Jon Ronson’s The Butterfly Effect series reveals how Fabian Tillman turned piracy into a $362M porn empire by buying RedTube, YouPorn, and Playboy TV, crushing traditional producers while fueling bespoke kink content—even bizarre requests like condiment-themed videos. Performers aged 23–29 face career collapse due to stigma, with some, like Macy May, publicly venting struggles while enduring backlash. Meanwhile, Ronson and Rogan dissect Alex Jones’ Sandy Hook denialism and fringe theories (Chobani rapists, Pizzagate), contrasting his legal risks with military experiments like the "gay bomb" or "death touch" martial arts. A viral autistic teen, Nathan, was wrongly labeled a sex offender for online missteps, exposing how free porn and internet morality exploit performers—ordinary people facing lifelong shame despite no real harm. [Automatically generated summary]
My wife did say to me once or twice, do you really have to go to another porn set?
I've just finished making a series for Audible called The Butterfly Effect and the flap of the butterfly's wings which I'm tracing throughout the series is this young man called Fabian who's like a tech nerd in Brussels and he has the idea to get rich from giving the world free porn so free streaming porn so the series is about the kind of tech takeover of porn in the valley and Doesn't he know that that's already real?
Fabian Tillman, a young boy in Brussels, like a tech nerd, would go on CompuServe and swap porn passwords or get porn for free, which is how people got porn for free back in the 90s.
And then he had a sort of eureka moment, which is, I can give the world YouTube for porn.
But Fabian was making money from running a site that dealt in piracy.
So basically fans would upload porn illegally onto Pornhub.
So Fabian was running a site that was filled with pirated content.
Fabian went to a bank to say, I want to expand.
But because he wasn't ostensibly a porn person, he was a tech person who was deemed to be respectable, this bank gave him a $362 million loan to expand to build an empire based in part on the handling of stolen porn.
So we went to the Valley, who were already kind of paranoid that all their porn was being stolen and put up onto Pornhub.
And he bought up loads of companies at cut price, because the companies were panicking and wanted to sell.
And suddenly, Fabian just single-handedly took over porn.
And nobody cares about that.
Nobody was thinking about the consequences of that, because Fabian was giving the world what they wanted, which was free porn.
But I was really curious to know, like, what were the consequences?
Well, it was an interesting tech, like a moral tech debate that was going on for a while.
The debate is lost.
I mean, it's really interesting, because there was a guy who lived down the street from me, and he was a big-time porn producer.
And I actually knew him from my jiu-jitsu class, and he was a real high-rolling sort of character.
He always had the This beautiful Mercedes Benz and he wore these really big watches and a lot of fancy clothes and he was just making just tons of money.
He had this beautiful house and he was just this baller character.
Partly because of ads, but partly because he bought up the paid sites as well.
So, you know, because the paid sites were like panicking because they were losing all their money to piracy.
So he just bought up everything.
So he bought up the competition.
He bought up RedTube.
He bought up YouPorn.
So he bought up all the competition to Pornhub.
But he also bought...
Loads of paid sites, including like Playboy TV. So your friend got so poor that his house got repossessed.
Fabian got so rich that he installed in his house an aquarium that was so big that a diver had to come every week and dive in and clean the coral reef.
Well, they care a little bit about the music thing, but the porn thing got almost no traction.
And when the porn industry essentially, for the most part, collapsed, or at least there was a massive amount of loss, there was no talk about like some sort of a bailout or anything silly like that.
And also, there's so much fucking free porn on Pornhub that it's like cutting down a forest with a butter knife.
It's impossible to...
You know, you can say, take down my pirated porn, and they'll say, okay, sorry, fine.
But then there's like a million other people's read porn up there.
Anyway.
Yeah, so actually, it's funny.
I don't, by the way, what I'm about to say shouldn't be construed as me saying that I think that Fabian is a psychopath, because I don't.
But that thing about not taking responsibility for your own actions, I just remembered I wrote a book a few years ago about psychopaths called The Psychopath Test.
And a psychopathic trait is that, like if somebody kills somebody in a bar, they would say, well, it's his fault for looking at me funny.
So failure to accept responsibility for own actions is one of the 20 items on the psychopath check.
I don't think Fabian, that was very much a tangential thing because I don't think Fabian is a psychopath at all.
I think that tech people have created a sort of amoral bubble around themselves.
I talked to the head of Pornhub's mobile division.
He's called Brandon.
If you've ever watched Pornhub on your mobile, you have Brandon to thank.
I said to Brandon, Brandon said like we never, like 99% of Pornhub employees never set foot on a porn set.
And he said that's good because, you know, we're designing, you know, we're search engine people.
We're, you know, we don't want to say it would be sort of unpleasant to set foot on a porn set.
It would be sort of intimidating and unpleasant.
And I said, well, maybe it would have been good if more Pornhub people did set foot on porn sets because you would be able to see the negative consequences of your business plan.
And Brandon went, Their livelihood.
Which, again, is a very techy thing to say, right?
Yeah, I just remembered a guy called David Lowery, who's interested in the kind of piracy issue in music.
And he said, when we look back on the dystopian movies of the 1930s, When, you know, machines would take over, like Metropolis or something.
Like the moral of the film, like the climax of the film, is when the people, the humans, defeat, say, you know, we're not going to live in a world run by machines, we're going to defeat the machines and human morality will take over.
But now that machines are ruling the world, instead of us defeating the machines, we are adapting our morality to fit in with the machine's capability.
So because it is easy to pirate, instead of saying, let's not pirate, we're just adapting our morality and saying, okay, we can watch pirated porn, it's fine.
And that's how he got out of the business eventually.
But I think that all got solved.
I'm not sure if he ever got sued.
Because if somebody said to him, like, take down my, you know, Bad Babysitter's Volume 2 is mine.
I say that because I was actually on the set of Bad Babysitter's Volume 2. He'd say, oh sure, yeah, sorry, of course.
And it would go down.
But then maybe somebody else would put it up later that day.
And it didn't matter because everything else was free.
I'll tell you one amazing consequence of all of this, though.
So what I wanted to do in this Audible series, The Butterfly Effect, was to kind of trace the consequences of this, like, you know, what was the tornadoes that were being created.
And one amazing consequence is, like, Fabian surrounded himself with tech wizards, like people who knew how the internet worked, including a lot of search engine people.
So, instead of making porn films like they made in the 90s, this porn director Mike Quasar said to me that the first film he ever made back in the 90s was called Women of Influence.
Now, all the porn films have to be easily searchable.
It's like a kind of arms race of search engine optimisation, like to get yourself up the Google rankings.
So all the porn films in the Valley aren't called Women of Influence because how do you search for that?
They basically see what the most popular search terms are and then make films based on that.
So Mike Quazzo was telling me this on the set of the film he was shooting that day, which was Stepdaughter Cheerleader Orgy.
So I said to Mike, because I thought about like...
