The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #995 - Jon Ronson

00:00:03.000 Three, two, one.

00:00:06.000 John Ronson, welcome back.

00:00:07.000 Joe, it's good to be back.

00:00:09.000 Good to see you again.

00:00:10.000 It's very good to be back.

00:00:11.000 What's happening, man?

00:00:11.000 How you been?

00:00:13.000 I've been good.

00:00:14.000 You've been floating around this neighborhood.

00:00:16.000 Yeah, I've spent a year on porn sets.

00:00:20.000 Just research.

00:00:22.000 Just research.

00:00:22.000 It was a lot.

00:00:23.000 My wife did say to me once or twice, do you really have to go to another porn set?

00:00:29.000 I'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?

00:01:00.000 Fake porn's everywhere.

00:01:01.000 Yeah, no, that was back in the day.

00:01:03.000 That was like in the 90s.

00:01:04.000 Oh, okay.

00:01:04.000 So Fabian gave the world Pornhub.

00:01:08.000 Okay.

00:01:09.000 So it's fiction.

00:01:10.000 No, no, this is all true.

00:01:13.000 So, okay, let me go back.

00:01:14.000 Okay.

00:01:15.000 So in the 90s, this kid called Fabian...

00:01:20.000 Fabian 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.

00:01:32.000 And then he had a sort of eureka moment, which is, I can give the world YouTube for porn.

00:01:41.000 Right.

00:01:41.000 So he bought up this fledgling company in Montreal called MAMSEF at the time.

00:01:48.000 It was run by these two brothers up in Montreal and they had just invented Pornhub.

00:01:53.000 Fabian bought up Pornhub and then kind of overnight single-handedly It took over the valley.

00:02:02.000 It's an extraordinary story.

00:02:04.000 This massive flow of money went from where we are now in the valley, a community of people who were making pretty good money from porn.

00:02:12.000 The money just flowed into Fabian's pocket.

00:02:17.000 Because what Fabian did was, well, look, if you're a porn star and you go to a bank and say, can I have a checking account?

00:02:27.000 Did you say a porn star or a porn stir?

00:02:29.000 Well, I said a porn star, but actually there aren't really many porn stars anymore.

00:02:34.000 If you're a porn person and you go to a bank and you say, can I have a checking account? 0.94

00:02:40.000 The bank manager will usually say no, because you're in porn, which means you're disreputable. 0.92

00:02:47.000 Really? 0.98

00:02:47.000 Yes. 0.98

00:02:48.000 Wait a minute.

00:02:49.000 People 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.

00:02:56.000 But checking accounts?

00:02:56.000 That seems unlikely.

00:02:58.000 I mean, I would believe that maybe mortgages, they would think that your business is fairly unstable.

00:03:02.000 That kind of makes sense as far as an investment's concerned.

00:03:05.000 And also the idea that other people, other customers...

00:03:14.000 It's called Reputational Risk. 0.97

00:03:17.000 Wow, that seems really dumb to me. 0.75

00:03:20.000 That doesn't make any sense at all. 0.98

00:03:21.000 Right, well, sure.

00:03:24.000 But Fabian was making money from running a site that dealt in piracy.

00:03:34.000 So basically fans would upload porn illegally onto Pornhub.

00:03:39.000 So Fabian was running a site that was filled with pirated content.

00:03:45.000 Fabian went to a bank to say, I want to expand.

00:03:48.000 But 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.

00:04:06.000 So we went to the Valley, who were already kind of paranoid that all their porn was being stolen and put up onto Pornhub.

00:04:13.000 And he bought up loads of companies at cut price, because the companies were panicking and wanted to sell.

00:04:20.000 And suddenly, Fabian just single-handedly took over porn.

00:04:24.000 And nobody cares about that.

00:04:26.000 Nobody was thinking about the consequences of that, because Fabian was giving the world what they wanted, which was free porn.

00:04:33.000 But I was really curious to know, like, what were the consequences?

00:04:37.000 Let me pause there.

00:04:38.000 You said no one cares about it.

00:04:39.000 But a lot of people did.

00:04:41.000 It was a huge issue.

00:04:42.000 And there was a lot of, like, moral debate.

00:04:45.000 About streaming porn?

00:04:47.000 Well, you know, there's a lot of the girls that were in porn that were really pissed off because they weren't making any money anymore. 1.00

00:04:53.000 And there was a lot of social media posts about it, imploring people to stop using these sites, which no one listened to.

00:04:59.000 Exactly.

00:05:00.000 I mean, porn people cared.

00:05:01.000 But, you know, porn consumers didn't care.

00:05:04.000 Well, it was an interesting tech, like a moral tech debate that was going on for a while.

00:05:10.000 The debate is lost.

00:05:11.000 I 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.

00:05:18.000 And I actually knew him from my jiu-jitsu class, and he was a real high-rolling sort of character.

00:05:25.000 He 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.

00:05:35.000 He had this beautiful house and he was just this baller character.

00:05:39.000 And then it all dried up.

00:05:41.000 It all dried up.

00:05:42.000 I mean, it dried up quick.

00:05:43.000 Yeah, it all went into Fabian pocket.

00:05:45.000 He lost his house.

00:05:46.000 His house got repossessed.

00:05:47.000 Yeah.

00:05:48.000 And Fabian got so rich because of this.

00:05:51.000 Because the money went from your friend's pocket into Fabian's pocket.

00:05:54.000 Fabian got so rich.

00:05:56.000 But how's he getting rich off of free streaming?

00:05:58.000 So the ads?

00:05:59.000 Is that what it is?

00:06:00.000 Partly because of ads, but partly because he bought up the paid sites as well.

00:06:04.000 So, you know, because the paid sites were like panicking because they were losing all their money to piracy.

00:06:08.000 So he just bought up everything.

00:06:10.000 So he bought up the competition.

00:06:11.000 He bought up RedTube.

00:06:12.000 He bought up YouPorn.

00:06:13.000 So he bought up all the competition to Pornhub.

00:06:16.000 But he also bought...

00:06:17.000 Loads of paid sites, including like Playboy TV. So your friend got so poor that his house got repossessed.

00:06:24.000 Fabian 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.

00:06:36.000 Wow.

00:06:37.000 You know you're doing well when you get your own diver.

00:06:40.000 That's weird.

00:06:41.000 Yeah.

00:06:41.000 So...

00:06:43.000 Yeah, you're right.

00:06:44.000 Porn people cared a lot, but the outside world didn't care.

00:06:47.000 Because, 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.

00:06:53.000 Well, they care a little bit about the music thing, but the porn thing got almost no traction.

00:06:57.000 And 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...

00:07:07.000 I think?

00:07:32.000 Now, he seems like a guy who's well aware of his crime.

00:07:38.000 Yeah, I mean, Fabian would say, if it wasn't me, it would be somebody else.

00:07:41.000 What does that mean? 0.91

00:07:42.000 That sounds like a good thing to say after you kill somebody. 0.82

00:07:46.000 I did say, it's progress. 0.94

00:07:48.000 You'd call it progress. 0.98

00:07:50.000 But he's a criminal.

00:07:52.000 I mean, it's essentially, he's lucky that he's dealing in pirated stuff.

00:07:57.000 Right?

00:07:58.000 The one time Fabian got annoyed with me...

00:08:01.000 He was quite game.

00:08:02.000 I wanted to interview him and then I wanted to travel to the Valley to look at the consequences and trace consequence through to consequence.

00:08:09.000 Like, where would I end up if I just...

00:08:11.000 Because I think people don't think about consequences on the internet that much.

00:08:14.000 They want to just, you know, destroy somebody and then carry on with their day.

00:08:18.000 So I wanted to tell a story about consequences.

00:08:19.000 The only time Fabian got annoyed with me was when either me or Mike Quasar, director, said to him...

00:08:28.000 You know, you uploaded pirated porn.

00:08:30.000 And he said, no, I didn't.

00:08:31.000 I have never uploaded pirated porn.

00:08:34.000 I offer a service in which other people can upload pirated porn.

00:08:41.000 And if they tell us to take it down, we'll take it down.

00:08:45.000 But they have to find it.

00:08:47.000 They have to find it. 0.99

00:08:47.000 And also, there's so much fucking free porn on Pornhub that it's like cutting down a forest with a butter knife. 0.99

00:08:53.000 It's impossible to... 0.99

00:08:54.000 You know, you can say, take down my pirated porn, and they'll say, okay, sorry, fine.

00:08:58.000 But then there's like a million other people's read porn up there.

00:09:01.000 Anyway.

00:09:03.000 Yeah, so actually, it's funny.

00:09:05.000 I 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.

00:09:11.000 But 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.

00:09:18.000 And 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.

00:09:27.000 So failure to accept responsibility for own actions is one of the 20 items on the psychopath check.

00:09:33.000 Do 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?

00:09:42.000 I don't think Fabian, that was very much a tangential thing because I don't think Fabian is a psychopath at all.

00:09:49.000 I think that tech people have created a sort of amoral bubble around themselves.

00:09:55.000 I talked to the head of Pornhub's mobile division.

00:10:00.000 He's called Brandon.

00:10:01.000 If you've ever watched Pornhub on your mobile, you have Brandon to thank.

00:10:08.000 I said to Brandon, Brandon said like we never, like 99% of Pornhub employees never set foot on a porn set.

00:10:16.000 And he said that's good because, you know, we're designing, you know, we're search engine people.

00:10:21.000 We're, you know, we don't want to say it would be sort of unpleasant to set foot on a porn set.

00:10:25.000 It would be sort of intimidating and unpleasant.

00:10:28.000 And 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.

00:10:37.000 And Brandon went, Their livelihood.

00:10:40.000 Which, again, is a very techy thing to say, right?

00:10:43.000 Because it's all about progress.

00:10:46.000 Their livelihood?

00:10:47.000 What does he mean by that?

00:10:49.000 Like, okay, now you want to talk about their livelihood.

00:10:51.000 Their livelihood, the people.

00:10:53.000 But I mean, they're essentially like a content provider that's not paying for any content.

00:10:57.000 Yeah.

00:10:58.000 And, yeah, so...

00:11:04.000 Yeah, I just remembered a guy called David Lowery, who's interested in the kind of piracy issue in music.

00:11:13.000 And he said, when we look back on the dystopian movies of the 1930s, When, you know, machines would take over, like Metropolis or something.

00:11:23.000 Like 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.

00:11:36.000 But 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.

00:11:47.000 So 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.

00:11:56.000 Yeah, but it's not as simple as pirating.

00:11:58.000 Because pirating is what everybody does when they're sharing it through message boards or what have you.

00:12:05.000 That's sort of pirating, right?

00:12:07.000 When they're uploading it to these websites and servers and stuff.

00:12:11.000 But what he's doing is massively profiting off of other people's work.

00:12:17.000 It's a little bit more of a gray area.

00:12:19.000 Yeah, I'd say so.

00:12:20.000 Not even gray.

00:12:22.000 It's kind of dark.

00:12:23.000 Well, he certainly profited hugely from other people pirating their favorite porn films onto his site.

00:12:30.000 Has he been sued?

00:12:33.000 He got arrested for tax evasion.

00:12:36.000 And that's how he got out of the business eventually.

00:12:39.000 But I think that all got solved.

00:12:42.000 I'm not sure if he ever got sued.

00:12:43.000 Because if somebody said to him, like, take down my, you know, Bad Babysitter's Volume 2 is mine.

00:12:51.000 I say that because I was actually on the set of Bad Babysitter's Volume 2. He'd say, oh sure, yeah, sorry, of course.

00:12:57.000 And it would go down.

00:12:58.000 But then maybe somebody else would put it up later that day.

00:13:01.000 And it didn't matter because everything else was free.

00:13:04.000 I'll tell you one amazing consequence of all of this, though.

00:13:08.000 So 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.

00:13:18.000 And 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.

00:13:32.000 So, 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.

00:13:45.000 Now, all the porn films have to be easily searchable.

00:13:49.000 It's like a kind of arms race of search engine optimisation, like to get yourself up the Google rankings.

00:13:55.000 So all the porn films in the Valley aren't called Women of Influence because how do you search for that?

00:14:00.000 They basically see what the most popular search terms are and then make films based on that.

00:14:06.000 So Mike Quazzo was telling me this on the set of the film he was shooting that day, which was Stepdaughter Cheerleader Orgy.

00:14:14.000 So I said to Mike, because I thought about like...

00:14:21.000 Women of Influence versus Stepdaughter Cheerleader Audrey. 1.00

00:14:27.000 Look, I haven't seen Women of Influence. 1.00

00:14:30.000 So for all I know, the moral of Women of Influence is that women shouldn't have influence. 1.00

00:14:34.000 But my guess is that Women of Influence is a more kind of holistic porn film than Stepdaughter Cheerleader Audrey.

00:14:40.000 So I said to Mike, are there any people in the Valley who like...

00:14:46.000 Can't get work because they're just not a keyword.

00:14:50.000 And 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... 0.99

00:15:08.000 I think?

00:15:29.000 And the answer is they have to find other ways to make money.

00:15:32.000 So escorting is going through the roof in the valley.

00:15:35.000 Because of people like Fabian, because of the tech takeover of porn, escorting is going through the roof.

00:15:40.000 But also another thing that's going through the roof is this kind of weirdly adorable world of bespoke porn.

00:15:48.000 Yeah, and that's what the article...

00:15:49.000 What was the publication?

00:15:52.000 Who published that article?

00:15:53.000 It was The Guardian.

00:15:53.000 I did like a written version of one of the episodes of the show.

00:15:57.000 I just stumbled upon it, you know, knowing that you were going to be here.

00:16:00.000 I didn't even know you wrote it.

00:16:01.000 I was reading it, and as I was reading it, I was like, oh, John wrote this.

00:16:04.000 Right.

00:16:05.000 Isn't it?

00:16:06.000 What an amazing...

00:16:06.000 Did you know about this world?

00:16:08.000 No.

00:16:09.000 And you're right in Pornland here, right in the valley.

00:16:12.000 So, yeah, it's a pretty hidden world.

00:16:14.000 Fascinating.

00:16:15.000 Explain what it is.

00:16:16.000 People literally will request some of the most bizarre things, and these people will make custom films based on their weird kinks. 1.00

00:16:26.000 Just 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.

00:16:36.000 Now, how much does something like this cost? 0.98

00:16:38.000 Like, say if you want to make a film about girls wearing mutant ninja turtle outfits who kick guys in the balls. 0.98

00:16:45.000 Like, that's entirely possible, right? 0.98

00:16:47.000 Yeah.

00:16:47.000 Oh, yeah.

00:16:48.000 Anything's possible.

00:16:49.000 But that sounds like something that might actually sell.

00:16:51.000 Yeah.

00:16:52.000 Oh, yeah.

00:16:53.000 Like a couple of thousand dollars.

00:16:55.000 That's it?

00:16:56.000 Yeah.

00:16:56.000 A couple grand?

00:16:57.000 Yeah.

00:16:58.000 Wow.

00:16:59.000 I got so obsessed with the world of bespoke porn because it was such a fascinating window into people's inner lives.

00:17:09.000 One of the first ones I saw was a condiments video.

00:17:15.000 Like ketchup and relish and stuff like that?

00:17:17.000 So 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.

00:17:33.000 And...

00:17:34.000 And the woman's like trying to, you know, she's like Gabe. 0.99

00:17:38.000 So she's going, oh, it's so cold and slimy.

00:17:41.000 Anyway, the guy who commissioned this video, the producers knew one thing about him.

00:17:46.000 He's a restauranteur who deals with condiments every day.

00:17:51.000 Oh, how weird.

00:17:52.000 Yeah, and has to, you know, presumably avoid situations like that happening in his restaurant.

00:17:56.000 So he just sits around thinking, like as customers are sitting down, squirt her with some mayonnaise, just lather her up with ketchup.

00:18:06.000 Or maybe it's stress. 1.00

00:18:07.000 Maybe it's like, oh my god, if this tub of mayonnaise falls on the floor, or falls on this woman, we're all fucked. 1.00

00:18:15.000 We get sued, yeah. 1.00

00:18:16.000 Yeah, we're doomed.

00:18:17.000 And there'd be like the cleaning pill.

00:18:19.000 And maybe it's like...

00:18:21.000 And maybe his release is to do this.

00:18:23.000 Wow. 0.79

00:18:24.000 Another 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. 0.96

00:18:48.000 Whoa. 0.94

00:18:49.000 Yes.

00:18:50.000 There you go.

00:18:50.000 There's a steal from it.

00:18:53.000 Yeah.

00:18:54.000 How much is a stamp collection worth?

00:18:56.000 Well, like...

00:18:58.000 Well, it turns out, because we managed to track down Stamps Man, and he talked to us, after a lot of persuasion.

00:19:06.000 And he's got ten books of stamps, and once a year he sends one to a custom producer.

00:19:13.000 And so he does it once a year.

00:19:14.000 So that's his thing?

00:19:15.000 Yeah, 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.

00:19:25.000 Stamp collecting was big.

00:19:26.000 So he became like an obsessive stamp collector.

00:19:30.000 The stamp shop owners would say, oh, if you buy this stamp, it's going to be very valuable in 20 years.

00:19:35.000 But then came the internet, and it killed off stamp collecting as a hobby.

00:19:41.000 Really?

00:19:42.000 Yeah, nerds apparently found other things to be interested in and the thrill of the chase just wasn't there anymore.

00:19:49.000 You could easily buy it.

00:19:50.000 So anyway, his stamps lost all of their value.

00:19:53.000 The stamp stores closed down.

00:19:55.000 That kind of collegiate atmosphere of fellow stamp collectors just vanished.

00:20:00.000 He began to regret his life choices of spending all of that time and money collecting stamps.

00:20:07.000 He 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.

00:20:19.000 So now he pays porn people to destroy his stamps. 0.97

00:20:22.000 The psychiatrist told him that a hobby is ridiculous. 0.98

00:20:26.000 Yeah. 0.95

00:20:26.000 According to him, I mean, I never talked to the psychiatrist, but according to him, yeah, he said that stamp collecting is a ridiculous hobby. 0.95

00:20:33.000 That seems like a ridiculous thing for a psychologist to say. 0.96

00:20:36.000 Sounds like a bad psychologist. 0.98

00:20:38.000 Yeah, someone enjoys it.

00:20:40.000 If 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?

00:20:50.000 Well, the only...

00:20:51.000 I mean, one good thing that came out of it was...

00:20:54.000 He really enriched the imaginations of the people in the valley.

00:21:00.000 And also my imagination, too.

00:21:01.000 I mean, Stamps Man, because all the custom producers talk, you know?

00:21:05.000 Right.

00:21:06.000 And Stamps Man was such a mystery to them all.

00:21:09.000 So, you know, so at least he destroys the stamps now in a way that's beneficial to him.

00:21:15.000 God, it's so weird.

00:21:16.000 Yeah, isn't it amazing?

00:21:18.000 But it's all weird, right?

00:21:19.000 Yeah.

00:21:19.000 Well, it's also quite sad.

00:21:22.000 Dan and Rhiannon, who made one of the Stamps videos, called us just as we were finishing our series.

00:21:27.000 And Rhiannon was in tears.

00:21:30.000 And they just had a request.

00:21:32.000 And the request was for a guy. 0.93

00:21:35.000 A guy wanted a porn woman to sit cross-legged on the floor, fully clothed. 1.00

00:21:40.000 And saying to the camera, you are loved.

00:21:44.000 Things may be bad now, but they won't always be.

00:21:48.000 And suicide is not the answer.

00:21:52.000 So then they thought, what do we do?

