Josh Olin and Joe Rogan debate how outrage culture—fueled by social media’s amplification of tribalism, like Gamergate or the Donald Sterling backlash—distorts justice, from Olin’s firing over a private tweet to Cecil the lion’s death sparking disproportionate fury. They critique media sensationalism, comparing it to network TV censorship, while defending free expression despite risks like harassment. Rogan’s retweet of a Zimbabwean perspective on Cecil highlights cultural nuance lost in viral outrage, contrasting with consequences faced by figures like Brian Williams. Olin’s Bombshell reimagines gaming’s future with depth over shock value, rejecting one-dimensional narratives. Both argue tech-driven connectivity—VR treadmills, HoloLens, or neural interfaces—could revolutionize creativity and education but warn against scapegoating media for societal issues, like violence or materialism, citing market choice over censorship as the solution. [Automatically generated summary]
Because I had seen online that you had gotten fired for this whole Donald Sterling comment thing, and then you had said to me, you took some heat for the Donald Sterling thing, too.
But not really.
I didn't.
There's no...
The only real heat is...
You get in trouble.
You lose a job.
You actually got fired for saying something that's entirely reasonable.
And I'm going to paraphrase what you said, but I believe what you said was he has every right to be an old bigot in the privacy of his home and that he's a victim because this fucking floozy that he was hanging around with had recorded him and then leaked the audio.
But this idea that in the privacy of your own home, that your words should be gone over with a fine-tooth comb by the entire world, and that's not some horrendous invasion of privacy.
He said, and he never used a racial slur, I mean, call him a bigot if you will, but what he said was, I don't want, to his girlfriend, I don't want you taking pictures with these black guys.
I don't care if you fuck them, but I don't want you taking pictures with them.
I don't care if you fuck them is a huge part of his statement.
Or best case, depending on what your perspective is, social justice warrior or whatever.
But yeah, best case scenario, worst case scenario, he's a bigot, right?
But even that shouldn't affect me the way that it seemed to have been affecting everybody, right?
And the way that the media was hyping it up and the media was spinning it and totally not necessarily looking at...
seedy shit that was going on around that whole thing right yeah I mean I have to question what is the mistress's motives in that right like all that's hearsay and I know that in the wake of all of that there was lots of finger pointing and he said she said going on and and lawsuits filed but I think that you know it's not hard to imagine that her motives weren't pure you know they weren't they weren't like it wasn't like she was some white knight you know rushing in to to do some great social justice I
I think that at the end of the day, she was really out to, you know, take this guy down or get something out of it, right?
I mean, whoever got a hold of it, I don't know what her statement is.
And at the end of the day, Joe, to me, it's hearsay, right?
All of that shouldn't matter to me.
What matters to me is...
And what I was trying to call attention to and what I've always tried to call attention to is the way people...
We have these weird priorities.
We love to have this endorphin drip.
We love to be angry.
We love to be a part of something big.
And then we don't necessarily take a step back and look at the big picture of what was happening, what was going down, and what could we be talking about instead of all of this stuff.
Well, it's just infuriating to me that you can get fired for what I believe is an incredibly innocuous statement.
I mean, maybe this is coming from me, maybe my perception of the difference between working for a public company and having controversial opinions, and me being a comedian, a cage-fighting commentator.
I might say it, and then I'll say, sorry, I was fucked up.
And then it goes away.
But, you know, I just can't believe that the standards are so low.
Or the outrage standards.
That it requires such a minimal ripple on the seismograph that people will freak out to the point where you can lose your fucking job for calling someone a bigot and saying, this guy should have the right to do that in his home and be a piece of shit.
I know what to expect from Westboro Baptist Church, right?
I know what to expect from the KKK, right?
I don't agree with any of that shit, and I abhor it.
I think that they're all scumbags, but I kind of know what to expect from that, and that shouldn't surprise me when some headline comes out or when they do some weird stuff, right?
A lot of people were saying, you know, well, Donald Sterling, he had this huge, long history of being like racially weird and questionable.
So it's like, well, then why are you acting really surprised that this thing happened at all?
And why are you supporting like a breach of privacy in that way?
Because that, to me, is a more sort of inalienable right to privacy.
And I think that this idea that somehow or another, you should be on your best behavior all the time.
You can't just say something.
If you're alone and you want to say something completely disgusting...
You may or may not mean it.
You might be under the influence of alcohol or drugs, but you're not giving public statements.
And so for those public statements or for it to get out like a public statement and for people to absorb it and then analyze it and critique it and criticize it and then get crazy about it.
I found it ridiculous.
And I think if the guy does have this long history of being racist, I understand it then.
I mean, you caught him in a fucked up way that nobody should get caught that way.
I mean, that's just not how the world is supposed to work in America in 2015. I mean, what is everybody upset about?
Everybody's upset about this Edward Snowden thing, right?
Because Edward Snowden found out that the NSA is secretly wiretapping every fucking phone in the country and recording all your emails, recording all your voicemails, and everybody got crazy.
Like, that's outrageous.
Well, that's no different.
This is all private stuff.
I mean, this is very similar.
It's along the same lines.
The idea that you can be judged, and him, ultimately, I mean, the guy got his fucking team taken away.
It changed the course of his life and for someone like that too like he's a billionaire He's the money aspect is hardly anything for him right to him It's his legacy the thing that mattered most to him completely trash completely gone and again It doesn't matter who he was and what other people thought of him and what matters again to me is just the way that and honestly I wasn't even that mad at the NBA because if you look at if you look at the position they were in they kind of had their hand forced in a lot of ways and Under this torrential downpour of media and
public discourse.
So in a way, I almost empathize with them and the position that they were put in.
But to me, it's the way that we reacted to it and the way that we kind of were okay with it and a part of it.
And so I was trying to be the one voice of reason at the time, swimming against the stream to try to bring some common sense to the conversation, which is like, this guy, he's not this weird monster dude.
He's not like this...
Crazy guy who's wreaking havoc and blowing up cities and towns.
He's an old guy who grew up in an era very different than ours, and he might have some weird shit floating around in his head.
And maybe all of that was true, but at the end of the day, what still is not right is what's happening to him right now.
Well, the company that I work for is called Turtle Rock Studios.
A bunch of really talented artists who are making an incredibly ambitious game called Evolve.
And so the game was and still is really awesome.
But the company, you know, game development, we work in a slightly different clock than most of corporate America.
We go in at like 10 a.m.
and we leave at like 7 p.m.
because we're usually up until really late in the evening.
Late in the evening, so I really don't even wake up until like 9 o'clock every day, most days.
So that day I woke up and my phone was kind of buzzing and blowing up.
One of my really close friends and colleagues at the time texted me and he was like, hey, by the way, you know, the stuff you tweeted about the other day, like some news outlet picked up on it, some small, you know, thing.
Some vulture group.
Exactly.
Who wanted to capitalize on that sensational headline.
And so he was just giving me a heads up.
And I was like, oh yeah, thanks, whatever.
To me, at the time, I was like, whatever.
I know what the group...
I don't want to name the site, but I know what they're about.
They do this all the time.
So I was like, whatever.
And then so maybe I jump in the shower and I get out and I've got texts from our GM at our studio like, you need to go Radio Dark on all social media, period.
And I was like, what?
I was like, what?
And so I texted him back, and I'm like, is this in relation to the article?
The one article that no one else picked up on, and that, like, you know, half the comments were like, dude, that's totally not what Josh was saying.
And the other half were kind of reacting sensationally to it.
But, like, the other half, even on the comments of the article, were like, you're taking him out of context.
And that was the entire extent of the controversy circling me at the time.
And then...
45 minutes later, I still haven't even left my apartment to go into the studio yet.
45 minutes later, my email stops working.
And I'm like, I'm not dumb, not stupid.
I'm like, they literally just shut off my email.
And then so I tried calling him and he didn't take my call.
And then an hour later, he's like, yeah, we should probably meet at the Starbucks around the corner.
And I was like, what?
You don't want me to come into the office and talk about this?
You don't want to hear my side of it?
You don't want to see what's what?
It's just...
Done.
And then they issued the statement that they made, which was, like, literally putting the match to the kerosene.
So maybe there was some kerosene.
Maybe there was some, like, potential for outrage.
And then when they fired me, it turned into this huge thing in the gaming industry around, like, was that right?
Was that wrong?
