Josh Szeps and Joe Rogan debate animal ethics, from Peter Singer’s controversial bioethics—like the moral weight of lobster liberation—to Cecil the Lion’s killing, exposing media bias toward "charismatic megafauna." They critique New Zealand’s invasive species culling, China’s economic ambiguity, and doping in sports, while exploring AI risks, existential threats like Yellowstone supervolcanoes, and nuclear power’s irreversible dangers. Szeps defends Dawkins’ call for Islamic reform, sparking a clash over identity politics versus substance, before mocking campus absurdities like "trans dogs" and speculating on VR porn’s future. The episode blends science, ethics, and satire, questioning whether humanity’s progress—or even reality—is as solid as it seems. [Automatically generated summary]
He coined the term animal liberation, and he sort of invented the...
He's one of the world's most important bioethicists, like, I mean, in terms of just thinking about the morality.
He's such a brilliant guy.
He's as if...
It's like an alien just came down to Earth and said, alright, we're not going to have any more preconceptions about what people think is right and wrong.
We're going to start from basics and think, okay, why do we think about the morality of things the way that we do, and in what ways is that wrong?
So he ends up with these crazy conclusions, and people hate him for some of them, like saying it's not necessarily wrong to, say, kill an infant, a newborn infant.
I think it's on the grounds that what's wrong with killing something is a sort of combination of snuffing out the life of a being that has the capability of conceiving of itself as having a future, right?
You're thwarting a person's plans when you kill them, you're robbing them of all of the opportunities that they hoped that they were going to have, and you're presumably causing them pain.
But if you could painlessly...
I mean, if you think of life as being an incremental thing that starts from conception and then gradually evolves up into adulthood and sort of self-awareness and consciousness, I mean, does a two-day-old baby have that much more sentience and consciousness and sense of itself than a 22-week-old baby in the womb does?
Not a huge amount, necessarily.
I mean, I'm not saying I agree with it, but he's just a fascinating person to talk to.
That's interesting that he thinks that way if he has children, because I could see it if you're trying to make some sort of a logic argument, you know, that you could argue it like that.
But as far as, like, being a human being, the difference being significant in that a child represents potential, and a child represents, to a lot of people, represents this insane bond of love that you have with the baby.
There's some people that are extreme animal rights folks that also believe that there's something about if you did kill a person, at least you stop that person from killing all the animals they're going to kill or be responsible for the death of in their entire life.
There's people that break into restaurants, places that have seafood and keep lobsters, and they release them, take the rubber bands off their atrophied claws, and release them back into the ocean.
I have no problem with it because I do eat meat and so I can't really be a hypocrite about it.
But I think there's something just kind of oddly sadistic about sitting there at a table and just being like, alright, I'm going to end that one's life right now and then I'm just going to eat him in front of his buddies.
So, getting back to Peter Singer, where his whole philosophy of animal liberation is sort of that there is a hierarchy of consciousness and sentience that has to be taken into account.
He happens to be a vegan, but he doesn't think, you know, I've spoken to him, obviously he doesn't think that an oyster has the same right to life as a lion does or as a chimpanzee does, right?
Right.
So you factor in the capacity of the creature to be sentient and to feel pain and to have a conception of itself and to feel love and fear and those sorts of things.
And however much it does, that's why human life is probably more important than any other animal's life.
Maybe whales or dolphins or, I don't know, some other animal that's equally smart as us.
But...
So for him, the bugs are less worthy.
And for anyone sensible, the bugs are less worthy, right?
But what's interesting when you say, like, we have these weird conceptions of our own hierarchies, of, like, cute animals and non-cute animals, or animals that we give a shit about and animals that we don't...
What's interesting is that that hierarchy doesn't match up with a logical, ethical hierarchy.
Like, why are we so willing to be so cruel to pigs, which are just as conscious and self-aware and capable of love and family and pain as dogs?
But we have these institutionalized, concentrated animal feeding operations that just...
Torture.
I mean, it's torture.
I mean, whatever that industry can do to lower the price of a pound of flesh by a few pennies, it will do, including not anaesthetising the pigs, grabbing little piglets by the tail and just smashing their heads against a wall to kill them if they're non-viable anymore.
I mean, it's an absolute murder show.
It's like an ongoing holocaust of pigs.
But then, like, little...
People will get arrested for, I don't know, Michael Vick or something, doing something bad for dogs.
We just don't give a shit.
So what Peter Singer would say is, yes, there's a hierarchy, but let's at least be sensible about the hierarchy.
Cecil's a 13-year-old lion, which I want everyone to understand that if you're a male lion and you reach 13 years of age, you have killed a fuckload of baby lions.
My friend Steve Rinella calls them charismatic megafauna.
And he's like, there's all these animals that are charismatic megafauna that we have anthropomorphized in movies like The Lion King and Yogi Bear and all these movies.
And we have this idealized view of what they really are.
But the reality of them is so alien to us because we're never in Africa, in Zimbabwe, in the jungle with these lions.
And if you were, you would be absolutely fucking terrified of them and you wouldn't think of them like...
I saw Jimmy Kimmel crying on TV. I was like, whoa, Jimmy, I want to show you some videos.
I want to show you some videos of Cecil killing babies.
Because apparently there's a video of Cecil actually killing...
Like a Neeland or a gazelle or something along those lines.
When they go to hunt those, occasionally they'll find people that are there and they call these people poachers.
And what they are is extremely poor people that are there shooting these animals without a permit.
And you know what they do?
They murder them.
They murder these people on a regular basis.
I have a friend who went over there for a hunting camp and while he was there, the people that he was with shot a poacher.
Shot it right in front of them.
There was a man, and that man had a gun that was like a...
They have makeshift guns.
They have a...
It's an actual gun, but they don't have real bullets.
So what they do is they create a bullet with like a piece of metal.
They find pieces of metal, and they get some gunpowder, and they create a firing pin, and they have to light it like a musket.
It's crazy.
I mean, these are extremely, extremely poor people.
Not only that, they find their camps, and in a lot of their camps, they'll find evidence of witchcraft.
So they have this white powder that they'll find in these camps, and they put this white powder on their wrists, and they believe this white powder that's been blessed by this witch doctor makes them invisible.
So this guy was standing out in the open, like right next to a tree, when the game wardens, the people that live and work in Africa and handle this stuff, shot this guy.
They shot this guy.
And you know what they do with him when they shoot him?
They fill out paperwork or they don't.
Sometimes they just feed them to the hyenas.
And this happens every day.
And this happens all the time because they have these huge hunting preserves, right?
So these preserves might be 20, 30, 40,000 acres, maybe more.
Enormous.
One of them, my friend was on, said it took eight hours to drive from one side of the ranch to the other.
So you're talking about an enormous piece of land.
And in this enormous piece of land, you'll find insanely poor people.
And these insanely poor people have nothing.
It's dry.
There's no supermarkets.
There's no government support.
There's nowhere for them to go.
So what do they do?
They take a risk, and they go and try to find animals to kill in these hunting preserves.
And they get shot, and they get killed, and no one gives a fuck.
And there's a case, I mean, some people say, well, look, trophy hunting, you may not agree with it, but the $50,000 that the person is spending can then go into maintaining a preserve that actually protects a whole bunch of lions.
Now, I'm a bit sort of conflicted about that, because there are only a few tens of thousands of lions left, right?
Well, I was reading a piece the other day that was saying that, you know, within 15 or 20 years, it's entirely possible there just won't be any African elephants left.
Well, one of the things that was pointed out on that show is there was a lot of animals that were on the verge of extinction that are now thriving because they live in these giant hunting camps.
So, Ricky Gervais was commenting on Facebook about Cecil the Lion and trophy hunting and everything, because he's a big animal rights guy, and he's super opposed to trophy hunting.
And he was saying, like...
Sure, maybe this is going to fund something better, but would you allow some arsehole to shoot a cancer patient if he was willing to donate a million dollars to cancer research?
But anyway, what happened to this guy who shot the lion reminds me a bit of what John is always on about.
So he's had to shutter his dental practice.
There are signs of abuse all over the dental practice.
His business is ruined.
He's had to go into hiding.
I mean, is that fair?
Yeah, he did a shitty thing.
I completely don't agree with it.
I don't understand trophy hunting.
I understand hunting hunting for meat, but I don't understand trophy hunting.
But we all pile on and we all love being so self-righteous and so sanctimonious about it.
At the same time, once again, as we're eating all those pigs that have been tortured and people are biting into chicken burgers, that's another tortured animal.
But the moment there's something with a big fluffy mane and it has a cute name like Cecil.
So I'm out here in LA this weekend doing an episode of my new show.
show I just launched a podcast which is a panel of like three three comics sitting around talking about the news each week what's it called it's called we the people live so people can get you should follow us at WTP underscore live on Twitter and much work or you can fuck me up already you just got off a plane Other people have like, their brains, your listeners are clever enough.
So we had Greg Fitzsimmons on the show last night, and we just got a bunch of people together in Hollywood.
And Fred Stoller, who was a writer on Seinfeld, I don't know if you know Fred, did a joke about exactly what you were just saying, about Cecil the Lion.
He was like, it's like if someone, like...
Someone accidentally shot Bruce Willis, but they thought that they were going to be shooting Gregory McGee, and they're like, oh fuck, I didn't realize that I was shooting Bruce Willis.
I just thought I was going to be killing this other random dude.
You'd still be like, no, you'd still murdered a guy, right?
