Sept. 22, 2020 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:13:00
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unidentified
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Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! | |
| The Joe Rogan Experience. | ||
| Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! | ||
| Hello Jenny. | ||
| Hello Joe. | ||
| Thanks for doing this, I appreciate it. | ||
| I'm totally psyched to be here. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me on. | ||
| My pleasure. | ||
| So your book, Sex, Robots, and Vegan Meat, did you have alternative titles? | ||
| I'm really, really shit at titles. | ||
| I just can't believe it. | ||
| It's a good title. | ||
| I thought it was an excellent one. | ||
|
unidentified
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It's a brilliant title. | |
| Yeah, it works well. | ||
| It's my editor Chris's title. | ||
| It's not my title. | ||
| Did you have ideas? | ||
| I had really bad ones. | ||
| I think when I wrote the proposal, it was called Future Humans or something. | ||
| And he just said, no, no, no, no, no. | ||
| I can't do titles. | ||
| I write things that are very, very long. | ||
| I can't do nice little short things. | ||
| So anyway, my editor at the publishing house, Picador, came up with the title and I loved it. | ||
| Yeah, he nailed it. | ||
| Excellent job, Chris. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes. | |
| Way to go. | ||
| He's a smart guy. | ||
| Well, it really covers the subject matter so well and so succinctly. | ||
| So I'm concerned with all the things you appear to be concerned with. | ||
| So I'm really excited about this conversation. | ||
| Good. | ||
| Let's start with Sex Robots. | ||
| This is the first part. | ||
| I'm sure you've seen Ex Machina. | ||
| Yes, I have. | ||
| Fantastic movie, right? | ||
| Brilliant. | ||
| Yes, totally. | ||
| And confusing, because I think there will be a time, whether it's in our grandchildren's life or when, where that's a real concern, where we do have artificial humans that don't have any empathy. | ||
| They're programmed whatever way we decide to program them, and they're insanely similar to us. | ||
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unidentified
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Yes. | |
| And people are going to have sex with them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's this idea that, I mean, there are people who are working on this stuff now. | ||
| That's what my book is about. | ||
| It's about, like, I went and met the people who are doing this stuff now. | ||
| We have this idea that comes from science fiction of, like, Ex Machina or Pris from Blade Runner, of these, like, totally perfect beings who are really dangerous. | ||
| And that doesn't exist at the moment, but it is going to exist. | ||
| It is going to exist at some point. | ||
| There will be something extremely realistic that gives a very good illusion of being human, even though it's not. | ||
| And there are lots of reasons to be concerned about this and there are some really solid kind of feminist reasons to be concerned about this because the vast majority of the robots being made at the moment are in the female form. | ||
| But for me, the thing that I was worried about is what What happens in a future where it's possible to have a relationship where only one half of the partnership matters, where you don't have to have empathy for your other half, you don't have to care about what their ambitions are, what their desires are, they'll always laugh at your jokes, they never get a period, you never have to meet their family. | ||
| And what is that going to do to us as human beings when empathy is no longer a requirement of the relationship? | ||
| Jenny, the way you're wearing your microphone, it's rubbing against your clothes because you're trying to look cooler. | ||
| Because I move about too much. | ||
| Is that better? | ||
| Perfect. | ||
| Excellent. | ||
| Yeah, that is a real concern. | ||
| And I've thought about this a lot. | ||
| Because I'm very concerned with... | ||
| There's two ways of looking at it. | ||
| One way of looking at it like we, at one point in time, there were single-celled organisms. | ||
| And then millions and millions of years later, you have human beings. | ||
| Why would we assume that this is the end? | ||
| It's clearly not. | ||
| There will be better iterations. | ||
| And I have a feeling that one of the ways we're going to bring that about is through technology. | ||
| And my real fear is that there will be no more biological life. | ||
| My real fear is that we will slowly integrate, we'll be symbiotic with some sort of technological creation, and then eventually we'll realize all the things that are holding us back They're biologically based, whether it's sex or gender or emotions or all these different things that seem to cause conflicts. | ||
| And then if we figure out a way to convince this future version of human beings to just give in to the matrix, that's our future. | ||
| You know what? | ||
| I would have kind of agreed with you on that take about a year ago, except for what's happened over the past year, which has just smacked us in the face, reminding us that biology always wins and that we're much more likely to be wiped out by some biological thing that we have no control over whatsoever. | ||
| Because ultimately that kind of reading of the future It depends on this idea that we will be able to control things really well, that there will be nothing that comes out of left field that can destroy us. | ||
| I'm sorry, but wouldn't that be a great argument that biology is the issue? | ||
| Because if we did have something that we could put our consciousness in that doesn't have problems with viruses, wouldn't that be an excellent solution to the problem that we're in? | ||
| We have a problem with our immune systems because we're essentially symbiotic organisms already. | ||
| We have all these bacteria and all these different life forms that live within us. | ||
| If the balance is off or your immune system is bad, then a virus gets in there. | ||
| You're basically being attacked by another life force. | ||
| Well, yes, but I'd say that's the difference between a perfect world and a real world. | ||
| And I think it would be almost impossible for us to be able to develop technological solutions that were perfect, that didn't have glitches in them, where you could upload yourself faithfully and exist in this sort of realm of consciousness where you were separate from your body. | ||
| There would be problems with that, and you'd be relying on this technology to embody you in many ways. | ||
| And I just basically think that technology can't It can't solve everything. | ||
| Technology can do fantastic things, but the most important human problems have to be solved by changing human behaviour rather than relying on technology. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| Maybe. | ||
| I see what you're saying, but most technology, although it's not totally reliable, is more reliable than human beings. | ||
| Like your phone works and it's much more consistent than most humans. | ||
| Occasionally your phone will screw up if you drop it a lot, but so will people. | ||
| If you drop them on their heads, they'll screw up as well. | ||
| But you're relying, you're giving the person who creates that technology a lot of your trust and you're giving them a lot of power. | ||
| And so essentially that phone is only as good as the person who made it and as much as they're fulfilling their pledge to give you what they say they're giving you. | ||
| And actually you're disempowering yourself if you're relying on a piece of technology that's created by a corporation to do something that you could do yourself basically. | ||
| And so that's what my book is about. | ||
| What I've been looking at is these fundamental parts of human nature and how we're relying on technology to solve problems for us because it's a bit of a shortcut to say, okay, I'm going to get a machine to do that. | ||
| I'm going to get a machine to be my girlfriend or machine to do any of these other things. | ||
| But in fact, there's lots of unintended consequences of doing that. | ||
| And in fact, you take away some of your agency if you're relying on a machine. | ||
| Well, you certainly do. | ||
| My general concern is that we won't be necessary. | ||
| I think this idea of human beings and agency and all these things are wonderful if we decide to stay human. | ||
| But what I'm concerned with is when I talked to Elon Musk and he was telling me about Neuralink. | ||
| And Neuralink is going to radically increase the bandwidth between human beings and information. | ||
| When you start stuffing wires into people's brains and you make some sort of weird Bluetooth connection to an app or some other piece of technology that allows you to interface with it and have access to information at a much more rapid pace. | ||
| That seems the beginning of the end of what we call the biological human. | ||
| I'm really worried about this. | ||
| I'm not worried in a sense, but I see the writing on the wall. | ||
| And I see people as having a short lifespan in terms of this version of a human being that we're enjoying right now. | ||
| I don't think this is going to last. | ||
| Well, it's certainly not going to last because something's going to come and wipe us out. | ||
| But whether or not we're superseded by technology depends on a whole lot of things. | ||
| It depends on everybody having this technology all over the world. | ||
| And it depends on this technology working properly. | ||
| And I think there will always be people who can't get their hands on it, who will be living in a different way and maybe a better way. | ||
| And while we all get wiped out because we're all... | ||
| Connecting to Bluetooth and telepathically, you know, being inside each other's consciousnesses and getting messed up because of it. | ||
| There'll be people who can't afford this technology who will be just quietly forging ahead. | ||
| I mean, I guess this is the whole thing. | ||
| It's like the difference between You never know where technology is going to take you until you put it in practice. | ||
| Like even the iPhone, like when Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, his projections, his kind of most ambitious hope was that it would take 1% of the market in the first year. | ||
| Like he had no idea we would all become completely addicted to these things and that we can't put them down. | ||
| And this is the thing, nobody knows where it's all going to go. | ||
| It might wipe us out, but, you know, there'll always be people who don't have it who survive that apocalypse. | ||
| Yeah, well, there are some people in remote parts of the world that don't have phones now, but that's what's fascinating. | ||
| If you go back to the movie Wall Street, when Michael Douglas is on the beach and he has that big brick phone and he's a baller. | ||
| He's a big player. | ||
| He's got this crazy phone. | ||
| He doesn't even have to have a wire there. | ||
| Remember that? | ||
| That was the big deal, that this guy was so cool and so rich that he could have a phone and talk to people that are nowhere near him. | ||
| With no wires. | ||
| And that was unusual. | ||
| Now, you could go to remote parts of the world and you'll see folks with cell phones. | ||
| Very poor people in third world countries. | ||
| They all have cell phones. | ||
| I feel like that is probably going to be what's happening with all future tech. | ||
| The rich people have it originally, initially, and then it'll trickle down to other folks as well. | ||
| But the real worry, when we're talking about haves and have-nots now, that's a big issue today, is income inequality. | ||
| Well, when you have people that can afford Neuralink or whatever the next version of that is or future iterations, if it really is that effective and it makes you that much more productive, you're going to have a massive advantage, assuming it works, over people you're going to have a massive advantage, assuming it works, over people that are just naturally using their And the gap will be even wider. | ||
| And then there'll be a real revolt. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And also with things like, for example, like artificial wounds, if you can be pregnant without anyone – well, if you can have a baby without anyone being pregnant, then there will be a great inequality between women who can kind of carry on working and not have to deal with all of this stuff happening to their bodies. | ||
| And, you know, companies might pay for your – You to grow your baby in a lab or in a bag instead of inside your body and you can carry on working and then there's a future where like being visibly pregnant might be a sign of having an unplanned pregnancy or of low status or of being like a pretty bad mother because you hadn't really thought about it. | ||
| Like this technology has the ability to create enormous not just like advantage and disadvantage but also Reinforcing class problems in a really huge way because we will end up looking down on people who don't have the ability to participate in this new world where there are opportunities provided by this technology. | ||
| Yeah, now we're getting really into the weirdness, right? | ||
| Because we're really talking about money more than we're talking about the development of a human being because you know you're a mother. | ||
| Strange things happen when you have a baby inside of you. | ||
| You have a connection with the baby. | ||
| The baby has a very bizarre connection with you and the outside world through you and your feelings and senses. | ||
| And to pawn all that off on some fucking robot just seems really weird. | ||
| I hope that never happens. | ||
| That freaks me out. | ||
| It's kind of already happening now, though, because, well, it is already happening now in one respect, in that they're doing experiments with animals where they're doing it, but it's already happening now with surrogacy. | ||
| I mean, all of the arguments that you make now about, you know, the connection, the bond and all of that, they apply to surrogates as well. | ||
| And surrogacy is a very, very, you know, difficult area ethically to get into, but it's the only way a lot of people have of having babies at the moment. | ||
| Yes, and that also is an issue with income inequality comes into play as well. | ||
| With people that really don't want to do it, and they do it because it's the only way they can earn a large sum of money, so they carry other people's babies inside of them. | ||
| Weird stuff. | ||
| You are renting out your body, even if you're doing it for the most noble reasons, to give the greatest joy to a couple, you are basically saying, okay, you can have this part of my body for nine months. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What we were talking about earlier, I'm with you. | ||
| I love human beings. | ||
| I love all our weirdness. | ||
| I love our flaws. | ||
| I love the conflict and the resolution of that conflict. | ||
| I think we're amazing. | ||
| I love talking to people. | ||
| That's why I started a podcast in the first place. | ||
| My concern is that we're going to be obsolete. | ||
| And I really think that if technology continues the way it's currently going, this exponential rate of improvement and with artificial intelligence and all the various things that people are working on, including artificial limbs, they're going to be superior. | ||
| They're talking about replacing eyes within our lifetime. | ||
| They're going to be superior to the eyes that we currently use. | ||
| All these things lead me down, if I sit and think for long, well, where's it going? | ||
| Well, it's going to artificial people. | ||
| It's going to something that's superior to us, just like we're superior, at least on paper, to single-celled organisms. | ||
| Well, yes, and there's the transhumanist argument that we're going to be augmenting ourselves and transcending our bodies. | ||
| But that depends on two things. | ||
| One is this idea that human bodies are kind of flawed and need to be rejected and improved. | ||
| But the other thing is that all of this stuff depends on whether or not we want to buy it. | ||
| This stuff is out there. | ||
| We can say, no, we don't want that. | ||
| We'd rather be inferior and flawed human beings because that's better than being perfect and rendering ourselves obsolete. | ||
| We don't have to go down that road. | ||
| Just because these things exist, it doesn't mean that we have to buy them. | ||
| We have to use them. | ||
| No, that's absolutely true. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| But I think people are going to do it, and I think more people are going to do it than not. | ||
| I believe in human beings. | ||
| I think that there's going to be a kind of backlash and a revolution against all of this stuff, and people will say, actually, there are certain areas where I want to be flawed and imperfect. | ||
| But maybe those people will become second-class citizens and be, you know... | ||
| Completely inadequate in this new economy of enhanced humanity. | ||
| You're depressing me now. | ||
| You can get depressed thinking about this, but I look back on chimps or our ancient hominid ancestors and I said, well, if you talk to them and say, hey, let me show your future. | ||
| Your future is filled with iPads and electric cars and you can fly in a Metal tube that gets you across the entire continent in five and a half hours. | ||
| What do you think? | ||
| They'd be like, fuck that. | ||
| I'm sticking with the trees, man. | ||
| This is where it's at. | ||
| It's bananas and eating bugs. | ||
| This is life. | ||
| What you guys are doing is nonsense. | ||
| Everyone's depressed, and you don't even have to worry about being eaten by a big cat. | ||
| No, you're doing it wrong. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| The idea of whether or not our life is better now that we have the capacity to do all of these things is really up for discussion. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| What is better, right? | ||
| What's better is, are you enjoying it more? | ||
