In this episode, I sit down with a man who is a legend in the field of public figure protection. He s been around a long time, and is a man of many talents. He is a writer, a public speaker, and an expert on public figure security and safety. He also has a fascinating story about how he got started in his career, and how he became one of the most respected public figure protectors in the world. He s also an author, a speaker, a consultant, and a public figure advocate for public figure safety and security. He has been a friend of mine for many years, and I ve always wanted to have him as a guest on the show because he has so much knowledge and experience in this field. This episode is a must listen for anyone who wants to learn how to be a better public figure protector and how to protect others. I hope you enjoy listening to this episode and that it makes you think about how important it is to have someone in your life who is well versed in public figure and security, and who is willing to put in the work to make sure that others are safe and well protected. Thank you Gavin. You are a great friend and a wonderful human being and I m grateful to have you on the podcast. Peace, Blessings, Cheers, EJ, Ej and Joe -Everest and Joe. -Gavin and Elesa - Joe and Ephraim and Ej and Joe - - Ej & Ej@ & EJ&J & . -Joe & E. and . . And Ej&EJ&S , EJ & - Joe - and EJ/EJ/ -BJ&A -S. & J.J. -EJ -J.E. & JB. & J.B. ( ) -P.J . .J.&J. . .EJ. & B. & A.J., EJ. ( ) -E.A. & S. EJJ. , J.S. & R. (S. .S. (J.B., ) (A.J.'S.& J.M. (E.J.) -A. (AJ)
00:00:20.000And I'm glad to talk about, we have a lot of shared interests, but this survival signals that protect us from violence.
00:00:31.000I've always wanted to talk to you because you are truly an expert on preparedness and cautionary tactics and what to do and not to do, like in terms of security and how to protect people.
00:01:46.000Like if I'd been a black kid with the same circumstance, I'd have been in big trouble.
00:01:49.000And so that life brought me to a fascination with when John Kennedy was killed, I was 10, and I was home from school, and it It's just absolutely captivated and fascinated me,
00:02:06.000not so much the issue of who killed him or the conspiratorial sides of these things, which are very real, not so much that, but the actual physics of how you prevent assassination.
00:02:17.000And that interest stayed with me throughout my life, and I eventually – I've had an odd life.
00:02:23.000So as I tell you this story, you'll be ready for it to be unusual.
00:02:27.000But by the time I was 19, I had already read and devoured everything I could on this subject, which was pretty limited.
00:02:34.000Most of the stuff on anti-assassination strategies I wrote later in life, but there wasn't a lot to read at the time.
00:02:40.000And at 19, I got a job working for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
00:04:23.000Later, I became all that kind of stuff.
00:04:25.000Later, I got appointed by the president of the Department of Justice Advisory Board and worked with CIA and FBI and all the things that have gone on between 10 years old and today.
00:04:34.000By the way, the reason I mention that is sometimes when somebody wants to say something shitty about me, they say, oh, his whole training is that he had a bad childhood.
00:04:42.000Could we count the 55 years between then and now, perhaps?
00:04:45.000But ultimately, I developed a company that is a consulting company that advises people at risk.
00:04:54.000And wrote books on the topic and did a lot of research and study on the topic.
00:04:59.000So when you were 19 years old, how did you get this job working with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton?
00:05:05.000So I went to Beverly Hills High School.
00:05:08.000We were on welfare and food stamps, but my grandfather got a one-room apartment in Beverly Hills where we could lie and my sister and I would say we lived in Beverly Hills, use that address.
00:05:19.000So I went to Beverly High, and there I met a lot of friends who are still friends today.
00:05:25.000And one of them was Gina Martin, and Gina Martin was Dean Martin's daughter.
00:05:30.000And so I went to work for her mother for $60 a week, which I still have, by the way.
00:05:41.000And one day, Elizabeth Taylor came over to their house.
00:05:44.000And Gina and I, my girlfriend and I, we sat up at the balistrad and looked through the railing, and I thought, Elizabeth Taylor?
00:05:50.000I didn't really even know who she was, but I thought, this is going to be a big deal, and in came this giant, you know, big hair and all the stuff.
00:05:57.000And then a few months later, somebody called me and said, she's looking for an assistant, and will you go meet with her?
00:06:05.000So I went to the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet with her, and she wasn't there.
00:08:07.000And then home one night, and a friend of mine calls and says, put on the television, and it's Elizabeth Taylor, back with Richard Burton, has left her boyfriend, and my career is over again.
00:09:39.000You know, I was in Jerusalem a few years ago and I stayed at the same hotel where Elizabeth and Richard and I had stayed when we made a trip to Israel.
00:09:49.000And she had converted to Judaism in the 60s because she was married to a guy named Mike Todd.
00:09:56.000And so she was an enormous big deal in Israel.
00:09:58.000There were Elizabeth Taylor theaters when we landed, the entire tarmac of the airport, hundreds of thousands of people.
00:10:05.000And I thought, wow, Israel's really a disorganized country.
00:10:07.000They let everybody on the tarmac, but it was obviously because of Elizabeth being there.
00:10:11.000And so I was learning quickly about this and this kind of stuff.
00:12:21.000And I realized that I was a kid living with this couple and really had no idea what they were going through and what he was going through with alcoholism and what she was going through with drug addiction.
00:12:34.000Were they always like that, or is this a response to the pressures of fame?
00:12:39.000Because one of the things that I've encountered, and you meet a lot of movie stars and celebrity-type people, especially rock stars, It's not just the life on the road and the partying that goes with that, but it's in response to the pressures of so many people wanting your attention and so much focus on you.
00:13:02.000A lot of them turn to something to dilute that.
00:13:17.000He grew up poor in Wales and then was thrust into this circumstance.
00:13:22.000He was a stage actor and suddenly thrust into this circumstance of being in this couple.
00:13:27.000And they had a lot of tabloid stories and controversies.
00:13:32.000But on your main point, Yeah, I've had a real front row seat on fame and the pressures that go with fame, and it's a highly unnatural circumstance, right?
00:13:43.000If we go back a thousand years, there was no such thing.
00:13:46.000You could be known in your community, you could be called the king, Caesar, but nobody met you or knew you or saw you.
00:13:53.000The vast majority of people had no connection to you.
00:13:56.000You have people who are known to millions and billions of people.
00:14:01.000If you're a female singer, you're singing romantically to somebody.
00:14:05.000If you're a female actress or male, your face is closer to people than you would ever be unless you were going to kiss them or hit them.
00:14:14.000You would never see all the little lines in somebody's face and have this kind of intimacy.
00:14:19.000And I think physiologically, our bodies are not able to distinguish between that which we We're good to go.
00:14:46.000And that's a weird distortion of, you know, you want to meet somebody and build a relationship, right?
00:14:53.000You don't want to meet somebody and they already have their 50% done.
00:14:56.000And now you have to undo it and assert yourself.
00:15:55.000So all the people that are listening, that are listening right now, that are driving in their car and at the gym and wherever you listen to the show or watch the show, these people experience the show.
00:16:08.000So all the controversy behind it, they can bring it into work and go, Did you hear about this guy that's on the JRE that said this and that?
00:16:16.000And like, oh, I heard that's bullshit.
00:17:13.000And especially, I've always thought that of cops, like, that people need to take that in consideration when, and also that cops, when they pull people over, they're really genuinely worried about being shot and killed.
00:17:24.000I mean, you might think, hey, I was only going 10 miles an hour over the speed limit.
00:17:28.000The cop is thinking, this guy could be an on-the-run criminal, and I could get shot in the face right now.
00:17:40.000So did they, like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, when you first started working with them, were you old enough or aware enough that they were dealing with the pressures of fame and of celebrity and that they were diluting it through alcoholism and pills and that that's why they were doing that?
00:18:53.000Well, they weren't just famous people two weeks ago or two years ago or two decades ago.
00:18:57.000And so it's regular people to whom a circumstance occurs, right?
00:19:02.000It doesn't change anything about you as a person and how you engage with people individually.
00:19:07.000But if something has happened to you and you specifically are a good example of it because of, you know, The controversial element – by the way, I don't think you're controversial.
00:19:20.000I think what controversy gets made on the outside, it doesn't get made in here.
00:19:24.000I haven't seen a lot of hot arguments in here.
00:19:27.000And so that thing gets stuck to you and it's basically an outfit you're wearing.
00:19:51.000People always want to give me a book that they wrote or they want to talk to me about being on the show because of some experience they've had.
00:19:58.000That becomes exhausting because they want to do it while you're eating dinner.
00:20:02.000They want to do it while you're ordering food somewhere.
00:20:05.000Yeah, I like this one that people come up to the table.
00:20:08.000And I've been with so many famous people through my career and life that I've seen every variation of it.
00:20:13.000And they say, oh, can I take a fast picture of you?
00:20:15.000And if the person says yes, well, not with the fork in your hand.
00:20:18.000Oh, so now you want to direct me and take a fast picture.
00:20:36.000No matter what you're doing, argument with your wife, difficult times in life, you know, just lost something, just gained something, doesn't matter.
00:20:43.000This is the protocol that people know, and they think that's the only one.
00:20:46.000And, of course, what I've learned is stand back and leave people alone or call out a nice thing.
00:20:52.000Well, definitely don't interrupt them when they're eating.
00:20:56.000I'm sitting there having a conversation with my kids, and I've had this before, where people come up and they want a photo, and I'm like, we're having dinner.
00:21:29.000I brought you a book that I asked you.
00:21:30.000Well, I'm excited to read this book because a good buddy of mine really, really enjoyed this book.
00:21:35.000And he said it was very valuable to him.
00:21:37.000And the perspective that you have about this, you know, about security and psychology and threats of violence and all those different things, because of your childhood and then because of your experience initially with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton,
00:21:57.000Did you know when you started working with them that this childhood that you had and this chaos would help you form this career?
00:22:09.000Realizing that you were working with these famous people and these famous people are uniquely vulnerable and that you could somehow or another protect them?
00:22:17.000I think I knew at 10 years old, I had a vision that there would be a company that people who were at-risk public figures might have a manager or an agent if they were in show business or a family office or a corporation or if they were religious leaders,
00:22:55.000And when she got to college, the acting teacher in the theater class said to the whole class on day one, you know, only one of you will ever make it in show business, statistically.
00:23:08.000And she looked around and she thought, oh, these poor kids.
00:23:14.000But how weird is that when someone is right about something like that?
00:23:17.000I think it happens with a lot of, you know, look, as I get older, it happens more frequently that something slips into the flow and I'm not as surprised anymore when things work together the way they do.
