Jon Ronson is back, and he's back with a special guest: Pornhub founder Joe Rogan. They talk about porn's rise in the late 90s and early 2000s, and how tech companies got their hands on porn, and the consequences of it. This episode was edited by Alex Blumberg and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. It was mixed and produced by Patrick Muldowney. Our theme music was made by Micah Vellian and our ad music was written and performed by Mark Phillips. We were mixed and mixed by Matthew Boll. Our editor was Matthew Boll and our editor was Ben Kuklinski. Special thanks to our sponsor, VaynerMedia, for sponsoring this episode. It was produced by Rachel Goodman and edited and produced in part by Rachel Ward. The show was mixed by Haley Shaw. Fact checking was done by Patrick Moffat. Additional editing was by Emily Blanchflower and Rachel Ward, with additional editing by Rachel Keyser, and additional mixing and mastering by Matthew Brodsky. We were edited by Ben Kucharski. Thanks to Rachel Ward and Caitlin Durante. To find a list of our sponsors and show related promo codes, go to gimlet.fm/OurAdvertisers/OurHeroism. Logo by John Ronson. Music by Ian McKirdy and Matthew Crowell. Art: Mackenzie Moore Music: Hayden Coplen Editor: Ben Kinsley and Paul Kasinski John Ronski Matt Knutsen Jeff Perrone Matthew Kostrowsky Mike McLennartz Sarah Mertschnell Michael Cradock Timestamps: "The Butterfly Effect and the Flap of the Butterfly's Wings" by Caitie Ochschnieder James Ronson: "Butterfly Effect" by Sarah Mckinnon Thank you, Joe Rogans: "Pornography" is a song written by Sarah Kortner: "Noah Rothkopforschner "The Devil's Work" by Jeff Perla - "The Girl Who Could See It?" by Sarah Ronson -- "The Other Way" by Rachel Maddows: "It's Good To Be Good" by Tom Hanks in the Badger Song
00:00:23.000My wife did say to me once or twice, do you really have to go to another porn set?
00:00:29.000I've just finished making a series for Audible called The Butterfly Effect and the flap of the butterfly's wings which I'm tracing throughout the series is this young man called Fabian who's like a tech nerd in Brussels and he has the idea to get rich from giving the world free porn so free streaming porn so the series is about the kind of tech takeover of porn in the valley and Doesn't he know that that's already real?
00:01:15.000So in the 90s, this kid called Fabian...
00:01:20.000Fabian Tillman, a young boy in Brussels, like a tech nerd, would go on CompuServe and swap porn passwords or get porn for free, which is how people got porn for free back in the 90s.
00:01:32.000And then he had a sort of eureka moment, which is, I can give the world YouTube for porn.
00:02:49.000People like Stoyer have written about this a lot, about how they find it really hard to get mortgages, how they find it hard to get checking accounts.
00:03:24.000But Fabian was making money from running a site that dealt in piracy.
00:03:34.000So basically fans would upload porn illegally onto Pornhub.
00:03:39.000So Fabian was running a site that was filled with pirated content.
00:03:45.000Fabian went to a bank to say, I want to expand.
00:03:48.000But because he wasn't ostensibly a porn person, he was a tech person who was deemed to be respectable, this bank gave him a $362 million loan to expand to build an empire based in part on the handling of stolen porn.
00:04:06.000So we went to the Valley, who were already kind of paranoid that all their porn was being stolen and put up onto Pornhub.
00:04:13.000And he bought up loads of companies at cut price, because the companies were panicking and wanted to sell.
00:04:20.000And suddenly, Fabian just single-handedly took over porn.
00:05:11.000I mean, it's really interesting, because there was a guy who lived down the street from me, and he was a big-time porn producer.
00:05:18.000And I actually knew him from my jiu-jitsu class, and he was a real high-rolling sort of character.
00:05:25.000He always had the This beautiful Mercedes Benz and he wore these really big watches and a lot of fancy clothes and he was just making just tons of money.
00:05:35.000He had this beautiful house and he was just this baller character.
00:06:17.000Loads of paid sites, including like Playboy TV. So your friend got so poor that his house got repossessed.
00:06:24.000Fabian got so rich that he installed in his house an aquarium that was so big that a diver had to come every week and dive in and clean the coral reef.
00:06:44.000Porn people cared a lot, but the outside world didn't care.
00:06:47.000Because, you know, the outside world doesn't care when music's getting pirated, so they sure as hell don't care when it's porn.
00:06:53.000Well, they care a little bit about the music thing, but the porn thing got almost no traction.
00:06:57.000And when the porn industry essentially, for the most part, collapsed, or at least there was a massive amount of loss, there was no talk about, like...
00:08:02.000I wanted to interview him and then I wanted to travel to the Valley to look at the consequences and trace consequence through to consequence.
00:08:09.000Like, where would I end up if I just...
00:08:11.000Because I think people don't think about consequences on the internet that much.
00:08:14.000They want to just, you know, destroy somebody and then carry on with their day.
00:08:18.000So I wanted to tell a story about consequences.
00:08:19.000The only time Fabian got annoyed with me was when either me or Mike Quasar, director, said to him...
00:09:05.000I don't, by the way, what I'm about to say shouldn't be construed as me saying that I think that Fabian is a psychopath, because I don't.
00:09:11.000But that thing about not taking responsibility for your own actions, I just remembered I wrote a book a few years ago about psychopaths called The Psychopath Test.
00:09:18.000And a psychopathic trait is that, like if somebody kills somebody in a bar, they would say, well, it's his fault for looking at me funny.
00:09:27.000So failure to accept responsibility for own actions is one of the 20 items on the psychopath check.
00:09:33.000Do you think that he's a psychopath or do you think it's some sort of a convenient neglecting of a certain responsibility for what happened?
00:09:42.000I don't think Fabian, that was very much a tangential thing because I don't think Fabian is a psychopath at all.
00:09:49.000I think that tech people have created a sort of amoral bubble around themselves.
00:09:55.000I talked to the head of Pornhub's mobile division.
00:10:01.000If you've ever watched Pornhub on your mobile, you have Brandon to thank.
00:10:08.000I said to Brandon, Brandon said like we never, like 99% of Pornhub employees never set foot on a porn set.
00:10:16.000And he said that's good because, you know, we're designing, you know, we're search engine people.
00:10:21.000We're, you know, we don't want to say it would be sort of unpleasant to set foot on a porn set.
00:10:25.000It would be sort of intimidating and unpleasant.
00:10:28.000And I said, well, maybe it would have been good if more Pornhub people did set foot on porn sets because you would be able to see the negative consequences of your business plan.
00:11:04.000Yeah, I just remembered a guy called David Lowery, who's interested in the kind of piracy issue in music.
00:11:13.000And he said, when we look back on the dystopian movies of the 1930s, When, you know, machines would take over, like Metropolis or something.
00:11:23.000Like the moral of the film, like the climax of the film, is when the people, the humans, defeat, say, you know, we're not going to live in a world run by machines, we're going to defeat the machines and human morality will take over.
00:11:36.000But now that machines are ruling the world, instead of us defeating the machines, we are adapting our morality to fit in with the machine's capability.
