In this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the comedian and podcaster talks about drugs and alcohol and how to deal with it. He also talks about how you can make money with cell phone service like Sprint and how it's better than going to the bathroom on the train. And he tries to figure out why someone is trying to text him in the middle of a podcast and he doesn't know why they're trying to get him to do something he's not allowed to do. It's a weird one, but it's a good one, and it's funny, so let's talk about it. Logo by Courtney DeKorte. Theme by Mavus White. Music by PSOVOD and tyops. The show is brought to you by Tingling, a mobile service that does things differently. They have their own terms and do things on their terms. They make a deal with Sprint where you get the exact same service you get with Sprint. They don't trick you with termination fees, no no nonsense, no early termination fees. You get the same service that Sprint does with Sprint, but you get a lot more bang for your buck. And they don't charge a hell of a lot less than Sprint does. You can't go wrong with Sprint and get a good deal. Use the code WORDROGAN at checkout to get 20% off your first month, plus free shipping, and they'll give you an ad-free version of the service that includes free shipping and a free of the company's mobile version of their phone service, plus they'll send you an extra $5 a month to you get free of a sim card, and you'll get a $5 credit when you sign up to $99 a month and they get $50 a month, they'll also get $25 a month for the service. It's like a freebie! We're talking all things Sprint, you're getting it all the same thing Sprint does it all, plus you get $5 and they're giving you a 20% discount, plus a free copy of the entire service, and a bunch of other stuff, plus an ad free version of Sprint gets you a year, plus I'll send it to you in the podcast and you get an ad on the pod, and I'll tell you how much of it's going to make you a deal, too! You get it all for free, it's like $5, $10, $25, $6, $7, $8, $9, and $10 a month.
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00:01:17.000You don't have to talk to some completely under-motivated and underwhelmed person who really doesn't want to be there at all, much rather beat you over the head with a club than weigh your stupid fucking packages.
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00:03:13.000LegalZoom can connect you to a third-party independent attorney if you're in a cold sweat panic and you think that you've done something illegal.
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00:03:33.000LegalZoom is not a law firm, but they do provide you with legal self-help See, legal self-help is the way to do it.
00:03:45.000If you can get things done like filing patents, like forming LLCs, forming a will, you can even get divorced.
00:05:18.000And what that means is they buy time through the Sprint Backbone.
00:05:21.000They use Sprint, so you get the exact same service that you get with Sprint, but you get it with no contracts, no early termination fees, no nonsense.
00:05:32.000There's a lot of ways that cell phone companies make money.
00:05:35.000And one of the ways they make money is they charge you for X amount per month.
00:05:40.000Like you have a deal where you get 1200 minutes a month or whatever the hell it is.
00:05:45.000But when you do that, most of the time you're not using those minutes, but you're still paying for those minutes.
00:05:51.000The way Ting does it, it's very smart, and I think it's a better way, and I think it's the only way that they're going to do it in the future.
00:05:59.000What they do is you pay for what you use.
00:06:24.000Because you'd be surprised at how little, when you look at these service minutes, you know, like 100 minutes a month, 200 minutes a month, most of the time people are texting each other these days.
00:06:35.000And if you call me a lot, man, most of the time I I don't spend a lot of time calling people.
00:06:40.000$440 is the average annual savings per device for a business with 1 to 20 employees.
00:06:47.000So if you have a business, Ting is the way to go if you want to set up business phones.
00:06:50.000And you have many options as far as the phones themselves.
00:06:53.000You have all of the best Android phones that are available today.
00:07:06.000If you pay $200 for a phone, you're not really paying $200 for that phone.
00:07:10.000The phone costs probably $500 or $600 and you think you're paying $200, but the other $300 to $400, you're paying off over the course of your contract.
00:07:20.000That's why if you try to leave, they stick it to you and they make you pay what you owe them.
00:07:28.000So that's what a contract termination fee is.
00:07:32.000What it's all about is you still owe money on a device.
00:11:10.000And there's new sort of etiquette developing about how to handle this.
00:11:13.000I think I was reading something about where you've got eight people around a table having dinner and it's okay for three of them to be looking at their devices.
00:11:31.000I mean, if you were at a bar with some friends and one guy is just watching TV only and not engaging in a conversation, that's just as rude.
00:11:40.000I find it fascinating how my children react to devices.
00:11:44.000That's where I really get a sense of it, because they don't have a cultural context.
00:11:48.000You know, when my four-year-old watches television or watches devices, and I'll stand in front of her watching TV, and she just reaches up and tries to move me.
00:11:56.000She doesn't give a fuck what I'm thinking.
00:11:59.000She's just trying to watch this program.
00:12:01.000Yeah, you literally can't get in between at that point.
00:12:06.000If they're watching something, that's it.
00:12:09.000You may have been away for a week and you haven't seen them and they're desperate to see you, but if there's something on TV at that point, not interested.
00:12:21.000It does it in this strange, hypnotic way.
00:12:24.000There's nothing else on Earth that gets a four-year-old to just sit there, motionless and engage.
00:12:31.000But it literally stimulates parts of the brain.
00:12:33.000There's a lot of quite interesting brain science about what's going on when kids watch TV, and it's generally fine.
00:12:38.000But when it gets to a point where they're watching more than two or three hours a day, and a lot of kids these days are in that situation, it literally starts rewiring their brain.
00:12:47.000Yeah, it's not healthy to completely entrench yourself in that world and to be in that world all day, every day.
00:12:55.000But a lot of people do because it's possible.
00:12:57.000But I think that's just like everything else.
00:12:59.000It's like I like the option to be able to buy a cheeseburger.
00:13:02.000I don't think you should eat cheeseburgers every day, all day.
00:14:33.000And he goes and said, apparently there's some bloke who's going around saying, if you eat too much of our food and don't take any exercise, you get fat.
00:14:45.000It's a really sweet response, which is, yeah, if you just do all of something, that's not good, but a little bit's okay.
00:14:51.000That's a quite Australian response, too, as opposed to the measured American legalese that you would probably hear from some CEO. Yeah, you know, I have a real issue with that documentary, and he did a show also called 30 Days.
00:15:40.000They're just high in cholesterol, and they're kind of fatty and sugary.
00:15:45.000I know for a fact that they did some fuckery on his show.
00:15:48.000He had a show called 30 Days where he was trying to achieve the same results.
00:15:51.000Because they went to a friend of mine who's a doctor.
00:15:54.000And this doctor specializes in hormone replacement therapy for older people.
00:15:59.000For older people and people that are, you know, like, you start getting older, you want to replace your testosterone, things along those lines.
00:17:02.000You're pretending that you're exploring these ideas.
00:17:05.000And when I was doing that sci-fi show, I found some similar issues with certain producers and certain people who were used to that world of reality TV. Reality TV has become this very strange mishmash of choreographed scenarios and predetermined scenarios,
00:17:54.000Well, the whole business is completely fucked because the business started off with a bunch of people that came over from scripted shows.
00:18:01.000So the legacy people that were involved in these dramatic shows where there were no, until Survivor came along, there were no reality shows, quote-unquote reality shows.
00:18:11.000So I have a deep understanding of this because I hosted Fear Factor for six years and because Fear Factor came in in 2002, which was when all the reality shows were being born.
00:18:23.000So I got to see where these people had their backgrounds from.
00:18:26.000And almost all of them had their backgrounds from dramas or from sitcoms or from the world of fictional shows.
00:18:33.000So much so that you were considered to be like a traitor if you were involved in a reality show.
00:19:20.000And the integrity, I had a real example of that.
00:19:24.000In the end, you're relying on the people involved to have a bit of integrity and ethics in the way they do their jobs.
00:19:30.000And I just saw a little example this weekend.
00:19:33.000I was out doing stuff to do with the election in my company, and I did an interview for the local news, for the NBC News.
00:19:41.000And we were doing some demos of stuff with people in Santa Monica, and they wanted to film one of the people that we're doing it with, you know, interacting with our thing, right?
00:19:53.000And at that point, there weren't any people interested in doing that.
00:19:57.000So one of the teams said, why don't we just pretend to be a member of the public doing it?
00:20:03.000And it was really interesting because they said, no, the producer and the journalist said, no, no, it's got to be, you know, a real member of the public.
00:20:32.000And I hope that's really widespread in the news business.
00:20:34.000But it was just, for me, a really interesting example of you can make rules and you can have stuff, but in the end it's about people and their choices in the moment.
00:20:42.000It is interesting that they chose to do that with integrity, but it's also interesting that someone suggested they not.
00:21:34.000So what you have to do is convince some member of the public that's around there to take that person's place and to say that they were the ones who saw this UFO. And you have to get them to say that they were taken aboard this UFO and that they were examined by aliens.
00:21:58.000What was shocking was how many people, when you put that camera on them, immediately said they would do it and immediately started just lying.
00:23:03.000It could be that as well, but I think most likely it's they want to be on television so they could go home, set their DVR, and, you know, it's on, it's on, it's on, it's on!
00:23:15.000You know, they just wanted to be on television.
00:23:19.000I think for a lot of people in this day and age, that is just some sort of a weird ultimate goal, just to have that camera on them and then they go home and see it.
00:24:02.000We went out and made a little film just to test that out about the elections going on in LA. And we literally went up to people and made up candidates that were running for Congress.
00:24:15.000And asked what they thought about that, you know, and what do you think of Angelina Jolie running for Congress?
00:24:19.000And this guy, yeah, I was so excited when I heard that.
00:24:55.000And a good percentage of them are really dumb and uninformed and not interested.
00:25:01.000When you say dumb and uninformed, here's what I think when I say that.
00:25:08.000When I'm saying dumb, what I mean is...
00:25:11.000If the human mind is essentially, say if everyone has the exact same physical structure, the exact same genetics, the exact same hormonal system, and one person does yoga every day and eats healthy and does chin-ups in the morning when they wake up and drinks a lot of water,
00:25:31.000and the other person sits in front of the TV, likes to smoke cigarettes, eats nothing but sugar, You get to see the results of one person being very aware of their body and taking care of their body and the other person not.
