Josh Szeps critiques Mel Gibson’s extremism, comparing fame’s psychological toll to Paul Wolfowitz’s ideological shift from Marxism to neoconservatism, while debunking 9/11 false-flag claims like Operation Northwoods. They dissect Australia’s harsh immigration policies—Manus Island detentions, self-immolation protests—and contrast them with U.S. debates on undocumented immigrants and virtue-signaling backlash at a "white privilege" conference. Szeps argues UBI could fund artisanal craftsmanship but Rogan counters with $9T annual costs; they clash over welfare efficacy amid Baltimore’s systemic racism. Tax transparency proposals face opposition from Norquist, while Line-X’s indestructible polymer tech sparks AI misuse fears—like digital trolls or engineered personalities—before Rogan teases Alex Gray’s visionary art segment. [Automatically generated summary]
I think it's just more, I think there's more, it takes more cojones to just say that you're unemployed than to be like, well, I've got a lot of projects going on.
Like, I've got a lot of fingers and a lot of pies, and I'm like, I'm freelance now.
You should tell people that you're going to get a trailer, and you're going to travel across the country, get one of those things you drag behind your car, and you're just going to live out of it.
She started talking like this, and everybody's like, bitch.
Get the fuck out of here.
Like, we know that people talk like that.
And we know it's a style of...
It's an affectation.
You decide to talk like that.
You don't have to talk like that.
You could...
Obviously, when you watch British actors play Americans and do such a brilliant job of talking in an American accent, like the Walking Dead people, when people find out that Rick is a fucking...
And similarly, I think that living in the rarefied atmosphere of being incredibly outrageously famous probably puts grooves in your mental pathways that predispose you to being odd.
And as you get older, when things start to fall apart, you know, physically and psychologically and maritally and, you know, when he was with that crazy lady.
I mean, what that is is like the ultimate three-quarters—it's not midlife, it's three-quarters life— Like, dilemma.
And how many people do you surround yourself with when you're at that level of superstardom who are willing to call bullshit on your bullshit, right?
Like, I think a healthy famous person, we all know them, are people who are able to keep their heads screwed on because they still surround themselves with a posse who are like, ah, get out of here.
What are you doing with this?
You've got a Latin mass still doing the pre-Reformation Catholic liturgies up on a hill in the Hollywood Hills and you're talking about how Jews caused all the wars in the world.
Because if you pay attention to Danny Glover's Twitter feed and his social media feed, it's all about helping people out and charities and spirituality and consideration for the earth.
I didn't either until I was following him on Twitter.
And the day that he died, I went to his Twitter page to see...
What his last tweets were, and saw that he was following me for some strange reason, which made me feel like all the more kind of close to him, and started going back through all of his old tweets.
And he was just interested in spirituality, meditation, all the kinds of shit that you and I are interested in.
I just walked in here and you told me that there are these pieces about how Facebook workers are admitting that they routinely suppressed conservative news from the Facebook news feed.
He was saying, but when you look at the Beliebers, like the Justin Bieber fans, they overwhelm the trending...
To the point where Twitter became the Justin Bieber show, and then Twitter had to go, okay, all right, settle the fuck down.
All these little 16-year-old girls are finger-banging themselves and slamming their fucking iPhones and trying to get this guy, you know, and try to pay attention to this guy constantly 24 hours a day.
Yeah, a long time ago, like two or three years into Twitter starting, they...
There's ten trending topics, I believe, I remember it's like seven out of the ten were all Justin Bieber this, I love Justin Bieber, whatever it was at the time.
What they're trying to do is they're acknowledging that this is a stupid behavior, and they would assume that you're old enough that you realize it's a stupid behavior, and you should be better than them.
The difference between deprioritizing Belieber tweet hashtags and using your status as the most important social media information company in the world.
But the coolest thing about it is he's got basically the Joker scars coming out of the sides of his mouth that look like they've got stitches, hence his name, Stitches.
He's combined the word burr with the visual iconography of an ice cream, thereby linking these two formerly disparate concepts in one beautiful tattoo.
They've never claimed that what you see is just the most recent thing that is coming up, right?
I mean, all of it is algorithms.
So the things that you tend to click on and the things that you tend to look at and the things that you tend to like, and the stories that you tend to click through to all go into their gigantic algorithm crunching machine, which I just imagine as being like a big Willy Wonka machine spewing with pink steam coming out the top.
You put in all of the data, and then out the other end, the Oompa Loompas compile your Facebook feed.
And so they're making judgments all the time about what they're going to prioritize.
But what they shouldn't be doing is including any kind of their own political preferences.
And we don't yet know if it's actually true, or it just looks like this is one person who's saying this.
But my problem with it is, even if you condone these kinds of policies and you're a liberal...
You don't know what impact it's going to have and whether or not by putting this stuff out people are going to get more liberal, maybe they'll get more frustrated with liberal ideas and they'll become more conservative.
It fuels the idea that being a liberal is being a person is detached from reality.
And that's one of the major points of criticism.
When the conservative people go after the liberals, one of the major things that they try to harp on is that liberals are out of touch with reality.
When you have something like this and you're reinforcing the idea that they're shielding certain aspects of reality, like that some people have these conservative opinions, and if some people have a conservative opinion and you disagree with that conservative opinion, that's where the open exchange and the marketplace of ideas comes into place.
Now, if you don't allow that exchange to take place because you deny that people think that way because you hide the stories, you're going to alienate and you're going to create these confirmation bias forums.
You're going to create these places where people like Salon.com, where people just agree with each other and then they tell you why.
I mean, it used to be the case that we thought of progressives and liberals as being more pro-free speech.
At least I did.
I thought of them as being on the side of more inclusiveness and more tolerance.
And it's becoming increasingly not the case at all, that there's more politically correct bullshit and more censorship and more imposing, less tolerance of other people's ideas on the left, even though they're on the right.
I 100% believe that, but I believe it's the pendulum effect.
I think it's the suppression of free speech by the conservatives in the Bush administration that fuck people up so sideways, they bounce back the other way ultra hard.
I think people got so angry at what was going on with John Ashcroft covering statues up with drapes and Oh, I loved that.
All the craziness that was going on in that administration, and all the suppression of gay rights.
The fact that John Ashcroft actually had the penis on a statue, on an old Roman or Grecian statue, which was like in one of the great, you know, temples down in Washington, D.C., covered up.
He was so disturbing that that guy got into office.
You know, one of the guys that I correspond with online, he had something to do with some record store, and he sent me an album of gospel songs that John Ashcroft had made with some other dude.
He was fucking, and probably still is, bat shit crazy.
