Josh Szeps joins Joe Rogan to dissect media controversies—Bill O’Reilly’s $1B+ Fox empire and Harvard ties, Tucker Carlson’s bow tie shift, and Rupert Murdoch’s abrupt firing—while critiquing Trump’s truth-bending presidency and its parallels to O’Reilly’s dismissive "tide" arguments. They debate biological determinism vs. social constructs in gender, race, and behavior, clashing over abortion legality (Rogan opposes post-viability; Szeps cites Singer’s extreme views) and media ethics, like Gawker’s outing of Peter Thiel or Assange’s uninvestigated DNC claims. Rogan mocks Trump’s foreign policy missteps—confusing Kim Jong-un with Jong-il, hesitating on the "mother of all bombs"—while Szeps warns about institutional decay under strongmen like Putin, whose authoritarianism thrives where checks fail. The episode ends questioning whether UBI could foster creativity or just chaos, and Rogan teases Szeps’s alien theories next. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, what he feels in his gut is more important than what the data tells him.
And I think he falls for a bunch of fallacies that a lot of people fall for, especially if they're religious.
Like, the idea that there is a certain order to the cosmos, and how could we all have come about...
How could this whole thing around us exist with all these butterflies and the moon and the tide comes in and the tide goes out and there's me and Joe, these spiritual creatures, these beings sitting opposite each other at a table in Los Angeles right now.
Some people just find that too inexplicable to explain without a deity.
So they're like, all right, there must have been a big guy who did it.
It's even dumber, in my opinion, to think that one dude engineered this whole fucking thing.
I mean, wouldn't you just think that, oh, wow, there's some crazy, super complex system that sort of works in some odd way where it balances itself out with predator and prey and food and water and fire and dirt and all this stuff together, and then you realize that it all has to form out of the actual...
The elements that come from an exploding star.
It's magnificent.
Just the actual, the full realm of things that they've absolutely proven to be true in terms of scientific discoveries about the universe and just the very elements that constitute human beings and everything you see, this table and laptops.
It's amazing.
The idea that one dude is sitting there up in his cloud with a robe on.
I mean, one of the things that's interesting is I think at any given point in time, people just assume that the universe was created by whatever thing happens to be around them.
He explained that when you talk about the universe being 14 billion years old, you're talking about the observable universe.
And he's like, the problem is...
Space moves faster than light the universe is moving faster than the speed of light so What we're seeing is what we can see from 14 billion years ago because but that doesn't mean that's all there is right he goes space itself Beyond branding, but what he's saying is space itself beyond that could be infinite.
It's just moving faster than we can see and You just broke my brain.
Yeah, exactly.
So what he was saying is like, when you're talking about the observable universe being, I think it's 13 point something billion years old, almost 14 billion years old, that's just how far back we can see.
He's like, but before that, like when you go back further, it's not that there's nothing there.
When people are science deniers, it's so frustrating because everything you use, everything you enjoy, everything in terms of medicine, technology, is based on the work of countless people who have worked generations after generations on the innovations of the past.
People before them invented some shit, they improved upon it, they figured out more, they studied the calculations of those people, they added to it, and then you get to 2017. So whenever someone steps in with an incredibly limited understanding of science or of what we're dealing with in terms of the universe itself and says, whoa, tide goes in, the tide goes out.
You can't explain it.
Like, you motherfucker, they've been explaining the tides forever.
Now, when you say highly intelligent, I think as soon as someone is religious in terms of, like, if you believe in preposterous notions, like there's a guy who came back to life, he turns water into wine, he walks on water, if you believe that, you're not intelligent.
You're just not.
I don't believe you're intelligent.
I think you are intelligent in individual disciplines, but obviously if you believe something that makes no sense whatsoever, you believe that someone was magic, someone defied physics, someone had superpowers, someone was a person who could bring people back to life, someone could come back to life themselves.
unidentified
There's no evidence that anybody like that has ever existed.
You are implying that the reason why Bill O'Reilly talks about tide goes in, tide goes out is because he's pandering to people because he's a Harvard guy and there's no way that he would be dumb enough to believe that.
No, I'm implying that because I looked at the way he said it and I know what he does and I think he's manipulative and I think what he's doing is playing to his base.
I think there's a lot of people out there that want to see some smug liberal atheist get taken down a notch and Bill's just the guy to do it and talk over him and he's a big giant guy so he can yell and get all aggressive.
These people find ways of compartmentalizing logic, I guess.
So, like...
As you say, they believe in something that is totally crazy.
I mean, the idea that you can say a certain number of Latin words over a cracker and it'll turn bodily into the flesh of someone who existed 2,000 years ago is crazy magic talk.
Well, it's crazy talk, but there are people that are religious that are extremely intelligent, and I agree with you on this, like Jordan Peterson.
Who's a brilliant man who is very religious in the sense that he studies religion and he believes there's some fundamental principles that are involved in religion that are inexorable to the human condition.
And I think he thinks they're important to our society and to civility and ethics and morals.
I don't think he believes people walked on water.
I don't think he believes someone came back from the dead.
I don't think he believes this stupid shit.
And I don't think the stupid shit is even the original story.
The huge problem with religion is translation over time.
That's one of the biggest problems.
The oldest version of the Bible that we know of is the Dead Sea Scrolls.
They don't even use that because it's so fucking crazy.
If you listen to some of the translations of the Dead Sea Scrolls or you read some of it, it is unbelievably crazy.
I mean, it sounds like science fiction stuff.
And...
If you go back to that version of it, I mean, you're talking about stuff that was written on animal skins.
They did DNA tests to make sure that the pieces that they got...
You know the whole story behind the Dead Sea Scrolls?
I think what we do too much of is confusing two questions, one of which is, is there a God, without defining what God is, and the other of which is, is there any reason to believe in a particular faith or a particular denomination, to be a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew or whatever?
Well, we know historical records, we know the stories of people from back then, but the idea that this one guy did things that no human being could ever do today, defied logic, physics, the laws of nature, the laws of life and death, all the different reality...
The realities that we accept today in terms of what's provable, what we know about biological life, all that stuff was violated by this one guy.
But it's not even a 50-50 shot is what I'm saying.
It's not like...
Like, Bertrand Russell kind of demolished this idea with his teapot analogy where he said, like, okay, I'm going to claim that there's a teapot circling in orbit between the Earth and the Moon.
And now if you deny that, then, hey, it's just a 50-50 shot.
Maybe it's there, maybe it's not there.
Who's to say?
Obviously, you would say, no, I think it's not there, because if there's no evidence that it's there, I'm not just going to believe you because you say it.
And similarly, if you say, oh, this guy Jesus, 2,000 years ago, he turned water into wine, he walked on water, and then he was the son of God, and that God requires you to believe on him, otherwise you're going to go to hell forever, and you say, why should I believe that?
And they can't turn around and say, hey, it's a 50-50 shot.
It's not a 50-50 shot.
There are good reasons for believing things and bad reasons for believing things.
And religion almost always only offers bad reasons for believing in it.
It just means that it's super likely that if there is something that's unbelievably powerful and there's some law that keeps the universe together and some force of good that's trying to guide us, there's some beautiful inclinations towards that direction.
What I'm saying is, I guarantee you that the people who lived 2,000 years ago who wrote this shit down on leather with ink that they made out of plants, they didn't have all the data.
It's probably not even the number 72. It's just like our translation from Arabic to English just screws it up and then someone probably came up with this numerical value a long time ago and they stuck with 72. So believe in science, people.
Because, first of all, you don't know those people.
You'd have to know those people.
You'd have to really know if they were honest.
You'd have to really be there.
To know what really happened is so fucking hard, man.
Because first of all, people, not only are they full of shit, but their memory sucks.
People's memories.
I'm sure you've had a conversation with someone about something that happened that you witnessed as well, and you both have totally different memories of it.
