersey and i moved to san francisco when i was seven and uh i grew up around a lot of different people so i didn't i didn't there's a lot of things that i didn't understand about like racism and even homophobia i when i moved to Florida, I was 11 years old when I moved to Florida, and my neighbor, this kid that I used to hang out with, his dad was getting super angry that black people, or that gay people rather, were allowed to get married.

And he threw this fucking newspaper down. He goes, you can't fucking believe this shit. They're trying to get married. And I remember thinking, I was 11, like what a fucking silly bitch this guy is. Like what do you a fuck my neighbors were gay in san francisco i grew up next to gay people they were always there i did i totally didn't understand it and between that and today it is very rare that you come across someone who actually gets angry in any urban environment yep the gay people are going to get married it's true it's pretty much accepted like

who i mean there's the there was always this economic argument about fucking insurance, but I always felt like those were bullshit arguments, because how is that affecting you? Is that really raising your insurance rates? I don't even understand all that stuff. It's like when, did you notice my interview with Jeremy Irons by any chance last year? It blew up momentarily when he said that for a man... What was his wording? He basically said, if you have gay marriage, then a father could marry his son to avoid death taxes.

Because if you wanted to pass on his estate, then you could marry your son, and then you'd be transferring the property to your spouse instead of to your kid. I guess you could do that. This is Jeremy Irons. The actor. The actor. Academy Award winning actor. Right.

But he's probably just pointing something out. That's right. That's right. And then the British, because he's very, very famous in the UK, the British press picked this up, and you know how crazy the British tabloids can be. And it was like a huge, huge firestorm over there. And I felt bad. I felt sorry for him, because it it was a you know what it's like when you do a long interview and you just say something you know it was a 33 minute interview and he's he he mused on that in like the 31st minute of the interview and you know you're just chatting on

a couch it feels casual he just thinks he's raising a kind of thought experiment and then the british press will go crazy about jeremy irons speaks out against gay marriage in a slightly unfair way. But that's the kind of stupid-ass thought experiment that obviously, I mean, if that ever happened, then you would just change the law about incest. Right, right. Yeah. It's a non-issue. Well, is it legal to marry your son? No.

Is that even legal? No. I don't think so. No, I don't think so. But maybe it is. I don't know. It's hard to imagine whether or not they would ever have actually bothered to write that law because like what if a son i mean let's throw this out there it's even more offensive what if a son and a father if they're both consenting adults and they decide they love each other and they want

to have sex all the time who's to say that that's bad if they like it if they both like it if the son's 30 and the father's 50 and they say look dad i think you're fucking hot let's if they both agree i mean if you're not talking about children you're talking about and there's no history of sex between them whatsoever there's no like slow indoctrination by the dad of look i basically think that we should have the largest amount of freedom yes it consistent with a society and a culture that functions. So I wouldn't say that that should be against the law. But it's hard to disentangle that from the power differential that there is between a father and a son. It's hard to imagine how.

My dad didn't have no fucking power over me when I was 30. Yeah. At a certain point in time. I mean, 40 and 60. You know, you're really an older man. If it was like 120 and 140, then now we're talking. But that's hard to fuck a 120-year-old man. They break.

Yeah. You know? I just don't think there's anything wrong with two people that consent to do what they both enjoy doing. And I know this is a weird example, but I think that as long as they both enjoy it, like, why do we care? And we care because of the confines of culture. It's one of the interesting things about animals. Bonobo monkeys will have sex with everybody

except the mother will not have sex with the son. That's it. The father has sex with the sons. The father has sex with the daughters. The brothers and sisters have sex. Brothers have sex with each other. Everybody has sex with everybody. Everyone's gay. The father has sex with the sons. The father has sex with the daughters. The brothers and sisters have sex. Brothers have sex with each other. Everybody has sex with everybody. Everyone's gay.

They're all bisexual. Except the mother's like, get out of here, bitch. Yeah. No dick from you. Interesting. Yeah, that's the only boundary that they will not cross, which is fascinating. I should emphasize that if people are watching this and I look horribly clammy, it's because I'm sick.

You don't look clammy. You look fine, dude. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you struggled getting that. this and I look horribly clammy it's because I'm sick you don't look clammy you look for it yeah okay yeah I am yeah yeah you struggle to get in and I appreciate you getting in here and doing this I really do know you're sick no problem I'm allowed to pollute you I didn't want to pollute anyone else I'll be fine I take antibiotics you'll be okay there's only two of you in here I didn't want to give a hundred never get sick the kids a fucking soldier really

he'll be fine. Good for him. But again, it's sort of the same thing, the Jeremy Irons thing. It's this desire to be offended or this green light to be offended. You see the green light, go, hit the gas. We got one. We got an opening. Time to be pissed. I do think that this is a part of a process.

I think this is a part of a process i think this is a part of a process of along with the erosion of privacy along with uh the the symbiotic connection that we have to technology which is connecting us in some sort of very strange way and this erosion of privacy the symbiotic nature of the the technological world that we live in and And then on top of that, all these opinions that are coming in, like this distribution method of Twitter and social media and Facebook. You could make a Facebook post that resonates and within a couple days,

fucking millions of people can see it. Hey, Alex from Target. Who's Alex from Target? Oh, you've been up in the woods. I have. What happened? There's been a viral meme last week. What happened? I want to talk about your Canada holiday as well.

There was this photo of this 15-year-old checkout guy at Target who was cute. And a girl tweeted it. And Twitter blew up with just retweets of this picture of this kid who suddenly he went from 144 twitter followers to 600 000 twitter followers in like 24 hours holy shit just because teenage girls thought he was adorable he ended up on ellen oh my god yeah alex from twitter that kid yeah hashtag alex from twitter blew up blew up the world blew up blew up the internet he is a little cutie pie look at him yeah look at ellen good for her jumping on that she's the best yeah she's awesome at that um so yeah i mean when you're talking about how things can just spiral out of

control this the connectedness yeah is insane the spontaneity i'm a little bit worried about whether it's getting too crazy like i mean it reminds me like nuremberg or something it's like you know what what happens if if you get a bunch of crazy bigots? What happens if you multiply the thing that happened to me with Cancel Colbert by a million times? Yeah. Like, it could just overwhelm your consciousness. It could overwhelm your life. It can, but your life is going to be different.

I mean, it's changed Alex's life. That's for sure. For sure. Damn sure. Do you know what that kid's phone must be like? All day. Oh, yeah. He's had wedding propositions.

I'm sure. It's probably just the amount of sheer photos of vaginas that have probably been sent his way. His iPhone. He's going to need one of these big iPhones with 128 gigs. It's all lobbyer all the way. Just his. Just his whole... Just getting bombed on. Well, imagine if he becomes a famous person,

like he gets a reality show or something like that. Why not? I mean, if Honey Boo Boo can get one, how about Alex from Target? Look, when you're talking about the bonobos as well, that's a whole other element of human sexuality that you can open up in terms of in terms of overcoming labels and overcoming the way that we think about each other

and the boxes that society wants to sort of fit us in there have been a lot of societies where you know people are a lot more bisexual than they are in this society right now almost all of them yeah i mean you look at ancient greece and ancient rome and paris in the 19th century and a lot of Polynesian islands and things like that. So, you know, in the great kind of sweep of trying to become a culture that's more accepting of individuals and individuality, that's something that I hope happens, that we are less sort of judgmental about the way that we think about each other's sexuality. And I think that sometimes the gay, I'm kind of going off on a bit of a tangent here, but just while it occurs to me, sometimes the gay community or the gay lobby, the extremely pro-gay lobby, can do a disservice to the sort of mission of sexual fulfillment by requiring you to pick a team, by requiring requiring you to by making it seem like

gayness has a certain politics and has a certain fashion style and has a certain way of speaking and way of behaving and that you have to defend that and fight for it uh why can't you just shag who you want and love who you want you know by picking a team is that an issue in the gay community like if someone like is gay then they decide to be straight for a little while yeah they get i think it's a taboo yeah that's funny well i mean imagine if you know man hilarious though yeah yeah i mean it's like the opposite of what they should be promoting i mean the whole idea about the ability to be gay was like like leave me alone let me do what i want to do if i'm not you know if i'm not hurting anybody if it's consensual if this is what we both

enjoy doing why do you care? why do you care? because you have to care because this is a this is a fight that we have to fight you know

but why do you have to fight it? can't a person also like this if you're a meat eater can you have a salad? I mean if you're a vegetarian right you don't eat meat

but if you're a person who eats meat can't you have a fucking salad? If I see you eating a salad, I'm like, what are you doing with that salad, pussy? You fucking eating some lettuce? And also, if you're a vegetarian, like, then that's great. But it's also not like a, if something, if like a tiny fleck of animal blood has like been on one of the pieces, one of the billions of pieces of lettuce that you eat, that's not a sin. You know what I mean?

There are now at some Whole Foods different, what do you call them, bread-cutting machines for the organic bread and the non-organic bread because people are so crazy about their organic bread that they don't want a crumb of non-organic bread to touch the organic bread. That is a religion. That is just cray-cray.

They don't understand what organic even means. When you're having bread, okay, this is a reality of food. If you are having bread, it is changed from the wheat that used to exist in the early 1900s. From the early 1900s to today, the wheat that you have has been modified. And when we say genetically modified it's not genetically modified in a laboratory where they're splicing genes but it is in the sense of natural selection they've they've they've selected non-natural yeah i mean man-made yeah yeah splicing plants together with you know scalpels and shit what they've done is creating they've

created a heartier um plant that can survive better it has better yields and it's i mean what is organic it just means it doesn't have pesticides that's right i think that's the main thing they care about when you're slicing you're not getting fucking pesticides stupid it's but it's it becomes a kind of a spiritual thing almost it's like a it's like you have to pray to the gods of the organic gods yeah well the the vegetarian option, you know, this whole thing. My favorite is the vegans who have cats. Yeah. Because guess what, fuckface? You're not a vegan.

If you're fucking buying murdered animals that are stuffed into cans for a little tabby, and you know, see all these people, they have their cats, and they don't believe in animal cruelty, but you have a fucking cat! Yeah. Those cats are cruel as shit! Yeah. I have this, I have two cats, but I have one cat. She's this big fluff ball.

She's 18 years old. I've had her forever. She's a sweetheart. You come near her, she meows at you. You pick her up, she starts purring immediately. She's the best cat. She's a fucking murderer. If I leave her outside in the courtyard

and a bird is stupid enough to come near her, she will snatch that fucker out of the sky, snap its neck, and bring it in and drop it at my feet yeah and she thinks it's fun i mean she's not hungry she's not starving to death she does that shit for a goof she's a fucking bowl of food it's there full all the time anytime she wants she can eat yeah she's a fucking murderer and that's what you have if you are a vegan with a cat you are har harboring murderers. And if you're not, if you're not, if you're one of those crazy fucks that tries to feed your cat some sort of vegetable-based food, you're killing your fucking cat. Okay? That cat's going to have organ failure.

They're going to go blind. There's all sorts of crazy shit that happens to cats when you try to feed them vegetables. There's this weird sense in which the kind of vegan movement, and I have to say I have a fair bit of sympathy for them because i do think that the way that we what we've done to industrialize agriculture is a fucking travesty horrible like we will look back in a hundred years at the way that we simply treat animals purely on the basis of of minimizing the cost the number of pennies that we have to pay for a pound of their flesh and we will i think we will regard that as almost being like a slate a form of slavery or something like it'll be so morally abhorrent but the response to that my response to that is similar to your response to that which is all right let's try to feel more

like we're part of an ecosystem in which we actually are more related to the food that we're eating and to the animals whose lives we're taking and let's have some karmic responsibility for that rather than just buying you know chicken breast in styrofoam and trying not to think about the chicken that it actually came from i don't think the correct response is the vegan response which is to sort of imagine that humankind is distinct and disjointed and detached from the rest of the ecosystem and that like what the cat does to the bird is fine because that's natural, but for us to eat meat is not natural because what we're morally conscious creatures who aren't part of the ecosystem, we are part of the ecosystem. consistent to think that we we that it's wrong for us to partake in the same kind of cycle of life that the rest of that all other species do the idea is that we are the highest form of animal on this planet because unlike dolphins we can actually alter our environment and i think

dolphins are probably in the same range as far as intelligence goes of human beings. They have incredible minds. They have dialects. They have the ability to communicate. They form bonds and pacts. They play with people. And also, they don't show any violence whatsoever towards human beings. But human beings show violence towards dolphins.

