Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1539 - Jenny Kleeman
Uploaded: 2020-09-22T17:00:07.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1539 - Jenny Kleeman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-09-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1539 - Jenny Kleeman' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2020-09-22. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1539 - Jenny Kleeman

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.
The Joe Rogan Experience.
Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.
Hello, Jenny.
Hello, Joe.
Thanks for doing this. I appreciate it.
I'm totally psyched to be here. Thank you so much for having me on.
My pleasure. So your book, Sex, Robots, and Vegan Meat, did you have
alternative titles?
I'm really, really shit at titles. I just can't do it.
It's a good title. I thought it's an excellent one.
Yeah, it works well.
It's my editor Chris's title. It's not my title.
Did you have ideas?
I had really bad ones. I think when I wrote the proposal, it was called Future
Humans or something.
And he just said, no, no, no, no, no. I can't do titles. I write things that
are very, very long.
I can't do nice little short things. So anyway, my editor at the publishing
house, Picador, came up with the title, and I loved it.
Yeah, he nailed it. Excellent job, Chris.
Yes.
Way to go.
He's a smart guy.
Well, it just, it really covers the subject matter so well and so succinctly.
So I'm concerned with all the things you appear to be concerned with. So I'm
really excited about this conversation.
Good.
Let's start with Sex Robots. This is the first part. I'm sure you've seen Ex
Machina.
Yes, I have.
Oh, fantastic movie, right?
Brilliant. Yes, totally.
And confusing because I think there will be a time, whether it's in our
grandchildren's life or when, where that's a real concern, where we do have
artificial humans that don't have any empathy.
They're programmed, whatever way we decide to program them, and they're
insanely similar to us.
Yes.
And people are going to have sex with them.
Yes. It's this idea that, I mean, there are people who are working on this
stuff now. That's what my book is about. It's about, like, I went and met the
people who are doing this stuff now.
Well, we have this idea that comes from science fiction of, like, Ex Machina or
Pris from Blade Runner, of these, like, totally perfect beings who are really
dangerous.
And that doesn't exist at the moment, but it is going to exist. It is going to
exist. At some point, there will be something extremely realistic that gives a
very good illusion of being human, even though it's not.
And there are lots of reasons to be concerned about this, and there are some
really solid kind of feminist reasons to be concerned about this, because the
vast majority of the robots being made at the moment are in the female form.
But for me, the thing that I was worried about is what happens in a future
where it's possible to have a relationship where only one half of the
partnership matters, where you don't have to have empathy for your other half.
You don't have to care about what their ambitions are, what their desires are.
They'll always laugh at your jokes. They never get a period. You're never able
to meet their family.
And what is that going to do to us as human beings when empathy is no longer a
requirement of the relationship?
Jenny, the way you're wearing your microphone, it's rubbing against your
clothes because you're trying to look cooler.
Because I move about too much. There we go. Is that better?
Perfect. Excellent. Yeah, that is a real concern. And I've thought about this a
lot because I'm very concerned with – there's two ways of looking at it.
One way of looking at it like we, at one point in time, there were single-celled
organisms, and then millions and millions of years later, you have human beings.
Why would we assume that this is the end? It's clearly not. There will be
better iterations.
And I have a feeling that one of the ways we're going to bring that about is
through technology.
And my real fear is that there will be no more biological life. My real fear is
that we will slowly integrate, we'll be symbiotic with some sort of
technological creation,
and then eventually we'll realize, well, all the things that are holding us
back, they're biologically based, whether it's sex or gender or emotions or all
these different things that seem to cause conflicts.
And then if we figure out a way to convince this future version of human beings
to just give in to the Matrix, that's our future.
You know what? I would have kind of agreed with you on that take about a year
ago, except for what's happened over the past year,
which has just smacked us in the face, reminding us that biology always wins
and that we're much more likely to be wiped out by some biological thing that
we have no control over whatsoever.
Because ultimately that kind of reading of the future depends on this idea that
we will be able to control things really well,
that there will be nothing that kind of comes out of left field that can
destroy us.
I'm sorry, but wouldn't that be a great argument that biology is the issue?
Because if we did have something that we could put our consciousness in that
doesn't have problems with viruses,
wouldn't that be like an excellent solution to the problem that we're in?
Because we have a problem with our immune systems because we're essentially
symbiotic organisms already, right?
We have all these bacteria and all these different life forms that live within
us.
And, you know, if the balance is off or your immune system is bad, then a virus
gets in there.
You're basically being attacked by another life force.
Well, yes, but I'd say that's the difference between a perfect world and a real
world.
And I think it would be almost impossible for us to be able to develop
technological solutions that were perfect,
that didn't have glitches in them, where you could upload yourself faithfully
and exist in this sort of realm of consciousness where you were separate from
your body.
There would be problems with that and you'd be relying on this technology to
embody you in many ways.
