The Joe Rogan Experience - #838 - Josh Zepps

Episode Date: August 23, 2016

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

Three, two, one, yes! Josh Depps, it feels like you were just here. People don't know. Most people don't know because it hasn't come out yet. Well, no one would. How would they? We did a podcast late last night and it got completely out of hand. So, I don't even know what to do with that thing now. Put that thing out, like a gentleman. I mean, I'm certainly putting it out.

I'm certainly putting it out. So long story short for listeners, Joe was kind enough to – I was interviewing Sam Harris for my podcast, and Sam was like, we really should just do more than just a one-on-one because ordinarily my podcast is a panel of people, a bunch of people sitting around talking about the news. And so I texted Joe, and I was like, is there any chance of doing it at your studio? And being the gentleman that he is, he was like, sure, just come on by and we'll just tape it.

Even though he had two shows yesterday. So after those shows, late at night, Sam Harris comes over and Hannibal Buress is still here. Hannibal was about to call an Uber and I said, why don't you stick around? We were drunk, by the way. We drank so much whiskey. Best decision you ever made, inviting him to stay. So Hannibal, Boris and Sam Harris and Joe

Rogan and I have an interesting episode of my podcast which will come up. If you're listening to this now or watching this now, subscribe to We The People Live. Just search for We The People Space Live. You need the We The People Space Live. You need the live. And then when it drops, you will see it.

It was an epic hour-long argument between a drunk Hannibal Buress and Sam Harris regarding statistics. We'll just leave it at that. Yeah. You don't want to give them more statistics that may or may not involve Black Lives Matter and police shootings. Yeah, and police shootings. And just the reality of police violence versus the perceived reality of police violence. So arguing about the statistics rather than the emotional connection.

And the difference, and I mean, what was interesting is how we have conversations about things that are so touchy, right? things that are so touchy, right? I mean, part of the reason why I wanted to talk to Sam and you on my podcast is because I think it's important for us to find ways to have the sorts of conversations that you have and that Sam has and that hopefully I have, where there's not a lot of kind of opinionated bloviating. It's more about actually trying to understand each other, actually trying to take each other at face value, not sticking, you know, what, a sword in the sand and saying, like, I can't believe that you offended me or, you know, what, a sword in the sand and saying, like, I can't believe that you offended me. Or, you know, having tripwires that if someone transgresses that or says a certain thing, then all of a sudden you're going to crank up the outrage machine. There's so much of that.

So much of that. So I wanted to talk to Sam and you about, well, how do we have conversations that are more reasonable? But, of course, you don't necessarily have a conversation that's that reasonable when you're drunk and emotionally sensitive. A drunk Hannibal Buress that says that he's smarter than Sam Harris. And smarter than, I think, anyone. Didn't he say anyone? He definitely said he was smarter than Sam Harris. I mean, Hannibal's a smart guy.

He must be. He's successful and he's a compelling and good comic. Just not smart enough to know that he shouldn't say he's smarter than Sam Harris. He was drunk. I'm telling you, we were really drunk, and we kept drinking, too. You hit it well. You hauled your liquor well. I bounce back quick.

I'm healthy. Yeah. So I stopped drinking also about an hour. What are you saying? Hannibal's not healthy? Is that what you're implying? That's exactly what I said. You heard me.

And about an hour before the end of our party and me and Hannibal, I realized I was drunk, so I backed off. Right. And he just plowed right on in. He was pouring himself like half a wine glass of whiskey. Yep. Yep. Yeah. It was deep. We went deep. So he can't be held responsible, folks.

Everyone's held... Yeah, right. Because if you drive drunk and kill somebody, then you're not held responsible for that, right? No, then you are. You are responsible for that. If you're a woman and you get drunk and have sex with someone, you're not responsible, though. The man's responsible. That's right. That's true. So was Hannibal more of a woman having sex or more of a drunk driver hitting a hobo? More of a woman having sex. I'll tell him you said that. He was a guest in my studio so uh

i'm responsible he could not consent to that conversation you were the chaperone he was too drunk to consent i was the rapist oh you were the rapist i raped him with our conversation right by forcing him into this conversation that i didn't know he was going to get into right you sort of anally fisted him with with words now you're going a little i'm just saying my own taste you said rape what about this whole rape have you been have you said rape. What about this whole rape? Have you been talking or thinking about the whole, like, Amy Schumer, Kurt Metzger? Do you know Kurt and, like, his Facebook?

I do, and I saw what he said and, you know, I had someone else contact me about that guy and whether or not, you know, he was telling the truth or the woman was telling the truth. I don't know him. I don't know her, and I'm not getting involved because I don't know if I knew her and I could implicitly trust her.

And I knew that she was going to tell the truth. And it's not, it's not, it's, I just don't understand the motivation behind someone jumping in with an opinion. I think what he's saying though is interesting because what Kurt was saying was that it is entirely possible.

He was satire, obviously, but he's saying women cannot lie they're like my bible it's impossible for a woman to lie just like the lord's word and that's you know he's being funny yeah he's such a he's hilarious a shit stirrer yeah he's hilarious but um it's uh it's weird you know like that there's this there's this culture what we know for a fact that some people lie about every single aspect of life. They lie about what they did.

They lie about their taxes. They lie about everything. But we're supposed to assume that women never lie about rape. And it's not true. We know it's not true. But we're not allowed to say it's not true. That's right. Even though we know it.

We're not allowed to bring it up. So if there's a possibility, if a woman says that she's raped, you have to accept that 100% at face value, even if the man is saying he didn't rape her. It's really hard because that's one side of the ledger. And then on the other side of the ledger, you've got all of the overwhelming number of cases where men get away with it. Yes. Because women are too afraid to go to the police or that they feel like they feel like they're dirty or that somehow, you know, for whatever reason. They would rather just not talk about it and let it go away. So I think that women's rights people and feminists think, like, if it's occasionally

the case that a man is wrongly accused, that's a small price to pay for fostering a climate in which women feel less nervous about coming forward. Now, I'm not saying that I believe that, but wow, what a shitstorm Kurt has. So I'm not sure if everyone knows the background to this that there was a one of the comics at ucb theater in new york was accused of being a repeat sexual offender by a bunch of women so ucb suspended him as a comic and excuse me and conducted its own internal investigation. And Kurt went on a big Facebook rant. I was looking at it this morning, actually, saying, basically, like, why is this internal, you know,

what is this, like, the Catholic Church that you see in theatre, like, doing an internal investigation? Why didn't these women go to the police? He writes, this is his original Facebook post, Guys, I've just heard some disturbing news. This guy, Jif Dilfiberg, is a rapist. I know because women said it, and that's all I need. Never you mind who they are.

They're all women. All women are as reliable as my Bible, a book that, much like a woman, is incapable of lying. That's sort of what you were saying, right? You think I would dare ask my God, Lord Jesus Christ, the Nazarene, to provide any details or evidence of any kind before I believe in him or a woman? No, because that would be like hammering the nails into Jesus my Lord's feet or re-raping the victim's good hole. Or asking for proof in a murder trial.

And he goes on like that. It's really funny if that guy's innocent. If that guy's guilty, then it becomes really disturbing because you kind of become an enabler. The problem is there's no way Kurt can know. Exactly. Exactly. But I do, I think it raises interesting questions about the whole kind of the censoriousness and like the hysteria of the social justice warrior brigade in that there are people who

really fucking want him to get fired and never to, you know, if amy's show comes back they don't want him back as a writer i'm sure that there are comedy clubs that are going to rethink whether or not they want to book him because he might be too toxic and oh i doubt that maybe maybe not this not i don't think this is that big of a deal because what he said was not that big of a deal but the issue but everyone went crazy she went crazy you know she posted that amy did she posted this thing you know saying that she's very disappointed that was in response to an endless barrage of social justice people and feminists saying that this is completely unacceptable and he deserves to be fired for it I mean he showed some pretty incredible loyalty to her during

that whole plagiarism scandal especially when he was one of the ones who told her to not do one of those jokes because it was a Wendy Liebman joke. So he kept his mud about all that, and then she turned on him with this whole thing. The whole thing is very sordid. I see her point of view, and I see his point of view. I really do.

I think she felt she didn't have an option, because she did say, you know, Kurt's my friend, and I support him, I'm disappointed in him. It's toxic. I mean, there's no way that you can talk about, you can't raise the question that you just raised. Unless you're on the Joe Rogan experience, you cannot raise the question of whether or not it's appropriate, whether there should be a presumption of innocence. That's why podcasts are so goddamn important.

Because you could never do this on a regular show. Certainly couldn't do the shit we were doing last night on a regular show. We'd be yanked off the air in a heartbeat. Yeah. Wait till it comes out. Woo. You know, here's the problem. Again, here's the problem.

If that guy is innocent, then Kurt is doing a service because he is expressing this very real possibility that someone might be lying. If that guy's guilty, then it's not funny at all. And it becomes really fucking gross for the girl. If she has to sit back and listen to someone mock, whether or not she's telling the truth when she knows she did, that has got to be a horrible feeling. So the question is, what is worse? Is it worse to get falsely accused of rape or is it worse to get raped when someone doesn't believe you and get accused of being a liar? It's obviously worse to get raped and being accused of a liar, but by how much?

I mean, if you're grading on a scale, like getting, I mean, let's just assume it's at least a bit worse on that side. Yeah, I think being raped is worse than being falsely accused. But surely there's a third option, right? But being falsely accused and having your career destroyed and dragged through the mud and forever labeled a rapist, which is entirely possible for someone who's innocent. It happened to a friend of mine. A friend of mine got accused falsely of rape. This girl that he was dating, he broke up with her. They broke up and she just decided that she was going to get back at him.

So she said that he was a rapist and she followed through with it for a while and then eventually abandoned it. But that does happen. And it's happened many, many times. And there's a bunch of statistics you can look up online, but they're not entirely accurate because they don't take into account how many women, if you look at like overall rapes and overall people who lie at rape, the overall rape statistics are not accurate because they do not know, nor do they take into account, or can they possibly take into account, how many women don't say anything. It's a big number.

And also, what constitutes a rape? Exactly. When you say that some men are falsely accused, it's not always as black and white as they were dating and they never even had sex at all, but she suddenly accuses him of rape. There are also scenarios where, as you said before, she was drunk or like she didn't know that she consented. Or they were both drunk.

Or he thought there was consent and there wasn't consent. Or maybe they were, you know, so it's a vague area. And I think Kurt's point, which is, like, I don't think that we should be having to choose between the two options that you just cited, which is on the one hand, a woman gets raped and is not believed. And on the other hand, a man is falsely accused of rape. Can't it be true that rape is really, really terrible and we also should offer men the benefit of, pathetic victims that you can't go to the police and it will never be taken care of by going to the police. So you should just be mollycoddled and you should either remain silent or, you know, just have it sorted out internally. Do you think he's saying that? Well, that's what he says. follow-up Facebook post which he posted last Wednesday where he begins by saying um my

punishment the mob is howling for is now officially more severe than the one for the actual rapist which is interesting but towards the end he says I didn't yell at victims to go to the police they are victims I'm yelling at the people who said women can't go to the police they have to work outside the system I think that's out of bullshit and leads to rapists walking free. It hurts the victims of sexual assault. Okay, he's saying that because this woman never went to the police. That's right. She just publicly accused this guy of rape.

That's right. Isn't there more than one woman as well? I believe so. Yeah. I believe there's a second one who's friends with that girl. Right. Who also says the same story. So, that ain't good.

He claims to be on the side of the victims. I mean, I think he just doesn't quite get how traumatic it can be for people who've been, for women who've been sexually assaulted. He gets raped every day. You don't even know. You don't know. He gets raped every day just so you can understand.

He gets raped every day. He loves it. Not funny. Rape is never funny. He says, why did the story of what actually happened, what happened come out after the guy is declared a rapist? I'll listen to any victim's account. All that was given initially is, pssst, Aaron's a rapist. Pass it on.

My point was that no one seems disturbed by this. No one sees that down the road next time we might get it wrong. Well, we might have it wrong here. We don't know. But it's not good when a second person calls you out for the same crime. That's right. But it's also not good that no one went to the cops. Yep.

But also, what kind of evidence do you have? If somebody raped you a month ago, guess what? You have no evidence. No, exactly. Once you've showered up and you don't have any bruises, what can you say? It's your word against them. Yeah.

And I think for some women, and it's also like like what exactly was the scenario that we're talking about was it a simple social justice warrior type thing where two people are drunk and then the woman didn't consent so they're calling that rape which is repeated ad nauseum i mean it got someone kicked out of occidental college there's a lawsuit going on right now because of that i'm sure you know that story where a man and a woman, the girl was saying, come on over, do you have condoms? They have sex, and then her friends convince her that because she

was drunk, it was rape, even though they were both drunk. And then the college kicks him out and keeps her, and so he's suing the college. It's a fucking giant disaster. It's total sexism. 100% sexism against the man. And when you look at the story and what it is, it's a goddamn witch hunt

and they gave in to the witch hunt. They just wanted to quiet it down and they figured it would be easier to kick this kid out and just give in to the wills of the mob. And then on the other hand, you've got that, like, the California college swimmer kid who raped the

girl behind the dumpsterster on campus you heard about that one yeah she was passed out and he was like fingering her and she had like pine cone cuts all over her vagina and it was really horrible story and she he ended up getting what six months basically nothing now he's out now he's out again and um and like that's that's that's a fucking terrible person yeah and that guy should be punished And the judge was an alum of the same college And so on, so he's like, it's an old boys school He's like, oh, well, boys will be boys

And the apology that this rapist little asshole wrote was like I think this serves as a good lesson about intoxication And the dangers of, like, inebriation on campus Like, fuck you't that's not the lesson the lesson is don't rape people like when she's pine cones in someone's vagina piece of shit i mean when she was and it was bad enough like to people who say well maybe he thought that she was consenting it was obvious enough that two other students they were foreign students they were swedish guys were riding by on bicycles and they saw what was going on and it was

obvious from afar even in the dark What was happening because they stopped and came over and rescued her. She was as limp as a as a rag doll So he can't you know, yeah, so there's that that's real rape and that's that's terrifying when a woman Does get you know exposed as being someone who's experienced rape? So then you have to think about all these people that know your personal trauma and then this guy barely gets punished that's horrible too that's horrible too yeah man it sucks both ways you know i guess it's definitely sucks worse if you're the person who gets victimized but it still sucks if you're someone who didn't do anything wrong and someone claims that you're a rapist and that tag carries you for the rest of your life and you're being

falsely accused yeah until we can read people's minds clearly and truly god that'll be terrifying it's gonna happen it's on the way it's it's like right now we are at the morse code of reading minds we're at the uh that's where we're at i mean they're sending signals they're receiving signals they're uh articulating words someone sending, they're sending words through the internet into your mind and you see those words, you hear those words, images, they can place images in your mind. This is very rudimentary right now, but they're going to be able to string those words together and form sentences. And those words, instead of being through some giant bank of supercomputers, it's going to be something that's in your phone or a chip that we all willingly install in our brains,

and we're going to read each other's minds. Then we're going to know. I wonder how nuanced that'll be, though. So I did a story. Before I was at HuffPost Live, I had a show on Discovery Science Channel, which was sort of a bit like The Soup, like a smart-ass-y kind of look at science nerd news.

And I went to, I can't remember where it was, somewhere up in the Bay Area, so some IT place, where they're working on mind-reading computer games. And this was all the way back in, I guess, 2010, 2009. And you could put a thing on your head and you can operate the computer game just through the intensity of your thought patterns. Like you say, it's basically Morse code.

It's pretty much only on or off. There's no nuance apart from just think hard about something, and then you'll set fire to this little thing that you need to set fire to to win the game. That's amazing that they can tell that, but I wonder whether or not... For example, we can see the brain when you put people in an MRI machine. We can tell whether or not the memory part of your brain is lighting up when they show you something. So they're talking about the possibility of, in a criminal trial, they'd at least be able to tell whether or not you've ever been to the inside of the place where the crime was committed, for example. Well, you know, I did an episode of this.

Oh, that's right. Joe Logan Questions Everything. With fMRI, they actually accused someone and convicted someone, I believe in India, of having functional knowledge of a crime scene. Because through fMRI, they were able to indicate that she understood where that crime scene was and she had some form of memory that they could deduce from the fMRI. The problem, according to neuroscientists, and the woman i was talking to on the podcast on the show i forget her name i'm i apologize to her but she explained that the problem is that during the course of the investigation that person the woman who was accused and convicted could have been exposed

to the evidence of that crime scene and then have functional memory of that crime scene because of that, which was exposed during the fMRI. Particularly when you think about the fact that her freedom was on the line. She was falsely accused or accused of this crime. I don't know if she did or not. She's accused of this crime. They present her with this evidence. She has to go over this evidence. There's an incredible amount of weight and emotions involved in that. And they could have seared that memory deeply in her brain of what that scene looked like yeah that's interesting i can't remember whether you've told me about that or whether i've just heard you talk about it on the on the podcast but but then as you get to more and more subtle layers of thought so it's not just is the memory part of

the brain firing when we show this person an image of something, but it's like, I mean, how would you, how would you ascertain somebody's guilt or innocence in a rape case? Well, right now we can't see, I think what they're doing with this fMRI stuff is, I mean, obviously you can, if there's like some significant evidence,

semen, scratches, video, I don't think they can yet. What they were saying is that the, what they did in India, this woman was telling me she, and she, again, is a prominent neuroscientist. She was saying that they misused the evidence. They misstated the efficacy of this evidence and that they used this in a very inappropriate way that would not be legal in the United States.

Like you would get no one who truly understands fMRI who would sign off on that. Or no one who's ethical. I mean, from the neuroscientists who I've spoken to, I think we are a long, long, long way away from having the kind of granularity and confidence that we could say, just because this part of the brain is lighting up, or just because these kinds of waves are being emitted by your neurons, that means that you're either guilty or not guilty. According to our standard biology, I would agree with that. And here's where I would deviate. I think that we are not that far away from them being able to introduce artificial recording of memories. And I think that people are going to do it willingly. And I think it's going to be one of those things that people share with each other back and forth. What are you showing me, Jamie?

Scientists discover how to implant false memories. Booyah! Wow. Jamie just blew it up. So what does that mean? Pull it up. MIT researchers, expand that so I can read that a little bit better. MIT researchers Steve Ramirez and, wow, so that's the same name. Zulu.

Recently made history when they successfully implanted a false memory to the mind of a mouse. The proof was a simple reaction from the rodent, but the implications are vast. They placed the furry little creature inside a metal box and it froze, displaying a distinct fear response. The mouse was reacting as if it received an electrical shock there when it had it at all. Huh. Interesting. I'm not surprised.

And this is what I think. I've been really heavily dabbling in virtual reality lately because my friend Duncan has the HTC Vive and he put it on me and I went into a fucking frenzy and I realized like what is happening and where we're at and where I thought we were at versus where we actually are at. They are so far ahead of where I thought they are. They are so close to creating an indiscernible virtual reality. It's so close. I've got to do this. A friend of mine works at Oculus up at... Who owns Oculus? Facebook? That's the big virtual

reality of either Google or Facebook, I remember. Yeah, Facebook. Carmack is coming in here. John Carmack, the guy from id Software who programmed... He created Doom and Quake and all those games. He's now at Oculus, which is just, I mean, he's a fucking super genius. I should go up there and try this stuff. I was hearing Tim Ferriss talk about this as well.

Do you know Duncan? Do Duncan's podcast. I'll connect you guys. How long are you in town for? Till Saturday. Okay. I'll connect you guys when we get after this show and I think Duncan's in town. Oh, fantastic. You're going to shit your pants. I love this shit so much. It's amazing. But what's amazing about it is right now it's goggles

and it's connected to a computer and it's clunky. But, you know, the original computers that the Apollo mission used were a giant room. Yeah, yeah. And they had one quarter of the processing power or something of your iPhone. I don't even think it's one quarter. Yeah. But that's the point is that as you, as this technology exponentially gets more and more powerful and smaller and more easy for people to access.

You know, it used to be everyone, like remember Wall Street when Michael Douglas had that giant brick phone? And we're like, what a gangster. Look at him walking around with that phone. Now that phone's a joke. Yeah. And now, I mean, I was in Brazil a few years back in 2003. And, you know, you go to these, like, little tiny jungle villages, and all these people have cell phones. Yeah.

