The Joe Rogan Experience - #677 - Josh Zepps

Episode Date: August 3, 2015

Josh Zepps is the host of #WeThePeople LIVE, available on Spotify and at http://wtplive.com

people that I'd be willing to do a podcast with, fresh back from Brazil, within hours of landing on sacred American soil. But you're one of them, Josh. Why, thank you. We're live. It's a real pleasure to be back. Thanks, buddy. Man, so first of all, well, let me say, the last time I was here, I was like out of it. I was white-knuckling it. I was hungover. I was tired. It was 10 in the morning. I hadn't

slept probably. I'd been on a late-night flight from New York I was sick Joe. I didn't know you were sick you performed admirably. Yeah, I tried I tried today I'm gonna kill it today. Tell you ready so much. I'm just gonna smash it. Well, I'll be the weak one today. Yeah good I'll pick it up. Thank you. We'll just switch switch roles You can sit back and I'll ask you questions. How are you feeling? Lowering my own expectations of my own self. Just maybe travel long trips before every podcast. What was Brazil about?

The UFC. Great. Ronda Rousey fight. Excellent. Pretty crazy. Good time? Yeah, fantastic. It was watching her fight is like, it's like watching some historical thing.

It's like I was saying, like, when people tell their grandchildren, I was there when Muhammad Ali fought Sonny Liston. You know, I was there when Mike Tyson beat Trevor Burbick and won the heavyweight title. That's what it feels like when you watch her fight. Like, you're not just seeing a fight. You're watching some crazy historic event. It's amazing. She's just a freak.

There's like a freak of all freaks. Beautiful woman who's just this insane, furious combat athlete. Nuts. You're the one who's just stepped off a 13-hour flight and is now working all afternoon. So that's good, too. That's not as hard. Especially doing this. Yeah, that's true. We have pretty easy jobs just sitting around talking to people doing this. Yeah, that's true.

We have pretty easy jobs just sitting around talking to people all day. Yeah, we do. We do. But I really enjoy your show, man. You have some excellent interviews. Did you interview that Peter Singer guy? Yeah. That's the animal liberation guy.

He coined the term animal liberation, and he sort of invented the – he's one of the world's most important bioethicists, in terms of just thinking about the morality's most important bioethicists. Like, I mean, in terms of just thinking about the morality, he's such a brilliant guy. It's like, he's as if, it's like an alien just came down to earth and said, all right, we're not going to have any more preconceptions about what people think is right and wrong. We're going to start from basics and think, okay, why do we think about the morality of things the way that we do? And how, in what ways is that wrong? So like he ends up with these crazy conclusions and people like hate him for some of them, like saying it's not necessarily wrong to say kill an infant,

a newborn infant. Well, how does he justify that? I think it's on the grounds that what's wrong with killing something is a sort of combination of snuffing out the life of a being that has the capability of conceiving of itself as having a future. You're thwarting a person's plans when you kill them. You're robbing them of all of the opportunities that they hoped that they were going to have. And you're presumably causing them pain. could painlessly, I mean, if you don't, if you think of life as being an incremental thing that starts from conception and then gradually evolves up into adulthood and sort of self-awareness and

consciousness, I mean, does a two day old baby have that much more sentience and consciousness and sense of itself than a 22 week old baby in the womb does? Not a huge amount necessarily. I mean, I'm not saying I agree with it, but he's, he's just a fascinating person to talk to. Does he have children? Yeah, I think so.

Hmm. That's interesting that he thinks that way if he has children, because I could see it if you're, if you're trying to make some sort of a logic argument, you know, that you could, you could argue it like that. But as far as like being a human being,

the, the difference being significant in that a child represents potential and a child represents to a lot of people represents this insane bond of love that you have with the baby i you know i i think just to clarify i think he's only saying like in cases where you know the parents don't want it or something i mean he's he's not obviously if you kill someone else's baby, you're doing a terrible thing because you're depriving the parents of the kid.

Right. Oh, so they're saying, like, if they don't want their baby, it's not that big a deal. In a situation like abortion, as if it was like an abortion. There's some people that are extreme animal rights folks that also believe that there's something about

if you did kill a person at least you stop that person from killing all the animals they're going to kill or be responsible for the death of in their entire life which is which gets real insane that's kind of crazy i don't think he'd agree with that well you want to know real crazy the lobster liberation movement no yes no yes there's people that break into restaurants uh places that have seafood and keep lobsters, and they release them and take the rubber bands off their atrophied claws and release them back into the ocean. Those lobsters aren't surviving in the ocean.

They've had it too good for too long. Sure. It might not be stimulating being in the lobster tank, but it sure is safe. I don't know if the lobsters eat while they're in the tank. That's a good question. I don't know how long- Well, they must be fed, right? I don't. I don't know if the lobsters eat while they're in the tank. That's a good question. I don't know how long... Well, they must be fed, right? I don't... I've never seen a view.

Well, that wouldn't do it while you're eating them. But they always have the rubber bands on their claws, so they don't jack each other up while they're in that tank all piled on top of each other. It is pretty... Like, I'm... It is kind of sick. Like, I have no problem with it, because I do eat meat, and so I can't really be a hypocrite about it.

But I think there's something just kind of oddly sadistic about sitting there at a table and just being like, all right, I'm going to have that, I'm going to end that one's life right now, and then I'm just going to eat him in front of his buddies. Yeah. Well, we have a weird thing about, we have like a hierarchy of animals that we love. And that's one of the things we found out about Cecil. We love Cecil. Cecil the lion.

I want to get to Cecil in a second. We definitely should get to it. But we don't have any problem with bugs. Even vegans will slap a mosquito when it's biting them. We don't have a problem with that. Not only that, when bugs are really little, like ants, we'll kill it and then brush it off our pants and leave the body on the ground. It's just like a head on our pants and just some little limbs scattered around the ground. Bug guts.

And then the ant will be... I had a friend do that in my kitchen once. He had an ant on. I was like, oh, fucking ant. And he just brushed it on the ground. I go, isn't that odd? I don't have a problem with you doing that, but isn't it odd that we do that? We just brush bodies onto our friends' floors and we don't care about it.

So getting back to Peter Singer, his whole philosophy of animal liberation is sort of that there is a hierarchy of consciousness and sentience that has to be taken into account. He happens to be a vegan, but he doesn't think, you know, I've spoken to him, obviously he doesn't think that an oyster has the same right to life as a lion does or as a chimpanzee does, right? So you factor in the capacity of the creature to be sentient and to feel pain and to have a conception of itself and to feel love and fear and those sorts of things. And however much it does, that's why human life is probably more important than any other animal's life, maybe whales or dolphins or, I don't know, some other animal that's equally smart as us. But so for him, the bugs are less worthy.

And for anyone sensible, the bugs are less worthy, right? But what's interesting when you say, like, we have these weird conceptions of our own hierarchies of, like, cute animals and non-cute animals or animals that we give a shit about and animals that we don't. What's interesting is that that hierarchy doesn't match up with a logical, ethical hierarchy. Like, why are we so willing to be so cruel to pigs, which are just as conscious and self-aware and capable of love and family and pain as dogs? If not more so. If not more so. But we have these institutionalized, concentrated animal feeding operations that just torture. I mean, it's torture. Whatever that industry can do to lower the price of a pound of flesh by a few pennies, it will do, including not anesthetizing the pigs, grabbing little piglets by the tail and just smashing their heads against a wall to kill them if they're non-viable anymore.

I mean, it's an absolute murder show. It's like an ongoing holocaust of pigs. But then people will get arrested for, I don't know, Michael Vick or something. You're doing something bad for dogs. We just don't give a shit. So what Peter Singer would say is, yes, there's a hierarchy, but let's at least be sensible about the hierarchy, which brings us to Cecil. Poor Cecil.

Cecil's a 13-year-old lion, which I want everyone to understand that if you're a male lion and you reach 13 years of age, you have killed a fuckload of baby lions. Sure. That's 100%. How many gazelles have you killed? A lot of gazelles. But also, there's a lot of, how do you say it?

Infanticide? Trucide? Tusside? Infanticide. Tusside. It's not tru. No. I always want to make an R there for somewhere.

Well, there are some other types of, like, fratricide, which has an R in it. I think that's why. Yeah. Infanticide if that is the correct way of saying he's no I'm getting my verbal wisdom 100% but I think that is that that's that's an important point to look at my friend Steve Rinella calls them charismatic megafauna and he's like there's all

these animals that are charismatic megafauna that we have um anthropomorphized in movies like the lion king and yogi bear and all these movies and we have this idealized view of what they really are but the reality of them is so alien to us because we're never in africa in zimbabwe in the jungle with these lines and if you were you would be absolutely fucking terrified of them and you wouldn't think of them like i saw jimmy kimmel crying on tv i was like whoa jimmy i want to show you some videos i want to show you some videos of cecil killing babies because apparently there's a video of cecil actually killing the actual same lion interesting allegedly it might not be him it's hard to yeah and it's also condescending to the people who live there like i mean there

are farmers there who are like well yeah you're allowed to be all teary about a lion. It eats up damn cows all the time. Or like elephants are just stomping all over our crops. So, yeah, let's save them. Absolutely. But we should have a little bit more empathy for the human beings who are there, too. Yeah, well, the human beings. Here's the other one.

The poachers. The lives of poachers, okay. I'm not defending this guy. I'm not exactly sure what happened. There's several different versions of what that guy did. And some of them are, according to book, they're fine and legal. That's not the only lion that's ever been killed like this with a collar on it. When the lions are off the preserved area, it's legal to kill them.

That's right. Not saying you should kill them, just saying if they're not there. But here's the thing. But they lured him off. I think that's the difference, right? Here's what's legal to kill as much as you want. Poachers. People.

They kill people there every day. When they have these hunting camps, when they go out looking for lions or More more often its lions are fairly rare Most people when they go over there to hunt they want to hunt something to eat with big antlers they could put on their wall Yeah, like a kneeling or a gazelle or something along those lines when they go to hunt those Occasionally they'll find people that are there and they call these people poachers and what they occasionally they'll find people that are there, and they call these people poachers. And what they are is extremely poor people that are there shooting these animals without a permit. And you know what they do? They murder them.

They murder these people on a regular basis. I have a friend who went over there for a hunting camp, and while he was there, the people that he was with shot a poacher. Shot it right in front of him. There was a man, and that man had a gun that was like a, they have makeshift guns. They have a, it's an actual gun, but they don't have real bullets. So what they do is they create a bullet with like a piece of metal. They find pieces of metal, and they get some gunpowder,

and they create a firing pin, and they have to light it like a musket. It's crazy. I mean, these are extremely, extremely poor people. Not only that, they find their camps and a lot of their camps, they'll find evidence of witchcraft. So they have this white powder that they'll find these camps and they put this white powder on their wrists and they believe this white powder, it's been blessed by this witch doctor, makes them invisible. So this guy was standing out in the open like right next to a tree when the uh the the game wardens the people that live and work

in africa and handle this stuff shot this guy they shot this guy and you know what they do with them when they shoot them they fill out paperwork or they don't sometimes they just feed them to the hyenas and this happens every day And this happens all the time because they have these huge hunting preserves, right? So these preserves might be 20, 30, 40,000 acres, maybe more enormous. One of them, my friend was on set. It took eight hours to drive from one side of the ranch to the other. So you're talking about an enormous piece of land. And in this enormous piece of land, you'll find insanely poor people. And these insanely poor people have nothing. It's dry.

There's no supermarkets. There's no government support. There's nowhere for them to go. So what do they do? They take a risk, and they go and try to find animals to kill in these hunting preserves. And they get shot, and they get killed, and no one gives a fuck. Right. So the underlying problem here is the economics.

Exactly. Right. And there's a case, I mean, some people say, well, look, trophy hunting, you may not agree with it, but the $50,000 that the person is spending can then go into maintaining a preserve that actually protects a whole bunch of lions. Now, I'm a bit sort of conflicted about that because there are only a few tens of thousands of lions left, right? Even fewer elephants, I think. There's some areas, it depends on Africa. about that because there are only a few tens of thousands of lines left, right? Even,

even fewer elephants, I think. So there's some areas, it depends on Africa. There's some areas where they have to call elephants cause they have too many of them. Yeah. I mean,

I mean that again, that's because of the encroachment of cities and more and more, you know, them losing so much of their habitat. You might have a lot of elephants in a particular small area, but overall the number is going down dramatically across the continent. I mean, yeah, yeah. Well, I was reading a down dramatically across the continent. Is that 100% true? Yeah, yeah. Well, I was reading a piece the other day that was saying that,

you know, within 15 or 20 years, it's entirely possible there just won't be any African elephants left. Well, I've brought this up before, so forgive me for anybody who's listening to this, but Louis Theroux has a great documentary on these crabs. Oh, so good. And I heard him on your show as well. I mean, I'm a huge fan of Louis's. Love that guy. I've seen that episode a couple of times. Well, one of the things that was pointed out on that show is there was a lot of animals that were on the verge of extinction

that are now thriving because they live in these giant hunting camps. Right. That's really fucked. Yeah. And that's what the guy running the hunting camp said. You know, when Louie was kind of confronting him about this, he goes, listen to me. Every guy is fucked. Every guy is fucked.

That's an intense moment. So incredible. And that guy saying that, whoa, like this guy is like, he's just at his wits end. So Ricky Gervais was commenting on Facebook about Cecil the Lion and trophy hunting and everything, because he's a big animal rights guy and he's super opposed to trophy hunting. animal rights guy and he's super opposed to trophy hunting and he was saying like you know sure maybe this is going to fund something better but would you allow some asshole to like shoot a cancer patient if he was willing to donate a million dollars to cancer research that's you know that's not how it's not how it works if why doesn't the asshole just donate if he thinks he's doing a good deed to fair lion conservation donate the fifty thousand dollars and then just don't kill the

lion well how about well he's he doesn't want that he wants this lion in his house so he could deed to fair lion conservation, donate the $50,000 and then just don't kill the lion. Well, he doesn't want that. He wants this lion in his house so he can climb on top of it and jerk off to it. That's the whole point. And I don't know what he, like, then it comes back to, like, you know, John Ronson, you've had him on the show. Yes. So you've been publicly shamed, guys. Yes, yes.

Love that guy. By the way, Bill Hader does the best John Ronson impersonation you've ever heard. I had Bill Hader and Judd Apatow on HuffPost Live a couple weeks ago. And for some reason, we were just talking about what books they like. I don't even remember how it came up. And Judd Apatow was like, I'm really into John Ronson. And I kind of thought that John was my special little fetish. I think he's so great.

But he's not like an A-list writer in America, at least. I don't think that many people know him. And then Bill Hader was like, oh, yeah, I just listened to the audio book of his book. And I was like, I just listened to the audio book of his book. And Bill Hader starts going, John O'Leary. It's brilliant John Ronson impersonation. But anyway, what happened to this guy who shot the lion

reminds me a bit of what John is always on about. So he's had to shutter his dental practice. There are signs of abuse all over the dental practice. His business is ruined. He's had to go into hiding. I mean, is that fair? Yeah, he did a shitty thing. I completely don't agree with it.

I don't understand, like, trophy hunting. I understand hunting hunting for meat, but I don't understand trophy hunting. But we all pile on and we all love being so self-righteous and so sanctimonious about it. At the same time, once again, as we're eating all those pigs that have been tortured and people are biting into chicken burgers that have been that that's another tortured animal but the moment there's something with a big big fluffy mane and it has a cute name like Cecil do you pronounce that name Cecil in America is that Cecil okay cool but Cecil sounds better Cecil yeah that's it's also like if the if the if the lion's name was like Garth or something I don't think people would be upset it's like Cecil is the cutest name no one who's called

Cecil has ever done anything wrong Cecil though is like a cool black guy who hangs around pool halls oh right you know

my man Cecil can hook you up Cecil is it like maybe that's where the pronunciation difference comes from does it come from

African Americans that's interesting I don't know I don't know there's a lot of different words that they pronounce differently in England. Yeah, that's true.

Yeah, of course. And spelled differently, like tires of the Y. That's always bizarre when I read like English auto magazines. Yeah. T-Y-R-E-S. I think that the idea of this killing this animal for no reason other than you want to kill it because you like killing things is what freaks everybody out. The idea that this sociopath could go over there and kill these beautiful things. And that's what freaks people out. But what's going on right now, why this guy

did this, is people are killing lions all over Africa. Like here was really fucked up. This is what's really fucked up. There was an article that said that Jericho, Cecil's brother, had also been killed by a lion. And everybody was like, oh my God, I can't believe this. We lost Jericho. This is crazy because Jericho's got a name. And then they said it was a false alarm. Worry not. It wasn't Jericho.

It was just some poor bitch-ass lion that doesn't have a name. And then I'm like, okay. This kind of highlights what Rinella was saying. It's charismatic megafauna. You give them a name and all of a sudden there's something significant about them. They have a personality like Simba. That's right. That's right.

So I'm out here in L.A. this weekend doing an episode of my new show. I just launched a podcast, which is a panel of like three comics sitting around talking about the news each week. What's it called? It's called we the people live so people can get you should follow us at WTP underscore live on Twitter and much work Oh, yeah, fuck me up already You just got off a plane Their brains your listeners are clever enough They'll be able to write it down you say that you need to go

on my Twitter and my Facebook and read some comments on Instagram as well or YouTube that's the fucking pit

that's the pit of stupidity or you can go to WTP live there's the other plug I've got the plug now

but it's great it's a lot of fun so we had Greg Fitzsimmons on the show last night and we just got a bunch

of people together in Hollywood. And Fred Stoller, who was a writer on Seinfeld, I don't know if you know Fred, did a joke about exactly what you were just saying about Cecil the Lion. He was like, it's like if someone accidentally shot Bruce Willis, but they thought that they were going to be shooting Gregory McGee. And they're like, oh, fuck, I didn't realize that I was shooting Bruce Willis.

I just thought I was going to be killing this other random dude. You'd still be like, no, you'd still murder the guy. Right. It doesn't matter whether it's Jericho the lion or, like, Shithead the lion. Either way, you're culpable. People were upset that Jericho died, and now they're not upset because it was an unknown lion. So no one is calling for the head of this person that shot this unknown lion. We're stupid.

We're very stupid, but we're also ruined by media. I really believe that media depictions of animals and when you add human voices to them, like zookeeper, a movie that I was in, you know, you, you, you do, you do fuck with people's reality. I think that we're not designed to take in the media. I really don't believe that the human body and brain is designed for films. And I think when we sit down there and we watch some epic movie with lions, like there was a movie called Bears. Did you ever see that movie? Yeah.

That was a nature documentary? Well, it was all over. There was another one called Cats, right, that was recent. Uh-huh. And it was about big cats. Yeah. They don't show what the fuck they really do in the bear documentary they didn't show the bears killing cubs bear

bears kill cubs like that's what they like to eat that's one of the reasons why female bears are so aggressive when they're around their their babies yeah that's it bears the disney nature film bears yeah they didn't show that male bears come out of hibernation and they go looking for cubs. Yeah. It's one of the first things they try to eat. I mean, I'm not sure that I buy your thesis that things like animated movies like The Lion King

screw us up. But I do definitely think that if there's something which is a pseudo-documentary, like what you're talking about, like Bears or something, like one movie that I hated, I couldn't get through more than 20 minutes of it, was March of the Penguins.