00:23:30.000The universe has got a lot of mystery to it.
00:23:32.000And, you know, my childhood and then the things I did afterwards, We're sort of part of a story.
00:23:42.000And I don't take credit for crafting that story.
00:23:45.000I couldn't get myself with Elizabeth Taylor or get myself with Ronald Reagan or cause these things to happen, I guess.
00:23:52.000But I watched the movie, and it's been super interesting.
00:24:06.000And then I wrote this paper that got picked up by the National Criminal Justice Reference Center, which is a part of the Department of Justice and given to every police department in America.
00:24:34.000But it was only of interest to law enforcement.
00:24:36.000But you weren't law enforcement back then.
00:24:38.000You were just an assistant to two famous people.
00:24:41.000Well, I had become, I became their, to use the lofty title, their traveling chief of staff.
00:24:46.000So when we would go to cities, it was me who arranged security and logistics, and I learned.
00:24:50.000And I had this really good gift you might like from your own Eastern self-defense training, and that is that in the mind of the beginner, there are many possibilities, and in the mind of the expert, there are few.
00:25:29.000I went to college for one course, one class, criminal investigation.
00:25:36.000And then when I got appointed as a senior fellow at UCLA School of Public Policy and I had to give a little speech, I thanked the dean because you're the first person to ever put me through college.
00:25:46.000And I've only been here for 20 minutes.
00:25:48.000But I drove through Princeton once, was my other college experience.
00:25:53.000But look, not everybody has the life that is in the system.
00:25:57.000And the system makes certain promises.
00:26:01.000If you do certain things, if you go to medical school, maybe you'll become a doctor.
00:26:04.000I think those promises get broken very often by big systems.
00:26:08.000But I just had a different life, a different circumstance.
00:26:12.000I did research just like a scientist and I met with people and I studied and we did experiments and we do all variety of things in my company, but it wasn't at a university.
00:26:21.000But that is a very unusual thing for a 21-year-old to do with no real background in law enforcement other than the fact that you were coordinating with them when you were traveling with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
00:27:04.000So you leave this in your early 20s and what do you do from then?
00:27:11.000So the next thing that happened is friends and people that knew me would recommend me to others who were just becoming famous and say, you know, you ought to talk to this guy, Gavin D. Becker.
00:28:31.000In fact, now as adults, we would go into a restaurant and he could tell if the person seating you was of a certain age, we're going to get a great table, right?
00:28:41.000Some people would say, oh, you know, I was a big fan of your brother because his older brother David Cassidy was also famous.
00:28:48.000And then other people would say, oh my God, you were on my bedroom wall all through childhood.
00:29:44.000I was now, I probably was 26, and he gave me a job as a director of special services group for the president's inaugural.
00:29:51.000And this president, because he'd been in show business, had all kinds of people coming, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Johnny Carson, etc.
00:29:57.000And right at the beginning of my getting there, John Lennon was assassinated.
00:30:03.000And the Lennons had also hired me to do work for them if they went on tour.
00:30:08.000And they were deciding whether to go on tour based on the success of his last record album called Double Fantasy.
00:30:39.000We're now working for President-elect Reagan.
00:30:41.000As director of special services group.
00:30:43.000And I was at Blair House in the morning where the president-elect was staying and then I flew to New York for this meeting after John Lennon was killed.
00:30:51.000And I later learned that John Hinckley made the same trip the same day and flew back on the same trip the same day.
00:30:58.000He also went and stood outside the Dakota building where John Lennon was killed in getting up his courage to eventually shoot President Reagan.
00:31:10.000So then Reagan became president and he was the oldest president at that time.
00:31:14.000Not anymore, but he was the oldest president at that time.
00:31:17.000And he appointed me as the youngest appointee ever at Department of Justice on the president's advisory board.
00:31:23.000So I'm kind of giving you the process of how this particular life happened.
00:31:28.000And I remember, you know, being on that advisory board and there was the Supreme Court Justice, Chief Justice from Arizona was on the board with me and a Supreme Court Justice from California and the Sheriff of San Diego County.
00:31:42.000And this kid, you know, we're sitting at the table at our first meeting.
00:31:46.000And as an icebreaker, I said, well, has anybody here ever been arrested?
00:31:50.000Knowing that, of course, none of these people would have been arrested.
00:31:52.000And every single one of them had a story about being arrested.
00:31:59.000You know, it would be I was standing in line with my, you know, 20-year-old son and the guy behind me said such and such.
00:32:05.000And my son took a swing at him and I took a swing at him and we all went to jail.
00:32:09.000Or it would be, I was in college and my girlfriend called the police because I took the record collection and I got arrested.
00:32:15.000Every single one of them, Supreme Court justices, chiefs of police, head of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, all of them had a story of being arrested.
00:32:22.000And my asking that question It was an icebreaker that, you know, that made our relationship work.
00:32:31.000Suddenly this 26-year-old kid in the room who doesn't know shit about shit was actually kind of interesting.
00:32:36.000And so that led to some Big research projects that I got done, the biggest one being on assessment of threats to public figures that I worked on for five years.
00:32:51.000And that was published and became a big deal, again, in law enforcement.
00:32:57.000And then I got appointed to something by George Bush also, not the younger, but the older George Bush.
00:33:02.000So it essentially started out as almost like a word of mouth, and then you just start working for people, your reputation grows, and then you do more and more research, you get more and more involved in it.
00:33:12.000Did you also find that there was a lack of understanding of what was necessary to protect people?
00:33:19.000When you're talking about your beginner's mindset, were there people that were doing it incorrectly?
00:33:27.000I think the biggest—yes is the answer, and it's a good question because it was a—you know, in those days when John Lennon was assassinated, there then came a few in a row, and they tend to group all kinds of— We're good to go.
00:34:05.000But on your question, I think the biggest mistake that people were making in public figure protection was the belief that threats, a direct death threat, I'm going to kill you, was the most important communication that could be assessed in advance.
00:34:21.000What I learned through research and then later wrote about Is that of every public figure attack you've ever heard of, of every one you've ever known where a public figure was killed, not any of them were threatened directly by the person who killed them in advance.
00:34:35.000And likewise, none of the people who made a direct threat to a public figure later shot that public figure.
00:34:43.000So when I started, everybody was very, you know, responsive to a direct threat.
00:34:51.000And I learned that other kinds of communications were far more indicative of who will show up.
00:34:57.000And I learned that the art, and still today, the art and craft of what I do and what my company does...
00:35:03.000Is try to avoid unplanned encounters, unwanted encounters.
00:35:06.000Because if you avoid all the unwanted encounters, you're also avoiding the dangerous ones.
00:35:11.000And you can be sure that nobody who travels a thousand miles to get a meeting with you or waits outside your house, if you're a famous person, is going to hand you a check for a million dollars.
00:35:23.000And it's always something inappropriate because millions of people write fan letters or emails or are admirers of a recording artist or a politician or whatever, but very few, statistically speaking, make what we call targeted travel.
00:35:40.000You know, figure out where somebody lives or where they work and travels to see them.
00:35:44.000So my approach was different from others, which was to try to detect as early as possible those individuals who might pursue encounters.
00:35:53.000And from that to where we are now, we now have the largest library in the world of threat material directed to public figures.
00:36:00.000I think it's about 600,000 pieces of communication.
00:36:03.000People who send blood, people who send bullets, people who send body parts.
00:36:36.000I'll give you another one that I remember the message for, which is somebody sent an animal they had killed and said, I killed this because it was beautiful like you.
00:36:53.000And so that is probably the biggest change I made in my contribution was that direct threats were not the most important pre-incident indicator.
00:37:04.000Trevor Burrus And before that, they were considered?
00:37:30.000But in those days, they responded only to threats.
00:37:34.000And now we've made a lot of progress in that, that there are other kinds of communications that are pre-incident indicators.
00:37:40.000I just want to give you and your listeners this little acronym, which is PIN, pre-incident indicators.
00:37:49.000So before everything that ever happens, there are PINs.
00:37:52.000And so one of the things in my work and in my book and in the masterclass that I've done, what we're trying to teach people about is what are the early pre-incident indicators of people in your life who turn violent or people who aren't yet in your life who turn violent.
00:38:06.000In other words, can we predict violence in advance?
00:38:11.000And so you go from this to, I mean, I don't want to make this big leap into the Jeff Bezos thing, but it's very fascinating to me.
00:38:21.000You were involved in finding out how Jeff Bezos' phone got hacked, and you were involved in connecting it to the Saudis and that whole thing.
00:39:10.000And embedded in that video was a video.
00:39:14.000It's a system that downloaded something that then later connects to a website and downloads something more sinister like Pegasus 2, which is a system that governments around the world use to get into your phone and then they have full control of your phone.
00:39:32.000So it doesn't immediately connect to it?
00:40:57.000The best way I can put it to you is that if a government wants you from an informational point of view, wants to get into your phone, they have you.
00:41:06.000These systems are extraordinarily robust, powerful, as I learned more and more about them.
00:41:12.000It's not actually my area of expertise, cybersecurity, but as I had to learn more about it for myself and for clients, when the Saudis wanted to get into a phone, they could.
00:41:22.000What if you're communicating, rather, only through direct encryption devices or applications, rather, like Signal?
00:41:32.000So Signal encrypts the package going back and forth between the two devices over the Internet.
00:41:39.000So if you have interception between device A and device B, It'll be encrypted.
00:41:45.000But that's not what happens with things like Pegasus 2. Pegasus 2 is a very high-end system, and it's in your phone, just like you're in your phone.
00:41:55.000Everything you can do on your phone, I can do from 7,000 miles away in some Saudi government office.
00:42:01.000And so Signal doesn't help you with that.
00:42:07.000It's not a for-profit company, so I'm glad to promote it.
00:42:11.000I do think they have something very valuable on Signal, and that is disappearing messages, which is if you and I were exchanging Signal communications, we could set, in one week, make all this disappear.
00:42:35.000Every communication I had for years, every text I sent, every photo, every argument, every joke that would be taken out of context, it's a very hard thing to do because we're like a mind.
00:42:48.000We're collecting all of this data in the phone.
00:43:44.000For some reasons that I don't want to share and for some reasons that I do want to share, WhatsApp has had a particularly vulnerable circumstance with regard to people getting into other people's phones.
00:43:57.000Now, having said that, there are thousands of people right now all over the world working on nothing but getting into the new iPhone operating system.
00:44:05.000And then there's thousands of people at Apple working on nothing but Being sure that the new operating system is impenetrable.
