The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1640 - Josh Rogin

00:00:15.000 You know, I have a Instagram influencer watch account.

00:00:20.000 Do you really?

00:00:21.000 Yeah, it's got like 22,000 followers.

00:00:23.000 What's it called?

00:00:23.000 It's called watch the ramen.

00:00:24.000 It's where I combine My love of watches and my love of Japanese ramen into one Instagram account.

00:00:29.000 It's never been done before.

00:00:31.000 That's an interesting combination.

00:00:32.000 And what I do is I take pictures of my watches and I review the watches and the ramen together.

00:00:37.000 Oh.

00:00:38.000 And I pair them.

00:00:39.000 I mean, to some extent, it's kind of a tongue and tongue.

00:00:40.000 There you are.

00:00:41.000 Boom.

00:00:42.000 Look at that.

00:00:43.000 Oh, that's hilarious. 1.00

00:00:44.000 You get the fucking watch and the spoon. 1.00

00:00:45.000 That's the Seiko version of your moon watch. 1.00

00:00:48.000 Oh, wow.

00:00:49.000 That's a beautiful watch.

00:00:50.000 The story is...

00:00:51.000 I don't know if you're...

00:00:52.000 Are you taping this?

00:00:53.000 Yeah.

00:00:54.000 Okay, the story is that Admiral Pogue...

00:00:56.000 On his moon mission was supposed to take the first chronograph into space, and the Omega people had a branding agreement with NASA, so they gave him an Omega moon watch.

00:01:06.000 And then he didn't like it.

00:01:07.000 He trusted his old Seiko.

00:01:10.000 That's what he trusted.

00:01:11.000 So he took this watch in his pocket, which was his.

00:01:14.000 And this is not the same exact watch, obviously.

00:01:16.000 It's a version of it.

00:01:18.000 A recreation of it.

00:01:19.000 And he took off his Omega once he got into space.

00:01:22.000 And he put on his Seiko chronograph, which was then forever called a Pogue.

00:01:28.000 So this was actually the first chronograph worn in space.

00:01:30.000 Not the Omega one, despite what you may have told.

00:01:33.000 That was fake news.

00:01:34.000 Fake news.

00:01:34.000 And now that's considered a...

00:01:37.000 So is that a quartz watch?

00:01:37.000 A Pogue.

00:01:39.000 No, that's an automatic watch.

00:01:40.000 It's not automatic, but I thought that was the problem with the watch in space, was that with no gravity, that the moving of the gears wouldn't be the same.

00:01:48.000 Admiral Pogue would dare to disagree with you because he just did it, and that was like 1973. Maybe he didn't give a fuck about the time, he just loved that watch. 0.74

00:01:56.000 No, no. 0.99

00:01:56.000 He needed it to time. 0.99

00:01:57.000 The whole point was that he needed it to time the bursts so that he wouldn't incinerate himself in the atmosphere.

00:02:02.000 Oh.

00:02:02.000 And he didn't trust the Omega.

00:02:03.000 He knew how to use his watch.

00:02:05.000 Oh, I see.

00:02:05.000 So he was like, I'll take this watch for the pictures, but then I'm going to get my old trusty Seiko out of my pocket because I can't die on this mission right now.

00:02:12.000 Oh, wow.

00:02:13.000 And that's obviously not as prestigious of a watch, but now it's like amongst watch freaks and geeks considered to be like one of the ones you want to collect.

00:02:20.000 That's so weird because a watch expert was explaining to me the reason why the moon watch from Omega is a wind-up is because you can't rely on gravity because the automatic movements, you know, there's these little things and they swing back and forth depending upon, like, your watch. 0.99

00:02:35.000 I don't know if that guy was full of shit or... 0.99

00:02:37.000 I don't know. 1.00

00:02:38.000 But, like, the Admiral Pogue is...

00:02:41.000 The watch is called the Pogue for a reason.

00:02:43.000 Right, right, right.

00:02:44.000 Makes sense.

00:02:45.000 So that's a weird combination, though.

00:02:47.000 Well...

00:02:47.000 And why didn't you just have two separate accounts?

00:02:50.000 Well, because that hasn't been done before.

00:02:52.000 No one's ever combined reviewing ramen restaurants and reviewing watches together.

00:02:58.000 Yeah.

00:03:21.000 I had like one burner.

00:03:23.000 But I loved it.

00:03:24.000 And then as I got older, I started getting into watches.

00:03:27.000 And then my Instagram was like, all watches and ramen.

00:03:30.000 My wife was like, nobody wants to see that. 0.89

00:03:33.000 She's like, can you just stop posting that?

00:03:35.000 I'm like, oh, I'll just make it its own thing.

00:03:37.000 And then people started to like it.

00:03:38.000 And in the ramen community, people started to learn about watches.

00:03:40.000 And in the watch community, people started to learn about ramen.

00:03:43.000 And communities were brought together.

00:03:45.000 Way to go, dude.

00:03:46.000 People seem to like it.

00:03:47.000 Now we're going to have a ton more followers.

00:03:48.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:03:49.000 David Lee Roth moved to Japan for a bit.

00:03:52.000 Have you been there?

00:03:54.000 Yes, I have.

00:03:55.000 It's amazing, right?

00:03:55.000 Yeah, I've only been there once for the UFC, but I really enjoyed it.

00:03:58.000 I was there for a couple days.

00:03:59.000 I didn't get to see much, but we went to some great sushi restaurants.

00:04:03.000 Got a chance to, and the Fight fans there are really, it's really interesting because they're super, super polite.

00:04:09.000 And they're really quiet, and then when something happens, like they applaud, like a guard pass or something that's like real technical, they all applaud, they get very excited about it.

00:04:20.000 I once went to Slipknot Festival, Knotfest Tokyo, because my brother-in-law is the drummer for Slipknot, Jay Weinberg.

00:04:27.000 And so he, I'd never been to a Slipknot concert before, so we just went.

00:04:31.000 And 25,000 Japanese fans, Slipknot fans, in rows, standing politely, perfect rows, and then the song would come on, and they'd be like, you know, doing this, and then the song would come off, and they'd politely wait for the next song.