00:11:47.000So because it is easy to pirate, instead of saying, let's not pirate, we're just adapting our morality and saying, okay, we can watch pirated porn, it's fine.
00:11:56.000Yeah, but it's not as simple as pirating.
00:11:58.000Because pirating is what everybody does when they're sharing it through message boards or what have you.
00:12:58.000But then maybe somebody else would put it up later that day.
00:13:01.000And it didn't matter because everything else was free.
00:13:04.000I'll tell you one amazing consequence of all of this, though.
00:13:08.000So what I wanted to do in this Audible series, The Butterfly Effect, was to kind of trace the consequences of this, like, you know, what was the tornadoes that were being created.
00:13:18.000And one amazing consequence is, like, Fabian surrounded himself with tech wizards, like people who knew how the internet worked, including a lot of search engine people.
00:13:32.000So, instead of making porn films like they made in the 90s, this porn director Mike Quasar said to me that the first film he ever made back in the 90s was called Women of Influence.
00:13:45.000Now, all the porn films have to be easily searchable.
00:13:49.000It's like a kind of arms race of search engine optimisation, like to get yourself up the Google rankings.
00:13:55.000So all the porn films in the Valley aren't called Women of Influence because how do you search for that?
00:14:00.000They basically see what the most popular search terms are and then make films based on that.
00:14:06.000So Mike Quazzo was telling me this on the set of the film he was shooting that day, which was Stepdaughter Cheerleader Orgy.
00:14:14.000So I said to Mike, because I thought about like...
00:14:21.000Women of Influence versus Stepdaughter Cheerleader Audrey.
00:14:27.000Look, I haven't seen Women of Influence.
00:14:30.000So for all I know, the moral of Women of Influence is that women shouldn't have influence.
00:14:34.000But my guess is that Women of Influence is a more kind of holistic porn film than Stepdaughter Cheerleader Audrey.
00:14:40.000So I said to Mike, are there any people in the Valley who like...
00:14:46.000Can't get work because they're just not a keyword.
00:14:50.000And Mike went, yeah, like every at-home porn actress now between the ages of 23 and 29 can't get work because they're not a teen and they're not a MILF. They're like in this sort of...
00:16:16.000People literally will request some of the most bizarre things, and these people will make custom films based on their weird kinks.
00:16:26.000Just for them, like a team of professional porn people, because the Valley's suffering so much because of Pornhub and so on, will make an entire porn film just for you.
00:16:36.000Now, how much does something like this cost?
00:16:38.000Like, say if you want to make a film about girls wearing mutant ninja turtle outfits who kick guys in the balls.
00:16:59.000I got so obsessed with the world of bespoke porn because it was such a fascinating window into people's inner lives.
00:17:09.000One of the first ones I saw was a condiments video.
00:17:15.000Like ketchup and relish and stuff like that?
00:17:17.000So it's a woman sitting in a child's paddling pool and out of shot, one of the bespoke porn producers is pouring industrial-sized tubs of condiments on her head, like ketchup, mustard.
00:18:24.000Another one was a Norwegian man has spent 40 years amassing a very valuable stamp collection and his bespoke porn film was to send his stamp collection to the valley where three naked porn women would destroy his stamp collection.
00:19:15.000Yeah, it turns out it's because he grew up in Iceland, where stamp collecting was a very popular hobby at the time, in the 70s and the 80s.
00:19:55.000That kind of collegiate atmosphere of fellow stamp collectors just vanished.
00:20:00.000He began to regret his life choices of spending all of that time and money collecting stamps.
00:20:07.000He began to feel depressed and isolated so he went to see a psychiatrist Who told him that stamp collecting is a ridiculous hobby because it isolates him.
00:20:19.000So now he pays porn people to destroy his stamps.
00:20:22.000The psychiatrist told him that a hobby is ridiculous.
00:20:26.000According to him, I mean, I never talked to the psychiatrist, but according to him, yeah, he said that stamp collecting is a ridiculous hobby.
00:20:33.000That seems like a ridiculous thing for a psychologist to say.
00:20:40.000If you have all your ducks in a row and everything's firing on all cylinders, but you really truly enjoy stamps, who's to tell you there's something wrong with that?
00:22:25.000The porn star Riley was saying into the camera, you know, I have thought about dying too, but I came out of that hole and I came back stronger and now I can see all the good in the world.
00:22:37.000Riley was crying and Rhiannon, the producer, was crying and they sent the video to the guy.
00:23:00.000And if you separate the fact that That they have sex on film for a living.
00:23:05.000Take that out of the mix and what you have is like looks like your average person who's trying to do better in this world and is sharing positive things that they find that gives them inspiration and moves them along in a certain way.
00:23:20.000But then you add the sex thing and for whatever reason we have this weird hang up about sex.
00:23:57.000Anyway, so she went to a radical honesty group where you have to be radically honest to each other.
00:24:03.000So it starts, I've been to one as well, it starts with everybody sitting in a circle and they have to confess to the room a secret about themselves that they've never told anyone.
00:24:17.000So the one that Starley went to, the first guy said...
00:24:22.000My secret is that I haven't paid taxes in ten years.
00:24:29.000And then the next guy said, my secret is that I killed a man.
00:24:36.000He said, I was in a truck, I was driving a truck, and I kicked the passenger out of the truck, and he fell onto the road, and he got run over, and I got away with it.
00:24:52.000So then the next person in the circle, when my secrets are pretty disappointing compared to that, she said, I suppose I can tell you that I have sex with my cat.
00:25:06.000So then the murderer kind of put his hand up and said...
00:25:34.000Yeah, that's part of the problem with those...
00:25:36.000I should say, by the way, I met Brad Blanton, the guy who runs these Radical Honesty groups, and I asked him whether Starly's story was true.
00:25:45.000The way she described that circle is what happened.
00:25:48.000So I was at this radical honesty group in this church school in New Orleans, and this girl called Dakota said that her secret was that she was, she's like this young church girl, she said her secret was that she watched porn.
00:27:21.000You know, you said that a lot of porn women on Twitter are kind of A-positive and are giving them interventional messages.
00:27:26.000One of the reasons why that is, I met this porn woman called Macy May, who was, like, really depressed.
00:27:32.000Another of Fabian's consequences is that, like, kids grow up on Pornhub these days, so there's no longer the kind of outlaw status about coming to the Valley to do porn that they used to be in, like, the 80s and 90s.
00:27:48.000We're flooded with women who, you know, they turn 18, they watch porn, they think that looks cool, and then they come to the valley.
00:27:54.000And a negative consequence of that is that they get work for like a couple of weeks, and then, you know, there's loads more women off the bus, and so the producers don't need to employ them anymore.
00:30:14.000They were all wearing their cheerleader outfits.
00:30:16.000And some teenagers had cotton on to what was happening, that a porn film was being shot, like up on a nearby hill, and they were like catcalling and hissing and sort of mocking these girls.
00:30:26.000And for the first time, not just the girls, but the cameraman, the director, everybody suddenly felt like self-conscious and the girls were like, you know, sort of...
