Bill O'Reilly is dead at the age of 65, and the world is a better place because of it. Joe and Josh pay their respects to one of the most beloved hosts of all time, and talk about what they think of Bill's take on religion and whether or not he really believed in God. Also, they talk about why they don't believe in God, and why they think there's no such thing as a God at all. And, of course, they also talk about how the universe came to be, and how it balances itself out with food and water, and then they realize that it all has to come from an exploding star and fire and water and the elements that come from exploding star, and that it's all a magnificent, magnificent creation. And then they wonder if there's a god in the clouds. And if there isn't, how could there be a god at all? And how could the universe balance itself in some sort of complex, mysterious way? And how does that even make sense? And why does it have to be a God? And who made it all come from a star and a fire and a water and a food and a dirt and an earth and a planet? And does it all have to do it all together? And is there a God in the universe? And if it's not a God, how did it all balance itself? And what is it all of that? And why is there no such a thing? and how could it all be? ? and why is it not a god? How could it be? and how does it exist? And can it all work? And isn't it all a beautiful and beautiful and all of it all at the same time? -- and how can we all of this be a big and beautiful? What is it be a whole lot of things? We'll talk about it all in this episode, and we'll do it live! - Josh and Joe - and we're not even talking about God? - and it's a good one, right? - is it a God and everything has to do that right, right, and it can be a little bit like that? And it's just a god and everything can be explained in a better than it is a little better than we think it is? And we can have it like that, but it can't be? We can't have it all, can it?
00:02:46.000To the cosmos and how could we all have come about?
00:02:48.000How could this whole thing around us exist with all these butterflies and the moon and the tide comes in and the tide goes out and there's me and Joe, these spiritual creatures, these beings sitting opposite each other at a table in Los Angeles right now.
00:03:01.000Some people just find that too inexplicable to explain without a deity.
00:03:06.000So they're like, all right, there must have been a big guy who did it.
00:03:09.000It's even dumber, in my opinion, to think that one dude engineered this whole fucking thing.
00:03:14.000I mean, wouldn't you just think that, oh wow, there's some crazy, super complex system that sort of works in some odd way where it balances itself out with predator and prey and food and water and fire and dirt and all this stuff together, and then you realize that it all has to form out of the actual...
00:03:34.000The elements that come from an exploding star.
00:03:38.000Just the actual, the full realm of things that they've absolutely proven to be true in terms of scientific discoveries about the universe and just the very elements that constitute human beings and everything you see,
00:04:42.000I mean, one of the things that's interesting is I think at any given point in time, people just assume that the universe was created by whatever thing happens to be around them.
00:04:58.000No, I had him on Point of Inquiry, actually, which is a different podcast than my normal one, We The People, like the week before he was on yours.
00:05:21.000Space moves faster than light the universe is moving faster than the speed of light so What we're seeing is what we can see from 14 billion years ago because but that doesn't mean that's all there is right he goes space itself Beyond expanding but what he's saying is space itself beyond that could be infinite It's just moving faster than we can see and You just broke my brain.
00:05:46.000So what he was saying is like, when you're talking about the observable universe being, I think it's 13 point something billion years old, almost 14 billion years old, that's just how far back we can see.
00:05:56.000He's like, but before that, like when you go back further, it's not that there's nothing there.
00:07:03.000That's why it's so important to appreciate.
00:07:06.000When people are science deniers, it's so frustrating because everything you use, everything you enjoy, everything in terms of medicine, technology, is based on the work of countless people who have worked generations after generations on the innovations of the past.
00:07:25.000People before them invented some shit, they improved upon it, they figured out more, they studied the calculations of those people, they added to it, and then you get to 2017. So whenever someone steps in with an incredibly limited understanding of science or of what we're dealing with in terms of the universe itself and says,
00:07:42.000whoa, tide goes in, the tide goes out.
00:08:17.000Highly effective at individual pursuits.
00:08:20.000Now, when you say highly intelligent, I think as soon as someone is religious in terms of like, if you believe in preposterous notions, like there's a guy who came back to life, he turns water into wine, he walks on water, if you believe that, you're not intelligent.
00:08:39.000I think you are intelligent in individual disciplines, but obviously if you believe something that makes no sense whatsoever, you believe that someone was magic, someone defied physics, someone had superpowers, someone was a person who could bring people back to life,
00:08:54.000someone could come back to life themselves.
00:08:56.000There's no evidence that anybody like that has ever existed.
00:08:59.000Yeah, and on what grounds do you believe this?
00:08:59.000You believe this on the flimsiest fucking evidence that wasn't even written down until 70 or 80 years after that dude died, because Christianity didn't even...
00:09:26.000If you believe stupid shit, are you smart?
00:09:28.000You are implying that the reason why Bill O'Reilly talks about tide goes in, tide goes out, is because he's pandering to people because he's a Harvard guy and there's no way that he would be dumb enough to believe that.
00:09:38.000No, I'm implying that because I looked at the way he said it, and I know what he does, and I think he's manipulative, and I think what he's doing is playing to his base.
00:09:47.000I think there's a lot of people out there that want to see some smug, liberal atheist get taken down a notch, and Bill's just the guy to do it, and talk over him, and he's a big, giant guy so he can yell and get all aggressive.
00:09:58.000What I don't understand is, like, Stephen Colbert is obviously a very smart guy.
00:10:10.000These people find ways of compartmentalizing logic, I guess.
00:10:14.000So, like, as you say, they believe in something that is totally crazy.
00:10:18.000I mean, the idea that you can say a certain number of Latin words over a cracker and it'll turn bodily into the flesh of someone who existed 2,000 years ago is crazy magic talk.
00:10:28.000Well, it's crazy talk, but there are people that are religious that are extremely intelligent, and I agree with you on this, like Jordan Peterson.
00:10:35.000Who's a brilliant man who is very religious in the sense that he studies religion and he believes there's some fundamental principles that are involved in religion that are inexorable to the human condition.
00:10:46.000And I think he thinks they're important to our society and to civility and ethics and morals.
00:10:54.000I don't think he believes people walked on water.
00:10:56.000I don't think he believes someone came back from the dead.
00:10:59.000I don't think he believes this stupid shit.
00:11:01.000And I don't think the stupid shit is even the original story.
00:11:06.000The huge problem with religion is translation over time.
00:12:49.000I think what we do too much of is confusing two questions.
00:12:52.000One of which is, is there a God without defining what God is?
00:12:56.000And the other of which is, is there any reason to believe in a particular faith or a particular denomination to be a Christian or a Muslim or a Jew or whatever?
00:13:05.000I think we can break it down even further than that.
00:13:43.000Well, we know historical records, we know the stories of people from back then, but the idea that this one guy did things that no human being could ever do today, defied logic, physics, the laws of nature, the laws of life and death,
00:14:01.000The realities that we accept today in terms of what's provable, what we know about biological life, all that stuff was violated by this one guy.
00:15:03.000This is this idea that you might as well be religious because, hey, if it's true, you've got an eternity of goodness and you avoid hellfire.
00:15:11.000It can't be true because no one knows.
00:15:13.000Like, no one has died and given you the...
00:15:16.000No one's died with a VCR or, you know, a VHS tape recorder and come back with a...
00:15:28.000Like, Bertrand Russell kind of demolished this idea with his teapot analogy, where he said, like, okay, I'm going to claim that there's a teapot circling in orbit between the Earth and the Moon.
00:15:40.000And now if you deny that, then, hey, it's just a 50-50 shot.
00:15:45.000Maybe it's there, maybe it's not there.
00:15:48.000Obviously, you would say, no, I think it's not there, because if there's no evidence that it's there, I'm not just going to believe you because you say it.
00:15:53.000And similarly, if you say, oh, this guy Jesus, 2,000 years ago, he turned water into wine, he walked on water, and then he was the son of God, and that God requires you to believe on him, otherwise you're going to go to hell forever, and you say, why should I believe that?
00:16:06.000And they can't turn around and say, hey, it's a 50-50 shot.
00:16:29.000A lot of religious people believe that.
