Comrade Sanders: Start the Riot! satirizes Obama’s fictionalized bigotry, a White House drone strike on his spokesman, and Ben Rhodes’ "echo chamber" media manipulation. It exposes the NYT’s botched Trump exposé backfire and DNC riots over delegate-rigging, comparing 2016 to 1968 chaos. The host debates brain enhancements, critiques 10 Rillington Place—a chilling film about serial killer John Christie’s chloroform murders—while clashing with his own anti-death-penalty stance. Ends with a warning: moral progress must outpace tech, or society risks losing its humanity entirely. [Automatically generated summary]
It's a banner month for President Barack Obama, as he has now officially become the U.S. president to have been at war longer than any other president in our history.
Obama celebrated the achievement in a meeting with the White House Press Corps, saying, quote, booyah, I knew I could do it.
Winning the Nobel Peace Prize was fun, but let's face it, they just gave it to me for being black, sort of like my Harvard degree.
This is something I did all on my own, and it's going to be a long time before anyone puts this record to bed.
The president took the unusual step of offering White House reporters Dixie cups of champagne, telling them, quote, you know, those crazy conservatives are always talking about how much I love Muslims.
The truth is, I do love them.
They're great for target practice.
There's something about blowing one of those bearded, Muzzy lunatics away that just makes your ghoulies clank.
That's why I keep these wars going.
I just can't get enough of killing Muslims.
Unquote.
White House spokesman Josh Ernest later issued a clarification of the president's remarks in a statement saying, quote, in speaking about the tragic wars in the Middle East earlier today, the president was obviously satirizing the attitudes of his opponents and did not intend his statements to be taken literally.
President Obama later issued a clarification of Ernest's clarification in a statement saying, quote, like hell I was.
I don't have to run for office again, and I'm sick and tired of pandering to all those peace nick girly girls at the New York Times.
Bad enough, I have to kowtow to every Negro with a grudge and all those homos who want to call it marriage when they do whatever unspeakable things they do to one another.
And what about those creeps who want to put on a skirt and make wee wee with the little girls?
How wacko is that stuff?
Unquote.
The White House immediately issued a clarification of Obama's clarification of their clarification, which said, quote, we're sure the president wants to be mindful of his legacy and obviously misspoke in his characterizations of his core constituency.
President Obama responded quickly, clarifying the White House clarification of his clarification of their clarification, saying, quote, screw my legacy and screw you, Mr. Pasty-faced Ernest, you damned uppity white man.
Ernest went before reporters in the White House press room to clarify the president's clarification of his clarification, clarifying Obama, clarifying him, clarifying Obama, telling reporters, quote, if that's the way the president wants it, then let me tell you what I really think.
Neither I nor any other American has ever seen an administration that mingled so much arrogance with so much incompetence.
We've only been at war for eight years because this idiot couldn't find his belly button with both hands and a flashlight.
Obama responded by ordering a drone strike that vaporized Ernest along with much of the press corps, after which he issued a statement saying, quote, booyah, you don't break the presidential war record by accident.
Obama out.
Trigger warning, I'm Andrew Clavin, and this is the Andrew Clavin Show.
Things are getting a little hairy at the White House.
That guy doesn't have to run for office again.
What does he care?
All right, it's mailbag day.
And if you subscribe, you know, you can't be in this mailbag day because you wasted your time.
I found out that they give you the subscription 30 days for free.
So there's no reason.
Yeah, no, there's no reason not to do it.
Subscribe.
And then you can be in our next mailbag.
And it's free for 30 days.
And then I think we come take your soul, right?
Awesome.
I said this yesterday, but I want to thank you again for pre-ordering my memoir, The Great Good Thing, A Secular Jew Comes to Faith in Christ.
I checked it today after I had mentioned it yesterday, and it's now like number one among new Jewish biographies.
So I'm beating out Moses, I think, and Einstein.
It goes right to me.
All right.
This has been a wild week, although you wouldn't know it if you're watching the mainstream media.
Although why you would be watching the mainstream media, I don't know.
But we started out this week talking about how the press had shot its credibility wad talking about covering up for Obama, covering up the Benghazi scandal and the Obamacare collapse and the IRS scandal and the Reverend Wright scandal and the Bill Air scandal.
