On this week's show, we're joined by Josh Whyte to talk about the UFC's Ronda Rousey vs. Conor McGregor fight, and the controversial question of whether or not it's wrong to kill a newborn baby. Plus, we talk about why we should or shouldn't kill babies, and why it's a terrible thing to kill someone else's baby, even if they're not doing it on purpose. And, of course, we take a deep dive into the mind of bioethicist Peter Singer and his theories about the morality of killing newborn babies. We also talk about what it's like being a parent to a child, and what it means to be a good parent to someone else s child. And of course we have a special guest on the pod, our good friend Joe Rogan, who's back from his trip to Brazil and just got back from a 13 hour layover in New York after a hell of a long plane ride. This episode is a must-listen for anyone who's ever wanted to know what's going on in the world of politics, morality, and parenting in the 21st century. Thanks to Josh, Joe, and Joe for coming on the show, and for being willing to do what we asked him to do. Also, we hope you enjoy the episode, and don't forget to subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts! and subscribe to our podcast! Subscribe, rate, and review our podcast on iTunes, and tell us what you think of it! We're listening to it on your favorite streaming platform! and sharing it with your friends! What do you think about it? We'll be looking out for you in the next week's episode? in the comments! Cheers, Cheers! -Your thoughts? -Jonah, Jonah, and Jonah's thoughts on it's value, too! Timestamps: 0:30 - What's better than yours? 6:00-9:00 - What does it mean to you? 7:30-10:00 8:15-11:15 - Whytee? 9: What's wrong with killing a baby? 11:40 - Is it wrong? 12:00+ - Is a child better than a baby in the womb? 13:00? 15:00 + +3: Is it better than you can have a future?
00:02:09.000It's like an alien just came down to Earth and said, alright, we're not going to have any more preconceptions about what people think is right and wrong.
00:02:16.000We're going to start from basics and think, okay, why do we think about the morality of things the way that we do, and in what ways is that wrong?
00:02:25.000So he ends up with these crazy conclusions, and people hate him for some of them, like saying it's not necessarily wrong to, say, kill an infant, a newborn infant.
00:02:38.000I think it's on the grounds that what's wrong with killing something is a sort of combination of snuffing out the life of a being that has the capability of conceiving of itself as having a future, right?
00:02:50.000You're thwarting a person's plans when you kill them, you're robbing them of all of the opportunities that they hoped that they were going to have, and you're presumably causing them pain.
00:03:01.000I mean, if you think of life as being an incremental thing that starts from conception and then gradually evolves up into adulthood and sort of self-awareness and consciousness, I mean, does a two-day-old baby have that much more sentience and consciousness and sense of itself than a 22-week-old baby in the womb does?
00:03:31.000That's interesting that he thinks that way if he has children, because I could see it if you're trying to make some sort of a logic argument, you know, that you could argue it like that.
00:03:41.000But as far as, like, being a human being, the difference being significant in that a child represents potential, and a child represents, to a lot of people, represents this insane bond of love that you have with the baby.
00:03:57.000I think, just to clarify, I think he's only saying, like, in cases where, you know, the parents don't want it or something.
00:04:11.000Oh, so they're saying, like, if they don't want their baby, it's not that big a deal.
00:04:14.000In a situation like abortion, as if it was like an abortion.
00:04:17.000There's some people that are extreme animal rights folks that also believe that there's something about if you did kill a person, at least you stop that person from killing all the animals they're going to kill or be responsible for the death of in their entire life.
00:04:43.000There's people that break into restaurants, places that have seafood and keep lobsters, and they release them, take the rubber bands off their atrophied claws, and release them back into the ocean.
00:04:54.000Those lobsters aren't surviving in the ocean.
00:05:10.000Well, they wouldn't do it while you're eating them.
00:05:12.000But they always have the rubber bands on their claws, so they don't jack each other up while they're in that tank all piled on top of each other.
00:05:23.000I have no problem with it because I do eat meat and so I can't really be a hypocrite about it.
00:05:28.000But I think there's something just kind of oddly sadistic about sitting there at a table and just being like, alright, I'm going to end that one's life right now and then I'm just going to eat him in front of his buddies.
00:06:31.000So, getting back to Peter Singer, where his whole philosophy of animal liberation is sort of that there is a hierarchy of consciousness and sentience that has to be taken into account.
00:06:42.000He happens to be a vegan, but he doesn't think, you know, I've spoken to him, obviously he doesn't think that an oyster has the same right to life as a lion does or as a chimpanzee does, right?
00:06:53.000So you factor in the capacity of the creature to be sentient and to feel pain and to have a conception of itself and to feel love and fear and those sorts of things.
00:07:04.000And however much it does, that's why human life is probably more important than any other animal's life.
00:07:10.000Maybe whales or dolphins or, I don't know, some other animal that's equally smart as us.
00:07:19.000And for anyone sensible, the bugs are less worthy, right?
00:07:22.000But what's interesting when you say, like, we have these weird conceptions of our own hierarchies, of, like, cute animals and non-cute animals, or animals that we give a shit about and animals that we don't...
00:07:33.000What's interesting is that that hierarchy doesn't match up with a logical, ethical hierarchy.
00:07:40.000Like, why are we so willing to be so cruel to pigs, which are just as conscious and self-aware and capable of love and family and pain as dogs?
00:07:59.000I mean, whatever that industry can do to lower the price of a pound of flesh by a few pennies, it will do, including not anaesthetising the pigs, grabbing little piglets by the tail and just smashing their heads against a wall to kill them if they're non-viable anymore.
00:08:36.000Cecil's a 13-year-old lion, which I want everyone to understand that if you're a male lion and you reach 13 years of age, you have killed a fuckload of baby lions.
00:09:11.000But I think that's an important point to look at.
00:09:15.000My friend Steve Rinella calls them charismatic megafauna.
00:09:18.000And he's like, there's all these animals that are charismatic megafauna that we have anthropomorphized in movies like The Lion King and Yogi Bear and all these movies.
00:09:29.000And we have this idealized view of what they really are.
00:09:33.000But the reality of them is so alien to us because we're never in Africa, in Zimbabwe, in the jungle with these lions.
00:09:41.000And if you were, you would be absolutely fucking terrified of them and you wouldn't think of them like...
00:09:46.000I saw Jimmy Kimmel crying on TV. I was like, whoa, Jimmy, I want to show you some videos.
00:09:51.000I want to show you some videos of Cecil killing babies.
00:09:53.000Because apparently there's a video of Cecil actually killing...
00:12:02.000I mean, these are extremely, extremely poor people.
00:12:05.000Not only that, they find their camps, and in a lot of their camps, they'll find evidence of witchcraft.
00:12:12.000So they have this white powder that they'll find in these camps, and they put this white powder on their wrists, and they believe this white powder that's been blessed by this witch doctor makes them invisible.
00:12:23.000So this guy was standing out in the open, like right next to a tree, when the game wardens, the people that live and work in Africa and handle this stuff, shot this guy.
00:13:26.000And there's a case, I mean, some people say, well, look, trophy hunting, you may not agree with it, but the $50,000 that the person is spending can then go into maintaining a preserve that actually protects a whole bunch of lions.
00:13:38.000Now, I'm a bit sort of conflicted about that, because there are only a few tens of thousands of lions left, right?
00:14:06.000Well, I was reading a piece the other day that was saying that, you know, within 15 or 20 years, it's entirely possible there just won't be any African elephants left.
00:14:13.000Well, I brought this up before, so forgive me for anybody who's listening to this, but Louis Theroux has a great documentary on these camps.
00:14:24.000I've seen that episode a couple of times.
00:14:26.000Well, one of the things that was pointed out on that show is there was a lot of animals that were on the verge of extinction that are now thriving because they live in these giant hunting camps.
00:14:48.000And that guy's saying that, and you're like, whoa.
00:14:50.000Like, this guy is, like, he's just at his wit's end.
00:14:54.000So, Ricky Gervais was commenting on Facebook about Cecil the Lion and trophy hunting and everything, because he's a big animal rights guy, and he's super opposed to trophy hunting.
00:15:05.000Sure, maybe this is going to fund something better, but would you allow some arsehole to shoot a cancer patient if he was willing to donate a million dollars to cancer research?
00:16:47.000I understand hunting hunting for meat, but I don't understand trophy hunting.
00:16:52.000But we all pile on and we all love being so self-righteous and so sanctimonious about it.
00:16:57.000At the same time, once again, as we're eating all those pigs that have been tortured and people are biting into chicken burgers, that's another tortured animal.
00:17:05.000But the moment there's something with a big fluffy mane and it has a cute name like Cecil.
00:17:10.000Do you pronounce that name Cecil in America?
00:19:40.000So we had Greg Fitzsimmons on the show last night, and we just got a bunch of people together in Hollywood.
00:19:45.000And Fred Stoller, who was a writer on Seinfeld, I don't know if you know Fred, did a joke about exactly what you were just saying, about Cecil the Lion.
00:19:52.000He was like, it's like if someone, like...
00:19:57.000Someone accidentally shot Bruce Willis, but they thought that they were going to be shooting Gregory McGee, and they're like, oh fuck, I didn't realize that I was shooting Bruce Willis.
00:20:05.000I just thought I was going to be killing this other random dude.
00:20:07.000You'd still be like, no, you'd still murdered a guy, right?
00:20:10.000It doesn't matter whether it's Jericho the Lion or Shithead the Lion.
00:20:28.000I really believe that media depictions of animals, and when you add human voices to them, like Zookeeper, a movie that I was in, you do fuck with people's reality.
00:20:40.000I think that We're not designed to take in the media.
00:20:43.000I really don't believe that the human body and brain is designed for films.
00:20:47.000And I think when we sit down there and we watch some epic movie with lions, like, there was a movie called Bears.
