00:01:51.440Really? Okay, so that's interesting. Well, it is interesting because I had this thought over the last couple of days that media crafts the narrative, right? So I think I had seen a story and I can't even remember what it was about. And it was on social media. And I was like, whoa, I've never even heard of this story. It must not be a big deal. That's the thought that went through my mind.
00:02:18.020But then I started thinking about it. I'm like, Oh no, the only reason I think that is because the mainstream media legacy media isn't covering it. So do you think, do you think the media is protecting the system or do you think they're basing their discussions on, on what society is interested in?
00:02:39.320right? No, the media always takes the lead. And the media creates the excitement. And
00:02:49.480I've been following Epstein for a very long time. And I'm not aware of one major media outlet that
00:02:57.860has demanded justice. They're very good at digging up salacious dirt, but they don't demand justice.
00:03:32.140I'll give you an example. There was a tranche of documents that were released before this
00:03:38.940latest tranche. And CNN, I put Epstein's Black Book and Flight Logs up on the internet. So CNN
00:03:45.200wanted to have me in the studio, I live in New York City, and talk about it. And I was texting
00:03:51.860with the producer throughout the day. And then I said, I'd like to talk a little bit about Epstein
00:03:58.800justice and then about five minutes later i get a text saying we're going to go another way nick
00:04:05.520so and i've got other examples of that from my personal experience where we're going to go
00:04:13.360another way nick uh happens to me repeatedly is it do you feel like it's because they're protecting
00:04:21.520people within the organization i mean these these are these are the kind of the highest
00:04:28.020echelons of cultural and political commentary is is that why like there's no exposure for
00:04:34.960legacy media who might be involved or like what's the reason i don't i don't understand
00:04:40.100well one thing that the epstein files has shown us that people at the apex of our society are
00:04:46.080involved with jeffrey epstein so why would that include the media people and i think these are
00:04:54.720the most powerful people out there so because they have the eyeballs and the attention of
00:05:00.440the average citizen that that makes you that that that makes you very very powerful and very very
00:05:07.980influential and with the mainstream media or legacy media i've completely been shut out of
00:05:19.860Epstein. And there really isn't a reason why I should be shut out. I mean, people in the
00:05:29.140mainstream media don't even want to write about articles about Epstein justice. And we're the
00:05:33.900only organization that's trying to get justice on behalf of the Epstein victims. There's another
00:05:41.000one called War Without Exploitation, but I wrote an article about them, and you can find it on
00:05:46.700zero hedge and i say some very unbecoming things about world without explication what is your what's
00:05:55.560your um why do you have so much skin in the game like what what what is it that is so important to
00:06:02.900you i mean there's the obvious and so i'm not trying to make it sound like hey we we don't
00:06:08.000want justice for the underage children who have been victimized at the hands of uh jeffrey epstein
00:06:16.220and uh i think her name what's her name giselle giselle yeah i can't i can't i couldn't remember
00:06:23.040it look sure obviously we want justice there but what what is your skin in the game on this one
00:06:28.960so i had a difficult childhood i wasn't molested but i had a difficult childhood nonetheless
00:06:36.020and i had a violent stepfather the first time i ran away i was 12
00:06:40.760And even before I got into writing about child trafficking, I'd written quite a bit about children's issues and how the government, our government doesn't adequately look out for children.
00:06:54.760And then from 2002 to 2007, or actually from 2002 to 2009, I spent researching a child trafficking network that's exactly, Epstein is, the book is called The Franklin Scandal, A Story of Power Brokers, Child Abuse and Betrayal.
00:07:14.720And Epstein is a kind of a carbon copy of The Franklin Scandal.
00:07:18.380If people read The Franklin Scandal, they'll understand Epstein much better.
00:07:21.800But the exact same things, cover up by state and federal law enforcement, victims flown around the country, hidden cameras, and one of the pimps in the Franklin Network was certainly a CIA asset.
00:07:38.220So I wrote this book. I spent seven years writing this book. And then I went to
00:07:53.420Florida in 2011. And I got Jeffrey Epstein's Black Book. And I had a really hard time
00:08:01.180getting a platform to publish it, but finally I did in 2015.
00:08:08.060During Delaine Maxwell's trial, I put together, and this was kind of the nascent
00:08:15.660beginnings of Epstein Justice, I put together a protest because I knew
00:08:21.900that what was going on in that courtroom was not justice. Delaine Maxwell was indicted on
00:08:29.900one count of child trafficking. She was the only one that was indicted. I knew that whatever was
00:08:36.380going on in that courtroom was all bullshit. I put together a protest about that across the
00:08:44.300street from that courthouse. Now, I was the only guy who decided to put on a protest.
