Aug. 8, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:34:51
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Three, two, one. | ||
| John Ronson, welcome back. | ||
| Joe, it's good to be back. | ||
| Good to see you again. | ||
| It's very good to be back. | ||
| What's happening, man? | ||
| How you been? | ||
| I've been good. | ||
| You've been floating around this neighborhood. | ||
| Yeah, I've spent a year on porn sets. | ||
| Just research. | ||
| Just research. | ||
| It was a lot. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Fake porn's everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, no, that was back in the day. | ||
| That was like in the 90s. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| So Fabian gave the world Pornhub. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So it's fiction. | ||
| No, no, this is all true. | ||
| So, okay, let me go back. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So in the 90s, this kid called Fabian... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he bought up this fledgling company in Montreal called MAMSEF at the time. | ||
| It was run by these two brothers up in Montreal and they had just invented Pornhub. | ||
| Fabian bought up Pornhub and then kind of overnight single-handedly It took over the valley. | ||
| It's an extraordinary story. | ||
| This massive flow of money went from where we are now in the valley, a community of people who were making pretty good money from porn. | ||
| The money just flowed into Fabian's pocket. | ||
| Because what Fabian did was, well, look, if you're a porn star and you go to a bank and say, can I have a checking account? | ||
| Did you say a porn star or a porn stir? | ||
| Well, I said a porn star, but actually there aren't really many porn stars anymore. | ||
| If you're a porn person and you go to a bank and you say, can I have a checking account? | ||
| The bank manager will usually say no, because you're in porn, which means you're disreputable. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Wait a minute. | ||
| People like Stoyer have written about this a lot, about how they find it really hard to get mortgages, how they find it hard to get checking accounts. | ||
| But checking accounts? | ||
| That seems unlikely. | ||
| I mean, I would believe that maybe mortgages, they would think that your business is fairly unstable. | ||
| That kind of makes sense as far as an investment's concerned. | ||
| And also the idea that other people, other customers might not like the idea that their high street bank is being shared with somebody who's in porn. | ||
|
unidentified
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Really? | |
| It's called reputational risk. | ||
| Wow, that seems really dumb to me. | ||
| That doesn't make any sense at all. | ||
| Right, well, sure. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Let me pause there. | ||
| You said no one cares about it. | ||
| But a lot of people did. | ||
| It was a huge issue. | ||
| And there was a lot of, like, moral debate. | ||
| About streaming porn? | ||
| Well, you know, there's a lot of the girls that were in porn that were really pissed off because they weren't making any money anymore. | ||
| And there was a lot of social media posts about it, imploring people to stop using these sites, which no one listened to. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, porn people cared. | ||
| But, you know, porn consumers didn't care. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then it all dried up. | ||
| It all dried up. | ||
| I mean, it dried up quick. | ||
| Yeah, it all went into Fabian pocket. | ||
| He lost his house. | ||
| His house got repossessed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Fabian got so rich because of this. | ||
| Because the money went from your friend's pocket into Fabian's pocket. | ||
| Fabian got so rich. | ||
| But how's he getting rich off of free streaming? | ||
| So the ads? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| You know you're doing well when you get your own diver. | ||
| That's weird. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So... | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| Porn people cared a lot, but the outside world didn't care. | ||
| Because, you know, the outside world doesn't care when music's getting pirated, so they sure as hell don't care when it's porn. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I was like, no, that industry is gone. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Many other industries were bailed out. | ||
| And when you look at that, far smaller. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| When you look at their headquarters up in Montreal, the company that owned Pornhub, it's not Pornhub, it's techie. | ||
| So you walk in. | ||
| Fabian actually said to me quite tellingly, he said, yes, he said it was amazing. | ||
| You wouldn't even know that we were in porn unless you went to the wrong floor. | ||
| Now, he seems like a guy who's well aware of his crime. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Fabian would say, if it wasn't me, it would be somebody else. | ||
| What does that mean? | ||
| That sounds like a good thing to say after you kill somebody. | ||
| I did say, it's progress. | ||
| You'd call it progress. | ||
| But he's a criminal. | ||
| I mean, it's essentially, he's lucky that he's dealing in pirated stuff. | ||
| Right? | ||
| The one time Fabian got annoyed with me... | ||
| He was quite game. | ||
| I wanted to interview him and then I wanted to travel to the Valley to look at the consequences and trace consequence through to consequence. | ||
| Like, where would I end up if I just... | ||
| Because I think people don't think about consequences on the internet that much. | ||
| They want to just, you know, destroy somebody and then carry on with their day. | ||
| So I wanted to tell a story about consequences. | ||
| The only time Fabian got annoyed with me was when either me or Mike Quasar, director, said to him... | ||
| You know, you uploaded pirated porn. | ||
| And he said, no, I didn't. | ||
| I have never uploaded pirated porn. | ||
| I offer a service in which other people can upload pirated porn. | ||
| And if they tell us to take it down, we'll take it down. | ||
| But they have to find it. | ||
| They have to find it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do you think that he's a psychopath or do you think it's some sort of a convenient neglecting of a certain responsibility for what happened? | ||
| 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? | ||
| Because it's all about progress. | ||
| Their livelihood? | ||
| What does he mean by that? | ||
| Like, okay, now you want to talk about their livelihood. | ||
| Their livelihood, the people. | ||
| But I mean, they're essentially like a content provider that's not paying for any content. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, yeah, so... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, but it's not as simple as pirating. | ||
| Because pirating is what everybody does when they're sharing it through message boards or what have you. | ||
| That's sort of pirating, right? | ||
| When they're uploading it to these websites and servers and stuff. | ||
| But what he's doing is massively profiting off of other people's work. | ||
| It's a little bit more of a gray area. | ||
| Yeah, I'd say so. | ||
| Not even gray. | ||
| It's kind of dark. | ||
| Well, he certainly profited hugely from other people pirating their favorite porn films onto his site. | ||
| Has he been sued? | ||
| He got arrested for tax evasion. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, and that's what the article... | ||
| What was the publication? | ||
| Who published that article? | ||
| It was The Guardian. | ||
| I did like a written version of one of the episodes of the show. | ||
| I just stumbled upon it, you know, knowing that you were going to be here. | ||
| I didn't even know you wrote it. | ||
| I was reading it, and as I was reading it, I was like, oh, John wrote this. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Isn't it? | ||
| What an amazing... | ||
| Did you know about this world? | ||
| No. | ||
| And you're right in Pornland here, right in the valley. | ||
| So, yeah, it's a pretty hidden world. | ||
| Fascinating. | ||
| Explain what it is. | ||
| People literally will request some of the most bizarre things, and these people will make custom films based on their weird kinks. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Now, how much does something like this cost? | ||
| Like, say if you want to make a film about girls wearing mutant ninja turtle outfits who kick guys in the balls. | ||
| Like, that's entirely possible, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Anything's possible. | ||
| But that sounds like something that might actually sell. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Like a couple of thousand dollars. | ||
| That's it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A couple grand? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I got so obsessed with the world of bespoke porn because it was such a fascinating window into people's inner lives. | ||
| One of the first ones I saw was a condiments video. | ||
| Like ketchup and relish and stuff like that? | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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And... | |
| And the woman's like trying to, you know, she's like Gabe. | ||
| So she's going, oh, it's so cold and slimy. | ||
| Anyway, the guy who commissioned this video, the producers knew one thing about him. | ||
| He's a restauranteur who deals with condiments every day. | ||
| Oh, how weird. | ||
| Yeah, and has to, you know, presumably avoid situations like that happening in his restaurant. | ||
| So he just sits around thinking, like as customers are sitting down, squirt her with some mayonnaise, just lather her up with ketchup. | ||
| Or maybe it's stress. | ||
| Maybe it's like, oh my god, if this tub of mayonnaise falls on the floor, or falls on this woman, we're all fucked. | ||
| We get sued, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, we're doomed. | ||
| And there'd be like the cleaning pill. | ||
| And maybe it's like... | ||
| And maybe his release is to do this. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
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Whoa. | |
| Yes. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| There's a steal from it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| How much is a stamp collection worth? | ||
| Well, like... | ||
| Well, it turns out, because we managed to track down Stamps Man, and he talked to us, after a lot of persuasion. | ||
| And he's got ten books of stamps, and once a year he sends one to a custom producer. | ||
| And so he does it once a year. | ||
| So that's his thing? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So now he pays porn people to destroy his stamps. | ||
| The psychiatrist told him that a hobby is ridiculous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| According to him, I mean, I never talked to the psychiatrist, but according to him, yeah, he said that stamp collecting is a ridiculous hobby. | ||
| That seems like a ridiculous thing for a psychologist to say. | ||
| Sounds like a bad psychologist. | ||
| Yeah, someone enjoys it. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, the only... | ||
| I mean, one good thing that came out of it was... | ||
| He really enriched the imaginations of the people in the valley. | ||
| And also my imagination, too. | ||
| I mean, Stamps Man, because all the custom producers talk, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And Stamps Man was such a mystery to them all. | ||
| So, you know, so at least he destroys the stamps now in a way that's beneficial to him. | ||
| God, it's so weird. | ||
| Yeah, isn't it amazing? | ||
| But it's all weird, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| Well, it's also quite sad. | ||
| Dan and Rhiannon, who made one of the Stamps videos, called us just as we were finishing our series. | ||
| And Rhiannon was in tears. | ||
| And they just had a request. | ||
| And the request was for a guy. | ||
| A guy wanted a porn woman to sit cross-legged on the floor, fully clothed. | ||
| And saying to the camera, you are loved. | ||
| Things may be bad now, but they won't always be. | ||
| And suicide is not the answer. | ||
| So then they thought, what do we do? | ||
| So they told him they'd make the video for him. | ||
| And they could shoot it really soon. | ||
| And he didn't respond. | ||
| So they made it anyway. | ||
| And we were there to record it. | ||
| And it made me realise just how kind of delightful the bespoke porn world is because they were so eager to help this guy. | ||