| Do you feel more fulfilled and happy? | ||
| Arguably, more people are depressed and more people feel disconnected because of technology than ever. | ||
| You know Jonathan Haidt? | ||
| Have you read his book, The Coddling of the American Mind? | ||
| I haven't. | ||
| It's an excellent book, in particular when it discusses children and growing up with technology and social media in particular, how difficult it is. | ||
| And for girls especially, for whatever reason, they experience more bullying and more depression. | ||
| There's more cutting, more suicides, and there's a giant uptick that coincides directly with the advent of social media and cell phones. | ||
| It's really weird because there's this thing that we're adding into our life that causes all these complications and is incredibly addictive. | ||
| I have a 12-year-old daughter and it's hard to get her to put her phone down like, hey, put that down. | ||
| She has a time. | ||
| She can only use it for an hour and then it just won't let her use it anymore. | ||
| But during that hour, it's like a feast. | ||
| It's crazy. | ||
| It's weird to see and it's disturbing. | ||
| And part of it is I see her enjoying it. | ||
| I see her doing TikTok and laughing with her friends and taking pictures with weird filters. | ||
| But part of me thinks this is a little demon that works its way into your life and it makes you unsatisfied and unhappy. | ||
| For a lot of people, the weird comparison aspect, particularly when you're an adolescent... | ||
| It's very dangerous for kids. | ||
| That's what it is. | ||
| I mean, that is the kind of key to being unhappy is comparing yourself with other people. | ||
| I mean, the key to happiness is to not compare yourself to other people and just be happy with you a lot. | ||
| But, you know, it's not just teenagers. | ||
| I'm completely addicted to my phone. | ||
| I remember one time I put my phone in to be repaired. | ||
| The screen was cracked and I was just, I felt like I'd lost a limb. | ||
| I was constantly thinking, oh, it's my phone, and then having to remind myself, you know, it was in for repairs. | ||
| They are incredibly addictive things and, you know, have a very incredibly powerful I think we're now living in a world where the problems that we have are not huge existential problems. | ||
| We're not constantly living with death around us all the time, although maybe this year things are slightly different. | ||
| You know, in a world where we're not constantly under threat, we are kind of, our kind of sphere of what should concern us has got smaller and we're kind of cannibalizing ourselves and looking for problems, creating problems, whereas in the past we would have been too busy, you know, running away from tigers or wherever, whatever you might think. | ||
| Yeah, for sure. | ||
| And there's other issues also where people are comparing themselves with things that aren't real, like filters and all this weird stuff. | ||
| I posted a picture on my Instagram that my 10 year old took of me. | ||
| We were at dinner and I made an ugly face and she put me through this filter and turned me into a beautiful girl. | ||
| It's really bizarre. | ||
| And I posted it up on my Instagram and said, this is me. | ||
| I want you to know how crazy this is. | ||
| I showed the original picture and then I showed the picture that my daughter created. | ||
| I'm like, this is how insane these filters have gotten. | ||
| It gave me hair. | ||
| It gave me beautiful lips and smooth skin. | ||
| And it's... | ||
| And people were stunned, because there's a lot of people... | ||
| I didn't know that it existed until my daughter did it to me, until she showed me. | ||
| I mean, I knew that it was pretty similar, that you could do some weird stuff with filters, but I had no idea you could turn an ugly man into a beautiful girl. | ||
| It's really weird. | ||
| So there's a lot of girls... | ||
| People are having, like, surgery so that they can look like filters as well. | ||
| They're so used to seeing themselves in this way. | ||
| And I don't know if you have this so much in the US, but we certainly have here this fashion for incredibly big lips and young girls having loads and loads of stuff put in their lips. | ||
| And so they begin to look more and more like, you know, cartoons because that's the kind of perfection that they're used to seeing in these images. | ||
| Yeah, we do have that, unfortunately. | ||
| It's a weird one. | ||
| I think people got so used to boobs being ridiculously big that they thought that, well, we just do that with lips too. | ||
| And butts. | ||
| Yeah, and butts. | ||
| The butt one is very strange. | ||
| But it's all weird, but it changes the geometry of your face and it makes people weird. | ||
| Like, they get odded out by you. | ||
| They see you with the lips and like, oh, those lips don't go with that face. | ||
| Like, why are those lips on that face? | ||
| Like, people who have thick lips, generally, if they naturally have thick lips, you know, there's the Fibonacci sequence with your face. | ||
| It works. | ||
| You see it. | ||
| You're like, oh, that's your face. | ||
| Those beautiful lips belong on your face. | ||
| But when someone has, like, thin skin and, like, angular, narrow features and these crazy, fucked-up lips... | ||
| It's your body, you gasp. | ||
| You tighten up when you see it. | ||
| Oh, what have you done? | ||
| What have you done to your face? | ||
| I think when people in the future look back on us, like when we look back on, I don't know, two or three centuries ago where people wore those tiny corsets and think, oh my god, I can't believe that was in fashion. | ||
| I think people in the future will either look back on us and just laugh that we did this to our lips, or they will all have lips like that and look back on you and me and think, uh, who knows? | ||
| Yeah, those regular looking people. | ||
| I'm worried about genetic engineering as much as I'm worried about artificial intelligence and symbiotic relationships with technology. | ||
| I'm really worried about things like CRISPR and how they're going to affect what the future shape of human beings is. | ||
| I think that if we really get to a point where we can edit genetics and every woman looks like Wonder Woman and every man looks like Thor, we're going to be in a really weird place. | ||
| Certainly. | ||
| And also because, you know, so much of this stuff is like being developed for really noble reasons, like we're going to stop people from being sick, we're going to stop people from having diseases, and it's hard to argue against that. | ||
| And also that the kind of The limits on people using this stuff are kind of voluntary things that countries sign up to. | ||
| China gets a bad rap for using this stuff, but at least Chinese scientists do sign up to lots of ethical codes. | ||
| There's nothing to stop scientists in North Korea or in Russia or countries like that that don't care about these ethical codes from doing whatever they like with this technology. | ||
| And that's the point, is that we need to be able to have these discussions before this technology is out there and be able to be critical about technologies that might be able to do incredible amounts of good so that we're ready for them, basically. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That is part of the issue. | ||
| It's like the people that create the technology, it's like they get to a point where they're editing genes and they're doing it for these good reasons. | ||
| But then that technology exists. | ||
| It's sort of like when Oppenheimer created the bomb. | ||
| They were trying to do it first because they knew that Germany was working on it. | ||
| And they knew that this was something that was very important to be first with. | ||
| But then once he detonated it and he realized what he had done, you know, that famous quote from the Bhagavad Gita that he said, like, as the bomb blew off, he said, now I am become death destroyer of worlds. | ||
| It dawned on him, like, what have I done? | ||
| And I think that's probably going to happen with genetic engineering. | ||
| When they're doing it initially and they're trying to help people with leukemia and all sorts of diseases, But then you see everyone looks like the Hulk, you know, and then you live a thousand years and then we have massive overpopulation problems because nobody dies and people have bulletproof skin. | ||
| This is not outside of the realm of possibility. | ||
| This is all in the wheelhouse of genetic engineering. | ||
| If they just keep doing what they're doing right now and you extrapolate, you go forward a hundred years, things can get really bizarre. | ||
| The point is that nobody can control where their inventions will eventually go and who will control them and what they'll be used for. | ||
| And like, you know, one of the things I've looked at is meat grown in laboratories. | ||
| So if you could eat meat without killing animals by cloning the cells of a live animal. | ||
| And the people doing that stuff, they're vegans and they're animal rights activists who are like, The animal rights argument, we haven't won that argument. | ||
| People are still eating meat, even though they know it's really cruel. | ||
| So we're going to give them what they want, but do it in a way that doesn't involve killing animals. | ||
| And we're going to try and make it cheaper and better for you. | ||
| And that is a noble intention in many ways. | ||
| But then, you know, they can't say that in 20, 30 years time, they're not going to be bought out by some giant meat company that doesn't care at all about animals or people or anything else. | ||
| And, you know, nobody can control how technology is going to be used and who is going to be using it and what for. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| But we do have this is this is where I'm kind of more optimistic than you. | ||
| That we as human beings have have the power to say that we don't want this and that we aren't going to go for this. | ||
| And there are enough of us that we can you know, there can be a critical mass of people who say we're not going to allow this to happen for it not to happen, I would say. | ||
| I love your optimism, but I feel the same way about you saying that as I do when the Green Party is running for president here in America. | ||
| We don't need the Republicans. | ||
| We don't need the Democrats. | ||
| We're going to start a third party. | ||
| And I'm like, good luck. | ||
| Most people are crazy. | ||
| Most people are going to jump right on board and get fake eyes. | ||
| They're going to do it. | ||
| They're going to want to be able to read minds. | ||
| They're like, come on, Elon Musk. | ||
| Drill into my brain. | ||
| Stuff those wires into my amygdala. | ||
| But it's not going to suddenly come out there and be there on the market. | ||
| As we said, the first people who are going to get it are going to be very rich people who have it. | ||
| And then there will be a backlash of other people saying, hey, it's not fair. | ||
| The rich people can read my mind. | ||
| Maybe nobody should be able to read anybody's mind. | ||
| It's not going to all of a sudden happen. | ||
| It's not going to be like a science fiction movie. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| No, I don't think it's going to happen quickly, but I think it's going to be one of those things that we just accept, just like we accept cell phones. | ||
| If you had a cell phone 50 years ago, people would think you were a warlock. | ||
| Now, all of a sudden, it's normal. | ||
| It's a normal part of our life, and I'm worried that that is going to be the same with whatever, whether it's Neuralink or whatever future inventions that we have that enhance brain activity. | ||
| It's already happening with things like IVF. When IVF first came, it was total science fiction. | ||
| So much backlash that these were Franken-babies. | ||
| And now it's just so normal, it's advertised on the tube here. | ||
| Yeah, and people talk about it in casual conversations. | ||
| No, we had our kid through IVF. Oh, cool. | ||
| It's normal, yeah. | ||
| The sex robot thing, I share the same concerns that you have about the... | ||
| There's a thing that people do when we get to know each other. | ||
| We want each other to like each other. | ||
| As boys grow up with girls, they learn what girls like and girls learn what boys like. | ||
| We learn to be better people because we want other people to like us. | ||
| It's part of the whole process of the development of a human being. | ||
| If all of a sudden you can have sex with this perfect woman that you can spit on and pee on and do everything and she's always going to be there for you, I mean, it's a gross image, I'm sorry, but this is the real worry that there's no consequence to any of your actions and you can do whatever you want. | ||
| It's like there's a video game mode called God Mode. | ||
| I don't know if you play video games. | ||
| But it's the most boring thing in the world because when you play on God mode, you can't die. | ||
| So all of the consequences of playing the video game have been removed. | ||
| When you play a video game, you have a certain amount of life. | ||
| You have a finite lifespan. | ||
| If you're playing a shooter game, you have a finite amount of bullets and you've got to run around and find more bullets. | ||
| That's part of the fun of the game is that it could end. | ||
| You could lose. | ||
| But when there's no consequence... | ||
| I feel like there's got to be the same thing in dating, right? | ||
| If you're not nice to people, they don't call you back. | ||
| They don't like you. | ||
| And then you go, well, what have I done wrong? | ||
| And then you learn and you grow. | ||
| If there's no learning and growing... | ||
| You need feedback in your relationships. | ||
| This is the thing. | ||
| It's about having a domestic echo chamber, to have something in your house that is always laughing at your jokes and always likes the same music as you and the same movies as you, unless you program it to disagree with you. | ||
| But then again, all that matters is what you want. | ||
| I think that's going to be very damaging and corrosive. | ||
| And particularly because the people who are making this stuff at the moment justify it by saying, we are making this for people who otherwise wouldn't have a relationship. | ||
| Bereaved people, socially awkward people, people who are disabled. | ||
| We're giving them a chance to have some sort of companionship which they wouldn't be able to have otherwise. | ||
| But what those people need is they need some human contact. | ||
| They will be further isolated by having this kind of Perfect illusion of a partner because that's just not reality. | ||
| The whole point about human beings is they're unpredictable and they disagree with you and they have in-laws and menstrual cycles and ambitions and stuff. | ||
| It's incredibly important to grow as an individual to not always get everything you want. | ||
| I'm totally with you on that. | ||
| Yeah, it's like that scene in Ex Machina where you realize that the genius has this bizarre sexual relationship with these robots that he's created, and particularly the Asian robot where he can kind of tell her what to do, and you're like, oh, wait a minute. | ||
| It's not a person, but why do I feel like it's a person? | ||
| Like, I feel like he's a fucking creep, but it's not a person he's doing this to. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| So it sort of highlights these strange dilemmas. | ||
| Like, you're going to create a nation of sociopaths with oddly perfect female companions. | ||
| Yes, and almost kind of worse than that is, I interviewed these sex robot manufacturers in China who make very, very realistic sex dolls that they're putting AI and animatronics into, but really, really realistic. | ||
| The AI isn't so great, but they look really realistic. | ||
| And I asked them, you know, how come you're doing this? | ||
| And they said that actually what this is really ultimately about is about having service robots in the home, that ultimately you can have robots that will cook and clean for you at the moment, but they look like movable trash cans and they're not appealing. | ||
| And so actually what we're doing is making them look nice so you want to have them in your house and if you want to have sex with them, you can. | ||
| And what that description is basically of is a slave. | ||
| This is what they're making is slaves. | ||
| They're making things that look human but will do all the things that human beings don't necessarily want to do. | ||
| And so my concern is there's a whole branch of ethics about should robots have rights and should they have legal protections? | ||
| I'm not so much interested in that. | ||
| I'm interested in what does it do to you, the robot owner, If you have this relationship with a being that looks very, very human but isn't human, and the mindset of being a slave owner where you can suspend your empathy for something that looks very human, how does it corrode you and affect you to be having that kind of relationship? | ||
| I mean, I see a Black Mirror episode ready to happen, right? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| And then I see someone pretending that they have robots, that they really have human slaves. | ||
| That's a really good idea. | ||
| You should make that. | ||
| It seems like that could really happen. | ||
| I think there's going to be a branch of ethics that gets developed to deal with artificial life if we get to the point where we have control over artificial life and that artificial life has been programmed to actually mimic our emotions. | ||
| Because if you have something that cowers when you hit it, and when you scream at it, it hides in the corner and cries and weeps, and you get off on that, and you think that's fun, like, what is that? | ||
| If you have a basketball and you like to punch that basketball and scream at it and call it a bitch and throw it in the corner, everybody's like, okay, it's just a basketball. | ||
| You're fucking weird. | ||
| I don't know why you're doing that, but if that's what makes you feel better, fine. | ||
| If you want to scream at your basketball and not at a human being, that's fine. | ||