00:08:51.900you know i mean i tried to conscript me too and other organizations end up protesting this but
00:09:01.780they didn't want to do it so isn't that the point of the me too movement it's crazy
00:09:07.380yeah i i was very disappointed by me too and whatever me too is i don't know
00:09:13.560what it's morphed into. But as I said, Epstein Justice is the only organization that wants
00:09:25.380justice for Epstein victims. We want two things, actually. We want an independent congressional
00:09:31.840commission to tell us why the government covered up child trafficking, and we want the perpetrators
00:09:36.380to be prosecuted. Now, if Americans are completely cool with our children getting molested with
00:09:46.540impunity and the government covering up child trafficking, I'd walk away from it completely.
00:09:55.800But I don't think that Americans are completely cool with it.
00:10:00.460well i hope not i i don't think america americans are cool with it but i also think they're worried
00:10:07.000about the cost of their groceries right so i think i think that's the that's i'm not saying
00:10:13.920it's a bigger issue i'm saying it's an issue that's more at the forefront of americans minds
00:10:20.200and so it's really easy to be distracted i mean we have uh you know this thing going on with iran
00:10:27.840uh we've got grocery prices there's burrito gate you know $20 for a burrito uh there's all these
00:10:35.860other issues unfortunately and I'm not saying what you're doing is is not worthy of attention
00:10:41.120it certainly is that's why I wanted to have you on the podcast I just think we're fickle I do I
00:10:46.640I think we're more concerned that the burrito costs $20 than we are that our young daughters
00:10:51.720are being trafficked and molested and raped and i don't know what to do about that because of how
00:10:58.540we've been manipulated and how we've allowed ourselves to be manipulated through legacy media
00:11:03.520social media and the like i think there's two variables that play the first variable is
00:11:11.140americans don't think that they can affect change and you you kind of you kind of alluded to that
00:11:18.080Americans just don't think that they can affect change. We've been conditioned that way.
00:11:24.000And then the second variable is the polarization of the left and the right.
00:11:31.600People on the right think that people on the left are mentally ill, and people on the left
00:11:36.000think that people on the right are mentally ill. And it's Sung Tzu in The Art of War,
00:11:44.640I think it was published 25 years ago, talked about divide and conquer. And this is the way
00:11:51.520that the right and the left, the Democrats and the Republicans are polarized, is a perfect example
00:11:58.080of divide and conquer. If something really negative happens, the right will blame the left,
00:12:04.480and the left will blame the right. And I've written three books about CIA honey traps,
00:12:13.120blackmail, I believe that many of our politicians are compromised. And I think that that's how we've
00:12:19.520ended up in the state that we've ended up in. But it not only affects groceries, I mean,
00:12:25.200if you look at the wealth polarization over the last 40 years, it's been exponential. The middle
00:12:33.360class is eroding. And I think that that's what gave people an idea to vote for Trump,
00:12:42.000is because Trump said that we can make America great again.
00:12:45.560But as long as we have the political system that we have,
00:12:50.700the rich are going to get richer and the poor are going to get poorer.
00:12:53.200And I haven't seen Donald Trump assuage that at all.
00:12:57.320And I'm not a Republican. I'm not a Democrat.
00:28:59.220And nothing makes people stupid like arrogance and sex.
00:29:03.840And our politicians have both those in spades.
00:29:07.400is is that the is that the main mechanism arrogance you said arrogance and sex is is
00:29:14.060is when you say arrogance i i would imagine i would have said power and sex maybe you mean
00:29:20.560something similar but is is that what you're talking about is that we give these these you
00:29:25.880know 535 people or whatever the the level of power they have and then we we expose them to
00:29:32.280endless amounts of insanely beautiful women and sex and game over.
00:29:38.280And greed, too. Greed is also a mechanism, and greed is something else that makes people
00:29:46.260really stupid. So our politicians have this psychological alchemy of arrogance and sex
00:29:58.760and greed, and they're very easy to compromise. I can give you a couple of examples.
00:30:08.380Yeah, I'm curious about this. Let's say, I was going to say I'm a young senator,
00:30:11.320but I'm not so young anymore. But let's say I'm a young senator. I'm an idealist.
00:30:16.760I really believe that my voice matters. I can make a difference for my constituents.
00:30:21.100And I start to get into the halls of politics. How would I potentially be compromised?
00:30:28.760Now, the parties that I'm aware of, the parties that I wrote about in the Franklin scandal,
00:30:36.560there was a mansion in DC that was owned by a CIA asset named Craig Spence.
00:30:44.160And the parties would just start out as, and everybody went to these parties, the upper
00:30:50.640echelon of the Reagan and Bush administrations, the upper echelon of business, and the upper
00:30:59.420echelon of the media, much like we see with Epstein.
00:31:04.060And every room in that mansion was wired for audiovisual blackmail.
00:31:11.880And the parties would start out as political parties, Washington, D.C., cocktail parties.
00:31:19.400and people would be drinking and talking and drinking and talking.
00:31:25.180And then maybe at 10 o'clock or 10.30, at some point,
00:31:30.660something would happen, some type of sexual acting out
00:31:37.120or someone would break out coke or fire up a joint, something like that.