| Did he kill himself? | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| They made the video for him. | ||
| 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. | ||
| We don't know. | ||
| You know, it's interesting. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It's because we're all fucked up. | ||
| I talked to this girl called Dakota, who was part of a Radical Honesty group. | ||
| A Radical Honesty group? | ||
| Have you come across Radical Honesty? | ||
| No, I don't think so. | ||
| You would love it. | ||
| I might be in one. | ||
| I don't even know it. | ||
| What's a Radical Honesty group? | ||
| Well, the first time I ever heard about Radical Honesty was my friend Starly Kine, the podcaster, who went on a Radical Honesty group. | ||
| And one of the things you have to do... | ||
| She's on a podcast? | ||
| Yeah, she does a podcast called Mystery Show. | ||
| She used to be on This American Life. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| And nobody knows that it was murder. | ||
| 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... | ||
| That's disgusting. | ||
| No, he said, can I add something to my... | ||
| You should be ashamed of yourself. | ||
| No, quite the opposite. | ||
| He said, can I add something to my secret? | ||
| He said, I also have sex with my cat. | ||
| He had a one-upper. | ||
| Yeah, he had to be the best secret in the room. | ||
| He might be a bullshit artist, huh? | ||
| It's possible. | ||
| Yeah, that's part of the problem with those... | ||
| 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. | ||
| But her issue is church-going plus female. | ||
| Whereas men, they have very specific tastes and they tend to gravitate towards very specific porn stars. | ||
| One of the things that I've noticed that really popular porn stars... | ||
| We'll have, like, gigantic numbers on, like, social media, Twitter or Instagram, like, upwards of a million, you know? | ||
| And maybe more. | ||
| And so they obviously have, like, a following, you know? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, in this particular example, maybe. | ||
| But I mean, I think it's an inherently, for whatever reason, in my estimation and in many others, a depressing business. | ||
| Yeah, and I don't know why. | ||
| I mean, for a lot of people, the idea of a young girl going into porn is depressing. | ||
| You know, like I have daughters. | ||
| The idea of my daughters going into porn is very depressing. | ||
| But I've met porn stars that seem nice. | ||
| They seem happy. | ||
| But why is it that everybody wants to have sex, but if you have sex on film... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And everybody gets to watch the shame. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| It's a weird little side effect of our civilization. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And the people that were mocking them, first of all, they're young, right? | ||
| Teenagers. | ||
| And second of all, they're probably thinking of it in terms of like, almost like they're online. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, like one of the things about online is there's no consequences for what you're saying and then people have no problem shitting on people. | ||
| We couldn't see them. | ||
| We could only hear them. | ||
| I was looking up and I couldn't see them. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| Because they were up on like a ridge above the house. | ||
| Yeah, it's almost like being anonymous. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like that Randy Newman song, I just want you to hurt like I do. | ||
| Yeah, I'd say there's certainly an element to that. | ||
| There's also an element of what the right call, what's that phrase that the right use all the time? | ||
| Virtue signaling, which I don't like using that phrase because it's still been kind of adopted by the sort of, you know, white nationalists. | ||
| But that's different, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But it exists. | ||
| Virtue signaling is absolutely real. | ||
| I see it all the time. | ||
| I see it all the time. | ||
| It's usually like really, really weak men. | ||
| They're trying really hard to court the favor of women and they're not attractive and they're not desirable. | ||
| And so they try really hard to be allies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| The last time I was here, I'd just gone through all of that as a result of my public shaming book coming out. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| And like a sort of small group of people decided to sort of try and... | ||
| Angry at you, John Johnson. | ||
| Get in the group. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wrong think. | ||
| You were guilty of wrong think. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I just read a story this morning in Vulture about the young adult world where this book came out called... | ||
| Let me see if I can find it. | ||
| It's called The Black Witch and it's a liberal book. | ||
| It's a young adult book. | ||
| It's a progressive book but it contains racist characters. | ||
| So a blogger took some of the quotes that the racist characters said in the book This Vulture article quotes it. | ||
| And took them out of context. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Page 163. The Celts are not a pure race like us. | ||
| They're more accepting of intermarriage. | ||
| And because of this, they're hopelessly mixed. | ||
| So that's a quote from the book. | ||
| And then the blog wrote underneath. | ||
| Yes, you read that with your own two eyes. | ||
| This is one of the times my jaw dropped in horror and I had to walk away from this book. | ||
| So then... | ||
| How noble. | ||
| 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. | ||
| It was Kirkus. | ||
| Kirkus is like this industry... | ||
| When you write a book, one of the first reviews you get is from Kirkus. | ||
| Spell that word? | ||
| K-I-R-K-U-S. Okay. | ||
| And if you get like a starred Kirkus review, it's like a big deal. | ||
| And so they powered in on Kirkus for giving it a good review. | ||
| But I noticed two things happened as a result of this. | ||
| One was actually it didn't seem to affect the book's success. | ||
| The book is doing well, like on Amazon, and people who actually read the book aren't offended by it. | ||
| And the same thing happened with my book, so you've been publicly shamed. | ||
| Like the kind of, you know, people trying to turn against the book, it didn't. | ||
| Well, the numbers are so small. | ||
| The numbers of twats that are actually out there beating the bushes for this stuff. | ||
| I mean, you're talking about, you know, a few thousand people out of whatever, or a few hundred maybe even, very vocal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if there's anyone particularly upset at you, it might just be... | ||
| There's many instances where people are attacked by one person, and that person assumes multiple identities online. | ||
| I had a buddy of mine who was dealing with someone who was doing that. | ||
| It's real common. | ||
| They just, for whatever reason, just single you out. | ||
| Maybe you wrote something that they found personally offensive. | ||
| But the thing that drives me crazy about that... | ||
| Taking out of context this character who's a racist character is we're talking about fiction. | ||
| And if fiction, if you can't portray realistic humans, I mean, there are racists. | ||
| But how come you're allowed to make a fictional character about a murderer or about some sort of Nazi-type character or something along those lines? | ||
| How come that's okay? | ||
| I mean, these are like, you know, these, I think, are kind of young kids because this is the YA world. | ||
| And, you know, they're not thinking... | ||
| YA? Young adult. | ||
| Oh. | ||
| It's a type of publishing. | ||
| And, you know, they're not thinking it through. | ||
| They're not thinking this through. | ||
| Well, they're just seeing an opportunity to be outraged. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know that, you know, the expression... | ||
| Recreational outrage. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So... | |
| But the other thing that happened as a result of this... | ||
| So the book itself apparently isn't being particularly negatively affected, even though the outrage was huge. | ||
| Probably helps it. | ||
| Possibly. | ||
| But the journalists from this Vulture article interviewed publishers who basically are saying, no, we're telling our authors... | ||
| You know, it's having a chilling effect on novels. | ||
| It's like, don't put in... | ||
| Like, if the author's white, don't try and put in a person of colour as a character. | ||
| It's just, it's not worth it. | ||
| You know, just don't do it. | ||
| So actually, these new rules, these are new rules. | ||
| A few years, you know, I just wrote this... | ||
| I've been writing movies lately, and... | ||
| And I always try and put in characters of colour. | ||
| Because I think, OK, maybe a director will kind of ignore it. | ||
| But if I put that into a screenplay, then there's a good chance that a person of colour is going to get offered a role. | ||
| But now suddenly I'm being told, like, that's not good. | ||
| I shouldn't do that. | ||
| Well, you're being told you shouldn't do that because you need to stay in your lane. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm not being told it, but I'm reading these articles where I read that novelists are being told. | ||
| Right, but this is a different situation. | ||
| You're not talking about an offensive character. | ||
| You should probably clarify that. | ||
| Oh, yeah, no, of course. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, writers are being told, according to this Vulture article that I read today, writers are being told not to do it. | ||
| And of course, That's a different thing. | ||
| It could easily be misconstrued. | ||
| I didn't want to let anybody take you out of context there. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, of course. | ||
| And that feels like a very new rule. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| It is. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, they fucked up, for sure. | ||
| They became unreasonable. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And I think it's true. | ||
| Yeah, it's 100% true. | ||
| People are fed up. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, this was stunning! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, but then he became president and everybody's like, well, he'll surely let that go once he's in the office because that's not presidential. | ||
| But he used an expression, you know, I forget the expression, but something like it's modern presidential to tweet. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Modern presidential. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, they certainly feel like they have some sort of responsibility, which is why they're silencing certain people. | ||
| And I don't know if shadow banning is real, but there's all this talk of people being shadow banned. | ||
| And a lot of people have had their accounts suspended. | ||
| Yeah, so they are doing a bit of stuff now. | ||
| I always remember Megan from the Westboro Baptist Church, Megan Phelps, who's a friend of mine. | ||
| Oh, she came on your show, didn't she? | ||
| Yeah, she was great. | ||
| She was amazing. | ||
| She's so great. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow, isn't that amazing? | ||
| She can't even talk to them anymore. | ||
| Yeah, but they won't talk to her. | ||
| They won't talk to her. | ||
| I think she went up to them at a picket of David Bowie's memorials. | ||
| They wouldn't talk to her. | ||
| They wouldn't look her in the eye. | ||
|
unidentified
|
That's so crazy. | |
| Anyway, she was on the phone to Twitter one time, she told me, because they love her. | ||
| I mean, Twitter love her because she sort of got talking to liberals on Twitter and that's what persuaded her out of the Westboro Baptist Church. | ||
| So for Twitter, that's like the best story in the world. | ||
| So she was talking to Twitter, she told me, and they wanted her to do a talk. | ||
| And she said, oh, you know who should do a talk as well? | ||
| John Ronson. | ||
| And she said Twitter went quiet. | ||
| So they're upset at you in some way? | ||
| I think they're upset at me for basically pointing out how we're all toddlers crawling towards a gun on Twitter. | ||
| But it's not all people. | ||
| You're pointing out some of the issues that many other people have seen. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| This is not... | ||
| I don't think what you're saying is controversial at all. | ||
