In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian, podcaster, writer, and podcaster joins Jemele to talk about his new show, The Experience, as well as what it s like being a podcaster and being a writer. He also talks about why he thinks the Catholic Church is a bunch of shit, and why we should all be mad about it. Also, he talks about how he got started in podcasting and why he doesn t want to do it anymore. And why he s not mad at anyone but himself for being mad at anything. We also talk about why we don t like the way the government is running our government, and how we should be mad at the way they run our government. Enjoy, and tweet us if you liked this episode! Timestamps: 3:00 - What's the worst thing you ve ever said to a politician? 4:20 - What do you think of Joe Rogans 5:30 - What does it take to be a good podcaster? 6:00 7:15 - What s your favorite part about the Catholic church? 8:20 9:40 - How do you feel about Jeffrey Epstein? 11:30 What s the worst piece of news you ve read? 12:40 13:15 15:00 -- Why the Vatican is a country full of pedophiles? 16:30 -- Why you should be angry about it? 17:40 -- What s a country filled with pedophiles 18:20 -- Why is it better than the Vatican? 19:00 | What s going to happen next? 21:00 // 22:10 23:30 | What would you like to see? 26:40 | Why is there a better country? 27:30 // 27:10 | What is the best piece of evidence? 29:30 Is it better? 30:00 Is there more of a Catholic Church in the Vatican a better than a Catholic church than a pedophile in the USA? 32:00 Do you have a problem with pedophile? 35: What s more? ? 36:00 + 33:00 Are you a Catholic Catholic Church? 39:00 Can you be a Christian in a Catholic in a country with a Catholic priest in a city filled with Pedophile priests?
00:00:38.000I really think that people like you that are reasonable and intelligent and have legitimate opinions grounded in facts, it's very important.
00:01:22.000I mean, how many podcasts are over in the UK? Is it a popular thing?
00:01:27.000It is a popular thing, but like everything, it really started to get motoring during COVID, particularly in our space with comedians, when everything shut down.
00:01:36.000And then comedians realized, hang on a second, we were just doing the comedy circuit and then wanting to be on TV. And then that moment was a really eye-opening moment where they realized ratings on TV are collapsing.
00:01:49.000Nobody's watching TV for ways that we'll get into through the podcast.
00:02:20.000Like during BLM, we had these protests in the center of London with these protesters going, hands up, don't shoot, in front of cops who don't have guns.
00:03:35.000This is why I love America, man, because in the UK we have libel laws, so if you say something like that, and you then have to be able to prove it, otherwise you can get sued.
00:04:13.000Oh my god, the Vatican City's equal age of consent being raised from 12 to 18 following the announcement of an overhaul of the Catholic Church criminal code by Pope Francis.
00:04:23.000Francis is like the most progressive guy, right, in terms of popes?
00:04:53.000I mean, this guy was already molesting.
00:04:56.000And then they say, well, let's just, instead of trying him and removing him from the church, we'll just move him to a place where people can't hear.
00:05:05.000It's amazing how people cover this stuff up.
00:05:07.000I don't know if you followed the grooming gang stories from the UK, but basically we had a situation for decades where young girls were being abused in the thousands, potentially half a million, and it was covered up.
00:05:24.000So what happened was it was basically people from a certain background.
00:05:28.000It was what we call in the UK South Asian, so Bangladeshi and Pakistani mostly.
00:05:33.000And they were abusing Sikh and local British white girls in hundreds of thousands.
00:05:39.000We had one of the victims on our show, Dr. Ella Hill, a very brave woman.
00:05:45.000And it was covered up for decades because we've just had a report come out to try and find out why it was covered up, why it wasn't investigated, because these people went to the police and they were told there's nothing we can do for you.
00:05:57.000And it wasn't investigated and wasn't reported on properly because of, quote, sensitivities about race, right?
00:06:04.000So all this stuff gets covered up for all kinds of reasons.
00:06:06.000It's mind-blowing, man, what people get away with on this sort of thing.
00:06:10.000Because the politicians who should have been exposing it, the people who should have been talking about it, the police who should have been investigated, were worried about being labelled racist.
00:06:20.000In fact, one famous tweet from a Labour MP told some of these people to shut up for the sake of diversity.
00:06:43.000Even to talk about, in polite society, people feel very uncomfortable talking about this because it comes from communities, what you would say, like Asian communities.
00:06:57.000And particularly white working class girls and Sikh girls.
00:07:00.000So people feel very uncomfortable about this.
00:07:03.000They're far more comfortable talking about Epstein because in their heads it's punching up.
00:07:07.000Whilst if you talk about this crime, it's seen as punching down, that it's racist.
00:07:12.000And it's far easier for them to silence it.
00:07:14.000But the problem is, Joe, is when you do that, what happens is that nefarious people can then get involved in this and they say these words...
00:07:56.000And what happened was when we got one of the victims on our show, Dr. Ella Hill, I remember because we were trying to get the Member of Parliament, who was one of the women that started to expose this, she wrote an article in one of the newspapers, and she got so much hate That she didn't want to talk about it anymore.
00:08:15.000So when we called her up and we said, do you want to come on the show and tell us about this?
00:08:21.000And that's when I remember sitting in the car talking to Francis on the phone and I went, we've got to a point where a member of parliament whose job it is to protect these children is getting so much hate for speaking out about it, she doesn't want to talk about it anymore.
00:08:37.000A member of parliament So this woman who's the doctor, she was presumably molested when she was young?
00:08:52.000So a lot of these people now are like my age, in their 40s, and it's still going on.
00:08:57.000How do they have access to these girls?
00:09:00.000They would basically prey on vulnerable girls.
00:09:04.000Maybe they didn't have a parent or maybe something like that.
00:09:07.000They ply them with alcohol, drugs, get them addicted.
00:09:10.000And when some of the families tried to go and take their kids back, the police, I can't remember the exact details, but in several cases it was like, oh, she's just a prostitute.
00:09:23.000And the father would get arrested for trying to get his daughter out of that situation.
00:09:39.000And this is why this identity politics is such a problem because when you stop treating people as individuals who behave correctly or incorrectly, lawfully or unlawfully, you start to go, well, these people can't commit a crime anymore, right?
00:09:54.000And these people commit a crime by just being whatever.
00:10:22.000That's one of the most disturbing aspects of this hardcore left progressivism is that they are willing to ignore reality for the sake of this narrative that they have.
00:10:34.000And also they're willing to lump, make these mass generalizations and lump everyone, like particularly if they're hard to defend, like straight white men.
00:10:48.000Wealthy people, you know, upper class people, people with money.
00:10:51.000It's just a very bizarre thing that's going on where people are unwilling to look at people as individuals because it just doesn't fit this narrative that they're trying to push.
00:11:02.000I remember when Brexit happened in 2016, I started to notice more and more when people were talking, the term old white man became an insult.
00:11:10.000And suddenly, if you're an old white man, that meant that you were racist, particularly if you voted for Brexit.
00:11:34.000My dad voted for Brexit because he said that he wanted the UK to be independent of Europe.
00:11:40.000He loves Europe, but he didn't believe that the EU should be making rules For the UK and my dad married my mother who is Latin American a woman of color and I fucking hate that term.
00:12:36.000And so, like, my dad married my mum, like, back in the 70s, where we lived, which was a predominantly working-class area.
00:12:43.000And, you know, there was a lot of, you know, there was racism.
00:12:46.000The pub down the road from where I grew up was a pub which had links to the BNP, which was the British National Party, which was a far-right organisation.
00:12:55.000And some of those guys operating out of that pub had assaulted Asian people in my area.
00:13:00.000And my dad married my mum, but as a result of that, my mum wanted to call me Francisco Jaime and take, in the Latino tradition, her last name as well, which was Palis.
00:13:11.000My dad was worried about racism, so he called me Francis, gave me the name of a middle-class white woman, which I'm very grateful for.
00:13:18.000LAUGHTER And that's how I live my life and that's how I was brought up.
00:13:23.000My dad is one of the nicest, sweetest, most generous, honourable people I've ever met.
00:13:28.000And to then have him be called racist and stupid and ignorant, it just enraged me.
00:13:35.000This is bizarre that some generalizations...
00:13:37.000Generalizations have always been a thing that it's looked down upon.
00:13:43.000You can make generalizations with caveats.
00:13:48.000You can say, in general, democratic-run cities or this or that.
00:13:54.000But when you do it with human beings, And you just decide to dismiss someone based on some immutable characteristics that they have zero control over, like being born white.
00:15:33.000Because, you know, we both voted remain in that referendum.
00:15:36.000So that's kind of like the equivalent of voting for Hillary Clinton versus Trump in 16. And suddenly there was this narrative like what Francis is talking about all, you know, old white people, all this.
00:15:47.000And for me, I'm a first generation dark skinned Jewish immigrant from Russia into the UK. And suddenly all these people were like saying, oh, yeah, we've got this country is really racist.
00:16:22.000And we were trying to understand where they were coming from.
00:16:24.000That's kind of the genesis of our show.
00:16:26.000Trying to understand people who have a different opinion to us.
00:16:29.000Well, there's a lot of right-wing people that don't want to vote for Trump based entirely on his personality, but there's a lot of left-wing people that voted for Trump just because they didn't like Hillary and they didn't like the policies of the Democratic Party and all the stuff that she stood for this ancient form of corruption that's been running America for a long time.
00:16:49.000It's a weird world that we're living in right now, because we're inundated with information.
00:16:54.000We have more information than ever before, but we also have these very clear boxes that you can shove people into that make it convenient, because there's so much information, because there's so much to sort out, because nuance is difficult, because looking at things for what they really are is complicated.
00:17:19.000And a lot of dull minds who have accepted these narratives of, you know, being just something that you just, if you're a good person, this is how you think and behave.
00:17:31.000But, you know, and I'd love to talk to you about this, Joe, because I think we're from the same place politically.
00:18:10.000Constantine and I always use this phrase, broke people's brains.
00:18:14.000COVID broke people's brains, but Brexit, Trump broke people's brains.
00:18:17.000Yeah, but man, you tell me all the stories about working in the school way before then, when you were being told, well, you can't teach people of this race.
00:19:10.000Boys, you know, you've just got to expect that they're going to write a little less, they're not going to be as engaged, and you need to have extra stimuluses for them as a result, and all this.
00:19:20.000And I'm thinking, this is the bigotry of low expectation.
00:19:23.000What I've got in my classroom are working class boys from desperately poor backgrounds, many of whom have grown up without a dad.
00:19:31.000And we all know the stats about what that entails.
00:19:34.000For most of those kids, the only way out of the poverty that they have grown up in It's education.
00:19:42.000And you want me to go into my classroom and say to these boys who have already got enough challenges as it is, and you know, 10 and 11, the gangs are starting to circle, and they're starting to stray into that world.
00:19:55.000You want me to say to them that they are not as capable for their writing as girls.
00:20:00.000Well, why don't we just scrap it and just let them run free?
00:20:05.000To me, the worst thing about this progressive movement is the bigotry of low expectations and saying to people, you know what, you need our help or you're not going to be as good as us.