So, like, the vast majority of people who would have never even heard about that or even would have cared that I had tweeted that, kind of, like, everybody heard about it.
Mainstream heard about it.
Like, Mark Cuban started following me on Twitter.
Like, if you were...
If they were afraid the NBA was going to get pissed at us for me for weighing in on it then, you know, their kind of reaction to it made it like 50 times worse.
We would have talked about it on the podcast as it happened.
I wasn't aware of it until after the fact.
But to me, it smacks of this outrage culture that we're in now, where people are just waiting for the green light to be a cunt.
And that's what it is.
It's not really that they're angry at this.
I don't believe it.
I think there's a great deal of fake outrage, recreational outrage, that we're experiencing in our culture right now.
And it's because people for the first time ever have a voice.
Instantly to talk about anything and that's what Twitter is.
That's what Facebook is.
You instantaneously can project your thoughts out to the world and people love doing it and they love being pissed off and they're most likely pissed off because of their life.
They're most likely pissed off because of their relationship or their job or their weight or, you know, whatever the fuck it is.
But they're just not balanced people, and there's a lot of them.
And they're looking to hit that fucking gas pedal when they see that green light.
Because that green light, that Josh Owens is a piece of shit, that fuck motherfucker.
Defending racism in 2015. And here's the scary thing for me, Joe, is that these people, I mean, these people, I don't want to make people sound weird, but they've always been here.
And they've only now had the microphone to talk about this.
So we as a society, society has to be better than the individual.
What I'm trying to say is that these individuals who...
You know, are fueled by that.
They've always been around.
And now we as a society need to be bigger than the individual.
And we need to look at that and understand.
We need to identify what it is, understand why it's wrong and the kind of damage and the kind of risk it presents to free thinking, free speech, and even industry.
And then we need to, you know, Change the way we're behaving very consciously, very cognizantly with everything that we do to try to suppress those feelings.
Because they're just natural tendencies.
If you try to boil it down to just the neuroscience of it, these are just emotional receptors in our brains.
It's what makes us tick.
It's why these click-baity articles like, you know, 11 crazy wonders of the world revealed after you click this link.
It's why that...
That is so successful because those appeal to the emotional centers of our brain instead of the cognitive centers of our brain.
And so as a social psychologist, I self-prescribed myself to that.
I didn't go to school for this, but I'm fascinated by it.
I try to learn everything that I can about it.
And in my position that I've been in, my whole career has been building and architecting communities and the way people interact online and on social media.
So I say this with a certain amount of self-loathing because I was kind of part of the problem building that empire up.
Now I look back at it and I think...
There's problems with this.
And it's unlocking a toxicity that is running rapid across a bunch of different issues.
And it leads to just hate and bile and venom and harassment.
I honestly believe this is a temporary step on the way to a more enlightened culture.
I really do believe this.
And I think that what we're experiencing now is...
People, when you see someone write something, like what was the name of this company that you worked for again?
Turtle Rock?
Turtle Rock.
Turtle Rock Studios, if you do not fire this man, you know, expect me to boycott your business.
You don't know who wrote that.
That guy could be shitting his pants as he wrote it.
He could be jerking off into fucking other people's soup.
He could be, you know, driving on the highway with one foot on the gas and one hand on his cell phone, the other hand on his dick.
You don't know.
We don't know who these people are.
They're words.
Anyone can type a sentence.
Anyone can type...
But you don't know...
Who that person is?
Should I consider your opinion?
We all know idiots.
We've all run into idiots in our lives that if you went to them with an opinion, you asked them a question about anything, they're likely to give you some really fucking stupid answer and you wouldn't even consider it because you go, oh, well, that's Mike.
Mike's a tool.
You know, of course he said that.
He's a fool.
And When you see Mike's words written down with a period and an exclamation point, and it looks all normal, it doesn't seem like it came from a fucking idiot.
We're used to talking to people.
I look at you, I can tell you're a reasonable, intelligent guy, we're having a wonderful conversation, and you're normal.
But if you're some fucking idiot, and you were saying the same thing that these people that are outraged about your Your tweet about John Sterling.
If you were an idiot and you were saying that, I would immediately dismiss it.
Your message is always fairly, fairly, coming from a very pragmatic place.
You take a look at the guy, you know, one arbitrary guy who is typing some angry shit in his Twitter feed, and you scroll back through his history and the stuff that he was complaining about just the other day or the last week, it could be in stark contrast to whatever he happened to be angry about today, right?
Of course.
Or coming from a completely different place of morals and standards that he has.
Well, that's one of the coolest things about Twitter is that when someone says something really stupid, you go to their Twitter page and go, oh, look at this amazing river of retardation that's coming out of your fat head, you know?
Three and a half million slobbering shitheads just pounding on their keyboards, demanding action, demanding you get fired, demanding you get reprimanded, demanding you apologize.
And over what?
Over their shitty fucking lives.
That's what it is.
But what the real problem is, is that companies like Turtle Rock are pussies.
And that they can't look at this rationally.
They can't look at this reasonably.
Two human beings.
Just like, why did you write that?
Oh, I wrote it because, you know, I feel like the invasion of privacy thing is much more important than the fact that this guy said something that was, you know, racially fucked up.
But you're taking these opinions from all these other people, people that are chiming in just because they're looking for that fucking green light.
They're looking to hit that gas because they're frustrated, because they're stuck in traffic all day, because their body sucks, because their girlfriend doesn't want to touch them.
No, the way it's better is you take the person who fired you, and they should be fired.
And they should be publicly flogged.
Someone should take them out with rubber dicks.
Just smack them in the face like a hundred lashes.
It's just, it's nonsense.
It's a fool's endeavor to try to please all the fucking idiots of the world and to not look at that.
I don't know how anybody can look at what you said rationally and be outraged.
You'd have to be a real fucking piece of shit to get angry at that enough to think that you should lose your ability to make a living.
You should lose your job.
But that's what people love to do.
They love to get people fired.
I mean, it's one of the...
More invasive aspects of social media.
The social justice warrior types that will try to get people fired from their job, and they will organize and attack, and they're trying to get a result.
And when they get a result, like these Turtle Rock dummies who fired you, They feel like they've claimed victory.
What I would want to do and what I keep doing, and it didn't stop at all, by the way.
I'm okay with being the provocative guy, right?
Provocation doesn't always have to be a negative word, right?
Anytime you evoke an emotion, it's because you're saying something distinct.
You're not being just sameness and muted and average and completely agreeable.
I like being the guy who has, like, Poignant thoughts who wants to share a different angle and a different perspective with as many people as I can and just try to keep the conversation moving forward because what you end up seeing and what people are trained into doing, which happened with my whole thing, is they get trained into taking a side and then closing off the other side.
You see this a lot with...
Do you have any Facebook friends that are like some who are either super religious or some who are super atheist?
And you watch some of the arguments they get in and you watch the aftermath of them.
Like I had a diehard atheist friend of mine who would always argue with Christians, always argue with anybody who says, like, thank God for being here for me through this hard time.
He would even go on that post and argue and debate with them.
So he's just surrounding himself with more of these like-minded people who share his ideas.
And then he's ranting and venting with those group of like-minded people about how angering the other side makes them.
So now he's not even having a debate with the other side.
He's just having this circle jerk with his own group of friends about what they assume the other side thinks and means and believes.
And so you take that...
With any issue or with any set of values that you have, it's the same thing.
Anytime that you cut off ties with another person, you could call that, well, I just surround myself with people who make me happy.
But I call that almost like, if that's the case, then you kind of forfeit the right to be mad at me for having a different opinion.
Because if you're not going to come to the table and understand what my opinion is and have a conversation with me about where I'm coming from, then you kind of lose the right to make up your mind about what I think and believe.
There is something that's going on in this culture that I think is happening because of this incredible new ability to communicate and form these groups of like-minded people, where you get this massive confirmation bias in these groups.
And because of that, they reject outright any notion of debate upon these issues.
And this is a big problem right now in universities.
It's a huge problem where people don't want to be offended, and they're trying to create safe spaces, and they're trying to create places where you can't say things that they might think are offensive, but you might think are totally reasonable, like your tweet.
Like, your tweet, in a lot of universities, would be deemed incredibly offensive, even though it's a legitimate subject of debate.
It's not, and that's where your company fucked up, because it's not a reasonable...
If you look at what you wrote, firing someone for that is not a reasonable reaction.