| You're just astute. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And then when she was asleep... | ||
| LOL. Yeah. | ||
| And then when she was asleep on a plane, you know, thinking she'd made a smart kind of South Parky and joke mocking her own privilege. | ||
| Like, everyone united to destroy her. | ||
| And she was fired. | ||
| Fired. | ||
| By the time she landed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know... | ||
| Everyone from, like, misogynistic trolls through to social justice people, all united to destroy this world. | ||
| But, you know, she upset everyone. | ||
| And, yeah, so I think that story became pretty powerful at the time, and I think it probably affected Twitter's business for a while. | ||
| People got too scared to go on Twitter, so I think that's why. | ||
| I don't think it dropped their business off at all. | ||
| I think it did. | ||
| 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? | ||
| You think just from the Justine Sacco, one racist joke that she got fired for, you think that really had an overall effect on Twitter use? | ||
| I think, well, what happened was, my book got extracted in the New York Times, and it was that story, and that story kind of went... | ||
| Crazy viral. | ||
| It really spoke, kind of spoke to people's like, deep fears, that story. | ||
| Well, deep fears, they might get drunk and pop a Xanax and say something really stupid. | ||
| Do the same shit. | ||
| And wake up in Africa fired. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| And I think that kind of probably affected I don't think it did. | ||
| I think they need to relax. | ||
| I think all that stuff just makes people interested and then makes more people sign up. | ||
| And I just, I don't, boy, I don't see that at all. | ||
| If they were upset at you over that, that's pretty preposterous. | ||
| I wonder. | ||
| I've given, I gave talks. | ||
| Facebook and Google. | ||
| You're upset they won't give you a talk? | ||
| Is that what's going on? | ||
| Well, I'm curious. | ||
| I'm curious. | ||
| I mean, of course I'm curious. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's what they do. | ||
| I do think, like, if you're gonna address harassment on social media, you have to accept that it comes from both sides. | ||
| It comes from the right to the left, it comes from the left to the right, it comes from misogynists to feminists, it comes from feminists to... | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you put yourself out there. | ||
| I mean, especially someone who's... | ||
| Look, you're not... | ||
| These people, a lot of them, they're not singers. | ||
| They're not authors. | ||
| They're not musicians. | ||
| They're not comics. | ||
| They're not producing anything other than their words, right? | ||
| So if someone doesn't like your words and they shit on your words, what else do you expect? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And it is bad. | ||
| It is bad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But when the mirror image of that is happening, people just pretend it's not happening. | ||
| Right. | ||
| When someone goes after someone on the right, even if it's a woman. | ||
| Like, you know, a perfect example of that was no feminist stood up to defend Sarah Palin. | ||
| Like, there's no one. | ||
| I mean, you never heard that when Bill Maher was calling her a cunt and all these different people were mocking her. | ||
| No one was stepping up and saying, hey, that's a woman. | ||
| That's a mother. | ||
| You know, that's someone's mom. | ||
| Like, leave her alone. | ||
| Have some respect for women. | ||
| If you're a woman and you're a conservative, like, you might as well be a monster. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| There was undoubtedly sort of, well it's cognitive dissonance, right? | ||
| Like when somebody's being harassed, they don't want to then see themselves as doing the same thing to a group of people that they don't like. | ||
| Well, it's very easy to think of someone who is opposed to your point of view or thinks of things completely different as an other. | ||
| You don't even think of them as a person. | ||
| I noticed that happened to me. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, it's true. | ||
| It's true. | ||
| And, you know, the problem's not going to go away until we... | ||
| Yeah, they're hypocrites. | ||
| I mean, that's essentially what's going on. | ||
| People don't want to be nice. | ||
| They think that there's power in shaming. | ||
| I've had multiple conversations with people online that think there is good in shaming people. | ||
| I'm like, well, you're saying that because you're hiding behind a keyboard and it's a free shot. | ||
| But if you had to sit down with that person in front of them and talk to them face to face and feel the social consequences. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, people don't like nuanced points of view. | ||
| And they also don't like people that are willing to talk to anybody. | ||
| You know, I've had so many people call me some sort of a right-wing monster. | ||
| And I'm like, well, let's go over what makes a right-wing monster. | ||
| What is right-wing? | ||
| I support gay marriage. | ||
| I support universal healthcare. | ||
| I'm absolutely in favor, if it could work, I don't know if it would work, of universal basic income. | ||
| Where do I become right-wing? | ||
| Where does it go? | ||
| I'm anti-war. | ||
| Where do I become right-wing? | ||
| In politics, as in porn, everything now has to be keyword searchable. | ||
| So everybody has to fall into some sort of niche. | ||
| And if you're not doing it yourself, then someone else is going to do it for you. | ||
| 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 got a question. | ||
| Can I just, like, totally change the subject for a second? | ||
| We have Alex Jones in common, because I, years ago, snuck into Bohemian Grove with Alex. | ||
| What year was that? | ||
| That was, like, when he did it in, like, the late 90s? | ||
| Yeah, it was 1990. You were with him on that. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah, 1999. Did we talk about that the last time you were here? | ||
| We did talk about it last time, yeah. | ||
| But since I saw you last, I rekindled my relationship with Alex as a means of trying to get inside the Trump world, which didn't go great. | ||
| It didn't go well? | ||
| What happened? | ||
| Not that well. | ||
| Well, I think I annoyed Alex a little bit. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| What'd you do? | ||
| I basically said Alex shouldn't have political sway. | ||
| You told him that? | ||
| Well, I wrote it in a story about him. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You were brought up in evidence. | ||
| Oh, that's right, because he was smoking pot on my show. | ||
| He was smoking pot, exactly. | ||
| Well, I'm just testing it. | ||
| See, George Soros makes the weed stronger. | ||
| That's what he said. | ||
| He said that in his custody trial. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly what he said. | ||
| He said he tests it once a year. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It's weird, because it's like, I'm always there when that happens. | |
| I mean, come on, man. | ||
| What's really funny is we drank whiskey on the show, too. | ||
| No one gives a shit about that. | ||
| That's way more destructive. | ||
| It's the pot. | ||
| Whatever. | ||
| The self-reflective, paranoia-inducing marijuana. | ||
| It's a real problem. | ||
| But I now wonder. | ||
| So he says that Trump called him just after the election to thank him. | ||
| And I'm inclined to believe that's true, because I don't think that's the kind of thing that Alex would lie about. | ||
| But have you come to any conclusion about whether there is a connection between Alex and Trump now? | ||
| Because I'm beginning to think maybe there just isn't anymore. | ||
| But I could be wrong. | ||
| That's a good question. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, first of all, I don't see how Trump can have a connection with that many people. | ||
| I feel like the job of being the president has got to be so insanely demanding. | ||
| The idea that he's taking a few moments out of his day, he's got his feet up on the chair with a laptop, and he's on Infowars.com. | ||
| He's like, God damn, I've got to call Alex and find out what the fuck's going on with this child slavery thing on Mars. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Alex, where are these slaves? | ||
| Tell me where. | ||
| We're on Mars. | ||
| I think it benefits everyone to think they're Alex, because it makes Trump look bad. | ||
| So it benefits people on the left to say that Alex is connected to Trump. | ||
| It kind of benefits Alex, I think, for people to think it too, because it aggrandizes him. | ||
| Well, it helps him in a way. | ||
| I mean, it's like the people that... | ||
| There's a bunch of people that enjoy Alex, right? | ||
| So some of them enjoy it for the theater. | ||
| There's a theater element of it all, you know? | ||
| I mean, and it's all doom and gloom and... | ||
| And then some of it... | ||
| Some people enjoy it because... | ||
| Like Bohemian Grove, occasionally he's correct. | ||
| Like, Bohemian Grove is a real mindfuck. | ||
| When you see all these super rich people wearing robes, burning an effigy, yeah. | ||
| I was in the crowd. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| With all the old men of wealth. | ||
| Did that freak you out? | ||
| You see those people? | ||
| One thing freaked me out. | ||
| Like, Alex came out of our Bohemian Grove night with a varying interpretation of what we witnessed. | ||
| What was your interpretation? | ||
| My interpretation is basically, with one caveat, I'm about to caveat this. | ||
| My interpretation was that it's just like fucking, you know, Skull and Bones or some sort of Harvard Club. | ||
| But those are all creepy, right? | ||
| Yeah, and there does seem to be amongst the American ruling elites, there does seem to be a proclivity for ritual. | ||
| Maybe amongst the British elites as well, I'm not sure. | ||
| But that's in itself psychologically interesting. | ||
| I think secrets too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's like, why? | ||
| So that is interesting. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Even if the ritual at Bohemian Grove, you know, and I would contend that contrary to what Alex implied, they weren't actually sacrificing a child. | ||
| No, he didn't say they were sacrificing a child. | ||
| Did he say it at some point in time? | ||
| In this video, yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It could be real. | |
| It could be real, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
It could be real. | |
| He probably was so jazzed up that they were actually dressed up like monks with the hoods and they have the Moloch, the Owl God. | ||
| When he was actually there, I mean, that probably ramped up his love of conspiracy. | ||
| Oh, so much. | ||
| Three or four hundred percent. | ||
| It was hilarious. | ||
| Because, you know, we went in separately to... | ||
| Because Alex got it into his head that maybe I was part of the Bohemian Grove... | ||
| Oh, you're like deep, deep inside. | ||
| Yeah, like the wicked man that I was like luring him in saying he would be the one sacrificed at the belly of the owl. | ||
| Oh, no. | ||
| So he went in separately to me. | ||
| He went in for the undergrowth. | ||
| And I went up the drive. | ||
| I just went up the driveway and gave the security guard a kind of I rule the world wave. | ||
| And then we went in there. | ||
| That's all you had to do? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Lazy ass security guards. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God, that's so often the case. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's like the White House. | ||
| And then we saw Alex and Mike Hansen, who was his producer at the time, walking towards us. | ||
| And I was with this local lawyer who we talked up with. | ||
| And I was like... | ||
| Hey, you know, Alex, Mike, how you doing? | ||
| And they were like, keep walking! | ||
| There's cameras in the trees! | ||
| There's owls everywhere! | ||
| Owls? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So you felt like the owls were cameras? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it was like some sort of satanic. | ||
| But actually... | ||
| 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? | ||
| That night was... | ||
| Was one thing? | ||
| 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 is ridiculous, but... | ||
| But they were into it. | ||
| It was that moment. | ||
| 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? | ||
| Well, yeah, that's true. | ||
| Look at that. | ||
| There's a photo of it there. | ||