00:16:31.000But it doesn't mean, here's the thing, if people are listening and you're getting fucking pissed, it doesn't mean there's not a higher power.
00:16:36.000It doesn't mean there's not an order to this universe.
00:16:38.000It just means that it's super likely that if there is something that's unbelievably powerful and there's some law that keeps the universe together and some force of good that's trying to guide us, there's some beautiful inclinations towards that direction.
00:16:56.000What I'm saying is, I guarantee you that the people who lived 2,000 years ago who wrote this shit down on leather with, you know, ink that they made out of plants, they didn't have all the data.
00:19:24.000I would not need more than 72 virgins or raisins to make me happy in the afterlife.
00:19:28.000It's probably not even the number 72. It's just like our translation from Arabic to English just screws it up and then someone probably came up with this numerical value a long time ago and they stuck with 72. So believe in science, people.
00:19:41.000So talking about Bill O'Reilly, do you think he should have been fired?
00:20:55.000I'm sure you've had a conversation with someone about something that happened that you witnessed as well, and you both have totally different memories of it.
00:21:02.000I've come to accept that, though, for myself over the last few years.
00:21:06.000I used to cling to memories and then try to argue them.
00:21:10.000But I think it's been scientifically proven that the human memory is one of the worst pieces of evidence that you could ever call upon.
00:21:19.000Yeah, the justice system is starting to deprioritize it as well, as it should do, because in the past, eyewitness accounts in courtrooms have been very highly prioritized.
00:21:29.000They've been very highly valued and prized by prosecutors.
00:21:32.000Well, I mean, this person points out, do you see that person sitting in the courtroom today, madam?
00:21:37.000And she points to her finger and, well, it's a slam dunk.
00:21:56.000But there's also someone who could be seriously deceptive and very ambitious and realizes that Bill O'Reilly's kind of a twat, and this is what I'm going to do.
00:22:06.000I'm going to get close to this old cunt, and I'm going to get this guy to get creepy with me, and then I'm going to exaggerate what he did, and I'm going to profit off of it.
00:22:14.000I mean, you understand that they've paid fucking millions of dollars to people, so there's a real industry in getting Bill O'Reilly to get creepy with you.
00:22:22.000Like, if I was a chick, like, especially if I was, like, a really unscrupulous chick, and I didn't like him.
00:22:28.000Yeah, he touched my knee, that's half a million, he went up the thigh, that's a million and a half.
00:22:34.000I'm just gonna, like, kind of give him, like, a semi-green light, you know, just a little bit, take it back, a little I mean, the problem is, though, that this kind of skepticism towards women's stories about sexual assault is what has permitted people like him to get away with it for decades and centuries,
00:23:03.000I think that has been more of an influence.
00:23:05.000But isn't the fear of not being believed part of that?
00:23:07.000Maybe I think the repercussions that he's gonna ruin your career that he's gonna that he has influence and also that if you just play ball You'll get something from it, you know, yeah, I mean I'm not Especially I'm not talking about an individual person and saying this individual person is not telling truth.
00:23:22.000What I'm doing is just making hypotheticals I'm just saying if I was a chick And I was an unscrupulous sort of social climber, and we all know that they exist.
00:23:33.000And I was the type of person that really wanted to make it in this business.
00:23:37.000And I was like, look, I'm working for an asshole.
00:23:39.000And I already know there's five chicks who got paid.
00:23:42.000They've already paid out 13 million bucks.
00:24:41.000Well, Jon Stewart was interesting in that regard where he was funny on his show when he was doing a scripted monologue and talking to people.
00:25:55.000And if it's my company and you have to worry about this guy representing you, okay, I see where you wouldn't want that guy representing you because he's problematic and people think he's a creep.
00:26:06.000But he could just go do his own shit, like Glenn Beck did, and it would be gigantic.
00:26:14.000I mean, it's an interesting question about what happens to the right-wing media now, because if Roger Ailes is no longer at Fox News, and Bill O'Reilly is no longer at Fox News...
00:26:36.000It's like an old Porky's movie, or like one of those 1970s National Lampoon films with women with their tits hanging out, running around the dorm.
00:27:08.000I think he had to make a decision, and he kind of sidelined the white nationalist bit, and he kind of empowered the old-school Republican orthodoxy.
00:27:16.000Gee, you'd be pissed if you were a Trump voter, wouldn't you?
00:27:42.000There are so many people, they have this cognitive dissonance that they have in addressing his actions.
00:27:49.000The support of him, they're so happy that they won, they would never want to take away their victory.
00:27:55.000The people that are happy that Trump is in office are so happy that he won, and they won with him, that any little thing that happens, They just come up with some sort of a way to rationalize or justify it.
00:28:09.000I saw a story the other day about a county in Pennsylvania or something which had voted for Obama twice and then voted for Trump because they thought they were going to get change.
00:28:18.000And they're all just like, well, he just seems like a regular Republican.
00:28:20.000He's going to try to cut taxes for the rich and go to war with foreign countries.
00:29:37.000What we've said here could easily have been in a private email questioning whether or not Bill O'Reilly's intelligent or whether or not he really believes that or whether or not religious people are actually intelligent.
00:29:49.000Clearly, there's a lot of religious people that are intelligent.
00:29:52.000I mean, part of the problem is that people give too much of a crap about things that people have said in the past.
00:29:57.000I mean, we've spoken about this before in relation to political correctness or something, or, like, using the wrong language.
00:30:03.000I think as more and more of what we say gets intercepted, or at least interceptable in emails and also in phone calls and so on, and we're being spied on all the time, and things can be leaked and things can be hacked, people are just going to have to chill the fuck out a little bit about people's past.
00:30:19.000Otherwise, we're only going to end up with the most boring, anodyne people in positions of power, because it's only going to be people who've always watched exactly what they say, who have never triggered a tripwire and who have never gotten people angry.
00:30:32.000Well, in that sense, Trump's the big victory for that.
00:32:06.000He's talking about girls that are enthralled with the fact that they're around this guy who has his fucking name on skyscrapers and he flies around with a jet with his name on it.
00:32:14.000And if you're that type of woman, and there are that, look, there's that type of men, there's that type of women.
00:32:20.000There's not a gross generalization about men or women, but guaranteed there are some women that when they're in the face of a guy like Donald Trump, they react that way and they let him do anything they want and they love it.
00:32:47.000What it sounded to me like was someone who is inept sexually, which by many accounts he is.
00:32:53.000Like, there are lots of accounts of, like, when he was married to or dating the most beautiful people, he'd be downstairs eating Cheetos, watching late-night cable news while they were upstairs.
00:33:01.000Yeah, but how do you believe that or not believe that?
00:33:03.000Well, just compare it to whether or not it comports with what else you know about him, which is that he's very image-focused and cares a lot about being thought to be the best at everything and the most glamorous and the richest.
00:33:15.000So you would imagine that it would be consistent with his personality, that he would want to present a front of being more of a slayer and more of a sexual demon than he actually is.
00:33:53.000And part of his rise, part of the backlash, is a backlash against the, you know, we've had so many conversations that we all know it by now, we're bored of like...
00:34:03.000People who absolutely lose their, you know, just go crazy because you use the wrong transgender pronoun or something like that.
00:34:11.000You know, you say he instead of she or whatever it is.
00:34:13.000Or microaggressions and stuff like that.
00:34:17.000All of that kind of bullshit, I think, gave rise to an environment in which people were so frustrated with political correctness that they unleashed and it was like a pressure cooker exploding and the Trump hair went everywhere.
00:34:29.000Exactly, but I don't think, you know, things would have been better if we hadn't gotten to that place and we could all just take a chill pill.
00:34:34.000Well, I think we need to learn, you know, and I think we need to make mistakes so that we can learn.
00:34:39.000One of the things that's really unfortunate is that he doesn't tell the truth and that he's the president and he shows that you can just not tell the truth and be the president.
00:34:55.000I mean, I'm trying to grapple with this on my podcast, because I think what's dangerous about Trump is not just that he doesn't tell the truth, because as lots of people point out, many politicians don't tell the truth.
