Joe Rogan | The Future of Humanity w/Eddie Izzard

So, I mean, I'm with you in that I am ridiculously optimistic. Oh, that's good. I think that, I think people, I mean, I follow Steven Pinker's logic of that people will sort of look at the horrible things that we have today and say, God, this world is terrible. Now, there are definitely terrible aspects, but this is without doubt the greatest time ever to be alive that we've ever seen. At least in recorded human history. I would agree with that. I think communication is a giant part of that. It is. This global world, which we thought was going to be a beautiful thing and then people say, oh no, it's a hellish thing. In fact, it's got beautiful aspects and some hellish aspects as any invention has. You know, like the internet, hey, you can teach someone how to save their life on the internet. You can also teach someone how to make a bomb on the internet. So, I think this is always the way every next step we get, we will have some positives, then we'll hit all the negatives and then we'll go back to some more positives. So, yeah, I've got to be optimistic. Yeah, well, I am an optimistic person. Otherwise, it just wouldn't be here. But this military aspect that I mentioned, I'm flipping back to that, but yeah, I do try and think I need to do this. I think that's a good thing to do now. I need to do that. For 10, nine years, I've been saying I'm going to politics, so I'm going next year, but it might not be a general election. I try and plan ahead because I can't, if I randomize this, if I just float, because a lot of people do, this happened and then that happened and then I was like, and that could be a wonderful life. But I have my river analogy. If you're canoeing down a river, if you go at the same speed as the river, it could throw you onto rocks, it could give you a wonderful ride, it could be anything, but it's up to the river. Whereas I pedal like crazy. Sometimes I backpedal like crazy. I have actively backpedaled against things. And sometimes, usually I'm pedaling faster than the speed of the river to try and guide myself through the river. And I usually that whenever do these canoeing, well, anyone driving a boat through a river. When I look at human interactions objectively, part of me has to consider that there's a possibility that we need all this negative in order to reinforce the positive, that there's some component of human life that desires or relies upon negative things to reinforce positive things. That this yin and yang that we exist under, that we see the horrors of war and horrific poverty and all these terrible things and horrible violence, we see this and it actually serves to reinforce our desire for positive things and push our society in a more positive direction. I mean, I almost think that this is when we see national tragedies and shootings and all these different terrible, terrible things. There's all this fear and anger and frustration, but there's also action. And the action might mean we might think there's a lack of action by politicians or a lack of action by the police or a lack of action by whoever we think should be responsible for mitigating these horrible situations that happen. But publicly, the social fabric of the world, the way people communicate and interact, I think it reinforces our desire to not have that happen. It reinforces our understanding of peace and our love of peace. And I think that these bad things that we see in our world, they almost propel us towards a better world because human beings are constantly striving for improvement and innovation. This is one of the things that we do. We want things to be better and bigger and faster and stronger and we want our society to be better at all times. We never say, this is good, let's keep it just the way it is. We never say that. So my thought is that even what we're experiencing in this country, it seems at times that we're almost like on the brink of civil war, between the right and the left and people are lying on both sides and conflating people's opinions and changing people's perspectives in order to suit their own narrative. That I think that this ultimately, all this angst and you see it from the outside and you look at it and you go, what the fuck are we doing? I think it's a natural part of the way human beings figure out life. I shall respond to that. Sure. I think almost the same as you. I would argue slightly differently. I noticed that humanity only sometimes gets going and does things when it's right up against the wall. You know, somebody that needs these things to go on. If you took a World War II scenario, we went right to the wire on that and then suddenly we came back and maybe not even, it wasn't even the political will on that. It was just actually, if the Japanese hadn't bombed Pearl Harbor, we wouldn't, you guys, we wouldn't have had you guys in us, with us for a D.A. World War II, yeah, sure. And all that, all the forces and the money and the armaments and the tanks and the Sherman's coming in, you know, we needed that coming in and without the Russian people, we wouldn't have won World War II and that was, and they were in this agreement. So I can't quite work out humanity. I do think positive, I do think the negatives, you can appreciate the positives more. I do think one thing on the Brexit, Brexit hate thing that's been going on is