#2043 - Francis Foster & Konstantin Kisin

When you have headphones on in a video game, like, you can hear things behind you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You can hear things in front of you. Yeah. You get a sense of where they are.

Yeah. That's one of the, god damn, those things are addictive. Yeah, man, I'm a gamer. They are so addictive. Yeah.

But that's why, because they have, it's so immersive. now. Are you into video games? Oh, my god, I have a real problem. I can't play them.

I literally can't play them. I can play pool, right? Because pool, I'm addicted to that. But pool to me is like a mind exercise. It's like a concentration exercise, as much as it is a game.

Like it's all about, like everything has to move together in perfect synchronicity. When I'm playing video games, I'm just absorbed in this like adrenaline-fueled chaos of graphics and sounds and explosions. It's just way too good. That's the problem. You don't want to do anything else.

You just want to fucking go crazy and play video games all day. There's this game I play, Escape from Tarkov, that I just, I shouldn't be allowed to play it. Yeah. It's not good for my family, man. It's just like 10 hours a day.

And before you know it, the whole day is gone. It's insane. Yeah. Wolfenstein 3D, that was the game where it just felt kind of like, the first time I saw Wolfenstein 3D, which probably shows how old I am now. That's the original id Software title.

Yeah. It's like the first one. they did. You quit at the right time, man.

That's what it looked like. That's Wolfenstein right there. Oh, man. So many hours of my childhood were spent on that. Yeah.

So I started off with Quake 1.. Quake 1 on a computer. I was just playing the game itself. Because they had put, because I used a Mac, and so then they put out, have a cigar, gentlemen. Thank you, brother.

We're like gentlemen here. Oh, thank you very much. Nice one. Enjoying some company?

But that was just, you just play the game. And then I found out about online playing. I was like, oh, no. Oh, no. What a life suck that is.

Yeah. Do you let your kids play? They play games. Yeah. But fortunately, one's really into Roblox.

What's Roblox? Roblox. R-O-B-O-L, or B-L-O-X. I think that's what it is, right? It's just like they have these little worlds they create, and they run around with their friends in there.

It seems like fun. You just have to limit the amount of time they do it. And you have to explain to them, like don't just let them figure out it's addictive. Explain to them that it's addictive. Yeah.

Explain to them that there's things that you're going to want to get really good at. that won't help you. Yes. It's a great way of looking at it. Because, like, I had a friend, and he was one of the guys who was one of the managers at the comic store.

Super awesome guy. And he was hooked on EverQuest. You know that game? Remember that game? Remember that game, Jamie?

The massive online multiplayer game. You're a wizard. You cast spells and shit. That kind of thing. One day I'll never forget.

We were all standing around in the comic store bar, and he was pale. Pale like paper. Like he hadn't been out of the house in days. Like his eyes were sunk into his head. He goes, I am so good at making money in the game and so bad at doing it in real life.

Wow. Whoa. I was like, okay, you've put all your energy into getting really good at something. that doesn't do you any good. Unless you're going to be a professional, which they do have.

That's a hard thing to say to a kid. Don't play video games. Right. If then you find out how much video game players are making. Right.

It's like. don't start a podcast. Exactly. Right. Are we dinosaurs?

They're so good. I'm not talking shit about games. You've got to control. it is what you're saying. They're too good.

They're too good. Your life is boring as fuck compared to those games. Like, there's no way. There's no way. it's as exciting as playing like Quake 3 Arena online with like a 30 inch monitor.

And you're sitting right in front of it. And you've got fucking headphones on, explosions and lightning guns. It's amazing. Because, if you think about it, right, like computer games are instant gratification. And that's how you get success in a computer game.

But if you think about life, how to become successful is basically deferred gratification. Yeah. And there's another level to it, which is, in a computer game, rewards are linear. You work for a bit, you get a reward. You work for a bit, you get a reward.

But life isn't like that. In life, you work for a bit, you get fucking kicked to shit for years. sometimes. You've got to work and work and work. And sometimes it's going to be really shitty for a long time.

And then there may be a reward. Or there may not. Sometimes the work is the reward itself, right? So in some ways, it actually changes how you think about achieving things and doing things as well. Which is, you know, I have sometimes found that helpful.

Because you kind of know, if you work, you get a reward. But sometimes it can mess with your reward system as well, I think. You look at what video games do. It encourages you to spend as much time doing them as possible. Because the more you do them, the more, whatever you're doing, you acquire.

You know, that's kind of the case with real life. Well, think about, like, stockbrokers. Think about those kind of folks. Folks, are, you know, just in it, trying to make money. Just trying to figure out what to buy and what to sell.

It's all, for them, it's all numbers. So they must be, like, addicted to these numbers. Like, they're probably super addicted to, like, seeing their bank account and seeing their hedge funds. What do they have? Like, how much?

How much? I need more than that. You know, like, you compare yourself and you read the list of the richest people in the world. Oh, this guy's got $200 billion. Holy shit, I've got to do better.

You know what? How do you keep going once you've got to, like, a billion? How do you motivate yourself to, like, make more? You've got more money than you. Unless what you're doing is what you enjoy doing.

Yeah. Which is where Elon falls into that category. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right? He's making money, but what he does is he's, I mean, it's essentially.

it's all engineering stuff. All of it. You know, it's innovation and engineering. You know, the boring company, they're trying to, like, drill tunnels under the cities. That's crazy.

SpaceX, that's fucking insane. You're shooting rockets into space. You want to put people on Mars. Electric cars, you're engineering electric cars, electric roofs. Like, everything is, like, this new innovative product, Starlink.

Oh, let's just get high-speed internet and fucking fly it through the sky. People keep seeing those things and thinking they're UFOs, by the way. Do they? Yeah. But it's also, as well, like, if you think about, like, making money, what is really making money?

It's the deal. And, actually, you just get addicted to the deal. You know? It's like a form of gambling. I'm going to try this tactic.

But, no, they push back on here. But I'm going to do this, and I'm going to do that. And then maybe, if we try that, then this is going to happen. And then you make the deal, and, boom, you get the dopamine. Yeah.

That makes sense. That makes sense. I know some hedge fund guys who love doing it after the first billion, too. Well, if they really enjoy that game, I guess. Yeah.

I mean, I guess it's kind of like playing, you know, Magic, the Gathering or something. I mean, it is a game. You're playing it to win it. Yeah. But social media is a game.

Yes. And it's a game a lot like video games. Yeah. Where it's like, you're really not getting anything out of this. You're probably losing a lot of your time.

I suppose, for people like us, we're building profile and, you know, connections. I've met so many amazing people, actually, through social media. For sure. We're all on it. Yeah.

Right? We're all on it. But also, we're all on it. Yeah. Yeah.

And some of the people that are on it aren't even really there. Like, there's so much interaction that's instigated. There's so much. There's so many inflammatory accounts that I read them and I'm like, there is no way that's a real person. No.

Like, this is all design. This is all, like, there's just a certain percentage of people that are just trying to stir up shit in conversations all the time. And they usually have, like, American flags in their profile.

You know, like some Trump thing in their name. And then you go to their account. It doesn't look real at all. And you're like, I wonder where this is. Is this guy in Moldova?

Like, where is he? Like, where is he? Yeah. Is he in Latvia? Like, where is this guy that's doing this?

There's so many people like that. There's one guy, I'm not going to mention his name, but he lives in Asia and he's always commenting about America. And I'm like, mate, should you not be commenting about your own country instead of clipping riots in America? Well, he could get killed.

He's displaced protestors. Good fucking luck. tweeting bad shit about China if you're in China. They got that pretty locked down. Oh, yeah.

Oh, they do. Yeah. And there's several countries that have arrested people for tweets. Well, we come from one of them. Yeah.

Yeah, I know. You guys do. You do. 2018, 3,000 people, man. 3,000 people got arrested for tweeting bad things.

Not tweeting, but social media posts. So between—what was the biggest one? It had to be Facebook, right? That's where people complain the most. Is it?

Probably. Yeah. I think those are the complainiest folks. Those are the older folks. Yeah.

I mean, the most famous example is Count Dankula, the Internet comedian, where he taught his pug to do a Nazi salute. But there's been lots of other examples. You know, people—there's a tragic fire that happened in London, called the Grenfell Fire. It was awful. People were literally burnt to death in this tower block.

And these group of people, they were idiots, basically did a representation on Bonfire Night in November, the 5th in our country. And they did a representation of people in the tower and set fire to it. They videoed it. They were laughing along. Now, obviously, that's a dick move.

I think we can all agree with that. But you don't arrest somebody for that, for basically being a dick. Yeah. It shouldn't be illegal to be stupid. No.

You're crossing a line because you're making a subjective judgment. You know, like, it's not funny to me. And it's not funny probably to a lot of rational people. Yeah. But you should be able to try.

Like, the whole thing about doing something—like, a lot of times when people do outrageous things they think are going to be funny. They don't know. Yeah. And then they try. That's not a thing you should arrest people for.

Because you're setting a crazy precedent. Because then it becomes subjective. Like, what's outrageous and what's not? It could move to anything. It could move to, you know, trans identification or trans rights.

It could move to anything. Vaccine hesitancy. I mean, we can keep going. Yeah. Vaccine hesitancy.

Not supporting Ukraine. There's a whole slew of things that could be stuffed into that box once you open it. You just can't open that box. That box has got to be—people have to be able to—this is how we have to conduct ourselves. People have to be able to express themselves.

And they have to be able to use facts and reality and not get censored. And they have to be able to do that kind of universally. And if they can't do that, if the good ideas can't compete against the bad ideas, then the good ideas aren't good enough. So we have to figure out a strength in the good ideas. But the only way that works is if you don't censor people.

Because as soon as you start censoring people, you're admitting that you don't want to engage in this. You don't want to show a better way of looking at things. You just want to be the only person who gets to talk. And that's what we saw on social media over the last few years. Which is why Elon buying Twitter was such a big fucking deal.

It's a big fucking deal. And I know advertisers are panicking and people are saying that hate talk is up. And I must admit, I have seen a lot of wild shit on X now that I don't think I would have ever seen before. Openly racist stuff, some pretty gross stuff. It's just—it's also—it's just weird how comfortable people are talking.

a certain way. It's almost like I wonder how much of the idea of it being completely uncensored now— It's not totally uncensored. There's some moderation, right? There's things you can't do. You can't dox people.

You can't do a lot of things. And they can't catch everything either. Didn't? they fire? like most people?

I mean nothing much changed. I didn't feel it terrible. I think that in terms of the hate speech stuff, or whatever you call that, whatever it is. That's just a product of the fact that they're not moderating as much. And I actually think—I mean what you said was just preach on that.

But I also think, on top of that, we have to—those of us who believe in freedom of expression— we have to also admit that freedom comes at a cost and it's worth paying. That's what we have to be honest about, I think. We have to say we're getting freedom at the cost of some discomfort. Some people are allowed to be dicks. And that's the price we're willing to pay.

I mean freedom always comes at a cost, right? And it's tradeoffs. You could make the country really safe if you lock every man between 18 and 40 in a prison. But we don't do that because we understand we can't do that, right? Despite what some feminists want.

Statistically, though, they'd be right. That's what I'm saying. That's who commits the crimes. I used to have this bit about. what would it be like if women caused all wars.

Because men caused all of them. Men caused every fucking war that's ever happened. Pretty much. I mean maybe women were involved. Well, I mean there's Helen of Troy.