I had a little bit about it. Did you? Yeah, a little bit. I was angry about it. Why? Well, there was a bunch of it. One of the things that they were mating for life, and I was like, you know, that they mate for life,

and they're monogamous. I'm like, first of all, they only mate for a year. I'm like, I could do that. And second of all, they look exactly the same. It's not like one penguin is a Jenna Jameson penguin, the other one's a Rosie O'Donnell penguin. They're fucking penguins. What's the point in cheating?

Just pretend you're cheat. It's like as if everyone was just identical twins. Yeah. Well, also, there was a part in the movie, and this really did happen. When I watched it, I was watching, and there's those leopard seals that feed off of the penguins that I didn't even know existed. I didn't even know it was a real animal until that movie. And this is amazing beast of an animal with these huge teeth. And I was like, Whoa, I was like, this is incredible. This thing's a wow. And there was a family in front of me. And this mom was upset at me that I was happy

when the leopard seal was eating the penguins. I'm like, what about the penguin is fucking slaughtering these fish. The hierarchy took, there's a leopard seal right eating the penguins. I'm like, what about the penguin that's fucking slaughtering these fish? The hierarchy took... There's the leopard seal right there. Look at that. Awesome. Fucking incredible beast of an animal. So what about the leopard seal?

Doesn't it have a right to live? Does not. It's mean and awful, and it's going after the star, which is the penguin. It's not marching the leopard seal, Josh said. Right. That's what I hated about it.

It was a total anthropomorphization, if that's a word, which probably isn't, of penguin life. It's portraying them as basically humans in little costumes. and it would be like young Jimbo wandered off with a heavy heart to think about how he'd just been jilted. You have no idea why. He's probably wandering over there to take a shit. I don't know what he's doing. He's taking a shit. He's trying to find some fish to eat. He's got three brain cells banging around inside his stupid little bird head. Yeah.

So I think companies like Disney probably should be held to better account to be more responsible about communicating to children the reality of animal life rather than making it all sunny. People don't want their kids to watch. Pull up this video, Jamie, lion killing cub, male lion killing cubs. I put this up on Twitter, and I thought Twitter took it down, but what actually happened is I retweeted, somebody else tweeted it, and the guy who tweeted it got attacked so hard that he decided to delete his tweet.

He's just like, fuck this. Thanks a lot, Joe. It was just too much. But the reason why he got in trouble is because this lion is killing cubs. This is reality. And it's not just an isolated instance like a lion at a screw loose. This one on a baby killing rampage. This is what they do.

When a lion takes over a pride, one of the first things he does after he chases out, go ahead, play it, Jamie. One of the first things he does after he chases out the male lion is kill all of its babies. Of course. And this is what's going on right here. It's genetics. I mean, I interviewed Richard Dawkins recently as well, and I've got another event coming up with him in October, which is going to be cool.

And he wrote The Selfish Gene, meaning the unit of evolution is not the individual and it's not the species. It's the gene. Now, that lion is killing those cubs because what better way to make sure that its genes end up getting passed on and spread out and procreated through the pride. There's no better way. By making sure that all of the other babies from the other guys don't go. I mean, he's just following instinct. Why wouldn't you? This is part of the picture.

And again, I'm not in favor of killing lions. And people say this is Cecil, by the way. I don't know if that's true. I mean, how would you know? I don't know. But Cecil has been studied. I mean, he's part of an Oxford study or was. Yeah, yeah.

I interviewed actually the head of that study, the Oxford guy. Fascinating stuff that they're doing. He looks different because he's younger in this video, and apparently when they get older, they get the black around their mane. I don't know if this is true. But bottom line is, this is also part of the picture. So by showing only the beautiful aspects of the lion with flowing mane, walking amongst the cubs that are his and the female lionesses, you don't see the actual whole animal.

You don't see the thing. You also don't see the reality of the poaching and what these people go through that live there and that it's easy for these hunting wardens to murder those people that are trying to survive. I get it. That to me is so much more disturbing. Yeah, but then there's this big question. I mean, so there's the ethics of actually taking the lives of these animals and living through one of the greatest extinction events

in history that's been unleashed by humans if in 50 years time we don't want to live in a world that has no lions has no african elephants has totally polluted overfished waters where you can't eat tuna anymore because there's so much mercury in it like we've got to find ways of dealing with this and if the poachers are part of that problem i'm not saying you put a bullet in their head but you gotta do something see with the poachers that are getting killed in africa though most i mean there's different types of poachers there's poachers in africa that are killing elephants for their ivory and it's this is the most unbelievably brutal aspect of it. When poachers kill elephants for their ivory, the amount of ivory that they get for, they get like four or five elephants that they kill. I think they,

there was a big story a few days ago where they killed five elephants and they, they just chop off their tusks and leave the bodies to rot. They got like $200 for those tusks. And those tusks on the black market are worth tens of thousands of dollars. But that's fucking crazy. I mean, this is not... But you're also talking about people that are just so fucking desperate. We can't even understand the poverty. I know, but there are a lot of desperate people.

There are a lot of desperate people, and they find ways of doing things. They're born desperate. They're stuck. I mean, if you're in that environment. I have a friend. His name is Justin Wren, and he'll be on the podcast soon again. He's been on a few times. He still is an MMA fighter, but he went over there on a trip and met some pygmies and just was in the Congo and fell in love and just was like, I need to help these people.

And we've been donating money, and they've been building wells. They've built 16 wells for these people. They're bringing in medical supplies. They're doing all these things to try to help these people. And we've been donating money and they've been building wells. They've built 16 wells for these people. They're bringing in medical supplies. They're doing all these things to try to help these people. But the feeling that he got when he was there is like, there's no one helping these folks. They have to do anything they can to survive. These people that are on these hunting preserves that they're calling poachers, a lot of them are just trying to feed themselves. There's nowhere to go. There's nothing. There's no options.

And it's legal to kill those people. And the idea that it's someone- No, it is legal in Africa to kill these people. It's not legal to kill people. Yes, it is. They might turn a blind eye to it. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. But it's always illegal to kill a person unless you're in a self-defense. No, I'm telling you it's not.

I'm telling you it's not. Really? It's not. In Africa, a poacher, you can shoot a poacher when they are on your property, and it's legal. You fill out paperwork, and you're done. And not only that, but it was being done by what they call professional hunters, but they're essentially game wardens. So, like, if you were, you know, if you were in Montana, say you were elk hunting, and when you shoot an animal, you have to have a tag for it,

which means Indian state allows shooting tiger poachers on site offers money to informants. Yeah. Well, that's one state in India, right? Yeah, but it's the same thing. It's not uncommon for it to be legal to shoot poachers. But that's because they're down to only like a few thousand lions. Or a few thousand tigers in India. It might be even less than thousands. It might be like hundreds of tigers in India.

But point being, it's not just legal. Like, it's done every day. Every day. Africa is so big. This is the other thing that people need. We have this perception in our head that Africa is something like America. Well, we know what life is like in America, so we expect life is like that in Africa. So if these people are over there in Africa and they're shooting lions, these are terrible people.

This is an insanely hard place to live. Insanely awful place in a lot of ways. Many, many parts of it. I think people know that. I don't think people have any illusions about what Africa's like. I don't think they do. I don't think I do. The only time we see Africa on the news is when some horrible, horrible shit goes down

or when Bono is playing some charity concert to raise money for him. I think, if anything, I mean, I've got friends who live in Nairobi, and there are lots of things going on. I mean, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing all kinds of stuff. There's lots of entrepreneurship. Cell phones have revolutionized the continent because all of a sudden people are able to, like, send a text message to the market that's a three-hour walk away

and ask what price, you know, fish or rice are getting that day, and they can actually plan instead of just guessing. There are a lot of good news stories in Africa. I'm not downplaying how terrible it is, but the idea that the only way that you can survive on the continent of Africa is by being an ivory poacher, come on. These are opportunistic people. No, I'm not saying ivory poacher.

I'm saying food poachers, these people that are getting shot in these game preserves. A lot of them are just hunting gazelles or something along those lines. They're just hunting for food. They have nothing. What I'm saying is, I know all these stories. I'm aware of all these stories. I read them all the time, but I think unless you have feet on the ground in Africa, unless you actually go there

and experience it firsthand, everybody that I've talked to that's been there said, it is another world. You might as well be on the moon. The moan? You could be on the moon with the moon the moan you could be on the moan as well yeah sure like i i think i know the information but i think i i haven't internalized it that's what what happened to my friend justin when he went there he's just like jesus christ i gotta do something and he was just struck with it because i don't i don't think i think don't

think it gets in i think the information hits the brain. It stores it. You know, one plus one is two. It's like it's all there. But unless you are there, I don't think you could truly understand what that place is like. Yeah. I think that's probably true. And we're also so caught up in our own little worlds.

I mean, especially in this country because America is so big and it's so easy to maintain, to just live inside of the American cultural bubble, essentially. You have to actively, proactively try to seek out other sources of information and other experiences. Otherwise, it's very easy to just coast along here and not really think about the rest of the world. It's also kind of ironic that the last big lion story that came out of Africa was the editor from the Game of Thrones that got pulled out of her car by a lion. She was taking a photograph of it and the lion was like, ooh, I think that's an open window. Just dove into the car and literally pulled her out in front of her friends. They're all screaming, and the lion killed her right in front of everybody. And that's what they do.

They're fucking killers. They're nature's cleanup crew. Anything with a limp, anything that looks like it's easy to take out. The thing, they didn't even eat her. They just killed her. They just killed her for a goof. Tired of her taking pictures. It's like sharks.

Like, did you see that Aussie surfer, McFanning, getting attacked by a great white? The whole point, like, so sharks don't like what we taste like, right? They're after big, fatty seals. They don't like scrawny humans. We're all bone and sinew. And so they'll just take a bite to see if they like us, and then they'll spit us out. But if it's a nine-foot great white,

then that little taste is enough to kill you if they rip off your leg or half your torso. So I've always felt, especially as an Australian, where this is constantly just in the background of your mind as a possibility every time, because we're always at the beach. Like, I would prefer it if they actually liked liked us so at least one of us is happy you know i don't want to right i don't want to it's it's just the ignominy of being of both being killed and then also the shark being like ah i didn't even like it oh fuck you shark well they they are the ultimate cleanup

crew they're just dead behind the eyes black marbles for eyeballs i love them i was like a shark nerd as a kid. Really? I read books about sharks and would always, yeah. I love them because I don't really go in there. I don't surf, but apparently surfing in South Africa is like fucking jogging where lions live. Like, good luck.

It is. Yeah. South Africa and South Australia, both at the bottom of that, because great whites like, you know, cool waters and that's just where you find them so fuck that fuck fuck fuck fuck that apparently they're finding a lot of them off the malibu coast right they're seeing them on a regular basis and some reason north in northern san francisco that area they breed out there i have a buddy my friend alex r us shark works, which is actually a Porsche Man in like a they take Porsches and modify them and in it calls it. That's the name of his company shark works

He's a shark fan. He's a freak. Yeah, he told me there's like they breed out there right I can know that I breathe somewhere Yeah, but like what the fuck man. They're like right there these goddamn monsters. That's a good thing The water's cold, so there aren't that many people swimming in San Francisco Bay. There's a video of them taking a surfboard and pulling it behind a boat in South Africa just to show there's this one area that's just overrun with sharks. And as they pull this surfboard behind the boat, these sharks just, bam, just hitting the surfboard,

knocking it up in the air, and you're like, what? They're amazing. Who wouldn't love them? It's in the air. And you're like, what? They're amazing. Who wouldn't love them? It's like the lion seal. It's like, I love them. Maybe that girl who lost her arm, she probably wouldn't be really too much into them. Did you see this petition that they've got just to,

this is from left field, but it just popped into my head, and I don't know why, about this 19-year-old kid who had sex with a 17-year-old girl who had told him she was 14 and she told him she was 17. And so he went to jail, and now he's on the sex offender registry for 25 years, and he's not going to be able to have a career because he wanted to do software engineering,

and as part of his parole, he's not allowed to own a computer, he's not allowed to own a smartphone, because he's classified as a pedophile computer. He's not allowed to own a smartphone because he's classified as a pedophile. Even though she was physically mature, he thought she was 17. Her parents lobbied the judge and she lobbied the judge to plead and say, please let this guy off. But instead, the judge threw the book at him basically saying like, you should understand that sex is supposed to be a meaningful and like holy experience between two people who love each other.

You shouldn't be hooking up online like this. What? Yeah. Where was this? Moralizing. It was in, can we check that out? It was either, it was in the Midwest somewhere. I think Indiana.

So now there's like 150,000 signatures on this petition to try to get this guy off the sex offender registry. You can be on the to get this guy off the sex offender registry. There are people in the sex offender registry who just urinated in public. I know a guy who did that. I know a guy who did that. He's a pool player, apparently. That's his story, at least. He went outside and he took a leak outside of this bar, and apparently it's close to a school.

And because he's within X amount of feet of a school, he got caught by these cops. And he's a sex offender for exposing himself. Yeah. Yeah. Like what? Here's the stats. I was looking at this yesterday. So in six states, you can get on the register if you hire a hooker.

Wow. In at least a dozen states. Hooker. Hooker. Hooker. Hooker. If you hire a hooker. Hooker. Sounds like cheery. Cecil the hooker. Hello. I'm Cecil the hooker. Hello, Debbie. And in, oh yeah, here it is. Make me out to be a monster.

Debate rages over man. 19. Put on a sex offender registry for 25 years. Zach Anderson, 19. Met a girl online via hookup app. Hot or not, last year on the app. Girl says she's 17. However, she's actually 14. Zach traveled 20 miles from Indiana home to Michigan and slept with her. He was arrested after the girl's mom became worried about her whereabouts. Whatever this petition is, Jamie, find out where it is and let's give it out online. Yeah.

We'll fill it out and hopefully that helps. I think it's a change.org thing or something. I signed it. I mean, this poor change.org thing or something. I signed it. I mean, this poor guy. He's just a kid, man. When you're 19, first of all, it's so hard to tell the difference between a 14 and a 17 year old. It's so hard.

How do you know? There's girls that are 14 that look like they're 18. You're going to ask for ID? We all know that. Yeah. Look, I met a girl who was 25 who looked like she was fucking 16. You know, people vary wildly in their appearance. And if you're 19, you don't have a whole lot of experience in judging that shit.

No, that's right. It's not like he fucking got her drunk or drugged her or any of that. The judge, first of all, they should take him and drag him in the same place they dragged that fucking surfboard. Just take him and feed him to the sharks. Dan Savage has been going on a lot about this, needless to say. I like that guy. Yeah, he's great. He's been on here, too.

Yeah, I've had him on Half Post Live a couple of times. I mean, his point is, like, what the hell legal rationale is there for saying that sex is supposed to be this meaningful thing between two people who love each other and shouldn't be using hot or not? Yeah, says who? Says who? The old judge and the prosecutor. That's not their job.

When he was getting laid, there was no hot or not. He wasn't getting laid. He was probably mad that he lost his virginity at 42. Probably. Fucker. Yeah. Or never has, maybe. Puts that robe on.

I remember one judge that got caught. He had some sort of a masturbation device underneath the robe. No. one judge that got caught. He had some sort of a masturbation device underneath the robe. Nah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They caught him in the middle of his proceedings.

He had some fucking pump on his dick. Crazy assholes. That's great. I'm wearing one right now. That's why I'm having such a good time, Joe. I don't mind that.

I welcome that here. But this guy is a judge, okay? He's supposed to follow the law we don't want his editorial comment on the nature of civilization and whether or not people should and should enjoy sex recreationally that's right because that's what he's saying it's got nothing to do with with the offense at hand i think anytime a judge says something like that you should like fuck you you're not a judge anymore because you've obviously lost your your your balance you've lost your your perspective that've lost your perspective.

That's not what we want from you. We want for you to be an expert in the law as it's written. And the law as it's written is supposed to protect people. You're not protecting anybody here. Well, that's right. And the whole point of the sex offender registry and that kind of stuff is to protect kids and protect parents from predatory, potentially violent, repeat child rapists, right? I mean, that's ideally what that offender registry should do. What kids is it protecting to prosecute this 19-year-old? Does anyone seriously believe that if he has a smartphone

at any point in the next 25 years or whatever it is, that he's going to be like preying upon multiple 14-year-old girls who look like they're 17? Come on. The whole thing is disgusting. It's just madness that someone thinks that they could do that. I have a theory about that, and I've talked about it on the show before, that I think that one of the main problems that we have with law enforcement and with police and even with judge and prosecutors is that it becomes a game. It becomes a win or a lose.

If the guy gets off, you lost. If the guy, if you convict him, you scored. And I think we have this built-in thing about playing games. And I think it fits very keenly into that sort of a justification for leaving evidence, for planting evidence. Like that guy who shot the guy in North Carolina and then drops the taser. Remember that? He shot the guy in the back and then drops the taser at his body. In the park. Yeah. Yeah. I think there's a lot of that where they get locked into this trying to win thing.

And some people will cheat. Like people playing pool, they'll move a ball when you're not looking. They'll cheat. Why? Because they want to win. I mean, who cares? Like, it's so petty. Playing pool, yes.

But when you're trying, when you're a cop, you also have a quota. You know, I had this guy on, Michael Wood, who's a former police officer in Baltimore, who's enlightening me as to how fucked up Baltimore is and how fucked up the police department is and how crazy it is over there. But he was like, you get in trouble if you're not arresting people. So if no one commits crimes, you're fucked,

you're fucked as a cop. Cause they're like, that's bullshit. These people suck. Yeah. Like it can't be that it ever, it ever cleans up. It can't be like,

Hey, you know what? Um, Baltimore just became Beverly Hills. And, uh, everyone is like this nice old rich Jewish couple that doesn't do anything wrong, and no one commits crime. So we could just relax and be like the fire department. Sit around and wait for something to happen instead of being forced.

Like if the fire department had quotas, how many fires you put out today, Wilson? There was no fires. They'd be going around starting fires. Exactly. They would start fires. Right. that's a good point right so there's it's a misalignment of incentives basically because the people who are supposed to be doing the cracking down on crime actually have an incentive for there still

to continue to be some crime so that they can keep doing the cracking down yes it almost reminds me a little bit of like the military industrial complex where like the pentagon the defense department is supposed to be about defending us but if we don't have wars to go into then they're kind of redundant exactly it's actually good for them when there is a war ironically yeah but you would expect that the people who are like who are trying to seek our security would not be wanting wars because wars are bad things yeah i think the overall dynamic of how we operate is flawed fundamentally on so many different levels that we just sort of try to patch it up and keep moving. And I think you can make an analogy about this hunting thing.

I mean, it is kind of fucked that you're talking about conservation when the best way to conserve is to get money from them being murdered. I mean, that's really what you're saying. The best way is to go over there. And there was an article in HuffPost actually today that I was reading and I was kind of laughing about it because it was wrong on a lot of different levels. And it was about hunting for conservation and that this model doesn't really work or that the argument doesn't hold up. And one of the things they brought up was that $335,000 that that guy had paid to go and shoot that rhino. And that rhino, they were saying, well, this rhino's in danger. These rhinos are endangered.