00:20:18.000And to me that's disgusting because you're dooming people to not have the life that they could have if you have high expectations for them.
00:20:26.000Because I'm telling you something, if you go into these schools or these places of learning and you have high expectations for these kids, the vast majority will meet it.
00:20:49.000You know, they're not as mature as girls.
00:20:54.000You've just got to accept that as well.
00:20:57.000But here's the thing, there's a joy that boys bring to a classroom.
00:21:01.000Girls tend to be more obedient, but with boys you can tend to have a little bit more fun, you can have a little bit more back and forth or banter as we call it in London or in the UK. So boys are different like that.
00:21:14.000But the thing is with boys is they respond to a challenge.
00:21:18.000If you say to them, I want, by the end of this lesson, Tony, I want four paragraphs, and I want capital letter, full stop, I want you to have all your apostrophes, and I want you to get that done by half-pass.
00:21:38.000We respond to people saying to us, come on, meet this expectation.
00:21:43.000But if you say to somebody, you're never going to do it, most people will agree.
00:21:48.000I mean, they'll be the odd kid who will just want to prove you wrong, but the vast majority will never do that.
00:21:52.000So do you think when they're dealing with boys and girls in classrooms, it's just complicated to deal with all the variables that the boys bring and the girls bring, so instead of handling that, they just lower the expectations for boys?
00:22:05.000I think not all teachers, I think a lot of teachers push back on that, but I think there were certainly some teachers who would take on board what this person was saying.
00:22:14.000And look, let's be fair to teachers, particularly in the type of schools that I worked in, you had 30 kids in the class.
00:22:20.000I had everything from a kid who potentially had the ability to go to Oxford or Cambridge, he was that intelligent, that smart, or she was, right the way through to a non-verbal autistic kid.
00:22:31.000So you had to make sure that all the resources were prepared in a way that all the children could meet.
00:22:38.000And not only just those two extremes, you also had all the ones in the middle and upper and lower and all the rest of it.
00:22:43.000So teachers have an incredibly difficult job.
00:22:45.000And are teachers in the UK as underpaid as they are here in America and underappreciated?
00:23:59.000We all remember that special teacher who, for whatever reason, took an interest, not necessarily just in the classroom, but maybe outside, maybe we're having a tough time, who took the time out from their day to help us or inspire us or actually give us a fire and a passion.
00:25:02.000I mean, there's some boxing instructors that weren't great boxers that turned out to be great coaches, but most of the great martial arts instructors were, in fact, great martial artists.
00:25:14.000They had a passion for learning it, and then they had a passion for explaining all the various, like, very nuanced details.
00:25:22.000Like, all the great jujitsu instructors are all world champions.
00:25:25.000Almost all of them, or champions in some way, shape, or form.
00:25:29.000Because to truly understand the subject, in order to be able to teach it, you need to be able to understand every part of the process.
00:25:39.000If I'm teaching you, I don't know, equations, and I don't fully understand it, I'm not going to be able to teach it, because you're going to go to me, Francis, but how did you get from this point to this point?
00:25:50.000And if I can't explain it, I'm not going to be able to help you.
00:27:10.000What it means to take someone on a journey.
00:27:12.000And it does make you better at whatever you're teaching.
00:27:14.000I was much better at martial arts after I started teaching it, and I recognized that in a lot of my friends that had regular jobs and went on to start teaching Jiu Jitsu.
00:27:23.000They all got way better at it, way better at it.
00:27:26.000And it's just because your understanding of it is ingrained deeply in your mind, like of all the various positions and transitions to different positions and the hazards and what you have to do to avoid and how to defend.
00:27:41.000All that stuff is complex, and to be able to explain it to another person, watch their mind light up with these infinite possibilities, it really does stimulate your own growth.
00:27:53.000It does, and one of the things that teaching gives you that We're good to go.
00:28:47.000And it was only when I became an adult and I realized that I want to do things in the world that I realized, actually, you have got to work so hard to create anything.
00:28:56.000And that's when I started cultivating this in myself.
00:29:08.000And I remember his dad telling me this, we were on the sidelines watching a rugby game, and another kid said to him, oh, yesterday there was this situation in a game where someone was taking a penalty kick to win the game.
00:29:23.000And my friend's dad, the friend who was successful, his dad, he went, no, think about it like this.
00:29:29.000How many people want to be in that position?
00:29:32.000And when you score, how many people are just so with you and delighted?
00:29:36.000And that little reframe, that's all it takes sometimes, just a little understanding how to build confidence in yourself or how to work hard.
00:31:05.000And if you want to create things, you've got to have these skills that otherwise you're going to struggle without, whether that's working with other people.
00:31:13.000Stand-ups struggle with this because everyone's so individually minded.
00:31:16.000But we've built an incredible team, not just me and Francis, but you met Anton, our producer, and a bunch of other people.
00:31:23.000That's an interesting part of our life now, is we've got a team of people to manage, and you've got to run that, you've got to look after them, you've got to make sure they're growing, they're getting what they need.
00:31:32.000It's an exciting challenge to be in the position that we're in.
00:32:17.000You just need the top dogs to accept this new way of thinking of things and try to help the young guys coming up and encourage this different kind of thinking.
00:32:31.000Because here's the thing, you know, that way of thinking of like, oh my, I've got to get this, and if someone comes here, they're going to...
00:33:55.000But everyone together is like feeding off of the inspiration of each individual member.
00:34:01.000And when people are doing really well, especially like young people, I love when up-and-comers are really starting to make it, and they're starting to make money, and they can afford a nice apartment, they get a car.
00:34:41.000We all played the clubs in the UK. You played the clubs in America.
00:34:46.000You know, there's that comic, that headliner, who's just burnt out, who just sits in the corner of the green room, who looks like he's got some form of PTSD. He's not engaging.
00:35:09.000One of the beautiful things about doing a special is you have to write new material afterwards.
00:35:14.000You release that special and it's not like the Rolling Stones can go tour and do fucking Gimme Shelter over and over and over again and everybody cheers.
00:35:44.000I don't love it at the time, but looking back, it is good.
00:35:47.000You know when you're gigging with all these people, and they're all doing their best stuff, and you do your 10 minutes of new, and you suck a dick?
00:35:55.000Yeah, and they're killing it with old stuff.
00:35:57.000And then you walk off, and they're like, He was shit.
00:36:47.000I was like, what the fuck is he doing here?
00:36:49.000And he went on and he closed it and he absolutely fucking destroyed.
00:36:56.000And that's when I realized, like, you got to be prepared to go on and do 10 minutes of new and not give a shit that you die in front of all the people that you want to respect.
00:37:05.000The only way it's ever going to get good.
00:37:45.000Go watch mine, start out, and just do it and get better.
00:37:48.000And don't be scared that you suck in the beginning.
00:37:51.000Everything you do when you start out, you suck at.
00:37:53.000There's no way to be amazing from the jump, especially at something complex.
00:37:58.000And if you are amazing at it, you're the rarest of the rare and just work even harder because you just have a very unusual gift and you should be very fortunate, feel very fortunate.
00:38:09.000And still work hard at it, as we talked about.
00:38:34.000Ravel Morrison is a fascinating study, and I would recommend anyone to read about him.
00:38:37.000This was a kid who, when he was at Manchester United, one of the biggest clubs in the land, was known as the most talented boy of his generation.
00:38:45.000They were saying he was the biggest talent they'd ever seen in the last 30 years since a guy called Paul Gascoigne.
00:40:14.000But one of the reasons I was doing it is because my mum's disabled, so I need to get money back to my dad and my mum in order to support them to pay for cleaners and stuff like that.
00:40:25.000And they very kindly said to me, why don't you run a stand-up course?
00:40:28.000When I qualified as a teacher for six years, I was a drama teacher.
00:40:32.000That's how I originally started, and then I went into primary.
00:40:36.000And then I thought about it, and I saw the way that other people were teaching, and I thought, I've actually got the opportunity here, as someone who trained as a teacher, who's got 10 years or 9 years experience at the time, I can actually teach it like a proper lesson.
00:41:30.000Which one was written by the same person and why?
00:41:35.000So what that would do is, because in teaching, if I'm just there being didactic and talking at you, eventually you're going to switch off because that's how the brain works.
00:41:43.000But if you say to them, right, analyze it, discuss it amongst yourselves.
00:41:46.000So that was one of the exercises that really worked because then they looked at it and from that they looked at tone.
00:42:59.0002016, I opened for Eddie Izzard, but I did comedy in Spanish, and it was actually a lot more difficult because Spanish, it doesn't have those words which have those dual meanings that you can pivot on.
00:43:49.000But if the twist makes sense, is it has a logic, if it has a consistent worldview, then you're going to be hooked into the thriller and you're going to be hanging on every single twist and turn.
00:43:59.000And that is the art of great joke writing.
00:44:47.000And then they'd go off and then they'd write.
00:44:49.000And a lot of the time we'd make a joke that would actually work.
00:44:54.000So it's by doing that consistently, all the time, I used to do things like worlds colliding, where I used to take, I don't know, this was in 2018, take a topic like Trump, take a topic like supermarkets.
00:45:07.000I go, right, we're going to create a joke about Trump and the supermarket, you know, target whatever it is.
00:45:13.000Think about everything you can think of Trump.
00:47:44.000But really focus on this, because this is really interesting.
00:47:47.000That great joke you did there, maybe you can talk about this here, and that, and this.
00:47:52.000And gradually, they got to have a really lovely five minutes.
00:47:56.000So by the end of it, I think I did it for about two years.
00:48:02.000A lot of the guys that I taught, they got to the finals of competitions, national competitions.
00:48:08.000And they started to come through, and a lot of them are still doing it, and I see them on the circuit, and it's great, man, because they kill, and then I go, I wrote that joke.
00:48:20.000I did it for a couple of years, and I loved it, because it meant that I could cut down on teaching, because the thing is, with school teaching, it's just draining, particularly when the schools that I was working in, it meant that it freed up a little more time.
00:48:39.000To me, writing a great joke is like alchemy.
00:48:42.000You take words that individually they don't have no connection, but you put them together in a particular order, with a particular rhythm, and you create something that's so beautiful.
00:48:59.000I think, I remember like a lot of the times when comedians were in a club and they would say like, oh are you going to talk about your stuff about this and I'm not going to do my stuff about that.
00:50:30.000And then you play on stage with it, and you try certain things.
00:50:33.000And then it got to a point where I was like, it's like she got to the UK, got to the border, turned around, and went, no, no, you're not coming.
00:50:45.000And that used to get a big laugh, but I knew it was good when I would meet people whose parents were from a different country and they'd come up to me and go, my mom's like that.
00:50:54.000I remember a black guy came up to me after a gig and went, my mom's Jamaican.
00:51:22.000It's a long and complicated story as well because one of the things that happened when we started doing the show is we became evil and right-wing and whatever.
00:51:32.000So we ended up leaving that club eventually.
00:51:37.000So they accused you of being right-wing?
00:51:39.000No, no, they found an excuse to get rid of us.