| But what if that basketball looks like a human being, talks like a human being, It has emotions that are programmed into it. | ||
| How realistic does it have to get before we rebel against this idea? | ||
| No, totally. | ||
| Part of the question about child sex dolls and child sex robots is part of all of this. | ||
| Some people say that you should give pedophiles child sex dolls and child sex robots like it's a kind of methadone. | ||
| That it will wean them off offending. | ||
| But we all know instinctively that that's wrong because it's more likely to feed that desire than to satisfy it. | ||
| We all know that. | ||
| But then how is that any different from saying, you know, you can give people who are sex offenders female dolls and robots or even men who are a bit aggressive or even, you know, whatever it is. | ||
| It's like if it's wrong to have a child sex doll because You'll relate to it like a child. | ||
| Then that same kind of thought process has to carry over when you're talking about adult dolls as well. | ||
| We will relate to them like they're human. | ||
| That's the whole point. | ||
| Yeah, it's a very messy situation. | ||
| Once they're created and once they actually do mimic real human beings, it's going to be very strange. | ||
| And I completely agree with you when it comes to pedophiles and a child robot doll. | ||
| That's not going to fix anything. | ||
| No. | ||
| But we know that. | ||
| And that's the interesting thing. | ||
| We have a kind of instinctive reaction. | ||
| No, that's wrong. | ||
| But then if you think, okay, well then why is it okay to have, I guess because adults can consent and kids can't consent, but we know that with a child doll or a child robot, it's wrong because you, the person owning it, are going to be treating them like a human and relating them like a human. | ||
| It's going to encourage you in the real world to go off and behave in a bad way. | ||
| It's the same sort of argument. | ||
| Yeah, even in an inanimate one, Like, if you went over a guy's house and he had a real doll, you know, one that doesn't move, but, you know, he's like, well, I just prefer that to masturbation. | ||
| You're like, oh, I don't know. | ||
| Like, masturbation's normal, but that's one step removed. | ||
| Like, that's weird. | ||
| That thing looks really real. | ||
| Well, the thing about real dolls is that they, because they don't move, I mean, obviously I went to the real doll factory, and because they don't move and speak, they're still like a fetish, and it's a very niche thing. | ||
| You have to be turned on by dolls, or you have to have an incredible imagination where you can imagine them coming to life. | ||
| The thing about robots with artificial intelligence and AI is that they're not so much of a niche and a fetish. | ||
| They are a versimilitude of a human being. | ||
| They are trying to To be a replacement relationship, really. | ||
| And with a robot, it's much more about the relationship than about the sex, because you can have sex with a doll. | ||
| The whole point of a robot is that you can have a relationship with it. | ||
| Yeah, it's the Joaquin Phoenix movie, She. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| Is that She or Her? | ||
| Her. | ||
|
unidentified
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Her. | |
| Yeah, where he has a love relationship with this voice, essentially. | ||
| I mean, that's what we're talking about. | ||
| We're just talking about it in the physical form. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I'm worried that this is inevitable. | ||
| It seems inevitable. | ||
| It seems like if these companies are already developing ones with wonky AI, it's going to be like the difference between that brick that Michael Douglas had on the beach and a Galaxy S20 Ultra, the newest, latest, greatest cell phones. | ||
| They're just going to get better. | ||
| They are. | ||
| It is totally inevitable. | ||
| They'll always be quite expensive. | ||
| But it is totally inevitable. | ||
| And there's a guy called Dr. David Levy, a British guy who wrote a book in 2007 called Love and Sex with Robots, where he predicted by 2050 human-robot marriages would both be legal and acceptable around the world. | ||
| And I think he thinks that's going to happen sooner now. | ||
| But yeah, I think this technology is inevitable. | ||
| It doesn't exist so much at the moment because at the moment you've got these robots that look very realistic because they're like real dolls. | ||
| And the AI isn't bad, but they can't walk. | ||
| Walking is really, really expensive to develop and it drains a lot of power. | ||
| So they haven't worked out how to do that. | ||
| That's the kind of next frontier. | ||
| So you haven't got this science fiction fantasy of like a robot that will come and knock on your door and deliver herself and say, hello, I'm your new girlfriend or whatever it is. | ||
| We're quite a way off that. | ||
| But it is going to happen. | ||
| Whether or not it'll be cheap enough for everyone to have one is another matter, but it's definitely going to happen. | ||
| Do you think that people will propose laws to prevent this? | ||
| Once it starts seeming like it's inevitable, once the general public goes, hey, wait a minute, this is not good, and then people realize that their romantic relationships, they're going to be replaced. | ||
| Men and women. | ||
| And women too. | ||
| Women are going to be tired of men's bullshit. | ||
| I think that's probably true, but then, I mean, I can't speak for all women here, but I think, certainly, my experience, and I don't think this is a minority view, is that women find the idea of having sex with something that you don't know genuinely wants you to be very unsexy indeed, and it's much harder. | ||
| Like, all of those real dolls, they make male real dolls. | ||
| They're bought by gay men. | ||
| It's very, very difficult. | ||
| It's not sexy to have sex with something that isn't really into you, basically. | ||
| Isn't that kind of the same thing with Playgirl? | ||
| Like, Playgirl, the idea was, well, women should have a magazine like Playboy 2. Like, okay, you know who buys it? | ||
| Gay men. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Male sexuality is a very, very different thing. | ||
| But I do think there'll be women who want companions. | ||
| Forget about the sex. | ||
| There'll be women having relationships, certainly, with very realistic male robots, too. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| But in terms of whether or not there are going to be laws against this, there's a campaign against sex robots in the UK that at first was trying to get laws done. | ||
| Banning sex robots or the development of sex robots in the UK, and now has kind of softened their stance and says they just want proper discussion ahead of maybe making some laws. | ||
| But the point is, the cat is out of the bag. | ||
| We could ban it in the UK, people will be making them in Korea or somewhere, unless there's a kind of global decision not to do this. | ||
| And there are too many rogue states for this not to happen. | ||
| So it is going to happen. | ||
| And always, you know, the law is really out of step with technology. | ||
| You know, if you look at things like revenge porn, something that we know instinctively is so wrong, it's been really hard to criminalize because of the way that we all live now. | ||
| Everybody's taking pictures. | ||
| Everybody's sending them all the time. | ||
| People can upload them and ruin someone's life in a moment. | ||
| And, you know, the law is kind of grinding on slowly, trying to keep up with all of this. | ||
| And so, for example, in the UK, what's illegal in terms of sex dolls is if you're not allowed to import a child's sex doll. | ||
| So it's the importation of it that's illegal, not having one, but trying to get it into the country just because the laws are kind of so old and creaky. | ||
| So I don't think actually it's something that we can stop with laws. | ||
| We can stop it by saying, actually, I don't want this and I'm prepared to accept compromise in my relationships and I'm prepared to accept that in order for me to grow as a person, I need to be challenged and not constantly in a relationship where all that matters is what I want. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, all those things sound right. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| It's not that I'm saying, no, no, no, you're wrong. | ||
| It would be better if these sex robots took over. | ||
| My real worry is that it doesn't matter what we think is right. | ||
| That technology always goes towards innovation. | ||
| It always goes towards improvements. | ||
| It always goes towards technology advancing where it's more effective, more available, easier, better, cheaper, faster. | ||
| This is what we always do. | ||
| This is what we've done with every single thing we've ever invented. | ||
| And it's got to happen with that as well. | ||
| But I think the difference between our position is that you think the march of technology is completely inevitable and there's nothing we can do to kind of shape it or stop it. | ||
| It's just gonna happen. | ||
| Whereas I think none of this is inevitable. | ||
| And I think human beings are capable of adapting and changing without technology. | ||
| And this year is a really good example of this, that we're all waiting for a vaccine. | ||
| The vaccine has not arrived. | ||
| And so we've kind of saved ourselves by changing our behaviour and changing our behaviour in a kind of altruistic way by staying at home even though, like, we might not get sick with coronavirus or wearing masks for other people's benefit. | ||
| I think human beings are really adaptable and we can adapt by changing our behaviour rather than We're relying on technology. | ||
| And this march of technology only exists if we continue to always think that technology is the solution. | ||
| People have to make this stuff. | ||
| And people have to buy this stuff in order for it to march on. | ||
| And we always have the power to say, you know what, I don't want it. | ||
| I think reasonable people like yourself, yes, that's going to happen. | ||
| But clearly you've seen videos of spring break in Fort Lauderdale where kids are making out, half naked, on the beach. | ||
| Nobody gives a fuck about coronavirus. | ||
| And then there's maps that show the spread of them leaving Florida and going all through the rest of the country. | ||
| And then all these infections that show up there. | ||
| Totally, but there's enough people that are being reasonable that when those things happen, it's really shit and people get ill, but it's not the end of the world. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| I think most people are reasonable and are able to behave in a kind of way where The good kind of wins out. | ||
| I think I agree with you on a lot of these things. | ||
| However, when I look at human beings, I try to look at human beings as if I was from another planet, if I was an alien. | ||
| And I looked at them without any connection to the way they think or behave or their culture. | ||
| And I said, well, what do these things do? | ||
| Well, this is what they do. | ||
| They make technology. | ||
| All they do is make technology. | ||
| They're obsessed with materialism, which plays into technology. | ||
| It plays into this want and need for the bigger, better, faster, greater thing that comes around every year, and that's what fuels them to work every day. | ||
| They go to work and they toil, and one of the things they reward themselves with is the newest, greatest thing. | ||
| And this is the fuel for this technological growth. | ||
| And this technological growth appears unstoppable because it seems like that's all the human animal does. | ||
| If you looked at it from afar, objectively, all I'm seeing is a constant wave of technology. | ||
| But I don't think that's true because we don't just make technology. | ||
| We also talk to each other and we communicate like you and I are now and we have discussions and we are capable of incredible change and that we could live in a world where it was okay to keep slaves and impregnate your wife every year and keep her in the kitchen. | ||
| But through having these discussions, we can really, really change the way we live very drastically from one generation to the next. | ||
| It's not just technology. | ||
| What defines a human being is that we use technology and that we're social animals. | ||
| And those are two different things. | ||
| And the idea that the technological advancement is always going to win out isn't necessarily one I buy. | ||
| I'm not saying that it's going to win out. | ||
| I don't think it's going to win out. | ||
| I think it's inevitable. | ||
| But they're both inevitable. | ||
| And as a society, we can make change just as much as we can make change by using technology. | ||
| Yeah, that is the fascinating balance, right? | ||
| I mean, most people today are aware that they're addicted to their cell phones, yet most people still use their cell phones. | ||
| We're aware that it's harming us, but yet we still use them because we just, oh, it's just a phone. | ||
| No big deal. | ||
| But you know it's a big deal. | ||
| Everybody, I know it's a big deal. | ||
| I know I check my messages too much, but yet I still check my messages too much. | ||
| And I'm aware of it, and I've read a lot of books about it. | ||
| But I think if you thought it was harming you enough, if you thought it was destroying your brain cells, you wouldn't. | ||
| The point is, it's about how you weigh up harm and you think, yeah, I should probably be doing other things, or I shouldn't be constantly checking the Twitter feed of that person I hate that's bad for my soul. | ||
| But you still do it. | ||
| Because it's bad for your soul, but only a little bit. | ||
| And if it was really, really corrosive and bad, then you would stop. | ||
| Yeah, maybe if you're a healthy person, or maybe you're one of those people that likes to pick scabs, and you just keep scratching. | ||
| That's possible too. | ||
| I'm worried for people. | ||
| I really genuinely am. | ||
| This is as a person who enjoys people. | ||
| I don't know how much time we have left in this form. | ||
| When I look at the archetypal alien, when you see those little grey men with the big heads I'm worried that what that is, is like we instinctively know that that's our future. | ||
| That we're going to be these genderless, weird things that reproduce through some sort of technology instead of these... | ||
| Bizarre, imperfect biological creatures with emotions that you and I both enjoy so much because of all the weirdness. | ||
| I mean, my whole business, everything I do is about the weirdness of people, whether it's stand-up comedy, whether it's podcasts, or even fighting. | ||
| When I do commentary on fighting, that's all the weirdness and imperfect nature of the human animal. | ||
| And I think it's awesome. | ||
| I mean, I love people. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| I'm not rooting for technology to do this. | ||
| But I see the writing on the wall. | ||
| It's not pretty. | ||
| Well, the thing is, it's all about the richness of the human experience, what makes it interesting to be human, which isn't just the basic functions of our life or basic logic. | ||
| You know, the fact that we have art galleries everywhere and music, you know, music, which is completely, completely illogical. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's because there's more to being human than those basic functions. | ||
| And when you talk about, you know, Sexless aliens reproducing without sex. | ||
| That kind of stuff is gonna happen quite soon. | ||
| I looked into quite a lot of this. | ||
| We can make gametes, we can make cells. | ||
| They can do this in mice. | ||
| You can make sperm and eggs out of cheek cells. | ||
| So you could make an egg out of your cheek cell and sperm. | ||
| There'll be a future where people can make sperm and egg Whichever one they need for whichever relationship they're in and that you can grow a baby outside the human body and we will become less and less gendered. | ||
| That is gonna happen. | ||
| The end of sex for reproduction is quite possible that we will just have sex for fun and then we'll do babies in this kind of very controlled way. | ||
| But we're always going to be weird, human beings. | ||
| We're always going to like strange things, like dancing around to music, all the stuff that can't be explained. | ||
| And the drive to be weird and the drive to be illogical is very, very powerful. | ||
| I'm not so deterministic about stuff. | ||
| And when I was doing all the work for my book, I was quite worried it was going to be really depressing because in a book like mine, you come to a conclusion where it's like, well, there's a future where women might be obsolete, where we can be replaced by robots and artificial uteruses and misogynist men can live without us. | ||
| All of these things that are really dark and worrying, but that's to buy a particular view of human nature as being a kind of slave to whatever comes next. | ||
| And we're too kind of weird and idiosyncratic, I think, to be done away with that easily. | ||
| Well, I think the weird and idiosyncratic nature of people is something that you and I both enjoy. | ||
| But I mean, I think if you can replace men with cheek cells, I mean, if you really can do that, if you really get to the point where you can create sperm from your nose hairs or whatever, and you don't need a man anymore... | ||
| Or a woman. | ||
| Or a woman. | ||
| It's called in vitro gametogenesis. | ||
| In vitro gametogenesis. | ||
| You can make gametes in vitro out of anything. | ||
| And they've done it in mice and they're going to try and do it in humans. | ||
| So it is going to happen. | ||
| But it means, you know, gay couples can have babies without anyone donating anything. | ||
| That's the good part. | ||
| That's the good point. | ||
| The bad part is no more people having sex to make people and then we're going to realize as a society all of our problems are caused by emotions if we were just logical. | ||
| So we figured out a way to remove emotions. | ||
