In this episode, we talk about the Omicron outbreak in Australia, and whether or not the vaccine is good enough to protect against this new strain of the virus. We also talk about why we should be worried about colds, and why we don't need to be worried at all. We're back on track with our regular programming, and we'll be back next week with a brand new episode of the podcast! Subscribe to Seeds to get immediate access to all new episodes, and stay up to date with what's going on in the world of Seeds! Subscribe today using our podcast s promo code POWER10 for 10% off your first pack! Want to sponsor Seeds? Become a supporter of Seeds here: bit.ly/support-support-saxoncoastcoast and receive a 10% discount when you sign up! We'll be giving out $10 or more in the form of a 5-piece Spring Cleaning Set that includes shipping, handling, and packaging, plus shipping and handling, plus free shipping throughout the rest of the year. We hope you'll join us on all of our socials, so we can spread the word about the amazing work we do for you! If you're a podcaster and want to support the podcast, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts, we'll see you in the comments below! Thanks for listening and reviewing the pod! - Matt, Josh, Matt, and Sarah :) Sarah, Sarah, Caitie, and Matt, Cheers, Sarah and Sarah, . Caitie & Sarah, Rachel, Sarah Josh, Rachel, and Rachel, - Sarah, and your support the pod, and her amazing work, and all of your support is so much love, love, and so much support is appreciated. - Rachel, thank you so much, Sarah's work, love you, and thanks for all your support and support is much more than you can do, so much so please spread the love, please spread love, good vibes, and support us, and you're so much more! , Sarah, thanks you're amazing, so thank you, so please send us out! Thank you, Sarah & Sarah xx - your support will be so much. Sarah & Rachel, Rachel and Sarah xx - Sarah and Rachel , Rachel, thanks so much! Sarah and her love, Sarah.
00:00:35.000Well, we're embracing it wholeheartedly.
00:00:39.000We can talk about all the numbers and stuff, but this whole theory that Australia has become a prison colony and there were definite excesses over the past couple of years in the way that some Australian states dealt with it.
00:00:52.000But since the 1st of November, when the biggest state, New South Wales, where Sydney is, where I'm from, basically was like, Alright, we're open.
00:01:00.000We're letting people come in from abroad.
00:01:01.000We're not going to have quarantine anymore.
00:01:03.000You're allowed to do whatever you want.
00:01:05.000We're not going to have any restrictions and stuff.
00:01:07.000I was looking at the numbers this morning just before I came here.
00:01:12.000There were like 1,200 new cases a day in November, and now there are between 60,000 to 100,000 cases a day in a state of...
00:01:21.0008 million people, so it's about- 100,000 cases a day.
00:01:24.000Yeah, so it's about the equivalent of, if I adjusted it for the US population, it's about 800,000 to 1.3 million a day in the US, which is about, I think, what it is.
00:02:03.000It's not the same, but it would still be a very different situation if no one in Australia was vaccinated than if 95% of them were vaccinated.
00:02:08.000If it's an escape variant, which is what some biologists believe, then no, because it doesn't have the protection.
00:02:15.000The vaccine doesn't provide the protection from this particular variant.
00:02:35.000The way the epidemiologist put it is, like, if it's half as bad, but ten times as many people get it, then you've still got five times as many people in hospital.
00:02:46.000It depends on what you're talking about.
00:02:49.000If you're talking about people with massive comorbidities, yeah.
00:03:13.000This is not even like the original version.
00:03:16.000Even the vast majority of people who got Delta didn't die from it and weren't hospitalized from it.
00:03:20.000I mean, it's all a numbers game, isn't it?
00:03:21.000Yes, it is, but it's a rougher disease.
00:03:24.000It's quite a much rougher experience for people that got the Delta.
00:03:29.000I mean, the problem is, you don't need something to be very deadly.
00:03:32.000If 330 million people all get it, then...
00:03:35.000I want to know if this is true because I was reading this paper where they were saying that the vaccine is not protecting people from Omicron.
00:05:42.000I honestly feel so warm towards you, and it's so nice to be with you.
00:05:48.000I did this show six times when you were in LA, between 2014 and probably 2017, so I was living in New York and working on HuffPost Live, and went to Australia, had twins.
00:06:00.000Nightmare of like babies and work and then the pandemic hits and like, you know, kind of a good time to not be able to leave the country because how much fun travel can you do when you've got two screaming babies next to you anyway?
00:06:12.000But as soon as the borders opened and the state government was like, you're not going to have to spend two weeks in a quarantine hotel when you come back into the country anymore, we left.
00:06:22.000What is the state in Australia that has the most ridiculous rules?
00:06:51.000I'll backtrack and I can give some context to this in a sec, but just to finish my thought about jumping across borders.
00:06:56.000I was in Europe and I sent my partner Sean and our kids to his parents in New England to see the grandparents because the grandparents haven't seen them in two years.
00:07:43.000And then Omicron just starts coming, and I've spent the past four weeks, I feel like Indiana Jones with a burning bridge, and I'm running And the bridge is just falling apart.
00:07:53.000It's like the borders are clanging close behind me.
00:08:21.000Yeah, you can't get on the plane to even come here.
00:08:22.000One day before is kind of funny, though, because you could easily be positive and get on that plane.
00:08:26.000Well, true, but I mean, it's also a pain in the ass, because it used to be three days before, and then Biden was like, we've got to really crack down on this and make it one day before.
00:08:57.000The kids haven't had Christmas with their grandparents for three years.
00:09:01.000And I get to this little hotel in Milan the night before I need to do the test and fly out to Australia and And the guy at reception is like, oh no!
00:10:35.000I mean, the weird thing about Australia has been...
00:10:39.000What people don't understand when they think, what the hell is going on in Australia, when they look at those videos of people being locked up in detention centres for two weeks just for being a close contact or something.
00:10:49.000And this is not to say that there hasn't been some overreach.
00:10:52.000There has, especially since it's sort of a state-by-state thing in Australia.
00:10:56.000So, you know, there are some states that...
00:10:58.000Have gone really hard, and other states have been a bit more loosey-goosey about it.
00:11:02.000And the borders of the states have been closed.
00:11:04.000You haven't been able to go for long periods of time when there's been a big outbreak in Sydney or a big outbreak in Melbourne.
00:11:10.000All the neighbouring states just go, putting up a police blockade, and that's it.
00:11:55.000No masks, no school closures, no social distancing.
00:11:58.000Up until recently, all this is changing a bit with Omicron.
00:12:01.000And so they've been like, well, why would we let it in?
00:12:04.000Why would we have all of the disruptions to our lives that the rest of the world has had to endure if we can just go to the beach and go out to restaurants and live normally?
00:12:12.000And they've had an attitude, and that was the attitude of the whole country up until...
00:12:42.000And to be frank, because Australia managed to eliminate coronavirus in March, April 2020, essentially eliminate community spread of it, there's a whole bunch of fat, old and sick people in Australia who, to be blunt,
00:12:58.000would be dead in America and are, or the UK or Italy, Because those are the people who were kind of lost in the first cull in New York and Northern Italy and London and places like that.
00:13:10.000So it's been like a managed kind of reopening.
00:13:12.000Well, Australia is a very different kind of country, right?
00:13:17.000We have to lay that out for people to understand.
00:13:19.000It's as large as a contiguous United States, but it has less people than California.
00:13:25.000You have less people than Los Angeles.
00:13:52.000Oh, you mean in normal times or in COVID? COVID times.
00:13:55.000COVID times, I mean, everything is screwy everywhere, isn't it, with the supply chain stuff, and it's hard to get things around.
00:14:03.000I mean, I kind of feel like if you could give...
00:14:10.000It's like the rest of the world had the luxury of not being able to control coronavirus, and it's almost like a survivor's curse, or like a victor's curse, where the countries that have been able to successfully keep it out...
00:14:26.000So, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong, New Zealand, Australia are broadly like the basket of countries that have taken what you might call a zero COVID approach, where for the first year or year and a half of the pandemic, they were like, we're going to have massive contact tracing of everybody who tests positive,
00:14:45.000we're going to close the border and make sure that the virus doesn't come in, and we're going to stamp out every instance of community transmission, because once it runs away, then you can't get control over it anymore.
00:14:57.000And we'll willingly bring it in when we're ready to do so, instead of allowing it to just come in and go.
00:15:06.000New Zealand and Western Australia are jurisdictions where Like, if you've never had it, and you've got no experience of it, what politician would have the guts to go, all right, my little cloistered population of people who've never been exposed to this pathogen,
00:15:24.000let's just bring it in voluntarily and manage how we do that.
00:15:27.000That's the conundrum that they face, and that's the conundrum that New South Wales, my state in Australia, on November 1st was just like, well, okay, now or never.
00:15:34.000We're as vast as we're going to be, we're as prepared as we're ever going to be, we understand the treatments now, we're not going to go through what New York and Northern Italy did, What is it like over there in terms of the recognition and the discussion of vaccine injuries?
00:15:57.000I've been thinking about this, like, and what is suppression and what is just the sort of habit of the media elite to find certain sources credible and certain sources non-credible.
00:16:28.000Well, yeah, people aren't dropping dead from the vaccine in those 5 billion double doses.
00:16:33.000But that doesn't mean that there aren't side effects.
00:16:35.000And so, I mean, I've tried to do a good job of not- Some people are dropping dead, right?
00:16:41.000Yeah, just not as many as you would if you infected all those people with COVID. Well, it depends on who the people are.
00:16:46.000Like, if you're talking about the young soccer players that are dropping dead, I don't think they would have died from COVID. So, I mean, I think the – well, again, it's a numbers game, isn't it?
00:16:55.000I mean, you only need a one in – even if there's only a one in 100,000 chance or a one in a million chance that someone with a particular risk profile is going to die of COVID. Right.
00:17:54.000I don't think it's true that there's an increased risk of myocarditis from people catching COVID that are young versus increased risk of myocarditis from the vaccine.
00:19:20.000I was looking at when they were vaccinating me as well.
00:19:22.000I was like, now I'm just getting nervous.
00:19:24.000No, I mean, look, there's a risk profile to everything, and as a broadcaster, because I work for the public broadcaster there, so I'm like sort of the...
