On this episode of Thick & Thin, host Alex Blumberg sits down with Alex Castellanos and Sarah Downey to talk about their new podcast, The FiveThirtyEight, and how they got started in politics. Alex and Sarah also discuss how they came to be on the show, and what it's like to be a conservative pundit on the left and a liberal commentator on the right. They also talk about how they met, how they became friends, and why they think there's a good chance they'll make it to the 2020 election. It's an episode you don't want to miss! Alex Downey is a writer, host, and host of the podcast Thick And Thin. He's also a frequent contributor to the New York Times and CNN, and is a frequent guest on Fox News and other media outlets. He's been with the show for over 20 years and is one of the most influential conservative voices on the airwaves, and has been a regular guest on CNN, Fox News, Fox Business, and other conservative outlets. He also hosts a podcast called The Five ThirtyEight, where he's a regular contributor and hosts a weekly show called "The Five Thirty Eight" where he hosts a panel of other conservative media personalities. Alex and Alex discuss the politics and culture of the right and the left. Sarah and Alex talk about what it means to be conservative, conservative, and left-wing in America. and why it's important to be progressive in the modern era of politics. We hope you enjoy this episode, and we hope you do the same in the next week's episode. Thank you for listening to this one. - and if you like it, please leave us a review of this episode and share it on your social media feed! and tell us what you think of it on Insta-tweet us what we said in the comments section. We'll be looking out for Alex's Insta: and your thoughts on it! - Alex's Story: . - - Sarah's Story - Sarah s Story - What's your favorite part of the show? - What do you think about this episode? -- Is it a good or bad? -- Do you think it's better than the other one? or not? , - Do you agree with Alex s Story: What would you like to hear it? ? - Is it better than that?
00:00:12.000Alright, now the first time we did this, my hair was fucked up the whole time and another one of y'all's told me about it, so I hope we're better friends now.
00:00:53.000It's really on him, because you and I were just getting to know each other then, so it was really his fault.
00:00:59.000You guys are a very unusual combination.
00:01:02.000It's very funny, because having someone who's on the right and having someone who's on the left, it's usually some sort of a formulaic thing.
00:01:10.000You know what I think of Hannity and Combs?
00:01:18.000It's kind of hard to describe what we do, because if you say, like, you know, we're on the right and we're on the left, it does sound like this sort of thing that, like...
00:03:01.000But what is really fascinating is that having these long-form discussions like you guys do, uncensored and undirected, without an executive leaning over your shoulder and telling you what to do, It's the best way to discuss things.
00:03:17.000And when I get to hear from a reasonable person on the left and a reasonable person on the right who respect each other, it gives me hope.
00:03:32.000That is actually the core goal of the show.
00:03:36.000Because, I mean, we are living through incredibly, like, politically fraught times where you have a lot of people whose whole business model is to persuade you that, like, half the country hates you and is destroying the country and it's existential and we're headed to civil war.
00:03:51.000And so I feel like if Sagar and I can, you know, agree on some things, which we do, and have debates on topics that are, you know, difficult and tense and fraught and be able to do that day after day in a way that is respectful, that's like, not just trying to score points,
00:04:07.000but actually trying to learn from each other.
00:04:09.000You know, I hope it makes a small difference in the political atmosphere.
00:04:14.000Yeah, I mean, what I'm most proud of in our analytics is half the audience is genuinely right and half the audience is genuinely left.
00:04:21.000And one of the pitches that we give our people, we're like, hey, if you're gonna support us, you're not gonna agree all the time.
00:04:26.000So you're almost conditioning people to be like, hey, this is a message that I'm buying into.
00:04:30.000And I think the most impactful, sometimes you don't meet people or whatever and they're like, man, I watched a show with my dad and I'm just like, dad, Crystal's what I believe.
00:04:38.000And dad is like, I'm with Sagar on some things.
00:04:40.000And then we sit down and we talk about it afterwards.
00:05:00.000Obviously, trust has completely fallen off a cliff.
00:05:02.000But there are some pitfalls in independent media, too.
00:05:05.000And one of them is that you develop an audience that is one ideology that just wants to hear one thing and is there to hear what they already think about things.
00:05:14.000And so I think because of the fact that we have different opinions and our different political ideologies, that has sort of protected us against having an audience that is there for any one particular idea.
00:05:28.000And, you know, we'll see sometimes, like, people go, oh, you guys said this and that.
00:05:34.000If this isn't the thing for you, you owe it to yourself to go somewhere else where you're going to hear every day, I guess, whatever it is that you want to be told from within your bubble.
00:05:42.000Well, I think you guys have reached a point where I have to give you the speech.
00:05:46.000And it's like, you've got to stop paying attention to the comments.
00:07:44.000And that person that you don't know that lives in fucking Indiana that is on meth and is, like, really mad because, you know, the progressive in her district doesn't represent her views.
00:07:53.000And she's, like, typing the meanest fucking shit.
00:07:57.000Like, even though you know that that's nonsense, this is probably a crazy person, that's in your head now.
00:08:02.000You know, the toughest thing actually was when we, and by doing the show, is actually by disconnecting from the broader, like, because in traditional media, the way it works is like, we used to go on Fox.
00:08:12.000When you're in Fox, it's like an ecosystem.
00:08:14.000You're in the green room, there's all the other conservatives that are around you, and then there's all these other people who work in conservative ink, like conservative world.
00:09:20.000And you guys are going to be cool to each other.
00:09:23.000I mean, we do take it really seriously.
00:09:26.000And I think we take it this year even more so than ever.
00:09:31.000You know, our biggest podcast download and our biggest YouTube numbers last year were right when Russia invaded Ukraine.
00:09:39.000And, you know, you talk about a high stakes situation where it's It's very difficult to sort through all the propaganda to really figure out what's going on.
00:09:47.000And, you know, we were trying our best to do that in real time.
00:09:50.000And the fact that so many people came to us to try to understand this conflict and what the U.S.'s role in it, what it should be, that really meant a lot, number one.
00:10:01.000But it also, I think, put on both of our shoulders like a real sense of, all right.
00:10:06.000We've got to make sure we're on top of our show.
00:10:07.000We've got to read as much as we possibly can.
00:10:09.000We need to go back and look at, like, Russian nuclear doctrine and just go as deep as we possibly, you know, are capable of on this topic.
00:10:16.000Because there are a lot of people who tell us we're it in terms of the news that they consume.
00:10:22.000So we have shifted to focusing, you know, we still do, like, fun and stupid and silly topics or whatever and indulge whatever our little hobby horse interests are.
00:10:30.000But we've shifted the program somewhat to do more Yeah, I think.
00:10:55.000You're going to have to have that kind of serious coverage of hard news events that people feel like they can trust what you're presenting them.
00:11:04.000And listen, we say all the time, sometimes we're going to fuck up.
00:11:08.000Sometimes we're going to be wrong about something.
00:12:10.000And then she puts all these different links that show all the different stories from as recently as 2017 that's talked about the immense corruption.
00:12:21.000You're supposed to be the New York Times!
00:12:24.000This is one of the primary ways that we've been gaslit in this conflict.
00:12:29.000And it just came out, I don't know if you saw this, you probably did, that Zelensky fired a bunch of his cabinet officials over corruption.
00:12:38.000And it was like, they were taking these fancy vacations to Europe.
00:12:42.000One of them was accused of basically overcharging the military for meals.
00:12:49.000The amount that we have sent to Ukraine, propping up not only their military, but their government, their economy, etc., when they're taking that money, that's coming directly out of the U.S. taxpayer pocket.
00:13:00.000And nobody reported on any of this until Zelensky fired people.
00:13:05.000And then we were allowed to be like, yeah, there's some problems with corruption there, maybe a little bit.
00:13:09.000Maybe we should worry a little bit about where the weapons are going and what exactly is happening there.
00:13:13.000But before then, you weren't allowed to say it.
00:13:14.000Even better, the Times actually changed its headline.
00:13:17.000They were like, Ukraine goes corruption drive.
00:13:19.000And it was like, Zelensky aims to stamp out corruption just to make it a little bit less like the appearance.
00:13:24.000I have some fun numbers for everybody.
00:13:26.000This is from a past monologue I've gone.
00:13:29.000USAID currently at $100 billion is double what the entire rest of the world has given to Ukraine in one year surpasses what we gave the Afghan military in 20 years.
00:13:39.000The total amount to Ukraine now exceeds all US military aid To the country of South Vietnam between 1956 and 1975. Wow.
00:13:59.000But the total lack of debate, the lack of willingness to say, like, hey, when we got into this, what you sold to the American people is you're going to provide defensive weapons only so Ukraine could defend itself.
00:14:35.000And that's the thing that, you know, however you feel about the Ukraine conflict and, you know, the buildup to it and how we got here and all of those things, I think at the very base level, the total lack of an ability to have dissent and debate and understand the potential consequences of what we're doing That is fucking terrifying,
00:14:55.000because we are talking about a nuclear-armed superpower that we are engaged in a proxy war with, and you're basically not allowed to say, hey, how does this end?
00:15:04.000What do we need to do to try to get to negotiated settlement here?
00:15:08.000How do we avoid having a conflict with this nuclear-armed superpower?
00:15:12.000World War III seems like a bad thing to have on the table right now.
00:15:16.000And you guys are one of the few voices of reason that will say that, that agree on both sides of the fence.
00:15:24.000And this is a thing that I... There's a lot of videos out now.
00:15:28.000And I don't know if these people get these videos, but I get them.
00:15:32.000I get these videos of horrible war encounters in Russia and Ukraine.
00:15:42.000And it brings me to this thing that I... I think about a lot.
00:15:46.000Because I think about things that other people do for a living and their jobs, and I think about, like, they live in a world that I don't understand.
00:15:53.000You know, there's, like, I'm fascinated by professional chess players.
00:15:57.000They live in a world that I don't understand because I don't play chess.
00:15:59.000I kind of know how the pieces move, but I've really only played, like, maybe ten times my whole life.
00:16:22.000There's a thing that people, the way my friends who've served talk about war is so Titanically different than the way people who ideologically support or disavow it.
00:16:36.000Like, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about if you say, there's no need for a military.
00:17:00.000This is so important for people to understand, which is that we are 75 years removed from what war on the European continent actually looks like.