Yes, but that rhino was an unviable male. Like, he was old, and he wasn't breeding anymore. Not only that, he was killing young male rhinos and female rhinos. And so they had targeted him for, they were going to cull him. They were going to kill him anyway. So the reason why this guy was able to spend so much money to shoot this endangered rhino is because they were going to shoot it anyway. And they said, look, if we can generate a tremendous amount of income,

and I had him on the podcast and he said the amount of money that he paid was actually small. And I had him on the podcast, and he said the amount of money that he paid was actually small. And the reason why it was small was that all the negative publicity actually fucked up the conservation aspect of it. Because there are people that would pay half a million, even more for that rhino. And they didn't because they were scared of having their name thrown into the pool. So this Corey Knowlton guy went over there, spent the $335,000, did everything legally. And he was, in a lot of ways, just like Cecil. Or just like this Walter Hill guy, Cecil. the outcome that you could potentially have. Because the people who could pull off the best outcome are so afraid of us all jumping down their throats on Twitter

and ruining their lives, turning them into a Justine Sacco. But then it also gets to, like, whoa, is that really the only way you can save these rhinos? The only way you can get $335,000 is you have to get some guy who wants to kill one and say, okay, you like killing shit?

Alright, how much money paradox but what else are you gonna do who else is gonna pay 350 000 to save rhinos i think this is the way if people hate this idea of hunting for for conservation if they hate this idea the best way to stop it is to really ramp up conservation uh efforts like to really really ramp up the idea of non-hunting for conservation yeah and to tell people like look we can you can generate like Zimbabwe apparently where this guy? Was they generate some insane amount of money? I don't want to quote it because I don't know if I'm right, but I read various amounts But I think it was like two hundred million dollars a year

Just from hunting just from these people coming over there to hunt and someone said well that's the only three percent of it goes to conservation that's probably right but it's still three percent of two hundred million dollars or whatever the fuck it is that's a lot of goddamn money for people who have nothing over there how much could they make from tourism though for people of looking at the Lions that's a good question and that's I think maybe the solution in a lot of these situations. But also, another thing that has to be carefully considered is that

at least in some areas, in some places, you have to manage populations of animals. Because if you just leave nature onto its own, nature will wipe out animals as well. Nature doesn't really give a fuck about like, wolves don't care if they wipe out all the elk. They really don't care.

They don't have it in their mind. They have it in their mind, what can I kill and eat, whether it's dogs or whether it's elk or whatever it can track down and kill. So the United States has a problem in a lot of the western states because they reintroduce wolves. And they reintroduce wolves. And there was a really interesting video about it, how wolves are changing Yellowstone National Park. And they sort of highlighted the positive aspects of it. The negative aspects of it are the elk population are getting decimated because these elk are not used to wolves because they didn't develop with wolves. And the wolves are within the last few generations. These wolves have been introduced here and they wanted to keep them within a certain population.

They wanted to keep them within a few thousand wolves wanted to keep them within you know a few thousand wolves in the whole country well they've gone way way way past that and so now they want to start hunting these wolves and they do hunt these wolves in some areas but they have all these people that are freaking out about the hunting of the wolves so you shouldn't hunt these wolves well you have to you don't like you have to manage these populations because if you don't then you have starvation then you have disease and then you have them encroaching into livestock. I have a friend who lives in Northern BC, British Columbia, and he is a hunter up there and he also has cows. His neighbor's cow was killed in the middle of

the night by a pack of wolves. He said, you don't even know what terror is. And when you're sleeping in your house with your children, and he said said you have glass windows that protect you from the wild right you're not living in a fortress you're living in a normal house and you look out the window and you see 20 30 wild savage murderous wolves tearing a cow apart in front of you screaming and cheering and ripping this thing apart. And they'll do that to your kid. Absolutely. They'll do that to you.

They'll do that to anything they can get a hold of. They don't have morals. Their idea is to stay alive. That is their programming. They're there to stay alive. And if you don't manage their population, you're fucked. So in that area, you can kill as many wolves as you want. Right, right.

Where he lives. You can kill him every day. that area, you can kill as many wolves as you want. Right, right. Where he lives. You can kill him every day. It all comes back to this misconception that people have that nature is at a permanent state of equilibrium and that we shouldn't tinkle with it because there's something kind of fundamentally precious about a particular state of nature.

But the reality is almost all states of nature in the world right now have been impacted by human civilization already. So as you say, the reason why we have to reintroduce the wolves is because we killed them in the first place, and the relationship between the number of elk and the number of wolves is already out of whack. So we need to be able to manage it. It reminds me a bit, I was talking to a marine biologist, I think I was in Tonga, a little fly-spec South Pacific nation, talking to this guy about whaling. And I was talking about how opposed I am to whaling. I don't think we should be killing whales. And he was like, you know what?

Because we already have killed so many blue whales and humpback whales, all the big, beautiful whales, the minke whales, which are the only whales that are currently being killed by the Japanese and the Norwegians and so on, are crowding out the bigger whales from having their populations be able to come back up. So it actually, from a sustainability standpoint, you may actually want to have some culling of the minke whales, which are the sort of little shitty whales. They're the ugly stepchildren of the whale species because they're eating all the plankton

and they're eating all the stuff that the blue whales and the humpback whales could be using to resurrect their populations. And in Australia, people go crazy sometimes, especially non-Australians, about kangaroo culls. But kangaroos breed like rabbits. They go out there and shoot kangaroos to bring down their population so they don't starve to death sometimes because there are so many of them. I have a good buddy who's a famous hunter, Adam Greentree, in Australia.

Oh, cool. And what he explained to me is what's really crazy is they brought over certain animals. And when they brought over certain animals, then they had to bring over certain animals to deal with these certain animals. And one of the things they brought over is rabbits. And they just fucked up, man. They fucked up. It's just terrible. They have so many rabbits there.

Well, they brought over the foxes to deal with the rabbits. Yeah, right. He said they brought over the foxes to deal with the rabbits. What they didn't anticipate is the foxes killing everything else. Ground nesting birds. So they're destroying these ground nesting birds and everything else. They didn't like have a mission. It's not like they programmed their DNA and say, foxes are only attracted to rabbit right go kill rabbits

No foxes kill everything cool, and they also kill a lot of calves They kill like they did one of the things that foxes love to do and it's a horrible thing They they can smell and they know when a mother is about to give birth to a calf So they wait until it's coming out and they literally pull it out of her vagina and eat it in front of the mother. And that's what they do. They do that with deer. They do that with, you know, anything they can get ahold of. It's just a part of nature. And they're, they're having a real problem with that. The Fox population is just booming. So they've set up these crazy fences. They've hired these contractors to build these enormous fences in Australia to try to keep the

rabbits out. The problem is it takes a while to build a fence. As they're building the fence, the rabbits got in, and they just fucked like rabbits inside the fence, and now the rabbits are over there, too, and they don't know what to do about it. They're trying to figure out how to handle it. It's just, you know, that reminds me. So New Zealand, I'm half New Zealand. My mom's a New Zealander, and I was just back there a few weeks ago. My grandmother passed away.

She was 100, so like, you know. Wow. Congratulations to her. Yeah, exactly. Made it. Yep, that's right. She was 100. So like, you know. Wow. Congratulations to her. Yeah, exactly. Made it. Yep. That's right. Show that mark.

That's the fucking goal. Yeah, that's right. I mean, imagine being 100. Anyway. That's pretty sweet. But one interesting thing about New Zealand in terms of all of that conversation around pests is that it's possibly the only country that actually has the capability and a major movement to do so to take itself back to pre to what the

ecosystem was before humans arrived so they like i don't know if you know what a kiwi is the bird not the fruit right it's a flightless bird that just wanders around like new zealand is just lousy with all of these really really evolutionarily dumb animals like the birds that don't fly which when approached by a predator just stand still in the hope that the predator isn't going to come after them which worked prior to the introduction of western species but now that there are foxes and now they're like all these it's not a great survival tactic to just stand still while a fox is is coming after you so there's this massive movement in new Zealand now, which my uncle is heavily

involved in and the prime minister is heavily involved in, to actually genuinely eradicate all of these small mammals that were brought in by humans when they came. So it's such a green country. They're such environmentalists in New Zealand. They really, really get their hands dirty with all that stuff. They're super, super natural about everything. But it's funny because in the rest of the world, if you're an environmentalist, you're probably an animal lover and you're probably maybe not a bloodthirsty person. But the Kiwis, the New Zealanders, are just so bloodthirsty

because they love killing small mammals. So it's almost like a part of your patriotic duty to just have traps set all over the place. They go out and there's just a bloodied old fox with its head smashed in by a trap. And they're like, oh, good. We did our job for the environment today. It's great. Well, there are hunting magazines in Australia. They're really fucking weird because hunting magazines in America, they show like a deer or an elk, like something you hunt for food. You know, like, look, this guy got an elk. Boy, that's like 500 pounds of meat. That's awesome.

Well, hunting magazines in Australia have those as well, but they also have guys holding up foxes and feral cats. Yeah. And my friend gave me a copy of this magazine, and I was like, do you have fucking dead cats in your magazine? Like kitty cats, like my cat. Like, this is fucked, man. These ones are feral, man.

Yeah, they're feral. They didn't make the cut. They didn't make the cut. They didn't make the team. They're out there fucking trying to hustle. Yeah, they're feral. They didn't make the cut. They didn't make the cut. They didn't make the team. They're out there fucking trying to hustle. Yeah, they're killing all the birds. Killing all those little flightless birds and killing all of the rabbits and killing all of the anything else they can get a hold of.

Yeah. New Zealand also has a lot of invasive large game species. It's one of the big destinations for hunting, like stags. Stag is a type of elk. It's similar to an elk. And it's an enormous, beautiful, majestic creature. But nothing kills them. They don't have any big cats over there. Like we have in America, we have mountain lions, we have bears.

Those all kill the calves. Like the bears kill more than 50%, or as much as 50%, depending on who you ask, of the moose that are born. Like as they're coming out, same with the fox do, they find the mother as it's giving birth. And they literally kill the calf immediately and eat it. It's one of their favorite things to eat. So it keeps the population low. There's sort of a balance to that.

But they don't have that in New Zealand. So in New Zealand, they just have these free-roaming stags that are just massive. And they have no predators. So it's a huge hunting destination. So people fly 16 hours, they go to New Zealand, they hunt all these animals, and you can bring the meat back. So you can bring back hundreds and hundreds of pounds of this insanely delicious stag meat. And it's one of the big hunting destinations in the world.

And you can kind of call it trophy hunting because everybody wants those antlers as well, but the meat is like the best meat in the world. And you can kind of call it trophy hunting because everybody wants those antlers as well. But the meat is like the best meat in the world. It's incredibly delicious and so good for you and so rich in nutrients that it doesn't get like the, you know, the, you know, like shooting lions or. No. And also it's not like stags are in danger. But they have to shoot them. Yeah.

You don't even have to have a license. That's what's fucked. You don't, you don't have to have tags. Like in America, it's hard to pull a tag for an elk like say like New Mexico New Mexico is like prime elk territory They have these enormous elk in New Mexico And they it's just majestic and if you can get lucky and get a New Mexico elk tag for hunters like wow I'm gonna get the get you have to sign up for it you you get it's almost like a there's a lottery and you get Picked say if like a hundred people sign up for it. It's almost like there's a lottery, and you get picked.

Say if like 100 people sign up for tags, maybe like 10 will get a tag. It's like trying to get a ticket to the opening ceremony of the Rio Olympics or something next year. Something like that. You have to apply, and then you've got a one in a thousand shot of being accepted. You could probably, well, and also in the same way, you could probably also get a scalper to sell you a ticket. You could probably scalp a tag. I'm sure that probably happens. Probably a black market for them. I a ticket you could probably scalp a tag i'm sure that probably probably a black market for them yeah i don't even think it's a black market i think it's legal like outfitters get a certain amount of tags and so that they could sell their tags for like 25 grand

or some exorbitant rate and then do it like that 25 grand you could fly first class to new zealand you could screw the tag 16 hours though it's a long flight you could drive to new mexico yeah have your own car, sleep in a tent. My friend from Australia actually came and hunted in New Mexico. He flew all the way from New Mexico, ironically, and hunted in New Mexico, or flew all the way from Australia, hunted in New Mexico, and wrote this big story about it. Cool. So it's complicated.

Speaking of how good the stags taste, I'm always amazed when I go back to New Zealand about how much we're missing out on great produce in America just because of the proliferation of industrialized farming and the dearth of great natural food. I mean, when I was back in New Zealand, I was staying at this little bed and breakfast, had these eggs for breakfast, these just two fried eggs. Like the yolk was bright red and it stood up like more than an inch above the rest of the egg. And the white was just perfect. It was so flavorsome. It tasted like an egg that I haven't tasted in years and years. I was like, where are these come from? She's like, oh, I just popped down the road to where we have a few chuckums and we just picked them up this morning. They are just fresh from the backyard.

I was like, that's what an egg, that's just all I'm doing is eating an actual egg, which I haven't had an actual egg in ages. When are you going back? When are you flying back? Oh, to New York? To New York, yeah. Tonight on a red-eye. Shit.

Why, have you got them? I'm going to give you some eggs. I have 22 chickens. Oh, man. Yeah, I get eggs every day, man. Can I take eggs on the plane? I don't know if they'll let you. Well, so you're not coming from another country.

Let me see if I can show you. I have an image on my Instagram of how incredible the eggs look like. Jamie, see if you can find that. But yeah, my eggs are like a dark, dark orange. Beautiful. And it's because my chickens run around free. That's another thing. When you see like vegetarian-fed chickens, like you see that?

Like grass- fed chickens. You don't want that. Chickens are fucking dinosaurs. All right. They eat everything. They eat a lot of bugs. I fed my chickens a mouse the other day. I didn't want to, but this is a story I've already told in the podcast.

So I'll tell it as briefly as possible because I was very conflicted about this. I came home. I was on the road and my family had found a wounded hawk in our yard. And this goes back to the hierarchy of animals argument. And they found this wounded hawk. Something was wrong with its wing, its broken wing. And it was a juvenile hawk. It was, you know, it could hunt for itself, but it was small.

And so they picked it up and put it in a box, and they wanted to feed it. And they had to get it to the veterinarian on Monday. But they were trying to figure out what wildlife organization saved these hawks. So they said, well, we have to feed this thing. We have to figure out how to feed it. So there was a pet store that's open that sells pinkies, which are baby mice. And so they fed this hawk these baby mice, and it kept it alive over the weekend. They gave it some water with an eyedropper, and then was one pinky left over and my daughter wanted to keep it. Let's keep,

we have to keep. I go, honey, this is not going to live. Like it needs its mother's milk. The mother's not here. It doesn't even, it can't even see. It's eyes, I mean, it's only a few days old and I was amazed it was still alive. And I said to my wife, what are you doing? Like you got, we've got to do something about this. And so the two options were take it to the pet store and give it back to the pet store, which they're going to feed it to snakes. That's what they sell them for. They sell them for food. Or I give it to the chickens.

And so my mind, no, I don't want the chickens to kill it. Like the hierarchy of animals. Like you were just feeding these fucking things to hawks just a day ago. Like what the hell? So, you know, we made an executive decision. I decided I was going to be the one since I'm the killer. I go out and feed it to the chicken. So I opened up the, there's, that's some of my eggs. Delicious. See, look at the color on the yolk there. Like you don't, you just don't get that from the supermarket. No. So look at that goddamn

El Yucateca hot sauce too. I ate that this morning. I had some of those exact same. I have that all the time with Ezekiel bread. I'll have an egg sandwich. So I put the pinky in the chicken. I have this big, huge chicken coop where all 22 of them run around. It's like, I don't know how many hundreds of square feet, but it's an enormous chicken coop. Where do you live? I live out in the burbs. I live with coyotes, deer in my yard fantastic but i put this thing down for a second i mean one second and these chickens dove on it they're murderers little fucking dinosaurs and they were biting each other's face to steal pieces of this this little tiny baby mouse from each other great so goes back to the hierarchy absolutely and when

you said when you said that birds are dinosaurs you made me did you see the story about how the how scientists have now sequenced the genome of woolly mammoths yes which means that within the next 10 or 20 years we're gonna be able to actually recreate woolly mammoths and bring them back should we want to China they're gonna do in China just like they've recreated like Paris and all these weird city Have you seen that no I haven't seen that oh my god They have these ghost towns in China where they've recreated famous European cities, and no one's living in them They I don't know what the fuck they're doing like an Eiffel Tower in China. They have everything they it's it's so bizarre

Look at this like these these are this is a real Recreated city in China. What the hell? And they're ghost towns. There's no one living in them. I mean, I did know about the ghost towns, but I didn't know that they were replicated off other existing cities. China's replica of Paris. Go to that page, Jamie, because it's fucking insane.

And there's a lot of people that aren't aware of that. It's an eerily depressing ghost town that is an exact replica of Paris. Go to full screen, if you would. Even the apartments look like Perusian apartments. that it's an eerily depressing ghost town that is an exact replica of Paris go to full screen if you would even the apartments look like perusian apart they're exact they're exact it's it's insane and look at the background behind the Eiffel Tower you can see like that there are like just regular skyscrapers in like a neighboring city yeah it's really really really strange and they haven't just done it with Paris, but this is abandoned.

This is what's really fucked about it. But why are they abandoned? Why aren't people moving in? I don't think it worked. I think they had an idea to build something and have a bunch of people move in, but everybody's like, what? Can't they just force people to live there? I think they're sort of slowly but surely becoming more capitalistic.

Is that a word? Yeah, but they're no less authoritarian. They're having a big crackdown in China. It's much more authoritarian than it's been in the past couple of decades. Yeah. In terms of like anti-free speech and just forcing people to do whatever Beijing wants them to. Right, you're right. But capitalism as far as their ability to earn money.

Certainly. That's apparently a huge issue that's in China now is the haves and the have-nots and how baller everybody wants to act and behave. And it's become a huge part of their culture, like flossing and having the finest of everything, the finest bag and the finest watch. If you're a CEO of a company, you must have a home that is bigger and more grand than anyone working for you or the other competitive companies that also have CEOs. You have to have the biggest out of all of them. Oh, it's incredibly consumerist, China. And I read an interesting piece about how different Asian cultures spend their money. And one of the points was that Japanese people, Japanese and Chinese cultures are totally different.

that chinese japanese people japanese and chinese cultures like totally different japanese in japan people when people earn money they will usually put it towards making their home as nice as possible so that you go into a japanese home and it's it's beautiful outwardly people aren't so obsessed with like flashy things in china people will live in an absolute shithole if it means that they can afford like the best watch or the best car or like the best handbag so there's there's like a lot more kind of outward consumerist almost like you say capitalist style overt consumption conspicuous consumption rather than just sort of feathering their nest the way that the japanese homebodies do i wonder if that's like a repression thing like a response to repression, sort of like Catholic school girls.

Like Catholic school girls, you know, everybody knows. I dated a girl that was in Catholic school when I was in high school, and she was a freak. She was just such a freak. And it was because everything was like, you're going to hell, sex is bad, and you get that girl alone, and she was just bought bananas just bonkers yeah i think that's what happens with that could be the repression you know it's a preacher's daughter type shit well they're also coming from a much lower also coming from a much lower place so i mean if you know if you're dirt poor and if you've just had uh you know the past couple of decades be your big boom then i suppose you want to show that you're profiting from it more than a country like Japan, which has basically been rich

since the 60s. Yeah, are they like a hybrid of like a communist and a capitalist state right now? They're sort of like... Well, they're not, I don't think it's fair to call them capitalists, because at its best, capitalism should be about the free exchange, about entrepreneurism, right? And the ability of individual human beings to start their own businesses and to trade with one another. That is still not the way that the Chinese economy runs. But I think what you're alluding to is the fact that they are rapaciously pro-money and desperate to enhance their economic growth as quickly as possible. So it's not like they're, you know, Mao Zedong said, you know, when someone said that the reforms that he was bringing in,

or maybe it was Deng Xiaoping, said that the reforms that he was bringing in were kind of capitalist, and shouldn't he have more of an allegiance to communism? He said, you know, black cat, white cat, as long as it catches mice. Ooh, what a clever bastard. Why are Chinese so good at saying things? They're so good at sayings, you know, like Sun Tzu's Art of War. You read that shit today, like, damn it, that dude nailed it.