00:19:32.000I suppose the big bad media elite, like lamestream media person, who other people might criticize as being part of a group of people who haven't necessarily covered themselves in glory in being as open as you might want them to be about all of the...
00:19:51.000Well, yeah, I think people have a chip on their shoulder about the way that the mainstream media has dealt with issues of...
00:19:57.000But to generalise mainstream media as one...
00:20:02.000There are a lot of people like me who work in the mainstream media, and so many of my colleagues at the ABC, who are genuinely committed to the truth and to trying to...
00:20:13.000And I will absolutely – I know that there's no long-term gain in trying to cover things up or trying to bullshit people.
00:20:23.000Well, especially a person like yourself that has had a career initially from the internet.
00:20:38.000And when you have very strong opinions and you work for a gigantic corporation, those very strong opinions could harm advertiser revenue or fuck with some narrative that you can get.
00:21:03.000Who is that one lady who is, she's like some health minister over there, is like saying, everyone's just going to have to get used to taking vaccines.
00:21:10.000We're going to have to get used to boosters, used to COVID vaccines.
00:21:52.000Because if you give people an enormous amount of power to control whether people come and go, whether they can work or not, what schools they can go to, what stores they can shop in, they exert that power.
00:22:04.000The kind of people that run for office enjoy power.
00:23:27.000From the VAERS reports, when they report this stuff, it's like the amount of people that report, the under-reporting, depending upon who you ask and what it is, it's either 1%, like Harvard did a study on the VAERS report about vaccine injuries.
00:23:45.000And I think they were talking at the time about the HPV vaccine.
00:23:51.000And they said it was 1% of the adverse events were reported by the VAERS system.
00:23:56.000And I know people that have tried to report things in the VAERS system.
00:24:04.000I don't trust American epidemiological data very much, but the fact that it's a global pandemic and that there are lots of wonky geniuses in Germany and South Korea and stuff doing a lot of this research as well, I think that in general I sort of trust the consensus of most of the people who are smarter than me about it.
00:24:21.000That's the data that I've heard about it.
00:24:37.000He thinks that Omicron being so mild that it's essentially going to give people immunity.
00:24:42.000It's going to go through the population.
00:24:44.000And it doesn't come with it a lot of the issues that the other COVID variants have come with, like the lack of smell and lack of taste, even though a lot of people are testing positive for both at the same time.
00:24:58.000Yeah, my friend, his buddy is vaxxed and boosted the whole, he's in his 30s too.
00:25:03.000He's been in the hospital for two weeks.
00:25:05.000I don't want you to get away with saying that it's too mild, though, because I just spent New Year's up in Vermont with a nurse who works in North Carolina, I think, and she was like, I've seen this movie run before,
00:25:36.000It does cause a huge amount of complications.
00:25:39.000It's not the same as it was in the past, but when you give...
00:25:44.000A whole bunch of people who haven't previously gotten it, or even if they have, but it's a while ago, a new respiratory illness, like, shit happens, you know?
00:25:52.000Yeah, and by the way, there's not, when people are getting tested, they're not telling you whether it's Omicron or Delta.
00:26:01.000And Delta is still, I think, isn't the Delta still the prevalent strain in America?
00:26:08.000I think they believe, and again, this is not based on super accurate 100% testing.
00:26:14.000I think they think that Delta's still, I think it's like 60%.
00:26:19.000Yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if it's neck and neck, since there was a lot of Delta here anyway, so you're going to have a lot of endemic infection from people who have Delta.
00:26:27.000But because Omicron is so infectious, it's crowding out all the Delta, at least in Australia and a lot of countries.
00:27:40.000The weird thing is, in all this whole, like, you know, Australia has become an authoritarian fascist dictatorship kind of rhetoric that I've seen pouring out of the States.
00:28:43.000We had kind of brutalising overreaches of some state police enacting local laws.
00:28:48.000I interviewed this woman on my radio show in December.
00:28:54.000So in South Australia, which is one of the states, they were continuing to insist that if you are a close contact of a...
00:29:01.000I don't think they do this anymore, but they were continuing to insist that if you're a close contact of someone who has COVID, then you have to isolate for a week, right?
00:29:09.000And if you can't isolate for a week by yourself, then they might just force you to go into one of these quarantine hotels that were initially set up for people coming in from abroad.
00:29:18.000That was a whole part of the system, like people coming in from abroad, two weeks in a hotel, or you might have seen images of these concentration camps in Australia, like these dum-dums like Tim Pool will go like, it's a concentration camp, when there's this large facility which was originally just sort of bungalows for workers who worked in the mining industry or something that got repurposed into...
00:29:39.000You realize that they have to stay on the porch and they can't go anywhere.
00:30:19.000You think he's a flight risk or something?
00:30:21.000I mean, it's like, you know, rules everywhere are silly once you start trying to enforce them and trying to What do you guys do in terms of early treatment if someone catches COVID over there?
00:30:31.000Not a lot yet, but I wish we were doing more.
00:30:37.000Because as a person who wasn't vaccinated and got early treatment and got over COVID very quickly, I was like, this narrative that the only way to beat COVID is to be vaccinated is nonsense.
00:30:52.000I think the idea of getting everybody vaccinated is a way of avoiding what you were alluding to earlier, which is like, can't we just protect the really vulnerable people?
00:31:20.000I mean, they have like, you know, one or two cases in managed quarantine facilities, like one might escape, and then they go and crash tackle a guy and put him in a hotel.
00:31:29.000There was some awful reports about them taking the Aborigines and forcing them against their will to go hundreds of kilometers to some other places.
00:31:42.000So what happened was there are these communities out in Catherine, which is this really remote part of the Northern Territory.
00:31:48.000If people think of the Northern Territory...
00:31:50.000Think like Crocodile Dundee, like really, really, really, really seriously remote.
00:31:56.000Like you just mentioned that Australia is the same size as the contiguous United States and has the population of, you know, not even the population of California.
00:32:04.000So everyone's huddled on essentially that 80% of the population lives on the East Coast and then a bit on the West Coast and then you've got Tasmania and everything in between is like...
00:32:14.000You can fly over it for four hours, and it's just red desert with nothing there.
00:32:19.000And there are indigenous communities who live out there, and they'll often live – there'll be 50 people who all live in the same sort of area.
00:32:29.000There are grandparents sleeping with kids.
00:32:31.000It's not a situation in which anyone can realistically isolate.
00:33:47.000Well, there was a woman and then there was like a bloke with some other Indigenous-looking people around him with like a flag behind them who were all like saying this went viral.
00:33:56.000I think Marjit Noah's retweeted it in the UK. And he was like, you know, Amnesty needs to look into this.
00:34:04.000They're crash-tackling us and vaccinating us on the ground.
00:34:33.000So, this guy is one of those guys who, he believes that Australia is actually owned by the Vatican, and that therefore all police officers are employees who don't have to be obeyed.
00:35:16.000He's in Australia, so maybe he's got it upside down.
00:35:18.000And he thinks that vaccines are bioweapons and that the COVID swabs that you take are carcinogenic intentionally and all this sort of stuff.
00:35:25.000They're not carcinogenic intentionally, but I did read that there is an element in the swabs that if it was in large doses could be carcinogenic.
00:37:07.000We are supportive of the Northern Territory government isolating people in this way at Howard Springs.
00:37:14.000Now, we can have a whole conversation about whether or not It's appropriate for, like, what do you do with the, like, three teenagers, three indigenous teenagers broke out of Howard Springs, which isn't hard.
00:37:24.000You just sort of walk out and climb a small fence.
00:37:27.000And you might say, wasn't that an infringement of their human rights?
00:38:12.000And one of the things, I wanted to compliment all of the indigenous people for, because of all the horrific bad shit that's, it's not even a thing of the past, and it's just more subtle and institutionalized now, but the indigenous people here as a whole have been so...
00:39:00.000The money thing, and it's not even real.
00:39:02.000So, you know, there's this whole alt-right ecosystem of Americans who are suddenly very exercised about Australians' rights, who, as you can hear, like, go over and are like, oh, what's going on?
00:39:10.000He's like, oh, it's all part of the new world order and all this sort of stuff.
00:39:18.000But he's not a representative of the Indigenous communities there.
00:39:21.000The Indigenous communities themselves are, like, working hand-in-hand with the Northern Territory government.
00:39:26.000It's to some extent, I suppose, an infringement of an individual's human rights if you're incarcerating them essentially for two weeks because they're a close contact of a COVID case.
00:39:37.000The alternative is that that individual infects the entire community against the wishes of the community and against the wishes of the community leader when they're hundreds of miles from...
00:40:11.000Not every single human being does, but if you're looking at it as a public health thing, a short-term public health thing to get through an emergency when the virus is just spreading in a very, very vulnerable community, then those community leaders have agreed to that.
00:40:29.000And for me, my concern is what I've been agitating for and what's made it a lot harder is the conversation here in the States from people like Tim Pool and people like that who is sort of like...
00:40:41.000If you had a buddy who you thought was a bit too strict with their kid or something, you just sort of wanted to change his behaviour in a certain way, and you were like, I think I can do this.
00:40:52.000I think I know how to talk to this person.
00:40:54.000I think the best solution is a collaboration with them.
00:40:56.000And then another buddy of yours goes, no, you have to say that your buddy is a child abuser, and until you admit that he's a child abuser, I'm not even going to have a conversation about this because your buddy is a child abuser.
00:41:42.000You're using that pejorative to dismiss what they're saying.
00:41:45.000They might get really into these conspiracies and you look at it on paper without the whole breadth of knowledge from the community and you find out that these people are being relocated and you do see those, whatever you want to call them, camps, communities where the people have to stay on their porch.
00:42:04.000It's concerning to someone who lives in America.
00:42:06.000You would understand how you would think of Australia as being this wild, free place.
00:42:11.000And then you see that and you go, oh my god, they're reverting back to the way they were.
00:42:15.000The difference is that there are some people, and I sort of give Marjorie a pass on this because I know him well enough to sort of think that he must just be sort of...