00:21:54.000 So they told him they'd make the video for him.

00:21:58.000 And they could shoot it really soon.

00:22:00.000 And he didn't respond.

00:22:03.000 So they made it anyway.

00:22:04.000 And we were there to record it.

00:22:08.000 And it made me realise just how kind of delightful the bespoke porn world is because they were so eager to help this guy.

00:22:20.000 Did he kill himself?

00:22:21.000 We don't know.

00:22:22.000 They made the video for him.

00:22:25.000 The 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.

00:22:37.000 Riley was crying and Rhiannon, the producer, was crying and they sent the video to the guy.

00:22:43.000 We don't know.

00:22:44.000 You know, it's interesting.

00:22:46.000 There's quite a few porn stars on Twitter that have really kind of motivational Twitter feeds.

00:22:54.000 They say nice things.

00:22:56.000 They say positive things.

00:22:57.000 They seem like healthy people.

00:23:00.000 And if you separate the fact that That they have sex on film for a living.

00:23:05.000 Take 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.

00:23:20.000 But then you add the sex thing and for whatever reason we have this weird hang up about sex. 1.00

00:23:27.000 It's because we're all fucked up. 0.99

00:23:28.000 I talked to this girl called Dakota, who was part of a Radical Honesty group. 1.00

00:23:33.000 A Radical Honesty group?

00:23:34.000 Have you come across Radical Honesty?

00:23:37.000 No, I don't think so.

00:23:38.000 You would love it.

00:23:39.000 I might be in one.

00:23:40.000 I don't even know it.

00:23:41.000 What's a Radical Honesty group?

00:23:42.000 Well, the first time I ever heard about Radical Honesty was my friend Starly Kine, the podcaster, who went on a Radical Honesty group.

00:23:51.000 And one of the things you have to do...

00:23:52.000 She's on a podcast?

00:23:53.000 Yeah, she does a podcast called Mystery Show. 0.56

00:23:55.000 She used to be on This American Life. 0.64

00:23:57.000 Okay.

00:23:57.000 Anyway, so she went to a radical honesty group where you have to be radically honest to each other.

00:24:03.000 So 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.

00:24:17.000 So the one that Starley went to, the first guy said...

00:24:22.000 My secret is that I haven't paid taxes in ten years.

00:24:26.000 And so everyone went, oh.

00:24:29.000 And then the next guy said, my secret is that I killed a man.

00:24:36.000 He 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.

00:24:48.000 Wow.

00:24:49.000 And nobody knows that it was murder. 0.97

00:24:52.000 So 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.

00:25:06.000 So then the murderer kind of put his hand up and said... 0.99

00:25:11.000 That's disgusting.

00:25:12.000 No, he said, can I add something to my... 0.99

00:25:15.000 You should be ashamed of yourself.

00:25:17.000 No, quite the opposite.

00:25:18.000 He said, can I add something to my secret? 0.99

00:25:20.000 He said, I also have sex with my cat. 0.99

00:25:26.000 He had a one-upper. 0.99

00:25:28.000 Yeah, he had to be the best secret in the room. 1.00

00:25:31.000 He might be a bullshit artist, huh? 1.00

00:25:33.000 It's possible. 1.00

00:25:34.000 Yeah, that's part of the problem with those...

00:25:36.000 I 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.

00:25:44.000 And he said yes.

00:25:45.000 The way she described that circle is what happened.

00:25:48.000 So 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.

00:26:03.000 So I said, what did you watch it on?

00:26:07.000 And she said, Pornhub, of course, because this is how every child in the world learns about sex these days.

00:26:12.000 And I said, did you ever get so into it that you would learn their names?

00:26:15.000 You'd say, oh, there's James Dean.

00:26:17.000 And she said, no, no, no.

00:26:19.000 She kind of laughed.

00:26:20.000 And she said, no, I never learnt their names.

00:26:22.000 It's like when you kill a deer, you don't name it because then you can't eat it.

00:26:26.000 So this is what the porn people are up against, right?

00:26:29.000 It's this shame of the viewer.

00:26:32.000 It's like in that...

00:26:35.000 Hypocrisy lies exploitation, which is why somebody like Fabian can come in and get a $300 million loan and take over porn.

00:26:42.000 It's because we don't want to think about it because it makes us feel bad about ourselves.

00:26:47.000 But her issue is church-going plus female. 0.94

00:26:53.000 Whereas men, they have very specific tastes and they tend to gravitate towards very specific porn stars.

00:27:01.000 One of the things that I've noticed that really popular porn stars... 1.00

00:27:05.000 We'll have, like, gigantic numbers on, like, social media, Twitter or Instagram, like, upwards of a million, you know?

00:27:14.000 And maybe more.

00:27:16.000 And so they obviously have, like, a following, you know?

00:27:20.000 Yeah.

00:27:21.000 You know, you said that a lot of porn women on Twitter are kind of A-positive and are giving them interventional messages. 1.00

00:27:26.000 One of the reasons why that is, I met this porn woman called Macy May, who was, like, really depressed. 0.86

00:27:32.000 Another 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.

00:27:46.000 Now, you know, the Valley's, like...

00:27:48.000 We'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. 0.97

00:27:54.000 And 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. 0.99

00:28:04.000 So there's a massive turnaround.

00:28:05.000 They get work for a few weeks, and then it's over.

00:28:08.000 So I met this woman called Macy May who was in that funk. 1.00

00:28:12.000 Like she came in May, throughout May she was working.

00:28:15.000 I met her in July and the work had just dried up.

00:28:19.000 And she was like venting on Twitter. 0.99

00:28:23.000 But then she stopped venting.

00:28:24.000 And then all of her tweets were like, I'm so happy, it's such a beautiful day.

00:28:29.000 And I said, why did you stop venting on Twitter?

00:28:31.000 And she said, well, a bunch of porn producers told me it looked bad for my brand.

00:28:37.000 Like, you know, they don't want a sort of miserable porn person saying, I'm not getting work today. 0.99

00:28:44.000 They want a porn person who says, here's a picture of my butt. 1.00

00:28:48.000 And isn't that unhealthy, right? 0.99

00:28:51.000 That this is what we've turned Twitter into.

00:28:53.000 We've turned it into this thing where we're not allowed...

00:28:56.000 To be ourselves or to tell the truth about ourselves.

00:29:00.000 Well, in this particular example, maybe.

00:29:01.000 But I mean, I think it's an inherently, for whatever reason, in my estimation and in many others, a depressing business.

00:29:11.000 Yeah, and I don't know why.

00:29:13.000 I mean, for a lot of people, the idea of a young girl going into porn is depressing.

00:29:18.000 You know, like I have daughters.

00:29:20.000 The idea of my daughters going into porn is very depressing. 0.99

00:29:23.000 But I've met porn stars that seem nice.

00:29:26.000 They seem happy. 0.98

00:29:28.000 But why is it that everybody wants to have sex, but if you have sex on film... 0.94

00:29:34.000 Yeah. 0.86

00:29:34.000 And everybody gets to watch the shame. 0.86

00:29:37.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:29:38.000 It's a weird little side effect of our civilization.

00:29:42.000 It's the shame coming in from the outside looking in.

00:29:45.000 There's no shame.

00:29:47.000 When I was on the set of Stepdaughter Cheerleader Orgy, which was...

00:29:53.000 Quite close to where we are now, probably like a mile away from here, but up in the hills.

00:29:59.000 And it was a kind of familial bubble, like everyone was being nice to each other, everyone was happy.

00:30:06.000 But Mike, the director, needed to get an establishing shot of the cheerleaders arriving home from cheerleader practice.

00:30:12.000 So we went outside.

00:30:14.000 They were all wearing their cheerleader outfits.

00:30:16.000 And 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.

00:30:26.000 And 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...

00:30:37.000 So until the mucking outsiders came along, it was healthy and shame-free. 1.00

00:30:43.000 But as soon as an outsider started hissing at them, it became shameful. 0.96

00:30:46.000 And I think that's porn for you.

00:30:50.000 Most of the problems that porn people face are stigma from the outside, not from the community itself, which tends to be quite respectful.

00:31:00.000 And the people that were mocking them, first of all, they're young, right?

00:31:04.000 Teenagers.

00:31:05.000 And second of all, they're probably thinking of it in terms of like, almost like they're online.

00:31:10.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.96

00:31:11.000 I 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. 0.94

00:31:18.000 We couldn't see them. 0.88

00:31:19.000 We could only hear them.

00:31:21.000 I was looking up and I couldn't see them.

00:31:23.000 Right.

00:31:23.000 Because they were up on like a ridge above the house.

00:31:27.000 Yeah, it's almost like being anonymous.

00:31:30.000 Yeah.

00:31:31.000 Yeah, I mean, anonymous people online, the behavior is very bizarre. 0.96

00:31:35.000 Because 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. 0.95

00:31:46.000 Just over nothing. 0.98

00:31:47.000 Over nothing.

00:31:48.000 Yeah. 0.65

00:31:49.000 Over 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.

00:32:03.000 That's almost what it seems like.

00:32:04.000 It's like a super angry, bitter person.

00:32:09.000 Life is just throwing rocks at them everywhere they go, and every chance they get to throw a rock back, they do.

00:32:15.000 Like that Randy Newman song, I just want you to hurt like I do.

00:32:19.000 Yeah, I'd say there's certainly an element to that.

00:32:21.000 There's also an element of what the right call, what's that phrase that the right use all the time?

00:32:28.000 Virtue 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.

00:32:35.000 But that's different, right?

00:32:37.000 Yeah.

00:32:38.000 But it exists.

00:32:39.000 Virtue signaling is absolutely real.

00:32:41.000 I see it all the time.

00:32:42.000 I see it all the time.

00:32:42.000 It's usually like really, really weak men.

00:32:46.000 They're trying really hard to court the favor of women and they're not attractive and they're not desirable. 1.00

00:32:52.000 And so they try really hard to be allies.

00:32:54.000 Yeah.

00:32:55.000 The last time I was here, I'd just gone through all of that as a result of my public shaming book coming out.

00:33:01.000 Oh, yeah.

00:33:02.000 And like a sort of small group of people decided to sort of try and...

00:33:05.000 Angry at you, John Johnson.

00:33:08.000 Get in the group.

00:33:08.000 Yeah.

00:33:09.000 Wrong think.

00:33:10.000 You were guilty of wrong think.

00:33:12.000 Yeah.

00:33:12.000 I just read a story this morning in Vulture about the young adult world where this book came out called...

00:33:23.000 Let me see if I can find it.

00:33:27.000 It's called The Black Witch and it's a liberal book.

00:33:30.000 It's a young adult book.

00:33:31.000 It's a progressive book but it contains racist characters.

00:33:37.000 So a blogger took some of the quotes that the racist characters said in the book This Vulture article quotes it.

00:33:45.000 And took them out of context.

00:33:46.000 Yeah.

00:33:47.000 Page 163. The Celts are not a pure race like us. 0.61

00:33:52.000 They're more accepting of intermarriage.

00:33:54.000 And because of this, they're hopelessly mixed. 1.00

00:33:56.000 So that's a quote from the book.

00:33:57.000 And then the blog wrote underneath.

00:33:59.000 Yes, you read that with your own two eyes.

00:34:02.000 This is one of the times my jaw dropped in horror and I had to walk away from this book.

00:34:08.000 So then...

00:34:09.000 How noble.

00:34:10.000 So 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.

00:34:19.000 It was Kirkus.

00:34:19.000 Kirkus is like this industry...

00:34:21.000 When you write a book, one of the first reviews you get is from Kirkus.

00:34:25.000 Spell that word?

00:34:26.000 K-I-R-K-U-S. Okay. 1.00

00:34:29.000 And if you get like a starred Kirkus review, it's like a big deal.

00:34:33.000 And so they powered in on Kirkus for giving it a good review.

00:34:38.000 But I noticed two things happened as a result of this.

00:34:42.000 One was actually it didn't seem to affect the book's success.

00:34:46.000 The book is doing well, like on Amazon, and people who actually read the book aren't offended by it.

00:34:50.000 And the same thing happened with my book, so you've been publicly shamed.

00:34:53.000 Like the kind of, you know, people trying to turn against the book, it didn't.

00:34:56.000 Well, the numbers are so small.

00:34:58.000 The numbers of twats that are actually out there beating the bushes for this stuff. 1.00

00:35:02.000 I mean, you're talking about, you know, a few thousand people out of whatever, or a few hundred maybe even, very vocal.

00:35:08.000 Yeah.

00:35:08.000 And if there's anyone particularly upset at you, it might just be...

00:35:12.000 There's many instances where people are attacked by one person, and that person assumes multiple identities online.

00:35:19.000 I had a buddy of mine who was dealing with someone who was doing that.

00:35:21.000 It's real common.

00:35:24.000 They just, for whatever reason, just single you out.

00:35:27.000 Maybe you wrote something that they found personally offensive.

00:35:32.000 But the thing that drives me crazy about that...

00:35:36.000 Taking out of context this character who's a racist character is we're talking about fiction.

00:35:43.000 And if fiction, if you can't portray realistic humans, I mean, there are racists.

00:35:49.000 But 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?

00:36:02.000 How come that's okay?

00:36:03.000 I mean, these are like, you know, these, I think, are kind of young kids because this is the YA world.

00:36:08.000 And, you know, they're not thinking...

00:36:09.000 YA? Young adult.

00:36:11.000 Oh.

00:36:11.000 It's a type of publishing.

00:36:12.000 And, you know, they're not thinking it through.

00:36:14.000 They're not thinking this through.

00:36:16.000 Well, they're just seeing an opportunity to be outraged.

00:36:18.000 Yeah.

00:36:18.000 You know that, you know, the expression...

00:36:19.000 Recreational outrage.

00:36:21.000 Yeah.

00:36:23.000 So...

00:36:24.000 But the other thing that happened as a result of this...

00:36:26.000 So the book itself apparently isn't being particularly negatively affected, even though the outrage was huge.

00:36:33.000 Probably helps it.

00:36:33.000 Possibly.

00:36:34.000 But the journalists from this Vulture article interviewed publishers who basically are saying, no, we're telling our authors...

00:36:42.000 You know, it's having a chilling effect on novels.

00:36:45.000 It's like, don't put in...

00:36:47.000 Like, if the author's white, don't try and put in a person of colour as a character. 0.84

00:36:52.000 It's just, it's not worth it.

00:36:54.000 You know, just don't do it.

00:36:55.000 So actually, these new rules, these are new rules.

00:36:58.000 A few years, you know, I just wrote this...

00:37:00.000 I've been writing movies lately, and...

00:37:04.000 And I always try and put in characters of colour.

00:37:10.000 Because I think, OK, maybe a director will kind of ignore it.

00:37:13.000 But if I put that into a screenplay, then there's a good chance that a person of colour is going to get offered a role.

00:37:21.000 But now suddenly I'm being told, like, that's not good.

00:37:25.000 I shouldn't do that.

00:37:27.000 Well, you're being told you shouldn't do that because you need to stay in your lane.

00:37:31.000 Yeah, well, I'm not being told it, but I'm reading these articles where I read that novelists are being told.

00:37:36.000 Right, but this is a different situation.

00:37:37.000 You're not talking about an offensive character.

00:37:39.000 You should probably clarify that.

00:37:40.000 Oh, yeah, no, of course.

00:37:41.000 Yeah, 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. 1.00

00:37:49.000 Yeah, writers are being told, according to this Vulture article that I read today, writers are being told not to do it.

00:37:56.000 And of course, That's a different thing.

00:37:59.000 It could easily be misconstrued.

00:38:01.000 I didn't want to let anybody take you out of context there.

00:38:03.000 Right.

00:38:04.000 Yeah.

00:38:04.000 No, of course.

00:38:05.000 And that feels like a very new rule.

00:38:08.000 Sure.

00:38:08.000 It is.

00:38:08.000 Well, it's just, again, it's just the left is turning on itself.

00:38:14.000 I mean, there are people that are turning on them.

00:38:17.000 So you cannot be progressive enough.

00:38:19.000 There is no one out there that's progressive enough.

00:38:21.000 And 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.

00:38:35.000 Yeah.

00:38:37.000 When, you know, because I was covering all of this for a couple of years and I was writing So You've Been Publicly Shamed.

00:38:42.000 And 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.

00:38:56.000 And this was in the run up to Trump getting elected.

00:38:59.000 And I can't help thinking that the left eating itself It's part of the reason why we've got Trump now. 1.00

00:39:06.000 Yeah, they fucked up, for sure. 1.00

00:39:07.000 They became unreasonable. 1.00

00:39:09.000 I 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. 0.99

00:39:22.000 And I think it's true. 0.99

00:39:23.000 Yeah, it's 100% true.

00:39:25.000 People are fed up.

00:39:26.000 I mean, they're fed up and they didn't realize what the consequences are.

00:39:31.000 You 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.

00:39:44.000 It was some crazy number of people to think that he should stop tweeting.

00:39:47.000 But one of the things that got him elected is the fact that he tweets, said people enjoyed it.

00:39:54.000 Like, here's a guy who's fighting back, and he's not scared to hit back with personal insults.

00:40:01.000 And, like, we'd never seen that before from someone running for president.

00:40:04.000 Like, this was stunning!

00:40:06.000 Yeah.

00:40:06.000 You 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.

00:40:15.000 But he used an expression, you know, I forget the expression, but something like it's modern presidential to tweet.

00:40:24.000 Yeah.

00:40:24.000 Modern presidential.

00:40:26.000 Yeah.

00:40:27.000 I 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.

00:40:34.000 This was at the bookshop Santa Cruz.

00:40:37.000 And she was, like, pointedly shaking her head in disagreement with everything that I was saying.

00:40:43.000 And then when it came to the Q&A, I said, like, has anyone got any questions?

00:40:46.000 And she went...

00:40:47.000 And she said, if you play with the Twitter toy, then it's your fault if you get burned.

00:40:57.000 And what I said to her was like, you know, it influences...

00:41:02.000 Beyond Twitter.

00:41:03.000 Twitter is infecting the culture and it's infected everything.

00:41:10.000 What began on Twitter, a new type of discourse and a new way of seeing each other, infected politics, culture, the mainstream media.

00:41:18.000 It's infected everything.

00:41:19.000 In 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?

00:41:32.000 Well, they certainly feel like they have some sort of responsibility, which is why they're silencing certain people.

00:41:39.000 And I don't know if shadow banning is real, but there's all this talk of people being shadow banned.

00:41:44.000 And a lot of people have had their accounts suspended.

00:41:47.000 Yeah, so they are doing a bit of stuff now.

00:41:50.000 I always remember Megan from the Westboro Baptist Church, Megan Phelps, who's a friend of mine.

00:41:57.000 Oh, she came on your show, didn't she?

00:41:59.000 Yeah, she was great.

00:42:00.000 She was amazing.

00:42:01.000 She's so great.

00:42:02.000 Fascinating that someone who came from such a horrible, regressive environment became this fascinating, really intelligent, really well-spoken, sensitive person. 1.00

00:42:11.000 Yeah, 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.

00:42:23.000 Like, they gave me this positive stuff as well as the negative stuff.

00:42:26.000 Wow, isn't that amazing?

00:42:27.000 She can't even talk to them anymore.

00:42:28.000 Yeah, but they won't talk to her. 0.86

00:42:30.000 They won't talk to her.

00:42:31.000 I think she went up to them at a picket of David Bowie's memorials.

00:42:37.000 They wouldn't talk to her.

00:42:38.000 They wouldn't look her in the eye.

00:42:40.000 That's so crazy.