They'd covered all this stuff up and they threw it away and they kept saying, oh, it's just Fox News is just covering these things, which meant that Fox News was delivering the news.
And so now when they go up against Trump, there's nothing they can do.
And now they are becoming the scandal.
I mean, first of all, we have this guy, Ben Rhodes, who was, what was he, the deputy national security advisor.
He is the deputy national security advisor for Obama.
He gives an interview to the New York Times.
This happened about a week ago.
He gives an interview to the New York Times in which basically he says that they lied to everyone when they were sending out information about the Iran deal.
So this is what he says.
First of all, people love this guy so much that the very stodgy foreign policy magazine, which I think is called Foreign Policy, ran a headline.
I have it up on my computer.
Foreign policy.
It says, this is the headline in Foreign Policy, which is just a policy magazine.
It says a stunning profile of Ben Rhodes, the a-hole, who is the president's foreign policy guru.
And it doesn't, I'm editing that.
It's not what it says.
That's how much everybody loves Ben Rhodes.
So here's a description of the profile from ABC News.
In the profile, Rhodes admitted to creating an echo chamber, quote unquote, an echo chamber, by which the administration hand-picked experts to champion the Iran deal and feed those perspectives to the public via social media and as media sources to reinforce the messaging that was favorable to the administration's position.
I mean, this Iran deal, Trump is right about this Iran deal.
This Iran deal is a disaster.
This Iran deal is going to give nuclear weapons to one of the worst actors on earth.
And it was sold to us.
I was going to prevent them because they're only going to have nuclear power plants.
Yeah, but they're nuclear power plants that actually can take off and land in New York and then explode.
So they're a little different than our nuclear power plants.
All right, so Rhodes goes on in this thing.
He says, we created an echo chamber.
They were saying things that validated what we had given them to say.
Rhodes spoke disparagingly about the media, quipping to the Times that average reporter, that the average reporter that covers the White House is 27 years old and they literally know nothing.
That's a quote.
They're 27 years old and they know nothing.
His assistant, Rhodes assistant Ned Price told the Times there were journalists whom he said could be relied upon to regurgitate White House talking points, calling them force multipliers.
So basically they were saying, you guys are liars and we used you to lie to tell our lies for us.
You guys are covering up for Obama, so we used you in that way.
And what basically was happening was they went and said there's a new moderate regime rising in Iran.
Now first of course in Iran the word moderate means what does that mean?
Like they only rip children's heads off with their teeth instead of cutting them off with swords.
But so moderate doesn't mean anything.
But while it was true that a more moderate regime was rising, they had been negotiating the deal before the regime rose.
So it had nothing to do with what they were doing.
They were ready to give these nukes to the guys who were in there before.
So it was all nothing.
So they sold this to the press.
So now, of course, the GOP is up in arms.
They subpoena Rhodes to come to testify before a congressional committee.
And the president says, well, executive privilege.
He doesn't have to go.
And that, in truth, it's usually accepted that a presidential advisor doesn't have to testify to Congress because we want the president to be able to get advice in secret.
But this is awfully bad theater for the White House.
I mean, this is an awfully bad theater for the press.
The press looks ridiculous.
Okay, so that's one scandal from the press.
And the other, of course, was this one we talked about, this New York Times story, which is still the number one trending story in the New York Times about how Donald Trump treats women in private, in which the New York Times, to their absolute shock, exposed the fact that billionaires like young pretty models and young pretty models like billionaires.
This is like an absolutely stunning development to the New York Times.
When you read into the story, by the way, it shows that Trump was pretty good with women.
He promoted them in his organization, and he occasionally made remarks that men make and all this stuff.
And this, of course, the New York Times throws their apron over their face and they run out of the room because he would say to some, it starts with him saying to some model at a party, put on a bathing suit, and he comes in and parades her around in a bikini.
Like, you know, that's what you do if you're a billionaire.
That's why you become a billionaire so you can do that.
And that's why girls go to billionaires' houses so they can do that.
That's why these things happen.
So all this is explained.
So meanwhile, the authors of this piece get caught out because the girl herself comes out and says, I had a great relationship with him.
We went out, we dated for a couple months.
He was a perfect gentleman.
He was very nice to me.
And they misquote.