00:04:43.000 It was hilarious.

00:04:44.000 Yeah.

00:04:45.000 It's a...

00:04:45.000 It's a different culture.

00:04:46.000 Yeah.

00:04:47.000 Really different.

00:04:48.000 Like alien.

00:04:49.000 Well, I wouldn't use that word, but...

00:04:51.000 I don't mean in a bad way.

00:04:53.000 It's so different from what we are here in America with the obnoxious people and the way people are on the street in particular.

00:05:02.000 They're so polite and everyone's so...

00:05:04.000 It's very orderly.

00:05:05.000 That's one way to look at it.

00:05:06.000 I mean, you know, I wasn't planning to analyze the Japanese psyche right now, but let me take a shot at it.

00:05:13.000 You know, there's two things that I think really struck me about Japan.

00:05:16.000 One is that, you know, we have like a 200-year history.

00:05:19.000 They've got a 5,000-year history, okay?

00:05:20.000 Yeah.

00:05:21.000 So for them, our history is like a snap, right?

00:05:24.000 So they have things that they are doing that they have brought from their ancient times that they totally forgot why, okay?

00:05:30.000 They have no idea why they're doing all these things.

00:05:32.000 Like, the tea ceremony takes four hours...

00:05:35.000 And the Sumo rules are as such, and the food is cooked this way.

00:05:38.000 And the tradition itself is a beautiful thing, but it's long detached from any sort of rationality.

00:05:43.000 Judaism is like this, right? 0.99

00:05:45.000 You know, like, why don't you eat this or that?

00:05:46.000 I don't know.

00:05:46.000 That's how we always are doing it.

00:05:48.000 And the other thing is that, you know, because it's an island, it's like an island in many more ways than one, and in a sense...

00:06:08.000 I think?

00:06:17.000 I think?

00:06:23.000 I think?

00:06:40.000 It could go either way, but they see each other as a community and as a family and they act as such.

00:06:51.000 There is a Confucius element to that, but there's also sort of like a community element to that that, again, I like for the most part, but also can get in the way sometimes if you just want to buck the system or do something interesting.

00:07:02.000 Yeah, they also have an ancient system of discipline and respect that comes from feudal Japan and also just martial arts in general.

00:07:13.000 They're known for being the birthplace of many styles of martial arts, and also where many styles of martial arts that maybe came from China were refined and changed in Japan.

00:07:24.000 Well, you know more about that than me, but I do remember going to a Pride In 2002, do you remember Pride?

00:07:30.000 Sure, yeah.

00:07:31.000 It was crazy, man.

00:07:33.000 Pride was the competitor to the UFC in the early 2000s.

00:07:37.000 They had enormous events.

00:07:39.000 Huge events, like 80,000 people.

00:07:41.000 Saitama Super Arena.

00:07:43.000 Exactly.

00:07:44.000 And that was the first time that I really saw up close all these different styles being posed against each other.

00:07:49.000 Yeah.

00:07:49.000 You saw like, oh, who could really fight?

00:07:52.000 You know what I mean?

00:07:52.000 Yeah.

00:07:52.000 No, they did in a very unique way in Japan.

00:07:55.000 They really did.

00:07:56.000 And it was the envy of the martial arts world because of the fact that they did have – and it's what's strange is that like it went away.

00:08:03.000 That's what's really weird.

00:08:04.000 Yeah, man.

00:08:05.000 I mean, they had the biggest martial arts scene in terms of the ability to have 90,000 people in a super arena.

00:08:13.000 At the time, America was not like that.

00:08:15.000 As a matter of fact, it wasn't even that popular in America at the same time.

00:08:19.000 It wasn't really popular in America until 2005. When the Ultimate Fighter was on television, on Spike TV, in the finals between Stephen Bonner and Forrest Griffin became this huge event because it was just this wild fight that was just perfect timing and the worlds collided in this perfect way and then it became this emerging sport.

00:08:40.000 But in Japan it was already huge.

00:08:42.000 Yeah, I always think of Japan as going like five years into the future.

00:08:46.000 You know what I mean?

00:08:47.000 It's like the near future.

00:08:49.000 But an orderly version of the future.

00:08:52.000 Yeah, it's a wonderful country.

00:08:54.000 The people are, you know, they can seem cold, but they're not.

00:08:56.000 They're very warm.

00:08:57.000 They're just very, you know, particular about the way that they interact.

00:09:01.000 And they appreciate if you go to their country that you learn some of these things, which I tried to endeavor to do in my two years of living there.

00:09:07.000 I don't think I Really got to the bottom of it.

00:09:09.000 I know that when my parents showed up, they did not follow any of the practices.

00:09:13.000 My dad's eating on the train.

00:09:14.000 I'm like, Dad, you can't do that.

00:09:15.000 He's like, why?

00:09:16.000 I got a bag of chips.

00:09:16.000 I don't care.

00:09:17.000 I'm going to eat them.

00:09:18.000 Stuff like that.

00:09:19.000 So it takes a while to learn, but if you do the work and you learn the language, and again, I'm what they call functionally illiterate.

00:09:25.000 I can speak and understand Japanese, but I can't read or write anything.

00:09:28.000 Well, that's cool that you can speak it.

00:09:30.000 To get around, to communicate with people.

00:09:32.000 So they super appreciate that, and Japan is actually a very diverse place in a sense in that if you go west to Kyoto and then you keep going to Kyushu or you go north to Sapporo, you will find crazy nuances and differences in the culture and the food and the people there that will blow your mind.

00:09:52.000 I started my career working for the Japanese newspaper, the Asahi Shinbun, in their D.C. office.

00:09:57.000 That's how you started, as a journalist.

00:09:58.000 I'm a failed Japan scholar.

00:10:00.000 That's true. 0.58

00:10:01.000 Like, you're a failed kickboxer? 0.63

00:10:02.000 Not failed, but you know what I mean.

00:10:04.000 You didn't set out to be like a...

00:10:06.000 I would go with that.