00:17:31.000The point, though, is that, you know, we have to try and convey this to people and just say, like, hey, when you're on Twitter and you're like, hey, you know, fuck you, you know, anybody who is against the narrative, you're like, this is not a joke.
00:17:40.000Like, hundreds of thousands of Russians are dead.
00:17:43.000Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead.
00:19:14.000If you look in the history of the way that the great superpowers actually consider their own nuclear first strike use, it's something that is considered ironclad and then boom, it changes like that.
00:19:24.000You're not even going to hear about this.
00:19:25.000And I was heartened a while back when there were some leaks that came out of the Biden administration.
00:19:31.000That he, at a donor event in San Francisco or something, said basically, we've got to make sure we avoid World War III. I'm paraphrasing.
00:19:40.000But he was like, we've got to avoid nuclear war.
00:19:43.000We've got to avoid World War III. And I was like, OK, good.
00:20:19.000And number two, the idea that Russia hasn't escalated in response to our actions is just not true.
00:20:26.000They've been striking critical energy infrastructure, including, you know, in and around Kyiv, which was an escalation.
00:20:32.000They went through with a conscription that there, you know, was very politically dicey for Putin.
00:20:37.000There's rumors that they may go through with another draft.
00:20:40.000So the idea that they just like took all of this lying down didn't escalate is a fantasy to start with.
00:20:46.000But it's incredibly dangerous and foolish to think just because they didn't push the nuclear button yet that, oh, it's all fine and he's just full of it.
00:20:53.000Thank God there's people like you guys out there, because there's so many people that they have Ukraine in the same category of importance and significance as they do climate change.
00:21:05.000Climate change, which is a real thing, but it's a politically divisive alleyway where you're not allowed to veer from the course and even look at any kind of science.
00:21:28.000Because you can't just openly support something you don't understand without a comprehensive view of what the fuck the factors are and how it got to be that way in the first place.
00:21:37.000And you're not going to hear that in a five minute clip on mainstream news.
00:22:56.000The first year of every Russian conflict is a total shitshow.
00:22:58.000If you look at Finland, if you look at the first year of Hitler's invasion, even going all the way back to Napoleon and some of the Tsar's campaigns before that, they lose a shit ton of people.
00:23:48.000And one of the reasons that many of those conflicts, first and two, went on and ultimately came to the conclusion they were, was because millions of lives were lost.
00:23:56.000And the whole point from those conflicts, if you look at the way that people talked, was we have to learn the lesson.
00:24:01.000We have to learn the lesson, but it's been 75 years, and now this is all a game.
00:24:05.000This is a tweet that people are saying about Ukraine, but it says real-world consequences.
00:24:21.000And, you know, there's a couple things that do give me some heart, which is, number one, even though, like, I can't really blame the people who are just, who can't understand seeing it another way, because the propaganda that is coming from every network, really,
00:25:56.000He's selling a book and in the book he's comparing Russia and Ukraine to Batman and Robin.
00:26:02.000And he's like, Ukraine is Robin and we want to take Robin and bring him over to our side.
00:26:08.000And it's like this open secret that they're doing this.
00:26:12.000There were cables that actually WikiLeaks released.
00:26:17.000And a friend who's a great journalist, Bronco Marcitech, who's been looking at the Ukraine conflict with a critical eye, he sorted through these cables.
00:26:27.000And he found all of these diplomatic cables from the prior era, where you had NATO allies, you had U.S. officials.
00:26:36.000Who were all saying, hey guys, Russia has red lines here with regard to Ukraine and floating NATO membership with Ukraine is a real violation of their hard red lines and were very fearful.
00:26:48.000And they laid out exactly the trajectory that we could find ourselves on.
00:26:53.000Now, that doesn't deny Russia agency or, you know, Putin and the Kremlin agency for invading.
00:27:02.000However, it is to say that, you know, there was a time when you were allowed to acknowledge that U.S. policy could lead to this exact event.
00:27:11.000And now when you even suggest that us, you know, floating NATO membership with Ukraine and saying that they were going to be made apart, that some of these things were exacerbating and they crossed the red line and You know, created a situation that was incredibly tense where this is the predictable outcome.
00:27:25.000Again, you're not allowed to talk about that now.
00:27:27.000Well, it's also, like, to bring back the chest analogy, is if you looked at war and you ignored the human casualties and the horrors and the fact that it should absolutely be avoided at all costs and all human deaths are valuable and bombing apartment buildings and all the horrible shit,
00:27:56.000And when we find out about the moving of weapons closer to Russia, the discussion of them joining NATO, and you realize Russia is getting moved on.
00:28:08.000Now, you absolutely be correct in saying the correct response is not blowing up apartment buildings and starting a war and invading a country.
00:28:32.000And that's what's so fucking important about today.
00:28:36.000And that's what's so dangerous about censorship.
00:28:38.000And that's what's so dangerous about these partisan ideas where you're willing to, like, you're willing to absolutely ignore good points that the other side says, because then you would give them some sort of credit in winning this ideological bullshit game we're all playing.
00:29:23.000And then we were like, hey, let's talk about Jared Kushner.
00:29:25.000And then a lot of people on the right side, I'm like, hey, you know, this guy, it's actually great.
00:29:30.000There are internal Saudi documents where he asked the Saudi Royal Kingdom fund or whatever for a billion dollar investment in his new fund, private equity fund, right after he leaves the White House.
00:29:40.000The internal emails are like, I don't think this guy's a very good investor.
00:29:43.000I'm not sure this would be a good use of our capital.
00:29:45.000And MBS, the crown prince, is like, give him the money.
00:30:41.000But to your point about censorship and the total lack of willingness to challenge your own side's narrative, did you just see this Columbia Journalism Review report that came out about Russiagate?
00:30:58.000But I think this is one of the first, certainly mainstream, and CJR is as mainstream as they come, mainstream attempts to actually go back through the Russiagate narrative Where it started, how it was sold to the American people, and all of the lies and especially the omissions.
00:31:17.000And they take a really hard look at the New York Times as kind of the main player in the story.
00:31:21.000There were other villains as well, but the New York Times was the main player.
00:31:24.000And they would report something that, you know, they would shade it to look as bad as possible with regards to Trump-Russia connections.
00:31:32.000They would get some other piece of information that was exculpatory.
00:31:37.000And they got all kinds of, you know, millions of new subscribers to their paper who were there to hear this, like, you know, elaborate tale of Russian conspiracy and the Manchurian candidate and whatever.
00:31:49.000And the underlying narrative that at least I take away from the CJR report is New York Times and MSNBC and a lot of other places.
00:33:09.000You don't have to be a propagandist or a spokesperson for the state.
00:33:12.000You can be a real person and tell people what the fuck is going on.
00:33:16.000Because this is a wild game that other people are playing on our behalf with money that they've gotten from our taxes where we don't even get a say in what the fuck they spend it on.
00:33:35.000But you're dealing with a fucking destructive empire that has been doing things to other countries that if you saw them, if you were boots on the ground, you would be horrified if you watched a drone bomb a wedding party in Yemen.
00:33:50.000If you were a part of something in another country that we're involved in, that our tax dollars have gone to, that we have just written off as being not of concern.
00:34:04.000I mean, across the board, humanitarian organizations around the world say this is the greatest humanitarian crisis that is unfolding in the entire world.
00:34:12.000And, you know, we are highly complicit in this through our support of Saudi Arabia.
00:34:17.000You don't see Yemen flags on people's cars.
00:34:19.000You don't see the news media talking about it.
00:34:22.000You don't see them humanizing the children that are starving and dying there.
00:34:27.000And so, you know, part of the way that the information ecosystem is shaped is what they decide to care about, what they decide to cover, the way they decide to cover it, and what just gets pushed off the page entirely out of sight, out of mind.
00:34:41.000I think this is an important part to talk about with this, that With human beings, when human beings work inside corporate systems and these systems have goals and everyone's working together and there's a hierarchy of people and you're not allowed to step out of line,
00:34:59.000we develop a way of thinking that is almost like it's a tribal way and it's kind of a religious way.
00:35:07.000And I'm curious to know how you guys feel about your ability to be completely independent outside of that and how that's affected the way you think about things.
00:35:16.000Because for me, personally, having all these conversations with so many different people about so many different subjects, I'm a different person.
00:35:33.000Bombarding, overwhelming education that it's like very difficult to process, but if you're in a corporate environment It's very hard to think independently.
00:36:23.000And, you know, some of it I watch and I'm proud of.
00:36:26.000You know, I focused on a lot of the same issues I do, like labor and economic inequality, economics, things that I really care a lot about.
00:39:06.000But I won't ever say anything negative about my friends.
00:39:09.000It's just like I don't think that's necessary.
00:39:11.000And that's something that happens when you get a shit ton of money involved and you get relationships and you're drinking scotch together at a private club and you're discussing the advertising revenue and we'd like to donate a bunch of money to CNN. We'd like to figure out a way that we can work together.
00:39:28.000You know, hey, I'm a fucking Captain Billionaire, and I want to donate all this money to all these people that own media organizations.
00:39:36.000And I would, you know, I'd like to be your friend.
00:40:12.000And so, like, when you buy cable, like Cox Communications or whatever, they pay, or Comcast, for example, they pay CNN and MSNBC and Fox to be a part of the bundle.
00:40:22.000The vast majority of the profit of these cable channels comes from the bundle.
00:40:27.000So CNN made a billion in profit just last year, all propped up by the bundle, because they're getting paid just to exist.
00:40:35.000I mean, can you imagine if we were getting paid to exist, not based upon our actual numbers?
00:40:40.000You can actually reach less people and make more money.
00:40:43.000And so it's all part of this fake system.
00:40:46.000But I mean, the benefit is, is that with the rise of independent media, more and more advertisers are waking up, the less eyeballs, the less of an incentive for the bundle to actually pay them to be a part of it.
00:40:56.000And that's why I was actually really excited by Amazon striking that deal with the NFL, because I'm like, yes, get the rights away from these people, because that is what props up all kinds of bullshit that we don't have like a small d democratic input with our eyeballs.
00:41:38.000I do think it's a dangerous moment for people.
00:41:42.000And one thing we've been covering a lot on the show is you have a kind of breakdown in previous national stories and narratives.
00:41:51.000And people are very, like, story-driven.
00:41:52.000You know, you have a breakdown in, I'm not a religious person, so this is, like, not my bag, but you have a breakdown in religion.