00:42:41.000 Anyway, she was on the phone to Twitter one time, she told me, because they love her.

00:42:45.000 I 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. 0.62

00:42:55.000 So for Twitter, that's like the best story in the world.

00:42:57.000 So she was talking to Twitter, she told me, and they wanted her to do a talk.

00:43:01.000 And she said, oh, you know who should do a talk as well?

00:43:03.000 John Ronson.

00:43:04.000 And she said Twitter went quiet.

00:43:08.000 So they're upset at you in some way?

00:43:09.000 I think they're upset at me for basically pointing out how we're all toddlers crawling towards a gun on Twitter.

00:43:17.000 But it's not all people.

00:43:20.000 You're pointing out some of the issues that many other people have seen.

00:43:23.000 Yeah.

00:43:23.000 This is not...

00:43:24.000 I don't think what you're saying is controversial at all.

00:43:27.000 You're just astute.

00:43:28.000 I don't think so.

00:43:29.000 That 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.

00:43:37.000 And then when she was asleep...

00:43:38.000 LOL. Yeah.

00:43:39.000 And then when she was asleep on a plane, you know, thinking she'd made a smart kind of South Parky and joke mocking her own privilege.

00:43:45.000 Like, everyone united to destroy her.

00:43:47.000 And she was fired. 0.74

00:43:48.000 Fired.

00:43:48.000 By the time she landed.

00:43:50.000 Yeah.

00:43:50.000 And, you know...

00:43:52.000 Everyone from, like, misogynistic trolls through to social justice people, all united to destroy this world.

00:43:58.000 But, you know, she upset everyone.

00:44:02.000 And, yeah, so I think that story became pretty powerful at the time, and I think it probably affected Twitter's business for a while.

00:44:09.000 People got too scared to go on Twitter, so I think that's why.

00:44:12.000 I don't think it dropped their business off at all.

00:44:14.000 I think it did. 0.90

00:44:16.000 I 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?

00:44:26.000 You 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?

00:44:33.000 I 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...

00:44:40.000 Crazy viral.

00:44:43.000 It really spoke, kind of spoke to people's like, deep fears, that story. 1.00

00:44:50.000 Well, deep fears, they might get drunk and pop a Xanax and say something really stupid. 1.00

00:44:54.000 Do the same shit. 1.00

00:44:55.000 And wake up in Africa fired. 1.00

00:44:56.000 Yeah, exactly.

00:44:57.000 And I think that kind of probably affected I don't think it did.

00:45:02.000 I think they need to relax.

00:45:03.000 I think all that stuff just makes people interested and then makes more people sign up.

00:45:07.000 And I just, I don't, boy, I don't see that at all.

00:45:10.000 If they were upset at you over that, that's pretty preposterous.

00:45:14.000 I wonder.

00:45:14.000 I've given, I gave talks.

00:45:17.000 Facebook and Google.

00:45:18.000 You're upset they won't give you a talk?

00:45:20.000 Is that what's going on?

00:45:21.000 Well, I'm curious.

00:45:22.000 I'm curious.

00:45:23.000 I mean, of course I'm curious.

00:45:24.000 Well, you have to sit before their Orwellian council, and maybe they'll go over every word that you're about to say.

00:45:29.000 What is their trust and verify council? 0.99

00:45:31.000 What the fuck is that called? 0.98

00:45:33.000 They have some people on that that are... 1.00

00:45:37.000 Ridiculous social justice warriors, proven attention whores, people that are dishonest. 0.98

00:45:42.000 They'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. 0.98

00:45:52.000 I mean, that's a bunch of people that are on that thing.

00:45:54.000 That's what they do.

00:45:56.000 I do think, like, if you're gonna address harassment on social media, you have to accept that it comes from both sides.

00:46:03.000 It 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... 1.00

00:46:08.000 You also have to define what is harassment and what is criticism.

00:46:13.000 Now, 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.

00:46:21.000 That is not harassment. 0.98

00:46:22.000 I just think that that is someone shitting on you. 0.99

00:46:25.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:46:26.000 And you put yourself out there.

00:46:27.000 I mean, especially someone who's...

00:46:29.000 Look, you're not...

00:46:31.000 These people, a lot of them, they're not singers.

00:46:34.000 They're not authors.

00:46:35.000 They're not musicians.

00:46:37.000 They're not comics.

00:46:38.000 They're not producing anything other than their words, right? 0.96

00:46:43.000 So if someone doesn't like your words and they shit on your words, what else do you expect? 0.98

00:46:49.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:46:49.000 I noticed that there was some kind of gaslighting going on on the left. 0.99

00:46:55.000 Like, everyone would agree.

00:46:57.000 The 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. 0.97

00:47:12.000 And it is bad.

00:47:13.000 It is bad.

00:47:14.000 Yeah.

00:47:15.000 But when the mirror image of that is happening, people just pretend it's not happening.

00:47:22.000 Right.

00:47:22.000 When someone goes after someone on the right, even if it's a woman.

00:47:25.000 Like, you know, a perfect example of that was no feminist stood up to defend Sarah Palin. 1.00

00:47:32.000 Like, there's no one. 0.99

00:47:33.000 I mean, you never heard that when Bill Maher was calling her a cunt and all these different people were mocking her. 0.99

00:47:39.000 No one was stepping up and saying, hey, that's a woman. 1.00

00:47:42.000 That's a mother. 1.00

00:47:43.000 You know, that's someone's mom.

00:47:46.000 Like, leave her alone. 0.99

00:47:47.000 Have some respect for women. 1.00

00:47:48.000 If you're a woman and you're a conservative, like, you might as well be a monster. 0.99

00:47:52.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:47:53.000 There was undoubtedly sort of, well it's cognitive dissonance, right?

00:47:58.000 Like 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.

00:48:08.000 Well, 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.

00:48:15.000 You don't even think of them as a person.

00:48:17.000 I noticed that happened to me.

00:48:19.000 An editor said that they wanted to run a series of articles about bullying on the internet and wanted me to contribute to the series.

00:48:31.000 And they said they wanted it to all be about how women are being bullied by men.

00:48:36.000 And I said, you know, I've no doubt that that happens a lot.

00:48:41.000 And it's presumably disproportionate, like women are bullied by men more than other groups are bullied.

00:48:48.000 You know, that could well be true.

00:48:49.000 But 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.

00:49:03.000 And the editor, when I said that to her, kind of rolled her eyes, as if to say, well, you would think that.

00:49:10.000 Oh, wow.

00:49:11.000 Yeah.

00:49:11.000 But, you know, it's true.

00:49:12.000 It's true.

00:49:13.000 And, you know, the problem's not going to go away until we... 1.00

00:49:18.000 Yeah, they're hypocrites. 0.96

00:49:19.000 I mean, that's essentially what's going on. 0.99

00:49:21.000 People don't want to be nice.

00:49:23.000 They think that there's power in shaming.

00:49:26.000 I've had multiple conversations with people online that think there is good in shaming people.

00:49:33.000 I'm like, well, you're saying that because you're hiding behind a keyboard and it's a free shot.

00:49:37.000 But if you had to sit down with that person in front of them and talk to them face to face and feel the social consequences.

00:49:44.000 Right.

00:49:45.000 It 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,

00:50:00.000 that's the internet. 0.82

00:50:01.000 Like 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,

00:50:19.000 we want to listen and understand.

00:50:20.000 We're like the 25-year-old adult film actors who can't get work.

00:50:23.000 Well, people don't like nuanced points of view.

00:50:26.000 And they also don't like people that are willing to talk to anybody.

00:50:29.000 You know, I've had so many people call me some sort of a right-wing monster.

00:50:33.000 And I'm like, well, let's go over what makes a right-wing monster.

00:50:37.000 What is right-wing? 0.97

00:50:38.000 I support gay marriage.

00:50:40.000 I support universal healthcare.

00:50:43.000 I'm absolutely in favor, if it could work, I don't know if it would work, of universal basic income.

00:50:50.000 Where do I become right-wing?

00:50:53.000 Where does it go?

00:50:54.000 I'm anti-war.

00:50:55.000 Where do I become right-wing?

00:50:58.000 In politics, as in porn, everything now has to be keyword searchable.

00:51:03.000 So everybody has to fall into some sort of niche.

00:51:05.000 And if you're not doing it yourself, then someone else is going to do it for you.

00:51:09.000 Yeah, but even when you're saying that, you don't.

00:51:11.000 That's not real.

00:51:12.000 You don't have to.

00:51:13.000 You don't have to fall into those categories.

00:51:15.000 It'd just be easier for people to categorize you if you did fall into those categories.

00:51:19.000 I'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.

00:51:29.000 But it's very convenient, especially when you look like me, and I look like a meathead.

00:51:34.000 It's easy to say that I'm some meathead conservative or a right winger or something along those lines.

00:51:41.000 Way more likely to vote for someone on the left than I am for someone on the right.

00:51:45.000 Because I think the people on the right, in general, are more suppressive, especially socially and culturally.

00:51:52.000 And I think that's where the real issues lie.

00:51:54.000 When you look at what Obama did...

00:51:56.000 Yeah, on the right.

00:51:57.000 When 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.

00:52:11.000 If you looked at it in terms of actual, real consequences of him being the president, a lot of it was very right-wing.

00:52:18.000 But, 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.

00:52:27.000 Now, I don't know if the Affordable Care Act was good, because...

00:52:30.000 A lot of small businesses, doctors with small offices hated it and thought it was absolutely horrible and it killed their business.

00:52:38.000 I don't know who's right about that because obviously I don't have to deal with that.

00:52:41.000 It's a controversial subject.

00:52:43.000 But the idea behind it, I liked. 0.65

00:52:45.000 I 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...

00:52:59.000 Caring for our neighbors and our fellow humans like that seems to me to be a no-brainer.

00:53:05.000 Yeah, 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.

00:53:31.000 I got a question.

00:53:32.000 Can I just, like, totally change the subject for a second?

00:53:36.000 We have Alex Jones in common, because I, years ago, snuck into Bohemian Grove with Alex.

00:53:42.000 What year was that?

00:53:44.000 That was, like, when he did it in, like, the late 90s?

00:53:47.000 Yeah, it was 1990. You were with him on that.

00:53:50.000 That's right.

00:53:50.000 Yeah, 1999. Did we talk about that the last time you were here?

00:53:53.000 We did talk about it last time, yeah.

00:53:55.000 But since I saw you last, I rekindled my relationship with Alex as a means of trying to get inside the Trump world, which didn't go great.

00:54:08.000 It didn't go well?

00:54:08.000 What happened?

00:54:09.000 Not that well.

00:54:09.000 Well, I think I annoyed Alex a little bit.

00:54:11.000 Oh, no.

00:54:11.000 What'd you do?

00:54:12.000 I basically said Alex shouldn't have political sway.

00:54:17.000 You told him that?

00:54:18.000 Well, I wrote it in a story about him.

00:54:20.000 I 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.

00:54:35.000 But I'm wondering, you've seen Alex more recently than I have.

00:54:38.000 Well, Alex has been my friend since 1998. Yeah, I was at his custody trial not long ago, and you were brought up.

00:54:44.000 You were brought up in evidence.

00:54:45.000 Oh, that's right, because he was smoking pot on my show.

00:54:47.000 He was smoking pot, exactly.

00:54:49.000 Well, I'm just testing it.

00:54:50.000 See, George Soros makes the weed stronger.

00:54:53.000 That's what he said.

00:54:54.000 He said that in his custody trial.

00:54:56.000 Yeah, that's exactly what he said.

00:54:57.000 He said he tests it once a year.

00:55:00.000 It's weird, because it's like, I'm always there when that happens.

00:55:07.000 I mean, come on, man.

00:55:10.000 What's really funny is we drank whiskey on the show, too. 0.99

00:55:12.000 No one gives a shit about that. 0.99

00:55:13.000 That's way more destructive. 0.99

00:55:15.000 It's the pot.

00:55:16.000 Whatever.

00:55:17.000 The self-reflective, paranoia-inducing marijuana.

00:55:22.000 It's a real problem.

00:55:23.000 But I now wonder.

00:55:24.000 So he says that Trump called him just after the election to thank him.

00:55:29.000 And I'm inclined to believe that's true, because I don't think that's the kind of thing that Alex would lie about.

00:55:34.000 But have you come to any conclusion about whether there is a connection between Alex and Trump now?

00:55:40.000 Because I'm beginning to think maybe there just isn't anymore.

00:55:43.000 But I could be wrong.

00:55:44.000 That's a good question.

00:55:45.000 I don't know.

00:55:46.000 I mean, first of all, I don't see how Trump can have a connection with that many people.

00:55:52.000 I feel like the job of being the president has got to be so insanely demanding.

00:55:57.000 The idea that he's taking a few moments out of his day, he's got his feet up on the chair with a laptop, and he's on Infowars.com. 0.99

00:56:04.000 He's like, God damn, I've got to call Alex and find out what the fuck's going on with this child slavery thing on Mars. 0.99

00:56:10.000 You know? 1.00

00:56:12.000 Alex, where are these slaves?

00:56:14.000 Tell me where.

00:56:15.000 We're on Mars.

00:56:16.000 I think it benefits everyone to think they're Alex, because it makes Trump look bad.

00:56:22.000 So it benefits people on the left to say that Alex is connected to Trump.

00:56:27.000 It kind of benefits Alex, I think, for people to think it too, because it aggrandizes him.

00:56:32.000 Well, it helps him in a way.

00:56:33.000 I mean, it's like the people that...

00:56:35.000 There's a bunch of people that enjoy Alex, right?

00:56:38.000 So some of them enjoy it for the theater.

00:56:41.000 There's a theater element of it all, you know?

00:56:44.000 I mean, and it's all doom and gloom and...

00:56:47.000 And then some of it...

00:56:48.000 Some people enjoy it because...

00:56:51.000 Like Bohemian Grove, occasionally he's correct. 0.99

00:56:54.000 Like, Bohemian Grove is a real mindfuck. 0.97

00:56:56.000 When you see all these super rich people wearing robes, burning an effigy, yeah. 0.99

00:57:01.000 I was in the crowd.

00:57:02.000 Yeah.

00:57:03.000 With all the old men of wealth. 0.98

00:57:04.000 Did that freak you out?

00:57:05.000 You see those people?

00:57:06.000 One thing freaked me out.

00:57:08.000 Like, Alex came out of our Bohemian Grove night with a varying interpretation of what we witnessed.

00:57:17.000 What was your interpretation?

00:57:17.000 My interpretation is basically, with one caveat, I'm about to caveat this.

00:57:23.000 My interpretation was that it's just like fucking, you know, Skull and Bones or some sort of Harvard Club. 0.97

00:57:28.000 But those are all creepy, right? 0.98

00:57:30.000 Yeah, and there does seem to be amongst the American ruling elites, there does seem to be a proclivity for ritual.

00:57:39.000 Maybe amongst the British elites as well, I'm not sure.

00:57:42.000 But that's in itself psychologically interesting.

00:57:45.000 I think secrets too.

00:57:46.000 Right.

00:57:47.000 So it's like, why?

00:57:48.000 So that is interesting.

00:57:49.000 Why?

00:57:50.000 Even 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.

00:58:01.000 No, he didn't say they were sacrificing a child.

00:58:02.000 Did he say it at some point in time?

00:58:04.000 In this video, yeah.

00:58:05.000 It could be real.

00:58:06.000 It could be real, ladies and gentlemen.

00:58:08.000 It could be real.

00:58:08.000 He probably was so jazzed up that they were actually dressed up like monks with the hoods and they have the Moloch, the Owl God.

00:58:15.000 When he was actually there, I mean, that probably ramped up his love of conspiracy.

00:58:21.000 Oh, so much.

00:58:22.000 Three or four hundred percent.

00:58:23.000 It was hilarious.

00:58:24.000 Because, you know, we went in separately to...

00:58:27.000 Because Alex got it into his head that maybe I was part of the Bohemian Grove...

00:58:32.000 Oh, you're like deep, deep inside.

00:58:34.000 Yeah, like the wicked man that I was like luring him in saying he would be the one sacrificed at the belly of the owl. 0.78

00:58:38.000 Oh, no.

00:58:39.000 So he went in separately to me.

00:58:41.000 He went in for the undergrowth.

00:58:42.000 And I went up the drive.

00:58:44.000 I just went up the driveway and gave the security guard a kind of I rule the world wave.

00:58:48.000 And then we went in there.

00:58:50.000 That's all you had to do?

00:58:51.000 Yeah, yeah. 1.00

00:58:51.000 Lazy ass security guards. 1.00

00:58:53.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:58:54.000 God, that's so often the case.

00:58:55.000 Yeah.

00:58:56.000 It's like the White House.

00:58:57.000 And then we saw Alex and Mike Hansen, who was his producer at the time, walking towards us.

00:59:04.000 And I was with this local lawyer who we talked up with.

00:59:07.000 And I was like...

00:59:09.000 Hey, you know, Alex, Mike, how you doing?

00:59:12.000 And they were like, keep walking!

00:59:13.000 There's cameras in the trees!

00:59:14.000 There's owls everywhere!

00:59:16.000 Owls?

00:59:17.000 Yes.

00:59:18.000 So you felt like the owls were cameras?

00:59:20.000 They 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.

00:59:30.000 Yeah.

00:59:31.000 And it was like some sort of satanic.

00:59:33.000 But actually...

00:59:35.000 Would 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? 0.74

00:59:51.000 I 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? 0.66

01:00:05.000 That night was... 0.99

01:00:06.000 Was one thing?

01:00:08.000 The 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.

01:00:22.000 They were really fired up by it.

01:00:26.000 I remember this old guy walked up to me before it started and said, Are you a first-timer?

01:00:31.000 And I went, yeah.

01:00:32.000 Oh, you're going to love it.

01:00:33.000 You're going to love it. 1.00

01:00:34.000 It's like, burn him, burn him. 1.00

01:00:35.000 Or something along those lines. 0.99

01:00:39.000 And it did make me think like...

01:00:41.000 And then I looked behind and there was Alex and Mike, wide-eyed, looking like they were in, you know, the belly of the beast.

01:00:46.000 And then there's all these old preppy men, like, wide-eyed.

01:00:49.000 They were really into it too.

01:00:50.000 I felt like the only sane person in the entire Redwood Forest. 1.00

01:00:54.000 I was like the only person who was thinking, this is fucking ridiculous. 1.00

01:00:57.000 It is ridiculous, but... 1.00

01:00:59.000 But they were into it. 0.92

01:01:01.000 It was that moment.

01:01:01.000 It 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.

01:01:13.000 Because I remember, like...

01:01:17.000 I 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.

01:01:23.000 And somebody said, okay, so I know what you think of it. 0.83

01:01:25.000 This woman in the audience said, I know what you think, I know you think this is like ridiculous. 0.94

01:01:29.000 And I know that Alex Jones thinks it's evil. 0.58

01:01:31.000 But what about the people in the crowd?

01:01:34.000 What were they thinking about it?

01:01:35.000 And I thought that's a really good question.

01:01:36.000 So 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.

01:01:43.000 Now, 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.

01:01:56.000 I mean, part of you had to be like, how many of these fucking things are going on that we haven't infiltrated? 0.79

01:02:03.000 Well, yeah, that's true. 0.98

01:02:04.000 Look at that.

01:02:05.000 There's a photo of it there.

01:02:06.000 This is real.

01:02:07.000 I mean, they really do have a giant owl, and they really do burn some sort of a sacrifice in front of this owl.

01:02:14.000 And there's the speakers.

01:02:17.000 There's at one point, this is a lesser documented part of the ritual.