Yeah, the justice system is starting to deprioritize it as well, as it should do, because in the past, eyewitness accounts in courtrooms have been very highly prioritized.
They've been very highly valued and prized by prosecutors.
Well, I mean, this person points out, do you see that person sitting in the courtroom today, madam?
And she points to her finger and, well, it's a slam dunk.
Of course, that was the perpetrator.
Now we realize our memories are terrible.
People are wrong all the time.
We're really susceptible to suggestion and influence and all that sort of stuff.
But I think you kind of remember whether or not your boss, who's a television star, put his hand up your skirt.
But there's also someone who could be seriously deceptive and very ambitious and realizes that Bill O'Reilly's kind of a twat and this is what I'm going to do.
I'm going to get close to this old cunt and I'm going to get this guy to get creepy with me and then I'm going to exaggerate what he did and I'm going to profit off of it.
I mean, you understand that they've paid fucking millions of dollars to people, so there's a real industry in getting Bill O'Reilly to get creepy with you.
Like, if I was a chick, like, especially if I was, like, a really unscrupulous chick, and I didn't like him.
I'm just gonna, like, kind of give him, like, a semi-green light, you know, just a little bit, take it back, a little I mean, the problem is, though, that this kind of skepticism towards women's stories about sexual assault is what has permitted people like him to get away with it for decades and centuries, right?
Maybe I think the repercussions that he's gonna ruin your career that he's gonna that he has influence and also that if you just play ball You'll get something from it, you know, yeah, I mean I'm not Especially I'm not talking about an individual person and saying this individual person is not telling truth.
What I'm doing is just making hypotheticals I'm just saying if I was a chick And I was an unscrupulous sort of social climber, and we all know that they exist.
And I was the type of person that really wanted to make it in this business.
And I was like, look, I'm working for an asshole.
And I already know there's five chicks who got paid.
There was that classic Jon Stewart moment when he used to host Crossfire, Chuck Tucker Carlson, and Jon went on and he was like, you're a grown man wearing a bow tie, stop hurting America.
Whatever you think about whether or not Bill O'Reilly believes what he believes, I don't think Tucker knows.
Like, Tucker has this constant...
He has this...
If you're listening to the audio podcast, you can't see my face, but it's kind of furrowed brow and, like, mouth-breathing, kind of like...
He plays the role of, like, the bemused clown who's just, I'm just a common man from, I'm just middle America, I don't understand what you're talking about.
You know, I would assume that a lot of these women are telling the truth.
I'm definitely not saying that they weren't telling the truth.
What I'm saying is, I don't know.
I don't know what happened or what didn't happen.
I don't know whether he should be fired or shouldn't be fired.
I mean, he fills a niche, right?
And if it's my company and you have to worry about this guy representing you, okay, I see where you wouldn't want that guy representing you because he's problematic and people think he's a creep.
But he could just go do his own shit like Glenn Beck did.
I mean, it's an interesting question about what happens to the right-wing media now, because if Roger Ailes is no longer at Fox News, and Bill O'Reilly is no longer at Fox News...
I saw a story the other day about a county in Pennsylvania or something which had voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump because they thought they were going to get change.
And they're all just like, well, he just seems like a regular Republican.
He's going to try to cut taxes for the rich and go to war with foreign countries.
This isn't what we bargained for.
But it'll be interesting to see whether or not they flip back in four years.
You know, questioning whether or not Bill O'Reilly's intelligent, or whether or not he really believes that, or whether or not religious people are actually intelligent.
You know, clearly, there's a lot of religious people that are intelligent.
I mean, part of the problem is that people give too much of a crap about things that people have said in the past.
I mean, we've spoken about this before in relation to political correctness or something, or like using the wrong language.
I think as more and more of what we say gets intercepted, or at least interceptable, in emails and also in phone calls and so on, and we're being spied on all the time, and things can be leaked and things can be hacked, people are just going to have to chill the fuck out a little bit about people's past.
Otherwise, we're only going to end up with the most boring, anodyne people in positions of power.
Because it's only going to be people who've always watched exactly what they say, who have never triggered a tripwire and who have never gotten people angry.
So when people are saying, you know, he's doing sexual assault, no.
He's talking about girls that are enthralled with the fact that they're around this guy who has his fucking name on skyscrapers and he flies around with a jet with his name on it.
And if you're that type of woman, and there are that, look, there's that type of men, there's that type of women.
This is not a gross generalization about men or women, but guaranteed there are some women that when they're in the face of a guy like Donald Trump, they react that way and they let him do anything they want and they love it.
I also thought that the phrasing of that term was kind of funny.
Like, they let you grab them.
Like, how do you grab a pussy?
Where do your fingers go?
Where does the thumb...
Who's doing...
What it sounded to me like was someone who is inept sexually, which by many accounts he is.
There are lots of accounts of when he was married to or dating the most beautiful people, he'd be downstairs eating Cheetos, watching late night cable news while they were upstairs.
Well, just compare it to whether or not it comports with what else you know about him, which is that he's very image...
Focused and cares a lot about being thought to be the best at everything and the most glamorous and the richest So it's you would imagine that it would be consistent with his personality that he would want to present a front of being more of a Slayer and more of a sexual demon than he actually is sexual demons Great name sexual demon So the grab-em-by-the-pussy, it sort of reminded me a little bit of the way that 15-year-old boys would talk to each other.
And part of his rise, part of the backlash, is a backlash against the, you know, we've had so many conversations that we all know it by now, we're bored of like...
People who absolutely lose their, you know, just go crazy because you use the wrong transgender pronoun or something like that.
You know, you say he instead of she or whatever it is.
Or microaggressions and stuff like that.
All of that kind of bullshit, I think, gave rise to an environment in which people were so frustrated with political correctness that they unleashed and it was like a pressure cooker exploding and the Trump hair went everywhere.
He's the Kraken.
Yeah.
Exactly, but I don't think, you know, things would have been better if we hadn't gotten to that place and we could all just take a chill pill.
Well, I think we need to learn, you know, and I think we need to make mistakes so that we can learn.
One of the things that's really unfortunate is that he doesn't tell the truth and that he's the president and he shows that you can just not tell the truth and be the president.
I mean, I'm trying to grapple with this on my podcast, because I think what's dangerous about Trump is not just that he doesn't tell the truth, because as lots of people point out, many politicians don't tell the truth.
He doesn't even care that he's not telling the truth, and he doesn't behave as if there is such a thing really as truth.
Like the other day, he talked about the warships that were heading for the Korean Peninsula.
Did you see this story?
He said that we've got this aircraft carrier which is going towards Korea.
It was going in the opposite direction to Australia to not attack Australia, but do a military exercise with the Aussies.
And then Sean Spicer got – you know, the press corps went crazy and the White House Correspondents, and Sean Spicer was like, well, he was saying that it had been heading – it was going to be going to the Korean Peninsula, but it was just on a detour.
So he wasn't saying the actual direction of the aircraft carrier.
He was saying that it was – he was talking about the overall strategy of what – and like poor old Spicer is out there trying to make Trump's statements comport with something – with reality in some way.
But Trump is just an explosive like vomit machine just tweeting out stuff that doesn't even have to map onto reality at all.
And he almost seems to take pride, I think, in the fact that he can say, whatever, whatever.
So he's acting as a politician for the first time in his life and he's 70. So for his entire life he's been this braggadocious guy who has exaggerated facts and built up this amazing persona and exaggerated wealth and he's obviously very successful but exaggerates that success.
So like the thing about him winning the inauguration, you remember that really interesting exchange that he had with a reporter?
There was a young reporter and he was up there saying, we won by the largest margin ever.
You know, it's just, he's not a politician, and that's what people like about him.
You know, but then he starts doing all these different things, like, you know, he's trying to get all these different plants to reopen and give Americans jobs, and they talk about all the jobs that have been created, and people get excited, and they signed this new thing yesterday, you know, American-made, American sales, and trying to encourage people to buy and make American, and And then trying to get rid of foreigners that are sneaking over here and doing bad things.