So, there's a lot of really super positive characteristics about wild dolphins that are quite, quite fascinating. More so than even monkeys or chimps, because chimps will eat babies. Chimps will steal human babies and eat them. Yeah, they'll rip your face off. They're fucking horrible monsters. That's our closest relative. So it could be argued that in some way, even though dolphins can't alter their environment, they have a very commensurate level of intelligence that human beings have.

But we consider ourselves the highest because we can alter our environment because we have opposable thumbs and the whole deal um but if if you are the highest form you should set the highest standards our understanding and our ability to communicate these ideas lead us to this thing where we say okay we are causing animal suffering and cruelty that is unnecessary and i want to leave the smallest footprint possible. I want to grow my own vegetables, eat them, and that's it. Yeah, sure. But they also won't even eat eggs, which is ridiculous. I have chickens.

I have 24 chickens. They lay eggs every day, and they don't care if you take them. Those chickens never become a chicken because there's no rooster, so they just lay an egg, and you can eat that egg, and it's super healthy. Would they have a problem with eating human eggs? I don't know. I have a joke about that, about if your wife was on the period every month, once a year, or once a month, rather, they had an egg. Yeah.

Dropped an egg. What would you do? If it can't become a person, would you let it go to waste? Eat it. Throw it in the backyard, let it fucking fertilize your food? That's the other thing. Why are we so speciesist about what species we eat? I mean, I've eaten dog in Vietnam.

Did you eat dog? Yeah, I mean... What was that like? Not great. Did it weird you out? I kind of felt like, again, I almost felt like it was a moral responsibility to do so because I eat pigs, which are at least as intelligent as dogs,

and show as much empathy as dogs. So where is it morally consistent for me to be okay eating bacon and and not okay eating dog that's just bias my friend ate a coyote cool yeah it was for a meat eater my friend steve ranella because uh he was tired of people asking him he's a it's a hunting show and he's very unusual for a hunter very educated educated, very well-read, and very articulate. And he was tired of people asking him, have you ever eaten a coyote? So he fucking shot a coyote and ate it. And cooked it on the show. That's great.

Yeah. And, you know, it wasn't bad, I guess. Sure. Meat's meat. I don't know about that. It varies. Meat certainly varies. There's a big difference between some forms of meat. I mean i mean i don't mean to say that all that however you raise meat it's all

the same thing but i think a wild species is a wild species it's going to have flesh that you know is edible most likely edible i've never heard of anybody eating a wolf except for that movie the gray they eat wolves on that but it tastes like shit apparently uh there's certain animals that just taste really bad like a friend just got back from africa and he said the one thing that the local villagers will not eat is hyena oh yeah they'll even eat lion i can imagine that they'll eat lion apparently mountain lion is delicious yeah i've talked to all these hunters that say that mountain lion and there's all this mountain lion recipes. I googled it. There's mountain lion recipes online. Yeah, they say it tastes like pork.

Wow. Yeah. I mean, I used to eat kangaroo a lot back in Australia. That's an increasingly popular meat in Australia. Is it really? It's great. It's like venison. It's very gamey and lean.

Really? Yeah, delicious. They are. I didn't know how fucking muscular kangaroos are. Oh, yeah. Jesus Christ. Have you ever seen the video of the kangaroo choking the other kangaroo unconscious? No.

Oh, my God. I mean, I've probably seen this before. You have to see this. As an Australian, yeah. It's fairly recent. Okay. These two kangaroos are involved in a fight, and this one kangaroo gets this other kangaroo in a fucking chokehold with his arms, and clamps down on the kangaroo's neck, and literally

gets into a jujitsu position. Wow. And puts this fucking kangaroo to sleep, and the kangaroo's neck and literally gets into a jiu-jitsu position and puts this fucking kangaroo to sleep. And the kangaroo just collapses. I mean, it chokes the blood out of it. They are. And it has to have some sort of a thought process behind doing that.

Yeah, sure. I mean, they're an interesting, they're such an interesting species. Australian fauna, you know the reason why Australia has all these weird animals is because it broke off from the rest of the continents before the you know before all the others did so there was this kind of parallel yeah hundreds of millions of years so there's this parallel evolution essentially and if you look at the face of a kangaroo and you look at the face of a deer very similar yeah very similar

they occupy basically the same ecological niche but because australia was uh here here's the video we'll see it watch watch in a sec. Because Australia broke off so early, we've just got these random, like, it's just, that's the beauty of, I love evolution. I think it's just so interesting. Because I guess they've got longer distances to cross in Australia than they did elsewhere and it's dry and arid for some reason. They just start bouncing.

You basically got a bouncing deer. Wow. And on two legs too. That's the other weird thing. Well, there's an animal called the duiker which is a type of antelope that lives in the congo that can actually swim underwater as much as a hundred yards and eats fish it's a fucking carnivorous antelope they've evolved apparently what the congo used to be was grasslands and And as the climate changed, it became a rainforest.

And as it became a rainforest, a lot of these animals that are traditionally grassland animals became trapped like rhinos. There's rhinos that are trapped in the rainforest of the Congo. And all these antelope and deer that are running through these swamps and these swampy, like, forest, thick, thick, thick, like, wooded areas. And this one animal figured out a way to get smaller and actually swim underwater with these short little legs. Good for him. Fucking crazy, though. Good for him.

And this all happened over a period of, like, 2,000 years. It wasn't, like, a long time. Yeah, it's a very short amount of time. It is true. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing about the Congo. Wow. Yeah, this area where these- So it's not natural selection. It's got to be some other force at true. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing about the Congo. Wow. Yeah, this area where these... So it's not natural selection.

It's got to be some other force at work. Well, it is. No, natural selection can happen. You don't get to shuffle the genes that quickly in just a couple thousand years. But maybe you... I'm talking out of school, obviously. I'm not a geneticist. But I think there's been some evidence of extreme changes in evolution over a very short period of time.

Like, for instance, people that live... Inuit people that live in the extreme northern areas, they've developed this ability to not get frostbite and to also keep their hands warm in extreme cold conditions. And they believe that this has happened between 10,000 plus years ago when the ice bridge between the Bering Strait,

between the Asian continent and the North American continent existed. They could travel back and forth. And the people that still live there, they have literally changed. They've changed to absorb. Look, I guess if someone, you know, you can imagine that if a kid is born with a propensity to not get frostbite in his fingers, then he's more likely to survive, to procreate, than someone who doesn't,

and that could shake itself out over the course of generations. There's certainly that. There's certainly that. But I think there's also, there's something I believe, and this is just me talking, there's something I believe about life where it finds a way. Life finds a way. Just like these, when they first discovered that there's life

at the bottom of the ocean, these crazy volcanic vents. Yeah, extremophiles. And it's like, what they first discovered that there's life at the bottom of the ocean these crazy volcanic extreme files and it's like what the fuck is that some weird tiny little animals that just are incredibly hot volcanic vents incredible pressure yeah yeah so that's why when they look at like the moon of europa you know one of jupiter's moons and it's covered in ice but there's water underneath yeah what the fuck is going on under there so exciting yeah i mean there might be some life forms that reminds me when you said something you said something a moment ago about um the the moral uh about morality and oh that's right dolphins and stuff i was interviewing neil degrasse tyson about extraterrestrial life and i was saying like one there is a fear that maybe as civilizations become as intelligent as we are, that they kind of extinguish themselves. Once they get the capacity to destroy themselves, that within a few centuries or millennia, they sort of do.

And that that's why the universe doesn't seem to be teeming with life. And he was like, you know what? I think that if you evolve to a position where you're able to destroy yourself, then there's another type. And I was basically saying, like, what if extraterrestrial civilizations did come and visit us? You know, Stephen Hawking says that would be the worst possible scenario. There are no instances of advanced civilizations meeting less civilized civilizations and it going well for the less developed civilization, right? I mean, just look at what happens on our planet it would that happen if an extraterrestrial civilization came and visited us would they just exterminate us or use us as their slaves and neil degrasse tyson was saying if they had gotten so advanced that they were capable of traveling across the cosmos then and

they hadn't destroyed themselves then you would like to think that there'd been a moral evolution as well as just a natural, physical, biological evolution, and that they would not do that, because otherwise they would have killed themselves before they got here. Right, but the counter to that would be, obviously, that if they did develop this, and they came over here, and they realized how fucking scary we are, with nuclear weapons and sucking every fish out of the ocean,

and polluting every fucking place we get a chance to set up shop wouldn't they see us as a threat to the entire ecosystem of the planet if we were just leaving nuclear waste as we've done in holes in the ground in nevada and polluting fukushima to the point where they're trying to figure out how to dig a hole and freeze the outside of the hole so they could fill the hole up with nuclear waste that will be toxic for longer than there have been humans in this particular shape that we find ourselves in now yeah i mean if you go back to 200 000 years ago you're dealing with essentially a different kind of human right i mean if you go to australia pithicus i mean what is that like a million years ago and then whatever the the the lower hominids

were before that you get to like 200 000 years, what is that, like a million years ago, and then whatever the lower hominids were before that, you get to, like, 200,000 years ago, that's kind of like a monkey person. Yeah. Yeah, basically.

Yeah, and that's what we're talking about with this fucking toxic waste. Yeah. We're talking, like, hundreds of thousands of years of toxicity. It's horrifyingly irresponsible.

I can't believe... I mean... Right, and if you were an alien... Yes, you would look at that and, yeah. Like, look at these crazy pink monkeys with their fucking bang sticks and their nuclear waste these guys are assholes i mean just look that you would just look at the history of what how we treat

other species on this planet and how we treat each other yeah and you would be like this is a very undeveloped like this is the this is as undeveloped as you can be and still be civilized yes i use that term as sort of in quotation marks well civilized in comparison to chimps that eat your face off yeah well i just mean civilized in that you can build spacecraft and you know you you conquer you know arithmetic and stuff yeah and you know send video through the sky and into someone else's phone it's i mean we're obviously super fucking advanced for what we know of in the past yes we're good makers, but we're about as undeveloped, like, morally and intellectually as you could be and still be a tool maker this good. But is it possible that that is a part of why we develop things in the first place, that we're trying to do battle with our instincts and that we're trying to, in our desire to innovate and our desire to create new technology and expand our capabilities,

that we're also doing this to sort of combat what we really are primally. This deep urge that we have to fuck and to kill and to feed ourselves and to sleep and all these biological urges. We're trying to fight against that. That's the idea of civilization. When you look at every space movie that talks about the future, in the future, everyone is super calm. They're all reading minds

or they're doing things with their hands. No one's physical. There's no one doing CrossFit in the fucking future. You know what I mean? If you look at those fucking movies about the future, no one's yoked. There's no dudes that are fucking, let's go, pussy. Come on.

Ten more push-ups. There's none of that in the future. The future is not a physical thing. The future is we've evolved past the physical. We're communicating with our minds. We're levitating things. We're not using kinetic energy. We're not using muscle and bone and blood.

And maybe that will be true. I mean, the other thing that fascinates me is what's going to happen with artificial intelligence. And, you know, there are guys like Ray Kurzweil who think that within our lifetimes we're going to be able to upload our intelligence into computers. And I was actually speaking to an... I was interviewing...