| This is real. | ||
| I mean, they really do have a giant owl, and they really do burn some sort of a sacrifice in front of this owl. | ||
| And there's the speakers. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like, oh trees, oh leaves. | ||
| So that's how it starts. | ||
| That's before the men in robes turn up. | ||
| So it's like some weird pagan nature ritual. | ||
| Leaf-covered lederhosen, Joe. | ||
| How much would you give to be in one of those skull and bones meetings? | ||
| See if they actually film each other sucking dicks or something. | ||
| There's just something that goes on where they have something over those guys, supposedly. | ||
| That's like the conspiracy theory. | ||
| They make them engage in gay sex. | ||
| I do believe these things happen for a reason. | ||
| Like, you know, skull and bones exist for a reason. | ||
| Well, they have something over you. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's possible. | ||
| Now a guy like Alex Jones stumbles upon something like that or infiltrates it and finds out it is real. | ||
| I mean, that is justifying to such an enormous, enormous level. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Of course, but that's standard. | ||
| That's standard Alex Jones 101. But it shouldn't be standard. | ||
| It shouldn't be, but I mean, think about all of the exaggerations that take place in the media. | ||
| Whether it's on the left or the right, there's rampant exaggerations. | ||
| Well, it's funny you should say that. | ||
| So did you watch Alex being interviewed by Megyn Kelly? | ||
| Yes, I did. | ||
| Yeah, well, that made me laugh. | ||
| You know, they phoned me a couple of days before the broadcast, Megyn Kelly's people, because they were panicking. | ||
| Do you remember, there was like a lot of criticism they were getting for having him on in the first place. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Called you. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because you went to Bohemian Grove with them? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know either. | ||
| I'm not really that interested in it, as odd as it is. | ||
| I have a very fucked up relationship with Alex in that he's actually my friend. | ||
| And so when I see him, it's like, what's up, man? | ||
| What are you doing? | ||
| I give him a hug and people go, oh, he's a monster. | ||
| How can you be friends with him? | ||
| And this and that. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I just base it on my interactions with him. | ||
| And does he say fucked up things? | ||
| The most disturbing thing that I didn't even know when he did the podcast, I didn't know that he was a Sandy Hook denier. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So apparently he's backed off that since being confronted by the facts. | ||
| And there was a horrible article that I read about a father who was actually a conspiracy theorist until his son was killed in Sandy Hook. | ||
| And then he got death threats for lying and being an actor. | ||
| From Infowars. | ||
| Yeah, and that was just so sad. | ||
| Yeah, that's just so horrible. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm not sure I understand it. | ||
| What you said about like, you know, biases and untruths and like across the media on the left and right reminded me of the Megyn Kelly thing. | ||
| So, you know, so they phoned me up, obviously in a bit of a panic because they were getting like so much criticism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then they re-edited the show, like, frantically just before it went out. | ||
| Re-edited it? | ||
| Yeah, apparently. | ||
| What did they change? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| But what I do know is, like you, I saw the final product. | ||
| And the final product was basically Megyn Kelly, like, looking incredibly poised, saying, you know, you're wrong, Alex. | ||
| You're wrong about this. | ||
| And then it would cut to Alex going, ah, bah, bah, ah. | ||
| And then we cut back to Megan. | ||
| So all they did was edit Alex at his most sweaty and stuttery. | ||
| And then Megan Kelly at her most poised and perfect. | ||
| Did you hear the Alex Jones audio? | ||
| The leaked audio that he released? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Where they were sort of buttering him up and conning him. | ||
| Yeah, Alex the father. | ||
| Personally, I would... | ||
| She was saying, I'm not here to make a hit piece. | ||
| I just want to know the real you. | ||
| Although they did re-edit, so I wonder what the original... | ||
| What this program would have been like. | ||
| Because they felt forced to basically... | ||
| By him? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they felt forced by the people pushing back against them doing it. | ||
| Both. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To then put out this shitty, you know, 10 minutes. | ||
| I wish I was in Megyn Kelly's corner. | ||
| I would have told her, first of all, don't ever go to NBC. Listen, here's the deal. | ||
| You made your bones as an ice princess on this conservative network. | ||
| And do you think they're just gonna accept you at NBC? People are gonna resent you? | ||
| They're gonna hate you? | ||
| Like, you're the lady that chastised people for saying that Santa Claus potentially wasn't white. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| I don't remember that. | ||
| 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. | ||
| That's a terrible move. | ||
| They're not going to accept you. | ||
| This is not going to work. | ||
| And the ratings have been horrendous. | ||
| And now they pulled the show. | ||
| They pulled the show early. | ||
| But it just goes to show like, you know, we rightly attack people like Infowars for spreading, you know, outright lies. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| But we, on the left, like Megyn Kelly, editing that segment to make it look like she was poised and perfect. | ||
| And all Alex does is stammer and sweat. | ||
| Well, it's a very hard sell saying that Megyn Kelly's on the left. | ||
| She's on the left now? | ||
| Well, I mean, like, the mainstream. | ||
| Let me say the mainstream. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| So it's a life of its own. | ||
| Well, here's also the problem. | ||
| 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. | ||
| No one is listening. | ||
| Sure, I agree. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, he's got some crazy ideas about Mars. | ||
| Or, no, was it the moon? | ||
| There's bases on the moon that they're going to all the time? | ||
| Is that what he's saying? | ||
| He's got some crazy moon thing. | ||
| Like, he thinks that they, well, they went on the moon, the problem is what they found up there. | ||
| 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... | ||
| Alex Jones reveals the truth about animal-human hybrids and the moon landing. | ||
| The real problem. | ||
| Give us some volume here because Alex... ...we're bleeding from your face left. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| And they're like, oh, we're scared. | ||
| You're so mean. | ||
| It's like Kathy Griffin simulating murdering Trump. | ||
| And then Trump says, you ought to be ashamed of yourself. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Pause right there. | ||
| I agree with him 100% on that. | ||
| I felt like that was so preposterous. | ||
| And I like Kathy as a person. | ||
| I've met her a hundred times. | ||
| She's with Kathy Griffin. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| 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! | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Well, maybe he's right about these animal-human hybrids. | ||
| Go back to that, please. | ||
| We need to find out what's happening on the moon. | ||
| That was awesome. | ||
| Did you turn off of it? | ||
| Go back to it. | ||
| What'd you do? | ||
| Running around fomenting war, fomenting violence, fomenting death. | ||
| Out of all their meth-mouthed reporters. | ||
| He broke me. | ||
| Looks like the Day of the Dead on CNN. Just like Kathy Griffin. | ||
| I guess that's the look that Zucker's looking for. | ||
| And then they freak out and go, you called me irresponsible. | ||
| You said that I was a bad person. | ||
| I've been crushed by you. | ||
| You're a bully. | ||
| It's a bunch of corporate special interests that had their Okay, stop. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Pause. | |
| 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. | |
| Here's the thing. | ||
| I agree with you that he has too much influence over some people, but I disagree. | ||
| In that, I don't think any of that should be taken seriously. | ||
| Like, what he just said should not be taken seriously, right? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, sure. | |
| 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. | ||
| You're so amazing. | ||
| And Alex bought it. | ||
| Is this according to Glenn Beck? | ||
| No, no, I spoke to both of them. | ||
| But you didn't speak to Trump? | ||
| I didn't speak to Trump, but I spoke to both Glenn Beck and Alex. | ||
| Right, but you don't know that Glenn Beck really did get that phone call from Trump, right? | ||
| Well, Glenn Beck told me that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But Glenn Beck has said some pretty ridiculous shit himself, and he became a Mormon at the age of like 50. You know, like, hey, did you read the book? | ||
| But I do think, like... | ||
| But that's convenient. | ||
| Like, if it's right, it's convenient. | ||
| It makes it look interesting. | ||
| Although, well, I mean, it's what Glenn Beck told me. | ||
| I only have his word for that story. | ||
| But, I mean, you don't really know, right? | ||
| Well, I mean, Glenn Beck told me that. | ||
| I believe that if Donald Trump called up Alex and said you were so influential and you're amazing and Alex would go, well, thank you, Mr. President. | ||
| We're going to do our best to keep you in office. | ||
| Fight against the tyranny and all these fucking people out there that think they're gonna stop us! | ||
| I mean, that's who he is. | ||
| You know, you can get him riled up. | ||
| That's who he is. | ||
| But I do think that Alex is a kind of bit of a neophyte in all of this, because nobody had taken him that seriously. | ||
| Nobody in positions of power had taken him that seriously. | ||
| Yeah, but here's the deal. | ||
| I think Trump played Alex, and Alex was played. | ||
| You might be right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Alex was really smart. | ||
| Alex, right from the beginning, said, I'm with Trump until Trump does something that I don't like and then I'll drop him like a hot potato. | ||
| So Alex was very smart. | ||
| Alex always gave himself a sort of parachute out of this relationship. | ||
| So I think Trump played Alex and Alex was a bit too gullible and believed Trump's slick talk. | ||
| But Alex was also smart and gave himself an out whenever he wanted the out. | ||
| Alex is goddamn entertaining. | ||
| Like, that alone is fucking entertaining. | ||
| Especially for me, a person, I'm not gonna be influenced by these things that he says. | ||
| But one thing that I have been influenced is by him uncovering some things that are real conspiracies. | ||
| One of them being agent provocateurs that they use to disrupt peaceful protests. | ||
| This is something that I didn't know was a standard tactic by the military and by certain politicians. | ||
| And what they do is they will hire these people. | ||
| I don't know like what branch of the military, what they do, but they will hire these people. | ||
| And it's been confirmed by people that I know that are like special operators. | ||
| They take these masked guys and say if they have some peaceful protest, the big one was the World Trade Organization. | ||
| Remember that protest? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Then they put up a no protest zone. | ||
| This is all documented. | ||
| What the fuck did you just do? | ||
| Jamie's like, we need some dance music here! | ||
|
unidentified
|
This video has music on, apparently. | |
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It reminds me of a time I went to Aryan Nations just before it closed down. | ||
| Do you remember Aryan Nations in Idaho? | ||
| Oh, they had that—that was like near Boise, right? | ||
| Yeah, Coeur d'Alene. | ||
| Oh, Coeur d'Alene, that's right. | ||
| Coeur d'Alene. | ||
| Which is gorgeous. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's that crazy lake up there they have, right? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| So I was making a documentary about Randy Weaver, about Ruby Ridge. | ||
| And I was spending a lot of time with Randy's daughter, Rachel, who I liked a lot. | ||