00:30:37.000So until the mucking outsiders came along, it was healthy and shame-free.
00:30:43.000But as soon as an outsider started hissing at them, it became shameful.
00:31:11.000I mean, like one of the things about online is there's no consequences for what you're saying and then people have no problem shitting on people.
00:31:31.000Yeah, I mean, anonymous people online, the behavior is very bizarre.
00:31:35.000Because sometimes I'll see people's comments, whether it's to me or to somebody else, and they're so fucking vicious and nasty over nothing.
00:31:49.000Over someone's movie that they did, or some album that they did, or whatever it was, and just shitting all over every aspect of their person, almost just to try to get them to hurt the way they're hurting.
00:32:04.000It's like a super angry, bitter person.
00:32:09.000Life is just throwing rocks at them everywhere they go, and every chance they get to throw a rock back, they do.
00:32:15.000Like that Randy Newman song, I just want you to hurt like I do.
00:32:19.000Yeah, I'd say there's certainly an element to that.
00:32:21.000There's also an element of what the right call, what's that phrase that the right use all the time?
00:32:28.000Virtue signaling, which I don't like using that phrase because it's still been kind of adopted by the sort of, you know, white nationalists.
00:34:10.000So then like hundreds and hundreds of people like powered in on the book and then Kirkus gave this book a good review and then people powered in on Kirkus.
00:35:24.000They just, for whatever reason, just single you out.
00:35:27.000Maybe you wrote something that they found personally offensive.
00:35:32.000But the thing that drives me crazy about that...
00:35:36.000Taking out of context this character who's a racist character is we're talking about fiction.
00:35:43.000And if fiction, if you can't portray realistic humans, I mean, there are racists.
00:35:49.000But how come you're allowed to make a fictional character about a murderer or about some sort of Nazi-type character or something along those lines?
00:37:41.000Yeah, no, what you're talking about is someone's telling you not to do or maybe you shouldn't do a person of color in your screenplay because that's not your place.
00:37:49.000Yeah, writers are being told, according to this Vulture article that I read today, writers are being told not to do it.
00:37:56.000And of course, That's a different thing.
00:38:19.000There is no one out there that's progressive enough.
00:38:21.000And so there's always going to be someone who finds some fault in something that you do, particularly if you're doing fiction that portrays realistic scenarios that could easily exist in any city, in any civilization on Earth.
00:38:37.000When, you know, because I was covering all of this for a couple of years and I was writing So You've Been Publicly Shamed.
00:38:42.000And I noticed that every time somebody like Justine Sacco kind of got got on the internet, Breitbart and Infowars, Marlu Yiannopoulos, Paul Joseph Watson, Alex Jones, you know, they would propagandize the hell out of this stuff.
00:38:56.000And this was in the run up to Trump getting elected.
00:38:59.000And I can't help thinking that the left eating itself It's part of the reason why we've got Trump now.
00:39:09.000I mean, there's a meme that's going out there that I've seen on many, many different places on Instagram and Twitter and stuff that says, this kind of shit is why I got elected, and it's Trump pointing at the camera.
00:39:26.000I mean, they're fed up and they didn't realize what the consequences are.
00:39:31.000You know, what's really fascinating is I saw this article today where it was talking about, it was on CNN, about Americans in general, like everyone polled, does not like the fact that Trump tweets.
00:39:44.000It was some crazy number of people to think that he should stop tweeting.
00:39:47.000But one of the things that got him elected is the fact that he tweets, said people enjoyed it.
00:39:54.000Like, here's a guy who's fighting back, and he's not scared to hit back with personal insults.
00:40:01.000And, like, we'd never seen that before from someone running for president.
00:40:06.000You know, but then he became president and everybody's like, well, he'll surely let that go once he's in the office because that's not presidential.
00:40:15.000But he used an expression, you know, I forget the expression, but something like it's modern presidential to tweet.
00:40:27.000I remember the very first talk I ever did for, say, being publicly shamed, there was this woman in the front row, this kind of elderly lady.
00:41:19.000In the same way that I wonder whether Fabian ever sort of feels a bit guilty about some of the consequences of his business plan, I wonder whether some of the Twitter executives ever feel guilty about what they've done?
00:41:32.000Well, they certainly feel like they have some sort of responsibility, which is why they're silencing certain people.
00:41:39.000And I don't know if shadow banning is real, but there's all this talk of people being shadow banned.
00:41:44.000And a lot of people have had their accounts suspended.
00:41:47.000Yeah, so they are doing a bit of stuff now.
00:41:50.000I always remember Megan from the Westboro Baptist Church, Megan Phelps, who's a friend of mine.
00:41:57.000Oh, she came on your show, didn't she?
00:42:02.000Fascinating that someone who came from such a horrible, regressive environment became this fascinating, really intelligent, really well-spoken, sensitive person.
00:42:11.000Yeah, you know what I think Meghan would say if she was sitting here, because I kind of said that to her one time, and she said it sort of goes to show that, you know, for all their sort of hateful beliefs, my parents were good parents.
00:42:23.000Like, they gave me this positive stuff as well as the negative stuff.
00:42:41.000Anyway, she was on the phone to Twitter one time, she told me, because they love her.
00:42:45.000I mean, Twitter love her because she sort of got talking to liberals on Twitter and that's what persuaded her out of the Westboro Baptist Church.
00:42:55.000So for Twitter, that's like the best story in the world.
00:42:57.000So she was talking to Twitter, she told me, and they wanted her to do a talk.
00:43:01.000And she said, oh, you know who should do a talk as well?
00:43:29.000That story I wrote about Justine Sacco a few years ago and about how, you know, the woman who tweeted, going to Africa, hope I don't get AIDS, just kidding, I'm white.
00:44:16.000I think people started to think, like, it may have recovered now, but I think people started to think, fuck, if Twitter's not fun, you know, what's the point of us being on here?
00:44:26.000You think just from the Justine Sacco, one racist joke that she got fired for, you think that really had an overall effect on Twitter use?
00:44:33.000I think, well, what happened was, my book got extracted in the New York Times, and it was that story, and that story kind of went...
00:45:33.000They have some people on that that are...
00:45:37.000Ridiculous social justice warriors, proven attention whores, people that are dishonest.
00:45:42.000They're not honest people, and they're a part of this whole thing where their business is getting attention and being a victim and exploiting it to the nth degree.
00:45:52.000I mean, that's a bunch of people that are on that thing.
00:45:56.000I do think, like, if you're gonna address harassment on social media, you have to accept that it comes from both sides.
00:46:03.000It comes from the right to the left, it comes from the left to the right, it comes from misogynists to feminists, it comes from feminists to...
00:46:08.000You also have to define what is harassment and what is criticism.
00:46:13.000Now, if you have ideas in the open marketplace of ideas, and you have ideas that people think are profoundly ridiculous, they're allowed to mock your ideas.
00:46:57.000The sort of world that I come from, like The Guardian and the left, Everyone would agree that if a gang of misogynists sort of gang up on a particular feminist writer and basically harass her until she goes offline, everyone agrees that's bad.
00:47:53.000There was undoubtedly sort of, well it's cognitive dissonance, right?