00:36:00.000Poor old Spicy is out there trying to make Trump's statements comport with reality in some way, but Trump is just an explosive-like vomit machine just tweeting out stuff that doesn't even have to map onto reality at all.
00:36:17.000And he almost seems to take pride, I think, in the fact that he can say, whatever...
00:36:52.000Well, the problem is he's not a politician.
00:36:55.000So he's acting as a politician for the first time in his life, and he's 70. So for his entire life, he's been this braggadocious guy who has exaggerated facts and built up this amazing persona and exaggerated wealth and obviously very successful, but exaggerates that success.
00:37:42.000You know, it's just, he's not a politician, and that's what people like about him.
00:37:47.000You know, but then he starts doing all these different things, like, you know, he's trying to get all these different plants to reopen and give Americans jobs, and they talk about all the jobs that have been created, and people get excited, and they signed this new thing yesterday, you know, American-made, American sales, and trying to encourage people to buy and make American,
00:38:04.000and And then trying to get rid of foreigners that are sneaking over here and doing bad things.
00:38:10.000The base, the people that have been clamoring for that kind of response get very excited.
00:38:26.000Yeah, and I think that there's a feeling that the whole people who regard themselves as being custodians of the truth are hoity-toity, out-of-touch elites who've been shitting on the honest, hard-working Trump supporter for so long that they deserve to be slapped in their face with a little bit of...
00:38:42.000Untruthful truthiness from time to time.
00:38:44.000You know, the journalists and the judges and the academics.
00:40:20.000Like, if you are the president, you should know that people in the executive branch, such as the president, people in the White House, should not disparage people in the judicial branch.
00:40:31.000Because we have a separation of powers in the United States of America.
00:40:33.000So when he made those comments, for example, about the judiciary, I think a lot of people think like, oh, why is everyone getting their tits in a tangle just because he implied that the judge was biased in the Trump University case?
00:40:46.000It's because presidential candidates shouldn't be shitting on judges.
00:42:12.000Most countries don't have that natural-born rule.
00:42:14.000Most countries, if you move to that country and you become a citizen, and you live there for a certain period of time, sure, you can run for the highest office.
00:42:21.000Are you upset because you want to run for office?
00:43:50.000And they went through the whole thing, where they had a surrogate, the whole deal, and then at the end of it, she's like, I'm keeping this.
00:44:07.000That's unusual, because California is usually...
00:44:09.000Our surrogate's not in California, but it tends to have pretty good pro-family surrogacy laws, by which I mean it makes it hard for the surrogate to change her mind at the end.
00:44:20.000Yeah, well, they did it in 2000. It was, like, early 2000s.
00:44:24.000Oh, yeah, that might have changed this then.
00:44:28.000I mean, let me whine for a moment about how backward Australia is.
00:44:31.00010 or 15 years ago, when I first started coming to the States, I was able to look down my progressive nose at these fine United States of America and think of it as being a more conservative, centre-right country.
00:44:42.000But now you guys are legalising pot all over the joint.
00:45:55.000So you want a woman to be able to kill that bunch of cells, but you don't want her to be able to bring that bunch of cells into existence and get paid for it.
00:46:02.000In Australia, you can't- it's against the law to pay a surrogate to carry your child.
00:48:38.000I had Gary Taubes on who wrote that book, The Case Against Sugar.
00:48:42.000And one of the things that he was saying that was really kind of interesting is that when you feed people a higher sugar diet, the higher insulin count is actually making larger people.
00:51:12.000I don't have the cycles of the menstruation and the moon and the tide comes in and the tide goes out and the blood comes in and the blood comes out.
00:51:19.000The sperm comes in, the baby comes out.
00:51:20.000The sweet baby Jesus is the only explanation, Joe.
00:51:23.000So explain to me what the law is right now in Australia.
00:51:26.000Like, can you hire a surrogate, or is it being pushed back?
00:51:29.000Well, it's a state-by-state thing, because Australia is also a federation like the United States, which used to be a bunch of separate colonies.
00:51:34.000So it used to be a bunch of, you know, penal colonies that Britain...
00:51:37.000Basically, after the American Revolution, Britain had nowhere to send its criminals, and it was a very, very tough law and order state in the 1700s in the UK. Like, if you...
00:52:06.000They discovered this great southern land that had been rumoured about and had been kind of sketched on the edges by some of the explorers from the Netherlands and from France so far.
00:52:17.000To settle it, basically so they would have a place for British criminals to, I mean, a huge, vast, sunburnt land for criminals to roam free in, now that they could no longer use the United States, any of those colonies.
00:52:30.000Meanwhile, it's one of the most beautiful places in the world, and some of the nicest people in the world live there.
00:52:51.000Oh, please, Judge, don't send me to the other side of the world to a tropical paradise when I could be living here in London where it's dirty and disease-ridden and it's rainy and drizzly and grey all the time.
00:53:01.000But isn't it interesting how there's a balance to everything?
00:53:04.000Because when you go to Australia, everything can fucking kill you.
00:53:21.000I'm terrified of bugs and snakes and shit.
00:53:24.000Because, I mean, you do realize statistically that you're much more likely to be killed on the freeway here in L.A. or by someone shooting you in the States than you are by a spider bite in Sydney.
00:53:33.000Unless you go near the spiders and the snakes.
00:53:59.000They went hunting and they didn't bring any water and they just figured they would find water and they use water purification systems and clean it out.
00:54:06.000So they're drinking buffalo piss water because these water buffaloes, they piss in this water and then you have these filter pumps and you pump out all the toxins, but it still tastes like piss because you're essentially drinking purified piss.
00:54:56.000Yeah, well, be with a group of people.
00:54:58.000I mean, in terms of how good it was for convicts, I mean, people came out to Australia, you know, Brits came out to Australia, even if they weren't criminals, just because they wanted a new...
00:55:12.000And some of the states of Australia actually were free settler colonies, like South Australia, which is one of the states, was never a penal colony.
00:55:20.000And in fact, when Australia became a country in 1901, in the constitutional conventions in the 1890s, which created a country out of all of these previously separate colonies, New Zealand was in negotiations to be part of that country as well.
00:55:34.000And Western Australia, which is the western half of the continent, was going to be a separate country.
00:55:37.000And the eastern half, the eastern states of Australia and New Zealand could have been a single country.
00:55:43.000And then at the last minute, New Zealand jumped out and Western Australia jumped in.
00:56:13.000You know, New Zealand is a place that's really fascinating because they brought over all these wild game animals from other countries to turn into a sportsman's paradise.
00:56:23.000I think they did in the 1700s or the 1800s.
00:56:27.000Would have been the 1800s, because I think it was only settled by white people in the 1700s.
00:56:31.000Yeah, and now they've run rampant around the island because there's no predators.
00:56:35.000So they have these, you know, hordes of red stags from Europe that are wandering around New Zealand.
00:56:41.000And I think we spoke last time about the attempt that New Zealand is doing to basically eradicate all of its predators, all of its invasive predators that have come from abroad.
00:56:50.000Like, New Zealand, because it was the last country to be settled by white people...
00:57:41.000Well, Australian bowhunting magazines show people holding cats up, like domestic cats.
00:57:48.000They hold them and they got like an arrow through the heart.
00:57:50.000And there was a guy recently who got attacked on Instagram because he's an Australian bowhunter and he was out bowhunting and he killed this cat.
00:57:58.000And all these people were freaking out.
00:57:59.000That was somebody's pet, you piece of shit!
00:58:51.000Your Tasmanian tiger, which was an animal that was extinct, apparently there's a bunch of sightings of this thing, and they're pretty sure that it might actually still be alive.
00:59:02.000There's this really depressing footage, you can see it online, of the last ever Tasmanian tiger in a zoo, just pacing back and forth and back and forth.
01:00:10.000Yeah, no, the only American accents that I can easily pick, apart from the big city ones, because you can tell Boston, you can tell New York, you can, uh, that's basically about it.