01:02:22.000 At 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.

01:02:34.000 Like, oh trees, oh leaves.

01:02:39.000 So that's how it starts.

01:02:40.000 That's before the men in robes turn up.

01:02:42.000 So it's like some weird pagan nature ritual.

01:02:46.000 Leaf-covered lederhosen, Joe.

01:02:47.000 How much would you give to be in one of those skull and bones meetings? 1.00

01:02:50.000 See if they actually film each other sucking dicks or something. 0.99

01:02:54.000 There's just something that goes on where they have something over those guys, supposedly. 0.99

01:02:59.000 That's like the conspiracy theory. 1.00

01:03:01.000 They make them engage in gay sex. 1.00

01:03:04.000 I do believe these things happen for a reason. 0.99

01:03:07.000 Like, you know, skull and bones exist for a reason.

01:03:09.000 Well, they have something over you.

01:03:11.000 It 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.

01:03:20.000 And 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.

01:03:27.000 That's possible.

01:03:28.000 Now a guy like Alex Jones stumbles upon something like that or infiltrates it and finds out it is real.

01:03:33.000 I mean, that is justifying to such an enormous, enormous level. 0.99

01:03:39.000 Yeah, 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. 0.97

01:03:50.000 Like he had to like turn it up to 11. Of course. 0.98

01:03:53.000 Yeah, and imply that we had possibly witnessed an actual human sacrifice.

01:03:56.000 Of course, but that's standard.

01:03:58.000 That's standard Alex Jones 101. But it shouldn't be standard.

01:04:03.000 It shouldn't be, but I mean, think about all of the exaggerations that take place in the media.

01:04:10.000 Whether it's on the left or the right, there's rampant exaggerations.

01:04:14.000 Well, it's funny you should say that.

01:04:15.000 So did you watch Alex being interviewed by Megyn Kelly?

01:04:17.000 Yes, I did.

01:04:18.000 Yeah, well, that made me laugh.

01:04:19.000 You know, they phoned me a couple of days before the broadcast, Megyn Kelly's people, because they were panicking.

01:04:24.000 Do you remember, there was like a lot of criticism they were getting for having him on in the first place.

01:04:29.000 Yeah.

01:04:30.000 So 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.

01:04:39.000 Called you.

01:04:39.000 Why?

01:04:40.000 Because you went to Bohemian Grove with them?

01:04:41.000 I 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.

01:04:53.000 It's kind of interesting stuff.

01:04:56.000 So I answered the questions as best as I could, but I don't know that much about exactly how often Trump and Alex talk to each other.

01:05:03.000 Yeah, I don't know either.

01:05:04.000 I'm not really that interested in it, as odd as it is.

01:05:09.000 I have a very fucked up relationship with Alex in that he's actually my friend. 0.51

01:05:15.000 And so when I see him, it's like, what's up, man? 0.92

01:05:18.000 What are you doing? 0.96

01:05:18.000 I give him a hug and people go, oh, he's a monster. 0.96

01:05:21.000 How can you be friends with him? 0.77

01:05:22.000 And this and that.

01:05:24.000 I don't know.

01:05:25.000 I just base it on my interactions with him. 0.73

01:05:28.000 And does he say fucked up things? 0.88

01:05:29.000 The most disturbing thing that I didn't even know when he did the podcast, I didn't know that he was a Sandy Hook denier. 0.74

01:05:35.000 Right.

01:05:35.000 So apparently he's backed off that since being confronted by the facts.

01:05:41.000 And there was a horrible article that I read about a father who was actually a conspiracy theorist until his son was killed in Sandy Hook.

01:05:49.000 And then he got death threats for lying and being an actor.

01:05:54.000 From Infowars.

01:05:55.000 Yeah, and that was just so sad.

01:05:58.000 Yeah, that's just so horrible. 0.98

01:05:59.000 People look for fucking conspiracies in everything, and I don't know what it is. 0.99

01:06:05.000 I have friends that have this issue. 0.99

01:06:07.000 I don't understand it.

01:06:09.000 Things that could be easily explained, they look for a conspiracy.

01:06:13.000 Anything that happens in the news, there's got to be a different story. 0.99

01:06:16.000 Like, sometimes shit just happens, and when that shit happens, the news has a story. 1.00

01:06:22.000 It doesn't always have to be some sort of nefarious plot, but these people also think that the government is filled with idiots. 1.00

01:06:29.000 Well, I'm sorry, but you can't have it both ways. 1.00

01:06:31.000 You 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. 0.99

01:06:46.000 There's a weird inclination that people have to not just... 1.00

01:06:51.000 Not just some conspiracy theories, but almost everything to think everything is some part of some crazy plot.

01:06:57.000 I'm not sure I understand it.

01:06:59.000 What 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.

01:07:07.000 So, you know, so they phoned me up, obviously in a bit of a panic because they were getting like so much criticism.

01:07:12.000 Right.

01:07:13.000 And then they re-edited the show, like, frantically just before it went out.

01:07:17.000 Re-edited it?

01:07:17.000 Yeah, apparently.

01:07:18.000 What did they change?

01:07:19.000 Well, I don't know.

01:07:20.000 But what I do know is, like you, I saw the final product.

01:07:23.000 And the final product was basically Megyn Kelly, like, looking incredibly poised, saying, you know, you're wrong, Alex.

01:07:31.000 You're wrong about this.

01:07:32.000 And then it would cut to Alex going, ah, bah, bah, ah.

01:07:34.000 And then we cut back to Megan.

01:07:36.000 So all they did was edit Alex at his most sweaty and stuttery.

01:07:41.000 And then Megan Kelly at her most poised and perfect.

01:07:45.000 Did you hear the Alex Jones audio?

01:07:48.000 The leaked audio that he released?

01:07:49.000 Yes.

01:07:50.000 Where they were sort of buttering him up and conning him.

01:07:53.000 Yeah, Alex the father.

01:07:55.000 Personally, I would...

01:07:56.000 She was saying, I'm not here to make a hit piece.

01:07:58.000 I just want to know the real you.

01:08:00.000 Although they did re-edit, so I wonder what the original...

01:08:05.000 What this program would have been like.

01:08:06.000 Because they felt forced to basically...

01:08:08.000 By him?

01:08:09.000 Yeah.

01:08:09.000 Well, they felt forced by the people pushing back against them doing it.

01:08:13.000 Both.

01:08:14.000 Yeah. 0.73

01:08:15.000 To then put out this shitty, you know, 10 minutes. 0.93

01:08:18.000 I wish I was in Megyn Kelly's corner. 0.95

01:08:21.000 I would have told her, first of all, don't ever go to NBC. Listen, here's the deal.

01:08:25.000 You made your bones as an ice princess on this conservative network. 0.97

01:08:30.000 And do you think they're just gonna accept you at NBC? People are gonna resent you?

01:08:35.000 They're gonna hate you?

01:08:36.000 Like, you're the lady that chastised people for saying that Santa Claus potentially wasn't white.

01:08:41.000 Remember that?

01:08:42.000 I don't remember that.

01:08:43.000 Oh my god, it was some thing where there were people talking about Santa Claus being black.

01:08:48.000 And I'll never forget it, because she was on TV going, you know, listen, Santa Claus is white. 1.00

01:08:53.000 And I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? 1.00

01:08:57.000 Santa Claus isn't real, you crazy bitch. 1.00

01:09:01.000 You can't say Santa Claus is white more than you can say Cat in the Hat is red. 1.00

01:09:05.000 They're not real things.

01:09:07.000 You know, you can decide that the cat in the hat in the book is always white.

01:09:12.000 Okay.

01:09:13.000 Yeah, you're right.

01:09:14.000 Good point.

01:09:14.000 But is he black?

01:09:16.000 Is he white?

01:09:17.000 What is the cat in the hat?

01:09:18.000 The hat is red and white.

01:09:20.000 What color is he, though?

01:09:22.000 I think he's black, right?

01:09:24.000 Is he?

01:09:25.000 Okay.

01:09:26.000 It's not important.

01:09:27.000 But 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.

01:09:47.000 And then all of a sudden she's on NBC. Like, you can't do that.

01:09:50.000 That's a terrible move.

01:09:51.000 They're not going to accept you.

01:09:52.000 This is not going to work.

01:09:53.000 And the ratings have been horrendous.

01:09:55.000 And now they pulled the show.

01:09:57.000 They pulled the show early.

01:09:58.000 But it just goes to show like, you know, we rightly attack people like Infowars for spreading, you know, outright lies.

01:10:08.000 Yes.

01:10:09.000 But we, on the left, like Megyn Kelly, editing that segment to make it look like she was poised and perfect. 0.98

01:10:15.000 And all Alex does is stammer and sweat.

01:10:17.000 Well, it's a very hard sell saying that Megyn Kelly's on the left.

01:10:20.000 She's on the left now? 0.88

01:10:21.000 Well, I mean, like, the mainstream.

01:10:23.000 Let me say the mainstream.

01:10:24.000 It's like NBC. So the mainstream has its own tricks.

01:10:27.000 It's like it's not an outright lie, like Alex would do.

01:10:31.000 But that, you know, panicky, selective editing is a lie of its own.

01:10:37.000 I 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.

01:10:49.000 I'm sure.

01:10:50.000 So it's a life of its own.

01:10:51.000 Well, here's also the problem. 0.92

01:10:53.000 Having any sort of a conversation about any sort of difficult subject and stuffing it into seven minutes or whatever it is, It's ridiculous.

01:11:02.000 It'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.

01:11:16.000 It's a better way to communicate.

01:11:18.000 And 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.

01:11:25.000 Because there's no other way to see him like that.

01:11:27.000 I wanted to get him drunk, I wanted to get him high, and I wanted to have him talk. 0.90

01:11:31.000 And 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. 0.96

01:11:40.000 But it was good, overall. 0.92

01:11:43.000 Because it's like, he was, Alex is so crazy that even Eddie was like, what? 0.99

01:11:47.000 There was a couple moments where Eddie turned to look at Alex and goes, what the fuck? 0.99

01:11:51.000 Like when he's talking about interdimensional child molesters. 0.99

01:11:55.000 I wanted people to see him the way I see him.

01:11:58.000 He's a fun guy that I like hanging out with.

01:12:01.000 Do I think that he has a lot of influence?

01:12:03.000 Yeah.

01:12:04.000 Do I think he says things that he definitely shouldn't say?

01:12:06.000 Of course, especially the Sandy Hook stuff.

01:12:09.000 I mean, I think this inclination to always look towards conspiracy.

01:12:14.000 Yes.

01:12:15.000 It's dangerous, it's harmful.

01:12:19.000 It's dangerous in that people are easily led. 0.92

01:12:23.000 And 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. 0.66

01:12:30.000 And there's a ton of them that are real. 0.99

01:12:32.000 So 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. 0.99

01:12:38.000 No one is listening. 0.99

01:12:40.000 Sure, I agree.

01:12:41.000 That'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.

01:12:52.000 Yeah.

01:12:52.000 Yeah, he's got some crazy ideas about Mars.

01:12:54.000 Or, no, was it the moon?

01:12:57.000 There's bases on the moon that they're going to all the time?

01:13:01.000 Is that what he's saying?

01:13:02.000 He's got some crazy moon thing.

01:13:05.000 Like, he thinks that they, well, they went on the moon, the problem is what they found up there.

01:13:09.000 The goat-spider hybrid that he talks about is true, though. 0.99

01:13:13.000 He 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...

01:13:29.000 Alex Jones reveals the truth about animal-human hybrids and the moon landing. 0.87

01:13:35.000 The real problem.

01:13:36.000 Give us some volume here, because Alex...

01:13:49.000 Yes.

01:13:49.000 Pause right there.

01:13:55.000 I agree with him 100% on that.

01:13:57.000 I felt like that was so preposterous.

01:13:59.000 And I like Kathy as a person.

01:14:01.000 I've met her a hundred times.

01:14:03.000 She's with Kathy Griffin.

01:14:05.000 Oh, okay.

01:14:05.000 She'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,

01:14:21.000 that his children could have seen.

01:14:23.000 What is that?

01:14:25.000 It's so ineffective.

01:14:28.000 And then for her to say that he broke her, he's a bully, all he did was say it was horrible.

01:14:34.000 Yeah.

01:14:35.000 Like, that he's targeting her.

01:14:37.000 It's like this whole, like, professional victim thing that people enjoy.

01:14:42.000 They enjoy, like, taking on the role with such, they have such, like, energy they put to being the victim.

01:14:51.000 It's just, God, you shouldn't hold up pictures of people's heads. 0.99

01:14:55.000 Okay, 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! 0.96

01:15:07.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:15:08.000 You 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.

01:15:26.000 And a bunch of his people are the ones who now drive vans into pedestrians.

01:15:33.000 And 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.

01:15:51.000 Well, maybe he's right about these animal-human hybrids. 0.92

01:15:54.000 Go back to that, please.

01:15:55.000 We need to find out what's happening on the moon.

01:15:58.000 That was awesome.

01:16:00.000 Did you turn off of it?

01:16:01.000 Go back to it.

01:16:02.000 What'd you do?

01:16:03.000 Running around fomenting war, fomenting violence, fomenting death.

01:16:09.000 Out of all their meth-mouthed reporters.

01:16:11.000 He broke me.

01:16:13.000 Looks like the Day of the Dead on CNN. Just like Kathy Griffin. 0.95

01:16:18.000 I guess that's the look that Zucker's looking for.

01:16:21.000 And then they freak out and go, you called me irresponsible.

01:16:26.000 You said that I was a bad person.

01:16:29.000 I've been crushed by you. 1.00

01:16:32.000 You're a bully. 0.99

01:16:35.000 It's a bunch of corporate special interests that had their Okay, stop. 0.99

01:16:47.000 Pause. 0.99

01:16:48.000 How 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. 0.99

01:16:59.000 Like, what?! 0.99

01:17:00.000 How the fuck has Kathy Griffin got her knee on anybody's neck? 1.00

01:17:04.000 She's not a corporation. 0.99

01:17:05.000 She's not a special interest. 1.00

01:17:07.000 She's a fucking comic. 1.00

01:17:08.000 I know her. 1.00

01:17:09.000 You can can that conspiracy instantaneously.

01:17:12.000 You're looking for the part where he talks about the moon?

01:17:14.000 I was looking ahead to see what this human-animal hybrid is coming. 0.56

01:17:18.000 Here's the thing.

01:17:18.000 I agree with you that he has too much influence over some people, but I disagree.

01:17:25.000 In that, I don't think any of that should be taken seriously.

01:17:30.000 Like, what he just said should not be taken seriously, right?

01:17:33.000 Oh, sure.

01:17:34.000 I mean, none of this would matter if there wasn't just the possibility that Trump believes this stuff.

01:17:39.000 Although, I'll tell you what I would say.

01:17:41.000 Last summer, I wrote this book, The Elephant in the Room, trying to trace just how it works.

01:17:46.000 Like, Alex via Roger Stone meeting Trump and so on.

01:17:50.000 I discovered one really interesting thing, which is, this is something Alex didn't like.

01:17:53.000 Alex did say to me when I was writing this book, you can write whatever you want, I don't care.

01:17:58.000 But that turned out to not be entirely true.

01:18:00.000 There were things that he did care about that I wrote.

01:18:02.000 And 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,

01:18:21.000 even though they were both at Mar-a-Lago.

01:18:24.000 Trump was in one room and Glenn Beck was in the other.

01:18:27.000 And Trump phoned Glenn Beck and said, I think you're so influential.

01:18:32.000 You're so great.

01:18:33.000 You're great.

01:18:34.000 You've got such influence.

01:18:35.000 You can unite the Tea Party and the mainstream Republicans. 1.00

01:18:39.000 And Glenn Beck thought, fuck you. 1.00

01:18:41.000 I know what you're doing here. 1.00

01:18:43.000 You're playing me.

01:18:44.000 I've been down this road a million times.

01:18:46.000 And then Trump did the same thing to Alex.

01:18:48.000 He phoned Alex and said, you know, you have so much influence.

01:18:52.000 You're so amazing.

01:18:54.000 And Alex bought it.

01:18:57.000 Is this according to Glenn Beck?

01:18:58.000 No, no, I spoke to both of them.

01:19:01.000 But you didn't speak to Trump?

01:19:03.000 I didn't speak to Trump, but I spoke to both Glenn Beck and Alex.

01:19:06.000 Right, but you don't know that Glenn Beck really did get that phone call from Trump, right?

01:19:11.000 Well, Glenn Beck told me that.

01:19:12.000 Right. 1.00

01:19:13.000 But 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? 1.00

01:19:29.000 But I do think, like...

01:19:32.000 But that's convenient.

01:19:33.000 Like, if it's right, it's convenient.

01:19:35.000 It makes it look interesting.

01:19:36.000 Although, well, I mean, it's what Glenn Beck told me.

01:19:39.000 I only have his word for that story.

01:19:40.000 But, I mean, you don't really know, right?

01:19:43.000 Well, I mean, Glenn Beck told me that.

01:19:45.000 I 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.

01:19:52.000 We're going to do our best to keep you in office. 0.99

01:19:55.000 Fight against the tyranny and all these fucking people out there that think they're gonna stop us! 0.99

01:20:01.000 I mean, that's who he is. 1.00

01:20:04.000 You know, you can get him riled up.

01:20:05.000 That's who he is.

01:20:06.000 But I do think that Alex is a kind of bit of a neophyte in all of this, because nobody had taken him that seriously.

01:20:12.000 Nobody in positions of power had taken him that seriously.

01:20:15.000 Yeah, but here's the deal.

01:20:18.000 I think Trump played Alex, and Alex was played.

01:20:23.000 You might be right. 0.78

01:20:24.000 But 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. 0.56

01:20:38.000 Alex was really smart. 0.96

01:20:41.000 Alex, 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.

01:20:48.000 So Alex was very smart.

01:20:49.000 Alex always gave himself a sort of parachute out of this relationship.

01:20:53.000 So I think Trump played Alex and Alex was a bit too gullible and believed Trump's slick talk.

01:21:00.000 But Alex was also smart and gave himself an out whenever he wanted the out. 0.97

01:21:06.000 Alex is goddamn entertaining. 0.99

01:21:07.000 Like, that alone is fucking entertaining. 0.99

01:21:10.000 Especially for me, a person, I'm not gonna be influenced by these things that he says. 0.94

01:21:14.000 But one thing that I have been influenced is by him uncovering some things that are real conspiracies.

01:21:21.000 One of them being agent provocateurs that they use to disrupt peaceful protests.

01:21:26.000 This is something that I didn't know was a standard tactic by the military and by certain politicians.

01:21:33.000 And what they do is they will hire these people.

01:21:36.000 I don't know like what branch of the military, what they do, but they will hire these people.

01:21:40.000 And it's been confirmed by people that I know that are like special operators.

01:21:46.000 They take these masked guys and say if they have some peaceful protest, the big one was the World Trade Organization.

01:21:53.000 Remember that protest?

01:21:55.000 Yeah.

01:21:55.000 And 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.

01:22:12.000 So now they break up these riots that they've created themselves, start arresting people left and right.

01:22:18.000 Then they put up a no protest zone.

01:22:21.000 This is all documented. 0.99

01:22:24.000 What the fuck did you just do? 0.99

01:22:26.000 Jamie's like, we need some dance music here! 0.99

01:22:28.000 This video has music on, apparently.