00:42:23.000Not doing enough fact-checking, but there are some other people, like Tim, who I feel like I and people like Claire Lehman at Quillette, who's the editor of Quillette, have done a lot of work pointing out the facts, and then it doesn't go anywhere.
00:42:36.000It's like, unless you call them concentration camps and accept that Australia is on a path to become a fascist authoritarian dictatorship, there's nothing to even talk about.
00:42:45.000I don't think he's having conversations with anybody who's actually in Australia, unfortunately.
00:42:48.000Well, I've invited him on my podcast and he doesn't come on.
00:42:51.000He and I have exchanged terse words on Twitter where I'm like, mate, you're not helping.
00:42:55.000And he's like, it's a concentration camp!
00:42:56.000That's just so that you don't admit it!
00:43:03.000Before I forget this, this is what the myocarditis thing was that I was confusing to.
00:43:08.000Peter McCullough, Dr. Peter McCullough was saying that there's instances that they're recognizing as myocarditis that are very different with the virus versus with the vaccine.
00:43:20.000And that the instances of the vaccine because they thought initially that the spike protein was going to be limited to the injection site but yet it's going to various tissue in the body including the heart and causing a completely different kind of inflammation.
00:44:02.000I mean, the point of all this, I suppose, is that at a population level, when you're talking about public health, I mean, I think the goal for me and the goal for a lot of people is like, can we just get some semblance of normal life?
00:44:20.000That's nice if we could do that without fucking people up.
00:44:25.000Yeah, I mean, and it's like, you know, I can fully understand the attitude of people in Western Australia or New Zealand who are like, well, I mean, we've kept it out and we've been living essentially normal lives.
00:44:36.000I think part of the whole thing about Australia is also that we've been out of sync with where America's and the rest of the world has been at because...
00:45:32.000You don't think that is concerning when you see that kind of shit where people get arrested and thrown to the ground because they don't have a mask on?
00:45:40.000Yes, I would think that's very concerning.
00:45:43.000Some of those videos that you see are also like, when you actually ask the cops about it, they were like, actually, we were arresting somebody for, like, that was a person being arrested for a crime.
00:45:51.000But no, there's videos where the guy says, is all this because I don't have a mask?
00:48:52.000Look, if you've got a respiratory virus that attaches itself to aerosol particles, to liquid particles, then it makes sense to me that anything that can trap the little bits of liquid that I'm spitting out onto this microphone right now is probably going to reduce the chance that I'm going to give it to you.
00:49:08.000Well, I guess if you're talking about spit flying through the air, but I don't think that happens a lot.
00:49:13.000I think the real issue is the actual virus particles itself are so small.
00:49:45.000Like the particles of Omicron, the particles of COVID, are so much smaller than the particles of vape.
00:49:52.000That's one of the reasons why it's so contagious.
00:49:54.000I know many, many people who are religious with masks and they've got COVID. Sure.
00:49:58.000But I mean, it's all a dosage thing, isn't it?
00:50:00.000I mean, at some point, I'm sure that over the past month, I've been bumping into a lot of people who have COVID, right?
00:50:05.000I've walked past them, they've served me in restaurants, whatever.
00:50:09.000I've been in places where infection rates are extremely high.
00:50:11.000And for whatever reason, the particular dose that entered my system, when you match that with my immune system, was not able to get a handle on me.
00:50:21.000Look at you, you're all thin, spry looking.
00:50:58.000In fact, he probably feels a little bit quietly judged by the fact that I've lost weight now, because now he's like, oh man, he's started taking up tennis lessons.
00:51:06.000He's like, oh man, I've got to get fit now as well.
00:51:30.000I mean, you're breathing out of the sides of those things, man.
00:51:32.000I just don't know what the fuck those things actually stop.
00:51:36.000I mean, I think you could probably make some kind of an argument that less of it could get on you, but if you're in a position where someone's breathing near you and they're wearing a mask, I think you're getting a fucking full load in the face.
00:52:54.000It's sort of like climate science or something, like...
00:52:56.000Like, if a lot of people who really know about this say that a mask is going to reduce the number of microscopic water particles that are coming out of my face that have COVID attached to it, then I'll probably just wear a mask.
00:53:25.000He goes, the particles of COVID are so fucking small that if they're in the air in a room, he goes, it's one of the best things about outdoor transmission.
00:53:36.000Well, that's the other thing about here.
00:53:38.000A buddy of mine who lives in California, he was standing six feet away from a woman who was picking up her kid at the daycare where he was waiting to pick his kid up, and he's not masked.
00:54:11.000I mean, I think if we just cleaved off all of the left-wing assholes and all of the right-wing assholes, then the rest of us would probably just find a sensible accommodation.
00:54:19.000Like, if I'm on a plane, if I'm in an airport, I'm going to wear a mask anyway because I think it's courteous because I don't know if there are people around.
00:54:24.000I don't know if I'm carrying the virus, and I don't know if there are people around who are immune-suppressed or who are super fat or super unhealthy who it might do damage to.
00:54:33.000It's not a huge—it's no skin off my nose, really.
00:54:36.000But if I'm outside, I'm not going to put it on at the playground with my kids.
00:54:39.000I'm not going to put it on when I'm jogging along the beach.
00:54:43.000I think it's one of those things where there's normal, natural human patterns of behavior dependent upon all the various factors that are in the community.
00:54:53.000And I think if you're in a community that's enlightened...
00:54:57.000That has a lightened attitude and they're more relaxed, you're going to get more people that sort of adopt that.
00:55:03.000And if there's more tense people, then you're going to get more people that are on the edge.
00:55:07.000And when you get these polar opposite viewpoints, like QAnon versus BlueAnon.
00:55:44.000I don't know how they work in Australia, but the fact that sitting members of Congress have information about deals that are going to affect positively or negatively these companies and trade...
00:56:46.000How the fuck do you guys all know what to buy?
00:56:49.000It's all the circles they swim in, man.
00:56:51.000This is part of what motivated Trump and it's part of what motivated Obama before him.
00:56:55.000This keenness among the electorate to just give us someone who's not in that group of people, of lobbyists and insiders and people who go to the same golf courses and go to the same parties.
00:57:11.000And I think this is also part of what's made the pandemic really difficult, is this erosion of faith in institutions, in the news media, and it's not unjustifiable, in political systems, in bureaucracies and stuff like that, leaves everybody just spinning around like you've just had your head walloped in a Warner Brothers cartoon,
00:57:30.000you've got little Tweety Birds floating around your head going, what am I supposed to grab onto here?
00:58:35.000Why does anyone want to be a politician in the first place, especially when you're as old as Joe Biden?
00:58:41.000I mean, no offense against old people, you can do whatever you want, but seriously, there are other more interesting things to do with your life.
00:58:48.000I don't think he has other things to do.
00:58:50.000I mean, I think his whole life has been about this weird sort of game of influence and power, but now he's out of it.
00:59:00.000He's so out of it that it's like there's a real justification for impeachment, I think, that if the Republicans take power, And they have this ability to highlight all the areas where he seems to be...
00:59:13.000What would you impeach him for, though?
00:59:24.000When they were talking about that with Trump, I was like, man, you open this door, it's just going to be every single president from now on is either going to get impeached or withdrawn under the 25th Amendment.
00:59:33.000Every party is just going to be like, all right, you're out.
00:59:35.000Well, clearly, the difference between the way Trump...
00:59:38.000I mean, you could make arguments that anybody over 70 is probably compromised, right?
00:59:42.000But the difference between the way Trump is compromised and Biden is pretty stark in comparison.
01:00:01.000I mean, it depends whether or not you find, like, sort of bumbling incompetence better or worse than intentional, like, corruption.
01:00:10.000Well, it's not better or worse, in my eyes.
01:00:13.000It's definitely not good to have intentional corruption, but I don't know if he's immune from accusations of intentional corruption.
01:00:21.000He doesn't own a hotel that he gets foreign heads of state and their delegations to all stay in so that he can make a personal profit out of it when they're on government business.
01:00:28.000But he does have a son that he sent overseas, and his son made a lot of money for no reason whatsoever, and his son wrote down that the big guy gets a cut, and then they had a story about his laptop, and there was an active move to suppress it.
01:00:44.000It comes back to the media thing, and the trust in media thing.
01:00:48.000That's where it gets really scary, because they're cutting off the access to independent media.
01:00:53.000Exactly, but didn't the post publish it and then Twitter banned the article from being shared on Facebook or something?
01:00:59.000Yeah, you couldn't even share it in a DM. Unbelievable.
01:01:01.000I mean, that's, to me, the whole new thing to be afraid of.
01:01:06.000Like, I... I'm sad that we've lost so much faith in conventional media because I do think that there are – like, anyone who's worked in a newsroom, in a formal newsroom, in a big old legacy institutional media outlet like the New York Times or the New Yorker or the Atlantic or the BBC or something like that – It knows that you bring in a story,
01:01:27.000an editor will be on your back about how can you verify it, how many sources do you have.
01:01:34.000Sometimes you need to have three sources, you certainly need to have two sources.
01:01:37.000This doesn't mean that there isn't a subtle ideological capture where these institutions are all looking at things from the same perspective.
01:01:46.000You only have to look at the New York Times over the past few years to be like, every time I open it up, I'm like...
01:02:02.000I'm sure it's a very worthy point to make, but can we occasionally have something that isn't just from your one hobby horse of everything has to be filtered through an identity lens at the moment?
01:02:12.000But I think that's different from some of the new media outlets, which are just...
01:02:18.000Intentionally kind of coming at things with a particular angle.
01:02:29.000And then, you know, whatever viral video of something going crazy in Australia happens to get attention, they provide more and more and more of that.
01:02:37.000You're sensitive to this criticism of the authoritarian state that you live in that has supported you coming over to America to spread your propaganda.
01:03:16.000She's her and her husband, and they've got like a five-year-old kid and like a three-month-old.
01:03:21.000And she decides to fly to Adelaide, the capital of South Australia, to see her family.
01:03:26.000So they fly in, they get off the plane, she gets a text message from the South Australian Health Department saying, actually, one person on your plane just tested positive, so you need to isolate for a week.
01:03:39.000And she calls them and she goes, well, can I just leave the state?
01:03:42.000And they're like, yeah, that's all right, according to her.