You can just imagine, they've probably got like a Tinder for Dick Cheney, where he's just swiping left and swiping right on the people who they're going to kill.
It's interesting you mention Wolfowitz, because in terms of what we're saying about the left can be intolerant of other ideas, a lot of these guys, especially Wolfowitz, were former Marxists.
When Wolfowitz was young at university, he was a revolutionary Marxist.
And it's interesting that oftentimes people who are hyper-revolutionary socialists can flip into becoming hyper, like, Ayn Randian, idealistic reactionaries.
And there's the same kind of...
It's not that different when you think about it.
People think of them as being ideas that are at the end of a political spectrum.
But it's actually more like a horseshoe, right?
Right.
Where at one end, you think that you can overthrow the capitalist system and create a utopia in which everyone is going to be equal and it's going to be from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
And then at the other end, you believe that you can wipe societies clean, you can go into Iraq and raise everything and then start from fresh and democracy will spring up and people will be able to live in peace.
I mean, they're both basically kind of messianic, utopian ideas about change, instead of the sort of change that I think actually works, which is just incremental, grudging change, bit by bit, slowly eking it out.
That's not what Cheney and Wolfowitz think the world is all about.
I mean, I do think, like, when you look at how incompetently they managed Iraq, when you look at how incompetently they managed Katrina, when you look at how incompetently they managed things that they wanted to get right...
The idea that they could have pulled off something like that within eight months of entering office, I find implausible.
If I have to choose between incompetence versus a massive conspiracy, I usually think people are just generally incompetent.
We gotta talk some dudes into flying planes into the World Trade Center in Towers 1 and 2. We're gonna hijack planes filled with people, and we're gonna talk these guys into flying them into the buildings.
They'd be like, wait, who the fuck is gonna do that?
Religious people.
You've got to get them to believe that there's a bunch of pussy waiting for them in heaven, and all they have to do is fly these planes into buildings to get that pussy.
Also, there's a much easier way to have done it, which is if you wanted a pretext to go into Iraq, all you'd need to do would be – I was talking to a national defense guy about this.
He was like, there was a no-fly zone over Iraq.
The CIA could have painted a US plane the Iraqi colours and just faked a shoot-down of a US or British jet that was patrolling the no-fly zone, and you would have a much clearer case, actually, in international law to go to war than the vague case that they did do, because it wasn't connected to 9-11, so they had to make up this shit about WMDs and all that sort of stuff.
You could easily have orchestrated something without bringing down the World Trade Towers that would have given you a good reason to go into Iraq.
And because they're such unscrupulous assholes and they do these legitimate conspiracy theories, that's what gives people reasons to believe in what I regard as being the much more ridiculous conspiracy theories.
But it would be a lot better if they just didn't do any of this shit in the first place, and then people wouldn't be out of their minds being so suspicious about whether or not 9-11 was an inside job.
Well, there was the word that Dick Cheney was discussing the possibility of doing something like that for Iran before they left office.
They were talking about orchestrating a false flag on Iran before they left office, and they never pulled it off.
Whether or not that's true or not remains to be seen, but it's not outside the realm of possibility.
I mean, it happened in so many different times in history, when Nero burnt Rome, when Hitler burned the Reichstag, when, I mean, the whole, what happened to get us into Vietnam.
And you don't even have to go as far as the Nazis, just in terms of what the CIA has done in counterinsurgency operations in South America and stuff, the involvement in the coup in 1973 in Chile.
I was reading up about that lately because I went to Chile a couple of years ago.
I mean, it's not that they absolutely, completely manufacture total bullshit from whole cloth, but they...
Give voice to conspiracy theories in those particular countries.
They fund media outlets that are spreading, you know, what the CIA wants to get heard.
And they just basically put their finger on the scales of something so that it goes another way.
I mean, the democratically elected government in Chile was overthrown by a brutal military dictatorship, which then lasted for an entire generation, thanks largely to the CIA. I mean, we don't even think or hear or learn about that stuff.
You want America to be America, land the free home of the brave?
Well, there's only one way.
We've got to fucking lie to you.
We've got to kick some asses.
There's a lot of shit we'd like to tell you, but the world works in a really fucked up way, and you don't want to know about that because you want to watch Real Housewives.
If you actually work there, then I think your outlook is basically what you just articulated, which is, it'll be lovely if we all lived in a world with ice cream and candy and where the lions slept with the lambs and the postman hugged the dogs and we were all dancing in the streets.
But listen, honcho, it's a tough world out there, and either the Saddam Husseins and the Putins are going to rule it, or we are.
And sometimes you have to break a few eggs in order to make an omelet, and sometimes you have To do things that might not seem pretty on the surface.
But I'll tell you what, we're the ones who are standing on the wall watching God.
So you go about your little business and we'll take care of shit.
It's crazy when you start seeing how many people...
You're like, oh, this is a lot who were killed in, for example, the Iraq War, and it goes back to Vietnam, World War I. But World War II, towards the final few years of World War II, even excluding the Holocaust, just looking at people, mainly Russians...
It's just millions upon millions upon millions of people.
And often, I mean, if you talk to a military historian, what really ended the war, yes, D-Day was important, but the Soviets won the war.
I mean, it was the fact that the Nazis were just hemorrhaging in the East.
That meant that they couldn't put up any defenses in the West.
So D-Day was a, you know, not to insult our great forefathers who fought there, but D-Day was a little bit of a walk in the park in comparison to what was happening on the Eastern Front.
Well, there was a lot going on all across the world, but one of the scariest things about France and what happened to them during World War II is the amount of France to this day that you literally can't even visit because it's so filled with waste.
From all the bombs that were dropped.
Have you seen there's an area larger than Paris that's completely fenced in and you can't go in it?
Because it's got so much munitions and so many bombs that were dropped there.
It's so fucked up that it'll be that way for something like 100,000 years or something crazy.
I mean, it's for poison gas and all kinds of shit they did.
There's this little town in northern France called Villers-Bretonne, where the Aussies were, I mean, you know, no one ever thinks about the Aussies and the New Zealanders and all those little countries who are fighting there as well.
But, of course, they had their own little plots that they had to fight.
And there was this big heroic stand against the Germans, which the Aussies were in charge of at Villers-Bretonne.
And still to this day, in the schools, in the elementary schools there, they sing the Australian national anthem.
They have little Australian flags flying and stuff because their fields are just littered with the bodies of Australians in northern France from the World War.
Look, he's not trying to take over the world, but it shows you how problematic personality can be when it comes to someone being chosen to be the leader.
Especially to this day.
In this day, rather.