Everybody has a phone. No, it's going to be incredible as you see how – I mean, the interesting thing for me in VR is what we're seeing is where it's going to – everything moves so fast now that it's incredible for me to, I love human ignorance as well as genius. Like I love my own inability to predict how things are going to unfold and just the sheer joy in how spontaneously kind of, I don't know, exciting this whole human experiment is. Because when, for example, Half Post Live,

we started doing this thing in 2012. We were like, okay, well, let's do the future of television because obviously television and the internet are coming together and they're going to merge. So the way that we, if you were starting from scratch

and inventing a television talk show now, knowing nothing about the history of broadcasting or television or radio, what would it be like? Well, it would be to have commenters and you'd have people joining via webcam. And so they developed like 12 hours a day of half-post live broadcasts from studios. Within a few years, it was clear that that was obsolete. That was not the way that the future was going.

And now it's all like short live streaming shareable things, right? live streaming shareable things right similarly with virtual reality i think the fear was and has been when it gets really good everyone's just gonna sit in their basement and watch virtual reality porn all day and no one's gonna connect with each other anymore right it's coming but here's what's the what's the biggest virtual or augmented reality breakthrough thus far that's widespread, that's caught on? I don't know. What is it? Pokemon Go. Yeah, but that's dropped off significantly.

Do you know that? Yeah. They've dropped off by 15 million users over the last week. Oh, really? Yeah. I didn't know it was that much. Yeah. But here's the thing.

That's pretty significant. Yeah. I mean, I'm not saying that Pokemon go itself is going to change the world what it points to to me is the possibility that where we thought that virtual reality was all going to be about headsets and me in my own head and maybe it still will be to some extent i could totally see it go in the augmented reality way instead so that you're walking around the street with some kind of little thing on the side of your head and everywhere you look, things are popping up, like little graphics are popping up on top of things,

offering you sales in a particular store, showing you where you can say what you're looking for, where's the nearest bank, and there's a little arrow that points down over the nearest Chase branch or whatever. That's what Magic Leap is saying. Yeah, right. So, I mean, and that strikes me

as actually a more plausible and organic possible future than the one in which we're all just sort of like in the WALL-E. Remember the movie WALL-E? Mm-hmm. Universe, where we're all just in Barker lounges and Lazy Boys in kind of our own universe. I don't think they're mutually exclusive. Maybe not. I don't think it's either or.

I think that's going to happen as well. There's going to be brave fools that venture outside and experience augmented reality where everybody else stares at people's buttholes from two inches away. I'm telling you, man, you put on these virtual goggles and you have a 3D porn going on where these people are having sex. And you can get right in there. You can look at their face. You can stare in their eyes while they have sex. And it looks so goddamn real. But they're computer-generated avatars or are they filmed

human beings filmed human beings with 360 degree cameras and right now it's you know it's fairly limited did you watch porn on it no i didn't duncan has though duncan is into it i didn't want to watch porn in front of duncan just didn't trust him you can't see anything other than the i'm just kidding but it's but all of a sudden you feel someone blowing you. You're just like, what? Duncan! Hey, Duncan! Come on, buddy. I'm feeling your beard. Enough, Duncan.

It's, you know, I saw the most impressive thing that I saw was the underwater thing. They have this underwater thing where you're like standing at the bottom of the ocean and these fish swim by and then a whale swims up to you and you're looking The whale in the eye and it has this feeling of mass Like you really feel like this whales in front of you you freaking out. I mean, it's so realistic It's actual 3d footage of a while. Mm-hmm. No, it's a CGI generated well, but it's amazing. It's amazing and it just it gives you this well, I First tried virtual reality at Duncan's place. I want to say four years ago, three years ago, somewhere like there. And it was really crude.

It was pixelated and it was some silly game and it was really like clunky, but I could see it. I could see it. I could go, oh, I get it. I see where this is going. This is just leaps and bounds past where that is and there's one game that you play or one experience that you have where you go into this guy's room and he's composing music on a piano and you walk in the room and you can look up and look around and while this guy's playing the piano you can get up beside him and look at his keys it's fucking crazy that's

video that's a real guy and apparently dun Duncan says like the porn is just like that. You can just like get. So, I mean, for me, the question is, I think fundamentally we are, oh, wow, here's the image of the whale. Yeah, I mean, this is not doing it justice because you don't have any control whether or not you move. Yeah, but you don't have any control whether or not you move. So you're kind of getting a sense of what happens while this camera moves around but i mean you can get underneath that whale and look at its body i got on i got in the water with a with a humpback whale in maui a couple years ago you're not allowed to swim with them but if you're in a little dodgy zodiac like i was then they get around the rules

well my guy did by just holding your legs so as long as you're still connected to the boat like you're technically not swimming so you're not allowed to swim with them uh because for environmental reasons like people dickheads would go up and like harass them you need to give them whale or something yeah exactly you need to give them their space uh and so i had a snorkel and goggles on and this huge thing just comes looming out of the water. It's the size of a fucking bus. This mammal that breathes air, like that eats these tiny... I mean, the miracle of... It blows my mind.

The miracle of evolution, of biodiversity, of this incredible planet that we live on. And then it just sort of sinks down into the crystal blue water until I can just sort of make it out, and then it's just disappeared and it's all just blue, blue underneath. Wow. I mean, it was like, I don't want to sound too wacky, but it was spiritual. I mean, you come out of that and you're like, that thing is just, that was born, that like

squirted out of another whale's vagina and then grew up and now it's just, now it's doing its thing in the Pacific. Well, they're so paradigm shifting because of their mass and the oddness of them. Well, even dolphins. I did this thing last summer where me and my whole family were in the Big Island and you go on this dolphin excursion where they take you on a boat and they find these pods of wild dolphins and you just jump into the water with the dolphins with snorkels. So you're there swimming around. And, you know, I did it with my, at the time she was five. I did it with my five-year-old.

I'm like holding her hand and taking her with these dolphins. And we're looking down with our goggles and these dolphins are swimming right under you. Amazing. It's fucking nuts, man. So beautiful. It's nuts. I was in the water in Australia, in Byron Bay. in australia uh in byron bay and was and there are occasional shark attacks there and caught a glimpse of movement out of the side of the side of my eye oh fuck and was like oh fuck and looked

over and could see like a shape and a fin pierced the the water and then like what that moment where time just stands still and you're like holy shit and And then the back just arched out of the water. And I was like, oh, thank fucking Lord, you dolphin. Oh, you fucker. Oh, God. And then this whole pot of dolphins just diving through the waves. I was like, oh, my God. Yeah.

There was a video off of Maui or excuse me, off of Malibu really recently where these people were flying a drone over Malibu and it was only I don't think maybe one or two hundred yards away from swimmers and surfers and there's this fucking monster great white just swimming around out there looking for something to chomp on and they're out there apparently like really common off of Malibu and they're realizing that now because of drones because people fly those drones. Have you ever done those? I haven't operated it myself, no. It's another aspect of virtual reality that's fascinating.

You put these virtual reality goggles on, and you put a camera on this drone, and as the drone is flying, you feel like you're flying. Yes. I did that in the Pacific Northwest when we were looking for Bigfoot. Duncan and I, coincidentally, and this drone was flying over the treetops, and it really does. You have this sensation of flight. That's what I want because I used to want to be a pilot. I'm a huge aviation buff. I'm part of the travel hacking community, the bunch of nerds who figure out ways to fly first class all over the place using credit card frequent flyer miles and all these travel hacking.

I didn't know that was real. Yeah, it's great. I mean, I fly around the world in first class at least two or three times a year, as many times as I have time for, on flights that would cost $20,000 or $30,000. I mean, a flight from here to Australia in first class on a good airline is $22,000, $23,000. And you hack it? Yeah, and you just use points, use miles. But so I'm a huge, you look like you think, and you just use points. Use miles. But, so, I'm a huge...

You look like you think that I'm committing a crime. No. I'm not. It's your own little insecurities. Coming out. I don't know. I feel like I'm in an interaction with law enforcement, Joe. So, whose credit card are you using?

No comment. But I've always... I mean, I reckon flight would be the most amazing thing. I'd love to, I've been meaning to get around to like learning to hang glide or paraglide or one of those types of things. I think that would be a great hobby. Well, have you seen the new inside of planes that they're building? Where they're building LCD screens? Oh, yeah.

I'm not sure they're going to do that. But you mean passenger planes where the interior shows you the exterior. I've seen the mock-ups of that. Yeah, well, apparently they're thinking about making it or they're in development. But if it becomes a reality, the ultimate goal is you're going to be flying in essentially what feels like a convertible. Because the entire top of the plane is going to be a screen. And you're going to be able to look up and see the actual sky above you. I mean, they could do it on the floor as well if they wanted to.

It would freak you out, feel like you're just sitting in a chair flying through space. Oh, my God. I sometimes wonder what the experience would have been like for the people on the Malaysia Airlines plane that was blown up over Ukraine, where one minute you're at 34,000 feet, because those explosions, the way that those anti-aircraft missiles go is they blow up outside the plane, just immediately outside it. And then all of the shrapnel shatters the plane and blows it apart. Yeah. So, did they shoot that thing down or did a bomb blow up on the plane?

They shot it down. Who did it? The Russians. The Russians shot a plane down for yeah you remember the malaysia airlines plane that went down mh i always get proved who shot that down yeah basically so putin was arming it wasn't intentional they didn't know it was a passenger plane so so it was during the ukrainian putin had annexed crimea and was basically fermenting a revolution in uk Ukraine because he resented the Ukrainian

government being pro-Western and pro-American. And so they were sending in Russian special forces in like not in Russian uniforms, but our secret service guys all know that they are Russian backed and Russian financed. They're using military hardware that only Russia could have gotten them that a ragtag team of Ukrainian rebel separatists would never have been able to get on their own, such as an anti-aircraft missile that can shoot a plane out of the sky from 34,000 feet. Now, there are lots of conspiracy theories that are put out by Moscow about this, because of course, Russia doesn't accept it.

They think that it was the West. They think that it was the Ukrainians or whatever. But there was a Malaysia Airlines jet that was flying from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur, full of quite a lot of people who were heading to Melbourne, actually, which is why I did quite a few stories on it. And they were heading to Melbourne for a big AIDS conference, it was a big national AIDS conference, so actually a lot of the world's best AIDS scientists and AIDS researchers died in that crash.

And they were just flying and they'd been in the air for a few hours and they were going over Ukrainian airspace. And the rebels saw a speck in the sky and assumed that it wouldn't be a passenger plane. Why did they assume that? I think that there was a warning that passenger jets shouldn't be going over that area. So they thought it was a military plane? Yeah, they assumed that it was a military plane. Wow. And they used one of these huge anti-aircraft things.

And it's self-guided. It's heat-seeking. So it goes straight to the thing. And then just as it's next to it, it explodes. And the plane splits in two and just literally drops out of the sky. And I sometimes wonder, like, what is the experience when you're sitting there? Do you have a half a second to know what's happening? I mean, you must, right?

The deceleration is so fast that I've heard scientists say you wouldn't really know what's happening. You'd just sort of pass out because all of a sudden you're going from, what, 500 miles an hour down to rapid, rapid, rapid deceleration. Obviously all of a sudden it's- No, there's no air. There's no air anymore. It's freezing cold. But I mean, some people I would have imagined would be momentarily aware that something horrible has happened and that suddenly it's cold and that they're tumbling out of the sky. It's kind of of weird to so i don't want that kind of flight joe don't know why that popped

into my head that whole story but i want some kind of flight yeah that's not good yeah be amazing on the question of virtual reality do you think do you not think that we are so fundamentally creatures of community, of communion, of communication, that this dystopian vision of all of us just sitting solo with our headsets on, having our own experiences, is unlikely. I tend to think that there are going to be ways, that we will find ways to use it to connect us more rather than less. Because what makes it anything that's not a gimmick? Like, I don't know, I can't foresee what virtual reality will become.

Like, when film was invented, they started out just by doing, here's an image of a steam train, and people were like, oh, my goodness, it looks like there's a steam train. But no one knew what the fuck to do with it. It took a while, it took years, it took decades before the craft and art of cinematography and filmmaking became a thing. And I don't know that we know yet what virtual reality will become. At the moment,

it strikes me as just something like, whoa! It'll become everything it can become. It's not going to become any one thing. It's not going to go in only one direction. All these directions that we're proposing are not just possible, but most likely inevitable. And whether or not we're creatures of community, there's a lot of people that see community online and that's the only way they get community and it's very problematic and a lot of them when you find out like who they are as people they're really fucked up and one of the reasons why they're seeking community online is because they don't have community in the actual physical world and they're disenfranchised and they're loners or they're on the spectrum. There's a bunch of different factors,

a bunch of different social misfits that are finding community online. I know places where you can go where you can see the same people online literally 18 hours a day, every day. Some people that are on disability and they get checks and they never leave the house and all they do is pay for

their internet connection and food and that is where they exist and that is really common so if that's really common you know there's probably a million plus people out there that are doing that every day what's going to stop them from going virtual they will yeah they will and i think a lot of other people will as well if you think about what we're doing with phones you know how many times you've gone to a restaurant you see a table full of seven people, no one's talking to each other. Everyone's staring at their phone. I mean, this is a form of virtual reality. You're going into the reality that exists on your phone.

And you're like, hmm, let's see what's going on. You're constantly updating it and constantly checking your Facebook feed to see who's posted something interesting. You're clicking on videos. And instead of talking to each other, you're showing each other some shit that's on your phone. That is really common right now. It is. It's a big fucking problem, I think. I think it's a deeper problem than we know.

Ari Shaffir and Big Jay Oakerson did a podcast where they were on the roof of this building. And they were peeping-tomming on this couple. And this couple's about to have sex, and they both start talking on their phones. They both start playing with their phones. The woman is straddling this man, and she's looking at her phone. And the guy's underneath the girl, and he starts looking at his phone. I want to know why Ari Shaffir's spying on people.

That's what he does. He's a pervert. He's a creep. But I think it's, I don't know what it's doing to our heads, but, like, because, like, so a friend of a friend of mine is a stand up here in LA. And he not, first he got rid of his smartphone in favor of a flip phone. Ari did that too. And then he got rid of his flip phone in favor of a home landline with an old fashioned answering machine with a tape in it.

Because he feels like he enjoy, he thinks there's a virtue in being bored there's something to being bored yep that that your brain needs the space of having to conjure up imagination in its own right in order to lead you to the muse because you never know when it's going to hit. So, you know, constantly, I mean, I think back to when I was a kid and if you made arrangements to go and see a movie with a buddy of yours, you know, when I was 15 and you said, we'll just meet at the movie theater at five and they were going to be late, there was no way for you to know that they were going to be seven minutes late. And during those seven minutes, there was nothing for you to do.

And it's amazing to me that I'm amazed that that's the case. It's amazing to me that now I can't even really imagine just standing on a street corner outside a movie theatre for seven minutes, being totally unruffled by the fact that a friend is seven minutes late, and being perfectly comfortable just doing what? Gazing at the sky? Looking at passersby? Yeah, that's what people have done for thousands of years when they had to wait for something.

And that space, that just psychic space of not having the ability to check who's talking about me on Twitter, what's going on on Facebook, what am I missing, what's happening, what's the latest photo from my friends, what's the latest news thing that's coming down? Just standing there. Life used to be punctuated by moments like that all the time. Yeah. And I wonder whether those are the moments in which you come up with ideas for the book

that you want to write or the stand-up bit that you want to do or the painting that you want to paint or the, I don't know, the chair that you want to make or the painting that you want to paint or the i don't know the chair that you want to make well they can or you can just actually work you know there's a lot of people think that the muse is supposed to come to you when you're bored how about you sit in front of your desk you fucking lazy bitch and actually write you know there's that too i mean i think there's there's there is absolutely an argument for not being constantly entertained by electronics there's absolutely an argument for not being constantly entertained by electronics. There's absolutely an argument for that, but I don't know if that's the best one. I think-

What is? Well, I think reflection and time alone. And also, I think the way to mitigate that is discipline. I think you have to have discipline. You have to know when to- A lot of people don't. I don't. And I appreciate moments of, you know, I used to love flying before you had seat back televisions because it was a good excuse to just read and just gaze out the window and just think now i watch tv do you yeah because i'm an undisciplined shit but you're not though but you're not you get a lot of things done i do but don't i mean i like a lot of creative people beat myself up a lot for not getting more done i mean i look i do as well and i get a lot done.

Yeah, but I think everyone looks at you and thinks, fuck, I wish I was more like Joe. I just did a lot of shit. He seems to have his shit together. Guys like you and Tim Ferriss and Anthony Robbins and stuff, you're always doing shit. Yeah, but- Whereas a lot of us other creative people spend a lot of time scratching our heads, scratching our asses. Here's the dirty secret. I'm satisfied yeah i'm not i hate everything i hate everything i do i hate everything i do if a podcast comes out great i'm happy and everything like that but i

get very little satisfaction from it i just all i think is the next one's got to be good too all right let's uh let's make sure the guest is good let's make sure the subject matter is good you're fucked on that today. I hope Gad was good. This is easy. You're an easy fella. You're a good guest. But I've had some guests before where they're like, oh, Jesus, I've got to do all the heavy lifting here. This motherfucker's not even finishing his sentences.

I've had people like that before, especially people that don't know how to do podcasts or they haven't done them before. Yeah, I mean, podcasting itself is kind of a work of art. It's a very pretentious way to describe it. But, I mean, it is a creation. And there's something that's going on, you have to be aware of how people are going to perceive this creation, how they're going to ingest it. And it has to be as smooth as you can make it. And you have to learn from your mistakes. And you have to make sure you're not talking over each other too much. But you also can't let someone ramble too much as well. Sometimes people get boring. They just drone on about things in their own space and you got to kind of pull them out of their space. So there's like a craft to it all. But yeah, I do a lot of different things. But one of the reasons why I do a lot of different things is that they all kind of symbiotically connect together in some sort of a weird way in that I love them all. I enjoy doing them all, whether it's comedy or MMA commentary or podcasting. They all do sort of flow together. I mean, it's interesting that you say that, like, there's a craft to podcasting in terms of how –

and we were talking about this a little bit last night with Sam Harris on my podcast about when should you interrupt and when should you not interrupt. Because I find that sometimes I'll be criticized for interrupting somebody on my podcast. And as far as I'm concerned, the last thing I want my podcast to be or any form of entertaining conversation to be is just a sequence of speeches that two people give to one another. I mean, this is one of the things that's appealing about your podcast. people give to one another. I mean, this is one of the things that's appealing about your podcast. You know, you come into this with a two to three hour stretch ahead of you with absolutely no idea what's going to happen and no preconceptions about where it's going to go. And the joy of it is the dance, right? Is the interplay. Like, I don't know what we're going to be talking about in five minutes time and neither do you. So it's interesting to find out. And I feel like if you are too nice to other people and don't interrupt them in order to create that dance,

then there's basically one person standing on the sidelines and another person trying to do the two-step or the flamenco by themselves. But that depends on who the guest is. There's certain guests like Dr. Rhonda Patrick is a perfect example. All I do is wind her up and let her go. I mean, I interact with her a little bit, but as little as possible. And she's just such a dynamo that all I have to do is ask her questions about, you know, the mechanisms of certain vitamin absorption or whatever we're talking about, cold shock therapy, whatever the fuck it is. And she just goes. So in that case, if I wanted to chime in and have a normal conversation, I'd fuck up the

flow of the conversation. Right. So you've got to know. You've got to have the, yeah. Whereas you and I, we always have these silly conversations. It goes all over the place. We're laughing. We're serious. It's very fluid and it goes back and forth. But you, like I, am not a fucking medical expert. No. I mean, we're not experts in anything, which is kind of what I like. I like being a polymath. I like having a lot of fingers in a lot of different pies. A polymath? A polymath.

A person who is good at it. Can we get a definition on polymath, Jamie? I understand it to be a person who's interested in and good at several different disciplines and doesn't really focus on one. I prefer a renaissance man. A renaissance man. A person of wide-ranging knowledge or learning. Well, expertise spans a significant

number of different subject areas. That's an expertise. Many expertise. A person who's known to draw on complex bodies of knowledge to solve specific problems. Well, that's the wiki. Look at the one above. I was using the general use. Wide-ranging knowledge or learning. Yeah.