If you look at what you wrote, being infuriated at you, and wanting your job, and wanting your head, and wanting you to pay, and wanting you to publicly apologize, that's not a reasonable reaction either.
This idea that everyone has to acquiesce, that everyone has to bow down to the masses, and anytime there's anything controversial, you're best off just keeping your mouth shut.
You're best off just not communicating and not projecting your thoughts for fear of other people disagreeing, and then the hate and the anger.
You said the confirmation bias is probably the best way to put it.
It's also, no pun intended, the way we look at it black and white.
We look at it like there's no gray area with a lot of these people.
So in gaming, another big issue now is feminism in Gamergate.
And so you take a feminist activist who's saying some stuff, and if you are to, which, by the way, let's say I wholly support, Equal rights, gender equality, all forms of equality.
I think people should be deemed as who they are as people and what they're saying and what they're bringing to the world.
It doesn't matter about your age, gender, sexual orientation, nothing.
But let's say that I'm talking to a feminist and she says something that I think is just wrong.
I think it's a bad opinion.
It's an opinion form based on a bias or it's an invalid stat.
And I argue with her for one second.
I'm immediately a misogynist.
I'm immediately a sexist because I opposed one point of her platform and now suddenly I'm anti-feminist.
And let's say you're a really smart person and you've done a lot of research.
And you're a smart person, but you're so invested in your mission.
You're so invested in what you're fighting for that you forget just for one minute.
For one minute, you forget that there's another side to it, that there's other perspectives, other ways of looking at an issue.
Even just for one second, and you say something, and then a bunch of people retweet it, and then it looks bad for the guy.
In a way, that person who's the smart person, It technically influenced a lot of that negative shit from happening that then transpired.
And so in a lot of ways, it's like having a conversation with even the smart people who think that they're leading activism and they're leading the charge on things.
It's trying to educate that tier of people who can be spoken to reasonably to understand that you need to be more open-minded.
And the second that you push someone away, you're already...
You're already, like, abandoning your cause.
Your cause should be bringing more people in.
The second that you react to what someone else said and you push them away like that, you're the one doing the wrong thing.
Well, the problem with this conversation right now is that it's kind of vague.
And we're not talking about very specific statements that could be debated on their merit versus...
This idea of immediately using an ad hominem like you're a misogynist.
That is the best way to shut down any sort of debate.
Immediately call you a racist.
Immediately call you a sexist.
I mean, that's the feminism playbook.
The dumb feminism playbook.
not the intelligent feminists that look at the reality of the world and see inequality and want to correct that and don't hate men.
Like there was this woman that was doing something for Google Ideas or I forget what the exact thing was, but she was arguing with people on Twitter and one of the things she said is "I eat men for breakfast." Like, okay.
Why should that be?
You're a fucking ridiculous human.
You eat everyone of the opposite gender.
So are you in a gender war?
Do you want to create equality for women or do you actually want to make up for all the men who rejected you or shit on you or dumped you or broke your heart or whatever?
Or whatever it is.
What is it?
Is it you have picked a team and you're fighting for that team?
Like the Dolphins versus the 49ers?
Because that's what it seems like.
And that is what it is.
It's Mac versus Windows.
I mean, it's fucking Android versus iPhones.
People pick fucking teams.
They get crazy.
It's Chicago versus New York.
Fuck LA! I'm from San Francisco!
It's the same goddamn thing.
And you decide, you know, I'm a feminist and men fucking suck!
I think a lot of women have achieved some fucking incredible, amazing things.
And I think there's a lot of men that I think are disgusting.
There's a lot of men I think are losers, and they're annoying, and they make excuses for their failures, and it's never about them, it's always about they got fucked over.
Like, oh, they're fucking brutal and boring and tiresome, and they are roadblocks.
They're roadblocks for conversations.
They are blood clots for progress.
I mean, there's a lot of people like that out there.
Both genders.
And I think that, you know, this whole idea of feminism...
And, you know, one of the things that happened that I thought was really hilarious...
I don't remember what it was about, but I retweeted something.
I retweet things that are provocative.
I don't agree with them.
I don't believe that a retweet should be an endorsement, I think.
Yeah, I mean, there's way more violence being directed at them, whether it's real or not, but in print, than it is directed at the men that are supposedly the oppressors.
You're not seeing a bunch of women saying, we should get together and cut all these guys' dicks off and stuff them down their mouth and make them choke to death on it.
But this whole fucking battle, like at the root of it all, it should be a battle about...
Well, it should be...
Developing games should be about what is the best way to make a really quality game that people are going to enjoy?
And what is the best way that all these people can interact with each other?
It shouldn't be about like, well, we need 10 women because we have 10 men.
It's a horseshit idea, and there's some real clear areas in life where you know it's a horseshit idea.
The NFL's one of them, okay?
If there was a quota in the NFL where the NFL needed a certain amount of women to play as linebackers, do you know how fucked up football would be if you needed to have, you know, how many linebackers are there?
Which, by the way, has nothing to do—it's not like what you're saying is that women aren't as capable of doing that job, but what you're saying is there may not—it's not about that.
It's about who's in front of you at the time and who do you want to put in that position.
And what are you going to care about at the end of the day?
You're going to care about the contribution that's being made.
There's this amazing interview that Ronda Rousey did recently in Australia, because she's supposed to be fighting...
Well, she is fighting in a couple weeks in Australia, and it's the biggest UFC event ever.
Headlined by a woman, okay?
70,000 seats in Australia.
And this woman does this interview, or questions her at this media scrum, and she says...
How do you feel?
We're having an issue here in Australia with equality of pay for women's football.
How do you feel about equality of pay in the UFC? It's such a stupid question because she makes more money than anyone in the sport.
She's the number one earner in the UFC. I get paid the most out of anyone in the UFC and I'm a woman.
And I don't get paid that much because Dana and Lorenzo, the owners of the company, wanted to do something nice for the ladies.
She's like, I get paid the most because I put the most asses in the seats and more people want to come to see me because I'm the best.
And when she said that, everybody cheered and they were booing when this lady had this question.
But her question's preposterous.
It's a ridiculous question because you're talking to the number one earner in the sport who happens to have a vagina.
She got there through the quality of her work and the amount of eyes that she attracts because of that work.
It's that simple.
It's that simple.
What she's been able to do, the outlier status that she has, being this beautiful woman who kicks people's asses, being unusual, it generates a significant amount of money.
So much money that she makes more money than anybody else.
So this idea that, like, you're supposed to pay women the same amount that you pay men, well, what if only half the people go to see the women?
Do you still have to pay them the same amount?
Well, that's a shitty business model, because then you're not going to make as much money.
I think the example that resonated best with me was the Jennifer Lawrence thing.
Did you read about that?
She wrote a big open letter about how she didn't get paid as much as Bradley Cooper did during the American Hustle movie.
Right.
And for a whole bunch of reasons.
And okay, that's fair.
I want to hear the argument, right?
But the argument that I heard was incomplete, right?
How about the number of lines both of them spoke in the movie, right?
How about the number of minutes How about the number of days she even went to work compared to the number of days he went to work to be on set and to do filming, right?
And so when you look at that quantitatively, you go, well, why would you be paid the same amount as him for a fourth or fifth lead role in that movie, right?
And then what you don't hear her talking about, of course, and I don't like this argument either, because again, there's no reason that the other side needs to lose for one side to win.
It shouldn't be about that.
But of course, then you look at the new movie that she's in, where she's getting paid more than any of her male co-stars, and you don't talk about that, right?
And so it's almost like this, we get angry and outraged about things when they're convenient to be angry and outraged about, and we don't call it out on the bullshit when it's the double standard, when it's on the other side of that curve.
And again, that's smart people who have figured out how to manipulate the masses' emotions into getting profit, into getting eyeballs, into getting ratings, into getting good things for them.
The reality is you're gonna have a really hard time getting sympathetic voices or sympathetic ears, rather, when you're making millions of dollars.
Like, oh, I'm only making two million while he's making four or whatever the fuck it was.
Boy, cry me a river.
You're making millions of dollars and you want people to feel bad?
Like, that's kind of ridiculous.
And if you look at it in terms of the number of, like you said, the number of hours that she was on screen, but...
Who knows?
Who knows why she said that?
Who knows?
I mean, she got shit on by this reporter once because she was at some award show and she was drunk and he wrote something about it.
And she had some response to why she did it.