01:22:31.000 But 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. 0.97

01:22:47.000 The Occupy Wall Street movement was infiltrated ad nauseam by people from whatever branch of government, whoever the fuck they were. 0.69

01:22:56.000 But what they did was they caused chaos and then gave them an excuse to arrest them. 0.71

01:23:03.000 And then in the World Trade Organization thing, Alex detailed, like with news reports, independent news reports, how those people were not arrested.

01:23:12.000 They negotiated their freedom.

01:23:14.000 They all held up in a house somewhere and then they got them out of there as soon as everybody kind of like forgot about it all.

01:23:20.000 And then they set up a no protest zone.

01:23:22.000 And the no protest zone was fascinating because there's a lot of people that disagreed with the policies of the World Trade Organization.

01:23:29.000 And these people were going to work with a pin on a backpack or a jacket that said WTO and had a line through it.

01:23:36.000 The police told them they could not go through with the pin-on.

01:23:41.000 They could not go to work with a pin-on that had a line through the word WTO, like they opposed the WTO. This is a no protest zone.

01:23:49.000 Alex Jones showed that.

01:23:52.000 So as wacky as he might be about...

01:23:54.000 Alien babies that are coming from another dimension that are here to steal your soul and make you vote libertarian. 1.00

01:24:00.000 Like, he might be wrong about a lot of shit, but he also, he's got the balls to expose a lot of crazy shit that people didn't talk about. 1.00

01:24:09.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:24:10.000 It reminds me of a time I went to Aryan Nations just before it closed down.

01:24:15.000 Do you remember Aryan Nations in Idaho?

01:24:17.000 Oh, they had that—that was like near Boise, right?

01:24:20.000 Yeah, Coeur d'Alene.

01:24:21.000 Oh, Coeur d'Alene, that's right.

01:24:23.000 Coeur d'Alene.

01:24:23.000 Which is gorgeous.

01:24:24.000 It's crazy.

01:24:25.000 Yeah.

01:24:25.000 That's that crazy lake up there they have, right?

01:24:27.000 Yes.

01:24:27.000 Beautiful.

01:24:28.000 So I was making a documentary about Randy Weaver, about Ruby Ridge.

01:24:33.000 And I was spending a lot of time with Randy's daughter, Rachel, who I liked a lot.

01:24:37.000 Anyway, 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.

01:24:45.000 Will I tell the story?

01:24:46.000 Yeah.

01:24:46.000 Okay, so it was a family of white separatists, Randy and Vicky and their children, Sarah and Rachel and a boy whose name I've forgotten.

01:25:01.000 It'll come to me.

01:25:02.000 Anyway, so they moved to Idaho.

01:25:06.000 Early conspiracy theorists, they moved to Idaho to a cabin on top of a hill at a place called Ruby Creek.

01:25:13.000 Anyway, Randy and Vicky used to go to Aryan Nations for their picnics and barbecues. 0.86

01:25:19.000 But they weren't, and this is a kind of pivotal point, they weren't as crazy as the people at Aryan Nations. 0.83

01:25:26.000 They weren't.

01:25:37.000 I think?

01:25:45.000 And Randy said no.

01:25:47.000 So then they sent in this guy and asked Randy to saw off a shotgun a quarter of an inch below the legal limit.

01:25:55.000 So 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. 1.00

01:26:09.000 And Randy, being a kind of hot-headed idiot, I made a big show of saying no, fuck off. 1.00

01:26:18.000 So they went back to their cabins. 1.00

01:26:21.000 They went back to the cabin and a warrant was issued for Randy's arrest and Randy didn't turn up to court.

01:26:27.000 So now the US Marshals are like hiding in the bushes, looking at Randy's cabin.

01:26:33.000 Randy arms his kids, his tiny little kids, you know, so they're patrolling up and down outside the cabin with these guns.

01:26:40.000 They were becoming increasingly paranoid thinking they were being watched from the bushes and they were being watched from the bushes.

01:26:49.000 CCTV cameras and US Marshals.

01:26:51.000 Anyway, one day the US Marshals got too close to the cabin and one of Randy's dogs started barking.

01:27:01.000 And 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.

01:27:14.000 The US Marshals shot the little boy, nearly shot his arm off, and he turned around and tried to run back to the cabin.

01:27:24.000 I'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.

01:27:44.000 So they got the son's body and put him in the cabin.

01:27:50.000 And the next day, this FBI sharpshooter called Lon Horiuchi turned up.

01:27:56.000 So the FBI surrounded the cabin.

01:27:59.000 A US marshal had been killed.

01:28:02.000 There were tanks.

01:28:03.000 There were hundreds of troops.

01:28:05.000 This was like in the Clinton 90s when the Cold War was kind of dying and they needed a new enemy.

01:28:11.000 And so the new enemy that week was...

01:28:13.000 Randy Weaver and his family.

01:28:16.000 So Vicky Weaver was holding their baby, Elisabeth, in the doorway of the cabin and the sharpshooter shot Vicky through the face and killed her.

01:28:29.000 And then they pulled Vicky's body into the cabin and Randy was shot as well but survived.

01:28:37.000 And a siege ensued.

01:28:38.000 It lasted about two weeks of the kids inside the cabin, the FBI outside of the cabin.

01:28:45.000 It ended up ending peacefully.

01:28:48.000 Beau Grites, who was a big kind of militia hero, turned up and sort of helped to stop it from happening.

01:28:54.000 To help to get Randy out of the cabin.

01:28:58.000 And in the end the daughters each got a million dollars each in compensation and it all kind of faded away.

01:29:05.000 So 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.

01:29:14.000 So 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. 0.89

01:29:25.000 So I said, what's my genealogy?

01:29:30.000 That was the word they used.

01:29:31.000 What's your genealogy?

01:29:33.000 So I said, I'm Church of England.

01:29:37.000 And 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. 0.79

01:29:48.000 And the skinhead sort of drifted away from me.

01:29:50.000 And 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.

01:30:02.000 It'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.

01:30:09.000 Do they know how infiltrated they are?

01:30:11.000 They must do, right?

01:30:13.000 That's gotta be so weird.

01:30:14.000 I know.

01:30:15.000 I know.

01:30:15.000 They must do.

01:30:17.000 Because they were, like, infiltrated to fuck. 1.00

01:30:19.000 I mean, all of them were. 1.00

01:30:20.000 Yeah.

01:30:20.000 Well, that's one thing the federal government does good.

01:30:24.000 They infiltrate the mob.

01:30:27.000 They're always getting people to wear wires.

01:30:29.000 Right.

01:30:29.000 They're good at that.

01:30:30.000 Yeah.

01:30:30.000 Jamie, you wearing a wire?

01:30:31.000 Oh, I forget.

01:30:32.000 We're live.

01:30:33.000 There's no need.

01:30:34.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:30:35.000 So I think they protected me in that moment when I could have had the shit kicked out of me. 0.99

01:30:40.000 You think so? 0.99

01:30:40.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:30:41.000 They found out you were Jewish?

01:30:42.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:30:43.000 Well, because I'm obviously fucking Jewish. 0.99

01:30:45.000 No, not necessarily. 0.99

01:30:46.000 Do you think?

01:30:47.000 Yeah, people don't know anything and they think all English people look like you. 1.00

01:30:51.000 It was my own stupid fault. 1.00

01:30:52.000 I drove up the drive past all the signs that said, no Jews. 1.00

01:30:57.000 Jews turned back. 0.96

01:30:58.000 Now, as they surrounded me, I did think to myself, like, if I get... 0.96

01:31:01.000 Beaten up now. 1.00

01:31:02.000 It's my own stupid fault. 1.00

01:31:04.000 The Jew thing is so weird because it's a race and it's also religion. 1.00

01:31:08.000 It's a weird one.

01:31:10.000 Yeah.

01:31:11.000 No.

01:31:12.000 It's weird, right?

01:31:13.000 Yeah.

01:31:14.000 Because you're European, but you're also Jewish, which is a religion.

01:31:19.000 Yeah.

01:31:19.000 So if you're a European atheist, are you still a Jew?

01:31:23.000 Yeah.

01:31:24.000 Well, I mean, I am, basically.

01:31:26.000 I remember when I was with Omar Bakri, the Islamic fundamentalist, and he outed me as a Jew at his jihad training camp.

01:31:33.000 He did?

01:31:34.000 Yes. 1.00

01:31:34.000 Son of a bitch. 1.00

01:31:35.000 In a place called Crawley, which is near Gatwick Airport. 1.00

01:31:38.000 How rude.

01:31:38.000 He said to me, look at me with the infidel John, who is a Jew.

01:31:43.000 And they all went.

01:31:44.000 And I said, surely it's better to be a Jew than an atheist. 0.56

01:31:49.000 And I heard someone in the crowd go, no, it isn't.

01:31:51.000 The thing that really surprises me about that exchange is that I am an atheist. 0.99

01:31:57.000 So 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. 0.98

01:32:07.000 Like, what self-defeating? 0.99

01:32:09.000 Did you have second thoughts about that one? 0.99

01:32:11.000 Like, were you in the midst of those people going, what the fuck am I playing with here? 0.82

01:32:15.000 Yes, although quite quickly, the tension dissipated. 0.99

01:32:21.000 And I remember, like, a bunch of these young radical Islamists all started asking me, like, what it was like to be a Jew.

01:32:28.000 They were, like, treating me like a kind of tropical fish.

01:32:30.000 Like, what do babies taste like?

01:32:32.000 And I remember leaving that jihad training camp that day thinking I'd done some sterling work in bringing together communities.

01:32:42.000 Did you really believe that?

01:32:43.000 Well, I thought I believed it till 9-11.

01:32:46.000 Oh, wow.

01:32:47.000 Don't believe it anymore.

01:32:48.000 And Omar's people were like... 0.96

01:32:50.000 People in that room at that scout hut went on to become suicide bombers and to kill people and to drive vans into people.

01:33:00.000 It was a different world before 9-11, though.

01:33:02.000 The fear of jihadis was much, much, much less prevalent.

01:33:06.000 Yeah, I made this funny.

01:33:07.000 I 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...

01:33:17.000 He said he wouldn't rest until he saw the flag of Islam flying over Downing Street.

01:33:21.000 So we made this sort of almost comic film about his sort of blundering attempts to create like Sharia law in Britain. 0.99

01:33:28.000 And the joke of the film is that, oh, this is never going to work.

01:33:30.000 And it was kind of, you know, some of his ideas were ridiculous.

01:33:33.000 Like at one point he had these 5,000... 0.52

01:33:36.000 Black balloons carrying the call to war on these little...

01:33:40.000 They were like leaflets attached to these balloons with slogans like, Islam is the future of Britain.

01:33:47.000 And they were going to fly over London and land wherever.

01:33:51.000 But they hadn't properly calculated the weight ratio. 0.99

01:33:56.000 So these fucking balloons let them off and they all just stayed on the floor. 0.99

01:34:00.000 So all year they were failing at doing everything. 0.99

01:34:05.000 But 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.

01:34:18.000 True.

01:34:19.000 John Ronson, you've been around.

01:34:20.000 I've been around the block. 1.00

01:34:22.000 You've seen some shit. 1.00

01:34:22.000 I have seen some shit. 1.00

01:34:25.000 So when was the last time you were in Alex's presence? 0.99

01:34:29.000 Does texting count?

01:34:31.000 No.

01:34:33.000 Have you been around him since Bohemian Grove?

01:34:35.000 Oh, yeah, yeah.

01:34:36.000 I went to visit Infowars last summer, last August.

01:34:41.000 And what did you think of him, like, knowing him in the late 90s when you guys went to Bohemian Grove together and knowing him now?

01:34:49.000 Well, I mean, his operation has expanded, like, massively.

01:34:53.000 Oh, yeah.

01:34:54.000 Yeah, 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.

01:35:05.000 And it was Alex, Mike Hansen, Alex's girlfriend.

01:35:13.000 They always called her Violet, but her real name's Kelly.

01:35:17.000 I said to her, because I went to the custody hearing for a couple of days.

01:35:20.000 Oh, so I saw him then.

01:35:21.000 I went to the custody hearing because I was just curious.

01:35:23.000 And 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.

01:35:36.000 Is it?

01:35:36.000 That's what divorce lawyers were saying.

01:35:38.000 How's it the worst?

01:35:40.000 Because it went national?

01:35:41.000 And they just hated each other so much.

01:35:43.000 They hate each other.

01:35:44.000 Sad.

01:35:44.000 I said, like, yeah.

01:35:47.000 And now Alex has got a staff of like 75 people, you know, with like these giant hangers for his supplements, his male vitality supplements.

01:35:59.000 Have 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?

01:36:07.000 No.

01:36:08.000 So, because it's on the internet, he can say whatever he wants.

01:36:11.000 So 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.

01:36:19.000 And the look of, for Joey Diaz, it was like the cat who saw the canary and realized that the cage was open.

01:36:27.000 And so he's telling some story about smuggling weed through the airport.

01:36:31.000 Listen to this. 1.00

01:36:32.000 Every 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. 1.00

01:36:46.000 With that, I'm out here. 1.00

01:36:47.000 I gotta go smoke a cigarette.

01:36:48.000 You're making some very solid points.

01:36:51.000 Don't do the...

01:36:52.000 No, I know.

01:36:52.000 Joey, you get it.

01:36:54.000 I'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. 1.00

01:37:10.000 The one thing that you'll get about me is, I'll say fuck, but I will not fucking rob you. 1.00

01:37:15.000 If I need something, I'll ask you like a man. 1.00

01:37:17.000 Hey, go fuck yourself, you cop. 1.00

01:37:19.000 Hold on, hold on one second. 1.00

01:37:20.000 Take a joke, take a shuttle.

01:37:21.000 Joey Diaz, Facebook, Twitter, check yourself before you wreck yourself. 1.00

01:37:26.000 Big dicks in your ass. 1.00

01:37:28.000 Get out of here, you're in trouble. 1.00

01:37:31.000 I'm the empire.

01:37:33.000 This is the...

01:37:33.000 I'm throwing...

01:37:34.000 All right, all right. 0.95

01:37:35.000 Stay black, because that's the most important. 1.00

01:37:37.000 Okay, okay. 0.78

01:37:42.000 He made Alex speechless.

01:37:44.000 He's the funniest man that's ever lived.

01:37:46.000 Do you think Alex regrets all of this?

01:37:48.000 No!

01:37:49.000 Alex is great.

01:37:50.000 I have a good time with Alex, I'm telling you.

01:37:52.000 No, when I say all of this, I mean, do you think Alex regrets the fact that the spotlight is on him in a kind of unprecedented way?

01:37:59.000 No!

01:38:00.000 Do you think he doesn't?

01:38:01.000 No!

01:38:01.000 You don't think a part of him is, like, stressed out?

01:38:04.000 What?!

01:38:04.000 Honestly, I don't think so.

01:38:06.000 He's fine.

01:38:06.000 I've never met a guy in my life that has more Teflon when it comes to stress.

01:38:11.000 Like, well, I've been kind of stressed out lately, but I go to the gym and feel fine. 0.99

01:38:14.000 Had a cheeseburger, probably shouldn't have had that shit. 0.99

01:38:16.000 Trying to stick to my diet, but it's hard. 1.00

01:38:19.000 He doesn't give a fuck, man. 1.00

01:38:22.000 He's a weird guy. 1.00

01:38:24.000 He's got a very unusual constitution.

01:38:28.000 You know what I bet did stress him out, though?

01:38:30.000 There was a couple of, like, pending lawsuits, like Chobani and...

01:38:35.000 Chobani? 0.99

01:38:35.000 What does that mean? 0.99

01:38:36.000 Chobani, the yogurt people.

01:38:38.000 The yogurt?

01:38:38.000 He was consumed by yogurt people?

01:38:40.000 Yeah, he got into trouble with Chobani. 0.83

01:38:42.000 Because he said they were, like, importing rapists. 0.90

01:38:46.000 Oh, yeah. 0.93

01:38:47.000 And...

01:38:49.000 And, of course, he got into trouble with the pizza restaurant.

01:38:52.000 And I would bet you...

01:38:55.000 I mean, Pizzagate. 0.95

01:38:56.000 Infowars' Alex Jones apologizes for saying Shabani supports migrant rapists. 0.80

01:39:01.000 He didn't really say that.

01:39:03.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

01:39:04.000 Yeah, he did. 1.00

01:39:05.000 He's so fucking crazy. 1.00

01:39:06.000 And I would guarantee you that that... 1.00

01:39:08.000 They support it!

01:39:09.000 I'd guarantee you that that and the Pizzagate stuff properly stressed him out because I think both of those were risking his entire operation.

01:39:18.000 Okay, let me tell you something.

01:39:20.000 It might stress you out.

01:39:21.000 Like, if it was you and you were being sued by Shabani, you'd probably be freaking out. 0.95

01:39:25.000 You'd be like, I've clearly made a horrible mistake.

01:39:28.000 I need to come clean and I need to apologize. 0.99

01:39:30.000 I'm so paranoid that I freak out if I eat a Chobani guava and think I'm like, fuck, this is the most disgusting thing I've ever eaten. 0.97

01:39:38.000 My threshold for getting panicky and stressed out is very low. 0.99

01:39:44.000 That's incredible considering you're in a jihadi camp. 1.00

01:39:46.000 Yeah, I know.

01:39:47.000 I often wonder why I put myself in these so dangerous situations.

01:39:52.000 Maybe that's why it's so compelling when you do.

01:39:54.000 Yeah.

01:39:55.000 But Alex, you think, doesn't...

01:39:56.000 No.

01:39:57.000 No, I know him, man.

01:39:59.000 He's a different dude.

01:40:04.000 I 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.

01:40:10.000 It's weird, man, and I get it. 0.99

01:40:13.000 I 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. 1.00

01:40:25.000 Shame on you. 0.99

01:40:26.000 You know, I think the deeper and the more crazy he goes, the better his show is, the more it's entertaining.

01:40:32.000 I mean, I'm a bad person for that.

01:40:36.000 I don't think I am, though.

01:40:37.000 Yeah.

01:40:38.000 You've got me wondering, like, why I put myself in dangerous situations.

01:40:42.000 Really?

01:40:43.000 Are you thinking about it?

01:40:44.000 A little bit.

01:40:45.000 Maybe 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.

01:40:56.000 We panic unnecessarily so often that when something really worth panicking comes along, we actually handle it really well.

01:41:03.000 Well, 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.

01:41:10.000 I'm not doing that.

01:41:11.000 Yeah.

01:41:11.000 When 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.

01:41:23.000 Was that remote viewing as well?

01:41:24.000 Yeah, remote viewing.

01:41:25.000 They were different, but there was, like, an overlap.

01:41:28.000 I met a bunch of those guys.

01:41:30.000 Right, I bet you did.

01:41:31.000 When I was doing that sci-fi show.

01:41:32.000 Right, like Joe McMoneagle and Ed Dames.

01:41:35.000 Do you remember the name?

01:41:35.000 Ed Dames.

01:41:36.000 I met with him.

01:41:36.000 Okay, yeah.

01:41:37.000 He was talking to me about how they found various bad people using this weird stuff, and I was like, hmm.

01:41:44.000 Yeah.

01:41:45.000 Oh, yeah.

01:41:46.000 No, so I met all of those people, too.

01:41:48.000 Remote viewing sounds really exciting, but...

01:41:51.000 You know, psychic spies in the military. 0.99

01:41:53.000 But it turns out that actually their lives were quite shit. 0.99

01:41:56.000 Because they were like... 0.99

01:41:57.000 Because basically they sat in the fucking room all day trying to like psychically sketch for like 20 years. 0.99

01:42:02.000 They never saw any action. 0.99

01:42:04.000 One of them told me that because they were black up, because they didn't officially exist, They had no coffee machine.

