Joe Rogan joins Jemele to discuss his new show, The Joe Rogan Experience, and why he thinks Maxine Waters should be fired from Congress. Plus, why The Hill should shut down the show. And why they should all be fired. And how to deal with a death threat from a member of Congress. Joe also talks about why he decided to go independent from The Hill and why it's a good thing he did. And why he doesn't want to do it anymore. And how much he's going to pay for the new show he's working on. Also, he talks about how much money he's getting from corporate sponsorships and why that's not a bad thing. Plus, he explains why he's leaving The Hill to do what he does best, which is talk about a woman in Congress who he thinks is a monster. Thanks to our sponsor, WFMU. Click here for the ad-free version of the show! Joe Rogans Experience is a podcast about comedy, stand-up, standup, and standup comedy, hosted by a comedian from New York and New York based on the podcast and produced by comedian and podcaster, in New York City. and hosts, , and to talk about what it's like to be a comedian, a writer, and a podcaster and a standup comedian, and what it s like to do standup and talk about comedy. Thank you for listening and supporting the show, and thank you for being a friend of the podcast, and for supporting it. -Joe Rogans - is a good friend of mine and I hope you enjoy the show and hope you do the show you enjoy it, too, and I know you do too, too much of it's good, because it's great, and it's worth it, and so much more, so thank you so much, so please give us a review of it, it's really, really good, and we really appreciate it, we really do, really really, thank you, really, it means it, really does, really well, so much so much. Thank you, Joe and I really appreciate you, and thanks for listening to it, bye, and really much, bye bye, bye. xoxo, bye! -Joes and Sarah and Sarah, Sarah & Sarah Joe and Sarah -p. Sarah
00:00:40.000I got kids, I got bills, health insurance, all this stuff.
00:00:45.000And so I think especially during COVID when we couldn't actually directly interact with the audience in person, it's hard to know how real it is.
00:00:54.000So when we talked to you and we were like, oh, we're thinking about it, we're kind of nervous, and you weren't just like, maybe, you were like, yes, do this.
00:01:02.000It actually really did help us to make the move, so thank you.
00:01:11.000Well, in this case, it was the right call, so broken block or whatever.
00:01:15.000It's really scary, and it's one of those things where, we were telling you this before, where you're like, you don't know If you're like, am I going to miss this?
00:02:11.000And once again, to be clear, the Hill never said anything.
00:02:13.000They said, don't say this or whatever.
00:02:15.000But we're talking about the seniority system for Democrats in Congress.
00:02:19.000And I was like, this creates really perverse incentives because you have all these really old people who run Congress, like Maxine Waters, who's like 80 years old.
00:04:37.000And we were working on getting him booked to talk about this.
00:04:40.000And meanwhile I'm seeing tweets that are saying, Crystal and Sagar aren't covering this because the Hill's taking money from the American Petroleum Institute.
00:05:00.000And I have to say, like Sagar, I was worried there would be things that I really missed about having the corporate structure, like just that support system around.
00:05:22.000I mean, Maxine, you can't control me now.
00:05:28.000The thing is, what they did by saying that you issued a death threat against them is literally that is everything that's wrong with politics and everything that's right about your show is that you guys are just present and honest and you see things and you talk about those things without biases.
00:05:45.000And you have perspectives, but you don't have biases.
00:05:48.000And the problem with these people is it's all bullshit.
00:05:51.000And so by saying that, they know you didn't really issue a death threat.
00:06:03.000So I was doing a lot of reporting around TikTok.
00:06:06.000And I was noticing all of these former Republican lawmaker lobbyists are working now for TikTok because I heard they were paying top dollar rates.
00:06:16.000I went on Google and I was looking at who TikTok has been hiring.
00:06:19.000And one of them, I'm not kidding you, is the former head or a part of the Department of Homeland Security Cybersecurity Division, who is now working for TikTok, the Chinese government.
00:07:22.000The Hill was taking ad dollars at the time from Huawei.
00:07:24.000So Huawei, which is a Chinese telecom company, And I was thinking in the back of my mind, man, if TikTok was real smart, they'd buy some advertising at The Hill.
00:07:31.000Because then I'd really have to be like, no shit.
00:07:33.000Why was The Hill taking money from what?
00:07:49.000In some ways, it was really brought, you know, back from the dead by Trump because he increased traffic so much and subscriber numbers so much for the New York Times and Washington.
00:07:58.000I mean, that's the irony of his whole attack on the media was the best thing that ever happened to the media.
00:08:05.000But the overall model is in freefall and people are revolting.
00:08:10.000I mean, that's really what with the success of your show with, you know, what what has happened with Breaking Points, our new show that has been totally wild is People don't want this spoon-fed narrative.
00:08:22.000They don't want to have to think about, like, why is this paper covering these politicians in this incredibly fluffy way?
00:08:30.000Because they're more interested in maintaining their access and maintaining their social status within that club than they are in actually getting the facts right in a way that can require sometimes courage, that can be uncomfortable sometimes with your social set.
00:08:45.000And so I really do see it as kind of a watershed moment where some of the old models are dying and people are sick and tired of having their attention monetized.
00:08:55.000They're sick and tired of being fed whatever the, like, safe mainstream narrative is.
00:09:00.000And all they want is just someone who, look, may get it wrong sometimes, but is really just trying to figure out what the truth of the matter is.
00:09:09.000Yeah, it's actually a viable strategy to tell the truth now as far as like a marketing strategy.
00:09:16.000Do you remember that clip of the Amy Robach and Epstein where the Disney, she works for, and she laid it all out there.
00:09:23.000She didn't even know, but this is what I'm talking about.
00:09:25.000She was like, Oh, the palace got involved, and they started calling this, and then Will and Kate's, that's it!
00:09:30.000That's all, a little peek behind the curtain, and it repeats itself.
00:09:33.000Isn't it amazing that that lady, her doing that in front of the camera, and not knowing that they were even filming, and then someone takes it and releases it, everybody gets a chance to see.
00:10:33.000It's one of the most difficult languages.
00:10:35.000A lot of people were like, wait, what is going on here?
00:10:38.000That movie proves everything about what went wrong with America, with Hollywood, entertainment.
00:10:43.000Vin Diesel begged to open that movie in China because all of their opening dollars come from China, Fast and Furious 9. First, I did a whole monologue about this, and I was like, do we really need nine?
00:12:16.000Their job is to make money and increase value to this shareholder.
00:12:20.000And there's a billion people in China that basically maxed out market penetration whenever it comes to the US. But these are American companies.
00:12:59.000There's a big article in the New York Times today about inside an Amazon warehouse.
00:13:04.000And Amazon was the first to say Black Lives Matter and put that banner up on their page and everything.
00:13:10.000And look, I support a lot of goals of that movement.
00:13:13.000But you read through this article and you find out, first of all, The way they treat their largely black and brown warehouse workers, I mean, it's despicable.
00:13:22.000They intentionally make sure they cannot move up the ladder.
00:13:26.000That's part of their business policy is if you're an hourly worker, you're not going to get promoted, and they try to force you out after three years because they think you're getting lazy.
00:13:35.000So this is the company that can, on the surface level, say Black Lives Matter because they think that's good for their profit maximization and their brand and their shareholder value.
00:13:45.000At the same time, what they're actually doing in real life, wildly different than that.
00:13:50.000And they specifically target black and brown people?
00:13:53.000Well, they target their warehouse workers.
00:13:55.000So the warehouse workers are 50-some percent black and brown.
00:14:00.000Management is overwhelmingly white and Asian.
00:14:03.000I thought the whole thing about Amazon was that you could move up the ladder.
00:14:08.000Walmart, who I'm also not a fan of, they actually promote from within.
00:14:13.000So most Walmart managers start out as hourly employees.
00:14:17.000And again, I'm not a fan of Walmart, okay?
00:14:20.000Amazon intentionally, and this is what the New York Times revealed, they intentionally have a system because Bezos said he believes that these human beings are lazy and that after, you know, that they're going to do the bare minimum.
00:15:49.000So when you have one company which has all of this overwhelming power over rural working Americans and even suburban Americans, because this is Amazon's strategy.
00:16:00.000Alec McGillis, he wrote a great book on Amazon, shout out to him, talked about how Dayton was like this Silicon Valley of America in the 1900s, you know, manufacturing, middle class jobs.
00:16:12.000Now, Dayton's prized economic value comes from the fact that it's one day's drive from one third of the U.S. population.
00:16:21.000So everybody there is all just involved in creating cardboard and other Amazon information.
00:16:27.000So the Amazonification, so to speak, or whatever, of America makes it so that, let's say 30 years ago, you grew up in your town, you may have to go to Walmart, H-E-B, I grew up here in Texas, Kroger as well, McDonald's, something like that.
00:16:41.000Now, it's basically like McDonald's, Dairy Queen, and Amazon.
00:16:44.000And when Amazon is the prime market employer, they are the sole determiner of market conditions, increasingly.
00:16:50.000So it's Walmart and Amazon, which are number two.
00:16:52.000And we're talking about millions of people.
00:17:49.000I would like to click the button that's like, I'll pay a little bit more if you can promise me no driver had to shit in a bag in order to get this to me tomorrow.
00:17:57.000We kind of glossed over this thing where you said that Jeff Bezos said that people were lazy.
00:18:01.000So here's what the New York Times says.
00:18:03.000Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, did not want hourly workers to stick around for long, viewing a large disgruntled workforce as a threat, this other executive recalled, who worked at Amazon but then left.
00:18:14.000Company data showed that most employers became less eager over time, he said, and Mr. Bezos believed people were inherently lazy.
00:18:21.000What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need.
00:18:27.000That was embedded throughout the business, from the ease of instant ordering to the pervasive use of data to get the most out of employees, so guaranteed wage increases stop after three years, and Amazon provided incentives for low-skilled employees to leave.
00:18:39.000So every year they would offer associates thousands of dollars to resign.
00:18:43.000They made sure that any position, they gave people sort of the illusion of promotions being available, but then there'd be one promotion available for hundreds of people.
00:18:54.000And they very seldom Higher or higher management from within their own ranks.
00:19:02.000It's totally class stratified as basically the bottom line.
00:19:06.000And of course, lower classes in America are disproportionately black and brown.
00:19:09.000It's not like they're specifically targeting black and brown people.
00:19:11.000But you have one class of people that they see as worthy of doing the grunt work and shitting in the bag, and one class of people that they think is worthy of actually having the more intellectual jobs and running the place.
00:19:24.000It's a really abhorrent way of viewing human beings, essentially.