| Anyway, part of the reason why the whole Ruby Ridge escalation happened was because Randy Weaver had gone to— A lot of people don't know that story. | ||
| Will I tell the story? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Do they know how infiltrated they are? | ||
| They must do, right? | ||
| That's gotta be so weird. | ||
| I know. | ||
| I know. | ||
| They must do. | ||
| Because they were, like, infiltrated to fuck. | ||
| I mean, all of them were. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, that's one thing the federal government does good. | ||
| They infiltrate the mob. | ||
| They're always getting people to wear wires. | ||
| Right. | ||
| They're good at that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jamie, you wearing a wire? | ||
| Oh, I forget. | ||
| We're live. | ||
| There's no need. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So I think they protected me in that moment when I could have had the shit kicked out of me. | ||
| You think so? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They found out you were Jewish? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, because I'm obviously fucking Jewish. | ||
| No, not necessarily. | ||
| Do you think? | ||
| Yeah, people don't know anything and they think all English people look like you. | ||
| It was my own stupid fault. | ||
| I drove up the drive past all the signs that said, no Jews. | ||
| Jews turned back. | ||
| Now, as they surrounded me, I did think to myself, like, if I get... | ||
| Beaten up now. | ||
| It's my own stupid fault. | ||
| The Jew thing is so weird because it's a race and it's also religion. | ||
| It's a weird one. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No. | ||
| It's weird, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because you're European, but you're also Jewish, which is a religion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if you're a European atheist, are you still a Jew? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I mean, I am, basically. | ||
| I remember when I was with Omar Bakri, the Islamic fundamentalist, and he outed me as a Jew at his jihad training camp. | ||
|
unidentified
|
He did? | |
| Yes. | ||
| Son of a bitch. | ||
| In a place called Crawley, which is near Gatwick Airport. | ||
| How rude. | ||
| He said to me, look at me with the infidel John, who is a Jew. | ||
| And they all went. | ||
| And I said, surely it's better to be a Jew than an atheist. | ||
| And I heard someone in the crowd go, no, it isn't. | ||
| The thing that really surprises me about that exchange is that I am an atheist. | ||
| So of all the places where I would choose for the first time in my life to kind of exert my Jewishness, I chose a fucking jihad training campus. | ||
| Like, what self-defeating? | ||
| Did you have second thoughts about that one? | ||
| Like, were you in the midst of those people going, what the fuck am I playing with here? | ||
| Yes, although quite quickly, the tension dissipated. | ||
| And I remember, like, a bunch of these young radical Islamists all started asking me, like, what it was like to be a Jew. | ||
| They were, like, treating me like a kind of tropical fish. | ||
| Like, what do babies taste like? | ||
| And I remember leaving that jihad training camp that day thinking I'd done some sterling work in bringing together communities. | ||
| Did you really believe that? | ||
| Well, I thought I believed it till 9-11. | ||
| Oh, wow. | ||
| Don't believe it anymore. | ||
| And Omar's people were like... | ||
| People in that room at that scout hut went on to become suicide bombers and to kill people and to drive vans into people. | ||
| It was a different world before 9-11, though. | ||
| The fear of jihadis was much, much, much less prevalent. | ||
| Yeah, I made this funny. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
True. | |
| John Ronson, you've been around. | ||
| I've been around the block. | ||
|
unidentified
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You've seen some shit. | |
| I have seen some shit. | ||
| So when was the last time you were in Alex's presence? | ||
| Does texting count? | ||
| No. | ||
| Have you been around him since Bohemian Grove? | ||
| Oh, yeah, yeah. | ||
| I went to visit Infowars last summer, last August. | ||
| And what did you think of him, like, knowing him in the late 90s when you guys went to Bohemian Grove together and knowing him now? | ||
| Well, I mean, his operation has expanded, like, massively. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Is it? | ||
| That's what divorce lawyers were saying. | ||
| How's it the worst? | ||
| Because it went national? | ||
| And they just hated each other so much. | ||
| They hate each other. | ||
| Sad. | ||
| I said, like, yeah. | ||
| And now Alex has got a staff of like 75 people, you know, with like these giant hangers for his supplements, his male vitality supplements. | ||
| Have you ever seen the video of when Joey Diaz and me are in Alex's studio and Joey realizes that it's on the internet? | ||
| No. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Listen to this. | ||
| 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. | ||
| With that, I'm out here. | ||
| I gotta go smoke a cigarette. | ||
| You're making some very solid points. | ||
| Don't do the... | ||
| No, I know. | ||
| Joey, you get it. | ||
| 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. | ||
| If I need something, I'll ask you like a man. | ||
| Hey, go fuck yourself, you cop. | ||
| Hold on, hold on one second. | ||
| Take a joke, take a shuttle. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Joey Diaz, Facebook, Twitter, check yourself before you wreck yourself. | |
| Big dicks in your ass. | ||
| Get out of here, you're in trouble. | ||
| I'm the empire. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is the... | |
| I'm throwing... | ||
|
unidentified
|
All right, all right. | |
| Stay black, because that's the most important. | ||
| Okay, okay. | ||
| He made Alex speechless. | ||
| He's the funniest man that's ever lived. | ||
| Do you think Alex regrets all of this? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Alex is great. | ||
| I have a good time with Alex, I'm telling you. | ||
| No, when I say all of this, I mean, do you think Alex regrets the fact that the spotlight is on him in a kind of unprecedented way? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| Do you think he doesn't? | ||
|
unidentified
|
No! | |
| You don't think a part of him is, like, stressed out? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What?! | |
| Honestly, I don't think so. | ||
| He's fine. | ||
| I've never met a guy in my life that has more Teflon when it comes to stress. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, well, I've been kind of stressed out lately, but I go to the gym and feel fine. | |
| Had a cheeseburger, probably shouldn't have had that shit. | ||
| Trying to stick to my diet, but it's hard. | ||
| He doesn't give a fuck, man. | ||
| He's a weird guy. | ||
| He's got a very unusual constitution. | ||
| You know what I bet did stress him out, though? | ||
| There was a couple of, like, pending lawsuits, like Chobani and... | ||
| Chobani? | ||
|
unidentified
|
What does that mean? | |
| Chobani, the yogurt people. | ||
| The yogurt? | ||
| He was consumed by yogurt people? | ||
| Yeah, he got into trouble with Chobani. | ||
| Because he said they were, like, importing rapists. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| And... | ||
| And, of course, he got into trouble with the pizza restaurant. | ||
| And I would bet you... | ||
| I mean, Pizzagate. | ||
| Infowars' Alex Jones apologizes for saying Shabani supports migrant rapists. | ||
| He didn't really say that. | ||
| Oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, he did. | ||
| He's so fucking crazy. | ||
| And I would guarantee you that that... | ||
| They support it! | ||
| I'd guarantee you that that and the Pizzagate stuff properly stressed him out because I think both of those were risking his entire operation. | ||
| Okay, let me tell you something. | ||
| It might stress you out. | ||
| Like, if it was you and you were being sued by Shabani, you'd probably be freaking out. | ||
| You'd be like, I've clearly made a horrible mistake. | ||
| I need to come clean and I need to apologize. | ||
| I'm so paranoid that I freak out if I eat a Chobani guava and think I'm like, fuck, this is the most disgusting thing I've ever eaten. | ||
| My threshold for getting panicky and stressed out is very low. | ||
| That's incredible considering you're in a jihadi camp. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| I often wonder why I put myself in these so dangerous situations. | ||
| Maybe that's why it's so compelling when you do. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But Alex, you think, doesn't... | ||
| No. | ||
| No, I know him, man. | ||
| He's a different dude. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, I'm a bad person for that. | ||
| I don't think I am, though. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You've got me wondering, like, why I put myself in dangerous situations. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Are you thinking about it? | ||
| A little bit. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I'm not doing that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Was that remote viewing as well? | ||
| Yeah, remote viewing. | ||
| They were different, but there was, like, an overlap. | ||
| I met a bunch of those guys. | ||
| Right, I bet you did. | ||
| When I was doing that sci-fi show. | ||
| Right, like Joe McMoneagle and Ed Dames. | ||
| Do you remember the name? | ||
| Ed Dames. | ||
| I met with him. | ||
| Okay, yeah. | ||
| He was talking to me about how they found various bad people using this weird stuff, and I was like, hmm. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| No, so I met all of those people, too. | ||
| Remote viewing sounds really exciting, but... | ||
| You know, psychic spies in the military. | ||
| But it turns out that actually their lives were quite shit. | ||
| Because they were like... | ||
| Because basically they sat in the fucking room all day trying to like psychically sketch for like 20 years. | ||
| They never saw any action. | ||
| One of them told me that because they were black up, because they didn't officially exist, They had no coffee machine. | ||
| They had to bring their own coffee into work every day because they couldn't justify having it. | ||
| Also, the room that they were in was really bad because they couldn't get it repaired because they didn't exist. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So their lives were quite shit. | ||
| I'll tell you how I came to this story. | ||
| So that was out. | ||
| 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. | ||
| I mean, everything's gonna fall over eventually. | ||
| Sorry, I was drinking water when I was laughing. | ||
| Okay, sorry. | ||
| So the goat really did fall over and die? | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| Oh, well, Guy Cervelli. | ||
| So we tracked down the goat starer. | ||
| He now runs a dance studio in Ohio. | ||
| The Cervelli Dance and Martial Arts Studio. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, so we tracked him down. | ||
| I said to him on the phone, so do you still ever kill goats just by staring at them? | ||
| And he went, well, as a matter of fact, just last week, I killed my hamster just by staring at him. | ||
| Hamsters live to be like three days old. | ||
| He said he caught it on video. | ||
| And I said, well, can we come and watch the video? | ||
| So we went... | ||
| He said, okay. | ||
| So we flew to Ohio to meet Guy Civelli. | ||
| The whole time, his son was filming me. | ||
| Like, the whole time I was there, he was filming me. | ||
| So eventually, like, he admitted, like, why they were filming me. | ||
| And it was that he was worried that I might be al-Qaeda, like, trying to learn... | ||
| How to stare at people and kill them? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So he was like filming me just in case. | ||
| So he really believed it? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| So with this video, did it show him staring at a hamster and it does? | ||
| I saw the video of the hamster staring. | ||
| I should tell you, by the way, that the moment when they... | ||
| I think I've pinpointed the moment when they worked out that I wasn't Al-Qaeda. | ||
| And it was because it turns out that Guy Savelli's daughter is in the movie Chicago, like one of the dancers. | ||
| And so I kind of shrieked, oh... | ||
| Oh, I love Catherine Zeta-Jones. | ||
| And I think, like, they all kind of relax. | ||
| I think even like a kind of deep cover Al-Qaeda operative wouldn't think to go that effeminate. | ||