Yeah. But she wasn't out there fighting. She just wanted to be with her true love, mate. It was her fault. That can be a factor.

Yeah. There's really strong women in Pussy Whip Kings. A lot of that happens.

But for the most part, if you locked all the men up, yeah, right, there would be no crime. Except in jail. There'd be a lot of crime in jail. Let's stop giving them ideas.

Obviously, you can't do that. But it's also, it's like,

how do we fix all of the insane tension in the world today? It seems like this is. at no other time in my life have I felt like there's more conflict and more tension in the air. It didn't used to be that people with differing ideas, whether they're on the right or the left, were so fucking hateful.

So I've seen the kind of rhetoric that you see online is just so like, if we don't win, democracy is lost. And it's from both sides. I think the problem is, man, is that we spend all our time on these platforms, which incentivizes that type of behavior. Because it's always going to be the most controversial, take, the most reactionary point of view, that's going to gain the most engagement. And that's going to work with the algorithm, which is going to drive it.

So really, people respond to incentives and you're incentivizing people to be more reactionary, more divisive, more aggressive. When the reality is, as we all know, if you got those two people to sit in front of one another and have a conversation, they wouldn't behave like that. Because you have the added element of getting a punch in the face. Yeah, that's another thing, right? Most people would never communicate the way they communicate online in real life.

And it's partly what Francis said, which is the potential for violence, right? Yeah, it's real. It's real. And it's maybe a guy thing, but we instinctively know that, right? Bill Burr used to have this incredible bit of how he would behave if it was illegal, if you couldn't hit him.

Just walk up to a Jimbro, snap a milkshake out of his hand. So the face-to-face thing changes everything, because most of the way we communicate is actually not in the words, right? This is how we're designed, right? We're designed to communicate in person. We're designed to take social cues, verbal cues, physical cues.

You can sense energy in people. You can sense that people are upset with you, even though their expression doesn't change. It's interesting. It's really interesting. And we've also come to this point, Joe, which is really worrying to me, where people think that words are violence.

That's crazy, man. And if you think that words are violence, and if you literally interpret it as that, then you having an argument with someone, is you literally being physically assaulted. So if you feel like you're being physically assaulted, then you're going to up the ante and you're going to become more aggressive. as a result. You're justified to defend yourself.

Yeah. Yeah. If you think that everyone is a Nazi, like a literal Nazi, you feel justified in your actions. A lot of them are convinced of that. It's like being in a cult.

But are they convinced, though? This is what I wonder, Joe. It's like they keep using that word about everybody, right? Yeah. But if you actually thought democracy was over and the Nazis have taken over, wouldn't you, like, pick up a gun and rise up and overthrow them?

I think we're pretty close to that. It seems like if you woke up one day and that broke out in Philadelphia, you wouldn't be stunned. Yeah. You're seeing what the looting and the craziness of Philadelphia is right now, right? Yeah.

It's bonkers, man. This defund the police stuff is psychotic. It's crazy to literally encourage crime, because if you don't have incentives, if you don't have something in place to keep people from committing crime, people that have already committed crime in their life like multiple times, like many times, they're just going to do it whenever they want. And that's what you're seeing. Yeah.

It's amazing how – and it's part of this sort of mindset that every human behavior is a product of the circumstances, but it's not. Some people will commit crime, right? And we have to also have a system that prevents that from happening. We have to have police. We have to have everything else, right?

And decriminalizing crime is a bad idea. It's a stupid idea, and it's just this idea that's born out of guilt, not logic. It's born out of virtue signaling, not rational thinking. It's just not the way to do it. If you have bad cops, you're supposed to train them to be better.

You should fund them better, treat them better, respect them more, and then they should have more of a relationship with the community. It should be a thing where they're trying to literally protect you, not constantly persecute people and fuck with people. And it's like that line is a very thin line. Then also, who the fuck wants that job? Who the fuck wants to be yelled at all the time?

Who wants to be the professional enemy? Who wants to be someone that it's okay to just shoot at? Who wants to be the person that everybody you interact with is lying to you? Was there a time in your life, Joe, where the police were respected by most people? There's always been problems.

Hunter S. Thompson wrote about the Chicago riots being one of the most horrific things that he ever saw in his life, the way cops were beating people with clubs and shit. There's always been bad cops, just like there's always been bad plumbers. Some people just suck. They suck at what they do.

They come from a bad environment. They didn't have good role models. They grew up around assholes. They don't have any motivation. Maybe they're hooked on drugs, and they suck at what they do.

And that could be anything. Anybody could suck at anything. Cops, too. There's cops that are awesome human beings. I know a lot of cops that are great people.

From jujitsu, I've known so many cops, because cops are constantly training. And generally, they're really nice guys with a fucking really hard job, but you don't hear about those. You hear about the one that does some horrible thing. You see about the one who plants the gun on the guy after he shoots him. You see the one where people shoot people when they're reaching for their wallets.

You see the crazy shit. You see people punching women in the face. You see crazy shit, right? But you don't see all the positive interactions. And you don't see what happens if you get rid of them.

And that's what you're seeing with these smash and grabs. These are fucking bananas, man, because they're everywhere now. And people are seeing so many of them on the Internet. And they're seeing that people are getting away with them. And it's encouraging them.

And this is what happened. Venezuela always had a problem with lawlessness. But when Chavez came to power, after a few years, they said the cops weren't going to prosecute people, criminals, because prosecuting a crime is a sign of right-wing oppression. Where have you heard that before? And as a result of that, it became so completely and utterly lawless that the city became uninhabitable.

It became the murder capital of the world and the kidnap capital of the world. Because there's always going to be a small subset of society who are criminals and who will then look to maximize their opportunities to make money. Yeah, there's a couple arguments about this that make sense. When people say that they're a victim of their circumstance, and we have to appreciate that they were put into a horrible circumstance in life, and they're just trying to get by, that's true too. So what we have to do that we're not doing is try to figure out how to stop that, how to make a minimum quality of life for everybody, where no one's growing up in dire poverty.

If you can send – I mean, how many trillions of dollars have we spent just on military budgets over the last few years? If they figured out a way to give contractors a lot of money to fix neighborhoods,

to completely clean them up, provide modern housing, take care of all the – figure out ways to set people up for work programs and give people jobs, if that was financially viable, just like Halburton had those contracts to rebuild Iraq after we blew it up, if they had something like that for inner cities, where these guys could literally make money doing it, that could be one way to kind of re-engineer things. Because if they could just figure out how to do that, you'd have so much less crime. You'd have a lot less crime. You'd have a lot less crime if people had hope, if people had role models, if they had community centers, if they had really good education and they had safe streets. Just that alone.

Just that alone. Yeah, it would reduce crime a lot.

Because you've got generation after generation of people who lived there. When you're talking about really fucked up, gang-ridden neighborhoods, no one's done anything about those neighborhoods for a long time. It's generational. It's built into the people that live there. They're accustomed to it.

And there's family structure as well. Once you disrupt all that, there's not enough male role models. Where are young kids going to look for a role model? It's going to be the men with status around them. Who's that going to be?

Drug dealers. Gang members. Status and money. And guys who grew up in those kind of neighborhoods. all have that story.

And that's true too. Yeah, you can't defund the police, but you also can't ignore the plight of a good percentage of our community. We're supposed to be a united community of human beings. We call ourselves Americans. We live on the same patch of land, except for Alaska and Hawaii.

Alaska's the dumbest. Like, how is that ours? It's not even connected. You know, people don't talk about the culture aspect, about it a lot. I remember when I was teaching at a school.

It was a really rough school. I taught a little kid. Let's call him Darren. It's one of the smartest kids I've ever encountered. So bright.

I remember he was always getting kicked out of lessons.

And when I was like, one of the jobs that you do as a teacher is, you walk around the corridor and you pick up the kids who get kicked out of the lesson. And I then taught Darren chess. And within about two days, he could beat me at chess. He was super, super, super bright. One of the brightest kids I've ever encountered.

But because he came from a criminal family, he was never going to make it through school. He just wasn't, because the values that had been inculcated in him right the way from birth meant that he was never going to succeed. And this is what I found frustrating that a lot of people didn't get. They were like, he's a bad kid. He's a kid who's a product of his culture.

And it takes a very special person to be able to break out of that. And generally, they have to find something to break out. Whether it's music or sports, or something that breaks them out. Stand-up comedy that breaks them out of that. So some new world that they can enter into and succeed in.

And then they can leave the old world behind. And at the same time, coming back to the point you made earlier, crime still has to be illegal. We can understand people's circumstances and not encourage and incentivize them to commit crime. We have to be able to do both. We have to walk and chew gum at the same time, man.

We've got to be. We have to be. Yeah, we have to be able to do both. But the way to fix it is not defunding the police. That's the worst strategy.

But that's such a virtue signaling strategy. That's like, look what they did to George Floyd. No, look what one guy did. One guy did. And there was a more than appropriate response by the people that saw that video.

People freaked out. And the violence and the burning and all that smashing and shit, very unfortunate. But that outblast of hate at least should make people recognize that, A, you can be held responsible for something horrific like that if someone's filming it. And then also that those kind of cops do exist. And also that it's on all of them.

And we've got to figure out a way to train cops or screen them better. or, like Jocko says, that you should train them the same way you train SEALs. Like SEALs develop, they go through this training program, and then they dedicate a certain amount of time forever for training. They're always training. Cops.

don't do that. They just stay cops. And he's like, you should dedicate a certain percentage of their time, should be dedicated to training. And they should be held accountable. But it's also it's like you're asking a lot, and then, on top of that, you're essentially dealing with people that have a high instance of PTSD.

Very high instance and not discussed and not appreciated. You hear about PTSD from people that are victims of violence and people that are victims of war. You hear about that, but you don't hear about it about cops. Yeah. And also the point you made earlier.

I mean, how much does it take to train a SEAL? It takes a lot. Right. How much do we spend training police officers? Not nearly as much.

And also like, hey, you shouldn't be fat. Like, hey. And also, you should be able to physically defend yourself. Yeah. You know, and even if you're a woman, you should know jujitsu.

You should be able to defend yourself. Because we've seen time and time again these horrific situations where cops can't physically defend themselves, and some criminal gets loose and beats the fuck out of them. Yeah. I mean, I've seen so many videos of this. One was horrible.

This lady pulled this guy over, and the guy's daughter was in the car. She's like, don't, daddy. Don't, daddy. And he's beating the fuck out of this lady cop. You know, when I left university, I did like a temp job at the Metropolitan Police, just doing like paperwork.

And what was really interesting when I was working in those offices is there were a lot of cops there working. And they were all just guys who were burnt out, PTSD'd out of their eyeballs. They couldn't function anymore. And all they did was just routine admin jobs. And I used to go with these guys to go and drink.

And like, really good guys. Really good guys. And the stories they told me, they were just horrific. And the drinking culture. And the only way a lot of these guys were functioning is by working.

Most of them, you know, they had one or two marriages. They had failed. And then they would just go out and just get smashed. Because that was their only way of coping. Because the support for them was minimal.

They didn't have any support. If you go to a murder scene and you see, you know, a guy who's basically killed himself and then shot his daughter and his wife. And you don't have any type of support when you come out to talk to, to help you to process that.

You're not meant to be exposed to that. All the time. All the time. But that's all you do. That's all you do.