It doesn't matter whether it's Jericho the Lion or Shithead the Lion.
I really believe that media depictions of animals, and when you add human voices to them, like Zookeeper, a movie that I was in, you do fuck with people's reality.
I think that We're not designed to take in the media.
I really don't believe that the human body and brain is designed for films.
And I think when we sit down there and we watch some epic movie with lions, like, there was a movie called Bears.
I mean, I'm not sure that I buy your thesis that things like animated movies like The Lion King...
Screw us up.
But I do definitely think that if there's something which is a pseudo-documentary, like what you're talking about, like Bears or something, like one movie that I hated, I couldn't get through more than 20 minutes of it, was March of the Penguins.
Well, also, there was a part in the movie, and this really did happen, when I watched it, I was watching, and there's those leopard seals that feed off of the penguins that I didn't even know existed.
I didn't even know it was a real animal until that movie.
And this is an amazing beast of an animal with these huge teeth, and I was like, whoa!
I was like, this is incredible!
This thing's amazing!
Wow!
There was a family in front of me, and this mom was upset at me that I was happy when the leopard seal was eating the penguins.
I'm like, what about when the penguin is fucking slaughtering these fish?
So I think companies like Disney probably should be held to better account to be more responsible about communicating to children the reality of animal life rather than making it all sunny.
Don't want their kids to watch like pull up this video Jamie lion killing cub male lion killing cubs I put this up on Twitter and I thought Twitter took it down But what actually happened is I retweeted somebody else tweeted it and the guy who tweeted it got attacked so hard That he decided to delete his tweet.
Meaning, like, the unit of evolution is not the individual and it's not the species.
It's the gene.
Now, that lion is killing those cubs because what better way to make sure that its genes end up getting passed on and spread out and procreated through the...
He looks different because he's younger in this video, and apparently when they get older, they get the black around their mane.
I don't know if this is true.
But bottom line is, this is also part of the picture.
So by showing only the beautiful aspects of the lion with a flowing mane, walking amongst the cubs that are his and the female lionesses, you don't see the actual whole animal.
You don't see the thing.
You also don't see the reality of the poaching and what these people go through that live there and that it's easy for these hunting wardens to murder those people that are trying to survive.
I mean, so there's the ethics of actually taking the lives of these animals and the hypocrisy of loving dogs but not pigs and of eating chicken but then going crazy about Cecil the Lion.
But then at the end of the day, I always come back to the fundamental fact that...
We are living through one of the greatest extinction events in history that's been unleashed by humans.
If, in 50 years time, we don't want to live in a world that has no lions, has no African elephants, has totally polluted overfished waters, where you can't eat tuna anymore because there's so much mercury in it.
Like, we've got to find ways of dealing with this And if the poachers are part of that problem, I'm not saying you put a bullet in their head, but you've got to do something.
I have a friend, his name is Justin Wren, and he'll be on the podcast soon again.
He's been on a few times.
He still is an MMA fighter, but he went over there on a trip and met some pygmies and just was in the Congo and fell in love and just was like, I need to help these people.
And we've been donating money and they've been building wells.
They've built 16 wells for these people.
They're bringing in medical supplies.
They're doing all these things to try to help these people.
But the feeling that he got when he was there is like, there's no one helping these folks.
They have to do anything they can to survive.
These people that are on these hunting preserves that they're calling poachers, a lot of them are just trying to feed themselves.
In Africa, a poacher, you can shoot a poacher when they are on your property, and it's legal.
You fill out paperwork, and you're done.
And not only that, but it was being done by what they call, they call them professional hunters, but they're essentially game wardens.
So...
Like, if you were, you know, if you were in Montana, say you were elk hunting, and when you shoot an animal, you have to have a tag for it, which means Indian state allows shooting tiger poachers on sight offers money to informants.
The only time we see Africa on the news is when some horrible, horrible shit goes down, or when Bono is playing some...
I mean, I've got friends who live in Nairobi, and there are lots of things going on.
I mean, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is doing all kinds of stuff.
There's lots of entrepreneurship.
Cell phones have revolutionized the continent, because all of a sudden...
People are able to, like, send a text message to the market that's a three-hour walk away and ask what price, you know, fish or rice are getting that day.
And they can actually plan instead of just guessing.
Like, there are a lot of good news stories in Africa.
I'm not downplaying how terrible it is.
But the idea that the only way that you can survive on the continent of Africa is by poaching, is by being an ivory poacher.
But I think unless you have feet on the ground in Africa, unless you actually go there and experience it firsthand, everybody that I've talked to that's been there said, it is another world.
And we're also so caught up in our own little worlds, I mean, especially in this country, because America's so big, and it's so easy to maintain, to just live inside of the American cultural bubble, essentially, that it's not, you have to actively, proactively try to seek out other sources of information and other experiences.
Otherwise, it's very easy to just coast along here and not really think about the rest of the world.
It's also kind of ironic that the last big lion story that came out of Africa was the editor from the Game of Thrones that got pulled out of her car by a lion.
She was taking a photograph of it and the lion was like, ooh, I think that's an open window.
Just dove into the car and literally pulled her out in front of her friends.
You know, they're all screaming and the lion killed her right in front of everybody.
And that's what they do.
They're fucking killers.
They're nature's cleanup crew.
Anything with a limp, Anything that looks like it's easy to take out.
Like, did you see that Aussie surfer, Mick Fanning, getting attacked by a great white?
That was crazy.
The whole point, like, so sharks don't like what we taste like, right?
They're after big, fatty seals.
They don't like scrawny humans.
We're all bone and sinew.
And so they'll just take a bite to see if they like us, and then they'll spit us out.
But if it's a nine-foot great white, then that little taste is enough to kill you if they rip off your leg or off your torso.
So I've always felt, especially as an Australian, where this is constantly just in the background of your mind as a possibility every time, because we're always at the beach, like...
I would prefer it if they actually liked us so at least one of us is happy.
It's just the ignominy of both being killed and then also the shark being like, eh, I didn't even like it.
There's a video of them taking a surfboard and pulling it behind a boat in South Africa just to show there's this one area that's just overrun with sharks.
And as they pull this surfboard behind the boat, these sharks just, bam, just hitting the surfboard, knocking it up in the air, and you're like, what?
Did you see this petition that they've got, this is from left field, but it just popped into my head, and I don't know why, about this 19-year-old kid who had sex with a 17-year-old girl who had told him, she was 14, and she told him she was 17, and so he went to jail, and now he's on the sex offender registry for 25 years.
And he's not going to be able to have a career because he wanted to do software engineering.
And as part of his parole, he's not allowed to own a computer.
He's not allowed to own a smartphone because he's classified as a pedophile.
Even though she was physically mature, he thought she was 17. Her parents lobbied the judge and she lobbied the judge to plead and say, please let this guy off.
But instead, the judge threw the book at him, basically, saying, like, you should understand that sex is supposed to be a meaningful and holy experience between two people who love each other.
Debate rages over man, 19. Put on a sex offender registry for 25 years.
Zach Anderson, 19, met a girl online via hookup app.
Hot or not, last year on the app, girl says she's 17. However, she's actually 14. Zach traveled 20 miles from Indiana home to Michigan and slept with her.
He was arrested after the girl's mom became worried about her whereabouts.
Whatever this petition is, Jamie, find out where it is and let's give it out online and have people fill it out and hopefully that helps.
Yeah, I've had him on Half Post Live a couple of times.
I mean, his point is like, what the hell legal rationale is there for saying that sex is supposed to be this meaningful thing between two people who love each other and you shouldn't be using hot or not?
And the whole point of the sex offender registry and that kind of stuff is to protect kids and protect parents from predatory, potentially violent, repeat child rapists, right?
I mean, that's ideally what that offender registry should do.
What kids is it protecting to prosecute this 19-year-old?
Does anyone seriously believe that if he has a smartphone at any point in the next 25 years or whatever it is, that he's going to be preying upon multiple 14-year-old girls who look like they're 17?
It's just madness that someone thinks that they could do that.
I have a theory about that, and I've talked about it on the show before, that I think that one of the main problems that we have with law enforcement and with police and even with judge and prosecutors is that it becomes a game.
It becomes a win or a lose.
If the guy gets off, you lost.
If you convict him, you scored.
And I think we have this built-in thing about playing games.
And I think it fits very keenly into that dynamic that we have about winning and losing.
And I think that's why cops can find some sort of a justification for leaving evidence, for planting evidence.
Like that guy who shot the guy in North Carolina and then drops the taser.
Do you remember that?
He shot the guy in the back and then drops the taser at his body.
Playing pool, yes, but when you're a cop, you also have a quota.
I had this guy on, Michael Wood, who's a former police officer in Baltimore, who's enlightening me as to how fucked up Baltimore is and how fucked up The police department is and how crazy it is over there.
But he was like, you get in trouble if you're not arresting people.
So if no one commits crimes, you're fucked.
You're fucked as a cop because they're like, that's bullshit.
These people suck.
It can't be that it ever cleans up.
It can't be like, hey, you know what?
Baltimore just became Beverly Hills and everyone is like this nice old rich Jewish couple that doesn't do anything wrong and no one commits crime.
So we can just relax.
It'd be like the fire department.
Sit around and wait for something to happen instead of being forced.
Because the people who are supposed to be doing the cracking down...
on crime actually have an incentive for there still to continue to be some crime so that they can keep doing the cracking down.
It almost reminds me a little bit of the military-industrial complex where the Pentagon, the Defense Department is supposed to be about defending us, but if we don't have wars to go into, then they're kind of redundant.