00:31:41.940And then people that wanted no part of that would leave,
00:31:46.080But those that stuck around for the real party, they would be compromised.
00:31:53.140Audio and visually, like you go into a room with an attractive young woman, all of a sudden there's video recording, audio recording, and now you're their puppet.
00:32:03.420I'll give you an example. Larry Craig was a very conservative senator from Idaho.
00:32:10.780And he was in Washington, D.C. for 25 years, first as a representative and then as a senator.
00:32:20.260And I wrote a book called Confessions of a D.C. Man, the Politics of Sex, Lies, and Blackmail.
00:32:25.440And it was about Henry Vincent, who had the largest gay escort service that's ever been
00:32:30.220uncovered in D.C. And Craig was getting escorts from his escort service. He was also getting
00:32:37.760escorts elsewhere, male escorts, and he had one of the worst records of voting for gay rights.
00:32:47.620And he was a family values guy. And keep in mind, he's a senator now. He's in a bathroom
00:32:55.740in Minneapolis. And there's a signaling system for gays in bathrooms. One slaps their foot on
00:33:08.280the ground when you're in the stall. And then if the other person is hot to trot, then they do
00:33:16.660their thing. So a vice squad cop in the airport was slapping his foot on the stall next to Craig,
00:33:25.960and Craig engaged. And he was arrested, and then he ultimately, that was the end of his
00:33:34.060senatorial life. But how hard would it be to compromise that guy?
00:33:45.620A guy that's trying to pick up somebody in a bathroom. That's a senator. I'm from Minneapolis. And I fly. I go back to Minneapolis at least a week or two every year. And I was sitting on a commode in the bathroom in the Minneapolis airport. And someone next to me was slapping his foot on the ground.
00:34:12.240and really yeah and i thought that it was a neurological disorder but i'm really glad i
00:34:22.080didn't say can i help you he's like yeah as a matter of fact you can that's wild that i yeah
00:34:29.600i didn't i didn't know of that story but i imagine it's a lot more common than than people people
00:34:35.480believe and then all of a sudden if you're like hey what you know i can destroy your life with
00:34:40.300this story um and unless you do vote vote for this thing or or you know support me in this or
00:34:48.740or get your donors to back me in this it seems like a not a not a real tall order at that point
00:34:54.840craig is trying to pick up guys in bathrooms how hard would it be to compromise him a kid
00:35:02.820with a smartphone in high school for extra credit probably could have compromised larry craig
00:35:10.420and he's just one of many examples that i know about it's do you think do you think that people
00:35:19.800come into politics this is one of the frustrating things for me we talked a little bit about it a
00:35:25.260second ago the these idealists and you know you gotta love them for it i i i think that there's
00:35:31.980plenty of people who come into politics believing that they can actually make a difference this goes
00:35:37.460back to what you said earlier like how much of a difference can one politician make um and then
00:35:43.080americans feel deflated like they can't they can't make a difference do do the people who who run for
00:35:49.940politics generally do you feel like they do it because of the greed the power the sex the access
00:35:55.540or or is there a cadre of of idealistic
00:36:00.180Americans who actually believe they can make a difference I mean we get the lowest of the low
00:36:06.660it seems like I I think a lot of people get into politics to make a difference but then I think a
00:36:13.880lot of people are corrupt I know of someone who became a senator and he was the mayor of kind of
00:36:22.780a sleepy town in New England. But I believe that he was compromised very, very early.
00:36:29.540And he ultimately ended up to be a senator, too. So I think that there are people that
00:36:37.880do get into politics for idealistic reasons. But it's very hard at the national level. I think that
00:36:45.780we see democracy at the local level, and I think we see democracy a lot of times at the state
00:36:52.660level. But once you get to the federal level, the Republicans and Democrats kind of come together
00:37:01.000to a certain degree as a uniparty, even though the media and the politicians have tried to explain to
00:37:09.400us that there's no common ground between the right and left. That is what makes this issue
00:37:17.320so dangerous. That's why the mainstream media is steering away from it, and we're not hearing a lot
00:37:25.060about it from our politicians, because the right and the left are so polarized right now that
00:37:32.480But children being molested with impunity and the government covering it up, that's probably the only issue that can bring the right and the left together.
00:37:42.540And that's why this is a dangerous issue, because, as I said, it's probably the only issue that can bring the right and the left together.
00:37:54.900I feel like when you talk about the unit party, like you're saying, I feel a little bit like I'm in the midst of a Batman movie.
00:38:02.100I mean, what, what good is Batman without the Joker? Nobody would care. Right. And what good
00:38:08.020is the Joker without the Batman? And I feel like that's, you can say which party is which I don't
00:38:13.540care, but the Democrat Democrats can't exist without the Republicans and the Republicans
00:38:18.320can't exist without the Democrats. And so there's this from where I sit, this love hate relationship.