01:03:45.000So she books the next flight out from Adelaide to go back to Melbourne, gets to the airport, they start boarding the flight, and some armed police officers come up to her and her family and kids, and they're like, are you so-and-so?
01:04:48.000I think you should apologize to Tim Pool right now because you clearly live in a concentration camp.
01:04:52.000Dear Tim, I live in a concentration camp and I'm a government stooge, an apologist for the inevitable Australian authoritarianism that you were so prescient in predicting.
01:05:01.000You should have done his podcast while you were in the country.
01:06:55.000He was saying that with Americans, it's like if you're landing a beach, if you imagine D-Day or Normandy or something like that, and you're trying to make friends with someone, then with Americans, it's super, super easy.
01:07:07.000The boat comes up on this beautiful shore, and Americans are all warm and welcoming, and you walk, and you walk, and you walk with them, and you walk, and you walk, and you walk, and you walk.
01:07:15.000And you walk and you walk and you never quite get behind the niceness, he felt.
01:07:21.000But with Brits and with Aussies, it's like coming in a tempestuous sea and you crash into these rocks.
01:07:28.000It's quite hard, especially with Brits, more than Aussies.
01:07:30.000You crash into the rocks and there's a huge cliff face and you have to claw your way up to get into their good graces and you've got blood coming out from under your fingernails.
01:07:38.000But then you emerge on top and there's this huge vista, this vast expanse of friendship.
01:07:43.000That's his analogy between the difference between Oh, interesting.
01:08:00.000That's interesting to see it from a perspective of someone coming from the UK. I have a good buddy of mine who grew up in England, and he's been over here, I think, for about 10 years.
01:08:09.000And the big factor for him, he said, is that in England, people kind of want you to fail.
01:09:30.000I think there'd be a lot of sort of, well, yeah, no, I mean, you know, so-and-so did try that a few years ago, and that didn't really work, so, you know, here are the impediments, here are the reasons why it might not work, here are all the impediments, here are the things that you should be thinking about.
01:09:44.000Like, it's just much more, we don't really do that sort of thing here, so maybe, and I think that's true in the UK as well, like...
01:09:51.000It's just, it's harder to get people excited about stuff, because Americans still have this kind of, almost like, naive little, oh shucks, this is great!
01:10:53.000Everyone thinks of themselves as that.
01:10:55.000Yeah, everyone thinks, my ship's just going to come in.
01:10:57.000Well, that's one of the weird things where people who are rich, who are politicians, who really kind of enact laws that suppress...
01:11:09.000In some ways, the ability for a lot of people to escape from middle class and do better.
01:11:16.000But meanwhile, those people celebrate these people and celebrate even the ethics that these people espouse because they think somehow or another one day they're going to make it and they want those protections.
01:11:28.000They want to save money on taxes and become rich.
01:11:32.000They almost have this attitude like eventually I'm going to be in a position where this is important.
01:11:38.000I mean, I've been thinking a lot about, like, the culture wars and...
01:12:58.000Like the distractibility of social media, of like the constant sort of dopamine hit of like, ooh, I got another mention, I got another thing.
01:13:06.000That like, while I was just traveling, it was so nice.
01:13:09.000I intentionally didn't get a data plan on my, sorry, data.
01:15:07.000Really putting out the call saying, this stuff not only is bad for you in terms of constantly forcing your brain to expect novelty and innovation and to train you to essentially judge yourself in comparison to other people,
01:15:22.000to judge your output on the basis of how many likes and comments and shares you get, to sort of derange the way that you interact with other human beings, to make you less capable of having Yeah.
01:15:58.000It's like been doubling every three years, basically, since Facebook was introduced.
01:16:03.000Well, it's really from the introduction of the smartphone.
01:16:05.000It's really from 2007. It's the coddling of the American mind, if people haven't read it.
01:16:39.000I mean, he just thinks that the social media companies have to be forced to at least Not let kids on.
01:16:47.000At the very least it should be like cigarettes and booze where they make a genuine attempt to keep people under the age of 16 or 18. It's interesting because there are some things that for those kids are...
01:17:06.000It celebrates academic achievements, athletic achievements, it's all science projects, all these different fascinating things, and they lock it out at 10 p.m.
01:17:50.000The difference is interesting, because I don't think we should engineer the way our society interacts with each other.
01:17:56.000But if you look at the way China's doing it, like, they're doing it clearly with this idea that they want to stimulate young minds, and they want to promote this idea that doing things that you are, you know, like, you're going to become more accomplished, you're going to become more athletic, these are what they're trying to encourage.
01:18:14.000I'm a little bit reticent about holing anything up that the Chinese Communist Party does as being a great idea.
01:18:22.000And if we're worried about things like the New York Post article about Joe Biden's son's laptop being suppressed by Twitter, just wait till you get along.
01:18:29.000And all of the people who are being suppressed on Twitter.
01:18:48.000Like, I mean, the other thing that Haidt says is maybe you try to force them to make the algorithms, like, not constantly addictive.
01:18:53.000I mean, I think what people don't necessarily always think about when you're using these platforms is that they're not blank open spaces into which your friends and the people you're following are commenting and then it's just kind of, you know, filtering down in a neutral way.
01:19:08.000Rejigged at the back end to maximize the time that you're spending on the site.
01:19:11.000All the algorithm wants to do is to keep you there for one second longer so that they can maximize the time that you're spending on the platform.
01:19:19.000John Hite's like, could you change that algorithm so that it's more fulfilling stuff instead of more addictive stuff?
01:19:24.000And I'm like, I don't know how you would legislate that.
01:19:26.000I don't know how you would make them do that.
01:20:02.000Well, that's probably good, but if there was no algorithm whatsoever...
01:20:07.000You know, the argument would be that, well, there's probably a lot of things that you would be introduced to that you would enjoy that you're going to miss if there's no algorithm at all.
01:20:17.000I mean, isn't that the way that I wander through life normally?
01:20:19.000Like there's all kinds of stuff that's out there that I miss because it's not being constantly shoved into my face.
01:20:23.000Like I don't necessarily need the most addictive food at all times.
01:20:26.000I can also just sometimes have a salad.
01:20:29.000Right, but the business model for them, they're concerned with the most engagement.
01:20:34.000And the best way to get the most engagement is find out what Josh Zeps likes and then show it to them over and over and over again.
01:20:40.000I mean, as you say, once AR, and whenever you talk about haptic feedback suits and stuff like that, my mind just goes to once porn gets mastered in that world, there's going to be a large percentage of the population that's just in the basement.
01:20:53.000Well, there's a woman, I talk about her in my act, there's a woman from 1970 who was allergic to pain medication, and they rigged this system where they drilled holes in her head and put wires into her brain and gave her an electrical device,
01:21:12.000and when she felt discomfort, she could hit a button.
01:21:14.000And the button would send a charge into her brain.
01:21:41.000I'll read you what they wrote about her because it's so crazy that you wonder how long before something like that is in a phone or how long before some ability to do something.
01:23:01.000So this is possible with humans, and it's not far off.
01:23:05.000Once they start doing things like Neuralink, and they start tapping into the receptors of the mind, or neurons, or...
01:23:12.000Just the stimulation aspect of the human body, like whatever they can do externally or internally, once there's a device that allows you to achieve a sensation that's unachievable without it, we're going to have a real fucking problem because people can't stop looking at their Instagram likes.
01:23:46.000Well, I think it'll happen the same way phones happen, where it's too late by the time we realize, and then it'll be so addictive, and then it'll also be so profitable.
01:23:55.000Because, like, with these algorithms, like what Jonathan Haidt is saying is very logical, that there really should be some sort of regulation on these algorithms.
01:24:03.000And this is also with Tristan Harris and The Social Dilemma, which is an amazing documentary that really sounds off the alarm on these things.
01:24:12.000These are minor in comparison to something that can actually change the physiological state of your fucking brain.
01:24:51.000And yet that's still illegal because there's, again, a kind of puritanical objection to the whole enterprise of trying to screw around with how your brain works.
01:25:00.000So my question is, why isn't Instagram sort of included in that?
01:25:05.000In fact, throughout the pandemic, like you mentioned, I lost weight.
01:25:07.000Well, I gained weight, then I lost weight.
01:25:09.000Let me tell you, that has an impact on your mood.
01:25:12.000That's a tiny orgasmatron in your head when you've just worked out.
01:25:15.000There are all kinds of things that we can do in our lives which moderate our moods, which impact on the way that our consciousness is perceiving the world and so on.
01:25:22.000But the difference is you losing that weight is a real effort.
01:25:54.000If they really do develop a Facebook coin, if they trick regulators into allowing them to have a crypto coin, we've got a real fucking problem on our hands.
01:26:03.000Because then Facebook becomes essentially a nation.
01:26:06.000They're going to have a coin that people are going to use if it becomes a predominant crypto coin.
01:26:11.000If it becomes a really big deal that people buy and exchange goods and then maybe even homes and cars and things like that with crypto that's from Facebook.
01:26:21.000And then Facebook, they have currency.
01:26:24.000And so not only do they generate untold billions of dollars a year, like how much money does Facebook make a year?
01:26:31.000Let's just guess, because I don't know.
01:26:33.000How much do you think Facebook makes a year?
01:28:12.000Who's, like, many of them, whose job it is to play...
01:28:17.000Like, crypto video games with, like, rich Western – well, richer Western teenagers who, like, exchange – the playing of the game generates some of the coins.
01:28:26.000So, like, Axie Infinity and these kinds of virtual games.
01:31:35.000So at the moment, just think about the fact that we're at the precipice at the beginning of the second decade, the third decade of the 21st century or whatever, at the beginning of this whole evolution.
01:31:45.000It's almost like being at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, but it's a technological revolution.
01:31:49.000And all of these little things are popping up.
01:32:14.000Gets his eyes set on, oh, okay, well, hang on.
01:32:16.000If that kind of money is being spent on this tiny little nothing game, how do I fold that into the metaverse, provide goods and services in my virtual territory that enable people to get some kind of perceived value from them?
01:32:30.000And then all of a sudden you're actually trading, conversing, living, aspiring, acquiring in this virtual world.