So it's actually good for them when there is a war, ironically, but you would expect that the people who are trying to Yeah, I think the overall dynamic of how we operate is flawed fundamentally on so many different levels that we just sort of try to patch it up and keep moving.
And I think you can make an analogy about this hunting thing.
I mean, it is kind of fucked that you're talking about conservation when the best way to conserve is to get money from them being murdered.
I mean, that's really what you're saying.
The best way is to go over there and there was an article in HuffPost actually today that I was reading and I was kind of laughing about it because it was wrong on a lot of different levels and it was about hunting for conservation and that this model doesn't really work or that the argument doesn't hold up and one of the things they brought up was that three hundred thirty five thousand dollars that that guy had paid to go and shoot that rhino And that rhino,
they were saying, well, this rhino's in danger, these rhinos are endangered.
And so they had targeted him for, they were going to cull him.
They were going to kill him anyway.
So the reason why this guy was able to spend so much money to shoot this endangered rhino is because they were going to shoot it anyway.
And they said, look, if we can generate a tremendous amount of income, and I had him on the podcast, and he said the amount of money that he paid was actually small.
And the reason why it was small was that All the negative publicity actually fucked up the conservation aspect of it, because there are people that would pay half a million even more for that rhino, and they didn't because they were scared of having their name thrown into the pool.
So this Corey Knowlton guy went over there, spent the $335,000, did everything legally, and he was, in a lot of ways, just like Cecil.
Then that brings us back to the social justice Twitter storm thing, right?
That you're ending up with an inferior outcome to the outcome that you could potentially have, because the people who could pull off the best outcome are so afraid of us all jumping down their throats on Twitter and ruining their lives, turning them into a Justine Sacco.
I think this is the way, if people hate this idea of hunting for conservation, if they hate this idea, the best way to stop it is to really ramp up conservation efforts.
Like, to really, really ramp up the idea of non-hunting for conservation.
And that's, I think, maybe the solution in a lot of these situations.
But also, another thing that has to be carefully considered is that, at least in some areas and some places, you have to manage populations of animals.
Because if you just leave nature onto its own, nature will wipe out animals as well.
Nature doesn't really give a fuck.
Wolves don't care if they wipe out all the elk.
They really don't care.
They don't have it in their mind.
They have it in their mind.
What can I kill and eat?
Whether it's dogs or whether it's elk or whatever it can track down and kill.
So the United States has a problem in a lot of the Western states because they reintroduce wolves.
And they reintroduced wolves, and there was a really interesting video about it, how wolves are changing Yellowstone National Park, and they sort of highlighted the positive aspects of it.
The negative aspects of it are the elk population are getting decimated, because these elk are not used to wolves, because they didn't develop with wolves.
And the wolves are within the last few generations.
These wolves have been introduced here, and they wanted to keep them within a certain population.
They wanted to keep them within, you know, a few thousand wolves in the whole country.
Well, they've gone way, way, way past that.
And so now they want to start hunting these wolves, and they do hunt these wolves in some areas, but they have all these people that are freaking out about the hunting of the wolves.
So you shouldn't hunt these wolves.
Well, you have to.
You have to manage these populations, because if you don't, then you have starvation, then you have disease, and then you have them encroaching into livestock.
I have a friend who lives in northern BC, British Columbia, and he is a hunter up there, and he also has cows.
His neighbor's cow was killed in the middle of the night by a pack of wolves.
He said, you don't even know what terror is, and when you're sleeping in your house with your children, and he said you have glass windows that protect you from the wild, right?
You're not living in a fortress.
You're living in a normal house, and you look out the window, and you see 23 30 wild, savage, murderous wolves tearing a cow apart in front of you, screaming and cheering and ripping this thing apart.
It all comes back to this misconception that people have that nature is at a permanent state of equilibrium and that we shouldn't tinker with it because there's something kind of fundamentally precious about a particular state of nature.
But the reality is almost all states of nature in the world right now have been impacted by human civilization already.
So as you say, the reason why we have to reintroduce the wolves is because we killed them in the first place, and the relationship between the number of elk and the number of wolves is already out of whack.
So we need to be able to manage it.
It reminds me a bit, I was talking to a marine biologist, I think I was in Tonga, a little flyspec South Pacific nation, talking to this guy about whaling.
to whaling, I don't think we should be killing whales.
And he was like, you know what, because we already have killed so many blue whales and humpback whales, all the big, you know, beautiful whales, the minke whales, which are the only whales that are currently being killed by the Japanese and the Norwegians and so on, are crowding out the bigger whales from having which are the only whales that are currently being killed by the Japanese and the Norwegians and so
So it actually, from a sustainability standpoint, you may actually want to have some culling of the minke whales, which are the sort of little shitty whales.
They're the ugly stepchildren of the whale species because they're eating all the plankton and they're eating all the stuff that the blue whales and the humpback whales could be using to resurrect their populations.
And in Australia, people go crazy sometimes, especially non-Australians, about kangaroo culls.
But kangaroos breed like rabbits.
They go out there and shoot kangaroos to bring down their population so they don't starve to death sometimes because there are so many of them.
But one interesting thing about New Zealand in terms of all of that conversation around pests is that it's possibly the only country that actually has the capability and a major movement to do so to take itself back to what the ecosystem was before humans arrived.
But now that there are foxes, it's not a great survival tactic to just stand still while a fox is coming after you.
So there's this massive movement in New Zealand now, which my uncle is heavily involved in and the Prime Minister is heavily involved in, to actually genuinely eradicate all of these...
small mammals that were brought in by humans when they came.
So it's such a green country.
There's such environmentalists in New Zealand.
They really, really get their hands dirty with all that stuff.
They're super, super natural about everything.
But it's funny because in the rest of the world, if you're an environmentalist, you're probably an animal lover and you're probably maybe not a bloodthirsty person.
But the Kiwis, the New Zealanders are just so bloodthirsty because they love killing small mammals.
So like, it's almost like a part of your patriotic duty to like just have traps set all over the place.
They go out and there's just like a bloodied old fox with its head smashed in by a trap.
And my friend from Australia actually came and hunted in New Mexico.
He flew all the way from New Mexico, ironically, and hunted in New Mexico, or flew all the way from Australia, hunted in New Mexico, and wrote this big story about it.
Speaking of how good the stags taste, I'm always amazed when I go back to New Zealand about how much we're missing out on great produce in America just because of the proliferation of industrialized farming.
And the dearth of great natural food.
I mean, when I was back in New Zealand, I was staying at this little bed and breakfast, had these eggs for breakfast, these just two fried eggs.
Like the yolk was bright red and it stood up like more than an inch above the rest of the egg and the white was just perfect.
It was so flavoursome.
It tasted like an egg that I haven't tasted in years and years.
I was like, where do these come from?
unidentified
She's Like, oh, I just popped down the road to where we have a few truck-uns, and we just popped up this morning.
That's another thing when you see like Vegetarian fed chickens like you see that like grass-fed chickens.
You don't want that chickens are fucking dinosaurs All right, they they eat everything.
They eat a lot of bugs.
I fed my chickens a mouse the other day I didn't want to but this is this is a story I've already told in the podcast So I'll tell you as briefly as possible because it was I was very conflicted about this I came home.
I was on the road and And my family had found a wounded hawk in our yard.
And this goes back to the hierarchy of animals argument.
And they found this wounded hawk.
Something was wrong with its wing, its broken wing.
And it was a juvenile hawk.
It was, you know, it could hunt for itself, but it was small.
And so they picked it up and put it in a box.
And they wanted to feed it.
And they had to get it to the veterinarian on Monday.
But they were trying to figure out, like, what wildlife organizations save these hawks.
So they said, well, we have to feed this thing.
We have to figure out how to feed it.
So there was a pet store that's opened that sells pinkies, which are baby mice.
And so they fed this hawk these baby mice, and it kept it alive over the weekend.
They gave it some water with an eyedropper.
And then there was one pinky left over.
And my daughter wanted to keep it.
Let's keep it.
We have to keep it.
I go, honey, this is not going to live.
It needs its mother's milk.
The mother's not here.
It can't even see.
It's only a few days old.
And I was amazed it was still alive.
And I said to my wife, what are you doing?
We've got to do something about this.
And so the two options were take it to the pet store and give it back to the pet store, which they're going to feed it to snakes.
That's what they sell them for.
They sell them for food.
I give it to the chickens.
And so my mind, no, I don't want the chickens to kill it.
Like the hierarchy of animals.
Like you were just feeding these fucking things to hawks just a day ago.
Like what the hell?
So, you know, we made an executive decision.
I decided I was going to be the one since I'm the killer.
I read an interesting piece about how different Asian cultures spend their money.
And one of the points was that Japanese people, Japanese and Chinese cultures are totally different.
In Japan, when people earn money, they will usually put it towards making their home as nice as possible, so that you go into a Japanese home and it's beautiful.
obsessed with like flashy things.
In China, people will live in an absolute shithole if it means that they can afford like the best watch or the best car or like the best handbag.
So there's like a lot more kind of outward consumerist, almost like you say, capitalist style, overt consumption, conspicuous consumption, rather than just sort of feathering their nest the way that the Japanese homebodies do.
I wonder if that's like a repression thing, like a response to repression, sort of like Catholic school Like, Catholic school girls, you know, everybody knows.
I grew up, I dated a girl that was in Catholic school when I was in high school, and she was a freak.