Women of Influence versus Stepdaughter Cheerleader Audrey.
Look, I haven't seen Women of Influence.
So for all I know, the moral of Women of Influence is that women shouldn't have influence.
But my guess is that Women of Influence is a more kind of holistic porn film than Stepdaughter Cheerleader Audrey.
So I said to Mike, are there any people in the Valley who like...
Can't get work because they're just not a keyword.
And Mike went, yeah, like every adult porn actress now between the ages of 23 and 29 can't get work because they're not a teen and they're not a MILF.
They're like in this sort of fallow period between teen and MILF when they're just attractive and just attractive isn't a searchable term.
So if you're not a teen and you're not a MILF, if you're like a 26-year-old adult film actress, you can't get work.
You just have to like, well, I said to Mike, what do you do?
Do you just like sit there until you like become a MILF and become employable again?
And the answer is they have to find other ways to make money.
So escorting is going through the roof in the valley.
Because of people like Fabian, because of the tech takeover of porn, escorting is going through the roof.
But also another thing that's going through the roof is this kind of weirdly adorable world of bespoke porn.
Just for them, like a team of professional porn people, because the Valley's suffering so much because of Pornhub and so on, will make an entire porn film just for you.
So it's a woman sitting in a child's paddling pool and out of shot, one of the bespoke porn producers is pouring industrial-sized tubs of condiments on her head, like ketchup, mustard.
Another one was a Norwegian man has spent 40 years amassing a very valuable stamp collection and his bespoke porn film was to send his stamp collection to the valley where three naked porn women would destroy his stamp collection.
Yeah, it turns out it's because he grew up in Iceland, where stamp collecting was a very popular hobby at the time, in the 70s and the 80s.
Stamp collecting was big.
So he became like an obsessive stamp collector.
The stamp shop owners would say, oh, if you buy this stamp, it's going to be very valuable in 20 years.
But then came the internet, and it killed off stamp collecting as a hobby.
Really?
Yeah, nerds apparently found other things to be interested in and the thrill of the chase just wasn't there anymore.
You could easily buy it.
So anyway, his stamps lost all of their value.
The stamp stores closed down.
That kind of collegiate atmosphere of fellow stamp collectors just vanished.
He began to regret his life choices of spending all of that time and money collecting stamps.
He began to feel depressed and isolated so he went to see a psychiatrist Who told him that stamp collecting is a ridiculous hobby because it isolates him.
If you have all your ducks in a row and everything's firing on all cylinders, but you really truly enjoy stamps, who's to tell you there's something wrong with that?
The porn star Riley was saying into the camera, you know, I have thought about dying too, but I came out of that hole and I came back stronger and now I can see all the good in the world.
Riley was crying and Rhiannon, the producer, was crying and they sent the video to the guy.
There's quite a few porn stars on Twitter that have really kind of motivational Twitter feeds.
They say nice things.
They say positive things.
They seem like healthy people.
And if you separate the fact that That they have sex on film for a living.
Take that out of the mix and what you have is like looks like your average person who's trying to do better in this world and is sharing positive things that they find that gives them inspiration and moves them along in a certain way.
But then you add the sex thing and for whatever reason we have this weird hang up about sex.
Anyway, so she went to a radical honesty group where you have to be radically honest to each other.
So it starts, I've been to one as well, it starts with everybody sitting in a circle and they have to confess to the room a secret about themselves that they've never told anyone.
So the one that Starley went to, the first guy said...
My secret is that I haven't paid taxes in ten years.
And so everyone went, oh.
And then the next guy said, my secret is that I killed a man.
He said, I was in a truck, I was driving a truck, and I kicked the passenger out of the truck, and he fell onto the road, and he got run over, and I got away with it.
So then the next person in the circle, when my secrets are pretty disappointing compared to that, she said, I suppose I can tell you that I have sex with my cat.
So then the murderer kind of put his hand up and said...
I should say, by the way, I met Brad Blanton, the guy who runs these Radical Honesty groups, and I asked him whether Starly's story was true.
And he said yes.
The way she described that circle is what happened.
So I was at this radical honesty group in this church school in New Orleans, and this girl called Dakota said that her secret was that she was, she's like this young church girl, she said her secret was that she watched porn.
So I said, what did you watch it on?
And she said, Pornhub, of course, because this is how every child in the world learns about sex these days.
And I said, did you ever get so into it that you would learn their names?
You'd say, oh, there's James Dean.
And she said, no, no, no.
She kind of laughed.
And she said, no, I never learnt their names.
It's like when you kill a deer, you don't name it because then you can't eat it.
So this is what the porn people are up against, right?
It's this shame of the viewer.
It's like in that...
Hypocrisy lies exploitation, which is why somebody like Fabian can come in and get a $300 million loan and take over porn.
It's because we don't want to think about it because it makes us feel bad about ourselves.
You know, you said that a lot of porn women on Twitter are kind of A-positive and are giving them interventional messages.
One of the reasons why that is, I met this porn woman called Macy May, who was, like, really depressed.
Another of Fabian's consequences is that, like, kids grow up on Pornhub these days, so there's no longer the kind of outlaw status about coming to the Valley to do porn that they used to be in, like, the 80s and 90s.
Now, you know, the Valley's, like...
We're flooded with women who, you know, they turn 18, they watch porn, they think that looks cool, and then they come to the valley.
And a negative consequence of that is that they get work for like a couple of weeks, and then, you know, there's loads more women off the bus, and so the producers don't need to employ them anymore.
So there's a massive turnaround.
They get work for a few weeks, and then it's over.
So I met this woman called Macy May who was in that funk.
Like she came in May, throughout May she was working.
I met her in July and the work had just dried up.
And she was like venting on Twitter.
But then she stopped venting.
And then all of her tweets were like, I'm so happy, it's such a beautiful day.
And I said, why did you stop venting on Twitter?
And she said, well, a bunch of porn producers told me it looked bad for my brand.
Like, you know, they don't want a sort of miserable porn person saying, I'm not getting work today.
They want a porn person who says, here's a picture of my butt.
And isn't that unhealthy, right?
That this is what we've turned Twitter into.
We've turned it into this thing where we're not allowed...
To be ourselves or to tell the truth about ourselves.
It's the shame coming in from the outside looking in.
There's no shame.
When I was on the set of Stepdaughter Cheerleader Orgy, which was...
Quite close to where we are now, probably like a mile away from here, but up in the hills.
And it was a kind of familial bubble, like everyone was being nice to each other, everyone was happy.
But Mike, the director, needed to get an establishing shot of the cheerleaders arriving home from cheerleader practice.
So we went outside.
They were all wearing their cheerleader outfits.
And some teenagers had cotton on to what was happening, that a porn film was being shot, like up on a nearby hill, and they were like catcalling and hissing and sort of mocking these girls.
And for the first time, not just the girls, but the cameraman, the director, everybody suddenly felt like self-conscious and the girls were like, you know, sort of...