00:38:26.320i mean it absolutely polarized by design we we have to be diametrically opposed because that's
00:38:34.480what riles people up and that's what gets people involved and and i don't think the government
00:38:39.980really cares you coming through the the liberal perspective or the conservative perspective
00:38:44.680doesn't matter we got you now it's like professional wrestling essentially where
00:38:51.680the combatants vehemently state how much they dislike their opponent but they're being paid
00:39:00.060by the same people and they're hanging out afterwards and having drinks and whatever
00:39:04.600so i i believe that our politics is is very much like professional wrestling
00:39:09.540yeah many of them have the same master regardless if they're on the right or the left
00:39:14.620well so that's a good point when you say the same master this kind of gets into the territory of oh
00:39:21.080they're they're doing this they are this they are that who who who is they is there some
00:39:27.080is there some you know wizard behind the curtain or is it just a collective understanding
00:39:33.880i believe that there is a malignant corner of our intelligence that compromises our politicians
00:39:41.200we know that but i know but let me ask you let me just clarify a little bit so
00:39:47.320when you say intelligence so for example i might say um the school system the public school system
00:39:55.160is is broken i i'm not talking about individual teachers who i think the majority of are there
00:40:01.960to serve the children so like what do you actually mean is it is it that everything's corrupt or is
00:40:07.940there's one person at the top is it just the system that's what i'm getting at we've seen
00:40:13.600this with Jeffrey Epstein, and I'll tell you how much power I believe this cadre has.
00:40:21.760The Department of Justice went after Jeffrey Epstein very hard in 2007, and an 80-count
00:40:29.140indictment was drafted. And one of those counts was child trafficking, which is a heavy sentence
00:40:36.260in the federal system. It's 15 to life. But Epstein was looking at 60 various counts.
00:40:45.540And the FBI had found 40 underage victims. The Department of Justice was getting ready to
00:40:55.860put Jeffrey Epstein in prison for a very long time, if not for the duration.
00:41:01.380and alexander acosta was told to stand down because epstein was intelligence but and and
00:41:12.100he's since denied saying that but early on he never denied saying that but here's the thing
00:41:20.000with that i don't know who that is nick can you alexander acosta was the uh u.s attorney for the
00:41:25.480southern district of florida that was overseeing the epstein investigation got it okay keep going
00:41:30.360So a US attorney, and they put all these resources, the FBI and the Department of the Southern District of Florida put all these resources into drafting a 60 count indictment against Jeffrey Epstein.
00:41:49.020And Alexander Acosta was obviously told to stand down.
00:41:53.000And the only two people in the government that can tell a U.S. attorney to stand down is the attorney general and the president.
00:42:04.480And the attorney general at that point was Alberto Gonzalez, and the president was George W. Bush, Bush 2.
00:42:13.340So that's the kind of power that was deployed to cover up Jeffrey Epstein.
00:42:20.980And do you believe that Bush was compromised or I can't remember his name, the AG you just mentioned, do you believe those two individuals were compromised, which is why, hey, we're not going to peel back the curtain on this?
00:42:36.580I mean, his father was head of the CIA and also George Bush, one, was head of the CIA and involved in all kinds of nefarious activities.
00:42:45.320So I don't know if George Bush, too, was, but for him to cover up a child trafficking network, if Jeffrey Epstein had no affiliations to the government, there's no way that orders would come from the president and the attorney general to let Jeffrey Epstein off the hook.
00:47:13.300He was busted repeatedly, ripping off the IRS, filing false tax returns.
00:47:22.020And then he was, I think it was ABC Records, when he was head of that company, I think
00:47:31.260it was ABC, he set up shell companies, and he was funneling money to those shell companies.
00:47:37.220And his partner was Pascual Falcone, who was in the Genovese crime family, who got busted for and how that happened is Pascual got busted for a bunch of heroin and they started to dig into him.
00:47:52.400And they came across these shell companies that he and Clive Davis had set up.
00:47:57.240And you want to know how much time Clive Davis spent in jail?
00:48:03.940yeah i don't know i'm assuming you need to say zero or a year or some absurd amount but i don't
00:48:10.760know zero yeah zero and i've talked to people that know how the government works and they've
00:48:19.500all told me there's there's no way that this dude wasn't an informant so that's how diddy
00:48:27.200got into business was via clive davis it's so it's so crazy okay so kind of a kind of an
00:48:36.280interesting little little conspiracy conspiratorial tangent here who is palm beach pete help help me
00:48:45.220help me understand this guy because this is a crazy story and i'm actually not somebody who
00:48:51.100generally navigates towards conspiracy theories but this one is an interesting one to me
00:48:56.480i haven't spent any time really looking at it so um i know i know the premise of it but
00:49:04.840i've got other things to do so i have well i i actually appreciate that because i think um
00:49:11.680no i do i appreciate that because i think when you start getting into this territory
00:49:16.400it just makes you sound kind of kooky and i think it undermines the real effort of what you're
00:49:22.920trying to do? In 1967, the CIA came out with what was a quote-unquote dispatch. And there were a
00:49:33.560lot of Americans that didn't believe the Warren Commission, because the Warren Commission is very
00:49:39.800problematic regarding JFK's assassination. And the dispatch said, we're going to take people that
00:49:47.660don't believe in the Warren Commission, and we're going to call them conspiracy theorists.