00:21:36.000But I do definitely think that if there's something which is a pseudo-documentary, like what you're talking about, like Bears or something, like one movie that I hated, I couldn't get through more than 20 minutes of it, was March of the Penguins.
00:22:15.000Well, also, there was a part in the movie, and this really did happen, when I watched it, I was watching, and there's those leopard seals that feed off of the penguins that I didn't even know existed.
00:22:24.000I didn't even know it was a real animal until that movie.
00:22:27.000And this is an amazing beast of an animal with these huge teeth, and I was like, whoa!
00:23:40.000So I think companies like Disney probably should be held to better account to be more responsible about communicating to children the reality of animal life rather than making it all sunny.
00:23:50.000Don't want their kids to watch like pull up this video Jamie lion killing cub male lion killing cubs I put this up on Twitter and I thought Twitter took it down But what actually happened is I retweeted somebody else tweeted it and the guy who tweeted it got attacked so hard That he decided to delete his tweet.
00:24:39.000I mean, I interviewed Richard Dawkins recently as well, and I've got another event coming up with him in October, which is going to be cool.
00:24:53.000Now, that lion is killing those cubs because what better way to make sure that its genes end up getting passed on and spread out and procreated through the...
00:25:38.000But bottom line is, this is also part of the picture.
00:25:42.000So by showing only the beautiful aspects of the lion with a flowing mane, walking amongst the cubs that are his and the female lionesses, you don't see the actual whole animal.
00:25:53.000You also don't see the reality of the poaching and what these people go through that live there and that it's easy for these hunting wardens to murder those people that are trying to survive.
00:26:05.000That to me is so much more disturbing.
00:26:07.000Yeah, but then there's this big question.
00:26:08.000I mean, so there's the ethics of actually taking the lives of these animals and the hypocrisy of loving dogs but not pigs and of eating chicken but then going crazy about Cecil the Lion.
00:26:18.000But then at the end of the day, I always come back to the fundamental fact that...
00:26:23.000We are living through one of the greatest extinction events in history that's been unleashed by humans.
00:26:31.000If, in 50 years time, we don't want to live in a world that has no lions, has no African elephants, has totally polluted overfished waters, where you can't eat tuna anymore because there's so much mercury in it.
00:26:44.000Like, we've got to find ways of dealing with this And if the poachers are part of that problem, I'm not saying you put a bullet in their head, but you've got to do something.
00:26:54.000See, with the poachers that are getting killed in Africa, though, most...
00:26:58.000I mean, there's different types of poachers.
00:26:59.000There's poachers in Africa that are killing elephants for their ivory, and this is the most unbelievably brutal aspect of it.
00:27:09.000The amount of ivory that they get, they get like four or five elephants that they kill.
00:27:14.000I think there was a big story a few days ago where they killed five elephants and they just chop off their tusks and leave their bodies to rot.
00:27:51.000He still is an MMA fighter, but he went over there on a trip and met some pygmies and just was in the Congo and fell in love and just was like, I need to help these people.
00:28:01.000And we've been donating money and they've been building wells.
00:28:03.000They've built 16 wells for these people.
00:29:01.000Like, if you were, you know, if you were in Montana, say you were elk hunting, and when you shoot an animal, you have to have a tag for it, which means Indian state allows shooting tiger poachers on sight offers money to informants.
00:30:33.000Cell phones have revolutionized the continent, because all of a sudden...
00:30:37.000People are able to, like, send a text message to the market that's a three-hour walk away and ask what price, you know, fish or rice are getting that day.
00:30:44.000And they can actually plan instead of just guessing.
00:30:46.000Like, there are a lot of good news stories in Africa.
00:30:49.000I'm not downplaying how terrible it is.
00:30:50.000But the idea that the only way that you can survive on the continent of Africa is by poaching, is by being an ivory poacher.
00:31:12.000But I think unless you have feet on the ground in Africa, unless you actually go there and experience it firsthand, everybody that I've talked to that's been there said, it is another world.
00:31:55.000And we're also so caught up in our own little worlds, I mean, especially in this country, because America's so big, and it's so easy to maintain, to just live inside of the American cultural bubble, essentially, that it's not, you have to actively, proactively try to seek out other sources of information and other experiences.
00:32:12.000Otherwise, it's very easy to just coast along here and not really think about the rest of the world.
00:32:17.000It's also kind of ironic that the last big lion story that came out of Africa was the editor from the Game of Thrones that got pulled out of her car by a lion.
00:32:24.000She was taking a photograph of it and the lion was like, ooh, I think that's an open window.
00:32:28.000Just dove into the car and literally pulled her out in front of her friends.
00:32:32.000You know, they're all screaming and the lion killed her right in front of everybody.
00:33:04.000And so they'll just take a bite to see if they like us, and then they'll spit us out.
00:33:08.000But if it's a nine-foot great white, then that little taste is enough to kill you if they rip off your leg or off your torso.
00:33:16.000So I've always felt, especially as an Australian, where this is constantly just in the background of your mind as a possibility every time, because we're always at the beach, like...
00:33:24.000I would prefer it if they actually liked us so at least one of us is happy.
00:33:30.000It's just the ignominy of both being killed and then also the shark being like, eh, I didn't even like it.
00:34:41.000They're like right there, these goddamn monsters.
00:34:43.000Well, it's a good thing the water's cold, so there aren't that many people swimming in San Francisco Bay.
00:34:47.000There's a video of them taking a surfboard and pulling it behind a boat in South Africa just to show there's this one area that's just overrun with sharks.
00:34:56.000And as they pull this surfboard behind the boat, these sharks just, bam, just hitting the surfboard, knocking it up in the air, and you're like, what?
00:35:10.000Maybe that girl who lost her arm, she probably wouldn't be really too much into them.
00:35:13.000Did you see this petition that they've got, this is from left field, but it just popped into my head, and I don't know why, about this 19-year-old kid who had sex with a 17-year-old girl who had told him, she was 14, and she told him she was 17,
00:35:29.000and so he went to jail, and now he's on the sex offender registry for 25 years.
00:35:35.000And he's not going to be able to have a career because he wanted to do software engineering.
00:35:39.000And as part of his parole, he's not allowed to own a computer.
00:35:42.000He's not allowed to own a smartphone because he's classified as a pedophile.
00:35:47.000Even though she was physically mature, he thought she was 17. Her parents lobbied the judge and she lobbied the judge to plead and say, please let this guy off.
00:35:57.000But instead, the judge threw the book at him, basically, saying, like, you should understand that sex is supposed to be a meaningful and holy experience between two people who love each other.
00:36:09.000You shouldn't be hooking up online like this.
00:37:16.000Debate rages over man, 19. Put on a sex offender registry for 25 years.
00:37:20.000Zach Anderson, 19, met a girl online via hookup app.
00:37:24.000Hot or not, last year on the app, girl says she's 17. However, she's actually 14. Zach traveled 20 miles from Indiana home to Michigan and slept with her.
00:37:32.000He was arrested after the girl's mom became worried about her whereabouts.
00:37:37.000Whatever this petition is, Jamie, find out where it is and let's give it out online and have people fill it out and hopefully that helps.
00:37:42.000I think it's a change.org thing or something.
00:38:31.000Yeah, I've had him on Half Post Live a couple of times.
00:38:33.000I mean, his point is like, what the hell legal rationale is there for saying that sex is supposed to be this meaningful thing between two people who love each other and you shouldn't be using hot or not?
00:39:56.000And the whole point of the sex offender registry and that kind of stuff is to protect kids and protect parents from predatory, potentially violent, repeat child rapists, right?
00:40:06.000I mean, that's ideally what that offender registry should do.
00:40:10.000What kids is it protecting to prosecute this 19-year-old?
00:40:14.000Does anyone seriously believe that if he has a smartphone at any point in the next 25 years or whatever it is, that he's going to be preying upon multiple 14-year-old girls who look like they're 17?
00:40:26.000It's just madness that someone thinks that they could do that.
00:40:29.000I have a theory about that, and I've talked about it on the show before, that I think that one of the main problems that we have with law enforcement and with police and even with judge and prosecutors is that it becomes a game.
00:41:30.000Playing pool, yes, but when you're a cop, you also have a quota.
00:41:34.000I had this guy on, Michael Wood, who's a former police officer in Baltimore, who's enlightening me as to how fucked up Baltimore is and how fucked up The police department is and how crazy it is over there.
00:41:46.000But he was like, you get in trouble if you're not arresting people.
00:41:50.000So if no one commits crimes, you're fucked.
00:41:53.000You're fucked as a cop because they're like, that's bullshit.
00:42:02.000Baltimore just became Beverly Hills and everyone is like this nice old rich Jewish couple that doesn't do anything wrong and no one commits crime.
00:42:26.000So it's a misalignment of incentives, basically.
00:42:29.000Because the people who are supposed to be doing the cracking down...
00:42:32.000on crime actually have an incentive for there still to continue to be some crime so that they can keep doing the cracking down.
00:42:37.000It almost reminds me a little bit of the military-industrial complex where the Pentagon, the Defense Department is supposed to be about defending us, but if we don't have wars to go into, then they're kind of redundant.
00:42:50.000So it's actually good for them when there is a war, ironically, but you would expect that the people who are trying to Yeah, I think the overall dynamic of how we operate is flawed fundamentally on so many different levels that we just sort of try to patch it up and keep moving.
00:43:13.000And I think you can make an analogy about this hunting thing.
00:43:16.000I mean, it is kind of fucked that you're talking about conservation when the best way to conserve is to get money from them being murdered.
00:43:23.000I mean, that's really what you're saying.