00:41:58.000So some of the stories that have kind of, like, held the country together and that people helped use to make sense of their life, or even the story about the American dream.
00:42:24.000Are willing to sell a narrative to, you know, a lot of folks who feel kind of lost, kind of adrift, and don't like existing in that chaos.
00:42:33.000So it's like, you know, whether they're being scammed by, like, SBF or this, like, Congressman George Santos who, like, made up every aspect of his life.
00:42:56.000The part I'm obsessed with him is, first of all, I just can't imagine being that person who can, like, whoever he was across from, he was going to tell them what they wanted to hear.
00:43:10.000When the dude was like, I'm into volleyball, he's like, I was a star volleyball player at a college he didn't even go to.
00:43:16.000I have a very good friend who texted me today.
00:43:19.000And he told me, I'm here with this guy who knew you from Boston and this and that and that and this.
00:43:42.000There's real people that are just crazy.
00:43:44.000And that's the thing, is I'm like, how many of these people are out there, number one?
00:43:47.000And number two, I just feel like his ability to rise and make it to Congress says so much about the cracks FTX execs maxed out on donations.
00:44:41.000I worked at Goldman Sachs, all this stuff.
00:44:43.000They're like, oh, this is our kind of guy.
00:44:44.000To the electorate and the Republican, he pitched that he's like this trailblazing, you know, Americans, I am the American dream, like Latino, gay, all this stuff.
00:44:53.000I mean, it really was incredible the way that he told people what they wanted to hear.
00:45:00.000I'm really interested and obsessed with because all of these people are like a reflection of the holes and vulnerabilities in society.
00:45:07.000You know, same thing with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. He told people in Congress, he told the media, he had this very specific cultivated image of his like wacky hair and his like dressed down look and whatever, that he was the eccentric genius or whatever.
00:45:23.000And a lot of people who were supposed to be super smart in the business press and in the regular press and on Capitol Hill, they all bought it hook, line, and sinker.
00:45:34.000After Bernie Madoff, you're not going to fool us again.
00:46:42.000The most sophisticated investors and just totally bamboozled by this guy.
00:46:48.000And then on the other end, a lot of people who bought into what he was selling or NFTs that were being sold or whatever random crypto scams were out there.
00:47:02.000You know, they had their own vulnerabilities of maybe they were hurt in the financial crash.
00:47:06.000Maybe they feel like it was disproportionately young men, right?
00:47:09.000So maybe they feel like the American dream of like getting the house and having the family and the, you know, the like...
00:47:17.000Basic middle class prosperity wasn't really open to them and they're being sold this sort of hero journey narrative about, you know, fortune favors the brave and you got to get in early and this is secret special knowledge that's going to allow you to achieve your goals of wealth creation that has been held out to you of like what is at the core of being a man.
00:48:07.000He's like, what we are talking about, though, is in the last two decades, we've had a crisis amongst young men.
00:48:12.000And something we talk about on the show is what Crystal's getting at with the decline of the American dream, like the idea that you were going to do better than your parents.
00:48:19.000And that's just not really true anymore.
00:48:22.000Even if you went to school and you have a shit ton of of student debt, even if you're working class in terms of wage growth, upward mobility.
00:48:29.000People who are graduating from high school, who are men and working class having much more trouble actually finding a mate.
00:48:37.000So there's a big college imbalance right now where a lot of men are dropping out of college.
00:48:41.000They no longer feel Accepted and you're reaching almost 60-40 splits of women and men in college, especially who are graduating.
00:48:49.000A lot of women who have college degrees don't actually want to date somebody who doesn't have a college degree.
00:48:54.000And so there's this big imbalance in the dating market.
00:48:56.000And then also among single men, you see a big decline in lifetime wages.
00:49:02.000But what really makes me really sad is the drug overdose numbers and they die much earlier.
00:49:08.000They're much less likely to exercise, much less likely to fulfill A stronger life.
00:49:13.000And that's what gets to the charlatanism of being able to buy into the charlatan.
00:49:17.000Signing up for some MLN scheme that you might see online.
00:50:54.000The word tough is a word, but it's like, oh, you're tough?
00:50:59.000No, mental toughness is fucking important.
00:51:01.000It's a really important quality of life, and it's been diminished to this thing that's like a part of toxic masculinity ideology, and it's...
00:51:10.000Well, and this is where, you know, the Andrew Tates of the world come in and they, like, perform this just, like, caricaturish, ridiculous, masculine whatever they're doing.
00:51:19.000And then also maybe as a sex trafficker, we'll find out.
00:51:44.000An assault on the middle class, on the working class, where it becomes so much harder to be able to fulfill that cultural narrative of what it is supposed to be to be a man.
00:51:57.000I think that's been, this is this woman, but, you know, from my external perspective, I think that's been really, really devastating.
00:52:05.000And I don't want to pretend also, though, like it's like only young men who are getting scammed right now.
00:52:15.000And there's a great series about this MLM multi-level marketing scheme of these fucking ugly leggings that a bunch of Midwestern housewives for some reason loved these things.
00:53:20.000As the thing went on, and originally there was like a real demand for these leggings and people really did want them.
00:53:24.000So you felt like, oh, I'm doing the thing.
00:53:25.000But then as time goes on, the only people who are making money are the people who are convincing more to get into the legging sales business.
00:53:34.000And, you know, it's a classic basically pyramid scheme.
00:53:38.000And over time, the quality of the leggings degrade.
00:53:40.000They're sending out packages that smell bad and they're ripped and whatever.
00:53:43.000But the bottom line is the only way to make money was by bringing in more people after you, which is definition of MLM. That was for the Midwestern housewife or whatever.
00:53:53.000Maybe they just have a marketing problem because someone should tell them how fly those leggings are.
00:55:16.000I don't know, but anyone who's willing to lie about doing steroids when it's so obvious to anyone who understands hormonal optimization and steroid use and like that More Plates More Dates guy, Derek.
00:56:43.000But the Liver King thing drove me nuts, because you were looking at teenagers who thought, they're like, oh, this is real if I eat bull testicles, or if I buy whatever his bullshit supplements are.
00:59:12.000There's no way you get there without the hard work.
00:59:15.000Like, the real tragedy in this is that this guy had an opportunity to say what's possible with chemical intervention, Here's the pros and cons, and this is the dangers of it.
00:59:26.000Also, this is the nutrition that I take to optimize my body, which is also critical.
00:59:32.000You cannot get to that physique with just steroids.
00:59:36.000You must have amazing work ethic, incredible discipline, ability to push through Exertion and just have a fucking force of will.
00:59:47.000And you have to have amazing nutrition.
00:59:49.000You have to be really fucking healthy to allow all those tissues to recover and nourish them and then stay that lean.
00:59:56.000So you have to be very disciplined with your diet.
00:59:59.000So what he's done is very, very, very impressive.
01:00:36.000I think the problem is just being dishonest.
01:00:38.000If you're the liver king and you're talking about your stack and explaining to people what you take, and that you're doing it all legally, and then you're also eating all this food, the question is, is that a thing that would influence other people to do that when they shouldn't do that?
01:00:56.000I think the real responsibility that someone has when you're in that situation, if you are doing that stuff, You should be honest about what you're doing and then also honest if something goes wrong.
01:01:08.000So I didn't get into health and fitness like two years ago or so.
01:01:12.000And it's so important to have realistic expectations about what you can do, about what you can get, about what it actually means to diet.
01:01:21.000So like Dr. Lane Norton, who I use his app, Carbon, like, you know, you realize after a couple of weeks into a cut, you're like, oh, this fucking sucks.
01:01:27.000And you're like, and I'm only losing, you know, I'm only losing whatever, two pounds a week.
01:01:32.000And then also even with heavy resistance training, four times a week, diet relatively on point.
01:01:54.000But I'm more saying, like, for kids, especially, you know, look, I didn't know a fucking thing before I started consuming all this content, like Puberman and all these other folks, Derek, all these videos.
01:02:03.000And Derek had a video once of a guy who was, like, one year out, I think.
01:02:07.000It was like, this is what a realistic, like, six pounds of muscle looks like.
01:02:09.000And he was like, yeah, it doesn't look great.
01:02:11.000He's like, but that's what it looks like, man.
01:02:13.000And I was like, yeah, that's actually very helpful to me as somebody who was just starting off from the ground.
01:02:17.000And then I think about 22-year-old me.
01:02:56.000But at the end of the day, does it matter if you're playing a character if people believe it?
01:03:00.000You know, then there's no difference whether you're just like playing a ridiculous character because you're still selling the same thing to a public that's buying it.
01:03:08.000Yeah, then what do you do about Stephen Colbert?
01:05:45.000They still don't buy the narrative, you know.
01:05:47.000But I do think in general, it was easier for them to sell a unified, like, propagandistic narrative to the American people, except when it came to things that were just, like, farcical on their face.
01:06:10.000I mean, that's the thing with the existing, like, the legacy media business models.
01:06:16.000There's no—you know, CNN has a new boss, and he's saying different things and trying to—it's like— You're still dealing with the same beast here, though.
01:06:24.000You're going to find yourself falling into the exact same mistakes and holes.
01:06:28.000I mean, that's why, you know, you see the same dynamic going on at Twitter right now, where it's like the part of the reason they were making the censorship decisions they were was because of ideology.
01:06:38.000And I think that comes out in the Twitter files like you had a couple of people.
01:06:41.000You had a lot of people who didn't want to make a decision.
01:06:43.000They're just like, you know, that's in general.
01:06:45.000People don't like being responsible or making decisions.
01:06:47.000And a couple of really ideological actors.
01:06:50.000But you also see in the fallout with advertisers fleeing now that a lot of the reason these censorship decisions were driven was about the money.
01:08:02.000I mean, we built our business model so that we could try to insulate ourselves from those incentives because we're human beings, too.
01:08:08.000And we don't want to be so arrogant to assume that we're not also shaped by whatever incentive structure we ultimately live in.
01:08:13.000But yeah, that's how you end up with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., making very similar content moderation decisions because ultimately it's all about what the advertisers are going to feel comfy with.
01:08:24.000Let me tell you a story about when we got the Spotify deal.
01:09:57.000So YouTube has a policy where if you play a clip of Trump claiming that the election was stolen, that they're going to take down that whole video.
01:10:04.000And I was like, well, so we're a politics show.
01:10:08.000We cover Donald Trump when we play clips.