00:49:51.600And then it had a list of the negative things that would be attributed to conspiracy theorists.
00:49:59.980And what I find amazing is the New York Times and the Washington Post use that term maybe once a year prior to that dispatch.
00:50:10.160But after that dispatch, the term conspiracy theory and the term conspiracy theorist was used exponentially.
00:50:16.420League. Whoever cooked that up in the CIA should be getting their family should be getting royalties
00:50:22.480because that term has really hurt people like me. I'm sure. A friend of mine was having dinner with
00:50:33.380a television personality who's got a talk show. And my friend said to him, have you heard of
00:50:41.620Nick Bryan. And this guy's got a national talk show. He knew who I was. But he said, oh, that
00:50:48.620guy's a conspiracy theorist. And he's never read anything I've written. But that's the kind of
00:50:59.660beating I've taken on the internet. If you look at the Franklin child abuse allegations on
00:51:06.000Wikipedia, it's nonsensical. Myself and others have tried to introduce sanity into that
00:51:15.600Wikipedia page, but there are editors that will not let you touch it, and it's locked down.
00:51:21.820Larry Sanger, who was the co-founder of Wikipedia, who was a really good guy,
00:51:27.540he came out recently and said that, and I'd known this because he and I had talked about this before,
00:51:33.040But the CIA was attracted to Wikipedia immediately.
00:51:38.060And before we got really exotic with IP addresses, the IP addresses, a lot of them were from Langley, Virginia.
00:54:55.480Actually, it was delivered by a woman.
00:54:58.520And then, although this hasn't happened much lately, I used to get really crazy phone calls.
00:55:05.740and I've felt at times that my computer was really not a great computer. Although here's
00:55:18.400the thing about me. I don't drink. I don't do drugs. I'm older now. I mean, if I was going
00:55:27.300to go out with a woman, she would have to be much older. So approximately my age.
00:55:35.400There's nothing that I can be compromised about. It has hurt my writing career, for sure.
00:55:41.120But what has amazed me is, although I've been branded as a conspiracy theorist in the mainstream
00:55:51.640media, I've still been able to make a living as a writer. I'm kind of amazed by that. I mean,
00:55:59.000there were some really tough years, but I never stopped writing. I kind of felt if I stopped
00:56:06.220writing, my adversaries have won. So I never stopped writing, but I've lost a lot, for sure.
00:56:14.480But someone, as we were talking about earlier, someone has to make sure that the government is accountable for these little girls getting molested with impunity.
00:56:29.480We talked about earlier the Glass-Steagall repeal, the lies about Iraq, the financial
00:56:39.520meltdown, Snowden's revelations about how we're being spied on, COVID.
00:56:50.260And this is, I think, the reason that we were talking about this earlier.
00:56:55.460They've been conditioned to think that they cannot affect change.
00:56:59.480and the right and the left have been very polarized. I think that this is the issue
00:57:04.040that can bring the right and left together. As Americans, we have to stop eating shit. We just
00:57:10.120have to. If our government is spying on us illegally, which it is, we have to make sure
00:57:17.880our government doesn't do that. If our government has caused a bunch of people to lose their homes,
00:57:23.960which it has, then the government should help them out. I'm a tendency towards libertarianism
00:57:33.840myself, but if the government destroys people, the government should help them out.
00:57:37.500If the government lies about wars, weapons of mass destruction, and gets us into crazy wars where
00:57:45.440billions of dollars are spent and thousands of American lives are lost.