00:19:28.000This is part of the kind of, again, rot of America that I also think is reflected with the John Cena thing, etc.
00:19:34.000It's like, you're certainly more of a capitalist than I am, but you can't have a country where the only frickin' value is money.
00:20:11.000This kind of shit drives me nuts, and I can't believe they actually report this.
00:20:15.000When it says it's been alleged that Bezos has barked out questions like, are you lazy or just incompetent at employees, and referred to the publishing industry as...
00:21:29.000This is the problem I have, though, because to what Crystal was referencing.
00:21:32.000And again, look, I'm more capitalist than Crystal, but I look at what's happening with Bezos and with Amazon and this unionization drive, which there was a recent failed unionization drive at one of their warehouses in Bessemer, Alabama.
00:21:45.000So Bezos reportedly got pissed that politicians were shitting on Amazon.
00:21:51.000And so I think it was Representative Mark Pocan tweeted out, like, Amazon workers are peeing in bottles.
00:21:56.000And Amazon's actual Twitter account was like, you don't believe the peeing in bottles story, do you?
00:22:03.000And then all of these former Amazon employees and current started reporting official, like, company guidance around peeing and shitting in bags.
00:22:15.000See, you don't really believe in the thing.
00:22:16.000And then they had to go and correct it.
00:22:18.000And they were like, actually, it's true.
00:22:21.000Some of our workers actually do pee in bottles.
00:22:39.000So they recruit people to be fake Amazon employees, and anytime someone tweets something like, you know, what we're talking about here, they'll come in and be like, I'm an Amazon employee, and my name's Bob, and I love it.
00:23:29.000Ken Klippenstein, amazing journalist, who one of the reasons why he gets these stories is because he reaches down to the rank and file instead of the execs.
00:23:36.000He had leaked to him The guidelines and the protocols of how to be an Amazon bot on Twitter, basically.
00:23:44.000How to set up your handle, the types of things to say, what things not to engage with.
00:23:48.000Do you remember when Howard Stern got busted doing that?
00:24:12.000No, I've never even advertised this show.
00:24:14.000It's one of the things that I'm very happy about.
00:24:16.000So I do have one more Amazon anecdote for you that Sagar was referencing.
00:24:20.000So they've started, you know how Wayfair and other companies, they'll do like delivery and they'll assemble your shit for you, your furniture or whatever.
00:24:28.000So Amazon's trying to compete with them and they're just taking the normal drivers.
00:24:31.000They're not giving them any training in furniture assembly, like this isn't their specialty or whatever.
00:24:36.000And they're just like, now do this also.
00:24:54.000Amazon allotted 11 minutes and 15 seconds for two drivers to transport a 59-part ottoman to a customer's room of choice, unpack, and assemble it according to one schedule.
00:25:06.000And this is like typical of the type of timing.
00:25:09.000And it's not like there's no consequence if you don't meet that timeline.
00:25:12.000If you don't meet that timeline routinely, you're fired.
00:25:14.000So this is the type of demands that they put on workers that are just completely unrealistic.
00:25:20.000So, I don't even remember what an ottoman is.
00:27:00.000So what is the solution to something like that?
00:27:03.000It seems like when you start putting money as the most important thing above the health and the happiness of the people that work for you, what is the solution?
00:27:52.000Now, the problem, though, right here with Amazon is Amazon is virulently anti-union.
00:27:57.000They will basically do anything they possibly...
00:27:59.000And this is basically an official Bezos policy.
00:28:01.000Like, we will not negotiate on unions.
00:28:04.000They threw everything they possibly could at the Bessemer election.
00:28:07.000And look, I mean, they did win, and that's the reason why they raised their wage to like $15 an hour, or I think it's $17 an hour now.
00:28:14.000And they're like, we have the best healthcare and all this is because it's basically like, you're gonna get this, but don't you goddamn dare unionize.
00:28:22.000Walmart, I think, just recently, they said they're going to give all of their employees a free Samsung phone, but it's like 729,000 employees.
00:28:32.000And buried within the stuff is that you're going to be tracked when you get that phone.
00:28:36.000Now the phone is with you, and that's the company phone.
00:28:39.000And the company phone is going to collect all of this data, exactly as you're talking about.
00:28:43.000You only have 15 seconds in order to go and get this and place it into the bin, which is the average time.
00:28:57.000I once read this Daily Beast story, which was horrific, where it aggregated like a FOIA thing of all of the suicide calls from Amazon warehouses.
00:29:06.000So it's like, we got another one over here at the plant.
00:29:43.000I saw a politician, I can't even remember who it was, talking about this with relation to Uber, where they're like, well, they can just go and they can leave if they can just leave and go work somewhere else.
00:29:53.000But in many cases, like I'm explaining with Amazon, if you work in a town where the only thing you can do is work at the warehouse, you don't have a lot of power.
00:30:20.000Is that basically 1975, 1980s and so onward, the shareholder march, that's what led us to the China problem.
00:30:28.000Wall Street and the shareholder class are the ones, they knew that it was going to screw working class jobs here in the US. They're the ones who pushed for more free trade with China.
00:30:40.000And then the political class are the ones who said, not only is shit going to be cheaper, because that was the trade-off.
00:30:45.000They're like, shit's going to be cheaper in America.
00:31:48.000Like, do we want to put We're good to go.
00:32:08.000The whole structure of society is basically set up to cater to, frankly, people like us who are doing well and we want to have everything at our fingertips as cheap as possible, as soon as possible, every experience, etc., etc.
00:32:20.000And it's become wildly unbalanced so that...
00:32:23.000If not a majority, close to a majority of the population, it really is very hard to live.
00:32:33.000So the idea of a working class family affording a home anywhere in America is just wildly out of reach.
00:32:38.000That's the one way that you can basically build wealth in America.
00:32:42.000You have no choice in terms of employers, so if you hate Amazon or they fire you or whatever, you're fucked because there's nothing else in your town because everything else has been sucked out to China.
00:32:51.000Especially during the coronavirus pandemic.
00:33:15.000This is one of the reasons why the really skeptical people, the people that are very cynical about things, think that some of the lockdown was on purpose and that what people were trying to do Was trying to accentuate the power that these big corporations had.
00:34:15.000They had to know that some of this was going to result in businesses going under, and that was going to result in their market share growing.
00:34:32.000I think that it was Trump and it was culture war.
00:34:36.000It became becoming pro lockdown became so we live in D.C. We had like we had the highest mass compliance in the country and our city was crazy.
00:34:45.000It was until Fauci came out and said that you can't you can wear a mask outside.
00:36:13.000The guy from The Daily Show, because everyone knows he's progressive, and always has been.
00:36:18.000He's like, he is the perfect guy to get this out.
00:36:21.000But you know, before we play this, the thing about him is, yes, he's always progressive, but he was always willing to take shots and call out hypocrisy wherever he saw it.
00:36:30.000So you knew what his ideology was, but he did not pull punches.
00:40:43.000Yeah, but that was the other thing that was crazy, the differences between the way people on the right and the left were looking at those emails, the Fauci emails that got leaked.
00:40:52.000So many people were saying, like, the fact that what hellscape world we live in, where anyone could look at those emails and think that Fauci is a villain, is so insane and shows you where we're at right now.
00:41:27.000And the minute that you buy into this, like, great man theory, it leads to some fucking ugly places.
00:41:33.000Fauci just recently went on MSNBC, did you see this?
00:41:37.000And was like, criticizing me is the same as attacking science.
00:41:43.000I think he even used the third person.
00:41:47.000Criticizing Dr. Fauci is the same as criticizing science.
00:41:53.000The reality, of course, is that as it looks increasingly likely that the lab leak theory was correct, asking those questions isn't harming science.
00:42:06.000That's bolstering the neutral quest for truth.
00:42:10.000That's all any of us are talking about here.
00:42:11.000And there was a scientist in the emails that was reaching out to him saying, when you examine this closely, there's aspects of this virus that seem to be engineered.
00:42:21.000Inconsistent with evolutionary theory.
00:42:23.000They communicated, then that same scientist changed his tune publicly.
00:42:28.000Then, when all the emails came out, deleted his Twitter account, and now he's moving to the And what's even worse, Joe, is he was actually the person who was the ringleader of the Nature magazine piece, I think it was March of 2020, saying that coronavirus definitively did not come from the lab.
00:42:44.000So in January 31st, 2020, sends Fauci an email saying that the coronavirus genome is not consistent with evolutionary theory.
00:43:04.000I was like, what the fuck is going on?
00:43:06.000Because when you won't even say the name of a country because you're worried about offending China, and we're supposed to believe that these people are completely unbiased, I was like, I got scared.
00:43:35.000The Chinese are liars, and they covered up SARS, and they've covered up basically everything that's come out of their country for the last like 30 years.
00:43:41.000The shocker is Dr. Anthony Fauci, 2017, reverses the ban on gain-of-function research, directs this funding to EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Peter Daszak, who then gives it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for the study of novel bat coronaviruses.
00:43:57.000And then when the pandemic turns around, we take Dr. Peter Daszak as the only American To join the World Health Organization's investigation team into whether coronavirus leaked from a lab.
00:44:09.000And on 60 Minutes, I forget who was interviewing him, she goes, well, wait, so how did you verify it?
00:44:31.000Inside of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, Sky News Australia just revealed a 2017 video that bats were present inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology, and the deputy director says, before this, China had no experience in BSL-4,
00:44:46.000that's the highest level safety for a laboratory, but we have been here, and I... I don't want to misquote him, but he said something along the lines of creating new viruses, synthesizing new viruses.
00:44:59.000And what Fauci and Dr. Xi, who is the head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they're playing fucking games.
00:45:05.000Fauci and Rand Paul, when Rand Paul was pressing him, he was like, we did not fund gain-of-function research.
00:45:12.000He's trying to define it as explicitly what is on the record of him funding.
00:45:25.000She did an email interview with the New York Times, which was mostly, I mean, it was just, you know, the standard, like, state party line from China.
00:45:32.000But they asked her about gain-of-function research.
00:45:35.000And I'm sure your listeners mostly know that gain-of-function research is basically modifying these to see...
00:45:41.000How can we make these pathogens more dangerous?
00:45:45.000And it's in and of itself very dangerous because these things do leak from labs relatively routinely.
00:45:51.000And she says, we were not doing gain-of-function research because what we were doing wasn't making it more virulent or dangerous.
00:45:59.000It was seeing if it could jump from species to species.
00:46:03.000I'm sorry, isn't that like the definition of making it more dangerous for us, seeing if you can make it jump into our species?
00:46:10.000Like, that seems like that's pretty dangerous.