00:51:58.000Other comedians, when we signed to an agent about a year and a half ago, there was a bunch of comedians who tried to get our agent to drop us.
00:52:19.000Well, we were just interested in having conversations with different people, but what we found very quickly is, certainly in the comedy world that we were coming from, this is, you don't do this.
00:52:35.000It's different in the UK because it's a small industry, and the gatekeepers in terms of getting on television and whatever is like five people.
00:52:43.000And in 2018, the woman who runs the Edinburgh Festival, which is how, in the UK, that's how you get anywhere, right?
00:52:49.000You do the clubs, then you take your own show, like a special, to the Edinburgh Festival, you get seen by people, you get plucked, and then you go on TV, and that's how you make a career.
00:52:59.000The woman who runs the Edinburgh Festival, a woman called Nika Burns, she said, I look forward to the era of woke comedians deciding what isn't, isn't acceptable.
00:53:09.000This is the person who controls the industry.
00:53:26.000I mean, it's the funniest thing about the entire thing because what he's produced ain't funny, but carry on, man.
00:53:30.000So what happened to us when we started the show was we found ourselves on our own and gradually pushed out and out and out, which has been great for us.
00:53:39.000Which has been brilliant for us because now we have our own thing.
00:53:42.000I actually stopped doing stand-up after the pandemic because I realized it was just killing me physically, the driving around, all of that.
00:54:24.000Well, this is why I said we're so glad to be here with you because we looked at people like you and we went, like, he's having interesting conversations with fascinating people.
00:54:54.000And you started hearing people suddenly one after another, well, I'm a straight white man, so this, and I'm this.
00:55:00.000People just started regurgitating all this stuff and we couldn't work out what was happening.
00:55:07.000And also there was a lot of censorship going on, self-censorship.
00:55:10.000I remember I was always political with my comedy, satirical.
00:55:13.000That's what inspired me because I grew up in Russia where we didn't have this.
00:55:17.000And then when there was a bit of an opening up in the early 90s when the Soviet Union collapsed… There was this guy called Viktor Shandorovic who wrote a TV show which was based on Spitting Image.
00:55:29.000These puppets of politicians talking and it was hilarious.
00:56:22.000And also as well, going back to that point that Constantine made, The people who decide whether you get spots on TV, the only way you can do that is through the Edinburgh Festival.
00:56:35.000And the only way you're going to get noticed is if you adhere to the company line.
00:56:39.000Because then it's TV, radio producers, and then you get your run at a West End theatre.
00:56:54.000And as you know yourself, the worst form of censorship is self-censorship.
00:56:59.000When you're sitting down with your pad and paper.
00:57:02.000And go, you know, I wrote a joke, which I didn't have the courage to do until recently, about, you know, because I was saying, like, my voice, I've got a racist voice, because in South London, this is...
00:57:15.000In London, I was banging on him for years to do that better material, because his voice is associated with someone who is, you know, intolerant in the UK. His accent.
00:57:26.000And then I would say, but you know, here's the thing, all my girlfriends have all been black, mixed race, all Latin American, so my voice is racist, but my dick is woke, right?
00:59:14.000And the only way you're going to get into the magazines is if you pay for PR. You then got to pay for a producer.
00:59:20.000A lot of the times people want to get a producer in to help them get them noticed so that they can say that they're with this particular person.
00:59:30.000The accommodation fees are through the roof.
00:59:32.000You can look at how much they're charging out the Edinburgh Festival just to stay there.
00:59:36.000And I was lucky, man, because what happened that year is I was, for the first time in my life, I was part of a huge news story that had happened.
00:59:45.000And so I had the PI. I was in the newspaper.
01:00:19.000I opened the file and it said, we have a zero tolerance policy on racism, sexism, classism, ageism, ableism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, xenophobia, Islamophobia, anti-religion, anti-atheism, and all jokes must be respectful and kind.
01:00:49.000I'm talking about this was the day that it was the second most read story on the BBC News website, which is the biggest news website in the UK. On the day that the Prime Minister had nearly been removed from office by her own party.
01:01:02.000So that's equivalent of the Democrats impeaching Joe Biden.
01:01:05.000And the second story on CNN and Fox is no-name comedian turns down unpaid gig from Two-Bit College.
01:01:22.000And that's when I realized, Joe, this is the thing.
01:01:25.000See, I thought that Francis and I and a couple of other, the rest of us, we were just like these weirdos who were campaigning about, you know, the stuff that was going on in comedy and generally.
01:01:35.000But when that story went that viral, I got thousands of messages and thousands of emails from ordinary people saying, I can't say what I think at work.
01:01:45.000And that's when I realized we've got a genuine problem in society where everyone feels like they're walking around having signed that contract.
01:04:08.000That's why it's called a play, because you've got to be playful.
01:04:10.000And if you feel restricted, if you feel that somehow, if you say this, that you might cross an imaginary red line, you're not going to be playful.
01:04:19.000And the best material, as far as I'm concerned, is where people take contentious issues, contentious subject matter, like a Bill Burr, for instance, and they're playful with it, and it pops attention, and we're all able to laugh.
01:04:39.000But the moment you go, oh, you can't say this, and here's a red line, and if you do say that, then we're going to come down on you on a ton of bricks...
01:05:04.000I really believe this is what diversity is, and I've said it many times and people don't like it, but it's true.
01:05:12.000Diversity and these diversity quotas and whatever else in comedy is having different races, genders, sexualities all saying the exact same thing.
01:05:25.000And if you stray from the party line, you ain't going to get a seat at the table.
01:05:31.000Because they want a black person on, but they want them to say what they think.
01:05:36.000We have a friend who's from Barbados in the UK, great comic, Nico Yearwood.
01:05:40.000And he was tweeting something, and another comedian, this is how fucked up the industry is, went to him, the optics of your tweets are really right-wing.
01:05:53.000Because he is a black dude, isn't allowed to say this.
01:06:48.000He does that in little theatres around London.
01:06:51.000And, you know, it's only 120 seats where it will sell out and then, you know, he'll put on, you know, these comedians.
01:06:58.000But a lot of the time, this is the interesting thing, a lot of those comedians won't go public that they work with Ricky because they're terrified of what will happen because he's a vicious, evil transphobe.
01:07:09.000But, you know, there's some good pushback happening as well.
01:08:33.000It's hard to say that they killed him.
01:08:35.000But they definitely tried him multiple times for obscenities.
01:08:39.000You ever see the recordings of the later stages of his life where you'd go on stage with legal notes and just read off of the transcript of the trials?
01:09:00.000I mean, he was losing his mind towards the end, but I mean, I would imagine the pressure of, you know, having essentially the entire legal system and a good part of society coming down on you for the things you're saying and not being really recognized as what he is in terms of a true—he's the true godfather of— American stand-up.
01:10:52.000Whether or not they honestly, earnestly think that they're protecting people, they are enjoying this power and control, and I don't like it.
01:11:00.000And the thing is, man, as I talk about in there, I've seen this before.
01:11:19.000People were embracing the pharmaceutical companies, which was bizarre to me.
01:11:24.000The people that have been the most deceptive that have caused irreparable damage to people and families because of lies, because of...
01:11:32.000Faking studies because of withholding data and information and they've been fined to the tune of billions and billions of dollars and all of a sudden people were putting all their eggs in that basket I was like you guys are out of your fucking minds like you don't remember the past you don't remember that remember the history of what these people have done and you don't they clearly don't understand how these studies work and how they get funded and how politicians get funded and how Special interest groups are working behind the scenes to make sure that these things get mandated.
01:12:14.000What I did find very strange is that we got to a position where you've got people who aren't medical experts telling doctors to take a vaccine that they don't want to take, and they're forcing them.
01:12:30.000They were attempting to introduce vaccine mandates for medical staff.
01:12:35.000There was an incident where a doctor is talking to the health minister and the health minister is forcing him, trying to force him to take it when he doesn't want to take it.
01:16:19.000Turns up in hell, the gates of hell open, the fires, the brimstone, the devil grabs a pitchfork, sticks him in a pot of boiling tar, and as he's drowning and his face is melting off, he goes, what happened to the girls, the booze?
01:16:30.000And he goes, don't confuse tourism with immigration.
01:17:23.000One thing that really annoys me about the UK, particularly UK comedians, they all go on the stage...
01:17:31.000At the comedy club, they'll say, Americans are stupid, right?
01:17:34.000And they'll be saying Americans are stupid whilst wearing a Converse jumper, Levi jeans, night trainers and drinking a Coke on stage, right?
01:17:41.000And you go, can you understand what's going on here?
01:17:45.000But the thing that I love about America is this is the place it happens, John.
01:17:50.000This is the place, every time I come here, it doesn't matter if it's New York, if it's Texas, there's an energy about it.
01:21:48.000And then that just made me understand that America is where stand-up is created, but it's also where the best stand-up is created, where the pushback occurs, where people like Burr and yourself and all these people...
01:24:22.000Whereas the thing is with the UK, and please, I love the UK, we're always looking for approval from the ups, because that's the way the class system works.
01:24:30.000So you're waiting for approval from the people above you to then go to the next level.
01:24:34.000Whereas here, it's like, well, no, I'm going to do my podcast, I'm going to go out, and we're starting to learn that now.
01:24:40.000But it's because of America that we're taking that on board.
01:24:44.000You showed us the way, but with the internet now, All the cool, exciting stuff that's happening in the UK is people who are going around that machine that Francis is talking about.
01:24:52.000And by the way, him and I, we both used to write for these TV shows and we watched them get shit as we were on them.
01:25:08.000And what happens is now we've got to a point where some people build a thing online and then they start getting asked back onto the mainstream thing because they've got the audience and because of what they're doing.
01:25:36.000There's a lot of forces moving in one way or the other.
01:25:39.000And then there's also a bunch of people that, again, the crabs in the bucket thing.
01:25:43.000And people that don't like the way you're doing it.
01:25:46.000They want everyone to do it their way.
01:25:47.000Or they think that if you succeed in your way, somehow or another it diminishes their possibilities, their opportunities to do it their way.
01:25:56.000There's people that have been following the so-called rules their whole life and career, and they don't like when people don't.
01:26:02.000Yeah, because they've invested and they've bought into a system.
01:26:06.000And when they see you doing something different, they're going, hang on a second.
01:26:10.000But my last 10 years, I've been following the rules.
01:26:14.000What do you mean you've become successful doing something else?
01:26:24.000It's now about going out and connecting.
01:26:28.000And whereas before, a gatekeeper would look at a particular comic and just go, nah, he's too on the edge, or she's too this, or they're too that, and whatever else.
01:26:38.000A mainstream audience isn't going to like them.
01:26:40.000That doesn't matter anymore, man, because you've got your people out there.
01:26:43.000Whatever you do, however you think, there are people who are going to think and are going to enjoy your stuff immediately.
01:26:59.000Because of the fact that you know that this one incompetent person with their shitty, narrow-minded ideology is trying to force their sensibilities on your art, you get frustrated and you try to figure out workarounds.
01:27:11.000If it was open and inclusive and easy, maybe people wouldn't expand as much.