| And here's the thing. | ||
| Emotions, the good part about emotions are dopamine and serotonin. | ||
| Right? | ||
| We all agree. | ||
| And dopamine and serotonin, we can actually reproduce that in your own brain. | ||
| So we can have the same feelings of love and the same feelings of happiness, but without all the illogical behavior that ruins lives. | ||
| So there'll be no more jealous boyfriends burning your house down. | ||
| There'll be no more chaos, no more murder, no more violence, no more any of this. | ||
| Everybody needs to sign up. | ||
| Or, you know, or you're a barbarian, or you're some terrible person who doesn't want progress. | ||
| Emotions are holding us back. | ||
| That's what I'm worried about. | ||
| It's like a slippery slide into us becoming something different and more predictable. | ||
| Man, this is really dark. | ||
| But you're right, I mean... | ||
| Well, I mean, it is quite possible. | ||
| It's dark for us. | ||
| As a thing. | ||
| As a species. | ||
| It is dark for us as a species. | ||
| I mean, I think the idea, you're right, that those emotions, they can be artificially induced anyway, and it's the natural emotions that are... | ||
| But all of this is depending on a world where there's a system where everybody has access to all that technology or all those drugs or all those whatever. | ||
| And, you know, there will be accidents. | ||
| There will be babies born naturally. | ||
| There will be, you know... | ||
| Yeah, and then maybe those people will have, you know, because they will be naturally selected in a different way, maybe they will have a completely different take on things that will save us all. | ||
| The thing that's really scary about the whole being able to make sperm and eggs from cheek cells It means you can make an infinite number of eggs. | ||
| So at the moment, the number of babies a couple can have is limited by the number of eggs a woman can produce. | ||
| And if you can make eggs from cheek cells, then you could have a billion eggs, which means that you could conceive a million fetuses and you could artificially select the best ones. | ||
| So you don't need CRISPR for that in terms of Genetic engineering, when you can make unlimited numbers of foetuses between a couple and choose which is the best one. | ||
| If this thing can happen that you can make eggs, that's not a difficult thing to do and we're not that far away off all of that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's so many things to worry about. | ||
| I had a conversation with Ray Kurzweil where he was talking to me about the ability in the future that we'll have the ability to download consciousness into a computer. | ||
| You'll be able to take your consciousness and put it into a computer because Essentially, consciousness is something that we're going to be able to replicate it. | ||
| It's going to be something that we can just recreate with computer programs and software. | ||
| And my thought was, what if someone's crazy? | ||
| What if some Kim Jong-un guy decides to make a billion of him? | ||
| If you have this world, this artificial world that you're going to live in, if you're going to live inside this computer, I'm assuming there's some sort of an environment that's compatible with the human consciousness. | ||
| So you're going to create some real-world multiplayer game where people live inside of it. | ||
| What's to stop someone like Donald Trump from making a billion Donald Trumps? | ||
| Right? | ||
| What's to stop you from doing that, from populating the world? | ||
| This is like a big philosophical experiment then, because the question is, why would it matter? | ||
| If this is all virtual and none of it's real, this is basically a computer simulation. | ||
| Why does it matter if in that computer game there's a billion Donald Trumps and a Kim Jong-il? | ||
| Right, or why does it matter if you want to piss on your sex robot and punch it? | ||
| It's not even a person. | ||
| Well, I guess the difference with that is because it's going to change you as a person when you get used to behaving like that. | ||
| Whereas this uploaded consciousness world, no human being is around to see it. | ||
| You've uploaded your consciousness. | ||
| It's doing its own thing in that world. | ||
| That world is a parallel universe where nothing matters. | ||
| But I think the idea of uploading your consciousness is very interesting because there's an incredible narcissism in that. | ||
| There's this idea that People will want to know you after you're gone and your consciousness deserves to be preserved. | ||
| There isn't enough space in anybody's kind of, you know, how could you deal with a world where the consciousness of every human being who's ever lived is in there? | ||
| There'd just be too much going on. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| I mean, imagine. | ||
| If you could remember all of your ancestors, you know, how would that affect you if you constantly had the judgment of your great, great, great, great, great, great, great grandparents to deal with as well as your parents or whatever? | ||
| I don't think that would be very good. | ||
| Well, not only that, who's to say that once they do upload your consciousness into some computer that they won't have some infinitely better version of this software and hardware down the line? | ||
| Are they going to transfer you again? | ||
| And who's going to do that at some point in time? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Are we going to be able to take your consciousness and continually upgrade it? | ||
| Are you going to have to sign on to some gold group? | ||
| Like, well, if you sign up to this plan, we upgrade you every two years to the newest, latest, greatest software, and you get a wonderful place in heaven. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| I know. | ||
| And who's to say that we're not going to be doing CRISPR for people's consciousnesses and editing out. | ||
| We'll say, we'll take out your mental illnesses and then eventually we'll take out your irrationality and your bad moods and your antisocial habits and then, you know. | ||
| The point is nobody who develops technology can ever control where it goes. | ||
| And the problem is we're really uncritical about technology because we're so used to science fiction where technology is either really bad or it's wonderful. | ||
| There's never this grey area in between where it sometimes really could be used for real good but has a potentially really dark application if it's used in a society that isn't fair or that has certain ideas about certain individuals. | ||
| And that's the reality in which we live. | ||
| Whereas, you know, at the moment we're stuck between, I don't know, The Terminator and, I don't know, some sunny future, you know. | ||
| Is there ever a sunny future, though? | ||
| I don't know of any science fiction movie where it looks awesome in the future. | ||
| It's always, like, really distraught, dystopian. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah, I can't think of any positive ones at the moment. | |
| I'm sure there are. | ||
|
unidentified
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There must be. | |
| There's quite often in science fiction, there's technology that's being used for incredible good. | ||
| There's just, you know, we've solved that problem or, you know, we no longer, you know, we can grow meat without killing animals and that's all fine and everything's fine and that's sorted. | ||
| It's no longer a debate. | ||
| And even things like, you know, like in Blade Runner, yes, the robots there are bad, but they're also perfect and flawless and don't have any problems with them. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| But yes, most science fiction is dystopian because it's about our inner fears, about how we can't really control anything. | ||
| It also seems like one of the things that people enjoy is we enjoy enduring and recovering and overcoming obstacles. | ||
| And if we get to a point where we've removed that... | ||
| Where will the joy come from? | ||
| There will be more obstacles. | ||
| We'll always invent more obstacles. | ||
| This is the whole thing. | ||
| When you live in a country where there is no longer the threat of nuclear war, starvation, death, there'll be another obstacle with body dysmorphia or whatever. | ||
| We'll invent something else. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, I think that human beings are, we are constantly trying to control everything around us, and we're constantly in fear of the chaos around us, and that's why we use technology to try and give us this illusion of control over the world. | ||
| And there are some things that we really can control, and technology has been great at doing that. | ||
| You know, I'm very grateful for technological advancements in birth control that mean that I haven't been, like, perpetually pregnant for the past 20 years. | ||
| It's a great thing. | ||
| That I can control that part of my body. | ||
| But ultimately, there are many things that we just can't control and that technology doesn't solve problems. | ||
| It just circumvents them. | ||
| It gives us a kind of easy way out of them. | ||
| Instead of forcing us to confront the cause of the problem, it's just like plastering over them. | ||
| And so, yeah, I think a lot of the human condition is this struggle between Wanting to control everything and having to deal with the fact that ultimately we have no control over anything. | ||
| And also implementing our ideas. | ||
| And that's part of the problem, is that people are constantly trying to come up with new, better ways to do things. | ||
| And then we implement these new, better ways to do things, and then we deal with the repercussions and the consequences of these new changes. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Of the way that we've implemented them. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And I've got the perfect example of this, which is when I was in Las Vegas doing part of the reporting, I went and interviewed a man who'd made a sex robot, a very bad sex robot in Las Vegas. | ||
| And then I went back to my hotel and they were playing really, really loud music outside the entrance to the hotel to try and get people to come into the casino. | ||
| And I went up to my room and there was like a dish next to my bed of different kinds of earplugs of like silicon earplugs, foam earplugs, wax earplugs, all these solutions to the problem caused by the management there. | ||
| And they could just turn the music off, but instead they've given you this profusion of solutions. | ||
| Which hotel were you at? | ||
| It was in downtown in LA, not in LA, in Las Vegas. | ||
| I can't remember the name. | ||
| It was a while ago. | ||
| It wasn't even a grimy hotel. | ||
| A good example of this is also with our phones. | ||
| We're all addicted to our phones so we can't sleep properly. | ||
| So people are taking melatonin so that they feel sleepy. | ||
| But you could just put your phone down. | ||
|
unidentified
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Do you know what I mean? | |
| So we've become addicted to different orders of magnitude of technology. | ||
|
unidentified
|
To solve problems caused by technology Do you ever go camping? | |
| I'm not a big camper, but I have been camping, yes, many times. | ||
| The interesting thing about camping is if you do it for enough days, you realize that your brain, when it gets dark out, you start preparing to go to sleep. | ||
| And normally, like 8 o'clock at night, I'm wide awake. | ||
| I'm wide awake for several hours at 8 p.m. | ||
| But when I'm camping, at 8 o'clock, it's like, well, let's eat and crash. | ||
| You sit around the campfire, talk a little bit, and you get ready to go to sleep. | ||
| But that's your natural cycle. | ||
| We've circumvented that with lights. | ||
|
unidentified
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Absolutely. | |
| I mean, if you look at the effect of technology on human beings, it doesn't have to be something as fancy as a perfect sex robot. | ||
| Lights, like artificial lighting has changed human society, human brain chemistry. | ||
| If you look at 150 years ago when everybody went to bed, and it's just simple things that We don't have to go to sleep as soon as it gets dark anymore. | ||
| How much we have changed because of that, it's incredible. | ||
| So that's the other thing, is the things that really have potential for radical change on human society and human behavior and human biology, they don't have to be very fancy and high-tech. | ||
| You don't have to have Elon Musk's Bluetooth brain chip. | ||
| There's one even more insidious aspect for lights, and that's it's disconnected us from the universe. | ||
| One of the things that you realize when you do go camping, when there's no lights is, oh my god, we're in space. | ||
| Like, you see all the stars, and it's extraordinary. | ||
| When you go, like, I went to the Keck Observatory once in Hawaii. | ||
| Well, I've been a few times, but one time I nailed it. | ||
| Where I went, where there was no moon, and the sky was clear, and it was stunning. | ||
| And to this day, I still close my eyes sometimes and try to remember that, remember what it was like, because you could see the whole Milky Way. | ||
| The Keck Observatory is very high on the Big Island, and it's above the clouds. | ||
| And in fact, when we were driving there, it was cloudy, and I was like, damn, this is going to suck. | ||
| We're going to get all the way up there, and we can't see anything because of these clouds. | ||
| But then you pop through the clouds, and then you get to the observatory, and it is Amazing. | ||
| Without looking through a telescope, just the amount of stars that you see, it changes your relationship to life and to this experience that we're having here on Earth. | ||
| We're so delusional. | ||
| When we don't see any stars... | ||
| We have streetlights and we're looking at our phone and we're watching TV. We have this bizarre idea of what life is. | ||
| But then when you're there and there's nothing but the stars in the sky, you go, oh no, this is an organic spaceship. | ||
| We're hurling through space on this ball. | ||
| And I thought this was everything, but it's nothing. | ||
| When you see all those stars, it just, it humbles you in a way that our ancestors were humbled, and why they were so obsessed with the constellations, why they were so obsessed with the zodiac signs, and all the different ways that these would study all the lights in the sky and try to figure out what kind of relationship we had with those lights. | ||
| We've lost all that. | ||
| We've lost the context and the perspective on our existence that we need, really. | ||
| But then again, also, could we really function if we were constantly aware of how I guess it would liberate us from being so obsessed with gazing at our own navels. | ||
| I think it would probably be humbling in a way that would eliminate a lot of unnecessary hubris. | ||
| I think there's a lot of dumb shit that we do that is connected to this sort of dulled perception of our place in the universe. | ||
| And I think if we could see it and it could humble us the way it humbled the Mayans and all these other civilizations that were constantly fixated on the celestial gods and all the different lights in the skies, I think it would be better for us. | ||
| But I think my fear is that all of this is like... | ||
| And again, this is looking at it outside of a human being. | ||
| All of this is leaning us towards this complete, total immersion in technology. | ||
| And one of the best ways to get us to not think about our position in this vast, infinite universe is that we don't see it. | ||
| What's the best way to not see it? | ||
| Technology. | ||
| Blind you. | ||
| Literally blind you to the most spectacular vision the world has ever known. | ||
| The most spectacular vision is the heavens, is the sky, the stars, the Milky Way, all the galaxies that are visible to the naked eye. | ||
| That's what gave people so much wonder and created so many myths of what's going on up there. | ||
| Well, if the best way to eliminate that and have us fixated totally on ourselves and become self-centered is to blind us to it. | ||
| And that's what we've done. | ||
| We've done that with lights. | ||
| But I think it's also all of this is also to do with capitalism and that capitalism depends on us all feeling incomplete and like we need the next big thing in order to be complete so we need this bit of technology will solve this problem or I will be fine I will be happy if I have bought this thing or if I bought into this solution and there's no money to be made saying hey what you really need to do is get a proper night's sleep go and do some exercise but you don't need you don't need anything fancy to do some exercise Eat a little less if you're trying to lose | ||
| weight, but all you need to do is eat a little less. | ||
| There's no money to be made in that way. | ||
| So we are robbed of our context because capitalism depends on us thinking that we can control everything and be a kind of self-determined beings if we just buy the next thing and are always focused on our own project and what we're going to do next to achieve the goal we want. | ||
| There's no money to be made in telling people Everything as it is right now is fine and good and you should just appreciate it. | ||
| We don't do that. | ||
| You're absolutely right. | ||
| But that's what we were talking about earlier when I was saying that I feel like materialism, which is one of the great plagues of humanity, this desire for shiny things that are supposedly going to make us happy, is also fueling technology. | ||
| Because in order to keep up with the human desire for these things, we're constantly creating newer and better things. | ||
| So all of our ridiculous instincts to acquire these things are literally fueling the innovation of technology. | ||
| But again, I would say, I agree with you, but again, I would say we have the power to say, you know, I don't need these earplugs, I'm just going to turn the music down. | ||
| Or, you know, I don't want this sex robot, I'm just going to deal with... | ||