01:32:41.000And every time you're buying something, someone's getting a cut Right?
01:32:45.000And Facebook's issuing the currency potentially.
01:32:47.000So they probably get a little percentage of each transaction, no matter what.
01:33:03.000I'm like, who would be the more powerful person?
01:33:05.000Maybe Rupert Murdoch, but I mean, I think you'd have to say Zuckerberg is the most powerful person in the world, because he can...
01:33:11.000What he does to the algorithm, what direction he chooses to take that company in, with billions and billions of users, it doesn't have to be a big thing.
01:33:22.000It's just like all these tiny little tweaks.
01:33:24.000It's like a sailboat in the ocean that you just tack it a little bit that way.
01:33:40.000So like the YouTube recommendation bar that you were talking about, we've all seen these experiments.
01:33:47.000I hope we've all seen them online of where people start searching about dieting and then it goes more and more extreme suggestions about dieting and you end up with pro-anorexia videos being delivered to 14-year-old girls because each step of the way it's just slightly more interesting and slightly more clicky to get slightly more extreme.
01:34:07.000No, I didn't know that they'll go all the way to pro-anorexia videos.
01:34:09.000Yeah, or like, you know, you start inquiring about 9-11 and you end up with a 9-11 truth video.
01:34:14.000It rarely goes in the other direction.
01:34:15.000It's rarely like, here's a very reasonable, moderate, like, centrist, mildly boring thing that you're probably not going to click on, which may be the truth.
01:34:23.000Most things that are true are mildly boring in comparison to their more extreme...
01:34:29.000The thing about these places, whether it's YouTube or Facebook or Twitter, it's like there's no real – once it's already been established and then it gets moving and then it becomes an enormous part of our culture.
01:34:42.000It becomes an enormous way where people exchange information.
01:35:03.000I mean, like, when you look at, like, the political and cultural swings from right to left as we sort of go back and forth and, like, one party, one side of politics gains power and the other loses— The gentle pendulum that has always happened,
01:35:21.000I worry, is turning into a pirate ship at a fair, where it just goes more and [...
01:35:41.000That all of that is feeding into that.
01:35:43.000And once we're all hooked up to our VR and AR and we're all exchanging like Axie Infinity tokens with each other and getting off on our orgasmatron porn plugged directly into our brains, how does that affect our actual ability to collaborate with each other on the big problems that actually exist in the real world?
01:36:01.000That's a good question, because if you leave it all to Mark Zuckerberg, are you comfortable having that guy dictate the future of the human race?
01:36:36.000It's like the Myanmar thing where there was like a whole genocide, right?
01:36:39.000And like people talk about how, you know, there needs to be more internal regulation at Facebook of hate speech and stuff like that, which is, of course, a double-edged sword because you don't want...
01:36:49.000Hate speech or misinformation to get defined so broadly that anyone with a dissident opinion like you is suddenly banned from the platform or something just because you don't agree with Fauci about something or whatever.
01:37:00.000Did I ever tell you the conversation I had with a woman at YouTube about a conversation between Douglas Murray and Sam Harris?
01:37:56.000And I go, the way you said that, so confidently, my wife grabs my knee, she squeezes my knee, she sees the fucking look in my eyes, and I'm like, what are you talking about?
01:38:09.000How can you say that so confidently that it was hate speech?
01:38:11.000Tell me about the contents of the conversation.
01:38:13.000She's fucking digging her nails in my leg.
01:38:15.000I go, tell me about the content of that conversation.
01:39:09.000It's like hate speech has gone from intentionally vilifying people and trying to encourage other people to be physically violent against minorities to raising any questions that might contradict the enforced narrative that people want you to believe.
01:39:26.000I think that was when Douglas had that very controversial book, The Strange Death of Europe.
01:40:06.000Sort of literally pro-genocidal activity that's going on, especially on WhatsApp.
01:40:11.000A lot of people don't realize that in developing countries, often...
01:40:14.000WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger and these things will be used to disseminate to thousands of people in a single text.
01:40:21.000They've changed this now, to their credit, about the number of times that you can retweet something and the number of people who you can group chat it to.
01:40:31.000Because, like, there would be military dictatorships in the developing world that would just spray out inflammatory rhetoric against, I mean, I'm thinking specifically of Burma here, Myanmar, where they'd spray out inflammatory rhetoric against religious minorities,
01:40:47.000for example, accusing them of having done all sorts of terrible things.
01:40:51.000And that would get passed on and passed on and passed on and passed on.
01:40:55.000All of a sudden you've got people effectively being lynched and running out of their homes and they're becoming refugees.
01:41:00.000And in terms of moderating this content, here in the States, Facebook proudly points to its army of content moderators of over like 100,000 people that keep saying to, you know, whenever Zuckerberg has to testify at Congress, he's like, we employ so many people to check it and blah,
01:41:22.000I can't remember what it was, but it's four or 14, certainly not more than 40, to cover a country of many, many tens of millions of people.
01:41:29.000So all over the world, there are these countries.
01:41:31.000And Zuckerberg made a deal with a lot of countries where he said, I'm going to give you free internet as long as Facebook is the portal through which all of your citizens get to the internet.
01:41:39.000So there are countries where people think that Facebook is the internet.
01:41:42.000They don't even know that there's a World Wide Web outside of Facebook.
01:41:45.000And it comes pre-installed on your phone.
01:45:09.000Well, when you're a creative person and you're trying to construct a creative life, now I sound like I'm kind of talking to the young people out there, but maybe I am a little bit.
01:45:16.000One of the exciting things is you do find yourself going in all these.
01:45:19.000Weird, crazy directions that you never would have expected.
01:45:22.000And that's part of the kind of beautiful tap dance of doing your own thing and of creating a life that isn't just getting a job.
01:45:32.000He learned to make shoes when he was, like, 15 during the Depression in New Zealand.
01:45:38.000And his buddy, you know, had a dad who worked at a shoe factory, so they trained him.
01:45:44.000Like, left school in 10th grade, went to the shoe factory at the age of 16, walked out of that shoe factory at the age of 65, and that was his job.
01:46:39.000And it comes back to what you were saying earlier about inequality and the elites that make that harder for people.
01:46:45.000I do worry that a lot of the craziness that we've seen over the past couple of years that I think is partly due to the pandemic in terms of...
01:47:24.000The true inequality in America is the inner cities.
01:47:27.000If you look at the disparity between the amount of violence and crime and drug use and gang violence that's in whether it's South Side of Chicago or Baltimore or Detroit or Compton, pick a spot where it's historically been riddled with crime and drug use and And just sadness and despair.
01:50:10.000The right would object because the right would be like, why are we spending all this money on these people in the first place?
01:50:15.000They should be able to swim their way up the salmon ladder without help.
01:50:19.000And then the left would have a whole bunch of vested interests, and they'd be like, well, we know the way of doing things here.
01:50:24.000We've been working for many years in these communities of need, and it's very important to allow the people who choose to be homeless to—oh, they're not homeless anymore.
01:50:33.000They're like, you know, whatever the euphemism is.
01:50:34.000It's very important for them to allow themselves to be self-expressed in the way that they want to be self-expressed.
01:50:39.000I have an idea to get people on board.
01:51:11.000A few years after Katrina, I had a buddy who was living down there and I was like, you know, I kind of want to go to the parts that were badly hit and that haven't been redeveloped yet.
01:51:21.000He was like, you don't want to go there.
01:51:23.000And I was like, no, I mean, I got my rental car.
01:51:27.000Hey, let's go and see what the poor people are up to, shall we?
01:51:32.000And he's like, so I went on a drive by myself, and you're talking about Thailand, people being happy.
01:51:40.000You go to India, they have nothing, but they all are sort of the same level of nothing, so they can be happy, and they can still have community, and they can have a sense of a functioning society, even without very much.
01:51:52.000Here, no functioning society, no nothing.
01:51:55.000I mean, just empty houses, boarded up.
01:51:58.000Like, a dude running from one house to another when he hears my car coming down the street.
01:52:51.000What a complete indictment of whatever system we've got that Zuckerberg's out there with his little figuring out how to turn Axie Infinity into Facebook coins that we're all going to spend in the metaverse at the same time as that exists.
01:53:35.000And then whatever chaos comes as a result of weather systems being disrupted due to climate change is only going to hit those kinds of neighbourhoods the worst anyway.
01:53:42.000So if you do care about that, then care about all of it.
01:53:44.000And the neighborhoods, if you stopped and thought about just the sheer amount of despair that comes out of these places and crime and the violence and all that stuff, if people saw it,
01:54:01.000if they really knew about it and they looked at it as like a problem that we have in America, In terms of, like, you know, we have a pollution problem, we have this problem, we have this problem, too.
01:55:09.000He's a blogger and he basically takes big huge ideas like the sort of stuff that we're talking about and puts them into stick figure cartoons and writes little blogs about them to super super super super almost hilariously oversimplify them.
01:56:12.000Texans are done with it a long time ago.
01:56:13.000But I'm hoping that, you know, obviously things vary, but according to epidemiologists, most things that follow along these lines that we're seeing in this pandemic, this is actually Omicron's a normal progression.
01:56:33.000So the theory that I was just talking to him about that we mentioned you about was like whether or not there's a...
01:56:41.000So why isn't there any evidence of alien civilizations, right?
01:56:44.000So one explanation is that there's like a great filter, which whenever civilizations get sophisticated enough to be able to reach out and communicate with other civilizations, they either blow themselves up, And like, you know, there's no opportunity to actually evolve beyond a certain point because you get too clever for your own good and you blow yourself up with nukes or you destroy the planet or something like that.
01:57:06.000Or maybe the great filter is behind us and there's a whole ton of life out there in the solar system, in the galaxy, in the universe, but none of it actually gets to be conscious and self-aware and build civilizations because there's some impediment to becoming as sophisticated as our brains are that we don't even know about,
01:57:25.000Overcome, like some point in human evolution.
01:57:28.000And the third point was like, maybe there are lots of civilizations out there, but there's one super predator civilization that as soon as another civilization gets too big for its boots, just comes and extinguishes all of the rival civilizations.
01:57:45.000And the ones that haven't been extinguished have to stay quiet, almost like there's a...