We're so soft.
This is a day of food coming on these little styrofoam trays and being able to pull up to Wendy's and get a fucking cheeseburger in 15 seconds.
We're so weak.
And it's so easy to exist that we're excited about this guy possibly, like, overturning the apple cart.
I feel like, you know, Bernie and Trump were the ways, in different ways, that people had, that people who've been shat on for a long time, white, working class dudes, mostly, I mean, when you look at the fact that incomes of middle America has been stagnating for the past 30 years, manufacturing has been in decline, there hasn't been a rise in working class incomes in America since the 80s.
He's real close to winning because I just don't know whether or not Hillary can hold up to scrutiny when you're talking about her being under two criminal investigations right now, right now, in the immediate future.
There's two criminal investigations going on.
They just gave immunity to the guy who set up that email server.
They just deported him.
They brought him over to America.
Extradited him.
What do they do?
What's that called?
They brought him over to America and gave him immunity.
Even if there was nothing, even if she wasn't doing anything wrong, the fact that she's so paranoid as to need to set that up because she's so terrified that someone's going to get access to her emails.
Yeah, probably not allowing any non-citizen Muslim into the United States is not only crazy, but incredibly dangerous.
Because I think that if we want to be able to conquer...
Islamism and jihadism and Islamist terrorism.
We've got to find a way of...
I mean, our best resources are moderate Muslims inside the United States, right, who have their ear to the ground, who will notice mosques that might be becoming radicalised.
You want to appear to be a friendly, tolerant democracy, and of course you want to put in place all the security precautions that are necessary, and you don't want to just be allowing millions of unscreened people to come pouring in the way that they have in Europe.
But we don't have that problem here because we've got oceans between us, so we can pick and choose who comes in.
Well, that's also why it gets really weird when you start talking about the CIA and the CIA infiltrating different organisations, It's like, that's where you kind of support it.
You kind of support clandestine behavior and sneakiness and deception because they're pretty good at it.
They've been doing it for a long time and they know how to get deep into organizations.
I don't think it would be a good investment of money.
I think it's silly.
I think it's a distraction.
If you talk to technology experts, they say that there are much better ways of securing the border than with a physical wall.
You can have drones and things, and you can have all kinds of crazy shit.
But, because people will dig under a wall, or they'll climb over a wall.
It's not nearly as sophisticated as the kind of technology that you could use.
But I don't think there's anything inherently bigoted about it.
I think deporting every single person who's here illegally is an overreaction.
Have you seen the stats about how many 747s full of people you would need to get all 11 million undocumented people in America out within the two years?
But we have this quite controversial and pretty inhumane but I suppose defensible policy which is if you pay a people smuggler to make your way all the way from Afghanistan or Iran or wherever it is you're coming from or Syria and you pass through a bazillion other different countries through Malaysia, through Singapore, you make your way down to Indonesia and you're rich enough to get on a boat that then comes to Australia you will never be settled in Australia.
You'll be intercepted, and you'll be sent to one of a couple of Pacific Island nations.
There's a place called Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, I believe.
There's another place called Nauru, which is a country in its own right.
And they have set up these big detention centers there, and people can end up there for years or even decades while their cases get hurt.
It's really barbaric.
People sew their fucking lips together in protest.
One guy just set himself on fire in front of United Nations inspectors who were there.
It's really not pretty stuff.
But the government says...
Listen, we used to have, under the previous government which relaxed these policies, 50,000 people died at sea trying to get to Australia in boats, including women and children.
Now, almost nobody tries to come to Australia by boat anymore because they know they're never going to settle.
So what do you prefer?
A few hundred people basically being stuck in indefinite detention on some shitty Pacific island, or 50,000 people dying at sea trying to get here because they think they're going to be resettled?
I feel like this just comes from what you're used to.
I reckon because you grew up in the Northeast, you're not as scared of the cold.
I find...
Like, when I first moved to New York, I remember saying to people back in Australia...
Why is there even a city here?
Why did anyone ever come across the ocean and build a fucking city here where it's literally so cold that a dog's piss on the sidewalk will turn into ice?
It's like I'm in the TV show The Dome and it's just a giant freezer because I'd never had the conception of actually being sub-freezing.
Like, shit is just freezing.
You should not be living anywhere where if you fell over drunk at night and hit your head, you would be dead by the morning.
You can not only go places when it's sub-freezing.
I have been swimming.
My sister-in-law is Finnish, and in Finland, they go in the saunas, and then they go out and swim in lakes in the middle of nowhere when it is minus 22 degrees.
I've been swimming in a lake when it's minus 22 degrees.
She was talking about cold shock therapy, cold shock proteins, and heat shock proteins, and that there's different proteins that we produce in the sauna, and the sauna is really beneficial for hormone production, for sleep, melatonin production, all sorts of different things.
I think it's melatonin.
Might not have been.
But all sorts of growth hormone, for sure.
That was one of them.
But things that rejuvenate the body, produced by these heat shock proteins.
So there was this white privilege conference, which was a kind of politically correct talkfest, right?
And it basically ended up consuming itself entirely because the people who were attending it decided that the conference itself had become too white.
So they were all there.
So they had this hashtag, white privilege conference, so white.
WPC, so white.
And it started after one of the speakers there, who was a white historian, went over time, and an Asian-American attendee, a woman, tweeted out, great keynote, but going over time allotted is another example of white supremacy.
Hashtag white privilege conference so white.
And he also made the mistake of using the N-word in his speech.
I mean, he obviously was using it in a historical context because he was talking about race in America.
But once that happened...
I mean, what could possibly go wrong using the N-word at a conference about white guilt, right?
Then everyone starts tweeting...
N-word, never acceptable, from hashtag white folks lips, deeply offensive and traumatising, hashtag white privilege conference so white.
And that was from a white tweeter.
So then it's like a snake eating its fucking tail, right?
All these white people just accusing one another of being too white.
It's like by saying that the word is, it's never acceptable to say the N-word, by saying that and putting that in a tweet, That's not true.
It's just not true.
Like, if there's a reason to say it, if you're explaining something that happened, what someone said, how they said it, you are allowed to repeat the word.
The idea that you're not allowed to repeat the word around grown adults is to pretend that word is magic.
In fact, I feel stupid for even having used the phrase, the N-word, because ordinarily I just say nigger if I'm talking about the existence of that word.
But hey, I'm Australian, so I don't understand context, right?
But, I mean, I was talking about this on my podcast about I do think that we've gotten away from, like, where is the other person's heart and what is their intention?
So, like, if you ever use that word in anger at another person, I think you're a total cunt, and you should not do that.