00:10:08.000 Yeah, so I wanted to work in U.S.-Japan relations and eat ramen and travel back and forth and work at a think tank or something like that.

00:10:15.000 Nobody wanted to hire me for that because, you know, Japan's like one of those countries that's like basically OK. Like if you study a problem country like Russia or Iran or something like that, there's industry for that.

00:10:24.000 There's money for that.

00:10:25.000 You know, somebody wants to know about that.

00:10:27.000 But, you know, the Japan scholarship community is very small and it's very hard to break into.

00:10:32.000 And I'm not like one for schooling.

00:10:34.000 You know what I mean?

00:10:35.000 Like I... Like, I graduated GW in four and a half years flat, and, like, that was it.

00:10:39.000 Like, there was no graduate school coming.

00:10:42.000 Like, it just wasn't going to happen.

00:10:43.000 I spent my time at GW working at the DC Improv, you know?

00:10:46.000 Yeah.

00:10:47.000 Which is a whole other story that you don't want to hear.

00:10:49.000 Well, we'll get to that.

00:10:50.000 Okay.

00:10:50.000 We can certainly get to that.

00:10:51.000 But anyway, so I found this country that I loved, and I wanted to spend time studying it.

00:10:55.000 So the job that I found was working at the Japanese newspaper.

00:10:57.000 It's called the Asahi Shimbun.

00:10:59.000 It's, like, their New York Times.

00:11:00.000 And big bureau, lots of journalists.

00:11:03.000 And if you're the...

00:11:04.000 Japanese journalist at the Washington bureau of the biggest newspaper. 1.00

00:11:07.000 You're the shit. 1.00

00:11:08.000 You're the cream of the crop, right? 1.00

00:11:10.000 And so there I am, you know, 24 years old.

00:11:13.000 I didn't know anything.

00:11:13.000 But I spoke Japanese, so they hired me.

00:11:16.000 And they're like, go to the Pentagon.

00:11:18.000 And I said, why?

00:11:18.000 They said, you're the Pentagon reporter.

00:11:20.000 I said, what are you talking about?

00:11:21.000 They're like, yeah, this is a true story.

00:11:23.000 They said, go to the Pentagon.

00:11:24.000 Donald Rumsfeld was the briefer, 2004. And they said, go early, sit in the front row.

00:11:30.000 If he calls on you, ask him anything about Japan.

00:11:32.000 It doesn't matter what he says.

00:11:32.000 That's going to be news for us.

00:11:34.000 So I said, okay.

00:11:34.000 So I got there super early.

00:11:36.000 And I had a notebook that's a little bit smaller than this one.

00:11:39.000 And I sat in the front row.

00:11:40.000 And, you know, the thing's about to start.

00:11:42.000 In Rumsfeld, like, for people who don't remember, like, there used to be these things called briefings.

00:11:46.000 You know what I mean?

00:11:46.000 Where, like, officials would, like, talk to us and tell us things, sorry, about what's going on in the government.

00:11:53.000 You know, they don't really do that anymore. 0.97

00:11:55.000 Like, the briefings now are all crap. 1.00

00:11:56.000 They're all bullshit. 1.00

00:11:57.000 But most of them anyway. 1.00

00:11:58.000 But back then, Rumsfeld didn't care.

00:12:00.000 He would tell you anything you wanted to know.

00:12:02.000 He wanted you to know it.

00:12:03.000 He wanted to spar with you.

00:12:04.000 He loved it.

00:12:05.000 You know, he lived through that kind of stuff.

00:12:07.000 And so I sat in the front row and Martha Raddatz from ABC, she's coming out of the bullpen, you know, two minutes before the thing starts. 1.00

00:12:14.000 And she looks at me and she says, you're in my chair.

00:12:17.000 And I said to her, I don't see any names on the chairs.

00:12:21.000 And she looks at the Wrangler and he says, yeah, this isn't high school.

00:12:24.000 We don't have assigned seats here.

00:12:25.000 This is the Pentagon.

00:12:26.000 And she's got to go sit in the back. 1.00

00:12:28.000 Okay, so she's already pissed at me. 0.99

00:12:30.000 Why did she think that she could just take your chair? 1.00

00:12:32.000 Traditionally, I should have, out of respect, given the very famous senior producers the seats that they sit in.

00:12:38.000 It's just the rule.

00:12:39.000 It's just like a custom.

00:12:40.000 But I didn't know that.

00:12:41.000 But saying it to you that way?

00:12:42.000 You're in my chair?

00:12:44.000 Yeah.

00:12:45.000 I love Martha Radd.

00:12:46.000 She's a very nice person.

00:12:47.000 And she's a great journalist.

00:12:49.000 But suffice to say, at that moment, I was just like, no, I'm not moving.

00:12:53.000 What did she say to you?

00:12:55.000 She's like, okay, I guess I'll go sit in the back.

00:12:57.000 And then the thing starts.

00:12:59.000 And Rumsfeld's doing his performance.

00:13:01.000 Iraq this, insurgency that, where's Osama bin Laden?

00:13:04.000 Is the insurgency stronger or weaker than it was yesterday?

00:13:07.000 And he's just like the master of this stuff.

00:13:10.000 I'm not endorsing his policies, I'm just saying he was the best.

00:13:13.000 So he calls on me randomly and I ask him something about Japan and his face lights up and he talks about the US-Japan relationship for 35 minutes.

00:13:20.000 He drained the entire press conference until the bell rang.

00:13:23.000 All we were talking about was like Okinawa basing or whatever.

00:13:26.000 And all the other reports, now they were super pissed because I had wasted their chance to ask 20 more times, where's Osama bin Laden?

00:13:33.000 Where's Osama bin Laden?

00:13:34.000 We don't know.

00:13:35.000 We still don't know.

00:13:35.000 Where's Osama bin Laden?

00:13:37.000 We still don't know.

00:13:38.000 And I went back to my bosses with a notebook full of Donald Rumsfeld talking about Japan.

00:13:43.000 And it was a front page article in seven million Japanese newspapers that I couldn't read.

00:13:48.000 And to this idea, to this day, I don't know what the article said, but I got the quotes.