Fuck this guy.
You're really worried about me because I got drunk at an award show?
Fuck off.
And she's right.
100% right there.
And would she have gotten that grief if she was a man?
I say no.
If, you know, fucking fill in the blank, if Brad Pitt had a couple of drinks at some award show and he was liquored up and laughing and being ridiculous, he could say, hey, I was just fucked up at that award show and I had a good time, but whoops, what did I say?
And no one's going to say, boy, I'm really worried about Brad Pitt.
And as long as we're having pragmatic conversations about it and we're staring it in the face, because it is an ugly issue, it's a scary issue, but as long as we're not taking teams and rattling pom-poms, as long as we're not just cutting off the lines and making boundaries, as long as we're constantly having that conversation and we're not looking for someone else to get hurt in the process...
Of having that conversation, then as long as we're still talking about it, we're going to be making progress.
After that whole Donald Sterling thing with me, I absolutely was scared for months.
Maybe I shouldn't tweet anymore.
But, of course, I came back to my senses and I thought, that's ridiculous.
I shouldn't feel that way.
I shouldn't be pushing away from the table because some, you know, bad shit happened to me.
That made me want to talk about things even more.
I mean, and wanting to make people learn that that's not the way you get your way or that's not the way that you make a point is by bringing someone else down.
Companies get scared and they get scared of backlash and boycotts and they make executive decisions and those executive decisions are oftentimes only made in those in that context in a large company Form like that's the only time like if there's a couple of people like you're saying you don't see it Yeah, I don't see it, but I'm not going to see it.
I don't care.
If I said something like that and people got upset, I'd go, whatever.
I'd say something else.
I'd say something even more outrageous.
I'll keep it going.
I don't care, because if I get fired by the UFC, I'd be like, oh well, hey guys, loved working for you.
Still support the company.
Great time.
But I'm doing five other things at the same time.
And one of the reasons why I do that, it's calculated.
I don't like...
Only having one job because I don't like worrying about losing that job.
I don't want to worry about shit, especially if I have to worry about something that would impede on my ability to speak freely.
I'm not interested.
You know, that's why I'm not interested in network gigs.
Those are not fun.
Because you have to fucking watch everything you say.
They want to take over your social media account.
That's what happens when you get on a television show.
But I just think we live in a strange time, and it's very important during this strange time to keep your sanity and to keep your ability to express yourself.
Because, like you said, as soon as you're afraid of speaking your opinion, as soon as you think about typing something that you really believe in, and you say, you know what?
It's not worth the risk.
I would like to keep these ones and zeros showing up in my bank account.
And look down three or four generations down the line of that, and what does it look like?
It's not a place that I want to live.
Fuck that.
We're all just these like...
Diluted down versions of each other that are identical and the same and don't have opinions and voices like that people don't want to hear that either They want to hear those tweets or read those tweets when you write something like that and they go yeah that is fucked up this chick just Recorded him and then not just recorded him but broadcast it to the world sold it to whatever outlets or somebody did well Everyone ended up saying what I said I was ahead of the I was way ahead of the curve I said it like like the day after it all happened right and I was the first I was the first one through the breach and I got fucking slammed for it right and Everybody ended up ultimately
having that opinion about it.
And yeah, at the end of the day, then she got sued by his now ex-wife because she was getting showered with gifts that were from her estate and all sorts of...
And it's like, yeah, you've got to realize that...
All of a sudden, instead of someone saying some canned shit that you know a team of speechwriters were, he's like, I want to put up a wall to Mexico and put my name on it!
It's just fun silliness until it gets down to whatever fucking corporate criminals they're actually going to put into the position of actually running the country.
So right now it is reality TV. It's what it is.
It's the most interesting game in town right now.
It's a sport that everybody has to watch for whatever fucking reason.
Yeah, and mainstream media itself is just a money-making machine.
This idea that mainstream media news is actually, their sole purpose is to disseminate information, to educate the masses, and to keep you informed about all the happenings in the world.
Well, it still exists in the form of online journalism.
I mean, what's going on now, today, when you see something like The Guardian printing that Ed Snowden, all the revelations, when no one else wanted to touch it, I mean, he went to other people first, and they said no.
So that's real journalism.
When someone prints something incredibly controversial, but something they think is important, that's going to piss off the entire country.
Look, Edward Snowden's living in Russia and a fucking homeboy, the pale ghost, what the fuck's his name?
Julian Assange.
Julian Assange is holed up in a fucking embassy.
He can't leave.
He's stuck in a house.
It's all madness.
It's all madness.
I mean, those two people are arguably two of the most important figures of the 21st century when it comes to establishing what is the current state of the government when it comes to surveillance, when it comes to the spreading of actual information about what's going on in the world.
Where are we at?
Well, those two guys are responsible for two gigantic leaps of revelation.
Where everybody's had to take a step back, especially Edward Snowden.
Everybody's had to take a step back.
What the fuck is happening when I send a text message?
Am I just texting Jamie and calling him a big queen?
Or am I going to get in trouble with people?
What's going to happen?
Is someone going to read some of my joke text to one of my friends, take it out of context, and get me fired for that?
But that's the world we live in today.
We live in a very weird time.
And in these weird times, The idea that CNN is gonna kick you the fucking real deal.
They're gonna drop the real knowledge on Fox News.
And every time that you click on one of those clickbaity articles, every time you click on one of those sensational tweets and hit their page, you're part of the problem.
You're the one positively reinforcing that business model.
They were putting her head on a pike and demanding it.
There was another girl, I can't remember her name, but she took a picture in front of...
She was at the Arlington Cemetery or something.
She was in front of a sign that said, like, no shouting or quiet, please.
Yeah.
Quiet, please be respectful.
Some sign like that.
And so she took a picture in front of her where she was pretending like she was yelling.
And, you know, just because that's what she thought was funny.
Now, she put it online and it went crazy because people were talking about how she was disrespecting our troops and our soldiers and the lost ones, right?
And then, of course, she goes out and talks about it.
She goes, if you look at my page...
That's just what I do whenever I see a sign.
When I see a sign that says no smoking, I put up a fake cigarette in my lips.
When I see a sign that says no soliciting, I pretend like I'm soliciting.
It's her shtick is she just does the opposite thing that signs say.
And when you understand that context, you realize she's just being funny.
When the cease of the lion thing happened, there was a New York Times article that a man from Zimbabwe wrote, and it's, uh, in Zimbabwe we do not cry for lions.
And he talked about lions that have killed his family.
The guy lost his leg to a poisonous snake bite, the guy who wrote the article.
I mean, he's like, his take was like, look, Africa, the wild of Africa is not your friend.
It's fucking terrifying.
It's beautiful to behold, but it is absolutely terrifying.
So this idea that you call this lion Cecil and that we're all crying because we lost Cecil.
Fuck Cecil!
You know?
I mean, that's what he's saying.
All I did, I mean, all I did was retweet that article.
And I got so many fucking people that were angry at me.
Objectively outside the context of culture and what we expect of today and I look to the future and what I'm looking at is there's a trend and the trend is from the moment that human beings invented language To the time they started writing things down to the time they started distributing that written word to the time They figured out how to broadcast and how to get ideas out there through television and radio to the internet What I'm seeing is The trend is
a shorter distance between human beings.
The trend is connectivity.
And I think, ultimately, we're dealing with this adolescent period in this connectivity where all these people that have never thought about the idea of projecting these words...
Like, if you get a guy like Brian Williams on TV and he's bullshitting about going to Iraq, that's a guy that's responsible for his words, okay?
That's a guy that's a professional broadcaster.
He should know what he's saying when he gets on television.
That's a guy who understands the repercussions of his words.
The average person has the same ability to reach human beings as Brian Williams.
When Justine Sacco wrote that tweet, she probably reached as much people, or as many people, as Brian Williams did when he lied about getting shot down in Iraq.
It's probably incredibly similar.
And that's a new thing.
That is a really, really, really new thing.
I think as it gets closer and closer, it's going to move from the written word, it's going to move from type and video, and it's going to be some sort of a brain-to-brain interface.
And when that starts happening, and I don't think we're far away from that, I think we're a decade or two at most, when that starts happening, this is all going to be bullshit.
I'm going to be able to read your thoughts.
I'm not going to wonder whether or not You know, you're reacting because you were beaten as a child or your boyfriend dumped you.
I'm going to know.