01:57:49.000Like you're in the dark woods and you know that there's a monster out there, so you don't light a fire because you don't want the monster to know where you are.
01:57:55.000So nobody's broadcasting the fact that alien civilizations actually do exist.
01:57:58.000They're just staying quiet because they don't want to communicate to the predator civilization that they actually exist and get wiped out.
01:58:06.000What if the idea of travel through space and visiting other planets, other physical planets is archaic and that what they do develop is some sort of hyper metaverse and that everything becomes more Internal with these quasi-dimensions,
01:58:28.000with these new ways of achieving stimulation and also like a symbiotic relationship with electronics where people stop being biological and they start being some sort of weird cyborg-type creature.
01:58:55.000You know, one of the things that people believe is that that's what human beings are destined to probably look like in the future.
01:59:01.000If you think about what we used to be, if we used to be these beastly, muscular primates, and we have slowly but surely become these doughy things with Big brains.
01:59:55.000But I think those scenarios of like, if you look at where we're going, I mean, clearly, there's some sort of a push for us to travel to other planets and interstellar exploration.
02:00:08.000I mean, Elon's at the forefront of that.
02:00:09.000But really, the big push of this country, of this population of human beings, though, is technological innovation.
02:00:18.000Like, if you looked at us objectively from afar, if you were some sort of a being and you didn't understand what we were, what's going on over there?
02:00:26.000Oh, there's this one dominant species that makes things.
02:01:05.000You're fueling because you're constantly working to try to earn the money so you can get these new things, and these new things are always superior to the old things.
02:01:14.000And they keep getting better and better.
02:01:34.000And so the other thing he talks about is like if the history of human civilization was an 800-page book, so say 160,000 years that we've been like homo sapiens sapiens with like the kinds of civilizations that, well, even pre-civilizations,
02:02:08.000Like, yeah, basically people are wandering around with pretty primitive tools.
02:02:12.000A few of them sort of figure out how to use fire.
02:02:14.000A few of them figure out, like, how to use metals and stuff like that.
02:02:17.000A few of them figure out how to ride horses and domesticate animals.
02:02:20.000But it's basically the same shit for, like, 790 pages of the 800-page book of our species.
02:02:28.000And then just towards the end, it's like...
02:02:32.000The page before the very end, like, the United States gets settled, Australia gets settled, the Industrial Revolution happens.
02:02:39.000And then, like, on the final page, if each page is 250 years of an 800-page book, you know, it's the last half of the page.
02:02:46.000Nuclear weapons, you know, going into space, landing on the moon, the evolution of the internet, vehicles, cars, climate change, like, all of this.
02:02:54.000And it's like the final few, like, Facebook and all this shit, Axie Infinity and little coins and your VR and your Orgasmatron and everything is like the final, We're good to go.
02:03:20.000No, I'm going to call bullshit on that.
02:03:21.000If an alien who knew nothing about anything took that 800-page book, they'd be like, page 233 is roughly the same as page 722. But they'd get to the end and they'd be like, holy shit, what's going to happen next?
02:03:35.000I want to read the sequel to this book.
02:04:40.000So like, even if they don't come, like, I'm not talking about like, why haven't aliens come and visited us like in Independence Day?
02:04:48.000I just mean like when we train our telescopes on the sky.
02:04:51.000Why isn't there any evidence of little flickering radio waves coming from somewhere?
02:04:54.000But a possible explanation is the one that you say, which is we're looking for the wrong things.
02:04:58.000We've only been emitting radio waves for a century, and we might be just about to end that and go into some virtual reality metaverse or something, and maybe we'll meet them all there.
02:05:08.000Maybe we'll unlock some door of the Zuckerberg multiverse and be like, oh, here are a whole bunch of pre-existing civilizations of aliens who already exist on this platform.
02:05:17.000Well, also, if you think about the various planets that we know exist just in our solar system and the conditions that exist on these planets, there's not a lot of them that can support life.
02:05:29.000Like, they believe that Mars at one point in time had liquid water and they had an atmosphere and they probably hit with some sort of an asteroid that wiped out everything.
02:05:39.000But other than that, you've got Europa that has frozen water on the outside.
02:05:45.000But when you're talking about the scale of the universe, it's almost like talking about rolling the dice on the numbers of COVID in a population.
02:05:52.000Like, you don't need very high numbers before once you go to that size.
02:05:56.000My point was, the solar system that we exist in is very unusual.
02:06:00.000And, you know, we obviously have a planet that exists in this Goldilocks range.
02:06:05.000But we also have an extremely large asteroid belt.
02:06:08.000And it's indicative of the initial impact between Earth 1 and Earth 2. You know, Earth 1 was a planet that got hit by another planet.
02:06:18.000And that's what created the moon, and they believe that also created the asteroid belt.
02:06:22.000And if there's a solar system out there that didn't have that sort of event, so didn't have to worry about these intermittent cataclysms, where, you know, that's one of the things that Randall Carlson and Graham Hancock have done some great research on, is that Indication that at least one time that we know of,
02:06:41.000while civilization existed, it was probably almost wiped out.
02:06:45.000And it's somewhere in the Younger Dryas Impact Theory.
02:07:15.000Thank God we didn't have an orgasmatron.
02:07:16.000Otherwise, people would have been in their basements with sore thumbs.
02:07:19.000The point is if there's a planet out there that doesn't have that issue and like let's imagine because I don't know what the reality is when it comes to like ancient Egypt or Mesopotamia or I mean these incredible structures that these people built where unfortunately because the burning of the library of Alexandria we don't have the real records of how they did it or how they accomplished it or who they were.
02:07:40.000Or even really how long ago they really made it.
02:07:42.000We know that some of them, they've done carbon dating on some of the stuff, and they know it's at least 2500 BC, but there's some indications that some of it might be far, far older than that.
02:07:52.000So let's imagine that there was some sort of a civilization 10,000 years ago, 20,000 years ago, that was very advanced.
02:07:58.000And was allowed to advance without any interruption, without nuclear war, without solar flares, without asteroid impacts or supervolcanoes.
02:08:08.000Maybe they lived in a much more stable climate, and they got to a place where they're a million years more advanced than us.
02:08:16.000Imagine what the fuck we're going to be in a million years.
02:08:20.000I mean, I can't even imagine what we're going to be in a hundred years, and then take a thousand years, ten thousand, a hundred thousand.
02:08:25.000Yeah, if that's the case, like, if they were out there and they were watching us, they'd probably just make sure we don't blow ourselves up.
02:08:38.000I don't know if it's benevolent or malevolent.
02:08:41.000Like, if you think about what a scientist is, it's someone who wants to observe but sometimes protect.
02:08:47.000You know, like, we protect endangered species.
02:08:49.000Activists get together and they say, hey, you know, there's only a few of these birds left.
02:08:53.000We have to do whatever we can to preserve them.
02:08:55.000If they have that same mentality about the human race, I think they would have a pretty standoffish attitude and just sort of wait for us to figure it out.
02:09:07.000Especially if they look at the acceleration of our innovation and this exponential acceleration of technology.
02:09:14.000I can't remember if it was like Michio Kaku or Neil deGrasse Tyson or one of those like great science guys who was saying like maybe any civilization that would be advanced enough to be able to reach out to us or to be noticed by us would also have to be the kind of civilization that would not be a predatory colonizing civilization.
02:09:38.000You basically have to reach a certain level of spiritual and psychological wisdom and self-awareness and compassion in order to sustain yourself over the course of, you know, so far we've had a couple of hundred years since the Industrial Revolution and it's only been a century, less than a century, that we've had nukes.
02:10:08.000I think one day we're going to recognize that one of the things that holds back progress is our primate bodies.
02:10:16.000And that the symbiotic relationship we have with technology is going to enable us to bypass emotions.
02:10:21.000Because emotions and hormones and our need to breed through traditional intercourse, I think we're going to look at that and go, this is the result or this thing that we have, these primate instincts, these animal instincts.
02:10:37.000This is the cause of all of our suffering.
02:11:12.000We're not going to be human, just like we used to be a monkey, and now we're not a monkey, right?
02:11:19.000And now we're something else, and we're going to be something new a million years from now.
02:11:23.000I mean, it is fascinating what the phenomenology of that would be, like the big fancy term of what the actual experience of feeling like that thing would be, in the sense that we like to think of ourselves as being brains which are having an experience inside this shell that does what we want it to do.
02:11:40.000And again, this is another Jonathan Haidt thing, like he has the analogy of the rider on the elephant, right?
02:11:45.000We're all riding around on an elephant, and the elephant is our kind of passions and our unreason and our instincts and the things that motivate us.
02:12:15.000When you startle someone, you see a bear or you see a snake or something like that, you think you see it and then your heart starts racing and your body goes into fight or flight.
02:12:23.000But when the scientists actually study you, your body is in the fight or flight and then you're reacting to it.
02:12:29.000So your body is actually physiologically reacting even before the psychological impression of the thing lands in your consciousness.
02:13:01.000Success or pride or anything if you are if you are Detached if you are disentangled from all the kind of messy neurology of your physical body, right?
02:13:13.000Is it important to feel loved and lust and is it are those things like human?
02:13:17.000It's certainly human right, but if if what we can achieve without that is superior like imagine the feeling of being on MDMA where you love everyone and What if you could get a little bit of that and maintain it?
02:13:37.000So whatever it is, it's a wearable device, it's maybe a headset, it's Neuralink, it's one thing.
02:13:43.000And one of the first things they do is ramp up your dopamine and your serotonin to the point where you are incapable of violence and everybody just wants love and everybody really does think of everyone as being one.
02:13:57.000We are all one race and we try and we like instantaneously have this desire to go to that neighborhood in New Orleans and rebuild it.
02:14:06.000We instantaneously want everyone to be on the same page and everyone to feel the same way.
02:14:13.000So instead of looking at people as your competition, looking at people like you're going to have to stomp on the lower class in order to, you know, so you can have a yacht.
02:14:24.000We're not going to think that way at all anymore because we're never going to be able to feel free with this idea of one person dominating other people.
02:14:33.000And even Mark Zuckerberg is going to be stuck like, oh my God, what have I done?