She was just such a freak.
And it was because everything was like, you're going to hell, sex is bad, and you get that girl alone, and she was just bananas, just bonkers.
So, like, I mean, if you're dirt poor, and if you've just had, you know, the past couple of decades be your big boom, then I suppose you want to show that you're profiting from it more than a country like Japan, which has basically been rich since the 60s.
Well, I don't think it's fair to call them capitalists, because at its best, capitalism should be about the free exchange, about entrepreneurism, right?
And the ability of individual human beings to start their own businesses and to trade with one another.
That is still not the way that the Chinese economy runs.
But I think what you're alluding to is the fact that they are rapaciously pro-money and desperate to enhance their economic growth as quickly as possible.
So it's not like they're, you know, Mao Zedong said, you know, when someone said that the reforms that he was bringing in, or maybe it was Deng Xiaoping, said that the reforms that he was bringing in were kind of capitalist, and shouldn't he have more of an allegiance to communism?
He said, you know, black cat, white cat, as long as it catches mice.
So, it used to be that you got assigned an occupation saying the way that we think of Russia or the way that we think of Cuba, that they tell you, hey, this is what you're going to do, and so you go do this, and you get paid X amount by the state, and that's all you get.
But that wasn't good for business.
You've got to give people an incentive in order to push harder and to innovate.
They have to know that that juicy watch is dangling from that string like a carrot in front of them.
That's what makes them push and that's right where they fucked up and that's where they sort of see they see that about America like look these dummies work all day for a Lexus They just want that car so bad and they see that billboard as they're driving home and they're fucking shitty Hyundai not that Hyundai's are shitty by the way I like how those.
I got an upgrade, like, at the, you know, the Avis guy gave me an upgrade, I don't know, because I'm some elite thing or something, or some credit card or whatever that I've got.
From the 70s on, when the gas crisis hit, in the 1970s, I believe it was like 73, 74, American muscle cars and American, like, big cars, like the Cadillacs, the things that people really loved about American cars.
Those, like, signified America.
You know, when you thought about automobiles, you thought about those big Cadillacs, those smooth, cushy rides.
No one was making those in Germany.
No one was making those.
That was a true American product.
But then gas became insanely expensive.
And once the gas crisis hit, America started making four-cylinder Mustangs that looked like shit, and everything just fell apart.
And they were really unreliable.
Then there was also the issues with unions.
The issues with automotive unions.
The union workers wanted to get paid a fuckload of money.
And I had a buddy who was a union employee in Detroit, and he told me, like, how they used to do it.
And it was...
It's just ridiculous.
The demands the unions had and what they were able to achieve in bargaining, they would have a job that one person could do, easily.
Eight-hour day job.
But two people would take that job.
There had to be a two-person job.
The union demanded it.
So what they would do is one guy would show up for four hours a day, and then he would leave, and the other guy would show up for four hours a day.
So they would both punch in.
But one guy would punch in at 9 o'clock, and he would go fuck off for four hours, and then he'd go back, and the other guy would relieve him, and they would just switch off like that.
And the car companies would have these massive long-term liabilities, right?
Right.
Because they'd have like pension programs that were defined benefit pensions instead of defined input pension.
I don't know what that may not be the correct economic way of saying it, but like instead of you put into your pension and then when you retire, you get back what you put in.
It's we will pay you X amount for the rest of your life, like a form of Social Security.
it's even more weird than social security it's like a form of guaranteed corporate welfare for all of the unionized employees for the rest of their lives after they retire yeah that's a lot for a company to be able to bear and that's why they moved all their things overseas i mean that's what happened when they started just shipping everything overseas and then ironically japanese companies started shipping their things to america like a lot of hondas are built in america i Mm-hmm.
Well, I was going to say, do you think that the American auto industry is ever going to be as innovative as it was back in the 50s and is ever going to rule the coupe?
You know when you're fucking trying to take little catnaps while you're holding a shotgun because you're worried that someone's going to come and steal your canned peaches?
But then I also don't want to be completely unprepared.
I don't even have an emergency.
I live in Manhattan and I don't even have a little bag with some granola bars in it and some fresh water in case we get hit with a dirty bomb or something.
Like, imagine if you have hundreds of thousands of a particular type of car driving around in America, and because they're all Wi-Fi enabled and they're all on the satellite and everything, you can have hackers or terrorists or just neater wells of some kind hack in and...
Theoretically, I mean, they can certainly slow down the car, they can certainly make the car turn, they can certainly screw around with it in some way, but if they could make it speed up to 160 miles an hour and then veer sharply to the right, you could kill 100,000 people...
And not only that, the engine flew from the wreckage.
Like, there he is right there.
That's the video of the car.
And these cars today are so fucking computer controlled.
There's so much gadgetry and stuff going on inside of them that there are many that argue that not only has this been possible for a long time, but they've been doing this for a long time.
I've got a piece here in New York Magazine, which I just chatted to Jamie.
Who killed Michael Hastings?
reflexively distrustful, eager to make powerful enemies, the young journalist whose Mercedes exploded in Los Angeles one night couldn't possibly have died accidentally, could he?
He was saying, like, if you were going to take Lance Armstrong's medals away, he was like, if you took away every award or prize that you give to people for something that they did while they were on drugs, there would be no Grammys.
I think to a certain extent, I think one of the real problems with Lance Armstrong was that he was suing people that were accurately talking about his drug use, because they got busted, and he was going after them and trying to ruin them.
They say that that race is so grueling, there's an argument that it's actually healthier to do with drugs.
That doing it with drugs actually allows your body to recuperate in a way that you would be breaking it down and you would be susceptible to rhabdomyelosis.
You know, that's that thing that those CrossFit people get.
When people have a breakdown of their muscle tissue, and then your body starts processing it, and it comes out in your urine, like ultramarathon runners have it.
I have a buddy who runs ultramarathons, and he says when you're done, you pee, it's black, like soda or like coffee.
It's awful.
And it's just your body, your kidneys are malfunctioning, everything's just shutting down.
Well, what they're doing is they're just trying to push past all the pain and discomfort and show mental toughness, and that's what's supposed to be inspiring, is that, you know, this guy ran, like my buddy, Cameron Haynes, he ran 106 miles in 24 hours.
It was a 24-hour race where you had a one-mile course, and he did it 106 times in 24 hours.
I think there's a real good argument that coffee is a stimulant, and that stimulant helps, and if that helps, why not Adderall?
And also, marijuana allows you to see things in a different way, and if you can do that and maybe write something better, marijuana helped you write that thing.
That's not exactly just your creativity, it's also the marijuana.
Yeah, and the weird thing is when there are drugs that are not actually performance enhancing but are also banned, like marijuana will be banned in sports where it clearly wouldn't actually give you an advantage.
The idea is that it's not good at learning stuff, because it just goes in and out, but the stuff you already know, that's in your system, that you already have trained down, you know, it's like a part of your sort of synapses.
I think when you fight the experience, like, oh, fucking pot, I'm high.
And that's where paranoia comes in.
And also, I think paranoia is also...
One of the things that marijuana does is sort of it lowers the boundaries that we put up in order to get things done.
We have boundaries.
There's sort of blinders that you put on that allow you to get through your job and get in your car and drive home to your family and not consider the massive amount of variables that the world creates.
Or that the world presents.
And also space.
The fact that you're on a fucking giant 24,000 mile round ball that's going a thousand miles an hour in a circle and hurling through infinity.
When you smoke pot, it sort of unveils all of these possibilities and potentials and it freaks people out.
What you're talking about there in terms of the doors of perception being kind of shut down during normal behavior strikes me as more of a psychedelic thing.
I mean, I've had some of the most insightful experiences of my entire life.
I don't do them anymore, but when I was in my late teens and early 20s doing acid or mushrooms and having that sense of sudden complete awareness that you are on a rock that's going around this star on the outer edge of a spiral arm galaxy in a cosmos that is so vast that you cannot comprehend it. but when I was in my late teens and early
And we have evolved as a species to not comprehend it and to not focus on it all the time because if we actually thought about where we are and what we're doing and how many things could be thrown at us at any point in time, we'd go crazy.
You wouldn't even bother working and eating anymore because everything would seem so kind of trivial.
I have a lot of friends in the quote-unquote psychedelic community that live their lives around the time they do psychedelics and then the downtime in between there where they're sort of processing it and gearing up for their next psychedelic trip.
And...
For them, it's just, that's their life.
It's a part of their life.
Like, those crazy trips and those realizations, that is a significant part of their existence and what makes life wonderful to them.
And then there's people like you that say, hey, I did it before, I don't do it anymore.
Well, I think yoga can take you there if you do the right kind of yoga.
I do like a hot yoga, like a Bikrams type hot yoga, and it's great for the body.
And it's great for relaxation.
Like to me, when I do a lot of yoga, I always talk about I got in a car accident and somebody rear-ended my expensive German sports car.
You know, I asked the guy, are you okay?
Everything okay?
And I wasn't even mad at him.
You know, I should have been probably upset that this guy wasn't paying attention or texting or whatever the fuck it was and slammed into my car and cost me a shitload of money.
But I wasn't.
And I attribute it to doing a lot of yoga that week.
I think it calms you down.
I think it...
There's something...
I mean, there's a reason why those skinny Indian dudes have been doing that shit for thousands of years.
I don't think they've just been...
It's just like a hobby.
No.
And they just stuck with it.
But Kundalini yoga, which I don't practice, but I have friends that do...