00:47:58.000Like when somebody's being harassed, they don't want to then see themselves as doing the same thing to a group of people that they don't like.
00:48:08.000Well, it's very easy to think of someone who is opposed to your point of view or thinks of things completely different as an other.
00:48:15.000You don't even think of them as a person.
00:48:49.000But if the series of articles is only about women being bullied by men, you know, it legitimises certain types of bullying, like when the left pile in on somebody, like Justin Sacco, it's going to legitimise, you know, if it's that partial, it's going to legitimise certain types of bullying.
00:49:03.000And the editor, when I said that to her, kind of rolled her eyes, as if to say, well, you would think that.
00:49:45.000It reminds me, actually, a moment I was telling you about one of the consequences that I look at in The Butterfly Effect about the tech takeover of porn is that if you're a 25-year-old adult actress, you can't get work now because you're in this sort of hinterland between teen and MILF. And I think that's not just porn,
00:50:01.000Like on social media, you know, if you're a If you're a kind of loud, aggressively authoritarian person on the left or a loud, aggressively authoritarian person on the right, you're like the teen or the MILF. Those of us in the middle are these people who are more interested in people talking to each other and we don't want to scream,
00:51:13.000You don't have to fall into those categories.
00:51:15.000It'd just be easier for people to categorize you if you did fall into those categories.
00:51:19.000I'm sure I have some points of view that people would consider conservative, and I have many more points of view that most people would consider to be liberal.
00:51:29.000But it's very convenient, especially when you look like me, and I look like a meathead.
00:51:34.000It's easy to say that I'm some meathead conservative or a right winger or something along those lines.
00:51:41.000Way more likely to vote for someone on the left than I am for someone on the right.
00:51:45.000Because I think the people on the right, in general, are more suppressive, especially socially and culturally.
00:51:52.000And I think that's where the real issues lie.
00:51:57.000When you look at what Obama did in office, in terms of what he did as far as drones, about freedom of the press, and going on after whistleblowers, God, a lot of that was very right, very right-wing.
00:52:11.000If you looked at it in terms of actual, real consequences of him being the president, a lot of it was very right-wing.
00:52:18.000But, when you look at it in terms of support for gay marriage, and passing the Affordable Care Act, a lot of that stuff was very left-wing.
00:52:27.000Now, I don't know if the Affordable Care Act was good, because...
00:52:30.000A lot of small businesses, doctors with small offices hated it and thought it was absolutely horrible and it killed their business.
00:52:38.000I don't know who's right about that because obviously I don't have to deal with that.
00:52:45.000I liked the idea that we would have some sort of universal health care because I think the idea of someone being too poor to get health care in this incredible country, like if we're going to pay, if our taxes are going to go to anything, god damn, shouldn't it go to...
00:52:59.000Caring for our neighbors and our fellow humans like that seems to me to be a no-brainer.
00:53:05.000Yeah, and that's probably a pretty left-wing idea Well, I got a ton of those but but it's easy to call me a right-winger for whatever reason I find that fascinating that people do not like a Nuanced approach not not only that they it's not that they don't like it is that they find it extremely easy to categorize you and sort of a negative caricature Yeah.
00:54:18.000Well, I wrote it in a story about him.
00:54:20.000I went to the RNC and I sort of, you know, got back in with Alex and spent a little bit of time hanging around with him and Roger Stone and so on and got really interested in the kind of dynamics of how Alex and Trump communicate to each other.
00:54:35.000But I'm wondering, you've seen Alex more recently than I have.
00:54:38.000Well, Alex has been my friend since 1998. Yeah, I was at his custody trial not long ago, and you were brought up.
00:57:50.000Even if the ritual at Bohemian Grove, you know, and I would contend that contrary to what Alex implied, they weren't actually sacrificing a child.
00:58:01.000No, he didn't say they were sacrificing a child.
00:59:18.000So you felt like the owls were cameras?
00:59:20.000They got it into their heads that the owls at Bohemian Grove, the owl motifs at Bohemian Grove, was indicative of the fact that it was like Moloch, the owl god.
00:59:35.000Would say that the reason why there's all those owls because I saw like stuffed owls in display cabinets and so on But I think it's like I think it's an owl sanctuary I Mean but anyway, but why do they stuff them that well?
00:59:51.000I mean, I presume it died of natural causes Miss it shitty fucking sanctuary if they kill it then stuff it so it's sort of like Norman Bates mom and psycho stuffer, but what was odd?
01:00:08.000The oddest moment, and this is where my memory of the night does tally with Alex's, is that for whatever reason, the people in the crowd were really into this ceremony.
01:01:01.000It was that moment of revelation, actually, that then led me to write the book that I wrote after that book, which was The Men who Stay at Goats, which was about, you know, soldiers trying to kill goats just by staring at them.
01:01:17.000I remember thinking, I was actually, I was in Belfast, I was giving a talk about my book Them, which is where I talk about all of that stuff.
01:01:23.000And somebody said, okay, so I know what you think of it.
01:01:25.000This woman in the audience said, I know what you think, I know you think this is like ridiculous.
01:01:29.000And I know that Alex Jones thinks it's evil.
01:01:31.000But what about the people in the crowd?
01:01:35.000And I thought that's a really good question.
01:01:36.000So that's what led me to write a book about, like, a rational thought in powerful places, which is what led me to write The Monster of Ghosts.
01:01:43.000Now, when you're there, and you see that there really is this giant stone owl, and they really do have this bundle of sticks that they're burning, and everyone really is wearing these robes.
01:01:56.000I mean, part of you had to be like, how many of these fucking things are going on that we haven't infiltrated?
01:02:17.000There's at one point, this is a lesser documented part of the ritual.
01:02:22.000At one point, there's a guy in leaf-covered lederhosen, a Appears in like a stage cut out of the redwood tree and starts singing this kind of elegy to nature.
01:03:11.000It could be that, or it could be just this weird sense, this weird sort of psychological need that people like Ivy League people feel they need to, like, have a sense of superiority.
01:03:20.000And one way to do that is to kind of create these secret rituals to give them a sense of, like, you know, grandeur over the people.
01:03:28.000Now a guy like Alex Jones stumbles upon something like that or infiltrates it and finds out it is real.
01:03:33.000I mean, that is justifying to such an enormous, enormous level.
01:03:39.000Yeah, but Alex, but here's my truck with Alex in all of this, is that it wasn't like for Alex, all the fucking crazy shit that we saw that night wasn't enough.
01:03:50.000Like he had to like turn it up to 11. Of course.
01:03:53.000Yeah, and imply that we had possibly witnessed an actual human sacrifice.
01:04:30.000So they called me up and they basically wanted me to give them as much evidence as I could that proved that Alex and Trump were, you know, aligned and they would talk to each other and so on.
01:04:40.000Because you went to Bohemian Grove with them?
01:04:41.000I went to Bohemian Grove, but then I also brought out this little Kindle single last summer called The Elephant in the Room, in which I'm trying to trace, like, the relationship between Alex and Trump via Rochester.
01:06:09.000Things that could be easily explained, they look for a conspiracy.