01:01:50.000I guess I get seasonal affective disorder because my sister-in-law is from Finland and when I go to Finland and it's grey and dark, I don't feel good.
01:02:04.000I get sad, and actually, I don't mind the cold cold.
01:02:07.000I don't mind the really frigid freezing cold.
01:02:09.000I lived in New York for 10-ish years, depending on how you count it, and the winters out there, when it's crisp and bright and blue sky, I mean, you grew up in the Northeast, you know what that's like.
01:02:18.000When it's a nice day, I don't actually care if it's only 5 degrees Fahrenheit, if it's, like, sunny.
01:03:48.000To try to reaffirm her mandate for Brexit.
01:03:51.000And the French are going to the polls next week for the first round of the presidential election, which could see the far-right leader, Marine Le Pen, win in France.
01:04:01.000And if she does, she wants to crash out of the euro currency, do Frexit instead of Brexit.
01:04:07.000And if France leaves the EU, then that actually is all over.
01:04:11.000If that happens, when would France leave the EU? I saw that there's massive anti-fascist protests this week.
01:04:17.000Yeah, so the way that their electoral system works is they, instead of doing it all in one day, they basically, whoever can run and get on the ballot, there's like maybe 8 to 12 candidates who are on the ballot next week, and then assuming that one person doesn't get, one of them doesn't get more than 50% of the vote,
01:04:34.000which they almost never do, that then goes to a second round ballot, which is next month, and that's the actual presidential election between the two main candidates.
01:04:42.000And what it looks like is that the far-right leader, who is...
01:04:46.000Softer than her dad who founded the far-right party was, but he was like a Holocaust denier and like serious anti-Semite, and she's just an anti-Muslim, like anti-immigration, anti-EU, sort of like more right-wing version of Trump.
01:05:01.000She will get through in next week's election, which means it'll be between her...
01:05:07.000The polls say she won't, but the polls didn't say that Brexit was going to happen or that Donald Trump was going to win either.
01:05:12.000So the question is, will people stay at home?
01:05:14.000Because the person who she's most likely to be running against is just this kind of slick, nice, handsome, doesn't really believe in anything, not really a politician, but kind of pragmatic.
01:05:38.000And then there was the Turkey thing that we were talking about.
01:05:40.000So we've got these kind of pieces of jigsaw puzzle that have been bashing around in my head over the past few days about, like, will we look back on this period...
01:05:49.000As just a starting point to something even bigger.
01:05:53.000Like, I already think that it's amazing.
01:06:03.000If someone had walked in that door and said to us...
01:06:07.000Okay, in 2017, you're going to be back on the show, you're going to be talking to each other, and the FBI will be conducting an active investigation into whether or not the government of the day conspired with Putin in Russia to spread misinformation and illegally hack the emails of the Democratic Party.
01:06:32.000Oh, and by the way, the president is Donald Trump.
01:06:56.000And so that's where my head has been at.
01:06:59.000But that would have been, if we did have that conversation, that would have been before the nightclub shooting in Paris, that would have been before the truck ran all over those people in Nice.
01:07:08.000Those terrorist attacks that they have had over in France and in Germany have scared the fucking shit out of people.
01:07:16.000And letting all those people in from Syria with no vetting and letting a lot of Muslims come into the country that may have some real hate in their heart for this new land that they've found.
01:07:29.000And that's when a person who's a fascist, who comes along, who's like this anti-immigration, you know, comes from a racist background, super right-wing, that's when those people take hold.
01:08:10.000I'm an open-minded person, so I think— What defined it?
01:08:14.000Well, I would define it as being someone who doesn't like borders and who doesn't like nationalism and jingoism and believes that we are all one and should try to get along.
01:08:37.000I ask people on Twitter what I should ask you, and overwhelmingly, overwhelmingly, it's all like, why does he legitimize quacks like Alex Jones?
01:09:15.000I showed everybody how crazy he was on my podcast by getting him high and drunk and have him talk about interdimensional child molesters.
01:09:22.000If you watch that and you think I'm legitimizing Alex Jones in some sort of a way, then you're just, you're looking at things in a very cookie-cutter way.
01:09:31.000You're deciding that this is what I've done.
01:09:34.000But a lot of people listen to you, and so I think the criticism that these people have is, like, people put faith in you, and they assume that if you don't raise a question against something, that that means that you tacitly agree with what's being said.
01:09:46.000And that that allows the spread of a lot of bullshit.
01:09:48.000You don't think I raised questions about Alex?
01:12:18.000But if you talk to him about conspiracies, but if you talk to him about, like, MMA, or he's a jiu-jitsu genius, I mean, he's like one of the very best jiu-jitsu instructors on the planet Earth, without a doubt.
01:12:28.000I mean, this comes back again to, like, how we can compartmentalize our minds, right?
01:12:33.000It's like a religious person who believes in the story of Jesus, but is also otherwise super intelligent.
01:13:00.000And this is why I'm a bit worried about where we're at culturally at the moment, because I think that concern about irrationalism being contagious...
01:13:51.000That if all you're doing every day is just tweeting out like a stream of nonsensical bullshit that is neither true nor false but kind of exists in like this meta area of like you are Trump's ego, then I actually have found myself becoming less convinced about reliable sources of information and myself becoming more susceptible to irrational ideas.
01:14:13.000Like I don't feel as confident anymore It's easy because you see so much stuff of like, I'll tweet out something that the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times have published, all of which I regard as being upstanding publications where I have faith that the journalists are doing their best,
01:14:33.000not always perfectly, but doing their best in the long haul to tell the truth and only report facts.
01:14:38.000And then people will say, oh, fake news, fake news, oh, this is bullshit, and they'll link to something that Alex Jones said as if there's kind of equivalence between those two things.
01:14:45.000And I have They link to something Alex Jones said?
01:14:48.000Are you talking about an actual specific thing or are you just speaking generalities?
01:14:52.000People have told me that they believe there's no difference between the credibility of Alex Jones and the credibility of the New York Times.
01:15:15.000And they have strayed from unbiased journalism, which is an issue.
01:15:21.000Because as soon as you start doing that, as soon as you editorialize the news, you open yourself up for people who point out that you editorialize the news and then point out the fact that you're biased.
01:16:50.000Truth is all socially constructed, and, like, gender is entirely socially constructed, and there is no such thing as masculinity.
01:16:56.000It's all just, I don't know, some kind of capitalist story that we've all been led to believe.
01:17:00.000So, like, put a flower in your hair and bust out of it and let your truth be whatever you want the truth to be.
01:17:05.000He sees a link between that and what you might think of as being something very opposite, which is the hard-right, kind of alt-right, Trumpy sort of fake news phenomenon.
01:17:37.000I definitely think that some of the, as we said before, some of the reasons why Trump became popular are these ridiculous assertions that gender Has no basis in biology.
01:19:10.000But now there's a boy who's not even taking treatment who decides he identifies as a girl, and he's just whooping everybody's ass in track, because he's a fucking boy.
01:19:41.000Before it eventually came out, and now once you're out, look, I say, especially in professional sports, you have a right to say no or to say yes to compete against that person.
01:19:55.000I think if a woman wants to fight against a man, if a woman's 130 pounds and she wants to fight against a man who's 130 pounds, they both agree, do whatever you want.
01:20:04.000But I think that there's a big difference between someone who has been a man their whole life, has had testosterone flowing through their bones, Their blood, their body, their whole life, and then decides they're a woman, versus a woman who was born a woman, raised a woman, and is a biological woman her entire life.
01:20:21.000A transgender woman just is not a regular biological woman.
01:20:29.000Saying that a transgender woman, who you can say is a woman, but saying that they're the same thing as a biological woman is just not factually true.
01:20:47.000This is what makes people so frustrated about the whole political correctness thing, right?
01:20:51.000That we set up tripwires, and if you trigger one of those tripwires by making a claim like the one you just made, which is that a trans woman is not exactly the same as a cis woman, a non-trans woman.
01:22:31.000I don't spend a lot of time thinking about this, but I just wish that we were all generous enough that when people find it a little bit difficult to understand, you don't assume that they're bigoted just because it's a new concept for them.