00:25:45.000Well, you get that same effect with life.
00:25:48.000You get that same effect with how you approach the world itself.
00:25:52.000Some people approach the world through this lazy, disconnected, you know...
00:26:00.000Like, pop culture obsessed, nonsensical, pop culture obsessed Jamie.
00:26:21.000And those people, with all these poor decisions and drug addictions and the life's a mess, they have an equal say to the person who's rational and aware and kind and objective.
00:26:36.000And I think that's one of the weirdest things about It's about communities, about culture.
00:26:42.000It's about trying to figure out how do you mitigate the effects of the lazy?
00:26:47.000How do you deal with the effects of the morons?
00:26:51.000Like when you have a riot and people start pulling white people out of cars and throwing rocks at their heads, which they've had in Los Angeles in the past, especially after the Rodney King beating and things along those lines, just random white people just attack them.
00:27:49.000Especially if you have a shirt, sort of like a flannel shirt that's over the t-shirt that says fuck black people, so you have to really look hard to see fuck black people and you think you're getting over.
00:28:00.000I think one of the things that they were trying to work around when they developed the concept of a representative democracy, the concept of America, a representative government, It's like, okay, let's sort of have some filters in place.
00:28:13.000You're voting, but you're kind of voting on a representative, and the representative sort of votes for you.
00:28:35.000And they literally had some image of, it wasn't images like a TV ad, of a racist guy spewing racist stuff.
00:28:46.000And then the tagline for the ad was, you'd better vote because you can be sure that he will.
00:28:52.000It was a really, you know, good way of making that point.
00:28:55.000But I think that generally, you know, those kind of people are the extreme.
00:28:59.000I think the idea is that most people are not, you know, the kind of extreme end of it where they're either totally, you know, where their views are just completely abhorrent or they are just completely off the page in terms of their knowledge.
00:29:14.000You got, you know, majority of people who are basically I think the problem is they just don't know enough about it.
00:29:23.000The information they get is not interesting.
00:29:31.000And so what happens, and I think it's happening more and more, is you end up with a smaller and smaller group of people who basically control the political system.
00:29:40.000Because The mass of people are just not interested.
00:29:44.000They think that getting involved won't make any difference.
00:29:46.000And so what you end up with is people with a lot of money, special interests, those who, you know, the kind of professionals of the political game running everything.
00:29:56.000And that actually makes people even less inclined to get involved because they see what's happening and think, oh, well, why should I bother?
00:30:05.000Yeah, and then people start saying things like, oh, the New World Order is in control anyway.
00:30:10.000The Bilderberg Group is in control anyway.
00:30:13.000There was some thing yesterday that was in the news where one of the members of the Bilderberg Group, I think he's some Dutch guy, had Some impromptu public discussion with all these people, and they start bringing out all these details of 9-11.
00:30:30.000You know, 9-11, the building was brought down, thermite, and they circle this guy and start talking to him.
00:30:37.000It's kind of fascinating, you know, this idea of the Illuminati, this idea of a small group of people controlling everyone through iconic symbolism and eyeballs inside of pyramids.
00:30:50.000All that stuff becomes, in a lot of ways, a vehicle for feeling unempowered, for feeling disenfranchised.
00:33:14.000Like, have these big signs in front of Red Lobster, you know, with Genesis, like, whatever the quote in the Bible that says here.
00:33:23.000Because there's four times as many references to shellfish as there is to gay people.
00:33:28.000There's, like, a lot of references to, like, you're not supposed to eat shrimp, but you can go to an all-you-need buffet and people right after church step right up.
00:34:28.000And my point that I was trying to make kind of clumsily earlier was that it's kind of strange That we are so varied.
00:34:40.000And it's kind of strange that everyone does get, like, if there's three of us in a room, you know, we have to all decide.
00:34:48.000And if one of us is retarded, not literally, but are people with Down syndrome, are people that are, anyone that is, like, mentally compromised, are they allowed to vote?
00:36:42.000I mean, the whole point of what you try and do with, you know, the criminal justice system and so on is to try and exactly, you know, rehabilitate people so they don't offend again.
00:36:55.000Yeah, I think people are just so tired of people just fucking up that they're like, you know what, this is a good way to keep fuck-ups from voting.
00:37:03.000The idea that we were talking about earlier that a person could be a racist, a person could be a complete nutter and still vote along with a person who's really kind and educated.
00:38:00.000I think one of the problems is that you've got these big, big systems and they're kind of really far from the human level where that kind of trust can be established.
00:38:10.000And that is one of the problems with a lot of things in government and politics.
00:38:14.000It's all just too big and removed from that human scale.
00:38:17.000Well, that's a problem with a lot of things when it comes to human beings, this diffusion of responsibility that comes with being a part of a massive group, like war.
00:38:27.000The idea that if there's 300 million of us and a million of us are overseas, you know, fighting for freedom...
00:38:36.000You could deal with that because it's not happening in Calabasas.
00:38:40.000You could go to work and you could deal with your life and the scope of your world doesn't come up.
00:38:47.000But you're kind of peripherally aware that this is happening somewhere else.
00:38:51.000But if people in Van Nuys were going to war with people in Studio City, and it was only a couple miles away, and you had to deal with that, then it would be something we would have to try to calm down.
00:39:40.000Don't work because they get away from the point where you can really know the other person or the group that you're with.
00:39:46.000There's some guy in England, I think at Cambridge University, did some research about the maximum number of people that you can really have any kind of human relationship with at any one time.
00:39:55.000I think he got to a number of 150. Dunbar's number.
00:41:23.000It's really the last kind of, well, definitely the last hundred years, but, you know, and it's just getting faster and faster, you know, this kind of everything becoming really kind of organized at this sort of inhuman level.
00:41:34.000And this mad struggle to sort of organize it and to try to...
00:41:39.000Control it and just calm it down, get a handle on the effects of it.
00:41:45.000And I think in a lot of ways, that's what you're doing with this crowd pack thing.
00:41:50.000With this crowd pack thing is you are utilizing these tools, these tools of the internet and this instant access to information that we have today.
00:42:00.000To sort of establish a much clearer sense of where political candidates are coming from and what are their influences as far as who is financing them?
00:42:20.000Yeah, I think that's a really good summary of it, which is that basically we think that when you talk to people about politics, one of the things they say is that we just don't know enough about it.
00:42:29.000We don't know enough information generally, but we don't have information we can trust.
00:42:35.000We have all this spin and ads and all the rest of it from the politicians.
00:42:42.000So what we're trying to do is give people really objective information that they can rely on to figure out where the politicians are on the issues that they care about.
00:42:52.000And the thing that we found from our research is that one of my co-founders, Adam, who's a professor at Stanford, has been working on this for many years and basically what he's shown is that the best way to predict what a politician will do if they're elected is to look at where they get their money and to look at also who they give money to because most politicians also kind of donate to other candidates so if you look at all that Campaign finance information,
00:43:23.000That is going to give you the best guide to what they're really going to do in office.
00:43:28.000And it's something that you can actually, what we're trying to do is like turn that into really simple information that you can, without kind of reading tons of stuff and doing loads of research, you can get a quick snapshot of who these people are.
00:43:41.000And then in time, the other thing we want to do is make it possible for you to find The politicians that are really good or bad on the issues that you care about and get involved in their campaigns.
00:43:52.000Because the other thing is that you've got a tiny, tiny number of people who are funding all these campaigns.
00:43:58.000If you look at the total number of people who put money into politics, it's a really small number compared to the number of people who vote and then the number of adults in the whole country.
00:44:08.000It's a tiny number that are funding it all.
00:44:10.000And even within that, most of the money comes from an even smaller number.
00:44:29.000And obviously, that is something that has a lot of appeal.
00:44:32.000You can see why you'd want to do that.
00:44:34.000There's a brilliant guy called Larry Lessig.
00:44:36.000I don't know if you've come across what he's been doing.
00:44:38.000And he's been arguing about this for years.
00:44:40.000And he's been saying, He's at Harvard.
00:44:42.000He's a brilliant campaigner on this issue of money and politics.
00:44:46.000And he's been saying, if you think about any problem in America today, whatever the issue is that you care about, if that's gay marriage or the environment, or it doesn't matter what it is, you're not going to get anywhere in terms of solving that problem unless you deal with the first problem,
00:45:04.000Because the money in politics stops the proper solutions from being developed.
00:45:08.000Because what it means is that you've got these special interests, whether that's left or right, it doesn't matter whether it's big businesses or unions, it doesn't matter.
00:45:15.000They want their particular outcome and they're buying it through the system.
00:45:20.000And he's got a campaign around that and he wants public funding for elections and so on.
00:45:25.000And all that is kind of a noble aim, I guess.
00:45:30.000But my feeling is that that's a really hard sell.
00:45:34.000Because you've got a constitution that says it's free speech.
00:45:37.000You're allowed to give money to politicians and we can't just kind of stop that.
00:45:41.000You've got to let people donate to politicians.
00:45:43.000And so our take on it is to say, well, if you can't take the money out, let's at least dilute the influence of the people there right now by letting more people, making it easier for more people to get involved and give money to these candidates so they are not dependent On these big donors with their particular interests.
00:46:03.000And that's really what we're trying to do is kind of make it easier for people to get involved in politics so that they can really, you know, get these politicians off this hook they're on, which is that their dependence on these donors for their campaign spending, which means that once they're elected,
00:46:20.000it's kind of inevitable that they pay attention to them rather than the people who elected them.
00:46:24.000In a lot of ways, it mirrors the influence that the internet has had on the news itself.
00:46:30.000Because the news used to be distributed only through these proper channels, whether it was NBC, CBS, and then the cable news networks, CNN, Fox, and all this jazz.