So until the mucking outsiders came along, it was healthy and shame-free.
But as soon as an outsider started hissing at them, it became shameful.
And I think that's porn for you.
Most of the problems that porn people face are stigma from the outside, not from the community itself, which tends to be quite respectful.
Yeah, I mean, anonymous people online, the behavior is very bizarre.
Because sometimes I'll see people's comments, whether it's to me or to somebody else, and they're so fucking vicious and nasty over nothing.
Just over nothing.
Over nothing.
Yeah.
Over someone's movie that they did, or some album that they did, or whatever it was, and just shitting all over every aspect of their person, almost just to try to get them to hurt the way they're hurting.
That's almost what it seems like.
It's like a super angry, bitter person.
Life is just throwing rocks at them everywhere they go, and every chance they get to throw a rock back, they do.
So then like hundreds and hundreds of people like powered in on the book and then Kirkus gave this book a good review and then people powered in on Kirkus.
Yeah, no, what you're talking about is someone's telling you not to do or maybe you shouldn't do a person of color in your screenplay because that's not your place.
Well, it's just, again, it's just the left is turning on itself.
I mean, there are people that are turning on them.
So you cannot be progressive enough.
There is no one out there that's progressive enough.
And so there's always going to be someone who finds some fault in something that you do, particularly if you're doing fiction that portrays realistic scenarios that could easily exist in any city, in any civilization on Earth.
When, you know, because I was covering all of this for a couple of years and I was writing So You've Been Publicly Shamed.
And I noticed that every time somebody like Justine Sacco kind of got got on the internet, Breitbart and Infowars, Marlu Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Alex Jones, you know, they would propagandize the hell out of this stuff.
And this was in the run up to Trump getting elected.
And I can't help thinking that the left eating itself It's part of the reason why we've got Trump now.
I mean, there's a meme that's going out there that I've seen on many, many different places on Instagram and Twitter and stuff that says, this kind of shit is why I got elected, and it's Trump pointing at the camera.
I mean, they're fed up and they didn't realize what the consequences are.
You know, what's really fascinating is I saw this article today where it was talking about, it was on CNN, about Americans in general, like everyone polled, does not like the fact that Trump tweets.
It was some crazy number of people to think that he should stop tweeting.
But one of the things that got him elected is the fact that he tweets, said people enjoyed it.
Like, here's a guy who's fighting back, and he's not scared to hit back with personal insults.
And, like, we'd never seen that before from someone running for president.
I remember the very first talk I ever did for, say, being publicly shamed, there was this woman in the front row, this kind of elderly lady.
This was at the bookshop Santa Cruz.
And she was, like, pointedly shaking her head in disagreement with everything that I was saying.
And then when it came to the Q&A, I said, like, has anyone got any questions?
And she went...
And she said, if you play with the Twitter toy, then it's your fault if you get burned.
And what I said to her was like, you know, it influences...
Beyond Twitter.
Twitter is infecting the culture and it's infected everything.
What began on Twitter, a new type of discourse and a new way of seeing each other, infected politics, culture, the mainstream media.
It's infected everything.
In the same way that I wonder whether Fabian ever sort of feels a bit guilty about some of the consequences of his business plan, I wonder whether some of the Twitter executives ever feel guilty about what they've done?
Fascinating that someone who came from such a horrible, regressive environment became this fascinating, really intelligent, really well-spoken, sensitive person.
Yeah, you know what I think Meghan would say if she was sitting here, because I kind of said that to her one time, and she said it sort of goes to show that, you know, for all their sort of hateful beliefs, my parents were good parents.
Like, they gave me this positive stuff as well as the negative stuff.
That story I wrote about Justine Sacco a few years ago and about how, you know, the woman who tweeted, going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS, just kidding, I'm white.
I think people started to think, like, it may have recovered now, but I think people started to think, fuck, if Twitter's not fun, you know, what's the point of us being on here?
Well, you have to sit before their Orwellian council, and maybe they'll go over every word that you're about to say.
What is their trust and verify council?
What the fuck is that called?
They have some people on that that are...
Ridiculous social justice warriors, proven attention whores, people that are dishonest.
They're not honest people, and they're a part of this whole thing where their business is getting attention and being a victim and exploiting it to the nth degree.
I mean, that's a bunch of people that are on that thing.
You also have to define what is harassment and what is criticism.
Now, if you have ideas in the open marketplace of ideas, and you have ideas that people think are profoundly ridiculous, they're allowed to mock your ideas.
That is not harassment.
I just think that that is someone shitting on you.
I noticed that there was some kind of gaslighting going on on the left.
Like, everyone would agree.
The sort of world that I come from, like The Guardian and the left, Everyone would agree that if a gang of misogynists sort of gang up on a particular feminist writer and basically harass her until she goes offline, everyone agrees that's bad.
An editor said that they wanted to run a series of articles about bullying on the internet and wanted me to contribute to the series.
And they said they wanted it to all be about how women are being bullied by men.
And I said, you know, I've no doubt that that happens a lot.
And it's presumably disproportionate, like women are bullied by men more than other groups are bullied.
You know, that could well be true.
But if the series of articles is only about women being bullied by men, you know, it legitimises certain types of bullying, like when the left pile in on somebody, like Justin Sacco, it's going to legitimise, you know, if it's that partial, it's going to legitimise certain types of bullying.
And the editor, when I said that to her, kind of rolled her eyes, as if to say, well, you would think that.
It reminds me, actually, a moment I was telling you about one of the consequences that I look at in The Butterfly Effect about the tech takeover of porn is that if you're a 25-year-old adult actress, you can't get work now because you're in this sort of hinterland between teen and MILF. And I think that's not just porn, that's the internet.
Like on social media, you know, if you're a If you're a kind of loud, aggressively authoritarian person on the left or a loud, aggressively authoritarian person on the right, you're like the teen or the MILF. Those of us in the middle are these people who are more interested in people talking to each other and we don't want to scream, we want to listen and understand.
We're like the 25-year-old adult film actors who can't get work.
Yeah, but even when you're saying that, you don't.
That's not real.
You don't have to.
You don't have to fall into those categories.
It'd just be easier for people to categorize you if you did fall into those categories.
I'm sure I have some points of view that people would consider conservative, and I have many more points of view that most people would consider to be liberal.
But it's very convenient, especially when you look like me, and I look like a meathead.
It's easy to say that I'm some meathead conservative or a right winger or something along those lines.
Way more likely to vote for someone on the left than I am for someone on the right.
Because I think the people on the right, in general, are more suppressive, especially socially and culturally.
And I think that's where the real issues lie.
When you look at what Obama did...
Yeah, on the right.
When you look at what Obama did in office, in terms of what he did as far as drones, about freedom of the press, and going on after whistleblowers, God, a lot of that was very right, very right-wing.
If you looked at it in terms of actual, real consequences of him being the president, a lot of it was very right-wing.
But, when you look at it in terms of support for gay marriage, and passing the Affordable Care Act, a lot of that stuff was very left-wing.