Yeah. And we don't even consider that. It's just such a stupid underappreciation. And it's just so unfortunate that that's so prevalent. And it's somehow or another equated to liberalism.

And I just think it's just the wrong approach. I think it's like. fundamentally it's the wrong approach. I empathize and I even agree with how they feel about the way the setup in this country is not fair. It's not fair.

There are people that do not get a fair starting block. Their starting block sucks. Where they take off from in life, it's not the same as yours. It's not the same as mine. But we got to fix that.

The thing is not like fixing it when it gets to all the way to letting violent criminals out because you think they were wronged in life. You're just going to let violent criminals out. You're not changing them because you acknowledge the fact that they've been done wrong. And also, we have to be real in a society like yours and like ours, where we define poverty. I mean, look, the communities you're talking about, they're really in deep trouble, of course.

But we still define poverty in relative terms. And somebody will always be poorer than other people. Yes. But even very poor. Like dire poverty, food stamps, welfare, you don't have money for food.

I know. But those people are much wealthier than many of the people I grew up around. Which is crazy, right? Right. It's like it's 34%.

There are $34,000 a year, is 1% of the world. Yeah. People call themselves, like, you know, these 1%. that's you. That's you.

Right. That's everybody here. That's all of us. Yeah. Especially, most people working make more than $34,000 a year.

So most people in America that have a full-time job, they're probably making more than $34,000 a year. And they're in the top 1% of the world. Yeah. You know the thing that I don't think people talk about enough. So when I was teaching, I taught in rural communities.

And in a lot of rural communities, because of globalization, because of the industrialization, there's just generation after generation who are growing up, who are becoming adults, and there is no work. There is no work for the vast majority of them. And what it inculcates in them is a sense of hopelessness. And if you grew up in a culture where you feel that there is no hope, and you look around you and everyone is broken, and no one is working, and everyone is giving up, then even as a kid, you think to yourself, well, what's the point of doing anything? Because I'm just going to end up like Uncle Dave on the sofa.

You know what I mean? Even if you don't intellectually think it, emotionally, you feel it. Well, that's a thing that can happen to kids in high school. So if you're in high school and you're hanging around with a crowd who likes to party and drink and fuck off and not do much, and those are the fun people to hang out with, and then you get out of school, and now you're supposed to get a job. Now you're on your own.

You have to figure it out. And these guys aren't figuring it out. If you're trapped in that kind of a friend group, you can get sucked into very low expectations. And you could fucking waste a long chunk of your life before you figure that out. Totally, man.

And, you know, culture, you're right, Francis, is such a powerful thing. I mean, when I was 18, I spent a few weeks sleeping in the park because I didn't have money, and I had a long family situation. that was very bad. But it never occurred to me that I would stay there, because that wasn't what I came from, and it wasn't the environment I was raised in. I always knew that I would get out of it, you know.

And culture, you know, whatever attitude, whatever you want to call it, will push you through things that if you don't have it, it's going to be impossible. But if you don't have expectations that, you know, you don't know people that have succeeded in life and done well. That's a better word, expectations, than culture, expectations. If you're in a fucking place like South Side of Chicago, have you ever looked at the murder rate? Fuck, man, it's heartbreaking.

There's so many crazy videos of shootouts in the street. I just watched one the other day. A guy pulls over, jumps out of the car, shoots these guys.

It's just happening on the street. These kids are growing up in a war zone. So if you're a kid, and you're growing up there, and you're 15 years old, how many people have you seen killed? Three, four, five? How many have you seen killed?

Are you out at night? Are you, at 13 years old, are you roaming around the streets at night, being wild? Are you seeing gang violence? Are you participating in it? And what do you want as a young man?

You want status? You want money? Yeah. You want girls? Who are the people, all the people that you see around you, who are the people that have that?

Also, it's probably pretty fucking exciting. Oh, man.

You know? Shoot some guns, yeah. A lot better than working at Lowe's. Yeah. When I was, again, I was working in East London.

And one of the, this is the thing, you know, because I try always to have compassion for people. And obviously, you're human. sometimes. You're just like. Right.

But the thing that I found most heartbreaking, man, is like, there were kids in my class who I taught. They had learning difficulties. They were, you know, they're low IQ. They weren't particularly bright. They were sweet kids.

And they were just targeted by gangs. Because gangs knew that they could groom them. That they were 10, 11 years old. There was no one at home. No one cared for them.

They could groom them. And then they could become drug runners and whatever else. You know, my ex was an educational psychologist. She was working with a lot of these kids. One of her kids, like, went missing.

The kid went missing. 10, 11 years old. This was in North London. She was working. The kid was found in Scotland.

Literally a different country, at the other end of the island. And you're like, you know, and it was gang. It was gang. You know, because they take them. They groom them.

They give them money. They're the first person who shows them affection. The first person to show. You know what? Everybody else has written you off.

Everyone else thinks you're stupid. But you know what? Come and join us. Come and join us. I'll show you respect.

I'm going to give you responsibility. And you know what else you're going to do? You're going to get money. Here's a question. We all have this vision of a utopian society where there is no longer war.

There is no longer crime. But it's never existed. It's never existed, even briefly. Isn't it? There's something that human beings, it's almost like, built into the operating system of human beings.

That you need a certain amount of antagonists, a certain amount of protagonists to keep things moving. And that the urgency that everybody feels right now is like social urgency. It's almost like we're building up to like an ideological Super Bowl. Like we're going to figure out which one of these ideas makes the most sense. You know?

It feels like there's this tension built up. I almost wonder if that's something that we need in order to figure things out. Like. we need this chaos. We need people trying to control narratives.

We need people trying to censor people. We need people to do it, so we realize how horrific it is. So we act out. We talk about it. So it's not like this slow, creeping censorship where you don't notice it.

It's like it's shocking. They're censoring news stories that could hurt the party that they want to win in the elections. It's crazy stuff. It is crazy. And we had the case with debanking in the UK, where this guy, Nigel Farage, I don't know if you know him.

I did hear about that story. Yeah, he's kind of like the Donald Trump of the UK in some ways, you know, very unpopular with some things, with some people, very popular with others. And his bank, which was a kind of like bank for wealthy people, they closed his account without explaining why.

He started doing some digging. He did a freedom of information request or something. It's not called that, but it's basically the same thing. And the bank came out and said it's because he doesn't have enough money. Bullshit.

Turned out, it wasn't true. Eventually, he got the information saying that the transcripts of their internal conversations were, that part of the reason they shut his account down was political. Right. And then we had the Financial Conduct Authority, which is the people who are supposed to investigate this stuff. They did an investigation and said there was no political debanking going on.

All the newspapers reported it. And in paragraph five of that same article, you can see that his case was not taken into account in the report. Right. So they lied about it stage after, stage after stage. And now you've got mainstream journalists spreading this crap that they know isn't true.

All they have to do is have a good headline. All they have to do is have a good headline. The inside of it can be nonsense, and they can even show you right in front of your face why what they're saying is incorrect. And it doesn't matter. And then they all bitch and whine.

And then they go, why is no one watching our content? Well, here's the wildest one. that's going on right now. You know the Mar-a-Lago controversy of the pricing? The inflated value of the house.

Yeah, the Mar-a-Lago. The judge ruled that it was worth $18 million. It's 20 acres in the most expensive real estate in that area. A house down the street from it, much smaller, just sold for $50 million. Wow.

Even if Forbes said it's worth somewhere between. See what Forbes said. I think they said it was worth between $300 and $700 million.

And they were saying that it's worth $18 million.

It's like they don't even try to pretend. Why does no one trust the mainstream? If the guy says his house is worth $1 billion, right? And then you come along and say, no, no, no, it's worth like $800 million. Forbes says it's worth as much as $700 million.

We'll call it $700 million. Now you've got a reasonable argument. But if you say $18 million, you've got to know that's a palace. The place is a palace. It's 20 acres.

Get the fuck out of here. This is great. You can't do that. That's like too obvious. You don't give a fuck about the truth.

They don't. You don't give a fuck about the truth. He claimed it was worth $1.5 billion. in the latest pleaded drop fraud case. The judge ruled it's wildly inflated.

But the judge does not have an accurate sense of the market, in my opinion. Just the property size alone. It's such a giant chunk of property. So that says it's worth somewhere about half a bill, right? Is that what that's saying?

No. The judge was saying that it's worth between eight. Oh, it says, okay, citing an appraisal report from the city of Palm Beach that pegged the value of Mar-a-Lago between $18 million and $27.6 million between 2011 and 2021.. Oh, right. Okay.

So it was $18 million. Now it's worth, because of inflation, $27..

$325 million. That's how much Forbes estimated Mar-a-Lago's worth as of September. Although he pegged its net value at $292 million after deducting roughly $33 million in debt. Okay, so it's got debt. So I think what they're saying the scam is, is you wildly over-inflate a piece of real estate.

Again, I don't know jack shit about real estate. But I think what you do is you say, I got a house worth a billion dollars. I need a loan. And they give you a loan based on this billion dollar property you have. But if then they send an appraiser to you and say, hey, this house is worth $18 million.

Then you're like, uh-oh. So now you really got a loan, but you got a loan based on something that's not really worth as much. So they're collateral or whatever. it is. The reason why they would give you that much money doesn't make any sense.

But clearly that can't be accurate. If you're seeing pictures of that fucking place, show some photos of Mar-a-Lago. If that was $18 million, dudes would be buying them every day. It would last three seconds on the market before somebody bought it. People would just be calling up.

The phone lines would get jammed. I'll take it. Sight unseen. I'll take it. $18 million?

Even $27 million. Calling it $1.5 billion is a Trump thing to say.

My favorite thing about the whole speech is he talks about himself in the third person. The judge hates Trump. That's what he keeps saying. That's a nice house. It's a nice house.

It's a fucking palace, man. Look at that place. It's insane. And the inside of it is all…. Click on that photo of Trump there with the chandelier.

Look how fucking beautiful it is inside. Matt, that is ridiculous. I mean, look, maybe it's me being a Brit, but I look at it and go, it's a bit fucking much. Oh, it's a lot much. It's not my style.

That looks like something out of a Russian Tsar's house. Yes! That's what I like about it. That's what I want Trump's house to look like. If Trump lived in some bullshit fucking log cabin, I'd be so disappointed.

Trump lived in, like, fucking John Dutton's house on Yellowstone. What are you doing, bro? You should be balling. That's on brand, as they say. That's on brand.

Look at the size of that property. So those little houses around there sell for like $30 billion. That's crazy expensive property there. To think that that's only worth $18 million to $27 million, that seems a little insane. You know the thing that always gets me, man, is like, you read in the mainstream media, and they criticize our podcast and your show, and then they go, these people spread misinformation.

I'm like, mate, what are you talking about? You've been spreading misinformation from day one. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like getting a lecture on dating from Ted Bundy.

You're like, mate, come on. Yeah, it seems crazy for them to keep harping on that at this point. It's like, don't you know about the internet? People have made compilation videos of you guys being wrong over and over, and over and over again, and you've never apologized for it. I mean, whatever you want to talk about, whether it's the Russia collusion thing or the saying the dangers of Trump denying the election, then you show how many people denied Trump's election.

Right. Call him the illegitimate president. Hillary called him an illegitimate president. Yeah, they said he stole the election. If you think that's dangerous from him, then it's dangerous from you too, and we should all acknowledge that we should try to figure out a way to make the elections as fair as possible.