| Ultimately, we have the power of being consumers, and the consumer has the power to not want something. | ||
| And that's where real power lies, in being in control of your desires and not just being led along by someone saying, you need this, you need this. | ||
| You know, having the power to say, I don't think that I do need this, and I'm fine just as I am. | ||
| I agree with you, but I don't think people are going to say that. | ||
| I think they're going to give right in. | ||
| I don't think anybody's moving to a log cabin in the woods either. | ||
| I think you're like one out of a million. | ||
| One out of a million, and we look at those people like they figured it out. | ||
| You don't have to move to a log cabin, though. | ||
| You just need to say, you know, I've got a house that suits my purposes and it's fine. | ||
| And I'm happy with it. | ||
| And my life is good. | ||
| I don't, you know, I don't care if people look at what car I've got and judge me on it. | ||
| Those people aren't worthwhile. | ||
| I mean, I'm not saying that you give up all your possessions and become a hippie. | ||
| I quite like having stuff. | ||
| But I've reached a point in my life where, you know, I've got a job that I love and I have... | ||
| I have two kids, I have a lovely family, and I am very, very aware of feeling like I'm there and I have everything that I want. | ||
| And other possessions, they might be nice, but actually, I feel fulfilled. | ||
| But then when you feel fulfilled, you're aware of how much the world is constantly trying to tell us that you'll only be fulfilled when you've got this or when you've done this. | ||
| But I would submit... | ||
| I would submit that you are a very intelligent, introspective person, and I think that's rare. | ||
| I don't think a lot of people feel very fulfilled. | ||
| See, we have a different view of human nature. | ||
| I think most human beings are really good people who just want to get along. | ||
| Oh, I agree with that. | ||
| I agree with that. | ||
| But what don't you agree with? | ||
| Well, I agree most human beings are really good people that want to get along, but I think they will give in to the siren song of materialism and technology and all these different things because I don't think they're as introspective as you are. | ||
| You're looking at it and you're like, this is perfect. | ||
| I've got this. | ||
| I don't need any more. | ||
| This is fine. | ||
| I realize all the things that are fucking up my life and fucking up society, and I'm not going to give in to that. | ||
| But you're an author. | ||
| You're someone who thinks all the time. | ||
| You literally spend... | ||
| Hours every day thinking. | ||
| We need to encourage critical thinking. | ||
| There isn't really enough of that. | ||
| And at the moment, particularly in the way that we communicate now, which is about people being angry and then other people being angry and then other people enjoying watching the two sides fight. | ||
| The skill of being able to think critically and to enjoy the grey area where both sides are kind of right here. | ||
| I think that we're going to move away from this era because it's I don't think we're going to get more and more polarized because it's only so far that we can all go without all killing each other, basically. | ||
| Yeah, we're pretty far polarized. | ||
| We're pretty far apart, and in the UK as well. | ||
| But eventually, I think, when we are no longer enjoying being spectators or participants in this sort of violent debate, We'll be able to look at the grey area and look at what's valuable in that. | ||
| We need to encourage critical thinking and not taking sides. | ||
| I agree with you 100%. | ||
| This is where it gets ironic because I feel like conversations like this are what help people because what you're saying resonates with people. | ||
| They hear your words and they go, she's right. | ||
| She's right. | ||
| I'm going to adjust. | ||
| I'm going to adjust the way I think. | ||
| But it's technology that's got us to this position in the first place. | ||
| We're more polarized now with more connection than we've ever had before. | ||
| We have more connection with each other than ever before. | ||
| But the problem is that connection is very crude. | ||
| It's very clunky. | ||
| It's the quality of the connection. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| It's through texting and this weird thing we're doing with Twitter and Instagram. | ||
| We're more connected, but we're more connected in a way that we don't feel it. | ||
| And so we're more polarized. | ||
| What really, the big difference now is that, you know, a friend of mine said to me, he's totally right, and it's something that I've discovered over the past five, ten years, that if you want a superpower, the superpower is to listen, to really listen to what people are actually saying, and not what you want them to say, or how you, you know, to really, really properly listen. | ||
| Because people are just not listening to people anymore. | ||
| And I have, you know, in one respect, I write books and I write really long articles. | ||
| And when I do those interviews with people, I interview them for a long time and I transcribe it all myself. | ||
| I don't use a computer or pay anyone else to do it. | ||
| And it's so dull and I hate it. | ||
| But that's where I really understand what people are saying. | ||
| And that's where I get all the ideas for structure. | ||
| And then I have another part of work that I do is I present a radio show, which is completely a different thing where I'm interviewing people for like six or seven minutes and I'm learning the skill of that. | ||
| And part of the skill of, when you're doing really short interviews, You're meant to kind of ask questions that force people into saying things or trap people in a way. | ||
| And the performance is you asking the question rather than you listening to the answer and thinking, okay, what would be an interesting question to ask next? | ||
| And that is much more common. | ||
| I mean, I love my radio show. | ||
| I'm not saying my radio show is like that, but I'm saying I'm learning how to deal with a world where that's what's traditionally done is the style of interviewing is a kind of A dance that you do with people instead of asking a question where you think the answer might be interesting and then really listening to the answer. | ||
| People don't really do that anymore. | ||
| And if they did, you know this more than anyone else, the power of giving people proper time and really, really listening and responding. | ||
| Because in the world that we're living in now, people feel like they don't have time for that. | ||
| 100%. | ||
| I think everything you're saying is why podcasts are so popular today. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| People are hungry for it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Particularly a podcast like this where there's very few people involved. | ||
| It's basically just you and me and my producer Jamie's over here working the controls. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And because of that, we can explore these ideas in long form. | ||
| And what I've learned over the years is to listen and The whole concept of having a conversation with a person, trying to think the way they think. | ||
| Don't try to be right. | ||
| Don't try to get them in a gotcha. | ||
| I don't ever try to do that. | ||
| I just try to figure out what you're thinking, and then I'll present you maybe something that's contrary or controversial. | ||
| I just want to see how you react, and I want to feel the way your brain works. | ||
| I want to let you breathe. | ||
| I want to give you room to explore these ideas and thoughts. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Totally. | |
| When people listen, they're essentially allowing you to think for them in a way. | ||
| You're talking and they're like, oh, Jenny's got some really good points. | ||
| It's working in their brain like, oh, okay. | ||
| You don't get that in a short form. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| And the popularity of your podcast shows that people really want that. | ||
| They want to be able to really explode ideas and hear the different paths that you can take through an idea. | ||
| Whereas most news journalism is about Forcing news lines out of people like getting this politician to say that they fucked up or Getting this celebrity to admit that they did whatever or you know managing to skewer someone into saying something or admitting something and And it's just the it's the opposite of what I do. | ||
| It's the opposite of what you do But most people assume that's what the public wants is these new lines or have you heard this has happened that's happened whereas actually I think People are really hungry to hear properly nuanced debates where different sides of things are weighed up and people are not kind of sparring. | ||
| Yeah, they want to hear people explore ideas. | ||
| That's what they really want to hear. | ||
| And they want to hear people explore ideas honestly, where they're not manipulating people's words or not playing weird games. | ||
| They're just trying to find out how each other views things. | ||
| And I hope there's an appetite for that. | ||
| As somebody who generally does, the articles I write are like 5,000 words. | ||
| They take a long time to write. | ||
| I write books. | ||
| I hope that people are always going to see the value of that because doing that kind of stuff takes time and it takes thought and energy. | ||
| And it's not as disposable as doing this quick interview where you're really clever and you've managed to get someone to say something or admit something that they haven't admitted to anyone else. | ||
| But that's where the real meal is. | ||
| It's been the really long stuff where people are actually listening to each other. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Have you thought about doing a podcast? | |
| I'd love to do a podcast. | ||
| I did like a podcast documentary, a kind of true crime thing, where I kind of did a story as a podcast. | ||
| It was a story about this Dutch fertility doctor who was really successful in the 1980s, and then it transpired recently that the reason why he got such great results is that he was using his own sperm to inseminate all his patients, and there are now like 70 Dutch kids who all look like him who are trying to get justice. | ||
| It's a great story. | ||
| Yeah, I heard about that story. | ||
| That's insane. | ||
| I did that, but then I would love, I mean, a podcast like this where I'm sitting and interviewing people, I think I'd probably enjoy that too. | ||
| You'd be great at it. | ||
| You really should do it. | ||
| You'd be fantastic at it. | ||
| I really think that's, I mean, you're built for it. | ||
| Well, it's quite an endorsement. | ||
| I would love to do it. | ||
| I guess it's all about picking the right people, isn't it? | ||
| I mean, how do you choose who comes on your show? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| It just has to be interesting. | ||
| That's all I do. | ||
| Luckily, there's no one telling me who to have on. | ||
| So I just find people's books interesting, or I find the subject matter interesting, or I'll watch a video interview with them with someone else. | ||
| I go, oh, I like the way they think, and I just want to talk to them. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| That's the only motivation. | ||
| And occasionally, some of them are famous. | ||
| There's some really interesting, famous people. | ||
| But that's it. | ||
| Or maybe an artist that I really enjoy, or whatever it is. | ||
| With an author, I really enjoy their work. | ||
| I just like to talk to people that I'm interested in, and that's my compass. | ||
| Have you ever asked to speak to somebody and it's turned out they're not that interesting? | ||
| Yeah, I've had a few of those. | ||
| I don't need to mention any names. | ||
|
unidentified
|
See, that's the kind of question where I'm trying to get a news line out of you. | |
| I don't want to be mean. | ||
| Yeah, there's some that I thought were going to be interesting and it just turned out to be sad. | ||
| It was depressing. | ||
| But I think you're lucky in that you have a reason to have a podcast, which is that you're a comedian, you do your ultimate fighting thing. | ||
| You have you as a brand. | ||
| And for me, the problem that I've had as a journalist my whole life is that people always say, like, what kind of journalist are you? | ||
| And I'm a journalist who, like, I look at stuff I find interesting, whereas most other journalists, they're like, you know, I'm an environmental journalist, or I write about women's issues, or I'm a political specialist, and I've only ever, I've been able, I'm like you, like, I want to do whatever interests me, but I haven't been given the same opportunities to do it, because I don't have that other thing, which is, I'm a comedian, so you should come along with me, hear what I think, because, you know. | ||
| Yeah, but you're a respected broadcaster. | ||
| People know who you are. | ||
| You're an author, a published author. | ||
| I think if you build it, they will come. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I really think you should do it. | ||
| Okay, well, if you say so, then I've got to. | ||
| Please do it. | ||
| Let's talk about vegan meat. | ||
| I want to talk more about that. | ||
| I've always found the vegan substitutes to be very disgusting and weird. | ||
| Weird because... | ||
| This is a thing that you don't like, right? | ||
| You don't like the fact that people are eating meat. | ||
| So I understand you're trying to indoctrinate people, but look, you don't have to eat meat. | ||
| You could have this fake burger that's actually terrible for you, actually worse for you than real beef, but filled with all these disgusting processed oils that mimic the taste of beef in some strange way. | ||
| So why don't you have that? | ||
| I've always found that to be so weird because I feel like if you do veganism correctly, it's great to have vegetable dishes that taste good, but shouldn't they be fucking vegetables? | ||
| Like, why are you tricking yourself? | ||
| Like, if you're a cannibal and you're like, can we all agree cannibalism is bad? | ||
| Yes, we can. | ||
| Okay, so let's have fake babies that you can eat. | ||
| We would never agree to that, right? | ||
| But yet we'll agree to these fake burgers. | ||
| We all know what a burger is. | ||
| It's ground-up meat. | ||
| So you have a fake burger? | ||
| Why are we doing that? | ||
| Why can't you just eat vegetables? | ||
| Why do we have to play these weird mental gymnastics games? | ||
| The people who make this stuff, so there's two things. | ||
| There's plant-based meat, which is meat substitutes, clever meat substitutes made not from animals. | ||
| And then there's the stuff that I look at a lot in the book, which is meat that is grown from cells that are cloned in a lab, in a medium grown in a lab. | ||
| But with both of them, they all come down to a particular view of human nature. | ||
| Which is that human beings are incapable of change, that human beings should be eating less meat because it's bad for our bodies, it's bad for the planet, enormous contributor to carbon emissions, antibiotic resistance, water pollution, water wastage, land wastage, it's a disaster. | ||
| You know, zoonotic diseases, so diseases that jump from animals into humans like swine flu, bird flu, maybe coronavirus, are linked to animal agriculture. | ||
| So we have to stop eating so much meat. | ||
| But the people who make this stuff think, Human beings are not going to change, so we have to give them what they want. | ||
| We have to give them what they want. | ||
| So we have to make a burger that looks like a burger. | ||
| Because the whole premise behind all of this is that the kind of ethical campaign of animal rights has failed. | ||
| That you can see pictures of animals in abattoirs and yet people still eat meat. | ||
| They shut their eyes when they open their mouth. | ||
| They just don't want to see it. | ||
| They know it's cruel, but they like it because it's tasty. | ||
| And so we've got to give them something that looks the same and tastes the same but isn't the same. | ||
| And that's how the kind of animal rights... | ||
| I think that the campaign will win, not with arguments, not with saying, oh, you should just like vegetables more. | ||
| So it's quite a dim view of human nature, which is, you know, we're never going to win people over with arguments, so we're going to give them something. | ||
| And yeah, maybe very unhealthy. | ||
| I mean, some of the plant-based meats that's being made now is very convincing. | ||
| But it's ultra-processed food. | ||
| Those plant proteins taste and feel like animal proteins. | ||
| You have to ship a lot of elements from around the world and put them together, so it might be responsible for a lot of carbon. | ||
| And actually, I think we just need to eat less meat. | ||
| You know, the argument of meat being bad for you, most of those arguments are epidemiology arguments. | ||
| Meaning you ask people, what do you eat? | ||
| How often do you eat meat? | ||
| And then you find out who's having heart attacks. | ||
| It's not meat being bad for you. | ||
| It's usually that the people that eat meat are eating a lot of other shit too. | ||
| They're usually eating french fries and drinking soda. | ||
| There's a lot of contributing factors to them being unhealthy. | ||
| There are some things you can pull out like colon cancer is really connected to red meat. | ||
| When you're talking about meat being bad for you, that's a big umbrella. | ||
| And yes, obesity is caused by a lot of different things. | ||
| But overconsumption of large quantities of meat is connected to heart disease and cancer. | ||
| But again, it's connected through these epidemiology studies. | ||
| That's the way it's connected. | ||
| There's no one who's shown a study, people who eat grass-fed, grass-finished beef and organic vegetables only. | ||
| Over a period of X years, what are the results? | ||
| Because I guarantee you, they would be healthy humans. | ||