01:06:13.000Anything that happens in the news, there's got to be a different story.
01:06:16.000Like, sometimes shit just happens, and when that shit happens, the news has a story.
01:06:22.000It doesn't always have to be some sort of nefarious plot, but these people also think that the government is filled with idiots.
01:06:29.000Well, I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways.
01:06:31.000You can't have a bunch of incompetent fuckheads who pull off the perfect fake world where everything you see is some sort of an elaborate, played-out scheme in order to manipulate you into either buying this or voting for that.
01:06:46.000There's a weird inclination that people have to not just...
01:06:51.000Not just some conspiracy theories, but almost everything to think everything is some part of some crazy plot.
01:06:59.000What you said about like, you know, biases and untruths and like across the media on the left and right reminded me of the Megyn Kelly thing.
01:07:07.000So, you know, so they phoned me up, obviously in a bit of a panic because they were getting like so much criticism.
01:09:27.000But what's important is that, like, her whole thing was being this spokesperson, this ultra-hot spokesperson for the conservative movement, but also being someone who's ruthlessly smart and articulate and capable of shutting down these stammering liberals that dare go and question her narrative.
01:09:47.000And then all of a sudden she's on NBC. Like, you can't do that.
01:10:24.000It's like NBC. So the mainstream has its own tricks.
01:10:27.000It's like it's not an outright lie, like Alex would do.
01:10:31.000But that, you know, panicky, selective editing is a lie of its own.
01:10:37.000I would have imagined that during the interview between Alex and Megyn Kelly, Alex would have said some things that were eloquent or a sentence without a stammer and a swear.
01:10:53.000Having any sort of a conversation about any sort of difficult subject and stuffing it into seven minutes or whatever it is, It's ridiculous.
01:11:02.000It's an ancient way of communicating and now that we have the internet and Alex is shown with his own show that he can go and rant about something for 15 minutes or whatever it is with no limitations or restrictions.
01:11:18.000And one of the things that I wanted to do when I had Alex on the podcast is I wanted people to see the Alex that I know.
01:11:25.000Because there's no other way to see him like that.
01:11:27.000I wanted to get him drunk, I wanted to get him high, and I wanted to have him talk.
01:11:31.000And my friend Eddie, who's just so into conspiracies, he kind of fucked some of it because he's just so into chemtrails and proving that chemtrails are real.
01:12:19.000It's dangerous in that people are easily led.
01:12:23.000And if you get people thinking that everything's a conspiracy, the real problem is they don't know what the fuck a conspiracy actually is when it's in front of them and it's real.
01:12:30.000And there's a ton of them that are real.
01:12:32.000So when you're crying wolf around every corner and then all of a sudden you turn a corner like, holy shit, that's a real wolf.
01:12:41.000That's my frustration with Alex, too, is that he has a conspiracy template, and whatever real-world event happens, he then shoehorns into this kind of simplistic template.
01:13:05.000Like, he thinks that they, well, they went on the moon, the problem is what they found up there.
01:13:09.000The goat-spider hybrid that he talks about is true, though.
01:13:13.000He doesn't express it very well, but I learned this when I was writing the Manistatic Goats all of those years ago, that they really were mixing up spider silk with goat milk and creating some kind of...
01:13:29.000Alex Jones reveals the truth about animal-human hybrids and the moon landing.
01:14:05.000She's always sweet, but when she was saying that he's a bully and he broke me, and I was like, oh my god, you held up a photo of his headless body that his children could have seen, or not his headless body, his head separated from his body,
01:14:37.000It's like this whole, like, professional victim thing that people enjoy.
01:14:42.000They enjoy, like, taking on the role with such, they have such, like, energy they put to being the victim.
01:14:51.000It's just, God, you shouldn't hold up pictures of people's heads.
01:14:55.000Okay, if you don't like them, I mean, especially, like, in this day and age when there's people that actually cut people's heads off and, I mean, show them on camera, I mean, this is fucking crazy!
01:15:08.000You know, by the way, speaking of cutting people's heads off and showing them on camera, Around the time that I was hanging out with Alex at Bohemian Grove, I was also hanging out documenting this Islamic militant called Omar Bakri Mohammed, who was the head of this group in Britain called Al-Muhajirun.
01:15:26.000And a bunch of his people are the ones who now drive vans into pedestrians.
01:15:33.000And it makes me realise that all of the people with the kind of craziest and most pernicious ideas that I hung out with in the 90s I don't think Alex should have political sway.
01:15:51.000Well, maybe he's right about these animal-human hybrids.
01:16:48.000How the fuck did he go from Kathy Griffin, who's a comedian who did a gag that she thought was going to get her attention to backfire, to there are a bunch of corporate special interests who've had their knee on our neck.
01:17:34.000I mean, none of this would matter if there wasn't just the possibility that Trump believes this stuff.
01:17:39.000Although, I'll tell you what I would say.
01:17:41.000Last summer, I wrote this book, The Elephant in the Room, trying to trace just how it works.
01:17:46.000Like, Alex via Roger Stone meeting Trump and so on.
01:17:50.000I discovered one really interesting thing, which is, this is something Alex didn't like.
01:17:53.000Alex did say to me when I was writing this book, you can write whatever you want, I don't care.
01:17:58.000But that turned out to not be entirely true.
01:18:00.000There were things that he did care about that I wrote.
01:18:02.000And one of them was, I talked to Glenn Beck, and he told me the story, this is before Trump was elected, he told me the story about how Trump invited him to Mar-a-Lago around the time that Trump was deciding to stand in And he phoned Glenn Beck,
01:18:21.000even though they were both at Mar-a-Lago.
01:18:24.000Trump was in one room and Glenn Beck was in the other.
01:18:27.000And Trump phoned Glenn Beck and said, I think you're so influential.
01:19:13.000But Glenn Beck has said some pretty ridiculous shit himself, and he became a Mormon at the age of like 50. You know, like, hey, did you read the book?
01:19:40.000But, I mean, you don't really know, right?
01:19:43.000Well, I mean, Glenn Beck told me that.
01:19:45.000I believe that if Donald Trump called up Alex and said you were so influential and you're amazing and Alex would go, well, thank you, Mr. President.
01:19:52.000We're going to do our best to keep you in office.
01:19:55.000Fight against the tyranny and all these fucking people out there that think they're gonna stop us!
01:20:24.000But if Trump turned on Alex and said InfoWars is a bunch of losers, a bunch of this and that, Alex would turn it around again and he would go after Trump.
01:20:41.000Alex, right from the beginning, said, I'm with Trump until Trump does something that I don't like and then I'll drop him like a hot potato.
01:21:55.000And these guys with masks and government-issued boots came in, started smashing windows, lighting things on fire, and that gave them an excuse to come in and break up this riot Where it had been a peaceful protest, where they couldn't stop the peaceful protest.
01:22:12.000So now they break up these riots that they've created themselves, start arresting people left and right.
01:22:31.000But see, this is, I mean, he documented, he documented this, and it's been documented by many people since then, and even in legitimate circles, like, it was a big factor in the Occupy Wall Street movement.