She didn't say they misquoted her.
They said they took her out of context.
Now it comes out that one of the reporters, Michael Barbaro, has been tweeting nasty stuff about Trump.
So he's completely exposed as being, you know, prejudice.
So all this stuff, all the scandals, last week they thought, ah, now we've got Trump.
We've got him.
We're going to hit him with all these scandals.
All those scandals are bouncing back.
I mean, I'm beginning to think that Donald Trump is actually a supernatural creature.
These things just bounce off him and go back against the press.
And this is why, this is why people like him.
Meanwhile, now Megan Kelly and Trump have made up.
They had their special interview, which was completely devoid of meaning or news or anything, where they had this very sweet reconciliation.
Here is Megan talking to Donald Trump about the little feud they had after she asked him about the things his first question to him on the first debate was, you have called women all these things bimbo and this and that and ugly and fat and all this.
And he reacted and got angry at her and started to tweet, call her crazy Megan or something and then made that remark about her bleeding from her whatever that caused all this fuss.
So now they're making up on Fox on Fox.
Let's talk about us.
Okay.
We were always friendly.
Right.
Good relationship.
Right?
And then came the August 6th, 2015 debate.
And I asked you a tough question about women using only the words that you had used.
I thought it was a fair question.
Why didn't you?
I thought it was unfair.
I thought, at first, I didn't think it was really a question.
I thought it was more of a statement.
That's the first question that I've ever been asked during a debate, and I've never debated before.
I mean, in my whole life, it's a debate, but I've never actually debated before.
And I'm saying to myself, man, what a question.
And then, of course, then you have Brett doing his thing.
So I'm saying to myself, I got two hours of this.
I don't really blame you because you're doing your thing.
But from my standpoint, I don't have to like it.
Afterward, you said you didn't feel that the moderators had been nice.
But do you think it's the journalists' role to be nice to presidential candidates at a debate?
No, fair.
I don't care if they're nice.
You use the word nice.
Well, okay, uh, no, I don't think so.
I mean, I might have said they weren't nice, but that doesn't mean they have to be nice.
I mean, I've known many.
You know, it's not a cocktail party.
No, no.
I tell you what, in a certain way, what you did might have been a favor because I felt so good about having gotten through.
I said, if I can get through this debate with those questions, you can get through anything.
So finally, they've made up.
So finally, Trump has a supporter at Fox News.
It's like now every reporter there is in his pocket.
Every single person.
But on the one hand, that is Megan Kelly auditioning.
She's got a year left on her contract.
She's obviously blown up.
She's very beautiful.
She's very smart.
She does these very cute interviews where she's also, she manages to be kind of cute, but also manages to hammer the people that she's talking to.
She has said she wants to be the new Barbara Walters and do these ungettable interviews and all this stuff.
So that's her.
They put that not on Fox News, but on Fox Network.
So that's her auditioning for the big job.
And Trump comes off.
You know, the funny thing about Trump is, if you think about it for a minute, he's not a sexist.
He is not a sexist.
He treats women borishly.
He says borish, horrible things about women, but he treats everybody like that.
He's a borish thug.
He's not a sexist.
He's an equal opportunity borish thug.
So like, you know, women, when they say, well, you said this about women, they're asking for special treatment.
They're asking for special treatment.
You get out there and you're out there in the arena.
You want to be a gladiator.
You've got to be a gladiator.
You've got to take on Trump.
He has the right to say anything he wants about you because he says anything he wants about everybody.
So why should he have some special, why should he be a gentleman and treat women any differently than he treats men?
It just seems ridiculous to me.
Like, why single out the way he treats women when he calls men names all the time?
So now this Novata convention thing, last press scandal of the week so far.
This is only the scandals in the press so far.
Yesterday we talked about this Novata convention, right?
The Sanders people were angry that they felt that it was rigged, as they keep saying.
They felt that the system was rigged so that Sanders wasn't getting the delegates that he should get at this convention.
And there was violence.
The people were throwing chairs.
They said there were death threats.
Armed police had to come in and empty out the room.
And there was some evidence that they actually shut down cell service so people couldn't take pictures of it.
Like one woman who was taking pictures of the whole thing, suddenly her phone went dead and she wasn't getting any streaming anymore.