I do another podcast called Point of Inquiry, which is for the Center for Inquiry. It's a non-profit that spreads science and reason and secularism, atheism. And I was speaking to one of these guys who works in the field of extraterrestrial life. He literally gets paid to plan for what we will have to do if we discover civilizations in other parts of the galaxy.

And I just lost my train of thought about how I got onto that. But, oh, that's right so i was like you know why haven't we found an extraterrestrial civilization yet he was like well maybe the reality is that biological intelligences biological civilizations quickly find a way to turn themselves artificial and we're looking for the wrong thing we're looking we're looking for biological civilizations but. We're looking for biological civilizations, but it may well be the case that within a few centuries, we will all be intelligences living inside of computers, and the need for biological human beings will have passed.

I think that's very possible. Not only that, if we do develop something that is artificial that is far better than what we are, the argument of why we keep the biological life alive will kind of erode i mean why do we need to shit and piss and eat and what why do we need to do that i mean we only need to do that because that's the best option but if we come up with something in a laboratory if they... Look, they've combined spider silk and human cells and created an artificial skin that is bulletproof.

I mean, this is all proof of concept right now, but they believe they will be able to develop artificial human skin that's fucking bulletproof. I want to be bulletproof. Make it happen. Yeah, but then people will be shooting everybody and fuck you! They already are.

They won't even worry about it. They already are. Sort of. I'm agnostic as to whether or not, I mean, it's a big philosophical question rather than a scientific question, as to whether or not a computer could feel the way that I do. Whether I, like, this is taking for granted, this assumption, the Ray Kurzweil style, you know, singularity assumption, takes for granted a fundamental premise that i have trouble taking for granted which is that if you added up all of the data that's in my head

right now and you put that into a computer it would have to be obviously a much more sophisticated computer than anything we have right now but assuming that you could that that computer essentially would be me it would feel like me i would would be in the computer. Now, that's a question for philosophy of mind. That's not a question for science, because what we really don't know is what undergirds my experience of being myself. Well, I also think there's an issue with why is it so important to be you? Why is it so important to be a person? Because I like me. But you do like you, but you but you like you because it's the only thing you have ever known and this is the highest form of life that

we know currently but if you think about how many people are fucking depressed and saddled down with emotions and relationships and just the stuff we're talking about today involving racism and homophobia and all these issues and social justice warriors and fucking uber conservative shitheads and if you look at all of this stuff that we have to deal with just because of the fact that we're biological life forms existing in cultures

and all these different emotions that we have to struggle with on a daily basis, if we could figure out a way to just shut that off with a switch and be these enlightened robot things that are far better, don't get disease,

and figure out a way to experience pleasure and that's in a level that is just unprecedented to the human body you've lost me i have that's dystopian to me the part of the messiness of being a human being is the complexity like part of part of the beauty of creativity uh for me is is being fucked up a bit like that you know perfection would be a boring state would it be if you could create wormholes and travel to distant galaxies and experience all sorts of different life forms with zero emotion and just pure love because it's been created on silicone fucking plates and you could fly through the galaxy with no worry about not being able to breathe?

I believe, in my personal experience, that without the troughs, the peaks are meaningless. I believe that we should have stayed single-celled organisms because all this fucking splitting has just been super complicated. If we were single-celled organisms, we'd have no racism, we'd have no murder. Single-celled organisms don't have gun rights. They don't fucking... They don't eat anything.

They're also fucking boring, Joe. They're boring! So are we, in comparison to these artificial lifeforms that can travel to different galaxies. I mean, part of the beauty of Shakespeare and Coleridge and Shelley and like the great art that we've ever produced is the fact that it touches something inside of us that can be contrasted against the fucked upness of the rest of the human condition. I think the human condition is an interesting thing worth preserving. Maybe. Or. I like that we're speaking as if we have the

option not to. Well, I think we will. I just can't figure out whether or not we should flip the switch on this. We're still a long way from that switch. Well, go back to when we were 200,000 years ago when we were the weird monkey people. Someone came along and said, hey, I know we haven't figured out language yet, but I'm going to explain to you the idea of twitter you know fucking a monkey you'd be like

no no no listen man i gotta find food in my area there's a beauty to starving there's a there's a beauty to running from leopards and climbing up trees to avoid predators i mean this is a beautiful thing to have a seven year lifespan if you're fucking lucky i mean i guess it depends what we're talking about about the fucked upness of the human condition i i would agree with you that if you could get rid of mental illness if you could get rid of unnecessary uh self-doubt and self-criticism then that would probably be a positive thing but that you wouldn't be left with purely positive emotions that i don't think you'd want to be who wants to be on an ecstasy trip their entire life me i'll take it i'm not saying that it would be that even.

I'm just saying that we live as if this idea of emotional struggle is a necessity to happiness and that happiness is a necessity to a meaningful life. And what is a meaningful life? If it is all just temporary and your life is finite and there's no arguing that right now, at least. Well, what is a meaningful life? If it is all just temporary and your life is finite and there's no arguing that right now, at least. Well, what is meaning? What are all these things other than these quantities that we attach to our life? You know, I'm more happy now.

I'm less happy when I do this. I'm more fulfilled when I do that. I mean, all these things are a part of the biological reality that we live in and we equate the significance of our existence to this biological reality but at the end of the day we're just fucking and breeding and continuing to make new tv sets right i mean at the end of the day when you look at the human race as a whole this gigantic super organism that continues to make smaller cell phones and fucking and faster cars what what exactly is the significance what exactly is the meaning if ultimately what we're doing is polluting the ocean and pulling out all the fish and

damaging the atmosphere and changing the fucking the the gulf stream and all this nutty shit that we're a part of as a byproduct of all these emotions and desire for materialism and all these different things if we can avoid all that if we could live as solar-powered creatures that are made out of carbon fiber sure sure it i you know we say no because we are this but we can't stay this we're not going to if 10 million years go by and we come back to 2014, we look how fucking goofy this argument is. Of course. These dumb motherfuckers wanted to stay people. No, I take your point, but I think that

the kernel of insight there that's precious is the fact that we've essentially got it asked backwards about how you find meaning and happiness, right? I don't think we necessarily, I think even as biological human beings, we can still do a hell of a lot better job than we currently do about contextualizing what happiness is like the it always frustrates me when people whine about not

being happy happiness for me is a byproduct of me doing things that i'm good at and that contribute in some way right like don't sit around, like, chasing. The more you chase happiness, it's like squeezing the soap in your hand too hard and it just slips right out. The more you specifically try to focus on chasing happiness, the less happy you are. Just get on with your life and do stuff that's good and happiness will just be a byproduct of that. That's a very good point as a person. And I think another thing that makes you happy is to be around happy people and to give each other things. Like, as far as, like, friendship and love and companionship and laughter. And, like, you give and, you know, you experience from each other.

And, you know, you bond together. By yourself, it sucks. You know, by yourself is okay in small doses. But find some of the most miserable, angry people. And you find a lot of times those people have no love in their life. Yeah.

And that's the big issue. Sean Hannity. Poor fucking Sean Hannity. Poor man. He's got love, but it's all from retards. He's got those nine-volt batteries out there.

Yeah, Sean, we're gonna have to close up our border, Sean. Once they invent jetpacks, all those borders are gonna be fucking meaningless. People are just gonna be flying through the air,

and you're gonna have to scoop Mexicans out of the sky with nets is no way gonna be able to stop them And then we're gonna have to just assimilate and deal with the fact that we you know We're all sharing this planet together and this idea of borders is fucking preposterous This idea that you're born on that patch of dirt, so you don't have health care, but I'm born on this patch of dirt So I got fucking gun rights and fucking freedom and American Eagle tattooed on my back. Woo! Everyone's got to get a shit ton more rich, though, before we can get rid of borders. Do you think so?

Yeah, because otherwise, I mean, I'm not saying that that's a good thing. I'm just saying that that's a fact on the ground. If every Indian and Chinese person was able to move to the United States, then a large proportion of them would, and then you can't get your free health care, because you can't afford your free health care. Not that America has free health care, but you know, you can't have, there's an old saying that you can either have a welfare state, or you can have open borders, but you can't have both. Or you can have utopia, when we all become carbon-based life forms that are made out of silicone plates.

A lot of libertarians would say, just get rid of the welfare state, and get rid of the borders, and let every man sort of fend for himself. But I'm a big believer that one of the great humanizing, socializing forces of the 20th century was the development of the welfare state, the New Deal, and the idea that we have a sort of societal obligation to take care of one another. I think it works well in a lot of countries, especially in Scandinavian countries. It works well in Denmark. It works well in Australia and New Zealand. And open borders would put an end to that. Well, I think there's a good thing that the welfare state does if it's attached to strong ideas and a strong philosophy of self-improvement. The problem with the welfare state is that on some folks, given some backgrounds and given some

behavior patterns that people have fallen into, that it can lead to complacency. Yeah, and let me just clarify what I mean by welfare state. That might be a slightly un-American term. I just mean providing universal health care for everyone, providing free tertiary education or discounted tertiary education and not burdening people with student loans, taking care of old people. Is that impossible to do globally?

Certainly health care is expensive. Really this country already spends like 14 or 17 percent of its entire gdp on health care right you would only need to double that or triple it to bankrupt it and you would certainly do more than triple it you'd do it a hundred fold if you well you'd do it 20 fold um if you expanded it to the world because the united states States is only 1 20th of the world's population. But if you take out the amount of money that we spend on military, the amount of money we spend... I mean, if the whole world was assimilated in that sort of sense... It's still not close. Not enough, huh?

No. Fuck. I mean, we spend like a sixth of the entire GDP on healthcare. That's insane. It's so insane. And we get outcomes in this country that are inferior to other countries that have socialized medicine. What do we spend on military? I don't know. We should look that up.

Because if we could spend, well, you know, obviously, you know, that's the fucking argument. We don't need war. We need doctors and gun, food. I mean, don't get me wrong. We spend way too much on the military. Way more than we need to. I mean, America spends more than the next, what is it, nine or ten nations combined? Yeah, most likely. And all of those nations are friendly nations. So who are we, well, apart from, I mean, depending on how you define China. But, you know, what is this for?

It's a jobs, a fucking jobs program. To keep everybody down. Flex. Flex on motherfuckers. Make sure nobody gets crazy. That's why we have military bases in over a hundred different countries. I mean, the real expense, though, is, when I say it's a jobs program, literally explicitly made a political case to make sure that all political constituencies across the country have have a local vested interest in maintaining their

their little piece of the military industrial complex which means we're producing you know fighter jets that the pentagon says they don't want and that they don't need simply because the local representative will say well we're not going not going to cancel this and lose certain jobs in my district. Okay, well, if it's a jobs program, just let's admit that it's a jobs program and just say, okay, that is the way that we've chosen to deliver welfare in this country by giving people jobs in the military that we don't need them to do. So, in that case, what we really need to do is declare war on poverty. If we declare war on poverty, then we'll make money out of eliminating poverty the same

way we have the war on drugs i mean the war on drugs is essentially a war against i mean it's it's a job factory the same way i mean it's a it's a it's a job hustle the same way military is i mean the military there's certain places where the military is a viable option for people that are in poor neighborhoods that need some form of income. Yeah, that's right. It's a constant. And oftentimes, I mean, if you're poor, especially if you're a minority, and so you don't have the same opportunities that other people do, yeah, the military is a great option.

And another option would be to become a drug dealer. So the military is a good option. Yeah. Yeah. What the fuck? We have to fix this, Josh Zeps. That's why I'm here, Joe. I don't think we're doing a goddamn thing, you and I.

I think we're on the way. I think we've fixed about 30% of the world's problems so far today. I really don't think we have. At this pace, I think we'll get it done. A couple of years of this conversation. Yeah, sure. How often are you in LA, man? We only have about 10 minutes left.