00:13:48.000 Wow.

00:13:54.000 Big score.

00:13:55.000 And I was like, what do I do now?

00:13:56.000 They're like, do it again tomorrow.

00:13:57.000 So for three years, I was Rumsfeld's foil in that room.

00:14:01.000 And I didn't know if the fix was in until one time I didn't ask anything and he stopped me in the hallway and I didn't even think he knew my name and he said, Josh, what are you tired today?

00:14:08.000 I could have used you in there.

00:14:12.000 So he was looking to just take away from all the Iraq... 1.00

00:14:15.000 With a big shit-eating grin on his face. 1.00

00:14:17.000 Oh, wow. 1.00

00:14:17.000 And that's when I knew the fix was in, right? 1.00

00:14:19.000 And I was like, okay.

00:14:20.000 So me and Donald Rumsfeld were making news in Japanese for three years.

00:14:25.000 And my bosses think that I'm just like the best thing since sliced bread.

00:14:28.000 That's hilarious. 0.85

00:14:29.000 It ended in a two-week trip to Guantanamo Bay that is a mindfuck story I can't even get into right at this moment.

00:14:35.000 But if you want to come back to it, I'll do it.

00:14:37.000 Okay.

00:14:38.000 Yeah.

00:14:38.000 Anyway, eventually I had to get a job in the American media, because if you're the white guy at the Japanese newspaper, there's no upward mobility for you.

00:14:45.000 So again, I tried to get a bunch of Japan jobs, consulting jobs, think tank jobs, didn't get any.

00:14:50.000 But I got a job working for a trade publication writing about the Pentagon because I knew how to cover the Pentagon.

00:14:55.000 And then, you know, those Japanese journalists who I had worked with, because, you know, people don't understand, it's like young journalists these days get thrown onto the heap, right?

00:15:03.000 There's no training.

00:15:04.000 Like maybe you went to, like, if you went to journalism school, that's a great leg up.

00:15:07.000 I didn't do that, you know what I mean?

00:15:09.000 So usually you have to be like...

00:15:18.000 I didn't have any of that.

00:15:20.000 But I had something that these people didn't have, which is I was trained by these people.

00:15:23.000 Top, top, top Japanese journalists who taught me the things that they never teach, which are like how to source, how to dig, how to pour through documents, how to use data, how to understand budgets, how to understand how these agencies work on the inside.

00:15:38.000 And that takes years and years and years to learn.

00:15:40.000 That's the work of covering the government that a lot of people still do, but not as much as they used to.

00:15:47.000 And I used those skills to break stories.

00:15:48.000 So I became a scoop master, and I just started breaking stories.

00:15:51.000 And the more I broke stories, the better jobs I got.

00:15:53.000 I went to Federal Computer Week magazine, Congressional Quarterly, Foreign Policy magazine.

00:15:58.000 I covered the State Department.

00:16:00.000 Then I covered Daily Beast, then Bloomberg View, and now The Washington Post.

00:16:06.000 And I also have a side gig at CNN. I'm a part-time contributor there.

00:16:10.000 What a weird way to launch your career.

00:16:12.000 I fell ass backwards into journalism.

00:16:14.000 My quest to eat more ramen. 0.68

00:16:16.000 That's the sad truth of the matter.

00:16:18.000 And when did you get out of Japan?

00:16:19.000 How long were you there for?

00:16:20.000 I was there for a year.

00:16:21.000 I worked for the Japanese newspaper in D.C. Oh, okay.

00:16:24.000 So you worked for them through America.

00:16:26.000 Exactly.

00:16:27.000 I worked in their Washington bureau.

00:16:29.000 They've got a bunch of Japanese journalists who don't speak English and they need some American... 0.99

00:16:32.000 Kids to run around and interview people to help.

00:16:36.000 We were like a team.

00:16:37.000 Did you consider learning the language in terms of how to write and read?

00:16:40.000 I tried.

00:16:41.000 I'm not a good student.

00:16:44.000 As my transcripts will bear out.

00:16:47.000 All right?

00:16:48.000 I think I was like eight when I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

00:16:51.000 I don't want someone at the front of the room telling me what's what.

00:16:54.000 You know what I mean?

00:16:54.000 I just want to figure it out for myself.

00:16:57.000 And, you know, so that led to like a few bad life choices in terms of like studying for exams when I was actually probably at the improv, you know.

00:17:06.000 Not sober.

00:17:07.000 And then, you know, basically your options limit.

00:17:10.000 Right.

00:17:10.000 No, but I mean, listen, again, you know, I think if I was meant to become a U.S.-Japan scholar, that would have been one thing.

00:17:17.000 I think things happen for a reason.

00:17:19.000 And, you know, that's life, man.

00:17:21.000 Would you have predicted 20 years ago that you'd be sitting here right now?

00:17:25.000 Like, you'd never have thought of that.

00:17:26.000 You just, you try to take the opportunities where you can.

00:17:26.000 Right.

00:17:29.000 You try to be authentic.

00:17:30.000 And when those two things interact, you take a step.

00:17:33.000 And sometimes that step leads you to a good place.

00:17:35.000 Sometimes it doesn't.

00:17:36.000 Yeah, no, for sure.

00:17:37.000 I don't plan anything.

00:17:39.000 I just keep going.

00:17:41.000 This is not advice.

00:17:43.000 This is not a good way to go through life.

00:17:45.000 But it kind of is.

00:17:46.000 You're wrong.

00:17:47.000 I mean, you're right.

00:17:48.000 It's not advice, but it is advice.

00:17:50.000 It's not advice in a traditional sense.

00:17:53.000 Yeah.

00:17:54.000 No, it's not for everybody.

00:17:55.000 But it is advice in the sense that if someone identifies with you, like, that guy's kind of like me.

00:18:00.000 It will work.

00:18:01.000 No, don't do what I did.

00:18:03.000 Study, get good grades, go to grad school.

00:18:06.000 Don't do what you did specifically, but do what you did in terms of like, You know, this is what you were interested in.