Now, I don't know if the Affordable Care Act was good, because...
A lot of small businesses, doctors with small offices hated it and thought it was absolutely horrible and it killed their business.
I don't know who's right about that because obviously I don't have to deal with that.
It's a controversial subject.
But the idea behind it, I liked.
I liked the idea that we would have some sort of universal health care because I think the idea of someone being too poor to get health care in this incredible country, like if we're going to pay, if our taxes are going to go to anything, god damn, shouldn't it go to...
Caring for our neighbors and our fellow humans like that seems to me to be a no-brainer.
Yeah, and that's probably a pretty left-wing idea Well, I got a ton of those but but it's easy to call me a right-winger for whatever reason I find that fascinating that people do not like a Nuanced approach not not only that they it's not that they don't like it is that they find it extremely easy to categorize you and sort of a negative caricature Yeah.
I went to the RNC and I sort of, you know, got back in with Alex and spent a little bit of time hanging around with him and Roger Stone and so on and got really interested in the kind of dynamics of how Alex and Trump communicate to each other.
But I'm wondering, you've seen Alex more recently than I have.
Well, Alex has been my friend since 1998. Yeah, I was at his custody trial not long ago, and you were brought up.
They got it into their heads that the owls at Bohemian Grove, the owl motifs at Bohemian Grove, was indicative of the fact that it was like Moloch, the owl god.
Would say that the reason why there's all those owls because I saw like stuffed owls in display cabinets and so on But I think it's like I think it's an owl sanctuary I Mean but anyway, but why do they stuff them that well?
I mean, I presume it died of natural causes Miss it shitty fucking sanctuary if they kill it then stuff it so it's sort of like Norman Bates mom and psycho stuffer, but what was odd?
The oddest moment, and this is where my memory of the night does tally with Alex's, is that for whatever reason, the people in the crowd were really into this ceremony.
They were really fired up by it.
I remember this old guy walked up to me before it started and said, Are you a first-timer?
And I went, yeah.
Oh, you're going to love it.
You're going to love it.
It's like, burn him, burn him.
Or something along those lines.
And it did make me think like...
And then I looked behind and there was Alex and Mike, wide-eyed, looking like they were in, you know, the belly of the beast.
And then there's all these old preppy men, like, wide-eyed.
They were really into it too.
I felt like the only sane person in the entire Redwood Forest.
I was like the only person who was thinking, this is fucking ridiculous.
It was that moment of revelation, actually, that then led me to write the book that I wrote after that book, which was The Men who Stay at Goats, which was about, you know, soldiers trying to kill goats just by staring at them.
Because I remember, like...
I remember thinking, I was actually, I was in Belfast, I was giving a talk about my book Them, which is where I talk about all of that stuff.
And somebody said, okay, so I know what you think of it.
This woman in the audience said, I know what you think, I know you think this is like ridiculous.
And I know that Alex Jones thinks it's evil.
But what about the people in the crowd?
What were they thinking about it?
And I thought that's a really good question.
So that's what led me to write a book about, like, a rational thought in powerful places, which is what led me to write The Monster of Ghosts.
Now, when you're there, and you see that there really is this giant stone owl, and they really do have this bundle of sticks that they're burning, and everyone really is wearing these robes.
I mean, part of you had to be like, how many of these fucking things are going on that we haven't infiltrated?
There's at one point, this is a lesser documented part of the ritual.
At one point, there's a guy in leaf-covered lederhosen, a Appears in like a stage cut out of the redwood tree and starts singing this kind of elegy to nature.
It could be that, or it could be just this weird sense, this weird sort of psychological need that people like Ivy League people feel they need to, like, have a sense of superiority.
And one way to do that is to kind of create these secret rituals to give them a sense of, like, you know, grandeur over the people.
Yeah, but Alex, but here's my truck with Alex in all of this, is that it wasn't like for Alex, all the fucking crazy shit that we saw that night wasn't enough.
Like he had to like turn it up to 11. Of course.
Yeah, and imply that we had possibly witnessed an actual human sacrifice.
So they called me up and they basically wanted me to give them as much evidence as I could that proved that Alex and Trump were, you know, aligned and they would talk to each other and so on.
I went to Bohemian Grove, but then I also brought out this little Kindle single last summer called The Elephant in the Room, in which I'm trying to trace, like, the relationship between Alex and Trump via Rochester.
It's kind of interesting stuff.
So I answered the questions as best as I could, but I don't know that much about exactly how often Trump and Alex talk to each other.
People look for fucking conspiracies in everything, and I don't know what it is.
I have friends that have this issue.
I don't understand it.
Things that could be easily explained, they look for a conspiracy.
Anything that happens in the news, there's got to be a different story.
Like, sometimes shit just happens, and when that shit happens, the news has a story.
It doesn't always have to be some sort of nefarious plot, but these people also think that the government is filled with idiots.
Well, I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways.
You can't have a bunch of incompetent fuckheads who pull off the perfect fake world where everything you see is some sort of an elaborate, played-out scheme in order to manipulate you into either buying this or voting for that.
There's a weird inclination that people have to not just...
Not just some conspiracy theories, but almost everything to think everything is some part of some crazy plot.
Oh my god, it was some thing where there were people talking about Santa Claus being black.
And I'll never forget it, because she was on TV going, you know, listen, Santa Claus is white.
And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about?
Santa Claus isn't real, you crazy bitch.
You can't say Santa Claus is white more than you can say Cat in the Hat is red.
They're not real things.
You know, you can decide that the cat in the hat in the book is always white.
Okay.
Yeah, you're right.
Good point.
But is he black?
Is he white?
What is the cat in the hat?
The hat is red and white.
What color is he, though?
I think he's black, right?
Is he?
Okay.
It's not important.
But what's important is that, like, her whole thing was being this spokesperson, this ultra-hot spokesperson for the conservative movement, but also being someone who's ruthlessly smart and articulate and capable of shutting down these stammering liberals that dare go and question her narrative.
And then all of a sudden she's on NBC. Like, you can't do that.
It's like NBC. So the mainstream has its own tricks.
It's like it's not an outright lie, like Alex would do.
But that, you know, panicky, selective editing is a lie of its own.
I would have imagined that during the interview between Alex and Megyn Kelly, Alex would have said some things that were eloquent or a sentence without a stammer and a swear.
Having any sort of a conversation about any sort of difficult subject and stuffing it into seven minutes or whatever it is, It's ridiculous.
It's an ancient way of communicating and now that we have the internet and Alex is shown with his own show that he can go and rant about something for 15 minutes or whatever it is with no limitations or restrictions.
It's a better way to communicate.
And one of the things that I wanted to do when I had Alex on the podcast is I wanted people to see the Alex that I know.
Because there's no other way to see him like that.
I wanted to get him drunk, I wanted to get him high, and I wanted to have him talk.