a lot of young people are coming on saying, well, so we're going to lose all this stuff, the ability, we could travel to Europe without visas, we can work there, we could retire there, we can get a healthcare there, all across Europe and that's something we cut off and we are roaming charges are going to go off. All that, people are valuing what they could lose a lot more. So yeah, the yin and yang, you can, I think, I think it's going to go on this way and also some people, once we get to a good place, I've noticed that a lot of people will say, okay, I'm not going to be politically active anymore, I'm just going to carry on doing my life and other people can sort things out. I've noticed that people will get activated to get to a result, maybe an election result or something or a referendum or whatever it is and then they'll, they will just back off. They get frustrated. They get frustrated, or they just think, well, that's done, that's bagged and a positive way maybe and just say, but now I'm not even going to pay attention to what's going on, but things will start rolling backwards. So I think we're going to keep having it like that. Maybe the percentage of positive things to negative things has never changed over all the years, over the last 10,000 years. Just as more people in the world doing more positive things than doing more negative things. Maybe humanity hasn't changed because our brain sizes haven't changed, even back to the caveman days, you know, even back to the last 100,000 years, the size of our brains has not moved. So we, if you went back to 70,000 years ago, we would still be able to have conversations like this, even though we wouldn't have the radios and things, it would be more on our tribe. I think our tribe is better than your tribe. Actually, Steve, I don't know if our tribe is better than that tribe. I just think maybe it's similar. There's some good people in that tribe and there's some shitheads in that tribe. We need to maybe trade with them more. We can go to war with them, but then we could die a lot and Shirley could die and Kenny and Roger at number 22, you know, because those conversations were happening in a slightly different way. I think all the way back and it, they weren't all just going, me, food, you, nice, good, we fight. It wasn't that. It was maybe, you know, millions of years ago, but not 700,000 years ago. And we only started speaking 100,000 years ago. So what we've developed since then, I'm fascinated by us as human beings because we were just another animal and now we are kind of amazing animal. We've invented beautifully. We landed on the bloody moon. You guys landed on the moon, which I as a child thought that we landed on the moon, but in fact, you guys landed on the moon. Apollo 11, they kept it quite open. I think Michael Collins in the command module said, this is for the world. And there was this kind of feeling and Neil Armstrong. It's a nice, yeah, I grabbed hold of that. As a kid, I was growing up, you know, a bit younger than me. It's a pretty weird thing to think that we went from not being able to talk to space travel in a hundred thousand years. I mean, that's what they think, right? They think that people didn't have real language a hundred thousand years ago. Yeah, Fox P2 genetic. I think it's about a hundred thousand years ago. That's when it came up. And the first words we said was, let's go to the moon in a hundred thousand days. What's your name? Jack Kennedy. Okay, Jack. Good idea. But let's put it on a back burner for a moment. What do you think happened that turned us into this? Do you ever stop and think about it? Well, I don't think it's a bloke upstairs floating in the clouds because they used to live in the clouds and then we flew through the clouds and no one ever mentioned, hey, he's not in the clouds. So I it's a randomized thing. You know, I think these random like dinosaurs, 165 million years of those big bastards and all they did was eat, kill, eat, kill, poo and have sex. That's all they did. Those four things for 165 million years. We've had 300 years since the enlightenment of human rights and democracy and stuff like that. If we say the great Greeks did a great thing, but really it's last 300 years. They had 165 million years of that. But why did they come along when we had all these creatures in the sea and suddenly huge ones, something happened, something twisted. Randomizing thing. It's I, we, I don't, maybe we'll never know, but it has happened. And I just don't think a bloke did it upstairs with a big beard. He said, now is the time that you speak and now you make handbags and now fight wars with the MG 42. And now, now, you know, I just, I just think it happened and we need to roll with it and try and make humans work on this planet. Because then we're going to be going a mile soon. And you can just see it in the future. If we got it going a mile soon, somebody like the Marshians is going to say, we want to vote. We got our own Martian government. You, you earthlings, you know. They're going to treat us the same way Americans treat the British. Yeah. And then the Marshians come back and attack us. The Marshians are going to actually come. You could just see that in some sort of, you know, 100 years down the line. Sure. Yeah, it definitely happened. So I, I, I despair about humanity and I, and I, and I celebrate humanity.