00:46:13.000So they're trying to play these games saying it's not technically gain-of-function research.
00:46:16.000How does Fauci get away with standing there under oath and saying...
00:46:51.000Every human being is flawed, and especially when you're in that kind of position of power and you have certain incentives, like, you have to ask questions about these things.
00:47:00.000And this was, frankly, an ingenious play by the media and the scientific community, is not only was it, oh, Trump and his band of wackos are the ones that are promoting this theory, but also that this theory is somehow racist.
00:47:14.000And the moment that the lab leak theory was pegged as racist, that's when it really became toxic for anyone in the mainstream to ask questions about because you don't want to be pegged as like, oh, well, you're just pursuing this racist conspiracy theory.
00:47:27.000And my thought has always been from the beginning, like, first of all, we just need the answer, like, neutrally to look at what actually happened here.
00:47:36.000But second of all, if we're playing the which is more racist game, it seemed way worse to me when people were like, oh, Chinese people eat bats and that's disgusting and they're so weird and that's how we all got this pandemic.
00:47:47.000That seemed to me way more problematic than the idea that a lab that, by the way, the USA is funding, that something leaked accidentally from that lab.
00:47:56.000So that was really the thing that put this all off the table was this strategic weaponization of, you know, what is a very real problem of alleging racism.
00:48:05.000It's the scientific community teamed up with them.
00:48:08.000Well, basically, they got the luckiest fucking break of their lives that Trump was president because they teamed up with the media and they made it so that it was racist to question.
00:48:17.000Even recently, the lead New York Times reporter on COVID tweeted and then deleted.
00:49:13.000Did U.S. government funds explicitly directed towards novel coronavirus research, which led to the worst pandemic in a century and cost the global economy trillions of dollars?
00:49:23.000And as Josh is the first one to point out, the response from the scientific community has been we need more gain-of-function research, $1.2 billion to the global VIROM project.
00:49:32.000And so once again, the scientific community wanted all of this covered up.
00:49:37.000They teamed up with the media to protect their funding resources.
00:49:40.000Because what people forget, Fauci is actually the king of funding.
00:49:44.000The National Institute of Infectious Disease, I believe, that's NIAD, that's what he's in charge of.
00:49:49.000They are the primary funding authority.
00:49:51.000For huge amounts of the scientific community.
00:49:54.000We had Dr. Brett Weinstein on our show, and he was explaining this to us, which is that if you're inside of that research system, you need access to those dollars to keep your lab afloat.
00:50:04.000My dad is a professor at Texas A&M, and so I know a little bit about funding and the way that you keep your tenure positions in a lot of these universities is you have to continually bring funding in.
00:50:15.000So both my parents are professors there, and so a lot of the professorial game Is getting money from granting institutions.
00:50:21.000Now, in the science community, it's from the National Science Foundation, it's from the National Institute, or whatever, Fauci is the head of the National Institute of Health.
00:50:29.000They have to keep the dollars flowing.
00:50:30.000So if you admit this is gain-of-function research, you start asking questions, the NIH and Fauci can fucking cut you off.
00:50:56.000It's a total cover-up of the Chinese government, the US government, the guy who was on the fucking TV, and we were all supposed to trust this entire time, and it turns out he's the guy who reversed the ban in the first place in order to take advantage of the chaos under Trump, and I know it's so complicated,
00:51:14.000This is what bothers me most about the mainstream media.
00:51:17.000People want to live their lives and they want answers.
00:51:19.000And increasingly, they know they are being lied to, but they do not have the time because it's our job in order to explain all this about Peter Daszak and the World Health Organization, what is gain-of-function research, how Washington actually works, the global funding structures, etc.
00:51:52.000But number two, it really does reveal the brokenness of the media and the way that they were complicit here, the way that they actually bought the lies because they were viewing everything through this culture war lens.
00:52:06.000Rather than just looking for and searching for the facts.
00:52:08.000So they looked at, okay, I know Dr. Fauci.
00:52:13.000I have this relationship with him and I trust him.
00:52:16.000And on the other side, we have these crazy kooks.
00:52:18.000So I'm not even going to dig any further.
00:52:20.000I'm just going to assume that what these people are saying is correct.
00:52:23.000And again, you layer on the charge of racism and it makes a very potent brew.
00:52:26.000So it shows the way that these facts Failures and vulnerabilities within the media can lead to wildly misleading the entire population for a year on what, I mean, you'd have to say this was one of the most important questions of the entire year,
00:52:41.000and they just were absolutely complicit in a total cover-up where you couldn't even talk about it.
00:52:47.000Well, it's also, there's no Democrats that are questioning Fauci the way that Rand Paul is or Senator Kennedy.
00:55:09.000This is the thing that I hated around this whole pandemic is like, and Trump definitely made all of this worse with the culture war and like the whole like the anti mask stance and all this.
00:55:19.000You have people who built up identities around whatever their pandemic era choices were.
00:55:25.000And then the media fed this, like, you know, the left media was like, the people who are, if you're having a hard time right now, the people to blame are those, like, crazy right-wing, like, your neighbor, your friend, your uncle down the street who has views that are different from yours.
00:55:38.000And if you're listening to right-wing media, it's like the real villain are these people that are wearing double masks, et cetera, et cetera.
00:55:45.000This partisan hatred, this sectarian-like hatred between these two camps.
00:55:51.000And then it makes it impossible to get to the facts of things like lab leak because everybody's just feeding it through these stupid cultural lens.
00:55:59.000And meanwhile, the people like we were talking about before who profited and benefited off of all of this misery and pain and suffering They don't they face no scrutiny.
00:56:09.000They get off scot-free because the media is so interested in the political class are so interested in making us all hate each other and blame each other for the things that are going wrong in the country.
00:56:19.000This is what I was saying to the Donald McNeil thing, because I want people to know this.
00:56:22.000He admitted after he was fired from The New York Times, he says, I did not believe the lab leak theory because Trump was saying it.
00:57:37.000Rather than thinking about the people who actually have power, who got wildly rich off of your suffering this year, it's like the media has conditioned everyone to just hate each other and think that your neighbor, your friend, your mom, whoever in your life that holds different views from you,
00:57:55.000be they liberal or conservative, that they're the real problem.
00:58:07.000And that situation cannot persist in America.
00:58:11.000I mean, that doesn't lead to anywhere good at all if you actually think that that is the scariest thing to your life and, like, the future for your kids.
00:58:21.000And it allows the political class to just do nothing.
00:59:33.000And one of the reasons why I think it's important because it highlights the reasons why a guy like Donald Trump is so fucking dangerous is because a guy can incite a bunch of morons to do something really fucking stupid.
00:59:42.000And now that he's silenced off of social media and now that, you know, that actually did happen.
00:59:58.000If it was a real commission, I would believe you, Joe.
01:00:00.000But knowing how these things work, I know that this commission would be some sort of bullshit, like the Benghazi report before it or many of these others.
01:00:08.000The way that the politics works around it, it will dominate the news cycle.
01:00:14.000Washington actually is a zero-sum game.
01:00:16.000Like, when I'm talking about mutual exclusivity, it actually is.
01:00:19.000Senate floor time is the most precious thing in D.C. So whatever the driving conversation of the D.C. is that day, it is actually detracting from somewhere else because these people take vacations literally every other day, the August recess is coming up, all of this.
01:00:32.000So when we focus on—I mean, look, the presidency— Like, the presidency is really about 100 days, and after that, you're, like, running for the midterms, and after that, you're running for re-election.
01:00:41.000In terms of the last, what, I think, like, 75, 80 years of the American presidency, the vast majority of major legislation moves in the first couple of months of the administration, and that's it.
01:01:16.000Is because the CNN reporter must ask this because he needs to give his bosses something to air on the nightly news that day, which is part of the editorial agenda.
01:01:25.000The Fox News reporter has to do the same thing.
01:01:28.000And it comes together to mask all of these incredibly important issues.
01:01:32.000So it's it really is a tragedy because it's like you said, I don't want to downplay Jan 6. I actually think it was terrible.
01:01:38.000And it does show like the power of, you know, of a demagogue, like of a charlatan whenever you become president.
01:01:45.000But Whenever we're focusing on that at the expense of everything else, and maybe we should even ask, why are these people all like, why are you willing to storm the Capitol for Trump?
01:02:12.000I think what you said is really profound about this is a thing that happened and now you're very likely to see similar repeats, similar type of, whether it's on the right or the left or whatever.
01:02:23.000And you just know that the sort of partisan commission that will come out of Washington, we know what the answer will be.
01:02:29.000The answer will be, number one, Republicans are bad and Donald Trump is bad.
01:02:33.000They will do, if you were going to really get to the root of what's going on, It would implicate too many Democrats as well who've been happy to play this game of mutual demonization and existential politics that only lead to these sort of horrific outcomes.
01:02:50.000And again, that doesn't take agency away from any of the people who did this shit, who are morons and deserve whatever punishment is appropriate.
01:02:57.000The problem is, what this will lead to is, number one, Donald Trump's bad.
01:03:02.000We all know that and we have our feelings about it.
01:03:04.000Number two, this justifies us taking more surveillance power, creeping into your life more, demonizing the other side, quote unquote, even more.
01:03:48.000So he announced, and I haven't had a chance to read through all the details, but there's a new big initiative to essentially use the powers that we deployed against Islamic terrorists now against the domestic population.
01:04:02.000So treating sort of domestic extremism in the same way that we treat it.
01:04:20.000But one day it's that, and the next day, just like we saw with Islam.
01:04:23.000Some of these people who were arrested for supposedly aiding and abetting terrorism, it was totally set up.
01:04:28.000They never would have even thought about a plot if the FBI hadn't encouraged them to create a plot.
01:04:34.000It helps to bolster someone's career because then they can say, look, we went out and got the bad guys and we disrupted this bombing plot, etc., etc.
01:05:44.000They're popular because of unfettered conversations.
01:05:46.000And this is what I want to underscore, is that When you allow this to happen in the hands of these, like, monsters, is that they will use it not to any—what you're talking about is a good-faith effort to be like, this is fucking crazy.
01:06:00.000And I actually read a profile of one of the guys—I hate to laugh about this, but some of the people who died on January 6th had heart attacks, and it was because it was, like, the most exciting day of their lives, like, while they were storming the Capitol.
01:06:11.000I read a profile of one of these guys— People were storming the Capitol.
01:07:42.000The like woke capitalism, exactly what you're talking about.
01:07:45.000They feel so dismissed, disgust, like the disgust like emanates from Washington, from New York, from Hollywood, from everywhere, through every organ of our culture, that in Trump, they were able to say, fuck you.