Right. So, you know, they want to make money. They don't give a toss whether or not you call it capitalism or communism. I think you might describe it as a kind of it's almost like a 19th century mercantilist regime. It's almost like the British Empire was or something where there wasn't a lot of freedom for individuals to prosper off their own bat. And there wasn't a lot of free industries.

So you would have big state-supported industries that, for example, ran like cartels. Only one company was allowed to import cotton into Britain or something like that. And these cozy relationships between mega conglomerates and politicians and the government. I mean, that's kind of what it's like in China. So it used to be that you got assigned an occupation, saying the way that we think of Russia or the way that we think of Cuba, that they tell you, hey, this is what you're going to do. And so you go do this and you get paid X amount by the state And that's all you get but that wasn't good for business like you got to give people an incentive in order to to push harder and to innovate and like you got a they have to Know that that juicy watch is like dangling from that string like a carrot in front of them

That's what makes them push and And that's where they fucked up. And that's where they sort of see, they see that about America. Like, look, these dummies work all day for a Lexus. They just want that car so bad. And they see that billboard as they're driving home in their fucking shitty Hyundai. Not that Hyundais are shitty, by the way. I like Hyundais. They're actually really nice now.

They're great. I was in one this weekend in Brazil. And I was like, these things are like a fucking Mercedes now. You know what? I'm driving a Kia here. I always thought of Kias as being, like, crappy. It's fantastic. No, not bad anymore. I got an upgrade, like, you know, the Avis guy gave me an upgrade,

I don't know, because I'm some elite thing or something, or some credit card or whatever that I've got. And he was like, oh, I've upgraded you to a Kia. I'm like, what, are you kidding me? You upgraded me to a Kia. Oh, thanks a lot, buddy. Some upgrade. Upgrade me to the worst car in the world. No, it's great.

Well, this is the golden age of automotive engineering. Like, all cars are so, they've learned so many lessons from the past few decades that all cars, the United States used to be known for having shit cars. Like, we used to make shitty fucking cars. We made really cool looking cars in the 60s, and then for, like, 20 years, we just shit all over the people that were buying cars. And you had to be, like, a

martyr to buy an American car. Like, a Japanese car was cheaper, it was better engineered, it would break down less, and a lot... I mean, not for most of automotive history. You're talking about, like, starting in the 80s or something. I think it was the 70s. From the 70s on, when the gas crisis hit,

in the 1970s, I believe it was like 73, 74, American muscle cars and American big cars like the Cadillacs, the things that people really loved about American cars, those signified America. When you thought about automobiles, you thought about those big Cadillacs, those smooth, cushy rides. No one was making those in Germany. No one was making those.

That was a true American product. But then gas became insanely expensive. And once the gas crisis hit, America started making four-cylinder Mustangs that looked like shit. And everything just fell apart. And they were really unreliable. Then there was also the issues with unions the issues with automotive unions the union workers wanted to get paid a load of money and i had a buddy who was a union employee in detroit and he told me like how they used to do it

and it was just ridiculous the the demands the unions had and what they were able to achieve in bargaining they would have a job that one person could do easily, eight-hour-a-day job. But two people would take that job. It had to be a two-person job. The union demanded it. So what they would do is one guy would show up for four hours a day, and then he would leave,

and the other guy would show up for four hours a day. So they would both punch in, but one guy would punch in at 9 o'clock, and he would go fuck off for four hours, and then he'd go back, and the other guy would relieve him, and they would just switch off like that. And the car companies would have these massive long-term liabilities, right? Because they'd have pension programs that were defined benefit pensions instead of defined input pensions. I don't know.

That may not be the correct economic way of saying it. But instead of you put into your pension And then when you retire you get back what you put in It's we will pay you X amount for the rest of your life like a form of Social Security I mean, it's even more weird than Social Security It's like a form of guaranteed corporate welfare for all of the unionized employees for the rest of their lives after they retire Yeah, that's a lot for a company to be able to bear. And that's why they moved all their things overseas. I mean, that's what happened.

They started just shipping everything overseas. And then ironically, Japanese companies started shipping their things to America. Like a lot of Hondas are built in America. Like different Japanese companies. I don't know how the fuck it works now. Yeah. One of the biggest Mitsubishi plants in the Asia Pacific was in Australia. Like, you know, why are they doing it in Australia?

I don't know. They must have got some sort of a deal. I don't know how it works. And then South Korea came online and started making good cars like the Hyundais and the Kias. The Hyundais are fantastic. Their luxury one that they make, that one that looks like a Mercedes, they sort of ripped off Mercedes design. Yeah. What's that called?

Equise. No, that's not it. What is it called? It's's not an elantra is it genesis equus or something like that yeah right yeah uh i mean but i've i've heard you talk also about like the the muscle cars of the 50s in terms of like the that are still in cuba and still working and running right i went to cuba over was it this past new year's? No, like a year and a half ago. And man, it's just incredible seeing like cruising around Havana, all these old cool, like they love those cars. Yeah. And they're still going. Yank tanks, they call them. Yeah.

They call them yank tanks because they built these enormous metal fucking buildings that you could drive around in. Those 55 Chevys and things along those lines. Yeah. What is it? What is it? Well, I was going to say, do you think that the American auto industry is ever going to be as innovative as it was back in the 50s and is ever going to rule the coupe?

It's going to be real tough to rule the coupe, but they've made an insane comeback. The new American cars are incredible. I drove one of those Cadillac Escalades. That thing is a marvel of engineering. The entire screen, the entire dashboard is an LCD screen. Huge LCD screen that controls the dashboard. LCD screen that controls the navigation.

Everything is magnetic ride control. So you go over bumps and it's like butter. Incredible engineering. Like the car is beautiful. They ride great. It's an enormous car, but it rides like a small car. When you drive one of those big Cadillac Escalades, that thing feels like you're driving a mid-sized car. This is what it looks like inside.

Wow. They're incredible. That looks gorgeous. They took it up 100 notches. I mean, it's an amazing car. I almost bought one. I came real close, but I went with the Lexus instead. I almost bought one.

I came real close, but I went with the Lexus instead. Because Lexus is, they go, they're based off of the Land Cruiser. And the Land Cruiser is one of the best platforms for driving off-road. They actually have a lift. You press a button, it lifts the car up. So it gives you more ground clearance. On the Lexus or the Land Cruiser? Lexus is the same car as a Land Cruiser.

Amazing. Lexus LS570, or LX570, yeah, is the same exact car as the Toyota Land Cruiser. It's like they call it a Land Cruiser in drag. They just make it a little more fluffy on the inside and a little prettier on the outside. But I'm an idiot. And for some reason, I'm like, well, what if the apocalypse happens and I have to drive on the dirt? I need a fucking car that can drive on the dirt. I one of those dummies I need a gas canister in my car in case there's no fucking gas

you'll be laughing on the other side of your face when it happens when it all goes to shit if a meteor hits I hope it hits me in the head I hope the meteor hits my house you don't even know about it what's that whistling sound boom I don't want to be that guy

that's like the prepper that's right. Yes! I knew it! Right. You know when you're fucking trying to take little catnaps while you're holding a shotgun? Uh-huh. Because you're worried that someone's going to come and steal your canned peaches? Yeah, I don't know.

I don't want to be that guy. No, I don't want to be that guy either. But then I also don't want to be completely unprepared. I don't even have an emergency. I live in Manhattan and I don't even have a little bag with some granola bars in it and some fresh water in case we get hit with a dirty bomb or something. I don't even – I have that stuff. I have that stuff.

I have freeze-dried food. I have hundreds of pounds of frozen meat because I hunt. So I have – if I can keep some sort of power on by generator or solar, I have food for a long time. But that's not why I do it. I do it because that's what I actually do eat. I'm not really prepping for doomsday. In terms of those cars being so sophisticated nowadays, I was interviewing a guy from, I think it was Gorka, who was involved in a test where these hackers encouraged him to get in the car. I think it was a Cadillac, right? And then they hacked into the...

It was a Jeep. Was it? It was recent, right? Really recent? They shut it off. So they, yeah. They even turned it off the side of the road.

That's right. So you could have, like imagine if you have hundreds of thousands of a particular type of car driving around in America and because they're all Wi-Fi enabled and they're all satellite they've got they're all on the satellite and everything you can have hackers or terrorists or just ne'er-do-wells of some kind hack in

and theoretically i mean they can certainly slow down the car they can certainly make the car turn they can certainly screw around with it in some way but if they could make it speed up to 160 miles an hour and then veer sharply to the right, you could kill 100,000 people like that. Like that. Well, that's the argument for Michael Hastings. You know that story, right? Remind me. Michael Hastings was a journalist that was writing all these stories about generals.

Like he had taken down, he was one of the guys that had taken down. Did he do a McChrystal piece? Well, let me find out about it. I remember his name. Yeah. Michael Hastings. Oh. Well, his car, he had actually, was it?

Was that who he had taken down? Yeah, he did the McChrystal piece. Yeah, he did the McChrystal piece. That's right. So he did that, and he was insanely worried about his safety. Yeah. And he was telling people, like, look, if I wind up dead. I didn't kill myself Just know this well he died because his Mercedes was barreling down sunset going 120 miles an hour running to a tree

I remember they were like committed suicide and not only that the engine flew from the wreckage Like there is right there. That's that's the video of the car. And these cars today are so fucking computer controlled. There's so much gadgetry and stuff going on inside of them that there are many that argue that not only has this been possible for a long time, but they've been doing this for a long time. He was a good guy. He was a good reporter. He was with BuzzFeed. Well, there's a lot of people Right. He was a good guy. He was a good reporter. He was with Buzzfeed. Well, there's a lot of people that believe he was murdered. Yup. There's a piece, I've got a piece here in New York Magazine, which I just chatted to Jamie, who killed Michael Hastings.

Reflexively distrustful, eager to make powerful enemies, the young journalist whose Mercedes exploded in Los Angeles one night couldn't possibly have died accidentally, could he? Yeah. There's a lot of people that believe that that... Well, also he had, apparently he had crystal meth in his system. But, here's the thing. A lot of people that work really hard and do long hours and are involved

in journalism, they take Adderall. Okay? And Adderall and crystal meth are fucking kissing cousins. They're almost exactly the same. I'm not saying that he wasn't really on crystal meth and I don't know, I didn't look at the toxicology examination, but they could have been lying about it.

It could have been Adderall. Adderall is so fucking common. There's so many people that take that shit, especially people that are on deadlines and they need energy to push through something. It's pretty common in journalism, yeah. So the idea is, oh, he went back on the drugs. He was on Adderall and he drove into a tree.

Man, or meth and drove into a tree. Not necessarily. Who knows? Who knows? But speaking of Adderall, did you see the story this week man or meth and drove into a tree not not necessarily who knows who knows but speaking of adderall did you see the the story this week that the electronic gamers association is going to start drug testing yes so video gamers are going to be drug tested for i mean i interviewed the d's yeah for for peds like adderall and i mean i did i had a conversation on half post live with the head of the of the that. What is it? Is it the Electronic Gaming Association?

It's something. It's SRB, I think. Yeah. So I had, like, the president of that on or whatever and a bunch of gamers and, like, some sports psychologists and sort of ethicists about this. And, like, it's so weird why we object to doping in the first place. Like, it gets very complicated like i understand oh yeah we're all on cataract right that's right so that's what sparked this whole thing because he made those comments so then they're like oh we got to crack down on it well that's like

cracking down on comics for marijuana if they start drug testing comedy clubs good fucking luck uh you know what greg fitzsimmons said last night on my wonderful podcast that everyone should listen to, WTPLive.com. What is it? WTPLive.com. And isn't there an underscore in somewhere in your Twitter handle? In the Twitter there is. WTP underscore live on Twitter. Who has WTP live on Twitter?

That's a good point. What the fuck? Some asshole who I'm gonna have to beat up. How's that possible? How's that possible? Somebody else has that. Exactly. Why would they? I don't know what it is. Somebody fucked up the underscore. Anyway, if you want to get on our mailing list, you can email info at wtplive.com. And what was Greg saying?

The great Greg Fitzsimmons, my good buddy? The great Greg Fitzsimmons was saying, now I've forgotten what he was saying. What were we just talking about? About Adderall? Drugs, Adderall, comedy clubs, pot. Oh, yeah, that's right. He was saying, like, if you were going to take Lance Armstrong yeah that's right he was saying like if you if you were gonna they want to take lance armstrong's medals away he was like if you took away every award that or prize that you give to people for something that they did while they were on drugs there would be no grammys

it's true right it's true well bill hicks had that great joke about it you know you know that um about drugs about every you know if you want to stop drugs, like take all your albums and fucking throw them away. Yeah. If you hate drugs, all those great songs and Led Zeppelin, The Doors,

all that shit, they were on drugs. They were all on drugs. What do you think about, about doping? Because I think like, so, all right,

Lance Armstrong. I'm glad you brought this up because Jeff Nowitzki, who busted Lance Armstrong, is going to be on my podcast. Brilliant. He was hired by the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

The UFC is trying to clear up a sport, and they're trying to clean it up by hiring the most knowledgeable anti-doping guy ever, the guy who busted the Balco scandal and Lance Armstrong and all that stuff. I had the most fascinating conversation with him in Brazil. We were at a bar, and we were talking for over an hour about all the different methods that they're using now to get away with, uh, that's my man. Great guy. Really enjoy talking to him. Um, and he'll be on soon and really empathetic and sympathetic guy. And it's,

you know, he's not like some evil person is just, you know, like some fucking jack law here to take down the criminals. He's a guy who was sort of seeing both sides of it. And that's one of the reasons why the people cooperated with him to kind of go after Lance Armstrong. Yeah. So people will say like, all right, well, Lance, you know, that was the reason why it's bad. What Lance Armstrong did is bad is because it's unfair. Well, LeBron James's genetics is unfair. Right. reason why it's bet what lance armstrong did is bad is because it's unfair well lebron james's genetics is unfair right i mean the fact that i now feel better after having two cups of coffee

than i did an hour ago is unfair me too yeah i mean i'm all jet lagged and shit but i have a two cups of coffee and four alpha brains and i'm kicking right now how different is is that stuff from adderall i mean isn't it all just degrees? Like, maybe we should just allow doping. I think to a certain extent. I think one of the real problems with Lance Armstrong is that he was suing people that were accurately talking about his drug use. Of course. Because they got busted. And he was going after them and trying to ruin them.

He's a cunt. Absolutely. And a liar. I mean, just a pathological liar and deceiver. But that's less interesting, I think, than the question of whether or not the laws that he broke should be against the rules in the first place. I agree with that. And also, there's also an argument that the Tour de France... Notice how I said France and not France.

I loved that. I was very impressed. I'm very, very good at that. You'll be misspelling tires with a Y pretty soon. They say that that race is so grueling, there's an argument that it's actually healthier to do with drugs That doing it with drugs actually allows your body to recuperate In a way that you'd be breaking it down And you would be susceptible to rhabdomyosis You know, that's that thing that those CrossFit people get

They start pissing, it looks like Diet Coke You know, have you ever seen it? No, I haven't seen it Oh my God. It's awful. When people have a breakdown of their muscle tissue and then your body starts processing it and it comes out in your urine, like ultramarathon runners have it. I have a buddy who runs ultramarathons. And he says when you're done, you pee. It's black like soda or like coffee.

It's awful. And it's just your body. just, your kidneys are malfunctioning. Everything's just shutting down. Yeah, see, I mean, I'm not the fittest guy in the world, and I'm not proud of that. Are you sure? I am not the fittest guy in the world, Joe Rogan. Have you tested yourself?

I have not tested myself. I could be. That's a very good point. I might be. But I think if you're doing a string, and, you know, if you like running marathons, good for you. Good for you, America. But if you're pissing black, your body's telling you that you shouldn't be doing that.

Well, what they're doing is they're just trying to push past all the pain and discomfort and show mental toughness. And that's what's supposed to be inspiring is that, you know, this guy ran, like my buddy Cameron Haynes, he ran 106 miles in 24 hours. My buddy, Cameron Haynes, he ran 106 miles in 24 hours. There's a 24-hour race where you had a one-mile course, and he did it 106 times in 24 hours. And he came in fourth place. He didn't even fucking win. Some dude ran like 120-something miles. It's insane.

That's crazy. How can you come in fourth? I don't know. Animals. That's like, I mean. I think he got beat by a chick, too. I think a chick came in third place. Well, she's definitely on the juice.

You never know. I mean. Might just be angry. Reminds me of like, you know. Running on the fuel of hate. Miranda's the equivalent of 50 Ironman triathlons in 50 days in 50 states to promote fitness among youths. Oh, my God. But is that fitness? No. I mean, are you actually doing good for yourself if you do 50 triathlons in 50 days in 50 states to promote fitness among youths. Oh, my God. But is that fitness?

No. I mean, are you actually doing good for yourself if you do 50 triathlons in 50 days? Well, his body has the capacity to do that kind of work, and my body doesn't. So the argument is that he's definitely more fit. You're better than me. The argument is that his body is more fit than the average person's body, but he's definitely not doing a service like my friend who did it Cameron he did it a couple months ago, and he said he hasn't recovered yet, so he still hasn't recovered He said when he runs like he still runs, but when he runs

He's like he's still feeling he's not back to baseline to where he was his times are off He's exhausted, and he didn't even come first no second his legs his legs swelled up He said almost twice the size they normally are. Ugh. Yeah. Fuck all that. I don't want... Yeah.

I'm happy here. I'm going to open a beer pretty soon. We got whiskey, man. We can just go hard right now. We should do it. Let's spark up a joint and fucking have a drink. I would definitely have a beer. I think...

You want a beer? Yeah. Can I? Jamie, get this man a beer. Get this man a couple of beers. Yeah, great. Look, it's 5.10. I think, you want a beer? Yeah. Jamie, get this man a beer. Get this man a couple of beers. Yeah, great. Look, it's 5.10. I'm Australian. As soon as the clock ticks 5, every Australian has to start

drinking. Yeah, I'll have a beer too as well. That sounds good. It's the law. We got a few good ones. We got that, what is that, like a dark beer? Black Butte Port? Yeah, I love that stuff. Yeah. I think it's, there's a real good argument that coffee is a stimulant and that stimulant helps.

And if that helps, why not Adderall? And also marijuana allows you to see things in a different way. And if you can do that and maybe write something better, marijuana helped you write that thing. That's not exactly just your creativity. It's also the marijuana. Yeah. And the weird thing is when there are drugs that are not actually performance enhancing but are also banned, like marijuana will be banned in sports where it clearly wouldn't actually give you an advantage. Well, like which ones?

I don't know. Any kind of athletic sport is probably not going to be enhanced by marijuana. That's actually where you're wrong. They're actually showing, especially ultra marathon runners, they're showing that marijuana does have a significant impact on ultra marathon runners. Well, what about like hand-eye coordination sports? What about, you know, playing soccer or something? You're probably not going to be better when you're high, are you?