The base, the people that have been clamoring for that kind of response get very excited.
Yeah, and I think that there's a feeling that the whole people who regard themselves as being custodians of the truth are hoity-toity, out-of-touch elites who've been shitting on the honest, hard-working Trump supporter for so long that they deserve to be slapped in their face with a little bit of...
Untruthful truthiness from time to time.
You know, the journalists and the judges and the academics.
I mean, when you say, though, that Trump is, like, he's not a politician and that's what people like about him.
Yeah.
The worry is that when you're President of the United States, shit you say has...
An impact.
It is an important position.
So things that you say can be misinterpreted by the Koreans or the Russians.
And there's a...
Like, if you are the president, you should know that people in the executive branch, such as the president, people in the White House, should not disparage people in the judicial branch.
Right?
Because we have a separation of powers in the United States of America.
So when he made those comments, for example, about the judiciary, I think a lot of people think like, oh, why is everyone getting their tits in a tangle about just because he said that the judge was, you know, implied that the judge was biased in the Trump University case.
dates shouldn't be shitting on judges.
Right.
Because otherwise you end up with situations like you've got in Venezuela or now in Turkey.
They've just had this referendum over the past weekend, which gave sort of quasi-dictatorial powers to Turkey's president.
And look, Russia has done that over the past 10 or 15 years.
Pretty close.
Russia has done that over the past 10 or 15 years.
And when you listen to people who are experts in these things, they always say, I was just listening to Marsha Gessen, who's really, do you know Marsha?
And when you listen to people who are experts in these things, they always say, I was just listening to Marsha Gessen, who's really, do you know Marsha?
She's a Russian journalist who lives in the States now.
She's a Russian journalist who lives in the States now.
Fascinating person.
Fascinating person.
She'd be a good person to get on the show.
And she was saying that the things that nascent dictators always like to do is take down a peg people who rely on facts for their living.
So that's journalists, it's people in the judicial department, and it's academics.
So it's judges, lawyers, academics, and so on.
That's always what you see, like the Putins, and again, the sort of Bill O'Reilly mindset of like, tide goes in, tide goes out.
Hey, I'm just a regular guy.
I've got my gut going for me.
I don't need all these fancy book learning.
It's just you and me.
Let's go to Washington, D.C., and take it back from those fancy elites.
Most countries, if you move to that country and you become a citizen and you live there for a certain period of time, sure, you can run for the highest office.
I have a couple that lives down the street from me.
They're a gay couple.
And I've known them for probably about 15 years.
And they have a child, and I watched this kid grow.
They went through the whole thing.
And they went through the whole thing.
Their kid's friends with my kid, and has been since it was a baby.
And he's about...
Seven or eight now, and they went through the whole thing where they had a surrogate, the whole deal, and then at the end of it, she's like, I'm keeping this.
Our surrogate's not in California, but it tends to have pretty good pro-family surrogacy laws, by which I mean it makes it hard for the surrogate to change her mind at the end.
I mean, let me whine for a moment about how backward Australia is.
10 or 15 years ago, when I first started coming to the States, I was able to look down my progressive nose at these fine United States of America and think of it as being a more conservative, center-right country.
But now you guys are legalizing pot all over the joint.
You've got the gay marriage.
Australia still doesn't.
Like, a lot of...
I feel like...
A lot of interesting stuff is going on in the States on the progressive side of politics and culture that Australia has just been too slow to pick up.
So on the question of surrogacy, there's this weird alliance in Australia that also exists in some communities here in the States between essentially extreme feminists and right-wing Christians to say that women should not be allowed to take money to be surrogate carriers.
From the Christian right, they say, you know, we shouldn't let these fags, you know, be using women to, I don't know, to create life.
So you want a woman to be able to kill that bunch of cells, but you don't want her to be able to bring that bunch of cells into existence and get paid for it.
In Australia, it's against the law to pay a surrogate to carry your child.
I had Gary Taubes on who wrote that book, The Case Against Sugar.
And one of the things that he was saying that was really kind of interesting is that when you feed people a higher sugar diet, the higher insulin count is actually making larger people.
So he's talking about his kids.
And then, like, he almost, like, wants to feed his kids more sugar to make, you know, bigger athletes.
Well, it's a state-by-state thing, because Australia is also a federation like the United States, which used to be a bunch of separate colonies.
So it used to be a bunch of penal colonies that Britain...
Basically, after the American Revolution, Britain had nowhere to send its criminals, and it was a very, very tough law and order state in the 1700s in the UK. Like, if you...
It was three strikes and you're out.
That wasn't even the start of it.
And there was incredible inequality.
There was no welfare, obviously, and no food stamps and shit like that.
So people who were starving would steal a loaf of bread.
And you do that twice, and they'd be like, all right, we're going to send you to the moon, which is essentially Australia, right?
So they went and found...
They discovered this great southern land that had been rumoured about and had been kind of sketched on the edges by some of the explorers from the Netherlands and from France so far.
And they sent out Captain Cook.
To settle it, basically so they would have a place for British criminals, a huge, vast, sunburnt land for criminals to roam free in, now that they could no longer use the United States, any of those colonies.
Oh, please, Judge, don't send me to the other side of the world to a tropical paradise when I could be living here in London where it's dirty and disease-ridden and it's rainy and drizzly and grey all the time.
Because, I mean, you do realize statistically that you're much more likely to be killed on the freeway here in LA or by someone shooting you in the States than you are by a spider bite in Sydney.
I mean, in terms of how good it was for convicts, I mean, people came out to Australia for, you know, Brits came out to Australia, even if they weren't criminals, just because they wanted a new adventure.
And some of the states of Australia actually were free settler colonies, like South Australia, which is one of the states, was never a convict, a penal colony.
And in fact, when Australia became a country in 1901, in the constitutional conventions in the 1890s, which created a country out of all of these previously separate colonies, New Zealand was in negotiations to be part of that country as well.
And Western Australia, which is the western half of the continent, was going to be a separate country.
And the eastern half, the eastern states of Australia and New Zealand could have been a single country.
And then at the last minute, New Zealand jumped out and Western Australia jumped in.
Interesting.
And now you've got two different countries.
But anyway, this massive huntsman spider in Australia is what...
You know, New Zealand is a place that's really fascinating because they brought over all these wild game animals from other countries to turn into a sportsman's paradise.
And I think we spoke last time about the attempt that New Zealand is doing to basically eradicate all of its predators, all of its invasive predators that have come from abroad.
Like, New Zealand, because it was the last country to be settled by white people...
By white foreigners, that is, who brought, you know, foxes and rabbits and whatever nasty things.
What was I going to say about Australian animals, too?
I forget.
It's amazing that there is this imbalance.
Oh, that's what it was.
Your Tasmanian tiger, which was an animal that was extinct, apparently there's a bunch of sightings of this thing, and they're pretty sure that it might actually still be alive.
There's this really depressing footage, you can see it online, of the last ever Tasmanian tiger in a zoo, just pacing back and forth and back and forth.
Yeah, no, the only American accents that I can easily pick, apart from the big city ones, because you can tell Boston, you can tell New York, you can...
I guess I get seasonal affective disorder, because my sister-in-law is from Finland, and when I go to Finland and it's grey and dark, I don't feel good.
I get sad, and actually, I don't mind the cold cold.
I don't mind the really frigid freezing cold.
I lived in New York for 10-ish years, depending on how you count it, and the winters out there, when it's crisp and bright and blue sky, I mean, you grew up in the Northeast, you know what that's like.
When it's a nice day, I don't actually care if it's only 5 degrees Fahrenheit, if it's, like, sunny.
And the French are going to the polls next week for the first round of the presidential election, which could see the far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, win in France.
And if she does, she wants to crash out of the euro currency, do Frexit instead of Brexit.
And if France leaves the EU, then that actually is all over.