00:46:41.000But now, it's become this thing where websites develop, Huffington Post, all these, the Young Turks, which is an internet-based news show, and they have no censorship, they have no restrictions,
00:46:56.000they have no influence other than the ones that they choose to accept.
00:48:08.000This massive change in the way the entire country looks at the NSA and government spying was done by one man leaking information to one guy in one source which spread through the internet and then boom it blossoms this huge news story that was essentially if he had sent that same story through the proper channels like the New York Times or CNN they would have ignored the fuck out of it they would have figured
00:48:38.000out a way to cover that thing and throw it under the rug and staple that rug down and light it on fire I mean what he did was Figure out a way to distribute things through this new channel.
00:48:51.000And essentially, that's what the internet is doing with voting.
00:48:56.000Before, something like the internet came along, it was very difficult to find out who the influences of all these different individual candidates were.
00:49:03.000With something like CrowdPak, It becomes much more easy and that also will change the way these people interact with these corporations.
00:50:24.000And actually the politicians themselves, in my experience, they, you know, you'd think, well, maybe I would say this because I used to work in politics myself for the Prime Minister in the UK, so I kind of know them.
00:50:37.000My feeling is that generally the politicians actually hate this just as much as everyone else.
00:50:42.000They hate the fact that they have to spend so much time raising money.
00:50:47.000You know, literally there was this document that was leaked To the New York Times, I think, a while back, from the Democratic leadership in Congress, where they gave a kind of guide to the newly elected members of Congress about how they should spend their time.
00:51:06.000To the newly elected members of Congress, and it went through how many hours a day they should spend on different types of activity, you know, thinking about policy, talking to constituents, this kind of thing.
00:51:17.000Half of the time, it was four hours, was recommended that they spend on fundraising.
00:51:28.000They hate, you know, being shoved in a room, which is what happens, and being, they call it dialing for dollars, you know, like just literally sitting on the phone trying to raise money.
00:51:36.000That's not why they went into politics.
00:52:09.000And so I think that there's a lot of effort actually in Congress to try and encourage more small donors and make it easier for people to give money because actually that's what they want too.
00:52:22.000They don't like being beholden to these big donors and these companies.
00:52:26.000They don't like it any more than we like it.
00:52:28.000I think ultimately the idea of leaders, whether it's presidential leaders or whether it's representatives, I think ultimately that's going to go away.
00:52:38.000And my thought about it is that anybody who really wants to lead everyone else is probably an asshole.
00:53:27.000I mean, a lot of the things that I was trying to do when I was in the government in the UK, and it's kind of part of what we're doing with CrowdPak, is trying to encourage that even distribution, that more even distribution of power, and redistribute power from The kind of traditional sources of power and central leadership and putting power in people's hands so that they can control more and more aspects of their life because in the end they'll make better decisions overall.
00:53:54.000And it's also just more healthy, I think.
00:53:57.000Going back to what we were saying earlier about...
00:54:00.000You know, the way people can only know a small number of people.
00:54:03.000And if you give them power to shape more of the things that happen in their lives, I think that actually they will take more responsibility.
00:54:12.000They'll be more responsible in a community sense.
00:54:15.000You'll just see everything get better if you take power out of the hands of these sort of leaders and central organizations and put it in the hands of people.
00:54:25.000I think there's also an issue of it being overwhelming, the amount of information that you have to absorb whenever you deal with political issues, whenever you deal with campaigns, whenever you deal with new elections.
00:54:36.000You're given this pamphlet of different people and the different propositions that are up for vote, and you just get overwhelmed.
00:54:43.000Especially if you have a job that's taxing as it is, and you have a family, and you're thinking about golfing on the weekend.
00:55:12.000It's easy to say, Oh, the voters are lazy or whatever they should do.
00:55:16.000But honestly, like you said, they've got real lives to live and they haven't got time for all this stuff.
00:55:21.000And that is a really big part of why we want to make it simple.
00:55:24.000You know, we're assuming that people want to spend less time Doing this stuff, not more time.
00:55:30.000And I think a lot of the kind of organizations and people that have tried to get people, you know, mobilized, you know, civic organization and that kind of thing, you know, it's worked to a certain extent with some people, but for the majority of people, they just don't want to do it.
00:55:56.000It's stuff that they choose to do and that's fine.
00:55:58.000That's their life and we shouldn't kind of require that you have to spend ages figuring out This political stuff.
00:56:05.000And that's why we're trying to make it really simple for people.
00:56:08.000But based on quite a lot of complex...
00:56:10.000And that's what technology allows you to do.
00:56:12.000You can take quite a lot of complex data and information, like we're doing with the campaign finance records, where it's literally hundreds of millions of pieces of information, and we're boiling it down into one piece of information, which is a score, like where is this candidate On the scale of liberal to conservative,
00:56:31.000where do they sit and where are they on each issue?
00:56:33.000That's what we're trying to do to make it really simple.
00:56:36.000Isn't it sort of analogous in a way to what we were talking about, about the amount of people that you can keep in your brain, the Dunbar's number, is that if you lived in a small tribe, say if we all lived 50 of us together in some small village somewhere, We really wouldn't have votes about gay marriage,
00:56:53.000and we really wouldn't have votes about...
00:56:56.000There'd be a million different things that would never be up for vote.
00:56:59.000And if someone really did start micromanaging everyone's lives, you'd be like, hey, you know, Mike is an asshole.
00:57:06.000We gotta kick him out of this fucking tribe.
00:57:08.000This guy's trying to get people to wear purple and, you know, wear certain Nikes during different moon cycles and make tribal rules and rituals and make all these things standard.
00:57:17.000And, you know, for whatever reason, he doesn't like men sleeping with men.
00:57:59.000And their theory was that without that kind of external rule-making and kind of stuff going on to tell you what to do, people would have to Kind of relate to each other as other people and just figure it out amongst themselves.
00:58:14.000So they would have to look other people in the eye and sort of work it out between them.
00:58:22.000And they found they had this brilliant effect, which was that...
00:58:35.000All the kind of things that you try and do when all these people think about traffic planning and whatever, they achieved all those aims by literally taking everything away and just allowing people to relate to each other.
01:00:03.000There's no better chance that you're going to run into a traffic stop or a traffic jam than if a cop is directing.
01:00:11.000If there's a cop that's standing there telling you people go forward and you people stop, for sure that guy's fucking that intersection up sideways.
01:00:19.000Every time I go into one of those situations where a light is down and there's a cop standing there, it's a fucking disaster.
01:00:26.000Whereas if it was just a light, if it's just red light, green light, everything seems to work because we're sort of programmed to wait for that light and then go.
01:01:39.000I completely agree with the way you put it, that there's tons of them that are great, and then there are others that totally abuse their position.
01:01:46.000It's another really interesting example of how technology can be really helpful in a way.
01:01:53.000I saw that they're trying to do it in here, the LAPD, that if you put the cameras on and you can't mess around with them, That's a really powerful incentive.
01:02:16.000They were having lights like if you were going through the light as it was yellow and it turned red, they would flash.
01:02:22.000So if your wheels were not, you know, if they were in front of the line, you hadn't made it across before the light turned red, they would give you a ticket.
01:02:30.000But it turned out to be a private company that was actually profiting from these tickets.
01:02:34.000And so they deemed that unconstitutional and they removed all those lights.
01:02:37.000But people were just in a goddamn uproar.
01:03:11.000And one of the reasons why people like freedom is because freedom isn't just the freedom to do as you wish.
01:03:18.000It's the freedom to not have to think about a bunch of other shit and be influenced by a bunch of other shit that takes your time away and takes your energy away.
01:03:27.000And I think that's where we're at when it comes to a lot of these propositions and a lot of these Really uber-complicated things that are involved in our day-to-day lives.
01:03:39.000It's like we've complicated ourselves to this point of almost of no return and where there's very few alternatives.
01:03:51.000Yeah, and I think that the thing that happens then is that they've complicated it.
01:03:56.000Then it's not working and they say, oh, we better try and fix it.
01:03:59.000Then the fixing of it makes it even more complicated.
01:04:02.000And then a new government comes in or a new governor or whoever it may be.
01:04:06.000And instead of actually just stopping and thinking, you know what, we've just got to rethink the whole thing and start from scratch and just not tinker with it anymore and try and improve it because it's just going to make it more complicated.
01:04:22.000They're only thinking about the next couple of years and the next election or whatever.
01:04:25.000And so things just get even more complicated.
01:04:29.000And they never seem to get to that point where people think, yeah, that's really working great now.
01:04:34.000My wife and I went out to this restaurant the other night, and the restaurant was this...
01:04:38.000We were noticing that there's this theme that's going on in a lot of restaurants where they have, like, this rustic thing going on where they have old-school lights, the filaments in them, and then they have hardwood tables and wrought iron this and metal that, and...
01:04:54.000And I was like, I think people are sort of reacting to this fabricated world that we've created and we long for this simplicity.
01:05:01.000That's why there's these shows like these Alaska shows where people living on the frontier and they're fucking collecting wood and fighting off wolves.
01:05:11.000It's like we almost long for that simplicity above this world that we've complicated to this almost unmanageable point.
01:05:22.000And you see in so many areas that, I mean, like food is a great example where there's all this kind of stuff about organic food and seasonal and local and grow it in your garden.
01:05:32.000And that whole movement, I think, is a reaction.
01:05:33.000I mean, if you think about food, like years ago, Like in the fifties, I think, you know, it was all about, um, you know, let's have all the kind of TV package food and all this kind of industrialized food that was then seen as better because it was, you know,
01:05:49.000scientific and hygienic and like really kind of good for you.
01:05:52.000And then people are now just thinking that is just really horrible.
01:06:10.000And there were no food stores, loads of choice and everything.
01:06:13.000And you would go in the store and it was just, you know, what you got.
01:06:17.000Just a few sort of vegetables and it was just very basic.