You're wrong about that, too. That's where it's crazy. No, jujitsu is a big one. Jujitsu, it's really, really, really common for jujitsu guys to train on marijuana. Matter of fact, I'm better at jujitsu when I do marijuana than I am when I'm sober. How high can you get and still be better high as fuck really high as fuck to the point where I can't even demonstrate techniques like I try to forget how it works

or how does this fucking work when you're in it see when you're sparring the idea about sparring is okay we got this stuff this is from New Mexico this is really good you can take it yeah I'll try the new one because I know Newcastle and I know Guinness so I'll try the new one because I know Newcastle and I know Guinness. Thanks, Jamie.

But the idea is that it allows you to get to this sort of zen state where you flow. So the things you already know. They think it's not that good for learning stuff, but it's actually... Oh, thank you, sir. What a gentleman. He opens one and hands it to me and then gets his own. What a good man. I do what I was raised right,

Joe. You were, sir. You were. The idea is that it's not good at learning stuff because it just me, and then gets his own. What a good man. I do what I was raised right, Joe. You were, sir. You were. The idea is that it's not good at learning stuff, because it just goes in and out, but the stuff you already know that's in your system, that you already have trained down, it's like a part of your synapses. Yeah, so it's almost muscle memory in a way.

It doesn't require a lot of cognitive effort. Yeah, like tennis players apparently find marijuana helps them significantly as well. Recreational tennis players would tell you when they get really high, they kind of like see the ball better. They can move pool players. It's a huge thing with pool. With pool, you can feel where the ball's going better. The guys

who play, they say it gives them like a 10-20% advantage when they smoke pot. Do you think there are different types of people who respond to the drug differently? Of course. Because I mean, I'm not a huge pot smoker. I'll have it occasionally. I can only have, like, a very small amount just so I get that buzz.

If I have too much, I start to get scattered and, like, paranoid and just, like, I can't focus. I can't do things. I can't be creative. I can't follow the plot of, like, television shows and stuff. Whereas I know I've got tons of friends who are like, well, that doesn't happen to me.

Yeah, well, they probably smoke a lot of pot, too, though. Yeah, that's probably true. The tolerance thing, that's real. And also the acceptance of the experience. I think when you fight the experience, like, oh, fuck, I'm high. And that's where paranoia comes in. And also I think paranoia is also one of the things that marijuana does is sort of it lowers the boundaries that we put up in order to get things done like we have boundaries like there's

sort of blinders that you put on that allow you to get through your job and get in your car and drive home to your Family and not consider the massive amount of variables that the world creates Yeah Or that the world presents and also space the fact that you're on a fucking giant 24,000 mile round ball that's going a thousand miles an hour in a circle and hurling through infinity. When you smoke pot, it sort of unveils all of these possibilities and potentials, and it freaks people out. Well, I don't get freaked out by that. I mean, what you're describing there sounds—

You're not taking enough. You need more, and you will. Well, maybe I just need a better dealer or something. I have some for you. You want to try it? Yeah, sure. I don't want to take it on the plane, though. I don't want to have it now.

Okay. Just smell this and it'll get you high. Jesus Christ. Are you allowed to have this? Is this medicinal or something? Oh, yes. I'm patient. I have issues.

Oh, wow. That smells great. Beautiful, right? It's flowers. What you're talking about there in terms of the doors of perception being kind of shut down during normal behavior strikes me as more of a psychedelic thing. I mean, I've had some of the most insightful experiences of my entire life. I don't do them anymore, but when I was in my late teens and early twenties doing acid or

mushrooms and having that sense of sudden complete awareness that you are on a rock that's going around this star on the outer edge of a spiral arm galaxy in a cosmos that is so vast that you are on a rock that's going around this star on the outer edge of a spiral-armed galaxy in a cosmos that is so vast that you cannot comprehend it, and we have evolved as a species to not comprehend it and to not focus on it all the time, because if we actually thought about where we are and what we're doing and how many things could be thrown at us at any point in time, we'd go crazy.

Freak us the fuck out. You you wouldn't bother working and eating anymore because everything would seem so kind of trivial. Yeah, and it does to many people. I have a lot of friends in the quote-unquote psychedelic community that live their lives around the time that they do psychedelics and then the downtime in between there where they're sort of processing it and gearing up for their next psychedelic trip and for them it's just that's their life it's a part of their life like those those crazy trips and those realizations that is a significant part of their existence and what's makes makes life wonderful to them and then there's people like

you that say hey i did it. I don't do it anymore. Yeah. Well, I mean, I wonder if there are also like non-drug related ways of getting there. Like I know this guy, Gadadara Pandit Dusser, who's a Hindu chaplain. He's the first Hindu chaplain of Columbia University in New York. Yeah. So he, Hinduism as a religion, but a chaplain? Yeah, which I guess is the religious authority at the university? Oh, okay. So, it's a designation by the university?

By the university. Yeah, but he's just a Hindu spiritual teacher in New York. Lovely guy. And he is just, you know, you can, it's like the Dalai Lama or something, right? You can just sense this awareness of him just being on another plane. He is not bothered by the same trivial stuff that distracts us. He is clearly communing with some kind of level of existence that is beyond the material. And I think that that is sort of similar to the mindset that you can get into with psychedelics. Well, I think yoga can take you there. If you do the right kind of yoga, I do like a hot yoga, like a Bikram's type hot yoga, and it's great for the body. It's really, and it's great for relaxation.

Like to me, man, some things happen. Like when I do a lot of yoga, I always talk about, I got in a car accident, somebody rear ended my expensive German sports car. And I, you know, I asked the guy, are you okay? Everything okay? And I wasn't even mad at him. You know, I should have been probably upset that this guy wasn't paying attention or texting or whatever the fuck it was and slammed into my car and cost me a shitload of money. But I wasn't.

And I attribute it to doing a lot of yoga that week. I think it calms you down. I think it, there's something, I mean, there's a reason why those skinny Indian dudes have been doing that shit for thousands of years. I don't think they just been, it's just like a hobby and they just stuck with it. But Kundalini yoga, which I don't practice, but I have friends that do, and you, you want to sit in a certain direction and like, it's all like very ritualistic, but it's also based on the idea of the circadian cycle. You sort of interrupt your sleep cycle and the cycle of the earth. And you, you do these stimulation exercises that supposedly activate your pineal gland,

which is the gland that's been proven to produce dimethyltryptamine, which is the most potent psychedelic drug known to man. And it's related in many ways to psychedelic mushrooms. They're very similar in their chemical composition. And we know that these psychedelic drugs that the brain produces, if you can take them and you extract them from plants, and they exist in thousands of plants, you have these insanely profound visionary experiences. She says that you can achieve these states through meditation and through kundalini yoga. I don't doubt that. I don't doubt it either. I mean, you know, Gadara, he meditates two or three hours a day.

That would probably explain why he is the type of person that he is. And you get into weird places when you do that. Well, I do a lot of meditation in an isolation tank. I have an isolation tank in my basement. I've been so wanting to do that. Dude, I can hook it up. You tell me when. You tell me when.

I'll hook it up. Well, I'm not here. I'm in New York. I'm so connected to this community. Oh, really? The tank community. Yeah. Will you put me in touch with someone in New York City?

There must be good outfits in New York. I'm putting out the word right now, and we will get messages on Twitter. I guarantee you there The tank community, yeah. Will you put me in touch with someone in New York City? 100%. They must be good outfits in New York. I'm putting out the word right now and we will get messages on Twitter. I guarantee there's places in New York. When I started talking about this about 10 years ago, a little bit more, maybe like 2002, there were very few of these. Now they're all over the country. Yeah, I'm dying to do it.

And a lot of it is me making videos and talking about it. I've had one in my basement. When I first started talking about it, the float lab where I got mine from which is in Venice Which is the finest float tanks in the world next to this guy in Austin us also has amazing ones But they were basically like almost on the verge of going out of business now They're opening up new locations great new locations all over the country all over the world in fact a lot of them They have as their option like how did you learn about? Joe Rogan is like one of the options because I talk about it so much.

That's great. I just think it should be something that everybody should do. I think it's an amazing form of meditation. It's amazing relaxation for your body. It's an incredible way for your body to get magnesium because it absorbs it through the skin, the Epsom salts. It's one of the best ways that your body can absorb magnesium, and it's hugely important for muscle recovery and for your health and wellness and relaxation. It's an incredible experience.

I can't wait. All right, you heard it here. If you are a float tank person in New York. We're going to hook it up, 100%. I'm going to put out the word. We'll put it out on Twitter. Bam. Yeah.

Oh, that's my tank? Yeah, that's the tank video that we made. Yeah, they use you. Yeah. They use me. Yeah. Oh, there we go. That's perfect.

I don't even know these people. That's New York? Okay. There you go. Great. Okay, so NewYorkAspire.com, flotation. Hey, how about you reach out to my buddy, Josh Zeps, and hook him up? All right.

If you're listening, reach out to me. Send an email to info at WTPlive.com and my producer will pass it on stalkers are Gonna say yeah, this is the place they're gonna Give you the address but fortunately I have a producer who will go through that it's gonna be plastic all over the floor And you know some fucking Dexter house When we were talking about the about the size of the cosmos and like how mind-blowing all of that is it reminded me Did you see about this Russian billionaire who has just invested $100 million in the search for alien? Yeah.

Not to talk, to listen. Yeah. To listen in. He just needs mushrooms. You can meet aliens in an hour. An hour and 20 minutes, you could be there. So he's got like Stephen Hawking and all these amazing people on board. It's the biggest injection of cash into the search for extraterrestrial intelligence

in history. I think a guy like Hawking is just like, okay, look, if you want to throw some money at science, I mean, that's really what it is. Yeah, sure. It's just science. You want innovation. It's great. It's a great thing. I personally think that there's two very distinct possibilities.

I mean, there's many, but there's two that I consider all the time. One of them is that this is it. That what we have achieved is exceedingly rare, incredibly rare. And that if the universe is 13.7 billion years old or whatever the fuck it is, when it started then, it's entirely possible that it took this long for something to come out of it like us. And that we are at the front of the line of the the idea of conscious life we're the only thing that we know of on this whole planet that's not just conscious but conscious and manipulates its environment to the point where we can change the weather we can do all kinds of

crazy shit like send videos all to australia instantaneously i mean if you're in australia and i'm here you can send me a text message with a photograph of you smiling and i'll get it in a couple of seconds. Oh, we could be having the same conversation we're having right now, couldn't we, on Skype? Yeah, through Skype. Yeah, really, really clearly. And that's just madness. That's madness.

Yeah. I think it is entirely possible that we are as advanced, as intelligent life has ever gotten ever in the entire universe. And that all of our searching and longing is really just some alpha chimpanzee thing where we're always looking for the daddy. You know, it might be a god or it might be a king or it might be a guru or something. We're always looking for someone to show us the way because we know we don't know the way. It's possible.

It's entirely possible that that's the case. And you're right that life got started here pretty much as quickly as it could. And it evolved into our sort of level of much as quickly as it could and it evolved into our sort of level of consciousness as quickly as you would expect it to given natural selection so it's true that we could be at the beginning you know we could be sort of the the the first intelligent conscious species in the cosmos but the fact that life got kicked off so quickly and the fact that we emerged so comparatively quickly might also suggest that it's woven into the kind of fabric of the cosmos. Because if it was a really, really, really, really, really rare thing, then you would have expected the Earth to be a dead gaseous ball for billions of years, many, many more billions of years than it was. So I'm not convinced by that. And I think also you might be underestimating

just how mind-bogglingly huge the cosmos is and how little access to it we have. Like, the fact that we haven't found anything yet doesn't mean anything. Doesn't mean anything. I mean, there are 100 billion stars just in our galaxy. So there are 100 billion suns just in our galaxy, and there are billions of galaxies in the universe.

Every single star that we see in the night sky is inside our galaxy. And, of course, that's only a tiny, tiny, tiny fraction of our little corner of that galaxy. And then beyond that galaxy, there are innumerable other galaxies. Like the idea that we are, as Carl Sagan said, you know, the great scientist, like if we're the only intelligent life in the cosmos, that is an awfully large backdrop. Like, why is it all there? No one's everything that has happened on this planet in the exact same order up to me touching that microphone right

there has happened exactly down to the nanosecond, an infinite number of times throughout space. Like that's how big the universe is but it doesn't mean that someone's ahead of us it doesn't mean that it doesn't mean that but it does mean that intelligent life is very likely scattered throughout the entire cosmos but it doesn't necessarily mean that intelligent life has reached a place past where we are right now it doesn't necessarily mean that, but I think that you would be well advised to believe that it probably has, just because the median is usually a better assumption than the extremes, right?

So, I mean, the likelihood is that we're not at either of the very, very extremes, that we're neither the very first nor the very last civilization. Just statistically, if you were just tossing a coin, you would expect our civilization to just happen to be clustered somewhere on a bell curve in roughly the middle. That's just a less anomalous statistical thing to have happened. Yeah, most certainly. I mean, I'm definitely not decided on it.

I think it's just a possibility. It's a possibility that this is it, that this is about as smart as anything has ever gotten ever in the entire existence of the universe. Depressing, isn't it? Yeah, so fucking depressing. Or not, or pretty fucking's ever gotten ever in the entire existence of the universe depressing isn't it that's depressing or not or pretty fucking cool like we're the ballers of the universe yeah maybe we figured it out this uh this system that they're going to put up with this russian billionaire's money uh i was looking at the at exactly what it's going to be able to do so astronomers are going to be able to examine 1000 star systems for any sign of radars being used because apparently radar is a good way of telling that someone is there,

because they've invented it. And it's going to be able to detect a laser with the output of an ordinary 100-watt light bulb from 23,000 billion miles away. Wow. That's the distance of the nearest stars, 23 trillion miles away. They'll be able to spot a laser with the wattage of an ordinary household bulb. What I was going to say about the other possibility

is the other possibility is what I believe we're heading towards right now, is that we're heading towards a virtual universe and that we're creating something with the possibility of artificial intelligence and the possibility of living inside of some artificial reality that they've created that your brain interfaces with, that there's going to be no need for traveling anywhere or no need even for the type of carbon-based life civilization that we currently enjoy and that it won't exist anymore and that we're going to create artificial life and that the artificial life is the next stage of evolution. And what we are is like some sort of a cosmic caterpillar that's going to become a butterfly. And that's one of the reasons why we're so obsessed with, you know, shiny brand new laptops

and innovation and beautiful materialistic items is that that is the mechanism and the fuel behind creating those things. Our obsession with these newer, better, greater things is fueling the creation of these newer, better, greater things. And they're ultimately going to lead to artificial intelligence. And that's what Elon Musk is terrified of. I was just about to say, look at what Elon Musk and also Stephen Hawking are saying about artificial intelligence. And Sam Harris, who I know is a friend of yours, and I'm a huge fan of Sam's, and I've spoken to him on HuffPost Live about this, the idea that we are really

not understanding the potential of creating artificially intelligent systems that self-improve in a way that they end up getting sort of exponentially more self-aware until they're actually outsmarting us and they have, in every meaningful sense, a sense of their own existence in the same way that we might, in the same way that non, that biological intelligence does. That is going to be a game changer, the likes of which, as you say, I mean, maybe biology just gets extinguished or maybe we, maybe we end up, I don't know. It's like, you know, I don't, I don't, I'm kind of agnostic on the, on the question of whether or not we could ever upload our consciousness into a silicon-based form.

I'm too dumb for that. I'm too dumb to make that up. You know, when people start going to that argument, I just go, ooh. The Ray Kurzweil kind of singularity thing. I had a chance to talk to him for a long, I did an interview with him for SyFy. I sat down with him, just me and him, chatting about this for about an hour and a half. At the end of it, I was fairly convinced that it's inevitable. Fairly convinced that it's like, if you look at like

the invention of the wheel, and then you look at the Cadillac that we just showed today, and or the, for Elon Musk's sake, the Tesla, this new insane Tesla that he has, it's all electric, goes zero to 60 in less than three seconds. Yes. Fucking

insane, these things that we've created. And these are just the beginning. We're not going to stop there. We're not going to go, yeah, I think zero to 60 in three seconds. That's good. Let's stop right there. We're not going to stop. But isn't there a...

He's making a philosophical case as well. And this is why I say I'm agnostic about it. Because, I mean, I did philosophy at university. And one of the big thorny questions in philosophy of mind is whether or not it's necessary to have the biological substructure of a of a brain in order to have a mind right could you disentangle those two things could the experience of me feeling like myself and feeling like i'm alive be disentangled from the biological reality of my physiology and the gray stuff in between my ears. Kurzweil's assumption, which he's basically just taking on

faith, is yes, you could disentangle that. If you could replicate all of the data that's whirring around in my head right now, as I'm saying these words, as I'm sitting here talking to you, if you could take all of the things that are going on, all those electrical impulses, all of those neurons, all of those synapses, and you could take all the things that are going on, all those electrical impulses, all of those neurons, all of those synapses, and you could replicate that in a computer, then that computer would be me. And it would not just seem like me, it would feel like me.

Like I would be, I could actually be uploaded to a computer and you could kill my body, and I would be existing in some really meaningful sense. I would be immortal. I would be immortal. I think we're entirely too attached to the idea of me or of us. I think we're entirely too attached to the idea of this even being a good structure.

I think we are so entangled with our chimpanzee DNA. We're so entangled with our monkey needs that we think that I would want to be downloaded into a computer and that computer would be me and I would share all my hopes and fears and dreams. Why the fuck would you want those? Are we going to have like YouTube haters that are in our artificial world that we created? Are we going to recreate them in the exact same way? Oh God, imagine the trolls when you're actually inside the computer. You're inside the matrix. That's what I'm saying. Like, haters and jealousy and anger and misplaced fear and homophobia and the hatred of, you know, xenophobia.

All these different bizarre, angry things that we have that make up a human being. angry things that we have that make up a human being. All these nationalism, all these different strange things that we've sort of just become inexorably attached to in our cultures that we're trying to eradicate, but we never seem to quite do. All of those things are a part of the monkey body, right? But that monkey body is what we're trying to save. We're trying to save that and download it into consciousness. What if we can purify consciousness and remove it from emotion, remove it from biological need and even sex? You know, one of the things that freaks me out about aliens, not that I believe in aliens, but the iconic image of the alien is always sexless. They're smooth, they have smooth genitals, they have no muscle,

they're totally undefined. You can't tell what's a male or a female, and they have these enormous heads. Is it possible that we have this iconic image because we kind of know and understand that ultimately the only way we're going to transcend this monkey body is to move past all of the needs that we've sort of automatically associated with being alive. Being alive means, you know, you have to find food. I've got to be a prepper. sort of automatically associated with being alive. Being alive means, you know, you have to, I've got to find food, I've got to be a prepper, I've got to make sure that I have canned foods and water. What if it goes down? It's all stay alive stuff.

It's all live. It's all about the monkey body. And that's why people want to be sexy. I've got to get my lips done. They're too skinny. Nobody wants to fuck. You know, all that crazy shit that people have in their brain is a lot of it is monkey body leftover stuff well I think that's an interesting theory about why the alien why the model of the cliched alien is like that like I'm more in

other words a Less advanced conception of humans is like hairier Racism also plays into this right darker skinned, you, with features that are more kind of monkey-like or something. And then the more advanced conceptions of civilization is white man with his tools and everything. If you extend that, if you extrapolate from that, then yeah, more hairless, I suppose, less prone to sex, less driven by animal desire. It's also, it's a huge factor in religion, I think,

where religions are so hung up about sex because it's what makes us animals. And they don't want to think of us as animals. They want to think of us as being divine. We are touched by the spark of God in a way that no other animal is, according to religion. So you've got to quash sex and gluttony because those are reminders that we're just primates.