01:10:10.000That doesn't mean necessarily that we agree or endorse those clips.
01:10:14.000So how are we supposed to cover the news?
01:10:17.000And they were like, well, as long as you say that it's not true.
01:10:20.000And I'm like, yeah, OK, even probably would say that anyway.
01:10:23.000But it's like, why are you dictating the way that I have to do my coverage?
01:10:28.000We're going to cover a State of the Union in a couple of days, like a live stream.
01:11:08.000And the other piece is, you know, it'd be one thing if the standards were consistent and clear, but they're just like, you just don't know.
01:11:16.000I mean, just like with your videos, suddenly they were monetized and, huh, who knows why or what happened or what that conversation was like.
01:11:23.000And so it makes it a challenging situation.
01:11:48.000But the problem is, if you say, okay, we'll let Crystal and Sager talk about it, because they're going to mock this guy's claims, but then you're going to have some right-wing, like, QAnon person who's going to put it, and then they're going to have it, and we need to do this because of that,
01:12:04.000and then it's a call to arms, and they're like, oh, Jesus.
01:12:45.000It was actually a Republican candidate who won because they were using this sketchy system of ballot harvesting, and that one actually got uncovered, and it was a very close race, and it was enough to throw the result.
01:13:01.000That's one of the only instances I know where there was enough sufficient to actually change what the result was.
01:13:08.000It's important you ask that question, too.
01:13:29.000I don't remember the exact number of—I want to say it was like 40 or 50 cases.
01:13:33.000Every single one of them was thrown out.
01:13:35.000And so I think with election fraud, it's important also to think about what level of fraud is being alleged, what exists actually today, how corrupt our elections actually used to be.
01:13:46.000In some measures, we actually have some of the least election fraud in modern American history.
01:13:52.000One of my favorite books, Means of Ascent, which is about how LBJ straight up stole the 1948 Senate election here in Texas.
01:13:59.000There's a lot that happened with JFK, too.
01:14:01.000It's like Box 13, where they straight up stuffed ballots on day six of the Democratic primary before the things were about to get counted.
01:14:10.000And there was a whole Supreme Court lawsuit.
01:14:12.000Anyway, LBJ is never president without stealing that election.
01:14:14.000JFK, a lot of dead people voted in Chicago in 1960. West Virginia...
01:14:21.000I want to revise my previous statement about that North Carolina election being the only one.
01:14:27.000I mean, to me, the most obvious example of election fraud was the 2000 presidential election where it was like, you know, top down and they had all the officials in place to get them to stop the count and like, okay, it's going to be George W. Bush.
01:14:39.000So, in my opinion, that was probably the greatest election fraud.
01:14:42.000Yeah, I mean, you got the Secretary of State.
01:16:24.000They had one Secret Service agent that didn't get to eat what everybody else ate, and he was on this vegan diet, and they were giving him all these pills.
01:18:55.000Here's something that people need to understand about bears, because people think about bears like, oh, there's a beautiful animal in the forest, and it's also a teddy bear, and it's Winnie the Pooh.
01:19:04.000I was there when there was a brawl between a male bear and a female bear, and the female bear scared the male bear off, and the male bear killed one of her cubs, and then she ate the cub.
01:20:04.000It's so weird how much the culture has changed in terms of the way that theocratic right and the way they would think about who was advocating for censorship.
01:20:14.000And then it's like you get to D.C. and I feel like everything changed very quickly.
01:20:19.000Well, it was always bipartisan, honestly, because if you go back to the Tipper Gore days, that was Al Gore's wife and she was the one that was advocating for censorship of rap videos and rap songs.
01:23:00.000I'm like, they need to know that that's a word.
01:23:02.000Because someday someone's going to say it, it's going to make them feel bad.
01:23:04.000But like, I can see that when they're in even like third grade, fourth grade, where they're able to understand there's things we can say here, but we can't say in this other place.
01:23:13.000But I mean, I have a five year old in kindergarten right now.
01:23:15.000I don't know that she would really get to make the distinction.
01:23:18.000I understand that, but eventually that information is going to get to her.
01:26:12.000The language guide also considers preferred pronouns as problematic, because the term preferred suggests that a person's pronouns are optional.
01:29:02.000We both feel the same way you do in terms of like, you know, I don't see myself as like fitting with the Democratic Party and everything that they're doing.
01:29:09.000I just saw like Nancy Pelosi is endorsing Adam Schiff for a California Senate.
01:29:13.000When you read through the way that man lied to the American public through all of Russiagate, you're like...
01:29:17.000He should be, like, in prison for perjury, not being bolstered by one of the most powerful women in the country for the United States Senate.
01:29:25.000Do you see him sitting next to Ilian Omar, where she's apologizing for talking about it's all about the Benjamins?
01:29:47.000I understand that the way she phrased it, like she could have phrased it a different way so that people would have less of a freakout, but can you not talk about the influence of money in D.C.? Of course.
01:30:00.000I mean, there's a very obvious reason why for my entire life, There's been a uniparty consensus around our policy vis-a-vis the Israeli government and a total inability or unwillingness to criticize the Israeli government.
01:30:15.000It has everything to do with organization and, yes, money, just like every other fucking interest in D.C. And so, yeah, the fact that she said that she got kicked off the Foreign Affairs Committee.
01:30:25.000Look, I have issues and disagreements with Ilhan Omar, but she actually is one of the more courageous voices on foreign policy who's willing to call out some of the hypocrisy and bullshit In U.S. foreign policy, extremely rare in terms of United States Congressmen.
01:30:39.000So it's actually kind of a real loss that she got kicked off that committee.
01:30:42.000Whether you agree with her or not, she has a bold opinion, and that opinion is not her own.
01:30:47.000There's many people that have that opinion, and they should be represented.
01:30:50.000My point is she's sitting right next to Adam Schiff, and no one says shit.
01:30:55.000She doesn't say, yeah, yeah, I probably should have said, hey, motherfucker, what did you say?
01:30:59.000You said some crazy shit that wasn't true at all.
01:31:03.000No, he loved having his face on the cameras during all the Russiagate stuff.
01:31:09.000And he would go out there and just go right up to the line of basically saying, yeah, we got the goods on Trump in Russia.
01:31:40.000You know, it's also funny in terms of, like, what you're not allowed to say, what you get censored off of a committee for.
01:31:44.000Like you said, look, I don't agree with Ilhan Omar on a lot.
01:31:47.000I mean, I also don't think that it should be out of bounds to talk about influence of any government, including the Saudi government, of which a lot of these people are on the take of hypocrisy, which drives me fucking crazy.
01:32:49.000She had, like, intentionally, I think my recollection is, infiltrated a bunch of, like, San Francisco's sort of, like, Democratic donor circuits.
01:32:56.000The crazy thing is, she's like a seven.
01:32:57.000You know, imagine if they brought up one of their bombshells.
01:32:59.000She was probably, like, the early ones.
01:33:40.000She would go to a bunch of CPAC and NRA conferences and ingratiate herself with GOP officials and then she would sleep with them and then basically try and get as close to Trump as possible.
01:33:52.000There's a lot of governments that do this, right?
01:33:54.000The Israeli government does this, the Russian government, the Chinese government.
01:34:47.000If you look at it, they explicitly, when they banned Google, Facebook, and all that, they're like, they're going to use it to shape our population and spy on us.
01:35:21.000Well, so I don't know, but it was spotted actually over one of the three sites in the United States which has intercontinental ballistic missiles.
01:35:28.000And of course, it just happened to fly there and it drifted off, of course, according to the Chinese government.
01:35:33.000But we already knew that their spy satellites are able to see this area and collect whatever data there is to collect.
01:36:29.000The worry was that there would be debris that would hurt the civilian population, and then the other thing I saw was that they actually wanted to be able to observe it more and see what it was and capabilities and whatever, and it might be more useful to it in the sky than shot up into a billion figures.
01:36:47.000Well, the Avengers have a net they could shoot out of a jet.
01:36:49.000You're telling me the United States doesn't have a net?
01:40:38.000So it was an enormous great ape that lived alongside us and absolutely 100,000 years ago.
01:40:46.000And then they found many other creatures that were really interesting that we didn't know existed that absolutely lived alongside human beings.
01:40:55.000One of them was the hobbit man from the island of Flores.
01:41:25.000And he was telling me all the different names that the native Hawaiians have for things.
01:41:29.000And he was explaining how there was a creature that supposedly lived when the first people got here.
01:41:36.000And it was a small, hairy, ape-like creature that is similar to what's been spotted in Vietnam and in other parts of the world in these jungle areas.
01:42:32.000You've talked a lot with Graham Hancock, his ancient apocalypse series, and the reason why I think there's a connectivity is like, what's possible, man?
01:42:40.000I'm like, if there is ancient life here or multiple forms of alien life or, you know, some connectivity between that or even past contact of all this, it's like our entire understanding of the world is just completely wrong.
01:42:52.000And I just find that so seductive, I guess, like that idea.
01:42:56.000Maybe that's foolish and maybe that's, you know, part like a male thing like you're talking about.
01:43:00.000But there's enough there that we can't help but be interested.
01:43:05.000You just persuaded Sagar he was just shitting on the Sasquatch people and now he's like all in.
01:43:09.000I'm talking more about Homo Florensis.
01:43:11.000The Sasquatch is more likely because it definitely existed.
01:43:18.000Like they know that within the time that human beings were alive, we're going to have stories about this creature.
01:43:22.000Now whether or not those stories persist long after the creature is extinct and people pretend they see it when they're really just seeing black bears that are walking upright, which they do all the time.
01:43:34.000And if black bears have a hurt paw, there was a famous black bear in New Jersey that had a very badly damaged front paw so it would walk on its rear legs.
01:43:45.000It would walk upright like a seven foot tall animal.
01:44:04.000We were in Montana, and we were at this grizzly preserve where they'd taken these problematic grizzlies that raid people's garbage and shit.
01:46:17.000So it was like late at night and they hear all this barking and barking and they look out from his fucking bedroom window to one of the stalls and you see a pack of wolves devouring a horse.
01:46:37.000That like super ideological libertarians took over and they like moved to the town.
01:46:43.000They like voted themselves onto the town council and they went about getting rid of like every single regulation they possibly could, including the ones that had to do with like the proper way to store your trash to avoid attracting bears.
01:49:07.000These are giant predators that will 100% kill your dog, 100% kill your kids.