01:06:21.000And now, I remember the other day, walking around in San Francisco, and there's the kind of farmer's market thing going on, and they had their kind of ugly vegetables and whatever put out there.
01:06:29.000And it just looked exactly like the Hungarian communist food shop.
01:06:34.000But here in San Francisco, it's the most expensive, fancy, amazing food that you can get.
01:06:43.000You know, a reaction to what's gone before.
01:06:45.000And we're currently, I think you're totally right, in this kind of sense of it's just gone too far, the whole industrialization of so many different aspects of our lives.
01:06:54.000Well, it's also we're starting to realize where people live in cities and they look around and they see all these buildings and they see this asphalt and they see these telephone poles and they go, We're good to go.
01:08:37.000There's a brilliant guy, I don't know if you've come across him, called Nassim Taleb.
01:08:42.000He wrote this book called The Black Swan.
01:08:44.000He's a mathematician and he was in the financial markets.
01:08:48.000And he really kind of predicted the crash and understood all that, and he's just great.
01:08:52.000And one of his big points is that these big systems that we've ended up with, and the word he uses are they're completely fragile.
01:09:01.000They look kind of big and solid, but actually we're so dependent on them It makes us really fragile.
01:09:09.000If they collapse or fall over or whatever, whether that's a company or some government system, we're really screwed because we're so dependent.
01:09:17.000And that's really a kind of fragile situation.
01:09:20.000And so that's definitely one of the reasons I sort of love what he writes about and talks about is that he's arguing for exactly that kind of thing, you know, making sure that companies don't get too big to fail, not just in the financial sector.
01:09:31.000A lot of people have talked about that with the banks.
01:09:34.000But in every area with the food system and other types of businesses where we're so dependent, if something went wrong, we couldn't cope with it.
01:09:43.000And when you have small distributed, it's just like we were talking earlier about the power being distributed.
01:09:48.000It's not just voting power and political power.
01:10:00.000It's actually going in the other direction.
01:10:02.000Yeah, it's going the other direction, and very few cities are diminishing in population unless there's something horribly wrong, like Detroit.
01:10:43.000It fell apart when they started moving jobs to Mexico and other countries.
01:10:48.000It fell apart when they started producing shittier and shittier cars And when there's all sorts of complications with unions and with a million different problems.
01:10:59.000And then slowly but surely they started diminishing these factories.
01:11:03.000And there's a really interesting documentary.
01:11:06.000I don't know if you watched Michael Moore's first documentary, Roger and Me.
01:11:42.000And, you know, I mean, if a company wanted to move there, you have a massive amount of people that are looking for jobs and cheap land, and it's a good idea, it's a good place to start, but very, very difficult to encourage people to do so.
01:11:54.000So, Detroit shows how easy things can fall apart.
01:11:58.000And there's been a bunch of blogs that have been created, websites where they've shown How these trees and nature are taking over these areas that used to be populated where trees are growing through buildings.
01:12:26.000That shows you how easily it could all fall apart, whereas, you know, 50, 60 years ago, here's an image that Jamie just put up.
01:12:34.000These are trees that are growing Inside of this abandoned building.
01:12:39.000They're just growing through the floor, and eventually they'll make their way through the roof, and the roof will rot, and it just shows you how easy it is for nature to reclaim areas that human beings feel like, well, this is a city now.
01:13:13.000I mean, they're like ramps, because the tree has slowly but surely lifted up the concrete of the sidewalk, and it's trying to reclaim this area that they've put this stupid rock paste over.
01:13:54.000But then you've got a huge problem with the crime.
01:13:56.000It's just so interesting how you have a city that is so great in so many ways, and they've got this sort of pocket of real poverty and crime, and that's been going on for years, and despite all the other advantages, and they've got a lot of,
01:14:12.000you know, Great economic growth going on there, and so on.
01:15:07.000He goes, nobody wants to hear about it, but the reason why they're making all this money is because they're selling something that's illegal.
01:15:13.000And so when you're selling something that's illegal, the only people that are doing that are the people that are criminals.
01:15:19.000And he goes, as soon as you make it legal, you deal with a personal choice issue.
01:15:23.000And the guy was, like, very rational about it.
01:15:24.000He was like, you're dealing with a personal choice issue instead of a crime issue.
01:15:29.000I think it's one of the more kind of interesting ways into that whole drug legalization argument is to think about the social problems that come from the current rules.
01:15:39.000Not just, you know, a lot of times people talk about drug use being a social problem, but actually it's everything that comes from it.
01:15:46.000The crime and the gangs and that's, I think, the most intelligent argument for legalization.
01:15:53.000Yeah, and there was a real interesting article recently about Mexico.
01:15:56.000They were talking about the cartels like hemorrhaging money because they relied on marijuana trade and now with legal marijuana, just the legal marijuana in Colorado and in Washington State and then all the medical places have massively diminished the amount of influence.
01:16:33.000Because it just shows people, this is what you do when you make things illegal.
01:16:38.000We should have figured it out in the 1920s with Prohibition.
01:16:42.000I mean, it's amazing that people are so goofy today that they still are dealing with the same issue that they kind of resolved in the 1920s.
01:16:50.000Almost a hundred years ago, they figured this out with alcohol, and they have to relearn the same lesson with cannabis.
01:17:10.000I think that the politicians have been put off for a long time from doing anything about it by the kind of reaction that they'll think they'll get from certain parts of the press and so on.
01:17:20.000But actually, I think that's changing, and it's changing really quickly here in America.
01:17:24.000The fact that you've got these ballot measures That are winning in different states, and that's just going to accelerate, I think.
01:17:30.000Not just that, the amount of revenue they pull in.
01:17:33.000With no resistance whatsoever, Colorado has 39% tax revenue on marijuana that's sold recreationally.
01:18:05.000And then they're making over $100 million a year in tax revenue just in the state of Colorado.
01:18:13.000So when that kind of money starts coming in, then that money has influence.
01:18:17.000And then they have to respect the pot dollar because the pot dollar is going to be a lobby just like anything else, just like the pharmaceutical lobby, just like the natural resource lobby, just like anything else.
01:18:27.000The pot lobby is going to be legit now.
01:18:29.000Because there's going to be a tremendous amount of revenue available.
01:18:35.000There's big businesses that are moving into Colorado right now and establishing warehouse.
01:18:40.000Warehouse spaces in Colorado are just evaporating.
01:18:44.000They're disappearing left and right because people are just picking them up.
01:18:47.000The way Colorado's laws are set up, in order to sell marijuana, you have to grow marijuana.
01:18:52.000So if you wanted to open up a shop in Colorado, you'd have to grow your own stuff and then sell it.
01:18:57.000You can't buy it from someone else and then sell it.
01:19:00.000So they're just giant warehouses everywhere being scooped up and they're setting up these massive grow ops and then they're funneling that money because it's being sold legally.
01:19:10.000They're funneling that money right back in the state at a rate of 39%.
01:19:15.000And huge companies are slowly but surely creeping their way towards Colorado because they realize this is a multi-billion dollar industry in just a couple of years.
01:19:26.000You're looking at three, four, five years from now, a multi-billion dollar industry nationwide currently Places where they're having serious money issues, serious problems with generating tax revenue, all of the sudden, all the profits that are going to illegal sales of marijuana,
01:19:43.000now 39% of that money is going to come right to the taxpayers, or right to the tax collectors.
01:19:50.000And have they got any, I guess it's a bit early, but I was just wondering what they're seeing in terms of People's behavior, the usage...
01:20:50.000It's when there's two million of us that you feel like you can get away with something like that.
01:20:53.000That someone can come along and say, I'm the sheriff, and if I find someone smoking marijuana in my district, I'm going to put them under lock and key.
01:21:01.000I'm going to make our streets safe for the children.
01:21:08.000But what I'm interested in is like just coming to, you know, I've been here two years now, but I do get a feeling that that is a really quite kind of almost mainstream position.
01:21:18.000A lot of people feel like that in America.
01:22:32.000Socially, at a rate that's just unheard of.
01:22:36.000The kind of movements that you're seeing now...
01:22:39.000Whether you agree with them or not, whether it's Operation Wall Street or whether it's...
01:22:43.000Anytime there's a social change or social movement in this country, whether you agree with it or not, it's fascinating to step back and watch this swarm of activity that takes place because of any issue that comes up now that...
01:22:58.000Really couldn't happen before without, you know, you'd have to have like a physical meeting.
01:23:03.000You'd have to have people would get together and someone would have to have a megaphone.
01:23:06.000What we need to do is take back the streets.
01:23:10.000What we need to do is make the world safe for our children and we need to get out of Vietnam.
01:23:16.000You know, and then, you know, the cops come and break it up and hose everybody down and they would shut down the problem.
01:23:33.000The problem exists anytime there's dissent, that dissent sort of encapsulates An entire group of people that share these ideas and they can freely communicate.
01:23:46.000And I think they're just starting to realize that they can freely communicate the way they can.
01:23:51.000And unfortunately, a lot of them are annoying.
01:23:53.000Unfortunately, a lot of people that have figured this out are annoying.
01:23:56.000And you see these really dumb ideas that spread like wildfire and a bunch of idiots are behind it.
01:24:04.000But I think ultimately, when it all balances itself out, we're going to deal with a much more informed, much more educated, much more aware, much more socially conscious society than we have ever had in the past.
01:24:17.000I think a decade from now, two decades from now, we're going to see the rewards of this.
01:24:29.000The way we're thinking about it is that we want to kind of...
01:24:33.000Now, the next step really is to really take that energy and really direct it into the heart of the political system.
01:24:43.000Not kind of on the edges of it with kind of protests and sort of social movements, but really getting into the guts of the way laws are made and the way the country is run, the states are run, cities are run.
01:24:57.000And kind of injecting it into the real heart of power.
01:25:02.000I think that's got to be the next step.