00:57:52.260We have to stop that, or else our leaders are going to take us off a cliff. I really do believe
00:57:59.900that. We talked earlier about the wealth polarization. I mean, that's a fact, and the
00:58:06.640middle class is eroding. That was one thing about America, is we had a very flourishing
00:58:14.980middle class if kids kids getting out of college now can't even buy a home yeah well i mean to be
00:58:23.500fair i don't know that they could 20 years ago either like a kid getting out of college should
00:58:28.900probably not buy a home i'm just trying to be fair i think we have this entitlement attitude
00:58:34.400where it's like well i graduated college so now i can buy a home well no hold on it probably took
00:58:40.100your parents an extra 10 or 20 years to get their first home too so i'm not saying you're wrong i
00:58:46.400just i'm very i'm very cautious of leaning towards this entitlement mentality of like well i'm a kid
00:58:52.860i should own a home no not necessarily when i went to the university of minnesota my tuition
00:59:00.140was $2,000 a year. Fair, totally fair. And I got student loans, but they weren't exorbitant. I mean,
00:59:15.140there are kids getting out of college. People better themselves through education. I believe
00:59:21.640that. Had I not gotten an undergrad degree and gone on to graduate school, there's no way I could
00:59:29.040have gotten the brakes that enabled me to become a writer. And that's what I wanted. I wanted to
00:59:34.080become a writer. So education is really important, but it's another scam now. The way that it's so
00:59:42.300expensive and colleges and universities don't tenure professors like they used to. They become
00:59:50.700adjunct professors where you can get rid of them anytime you want. And a lot of times you don't
00:59:57.320have to pay for any kind of benefits so as education has become more expensive
01:00:03.980universities have become very draconian as far as tenuring professors
01:00:10.680yeah it's wild i i was i mean i've had a couple good conversations the last several days
01:00:17.160um one conversation i had just yesterday i was with some buddies we went to lunch a couple guys
01:00:22.720to hunt with, there was about six of us and we just went and grabbed a bite to eat. And
01:00:26.120we were talking about, you know, when I, when I graduated high school, I'm a little bit younger
01:00:31.640than you. So I graduated high school in 1999. And I remember thinking, man, if I could just make
01:00:37.480a hundred thousand a year, I'm, I'm elite. Like I, I've made it, you know, if I could make six
01:00:43.880figures, I'm the top of the top. And we were talking about that's, that's breadcrumbs right
01:00:49.660now like one of the guys said and i'd have to verify this and i'm curious about this but he said
01:00:54.980that the the the median household income for average middle class families is 220 000
01:01:04.700quarter of a million dollars it's it's what it's it's asinine to me okay let's i've got dr google
01:01:13.620right in front of me let's see yeah pull it up i'm curious
01:01:16.300you know while you're doing that nick the other thing that i was thinking of is anytime the
01:01:23.300government gets involved in any of this nonsense you know it's the college for example um academia
01:01:29.900medical you know health everything becomes more expensive uh years and years ago so probably 10
01:01:35.800years ago at this point but my ex-wife had found her her grandfather passed away and her grandmother
01:01:43.920as well. And we were cleaning files out and cleaning their house and helping the family
01:01:48.880get things organized and straight. And she pulled out this receipt and it was a receipt of when her
01:01:55.900mother was born and it was her grandfather, her grandfather's receipt. And, and it said, you know,
01:02:03.140birth certificate or what I can't exactly remember what it said on him, but birth certificate and
01:02:06.920had a signature and it was like $500 or something. And he just paid cash and gave it to the hospital
01:02:13.900and they gave him a receipt for what he paid and and then you know i've got four children
01:02:20.860five hundred dollars would be a dream i mean the the exorbitant amount just to bring a child into
01:02:27.500the world and that's a result of the government getting involved in health insurance scams it's
01:02:34.840insane i agree with you 100 hmos are if there was an extraterrestrial that came to earth and
01:02:43.820i was talking to him and i'm not saying they're extraterrestrials but if and i i said well you
01:02:49.300know our health care system i pay this company money and then for my health care and then it
01:02:56.320deprives me of my health care i mean so yeah well and look it's crazy if i'm a physician let's say
01:03:07.200it's you know ryan mickler physician and i'm a private practice and you come in you're not feeling
01:03:12.600well and you come in and it's going to be a hundred dollars if you pay me cash or or you
01:03:21.480come in and i start taking medicare medicaid fill in the blank and all of a sudden you know i'm
01:03:26.660making 180 instead of a hundred dollars cool for me but who's subsidizing that additional money
01:03:36.480Well, the taxpayer, right? And so the government has basically just found a way to participate in the market, which legally it cannot. But they're trying to find a way to participate in the market. And because they're participating in the market, they're driving up the cost of literally everything, because they have not only the power of the US dollar, but they also have the power of printing money, which wouldn't that be cool?
01:04:03.920If I need $100, I can run over to my printer and just print out a $100 bill.
01:04:08.080But, of course, it doesn't mean anything, but we don't recognize it.
01:04:33.920me but that happens i knew it was lower than that yeah well 220 sounded extremely high but
01:04:43.980even still 83 000 just doesn't go as far as it used to right and i think that's the real measure
01:04:52.840we need to look at too 83 000 if you look at what it costs to raise a family
01:05:00.240and that's probably both the husband and the wife working or a lot of times it's the husband
01:05:07.920and the wife working so i mean i remember when i got married um 20 about 20 years ago
01:05:17.820we were doing our budget and i remember saying hey we've got like two to three hundred dollars
01:05:23.060a month for groceries. If I tried to do that now, I'd be eating beans and rice. So it's always
01:05:30.860interesting, too, how the government manipulates the inflation rates, like they won't include gas,
01:05:37.720for example, or the price of milk. It's like, okay, well, those are the things that people
01:05:41.900actually use. So maybe calculate that into the equation.