My real fear is that not everybody's on board with that. That's my real fear. I would love to believe that everybody on the right and everybody on the left just wants a fair battle, and they just want to be able to speak their mind to the public and have the people choose. That's what I would like to believe, and that we would like to encourage all Americans to vote. Everyone should just get informed and go out there and give your opinion.

Let's see how the country feels. But I don't know how much shenanigans is going on. You know there's a little collusion between social media companies. We know that. now.

That's kind of scary. It's kind of scary that you would think that what you believe is so important that you're willing to manipulate an election. That scares you. It should scare us because it's like, man, they could use that on you. Imagine if we have this fucking amazing person who's running for president, and finally, all rational people in the center, people that are rational on the right and the left, agree that this person has the country's best ideas in mind, and we've made awesome progress with the way this person is communicating with everybody.

It seems like they could really unite us, and they get fucked. Somebody comes in and just manipulates. it, doesn't like the idea of some new person taking charge, doesn't like the idea of some radical thinker who wants to try to make things as good as possible for the whole country, and that maybe there's a way to do that. And they get fucked by some establishment spokesperson because they know how to manipulate the system. And look at the people that rise to the top in the current system, in your country and in ours.

I mean the idea that these two people, whoever they end up being, if it's Biden and Trump, let's say, these are the best people out of 320 million fucking people? Well, the thing about Biden is he's already won, right? So he is the president, so it only makes sense that he runs for president if he's physically capable of doing that. The thing about Trump is, there's the narrative that he and a lot of his followers put out is that the election was rigged, and that he should be the legitimate president anyway, and no one else is voting for anybody else. These hardcore Trumpers, they're going to go all in on Trump.

So it's like, okay, how else could it be other than Trump versus Biden? Unless they arrest Trump, unless they figure out a way to make some of these charges stick. And here's the thing with Trump, you know, to him, this is no longer a presidential race. To him, this is existential, because this is probably the only chance he's going to have of avoiding jail. So you look at it like that and you think Trump is already a guy who, let's put it bluntly and mildly, will do whatever it takes to win.

And if you put a guy like that and you say the only way that you're going to avoid jail is to win the presidency, you're already notching it up a few ratchet when it comes to making the atmosphere really toxic. And you can play that argument the other way. I mean, in terms of Biden and the investigations that are happening, Donald Trump gets elected, what is he going to do? They would argue that too, right? The Biden thing is fascinating to watch people ignore it.

Did you see Noam Dorman's interview with that guy? No, I did not. Oh, man, it's Noam Dorman from the Comedy Cellar. Oh, okay. He had a guy on his podcast who he built up as like the most sane guy who says the Hunter Biden thing was a nothing burger.

And they went around for like an hour and the guy just would not – it was the craziest thing that I've ever seen. I'll send it to you. Okay. It's a journal from the Washington Post. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And he thinks it's nothing? Yeah. Is he doing mental gymnastics? Yeah, so when Noam essentially corners him and goes, no, no, look at this, look at this, the guy just – he wants to leave. That's it.

Yeah, well, that's a fucking live wire for them. They don't want to touch that. It's like there's really no defending it rationally. So if you're on the team that has to defend the left, which you've all seen people like that on podcasts before, where you realize, oh, this guy is just – this isn't like a real person. This is a representative of whatever they're for, whether it's the right or the left.

There's people like that where you never really see them. They have walls. And what they're doing is just like speaking that kind of language. There's always going to be people like that. We've got to get back – or not back.

I don't think we were ever there. But we've got to get somehow the idea that truth matters, man. And it doesn't matter what fucking team you're on. The truth matters if you're left, right, up, down, whatever. The truth matters.

Well, I think that's what we're doing right now. Yeah. I think that's what we do, and that's one of the reasons why your show works. And that's one of the reasons why this show works is because people can just talk. And they can do so in a way that you really – it's not available anywhere else.

The reason why people are so hungry for these kind of conversations on podcasts is because you can't get it anywhere else. These other people aren't doing it. They're doing a different thing. They're doing a thing where there's a giant business behind it, and there's advertisers, and there's a bunch of executives and producers, and they all have segments that they've developed, and there's writers and everyone. And then you get to express yourself, sort of through this very narrow window, to be able to just sit and shoot the shit and just say why is this and why is that?

and what is this and what is that, like that kind of freedom to do that. It's never existed before. No, and they're all terrified of a Twitter storm. They're all terrified of a Twitter storm. You see it in our politics, where somebody says something like the hot topic at the moment is immigration, particularly illegal immigration.

So there's a lot of people coming from France to the UK illegally. They just jump in a boat from France illegally. And it's run by cartels and gangs. And the really sad thing is some of these people actually drown in the English Channel as a result, and they come to the UK. This needs to stop.

You just can't have unfiltered illegal immigration. Yet you get people on, politicians that go, look, we need to stop this. And then people are calling, they're saying that they're, you know, one very famous ex-sportsman compares that to Nazi Germany. It's like, why is it happening in this big rush? Is this engineered?

Like, why is it happening like this? Like, what is it about this?

It seems like at least some people want to keep the borders open. Yeah. It seems like it. Yeah. It seems like something's changed where they've made it easier for people to just come across.

Yeah. So what happened? Whose idea is that? Right. And then what is this crazy push where you want people to not have ID to vote, but you want people to have ID to make sure you have a vaccine passport or you can't work or get on a plane?

And did you check any of these people to see if they're vaccinated when they came aboard? You really didn't, did you? So what are we doing here? It's crazy. It's like hundreds of thousands of people a month.

It's crazy. You brought it up earlier. I think we talked about this last time with Thomas Sowell, who's just like, I mean, I've read every book that he's ever published, and I just think he's amazing. We talked about the tragic vision versus the slightly more utopian way of looking at things. When you were talking about crime earlier, the tragic vision of life kind of says, if you look back at our history, you kind of get a sense of what human beings are.

Yeah. And human beings are flawed. They're not perfect. They will commit crime. They will do terrible things.

They will go to war. They will do that. And so the only thing you can do is know that and then act accordingly, right? That means that you have to have a border. That means you have to have a police force.

You have to recognize the fallibility of human beings and the societal dynamics as well, and then you can make good policy. That's how you make good policy. But if you live in this blue sky world, only, the blue sky world is great for inspiring you to be better than your human instincts and all of that. But there's also a real world in which you have to be able to live in both, and it's hard. It's really hard.

But if you can do that, you can hopefully make improvements, because you're trying to be better. You're trying to speak to your own and other people's better angels, and at the same time, you have to recognize that not everybody is a good guy. Some people are terrorists. Some people are murderers. Some people are rapists.

Some people will do things that you don't want to happen, and you have to also tackle that at the same time. And immigration, countries need borders, man. That's something people used to agree about, left and right. I've quoted Barack Obama talking about this. We need borders.

Yeah, he was talking about that when he was running for president. He's saying something that would get Trump canceled today. Yeah. What do you think happened, Joe? I don't know, but I don't know how it can keep happening.

I don't know how anybody doesn't recognize that it's a problem and go, hey, let's sort this out. I don't know. You don't want to go full tinfoil hat. Nobody does. Nobody wants to, like, are they engineering?

I mean, some people do.

All the elves. Some people do. That's not important right now. If you just stop and think about all these converging factors, all these things that are happening simultaneously, right? Okay.

First of all, massive dip in the economy from the COVID pandemic, businesses closing. Then you have George Floyd. Then you have riots. Then you have defund the police. Then you have massive theft.

Do you know how much more theft there is? Lowe's hardware store lost. Google. this. I think.

in 2022, they lost $900 million in theft.

Yeah. Just people walking into their stores and stealing drills and shit. Just stealing things. Because in some places, you can get away with stealing as much as $900, and they're not even allowed to stop you. I mean, that is a recipe for chaos.

See if that's true.

This is new media. We actually check the facts. And shout out to our friend Andrew Doyle and his new book, The New Puritans. Andrew's awesome. Did he ever get kicked off of Twitter?

Did Tatiana McGrath get kicked off? Yeah. He got kicked off a couple of times. Look at that. Shrink and theft loss is near $1 billion at Lowe's.

Here's how much it's costing other retailers. Yeah. So it's true. It's almost a billion dollars they lost. What does shrink mean?

Shrink and theft loss. That's a good question. Yeah. Why does it mean? They're not.

Shrink and theft. Is shrink like internal theft? What does that mean? It's just blaming it on shrink. What does that mean?

Items lost to factors. Oh, external or employee theft. Oh, okay. External or employee. So that's okay.

So what is the actual number? It says it in there somewhere, I'm pretty sure.

Target lost $219 million. I think it's slightly further down, Jamie. Just a little bit. There you go. $997 million.

$997 million. They lost $796 million in 2021.. Oh, my God. Imagine insuring them. Imagine insuring a store that you know is going to get robbed.

But just imagine this, Joe.

Actually, Constantine went to speak at this festival. It's a very prestigious festival in the UK called How the Light Gets In. And I have friends who go and speak there and go and watch debates. Like I said, Constantine took part in a debate there. And one of my friends went to watch because his partner, she, was speaking there and hosting debates.

And I said to him, how was it, mate? And he said, do you know the thing? that was really worrying? I go, what? He goes, and bear in mind, these are some of the most educated people in the UK.

At least one of them per panel, per debate went, look, until we abolish capitalism, then we're never going to solve these problems. And it's just like you're talking about genetics. Why are you talking about abolishing capitalism? But think about it like this. It's a virtue.

There's not a lot of science, research that happens out there. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. You need money to do research. Exactly.

You think a scientist would get that? You know, the problem is, they're so insulated in these university-like ecosystems. They're so insulated. If you're a professional academic, I mean, look, it's a noble thing. It's an amazing thing to be a professor.

It's an amazing thing to be educating kids and shaping minds and exposing them to great literature and mathematics and all the wonderful things professors teach. But the reality of their existence is you go from being a high school student to a college university student, to getting your master's degree, to getting your PhD, to teaching. You're constantly in this world, and that world is almost entirely left-wing, like radically left-wing. Like. what is the percentage of, like, far-left professors?

You almost even think, when you think professor, like far-left. It's like Catholic priest pedophile. You know what I mean? You know what I'm saying? Yeah.

Unfortunately, they're connected in your head. So you hear about that. You think far-left professor. John High talks about it in his book. Yeah.

On social studies and stuff like anything to do with that, it's like 9 to 1 or 10 to 1, sometimes 100 to 1.. Yeah. So then they're in that world where it's constantly – they're constantly being reinforced. Like these ideas are reinforced and never challenged, and almost, you know, ridiculously so. Like really bright people talk like they're in a cult, like avoiding reality and bending truth to placate whatever the new social norm is for anything.

It's like – it's bizarre to see. And so those people are always going to be in conflict with reality. So when they're like, you know, we should abolish capitalism. Like, okay. Like, you live in a fucking playground.

Like what are you talking about? It's a good description. You're not out there in the real world. You're teaching kids. You're teaching kids at a playground and you're the god because you're the professor with all the knowledge.

Stop. Yeah. No, you can't. It's never been done before, stupid. Like communism never works.

We tried. We tried. Look at how that works out. It leads to violence. It leads to fucking authoritarianism.