Okay. We've got to do this again. It goes fast, doesn't it? It goes so fast. Yeah, I'm i'm i'm in and out sometimes uh i also want to plug uh my new my new venture which is i'm doing a live i'm launching a live show in um in new york in front of a live studio audience and we're going to podcast that so i want people to like send an email to the show and get on our mailing list so that you can get free tickets and swag and all that sort of stuff uh it's called we The People, and it's like a panel show of me hosting with four guests,

and we talk about the news, and the audience votes on whose opinion they like the best. That's great. It will be really fun. So send an email to info at wethepeoplepod.com. Are you going to pick the audience, or are you just going to let Sean Hannity fans come in? Only Sean Hannity fans. Fucking drooling and slipping all over the floor. Are you going to let Sean Hannity fans come in? Only Sean Hannity fans. Fucking drooling and slipping all over the floor. Are you going to let them in?

I welcome everybody, including Sean Hannity fans. What about Sean Hannity? Would you have him on the show? No. No? Yes, of course I would. Really? Wouldn't that be fascinating?

It would be fascinating. It would be really interesting. As long as you had a lot of time to really get deep with him and break it down. Because a guy like that can keep up the fucking hustle and shuffle for like 20 30 minutes Yeah, it would either be interesting or it wouldn't be interesting at all You know it was like I was talking to Marc Maron in that interview on Friday about whether or not he'd want him interview Rush Limbaugh on his show and he was like not really he was like that

I don't think I'd ever get through the the charade and then really had a nice little bog of Oxycontin's on charade. You would if you had a nice little bog of Oxycontins on you. Look what I got here, my man. Got a little bag of for you. Come on, son. Shake it, shake it, shake it. Listen to this. Wouldn't it be amazing, though, if you could get one of those guys on drugs and just take them down the rabbit hole and really get, like, just do it. Do ayahuasca with Rush Limbaugh. See what happens. Oh, a lot of crying, a lot of screaming. A lot of fucking being pulled apart by demons.

A lot of vomiting, a lot of shitting. There'd be a lot of bodily fluids. It wouldn't be pretty. I take it back. I don't want that thought experiment. I would be willing to be around him shitting as long as I could see all the other stuff. I mean, I just think of a lot of these people that have been incredibly supportive of war and the military-industrial complex.

Just seeing the repercussions, the possible repercussions of that support manifested in some sort of a spiritual form, that would be very, very terrifying. I wonder if they could ever get present to the impact of what they're part of. I don't know. I mean, the drugs that that guy's into are the disassociative drugs. I mean, someone who's into, like, the oxys, and someone who's into something just like the narcotics and someone who's into, like, something just like the narcotics

that zonk you out. But even not. I mean, even a Hannity. Like, you know, I saw one thing that I'm pretty passionate about is the push to get rid of nuclear weapons, right? This is a perfectly achievable thing. It's something that Ronald Reagan was passionate about as well. So it's not a right-wing or left-wing thing.

It's just a recognition that if we have thousands and thousands and thousands of nukes in the world at some point eventually we're gonna use them someone's gonna get them someone's you know we can't as they say in in the nuclear security game you can be right 99.9999999 percent of the time and that and still destroy the world yeah when you've got thousands of nukes and i saw sean hannity saying like railing against this and saying you know the way to stop nuclear weapons is to have more nuclear weapons in the united states so that bad guys won't use them and i'm like what what are you even like are you even close to being present to the impact of what you're saying like it's so fucking wildly out of touch with any grander bigger attempt to to think beyond just the the momentary immediate talking point in the most

obvious reflexive knee-jerk bullshit like step back for a second and look at where you are in the world well it's also not supported by the history of suicide bombings right the history of suicide bombings in this world is pretty fucking extensive. There's a lot of people that have taken their own life and a bunch of other people's lives with them because they thought they were doing it for some holy purpose or some martyrdom or whatever. Someone can do that with a nuclear weapon. And that is a reality of nuclear weapons.

Absolutely. The real question though is, is it too late? Is, can you take the salt out of the ocean? Is it possible to extract all the nuclear weapons and figure out a way to make some sort of a deal? At the moment, it does seem to be. Really?

Well, with the exception of North Korea, you could do a deal. I mean, I think everyone could get on board. And look, if you want to keep one nuclear weapon, then do it. What is this? budgets of from 2012 of all the different countries and then the u.s yeah so you've got about you've got one two three four five six seven eight nine so that's the next 10 countries and it's less than the u.s 682 billion And so looking at those countries, the only country there that's a rival really is Russia. China is, I'm not worried about China. I think we'll have a peaceful coexistence with them.

And then the UK, Japan, France, Saudi Arabia. I mean, they're shitholes, but they're not going to use the UK against us. Even China's a tiny amount. It's so small in comparison. It's hilarious. Well, that's how you run shit. That's how you regulate. That's where our tax dollars go.

Yeah. It's a weird situation when you think about a thousand years from now. Will we still have this whole mutually assured destruction thing hanging over our heads a thousand years from now? I can't see it. Will we have figured out a way can't see it will we have figured out a way past this i think we have to well isn't it all about the emotions and the greed and all the stuff that comes along being a biological life form isn't it all about all the stuff that comes from being this troubled monkey that's trying to assimilate with cell phones and yeah

but our ability to triumph over that i mean one of the most touching things, this past weekend was the 25th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall. You know, one of the great triumphs of human civilization is the fact that the 20th century, as fucking nasty as it was, as brutal as it was, didn't end in mutually assured destruction. These pink monkeys managed to rise above their worst selves and come to their better nature and on several occasions came really, really close to destroying themselves, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and didn't. Good for us. Good for us. That's part of the complexity. Pat yourself on your back, humankind.

Yeah. Well, we figured out when we watched Hiroshima and Nagasaki that this could be a fucking mess globally, and somehow or another we managed to stumble to 2014 and kill a lot of fucking people but not with nuclear weapons that's right you know there is a single nuclear weapon i think it's the titan 2 which we have loads of either hundreds or thousands which has the explosive power more explosive power much more explosive power than every single bomb dropped in World War II by all parties including Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Whoa.

That's why I'm renaming my deck Titan II. Rename. Notice I said rename. I got all these other names for my deck. It's currently called Titan I. Yeah.

You're going to upgrade it. I was calling it what is it? Enola Gay? The plane? i think that it's nice to see that we haven't done that it's nice to see that we haven't blown each other up since 1945 or whatever it was what was it 45 when we dropped the bombs it's nice to see that we have not done that since then but it's such a small amount of time in perspective that's why we have to get rid

of them i think i think we've we've stumbled onto something that is far more advanced technologically than our emotional capability has to handle it's like it's like you've been given you're given a monkey the you know the keys to a car you just gotta you just gotta take the keys back well it's also the people that have this are not the people that built it and created it and engineered it and understand it and so the discipline involved in doing all those things and the accomplishment of creating it the people that did create it were absolutely horrified at it being used the oppenheimer quote if you've ever seen it but it's fucking terrifying we can end on this we like oppenheimer quoting the bhagavat gita yes have you seen that i haven't seen it i've read the quote it's fucking

amazing because you know you see the pain in this guy's face like the owls is the face of death or whatever that is that that's um i am becoming death destroyer of worlds yeah he he well we'll play it and we'll end on this please tell people how they get a hold of your your show and how they get a hold of you yeah so huffpost live you can just go to www.huffpost live we air seven or eight hours of original content every single day you you probably see our stuff you know posted in terms of clips all over the huffington post um or you can also go to huffingtonpost.com slash live and so that's my my main gig

and then this but subscribe to this live show and you'll get lots of cool swag and stuff because I'm going to podcast it and that is info at we the people pod we got another hour

dot com my fucking clock is set to time oh we're good let's play the Bhagavad Gita thing too alright cool I was like

how did that go by so quick? How did two and a half hours go by so quick? It was one and a half hours. Okay. I'm fucking stupid. I can't say Colbert, and I don't know about time change. I have this little clock here. And daylight saving.

It's an old school clock. It's daylight saving. So let's play this Bhagavad Gita thing, because it is good. I'm glad we do this, because I love talking to you, man. Great. Five, four, three, 2, 1. In the dead silence of the morning at 529.45 Mountain War time, the Jornada del Muerto was bathed in an

intense flash of a light that man had only seen from the stars just cut to fucking Oppenheimer man lonely and all this drama bullshit there it is okay here it goes the world would not be the same. Look at his face, man. Few people laughed. Few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty.

To impress him, takes on his multi-armed form, and says, Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds. I suppose we all thought that, one way or another. Oh my god. Chills up my fucking spine. When you see his face, and you realize that this is a scientist, fucking spine when you see his face and you realize that this is a scientist that essentially was given the task of creating this incredibly destructive device and if he didn't if they didn't then the enemy would have and they saw what was going on with nazi germany yeah the third reich was taking over europe and killing everybody and what was going on in the holocaust

and they just realized that we're in this unwinnable situation. Someone had to do something, and they created a nuclear bomb. It's completely understandable, the scientists. Like, I don't blame the scientists for doing it. And they were, as you can see, morally conflicted about it. Richard Feynman, one of the greatest physicists of the 20th century, worked on it and then campaigned for the rest of his life for denuclearization. He died of cancer because he kept going to these nuclear testing zones and um and protesting that's how feynman died oh no hang

on that was carl sagan um yes sagan died from carl sagan died from cancer because of his anti-nuclear protests but feynman was also very conflicted about his role in in all of that it's tricky i mean you had to do it at the time but in in hindsight, just imagine, I mean, think of a world where there is no nukes and it's just like the idea of a single bomb wiping out an entire city. You used to have to fly sorties like over Dresden 24-7 just raining bombs on something just to, you know, to destroy a city. One bomb killing thousands, hundreds of thousands of of people potentially nowadays millions of people from one bomb like that one moment one instant and we got up to you know when we're in the height of the cold war we were producing hundreds of these i think it was hundreds a day at the peak what was it no it was no we were producing more than one an hour it was like what yeah we were

producing like we were producing we ended up with over 10 oh no i don't even remember it was like what yeah we were produced like we were produced we ended up with over 10 oh no i don't even remember it's like in the tens of thousands of nukes that we had stockpiled we've now brought that considerably down but we still have thousands what do we need thousands of nukes for well we need one everyone many times over we could kill everyone on earth many times over totally we could kill not only everyone but like everything we could blanket the the planet well when you look back at history and the horrible things that human beings have done to each other without bombs i mean if you look at the amount of like the mongols regularly killed i mean the estimations between 20 and 50 million people during genghis khan's life and they did that with

horses horseback and arrows and catapults and shit and yeah they killed cities with a million people during Genghis Khan's life and they did that with horses horseback and arrows and catapults and shit and yeah they killed cities with a million people they wiped the entire city out they did that with no weapons other than you know standard shit

yeah it was a lot more work a lot more work but it's the idea behind it that's so terrifying that people can be so fucking brutal and the idea that you give these

same animals this ability to do the same thing with a press of a button yeah it's the ease of it that is so kind of bone chilling about nukes it's similar to you know people who who are big guns guns rights defenders will always say look you know the hutus and the tutsis hacked each other to death with machetes you know they didn't need guns no that's but it's just, you have to really care about it more to kill someone with a machete than by pulling a trigger. It's just a lot easier,

and that's true of nukes. You have really, you are able to achieve spontaneously with almost no effort, something that would otherwise take a tremendous amount of effort and forethought. What scares me the most about the gun debate is not the concept of whether or not

people should have background checks, whether or not people should have background checks whether or not people should have access to automatic weapons it's the ignoring of the psychotropic drugs that people are on it's the ignoring of you mean legal ones legal ones the ignoring of all the different instances of people either being on antidepressants, withdrawing from antidepressants, getting off their medication and having unbelievably erratic behavior. If you ever looked at the statistics for mass shootings and how many of those people were on psychotropic drugs or coming off of them or withdrawing from them, it's almost all of them. Right. But there's an ambiguous causation chain there, right? Correlation or causation.