01:49:12.000You leave a baby outside, the baby's dead, the bear eats it and runs away with it.
01:49:16.000They don't have any morals, they don't have any ethics, they're playing by a totally different set of rules than you would imagine from a Disney movie.
01:49:23.000But this is what happens when you don't control predators.
01:49:27.000The wildlife conservationists have long been saying, you have to keep these animals in check, because it's bad for them, it's bad for the people, and the nutty people are like, yeah, but we're in their area.
01:49:40.000But they don't understand, like, you know, right where we are, the hill country.
01:49:48.000Pure Comanche range versus rival Indian groups, like complete just slaughter for resources.
01:49:57.000Like, I don't think people really get what it really was like, even 150 years ago, like, if you think about Buffalo and the range and the conquering of the Old West, I've read so many books about that time period, just because I'm so fascinated by it.
01:50:10.000That era of what it was like and what the actual West and the range and all that was, it was a dangerous place.
01:50:17.000I've read a lot about Theodore Roosevelt and some of his original encounters on some of his hunting trips with bears and everything.
01:50:25.000It's just completely, completely outrageous.
01:51:24.000I just hunted a Neil guy recently, which is an Indian animal that evolved around tigers.
01:51:30.000And I've never seen an animal that runs so fast when you hit it.
01:51:35.000I thought I shot this Neil guy with a bow and arrow, and it was a perfect shot.
01:51:41.000And I was really sure that it was a perfect shot.
01:51:43.000It was a 52-yard shot, centered my pin, watched the arrow hit it, and that animal ran off like on a full sprint like it wasn't even remotely injured.
01:52:26.000And that is an animal that evolved around tigers.
01:52:29.000And those dudes, you can't get close to them, and if you hit them, they run like there's nothing wrong.
01:52:35.000Like, that animal had an arrow that went through its vitals in a perfect shot, passed through its body, went 30 yards past its body where it found the arrow.
01:52:58.000They were telling me they shoot those with a.300 Win Mag and they have to have another one in the chamber because the guide will do a follow-up shot on the animal because they're so fucking tough because they evolved around tigers.
01:53:51.000It's one of those skills where you have to put it in from a very early age.
01:53:55.000And when you learn about indigenous tribes, or I read a lot of history, like the Mongols I know you're into as well, they start learning when they're like three or four years old.
01:54:02.000Like they start pulling bows before they can, like barely when they can start walking.
01:54:06.000So it becomes part of the actual culture itself.
01:54:09.000And that level of skill, I don't know if you could teach that at this point in the West.
01:54:18.000We were talking the other day about people that live in the Congo that are working in these cobalt mines, and I was like, you've got to imagine if this is what you were born into, because humans are so adaptable.
01:54:28.000We're so accustomed to whatever we're accustomed to.
01:54:31.000And if you live there, you would do what everyone else is doing, because you would get by.
01:54:35.000And if you were born into a nomadic tribe that traveled around and followed the buffalo, you would be hunting them the same way they did.
01:54:45.000And that's the whole idea behind Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson's theory about the restarting of human civilization, is that we have achieved a very high level of sophistication, which explains the pyramids and Gobekli Tepe.
01:55:00.000It explains all these immense stone structures where they move stones with some unknown technology from as many as 500 miles away.
01:55:09.0001,000 tons stones through the mountains.
01:55:12.000We have no idea how the fuck they did it.
01:55:14.000And then you go 5,000 years later and you have barbarians.
01:55:25.000And I think that's one of the reasons why, if we go back a few thousand years ago, you have these people with these brilliant minds that live these unbelievably barbaric lives.
01:55:35.000And I think it's because they're the descendants of people that had to survive whatever was left over after the sophisticated civilization was hit by comets.
01:55:43.000Crystal just bought me a copy of the Perry Reese map, that famous map, which was the Ottoman Admiral written like 1513. I think he drew it and he based it off from the Library of Alexandria and it includes that 10,000 year old coastline of Antarctica.
01:56:03.000And the more evidence that gets uncovered, the more that's a very viable theory.
01:56:08.000Because the core samples, the hard physical data of those core samples shows that somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,800 years ago, there was massive impacts all over the earth.
01:56:20.000As much as 30% of the Earth shows evidence of this.
01:56:23.00030% of the Earth shows evidence of iridium in high levels, which is very rare on Earth, but very common in space.
01:56:29.000Nano diamonds from the impact, carbon from burnt everything.
01:58:11.000Oh, that's right, because it has more information that's going to be available to it.
01:58:14.000It's going to be way, way, way better.
01:58:16.000See, I listened to Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT.
01:58:22.000I heard he got a question about the fourth version, because there is a lot of speculation that it's going to be like...
01:58:28.000A whole other universe in terms of his capabilities, that it's going to be more closely approximating actual intelligence in a way that's going to really super freak people out.
01:58:38.000That's what a lot of people like Lex and others, I guess, are projecting.
01:58:42.000He was really trying to pour cold water on that idea, but that may just be because he doesn't want to get it overhyped.
01:58:49.000He wants to set the bar low so that when the thing actually drops, It lands with an appropriate, I guess, fanfare.
01:58:56.000The real thing of concern is that this didn't exist four years ago, three years ago, two years ago, and now it exists and it's gotten better really quickly.
01:59:05.000Maybe it did exist two years ago, but it wasn't publicly consumable.
01:59:12.000Actually, this was, again, listening to this interview with Sam Altman, he was talking about how he was actually really surprised by the way that the public, when they got to play with it, were like, oh my god.
01:59:25.000Because in his mind, working so closely with the technology, this just felt like the next logical step.
01:59:31.000But for people who hadn't been deeply, you know, enmeshed in the details of the technology, when suddenly you had this thing in front of you and you could play with it and then you've got this, like, the image generators and whatever, that it kind of blew people's minds.
01:59:45.000And we've been talking about how you've got universities professors who are freaked out.
01:59:51.000About kids cheating on tests and using this to write their essays and whatever.
01:59:55.000And so I do think it's going to require a kind of entire rethink of the university experience, of what parts of what human beings can do are more difficult to replicate by the machine.
02:00:10.000Because the machine can spit out a Sager and Jetty theoretical UFO monologue, but it can't create new ideas, right?
02:00:16.000It's lacking a sort of, like, creativity.
02:01:28.000And I do think part of the freak out right now is because most automation that has like killed people's jobs has been service workers, has been blue collar.
02:01:41.000And now you have a lot of white collar workers who are like, oh shit, this could be coming for me.
02:02:33.000And I think if you want to get better at whatever you're doing that requires writing, like if you're going to be a journalist, even if you use ChatGPT to give you a framework, you should learn how to be creative.
02:03:42.000So some of them are going to be great.
02:03:43.000Some of them are going to be, you know, solid.
02:03:46.000Some are going to be like, oh, it was a bit of a struggle.
02:03:47.000But when you get that one that it's like you have the idea and you're able to lay it out in a way that you feel like really captures what you were trying to say and, like, makes a point that you feel like hasn't been made before, that's wonderful.
02:04:00.000That's why I'm celebrating it with the classroom, though.
02:04:02.000Because I had to do—when I was in college, we had so many bullshit, like, busywork quizzes that they were just doing to assign so they could check a box on the syllabus.
02:04:10.000Now, they're sitting in the classroom being like, what do you think?
02:04:13.000They have to test you live to see if you're either paying attention.
02:05:03.000For entrepreneurship, we're all going to use it.
02:05:05.000We're going to learn how to use this tool together, and then we're going to talk about it in the classroom.
02:05:10.000That's what education actually can be.
02:05:12.000And so I talk a lot about higher education corruption.
02:05:15.000And really what it is to me is, you know, places charging $80,000 a year, which is outrageous, putting these kids into debt and not teaching them anything which is actually useful in the real world.
02:05:58.000It's like something on Jekyll Island on the creation of the Fed and then what the Fed's actual mandate is.
02:06:03.000And you're like, oh, the Fed has a lot of Over our society, over our economy, over our politics, actually.
02:06:09.000There's a lot of arguments about certain politicians never would have gone if the Fed hadn't been doing the policies that they had, like Jimmy Carter in 1979 with Paul Volcker.
02:06:17.000We're living actually in an era right now of tremendous departure from previous Federal Reserve policy.
02:06:23.000We went from a zero interest rate environment to higher interest rates.
02:06:26.000The economy right now is the craziest thing you've ever seen.
02:06:28.000So the jobs numbers actually came out this morning.
02:06:30.000We are at one of the lowest unemployment rates in modern American history.
02:06:34.000Since 1969. Right, so it's a great economy, right?
02:06:37.000But wage stagnation, it's not keeping up with inflation of goods.
02:07:38.000This is actually Alan Greenspan sort of innovated this of like Fed speak, where any pronouncement he made was like incomprehensible if you didn't have a PhD in economics.
02:07:49.000And it hasn't always been like that in American history.
02:07:52.000You know, Fed policy, monetary policy was hotly debated.
02:07:55.000There were like populist revolts over it.
02:07:58.000But there's a real anti-populist movement to consolidate power in the hands of a few credentialed bureaucrats by posturing like, oh, we're just sort of like doing the math and it's just a calculation and there's no morals involved.
02:08:11.000We don't need to understand what other people think about it and to make it feel like, oh, we've got this because we're the credentialed experts when, you know, in reality, these are things that affect people's lives.
02:08:21.000But on the fakery in the economy, I think this is one of the under-told stories of our era.
02:08:30.000We were talking a lot about incentives earlier.
02:08:33.000The incentives for corporate America are not to innovate, not to create new products, certainly not to invest in their workforce.
02:08:41.000It's all to engage in financial engineering to reward themselves and their stockholders.
02:09:17.000Rana Faruhar, who's a very smart financial thinker, she wrote a book that highlighted this statistic.
02:09:24.000Apple, when they released the iPod, their stock that year actually went down.
02:09:29.000When they did financial manipulation and like gigantic stock buybacks, their stock goes up.
02:09:34.000So it just shows you how much of our whole economy big picture is basically fake, geared towards financial engineering and not towards actual innovation, development, like growing a company based on a good idea and a good product.
02:09:51.000Well, you talk about this with your phone all the time, right?
02:09:55.000iPhone 4 is not all that different from iPhone 14. That's an exaggeration, but like iPhone 11 and iPhone 14 aren't that different.