02:14:39.000I have to, you know, The YouTube people will drop the algorithm and everything is going to realize that what we really are is a gigantic superorganism that has to be together with each other.
02:14:52.000This idea of independence is so preposterous because the worst thing they could ever do to you when you're in jail is put you in solitary confinement.
02:15:00.000We are literally useless without each other.
02:15:03.000And we never would have achieved a fraction of what this species has achieved if it wasn't for everyone working together, even with the horrible things like the Manhattan Project.
02:15:14.000It required so many scientists to work on it simultaneously.
02:15:17.000I mean, imagine what one person just born into the world would be able to achieve without all of the shared knowledge that they inherit.
02:15:25.000But isn't that outlook available to us right now?
02:15:27.000I mean, I'm not sure that we need to extract ourselves from our human physiology.
02:15:30.000We need the wisdom and the enlightenment.
02:15:33.000It's for you and for a growing number of people.
02:15:35.000But we're successful and we're healthy and we live in the Western world.
02:15:38.000Do we feel that way because we're successful or are we successful because we feel that way?
02:15:41.000I think, well, from my perspective, I mean, I don't know too much about your life growing up, but I think I've had a lot of lucky breaks.
02:18:47.000We all know the type of conspiracy theorist who is so anti the mainstream narrative that it's a kind of credulity in itself.
02:18:54.000It's like they just believe anything because it's not what the mainstream believes.
02:18:58.000But nor do I want to have to live in a world where you get social credits for saying the right thing and doing the right thing and reciting what the authorities want you to say or what the opinion page of the New York Times wants you to say.
02:19:11.000We're at a fork, and page 801 is going to be written by us.
02:19:17.000I think the last time I was on the show, I was talking about my nana had just died in New Zealand, my grandmother.
02:19:24.000She lived to the eve of her 100th birthday.
02:19:28.000And I was going to Greece after her funeral to visit a buddy of mine who lives in Athens.
02:19:33.000And I'm wandering around the foothills of the Agora where democracy was born, near the birthplace of ancient Greece.
02:19:44.000And I'm like, wow, 4,000 years ago, Western democracy was born on this site with people just wandering around for the first time, asking each other what they thought about things.
02:19:52.000Instead of an authority from on high telling people what to do, people are like, Hey, maybe we can all figure it out for ourselves.
02:19:57.000And that germ of an idea has then spread and changed the world and been the birthplace of civilization, the cradle of Western, blah, blah, blah.
02:21:17.000And through his research, they've opened up a field of study at Harvard that are looking into this.
02:21:26.000And what they found is physical evidence of psychedelic drug use in ancient Greece.
02:21:32.000And that they found these vats of wine, these vessels that contained ergot and a bunch of different psychedelic compounds that resemble LSD and psilocybin.
02:21:45.000And that this idea of wine, like we think of wine like a great Cabernet from Napa, right?
02:21:51.000It's like, oh, it's a 19, you know, but it's really good.
02:21:57.000The Greeks had a different idea about wine?
02:21:58.000What they were doing was mixing, first of all, most of their wine was very low fermentation alcohol.
02:22:05.000Like it didn't, they weren't able to develop the kind of alcohol, like when we think of beer, when we think of like strong Canadian beer or something like that, it's like 9% alcohol.
02:22:23.000So the alcohol killed the bacteria so they were able to prevent what they would call traveler's disease from drinking bad water.
02:22:29.000Well, they would add a bunch of stuff to their wine.
02:22:33.000Different flavors and different spices and they would also add psychedelic drugs to their wine.
02:22:40.000Now because of the fact that Roman emperors came along and they put a kibosh in this stuff, they had to start traveling to different lands and they brought these Rituals and the way they practiced these psychedelic rituals,
02:22:56.000they brought them to Spain and to Italy and they found evidence of this all over Europe where they had to travel to avoid persecution.
02:23:04.000But the root of democracy, the root of the enlightenment, the root of all of the foundations of modern society probably came out of drugs.
02:23:15.000And Brian has done an amazing job of a thorough research of that.
02:23:20.000See if you can pull up the cover of that book so you can see it.
02:23:32.000And the burning bush and the secret history of religion with no name.
02:23:37.000Yes, and well, yeah, the burning bush being, at the university in Jerusalem, they believe that that was an acacia tree, and that the acacia tree is rich in dimethyltryptamine, and that the whole idea of the burning bush being a message from God,
02:23:54.000like, we're looking at this in a literal sense, and it was probably they smoked this tree, and they saw visions, and they saw God, and God told them, like, I want you to live your life by these commandments.
02:24:07.000And if you've had psychedelic experiences, I know you have, there's moments where you have them where you start thinking, oh, we're supposed to do this.
02:24:15.000We're supposed to treat each other with love.
02:24:17.000We're supposed to look at each other as if we are one.
02:24:21.000This is my brother and this is my sister.
02:24:23.000Yeah, I mean, there's a kind of a truth.
02:24:26.000Michael Pollan writes about this, which is, you know, part of my sort of scientific interest in this experimentation as well.
02:24:32.000I haven't done it since I was in my teens, but then it was like what Pollan, the New York Times bestselling journalist, calls the noetic.
02:24:42.000Truth, meaning a kind of a truth that is only accessible because you really, really deeply know it.
02:24:47.000So it's almost like a spiritual understanding or something.
02:24:50.000And a lot of the research that's going on into psychedelics and MDMA and end-of-life care and in these clinical studies and stuff like that, I mean, even in treating addiction, it's showing incredible promise in getting people to quit smoking and stuff like that because people have these epiphanies,
02:25:17.000Yeah, and it lets you know what is causing you to have this self-destructive behavior, too.
02:25:24.000So many people, they have, whether it was alcohol or drug addiction or whatever, they have these psychedelic moments where they allow themselves to see themselves objectively, completely free of the confines of the ego and they can see all the pitfalls.
02:25:43.000Of these personality traits they've developed and all these patterns of behavior that they've fallen into, like a tightly carved groove and they just can't seem to get out of it.
02:25:53.000And then it all seems so preposterous.
02:25:54.000It's the dusting of fresh snow, they put it.
02:25:57.000It's like you've been skiing down a slope and there's all those grooves and you have this experience and all of a sudden there's just like a fresh dusting of snow.
02:26:06.000And for me it comes down to the biggest question of all.
02:26:31.000These little bits that get created in stars aggregate together on this planet and form themselves together in such a way that not only are we capable of making all these tools and doing all these incredible things and going to the moon and building a metaverse,
02:26:47.000but we're able to have an experience of what it's like to be doing that thing.
02:26:53.000Which the psychedelic or MDMA or whatever these new clinical trials are doing seems to unlock the ability to, as you say, transcend the ego and just elevate you to a level of pure consciousness and connectedness with...
02:27:51.000And now I'm still not a religious person in terms of believing in books that were written thousands of years ago as being the sole source of truth about the world.
02:27:58.000But I do sort of sit back in my kind of, I'm a 15-year-old, you know, smoking a reefer, lying on my back, gazing at the stars type moments and go like, what?
02:28:15.000I had Dawkins on the podcast once and his reaction to, you know, the idea of there being a God is like so, he gets so nasty about it.
02:28:25.000And the fact that he's not willing to have any psychedelic experiences, he said that he might be willing to do LSD under the proper clinical setting.
02:28:47.000Build yourself up to the point where you can take a real heroic dose.
02:28:50.000And then all these cocky thoughts you have of what you absolutely know exists out there in the world and in the universe and in reality itself, it's going to go away.
02:29:04.000I'm not a religious person, and I think that I'm...
02:29:08.000And I'm more of a person who is open to the possibility of there being an infinite number of variables that we don't even have the ability to perceive.
02:29:21.000Because that's one of the things that I've experienced through psychedelic trips is that, like, The first time you do a really strong psychedelic, you go, how the fuck is that?
02:29:35.000That's what's weird about these compounds when you think about the burning bush and what you were just saying about ancient Greece and stuff.
02:29:40.000Maybe the great filter that I was talking about with regard to alien civilizations, like why are we rare?
02:29:45.000Why is it rare that a civilization as sophisticated as ours Since we don't seem to see evidence of it in any nearby galaxies, even though there are 100 billion stars.
02:29:55.000Maybe the filter is that we needed these compounds.
02:29:58.000Maybe we needed these compounds to unlock something in our primate brain and go, whoa, look at the stars.
02:30:05.000I'm sure you're aware of McKenna's theory, right?
02:30:07.000That's the most fascinating, the stoned ape theory.
02:30:11.000I mean, it very well could be what caused us to become people in the first place in that it's sort of like a, you know, a signpost on the road guiding us into a direction of whatever the fuck we're going to become.
02:30:24.000Stop looking at your little, like, leaf-cutting, like, stop making the little tools that the chimps make to, like, dig the ants out of the thing and, like, turn your eyes to the stars and, like, think about where you actually are and look at miracles.
02:30:34.000But if you wanted to be really, if you wanted to be, you know, look at it I'm not completely objective, like looking at outside of what benefits or does not benefit the human race.
02:30:46.000Maybe you would think that it's probably better that they made this stuff illegal and then they demonized it and made it very hard to get because that forced people to really accelerate this technological race.
02:31:01.000That forced people to accelerate like in not letting them become aware of the futile nature of materialism.
02:31:10.000They pursued it to the nth degree to the point where they have spectacular technological capabilities, but also this existential crisis and then also this real concern about thermonuclear warfare with these rivals.
02:31:24.000And then, slowly but surely, psychedelics get reintroduced into society while we have...
02:31:30.000Once we have the technological ability to...
02:31:32.000Yes, because we might not have ever gotten there.
02:32:00.000Well, that's why I say maybe, because it also does make people more creative, right?
02:32:05.000I think you're absolutely right that there's a certain kind of mainstream, kind of middle American, like Willie Loman, Death of a Salesman, like work, work, work, work, work.
02:32:13.000Like, you know, I'm going to be the hardest working.
02:32:15.000This is a kind of, almost reminds me of like Peter Thiel or someone like that, or a Wall Street person who's like, I'm just going to work harder than everybody and work longer and be better than everybody else.