And my friend Eddie, who's just so into conspiracies, he kind of fucked some of it because he's just so into chemtrails and proving that chemtrails are real.
But it was good, overall.
Because it's like, he was, Alex is so crazy that even Eddie was like, what?
There was a couple moments where Eddie turned to look at Alex and goes, what the fuck?
Like when he's talking about interdimensional child molesters.
I wanted people to see him the way I see him.
He's a fun guy that I like hanging out with.
Do I think that he has a lot of influence?
Yeah.
Do I think he says things that he definitely shouldn't say?
Of course, especially the Sandy Hook stuff.
I mean, I think this inclination to always look towards conspiracy.
Yes.
It's dangerous, it's harmful.
It's dangerous in that people are easily led.
And if you get people thinking that everything's a conspiracy, the real problem is they don't know what the fuck a conspiracy actually is when it's in front of them and it's real.
And there's a ton of them that are real.
So when you're crying wolf around every corner and then all of a sudden you turn a corner like, holy shit, that's a real wolf.
That's my frustration with Alex, too, is that he has a conspiracy template, and whatever real-world event happens, he then shoehorns into this kind of simplistic template.
The goat-spider hybrid that he talks about is true, though.
He doesn't express it very well, but I learned this when I was writing the Manistatic Goats all of those years ago, that they really were mixing up spider silk with goat milk and creating some kind of...
She's always sweet, but when she was saying that he's a bully and he broke me, and I was like, oh my god, you held up a photo of his headless body that his children could have seen, or not his headless body, his head separated from his body, that his children could have seen.
What is that?
It's so ineffective.
And then for her to say that he broke her, he's a bully, all he did was say it was horrible.
Yeah.
Like, that he's targeting her.
It's like this whole, like, professional victim thing that people enjoy.
They enjoy, like, taking on the role with such, they have such, like, energy they put to being the victim.
It's just, God, you shouldn't hold up pictures of people's heads.
Okay, if you don't like them, I mean, especially, like, in this day and age when there's people that actually cut people's heads off and, I mean, show them on camera, I mean, this is fucking crazy!
You know, by the way, speaking of cutting people's heads off and showing them on camera, Around the time that I was hanging out with Alex at Bohemian Grove, I was also hanging out documenting this Islamic militant called Omar Bakri Mohammed, who was the head of this group in Britain called Al-Muhajirun.
And a bunch of his people are the ones who now drive vans into pedestrians.
And it makes me realise that all of the people with the kind of craziest and most pernicious ideas that I hung out with in the 90s I don't think Alex should have political sway.
How the fuck did he go from Kathy Griffin, who's a comedian who did a gag that she thought was going to get her attention to backfire, to there are a bunch of corporate special interests who've had their knee on our neck.
Like, what?!
How the fuck has Kathy Griffin got her knee on anybody's neck?
She's not a corporation.
She's not a special interest.
She's a fucking comic.
I know her.
You can can that conspiracy instantaneously.
You're looking for the part where he talks about the moon?
unidentified
I was looking ahead to see what this human-animal hybrid is coming.
I mean, none of this would matter if there wasn't just the possibility that Trump believes this stuff.
Although, I'll tell you what I would say.
Last summer, I wrote this book, The Elephant in the Room, trying to trace just how it works.
Like, Alex via Roger Stone meeting Trump and so on.
I discovered one really interesting thing, which is, this is something Alex didn't like.
Alex did say to me when I was writing this book, you can write whatever you want, I don't care.
But that turned out to not be entirely true.
There were things that he did care about that I wrote.
And one of them was, I talked to Glenn Beck, and he told me the story, this is before Trump was elected, he told me the story about how Trump invited him to Mar-a-Lago around the time that Trump was deciding to stand in And he phoned Glenn Beck, even though they were both at Mar-a-Lago.
Trump was in one room and Glenn Beck was in the other.
And Trump phoned Glenn Beck and said, I think you're so influential.
You're so great.
You're great.
You've got such influence.
You can unite the Tea Party and the mainstream Republicans.
And Glenn Beck thought, fuck you.
I know what you're doing here.
You're playing me.
I've been down this road a million times.
And then Trump did the same thing to Alex.
He phoned Alex and said, you know, you have so much influence.
But if Trump turned on Alex and said InfoWars is a bunch of losers, a bunch of this and that, Alex would turn it around again and he would go after Trump.
And these guys with masks and government-issued boots came in, started smashing windows, lighting things on fire, and that gave them an excuse to come in and break up this riot Where it had been a peaceful protest, where they couldn't stop the peaceful protest.
So now they break up these riots that they've created themselves, start arresting people left and right.
But see, this is, I mean, he documented, he documented this, and it's been documented by many people since then, and even in legitimate circles, like, it was a big factor in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
The Occupy Wall Street movement was infiltrated ad nauseam by people from whatever branch of government, whoever the fuck they were.
But what they did was they caused chaos and then gave them an excuse to arrest them.
And then in the World Trade Organization thing, Alex detailed, like with news reports, independent news reports, how those people were not arrested.
They negotiated their freedom.
They all held up in a house somewhere and then they got them out of there as soon as everybody kind of like forgot about it all.
And then they set up a no protest zone.
And the no protest zone was fascinating because there's a lot of people that disagreed with the policies of the World Trade Organization.
And these people were going to work with a pin on a backpack or a jacket that said WTO and had a line through it.
The police told them they could not go through with the pin-on.
They could not go to work with a pin-on that had a line through the word WTO, like they opposed the WTO. This is a no protest zone.
Alex Jones showed that.
So as wacky as he might be about...
Alien babies that are coming from another dimension that are here to steal your soul and make you vote libertarian.
Like, he might be wrong about a lot of shit, but he also, he's got the balls to expose a lot of crazy shit that people didn't talk about.
Okay, so it was a family of white separatists, Randy and Vicky and their children, Sarah and Rachel and a boy whose name I've forgotten.
It'll come to me.
Anyway, so they moved to Idaho.
Early conspiracy theorists, they moved to Idaho to a cabin on top of a hill at a place called Ruby Creek.
Anyway, Randy and Vicky used to go to Aryan Nations for their picnics and barbecues.
But they weren't, and this is a kind of pivotal point, they weren't as crazy as the people at Aryan Nations.
They weren't white supremacists, but they were sort of fellow travellers, but not quite as crazy.
So alienations was infiltrated, like all white, you know, supremacist groups by lots of federal agents.
And they saw Randy and thought they could work with him.
So they said to Randy, you know, will you be an informant for us?
And Randy said, no.
So then they sent in this guy and asked Randy to saw off a shotgun a quarter of an inch below the legal limit.
So Randy sawed off the shotgun for this guy and then they said, we're federal agents, you just committed a felony, you're going to go to prison unless you become an informant for us against Aryan nations.
And Randy, being a kind of hot-headed idiot, I made a big show of saying no, fuck off.
So they went back to their cabins.