01:25:08.000I mean, I wonder if the way technology is advancing and the way technological innovation seems to exponentially increase, if there's some way to manage things in a way that's sort of not discovered yet or sort of hasn't been No one's figured out a way to sort of organize this whole thing in a way that's much clearer.
01:25:35.000Like, do you remember what code used to look like when you used to use DOS and if you used an old computer, you had to enter everything and command prompts?
01:26:08.000And if we could get it to that in politics, like, okay, what would we have to do to make more money go towards school and less money go towards...
01:26:23.000Is there a way we could work that out?
01:26:25.000If you look at how much money is being spent in the Iraq War, how much money is being spent in Afghanistan, is there a way to take 30% of that and put it into our schools?
01:26:37.000Because, my God, the school system would radically change.
01:26:40.000Our education system would radically change.
01:26:42.000The amount of people that would come out of these educational systems that were more balanced, more aware, had more nuanced perspectives, would radically change.
01:26:56.000Like, over the course of a decade, if you could just figure out a way to put that kind of power in people's hands, what they choose to do.
01:27:05.000Well, I think the way that you do that, it comes back to what we were saying earlier.
01:27:09.000Is actually literally doing it by getting rid of these kind of big organisations, central government organisations that try and run the whole system from some office somewhere that's completely removed from the parents and the kids that are actually using the schools and really give responsibility.
01:27:31.000For the way the schools operate to local communities so that they can try things out because every kid is different.
01:27:50.000A kind of common application of that in every school, and everyone's going to teach the same way, and that's great.
01:27:57.000And I just think the evidence shows that is not right.
01:27:59.000It doesn't work for every kid, and you want to have a system where you've got much more ability to experiment and try things out and adapt things to each...
01:28:15.000I think a community approach to these things is going to be the way to do it.
01:28:27.000You definitely need the money, of course, to have high quality as well.
01:28:31.000It's just that if you just put more money into the current system of organizing schools, I don't think you'll get the kind of benefit that you could if you actually gave the power.
01:28:42.000Over the system and took it away from the people at the center and put it in the hands of people locally.
01:28:54.000You could see, like, these people have an approach and their approach is more sort of Waldorf school based and less electronics and more wooden toys and interacting with kids.
01:29:03.000And look at the benefits, like, man, all these people are coming out so creative.
01:29:08.000But then there's another place in San Francisco that's much more tech involved.
01:29:11.000Everybody has an iPad and all these kids.
01:29:13.000Well, there's a benefit there as well.
01:29:15.000I mean, I think schools are a huge issue.
01:29:18.000The massive underfunding of education in this country is a huge, huge issue.
01:30:29.000In this country, the prohibitive cost of higher education is shocking.
01:30:34.000When you start thinking about how much money it costs to go to college, how much money it costs to get a degree, and you accumulate student loans that are almost insurmountable.
01:30:43.000How many people get out of college in this country?
01:31:23.000There's a kind of good point to it, which is that it seems to me that the students are so much more hardworking and motivated than the ones that...
01:31:34.000Well, certainly than I was from Nazi University.
01:31:36.000But, you know, it was all free when we did it in the UK. And here, it's not anymore, but it was when I was at college.
01:32:40.000And if you think about the amount of access...
01:32:52.000Yeah, and it's actually really powerful in not just thinking about America, but people in the States who I wouldn't have had that access.
01:33:05.000But actually, all over the world, in Africa, where you're just able to bring instruction and the best people in the world, the best teachers, to the most remote village in Africa is completely staggering.
01:33:21.000I've always had a fascination with the power that someone has in the position of being a professor.
01:33:27.000And especially a professor with tenure, where they have this job that essentially is very difficult to get fired from.
01:33:36.000I mean, you have to really do something really fucked up to lose your position.
01:33:41.000And because of that, some of them, and I've had friends that have had these professors, some of them get these incredibly arrogant attitudes, and they...
01:33:53.000Push their ideas as if they're doctrine.
01:33:56.000And they push their own political ideas and their own ideology, oftentimes a very left-wing liberal agenda to the point where it just infuriates certain parents and infuriates people who disagree with these ideas, who get silenced because,
01:34:12.000you know, it's the professor's word and that is it.
01:34:18.000I mean, you know, to me, the whole point is You should be equipping the students to think for themselves and to kind of come to their own point of view, but give them the tools that they can do that with, and go out and then use that knowledge and ability to do great things in the world,
01:34:34.000not to kind of tell them your point of view.
01:34:36.000Well, you can tell them your point of view, but make clear that it is your point of view, and there are other points of view, and it's up to them to decide what they think.
01:35:05.000He went to Harvard and he gave a commencement speech, I think, to Harvard where he really attacked them on this point.
01:35:12.000And said that they had this kind of liberal bias in the faculty there that was just really bad and the opposite of it.
01:35:19.000And he had this great piece of data which was that if you look at, going back to campaign finance, if you look at the campaign finance records, because everyone's donations are reported and when you make a political donation, You have to say what your occupation is.
01:35:36.000So you know it's quite easy to look at types of professions or whatever and where their money goes.
01:35:43.000And he got this piece of data which was that if you look at the political donations of Ivy League faculty and staff And you look at where the money went in the last election, the figure for how much went to Obama was 96%.
01:35:57.000So it's like this total liberal dominance.
01:36:20.000I'm not a fan of what this administration has become.
01:36:25.000Especially when it deals with freedom of the press, when it deals with whistleblowers, when it deals with spying on Americans, like all the revelation that we found out about the lack of privacy that people have.
01:37:06.000Of course the most educated amongst them went for the lesser of two evils, being Obama, being a guy who is a very articulate and intelligent guy who's a whore.
01:37:17.000I mean, essentially, that's what Obama is.
01:37:20.000What he is is a guy who's this very intelligent, articulate guy who had these ideas and promoted this ideology, got into office, and did essentially exactly what Bush did.
01:37:30.000I mean, in worse, when it comes to whistleblowers.
01:37:47.000This country has a horrible record, and this administration has a horrible record on freedom of the press, a horrible record on punishing whistleblowers.
01:37:59.000The lack of respect for journalism and freedom of the press is very disturbing to people, because what is journalism truly?
01:38:06.000Well, what it truly is, is you're exposing reality.
01:38:10.000What a true journalist is doing is exposing reality.
01:38:13.000When you punish people for doing that, when you punish people for blowing the whistle on, with essentially unconstitutional activities, like the NSA spying on every single fucking person on the planet.
01:39:08.000We don't have a point of view as a company about individual issues.
01:39:11.000But I think that we do really care about changing the system.
01:39:16.000And I think that one of the things about the press that sort of happens, and I've seen this on kind of both sides of it, is that there tends to be this kind of coziness that develops with a lot of the press, particularly the traditional press,
01:39:31.000where they want to Have access to the politicians, and the politicians want to get their message out, and it just gets quite kind of cozy.
01:39:38.000And so that whole role of investigation and exposing things kind of sometimes takes a back seat to having a good relationship so that you can get your message out and they get access.
01:39:50.000And I think that that's one of the things, again, that's really helpfully being changed by technology, like you were saying, which is that you've got people who are able to do that job of investigation without having to be part of some Cozy group around the politician.
01:40:06.000Yeah, that's going to lob softballs at every politician in the interview.
01:40:10.000If you see it from the politician's point of view, their point of view, and there's a lot of truth to it, is that they're trying to do stuff.
01:40:32.000And they feel that increasingly the media and the press are just interested in the trivial aspects of it and who's up and who's down and they're not really interested in kind of exposing the complexity of some of these issues.
01:40:47.000And then on the other side, and that's why they end up trying to, you know, have a relationship that enables them to, in the way they see it, to explain what they're trying to do a bit better.
01:40:59.000So that they, so people kind of give them a fairer hearing.
01:41:36.000And that's why they want to, you know, try and control the message, I think, because they feel that a lot of the time they don't get a fair hearing.
01:41:44.000Well, that makes sense in some ways, but it doesn't make sense from the point of view of the people that are in the position of being a journalist.
01:41:54.000If you're in the position of being a journalist, your whole position is to expose inequality, expose violations of the Constitution.
01:42:05.000And when you're in one of those places where you Whether it's for CNN or Fox News or whoever you're working for, if you get to sit down with Dick Cheney or you get to sit down with Obama, you're already muted.
01:43:17.000I think what guys like him are doing, he was the one who helped Edward Snowden release all of his documents.
01:43:26.000These new players in this whole game, these outsiders that don't have to cozy up, don't have to be a part of this nepotism that we're seeing with the big ones.
01:43:39.000Anybody that's in any sort of a large group Fox and CBS and NBC. You're a part of this wacky system.
01:43:48.000You're a part of this system that's not going to expose these things.
01:43:51.000It's going to let these people get their message out because if you don't, you're not going to get the big names.
01:43:57.000If you don't get the big names, you're not going to get the ratings.
01:43:59.000And then those big names are going to go over to Fox.
01:44:01.000Those big names are going to go over to CNN. They're going to go somewhere else and you're going to lose this campaign.
01:44:05.000Yeah, that's exactly how it seems to work here.
01:45:26.000And I think he's probably going to be the last guy that ever skates off into the sunset with this knowledge.
01:45:35.000I think Obama's going to be held accountable for a lot more than Bush ever was.
01:45:39.000And I think whoever's next is truly fucked.
01:45:42.000Whether it's Jeb Bush or whether it's whatever new Democrat they try to sneak into, I don't know, Hillary Clinton.
01:45:49.000I don't know what they're trying in 2016. And we won't know for a while because they have to vet out everyone's fucked up vices and skeletons in their closets.
01:45:59.000In this day and age, it's almost impossible.
01:46:01.000Which is terrible, I think, by the way, because that's one of the reasons that so many people get put off.
01:46:56.000It's a weird time when it comes to exposing people's past and this idea of this perfect person from the cradle to the grave running for president is preposterous.