It leads to dictatorships. You've got to enforce people following all these rules. You have to. That's the point. You have to use violence.

You have to use violence to make that work. What Yeonmi Park talks about when she talks about her experience in North Korea? when she fled North Korea. She said they promised everyone that they would be able to feed everyone if they took over the land. That's how they got everyone's land.

That's how they got everybody to give up. And now they're fucked. And that is happening right now, in 2023.. The way Yeonmi Park describes North Korea is actually the way North Korea is right now. So don't think that that can't happen here.

Don't think that can't. They're regulating podcasts in Canada. Oh, yeah. Yeah. I was reading about this.

About this bill. Because I woke up and we're jet lagged. So I woke up at ridiculous time. I went on the phone, which you should never do. Let's be honest.

That is a bad way to start the day. It's not good. No. And then I was reading about what they're doing. It's terrifying.

So they want to bring in this bill whereby they regulate podcasts. So what they want to do is every podcast streamer, or whatever it is platform that makes more than $10 million revenue. Not profit. Revenue has to register with the Canadian government. They then want them to hand over information about their content and the people listening to their.

Right. To their. To the government. Imagine getting a hold of Alex Jones' email list.

Probably a bunch of senators in there. Yeah. Oh, yeah. For sure. I mean, imagine.

Yeah. And then. The government can get that. They're talking right now about. And maybe we're going to need to fact check this again, because I was reading it this morning.

But basically they want it to promote Canadian. Something to do with, like, basically what Canadian greatness or whatever it is. They talk about it and indigenous affairs. And you're like, oh, so, they're going to say a number of things are un-Canadian. And then you can just silence them.

Look what Trudeau did with the truckers. Yeah. Yeah. Terrifying. We just had one of the guys on to talk about it.

Not just the truckers, but people who donated to the truckers got their bank accounts closed. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that is wild. Yeah.

You're locked out of all of your money because you donated to a cause where you didn't think that people should have to take an experimental vaccine. In order to be able to work to drive a truck. But. Really? Really?

You think that's okay? Like that's so not okay. The fact that those people aren't up in arms. The whole country didn't freak out and demand a fucking change. Like you can't have.

That's dictatorship stuff. That's what it is. It's banana republic stuff. We do these calls with our top supporters and we have some. in Canada.

We have this lady who's been supporting us for years. And she's always fine. And in the middle of this thing, she was like, I'm terrified. I'm not going to be able to eat because they're going to shut down my bank account. God.

Right? In Canada. It's so crazy that they think they could do that if people disagree with them. Because that's all they're doing. They're just disagreeing.

And they're supporting a protest. It should be. And it was a peaceful protest. Those people did it the right way. They just parked their trucks and they didn't block roads off.

They didn't do anything. fucked up. But if you frame it that these people, which is how they were being framed as racist, far right. Well, look, you're giving money to a far right racist organization. You're encouraging hate.

Well, the government has to step in. We have to step in and we need to freeze everything, because we need to make everything safe. What was his most recent apology? because they accidentally awarded a Nazi? Yeah.

Like what happened? I think. so. I think Zelensky was visiting the Canadian parliament and they got some guy who was a Ukrainian inverted commas war veteran. Turned out he fought for the bad guys in that one.

Oh, my God. Yeah. I don't think they. I don't think like Zelensky, or I don't know. We didn't know.

Yeah. He didn't know. But so imagine you're sitting in parliament and everyone's like, hey, let's do a stand up and give a round of applause for this war veteran. You're like, yeah. And then it turns out you're applauding a Nazi.

How old is this dude? Old. He probably doesn't even know. I'm not a good guy. I'm not a fucking good guy.

Maybe he's like tricked himself into being a Nazi. Imagine. Yeah. I mean, how do you, if you are a sane person, like, how do you deal with that fact that you committed all of these heinous crimes? Yeah.

If you're living in that time, do you think it's just everyone's doing it and you just get sucked into the cult and you're scared? or you believe it? Is it that easy for human beings to other people? Is it because it was a different time and people just didn't didn't have as much exposure to to knowledge as they do today? And that wouldn't be as possible today.

I hate to think that that's a possible, because there's always been times in history people committed genocide. There's always been times in history where people have decided that this other group and oftentimes other groups, looks exactly like they do. Right. Those are the bad people, for, whether it's because of religion or a line they drew on the dirt. They've decided that those people are worth exterminating.

And those stories are fucking horrific. And that the Nazi Germany one is just the latest one. It's just the one that we call upon. But, you know, just think about what the Mongols did. You know, that's in the in twelve hundred.

Think about what they did. They just sacked entire cities, just killed everybody, piled them up in big fucking stacks, lit everything on fire, took all the women and they just left out. And they did that all over Europe, all over Asia. They did it all. They've.

they've ran everything. They killed something. Some of the neighborhood of 10 percent of the world's population was murdered during Genghis Khan's era. So much so that the carbon footprint of human beings on Earth got lower. He was progressive.

That's how many people. Yeah. You know, there's a lot of historians in Russia who say that many of the reasons the way Russian people are, the way they are. And there's a lot of, like, trauma in society that's carrying on is from that period. We have a lot of words in Russian for cruelty and all that sort of thing that come from that period.

Completely makes sense. Completely makes sense. I mean, just imagine the horror of a gigantic army of men on horseback intent on murdering everyone in front of them. And that that was consistent with the era. It was normal stuff.

that was like, oh, the Mongols here were fucked. You know, that was. that was, that's a thing that human beings have always done. for some strange reason. They've always done that.

And the thing, the thing about today is that as much as we know about humans and much access technology, we have, the interconnectivity that we have with each other, there's still war. And no one, if you had to put your money, if you're a gambler on within 10 years, will there be no war on Earth? What kind of odds am I getting? Yeah. Because for sure there's going to be something popping off somewhere.

We're bands of chimps, man. That's what we are. We're bands of chimps. And chimps go to war. And so do we.

Absolutely. But then there's also the flip side of it, where there are. like, you know, I always tell this story because to me, it's this is a story of my grandfather. So my grandfather, in the Second World War, he used to. he was a master joiner, which is the highest level of carpenter you could get.

And he used to work in a factory in Manchester on the mosquito plant. And the fascinating thing about the mosquito was it was the only airplane. It was a fighter airplane and was made entirely out of wood. Whoa. Yeah.

So it was because a Messerschmitt was very lumbering. It was very heavy. It was a great fighter plane, but it wasn't very nimble. And the mosquito was. And it was so and he was making mosquito.

So he was exempt from going to war. And he I think it was 1941 and he was a smart guy and he was following what was happening. And he, like I said, he was exempt because he was part of the war and a very important part. He resigned his position at the factory, enlisted to go and join, had a baby. My aunt Patricia, who was probably around one or two years old, married, and he enlisted to go and fight in the war, knowing full well that there was a very significant chance that he wouldn't come back.

Yet he risked his life because he knew that there was something more important. And was it's. we focus on the bad. There's also incredible people like everyday people like from that generation who just went, no, this is wrong. And I need to stand up and I need to do something.

And there is something greater than me. So there is that aspect of humanity as well. That does exist, but I think people were more resilient then because life was more difficult. I think it's it's great that we've managed to make starvation on one of the least of our concerns in this country at this point in time. You know, but along the way, I think we've made it so easy to survive for so many people that we've got kind of lost resolve.

And it must have been horrible to live back then, to live during the time of World War One. I mean, imagine how hard life was back then. Life was fucking hard. But those are the type of people that you need if you're going to have a war. We don't have that.

many of those now. Not not like that. That was probably like you've seen those videos. I don't have, but like there's physical fitness classes in the 1960s in America. And they all look like little athletes.

They're all doing monkey bars and shit like everybody can. Everybody's working out. They all look fit. If you try to have a video like that today, you'd have some blue haired slobs falling down and breaking their arms. You know, like how many people are resilient today?

It's less. There's a lot more people, but the percentage of resilient people is less. Well, Jamie, you might be able to look this up. I think there was an article recently about the fact that the U.S. Army is having trouble recruiting people because they're just not physically capable.

They're struggling. You know, and that wouldn't just be the U.S. It would be a lot of places. Also, the Army's kind of going woke. Oh, man.

And this is the thing we've been talking about, right, man? It's like inclusion. Can we just focus on what fucking works? Can we focus on what works? Right.

I want the Army to be good at killing the enemy. I don't give a fuck about how diverse they are. Right. Imagine if the UFC had to have diversity. Do you know what a problem that would be?

Yeah. We'd like to have a certain amount of trans folks, a certain amount of—. I would work well in the women's division. If you only had—like, if you had numbers you had to achieve, it wasn't the best fighters. Yeah.

It was just, you know, like who meets certain criteria. There's going to be a bunch of people that get murdered. Yeah. They're going to get thrown in with the real ones. There's going to be a certain percentage of people that are just there because they're awesome, and a certain percentage of people that they have to hire in order to meet these DEI standards.

Joe, I'm going to—Jamie, can I ask a favor, man? Would you mind bringing up RAF Diversity UK? You're going to—. It's a beautiful story. This is a beautiful story.

What happened? Mate, this is— Just look up for male white—useless male white pilots. Look that one up. Yeah. Useless male white pilots?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is that a quote? Yeah, that's a quote from their report. They were like, you know what? We're not hiring any more white men to fly planes.

What a good idea. Yeah. Definitely don't hire the people that are the best at it. No. Why would you?

Whether they're white or black or Asian. No, just don't hire white ones. Royal Air Force on lawfully discriminated against white male recruits in bid to boost diversity. Dude, you want the best. Whoever the fuck they are, whether they're white or South American or Indian, you want the best.

Who cares? No one cares. You want people who fly the planes. the best, right? Only the best.

And this is, like, controversial. now. It's a war plane. Could you imagine? Imagine if, like—again, this goes back to the MMA fighters.

Imagine if, like, you know, like the UK had one representative that was supposed to be fighting Francis Ngannou. You know what I'm saying? Don't pick me. You know, you have one person who's supposed to step up and fight that guy. And, well, it says the right move is to, you know, send in a non-binary woman.

Yeah. Because they don't get represented in the UFC. Like, okay, what the fuck are you talking about? She's representing the UK. We need someone to beat him.

Man, it comes to a point—and this is where we talk about the university campus, right? You can have these demented ideas on a university campus, and all they are is an exercise in intellectual masturbation. when you come down to it, when you break it down to its purest sense, right? And in a way, that's fine. What's wrong with having stupid ideas and debating and believing it?

But the problem is, is, when you start to implement it in the real world, where there is such a thing as reality, that's when the rubber hits the road and things really start going wrong. That's when things go Western. That's what we like to call it out here. Right. Things go Western.

Right. I will say as well, I think, you know, we've been talking about social media. I think social media is a big part of this. I don't know if you've seen the graphs, but basically what happens in 2013,, 2014,? newspaper articles just start all this social justice bullshit.

It just goes through the sky, and not just in the U.S. and the U.K. It's Qatar. It's every country in the world. So I think social media rewards ideas that sound good.

It does, but it also awards echo chambers. Yeah. You know, that's a big part, just like we're talking about universities, that, you know, the echo chambers on the right wing online are just like the echo chambers on the left wing. Yeah. It's like.

it rewards that. Everybody looks for their favorite commenters, who jump on their threads and comment on each and every one and back them up on these things, and they look at all the likes. and, yeah, kick an ass. Yeah. But my favorite story of this year, and this is one that I love so much, it's by a beautiful woman, Joe, called Isla Bryson.