They went back to the cabin and a warrant was issued for Randy's arrest and Randy didn't turn up to court.
So now the US Marshals are like hiding in the bushes, looking at Randy's cabin.
Randy arms his kids, his tiny little kids, you know, so they're patrolling up and down outside the cabin with these guns.
They were becoming increasingly paranoid thinking they were being watched from the bushes and they were being watched from the bushes.
CCTV cameras and US Marshals.
Anyway, one day the US Marshals got too close to the cabin and one of Randy's dogs started barking.
And the kid, Randy's son came out, 12-year-old kid, looked much younger, looked like eight years old, came out with a gun and gunfire happened.
The US Marshals shot the little boy, nearly shot his arm off, and he turned around and tried to run back to the cabin.
I'm shouting dad and the US Marshals shot him in the back and killed him and they killed the dog and one US Marshal was killed and there's debate as to whether it was either Randy's son or a family friend or whether it was friendly fire or not.
So they got the son's body and put him in the cabin.
And the next day, this FBI sharpshooter called Lon Horiuchi turned up.
So the FBI surrounded the cabin.
A US marshal had been killed.
There were tanks.
There were hundreds of troops.
This was like in the Clinton 90s when the Cold War was kind of dying and they needed a new enemy.
And so the new enemy that week was...
Randy Weaver and his family.
So Vicky Weaver was holding their baby, Elisabeth, in the doorway of the cabin and the sharpshooter shot Vicky through the face and killed her.
And then they pulled Vicky's body into the cabin and Randy was shot as well but survived.
And a siege ensued.
It lasted about two weeks of the kids inside the cabin, the FBI outside of the cabin.
It ended up ending peacefully.
Beau Grites, who was a big kind of militia hero, turned up and sort of helped to stop it from happening.
To help to get Randy out of the cabin.
And in the end the daughters each got a million dollars each in compensation and it all kind of faded away.
So I was making a documentary about all of this and I went to Aryan Nations because I thought I can just turn up and say I'm friends with Randy Weaver and they'd let me in.
So I turned up and immediately all of these skinheads surrounded me and started asking me what my genealogy was because they thought correctly that I'm a Jew.
So I said, what's my genealogy?
That was the word they used.
What's your genealogy?
So I said, I'm Church of England.
And one of the Nazis, their Aryan nations, Made a joke and said something like, oh, Church of England, you're the guys who blah, blah, made some kind of joke.
And the skinhead sort of drifted away from me.
And I've always thought that the guy who alleviated the situation was maybe an undercover agent who was like calming things down and protecting me.
It's always crossed my mind knowing how infiltrated those groups always are, just like the video that you saw, knowing how infiltrated those groups are.
I made this film called Tottenham Atollar, where I spent a year with Omar Bakri, and it was a kind of comic film about his attempts to, like, you know...
He said he wouldn't rest until he saw the flag of Islam flying over Downing Street.
So we made this sort of almost comic film about his sort of blundering attempts to create like Sharia law in Britain.
And the joke of the film is that, oh, this is never going to work.
And it was kind of, you know, some of his ideas were ridiculous.
Like at one point he had these 5,000...
Black balloons carrying the call to war on these little...
They were like leaflets attached to these balloons with slogans like, Islam is the future of Britain.
And they were going to fly over London and land wherever.
But they hadn't properly calculated the weight ratio.
So these fucking balloons let them off and they all just stayed on the floor.
So all year they were failing at doing everything.
But yeah, but then like this was like 96 and then five years later 9-11 happened and now Omar's in prison in Beirut for inciting terrorism and a lot of Omar's people became terrorists.
Yeah, when I knew Alex in the 90s, Infowars was a spare bedroom in his house with choo-choo train wallpaper, like little trains, and an Empire Strikes Back poster.
And it was Alex, Mike Hansen, Alex's girlfriend.
They always called her Violet, but her real name's Kelly.
I said to her, because I went to the custody hearing for a couple of days.
Oh, so I saw him then.
I went to the custody hearing because I was just curious.
And I said to her, the last time I saw the two of you, you were kissing and telling each other how much you loved each other, and then 16 years passes, and it's the worst divorce that Texas has ever known.
So, because it's on the internet, he can say whatever he wants.
So we go live, and Alex goes, well, actually, from here on out, we're on the internet, so you can kind of say whatever you want, but try to keep it clean.
And the look of, for Joey Diaz, it was like the cat who saw the canary and realized that the cage was open.
And so he's telling some story about smuggling weed through the airport.
Every time you listen to your bullshit congressman, or your bullshit governor, or even a bullshit president, and he's kicking you with that same four shit that they give you every four fucking years, and you still vote for the fucking Momo, and then you get mad, think about me saying the word fuck.
I'm with you, but this is just to let the American public know that every four years, they buy the same shit they've been buying every four years, and the same people with their Harvard articulation, and how they don't curse, and they're Christians, and they have a family, and these are the same people that shove it up your fucking ass every year.
The one thing that you'll get about me is, I'll say fuck, but I will not fucking rob you.
I don't agree with a lot of the stuff he says, just like I don't agree with a lot of stuff my friend Eddie says, but I love the both of them.
It's weird, man, and I get it.
I get people saying that he's got too much influence, but my take is if you really think there's fucking alien bases on the moon and that there's child slaves on Mars, fucking shame on you.
Shame on you.
You know, I think the deeper and the more crazy he goes, the better his show is, the more it's entertaining.
Maybe it's because people who have anxiety disorders are quite good when it comes to actual difficult situations, because we've rehearsed it so many times.
We panic unnecessarily so often that when something really worth panicking comes along, we actually handle it really well.
Well, let me ask you, has there ever been a situation where you were confronted with an idea and you're like, you know what, that one is too dangerous.
When I was writing The Minister at Goats, The Minister at Goats was about this kind of secret unit in the 80s of, like, soldiers who were trying to, like, walk through walls and become invisible.
This guy called Jim Schnabel had written this book called Remote Viewers, which kind of, you know, uncovered all of that stuff.
And there was this magician called Ray Hyman, who was like a skeptic.
I think he's dead now.
The CIA brought him in to assess...
The remote viewing program to see whether they should keep it going or close it down.
And Ray Hyman said it was kind of nonsense.
And so that helped the CIA close down the unit.
So I met Ray Hyman and I just happened to say to him, it's like one of those questions that kind of changes your life.
I said to him, so when you were like in the military, like sniffing around with the remote viewers, did you happen to notice like anything else going on?
And he went, yeah, he said there was this general called Stubblebine who thought he could burst clouds with his mind.
And there was this lieutenant colonel called Channon who thought that he could train soldiers to fast for a month.
And so I had these two names, Stubblebine and Channon, and the whole...
Men to stay at goat stuff, which wasn't out in the open.
It all came out.
It was amazing that they were trying to kill goats just by staring at them.
So they had like...
I met this guy who was part of the goat staying program.
And they had like...
This is all at Fort Bragg.
I had a trip around Fort Bragg one time.