And we're gonna know each other in a really weird, intense, intimate way that I don't think we could possibly understand today.
Because, and when you think about, yeah, with the way that we're already right now, like, fusing, you know, computer chips in with brains and helping to restore language centers.
Well, what happens when that AI computer chip can directly interface with your brain and learn about it and learn about its circuitry and understand it in a way that, and at a rate that we, it took us this many years to learn, and it's going to learn it overnight and in a second.
I did a podcast with Sam Harris recently, and the last half hour of the podcast was all about AI.
It was all about a conference that he had want to.
And he had gone to this conference with one idea about what AI was and left terrified and left saying, well, this is not just something to be fearful of.
This is something inevitable.
And Elon Musk's statement that we're summoning the demon was just horrific.
Our obsession with technology, our obsession with innovation, I really firmly believe that we are fueling, even through our obsession with materialism.
Because materialism, ultimately, you always want the biggest, best thing.
The newest, latest, greatest.
And the companies have to keep up.
So they're all competing.
You know, Nexus has to come up with a better phone because the iPhone 6S is out.
And then, you know, fucking boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.
And it keeps going faster and faster and faster until...
You're getting your dick sucked by a robot, you know?
And then that robot is deciding that it wants to take over your house and turn it into a nuclear fusion center.
I mean, who the fuck knows what a hundred years from now looks like or a thousand years from now looks like?
But I think that what we're seeing with all this electronic outrage and all these people communicating, we're seeing these initial blips of this newfound ability to communicate.
But I think that I'm very optimistic about where that's going to lead.
I think the beauty is, and if we all realize that we're all just human beings and that competition is actually good because the real competition is with yourself to do your best and you are inspired by other people who are doing their best, you compare yourself to them and instead of shitting on them, instead of trying to put them down, You look at them and get inspired, or maybe not.
Maybe you say, I appreciate the amount of effort that person's done, but I don't want to work 12 hours a day.
I don't think that's smart.
I would rather surf.
I think surfing's the way to go.
I mean, I think I have 80 years on this planet if I'm lucky.
I want to enjoy them in as richly fulfilling a way as possible.
Yeah, he does the Venus Project and all about resource-based economies.
Right.
I mean, he simply, you know, he talks about it like we have enough resources on the planet to sustain every human being that we will have for a long time.
Equally, fairly, and they could do whatever they want as long as we got rid of the dollar.
As long as we got rid of the need to earn a dollar and to amass these dollars and to spend them and to enhance your life through them, if you take an inventory management system that Walmart has or Amazon has and scale it up to a global level and you inventory every blade of grass, every tree, every piece of wood, every raw material that we have, and then you create a system for distributing that equally and freely so that anybody can have anything at any time that they want, that's a fucking great utopia.
There's always going to be some that do, but what percentage of our population are surgeons that do things specifically because they had a child afflicted by a disease?
It's incredibly minute.
What percentage of our population is teachers That just want to help children.
It's not that big.
It's small.
And I think most people are out there struggling because they want a Lexus.
Most people are out there, they want to move into the house down the block.
These are not wise choices in a lot of ways because they're not engineering their life in a way that's harmonious or that's really going to prepare them for a long, healthy, happy life.
They're just rat wheeling it.
They're just hamster wheeling it, just fucking spinning and trying to collect shit until they die.
But I think ultimately that's like our transition from living as apes, trying to compete against the other apes in order to fuck and make babies.
And then you get eaten by a jaguar to live in an apartment in Los Angeles in 2015 and finding out that you got fired because you made something on Twitter that upset people.
I mean, there's a transition involved there, and the radical transition of our environment changing, when you juxtapose that with our physical transition, boy, we're not much fucking different than we were a thousand years ago.
Look, if you went back to the Neanderthal days and said, listen, you guys are fucked.
Let's just enjoy your time here.
Keep throwing those fucking spears at woolly mammoths.
But ultimately, you ain't gonna make it.
What would they do?
Would they carry on?
Would they keep going?
Would you went back to the ancient hominids that were living in Africa that had just climbed down from the trees and started experimenting with new food sources and trying to figure out tools?
Would you say, hey, look, guys, I know you're trying real hard to keep your family alive, but your family's fucked.
You people are fucked.
Even if you figured out shoes, you still have thumbs in your feet, you're not gonna make it.
There's going to be some new thing that comes after you that's going to be awesome.
It's going to have a goatee.
It's going to be talking on a microphone on a podcast.
That's you.
If you were standing in the savannas of Africa 300,000 years ago when our ancient hominid ancestors first started traveling around and figuring out hunting and all sorts of other things, you would look like a goddamn alien.
If you walked out holding onto your phone and started taking pictures of them, How much different would that be than a spaceship landing in Washington, D.C., and then coming out with a ray gun and making duplicates of people?
But I think that our future is like the alien that comes down and reproduces people with a laser.
I mean, I think our future is...
I think that's why the alien archetype exists.
I'm very pessimistic or very cynical when it comes to the idea of alien invasion.
The idea that we've been abducted, the people have come here, or beings have come here from another planet.
It's more likely in my mind that that archetype exists because we're extrapolating.
We're going from looking at gorillas to looking at people to looking at, well, what are we going to become?
We'll become this big-headed thing with very little use for muscle and tissue.
We're probably going to communicate telepathically.
We're not going to need mouths or vocal cords.
And we're probably not even going to need sex.
Because we're probably going to reproduce through some sort of a genetic replication process created by scientists.
That's probably our future.
It's probably going to be more efficient, more healthy.
Our monkey bodies that need sex, we need to come and we need to feed it with food and all that.
We're kind of prisoners to that.
And I think slowly but surely, if you can prove that people can be more harmonious or more happy or more healthy or whatever the fuck would be the benefit in evolving past that, I think it's almost inevitable.
I think that's when you look at this idea of this big-headed thing with a little skinny body.
Fuck, man.
It's kind of obvious.
This is where we're going.
We're becoming more and more slender.
We look at us in comparison to all the other animals.
If you grab your dog's fur, grab his skin, it's fucking tough.
It's like they could bite each other and they don't even get hurt that much.
If you got bit by a dog, you're fucked, man.
But dogs, like two dogs would get mad at each other at a dog park, and they bite each other and everybody's okay.
We need to be thinking way bigger than we are right now.
I mean, you look at issues even like climate change, right?
It's a bigger issue than just the United States.
It's a global issue, and the sooner that we can get on board on a global agenda, but man, did we get far removed from the way this conversation started.
We did, but we didn't, because I think ultimately what we're talking about when we're talking about this outrage, this Twitter outrage, I think ultimately what it really boils down to is a bunch of people That are being unreasonable, and they're communicating in this unreasonable way, but they're just, they're out there.
There's a lot of them.
Most people, like, what percentage of people do you think really commented on that and got outraged?
When I pose the question to some people, that's usually the answer, right?
They go, oh, two galaxies collide and it's just shit crashing at each other and planets exploding and suns eating other stars and black holes eating each other.
And the reality, though, when you think about and when you judge the magnitude of the distances between those objects, the reality is statistically it's unlikely any two object would impact at all.
They'll come close and you're going to have some gravitational effects, but the odds that any two object actually collides is really, really, really small.
I think that when, you know, you pose that question to a lot of people, they imagine this apocalyptic scenario, but it's just, it's because they have a tough time estimating things.
They have a tough time thinking outside of their bubble, outside of their own consciousness, into like, you know, What could that be?
It's why Google used to have that interview question, that famous one, like, how many golf balls would fit in this school bus, right?
And a lot of people criticize that as like, ah, what a dumb question.
That doesn't have to do anything.
And it's like, well, they want to know, do you say a million, a billion, or a hundred thousand, right?
They want to know at what scale are you able to estimate the size of an object?
Because that just gives like a real quick feedback as to like, where are you on the critical thinking level?
So I think that when you apply that to what we were talking about today, I think that a lot of people have a tough time, and myself included, have a tough time estimating and oftentimes taking a step back from whatever their current daily issue is, whatever their current stress is, whatever their current endorphin release they're seeking is, whatever their current thought is, and they have a tough time always keeping in perspective.
Perspective's the key here.
Keeping in perspective what the rest of The universe is and the world is and and the other people even just next door to you are going through well There was an article that I tweeted today from Yahoo from the UK Evidence of the multiverse.
Or I'll watch documentaries on hypernovas or something like that.