I reckon if your people and your ancestors have been fucked over completely for 400 years, then it's a little bit rich when the people who belong to the ethnicity that's been fucking you over don't let you reclaim...
One of the things that I think is fascinating about Trump and really problematic is that human beings love to be united in tribes.
And not necessarily always good tribes.
We love to be united in tribes.
And whether it's tribes of people who use Mac over Windows, whether it's tribes of Android users, whether it's tribes of people from Wisconsin versus tribes from people from Texas, we love to be in a fucking collective group of people.
Even if it's not a good group, even if it's not good ideas.
And one of the things that I... Get disturbed about this Trump thing is how many annoying Goofy white dudes are really into him There's an anti-intellectual aspect, like a shut-down debate aspect about this.
I feel like there's a bunch of people supporting him because he's winning and they want to see him win and they want to get in on some of that winning.
There's a bunch of dumb white dudes that are hopping aboard that that are just letting you know he's winning, he's winning, Trump's winning.
I think it's partly exhaustion with the political correctness that we've just been talking about.
Absolutely.
And the fact that they feel like they can't say anything about the threat of Islamist terrorism or about the changing demographics of America.
Of course.
Or about illegal immigration without being branded as a bigot.
And I think it's also just what I was saying before about him seeming refreshing.
Like, it's the same back in Australia.
I was back in Australia about six weeks ago, and I was on a panel TV show there, and they were asking me about Trump.
Like, the audience asks questions and stuff.
And I was trying to explain it by reference to the fact that even in Australia, people don't feel like politicians are speaking their language like actual human beings and are...
I think it's like these pot dealers up in Northern California that secretly voted against marijuana legalization because they wanted to keep it illegal so they could make more money and they wouldn't have to turn in the taxes for them.
But, I mean, my point is simply that the Prime Minister of Australia currently favours gay marriage.
There's a majority in Parliament for it, and instead, because he had to do some shady backroom deal to get into power with his fellow party hacks...
They're not doing it.
Now there's going to be like a plebiscite, which is like a non-binding referendum about it or something.
And my only point was, it's so obvious that politicians are so full of shit and that they're beholden to people other than the people who elected them, that whether you're listening to Ted Cruz or Hillary Clinton, people just have a sense that they're being fed...
Did you hear Hillary talking about, after Trump accused her of playing the woman's card, she goes, you know, If it's playing the woman's card to believe in equal pay, then deal me in!
Isn't it convenient how her views on everything just happen to evolve at exactly the same point so that when 51% of the American population comes around to them, she has an awakening?
Who is trying to keep gay marriage illegal in Australia?
Because if there's all those people, you would think that if the majority of the people wanted it, if the Prime Minister wanted it, if all these people wanted it, who's working and what benefit is there of keeping it illegal?
But what's basically happened is that there is a rift within the Conservative Party between conservative conservatives and progressive and socially liberal conservatives.
So think about the Republican Party here where you've got like Christian evangelicals as a component of it, but you've also got the Rand Paul slash maybe Donald Trump kind of contingent people who don't really care what people do in the privacy of their own homes, but they're fiscally conservative.
Those people, that faction had previously nominated their leader to be the prime minister, and that was the prime minister.
He got stabbed in the back by one of his colleagues who's socially liberal, and the only way that he could get the support of the faction that he needed to become prime minister was by guaranteeing them that he wouldn't move too fast on gay marriage.
So it's a minority of a minority of like culturally conservative conservatives who represent rural districts with a bunch of farmers in them.
Man in famous Enumclaw horse sex faces new charges in Tennessee.
Oh, it's a different guy.
What year is this?
2009. It's after that guy was dead.
It says, okay, here it is.
A former Washington state man who was convicted of trespassing at an Enumclaw farm where a man was fatally injured while having sex with a horse in 2005, right, is accused of having sex with animals on a Tennessee farm.
So one of the same people that was in that group Well, yeah, what did they think he was going to do?
But it's like, I mean, I think it's like being gay or something.
I always get in trouble because when we talk about pedophilia and stuff like that, I sort of make the same analogy, which is I have...
I mean, whilst it's the worst conceivable thing that I can imagine anyone doing morally, I have some sympathy for people who are hardwired in such a way that they get a hard-on from infants or animals or something.
Right?
I mean, the reason I'm not a pedophile is not because I'm morally superior, it's because I've never been attracted to anyone who's not post-pubescent.
The problem becomes whether or not it's actually sexual or whether it's psychological, and if it's uniform.
Like, some people might be sexually attracted to children in some way that you could cure with chemical castration, whereas some of them might be psychologically attracted to the dominance and to, like, it's what they say about rape, right?
That rape isn't really about sex in a lot of the cases.
Obviously, in some cases, it's about sex.
But in some cases, it's not.
It's about power and dominance.
And how many people, it's not a sexual thing.
What if they wound up, because they couldn't get it up, they wound up just doing things to kids in a fucked up way because they wanted to control them and dominate them.
No, but I've spoken to experts about pedophilia who say, like, what you want to do, we're making a mistake at the moment by demonizing the condition rather than demonizing the act, right?
So what you want to do is set up a scenario in which it's possible for a 15-year-old kid...
Who realizes that he's attracted to infants to go to a psychiatrist and get help and talk about his options without feeling like he is a total monster just because he's having those feelings.
It's hard for us to think that way because if he acted on those feelings, he would be a monster.
But you want him to be able to avail himself of whatever kind of medical treatment is possible.
Available rather than just going out and hiding in the shadows and committing monstrous acts.
and in this gigantic, broad variance of human beings, every now and then, one pressure cooker spits out a dude who likes to get fucked by horses. - But what I mean, yeah, I totally take that, But what I mean is I'm amazed at the people who can translate their latent mental desires into actual real-world experiences, whether that's climbing Mount Everest.
I mean, there's all kinds of things I'd like to do.
Joe's eyes are just getting real wide as he looks at something on his laptop.
Yeah, there's other options, but I mean, listen, my point of view is that this guy, in getting fucked to death by a horse, created this video, and this video has provided me with hundreds of hours of entertainment that I would have never gotten without this guy dying.
Did you hear that Oklahoma has had to change their...
I was just looking this up when we were talking about pedophilia, that there was a rape case in...
This is not something to laugh about, but it is interesting about how we define rape, where a 17-year-old kid, this was last month, and a 16-year-old, he made her...
She was really drunk.
They'd been drinking in a park with some friends.
He gave her a ride home.
She woke up, I think in the middle of the night, completely deliriously drunk, and her mother or grandmother took her to the hospital because she was so drunk.