01:08:03.000And so and I don't want to downplay once again, but like, You have to ask this question, like, how did this Obama guy storm the Capitol and then die of a heart attack because it was one of the most exciting days of his life?
01:08:31.000I think it was Joy Reid who was talking about debathification.
01:08:34.000And if anybody wants to know, so I don't want to go too deep around a rabbit hole, but the only reason I'm in politics is because of my opposition to the Iraq War.
01:08:41.000And I grew up not far from here in College Station, which was Very pro-Iraq war, and I thought I was losing my fucking mind as a teenager.
01:08:48.000De-Bathification was the policy where we basically unemployed in a single day all of the people who used to work for the Saddam regime in Iraq.
01:08:57.000Oh, they also happened to be the situation where you had to be a Ba'ath Party member if you wanted to take out the trash or the military, the police, all of that.
01:09:05.000So the country fell to shit in six months, and that's how the insurgency happened.
01:09:09.000And it was amazing to me watching Joy Reid and many others talking about Iraq and war on terror style policy saying that we need to do that to our own population.
01:09:35.000It means billions more dollars to the CIA, to a new creation of some fake, like, National Domestic Terror Center, which will be a fancy new building in McLean, Virginia, so that people can spy on you.
01:09:46.000And then once that happens, you think they're gonna give that up?
01:10:01.000I even saw, I don't want to attribute the quote directly to him, but I saw some suggestion somewhere about like, these are the type of people we would drone strike in Iraq, some former military.
01:10:18.000And yet, I mean, look, it hasn't happened yet, but, like, there were a lot of discussions about a new domestic war on terror law, and you don't even really need a new war on terror law.
01:10:26.000All you need to do is to redefine what domestic terrorism means.
01:10:30.000The FBI can do basically whatever the fuck it wants.
01:12:56.000Don't buy into the whole, like, fuck the Democrats, fuck the Republicans.
01:12:59.000The problem is a lot of people live in these worlds where they're very isolated and they don't know anybody outside of their own ideological bubble.
01:13:21.000You know, I think the hopeful piece is, like...
01:13:24.000People are searching out people like you.
01:13:27.000People are searching out places like Breaking Points.
01:13:29.000They're searching for—because, you know, most people in their normal lives, they don't experience it as like, oh my god, this person across town is like the real threat to me.
01:13:38.000They don't experience that isn't the reality of their daily lives.
01:13:41.000And so I do think that there's an innate hunger for a different way of approaching this.
01:13:47.000And this is the perfect example of like with the domestic surveillance, you know, when it was the war on terror, you had a lot of progressives who were very like clear about civil libertarian, like they stood up for the principle, they really knew where they stood.
01:14:01.000And now that we're talking about the domestic terrorism, well, suddenly they've totally flipped.
01:14:29.000Baker argued that the counterterrorism strategy should be reserved for the much more dangerous forms of terrorism we've seen from ISIS and Al-Qaeda.
01:14:40.000But intelligence officials say the threat to the homeland from Islamic terrorism has greatly diminished.
01:14:45.000And the Biden administration says domestic terrorism, in quotes, has evolved into the most urgent terrorism threat in the United States faces today.
01:17:27.000But they were there, and the reason they had to stay is because Congress was like, well, there's a QAnon forum where they say maybe real inauguration day is March.
01:17:35.000So all of these National Guardsmen, yeah, they have to stay until March.
01:17:39.000And then the permanent fencing was up there for a long time.
01:17:43.000Even today, you cannot enter the Capitol building, which this is our nation's Capitol.
01:17:47.000It used to be a very open and free place, which I always thought was amazing.
01:17:50.000You see these tourists walking through, and I think it's important.
01:18:09.000And again, the image of the world that we broadcast from Biden's inauguration was a lockdown city afraid of its own shadow, as you said, over a bunch of yahoos who stormed the Capitol.
01:18:20.000You have a hundred more cops on that day with riot shields.
01:18:22.000It looks completely and totally different.
01:18:48.000It is money and power that concentrates, and then they use the justification of January 6th in order to blow up the budget for billions and billions more.
01:19:01.000I don't want to use my words carefully, but the Herald Square thing is an example, what you were talking about with a 19-year-old, that they're going to go out there on these forums and start grooming kids and saying, hey, do you fucking hate, you know, like, do you hate brown people or something?
01:19:15.000Well, you should buy this thing and buy a ticket to come to this convention.
01:19:19.000The moment you buy the ticket, they're going to fucking nail you, right?
01:20:11.000No president comes into office and says, I'm going to give some of these powers that I have that I think have gone too far, I'm going to give some of that up.
01:20:55.000You asked what we can do to push back.
01:20:57.000It really has to be people who have actual principles, who apply them consistently, even when they think it might hurt, quote unquote, their team.
01:21:06.000And that's where you just, you know, the media and the political class obviously goes in the complete opposite direction, where they flip-flop constantly, depending on what's convenient for them in that day.
01:21:17.000And we're in a dangerous situation because The quote-unquote liberal outlets have spent the past four years elevating people like former heads of the CIA and former heads of the FBI and all of these people who want nothing more than to get the next surveillance contract, to continue to further the power of themselves and their buddies and the institutions that they always represented.
01:21:35.000And those people are now seen as like liberal heroes.
01:21:38.000So it does put us in a very vulnerable and dangerous situation.
01:21:43.000If you're some sort of an outside agency that's trying to fuck with people and you want to get on forums or get on social media and incite people in one direction or the other.
01:21:55.000And we don't know how many of the people that post on Facebook or how many of the people that post on Twitter are that.
01:22:27.000This is why I focus on the economics as well...
01:22:30.000We are becoming a completely stratified society.
01:22:32.000Like people are flocking to mega cities like Los Angeles.
01:22:36.000Well, not now, but Austin is actually a very good example of a lot.
01:22:40.000Arizona had a lot of incoming Florida as well, which is that you have the professional managerial class basically concentrating in these mega urban environments.
01:22:50.000And this sounds crude, but like breeding with each other, having kids.
01:22:54.000And again, there's nothing wrong with this.
01:22:56.000People who go to college generally want to marry somebody else who went to college.
01:23:00.000But then they want to move somewhere where other people also went to college.
01:23:03.000And then you raise your kids in such a way that you all have the same values.
01:23:07.000But this has now happened over 40 years or so.
01:23:11.000And what has happened, Charles Murray, who he shall not be named, actually wrote an entire book about this called Coming Apart.
01:23:19.000And you actually saw that zip codes were completely being ripped apart by education level.
01:23:24.000And the more that this happens and the trend continues where more educated people marry other educated people and they increasingly become raised away from one another, then you're just going to hate each other.
01:23:34.000And the people who got the short end of the stick are very normal, average people who are like, hey, I like living 10 miles away from my mom.
01:24:18.000This is the whole suburban phenomenon, which is that the more that people live and raise their kids in a bubble, then they're going to make it so that, like where I live, for example, they don't know.
01:24:29.000I don't think the people I live around, all the Black Lives Matter, gay pride flags, everything is, you know, all of the flags are in the windows and all of that.
01:24:38.000I don't think they even know anybody who thinks differently.
01:26:19.000I'm not related to any of these people, but I'm like, this is part of who we were, like Union troops dying and fighting to free slaves.
01:26:26.000When I think about that, I feel a deep connection with it in our history, but we're losing that because we're increasingly losing any connection to one another.
01:26:35.000So there was a study that just came out recently that I actually think is incredibly important.
01:26:41.000I don't know if you know the economist Thomas Piketty, but he's done some of the sort of like seminal work, not just here in the U.S., but across Western European democracies as well on class and income inequality and like the way that these societies are coming apart.
01:26:58.000And what he found, and, you know, I think this very much is some of the points that you've been making, Joe, is, like, in places where these tribal culture war politics are put at the center, the economics and just, like,
01:27:13.000trying to get people the basics of a decent life, it completely falls by the wayside.
01:27:17.000Because you look at the numbers over the past year.
01:27:20.000You look at the fact that you have these billionaires who got wealthier and wealthier and wealthier.
01:27:28.000Either you were forced onto the front lines and your health completely disregarded and getting sick and overwhelming numbers and all of that, or you lost your job completely, right?
01:27:38.000That was the reality for most working class Americans.
01:27:39.000So you look at that and you're like, where's the backlash?
01:27:43.000Where's the balancing of the scale so that at least you got a fighting shot if you're a working class person in this country?
01:27:49.000And the answer is, and this is what his research over 21 different Western democracies showed, the answer is, culture war is so good at distracting people and pitting them against each other versus focusing on any of those concerns.
01:30:18.000That was one of the things they thought in the 60s and 70s is like, we're going to get everybody LSD and then we're all going to get along.
01:34:02.000But I mean, from their recommendation algorithm, it basically, as I understand it, which is that they track almost every minute thing that you do within the app, like how fast that you take to swipe up, and they are able to build a hyper-personalized algorithm specifically to you.
01:34:17.000And the reason why is this takes out all the bullshit from Facebook and Twitter, and it boils it down to what social media's job actually is, keeping you on that app as long as humanly possible.
01:34:27.000And I saw recently TikTok actually surpassed Instagram.
01:34:30.000In terms of time on app here in the United States, where we have tens of millions of people who are spending more time there than on Instagram.
01:34:39.000You're taking money out of Zuckerberg's pocket whenever you do that.
01:34:42.000And now you're giving it to, I forget his name, the ByteDance CEO. Now you're giving money to the ByteDance guy because that is the best.
01:35:49.000The Chinese, because they have a state-run economy, come up and they gobble up a huge portion of American manufacturing, of a lot of our companies which were cash-strapped, who needed cash injections.
01:36:01.000The Chinese are like, oh, here, we're right here.
01:36:02.000They're fake billionaires who are all propped up by the Chinese government.
01:36:07.000Around 2010 is when you could see some of this happening.
01:36:10.000Actually, weirdly enough, Obama produced a very good documentary on this called American Factory, which is on Netflix.
01:36:40.000He's one of the only politicians that I think, I'm sure he got compromised once he got in there, but he's the only guy that when I hear him talk, I feel, I really genuinely feel you can tell a lot about a person by watching him talk.
01:36:54.000And when I see Clinton talk, I'm like, how many people have you killed?
01:36:59.000When I see Obama talk, I'm like, I think this is a guy that was an idealistic young man that entered into politics and slowly became intertwined in an unfixable system.
01:37:19.000Our friend Matt Stoller calls him the Instagram president because his first trip after presidency, he's going hanging out with, like, billionaire Richard Branson, Gotta get paid.