And I said to them like...
So where's Goat Lab?
And they went, you're not supposed to know about Goat Lab!
So they had like...
At one point they had like 30 goats in a room and they were all staring at goat number 16. They all had numbers on their backs and goat number 17 fell over.
Which I suppose is collateral damage.
I mean, I would argue that if you stare at a goat long enough, it's gonna fall over.
Because those things, first of all, the way they're cut is with the grain.
The grain is going in a manner...
What's the way we describe it?
It's like if you're holding something up, the grain is actually going in the way that you want it to break.
So you're breaking it with the grain.
You literally can do it with your fingers.
Like I could...
You could take, and those are thin pieces of wood, too.
You could take this piece of, if this wood, if this pad was a wood, you would just go like this with two fingers and just go, snap, and it would break.
It breaks like nothing.
I was 15, and we would do these karate kicks and punches and stuff, and they always broke.
Well, they probably just grabbed whatever dummies they could find.
Like, get some dudes willing to stare at a goat.
Like, there's a lot of people, though.
Here's one thing that is a fact.
There's a lot of people, particularly in the 80s, In the 90s, before the Ultimate Fighting Championship came around, there was a lot of fake martial arts out there.
A lot.
I know people that were teaching fake martial arts that got into the military, that got into the police.
I knew the guy who was deep in the police force, and he had fake martial arts.
When I did that sci-fi show, we did a whole segment on remote viewing and we actually had...
A guy who claimed to be a successful remote viewer, and we set up this location and asked him, me and DJ Grothy, who's a skeptic, very nice guy, and DJ was just as accurate just guessing as this guy was.
I think actually, now that I think about it, I think DJ was more accurate.
You know the kind of dark secret of the remote viewing world?
I mean, you can't totally blame the remote viewers for this.
So the remote viewing unit at Fort Meade got declassified and shut down.
So a lot of these remote viewers then set up their own training centres, including Ed Dames in, I don't know, maybe in Vegas, or somewhere not far from me.
There was a woman called Courtney and then there was this other student.
I've forgotten her names.
Anyway, but they would then...
So Ed Dames taught them remote viewing, these two people, who would then go on the Art Bell Show and they became, you know, regular guests on the Art Bell Show.
And they're the ones, these two of Ed Dames' students, they're the ones who basically announced on the Art Bell Show that the Hale-Bopp comet had a companion object in its tail.
They'd remote viewed it.
The Hale-Bopp comet that was about to pass over the Earth had a companion object in its tail.
And listening to the Art Bell show was the Heaven's Gate group.
Now, when it goes back to conspiracy theorists or whether it's the remote viewers or even someone who would watch that guy's karate videos and think that he's really doing death touches.
He's talking about how he has a method of going through the skin to attack the organs.
Is it true that in the movie adaptation of my book, The Minister of Goats, there's a kind of bit of comedy where somebody thinks that they fell victim to the death touch, but it happened like years later, like 25 years ago, he was given the death touch and now he's dying from it 25 years later.
In China, it was so poorly received that the guy who was the MMA fighter had to go into hiding because he beat the living fuck out of this guy in like 10 seconds.
The guy came out and did all this crazy stuff and the guy just smashes him in the face MMA style and his kung fu was no good this day.
Watch this.
So you get the young guy in orange shoes who's like a legit fighter and then the other guy who is this Silly death touch guy dressed up like he's in a different century and like watch how this goes down because it's it's horrible Because this guy on the left with the orange sneakers on is a real trained fighter.
And this other guy has a real belief in this system that he's been practicing under and he has no idea that it's horseshit.
And the way he finds out that it's horseshit is on YouTube.
I mean, he literally finds out in this moment that what he's...
I mean, he probably believed it.
He probably believed that what he does is actually real and effective.
So check this out.
It's horrible.
They get together.
Blah, blah, blah.
They go over what you're supposed to do or whatever.
And they...
I don't know if they make them shake hands.
Yep, they shake hands.
And then they go back.
And then they get the party started.
And it takes 10 seconds.
Here we go.
Ready, set, go.
There it goes.
So this guy's...
Like literally...
Doing like some movie stuff...
And then, boom, the MMA guy just starts teeing off.
And so he's got this crazy idea that he's just gonna, like, give that guy the hex and the guy's gonna go flying through the air like the other guy was teaching.
But this kid just sort of...
Circles them for a few seconds and then just like that other video beats the holy fuck out of them inside of about 10 seconds.
Just zoom off until they engage.
Yeah, it's like here goes See?
He's like doing his craziness.
And the young martial artist just grabs him, punches him, kicks him.
And you see, he's holding his face.
He's like, what the fuck?
And the young guy's really nice.
He's like, you okay?
You want to keep going?
And he's holding his mouth.
Look, the young guy literally says, look...
Does he want to keep going?
Let's stop.
Let's stop.
This guy's bleeding out of his nose, and so he says, keep going.
He says, I'm fine.
And so he gets his hands up, and this time it's going to work.
This time I'm going to hit him with the full voodoo.
And this kid just blam, blam, blam, and then this kick.
Boom!
That's where it gets horrific.
And that guy was probably like 60. It's not a good time to get kicked in the face.
Well, you've got to think, if you're an innocent person, and for two years they take away your freedom, and they make you listen to Fleetwood Mac cover band, you probably...
Also heartbreakingly from around that time, Omar Bakri, who was the guy, the jihadist I made a film about, his son, he had this really sweet little kid, this son, Mohammed, who was really scared that his father might get hurt because he was so public and open.
And he would confide in us that he was scared that his father would get hurt.
Fucking two years ago, his son joins ISIS. Tries to leave ISIS. So ISIS kill him.
I know.
All these people I knew 20 years ago.
I tell you, all the worst.
Here we go.
Jamal O'Hara has been killed when he carried out a suicide car bombing.
And he apparently found this girl he was dating, but they broke up.
He found her in bed with another man and wound up beating him and beating her like half to death, like ruptured her liver, broke her ribs, smashed her face, broke her teeth.
I wonder whether, you know, I wrote this book called The Psychopath Test.
And I met a martial arts guy once.
I got into like a road rage instance with this guy.
And I had like, my son was one at the time.
And he like leapt out of the car.
And I said, my son's in the car.
And he said, I don't give a fuck about your son.
And afterwards, when I got The Psychopath Test, I always remembered this guy as being like, I wonder whether he was a psychopath.
I wonder whether, like, given that one of the items on the psychopath checklist is like grandiose sense of self-worth, I wonder whether the mixed martial artist world, given that, you know, whether it sort of attracts psychopaths?
Well, it certainly attracts people that aren't opposed to violence, right?
Because they're engaging in violence.
It also attracts people that are just like they might have been BMX riders or skateboarders or skydivers.
They love the extreme danger aspect of it.
They're thrill seekers.
And the way I described mixed martial arts is high level problem solving with dire physical consequences.