Yeah, so the way that their electoral system works is they, instead of doing it all on one day, they basically, whoever can run and get on the ballot, there's like maybe 8 to 12 candidates who are on the ballot next week, and then assuming that one person doesn't get, one of them doesn't get more than 50% of the vote, which they almost never do, that then goes to a second round ballot, which is next month, and that's the actual presidential election between the two main candidates.
And what it looks like is that the far-right leader, who is...
Softer than her dad, who founded the far-right party, was, but he was like a Holocaust denier and serious anti-Semite, and she's just an anti-Muslim, anti-immigration, anti-EU, more right-wing version of Trump.
She will get through in next week's election, which means it'll be between her...
I don't know.
The polls say she won't, but the polls didn't say that Brexit was going to happen or that Donald Trump was going to win either.
So the question is, will people stay at home?
Because the person who she's most likely to be running against is just this kind of slick, nice, handsome, doesn't really believe in anything, not really a politician, but kind of pragmatic.
I mean, maybe that'll work.
I don't know.
But it's a bit of a worry if you care about the stability of...
I do worry about it.
And then there was the Turkey thing that we were talking about.
So we've got these kind of pieces of jigsaw puzzle that have been bashing around in my head over the past few days about, like, will we look back on this period...
As just a starting point to something even bigger.
Like, I already think that it's amazing.
Like, that Trump is amazing.
Like, I mean, if two years ago...
When was I first on this show?
Maybe three years ago or something like that?
Something like that.
If someone had walked in that door and said to us...
Okay, in 2017, you're going to be back on the show, you're going to be talking to each other, and the FBI will be conducting an active investigation into whether or not the government of the day conspired with Putin in Russia to spread misinformation and illegally hack the emails of the Democratic Party.
Oh, and by the way, the president is Donald Trump.
And we know that the hacking happened.
We know that the Russians did hack this and did spread misinformation.
But the only question is whether or not...
The FBI is trying to figure out whether or not there was active collaboration with the government.
But that would have been, if we did have that conversation, that would have been before the nightclub shooting in Paris, that would have been before the truck ran all over those people in Nice.
Those terrorist attacks that they have had over in France and in Germany have scared the fucking shit out of people.
And letting all those people in from Syria with no vetting and letting a lot of Muslims come into the country that may have some real hate in their heart for this new land that they found.
And that's when a person who's a fascist, who comes along, who's like this anti-immigration, you know, comes from a racist background, super right-wing, that's when those people take hold.
Well, I would define it as being someone who doesn't like borders and who doesn't like nationalism and jingoism and believes that we are all one and should try to get along.
I'm not a journalist, by any stretch of the imagination.
Alex Jones has been my friend for 20 years.
He's fucking crazy!
I showed everybody how crazy he was on my podcast by getting him high and drunk and having him talk about interdimensional child molesters.
If you watch that and you think I'm legitimizing Alex Jones in some sort of a way, then you're just, you're looking at things in a very cookie-cutter way.
But a lot of people listen to you, and so I think the criticism that these people have is, like, people put faith in you, and they assume that if you don't raise a question against something, that that means that you tacitly agree with what's being said.
I definitely raised questions, but we were more bullshitting than anything and having fun, and he was hammered.
I mean, look, people got a chance to see him.
They're actually using footage of the conversation that we had against him in his custody battle, because they're saying he was in Los Angeles on film smoking marijuana.
And again, I've been friends with him as long as I've been friends with Alex Jones.
I'm way closer with Eddie.
Way closer.
Eddie's one of my best friends.
He's fucking crazy.
But if you talk to him about conspiracies, but if you talk to him about MMA or he's a jiu-jitsu genius, he's one of the very best jiu-jitsu instructors on the planet Earth, without a doubt.
And this is why I'm a bit worried about where we're at culturally at the moment.
And because I think that concern about irrationalism being contagious is not too dissimilar from my concern about a disrespect for the idea of truth and falsehood being contagious.
So, you know, when I was talking about this analyst, this Russian journalist who was talking about the ways in which Putin and Chavez and Erdogan in Turkey and the Hungarian dictator, well, not dictator, Hungarian president who was becoming a quasi dictator, the way that they Hungarian president who was becoming a quasi dictator, the way that they kind of used the muddiness of the whole question of what's true or false as a way of throwing sand in the gears of the whole
And sand in the gears of people's ability to kind of analyze the world and figure out what's true and false and what's important and not important.
That if all you're doing every day is just tweeting out like a stream of nonsensical bullshit that is neither true nor false, but kind of exists in like this meta area of like you are Trump's ego.
Then I actually have found myself becoming less convinced about reliable sources of information and myself becoming more susceptible to irrational ideas.
I don't feel as confident anymore...
It's easy because you see so much stuff of like, I'll tweet out something that the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times have published, all of which I regard as being upstanding publications where I have faith that the journalists are doing their best, not always perfectly, but doing their best in the long haul to tell the truth and only report facts.
And then people will say, oh, fake news, fake news, oh, this is bullshit, and they'll link to something that Alex Jones said as if there's a kind of equivalence between those two things.
And I have They linked to something Alex Jones said?
And they have strayed from unbiased journalism, which is an issue.
Because as soon as you start doing that, as soon as you editorialize the news, you open yourself up for people who point out that you editorialize the news and then point out the fact that you're biased.
But hold on.
They have been.
That's an issue.
And I think they realize that that has been used against them.
And I think that's one of the things that they addressed when they talked about sort of Reinvigorating the idea of objective journalism.
And they started talking about that after the Trump election, after he was elected president.
They talked about this reinvigoration, this sort of recommitting themselves to real hard journalism.
Like, a lot of people think that because they got the election wrong, that means that you can't trust polls.
Here's another way in which this kind of insidious idea that nothing is trustworthy and there's no such thing as the truth or facts...
Or, you know, your version of history is as good as anyone's version of history.
This is another thing that Lawrence Krauss was saying on my podcast, by the way, which is he thinks that there's a link between the kind of postmodern, like, hippie 1960s, like, philosopher movement of, like, hey, believe whatever you want to, man.
Like, there is no truth, right?
Truth is all socially constructed, and, like, gender is entirely socially constructed, and there is no such thing as masculinity.
It's all just, I don't know, some kind of capitalist story that we've all been led to believe.
So, like, put a flower in your hair and bust out of it and let your truth be whatever you want the truth to be.
He sees a link between that and what you might think of as being something very opposite, which is the hard-right, kind of alt-right, Trumpy sort of fake news phenomenon.
Because both of them make the claim that there's no such thing as the truth, essentially, and your truth is whatever is true for you.
I definitely think that some of the, as we said before, some of the reasons why Trump became popular are these ridiculous assertions that gender Has no basis in biology.
That you can be anything you want.
You can be foxkin.
You know, that you can identify with being...
I mean, there's people that are trying to figure out whether or not transracial is a thing.
Rachel Dolezal was on CNN, and she was talking about the fact that Race is a social construct.
But now there's a boy who's not even taking treatment who decides he identifies as a girl, and he's just whooping everybody's ass in track, because he's a fucking boy.
You know, I took a lot of heat because I was saying that there was a man who was a man for 30 years who became a woman and didn't tell people that he used to be a man for 30 years and beat the fuck out of two chicks before he eventually came out.
And now once you're out, look, I say, especially in professional sports, you have...
You have a right to say no or to say yes to compete against that person.
I think if a woman wants to fight against a man, if a woman's 130 pounds and she wants to fight against a man who's 130 pounds, they both agree, do whatever you want.
I think you should be allowed to.
But I think that there's a big difference between someone who has been a man their whole life, has had testosterone flowing through their bones, their blood, their body, their whole life, And then decides they're a woman, versus a woman who was born a woman, raised a woman, and is a biological woman her entire life.
A transgender woman just is not a regular biological woman.
There's a difference.
But saying that gets people so angry.
Saying that a transgender woman, who you can say is a woman, but saying that they're the same thing as a biological woman is just not factually true.