01:22:47.000The Occupy Wall Street movement was infiltrated ad nauseam by people from whatever branch of government, whoever the fuck they were.
01:22:56.000But what they did was they caused chaos and then gave them an excuse to arrest them.
01:23:03.000And then in the World Trade Organization thing, Alex detailed, like with news reports, independent news reports, how those people were not arrested.
01:24:28.000So I was making a documentary about Randy Weaver, about Ruby Ridge.
01:24:33.000And I was spending a lot of time with Randy's daughter, Rachel, who I liked a lot.
01:24:37.000Anyway, part of the reason why the whole Ruby Ridge escalation happened was because Randy Weaver had gone to— A lot of people don't know that story.
01:25:47.000So then they sent in this guy and asked Randy to saw off a shotgun a quarter of an inch below the legal limit.
01:25:55.000So Randy sawed off the shotgun for this guy and then they said, we're federal agents, you just committed a felony, you're going to go to prison unless you become an informant for us against Aryan nations.
01:26:09.000And Randy, being a kind of hot-headed idiot, I made a big show of saying no, fuck off.
01:26:51.000Anyway, one day the US Marshals got too close to the cabin and one of Randy's dogs started barking.
01:27:01.000And the kid, Randy's son came out, 12-year-old kid, looked much younger, looked like eight years old, came out with a gun and gunfire happened.
01:27:14.000The US Marshals shot the little boy, nearly shot his arm off, and he turned around and tried to run back to the cabin.
01:27:24.000I'm shouting dad and the US Marshals shot him in the back and killed him and they killed the dog and one US Marshal was killed and there's debate as to whether it was either Randy's son or a family friend or whether it was friendly fire or not.
01:27:44.000So they got the son's body and put him in the cabin.
01:27:50.000And the next day, this FBI sharpshooter called Lon Horiuchi turned up.
01:28:16.000So Vicky Weaver was holding their baby, Elisabeth, in the doorway of the cabin and the sharpshooter shot Vicky through the face and killed her.
01:28:29.000And then they pulled Vicky's body into the cabin and Randy was shot as well but survived.
01:28:48.000Beau Grites, who was a big kind of militia hero, turned up and sort of helped to stop it from happening.
01:28:54.000To help to get Randy out of the cabin.
01:28:58.000And in the end the daughters each got a million dollars each in compensation and it all kind of faded away.
01:29:05.000So I was making a documentary about all of this and I went to Aryan Nations because I thought I can just turn up and say I'm friends with Randy Weaver and they'd let me in.
01:29:14.000So I turned up and immediately all of these skinheads surrounded me and started asking me what my genealogy was because they thought correctly that I'm a Jew.
01:29:37.000And one of the Nazis, their Aryan nations, Made a joke and said something like, oh, Church of England, you're the guys who blah, blah, made some kind of joke.
01:29:48.000And the skinhead sort of drifted away from me.
01:29:50.000And I've always thought that the guy who alleviated the situation was maybe an undercover agent who was like calming things down and protecting me.
01:30:02.000It's always crossed my mind knowing how infiltrated those groups always are, just like the video that you saw, knowing how infiltrated those groups are.
01:30:09.000Do they know how infiltrated they are?
01:31:44.000And I said, surely it's better to be a Jew than an atheist.
01:31:49.000And I heard someone in the crowd go, no, it isn't.
01:31:51.000The thing that really surprises me about that exchange is that I am an atheist.
01:31:57.000So of all the places where I would choose for the first time in my life to kind of exert my Jewishness, I chose a fucking jihad training campus.
01:33:07.000I made this film called Tottenham Atollar, where I spent a year with Omar Bakri, and it was a kind of comic film about his attempts to, like, you know...
01:33:17.000He said he wouldn't rest until he saw the flag of Islam flying over Downing Street.
01:33:21.000So we made this sort of almost comic film about his sort of blundering attempts to create like Sharia law in Britain.
01:33:28.000And the joke of the film is that, oh, this is never going to work.
01:33:30.000And it was kind of, you know, some of his ideas were ridiculous.
01:33:33.000Like at one point he had these 5,000...
01:33:36.000Black balloons carrying the call to war on these little...
01:33:40.000They were like leaflets attached to these balloons with slogans like, Islam is the future of Britain.
01:33:47.000And they were going to fly over London and land wherever.
01:33:51.000But they hadn't properly calculated the weight ratio.
01:33:56.000So these fucking balloons let them off and they all just stayed on the floor.
01:34:00.000So all year they were failing at doing everything.
01:34:05.000But yeah, but then like this was like 96 and then five years later 9-11 happened and now Omar's in prison in Beirut for inciting terrorism and a lot of Omar's people became terrorists.
01:34:54.000Yeah, when I knew Alex in the 90s, Infowars was a spare bedroom in his house with choo-choo train wallpaper, like little trains, and an Empire Strikes Back poster.
01:35:05.000And it was Alex, Mike Hansen, Alex's girlfriend.
01:35:13.000They always called her Violet, but her real name's Kelly.
01:35:17.000I said to her, because I went to the custody hearing for a couple of days.
01:35:21.000I went to the custody hearing because I was just curious.
01:35:23.000And I said to her, the last time I saw the two of you, you were kissing and telling each other how much you loved each other, and then 16 years passes, and it's the worst divorce that Texas has ever known.
01:35:47.000And now Alex has got a staff of like 75 people, you know, with like these giant hangers for his supplements, his male vitality supplements.
01:35:59.000Have you ever seen the video of when Joey Diaz and me are in Alex's studio and Joey realizes that it's on the internet?
01:36:08.000So, because it's on the internet, he can say whatever he wants.
01:36:11.000So we go live, and Alex goes, well, actually, from here on out, we're on the internet, so you can kind of say whatever you want, but try to keep it clean.
01:36:19.000And the look of, for Joey Diaz, it was like the cat who saw the canary and realized that the cage was open.
01:36:27.000And so he's telling some story about smuggling weed through the airport.
01:36:32.000Every time you listen to your bullshit congressman, or your bullshit governor, or even a bullshit president, and he's kicking you with that same four shit that they give you every four fucking years, and you still vote for the fucking Momo, and then you get mad, think about me saying the word fuck.
01:36:54.000I'm with you, but this is just to let the American public know that every four years, they buy the same shit they've been buying every four years, and the same people with their Harvard articulation, and how they don't curse, and they're Christians, and they have a family, and these are the same people that shove it up your fucking ass every year.
01:37:10.000The one thing that you'll get about me is, I'll say fuck, but I will not fucking rob you.
01:37:15.000If I need something, I'll ask you like a man.
01:39:09.000I'd guarantee you that that and the Pizzagate stuff properly stressed him out because I think both of those were risking his entire operation.
01:40:04.000I don't agree with a lot of the stuff he says, just like I don't agree with a lot of stuff my friend Eddie says, but I love the both of them.
01:40:13.000I get people saying that he's got too much influence, but my take is if you really think there's fucking alien bases on the moon and that there's child slaves on Mars, fucking shame on you.
01:40:45.000Maybe it's because people who have anxiety disorders are quite good when it comes to actual difficult situations, because we've rehearsed it so many times.