00:44:11.000And this just is an arms race that's going to go on forever.
00:44:16.000So you were saying that if you get a message through WhatsApp, but what if you don't get a message through WhatsApp?
00:44:22.000Is that executable if just a blank text message comes your way and you don't open it?
00:44:39.000And that's a problem with, you know, zero-day exploits, which is you don't know what happened, and you go on for months and months and months not knowing that somebody's in your phone is a problem.
00:44:49.000And how do you find out if someone's in your phone?
00:44:53.000In the case you described, I was notified originally by somebody in CIA, then notified eight times by the FBI. about the information they had learned and then we began to do you know work on the phone itself and you learn about it in those ways which is very difficult by the way because Pegasus 2 I feel like I'm giving a commercial for Pegasus 2 but most people can't buy it anyway but Pegasus
00:45:23.0002 is not sitting in an armchair waiting for you to arrive.
00:45:28.000It is extremely well hidden Right down at the very core levels of a phone or an iPad.
00:45:37.000But there are strategies for finding it, and they're challenging and they're evolving all the time.
00:45:44.000There are whole organizations like Citizen Lab and a really great expert, Anthony Ferrante, who used to work for Obama at the White House on this kind of stuff.
00:46:51.000It can happen internally because what happens, remember when it's turned off or the battery is taken out or a wide variety of things can happen, That, you know, with a, quote, suspect phone, it will self-destruct on its own after a few days of no contact.
00:48:08.000What I'm saying is that the high-end Pegasus system that's used by Saudi Arabia and other countries, all they need to do is have your phone number.
00:49:04.000So anyway, yeah, the short punchline on this is that there's a lot of products being sold that do the best they can, but depending on who wants you, there really is no way, you know, if the Central Intelligence Agency wants to get into somebody's phone overseas,
00:49:21.000Now, is there a difference between operating systems?
00:49:24.000Like, is there more of a vulnerability to Android than there is to iPhone?
00:49:28.000I hear, again, not an expert, but I hear that there's more vulnerability to iPhone, but that might be because they are the ones that are targeted most often and that thousands of people are working on all the time.
00:49:51.000Because there's a lot of people that are swearing by those now that have moved to these operating systems that have been manipulated to the point where they don't send information, you can't get tracked, GPS doesn't work, all that stuff.
00:50:04.000Yeah, it's good to have the lowest number of apps you can have on a phone, the better if you're talking about just using it for phone calls.
00:50:11.000The challenge I have, because I get, you can imagine, every product is brought to me, Usually given to me for free to try, hoping that clients will want it or that my company will want it.
00:50:21.000But the challenge is it's a moving target.
00:50:24.000So if somebody says today, oh, we've got something great for such and such, two weeks later, people have been able – adversaries have been able to work on it and it's an arms race.
00:50:34.000And so it's sort of like saying, hey, I got this great new thing, you know, a catapult and I can throw fiery bombs over the wall of a castle.
00:50:41.000That's not so interesting anymore now that we have tanks.
00:50:47.000Do you anticipate there ever being a time where they can circumvent that and there will no longer be exploits like that?
00:50:54.000Or is this just a new reality that people have to live with?
00:50:58.000I anticipated going in the other direction, which is that it becomes far more accessible for far more people and that anything we do, you know, online is subject to being intercepted and seen more and more.
00:51:13.000You know, a lot of people, like I have clients who could be targeted by China, could be targeted by Russia, could be targeted by France, could be targeted by the United States, by other companies, by powerful adversaries.
00:51:23.000And they often say, well, I just treat every communication as if it could be heard.
00:51:29.000But the reality is that as human beings on a phone call, we are unguarded, right?
00:51:34.000You don't want to have a phone call with me or a conversation that's completely guarded, where I'm like this all the time.
00:51:39.000And so the reality is that this is going to be a vulnerability in people's lives, period.
00:52:22.000And so slowly it will erode that way as well.
00:52:24.000Well, those are some of the dumbest arguments ever.
00:52:26.000Like, why would you want encrypted communication?
00:52:29.000And after January 6th in particular, there was a lot of talk of the dangers of encrypted peer-to-peer messages and applications, which I thought was hilarious.
00:53:33.000Isn't that encouraging, though, about people having their head screwed on right?
00:53:36.000In other words, that they were aware that some of what they're seeing is not just pandemic or is not just politics.
00:53:42.000It is also a Why was MBS trying to get into Jeff Bezos' phone?
00:54:07.000Hard always to predict what someone else – what's going on in their heads.
00:54:10.000I can just tell you the circumstances at the time included that the Saudi government was negotiating a multibillion-dollar deal with Amazon.
00:54:24.000I think the far more likely one is that Jeff was the owner of the Washington Post and the Washington Post was employing Jamal Khashoggi and he was just really ramping up his communications that were making MBS crazy.
00:54:39.000We had sources inside the The Royal Palace and the family, and who said that MBS's first thing every morning was to open the Washington Post website and look at what was in there.
00:54:50.000He was very stressed by it, and as you may have heard, he became so stressed that he, you know, ordered the killing of Khashoggi.
00:54:57.000Yeah, I follow that very closely and I had Brian Fogel on when he was promoting The Dissident.
00:55:08.000And the response by the world, the world stage, is terrifying too because they kind of just waited to see how much outrage was out there and then sort of accepted the fact that this head of state Killed a journalist and had him dismembered in a consulate.
00:55:28.000I mean, the whole story is beyond crazy.
00:55:31.000I mean, flew a hit team with a coroner amongst them.
00:55:59.000I think he had a really hard time finding streaming services to accept it.
00:56:04.000That's what I thought was fascinating, that even Jeff Bezos, who had been victimized, By this intrusion on his privacy, he wasn't willing to have it stream on Amazon Prime.
00:56:15.000You could buy it, and you could buy it on iTunes, but the amount of people that would buy something versus the amount of people that would stream something for free on Netflix, it's a big difference.
00:56:26.000And he was just coming off of this Icarus documentary, which was award-winning.
00:57:19.000And so that is a, you know, the use of the word dangerous, for example, when you said, you know, it's dangerous for people to be able to communicate encrypted end-to-end encryption.
00:57:32.000Any time that word is floated, that something is dangerous, what you want to hear that as is it's dangerous to government.
00:57:51.000And so when we see any time a government wants us to fear something, it's very important to Ask yourself and really learn about what that thing is.
00:57:59.000Is that thing worth fearing in the ways that the government is telling us?
00:58:03.000Because government wins from A frightened population all the time.
00:58:08.000You know, President Woodrow Wilson wanting to get support to get into World War I. He formed a virtual police state like something out of 1984 with people, you know, fired and people losing their careers and people being lynched and new sedition laws and all variety of things that if you weren't with us,
00:58:45.000Because coffee houses were places that people gathered together and talked and they'd be a little, you know, amped up because of the coffee and they'd be feeling good with each other.
00:58:58.000Restrain the spreading of false news and licentious talking of matters of state and government.
00:59:04.000And he said that this bold discourse that was going on, this is really worth it, that the public assumed to themselves a liberty, not only in coffee houses but in other places and meetings, both public and private, to censure and defame the proceedings of state by speaking evil of things they do not understand.
00:59:23.000And causing jealousy and dissatisfaction in the minds of my subjects, the King's subjects.
00:59:28.000But I want to give you one more piece of this.
00:59:30.000The following year, he extends it to not just coffee houses, but any place that sells coffee or chocolate or tea.
00:59:38.000And then the following year, he does another proclamation, and this one says, We'll be considered seditious, you know, going against the government.
01:00:34.000And now people want to ban end-to-end encryption or anything else that will allow for an actual open dialogue.
01:00:42.000Well, there's people that are openly talking about amending the First Amendment, changing it and saying maybe we shouldn't have so much free speech.
01:00:49.000Maybe free speech is a problem, which is crazy.
01:00:53.000It's crazy that there's so many people that have a voice and have a say in matters and they're so short-sighted that that's one of the things that they would actually say.
01:01:04.000I think it is – but it has existed before and I think it's important to remember that if you look at human history, it's almost all tyranny and the United States and Western Europe is a tiny sliver of the pie.
01:01:19.000It's a tiny period in human history in which we grew up with freedom of speech and we grew up with these protections from the court and from the constitution.
01:01:31.000But it's not some permanent state of affairs.
01:01:36.000And I say to people who want to change any amendment, want to make an amendment to the amendments in the Constitution, you almost don't have to because major media companies have done it anyway.
01:01:48.000Major media companies, New York Times, CNN, etc., etc., something your listeners might not know about called the Trusted News Initiative that's run by BBC, which is a whole collection of major media companies from all over the world who decide together on how to handle certain stories.
01:02:06.000And that's how you get, you know, 5,000 headlines that say Ivermectin is a horse paste.
01:02:14.000Ivermectin Is an animal drug in the same way that antibiotics are an animal drug, meaning we have a shared biology with other animals and it can be given to all kinds of beings, but of course it's a people drug, won the Nobel Prize as a people drug,
01:02:31.000given billions of times as a people drug.
01:02:33.000But when you looked at what happened with you, You had a monolithic approach in media where everybody said the same thing.
01:03:13.000Many, many people have competing incentives to exploit a new thing.
01:03:18.000So for example, when 9-11 happened and airplanes flown into buildings, there came up companies that reinforced the concrete on government buildings as if they could stop a fucking airliner.
01:03:30.000But the government spent millions of dollars on it.
01:03:32.000On reinforcing windows and reinforcing, you know, the outsides of buildings.
01:03:36.000My point being that for in our current world, if you used to make perfume, now you make hand sanitizer.
01:03:44.000If you used to make bumper stickers, now you make stickers that say, stand six feet apart, that are on the, you know, the floor of the supermarket.
01:03:51.000If you used to make, you know, fabric scarves, now you make masks.
01:03:57.000And so everybody is inclined by the momentum of commerce to jump on to anything that has everyone's attention.
01:04:07.000In attention, there is money to be made in the area of attention.
01:04:12.000So when governments of the world say – You know, there's a virus, and if you're over 60, it'll kill you.
01:04:18.000That was the first, you know, that was the original information.
01:04:21.000And when that gets etched on the tablet, it's very hard to change people's minds after that, even though we learned that it was far more, you know, you were far more vulnerable if you were older, if you were frail, if you were, I mean, look at Canada.
01:04:36.00070% of the people who died in Canada whose deaths are attributed to COVID were nursing home residents.
01:04:43.000Meaning, what do you go to a nursing home for, by the way?