00:18:11.000 You had passion and drive and it does apply to everything.

00:18:15.000 I think if you can find the thing that you love to do and you can find someone to pay you for it, then do that!

00:18:21.000 You know what I mean?

00:18:22.000 And that was quite lucky because, again, I never thought of being a journalist until I was one.

00:18:26.000 My wife, on the other hand, who's a fabulous journalist for PBS NewsHour, Allie Rogan, she started interning in journalism. 1.00

00:18:34.000 She worked on it in college.

00:18:35.000 She worked at NBC. She worked at ABC. This is what she wanted to do.

00:18:38.000 In the end, I think, in part for that reason also because she looks better on TV than me, she's going to end up being a lot more successful than I am.

00:18:46.000 But I'm cool with that.

00:18:48.000 I love that, actually.

00:18:49.000 I just want to work in this business, have a career, and make a living, and at the point where Doing what I love and getting people to pay me for it doesn't work out, I'll do something else.

00:19:02.000 It's not an end for me.

00:19:04.000 It's just a means.

00:19:05.000 It's a gig.

00:19:06.000 It's a thing that you enjoy doing.

00:19:08.000 It's a thing that I've gotten, I think, kind of good at over 17 years of doing it, and I don't have any other skills.

00:19:13.000 So I'm kind of stuck in a way.

00:19:15.000 But if I get cancelled, if I say, like, fuckabee on TV instead of Huckabee or something like that, then I'll go get a real estate license or whatever.

00:19:25.000 It's not going to crush my soul.

00:19:27.000 But on the other hand, I would like to continue my career in journalism, at least, for not to get cancelled.

00:19:33.000 How caffeinated are you right now?

00:19:36.000 This is actually how I am all the time.

00:19:40.000 My wife will attest to that.

00:19:41.000 But yes, there's been a couple of...

00:19:44.000 Cups of coffee?

00:19:45.000 Yeah, Black Rifle's strong.

00:19:47.000 It's good stuff.

00:19:48.000 Well, this is fun, man.

00:19:49.000 Yeah, it's fun to have you here, man.

00:19:51.000 I became aware of you because you got in a squabble with a comedian where someone punched you.

00:19:56.000 Dan Ninen.

00:19:57.000 Yeah, I forget what happened.

00:19:59.000 I forget how I found out about it.

00:20:01.000 Maybe because we share a similar last name.

00:20:04.000 Is that when someone was like, hey, do you know this guy who got punched by Danine?

00:20:07.000 I think so.

00:20:08.000 I forget what it was.

00:20:08.000 Do you know the true story of that incident has never been told?

00:20:10.000 The true story?

00:20:11.000 The true story.

00:20:12.000 I've been waiting 10 years to tell this story.

00:20:14.000 Feel free.

00:20:16.000 Okay.

00:20:17.000 Now, here's the thing.

00:20:20.000 Okay.

00:20:21.000 Again.

00:20:22.000 We're not, you know, so I worked in the DC Improv in 1999 as a GW junior, right?

00:20:29.000 It was great.

00:20:29.000 I was just like...

00:20:30.000 What's a GW junior?

00:20:31.000 George Washington University.

00:20:32.000 Oh.

00:20:33.000 It's like two blocks from the improv, all right?

00:20:35.000 Oh, okay.

00:20:35.000 I needed beer money.

00:20:37.000 They needed waiters.

00:20:38.000 Simple as that.

00:20:39.000 I'll never forget.

00:20:39.000 I walked in.

00:20:40.000 There was a guy named John...

00:20:41.000 Did you ever play at DC Improv?

00:20:42.000 Yes.

00:20:43.000 You remember a guy named John X? Yes.

00:20:45.000 I only played it once, and it was quite a while ago.

00:20:48.000 Anyway, there's this manager named Allison Jaffe, who's the owner now, was the host then, and Mike Barbiglia was a host.

00:20:53.000 I worked with him.

00:20:53.000 Mike Barbiglia, the comic?

00:20:55.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:20:55.000 He was at Georgetown when I was at GW. Oh, he was the host of the show.

00:20:59.000 He was literally the host that takes you to your seat and tells you- That's what I was thinking you said.

00:20:59.000 No, no.

00:21:03.000 That's what he was.

00:21:04.000 Oh, wow.

00:21:05.000 I was a waiter, and he was the guy who takes your ticket and shows you to your seat, because he was trying to break into the business.

00:21:10.000 Oh.

00:21:11.000 And he always had notebooks.

00:21:12.000 He was always writing.

00:21:13.000 Like, he was a very smart guy, as you know.

00:21:15.000 He was a very cerebral comic.

00:21:17.000 But we were friendly, you know.

00:21:18.000 And, you know, I didn't care.

00:21:21.000 I wasn't trying to break into stand-up comedy.

00:21:23.000 I just wanted, you know, we had money.

00:21:24.000 And so I was, like, trying to work there.

00:21:27.000 But I got to hang out with all my stars, all my favorite stars.

00:21:30.000 So it was, like, you know, all the living color guys.

00:21:34.000 David Allen Greer would always come through.

00:21:35.000 Keenan Ivory Wayans.

00:21:38.000 A lot of the, like...

00:21:40.000 Dave Attell was a big one.

00:21:41.000 Dave Chappelle lived in D.C. at the time.

00:21:44.000 Well, he didn't live in D.C. at the time, but his mom lived there, and that was his hometown. 0.95

00:21:47.000 So he would do these endless four-hour sets where he would try out all his new shit, and we would just sit there, full house. 0.96

00:21:53.000 No one would ever leave. 0.98

00:21:54.000 You never saw anybody perform like that.

00:21:57.000 So it was just a great job.

00:21:58.000 I eventually got fired.

00:21:59.000 It's a separate story.

00:22:02.000 Neither here nor there.

00:22:03.000 Water under the bridge.

00:22:04.000 But anyway, I stayed in touch with them.

00:22:06.000 And Allison, who was the host, she became the owner. 1.00

00:22:08.000 And so I kept in touch with her.

00:22:10.000 And every year they had this thing called the Celebrity DC Comedy Contest.