Armed police officers in uniform, pistol packing guys, came out line and cleared the place out.
And so the Hillary, the DNC, which is really the Hillary camp, because they're the machine, they have been charging that the Sanders people basically set this up.
They basically told their people to get mean and get violent.
And they released this video of one of Sanders' operatives, Joan Cato, who had the Cato tape, telling her followers not to leave.
It's not this one.
There it is.
Telling people not to leave the room and don't let them push you around.
Here's Joan Cato.
You should not leave.
I'm going to repeat that.
Unless you were told by somebody from the campaign, i.e. probably me or David, that you can leave, you should not leave.
I don't care if the chair is up there herself or whoever the chair is and whoever becomes the chair, you should not leave.
Okay, now what they didn't show you on CNN, and the guy, that guy, Sink Ugyur or something on the Young Turks, he brought it out.
What they didn't show you is the way this meeting ended was the Sanders people were calling for justice and the chairwoman of the Democratic Party in Nevada got up and took a voice vote of whether they should close the meeting and people were screaming, you know, give me your A's, your I's and give me your nays, and people were screaming no, no, no, and she just ignored him.
that video that they didn't play on CNN.
So that sound that you're hearing.
A couple of people are going, what the?
Because she goes up and she says, all who were in favor say yay.
Nobody says anything.
And all who are against say no.
And people are screaming, no, no, no.
And she says, the eyes have it.
And she brings down the gavel and walks out.
Bernie's Spokesman Pushback00:03:20
And people went nuts.
People went nuts.
They were throwing chairs.
There were fist fights.
They say there were death threats.
And like I said, the cops come in and clear out this is a Democratic convention.
So now, okay, the Sanders people, they're telling the Sanders people, stand down, stop this, you're ruining Hillary's coronation, you know.
And Bernie Sanders sends out his spokesman who says, not so much.
So here's Sanders, and then followed by Debbie Wasserman Schultz, who has just been steadily, she claims she's neutral, but I think she's just basically a Clinton operative, essentially.
So here are the two of them going at it.
We're not condone any kind of violence or threats.
That's unacceptable, bad language.
That's unacceptable.
But we are not going to allow the millions of people who supported Bernie Sanders to be sort of rolled over in places like Nevada by the way they handled that convention.
The Sanders campaign says that the Nevada State Party, the Democratic Party, prevented a fair and transparent process.
Was it unfair?
Well, first of all, let me just reiterate that the Democratic National Committee remains neutral in this primary based on our rules.
But when I heard what happened at the Nevada State Democratic Convention this weekend, I was deeply disturbed.
Regardless of any campaign or candidate's frustration over process, there should never be a but when it comes to condemning violence and intimidation.
Well, yeah, there should never be a but when it comes to condemning violence and intimidation, but it's intimidation too to slam your gavel down and chase people out with guys with guns.
I mean, even though they're the police, they're guys with guns lining a political convention and chasing people out who were treated, they were treated obviously unfairly.
You can see it.
So this is what's going on on the Democrat side, right?
And meanwhile, and everything, all this stuff that was supposed to be on the right, I mean, this is the joke.
All this stuff that was supposed to be the right, we're all supposed to be at each other's throats.
And we are.
You know, we are at each other's throats.
We're having a really hard time adjusting to this whole Trumpian thing.
It's a very difficult thing.
But meanwhile, meanwhile, the press is trying to avoid the fact that the Democratic Party is coming apart at the scenes.
And last night, Bernie won again in Oregon.
And Clinton is saying she won in Kentucky, but she won by like a vote.
I mean, she won by like a guy named Fred in Kentucky.
And they split the delegates.
So she's, you know, and yes, he's so far behind, and she's got the super delegates from the machine so that, you know, he's got to win something like two-thirds of all the delegates, and he's not going to do it.
He's going to lose.
But it is making her look bad.
And the Democrats are now terrified that when the convention comes in Philadelphia, this violence is going to spring up.
Because remember, Donald Trump was threatening riots at the convention, the GOP convention?
That's going to be Rose's May now.
You know, it's going to be like, hello, Donald, welcome to the GOP.
We're so happy to have you.
You're a disgrace, but we love you, and it's going to be fine.
The Democrats are looking at 1968.