02:32:55.000I mean, when you see what Apple's created and when you see what Elon's up to, you're like, I'm in the presence of something truly unusual, truly incredible, that may be enhanced by psychedelic compounds.
02:33:09.000Maybe enhanced by it, but then the other thing is, think of those things that you're talking about, specifically like Apple.
02:33:17.000Through the use of that technology, that accelerated the whole smartphone revolution.
02:33:22.000And that also changed the way people exchange information.
02:33:26.000And through that, accelerated our understanding of these things.
02:33:30.000Like Brian Murrow-Rescue's book and his ideas, like who knows how much of that was affected by the use of social media, reading things online about...
02:33:39.000You know, Terence McKenna's work and all these various people that have researched psychedelic drugs throughout the years and written all these different things about ancient Greece.
02:33:51.000And he had to take a big chance to try to put that all out in a book.
02:33:55.000Fortunately, he did and then came on this podcast.
02:33:58.000Then the podcast broadcasted to millions of people.
02:34:07.000So you can study this concept of psychedelic drugs influencing ancient Greece and what ancient Greece has contributed to the entire civilization of the world.
02:34:18.000All this happens through the invention of Steve Jobs and technology.
02:34:23.000Podcasts literally were invented for an iPod.
02:36:20.000You can't just say, like, my rational brain has concluded that the conclusion to this whole experiment is that it is just an artifact of consciousness and it has nothing to teach us.
02:36:30.000Well, you don't know until you've seen it.
02:36:32.000I think he thinks that people have learned things from it and that he can get what they've learned through their writings and their work.
02:36:41.000But I think it's an experiential thing.
02:38:26.000He's like, he just got a fucking great attitude.
02:38:28.000It's funny how, actually, some of the best people to debunk, like, pseudoscience and, you know, psychics and that sort of thing are magicians.
02:39:41.000So Geller thinks that he's coming on the show just for a nice chat, but Johnny Carson surprises him with all of these things that he didn't know he was going to have to do, all of these things that he claims to be able to do.
02:39:51.000Carson collaborated with Randy behind the scenes.
02:39:53.000Randy wasn't on the show, but he was like the coach, essentially, behind the scenes.
02:39:58.000You can find videos of some of that stuff.
02:40:01.000And Yuri Geller, if you go to the end of the segment, Jamie, you can see how sort of embarrassed he is and how kind of awkward and apologetic he is.
02:40:08.000Because Johnny's just like, you know, I don't want to put you on the spot, but this is stuff you say you can do.
02:40:21.000Well, for example, you asked us before the show and this afternoon for one of our staff members to draw on a couple of cards and seal them in an envelope, which we have done.
02:40:33.000This didn't bend much, and right now here I'm stuck.
02:40:36.000I don't feel for it more, so I don't want to be stuck either on an envelope.
02:40:41.000I'd rather tell you that many people are skeptical about these things.
02:40:48.000They see something happening and then they want to see it closer and closer.
02:40:53.000There have been many people running and saying that they can duplicate what I do.
02:40:59.000Well, I can only say that if I'm on stage and people see me from far, they can always say that there is some sort of a sleight of hand trickery here.
02:41:09.000But I've been working with science quite a lot.
02:41:12.000And by doing what you see here under controlled conditions, because this is not a controlled condition...
02:41:22.000Well, this is not a controlled condition.
02:41:24.000What I mean is, for instance, in experiments, it's covered with bell jars, and there are cameras running, and many scientists looking at every point, although you're trying to do the same,
02:41:40.000but this is really not a controlled condition.
02:41:42.000Boy, he talks like a cult leader, doesn't he?
02:41:44.000But again, it's quite difficult for me, and I won't go on something that I don't feel strong for.
02:42:45.000If he claims that he can tell which salt shaker has water in it without seeing it just by moving his hand over a covered batch of salt shakers, then actually do it properly.
02:43:43.000But I'm not sure it's just that, because I once had coffee with a supposed mentalist in New York, and he was like, you want to see me bend a spoon?
02:44:49.000When someone does something like that with a spoon and they know how to do it, the people that know how to do it and they watch someone fuck with someone, I've had Banachuk on the podcast before.
02:45:06.000We had me and my friend Duncan Trussell, we did a television show where he contacted people from the audience and knew things about their family and did all that kind of crazy shit.
02:46:28.000I don't believe in it, but it's just something you do.
02:46:30.000But then a part of me is like, I read a great book in my teens, which was Carl Sagan, and it's one of his books called The Demon Haunted World.
02:46:53.000He could foresee how a society that became obsessed with trivialities and with little squabbles and with consumer culture and with celebrities and stuff like that would be led blindly into unproductive dead ends, basically.
02:47:08.000And his concern was that all these little things that you think you're dabbling in, sure, they might just be a bit of fun to you.
02:47:15.000But if we're going to have the ability as a civilization to come together and to speak to each other on the same page about reality, about facts, about the things that we're actually grappling with, whether you think that's climate or whether you think that's the pandemic, whether you think that's going to space or whether you think that's evolving into the next phase of human civilization due to psychedelics or artificial intelligence or virtual reality or whatever,
02:47:36.000we're not going to be able to have like I think we're good to go.
02:48:09.000Every time I hear about psychics and this and that, for me it's more than just like, oh, it's a little bit of fun.
02:48:16.000It's like, no, just make shit make sense.
02:48:31.000I think that there's too many pathways to nonsense.
02:48:34.000And it's so easy to get locked up in flat earth theory or get taken away.
02:48:44.000And you should be able to if you're an intelligent person, right?
02:48:47.000If you want to Google that there are trolls and goblins living in New Zealand and you really want to watch these videos, like, what the fuck is going on?
02:49:30.000I mean, that's why I'm not a religious person either, because a religious person is trying to tell me that they know what happens after we die when we all know that nobody knows that.
02:51:26.000I go, so if that assumption's correct and I really just go to sleep and I really just wake up, I can tell you that I lived in a time where there were no computers.
02:51:35.000So I don't think simulation theory is happening right now.
02:52:45.000It was this, like, Austrian music conductor or something in, like, the 1970s, and his wife has written a book about this, who had some traumatic brain injury, and then basically became, like, the guy out of Memento, where he would wake up every,
02:53:00.000like, I don't know, 30 seconds, 60 seconds, something like that, a whole new person, right?
02:53:06.000And so his short-term memory was so erased, his memory was completely gone, so he's like...
02:53:12.000And he has these notebooks that would be like, this is the real me now.
02:53:57.000More fucking crazy shit to think about.
02:54:01.000But his book's called Being Conscious or something like that.
02:54:04.000It's a great read or listen if you're interested in that.
02:54:06.000But I mean, it raises all those questions about like, yeah, you wake up in the morning, you have a memory of yesterday.
02:54:12.000How do you know that you're not actually like the composer who can't remember anything, but you just have an artifact of a memory that is the Joe Rogan who's existed prior to right now?
02:54:23.000How do you know that you're the same person who came into this studio and started having a conversation with me?
02:55:01.000The concept of artificial intelligence and the concept of creating an intelligence that mirrors ours, that's the scariest aspect of it, is that we would be...
02:55:25.000I mean, that's one of the many things that are genius about that movie, which is the Oscar Isaac character has a line in there, which is like, this isn't about the Turing test, trying to get a robot to convince you that it's not a robot.
02:55:37.000The whole point here is that you can see it's a robot.
02:57:19.000I mean, this is kind of what you were talking about, about like, what if our brains were detached from our physical body so we didn't have all of the hormones and the arousal and everything that comes with a physical human body?
02:58:34.000You know, I mean, if you were being trapped, if you woke up as like, you know, Joe Rogan wakes up in the morning and you don't know, you know, what has happened in the past, you're like our Austrian conductor and you've got amnesia or something, or, you know, all of your memory about what has happened in your life is actually an artifact of Oscar Isaac's character who's embedded this in your artificial system,
02:58:55.000then you might just think, well, I don't want to be a prisoner.
02:59:20.000Well, that's a real question too in terms of like if we do create artificial life or artificial intelligence or even we separate our emotions from everything else.
02:59:30.000If they create something artificial, you would assume that if you're going to create an artificial person, they would try to program emotions into it.
03:00:38.000What I think is interesting about the space that's sort of opening up that people like Sam Harris are creating is like this new secular version of that ancient Buddhist wisdom.
03:00:50.000I mean, you play a role in this as well, in kind of fostering an ability for people to think about themselves as somewhat detached from their animal emotions, from their instincts, from what's driving us as physiological primates.
03:01:02.000And just to sort of notice the thoughts...
03:01:04.000A kind of a psychedelic mindfulness and detachment where you're not going to stop yourself from being a human.
03:01:12.000You're not going to stop yourself from being subject to all of the whims of being a physical embodied evolved primate.
03:01:18.000But you can just like take one step back so that you're not activated by them.
03:01:23.000I was on the subway in New York and I saw these two young girls and they were in an argument.
03:01:28.000They were like, I mean, they were like...
03:01:32.000They were just angry, so angry, so everything that one of them said would activate the other.
03:01:37.000It was one of those situations where the whole subway car shifts down to the other end of the car because they're all like, I don't want to be part of this.
03:01:43.000And I was looking at them thinking, you're just...
03:02:12.000You know, it's just like breathe, create some like space between all of the chaos that's going through my mind.
03:02:19.000This has also been helpful during the pandemic, isolation, you know, trapped in a house with the family, like all this sort of stuff.
03:02:25.000Like just create a little bit of distance from all the bullshit and give yourself that little cushion.
03:02:31.000The pathways of those behaviors are really just the remnants of barbaric pasts, the barbaric genetics that we have, where we had to have that sort of response because this primate was coming to try to take your food or take your mate or take your baby or whatever,
03:03:22.000When I turned, I think, 30, I was like, if you woke me up in the middle of the night and you just shook me awake and you were like, how old are you?
03:04:13.000You know, whoever, whatever he said about COVID shots, we're going to give you two more.
03:04:18.000They're going to cancel the confetti arrival.
03:04:20.000I was going to have an open-topped car and streamers and everything, and now it's just going to be throwing rotten tomatoes and turds at me when I get off the plane.