I have a friend who teaches it in Boulder, and she's a firm advocate of achieving psychedelic states through this practice.
You get up at four o'clock in the morning, and you do these breathing exercises, and you want to sit in a certain direction.
It's all very ritualistic, but it's also based on the idea of the circadian cycle.
You sort of interrupt your sleep cycle and the cycle of the earth, and you do these Stimulation exercises that supposedly activate your pineal gland, which is the gland that's been proven to produce dimethyltryptamine, which is the most potent psychedelic drug known to man.
And it's related in many ways to psychedelic mushrooms.
They're very similar in their chemical composition.
And we know that these psychedelic drugs that the brain produces, if you can take them, And you extract them from plants, and they exist in thousands of plants.
You have these insanely profound visionary experiences.
She says that you can achieve these states through meditation and through kundalini yoga.
I'm putting out the word right now, and we will get messages on Twitter.
I guarantee you there's places in New York...
When I started talking about this about 10 years ago, a little bit more, maybe like 2002, there were very few of these.
Now they're all over the country.
And a lot of it is me making videos and talking about it.
I've had one in my basement.
When I first started talking about it the float lab where I got mine from which is in Venice Which is the finest float tanks in the world next to this guy in Austin.
I was also has amazing ones But they were basically like almost on the verge of going out of business now They're opening up new locations great new locations all over the country all over the world and In fact, a lot of them they have as their option, like how did you learn about this?
When we were talking about the size of the cosmos and how mind-blowing all of that is, it reminded me, did you see about this Russian billionaire who has just invested $100 million in the search for aliens?
I personally think that there's two very distinct possibilities.
I mean, there's many, but there's two that I consider all the time.
One of them is that this is it.
That what we have achieved is exceedingly rare, incredibly rare, and that if the universe is 13.7 billion years old or whatever the fuck it is when it started then, it's entirely possible that it took this long for something to come out of it like us.
And that we are...
At the front of the line of the idea of conscious life.
We're the only thing that we know of on this whole planet that's not just conscious, but conscious and manipulates its environment to the point where we can change the weather, we can do all kinds of crazy shit like send videos all to Australia instantaneously.
I mean, if you're in Australia and I'm here, you can send me a text message with a photograph of you smiling, and I'll get it in a couple of seconds.
And you're right that life got started here pretty much as quickly as it could, and it evolved into our sort of level of consciousness as quickly as you would expect it to, given natural selection.
So it's true that we could be at the beginning.
You know, we could be sort of the...
intelligent conscious species in the cosmos.
But the fact that life got kicked off so quickly, and the fact that we emerged so comparatively quickly might also suggest that it's woven into the kind of fabric of the cosmos, that this is a...
Because if it was a really, really, really, really, really rare thing, then you would have expected the Earth to be a dead, gaseous ball for, you know, billions of years, many, many more billions of years than it was.
So I'm not convinced by that.
And I think also you might be underestimating just how mind-bogglingly huge the cosmos is and how little access to it we have.
Like, the fact that we haven't found anything yet doesn't mean anything.
There also is the theory that the universe is so incredibly large that not only is there an exact replica of Earth out there, but infinity, which is what the universe is supposed to be infinite, is that not only is there an exact version of Earth There's everything that has happened on this planet in the exact same order up to Me touching that microphone right there has happened exactly down to the nanosecond an infinite number of times throughout
space Like that's how big the universe is, but it doesn't mean that someone's ahead of us.
It doesn't mean that It doesn't mean that.
But it does mean that intelligent life is very likely scattered throughout the entire cosmos.
But it doesn't necessarily mean that intelligent life has reached a place past where we are right now.
But I think that you would be well advised to believe that it probably has just because the median is usually a better assumption than the extremes, right?
So, I mean, the likelihood is that we're not at either of the very, very extremes, that we're neither the very first nor the very last civilization.
Just statistically, if you were just tossing a coin, you would expect our civilization to just happen to be clustered somewhere on a bell curve in roughly the middle.
That's just a less anomalous statistical thing to have happened.
So, this system that they're going to put up with this Russian billionaire's money, I was looking at exactly what it's going to be able to do.
So, astronomers are going to be able to examine 1,000 star systems for any sign of radars being used, because apparently radar is a good way of telling that someone is there, because they've invented it.
And it's going to be able to detect a laser with the output of an ordinary 100-watt light bulb, From 23,000 billion miles away.
What I was going to say about the other possibility is the other possibility is what I believe we're heading towards right now.
Is that we're heading towards a virtual universe and that we're creating something with the possibility of artificial intelligence and the possibility of living inside of some Artificial reality that they've created that your brain interfaces with that there's gonna be no need for traveling anywhere or no need even for the type of Carbon-based life civilization that we currently enjoy and that it won't exist anymore and then we're gonna create artificial life and And that the artificial life is the next stage of evolution.
And what we are is like some sort of a cosmic caterpillar that's going to become a butterfly.
And that's one of the reasons why we're so obsessed with, you know, shiny brand new laptops and innovation and beautiful materialistic items is that that is the mechanism and the fuel behind creating those things.
Our obsession with these newer, better, greater things is fueling the creation of these newer, better, greater things.
And they're ultimately going to lead to artificial intelligence.
I was just about to say, look at what Elon Musk and also Stephen Hawking are saying about it.
And, you know, Sam Harris, who I know is a friend of yours, and I'm a huge fan of Sam's, and I've spoken to him on HuffPost Live about this, the idea that we are...
Really not understanding the potential of creating artificially intelligent systems that self-improve in a way that they end up getting sort of exponentially more self-aware until they're actually outsmarting us and they have, in every meaningful sense, a sense of their own existence in the same way that biological intelligence does.
That is going to be a game changer, the likes of which, as you say, I mean, maybe biology just...
It's extinguished, or maybe we end up, I don't know, it's like, I'm kind of agnostic on the question of whether or not we could ever upload our consciousness into a silicon-based form.
I sat down with him, just me and him, chatting about this for about an hour and a half.
At the end of it, I was fairly convinced that it's inevitable.
Fairly convinced that...
It's like, if you look at, like...
The invention of the wheel, and then you look at the Cadillac that we just showed today, or for Elon Musk's sake, the Tesla, this new insane Tesla that he has.
He's making a philosophical case as well, and this is why I say I'm agnostic about it, because...
I mean, I did philosophy at university, and one of the big thorny questions in philosophy of mind is whether or not it's necessary to have the biological substructure of a brain in order to have a mind.
Could you disentangle those two things?
Could the experience of me feeling like myself and feeling like I'm alive be disentangled from the biological reality of my physiology and the grey stuff in between my ears?
Kurzweil's...
Assumption, which he's basically just taking on faith, is yes, you could disentangle that.
If you could replicate all of the data that's whirring around in my head right now, as I'm saying these words, as I'm sitting here talking to you, if you could take all of the things that are going on, all those electrical impulses, all of those neurons, all of those synapses, and you could replicate that in a computer, then that computer would be me.
And it would not just seem like me, it would feel like me.
Like I would be...
I could actually be uploaded to a computer and you could kill my body, and I would be existing in some really meaningful sense.
Like, haters and jealousy and anger and misplaced fear and homophobia and the hatred of, you know, xenophobia.
All these different bizarre...
Angry things that we have that make up a human being all these nationalism all these different strange things that we've sort of just become Inexorably attached to in our cultures that we're trying to eradicate But we never seem to quite do all of those things are a part of the monkey body, right?
But that monkey body is what we're trying to save we're trying to save that and download it into consciousness what if we can Purify consciousness and remove it from emotion, remove it from biological need, and even sex.
You know, one of the things that freaks me out about aliens, not that I believe in aliens, but the iconic image of the alien is always sexless.
They're smooth.
They have smooth genitals.
They have no muscle.
They're totally undefined.
You can't tell what's a male or a female, and they have these enormous heads.
Is it possible that we have this iconic image because we kind of know and understand that ultimately the only way we're going to transcend this monkey body is to move past all the needs that we've sort of automatically associated with being alive.
Being alive means, you know, you have to, I gotta find food.
I gotta be a prepper.
I gotta make sure that I have canned foods and water.
What if it goes down?
It's all stay alive stuff.
It's all alive.
It's all about the monkey body.
And that's why people want to be sexy.
I gotta get my lips done.
They're too skinny.
Nobody wants a fuck.
You know, all that crazy shit that people have in their brain, a lot of it is monkey body leftover stuff.
Well, I think that's an interesting theory about why the model of the cliched alien is like that.
In other words, a less advanced conception of humans is hairier.
Racism also plays into this, right?
Darker skinned.
you know, with features that are more kind of monkey-like or something.
And then the more advanced conceptions of civilization is white man with his tools and everything.
If you extend that, if you extrapolate from that, then, yeah, more hairless, I suppose, less prone to sex, less driven by animal desire.
It's also a huge factor in religion, I think, where, you know, religions are so hung up about sex because it's what links us, it's what makes us animals.
And they don't want to think of us as animals.
They want to think of us as being divine.
We are touched by the spark of God in a way that no other animal is, according to religion.
So you've got to quash sex and gluttony because those are reminders that we're just primates.
On that question of the evolution of humans creating maybe computers and artificial intelligence are the next stage and maybe the universe is full of artificial intelligence that isn't sending out the signals that we're looking for when we're looking for biological intelligence.
Maybe they don't need radars anymore.
They don't need to be losing lasers because they're all in computers.