01:42:11.000 They had to bring their own coffee into work every day because they couldn't justify having it.

01:42:14.000 Also, the room that they were in was really bad because they couldn't get it repaired because they didn't exist.

01:42:19.000 Right.

01:42:20.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:42:21.000 So their lives were quite shit. 0.99

01:42:24.000 I'll tell you how I came to this story. 0.99

01:42:26.000 So that was out.

01:42:27.000 This guy called Jim Schnabel had written this book called Remote Viewers, which kind of, you know, uncovered all of that stuff.

01:42:33.000 And there was this magician called Ray Hyman, who was like a skeptic.

01:42:37.000 I think he's dead now.

01:42:39.000 The CIA brought him in to assess...

01:42:42.000 The remote viewing program to see whether they should keep it going or close it down.

01:42:48.000 And Ray Hyman said it was kind of nonsense.

01:42:50.000 And so that helped the CIA close down the unit.

01:42:53.000 So 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.

01:43:00.000 I 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?

01:43:08.000 And he went, yeah, he said there was this general called Stubblebine who thought he could burst clouds with his mind.

01:43:17.000 And there was this lieutenant colonel called Channon who thought that he could train soldiers to fast for a month.

01:43:26.000 And so I had these two names, Stubblebine and Channon, and the whole...

01:43:29.000 Men to stay at goat stuff, which wasn't out in the open.

01:43:32.000 It all came out.

01:43:33.000 It was amazing that they were trying to kill goats just by staring at them.

01:43:37.000 So they had like...

01:43:39.000 I met this guy who was part of the goat staying program.

01:43:42.000 And they had like...

01:43:43.000 This is all at Fort Bragg.

01:43:46.000 I had a trip around Fort Bragg one time.

01:43:49.000 And I said to them like...

01:43:52.000 So where's Goat Lab?

01:43:53.000 And they went, you're not supposed to know about Goat Lab!

01:43:57.000 So they had like...

01:43:59.000 At 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.

01:44:12.000 Which I suppose is collateral damage.

01:44:15.000 I mean, I would argue that if you stare at a goat long enough, it's gonna fall over.

01:44:21.000 I mean, everything's gonna fall over eventually.

01:44:24.000 Sorry, I was drinking water when I was laughing.

01:44:26.000 Okay, sorry.

01:44:27.000 So the goat really did fall over and die?

01:44:29.000 Well, no.

01:44:30.000 Oh, well, Guy Cervelli.

01:44:32.000 So we tracked down the goat starer. 0.71

01:44:35.000 He now runs a dance studio in Ohio.

01:44:39.000 The Cervelli Dance and Martial Arts Studio.

01:44:42.000 Jesus Christ.

01:44:43.000 Yeah, so we tracked him down.

01:44:44.000 I said to him on the phone, so do you still ever kill goats just by staring at them?

01:44:51.000 And he went, well, as a matter of fact, just last week, I killed my hamster just by staring at him.

01:44:57.000 Hamsters live to be like three days old.

01:44:59.000 He said he caught it on video.

01:45:02.000 And I said, well, can we come and watch the video?

01:45:04.000 So we went...

01:45:05.000 He said, okay.

01:45:06.000 So we flew to Ohio to meet Guy Civelli.

01:45:10.000 The whole time, his son was filming me.

01:45:14.000 Like, the whole time I was there, he was filming me.

01:45:16.000 So eventually, like, he admitted, like, why they were filming me.

01:45:20.000 And it was that he was worried that I might be al-Qaeda, like, trying to learn...

01:45:26.000 How to stare at people and kill them? 0.81

01:45:27.000 Yes. 0.99

01:45:28.000 So he was like filming me just in case.

01:45:30.000 So he really believed it?

01:45:31.000 Totally.

01:45:32.000 So with this video, did it show him staring at a hamster and it does?

01:45:35.000 I saw the video of the hamster staring.

01:45:38.000 I should tell you, by the way, that the moment when they...

01:45:40.000 I think I've pinpointed the moment when they worked out that I wasn't Al-Qaeda.

01:45:45.000 And it was because it turns out that Guy Savelli's daughter is in the movie Chicago, like one of the dancers.

01:45:51.000 And so I kind of shrieked, oh...

01:45:55.000 Oh, I love Catherine Zeta-Jones.

01:45:58.000 And I think, like, they all kind of relax.

01:45:59.000 I think even like a kind of deep cover Al-Qaeda operative wouldn't think to go that effeminate.

01:46:05.000 So, yeah, so then they showed me the hamster video.

01:46:10.000 It's a hamster.

01:46:11.000 I'm sure this is on YouTube, by the way.

01:46:14.000 I'm sure you can find this.

01:46:16.000 If you typed in, I don't know, John Ronson, hamster, crazy rulers of the world, Guy Cervelli or something.

01:46:26.000 So the hamster's running around in its wheel and that guy's off camera staring at the hamster.

01:46:31.000 And then finally the hamster gets off the wheel and it's like all the sawdust.

01:46:35.000 And then the hamster like...

01:46:37.000 Drops, like, stops moving.

01:46:39.000 Drops down and stops moving amid the sawdust.

01:46:43.000 So I'm like, whoa!

01:46:45.000 And then the hamster gets up again and the video ends.

01:46:50.000 So I was like, that's not dead.

01:46:56.000 Like...

01:46:59.000 A guy said...

01:47:00.000 You flew all the way to Ohio to see a video of a hamster.

01:47:04.000 So a guy said, yeah, yeah, my wife told me not to...

01:47:07.000 My wife said, don't show them the part where the hamster dies. 0.75

01:47:12.000 What?!

01:47:12.000 Yeah, in case I was like a bleeding heart liberal and I was like...

01:47:15.000 His wife told him to not show you the video that you flew all the way the fuck to Ohio to see? 0.99

01:47:22.000 Well, I think it's possible that the hamster just doesn't die. 0.99

01:47:28.000 No way, bro.

01:47:29.000 But Guy showed me like a whole...

01:47:32.000 Is that him?

01:47:32.000 Yeah, that's Guy Sivelliott.

01:47:34.000 Full screen, please.

01:47:36.000 You need to put a guy's value in mind.

01:47:37.000 Hey, what happens when you've got a guest who's on for three hours and they want to use the bathroom?

01:47:41.000 Just go ahead and use the bathroom. 1.00

01:47:42.000 Go ahead.

01:47:42.000 Can you cover for me?

01:47:43.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

01:47:44.000 We'll turn the volume on here.

01:47:45.000 Okay.

01:47:46.000 Oh, he's doing some fake martial arts, too.

01:47:47.000 Oh, this is hilarious.

01:47:49.000 Oh, you don't understand.

01:47:51.000 This is my favorite stuff, John Ronson.

01:47:53.000 Look at this.

01:47:54.000 This is my favorite stuff.

01:47:56.000 It's all like pokes.

01:47:58.000 Triangle of death.

01:47:59.000 Oh, it's called the triangle of death.

01:48:01.000 Yeah.

01:48:03.000 Oh, go back to that.

01:48:05.000 I need to watch that again.

01:48:07.000 This is hilarious.

01:48:09.000 Ooh, the artery.

01:48:12.000 Esophagus.

01:48:14.000 Yeah.

01:48:18.000 Mm.

01:48:22.000 Mm.

01:48:23.000 Mm.

01:48:24.000 Mm.

01:48:30.000 Pause that for a second. 0.99

01:48:31.000 One thing about bullshit artists is they always use these real technical terms, especially martial arts bullshit artists. 0.99

01:48:38.000 They always talk about medical terms that they're disrupting the nerve, the vagus nerve that goes to the brain. 0.99

01:48:48.000 This is your C6, C7, your cervical disc, and I'm going to attack the cervical disc through the carotid artery.

01:48:56.000 It's almost like they learn all these technical terms. 0.97

01:49:00.000 Make their horseshit look more palatable. 0.98

01:49:03.000 Go ahead. 0.99

01:49:04.000 In order to live.

01:49:06.000 In the poison hand technique...

01:49:07.000 Poison hands? 0.94

01:49:08.000 Cool.

01:49:08.000 ...although we're not showing you how to strike to penetrate the skin, of which we have a way to do that...

01:49:14.000 What?

01:49:15.000 ...in the motion that we use...

01:49:17.000 Please don't show anybody, sir.

01:49:19.000 With your flabby grandma arms.

01:49:21.000 Now, just watch a second.

01:49:22.000 He's gonna watch.

01:49:23.000 He's gonna show you.

01:49:25.000 Oh, boy.

01:49:26.000 How's he alive? 0.99

01:49:28.000 It's just, the end part is my favorite, where he does like the fucking karate stance behind the guy's back. 0.98

01:49:38.000 Look at that, the end part! 0.98

01:49:40.000 A little limp hand to the back.

01:49:43.000 Oh, that guy is wonderful.

01:49:50.000 I don't know why, man.

01:49:52.000 I don't know why, but this stuff gives me so much pleasure.

01:49:55.000 I enjoy fake martial arts videos more than almost anything. 0.97

01:50:01.000 Almost as much as Hold This Beer, the Twitter account, that I fucking... 0.92

01:50:06.000 Every two days I have to retweet one because I find a good new one. 0.95

01:50:10.000 I don't know why.

01:50:11.000 Oh, he's got new stuff.

01:50:12.000 Oh, what's he gonna do?

01:50:13.000 Mind development.

01:50:14.000 Oh, mind development.

01:50:15.000 And striking techniques.

01:50:16.000 Let me see this.

01:50:17.000 Let me see this.

01:50:18.000 The guy's coming close.

01:50:19.000 He's touching him.

01:50:20.000 He's about to touch him. 1.00

01:50:21.000 What the fuck? 1.00

01:50:26.000 What the fuck was that? 1.00

01:50:27.000 The guy's about to touch him. 0.99

01:50:30.000 You're gonna hear this.

01:50:36.000 No, no, no, he's got this.

01:50:38.000 Hold on, play that back.

01:50:40.000 Play that back.

01:50:42.000 Development of the mind! 1.00

01:50:44.000 So you know the shit better than me, right? 1.00

01:50:46.000 Oh yeah, I certainly do. 1.00

01:50:47.000 This is your bread and butter.

01:50:48.000 This is something I've been doing more than I've been doing anything in my whole life.

01:50:55.000 This is the first real exercise towards that goal.

01:51:00.000 You gotta, you gotta see this! 1.00

01:51:02.000 It's so fucking stupid! 1.00

01:51:04.000 So he's the goat star for the minister of Goat. 1.00

01:51:06.000 Oh, he's just gonna punch a watermelon. 1.00

01:51:08.000 Oh, you're crazy, bro. 1.00

01:51:10.000 Solid watermelon. 0.99

01:51:10.000 Oh, it's solid? 0.99

01:51:11.000 Oh, no way.

01:51:12.000 That's impenetrable.

01:51:13.000 That's basically a brick wall.

01:51:15.000 He's gonna use his fingers.

01:51:17.000 One, two...

01:51:22.000 Oh, I broke his hand, son.

01:51:23.000 You broke your hand, kid.

01:51:25.000 He's the first guy to tell me about the dim mac, the death touch.

01:51:28.000 He went right through that watermelon, bro.

01:51:31.000 I would let that guy do that to me. 1.00

01:51:32.000 I'd be like, okay, fuck the watermelon, dude. 1.00

01:51:35.000 Let me tighten up my stomach. 1.00

01:51:36.000 Oh, yeah, I've seen these.

01:51:38.000 I've seen this stuff.

01:51:39.000 Yeah, this is Guy doing military stuff, right?

01:51:41.000 This is deep.

01:51:42.000 Well, it's not really military, but he's wearing a military outfit.

01:51:48.000 I do know that Guy went to Fort Bragg and did the goat stuff. 1.00

01:51:53.000 Like, he showed me documentation.

01:51:55.000 See this right here?

01:51:56.000 Listen, man.

01:51:57.000 I used to do this. 1.00

01:51:58.000 Look at that so stupid, that guy! 1.00

01:52:00.000 He picked his leg up when he's doing it. 1.00

01:52:02.000 Oh, this is hilarious.

01:52:03.000 This guy's gonna do it at his fingertips.

01:52:08.000 Here's the thing.

01:52:09.000 When I was a kid, like real young, we used to do these demonstrations when I was like 15. Right.

01:52:17.000 When we would open up a new school, we'd do these demonstrations, and it was the only time we ever broke boards. 0.99

01:52:23.000 We fucking never broke boards. 0.94

01:52:24.000 Because it's really easy to do, and it looks harder than it is. 0.98

01:52:27.000 But like walking on hot coals, right?

01:52:29.000 It's way easier than walking on hot coals.

01:52:31.000 Because those things, first of all, the way they're cut is with the grain.

01:52:35.000 The grain is going in a manner...

01:52:40.000 What's the way we describe it?

01:52:41.000 It's like if you're holding something up, the grain is actually going in the way that you want it to break.

01:52:48.000 So you're breaking it with the grain.

01:52:49.000 You literally can do it with your fingers.

01:52:51.000 Like I could...

01:52:52.000 You could take, and those are thin pieces of wood, too.

01:52:54.000 You 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.

01:53:02.000 It breaks like nothing.

01:53:03.000 I was 15, and we would do these karate kicks and punches and stuff, and they always broke.

01:53:08.000 They always broke.

01:53:09.000 They're so easy to break.

01:53:10.000 So here's a question, and what does it say about, like, Special Forces at Fort Bragg that they would bring Guy in to do these?

01:53:18.000 They brought that guy in?

01:53:19.000 Well, 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.

01:53:28.000 He stared at goats at Fort Bragg.

01:53:30.000 Well, they probably just grabbed whatever dummies they could find. 0.53

01:53:33.000 Like, get some dudes willing to stare at a goat. 1.00

01:53:35.000 Like, there's a lot of people, though.

01:53:37.000 Here's one thing that is a fact.

01:53:38.000 There'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.

01:53:48.000 A lot.

01:53:49.000 I know people that were teaching fake martial arts that got into the military, that got into the police.

01:53:55.000 I knew the guy who was deep in the police force, and he had fake martial arts. 0.99

01:54:00.000 His martial arts were fucking completely useless. 0.94

01:54:03.000 And 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. 0.99

01:54:11.000 What is going on here?

01:54:12.000 They're blurring.

01:54:13.000 Look at how easy it is to break that.

01:54:15.000 Oh, they're special ops.

01:54:18.000 Okay.

01:54:19.000 So yeah, there you go.

01:54:20.000 And they were killing goats.

01:54:22.000 Cun Tau.

01:54:23.000 I've never even heard of that one.

01:54:24.000 Cun Tau.

01:54:25.000 Yeah, that's Guy Civelli's thing.

01:54:27.000 But, you know, then General Stubblebine, who I'm sure would have been a fan of this show because he was a big fan of Alex's and so on.

01:54:34.000 So he was, like, head of army intelligence.

01:54:36.000 He had 16,000 soldiers under his command and he, like, totally believed in all of this stuff.

01:54:41.000 He believed in that stuff?

01:54:42.000 Oh, yeah.

01:54:42.000 What that guy was doing?

01:54:43.000 General Stubblebine would, when he was head of army intelligence in Arlington, would try and walk through his wall at...

01:54:54.000 Because he told me one time, he said, like, he said, what is the atom mostly made up of?

01:55:00.000 Space.

01:55:01.000 What is the wall mostly made up of?

01:55:04.000 Atoms.

01:55:04.000 I mean, to me, the key word in this is mostly.

01:55:07.000 Mostly is a big part of that, bro.

01:55:10.000 He would like stand up from behind his desk and like, you know, basically run into his wall.

01:55:15.000 So you should have asked him, what's an atom bomb made up? 1.00

01:55:17.000 You fucking idiot. 1.00

01:55:19.000 Let me show you a video. 1.00

01:55:21.000 He said he would like, he'd bruise his nose trying to walk through his wall.

01:55:24.000 He said, fortunately, he was going through a messy divorce at the time.

01:55:28.000 So like, like other people in his office just assumed it was like, you know, his wife beat him up. 1.00

01:55:32.000 But in fact, he was She's probably like, I gotta get away from this wall walking asshole. 0.99

01:55:36.000 He was trying to merge the spaces between his atoms and the wall's atoms when he just kept bumping his nose. 0.99

01:55:42.000 Yeah, yeah, this was fun.

01:55:44.000 My couple of years.

01:55:46.000 When I did that sci-fi show, we did a whole segment on remote viewing and we actually had...

01:55:54.000 A 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.

01:56:12.000 I think actually, now that I think about it, I think DJ was more accurate.

01:56:17.000 You know the kind of dark secret of the remote viewing world?

01:56:21.000 I mean, you can't totally blame the remote viewers for this.

01:56:25.000 So the remote viewing unit at Fort Meade got declassified and shut down.

01:56:31.000 So 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.

01:56:40.000 So Ed Dames had this student called...

01:56:45.000 Magneto. 1.00

01:56:47.000 Fuck. 1.00

01:56:47.000 What was his name? 1.00

01:56:50.000 There was a woman called Courtney and then there was this other student.

01:56:53.000 I've forgotten her names.

01:56:54.000 Anyway, but they would then...

01:56:56.000 So 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.

01:57:06.000 And 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.

01:57:19.000 They'd remote viewed it.

01:57:20.000 The Hale-Bopp comet that was about to pass over the Earth had a companion object in its tail.

01:57:26.000 And listening to the Art Bell show was the Heaven's Gate group.

01:57:31.000 So they decided that that was the spaceship they were waiting for.

01:57:35.000 Yes.

01:57:35.000 So they all killed themselves to get on the spaceship.

01:57:39.000 Prudence Calabrese and another guy whose name I forgot.

01:57:44.000 Good lord.

01:57:44.000 Yeah.

01:57:45.000 So that's the sort of weird butterfly effect.

01:57:47.000 That's hilarious.

01:57:48.000 Yeah.

01:57:48.000 That whole thing was such a...

01:57:50.000 It's amazing what people want to believe.

01:57:53.000 Now, 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.

01:58:03.000 He's talking about how he has a method of going through the skin to attack the organs.

01:58:08.000 Like...

01:58:08.000 Right.

01:58:09.000 Oh, yeah, he told me all of that stuff.

01:58:11.000 Oh, he showed me a photograph of, well, actually, he accidentally showed me a photograph of him karate chopping a goat.

01:58:19.000 Oh, no.

01:58:20.000 He said, oh, you weren't supposed to see that one.

01:58:22.000 Yeah, he did the death touch on a goat. 0.99

01:58:25.000 Well, you could fuck a goat up if you hit it in the right spot. 0.99

01:58:28.000 Yeah, a lot of indignities were meted out to goats in the U.S. military. 0.99

01:58:34.000 Goats are actually pretty tough, though, now that I think about it.

01:58:37.000 I bet you probably couldn't kill a goat with a karate chop.

01:58:40.000 Right. 0.85

01:58:41.000 I mean, you have to really hit it hard in the right spot, like in the neck.

01:58:45.000 Is 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,

01:59:01.000 like 25 years ago, he was given the death touch and now he's dying from it 25 years later.

01:59:07.000 Was that in the movie?

01:59:08.000 Yeah, that was in the movie.

01:59:09.000 Is it true in, like, the death touch world, in the dim black world, is it true that some people think, like, you can touch them now?

01:59:16.000 And, uh...

01:59:18.000 That was the moment.

01:59:20.000 That movie was great.

01:59:25.000 That's the moment.

01:59:27.000 Well found.

01:59:28.000 So 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?