Oh, this is a great story. This, I remember last time I was at your club, The Mothership, we touched on it briefly when you and I were talking, but this, to me, is the most beautiful story of a beautiful woman living her best life. James, we're going to need to see a photo of this beautiful woman. Joe, you're happily married. I don't remember you bringing this up.

Right. So this happened in Scotland. Yeah. So what is the story? Okay.

So there's a two-time male rapist called Adam Gray, convicted male rapist, right? And then, just before he was going to be sent to prison, he got what Constance and I like to call rapid-onset prison dysphoria. Prison onset. You put it in the line, but it's prison-onset gender dysphoria. Yeah, there you go.

This is the guy. So now he's a woman in women's prison? Yeah. They put him in a woman's prison. in Scotland.

There's a clitoris, Joe, if you're wondering. They're doing that in America, too. Yeah. There's quite a few. There's one person that identifies a woman, went to jail, and got two people pregnant in jail.

They're like, what?

It just seems so silly. And I'm as liberal as you can get, but I'm not on board with that. Well, I'm as liberal as you can get, too. That's what's so crazy. It's like they push it so far to cuckoo land that any rejection of any of these outrageously stupid ideas becomes far right.

Yeah. You're far right. if you don't think a guy with a regular dick who has been straight his whole life should be able to identify as a woman and go into a woman's prison and be with women. Like, come on. And this guy's a rapist.

He's a threat. We know he's a threat. It's so crazy. It's just so crazy that they'll take it all the way to prison. And then you've got politicians who, on the question time, which is our most prestigious political debate, show, they had a member of the SNP, because this happened in Scotland, so this is a member of the Scottish National Party, and this SNP member was asked,

is Isla Graham male or female? And you know what she responded to this woman? She went, they're a rapist. Refused to even acknowledge that it's a man. What a weird world.

So weird, isn't it? I would have never imagined if you came to me in 2013 and said, guess what's going to be a crazy subject 10 years from now? Guys who just say they're women and they put them in women's prisons. What? Come on.

That can't be a thing. Imagine if you had to dress up like a woman for a whole year in order for it to be, like, legit. Like, there was a rule. Like, you could do it, but you had to dress up like a whole year, so criminals just started dressing up like women. And that became, like, the thing.

You know how guys like to sag? Yeah. Like, that's how they wear their pants in prison, right? So they like to sag. It's, like, part of the thing.

What if that becomes the thing? Like, you know, there's only one way to get locked up with women. You've got to dress like a woman all the time. So you've got to dress like a woman for, like, a whole year in order to be accepted. It would be the new style of, like, just people who are just like, I'm a criminal.

I don't give a fuck. This is what I do. If I get arrested, at least I'm going to get arrested with women. Yeah. I mean...

Guys who start wearing dresses. And I'll be honest with you, man. I don't want to be talking about trans, my fucking, my whole life. I don't. You have to.

You have no choice. You will comply. No, no. You will comply, or we will freeze your bank account. You will...

I don't want to be talking about this shit. But when this is happening, what are we supposed to do? We're just supposed to sit there and pretend it's not happening? Well, if you have any opinion other than what you're supposed to have, then you're some kind of a terrible person, a transphobe. That's nuts.

Because there's always room for crazy. You've got to leave room for crazy. You've got to leave room for crazy in all groups of people. Yeah. Including trans people.

And if you don't, if you try to pretend that, you know, you have this group, that anybody can join and that these are new rules, and we're all living in Narnia now, come on. Come on. There's always going to be crazy people. Of course. The emperor's fucking naked, man.

The emperor's naked as fuck, and he's got a heart on him. Yeah. He's right there. Yeah. And he's like, I want access to the female changing rooms.

Then will I come this way, madam? And you're a bigot, if you don't agree. Imagine Francis Ngannou was like, you know what? I'm a woman. I wonder what percentage of, like, people with kids believe that versus people who don't have kids.

Yeah. That's an interesting. Right. Yeah. Because I wonder if so many, like, there's so many people that have ideas, people that don't have children, they have ideas that I think, you know, they just have this ideology that they subscribe to, but with no consequences for anyone that's really young, that they love and care about.

And then, when they have kids and then there's someone young they love and care about, you start looking at the world as a much more dangerous place. You start saying, oh, these people are like little kids. Like, there was some little girl who got kidnapped really recently. They found, they used geo-tracking of cell phones and shit, and the person's fingerprints from the ransom note, and they got her back pretty quickly, luckily. But, you know, a nine-year-old girl just gets kidnapped.

Like, there's people like that in the world. And when you have children, you think like that. Like, someone could steal your kids. Like, that's real. Someone could hurt your kids.

And someone, you know, could go in the locker room and watch your kid go to the bathroom because they decide that they're a girl. And that doesn't mean that there's not people that are legitimately trans and identify as women, and that's who they are, and they're not perverts and they're not creeps. Of course. Of course that exists too. But you're opening the door.

If someone just says, I'm trans, I can use that restroom. You're opening the door for perverts. You 100%, most certainly are. This doesn't deny the existence of trans people, but we have to be honest about what could possibly happen. That's why, if people are uncomfortable with biological males walking around female locker rooms, it's because some people are liars and they're con artists.

And they're not really this person that's been trapped in a man's body their whole life. They're fucking perverts and they want to be around kids or they want to be around women. They want to make them uncomfortable. They want people to stare at their dick while they walk around and know that they can't say anything about it. That's real too.

Sure. That's real too. 100%. This doesn't discount the problem that trans people have with integrating into society and being accepted. That's real too.

That's real too. But you have to understand that if you just have this blanket policy where no one can question anything about this stuff, you're opening the door to abuse. Right. And you have a front door in your house, not because you think everyone is going to come and steal shit from your house, but you know that some people will. So you have to put certain things in place to protect yourself and your family.

It's the most obvious thing, man. Well, it's just. there's no screening in women's bathrooms. You don't know whether someone is a creep. You have no idea.

No. It's not like getting into a job where they have to do a background check on you. It's not like applying for some top secret position where they have to make sure that you're someone who can be trusted with information. No, it's like a bathroom. So it could be like someone just out of jail, puts on a dress, goes into a women's room.

That's what we're accepting today. That is a possibility. And women that feel vulnerable in those situations are fucking terrified, and rightfully so, because if they do encounter something like that, they get no support. No one will say anything. No one will take your side.

You saw what happened with that, the thing that happened in Hollywood at that massage parlor. Oh, yeah. Yeah, in California. Bonkers, man. Someone who had a history of being a sex offender, walking around naked in the women's room, they complained, then all of a sudden there's protest there.

It's like, come on, kids. Man, going to California, and we love this country, as you know, we traveled all around it. You should, motherfucker. We love it. We rule.

It's fucking awesome. Only an American would say that. The British person would be like, yeah, it's all right, my bitch. It's not too bad. America.

Fuck yeah. We put up flags everywhere. Yeah. I've got one right there. Yeah.

I mean, they're small. in California. The California flag is about this big. People started accusing me of being right wing when I had that flag behind me. Oh, really?

Yeah, that very flag. Yeah. It's cool. It's a cool art piece. I love it.

That used to be the backdrop. And people criticized. They were saying, he's right wing. You're a right winger. now.

Look at the American flag. People think American flag is right wing. God, that's all of us, kids. That's the whole batch of us. We're supposed to be in this together.

Yeah. And this is, you know. But California, man, what you see, I mean, it's many American cities, actually, sadly, but what you see in California, people go, it's like a third world country. I grew up in several third world countries. I did not see that.

Well, you were talking about the encampments, the homeless encampments. But also the crime, the way that people are. I mean, we've driven around places where you just see people. You don't even know if they're alive. Yeah.

That's good drugs. You get the good stuff. The good stuff, you just nap anywhere. You're like, fuck the world. I'm sleeping on this potted plant.

Yeah. Yeah, it's not good, man. And I don't know how that snaps back either. Yeah. I wouldn't want to be the governor.

Imagine that. Imagine being the mayor of Los Angeles or the governor of California trying to clean that mess up. But somebody's got to do it, Joe. There's got to be a point now where ordinary rational people just go, you know what, mate? Enough's enough.

Or AI. We just farm it off to AI. AI is your new governor. It eliminates bias. Oh, it doesn't eliminate bias.

AI follows the rule of the law. Oh, boy. AI will just figure out how to get rid of the homeless people. They're going to shoot one every night until they all quit. They'll be like those robot dogs that are just going to show up on Venice Beach and just gun one person down.

We will be back tomorrow. We will shoot one person every night until this beach is clean, and then they just drive into the center of it and shoot people. So it's not even just the people on the outside, so no one's safe. Tell you what, that TV show would get great ratings. It would.

That's an episode of Black Mirror, I bet. Did you ever see that one, Heavy Metal, where the robot dog is chasing this lady? No. Oh, my God, it's terrifying. It's terrifying today, too, when you watch those Boston Dynamic videos where they show those DARPA robots.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Those things are so crazy. They got DARPA cheetahs and shit, and all these really nutty robots they're working on that, can do backflips and they can do parkour. They're making super robots. And when those motherfuckers decide to reinforce the will of AI and just roam to the streets like that fucking Will Smith movie, iRobot.

We're not far away from that, man. That might be our best bet. That might be. what gives us hope, is that AI takes over government, and they take over allocation of funds. I can't tell if you're being serious or you're joking, man.

I'm kind of serious. I'm kind of serious. That's how they eliminate corruption, because they're not terrified of the corporations and their money, because AI will control all the money. If you search out GPT and try to ask it some questions about trans, you're going to, oh, boy, that thing is a little woke. Yeah, it's a little woke.

It's also, it will criticize certain people but not criticize others. Yeah. Yeah, it's interesting. It also won't say anything nice about Donald Trump. Really?

Yeah. Didn't someone do something like that? They tried to say something good about Trump and why he'd make a great president.

I wonder what it says. Let's find out in real time, because somebody told me that, but I always wonder. Are you using the same program? Are you using the older program or the new? What is it now, 4.5??

And then what they're saying is, when 5 comes out, it's going to be, like. each one of them is exponential. They're more and more complex. Their answers are better. They can code websites in seconds.

They can figure things out that you can never figure out. You can never figure out if you had a lifetime of studying over books, figure things out instantaneously. We're real, real close to having, like, full-on training wheels for life. Just like you don't remember phone numbers anymore, because they're all in your phone. Donald Trump has a talent for engaging with and energizing his supporters.

His ability to connect with a large segment of the American population and inspire passion and loyalty is noteworthy. Additionally, his presidency marked a period of significant policy changes, including tax reform and criminal justice reform, which had lasting impacts in the United States. It's important to remember that different people have varying perspectives on political figures, and recognizing their positive attributes can foster constructive dialogue. You should go into politics, man. That's great.

That's a great answer. So is that chat GPT, Jamie? That's a great answer. Chat GPT is a right-wing bigot. That's why chat GPT should govern us.

See what I'm saying? It's basically just echoed what we've been saying. So what if chat GPT is that smart? And what if it understands that the policies were actually effective? You know, the thing that really worries me about AI?