The other possibility, which is similar to that and which is very depressing and which I don't particularly like, is that once a species becomes capable of destroying itself, that they usually do.
You can't get beyond...
You're not responsible enough to be able to handle the kind of industrial-scale destructive capacity that we now have with nuclear weapons and with...
Coal-fired power plants and with all of our ability, we're so successful as a species that we're successful enough to destroy ourselves, but not yet wise enough not to do so.
And that maybe that's a trap that lots of species fall into as they try to pass through the crucible of going from being ordinary animals to hyper-intelligent animals.
Self-aware animals, but then on the way they invent tools that they aren't yet mature enough to be able to handle properly and they end up wiping themselves out.
Well, it's certainly possible, and if we look at the universe as being infinite, infinite possibilities exist as well.
So probably all the pitfalls, like all the things that we avoided, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, maybe they didn't avoid, and maybe they were wiped out, and maybe they did toxify their atmosphere to the point where they didn't recover for hundreds of thousands of years, and mutants and freaks barely made it by, you know, running from hybrid wolves that have fucking glowing red eyes.
You're back at the birthplace of Western Civilization.
That is not a number that's like the hundred billion stars in the galaxy that I can't even begin to wrap my head around.
It's not a number like the billions of years that the Earth is old that I can't wrap my head around.
That's a very measurable, understandable thing.
The birth of Western Civilization is just 30 or 40 of my grandmothers long.
And then think about the fact that when she was born there were no nuclear weapons, there was no nuclear power.
We hadn't discovered any of that stuff.
Right?
This is so recent.
We have the privilege of being the generation, the couple of generations, that are witnessing the dawn of the beginning of something extraordinarily new.
A, the capacity to destroy ourselves, using nukes and environmental degradation, and B, the rise of artificial intelligence and computing and globalization.
But the bottom line is, when you talk to Greek scholars and they talk about the construction of the building on top, it was built on something that was even more ancient.
They don't exactly know who built.
They don't exactly know who built the platform that fucker was put on.
And then you go back to crazy things like Baalbek in Lebanon, where they have these enormous stone things that...
Thousands and thousands and thousands of tons, and they're like, who the fuck built?
How'd they build these?
What'd they do with these?
Where'd these things fucking come from?
And they really don't know.
And that brings up the possibility that we haven't had a linear progression from Ape Man to this, but we've had these ups and downs, and we've been partially wiped out.
There's a series of supervolcanoes all over the world, and one big one being in Yellowstone that everyone's terrified of, but there's one of them, I believe, in Indonesia, that there's a certain theory that links to a massive eruption of this supervolcano 70,000 years ago that is the reason why we all share this so little genetic diversity.
And they believe that we might have been down to a few thousand people somewhere around 70,000 years ago.
I mean, scientists, evolutionary biologists can tell that we were down to...
I don't know if it's as low as that.
But certainly, I mean, it was tens of thousands of people.
And I don't know when that was, but I remember you mentioned that supervolcano last time I was on this show.
And then I went and Googled it, and it was like, eh, probably didn't happen.
Like, most of the expert sites that I went and looked at was like, this is kind of one of those sort of conspiracy theory things that we don't actually think happened.
But whether or not it was that particular Indonesian supervolcano or not, we do know that there have been periods where humankind has almost gone extinct, and we've just gotten through that.
Every six to eight hundred thousand years, Yellowstone blows, and it is a continent killer.
It will fuck up everything in the continent and cause some sort of a nuclear winter effect to a vast majority of the world, except maybe like Australia.
So what we're looking at here for people who are listening to the podcast is Yellowstone and then Toba, which looks like it's in Indonesia, and Taupo, which was a mega volcano.
Well, our stability, the stability that we've enjoyed over the past several thousand years that people have written about, I mean, other than, what was the one that happened in Rome?
Killed and we could see their bodies and there's an exhibit somewhere where they have the bodies of the people from Pompeii, the preserved ones, on display somewhere.
It comes back to what we were talking about, about the doors of perception and how our brains are forced by evolution to keep us in a very narrow mindset where we don't think about the reality of what's going on around us and how vast everything is and so on.
Because I think sometimes about my friends who live in San Francisco.
San Francisco is going to be devastated by a massive earthquake.
But, you know, we know this is going to happen, and we all go about our daily lives, and we don't pay any attention to it, because we couldn't, because we would be paralyzed if we kept thinking, is it going to be today?
Is it going to be today?
Then we'd just be, I mean, that's OCD, right?
So we're forced to go through life not actually reckoning with the fact that that's going to happen, and Yellowstone's going to happen, and all kinds of stuff's going to go down, and there's not a thing we can do about it.
That might have been why there is this this really old structures that are sort of unexplained and the sort of resurgence of civilization Somewhere around the 10,000 year mark that we have this big downfall people start figuring things out again Just like if you go back 2,000 years from now, you know, you're talking about Greece You're talking about ancient Rome and then 2,000 years later you have New York City, right?
They think that it's very possible that civilization has experienced many of these...
That's what Graham Hancock has based a tremendous amount of his work on.
I don't know if you're aware of him, but...
He's a good friend, and he wrote a book called Fingerprints of the Gods that's based on exactly that, all this evidence that shows that civilization has experienced these peaks and valleys, and that things have happened, that there have been some resets, and it hasn't been as simple as people figured out fire, then they figured out the wheel, and here we are today in New York City.
I don't know if I mentioned it last time I was on the podcast or not, but there's an amazing kind of study and there's an amazing article about this sort of research, which is if society collapses and we still have nuclear waste in the ground, How do we mark our nuclear waste sites such that a future civilization who is completely different from us, doesn't speak our language, has no more records of anything that went on, so that they don't go and hurt themselves by digging it up.
And so there are semioticians and all these people who study the nature of symbols and of conscious interpretation of the ways that we communicate and everything.
Who have got these crazy ideas like putting up these big kind of structures that look like big scary angled poles that get deeper and deeper and thicker and thicker as you get towards the site of where the nuclear waste is being stored to try to indicate to future intelligent civilizations not to go in there.
But then the conclusion that they always reach is...
They're just going to think, I mean, they're going to be interested in it.
They're going to want to explore it, right?
It's like, even if they understood that we're saying that there is this invisible radioactive stuff, if they haven't yet devised the concept of nuclear power, then they're just going to treat it the way that we treat the warnings on the pyramids, saying, don't go into the mummies, because you'll get attacked by spirits.
We're like, oh, that was a nice, fun thing for you to say, you old-fashioned people in ancient civilisations.
But we're going to go in and open the tomb anyway.
And so the conclusion was, don't do anything.
Just don't mark it at all.
Don't try to communicate it because human curiosity is always going to be more, not even human curiosity, maybe, like whatever this future species is, their curiosity is going to be more powerful than any warning that we could possibly give them.
Because this stuff lasts for tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of years.
Because there is apparently a type of reactor now where...
If anything goes wrong, it automatically self-shuts down.
Like, it's a physiological thing where they're having...
Oh, it's called a pebble-bed reactor, a graphite-moderated gas-cooled nuclear reactor.
So, apparently, I believe scientists when they say that there are new types of reactors that are basically meltdown-proof.
My concern is, I just think it's so woefully irresponsible to do something that you know produces waste that's incredibly deadly, that's going to last for thousands and thousands of times longer than any of us or any of our children or any of our grandchildren or great-grandchildren are going to be around, that's going to last for thousands and thousands of times longer than any of us or any of our children or And I hear conservatives or pro-nuclear people say, well, we'll figure it out eventually.
Okay, great.
Let's not use nuclear power until we figure it out then.
Because otherwise you just, you're fucking with other people's lives.
Fake experts that essentially get hired by oil companies, tobacco companies, to poo-poo the concerns and debate them ferociously, the concerns about global warming, concerns they used to do, the concerns about tobacco being, or nicotine being addictive and causing cancer.
And this guy shows that when there's money involved, what they do is they hire all these people to fuck with the argument, and they write op-ed columns in all these different newspapers all throughout the country, and they constantly hammer so that your grandfather reads and he goes, I've read a thing today that said 31,000 scientists have said that global warming's not real.
You know who was amongst those 31,000 scientists?
Michael J. Fox.
That was one of the names.
They're fake.
They're fake names.
And they have Michael Shermer on who's kind of explaining that he's great.
At one point in time, he thought that it was nonsense, that global warming was nonsense.
And then he started delving into the actual data, the actual scientific papers, and then he realized, well, not only is there a consensus, That man-made global warming is a real thing, but there are no peer-reviewed studies, no scientific papers that indicate the opposite.
I interviewed the director of that movie on HuffPost Live, so I did see the movie on a screener beforehand.
And the amazing thing to me was that it's not just the same tactics that are being used in sowing doubt about climate change as were used in sowing doubt about all kinds of other different things, you know, starting with...
These are the same human beings who went in and fought for the tobacco lobby, who then went and fought for the asbestos industry, who are now fighting for the fossil fuel companies.
Exactly the same human beings, using exactly the same playbook, using exactly the same tactics.
And those goddamn television shows where they have the split screen, where they have the host, and then they have the two experts debated out, and then you have the one person who's like Bill Nye, who's like sort of a reasonable scientist that's saying things that people can't totally understand because they're a little bit too technical.
And then you have this shouting guy who's like, fact!
23,000 scientists from 40 countries have said global warming's not real.
Fact!
The United States and blah, blah, blah.
And they have this playbook that they use.
They have this style of communicating in these short bursts.