01:27:16.000Well, man, where we are now is like none of us is a person of faith, but we've started saying grace, like a secular version of grace around the table at the studio when we're having food because we're just so grateful for those people that made our life difficult.
01:27:32.000And now we're in this position where we build something and every day we just like wake up and pinch ourselves.
01:27:38.000I think, you know, gratitude is very real.
01:27:41.000It's very important and it's contagious.
01:27:43.000And, you know, that's what grace is about.
01:27:46.000Grace is saying it's about gratitude and whether or not you have to have gratitude towards an invisible deity or just for the experience that you're currently engaging in.
01:27:56.000There's still a lot of room for that positive energy and that positive thinking.
01:28:01.000And again, in that contagious mindset, it transfers to other people and then as you watch them benefit from it, it inspires you more.
01:28:11.000And I would say to anyone who is maybe listening to this and they're going through hard times and they can't see a way out, just get a piece of paper and write down all the things that you're grateful for and be honest.
01:28:24.000Just be honest about the things that you are grateful for and I guarantee you'll look at that list and you'll You'll be inspired because that is a springboard to something.
01:28:34.000And look, we all went through tough times and there were moments where we were looking at our life and thinking, holy crap, how am I going to get out of this?
01:28:46.000But I promise you, if you keep working, if you're honest, if you have integrity, if you push through and you keep pushing, things will change.
01:29:16.000There seems to be a crisis and there's a lot of young men who are very angry and they feel that things haven't gone their way and they're never going to go their way.
01:29:28.000If you're grateful, but also if you identify what you're going to do, and you just keep working, and you keep pushing, and you keep striving.
01:29:37.000Even if that, I wanted to be an actor when I started out.
01:29:40.000Then I became a teacher, and that worked, and then I went and did, and I gradually found my way.
01:29:45.000And it took years and years and years of knockbacks and grafts, but if you're prepared to do the work, you will get to where you're meant to be.
01:31:15.000And then when they get back together, it works out, right?
01:31:17.000And I just, I always thought that if we can stick together and if we can encourage a sense of, like, we can work through anything, we were gonna be successful.
01:31:25.000And we've gone through some really difficult things together, man.
01:33:37.000And that video is like on 1.2 million views, which is a huge amount for us back then, particularly.
01:33:43.000And the thing about that episode is what happened was...
01:33:46.000We are people who are – we want to hear what you have to say, and if it makes sense to us, it makes sense, however controversial it is.
01:33:54.000And if it doesn't make sense, we're going to ask you questions and challenge.
01:33:57.000So it's basically an hour, like I said, of him sitting there shitting himself and me trying to find the logical flaw in her argument, but I can't.
01:34:05.000So I'm sitting here having to admit that this woman is correct about what she's saying, and I know that that means we're going to get shat on from a great height.
01:34:22.000It's the most controversial one in ours as well.
01:34:24.000And I've always said, man, from day one when we started this, I always said, this progressive shit, the way that it's gone, this is the thing that's going to blow it up.
01:37:44.000But the problem is if your ideology says we must always be making more progress, you're going to keep going to the next thing and the next thing and the next thing.
01:37:54.000You know, a lot of the change, this is where my disagreements with conservatives come in because You know, Hayek wrote about this and why I'm not a conservative.
01:38:03.000The big tension between progressivism and conservatism is about your attitude to change, right?
01:38:08.000If you're progressive, you think change is always good, at the extreme, right?
01:38:12.000And if you're conservative, you think that change is bad, essentially.
01:38:21.000And largely it's driven by technology.
01:38:23.000So I think one of the reasons we talk about the trans issue so much now is that we have the technology to facilitate some of this transitioning in a way that we didn't have in the past.
01:38:32.000So I think that's also part of the thing that's driving it.
01:38:35.000But the reason I say that it's going to destroy this whole thing from the inside is, number one, you're trying to deny basic biology that we all know.
01:40:11.000They believe that if they get everything, if we do all of these things, we're going to reach this magical utopia where everything is free, everybody lives in perfect harmony.
01:40:23.000We are going to perfect the human race.
01:40:27.000But the problem is, humans can't be perfected.
01:40:30.000I was talking about Shakespeare earlier.
01:42:14.000My granddad, in the 1980s, he said the Soviet Union was wrong to invade Afghanistan.
01:42:19.000He said in a private conversation, one of his friends snitched on him, reported him, and he was immediately made unemployable, and people would come up to him, his friends, and go, Yeah, I really agree with you.
01:42:37.000And that's the world we're increasingly starting to live in now, where people have a public view and a public opinion.
01:42:44.000Do you know how many comedians who used to hate us on the comedy circuit for starting trigonometry now contact us and say, actually, you guys were right?
01:43:32.000And we've got laws in the UK now where, you know, we had a guy on our show who posted something about this issue, the trans issue, something that was offensive, and he had a policeman call him up and say, we need to check your thinking.
01:43:48.000A policeman in the UK calling someone up and saying, we need to check your thinking behind what you said.
01:43:54.000We had a comedian recently who was on tour, not an offensive comedian at all.
01:43:58.000An audience member reported him and he had the police investigate the joke.
01:44:12.000Because they're afraid of losing the few opportunities that they have.
01:44:15.000Because that is what happens when you work in an industry where the majority of the gatekeepers come from Our equivalent of Ivy League colleges, Oxford and Cambridge, who drink this Kool-Aid, and then the people in charge of the awards saying they support the ideology.
01:44:45.000We were talking about this kind of stuff on the podcast in like 2012 when it was primarily isolated into colleges.
01:44:52.000We were talking about how crazy some of these conversations they were having in colleges were and how they were yelling at professors, you are not making this safe for me.
01:45:11.000People graduate, and then they get jobs, and then they enforce those ideologies on the new corporation that they work for, and the corporations are scared, and so they go along with it, and they have these diversity and equity and inequality meetings, and they try to make everything perfect and balance everything out.
01:45:27.000Some of these companies are recognizing it, and one of the ways that they recognize it is when it starts hurting their bottom line, like Netflix.
01:45:34.000Like Netflix, before they released the Ricky Gervais special, they put out a memo saying, listen, if you don't agree with the kind of content that we put out, you could always quit.
01:45:43.000You don't have to agree with every individual content creator that puts something out that Netflix distributes.
01:46:56.000They take their money and funnel it into pointless, like, DIE programs, spend lots of money, or they make programs that nobody wants to watch.
01:47:05.000And then it bleeds viewers until what is left is an organization that is no longer fit for purpose.
01:47:12.000And that's what this ideology is to me.
01:47:14.000This ideology to me, and I'm saying this as someone on the left who...
01:47:19.000believes in a lot of what the left used to stand for.
01:47:23.000This is a cancer that has come from the left.
01:48:20.000And it lifted up people who were lazy and stupid, right?
01:48:24.000I think the solution, if you're asking that question, is to accept that people aren't equal and to create a society where we get the barriers out of people's way.
01:48:33.000Right, but that's a very simplistic version of a solution, like accept.
01:48:37.000Like people, they're balls deep in this ideology.
01:49:10.000We need to convince the sensible people in the middle, and we need to teach them and show them that they can be brave, they can be courageous, and they can speak their mind.
01:49:18.000And if enough people will do that, this whole thing will become irrelevant overnight.
01:49:22.000How do you do that, though, when they lose their job, if they speak out or if they just put a Billy Connolly routine on their Facebook, they get fired?
01:49:28.000You have to fight to get rid of the laws that are in place.
01:49:31.000And we have initiatives to do that in the UK. People are doing that.
01:49:35.000And you have to create a culture in which people start to speak their mind.
01:49:42.000But coming back to your point about where this goes, there is another dimension to this that we haven't talked about yet, which is what's happening in Ukraine right now.
01:50:40.000Best case scenario, which may happen, and I'm enthused, for example, by the unity of the West, I mean Germany aside, in response to what happened in Ukraine.
01:50:50.000Best case scenario is every action has an equal and opposite reaction, and perhaps the concern there should be that we don't overreact.
01:50:58.000You know, that's something also we're going to have to think about.
01:51:01.000But I think best case scenario is we gradually win over that middle that I was talking about.
01:51:06.000And we let go of some of these ideas and we get back on the right path, which is working towards what we started, which is everybody should be treated based on their individual characteristics.
01:51:17.000Identity politics, Joe, has been tried many, many times in the history of the world and it always leads to one thing.
01:51:25.000I think the one note, another note of optimism, it's like my girlfriend always says, she's American, she's a massive Bernie bro, and she always says to me, capitalism always wins.
01:51:34.000You know, eventually, people are going to have to wake up.
01:51:37.000You're not going to drive your company into the ground.
01:51:40.000Eventually, you're going to put the brakes on this thing.
01:51:43.000When you stop making money, when you see your profit margins go through the floor, when you see competitors who don't adhere to this ideology start to streak ahead, eventually you're going to have to say, look, we can't keep doing this.
01:51:59.000If something doesn't work with your show, and it means that less people are watching, less people get interested, whatever it may be, you...
01:52:09.000As a business owner, you look into it.
01:52:12.000So that's one of the things why I'm thinking, actually, capitalism will win, because eventually you're not going to bankrupt and you're not going to make yourself out of a job.
01:52:22.000Now, the extremists will do that, but the vast majority of ordinary people who have got families, who have got mortgages to pay, will go, hang on a second.
01:52:31.000That's what I'm hoping for, is that we come to our senses, a collective coming to our senses.
01:52:37.000The problem is, whenever we have this conversation, and in the West this is a very common thing, people underestimate the power of ideology.
01:52:49.000Ideology is a very powerful tool, and one of the things that's happening in the West is...
01:52:55.000These institutions are being captured, as you mentioned.
01:52:57.000And once you've got the laws on the books, it becomes very hard to get them back off once you start to implement some of these concepts.
01:53:04.000So we're going to have to work very hard to challenge this stuff in a healthy way.
01:53:11.000And like I said, I think we're doing it right now.
01:53:14.000I think we're having the conversations you are, we are.
01:53:17.000We see initiatives in the UK which are aimed at preventing this sort of censorship, people being cancelled, people losing jobs for things they've said.
01:53:26.000The Free Speech Union does some good work.
01:53:31.000And I wrote an immigrant's love letter to the West, Joe, because I love particularly the United States, Britain, and I'm deeply concerned that I'm seeing some of the patterns that I saw in my life and in my grandparents' lives in the Soviet Union.
01:54:17.000We've got to understand that, you know, the beauty of the West is we are going to have different views and different ideas about things, but we can't destroy our own civilization from the inside.
01:54:26.000We can't undermine the very values that built this civilization.
01:54:31.000And freedom, we talked about freedom here in Austin, it's such a big part of it.
01:54:35.000You can't make the technological and scientific progress that we've made without scientists being free to pursue science.
01:54:42.000And if we can't agree with what a woman is, Biological fact.
01:54:47.000We're eating our civilization from the inside.
01:54:51.000We've got to push those extremists to where they belong, and we've got to concentrate on the sensible middle of people who want to have a reasonable conversation about these issues.