00:43:25.000The best way is to go over there and there was an article in HuffPost actually today that I was reading and I was kind of laughing about it because it was wrong on a lot of different levels and it was about hunting for conservation and that this model doesn't really work or that the argument doesn't hold up and one of the things they brought up was that three hundred thirty five thousand dollars that that guy had paid to go and shoot that rhino And that rhino,
00:43:53.000they were saying, well, this rhino's in danger, these rhinos are endangered.
00:43:56.000Yes, but that rhino was an unviable male.
00:43:59.000Like, he was old, and he wasn't breeding anymore.
00:44:02.000Not only that, he was killing young male rhinos and female rhinos.
00:44:05.000And so they had targeted him for, they were going to cull him.
00:44:10.000So the reason why this guy was able to spend so much money to shoot this endangered rhino is because they were going to shoot it anyway.
00:44:17.000And they said, look, if we can generate a tremendous amount of income, and I had him on the podcast, and he said the amount of money that he paid was actually small.
00:44:25.000And the reason why it was small was that All the negative publicity actually fucked up the conservation aspect of it, because there are people that would pay half a million even more for that rhino, and they didn't because they were scared of having their name thrown into the pool.
00:44:40.000So this Corey Knowlton guy went over there, spent the $335,000, did everything legally, and he was, in a lot of ways, just like Cecil.
00:44:48.000Or just like this Walter Hill guy, Cecil.
00:44:52.000Then that brings us back to the social justice Twitter storm thing, right?
00:44:56.000That you're ending up with an inferior outcome to the outcome that you could potentially have, because the people who could pull off the best outcome are so afraid of us all jumping down their throats on Twitter and ruining their lives, turning them into a Justine Sacco.
00:45:11.000But then it also gets to like, whoa, is that really the only way you can save these rhinos?
00:45:15.000The only way you can get $335,000 is you have to get some guy who wants to kill one and say, okay, you like killing shit?
00:45:25.000It's a paradox, but what else are you going to do?
00:45:26.000Who else is going to pay $350,000 to save rhinos?
00:45:29.000I think this is the way, if people hate this idea of hunting for conservation, if they hate this idea, the best way to stop it is to really ramp up conservation efforts.
00:45:40.000Like, to really, really ramp up the idea of non-hunting for conservation.
00:45:45.000And to tell people, like, look, you can generate, like, Zimbabwe, apparently, where this guy was, they generate some insane amount of money.
00:45:54.000I don't want to quote it because I don't know if I'm right.
00:45:56.000I read various amounts, but I think it was like $200 million a year just from hunting, just from these people coming over there to hunt.
00:46:05.000And someone said, well, that's the only 3% of it goes to conservation.
00:46:08.000That's probably right, but it's still 3% of $200 million or whatever the fuck it is.
00:46:14.000That's a lot of goddamn money for people who have nothing over there.
00:46:17.000How much could they make from tourism, though, for people looking at the lions?
00:46:22.000And that's, I think, maybe the solution in a lot of these situations.
00:46:26.000But also, another thing that has to be carefully considered is that, at least in some areas and some places, you have to manage populations of animals.
00:46:35.000Because if you just leave nature onto its own, nature will wipe out animals as well.
00:46:49.000Whether it's dogs or whether it's elk or whatever it can track down and kill.
00:46:54.000So the United States has a problem in a lot of the Western states because they reintroduce wolves.
00:47:00.000And they reintroduced wolves, and there was a really interesting video about it, how wolves are changing Yellowstone National Park, and they sort of highlighted the positive aspects of it.
00:47:09.000The negative aspects of it are the elk population are getting decimated, because these elk are not used to wolves, because they didn't develop with wolves.
00:47:16.000And the wolves are within the last few generations.
00:47:18.000These wolves have been introduced here, and they wanted to keep them within a certain population.
00:47:22.000They wanted to keep them within, you know, a few thousand wolves in the whole country.
00:47:26.000Well, they've gone way, way, way past that.
00:47:28.000And so now they want to start hunting these wolves, and they do hunt these wolves in some areas, but they have all these people that are freaking out about the hunting of the wolves.
00:47:38.000You have to manage these populations, because if you don't, then you have starvation, then you have disease, and then you have them encroaching into livestock.
00:47:47.000I have a friend who lives in northern BC, British Columbia, and he is a hunter up there, and he also has cows.
00:47:54.000His neighbor's cow was killed in the middle of the night by a pack of wolves.
00:47:59.000He said, you don't even know what terror is, and when you're sleeping in your house with your children, and he said you have glass windows that protect you from the wild, right?
00:48:09.000You're living in a normal house, and you look out the window, and you see 23 30 wild, savage, murderous wolves tearing a cow apart in front of you, screaming and cheering and ripping this thing apart.
00:48:45.000It all comes back to this misconception that people have that nature is at a permanent state of equilibrium and that we shouldn't tinker with it because there's something kind of fundamentally precious about a particular state of nature.
00:49:01.000But the reality is almost all states of nature in the world right now have been impacted by human civilization already.
00:49:06.000So as you say, the reason why we have to reintroduce the wolves is because we killed them in the first place, and the relationship between the number of elk and the number of wolves is already out of whack.
00:49:17.000It reminds me a bit, I was talking to a marine biologist, I think I was in Tonga, a little flyspec South Pacific nation, talking to this guy about whaling.
00:49:31.000I don't think we should be killing whales.
00:50:03.000They're the ugly stepchildren of the whale species because they're eating all the plankton and they're eating all the stuff that the blue whales and the humpback whales could be using to resurrect their populations.
00:50:14.000And in Australia, people go crazy sometimes, especially non-Australians, about kangaroo culls.
00:50:21.000They go out there and shoot kangaroos to bring down their population so they don't starve to death sometimes because there are so many of them.
00:50:27.000I have a good buddy who's a famous hunter, Adam Greentree, in Australia.
00:51:13.000One of the things that foxes love to do, and it's a horrible thing, they can smell and they know when a mother is about to give birth to a calf.
00:51:20.000So they wait until it's coming out and they literally pull it out of her vagina and eat it in front of the mother.
00:52:11.000But one interesting thing about New Zealand in terms of all of that conversation around pests is that it's possibly the only country that actually has the capability and a major movement to do so to take itself back to what the ecosystem was before humans arrived.
00:52:52.000But now that there are foxes, it's not a great survival tactic to just stand still while a fox is coming after you.
00:53:01.000So there's this massive movement in New Zealand now, which my uncle is heavily involved in and the Prime Minister is heavily involved in, to actually genuinely eradicate all of these...
00:54:57.000Like, the bears kill more than 50%, or as much as 50%, depending on who you ask, of the moose that are born.
00:55:06.000Like, as they're coming out, same with the fox do, they find the mother as it's giving birth, and they literally kill the calf immediately and eat it.
00:55:13.000It's one of their favorite things to eat.
00:57:05.000And my friend from Australia actually came and hunted in New Mexico.
00:57:09.000He flew all the way from New Mexico, ironically, and hunted in New Mexico, or flew all the way from Australia, hunted in New Mexico, and wrote this big story about it.
00:57:20.000Speaking of how good the stags taste, I'm always amazed when I go back to New Zealand about how much we're missing out on great produce in America just because of the proliferation of industrialized farming.
00:57:38.000I mean, when I was back in New Zealand, I was staying at this little bed and breakfast, had these eggs for breakfast, these just two fried eggs.
00:57:46.000Like the yolk was bright red and it stood up like more than an inch above the rest of the egg and the white was just perfect.
00:58:51.000I fed my chickens a mouse the other day I didn't want to but this is this is a story I've already told in the podcast So I'll tell you as briefly as possible because it was I was very conflicted about this I came home.
00:59:02.000I was on the road and And my family had found a wounded hawk in our yard.
00:59:08.000And this goes back to the hierarchy of animals argument.
01:01:34.000Which means that within the next 10 or 20 years, we're going to be able to actually recreate woolly mammoths and bring them back, should we want to.
01:03:20.000That's apparently a huge issue that's in China now, is the haves and the have-nots and how baller everybody wants to act and behave.
01:03:29.000And it's become a huge part of their culture, like flossing and having the finest of everything, the finest bag and the finest watch and the finest...
01:03:37.000If you're a CEO of a company, you must have a home that is bigger and more grand than...
01:03:43.000Anyone working for you or the other competitive companies that also have CEOs, you have to have the biggest out of all of them.
01:03:53.000I read an interesting piece about how different Asian cultures spend their money.
01:03:58.000And one of the points was that Japanese people, Japanese and Chinese cultures are totally different.
01:04:05.000In Japan, when people earn money, they will usually put it towards making their home as nice as possible, so that you go into a Japanese home and it's beautiful.
01:04:57.000And it was because everything was like, you're going to hell, sex is bad, and you get that girl alone, and she was just bananas, just bonkers.
01:05:16.000So, like, I mean, if you're dirt poor, and if you've just had, you know, the past couple of decades be your big boom, then I suppose you want to show that you're profiting from it more than a country like Japan, which has basically been rich since the 60s.
01:05:28.000Yeah, are they like a hybrid of, like, a communist and a capitalist state right now?
01:05:34.000Well, I don't think it's fair to call them capitalists, because at its best, capitalism should be about the free exchange, about entrepreneurism, right?
01:05:43.000And the ability of individual human beings to start their own businesses and to trade with one another.
01:05:48.000That is still not the way that the Chinese economy runs.
01:05:51.000But I think what you're alluding to is the fact that they are rapaciously pro-money and desperate to enhance their economic growth as quickly as possible.
01:06:03.000So it's not like they're, you know, Mao Zedong said, you know, when someone said that the reforms that he was bringing in, or maybe it was Deng Xiaoping, said that the reforms that he was bringing in were kind of capitalist, and shouldn't he have more of an allegiance to communism?
01:06:16.000He said, you know, black cat, white cat, as long as it catches mice.
01:06:32.000So, you know, they want to make money.
01:06:34.000They don't give a toss whether you call it capitalism or communism.