Well, that's just a more pronounced version of it. Yeah. Or more. Yeah. Okay. Polymath. I like it. How much time do you spend distracted by your phone?

I try very little. More, less lately than ever. I've been really good about it over the last few months. Like, I went to, I was in the Nevada high country in the desert last week. Just now? For a whole week. I love this. I love that, just for your listeners.

So I book a trip to LA. I have a few meetings out here. I'm always here at the last minute. So I never plan in advance. I send Joe a text. Don't hear from him for a couple of days. He gets back to me. Sorry, I've been in the wilderness.

My image of you is like, you didn't have any cell phone reception. You're out in the woods, and in my brain, you're, like, you're naked on the back of a horse, like, shooting elk. No, I was trying to shoot mule deer. I was in the desert. I was camping, and I was with a group of friends, and we were on a hunting trip. We were there for seven days. No cell phone reception. We occasionally saw another hunter, but that's it.

We're just out there on public land in the wilderness and chasing after deer. I've got to do more of that. Seven days, no cell phone, no email. How many people? No. There was five of us total. One, two, three, four, five, six. Six of us total. Great.

Yeah. What did you eat? We split off into two groups. We brought food. Brought freeze-dried foods, these things called mountain ops. You add water to them. There's freeze-dried foods and dehydrated foods. And then we brought some whole foods, some actual real foods.

We ate that all by the fourth or fifth day, and then we were eating that shitty freeze-dried stuff. But we were hoping we were going to eat a deer but we struck out but it was a very fun time and even just for the release of just being disconnected from society but the point is I try to do that several times a year I do that maybe five times a year but more important than that

I leave that fucking thing alone more than I've ever done before I treat that thing like if I spend too much time with it it's going to give me a disease I think it does I think it does and I don't know why I don't know what's changed I'm trying to put my finger on what it is about my relationship, especially to Twitter that has changed because it's a very holes Yeah, is that what it is with so many assholes you realize like in my real life How many people do I get in contact with that make me feel awful very few most zero almost zero?

Yeah, so you choose to hang out with your friends you choose to hang out with your acquaintances all the people that you know you Interact with people and even if I meet someone in there a stranger 99.9 times When I meet them it's a pleasant interaction It's very rare that I find someone who's like really truly rude or where it can't be worked out You know where you can't walk away from it with a handshake and feeling good. But this thing, this two-dimensional conversation where you don't know who the person is, you don't know where they're coming from, you don't know what their agenda is, you don't know what their life is like, you don't know anything about them. And they say something and you react to that 130 plus characters

so there are two problems right one is the the absence of distract the distractedness that it kind of fosters in our lives the fact that it robs at least in my experience i only speak for me it robs me of moments of zen that could exist throughout the day right by plunging by you know we know physiologically that it gives you a little dopamine hit every time you notice that someone's mentioned you on twitter and said something right i mean you get true that they've done like studies with people yeah you get a little hit you get a little drug hit i mean just a tiny drip drip drip it's like having a little piece of candy i could just get dripped all day then just sit around and just drip away well people do drip

drip drip yeah something yes fucking crazy, man. And so there's that. There's the fact that I'm constantly getting that little hit by logging on. What is that? An energy thing that you're eating? Alpha brain? Alpha brain, yeah. Want some? Yeah, sure. What does it contain? I mean, I know I should know this because I know that

you're the guy. Ah, don't worry about it. Doesn't matter. I'll talk to you off the air about it. Hannibal fucking stole it. Hannibal sent me... Oh, no, he did. He burned through them all last night. There was only two left.

Hannibal stole it. He sent me a text message this morning laughing about how he stole all my alpha brain. And I got his address. I'm like, just give me your address.

I'll send you a bunch. Did he say anything else about last night? No, no, no. Okay, good. I don't want him to feel bad about it. No. Well, he's going to feel bad when it comes out.

Yeah, all right. You know, getting around that. If you release it, he's going to feel bad. Or maybe he won't. Certainly not going to not release it. Maybe Sam will feel bad. I don't know. I doubt it.

Well, this comes back to Twitter. They'll feel bad if they read Twitter, and they won't feel bad if they don't read Twitter. Stay off Twitter. And so this is interesting. So in addition to it being a kind of a little drug that you keep in your pocket that stops you from ever just being alone with yourself. Have you seen that Louis C.K. bit, by the way? I think he's on Conan where he's talking about why he doesn't want to give his daughters a phone. Because he's like, you know that he was stopped in traffic at lights and he felt something inside that he didn't want to give his daughters a phone because like, he's like, you know that he was like, he was stopped in traffic at lights and he felt something inside that he

didn't like, which was like the experience of being human. And so he reached for his phone and then he realized that that's what we do. Like the moment we start to feel the great emptiness of being alive, we reach for our phone. And, but one on one occasion he didn't reach for his phone, and he pulled over to the side of the road and started bawling his eyes out,

and it was so cathartic and so beautiful. And then he recovered, and he had this wonderful, spiritual, wholesome experience. Hold the fuck on. He just started crying? Why did he start crying? It was like he'd been listening to some song on the radio, and it was so beautiful.

Anyway, he waxes all lyrical and gets all poetic about it. Louis C.K. growing a vagina right in front of our eyes. You heard it here first, Louis. Joe Rogan says you have a vagina. Sorry, go ahead. But anyway, his point is that's what part of the experience of being human is all about. Crying on the side of the road with a car, listening to music created by a machine. Yeah, so human.

All right, maybe that's the wrong example. Fucking pussy. So in addition to that, then you're talking about... People are tweeting Louie right now. Yeah, exactly. Did you hear? Did you hear? He doesn't even have a Twitter anymore.

That's wise. Deleted his Twitter. Well, he sells out Madison Square Garden. Yeah, what does he need? He doesn't need a fucking Twitter. So disappointed. I was one of these schmucks who bought a ticket to see him at Madison Square Garden in a couple weeks. And now I'm thinking, I used to see him when he was at the Cellar.

Like, I was at the Aspen Comedy Festival and saw him, you know, with 50 people in the room. Why am I going to be sitting? I'll feel like it's not going to be the same. In the garden? Well, it's definitely not going to be the same because it's a different show and a different day. You know what I mean. Yeah, well, so what? You wanted to see him.

It's a stadium. So you could see him at the comedy stores here all the time. Can't he just come over to my place and do it in my living room? Shit just got weird. He's crying. You're inviting him over to your house. He's crying. I'm going to be on virtual reality watching porn.

He's going to be doing a bit. Yeah, man. It's going to be different. He's doing a big, gigantic show and he's making a lot more money oh yeah man it's gonna be different he's doing a big gigantic show and he's you know making a lot more money doing it that way sure is yeah well he uh apparently emptied out his bank account to create that animated series no horace and pete was the animated series that's not animated horace no horace and pete is uh is like a an old school uh kind of multi-cam no studio studio audience. I never watched it.

Somebody told me it was animated. Sitcommy thing. I just assumed they were right. I thought it was animated. No, it's not. Oh, wow. It has a drawing as its icon. Oh, that's what it is.

I think. Oh, huh. So what is it? Is it good? It is innovative in a way that only an auteur like Louis would have the balls to pull off. Is that a tactful way of dodging that question? So don't get it. Just kidding.

I watched the first... So he fucks with you, right? Do you remember his original Lucky Louis on HBO? That was done to sort of look like the Honeymooners and with bad sets that kind of shook and a bad studio audience. It was like a very sort of 1960s sitcom feel. And everyone criticized it because they were like, oh, the production values are terrible. And he's like, well, yeah, we fucking know that.

It's not like HBO doesn't have the money to get a good set if we wanted a good set. It's supposed to look like an old sitcom. But it's a very sort of meta, like, fuck you concept. sitcom but it's a very sort of meta like fuck you concept and in a similar way what he's done here is he's basically done a a dramatic sort of almost 1970s english style play that is shot with no studio audience with very very very long scenes and long takes that's very dark and a bit whimsical and funny. But I only got through a few episodes, and then although I respected it, it just wasn't a way that I wanted to spend my evening,

if that makes sense. Yeah, that does make sense. I mean, it's a piece of art. You're creating something. Yeah, yeah. And also, when you're creating something, especially when it comes to a sitcom or something along those lines, it takes a long time for it to find its legs,

for you to figure out like what the characters are all about and how the scenes are going to play out. Every sitcom that I've ever seen or the ones that I've been a part of, they take many, many, many episodes to create, like to figure out what it actually is. And then along the way, like you have to have someone who believes in it and then they're financing it, funding it.

Well, not him. And he apparently did all that shit on his own, but emptied out his fucking bank account. And he's already made it back. So now everything from now, he hasn't made any sales of it. So he's made it all back just from internet sales, according to him. And so whatever sale he ends up making, if he sells it to Netflix or whatever, he's apparently waiting for the Emmys because he's hoping he'll get some and then we'll be in a stronger negotiating position. But all of that will be profit, 100% profit.

That's interesting. So he did make the money back. So he complained about it, and then after he complained about it, he made more money? I think the complaining about it thing was he claims that was just a bullshit media spin. He was on Howard, I think. I think he was on Howard Stern's show or something. Oh, he lied? No, no, no.

He didn't lie. His point is that he was saying that he spent all of his money right and he was like joking about how like you know i spent all my money on this thing and i have no idea if it's going to work and then some fucking clickbait media outlet was like louis ck broke after you know losing all of his money on the show he was like no i never expected to get my money back immediately this is an experiment i put my money and it's It's an investment. And now, later, it's paid off. But wasn't he saying that that was all the money that he had, and he was just doing that, and then he had to go on tour?

I mean, that was part of what he was saying, that he was going on tour for more money, because he had emptied his bank account. Yes. Okay. But that's different from losing your money. Right. He didn't lose the money. He invested his money in this thing, and while he was waiting for it to pay itself off, a

bunch of news articles came out about how he had no money. Well, that's what people want to hear. They don't want to hear, what a wonderful investment. And all paid off. And what creative venture that was profitable. Nobody wants to hear that. They want to hear, he's a loser now. He's sucking dicks for homemade wine.

Homemade wine. People are gross, man. They want to hear about failure Like hearing about a guy That has a You know A reasonable Sort of a

Risk And it pays off It's not a great story He's already successful Yeah That's not Nobody wants to hear that Why are we like that Joe?

Why do we want to hear the bad shit? Because it's exciting to see accidents Yeah Do you want to see Someone fly by in a motorcycle? Or do you want to see Someone fly by And another motorcycle? Do you want to see someone fly by and another guy change his lanes and that guy goes, fuck Change his lanes. Change his lanes.

I want to see blood. And at least see him flying. I saw a fucking VW Beetle on the highway on the way here, charred, burned to a crisp on the side of the road with the cops around it. Whoa. Is that a thing in Los Angeles that I should be aware of? Is that for insurance or something? Or is it a massive accident?

It could have been anything. It could have just been a fire. You know? I mean. How does a car catch fire? Well, didn't VW go through some weird fucking shit where they were lying about. Yeah, the diesel. Yeah.

But this was a VW. Lying about gas miles. This was a Beetle. Oh, an old school one? Yeah, from the 70s. Oh, not the new ones? No, no, no. Not the ones with the little fake daisies in the.

Probably caught on fire. Those are shit boxes. Well, it definitely did that. Not the new ones? No, no, no. Not the ones with the little fake daisies in them. Probably caught on fire. Those are shit boxes. Well, it definitely did that, Joe. All right. Thanks for listening, everybody. That's the show. We solved it. This is like CSI VW Beetle.

Okay. Joe fixed it. Yep, it was on fire. No, it was definitely on fire. I just don't know why. Have you ever been in a car that accidentally caught on fire? Actually, I have now that you mentioned it. Yeah, when I was a kid, we were staying in the UK and we were driving a friend's Jaguar.

I like how you say it. Jaguar, as Americans say. Jaguar. And it was incredibly expensive. This guy's a multi, multi-millionaire, big star in the UK. And so we are driving. He lends it to us for a weekend while we're there. And it's a 1960s vintage thing.

And we go out on a drive through the countryside. And the car catches on fire. Oh, no. So my parents had to pay to restore this vintage Jaguar. Wait a minute. Why are you responsible for this piece of shit catching on fire? Well, he lent it to us. So fucking what?

Actually, it was for more than a weekend. He was letting us use it because he was out of the country. I think we were staying there for a couple of weeks. He was letting us use his place, letting us drive his car. It's kind of the deal, you know? We're not going to accept money for it. But whatever. A car does not catch on fire.

It does if it's a 1960s vintage Jaguar. But it doesn't catch on fire because of your fault. No. It catches on fire because it's a piece of shit. But we But it doesn't catch on fire because of your fault. No. It catches on fire because it's a piece of shit. But we got unlucky. So he let you a piece of shit. He knew it was a piece of shit because it's a 1960 car. You're driving it around and it acted like a piece of shit and caught on fire.

And then he wants you to pay? Yep. I would have been like, fuck you, buddy. How about you get your wires checked and I sue you for almost killing me with your shitbox car? He didn't want us to pay. We just paid. How much was it? I don't remember.

I was a child. Well, not a child. Probably a lot of money. Probably about 12. It was a lot. I remember my parents feeling like it was a lot of money. And it was because smoke just started pouring out of the back seat in between my parents. Because it's a piece of shit.

Did it even have a fucking fire extinguisher? No. Fucking shitbox. Yeah. God damn it, I'm mad. I know. I'm mad now. British engineering excellence.

And he was a wealthy guy, this guy? Very wealthy. Well, he's a piece of shit. Your parents weren't rich? That's why he had such an expensive car. Your parents weren't rich? They were not rich at the time. And he made them pay?

He didn't make them pay. They refused to accept his offer to reimburse them. Oh. So they insisted on paying? Yeah. Wow. He should have bought himself something with that money. He probably did.

My parents are nice people, Joe. I come from good Aussie stock. I appreciate that. They're not going to take money from a friend of theirs. Yeah, but that's tricky, man. First of all, what a wonderful guy for letting you borrow this 1960-something Jaguar. Those old Jaguars are so badass looking, with that long front nose. God, what a fucking design. No, this was even before. So,

I'm trying to think of what model that is with the very, very long nose. This is the one before that which was a rounder kind of shape from memory. Pull it up, Jamie. I can't remember what it is. What was the shape of Jags in the late 60s? Talk about a gas guzzler.

I mean, you know, it's a... V12, wasn't it? Yeah, it'd be a V... I'm not even sure. It might have been an inline 8. Would that make sense? Could have been a V12. I don't know.

I'm making things up. I don't know anything about old Jags. I don't know why I said V12. I mean, it was certainly 8 or 12. It was not, you know, it was not nothing. It was expensive. Is that it? Yeah, it was one of those.

It was something like that. Whoa, 1960s Jaguar MK2 Whoa. It was something like that. Whoa. 1960s Jaguar MK2. Wow, what a pretty car. Incredible. It was the kind of car where when you stopped at the lights, people would wind down their windows and be like, beautiful car, mate. See, the one next to it is the one I was thinking of, the red one. Yeah, yeah.

What is that one, Jamie? That's like a James Bond style. That's so dope. I love those. Oh, an E-type. That's an E-type. 1960s E-type. That's so dope. I love those. Oh, an E-Type. That's an E-Type. 1960s E-Type. Those are so pretty.

You know, they make those now with modern underpinnings. You can buy one of those. These companies, they take an old Jaguar E-Type, but they put a completely modern suspension and brakes and modern engine. And so you look like you're driving like this 1960s car, but you're driving this. That's a real new thing that they're doing. It's called Restomods. That's great.

Super common. I have a 1965 Corvette like that. Really? Yeah. I love Corvettes. Yeah, it's got- 65. What's a 60?

Can you show me a 65 Corvette? This is a picture of mine. See, I did a video with Jay Leno. We did Jay Leno's Garage. We drove it around. Yep, yep. Oh, I'll check that episode out. Yeah.

That'd be great. I heard him on your show as well. You had him on, right? That's my car. Oh, that's great. I love those. That's fantastic. How many cars have you got?

I've got a few. You don't want to say. That's a nine. You don't want to lose the common man touch. I'm definitely not. Well, I've lost it. It's over. Yeah. But that has a 500 horsepower LS1 supercharged engine under the hood.

And it only weighs like, it's probably less than 3,000 pounds, especially because it's a convertible. At what point during this did Jay come in his pants? Immediately. Yeah. We had to change pants four times. He's an animal. But it's... Oh, speaking of coming in... Oh, no.

I'm not even going to go there. I'll talk to you about it after the podcast. Why? You know when the filter between your brain and your mouth... Let it go. What is it? There's no more floodgate. Come on, man.

No, it's just something personal in my life that I don't want to talk about. All righty. Your call. So, I just want to come back to... Awkward segue. your call so I just want to come back to awkward segue how do we go from the problem is that the actual thing

is so much less interesting than whatever is in everybody's brain so dear listener I understand here's a piece of advice whatever you are thinking about

right now when you heard me talk about coming that is more interesting than the reality of the story that i was going to tell you so just hang on to that listen folks whatever he tells me after the show next podcast i'll tell you i will break our bond of trust i will violate violate our privacy no it basically had to do i'll tell i'll tell you the i'll tell

you the skeleton of the story, which is that there's a medical procedure that I am a part of at the moment, which requires me to potentially... It's an IVF-related thing, right? So I had a meeting earlier this week. IVF means in vitro fertilization. In vitro fertilization.

Trying to make a baby. Yes, conceivably. Josh Zepp's trying to make a baby. So I didn't say it was my baby necessarily. Test tube robot baby. That's right. A super fucking superhuman. I'm basically trying to create like, it'll be like the movie Twins, you know, creating

the ultimate superhuman machine. But I had a meeting at 11 a.m. on the same morning that I had to donate my sperm sample this week, a few days ago. And so I'm in the meeting and like, it's not going that well. I'm not really feeling it. So then I was like, guys. I could be jerking off right now. No, I literally said to them, these really, these important entertainment types. I was like, guys, I got to be blunt.

Earlier this morning, I came into a bucket and created a human what the fuck did you do before 11 a.m you were that bored with the conversation i'm out of here just blew it up you were doing huffpost live why did you stop doing that the whole thing basically gradually imploded yeah i got out a founding editor of the Huffington Post who sort of helped create it with Ariana, had been fired slash supposedly resigned in November. And now Ariana was fired slash supposedly resigned, what, last week or two weeks ago. How do you fire the Huffington of the Huffington Post? That's what happens when you ask other people for money. Yeah, basically.

So HuffPost was bought by AOL in 2011. Wait a minute. AOL has money? Yeah. Well, basically, AOL actually does have money because they have some. Where the fuck do they get money? It's really funny. Two ways.

One is they've got some proprietary ad software, which is helpful for websites. One is they've got some proprietary ad software, which is helpful for websites. And the second is a lot of people in America still unknowingly pay for AOL.com. Because back when they used to sell you, well, they don't know that they don't have to anymore. Like in the 90s, they would send out CDs, apparently. I wasn't here then, but AOL was the place where Americans got online. And so those, here we go, OMG, CNN money, 2.1 million people still use AOL dial-up. And they pay. They pay for that.

Scroll that down. I want to read that. Oh my God. 70% of Americans are connected to the internet over much faster broadband. The average UF broadband speed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, 200 times faster than the 56K per second dial-up. Even smartphones are more than 100 times faster than that. Yeah, so the average AOL dial-up user is paying $20 a month. Whoa.

$20 a month for dial-up speed. They should pay you for dial-up. So what is this, people that just live in really super rural areas? Yeah, basically. They probably can't get it. Yeah. Or can't get better. That's right.

Or they're just old hicks and they don't know better. That's amazing. So AOL basically, I mean, they say that AOL bought Huffington Post, but really it was Ariana essentially becoming a senior manager of AOL or whatever her title was at AOL because AOL had no future and they were like oh HuffPost is cool with the kids so let's have let's get in on some of that action oh I see then last year Verizon bought AOL and in part of that whole shake-up the you know she got ousted I mean let's be frank she is eccentric and has her own hobby horses like her i mean she spends a lot of her time on her boyfriends is a hobby horse is a hobby horse a thing in america is that a term i would think

if i was an old rich lady i'd have some hobby horses though a lot of dudes that need money for the gym yeah sure no i'm not implying that studs and give them Viagra and send them over. Do you want a fucking jaguar or not, boy? Get it hard. Not a boy toy. A hobby horse is a hobby that is a personal interest that you spend way too much time on. Hobby horse? Yeah. I mean, it's probably an Australianism.