This is what makes people so frustrated about the whole political correctness thing, right?
That we set up tripwires, and if you trigger one of those tripwires by making a claim like the one you just made, which is that a trans woman is not exactly the same as a cis woman, a non-trans woman.
I just think that people should be able to live however they want to live their lives.
I agree.
I don't spend a lot of time thinking about this, but I just wish that we were all generous enough that when people find it a little bit difficult to understand, you don't assume that they're bigoted just because it's a new concept for them.
And I think, as you say, this is part of what gave rise to Trump.
I mean...
The parallel that I was drawing a moment ago between post-structuralist, there is no such thing as gender, and Trump's fake news campaign was not so much the one led to the other, it was just that both, this is the point that Lawrence Krauss was making, both undermine the, they both erode the idea of truth.
Like, I don't understand why there's this big thing about trans people.
I understand it's silly.
I mean, this comes to also, like...
currently obsessed with political correctness as being the biggest problem facing america today i feel like have missed the boat they're fighting last year's battle they're fighting yesterday's battle when the actual battle to fight is the day before yesterday's battle which is today's battle which is a battle against bigotry i think which is a battle against trump a battle against the idea of fake news a battle against america eventually having its own putin-like strongman
anyone who's spending all of their time doing all of their shows about how terrible political correctness is and milo ianopoulos should be able to say whatever he wants which of course he should is not i think is like well political correctness is a response to To people feeling that there's an injustice, people feeling that there is bigotry and prejudice and so they go too far with it.
Like, the past few times that we've gotten together and shot the shit on this show, political correctness and the extremes of it have been a major topic of conversation.
And I think justly so.
But I do think that last year, with the election of Trump and the kind of...
Welling up of kind of subtly anti-Semitic, racially coded language during the election campaign last year.
I think he's an old white guy with traditional ideas about what made America great, and those traditional ideas coincide with an America that was a lot whiter and more Christian than the country that we see today.
He's never even been a religious person, which is really interesting when you see him talk about, no children of God should be forced to suffer such defeat.
So, they're all corrupt and full of shit, the religious right, for getting behind him when they always talk about how important personal faith is in their candidates.
Well, so here's part of the thing about gender as well.
This brings us back to Rachel Dolezal and race and stuff like that.
Like, obviously...
So maybe there is some biological reason why dudes who are attracted to dudes tend to exhibit mannerisms that are more commonly associated with femininity, right?
Maybe a sing-songy voice, a certain style of walking, sashaying, a swishy sort of walking.
And so, but then, so what I think, if there's a kernel of biology in that, I think it's been ramped up.
Aggressively over the past century by people also playing the role of gay in the same way that masculine dudes play the role of, you know, masculine straight dudes will play the role of masculinity and girls will play the role of being girly.
And in that respect, people who point out that gender is not the same as sex are right.
Like, gender is a bunch of behavioral tropes that we all act out.
And so it's interesting to me, like, when you say, why do gay people act gay?
What is it with parents defending their kids so much these days?
If a parent had come up to my parent when I was a little kid and told them that I'd been doing something like that, it would have been the grown-ups...
Gathering together against the child in order to kind of communally raise the child.
Like, my dad would not have said he didn't do that.
He would have come up to me and said, did you do that?
But what I'm saying is, kids, especially boys, they have this thing inside of them.
Some of them do.
Some of them don't.
But, you know, we vary biologically.
But some of them have this aggressive tendency.
That's why boys like to play football.
That's why boys gravitate towards aggressive activities.
They've got to get it out of their system.
You've got to exercise with that kid.
You've got to do something with him.
Play catch with him.
Run around with him.
Wear him out.
People are not meant to sit down in a fucking classroom and just pay attention all day to some shit they don't want to pay attention to and then go home and sit in front of the TV. And what do they do with all that energy that kept us from...
You know, kept us alive, kept us from predators, kept us from invaders.
I mean, all that stuff is biologically programmed in the human animal, and we ignore it.
And how do I also make sure that they grow up with good masculine role models and enable them to be the best kinds of human beings that they want to flourish into?
And then you've got the whole question of Adderall and Ritalin and so on.
He's the kind of guy who, now that he's in his mid-50s, says that he's sure that when he was younger he would have been medicated if he were a young person today.
And the point that he was making about that was that human psychology is complicated, and there's no sort of yin without the yang, right?
The distractedness that he had Yes.
Yes.
bunch of other ways that he thinks were invaluable.
Yeah, right.
Or my best friend, Sam, in Australia, who is a brilliant soil scientist, one of the countries and possibly the world's best scientists in his field, has a PhD.
If we'd been growing up, if instead of being born when we were born, we'd been born just ten years later, what would have happened to his creativity if he'd been medicated in order to be able to get through class because he was always distracted?
They want convenience, especially parents at work all day.
They work all day and they come home and they want this kid to fucking behave because they're tired.
And they want this life that they see in movies and in television shows.
They don't know what it's like to raise a human being.
It's very complex.
And, you know, especially when you're sending these fucking kids to schools that they promote these rigid ideas of how children are supposed to behave and, you know, and tell you that if you don't follow their rules, you're not going to be successful.
I mean, how many fucking stories have you heard where teachers tell rowdy kids they're never going to amount to anything?
I mean, I wouldn't want to deal with me either when I was 15. Who the hell wants to deal with a 15-year-old boy who doesn't want to pay attention, who doesn't give a shit about math?
I mean, I had Frank Rich on my podcast on We The People.
He's an executive producer on Veep.
And he was like the main columnist on the New York Times opinion page for maybe almost 20 years in the 90s and the 2000s.
And he sort of started the New York Times Week in Review section, which comes out in the Sunday paper these days.
And he had a piece in New York Magazine, which was about how much empathy we should feel towards uneducated people.
He was talking specifically about Trump, about like Trump voters, because like since the election, there's been quite a lot of hand wringing among progressives about like we've been focusing too much on these issues like trans rights and gay rights and so on and identity politics and Black Lives Matter.
and we've lost touch with the working class base.
Like, the Democratic Party no longer speaks in a meaningful way to white working class, especially males, and especially in Rust Belt cities, you know, in the Midwest.
And his point was, actually, fuck them.
You shouldn't need to pay attention to them.
They're a lost cause.
They keep voting against their own interests by voting for people like Trump and voting for Republicans.
Don't try to win them over and stop trying to understand them and wringing your hands about why you've lost them.
It's an interesting episode if people want...
I mean, obviously I'm grossly exaggerating what his actual position is, but you should...
It's really common to see the suppression of one ideology and bounce in the other direction.
If you have a parent, I mean, there's a lot of people that, you know, they grow up and their parents are super hippies, and then they become conservative to rebel against their parents.
That's what I'm always thinking about in terms of parenthood as well.
Like, no matter what it is that I try to fix in the way that my parents raised me where I think they could have done it better, that's just going to swing in the opposite direction and then my kids are going to do the opposite because you always think that your parents did an imperfect job, right?
Well, I don't think it was sexual, but I think there were a lot of questions about her ethical dealings in terms of the Mother Teresa Foundation and where her money went.
And most charitable organizations are criticized for spending far too much on infrastructure and, you know, administrative costs, and then you find out how much money actually goes to the charity.
Like, you just have an organization where you're giving people jobs.
It's interesting because whenever I give to charity, I always try to pay attention to how many overheads they have and how much money is being spent on admin and so on.
But then it was actually, I think, Will McCaskill or someone who's involved in the Life You Can Save kind of give well movement, which is like rational...
So if you just look at the ones at the charities with the lowest overhead, then it doesn't necessarily actually mean that they're doing the best work in the field.
Because it might cost $0.40 out of every dollar to make sure that you're targeting the remaining $0.60 in a way where you'll get actually $0.60 of value, rather than a place that only has a 15% overhead, but then the remaining $0.85 are all being squandered on bullshit projects that don't have any measurable value.