But meanwhile, the depictions of God, he's always ripped. He's always ripped and he's always wearing a robe because he's modest. He's reaching over and touching people with his fingers and he's got giant traps. He looks great. Yeah, it's true. God looks awesome. So does his son. His son's looking great.

On the cross, beaten to death and he's got abs. And really white for a guy who was living in the Middle East 2,000 years ago. Skin of bronze, hair of wool. Yeah, sure. Bullshit. The other possibility. Fear of a black planet.

Chuck D was right. There you go. Look at that. Look at God. Beautiful. The dude on the left got robbed. That's what I'm saying. It's just not even, I mean, why even draw it?

You might as well just make him an alien with no genitals. People back then just had littler dicks. Is that possible? It's possible, but I've always just assumed that it's the modesty of the artist. Like, it'd kind of change the frame of the picture of God reaching down and touching man if man had a massive schlong just hanging down his leg. Yeah, it would be distracting if you're just giant John Holmes hog. But look how big the muscles are in these guys.

Like, these guys have to be fucking cross-fitting all day as well as being divine. I mean, that guy on the left is doing a lot of fucking weightlifting. That is not a regular body. That's a body of someone who's picking up heavy shit all day long. But he's got a skinny neck. I bet he's never been choked. Maybe he's a neck. That's not a guy who knows how to get out of a choke. No.

Little dick, skinny neck, but giant fucking biceps. Look at his forearms. Yeah, he does a lot of weightlifting. For sure. On Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. And look at the bizarre image of God being supported by cherubs. Mm-hmm.

That's how weird people are. Religionists. Can't see God's dick, though. Notice that? Nope. He's got a robe on. That other dummy. Yeah.

Showing his little tiny dick. God looks kind of... I haven't really noticed this before, but God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel looks a bit like Meryl Streep. Like, Meryl Streep with a beard, because I think he's kind of got breasts and he's wearing like a nice white robe he looks like an old American actor and I can't remember his

fucking name Charlton Heston? A little maybe maybe? Anyway on the uh just getting back to that one girl though hold on go back to that picture look at the one that's in the crook of his elbow she looks like a fucking hater she's a hater she doesn't like that dude no that dude's getting all the love she's like fuck that dude ain't shit look at his little dick look at her face she's like she's not filled with love she's like whatever

uh on the on that question of of the evolution of humans creating, like maybe computers and artificial intelligence are the next stage and maybe the universe is full of artificial intelligence that isn't sending out the signals that we're looking for when we're looking for biological intelligence, right? Maybe they don't need radars anymore. They don't need to be losing lasers because they're all in computers. The other possibility, which is similar to that and which is very depressing and which I don't particularly, destructive capacity that we now have with nuclear weapons and with coal fired power plants and with all of our ability.

We're so successful as a species that we're successful enough to destroy ourselves of species fall into as they try to pass through the crucible of going from being ordinary animals to hyper intelligent uh self-aware animals but then on the way they invent tools that they aren't yet mature enough to be able to handle properly and they end up wiping themselves out well it's certainly possible and if we look at the universe as being infinite the infinite possibilities exist as well. So probably all the pitfalls, like all the things that we avoided, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, maybe they didn't avoid, and maybe they were wiped out, and maybe they did toxify their atmosphere to the point where they didn't recover for hundreds of thousands of years,

and mutants and freaks barely made it by running from hybrid wolves that have fucking glowing red eyes. Who knows what has been done? Right. So what kind of genetic engineering has been done on these planets? It's been run amok and fucked everything up. What version of the movie are we in? What version of what we've done in Australia with foxes and rabbits is out of control.

Nature experiments that have really gone all fucked up. Wolves in Idaho that are out of control. How much of that has been done in these other places as well as genetically modifying things to the point where it doesn't work anymore? And that's also possible. Absolutely. And what's sort of staggering to me is getting an insight into how recently we have invented all of this stuff and changed the world like this. Like I was in Athens during the Greek financial crisis just in the week after they had the big no vote.

It was the week when it really looked like Greece was going to crash out of the Eurozone about, what, four or five weeks ago. And I went to the Acropolis and like to the Parthenon because, you know, that's what you do. And I was standing there in the museum like looking at all this stuff and I was struck not so much by how incredibly ancient it is like this is the birthplace of civilization right I mean this is where it all began this is the birthplace of western civilization basically but I was amazed at how actually comparatively

recent that is like I was saying earlier that my grandmother just died she was 100 I can conceive of her lifetime, right? I knew her, like, that's a long lifetime, but it's not inconceivably long as a period of time. She was born before the Roaring Twenties. Think of that. Yeah. She was born in 1915. She was born during the Gallipoli campaign

in the First World War. Wow. But, so, anyway, that's a span of time that I can wrap my head around. You have 30 or 40 of those, and you're back at the Acropolis, right? Amazing. You're back at the birthplace of Western civilization. That is not a number that's like the 100 billion stars in the galaxy that I can't even begin to wrap my head around.

It's not a number like the billions of years that the Earth is old that I can't wrap my head around. That's a very measurable, understandable thing. The birth of Western civilization is just 30 or 40 of my grandmothers long and then think about the fact that when she was born there were no nuclear weapons there was no nuclear power we hadn't discovered any of that stuff right this is so recent we are we have the privilege of being the generation of the couple of generations that that are witnessing the dawn of the beginning of something extraordinarily new. A, the capacity to destroy ourselves using nukes and environmental degradation, and B, the rise of artificial intelligence and computing and globalization.

You look at that, the Acropolis and the Parthenon, what's crazy, the Acropolis is the building, right? The Parthenon is what it's built on? The Acropolis is the whole thing, I think, and I think the Parthenon is the building. Am I getting that back to front? I'm not sure. But the bottom line is, when you talk to Greek scholars, and they talk about the construction of the building on top,

it was built on something that was even more ancient. They don't exactly know who built. They don't exactly know who built the platform that fucker was put on and then you go back to crazy things like Baalbeck and Lebanon well they have these enormous stone things that thousands and thousands and thousands of tons and they're like who the fuck bill how they build these what they do with these where these things fucking come from and they really don't know and that brings up the possibility that we haven't had a linear progression from ape man to this.

But we've had these ups and downs and we've been partially wiped out. Like there is a series of super volcanoes all over the world. And one big one being in Yellowstone that everyone's terrified of. But there's one of them, I believe, in Indonesia that there's a certain theory that links to a massive eruption of this super volcano 70,000 years ago that is the reason why we all share this so little genetic diversity. And they believe that we might have been down to a few thousand people somewhere around 70,000 years ago. We were down to, I mean, scientists, evolutionary biologists can tell that we were down to, I don't know if it's as low as that, but certainly, I mean, it was tens of thousands of people. And I don't know when that was, but I remember you mentioned that super volcano last time

I was on this show. And then I went and Googled it and it was like, probably didn't happen. Like most of the expert sites that I went and looked at was like, this is kind of one of those sort of conspiracy theory things that we don't actually think happened. But whether or not it was that particular Indonesian super volcano or not, we do know that there have been periods where humankind has almost gone extinct. And we've just gotten through that. Well, human beings have been in this form for who knows how long you know like a million Years, whatever it's been There without a doubt has been an eruption of Yellowstone in that time period so if there were human beings in North America

600,000 years ago those fuckers were cooked yeah, and we're due We're due every six to eight hundred thousand years Yellowstone blows, and it is a continent killer. It will fuck up everything in the continent and cause some sort of a nuclear winter effect to a vast majority of the world, except maybe like Australia. I'm glad I've got an Australian passport. I was going to say. You might have to fucking escape back to the homeland. Move to New Zealand.

Go and kill some foxes. That might be the spot. That might be the spot. Because there's a real, but then you have to like deal with what they're doing to Kim.com. That poor bastard. Who? Kim.com, that poor bastard. Who? Kim.com. You don't know what's going on with him with that mega upload site?

Oh, yeah, right. The government's trying to extradite him to a country that he's not even from? Yeah. What are you showing? Those super volcanoes? Yeah, so Taupo is an amazing... So what we're looking at here for people who are listening to the podcast is Yellowstone and then Toba, which looks like it's in Indonesia, and Taupo, which was a mega volcano.

So, my uncle actually is like a Maori. I have Maori on my side. Yeah. Wow, that's cool. You ever thought about getting those crazy face tattoos? I have a tattoo on my back, which is a Maori symbol. Yeah. So, Taupo is an old extinct volcano.

When it blew, there were writings of people in Italy talking about how the sunset is, how, like, the sky is red at sunset, and that's because of the ash from a volcano on the opposite side of the world. And there's currently a crater that is so big, like, it's a lake that you can... I mean, it's a huge lake, huge lake, and that whole thing was just a stream of lava just exploding.

Like, you stand on the side of the lake and you're like, I can't even imagine what kind of Armageddon that must have been back when it was active. Well, our stability, the stability that we've enjoyed over the past, you know, several thousand years that people have written about. I mean, other than what was the one that happened in Rome? Or what was the one? Was it? Vesuvius. Pompeii. Pompeii.

Yeah, the Pompeii one, which was fairly famous because we've actually found people that were killed and we could see their bodies. And there's an exhibit somewhere where they have the bodies of the people from Pompeii, the preserved ones on display somewhere which is supposed to be really freaky but that this is that was a main a minor one in comparison to yellowstone they didn't even there it is those are the people that were fucking frozen in time and cooked and killed by this it's just insane those are actual real human beings i mean it looks like some claymation animated thing.

It's incredible. But what they believe is that, well, they didn't even know. Here's another thing. They didn't even know about Yellowstone until they started looking at it from satellites. They had no idea it was a caldera volcano. They knew that there was some sort of thermal activity because of Old Faithful. They knew there was some lava going on under there, but they didn't know how big the thing was until they started looking at it with satellite imagery.

And then they realized, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. This thing is like 600 kilometers wide. And what it is is a mountain that explodes and leaves this crater. And that's what a caldera is. It reaches this explosion and the whole mountain flies, like a 300 mile wide mountain, shoots lava

up into the sky and just kills everything. Everything, anywhere on the west coast, all this is dead. Isn't it funny how we have a kind of, there's a sort of cognitive dissonance. It comes back to what we were talking about, about like the doors of perception and how our brains are forced by evolution to keep us in a very narrow mindset where we don't think about the reality of what's going on around us and how vast everything is and so on. Because I think sometimes about like my friends who live in San Francisco. San Francisco is going to be devastated by a massive earthquake. It's just going to happen. How about Los Angeles? It's only a question of when.

There's two. Yeah, LA. I mean, yes, at some point. You don't mind it. You don't mind if San Francisco goes. Look at you. I mean, if LA goes. No, no, I just think.

If San Francisco goes, this is going to be awful. But, oh, yeah, LA is going to go, too. LA is big. LA sucks. No, LA is great. You know what I'm saying. That's what I'm saying. You don't like us as much.

San Francisco is more likely to be more devastated. More likable. More likable. They make more tech stuff. I feel like I'm having words put in my mouth here, Joe. I don't know. Am I paranoid? Am I just being paranoid?

Or are you? How about the story that was written in New York? That's what I felt like you were saying. But, you know, we know this is going to happen, and we all go about our daily lives, and we don't pay any attention to it because we couldn't. Because we would be paralyzed if we kept thinking, is it going to be today? Is it going to be today? Then we'd just be, I mean, that's OCD, right? So we're forced to go through life not actually reckoning with the fact that that's going to happen, and Yellowstone's going to happen, and all kinds of stuff stuff is going to go down and there's not a thing we can do about it.

And then there's asteroids. Asteroidal impacts are the big one. All the evidence they're finding now about all the different impact craters that they have ignored or not been aware of until recently, the discovery of what they call, I think it's called tritonite. It's nuclear glass that exists on nuclear test sites and also meteor impacts that they've founded all throughout Asia and all throughout parts of Europe from 12,000 years ago. And they think that that coincided with the end of the ice age might have been instigated by massive asteroids and impacts all over the world, like 12,000 years ago. Amazing.

That might have been why there is this really old structures that are sort of unexplained and this sort of resurgence of civilization somewhere around the 10,000 year mark. We have this big downfall. People start figuring things out again. Just like if you go back 2,000 years from you know you're talking about greece you're talking about ancient rome and then two thousand years later you have new york city right well two thousand years after this meteorol meteor i've seen terrible words i'm using meteorological i'm trying to i'm trying to say like a weather reporter it's all right you're jet lagging a

long flight yes asteroidal and i'm drinking now and you've had weather reporter. It's all right. You're jet lagged. You've been on a long flight. Asteroidal. And I'm drinking now. And you've had a half beer. That's all I need. What is this? Fucking Nuevo. It's nice. New Mexican beer. Yeah, it's good.

They think that it's very possible that civilization has experienced many of these. That's what Graham Hancock has based like a tremendous amount of his work on. I don't know if you're aware of him, but he's a good friend and he wrote a book called Fingerprints of the Gods that's based on exactly that. All this evidence that shows that civilization has experienced these peaks and valleys and that things have happened, that there's been some resets and it hasn't been as simple as people figured out fire, then they figured out the wheel and here we are today in New York City. I don't know if I mentioned it last time I was on the podcast or not, but there's an amazing kind of study. And there's an amazing article about this sort of research, which is if society collapses and we still have nuclear waste in the ground, how do we mark our nuclear waste sites such that a future civilization who has got who's

completely from us doesn't speak our language has no more records of anything that went on so that they don't go and hurt themselves by digging it up and so there's the actual there are semioticians and like all these people who study the the nature of symbols and of conscious interpretation of the ways that we communicate and everything, who have got these crazy ideas, like putting up these big kind of structures that look like big, scary angled poles that get deeper and deeper and thicker and thicker as you get towards the site of where the nuclear waste is being stored to try to indicate to future intelligent civilizations not to go in there. But then the conclusion that they always reach is, they're just going to think, I mean, they're going to be interested in it. They're going to want to explore it, right? It's like, even if they understood that we're saying that there is this

invisible radioactive stuff, if they haven't yet devised the concept of nuclear power, then they're just going to treat it the way that we treat the warnings on the pyramids saying, don't go into the mummies because you'll this you know you'll get attacked by spirits we're like oh that was a nice fun thing for you to say you old-fashioned people in ancient civilizations but we're going to go in and open the tomb anyway and so the conclusion was don't do anything just don't mark it at all don't try to communicate it because human curiosity is always going to be more not even human curiosity maybe like whatever this future species is their curiosity is going to be more powerful than any warning that we could possibly give them. Because this stuff lasts for tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of years.

Yeah, we really fucked up with that whole nuclear power thing. And I was trying to explain to someone who was, he's a pretty staunch conservative, and he was saying how clean nuclear power is relatively. And I said, do you understand that nuclear power has only been around since the 1940s and we already in this brief moment of time we already have three spots that we can never go to.

They're done. Like Chernobyl is done. That spot is fucked. And Fukushima is fucked. That spot is fucked. There was the other one, the Mile Island, Two Mile Island, whatever the fuck it is. Three Mile Island. Three Mile Island, whatever it was.

I don't think that's nearly as bad. Mildly fucked. Yeah. But that's still three spots that they fucked up already. Never to, not even to mention all the ones that are based in the same technology that Fukushima was, where they can't really shut them down. They have these archaic fucking nuclear power plants that they built when they didn't really shut them down. They have these archaic fucking nuclear power plants that they built when they didn't really understand nuclear power plants.

Have you heard of pebble shell reactors or something like that? Pebble, hang on, let me see if I can find... Because there is apparently a type of reactor now where if anything goes wrong, it automatically self-shuts down. Like, it's a physiological thing where they're having... Oh, it's called a pebble bed reactor a graphite moderated gas cooled nuclear reactor um it's so apparently i believe scientists when they say that there are new types of reactors that are basically meltdown proof my concern is i just think it's so woefully irresponsible

to do something that you know produces waste that's incredibly deadly, that's going to last for thousands and thousands of times longer than any of us or any of our children or any of our grandchildren or great-grandchildren are going to be around, and just leave it up to other people to deal with. And I hear conservatives or pro-nuclear people say, well, we'll figure it out eventually. Okay, great. Let's not use nuclear power until we figure it out then. Because otherwise, you're fucking with other people's lives. People don't think like that, though. They think short term, and they just try to make as much money as possible. That's Chernobyl today.

There's a great documentary that I watched on a plane back from Brazil called The Merchants of Doubt. It was really... Have you seen it? Yes. Remind me what it is, because I think I interviewed the filmmakers. Fucking fascinating. It is about fake experts that essentially get hired by oil companies, tobacco companies, to poo-poo the concerns and debate them ferociously.

The concerns about global warming, concerns they used to do, the concerns about tobacco being, or nicotine being addictive and causing cancer. And this guy shows that when there's money involved, what they do is they hire all these people to fuck with the argument. And they write op-ed columns in all these different newspapers all throughout the country. And they constantly hammer so that your grandfather reads it and goes, I've read a thing today that said 31,000 scientists have said that global warming is not real. You know who was amongst those 31,000 scientists?

Michael J. Fox. That was one of the names. They're fake. They're fake names. Right. And they have Michael Shermer on who's kind of explaining that he's great. At one point in time, he thought that it was, that it was nonsense, that global warming was nonsense.

And then he started delving into the actual data, the actual scientific papers, and then he realized, well, there's, not only is there a consensus that man-made global warming is a real thing, but there are no peer-reviewed studies, no scientific papers that indicate the opposite. None. Zero zilch. I interviewed the director of that movie on Half Post Live, so I did see the movie on a screener beforehand. And the amazing thing to me was that it's not just the same tactics that are being used in sowing doubt about climate change as were used in sowing doubt about all kinds of other different things, you know, starting with asbestos, all of this sort of stuff.

It's the same human beings. Yes, yes. These are professional. Thatos, all of this sort of stuff. It's the same human beings. Yes. Yes. It's this, these are professional. That's why it's called merchants of doubt. These are the same human beings who went in and fought for the tobacco lobby, who then went and fought for the asbestos industry, who are now fighting for the fossil fuel companies, exactly the same human beings using exactly the same playbook, using exactly the same

tactics. And those, those goddamn television shows where they have the split screen, where they have the host, and then they have the two experts debated out. And then you have the one person who's like Bill Nye, who's like sort of a reasonable scientist that's saying things that people can't totally understand because they're a little bit too technical. And then you have this shouting guy who's like fact 23 000 scientists from 40 countries have said global warming's not real fact the united states and blah and they they have this playbook that they use they have this style of communicating in these short bursts because those shows only last you have seven minutes you have seven minutes there's three people they're all talking, it's so hard

to get a point across. It's one of the reasons why I think it's one of the shittiest ways to discuss a subject. Totally. Those shows suck. This is one of the things that I really spend a lot of time trying to do in my job, which is overturn this phony sense of

balance that is required. So every journalist and every media person tries to be anyone who's good, has instilled in them a sense that they're supposed to be fair, right? But that often gets misallocated, especially at places like CNN, for example, where they're trying to be genuinely even-handed. But what they think that means is giving a microphone to the two people at either side of any particular debate. Now, there are some debates where one side is right and one side is wrong, right? Or there's a 98% chance that one side is right and a 2% chance that the other side

is right. When you try to be balanced by just sitting in the middle and trying to moderate a debate between those two people, you're actually not being unbiased at all. You're being biased towards falsehood instead of towards truth. So whenever I have a weekly segment about science news called the Nerds Forum on HuffPost Live, and I always try to explain to people and express, look, this is the likelihood that this thing is actually true, so let's talk about the science

and let's not get caught up in this trap of false equivalencies. It's like where, you know, did you say Colbert did a bit about, no, it wasn't Colbert, it was John Oliver, did a bit. Same guy, isn't it the same guy? Isn't it the same guy? John Oliver is a different guy. Does he have an English accent? He has an English accent.