And she spends, in other words, she spends a lot of time going around the world giving speeches about why you should get more sleep. Really? Mm-hmm. you should get more sleep. Really? Mm-hmm. She's big into sleep. That's it? She wrote a whole book about it. How much sleep do you need?

She wrote a whole book. Really? Yep. And all it is is one of, you know those books where you basically know in the first page what the whole book is going to be, but then they just pad out the remaining 180 pages? That's one of those. Huh. And it's just about how much you need to recover. You don't get enough sleep. Arion Huffington, the sleep revolution.

Here it is, the sleep revolution. Transforming your life. Listen, you're a rich lady. Most people aren't rich. They can't fucking sleep all the time, bitch. The sleep revolution. Do you know how many fucking people I know That are participating in that revolution

Unknowingly Especially comedians Comics There's a lot of comics where I'll fucking call them Before noon Oh totally If it were up to me I would stay up very late And get up pretty late as well

Some people are just like that I felt bad about it and then I found out that Sam Harris and Tim Ferriss do it as well, so fuck. They stay up late and get up late? Yeah. Well, I get my best work done late at night when everyone's asleep. Oh good, me too. I almost feel like it sounds so woo-woo, but this is what I believe. I believe there's a different feeling to the air at like 2, 3 o'clock in the morning because almost everyone is asleep, and I feel like there's less signal. I think you get something from people. I think there's an intangible quality that people exude, that people express, that they broadcast. And

when you're around them, that's why certain people have bad energy and certain people have good energy and some people are warm, some people are weird. I think there's a thing that we don't know how to quantify and that it's about people. And I think that it is entirely possible that there is a hum of a city, like literally a feeling that you get when a bunch of people are thinking and awake and conscious. And you get a different expression when those people are asleep. And so I know that when I'm writing at 2 or 3 o'clock in the morning, which is when I do my best work, everybody else is conked out. So I feel like I have more clarity. I feel like I have more peace, and I can write better.

Might be total bullshit, but there might be something to it. You're right. That is woo-woo. Total woo-woo, right? It's possible. It's also possible that there are visual and auditory cues that just make you feel like you're in a special place, right? It's dark. There's no one moving. There's no one making noises.

Here's another reason why I might be interested in believing that. Not what you're saying, but what I'm saying. It's because when I go on these camping trips, these hunting trips where there's no cell phone service, That's another reason why I might be interested in believing that. Not what you're saying, but what I'm saying. It's because when I go on these camping trips, these hunting trips where there's no cell phone service, there's a very different feeling to the world when there's no service. You feel different. Like you feel... Wait, when your cell phone has no service? No cell phone, no internet, no signals.

There's no nothing. But how would the thinking hum of a human mind get transmitted through to your phone? Not to your phone. I'm not saying it gets transmitted to your phone. I'm thinking that there are signals that you are receiving all the time. Like in this room, we have Wi-Fi. There's cell phone. There's radio.

Oh, I see what you're saying. There's a lot of shit in the air. That all of those waves somehow resonate. You can sense them. I don't know if you can, but I know computer can and i know my phone can but do you think you can sense the mental states of other human beings which is what i thought you were saying it was what i was saying but i'm thinking that there's more than one kind of signal i see that is being expressed not just by people but by society in general the the hum of a city, the buzz, the alive.

You know that feeling you get of New York City, like it's alive. Yes, absolutely. I wonder if that's not because you're dealing with 7 million people stuffed into this little tiny area, stacked on top of each other. It's definitely that. The question is, what is the transmission mechanism by which that presence makes itself known? The question is what is the transmission mechanism by which that presence makes itself known? I mean, I totally know what you mean about camping because one of the most beautiful places that I could ever be is in the outback at night. Nothing around for miles. I love deserts. I love, you know, I drove through Nevada once and I've done a couple of trips around Australia right deep into the middle of nowhere

and there's just something so I mean for a start the blazing sky of just stars so bright that if anyone hasn't seen them you would not believe that the sky could be that bright yeah and then the sheer silence silence so silent it's just it's almost a noise in itself yeah it's almost a deafening noise in the in the absence of noise it's not just a silence no I feel, it's almost a noise in itself. It's almost a deafening noise in the absence of noise. It's not just a silence. No. I feel like it's an absence of signal. It's a silence and an absence of signal.

I think we've become accustomed to the signal of a city, the signal of all the people and all the things that are being broadcasted around us and all the waves and all the different shit that we're experiencing unknowingly might be bullshit. But it might. I mean, there's people that really are concerned with Wi-Fi. They're concerned with Wi-Fi because there's not a long history of us using Wi-Fi or even cellular signals. We know for a fact that they interfere with bees. Bees' form of communication gets interfered with by-

That's cell towers, right? Cell towers right cell towers and cell phone signals in general and that all these signals that are flying through the air that are reaching your and my phones and everyone else's phones are that bees are actually taking these things in too and just imagine the world where bees before you know the 1990s they're like hanging out having a great time buzz buzz buzz communicating with each other buzz buzz buzz and then all of a sudden they they hear a jackhammer in the background. Dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong, dong.

They're like, what the fuck is that? Well, they think that sonar is one explanation for why whales beach themselves and why so many migratory patterns underwater are fucked up as well. Have you heard that theory? It totally makes sense. That theory, this is, you know, the military and the U.S. military does all kinds of, I don't even, I can't remember the name of it, but long distance sonar. So that, you know, really, really reaching out. Part of the spying system, I think, is, it may not be sonar, but anyway, the gist of this is correct, even if the details aren't. That they basically blanket, you know, hundreds of thousands of miles of ocean in these things that we can't hear, that we thought had no impact on anything. But you can notice behavioral changes in whales just vast distances away from these submarines that are conducting these things.

So it's entirely conceivable that with bees and other animals tuned into things that we're not tuned into. Yeah. all tuned into things that we're not tuned into yeah i mean the thing i love about getting away from all that is like the first day i don't know if you find this but i find that the first day the absence of all of that can seem a little bit irritating in some way or a little bit like there's nothing to do like i feel sort of fidgety when i first go to the desert that's why you gotta go hunting but well yeah that'd be great too. There's nothing fidgety about that at all. You have a very primal task in front of you. Sure.

But, I mean, after three, four, five days, then your pace just slows down into, it almost makes me feel some kind of kinship to Aborigines or something, or like people who are a lot more connected to land and New York City. And you get into just a different sort of headspace, different relationship to the earth and the soil and the sky and all that. I mean, it sounds very hippy-dippy, but you can definitely feel it when you're there. Yeah, it does sound hippy-dippy, but I think you're right.

There's something going on. And I think there's something going on that's natural. You're disconnected from all this unnatural stuff that is so attractive to us. Yeah. I mean, the reason why you're seeing these people this unnatural stuff that are so attractive to us. Yeah. I mean, the reason why you're seeing these people at dinner all touching their phones and playing with their phones, something is happening to them, right? There's some sort of compelling thing. It's not like they're that compelled to read.

The dopamine hit, mate. Yeah. Because if you had books in front of these people, would they be looking at those books the same way they're reading people's tweets? No. No. Well, that takes focus and concentration. Right. You know, this is the big thing. There's a book called The Shallows by, I can't remember.

I did a segment on the Discovery Science Channel show based on, is Google making us stupid? Which is, do you know that book? There's a book, Is Google Making Us Stupid? No. And there's this kind of ideological battle between these two guys. I can't remember their names. One of them is Nicholas, someone or other, about the question of, is all of this technological input, you know, making us smarter because we've got so much more data at our

fingertips and we're so much more nimble intellectually? Or is it making us more stupid because we're more reliant on outside sources of data? We don't have to remember things anymore. And we're constantly skipping across the surface of information instead of digging down into it. And I think it's an interesting question about, you say, would those people be reading books? Well, no. And do they even read as many books as they would have if they'd lived 100 years ago? Because an argument can be made that we're really good these days at multitasking. We're really good at jumping from Facebook to Twitter to the next thing to, I'm writing something,

but then a little email pops up and then a text message comes through. So I'm constantly distracted. I'm constantly busy, but there's that old line of a company who said, yes, you're busy. Ants are busy, but what's the point,

right? Like, what are you up to? What are you doing? What are you being productive? Are you being efficient? Are you achieving anything that's really point, right? What are you up to? What are you doing? Are you being productive? Are you being efficient? Are you achieving anything that's really important to you? Busyness is the scourge of modern life in a way

because it gives you a fake way of feeling like you're doing something when you're actually not. And the argument is, yeah, we're better at juggling all this shit than someone in the 1800s would have been, but are we as capable of having the patience to read Dostoevsky? Could you read Moby Dick? Do people sit down and really devote themselves to a deep dive rather than just an across-the-surface horizontal? You certainly can if you put that thing down for a little bit.

Of course you can. My question— But does it disincline you to doing that? I think so. I think something's going on. And I think something's going on that we haven't quite recognized yet. And I think one of the things that's going on with cell phones is this is a step towards

this symbiotic relationship that we're going to have with computers and internet and communication. And what we're talking about with virtual reality is a part of that. And it's all becoming more and more integrated, more and more invasive, and more and more prevalent. And I think what we're doing, and I've said this time and time again, so forgive me if you've heard this before, other people who are listening, I think we are a caterpillar that is giving birth to some sort of an electronic butterfly. And I think we are going to become

something different. And I think this are going to become something different. And I think this is a step. I think we're building a cocoon. We're building an electronic cocoon by encompassing and engrossing ourselves in these electronic aids, these things that we're connecting to constantly all day. We are getting more and more attached to them to the point where the other day I left my phone in my house. I drove down the street and panicked and had a U-turn and turned right back around. How could you live?

I was just going to go to the store. What could you do? I was just going to go to the store real quick. Yeah. And I couldn't do it without my phone. I'm like, fuck my phone. Turned around. And that feeling, it's a weird feeling.

It's a strange feeling. And I think that that feeling is, there's something, I think it's a, it's a strange feeling. And I think that that feeling is, um, there's something, I think it's a natural thing that we're doing. I think that as technology becomes more and more, um, innovative and more and more powerful, and it can do more and more things for you and connect you to more and more people and in more and more different and involving ways, I think it's going to eventually lead to the next step. And that next step is some sort of an integration of it into your biology. I want to get to that in one second, because you've said that to me before,

and I think it's really interesting. On the question of leaving your phone at home and freaking out, I mean, this comes back to the anecdote that I was telling earlier about the friend of a friend who's a comic who's gotten rid of his phone. Because I love podcasts, listen to podcasts all the time, love your show, love a whole bunch of different shows. And I will habitually be listening to a podcast while I'm brushing my teeth, listening to a podcast while I'm driving around, whatever it is. And today, I was interviewing Andy Kindler, the comic for my podcast. And he, like, literally, he was downstairs at the hotel where I was staying.

And just to go down and pick him up, I had exited the room without my phone to listen to a podcast. I walked back into my room, opened the podcast app on my phone, put my earphones in, find the podcast that I was listening to, waste like 25 seconds of a one-minute task. Because heaven forbid I should go outside and get in an elevator and go down and meet Andy Kindler without listening to, what, 55 fucking seconds of the latest Radiolab episode that I have to listen to? How dumb am I? How distracted do I need to be by people speaking in my ears that I can't just be with myself for an elevator ride from the seventh fucking floor? In your defense, how engaged are you in this wonderful podcast where you're gaining all this knowledge and it's fascinating and intriguing and you don't want to let it go?

Thank you, Joe. I feel better. How much do I owe you for this session? It's free. It comes with being a friend. If we are building a cocoon, then is the butterfly artificial intelligence? Yes. And do we play a role? We become it. while we'll say that the artificial intel the whole question of artificial intelligence is slightly a red herring because we will become the artificial intelligence we will unify ourselves with machines in such a way that human intelligence that biological intelligence and artificial intelligence become essentially indistinguishable i think it's possible that that's true i also think

it's possible that we could have both we could we could literally have artificial life forms that we've created along with us being interconnected with some sort of computer that enhances our intelligence that we carry with us everywhere or that is a part of our body. And that it becomes something like Kurzweil has talked about these computers, these nanocomputers that are as small as red blood cells that they're going to inject into our bloodstream to find cancer and cure diseases and all those things. that they're going to inject into our bloodstream to find cancer and cure diseases and all those things. I think it's entirely possible that there's something like that that's going to enhance intelligence and that you're going to have something that you can inject into your body and you're going to be like Lucy from that Scarlett Johansson movie. I mean, it's not outside the realm of possibility that both things could happen at the same time, that you could have a literal artificial intelligence, something that is created by a person that can think and talk.

Did you see Ex Machina? Yes, loved it. Me too. I actually interviewed both of the actors and also the writer of that, Alex, I forget his name, but very interesting guy grappling with a lot of these big issues. I mean, he's genuinely motivated by and interested in the whole question of what it means to be conscious and self-aware. Yeah. Amazing, amazing movie. But that's possible too, that kind of thing where you're going to make a fake human and it could be confined like they were in some sort of a way where it didn't have the option to access the worldwide web and nor did it have the option to exponentially increase its own abilities.

Because that's one of the things that all of these people sort of agree with, is that the launch of artificial intelligence is not simply going to be, oh my God, we have an artificial intelligent thing here now. But it's going to be that this artificial intelligence is going to be infinitely smarter than us, almost instantaneously, because it's going to innovate on itself. That's right. So, yeah, I mean, I've heard Sam talk about this as well. I mean, 10,000 years. Precisely in a minute or something. Yeah. So it's amazing. So when you say something to me, my brain is operating at presumably roughly the same speed that your brain is operating.

Neither of us are inebriated. Neither of us are incredibly tired. So presumably the experience of the passage of time of this conversation for us is roughly one-to-one, maybe slightly off. Imagine if every single thing that you said, I had the experience of basically waiting for several years to figure out the perfect way to answer that. And then by the time you get to that, the artificial intelligence is going to be so far ahead of that. Because we're talking about- No, I mean, I'm the artificial intelligence in this analogy, right? And so I've just been sitting here wondering, what is the best possible response? Well, of course, I'm going to end up giving better responses. What I find interesting is, if you make this X mark in a robot,

I think it'll be easier to make a robot that passes the Turing test that seems to us to be self-aware than it will be to know whether or not it really is self-aware. Right? Right. And is there a meaningful difference? I mean, this is what's interesting to me. this is what's interesting to me is there is there a meaningful difference between a computer that can completely convincingly reassure you that it is that it has feelings and a computer that actually feels well what i think there is feeling and what what difference does it make here's here's the thing like we're so connected to this idea that the only life that's

real is a carbon-based life of biological intelligence, cells, life, death, lifespan. It's got a finite reality. It's eventually going to rot. I mean, that's what we think of life is, and that's the only thing that's worth anything to us, because we're just so inexorably connected to what we are, and that we only think that's the only kind of life. But there could easily be a life form that exists in the form of ideas you know and i've often thought about this in terms of like the word of a the word alien like people always love that expression alien intelligence and uh has have we ever been visited by aliens i often think that if intelligence keeps expanding and keeps growing at the rate that it has with human beings, you compare us to people that lived a few thousand years ago versus today, it's impossible not to conclude that people have gotten far more intelligent, far more capable, and have far more abilities than we did, whether it's technologically or through the way we can manipulate matter in our environment it's fought we're far more capable

now right now if we continue to go from here till you know thousands and thousands of years from now we could get to the point where we can inject ideas and send ideas to each other in the form of thoughts. Yep. Now, how do we not know that imagination itself is not a life form that wants us to continue to innovate and create and build something different? It's not just a function of the brain. It's not just a function of the conscious mind to be curious and a byproduct of our time as hunter-gatherers and this constant seeking of food and shelter and safety that is causing us to innovate. that's in the mist and that imagination itself, which is responsible for every single thing you see in this room and in this

city and on this planet that human beings have created. All of it came out of the imagination, all of it. And why is this imagination so fucking hungry for innovation? Why don't we have the capacity to recognize that phones are small enough. Computers are fast enough. TVs are big enough. Cars are quick enough. are fast enough TVs are big enough cars

are quick enough let's stop right here let's stop right here and work for the better good of humanity every era you could have said that Joe that's why fuck the 60s yeah shit bad cars and they're fucking you know that's what people will say in a half century old shitty Jaguars and catches on fire no but you know I'm saying yeah I do I do. You're right. You're right. I mean, you could have said that. But what is it?

What is going on? Like, what is imagination? Well, I think anyone who works in a creative field, or maybe anyone who even those who don't, will agree that there is something mysterious about the muse, for want of a better word, right? I mean, there are moments when I'm writing where something just drops into my head and I'm like, that's great. And certainly people who write music or who paint,

you know, they will, you get in that zone and you find that flow and it is like you're writing something else. It's not like you're the author of it entirely. So on the question of whether or not computers would fit in, when you say like what would it mean to say does a computer actually feel, I think – do you know the – have you heard of the essay What Is It Like To Be A Bat? I think it's called Thomas Nagel. It was a 20th century philosopher. And this was a foundational sort of philosophical essay.

It's only about 10 pages long. foundational sort of philosophical essay. It's only about 10 pages long. Really kind of trying to nail down the fundamentals of, I can't remember the field of philosophy, but basically a philosophy of mind, where his point is, it's only meaningful to talk about things having feelings if you can say, like, what is it like to be an X? And so what is it like to be a bat? That's a meaningful question. I mean, you can sort of look at a bat's brain. You can try to figure out how it responds to its sonar, what that might feel like.

Is that a kind of a vision? Is it a kind of a sound? If I pick up this cup and I say, what is it like to be this cup? I mean, that's essentially meaningless. What do you mean, what is it like to be a cup? The cup is non-sentient. It has no input. It has no experience of life. So my question about artificial

intelligence is what would have to happen for it to be meaningful to say, what is it like to be that computer? And I think that's more than just a computer that can be creative or a computer that can have imagination or a computer that can spew out something that's interesting. I mean, we already have computers that can, for example, write operas, bad operas, but operas that conform to operas. Like, we're not far away from having computers that can write books that are at least as good as the average book that you get in an airport bookstore, right? Just a general book. But for a computer to write Proust is going to be difficult. For a computer to write Beethoven is going to be difficult. Are you sure?

And when it does, I'm not saying it won't happen. I'm just saying there's some spark of imagination in humans. There's something about biological intelligence so far which is uniquely creative and uniquely imaginative. And what the fuck is it? It's the imagination. Without the imagination, we're just an animal. Deers are not very imaginative. They're not. But they still have an experience of life in a way that my computer and phone don't. For now. For now. and so something's

going to happen i mean so at some point there will be i mean i sort of agree with the materialists on this because i'm not a religious person that our brains are surely all of all of this experience of being me for like philosophers have this word qualia which means the actual experience of experiencing knowledge and data. So there's this thought experiment that I remember from university where imagine a child is born in a black and white room. They can't see themselves. They're just strapped down, so they can't see any color, right? But they learn everything there is to know about color.

They're scientifically schooled in the nature of the light spectrum, and they understand it all. They know that the sky is blue. They know that they've never seen the sky, but they know everything there is to know about the science of color. Then one day, after they've only ever seen black and white, you release them into the world, and they look around at trees and birds and skies and the ocean, what would their response be? Would their response simply be, oh, well, I already know everything about color. I perceived the world previously as a kind of a paint-by-numbers picture, so I already know that the sky was blue, and I know what the wavelength of light is that makes it blue. Or would they be overwhelmed by how

beautiful and amazing the world looks? Of course course they'd be overwhelmed by how much richer the experience of experiencing colour is than merely knowing and understanding about the spectrum of light. And that difference is what philosophers call qualia, the experience of having an experience, which is very hard to... Like, what is that difference? This person already had everything you could possibly know about color. What was added? What was added to the mix here that made them impressed?