The guy who runs Snopes left his wife, he started with his wife, left his wife, married a prostitute, A prostitute has a website where she was, as recently as two years ago, was getting reviewed for her prostitute work.
She's an escort.
And they both have a clear left-wing bias.
Clear.
Like, she's been involved in anti-Bush organizations.
I mean, did you guys in the States when you were like kids, were you like, did you have like, I know you are, you said you are, but what am I? Like that kind of bullshit?
He was elected by very, very narrow majorities in a few key swing states that had been inundated with bullshit stories on Facebook that were coming out of Eastern Europe with Russian funding and exploding all of these fake bombshell exposés very narrow majorities in a few key swing states that had been inundated with bullshit stories on Facebook that were coming out of Eastern Europe with Russian funding and exploding all of these fake bombshell exposés about how Hillary
Then the term came into public consciousness last year.
And now anyone who criticizes the administration, he just pulls a, I know you are, you said you are, but what am I trick?
LAUGHTER What did you think about when Julian Assange implied that that young man who worked for the DNC, who was assassinated, who shot in the back...
They tried to say it was a robbery.
Like, they left his wallet, they left his watch, they left his phone, they left all his money.
They didn't take a thing from him.
They shot him at four o'clock in the morning in the back.
Julian Assange was insinuating that this young man had been the source of the DNC leaks that showed that Hillary Clinton and the DNC conspired against Bernie Sanders in the primary.
I think Assange has kind of lost credibility by essentially becoming a conduit for the Kremlin.
Like all of, you know, WikiLeaks, we all know that the, I mean, people in security service, anytime I talk about this, people are going to respond and say, oh, you're just buying the security services line.
You're just believing what the NSA and the CIA want you to believe.
I'm basically taking on faith the conclusions of security agencies here in the United States.
Multiple, more than a dozen different security agencies, also confirmed by the Brits, by the British Secret Service, all believe, say that they have good reason to believe, that the Kremlin was behind the hacks and that WikiLeaks released...
Must have been in cahoots with the Kremlin, because otherwise, how did they release the DNC hacks?
Well, the other thing that I would worry about with Julian Assange is that this poor fuck has been trapped in the embassy in London for so long, and he can't get out.
Well, you know, when she was so smoking hot when she was younger, that there's probably an incredible amount of pressure just to keep that up that people don't want to do.
Imagine what people would pay to be able to look and feel like they did when they were 25. Well, you know that Peter Thiel guy is already getting young blood put into his system.
I don't trust that guy.
Him and Julian Assange should meet up and create some little underground empire or something.
I mean, they outed him, and then they went after Hulk Hogan, and then the guy said that he would release a sex tape of a child, you know, if he could get away with it.
Yeah, I do, and I don't condone them, but I don't like setting up a precedent where very, very rich people can just...
Because this wasn't the only thing that he was suing them about.
He was basically just throwing lawsuits at them so fast that they couldn't keep their head above water, and they went under, because, I mean, how can you...
Do you think that America would be a better place if fantastically wealthy people could launch an endless string of lawsuits, whether or not they're legitimate, at media companies they don't like?
Or should there be some limit to the number of, like...
Because, I mean, you would want people to be able to bankroll cases that they care about deeply, but maybe not three or four completely unrelated cases all against the same organization.
Anyway, so what Richard Dawkins was saying is people are going to be angry at him on Twitter regardless of what he says, but I still affirm that in the States the conversation around abortion is uniquely different from the way that it is in Europe and in Australia.
It's much more of a...
It's just much more of a fault line issue.
And I wonder whether, in hindsight, it wouldn't have been better for Roe v.
Wade not to actually have been decided by the Supreme Court that way.
I believe in abortion rights, but I don't believe that you can find in the Constitution of the United States a right so inalienable Where is it in the Constitution?
The Supreme Court said there's a right to privacy, therefore there's a right to abortion because we don't want to interfere in women's affairs.
But that presupposes that the embryo isn't a human.
right to privacy to kill somebody, right?
I mean, if I go into a room, my right to privacy doesn't extend to me being able to get away with killing a baby.
The question of whether or not it's a baby is the relevant question.
That's not addressed in Roe.
So I think that it should be legal, but I think that it should be legal through the legislative process.
I think that is a legitimate democratic aspiration for people to be able to...
And if it means that it's not legal in Alabama, because a majority of people in Alabama don't want it, I don't think the founding fathers would have a problem with that.
Well, I can understand a woman being upset that a man with no stake in the game is stepping up and saying that a woman should or should not be able to have an abortion.
This is what I'm arguing for, is a kind of incrementalism, which you were just alluding to, right?
It's not a black or white thing.
Why can't we all appreciate that it's both?
Because it's become so polarized in the United States that both positions are bullshit.
And people on both sides know that both positions are bullshit.
It's bullshit to say that it is just a women's health issue and has no ethical implications whatsoever, even if, as you say, you're talking about cutting a woman open at nine months and stabbing the embryo in the head.
It's also bullshit to say that the instant an egg is fertilized, that is a person that should have all of the rights to life that an adult should have, and that it's murder to kill a blastocyst that's smaller than the size of the head of a pin.
I mean, Peter Singer, the great philosopher, also an Australian, says that under certain conditions, infanticide, the killing of babies, should be legal and could be ethical.
Yeah, but he makes a legitimate point, which is that, you know, why does it make a difference one day after the baby is born?
Suppose you've got a premature baby that's born, you know, four weeks early.
In fact, now we can already make babies survive right around the point of viability, which is where abortion is still on the fringe of.
So say you've got a 22 or 23, 24 week old baby, not week old baby after birth, but timing from the moment of conception.
That could live outside the womb.
Right.
But the moment it gets born, it becomes murder to kill it, but you could have killed exactly the same organism with exactly the same future, and exactly the same prospects, and exactly the same life, if it was inside the womb.
But I'm saying that is an argument that women want to take because they feel like there's this unjust sort of male dominance on the female reproductive system.
Look, when I see a bunch of white men, white old men sitting in Congress making rules against women, predominantly young women, predominantly young women of color who are in areas that have less, the least amount of access to safe and legal- What do you mean predominantly women of color?
I think the optics are worse if it's white people than if it's black people, but I'm happy to yield that point, to concede that point if that's a sticking one.
The point is We have to be able to have conversations about anything without allowing our identities to prevent us from being able to think.
I agree with you about the conversation.
And she was claiming that I didn't have a right to have a conversation about it because I'm a white man.
No, no, no, because we're talking about the rights, giving someone a right or stopping them and controlling them.
If you're talking about a blastocyst inside a woman's body and you're a man and you decide, you don't even know this woman, you decide by your moral argument and judgment she should not be able to terminate that blastocyst, then you are deciding what she can do with her body.
Well, if it's a dictatorship, then I don't agree with it.
I do believe that people should be able to...
I think this is something that people ought to be able to vote on, yes.
I personally, again, favor abortion rights.
But I don't think that the gender of the person who is voted into power by the voting public is relevant in terms of whether or not the voting public thinks that embryos are human beings.
I don't think that embryos have a right to life, but I don't think that it makes sense to say that an embryo is just the woman's body.
It's a huge issue that someone who cannot get pregnant decides that another human being that they're totally unrelated to can't make the decision that five cells that are bundled together must be brought to life.
And I know that you're saying that we should all have a stake in this.
We should all be able to discuss this.
I just think that when you talk about, especially like a blastocyst eventually becoming an embryo, we have to agree in some way, shape, or form that you and I don't have a stake in it.
Where I'm coming from here is that I feel like we use identity politics to deprive other people of standing to discuss questions that are actually universal because they're moral questions.
And I think we all have – so one thing that I try to do as much as possible is understand where people who I disagree with are coming from.
And I know you do that as well.
So I am pro-abortion rights.