01:37:52.000I saw this recent thing where it was like, Obama implores Chicago business community to go against environmental activists who oppose his new library in Chicago.
01:38:05.000And look like whatever he can do whatever he wants.
01:38:08.000But I was just like, man, like, You think about the insurgent campaign of Barack Hussein.
01:38:13.000I was inspired by Obama when I was a kid.
01:38:15.000I mean, he had this crazy name and he beat Hillary.
01:39:08.000What he leaned into was he was trusted the generals, right?
01:39:12.000I think the greatest mistake that he ever made, 2009, David Petraeus and many of the other generals were like, because he had run on, I'm going to fight the good war.
01:39:19.000And they were trying to get him to do a surge in Afghanistan, which he eventually agreed to.
01:39:35.000We had thousands of troops who were killed in Afghanistan for two years, and we had a two-year deadline where we were just going to pull them out.
01:39:40.000He didn't have the courage in order to actually fulfill the electoral mandate that he ran on.
01:40:15.000They let the economy go to crap, didn't do what was necessary to make sure regular people were going to be OK. And so, yeah, eight years down the line, you get this huge backlash to that.
01:40:39.000You've got a super majority in the Senate.
01:40:42.000You've got a neoliberal system, you know, that sort of like Reagan era and Clinton era system that is breaking down here and around the world.
01:40:51.000And the response to that was, let's do this like terrible health care program that's going to like modestly improve things, but mostly give away the store to the health insurance industry.
01:41:01.000Let's bail out the banks and have zero accountability and not send a single banker to jail and let homeowners die on the vine.
01:41:08.000Like, The moment called for a sort of more fundamental rethinking of the direction that we were heading in for the country and shoring up, making sure working class people were going to have a basic life of dignity.
01:41:52.000Anything to do with those topics, he just did not respond.
01:41:55.000And it made me think to myself, like, geez, There are—he may be the most popular politician in America right now, right?
01:42:02.000A lot of people feel exactly like you do.
01:42:04.000Like, this is a man who has moral clarity.
01:42:07.000Like, this is someone who I look to as a leader.
01:42:10.000And when have we needed that sort of moral leadership more— And instead you're just like building your brand and hanging out with Bruce Springsteen and avoiding anything that might be remotely controversial.
01:42:23.000What's interesting about the Bruce Springsteen thing is it's not successful.
01:43:04.000And I think about that with so many people who have that kind of cultural power and already wealthy and like everything is these safe moves and they're so fearful of damaging their brand.
01:44:38.000I was a swimmer, and I always felt like the minute that you just surrender to it, Getting out or stopping or whatever is just not an option is actually the moment when a lot of the suffering stops because your brain is just like sealed the exits.
01:46:06.000This is actually what pissed me off about him, which is like he won white working class voters overwhelmingly in 08, and they stuck with him in 2012, then abandoned the Democrats for Trump in 2016. He's a huge part of that story, and yet he never is introspective about it.
01:46:40.000And that he was saying, I forget what his exact words were, but something about white people were not willing to accept the idea of having responsibility for reparations.
01:46:53.000And, you know, it's an interesting subject, right?
01:46:56.000Because if you really take it back to the corporations that actually did benefit from slavery, they still exist.
01:47:21.000And this is what America really is supposed to be.
01:47:24.000The most fascinating thing about America to me is that we are all children of immigrants.
01:47:28.000I look at the problem, the slavery problem and the reparations problem, as a massive failure of the community of America.
01:47:37.000And I think you look at these impoverished communities, you look at these places like whether it's Baltimore or the South Side of Chicago or these places that have a deep History of poverty and of gangs and crime and violence.
01:47:50.000And then you look at what happened during the COVID pandemic, where all of a sudden there was these trillions of dollars that were allocated to these major corporations to make sure that they didn't fail.
01:47:59.000And my perspective is, instead of thinking of corporations, let's think of it as problems.
01:48:06.000Like what is one of the major problems in this country?
01:48:08.000Well, one of the major problems in this country is people that are born into communities that are fucked.
01:48:19.000They're stuck in this situation where everyone around them is involved in some sort of crime, or they're deeply impoverished, or there's gang violence, and maybe there's no family around them, and maybe the only family is the gangs.
01:48:31.000This is the problem with America, and if we don't address this, we're going to continue to pump out the same disenfranchised, angry people that don't feel like they're represented by the system, and we've done nothing about No, nothing about it.
01:48:48.000Well, he could have, to your point about reparations, black homeownership was at the lowest level under Barack Obama's presidency, because it turns out black people dramatically lost their houses disproportionately.
01:49:05.000Like, he was presided over the largest drop in black wealth in modern American history.
01:49:10.000And he's out here talking about white grievance?
01:49:12.000Now, look, I'm not saying there isn't white grievance, but Barack Obama was president of the United States with a massive democratic mandate, supermajority in the United States Senate, and then squandered it.
01:49:23.000And this is what I mean, which is that, like, yes, Obama...
01:49:26.000He's a smart man, and he does understand culture and all that.
01:49:30.000But he absolves himself of many discrete choices that he made, which directly led to a lot of the problems that he's bitching about and blaming other people about.
01:49:40.000Sorry, that's a big pet peeve of mine.
01:49:42.000What you're talking about, though, I mean, it really it really goes very deep because what you're talking about is it turns the American dream that ideal of like anyone can make it if you just try hard.
01:49:55.000So if you're a person like that, sure, you may have one one off Barack Obama, who's just like such a genius that he's able to transcend those circumstances.
01:50:05.000And then we hold those people up like, look, The system is working.
01:50:08.000The meritocracy is working, et cetera, et cetera.
01:50:11.000And so in this country, you have a lot of people who struggle every day, right, just to be able to afford an apartment and start a family, put food on the table, just the basics of life.
01:50:23.000And they think it's their fault because of the failures of that basic promise, right?
01:50:29.000Where, yeah, it turns into now rather than seeing the larger problems in the country and seeing where the blame really lies, I turn it inward to, oh, it's my fault.
01:52:34.000If you have some kid who's born in poverty-stricken Baltimore and you expect that kid to do as well as someone who lives in Calabasas, California, who goes to private schools, you're out of your fucking mind.
01:53:07.000And if you live inside your own bubble, like we were talking about, you don't know that these other people exist in this realm where this neighborhood, this community, where they can't get out.
01:53:59.000Well, and look, you see the same thing, and I lived in Kentucky, and I've done work in West Virginia, and that's where my family's originally from, is West Virginia.
01:54:07.000I mean, you see the same thing in Appalachia, you know, where you go in some of these towns in southern West Virginia that were coal mining towns, and that's basically gone and dead, and there's just...
01:54:18.000There's nothing there, and it's not an accident.
01:54:49.000If you're a patriot, if you're a person who believes in exception, exceptional Americans, you believe in this concept that this is a unique place, wouldn't you want less losers?
01:55:01.000If there's more people that are out there kicking ass, it's better for everybody.
01:55:53.000They're farming homeless people is what they're doing.
01:55:55.000And there's no incentive whatsoever to fix it and solve it.
01:55:59.000If we could figure out as a country how to slowly but surely...
01:56:05.000But there has to be an ethic, instead of looking at it tribally, instead of looking at it as like this culture war, looking at we're one giant fucking community, and what do we share in common?
01:56:16.000We want our loved ones to be safe and happy.
01:56:18.000We want everybody to have a good living.
01:56:20.000We want everybody to be able to find their dream and pursue it, whatever their dream is, whatever their thing is.
01:56:25.000And that's what we should be doing as a team.
01:56:28.000If there was only four of us, we would look at it that way.
01:56:31.000But when there's 400 million of us, we lose sight of things because there's a diffusion of responsibility.
01:56:36.000And people profit off of making sure that we don't see each other that way.
01:56:55.000It all just like happens to come about in a certain way.
01:56:59.000And then coming out of that is very fucking hard.
01:57:02.000This is the problem where I was saying about the meritocracy, which is that the biggest mistake America made is we convinced our upper class that they earned it.
01:57:12.000So it used to be that we actually had a pretty deep sense of like noblesse oblige amongst the elite in America.
01:57:17.000You can look at Teddy Roosevelt, the Roosevelt family.
01:57:40.000And so when you think about what happened is that we convinced everybody that, as you're saying, Calabasas, buying your way into the college, that kid is like, I worked my fucking ass off and I got my ass.
01:57:51.000And you're like, you're from Calabasas.
01:57:54.000About all of the things that got you to where you were and I'm not saying you didn't work very hard But there were a lot of structural things in place in order to make and then you move to New York City And you're like I'm working my fucking ass off in New York City and these poor pieces of shit down in West Virginia Why can't they just get a job?
01:58:10.000Why don't they why doesn't their mom get them a tutor?
01:58:13.000Why do they don't even know that that's so there are outside of the realm of the lived experience of millions of working people and the more that that happens and And remember, I think where are we at with college?
01:59:32.000I actually want to ask you more about that.
01:59:34.000I have more questions than that, Eric.
01:59:37.000Did you follow any of the studies around UBI? Yes.
01:59:42.000The Stockton, California mayor, who actually now wants to see, but he was doing this experiment there and they came out with the results of like, I think the people in that town who participated in the trial, it wasn't a lot of money they got.
02:00:06.000And he was so sort of close to the edge financially and didn't have any sort of like paid leave or whatever.
02:00:13.000Basically, you miss a day and you either lose a paycheck or lose your job.
02:00:16.000He was so close to the edge financially, he couldn't even take one day off to go and interview for another position.
02:00:23.000So with just that $500, it was like, okay, I can buy myself a suit and I can go interview for a different job in an area that he actually had a skill set and he was able to get that job and to be able to move forward.
02:00:35.000And it just makes you realize, like, the whole thing is dependent on people having zero choice, right, in terms of their employers.
02:00:45.000Being so locked into this thing that they have zero breathing room.
02:00:51.000So, you know, a lot of the critique of UBI is always like, oh, you give people money and they're just going to spend it on like booze or Cheetos or drugs and they'll be lazy, etc., etc.
02:01:00.000And what the results have found is actually the polar opposite.
02:01:04.000People are able, they actually get jobs at higher rates because they have the luxury and the flexibility to get the interview closed and get the skills that they need to be able to do that.
02:01:15.000To pick and choose rather than just having to take this one thing that you might have a little bit of a luxury to wait.
02:01:20.000And so one of the things that I find fascinating that's happening right now is you've probably seen the statistics about the number of people who are quitting their jobs, the number of jobs that are going unfilled, because people actually had this experience that was forced on them over the course of the pandemic of changing their lives around.