And you try to...
Wrap your head around the idea of a star exploding and taking out the entire solar system or many other solar systems nearby and the fact that this is happening millions of times a day all throughout the universe.
There was a documentary that they had I don't remember was science channel or what channel was on but where Scientists at one point in time were concerned that there was a war going on in space Because they were recognizing these gamma bursts these incredible bursts of massive amounts of energy and they were happening at a in a repeated fashion all throughout the sky and They had to try to figure out what the fuck was going on.
Is there an alien war like this is like, you know What could this be?
He takes this incredibly difficult science and communicates in a way that we emotionally respond to.
And I love that.
And he was just talking about, like, he said one line in one of his videos somewhere where he was like, up there...
That's not an up there, far away place.
You're in the middle of it.
You're in the middle of the universe right now.
And even our galaxy, right?
We have these paintings of what the Milky Way galaxy looks like.
A lot of times people don't even ever have the thought, they would never need to even think about this, that we don't have a picture of what our galaxy looks like.
We have an artist rendition of what we think our galaxy looks like, but the furthest craft we have is barely out of our own sun belt.
It's out of our own gravitational pole from our own sun.
The most mind fucky statistic that I ever saw in one of these documentaries was they were talking about the possibility of each hole.
They were talking about the relative size of supermassive black holes and that every galaxy has a supermassive black hole that's one half of 1% of the mass of the galaxy.
The larger the galaxy, the larger the black hole.
And they're speculating that inside that black hole may be a whole nother universe with completely different laws, and that inside that universe may be other galaxies that have supermassive black holes at their center, and inside those supermassive black holes there are other universes.
So in our hundreds of billions of galaxies, There may be hundreds of billions of individual universes inside of those.
And when you go inside of them, there's hundreds of billions of more individual galaxies with hundreds of billions of more individual universes inside of them.
Our lack of perspective is alarming, but fuck, it makes sense.
I mean, we still have these goddamn monkey bodies.
And I think that's ultimately going to be the big pull or the big appeal of transcending this physical embodiment that we carry our consciousness in.
And then accepting this idea of a symbiotic relationship with some sort of microchips and Fucking fiber optic lines or whatever the hell it's gonna take form of I mean, we're essentially symbiotically connected to technology already with glasses You know we need these fucking things that we've created that cover over our eyes to see better or With phones man.
I left my house the other day.
I got a hundred yards from my door and went shit Shit!
My phone!
It was like I left my baby on the roof.
Like, I had to turn around.
Like, I was terrified.
I mean, that's ridiculous.
I can't just go somewhere and borrow someone's phone and call my wife and go, hey, I left my phone at home.
Well, that's why when you say that over the timeline, you've seen we're getting closer and closer, the connections, more people are getting connected, and we're getting connected with more people and closer.
I agree technologically, but I feel like in the real physical world that we live in, we're getting further apart.
And we look at people's lives on social media, like on Instagram and Facebook, and all the models who are coming out right now with their posts about...
Instagram models posting about what you don't see, the side of it you don't see, right?
The hundred shots that it took her to get that perfect photo and the argument she got in with her sister over take one more, take one more, take one more before she got that perfect one that you're then liking and you're then trying to compare your life to.
We are pushing our real connections and real personal lives.
First of all, we're judging ourselves based by this impossible, unattainable standard on social media that That, you know, if someone takes a bad picture, they don't upload it.
They delete that one and they take a better picture.
And they take a better one and better one and better one until that's the one that it doesn't even look...
It hardly looks like them anymore.
And now we're expected to measure us looking at the mirror against that perfectly lit, perfectly critiqued, careful image of what we think our next best person is like.
And that's got some really weird implications to evolution.
I'll give you one example real quick with Instagram is...
I have a little sister and I'm terrified of when every time she gets in another social media account because I'm like, oh no, like, you know, where is this going to lead?
When I think about young kids, let's say impressionable teenagers who are going through the most important biological and neurological development phase of what will be their adult life, they're coming into their identity.
And they have access to this dopamine drip, this endorphin drip in their brain that generations before never had that kind of access to.
When a girl can upload a photo onto Instagram and start refreshing the dozens of, you're hot baby, sexy baby, nice smile, pretty girl.
And she does that during a time when she's otherwise dealing with a difficult, conflicting emotion inside of her.
And that's now her drug.
That's her escape from otherwise facing that reality.
And growing through it the way generations before did.
I'm not saying it's necessarily bad or wrong.
Maybe this is a better way to go through that stage of your life.
But maybe it's not.
Maybe that's bad that you can so easily bypass all that hard shit you would have otherwise had to have dealt with internally.
What is that doing to evolution?
We don't know.
We won't know for a long time until we look back on it and go, that was probably not great.
Or maybe we look back on it and go, that's what led us to where we are.
But it's got to have some impact.
And that kind of stuff, you know...
I deal with on a daily basis as I try to figure out, like, how do I want to bring my games on these platforms?
And I want my games to interact with people in these ways.
I think I have this other thought about these things and this progression, and I think that we look at the world, we look at everything that's going on, whether it's butterflies or elk or eagles or caterpillars, and we look at it all and we say, well, that's nature.
But we look at ourselves and because we're conscious and because we can make choices and because we can objectively look at the risks versus rewards of each decision and debate it amongst each other and seek advice from peers, we don't think of it as natural.
We think of it as something that we can manipulate and something that we can change and that we can alter.
But I think that human behavior might just be ultimately the most complex version of the natural world that we know.
And that all of our behavior, all the stuff that we're doing, whether it's our rampant materialism, our obsession with attention and technology, All this stuff is leading to what I said before, this electronic caterpillar.
I think that what we're doing right now is totally natural.
And this obsession with checking your likes on your ass pic to make sure that everybody thinks you're hot, this is...
This is all just going to fuel your desire to get a better camera.
It's going to fuel your desire to get a new phone or to support the newest social media platform that's going to allow your ass to shake in a much more enticing way that's going to get you even more likes and hearts and fucking thumbs ups and emojis.
I think it's natural.
I really do.
I mean...
I don't know what we can do about it other than communicate our concerns about the potential downfalls of this behavior and this kind of thing.
And that's what's a huge problem with that company firing you because they impeded on your ability to communicate and You communicated in a very concise, objective, analytical way.
You looked at the problem and said, look, this guy, he has every right to be an old bigot in the privacy of his own home.
The fact that you got in trouble for that...
It shows the repercussions and the downfalls of this new time.
When that whole thing was unfolding, it got a lot.
So a lot of media outlets, I linked you to the Opie and Anthony, they talked about it, and they completely held my back, obviously, because those guys are super level-headed people.
But the media shitstorm that started to unfold, CNN, Fox News, everybody, every major outlet was reaching out to me, trying to get me to come on their show.
And I was sitting at a Crossroads.
I'm a communications professional.
I knew that.
And I had seen what happened to Justine Sacco.
I think that happened before me.
And I was well aware of where this could go for me in my career and my personal life.
So I realized that, you know, I need to take control of the PR shitstorm.
I need to be the one who makes the right moves while the company makes all the wrong moves.
And I need to get this back on track.
So they didn't, you know, part of their terms, they didn't want me to do any media appearances whatsoever.
I would have called the bluff of the publishing company and I would have said, that's ridiculous.
Wait a day.
Nothing is going to happen and we'll talk about it again tomorrow.
And then when nothing happened and when everything goes away and no business deals were threatened, we'd go, now what was the big fucking deal?
What was the big fucking deal?
Let's finish making the game.
Let's not have a bunch of people mad at us because we trampled all over someone's constitutional rights.
And let's implement his good ideas.
That was the other thing that they lost was all of these programs and initiatives that I was building and that I was going to take charge of and run through the game's launch cycle and keeping all of the players engaged.
All this stuff I had done before, I was going to do again for them on this new IP, this new thing that needed that work more than anything.
It didn't have anything to build off of.
It was starting from zero.
All of that was gone.
They didn't have a person to come in that could carry that torch further and finish the job I had started.
From what I know is the game just went through a lot of iteration.
So every year, the next big thing came out, and the game was no longer the next big thing, so they had to add some more stuff to it to try to beat the thing that just came out.
And then something else came out.
And so this constant trying to, you know, striving for perfection, and there was other problems, and there was lots of controversy.
You could read articles for days, literally days, where people are just investigating that whole evolution of that franchise.