I thought it was a new character that Colbert was doing. Stephen Colbert is a human being. Well, no, he's not. He is now. Not anymore. He's going to host a late show. Oh, right. Colbert Report is no more.

Carry on. So John Oliver did this bit where he was like, instead of having a pro-climate change person and an anti-climate change person uh we think that we should actually reflect the proportions accurately since 99 of climate scientists believe in it they have one so he brings out 99 people come on set and they're all just shouting all like shouting pro the pro-climate change position and there's this one other guy who's shouting the anti-climate change position he's like this is what it actually is like Like, it's not one for one. It's 99 for one. And that's how the media should portray it.

That's hilarious. That's a great idea, by the way. That really is a great idea. Yeah, I think that those shows are horrible because this is how a lot of people get their information. And they call it the news in quotes, but it's not really the news. It's an entertainment show and it's an entertainment show that relies on commercials. So there's nuanced perspectives and arguments that are extremely complex. Like we spent all this time talking about the conservation for hunting argument and the artificial intelligence argument, the argument about pursuing it. Intelligence argument the argument the argument about pursuing it all these things are real complex

nuanced issues that require long sort of detailed examinations of all the possibilities and not from a biased perspective But from as objective as is humanly possible especially when there's real ramifications things like global warming or Nuclear energy or things that really are going to fuck up our generation and generations to come like hundreds of thousands of years from now. Those don't get addressed when you have seven minutes

and you have a guy who's being paid by these think tanks. That's what's crazy about this Merchants of Doubt documentary is it shows that there's these people that are paid by think tanks. And these think tanks, what they really are, is it shows that there's these people that are paid by think tanks. And these think tanks, what they really are, is they're these fake organizations that are propped up by companies that are selling whatever the fuck they would benefit from this being

passed or the concerns being alleviated. One of them being this doctor who was paid by this think tank to go and and preach about these flame retardant fabrics and and materials they're using to make furniture and that he would say this story about a woman who left a candle in the baby's was a cigarette wasn't it a candle she said a candle she left it there was a cigarette story too but there's a woman left a candle in her baby's crib and that the the baby uh because the the pillow was flame retard leaves a candle in a baby's crib anyway exactly it wasn't a real story it was a lie and this guy had told not that story not just once but several times over a long period of time over many years and these people started

investigating the merchants of doubt go watch the documentary it's amazing amazing and they started over a long period of time, over many years. And these people started investigating. The merchants of doubt, go watch the documentary. It's amazing. And they started investigating this doctor, and they called him up. Did you actually treat these people? They looked into his background, his past. They did a computer database on all the infants that died from burns in this guy's area, and they found that it was a lie.

And so they called him, and they said they said well this is an anecdotal thing and i was just trying it wasn't real i was just trying to paint a story of what's possible no he fucking but because he wasn't under oath because he wasn't under oath when he was testifying he was allowed to lie about this stuff when they asked him yeah i was paid for citizens for fire safety or whatever the fuck the think tank was. And then when a think tank has less than X amount of members, you have to sort of disclose where the funding comes from. And the funding all came from the manufacturers of this flame-retardant shit that is causing all sorts of problems with children, especially babies.

Like babies that are around this flame-retardant stuff, the dust from that stuff gets in their lungs, it gets in their system. And they showed the difference between the amount of this shit that's in American babies versus the amount of this shit that's in babies in other countries where they don't have these people lobbying to have this shit be put in their furniture.

It's fucking terrifying. I often wonder, living in America, why cancer rates here are increasing at the rate that they are, and, you know, why you know why fox news gives you cancer just watching it well i mean something tell you those hot chicks something's going something is going on right that is not happening in japan and is not happening in in other countries and i wonder whether it is stuff like industries lobbying for like fire safety things that are so

every time you sit down on your couch, you're just a little bit, you're just absorbing like the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest little bit of some shitty chemical. You know, I don't want to get too hippy dippy about it, but like all the stuff that's in our soaps and that's in our, just the,

the number, you look at the ingredients on things and they're just, it's just a litany of chemicals. It makes me, it makes me want to move to New Zealand and eat my, my, you know, my grandmother's beautiful eggs from a natural chicken and just use eucalyptus oil to bathe myself in and sit on a wooden chair.

Well, I think you're right. And I think the argument is pretty clear when you see things like this merchants in doubt and you find out how lobbyists work and you find out how think tanks work and you find out how these people are actively trying to get these things, get the concerns about these things alleviated, and they're doing it strictly for financial reasons. That's it. They're not doing it because they have a real concern. And it takes us a while before we figure it out. Like thalidomide, like thalidomide babies, and that has to happen.

Asbestos. People have to get cancer. They get rid of asbestos. Now they're getting rid of trans fats. Trans fats are now illegal. Well, how many fucking people had to get sick? I mean, how long of trans fats and margarine? I can't believe it's not butter.

How long has that shit been around? It's been around forever. And people have lobbied and lied and promoted these things for their own personal gain and profits. And it's crazy, but it's a real part of our culture. It's a real part of our legal system. It's a real part of our culture. It's a real part of our legal system. It's a real part of how we create laws. It's kind of scary. It's kind of scary when you think about

how sociopathic it really is. That's right. And I do think that, again, coming back to the media, I think we have a big responsibility because... Are we in the media? You and me? Well, I didn't mean to include you in the we. I was including... I got nervous. I was including me. I mean, you are, and you're a part of the

good part of the media insofar as what the internet is now doing is allowing conversations like this. Like you say, well, how can you impart these ideas in seven minutes? I mean, you're lucky if you get seven minutes on network TV. You usually get three minutes. If you're on the Today Show, you get three minutes or something. Right, but how many people have time to listen to a three-hour

podcast? 1.6 million Twitter followers? Yeah, there's a lot now. It's getting more now, but it's also ridiculous that a former Fear Factor host, meathead, cage-fighting commentator, smokes pot all the time, is the guy that you're coming to for information. It seems like there should be someone more qualified. Well, that's right. That's right. But I mean... And there are, like Sam Harris, and there's a lot more people out there that are doing this as well. But this medium, I agree with you that this medium, the openness of it. Absolutely. And the problem is that people, journalists are not, don't tend to be scientifically literate. So when something

comes out saying that butter is a deadly killer and margarine is the answer, then someone puts out a press release, a PR company earns some money from it, from the margarine industry. And then the producer at the radio station or the television station who receives that knows that that's a juicy tidbit. So they write it up and they do a story on it. And that's that. All of a sudden, the viewer is under the impression that this is a settled fact. It's not a settled fact. It's one study. And in three years' time, margarine is going to be a deadly killer, and butter is going to be good again. But also in the defense of the people that were distributing that information,

there was very little known about cholesterol back then, LDL cholesterol, HDL cholesterol. What is the difference? What is needed? Scientific work had still been needed to be done on a lot of different dietary supplements and things. The data wasn't in yet. Right, but Joe, scientists will always speak with more caveats than the media does. Right. You'd spoken to a scientist back then, even if they hadn't known about LDL cholesterol,

they would have said, look, on the basis of what we currently understand about margarine and butter and human physiology, blah, blah, blah. That's not the way that it ends up getting imparted because nobody wants to watch a television show that equivocates like that or a news broadcast that equivocates like that right no i think you're definitely right about that and i also think that we're in a weird time now where because of the internet and because like you could do huffpost i don't know what kind of editorial control they have over what you do like when you know i really enjoy your show by the way thank you if anybody hasn't seen it the reason why i wanted to get you on the show in the first place, I've watched many episodes of your show and it's very balanced and it's like,

like this conversation. It's a, it's a cool show and it's, and it's very unlike something that you would see, uh, in normal NBC, 8 PM or whatever the fuck it would be on broadcast television. It's just very different.

I think that that kind of stuff and that the internet and what the internet, the freedom that it provides and also the freedom of what the Internet, the freedom that it provides, and also the amount of information, the access to it, is kind of changing the ability of these people to do things like this. Yeah, I agree. Did you see, by the way, and this also just popped into my head while we were talking, Richard Dawkins' tweet about feminism in Islam. No, what did he say? He said, Islam needs a feminist revolution.

It will be hard. What can we do to help? Which seems reasonable to me. And then the internet just exploded. I saw it. Really? They got mad at him? Oh, totally. God, if anybody needs...

He was so misogynistic. How dare he as a white male... Look, I have these... I still have these tabs up on my computer because we were looking at it the other day. How dare he as a white male think that women who are forced to wear these crazy outfits that cover their body, they can't go to school, they can't drive, they can't vote. Look at these headlines. Richard Dawkins mansplains feminism to Muslim women.

Whoa, mansplains. Atheist Richard Dawkins mansplains feminism to Muslim women. Whoa, mansplains. Atheist Richard Dawkins tweet fail. Richard Dawkins fails spectacularly on feminism and Islam. Who wrote these, by the way? They're all over the place. But are these adult? One of them's an opinion piece in the HuffPost. What?

Yeah. I mean a blog. What is the opinion blog? What does it say? That is the... Hang on, let me see if I've still got it up. I think I... I just saved the titles here.

See, so I don't have the... There are so many people looking to call bullshit on men that somehow or another try to say anything about what women do or need to do. Like, here's one Twitter user. It says, Richard Dawkins needs to abandon his patronizing white savior paternalist islamophobia like how many buzzwords can you fit in a tweet

how many politically correct buzzwords can you fit that person's not real that's a stephen colbert of huffington post that's what that is they're pretending to be a fucking a liberal it's like the conservative and then and then there was an article saying that he's no better than early 20th century European colonists who told Muslim women that they needed help from European men. Like, he literally... The tweet even says, what can we do

to help? It says, Islam needs a feminist revolution. It will be hard. What can we do to help? That's a beautiful tweet, and it's correct. Look, if you just look at it... Forget about Islam. Forget about sexes, forget about all that gender shit. If you just looked at it, there's a human being that's looking at other human beings that are forced to behave in a way that they might not want to. That's Islamophobic, Joe. It has nothing to do with Islam.

It's Islamophobic. Let's say it's a new group that starts up tomorrow, and they call themselves the fucking monkey faces. Joe, you're ignoring the deep complexity of so many different strains of Islam throughout the world. You're disempowering women of color in the Muslim world. What about white chicks that are Muslim? You're a racist. I just called you out and you don't call out. Fucking racist.

There's a lot of white Muslims, bro. Of course I'm being sarcastic. I know you are. It's just so frustrating. My call out was sarcastic, too. I know. But I mean, what are. It's just so frustrating. My call out was sarcastic too. I know. But I mean, what can you do? What can we do?

I think there are people that are trying to call bullshit on people when the bullshit doesn't exist because they want to score. Just like we were talking about earlier that cops want to arrest people because it's a fucking game and they want to win. I think there's people that want to win on Twitter. There's people that want to win on HuffPost. There's people that are looking to write blogs about a guy like Richard Dawkins, who has said some kind of weird, questionable shit in the past,

like especially the shit that he said about child molesting. He experienced some mild molestation when he was young. No big deal. Got over it. You know, like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What the fuck, man? But even then, if you listen to what he was actually saying, I think what he was saying is...

Get over it. ...that we have certain paradigms about which we get very, very upset. Yes. And because abusing and violently raping children is pretty much the worst thing that you can possibly do, we have made it mandatory to regard all child abuse as being the worst thing that can possibly happen. Right.

I think his point was, like, I was fondled by a stupid, crazy priest when I was, you know, 12 years old or something, and I pretty quickly got over it. So that's not to say that other people who didn't get over it didn't go through horrible things, but do we have to regard every single instance of every single type of crime as equally bad can't we be a bit more nuanced like maybe there are very very bad forms of child abuse and maybe there are less bad forms of

child abuse but the moment you say that everyone says he's saying that child abuse is good right well and also this is a horrible thing to say but and i'll and i'll preface it by saying this is my own personal experience i was bullied when i was a kid, but it was mild bullying. Like, nobody did anything horrible to me. I was never beaten half to death, or I was never, you know, nobody ever threatened me with weapons. I was just kind of picked on and fucked with, but it got me into martial arts, and it changed my life. Like, there's a yin and the yang to things. of life. Like these are the yin and the yang to things. And I think that sometimes like a little bit of resistance is good because the reaction to that resistance is you decide like, this is never

going to happen to me anymore. I'm going to fire up and I'm going to figure out a way to empower myself. So this is no longer a fear of mine. And I think that a little bit of someone being an asshole to you makes you appreciate kind people. I think the evil people in the world, and here's another one, shitty relationships. I think most of us have had some bad relationships. Bad relationships make you appreciate good relationships. You know, like I, I really appreciate one of the things I really love about my wife. She doesn't like to argue about shit. She's like a really kind person. She's friendly and sweet and warm. And she's not like a person who like picks on

people and she like picks on you or starts arguing or brings up shit that happened like a month ago or a year ago. I have a buddy that has a wife that argues with him like that. Well, yeah? Well, you know, when we were first dating, he's like, that was fucking ten years ago! Ten fucking years ago!

I'm not even the same guy! He's like, every fucking cell in my body is different from the cells that were in my body seven years ago. I'm not even the same guy! Leave her. Leave the food. He's like, every fucking cell in my body is different from the cells that were in my body seven years ago. I'm not responsible for that guy who came home drunk and fucking shit in the sink. Also, he's probably already apologized. Exactly. But it's not, if anything comes up, like if she does something wrong, like if she doesn't pay a bill, it's like, what the fuck?

The cable's off. Well, you remember when we first started dating? Yeah. You fucking. Yeah. Yes, I do remember that. And it also has nothing whatsoever to do with the conversation that we're having right now. Well, when you experience that he fucked up and married this crazy broad.

Sorry, I said broad. I'm an asshole. I'm a misogynist. Oh, my God. Joe Rogan and trying to explain things. Your white male privilege is dripping into the microphone right now. I spray that shit like cum. That's what I do with my white male privilege.

I don't allow it to just ooze out like maple syrup. I think that when we see these terrible things, like when I go to, I love Brazil. Okay. Brazil is a wonderful country. The people are friendly. They're free. They're happy. But it's also like kind of crazy unorganized.

Like when you go to the airport, like one of the things when we were getting on a plane from Sao Paulo to Brazil, or Sao Paulo to Rio, rather, we couldn't find out what fucking gate it was. Because the gate said 17C. So we go to 17C. And the lady, you know, she speaks Portuguese. So she's like, no, no, no, day 24, 24. I'm like, but it doesn't say 24. It says 17 seats.

So we go to 24 and 24 says Florinopolis. And it says another one next to it. Like, what the fuck? But they were saying it over the loudspeaker. So all the people that were listening that spoke Portuguese knew that it was. But there was no signs. Right. Because it's a different world.

They have a different. So it made me appreciate when you come back to America, you look up at the fucking departures. Oh, there's the gate. Here we go. Yeah, what if you only spoke Mandarin, though? It's true. I'd be fucked.

You'd be fucked. You'd be just as bad here. It'd be even worse. Because if I spoke Mandarin and I was in Brazil, I'd be double fucked. Because I couldn't even read what the fuck they're writing. And you couldn't know what the hell. You know, you'd go to your app on your phone and try to decipher it but point being like when you see something like if you like if you go to like my buddy who went

to Africa and experienced like all the chaos of Africa said god I mean people complain about America like you go yes there of course it's not perfect there is no utopia on this planet. Denmark. Is Denmark utopia? I don't know. I mean, it's just like, I think there are degrees, right? Like, obviously Africa and many South American countries are going to be more screwed up than rich countries like America. Right. But then within the club of rich countries, there are also countries where shit just works. It's just easy. Like, stuff is easy.

I lived in Copenhagen for a semester and went to university there in my early twenties. And like, you know, there's no lines at the post office. There's not, I mean, granted there's no people who live there. There's like 14 people in the whole country, but like it's still scalable. You could actually have, they've still got a tax, the same tax base per capita, you know, as America could have if it wanted to have higher taxes. And you could actually have a DMV that works and you could have a post office that functions. We don't have to wait around all the time. It's just there are certainly societies that, you know, Thomas Friedman says that flying

from Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam into JFK is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones. It's like, I mean, now like la guardia is a shithole yeah and that's just the way it is like you know there are countries whose airports are nice and whose trains are fast and whose health care systems work more cheaply the worst is the way the people treat you at la guardia they're so fucking over it and aggressively over it like shitty to you oh new york tsa workers are my least favorite of all the tsa workers they're pretty bad they're fucking so dicky you're asking a question now that i've now that i've got a i gotta tell you you're lucky that do you have global entry

i need to get it you gotta get it i know i'm a fucking idiot i mean god damn it i just got my green card earlier this i got my green card earlier this year. Welcome to our country, sir. Thank you very much. I hope you enjoy it. I hope you appreciate it. I've been here more than 10 years, but just on temporary visas. And now that I was able to get global entry, just not having to deal with the customs officials coming in, especially in the foreigners' lane. I mean, I imagine it may be better in the citizens' lane, but coming in in the foreigners' lane where you're in front of, like,

they've just had to deal with 478, like, people who don't speak English, who are probably coming in with some lousy shit from abroad or something. Have a chicken in their backpack. Yeah, that's right, exactly. What have you got in the backpack there? Nothing. Nothing. No speak.

Whoa, how racist. Josh Zep's racist. Islam needs a feminist revolution. It will be hard. Get on it, Sui. Start tweeting. What can we do to help? This asshole.

I can't believe what he just did. And so by the time I get up to the customs guy, they are pissed. They're over it. They're over me. They're over everything. So just being able to go to the kiosk and swipe your global entry and then just walk straight through, it's one of the greatest things. All the guys I work with at the UFC have it.

I'm the only one who doesn't. I'm a fucking moron. It's not hard. Just busy, bro. I'm doing a lot of podcasts and shit. You are. I have no excuse. It's not hard.

You make an appointment. I go to cryotherapy five times a week. I can't go to global entry appointment. Yeah, you should do it. I should. I agree with you. I'm disappointed in myself as well. You should be.

Yeah. Yeah. I wonder whether or not, just on why people are angry at Richard Dawkins for saying something that obviously makes sense. I think they're not really angry. I don't believe they are angry. I don't. I feel like some people see the world in groups and identities. And for them, identity politics is the most important way of contextualizing and conceiving of the things that are happening around them in culture. So the moment a person who's a white male starts saying anything, they're like, okay, this is in the category

of patronising white male authority, looking down on this other category of person who is oppressed, like religious minority. So let's not actually listen to what's being said and let's not give anyone the benefit of the doubt. Let's just superimpose that into the jigsaw puzzle in my brain, which is like culture. I mean, you see it also in all of the racial problems

that have been happening in the past year in the United States. And I'm totally on the side of the Black Lives Matter movement here. And I have a huge problem with the brutality that police show towards minority communities. But you've got to make sure that you're actually talking on the same page about the ideas and the practices, that you're not just caricaturing people into stereotypes of one another, right? And I think maybe that's what's happening here.