02:01:40.000And it created an experience of, like, reassessing the values of, okay, number one, you know, if I'm in one of these frontline industries where my health was put at risk for frickin' $7.25, or even less than that if you're working for tips, Do I really like,
02:02:15.000So you actually were in the midst of a huge worker, uncoordinated worker revolt where Where that leads, I don't think anyone could possibly say.
02:02:25.000In fact, I think the whole ramifications of this coronavirus and what ultimately happens coming out of the pandemic, I don't think we have any idea.
02:02:31.000But there are going to be massive ramifications for years and years to come, and we're starting to get a little taste of those reassessments and those value reassessments right now in some of the numbers that are coming out.
02:02:43.000I see it as revenge, which is that we made a choice at the beginning, which is that Washington decided we had two choices.
02:02:49.000We could push people into the unemployment system or what they did in Europe and what some politicians here, I think it was Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders and a few others, put forward a proposal about payroll subsidy, basically making it so that...
02:03:00.000Businesses could keep people on payroll, even during the lockdown.
02:03:04.000And that way, when you come out of lockdown, your employees still work for you.
02:03:07.000Well, we said, no, let them quit, file for unemployment.
02:03:11.000The state system can distribute that and whatever.
02:03:13.000So we separated people from their jobs.
02:03:16.000When we made that choice, we fucked the business and we fucked the employees.
02:04:06.000Oh, well, because the conversation is around unemployment insurance.
02:04:08.000Because the conversation is, should we continue to have the supplemental $300 a week of unemployment insurance going to people because it's discouraging people from work?
02:04:17.000So the basic idea is that if unemployment might be higher than a wage at a normal job, then you're basically subsidizing unemployment and you're screwing over the business.
02:04:26.000Well, it's like, It's like, we gotta make life more miserable so that these people are forced back into the workplace at their shitty jobs for $7.25.
02:04:32.000And it's always people that don't have shitty jobs that feel this way.
02:05:28.000Would that though, the hiring bonus, wouldn't the employer be able to hold that over the head of the employee, that if you get fired, you lose your $300 as well?
02:05:36.000Well, I think you could make it transferable.
02:05:37.000So right now, it is mutually exclusive.
02:05:39.000But I worry about companies like Amazon that are doing those kind of weird, shitty practices.
02:05:45.000Imagine, let's say they didn't go union.
02:05:49.000And let's say they just had some sort of a meeting where they managed this situation in a much better way where they gave people more time and more money and they relaxed all their standards.
02:06:06.000They had some sort of mediation where they came to a conclusion like, listen, we want you to feel better about this.
02:06:13.000And then you looked at the real quantifiable numbers, and you recognized that there's a significant dip in profits.
02:06:20.000Because part of the way you make the profit is you've got to squeeze blood out of a rock.
02:07:47.000I actually did a whole monologue on this because it's how Bezos actually weaponized his ownership of the Washington Post to benefit his bottom line, which is he made it seem like the Saudis targeted him.
02:09:32.000Like if you're playing a numbers game, if you're used to 100 and then you get 200, now you're used to 200. If you're used to 200 and you get 300, you're used to 300. If you find out you get 1,000, you get that 1,000.
02:09:43.000Then you have 1,000 and you're like, you know, I heard there's a guy who has 10,000.
02:09:56.000Do you think that that's just a characteristic of people who become wildly wealthy like him?
02:10:01.000Do you think that part of the reason that he became wildly wealthy is he was different than other humans and that he had this obsessive thing?
02:12:04.000See, I understand the motivation behind it because it's a natural human characteristic.
02:12:10.000If you have, you want more, and if all you do is business, because he's a businessman, those guys are the most susceptible to this trait, this characteristic, rather.
02:12:58.000Like, Lenny Bruce is the seed that led to Richard Pryor, that led to Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison, that led to me, and Chris Rock and Chappelle and all these guys.
02:14:06.000What I started doing was talking to my friends, and then I got a chance to talk to some interesting people, like Graham Hancock was one of the first guests, and I got a chance to talk to these people, and I'm like, oh, now that I get X amount of downloads, I can get these fucking cool people to talk to me.
02:14:21.000Because I didn't have a way to get them to talk to me before.
02:14:25.000The idea that I could get a guy like Randall Carlson to sit across from me for three hours with no phones, with no nothing, and talk to me about his theory about how the human race has been reset multiple times.
02:14:38.000Because of asteroid impacts and explain it because there's a comet that comes into our neighborhood every X amount of thousands of years and it's trackable and it's also trackable by core samples.
02:14:50.000When they do core samples they find all this nuclear glass that indicates impacts and this impacts coincides with the drop off of civilization.
02:14:57.000Also the changing of the climate and the ice age is like, holy shit I can get a guy like that?
02:17:37.000So like, what was Jeffrey Epstein offering Leon Black and Bill Gates that they could not get anywhere else?
02:17:42.000Bill Gates is one of the richest men in the world.
02:17:43.000And you start to see how these networks of power—this was Epstein's superpower—is he was like, oh, I can get you a meeting with the Nobel Committee.
02:17:51.000He's like, I'm facilitating—and remember, he knew all these scientists.
02:17:54.000I talked to Lex Friedman about this when I was a little bit on his podcast.
02:18:05.000So he took and facilitated this whole network.
02:18:09.000And Gates is trying to like use Epstein to get himself the Nobel Peace Prize.
02:18:14.000I'm like, this is so insane because it reveals the pathology of Gates where it's like being one of the richest men in the world is not enough.
02:18:20.000I have to have the recognition that I saved lives.
02:18:25.000What if Epstein realized that Gates' ego is easy to stroke and that he's a nerd that never got laid and that he could maybe bring him around some beautiful young ladies and then say, you know what I can do for you?
02:18:42.000It repeats itself over and over again.
02:18:45.000Right, because that was his whole business.
02:18:48.000We don't know what Epstein's exact affiliation with intelligence communities and Mossad and all that shit was, but let's assume he knew some people that knew how to manipulate folks.
02:19:01.000If you're looking at a guy like Bill Gates, you ever see him dance?
02:19:23.000If I saw that, and I'd be like, I can get Bill to a party and I can talk him into almost anything.
02:19:29.000If I see that guy, if I could spend some time with him and bring him to a fucking island, filled with hotties, some of them which may or may not be 18. Look at him.
02:20:21.000Bill Gates basically runs global public health.
02:20:25.000And this has become a major problem in terms of getting vaccines distributed to the rest of the world.
02:20:30.000And not just with this, also in the AIDS epidemic.
02:20:33.000He believes very much in monopoly patent power.
02:20:38.000And so he sides with all the pharmaceutical companies in making sure that their patent monopolies are enforced.
02:20:44.000You know, whether you like him or not, etc., etc., the idea that you have these few billionaires that have so much control.
02:20:52.000I mean, Bezos basically controls the U.S. labor market.
02:20:55.000Bill Gates basically controls public health.
02:20:57.000And that's not to say that he hasn't done some good things there, but it's a scary thing to just like outsource money.
02:21:03.000All of what we're doing in a certain sphere to a guy who dances like that.
02:21:07.000Isn't it a weird thing that's going on right now with the patents and the vaccines?
02:21:11.000Because the narrative has always been we have to get everyone vaccinated.
02:21:16.000It's so important to get everyone vaccinated.
02:21:18.000And now the narrative is we can't give up this intellectual property because it will take these people too long to manufacture these vaccines.
02:21:36.000So the pharmaceutical industry will tell you, we're investing in life-saving research, and that's why we need this patent protection, etc., etc.
02:21:46.000Every one of the new drug molecules developed over the past decade has been funded by public research.
02:21:54.000What they're good at is taking that public research and bringing a product to market.
02:21:59.000Okay, mRNA technology used in the vaccine.
02:22:03.000That was publicly funded research over decades that now they are profiting off of massively.
02:22:09.000These vaccines will be some of the most profitable drugs in history, but it's not enough for them.
02:22:13.000So, yeah, they're full of a pack of lies.
02:22:16.000And Bill Gates went on TV and said the same thing like, oh, well, these factories aren't really up to snuff and it's not going to work, etc., etc.
02:22:23.000Just totally carrying water for them because he has an ideological commitment to the shit that they're saying.
02:22:27.000Meanwhile, the Johnson& Johnson factory just had to get rid of 60 million doses.
02:23:51.000Well, let me just say this, because I think your point is bigger than just the healthcare system, right?
02:23:58.000When you have it just be about profits, and profits are the only, like, what are you incentivizing?
02:24:03.000You're not actually incentivizing health.
02:24:06.000What you're incentivizing is people to have chronic illnesses that require a lot of treatment.
02:24:10.000Oh, lo and behold, America has a lot of chronic illnesses that require repeated treatment.
02:24:15.000You're actually incentivizing a system to keep people sick.
02:24:19.000So it's not a surprise then when that's the result that you ultimately get.
02:24:23.000And that's where, you know, this country, what I said earlier of like, the only value is money.
02:24:29.000There are some fields where maybe that makes sense.
02:24:31.000But in a place like healthcare, where we're talking about people's health, We're in a place like education, where we're talking about people just learning and acquiring knowledge.
02:24:39.000When I think about drug legalization, it's the same thing that I'm concerned about.
02:24:43.000Are these just going to become another quiver in the air of big pharma?
02:24:47.000There are these areas of life that there should be values other than just profit maximization.
02:24:54.000This is where I think that the big realignment that's happening is around that.
02:24:58.000Look, we had a system and we've recognized the power of American capitalism and profit in order to generate extraordinary things.
02:25:04.000But we can't erase the government role in Operation Warp Speed and bringing the vaccines to bear.
02:25:09.000And there's actually I forget what the terminology is called.
02:25:12.000Where whenever so much government subsidy or whatever is involved, the government has the ability in order to waive vaccine IP protection and actually not necessarily seize it or whatever, but they march in right marching rights.
02:25:24.000So they have the ability to come in and say, no, we're going to distribute it X way and do this, this and this.
02:25:29.000That is what we've lost, which is that what we have lost is the recognition of the power of the government and the socialized benefits of a lot of this.
02:25:53.000They want to tax regular working class Americans to pay for all these brand new roads.
02:26:00.000Now, first of all, infrastructure is the one thing you probably should deficit finance, if there is such a thing, because it can explode economic benefits.
02:26:31.000But a lot of these senators and the Chamber of Commerce and all these other people are like, no.
02:26:36.000And that's actually effectively a tax on the South because a lot of people drive here more than up North.