01:55:00.000And you know, as we travel around America, we talked about how much we love it.
01:56:09.000You may be able to reduce it, but you're never going to be able to eradicate it completely.
01:56:14.000There will always be evil people, murderers, rapists.
01:56:18.000Unfortunately, that is part of the human condition.
01:56:20.000Now, you can put steps in place to minimize it and all the rest of it, but you're never going to stop that.
01:56:28.000There's always going to be that element of people.
01:56:31.000I think part of the problem is, and Constantine and I talk about this a lot, a lot of people in the US and the UK and all around the Western world have got what I call Western privilege.
01:56:43.000You grew up in a country that is comparatively safe, where you don't worry about things like electricity, where you don't worry where your next meal is coming from, Where the water is clean.
01:56:55.000All these things you take for granted.
01:56:58.000That ain't normal in the rest of the world.
01:57:00.000In Venezuela at the moment, I was talking to my cousin and I said to him, Johan, how are you doing?
01:57:06.000And he went to me, well, I mean, things are tough, Francis.
01:57:27.000So one of my friends, Henry, came over from Venezuela to see my friends and particularly my family because my parents have known Henry since he grew up.
01:57:56.000And that's the problem, where you live in a society where people have become used to whispering.
01:58:03.000And that's what I'm seeing in the UK, where people are afraid to say what they think and they feel, where if you say something out loud, you're constantly looking over your shoulder because you're worried that somehow that's going to reduce your Your opportunities, your career, it might isolate you from friends.
01:58:19.000We can't live in a society where we whisper.
01:58:23.000That is not the West, and that's not a free society.
01:58:26.000Joe, and I'll tell you a couple of quick stories about the power of ideology.
01:58:30.000My grandmother, who was born in a gulag, right, when they released people from these camps, you were not allowed to live within, I think, 100 miles of any of the big cities in the Soviet Union at the time.
01:58:42.000You had to live in a small town in Siberia somewhere.
01:58:46.000And in these towns, the only people that lived there because they were so remote were the people who were former prisoners of the camps and the people who were former guards in the camps, right?
01:58:55.000And when Stalin died in 1953, Khrushchev, who took over from him, exposed his great crimes and he said, this wasn't real communism, blah, blah, blah.
01:59:06.000And these people who lived together, the guards and the prisoners, right?
01:59:10.000My grandmother's family, on their very landing in their apartment block, opposite them was a guy who used to be a guard in the camps.
01:59:17.000And when these great crimes of Stalin were exposed...
01:59:22.000Many of these men shot themselves because they thought they were doing the right thing.
01:59:27.000They thought they were acting correctly by beating and torturing and imprisoning these people.
02:00:03.000When you're smashing people's businesses up, you're not a good person.
02:00:07.000And ideology is what allows people to feel good while they attack people, while they send them death threats, while they send them rape threats.
02:00:13.000Do you know how Stalin, do you know how the Soviet Union got a nuclear weapon?
02:00:47.000Because scientists who were working on the Manhattan Project, who had communist sympathies, they had ideology, they gave all of the blueprints and everything to Stalin, to the Soviets.
02:01:01.000This regime that had killed millions of its own people, because they felt justified by their ideology, they gave the West's greatest enemy in that time a nuclear weapon.
02:01:13.000That's how hard they believed in stuff.
02:01:33.000Someone who thinks they've got the right ideas and therefore you're entitled to commit violence against people or to threaten people or to cancel people and to end their ability to make a living.
02:01:43.000If you're doing that, you're not a good person.
02:01:50.000One of my friends who's sadly since passed away, and I'm making the details very obfuscating because I don't want people to know who this person was.
02:03:47.000It's just a different way of silencing people and getting them to shut up.
02:03:52.000And if they don't shut up, you're going to take everything from them.
02:03:55.000But what's really interesting in it isn't like the authoritarian, like in Venezuela, people know the rules.
02:04:03.000They do it because they're being kind and respectful and they're manipulating language and it's insidious and it's in our culture where now we can't define what a woman is.
02:04:15.000You ask somebody what a woman is and if on the liberal left they'll have a fucking meltdown.
02:06:06.000Well, because if you accept this one thing, this one thing which is very strange, right?
02:06:12.000This one thing that not only can you be a biological male with a penis, but you're a woman and you have sex with women and you make that woman pregnant.
02:06:24.000If that woman identifies as a male, that's a pregnant male.
02:07:26.000Do you think it signals a pivotal chapter in this whole thing that this is where, and you were saying this, that this is probably what's going to force it to implode.
02:07:34.000And do you think that, do you find an encouragement in the fact that out of the people that are completely free, And the word completely is probably the wrong word.
02:07:45.000But out of the people that do commentary on the internet, where they don't have a network that they have to answer to, they don't have producers that they have to answer to, and executives that have this woke ideology as their center point,
02:08:00.000you're seeing far more of How people excel and advance and succeed in rational, objective commentary?
02:09:00.000And that being the case, you know, we all say that the internet is the great hope for us to be able to debate and share ideas.
02:09:07.000But what's happening, because these companies are coming under a tremendous amount of pressure from governments in order to, you know, to toe the line.
02:10:49.000And you just think to yourself, How arrogant are you that you think you're so sure of your own opinion that hundreds of years down the line people are going to look at you and think you are the new MLK? How arrogant is it?
02:11:05.000And it's so beautiful as well because they say you're on the wrong side of history and immediately...
02:11:12.000Your opinion doesn't matter anymore because you're part of the problem.
02:11:15.000And if you're part of the problem, we don't have to engage with you.
02:11:19.000And it's something that I said in 2020 when the whole world went nuts, when you had the BLM marches and they were saying things like abolish capitalism, defund the police.
02:11:28.000And I had friends who got on board with this and I saw what happened in Venezuela.
02:11:32.000And I said to them, be very, very careful.
02:11:36.000You don't understand the forces that you are messing with.
02:11:45.000I saw, like, my cousin had to flee for his life.
02:11:48.000He's a journalist because if you criticize the government, my grandfather was murdered when I was 31. His murder was never investigated, even though we know who did it, because investigating crimes is a sign of right-wing oppression.
02:12:45.000And in the Soviet Union, the groups that were, you know, the privileged were the aristocrats and whatever.
02:12:53.000And the underprivileged were the working people.
02:12:56.000The ideology of Marxism is based on class.
02:12:59.000What we're talking about here is a new form of it, which is Marxism and ideology based on ethnicity, identity, sexuality.
02:13:08.000And it's the same thing, just being applied in a different way, right?
02:13:12.000There's this privileged people and underprivileged people, and we must flip the thing, right?
02:13:16.000That's why it worries me because I do think, you know, obviously Western societies, like every other societies, have racism in them, have sexism, have discrimination.
02:13:48.000So, you know, Francis and I, you know, we had the conversation about comedy, but the truth is the reason we do what we do is we're both people who've come from different societies who are deeply, deeply concerned about what's happening in the West.
02:16:01.000Question Time, which is our biggest...
02:16:04.000It's a debate show where they get notable people on to debate.
02:16:08.000Constantine's been on it, and they get on to debate various things.
02:16:11.000We had Robert Winston, Sir Robert Winston, one of the UK's most eminent biologists, and they were talking about this very issue.
02:16:20.000And they asked him what his opinion was, and he went, your sex is quite literally coded into your cells, into the very fabric of your DNA. The host of the program turned around and looked at him and went, some people may disagree with that.
02:16:40.000You've got a man who is eminent, who is one of the foremost biologists, explaining something that we all know is true, and that's your rebuttal?
02:16:50.000Have you seen the movement where they're trying to get archaeologists to stop gendering corpses?
02:16:56.000And they find skeletons from a thousand years ago?
02:16:59.000Because we don't know what identity, what sexual identity they had.
02:17:03.000Maybe we should ask them their fucking pronouns, man.
02:17:28.000Try going into an inclusive space if you're you or me or Francis.
02:17:31.000You suddenly find you're quite excluded in there, right?
02:17:34.000Safety doesn't mean what safety used to mean.
02:17:36.000We had an MP, a member of parliament, a member of the most prestigious debating chamber in the world, say that we shouldn't fetishize debate.
02:22:54.000But all of a sudden, if you're having to live this life where there's tripwires around you, and if you say the wrong thing, then suddenly all these horrible things can happen and you can be exposed for these things that you know you're not.
02:23:21.000But I think what we're seeing is a population of people who are being gaslit, who are told that they're racist, sexist, they have their internalized homophobia, all of this kind of stuff.
02:23:33.000When the reality is, and I really believe this, Most people are honest, decent, and here's the thing that I find really upsetting, is people are starting to believe that they're problematic,
02:24:17.000Yeah, I didn't think of it and we improve and we move forward and by doing this We're just drilling down and our opinions aren't being challenged and we're not gonna be able to move society forward What's fascinating is that those kind of conversations where you can say to someone I think your opinions wrong and they go ah you got a point That's only happening on the internet,
02:24:38.000You're not seeing that on any of these major news broadcasts any of these opinion shows you're just not seeing that it's just echo chamber and A hundred percent.
02:24:48.000And the thing is, as well, is even on the internet, man, like, we all understand we're on YouTube, right?
02:24:53.000If this was the reverse and we were interviewing you, there's certain things that can't be said on YouTube.
02:24:59.000There's certain things that can't be questioned, which comes back to the point we didn't really get into, which is the big tech censorship.
02:25:19.000I don't think we're ever going to get away from it because we're human beings, right?
02:25:21.000But it's that left versus right thing that is the problem, in my opinion.
02:25:25.000That's how you get the echo chambers in the first place.
02:25:27.000But the problem is, you know, what happened with the Hunter Biden story?
02:25:35.000I woke up that day and I saw what had happened and I said to the guys, this is one of the biggest stories and this is one of the worst things that I've ever seen.
02:25:43.000Because once you start fucking with the electoral process like that, once you start making up bullshit like this is Russian disinformation and we later learn that it's true, I don't care that it's Biden or that it's Trump.
02:26:03.000But that was the problem with Trump, is that he was so problematic to people on the left, they were willing to break the rules in order to hamper him and to hamper his success, in order to empower the Biden team.
02:26:15.000They wanted to withhold information that they thought would be a problem.
02:26:53.000We're living through a technological revolution.
02:26:56.000The last time we saw something like this was the printing press.
02:26:58.000But it's far more impressive because it's something that's beyond anything that's ever existed before.
02:27:06.000Whereas these people who went, many of them, straight from college, right into positions in these companies and then right into positions of power in these companies, Are literally in charge of the narrative of the civilized world.
02:27:20.000They don't have real life experience in many cases.
02:27:23.000A lot of these people in high positions, like the guy who's the CEO of Google, he's in his fucking 30s, man.
02:28:35.000But we've got to understand that we cannot have these big tech platforms messing around with this structure that is built to allow people to express their opinion democratically.
02:28:47.000Because once you undermine that, you're going down a very dark path.
02:28:51.000Also, the tech platforms are almost entirely left-wing.