01:05:46.100so we've got a medium income of 83 000 and according to dr google
01:05:55.600the average home sale price in the united states is 500 000 that's crazy
01:06:02.940and what i was talking about earlier gonna work well that's what i said kids can't afford
01:06:10.100to buy homes. The American dream has dissolved. And when I was talking earlier about the wealth
01:06:18.760polarization, the reason why there's been that wealth polarization is because of the laws
01:06:23.460that our legislators have passed that have enabled that. And I believe that a country
01:06:33.360like the United States of America, with their tremendous wealth that we have,
01:06:38.220should at least have a social, a safety net for people that fall through the cracks. And there
01:06:44.940are a lot of people that fall through the cracks. Yeah. But what, okay. But what would that look
01:06:50.220like? I'm not, I'm not entirely against that. I'm like 80% against that. Um, because I don't think
01:06:56.580we have a right to, uh, a safety net. I think people have the right to make decisions good
01:07:03.480and bad. And then we live with the consequences of it. But what, what, what do you mean? What
01:07:07.700would I say? Cause you might say that we have safety nets now. So what would that actually
01:07:11.860look like? I believe that. Okay. So let me just put in one more figure. The average cost of college
01:07:24.440in the U.S. ranges from $21,000 to $65,000. So education has become a scam. I think that people
01:07:37.320should be allowed to have education. I really do. At least the community colleges started out that
01:07:44.040way, very, very inexpensive. And I think that people should be able to have that. There are
01:07:51.480millions of children in the United States that experience hunger at least once a month.
01:07:59.060Should we deprive them of hunger? They're families with children out of the fast-growing segment of
01:08:04.540the homeless population. Yeah, but do you think we are, though? I mean, like, I don't, I'm not
01:08:11.060well-versed in this, so I am speaking a little bit ignorantly, but I was thinking about it. I was
01:08:17.860recently uh traveling and uh we were talking about the homeless population because we were
01:08:25.440downtown and these people these people it's not a housing crisis for example like there's probably
01:08:34.700and i don't know i could look but there's probably five shelters within a 10 mile radius or less
01:08:40.640that they could go to but they're choosing not to and and and it's the same thing i mean we have
01:08:46.780snap benefits. And I think it's called EBT benefits. Like who's starving out of not having
01:08:55.320options. Let's see. I mean, I don't disagree with you, but I'm just saying like, I think those
01:09:06.500things are already built into the system and maybe I'm wrong. I'm again, I'm speaking from
01:09:10.760ignorance but i think it's worthy of having the discussion so according to the usda uh three
01:09:20.42013.7 percent of u.s households approximately 47.9 million people experience food insecurity
01:09:29.200and there's approximately 1.5 million children who are in public schools who are homeless
01:09:38.980and when you start superimposing trends upon one another i wrote a book about lower socioeconomic
01:09:47.660children in america before i got into writing about all this other crazy stuff as i said earlier
01:09:51.900i've written a lot about children's issues yeah no it's good there was a uh a researcher his name
01:09:58.320is greg duncan at the university of michigan it was either the university of michigan or michigan
01:10:02.500state and he found that if a child is uh born at a low birth weight uh and generally children are
01:10:12.340born at low birth weights because the mother doesn't have prenatal care yeah malnourished
01:10:19.400potentially drug abuse there's a lot of reasons i'm sure but if a child is born
01:10:24.800at a low birth weight and as subjected to five years of continuous poverty,
01:10:33.440if they're white, their IQ is going to be 90.
01:10:36.180And if they're black, their IQ is going to be 85.
01:10:39.200So that right there is taking them out of the gain.
01:10:46.620The best that they're going to be able to get is a menial job.
01:10:50.080and nothing and what i found out when i wrote that book nothing destroys cognitive abilities
01:10:58.460and children like homelessness it's it's really striking do you think nick is there i don't
01:11:07.780this is actually fascinating we might need to do a part two on this but do you think i don't again
01:11:13.520i don't know i'm asking you genuinely because i don't know can can you increase iq for example
01:11:21.260cognitive ability through i imagine the biggest thing is probably mindset right scarcity versus
01:11:31.040abundance like i i grew up in a low middle income household my mom raised me and my sister primarily
01:11:38.360on her own. Um, but she just had this incredible, uh, abundance mindset. And I'm sure the mindset
01:11:46.900that she adopted and embraced in her life through osmosis and teaching and everything and experience
01:11:52.580was, was relayed to me, but does that change IQ? I think IQ is like a rubber band
01:12:00.660and we're born with a certain, but it can be augmented for sure. But I think a lot of it is
01:12:12.320innate. But as I said, the child that's born at low birth weight, that's subjected to five years
01:12:19.260of continuous poverty, if they're white, they're going to have an IQ of 90. Now, that could have
01:12:25.540been prevented for sure. The mother could have had prenatal care and the kid wouldn't be subjected
01:12:35.560to poverty. I mean, so yes, I believe that IQ can be increased, but a lot of it is innate.