02:26:41.000So we're talking about user fees, average working people, drivers and others.
02:26:45.000They're going to pay for the new roads and then Amazon can offer you like three-hour delivery or two-hour delivery.
02:26:51.000This is the problem that we have, which is that What they want, the current structure, is for people to pay for the stuff that everybody benefits them.
02:27:00.000And increasingly, as they are benefiting from everything, they want to even continue to push down every single dollar towards people.
02:27:07.000The gas tax thing, it makes me so angry because, first of all, the politically stupidest thing you can do is raise taxes on gas.
02:27:15.000Nobody, people are going to freak out.
02:27:17.000But really what it is, is that that is a tax on the poor.
02:27:20.000And that is what we want to push down for everything.
02:27:24.000And I just see this like all across the system.
02:27:26.000Like we're pushing all of the costs down in the personal financial system and more like late fees and all of this.
02:27:32.000And I understand like the problems in creating banks and all that.
02:27:36.000But one of the things that we've discovered is that it's So much more expensive to be poor in America than it is...
02:27:43.000It's like you get all this free shit apparently when you're rich or whenever you have money in your bank account.
02:27:47.000Like, oh, then we're going to waive this fee or waive that.
02:27:50.000But when you're poor, oh, you can't have a real bank.
02:27:53.000You have to go pay a fee to get a money order or something.
02:27:57.000All of these things just stack up and they become a structural inability in order for you to move up the ladder.
02:28:17.000Yeah, so he doesn't really get money from...
02:28:21.000Well, because he owns something and he borrows against it.
02:28:24.000And you know what's interesting is apparently in that very first Supreme Court case that said, like, essentially you can't tax things that you haven't had a cash-out event, there were scholars at the time that predicted exactly...
02:28:37.000The method that Elon and many others use to avoid.
02:28:40.000So since he's taking a loan and living off the proceeds of the loan, he's not technically cashing out his shares.
02:28:46.000And so there isn't a taxable event, quote unquote.
02:28:50.000What is he supposed to do, though, in that circumstance?
02:30:57.000He's thinking about putting people on Mars.
02:30:59.000He's thinking about making the most insane cars to get people to adopt electric cars.
02:31:03.000He's thinking about drilling holes under the ground to make people go through tunnels so that we don't have any traffic.
02:31:09.000He's thinking about making solar power with roof tiles so it makes it efficient and easy for people to adopt.
02:31:15.000He really is thinking about all these things.
02:31:18.000What I'm thinking about is a system that would have a regular wage earner, like earning 60K a year or whatever, paying higher taxes than someone who's a billionaire.
02:31:28.000That's what I'm thinking about, which is insane.
02:31:29.000And you know, really, too, around the billionaire conversation, it always drives me crazy, we think of billionaires in America as Bezos, Elon, and all of those.
02:31:37.000That's actually not how you become a billionaire.
02:31:38.000We crunched the numbers for Forbes 2020. The number one predominant way that you become a billionaire in America today is private equity and hedge funds.
02:31:47.000It's just financial engineering, trading money, making front-running trades in terms of the whole Robin Hood thing, Citadel, Ken Griffin.
02:32:08.000Silver Lake Capital Management, where you don't fucking do anything.
02:32:12.000And you're basically just a leech on the American financial system driving up taxes or driving up the prices of stocks because you're front-running people's trades and you're making it so that you make.0003 dollars more per trade.
02:32:25.000And if you do that at scale, you become a billionaire.
02:32:28.000That's how you actually become a billionaire in America today.
02:32:30.000Let's also not pretend that it's like an accident.
02:32:48.000So at the January 5th, the day before the January 6th thing happened, Mm-hmm.
02:33:09.000So he like writes out, gets zero coverage because the riot happens and understandably people are paying attention to that.
02:33:15.000But, you know, the hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in Washington over, you know, the past decade just from the private equity industry lobbying forces to make sure I think?
02:33:44.000This is a bedrock principle of fairness.
02:33:46.000The sense that everybody's got skin in the game, that this is a more or less, you know, nobody expects anything to be 100% fair, 100%, but that this is more or less fair.
02:33:56.000And then you look at, like, you know, Elon Musk's Secretary or the person who's like delivering this or security guard or whatever.
02:34:04.000He's paying a higher tax rate than the billionaire.
02:34:09.000And so when you have that realization throughout the public, it really does destroy just sort of the faith in the nation as a whole.
02:34:16.000In the New York Times story, this made me so angry.
02:34:19.000They quoted somebody from the IRS. You are three times more likely to be audited if you make less than $25,000 a year than you are if you're one of these private equity people.
02:35:37.000There's a business of making sure that homelessness doesn't really get resolved because then you'd lose your quarter million dollar a year job.
02:36:28.000The finances and the misery that comes from not being able to have confidence that you're going to be able to provide for your kids, that's a very real thing.
02:36:37.000But I think just as real as that is this sense of, What am I even doing here?
02:36:42.000Well, it goes back to what you were talking about earlier with universal basic income.
02:36:45.000And this is one of the things that I felt that attracted me to Andrew Yang when we're talking.
02:36:49.000I'm like, yeah, there's gonna be some people that get lazy.
02:38:41.000All of these confluence of events are making it so that we are really, we are basically failing our civilizational priority, which is replacing itself.
02:38:48.000And so, again, though, you look at America, and you say, why are people not having kids?
02:38:52.000Yes, there is some cultural drop-off in the people who don't necessarily want to have kids.
02:38:56.000But people want to have around 2.2 kids.
02:39:29.000I can't afford in order to change my life.
02:39:31.000Oh, that means I would have to leave my job.
02:39:33.000That is where I'm saying, look guys, maybe the culture has changed a lot, but...
02:39:38.000It sounds like money actually can fix a lot of our problems in terms of marriageability.
02:39:42.000We actually could increase our marriage rate dramatically if we bait it so that people weren't mired in student debt or mired in personal finance or, frankly, just had the ability in order to provide for a basic family based maybe on one income.
02:39:57.000If you want people to have more kids, they want to.
02:40:00.000People are crying out, being like, I want to have more children, but I cannot.
02:40:05.000This is what they tell—I think it was the American Community Survey, which is like a branch of the Commerce Department, which does a lot of the census data.
02:40:12.000And you can see so clearly, but guess what?
02:40:15.000And this is my biggest departure from a lot of the Republicans.
02:40:24.000They're voting against child tax credits.
02:40:26.000Here's one of the most insanely depressing ideas that I've read about was people that have debt, student loan debt, and they're getting their Social Security docked.
02:40:36.000Yeah, because they can garnish your wages even when you're dead.
02:42:35.000And I think it comes from this sense of like, you know, people feel that things are very chaotic and Trump was a genuinely like terrifying experience for a lot of people.
02:42:45.000And there's this sense, you know, as someone who is on the left, like throughout history, this was the standard left wing position.
02:42:52.000I mean, you support free speech and censorship and these like McCarthyism and all this stuff has always targeted the left.
02:42:59.000Go look at Cohen, Tell Pro, all this stuff.
02:43:02.000And now you have this really rigid ideology that if you step out on a line even a little bit, you know, everyone's going to come for you and people are afraid to really say what they think.
02:44:57.000And you understand this more than anybody.
02:44:59.000You understand collaboration on the internet, which is that on YouTube, among podcasting and more, you have a scenario where when you go on each other's podcasts, when you do each other's shows and more, everybody collectively rises together and actually the wealth increases,
02:45:16.000This is an old TV mentality because on TV with cable, You have to get locked in, right?
02:45:22.000Like, if you're watching Fox and you're not watching CNN, CNN is losing.
02:45:26.000If you're watching CNN, you're not watching MSNBC, MSNBC is losing.
02:45:29.000That's old media, like, in terms of the scoops.
02:45:32.000But this new media, independent environment, we have people, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, all these people with, I mean, technically, I guess, competing subscription products, but that's not how it works.
02:45:43.000Which is maybe somebody who watches our show who doesn't necessarily become a premium member or whatever.
02:45:47.000They really, really appreciate Glenn and they see them out.
02:45:50.000And then they go and they subscribe to him.
02:46:09.000They're monsters in the best way possible because they are not attached to any ideology in terms of what you're supposed to say, and Glenn particularly fights against it tooth and claw the moment he sees it.
02:46:23.000He's so brave, and it's so important to have people like that out there because if you don't support them, if they go down, the whole thing goes down.
02:47:49.000My former White House Presbyterian colleague, Jim Acosta, made millions of dollars with his books and his bullshit performances there in the Rose Garden.
02:47:57.000And it's like he actually is presenting himself and profiting off of gaslighting millions of Americans into thinking that he somehow risked his life by behaving like an asshole while he was in the White House briefing room.
02:48:09.000And then you have guys like Glenn and you have guys like Matt who wrote this whole thing about the financial power elite and, you know, with Goldman Sachs and then Glenn Greenwald who's literally being pursued by the Brazilian government and they have the audacity.
02:48:23.000To say that they're misinformation purveyors or they're not real journalists.
02:48:27.000I mean, that is what makes me so angry because the entire corporate media infrastructure is not about producing actual journalism, especially when the power elite is the Biden administration.
02:48:40.000Brian Stelter recently had the White House press secretary on his show on CNN. And he said, what are we getting wrong about the White House?
02:48:47.000He invited the White House press secretary, the paid propagandist of the United States government, and his first, I think, first question, and I don't want to say too much, but one of his questions to her in his very limited airtime on cable news was, what does the press get wrong about the Biden administration?
02:49:02.000So he invited her to correct his network and other media's coverage on his cable show.
02:49:36.000What we're talking about with Glenn and with Matt and with you guys, one of the things that I love about you guys is that I know that you're telling me, whether you two disagree with each other or whether you agree, I know you're telling me what you really think about things.
02:51:06.000It's called Rise of the Barstool Conservatives.
02:51:08.000So if you were to ask me who I think like the most the biggest like right wing social icon in America right now, 25 years ago, I would have said like Franklin Graham or something like that.
02:51:19.000I really think it is somebody like Portnoy who is anti-PC. The current social conservatism, or at least the way that I think things are moving forward, is anti-woke, anti-PC. And that is where I think the emerging fights are.
02:51:36.000So, for example, around abortion or something.
02:51:38.000It's not that Portnoy or whatever is not personally pro-life.
02:51:41.000I think he's actually on the record that way.
02:51:42.000But he's also probably not going to actively be hostile towards people who are pro-life.
02:51:49.000This is where my politics change a little bit because I'm extraordinarily anti-PC, very against the anti-woke stuff, but I am much more – I would say, oh, I call myself centrist when it comes to economics because I know what the actual – Populist believes on economics.