She woke up in hospital.
First thing she kind of really remembered was the doctors asking her what kind of sexual activity had happened because they'd found some of the 17-year-old's DNA around her mouth and on her legs.
She said...
I've got no recollection.
They went to the guy and he said, yes, she wanted to give me a blowjob.
And she gave me a blowjob when she was blackout drunk.
So she charges him for rape, and the Oklahoma court found that it wasn't forcible rape.
So now they're having to change Oklahoma's laws, because the only thing that it would have been...
Like, it basically has to be forcible.
It's called forcible sodomy, right?
And the judge was saying if a victim is so intoxicated that they're completely unconscious, then it's not actually forcible, because they weren't forced to do it.
They didn't even know that they were or weren't doing it.
So it is entirely possible that this boy, who was only a few months older than her, didn't have the wherewithal to understand that she was compromised to the point where she couldn't consent.
So they're both drunk.
That gets real weird.
It gets real weird.
And we don't know exactly what words were exchanged, what actually did happen, what the history of these two together was like.
There was a big thing that feminists were trying to push for a while, and they kind of abandoned it because they realized that it literally makes 90% of the population a rapist.
And they were saying, you shouldn't have sex even with your husband.
If your husband is drunk and you're sober, don't have sex with him.
That sex with a drunk person is rape, because they cannot consent.
Well, then you might as well just, as you say, make every single activity that you do while drunk But the real problem becomes it becomes an attack on men because it's very, very rare that any woman ever gets in trouble for having sex with a man that's drunk.
But women and men have both been drunk and the men have been accused of being rapist whereas the woman wasn't.
It frustrates me so much because this is one of those areas where, like Islam or like political correctness or like Black Lives Matter, I feel like the moment you try to introduce nuance, you can be very quickly taken out of context and accused of being pro that thing.
You know, because I'll say something like this, and then supporters of mine on Twitter will be like, yeah, like, fuck her, or like, you know, let's rape.
And I'll be like, no, that is not what I'm saying whatsoever.
That's why it's horrific that they could take what you're doing right now and take it and make a little YouTube clip out of it, take that clip and put a title on it.
Yeah, if I were to say, for example, that preying upon somebody, preying upon a woman with a knife and forcing her against her will to have sex with you is a worse class of behavior than coming in your unconscious girlfriend's mouth...
Right.
Have we gotten to a stage where it's just not possible to even talk about that because we just have to keep mouthing the slogan of sexual violence is unacceptable all the time, therefore there's no way of even distinguishing in the law between different levels.
A 17-year-old boyfriend who makes a mistake should go to jail for just the same length of time as a repeat serial predator who preys upon...
Well, we don't want to admit that there is any difference and that all these things are exactly the same and one of the reasons why is because what you just said just in introducing it as a possibility like there might be a variation there might be There there might be a grade of like this is a level 10 rape But this is a level 9 rape this level 8 like whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa as soon as you start getting into that it's almost like you're a rape apologist or you're a rape supporter or a
We want to be able to boil things into a fucking headline.
A clickbait headline and spit it out there.
Here's my thoughts on rape.
You know, and that's why the idea of everyone who's drunk is getting raped is so ridiculous.
And they were making the point that when every act of sexual violence gets labeled with, I am a survivor of sexual violence, even if that was just unwanted touching on the subway...
Then, like, what does it mean to be – what do you mean you survived it?
Were you ever going to die because someone, like, slapped you on the ass in the workplace?
Not to say that it's okay to do that, but, again, you're just compressing all of the actual, real, horrifying survival stories down to the level of, oh, someone looked at me funny and called me toots.
of the things that people don't understand it might be in an area of africa but africa itself is fucking huge yes and there's a conference with all of the people who are there we go time magazine africa could be extinct within 20 years if poaching maybe because all of the uh there's a conference of african leaders at the moment going on to figure out how they can uh they can tackle poaching wow But Africa's a continent.
That whole African hunting thing, I tell people, if you think it's bizarre, from a cursory glance, you gotta look at Louis Theroux's documentary about these African hunting camps.
And when he was saying that, you really kind of get it.
I hate that term poacher too.
Poacher is a dark term because a lot of those people that are poaching are just fucking starving.
They're poor as fuck.
We have this idea that these are like these mercenaries that come over to steal ivory so they can make money off of it.
There's a lot of people that are killing these animals that almost have no way out.
There's nothing there for them.
They don't know any better.
They're not educated.
They're just starving.
And someone says, hey, you give me that rhino horn, I'll give you 500 bucks.
And they're like, holy shit, 500 bucks.
And they'll kill as many rhinos as they can before they get killed.
It's so dark.
I have a friend who went over there.
He went over there to Africa.
And he said he was on this hunting safari where they have these enormous places where they have these hunting camps where it's a 10-hour drive to the other side of the ranch.
I mean, it's enormous, enormous territory.
And while they were there, they encountered these Quote-unquote poachers.
And he said the people from the honey cam just shoot at the poachers.
And as our lives get better and better, we fail to accurately calibrate any benchmark.
It's like there was a study that came out that 47% of Americans could not come up with $400 if they needed to, if they suddenly got an unexpected bill.
Almost half of Americans, in other words, are right on the brink of the poverty line.
But in terms of just being able to come up with cash.
But how do we get ourselves into that scenario?
We fail to recognize how prosperous we are.
I mean, most of the people who are listening to this podcast are in the top 5% of income earners globally.
But I think that's also probably one of the reasons why you became ambitious and why you worked hard and why you're in a position right now where you don't have to worry about that.
And when I started looking into it, one of the things that I was intrigued by was like, okay, How much of crime and how much of people's aberrant behavior could be...
You could write it off to them being desperate and needy and poor and feeling hopeless.
And how much of that crime would not take place if they got $35,000 a year?
And if these are people that are just gonna fuck off anyway, but this way they're gonna fuck off but they won't be committing crime because they're gonna have a steady income for the rest of their life.
Is that feasible?
How much money is there out there?
Could you give everybody in America $35,000 a year?
Up to a certain number, right?
I think once you hit a cutoff, you hit, I would say, a quarter million dollars a year.
He was basically saying there's a jurisdiction in, I think, Finland or Sweden which is actually trying this out just to test the proposition of how much less will people actually work if everyone gets a basic income.
How much of a deterrent will it be from bothering to get a job?
Well, 35,000 times 300 million The it is the thing you would stop There are a lot of savings, right?
So the weird thing about this idea is that libertarians like it as well as progressives, because for libertarians, this is a way of getting rid of Social Security, getting rid of Medicare, getting rid of food stamps, getting rid of all of these different programs, and streamlining everything.