They're looking at this thing blowing up in their mind, which, by the way, was followed by a tremendous Democrat loss.
Who can predict anything in this election?
This is the craziest election I have seen in a lifetime.
It really is amazing.
Let us go on to the mailbag.
We need a mailbag music.
Okay, here we go.
Viewing Life Differently00:05:35
I'm only going to read first names because I don't know whether people want their whole name.
From Robbie, Andrew, do you consider your more optimistic view of the future as more realistic than Ben's more depressing views?
Or is it closer to hopeful optimism to just keep your spirits up as things progress?
Okay, excellent question because everybody comments on this.
Everybody says they like to listen to Ben first and then listen to me so they don't kill themselves.
Which I think that's good.
I like that.
I like being medicinal, you know.
It's not a question of realism, though.
I mean, Ben and I talk a lot, and we talk between my show and his show, and we always have conversations.
And we see the world very, very similarly in terms of the facts that we see.
He's to the right of me socially, I would say.
I'm an artist.
I live in the zoo of the arts where everybody's crazy eccentric sleeping with something that they shouldn't be sleeping with.
And so I'm just kind of used to that and I don't really care about it.
It just doesn't keep me awake at night.
But we both see the same facts.
I mean, we never have arguments, really, about what is actually happening or where it's going and what's right and what's wrong.
We're pretty much in agreement about that.
The difference between us is attitudinal, and it's not a question of right or wrong at all.
It's not a question of right or wrong.
It's really a question of how you're born, how you're raised, and just how history, your history, sculpts your attitude.
Ben is an idealist.
I mean, he is an idealist.
He looks at what's not and asks why not.
He looks at what is and says, why isn't it better?
I am a tragedian.
I have a very, very tragic view of life.
And you think like, well, that's kind of a contradiction.
If you have a tragic view of life, why aren't you sad?
Well, it's easy.
You know, if you're an idealist, you wake up and you wonder why things aren't better.
If you're a tragedian, you wake up and think, wow, things are pretty good right now.
I'm still here.
You know, this is good.
My wife's still here, so things are okay.
You know, I really do have a sad view of life.
I believe that everything that is mortal dies, including countries, including civilizations, including freedom, which is a thing built by men.
Freedom is not natural to man.
It's something that we build with energy, and entropy eventually destroys it.
I believe that all your joy comes from love, and all your love has to be paid for in grief.
And so that's a sad point of view.
I do have this mitigating faith in God, but that's not what we're talking about.
What we're talking about is that I wake up and I'm really glad that things are going well today.
I think that's a great thing.
So what you're really asking is which one of us is going to be right?
Is Ben right and things are going to go horribly wrong?
Or am I right and they're going to be okay?
And the answer is yes, both of us, because ultimately, everywhere, there will be a disaster.
Ultimately, everything will end.
You will die.
Everything will die.
Everything will fall.
So ultimately, Ben will be right.
Today, things are pretty good.
I'm right.
So I think that, you know, and it's a question of whether, you know, what you bring to life.
And, you know, Ben is a happy guy.
I mean, he's not an unhappy guy.
He just looks at things from the perspective of how they should be, and I look at things from the perspective of how they might be, even worse.
I think that really, really is the difference between us.
All right.
James, how did you find the courage to publicly express yourself?
Was there a defining moment for you?
I've tried to talk to my left-wing friends here in Los Angeles about my conservative views, but I quite enjoy having all four of my limbs and both of my eyes.
Well, I live in Los Angeles, so I know exactly what you're talking about.
You know, partly I developed, I became the way I am living under a delusion.
Probably the biggest disappointment of my life was realizing that people don't really care about the truth, that they don't want to know the truth.
I grew up thinking that people wanted to know the truth, so I always spoke the truth boldly.
Even when it would get me thrown out of class, and it often did get me thrown out of class, even when it would put me at odds with my teachers, I would always speak the truth boldly because I thought the truth was what people wanted.
And when I realized, no, in fact, that they didn't want anything else, I was very, it saddened me.
It really did.
I mean, I seriously think it.
It was a central disappointment of my life, but by then, it was too late.
That was who I was, and that was how I formed.
And it matters to me.
The truth matters to me immensely.
That doesn't mean I always know the truth.
It always means that I'm trying to find it.