Well, color is a purely visual thing. I don't think it's the best example because you don't feel color. So if you cannot see color and then you can see color, there's no way you could have known everything about color without seeing it. But what is it that you didn't know? You didn't know what the visual aspects of different hues are. You hadn't experienced them, but you would have been able to answer a question. No.

Yes, a scientist could have answered you. No, it's nonsense. What question would you not have been able to answer? Well, you don't know what it looks like to see red. But you would have been able to answer exactly what red means. No. In conversation, you would have. No.

Not without seeing it. No. No. Understanding a spectrum. You're not grasping the point of the qualia analogy. I'm absolutely grasping it. I'm saying it's a nonsense argument. No.

A scientist would have been able to have the person who's never seen color and a person who has seen color, and there's nothing they could ask either of them that would make a difference. Doesn't matter. They haven't experienced the visual aspect of color. Precisely right. Right. So they haven't taken it in. So that's what I'm talking about. But that would make a difference. Doesn't matter. They haven't experienced the visual aspect of color. Precisely right. Right. So they haven't taken it in.

So that's what I'm talking about. But that's just a signal. But it's a signal that the person who is seeing in black and white does not receive. Once they receive that signal, it simply becomes more data. And then- No, it's not more data. That's the thing. What do you mean it's not more data?

It's a visual experience of data. Okay. It's data. We're splitting hairs here because if you're looking at red, like if you're looking at something and you just see black and white, right? Yeah. And then all of a sudden someone adds something and you see color, right? They turn on the switch. Yeah.

That's data. So suppose that the black and white thing that in your world, in your paint by numbers world, red is the number 19. And that object had a 19 written on it. Then you knew that it was red. You don't know what red is. Try saying what the color blue is to a blind man. But I think the point that you're arguing is precisely the point that philosophers wrestle with, which is if the question we're asking is

what does it mean to actually feel and be self-aware and be conscious what would it mean for an artificial system to feel the way that we do what would it mean for artificial intelligence to actually have interests for it to be meaningful for us to say what's it like to be this computer in a way that it's not meaningful to say what's it like to be this cup then qualia is one of these interesting things that's intrinsic to the experience of being human. And you're totally right. It is part of our foundational knowledge because living without it would be sort of meaningless. But it's very, very tricky to understand exactly what the difference between that and pure data is.

There clearly is a difference. I mean, it's clearly different. There's a difference now. is a difference. I mean, it's clearly different. There's a difference now. It was clearly different for me to be me alive and experiencing things than merely for me to be, for example, an intelligence

that is just behaving like me, but actually the lights are off inside, right? Okay, but why do you assume the lights are off? Once the connections are being made, how do you not know that artificial life won't be a life that's artificial? Well, I think it will be at some stage. Yeah, it certainly can be. That's right. life that's well i think it will be at some stage yeah it certainly can be that's right we already that's what i'm saying right that that that that difference

is the difference at which how are we going to know where when once that where that boundary is being we don't have to know this is what i think i think we're trying to define it in some way where this is real life and that won't be real life. The same thing is like we're talking about virtual reality, like this is reality and that will be a fake virtual reality. I don't necessarily know that. I'm not necessarily convinced that this reality that we experience because we have gravity and because we have cells, because we feel the weight of our feet on the ground as we walk,

once that is replicable, once there's something that you can plug into that gives you all of that exact experience, but it's not happening in the physical sense, and it's indiscernible, is it still happening? It's absolutely still happening. The experience is still the same. So is your consciousness what guides you? Is the data that hits your consciousness, is that what's important important or does it have to be something you could put on a scale or measure with a ruler or or see over a timeline and what is reality is what the real question becomes and that's when people who really think there's a

significant possibility there's a real physicist that we are living in some form of a simulation currently, that it's one of the reasons why reality is so preposterous, is that reality is a work of fiction, and that if we keep going as we are today, there's going to come a time where we are able to create some form of virtual reality that's indistinguishable from reality. So the question becomes, how will we know when we're in it? argument goes along the lines of at some point in the future there are going to be so many virtual realities that the likelihood of us being in one of those instead of in the earthly reality that we think we are in is going to just be enormously more probable well we can go one better that even the earthly reality is so fucking bizarre and filled with holes that the it's like they're in the matrix i mean the very atoms that we that we have that exist that encompass every single aspect of everything that we see that's physical are mostly nothing.

And then we have these subatomic particles that blink in and out of existence. And they can be in a super state where they're moving and still at the same time. They come and go. They go somewhere. We don't know where the fuck they're going. And it seems like they're bouncing back and forth between this dimension and another dimension that we don't even...

Have you seen Stranger Things on Netflix? Yes. Yes. It's like the underside. Which brings us to ayahuasca. Oh. So, about a month ago,

I tried ayahuasca for the first time. I'd wanted to do it for a while, and a friend of mine... Have you done the psychedelics before that? I've done psychedelics. I've never done DMT, but I've done... So I've done acid and mushrooms, but not for a few years. Had some of the best experiences of my life on acid. I mean, some of the most eye-opening and just revelatory and extraordinary experiences. Had a bad mushroom trip and haven't really done many psychedelics since then.

Bad how? Too much. I was in Amsterdam. There was... Too much for the circumstances under which I was trying to hold it together. You tried to do it in public? Yeah. Oh, you're not supposed to do that.

I was going out on a trip with my brother in Amsterdam, like wandering around. It was like we were just, it was one of those moments where like you can't even remember the thought that you had like half a second ago. So your entire experience of life is just a fractured. You're supposed to be quiet laying down somewhere. I know, I know, I know that. I knew all that, but I was too good for any advice that I could give myself. How many grams? I don't know. Well, it was mushrooms. Show me in your hand

how big it was. Oh, it was a handful. A significant handful. It was a lot. Scary. And we ended up like, you know, we tried to go into a cafe thinking that that would be better, but by the time we'd made our way through the thicket of impenetrable chairs that seemed like there were too many tables, like none of it made sense.

I didn't know where the walls were. So then I'm sitting down and like I don't know how to order tea anymore. And like she's, I don't know what people are asking for. I don't know when I'm supposed to pay or how. And then it just became too stressful. And I was like, I have to get out of the cafe. It was just all of that. And then I don't even remember like how long have I even been in the cafe.

People were looking at me because it was just just one of those weird, just not good. Right. But, I mean, ayahuasca is a bit different. Because it's a shamanistic ceremony that's presided over by this Peruvian dude. Where'd you do it? In New York. In the city? Yeah, in Brooklyn.

They rent out a dance studio or some space. Did you know the other people you're doing it with? Only one of them was my friend. He's done it a bunch of times. He's done it a lot. And they rent out like a dance studio or some space. Did you know the other people you're doing it with? Only one of them was my friend. He's done it a bunch of times. He's done it a lot. And starts about 9 or 10 in the evening, goes until about 4 to 6 in the morning.

And there were about 20 people there. So it was a reasonably large group and you're all sort of lined up along the walls with yoga mats and whatever else you want a bucket to vomit into. And he gives a little speech. He's down in Peru a lot. He's been doing this for decades.

This has been going on for thousands of years among, for people who don't know what ayahuasca is, it's a hallucinogen from the Amazon. It's been fundamental to a lot of South American religions for thousands of years among, for people who don't know what ayahuasca is, it's a hallucinogen from the Amazon. It's been fundamental to a lot of South American religions for thousands of years. It's a combinatory hallucinogen that combines the leaves of one plant and the vines of another. So one of them is DMT and the other one is called an MAO inhibitor. And monoamine oxidizes MAO and your body produces it in your stomach and your gut. And what it does is it keeps you from getting high on DMT, which exists in thousands of different plants. So if you were eating a lot of the things that we eat on a regular basis, if you didn't have monoamine oxidase,

I'm sure it has other functions as well, but it would cause you to get high on certain grasses and plants and many, many different ones. So your body produces this stuff to break that down. There you go. Glad I got you here, Joe. I didn't even know that. I just drank it. It's an orally active version of DMT, and they've essentially figured out a solution

for dealing with the monoamine oxidase that your stomach produces. Long before they even knew what any of that shit was. Yeah. Thousands of years ago and they were just screwing around in the amazon yeah we don't even know how really how old it is because they don't really have much of a written tradition you know no but um they claim it's i mean they claim that it's been fundamental but who knows it's a it's a verbal we don't know how they figured it out we don't know we don't know any of those things. I mean, it's a very interesting experience because the...

I went into it sort of wanting what everyone, I guess, wants out of a psychedelic experience, which is some kind of like opening up of your mind and connection to the cosmos and connection to your own true self and, you know, connection to life force and the mystery of consciousness and everything. But ayahuasca is very interesting. It almost felt like it was a character in the trip. The trip was very visual, and the first portion of it was like just the moment I would close my eyes, it was just an incredible, a candy- colored universe of

weird like pez dispensers dancing and all kinds of amazing visual hallucinations i opened my eyes and the the person next to me i couldn't tell whether or not they were there or not or whether they'd gone i think that he'd gone to the restroom but and i, I mean, it's not that dark, I couldn't see that he was not there, but I still felt like he was there. Not in like a woo-woo, oh, his spirit is still their way, just like I was literally not sure what criteria I would need to use to establish whether or not there was a person sitting next to me. Whoa.

Like the visual data was there. I could see that there was just a yoga mat. But I was like, where'd he go? Is he there? Wait, he's there. No, he's not. If he's there, then where's his physical body? No. Is he there?

Is there someone sitting next to me? I think there is. But hang on, then where is he? It was literally, it was very, because some people were vomiting. I mean, some people have an experience where they're crying, they're bawling their eyes out, and they go to the darkest places. I was a bit nervous beforehand because it shows the claim, what they claim, what the shamans claim is that it shows you what you need to see about yourself at that moment. it is it's like ayahuasca has a personality it's like it is gaia it's like it is the power of life it's like it is you know the amazon itself it's like the lungs of the earth or something and it brings you in and you just have to roll with it because if you try to fight it it'll crush you

um what i loved what i was heartened by was the true sort of josh sepps that came out during the experience was a very, like, funny, not funny haha, but, like, just joyful person. Like, there was no, there were moments of darkness and there were moments of hallucinations where, like, there was the bloodied face of a woman up on the right-hand side of my periphery. And I started going towards it. And then I was like, I consciously sort of said to the ayahuasca, you know, we can go there. I didn't want to, I knew that if I tried not to go there,

then it would get worse and worse. So I was like, we can do that, and that's fine, and we can make this a bad trip if you want. Frankly, it's just more interesting over on the fun, candy-colored side, and then it just sort of faded away. So I think there's something about relinquishing yourself to it and not trying to control it and not that's where power a lot of bad trips come from is just trying to trying yeah trying to control with your ego trying to control

the experience so i sort of gave myself into it and like there were moments where like the funniest thing that you can ever do i know you're a comic so here's a little tip you'll enjoy this joe next time you need to have the best laugh of your life, just pull a blanket over your head. Hilarious. According to Josh Sepps whilst on ayahuasca. Funniest thing I'd ever done. I was like giggling madly underneath a blanket

with the blanket over my head. That's why drugs are illegal. Look at him. He's just laughing at nothing. It was so funny. And then, so to get back to the point about what I was looking for was some kind of insight into the mystery of consciousness. And what you were just sort of talking about, about the imagination and self-awareness. I felt like about halfway through the trip I hadn't really gotten my money's worth on that.

It was a fun... You had a goal in mind. you had a goal i had a goal exactly i was like i felt ripped off and the ayahuasca goddess or whatever it is like the personality of the drug was sort of visually like up here on the left of my periphery and i was like hey what gives like what did it show me the show me the majesty of of consciousness and the drug said, I can't, just notice. And I was like, oh, that's bullshit. I came here for some life-expanding experience. I wanted my mind to be blown.

And all of a sudden the drug tells me that she can't even give me an insight into the nature of how incredible consciousness is. And I went off and my brain went off on different tangents. Then about 10 or 15 minutes later, I'm not sure how long it was because your sense of time is completely screwed around with. I was struck by how incredibly profound it was. She was like, you don't need the drug to be aware of how incredible consciousness is, just notice. And I was like, whoa. And I kind of was struck by the fact that at any point in time, on drugs or not, day or night, wherever we are, if you just remind yourself that we are atoms that

were produced inside of stars that have been spewed out of exploding stars and have accreted on this little rock that is spinning around another star. And we have evolved over hundreds of millions of years from amphibians through to mammals, and we are self-aware, and we're blots of substance clinging to the side of a speck of dust in the middle of a massive cosmos,

and we are self-aware, and we are conscious, and we're looking at the universe that created us, and now having a conversation about it, that in itself is weird, and is staggering, and impressive. And we're a couple of decades away from creating an artificial version of ourselves. Quite probably. We're a couple of decades away from creating an artificial version of ourselves. Quite probably. Quite probably. If not decades, by 100 years. Yep. It's 100%.

Yep. And then we're off to the races. Well, then we're God. Or not us, but it is God. Yeah. Because it's going to, like we were talking about, become 10,000 years more advanced in a matter of moments. And then in a matter of moments after that, 10,000 years more. And then in a matter of moments and weeks and months will pass and we will be infinitely more separated from what we are today or more evolved or more capable.

or more capable. There was a moment during the trip where one of the female, and the shaman is on I, Oscar as well, and he has female assistants. She sang this incredible song about like the majesty of life or something. And one of the things she was singing about was like that whatever the life force is inside you is more

powerful than the sun more powerful than anything and it sounds a bit corny when you're not high listening to it but it gave me a profound sense that yeah this this web of procreating self-developing ever-improving sentient creatures that are life is one of the oldest and most enduring things in the universe and most impressive things in the universe just in terms of going all the way back to the genesis of life on on this planet or elsewhere so as you say if we give birth to this new artificial intelligence we will as you say be the the organism that sort of transcends from biological life to artificial life and just being a part of being a part of any of that experience struck me as incredibly incredibly moving and touching in a way that i know sounds

stupid to people who've never done psychedelics. And I know that there are friends of mine who are like, well, yeah, okay, you had a hippy dippy trip, but it's one of the, again, it comes back to sort of the qualia question, the experience, the insight that you are able to achieve when you're using these substances, or alternatively, if you're a great meditator or something, or if you're in a float tank or any other way of getting your mind into a different plane than the normal daily plane, is not a one of data. It's not one that is easily explainable. It's not one of reason.

It's an insight. You know, it's an experience. It's an undeniable experience and um i always wonder if that that state that you uh achieve when you're on dmt and dmt which is the active component in ayahuasca and you haven't done ayahuasca i've only done the the hardcore form of dmt but dmt um takes you to these places that apparently you can kind of reach an ayahuasca for brief moments. A lot of people feel like ayahuasca is a more spiritual version of it because it lasts longer. You have more time to absorb the experience.

And a lot of times it's more, for some people, more life-changing. Because DMT is so titanically alien that when it's done, you're just like, what the fuck was that? But I've done DMT over the course of several hours where you keep doing it. I thought only, oh, right, you keep doing it because you smoke it, right? And it lasts for about 15 minutes. 15-minute trips and then you fucking bang it out one more time, get back in there. Did you have someone coaching your way through it? Because my ayahuasca friend who introduced me to this ceremony tried DMT once and really had a freak out and wasn't crazy about it and was then

told you should really have someone who sort of knows what they're doing with you. Or don't be a pussy. Or don't be a pussy. You got to just let it go. You got to let it take you there. But your mind does get exposed. Your thoughts do get exposed. You find out what's negative and what's positive about the way you look at the world. I had one of the most powerful experiences ever in my second trip where I had this visualization of negative thinking. Like I had a negative thought came into my head and it was like dark and twisted. And I just had this negative thought. And then I realized that I was thinking in a negative way. And this is a physical manifestation in front of me of negative thinking. And at that moment, I relaxed and thought wonderful, beautiful, positive thoughts.

And it blossomed into this incredible flower of geometric patterns and continued to get more and more beautiful as I relaxed more and more. It was like a physical manifestation of looking at negative thinking. It was negative. The negative was like dark black and green. And it was just like, it was like a toxic. Were your eyes open or closed? No, totally closed. But I was so fucked up. It probably wouldn't have mattered. If I opened my eyes, I probably would have seen the same thing. I was so gone. You dissolve. You cease to be there when you're doing the DMT, the most intense version of it, smoking it. But I wonder if we will eventually be there. Because what that feels like when you're doing DMT, and McKenna's described it as,

Terrence McKenna described it as, like you're in some sort of a well of souls. That you transcend the physical body and you enter into some space, some well of souls. I wonder if this thing that we look at, when we look at reality and we look at atoms and what we're talking about, the physical space when atoms are mostly nothing. And then these subatomic particles that blink in and out of position. I wonder if what really is going to happen as we get more and more evolved and more and more powerful with our ability to manipulate matter is that we're going to transcend this dimension. And I wonder if that place that we go to is where our future lies, and that our future doesn't lie in the stars, because the stars aren't even real. And that the real dimension, I mean, they're real as in you can see them, and you can send

things to them, and you can measure them. But this is just almost like a prison of a dimension, and that this dimension can be transcended, and that you can briefly view it when you do DMT or when you visit the ayahuasca god and you pass through briefly into that dimension. But if one day that is where consciousness will exist all the time and that we are creating this possibility and this door through our thirst for innovation and knowledge and this constant evaluation of our current abilities and the constant desire to improve upon those abilities, that one day it'll get past this desire to have artificial intelligence and what is this intelligence going to be able to do, what's it going to be able to achieve,

and what's it going to be able to accomplish, and we're going to open up other dimensions as possibilities for consciousness to exist in. I mean, this sounds a lot like pre-Abrahamic religion, right? I mean, this sounds a lot like- Well, a lot of those religions were based on psychedelic experiences. Yeah, and indigenous religions where before we fucked everything up with Moses and Jesus and Yahweh and Muhammad. Well, you say that, but do you know that most recent scholars in Jerusalem

believe that the Moses experience was about DMT? The Moses experience specifically? Oh, no, I have heard theories that a lot of those Old Testament things, writers were on psychedelics. Most likely they were, when you think about the fact that psychedelics have been here forever. So what's the Moses theory? The Moses experience is that Moses saw a burning bush that represented God. Well, one of the most

DMT-rich plants in the area where Moses was was the acacia tree. The acacia bush is rich in DMT. If that was on fire, or if you figured out a way to extract DMT from it, and then you smoked it, or you lit it on fire and did it in some sort of a way where you're absorbing the smoke and absorbing the DMT... You would see God.

You would see God. There's a lot of DMT flora in Australia, apparently. In phalaris grass, right? A lot of different plants? There's an Australian native called the wattle, which I think is the national plant. I'd have to look that up. Or maybe it's the state plant of my state. And acacias, they're all part of that family. And so I was looking earlier this year that there's a push in Australia to get ayahuasca off the ban substances list and permit it as a religious... As a medicine.

As a medicine, yeah. Well, it helps a lot of people. There's a lot of people that go to it that have all sorts of addictions and all sorts of real problems, and it sort of resets their brain. It resets their life. It's one of many different psychedelics that are really good at that. Iboga is incredibly good for people that have addictions to opiates. It literally resets the way your brain views

and connects to addictive substances. Well, I've heard, yeah. I mean, one of the, I did a story on Half Post Live about ayahuasca before I'd ever used it, and they were saying that there's some interesting research about its ability to be a circuit breaker against, for example, alcoholism and stuff like that,

that people will go into the experience, alcoholics will come out. Yeah, right. Yeah, with psychedelics. So, I mean, it's so difficult to know what the fuck is going on with consciousness, right? Why is it that we are assembled in rather than just a another perspective on this world that we are opened up to because we're ordinarily i mean my my theory i suppose although it's tentative is we have the capacity to be tuned into all kinds of amazing shit that's going on

in the universe but i don't really mean in terms of woo-woo. I don't mean in terms of spirits or ghosts or anything. I just mean there is a perspective on life that is much bigger than the one that we walk around with on a day-to-day basis. But evolution has favoured traits that force us to focus on getting food and having sex and surviving.

Right. Which means that it has intentionally closed the parameters of what our mind is capable of experiencing. Is it intentionally closed or is there no benefit for the biological body? That's what I mean. To be distracted by these things like running from tigers. Precisely. You don't want a caveman who's philosophizing about his place in the cosmos. He gets eaten while he's tripping. Yeah, exactly.