01:06:38.000I think you might describe it as a kind of, it's almost like a 19th century mercantilist I mean,
01:07:04.000that's kind of what it's like in China.
01:07:13.000So, it used to be that you got assigned an occupation saying the way that we think of Russia or the way that we think of Cuba, that they tell you, hey, this is what you're going to do, and so you go do this, and you get paid X amount by the state, and that's all you get.
01:07:30.000You've got to give people an incentive in order to push harder and to innovate.
01:07:36.000They have to know that that juicy watch is dangling from that string like a carrot in front of them.
01:07:43.000That's what makes them push and that's right where they fucked up and that's where they sort of see they see that about America like look these dummies work all day for a Lexus They just want that car so bad and they see that billboard as they're driving home and they're fucking shitty Hyundai not that Hyundai's are shitty by the way I like how those.
01:08:12.000I got an upgrade, like, at the, you know, the Avis guy gave me an upgrade, I don't know, because I'm some elite thing or something, or some credit card or whatever that I've got.
01:08:19.000And he was like, oh, I've upgraded you to a Kia.
01:09:05.000From the 70s on, when the gas crisis hit, in the 1970s, I believe it was like 73, 74, American muscle cars and American, like, big cars, like the Cadillacs, the things that people really loved about American cars.
01:10:12.000So what they would do is one guy would show up for four hours a day, and then he would leave, and the other guy would show up for four hours a day.
01:10:19.000But one guy would punch in at 9 o'clock, and he would go fuck off for four hours, and then he'd go back, and the other guy would relieve him, and they would just switch off like that.
01:10:30.000And the car companies would have these massive long-term liabilities, right?
01:10:34.000Because they'd have pension programs that were defined benefit.
01:12:28.000Well, I was going to say, do you think that the American auto industry is ever going to be as innovative as it was back in the 50s and is ever going to rule the coupe?
01:12:34.000It's gonna be real tough to rule the coupe, but they've made an insane comeback.
01:14:27.000You know when you're fucking trying to take little catnaps while you're holding a shotgun because you're worried that someone's going to come and steal your canned peaches?
01:14:40.000I live in Manhattan and I don't even have a little bag with some granola bars in it and some fresh water in case we get hit with a dirty bomb or something.
01:15:39.000Like, imagine if you have hundreds of thousands of a particular type of car driving around in America, and because they're all Wi-Fi enabled and they're all on the satellite and everything, you can have hackers or terrorists or just neater wells of some kind hack in and...
01:15:53.000Theoretically, I mean, they can certainly slow down the car, they can certainly make the car turn, they can certainly screw around with it in some way, but if they could make it speed up to 160 miles an hour and then veer sharply to the right, you could kill 100,000 people...
01:17:04.000And these cars today are so fucking computer controlled.
01:17:09.000There's so much gadgetry and stuff going on inside of them that there are many that argue that not only has this been possible for a long time, but they've been doing this for a long time.
01:17:33.000Reflexively distrustful, eager to make powerful enemies, the young journalist whose Mercedes exploded in Los Angeles one night couldn't possibly have died accidentally, could he?
01:20:02.000He was saying, like, if you were going to take Lance Armstrong's medals away, he was like, if you took away every award or prize that you give to people for something that they did while they were on drugs, there would be no Grammys.
01:20:43.000He was hired by the Ultimate Fighting Championship.
01:20:46.000The UFC is trying to clear up the sport.
01:20:48.000And they're trying to clean it up by hiring the most knowledgeable anti-doping guy ever.
01:20:54.000The guy who busted the Balco scandal and Lance Armstrong and all that stuff.
01:20:58.000I had the most fascinating conversation with him in Brazil.
01:21:01.000We were at a bar and we were talking for over an hour about all the different methods that they're using now to get away with That's My Man.
01:22:07.000I think to a certain extent, I think one of the real problems with Lance Armstrong was that he was suing people that were accurately talking about his drug use, because they got busted, and he was going after them and trying to ruin them.
01:22:18.000Absolutely, and a liar, just a pathological liar and deceiver.
01:22:22.000But that's less interesting, I think, than the question of whether or not the rules that he broke should be against the rules in the first place.
01:22:38.000You'll be misspelling tires with a Y pretty soon.
01:22:40.000They say that that race is so grueling, there's an argument that it's actually healthier to do with drugs.
01:22:47.000That doing it with drugs actually allows your body to recuperate in a way that you would be breaking it down and you would be susceptible to rhabdomyelosis.
01:22:57.000You know, that's that thing that those CrossFit people get.
01:23:05.000When people have a breakdown of their muscle tissue, and then your body starts processing it, and it comes out in your urine, like ultramarathon runners have it.
01:23:16.000I have a buddy who runs ultramarathons, and he says when you're done, you pee, it's black, like soda or like coffee.
01:23:46.000But if you're pissing black, your body's telling you that you shouldn't be doing that.
01:23:51.000Well, what they're doing is they're just trying to push past all the pain and discomfort and show mental toughness, and that's what's supposed to be inspiring, is that, you know, this guy ran, like my buddy, Cameron Haynes, he ran 106 miles in 24 hours.
01:24:05.000It was a 24-hour race where you had a one-mile course, and he did it 106 times in 24 hours.
01:26:00.000I think there's a real good argument that coffee is a stimulant, and that stimulant helps, and if that helps, why not Adderall?
01:26:10.000And also, marijuana allows you to see things in a different way, and if you can do that and maybe write something better, marijuana helped you write that thing.
01:26:19.000That's not exactly just your creativity, it's also the marijuana.
01:26:23.000Yeah, and the weird thing is when there are drugs that are not actually performance enhancing but are also banned, like marijuana will be banned in sports where it clearly wouldn't actually give you an advantage.
01:26:40.000They're actually showing, especially ultramarathon runners, they're showing that marijuana does have a significant impact on ultramarathon runners.
01:26:46.000Well, what about hand-eye coordination sports?
01:26:48.000What about playing soccer or something?
01:26:50.000You're probably not going to be better when you're high, are you?
01:27:14.000But when you're in it, see, when you're sparring, the idea about sparring is, okay, we got this stuff, this is from New Mexico, this is really good.
01:27:45.000The idea is that it's not good at learning stuff, because it just goes in and out, but the stuff you already know, that's in your system, that you already have trained down, you know, it's like a part of your sort of synapses.
01:27:57.000Yeah, so it's almost muscle memory in a way, like it doesn't require a lot of cognitive effort.
01:28:01.000Yeah, like tennis players apparently find marijuana helps them significantly as well.
01:28:06.000Recreational tennis players would tell you when they get really high, they kind of like see the ball better.
01:29:06.000There's sort of blinders that you put on that allow you to get through your job and get in your car and drive home to your family and not consider the massive amount of variables that the world creates.
01:29:19.000The fact that you're on a fucking giant 24,000 mile round ball that's going a thousand miles an hour in a circle and hurling through infinity.
01:29:27.000When you smoke pot, it sort of unveils all of these possibilities and potentials and it freaks people out.
01:29:34.000Well, I don't get freaked out by that.
01:29:58.000What you're talking about there in terms of the doors of perception being kind of shut down during normal behavior strikes me as more of a psychedelic thing.
01:30:06.000I mean, I've had some of the most insightful experiences of my entire life.
01:30:11.000I don't do them anymore, but when I was in my late teens and early 20s doing acid or mushrooms and having that...
01:30:53.000I have a lot of friends in the quote-unquote psychedelic community that live their lives around the time they do psychedelics and then the downtime in between there where they're sort of processing it and gearing up for their next psychedelic trip.
01:32:44.000You know, I should have been probably upset that this guy wasn't paying attention or texting or whatever the fuck it was and slammed into my car and cost me a shitload of money.
01:33:06.000But Kundalini yoga, which I don't practice, but I have friends that do...
01:33:10.000I have a friend who teaches it in Boulder, and she's a firm advocate of achieving psychedelic states through this practice.
01:33:19.000You get up at four o'clock in the morning, and you do these breathing exercises, and you want to sit in a certain direction.
01:33:26.000It's all very ritualistic, but it's also based on the idea of the circadian cycle.
01:33:31.000You sort of interrupt your sleep cycle and the cycle of the earth, and you do these Stimulation exercises that supposedly activate your pineal gland, which is the gland that's been proven to produce dimethyltryptamine, which is the most potent psychedelic drug known to man.
01:33:48.000And it's related in many ways to psychedelic mushrooms.
01:33:52.000They're very similar in their chemical composition.
01:33:54.000And we know that these psychedelic drugs that the brain produces, if you can take them, And you extract them from plants, and they exist in thousands of plants.
01:34:06.000You have these insanely profound visionary experiences.
01:34:10.000She says that you can achieve these states through meditation and through kundalini yoga.
01:35:27.000I just think it should be something that everybody should do.
01:35:30.000I think it's an amazing form of meditation.
01:35:33.000It's amazing relaxation for your body.
01:35:36.000It's an incredible way for your body to get magnesium because it absorbs it through the skin, the Epsom salts.
01:35:42.000It's one of the best ways that your body can absorb magnesium and it's hugely important for muscle recovery and for your health and wellness.
01:36:16.000Hey, how about you reach out to my buddy Josh Zeps and hook him up?
01:36:20.000Alright, if you're listening, reach out to me.
01:36:22.000Send an email to info at wtplive.com and my producer will pass it on.
01:36:26.000Stalkers are going to say, yeah, this is the place.
01:36:28.000They're going to give you the address.
01:36:29.000Fortunately, I have a producer who will go through that.
01:36:32.000It's going to be plastic all over the floor.
01:36:33.000Going to go to some fucking Dexter house.
01:36:35.000When we were talking about the size of the cosmos and how mind-blowing all of that is, it reminded me, did you see about this Russian billionaire who has just invested $100 million in the search for aliens?