Like the engine kept changing, the technology kept changing, the requirements kept changing, everything kept changing instead of just polishing something up, sticking with what you had and getting it out the door.
You compare that to the game we're working on now, like Bombshell, right?
Bombshell is built on Unreal Engine 3.
That's the last generation of Unreal Engine, Unreal Engine's on four now.
It's Unreal Engine now.
But imagine if for Bombshell we had indefinitely kept upgrading the engine, changing new technologies, implementing new technologies, and new workflows, and new stacks, and new things breaking.
It would never end.
It would be a never-ending building and polishing cycle.
So that was kind of my perspective of what Duke Nukem was stuck in for a long time.
And, you know, creatively, you could debate whether it was also creatively like, you know, almost like this need for perfection, you know, like no one pixel can be out of place, that type of thing.
And people did.
They pointed fingers to that whole thing.
But at the end of the day, what came out was Duke Nukem Forever.
And it wasn't, you know, I don't think anything could sustain like a decade of hype and ever live up to that expectation.
But got it away from that and now we've turned it into, so that's the robot.
So she's got this bionic arm, and she as a character is defined more by what she's been through, and very multifaceted personalities and attributes, not just traits, not just physical appearance.
No, but what I need to ask for all gamers, right, is to look at this and go, it's not easy making a strong female character that can appeal to both men and women.
Yeah, and excuse me, I'm not saying those games don't have a place.
They do, right?
And that's the thing.
What we don't want to be doing to creators, to creative people, to artists, is making them kind of like we didn't want to walk on eggshells with talking about these controversial issues today, and I feel like we didn't.
We don't want our artists walking on eggshells, worried about, well, what are people going to think?
Are they going to be down our necks for being sexist or misogynist or...
It's amazing looking at this now, seeing how far along, even from when this video was recorded, how much better the game is.
But these are the Xerath Guardians, one of the boss fights.
So you're playing with two sticks on your controller.
So you're running around with the left one, and you're aiming with the right thumbstick.
And then you're shooting, you're using different abilities, different, you know, she's got her mighty punch, she's got eight different weapons that she can transform her arm into.
Well, if you love Quake, and if you love first person shooters, we actually have a build engine prequel to Bombshell that's gonna come out after this game that takes place in the first person.
Think about how many hours of entertainment you can get, especially if you turn it into a first-person shooter where you go online and play multiplayer.
And you're getting so much bigger bang for your entertainment dollar buying a video game than you would in a movie.
And so a lot of times when people are worried about our games getting too pricey, with mobile games being so cheap and so affordable that they are, with how much entertainment you're getting out of it, it's crazy.
If you play bombshell and if you walk away with a different image jump into your head than just that blonde babe, scantily clad, tits and ass, then we've done something.
We left an impression on you that tells you that what defines a bombshell, what defines a badass chick is more of her context in her life and what she's doing and how she's combating that adversity, then it is what she looks like.
No, I mean, I think about it a little bit more myself just because of the way I think and what I've been through, but that's not what the team at Interceptor is the studio in Denmark making that game.
Interceptor, no one there is thinking that.
They're just thinking, we have this idea for an incredible chick, an incredible villain too.
Jadis Heskel, he's the villain.
You didn't see him in that trailer.
But he's the lead antagonist.
He's voiced by the voice of Duke Nukem, John St. John.
So he's also part of the 3D Realms family still.
They're just looking at making incredible characters with a fun story.
No one's saying this story is serious like you saw.
She rides a shield and punches him in the face to do the executing move.
I've only worn well, I've won two two versions I've worn the original version which is very pixelated which was okay Amazing because it gave me this like whoa this idea like I see where this is going and then more recently I My friend Lewis from Unbox Therapy was in here, and he showed me one that's a cell phone.
You slide it in like a Galaxy.
Yeah, Samsung phone, and you put it on, but it's still not the real deal.
The real deal is the one that hooks up to a computer.
But I saw that video where you get to look around.
It's completely three-dimensional.
The guy playing the piano, have you seen that one?
Well, I know John Carmack is involved with some Oculus Rift stuff, because we were tweeting back and forth, and I've been to Id Studios way back when, before Quake 3 was released.
I got to play an early version of it with Tim Willits and all those guys online, or on a LAN, rather.
It was really fucking cool.
But they're doing some crazy Oculus Rift shit, and I just can only imagine what that's going to be like.
Which is great because, you know, one of the things about Dance Dance Revolution, that game that's really popular in arcades, one of the cool side effects is a lot of people lost weight.
Like a shitload of weight.
Because they were gamers, but they got really into playing this one game.
And this game requires you to jump around and bounce around.
And they were burning off all these fucking crazy calories.
And there's...
I mean, I think there's a whole website dedicated to Dance Dance Revolution weight loss.
Like, it's showing all these people that have lost, like, fucking 60, 70, 80 pounds just playing this silly game.
The one that I saw, I didn't get to try it though, is they had this thing, this almost sock thing you put on.
Instead of a shoe, it's like a boot that's super soft material.
And then rather than the thing being a track that you have to move and have all that resistance, because that was harder to move, it was this really slick surface.
So you're still bound in, but you just glide your feet over it.
Yeah, and so you like polish it up like almost like a like a bowling alley you would and then so You're almost like walking in place and gliding and because you still have that harness holding up you don't slip and fall And that was kind of interesting too.
That is kind of interesting I would think one would be better for fitness.
Yeah, absolutely But we could probably get some really good workouts in with an omnidirectional treadmill with resistance and I know there's one that they're working on that I had heard is fucking terrifying.
It's based on Ridley Scott's Alien, the first Alien movie.
And you have to duck, and you actually see it walking around, and it's trying to find you, and you physically have to duck and move your body down so that it can't see you in the game.
And when it finds you, it roars at you.
And you watch the YouTube videos.
The Fine Brothers.
It's the Fine Brothers YouTube channel where they have these teens react videos.
They'll put teenagers in chairs.
They'll film them reacting to these things.
It's so fucking funny to watch them.
They're clawing at their eyes trying to get the thing off because it was terrifying.
Well, isn't this like sort of a glimpse of what's going to happen when they figure out how to make some sort of, not just goggles that you put on, like what they're doing with Oculus Rift, but some sort of a neural interface where they bring you into this world.
But this virtual reality was something that always had been talked about a long time ago.
It was always like the thing.
We're gonna have virtual reality I mean it was it was a big plot line in movies and like the 1980s, but the technology wasn't there but now the technology is finally caught up to it and Again, this is just the beginning.
Yeah, and I saw it online, and they were just sort of demonstrating it.
It might just be like a proof of concept sort of a thing, but they were doing it in real time, and this person was moving around, watching all this shit happen.
If you go to a movie theater, right?
You're sitting in a theater, it's this big whole, big giant place, and everybody's sitting down eating popcorn and watching this flat screen in front of you where everything takes place.
What if instead of that, you enter into a warehouse, and that warehouse is the film?
You strap on these goggles, and they have an environment with wind and heat and all sorts of different three-dimensional environmental effects.
I mean, you could be in the fucking Hobbit land, climbing the hill to where Bilbo Baggins' house is, opening the door, looking at him, and he's telling you to come on inside.
There's the one proof of concept video, maybe Jamie can find it, where it's, with the Oculus Rift, they created a third-person shooter.
So it's a real-life third-person game where the guy has a wide-angle camera mounted in a backpack on his back that is back here, so it looks down and it can see himself standing there.
And he's wearing these 3D glasses and it's doing the head tracking in real time.
There's maybe like an 80 millisecond delay.
So almost imperceivable.
So he's seeing his own, he's literally living an out-of-body experience through Oculus Rift and he's walking around like he's a third-person avatar through the world.
And Oculus, I think Oculus came out with a peripheral as well now where you hold these little things in your hands.
And now the head tracking device can track, or the cameras can track where your hands are in relation to your eyes, so you can hold a gun up and see the gun that you're holding.
You know, I mean, if your game, I mean, that would be so much more immersive.
If you had a game that required you to shoot at monsters with a shotgun, and you had a fake shotgun, but it was heavy, like a metal shotgun, it had a real cocking mechanism, and you could really see the shells eject, you had to put new shells in, maybe.
Maybe you have shells in your pocket, and that's how you reload.
Where they had aliens breaking through the walls of your home.