00:22:15.000 It was like a charity event.

00:22:17.000 Which actually turned out to be corrupt in the end.

00:22:20.000 Really?

00:22:20.000 Yeah, the guy who was running it was like, I'm the charity.

00:22:23.000 The charity's never got any money.

00:22:24.000 Oh, no.

00:22:25.000 Now he's probably going to sue me, but the point is that it's true anyway.

00:22:29.000 So anyways, they would have Joe Lieberman would get up and do six minutes of blue stand-up.

00:22:34.000 It was pretty funny.

00:22:35.000 Grover Norquist was always doing it.

00:22:37.000 That was back when he was blue.

00:22:39.000 Is he red now?

00:22:40.000 I see what you did there.

00:22:41.000 I see what you did there.

00:22:42.000 Got it.

00:22:43.000 I see what you did there.

00:22:43.000 It was very punny.

00:22:45.000 Blue meaning dirty.

00:22:47.000 Yeah, like sad comedy.

00:22:48.000 Not like...

00:22:49.000 Oh, blue.

00:22:50.000 Like sad.

00:22:51.000 Like he was working blue, yeah.

00:22:52.000 Is that not a stand-up term?

00:22:54.000 Did I use that?

00:22:55.000 Blue is dirty.

00:22:56.000 Oh, yeah.

00:22:56.000 Blue, that too.

00:22:57.000 Yeah, but that's what blue stands for.

00:22:59.000 Like, do you work blue?

00:23:00.000 It's a weird...

00:23:01.000 It's very obscure.

00:23:01.000 You never hear it anymore.

00:23:02.000 But that's what it used to be back in, like, the 90s, I guess.

00:23:05.000 Like, he works blue.

00:23:07.000 Okay, so I massacred that.

00:23:08.000 I massacred that. 1.00

00:23:09.000 No, but you did it in a sense of, like, he would say depressing shit. 1.00

00:23:12.000 It was like dark. 0.99

00:23:13.000 Dark. 0.73

00:23:14.000 It was dark.

00:23:14.000 He did a lot of black comedy.

00:23:15.000 Maybe it's black comedy?

00:23:16.000 Is that right?

00:23:17.000 Anyway, we're getting off the subject.

00:23:17.000 Yeah.

00:23:18.000 Black comedy is a very different thing. 0.98

00:23:19.000 Can we get back on track with this story?

00:23:20.000 We only got three hours.

00:23:23.000 We're wasting time.

00:23:25.000 Let's get back on track.

00:23:26.000 So anyway, Dan Nynan is the ringer.

00:23:28.000 They paid him to be the ringer.

00:23:30.000 You know, the one paid guy who gets paid.

00:23:32.000 Everyone else is doing it for charities.

00:23:33.000 Okay.

00:23:34.000 And if you don't know who Dan Nynan is out there, he was first made famous because he's like the Silicon Valley tech guy who decided to toss it all and become a stand-up comedian because that was his true calling.

00:23:45.000 And he would do all these corporate gigs for these Silicon Valley companies.

00:23:49.000 He made a bunch of money, performed for Obama.

00:23:51.000 He got a little buzz.

00:23:52.000 He bought 400,000 followers on Twitter.

00:23:54.000 That was like one thing.

00:23:55.000 And anyway, he was supposed to be this clean comic.

00:23:58.000 He's like, I'm the clean comic that you can invite to your corporate event, right?

00:24:02.000 He's not like playing over like, you know, trying to do comedy over like stripper music like you were.

00:24:08.000 Like he's a corporate guy.

00:24:08.000 You know what I mean?

00:24:11.000 So he wasn't doing road gigs.

00:24:13.000 He was doing just these sort of— He was doing some of that, but mostly the corporate conference stuff, which is fine.

00:24:19.000 That's all well and good. 0.99

00:24:20.000 Anyway, his act was just like—it was crap, right? 0.98

00:24:24.000 It was just like not funny. 0.98

00:24:26.000 And I was tweeting about it from my seat on the high tops in the back.

00:24:29.000 And I was—to be fair, I was tweeting sarcastic stuff about all the comics, but the other ones are like journalists and politicians.

00:24:34.000 They don't care.

00:24:35.000 And because I worked there and because I was using the club's Twitter feed, someone showed it to him.

00:24:41.000 Oh, you were doing it through the DC Improv?

00:24:43.000 I just tagged him.

00:24:44.000 No, I just tagged him.

00:24:45.000 So the staff saw it.

00:24:46.000 They showed it to him in the green room.

00:24:48.000 And he comes to the back of the room.

00:24:49.000 He says, are you Josh Rook?

00:24:50.000 And I said, yes.

00:24:51.000 He punches me in the face.

00:24:53.000 And I was like, have you ever been sucker punched? 0.55

00:24:55.000 I mean, you've been sucker punched.

00:24:57.000 You're kind of shocked.

00:24:58.000 You're like, did that just happen?

00:24:59.000 And there's like, oh, by the way, there's like seven journalists who are there covering the thing.

00:25:03.000 We're not covering the thing, we're just going for the free drinks.

00:25:05.000 And they're all like, did that just happen?

00:25:08.000 So I start tweeting, Dan and I had just punched me in the face. 0.67

00:25:11.000 And then he starts like, you know, these jokes are terrible, like election, erection, you know, like weirdly, vaguely problematic jokes for an Indian guy to make, right? 0.98

00:25:21.000 And then he sees me tweeting about him and he comes back and he swings at me again. 0.91

00:25:28.000 He's like flailing.

00:25:28.000 Again?

00:25:29.000 He hit me twice.

00:25:29.000 Again.

00:25:30.000 He comes back again.

00:25:31.000 Yeah.

00:25:31.000 So he doesn't think, I'm going to get arrested.

00:25:32.000 I just punched a guy. 0.99

00:25:33.000 Let me get the fuck out of here. 0.99

00:25:34.000 No. 0.97

00:25:35.000 He wants to stop me from tweeting about it.

00:25:37.000 Mashable said I was the first person to ever live-tweet my own assault.

00:25:41.000 True story.