01:04:58.000So when we learned, myself included, I heard about the pandemic and thought, oh, shit, over 60, you get it, you die.
01:05:05.000So all kinds of cautions and care and concern.
01:05:08.000Then I got that first report that came out of Italy, which showed that 94% of the people had 2.7 fatal comorbidities, meaning they already had other diseases that could kill them.
01:05:20.000And they already were Elderly, I wasn't.
01:05:24.000They were in many cases overweight, all variety of problems and the point being that it was highly age stratified.
01:05:30.000This disease is highly age and health stratified.
01:05:34.000And so young people, you know, a kid in college, You don't have a challenge from this disease.
01:05:41.000Now, quickly, if Dr. Fauci were in my pocket right now, he would be climbing up here to yell at me, oh yeah, but we've got a lot of young people who were killed.
01:05:49.000First of all, it's not a lot relative to anything.
01:05:52.000And secondly, you know, people get killed in car accidents.
01:05:57.000Life is a sexually transmitted, always fatal, communicable disease.
01:06:32.000And then you see, how do people actually die?
01:06:35.000Overweight, heart disease, diabetes, etc., etc., etc., etc.
01:06:39.000And that was a little diatribe you just said.
01:06:41.000So this trusted news network, like in the instance of COVID and in my recovery in particular, they concentrated on one thing, and that one thing was ivermectin.
01:06:54.000And it was one of many things that I listed.
01:08:01.000You know, for anybody who hasn't read Robert Kennedy's book called The Real Anthony Fauci, you can skip right to the last chapter and have your socks blown off in terms of things that are going on in the world.
01:08:12.0003,200 citations, everything is very carefully researched and studied, and it's been the number one book in the country for— Silently.
01:08:22.000We're coming up on 25, 30 weeks now without a single review in the United States.
01:08:27.000Now, when in our lives did that ever happen, that a book is the number one bestselling book in America and nobody reviews it?
01:08:32.000So it goes to the same question you're asking, how you have a monolithic opinion.
01:08:36.000That is foisted on the public, and it's why, Joe, this show has been so important, not because you give people advice or you give them some specific guidance and tell them what to do, but because you just give another,
01:09:49.000Before you would inject something into somebody's body, it used to be that vaccines took 7, 8, 9, 10, and on the average 12 years to be approved by the FDA. This was 101 days.
01:10:03.000And if people knew it was a viable treatment, or any early treatment, by the way, I mean, how can you have a government health system that doesn't even bother to say to people, through a pandemic, take vitamin D? Take zinc.
01:10:17.000You know, there are many experts who feel that this was a pandemic of low vitamin D, meaning that's an absolute epidemic in America.
01:10:26.000You know, people don't go out, and what did the government do?
01:10:28.000Stay home, don't go outside, watch television, eat everything you can possibly eat, and they don't say a word about your health.
01:10:35.000And it's supposed to be public health, but it isn't public health anymore.
01:10:38.000It's much more focused on specific I still haven't answered your question, though, which is how it happens.
01:11:09.000They cannot get sued for any effect from these particular products.
01:11:13.000And, you know, even 500 years ago, when you went into the town square and you bartered with somebody to, you know, buy something off him, if it turned out to be shitty, you could bring it back to him and say, hey, man, this thing you sold me isn't what you said it was.
01:11:26.000And you could, you know, engage with him, not with pharma, right?
01:11:29.000No matter what happens from these particular products, they cannot have liability.
01:11:35.000But how do all these media outlets share this narrative?
01:11:56.000Not just a company or drug companies in general, but they've been pharma companies for a decade.
01:12:02.000Meaning that's what, if you watch regular television and you see commercials, you're going to see pharma commercials.
01:12:07.000All those commercials that, you know, tell you about the adverse effects, etc.
01:12:11.000Do you think that there's a specific conversation that gives them this narrative or do you think that they know that their interest lies in keeping these pharmaceutical companies happy so that there's this sort of like understanding?
01:12:29.000There's a, you know, the former head of Fox who's died now, I forgot his name, Fox News.
01:12:34.000He said to a good friend of mine, I will never put on, he was talking about a particular guest who was perceived as going to speak adversely about vaccines.
01:12:44.000He said, I'll never put him on because Pfizer is our primary, you know, this is how we run this place is based on these sponsors.
01:13:11.000A very interesting example was the New York Post story on Hunter Biden.
01:13:15.000New York Post, oldest newspaper in America, started by Alexander Hamilton, for God's sake, runs this story about Hunter Biden's laptop.
01:13:24.000And the Biden campaign, he hadn't won yet, floated the idea that it was all Russian disinformation.
01:13:32.000And 50 former intelligence officers wrote a public letter saying it has the earmarks of Russian disinformation, meaning it looks like it could be Russian disinformation.
01:13:45.000But the really bad thing that happened is Twitter would not allow you to share the story.
01:13:49.000And Facebook would not allow you to share the link.
01:14:18.000Why do you think that they're admitting that it's real now?
01:14:24.000Probably because indictments might be coming.
01:14:26.000There might be some kind of charge arising out of an investigation or, you know, the New York Times has done this before.
01:14:33.000Big media companies do it, which is eventually they say everything.
01:14:39.000You can't believe it could possibly happen, but eventually there'll be an article saying these 70 studies about ivermectin might actually speak to some remote and possible efficacy for this drug.
01:16:01.000I want to see what I can learn about it.
01:16:03.000But people are not that way, some people, with government proclamations.
01:16:08.000And so it's considered – Everything, you know, fake news.
01:16:12.000If you disagree with these particular public health officials, and an interesting thing to remember about, for example, the FDA, 25% of new pharmaceuticals are later recalled.
01:16:29.000They let things go out that later are found to be problematic, opioids being a big example.
01:16:35.000Opioids for 11-year-old kids, which are current head of the FDA, who's been at the FDA before, and a consultant to 15 pharma companies in the interim, of course.
01:16:47.000He presided over, you know, over All variety of opioid problems that have led to some of the biggest fines in American history, criminal fines against pharma companies, Johnson& Johnson, Pfizer.
01:17:01.000And yet today we've decided, I have this fear.
01:17:18.000The fact that people put their faith in It's an industry that's been the most deceiving, the most ruthless, the most willing to allow people to die for profit.
01:17:33.000I mean, when you look at what they did with Vioxx, I had John Abramson on the podcast to talk about that because he worked with that case, and he's explaining how they knew that it was going to kill people.
01:17:48.000They knew that it was going to have these sort of cardiorespiratory problems and blood clots and And the like, and it wound up killing someone in the neighborhood of 60,000 people.
01:17:57.000And they were fined, but yet they're still in business.
01:18:01.000These are the same companies that people are defending as somehow or another amazing because they've come up with this solution to what is this...
01:18:10.000For many people, this existential crisis, this terrifying reality of a virus that is going to kill a certain amount of people no matter what you do.
01:18:21.000And there's got to be some sort of a solution.
01:18:23.000Then there's this one solution that gets presented.
01:18:25.000And everybody who thinks of themselves as being a good person or wants other people to think that they're a good person Stops all questioning of this one group of companies that has been notoriously the most deceptive It's amazing.
01:18:42.000It's amazing the willingness to just believe people that have been profit motivated and driven and Willing to do whatever the fuck it takes to get products to market Regardless of whether or not they're even effective or more effective than the current products that are available that are safe.
01:19:00.000Yeah Well, I want to say since you mentioned Vioxx that the president's nominee and the current head of the FDA presided over the Vioxx disaster as well, and even went against an advisory board recommendation and approved Vioxx.
01:19:15.000And so Vioxx leads to fines of more than a billion dollars, but he gets to be head of the FDA again.
01:19:21.000When Abramson was on, one thing that he told me that blew me away, he said, when scientists do peer-reviewed work on whatever the pharmaceutical drug company is working on at the time, whether it's pain killers or anti-inflammatories, whatever it is, they don't get access to the data.
01:19:39.000They get access to the interpretation of the data from the pharmaceutical companies.
01:19:44.000And then they do their papers, which is fucking madness.
01:19:48.000It is, and I think the public probably assumes that trials, like trials for a new pharmaceutical product, the material is studied by the government in some government lab.
01:20:02.000But that's not what happens, of course.
01:20:04.000These trials are run by the pharmaceutical companies using...
01:20:10.000And so, going back to your original question about how you have a monolithic opinion, I think the corporate media in America, at the beginning, wanted to disadvantage Trump and advantage Biden.
01:20:26.000And by the way, I'm all, you know, I get it.
01:20:28.000I get that people have strong opinions about Trump or about Biden or about politics in general.
01:20:33.000I think you can make a good argument that we'd be better off with a change and you can make a good argument that we'd be better off keeping Trump.
01:20:41.000I mean, you can go around that stuff all you want.
01:20:44.000What happened, though, is that they succeeded at, you know, in a very close election, they succeeded at Biden winning.
01:20:53.000And that's not considered, of course, election tampering, not letting the public know about the Hunter Biden laptop, for example, which would be a big thing in a normal campaign, right?
01:21:03.000The president's son, and he's got references to the president inside his emails, and he's working with other governments.
01:21:59.000And what's fascinating to me is that so many people are willing to pretend that this isn't happening.
01:22:08.000They're willing to stick their head in the sand and think that all these other folks that are making a big deal out of this, they're Trumpers, or they're this, or they have these biases that don't allow them to see the truth.
01:22:21.000And there's also a bunch of people that...
01:22:24.000Bought into things early on and because they bought into it They have this established narrative in their head and they're not willing to say they were wrong They're not willing to say that they had an incorrect assumption or that they bought into the narrative Because the government was saying it and they were scared and they wanted to have some sort of a feeling of comfort and also Wanted to signal to all the people around them that they're doing their part that they're a good person Yeah.
01:22:49.000I think that's all accurate and if you are a sports league, for example, and you have mandated that the young athletes get the vaccines and boosters for young athletes and then someone has myocarditis and collapses or dies,
01:23:07.000The sports team does not want to say we were wrong, so they double down.
01:23:11.000And we're seeing a lot of doubling down altogether.
01:23:13.000And by the way, I think it's awesome that people have their opinions, whatever they are and however they got them.
01:23:20.000What I strongly oppose is any effort to censor various views.
01:23:27.000The idea that there is an okay Scientist to talk on your show and that there's another one that's not okay to talk on your show is itself a little bit alarming because, you know, your show in particular, these are conversations.
01:23:52.000Like, I mean, if you're talking about people that are quacks, that you can prove that they're full of shit, and they haven't worked in years, and they're just nuts, and they've got...