But in order for me to understand where people who detest abortion are coming from, it's necessary for me to make the leap of empathy and logic into their camp and see things from the way that they see them, which is that the instant an egg is fertilized, for them that becomes a sacred question of a new life.
Where it's no longer about the woman's body.
It's now a moral and ethical question that we're all involved in because we're all involved in what our culture is allowed to do and who it's allowed to kill and how it's allowed to kill them.
So it becomes a bit more like a death penalty question where you might say, well, I'm never going to be up for the death penalty because I'm never going to do anything.
That would put me on death row.
So what standing do I have to be in favour or against the death penalty?
That's sort of a moot question.
Like, we're all in this society together.
We all have to figure out what's right and wrong.
And if we've got a brain, we should have conversations about what's good or bad.
And the fact that I'm unlikely to be in a specific scenario doesn't actually really give me less standing to have a conversation about it or even to write laws about it if people vote me into a position where I can write laws about it.
I think it should basically be legal all the way up to nine months, and I probably agree with Peter Singer that maybe it's occasionally okay to kill babies.
So you think that a viable baby inside a woman's body at nine months old, she's fully pregnant, as long as that baby doesn't come out, she should be able to kill it?
Yeah, I think it's obvious that the process of going from an egg into a Joe Rogan is such a long and incremental passage that I don't see any reason why 20 weeks or 22 weeks or even vaginal birth is like the absolute moral cutoff.
Well, that there would be systems in place that would help mothers.
I don't think that it should be...
I sort of agree with Bill Clinton's old framing that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
Right?
That you should have as many opportunities for people not to get pregnant in the first place, widespread contraception, widespread sex education, and that this should not just be a form of birth control.
I mean, people are not going to be happy with me saying that you should be able to kill a baby, and people are not going to be happy with you saying that you should be able to kill a blastocyst.
I think more people will hate my position, if it even is a position.
Peasants podcast that's where it get got more weird.
Yeah Because then he started framing it in a different way and saying that he thinks that there is a lot of positive benefits to a young man like a I shouldn't say young man a boy having a relationship with a man sexually that can help them and That there's positive benefits to being molested as a young boy and I think that's obviously a horrible thing to say.
I think what was going on was he was trying to rationalize his own sexual abuse.
I really do.
I mean, I think in no way, shape, or form is it comfortable for a young boy to be sexually abused by an older man.
And I think that in this process of rationalization, he's created this way that's empowered him.
And he's also rationalized that he was the predator.
I mean, he keeps saying that and joking around about it.
I mean, I was on a TV show in Australia where there was a question of whether or not we should be naming and shaming sexual offenders, sexual predators, or people who'd been convicted of sex crimes.
And in the meeting before we went on air, because it's a live show, I raised the point that, like, I think the more sort of interesting and controversial angle here is what a...
Imagine if the only way that you could express yourself sexually and find fulfillment in life was by torturing another human being.
Like, you're basically a form of...
I don't want to...
I used the wrong word here, but it's a form of psychopathy in some way, in the sense that a psychopath can only get fulfillment by doing something that's awful.
So the job is to try to figure out how to stop the psychopath from doing something awful.
I'm not saying that pedophiles are psychopaths, but you can see the analogy, where if your only way of finding fulfillment in life is to rape children, then...
Let's address how to figure out how to stop you from doing that thing rather than demonizing you as a monster even if you don't do it.
For me to even say that, a lot of people are going to push back on that as well.
It's a very similar thing to where I'm just trying to figure out in my head what makes the most sense to me.
And as you say, it's got to be some kind of a spectrum of...
Like it can't be black and white either on abortion or on something like pedophilia But the moment you start having conversations like this shit's gonna explode because people are very very very strident Like you're gonna protect the babies like you know, we're gonna protect the children.
Yes.
I understand that But does that make it impossible for us to have conversations about it?
You're talking about babies, which I think is probably even more rare than someone fucking young boys.
But it's a very bizarre part of our human history.
Very bizarre.
And it makes you wonder how much of that sexual abuse gets somehow or another transferred from a child being abused to that child growing up becoming an adult and becoming an abuser themselves.
Is it a cancer of ideas?
Is it almost like a sexual disease that gets spread from perpetrator to victim?
The victim becomes perpetrator, makes new victims?
I'm talking now only about people who are sexually mature, right?
So someone who's like a 15-year-old catwalk model, let's assume that it's a woman who's walking down the catwalks of Milan and Paris, and has what she thinks is a consensual relationship with a 25-year-old fashion designer.
That's against the law, and it's regarded as being deeply unethical in our current society.
Happened all the time in other societies.
There's...
No, I'm not saying that I think that the law should be changed.
I don't.
I think it's good to have laws against these things, and I don't think that it's ethically defensible for people who are significantly older to assume that a person who is still kind of evolving and still coming of age is capable of giving proper consent.
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Well, it's illegal if they're just three years older.
Well, you would never be prosecuted, but there have been these weird cases where...
Teenagers have been prosecuted for having dick pics of not only their boyfriends or girlfriends, well, not dick pics of their girlfriends, unless they're trans, but of themselves, and they've been prosecuted for child porn because they're a child and they're holding pornography.
I mean, it's almost like, I can't remember who I heard saying this the other day, that police used to go out and catch bad guys and, like, solve crimes, but now we've sort of outsourced to police the job of just making everything kind of nice.
It's one of the things where, when I talk to Americans about the best things about America, the number one thing that Americans will always say is freedom, that this country represents freedom.
But the actual daily experience...
Like, I've lived in New York, and I've lived in Copenhagen, and I've lived in Australia.
And, like, the daily experience of...
Like, I was standing outside my apartment in New York, drinking an open beverage, just watching the world go by, and a couple of cops came over, and one of them was like,"'Yo, what's in the glass?' What's in the glass?
And I was like, just soda.
It was vodka soda.
Just soda.
And his partner had to be like, ah, don't worry about it.
Like, come on, don't make a big deal out of it.
And they walked away.
But I was like...
Go to a park in Copenhagen.
Everyone's drinking beer.
They're not getting harassed by cops.
Isn't that a kind of freedom as well?
They're taking off their shirts and they're playing volleyball topless with their breasts hanging out.
Like when people who live in Kansas go to Vegas and we can drink all down!
As opposed to someone who grows up in that environment.
Or, like, say, we were looking at the North Korea footage yesterday of them goose-stepping down the street and the giant throngs of people who were following the orders and doing the bidding of Kim Jong-un.
We're saying, like, what would happen to those people if you removed this military dictatorship and gave them a democratic life?
Would they even be able to appreciate it and understand it?
Or are they so institutionalized, are they so indoctrinated into this very specific style of living and behavior that they wouldn't be able to adjust?
Like, I talked to Ron Miscavige about that.
You know, he got out of Scientology when he was fucking 76. I mean, stop and think about that.
The guy got in in 1970 and got out in 2012, lived the bulk of his life in this really bizarre environment, and now all of a sudden he's this free man.
I think that's right, and this is one of my concerns about laws that prevent people from doing things.
This is why I'm sort of libertarian-ish when it comes to, you know, non-economic cultural issues, because I actually think you need to inculcate in people an experience of showing restraint on them by...
By themselves, because if the law always does it for you, you then remove the laws and all of a sudden everyone goes crazy.
You can't imagine that if all of a sudden street drinking were permitted in New York, that people would be vomiting all over the place and getting drunk because they've been so used to, so acclimated to never being allowed to do it, that now it's the forbidden fruit.
Let's go out and just get smashed in the park, because that's what we can do now.
It's interesting that you use the word institutions, Joe, in describing, like, North Korea, because I think this is another thing that I'm so grateful about America for, and why I'm sort of optimistic that Trump is not going to destroy this country, that institutions, like, this sounds like such a valuable thing to say, I was going to say, institutions, like, really matter, right?
You look at places like Hungary and what we've just seen happen in Turkey and Russia and Venezuela, and it's much easier for people there who are corrupt or who would like to...