Because those shows only last, you have seven minutes.
You have seven minutes, there's three people, they're all talking.
It's so hard to get a point across.
And it's one of the reasons why I think it's one of the shittiest ways to discuss a subject.
This is one of the things that I really spend a lot of time trying to do in my job, which is overturn this phony sense of balance that is required.
So every journalist and every media person tries to be anyone who's good, has instilled in them a sense that they're supposed to be fair, right?
But that often gets misallocated, especially at places like CNN, for example, where they're trying to be genuinely even-handed.
But what they think that means is giving a microphone to the two people at either side of any particular debate.
Now, there are some debates where one side is right and one side is wrong, right?
Or there's a 98% chance that one side is right and a 2% chance that the other side is right.
When you try to be balanced by just sitting in the middle and trying to moderate a debate between those two people...
You're actually not being unbiased at all.
You're being biased towards falsehood instead of towards truth.
So whenever I have a weekly segment about science news called the Nerds Forum on HuffPost Live, and I always try to explain to people and express, look, this is the likelihood that this thing is actually true, so let's talk about the science and let's not get caught up in this trap of false equivalencies.
It's like where, you know, did you see Colbert did a bit about...
So John Oliver did this bit where he was like, instead of having a pro-climate change person and an anti-climate change person, we think that we should actually reflect the proportions accurately.
Since 99% of climate scientists believe in it, they have won.
So he brings out 99 people come on set.
And they're all just shouting the pro-climate change position.
And there's this one other guy who's shouting the anti-climate change position.
Yeah, I think that those shows are horrible because this is how a lot of people get their information.
And they call it the news, in quotes.
But it's not really the news.
It's an entertainment show.
And it's an entertainment show that relies on commercials.
So there's balanced...
There's nuanced perspectives and arguments that are extremely complex.
We spent all this time talking about the conservation for hunting argument and the artificial intelligence argument, the argument about pursuing it.
All these things are real complex, nuanced...
Issues that require long sort of detailed examinations of all the possibilities, and not from a biased perspective, but from as objective as is humanly possible, especially when there's real ramifications, things like global warming or nuclear energy or things that really are going to fuck up our generation and generations to come, like hundreds of thousands of years from now.
Those don't get addressed when you have seven minutes and you have a guy who's being paid by these think tanks.
That's what's crazy about this Merchants of Doubt documentary, is it shows that there's these people that are paid by think tanks.
And these think tanks, what they really are, is they're these fake organizations that are propped up by companies that are selling whatever the fuck they would benefit from this being passed or this being The concerns being alleviated.
One of them being like this doctor who was paid by this think tank to go and preach about these flame-retardant fabrics and materials they're using to make furniture.
And that he would say this story about a woman who left a candle in the baby's bed.
And they started investigating this doctor, and they called him up.
Did you actually treat these people?
They looked into his background, his past.
They did a computer database on all the infants that died from burns in this guy's area, and they found that it was a lie.
And so they called him, and they said, well, this is an anecdotal thing, and it wasn't real, I was just trying to paint a story of what's possible.
No, he fucking, but because he wasn't under oath, because he wasn't under oath when he was testifying, he was allowed to lie about this stuff.
When they asked him, yeah, I was paid for Citizens for Fire Safety or whatever the fuck the think tank was, and then when a think tank has less than X amount of members, you have to sort of disclose where the funding comes from.
And the funding all came from the manufacturers of this flame retardant shit that is causing all sorts of problems with children, especially babies, like babies that are around this flame retardant stuff, the dust from that stuff.
It gets in their lungs, it gets in their system, and they showed, like, the difference between the amount of the shit that's in American babies versus the amount of the shit that's in babies in other countries, where they don't have these people lobbying to have this shit be put in their furniture.
Something is going on, right, that is not happening in Japan and is not happening in other countries.
And I wonder whether it is stuff like industries lobbying for, like, fire safety things.
So every time you sit down on your couch, you're just absorbing the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest little bit of some shitty chemical.
I don't want to get too hippy-dippy about it, but all the stuff that's in our soaps, you look at the ingredients on things, and it's just a litany of chemicals.
It makes me want to move to New Zealand and eat my grandmother's beautiful eggs from a natural chicken, and just use eucalyptus oil to bathe myself in, and sit on a wooden chair.
Well, I think you're right, and I think the argument is pretty clear when you see things like this Merchants of Doubt, and you find out how lobbyists work, and you find out how think tanks work, and you find out how these people are actively trying to get these things, to get the concerns about these things alleviated, and they're doing it strictly for financial reasons.
That's it.
They're not doing it because they have a real concern, and it takes us a while before we figure it out.
Thalidomide babies, and that has to happen.
Asbestos.
People have to get cancer.
They get rid of asbestos.
Now they're getting rid of trans fats.
Trans fats are now illegal.
Well, how many fucking people had to get sick?
I mean, how long of trans fats and margarine?
I can't believe it's not butter.
How long has that shit been around?
It's been around forever.
And people have lobbied and lied and promoted these things for their own personal gain and profits.
And it's crazy, but it's a real part of our culture.
It's a real part of our legal system.
It's a real part of how we create laws.
It's kind of scary.
It's kind of scary when you think about how sociopathic it really is.
It's getting more now, but it's also ridiculous that a former Fear Factor host, meathead, cage-fighting commentator, smokes pot all the time, is the guy that you're coming to for information.
It seems like there should be someone more qualified.
If you'd spoken to a scientist back then, even if they hadn't known about LDL cholesterol, they would have said...
Look, on the basis of what we currently understand about margarine and butter and human physiology, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
That's not the way that it ends up getting imparted, because nobody wants to watch a television show that equivocates like that, or a news broadcast that equivocates like that.
And I also think that we're in a weird time now, where, because of the internet, and because, like, you could do HuffPost, I don't know what kind of editorial control they have over what you do.
Like, when you do your show, I really enjoy your...
Thank you.
If anybody hasn't seen it, the reason why I wanted to get you on the show in the first place, I've watched many episodes of your show, and it's very balanced, like this conversation.
It's a cool show, and it's very unlike something that you would see in normal NBC, 8pm, or whatever the fuck it would be on broadcast television.
It's just very different.
I think that that kind of stuff, and that the internet, and the freedom that it provides, And also the amount of information, the access to it, is kind of changing the ability of these people to do things like this.
And then there was an article saying that he's no better than early 20th century European colonists who told Muslim women that they needed help from European men.
Abusing and violently raping children is pretty much the worst thing that you can possibly do.
We have made it mandatory to regard all child abuse as being the worst thing that can possibly happen.
I think his point was, like, I was fondled by a stupid, crazy priest when I was, you know, 12 years old or something, and I pretty quickly got over it.
So that's not to say that other people who didn't get over it didn't go through horrible things, but do we have to regard every single instance of every single type of Right.
Well, and also, this is a horrible thing to say, but...
And I'll...
Preface it by saying this is my own personal experience.
I was bullied when I was a kid But it was mild bullying like nobody did anything horrible to me.
I was never beaten half to death or I was never Nobody ever threatened me with weapons I just kind of picked on and fucked with but it got me into martial arts and it changed my life like these a the yin and the yang to things and And I think that sometimes a little bit of resistance is good because the reaction to that resistance is you decide, like, this is never going to happen to me anymore.
I'm going to fire up and I'm going to figure out a way to empower myself so this is no longer a fear of mine.
And I think that a little bit of someone being an asshole to you makes you appreciate kind people.
I think the evil people in the world...
Here's another one.
Shitty relationships.
I think most of us have had some bad relationships.
Bad relationships make you appreciate good relationships.
Right.
One of the things I really love about my wife, she doesn't like to argue about shit.
She's like a really kind person.
She's friendly and sweet and warm.
And she's not like a person who picks on people.
And she picks on you or starts arguing or brings up shit that happened like a month ago or a year ago.
I have a buddy that has a wife that argues with him like that.
Well, yeah?
Well, you know, when we are first dating, he's like, that was fucking 10 years ago!
Well, when you experience that he fucked up and married this crazy broad, sorry I said broad, I'm an asshole, I'm a misogynist, oh my god, Joe Rogan and trying to explain things.
I don't allow it to just ooze out like maple syrup.
I think that when we see these terrible things, like when I go to, I love Brazil, okay?
Brazil's a wonderful country.
The people are friendly, they're free, they're happy, but it's also like kind of crazy unorganized.
Like when you go to the airport, like one of the things, when we were getting on a plane from Sao Paulo to Brazil, or Sao Paulo to Rio rather, we couldn't find out what fucking gate it was.
Because the gate said 17C. So we go to 17C, and the lady, you know, she speaks Portuguese, so she's like, no, no, no, 24, 24. I'm like, but it doesn't say 24, it says 17C. So we go to 24, and 24 says Florinopolis, and it says another one next to it.
I'm like, what the fuck?
But they were saying it over the loudspeaker.
So all the people that were listening that spoke Portuguese knew that it was, but there was no signs.
It'd be even worse, because if I spoke Mandarin and I was in Brazil, I'd be double fucked.
They couldn't even read what the fuck they're writing, and they couldn't know what the hell.
You know, you'd go to your app on your phone and try to decipher it, but point being, like, when you see something, like, if you go to, like, my buddy who went to Africa and experienced, like, all the chaos of Africa, said, God, I mean, people complain about America.
But then within the club of rich countries, there are also countries where shit just works.
It's just easy.
Like, stuff is easy.
I lived in Copenhagen for a semester and went to university there in my early 20s.