01:22:49.000The parallel that I was drawing a moment ago between, like, post-structuralist there is no such thing as gender and Trump's fake news campaign was not so much the one led to the other.
01:23:00.000It was just that both—this is the point that Lawrence Krauss was making—both undermine the—they both erode the idea of truth.
01:23:08.000And what's ironic is, it's almost exactly the same thing that Bill O'Reilly said.
01:23:46.000Louis says, like, I would understand if, like, there were a couple of gays fucking on my lawn and I had to, like, hose them down to get them, or, like, gay people were just, like, touching their dicks in front of my face as I'm trying to eat my breakfast cereal.
01:25:31.000Like, the past few times that we've gotten together and shot the shit on this show, political correctness and the extremes of it have been a major topic of conversation.
01:25:42.000But I do think that last year, with the election of Trump, and the kind of Welling up of kind of subtly anti-Semitic, racially coded language during the election campaign last year.
01:25:57.000But how do you claim anti-Semitic when Jared Kushner is like his main guy now?
01:26:01.000I don't think Trump is an anti-Semitic.
01:26:14.000I think he's an old white guy with traditional ideas about what made America great, and those traditional ideas coincide with an America that was a lot whiter and more Christian than the country that we see today.
01:26:27.000I think that's the way it becomes racially coded.
01:26:29.000He's never even been a religious person.
01:27:29.000So, they're all corrupt and full of shit, the religious right, for getting behind him when they always talk about how important personal faith is in their candidates.
01:27:37.000Yeah, but I mean, what else are they going to do?
01:29:41.000So maybe there is some biological reason why dudes who are attracted to dudes tend to exhibit mannerisms that are more commonly associated with femininity, right?
01:29:53.000Maybe a sing-songy voice, a certain style of walking, sashaying, a swishy sort of walking.
01:30:01.000Well, my friends that I was talking about, the couple, there's a very clear male and female in the relationship.
01:30:15.000And so, but then, so what I think, if there's a kernel of biology in that, I think it's been ramped up aggressively over the past century by people also playing the role of...
01:34:00.000I'm sorry that this is the case, but this is what happened.
01:34:02.000What is it with parents defending their kids so much these days?
01:34:06.000If a parent had come up to my parent when I was a little kid and told them that I'd been doing something like that, it would have been the grown-ups...
01:35:44.000People are not meant to sit down in a fucking classroom and just pay attention all day to some shit they don't want to pay attention to, and then go home and sit in front of the TV. And what do they do with all that energy that kept us from...
01:35:58.000You know, kept us alive, kept us from predators, kept us from invaders.
01:36:03.000I mean, all that stuff is biologically programmed in the human animal, and we ignore it.
01:36:08.000You're being very transphobic by implying that there's something male, intrinsically male.
01:37:12.000He's the kind of guy who, now that he's in his mid-50s, says that he's sure that when he was younger he would have been medicated if it were...
01:38:03.000What would have happened to his creativity if he'd been medicated in order to be able to get through class because he was always distracted?
01:38:26.000And, you know, especially when you're sending these fucking kids to schools that they promote these rigid ideas of how children are supposed to behave and, you know, and tell you that if you don't follow their rules, you're not going to be successful.
01:38:39.000I mean, how many fucking stories have you heard where teachers tell rowdy kids they're never going to amount to anything?
01:40:14.000I mean, I wouldn't want to deal with me either when I was 15. Who the hell wants to deal with a 15-year-old boy who doesn't want to pay attention, who doesn't give a shit about math?
01:43:56.000It's really common to see the suppression of one ideology and bounce in the other direction.
01:44:02.000If you have a parent, I mean, there's a lot of people that, you know, they grow up and their parents are super hippies and then they become conservative to rebel against their parents.
01:44:11.000That's what I'm always thinking about in terms of parenthood as well.
01:44:14.000Like, no matter what it is that I try to fix in the way that my parents raised me where I think they could have done it better, that's just going to swing in the opposite direction and then my kids are going to do the opposite because you always think that your parents did an imperfect job, right?
01:44:58.000Well, I don't think it was sexual, but I think there were a lot of questions about her ethical dealings in terms of the Mother Teresa Foundation and where her money went.
01:45:37.000Well, I mean, the people are not perfect.
01:45:39.000And most charitable organizations are criticized for spending far too much on infrastructure and, you know, administrative costs, and then you find out how much money actually goes to the charity.
01:45:49.000Like, you just have an organization where you're giving people jobs.
01:45:52.000And, by the way, you also do some good.
01:45:56.000It's interesting because whenever I give to charity, I always try to pay attention to how many overheads they have and how much money is being spent on admin and so on.
01:46:04.000But then it was actually, I think, Will McCaskill or someone who's involved in the Life You Can Save kind of give well movement, which is like rational...
01:46:14.000Is it practical altruism or rational altruism?
01:50:14.000I mean, did you guys in the States when you were like kids, were you like, did you have like, I know you are, you said you are, but what am I? Like that kind of bullshit?
01:50:27.000Like he was elected on the back, he was elected by very, very narrow majorities in a few key swing states that had been inundated with bullshit stories on Facebook that were coming out of Eastern Europe with Russian funding Right.
01:51:00.000And now, anyone who criticises the administration, he just pulls a, I know you are, you said you are, but what am I trick?
01:51:15.000What did you think about when Julian Assange implied that that young man who worked for the DNC, who was assassinated, who was shot in the back?
01:51:33.000They shot him at four o'clock in the morning in the back.
01:51:35.000Julian Assange was insinuating that this young man had been the source of the DNC leaks that showed that Hillary Clinton and the DNC conspired against Bernie Sanders in the primary.
01:51:48.000And you don't really hear about that anymore.
01:52:00.000I think Assange has kind of lost credibility by essentially becoming a conduit for the Kremlin.
01:52:06.000Like all of, you know, WikiLeaks, we all know that the, I mean, people in security, so anytime I talk about this, people are going to respond and say, oh, you're just buying the security services line.
01:52:15.000You're just believing what the NSA and the CIA want you to believe.
01:52:19.000I'm basically taking on faith the conclusions of security agencies here in the United States.
01:52:25.000Multiple, more than a dozen different security agencies, also confirmed by the Brits, by the British Secret Service, all believe, say that they have good reason to believe, that the Kremlin was behind the hacks and that WikiLeaks released...
01:52:40.000Must have been in cahoots with the Kremlin, because otherwise, how did they release the DNC hacks?
01:52:45.000Well, there could have been many people that were trying to hack.
01:52:48.000There could have been, but our secret services can see fingerprints on things.
01:53:08.000I just don't know why I would be trusting Julian Assange about any of this, because he says that it didn't come from Russia.
01:53:13.000Well, the other thing that I would worry about with Julian Assange is that this poor fuck has been trapped in the embassy in London for so long, and he can't get out.
01:53:28.000Pamela Anderson makes a sixth visit to lover Julian Assange as she brings vegan cheeseburgers to the Ecuadorian Embassy for the WikiLeaks Foundation.
01:54:47.000Imagine what people would pay to be able to look and feel like they did when they were 25. Well, you know that Peter Thiel guy is already getting young blood put into his system.
01:55:21.000I mean, they outed him, and then they went after Hulk Hogan, and then the guy said that he would release a sex tape of a child, you know, if he could get away with it.
01:55:30.000Yeah, I do, and I don't condone them, but I don't like setting up a precedent where very, very rich people can just...
01:55:36.000Because this wasn't the only thing that he was suing them about.
01:55:38.000He was basically just throwing lawsuits at them so fast that they couldn't keep their head above water, and they went under, because, I mean, how can you...
01:55:46.000Eventually, the person's going to win a lawsuit.
01:55:48.000I don't like the idea that media companies...
01:56:31.000Do you think that America would be a better place if fantastically wealthy people could launch an endless string of lawsuits, whether or not they're legitimate, at media companies they don't like?
01:58:04.000I mean, because wasn't it the case that he didn't realize that he was being filmed at the time?