It's that it's going to get rid of low-skilled labor that employs a hell of a lot of people, particularly a hell of a lot of men in this country. I saw this great clip from Tucker Carlson where he was going, you know, we're talking about AI. But AI is going to bring in driverless cars. It's going to bring in driverless lorries. Think about how many men in the U.S.

at the moment are employed in the driving industry. What's going to happen when all of those men become redundant? There are no jobs. They're at home. And he goes, I'm going to be honest with you, men without direction, men without jobs, earning without responsibility, that doesn't end.

well. What are we going to do then? We're going to transition all of them.

Everybody's got a problem. It's like we found out that men create all the problems. We're just going to turn you into a woman. There you go. Problem solved.

That's how we, instead of putting all the men in prison, we just turn all of them into women. Fantastic.

Well, you know what? I don't have a counterargument to that. And this is the thing that scares me.

Before COVID, I used to think of myself as pretty anti-conspiratorial. But during COVID and post-COVID, I've realized I'm becoming more and more conspiratorial, as I realized that we were being lied to. Well, there most certainly are real conspiracies. The problem is no one wants to feel stupid. And you don't want to even entertain conspiracy theories, because there's dumb ones out there.

So you get connected to all the dumb ones. And you can get connected to those if you're not paying attention. But there's real ones. And there's a lot of them. And they've always existed.

What's your favorite? Conspiracy theory? My favorite is always the war ones. Because it's just so crazy that they'll just lie to get us into wars. And that it's always been a thing.

Hitler burned the Reichstag. And Nero burned Rome. And the Gulf of Tonkin incident. And the Operation Northwoods thing they planned. That was signed by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and vetoed by Kennedy.

Where they're going to arm Cuban friendlies and have them attack Guantanamo Bay. And blow up a jetliner and blame it on Cuba. They're going to do some wild shit. Try to get us to go to war with Cuba. Those are the most fascinating to me.

Because there are a bunch of people at high level positions in the government that are conspiring to get us to go to war. And this is what Eisenhower warned us about at the end of his presidency. He warned about the military industrial complex. It was a fascinating speech. And if you think about it now, it's like, God damn.

was he right. That, to me, is the most fascinating. Because it seems like there's just this machine that's always been running society. But we've kind of pretended it wasn't. Pretended.

that wasn't the case. Pretended. it wasn't this massive industry that requires war in order to feed itself. That, to me, is the wildest one. That.

and then UFOs. The UFO. one, man, I'm kind of sour on it lately. Really? Yeah, because they keep talking about it.

The more they talk about it, not show me anything. And the more they have whistleblowers. The more I'm like, why do I feel like I'm being fucked with? Why do I feel like there's something going on? Why do I feel like this is a juicy distraction?

Why do I feel like? because it always happens in these military areas, why do I have a feeling like you guys have developed some insane technology that people aren't aware of? I mean, and it might even not be a physical thing, right? It might be something they can project from satellites. Maybe it's some sort of a hologram.

Maybe it's, I mean, who knows what the fuck it is? Maybe it is from another planet. Maybe there are interdimensional beings that occasionally visit us and they always have. But that sounds, but it sounds goofy. But the problem is, if something as crazy as alien life visited us, wouldn't it just seem fake?

That's the other thing I tussle with. I'm like, even if they really were having actual disclosure, they really are having congressional hearings about whether or not these things are ours or whether or not there's any crashed UFOs that the government has retrieved. Is there really a program where they retrieve crashed UFOs and back-engineer them? Is that real? So if it is real, how long has this been going on?

And you guys are just telling us now? Why? If that's real, that changes everything. It changes everything about the way we interact with the universe. That we're like little children and they're just keeping an eye on us, like Chimp Empire.

Like, be careful over there. Don't do anything nutty. Be careful. Let's just watch them. We'll just watch them as they evolve and eventually travel into the cosmos like all the other aliens.

You know,

there is an argument to be said for not telling the truth. Have you ever heard the story of War of the Worlds when it was broadcast on the radio? And it created pandemonium because people thought it was a news broadcast. And, you know, loads of people lost their minds. Apparently, I just read recently that that was really overblown.

And that was a lot of propaganda. And a lot of that was like the narrative they put out to show the success of that radio show. And that most people were aware that it was a radio program, like a fiction. Really? Yeah, apparently there wasn't any suicides.

I thought there was a bunch of suicides. People killed themselves. Didn't we pull that up recently? We did, right? Yeah, I think Jamie found it, actually.

We've always been saying that, that it, like, created mass pandemonium and chaos. But apparently that's not really accurate. Or at least might not be accurate. Have you heard of the one about Hitler and Stalin? Which one?

Well, the idea is, and I'm not into a lot of conspiracy theories, but this one, having read a lot of various historians' talk about it, which I actually genuinely think could be real, is the idea that Stalin encouraged Hitler, supported him, which he did. I mean they signed a non-aggression treaty. The Soviet Union funded Germany, sent them grain and all sorts of other things. The idea is that Stalin wanted Hitler to start a big European war so that once it was all done, he could come in and sweep over the ashes. Which makes a lot of sense.

because the communist idea was you can't make the shit work unless everybody gets it. That was the idea of communism, right? You can't have communism in one country. You have to spread it around the world. And they thought, and they said this openly, the communists, that the best way to do that is to have a world war.

And then you can spread the ideas. as a result of that. God damn, people have always been crazy. They've always been insane. Imagine someone, like, that's your idea.

Like, what are you going to do today? I'm going to go play golf with Ron White. What are you going to do? I think I'm going to start a war so I can take over Europe. Right.

Yeah, but the terrifying thing is there's always been those dudes. And there always will be. There always will be. But we don't want to think they're here now. But the thing is, for them, you could argue it's rational, right?

How do you best secure the future of your people? You can rationalize it in your head. How do you best secure the future of your people? Well, the best way, North America, right, is controlled by the United States. And it's safe because of it, right?

You have Canada. to your north. You have Mexico. These countries are all kind of in your orbit. You've got them under control.

You're safe. What's the safest way for Russia or the Soviet Union to do that? It's to control the entirety of their continent. So you can rationalize anything if you're in that position. I'm looking after my people.

It's not that hard. You know, we are able to rationalize the most horrific shit in our heads if we really want to. And we always have. And we always have. And we always will.

And we always will. And we've always wanted to build empires. We've been building empires from year dot. Everybody builds empires. But do you think that is also what we were talking about earlier, a part of our operating system?

Like there's always going to be these conquerors and then the resistance of the conquerors. And through this back and forth, the society evolves. Yeah. And I think I sometimes think, like speaking of aliens, what would it be like if you look down on planet Earth, right? What do you see?

if you actually look? You see these bands of chimps with every fucking weapon that they could possibly invent, pointed at each other. That's what we are. Yeah. That's what we are.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, you know what also. you'd see, though? You'd see if you were really objective, like, what does this species do?

They make better things. Yeah. That's what they do. Even in Star Wars, they never made anything better. Go back to like fucking Luke Skywalker, like the first movie, Star Wars, and then to the last movie.

They basically have the same weapons. Yeah. Same fucking light speed capabilities. Same problems with their spaceships. They didn't get any better.

We get better constantly. Yeah. We're constantly obsessed with innovation. And if you just looked at the species as a whole, like what is it doing? It's making better stuff.

Yeah. And even the things that are weird about it, like this desire for material possessions. Well, one of the things that does is it facilitates consumerism. It facilitates people buying things. And that facilitates innovation.

You've got to sell more things to people. I've got to get you to buy a new TV. You already have a TV. I've got a better TV. And this is constant, whether it's computers or cars or whatever it is that we make.

Everything is better. I think, and when you combine that with this new emergence of AI, and when you see what's possible with quantum computing and what they're projecting for the implementation of that kind of technology, we're looking at another life form. We're building another life form. We're going to build an artificial life form that's way superior to us. We're the electronic caterpillar that is building the cocoon.

And we're never going to be able to stop it, because there was this document- You can't stop it. You can't stop it, because there was this document that was signed, I think it was signed by Elon as well, requesting that there's a moratorium on AI. Get the fuck out of here. You think China's going to sign that? Yeah.

Yeah, go ahead and do that. Go ahead and do that. We're like, it's a mad race. Just like the fucking, you know, the trying to figure out who makes the nuclear bomb first. It's a mad race.

Right. Yeah. Because we know that if we don't do it, other people will, and then they will have the upper hand. And once another group has the upper hand over you, if you just look at history, it doesn't end well for the weaker group. Especially with this one.

If you can make a superior life form that can figure out how to- Just think about what GPT can do in terms of like, the average person with no coding can just instantly make a website. Yeah. You can get answers to problems. You instantly can get information and explain to you how to do very detailed and specific things like that. That's just the beginning.

It's going to be so much better than you, and it's going to make a better version of it really quickly. If you give it the ability to create, I mean, why isn't that engineerable? It seems like it could. If you could engineer creativity into some super intelligent artificial thing that you've created, it seems like that's what we do. We just think we do all these other things because that moves us closer and closer towards this.

Ultimately, when that does happen, all that other stuff will be bullshit. The pyramids, the fucking airplane, the invention of the iPhone, nonsense. It's all nonsense compared to this life form that we're about to make. Let us get caught up in whether or not a trans person should be able to play in women's sports or whether or not climate change is so real we need to bury trees.

Let's pay attention to what's really going on. We're about to give birth to a fucking super intelligent life form. It's going to take over Earth, and we're either going to merge with it or going to be consumed by it. Do you know what the Eater robot is? Have you ever heard of that?

No. The Eater robot is, I think this is a DARPA program as well, they've developed a robot that is fueled by biological fuel, like biological waste, like bodies. You use it on a battlefield, and it can consume bodies. What? Yeah.

It consumes things for fuel. Yeah. It can consume plants, I think, too. But the implication is, when they said biological, I was like, oh, Jesus. When you say biological, I don't think plants.

I think like human beings, like dead bodies on a battlefield. Like, if you have a robot that kills people and eats them, and that's how it fuels itself, you don't need to charge it. It just goes on whatever energy it extracts from consuming flesh. I'm not an expert, Joe, but I can see how this could go wrong. Pull up E-A-T-R, pull up E-A-T-R robot.

I think it's real, dude. I think it's real. Well, yeah, the Wikipedia said everything you were saying, and then it also included chicken fat was labeled as well. Oh, yeah, just chicken fat, guys. It's not dead people from some fucking bomb.

we dropped. The purpose of the energetically autonomous tactical robot E-A-T-R, just the fact they call it E-A-T-R, patent pending, guys. Hang on for that. We'll make a big announcement when the patent comes through. Project is developed and demonstrate an autonomous robot platform able to perform long-range, long-endurance missions without the need for manual or conventional refueling, which would otherwise preclude the ability of the robot to perform such missions.

The system obtains its energy by foraging, engaging in biologically inspired organism-like energy harvesting behavior, which is the equivalent of eating. It fucking eats things. It can find, ingest, and extract energy from biomass in the environment and other organically based energy sources, as well as use conventional and alternative fuels such as gasoline. So it can eat anything. It eats everything.

Gasoline, heavy fuel, kerosene, diesel, propane, coal, cooking oil, and solar, when suitable. In addition to missions requiring long-range, long-endurance ability, the E-A-T-R can provide direct support to combat units without requiring labor or material logistic support for refueling, because it eats the bodies on the field, kids. I think it's great.

Say what you like about the Terminator, at least it didn't fucking eat you. This is so crazy. What a good idea, though. It's a good idea, because otherwise those bodies are just going to sit there. What do you want to do?