And, like, You know, there's no lines at the post office.
I mean, granted, there's no people who live there.
There's like 14 people in the whole country.
But, like, it's still scalable.
You could actually have – they've still got the same tax base per capita, you know, as America could have if it wanted to have higher taxes.
And you could actually have a DMV that works.
And you could have a post office that functions.
We don't have to wait around all the time.
It's just, there are certainly societies that, you know, Thomas Friedman says that flying from Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam into JFK is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.
Like LaGuardia is a shithole, and that's just the way it is.
There are countries whose airports are nice and whose trains are fast and whose healthcare systems work more cheaply.
I've been in more than 10 years, but, you know, just on temporary visas.
And now that I was able to get global entry, just not having to deal with the customs officials coming in, especially in the foreigner's lane.
I mean, I imagine it may be better in the citizen's lane.
But coming in in the foreigner's lane where you're in front of, like, they've just had to deal with 478, like, people who don't speak English who are probably coming in with some lousy shit from abroad or something.
I feel like some people see the world in groups and identities, and for them, identity politics is the most important way of contextualizing and conceiving of the things that are happening around them in culture.
so the moment a person who's a white male starts saying anything they're like okay this is in the category of patronizing white male authority looking down on this other category of person who is oppressed like religious minority so let's not actually listen to what's being said and let's not give anyone the benefit of the doubt let's just superimpose that into the jigsaw puzzle in my brain which is like culture i mean you see it
also in in all of the all of the racial problems that have been happening in the past year in the united states and i'm totally on the side of the the Lives Matter movement here.
And I have a huge problem with the brutality that police show towards minority communities.
But you've got to make sure that you're actually talking on the same page about the ideas and the practices, that you're not just caricaturing people into stereotypes of one another, right?
I think that what's going on is like a game of Hungry, Hungry Hippo.
And there's a little marble, and they see that they can snatch that marble, and they go for it.
I think it's an opening, and I don't think it's logical.
And you know what I love?
I love when people who have these knee-jerk reactions to these things, like they see these openings, and they go for it because they feel like there's an opening to attack, also get attacked.
Like, there's a woman who wrote a piece, she's a feminist, and she wrote a piece about my friend Amy Schumer, who is hilarious and wild and just fucking awesome, and she's kicking ass right now.
And she's on the cover of a magazine, sucking on C-3PO's finger.
And they were saying why this magazine is so awful about, you know, against feminism.
And I was like, what the fuck are you, like, this is an anti-feminist thing and she shouldn't be sucking fingers, like...
As if, like, you're a woman, you can't be sexual, you know, like, isn't it, like, part of being a person who owns themselves, owning all the things you enjoy?
Maybe she likes sucking fingers, you know?
Like, she's a fucking, she's an autonomous human being.
The same woman wrote a bit, she wrote another piece, because I like to follow knuckleheads.
She wrote another piece about how she's getting older and it's really kind of, she's torn because she doesn't get catcalled as much anymore.
Oh please.
She actually has conflicting opinions about this.
And so here's the tweet that drove me crazy.
I howled at my own computer.
Someone tweeted her saying that this article about being conflicted, about not being catcalled anymore, I felt like that was a very white cis piece.
White cisgender, meaning that people of color and trans people have to worry about being catcalled, because trans people, if they're catcalled and then someone finds out that they're trans, they can get beaten to death.
And you should be more aware of that when you write these pieces, you're insensitive.
And the woman was like, true.
She had to acquiesce.
She had to give in to it, because she's a part of that fucking retarded culture.
How are you actually supposed to help people How are we supposed to be kind and considerate and generous if every time we try to, we get shot down because we put our foot in it?
Like, Dawkins in that tweet about Islam is trying to support women.
He tries to do that, and then feminists jump down his throat for being condescending towards women because Muslim women should be the ones who are sticking up for Muslim women.
they don't need your white patriarchal Islamophobic male activity to in order to do so because they're proud and bold Muslim women Well, not all of them are some of them are in stuck in beekeepers outfits in Saudi Arabia So how do we help them if every time we try to help we get jumped we get jumped on?
Well, I think we have to negate the opinions of those people that write these posts for like the HuffPost write these these articles We have to negate them by mocking them.
Because I think it is hilariously stupid.
I think that opinion is fucking hilariously stupid.
That he doesn't have the right to say that he has concern for people that are a different gender than him, that have a different ideology than him, that live in a different part of the world than him, that have more melanin in their skin.
That's ridiculous.
And I think that what we're doing here by mocking that is really the correct response.
It's the only correct response.
You're not going to get that response from the news.
You're not going to get that from the president.
But you get that from people that don't have a vested interest in supporting one particular tribe.
And I think that's one of the things that they talked about in this Merchants of Doubt documentary that really resonated with me, is that a lot of times when people talk about global warming or they talk about fucking chemtrails or any of these things, there's a tribe of people that have subscribed to that ideology, and it's very important that you support that tribe.
And it manifests itself in ridiculous places, like the tribe of people that are like...
What about those people who, when a new product comes out, and it's usually an Apple product, they'll go out and they'll camp for four or five days in order to be the first person who gets the product?
It reminded me a little bit of when you were talking about your buddy who did the massive, massive marathon but then came in fourth.
I was watching the Today Show or something where they were interviewing the people who were standing in line and they've all got tents and they've got sleeping bags.
They're on Fifth Avenue near Central Park and they're camping out for 72 hours.
And the correspondent was talking to someone who was the seventh in line or something.
When that happens, you're going to then realize that you'll be one of the first adopters and then they'll realize it's radioactive and it gives you cancer and you'll die.
They're being very secretive about it, and they've shown some demonstrations of it, but only the demonstration in the fact that you can see, like, there's a little girl that's watching a ballerina on her bed dancing around.
Yeah, and they can do stuff like this where they can be like, all right, let's just extend this wall by another three inches and see what that looks like.
And then they can actually take people who are prospective buyers of properties on three-dimensional virtual reality tours of the house that isn't even built yet.
Yeah, and actually some kind of, like, I don't know, you know, masturbation thing or something that fits on you, and then gets synced up to a virtual reality that actually looks not like a 3D robot human, but kind of like an actual plausible human being.
They already have that, what is that technology called again, the one that Duncan's always raising?
Oculus Rift.
Oculus Rift.
They put the goggles on, they have first-person interactive porn, where you put your dick into, like, a machine, and the machine sort of strokes your dick, and you're having sex with someone in first person.
Yeah, they already have it.
It's crazy.
Not only that, it coincides, the movements coincide to a computer program that coincides with the action that you're seeing on screen.
Well, I think that goes back to what we're talking about, about future civilizations, that do these civilizations that exist out there in the cosmos, do they have radar?
Or have they transcended that, and have they gone into virtual?
Because I think, once we realize that virtual can be avatar, we can live inside some fantastic world that's so much more rewarding and exciting, and why bother with the regular carbon-based life world?
Why do we need everything to be real?
Why?
Because I can knock on this table.
Why is this table better than a table that I feel like I can knock on, but it's way better, and every time I touch it, it gives me love?
I think that's a really good point, to point out that it's not artificial.
Because look at what we're doing right now.
We're having a conversation which is going through technology that a half century ago would have been inconceivable, which is being viewed by people who are watching us in real time and also listened to by people who are carrying around devices in their pockets who are able to listen to us at any point in time after the fact, and those devices would have been unimaginable a few decades and those devices would have been unimaginable a few decades ago.
And yet what we're actually doing is as authentic and as old as time, which is we're having a conversation.
And we're having a conversation that's fueled by this digital interface that we have in front of us that's allowing us to, in real time, get information in a way that was never possible just a couple of decades ago.
I have visions of people who just spend all their days in their basements, plugged into a virtual reality machine, with a drip in their arm providing them with sustenance, and just are off in this other universe of their own...
I think that gets to the nub of my concern about it, that as long as that person who's lying in their basement, plugged into an IV, and living in a virtual reality world is interacting with actual other human beings who are also in that virtual world, I have less of a problem with it.
But if he's interacting with avatars who aren't actual human beings, but who give him all of the feedback that we need from companionship, and he's living in a fake world where there is no reciprocation, I'm pretty confident that you actually have a consciousness.
You might be a robot, but I'm pretty confident that what we're actually doing here...
The concept being, for those who are not aware of it, is that one day we are going to, not we, because I'm dumb, but someone way smarter than us is going to figure out a way to create this sort of Oculus Rift thing, next level stuff that we're discussing right now, to a point where it's unrecognizable.
You can't tell the difference between this and reality.
It is inevitable.
They're going to eventually figure it out.
Just like the stuff that we're looking at right now is sort of the beginning stages of this inevitable technology that's going to transform If that's the case, how do we know that we haven't already gotten there?
And why would they tell you?
If you are in a virtual reality, if you are in an artificial simulated version of the world we live in, And it's so good, you can't distinguish.
And there's one mode of strand of logical argument in that philosophy which says that because...
We're probably likely to invent that kind of technology fairly early in the evolution of the human race, of our civilization.
If you think about the dinosaurs having lived for hundreds of millions of years, we've only been around for a few hundred thousand or something, then we're probably going to get to that point really soon.
Then this argument says it's very, very likely that we actually are in the simulation already because we've got hundreds of millions of years in the simulation and only maybe a hundred thousand years not in the simulation at the very, very dawn of our species.
So odds are...
We're probably already in it.
Which I don't really buy, but I think is a cute argument.