01:37:26.000That what we have achieved is exceedingly rare, incredibly rare, and that if the universe is 13.7 billion years old or whatever the fuck it is when it started then, it's entirely possible that it took this long for something to come out of it like us.
01:37:43.000At the front of the line of the idea of conscious life.
01:37:47.000We're the only thing that we know of on this whole planet that's not just conscious, but conscious and manipulates its environment to the point where we can change the weather, we can do all kinds of crazy shit like send videos all to Australia instantaneously.
01:37:59.000I mean, if you're in Australia and I'm here, you can send me a text message with a photograph of you smiling, and I'll get it in a couple of seconds.
01:38:05.000Oh, we could be having the same conversation we're having right now.
01:38:36.000It's entirely possible that that's the case.
01:38:39.000And you're right that life got started here pretty much as quickly as it could, and it evolved into our sort of level of consciousness as quickly as you would expect it to, given natural selection.
01:38:52.000So it's true that we could be at the beginning.
01:39:07.000That it's woven into the kind of fabric of the cosmos.
01:39:10.000Because if it was a really, really, really, really, really rare thing, then you would have expected the Earth to be a dead, gaseous ball for, you know, billions of years, many, many more billions of years than it was.
01:40:12.000There also is the theory that the universe is so incredibly large that not only is there an exact replica of Earth out there, but infinity, which is what the universe is supposed to be infinite, is that not only is there an exact version of Earth There's everything that has happened on this planet in the exact same order up to Me touching that microphone right there has happened exactly down to the nanosecond an infinite number of times throughout
01:40:43.000space Like that's how big the universe is, but it doesn't mean that someone's ahead of us.
01:40:49.000It doesn't mean that It doesn't mean that.
01:40:50.000But it does mean that intelligent life is very likely scattered throughout the entire cosmos.
01:40:56.000But it doesn't necessarily mean that intelligent life has reached a place past where we are right now.
01:41:03.000It doesn't necessarily mean that, but if...
01:41:06.000But I think that you would be well advised to believe that it probably has just because the median is usually a better assumption than the extremes, right?
01:41:14.000So, I mean, the likelihood is that we're not at either of the very, very extremes, that we're neither the very first nor the very last civilization.
01:41:21.000Just statistically, if you were just tossing a coin, you would expect our civilization to just happen to be clustered somewhere on a bell curve in roughly the middle.
01:41:29.000That's just a less anomalous statistical thing to have happened.
01:41:50.000So, this system that they're going to put up with this Russian billionaire's money, I was looking at exactly what it's going to be able to do.
01:41:57.000So, astronomers are going to be able to examine 1,000 star systems for any sign of radars being used, because apparently radar is a good way of telling that someone is there, because they've invented it.
01:42:09.000And it's going to be able to detect a laser with the output of an ordinary 100-watt light bulb, From 23,000 billion miles away.
01:42:19.000That's the distance of the nearest stars.
01:42:21.00023 trillion miles away, they'll be able to spot a laser with the wattage of an ordinary household bulb.
01:42:29.000What I was going to say about the other possibility is the other possibility is what I believe we're heading towards right now.
01:42:35.000Is that we're heading towards a virtual universe and that we're creating something with the possibility of artificial intelligence and the possibility of living inside of some Artificial reality that they've created that your brain interfaces with that there's gonna be no need for traveling anywhere or no need even for the type of Carbon-based life civilization that we currently enjoy and that it won't exist anymore and then we're gonna create artificial life and And that the artificial life is the next stage of evolution.
01:43:03.000And what we are is like some sort of a cosmic caterpillar that's going to become a butterfly.
01:43:08.000And that's one of the reasons why we're so obsessed with, you know, shiny brand new laptops and innovation and beautiful materialistic items is that that is the mechanism and the fuel behind creating those things.
01:43:20.000Our obsession with these newer, better, greater things is fueling the creation of these newer, better, greater things.
01:43:27.000And they're ultimately going to lead to artificial intelligence.
01:43:30.000And that's what Elon Musk is terrified of.
01:43:32.000I was just about to say, look at what Elon Musk and also Stephen Hawking are saying about it.
01:43:36.000And, you know, Sam Harris, who I know is a friend of yours, and I'm a huge fan of Sam's, and I've spoken to him on HuffPost Live about this, the idea that we are...
01:43:46.000Really not understanding the potential of creating artificially intelligent systems that self-improve in a way that they end up getting sort of exponentially more self-aware until they're actually outsmarting us and they have, in every meaningful sense, a sense of their own existence in the same way that biological intelligence does.
01:44:06.000That is going to be a game changer, the likes of which, as you say, I mean, maybe biology just...
01:44:13.000It's extinguished, or maybe we end up, I don't know, it's like, I'm kind of agnostic on the question of whether or not we could ever upload our consciousness into a silicon-based form.
01:44:48.000The invention of the wheel, and then you look at the Cadillac that we just showed today, or for Elon Musk's sake, the Tesla, this new insane Tesla that he has.
01:45:12.000We're not going to stop, but isn't there a...
01:45:14.000He's making a philosophical case as well, and this is why I say I'm agnostic about it, because...
01:45:21.000I mean, I did philosophy at university, and one of the big thorny questions in philosophy of mind is whether or not it's necessary to have the biological substructure of a brain in order to have a mind.
01:45:35.000Could you disentangle those two things?
01:45:37.000Could the experience of me feeling like myself and feeling like I'm alive be disentangled from the biological reality of my physiology and the grey stuff in between my ears?
01:45:50.000Assumption, which he's basically just taking on faith, is yes, you could disentangle that.
01:45:55.000If you could replicate all of the data that's whirring around in my head right now, as I'm saying these words, as I'm sitting here talking to you, if you could take all of the things that are going on, all those electrical impulses, all of those neurons, all of those synapses, and you could replicate that in a computer, then that computer would be me.
01:46:10.000And it would not just seem like me, it would feel like me.
01:47:20.000Angry things that we have that make up a human being all these nationalism all these different strange things that we've sort of just become Inexorably attached to in our cultures that we're trying to eradicate But we never seem to quite do all of those things are a part of the monkey body,
01:47:37.000But that monkey body is what we're trying to save we're trying to save that and download it into consciousness what if we can Purify consciousness and remove it from emotion, remove it from biological need, and even sex.
01:47:49.000You know, one of the things that freaks me out about aliens, not that I believe in aliens, but the iconic image of the alien is always sexless.
01:48:03.000You can't tell what's a male or a female, and they have these enormous heads.
01:48:06.000Is it possible that we have this iconic image because we kind of know and understand that ultimately the only way we're going to transcend this monkey body is to move past all the needs that we've sort of automatically associated with being alive.
01:48:25.000Being alive means, you know, you have to, I gotta find food.
01:50:30.000It's possible, but I've always just assumed that it's the modesty of the artist.
01:50:35.000It would kind of change the frame of the picture of God reaching down and touching man if man had a massive schlong just hanging down his leg.
01:50:44.000Yeah, it would be distracting if you're just a giant John Holmes hog.
01:50:47.000But look how big the muscles are in these guys.
01:50:50.000Like, these guys have to be fucking cross-fitting all day as well as being divine.
01:50:55.000I mean, that guy on the left is doing a lot of fucking weightlifting.
01:52:22.000On that question of the evolution of humans creating maybe computers and artificial intelligence are the next stage and maybe the universe is full of artificial intelligence that isn't sending out the signals that we're looking for when we're looking for biological intelligence.
01:52:41.000They don't need to be losing lasers because they're all in computers.
01:52:45.000The other possibility, which is similar to that and which is very depressing and which I don't particularly like, is that once a species becomes capable of destroying itself, that they usually do.
01:53:00.000You're not responsible enough to be able to handle the kind of industrial-scale destructive capacity that we now have with nuclear weapons and with...
01:53:09.000Coal-fired power plants and with all of our ability, we're so successful as a species that we're successful enough to destroy ourselves, but not yet wise enough not to do so.
01:53:20.000And that maybe that's a trap that lots of species fall into as they try to pass through the crucible of going from being ordinary animals to hyper-intelligent animals.
01:53:31.000Self-aware animals, but then on the way they invent tools that they aren't yet mature enough to be able to handle properly and they end up wiping themselves out.
01:53:39.000Well, it's certainly possible, and if we look at the universe as being infinite, infinite possibilities exist as well.
01:53:46.000So probably all the pitfalls, like all the things that we avoided, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, maybe they didn't avoid, and maybe they were wiped out, and maybe they did toxify their atmosphere to the point where they didn't recover for hundreds of thousands of years, and mutants and freaks barely made it by,
01:54:02.000you know, running from hybrid wolves that have fucking glowing red eyes.
01:54:14.000What version of what we've done in Australia with foxes and rabbits is out of control nature experiments that have really gone all fucked up.
01:54:25.000Wolves in Idaho that are out of control.
01:54:27.000How much of that has been done in these other places as well as genetically modifying things to the point where it doesn't work anymore?
01:54:37.000And what's sort of staggering to me is getting an insight into how recently we have invented all of this stuff and changed the world like this.
01:54:45.000Like, I was in Athens during the Greek financial crisis just in the week after they had the big no vote.
01:54:52.000It was the week when it really looked like Greece was going to crash out of the Eurozone, about, what, four or five weeks ago?
01:54:58.000And I went to the Acropolis and, like, to the Parthenon, because, you know, that's what you do.
01:55:02.000And I was standing there in the museum, like, looking at all this stuff, and I was struck not so much by how incredibly ancient it is.
01:55:10.000Like, this is the birthplace of civilization, right?
01:56:18.000We have the privilege of being the generation, the couple of generations, that are witnessing the dawn of the beginning of something extraordinarily new.
