Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1366 - Richard Dawkins
Uploaded: 2019-10-22T05:57:18.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1366 - Richard Dawkins' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-10-22. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1366 - Richard Dawkins' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2019-10-22. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1366 - Richard Dawkins

all right here we go mr dawkins thank you very much for being here i really
appreciate it thank
you uh i'm a huge fan of your work and we have a new book out outgrowing god
when does it come
out is it out now it is out now it is now like this week right uh last week i
think i read the
god delusion in in preparation for this can you pull that microphone right up
to your face just
get it about a fist away from your face you don't have to move okay the
microphone move for you okay
um i'm a huge fan of your work and i always wanted to ask you you you go so
hard against
religion and you have for so long has there ever been a time where you've
gotten fatigued from this
where you're like i just leave this to somebody else well obviously not because
i just put another one
um it it's not so hard as you think i mean you you remember it as hard but
actually if you read it
again i think you'd find it was not as hard as you remember i didn't mean hard
in in a negative sense
i mean you push you're okay you're so enthusiastic about your i'm enthusiastic
yes i'm also humorous i
mean i like to think it's a funny book but a lot of people do think it's hard
in the other sense and
and sometimes when they read it again they realize actually no it's more humorous
it's not so not so
edgy not so hard-hitting as as they think as they originally thought it was
well i think that's probably
because you've had some interviews in the past we have talked to some fiercely
religious people and
you've had some cantankerous interactions with them i think maybe so they they
associate you with having
this uh almost aggressively atheistic stance yes well perhaps you're thinking
of bill o'reilly i'm not
sure um where i mean he's aggressive all right yeah in the other way i did once
had to tell him
will you please stop interrupting me and let me talk and and uh so that might
give the slight impression
that i'm aggressive now what was that bbc documentary that you you had done
where you had you had done
several the one where you had gone and interviewed a bunch of different
religious people yes that was
not bbc that was channel four which is the commercial um station and um yes i
interviewed ted haggard
yes uh and a guy who ran a thing called hell not hell holes hell hell hell
houses where they right yeah
tried to terrify children i mean freak them out with horrible little play
little playlets yeah the
devil coming on with horns and glowing eyes and and i actually participated in
a reenactment of that play
in los angeles back in the day a comedy reenactment um bill maher was in it a
bunch of other comedians
were in it and we read word for word the the script and we acted it out in
front of a live audience so
people would come through the hell house yes this haunted house but instead it
was people knew it was
all comedians reading and they're like is this really the words that they said
it was so preposterous
that it actually without being a parody it actually played out like a comedy
well when we filmed it we
filmed them doing the play and then we they filmed me interviewing the perpetrator
michael somebody or
other yeah and i said to him what's your target audience and he said 12 and i
said really are you
are you really serious that you like to he said hell is that a terrible place
that anything i can do
to persuade children not to sin and they must acknowledge acknowledge jesus and
so on is is worth
it i thought that was a deeply immoral thing to say but i think he was sincere
yeah well i would agree
with you it is it's it's very disturbing that that was a there's a great
documentary on it as well for
someone who wants to see like the the thought process behind them creating this
but one of the things
that i really enjoyed about the god delusion is that you you kind of outlined
every single possible
argument against atheism and then how to counter to it in advance like if you
you know you you have
a soft position look at chapter one if you look at this look at chapter two and
you you outline that
in the preface before you got into it yes well i i tried to be as persuasive as
possible uh the new
book outgrowing god is sort of aimed at a younger audience and i like to think
that could be read
at any age but uh being aimed at a younger audience is a bit shorter and
perhaps um a bit easier to
follow i'm not sure why is it that you think that there are so many religions
and that basically every
single civilization throughout human history has had some sort of deity some
sort of higher power it's
amazing the way they split and diverge and diverge and diverge it's as though
they somehow can't get
along with each other and uh maybe new leaders arise who have a leadership
complex or something and want
to found their own sector time and time again you have breakaway religions
breakaway faiths um i don't
know what the psychological reason for it is uh but they what i have noticed is
that they usually hate the
religion which is the closest to their own more than they do more distant ones
and that has a certain
biological ring to it too uh that kind of makes sense to it to a biologist
looking at diverging species
well it almost seems like if you were studying human beings if you were
something that was completely
alien to our civilization our culture and you were looking at this this strange
tendency to believe in
something that there's no proof of and devote a massive amount of energy into
defending that put
it into your songs and put it into you know your pledge of allegiance and all
these which of course
was not until the 1950s but all the different things that people have done in
so many different cultures
with in regards to religion it almost seems like a natural aspect of being a
human being you're right