| They look at societies where people don't eat, like where people generally, epidemiological, but when you look at societies where... | ||
| Traditionally, there is not a dairy culture or a beef culture. | ||
| How those societies have changed when it's become fashionable to have dairy in those cultures and what kind of diseases have sprung up because of that. | ||
| I think, I mean, I would need to go and look at the evidence base, but I do think there's quite a well-established link between overconsumption, and I mean overconsumption of meat, so like eating it every day, several times a day. | ||
| I don't think there is. | ||
| I've looked into it pretty deeply. | ||
| The real issue is human beings have eaten meat since we were human beings. | ||
| We've always eaten meat. | ||
| This idea that all of a sudden meat is bad for you. | ||
| Meat is protein and water and amino acids. | ||
| It's not bad for you. | ||
| What's bad for you is food. | ||
| First of all, processed sugar and nasty carbohydrates and those fake burgers, all that shit's terrible for you. | ||
| What's bad for you is hydrogenated vegetable oils and all the sugars and all the... | ||
| Yeah, but I would say what's bad for you is the overconsumption of anything. | ||
| So yeah, human beings have eaten meat since the beginning of time, but you would kill one animal and then live off that one animal for a really, really long time and then maybe go quite a few days without... | ||
| Getting another kill in the same way. | ||
| It's the greediness and the overconsumption of it that's bad for you. | ||
| Well, obesity for sure is bad for you. | ||
| So the overconsumption of anything, meaning too many calories, more than your body's burning off and you get obese. | ||
| Obviously, that's terrible for you. | ||
| But most animals are edible. | ||
| So when human beings were evolving, we ate whatever we could get a hold of. | ||
| Most plants are inedible. | ||
| And when you're running around trying to figure out what you can eat and what you can't eat, the animals that survived are the ones that ate other animals. | ||
| If you just run around... | ||
| Unless you're an animal like a cow that figures out, well, I'm just going to stick to grass because grass seems to work out for me. | ||
| Well, what happens when we feed cows things that aren't grass? | ||
| They get really sick. | ||
| I mean, that's one of the problems with... | ||
| Have you ever watched any of those documentaries on... | ||
| cattle to make them fat and you see oh it's horrific what happens to their stomachs and their bodies and when you see a well marbled piece of meat that people think is delicious that's a dying animal that that animal is dying that's why it's so fat but that's not normal and this juicy steak that's well marbled it's because you've made that thing sick that poor animal's sick and now you're eating a sick animal that's well there's two things i'd say to that i mean One is, yes, the problem is industrial agriculture. | ||
| Producing a factory production line of animals because we are all eating meat so much. | ||
| It is unsustainable. | ||
| The only way to produce it and produce it cheaply enough is to produce it in that way. | ||
| And, you know, it's disgusting. | ||
| I saw some of these farms from the outside as part of my research for it. | ||
| And it's like it's disgusting and awful. | ||
| You know, there's the Harris Ranch that's in between L.A. and San Francisco. | ||
| The nickname is Cowschwitz because it's like a giant concentration camp for cows. | ||
| It's horrific. | ||
| They're all just crammed in there. | ||
| But then I think you also have to be careful talking about it being natural to eat meat on the basis of the fact that as cavemen, that's what we did. | ||
| It is natural, but that doesn't mean to say that that meat, that's a reason why we should continue to... | ||
| I'm talking to you as someone who is still a carnivore. | ||
| I still eat meat now, even though I wrote this book where I set out the argument for why eating meat At the levels that we're doing now is completely unsustainable. | ||
| So I like the way it tastes. | ||
| But the thing is, there's a lot of the way that we live now. | ||
| It was natural for us to be naked and for us to die when we were 30. There was a lot that was natural before that we don't necessarily live with now. | ||
| And the point is, I think a lot of people are very defensive about They're right to continue eating meat because we really like it. | ||
| It's tasty. | ||
| It's part of our culture. | ||
| It's something that we don't want to let go of. | ||
| And that's why people are going to all these great lengths to give us these kind of substitutes because it's such a big part of who we are. | ||
| But it's difficult to make an argument that it's right for us to continue eating meat because it's natural, because it's good for us. | ||
| Because those arguments, I think, don't necessarily stand up. | ||
| But it is okay to say, I want to continue eating meat because I like the taste of it. | ||
| I think the argument that it's right to eat meat is a very tough argument to make when you're talking about factory farming, and I agree with you 100%. | ||
| percent it's disgusting and it it shows the worst aspects of human nature that we have uh conceded that the best way to feed people in mass is to stuff these animals into these disgusting factories and these huge warehouses and and have them live in their own shit like you've seen pigs and cows and chickens and all these animals that are treated this way i don't think that that is the only way to raise animals | ||
| and if you if you talk to people that specialize in regenerative agriculture they can not only can they not have this massive uh carbon emission but they can generate carbon neutral farms and There's a guy named Joel Salatin who runs a farm called Polyface Farms. | ||
| He speaks to people all over the world about this particular style of regenerative farming and about letting these animals live like they would naturally. | ||
| Only eating grass. | ||
| He sets up these enormous chicken coops and they're mobile where these chicken coops, he moves them all throughout the farm so these chickens can go out and free range and then come back in. | ||
| And he loses a tremendous amount of chickens to natural predators like hawks and eagles and things along those lines. | ||
| But his take on things is that it's completely immoral what human beings have done in the name of profit as far as raising animals and that it should have never been done and that is the main argument against animal agriculture is factory farming. | ||
| Yes, but I would say that even though that sounds great and it is great, there is not enough land on planet Earth For all the meat that we're currently eating to be produced that way. | ||
| I don't know if that's true. | ||
| It is true. | ||
| I think we'd need like five other planets. | ||
| For everybody to continue eating meat at the level that we're eating it now, the population of the Earth is going to be... | ||
| 50%, again, what it is now. | ||
| By 2050, there's going to be nine... | ||
| Unless they factory farm? | ||
| Unless they factory farm the way they're farming it right now? | ||
| There is no way that we could meet the demands of all of those people eating meat, particularly if there's going to be nine billion people on the planet by 2050, with the land that we have now. | ||
| So you're talking about an expansion of population, but with the current population that we have right now, is it sustainable to live in a way where they don't have to factory farm? | ||
| I think it is sustainable if we eat less meat. | ||
| That's the thing. | ||
| If we don't eat it twice a day, seven days a week. | ||
| If we eat it twice a week, it's totally sustainable. | ||
| I think this is a complex issue, and I honestly don't think neither you nor I have all the data at our fingertips where we could argue this. | ||
| But I think we'll both agree that... | ||
| First of all, factory farming is fucking disgusting. | ||
| It's horrific. | ||
| I think it's one of the worst things that human beings do in terms of not just our impact on the world itself, but also how we feel about what we do. | ||
| If you know that you're eating something that was tortured most of its life, but you do it anyway just because it's delicious, how could you respect yourself? | ||
| How do you feel about yourself? | ||
| I think it's very bad for us to accept factory farming. | ||
| In America, we have these ag-gag laws that are even more disturbing where, say, if you work in a factory farm and you find the conditions to be horrific and you film it and take photographs of it, you go to jail. | ||
| They'll arrest you. | ||
| They'll lock you up for showing horrific actions that will disgust most of the people that are eating that food, which is really crazy. | ||
| Well, I think, I mean, most people when they eat food, they know kind of theoretically that It is produced generally through a lot of cruelty, but they just push it out of their minds. | ||
| You can't be thinking about that on a daily basis. | ||
| If we're agreeing that most people are good people, they don't want to feel like they're complicit in the torture of animals on a daily basis. | ||
| But that is what's going on at the moment, really. | ||
| And even the ones that live a good life, they still have to be killed for us to eat them. | ||
| Well, they don't live forever if you don't kill them. | ||
| I don't know if you know that. | ||
| It's not like if you don't kill them, they become fairies. | ||
| It's not very nice to be killed. | ||
| No, it's not. | ||
| But if they do it effectively and humanely, it's instantaneous. | ||
| You do that rod to the brain, it really is instantaneous. | ||
| It's a very messy, complicated argument though, right? | ||
| Is it okay for human beings to kill their animals? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And for me, what's interesting is I am on an intellectual level. | ||
| I buy the arguments. | ||
| I totally agree with the arguments for not eating meat. | ||
| I wrote all about all of this. | ||
| And that's why I was a kind of interesting person to go and look into this world of, okay, so if you could grow meat without any animal dying. | ||
| And I ate a chicken nugget that It came from a chicken called Ian who's still alive. | ||
| So I ate a piece of meat from an animal that's still alive. | ||
| So I'm the kind of dream target market of this stuff. | ||
| How vile was it? | ||
| It was really bad. | ||
| It was bad in a way that you don't really expect because it tasted like chicken because it was chicken. | ||
| But it's chicken cells that have been grown in a lab, and they're in a kind of mass, a mushy mass. | ||
| So it wasn't like it didn't have the texture of meat at all. | ||
| It didn't have, you know, fibres in it. | ||
| It wasn't a cut of meat. | ||
| And you know when you eat meat, but the texture's not quite right, or something's not quite right, you have a kind of primal response where your brain is saying, spit this out. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So I had that, but then I had all these PR people looking around me going, it tastes like chicken, doesn't it? | ||
| And I was like, yeah, it tastes like chicken. | ||
| A chicken that has cancer. | ||
| Yeah, a chicken who's been mushed up and stepped on and rolled into a ball. | ||
| So it's not ready yet, but ultimately, these people are thinking they will be able to grow a cut of meat, and they will be able to grow a steak, a beautiful steak. | ||
| But at the moment, it's really, really difficult to do that. | ||
| They can grow the meat. | ||
| I don't think the argument is just a taste argument. | ||
| I think the argument is a health argument because I think there are some in the neighborhood of the high 80% of people that try veganism and quit. | ||
| And a lot of them, I mean, I've had a bunch of them on my podcast that talk about it. | ||
| Miley Cyrus is one. | ||
| Mike Tyson was another. | ||
| They just give up because they don't feel good. | ||
| And immediately upon eating meat, they start feeling better again. | ||
| Some of them become pescatarian. | ||
| Some people don't have problems with fish because they don't have eyelashes and they don't really look like us. | ||
| It's like if you're going to kill something, kill them. | ||
| But the thing is, the moral argument against eating fish is even greater. | ||
|
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Yes, it is. | |
| I was going to get into that. | ||
| Because we're completely overfishing the oceans. | ||
| We're doing genocide in the oceans with a fish. | ||
| And the way we do it is even more horrific. | ||
| It is really horrific. | ||
| And we can't farm fish in the same way. | ||
| We can't do the awful things that we're doing on factory farms with animals. | ||
| We can't really do that with fish because they die. | ||
| Most fish don't really like living in those conditions and they just don't grow properly. | ||
| But yeah, it's terrible. | ||
| But yeah, with... | ||
| The thing about me is it's a very efficient way of getting that nutrition into your body. | ||
| You can get that nutrition in other ways. | ||
| I mean, I'm sounding like a vegan here, aren't I? I'm not a vegan. | ||
| I'm not a vegan at all. | ||
| No, but I know you're right. | ||
| I have friends that are vegan that do it right, and it can be done. | ||
| I just don't think it's optimal. | ||
| I don't believe it's optimal. | ||
| We haven't worked out how to do it yet, but it is possible and it's not like the only way to get adequate nutrition is to have a hamburger or whatever. | ||
| Certainly not a hamburger. | ||
| I think the argument for this vegan meat, the creating meat in a lab is really the future. | ||
| And I think they're going to be able to do it. | ||
| The question is if they're going to be able to do it, as you're saying, where it has the texture of an animal that's been... | ||
| Animals that taste good are animals that are healthy. | ||
| To me, I enjoy grass-fed animals. | ||
| And I enjoy particularly wild game. | ||
| Because wild animals, they live a wild life. | ||
| They taste better. | ||
| There's more chew to it. | ||
| There's more substance to it. | ||
| If they can figure out how to do that in a lab, that's going to be fascinating. | ||
| And that will be a difficult thing to do, because the reason why the texture is different is because those animals exercise. | ||
| You're eating muscle, and you're not going to be exercising those little things in the lab, even if you're growing it. | ||
| So it's a really, really tricky thing to do. | ||
| And the other thing is that food is really an intimate experience. | ||
| Eating is a very intimate experience, and people don't forgive. | ||
| If you eat something that's disgusting, you don't try it again. | ||
| And so the issue with this is whether or not the first products that come onto the market are going to be good. | ||
| And if they're not, you could have some giant bubble. | ||
| And it will be a bubble and there'll be hype cycles and then people will try and do it again. | ||
| Eventually people will get there. | ||
| But the sort of thing that I think would satisfy you and make you feel like this is great, we're really, really far off. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| muscular stimulation to keep active and you develop muscles through that, like that's going to freak people out even more. | ||
| But don't worry, it can't be alive. | ||
| It's never been alive. | ||
| So you've created this thing with like a, you know, that's bolted into this machine where you're shocking it constantly in order to keep the muscle strong and then you eat But it's never had a head. | ||
| It's never going to have a head, so it can't really experience pain. | ||
| It's very interesting because the whole... | ||
| I hadn't thought about this, but you're quite right. | ||
| It's like the whole appeal of this stuff is this is meat, not from animals. | ||
| But if you have to make it behave a little bit like an animal so that it has the right texture, Where does that work in terms of the philosophical approach, the ethics of this? | ||
| If it's not an animal, but it's been moving like an animal, how much is it still de-animalized? | ||
| Yeah, don't you think that's where it's going to go? | ||
| If somebody wants a bone-in ribeye... | ||
| And they're like, hmm, well, there's a way. | ||
| There's a way. | ||
| And they just decide to recreate an artificial cow and clone the whole thing but sans head. | ||
| And then, you know, you will actually have a boned ribeye from an animal that you can ethically eat because it never really had a chance to be alive and just be a cow. | ||
| I think we're much more likely to have a 3D-printed Maybe. | ||
| Bob the beef scientist comes up with some headless animal that tastes way better than those mushy, cloned animals. | ||
| He's like, look, I understand what you're saying. | ||
| We shouldn't kill animals. | ||
| Well, this isn't even an animal. | ||
| This is just a headless cow that's attached to a bunch of wall sockets, and we just charge that fucker up every day, and he's got big, thick, meaty muscles because he's been electrically shocked constantly into contracting and relaxing those muscles. | ||
| I mean, one of the arguments for this meat growing in labs is that an animal is quite an inefficient conveyor of calories because animals, as well as growing flesh, they also flap their wings and they peck and they run around and so they burn the calories they take in. | ||
| And so these scientists have done kind of equations that for every For every one calorie that you eat from beef, it's taken 36 calories. | ||
| The cow has had to ingest 36 calories to produce one calorie of beef. | ||
| So I think the argument that you make the meat and then you get the meat to exercise will kind of undermine that idea of it being more calorie efficient because the meat will be spending calories by moving around. | ||
| Maybe, but if it doesn't have a head. | ||
| LAUGHTER Yeah, it's like, how are we going to sustain this thing? | ||
| I'm sure there's scientists shaking their head at my stupid idea, like, that is not going to work that way. | ||
| It's an interesting philosophical principle, though, because it comes down to the point of what is life? | ||