02:10:01.000Apple has actually increased its revenue significantly through its bundle of services by increasing the amount of costs it can pull from the App Store.
02:10:09.000I've got my Mac here, so everything is locked in here.
02:10:12.000Software as a service, everything is linked into the Apple bundle.
02:10:16.000That Tim Cook's great – there's a great book.
02:11:42.000It's like, yeah, I mean, you know, we had some tech advancements, but at the end of the day, like, I've been using the same relative phone for the last 10 years.
02:11:50.000And if you were to ask me in 2012, when the first time I picked up that iPhone 4, I would be like, no way, man, 10 years from now, who's gonna know?
02:11:56.000We're gonna have Oculus, or we're gonna be living in this, like, brave new world, for example.
02:12:17.000What's fascinating is there's a never-ending push towards technological innovation that we don't ever see stopping.
02:12:25.000We are 100% addicted to having the newest, best, greatest, latest, and then companies will continue to do that.
02:12:33.000I mean, they're going to be manipulating stock prices.
02:12:35.000But at the core of it, if you want people to buy shit, you have to make better shit.
02:12:40.000And so you're going to have people that are— I wish that was the core of it, though, now, right?
02:12:43.000Well, at least at the end of the line of what gets done— It's like if you looked at the Earth from above, I use this analogy all the time, if you didn't know us, if you were from some other culture, some other planet, and you were trying to observe what human beings do, well, they make stuff.
02:13:04.000This is keeping up with the Joneses, materialism, but what that does ultimately is it forces you to buy more stuff.
02:13:10.000The materialism instinct that people have, it's a base thing, it's like silly, why do it?
02:13:16.000It's a part of human beings for some strange reason, a status thing.
02:13:21.000And that status thing allows people to continue to innovate and buy new stuff and continue to make better and better versions of that thing so you're compelled to buy it.
02:13:30.000And that's ultimately leading towards something.
02:13:33.000So much of public companies in particular, this is where the incentives are the most fucked up.
02:13:39.000The amount that they spend on research and development now is way less than it used to be number one and dramatically less than private companies.
02:13:47.000Because, again, I was telling you the other day about this, what might be...
02:13:51.000The greatest corporate con like in history from this Indian industrialist who was at least up until like the last week, the richest man in Asia, like fourth richest man on the planet after like, you know, Elon and Bezos and Bill Gates.
02:14:09.000And there's no doubt his company is big.
02:14:11.000He's got close ties in with the Modi government.
02:14:15.000He's involved in energy, runs airports, all this stuff.
02:14:19.000But there was a big 100-page report that came out from this group called Hindenburg Research, which is known for sort of identifying fraudsters.
02:14:27.000They're short sellers, so let me be clear.
02:14:28.000They have a financial incentive also on the other side.
02:14:30.000They're betting on this company going down.
02:14:32.000But what they revealed was essentially that this guy, allegedly, they deny it, had set up all of these shell companies that they were using to manipulate their stock, which propped up the company's value, which also hid how bad their debt situation was,
02:14:49.000that his brother was controlling a bunch of these shell companies.
02:14:53.000And so over the course of the past, what, week and a half, his suite of companies, like seven different companies, have lost like half their Their value.
02:15:04.000He's lost half of his fortune in a week, 10 days, something like that.
02:15:11.000The scheme is actually not all that dissimilar from the SPF thing, which is basically Mauritius, which is offshore.
02:15:17.000They were using Mauritius-based shell companies to have cash there that they actually owned to buy their own stock, inflating the stock price.
02:15:27.000Based on inflation of stock, they're able to borrow— The actual cash against that stock.
02:15:32.000So the actual value of the stock wasn't as high as it supposedly was.
02:15:36.000SBF kind of did the same thing by issuing that own token, which they then claimed had value and then borrowing actual cash based on the value of this false token.
02:15:45.000And that's how you get the billions and billions that stack up on each other.
02:15:49.000And this would all be funny if Adnani was not one of the most powerful men in India.
02:15:53.000If his companies did not prop up and not was invested in by the, I think it's the State Bank of India, there is a tremendous amount of exposure in the Indian economy.
02:16:04.000And Nani is a hero there alongside Ambani and a few of the other industrialists.
02:16:09.000There's a good book, if anyone's interested, called The Billionaire Raj, which is specifically about the rise of these new Indian oligarchs.
02:16:15.000And the amount of power that they yield in India is tremendous.
02:17:02.000And his response, now listen, I want to be clear, the response was 435 pages.
02:17:08.000I do not claim that I read all of it, but in part, what it said was basically like, this is an attack on India, rather than responding to the specific claims he's playing to sort of like Indian nationalism to try to rally the troops.
02:18:33.000Because, I mean, so much of crypto is collapsing now.
02:18:37.000And, I mean, that's why it looks like they got so overextended at Alameda, which was basically the crypto hedge fund, because they placed all these bets.
02:18:51.000And so they're tapping into their customer accounts over at FTX. It's all story of leverage, yeah.
02:18:57.000I just feel like with so many of these crypto bubbles and schemes and whatever, it's like they're just rediscovering all of the worst ills of the banking system.
02:19:07.000You know, it's like, oh, we did this new thing.
02:19:35.000Now, one of the things that we are keeping an eye on...
02:19:40.000Is at some point in the FTX run-up when he's buying all these politicians and he's buying all his like puff piece coverage and the New York Times and everywhere else, there was actually some effort to investigate him coming from the SEC. And there was a bipartisan group of lawmakers that sent a letter that was like,
02:20:32.000I guess I'm more sympathetic to the original idea of Bitcoin.
02:20:35.000To be fair, Bitcoin is very different than a lot of these other shitcoins that are out there in terms of the invention by the invention of this mysterious man, and then it has a limited number of supply, the original selling point of it as a hedge against inflation,
02:20:51.000and also where I thought it was the most important was the idea of being able to get around Sanctions, regulation, people being able to censor you.
02:20:59.000Where a lot of that came apart, though, and this was scary, was, if you remember, right before Ukraine, what was one of the biggest stories in the country?
02:21:07.000And how the Canadian government was seizing their banks.
02:21:11.000And then what was even crazier is they were actually seizing their Bitcoin.
02:21:14.000So it actually showed us one of the big choke points in crypto.
02:21:18.000I have some friends who work in the industry, and I haven't really gotten a good answer on this, which is, you know, to be able to seize Bitcoin, it's because a lot of it was sent on the platforms, which are itself regulated.
02:21:27.000So, for example, Coinbase is still subject in the United States to U.S. regulation, and Canada, similarly.
02:21:33.000So the idea of the censorship-free money, it's possible if you know how to do it.
02:21:49.000It was Canadian government seizes cryptocurrency sent by U.S. citizens to the actual Canadian freedom protesters.
02:21:55.000And that was one of the problems was that because some of that was on the exchanges, which are subject to regulation, it's the same thing as if I were trying to wire them money to a prohibited group in Canada.
02:22:05.000But you were looking at that and you're like, man...
02:22:07.000You know, that level of censorship resistance, which I really still really believe in, like, we got to have something, you know, in terms of, there's a current lot of pressure right now for the Fed and for the United States to create like a centralized digital currency.
02:22:18.000And even, I mean, essentially, cashless, we don't, we basically live in a quasi cashless society right now.
02:22:24.000If you think about China, one of the ways that they're able to implement their social credit score system is everything is within the WeChat app.
02:22:49.000The problem is, when you have the wild, wild west, the people are going to rise to the top.
02:22:55.000It's not an accident that you end up with psychopathic charlatans like SBF at the top of this thing.
02:23:01.000You know, because it is like the time, in a way, the time before you had like a central bank and when you had all these different currencies competing with each other in the U.S. And so I, too, was sympathetic to the original idea behind crypto,
02:23:18.000which is like, you know, look, fiat money is also just based on what we all decide to put value on.
02:23:24.000Now, I would say like our fiat currency is also backed by the United States government and the military, etc.
02:23:28.000So that would be the most powerful country of the So there is more than just like a belief in it at this point, but okay.
02:23:34.000And so if we have this like mode of exchange and this sort of like anarchist principles of organization, it was really a response, a philosophical response, the failures of 2008. When you see how bankrupt are and corrupt our existing financial institutions are and how rigged and how much they lie and how captured the political system is.
02:23:56.000And so I understand the impetus for it.
02:23:59.000But in reality, it has never been used as actual currency to a significant degree.
02:24:06.000It just became a purely speculative vehicle.
02:24:11.000And to your point, like the idea that the three of us could just go out and be like, we're making Rogan coin and like, we bought- We could make a shitload of money on that, by the way.
02:24:20.000We like hired Kim Kardashian to sell you Rogan coin and if we can like pump it up and do the confidence game enough, then we can run away with real cash and leave all these people holding the bag.
02:24:31.000When I look at that, I'm like, I think this went astray.
02:24:40.000With some new emerging thing, you're going to have some crazy people that rise to the top?
02:24:43.000It's like what Crystal was saying with the original U.S. currency.
02:24:45.000You know, we didn't have centralized greenbacks in the United States until the Civil War.
02:24:49.000And that was because the government literally wanted to be able to print money and buy weapons and goods with it without having to pay gold.
02:24:56.000Before that, we had state-issued and banknotes, which was like a total free-for-all.
02:25:00.000In the U.S. It was actually kind of wild.
02:25:02.000And it literally took the Civil War to be able to push back against that.
02:25:09.000There was like multiple panics of like 1816 or whatever.
02:25:13.000Or even leading up to the Great Depression and the stock market crash of 1929, there was a whole buildup in the 20s of people were introduced to the idea of buying stock online.
02:25:31.000And so after 1929, there were a lot of banking reforms that basically made banking boring, right?
02:25:43.000They separated all the gambling and wild speculation out from the just like basic Customer deposit, like regular bank that people go to.
02:25:52.000And then, you know, over the years, that was eaten away and those regulations were eaten away.
02:25:57.000And eventually you ended up sort of back to a pre-1929 situation where they were again allowed to speculate in these wild ways and there was no separation.
02:26:40.000But I think the only answer to it is to have better reforms of the existing system to make it safe and less corrupt and not have this wild speculation that can create these bubbles that just destroy the entire economy and people's livelihoods.
02:27:34.000If we get to the point where we can just ban members of Congress from trading stocks, the institutional trust I think that we could all then have within the system, just at a baseline level, it would help a lot.