01:40:56.000We panic unnecessarily so often that when something really worth panicking comes along, we actually handle it really well.
01:41:03.000Well, let me ask you, has there ever been a situation where you were confronted with an idea and you're like, you know what, that one is too dangerous.
01:41:11.000When I was writing The Minister at Goats, The Minister at Goats was about this kind of secret unit in the 80s of, like, soldiers who were trying to, like, walk through walls and become invisible.
01:42:42.000The remote viewing program to see whether they should keep it going or close it down.
01:42:48.000And Ray Hyman said it was kind of nonsense.
01:42:50.000And so that helped the CIA close down the unit.
01:42:53.000So I met Ray Hyman and I just happened to say to him, it's like one of those questions that kind of changes your life.
01:43:00.000I said to him, so when you were like in the military, like sniffing around with the remote viewers, did you happen to notice like anything else going on?
01:43:08.000And he went, yeah, he said there was this general called Stubblebine who thought he could burst clouds with his mind.
01:43:17.000And there was this lieutenant colonel called Channon who thought that he could train soldiers to fast for a month.
01:43:26.000And so I had these two names, Stubblebine and Channon, and the whole...
01:43:29.000Men to stay at goat stuff, which wasn't out in the open.
01:43:59.000At one point they had like 30 goats in a room and they were all staring at goat number 16. They all had numbers on their backs and goat number 17 fell over.
01:52:52.000You could take, and those are thin pieces of wood, too.
01:52:54.000You could take this piece of, if this wood, if this pad was a wood, you would just go like this with two fingers and just go, snap, and it would break.
01:53:19.000Well, I mean, it wasn't like, I don't believe it was like a sanction from the very top, but he certainly went to Fort Bragg and stared at goats.
01:53:38.000There's a lot of people, particularly in the 80s, In the 90s, before the Ultimate Fighting Championship came around, there was a lot of fake martial arts out there.
01:53:49.000I know people that were teaching fake martial arts that got into the military, that got into the police.
01:53:55.000I knew the guy who was deep in the police force, and he had fake martial arts.
01:54:00.000His martial arts were fucking completely useless.
01:54:03.000And it tallies with the light US military credo of thinking out of the box, like, if we don't try this stuff, nobody else will try this stuff.
01:55:46.000When I did that sci-fi show, we did a whole segment on remote viewing and we actually had...
01:55:54.000A guy who claimed to be a successful remote viewer, and we set up this location and asked him, me and DJ Grothy, who's a skeptic, very nice guy, and DJ was just as accurate just guessing as this guy was.
01:56:12.000I think actually, now that I think about it, I think DJ was more accurate.
01:56:17.000You know the kind of dark secret of the remote viewing world?
01:56:21.000I mean, you can't totally blame the remote viewers for this.
01:56:25.000So the remote viewing unit at Fort Meade got declassified and shut down.
01:56:31.000So a lot of these remote viewers then set up their own training centres, including Ed Dames in, I don't know, maybe in Vegas, or somewhere not far from me.
01:56:40.000So Ed Dames had this student called...
01:56:56.000So Ed Dames taught them remote viewing, these two people, who would then go on the Art Bell Show and they became, you know, regular guests on the Art Bell Show.
01:57:06.000And they're the ones, these two of Ed Dames' students, they're the ones who basically announced on the Art Bell Show that the Hale-Bopp comet had a companion object in its tail.
01:57:50.000It's amazing what people want to believe.
01:57:53.000Now, when it goes back to conspiracy theorists or whether it's the remote viewers or even someone who would watch that guy's karate videos and think that he's really doing death touches.
01:58:03.000He's talking about how he has a method of going through the skin to attack the organs.
01:58:41.000I mean, you have to really hit it hard in the right spot, like in the neck.
01:58:45.000Is it true that in the movie adaptation of my book, The Minister of Goats, there's a kind of bit of comedy where somebody thinks that they fell victim to the death touch, but it happened like years later,
01:59:01.000like 25 years ago, he was given the death touch and now he's dying from it 25 years later.
01:59:28.000So is it true in the death touch world that people think you can do the dim back on someone and they die years later of seemingly natural causes?
01:59:37.000I'm sure there's someone who believes that.
02:00:23.000In China, it was so poorly received that the guy who was the MMA fighter had to go into hiding because he beat the living fuck out of this guy in like 10 seconds.
02:00:35.000The guy came out and did all this crazy stuff and the guy just smashes him in the face MMA style and his kung fu was no good this day.
02:00:45.000So you get the young guy in orange shoes who's like a legit fighter and then the other guy who is this Silly death touch guy dressed up like he's in a different century and like watch how this goes down because it's it's horrible Because this guy on the left with the orange sneakers on is a real trained fighter.
02:01:09.000And this other guy has a real belief in this system that he's been practicing under and he has no idea that it's horseshit.
02:01:17.000And the way he finds out that it's horseshit is on YouTube.
02:01:20.000I mean, he literally finds out in this moment that what he's...
02:03:48.000And so he's got this crazy idea that he's just gonna, like, give that guy the hex and the guy's gonna go flying through the air like the other guy was teaching.
02:04:51.000And that guy was probably like 60. It's not a good time to get kicked in the face.
02:04:56.000You know, in the military, I'm remembering...
02:04:58.000I don't think about the minister of goats that much because it was so long ago, but now I'm remembering some of the other stuff that they were doing.
02:05:05.000And there was a lot of weaponry stuff, you know?
02:08:46.000Well, you've got to think, if you're an innocent person, and for two years they take away your freedom, and they make you listen to Fleetwood Mac cover band, you probably...
02:08:56.000You're like, I can't get over that, man.
02:09:17.000Also heartbreakingly from around that time, Omar Bakri, who was the guy, the jihadist I made a film about, his son, he had this really sweet little kid, this son, Mohammed, who was really scared that his father might get hurt because he was so public and open.
02:09:31.000And he would confide in us that he was scared that his father would get hurt.
02:09:36.000Fucking two years ago, his son joins ISIS. Tries to leave ISIS. So ISIS kill him.
02:10:44.000And he apparently found this girl he was dating, but they broke up.
02:10:51.000He found her in bed with another man and wound up beating him and beating her like half to death, like ruptured her liver, broke her ribs, smashed her face, broke her teeth.
02:12:45.000And he said, I don't give a fuck about your son.
02:12:47.000And afterwards, when I got The Psychopath Test, I always remembered this guy as being like, I wonder whether he was a psychopath.
02:12:53.000I wonder whether, like, given that one of the items on the psychopath checklist is like grandiose sense of self-worth, I wonder whether the mixed martial artist world, given that, you know, whether it sort of attracts psychopaths?
02:13:08.000Well, it certainly attracts people that aren't opposed to violence, right?
02:13:30.000And the way I described mixed martial arts is high level problem solving with dire physical consequences.
02:13:38.000That's really essentially what it is and these guys are attracted to these extreme experiences So some of them are very pleasant people some of them are very nice like Like for instance Mighty Mouse is probably the best pound-for-pound fighter ever if you met him You would never know he's the best fighter in the world.