01:56:29.000A, the capacity to destroy ourselves, using nukes and environmental degradation, and B, the rise of artificial intelligence and computing and globalization.
01:56:39.000You look at that, the Acropolis and the Parthenon.
01:56:42.000What's crazy, the Acropolis is the building, right?
01:56:51.000But the bottom line is, when you talk to Greek scholars and they talk about the construction of the building on top, it was built on something that was even more ancient.
01:57:23.000And that brings up the possibility that we haven't had a linear progression from Ape Man to this, but we've had these ups and downs, and we've been partially wiped out.
01:57:34.000There's a series of supervolcanoes all over the world, and one big one being in Yellowstone that everyone's terrified of, but there's one of them, I believe, in Indonesia, that there's a certain theory that links to a massive eruption of this supervolcano 70,000 years ago that is the reason why we all share this so little genetic diversity.
01:57:58.000And they believe that we might have been down to a few thousand people somewhere around 70,000 years ago.
01:58:11.000But certainly, I mean, it was tens of thousands of people.
01:58:15.000And I don't know when that was, but I remember you mentioned that supervolcano last time I was on this show.
01:58:19.000And then I went and Googled it, and it was like, eh, probably didn't happen.
01:58:24.000Like, most of the expert sites that I went and looked at was like, this is kind of one of those sort of conspiracy theory things that we don't actually think happened.
01:58:32.000But whether or not it was that particular Indonesian supervolcano or not, we do know that there have been periods where humankind has almost gone extinct, and we've just gotten through that log ahead.
01:59:01.000Every six to eight hundred thousand years, Yellowstone blows, and it is a continent killer.
01:59:06.000It will fuck up everything in the continent and cause some sort of a nuclear winter effect to a vast majority of the world, except maybe like Australia.
01:59:12.000I'm glad I've got an Australian passport, I was going to say.
01:59:15.000You might have to fucking escape back to the homeland.
01:59:16.000Move to New Zealand, go and kill some foxes.
02:00:22.000And that whole thing was just a stream of lava just exploding.
02:00:28.000You stand on the side of the lake and you're like, I can't even imagine what kind of Armageddon that must have been back when it was active.
02:00:36.000Well, our stability, the stability that we've enjoyed over the past several thousand years that people have written about, I mean, other than, what was the one that happened in Rome?
02:00:56.000Killed and we could see their bodies and there's an exhibit somewhere where they have the bodies of the people from Pompeii, the preserved ones, on display somewhere.
02:02:01.000That explodes and leaves this crater, and that's what a caldera is.
02:02:06.000It reaches this explosion, and the whole mountain, like a 300 mile wide mountain, shoots lava up into the sky and just kills everything.
02:02:17.000Everything, anywhere on the West Coast, all this is dead.
02:02:20.000Isn't it funny how we have a kind of...
02:02:22.000There's a sort of cognitive dissonance.
02:02:23.000It comes back to what we were talking about, about the doors of perception and how our brains are forced by evolution to keep us in a very narrow mindset where we don't think about the reality of what's going on around us and how vast everything is and so on.
02:02:36.000Because I think sometimes about my friends who live in San Francisco.
02:02:41.000San Francisco is going to be devastated by a massive earthquake.
02:03:18.000Well, how about the story that was written in New York?
02:03:21.000That's what I felt like you were saying.
02:03:23.000But, you know, we know this is going to happen, and we all go about our daily lives, and we don't pay any attention to it, because we couldn't, because we would be paralyzed if we kept thinking, is it going to be today?
02:03:33.000Then we'd just be, I mean, that's OCD, right?
02:03:35.000So we're forced to go through life not actually reckoning with the fact that that's going to happen, and Yellowstone's going to happen, and all kinds of stuff's going to go down, and there's not a thing we can do about it.
02:04:30.000That might have been why there is this this really old structures that are sort of unexplained and the sort of resurgence of civilization Somewhere around the 10,000 year mark that we have this big downfall people start figuring things out again Just like if you go back 2,000 years from now,
02:04:46.000you know, you're talking about Greece You're talking about ancient Rome and then 2,000 years later you have New York City, right?
02:04:53.000Well 2,000 years after this meteor Meteor...
02:05:12.000They think that it's very possible that civilization has experienced many of these...
02:05:17.000That's what Graham Hancock has based a tremendous amount of his work on.
02:05:20.000I don't know if you're aware of him, but...
02:05:22.000He's a good friend, and he wrote a book called Fingerprints of the Gods that's based on exactly that, all this evidence that shows that civilization has experienced these peaks and valleys, and that things have happened, that there have been some resets, and it hasn't been as simple as people figured out fire,
02:05:40.000then they figured out the wheel, and here we are today in New York City.
02:05:44.000I don't know if I mentioned it last time I was on the podcast or not, but there's an amazing kind of study and there's an amazing article about this sort of research, which is if society collapses and we still have nuclear waste in the ground,
02:06:00.000How do we mark our nuclear waste sites such that a future civilization who is completely different from us, doesn't speak our language, has no more records of anything that went on, so that they don't go and hurt themselves by digging it up.
02:06:13.000And so there are semioticians and all these people who study the nature of symbols and of conscious interpretation of the ways that we communicate and everything.
02:06:23.000Who have got these crazy ideas like putting up these big kind of structures that look like big scary angled poles that get deeper and deeper and thicker and thicker as you get towards the site of where the nuclear waste is being stored to try to indicate to future intelligent civilizations not to go in there.
02:06:42.000But then the conclusion that they always reach is...
02:06:45.000They're just going to think, I mean, they're going to be interested in it.
02:06:47.000They're going to want to explore it, right?
02:06:48.000It's like, even if they understood that we're saying that there is this invisible radioactive stuff, if they haven't yet devised the concept of nuclear power, then they're just going to treat it the way that we treat the warnings on the pyramids, saying, don't go into the mummies, because you'll get attacked by spirits.
02:07:05.000We're like, oh, that was a nice, fun thing for you to say, you old-fashioned people in ancient civilisations.
02:07:10.000But we're going to go in and open the tomb anyway.
02:07:12.000And so the conclusion was, don't do anything.
02:07:16.000Don't try to communicate it because human curiosity is always going to be more, not even human curiosity, maybe, like whatever this future species is, their curiosity is going to be more powerful than any warning that we could possibly give them.
02:07:29.000Because this stuff lasts for tens, sometimes hundreds of thousands of years.
02:07:32.000Yeah, we really fucked up with that whole nuclear power thing.
02:07:35.000And I was trying to explain to someone who was, he's a pretty staunch conservative, and he was saying how clean nuclear power is relatively.
02:07:42.000And I said, do you understand that nuclear power has only been around since the 1940s?
02:07:47.000And we already, in this brief moment of time, we already have three spots that we can never go to.
02:09:48.000Fake experts that essentially get hired by oil companies, tobacco companies, to poo-poo the concerns and debate them ferociously, the concerns about global warming, concerns they used to do, the concerns about tobacco being, or nicotine being addictive and causing cancer.
02:10:06.000And this guy shows that when there's money involved, what they do is they hire all these people to fuck with the argument, and they write op-ed columns in all these different newspapers all throughout the country, and they constantly hammer so that your grandfather reads and he goes,
02:10:23.000I've read a thing today that said 31,000 scientists have said that global warming's not real.
02:10:28.000You know who was amongst those 31,000 scientists?
02:10:36.000And they have Michael Shermer on who's kind of explaining that he's great.
02:10:40.000At one point in time, he thought that it was nonsense, that global warming was nonsense.
02:10:45.000And then he started delving into the actual data, the actual scientific papers, and then he realized, well, not only is there a consensus, That man-made global warming is a real thing, but there are no peer-reviewed studies, no scientific papers that indicate the opposite.
02:11:04.000I interviewed the director of that movie on HuffPost Live, so I did see the movie on a screener beforehand.
02:11:09.000And the amazing thing to me was that it's not just the same tactics that are being used in sowing doubt about climate change as were used in sowing doubt about all kinds of other different things, you know, starting with...
02:11:27.000That's why it's called merchants of doubt.
02:11:29.000These are the same human beings who went in and fought for the tobacco lobby, who then went and fought for the asbestos industry, who are now fighting for the fossil fuel companies.
02:11:39.000Exactly the same human beings, using exactly the same playbook, using exactly the same tactics.
02:11:43.000And those goddamn television shows where they have the split screen, where they have the host, and then they have the two experts debated out, and then you have the one person who's like Bill Nye, who's like sort of a reasonable scientist that's saying things that people can't totally understand because they're a little bit too technical.
02:12:01.000And then you have this shouting guy who's like, fact!
02:12:05.00023,000 scientists from 40 countries have said global warming's not real.
02:12:34.000This is one of the things that I really spend a lot of time trying to do in my job, which is overturn this phony sense of balance that is required.
02:12:44.000So every journalist and every media person tries to be...
02:13:08.000Now, there are some debates where one side is right and one side is wrong, right?
02:13:12.000Or there's a 98% chance that one side is right and a 2% chance that the other side is right.
02:13:17.000When you try to be balanced by just sitting in the middle and trying to moderate a debate between those two people...
02:13:23.000You're actually not being unbiased at all.
02:13:25.000You're being biased towards falsehood instead of towards truth.
02:13:29.000So whenever I have a weekly segment about science news called the Nerds Forum on HuffPost Live, and I always try to explain to people and express, look, this is the likelihood that this thing is actually true, so let's talk about the science and let's not get caught up in this trap of false equivalencies.
02:13:47.000It's like where, you know, did you see Colbert did a bit about...
02:13:51.000No, it wasn't Colbert, it was John Oliver.
02:14:15.000So John Oliver did this bit where he was like, instead of having a pro-climate change person and an anti-climate change person, we think that we should actually reflect the proportions accurately.
02:14:28.000Since 99% of climate scientists believe in it, they have won.