02:31:46.000And so then, because there's this organic movement, you see actually some people in the mainstream press start to cover it.
02:31:53.000There was actually a reporter at Insider.
02:31:55.000They started digging into the details of these trades and compiling reports.
02:31:59.000That leads to that, when you're talking about Nancy Pelosi at that press conference, that leads to her actually getting asked a question about it.
02:32:05.000And wasn't it incredibly revealing her response in that moment?
02:33:08.000And President Biden actually originally had a line in the State of the Union just last year where he was going to endorse a congressional stock rating ban.
02:33:16.000The line was pulled at the very last minute.
02:33:56.000Well, and again, like, Republicans, you know, all these people, like, the Republican holdouts or Kevin McCarthy, the apostatingly populist or whatever, this was not one of the demands that they made of, like, let's get stuck.
02:34:19.000I mean, and like I said, McCarthy, he brought it up at a moment when he thought it would serve him politically, but then the moment he actually got the gavel and took power, nothing.
02:34:28.000That's the key to getting what you want in politics, though.
02:34:32.000That's, you know, look, these people, they're never going to do anything because it's the right thing.
02:34:34.000You've got to force him to do it so that it's politically advantageous.
02:34:37.000And look, there's actually a lot of room for some politician out there.
02:34:41.000Originally, I think it was John Ossoff, the senator from Georgia.
02:34:52.000He goes, oh, I'll just introduce a bill to ban this.
02:34:54.000He got a ton of good press for being the first senator to actually propose a ban.
02:34:58.000So we need to make it and create a system where right now it's politically advantageous to sell out To K Street, which is the lobbyists, that's where they all sell out to big business, Wall Street, military, industrial complex, any of these people.
02:35:10.000I think what I would love to do, and one of the aims of the show was creating and rise with independent media and working with everybody is to create an alternate system where you get rewarded for.
02:35:22.000We had a big conversation about Ukraine.
02:37:36.000There may be no opening for diplomacy, especially right now.
02:37:39.000But Sagar is right to point to the fact that early on in this conflict, there actually were meetings happening between Russian officials and Ukrainian representatives.
02:37:53.000And reportedly, they were kind of working out an outline.
02:37:57.000There were still very difficult sticking points, you know, based on the reporting that's available.
02:38:02.000And Boris Johnson, who was at that point Prime Minister of the UK, and of course they have been our closest ally in all of this, was dispatched to go to Kiev and give the message to Zelensky.
02:38:14.000This was reported actually in Ukrainian press.
02:38:35.000They are where they are, 100% because of us.
02:38:38.000This is an incredibly dangerous situation because of the proxy nature of it, because Russia certainly sees themselves and they accurately should as being in a proxy war versus us.
02:38:48.000And so the idea that we have no say and no influence over whether or not there are negotiations is completely bunk.
02:38:57.000And so, you know, that's the piece where my other concern is that we're sort of building up to another Afghanistan situation where, you know, we went in with one goal, like, okay, we're going to get the bad guys, we're going to get Osama.
02:39:10.000And then when we failed at that, we end up with this 20-year occupation and total disaster at the end of it.
02:39:19.000And no one can really say how or why we were there for so long.
02:39:23.000Like, how do we get to some sort of exit ramp in Ukraine?
02:39:26.000And here the stakes are so much higher because, as you point out, it's like nuclear war and World War III on the line.
02:39:32.000And even if that's like a tiny chance, we should care a lot about that tiny chance.
02:39:38.000Did you see Jimmy Dore on Tucker Carlson?
02:40:57.000Your enemy is the military-industrial complex which has been fleecing this country to the tunes of hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars.
02:41:05.000How many times are we going to have a defense secretary say, hey, we can't account for two trillion dollars in the Pentagon again?
02:41:12.000Which has happened twice now in my lifetime.
02:41:22.000It certainly isn't Joe Biden making these decisions.
02:41:24.000I would like to know who is making these decisions.
02:41:27.000And I just want to remind everybody, the United States is the world's terrorist.
02:41:31.000We just set the Middle East on fire in the last 20 years, and now we're doing a proxy war in Ukraine, which we provoked, NATO provoked, and was just admitted that we provoked it by the former Prime Minister of Germany, and now we're trying to sable-rattle with China, and they're predicting a war.
02:41:48.000Again, China's not going to invade us.
02:41:57.000It's about liquefied natural gas and making sure Germany and Russia never come together because we fear Russia's natural resources and manpower, and we fear them getting together with Germany with their technology and their capital.
02:42:10.000And so that's why we blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.
02:42:12.000That's why we're doing the Ukraine war.
02:42:14.000This is all about hegemony, imperialism, and economics.
02:42:18.000And if there's a Marine somewhere, it's there because they're about to steal some natural resources from another country.
02:42:24.000As everybody's screaming about what a bad guy Putin is for invading Ukraine, the United States is currently occupying a third of Syria.
02:43:24.000They donate a lot of money in Washington.
02:43:26.000They go, you know, revolving door, not just from, like, Government officials, but also they go on CNN and MSNBC and whatever, and it's never disclosed like, oh, and by the way, this person is like on the board of Raytheon and happens to have a vested financial interest in what we ultimately do here.
02:43:51.000You know, something crazy is that even the Navy secretary, we just covered this, he came out and was like, in a few months, we may have to choose between arming ourselves and arming Ukraine.
02:44:00.000And then the Biden administration made him come up and, quote, clear up that comment.
02:44:04.000He's like, oh, I didn't mean it that way.
02:44:06.000It was just, well, no, he actually did mean it that way, because it turns out that we've been sending so many munitions and stuff that we have over to Ukraine.
02:44:14.000If the defense industry can't boost production, arming both Ukraine and the U.S. will become challenging.
02:44:19.000He literally came out and said that we may have to choose if these weapons makers don't get their act together, because actually, and this is the other thing where, you know, military industrial complex.
02:44:28.000One of the things that we forget is they're not actually particularly good at what they do.
02:44:31.000If we look at the F-35 program, it was a colossal disaster.
02:44:54.000The gun costs a million dollars a round in order to fire it.
02:44:58.000So we're not able to even produce what we need.
02:45:02.000This is a big fight during the Iraq War, too, where guys in the Pentagon would rather fund boondoggle programs than stuff that was actually protecting the lives of our soldiers, like MRAPs.
02:45:12.000Like, they didn't want to fund some of the stuff that was actually protecting American soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan.
02:45:18.000The A-10 Warthog is another good example.
02:45:21.000Cheap Plane, which actually has ability to assist people in a tactical situation because they're more interested in their, you know, ridiculous flying shit.
02:45:28.000And Jimmy also points to the correct thing, which is the Pentagon did just fail its fucking audit.
02:45:32.000You know, we don't really talk about that.
02:46:57.000Even with terms of Ukraine, there was a great—this is a great media episode.
02:47:00.000CBS News did a whole documentary about how many of the weapons that we were sending to Ukraine were not making it to the front line, which is bullshit, right?
02:47:07.000Because if we're going to take all these weapons, I would at least hope a Ukrainian soldier is using it to protect— His own life.
02:47:13.000Literally, the day after that documentary went live, he had to delete it.
02:47:17.000CBS News retracted it and said, no, actually, the situation has changed.
02:47:32.000We have no way to independently verify that anything that we send to Ukraine is actually being used by Ukraine in the way that we want it to.
02:47:39.000How much money have we sent over there?
02:47:41.000In terms of how much we've actually spent...
02:49:29.000But you see the way that they came out in force because they hated this decision.
02:49:34.000They wanted us to continue to be there forever because this was like the endless gravy train for them.
02:49:38.000And so, you know, that was the most effective, most potent criticism against.
02:49:43.000It was uniform across the board with the media.
02:49:45.000And so that they did the same sort of stuff to the leak against you.
02:49:51.000They'll really damage your approval rating.
02:49:53.000They're really tied in with the media in terms of like, you know, they're leaking to their sources and they will go on and make their own case, et cetera, with no disclosure that they have financial incentives involved.
02:50:04.000It's very, very easy to be manipulated by the people who want to be in a place forever or want to start a war or whatever it is.
02:50:19.000And I think part of why Biden in this limited instance was able to buck that trend is maybe perhaps just because he's been around for so fucking long.
02:50:28.000Obama got totally rolled by the generals.
02:50:30.000Great book, Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars, about the very first year of the Obama presidency.
02:50:35.000He promised to run on the good war, Afghanistan, but he's not necessarily wedded to a surge.
02:50:40.000The Obama's Wars book just details how Biden was the only guy in there being like, Mr. President, what the fuck are we doing in Afghanistan?
02:50:47.000He's like, why should we send 40,000, whatever, more troops?
02:50:52.000Let's just have a counterterrorism mission.
02:50:54.000And David Petraeus, Mike Mullen, and all the other generals in the Obama White House were leaking against President Obama and actually actively undercutting him to the New York Times and to the press to create a Obama is soft on terrorism narrative, specifically so they could do a surge in Afghanistan under Stanley McChrystal.
02:51:14.000But if we look back on that, Did it really buy us anything in the long war of history with Afghanistan?
02:51:19.000I know personally people who were blown up during the surge in Afghanistan, and I also know how much it hurts them emotionally to watch ground that they fought and lost their brothers for, lost limbs for, get retaken by the Taliban several years earlier.
02:51:34.000It's just like we're talking about with Ukraine.
02:51:37.000And the endgame is not something that Washington really likes to talk about.
02:51:41.000And even if you're looking at the pullout situation on Afghanistan, it's like, well, why should we stay in Afghanistan?
02:51:46.000If you're listening to the media, it was like, because so Afghan girls can go to school.
02:51:49.000And look, I feel very bad for Afghan girls.
02:51:52.000I do not wish a situation where they are unable to go to school.
02:51:55.000Does that mean that we should have people there in perpetuity and spend $200 million per day and have Several American soldiers get blown up by an IED. I'm sorry, I don't think so.
02:52:04.000I think there's a lot of bad shit that's happening all across the world.
02:52:06.000But they're never going to frame it that way.
02:52:08.000And that's why, man, the media on this, on war in particular, they offer no nuance.
02:52:14.000Afghanistan was a real red pill moment for Crystal and I. And look, I'm not defending it.
02:52:20.000They were like, oh, we should have surrounded the city of Kabul.