He's like, this is amazing. Such a spiritual journey. We are but stardust. Gets devoured by a woolly mammoth. I can't get in that little silly voice. But, you know, and what drugs do is they break down the walls of perception. You know, to borrow from Huxley, They shatter those kind of limits and constraints that our biology, that evolution has put on our mental ability and simply let the mind wander into whatever space it cares to go

to. Yeah, well, by using the word dimension, I think we've sort of, we've, I've limited the perception of what I'm saying because we already have like three dimensions that we believe in and the dimensions that we understand, three dimensions that we believe in and the dimensions that we understand for dimensions that we believe in but time also the They believe that I think they're a nine or eleven eleven is it yeah? So we know we understand that there are other dimensions that we don't totally understand yet, right?

But those are those are words right dimensions or words where it's time space distance all these different things are words, right? Dimensions are words. There's time, space, distance. All these different things are words. And these words sort of lock in a definition in our own mind. But whatever the fuck it is, when you do have a DMT trip, you go to a place and that place is not right here. You're not here when you go there. And it's some all-encompassing, infinite, geometric place. Call it a dimension, but that's just a noise that you make with your mouth. It doesn't really matter what it is. It's something that you experience that you don't experience right here in Calabasas or wherever the fuck we are. There's something different about it. And could it be another dimension yes could it be all in your imagination yeah but your imagination might also be another

dimension i mean the word dimension is a weird word because it's so limiting and defining and and we have these uh preconceived ideas that we you know it's a box that we can put in our head oh it's a dimension there's a dimension you, whatever that thing is that you can experience, if we can tap into that in other ways, the world is going to get very strange. One thing that struck me after the experience, which gives, which I think bolsters the idea that there is something real about that dimension

or slash intelligence or whatever it is, whatever you want to call it, was that I noticed that whenever people have these experiences and go to these places, regardless of what mechanism they use, they always come out with basically the same gist of a conclusion and if it was merely what someone like um uh who's a teller pen pen and teller why am i pen gillette name why if it was merely what a person like pen gillette thinks it is which is just the perturbations of your brain right you mean you take this stuff but he's never done anything no exactly that's right he's a totaler so he's not just a teetotaler he's a denier of the possibility of all these different experiences being transcendent that's right he's a t-totaler so he's not just a t-totaler he's a denier of the possibility of all these different experiences being transcendent that's right he as far as he as far as he's concerned

what happens when you take dmt is that there are neurological disturbances and your brain goes goes in has weird experiences because the drug is just fucking with your neurology and that tells us nothing what i said why don't you why have you how come you have no interest in us i think everything's been learned from those experiences. Everything, we've already figured it out. We've already taken what we can from those experiences. Nothing to be learned by doing that. Other people have already done it.

I'm like, you're out of your fucking mind. And if that's the case, then just do it. Then there's no harm, right? He's so silly. To say that is so silly. And I love that guy. I think he's awesome. But I think he is missing out on a gigantic-

Massive blind spot. Massive blind spot. Gigantic chunk of possibility. He thinks it's hallucinations. Yeah. I mean, he doesn't know. He really doesn't know. He doesn't understand.

I mean, some of it is hallucinations, but- Is it? I'm not sure. I'm not sure. I think it might be what McKenna thinks. It might be a well of souls. It might be what life is. This whole biological thing might literally be the cocoon that we were talking about. pink, yellow, and purple machines clanking away and exploding and little sort of Mario-style computer things bouncing around on them, and then I start spinning through kaleidoscopes of color.

Are you implying that McKenna... I don't think McKenna would say that those are actual real things that I'm seeing in another dimension, would he? McKenna believed that what you were... I mean, he had some weird names for them i think he called them uh what did he call machine elves in hyperspace he believed that they were entities he believed that they were living entities and that you were communicating with an other that was his words i think there are i could believe that i think there are clearly

hallucinations uh because there are just things like I would open my eyes and then there was a river in the middle of the room between me and the other people sitting there. I'd see no reason to assume that that actually was a river. But maybe it was. But anyway. But where it comes to souls and where it starts getting really woo-woo is when I could feel the tug of going into a particular place, like the woman's head or something. Like I could feel, there were moments where I was having lots of fun and I was thinking, oh, is this all this is? Oh, this is going to be enjoyable. And then some, I would just, a wave of dread would wash over me. And I was like, and I'd start to feel

like I was going to vomit. And then I'd be like, oh, okay, I have to take this shit seriously. And I'd sit upright and I'd take a deep breath. And that I can imagine, I think, is what he's sort of talking about, right? Maybe that's like some fucking. Well, one of the things to make a really powerful distinction is McKenna was specifically talking about DMT. That's what he was into. Sure. He wasn't really into ayahuasca.

Right. His brother Dennis is really into ayahuasca. And his brother Dennis has really recommended that I do it. And I probably really into ayahuasca. Right. His brother Dennis is really into ayahuasca, and his brother Dennis has really recommended that I do it, and I probably will eventually. I'm sure I will. But Terrence was into the hardcore version of it. Yeah, I see. And it was, it's a, apparently, you can't, well,

I know from the hardcore version of it, you're not escaping. Like, once you're locked in, you're gone. Like, it's way more potent. Way more potent. Yeah, I gotta try it and see the difference. So, the, the, the, what you're locked in, you're gone. It's way more potent. Way more potent. Yeah, I've got to try it and see the difference. What you're experiencing when you're having the ayahuasca trip is this MOA inhibitor allowing you to have this prolonged, slow-release DMT trip. So you're not getting shot through a fucking cannon to the center of the universe.

No, sure, but people have been using this for thousands of years and believing that it is opening a portal to some kind of spirit world. No, I understand, but I'm saying there's a difference between what McKenna's describing and what you experience and what I experience. But presumably McKenna's theories can be extrapolated to ayahuasca as well as to EMT. Sure, yeah, yeah, yeah, definitely. theories can be extrapolated to ayahuasca as well as tmt because yeah yeah yeah definitely but i think that you're getting a much more watered down version of it when you're doing ayahuasca sure which is one of the reasons why people can sustain it for many many hours i mean i'm just

trying to figure out what the what the competing claims about this this dimension that we're accessing are right on the one hand you've got a a pend Jillette who's saying, well, it's just all in your head. You've got to disregard what he's saying. He hasn't experienced it. If he experienced it and he was dismissing it, I would be like, wow, he must've got some weak shit. I mean, what's compelling to me, what I was just saying about the conclusions that people have after they come off of these kinds of experiences, no one has ever had one of these experiences and come out of it and said, wow, I really felt like I got an insight into the true meaning of life, and the meaning of life is I should hate Jews.

Or like, no one has ever become more petty. Are you sure? Well, not that I know of. Certainly everyone who I know or have read of who have had these kinds of experiences tend to come out with similar intellectual conclusions, that we are all one, that life is precious, that consciousness is divine, that love is important, all these kinds of things, which indicates to me that it's more,

that makes it more plausible than it would otherwise be, that you're actually viewing something that exists, rather than merely having your brain stirred up. The biological necessity of survival and all these different things that sort of motivate us and sexual impulses and desires and fears. Strip all that stuff away with dimethyltryptamine and all of a sudden you reveal what the human soul really essentially is. Could be. But why is the human soul based on love? Well, because love is probably the thing that makes us most connected and makes us most productive and makes us feel the best. You know, you don't feel good if you're successful and alone. It's one of the weirdest things about being a person.

If you gave a person all the money in the world and all the tools and toys in the world and all the gadgets and gizmos, but you left them by themselves on the moon, they'd probably want to blow their fucking brains out. We don't exist in a vacuum. We exist as a super organism this is something that anthony robbins that makes sense absolutely absolutely i mean it's almost you could it comes back to it's almost semantics between that and having an insight into another dimension because if what you're saying is that fundamentally

at the core of all of us once you you strip everything else away, is a kind of beating heart of deep, glowing and abiding connected love. Well, just call that the other dimension then, because that's spooky in and of itself. That other dimension, what it feels like when you're doing DMT is that the way I describe it is it's you're in this infinite realm of complex geometric patterns that are made out of love and understanding. And that you, and by understanding, I mean mean like wisdom like they see you can't bullshit them you just you're exposed raw and what you are and what you've been is exposed raw and your personality in your life your culture stripped away and you're left with your soul or whatever

we think of as soul again weighted words weighted words, weird words. But ultimately, that feeling of love does come out of everybody. And I think that that's probably at the root of what makes us want to be connected with each other. That's why you do feel bad when you're just alone for long periods of time. You don't connect with people. It's probably good to be alone occasionally, but ultimately you want to get back to people and you want to get back to people that you care about and that you love because you bond with them. You do that thing that happens when you go into the DMT world, where you connect with everything and it sucks you in. And as you let go, it bathes you with that loving, weird, strange, all-knowing feeling.

Anthony Robbins has an interesting line that you reminded me of at the beginning of the show when you were joking about how you always feel unfulfilled. And like, you know, the moment you do a podcast, you need to just focus on the next one and get the next one done. Which is that he feels like the greatest failures are successful people who don't feel fulfilled. That he would much rather see an unsuccessful fulfilled person than a successful unfulfilled person. Let me step in here because Anthony Robbins' greatest success, Robbins, his greatest success is teaching people to be successful. I think he'd say that it people to be successful. So he must feel fulfilled teaching people how to be successful. I think he would say that he teaches them how to be fulfilled. Okay.

What has he done? What has he done? Besides teach people how to be fulfilled. Yeah, that's his version of fulfillment. How much amazing creative work of literature, of fiction, of how much stuff has Anthony Robbins done? How many movies has he made? How many paintings has he done? How many things has he created out of nothing that he's super happy with?

No, none. He's not a creative artist. His life mission is to help people get fulfilled. So him talking about creative people being fulfilled, fundamentally, I don't think he understands what I'm saying. Like, am I fulfilled? Yeah. I mean, is it great that we have 830 whatever podcasts and a bunch of people like, absolutely. But what does fulfilled mean?

Am I content? Can I sit back and relax and enjoy it? No, because part of what makes you good at something is that you're constantly assessing whether or not it's good. And you're constantly objectively and introspectively analyzing it and breaking it down and chopping it up. Dude, I just got through doing a Netflix special. It's going to air in October. And I had to edit it. It's fucking awful doing that. Chewing away at your work and

trying to figure out what you can, what's better. Can I cut this out? Should I leave this here? And ultimately what I decided to do is I did four shows so I could do one of them almost completely in its entirety and do it that way. But I know other people think it's funny. I know the people that were there, I got a standing ovation i know they loved it i fucking hate everything i don't i don't i don't mean hate but i mean you're a perfectionist yeah but there's a constant search for the right beats and the right things and it's not a matter of not being fulfilled i'm a very fulfilled person it's a matter of never really liking anything that i do never really loving it and there's always this constant need to make it

better. This constant state of, and the most people that I find that are really super happy with everything they do, they usually suck. That's true. Yeah. No, I mean, I'm like you. I never, that's why it takes me forever to write and why I never meet writing deadlines because I always hate what I produce. That's why you're good. Anthony Robbins is a great guy. I appreciate him very much. And I listened to his motivational books on tape when I was a fighter. I used to listen to that. I have fucking one of those Walkman cassette things.

Yeah. And I bought his books. I've listened to his stuff. Ultimately, though, and this is not to dismiss him, what he does is write about success. That's right. And he wants people to be successful. So that's what he thinks of as fulfillment. But if Anthony Robbins decided to write some great work of fiction, then I could listen to him. If Anthony Robbins sat down and came up with this fucking amazing movie and produced it,

and it's some sci-fi masterpiece, then I could understand. But he's not doing that. But don't coaches, I mean, this isn't the Defend Anthony Robbins hour, but don't coach – like, you can be a great coach without being good at the thing that you're coaching people on. Yes, absolutely. And sometimes that's useful, too. Oh, sure. There are great screenwriting coaches.

Robert McKee runs his three-day seminar, incredibly invaluable. If anyone wants to write a screenplay who's out there, do Robert McKee's seminar. He's never written a decent screenplay in his entire life. No? He's not a good screenwriter, but he understands. And he's the first to say that. But you know what? All the big studios pay for their script readers to go to his seminar.

Well, you know where that doesn't work? Stand-up. Sure. There are no stand-up coaches that that are any good no that's true that's true uh isn't it weird yeah you get like these terrible comedians that fail and then they start teaching stand-up yeah it's like the the stand-up class but and you're like well i'm sorry what do you know about stand-up and if you ever watch them do stand-up you want to fucking shoot yourself there was a a couple people that wrote books about stand-up? And if you ever watch them do stand-up, you want to fucking shoot yourself. There was a couple of people that wrote books about stand-up and they were all awful,

all awful comics. There's one guy who was really helpful to me when I started doing stand-up, not that I've ever been successful at doing stand-up because I didn't pursue it, but he was really helpful to me in New York when I first got there. But apart from that, yeah, I completely agree. Basically, he was just a good joke writer. So he was good at whittling down a concept into a punchline. But beyond that. Well, there's definitely people that are good at that. And you could learn from friends. But I've never seen a really good comic teach a course.

Like David Tells, not out there teaching stand-up. No, that's right. You know what I mean? That's right. Well, be yourself. I mean, like, I love the idea. I've had so many conversations with successful creative people who I admire that I can't believe that I still ever doubt this advice. But it's the most consistent advice that I get from creative people I like.

Anytime they try to do something which is calculated to appeal to a particular demographic or which is based on notes that other people have given them or which is intended to fill a particular niche, it falls flat on its face. And every time they do something that is for them, that they love, that has an audience of one, which is them, and it's true to them, and it speaks to them, and it's idiosyncratic and particular, it kills. It's so true. But here's the rub. You have to learn how to be yourself. That's right and that takes a long fucking time yeah i think back when i was 21 when i first started doing stand-up and i'm horrified that anybody let me on stage because i didn't know anything i didn't know who i was i didn't know what my thoughts on things were i was just terrified trying to get laughs. So I was trying to figure out what would make people laugh. I had no idea what I thought was funny other than what I saw that

made me laugh. I couldn't break it down. Like if I went to see Sam Kinison or Jerry Seinfeld or something like that, I knew they were hilarious. They made me laugh. I could repeat the joke to you. I could say, oh my God, I saw Seinfeld. Let me tell you his joke. And I could repeat the joke to you I could say oh my god I saw Seinfeld let me tell you his joke and I could tell you and I knew it was funny but I didn't know how to do it yeah I just clumsily concocted my own versions of different subjects that I thought could possibly be funny and then over time slowly but surely figured out how to actually be funny but along the lines i had to fail miserably and learn and feel pain and heartbreak and all the bullshit that people go to before i started forming my own actual opinions on things i think that's a really good

point because i i sometimes wonder i was i was a late bloomer in figuring out who i am as a creative person do you know it now yeah I don't know who the fuck I am. Do you know who you are? Well, no. To a closest approximation that you're able to land. Yes. Your audience knows who Joe Rogan is. Put it that way, right?

And that's enough. Some of them do. Some of them are mad. I thought you were different, bro. I didn't think you'd make fun of that. What? Ignore them. I didn't make fun of my mom that's

like reading the comments section of a website uh but it i think some of sometimes one of the differences between people who peak early and a successful young versus people who are better later in life is just how just how long does it take you to really get grounded in who you are and to stop trying on these different kind of invisible cloaks of personalities that you think you might be yeah until you can strip all that away and then you're like okay i think this is i think this is the real it's the same with podcasting as well like i used to host stuff and try to get it up and do radio bits in australia and i if i listen back to them now it's so affected it's so it's so not it's so me trying to be me on radio that's a great

instead of just me yeah you got to be you yeah um i think the thing that happens also with the peaking early thing is success itself is the poisoner of creativity uh success itself like you for all of a sudden you have it that's one of the reasons why i don't believe anthony robbins is correct is like this this idea of like being satisfied and being fulfilled like i mean sure i'm satisfied and sure i'm fulfilled absolutely but the whole thing about the this creative process is you can never totally be happy with what you're doing or what you've done because you got to do more shit especially stand-ups like if you're happy with what you're doing or what you've done because you got to do more shit especially stand-ups like if you're a musician and you're the rolling stones and you

have a catalog fuck man you could tour forever you don't need to write a new song ever but if you're a stand-up i put out a new special every year and a half every two years whatever it is and if i don't do that i feel like a fucking piece of shit. And if I try to do the same jokes five years in a row, six years in a row, ten years in a row, we all know comics that do that. You go to see them and they're doing the same bits word for word for decades and decades and you never put anything out. Yeah. That doesn't work. I go back to the comedy seller in New York sometimes and the MC will be doing the same shtick that he was doing 10 years ago when I first came to New York. I'm like, that guy is still doing the same material?

I mean, in one respect, I can sort of understand it because if you're, like, take music, maybe not the Rolling Stones, but say Hanson. You can just do mbop every single time you go anywhere and that's all you need to do for the rest of your life. And in comedy, there are people like, like sometimes audiences want it, right? Sometimes audiences will be like, do that bit about bloody blah. Do the bit about your grandma's socks. Which is fine. I mean, Jerry Seinfeld did that one thing I'm telling you for the last time. Yeah, he did a global tour.

Yeah, I went and saw him in Sydney. Yeah. Yeah. Nothing wrong with that. But then he retired all of that material. Right. But like, if you go to see a guy like Bill Burr, you see Bill Burr's special, and then you go see him a year later, you're going to see a whole new set every time. And that's the same with Ari Shaffir.

That's the same with fill in the blank. Every single, essentially, touring comedian now. To be fair to Anthony Robbins, I don't think that he's saying that you should just sit on your laurels and not strive and succeed. You know what I mean? What he's saying is we all know the story of the person who wanted a Ferrari and wanted a sexy wife and wanted the best job and wanted to make a million dollars and then gets it and finds themselves miserable. Well, he didn't really want that. Exactly. They're not connected to what they really want. That's what he's talking about. He doesn't mean being self-satisfied. He means being genuinely fulfilled by the things that you're aspiring to do with your life and to get up to in the world.

Well, there are a bunch of things that we think we want. That's right. And then what they are is really just these unattainable goals that seem like they're unattainable. And then once we attain them, we go, well, then now what? And that's what happens to a lot of people when they get famous. That's why a lot of comics in particular, they become famous and they're really good when they become famous. Like Kinison's my favorite all-time example. Because I believe that Kinison from like 1984 to 1986 is probably the greatest comic of all time.

There was just a time where he was just a maniac. And he just was. And it's hard because you've got to kind of put it in the context of the time. There was no one like that back then. Because comedy is not like music. Like you go listening to music from the 1960s. It's still really awesome. Go try to listen to some Mort Sahl from 1960. It's fucking terrible.

It doesn't mean that Mort Sahl is not a brilliant comedian. He certainly was. Or Lenny Bruce, who's like the godfather of the whole thing. If it wasn't for Lenny Bruce, no one today would be doing the same kind of stand-up. It just wouldn't have existed. It's an art form that almost that he, in many ways, sort of gave birth to.

Well, go listen to that stuff today. It doesn't hold up. Comedy doesn't necessarily hold up. So, in some ways,, Kinison doesn't totally hold up when you go back and listen to it. I found him a bit hard to grasp from today's vantage point, I must say. But during the time, this is, I've told this story before, unfortunately, so everybody who heard it, gather around. There was a girl that I worked with. I was working at the Boston Athletic Club. I was 19 years old.

And there was this girl that was working at the front desk. She was hilarious. She was like a really like this big athletic girl and she was just always like boisterous and joking around about stuff and she was awesome. I really wish I stayed in touch with her. But anyway, I don't know her name anymore. I don't remember

her name. But I remember she told me about Sam Kinnison. She goes, I saw this comedian on HBObo and now granted this is the back and then there was like hbo fox nbc abc there was that's nothing and maybe cinemax right she did that bit about uh homosexual necrophiliacs paying money to spend a few hours undisturbed with the freshest male corpses you. You know that bit? There was a bit about a real story that Kinison had heard where these, apparently this is a real issue. And Joey Diaz knows a guy who walked in on this mortician that was fucking his mom after his mom was dead. No.

That apparently people have done this and that they treat people's bodies like a sex doll. Is Joey Diaz the kind of guy who'd make that shit up? No. Because that sounds almost impossible. No, no, no. These guys got arrested. These guys, in the Kinison story, they got arrested because these morticians were accepting money from these people that would come in and fuck these corpses.