I mean, think of how hard it is to do your taxes and to fill in the forms and to figure out what you're supposed to get.
be a check from the government, everybody gets it, no questions asked, you go out and you buy what you need to buy.
Now, with healthcare as expensive as it is in the United States, that's not going to work for old people.
They're not going to be able to pay for healthcare and health insurance and also social security and also survive on $35,000 a year.
But just thinking in terms of the budget, if you got rid of those massive line items in the budget, Medicare and social security and so on, then you would be able to start to think about affording things like that.
So you might start with just $10,000 a year for everybody.
And work your way up from there and just test it.
I think one of the states should start to do it on a more aggressive level.
Just like Colorado's going to be playing around with universal healthcare at the November election.
And so what happens when you've got Silicon Valley and Hollywood pumping out huge amounts of stuff, which give us a massive GDP, a larger GDP, where growth is still happening, but it takes fewer and fewer people?
I mean, Uber is a transportation company that doesn't employ anybody.
That gets really problematic when you deal with the actual labor laws.
But that's one particular scenario.
I think one thing that's happening that's interesting is that people are gravitating more towards craftsmanship and crafts, and people are gravitating towards handmade things, and they're gravitating towards things that actually have...
Like, if somebody...
Like, if I go to a store and I buy a knife, okay?
I buy a kitchen knife.
You know, it's nice.
It cuts my vegetables.
But if I know a guy who's a blacksmith, and he actually makes a knife, and he does all this craftsmanship and puts together the handle, and that to me is like, there's a feeling that you get from this object when you're using it.
Like, this is someone's craftsmanship.
This is someone's creation.
Someone learned a trade.
They learned the art form of making a functional piece of kitchenware.
And I'm Yeah, but speaking of the 47% of people who can't come up with $400, I mean, you can afford to care about such things, but the majority of people are just going to buy a pack of steak knives for $14.99 at Walmart, right?
But I think it's becoming, for the people that are looking for something to do, that has meaning in their life, there's extreme meaning in hand-produced things.
When you buy something from someone, like a piece of office furniture, and you know this guy made it.
And then in terms of the question of whether or not people can afford to buy such things, maybe the universal basic income means that we don't necessarily have to all be buying those things because the people who make them are going to be getting the universal income.
This is the theory, which is that...
If the overall pie is bigger every year, then you just have to figure out how to tax that pie.
Maybe that means that you have to have super huge taxes on Silicon Valley in some way in order to fund the universal basic income.
But if there aren't enough people being employed to fund what the government needs to do on the basis of a conventional income tax, but there's more stuff being produced going around, there's more wealth, you should still be able to extract that wealth somehow, and maybe people can...
If everyone got a universal basic income, people can become a poet or an artisanal knife maker or a table maker and they don't need to necessarily be able to sustain their living doing that.
I was making fun of Eddie talking about it, but then I thought about it for quite a while afterwards, and then I started reading some things on it that sort of reinforced these new ideas that I was starting to play around with.
And one of the things that I was thinking is, how much of what people do that's fucked up, they're doing out of desperation or out of...
Frustration.
And how much could that be eliminated?
And how much would that change society?
And are ambitious people just...
I mean, you're not talking about anything where you could fucking go balling on.
35 grand a year or 12 grand a year.
Whatever you give them.
12 grand a year.
Let's say that.
You're barely going to live off that.
But you have enough money for food.
You have enough money for food.
Hopefully you got enough money for rent.
If you get some part-time jobs here or there, hopefully you can survive.
But you're less desperate and more dependent upon society.
Well, I mean, to see what countries look like when that sort of thing happens, even though it's not a perfect analogy, just look at the countries of Northern Europe, or even, you were talking about Melbourne, you know, a country like Australia, where it's by no means perfect, there are still poor people, but gee, the levels of poverty are a lot less than they are here, and the number of people in grinding abject absolute poverty is almost non-existent in comparison to the way that you see it here in the States, because we have social safety nets that are just much more robust.
But you could certainly imagine a system in which it was a lot easier for people to – where you just didn't have entrenched levels of grinding poverty.
To stop children from growing up in an environment.
I have this guy on, Michael Wood.
I've got to get back to him this week because we're working on a new date.
But he was a Baltimore police officer.
And he talked...
In great detail about real institutional racism in Baltimore, where they, you know, they had literally areas where you couldn't sell black people homes.
And this had been established like in the 1960s.
And because of that, those areas are still fucked.
Those areas, like, they're still to this day.
He found something from the 1970s.
The police officers in his district did, where it was like a mandate, like what they were supposed to do and where the crime was, and he's like, it was exactly the same places, exactly the same crimes as they were dealing with in the 2000s.
That you're dealing with this pattern that never gets fixed, never gets corrected, and just, they just, cops keep arresting the same people in the same areas for the same problems, and it's like, You know, they've done studies about what the most effective way to help poor people is, because oftentimes people on the left will be in favour of food stamps or better public schools and so on.
All of those things are great.
But a lot of recent research suggests that just giving people money...
Is more effective than trying to figure out all of these tweaks.
Because we don't like giving poor people money because we think, well, they're just going to spend it on drugs or they're going to spend it on booze or something like that.
Yeah, and it's also this absolute realization that this is not a level playing field, and that someone born in the slums of Inglewood is not the same as someone who was born in Beverly Hills.
It's so fucking crazy about libertarians when they go on about how everyone should be free.
Yeah, of course everyone should be free.
I am as libertarian as you can get.
Within the understanding that it's crazy to say that the person who's born in Beverly Hills to a white, middle-class, upper-class family is only as free as the baby born in the slums of Baltimore.
This is crazy.
Of course you should use, I think, the power of the state to be able to level the playing field a little bit, just to skim a little bit off the Beverly Hills family and give a little bit to the Baltimore family.
I'll tell you what we don't spend a lot of money on.
We don't spend a lot of money on bureaucracy and waste.
People who want to cut government spending will often say, first thing I'm going to do when I get to Congress is I'm going to not repaint my congressional office or something.
I'm going to throw out the fancy stuff and I'm going to get an old couch.
This is not what we're spending our money on.
What we're spending our money on is the military.
And Medicare and Social Security, basically.
So, rein in healthcare costs and cut the military, and that's where the big meat is.
I've been having a Twitter argument with a person who's been saying that the reason why America's roads are so bad is because we spend too much on foreign aid.
Here's a reform which you could support, which would really help you figure out where the money goes.