02:52:22.000I'm like, so you want to send thousands of American soldiers to create a perimeter around the city of Kabul?
02:52:28.000That suicide bomb that happened in the airport, it would have been that times 100. In terms of we were occupying and surrounding an entire city, there are valid criticisms of we should have held on to Bagram, we shouldn't have abandoned the military base or whatever.
02:52:43.000I'll leave that to the people whose job it is.
02:52:45.000But on a broader strategic level, why should we have stayed in Afghanistan?
02:52:49.000And I haven't heard a particularly good answer to that.
02:52:52.000You know how much they actually cared about the women and girls by the fact that now that those women and girls are starving in a mass famine, they don't give a shit.
02:53:01.000They don't cover the fact that we're partly connected to it because of the fact that we are continuing to hold their central bank reserves.
02:53:40.000We went from the stock ban, which I thought was a rosy one.
02:53:42.000I wanted to talk to you about something that I remember you discussing that I wanted to get clarity on.
02:53:48.000What was that story that you discussed where there was a company that was working with China, and China had bought a large stake in the company.
02:54:00.000I forget the exact name of the company, Jamie, but it's basically called the heist of the century.
02:54:05.000If you Google like heist of the century, China, semiconductors, I think it was called AML. It was a British semiconductor company.
02:54:12.000Any American or Western business is required to do business in China has to have a Chinese subsidiary.
02:54:17.000So essentially what happened is the Chinese subsidiary, I believe of AML, was stealing the technology from within it.
02:54:25.000And after they were reprimanded for something like this, the CEO of the Chinese subsidiary just said, nope, I'm taking it.
02:54:32.000He stole all of their IP, created an independent business backed by the Chinese government, and is now spinning up, based on their IP, semiconductors that were originally intellectual property of this British semiconductor company.
02:54:44.000And the reason that this matters is that is just the tip of the iceberg for IP theft that is happening with respect to China.
02:54:52.000It's one of the reasons why if you look at Chinese or American businessmen who do business over there, they fully and readily admit the amount of IP that has just been straight up stolen through their fake legal process of this Chinese subsidiary.
02:55:05.000But really, it's just a farming operation.
02:55:06.000There's no such thing as private industry in China.
02:55:10.000All the time, the CEO, Zhang Ximing, he actually was forced to pull one of ByteDance's apps from the Chinese app store and apologize because it was not supporting, quote, socialist principles.
02:55:23.000This is the CEO of TikTok today, the owner of TikTok.
02:55:28.000Everything there is totally controlled by the government.
02:55:31.000They're very savvy and they're very smart.
02:55:33.000And at this point, they've actually even reached a point where in some cases, they don't even need our IP. In some areas, they are far more superior and advanced than we are.
02:55:42.000One of the ones that scares the shit out of me is electric vehicle batteries, so the entire EV battery supply chain.
02:55:50.000You've talked about the cobalt and all that.
02:55:52.000And one of the things that Siddharth brought up on your show was that it's the Chinese companies that are working with these Congolese gangs.
02:55:58.000Chinese don't give a shit about labor.
02:55:59.000I mean, it's not like we give a shit either, so to be fair.
02:56:01.000But anyway, they're willing to come in and be like, Look, we want the cobalt.
02:56:05.000This is actually part of the reason why Elon is in a precarious position.
02:56:08.000A huge part of the Tesla EV battery supply chain is in China.
02:56:12.000Even here in the United States, a lot of the new EV battery plants that are being built, it's a Chinese subsidiary and a conglomerate that is behind that.
02:56:21.000And look, what did we come through with the whole pandemic?
02:56:24.000If you're going to have critical supplies being manufactured and connected to China in some way, they're always going to put their interest, as any country should, above your own.
02:56:33.000You need to have some sort of resilience.
02:56:39.000TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturer, they are building a plant here in Arizona.
02:56:43.000They're building, I think it's a $100 billion plant, which is great.
02:56:46.000I'm glad that they are, but it takes a decade to spin those things up.
02:56:49.000They create 92% of the world's most Advanced chips.
02:56:54.000If we have a conflict in Taiwan, I always talk about this on the show, we are all turning this shit into the government so that they can create missiles and bombs.
02:57:02.000Like, they will literally need to rip the semiconductors and chips out of our cell phones, out of our computers, because we're not going to have anything.
02:57:10.00092% of the world's most advanced chips.
02:57:30.000I mean, that is the, like, if we're looking for a more positive story, less, like, gloom and doom.
02:57:36.000The Biden administration has, like, dipped their toe in the water of industrial policy, recognizing that, I mean, the best response to China, the problem for us is being so interdependent, where, you know, The pandemic, you come to realize,
02:57:52.000like, oh, fuck, they make all the masks.
02:58:12.000You're going to have all these backups at the ports and all this stuff.
02:58:16.000They have dipped their toe in the water of having industrial policy that makes us more resilient, less reliant on these other countries, including the Inflation Reduction Act had a lot in it for bringing that green energy production and EV battery production to our shores and has requirements about where those batteries are built and where the sourcing comes from.
02:58:38.000But it really is just starting to dip your toe in those waters, ultimately.
02:58:45.000I mean, the sourcing on the EVs is such a nightmare.
02:58:48.000And if you're trying to get, you know, Conflict Creek cobalt or lithium, right now there's a huge battle right now in South America, in Mexico, in Chile and elsewhere where Chinese companies are trying to buy all of the lithium deposits, which of course you need for a lithium operation.
03:01:22.000Texas, a lot of the power just went out here in Austin.
03:01:26.000One of the reasons why, from what I've been able to read so far, it's actually not the grid, it's because power lines are constructed above ground.
03:01:33.000And people are like, okay, well, why do we do that?
03:02:27.000You can't even get a new nuclear power plant approved if you were to apply to, I think it's the FERC, it's like the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
03:02:35.000So we need reform on all these things just to make life better in America.
03:02:40.000And unfortunately, a lot of it is just corrupted so that it's not really possible.
03:02:46.000We have a lot of short-term thinking, a lot of profit It's crazy because all the things that we discussed Healthcare,
03:03:13.000energy, all the issues that we have, and that's where it gets really crazy when you look at the money that we're putting into other things like Ukraine.
03:03:21.000If we had the resources to do what we're doing right now currently, that means we had the resources to attack all these problems domestically.
03:05:13.000And a lot of these people just succumb to that, unfortunately.
03:05:16.000I really don't know how to get around it.
03:05:19.000But if I can have anything take away, is what you said.
03:05:22.000Look, if people were willing to unanimously, relatively agree to send $100 billion to Ukraine, and we have all these problems that we just talked about, that shows you what the priority is.
03:05:31.000I always look at, what's the bipartisan consensus in Washington?
03:05:34.000That's the only shit that actually gets done.
03:05:57.000They were spending it on like, you know, enrichment for their children.
03:05:59.000It was like unanimously great policy that worked really well.
03:06:05.000And Democrats, Republicans decided they were against it, and Democrats just let it expire without a peep.
03:06:12.000And so again, it's like, you know, the hard thing is...
03:06:18.000So many people's political approach is so focused on, like, whatever the cultural outrage of the moment is, that things like that don't even get surfaced, they don't get debated, they don't get discussed.
03:06:31.000And then this program, which was one of the most successful programs we've done in a long time, just...
03:06:37.000I know you've been talking about UBI and concerns about it.
03:06:40.000So we actually been doing a lot of deep dive into this.
03:06:43.000And we looked at a couple of new studies.
03:06:46.000There's a new one actually just came out that a big part of the, quote, labor shortage is actually men who were working much longer hours during the pandemic cutting back on their hours.
03:06:57.000So it's not—and actually, Matthew Iglesias tweeted this study, if you want to see it, Jamie.
03:07:02.000It's from the National Bureau of Economic Research.
03:07:25.000And there were certainly some cases of that true.
03:07:28.000But we had a interesting natural experiment where they actually ended unemployment benefits back in 2021. It had little to no change on the overall employment rate.
03:07:37.000So even when you took away the unemployment benefits, all of the anecdotal stories of like, I can't get somebody in because they're getting unemployment, they didn't want to work.
03:07:45.000Actually, when they stopped getting unemployment, a lot of them didn't go back to work.
03:07:49.000And it wasn't just because they had money saved up, because we know right now we have some of the highest credit card debt in modern American history, which is never a good sign.
03:07:57.000In fact, many bank accounts are below pre-pandemic levels.
03:08:01.000And so there's actually just been a fundamental reset in the way, a cultural reset, in the way that a lot of people approach work.
03:08:09.000One of the fascinating things that happened is we had, for the first time in modern American history, we had an increase actually in the amount of babies that were born.
03:08:25.000People were bored and they had more time and they were able to plan pregnancy, be at home, not have to worry about one week or whatever of maternity leave.
03:08:34.000So we're living in a really interesting moment in the way that people have evaluated their relationship with work.
03:08:39.000There's a real reorientation going on, especially for like white collar workers who were very wrapped up in their like, you know, whatever their work dramas were and their whole life was centered around work and climbing that ladder and whatever.
03:08:53.000And so when they were forced to go remote and all of that was stripped away, it was like, why am I, why is this the only part of my life that I'm focusing on?
03:09:03.000This thing that I don't even really like when I have like a family, I have a community, I have other things that are important to me.
03:09:09.000And I don't think that that – I think that is a dramatic mindset shift that is probably not going away, like a cultural mindset shift.
03:09:19.000And you see all these people, too, like moving to different areas, valuing different things in terms of their quality of life.
03:09:25.000And so, yeah, as we look at the labor force participation rate, A lot of the decline was actually people not leaving their jobs, not that they didn't want to work, but just working fewer hours and being unwilling to dedicate their entire waking life to their job.
03:09:42.000Well, that's probably a good thing, right?
03:10:06.000Most people are, you know, they're, like, punching the clock.
03:10:10.000They're doing their thing to be able to get a check, to be able to support their families.
03:10:12.000And so, you know, there's been this sort of, like...
03:10:16.000I don't know ideology sold around careerism to especially like college educated white collar workers that like this is the thing that's supposed to be who you are in your whole life and I think taking a step back from that and being more intentional about like well is that actually what I want my whole life to be about and maybe there are other things that are outside of the workplace that are more meaningful to me that provide me More happiness or more joy or more fulfillment in my life.
03:10:42.000I 100% think that that's a positive thing.