01:58:08.000Yeah, you shouldn't be able to have a video of you having sex with somebody that you didn't know was being taken, splashed all over the internet.
01:58:21.000Or should there be some limit to the number of, like...
01:58:26.000Because, I mean, you would want people to be able to bankroll cases that they care about deeply, but maybe not three or four completely unrelated cases all against the same organization.
01:59:20.000People will always get offended on Twitter when Richard Dawkins tweets something that's unpopular.
01:59:24.000By the way, I have an interview with him coming up.
01:59:27.000So if you don't, let me just plug, if you don't subscribe to We The People Live, then search for We The People, all one word, in your podcast app.
01:59:34.000I'll be talking to Sam Harris tomorrow, which will get released in a couple of weeks.
01:59:38.000And don't shout at me for not releasing it immediately, like you did last time, Twitter.
02:00:22.000Anyway, so what Richard Dawkins was saying is people are going to be angry at him on Twitter regardless of what he says, but...
02:00:29.000I still affirm that in the States the conversation around abortion is uniquely different from the way that it is in Europe and in Australia.
02:01:13.000The Supreme Court said there's a right to privacy, therefore there's a right to abortion because we don't want to interfere in women's affairs.
02:01:22.000But that presupposes that the embryo isn't a human.
02:01:57.000Well, there's a large amount of people that don't want men talking about this at all.
02:02:07.000They don't feel like you should be able to discuss this.
02:02:10.000That is one of the main problems in America as well.
02:02:13.000Well, I can understand a woman being upset that a man with no stake in the game is stepping up and saying that a woman should or should not be able to have an abortion.
02:02:23.000Well, how do I have stake in the game of whether or not, for example, murder should be legal?
02:02:51.000If it's a nine-month-old baby, the baby's in there, and it's about to come out the next day, and you decide to open her up and stab it in the head?
02:02:57.000This is what I'm arguing for, is a kind of incrementalism, which you were just alluding to, right?
02:03:02.000Why can't we all appreciate that it's both?
02:03:05.000Because it's become so polarized in the United States that both positions are bullshit.
02:03:10.000And people on both sides know that both positions are bullshit.
02:03:13.000It's bullshit to say that it is just a women's health issue and has no ethical implications whatsoever, even if, as you say, you're talking about cutting a woman open at nine months and stabbing the embryo in the head.
02:03:27.000It's also bullshit to say that the instant an egg is fertilized, that is a person that should have all of the rights to life that an adult should have, and that it's murder to kill a blastocyst that's smaller than the size of the head of a pin.
02:03:49.000I mean, Peter Singer, the great philosopher, also an Australian, says that under certain conditions, infanticide, the killing of babies, should be legal and could be ethical.
02:05:34.000But I'm saying that is an argument that women want to take because they feel like there's this unjust...
02:05:42.000What sort of male dominance on the female reproductive system?
02:05:55.000Women, predominantly young women, predominantly young women of color who are in areas that have the least amount of access to safe and legal...
02:06:03.000What do you mean predominantly women of color?
02:08:14.000And she was claiming that I didn't have a right to have a conversation about it because I'm a white man.
02:08:20.000Well, that was just the way she tried to get out of the argument.
02:08:23.000You know, the whole thing before that was her not understanding the joke.
02:08:27.000And she didn't want to own up to the fact that she didn't understand the joke.
02:08:31.000And then when you sort of explained it to her, she was using the you as a white man thing to try to deny your opinion.
02:08:37.000But don't you think it happens all the time?
02:08:39.000I think this is exactly what you're saying.
02:08:41.000I think we're both on the same page here in that I think we both agree that you should absolutely be able to have a conversation about this.
02:08:47.000The question is, should a man be able to decide what a woman can and can't do with her body?
02:08:54.000And should we be able to make the laws?
02:08:55.000But you just smuggled in the term with her body.
02:08:57.000Well, it is a baby if it's a blastocyst, and it is in her body.
02:09:01.000Right, if it's a blastocyst, it's in her body.
02:09:50.000You're framing it as being a woman's body.
02:09:53.000No, no, no, because we're talking about the rights, giving someone a right, or stopping them and controlling them.
02:09:58.000If you're talking about a blastocyst inside a woman's body, and you're a man, and you decide, you don't even know this woman, you decide by your moral argument and judgment, she should not be able to terminate that blastocyst, then you are deciding what she can do with her body.
02:10:12.000No, you're deciding what she can do to the blastocyst.
02:10:48.000But I don't think that the gender of the person who is voted into power by the voting public is relevant in terms of whether or not the voting public thinks that embryos are human beings.
02:11:15.000Are you arguing that if there are males in positions of power in Congress, that they should have to abstain from ruling?
02:11:23.000Should the male justices on the Supreme Court have to abstain from voting on abortion cases?
02:11:28.000I'm arguing that it's problematic when a man decides, who cannot get pregnant, decides when a baby is actually a baby inside a woman's body.
02:11:40.000So should men not be allowed to vote for...
02:11:59.000It's a huge issue that someone who cannot get pregnant decides that another human being that they're totally unrelated to can't make the decision that five cells that are bundled together must be brought to life.
02:12:10.000They think that those five cells are a person.
02:12:12.000Well, they don't even know this chick.
02:13:13.000And I know that you're saying that we should all have a stake in this.
02:13:15.000We should all be able to discuss this.
02:13:17.000I just think that when you talk about, especially like a blastocyst eventually becoming an embryo, we have to agree in some way, shape, or form that you and I don't have a stake in it.
02:14:10.000But in order for me to understand where people who detest abortion are coming from, it's necessary for me to make the leap of empathy and logic into their camp and see things from the way that they see them, which is that the instant an egg is fertilized,
02:14:25.000for them that becomes a sacred question of a new life.
02:14:29.000Where it's no longer about the woman's body.
02:14:31.000It's now a moral and ethical question that we're all involved in because we're all involved in what our culture is allowed to do and who it's allowed to kill and how it's allowed to kill them.
02:14:39.000So it becomes a bit more like a death penalty question where you might say, well, I'm never going to be up for the death penalty because I'm never going to do anything.
02:14:54.000Like, we're all in this society together.
02:14:56.000We all have to figure out what's right and wrong.
02:14:58.000And if we've got a brain, we should have conversations about what's good or bad.
02:15:01.000And the fact that I'm unlikely to be in a specific scenario doesn't actually really give me less standing to have a conversation about it or even to write laws about it if people vote me into a position where I can write laws about it.
02:15:13.000Well, I certainly think it does when you're talking about a blastocyst.
02:15:16.000I certainly think it does when you talk about the argument of conception and when something becomes alive.
02:15:21.000When do you think abortion should be legal?
02:15:24.000Do you think it should be legal up to nine months?
02:15:26.000Or do you think it should be a cutoff period?
02:15:28.000I think it should basically be legal all the way up to nine months, and I probably agree with Peter Singer that maybe it's occasionally okay to kill babies.
02:15:37.000So you think that a viable baby inside a woman's body at nine months old, she's fully pregnant, as long as that baby doesn't come out, she should be able to kill it.
02:15:45.000Well, I'm saying even if it does come out, maybe.
02:16:03.000Yeah, I think it's obvious that the process of going from an egg into a Joe Rogan is such a long and incremental passage that I don't see any reason why 20 weeks or 22 weeks or even vaginal birth is like the absolute moral cutoff.
02:16:24.000Don't you think, though, that that's weird that you have this really rigid opinion on it?
02:16:52.000I sort of agree with Bill Clinton's old framing that abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.
02:16:57.000That you should have as many opportunities for people not to get pregnant in the first place, widespread contraception, widespread sex education, and that this should not just be a form of birth control.
02:17:11.000On the other hand, if people find themselves in a horrible pickle, and they don't know of how to get out of it...
02:17:18.000You think you should be able to hit the baby with a rock?
02:17:21.000We used to do it years ago, didn't we?
02:18:09.000You would have to have reading glasses on to even look at it at the head of a pen.