That's right. Is it the drugs, or is it because they're crazy, and that's why they're taking the drugs? It's a very good question. And that's where I deviate from a lot of guns rights advocates that don't think that we should have some sort of background checks, or don't think we should have stability checks, or at the very least, how come you don't have to have a license?

How come you have to take a test to drive a fucking car? Someone stands over you and looks at you and everybody knows it's that weird feeling of being in the nervousness of being in the car

with a driving instructor that's asking you, a tester that's asking you, you know, questions and seeing if you stop perfectly at a stop that's asking you uh you know questions and seeing if you stop perfectly at a stop sign and whether or not you look both ways before you make a turn but you could just go buy a gun and no one has to look at you no one has to ask you if you know how to fucking load that thing i don't honestly don't understand the gun debate in this in this country

i don't i don't it does not even compute for me because uh i don't understand why the gun lobby is against all of that sort of stuff like i don't have i'm not i don't have a huge issue with people having firearms i do basically think that that in dense urban areas you should not be packing a gun unless you're like you need one because you're a celebrity or something um but i don't understand why the NRA thinks that background checks and licensing and stuff is a – are they paranoid and they think that that's a slippery slope and that that's going to lead to guns being taken away in the future

or is it actually those simple precautions that they on principle object to? I can't figure it out because it doesn't make any sense to me. If you could massively reduce the number of people who are being slaughtered in this country constantly every day yeah why wouldn't you i think it's a slope thing i really do i think it's a slippery slope argument i think that uh it's like we were talking about with uh social justice warriors you know that there there's the extreme reaction towards um uh doing something I believe is morally correct and fighting for objectified people or fighting for marginalized people, that this is in reaction to the racism and sexual exploitation and all the different things that have occurred on the other side of the spectrum.

And this is what, in a sort of analogous way, they're trying to do with gun control. What they're trying to do is fight off any form of possible gun control. Fight off any background checks, fight off any waiting periods, holding periods, fight off magazine size restrictions. And yet, like I was saying about

the suey parks of the world, the cancel coal bears of the world, losing potential allies in people like me, that just completely alienates me from the gun rights movement, right? Because if the conversation was around, should it be legal or illegal for a person who is sane, who is provably sane,

and who undergoes a test to make sure that they know how to safely use a firearm and is responsible and can keep it locked up at home, should they know how to safely use a firearm and is responsible and can keep it locked up at home, should they be able to have a basic firearm, then you're not going to get a lot of dispute from almost anyone apart from the most extreme people on the anti-gun side. And there are very few people like that. So you alienate, you lose an ally, you lose a potential ally in someone like me by being so rabidly against what I regard as being simple precautions for the responsible use of something that could kill people.

I agree with you, but I think that this is what we're dealing with. We're dealing with, there are many groups that, I mean, there was a famous Obama quote where he was talking about how people are just resistant. They don't, you know, whatever it is, they don't want us to come and take their guns. And these people were furious that Obama would think that he has the right to come and take their guns. Like, who are you as a person to tell another person they cannot have this gun? And there's a lot of people that fucking love guns in this country. I have friends that are gun nuts.

My friend Justin is a fucking gun nut. Every day that dude's at the range shooting targets at like a 900-yard distance and fucking pinging metal. It's like bang, dink, because he's shooting that fucking far away. You can actually hear it after the gunshot goes off. Amazing. Dink, boom. That's fine. Good for him. He's got a hobby.

Okay. No one's taking his guns. It's there in the Constitution. Yeah, but they're worried about amendments to the Constitution. They're worried about things changing. Well, think about the privacy amendments. I mean, think about what's happening right now with the NSA. This is unconstitutional, what's happening.

But they're doing it anyway. What they're doing as far as spying on everyone's cell phone, being able to record everyone's messages, data center that they're developing in Utah. But that's because the Supreme Court is stacked with the very types of people who gun nuts vote for. That's true, but they're worried that the tide could shift with a president like Obama. Why? I mean, how quickly? Yes, if you had a rabidly left-wing, if you had a Supreme Court that was eventually as rabidly left-wing as the current Supreme Court is right-wing, then it's conceivable, of course, that you could just rip up a portion of the Constitution

and ignore it and reinterpret it some way. So that's what they're worried about. I mean, if you see this example... That's so far-fetched. It's so far down the road. I would think it's so far-fetched that they'll be able to record... When Alex Jones, who's a friend of mine who's arguably very crazy, but he used to tell me, Joe Rogan, they're going to take every single phone call

that everyone makes across the country, they're going to record it in a database, and they're going to take every single phone call that everyone makes across the country. They're going to record it in a database. And you're going to have everything you've ever said. If you ever get in trouble, they pull you over for some reason. Some guy wants to fuck your wife, wants to put you in jail. They're going to go to your fucking database and pull something out, take it out of context, and lock you up in a cage. And I would go, this guy's fucking out of his mind. But then you look at what's going on today when this Edward Snowden revelations came out that literally they can go to your email. The employees, it's not just metadata, all this horse shit that Obama said.

It's not true. The employees can go to your email and record and take anything they would like. That is unbelievable. It's an absolute outrage. and take anything they would like. That is unbelievable. It's an absolute outrage, and this is the issue on which I'm most furious at Obama,

along with hounding whistleblowers and leakers and prosecuting these people. But, I mean, on terms of Alex Jones being right on that, a stopped clock is right twice a day as well, just because someone gets one thing right. Typical left-wing bullshit coming from Josh Sepps! Doesn't mean that you can give credence to the rest of what they're talking about.

That's a good Alex Jones. Thank you very much. He's my friend. You know, I think we have to it's useful to sort of allocate our concern to the fields that most deserve it. And at the moment moment the big concern

for people who'd like freedom is guns no i don't i just don't think that's a big concern that's not that's my concern god damn it guns this is not gonna happen i take umbrage an issue with something you said earlier about someone living in a city not being able to have a gun why why not i mean isn't that like one of the most if you live in a densely populated area the the possibility of you being robbed is much higher you know if you live in certain areas like detroit or chicago i don't think guns should be a way of resolving disputes between individuals even that's true what about this defending yourself you don't think it should be able to you should someone breaks in your house and they have a gun and they're looking to kill your family you don't think you should be able to... Someone breaks into your house, and they have a gun, and they're looking to kill your family.

You don't think you should be able to defend yourself? You should be able to defend yourself. The flip side of that is that if everyone is armed, you end up with far more violent cities than if everyone isn't armed. Untrue, sir! Look at the statistics! No, I do. I have the statistics. A well-armed society is a polite society. I have the statistics. Well, in defense against this concept, Chicago has one of the strictest gun control laws in the country. Yeah, it's the example everyone always brings up.

Well, it's a good example. That's why. Because it also has an extremely high level of gun violence. Because you're not going to ever get the criminals to stop using guns because they're illegal because they're doing illegal shit anyway. One of the things where I agree with you on that is that there are so many guns in the States already. We're so far, the horse has bolted so far that closing the gate now is kind of pointless.

There are more guns than there are people, aren't there? Yes. In my house there are. I do think that that's the explanation for why places like Chicago are so violent because, I mean, what's the point in putting in a gun, a strict gun law now? Everyone's already got guns. Well, actually, in defense of the reality of the Chicago situation is it has to do with organized crime. Chicago, it has to do with the war on drugs, and it has to do with gangs being in control of drug dealing.

What happened in Chicago, they sort of destabilized the environment by locking up key gang members i have a friend of chicago cop and he explained the whole situation to me what an unbelievable clusterfuck it became when they locked up certain they they went on these raids locked up certain gang members and and drug leaders uh drug gang leaders and when they did that a power struggle ensued and then it's sort of like what's going on in mexico it's like once you once you have uh this this power struggle you have this vacuum people try to fill the position and there's just unbelievable violence i mean he was describing to me things that they find on a daily basis that the amount of murder

that they uh that they encounter in Chicago. And it's not just disheartening, but I was like, why do you stay? Why do you stay? He's like, hey, this is my job. This is what I do. I'm not happy about it, but I hope we can get a handle on it eventually. But he was outlining all the different issues with it. He's like, this has nothing to do with gun control.

He goes, if you change the laws, you would have the exact same results. This has to do with profit, and it has to do with drugs, and it has to do with the war on drugs. It has to do with the fact that these people can make insane amounts of money, and then they have these insane resources. Exactly what we're seeing in Mexico. Look at Mexico. I mean, Mexico is one of the great tragedies of the world at the moment. Unbelievable. And also, it also provides a good counter.

If you want to be more original next time, then use Mexico as the gun argument, because they actually have really strict gun laws too. Look at how awash with gun violence they are. So I take that point, I take that critique. I think in other societies, I was a big fan of the fact that Australia, after it had its last mass massacre,

mass shooting in the late 90s, a conservative prime minister took on the gun lobby and basically outlawed guns. Did a gun buyback where the government paid to collect guns. And there's a huge amount of misinformation on the web about the consequences of that by gun rights folks. But Australia only has 100 people on the whole continent. That's kind of my point. That shit is not going to work here.

That's kind of my point. And you didn't have this pre-existing gun culture, really. John Wayne movies. That's right. You didn't have this pre-existing gun culture, really. John Wayne movies. That's right. A lot of Americans who haven't been to Australia kind of assume that Australia is real rugged, outdoorsy, kind of wild, outback, Steve Irwin, crocodile hunter, crocodile dundee. In reality, we're a bunch of pussies.

We all live on the coasts in several big cities. Like three cities have almost half of the entire population of the country. And we all sit around going sailing and drinking Chardonnay and sipping lattes. So we didn't really need guns. I fucking love Sydney. It's my hometown. I've only been there. This is the only place I've ever been in Australia.

But I'd fucking move there in a heartbeat. If the shit hit the fan, if somebody decided to blow up America, or if Yellowstone exploded and I needed a place to live, I'd fucking move to Sydney in a goddamn heartbeat. Hard to think of another city that has, just in terms of the sheer day-to-day standard of living, as nice, as pleasant a place to be. Fantastic. The sunshine, the harbor, the beaches, the food, the friendly people. Everything.

The Asian communities, the Middle Eastern communities. The problem is you guys drive on the wrong side of the road. If you could just switch over, I'll move. Sure. We'll do it for you. Americans are like, listen, we invented the fucking car. Why are you guys driving on the wrong side of the road. If you could just switch over, I'll move. Sure. We'll do it for you. Americans are like, listen, we invented the fucking car.

Why are you guys driving on the wrong side of the goddamn road? You know why that is? Yes. Tell me. Remind me. Swords.

It's an ancient, ancient thing from England in that when you would pass on, the horses would pass on the road. If you were fighting in combat,

you would fight with your right hand. So most people are right-handed. That's the hand you would carry your sword. So you would want to be on the left side. So that way, you would fight with your right hand. So most people are right-handed. That's the hand you would carry your sword. So you would want to be on the left side. So that way, if someone was on your right side, you could hack at them. If you are on the right side and someone's over on your left side and you have a sword,

it's fucking very difficult to reach across the horse or you'd have to hack at them with your left. Didn't that have to do with there being two horses put to pulling coaches? I mean, I think you're right. But that doesn't explain why it was different here in the States. Why were people already using horse and carts on the right-hand side here? They also used a right-handed. Because by the time we got to America,

by the time European travelers came to America, we were already like, fuck England, fuck Europe, we're going to do shit our way over here, let's just go on the other side of the road, and then we invented cars. And so we also have guns. We're like to do shit our way over here. Let's just go on the other side of the road. And then we invented cars. And so we also have guns. We're like, it doesn't matter. I'd rather be further away from the fucking guy shooting. I'll fucking go on the right side and shoot at him. I read that in addition to that,

there were wider roads here. So you would have two horses side by side or like four horses or something pulling larger carts than they had back in England. And it had something to do with being in the right position to whip the horses. So you didn't have to cross over your body with the whip. Could be. Who knows? I don't know.