02:14:33.000So he brings out 99 people come on set.
02:14:35.000And they're all just shouting the pro-climate change position.
02:14:39.000And there's this one other guy who's shouting the anti-climate change position.
02:14:42.000And he's like, this is what it actually is.
02:15:08.000There's nuanced perspectives and arguments that are extremely complex.
02:15:13.000We spent all this time talking about the conservation for hunting argument and the artificial intelligence argument, the argument about pursuing it.
02:15:23.000All these things are real complex, nuanced...
02:15:27.000Issues that require long sort of detailed examinations of all the possibilities, and not from a biased perspective, but from as objective as is humanly possible, especially when there's real ramifications, things like global warming or nuclear energy or things that really are going to fuck up our generation and generations to come,
02:15:48.000like hundreds of thousands of years from now.
02:15:51.000Those don't get addressed when you have seven minutes and you have a guy who's being paid by these think tanks.
02:15:56.000That's what's crazy about this Merchants of Doubt documentary, is it shows that there's these people that are paid by think tanks.
02:16:05.000And these think tanks, what they really are, is they're these fake organizations that are propped up by companies that are selling whatever the fuck they would benefit from this being passed or this being The concerns being alleviated.
02:16:18.000One of them being like this doctor who was paid by this think tank to go and preach about these flame-retardant fabrics and materials they're using to make furniture.
02:16:31.000And that he would say this story about a woman who left a candle in the baby's bed.
02:17:14.000They looked into his background, his past.
02:17:16.000They did a computer database on all the infants that died from burns in this guy's area, and they found that it was a lie.
02:17:25.000And so they called him, and they said, well, this is an anecdotal thing, and it wasn't real, I was just trying to paint a story of what's possible.
02:17:32.000No, he fucking, but because he wasn't under oath, because he wasn't under oath when he was testifying, he was allowed to lie about this stuff.
02:17:40.000When they asked him, yeah, I was paid for Citizens for Fire Safety or whatever the fuck the think tank was, and then when a think tank has less than X amount of members, you have to sort of disclose where the funding comes from.
02:17:51.000And the funding all came from the manufacturers of this flame retardant shit that is causing all sorts of problems with children, especially babies, like babies that are around this flame retardant stuff, the dust from that stuff.
02:18:02.000It gets in their lungs, it gets in their system, and they showed, like, the difference between the amount of the shit that's in American babies versus the amount of the shit that's in babies in other countries, where they don't have these people lobbying to have this shit be put in their furniture.
02:18:30.000Something is going on, right, that is not happening in Japan and is not happening in other countries.
02:18:37.000And I wonder whether it is stuff like industries lobbying for, like, fire safety things.
02:18:42.000So every time you sit down on your couch, you're just absorbing the tiniest, tiniest, tiniest little bit of some shitty chemical.
02:18:50.000I don't want to get too hippy-dippy about it, but all the stuff that's in our soaps, you look at the ingredients on things, and it's just a litany of chemicals.
02:19:00.000It makes me want to move to New Zealand and eat my grandmother's beautiful eggs from a natural chicken, and just use eucalyptus oil to bathe myself in, and sit on a wooden chair.
02:19:11.000Well, I think you're right, and I think the argument is pretty clear when you see things like this Merchants of Doubt, and you find out how lobbyists work, and you find out how think tanks work, and you find out how these people are actively trying to get these things, to get the concerns about these things alleviated, and they're doing it strictly for financial reasons.
02:20:25.000I mean, you are, and you're part of the good part of the media insofar as what the internet is now doing is allowing conversations like this.
02:20:32.000Like you say, well, how can you impart these ideas in seven minutes?
02:20:35.000I mean, you're lucky if you get seven minutes on network TV. You usually get three minutes.
02:20:39.000If you're on the Today Show, you get three minutes or something.
02:20:41.000Right, but how many people have time to listen to a three-hour podcast?
02:20:48.000It's getting more now, but it's also ridiculous that a former Fear Factor host, meathead, cage-fighting commentator, smokes pot all the time, is the guy that you're coming to for information.
02:20:59.000It seems like there should be someone more qualified.
02:21:10.000And the problem is that journalists don't tend to be scientifically literate.
02:21:15.000So when something comes out saying that butter is a deadly killer and margarine is the answer, then someone puts out a press release.
02:21:23.000A PR company earns And then the producer at the radio station or the television station who receives that knows that that's a juicy tidbit.
02:21:32.000So they write it up and they do a story on it.
02:22:08.000If you'd spoken to a scientist back then, even if they hadn't known about LDL cholesterol, they would have said...
02:22:13.000Look, on the basis of what we currently understand about margarine and butter and human physiology, blah-de-blah-de-blah.
02:22:19.000That's not the way that it ends up getting imparted, because nobody wants to watch a television show that equivocates like that, or a news broadcast that equivocates like that.
02:22:25.000No, I think you're definitely right about that.
02:22:27.000And I also think that we're in a weird time now, where, because of the internet, and because, like, you could do HuffPost, I don't know what kind of editorial control they have over what you do.
02:22:38.000Like, when you do your show, I really enjoy your...
02:22:40.000If anybody hasn't seen it, the reason why I wanted to get you on the show in the first place, I've watched many episodes of your show, and it's very balanced, like this conversation.
02:22:48.000It's a cool show, and it's very unlike something that you would see in normal NBC, 8pm, or whatever the fuck it would be on broadcast television.
02:22:59.000I think that that kind of stuff, and that the internet, and the freedom that it provides, And also the amount of information, the access to it, is kind of changing the ability of these people to do things like this.
02:23:52.000Think that women who are forced to wear these crazy outfits, they cover their body, they can't go to school, they can't drive, they can't vote.
02:25:04.000And then there was an article saying that he's no better than early 20th century European colonists who told Muslim women that they needed help from European men.
02:25:13.000The tweet even says, what can we do to help?
02:25:16.000It says, Islam needs a feminist revolution.
02:25:20.000That's a beautiful tweet, and it's correct.
02:25:22.000Look, if you just look at it, forget about Islam, forget about sexes, forget about all that gender shit.
02:25:29.000If you just looked at it, there's a human being that's looking at other human beings that are forced to behave in a way that they might not want to.
02:26:08.000I think there are people that are trying to call bullshit on people when the bullshit doesn't exist because they want to score.
02:26:14.000Just like we were talking about earlier that cops want to arrest people because it's a fucking game and they want to win.
02:26:19.000I think there's people that want to win on Twitter.
02:26:22.000There's people that want to win on HuffPost.
02:26:23.000There's people that are looking to write blogs about a guy like Richard Dawkins Who has said some kind of weird, questionable shit in the past?
02:26:30.000Like, especially the shit that he said about child molesting.
02:26:33.000He experienced some mild molestation when he was young.
02:26:53.000Abusing and violently raping children is pretty much the worst thing that you can possibly do.
02:26:58.000We have made it mandatory to regard all child abuse as being the worst thing that can possibly happen.
02:27:04.000I think his point was, like, I was fondled by a stupid, crazy priest when I was, you know, 12 years old or something, and I pretty quickly got over it.
02:27:12.000So that's not to say that other people who didn't get over it didn't go through horrible things, but do we have to regard every single instance of every single type of Right.
02:27:36.000Well, and also, this is a horrible thing to say, but...
02:27:41.000Preface it by saying this is my own personal experience.
02:27:44.000I was bullied when I was a kid But it was mild bullying like nobody did anything horrible to me.
02:27:49.000I was never beaten half to death or I was never Nobody ever threatened me with weapons I just kind of picked on and fucked with but it got me into martial arts and it changed my life like these a the yin and the yang to things and And I think that sometimes a little bit of resistance is good because the reaction to that resistance is you decide,
02:28:10.000like, this is never going to happen to me anymore.
02:28:11.000I'm going to fire up and I'm going to figure out a way to empower myself so this is no longer a fear of mine.
02:28:18.000And I think that a little bit of someone being an asshole to you makes you appreciate kind people.
02:28:24.000I think the evil people in the world...
02:29:19.000Well, you remember when we first started dating and you fucking...
02:29:20.000Yes, I do remember that, and it also has nothing whatsoever to do with the conversation that we're having right now.
02:29:26.000Well, when you experience that he fucked up and married this crazy broad, sorry I said broad, I'm an asshole, I'm a misogynist, oh my god, Joe Rogan and trying to explain things.
02:29:35.000Your white male privilege is dripping into the microphone right now.
02:29:56.000The people are friendly, they're free, they're happy, but it's also like kind of crazy unorganized.
02:30:02.000Like when you go to the airport, like one of the things, when we were getting on a plane from Sao Paulo to Brazil, or Sao Paulo to Rio rather, we couldn't find out what fucking gate it was.
02:30:15.000Because the gate said 17C. So we go to 17C, and the lady, you know, she speaks Portuguese, so she's like, no, no, no, 24, 24. I'm like, but it doesn't say 24, it says 17C. So we go to 24, and 24 says Florinopolis, and it says another one next to it.
02:30:54.000It'd be even worse, because if I spoke Mandarin and I was in Brazil, I'd be double fucked.
02:30:59.000They couldn't even read what the fuck they're writing, and they couldn't know what the hell.
02:31:03.000You know, you'd go to your app on your phone and try to decipher it, but point being, like, when you see something, like, if you go to, like, my buddy who went to Africa and experienced, like, all the chaos of Africa, said, God, I mean, people complain about America.
02:31:18.000Like, you go, yes, of course it's not perfect.
02:31:57.000You could actually have – they've still got the same tax base per capita, you know, as America could have if it wanted to have higher taxes.
02:32:03.000And you could actually have a DMV that works.
02:32:06.000And you could have a post office that functions.
02:32:07.000We don't have to wait around all the time.