I agree. I think that what's going on is like a game of Hungry Hungry Hippo, and there's a little marble, and they see that they can snatch that marble, and they go for it. I think it's an opening, and I don't think it's logical. And you know what I love? I love when people who have these knee-jerk reactions to these things, they see these openings and they go for it

because they feel like there's an opening to attack, also get attacked. Like, there's a woman who wrote a piece. She's a feminist and she wrote a piece about my friend Amy Schumer, who is hilarious and wild and just fucking awesome and she's kicking ass right now. And she's on the cover of a magazine sucking on C3PO's finger. And they were saying why this magazine is so awful about,

you know, against feminism. And I was like, what the fuck are you like? This is an anti-feminist thing. And she shouldn't be sucking fingers. Like as if like you're a woman, you can't be sexual,

you know, like, you can't be sexual. Isn't it part of being a person who owns themselves, owning all the things you enjoy? Maybe she likes sucking fingers. She's an autonomous human being. How condescending is it? There's a picture of it. That's fun.

Badass bitch. Look at her. She's so good. I love her. I love her. She's gangster as fuck. But here's the thing. The same woman wrote a bit.

She wrote another piece because I like to follow knuckleheads. She wrote another piece about how she's getting older and it's really kind of she's torn because she doesn't get cat called as much anymore. Oh, please. She's actually getting she's actually has conflicting opinions about this. And so here's the tweet that drove me crazy. It made me laugh. I howled at my own computer someone tweeted her saying that this article about being conflicted about not being cat

called anymore i felt like that was a very white cis piece white cisgender meaning that people of color and trans people have to worry about being catcalled because trans people, if they're catcalled and then someone finds out that they're trans, they can get beaten to death. And you should be more aware of that when you write these pieces,

you're insensitive. And the woman's like, true. She had to acquiesce. She had to give into it because she's a part of that fucking retarded culture. Right. She got stuck in her own bullshit ideology. Here's the caveat.

Trans women in particular, but trans people in general, are the victims of violence at way higher rates than everybody else. So let's just put that aside and say that that's a terrible thing and that we should be supportive of the trans community. But, I mean, did you hear about, there was a college that canceled the vagina monologues because they were doing a production of the vagina monologues, this popular feminist play. Yes, yes, yes.

And the on-campus trans community. Not even the on-campus trans community. There wasn't an on-campus trans community. The on-campus liberal fucking knee-jerk douchebags decided it was insensitive to trans people. To trans people because not all women have vaginas. Exactly! Some women have dicks. Yeah, and not all people are people.

My dog is a person. My dog identifies as a person. Uh-huh. I don't know if you know that. I didn't know that. Well, be more respectful and sensitive. Because not all dogs are actually human beings. Or not all people are human beings.

What? I didn't follow that bit. We live in fucking fairytale land. It's too easy to get food. That's what's going on. So people make up shit to get upset about. That's my feeling. It's too easy to just go to the supermarket and pick up fucking cereal. It's just too easy.

Here's the thing. How are you actually supposed to help people? How are we supposed to be kind and considerate and generous if every time we try to, we get shot down because we put our foot in it? Dawkins, in that tweet about Islam, is trying to support women.

Like, what could be wrong with that? He tries to do that, and then feminists jump down his throat for being condescending towards women, because Muslim women should be the ones who are sticking up for Muslim women. They don't need your white, patriarchal, Islamophobic male activity in order to do so because they're proud and bold Muslim women. Well, not all of them are.

Some of them are stuck in beekeepers' outfits in Saudi Arabia. So how do we help them if every time we try to help, we get jumped on? Well, I think we have to negate the opinions of those people that write these posts for like the HuffPost, write these articles. We have to negate them by mocking them because I think it is hilariously stupid. I think that opinion is fucking hilariously stupid that he doesn't have the right to say that he has concern for people that are a different gender than him, that have a different ideology than him, that live in a different part of the world than him, that have more melanin in their skin. That's ridiculous. And I think that what we're doing here by mocking that

is really the correct response. It's the only correct response. You're not going to get that response from the news. You're not going to get that from the president. But you can get that from people that don't have a vested interest in supporting one particular tribe. And I think that's one of the things that they talked about in this Merchants of Dou that I that really resonated with me is that a lot of times when people talk

about global warming or they talk about fucking chemtrails or any of these things there's a tribe of people that have subscribed to that ideology and it's very important you support that tribe and it might it's it can it it manifests itself as in ridiculous, like the tribe of people that are like Android phones. They love Android phones, and they hate iPhones. I have a friend who fucking hates. She's brilliant. She's a brilliant director. She writes movies.

She's fucking great. She hates Mac. I hate Mac. Everybody uses Mac. I won't fucking use Apple. I use Windows. I'm like, what are you talking about, Patty? Give me a hug.

What the fuck is wrong with you? It's a goddamn computer. These ones don't get viruses. The other ones do. I use Windows. I'm like, what are you talking about, Patty? Give me a hug. What the fuck is wrong with you? It's a goddamn computer. These ones don't get viruses. The other ones do. That's right. You're such a powerful individual for not being a Mac person, right? It's like you're asserting your rebelliousness by going with the world's largest computer company. She knows it's ridiculous. She laughs when I

make fun of it, but she just fucking sticks to her guns. She fucking digs her heels in the ground, fucking wraps her wrists around a cord. I'm not going anywhere. Just madness. What about those people who, when a new product comes out, and it's usually an Apple product,

they'll go out and they'll camp for four or five days in order to be the first person who gets the product. Like, I do not under... It reminded me a little bit of when you were talking about your buddy who did the massive, massive marathon, but then came in fourth. I always like, I was watching, I was watching like the Today Show or something where they were interviewing the people who were standing in line. And they'd been, you know, they've all got like, they've got tents and they've got sleeping bags. Like they're on Fifth Avenue, like near Central Park. And they're sleeping on the, they're sleeping, camping out for 72 hours.

And they were, and the correspondent was talking to someone who was like the seventh in line or something. And I was like, what the hell are you doing? What are you doing? I can understand spending a week outside to get the new iPhone if you're number one. Why is not being number seven even better than being like number 342? What difference does it make? Oh, I got the seventh iPhone. Maybe he's in the middle.

Like, do you think that that's, I mean, what is it about people that are going to get something that doesn't even do anything different? Yeah. Like, the smartest person I know is this woman, Dr. Rhonda Patrick. She does my podcast all the time. She's absolutely brilliant. She has an iPhone 4. Right.

It's an old piece of shit. It's the size of my thumbnail. It doesn't even run. There are certain things that don't even run. There are so many apps. Until I recently, I didn't have any space on my phone. You've got a 5. See? I've got a 5. You're smarter than me. I've got a big fucking stupid 6. Well, there you go. It's better.

It's the new thing. It's to take one generation back. I didn't even realize there was a 6. Wow, you're amazing. That's how cool I am. That's, you're amazing. I'm like that. That's how cool I am. That's how much of an individual I am, Joe. I'm like, I'm so like totes out of like the whole like,

let's keep up with the Joneses thing. Go to gizmodo.com. No, I don't even know. I just live in Brooklyn and eat kale. Oh, you live in Brooklyn and eat kale, which is even better because they don't grow kale in Brooklyn. They have it flown in from Brazil. Bro-Kale in Brooklyn. They have it flown in from Brazil.

So, I didn't have any room on my phone to upgrade to the latest software. So, for ages, I was still running the older software. And gradually, your apps just stop working. Like, stuff just doesn't even work. Like, you open up the American Airlines app, and it's like, this is no longer supported by this software. So, they keep you up. They keep you on your toes. Well, I still have an older software, too. I don't have the newest software because I don't have the newest software on my computer either.

I heard it fucking crashes. I wait a long time, man. Yeah, me too. I wait some time. I was once interviewing a plastic surgeon in Australia about penile enlargement surgery. Don't ask. Wow. Does it work?

Is that done? Have they figured it out yet? It is. Yeah, they have. Don't ask. Whoa. Wait, does it work? Is that done? Have they figured it out yet? It is, but yeah, they have. Really? Yeah, but it has some side effects. What's the side effects? Your dick flops around in weird ways when it's erect. Oh, that's when they cut the tendon?

Yeah. That's not enlarged. If you have a micro dick, what, you're going to get an extra inch? Oh, congratulations, now you have two inches. It's mostly just for vein people. It's not for micro dick people. But then also they can take fat out of other parts of your body. That's for the girth.

And then they'll put fat in around the edge. But then it's fat and smooshy. No one wants that. Anyway, my point is simply this. I wasn't intending to talk about little dick dudes getting bigger dicks. Bastards. He said there's a maxim in medicine that you should never be either the first nor the last to adopt a new procedure. He said there's a maxim in medicine that you should never be either the first nor the last

to adopt a new procedure. Hmm. That's a good smart way to look at things. That's my philosophy towards iPhones. Yes. I have my philosophy on technology on the basis of penile enlargement surgery. Well, I wait a little while, but I'm not the last person to adopt, but I'm probably like third.

I'm like in the third wave. I'm not in the first. I'm not waiting in line for shit. I'll tell you the third wave. I'm not in the first. I'm not waiting in line for shit. I'll tell you that right now. I'm not waiting in line for a fucking phone. It's never. Why do they iron out the kinks anyway? Unless the phone does like holograms.

Unless you put the phone down. Help me, Obi-Wan. You're my only hope. Like Amy Schumer pops up and fucking dances for you. Then I'll take it. When that happens, you're going to then realize that you'll be one of the first adopters, and then they'll realize it's radioactive and it gives you cancer and you'll die. God damn it.

Turn your smartphone into a 3D hologram. Is this real? Oh, my God. It's a little piece of glass you stick on the top of your... I just saw this the other day. It just popped in my head. What the fuck? And it makes a little hologram on your smartphone.

Seriously? Yeah. Just using glass and weight. Well, we're really close to these new goggles that they're creating. Right now, they look like ski goggles, but eventually they're going to be like sunglasses that are the new desktop. That is incredible. Look at that. That's amazing.

That's cool. What is that? Magic Leap? What is that technology? What is it called? Magic Leap? Yeah, I think so, yeah. They're going to have that technology, which is also called magic leap they're gonna have that technology

which is also like a hologram that you can hold in your hand i don't know exactly how that works but there's another version of it what is it is it being fired out of your phone or what or out of a laptop i don't know they're being very secretive about it and they've shown some demonstrations of it but only the demonstration in the fact that you can see like there's a little girl that's watching a ballerina on her bed dancing around the ballerinas like four inches high. It's incredible It looks amazing. Look at this like this is Magic Leap. They don't explain it, but that's got to be This is not CGI. That's not a real no no no no it's not CGI. We're looking at a little We're looking at a little tiny in the palm of someone's hand with a tinier puppy like look at this

There's somehow they're going to be able to broadcast holograms, and it's not done yet. This is like some technology that's proof of concept, and it's in the middle of being developed. But then there's another one that's similar but different. What was the one, the Google one with the goggles, Jamie? Do you remember that one? Microsoft HoloLens. That's it. Yeah, sorry.

And the HoloLens is going to be able to change a room into a desktop. Say like a video game that you're playing. Like say if you want to play like Call of Duty. You play Call of Duty in an empty room and the whole room will be the desktop. And like, yeah, yeah, yeah. They have demonstrations of that. In three dimensions.

Like Minority Report. Where you scroll and you'll be able to spin cubes around the air and hold them and pause them. Like, look at this. This is real. This is how they're going to be able to do it. This is going to be, you're going to wear these, you're going to be able to spread, pinch, walk around your house. These fucking, right now they're goofy. They're these giant, like, huge ski goggles.

That is so exciting. When you're actually going to be able to have three-dimensional interactivity with computer-generated images. I mean, it's fairly inevitable. Yeah. If you think about, look at this, like how she's manipulating images. I mean, don't architects already have something like this? There's a virtual reality program that architects can use

where they can walk through the house before it's been built based on their designs. Really? Yeah, and they can do stuff like this where they can be like alright let's just extend this wall by another three inches and see what that looks like and then then they can actually take people who are prospective buyers of properties on three-dimensional virtual reality tours of the house that isn't even built yet look at this is showing an instructional from how to put together a pipe on a

piece of plumbing under your sink. And it's showing the actual applications where you could use something for instructional purposes. So it's just amazing. And this is almost inevitable. Just as crazy as what we were talking about before, we could send videos to other parts of the world and Skype instantaneously. All this stuff is just next-level stuff.

And it's probably not that far off as well. This isn't like in the distant future. This is the kind of stuff that we're going to be using and dealing with probably in 10 years. Yeah, look at what he just showed. That was a 3D virtual reality version of the surface of Mars. Back up a little bit more, Jamie. Look at this.

That's real too. They're going to be able to send one of these rovers to Mars. You're going to be able to walk around on Mars and see it as if it's really right there. I tell you what will be a game changer for virtual reality and three-dimensional stuff like this will be porn. It's already a game changer.

When you get a virtual reality headset and some kind of like bodysuit device that allows people to, like, feel. Feel. Feel touches all over your feel feel feel touches yeah actually some kind of like i don't know you know masturbation thing or something it's on you and then get synced up to a virtual reality that actually looks not like a 3d robot human but kind of like an actual plausible human being that is going to make so much money yes yeah well it's already it's already

happened they already have that what is that technology called again the one that duncan's That is going to make so much money. Yes. Yeah, well, it's already happened. They already have that. What is that technology called again? The one that Duncan's always raising their hand. Oculus Rift. Oculus Rift. Oh, yeah, right. They put the goggles on. They have first-person interactive porn where you put your dick into a machine,

and the machine sort of strokes your dick, and you're having sex with someone in first person. Yeah, they already have it. It's crazy. Not only that, it coincides, the movements coincide to a computer program that coincides with the action that you're seeing on the screen. Well, yeah, that's what you'd want, right? You'd need it to actually feel. I mean, the advances that are coming in all of that kind of stuff in the next decade are going to be mind-boggling. Well, I think that goes back to what we're talking about, about future civilizations.

Do these civilizations that exist out there in the cosmos, do they have radar or have they transcended that? And have they gone into virtual? Because I think once we realize that virtual can be avatar, we can live inside some fantastic world that's so much more rewarding and exciting. And why bother with the regular carbon-based life world? Why do we need everything to be real? Why? Because I can knock on this table. Why is this table better than a table that I feel like I can knock on? But it's way better, and every time I touch it, it gives me love.

Well, this is the problem that's raised by the film The Matrix, isn't it? I mean, it's become sort of a punchline of like blue pill, red pill, but it's actually a profound philosophical question. Would you rather do what the bad guy does in the matrix when he sells them all out and decides that he's going to go back into the matrix and have his his memory of the matrix be erased and he'll live like the life of a celebrity of a rich celebrity right or do you prefer the tragedy of reality knowing that it's actually true but then what does it mean to say that reality is actually true or truer than a matrix right and why does it have to be why why does everything that's real have to be real in only the way we understand it today?

It's just as what we've become accustomed to, and even our own real of today has become very bizarre, like the real of money. The real of money used to be you had a leather sack filled with gold coins, and you carried that around, and someone could steal it from you. Now it's's Bitcoin and it's on your phone. It's all just digits. It's digits that have no relationship to anything. I mean, it's preparing us for this inevitable, artificial, weird world of something that we have created. And it's not even artificial. It's just a new level of life. It's a new thing. I think that's a really good point to point out that it's not artificial because look at. It's a new thing. to listen to us at any point in time after the fact, and those devices would have been unimaginable a few decades ago. And yet what we're actually doing is as authentic and as old as time,

which is we're having a conversation. Absolutely. And we're having a conversation that's fueled by this digital interface that we have in front of us that's allowing us to, in real time, get information in a way that was never possible just a couple of decades ago. We can get all this information and we, what was that, Jamie? Boom, he pulls it up, boom, we see it up on the big screens. We're living right now in the matrix. We're living in like a baby matrix. Do you think it matters, though, if, I mean,

I have visions of like people who just spend all their days in their basements plugged into a virtual reality machine with like a drip in their arm providing them with sustenance and just are off in this other universe of their own creation. How different is that than people that are listening to this while they're playing video games and drinking Mountain Dew? I mean, the idea that you have to live in the real world in order to be valid, like why?

I mean, the only reason why is because we have needs. We have needs for companionship and love and friendship, and it's good to go outside and smell the fresh air. But when they figure out a way to make Oculus Rift, you put on a headset, and it's way better than regular fresh air. I think you're onto something with companionship. I think that gets to the nub of my concern about it, that as long as that person who's lying in their basement,

plugged into an IV and living in a virtual reality world is interacting with actual other human beings who are also in that virtual world, I have less of a problem with it. But if he's interacting with avatars who aren't actual human beings, but who give him all of the feedback that we need from companionship, and he's living in a fake world where there is no reciprocation, like, I'm pretty confident that you actually have a consciousness. You might be a robot, but I'm pretty confident that what we're actually doing here. I might be in your imagination. Yeah, you might be. That's right. You might be dreaming right now. Yes. But I'm pretty confident that you're a human being and that you are actually, that I am currently engaged in an actual conscious exchange. Whereas if you were an avatar and I was in virtual reality, I think that would be a loss. Well, you know, the concept of simulation theory, I'm sure, right? Yeah. The concept being for those who are not aware of it

is that one day we are going to not wait because I'm dumb, but someone way smarter than us is going to figure out a way to create this sort of Oculus Rift thing, next level stuff that we're discussing right now to a point where it's unrecognizable. You can't tell the difference between this and reality. It is inevitable. They're going to eventually figure it out. Just like the stuff that we're looking at right now is sort of the beginning stages of this inevitable technology that's going to transform via whatever mode that they figure out how to do. And you're going to be able to have an artificial reality that's indistinguishable from the reality that we currently experience. If that's the case, how do we know that we haven't already gotten there? And why would they tell you? Why would

you know? I mean, if you are in a virtual reality, if you are in an artificial simulated version of the world we live in, and it's so good, you can't distinguish, how do you know that it's not already happening? How do you know it's not going on right now? You don't. And there's one mode of strand of logical argument in that philosophy which says that because we're probably likely to invent that kind of technology fairly early in the evolution of the human race, of our civilization, if you think about the dinosaurs having lived for hundreds of millions of years, we've only

been around for a few hundred thousand or something, then we're probably going to get to that point really soon. Then this argument says it's very, very likely that we actually are in the simulation already because we've got hundreds of millions of years in the simulation and only maybe 100,000 years not in the simulation at the very, very dawn of our species. So odds are we're probably already in it. Which I don't really buy, but I think is a cute argument. Suck on that, ladies and gentlemen.

That's the end of the podcast. Thank you very much, Josh. You're awesome. And like I said, there's very few people that I would do a podcast immediately after landing from Brazil, but I always enjoy our conversations. Check out We The People Live, WTPlive.com. It's a good podcast. And Twitter is WTP underscore live. Or just send us an email. Ampersand, hologram. And then a dollar sign. WTPlive.com It's a good podcast And Twitter is WTP Underscore live

Or just send us an email Ampersand Hologram And then a dollar sign WTP underscore Live Dot com At Twitter

And HuffPost Live Awesome show And thank you We could do a thousand of these man I'd love it I'd really really enjoy these If I move to LA We'll just do it every week

Are you thinking about it? It's possible Move motherfucker Alright ladies and gentlemen We'll be back We'll be back I'd really, really enjoy this. If I move to L.A., we'll just do it every week. Are you thinking about it? It's possible. Move, motherfucker! All right, ladies and gentlemen, we'll be back. We'll be back soon. I forget when. But I got a lot of good guests this week. Stay tuned, freaks.

All right, see you soon. Much love. Big kiss to everybody. Mwah! Woo! Here we go. Woo!