| So, yeah, so then they showed me the hamster video. | ||
| It's a hamster. | ||
| I'm sure this is on YouTube, by the way. | ||
| I'm sure you can find this. | ||
| If you typed in, I don't know, John Ronson, hamster, crazy rulers of the world, Guy Cervelli or something. | ||
| So the hamster's running around in its wheel and that guy's off camera staring at the hamster. | ||
| And then finally the hamster gets off the wheel and it's like all the sawdust. | ||
| And then the hamster like... | ||
| Drops, like, stops moving. | ||
| Drops down and stops moving amid the sawdust. | ||
| So I'm like, whoa! | ||
| And then the hamster gets up again and the video ends. | ||
| So I was like, that's not dead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like... | |
| A guy said... | ||
| You flew all the way to Ohio to see a video of a hamster. | ||
| So a guy said, yeah, yeah, my wife told me not to... | ||
| My wife said, don't show them the part where the hamster dies. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What?! | |
| Yeah, in case I was like a bleeding heart liberal and I was like... | ||
| His wife told him to not show you the video that you flew all the way the fuck to Ohio to see? | ||
| Well, I think it's possible that the hamster just doesn't die. | ||
| No way, bro. | ||
| But Guy showed me like a whole... | ||
| Is that him? | ||
| Yeah, that's Guy Sivelliott. | ||
| Full screen, please. | ||
| You need to put a guy's value in mind. | ||
| Hey, what happens when you've got a guest who's on for three hours and they want to use the bathroom? | ||
| Just go ahead and use the bathroom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Go ahead. | |
| Can you cover for me? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| We'll turn the volume on here. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Okay. | |
| Oh, he's doing some fake martial arts, too. | ||
| Oh, this is hilarious. | ||
| Oh, you don't understand. | ||
| This is my favorite stuff, John Ronson. | ||
| Look at this. | ||
| This is my favorite stuff. | ||
| It's all like pokes. | ||
| Triangle of death. | ||
| Oh, it's called the triangle of death. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, go back to that. | ||
| I need to watch that again. | ||
| This is hilarious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ooh, the artery. | |
| Esophagus. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
of helping a person or hurting a person. | |
| They need a clear airway, they need to be able to breathe, and they need have circulation of blood through their body Pause that for a second. | ||
| One thing about bullshit artists is they always use these real technical terms, especially martial arts bullshit artists. | ||
| They always talk about medical terms that they're disrupting the nerve, the vagus nerve that goes to the brain. | ||
| This is your C6, C7, your cervical disc, and I'm going to attack the cervical disc through the carotid artery. | ||
| It's almost like they learn all these technical terms. | ||
| Make their horseshit look more palatable. | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
In order to live. | |
| In the poison hand technique... | ||
| Poison hands? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Cool. | |
| ...although we're not showing you how to strike to penetrate the skin, of which we have a way to do that... | ||
| What? | ||
| ...in the motion that we use... | ||
| Please don't show anybody, sir. | ||
| With your flabby grandma arms. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Now, just watch a second. | |
| He's gonna watch. | ||
| He's gonna show you. | ||
| Oh, boy. | ||
|
unidentified
|
How's he alive? | |
| It's just, the end part is my favorite, where he does like the fucking karate stance behind the guy's back. | ||
| Look at that, the end part! | ||
| A little limp hand to the back. | ||
| Oh, that guy's wonderful. | ||
| I don't know why, man. | ||
| I don't know why, but this stuff gives me so much pleasure. | ||
| I enjoy fake martial arts videos more than almost anything. | ||
| Almost as much as Hold This Beer, the Twitter account, that I fucking... | ||
| Every two days I have to retweet one because I find a good new one. | ||
| I don't know why. | ||
| Oh, he's got new stuff. | ||
| Oh, what's he gonna do? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mind development. | |
| Oh, mind development. | ||
| And striking techniques. | ||
| Let me see this. | ||
| Let me see this. | ||
| The guy's coming close. | ||
| He's touching him. | ||
| He's about to touch him. | ||
|
unidentified
|
What the fuck? | |
| What the fuck was that? | ||
|
unidentified
|
The guy's about to touch him. | |
| You're gonna hear this. | ||
| No, no, no, he's got this. | ||
| Hold on, play that back. | ||
| Play that back. | ||
| Development of the mind! | ||
| So you know the shit better than me, right? | ||
| Oh yeah, I certainly do. | ||
| This is your bread and butter. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This is something I've been doing more than I've been doing anything in my whole life. | |
| This is the first real exercise towards that goal. | ||
| You gotta, you gotta see this! | ||
| It's so fucking stupid! | ||
| So he's the goat star for the minister of Goat. | ||
| Oh, he's just gonna punch a watermelon. | ||
| Oh, you're crazy, bro. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Solid watermelon. | |
| Oh, it's solid? | ||
| Oh, no way. | ||
| That's impenetrable. | ||
| That's basically a brick wall. | ||
| He's gonna use his fingers. | ||
| One, two... | ||
| Oh, I broke his hand, son. | ||
| You broke your hand, kid. | ||
| He's the first guy to tell me about the dim mac, the death touch. | ||
| He went right through that watermelon, bro. | ||
| I would let that guy do that to me. | ||
| I'd be like, okay, fuck the watermelon, dude. | ||
| Let me tighten up my stomach. | ||
| Oh, yeah, I've seen these. | ||
| I've seen this stuff. | ||
| Yeah, this is Guy doing military stuff, right? | ||
| This is deep. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, it's not really military, but he's wearing a military outfit. | |
| I do know that Guy went to Fort Bragg and did the goat stuff. | ||
| Like, he showed me documentation. | ||
| See this right here? | ||
| Listen, man. | ||
| I used to do this. | ||
| Look at that so stupid, that guy! | ||
| He picked his leg up when he's doing it. | ||
| Oh, this is hilarious. | ||
| This guy's gonna do it at his fingertips. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| When I was a kid, like real young, we used to do these demonstrations when I was like 15. Right. | ||
| When we would open up a new school, we'd do these demonstrations, and it was the only time we ever broke boards. | ||
| We fucking never broke boards. | ||
| Because it's really easy to do, and it looks harder than it is. | ||
| But like walking on hot coals, right? | ||
| It's way easier than walking on hot coals. | ||
| 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. | ||
| They always broke. | ||
| They're so easy to break. | ||
| So here's a question, and what does it say about, like, Special Forces at Fort Bragg that they would bring Guy in to do these? | ||
| They brought that guy in? | ||
| Well, I mean, it wasn't like, I don't believe it was like a sanction from the very top, but he certainly went to Fort Bragg and stared at goats. | ||
| He stared at goats at Fort Bragg. | ||
| 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. | ||
| His martial arts were fucking completely useless. | ||
| And it tallies with the light US military credo of thinking out of the box, like, if we don't try this stuff, nobody else will try this stuff. | ||
| What is going on here? | ||
| They're blurring. | ||
| Look at how easy it is to break that. | ||
| Oh, they're special ops. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So yeah, there you go. | ||
| And they were killing goats. | ||
| Cun Tau. | ||
| I've never even heard of that one. | ||
| Cun Tau. | ||
| Yeah, that's Guy Civelli's thing. | ||
| But, you know, then General Stubblebine, who I'm sure would have been a fan of this show because he was a big fan of Alex's and so on. | ||
| So he was, like, head of army intelligence. | ||
| He had 16,000 soldiers under his command and he, like, totally believed in all of this stuff. | ||
| He believed in that stuff? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| What that guy was doing? | ||
| General Stubblebine would, when he was head of army intelligence in Arlington, would try and walk through his wall at... | ||
| Because he told me one time, he said, like, he said, what is the atom mostly made up of? | ||
| Space. | ||
| What is the wall mostly made up of? | ||
| Atoms. | ||
| I mean, to me, the key word in this is mostly. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Mostly is a big part of that, bro. | |
| He would like stand up from behind his desk and like, you know, basically run into his wall. | ||
| So you should have asked him, what's an atom bomb made up? | ||
| You fucking idiot. | ||
| Let me show you a video. | ||
| He said he would like, he'd bruise his nose trying to walk through his wall. | ||
| He said, fortunately, he was going through a messy divorce at the time. | ||
| So like, like other people in his office just assumed it was like, you know, his wife beat him up. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But in fact, he was She's probably like, I gotta get away from this wall walking asshole. | |
| He was trying to merge the spaces between his atoms and the wall's atoms when he just kept bumping his nose. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, this was fun. | ||
| My couple of years. | ||
| 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. | ||
| So Ed Dames had this student called... | ||
| Magneto. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Fuck. | |
| What was his name? | ||
| 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. | ||
| So they decided that that was the spaceship they were waiting for. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So they all killed themselves to get on the spaceship. | ||
| Prudence Calabrese and another guy whose name I forgot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Good lord. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So that's the sort of weird butterfly effect. | ||
| That's hilarious. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| That whole thing was such a... | ||
| It's amazing what people want to believe. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Like... | ||
| Right. | ||
| Oh, yeah, he told me all of that stuff. | ||
| Oh, he showed me a photograph of, well, actually, he accidentally showed me a photograph of him karate chopping a goat. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, no. | |
| He said, oh, you weren't supposed to see that one. | ||
| Yeah, he did the death touch on a goat. | ||
| Well, you could fuck a goat up if you hit it in the right spot. | ||
| Yeah, a lot of indignities were meted out to goats in the U.S. military. | ||
| Goats are actually pretty tough, though, now that I think about it. | ||
| I bet you probably couldn't kill a goat with a karate chop. | ||
| Right. | ||
| I mean, you have to really hit it hard in the right spot, like in the neck. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Was that in the movie? | ||
| Yeah, that was in the movie. | ||
| Is it true in, like, the death touch world, in the dim black world, is it true that some people think, like, you can touch them now? | ||
| And, uh... | ||
| That was the moment. | ||
| That movie was great. | ||
| That's the moment. | ||
| Well found. | ||
| So is it true in the death touch world that people think you can do the dim back on someone and they die years later of seemingly natural causes? | ||
| I'm sure there's someone who believes that. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, if you see that guy that was just having... | ||
| Did you see that guy who did all the crazy stuff and the guy falls down? | ||
| You might have missed it. | ||
| Yeah, but that's the movie based... | ||
| Oh, you mean in the loo? | ||
| Yeah, the other guy. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Thank you for using an English word, by the way. | ||
| He does all these crazy, like, fake karate moves. | ||
| Slap, slap, slap, slap. | ||
| And then he slaps him in the back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah, there's people that believe all kinds of crazy stuff. | ||
| Well, you know, he definitely inspired the characters in the Minister of Goats movie. | ||
| Have you ever seen what happens when one of these fake death touch guys fights a real fighter? | ||
| No. | ||
| Do they kind of get the shit kicked out? | ||
| Oh, it's horrific. | ||
| There's a few of them. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And these guys just don't seem to learn. | ||