01:24:07.000But if you're talking about people that are amongst the most published doctors ever in their field, and you're saying there's something wrong with them because they've deviated from the narrative about one particular subject ever in their whole career, Now you're mad?
01:24:29.000We have a real problem in this country, too, with that there's only two countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise.
01:24:48.000Yeah, it would, you know, even when I was growing up, you would learn about medications from your doctor, who you hoped had, you know, got the best information.
01:24:56.000And slowly, throughout my life, you now had people would come to the doctor's office with a nice briefcase and samples of the new pharmaceutical.
01:25:09.000And she'd say, oh, here's a bunch of samples you can give out to people.
01:25:12.000And here's our paper on how good and safe it is and on and on and on.
01:25:16.000And some of those drugs were thalidomide, meaning they weren't all perfect.
01:25:21.000And the idea that we think that a product – this is the most successful product in world history, by the way.
01:25:28.000This makes Coca-Cola look like nothing.
01:25:31.000There is no other product in world history that billions of people have taken and that is going to be taken billions of times more as it comes into its fourth and fifth approved booster here in the United States.
01:25:44.000So my problem with all of it is I don't even have to have a medical opinion.
01:25:49.000I have to have an opinion that I want all the information.
01:25:53.000Just imagine, you go to your doctor and he says, so let me tell you about this product.
01:25:58.000And he says, I want to give you this piece of paper about the product.
01:26:01.000And I said, what about the other papers you have over there?
01:26:03.000He says, I don't want you to see those.
01:26:07.000What do you mean you don't want to tell me that stuff?
01:26:09.000Informed consent is telling me the two sides of the issue, what's favorable about this product and what's unfavorable about this product, so that I can make a decision.
01:26:17.000Well, informed consent, you know, went out the window here in these last two years.
01:26:20.000And I think that the something that I care about is that people be allowed to have a dialogue and have access to information They can make their own decision on anything, but have access to information.
01:26:32.000And I'm always stunned when people say, I don't want to see that guy, that interview.
01:26:37.000You know, some interview you've had, for example.
01:27:36.000Your job is not to form a consensus opinion amongst the general public through the way you present things.
01:27:44.000Your job is to give them the data and to allow the public health experts and the scientists to interpret that data in a way that makes the most sense to people.
01:27:54.000Your job is not just to say, we're going to withhold this data because we personally don't feel that it's within the best interest to let people know the facts.
01:30:22.000And after 9-11, it goes to, you know, terrorists.
01:30:27.000Then it goes to terrorism, a strategy.
01:30:29.000Then it goes to, you know, you're either with us or against us.
01:30:33.000And the point I'm making is that it gets smaller and smaller and smaller, right down to the smallest particulate matter ever, which is like talcum powder.
01:31:27.000You could go to centers and get tested.
01:31:29.000Yes, but you could not have the consumer test.
01:31:31.000You couldn't have it on your own in your home because I think they thought that people would do it incorrectly.
01:31:36.000Well, okay, that's a generous thought.
01:31:38.000But honestly, when you stop thinking about it, you're talking about something that is important.
01:31:43.000When you're reporting the number of COVID cases, if someone's doing it incorrectly and they're getting a false negative, but then they actually do have COVID and they wander around and spread it because they incorrectly used a home test, like until they knew that it was...
01:31:58.000I mean, that's a big piece of information.
01:31:59.000If you're talking about a pandemic, especially early in the pandemic, where people were legitimately concerned that it was going to kill everybody.
01:32:06.000I mean, in March of 2020, people were terrified of this.
01:32:09.000If they had a test then and people misuse everything, So you're allowing the general public to take something and give them a false sense of security, and they could potentially use that false sense of security to bypass safety protocol and go out and spread this deadly virus.
01:32:26.000That makes sense to me, that you would only be able to get tested in places where people are trained to do it correctly.
01:32:32.000Okay, so why is it now available to everybody in the store?
01:32:36.000Well, I think the concern about the virus is lessened because of vaccines and then because of previous infection and then because of education.
01:32:47.000Enough people have understood now that your vulnerabilities increase because of obesity, your vulnerabilities increase because of vitamin deficiencies and all sorts of other factors that I think people have a more comfortable sense.
01:33:01.000I mean, there's still a bunch of like Very paranoid people out there that are highly ridden with anxiety, that still wear double masks when they're walking around outside.
01:33:12.000But there's always been people in our culture that are overwhelmed by anxiety and overwhelmed by fear.
01:33:19.000And those, you know, there's a spectrum, of course.
01:33:21.000There's people that were maskless in the early days, like, fuck it, I don't care.
01:33:25.000And then there's people who are, like, cautionary, but not sure how much risk is really, truly involved.
01:33:31.000I think we kind of have, as a general base of fear and anxiety over the virus, it's greatly diminished.
01:33:37.000And now, particularly because of Omicron.
01:33:40.000Because of Omicron, I think most people who get it, and, you know, there's this weird narrative where people get it, and they're sick, but they go, thank God I'm vaccinated.
01:34:20.000You're seeing a lot of people that are saying things that don't necessarily make sense because it justifies their life choices or their choices.
01:34:28.000When it comes down to testing, though, I think it's probably wise, especially in the early days, when we weren't exactly sure what's going on.
01:34:37.000I mean, it's easy to look at it as a Monday morning quarterback and say they should have done this, but...
01:34:41.000When you're looking at what people did in the early days, if you gave people home tests and they weren't good, or they weren't good at it and they did a shitty job, you would get a totally distorted idea of whether or not you were safe, and you probably would cost lives.
01:34:57.000You probably would go to visit your mom when she was sick.
01:35:03.000I think the concern of government was a slightly different one, which is that if consumer tests were available, we could decide on our own, yeah, we will have that wedding.
01:35:16.000I think it's great, people who are concerned about getting the virus.
01:35:19.000But do you think that they would stop people from doing tests because they wanted to control people, they wanted to stop weddings, they wanted to stop gatherings, regardless of whether they were safe?
01:35:31.000Well, of course they wanted to control people.
01:35:39.000Are you wanting to control people because it's in their own best interest to do so because they'll get sick less often?
01:35:45.000Or are you wanting to control people because it's your default position and when you get it, you know, it's the greatest wet dream you ever had, what we saw with Mayors and governors and city officials of all kinds who sort of their inner bureaucrat came out or dictator came out.
01:36:02.000So the question isn't whether they wanted to control people.
01:36:04.000They wanted to control the numbers as well.
01:36:06.000And so when you have tests that are only done by official sanctioned locations that report back the information, you have a far greater connection to the data, right?
01:36:18.000If I just do it at home, that test isn't recorded somewhere.
01:36:21.000So I do think that in all of the things I mentioned about governments and the narratives of fear that have been used, they all have an element of only the government can help you and only the government can tell you whether you've got it.
01:36:36.000I agree with you, but I also think there's a real problem managing at scale.
01:36:40.000You're managing millions and millions and millions of people.
01:36:44.000To offer options when you're thinking about something that you really need to control, which is the spread of a deadly disease, To have options available for people which would create gray areas.
01:36:57.000Look, if you're not reporting, if you just buy a home test and you decide whether or not it's accurate or inaccurate, you can get a home test and test positive for COVID and just fucking lie to people and say, yeah, I tested, I'm good.
01:37:11.000If you go to a place and they tell you Whether or not, I mean, there's still an area of inaccuracy with all these tests, right?
01:37:21.000But if you go to a place and you get tested, at least they have an accurate recording, or at least they have an accurate recording of the test results.
01:37:30.000They don't know if their test results are accurate, but they do.
01:37:32.000Well, we tested 100,000 people, and out of those people, you know, 2% of them were positive for COVID. So this is the local infection numbers.
01:37:41.000Don't you think that that would be a valuable thing?
01:37:44.000I think it was a valuable thing, and I don't argue that it's valuable.
01:37:47.000I argue that government steps in when there are opportunities.
01:38:12.000What scares me is the notion that people might start using these same sort of draconian measures of control with something that we've always just accepted as a part of everyday life.
01:38:23.000Now, a lot of people have accepted COVID and they're encouraging people to accept COVID as endemic.
01:38:30.000Well, that's always been how we accepted the flu.
01:38:33.000But I'm hearing a lot of talk of mandatory flu vaccines.
01:38:36.000I'm hearing a lot of talk of mandating things.
01:38:39.000And that makes me nervous, because I do know that there's a financial incentive.
01:38:43.000Whenever there's any kind of financial incentive, and you do know that these financial incentives trickle down into media, which shapes narrative for the entire population.
01:38:53.000Like, as a whole, we should be super fucking concerned about that.
01:39:16.000If we had a community group of 100 people and we got together to do something in the community and we said, hey, let's have Bob and Susie Be in charge.
01:39:37.000And start giving us all variety of instructions.
01:39:40.000In that little democracy that we had, this little 100-person democracy, we would say, we don't want 2% telling everybody what to do, and we'd laugh at them.
01:39:48.000Bob and Susie started saying ridiculous things.
01:39:50.000Now, in the actual, the non-metaphorical version of this, it's a minuscule percentage of our population in any country controls the rest of the population.
01:40:01.000And what do they tend to like, people in power?
01:40:04.000What they tend to like is, throughout history, the king and queen would look over the castle wall.
01:40:09.000First of all, they always have a castle wall, a question we can ask ourselves, why is that?
01:40:13.000But the reason is, they look over the castle wall and they see the people fighting with each other.
01:40:18.000They're disagreeing over things and they give each other a hug because that is the best news possible.
01:40:23.000It's only when all the people agree that they have a risk of coming over the castle wall.
01:41:12.000And he said there's no exception for liquor stores to be considered an essential business, but there is reference in the Constitution to churches which were closed.
01:41:23.000So my objection is that, or my observation I should say, it doesn't matter whether I object, my observation is that We all ought to care a lot, whatever the reason, when government seeks to assume a lot of power.
01:41:37.000There's a little town in Arizona a few months ago that had three people escape from their jail.
01:41:42.000And the sheriff, looking for the three people who escaped from the jail, who embarrassed their sheriff's department, did a lockdown of the little town.
01:41:51.000So they got to search for these three people without those pesky citizens going about their lives and going to work and going to restaurants.
01:41:59.000So the idea of lockdown suddenly becomes part of our accepted lexicon.
01:42:06.000And so I have said throughout that I am also not anti-vax.
01:42:12.000I am also not even anti-pharmaceuticals.
01:42:15.000We're going to need pharmaceuticals at different times in our lives.