02:52:05.000They're extraordinarily – I mean taxing people who are rich is extraordinarily popular.
02:52:10.000Florida, which just voted for Trump, why 3.2 percent higher than Barack Obama won that state, also voted overwhelmingly for a $15 minimum wage.
02:52:22.000Because actual voters, whenever you take the culture part of it out, they're actually very much for paying higher wages, taxing the rich, rebalancing our financial system, making it so what I was talking about, people being able to get married and more.
02:52:35.000It's the culture woke piece of it, which just drives everybody.
02:52:39.000This is how you know the world is upside down.
02:53:27.000So actually, so one of the things around this, though, is that I personally, at least kind of how I view myself, is like a spokespeople for so many of the completely underrepresented in America.
02:53:39.000We're in our great state, Texas, like where I'm from.
02:53:55.000Nobody speaks for somebody who is Latino, maybe third or fourth generation, who's skeptical of mass immigration, but who also is like pro-life, pro-15 dollar minimum wage, pro-Medicare for all, and pro-gun.
02:54:09.000Nobody speaks for that person in American politics today.
02:54:12.000And that is where I think the emerging future is.
02:54:15.000I think that the future of any Republican Party, if they want to survive, given the inability to win the popular vote seven out of eight last presidential elections, is changing their stance on economics and becoming— What it is is embracing this anti-PC against the liberal intelligentsia and elite.
02:54:35.000Now, this is all easier said than done because what's Crystal immediately going to say?
02:54:38.000Yeah, because they're owned by the fucking billionaire class and because they're never going to give it up.
02:54:43.000Tell them the Mitch McConnell thing about this tax leak story.
02:55:13.000And not only that, if you were a billionaire, and this is not a slight on my friend Elon, but if you were a billionaire, like if I ever become a billionaire, I want to pay taxes.
02:55:29.000If I could pay 50% more and know that my money is going to educating people, you kind of do that with philanthropy, you kind of do that with charitable donations, but it's not the same.
02:55:39.000Because all that stuff, you don't understand what's the administrative cost, how much is actually getting to people.
02:56:09.000But we have not lived in a scenario where one person actually could fucking dim the sun.
02:56:17.000And he could do it through philanthropic research around carbon or whatever.
02:56:20.000I don't remember exactly what the justification of it is.
02:56:23.000I think I want to say, as an American citizen, of like, no, you don't get to dim the sun, Bill Gates.
02:56:30.000Well, not only that, do you understand that that is one of the premier conspiracy theories about the idea that the global elite wants to reduce the population by half?
02:56:43.000He is involved in so many of the conspiracy theories.
02:56:47.000He's involved in the massive vaccination.
02:56:51.000All the nutbags are worried about massive vaccinations trying to depopulate the earth.
02:56:57.000All the nutbags are worried that he's going to spray things into the sky and somehow or another it's going to come down and ruin our water supply and our food.
02:57:30.000Anyway, Zachariah Sitchin was a guy who is a linguist and a scholar who took ancient cuneiform tablets from Sumer.
02:57:42.000And his idea, out of all this stuff, and he wrote all these books about it, Was that there was another planet that's on an elliptical orbit that would come in and out of Earth every 3,600 years and they genetically manipulated lower primates to create human beings and they came here to mine gold because their atmosphere had deteriorated and they wanted to suspend reflective gold particles in their atmosphere and Earth has a very large amount of gold.
02:58:12.000So they would come here and get gold and they would get people to mine this gold for them and make gold very valuable.
02:58:21.000So here's the thing, if you're thinking...
02:58:50.000What Zechariah Sitchin believed, and if you ever follow ancient Sumer, it's a very bizarre civilization.
02:58:57.000Very bizarre in the fact that they had a detailed map of the solar system 6,000 plus years ago, including Pluto, with all the planets in the correct order, and they had these weird images of really tall, giant, human-like people with little monkey people sitting on their lap,
03:01:56.000But just imagine, a guy that is genetically modifying crops, a guy that is spraying, wants to spray the sky, stratosphere-controlled perturbation experiment Scopex.
03:02:16.000But the thing is, like, he wrote about this.
03:02:18.000Sitchin wrote about this in the 1970s.
03:02:20.000It wasn't even proposed as a theory about or a possible solution to global warming until the 2000s.
03:02:30.000It was somewhere in the 2000s and someone was talking about suspending reflective particles in the atmosphere.
03:02:35.000But one of the things about gold that's a very unique reflective particle, gold is a crazy, crazy metal in that you can take a very small piece of gold.
03:03:02.000That's why gold plating is so interesting.
03:03:03.000I guess the counter argument about some of these things, because there are other things like, oh, did this book predict this happen or whatever.
03:03:09.000With so many books being written in any given year, isn't one of them going to weirdly accurately predict something that happens?
03:03:25.000But still, the same sort of principle applies.
03:03:28.000If there's this much body of research on these various times and beings and places, etc., and this much conspiracy writing about it, surely some part of it is going to be like, oh my god, they predicted the thing.
03:05:03.000He said it is more probable than not that it came from a lab.
03:05:08.000I think this is the why I believe so much in your platform and why I'm frankly such a big fan is because I know that you're just bullshitting sometimes, but the power that you have to be able to elevate these types of conversations is incredibly important.
03:05:21.000Hancock in particular, like you had Hancock on over a decade ago.
03:05:24.000The archaeology community said he was totally full of shit.
03:06:06.000That's actually a problem in some of these areas that are pushed down in the mainstream, is the people that stick with it are the ones who will embrace the wildest shit, and then that serves to continue to discard it.
03:11:00.000I was going to shit into a garbage bag and throw it over my fence so that the other coyotes, after I ate him, would know that I ate their friend.
03:12:56.000One thing that he discussed that was really fantastic was that there are alloys and there's these samples of metals that if a company was to construct this metal, it would cost billions of dollars to do so.
03:13:10.000And there is no known version of this alloy that exists on Earth.
03:13:13.000And there's an actual alloy that they're testing and working on right now.
03:13:17.000And through Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp and all these leaks and releases from the Pentagon, people are now understanding that not only is this a real phenomenon, but there's actual video footage that cannot be explained of things that show no visual propulsion system,
03:13:33.000no visible propulsion system, no heat signature.
03:13:36.000And from the Tic Tac incident off the Nimitz in 2004, They have video of this thing taking off, going thousands of miles an hour in a way that any other known craft that we've ever constructed would just obliterate, just through the G-forces.
03:13:51.000Well, and just, it really challenges our notion of physics.
03:13:55.000I mean, even just like the basic laws.
03:13:57.000And, you know, physics was, my dad's a physicist, Biotrade, he's long retired now.
03:14:06.000I haven't talked to him much about it.
03:14:08.000But, you know, physics, when he's older, he's 86. And so when he was coming up through college, like physics was a hotline of anywhere.
03:14:15.000There were all kinds of developments there.
03:14:16.000It was really considered the frontier.
03:14:18.000Now that profession seems to have gotten kind of stale.
03:14:20.000And actually, Osweid in a similar way where it's like you have to have this particular ideology and you have to pursue within string theory.
03:14:27.000And if you're Looking at theories outside of that, then you're not going to progress in your career.
03:14:32.000And there's this sort of groupthink mentality that's set in.
03:14:34.000But that's part of why I find it really fascinating is because, like, this is defying what we – the basics of what we understand about how the universe works.
03:14:54.000But I will say this, which is that it intersects...
03:14:56.000I was a Pentagon correspondent once upon a time, and so what really pissed me off with this recent New York Times story, I did a big monologue on this, is that Pentagon has this forthcoming report.
03:15:05.000So they got to pre-leak the report and have their journalists write it the way that they want.
03:15:31.000First of all, take this with a grain of salt.
03:15:33.000The government says it's not a secret USA technology.
03:15:36.000Okay, well, they're not going to admit it, even if it actually was, so I'll cast that one aside.
03:15:39.000But the most important one to me was the government finds and dismisses the weather balloon theory.
03:15:47.000Saying that crosswinds or whatever at the time, changing wind directions, dismisses the fact that the objects seen on the FLIR are weather balloons.
03:15:56.000Weather balloon is the top explanation by the debunkers, by the professional debunkers.
03:16:00.000So I'm like, wait, so the real headline is that the government has no fucking idea what this was, dismisses the main debunked theory around this.
03:16:11.000And then this is where the military industrial complex part of this comes in.
03:16:15.000But they're like, and maybe it's China or Russia, like intelligence officials worry that it's China and Russia.
03:16:47.000Like I said, Tom DeLonge, because by bringing Lou Elizondo and all that forward in the New York Times is what broke this open.
03:16:54.000And that is what pisses me off, which is that the government is actually just not admitting the truth and the media is going along with it, which is that we have no fucking idea what's going on.
03:18:24.000He's got to distract everyone from the truth.
03:18:26.000He's also on my show, and I got him in trouble by smoking weed, and he almost lost his Top Secret clearance with NASA. And a stock price drop.
03:21:41.000Yeah, the current ones are grainy because actually it's a miracle that we have video at all of something moving at nighttime in the middle of the fucking ocean.
03:24:02.000And if you look at sci-fi, and I know I'm getting deep here, which is that the use of nuclear weapons is almost always how you know when humanity went ladder up in civilization.
03:24:13.000And if you think about how much that changed, I would want to pay attention.
03:24:16.000Like, if you're just paying attention.
03:24:19.000Well, all the things that Bob Lazar talked about in that Jeremy Corbell documentary, which is, by the way, my favorite documentary ever about UFOs and my absolute favorite conversation I've ever had with anyone who claims to have had an experience.
03:24:53.000Until the 2000s, and then someone figured it out with a particle collider.
03:24:57.000But he was talking about this was what they used, and that they had a stable version of this.
03:25:02.000And you've got to think about what, and this is the other thing that he talked about, like if you brought a nuclear reactor to someone in the 1400s.
03:25:10.000And this is what the kind of technology that whatever these things are, whether they're from the future, whether they're us from the future, or whether they're from another dimension, or whether they're from another planet, whatever the fuck it is, they have technology that is indistinguishable from magic.
03:25:25.000And Bob Lazar allegedly, according to him, worked on trying and attempting to back-engineer this thing.
03:25:32.000And when he describes his experience with it, he has been insanely consistent forever, since the 1980s.
03:27:10.000I think your two together in your show is one of the most important things out there because it's a rare thing that's unmolested from the corporate media and from the ideologies on the left and the right.
03:27:22.000And you have your own opinions on things.