| One of them that was recently... | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. | |
| And that's a wrap. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh. | |
| I mean, it literally lasts, once he engages him in the last ten seconds. | ||
| But that's because one of them is doing an actual martial art, and the other guy is practicing nonsense. | ||
| And he's probably practiced that nonsense his whole life. | ||
| And he thought it was real. | ||
| There's another one where there's an old man. | ||
| And that's even harder to watch. | ||
| Because this old man gets kicked in the face. | ||
| And you just go, oh, Jesus Christ. | ||
| Like, save this guy. | ||
| This is horrible. | ||
| And he looks like legitimately, like, let's watch what he does back up to the beginning. | ||
| So he bet $5,000. | ||
| Check this out. | ||
| Like, look at what he thinks he can do. | ||
| He claimed a 200 and 0 record. | ||
| Look, he's not even touching these people. | ||
| They just go flying. | ||
| It's like they're a part of a cult, you know? | ||
| So they move at him and he really firmly believes that he can do this. | ||
| Look, he's like manipulating them like he's a puppet master. | ||
| It's so crazy. | ||
| So this guy is so hypnotized by his own bullshit that he decides that he's going to fight. | ||
| So this is like a cum, right? | ||
| Well, I don't know. | ||
| See, here's the thing. | ||
| Because he actually makes a real fight with a real trained martial artist. | ||
| So... | ||
| He might... | ||
| He may very well have been in on it himself. | ||
| I mean, not in on it being... | ||
| What I mean is he might have been taken by his own bullshit. | ||
| He might have actually believed it. | ||
| So now he's gonna fight an actual... | ||
| A young, actual martial artist. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, in the military, I'm remembering... | ||
| I don't think about the minister of goats that much because it was so long ago, but now I'm remembering some of the other stuff that they were doing. | ||
| And there was a lot of weaponry stuff, you know? | ||
| There was the prophet hologram. | ||
| All of this sort of came from the central well of, like, you know, 80s... | ||
| Prophet hologram? | ||
| What's that? | ||
| Yeah, that they would... | ||
| They never, like, got it off the ground. | ||
| But what they were trying to do was have a hologram of Allah that they would project over an enemy capital. | ||
| And Allah would basically say whatever the U.S. military wanted him to say. | ||
| Like, the Americans aren't that bad. | ||
|
unidentified
|
LAUGHTER God bless President Bush. | |
| They had a race-specific stink bomb, which again, they never managed to get off the ground. | ||
| What about the gay bomb? | ||
| They had the gay bomb. | ||
| That was real. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| They literally were engineering some sort of a chemical warfare device that would turn men homosexual. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And what's less known about it is that they were also trying to do a halitosis bomb so that you'd turn the enemy gay. | ||
| And then he gave them bad breath. | ||
| Yeah, they gave them bad breath. | ||
| And they'd be so freaked out that the Americans would come in and win. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow, they would just have shame all around. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They had attack bees that would, again, just attack the enemy. | ||
| None of these things got off the ground, I don't think. | ||
| Well, I guess it's sort of like writing comedy. | ||
| You throw a lot of shit against the wall and only like one-tenth of it sticks. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Like... | ||
| And some things did stick, right? | ||
| I mean, the taser came from the military, I believe. | ||
| But that seems totally reasonable, though. | ||
| Everybody knows you can get electrocuted and figure out a way to get a large charge into a small device. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then there was all those kind of weird aural techniques that they would do at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. | ||
| Aural meaning oral? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I probably said it wrong. | ||
| Yeah, where they would play subliminal sounds. | ||
| They'd blast Metallica at people, but laced into Metallica would be these subliminal sounds that would try and hypnotize people. | ||
| Do you remember when they used to do that in movie theaters? | ||
| Hungry Eat Popcorn. | ||
| They'd have subliminal images in between screens. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 35th of a second. | ||
| Like one frame. | ||
| Has ever been shown that that actually worked? | ||
|
unidentified
|
That it works. | |
| I'm not sure that it ever worked in the... | ||
| I met this guy... | ||
| Oh my God, I just remembered. | ||
| So I met this guy called Jamal Al-Harith, who had been released from Guantanamo. | ||
| And he was telling me about all of this stuff. | ||
| He was in Guantanamo for like two years, and then he got released. | ||
| And he was telling me about this stuff. | ||
| He said they played him an entire CD of a Fleetwood Mac covers band. | ||
| LAUGHTER At normal, in Guantanamo, at normal volume. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Those guys are just fucking winging it, man. | |
| They're just winging it. | ||
| I said, what was going on? | ||
| He's like, I don't know. | ||
| I said, like, were they doing it to be nice? | ||
| Maybe they thought you were a fan. | ||
| Wanted to make it more pleasant. | ||
| He said it was Guantanamo. | ||
| They weren't trying to be nice. | ||
| Anyway, so I interviewed Jamal Al-Harith. | ||
| He was telling me about all of this weird shit. | ||
| And a few months ago, he goes and fucking joins ISIS and blows himself up somewhere. | ||
| This guy, the Fleetwood Mac cover band guy? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Wow. | ||
| So when they arrested him and brought him to Guantanamo Bay, was he innocent of those charges? | ||
| Well, he certainly convinced everybody that he was. | ||
| And in fact, Tony Blair got involved and helped get him out of Guantanamo. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| And he went on to be a jihadi. | ||
| What I don't know, but I'd be very curious to find out, is exactly the question that you just posed. | ||
| Like, was he always a jihadi? | ||
| Or did the experience of being in Guantanamo somehow, like years later, you know, help to turn him into a jihadi? | ||
| I don't know the answer to that. | ||
| 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... | ||
| You're like, I can't get over that, man. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It stained my soul. | ||
| I have no idea, but I met this guy, a very personable young man. | ||
| I met him at a hotel in Manchester. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| Which is where I interviewed him for the Men's Dirt Goats. | ||
| And where did he kill himself? | ||
| I can't remember. | ||
| Can you look it up? | ||
| He killed other people as well? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Jamal Al-Harith. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Iraqi army base. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah, I know, I know. | ||
| What does that feel like when you hear that, that you knew someone that became a suicide bomber? | ||
| Well, Jamal, I just met that one time. | ||
| But still, you knew him. | ||
| Well, I met him that one time. | ||
| If I had someone on my podcast that turned out to be a suicide bomber... | ||
| Well, you did. | ||
| Who? | ||
| No, you. | ||
| I did? | ||
| Oh, you mean if? | ||
| No, no. | ||
| I thought you were saying I did and I didn't know. | ||
| No. | ||
| Shit, are you going to tell me something? | ||
| I thought you were saying that you did. | ||
| No, well, I did have a guy on my podcast that almost beat a woman to death after he was on and now he's in jail for life. | ||
| Shit. | ||
| Yeah, it was a very public story. | ||
| He's an MMA fighter named War Machine. | ||
| His name is John, John Copenhaver. | ||
| Right. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Horrific, horrific. | ||
| And she was here with him. | ||
| What do you think it was? | ||
| Do you think it was steroids? | ||
| Do you think it was psychopathy? | ||
| All of the above. | ||
| I think steroids probably played a factor. | ||
| Traumatic brain injury probably played a factor. | ||
| I think... | ||
| That's what they say about Chris Benoit, right? | ||
| That it was maybe a traumatic brain injury. | ||
| It's a huge factor because these guys, they get hit in the head so many times and no one can tell you when it's going to go bad. | ||
| No one knows. | ||
| It varies. | ||
| You might be able to take 100 punches. | ||
| For me, it might be 30. No one knows. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Are they receiving them on a regular basis? | ||
| Has it changed them instantaneously? | ||
| I know far too many people that have experienced a lot of shots to the head where it's completely changed who they are. | ||
| This guy was troubled to begin with. | ||
| He saw his father die beaten up by cops. | ||
| Wasn't that the story? | ||
| I think that was the story. | ||
| Something fucked up experienced at a very young age. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Well, I know that's what they said about Chris Benoit. | ||
| Maybe that's why he... | ||
| Oh, yeah, for sure. | ||
| Those guys get it. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| And people will say, well, that's fake wrestling. | ||
| Listen, man, there's nothing fake about what those guys go through. | ||
| They might be choreographed. | ||
| They might have a bunch of things that they're doing. | ||
| But these guys are body slamming each other and throwing each other through the air and landing on each other and hitting each other with elbows. | ||
| That is 100% real. | ||
| And they suffer. | ||
| And you have to be tough to do that. | ||
| They are experiencing some severe pain. | ||
| Hmm. | ||
| 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 after it was afterwards. | ||
| Oh, yeah You tricked them. | ||
| I don't think I tricked them How the fuck could they think that you were gonna put a positive spin on someone murdering their family? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Well, I think they thought I was going to put less emphasis on Chris Benoit and more emphasis on, you know, the nice things about wrestling. | ||
| No, Jesus Christ. | ||
| But they knew you were going to put some emphasis on it, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I was asking lots of questions, so they must have known. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Speaking of nice people, by the way, my porn people. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| It was probably the loveliest year of my working life. | ||
| Hanging out with the born people. | ||
| Yeah, they were delightful. | ||
| Did you feel like you got all that work done? | ||
| Like maybe, I don't know, a couple days? | ||
| Like why'd you... | ||
|
unidentified
|
We did a lot of digging. | |
| Well, I wanted to, you know. | ||
| A lot of digging. | ||
| It sounded like dicking with your accent. | ||
| Didn't it? | ||
| We did a lot of dicking. | ||
| I did no dicking. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| Let me explain yourself. | ||
| I'm just joking. | ||
| 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? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Sure. | |
| So this, you know, like pretty much every child in the world gets to learn about sex through Pornhub these days. | ||
| Pornhub is sex education for like every 12-year-old. | ||
| I'm sure. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because their parents probably don't get around to talking about it in time. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| 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. | ||
| For me, it was 12. We'd find them in the woods. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| I have a whole bit on it in my act. | ||
| Yeah? | ||
| That's, yeah, about finding perversion. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's a true story. | ||
| I literally didn't know about perversion until I found a fucked up magazine in the woods. | ||
| What was the magazine? | ||
| I think it was called Foot Action or something like that. | ||
| It was very strange. | ||
| But here's what's weird. | ||
| That kids today, if you give them a phone... | ||
| I mean, what age do kids get a phone? | ||
| Some kids get a phone at like 10 or 9. You're essentially giving them porn. | ||
| Yeah, you're giving them every awfulness. | ||