02:13:56.000He's so normal Very articulate easy to talk to doesn't get hit a lot either though.
02:14:01.000He's so slick and smart and the way he fights is so clever but Some of them get hit a lot And, you know, now that we're knowing more and more, essentially every day, about the effects of traumatic brain injuries and concussions,
02:14:17.000and you're seeing more and more of these stories of football players doing crazy things.
02:14:22.000And I'm sure you saw that recent study where they tested 111 football players and they found 110 of them had traumatic brain injuries.
02:14:44.000They might have a bunch of things that they're doing.
02:14:46.000But these guys are body slamming each other and throwing each other through the air and landing on each other and hitting each other with elbows.
02:15:04.000Chris Benoit's brain forensic exam, consistent with numerous brain injuries, CTE, which is found in all regions of his brain, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.
02:15:16.000You know, I wrote a piece about Chris Benoit for The Guardian, and when it came out at one o'clock in the morning, the press officer for WWE phoned me up and yelled at me.
02:15:28.000Yelled at 1 in the morning cuz I said what like like I tricked them into like spending time backstage at WWE when I was only interested in Chris Benoit You know was this did you write the did you meet go backstage before he killed people?
02:15:55.000Well, I think they thought I was going to put less emphasis on Chris Benoit and more emphasis on, you know, the nice things about wrestling.
02:17:00.000You know, so Fabian has this idea about giving the world free porn, and then that leads to that, and that leads to that, and that leads to that, and, like, what's the furthest I could find, the furthest consequence?
02:17:10.000And it was such a sort of fun exercise, coupled with the fact that being around porn people was a little bit like being at a Broadway show backstage, you know, these, like, you know, theatre people.
02:17:22.000So, coupled with all of that, and the fact that I was in L.A., and I got to, like, hang out in L.A., it was a really fun year.
02:17:28.000Can I tell you, by the way, one of the strangest consequences?
02:17:50.000It's like, you know, I think when we were growing up, maybe, I don't know, 14 was probably maybe about the age that we started, like, seeing ripped out pages of Playboy and bridges and so on.
02:18:02.000For me, it was 12. We'd find them in the woods.
02:18:45.000So anyway, so I was really interested in like, so what are the consequences of this, of like 12-year-old kids learning about sex through Pornhub?
02:18:51.000And I found this terrible consequence in Oklahoma.
02:18:55.000So this was a boy called Nathan with autism.
02:19:36.000So then he texted her a line of dialogue that he heard in a porn film and it was, I want to bend you over and rape you from behind.
02:19:45.000So he is now on the sex offenders registry for 25 years, which means he has to live in a house right at the edge of town because he has to be 2,000 feet away from parks and daycare centres.
02:20:02.000He can't go anywhere where children go, so he can't go to football games, basketball games, he can't go to the park.
02:20:24.000Like, if you play as this little boy, they were, like, playing this game where they'd take their clothes off in the dark and then put their clothes back on quickly, like a bunch of nine-year-old kids or something.
02:20:36.000This one kid kept his clothes off when they turned the lights on.
02:20:40.000The girl complained to her parents and this boy is on the sex offenders register.
02:21:06.000So I said to this woman who like defends children on the sex offenders registry, I said to her like, you know, why doesn't the judge just say this is ridiculous and throw it out of court?
02:21:16.000And she said, you know, there's this kind of prevailing view that, A, it's better to protect, you know, it's better to err on sight of caution.
02:21:27.000But also, there's this prevailing view that if a kid starts acting sexually weird at the age of 10, that's a kind of precursor for them being sexually weird when they're an adult.
02:23:12.000And, you know, the other thing that's weird is that porn, for the most part, I mean, other than this bespoke porn, which is very specific, but porn...
02:23:21.000There's like levels to the depravity that never existed before.
02:23:27.000Yeah, because everything's keyword searchable.
02:23:29.000This is what happens when you let tech people run the world.
02:24:59.000You know, and that sort of shatters some of the stereotypes people have about porn, that the people are sleazy and uncaring and doing coke and smacking each other.
02:25:09.000This show, if I may, blow my own trumpet.
02:25:13.000Which I learnt on the set of Blow My Own Trumpet.
02:25:20.000I did a little bit from the butterfly effect on stage at the Ace Hotel down here in Los Angeles.
02:25:28.000And we invited a bunch of our porn people along.
02:25:31.000And they said to us afterwards, like, 25 years of being in porn, we were the first mainstream people to come along and not treat them as like, you know, ingredients in our pre-existing ideology.
02:25:45.000So not pitying them or attacking them, just treating them on a level as a fellow human being.
02:25:52.000And isn't that kind of nuts that that's rare in porn?
02:25:56.000Because we all feel the sort of society, as mainstream journalists, we feel these kind of societal pressures.
02:26:08.000I think you also have to establish that your own, whether it's moral superiority or good taste, that you don't approve of this.
02:26:34.000So that's why I wanted to do this show.
02:26:36.000I'm sorry that I sort of brought it back full circle, but that's one of the reasons why I wanted to do this show.
02:26:41.000When I first moved to California, I was on this sitcom called Newsradio, and one of the guys who was a writer on Newsradio was a writer for porn films on the side.
02:26:50.000And what it was, was it didn't really pay much, but it gave him access to the girls and let him meet these girls.
02:26:56.000And he was kind of a nebbishy, sort of dorky guy.
02:26:59.000And he had never been around like a real bombshell girl that was willing to have sex with him before.
02:27:04.000So all of a sudden he's having sex with these porn stars but they get to have sex with these guys on set and it was like some of this weird thing that like this is his girlfriend but she would go to work and get the shit fucked out of her by a bunch of different guys.
02:27:54.000It wasn't my friend, but it was a friend of a friend who told me this story that this guy was dating this girl and, you know, it was just the same thing.
02:28:03.000It's like, hey, you know, it's what she does for a living.
02:28:39.000And the porn stars were like real stars.
02:28:42.000It was Janine and Jill Kelly, who are very famous porn stars, a lesbian scene, and there was a scene like there was a cartoon character, a comic book character this woman wrote, she came to life, and they were having a lesbian scene together.
02:29:25.000I remember Mike Quasar saying to me on my first porn set, this director who we kind of embedded ourselves with said to me, you'll find that there's a wisp of darkness to everybody who does this for a living.
02:30:01.000Why is it so shameful when other people get to watch?
02:30:05.000And why does it devastate people when they find out that their loved one had done something on film that others can see?
02:30:13.000And when they leave porn, this is another consequence of Fabian that I look at in the show, is that when they leave porn, it's much more likely That, you know, they leave porn, they go to a different part of America, they start a new life.
02:30:27.000It's much more likely that they'll be noticed than in the 90s.
02:30:32.000Like in the 90s, for an ex-porn star to be outed, someone would have to go to like a DVD shop.
02:30:38.000These days, everybody, you know, just watches 20 porn films for five seconds each until they find the one that...
02:33:26.000Well, I hope that our show, I hope the butterfly effect, because it's so just, it just shows them to be just, you know, just like the rest of us, ordinary, sweet, fucked up, nice, you know, mixtures of...