When you get your tax bill at the end of the year, your tax statement from the IRS, they could, as they do in Australia and a bunch of other countries, have a little bar graph, a colourful little graph with lines showing how much you've spent on everything.
So in Australia, if you paid $18,000 in tax that year, then there'll be a little purple line on the graph which says, you know, you spent $4,782.16 on Medicare, spent this much on security, spent this much on foreign aid, and then you can actually see it there.
There's a proposal in front of Congress, which some Democrats are pushing, to bring this in here and also to streamline the way that you do your taxes, because in a lot of other countries, apart from the States, you don't have to go through the rigmarole of filling out all of your taxes.
Because when you do a job and you have to supply the IRS with a 1099 or a W-2 at the end of the year...
Remember that the person who gave you the 1099 or the W-2 also sent a copy to the IRS. The IRS already has it.
They could just fill it out themselves.
Instead, they make you do it, and it's difficult and cumbersome.
But in a lot of other countries, like the UK and Australia, you have the option of just signing off on it and saying, yeah, okay, this looks good.
You can just do my taxes for me.
And the proposals to make to simplify doing your taxes are being pushed by Democrats.
And I find it wildly ironic that the people who oppose these policies are Republicans and Grover Norquist, the anti-tax crusader, who you would think would want to make it easier.
But it's in their interest to make taxes as difficult to do and as difficult to understand as possible because they want you to continue hating taxes as much as possible.
Also, the military industrial complex that the Republicans essentially work for don't want you to know how much we spend on the Pentagon.
So they oppose this bar graph idea because they know that the biggest line item would be this massive thing.
And you'd be like, do we really need to be spending that much on the military?
Or is this really a jobs program where we're building nuclear submarines that the Pentagon doesn't want in important districts in Delaware just so that we can keep some jobs there in a factory that's producing munitions that it no longer needs?
Well, I think one of the good things about someone proposing something like that is you get to look at who's opposing it.
And when someone's proposing something that makes sense, unless there's some sort of exorbitant fee that's involved in giving people a detailed rundown of where their money goes, then you would say, well, someone's against transparency.
And if you're against transparency, you're against freedom, you fuck.
You know, I said on my podcast the other day that people who vote for Hillary because she's a woman are only voting for her because she's got a vagina.
And someone on Twitter said that that was transphobic because there are women who don't have vaginas.
I also got into trouble on my podcast for talking about this.
So, I think it's obviously a silly beat-up and I think that trans people have been and will continue to use bathrooms and we shouldn't worry about it and I don't think that people should be passing laws against it.
But...
I also think it's disingenuous of pro-trans people, and I regard myself as broadly pro-trans, just in the same sense that I'm broadly pro-hey, whatever floats your boat, just live the life that you want to live, whoever you are.
I do think it's disingenuous when they start saying that people who have the outward appearance of the gender that's on their birth certificate should be able to use the opposite restroom, and that nobody should have a problem with that because they declare themselves and that nobody should have a problem with that because they declare themselves So I'm talking, for example, about –
I saw a Facebook argument about this where a friend of a friend of mine on Facebook is a trans woman who was assigned male at birth and has no intention of transitioning at all, right?
So she has a beard.
She's a fat guy with a beard who plays guitar, and that's what all of her photos are, and she doesn't want to have her dick cut off, and she doesn't want to grow breasts, and she doesn't want to lose her beard.
And she's arguing that it's transphobic to say that she shouldn't be able to use the women's restroom...
And other people were saying, you can understand how, like, a parent might be concerned if their daughter went into the girl's restroom and then what appears to be a large, bearded, fat man walks in after her.
You know, that is not necessarily transphobic.
And then all of a sudden, she's like, how dare you say that?
There has not been a single instance of a trans person abusing...
This is just like the gay fear back in the 1970s.
You're claiming that trans people are more likely to be pedophiles.
It's people that are using this very ambiguous law.
I mean, this is a very ambiguous distinction.
If someone identifies with the opposite sex without having any outward appearance of being that opposite sex, all a guy would have to do is say, I'm trans, and you can go into a female restroom.
But again, it comes back to our conversation about rape or about Islam or about Black Lives Matter or whatever.
We're trying to have a nuanced conversation and it's impossible to have because all you're allowed to be is either pro-trans or you're a religious evangelical bigot, right?
We just have to hunker down, Joe, into our little trenches and have a war of attrition where I'm on one side and you're on the other side and the last man fucking stands.
It's like World War I. We're doing Passchendaele all over again, just firing at each other on Twitter.
Don't you think this is a direct result of the Bush administration, like we were talking about?
I really do think that that's what it is.
I think everybody was so scared and conservatism was at such a high point that the rebound from that, the rebound from all the anti-gay hysterica, I mean, that administration was ripe with homophobia, ripe with all sorts of different types of discrimination.
He was one of the first adopters, and he was like, it used to be this lake in the forest where you could run and jump and play, and now it's a fetid swamp with everyone pissing in the pool.
And also, he lives in a country, remember, where you can actually be prosecuted for saying things that people find offensive.
Like in the UK. Did you hear about the mealy-mouthed tweet, this guy?
So after the Brussels attack...
There was a guy, just a regular dude, who tweeted, I confronted a Muslim woman yesterday.
I asked her to explain Brussels.
She said, nothing to do with me.
A mealy-mouthed reply.
That caused a media storm because there were lots of funny reactions to that where people were like, I met an Irish person and asked him to explain the IRA. He said, nothing to do with me.
A mealy-mouthed reply.
I asked a dog why I was bitten by a dog when I was four.
He said, woof.
Mealy-mouthed reply.
But this guy was arrested.
He was arrested on suspicion of inciting racial hatred.
He was like, in response to people getting angry with him, he was like, Oh, so I offended a towelhead?
Big deal.
So, you know, he's not maybe the nicest guy in the world, but when you live in a country with a First Amendment, it's pretty fucking crazy that a person can say something, can tweet something like that, and then get arrested.
There was one comedian in Montreal that made a joke about some kid that was dying, and the kid survived, and all these people had donated money, apparently.
So he made some joke about, you know...
How the fuck is this kid still alive?
Something along those lines.
And he's just trying to be funny.
And he's been fighting it in court.
And they're trying to put him in jail.
And there's the other kid in Vancouver, the guy who was on stage.
And some women were heckling.
And he said something about them being ugly lesbians and some mean shit to them.
He got sued.
Lost.
I mean, they're heckling at a comedy club.
And what he said, whether it was...
It's not like someone just yelling something to someone out randomly.
This is someone trying to handle a heckler ad-libbing in a comedy club with a bunch of drunk people and these hecklers who had been fucking up the show up until the time he got there.