| What does it take for something to be alive? | ||
| Is it alive if it's moving around, but it doesn't have a brain? | ||
| And that was something also that I looked at, is that we have a very unsophisticated idea of what life is. | ||
| And while we do that, it's quite dangerous that we're tinkering around with it and growing things when we haven't really sat down and thought about what we really mean when we say that something's alive. | ||
| It also is interesting that we've sort of conceded that we're going to continue to overpopulate the planet. | ||
| We're just like, listen, it's hopeless. | ||
| We have 7 billion now. | ||
| We'll have 10 billion in 50 years. | ||
| Let's just deal with this. | ||
| And just, yeah, that's a giant problem. | ||
| I think there's a lot of good ways that we could tackle overpopulation, the really positive things. | ||
| Like, you know, if women have an education, they have far fewer children. | ||
| That's kind of the point of my book, really, is that this is the most ridiculous overshoot engineering. | ||
| Educate women and eat slightly less meat. | ||
| But no, we're not going to do that. | ||
| We're going to go to a lab where we're going to clone. | ||
| You know, it's just ridiculous. | ||
| What does it say about us as human beings that instead of using these solutions that are within our power, we want to have our cake and eat it. | ||
| And I think that technology is going to be able to provide us with that. | ||
| And the thing about the meat grown in labs is it does sound like there's no downside. | ||
| But there are, you know, nobody really knows if it's better for the environment to grow meat in this way. | ||
| There haven't been enough studies on it. | ||
| But let's say even that it is. | ||
| The people who are going to own this technology, at the moment the startups are trying to get investment from Cargill and Tyson and big meat companies that have the infrastructure to distribute meat. | ||
| And those are companies, I mean, you know what happens in those In their meatpacking plants where people have amputations all the time. | ||
| They're not very ethical companies, shall we say. | ||
| And so it's very likely that this industry is going to be taken over by People who don't care about animal rights or human rights very much. | ||
| They just want to make sure that they're in control of the meat market. | ||
| Yeah, they're just going to want profit. | ||
| Yeah, that's going to be the bottom line. | ||
| Yeah, it's a human problem. | ||
| It's like many human problems. | ||
| It's messy and complicated and nuanced. | ||
| There's a lot to it. | ||
| And what if it's bad for you? | ||
| What if this lab-grown meat turns out to be particularly... | ||
| Problematic with our digestive systems. | ||
| Well, they're saying that they can make it good for you. | ||
| They can take out whatever's bad for you. | ||
| They're saying that they can make kosher bacon because it doesn't come from a pig. | ||
| And they can make foie gras without all the ethical problems of force feeding. | ||
| That this is the perfect meat because they can engineer it down to every last cell. | ||
| But again, we don't know what the unintended consequences of any of this stuff is. | ||
| And we only find out through experience, which is the frightening thing. | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious. | ||
| I mean, I wonder if we could do that with fish. | ||
| They're growing fish at the moment. | ||
|
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Are they? | |
| Fake fish? | ||
| Real fish from fish sales. | ||
| There's a company called Finless Foods that is the pioneer in all of that, and they're growing fish at the moment. | ||
| The same way they're growing beef? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Have you tried that? | ||
| No, because the people I interviewed there, they weren't kind of, they were much less full of hype and they're like, no, no, no, it's not ready. | ||
| What we've got yet isn't ready. | ||
| But the thing about fish is it's harder because with meat you can make burgers and sausages where it doesn't really, or nuggets where You don't really need cuts of meat, whereas with fish you really do need cuts of meat, and especially because we're so used to eating sashimi, we know what raw fish is supposed to taste like, so you can't use the smoke and mirrors of cooking it in this butter and adding these herbs or whatever. | ||
| So fish is kind of harder in some ways, but the need for it is even greater, I would say, than for meat. | ||
| Well, it would be nice if they could figure out how to repopulate the ocean. | ||
| That would be wonderful because if you talk to people, particularly if you watch any documentaries on tuna and tuna fishermen in Japan and the way it used to be just 50 years ago and what it is now, it's a radical decrease in the population of the tuna. | ||
| It's really frightening because we've done it in such a short period of time and so efficiently and there's no one hitting the brakes. | ||
| I mean, they're just... | ||
| The only parts of the ocean which are still healthy are either so far away that it wouldn't make any financial sense to go fishing there, or they're in politically contested waters where you'd start a war if you went there. | ||
| We've pretty much taken all the fish out of the ocean that we can do. | ||
| And also, the people who rely on the oceans, the people who live on the coast, are really suffering, and quite often they're the poorest people. | ||
| So it's a total disaster what we've done to the oceans. | ||
| It's another human problem. | ||
| We're weird. | ||
| We're bad. | ||
| It's not so much that we're weird and bad. | ||
| What is bad about human beings, I would say, is our greediness. | ||
| We don't have to be greedy. | ||
| We live in a system that is encouraging us to be greedy all the time and assumes that we are greedy and that we just want more and more and more because that's what's required for the system to carry on working. | ||
| Whereas, in fact, we don't have to be greedy. | ||
| We can say, this is enough. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| People like you. | ||
| Again, introspective, intelligent people who are rare. | ||
| Well, it's not just that. | ||
| I interviewed this guy. | ||
| There is one guy I could find. | ||
| So normally there are people who campaign against all of these technologies. | ||
| And I'm sure I was going to find some crazy animal rights group or some vegan group. | ||
| Because animal rights activists, they can get nasty. | ||
| And certainly in the UK, they've done some very extreme things to fight against... | ||
| You know, animal cruelty as they see it. | ||
| And there's no organised opposition to growing meat in labs, even though there are some animal rights reasons to be worried about it. | ||
| At the moment, a lot of meat that's grown in labs is grown in this stuff called foetal bovine serum, which comes from the hearts of calves that are foetuses When their pregnant mothers are being slaughtered in the abattoir, they put a needle into the heart of the calf and pull this stuff out, and this serum is the medium in which the cells are grown. | ||
| And they're working on finding other ways of growing the cells, but at the moment, that's the best stuff to use. | ||
| So you'd expect there to be some animal rights argument, some fight against these people, but there isn't, because it's seen as the silver bullet that's going to stop people from eating meat. | ||
| But I found one person, this British sociologist, a vegan sociologist, Um, who, uh, is, who says that, you know, actually the answer in all of this is that we have to stop thinking of meat as being, you know, the answer isn't to, to have a sort of techno fix that solves the problem. | ||
| We just have to stop feeding meat to our kids so much and then they won't have such an appetite for it. | ||
| You know, the appetite is learned. | ||
| There are people who've been vegan for a long time who, when they try and eat meat again, they can't digest it or they think it's disgusting or they hate the texture of it. | ||
| Those people are pretty rare. | ||
| You think? | ||
| You think people rush back to it with open arms? | ||
| I think they do. | ||
| I think they smell fat steak cooking. | ||
| Smells amazing. | ||
| My sister's been vegetarian for like 30 years, and if she eats meat by mistake, it's revolting to her in her mouth. | ||
| It just feels kind of... | ||
| Don't you think that's odd? | ||
| Well, as someone who loves meat, I can't empathize with it, but I can understand if you haven't had it for a while, it's like eating a piece of muscle. | ||
| Yeah, delicious muscle. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ha ha ha! | |
| But anyway, he said the answer is to, you know, the way that cultural change happens is it's to do with the world that your children grow up in. | ||
| And we need to just, and I kind of buy that. | ||
| I mean, I think about my son. | ||
| My son is six. | ||
| You know, we had some upstairs neighbours who are in their 70s. | ||
| They're a gay couple. | ||
| They got married. | ||
| This is just completely normal for him. | ||
| And it's normal for me as well, but it's still a little bit because it's not the world that I was born into where that happens all the time. | ||
| I'm still like, oh, wow, congratulations. | ||
| Whereas for my son, it's like, yeah, you know, men marry women, men marry men, women. | ||
| He's native into that world. | ||
| And I think that's how you get social change is by making the next generation native into a world where Where people think differently. | ||
| And I think the way that we're going to save the world, I think vegans will save the world not by doing the plant-based meat or by growing meat in labs, but by getting people not to feed their kids meat. | ||
| That's the answer. | ||
| I don't know about all that. | ||
|
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I don't think it's healthy for children to not eat meat. | |
| But you can get the nutrition you need elsewhere. | ||
| You can. | ||
| It's not bioavailable the same way it is with meat. | ||
| Meat is the most efficient way to get protein, most efficient way to get amino acids. | ||
|
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It is. | |
| It is. | ||
| The best way to get B12. And B12 deficiency is one of the biggest problems with vegans. | ||
| I can't believe I'm here on your podcast making the vegan argument here as somebody who is not even a vegetarian. | ||
| It's possible with some people to do it well but there's also biodiversity in human beings. | ||
| People are very different in what they can and can't consume. | ||
| Obviously some people can't eat certain nuts or they'll die. | ||
| And other people have no problem with it whatsoever. | ||
| We all come from different parts of the world. | ||
| And that's another problem with whether it's even with meat eating. | ||
| Some people, their body just does not agree with eating meat. | ||
| Or other people, I mean, there's some science to, I mean, it's really disputed to what blood type you are. | ||
| And, you know, I happen to be O positive, which is supposed to be really good for meat. | ||
| I eat a lot of meat and I'm very healthy. | ||
| I've never had a problem with it. | ||
| But I know some people that don't like meat. | ||
| It doesn't sit well with them. | ||
| But I know some people that have a real problem with grains. | ||
| And I know some people that have a real problem with certain green leafy vegetables make them sick. | ||
| It sounds crazy. | ||
| But it's just... | ||
| No, but it's true. | ||
| I mean, people are... | ||
| We are diverse. | ||
| And so it is a very efficient way of getting nutrition. | ||
| But you also have to disentangle... | ||
| How much of our desire for meat is cultural rather than biologically necessary? | ||
| When my daughter was one years old, she was a baby. | ||
| My wife was holding her and I was cooking ribs and she's literally pulling away from her mother trying to get a hold of my ribs because they tasted so good. | ||
| She could smell it. | ||
| We have a video of this, of her with this little rib bone and she's like... | ||
| With a little tiny mouth. | ||
| Yeah, but presumably that wasn't the first time she ate meat. | ||
| That was the first time she ate meat. | ||
| That was the first time she ate meat. | ||
| I don't even think she was one. | ||
| She was tiny. | ||
| Like, she wasn't even walking yet. | ||
| It was genetic. | ||
| There was something in her little brain and her senses from smelling it. | ||
| She wanted that meat. | ||
| Maybe it's because it's my kid. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Maybe it's learned. | ||
| No, I think maybe there is something primal about it, but there's also a lot of primal stuff about us that we don't act on. | ||
| I love eating meat. | ||
| I just feel like we need to... | ||
| Not have so much of it. | ||
| I mean, it used to be like a big treat. | ||
| In England, we have, you know, in Britain, we have the Sunday roast, which is this traditional, you know, you would have one kind of big feast on a Sunday of a sort of giant family to get together, and it was an occasion. | ||
| And I think maybe we need to have more of a culture of that, really. | ||
| But the answer is not telling people they should not eat any meat at all, I think, also, because I think that's... | ||
| Have you ever talked to people that are proponents of the carnivore diet? | ||
| I have never spoken to any of them. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You should. | |
| Yes, I have. | ||
| It's fascinating. | ||
| Here's what's fascinating, and it's all anecdotal, of course, but there's a lot of people with autoimmune disorders that have completely cured those autoimmune disorders by eating only meat. | ||
| They literally only eat meat, and they eat nose to tail, meaning they eat organs. | ||
| They eat a lot of organ meat. | ||
| They get most of their vitamins from liver and heart and kidneys, and they eat fatty cuts of meat, and they're basically... | ||
| Semi-ketogenic because if you eat a certain amount of protein, your body develops this. | ||
| There's a process called, I think it's called glucogenesis, where your body converts protein into glucose. | ||
| So it actually keeps you from being ketogenic. | ||
| But it's because you're eating so much protein. | ||
| It makes you smell really bad, doesn't it? | ||
| This kind of stuff makes you smell bad. | ||
| See, that's a vegan talking to you right now. | ||
| Someone's trying to tell you, if you eat the meat, you're going to smell bad. | ||
| Your breath will be bad. | ||
| You know what smells bad? | ||
| Broccoli farts. | ||
| People eat too much broccoli. | ||
| That's bad, too. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| Is this the Jordan Peterson diet? | ||
| Is this the diet that Jordan Peterson is? | ||
| Jordan Peterson is on that diet, but... | ||
| He's not a good poster boy for it. | ||
| Not the best because Jordan has had a lot of problems. | ||
| It was good for his autoimmune disorders, but he's had a few problems publicly recently with benzodiazepine and getting off these antidepressant drugs and anti-anxiety drugs. | ||
| There's some other doctors, though, that are proponents of this. | ||
| And they actually are prescribing it for people with autoimmune disorders, particularly people with arthritis and arthritis issues. | ||
| Because a lot of people find that, particularly with grains, there's a lot of inflammation issues that certain folks have with grains and glutens and all sorts of different things. | ||
| That are really basically fairly new in terms of human evolution of our consumption. | ||
| Like breads and things along those lines. | ||
| Yes, but then again, that goes back to this idea of our insides being kind of, that we're kind of internally cavemen and that we're designed to eat a certain way and be a certain way when we don't have to be that way because we have access to a wide variety of different kinds of, you know. | ||
| Right, but the thing is they're talking about health consequences with this wide variety. | ||
| And when they have an elimination diet, and one of the best elimination diets is this carnivore diet because you're really cutting out everything. | ||
| On the carnivore diet, are people not getting cancers? | ||
| Well, it's not. | ||
| Here's the thing. | ||
| It's not that studied, and there's not that many people doing it. | ||
| And there have been people that have done it for decades. | ||
| But again, all this is anecdotal. | ||
| You would have to study people. | ||
| And I know Harvard is actually in the middle of some long-term carnivore study that they're doing. | ||
| They're trying to find out whether or not there's any real science to any of this stuff. | ||
| Because there are these people that have these autoimmune disorders that are clearing up. | ||
| I did it for a month. | ||
| It was pretty fascinating. | ||
| It was really interesting. | ||
| Why did you stop? | ||
| Well, because I love food. | ||
| I just love food. | ||
| I love pasta, and I love bread, and I love vegetables. | ||
| I love all kinds of food. | ||
| And it's very limiting to only eat meat, but I did it for a whole month. | ||
| I ate nothing but meat for one month. | ||
| I mostly steak and liver and wild game and a lot of animal fat. | ||
| I felt great. | ||
| It's kind of crazy how good I felt. | ||
| Yeah, I lost 12 pounds and I had energy all day long. | ||
| That was what was weird about it was there was no lulls. | ||
| Like my energy stayed at a constant state all day long. | ||
| Very strange. | ||
| You should try it, just for a goof. | ||
| Maybe that's my next book, is investigating the carnivores and seeing if they're alright. | ||
| The weird thing is the complete elimination of brain fog. | ||
| I found that fascinating. | ||
| I did a video afterwards where I showed how much weight that I had lost, because I had gotten kind of fat. | ||
| I had been eating too much. | ||
| I'm a glutton, and if given enough time, I eat so much. | ||
| I eat massive amounts of food. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| I just have always been a glutton. | ||