I'm talking out of my ass, clearly. Yeah, me too. But when I talked to my friends in England, they were explaining to me that it was actually, it literally went back to the time of sword fighting, that you would be on the left-hand side. I buy that. I just don't buy why Americans would have changed. Because we're better. We're smarter.

We have guns. We have jets. We go to the moon. This is a lot better here. It's a lot better. This is why people don't like you, Joe. Me or America? Both.

Both, yeah. I don't mean it, folks. Yeah. Relax, everybody, please. There was a... You shouldn't mean it! It is interesting, though, isn't it? We are better!

How different cultures kind of conceive of their, or different nationalities conceive of themselves. Well, Koreans are very proud, you know. I mean, and the North Koreans, particularly nationalistic. So much so that, you know... Well, it's a crazy basket case of a dictatorship and it's the best example of the bullshit that america tries to shove down everyone's throat it's about protecting people from bad people like jesus christ if we were really worried about protecting people is that really why we're in afghanistan because we want

to protect those folks why the fuck have we not not invaded North Korea? As well as the logistics about China and nuclear weapons and the proximity to South Korea who are our allies and all this fucking... But there's not even a discussion about mitigating the situation. There's zero discussion. You know why? No natural resources. It's so fucking poor they have to keep the lights off at night.

They're not even strategically important in any way. Like, they're basically a vassal of China, and they don't matter to us. I just got back from Canada. I was gone for a week. I was offline, essentially, for a week, pretty much. Did fucking Dennis Rodman get Kenneth Bay released? He said he did. He wrote a letter right after he got back from his one trip there and he's claiming that

i have not seen that reported that was the uh that's so he's reporting well he does have a relationship with kim jong-un right what's that all about the dude likes basketball it's fucking great thing no i understand why he wants to be you know hobnobbing with dennis what's in it for dennis dennis is broke as fuck i mean you think about what is not in it for Dennis. What does Dennis have going on, man? It's not about, I'm not baffled by, like, why he does it. I'm baffled that he's so bought into the, he's seemingly so bought into the propaganda of that regime. He keeps, he has this stupid moral equivalency.

This is something that also frustrates me. When people are like, oh, because the U.S. does bad stuff, that basically means that we're not in a position to criticize anybody else. Does he say that? Yeah, he's like, hey. Dennis Robinson says he helped secure Kenneth Bae's release. Well, it's nice that Kenneth Bae got released. He's like, I've heard him say, look, Kim Jong-un, you know, we hear all this propaganda about what a bad guy he is, but hey, you know, Clinton screwed Lewinsky. What?

No, he didn't mean that. Bad stuff happens here as well. That's a dumb as fuck comparison. Not exactly a parallel, dude. I think that what he's probably doing is trying in some way to, if he goes over there on a regular basis, he has to play politics. He has to. He has to say something positive about it.

I mean, he has to. Sure. He says negative things, he's going to get back to that guy. I just don't think, he doesn't strike me as a very smart guy. He's definitely not that. I mean, did you ever see him on Celebrity Rehab with Dr. Drew? No. He was terrible.

It was awful. I mean, he's not a bright guy. And it's, you know, he's also in a weird situation where he doesn't have a whole lot of job options. I was at the K1. The K1 is one of the biggest kickboxing organizations in the world and they had a big mixed martial arts event in los angeles many many years ago it was the um not many many but it was the uh debut of brock lesnar in mixed martial arts and dennis rodman for whatever reason got hired by k1 to be there and like pump it up and

like it was very strange it was very japanese because japanese they're they're they have a they're big fans of pageantry at these events and the events are often filled with like huge like gigantic crowds and big like big walkthroughs and big productions and explosions and fire and like so dennis rodman's like standing at the top of this things you know and he gave the speech and it was just so dumb and awkward. And he was saying, fuck the UFC. K1 is here and all this different crazy shit. But my point is, like, he doesn't have a lot of money.

Like he has to do things like this. He doesn't have a lot of options. So then just don't talk about it or something. It just frustrates me when stupid people talk about shit that I don't understand. And it's usually it's so fat it's so easy and fashionable also to be like anti-american and to be anti yes america's foreign policy is a basket case america's done a lot of shitty stuff but you know you get this also with with conversations around islam and you know i know you've spoken to sam harris and stuff about this about the

the all is all things are not equal i just interviewed interviewed an Iraqi human rights campaigner who has come to the U.S. as a refugee. He's in his early 20s. He grew up under Saddam Hussein. He grew up during the American occupation. isn't a problem in Islam and stop saying that the US is to blame for everything that's going on in the region. We have our own problems and when left-wing people think that they're doing the right thing by being all fashionably kind of anti-American, you're not siding with the people who actually need help over there. You're not siding with the secularists over there and the people who care about human rights. There's also this weird thing, and this goes back to the social justice warrior thing,

rights there's also this weird thing and this goes back to the social justice warrior thing where people are allowed to criticize christianity openly but if you criticize islam you become islamophobic such a bullshit it's such an overused term it is which is not to say that there aren't islamophobes like the crazy preacher who wanted to burn the quran well there's there's there's people are phobic in many, many ways. You know, there's Christian-ophobes, you know, if you want to look at it that way. I've had Christians on my podcast that I deeply enjoy talking, Rupert Sheldrake, who's a scientist, who's also a Christian. But his version of Christianity is more of a philosophy, and it's all, like, psychedelically based. I mean, he's very very interesting guy and openly

christian and he derives or he he gets a lot of comfort from that and you know he does it in a very very intelligent and well thought out way and it's it's an interesting point to discuss with a guy like that but this islamophobic thing like this idea that if you criticize like sam harris has been accused of it on multiple times it's just aslamophobia his islamophobic stance listen all religions are fucking terrible all of them they're terrible they're terrible for ideologies are bad for thinking they're. Because they lock you into a strategy, or they lock you into a pattern, rather. And if you aspire to be divine inside that ideology,

especially an ancient one, it's extremely difficult to think outside the box. Well, they are the oldest and most original incarnation of what I was talking about at the beginning of the show, which is thinking in terms of labels and preset, you know things that you can just pull out of a box and take with you rather than actually communicating or thinking originally or being authentic right i mean you know the the the tribes that we belong to now be they the pro-gay tribe or the sui or the cancel colbert tribe or any of those things are really just new, small, cultural versions of the old, biggest tribes, which are religion.

Religion is just the easy, preset way for people to inherit assumptions about the meaning of life and the history of the world without having to do any intellectual lifting of their own. And I also think it's, when you look at religions, I'm absolutely fascinated by religions and I find them amazing. When you look at religions, I'm absolutely fascinated by religions, and I find them amazing. And one of the things that I find amazing about them is just from a historical perspective of thinking about people that lived in a time where there were no answers. I mean, it is really, truly amazing. They started coming up with mouth noises to indicate, like, where to go and what to do and what foods to eat and what's no and what's yes. And then slowly but surely, after fucking eons of staring at the stars and seeing people die and experiencing loss, they tried to find meaning to it all. And they slowly but surely created these fables and these parables and these things that eventually were written down

and translated from language to language. I find it absolutely fascinating when you look at it from a historical perspective of this being, this organism trying to understand its place in the cosmos. And that's what I think is beautiful about religion. I think from a historical perspective, it's beautiful. The problematic aspects of it, when you try to apply it in 2014 with all the goddamn information that we know, and I didn't mean to say goddamn, but I said it because it's appropriate, accidentally.

The information that we have now that refutes virtually everything that's in these... Right. I mean, look, what you say is very nice and poetic about the historical origins of religion, but as soon as the Enlightenment came along, as soon as the scientific method was developed, as soon, certainly, by the time darwin provided an explanation with how naturalistic processes could give rise to intelligent life you don't need those original myths anymore i mean we should long ago have been able to dispense with them and the fact that we're we're unable to to talk openly and frankly about how concerned we ought to be about people who take their religions literally yes is a problem it's a huge problem I also I

also have a problem with Sam Harris also on the point that you know moderate you say you you you enjoy talking about Christianity with this Christian who you had on I do have a problem with people who give cover essentially to religious extremists by presenting religion as if it can be a reasonable thing. Because to the extent that moderate Christians or moderate Muslims are moderate is the extent to which they don't really follow the letter of their faith, right? I mean, you have to reinterpret and kind of squint and peer at your holy book through

a particular prism and then do a lot of juggling and reinterpreting in order to come out with a conclusion that is kind of morally tenable in 2014 to secular people. Yeah, and that is an extremely important point, right? And that's a big issue when it comes to the leaving of the Islamic tradition. If you leave, you're supposed to be killed. Yeah, it's apostasy. Yeah, apostasy in Islam is punishable by death. Homosexuality, punishable by death.

I watched a fucking horrible video last week, absolutely horrible, of a woman who was accused of adultery, and she was stoned to death. And this was, I mean, this was all carried out by these ISIS guys, apparently, supposedly. You know, whether or not that's true, I don't know. I just watched this video, and it's being translated. But this woman, she tried to apologize to her father. Her father wouldn't even touch her hand. He wouldn't shake her hand. He says, you're not my daughter anymore. And then he threw the first rock. It was fucking horrible. And that is all done under the guise of religion, all of it. And you constantly hear apologists like Reza Aslan is an obvious example

saying, look, this is a gross or Ben Affleck on Bill an obvious example saying look this is a gross or ben affleck on bill maher's show this is a gross character he's gonna fuck up batman i know he's gonna fuck up batman son of a bitch we need a jihad they get you i just i don't mean that ben come on you're a good guy uh yeah the refrain is always this is a generalization most muslims are good people and that is absolutely true yes the vast vast vast generalization, most Muslims are good people, and that is absolutely true. Yes. The vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims are good people, and just like you and me. But the kind of, the software that they're running on is problematic.

And this Iraqi human rights activist who I was talking to was saying, look, one thing that Reza Aslan will always say is like, what about Indonesia, for example? Indonesia is the most populous Muslim country in the world. Apologists for Islam are constantly pointing at it and saying it's fairly progressive. It's had a female leader. You know, it's democratic. It's not, this is not Saudi Arabia. You know, to think that all of Islam is about not letting women drive is a misrepresentation of the way that most Muslims live.

women drive is a misrepresentation of the way that most Muslims live. But you would hardly say that a country like Indonesia or even Jordan or any one of the other sort of good Muslim countries is particularly progressive by the standards that we should expect as liberals, as smaller, I don't mean in the political sense within the United States, but as people who believe in freedom. Yes. That, you know, this Iraqi guy was saying, this is the bigotry of low expectations, that if someone in the United States were to say the things about women and gays that are routinely said, even in Indonesia and the most moderate Muslim countries, liberals would be absolutely

outraged. Why are we holding them to such a different standard? It's a very good point. And I think that one of the resistance, one of the big points of resistance when people in these countries get upset at people criticizing religion is you're essentially criticizing their way of life and their culture. Yeah. And it's tied in together. And that this is almost inexorable from their daily existence. Islam, whether or not they believe in death or adultery or homosexuality or any of the

things that we find completely offensive, what you're saying by criticizing their religion is you're criticizing their very way of life. That's right. And that's what you're dealing with when you're dealing with these fundamentalist societies. And not even fundamentalist societies. And not even fundamental societies. I mean, you know, I can understand that if all of your being and your culture and your family and your community are woven up in a certain set of traditions, even if that's just, you know, Catholicism because you grew up in a suburb of Boston and, you know, that's

the way that you do things. And then someone confronts you and says that that is just a tissue of fabrications and lies that have been handed down for generations and it's wholly worthless. That's going to be an affront to you. I mean, it's not because it's not an, we're not intellectual beings. We can't like unpack and disentangle the sort of factual claims of our faith from the lived experience of being a human being who lives in a community and goes to church and has a nice pastor and, like, all of that

sort of stuff. We have to find a way to do that, though. Like, we have to find a way to disentangle our identity from the intellectual claims of religion. Yeah, a lot of people do it very slowly. They do it over the course of their lives. I have some friends that, when I met them probably a decade ago they're pretty hardcore mormons they're really nice folks and they're friends of my wife first and then we would go to dinner with them and then we'd have

these bizarre fucking conversations like you don't believe in a higher power i go it's not that i don't believe i just don't see any evidence like you show me some evidence of a higher power and then i'll say well that makes a lot of sense. But she's like, well, I wouldn't be able to live with, I wouldn't be able to get up every day if I didn't think that something was going to happen after I die. I go, don't you enjoy going out to dinner? We're out at dinner. We're having a nice dinner at a nice restaurant. We're having fun, having a glass of wine. Are you not enjoying this?