So he's trying to wreck them and make them feel bad.
I gotta tell you, I haven't seen anything that bad in Australia, but it is also bad in Australia in terms of, like, what frustrates me the most is that people from certain ethnic groups or religions...
A claiming that you can be, you can blaspheme, you can, what do you call it when you defame, right, you can defame like a religion or an ethnicity.
You can soak the film with sunscreen and protect yourself without worrying about sweat or water washing it away.
The researchers say they expect it can be used to treat eczema, psoriasis, and other skin conditions by covering dry, itchy patches with a film that moisturizes and soothes.
Its chains are not very strong, though, so the next step is applying a product that links them together.
By modifying the chemistry of the chains, the researchers can alter the properties of the second skin depending on how it will be used, making it more or less permeable.
For example, a more permeable second skin might be used for under eye bags where a less permeable one might hold a medication in place.
It can be removed with a solution that dissolves the polymer.
I mean, the fact that we've got enough money to be thinking about this, like, coming back to the question about, like, poaching elephants in Africa or me going to the Mumbai slum, like, what the fuck is the world on about?
When you talk about the inequality between Beverly Hills and Baltimore, what about the inequality between people who are inventing polymers so that we can spray them on our eye bags so that we look a little bit less old at the same time as there are people living on a penny a day in Mumbai?
It's nutty.
Like, if you were an alien and came down to the Earth right now, You'd be like, what are these guys doing?
And there's something that I was reading about today about a type of polymer that they've used on...
God, what was it on?
It was on certain...
Let me find the history here.
It was on certain...
Certain types of, uh, it's like a plastic that can spray on things, and when they spray the shit on things, it, um, it actually, uh, you could, you could throw, like, cinder blocks off of buildings and shit because of it.
Because this stuff, they put it on plates and they threw it off of buildings.
Like, look, they threw this.
This is on the History Channel.
They threw these cinder blocks off of a building.
And then they cover the cinder block with this paint.
And then they throw the same cinder block, same size cinder block, off a building that's covered in this protective coating, and watch what happens.
It just fucking bounces.
Now, they did it with eggs, man.
They did it with plates, they did it with eggs, and then on top of that, they did it with plastic cups, where they had a sumo wrestler stand on plastic cups.
Look at the egg.
So they're spraying the egg.
And by the way, this is like less than a quarter inch coating that they put on these eggs.
If that happens, then that's going to be a bigger game changer than all of the physiological things that we've been able to do in terms of the evolution since the Industrial Revolution.
It's going to be like an information revolution, and we're going to become cosmic gods.
In some sort of a weird way, I think it's inevitable.
Because I just think, as long as we don't blow ourselves up, or we get hit by a meteor, or a supervolcano wipes out the planet, I think it's inevitable.
We're going to continue, not we, not you and I, we're not going to do shit.
We're just going to be talking, but there's going to be other people out there that are really fucking smart, and they're going to come together with some other really smart people, and they're going to figure out some amazing things.
When people wonder about why we haven't found extraterrestrial civilizations yet, and we haven't heard their radio waves, I'm so hopeful that the reason is that we just evolved out of that.
We've only had them for less than 100 years, right?
We've only been pumping them out for 100 years.
Maybe we're just about to find something else and we'll realise that the universe is actually teeming with all these conversations between different civilisations that we are just completely oblivious to and they don't care about reaching out to us because we're just little ants on a little rock floating around a...
significant galaxy called the Milky Way and they're like some some these guys will grow up and they'll join the conversation when they're ready It's probably exactly what's going on or it gets to the point where it's no longer necessary because intelligence and artificial intelligence become exactly the same thing we create a different kind of life with technology and our pursuit like this fucking this
IBM machine that's beating people in that Go game, killing chess champions at their fucking preferred game, that one day it's going to reach some sort of a state where we have to accept it as a life form.
I was talking to someone who was saying that when we can grow artificial meat, because they're working on artificial meat in a lab, then will it be the case that the only ethical meat to eat that isn't artificial...
Would be human meat, because we're the only people capable of giving informed consent to have ourselves be eaten.
You mentioned the Go game, the computer that beats people at Go.
The thing that I find really fascinating about that is the computer that beats people at chess is basically just a brute number cruncher, right?
So Deep Blue and Deep Blue 1, whatever, was it Kasparov?
What that basically does is just looks at all of the different possible outcomes that you might be about to play and then rapidly calculates the probability that any particular move is going to yield a good result.
We can all imagine how that functions.
It's basically just lots and lots of numbers.
But go is so complicated.
There are so many different options at any particular point in the game that no computer can even remotely and probably ever will be able to calculate the game itself the way that the chess computer does.
There are more options, I think, in a game of Go than there are, like, atoms in the universe.
So, like, if there are two options, and then those two options each lead to another two options, which each lead to another two options, which each lead to another two options, very quickly you get up to numbers that are...
You know, it's like those thought experiments of how many times would you have to fold a piece of paper for it to reach the moon, and it's only, like, 30 or 40 times or something ridiculous like that, because it's doubling all the time.
Can you look that up, Jamie?
unidentified
How many times do you need to fold a piece of paper for it to reach to the moon?
So they load into it all of the Go games, like thousands or millions of games that have happened.
And it then looks at all of those games and tries to find patterns between the particular moves that humans have done in past games.
And then uses its own intuition to run...
Billions of possible games in its own head, and it gradually learns from its own mistakes.
So it's not just a computer.
It's not just like a gigantic calculator like the chess computer is.
It is a form of artificial intelligence in that it is making calculations.
I mean, obviously, it doesn't know anything, we don't think.
But for me, it's really super exciting because I do think that it's really interesting to ask the Turing test question of, like, when is a computer actually self-aware?
Right.
And this is the beginning glimmers of that.
I think within our lifetime there will be computers that it's just meaningless to say they're not self-aware because they claim to be self-aware.
They behave as if they're self-aware.
They tell us that they feel pain.
They tell us that they have an interest in their own continued existence in a way that's so authentic and that learns that.
To say that they're not self-aware, but like a chimp is, would be meaningless.
So the sort of the billionaire kind of leader, the Mark Zuckerberg type in that.
The way that he builds the artificial intelligence is by hoovering up all of your social media information from his kind of Facebook-style thing.
And I think you're right, that that could be one way of creating an artificial intelligence, to collect all of the communal inputs that we're putting in every single day on social media...
I was just going to say, there's a specific episode of that show, Black Mirror, I've been trying to tell you about, that deals with this exact topic, where there's some sort of Android-created thing, and they take this guy's whole social media presence, and that's his new being.