02:32:09.000It's just, there are certainly societies that, you know, Thomas Friedman says that flying from Schiphol Airport in Amsterdam into JFK is like flying from the Jetsons to the Flintstones.
02:32:24.000Like LaGuardia is a shithole, and that's just the way it is.
02:32:27.000There are countries whose airports are nice and whose trains are fast and whose healthcare systems work more cheaply.
02:32:34.000The worst is the way the people treat you at LaGuardia.
02:32:38.000They're so fucking over it and aggressively over it, like shitty to you.
02:32:43.000Oh, New York TSA workers are my least favorite of all the TSA workers.
02:33:11.000I've been in more than 10 years, but, you know, just on temporary visas.
02:33:15.000And now that I was able to get global entry, just not having to deal with the customs officials coming in, especially in the foreigner's lane.
02:33:24.000I mean, I imagine it may be better in the citizen's lane.
02:33:27.000But coming in in the foreigner's lane where you're in front of, like, they've just had to deal with 478, like, people who don't speak English who are probably coming in with some lousy shit from abroad or something.
02:33:55.000Asshole, I can't believe what he just did.
02:33:57.000And so by the time I get up to the customs guy, they are pissed, they're over it, they're over me, they're over everything.
02:34:04.000So just being able to go to the kiosk and swipe your global entry and then just walk straight through, it's one of the greatest things ever.
02:34:10.000All the guys I work with at the UFC have it.
02:34:43.000I feel like some people see the world in groups and identities, and for them, identity politics is the most important way of contextualizing and conceiving of the things that are happening around them in culture.
02:34:58.000So the moment a person who's a white male starts saying anything, they're like, okay, this is in the category of patronizing white male authority, looking down on this other category of person who is oppressed, Yes.
02:36:05.000I love when people who have these knee-jerk reactions to these things, like they see these openings and they go for it because they feel like there's an opening to attack, also get attacked.
02:36:14.000Like, there's a woman who wrote a piece, she's a feminist, and she wrote a piece about my friend Amy Schumer, who is hilarious and wild and just fucking awesome, and she's kicking ass right now.
02:36:25.000And she's on the cover of a magazine, sucking on C-3PO's finger.
02:36:29.000And they were saying why this magazine is so awful about, you know, against feminism.
02:36:35.000And I was like, what the fuck are you, like, this is an anti-feminist thing and she shouldn't be sucking fingers, like...
02:36:41.000As if, like, you're a woman, you can't be sexual, you know, like, isn't it, like, part of being a person who owns themselves, owning all the things you enjoy?
02:36:50.000Maybe she likes sucking fingers, you know?
02:36:53.000Like, she's a fucking, she's an autonomous human being.
02:37:03.000The same woman wrote a bit, she wrote another piece, because I like to follow knuckleheads.
02:37:08.000She wrote another piece about how she's getting older and it's really kind of, she's torn because she doesn't get catcalled as much anymore.
02:37:26.000Someone tweeted her saying that this article about being conflicted, about not being catcalled anymore, I felt like that was a very white cis piece.
02:37:38.000White cisgender, meaning that people of color and trans people have to worry about being catcalled, because trans people, if they're catcalled and then someone finds out that they're trans, they can get beaten to death.
02:37:51.000And you should be more aware of that when you write these pieces, you're insensitive.
02:39:19.000How are you actually supposed to help people How are we supposed to be kind and considerate and generous if every time we try to, we get shot down because we put our foot in it?
02:39:29.000Like, Dawkins in that tweet about Islam is trying to support women.
02:39:35.000He tries to do that, and then feminists jump down his throat for being condescending towards women because Muslim women should be the ones who are sticking up for Muslim women.
02:39:42.000They don't need your white, patriarchal, Islamophobic, male...
02:39:59.000Well, I think we have to negate the opinions of those people that write these posts for, like, the HuffPost, write these articles.
02:40:07.000We have to negate them by mocking them.
02:40:09.000Because I think it is hilariously stupid.
02:40:11.000I think that opinion is fucking hilariously stupid.
02:40:14.000That he doesn't have the right to say that he has concern for people that are a different gender than him, that have a different ideology than him, that live in a different part of the world than him, that have more melanin in their skin.
02:40:32.000You're not going to get that response from the news.
02:40:34.000You're not going to get that from the president.
02:40:36.000But you get that from people that don't have a vested interest in supporting one particular tribe.
02:40:41.000And I think that's one of the things that they talked about in this Merchants of Doubt documentary that really resonated with me, is that a lot of times when people talk about global warming or they talk about fucking chemtrails or any of these things, there's a tribe of people that have subscribed to that ideology,
02:40:56.000and it's very important that you support that tribe.
02:40:59.000And it manifests itself in ridiculous places, like the tribe of people that are like...
02:41:51.000What about those people who, when a new product comes out, and it's usually an Apple product, they'll go out and they'll camp for four or five days in order to be the first person who gets the product?
02:42:00.000It reminded me a little bit of when you were talking about your buddy who did the massive, massive marathon but then came in fourth.
02:42:07.000I was watching the Today Show or something where they were interviewing the people who were standing in line and they've all got tents and they've got sleeping bags.
02:42:17.000They're on Fifth Avenue near Central Park and they're camping out for 72 hours.
02:42:23.000And the correspondent was talking to someone who was the seventh in line or something.
02:45:42.000When that happens, you're going to then realize that you'll be one of the first adopters and then they'll realize it's radioactive and it gives you cancer and you'll die.
02:46:34.000They're being very secretive about it, and they've shown some demonstrations of it, but only the demonstration in the fact that you can see, like, there's a little girl that's watching a ballerina on her bed dancing around.
02:46:43.000The ballerina's like four inches high.
02:49:46.000Yeah, and actually some kind of, like, I don't know, you know, masturbation thing or something that fits on you, and then gets synced up to a virtual reality that actually looks not like a 3D robot human, but kind of like an actual plausible human being.
02:50:10.000They put the goggles on, they have first-person interactive porn, where you put your dick into, like, a machine, and the machine sort of strokes your dick, and you're having sex with someone in first person.
02:50:32.000I mean, the advances that are coming in all of that kind of stuff in the next decade are going to be mind-boggling.
02:50:37.000Well, I think that goes back to what we're talking about, about future civilizations, that do these civilizations that exist out there in the cosmos, do they have radar?
02:50:46.000Or have they transcended that, and have they gone into virtual?
02:50:49.000Because I think, once we realize that virtual can be avatar, we can live inside some fantastic world that's so much more rewarding and exciting, and why bother with the regular carbon-based life world?
02:51:59.000The real of money used to be you had a leather sack filled with gold coins and you carried that around and someone could steal it from you.
02:52:05.000Now it's Bitcoin and it's on your phone.
02:52:22.000I think that's a really good point, to point out that it's not artificial.
02:52:24.000Because look at what we're doing right now.
02:52:27.000We're having a conversation which is going through technology that a half century ago would have been inconceivable, which is being viewed by people...
02:52:52.000And we're having a conversation that's fueled by this digital interface that we have in front of us that's allowing us to, in real time, get information in a way that was never possible just a couple of decades ago.
02:53:03.000We can get all this information and we...
02:53:16.000I have visions of people who just spend all their days in their basements, plugged into a virtual reality machine, with a drip in their arm providing them with sustenance, and just are off in this other universe of their own...
02:53:29.000How different is that than people that are listening to this while they're playing video games and drinking Mountain Dew?
02:53:35.000I mean, the idea that you have to live in the real world in order to be valid.
02:53:40.000I mean, the only reason why is because we have needs.
02:53:43.000We have needs for companionship and love and friendship, and it's good to go outside and smell the fresh air.
02:53:48.000But when they figure out a way to make...
02:53:51.000Oculus Rift, you put on a headset, and it's way better than regular fresh air.
02:53:54.000I think you're onto something with companionship.
02:53:56.000I think that gets to the nub of my concern about it, that as long as that person who's lying in their basement, plugged into an IV, and living in a virtual reality world is interacting with actual other human beings who are also in that virtual world, I have less of a problem with it.
02:54:10.000But if he's interacting with avatars who aren't actual human beings, but who give him all of the feedback that we need from companionship, and he's living in a fake world where there is no reciprocation, I'm pretty confident that you actually have a consciousness.
02:54:23.000You might be a robot, but I'm pretty confident that what we're actually doing here...
02:54:47.000The concept being, for those who are not aware of it, is that one day we are going to, not we, because I'm dumb, but someone way smarter than us is going to figure out a way to create this sort of Oculus Rift thing, next level stuff that we're discussing right now, to a point where it's unrecognizable.
02:55:03.000You can't tell the difference between this and reality.
02:55:07.000They're going to eventually figure it out.
02:55:09.000Just like the stuff that we're looking at right now is sort of the beginning stages of this inevitable technology that's going to transform If that's the case,
02:55:27.000how do we know that we haven't already gotten there?
02:55:33.000If you are in a virtual reality, if you are in an artificial simulated version of the world we live in, And it's so good, you can't distinguish.
02:55:42.000How do you know that it's not already happening?
02:55:44.000How do you know it's not going on right now?
02:55:46.000And there's one mode of strand of logical argument in that philosophy which says that because...
02:55:54.000We're probably likely to invent that kind of technology fairly early in the evolution of the human race, of our civilization.
02:56:02.000If you think about the dinosaurs having lived for hundreds of millions of years, we've only been around for a few hundred thousand or something, then we're probably going to get to that point really soon.
02:56:10.000Then this argument says it's very, very likely that we actually are in the simulation already because we've got hundreds of millions of years in the simulation and only maybe a hundred thousand years not in the simulation at the very, very dawn of our species.
02:56:33.000And like I said, there's very few people that I would do a podcast immediately after landing from Brazil, but I always enjoy our conversations.
02:56:39.000Check out WeThePeopleLive, WTPLive.com.