01:47:26.000All sorts of terrible things that are just massive, you know, ethical errors that just shouldn't be ever tolerated from a person's character.
01:48:13.000She's in Mississippi and she revealed it herself.
01:48:16.000She revealed that she was a former prostitute and she was a prostitute like I believe it was 30 years ago and she met her husband while he was a John and he was one of her clients and she married him And she hasn't been a prostitute since.
01:48:39.000And I think in a lot of ways, you could see that and think, this person is actually really well qualified to be in office.
01:48:47.000Because obviously, you know, going through those sorts of experiences will give you A sense of empathy for, you know, the tough lives that some people have and the circumstances that end up putting them in that situation.
01:49:00.000And it probably makes you better, not worse.
01:49:02.000Well, not only that, what she did was totally legal as well.
01:49:05.000She was in a legal brothel in Nevada and it was over 30 years ago and she hasn't been there since.
01:49:13.000And the idea that this person Is not allowed to make errors and that she wouldn't have developed like a lot of empathy and character and she wouldn't have a more balanced perspective than a person who's grown up in a very privileged household with very rich,
01:49:33.000wealthy, connected people and then they got him to an Ivy League school and then he became a member of Skull and Crossbones and blah blah blah blah instead of that, well you have a person who was 14 and was pregnant with a child And had to take care of her child, and her parents died.
01:49:48.000And she was forced into a situation where she had to earn a living, and she didn't have a lot of options.
01:49:54.000And this was one of her options that she chose.
01:49:56.000And how could you judge someone who's a teenager that makes those choices?
01:51:18.000It's not something you'd be proud of, but if that was kind of exposed or whatever, that wouldn't be a barrier.
01:51:23.000Sure, even 10 years ago, forget about 30 years ago, if 10 years ago the guy went to a prostitute and said, listen, I was horny, I didn't have any options, I had a few bucks.
01:52:27.000I honestly haven't thought about it enough.
01:52:30.000One of the things that I definitely feel strongly about is If we're going to make that kind of decision, the sex trafficking trade needs to be one of the ways you think about it.
01:52:42.000Because that is just so evil and disgusting.
01:52:55.000I think there would probably be far less demand for sex trafficking, for illegal sex trafficking, if prostitution was legal, if adults could make that decision.
01:53:05.000If some woman, you know, was in a situation which was like, you know, I'm reasonably sexually attractive and I make X amount of money per month doing this, I can make that same amount in a day having sex with people.
01:53:34.000And isn't part of what objectifying women, part of this issue is, it's very difficult for some people to find sexual partners.
01:53:43.000So there's like, This thing with this Elliot Rogers, this crazy kid that shot up everybody in Santa Barbara.
01:53:53.000The nuttiest response that I've seen to this, the craziest, most infuriating response, is by these people that believe that if women weren't so stuck up, this guy wouldn't have gone on a rampage because he would have been able to have sex with more people.
01:54:07.000Or he would have been able to get people to have sex with him.
01:54:10.000Pickup artists and these women-hating fuckheads.
01:54:14.000There's a bunch of guys that operate under this guise of being for men's rights.
01:54:23.000It's kind of funny because I didn't even know there was a thing called an MRA. It's a men's rights...
01:56:07.000I don't even really want to get into it because some of it is so fucking stupid and I've been reading these things over the last couple of days and I'm trying to erase them from my memory.
01:56:15.000Because some of these poorly written articles by these men are so stunningly stupid.
01:56:20.000Like one of them was, this guy was talking about How he was around this 60-year-old man and this 25-year-old woman who is his incredibly hot wife and that this 25-year-old woman was insulting this man and,
01:56:35.000you know, that this is the anguish that this guy had to deal with and how horrible it is and this is what men have to deal with.
01:56:42.000I was like, that might be one of the dumbest fucking arguments I've ever heard in my life.
01:56:46.000First of all, what if it was a 25-year-old man and a 60-year-old woman that was this old, wretched creature that this guy was forced to fuck for money?
01:56:56.000Would you be on the man's side or the woman's side then?
01:57:06.000She's supposed to be having sex with a 25-year-old man or a 35-year-old man or someone reasonably close to her age where they would be naturally sexually attracted to each other.
01:57:15.000What you're dealing with is a bizarre situation where someone has sort of circumvented the system by acquiring money.
01:57:47.000But it's just, what you're dealing with with these men is a bunch of nitpicky shitheads with terrible personalities that are complaining about men getting a bad rap in this world.
01:59:17.000I think she's 50s, but I think that that's what's really, to be honest, really cool about what she's doing there, which is like she's just really constantly challenging those kind of stereotypes.
01:59:29.000I think that she's certainly, I think she's...
01:59:32.000She's got a pretty intelligent point of view on some of these gender issues.
01:59:39.000I think the fact that people find it uncomfortable is kind of making the point that we're agreeing about, which is that this is not how it's supposed to be.
01:59:47.000Well, she doesn't even consider herself a feminist.
01:59:49.000She considers herself a humanist, which I agree with wholeheartedly.
01:59:54.000And this idea of men's rights, what's really offensive about it is that they're concentrating entirely on the ideas and the problems that men face.
02:00:04.000When I think the only ideas and problems that men face, the only ones, are child custody and getting robbed in divorces.
02:00:56.000This is the natural balance of nature.
02:00:59.000And, you know, you've figured out a way to inject influence and power and money and sort of pervert this whole system.
02:01:08.000And when you complain about this perversion not working out in your favor, and this is why we need men's rights, you go, oh, fucking Christ.
02:02:49.000Every day our balls are building up more sperm, and if you're a shithead, and if you were raised improperly, and you don't have respect for women, or the opposite sex, or anyone in general other than your selfish self, Yeah, we have problems.
02:03:15.000There's a massage place on every corner.
02:03:17.000If you drive down the street in LA, if you drive, go to Ventura Boulevard, drive down the street, if your back is bothering you, you can find a massage place one a mile.
02:03:25.000You'll see a neon light Thai massage, Swedish massage, this massage.
02:03:30.000You can go in and get your neck rubbed.
02:04:02.000I think that with all that stuff, the thing...
02:04:04.000I've got a lot of sympathy for it, but I just keep coming back to this thing about, well, what is the...
02:04:10.000Are you going to set up a situation where it's not really a choice?
02:04:14.000That there's some kind of economic or other power or pressure that means that even though you kind of treat it like a marketplace where everyone's freely entering into it, is that really going to be the case?
02:04:32.000And I'm not suggesting, by the way, that prostitution is going to stop rape.
02:04:36.000What I'm suggesting is that there are real issues with human sexuality, and there's real issues with making things illegal that shouldn't be illegal, whether it's drug use or whether it's sexuality.
02:04:48.000I think there's real issues in suppression.
02:04:50.000I think when you suppress people from doing things, whether it's suppressing them from using marijuana, suppressing them from drinking, Suppressing them from wearing certain clothes.
02:05:26.000I see your point of view and I agree with it wholeheartedly that you do have to worry about people being...
02:05:31.000Sold into this that you have to worry about them being somehow or another Compromised by this this overwhelming need for you know the financial revenue that can be generated from sex and that people could be exploited and they could be a real issue with the objectification of women it could change the cultural attitudes about things but if you go to countries where it is legal that prostitution and I was just going to say,
02:06:52.000But that becomes the problem with everything.
02:06:54.000I mean, if people are being exploited into labor, if children are being forced to work in factories at young ages, which they are in other countries, And typically other countries that provide us with these goods that we so want.
02:07:07.000Cell phones, laptops, all these different...
02:07:09.000I mean, how many children every year are scraping minerals out of the mountains that they need to use to make electronics?
02:07:19.000This is exploitation that we benefit from.
02:07:22.000And I think that we have to address all forms of that.
02:07:25.000But we also have to address ridiculous laws that don't make any sense.
02:07:30.000And anytime you try to control people, anytime you try to suppress people's ability to express themselves in any way, if you don't like it, whether it's walking topless down the street, you can do it if you're a man, you can't do it if you're a woman.
02:07:43.000That's what they're dealing with in New York City now.
02:07:45.000In New York City, you're allowed to be topless.
02:07:49.000There's some woman who calls herself the fucking naked cowgirl, and she's getting sued by the naked cowboy.
02:07:54.000Because a naked cowboy is a guy who, he wears underwear, and he plays guitar with a cowboy hat on.
02:08:01.000Sort of tourist attraction in New York.
02:08:03.000Well, women are allowed to be topless now as well in a lot of places because the idea is, well, why is a man allowed to have no shirt on but a woman has to have?
02:08:11.000It's because you're saying that breasts are much more sexual when they're on a woman and that they need to be They need to be covered.
02:08:19.000And that sort of develops a sort of inequality in the law.
02:08:23.000That a woman is oppressed or a woman is subject to laws that a man is not.
02:08:30.000And that seems to be very difficult to pass.
02:08:33.000So, you know, you deal with some situation where women are allowed to be topless.
02:08:57.000You're right that there are so many kind of weird things about sex and how that kind of plays out when you think about sort of social issues and stuff like that.
02:09:08.000And I think one of the biggest things that's going on is the way that kind of the sort of sexualization of...
02:09:17.000Of, you know, like public space and the kind of world around us is like really influencing more and more children.
02:09:24.000I think that they're kind of, it's getting younger and younger that kids are being exposed to kind of sexualized stuff.
02:09:29.000That is a real problem because it's changing their expectation of what sex is.
02:09:34.000And there's lots of studies now showing how the, you know, like kids' sexual behavior is really different.
02:09:39.000You know, boys sort of viewing porn differently.
02:09:41.000Violent porn at much earlier age, thinking that that's how you behave, treating women really badly, women thinking of themselves as sexual objects more.
02:09:49.000I think there's a lot of kind of quite deep problems that are coming out, and we'll see in the years ahead, from the way that that is just, you know, like sexual images and content is just becoming much more widely available for younger kids.