01:59:37.000 I'm sure there's someone who believes that.

01:59:39.000 For sure.

01:59:40.000 Yeah.

01:59:41.000 I mean, if you see that guy that was just having...

01:59:43.000 Did you see that guy who did all the crazy stuff and the guy falls down?

01:59:46.000 You might have missed it.

01:59:47.000 Yeah, but that's the movie based...

01:59:50.000 Oh, you mean in the loo?

01:59:51.000 Yeah, the other guy.

01:59:52.000 Right.

01:59:52.000 Thank you for using an English word, by the way.

01:59:54.000 He does all these crazy, like, fake karate moves.

01:59:58.000 Slap, slap, slap, slap. 0.99

02:00:00.000 And then he slaps him in the back. 0.92

02:00:01.000 Yeah.

02:00:02.000 Yeah, there's people that believe all kinds of crazy stuff.

02:00:04.000 Well, you know, he definitely inspired the characters in the Minister of Goats movie.

02:00:08.000 Have you ever seen what happens when one of these fake death touch guys fights a real fighter?

02:00:14.000 No. 1.00

02:00:14.000 Do they kind of get the shit kicked out? 1.00

02:00:16.000 Oh, it's horrific. 1.00

02:00:17.000 There's a few of them.

02:00:18.000 Right.

02:00:18.000 And these guys just don't seem to learn.

02:00:20.000 One of them that was recently... 0.98

02:00:23.000 In 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.

02:00:35.000 The 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.

02:00:44.000 Watch this.

02:00:45.000 So 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. 0.98

02:01:09.000 And 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. 0.97

02:01:17.000 And the way he finds out that it's horseshit is on YouTube. 0.95

02:01:20.000 I mean, he literally finds out in this moment that what he's... 0.96

02:01:24.000 I mean, he probably believed it.

02:01:25.000 He probably believed that what he does is actually real and effective.

02:01:30.000 So check this out.

02:01:31.000 It's horrible.

02:01:33.000 They get together.

02:01:34.000 Blah, blah, blah.

02:01:35.000 They go over what you're supposed to do or whatever.

02:01:38.000 And they...

02:01:39.000 I don't know if they make them shake hands.

02:01:40.000 Yep, they shake hands.

02:01:42.000 And then they go back.

02:01:43.000 And then they get the party started.

02:01:45.000 And it takes 10 seconds.

02:01:47.000 Here we go.

02:01:48.000 Ready, set, go.

02:01:52.000 There it goes.

02:01:55.000 So this guy's...

02:01:56.000 Like literally...

02:01:59.000 Doing like some movie stuff...

02:02:06.000 And then, boom, the MMA guy just starts teeing off.

02:02:10.000 Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom.

02:02:14.000 And that's a wrap.

02:02:16.000 It's horrible.

02:02:17.000 Oh.

02:02:18.000 I mean, it literally lasts, once he engages him in the last ten seconds.

02:02:23.000 But that's because one of them is doing an actual martial art, and the other guy is practicing nonsense.

02:02:29.000 And he's probably practiced that nonsense his whole life.

02:02:31.000 And he thought it was real. 0.57

02:02:33.000 There's another one where there's an old man.

02:02:35.000 And that's even harder to watch. 0.59

02:02:37.000 Because this old man gets kicked in the face.

02:02:40.000 And you just go, oh, Jesus Christ.

02:02:42.000 Like, save this guy.

02:02:43.000 This is horrible.

02:02:45.000 And he looks like legitimately, like, let's watch what he does back up to the beginning.

02:02:50.000 So he bet $5,000.

02:02:52.000 Check this out.

02:02:52.000 Like, look at what he thinks he can do.

02:02:55.000 He claimed a 200 and 0 record.

02:02:57.000 Look, he's not even touching these people.

02:02:58.000 They just go flying.

02:02:59.000 It's like they're a part of a cult, you know?

02:03:02.000 So they move at him and he really firmly believes that he can do this.

02:03:06.000 Look, he's like manipulating them like he's a puppet master.

02:03:09.000 It's so crazy. 1.00

02:03:11.000 So this guy is so hypnotized by his own bullshit that he decides that he's going to fight. 1.00

02:03:20.000 So this is like a cum, right? 1.00

02:03:22.000 Well, I don't know. 0.98

02:03:23.000 See, here's the thing.

02:03:24.000 Because he actually makes a real fight with a real trained martial artist.

02:03:30.000 So...

02:03:31.000 He might...

02:03:32.000 He may very well have been in on it himself.

02:03:36.000 I mean, not in on it being... 1.00

02:03:38.000 What I mean is he might have been taken by his own bullshit. 0.99

02:03:41.000 He might have actually believed it. 0.99

02:03:43.000 So now he's gonna fight an actual...

02:03:45.000 A young, actual martial artist.

02:03:48.000 And 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.

02:03:55.000 But this kid just sort of... 0.93

02:03:58.000 Circles them for a few seconds and then just like that other video beats the holy fuck out of them inside of about 10 seconds.

02:04:06.000 Just zoom off until they engage.

02:04:09.000 Yeah, it's like here goes See?

02:04:12.000 He's like doing his craziness. 0.55

02:04:14.000 And the young martial artist just grabs him, punches him, kicks him. 0.92

02:04:19.000 And you see, he's holding his face. 1.00

02:04:22.000 He's like, what the fuck? 0.99

02:04:22.000 And the young guy's really nice. 0.99

02:04:24.000 He's like, you okay?

02:04:25.000 You want to keep going?

02:04:25.000 And he's holding his mouth.

02:04:27.000 Look, the young guy literally says, look...

02:04:31.000 Does he want to keep going?

02:04:32.000 Let's stop.

02:04:33.000 This guy's bleeding out of his nose, and so he says, keep going.

02:04:37.000 He says, I'm fine.

02:04:38.000 And so he gets his hands up, and this time it's going to work. 0.93

02:04:41.000 This time I'm going to hit him with the full voodoo. 1.00

02:04:44.000 And this kid just blam, blam, blam, and then this kick. 0.99

02:04:47.000 Boom! 0.99

02:04:48.000 That's where it gets horrific.

02:04:51.000 And that guy was probably like 60. It's not a good time to get kicked in the face. 0.96

02:04:56.000 You know, in the military, I'm remembering... 0.61

02:04:58.000 I 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.

02:05:05.000 And there was a lot of weaponry stuff, you know?

02:05:07.000 There was the prophet hologram.

02:05:11.000 All of this sort of came from the central well of, like, you know, 80s...

02:05:16.000 Prophet hologram?

02:05:17.000 What's that?

02:05:17.000 Yeah, that they would...

02:05:18.000 They never, like, got it off the ground.

02:05:20.000 But what they were trying to do was have a hologram of Allah that they would project over an enemy capital.

02:05:29.000 And Allah would basically say whatever the U.S. military wanted him to say.

02:05:33.000 Like, the Americans aren't that bad. 0.85

02:05:35.000 LAUGHTER God bless President Bush.

02:05:39.000 They had a race-specific stink bomb, which again, they never managed to get off the ground. 1.00

02:05:44.000 What about the gay bomb? 1.00

02:05:45.000 They had the gay bomb. 1.00

02:05:46.000 That was real. 0.99

02:05:47.000 Yeah.

02:05:47.000 Oh, yeah.

02:05:48.000 They literally were engineering some sort of a chemical warfare device that would turn men homosexual. 0.96

02:05:53.000 Yeah. 0.93

02:05:54.000 And what's less known about it is that they were also trying to do a halitosis bomb so that you'd turn the enemy gay. 0.97

02:06:02.000 And then he gave them bad breath. 0.98

02:06:03.000 Yeah, they gave them bad breath.

02:06:03.000 And they'd be so freaked out that the Americans would come in and win.

02:06:07.000 Yeah.

02:06:07.000 Wow, they would just have shame all around.

02:06:09.000 Yeah.

02:06:10.000 They had attack bees that would, again, just attack the enemy.

02:06:16.000 None of these things got off the ground, I don't think.

02:06:18.000 Well, I guess it's sort of like writing comedy. 0.95

02:06:21.000 You throw a lot of shit against the wall and only like one-tenth of it sticks. 0.99

02:06:24.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:06:25.000 Like...

02:06:27.000 And some things did stick, right?

02:06:28.000 I mean, the taser came from the military, I believe.

02:06:32.000 But that seems totally reasonable, though.

02:06:34.000 Everybody knows you can get electrocuted and figure out a way to get a large charge into a small device.

02:06:39.000 Yeah.

02:06:39.000 And then there was all those kind of weird aural techniques that they would do at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib.

02:06:45.000 Aural meaning oral?

02:06:47.000 Yeah.

02:06:47.000 I probably said it wrong.

02:06:49.000 Yeah, where they would play subliminal sounds.

02:06:54.000 They'd blast Metallica at people, but laced into Metallica would be these subliminal sounds that would try and hypnotize people.

02:07:02.000 Do you remember when they used to do that in movie theaters?

02:07:04.000 Hungry Eat Popcorn.

02:07:05.000 They'd have subliminal images in between screens.

02:07:12.000 Yeah.

02:07:12.000 35th of a second.

02:07:13.000 Like one frame.

02:07:14.000 Has ever been shown that that actually worked?

02:07:16.000 That it works.

02:07:17.000 I'm not sure that it ever worked in the...

02:07:19.000 I met this guy...

02:07:19.000 Oh my God, I just remembered.

02:07:20.000 So I met this guy called Jamal Al-Harith, who had been released from Guantanamo.

02:07:25.000 And he was telling me about all of this stuff.

02:07:27.000 He was in Guantanamo for like two years, and then he got released.

02:07:29.000 And he was telling me about this stuff.

02:07:31.000 He said they played him an entire CD of a Fleetwood Mac covers band.

02:07:38.000 LAUGHTER At normal, in Guantanamo, at normal volume. 0.99

02:07:45.000 Those guys are just fucking winging it, man. 1.00

02:07:48.000 They're just winging it. 1.00

02:07:48.000 I said, what was going on? 1.00

02:07:50.000 He's like, I don't know.

02:07:53.000 I said, like, were they doing it to be nice?

02:07:55.000 Maybe they thought you were a fan.

02:07:57.000 Wanted to make it more pleasant.

02:07:58.000 He said it was Guantanamo.

02:08:00.000 They weren't trying to be nice.

02:08:00.000 Anyway, so I interviewed Jamal Al-Harith.

02:08:03.000 He was telling me about all of this weird shit. 0.99

02:08:05.000 And a few months ago, he goes and fucking joins ISIS and blows himself up somewhere. 0.99

02:08:11.000 This guy, the Fleetwood Mac cover band guy? 0.99

02:08:14.000 Yeah.

02:08:14.000 Wow.

02:08:15.000 So when they arrested him and brought him to Guantanamo Bay, was he innocent of those charges?

02:08:20.000 Well, he certainly convinced everybody that he was.

02:08:24.000 And in fact, Tony Blair got involved and helped get him out of Guantanamo.

02:08:29.000 Wow.

02:08:30.000 Wow.

02:08:30.000 And he went on to be a jihadi.

02:08:32.000 What I don't know, but I'd be very curious to find out, is exactly the question that you just posed.

02:08:37.000 Like, was he always a jihadi? 0.98

02:08:39.000 Or did the experience of being in Guantanamo somehow, like years later, you know, help to turn him into a jihadi? 0.58

02:08:46.000 I don't know the answer to that.

02:08:46.000 Well, 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...

02:08:56.000 You're like, I can't get over that, man.

02:08:58.000 Right.

02:08:58.000 It stained my soul.

02:09:00.000 I have no idea, but I met this guy, a very personable young man.

02:09:04.000 I met him at a hotel in Manchester.

02:09:06.000 Wow.

02:09:07.000 Which is where I interviewed him for the Men's Dirt Goats.

02:09:09.000 And where did he kill himself?

02:09:11.000 I can't remember.

02:09:12.000 Can you look it up?

02:09:13.000 He killed other people as well?

02:09:14.000 I don't know.

02:09:15.000 Jamal Al-Harith.

02:09:17.000 Also 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.

02:09:31.000 And he would confide in us that he was scared that his father would get hurt. 0.95

02:09:36.000 Fucking two years ago, his son joins ISIS. Tries to leave ISIS. So ISIS kill him. 0.99

02:09:46.000 I know. 0.97

02:09:46.000 All these people I knew 20 years ago. 0.97

02:09:49.000 I tell you, all the worst.

02:09:50.000 Here we go.

02:09:51.000 Jamal O'Hara has been killed when he carried out a suicide car bombing.

02:09:55.000 Iraqi army base.

02:09:57.000 Yeah.

02:09:59.000 Jesus Christ.

02:10:00.000 Yeah, I know, I know.

02:10:03.000 What does that feel like when you hear that, that you knew someone that became a suicide bomber?

02:10:09.000 Well, Jamal, I just met that one time.

02:10:13.000 But still, you knew him.

02:10:14.000 Well, I met him that one time.

02:10:15.000 If I had someone on my podcast that turned out to be a suicide bomber...

02:10:19.000 Well, you did.

02:10:20.000 Who?

02:10:21.000 No, you.

02:10:22.000 I did?

02:10:22.000 Oh, you mean if?

02:10:23.000 No, no.

02:10:24.000 I thought you were saying I did and I didn't know.

02:10:25.000 No. 0.99

02:10:26.000 Shit, are you going to tell me something? 1.00

02:10:27.000 I thought you were saying that you did. 1.00

02:10:30.000 No, well, I did have a guy on my podcast that almost beat a woman to death after he was on and now he's in jail for life. 1.00

02:10:36.000 Shit. 1.00

02:10:37.000 Yeah, it was a very public story. 1.00

02:10:38.000 He's an MMA fighter named War Machine.

02:10:41.000 His name is John, John Copenhaver.

02:10:43.000 Right.

02:10:44.000 And he apparently found this girl he was dating, but they broke up.

02:10:51.000 He 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.

02:11:03.000 Horrific, horrific.

02:11:05.000 And she was here with him.

02:11:07.000 What do you think it was?

02:11:09.000 Do you think it was steroids?

02:11:10.000 Do you think it was psychopathy?

02:11:13.000 All of the above.

02:11:14.000 I think steroids probably played a factor.

02:11:17.000 Traumatic brain injury probably played a factor.

02:11:20.000 I think...

02:11:21.000 That's what they say about Chris Benoit, right?

02:11:23.000 That it was maybe a traumatic brain injury.

02:11:25.000 It's a huge factor because these guys, they get hit in the head so many times and no one can tell you when it's going to go bad.

02:11:34.000 No one knows.

02:11:34.000 It varies.

02:11:35.000 You might be able to take 100 punches.

02:11:38.000 For me, it might be 30. No one knows.

02:11:43.000 Yeah.

02:11:58.000 How much time is in between these beatings that they've received?

02:12:02.000 Are they receiving them on a regular basis?

02:12:03.000 Has it changed them instantaneously?

02:12:06.000 I know far too many people that have experienced a lot of shots to the head where it's completely changed who they are.

02:12:15.000 This guy was troubled to begin with.

02:12:18.000 He saw his father die beaten up by cops.

02:12:21.000 Wasn't that the story?

02:12:22.000 I think that was the story. 0.98

02:12:23.000 Something fucked up experienced at a very young age. 0.80

02:12:27.000 I wonder whether, you know, I wrote this book called The Psychopath Test. 0.98

02:12:31.000 And I met a martial arts guy once.

02:12:34.000 I got into like a road rage instance with this guy.

02:12:38.000 And I had like, my son was one at the time.

02:12:41.000 And he like leapt out of the car.

02:12:44.000 And I said, my son's in the car. 0.99

02:12:45.000 And he said, I don't give a fuck about your son. 0.99

02:12:47.000 And afterwards, when I got The Psychopath Test, I always remembered this guy as being like, I wonder whether he was a psychopath. 0.99

02:12:53.000 I 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?

02:13:08.000 Well, it certainly attracts people that aren't opposed to violence, right?

02:13:13.000 Because they're engaging in violence.

02:13:17.000 It also attracts people that are just like they might have been BMX riders or skateboarders or skydivers.

02:13:25.000 They love the extreme danger aspect of it.

02:13:29.000 They're thrill seekers.

02:13:30.000 And the way I described mixed martial arts is high level problem solving with dire physical consequences.

02:13:38.000 That'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.

02:13:55.000 He's the sweetest guy.

02:13:56.000 He's so normal Very articulate easy to talk to doesn't get hit a lot either though.

02:14:01.000 He'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,

02:14:17.000 and you're seeing more and more of these stories of football players doing crazy things.

02:14:22.000 And I'm sure you saw that recent study where they tested 111 football players and they found 110 of them had traumatic brain injuries.

02:14:30.000 Wow.

02:14:30.000 Well, I know that's what they said about Chris Benoit.

02:14:33.000 Maybe that's why he...

02:14:34.000 Oh, yeah, for sure.

02:14:35.000 Those guys get it.

02:14:36.000 For sure.

02:14:37.000 And people will say, well, that's fake wrestling. 0.95

02:14:39.000 Listen, man, there's nothing fake about what those guys go through.

02:14:42.000 They might be choreographed.

02:14:44.000 They might have a bunch of things that they're doing.

02:14:46.000 But 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.

02:14:52.000 That is 100% real.

02:14:54.000 And they suffer.

02:14:55.000 And you have to be tough to do that.

02:14:57.000 They are experiencing some severe pain.

02:15:01.000 Hmm.

02:15:04.000 Chris Benoit's brain forensic exam, consistent with numerous brain injuries, CTE, which is found in all regions of his brain, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

02:15:16.000 You 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.

02:15:28.000 Yelled 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?

02:15:43.000 No, it was after it was afterwards.

02:15:44.000 Oh, yeah You tricked them. 0.98

02:15:47.000 I don't think I tricked them How the fuck could they think that you were gonna put a positive spin on someone murdering their family? 0.98

02:15:54.000 Exactly. 0.95

02:15:55.000 Well, 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.

02:16:01.000 No, Jesus Christ.

02:16:02.000 But they knew you were going to put some emphasis on it, right?

02:16:04.000 Yeah.

02:16:05.000 Well, I was asking lots of questions, so they must have known.

02:16:09.000 Yeah.

02:16:10.000 Speaking of nice people, by the way, my porn people.

02:16:15.000 Okay.

02:16:17.000 It was probably the loveliest year of my working life.

02:16:21.000 Hanging out with the born people.

02:16:22.000 Yeah, they were delightful.

02:16:23.000 Did you feel like you got all that work done?

02:16:25.000 Like maybe, I don't know, a couple days?

02:16:27.000 Like why'd you...

02:16:28.000 We did a lot of digging.

02:16:31.000 Well, I wanted to, you know.

02:16:32.000 A lot of digging.

02:16:33.000 It sounded like dicking with your accent.

02:16:36.000 Didn't it?

02:16:37.000 We did a lot of dicking.

02:16:38.000 I did no dicking.

02:16:39.000 I'm sure.

02:16:40.000 Let me explain yourself.

02:16:41.000 I'm just joking.

02:16:44.000 No, it was tracing the butterfly effect of Fabian's business plan on their world.

02:16:50.000 It was such a kind of interesting exercise, you know, to try and work at what's the furthest ripple I could find.

02:16:59.000 Like, what...

02:17:00.000 You 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?

02:17:10.000 And 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.

02:17:22.000 So, 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.

02:17:28.000 Can I tell you, by the way, one of the strangest consequences?

02:17:31.000 Sure.

02:17:34.000 So this, you know, like pretty much every child in the world gets to learn about sex through Pornhub these days.