| You're giving them ISIS beheading videos. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| 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. | ||
| How old was he? | ||
| He was... | ||
| 17 and a half, I think. | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Maybe 18. But kids as young as eight years old are on the Sex Offenders Registry in the United States. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Eight? | |
| Eight years old. | ||
| I had no idea. | ||
| Boys and girls, by the way. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you can't... | ||
| So with Nathan... | ||
| First of all, where the fuck were the parents? | ||
| You know, unsurprisingly, it's like, I think this kid was a foster kid. | ||
| So there's already like the sort of... | ||
| Stigma attached to him. | ||
| Yeah, the shadow of stigma. | ||
| Nathan's a kid with autism. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| But maybe not. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| I mean, I'm sure it's true in certain cases, but I'm sure it's not true in many cases. | ||
| But the consequences of sentencing a kid like that are so extreme. | ||
| Like, you should probably have a real understanding of what's going on with the kid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And if he's autistic and he doesn't know what the fuck to do and he's confused and he... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, Nathan, so he read me, like, his book. | ||
| He needs to, like, fill out this sex offenders book, like, at therapy. | ||
| And so he was, like, reading me the... | ||
| How old is he now? | ||
| I think he's, like, about 20 now. | ||
| He's going to be on the sex offenders registry for the next 23 years. | ||
| Now, what is it like talking to him? | ||
| Is he... | ||
| Does he understand the consequences of what went down? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He says it's like being permanently grounded. | ||
| He was reading me the questions and answers from the Sex Offenders book. | ||
| So it's questions like, have you ever had a sexual situation in which urine or feces was involved? | ||
| And his answer was like, no. | ||
| And there were questions like, you know, have you ever had sex with animals? | ||
| And his question was like, no. | ||
| And then the last question was, when was the last time you had sex with somebody? | ||
| And his answer was, still a virgin. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| A virgin on the sex offenders registry. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| I mean, of course you can understand why the girl was scared and told her parents and the parents told the police. | ||
| You can totally understand it from the other point of view. | ||
| Oh, 100%. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, I mean, what a butterfly effect. | ||
| That is. | ||
| And I'm not, of course, I'm not saying any of this is Fabian's fault. | ||
| This is all unintended consequences. | ||
| That's just access to sex and porn. | ||
| And, you know, the other thing that's weird is that porn, for the most part, I mean, other than this bespoke porn, which is very specific, but porn... | ||
| There's like levels to the depravity that never existed before. | ||
| Yeah, because everything's keyword searchable. | ||
| This is what happens when you let tech people run the world. | ||
| But it's also ramping up. | ||
| It's also people get tired of just people kissing and then having sex. | ||
| So then it's like, I want to watch a guy tie a girl up. | ||
| Oh, I want to watch a guy spit in a girl's mouth. | ||
| I want to watch her get smacked around. | ||
| And then it gets weirder and gagging and all this, you know. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So that's one consequence of the ubiquity of free porn and just the sheer volume of free porn. | ||
| Yeah, you've got to stand out with extreme content in some way. | ||
| But the other thing is all these search engine people are sort of looking at what's being searched for the most. | ||
| What is number one? | ||
| Well, I'll tell you what's like a... | ||
| I don't know if it's number one, but I'll tell you what's really like way at the top. | ||
| It's anything to do with like stepsisters, stepbrothers, stepfathers, stepdaughters. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Really? | |
| Stepmoms? | ||
| Incest porn is basically... | ||
| But it's not real incest. | ||
| It's like you get away with it. | ||
| But actually, when I was on the set of Stepdaughter Cheerleader Audrey, poor Mike, Quasar, the director, there was a bit of dialogue. | ||
| Like, these guys were saying, oh, I think your stepdaughter's sexy. | ||
| But they kept on getting it wrong, and they were saying, I think your daughter's sexy. | ||
| And Mike's going, stepdaughter! | ||
|
unidentified
|
Like, Mike behind the camera's going, stepdaughter! | |
| That's hilarious. | ||
| We don't want to be too fucked up here, people. | ||
| Step! | ||
| Keyword step. | ||
| All right, take one. | ||
| These are great people. | ||
| My porn people were great people. | ||
| Well, that's nice. | ||
| 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. | ||
| This show, if I may, blow my own trumpet. | ||
| Please do. | ||
| Which I learnt on the set of Blow My Own Trumpet. | ||
| 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. | ||
| You know, I think you also have to establish that your own, whether it's moral superiority or good taste that you don't approve of this. | ||
| You're not one of those people. | ||
| Exactly, yeah. | ||
| I'm not even a connoisseur of this work. | ||
| Right, exactly. | ||
| I made my excuses and left. | ||
| And that means, you know, because of our hypocrisy... | ||
| They get exploited. | ||
| So that's why I wanted to do this show. | ||
| I'm sorry that I sort of brought it back full circle, but that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this show. | ||
| 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. | ||
| And how did he feel about that? | ||
| This is what the straw that broke the camel's back. | ||
| He was having dinner with her and she's like, God, I'm so tired. | ||
| I had to do an anal scene all day today. | ||
| And he was like, what? | ||
| They were out to dinner. | ||
| In his mind, he was able to put that barrier up. | ||
| And what she does is just work. | ||
| It's fine. | ||
| We're going to go to dinner and have a wonderful time. | ||
| Candlelight, fine wine, some amazing food. | ||
| I'm in love with her. | ||
| She's amazing. | ||
| And he couldn't handle it. | ||
| Nope. | ||
| She was tired. | ||
| She was complaining about taking it in the ass all day. | ||
| And he was like, check, please. | ||
| Let's get out of here. | ||
| So they split up. | ||
| I got another one. | ||
| 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. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So the guy, the first guy, though, took me to a set. | |
| And this is like in 94. Okay, so this was the pre-keyword, pre-Fabian days. | ||
| Pre-internet. | ||
| And they were all rich. | ||
| Everybody was rich. | ||
| And the porn stars were like real stars. | ||
| 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 don't know if I'm buying all this. | ||
| I was like, this just seems weird. | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| A wisp of darkness. | ||
| But that's what's fascinating. | ||
| Like, why? | ||
| It's illogical if you look at it on paper. | ||
| It's like everyone who is healthy, whose body functions correctly, enjoys sexual relations. | ||
| Whether it's straight sex or gay sex or whatever the fuck it is. | ||
| People like to be touched. | ||
| It's part of being a person. | ||
| Why is it so shameful when other people get to watch? | ||
| And why does it devastate people when they find out that their loved one had done something on film that others can see? | ||
| 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. | ||
| Yeah, you should be mad at the people who recognize him. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You're a pervert. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm just doing a job, you fuck. | ||
| There was a woman who got arrested, not arrested, rather fired. | ||
| She was a schoolteacher. | ||
| And it turned out that in the 90s or something like that, she had done porn. | ||
| And she was really well-respected, very loved schoolteacher. | ||
| And then one of the kids in school figured it out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Started telling everybody. | ||
| Next thing you know, kids are getting online. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And watching the teacher. | ||
| And she lost her job. | ||
| And she was really... | ||
| Really respected and loved. | ||
| And then, you know, we don't love you anymore. | ||
| You used to fuck. | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| It's baffling. | ||
| Even in these sort of sex-positive, more sex-positive kind of anti-slut-shaming times, there's still a massive amount of stigma. | ||
| Yeah, but that's not real. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, it's a bubble. | ||
| It's a small bubble that most of the world doesn't share. | ||
| Well, that's the other thing. | ||
| It's like, what about other countries? | ||
| Like, is this stigma attached to... | ||
| Wasn't there, like, in Italy, a former porn star who ran for Parliament or something like that? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then started going out with... | ||
| Oh, fuck. | ||
| The artist, Jeff Koons. | ||
| I don't know who he is. | ||
| Oh, he's like a big, like, famous sort of pop artist. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| And I think they were having a relationship. | ||
| And yeah, she... | ||
| Yeah, she ran for... | ||
| Britain is still with that stigma, I'm sure. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But yeah, no, Italy, they've got it. | ||
| Italy doesn't give a fuck. | ||
| They don't give a fuck. | ||
| They're a little wild over there. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Yeah, I mean, I would wonder, like, what countries are the most accepting of former adult stars. | ||
| Adult is my favorite term. | ||
| Adult. | ||
| You know, it's like urban. | ||
| You know, when you say urban, you just say black people. | ||
| Jesus Christ. | ||
| Adult. | ||
| Say porn. | ||
| Just say porn. | ||
| The adult industry. | ||
| Like, what do you mean? | ||
| The industry of people who are grown up? | ||
| Like, what are you saying? | ||
| Gotta play stupid. | ||
| I'm like, what? | ||
| Adults? | ||
| As opposed to what? | ||
| The children industry? | ||
| The fuck are you saying? | ||
| It's just a weird term. | ||
| 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... | ||
| And they are. | ||
| They're just people. | ||
| I hope it will do its bit. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think I should go now? | ||
| Do you think you should go now? | ||
| Have you said enough? | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| I think it was great. | ||
| We had a great talk. | ||
| This would be a good way to end it. | ||
| I enjoyed it very much. | ||
| I'm going to meet my family and help go to Runyon and have a walk. | ||
| Oh, that's a good place. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You do that all the time? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's a good spot. | ||
| I go to Runyon every day when I'm in Los Angeles. | ||
| Oh, beautiful. | ||
| Joe, it was such a pleasure talking to you again. | ||
| Always a pleasure, John. | ||
| Let's do it again, for sure. | ||
| I would love to come and do it again. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| And tell people how they can find your stuff. | ||
| Okay, so this new series is called The Butterfly Effect and it's on Audible. | ||
| Audible.com. | ||
| I'm a big fan of Audible. | ||
| I love Audible. | ||
| I also love Audible. | ||
| They're amazing. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| Here's The Butterfly Effect. | ||
| The biggest collection of audio entertainment on the entire internet. | ||
| And look at that star rating. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Look at you, you savage. | ||
| So that's my new... | ||
| And my Twitter thing is just at John Ronson and... | ||
| J-O-M Ronson. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh, yeah. | |
| And the other thing is I just co-wrote this movie called Oak Joe, which is on Netflix, about a giant pig. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| It's on Netflix. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| John Ronson, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Thank you, brother. | ||
| Thank you. |
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