00:25:42.000 So anyway, Allison, the owner, she calls the cops. 1.00

00:25:46.000 They arrest him.

00:25:49.000 And, you know, it became a big story because of the seven journalists who were there to cover, they didn't want to cover Joe Lieberman's black, you know, whatever.

00:25:56.000 This is a much better story.

00:25:57.000 So immediately there were seven, before he posted bail, there were seven articles about it.

00:26:01.000 And then that became viral and that became a big thing.

00:26:04.000 And the Taiwanese media made like an animation of my assault, like an animation depiction of it.

00:26:09.000 Is that available online still?

00:26:10.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:26:11.000 You can pull that up right now.

00:26:12.000 It's hilarious.

00:26:13.000 It's like, it's not that long.

00:26:14.000 They did a pretty good job with it.

00:26:17.000 Anyway, so then I was like, you know what?

00:26:19.000 Okay, fine.

00:26:20.000 It happened.

00:26:20.000 It's like a little viral moment.

00:26:22.000 No big deal.

00:26:23.000 I wasn't hurt or anything.

00:26:24.000 And then this...

00:26:25.000 I want to use my words carefully. 1.00

00:26:27.000 Motherfucker? 1.00

00:26:27.000 This sociopathic violent hack. 1.00

00:26:32.000 Starts lying on TV and radio. 0.99

00:26:34.000 I never punched him.

00:26:36.000 I never did this.

00:26:37.000 He made it all up.

00:26:38.000 What is this going on?

00:26:40.000 And I'm a columnist now, so I can tell you what I really...

00:26:43.000 I can say these.

00:26:45.000 At that time, I didn't want to get into a public...

00:26:48.000 I'm not allowed to do that.

00:26:51.000 By the way, he pled guilty and did probation.

00:26:54.000 I didn't even care.

00:26:55.000 Then, through an intermediary, he called me and tried to bribe me.

00:26:58.000 To pull the charges, like give me a bunch of money.

00:27:01.000 How much?

00:27:02.000 I think the number that I was quoted was 10 grand.

00:27:04.000 That's not enough.

00:27:05.000 It's not that.

00:27:06.000 I'm not taking any...

00:27:07.000 I'm a journalist.

00:27:09.000 What if it was like 500 grand to stop talking about?

00:27:09.000 I can't take any...

00:27:11.000 I don't like where this conversation is coming.

00:27:13.000 Because every man had his praise.

00:27:15.000 I mean, everybody here already knows about it.

00:27:18.000 He just wanted to avoid the charge.

00:27:19.000 Because I wrote on the charge, you know.

00:27:21.000 I understand.

00:27:21.000 So anyway, this guy is like...

00:27:23.000 For years and years and years...

00:27:26.000 Telling lies about me in public.

00:27:29.000 And then the story changes every time.

00:27:31.000 He's like OJ. In his mind, he doesn't believe he did it.

00:27:34.000 And he changes the story a lot.

00:27:34.000 You know what I mean?

00:27:35.000 Yes.

00:27:36.000 But that's why I say I'm not a doctor.

00:27:40.000 There's an issue.

00:27:41.000 There's an issue.

00:27:41.000 Some sort of pathology.

00:27:42.000 And then I started meeting other comedians like Hasan Minhaj. 0.93

00:27:44.000 She was like, oh yeah, this guy's crazy.

00:27:45.000 He gets into all these crazy emails. 0.96

00:27:48.000 He's very aggressive.

00:27:49.000 He's harassing.

00:27:50.000 And this and that.

00:27:51.000 They're like, you better steer clear of him.

00:27:53.000 And then, you know, actually the problem solved itself because this article came out in 2017 about how he was totally lying about his age the whole time.

00:28:01.000 He was like the millennial comic, but he was like 55. Did you know this?

00:28:06.000 I didn't even know who he was until today.

00:28:10.000 This is a real example.

00:28:11.000 He was giving sex tips in Cosmopolitan as a 31-year-old, you know, quoted on the record, but he was like 55 at the time. 0.96

00:28:19.000 So he's a fraudster. 0.99

00:28:21.000 A fraudster. 0.99

00:28:22.000 A classic fraudster in the classic sense. 0.98

00:28:22.000 Okay? 0.98

00:28:25.000 And now I don't think he's worked since, so we might be piling onto him cruelly.

00:28:31.000 So in that sense, I would like to say that.

00:28:33.000 I'm sorry.

00:28:35.000 But you forced me.

00:28:37.000 You have to take into consideration cancel culture.

00:28:39.000 No, I mean, he's already been canceled.

00:28:41.000 But you have to take into consideration it coming after you if you're piling on.

00:28:41.000 He was canceled before, you know what I mean?

00:28:45.000 I don't want to be unduly punitive against Dan Ninety.

00:28:50.000 The bottom line is the true story has never been told until this moment, Joe Rogan.

00:28:53.000 Well, I'm glad you told the true story.

00:28:54.000 Okay, and now I had to get that off the chest.

00:28:55.000 Now let's talk about something real.

00:28:57.000 Yeah, well, that sounds like a great education, though, for a young guy to be working at a place like DC Improv, because you get a chance to see so many great comics come through there.

00:29:08.000 It's probably a really fun, wild place to be.

00:29:11.000 Yeah, no, it was just like, you know, and then we would go out drinking afterwards.

00:29:14.000 Oh, that's awesome.

00:29:15.000 And, like, you know, there's this place called The Big Hunt in DC. And, you know, like, have you ever seen the show Insomniac?

00:29:22.000 Yes.

00:29:23.000 That's his life.

00:29:24.000 I used to drink with Dave Vitella at The Big Hunt.

00:29:28.000 Listen, I know Dave very well.

00:29:31.000 He's one of my favorite comedians.

00:29:32.000 He's one of the greatest of all time.

00:29:33.000 I agree with that.

00:29:34.000 He doesn't get nearly enough credit because he has zero intent to publicize himself or to get more famous.

00:29:40.000 He doesn't want to play the game.

00:29:41.000 It's not just that.

00:29:42.000 He's not interested in being famous.