To bring people under their spell to do so because there aren't these big, robust, divided institutions like the press being fiercely independent, the judicial system being fiercely independent, Congress and the executive hopefully hating each other just enough to keep themselves in check, and also just the traditions of American life where there's, I think, more acceptance of dissent and of weirdness than there are in those other places.
Like, Russians are just very, I don't want to generalize here, but allow me to, conformist people.
Like, they've lived under Tsars and fucking empires for centuries and millennia.
Like, they like following strongmen.
Americans aren't like that.
I mean, some of them are.
There is this kind of militaristic, jingoistic side to America, which is very kind of like, salute the flag and, like, say, yes, please, like, you've got to honor the veterans and everything.
I think the best thing that America has ever kind of given the world is its flamboyant, boisterous sense of possibility and craziness that expresses itself in Silicon Valley.
And maybe Peter Thiel, who I might not like, but at least he's unusual, you know, in Hollywood, you know, even in Wall Street.
There are a whole bunch of – there's just an excitement in this place which seeps out in so many different ways in America that I think to try to corral it as a dictator would be like herding cats.
Like it'll just never, you know, it'll never quite work.
Well, we can only hope, because if Trump has his way, he would definitely try to do that.
He would try to get all these people to do his bidding and figure out some way to dismantle all these different institutions and make it much easier for him to make America great again and just fucking force that agenda through.
Somebody does right outside the Kremlin, you know, on the main bridge leading to the Kremlin at night, and all of the security cameras from the Kremlin happen to go off and have their footage missing just when the murder happens.
I wonder if part of it is when he says that he admires someone like Putin, if it's just his sort of constitutional sense that he kind of likes A strongman.
Isn't his whole life sort of about, I am powerful, I am rich, you're going to kneel before me?
And people who can pull that off, I think just resonate with him in some way that's more...
So I've always found the how much money does he have invested in Russia question...
It's somewhat less interesting to me than, why does he want to suck Putin's dick so much?
I mean, the whole thing, I think there's too many things to focus on.
And he's so fucking busy with himself and his business interests and the things that he's trying to push through and fucking ExxonMobil and all these different subsidiaries that he's kind of invested in.
He's got his fucking fingers in so many different pies.
Well, what's one of the big concerns is that he's not concerned with foreign policy to the point where he's putting off all these things and letting the military do their job.
Well, I think there's a real argument that the military has been...
That they've been held back to the point...
I mean, look, you're engaging in war, right?
And that there's a real argument that the people in the military make that people die because they're forced to take too many steps before they get clearance to do something when they're being attacked.
And so their argument is it's better to let people who really understand war engage in war.
But then there's the Eisenhower argument that, well, you're dealing with an institution, like the military-industrial complex.
You're dealing with a, I can think of it as an organism that survives on war.
There's a tremendous amount of money that gets pumped into this thing, this war machine, right?
And have you noticed how the military contractors, have you looked at how delicately spread out around America they are?
Like, they have plants in almost every single state, so that there's always a congressperson or a senator who the military contractors can call up and be like, well, you're going to lose, like, so many thousand jobs in this little...
Of course.
It would make more economic sense for them to have consolidated their operations and be making all the submarines and warships in the same place.
But they don't.
They make one widget in Delaware.
They make another one over here, another one over here.
It's like most of the things that we've talked about today.
They're super complicated, and there's so many different things to consider, and there's no real one black and white answer.
When you're dealing with so many factions and so many variables and so many things, that's one of the reasons why being a president is a preposterous idea.
There was Vietnam, and we didn't like that, and then we forgot about it long enough, so we did Iraq, and we didn't like that, but now that's kind of fading, receding into the distant past as well.
But I... Yeah, I actually interviewed Phil Donoghue on HuffPost Live because he was a very outspoken anti-war critic.
And I was saying at the time, like, can't we be nuanced enough to make a difference, to understand the difference between the Iraq war, a full-scale invasion based on a misunderstanding or a misleading interpretation of what Iraq's capabilities in its weapons program was?
And this Syrian problem...
Which is a horrifying civil war where a dictator is gassing his own people and we didn't want to invade, but...
Drawing some kind of a line in the sand and saying, you can't do that in the 21st century.
You can't just be dropping gas canisters on kids so that they bleed out their eyes and cough up their own lungs.
That's not a way to behave, and the United States, as an exceptional nation, will do something about that.
You're right that Obama really had his hands tied because he went to Congress, and Congress didn't give him the power to do it.
But I kind of felt somehow sort of slightly vindicated when Trump did it.
Like, I was not one of the people on the left who was like, oh my goodness, what's he doing?
The idea of having a president that also deals with ExxonMobil and BP, and then also was talking to the coal people, and also was talking to the people in Silicon Valley, Well, I mean, that's why you have an administration, right?
I mean, so the Secretary of State is broadly overseeing it, and then they will have a special envoy to the Middle East who basically is the president of the United States for Syria.
I was in New Zealand actually listening to that episode.
At the lounge in Auckland Airport coming back to Australia a couple months ago.
And Henry was really inspiring to me in that episode because it made me realize, like, yeah, just because I'm getting old and, like, I'm going to be a dad and everything doesn't mean you have to lose your sense of adventure.
What is ADD? I mean, it's a real thing, but how does it manifest itself in a person, and how does it manifest in a person that is formed in this environment where they're forced to be in this rigid, controlled, social experiment called school?
Well, that's one thing that I assumed we would have gotten to today, which I'm surprised we didn't, which is like the rise of automation and robotics and stuff.
I mean, millions...
How many millions of Americans...
I think it's the largest employment sector for working class males is driving.
I think it's a fantastic experiment, and I'm glad that there are a few little jurisdictions in Scandinavia and Canada which seem to be trying it out, because I'd be interested to know how many...
You could imagine different groupings of human psychology.
Some people will be like...
Awesome!
I don't have to worry about making money.
I'm going to become the greatest artisanal, you know, furniture maker that I can, and that's fantastic.
And then at the other end of the spectrum, there'll be people who are like, sweet, don't have to work, like, I'm just going to sit at home all day.
And the idea, the real good argument for universal basic income is that the money that you spend giving people a certain universal basic income, you would save money from people going to jail, juvenile detention, medical issues, all sorts of issues that come out of poverty.
There's a lot of issues that come out of poverty that are directly connected to that.
Yeah, this is one of the arguments for welfare as well.
I mean, people who say that it wouldn't have any impact on crime, I would just say, look at the different countries in the world that have more or less generous welfare systems.
And the ones with more generous welfare systems do tend to be more peaceful places.
I wonder if enough people can find self-expression through that to counteract the job losses that are resulting from and will continue to result from technological advance.
It's like the North Korea thing that you were saying.
Like, if you got rid of the North Korean regime, would the people who lived under it have the scope, have just the mental scope to know what to do with themselves?
In some ways, it's a comparable question with capitalism, right?
If you took away the capitalist incentive to work and all of a sudden everybody was liberated and had a basic income that gave them all the sustenance that they need...
Would they have the horizons available to them, having been raised in this idea of, like, you've got to work, got to climb your way up the ladder, got to get a nine-to-five job, go to college, get an education, you know, please the boss, get your promotion, to have all of that suddenly fall away and be like, you know what, just go and make clocks.
And also you have expectations immediately after winning that things are going to get a lot better.
And as you know from anyone who has paid attention to the process of their own consciousness, whether that's through psychedelics or flotation tanks or what Sam Harris and Dan Harris were talking about recently about meditation, your conscious perception of life is not...
Determined by what's going on outside.
It is trivially, occasionally, in the short term, but in the long term your actual happiness It comes from within.
But people always take the path of least resistance, and oftentimes the path of least resistance is these patterns that we've carved into our behavior, these behavior patterns that we've carved into our psyche, and a lot of times those aren't even the path of least resistance, they become the path of more resistance.
But we're so accustomed to those paths that we think of them and treat them as if they're the right path.