| And I work out a lot, so I stay pretty lean. | ||
| But sometimes I can go off the rails. | ||
| I'm not even hungry. | ||
| I just keep eating. | ||
| It's really kind of a crazy thing. | ||
| But on the carnivore diet, I did lose a lot of weight. | ||
| But it's very limiting in terms of, like, I enjoy food. | ||
| I like restaurants. | ||
| I enjoy a chef's creation. | ||
| I think it's fascinating when they combine all the different flavors, and I love the art of it. | ||
| I love the art of cooking. | ||
| I think it's an amazing... | ||
| Art form that you enjoy with your face. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| I love food. | ||
| So to me, it was like, I'm not going to do this forever. | ||
| I just can't. | ||
| I enjoy too many different things in terms of flavors. | ||
| And I also respect the culinary art form of cooking. | ||
| To me, it's a different kind of art. | ||
| It's like... | ||
| It's like music or literature or all the other different ways people express themselves. | ||
| But they express themselves through food and I respect that. | ||
| It's exactly it though, which is that food is not just nutrition. | ||
| It's culture. | ||
| There is the culture of how we eat and the ceremony of eating together and appreciating the food and the way that food is displayed. | ||
| And actually, probably the culture is more important than food. | ||
| Well, it's definitely more important than nutrition, otherwise we'd all just be taking pills and not eating. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Well, you wouldn't get the nutrition from pills, though. | ||
| That wouldn't work. | ||
| No, but if you could, people wouldn't. | ||
| And not just because they want the taste in their mouths, but they like... | ||
| The way that it breaks up your day, that you sit down, have a meal, it represents a certain occasion, you know? | ||
| And it's a huge part of what it is to be human, is to eat, and how our meals are assembled, and how, you know, all of that, yeah. | ||
| And that's the point, when things are cultural... | ||
| We can change because we can change our culture. | ||
| Whether or not we want to is up to us. | ||
| That's also one of the more interesting things about food is going to a place and experiencing this new culture and their new food. | ||
| Like going to Thailand and eating authentic Thai food or going to Italy and eating authentic Italian food. | ||
| That is, to me, one of the great ways of experiencing a place. | ||
| The late, great Anthony Bourdain, who was a friend of mine, is the reason why I changed my opinion of food. | ||
| I used to think it tasted good. | ||
| But then I watched his program, and I realized, oh, this is an art form. | ||
| I had a blind side. | ||
| I had a blind spot. | ||
| I didn't look at it as an art form. | ||
| But his... | ||
| passion for cuisine for chefs and for the way that they prepared and sourced the food from these you know these fresh markets and got everything pieced it together and and then presented it I was like oh I was looking at this wrong this is art I didn't think of it that way now I think of it that way that's why I can't be carnivore I just like food too much just it's too important I like wine I like all of it I like all of it together it's like But also, ultimately, a lot of this comes down to what is life for? | ||
| What is your life for? | ||
| I mean, there are these people who are life extensionists who do whatever they can to prolong their life, but you would argue that the way they're living, it's not a life worth extending. | ||
| It's boring! | ||
| You have to make choices in your life about what do you want from life? | ||
| Are you going to do something that's a little bit unhealthy because, you know, we all make choices. | ||
| For me, it's really difficult though. | ||
| I mean, in terms of having written the book, I've had people interview me about it who are vegan who have asked me, how come you're not vegan now? | ||
| How come having written all of this? | ||
| And it's really, really difficult because I try to explain, well, you know, I'm eating less meat and There isn't a moral argument you can make other than I really, really enjoy it, which makes you sound really superficial. | ||
| But I enjoy it, and I have a family that enjoys it, and it would involve a huge disruption in our lives. | ||
| Yeah, it's a weird one, right? | ||
| I think the real argument is health. | ||
| I really do. | ||
| I was vegetarian for six months back when I was fighting. | ||
| I did it to try to make weight, and my performance suffered. | ||
| You could argue that I wasn't doing it correctly, and I'm sure I wasn't. | ||
| Boy, when I started eating meat again, I felt so much better. | ||
| Like, instantaneously I felt better. | ||
| And then it corresponded with... | ||
| To do it well, to live really well on a vegan diet, you have to be very organized. | ||
| I don't think everybody could do that. | ||
| First of all, it has to suit your body. | ||
| You have to be organized, you have to be diligent, and you have to be educated. | ||
| You have to really understand supplementation and do it correctly. | ||
| One last thing I want to talk to you about is death. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Another thing that you cover. | ||
| Please expand on your thoughts about death. | ||
| So I was looking at the perfect death and that we have this kind of dream that you could maybe take a tablet and fall asleep painlessly and peacefully at a time of your choosing. | ||
| But actually that That doesn't really exist. | ||
| Or rather, it does exist. | ||
| There is one substance that you can take that will give you that death. | ||
| And it's a particular substance. | ||
| It's what they used to give prisoners on death row. | ||
| It's what they give animals when they put them to sleep. | ||
| But it's illegal to possess privately almost everywhere in the world. | ||
| And so at the moment, if you want to be in control of your own death, You either have to put yourself at risk of a death that isn't very nice by doing some risky things that might not work out for you and might be horrible for people who find you, or you have to get a doctor to help you die in a place where assisted dying is legal. | ||
| And so I was writing this from the perspective of being in the UK where it's not legal at all. | ||
| And I was looking at there are some doctors that will, for a fee, teach you how to kill yourself in the best possible way. | ||
| Like either how to get hold of these illegal drugs or other ways of killing yourself that are supposedly peaceful and painless. | ||
| What is the drug? | ||
| What is the thing that they used to give people? | ||
| It's called Lembutal. | ||
| It's a barbiturate drug. | ||
| So the company he used to make it is a Danish company called Lundbeck and they stopped providing it to death row facilities I think in 2011 because it became very controversial that they were doing it. | ||
| But it's the same Bob, it's what Marilyn Monroe took when she killed herself. | ||
| But I wouldn't recommend anyone try and get it because at the moment if you try and get it you have to do lots of stuff on the dark web and you might be sent the wrong stuff and nobody wants to be taking the wrong stuff when you've decided you're going to die. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Basically, the investigation that I was doing was looking at, whilst we haven't worked out how to give everyone the right to die, there are people who are stepping into that void and telling people, I can give you control over your own death. | ||
| I can give you the perfect death. | ||
| And I looked at different people who've invented death machines that can supposedly do this. | ||
| But there is a guy at the moment called Philip Nitschke who has developed this 3D printable capsule Which looks like a kind of James Bond vehicle or a kind of, I don't know, a spaceship. | ||
| You get the plans, so you have to be a member of his organisation, you get the plans and then you go and you print out this capsule, you pour liquid nitrogen into the base of it and then you lie inside and you die in about two minutes. | ||
| Yes, so I saw this being displayed. | ||
| I went to Venice to this design show in Venice where it was being unveiled. | ||
| And it was a sort of strangely beautiful thing, but it's a kind of symbol for me of how ridiculous this is. | ||
| If we're talking about overshoot engineering again, all we need to do is give people the right to die. | ||
| We don't need to be able to give people the means to 3D print their own death. | ||
| Because ultimately I think it's probably a good idea if other people are involved and doctors are involved because who's to say that you wouldn't decide to do this if you were drunk or bereaved or might one day decide that you wanted to live. | ||
| And until we've kind of worked out How to frame laws in ways such that vulnerable people aren't exploited or vulnerable people aren't killed using these right to die laws. | ||
| There are going to be people who step into the void and give people who maybe shouldn't necessarily have it a way of killing themselves. | ||
| It's another very human problem in that it's very messy. | ||
| If you have someone who has terminal cancer and they're constantly in pain and they're going to die, why do we have this archaic idea that they have to ride this out to the end? | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Although there's anything noble. | ||
| The language we use a bit about their fight against cancer or them losing their battle. | ||
| I mean, I really think you talk about, you know, if aliens were looking at us, I look at it in terms of people 200 years from now, when they are studying this era in history, what will they look back on and think, God, they were barbaric at that time? | ||
| And I think the two things definitely are drugs and the right to die and the fact that we let people suffer. | ||
| But the people who want this death machine or who are trying to buy Nembutal that I looked at, they aren't terminally ill. | ||
| They're people who are kind of baby boomers who are used to having control in their lives and being In charge of their own destiny who are terrified of things like getting dementia or motor neurone disease and terrified of losing their dignity. | ||
| And so they want to be able to own something in their home or have the plans to something that will mean that they'll still be able to be in control at the end. | ||
| But death is, you know, the point is it's a symptom of the fear that we have of death. | ||
| Rather than an actual solution to that problem. | ||
| I think we also have the fear of people making an error. | ||
| Like people who are experiencing great grief or they're experiencing the depression that comes from the loss of a job or a broken relationship or whatever it is. | ||
| And they would make a hasty decision that they would regret later. | ||
| Well, obviously they can't regret it, but other people in their life are certainly going to regret it. | ||
| But if they just hung in there, if they just hung in there and wrote it out and sought counseling and sought the advice and the love of friends and family, they could get through this and be stronger on the other side and find a new relationship, find a new job, whatever it is, and you don't have to pull the cord. | ||
| But the thing is, who are we to tell people when they can and can't? | ||
| That's where it gets really strange. | ||
| That's what this doctor says. | ||
| This doctor is a libertarian, and he says it's ridiculously paternalistic that doctors should be able to say, I know your mind better than you do. | ||
| I know you better. | ||
| And he says that you could develop an AI that could tell whether or not somebody was of sound mind. | ||
| He personally thinks if you're depressed, you should still be given the advice on how to take your own life. | ||
| It's still your choice. | ||
| It's a choice that you can make rationally if you're depressed. | ||
| If you're mentally ill, that's a different matter. | ||
| But he's saying this is all about taking back control, the individual. | ||
| It's your life, you should be in charge of it. | ||
| But the problem is there are so many stories. | ||
| I mean, I don't know if you've seen that documentary, The Bridge, about people who jump off the golf gate. | ||
| And there's that person there who survived, who talks about that visceral feeling of being in the air and thinking, oh my God, what have I done? | ||
| And the point is you kind of do need human gatekeepers to take you through the decision that you're making. | ||
| And I think the idea that I just think most of the doctors who are in places where the right to die is legal, who are involved in making those decisions, are not people who are reveling in their power, but they are people who are genuinely trying to find out if this is what you really want. | ||
| And I think you kind of do need Those gatekeepers, because it is always a life or death decision. | ||
| It has to be the right decision every time. | ||
| It's a strange thing that we impose our own ideas on whether or not a person can or cannot end their life. | ||
| We say, no, no, no, you have to keep going. | ||
| The law says you must keep going. | ||
| It's very odd, because it's I want them to get better. | ||
| I want people who are feeling depression and want to end their life. | ||
| I don't want them to do it. | ||
| I don't want them to. | ||
| But I also don't think that I should be the person who can tell them whether or not they can or can't. | ||
| But in some countries where the right to die is legal, so for example in the Netherlands, in Holland and in Belgium, you can be given the right to die, you can be helped to die if you're depressed. | ||
| Or if you're a chronic alcoholic who says, I don't think I'm ever going to be able to beat this, it's making me miserable. | ||
| And I think a really large proportion of the number of people who are euthanised in those countries have something like depression. | ||
| So that's not to say that you wouldn't allow people who are depressed to take their own lives. | ||
| It just means you have to have come to a conclusion that there's no reason to think they're ever going to feel better. | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| And if there's ever a case to objectively think that someone might be able to feel better with medication or counselling or a change of circumstances, then there has to be hope for people. | ||
| The alcoholic one is a weird one because have they exhausted all possible alternatives? | ||
| In that case, have they explored psychedelic therapy, which is illegal but massively effective for people that are addicts, particularly Ibogaine. | ||
| Ibogaine is incredibly effective for people that have addictions to opioids, alcohol, even cigarettes, even lifestyle problems, and yet it's completely illegal in this country. | ||
| But there's lots of people trying to, there's lots of entrepreneurs working on it, aren't there, on finding a way of getting it to market? | ||
| Well, they're doing clinics in Mexico. | ||
| I have a friend who owns a clinic in Mexico, and he started this clinic after he went down to Mexico. | ||
| He had lower back pain from an injury that was severe and got hooked on opioids. | ||
| And went to Mexico, went through an Ibogaine clinic and got therapy and then completely snapped. | ||
| He was completely cured of it and realized like, okay, there is an actual real workable alternative. | ||
| To all these different methods of getting off of it, and it's for some reason not available on this patch of dirt. | ||
| I have to drive across a border, this weird fucking wall, and go to this place, and that's where I can do it, but it works. | ||
| So he just started up a clinic in Mexico. | ||
| He started bringing people that he knew had problems with it, and it's not, again, not just opioids, but alcohol, all sorts of behavior problems. | ||
| It's a very ruthlessly introspective experience, apparently. | ||
| I haven't personally rather done it, but I know many people who have and they've said it's been amazingly beneficial. | ||
| I know several people that have kicked pills that way. | ||
| It is incredible, really, that we have, you know, good drugs and bad drugs. | ||
| This is what I mean, like, in 200 years' time. | ||
| The idea that, you know, still in the UK, you know, pretty much everything is banned, and even there are epileptic kids who've had to fight to say that they need, you know, cannabis-based medication. | ||
| It stops their seizures. | ||
| They've had to really, really fight for this in the UK. But it's because of, you know, it's because of the way politics works. | ||
| But it's It's ridiculously short-sighted and the sort of thing that we're going to be really embarrassed about one day, I think, that it was ever like this. | ||
| But yeah, there's amazing stuff going on. | ||
| There's amazing boundaries being crossed if we would just allow ourselves to embrace them. | ||
| I'm a pretty hopeful person, that's the thing, and I really believe that human beings are capable of wonderful things. | ||
| And that's why I feel like The idea of entrepreneurs taking advantage of our anxieties and saying that they can make money by providing us with quick solutions that stop us from looking at why we're afraid or why we're greedy or why we don't want to compromise in relationships, I think it's a real shame. | ||
| I agree with you. | ||
| Jenny, I really enjoyed talking to you. | ||
| I really did. | ||
| And I really hope you do a podcast. | ||
| I think you'd be amazing at it. | ||
| I've got to now, don't I? If you say I've got to do a podcast, then I've got to do a podcast. | ||
| Maybe I will. | ||
| But until then, your book, Sex Robots and Vegan Meat, it's available now everywhere. | ||
| Is there an audiobook and do you read it? | ||
| There is an audiobook and I read it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes, excellent. | |
| I loved doing it. | ||
| So yeah, get the audiobook, get the e-book, get the book. | ||
| It's a good book. | ||
| Thank you very much, Jenny. | ||
| Appreciate you. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| Bye. |
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