02:30:11.000And then he gave this example of this musical comedian who was doing Holocaust-denying material, right, and got kicked off all the platforms, right?
02:30:22.000Who cares if this nutbag woman got kicked off all the platforms for Holocaust-denying comedy material?
02:30:28.000But what I didn't understand is you've got to stand up for the people who you disagree with, who you think are out there, wackos or whatever else.
02:30:38.000Because here's the thing, like we said before, the Overton window will continue to narrow and eventually it will be you.
02:30:46.000Can we explain the Overton window to people?
02:32:02.000Then suddenly she gets investigated by the police.
02:32:05.000We need to wake up and realise that if you start using these weapons against your enemies, it won't be long before they wake up and they're going to use them against you.
02:32:16.000And once that happens, we're going to be in a very dangerous place in society.
02:32:21.000This is where the point you made about the age thing really matters because remember we talked about the contract that I turned down?
02:32:27.000When I went on TV there was a woman who we were debating this issue and she was unpleasant.
02:32:34.000She shushed me and all sorts of shit happened.
02:32:37.000Anyway, I met her years later because we were supposed to hate each other and we did a bunch of TV together and actually she's a nice girl.
02:33:57.000My hope is that the popularity of these kinds of conversations, like your show and my show and a lot of other shows like it, That this is sort of an unexpected twist in the narrative that people didn't see coming.
02:34:12.000And that the freedom that we enjoy before the Overton window slams shut on us, it does give us the possibility to spread this idea and let people recognize that this is a genuine, real problem.
02:34:25.000That although it might make you feel better to deny it, it might make you feel better to go along with it at work or at school.
02:34:32.000It ultimately will lead to a far more suppressive environment than the one you're experiencing right now.
02:35:56.000And he was telling us that when he was working on TV, and he didn't want to work on TV anymore because in the last two years, people started basically, he was just a token there.
02:36:09.000They were just looking at him as his race.
02:36:12.000And they'd be like, oh, well, you know, BLM happened.
02:36:18.000The guy's from a Sikh, but what the fuck does he have to do?
02:36:20.000And so when he came to us, he was like, man, this is such a relief to be working in a place where we don't care.
02:36:27.000We were looking for someone to make the thumbnails for our YouTube videos, so we put the word out, and we got a bunch of responses, and we picked the best one, right?
02:36:35.000We picked the best one, been working for him for a while, and then he goes, by the way, I'm trans.
02:36:39.000And we're like, by the way, we don't give a shit.
02:38:56.000This comes from the internet where we see other people as an avatar.
02:39:01.000Richard Grannon on our show talked about this.
02:39:03.000Where we've spent so much time on social media, we just see other people as avatars, and that we can't have a discussion, we have to destroy, we have to win, we have to humiliate them, we have to be the one who wins in the discussion.
02:39:17.000Whatever happened to just agree to disagree?
02:39:20.000And just accept that people see the world differently.
02:40:09.000We're all, take something from everyone.
02:40:12.000Some people are right, and some people are left, I would argue.
02:40:15.000We just spent a couple of days with somebody, like I said, we've got a friend, I've got a friend who's on the Green Party side of things.
02:40:21.000We just spent a couple of days in D.C. with Sebastian Gorka, who's like a Trump attack dog, you know, and a bunch of his Christian conservative friends.
02:40:30.000I've never had a better time in my life.
02:40:41.000I don't have to agree with them on everything, right?
02:40:43.000Don't you think that this is a very unique time, though, that I'm exposed to the way you think in a way that I would never be exposed to this 50, 60 years ago?
02:40:50.000That's why when people complain about the internet, I'm like, there's a lot to complain about.
02:41:21.000Yeah, we have allowed it to run amok in some ways, but we've also opened the discussion that it has run amok in a way that never existed before.
02:41:29.000And this is what might be our water for the flames.
02:41:34.000And here's the thing, when we were spending time with Seb, we started talking, they were on the right Christian conservative, but I said, look, one of the real problems I have with America is your lack of socialized healthcare.
02:41:48.000And they put forward their argument, but then a lot of them disagreed with each other and they started to have a debate about it and go, look, and then one of them went, look, it's obvious the system isn't working.
02:41:58.000Another one went, I've got this friend who's really sick and they can't get the treatment.
02:42:16.000So even on the right, you're still going to have things on the left.
02:42:19.000Well, this is what happens, like you say, Joe, is when you take your foot off people's throat and when you stop making them feel that they're evil for having an opinion and you just listen and hear and discuss, that's when you find out human beings are actually quite complicated.
02:42:35.000And you can change people's minds sometimes just by listening to them.
02:42:40.000And a lot of times the opinions that they have, they've taken out of comfort.
02:42:44.000They've taken these opinions because it's easier to subscribe to a predetermined pattern of ideas and opinions than it is to form your own.
02:42:51.000If there's a very clear-cut ideology that you can just subscribe to and all of a sudden that makes you a good person or accepted in your community, it's very easy to do that.
02:43:00.000And that's where you get the people that whisper.
02:43:44.000The thing about weed being illegal is when we are in places where we're actually allowed to smoke it, it's so much better because you're not worried and because you can pick what you want and stuff like that.
02:44:17.000This is one thing that I do have hope for is the implementation and adoption of psychedelics.
02:44:24.000I think if there's anything that's going to change people's minds, that's going to be one of the things because it's going to change your whole understanding of what is rigid and what structures exist and why they exist and why you think the way you think and it'll make you question yourself in a way that I don't think anything else happens.
02:45:38.000Anyway, so we put her into this trance, took her through the process, and then we said, open your eyes, and she opened her eyes and said, holy shit!
02:45:46.000And she was speaking like this guy, right?
02:45:49.000So when I was doing this exercise with me being the one, I thought, you know what, I want to do this with the universe.
02:45:56.000I want to feel what it's like to be the universe.
02:46:00.000So the guys put me in this deep trance, take off your identity, try it on.
02:46:04.000And when I opened my eyes, I just felt connected to everything, to every human being on the planet.
02:46:11.000And you know how the universe is expanding?
02:46:27.000And I know that people who take various psychedelics and stuff like that sometimes have a similar experience of deep connection with other people through this thing.
02:46:35.000And that's why I'm not someone who's...
02:46:37.000I don't believe in God, but I know that we're all connected in some way as humans.
02:46:56.000Do I believe that everything that man has written about religion, all the religious texts or the inaccurate interpretation of the will of God?
02:47:06.000Because I think there's too much that's cultural in that.
02:47:09.000There's too much that it's like a sign of the times, the laws and the rules of the land.
02:47:14.000So it's clearly at the hand of man all over everything.
02:47:17.000But like, why did they write it in the first place?
02:47:19.000Like, what were they feeling and experiencing that they wanted to lay down ground rules and talk about some connection with the Almighty?
02:47:26.000And maybe there is a thing and just we don't know what the fuck it is, you know?
02:47:31.000We're stuck in this strange sort of very limited existence for a very short amount of time to figure things out.
02:47:39.000And most of the time you're alive, you're trying to manage your anxiety.
02:47:43.000You're trying to figure your way through this maze of civilization and culture and conversations and relationships and friendships and business and bills and mortgages and all that shit.
02:47:52.000And in the meanwhile, you're a part of this massive super organism that is but a speck.
02:47:58.000In the atom of another being that is far more infinitely, not just impossible in size to consider, but that's a part of something that's far more impossible than that.
02:48:13.000So much of what we see in fractals We like to think that the universe is so vast and so amazing that that's it.
02:48:21.000What if the universe, what if this idea of the infinity of the universe is like it's just a part of a cell that's a part of something far greater and far larger?
02:48:33.000It's so fucking short that most of the time you're just trying to figure out what's going on and then it's too late and then it's gone.
02:48:39.000And you hope that you've transferred some of your wonder and some of the information you've accumulated during your lifetime to the next group that's going to look at it and they're going to have a little bit more knowledge.
02:48:49.000They're going to take it to a little bit better place and hopefully they're not going to blow themselves up before they work their way through many of the problems we've already worked our way through.
02:48:58.000When you were talking earlier about this is one of the greatest times ever to be alive, like Pinker gets criticized all the time for his conclusions, but his work is pretty clear.
02:49:06.000What he's talking about is if you go back in time and you look at all the violent crime and the murder and the rape and just the chaos of life, it's way better now than it's ever been before.
02:49:19.000And I think out of all the bad things that the internet has done, one of the good things is I genuinely think it's made a percentage of people way nicer.
02:50:14.000Because they say that so many people have attached it to the modern idea of what a vengeful god is based on their interpretation of the Bible.
02:50:23.000Yeah, I go deeper than that, to be honest, because if you look at how gods have been used throughout history before monotheistic religions, before religions that had one god, god was always a way to explain things that human beings couldn't explain scientifically at the time that they were living in,
02:50:39.000The god of rain, the god of lightning, the god of fire, the god of war.
02:50:44.000So, to me, I worry about using that word not because I'm scared or whatever.
02:50:48.000It's because I don't think it accurately describes what I think exists.
02:50:53.000And what I mean by this thing above us all is not some kind of being.
02:50:58.000It's the deep connection that all human beings at the end of the day have with each other.
02:51:05.000Sorry, Francis, just to finish this point.
02:51:07.000You can meet somebody who's a completely different race, doesn't speak the language, doesn't do anything, and with just the basic movement of your meet, you can connect with that person quite at a deep level.
02:51:53.000You know, Jordan Peterson had a very interesting take on this, and I'm going to butcher it, because I don't remember it totally, but I think his take was, like someone was talking to him about whether or not he believed in the God of the Bible, whether or not he believed in Jesus Christ, and I think his take was that if you live your life as if it's real,
02:52:20.000And there's a lot of people that I'm very good friends with that are absolutely atheists.
02:52:23.000And they have this very fatalistic view of this life that it's here and it's gone, and you're never going to figure it out, and you're conscious because you're suiting a purpose.
02:52:32.000You're part of this biological machine.
02:52:35.000You're part of the food chain and your consciousness enables you to continue to innovate and continue to create and contribute to this thing that allows people to breed out of control and create technology that literally can change the surface of the earth.
02:52:52.000What we're doing is very, very strange.
02:52:55.000We're operating together as a gigantic superorganism that's making technology.
02:53:21.000And so every moment that I live, especially now when I have something that I love doing, like trigonometry, and my son is born, I want to be present.
02:53:30.000That's why we say the grace at the beginning of the meal.
02:53:32.000I want to be present for every moment because I want to make the most of it because I don't believe that there's another time this is coming around.
02:54:20.000They cannot process the world in that way and be fulfilled because their fear of death or because of something else just doesn't allow them to experience life fully unless they believe there's another world.
02:54:38.000You know, when I talk about the vastness of the universe being a part of an atom that's in another being like, That's what infinity is.
02:54:44.000I don't think we could wrap our puny little brains around it.
02:54:47.000And if there's some sort of a force, some sort of a thing, but it's not, you know, we want to, you know, the thing that we do with cartoons.
02:54:57.000What's that phrase when we humanize cartoons?