01:42:18.000You can't speak about vaccines as if they're one thing.
01:42:22.000There have been vaccines taken off the market because they're dangerous.
01:42:25.000There's the Gardasil vaccine that's downright dangerous and terrible.
01:42:29.000And shouldn't be given to nine-year-old boys who cannot get cancer in their female sex organs.
01:43:05.000And HPV is not clearly demonstrably going to lead to cancer for your little girl in 40 years because you have these cancers that are serious cervical cancer in your 50s.
01:43:16.000So you're taking this little girl right now, 9 years old, 10 years old, and you're saying, gee, I don't want her to get cervical cancer.
01:43:22.000Well, it's not her we're talking about.
01:43:23.000It's her in 40 years we're talking about.
01:43:25.000And cervical cancer is highly treatable.
01:44:08.000Polio have been beneficial, you know, there hasn't been a case of polio since 1986 in the United States, but polio vaccine isn't so bad for you.
01:44:15.000And so, you know, majority of polio in the world today is actually vaccine-based.
01:45:34.000July of 2021. Just stay right there for a second.
01:45:40.000Many of the people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.
01:45:50.000But researchers say the solution is not test less or skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
01:46:18.000In three sets of tested data that include cycle thresholds compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada, up to 90% of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by the New York Times found.
01:46:32.000So this is people that were testing positive that were testing positive at high cycles of PCRs.
01:46:36.000And they couldn't get symptoms and they couldn't make you sick.
01:46:40.000Well, they've lowered the cycles of PCRs dramatically, right?
01:46:45.000I don't know about whether that's done nationally, but it was recommended.
01:46:48.000I'll just read one more quick paragraph.
01:46:50.000The United States recorded 45,000 new corona cases.
01:46:53.000If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.
01:47:06.000Is it currently where they are right now and is it still possible for the virus to replicate inside their body and they would eventually become contagious?
01:47:13.000It's a good question because some are pre-symptomatic, that is true, meaning they were going to get worse, that might very well happen.
01:47:19.000It just hasn't, the virus hasn't replicated enough in their system yet.
01:47:22.000But there's a reason that you saw countries all over the world have 80% asymptomatic cases, right?
01:47:28.000The other way to say that is, the way we would have said it pre-COVID our whole lives is, oh, you not sick.
01:47:38.000And 80 to 90 percent of the people having no symptoms is called not sick, historically.
01:47:43.000So now we're searching for something that the testing process allowed for a great deal of disruption in the United States.
01:47:51.000I happen to believe in the test more for the negative than for the positive, just FYI. I'm sorry, more for the positive than for the negative because, okay, now you're going to take a 9 out of 10 chance and I'm not going to come to your dinner party because I tested positive, right?
01:49:37.000One is I had to advise a lot of people on how are we going to navigate life in this new circumstance.
01:49:43.000Everything from, you know, in the beginning, we were told that it will live on packages that come from the store.
01:49:48.000So you're cleaning packages or you can get a pizza delivery.
01:49:52.000The outside of the box will kill you, but the inside of the pizza will be just fine.
01:49:55.000You remember this period where you're cleaning everything, you're wiping off the bananas before they come into the house.
01:50:00.000And so it was my challenge to manage life for people during this circumstance, and it's also just my general curiosity.
01:50:08.000The second issue that affected me a lot is that we have a lot of – I've got 570 employees, a lot of them young people, and a lot of them out of the military.
01:50:17.000And we had our own four cases of myocarditis inside.
01:50:22.000We also had a young man come out of the military and come to our physical fitness requirements and while running on the track, 33 years old, fall down and die.
01:50:35.000He was applying to be an employee of ours.
01:50:37.000And so it was in my interest to learn a great deal about whatever the risks are from both the vaccine and whatever the risks are from the virus.
01:50:47.000And to do what I think people wisely do, which is compare the two things and make your decision about how to administer it.
01:50:55.000As an employer, I had to decide, was I going to mandate vaccines, for example?
01:50:59.000And so you looked at it in terms of the way you look at other security concerns.
01:51:02.000What's the accurate assessment of threat?
01:51:05.000And I had a bunch of clients ask me, you know, I'm this age, I'm in this general physical condition, just not asking me for medical advice, but they're asking me for statistical information on, you know, what are the risks here?
01:51:18.000So in the beginning, after we got the Italy information, what you had to do to die of COVID, In the beginning, if you were, say, 53 years old and fit, first you had to get COVID. Then you had to ignore it for a few days.
01:51:38.000Then you had to go up to the ICU. That's 87% didn't get to the ICU. And then you had to be put on a ventilator and then you could die.
01:51:48.000So there was quite a series of things you had to go through in order to say this is a giant risk to the individual, right, to a specific individual who's fit.
01:51:59.000Much different when you're looking at it from a public health perspective and you're looking at a global population that is, you know, if you pick a number, 40% obesity, extraordinarily high amounts of diabetes, for example.
01:52:13.000And so I had to do a, you know, just a statistical look at At every kind of risk.
01:52:19.000We do it when clients go to another country.
01:52:47.000What form of science is there that tells you it would have been worse if?
01:52:53.000It's just an unknowable thing, and it's a genius marketing mechanism.
01:52:57.000It is, because so many people repeat that.
01:52:59.000Yeah, I want to go back to something that I said about Gardasil, which is that the commercials for Gardasil are a little girl talking to camera, and she says, do you know about this, mommy?
01:56:38.000If your person is sitting at home and you don't feel good and there's an ad that comes on and these people are living the way you would like to live.
01:56:58.000But if you're selling something that could potentially change a person's entire life if it goes sideways...
01:57:06.000You know, you're giving me a good idea, which is what about a law that prohibits pharmaceutical advertising like virtually every country in the world?
01:57:16.000That would be an interesting thing for a politician to look at at the federal level.
01:59:43.000And in fact, there's a thing in the masterclass where we ask people on the street, men and women, when's the last time you thought about yourself being in danger?
01:59:52.000And the men would be like, hmm, danger?
01:59:57.000And the women would all be yesterday, today, when I parked last night, where I park, where I go.
02:00:02.000So it's just a different world for men and women in society.
02:00:06.000And it's And so a lot of that book is about, you know, listen to your intuition.
02:00:10.000And a lot of the masterclass, the idea came from Oprah that she did a bunch of shows with me.
02:00:17.000And then 10 years later, she did a 10-year anniversary show on this book.
02:00:21.000And I thought, and got some of the people together who were involved.
02:00:26.000And I thought, well, let me go back and get these people together and do this thing where we just sit around and And have a conversation and I got, you know, a woman whose child was killed at the Newtown school shooting, someone else whose daughter was killed by her boyfriend,
02:00:41.000a man who shot his own brother by accident when he was a kid.
02:00:45.000Very interesting perspective because you never hear from that person.
02:00:48.000You know, you hear, you get the news stories about the tragedy but the guy who has to go through life, you know, having had that accident, that shooting accident.
02:00:57.000And then a bunch of experts, FBI, LAPD, etc.
02:01:02.000And I think it can help people now when there's a lot of fear and a lot of crime and a lot of demonstrations and a lot of upset in society right now.
02:01:12.000In fact, it's even, you know, I saw you talk about Will Smith.
02:01:16.000Even decorum in general is being broken in this time in America in that a lot of people are on edge.
02:01:26.000You have a lot more multiple victim shootings.
02:01:30.000You've got these break-ins in California where 70 people break into a store.
02:01:35.000At the same time that laws are changing that says we're not going to prosecute in California most cities for anything unless it's over $1,500 theft.
02:01:44.000So people just walk into a CVS and pick up something or a Target store and walk out.
02:01:48.000So it's a hard time and I know there's a lot of fear and I always want to remind people that...
02:01:54.000There are women who were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, but the fear they were thinking about was terrorists, you know, during 9-11.
02:02:03.000So more people have died at the hands of boyfriends and husbands than died at 9-11, triple.
02:02:10.000And so we focus on the wrong things, right?
02:02:13.000You know, on our refrigerator, we might have the doctor's name and number, but we don't have the nuclear emergency search team phone number, you know, the black helicopters that the Pentagon has, because it's not in our thinking day to day, and it shouldn't be.
02:02:25.000But we let television news program our fears.
02:02:29.000And years ago, I was doing a book tour for this book, and a guy said to me, a television producer, he said a little...
02:02:36.000He had a guest on talking about the flesh-eating disease that has come and gone in our consciousness.
02:02:46.000You could get the flesh-eating disease.
02:02:47.000And I met this woman who was going to be interviewed, and I thought later on she could have...
02:02:52.000She could have told me about the flesh eating disease before I shook hands with her, I thought jokingly, but she didn't and I didn't get it and she didn't have it.
02:02:59.000She only wanted to talk about her fear of it.
02:03:01.000They couldn't find somebody with the disease.
02:03:02.000So I said to the news producer, you know, what the fuck?
02:03:10.000He said, well, another, he said, a little worry never hurt anybody.
02:03:14.000And I put it in one of my books because a little worry is the cause of hypertension and drug addiction and alienation from people and fear of each other and all this stuff that goes on programmed, our fears programmed.
02:03:28.000And my teaching is that things to fear actually have not changed.
02:04:08.000They participate in their own victimization without recognizing that they have every piece of information that they need in their intuition, which by the way, the word intuition, the root of it is inter and it means to guard and to protect.
02:04:24.000Do you encourage people to take self-defense courses or to learn martial arts?
02:04:30.000Particularly a kind of self-defense class sometimes called model mugging where you may have seen it where the perpetrator is in a padded suit.
02:04:40.000And for women who are not going to invest years in some self-defense class, it's very valuable because it teaches them to strike.
02:04:47.000Many women, maybe most, have never really hit anybody to hurt them.
02:04:52.000And so with a padded assailant, this kind of training, often called model mugging and there are other names for it, which is available in every major city, is something I really believe in because it lets you engage with somebody physically and prevail and it teaches you a few tricks,
02:05:10.000not at the level that somebody who takes martial arts courses, but I like martial arts for every purpose, for confidence, For self-defense, for health, I think in every way.
02:05:22.000So yeah, even in this book, more in my later books, but in this book there's a discussion about model mugging and that kind of engagement where you You sort of gain some muscle memory about what it is to actually strike somebody.
02:05:59.000I don't think you really learn anything in those environments, in those classes.
02:06:04.000When I used to teach martial arts, one of the things that I had a problem with was trying to Gently explain to someone that everything they had learned in one of those classes was useless.
02:06:19.000Like the idea you should drop to your back and start kicking up.