Like, why does this have to lead to some magic fairyland where people have wings? Why does that have to, why can't you just enjoy this life? Well, I don't know what happens when I die. I mean, if I didn't know what happens when I die, I wouldn't be able to go on. I'm like, well, that's pretty ridiculous. That's pretty ridiculous. But for a lot of people, it becomes scaffolding for your thoughts, scaffolding for your emotions. Like you have this structure that

allows you to get by allows you to get through every day and if someone pulls that structure and you're forced to sort of create a structure on your own it's extremely problematic and these people that i'm friends with they abandon their church and they abandon their church um and now they're they're in this very weird limbo place where it's fairly interesting because they're very insightful. And the woman, we had this weird conversation when she was talking about how she feels like she's very open to being scammed because she's so trusting, because she grew up in this fundamentalist Mormon background, and that she's just so open to suggestion because

she was buying into horseshit her whole life. And she just didn't question and this becomes like sort of a pattern of thinking and it's it's hard for people to just all of a sudden re-establish their their ideology re-establish their position and religion is an excellent scaffolding for like sort of establishing your your place in the world yeah and it's it's very comforting to have a sense of authority over you as well, right? I mean, there's something like having a loving, having the creator of the universe personally take an interest in your well-being

must be an incredible sort of ego boost, an incredible security blanket. I mean, there's a reason why religion strokes us in certain ways that 98% of the world is religious. blanket i mean there's a reason why religion strokes us in certain ways that 98 of the world is religious you know yeah it provides it must provide some kind of sanctuary that's hard to to to shake off i think it's an enlightenment bridge i think it's a it's almost like a construct that we've created to sort of get our way out of the monkey body to get our way through to some next stage and as we're rejecting it now pretty much for the first time in human history it's culturally acceptable to reject it and it's almost more prevalent amongst youth than it is to accept

it if you talk to people in the you know the early 1900s about rejecting god and atheism but you would get a small percentage of highly educated people that would accept that idea whereas if you go to universities today and you promote atheism you're going to get a massive following yeah there's a massive amount of people that are with you on this i'm not even following i shouldn't say following a massive amount of people in agreement with you on these concepts so that yeah we are dealing with a new era a new era of understanding and for a lot of people that's absolutely terrifying yeah it's less terrifying to me than the possibility of people with religious delusions getting access to weapons of mass destruction, which is why I keep fighting the atheist fight. I think this has the potential to be absolutely calamitous and whatever we can do to minimize religious thinking and basically just hold people to account for what they claim to believe i mean

if if you were interviewing someone for a job and you were considering hiring them and they started talking about how elvis is still alive and he communicates with them you know through by leaving messages in their toast or something right i mean you would just immediately disqualify that person from you would think this is a crazy person it would be nice to me if you similarly judged people who claim that the creator of the universe speaks to them on a daily basis and listens to what they say and listens to their prayers and and intervenes in worldly affairs to cause make natural disasters like destroy their neighbor's house but not their house i mean why like there's so many you know monumental arrogance like i saw on the tv there was like a you know a wildfire that went through an australian suburb

and the lady's standing there in front of her house that she's like oh you know god just saved my house like what god hated your neighbor so much he wanted to burn down their house that's a pretty fucked up thing for god to do like just to judge people on these beliefs the same way we would judge them if you if they weren't religious beliefs yeah if they were equally silly but but not protected by the fact that they they they fold into a formal religion well their legacy thought patterns their thought patterns that existed before the internet and i think that the internet is the new religion in the sense that it's not a religion but it's in a it's a way to establish cultures and communities it's a way to exchange information it's a way to

to live and think that never existed before when you were alone and when you're by yourself when you're in these small tribes and all you had with this stupid old book of nonsense stories about you know the original two people that existed and fucking earth being created in seven days by an old man who lives in the clouds That was all you had it's all you had and we have so much more now and the this the landscape that you're surveying is so much larger the landscape of information is just Not just it's almost Inconceivably larger. Yeah, and inconceivably larger than when I was a boy

I mean I was I went to catholic school for only one year and i was very fortunate that i didn't have very religious parents and they just sent me to catholic school because it was a good option i mean everyone was sort of religion religious but only casually but it was so bad that i abandoned all my ideas of religion and i can really clearly remember this because it was an important part of my life. Because my parents had broken up when I was five years old, and I was really insecure and scared.

And I just, my dad wasn't around anymore. I was with my mom. And I was, for whatever reason, I was seeking some sort of comfort in religion. Well, God says you should do this. And God says, I don't even know who the fuck I heard it from. But I went to one year of Catholic school and these people were so horrible that I abandoned everything I had given it all up by the

time I was seven they're the cancel Colbert of religion they could have had you they could have had you if they just been a little sweeter I so I understand it even though I was only five years old I can remember it I mean I remember in vague sort of snapshots and some weird, you know, weird images in my mind and weird concepts that I've sort of like held on to. I've never experienced it. I've never,

I've never, it's a, it's a, it's a, an aspect of human, humankind and human civilization and human psychology that is totally opaque and ineffable to me. I don't, I don't quite understand how I'm almost one of the very, very few people in the world

who doesn't have that gene. You're one of the new breed. I guess. Upload me to a computer. Well, you're one of the very few people in the world, but I think the children that are growing up today, kids that are born in 2014, there's going to be less and less of that. That's true. And also, I should carve out here that there are certain civilized societies

and, again, I use the word civilized advisedly not to shit on developing countries, but there are educated, rich countries where the populations have basically gotten rid of religion altogether, really. What cultures are they? Denmark. I mean, Australia and New Zealand are pretty secular.

Like, people will nominally tick Catholic on a box, but when you actually start to ask them whether or not they believe any of the tenets, you've got 60 or 70% of the population who never go to church and don't think of themselves as being religious. Well, look at Canada. Yeah, same with Canada. Canada is less religious than America. America is less religious than Mexico.

Right. America is the most religious rich country. And that's all because of the fucking Reagan administration, those cocksuckers. Why? Because they courted it. They courted the radical Christian religious people from the 1980s were courted by the Reagan administration because they recognized them as being a source of, if you could get those people on your side, you had a guaranteed base. I mean, that's where they get their political clout from, but it goes back a long way in American history, the strain of puritanical evangelical Protestantism. In Australia, we have a saying that whenever there's a moral outrage in America and America gets its tits in a tangle about Janet Jackson's boob or something, we say, thank God we were founded by criminals and not by puritans.

But it's true, though. I mean, Australia has legalized prostitution. Australia has a lot of things that America doesn't have in that sense. And I think the foundation, the original echoes of ignorance that started this whole thing off, they still reverberate in 2014. Yeah. And these really ridiculous ideas about sex in this country. Oh, God. Don't even get me started.

It's crazy. I'm trying to get you started. That's why we're here. Well, the dysfunction that religion puts into people's sex lives, I think, is just, well, for a start, it's criminal because it leads to so much suffering, especially in the gay community. I mean, you know, the level of teenage suicide among queer kids in religious areas is shocking. It's a national disgrace that we should be doing a lot more about, and we should be much more vocal about not tolerating, you know, the preaching of hate.

Yeah, the preaching of hate and also this idea that it's a choice. That's maddening to me. What always makes me, like, I was reading an opinion by Scalia about this, and it almost sounded like these people are bisexual. Because if he believes it's a choice, he's implying that he could choose to blow a guy. Right. Well, he could choose to blow a guy. Right. Well, he could choose to blow a guy. Yeah.

Why not? He could. I mean, if he's just like, fuck, man. I mean, I don't understand it. I mean, Mick Jagger and David Bowie apparently slept together, if you want to believe. Yeah, I'm sure. Fucking jilted ex-wife. A lot of crazy stuff was going on.

It was the 70s, hey? Yeah, they got nutty. But I think it is a choice. But here's my point. So what? If you're a straight person and you choose to do gay shit well who cares right why does anybody care and if you but why would anyone say that it must be a choice how the fuck could you possibly know what someone wants to or doesn't want to do what they feel

inside them and even if it were a choice let's assume for the sake of of argument that everyone is like perfectly bisexual it's an absurd argument but this is kind of what they're saying, what they're implying, if they're saying that it's totally a choice, then you don't give up your civil rights just because the community you belong to is a choice. Religion is a choice, but it's still protected. You still have the right to worship in whatever faith you want. The fact that I can choose to be a Christian or choose to be a Muslim doesn't deprive me of my right to the free exercise of religion. Similarly, my choice to be a Christian or choose to be a Muslim doesn't deprive me of my right to the free exercise of religion. Similarly, my choice to be married to a man, even if it is completely a choice, the way that I'm hardwired sexually and emotionally, should not deprive me of my civil rights.

Absolutely. And that's one of the most offensive ideas when it comes to this country, where there's an argument against same-sex marriages, and it's still a fucking hot point topic of debate. In 2014, how many states are same-sex marriage legal? 32, I think. That's fucking crazy. That is crazy. Vatican proposed a dramatic shift in attitude towards gays,

same-sex couples. This new pope, I'm not into the pope, man, but this new pope is a fucking interesting cat. Yeah, he's a goody. He sits on a regular chair. He doesn't ride around the popemobile. I mean, they got rid of that evil fucker, and they went 180 degrees the other direction. Yeah, he's causing, I mean, he's ruffling a lot of feathers in the conservative.

You know, there are a lot of people behind the pope who are conservative cardinals who are not happy campers at all. who are not happy campers at all. He represents a much more, frankly, Latin American strain of religion, which is a much less crazy, much more loving kind of communal interpretation of Catholicism. So there's 18 different states? You said 32? I think I'm right. Can we Google it?

Yeah. I think that... That's fucking incredible. That's incredible that there's still a bunch of people that have laws. It might actually be the other way around. It might be that 32, you can't get married. I don't know. We'll find out soon enough. But the fact that there's that many states where it's 32 states have legal same-sex marriage,

that's fucking crazy. I mean, frankly, it's like you were saying about the moral evolution of racism, though. Like from when you were growing up, you know, born in 1967, that half century there has just been a massive, massive period of advance. Yes. And it is true. I mean, you've got to give people time. I am impressed that 32 states now you can get married, same as a couple can get married in. Because just 10 years ago, let alone 20 years ago, it was kind of inconceivable.

This is why I'm not impressed. Because there's no logical reason other than religion. But there never is. There's not a logical reason for racism. There's not a logical reason for homophobia. There's not a logical reason for Cancel Colbert. Yeah, but in a completely free society, there should be no reason to restrict people because you don't like it. There should be no reason why anyone should be able to say, you can't get married to a man because I don't like it. There should be no reason why anyone should be able to say you can't get married to a man because I don't like it. I hope that that sentiment is

becoming, and I think it is becoming more and more prevalent across the board. 100%. I think it is. The libertarian wing of the Republican Party and the progressive wing of the Democratic Party are kind of horseshoeing together. They're kind of opposite extremes, but they're actually quite close on this stuff. Also on NSA stuff and civil liberties. I really wish we could galvanize a community of like-minded people who are basically broadly socially libertarian and kind of culturally sophisticated people

to enact policies like this. And I think that group, that core, is growing. The trend is definitely moving in that direction. And I think the only thing that would stop this, some sort of cataclysmic disaster that sends us back to this really difficult struggle and removes our access to information. Well, actually, I think what always does it is like an attack.