02:55:04.000I think we want to do that with the living entity of the energy of the universe, which is so crazy to think that it's a thing, like that it's a god, a thing.
02:55:14.000It might just be a force, like fire causes trees to burn.
02:55:19.000There might be a force that creates things, and it might We're so limited in our understanding of what language is and what thoughts are and trying to express ourselves.
02:55:30.000We're so burdened by the weakness of the chimp structure of our bodies that we're like some sort of hybrid between an animal and an enlightened being.
02:55:38.000And what if it's past all that and it is the very source Of everything and it brings things to it in a very messy way and that's what we're doing We're moving towards this source of ultimate love in the universe in a very very messy way by figuring it out through itself But here's the thing Joe and this is maybe this is part of the beauty of life Maybe we just can't figure it out because we're simply not capable Like an ant doesn't know you're hovering your hand over it.
02:56:47.000If we go back to early man, to early hominids, and you look at us, we're a very different thing that interfaces with the world in a very different way.
02:56:55.000And that's not going to end right here.
02:58:30.000I think once it actually can make decisions and become sentient and it has logic and no emotions, and it can decide that it wants to prosper.
02:58:38.000Now, there's got to be a reason why it prospers and procreates, right?
02:58:41.000If they don't have biological reasons, like, why would the AI do anything?
02:59:09.000We think of it as being like a dumb artificial intelligence, like an artificial intelligence that we created to mimic us.
02:59:15.000But we're connected to emotions and our tribalism and all the chaos that we've already expected out of Earth because that's all we've ever known.
02:59:24.000We expect these patterns will continue.
02:59:26.000It will have zero expectations of how to live and exist.
02:59:30.000But if we Make something that is a life, that's way fucking smarter than us.
02:59:38.000It's not gonna let us blow everything up.
02:59:40.000It's not gonna, it's gonna put a stop to it.
03:00:39.000And you go into these games, and you get to like, you're on a pirate ship, and you're fighting skeletons, and they're slashing at you with swords, and when they hit you, you feel it.
03:00:49.000You feel like haptic feedback, and it's wild.
03:00:51.000It's all VR. And I'm watching this as a kid who grew up with Pong.
03:00:55.000I remember when Pong came around, we were like, this is crazy.
03:01:14.000And it's kind of crude in that you know it's not real.
03:01:18.000But there's one called, I think it's called Deadwood Mansion, is that what it's called?
03:01:22.000Where you're in a fucking haunted house and zombies are running at you and you're gunning down the zombies and when you're shooting them they splatter and they hit you, you see red and red splatters.
03:01:39.000This is Pong to what we're going to feel when it can interface with some sort of a neural link type system and give you an artificial experience.
03:02:02.000We are going to invent forms of weapons using the artificial intelligence way before we invent something that is capable of the type of intelligence you're talking about.
03:02:39.000Our ability to destroy the planet is only going to get greater.
03:02:42.000It's going to take a smaller mistake to destroy the planet as technology gets more sophisticated.
03:02:48.000So you feel it's just human nature that if we have control of artificial intelligence, the first thing it's going to do is devise weapons of insane destruction.
03:02:56.000We are going to devise the weapons using artificial intelligence before there is any overarching artificial intelligence that could take care of us.
03:03:04.000So you're saying the kind of artificial intelligence that's already available, not like general artificial intelligence, which is what they think of as like a sentient being.
03:03:19.000So you're saying that this artificial intelligence that's in place right now, that they already use for a lot of things, is going to be used and make weapons.
03:03:32.000And if we don't, artificial general intelligence is what I'm talking about.
03:03:36.000Oh, if we don't destroy ourselves, I'm just convinced we are, that's all.
03:03:40.000We may, you're right, we've dropped bombs.
03:03:43.000I mean, whenever anybody talks about anything that anyone's done anywhere in the world, when they talk about horrific things, I always go, dude, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that is insane.
03:03:53.000That was a completely untargeted city in the sense that there's not like there's an army there and they're shooting at us.
03:04:04.000The kind of death and destruction that must have happened on those days to be a person who's an innocent person living on this regime in this city.
03:04:13.000I know that the consequences for something that you've done nothing to.
03:04:39.000In comparison to the firebombings, in comparison to what the Germans were doing in the Soviet Union.
03:04:44.000I understand, but there's a thing about the instantaneous nature of those bombs that was uniquely terrifying, which is why we haven't used them since.
03:05:37.000And if some of those people think that they have a chance of survival, that this is a personal thing against the leader, what is their rational...
03:05:49.000What is their rationale for pressing that button down the line?
03:06:05.000Why would you push that button if you felt there was any chance of survival at all?
03:06:09.000That is one of the biggest fucking sources of anxiety for people is the idea that we're living in this conflict that we have zero control over that might lead to a global thermonuclear war at any moment in time.
03:06:22.000The wrong buttons might get pressed and the wrong people might get mad or the wrong military decisions might get made and someone just tries to fucking do something wild.
03:06:33.000We didn't really think that that was a possibility until this Ukraine invasion.
03:06:38.000I think the Ukraine invasion opened up a lot of people's eyes because there's so many people from Ukraine that have relatives in Russia and vice versa.
03:06:45.000It's not like you might be at war with your own people, people that you are literally related to.
03:06:57.000The idea is wild and the idea that the country has such extraordinary control over the narrative of what the people know about and hear about.
03:07:06.000Well, 80% of Russians get their news from TV and the message is very consistent and very clear.
03:08:22.000And when you hear the government bragging about how much money they're sending over to Ukraine to help fight the Russians, it's like, maybe we should shut the fuck up all the time.
03:08:31.000Remember that one you might want to keep under your hat.
03:08:34.000Yeah, oh, you mean in terms of talking about it publicly?
03:08:37.000I mean, I'm joking, but I'm saying, like, the idea that we're essentially paying for this war.
03:09:06.000And again, I'm not saying I'm against this, but I'm saying at what point would someone who knows we're funding that consider us at war with them?
03:09:14.000They already consider us at war with them.
03:09:16.000But I mean, enough that an attack would be warranted.
03:09:19.000Like, that someone would do something.
03:10:14.000If you think about all the different times we've done this, all throughout history, to aid armies and fund them and give them weapons, at what point in time would someone who opposes those people feel like we're at war with them?
03:10:41.000I'm saying that the argument, not the perception of the Russian people, the argument that is being made is that we are, you know, it's siege mentality.
03:10:57.000Now, if you're talking about kinetic war, right, then I think the only way that becomes an issue is if the United States gets directly, or NATO gets directly militarily involved.
03:11:09.000Like you start shooting down Russian planes or shooting Russian tanks.
03:11:14.000But apart from that, I don't see it because you talk about vulnerability.
03:11:17.000America is the least vulnerable country in the world.
03:11:44.000But here's the thing, people are terrified in the UK because we've bought into this idea that the West has eliminated war.
03:11:54.000You know, we have a few pockets of things going on, but we're safe and we don't have to concern ourselves with that about having another country, you know, being aggressive and invading and whatever else.
03:12:05.000So we've bought into that and we felt really safe, so safe, that we've eliminated it from our minds.
03:12:12.000And this has been an incredibly sharp wake-up call.
03:12:15.000This has been a slap to the face around the West.
03:12:18.000And what it's saying is, you ain't as safe as you think you are.
03:12:39.000He talks about two visions of the world, right?
03:12:43.000The constrained, what he calls the constrained vision and the unconstrained vision.
03:12:47.000And the constrained vision says that human beings are flawed, human beings have certain predispositions, human beings aren't rational, human beings behave the way they behave, and the best way to understand how they are likely to behave in the future is to look at how they behave now and how they've always behaved,
03:13:05.000And the unconstrained vision is essentially progressivism.
03:13:08.000It's the belief that this can be changed fundamentally.
03:13:12.000It's the belief that if you do enough social engineering, you're going to get to a position where people are going to stop being the way that they are and we're going to build new people.
03:13:25.000This is what people said in the Soviet Union, homo sovieticus, right?
03:13:28.000A new type of human being can be created.
03:13:32.000And we view the world now through that vision, through the progressive vision, the idea that there would never be war, the idea that people would never want to attack us, the idea that, you know, when I went to university to study politics, the thing that was doing the rounds at the time was, they called it the golden arches theory of international conflict.
03:13:50.000Which was that no two countries with McDonald's had ever gone to war.
03:14:28.000People act for all sorts of irrational reasons that don't necessarily correspond to the reality.
03:14:32.000And I think we also have to take into consideration that when you're talking about Russia, when you're talking about the population, they're not as exposed to information, to the free flow of information as we are in America.
03:14:42.000There's a lot of people that might have these notions in their head based on what they've seen on television.
03:14:48.000They might buy it hook, line, and sinker.
03:15:22.000And they move down to New York and act the way they think you're supposed to act when they get here.
03:15:26.000You know what I love, actually, is how people, like you said, who are really celebratory about their virtue or whatever else, a lot of the time, when they get home, they're really dreadful people.
03:15:40.000A lot of times, the people they work with, they're dreadful people, too.
03:17:52.000Like, his ability to express himself was so powerful, so compelling, so interesting, and his belief, you know, in what he was saying.
03:18:00.000And then it was about God, and then later it just became about comedy, you know?
03:18:04.000But it's really kind of the same energy.
03:18:06.000Man, that story about Kinnison's death in the Comedy Store documentary is so powerful where he looks up into the sky and goes, I'm not ready.
03:25:32.000100% don't know what he did, but I do know that the family doctor, that guy who went to jail for sedating him, said that he was chemically castrated.
03:25:41.000That his father had chemically castrated him in order to keep him in a falsetto voice.
03:28:03.000If you were an evil person, and I'm not saying that this is what happened, but if you were an evil person and you said, I need to keep that voice like that forever, that would be the way you would do it.
03:28:13.000But here's the thing with Jackson as well.
03:28:16.000It wasn't just his talent and his voice, Joe.
03:28:19.000It was his ability to connect with the song.
03:28:21.000Do you remember when he did that rendition of Who's Loving You?
03:28:27.000However old he was, 10 years old, he shouldn't be able to sing with that much emotion, that much connection.
03:28:35.000Now, maybe it's because he was a kind of astral level performer, but you did really feel that he knew that what he was talking about, there was a soul and resonance to his voice, which it wasn't just his voice.
03:28:52.000Well, I think you have to look at him in the context of his whole family was entertainers, and all of his older brothers were entertainers.
03:29:00.000And so as the youngest, he's got to catch up, right?
03:29:03.000And so he's in this incredible competition scenario with professional entertainers that are 10, 15 years older than him.
03:29:11.000Like, how much older were his brothers than him?
03:30:00.000I think James Brown might have been on one of his tours with James Brown.
03:30:03.000So he sort of like James Brown dancing incorporated that.
03:30:07.000Until what you had was the fusion of the perfect performer.
03:30:11.000Because you've got to remember, this kid never went to school.
03:30:14.000He never experienced school or hardly any of it.
03:30:17.000This was a kid who was taken and the only thing...
03:30:22.000What they did with him is transform him into the greatest musical performer of all time, modern day.