02:06:23.000Because women have greater lower body strength than upper body strength.
02:06:26.000All of this only would work on a moron.
02:06:57.000A martial art where a lighter, smaller person actually can prevail over a bigger person because they have skills and they understand techniques, they understand positioning, they understand leverage, and they've applied it over and over and over and over again so that in times of extreme stress they can perform.
02:07:19.000Because most people, when encountered with actual violence, will freeze up.
02:07:23.000Because they don't know what it's like to be an actual physical conflict.
02:07:26.000One of the great things about jiu-jitsu is you are in constant violent conflict in class.
02:07:33.000It's controlled, but you're going full blast.
02:07:37.000And because of that, when a situation occurs and you have to grapple with someone, you have muscle memory completely built in.
02:08:38.000I just think there's no shortcuts to self-defense.
02:08:42.000There's no shortcuts to being able to take care of yourself.
02:08:44.000And I think what bothers me is that there's some people that walk out of those classes, and I don't know how they're taught, if they're taught this way, but they walk out with An interpretation of it.
02:08:58.000And I think they have this false confidence that I think is dangerous.
02:09:03.000And if you think you're just gonna go around punching people, you know, that you think are a threat, and that that's gonna protect you because you took a class, like, that's not likely.
02:09:48.000And so the fact is we're not going to get 220 million American women or young girls, I've got two daughters, to all become jiu-jitsu experts.
02:09:57.000And a little jiu-jitsu is also dangerous, you probably feel.
02:10:21.000Typically, there are all kinds of courses and there are advanced courses as well.
02:10:25.000But we just don't see that the same way because I have to leave people – by the way, My books do not say, go to a model mugging class, and that's the end of the book.
02:11:40.000And generally speaking, I won't be there with some victim at the time of that emergency, but generally speaking, Resistance is more valuable.
02:11:50.000And resistance in getting away is most valuable.
02:11:52.000And you talked about a big predator, for example.
02:11:56.000There are basically two kinds of predators.
02:11:58.000I'm going to speak global categories for a moment.
02:12:30.000And I agree with you that for the power predator, other than the ability to get away quickly, you are not going to have a successful fight with a power predator.
02:12:39.000It's 2% of the predators in the world, in the Western world, but nonetheless, I agree with you on that.
02:12:44.000But for the persuasion predator, the teaching early for your daughter and my daughters What am I being persuaded to do here?
02:12:52.000Why is this person not listening to me when I say no?
02:12:55.000Why is this person wanting to go to this more remote location?
02:12:58.000Why is he saying lock the door at the end of work when he's the manager and I should – all of those early intuitions are how you actually save your life or save yourself from a violent situation.
02:13:10.000I had no idea that it was six hours or six weeks of doing it.
02:13:14.000That actually makes sense more too, because you're explaining to people possible scenarios and how to get out of them.
02:13:20.000I just don't like the idea of giving people false confidence about their physical prowess.
02:13:25.000And maybe this is on my own personal bias from actually being a martial arts instructor and talking to people.
02:13:31.000That we're saying, do I really need to learn this?
02:13:33.000Because I learned that I can just palm strike you in the nose.
02:13:37.000And, you know, man, you palm strike a guy in the nose, like there's a very high likelihood that's going to not do much.
02:13:44.000Well, so I don't think our disagreement is enough to end the friendship.
02:13:51.000No, I don't think we're even disagreeing because I think in many ways I'm ignorant to the protocol that they're prescribing if they're doing it for six weeks.
02:13:58.000I think there's something about long courses where I don't think you can get anything in a class.
02:14:03.000This one woman that I'm referring to was one of my former students.
02:14:20.000You want to get the fuck out of there.
02:14:21.000This idea that you're going to be on your back and you're going to kick someone, that shit, that's not going to work.
02:14:25.000So you just did something, Joe, that is such an interesting example of Joe Roganism, which is you went from your opinion, which is very well informed because you have a lot of experience, and then you heard some new information, and then you said,
02:14:41.000you know, maybe I don't know enough about those classes.
02:15:11.000It was just fun to be sitting over here and see you have a strong opinion and then see, well, there's something more I need to know about this.
02:15:17.000If more people in America would do that, we would not have mandates.
02:15:47.000Women, in many cases, are physically more vulnerable than men, in most cases.
02:15:53.000And so when someone is teaching self-defense course again, I probably shouldn't have said that I don't agree with it because I don't know how they're running their course, but I've seen a lot of women's self-defense courses and I'm like, man, that is not gonna work.
02:16:09.000And I really get upset by giving people false confidence.
02:16:13.000There are so many men out there that have this delusional idea of their ability to defend themselves.
02:16:23.000How the ego can play tricks on you to the point where there's men out there starting fights and they have no idea how to fight.
02:16:32.000It's legitimately like, back to speaking French, it's like having an argument with someone when you don't even understand their language.
02:16:39.000Like you might know Paulie-vous Francais and you're literally getting in a fucking debate with them.
02:16:44.000This is what it's like to get into a physical altercation if you don't know how to defend yourself.
02:16:50.000So I want to share two things with you.
02:16:51.000In my company, we employ a lot of people who are coming out of the military.
02:16:56.000And we have a training academy they go to.
02:16:58.000And one of the things that we're using is attack dogs, police dogs.
02:17:03.000And what we do is we put somebody in a bite suit, and we have a variety of exercises, one where they're put in the back of a van, and they are told you have to feed the dog.
02:17:14.000If it comes over the seat, it's going to get to your legs, your hands, and your head are all not covered.
02:17:19.000So you gotta feed the dog, and so you're just like this with this dog right here that wants to hurt you.
02:17:23.000The dog don't know anything but wanna hurt you.
02:17:25.000And then there's another exercise where you run and you're chased, and the dogs are pretty good at judo.
02:17:31.000These are trained police dogs, they wanna pull you down and get you on the ground.
02:17:34.000But the reason we do that training, and we've had a lot of people go to the hospital in that training, so it's not bullshit, it's very real.
02:17:40.000Is the specific point you were making, which is the grappling, the sweating, that this thing really wants to hurt me.
02:17:46.000If people haven't had that experience, then they get into a fight, and they're basically in trauma immediately, instant trauma.
02:18:03.000There's some real value in giving people some examples of scenarios that you should avoid.
02:18:08.000There's some real value in giving people, before it ever gets to a physical encounter, giving people some real clear boundaries you should never let someone cross.
02:18:18.000Particularly women my concern is and I have a deep concern about this is people having a distorted perception of their ability to defend themselves because I see it from people that Think that they know how to fight from men more than even from women.
02:18:33.000Yeah, but from women I think the consequences concern me far more because with men I worry about men getting beat up by other men because they're delusional and they'll start fights but that I I'm not thinking of them as a victim the way I'm thinking of a woman as a victim.
02:18:48.000So when a woman has a distorted perception because of a class, an erroneous...
02:18:52.000I mean, there's so many of these goddamn self-defense classes that are teaching them nonsense.
02:18:58.000And, you know, one of them is, like, kick the knees out.
02:19:23.000And so my question goes back to your question, which is, could people be better off?
02:19:28.000You've got over here, you know, 60 people who would take jujitsu and do it for 10 years.
02:19:34.000And then I've got over here 80 million people who won't.
02:19:38.000And so something, you know, you still want to give something to these people in terms of training, and you'll see a lot of it in that masterclass, it's just a lot of training about recognizing the situation you're in.
02:19:50.000Most people are victimized because of their own cooperation with the victimizer.
02:20:40.000What degree of training are they going to go to?
02:20:42.000There's an example in this book, in The Gift of Fear, where a woman, while she's asleep, takes the gun from underneath her pillow and shoots herself in the face, thinking it's her asthma medicine.
02:20:59.000My concern about firearms in the bedside table, for example, is that you're asking somebody, it's like asking somebody to fall into a deep sleep and then wake up.
02:21:28.000Wouldn't it be better if you get woken up in the middle of the night because there's an intruder in your home to have a gun than to not have a gun?
02:21:35.000Well, the example I gave you, though, was not an intruder in your home.
02:21:38.000The example I gave you was an intruder at the foot of your bed.
02:21:44.000You have to – you know, a gun is not – it's a fantastic consumer product.
02:21:48.000It lasts longer than the consumer that buys it, right?
02:21:51.000It lasts for hundreds of years if well taken care of.
02:21:54.000And people pay $300, $500 for the gun, whatever it is, and they now believe, just like you feel about self-defense, they now believe, oh, I'm safe.
02:22:03.000The guy in the gun store says, this is the one that'll do it for you.
02:22:05.000Yeah, it'll do it for you if you're smart, if you're sober, if you have some detection system downstairs that gave you some heads up, if you are reasonable, if you're not shooting your 10-year-old kid.
02:23:07.000It's facial recognition and fingerprint recognition, both.
02:23:11.000And it cannot be shot by the nine-year-old son of the plumber who's looking around your house on a Saturday while you're not thinking about it.
02:23:18.000And so the accidental shootings to me, there's a lot on them in the master class as well, are by far the most tragic.
02:23:25.000These situations where the eight-year-old kid kills his six-year-old sister or kills his mother or, you know, those lives are all ruined.
02:23:33.000The dead person is easy, but the other lives are all ruined.
02:23:36.000So I'm a believer that when you ask me, do I recommend guns?
02:23:40.000I own hundreds of guns because of my company.
02:24:04.000If you have a firearm that you know how to use, all good.
02:24:07.000But if you just have a gun in the bedside drawer and it sits there for 15 years and you think you're safe now, that's as bad a mistake as the mistake you're talking about with taking a 20-minute self-defense class.
02:24:18.000I think that is a genuine issue with the accidental shootings and a genuine issue with people being delusional and their ability to use that in a high-stress situation.
02:24:33.000Adrenaline is so crazy and anxiety is so crazy.
02:24:36.000When you're in the middle of Thing like that you have tunnel vision you can't see well if you don't know how to stay calm under pressure if you don't experience a lot of physical stress And you don't know what to do the way that's the reason those courses are important because they do give people the ability to Understand what it is to be engaged pushed down knocked over struck and And even that by itself is valuable for somebody to not freeze up in quite the same way.
02:25:02.000Forget whether they win the engagement.
02:26:05.000So we have the dog thing, and all of these things are called stress inoculation.
02:26:11.000If you never had it, what you're describing, you know that people break into the house and suddenly they're going to shoot somebody, make a split-second decision, and they've never had any of those experiences, they won't do as well as they would do, right?