So it's not goggles, it's like a lens, and so you still see your space, but it's like as soon as you put them on, you could look at that wall, and now suddenly an alien can break through the wall, and it actually makes it look like your wall is tearing apart and aliens climbing through it.
And then you're shooting at the alien in your own house at your own wall.
So it's bringing video games into your world instead of putting, transplanting you into another world.
HoloLens is bringing that game experience into wherever your space is.
It was this little girl sitting on her bed watching a four-inch high ballerina spinning around her bed like it was a real ballerina, like it was fucking Tinkerbell.
Because obviously, they're going to take it to the next place as they become more educated and they go to school and they learn how to create this kind of content and...
They learn how to evolve it and make it better and make the technology better.
Imagine when a science teacher can put this in a classroom and let you, like, walk around a universe or a galaxy and interact with the objects in, like, your actual space.
Exactly, but here you're seeing a bunch of kids in a gymnasium that are watching this whale fly through the air, but the kids don't have anything on their eyes that we can see.
Yeah, when I saw the clip, I assumed that they were just reacting because they had said, oh, now there's a whale jumping out and just react so that it makes the viral video on you.
See, I think you and even me in a lot of ways, because I remember a time before that, too.
I was younger, but I remember when the internet was really getting into our house.
So I feel like we were, like, in a great...
A great generation for perspective.
And not to go back to all that stuff again, but it's like the next generation, even my younger sister's generation, they didn't have all that perspective necessarily.
And now I have little toddlers and nephews who are growing up with iPads and they're doing stuff sitting on the couch after school on their iPad.
And so I'm just worried like...
And what do you think?
Do you think you and I are in the best generation for perspective?
Or do you think that it's better to be a generation now?
Or a generation before you and I? Well, I think if you want to compare the two, there's no way they're going to understand what it was like to not have the internet.
They're not going to understand it.
It's going to be a concept.
It's like us understanding what it was like before written language.
We're never going to get it.
We can pretend all we like.
We're never going to really know what that's like.
But I think the leap between no written language to written language took so much longer to have an impact than what we're experiencing in just a couple of decades.
In a couple of decades, the world has changed radically, and it's happened right in front of our eyes.
And I think that human beings have a really difficult time recognizing change while it's taking place right in front of them.
I think it just seems normal to us.
But I think when history looks back at this era, they're going to say, this is the craziest moment in time.
This was when it all began.
This was the birth of the machine.
This was when it came alive, when information became viral for the first time, like literally viral, like became almost a living organism and spread.
And there was hiccups and there was Justine Sacco and Josh Olin and there was all sorts of weird shit that happened along the way and virus.
Viral videos and fucking that...
What is that fucking guy from Korea?
Gangnam Style?
There's all sorts of...
Strange things have happened.
You know?
Strange things.
Hamster damps.
There's been a lot of weird stuff that's happened because of the internet.
They form these little communities, and they just shit in each other's mouths all day.
You're going to find that with sports.
You're going to find that with video games, with any...
You're going to have like-minded communities, and some of them are going to be toxic.
But for the most part, what I encounter and the people that I interact with online, incredibly positive.
Even criticisms, like the criticisms that I've experienced online, for the most part, the vast majority of them are polite.
Vast majority.
You know, I think that's rare.
I think also people are learning how to use social media and the internet and this newfound ability.
They're learning how to do it.
And some people do it wrong.
I mean, there's some people that have like essentially attack blogs.
You go to their blog, it's just them shitting on one person or shitting on another person.
And why are they doing that?
Well, they're doing that because they can.
This is the first time they've ever had a voice in their whole life and they're going to use it to displace some of the anger and hate that they have in their own life and just throw it out there in the world.
And these are all like hiccups and growing pains and I think it's amazing.
That's why I like to still be talking to as many people as I can and changing and influencing in a positive way, hopefully, as many lives as I can because just like the universe, you know, I'm a part of it.
I'm in the middle of it and I want to be a part of it and I want you to be a part of it.
That's why I love comedians too and I respect comedians because they talk about these kinds of social issues with such, you know, just absolutely brazenness and they don't care Most people don't care what other people think about it and they make they make you laugh at the same time that they make you really think and be thoughtful about it so I really respect what you do and and You know kind of paving the way for that because you you were doing that in an era before there was social media So well,
it was easier before there was social media you were eating is attacked for it It was limited to one room at a time, right?
You got attacked in that room, you know, but I think people had less of a They had less of this entitlement to outrage that people have now.
And I think that there has been some attacks on comedians that have gone sort of the way that, you know, you see these attacks on people for whatever reason in social media, whether it's the Lion Killer guy or Justine Saka or you, there's going to be these targets that exist.
And they have occasionally gone after comedians.
And for the most part, comedians have vehemently And aggressively supported and defended themselves.
So it happens everywhere, because that was the one thing that I wish would have, if I could have changed anything about what happened with me, it would have been that I would have loved for more of my peers to come out and been like, this is wrong.
I would have loved for more people to have had the gonads to come out and say, Fuck that.
He didn't do anything wrong publicly.
They all came to me privately, man.
Empathizing, right?
But as you would expect friends to do.
But I would have loved for people to have been like, you know what?
That's not okay.
Because I see that all the time in the comic community where that's how you fight that.
That's how you get back against that.
And that's how you make sure that that shit doesn't resurge and take over.
But we have to, because without that, the art form is shit.
I mean, it really doesn't even exist.
The art form of stand-up comedy depends upon freedom.
Because you're going to say things that are offensive, you know, that you don't even mean, because the offensive things will be funny, you know?
And you've got to know when you mean them or when you don't mean them.
I went through this whole bit in my last special where I was explaining, like, this is a Tracy Morgan bit that he got in trouble for, because he said that if his son was gay, he would stab him.
And then I'm like, well, he also said he would eat a mile of shit to get to Beyonce's ass.
Do you understand he said both of those things in the same set?
Like, you gotta, like, look at what he's doing.
He's saying things that are outrageous that are not real.
In video games, we get that a lot with violence in video games.
There was a lot, a lot of lawsuits actually went to the Supreme Court in California over California versus the EMA. And thankfully, video games won.
It was like a seven to two vote.
But what they were arguing is that violent video games can lead to these mass shootings, can lead to violence in your life, lead to aggression, despite not a single study supporting any of that evidence.
And I come to realize that video games as an industry, we're just younger.
As an art form, we're younger.
We're a very immature industry, just like movies, just like music.
Eminem and Marilyn Manson went through the same scrutiny back when they were having violent and vulgar rap lyrics, right?
And every time we come to realize, you know, it's probably not real.
It's probably not the case.
And no matter what someone writes in a manifesto or what someone, you know, some study person might think, you know, at some university, there's nothing that suggests that.
And if anything, there's data that suggests that, you know, these things as mediums are releases.
They lower aggression.
They make people happier and better people overall.
There's this idea that watching something violent and watching something sexual and watching these things that are horrific, they release this anxiety and they release the desire to actually do those things.
And that you can somehow or another By, you know, by viewing those, alleviate those issues in your own mind.
Or to do the thing that they watched in the porn, exactly.
And that's a good thing.
That's not desensitizing them.
Again, that all comes from a place, I think, just lack of understanding.
It comes from a place of closed-mindedness.
It's that confirmation bias.
You have a theory, and so you will look at the world through the stained-glass lenses of that theory, instead of looking at it objectively and understanding the data and what the data is telling you.
And you're always going to have examples where you can point the finger at that person and blame whatever influences from the media, whether it's music or games or films or anything, for their behavior and their actions.
But you've got to have to look at all the factors in their life.
And what percentage of the pie is the video game?
Is it even a sliver?
I mean, is it even a percent or two percent?
What about the 98% of...
Them getting sexually abused or beaten up or bullied or the fact their mom drank like a fish when they were in the womb, who the fuck knows what makes a broken person.
The idea that a person can be perfectly normal and then sit down and play Call of Duty and want to go fucking shoot up a mall, that's crazy talk.
And you as an adult producing a product that is supposed to be, at the very least, your parents are supposed to approve your use of it.
And even still, we still have rating systems, just like the movies have the MPAA. We still have the ESRB. We're still properly rating them and making sure that parents have to sign off if they're going to buy the thing with the kid.
They have to be there in the store.
You have to have a guard.
You know, we still have all those same systems just in case.
Because it's still good to be better safe than sorry, I agree, but not to the degree that you're removing an entire genre of game or genre of entertainment because of it.