I mean, if it's a stranger, I understand. I'd do that in a heartbeat. But my own mother? Well, the guy wasn't fucking his mom. He was fucking his friend's mom. This mortician was fucking this guy's mom. That's fine. Anyway, I'm pretty sure it was Joey who told me that. I hope it was.

Anyway, the point is, this girl does this bit for me. She goes, the way Kinison do it, he goes, imagine, he goes, you're lying there. You're on the slab. You go, well, I had a good time in life. Now I guess I'm going to go to heaven and be with Jesus. And then starts rocking back and forth. And she's doing this on the floor in the parking lot, on the ground. She's lying on her stomach going, hey, it feels like someone's fucking me in the ass.

Oh, you mean life keeps fucking me in the ass even after you're dead? It never ends. It never ends. Oh, oh. I am laughing my ass off at this girl doing this in the ass even after you're dead it never ends it never ends oh oh i am laughing my ass off at this girl doing this in the parking lot and i went out and i believe i got it on vhs cassette because again this is 86 it's before i'd ever done stand-up and uh i i watched his hbo special and i went holy shit like i didn't even know that was comedy. Yeah. I didn't know someone could.

I thought comedy was evening at the improv. Guys would roll up their sleeves. Did you ever notice? Yeah. Yeah. Set up punchline. Yeah. And this guy was doing this completely radical version of that with a beret on and a trench

coat. I was like, what the fuck is this? And he was so good for a short period of time. And then I went to see him live when I first got into comedy around 1988. And he had already slid way off the rails. And he was just partying all the time and doing coke and banging strippers. Well, he was on heroin as well, wasn't he? No.

I don't believe so. I think he was pretty much just a coke guy. Probably did heroin. Probably did everything you put in front of him. He was Sam Kinison. He was an animal. He even joked around about that, about people expecting him to do drugs. They're like, he's here, he's here.

Cut the biggest line in the world. What he would do with his heart would be beaten out of his chest. He'd say, well, I can't say no. I mean, that would be impolite. Well, also, it would be bad for his image. He sort of became a prisoner of his own image. He created this persona, and then he became a prisoner to that persona. But he just stopped writing and stopped being funny, and he's hanging out with celebrities, and he's going to parties, and he's not hungry anymore, not doing the work.

And he went from being one of the best ever to being, like, an open-mic-ers caricature of who he really was, where he really didn't have any points. like an open micers caricature of who he really was, where he really didn't have any points. And it was all just the scream and all just the, you know, like trying to pick out a shocking subject, but it wasn't really, it wasn't, didn't really resonate with him.

And I think with a lot of comedians, what's really important is that you are a regular person that you are. You just, you can fit in with people and you understand people. And a lot of people, they become famous. And then all of a sudden they get assistance and then they get, you know, managers and agents shield them from the world. They have publicists that do all the talking for them and they get tucked away in an ivory tower and then they show up for interviews with sunglasses on and, you know, and they're all about maintaining.

Tell me about it. I've interviewed enough of those on Post Live. about maintaining. Tell me about it. I've interviewed enough of those on Post Live. Yeah, well, I mean, not even necessarily comedians, but people who come on with that persona who are handled, who have spent their entire lives being handled. Yeah.

Like, give me an example. Roseanne Barr. See, I have her in here. She was awesome. Was she? Yeah. Well, you probably got her to open up. I had 25 minutes.

Well, I had three hours, and she knows I'm a huge fan. I think Roseanne is probably one of the ten most important comedians ever. Oh, absolutely. I mean, I'm a huge fan. Actually, did you see the documentary film that was made about her run for president? No, no. It's actually really interesting. interesting it's you know it's it's fascinating to see this person who was so so groundbreaking and who who did so much for comedy and for and for i guess the portrayal of women and fat people and the working class on television like it was a totally different thing she was a totally

different thing yeah to see her kind of pottering around her home in hawaii like trying to run for president as a green candidate it It's an interesting documentary. I had to set her straight about chemtrails. She believed the government was spraying things in the sky. We had this whole long conversation. Oh, I remember reading, maybe I read about that on, maybe you tweeted about it or something, but I remember reading about her and chemtrails. Or maybe it was Brian Dunning's episode. Did he reference that or something? There was something to do with skeptical stuff. Maybe. He might've. i don't know i don't remember there's too many of them they get 830 some if i really remember it at all you know

dunbar's number like there's there's only like a certain amount of data you can stuff in that fucking dome of yours absolutely and let it go who cares who gives a shit how many hundreds it is but she was awesome on this show she didn't she didn't come in like handled at all she came in by herself sat down shot the shit laughed joked around interesting i mean fame you were met you were talking earlier about fame like it can be incredibly alienating when you reach a certain what's your sweet spot of fame because i you know i think i hit it about a year and a half ago i'm trying to back off you know i want to be able to go to the movies yeah i can't think of anything worse than not being able to get on a plane without everybody like i got on a plane a couple years ago and

de niro was sitting in seat 1a so i don't know how he got on the plane or how long he'd been on the plane but he wasn't here i didn't see him bored so i guess he'd be sitting there for an hour ritchie oh yeah we got on the plane and Lionel Richie was already there. I have no fucking idea. He was already on the plane. I'm like, I'm in the front of the line, bitch. Exactly. How the hell did you get on that plane, Lionel?

So I was one of the first people on the plane, and I also happened to be in first class. Did you hack your way into first class, you son of a bitch? No, actually, a production company paid for me. I was shooting a pilot. So I was one of the first people on the plane, and I was able to see the reactions of everybody walking past as they notice or don't notice that it's Robert De Niro sitting on the plane. Right.

And it's incredible to, I mean, his life is just a relentless stream of people acting weird. Yeah. Right? I mean, every single person who noticed him would do a double take, gasp, nudge, you know,

unsubtly nudge the person who they're traveling with. And he has to sit there reading the newspaper pretending that this is normal. He can't say hello to everybody. It is now for him.

But what a horrible normal. What if you want to pick your nose? Don't pick your nose in public, you piece of shit. I love a good pick. Isn't a good pick just satisfying? It's weird how many people pick in a car. When it's dry up there. I know.

Get a big chunk out. It's all dry. Yeah. You realize that there's more up there. You kind of pull out a piece of your brain almost. It just goes all the way up to in between your eyes. I agree. It's good.

Yeah. It's got to be weird to be that famous. There's certain levels. like a buddy of mine, his friend Doug Stano, he's friends with Johnny Depp, and he talks about how unmanageable Johnny Depp's fame is. Like he cannot go to, if he goes to a restaurant, literally people do not give a fuck if he's eating.

They swarm the table and come over with cameras and pictures and they want to touch him, and they don't leave him alone. He's just far beyond the regular fame into that weird, there's only 10 people in the world that have that kind of fame. You become other people's property. Yeah. Basically.

And they feel like you owe them. Mm-hmm. And I think television, maybe movie stars, I'm not sure how it would play, but I think, in my experience, broadcasters and in other words television personalities and radio hosts are people feel like you're their friend in a way that they don't to movie stars yeah so there's a different interplay like people movie stars are different because they play someone different like oh my god that's the guy from cape fear that's raging bull that's jake lamotta you know that's the thing and there's something about the bigness of the screen and the glamour of Hollywood that

makes them sort of otherworldly. Yes. Whereas when people go up to Jimmy Fallon, it's like, oh, Jimmy. Exactly. You know, it's like, oh, you're my buddy. Like, we should hang out sometime. Yeah. Exactly.

No, you're not an idiot. But I think there's a sweet spot to fame that, as you say, I would not want to go past. I'd like to be more famous than i am but not not so famous that i can't pick my nose in public that's the josh sepp's level definitely shouldn't pick your nose in public dude wait till you're alone grandmother stop chastising me for my boogers in front of all these humans i've got my fist up my nose right now up to my wrist i was sitting next to this guy in an airplane once, this old dude, and he just kept digging in his nose.

He didn't give a fuck. Well, that's not appropriate. Because he was about 75 years old, and he's like, nobody's fucking me. Do it once. Like, it ain't happening. I don't give a shit. And he was in first class, so he had some cash, and he's just fucking up there. Where'd he wipe it?

I don't remember. I just stopped looking at him. I put my headphones on. I zoned out. I'm like, I'm tired of looking at this old dude picking his nose. He farted a bunch of times, too. Asshole. He was just all about just letting that body go.

I've had some bad experiences. Greg Fitzsimmons has a bit about that, about how when he's in first class, he always gets upgraded because he flies so much. So he was in first class and needed to fart, but didn't want to stink out the first class cabin. So he'd go back through the curtain to economy class and just walk down the aisle farting. Just crop dusting.

And then he'd go back to first class. Smart move. Those people in cattle class are disgusting. It smells like hell back there. Joey Diaz always farts in first class, and it's always so horrific. You can imagine. I wrote a whole bit about Joey farting in first class. I wrote a whole blog entry

about this one time that he did that. This woman, she yelled out, but I had headphones on, and she yelled out behind us, oh my God! And she yelled it out. I put my shirt over my nose like this, and he started laughing and clapping his head.

Look, I've occasionally, I will confess, I've occasionally been too hungover on a plane and have not been able to hold it in, and I've got a little trick for people, which they can keep up their sleeves. Go to the bathroom, you rude piece of shit. Sometimes you're in the window seat and the person sitting next to you is eating their meal or something

and you can't get out. You don't want to disturb things and you're not sure if it's going to be smelly or not and you're not sure if it's going to be big or not. It's just going to be something has to give. And so here's the tactic so that no one will suspect you. You release it. You survive through the beginning of the horrible smell without paying any attention to it.

Then as soon as it would have had time to have gotten to you, if it had been emitted by someone nearby, then you very visibly start to react to the bad smell. You don't understand. Later. This is a strategy that has been employed by American children for decades. It is called he who smelt it dealt it. So this is not some new strategy. I'm not saying you should be the first. You wait until the person sitting next to you starts to wince.

And then once they wince, then you go, oh, because then the trajectory can be established. If they wince first and then you wince, then it's obviously coming from the other side of them. No, you're going to give away these like micro expressions that are going to reveal your guilt. No, because I'm a perfect actor. You're going to be like, oh, God. It's the perfect crime. Who, by my word. You don't know my poker face.

Who is this? Who has shat themselves? And then I loudly say, I can't believe someone was so disgusting as to fart in this cabin and that person wasn't me. Yeah, it's the woman behind Joey Diaz. That's who it really was. She probably farted when she smelled his fart

and she made it even worse. And I was blaming it all on Joey. But her yelling out, oh my God! I'll never forget that lady. That poor lady. I love the audacity that she's not embarrassed about it. Because ordinarily you have the tact to be a bit embarrassed on behalf of the farter when you're the fartee. I don't understand what kind of fucking smell Joey Diaz can pack in that body. You're talking with a man who's well over 300 pounds.

And who knows what he ate he ate a small child who was farting inside him and now he's farting the fart many things could be happening many things um i wanted to to mention also um i was reading this piece about stem cells have you been paying attention to the fucking crazy i, it looks now like we're going to be able to use stem cells to grow. I mean, we always knew you'd be able to grow organs in a lab, right? But now it looks like within the foreseeable future, we're going to be able to grow hearts and essentially grow hearts in a lab

and you're not going to have to worry about getting a heart transplant. Do you know that I've had stem cell treatments? No, talk to me. I was that close to shoulder surgery. I had a tear in my rotator cuff, a tear in my labrum, a tear in my bicep tendon, and my shoulder was in some pretty significant pain. And I was like, God damn it. Is this from a particular injury or is this just from generic? It's from jujitsu. It's from martial arts. It's from weightlifting. It's from years of abuse. The overall wear and tear of being joe rogan when

i got the mri apparently my shoulder had been dislocated i didn't know it and it popped back in place at one point in time and they saw there's some particles that are floating around jujitsu is just unbelievably brutal on your body because you're constantly attacking joints and trying to break those joints and then you have to tap but you don't want to tap so you muscle through it and then you wind up getting pretty injured and then you heal up for a little bit and you hop right back in and train again because it's so much fun so I was really close to getting shoulder surgery and I talked to the doctor from the UFC who had just gotten these stem cell injections in his shoulder after surgery he had shoulder surgery had his shoulder repaired and

then gotten these injections and had some pretty pretty results with it. And he's like, look, you really probably need surgery, but if you want to try these injections, let's give it a shot because it has been shown. I just don't want to give you any false hope. Okay, let's give it a shot. So what they do is they take a woman's placenta that is given birth to a kid through cesarean section, and then a young woman, and they take that placenta, and then they get these embryonic stem cells from it. Yep. And they injected it into my shoulder, and within four weeks I felt better than I'd felt in a year.

And then it kept getting better and better and better. And now, I mean, there's still some, like, clicking, because there's still some shit floating around in there. But I lift a lot of weights and i don't have any pain i mean it's it's amazing how much better it got i i did a kickboxing workout today where um i went seven rounds on the back so i'm slamming into the back i have no pain in my shoulder at all nothing zero i mean there's stuff floating around in there like i said i can feel it go click click click because there's like some broken off cartilage and shit that's that I'll maybe I'll to

get pulled out of there one day but there's no pain so there's no there's no limit in my range of motion there's no strength problem like I've shown the doctor like the physical exercises that I can do and he's blown away it's like that is incredible because it just regenerates tissue and it could regenerate it could regenerate meniscus it can regenerate ligaments it's it's it's incredible anything exactly anything exactly i mean think about that you had an injury you had a you had a debilitating injury that was causing you significant discomfort and pain what science was able to do is take the cells that were going to form the spinal cord of a baby from an embryo and those cells were then able to convert themselves into portions of joe rogan's

different constituent components in order to rebuild a portion of joe's body it's crazy shit i mean if that ain't miraculous i don't know. I mean, there are some things coming down the pike with stem cells that are going to change everything. I literally made the cusp. Like, if I had gotten this injury five years ago, I would have had to have surgery. But I didn't. I got it now, and now there's no need for surgery. Like, my shoulders. I have a, I shoot archery, you know?

Right? So I shoot, I pull 80 pounds 100 times a day. So I'm just going, no shoulder pain at all. Nothing. I mean, zero. Did you watch the archery in the Olympics? I did watch some of it. Yeah.

It's fun. The Aussies got silver, I think. Oh, you fucking people are so into yourselves. Oh yeah, we're into ourselves. I've just watched the NBC telecast of that. I gave up on the Americans after that. I'm sure Americans were very humble. That swimmer lied.

I gave up. Ryan Lochte. That poor fella. He's a bit of a bogan, isn't he, as we would say in Australia? Yeah, that's what you guys would call him. You know what I thought was hilarious, though? How people were... I think it was Salon had some article that it's proof that white male athletes are pieces of shit.

Like, they had this whole thing about white male athletes. Like, Jesus Christ, you think you can generalize? One person. One guy. Can you imagine if they'd said this is proof, like, if it was an African American, they were like, this is proof that black women are... Yeah, that black women are pieces of shit. That would have been fine. That would have been totally fine.

It's amazing that people are allowed to... And by the way, it was written, the article was not written by a white man. Okay. So it was written by someone else. But it's amazing that you could do that. Yeah. You can be sexist as long as you're being sexist about, and you can be racist, as long

as you're being sexist and racist about a class that you believe is privileged. So you're allowed to punch up. Yeah. You should always punch up. Always punch up. That's what we were talking about yesterday with Suey Park, that nonsense. That's on my podcast. That punch up shit, that is, goddammit, that's annoying.

I mean, it's so annoying. And it's especially annoying because I understand the motivation behind it, right? I do believe that it's different. If there's a genuinely oppressed minority, then it's different. Then they should have more of a license to make fun, for example, of the majority than the majority should on them. At least it's less...

I can understand that it's less bad. Yes. What I don't understand is when they're allowed to show flagrant bigotry. Yes. Right? I mean, it's not just like a gag. It's like...

So did you see there was a i mean this is slightly tangential but there was everyone got their knickers in a knot or their tits in a tangle about about a headline and i think it was in the san jose mercury when michael phelps won his final do you see that and it was this tokenistic kind of patronizing headline which was like you know olympic glory for michael phelps and african-american woman because there was like an african-american woman who made no what i saw is no what i saw is michael phelps when silver is a big headline and then below it is world record set in the 800 meters by this woman so she set a world record and she was below him

he won a silver and he was above her. There must have been another one because there was another one which was something like, you know, Olympic triumph for Michael Phelps and African-American athlete. Now, that's a clumsy, stupid headline, right? Is that the one? Michael Phelps shares historic night with African-American. Olympics, it said. Michael Phelps shares historic night with African-American. Olympics, it said. Michael Phelps shares historic night with African-American. Wait a minute, wait a minute.

He was wildly panned for being racially insensitive? That headline. The headline said Olympics. Michael Phelps shares historic night with African-American. My point is it's part of America's anal obsession with race that makes that headline possible in the first place. That headline isn't racist in the way that the KKK is racist. I mean, no white supremacist would write that headline. They would just ignore the African-American entirely, or they would write off that achievement.

That is the kind of headline that's written by a constipated white guilty liberal. Right, who has to say African American instead of just say the woman's name. That's right. Trying to be tokenistically approving in this kind of paternalistic patronizing way that white liberals insist on being. And in doing so, it became racist. Is actually racist. And that's telling, I think, because it is racist to be overly concerned about race, even if you're trying to be positive. What does this say?

They put up a second one 10 minutes later. But still including the gaffe. It says, Olympics Michael Phelps shares historic night with Stanford's Simone Manuel. Why is that a gaffe? It says, missing something, guys? The third time was the charm as the Merc went with. It says, missing something, guys? The third time was the charm as the Merc went with... Oh, third time, they wrote instead, Stanford, Simone Manuel, and Michael Phelps make history.

So, because Michael Phelps was first. That's hilarious. That's ridiculous. So, they're saying that when they changed it, they didn't put the gold medalist first. They put Michael Phelps first. Because he's the best fucking swimmer in the history of the world! Ever. Yeah, but what's hilarious is they got it right the third time because her name is first like why why first of all how about just say she won a fucking gold medal why does she have to be

in the same headline as him anyway can you have another goddamn story where she won a gold medal have her give her own fucking story and then have him have his own story. I mean, why not just say Olympics? You know, gold and silver, you know, silver and gold for Phelps and Simone Blagler. I'll tell you why. Because if you want people to buy your fucking newspaper, you better show Michael Phelps' name. Because otherwise they're not going to buy it. No, I said you'd say Phelps' name.

Because he's the Kim Kardashian of swimming. I think it's, I just think there's so much unnecessary... Yeah, here it is, the Mercury News. I didn't have him in the picture. I just had a picture of her. Well, now... Is that the original tweet? No, that's the original.

That's the original. Well, still, people love to say his name. Hang on, let's see some of these tweets. So flustered now, they can't even get it grammatically correct. Keep trying. Michael Feltz shares historic night. Oh,ford i mean who cares well social justice warriors care a bunch of fucking weirdo shut-ins that are constantly monitoring the internet looking to be recreationally offended and can't wait to but look there was a clumsy fucking headline it was stupid but but

again to be fair the reason why this that that headline is stupid or exists in the first place is because it's written by someone who has been contaminated by social justice warrior thinking and thinks that they need to point out the race of the gold medalist. Wouldn't it be nice if there was just a gold medalist and a silver medalist? And that silver medalist happens to be much more famous than the gold medalist so obviously you put his name in imagine if she went to a gas station and lied about being robbed and then someone from salon wrote an article that it's proof that that black american women are look at this proof that male athletes are a protected class it's not proof it's a proof that this guy is a fucking sociopath and he lied m Mary Elizabeth Williams. The Ballad of Swim Shady. That's a good headline. That's pretty cool.

I don't know why we have to... That's not true. I was wrong too. I thought it said white males. It just says male athletes are a protected class. I just don't think that it's fair because it was one guy amongst thousands of athletes. It's so stupid that you said male athletes are a protected class because he didn't get protected, by the way.

He got exposed. There's nothing protected about dragging that guy's name. Do you know he will be the fucking subject of jokes about lying for the end of time? Yeah. That guy will be the Benedict Arnold of jokes. Jimmy Kimmel did a gag about him last night. Look, it's going to happen. There's nothing protected.