02:17:41.000 Pornhub is sex education for like every 12-year-old.

02:17:44.000 I'm sure. 0.83

02:17:45.000 Yeah.

02:17:46.000 Because their parents probably don't get around to talking about it in time.

02:17:49.000 Exactly.

02:17:50.000 It'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.

02:18:02.000 For me, it was 12. We'd find them in the woods.

02:18:04.000 Okay.

02:18:05.000 I have a whole bit on it in my act.

02:18:07.000 Yeah?

02:18:07.000 That's, yeah, about finding perversion.

02:18:09.000 Yeah.

02:18:10.000 It's a true story. 0.99

02:18:11.000 I literally didn't know about perversion until I found a fucked up magazine in the woods. 0.97

02:18:17.000 What was the magazine? 0.98

02:18:18.000 I think it was called Foot Action or something like that.

02:18:22.000 It was very strange.

02:18:24.000 But here's what's weird.

02:18:26.000 That kids today, if you give them a phone...

02:18:29.000 I mean, what age do kids get a phone?

02:18:32.000 Some kids get a phone at like 10 or 9. You're essentially giving them porn. 0.80

02:18:37.000 Yeah, you're giving them every awfulness. 0.99

02:18:40.000 You're giving them ISIS beheading videos. 0.80

02:18:43.000 Oh, yeah. 0.62

02:18:44.000 Yeah.

02:18:45.000 So 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?

02:18:51.000 And I found this terrible consequence in Oklahoma.

02:18:55.000 So this was a boy called Nathan with autism.

02:18:58.000 So he was like an awkward kid.

02:19:02.000 We're good to go.

02:19:26.000 So I said, like, if she'd responded, what would you have done?

02:19:29.000 He said, I would have stopped.

02:19:30.000 Like, if she said, can you stop sending me these, what would you have done?

02:19:32.000 He said, I would have stopped sending them.

02:19:34.000 I just assumed she was busy. 1.00

02:19:36.000 So 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. 0.95

02:19:45.000 So 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. 0.97

02:20:02.000 He can't go anywhere where children go, so he can't go to football games, basketball games, he can't go to the park.

02:20:08.000 How old was he?

02:20:09.000 He was...

02:20:12.000 17 and a half, I think.

02:20:13.000 Something like that.

02:20:14.000 Maybe 18. But kids as young as eight years old are on the Sex Offenders Registry in the United States.

02:20:19.000 Eight?

02:20:19.000 Eight years old.

02:20:20.000 I had no idea.

02:20:22.000 Boys and girls, by the way.

02:20:24.000 Like, 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.

02:20:36.000 This one kid kept his clothes off when they turned the lights on.

02:20:40.000 The girl complained to her parents and this boy is on the sex offenders register.

02:20:44.000 Jesus Christ.

02:20:45.000 Yeah.

02:20:46.000 So you can't...

02:20:47.000 So with Nathan... 0.99

02:20:49.000 First of all, where the fuck were the parents? 0.99

02:20:51.000 You know, unsurprisingly, it's like, I think this kid was a foster kid. 0.99

02:20:58.000 So there's already like the sort of...

02:21:00.000 Stigma attached to him.

02:21:01.000 Yeah, the shadow of stigma.

02:21:04.000 Nathan's a kid with autism.

02:21:06.000 So 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?

02:21:16.000 And 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.

02:21:27.000 But 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.

02:21:38.000 Maybe.

02:21:39.000 Maybe.

02:21:40.000 But maybe not.

02:21:41.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:21:42.000 I mean, I'm sure it's true in certain cases, but I'm sure it's not true in many cases.

02:21:45.000 But the consequences of sentencing a kid like that are so extreme.

02:21:49.000 Like, you should probably have a real understanding of what's going on with the kid.

02:21:52.000 Yeah. 0.93

02:21:52.000 And if he's autistic and he doesn't know what the fuck to do and he's confused and he... 0.93

02:21:57.000 Yeah. 0.97

02:21:57.000 Well, Nathan, so he read me, like, his book. 0.97

02:22:00.000 He needs to, like, fill out this sex offenders book, like, at therapy.

02:22:04.000 And so he was, like, reading me the...

02:22:05.000 How old is he now?

02:22:06.000 I think he's, like, about 20 now.

02:22:08.000 He's going to be on the sex offenders registry for the next 23 years.

02:22:11.000 Now, what is it like talking to him?

02:22:12.000 Is he...

02:22:13.000 Does he understand the consequences of what went down?

02:22:16.000 Yeah.

02:22:16.000 He says it's like being permanently grounded.

02:22:20.000 He was reading me the questions and answers from the Sex Offenders book.

02:22:23.000 So it's questions like, have you ever had a sexual situation in which urine or feces was involved?

02:22:30.000 And his answer was like, no.

02:22:33.000 And there were questions like, you know, have you ever had sex with animals?

02:22:37.000 And his question was like, no. 0.96

02:22:38.000 And then the last question was, when was the last time you had sex with somebody? 0.99

02:22:43.000 And his answer was, still a virgin. 0.99

02:22:46.000 Oh my God.

02:22:47.000 A virgin on the sex offenders registry. 1.00

02:22:49.000 Wow.

02:22:50.000 I mean, of course you can understand why the girl was scared and told her parents and the parents told the police.

02:22:55.000 You can totally understand it from the other point of view.

02:22:58.000 Oh, 100%.

02:22:59.000 Yeah.

02:22:59.000 But, you know, I mean, what a butterfly effect.

02:23:02.000 That is.

02:23:03.000 And I'm not, of course, I'm not saying any of this is Fabian's fault.

02:23:06.000 This is all unintended consequences. 0.96

02:23:09.000 That's just access to sex and porn. 0.87

02:23:12.000 And, 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... 0.67

02:23:21.000 There's like levels to the depravity that never existed before.

02:23:27.000 Yeah, because everything's keyword searchable.

02:23:29.000 This is what happens when you let tech people run the world.

02:23:32.000 But it's also ramping up.

02:23:34.000 It's also people get tired of just people kissing and then having sex.

02:23:38.000 So then it's like, I want to watch a guy tie a girl up. 0.99

02:23:41.000 Oh, I want to watch a guy spit in a girl's mouth. 1.00

02:23:43.000 I want to watch her get smacked around. 0.98

02:23:45.000 And then it gets weirder and gagging and all this, you know. 0.70

02:23:49.000 Yeah.

02:23:50.000 Exactly.

02:23:50.000 So that's one consequence of the ubiquity of free porn and just the sheer volume of free porn.

02:23:56.000 Yeah, you've got to stand out with extreme content in some way.

02:24:00.000 But the other thing is all these search engine people are sort of looking at what's being searched for the most.

02:24:05.000 What is number one?

02:24:06.000 Well, I'll tell you what's like a...

02:24:09.000 I don't know if it's number one, but I'll tell you what's really like way at the top.

02:24:13.000 It's anything to do with like stepsisters, stepbrothers, stepfathers, stepdaughters.

02:24:21.000 Really?

02:24:21.000 Stepmoms?

02:24:22.000 Incest porn is basically... 0.99

02:24:24.000 But it's not real incest. 0.97

02:24:26.000 It's like you get away with it.

02:24:27.000 But actually, when I was on the set of Stepdaughter Cheerleader Audrey, poor Mike, Quasar, the director, there was a bit of dialogue.

02:24:34.000 Like, these guys were saying, oh, I think your stepdaughter's sexy.

02:24:39.000 But they kept on getting it wrong, and they were saying, I think your daughter's sexy.

02:24:43.000 And Mike's going, stepdaughter!

02:24:45.000 Like, Mike behind the camera's going, stepdaughter!

02:24:48.000 That's hilarious. 0.99

02:24:49.000 We don't want to be too fucked up here, people. 0.99

02:24:51.000 Step! 0.99

02:24:53.000 Keyword step.

02:24:54.000 All right, take one.

02:24:55.000 These are great people.

02:24:56.000 My porn people were great people.

02:24:58.000 Well, that's nice. 0.74

02:24:59.000 You 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.

02:25:09.000 This show, if I may, blow my own trumpet.

02:25:13.000 Please do.

02:25:13.000 Which I learnt on the set of Blow My Own Trumpet.

02:25:20.000 I did a little bit from the butterfly effect on stage at the Ace Hotel down here in Los Angeles.

02:25:28.000 And we invited a bunch of our porn people along.

02:25:31.000 And 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.

02:25:45.000 So not pitying them or attacking them, just treating them on a level as a fellow human being.

02:25:52.000 And isn't that kind of nuts that that's rare in porn?

02:25:56.000 Because we all feel the sort of society, as mainstream journalists, we feel these kind of societal pressures.

02:26:08.000 I think you also have to establish that your own, whether it's moral superiority or good taste, that you don't approve of this.

02:26:16.000 You're not one of those people.

02:26:18.000 Exactly, yeah.

02:26:19.000 I'm not even a connoisseur of this work.

02:26:21.000 Right, exactly.

02:26:22.000 I made my excuses and left. 0.88

02:26:26.000 And that means, you know, because of our hypocrisy...

02:26:32.000 They get exploited.

02:26:34.000 So that's why I wanted to do this show.

02:26:36.000 I'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.

02:26:41.000 When 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.

02:26:50.000 And what it was, was it didn't really pay much, but it gave him access to the girls and let him meet these girls. 0.87

02:26:56.000 And he was kind of a nebbishy, sort of dorky guy. 0.97

02:26:59.000 And he had never been around like a real bombshell girl that was willing to have sex with him before. 1.00

02:27:04.000 So 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. 0.99

02:27:18.000 And how did he feel about that? 0.99

02:27:19.000 This is what the straw that broke the camel's back.

02:27:22.000 He was having dinner with her and she's like, God, I'm so tired. 0.98

02:27:25.000 I had to do an anal scene all day today. 0.96

02:27:27.000 And he was like, what? 0.97

02:27:29.000 They were out to dinner.

02:27:31.000 In his mind, he was able to put that barrier up.

02:27:34.000 And what she does is just work. 1.00

02:27:36.000 It's fine.

02:27:37.000 We're going to go to dinner and have a wonderful time.

02:27:40.000 Candlelight, fine wine, some amazing food.

02:27:43.000 I'm in love with her.

02:27:44.000 She's amazing.

02:27:45.000 And he couldn't handle it.

02:27:46.000 Nope.

02:27:46.000 She was tired.

02:27:47.000 She was complaining about taking it in the ass all day. 1.00

02:27:49.000 And he was like, check, please. 0.99

02:27:51.000 Let's get out of here.

02:27:52.000 So they split up.

02:27:53.000 I got another one.

02:27:54.000 It 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.

02:28:03.000 It's like, hey, you know, it's what she does for a living. 0.97

02:28:05.000 No big deal.

02:28:06.000 And he read her contract and he goes, what's airtight? 1.00

02:28:15.000 And Airtight is a dick in every hole. 0.99

02:28:18.000 And he's like, check please. 1.00

02:28:21.000 This is it.

02:28:22.000 I can't do this.

02:28:24.000 I can't.

02:28:25.000 So the guy, the first guy, though, took me to a set.

02:28:28.000 And this is like in 94. Okay, so this was the pre-keyword, pre-Fabian days.

02:28:34.000 Pre-internet.

02:28:36.000 And they were all rich.

02:28:38.000 Everybody was rich.

02:28:39.000 And the porn stars were like real stars.

02:28:42.000 It 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.

02:28:57.000 But it was really weird.

02:29:00.000 Because she knew that we were watching, and so there was this air of theatrical enthusiasm that was very forced.

02:29:12.000 They would do the scenes, she'd be like, I love my job, I love my job, my job is amazing.

02:29:18.000 And I look at my friend at the time, and I was like, hmm.

02:29:21.000 I don't know if I'm buying all this.

02:29:23.000 I was like, this just seems weird.

02:29:25.000 I 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.

02:29:36.000 Yeah.

02:29:37.000 A wisp of darkness.

02:29:38.000 But that's what's fascinating.

02:29:39.000 Like, why?

02:29:41.000 It's illogical if you look at it on paper.

02:29:44.000 It's like everyone who is healthy, whose body functions correctly, enjoys sexual relations. 1.00

02:29:53.000 Whether it's straight sex or gay sex or whatever the fuck it is. 1.00

02:29:58.000 People like to be touched. 1.00

02:29:59.000 It's part of being a person.

02:30:01.000 Why is it so shameful when other people get to watch?

02:30:05.000 And why does it devastate people when they find out that their loved one had done something on film that others can see?

02:30:13.000 And 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.

02:30:27.000 It's much more likely that they'll be noticed than in the 90s.

02:30:32.000 Like in the 90s, for an ex-porn star to be outed, someone would have to go to like a DVD shop.

02:30:38.000 These days, everybody, you know, just watches 20 porn films for five seconds each until they find the one that... 0.97

02:30:44.000 You know, they want to jack off too. 0.94

02:30:45.000 So it's much more likely that a former porn star will be spotted and outed and, as a consequence, fired. 0.95

02:30:52.000 Like, I was talking to this guy called Dale Rutter.

02:30:55.000 His poor name is Dale DeBone.

02:30:57.000 LAUGHTER Got a job as a nurse in a hospital and Human Resources called him in and said to him, are you Dale DeBone?

02:31:07.000 He said, yeah, and said, we have to fire you because if any patient says you even looked at her the wrong way, they would win in court.

02:31:16.000 So poor Dale.

02:31:17.000 And Dale said that his recognisability has gone up massively since Pornhub and Free Porn came along.

02:31:24.000 Yeah, you should be mad at the people who recognize him.

02:31:26.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:31:27.000 You're a pervert. 1.00

02:31:28.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:31:28.000 I'm just doing a job, you fuck. 1.00

02:31:30.000 There was a woman who got arrested, not arrested, rather fired. 1.00

02:31:33.000 She was a schoolteacher.

02:31:35.000 And it turned out that in the 90s or something like that, she had done porn.

02:31:39.000 And she was really well-respected, very loved schoolteacher.

02:31:44.000 And then one of the kids in school figured it out.

02:31:47.000 Right.

02:31:48.000 Started telling everybody.

02:31:49.000 Next thing you know, kids are getting online.

02:31:51.000 Yeah.

02:31:52.000 And watching the teacher.

02:31:53.000 And she lost her job.

02:31:54.000 And she was really...

02:31:56.000 Really respected and loved.

02:31:58.000 And then, you know, we don't love you anymore. 1.00

02:32:00.000 You used to fuck. 1.00

02:32:01.000 Yeah, I know. 1.00

02:32:03.000 It's baffling.

02:32:05.000 Even in these sort of sex-positive, more sex-positive kind of anti-slut-shaming times, there's still a massive amount of stigma.

02:32:12.000 Yeah, but that's not real.

02:32:15.000 Yeah.

02:32:16.000 Well, it's a bubble.

02:32:16.000 It's a small bubble that most of the world doesn't share.

02:32:20.000 Well, that's the other thing.

02:32:21.000 It's like, what about other countries?

02:32:23.000 Like, is this stigma attached to...

02:32:25.000 Wasn't there, like, in Italy, a former porn star who ran for Parliament or something like that?

02:32:30.000 Yeah.

02:32:30.000 And then started going out with...

02:32:32.000 Oh, fuck. 1.00

02:32:34.000 The artist, Jeff Koons. 1.00

02:32:36.000 I don't know who he is.

02:32:37.000 Oh, he's like a big, like, famous sort of pop artist.

02:32:41.000 Oh, okay.

02:32:42.000 And I think they were having a relationship.

02:32:43.000 And yeah, she... 1.00

02:32:43.000 Yeah, she ran for... 1.00

02:32:46.000 Britain is still with that stigma, I'm sure.

02:32:48.000 Yeah.

02:32:48.000 But yeah, no, Italy, they've got it.

02:32:49.000 Italy doesn't give a fuck. 1.00

02:32:51.000 They don't give a fuck. 1.00

02:32:51.000 They're a little wild over there. 1.00

02:32:52.000 Yeah.

02:32:53.000 Yeah, I mean, I would wonder, like, what countries are the most accepting of former adult stars.

02:32:59.000 Adult is my favorite term.

02:33:01.000 Adult.

02:33:02.000 You know, it's like urban.

02:33:05.000 You know, when you say urban, you just say black people. 0.99

02:33:08.000 Jesus Christ.

02:33:09.000 Adult. 0.99

02:33:10.000 Say porn. 0.99

02:33:11.000 Just say porn. 0.86

02:33:12.000 The adult industry.

02:33:14.000 Like, what do you mean?

02:33:14.000 The industry of people who are grown up?

02:33:16.000 Like, what are you saying? 1.00

02:33:17.000 Gotta play stupid. 1.00

02:33:19.000 I'm like, what? 1.00

02:33:19.000 Adults? 1.00

02:33:20.000 As opposed to what?

02:33:21.000 The children industry? 1.00

02:33:22.000 The fuck are you saying? 1.00

02:33:24.000 It's just a weird term. 1.00

02:33:26.000 Well, 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... 0.70

02:33:40.000 And they are. 0.67

02:33:41.000 They're just people.

02:33:42.000 I hope it will do its bit.

02:33:44.000 Yeah.

02:33:45.000 Do you think I should go now?

02:33:49.000 Do you think you should go now?

02:33:50.000 Have you said enough?

02:33:51.000 What do you think?

02:33:51.000 I think it was great.

02:33:52.000 We had a great talk.

02:33:53.000 This would be a good way to end it.

02:33:54.000 I enjoyed it very much.

02:33:56.000 I'm going to meet my family and help go to Runyon and have a walk.

02:34:00.000 Oh, that's a good place.

02:34:02.000 Yes.

02:34:02.000 You do that all the time?

02:34:03.000 Yes.

02:34:04.000 It's a good spot.

02:34:04.000 I go to Runyon every day when I'm in Los Angeles.

02:34:07.000 Oh, beautiful.

02:34:07.000 Joe, it was such a pleasure talking to you again.

02:34:08.000 Always a pleasure, John.

02:34:10.000 Let's do it again, for sure.

02:34:11.000 I would love to come and do it again.

02:34:12.000 Thank you very much.

02:34:12.000 Thank you.

02:34:13.000 Thank you.

02:34:13.000 And tell people how they can find your stuff.

02:34:14.000 Okay, so this new series is called The Butterfly Effect and it's on Audible.

02:34:19.000 Audible.com.

02:34:21.000 I'm a big fan of Audible.

02:34:22.000 I love Audible.

02:34:22.000 I also love Audible.

02:34:24.000 They're amazing.

02:34:24.000 There you go.

02:34:25.000 Here's The Butterfly Effect. 0.99

02:34:26.000 The biggest collection of audio entertainment on the entire internet.

02:34:30.000 And look at that star rating.

02:34:31.000 Beautiful. 0.97

02:34:32.000 Look at you, you savage. 0.96

02:34:35.000 So that's my new...

02:34:36.000 And my Twitter thing is just at John Ronson and...

02:34:39.000 J-O-M Ronson. 0.95

02:34:40.000 Oh, yeah.

02:34:40.000 And the other thing is I just co-wrote this movie called Oak Joe, which is on Netflix, about a giant pig.

02:34:46.000 Oh, okay.

02:34:47.000 It's on Netflix.

02:34:47.000 Beautiful.

02:34:48.000 Yeah.

02:34:48.000 John Ronson, ladies and gentlemen.

02:34:50.000 Thank you, brother.

02:34:51.000 Thank you.

02:34:52.000 Yay! 0.99

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 08, 2017

Joe Rogan Experience #995 - Jon Ronson

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