02:10:02.000That's a really good point, because it's so prevalent and it's so uniquely new.
02:10:07.000The ability to download porn on a cell phone.
02:10:09.000So essentially, if your child is 12 and they have an iPhone, you send them off to school, they're watching people fuck.
02:10:15.000There's no way you're gonna stop them.
02:10:17.000If that phone has internet data, if it has internet access, those kids are gonna look at images.
02:10:22.000If they have somehow or another some access to an iPad or a laptop or something that's connected to Wi-Fi, if it's not blocked through some sort of a complicated filter that they probably know how to dismantle better than you do, They're gonna see sex.
02:10:36.000They're gonna see sex in a way that we never saw sex.
02:10:38.000You know, I have this joke in my act that is a true story about when I was 11 years old, me and a couple of my friends found a magazine in the woods that was a foot fetish magazine.
02:10:51.000And it took us like a few minutes to realize what was going on when we were looking at this magazine because it was really confusing.
02:10:59.000You thought it was like a podiatry today or something?
02:11:42.000So, the point was that we found this bag that had these magazines in it, and we're going through this one magazine, and it took us, like, many pages in.
02:11:52.000My friend goes, dude, this shit is all just dicks and feet.
02:13:03.000It's actually setting back some of the progress that's been made in terms of women's equality.
02:13:09.000I agree, but I think hopefully, at least because I'm the eternal optimist, I think it's temporary.
02:13:16.000And I think that ultimately it's all going to even out.
02:13:19.000Because I think that what people are doing is they're looking at these things, like if women are engaging in these sexual activities at a much earlier age, they're looking at it as like this is something that they need to do to become more attractive to men.
02:13:38.000My thought on all of this is that we're going to reach a point within our lifetimes, probably within the next few decades, where we're going to be able to read each other's minds.
02:13:54.000And I remember putting this thing on and scanning it and, you know, and Googling things and looking at navigation screens in front of my eye thinking, man, shit's going to get really fucking weird soon.
02:15:31.000And then we're going to have to come to some sort of an agreement where we're going to say, hey, listen, in order for the human race to establish an enlightened perspective, we're all going to have to look into each other's heads.
02:15:43.000We're all going to have to be able to read each other's minds and find out how we think and feel.
02:15:47.000And so there'll be no more mystery in this world.
02:15:55.000There's going to be this weird hive mind thing going on.
02:15:58.000And it's going to happen within a hundred years.
02:16:01.000I think that's incredibly interesting and the way that that will change so many things if that comes to pass and people can just know what the other person is thinking.
02:16:12.000Well, think about what it used to be like before language was established.
02:16:15.000People used to grunt and point and kind of try to figure out what the other person wanted and we're essentially monkey people.
02:16:24.000We got to this point and now you compare your life today to that point.
02:16:29.000I was in a conversation with a friend, and we have another friend that is becoming a prepper.
02:16:37.000He's fucking setting up his house for solar power and collecting rainwater and growing his own fruits and vegetables, and doing so in this fear that society was going to collapse.
02:16:52.000And my friend Jimmy was like, If society collapses, you don't want to live, man.
02:16:58.000Like, you don't want to be that one fucking guy that's got all the food and you're, you know, standing on your porch with a rifle and you're all taking turns waiting for the zombies to come over the hill, you know, sounding the horns and alerting the people that the barbarians have arrived.
02:17:24.000Once the no secret thing happens, and people just get this kind of understanding of what it is to be a human being, that it's universal.
02:17:33.000It reminds me, there's this work going on at Stanford, they have a virtual reality lab, and they're looking at how virtual reality could change the way people think about other people, about other issues.
02:17:46.000There's one experiment they're doing where, I'm trying to get it right, where I think they put you in a forest situation, you think you're in a forest, and then they measure some nature.
02:18:23.000And you can actually influence someone's behavior by giving them this sense of Yeah.
02:18:30.000And that's, again, just in its infancy.
02:18:31.000You know, the virtual reality stuff is just getting going.
02:18:35.000And I just think it's interesting, all these things, how they will affect so many aspects of how we relate to each other and think about these issues that at the moment are just so kind of superficially dealt with.
02:18:47.000It's going to get really squirrely when that artificial reality is indistinguishable from the reality that we're experiencing right now.
02:18:55.000That's what the whole simulation theory is based upon.
02:19:00.000This idea that one day we're going to get to a point where you can't tell whether or not we live in a computer or we live in the material carbon-based flesh world.
02:19:11.000And if that's the case, how do we know that we haven't already gotten to that point?
02:19:15.000How do we know that we're not in a computer right now?
02:19:18.000And we're thinking that we're experiencing this reality, but it's not.
02:19:36.000The thing is that this kind of gets to a point where I can't handle it anymore.
02:19:41.000My brain cannot literally cope with Thinking about some of this stuff, I remember a friend of mine repeatedly trying to explain to me quantum physics and quantum things, and I just literally can't understand it.
02:20:06.000When we start getting into quantum stuff, I don't even think they understand it.
02:20:10.000I mean, they understand it in terms of these theoretical concepts, but it's so abstract in a lot of ways.
02:20:16.000When you're dealing with things like, when they start talking about subatomic particles, and they start talking about the things that they actually do know, like the things that you actually can measure.
02:20:27.000Like particles in superposition, meaning they're in movement and still at the same time.
02:20:32.000When they're talking about things blinking in and out of existence, they go away and they don't know where they went, and then they come back.
02:20:39.000With just that alone, the measurable stuff is so crazy that the lowest point, not the lowest, but the smallest measurable point of reality, which is these quantum ideas, the world is made of magic.
02:22:00.000I mean, I don't understand it, but eventually it leads to things that we all can use and deal with, and a lot of those things are really good.
02:23:35.000There's all sorts of roles that are played in a society, and there's the innovator, and there's the scientists, there's the people that are constantly pushing the boundaries of technology, and then there's the social engineers who step back and go, okay, let's look at the repercussions of this, and how do we mitigate the negative aspects of it?
02:23:51.000How do we figure out how to integrate these ideas into society and use them to enhance society, and what is being done to sort of manage that, and what is being done to minimize the negative impact?
02:24:05.000Yeah, that is a good way of putting it.
02:24:08.000Yeah, there's just a constant, there's no one thing that's awesome.
02:24:12.000There's things that are awesome and then there's repercussions that are like, yeah, but then there's this.
02:24:17.000Well, there's that, but then there's this part of it that we're not really comfortable with.
02:24:22.000And there's this sort of dance that we do as we build society and as society continues to grow and expand and our ability to do things changes.
02:24:31.000Our ability to access information, our ability to accomplish goals, our ability to transmit ideas is so much quicker and faster.
02:24:40.000And there's these repercussions to that that were before this day and age were really unexplored because they weren't available.
02:24:48.000So we don't really know the long-term repercussions of children being able to access porn because they really didn't have it.
02:25:20.000You have to have a phone that you give to people that could possibly be annoying so that at any given time, if it fell into the ocean, you'd be like, whatever with that fucking phone.
02:25:30.000And then have a phone that you only give to your family and your close friends.
02:25:34.000Well, one of the things that really puts me off, I just can't, there's something about my kind of useless, sort of fat, stubby finger, I'm just hopeless with touchscreens.
02:26:19.000But you're not a rageful guy, which is so crazy, because you're normally the last person I would expect to get violent and throw something and get crazy.
02:26:28.000But it was an iPod that did it to you.
02:26:30.000I know, it was weird, but I do with technology, as people who know me and work with me will testify.
02:26:39.000You're very Unabomber-esque in that way.
02:27:30.000It was scary for a lot of people also because of who he was attacking, that he was attacking people that were technological innovators.
02:27:36.000He was attacking people that were involved in the distribution of technology.
02:27:39.000And he believed that, and in a lot of ways correctly believed, that there was something going on right now where people were creating technology and this technology would eventually do bad things to the human race and to the biological Existence that we currently exist in,
02:27:56.000you know, this sort of like established way of being and living that we consider being, you know, inherent to being a human being.
02:28:04.000And he felt like these people were the enemies of humanity because they were fostering technology and creating technology.
02:28:11.000I didn't really know that that was what was behind all that.
02:28:17.000Instead of living in the moment and dealing with the moment, he just saw this attack by the biological humans or on the biological humans by technology.
02:28:27.000Which essentially, I kind of see his point in a way.
02:28:32.000I don't see his point as far as like attacking people that are creating technology, but if you really extrapolate where we are right now and where we're going, this symbiotic relationship that we have with technology where people are afraid to leave their phones behind, The phones will eventually become Google Glass.
02:29:13.000What it is is a new world that we're living in where we're going to have weird choices that never existed before.
02:29:20.000And a lot of the people that are involved in Google, they hired Kurzweil.
02:29:25.000Ray Kurzweil, who is the proponent, the number one proponent of this sort of Transcendental moment where we become one with computers, where we become one either with some sort of a computer interface,
02:29:41.000or we download our consciousness into an artificial body, or we figure out a way to exist in some sort of a virtual reality that is eternal.
02:29:52.000A lot of people feel like that's where things are going to go if you give us a thousand years.
02:29:57.000Science fiction is really not fiction.
02:30:04.000I've talked to a friend of mine about this quite a bit, which is, if you think about, I'm just interested that there is, okay, the Unabono, that's an extreme example, and I didn't realize that it was so focused on technology.
02:30:16.000But there isn't really a, people like it, generally speaking, there isn't really a movement, a sort of anti-technology movement, certainly not that I'm aware of.
02:30:27.000I can't remember exactly when it was, but when you had the industrial revolution and the Luddites smashing up machines that were taking jobs away from people and in their view really damaging society.
02:30:40.000It didn't get anywhere and You know, history sort of made them irrelevant, but there was a movement with an aim and an organization that did stuff.
02:30:51.000I think that specifically it was the new equipment, like the weaving.