03:30:28.000It's very similar to Tyson's journey, if you think about it, Mike Tyson.
03:30:32.000Mike Tyson was nearly in school, was never really in school.
03:30:35.000He got taken over, he got taken by Customato and they trained him to the point when he was still youth, right the way to become heavyweight champion of the world at 18. Those are people, and you hear, Tyson explained it on this very podcast.
03:30:49.000I think he was 20. He was 20 when he won the world title.
03:32:50.000Like when he knocked out Larry Holmes, even though Larry Holmes was like, I think he was 36 at the time, that's still Larry fucking Holmes.
03:32:57.000He knocked out Michael fucking Spinks, okay?
03:33:35.000He was one of the greatest of all time, if not the greatest heavyweight of all time.
03:33:38.000In my era, my time when I was a young man and I was watching boxing and he was the heavyweight champion, it was the most exciting moment in all of sports.
03:33:46.000Because when he would fight, everybody would grab the cushions of the couch and be like, fuck!
03:33:51.000Because he was just smashing everybody.
03:33:53.000But I remember when Tyson was fighting, and this was in the 80s, and I was in primary school.
03:33:58.000I have memories of us sitting down and talking about who would win the Tyson fight.
03:34:03.000And this is kids who are about eight years old in a playground.
03:35:34.000I mean, if people want to go for it, make a more exciting fight because they want a bonus, like performance of the night, maybe that will incentivize people to do that.
03:35:55.000A lot of people were upset that Israel Adesanya's fight with Jared Kananir wasn't the most exciting fight.
03:36:01.000Because that's how you have to fight Jared Cannoneer.
03:36:04.000If you want to win, that's how you have to fight.
03:36:08.000This idea that everybody should make everything exciting and just go in there guns blazing against a guy in Jared Cannoneer who had knockouts at heavyweight And light heavyweight and middleweight.
03:36:41.000He's gonna be able to hold that pace with you for five rounds and he did.
03:36:44.000So you have to fight that way because if you don't fight that way, he clips you and then you're fucked because you opened doors, you left mistakes, you left openings that shouldn't have been there and wouldn't have been there if you were fighting cautiously.
03:36:58.000Because you've got to know when you can attack and know when you can't.
03:37:00.000And when you're better, like striking-wise in particular, like a guy like Stylebender, when you're better, you impose exactly the amount that you need to in that moment right there.
03:37:11.000And if you push further, you might hurt the guy, but he might hurt you.
03:37:14.000But if you stay at this one range where you know you're completely in control, you can basically just run it.
03:37:30.000And they can choose to make big moves at him in which time he'll counter, like Robert Whittaker did in the first fight, or you could do the approach that Robert Whittaker took in the second fight, more grappling-heavy and more cautious in the way he rushes in.
03:37:42.000But you only can fight the way you're supposed to fight in that moment.
03:40:14.000Do you think if we turn our attention to boxing very quickly, that surely must mean Floyd is the greatest of all time?
03:40:21.000I believe that Floyd Mayweather is, if he's not the greatest boxer in terms of talent of all time, you could say that he's the greatest fighter of all time.
03:40:30.000He's definitely the greatest in terms of figuring out how to make money.
03:40:39.000If you go and look at all the other greats, the Sugar Ray Robinson and, you know, the Marvin Haglers and Tommy Hearns, Roberto Duran, Julio Cesar Chavez, early career Ali.
03:40:51.000Like Henry Cooper dropped him and had him badly hurt.
03:43:01.000Yeah, it was a crazy war, but Henry Cooper legitimately clipped Muhammad Ali and dropped him and had him really hurt.
03:43:10.000You see, that's part of the problem with Ali, is that because so much of his career was in this kind of black and white, you know, we can't truly remember him.
03:43:21.000Because the content will never be as good as Floyd Mayweather.
03:45:43.000Nick has had some work done to try to fix that.
03:45:46.000Joe, I'm going to ask you this question because we're starting to see this getting talked about more and more, and especially in the mainstream press, CTE, particularly with contact sports.
03:45:56.000They're talking in soccer about eliminating it from certain age groups and blah, blah, blah.
03:46:47.000And then when you have sports like mixed martial arts, where the whole goal is to damage people.
03:46:52.000And then you have sports like football, where you have enormous super athletes in the prime of their youth running full clip at each other and colliding.
03:46:59.000I mean, the impact is for us puny humans...
03:47:03.000We don't even understand what that's like.
03:47:06.000Imagine a 300-pound super athlete at a full sprint and collides with you.
03:47:11.000I mean, that's what those guys are doing.
03:47:34.000They see the guys that have been around a long time.
03:47:35.000And they see the stories of the guys who commit suicide and shoot themselves in the heart so that the medical community can study their brain.
03:47:46.000Do you not think there's going to come a point where so many people are suing the Rugby Federation for having CTE or suing the Boxing Federation?
03:47:58.000Isn't there going to come a point with that where they'll say, and they can make a quite coherent legal argument going, I was doing my job, I suffered this industrial injury as a result of doing my job, Therefore, the work area was unsafe and you were liable for it.
03:48:16.000You definitely can make an argument in that direction.
03:48:19.000I mean, if you think about that someone's profiting off, especially back in the day when there was no real data, right?
03:49:07.000So it should inform people's choices if they choose to do something that's that dangerous.
03:49:12.000If they fucking love football, I don't want to be the one that tells them they can't play football.
03:49:16.000If they love MMA, I don't want to be the one that tells them not to do it.
03:49:19.000I think people should be able to take risks in their life, just like they should rock climb, just like they should be able to do whatever the fuck they want to do.
03:49:26.000I don't think this world is meant to be just living in a safe way.
03:49:31.000There's an excitement and a glory to fighting.
03:49:36.000And once those guys have experienced that, once you've been a Kamaru Usman, once you've been a Frankie Edgar, and you've experienced the top of the heap, those guys, their life, the way they view the world is different than you.
03:49:53.000That thing, to be the fucking champ of the world, to be standing there on your trainer's shoulders, holding up a UFC belt while the whole fucking arena goes nuts.
03:51:27.000So the story was he was taking money to try to keep the UFC out of New York so that they would put pressure on the owners of the UFC who owned a bunch of casinos.
03:51:36.000And so there was some sort of deal they were trying to...
03:52:11.000But I think you have more control over what happens than, like, a football game.
03:52:16.000I think a football game is so crazy that, I mean, I'm sure the best athletes can avoid a lot of stuff, for the most part, but I've seen guys get clipped when they don't know it's coming, and it seems so wild that you could do that.
03:52:28.000Like, when a guy's running and some guy takes them from the side or, like, right from behind them and collides with them, like, those guys can run, like, 30 miles an hour, and they're super athletes.
03:53:55.000I don't know the answer to this question, but I think what's happening at the moment is that we don't want to have this conversation.
03:54:02.000I don't think we want to have it because it's going to throw up a lot of very difficult, very challenging questions which would go far deeper than sport and about personal responsibility, liberty, freedom, etc., etc., and safety, which is a lot of what we've been talking about.
03:54:19.000And I also think one of the things that's interesting about this conversation is that many of the people that signed up for this early on in life, and they achieved a certain amount of skill and talent, it wasn't until deep in that they really knew what the dangers were.
03:54:34.000They were already on this path of being an elite.
03:54:36.000If you're an elite professional rugby player, I just assume that it's like being an elite professional football player.
03:54:41.000Like you probably played football when you were young, in high school, in college, and then you make it to the pros, right?
03:54:52.000You're really good at this one fucking game, and it makes you exceptional.
03:54:56.000And you can either back out of it because you think it's gonna hurt you, or you can pursue your dream, which you've been on for two decades.
03:55:40.000They learn it because they want to find something they can achieve at and something they can get really good at and it helps their self-esteem.
03:55:47.000And then along the way, someone offers them a fight.
03:55:50.000Along the way, people realize, like, hey, have you ever thought about competing?
03:56:09.000You have another fight in three months.
03:56:11.000Two years later, you're a fucking full-time professional fighter with a diet plan and you're fucking wearing a cardio strap every day and monitoring your calories and like, whoa!
03:58:17.000And so I think it's some expression of the gene, if they can find that in your DNA, I might be fucking this up, but I know I'm not fucking up that there is something in your genes that makes you more susceptible to CTE. That makes sense.
03:58:29.000And when people have it, they get it way easier, or easier at least.
03:58:56.000And we have to decide whether or not people can take risks.
03:58:59.000It is also why people love the game, because it's that moment, you know, especially when you live in a world that's so safe, suddenly you're watching something so fundamentally unsafe, it's that when you see someone get knocked out, it's that visceral, it's an instinctual,
04:02:46.000And Eubank gave him brain damage in the ring.
04:02:49.000And after that, Eubank said that a lot of people actually have said that he was never the same fighter.
04:02:54.000I think he might have even admitted like he never went for the real knockout.
04:02:58.000That's how Ray Boom Boom Mancini was after Dukku Kim.
04:03:02.000You know, Ray Boom Boom Mancini fought Dukku Kim on, I think it was on ABC Wide World of Sports, and he killed him.
04:03:11.000And I think he died in the 13th or 14th round and after that they started changing fights to 12 rounds and I think Kim had cut a lot of weight to make the weight class you know this is back in the day when they used to weigh in the day of the fight so they'd weigh in I think it was lightweight so it was 135 pounds and they would weigh in the day of the fight so Super dehydrated.
04:04:13.000And it's also the impact it's having on the rest of your family.
04:04:15.000I saw this documentary about Frank Bruno and they showed, I think it was the second Tyson fight, him going to his training camp and his five-year-old girl holding on to him, crying, going, please don't go, daddy, please don't go.
04:05:21.000You really know how to cheer up the conversation.
04:05:24.000No, but it's something to talk about because all this, what we're talking about, about CTE and combat sports, it's the one thing that bothers me the most about the sport.
04:05:33.000I love the sport because it is the most exciting and because it is what I call high-level problem-solving with dire physical consequences.
04:06:28.000When he was fighting later on in his career, like the Manny Pacquiao fight or the Juan Manuel Marquez fight, he wasn't stopping them the way...
04:08:06.000Wayne Rooney at the start of his career.
04:08:07.000The moment he touched the ball, the moment he moved...
04:08:10.000It didn't look like someone who had learned something.
04:08:13.000It looked like something completely fluid and natural that nobody else could do, no matter how hard or how gifted they were or how long they spent on the training pitch.
04:09:57.000Look, if you want to keep your brain and you want to keep your health and you know you got it right now and you did everything that anybody could ever do...
04:10:05.000Everything on top of what Andre Ward, other than the financial rewards of having a big Canelo Alvarez fight, that would be the only thing to lure him in.
04:10:14.000As far as accomplishments, he did everything.
04:10:16.000Olympic gold medalist, two-division world champion, undefeated, retired.
04:14:00.000And he was so fun to watch Ricky Hatton.
04:14:02.000I don't think there's, in boxing at the moment, I don't think there is anyone, there are better boxers, but there's no one more fun to watch than Ricky Hatton.