01:12:46.020I don't know. I just don't know if I agree with that assertion. I like what you're saying. I like
01:12:50.520the idea of it again i'm not well versed in this i don't know if i agree with the assertion that if
01:12:56.420we let's say for example in this hypothetical scenario uh gave a single mother with a brand
01:13:04.140new baby a home and all the food that she needed and access to education that would solve the
01:13:10.880property problem i i don't in the in the micro absolutely tonight for sure full bellies nice
01:13:19.180mattress to sleep on, but over a period of time, I'm not sure that is what solves the problem.
01:13:28.380Well, you know, we have to have priorities in our society. And I think that our children should be
01:13:41.440our most precious resource. I agree with that.
01:13:44.680The United States spends approximately $954, $960 billion on the military.
01:13:56.300Do you know, let's take $5 billion off that and apply it towards children that are experiencing hunger and children that are experiencing homelessness.
01:14:08.120I think that would be the end of the problem.
01:14:12.460i mean we can we can debate where it comes from but i think i think that's fair um i would why
01:14:18.100do we spend a million dollars programs that we could pull it from for sure those those programs
01:14:24.820have been wheeled down pretty badly um starting with clinton actually this is actually one of
01:14:32.220the reasons and people might not know this about the way i think on this um when when we have the
01:14:39.240the just the extreme amount of of american citizens sitting in prison cells right now
01:14:46.120i'm i'm a huge advocate for let's educate them like i don't and you might say well they're
01:14:55.500going to get free education but they're criminals yeah yeah yeah true um but i would rather educate
01:15:02.660those individuals teach them how to start a business teach them to how tax works how how
01:15:09.720money work like educate them please because I would much rather those individuals come back
01:15:15.760out into society and they probably will for the most part at some point and and at least have some
01:15:21.400skill set to be productive members of society so yeah I there's some a lot of things that I agree
01:15:27.960with um and some things i don't you know there's a lot there's a lot to discuss here we have got
01:15:35.020i think 400 000 people that are incarcerated for non-violent drug offenses
01:15:41.440how insane is that yeah no it's insane because how many people are just you know smoking a joint
01:15:51.040for example on the weekend and like although i don't agree with that behavior i don't care
01:15:57.280like if you're not bothering anybody you're not driving around you're not hurting people and you
01:16:02.200do what you want it's fine so we have this huge problem we've got two million people that are
01:16:09.580in our prisons and they were getting educated the prisoners did have an opportunity a long time ago
01:16:20.280to get pell grants to go through but then there was out or uproar about that and so that kind of
01:16:26.660that program. But I had a friend who was in prison for a while and I made a resume for him once and
01:16:37.260he had a lot of correspondence classes. But at that point, he was able to get an education
01:16:45.780in prison and he never went back. So that's a very important thing.
01:16:52.760I'm with you. I think, I think education is the answer. I really do. The more people who learn
01:16:57.820things, whether it's, you know, a specific trait like engineering or medical, or just how to have
01:17:04.560a better mindset, how to, how to add value to the world. Like the more people who are educated,
01:17:10.500the better off we'll all be. I mean, there's no doubt in my mind about that.
01:17:14.160and i was wrong there's there's uh 350 000 people 360 000 people that are incarcerated
01:17:25.160for non-violent drug offenses in the united states how crazy how crazy you were pretty close
01:17:29.920i'll give you the benefit of the doubt on that one you were within a eight percent margin or
01:17:34.920whatever it was so the median income of americans is 83 000 the average cost of a house
01:17:43.920is over 500 000 uh tuition is easily 20 25 000 can you see how this is whittling away at
01:17:55.760the middle class no doubt yeah i mean inflation is is rampant but again the housing thing here's
01:18:04.540another example the government getting involved 2007 2008 2009 subprime mortgages uh you know
01:18:11.480letting letting people who have no business owning a home backing it with with insurance it every time
01:18:19.180the government gets involved things get less effective and more expensive well that was a
01:18:25.680scam i mean when clinton totally repealed glass steagle i mean that's where we ended up in 2007
01:18:31.6802008 um it was that was designed i mean this is my personal opinion that wasn't designed to give
01:18:39.300people's houses. That was designed to turn the world into the world's largest casino.
01:18:46.720Before Glass-Steagall, the reason why Glass-Steagall was enacted was during the Great
01:18:51.740Depression when you had commercial banks speculating. So that's why Glass-Steagall put
01:18:57.300a wall between those two types of banking. And when it was repealed, we just got an act two of
01:19:05.800glass seagull uh which played a significant role in delivering us to the great depression
01:19:14.680in in the uh late 20s and early 30s i mean just just look at fractionalized banking for example
01:19:23.380you know i i turn a dollar in they can loan it out 10 times if i want to borrow it back they're
01:19:28.500like yeah we'll do that at seven percent it's my own money and you're fractionalizing it
01:19:32.040Blowing it out at 10 times the amount that I gave you, this stuff's crazy.