That's not proof that he's in a protected class. In fact, it's evidence that no one is protected from lies. Because of video cameras, because of technology, and because the truth eventually gets out. I do think that if he was a black athlete from a poor, from like Ghana or something. Look at that. He lost all four major sponsors in one day.

Good. He's a dickhead. I don't give a shit about Ryan Lochte. He lost a reported $1 million in endorsement money. Woo! That's got to suck. Speaking of breaking ourselves into tribal racial camps, did you see the uproar over Ellen Generous' tweet?

No. What'd she say? She did this. Can you find that, Jamie? So Usain Bolt, she was like... It was something like, next time I go to the supermarket, I know what mode of transportation

I'm going to get. And there was like a Photoshopped image of her on Usain Bolt's back or something. Here we go. She tweeted that? Or did somebody Photoshop it or did she do it?

I think her show Photoshopped it. Someone Photoshopped it and then she tweeted it. Oh, okay. I see. Right. Someone, a fan did it or did she do it? I think her show Photoshopped it. Someone Photoshopped it and then she tweeted it. Oh, okay. I see. Right. Someone offended it, did they? And so then, of course, it's like it becomes this big thing about she's racist because it's the white person enslaving the black person. Seriously, does anyone believe that she wouldn't have made the same joke if so here she is like being given a piggyback

by hussein bolt that's funny it's funny is that a photoshop is that what that is no she's really doing it joe is she really writing why did somebody photoshop what is the tweet what does the tweet say her girlfriend's hot who gives a fuck fuck? Scroll down. Scroll down. Stop. Go back. God damn it. Go back. I'm trying. You're trying? Try harder. Scroll down.

We have a picture of her girlfriend right there. Yeah. Good for them. Okay. Is that the current one? Should have gone back again. I was wrong. Yeah.

She looked really cute in the small picture. So she wrote, this is how I'm running errands from now on. Hashtag Rio 2016 with a picture of her. But that's not a race joke. Well, people are retarded. If it was a white guy, it would be okay. If it was a white guy, she'd still, I mean, she still would have tweeted it, right? So that doesn't mean that she's racist.

So this comes down to the question of when we accuse someone of doing something racist, do we actually believe that they're racist? No. Or are we just trying to find an excuse to interpret what they're saying as being racist? This is recreationally outraged. That's what she is.

Yeah. Or they are. Or they're getting upset at her. Yeah, they're having fun. They're deciding that this is something they should be upset about. They see the green light and they're hitting the gas.

Yeah. If you really get pissed off at that, go jump off of a fucking bridge. Seriously. Just stop. Just pissed off at that, go jump off of a fucking bridge. Seriously. Just stop. Just stop talking, tweeting, interacting. Stop sharing your opinions. Think of the amount of sort of emotional

and intellectual effort, Joe, that's expended in the world these days on these outrage outbursts. If you could channel that hot air into some kind of power plant. Be like Zeppelin. Light it on fire. Crash it into the ground. Just blow it up. Oh, the humanity. Cover of that like Zeppelin, light it on fire, crash into the ground.

Just blow it up. Cover of that Led Zeppelin album. Yeah. It's a waste of time and it's one of those things where I think we've already beaten it into the ground. We know what it is.

Yeah. And I think it's slowly being less and less acceptable for people to do shit like that because I think more and more people realize how fucking unproductive and stupid it really is. Yeah, I feel like, that's right.

I hope that the tide is turning, but I think that as the tide turns, the people who really get a kick out of this stuff are becoming more and more vitriolic and are turning the dial up to 11. Yeah, because they're still- Because they feel like they're being sidelined. They're still shut-ins.

They're still not going out and experiencing the world. They're still living in this really bizarre, confined environment that they exist in. It's not reasonable. That's not reasonable to get upset at that. I had a conversation with an African-American friend of mine about braided

hair the other day. Was it a Kardashian just got her hair braided? Oh, it's cultural appropriation. Cultural appropriation. What frustrated me was she kept going up to the edge of being critical of it and then saying, look, I don't really care either way. And in these conversations, I always feel like saying, well, if you don't care, then just don't care. Didn't Bo Derek do that, like, way fucking back in the day? I mean, is that really cultural appropriation to have braids?

Braids came from Egypt. I mean, they've been around for so much longer than African-Americans existed. Remember when that fucking girl was getting mad at that boy for having dreadlocks and she was trying to cut his hair off? Yeah. She was being a cunt to him. Yeah. And she was doing it just because he was a little tiny guy

and she can get away with it. Think if he was a 250-pound football player, she'd be saying the same things to him? Well, also, I mean... No, of course not. She's at a liberal arts college, and so she knows that he's going to be full of enough white guilt that she can pull that shit,

and he's going to cop it, she assumes. And meanwhile, she's wrong. The dreadlocks came from the Greeks, came from the Romans. It's like they've been around as long as people have been stinky with dirty hair. And so what my friend was saying about braids was... There you go cultural appropriation bro derrick god damn she was hot she was hot as fuck back then my friend was saying look all we want is for people to to just

recognize that it's appropriation and to and to to to understand and to express their gratitude for and i was like well by what mechanism would a Kardashian who gets braids elicit such... I mean, exhibit such gratitude for the cultural... If a Kardashian gets braids and then goes out and says, I want to thank everyone in the African community for creating braids,

that's going to cause more of a fucking stir than if she just did it... It's so stupid. What if I wear a sarong? What if you just wear pants and you're black what if you wear white european created pants and shirts is that cultural appropriation what is that it's so stupid culture is about sharing that's what it is about it's about when you go to an indian restaurant are you culturally appropriating because you're eating their food it's fucking stupid when you create your own indian food are you violating the rules of cultural appropriation yeah if you have taco

tuesday you're a piece of shit you know come on it's fucking dumb man it's dumb you're probably a piece of shit if you have taco tuesday i'm mad it's just stupid but some of the best cuisine talking about all this stupid stuff i'm tired of wasting any of my time and thoughts about social justice warrior ideal you're right i'm I'm actually starting to stop doing that because if people haven't heard previous times that I've been on the show and you like this, then go back and listen to the previous ones. But you'll find that Joe and I spend a reasonably large amount of time talking about social justice issues and social justice warrior issues and how ridiculous it all is. I feel like to some extent we've reached a tipping point where that's hopefully no longer necessary. And now it's a little bit self-indulgent for us to be whining about the whiners.

I think you're right. That's how I feel. I feel like we've sort of won. I'm whining. I feel like it. Exactly. I feel like we've kind of won this battle and we don't need to be so outraged at the outrage anymore.

I think the data had to come in and we had to understand the only reason why people are being so recreationally outraged about this stupid shit is because they don't have real things to be fucked up about in real life. It's easy to get food. It's easy to get shelter. Most people have those things. Those are the primary things that we need.

And once you have those things and they're so readily accessible, then you start looking at things to pick on in the world because you don't have any real dilemmas, any real significant, important, absolute dilemmas, primal dilemmas. Yeah. So the outrage machine, I mean, it comes back a little bit to the reaction to Kurt Metzger's comments, Amy Schumer's writer, about rape as well. Like what is within the appropriate parameters of public discourse in order to trigger the outrage see i kind of disagree there because like in that sense like he's saying something about a violent crime against women and he's not exactly sure you know so i i kind of see

why someone would be outraged that you would step up and defend a guy when you don't really know because you weren't there but he's also I definitely agree that it's a more valid- a criticism of him is a lot more valid than criticism of Ellen DeGeneres for her tweet. That's true. Oh yeah, definitely. But still- In both cases, I think that getting too angry and wanting to punish people for doing something that's politically incorrect is not the ideal response.

Like, did you see- Well, also it's important to point out that he didn't say that the guy wasn't guilty. What he did say is that we have to understand that women are capable... He did it in a parody form. But what he did say is women are capable of lying, too. Like, this stupid club, whatever it is, bans this guy. You know, I don't know if they're stupid. I'm sure they're great.

But they ban this guy. They don't know whether or not he's guilty. And he's saying that this woman cannot have lied because like my Bible. That's right. I wouldn't get too hung up on the question of whether or not he thinks the guy is guilty or not. That's not what his point is. Yeah, that's not his point. His point is social media should not be the forum in which we conduct witch hunts into people.

Right. And so people, they see something where someone's stepping out with a controversial opinion and what's their immediate idea is not to debate this and say, hey, this is not necessarily appropriate, but here's where his point is and here's where I disagree.

No. Fire him. Punish him. Yeah. Bird him. Yeah. Hang him. Shoot him in the dick. Shoot him in the dick!

Shoot him in the dick. Did you see the story about the Saatchi, the executive at Saatchi in London who was fired for inappropriate comments about feminism? No. So about maybe four or five weeks ago. What was his comment? He said he was giving a- What is a Saatchi? Oh, sorry.

Saatchi and Saatchi is one of the world's biggest ad agencies. Oh. And they're based in the UK and he is an elderly white guy and he was giving an interview to Business Insider and they asked about feminism and sexism in the workplace and he said

that it's not an issue at Saatchi because he thinks that women have this much more expansive vision of what their priorities should be and that old male dinosaurs have this old-fashioned idea about success, which is they want to get to the top of the ladder and they want to become an executive and they want to have as much money and power as possible, but that women have a more expansive view and are wiser and care more about children and family and other things than just success. And that was perceived as being an excuse for not addressing sexism in the workplace.

And he was fired. He was fired for that? He was fired, yeah. Oh, that's hilarious. Or put on administrative leave or whatever it is indefinitely. Oh, my God. And I... Thank God I don't work in advertising.

I sort of understand... Like, that is a whole big argument, an interesting conversation that's happening among feminists themselves, right? I mean, even my old boss, Arianna Huffington, has written columns about this sort of thing. In between sleeping? In between...

Her wonderful box of sleeping. I take lots of naps and then I complain about how women can't make it as I'm worth a hundred billion dollars. She sounds like Dr. Evil from Greek Dr. Evil.

One million dollars. We are being held back except for me. You complete me. Though she was not saying that, she doesn't say that women are being held back, except for me. You complete me. Though she was not saying that, she doesn't say that women are being held back. I'm just joking. Her point is that we need to have like a broader view of success rather than just thinking about money and power. Oh, for sure.

But when a white man says, and look, I don't know that it is appropriate for a white man at the top of a company that doesn't have very many women on the board to be speculating loudly about why it's not important, why there's no sexism in his company and why it's not important for them to address. But I don't think that he should be fired for it. Well, I don't think you should be able to say to someone, you know, how do you feel about racism in your company? I think you should have to have something to accuse someone of before you start bringing up accusations like that. There has to be something.

If there's a specific example of sexism that he needs to address in his company and then he needs to make a statement on it, that's one thing. But the journalist is just interested in this powerful man's idea about women in the workforce in general. I don't think they're making an accusation. Right. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying they're're making an accusation. Right. That's what I'm saying. I'm saying they're not making an accusation. So if you're getting upset at this guy's opinion about sexism and saying that I don't think there's sexism in my company because we have this diverse view of what success is and I think women are getting

away from this old dinosaur idea of what sex... There's nothing wrong with what he said. But if you say anything about sexism other than what they want you to say Well, that's the thing That's the problem What upsets, what I worry about is that people are no longer being punished for using bad words or slurs or attacking people or expressing flagrantly bigoted opinions or saying that one race or one sex is better or worse than another I'm kind of cool with taking people down for doing that shit. They're now being punished for simply expressing opinions that feel old-fashioned.

Right, exactly. And so you have to subscribe to sort of the ideological thought police. Yes. And that's a real worry. Even if I disagree with all of those opinions, I want to live in a society that is boisterous and diverse with lots of different argumentative, you know, arguments coming from lots of different positions. And a lot of my white liberal friends disagree with this. They say that- Cut them loose. These are smart, successful people.

Cut them loose anyway. Having someone like him express a view like that actually silences other people because it deprives, it probably inhibits the women in his company from feeling like they can speak openly about their ambitions because they think that there's a misogynistic, chauvinistic old dinosaur in charge of the company. Well, what is his, let's go, I can't really comment on this unless I see his exact quote because we're paraphrasing him here. So what is his exact quote? You can't find the story. I was looking it up when he started and I couldn't really comment on this unless I see his exact quote, because we're paraphrasing him here. So what is his exact quote? You can't find the story. I was looking it up when he started, and I couldn't find it. Well, tell me what is his name. What is the name of the place? Saatchi's?

Saatchi and Saatchi. Let me just see. Saatchi and Saatchi. Spell that. Spell that. S-A-A-T-C-H-I. Whoa. Jamie can't spell.

Try Saatchi Boss Feminism. Saatchi Boss Feminism Sachi Boss Feminism Fupa F-A-U-X space P-A-S scroll up please if women want to equal men they must change their notion of happiness

hmm women not men propel the cult of motherhood and spread the frightening notion that life will never be truly complete without a baby and that no career plotted can compare is that what he said no it's not what he said that's an opinion piece by someone in the independent who is twisting his words well what the fuck is his words let's find out let's see if well it might be quoted in that let's find his words please yeah because what the fuck is his words? Let's find out his words. He might be quoted in that piece. Let's find his words, please. Yeah, because what that is is ridiculous.

Whatever the fuck that person just said, yeah, you can get upset at a guy if he says that. Their ambition is not a vertical ambition. It is intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy. Huh. They are going, actually, guys, you're missing the point. You don't understand. I'm way happier than you, he explained. Their ambition is not a vertical ambition. It is this intrinsic, circular ambition to be happy. What? This is weird. he'd met a number of talented women who reach a certain point in their careers and rejected the chance to become creative directors they're going actually guys you're missing the point so i'll repeat it again he's saying there's that these women are saying guys you're missing the

point you don't understand i'm way happier than you he explained their ambition is not a vertical ambition it's his intrinsic circular ambition to be happy well you'd have to debate that idea because i don't know if that's not necessarily true for a lot of women who decide to have children and then realize they would like rather raise these children than climb this stupid fucking corporate ladder i don't think there's anything wrong with what he said yeah he also says here's the original article that i've got he says if you think about those darwinian urges of wealth power and fame, they're not terribly effective in today's world for a millennial

because they want connectivity and collaboration. They feel like they can get that without managing and leading. So maybe we've got the definition wrong. We're trying to impose our antiquated shit on them. And they're going, actually, guys, you're missing the point. You don't understand. I'm way happier than you. Their ambition, meaning women's ambition, is not a vertical ambition. It's this intrinsic circular ambition

to be happy. Yeah, you just read that. So they say, we're not judging ourselves by those standards that you idiotic dinosaur-like men judge yourself by. He says, I don't think the lack of women in leadership roles is a problem. I'm just not worried about it because they're very happy. They're very successful and doing great work. I can't talk about sexual discrimination because we've never had that problem, thank goodness. That last part's slightly problematic. Other than that, what he's doing is expressing a very self-deprecating opinion. He's talking about himself being like an old fuck.

And then the following weekend, they announced that he'd been placed on leave. And they released a statement saying, because of his comments, it is for the gravity of these statements that Kevin Roberts has been asked to take a leave of absence, effective immediately. Oh my God, everyone can suck my dick. Everyone, line up. Promoting gender equality starts at the top, and we will not tolerate anyone speaking for our organization who does not value the importance of inclusion. I don't think that's what he was saying. We work very hard to champion diversity and will continue to insist that each agency's leadership be champions of both diversity and inclusion.

They should boycott that agency. They're a bunch of twats. I can't believe I've spent so many man hours arguing this on Facebook. This is the other thing, like when you were talking about using cell phones and Facebook and not using Twitter so much and how kind of corrosive that can be to your lived experience

constantly dipping into that well of insanity. It's just a fucking waste of time. It's a drag on my time these days, Joe. I spend, like I post, so how this blew up in my face was I posted on Facebook an article about this and all my comment was was dissent shall not be tolerated. That was what I wrote. As a joke, right? You know, we're not going to tolerate dissenting. It ended up being like pages and pages and pages

and pages. We had to migrate it into messenger. I had to go into private messages. It's just reams and reams of back and forth with friends in Europe, friends all over the world, trying to convince me that I'm a ch into private messages. It's just reams and reams of back and forth with friends in Europe, friends all over the world, trying to convince me that I'm a chauvinist for supporting. They can all suck my dick. All those friends. All of them. People stop.

They said to me. First of all, here's a problem. This is not a prepared statement. No. This guy's speaking off the cuff. That's another point that I was making. People don't understand. He's just having a coffee with a reporter.

Yeah. I mean, what he said was not that bad. He's riffing. Yeah, and he's trying to speak positively about the company that they don't have an issue with sexism. Look, I disagree with what he's saying. I think it's naive. I think it's kind of ham-fisted. I do too. Yeah, exactly.

It's not the smartest thing to say. It's not offensive. It's something that certainly opens up the possibility of debate. You could say, well, there's a lot of women that don't feel like that. They feel like the door or the glass ceiling is there for them to achieve management positions. Exactly. And the best response to an idea that you disagree with is to respond with more ideas and to take that idea down, not to fire the person who aired that idea. I'm so weary.

I can't do this anymore. Me too. And these are very smart, successful people. One of them told me that I sounded like he, he basically said that I'm the same. He was remembering back to an occasion in the 1980s where an English broadcaster,

an English sports broadcaster called one of the, one of the players, a nigga, a really like, but with a whole bunch of adjectives before it, like a, a lazy, a lazy, he's just a lazy,

nasty old nigger. He was saying that you were doing that? And that person got fired, and he said that I am just like the type of person who was opposed to the firing of that person, because he was like, at every point in time, our standards evolve, and you are just one of those white chauvinistic dinosaurs who's defending the old guard. evolve and you are just one of those white chauvinistic dinosaurs who's defending the old you know the old guard and in 50 years i'll be regarded as being as i was like and that guy got away from his computer and his wife put her strap on on and pegged him and he cried and then she

took his credit card and she shit in his mouth and she left the house and she fucked her her personal trainer who's a giant african-amerAmerican man with a dick like a police flashlight. Fuck him. Fuck them all. I'm tired of it. It's stupid. I'm tired of it. And it makes me question myself.

What's that sound? Neighbors alarm. Oh, neighbors alarm. Someone's breaking in their neighbors. Mm-mm. Slate. No one's alarm shouldn't be going off the slate. Past business hours.

I got to get out of here, dude. Yeah, let's go for it. I can't do this anymore. And I really can't do this anymore in terms of like subject matter I'm so tired of like validating these dummies opinions and arguing about it

no I mean I'm glad that we didn't really talk about it much today I'm over it as well I try to stay away from it as much as possible and I try to let it just peter out

the Mazger conversation is much more complex true you know and the subject of I mean you're talking about like a real crime rape right did it happen we don't know it was a real issue just two women are accusing a guy of a real crime

it's there's a thing happening there with this other guy this is not this is a conversation a guy's having about sexism at a company that he works at but the metzger thing is i take your point but the metzger thing is similar to me, not insofar as it relates to rape but insofar as it relates to what should the penalty be against Kurt for expressing an unpopular opinion in an unpopular way. Yes. No, you're right. You're right. He should fucking quit that stupid show and

get a podcast. Well, he's got Legion of Skanks. Go listen to it. He's got Race Wars as well. I've been on that show with Sherrod. Everybody else, go fuck yourself. We the people alive. Everybody who Sherrod. Everybody else, go fuck yourself. We the people live. Everybody who doesn't support Josh Sepps, fuck off. Exactly. And if you want to hear Sam Harris and Hannibal Buress.

When is that going to be released? Within the next few weeks. A few weeks? The fuck is... Put it out, man. What are you doing? Why are you clinging to it? Trying to build up attention?

No, it was just originally planned for then so if I was going to release it now because that was just when Sam was fitted into the schedule just throw it out there

it's already done but you're so wild but why are you holding on to it I don't know call my producer people are going to want to hear it

yeah but why are you hanging on to it I don't know maybe I won't just release it before we do if you don't release it in a couple of days

we have a copy of it we're just going to fucking send it out there just kidding thank you Josh Sepps we the people live everybody look for it on all of your pod platforms Joe it's always wonderful always a pleasure I really appreciate it we've got to do this more often open invitation

thank you ladies and gentlemen see you soon, you fuckers.