It doesn't mean I'm always as truthful as I wish I were.
It just means I'm trying to find the truth and trying to speak it.
You know, Ernest Hemingway had a great line about this.
He said, cowardice is a lack of ability to suspend your imagination.
And I think that is absolutely true.
I get letters all the time saying, well, if you say this, the left is just going to say that.
And if I say this, you know, my teacher's going to do that.
And if I, you know, you don't know what's going to happen.
People may be bowled over.
You know, there's never a reason to be cruel.
There's never a reason to be bigoted.
There's never a reason to be unkind.
But to simply speak what's true, you know, you don't know what's going to happen.
So suspend your imagination and find the courage because a life lived in silence is, I don't know, that's not much of a worthwhile life.
A life lived hiding, a life lived in fear.
It's just not really going to make you happy.
That's just the way I feel about it.
So that is my long-winded answer, but I think that is an answer, right?
Now here's one that's a little confusing.
From Chris, I just got a three-word question.
Favorite YouTube video, question mark?
And I didn't know whether what he meant was my favorite of all YouTube videos or the favorite of my YouTube videos.
Like, I'm not sure which that meant.
So I'm going to give you both of them.
You know, I have a couple of favorites of my own YouTube videos.
One of them I did for PJTV, Claven on the Culture, was a young person's guide to the Constitution.
And if you think I sometimes crack up when I'm doing these openings, it must have taken us about three hours to record this.
Shia Labeouf's Future Predictions00:04:51
I'm not even going to play the part that kept making me laugh, but here's just a snippet of a young person's guide to the Constitution.
The Constitution is a document written on crinkly brown paper by assorted men wearing wigs.
These crinkly brown wigmen were the descendants of other assorted crinkly people who were so desperate to escape from Europe, they crossed the ocean in rickety, unsafe vessels, lacking even the barest creature comforts.
Although the smarter ones avoided commercial airlines and just came over on ships.
The new American crinklies were tired of living under European systems of government that allowed a small group of elites to lord it over ordinary people, instituting poorly conceived programs paid for by taxing the productive while they themselves sat around drinking their venty, half-calf cinnamon, mocha frappuccinos, and passing off their opinions as facts in the New York Times of Europe.
It goes on.
I've just always been very fond of that one.
Maybe because it made me laugh so hard.
One of my, obviously I don't have one favorite YouTube video any more than I have one favorite movie or book, but one of my favorite YouTube videos was shown to me by Jeremy Boring, who runs the Daily Wire, the God King of the Daily Wire.
And it's a guy, Rob Portman, his name is, who organized the gay men's choir, I think, to do this thing called absolute actual cannibal Shia LaBeouf.
Here's the opening one minute of this.
You're walking in the woods.
There's no one around and your phone is dead.
Out of the corner of your eye, you spot him.
Shia LaBeouf.
He's following you about 30 feet back.
He gets down on all fours and breaks into a sprint.
He's gaining on you.
Shia LaBeouf.
You're looking for your car, but you're all turned around.
He's almost upon you now and you can see there's blood on his face.
My God, there's blood everywhere.
Running for your life from Shia LaBeouf.
He's practicing a knife in Shia Labuff.
Lurking in the shadows, Hollywood superstar, Shia LaBeouf, living in the bus, Shia LaBeouf, Killing for sports, Shia Labu, eating all the bodies, actual cannibals, Shia LaBeouf!
That thing, it's genius.
I mean, it really is genius.
And if you can't see it, if you haven't subscribed yet and you can't see it, they're doing like this absolutely beautiful interpretive ballet of the cannibal Shia LaBeouf.
And by the time he's over, they're in these fabulous costumes and all this stuff.
And the funny thing about it is when I first seen it, I must have watched this thing over a hundred times.
I mean, I keep watching it and I go back to it over time.
And as you start to think about it, at first you think it's just completely ridiculous.
But like everything that affects you and grabs you, it actually does have meaning underneath.
And it really is about celebrity.
I mean, it's about what celebrity has done to our culture.
And I just find it really brilliant.
The guy, Rob Portman, he's a composer, I guess.
He does a couple of, he's done a couple of musical things.
All right, we have time for one more.
Do you believe transgenderism will ever catch on?