02:18:13.000So as long as you put a comforter over the baby so you can't see what's happening.
02:18:16.000I think what we're talking about is a really complicated subject.
02:18:20.000And I think it's one of the reasons why people like to box it and put it into this yes or no, black or white.
02:18:26.000Because it's so complicated to really sit back and think that, hey, if you have an abortion at four weeks, five weeks, six, when does it have fingers?
02:18:43.000I mean, people are not going to be happy with me saying that you should be able to kill a baby, and people are not going to be happy with you saying that you should be able to kill a blastocyst.
02:18:52.000I think more people will hate my position, if it even is a position.
02:19:40.000Because then he started framing it in a different way and saying that he thinks that there's a lot of positive benefits to a young man, I shouldn't say a young man, a boy, having a relationship with a man sexually that can help them.
02:19:56.000And that there's positive benefits to being molested as a young boy.
02:20:00.000I think that's obviously a horrible thing to say.
02:20:03.000I think what was going on was he was trying to rationalize his own sexual abuse.
02:20:38.000He's a very strong, smart guy, and I think a lot of his intelligence has allowed him to use his perception of that event to sort of shape it into a way that benefits him.
02:20:54.000I mean, I was on a TV show in Australia where there was a question of whether or not we should be naming and shaming sexual offenders, sexual predators, or people who'd been convicted of sex crimes.
02:21:07.000And in the meeting before we went on air, because it's a live show, I raised the point that, like, I think the more sort of interesting and controversial angle here is what a...
02:21:55.000I used the wrong word here, but it's a form of psychopathy in some way, in the sense that a psychopath can only get fulfillment by doing something that's awful.
02:22:03.000So the job is to try to figure out how to stop the psychopath from doing something awful.
02:22:06.000I'm not saying that pedophiles are psychopaths, but you can see the analogy, where if your only way of finding fulfillment in life is to rape children, then...
02:22:15.000Let's address how to figure out how to stop you from doing that thing rather than demonizing you as a monster even if you don't do it.
02:22:24.000For me to even say that, a lot of people are going to push back on that as well.
02:22:28.000It's a very similar thing to where I'm just trying to figure out in my head what makes the most sense to me.
02:22:33.000And as you say, it's got to be some kind of a spectrum of...
02:23:58.000And it makes you wonder how much of that sexual abuse gets somehow or another transferred from a child being abused to that child growing up becoming an adult and becoming an abuser themselves.
02:24:35.000So I'm talking now only about people who are sexually mature, right?
02:24:38.000So like someone who's like a 15-year-old catwalk model, let's assume that it's a woman who's walking down the catwalks of Milan and Paris and has what she thinks is a consensual relationship with a 25-year-old fashion designer.
02:24:52.000That's against the law, and it's regarded as being deeply unethical in our current society.
02:24:58.000Happened all the time in other societies.
02:25:05.000I think it's good to have laws against these things, and I don't think that it's ethically defensible for people who are significantly older to assume that a person who is still kind of evolving and still coming of age is capable of giving proper consent.
02:25:18.000Well, it's illegal if they're just three years older.
02:25:31.000There's a Romeo and Juliet clause that some countries have.
02:25:34.000Like, I think in the Netherlands, it's not against the law to have sex with people, even as young as 12 or 13, if you're 14. Oh, that makes sense.
02:25:52.000Well, you would never be prosecuted, but there have been these weird cases where...
02:25:57.000Teenagers have been prosecuted for having dick pics of not only their boyfriends or girlfriends, well, not dick pics of their girlfriends, unless they're trans, but of themselves, and they've been prosecuted for child porn because they're a child and they're holding pornography.
02:27:04.000I mean, it's almost like, I can't remember who I heard saying this the other day, that police used to go out and catch bad guys and, like, solve crimes, but now we've sort of outsourced to police the job of just making everything kind of nice.
02:27:18.000Well, police are glorified revenue collectors in a lot of ways.
02:27:39.000It's one of the things where, when I talk to Americans about the best things about America, the number one thing that Americans will always say is freedom, that this country represents freedom.
02:27:57.000Like, I was standing outside my apartment in New York, drinking an open beverage, just watching the world go by, and a couple of cops came over, and one of them was like,"'Yo, what's in the glass?' What's in the glass?
02:29:22.000As opposed to someone who grows up in that environment.
02:29:25.000Or, like, say, we were looking at the North Korea footage yesterday of them goose-stepping down the street and the giant throngs of people who were following the orders and doing the bidding of Kim Jong-un.
02:29:37.000We're saying, like, what would happen to those people if you removed this military dictatorship and gave them a democratic life?
02:29:43.000Would they even be able to appreciate it and understand it?
02:29:48.000Are they so indoctrinated into this very specific style of living and behavior that they wouldn't be able to adjust?
02:29:54.000Like, I talked to Ron Miscavige about that.
02:29:57.000You know, he got out of Scientology when he was fucking 76. I mean, stop and think about that.
02:30:03.000The guy got in in 1970 and got out in 2012, lived the bulk of his life in this really bizarre environment, and now all of a sudden he's this free man.
02:30:14.000I think that's right, and this is one of my concerns about laws that prevent people from doing things.
02:30:20.000This is why I'm sort of libertarian-ish when it comes to, you know, non-economic cultural issues, because I actually think you need to inculcate in people an experience of showing restraint.
02:30:30.000By themselves, because if the law always does it for you, you then remove the laws and all of a sudden everyone goes crazy.
02:30:37.000You can't imagine that if all of a sudden street drinking were permitted in New York, that people would be vomiting all over the place and getting drunk because they've been so used to, so acclimated to never being allowed to do it, that now it's the forbidden fruit.
02:30:50.000Let's go out and just get smashed in the park, because that's what we can do now.
02:31:56.000You look at places like Hungary and what we've just seen happen in Turkey and Russia and Venezuela, and it's much easier for people there who are corrupt or who would like to...
02:32:10.000To bring people under their spell to do so, because there aren't these big, robust, divided institutions like the press being fiercely independent, the judicial system being fiercely independent, Congress and the executive hopefully hating each other just enough to keep themselves in check,
02:32:28.000and also just the traditions of American life, where there's, I think, more acceptance of dissent and of weirdness than there are in those other places, like Russians are just very, I don't want to generalise here, but allow me to, conformist people.
02:32:44.000Like, they've lived under tsars and fucking empires for centuries and millennia.
02:32:53.000There is this kind of militaristic, jingoistic side to America, which is very kind of like, salute the flag and, like, say, yes, please, like, you've got to honour the veterans and everything.
02:33:28.000In this place, which seeps out in so many different ways in America that I think to try to corral it as a dictator would be like herding cats.
02:33:36.000Like, it'll just never, you know, it'll never quite work.
02:33:39.000Well, we can only hope, because if Trump has his way, he would definitely try to do that.
02:33:42.000He would try to get all these people to do his bidding and figure out some way to dismantle all these different institutions and make it much easier for him to make America great again and just fucking force that agenda through.
02:33:52.000Yeah, I don't even think he would think that he's doing the wrong thing, would he?
02:34:16.000Somebody does right outside the Kremlin, you know, on the main bridge leading to the Kremlin at night, and all of the security cameras from the Kremlin happen to go off and have their footage missing just when the murder happens.
02:35:21.000I wonder if part of it is, when he says that he admires someone like Putin, if it's just his sort of constitutional sense that he kind of likes Putin.
02:36:24.000I mean, the whole thing, I think there's too many things to focus on.
02:36:27.000And he's so fucking busy with himself and his business interests and the things that he's trying to push through and fucking ExxonMobil and all these different subsidiaries that he's kind of invested in.
02:36:37.000He's got his fucking fingers in so many different pies.
02:36:41.000He's also just not interested in the affairs of state.
02:36:44.000He doesn't care about foreign policy and stuff.
02:36:50.000Well, what's one of the big concerns is that he's not concerned with foreign policy to the point where he's putting off all these things and letting the military do their job.
02:37:20.000Well, I think there's a real argument that the military has been...
02:37:26.000That they've been held back to the point, like they have, I mean, like you're engaging in war, right?