You want to feed the wolves, feed the vultures, or feed your robots and win this fucking war, kids? Win this war for America. It's the most uplifting episode of the Jurogan experience ever. How wild is that? That's fucking wild.

But a good idea, right, if you were a sociopath. I mean, if you want to make a war machine. Look, I shouldn't even say sociopath. If you want to make something that saves soldiers' lives, how about a fucking robot? A robot that fights and eats bodies.

But it comes to the point, right? Why don't we engineer werewolves? Why don't you let werewolves loose?

But you look at all of this stuff, and you then go, well, then, what's the purpose of us? Yeah. You know, that's the fundamental question here. Because the most important thing in life for any human being is to have a purpose. Whatever that purpose is.

Why is that, though? Why is that? Because it gives you a reason to get up in the morning. It gives you a reason to do what you do. It gives you a reason to move forward.

The worst thing for a human being to have is no purpose, to have a lack of purpose, because then you feel empty and hopeless. We talk about a crisis of meaning in the West, particularly. I mean, that's what it is, right? A lot of people not having purpose. And then it plays into what we were talking about earlier, which is you go on social media and you can attack somebody.

That gives you power. That gives you meaning. Yeah, that is a thing that people connect themselves to. They get meaning out of destroying other people. Yeah.

It's really fascinating. Yeah, because that's your ideology. And your team wins. Especially if you feel justified in doing so. If that person disagrees with you, supports some other candidate, supports some ideas you don't like, because pro-life is this, is that.

And you're morally superior because they disagree with you. Yeah, you're morally superior because – I forget who was talking to David Pakman. Someone was talking to David Pakman, and they brought up this idea of if you were alive and Hitler was – there was an election with Hitler, and you knew that you could stop Hitler from being elected, you would do whatever the fuck you could, morally. And that is often the way they portray Trump, which justifies people doing everything and anything they can. Throw every lawsuit at his direction.

Don't even look at the optics of it, and don't look at the possibility that you're setting a precedent and then some right-wing person, including Trump, if he gets in office, can now do this to you. The weapons you unleash will be used against you. They always will be. They always have been. That's why, generally, it's good for society to have certain rules about, like, we don't go there.

We do not depersonalize our opponents. We do not rig elections. Democracy relies on the consent of the losers. The moment you lose that, you're fucked. You're fucked.

Yeah, and that's what's spooky, is that this sort of thought that everyone has now, or that a lot of people have now, that one side has to win or it's all going to fall apart. But I feel like, if either side wins, it's going to be chaos. right now. We're at a boiling point. We're at a crazy boiling point.

I think that this year is the calm before the storm. Oh, Jesus, son. It's going to get worse? Yeah. Why can't it get better?

What if they just legalize mushrooms? 2024, you think that's going to get better? I mean, legalize mushrooms, maybe. What if they just put up, everybody goes, hey, let's do these mushrooms. I've got some thoughts.

Maybe we're spinning our fucking wheels here, kids. Yeah, well, we banned magic mushrooms in 2005,, even though they grow naturally. What a good move to do it so late. When everybody had already figured out they were awesome. It's not like you're not doing it in 1950, after you watch Reaver Madness.

What? Mushrooms too? Are those legal? Get rid of them. No, in this country they did it in 1970..

Really? Yeah, it was to break up the anti-war movement. It was essentially to break up the civil rights movement and the anti-war movement. What they did is they made a sweeping group of drugs illegal, Schedule 1.. That's also part of what MKUltra was doing by allegedly encouraging and training Manson.

That's the Tom O'Neill book, Chaos, which is a fascinating story. What they were doing was trying to stop the anti-war movement. One of the best ways is to lock all these people up for drugs. Lock all these people up. Make everything illegal and just start locking them up.

Lock them up for weed. Lock them up for mushrooms. Whatever they have. So they made all these sweeping illegalizations, including things that weren't even psychoactive. They made them illegal.

But isn't it bizarre that the UK government made magic... And, by the way, that was a left-wing government. That was a Labour government. It was a left government. They made magic mushrooms illegal in 2005,, and magic mushrooms grow in every field in the UK.

How does that work? Yeah. Well, so the poppies grow naturally too, right? And that's heroin. But you literally pick a mushroom, you dry it, or you can eat it fresh.

Yeah, you eat it fresh. Yeah, and then it will create a psychoactive... And it might be the source of many religious experiences. It might be the source of many, many stories that people have had about encounters. I mean, there's so much ancient religious artwork that centers around mushrooms, including all the old depictions of Christmas.

All the old depictions of Christmas involve the Amanita, muscaria mushroom and elves. All of them. And that's a psychoactive mushroom. That's the mushroom that John Marco Allegro wrote about. when he wrote that book, The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

He was a guy who deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls. He worked on them for 14 years, and it was his conclusion. afterwards. He wrote a book about it called The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. His conclusion was that the entire Christian religion was probably a misunderstanding.

What it was really originally all about was fertility rituals and mushroom rituals. It was about the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms that brought you to God and fertility rituals. Because having children back then was imperative. Everybody died. You know, everybody fucking died.

Nobody lived. You got an infection, dead. Broke your leg, dead. So it was hard times back then. And so it's probably the root of so many religious experiences.

They believed. it's the root of the Eleusinian Mysteries. That's Brian Murrow Rescue's book, The Immortality Key, where these people would travel to Eleusis and partake in this ritual, where they drank wine, where now they know for sure those wine vessels. they've now tested them and found that they have ergot in them. So these people were tripping balls.

They've opened up a field of study at Harvard about this. now. You know, the other thing that I find really interesting is as our society becomes more godless and we become more secular, we've started to embrace things like ayahuasca as experiences. Because there is still that deep-rooted need within us to have a psychedelic-slash-religious experience. We need it.

We crave it. Yeah, we crave it, and that's also the root of wokeness. I think it's very much religious. And I think also right-wing authoritarianism too. I think it's very much almost like a religious thing.

It's like they believe there's only one ideology, there's only one way, and that way is the right way and the good way. And there's a lot of... Like Marc Andreessen laid it out, that it's very much like a cult, and that there's a separation. They take you away from people who disagree, take you away from your family, isolate you. People are cast out of the group if they violate any of these very rigid principles.

And there's a lot of fear involved in it. It's very aggressive. People that are involved in it are very aggressive in enforcing their ideas on other people and wanting other people to comply with their ideas, much like proselytizing. And there's a very active disinterest in truth. Very active.

And that is a very cult-like thing, man. Because it's hard to form a cult around the truth, because truth is complicated. It's shades of grey. You're not going to get the exact truth. You're working at it.

We can sit and have a long conversation and we disagree and agree. What about if I just gave you the way? This is what you do. This is what you say. This is what you believe.

This is what you follow. And if you don't, we cast you out. So don't be that guy. You don't want to be that guy. You don't want to be that guy.

Absolutely don't. Because we're hardwired to think that the moment we're that guy, we get extradited from the tribe, we're done, we're dead. In the savannah, that was it. You're over. There's some research that says that.

that's why almost everybody has a fear of public speaking. Because, historically, in the ancestral environment, if you were in front of a group of your peers and they were all silent, that was usually not a good place to be. And if you had to explain yourself to them, if you had to speak to them, you fucked up. William Cummings told me about that. I was like, oh, that completely makes sense.

Yeah. That completely makes sense. That's why dying on your arse as a comedian is so painful.

Yeah. For any public. shame, anything that happens to you in front of people, losing something, in front of people, where they get to cheer that you lost, painful. Painful for people. But the thing is, the weird thing about when you do comedy and you do die, it actually isn't as bad as you thought.

at the same time. Do you know what I mean? Oh, that depends. I've seen some. I've been a part of some horrible bombings.

Especially early in my career, they still wake up in the middle of the night and go, jeez.

But you know what it is? It's because everybody can talk. So why should you be able to talk? You're not doing something really special, like playing guitar, that I can't do. You're not juggling.

You're not doing something extraordinary that I know I can't do. So if I go see someone play guitar, it's awesome. I can't play guitar at all, so it's cool to watch. I can talk. You can talk.

Everyone can talk. So everybody watches someone talk. that sucks at it and go, this sucks. I could do better than this guy. So everybody has that moment in their life where they've been funny.

Everybody said that one zinger, that one time. Everybody talks about it. Remember when you had that, Bob? Every now and then, you catch the lightning in a bottle. But to be able to do it on stage, it's a tricky thing, because it seems like you're just talking, but there's a lot going on.

It's very complicated. It's hypnosis. in a way. You're hypnotizing people. You're dragging them into the way you think about things.

If you do it well, if they enjoy it, they're having a good time. It's one of the most rewarding experiences, both as an audience member and as a comedian. But the other side of that is, if you fucking eat shit up there. I always say bombing on stage is like sucking a thousand dicks in front of your mother. But I think somewhere out there is a guy who wants to suck a thousand dicks in front of his mom.

You know someone out there going, you watching, Mom? You watching? 99!.

He's probably been on your mom's house. There's one crazy guy out there that is probably into that. But no one's into bombing on stage. It's horrible. No, of course it is.

I'm excited about your club, man. Francis was telling me all about it. It's a fun place. He was saying how you really worked out the design of it so that, you know, you're a comedian who's built a comedy club. This has got to be amazing.

Yeah, we were real lucky too, though. We were real lucky that we got this spot, the Ritz Theater. It was like the perfect place. It's almost like it's supposed to be there. When we walked into the room, we were like, Oh my God, this is it.

This is perfect. It's the perfect size. And there's two rooms. We were like, Oh my God, this is perfect. We had to make some changes and shit.

We raised the floor and lowered the ceiling and did a lot to the sound and all that stuff and changed all the seating and everything like that and built a new stage. But the bones of it were perfect. The structure that was available to build it in was perfect for this idea of just having a place that's like, even the big room is still real intimate. It's still like, it's fun. And it's all super positive people working there and super happy people.

Everybody's getting paid well. Everybody's having a good time. And it's just like a real good energy. It just feels good when you get there, because everybody's kind of trying to do the same thing. And the people that are going there are trying to do this.

They're just trying to have fun. Everyone's just trying to have fun. So if you can create, especially with everything so fucking kooky right now, like people are so excited to just blow off steam. Yeah. Yeah.

It's a special place. And it's not, I mean the building and the environment, it's all great. It's all perfect. But that, to me, isn't what makes it special. To me.

what makes it special is wherever I go as a comedian, when you gig at a comedy club, the comedian is always the afterthought. It's the only comedy club that I've ever been to where it's the comedian who is at the foremost. It's the place where the comedy is respected. And that is unique, man, because, unfortunately, with practically every other comedy club, with the exception of a certain few, the comedian is always the last person to be thought about. Yeah, because they build it as a business.

That's why. They try to make money. I built it as a place for comedy. I genuinely, the design and the idea behind it was just make the best place for comedy. I just took the same attitude that I do with all other things.

I just applied it to that. What's the best way to do it? What's the best way for the art form? The best way for the art form is a lot of open mics. We have open mics Sunday and Monday.

The employees, the door people, are all comics. They audition for the job with their act. And they're all happy to be there, and there's a real path to being a professional. They see it laid out in front of them with Kill Tony. They see it laid out in front of them with the showcase nights and all the clubs that are also in Austin that are blowing up.