For example, the homosexual movement for legitimacy made big waves in America for the past 10 years or so, and now it's much more of a normal thing, much more so than when I was born in 1990.
Do you think transgenderism could catch on like that?
And my answer to that is absolutely.
Because, you know, things are going to get so much weirder.
This is one of the reasons I don't worry about this too much.
You know, this week, I think, they did the first ever penis transplant, which means that pretty soon, you know, when you want to be transgender, you'll be able to be transgender.
You know, I mean, and nobody that I know has an objection, by the way, when we're talking about bathrooms, nobody I know has an objection to somebody actually having a sex change operation.
It may not make you happy.
You may kill yourself afterwards, but I don't object to your doing it and then using the bathroom that goes with your new body.
But things are going to get absolutely stunningly weird.
There's going to be robot sex.
There's going to be people actually changing their gender in other ways.
eventually, possibly within the lifetime of somebody born in 1990, eventually there's going to be, you know, stuff that they do to your brain that may change the way you think.
You may actually be able to become more of a, things are going nuts, pal, you know?
So it's like.
So relax.
And the argument that we're going to have to make is the argument for being human, which is going to be a harder and harder argument to make as people start inserting things into their brains that make them faster and smarter and better at things.
And you want your kids to be able to catch up, so you're not going to stop your kids from doing it.
There's going to be a lot of crazy stuff happening, which is why I don't think we can be looking backward.
I think we have to be looking forward and forming a morality, a true morality, for new technological times.
Wait a little Ben hears that, he'll really be depressed.
All right, stuff I like.
John Christie's Tea Drinkin' Morality Play00:03:10
Another good mailbag, I thought.
That was okay.
Yeah, yeah, all right.
Good.
So keep the questions coming.
Stuff I like, I've been doing grim but fascinating true crime stories, and this one is a movie called 10 Rillington Place.
It's about John Christie, the famous British serial killer.
He killed, I think, eight women in the 40s and 50s in England.
And I don't want to give too much away, but the case had an enormous effect on the attitudes toward capital punishment in Britain, which has now obviously been got thrown away.
And they were talking about bringing it back.
And Richard Attenborough, who stars in this, is a young man.
John Hurt is in it as a young man.
You know John Hurt from the Harry Potter stories probably.
But John Hurt is a great actor as a young guy.
He plays one of the characters in this.
And they wanted to, they were talking about bringing back capital punishment and they wanted to make this movie as a protest against it.
Now, I'm actually in favor of capital punishment.
However, this movie is just absolutely brilliant because what it does is it takes this murderer and it just shows him to be what they call in England a little Englander, a guy who drinks tea, a guy who has, you know, and he gives medical advice.
He's not a doctor, but he gives medical advice to people, and under that guise, he gasses them and kills them, you know, and does all this stuff.
And it's all done with this quiet, understated way.
This is colorized.
I may be wrong, but I remember this movie as being in stunning black and white.
I think this is a colorized version, but it's the only one I could find.
Here's a brief scene where he gives a woman tea and, under the guise of treating her bronchitis, gets her to breathe chloroform.
Well, now it's been bad, has it?
The bronchitis.
At night.
It's been bad at night.
Keeps you awake, I dare say.
Well, this is the stuff for you, Muriel.
You don't mind if I call you Muriel, do you?
No.
No.
It's very good of you to go to all this trouble.
Oh, not at all.
All my doctor does is keep giving me this cough mixture.
Well, not many of them know about this stuff.
Oh, it smells just like Friars Balsam.
Well, yes, that's in it.
It's a mixture, what we call a compound.
Let's see.
Now, here's the little mask that goes over your face.
Have you finished with your tea?
Yes, thank you.
Fine.
And when it's over your face, you must breathe deeply so you take in all the vapors, you see.
You may feel just a bit dizzy.
Yeah, you may.
And, you know, it's like, it's all that quiet, understated little have a cup of tea, would you like it?
And it's absolutely horrifying.
And it's a true story.
And the things that happened are the things that happened in it are beggar belief, but it's just a gripping, gripping film with two spectacular performances at the center: Richard Attenborough is a young guy, and John Hurt.
All right.
Well, who knows what's going to happen tomorrow?
I don't know, but we will be here to explain it all and to laugh uproariously about it.