02:26:24.000An experienced soldier versus some other 18-year-old kid or a police officer who's been in some shootings.
02:26:31.000We are trying to train your heart rate to stay low.
02:26:35.000If you engaged with me physically, if you and I were going to fight—and a few minutes ago, the argument was getting pretty close, I think—but if you and I were going to fight, you'd have a lower heart rate than some other guy who's never had a fight.
02:26:54.000Like, we have a thing where— We have a vehicle and there's a sniper and we're shooting at you while you're walking a protectee to the car.
02:27:02.000And we're hitting you with simunition.
02:27:54.000If you're worried about marks on your back from Simunition, why don't you go with the client to Zimbabwe in two weeks when they're at some controversial event giving a speech?
02:28:02.000And so we're training, increasing the likelihood of courage.
02:28:07.000Do you provide, like, I know there's some companies that create Kevlar clothes.
02:28:26.000And so all that stuff gets sent to us, as I said earlier, for free.
02:28:29.000I'd be the biggest consumer of a product if it was a great product.
02:28:33.000But there are clothes, there are suits, there are definitely overcoats that work real well because an overcoat's already bulky, right?
02:28:39.000But a garment like what you're wearing now, it will come that you can have something that will stop a bullet going through a thin garment.
02:28:46.000The problem is it can't stop the energy.
02:28:48.000And so you need, you know, people have been shot, cops you've heard about, where they have a steel plate in the body armor in addition to the body armor.
02:28:57.000And we have that body armor where you can slip in a steel plate, very light body armor.
02:29:15.000I believe very much in body armor, by the way, for our protectors.
02:29:21.000Anybody who's in a position where they might have to engage with a gun and they think they're there because, like a cop, thinks you're there because you might have to engage in a gunfight, body armor is very valuable.
02:29:42.000It's not getting the penetration of the bullet, but it's still getting the penetration of the energy.
02:29:47.000And so that's the piece that isn't resolved.
02:29:48.000Why body armor, like a vest that a cop wears, is many, many, many, many layers, and it's a bit, if you felt it, it's a bit wide and strong, and it does do some disbursement of that energy.
02:30:00.000Something as thin as you're wearing or I'm wearing Might stop penetration but not stop the energy and still the energy is the problem.
02:30:06.000But isn't there still some benefit in not being penetrated?
02:30:10.000Isn't it at least a slight diminishment of the amount of trauma that your body spends?
02:30:23.000Probably more than slight benefit, probably a substantial benefit.
02:30:27.000Whether we're there, though, in terms of all the fashion and all the clothes that people want to wear, I'm not recommending to people anything that I've seen yet, and I've seen some pretty nice stuff.
02:30:36.000Now, I do recommend conventional light body armor under your clothes if you're doing the most controversial speech of your life or you're an at-risk public figure or you're a protector in our company or a cop, of course, a Secret Service agent.
02:30:50.000Very few wear it, but more should wear it.
02:30:53.000Secret Service agents don't wear body armor?
02:30:58.000Because one thing that you want a protector to be able to do is stop the bullet from going through me, something like a.223 or something, going through me and into you.
02:31:07.000So the excuses for all variety of people who choose not to wear body armor is comfort, I'm hot.
02:31:15.000I've had this with people in my company over the years.
02:31:53.000It won't stop energy, but I think it will get there.
02:31:55.000I was looking at an online company that was selling bulletproof clothing that people wear over their vests, that the clothing itself would stop the penetration of a bullet.
02:32:07.000Yeah, there are suits and there are various things.
02:32:09.000But the heavier the jacket, you know, I see Putin wearing it, all variety of public figures who are at risk.
02:32:17.000The heavier the jacket, the more likely it is to contain from a fashion point of view.
02:32:22.000The body armor and make a real difference.
02:32:25.000The lighter it gets, the less effective it is.
02:33:52.000Then the United States wouldn't let him in.
02:33:54.000We finally got India to agree to take him and he died the night before the flight after six weeks of bullshitting with these countries to let in somebody who needs care.
02:35:00.000Just the nature of how that society, both of those societies, but I'll take Australia, became so dictatorial and totalitarian over this issue, the abuse of citizens.
02:35:15.000It was really dark and somebody said to me, can you believe it?
02:35:18.000They were immigrants originally and they were prisoners.
02:35:22.000They should really resist and not like this kind of treatment.
02:35:26.000And I said, yeah, you have to remember they were also the prison guards.
02:35:34.000That was a big argument for the Second Amendment.
02:35:36.000It was a big argument that those kind of draconian measures, stopping people from working unless they complied with mandates, would never work in America.
02:35:47.000By the way, speaking of mandates, you saw that Washington, D.C. event against the mandates that had a bunch of doctors speaking and firemen and all kinds of people.
02:35:56.000So that is happening again April 10th in Los Angeles.
02:35:59.000And I support it because, again, I don't need any medical opinion.
02:36:03.000I don't need to like or dislike a particular pharma product to support the idea that mandates are destructive.
02:36:12.000Today, you might love it because you're afraid of COVID. Tomorrow, it'll be something else.
02:36:17.000And so I really believe in the people who are standing up and saying that mandates themselves, without regard to why, mandates themselves are destructive.
02:37:16.000When you're talking about the doctors and the hospitals, you know, we had 34,000 medical workers fired in New York, in New York, for not wanting to get vaccinated.
02:37:27.000Especially since some of them actually had natural immunity because they had COVID. That was one of the weirder things, where they were denying natural immunity, denying that it's a thing.
02:37:53.000A big-time consultant to CDC, just one of the big-time vaccine doctors, vaccine promoters.
02:38:00.000You know, when I talk about vaccines or you say anti-vax, you've got to remember we're talking about a suite of products that are all different.
02:38:58.000The reason I'm saying probably, and this is a bit discouraging what I'm going to say, is that, you know, I mentioned throughout human history, governments have been in the business of how can they control the only population they really care about.
02:40:09.000And there may be a place for draconian actions by government, but you have to choose that very, very artfully and carefully because you're never going to get it back.
02:40:21.000And so if we, you know, it turns out it's most of our conversation today about that subject, which, you know, people asked me what I was going to talk about.
02:41:24.000Intelligent people would look back on this one day and say that was an overreaction.
02:41:28.000It was an overreaction to imprison Japanese people and put them in prison camps in 2000 – I mean in World War II. And we're now making amends for that and we're compensating people and – but we were scared.
02:41:39.000We were scared that the Japanese were going to be – we'd been attacked and blah, blah, blah.
02:41:43.000There's similar reactions right now to Russians.
02:41:58.000So I'd like to think we will look back soon, by the way, and say, well, wait a minute.
02:42:03.000Maybe we weren't so right about this and this and this and this, and maybe that was a little much.
02:42:08.000And maybe we shouldn't have had children in school before.
02:42:12.000Wearing masks that don't work, that they're not wearing properly, that are under their nose anyway, but they have to do it.
02:42:18.000Maybe we shouldn't have done that to kids developing their language skills who can't see mouths.
02:42:23.000And maybe we shouldn't have frightened these kids to think that everybody is going to kill them because they're carrying a virus and to touch the doorknob and then somebody spray that doorknob.
02:42:31.000All this shit went on and is going on in some schools right now.
02:42:34.000So maybe we shouldn't have inoculated 12-year-old kids with boosters after...
02:42:59.000Sorry to interrupt, but do you think we have, because we've got to wrap this up soon, but do you think we have the potential for an uncensored social media network that's not a dumpster fire?
02:43:11.000Because there's been some attempts at uncensored social media, but a lot of them are not that good.
02:43:18.000You go there, they're filled with assholes and trolls, and I don't even know if the people that are posting on those are real people, or if they're people that have been sent over there to try to ruin these companies.
02:43:29.000But everything you just said applies to Facebook, with the only difference being that Facebook will censor certain kinds of things and has tens of thousands of people to do it, by the way.
02:44:27.000And for me, the process of questioning government is what makes this country extraordinary.
02:44:34.000If we're not allowed to question the king, if the king can just say, As Biden did, by the way, if you get this injection, you will not get sick and you will not spread it to anyone else.
02:44:56.000And so long answer to your question is, will we look back with help from you and others to just provide an alternate view and let the consumer decide?
02:45:07.000Maybe we look back on it, but it's also possible that it will disappear.
02:45:12.000Well, it seems that there's the potential for an extraordinary shift in our ability to...
02:45:19.000Ascertain what's right or wrong if someone created a social media platform that was uncensored, that did abide by the freedom that we expect from the First Amendment.
02:45:32.000I know it doesn't apply to private companies.
02:45:35.000These are private companies, but when you get to something like Twitter that is so extraordinarily influential, it reaches I don't know how many people are on Twitter, but it's fucking insane amounts of numbers.
02:45:48.000And information can spread so quickly on there.
02:45:55.000But you've gotta figure out a way to not censor people.
02:46:00.000Especially not censor people that just have disturbing but accurate information like the Hunter Biden laptop story.
02:46:07.000That alone, the fact that that alone was removed from Twitter should disturb the shit out of people that just want the truth.
02:46:15.000Especially when you realize that that was a factor in choosing the president.
02:46:20.000And clearly the administration is not doing well.
02:46:24.000I mean, I'm not a Trump supporter, and I didn't vote for him, but I'm saying if you look at what happened, that had an absolute influence on the election.
02:46:35.000And I agree with you, and I think that many people I know, and you know, Joe, if we talked about the Hunter Biden laptop, they say, oh, that's Russian.
02:46:43.000Today, say that's Russian disinformation, because the New York Times article was this big that has them coming around, but all the other stuff was so enormous.
02:48:00.000And I think if we can capture again the idea, here's the point, main point.
02:48:05.000If Facebook were less controlled, Then people know they have to be more careful, meaning right now they're just being told, Daddy's going to take care of it.
02:48:13.000You won't see anything you shouldn't see.
02:49:27.000It didn't ruin society when that was the case.
02:49:30.000It made things uniquely interesting because it was the first moment in time where we had access to information in that way.
02:49:38.000And having these nannies and gatekeepers in the form of Facebook and Twitter, it's not helping us.
02:49:46.000It's dividing people even further and it's polarizing the strong elements of the far right and the far left.
02:49:53.000And I think that's extremely detrimental because I think most people lie somewhere in the center and they have ideas from both sides.
02:50:00.000And if you give people the ability to debate things, to have controversial or maybe even incorrect opinions, but then someone comes along and shows how those opinions are incorrect, if someone's paying attention who's an outside observer, they get a chance to see the argument play out and they form their opinion based on what's a stronger position,