If we get hit again on the scale of 9-11, or heaven forbid worse, which it probably would be if it were another example of mega terrorism um then you will get people clinging to their religion more and going back and being less tolerant and being much much more okay with their civil liberties being infringed they'll be more antagonistic that's the really corrosive effect of but don't you think things come in waves i mean there are like heightened civilizations that fall apart and then they come back and go and forth and it's like if you look at history we like to think of history as being some straight linear path to

2014 with you know progress from day one to date you know but it's not i mean there's ages of enlightenment and there's decreases and there's cataclysmic disasters, natural disasters, horrific things that happen that throw people back. I mean, there's people that argue that Iraq and especially Baghdad have never recovered from the Mongol invasion of the 1200s. They killed everyone in the city, turned the river red with blood and black with ink, literally slaughtered all the scholars, threw away all the... I mean, one thing that people in this day and age don't realize is that Islam used to be the center of science, of philosophy. I mean, that was the original advanced culture. Yeah, they were onto the Enlightenment a long time before we were.

That's the odd thing about the way that the tables have kind of turned. I mean, look at the Library of Alexandria burned down, and we lost massive resources of human civilization. Yeah, as we say in Australia, it's swings and roundabouts, meaning, you know, comes and goes. Well, I think we're looking at things on an unbelievably large scale, and we're looking at these little blips, and these blips are very important to us because our lives are so short in perspective you know if you if you look at the the concept of a human life being only a hundred years at the very best and look at a hundred years in comparison to

the ten thousand known years of human history it's a fucking blink of an eye and the ten thousand years of human history is a blink is a blip in comparison to the age of the of the earth and the age of the earth is a blip in comparison the the age of the of the earth and the age of the earth is a blip in comparison the age of the universe and i've talked to folks like there's a guy named randall carlson who i've had on the podcast who's an expert in astro uh asteroidal impacts and he believes that the whole reason for this 10 000 year like our idea of human civilization being 10 000 years he thinks it goes back way further than that. And he points to all these meteor impacts, and especially in Asia and in Europe, in 12,000, when they go to these core samples of the Earth, you go back to about 12,000 years ago,

there's all this evidence of what's called nuclear glass. I think it's called tritonite. That means that the Earth was pelted by meteors. He thinks there were human civilizations prior to that? Most certainly. He's absolutely convinced. Is there any fossil evidence for that? There's evidence as far as construction that we're starting to uncover now, like Gobekli Tepe. Gobekli Tepe is this massive stone structure that existed back when they thought that people were just hunter and gatherers. And it's recently unearthed. And to this day,

they've only gotten about 5% of it unearthed, but it's these massive stone columns 19 feet high that are between 12 and000 and 14,000 years old at a time where they didn't think anyone was building those constructors. As a secular, scientifically-minded guy on issues where I don't really know what I'm talking about, I usually just yield to the majority expert opinion. And that's so far outside of what most archaeologists claim. No, not anymore. I'll just go with them. No, it's not anymore. Really?

No, yeah. Go back to Tepe. You need to look at this. Okay is a hundred percent established science with the reason why it's established is gobeckley tepe was somehow or another covered up on purpose so they were most likely conquered by someone else and these structures were covered so when they do these these carbon samples of the soil it's uniform from the top to the bottom, which means that somewhere around 12,000 years ago, these things were covered up. That means it could be far older than that because you're dealing with stone structures.

I mean, it could be 13,000. Who knows how old it could be? But these are huge structures that were created. Jamie, pull it up if you get a chance. Also, it depends on how you define civilization, right? I mean, this is really advanced stuff. Look, I don't mean you get a chance. Also, it depends on how you define civilization, right? I mean, the- This is really advanced stuff. Look, I don't mean to be all PC about this, but the Australian Aborigines, they are 80 to 120,000 years old. They're the oldest surviving civilization.

know big structures but to survive for a hundred thousand years in a stable form to have language to have a certain culture to you know to know how to how to use the land and to know how to hunt and to build tools and all that sort of stuff like that's a that's a long time that makes our sort of five thousand years of you know modern civilization look like just nothing i think like sumer was about six thousand years ago that was what we considered to be the first written language cuneiform yeah i'm sort of just counting it from the birth of judaism i suppose and the iliad and the odyssey and the talmud this um gobekli tepe discovery is just one of many that they're slowly starting to uncover because when you look at these structures, a lot of them are, they're covered up with dirt.

The Amazon, they're constantly finding these ancient civilizations they have no explanation for in the Amazon, ancient structures that have actually become like hills. And they find these hills and they go, I think this might have been a building.

Wow. And then they start hacking through it and then they bring in radar and they just, they pound the earth with radar to try to understand what's underneath it and they find these buildings amazing how quickly we can forget our history such that we don't even know that like i would have thought that there'd be a continuity of human experience and human record keeping in some way that we would we would

know that we wouldn't have to be making this stuff up well that's where randall carlson comes in because randall carlson who's this expert in these asteroidal impacts says that human beings have had to reset that there's been several resets over the course of you know many many millions of years or maybe hundreds of thousands of years of life there's also a super volcano in indonesia that they've attributed to be one of the main reasons why all human beings come from one individual genetic source they think that 75 000 years ago this super volcano that's much larger than yellowstone and if yellowstone blows we are all fucked like it's going to kill almost everyone on this continent eventually and globally it's going to have a massive effect to nuclear winter

massive climate change and every six to eight hundred thousand years, this fucking goes off. It's a caldera volcano that's, I believe it's 600 kilometers wide, which is 300 miles. And they only discovered this, that this used to be a volcano in like the beginning of the 20th century, when they started using satellite imagery. When they started looking at Yellowstone from space, and they were like, um... It's kind of terrifying, isn't it? This is a fucking cap that blew off and left a crater like it's like we're just going about our lives you know the best laid plans of mice and men i mean it'll all go to hell at some point some point and this is is that yellowstone that's the caldera fucking terrifying

and they figured that out from space where they looked at it and so that used to be a mountain and that mountain exploded and left behind this sort of crater looking thing it's amazing in terms of the continuity of civilizations and you know how we and that that reset yeah that i was reading a fascinating piece about there was a a commission to figure out how to we were talking about radioactive waste earlier and how long this lasts, right? The radioactive waste from nuclear stockpiles. How do you build signs for a future civilization to tell them not to touch the waste? Don't go here. There is an act, there is a fascinating, I think it's in Slate, a fascinating article

about the commission, which was, which had the commission, which has been commissioned, to figure out, let's assume that there's a civilizational reset, which there probably will be, right, at some point while this stuff is still bad. So these people aren't going to know our language. They're not going to understand that a skull and crossbones means this is bad. They may not even understand the concept that we may lose the technology to even understand what nuclear is, right? And that happens. I mean, surprisingly often that happens. You know, it's already I'm losing where my photos are from hard drives that are just three hard drives ago, right? You know, multiply that by a million.

So they're designing these huge landscapes of interlocking sticks that are hundreds of feet high to try to imply that this is a bad thing and that you shouldn't dig it up. But I mean, at the end of the day, what their conclusion was, you probably just shouldn't put anything there because people are always going to be curious and you're never going to quite convince them. Like, you know, we go into the tombs of the pharaoh in Egypt because we just think that their beliefs about, you know, the bad that will come to us from going in there are silly fantasies. What if future civilizations think that we're full of silly fantasies when we tell them not to go into nuclear waste? It's absolutely possible. And I think we would need something like Georgia Guidestones or like some giant rosetta stone in several different languages to sort of let them decode it and if we do have a civilizational reset like a barbaric type civilization is all that's left and we literally like walking dead running around scavenging for food and everyone forgets how to count i mean fuck man people a lot of people are going to die of cancer and if it's the only people that are left on earth are people that live in Nevada,

they might all die. I mean, it's very possible. If you're talking about 75,000 people, which is, or 75,000 years ago, which they think a few thousand people were left over. That's right. Isn't that amazing? That's it.

Yeah. Yeah, this Indonesia super volcano. I mean, we are all much more closely related than you would ever assume from that bottlenecking period where humanity dwindled down to just a few peeps. So what they're thinking is 75,000 years ago, giant sums of people were wiped out. And then 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, again, giant amounts of people were wiped out. And that's where civilization had its reset. That's also the end of the Ice Age. That's also the almost instantaneous death of woolly mammoths, saber-toothed tigers.

And it's this moment, this event that they're showing in geological evidence that's indisputable. There was absolutely some sort of huge meteorological event, some sort of meteor event, asteroidal event, where we were pelted. We were pelted with space. And it's not like it's unusual it's like something like 900 000 near earth objects have been mapped out yeah we this is actually a really easy thing to solve but we don't put the money into solving it we're not looking yeah if you if you identify it far enough out it's a simple calculation to be able to do the

math and go oh well that one's going to hit us and then you just got to send up a bunch of nukes to nudge it off course if you catch it early. But if you don't catch it until it's almost here, then you're screwed. I don't think they think that anymore. I don't think they think nukes. I think the idea is to nudge it out of the way. That's what I mean. But with changing the, what is it called, the aerodynamics of the asteroids.

Oh, really? That's interesting. Putting a web on it that somehow or another will affect how it... I mean, I'm sure there are a bunch of things, but it's not a difficult engineering thing to come up with

to figure out a way to nudge an asteroid off. I don't think that's true. And I also think there's also an issue with space because of the gravity of the sun.

There's a lot of things that come from behind the sun that we don't even see coming because the gravity of the sun alters space. It alters the way we view things. But can't you factor that in? I mean, we spin around the sun, so don't even see coming because the gravity of the sun alters space it alters the uh the way we we view things but can't you factor that in i mean we spin around the sun so we get to see all all four corners of the of the universe as we go around but to this day constantly there's

things that come very close to us that we don't see coming i know because we don't because republicans cut funding to nasa and stuff like that well i would like to think that that's the case but i think it might be slightly beyond our grasp right now to see all of them coming, especially things that are coming from the North Pole and the South Pole. They're coming from places where we're not really observing the sky very vigilantly. You know, a lot of what we find is actually discovered by amateur astronomers. They find asteroids, and they name them and measure them,

and then they send in their data. I mean, how many of those fuckers are out there? there i mean i don't know how many people are out there actively searching for asteroids i don't think it's very many and i think it's shocking i know but you're talking about the policy concern which i agree with i'm talking about there are two concerns right one is would it be do we have the scientific and engineering know-how to be able to nudge an asteroid out of the way if we catch it early enough. And then the other question is, are we bothering to look? And it's the latter question that I'm more concerned about. I think we're getting close.

But I also think there's the issue of collisions, when asteroids collide with each other and then send one hurling towards us that we didn't expect. Right. That can happen, too. We're fucked, Josh. We're all fucked, Joe. We're fucked.

We're all fucked. So we did another hour. Good. I'm going to go take a chill pill. Take a chill pill. Tell everybody one more time. How do we get to your show? Josh Zeps on Twitter.

Well, you can either go to my... Well, actually, my website's down at the moment, so don't worry about that. It's Josh Zeps on Twitter. J-O-S-H-Z-E-P-P-S. I always want to say Zed because that's what we say in Australia. But shoot an email. Just open your mail your mail Right now Don't give out your email address

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You liked the most And then you'll get free stuff When I launch my Someone going to read that When I launch my podcast You got an employee I'll find someone. Josh Sepps, ladies and

gentlemen. Thank you, sir. This was a beautiful conversation. I really enjoyed it. We're going to do this again. I'd love to.

When are you going to be in LA again? I don't know. Whenever you invite me back, we'll work it out. Great. We'll work it out. Thank you.