02:37:31.000And that there's a real argument that the people in the military make that people die because they're forced to take too many steps before they get clearance to do something when they're being attacked.
02:37:42.000So their argument is it's better to let people who really understand war engage in war but then there's the Eisenhower argument that well you're dealing with an Institution like the military-industrial complex you're dealing with a I can think of it as an organism that survives on war There's a tremendous amount of money that gets pumped into this this thing Yeah,
02:38:13.000And have you noticed how the military contractors, have you looked at how delicately spread out around America they are?
02:38:20.000Like, they have plants in almost every single state, so that there's always a congressperson or a senator who the military contractors can call up and be like, well, you're going to lose, like, so many thousand jobs in this little...
02:38:33.000It would make more economic sense for them to have consolidated their operations and be making all the submarines and warships in the same place.
02:38:40.000But they make one widget in Delaware, they make another one over here, another one over here.
02:38:45.000So they've got Congress and no one's ever going to want that plant to close.
02:38:48.000It's like most of the things that we've talked about today.
02:38:51.000They're super complicated, and there's so many different things to consider, and there's no real one black and white answer.
02:38:58.000When you're dealing with so many factions and so many variables and so many things, that's one of the reasons why being a president is a preposterous idea.
02:39:43.000I don't understand exactly what is accomplished other than you blow up an airfield and they have to rebuild it.
02:39:50.000I mean, you show people that you can do that, but we already knew you could do that.
02:39:54.000You show people you're willing to act.
02:39:56.000I mean, back in 2012 and 2013, I thought that Obama flubbed it by saying that we wouldn't tolerate the use of chemical weapons and then doing nothing.
02:40:08.000Well, the reaction by the right and the left.
02:40:11.000People were very weary of war back then.
02:40:24.000I want to get cool again with a nice foreign war.
02:40:27.000There was Vietnam, and we didn't like that, and then we forgot about it long enough, so we did Iraq, and we didn't like that, but now that's kind of fading, receding into the distant past as well.
02:40:37.000Yeah, I actually interviewed Phil Donoghue on HuffPost Live because he was a very outspoken anti-war critic.
02:40:44.000And I was saying at the time, like, can't we be nuanced enough to make a difference, to understand the difference between the Iraq war, a full-scale invasion based on a misunderstanding or a misleading interpretation of what Iraq's capabilities in its weapons program was?
02:42:13.000And there's no way to get rid of ISIS without getting rid of Assad, because the locals in Syria who are left hate Assad, who are anti-Assad.
02:42:23.000They hate Assad even more than they hate ISIS. So as long as Assad is there, they're going to give ISIS their sympathies.
02:42:32.000I mean, basically, the whole ISIS thing, I think, is just a smokescreen to allow Putin and Assad to crack down on dissidents.
02:42:39.000But isn't it also, like, a lot of the same issues that they faced when they dethroned Gaddafi in Libya?
02:43:12.000The idea of having a president that also deals with ExxonMobil and BP, and then also was talking to the coal people, and also was talking to the people in Silicon Valley, Well, I mean, that's why you have an administration, right?
02:43:24.000I mean, so the Secretary of State is broadly overseeing it, and then they will have a special envoy to the Middle East who basically is the president of the United States for Syria.
02:43:34.000Yeah, and then Sean Spicer's in charge of cleaning up lies.
02:43:38.000I mean, he's the alternative facts president.
02:46:08.000What is ADD? I mean, it's a real thing, but how does it manifest itself in a person, and how does it manifest in a person that is formed in this environment where they're forced to be in this rigid, controlled, social experiment called school?
02:46:27.000It has to be 30 people, and they all have to be sitting in a row.
02:46:31.000And they have to program you to have a regular job that you don't have, I don't have, he doesn't have.
02:46:37.000There's a lot of people that don't have jobs where you have to work in a fucking cubicle like that.
02:46:41.000Well, that's one thing that I assumed we would have gotten to today, which I'm surprised we didn't, which is like the rise of automation and robotics and stuff.
02:46:47.000I mean, how many millions of Americans...
02:46:50.000I think it's the largest employment sector for working class males is driving.
02:46:56.000Well, self-driving cars are just around the bloody corner.
02:46:59.000What's going to happen to the millions of Americans who make a living driving trucks and Ubers?
02:47:03.000Well, the big solution to that that a lot of people bring up is universal basic income.
02:47:07.000But universal basic income, you know, there's people that have a problem with that because they believe that people are only motivated by want.
02:47:14.000And then as soon as you give them money, then they're not going to just pursue their interests.
02:47:18.000They're going to lay around and do nothing and just live off of that money only.
02:47:22.000Well, and this also, the question of whether or not that's right or wrong comes back to America's sort of Puritan work ethic as well, right?
02:47:28.000The idea that it would necessarily be wrong for a person not to be doing something productive.
02:47:33.000But, like, if the robots are doing all the work and they're producing lots of wealth, then who cares if someone's doing something productive or not?
02:47:40.000We're worried that they're going to get mad at the people like you that are out there being ambitious and they're going to keep you in Mercedes.
02:47:45.000Well, maybe I would sometimes not do anything as well.
02:49:03.000I think it's a fantastic experiment, and I'm glad that there are a few little jurisdictions in Scandinavia and Canada which seem to be trying it out, because I'd be interested to know how many...
02:49:11.000You could imagine different groupings of human psychology.
02:49:39.000And the idea, the real good argument for universal basic income is that the money that you spend giving people a certain universal basic income, you would save money from people going to jail, juvenile detention, medical issues, all sorts of issues that come out of poverty.
02:49:57.000There's a lot of issues that come out of poverty that are directly connected to that.
02:50:00.000Yeah, this is one of the arguments for welfare as well.
02:50:02.000I mean, people who say that it wouldn't have any impact on crime, I would just say, look at the different countries in the world that have more or less generous welfare systems.
02:50:11.000And the ones with more generous welfare systems do tend to be more peaceful places.
02:51:42.000Versus something that's mass produced.
02:51:44.000I wonder if enough people can find self-expression through that to counteract the job losses that are resulting from and will continue to result from technological advance.
02:51:55.000Well, I think that with universal basic income is possible.
02:51:59.000But I think making things is not necessarily the only way to do it.
02:52:02.000I mean, it's making art, being creative, encouraging people to think of that as an actual way to live.
02:52:09.000That's a big impediment and a big hurdle that people have to get over.
02:52:14.000It's like the North Korea thing that you were saying.
02:52:15.000Like, if you got rid of the North Korean regime, would the people who lived under it have the scope, have just the mental scope to know what to do with themselves?
02:52:23.000In some ways, it's a comparable question with capitalism, right?
02:52:26.000If you took away the capitalist incentive to work and all of a sudden everybody was liberated and had a basic income that gave them all the sustenance that they need...
02:52:35.000Would they have the horizons available to them, having been raised in this idea of, like, you've got to work, got to climb your way up the ladder, got to get a nine-to-five job, go to college, get an education, you know, please the boss, get your promotion, to have all of that suddenly fall away and be like, you know what,
02:53:16.000And you're like, fuck, I don't want to paint cars.
02:53:18.000And next thing you know, you're loaning money out, and family wants money from you, and you're just dealing with a lot of bullshit.
02:53:23.000And also you have expectations immediately after winning that things are going to get a lot better.
02:53:27.000And as you know from anyone who has paid attention to the process of their own consciousness, whether that's through psychedelics or flotation tanks or what Sam Harris and Dan Harris were talking about recently about meditation, your conscious perception of life is not determined by what's going on outside.
02:53:46.000It is trivially, occasionally, in the short term.
02:53:51.000But in the long term, your actual happiness...
02:53:55.000But people always take the path of least resistance and oftentimes the path of least resistance is these patterns that we've carved into our behavior These behavior patterns that we've carved into our psyche and a lot of times those aren't even the path of least resistance They become the path of more resistance,
02:54:11.000but we're so accustomed to those paths that we think of them and treat them as if they're the right path hmm Mind blown.