That's really essentially what it is and these guys are attracted to these extreme experiences So some of them are very pleasant people some of them are very nice like Like for instance Mighty Mouse is probably the best pound-for-pound fighter ever if you met him You would never know he's the best fighter in the world.
He's the sweetest guy.
He's so normal Very articulate easy to talk to doesn't get hit a lot either though.
He's so slick and smart and the way he fights is so clever but Some of them get hit a lot And, you know, now that we're knowing more and more, essentially every day, about the effects of traumatic brain injuries and concussions, and you're seeing more and more of these stories of football players doing crazy things.
And I'm sure you saw that recent study where they tested 111 football players and they found 110 of them had traumatic brain injuries.
Chris Benoit's brain forensic exam, consistent with numerous brain injuries, CTE, which is found in all regions of his brain, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
You know, I wrote a piece about Chris Benoit for The Guardian, and when it came out at one o'clock in the morning, the press officer for WWE phoned me up and yelled at me.
Yelled at 1 in the morning cuz I said what like like I tricked them into like spending time backstage at WWE when I was only interested in Chris Benoit You know was this did you write the did you meet go backstage before he killed people?
No, it was tracing the butterfly effect of Fabian's business plan on their world.
It was such a kind of interesting exercise, you know, to try and work at what's the furthest ripple I could find.
Like, what...
You know, so Fabian has this idea about giving the world free porn, and then that leads to that, and that leads to that, and that leads to that, and, like, what's the furthest I could find, the furthest consequence?
And it was such a sort of fun exercise, coupled with the fact that being around porn people was a little bit like being at a Broadway show backstage, you know, these, like, you know, theatre people.
So, coupled with all of that, and the fact that I was in L.A., and I got to, like, hang out in L.A., it was a really fun year.
Can I tell you, by the way, one of the strangest consequences?
It's like, you know, I think when we were growing up, maybe, I don't know, 14 was probably maybe about the age that we started, like, seeing ripped out pages of Playboy and bridges and so on.
So anyway, so I was really interested in like, so what are the consequences of this, of like 12-year-old kids learning about sex through Pornhub?
And I found this terrible consequence in Oklahoma.
So this was a boy called Nathan with autism.
So he was like an awkward kid with autism, trying to chat up a girl but didn't know how to do it.
So he thought he should text her lines of dialogue that he'd heard in porn films.
So he texted her.
First he texted her a bunch of hentai porn photographs and she didn't respond.
So I said, if she'd responded, what would you have done?
He said, I would have stopped.
Like, if she said, can you stop sending me these, what would you have done?
He said, I would have stopped sending them.
I just assumed she was busy.
So then he texted her a line of dialogue that he heard in a porn film and it was, I want to bend you over and rape you from behind.
So he is now on the sex offenders registry for 25 years, which means he has to live in a house right at the edge of town because he has to be 2,000 feet away from parks and daycare centres.
He can't go anywhere where children go, so he can't go to football games, basketball games, he can't go to the park.
Like, if you play as this little boy, they were, like, playing this game where they'd take their clothes off in the dark and then put their clothes back on quickly, like a bunch of nine-year-old kids or something.
This one kid kept his clothes off when they turned the lights on.
The girl complained to her parents and this boy is on the sex offenders register.
So I said to this woman who like defends children on the sex offenders registry, I said to her like, you know, why doesn't the judge just say this is ridiculous and throw it out of court?
And she said, you know, there's this kind of prevailing view that, A, it's better to protect, you know, it's better to err on sight of caution.
But also, there's this prevailing view that if a kid starts acting sexually weird at the age of 10, that's a kind of precursor for them being sexually weird when they're an adult.
You know, and that sort of shatters some of the stereotypes people have about porn, that the people are sleazy and uncaring and doing coke and smacking each other.
I did a little bit from the butterfly effect on stage at the Ace Hotel down here in Los Angeles.
And we invited a bunch of our porn people along.
And they said to us afterwards, like, 25 years of being in porn, we were the first mainstream people to come along and not treat them as like, you know, ingredients in our pre-existing ideology.
So not pitying them or attacking them, just treating them on a level as a fellow human being.
And isn't that kind of nuts that that's rare in porn?
Because we all feel the sort of society as mainstream journalists, we feel these kind of societal pressures to in some way attack them.
You know, they're to be pitied, they're to be hated.
When I first moved to California, I was on this sitcom called Newsradio, and one of the guys who was a writer on Newsradio was a writer for porn films on the side.
And what it was, was it didn't really pay much, but it gave him access to the girls and let him meet these girls.
And he was kind of a nebbishy, sort of dorky guy.
And he had never been around like a real bombshell girl that was willing to have sex with him before.
So all of a sudden he's having sex with these porn stars but they get to have sex with these guys on set and it was like some of this weird thing that like this is his girlfriend but she would go to work and get the shit fucked out of her by a bunch of different guys.
It wasn't my friend, but it was a friend of a friend who told me this story that this guy was dating this girl and, you know, it was just the same thing.
It's like, hey, you know, it's what she does for a living.
No big deal.
And he read her contract and he goes, what's airtight?
And Airtight is a dick in every hole.
And he's like, check please.
This is it.
I can't do this.
I can't.
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So the guy, the first guy, though, took me to a set.
It was Janine and Jill Kelly, who are very famous porn stars, a lesbian scene, and there was a scene like there was a cartoon character, a comic book character this woman wrote, she came to life, and they were having a lesbian scene together.
But it was really weird.
Because she knew that we were watching, and so there was this air of theatrical enthusiasm that was very forced.
They would do the scenes, she'd be like, I love my job, I love my job, my job is amazing.
And I look at my friend at the time, and I was like, hmm.
I remember Mike Quasar saying to me on my first porn set, this director who we kind of embedded ourselves with said to me, you'll find that there's a wisp of darkness to everybody who does this for a living.
And when they leave porn, this is another consequence of Fabian that I look at in the show, is that when they leave porn, it's much more likely That, you know, they leave porn, they go to a different part of America, they start a new life.
It's much more likely that they'll be noticed than in the 90s.
Like in the 90s, for an ex-porn star to be outed, someone would have to go to like a DVD shop.
These days, everybody, you know, just watches 20 porn films for five seconds each until they find the one that...
You know, they want to jack off too.
So it's much more likely that a former porn star will be spotted and outed and, as a consequence, fired.
Like, I was talking to this guy called Dale Rutter.
His poor name is Dale DeBone.
LAUGHTER Got a job as a nurse in a hospital and Human Resources called him in and said to him, are you Dale DeBone?
He said, yeah, and said, we have to fire you because if any patient says you even looked at her the wrong way, they would win in court.
So poor Dale.
And Dale said that his recognisability has gone up massively since Pornhub and Free Porn came along.
Well, I hope that our show, I hope the butterfly effect, because it's so just, it just shows them to be just, you know, just like the rest of us, ordinary, sweet, fucked up, nice, you know, mixtures of...