And I just basically think that technology can't, that it can't solve
everything.
Technology can do fantastic things, but it can't solve, the most important
human problems have to be solved by changing human behavior rather than relying
on technology.
Maybe.
Maybe.
I see what you're saying, but most technology, although it's not totally
reliable, is more reliable than human beings.
Like your phone works and it's much more consistent than most humans.
Occasionally your phone will screw up if you drop it a lot, but so will people.
If you drop them on their heads, they'll screw up as well.
But you're relying, you're giving the person who creates that technology a lot
of your trust and you're giving them a lot of power.
And so essentially that phone is only as good as the person who made it and as
much as they're fulfilling their pledge to give you what they say they're
giving you.
And actually you're disempowering yourself if you're relying on a piece of
technology that's created by a corporation to do something that you could do
yourself basically.
And so that's what my book is about kind of like what I've been looking at is
these fundamental parts of human nature and how we're relying on technology to
solve problems for us because it's a bit of a shortcut to say, okay, I'm going
to get a machine to do that.
I'm going to get a machine to be my girlfriend or machine to do any of these
other things.
But in fact, there's lots of unintended consequences of doing that.
And in fact, you take away some of your agency if you're relying on a machine.
Well, you certainly do.
My general concern is that we will be just – we won't be necessary.
I think this idea of human beings and agency and all these things are wonderful
if we decide to stay human.
But what I'm concerned with is when – you know, I talked to Elon Musk and he
was telling me about Neuralink.
And Neuralink is going to radically increase the bandwidth between human beings
and information.
When you start stuffing wires into people's brains and you make some sort of
weird Bluetooth connection to an app or some other piece of technology and that
allows you to interface with it and have access to information at a much more
rapid pace.
And that seems the beginning of the end of what we call the biological human.
I'm really worried about this.
I'm not worried in a sense.
But I see the writing on the wall.
And I see people as having a short lifespan in terms of like this version of
human being that we're enjoying right now.
I don't think this is going to last.
Well, it's certainly not going to last because something's going to come and
wipe us out.
But whether or not it's – whether or not we're superseded by technology
depends on a whole lot of things.
It depends on everybody having this technology all over the world.
And it depends on this technology working properly.
And I think there will always be people who can't get their hands on it who
will be living in a different way and maybe a better way.
And while we all get wiped out because we're all connecting to Bluetooth and
telepathically being inside each other's consciousnesses and getting messed up
because of it.
There will be people who can't afford this technology who will be just quietly
forging ahead.
I mean, I guess this is the whole thing.
It's like the difference between you never know where technology is going to
take you until you put it in practice.
Like even the iPhone, like when Steve Jobs invented the iPhone, his projections,
his kind of most ambitious hope was that it would take 1% of the market in the
first year.
Like he had no idea we would all become completely addicted to these things and
that we can't put them down.
And this is the thing.
Nobody knows where it's all going to go.
It might wipe us out.
But, you know, there will always be people who don't have it who survive that
apocalypse.
Yeah, well, there are some people in remote parts of the world that don't have
phones now.
But that's what's fascinating.
If you go back to like the movie Wall Street when Michael Douglas is on the
beach and he has that big brick phone and he's a baller.
He's a big player.
He's got this crazy phone.
He doesn't even have to have a wire there.
Remember that?
That was the big deal that this guy was so cool and so rich that he could have
a phone and talk to people that are nowhere near him with no wires.
And that was unusual.
Now you could go to remote parts of the world and you'll see folks with cell
phones.
Very poor people in third world countries.
They all have cell phones.
I feel like that is probably going to be what's happening with all future tech.
And that's the rich people have it originally, initially, and then it'll trickle
down to other folks as well.
But the real worry, like when we're talking about haves and have nots now, like
that's a big issue today is income inequality.
Well, when you have people that can afford Neuralink or whatever the next
version of that is or future iterations, if it really is that effective and it
makes you that much more productive, you're going to have a massive advantage,
you know, assuming it works, over people that are just naturally using their
biological brains.
And the gap will be even wider and then there will be real revolt.
Yeah.
And also with things like, for example, like artificial wounds, if you can, if
you can be pregnant without anyone, well, if you can have a baby without anyone
being pregnant, then there will be a great inequality between women who can
kind of carry on working and not have to deal with all of this stuff happening
to their bodies.
And, you know, companies might pay for you to grow your baby in a lab or in a
bag instead of inside your body and you can carry on working.
And then there's a future where like being visibly pregnant might be a sign of
having an unplanned pregnancy or of low status or of being like a pretty bad
mother because you hadn't really thought about it.
Like this technology has the ability to create enormous, not just like
advantage and disadvantage, but also reinforcing class problems in a really
huge way because we will end up looking down on people who don't have the
ability to like participate in this new world where there are oppor