02:30:56.000During the Industrial Revolution in England, the machines that were now being used to do the work that had been done by people, and they objected to that.
02:31:09.000That was, I think, one of the things they did.
02:31:11.000And I'm sure there's people with a better study of history that can give you a better picture.
02:31:16.000But that was, they were called the Luddites, I think, named after the person that set them up, someone called Ludd, I think.
02:31:25.000I don't know how big it was, but it's big enough that it's something we still know about and it's part of the history of that era.
02:31:33.000And there's nothing like that now, not to my knowledge, where you don't have people going out and smashing up cell phone towers to make a point about technology.
02:31:43.000Well, I think it's what we were saying earlier.
02:31:51.000There's a lot of benefits to technology.
02:31:53.000But I think it's what we were talking about earlier that maybe back then they didn't have enough information to draw upon and they saw it as being this direct threat to their livelihood.
02:32:05.000Yeah, I think that was a big part of it.
02:32:06.000And I think today we're sort of forced into this realization that it's neither good nor bad, but rather something that needs to be managed.
02:32:17.000And there's good aspects to it, and then there's negative aspects to it, and ultimately you have to figure out what outweighs what and how to lean it towards the positive.
02:32:27.000How to manage it in a way that it goes towards the positive.
02:32:30.000And I think that's the case we were talking about with children watching television.
02:35:09.000I think there's weird senses that are emerging with human beings.
02:35:13.000Like, for instance, they've statistically shown in a way that's measurable that people can tell when people are looking at the back of their head.
02:35:58.000I don't know, but I know that a fucking channeler starting a school that tells you not to use cell phones and don't watch TV, that guy's a silly bitch.
02:37:00.000And when you think about it, it's probably because whatever they're doing, whatever part of their brain they're stimulating, they're constantly focused on that and all the other shit about wondering about existential questions, the purpose of man,
02:37:17.000the idea of infinity, all these weird questions that normally bounce around inside a person's brain.
02:37:22.000They're completely non-existent because you're just trying to find the next person to jerk off to.
02:37:28.000But that guy the other week that came out in the government, he was in the Environmental Protection Agency, I think, and he was watching, he lost his job, he was watching porn, like, I think six hours a day or something,
02:37:43.000in the office, in the government office, and you just think, what is going on that that's even possible?
02:37:50.000Well, people are listening to this podcast in their office, guaranteed.
02:38:34.000Especially if you give them, it's like we were talking about as far as professors or police officers or anybody in some sort of an ultimate position where they don't have enough supervision.
02:38:44.000They don't have enough, they have too much influence over others and they don't have enough oversight.
02:38:51.000You wind up being this fucking guy who's supposed to be paying attention to our drinking water and he's just beating off all day.
02:39:42.000If you're in an office, and especially if your computer is facing you and you're looking at the door so you get a clean shot at anybody walking in, for men, men are freaks.
02:39:53.000You give a guy the opportunity to just beat off in his office, a lot of times dudes are going to take it up.
02:40:03.000What a weird world we live in where that's an issue.
02:40:06.000Imagine if, like, it was back in the day where, you know, a guy who was assigned to work for the city water department in the 1930s, they found 7,000 pornography books in his office.
02:40:18.000Like, Frank, what the fuck are you doing, man?
02:40:20.000Like, I'm getting crazy with all this reading.
02:40:24.000I think in a lot of ways what we're dealing with when it comes to pornography, when it comes to the internet, when it comes to just...
02:40:34.000Technology itself is we're dealing with these things that have influence over people in a way that we're not designed to process.
02:40:41.000You know, we're not designed to process movies, a giant screen where explosions and, you know, spaceships and all this stuff that's not real, but we're seeing it in a way that's much more impactful than real life.
02:42:37.000We're animals with computers that may become part of machines.
02:42:40.000That's the thing that freaks me out the most, is the symbiotic connection that human beings have to technology and the potential for developing artificial technology or artificial life.
02:42:53.000I mean, Marshall McLuhan once said that human beings are the sex organs in the machine world.
02:42:58.000And I always wonder if we're not some strange caterpillar that becomes a butterfly that has no idea what the fuck it's doing.
02:43:06.000We're making some sort of a technological cocoon, thinking that we're just doing my thing, running around, looking at porn.
02:43:13.000No, you know, you're a part of this gigantic machine that's processing and pushing for the innovation of technology.
02:43:20.000And the innovation of technology will eventually give birth to a life form.
02:43:23.000They're constantly working on trying to map out the human mind, Duplicate the functions of the human mind in some sort of a synthetic process.
02:43:32.000And we're not anywhere close right now, but the way technology accelerates...
02:43:39.000It feels unlikely that that's not going to happen.
02:43:42.000Yeah, I read this article by this really grumpy fuck who's an interesting guy.
02:43:47.000He's a smart guy, but he's also just probably a lonely shithead.
02:43:50.000And he was mocking Ray Kurzweil and how Ray Kurzweil knows nothing about the human mind.
02:43:56.000He was talking about the complicated functions of the human mind and the way the human mind processes proteins and that this is barely understood.
02:44:05.000But what I read from this and what I got out of this is like, I don't think this guy understands that the biological functions are not going to matter.
02:44:52.000If we can figure out a way to do all the things that a body does, but do it with a computer, or do it with technology, or do it with some sort of quantum computer, Some sort of quantum computer that's contained in an artificial body that can completely replicate the functions of consciousness, the functions of emotions,
02:45:09.000of interaction, of curiosity, of creativity.
02:45:12.000If you can develop an artificial computer that's creative, it doesn't matter of luteinizing hormones and all this shit that you're bitching about.
02:45:21.000You're just bitching because you're showing your intelligence.
02:45:23.000You're trying to show people how smart you are.
02:45:25.000Like criticizing a known genius because you're not a known genius.
02:45:29.000I mean, that's essentially what you're doing.
02:45:46.000What they do know about the mind and they do know about the body is comparatively rudimentary when you think about what we know about a clock.
02:45:58.000You know, you could buy a Swiss watch and there's a man out there that knows every single function of that watch, knows how it interacts, knows exactly what's going on, tick-tock, tick-tock.
02:46:08.000We don't know that about the body yet.
02:46:56.000There was a guy that we talked about in the podcast who had been bitten by a shark.
02:47:00.000And the shark had taken his arm and taken his leg.
02:47:03.000And he had this carbon arm and he was moving his fingers around.
02:47:06.000And he was standing there talking with this fake arm and his fake leg about how great it is that technology has provided him with a way to still be mobile and functional even though he had been attacked by a shark.
02:47:17.000And I was sitting there and I was thinking, wow, this is fascinating.
02:47:22.000What we see is a man with an artificial arm and the story was about how well they had created this arm to the point where this guy was living a totally normal life and was functional and mobile and could take care of himself even though his arm had been bitten off by a monster.
02:47:39.000And then I thought about what if it was both legs?
02:47:42.000Okay, and then they figured out artificial legs.
02:48:15.000If you are your thoughts and your personality and your memories downloaded into some creation, some sort of a new thing that they've done that mimics all the functions of the human mind without any of the biological limitations,
02:48:35.000It's so funny you talking about that because it reminds me years ago when I was doing my interviews to go to Oxford University and I had an interview with a philosophy professor.
02:48:43.000And he gave me this scenario, which I now know is a famous philosophical thing.
02:48:50.000And there's this construct very much like what you're talking about, which is like if we could put you in a machine that gave you all the experiences of a fantastic life, but it would be a machine doing it.
02:50:16.000It's way more important than other people are doing it than me.
02:50:20.000In the hierarchy, I think that you know a lot more about it than I do and you've read more about it than I have.
02:50:25.000And I just think that, yeah, it's really important that generally we talk about it and keep a really strong sense of awareness of how these things might change stuff.
02:50:37.000And a lot of the time it will be for the better and that's great, but we should just talk about it.
02:50:41.000Well, I had the opportunity to talk to Kurzweil for an hour and a half, and I sat down and interviewed him about these things, and it was really fascinating.
02:50:47.000We had a great conversation, but this guy is not thinking about negatives at all.
02:50:53.000All he's thinking is gung-ho, full blast, pedal to the metal.
02:50:59.000He takes giant bags of supplements every day, because he's an older man.
02:51:05.000He's just trying to keep his biology alive long enough to see this This new birth of technology and when it gets really crazy what he's trying to do also is he's trying to Make his father come back to life.
02:51:21.000His father died when he was young, and he believes that if they figure out a way to recreate a person from memories, from just the knowledge of who this person was, images, that you're going to be able to recreate this guy in some sort of an artificial form.
02:51:40.000I mean, it's one of the things he's discussed.
02:51:52.000From memory, from all the data that he knows, from recorded stuff.
02:51:57.000One of the most fascinating concepts that I've ever heard when it comes to the increasing power of computing is that they're going to get to a point one day, if computers continue to accelerate,
02:52:13.000they're going to get to a point one day where they can take into account all the positions of all the objects and all the things that exist all over the world as data and from them We'll extrapolate where things will be and where things were.
02:52:27.000So by where things were, meaning knowing everything in this room, where it's at in this position, they'll be able to figure out how it all got here.
02:52:45.000They'll be able to, by what we have here, by everything we have here and what we know, they'll be able to calculate the actions of the past.
02:54:01.000If you put him in a time machine from a million years ago and threw him into the fucking Burbank Mall, this thing would be running around going, what the fuck is this?
02:54:32.000It's a great way of thinking about it because it just means that you don't worry so much because there's stuff that you can understand and relate to and be good at and enjoy.
02:55:35.000And it's simply a matter of there's so much happening and there's so much to take in and there's so much going on that there is not one good or bad.
02:55:44.000There's just a bunch of different things happening all at once.
02:55:47.000Yeah, and that's why I totally agree with you that the more you can give people the freedom to experience and enjoy and kind of, you know, write their own story about how they do stuff.