that they put an enormous amount of energy and effort and and expense and time
uh and and cost in share
i mean some of the extreme sex which whip themselves with with horrible weapons
actually bleed
uh scar their own backs uh it's a it's very very surprising to a biologist you
do you think
we would think that they would be more interested in surviving and reproducing
but no there's something
about religion that makes them go to extremes of costliness and i don't get it
i must say
do you i've thought about this so many times uh do you think that it is in some
way a counter
to the sort of existential angst that comes from being a finite life form from
being a finite a thinking
conscious finite life form that's aware of its own demise where it's coming so
it has to formulate
some purpose and some meaning and and uh a hope of an afterlife yes yes that is
the purpose and meaning
right yeah yes i suppose that's right yes i think that's that's right um i can
understand why people
might want to believe a priest who comes along and tells them you don't have to
worry about death because
you're going to survive it i'm less understanding of people who make up stories
uh to comfort either
themselves or other people i mean a made-up story should not be comforting i
don't understand how
a made-up story can be comforting of course if you make it up and persuade
somebody else then they
could find it comforting on the other hand is an afterlife really all that
comforting when you think
about half of them believe they're going to go to hell so it's anything but
comforting um and also even
if you're not going to hell if you're going to heaven eternity in heaven i mean
sitting up sitting
in in heaven for not just billions of years but trillions of years i mean these
are these are time
spans beyond our comprehension how unbelievably boring it would be would it
though i mean i don't know
i i enjoy life but if i had to live my life over and over again infinitely if
if i had an infinite number
of this exact lives i don't know how i'd approach that in the moment i can
enjoy it i could do with
maybe 200 years but after that no i mean i think i think that eternity is what's
frightening about death
and eternity is best spent under a local under a general anesthetic which is
what's going to happen
right gonzo alcohol the lights maybe yeah or maybe not have you had any
experience with psychedelics
no no do you have any interest in that i've been offered to be accompanied on a
trip by a very nice
woman friend yeah and i've never so far dared take her up on it how come i
asked advice of a
cousin of my father who's just recently died who was a major expert on
psychedelics and i think he
was the one who introduced aldous huxley to to uh mescaline for example and he
judiciously advised
against uh he said that the horrors of a bad trip are so so awful that uh he
wouldn't he wouldn't advise
somebody to go into it my friend uh who's offering me this this trip says it
would be a a relatively low
dose and she would take another low dose so she could kind of accompany me yeah
and stop me jumping out
a window or anything well there's so many stories in so many ancient religions
that seem to originate
with the consumption of some some sort of a psychedelic yes and you know there's
many including john marco
allegro's uh the sacred mushroom jesus jesus was a mushroom yeah yes yes so i
mean i mean you could see the
connection if you were a primitive person with no access to science and you
found some mushroom
growing under a tree and consumed it and had this unbelievable experience you
would assume
that you've transcended this life and gone into this other realm where where
god exists i once thought
that i would try a psychedelic when i was on my deathbed that's it but what if
it was amazing and
you're like i could have gotten so much done with this okay if i had maybe if i
tried this out when
i was 30. yes maybe you're right yeah i i don't you know i don't think anybody
should do anything i mean
i used to i used to encourage people to do things all the time now my my
thought is do whatever compels
you whatever you feel like it but i would think that a person like yourself who
has this sort of rigorous
belief that the lights go out and then that's it i i would think that that
would be attractive to just
at least dip your toes in yes yes well don't you think the lights go out i don't
know you know i
don't know i've had some pretty profound psychedelic experiences that make me
wonder what um what
thoughts are and what what consciousness is and whether or not there's some way
that it transcends well
i wonder what consciousness is but it's pretty clear that it's to do with
brains and brains decay
and so i i wouldn't have that much hope for you well you might be right yeah
you might be well
certainly consciousness does have to do with brains and we know brain damage
severely perturbs consciousness
but there's some interaction with certain chemicals and that makes this
experience far different than
what it is when we're on the natch right now still brains though mm-hmm yeah
still brain but that's it
reductionist nothing wrong with reductionism nothing wrong with it not saying
there is do you what is the
the fiercest opposition that you've ever had to to your work fiercest or most
cogent um well okay let's try
both fiercest meaning the most the who has become the most angry at your work
and most cogent meaning
ted haggard maybe that guy really yeah well he's such a preposterous person for
folks who don't know
he was a guy who uh he was he was pretty anti-gay right and then it turned out
he was smoking meth and
having sex with gay prostitutes and you know the whole deal and which is
whenever someone to me is
ridiculously anti-gay i always assume that they're gay i always assume well
this guy's he's just trying
to like divert divert attention yes well he was very hostile uh and uh um in a
very weird way it's
it's all on television that was before his scandal oh yes you got a hold of him
before the scandal oh yeah
yeah yeah yeah he was he was very hostile with you i remember that he was
aggressive like angry he almost
tried to run us over in the in the car park after aft