00:29:44.000 He doesn't care.

00:29:45.000 All he cares about is telling more, better jokes.

00:29:48.000 He's one of my favorites by far.

00:29:50.000 Dude, last time I saw him, it's been a while, but other than the last time we did the podcast, I saw him at the Improv.

00:29:56.000 He showed up, I was doing a show at the LA Improv, and he's like, hey, can I do some time?

00:30:01.000 I'm like, of course, come on, man, get in there.

00:30:04.000 And so he goes up, and it was only like, at the end of the night, it was probably like 100 people in the room or so.

00:30:12.000 And I'm telling you, man, it made me think, like, God, why isn't this guy more famous?

00:30:18.000 Yeah.

00:30:19.000 It was a late show, because we had a 10 o'clock set, or a 10 o'clock start, and it was probably like 12, 30, so it was at the end of the show, and he's up there...

00:30:30.000 And just so...

00:30:31.000 He's just so good, man. 0.99

00:30:33.000 He's so tight and funny and loose and polished and trying out new shit. 0.98

00:30:39.000 And when it doesn't go... 1.00

00:30:40.000 The new shit doesn't go well, it's even funnier because then he'll shit on himself and his jokes. 1.00

00:30:46.000 God, he's good. 1.00

00:30:47.000 We used to listen to his tapes all the time.

00:30:49.000 But I remember just sitting there thinking, like, this is a shame that more people don't know how good this guy is.

00:30:54.000 He should be selling out arenas all over the world.

00:30:57.000 Like, he really is that good.

00:30:58.000 Everyone else should go download his album. 1.00

00:31:00.000 Yeah, he wears the same fucking clothes every day. 0.99

00:31:03.000 There's a lot of guys like that in the stand-up business. 1.00

00:31:07.000 There's a lot of guys like that, like Brian Regan, okay?

00:31:09.000 But Brian Regan's very huge.

00:31:11.000 He's huge.

00:31:12.000 Is he bigger than David Fell?

00:31:12.000 Yeah, he's huge.

00:31:13.000 Brian Regan sells out Red Rocks.

00:31:16.000 I don't know if Dennis is doing comedy anymore, but Dennis was a great comic.

00:31:20.000 He used to come through, and I used to hang out with him.

00:31:22.000 I think Dennis stopped doing comedy.

00:31:23.000 Well, that's a darn shame, because he was really funny.

00:31:26.000 He was very good. 0.91

00:31:26.000 He always started with the same joke. 0.91

00:31:28.000 Every set, same joke.

00:31:29.000 He'd be like, you know they say making the first million is the hardest?

00:31:33.000 I'm finding that to be the case. 0.94

00:31:37.000 Well, he was always deadpan, and his brother was way more goofy. 0.98

00:31:42.000 Brian is really fun and silly. 0.95

00:31:46.000 Jay Moore was always great. 0.90

00:31:48.000 Dave Chappelle was always great.

00:31:50.000 Louis Black was always great.

00:31:51.000 Kathy Madigan.

00:31:53.000 Oh, sure.

00:31:53.000 Yeah, she was there a lot.

00:31:55.000 Flip Orly did the hypnosis stuff all the time.

00:31:57.000 Oh, isn't that wild?

00:31:58.000 It works.

00:31:59.000 I never thought it worked, but I thought it worked.

00:32:01.000 There was a guy, Frank Santos, in Boston that used to do it.

00:32:06.000 Comics would go and watch and go, this is crazy, but it is real.

00:32:10.000 It really can.

00:32:10.000 There's a certain percentage of the population that can get up there and they can talk them into all kinds of crazy things.

00:32:15.000 David Alan Greer, super nice guy.

00:32:16.000 Real good guy.

00:32:17.000 Tommy Davidson, pretty nice.

00:32:22.000 He's nice to me.

00:32:22.000 Okay, can I tell you, I'll tell you one crazy story, and then we gotta talk about China or something like that, but I'll tell you this one crazy story.

00:32:28.000 I probably shouldn't tell this, but who cares?

00:32:30.000 Then don't tell it.

00:32:31.000 Okay.

00:32:31.000 Was it about Tommy?

00:32:32.000 No.

00:32:33.000 So Kenyan Ivory Wayans demanded like $25,000 or he wouldn't go on.

00:32:33.000 Okay.

00:32:37.000 They had to pay him out like the entire thing and he was like, I need it all in cash right now or you have no show.

00:32:42.000 They had to like scramble and go get like $25,000 in cash out of some vault somewhere they didn't even know what to do.

00:32:48.000 Like these were the types of things that went on.

00:32:50.000 That's a crazy thing.

00:32:51.000 Why did he need that money right away?

00:32:53.000 He wanted to be paid up front in cash.

00:32:55.000 I don't know.

00:32:56.000 Cash is a weird thing to want.

00:32:58.000 I want it.

00:32:59.000 Bags of it?

00:33:00.000 Yes.

00:33:00.000 Thank you.

00:33:01.000 Do you have any?

00:33:02.000 No, but I went to a place once that sells cars and Offset.

00:33:09.000 That's the dude who's married to Cardi B, right?

00:33:11.000 Was.

00:33:12.000 He was there with a dude, and the dude had this designer bag filled with cash.

00:33:18.000 Nice. 0.99

00:33:19.000 And they were looking at Lamborghinis and shit. 0.99

00:33:21.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:33:21.000 I was like, damn, this is the rap world. 1.00

00:33:23.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:33:24.000 IRS will come get you, though. 0.96

00:33:26.000 Well, I don't think it wasn't that he wasn't paying taxes.

00:33:29.000 No, the place that sells the cars is very legit.

00:33:31.000 You have to pay taxes. 0.98

00:33:33.000 They're not fucking around. 0.98

00:33:34.000 Shout out to Fusion Motorsports. 0.98

00:33:35.000 Is it about where he got the cash?

00:33:37.000 No, he got it from rap gigs.

00:33:39.000 I mean, they give it to him.

00:33:42.000 They just love paying for things in cash.

00:33:46.000 I think it's just a fun thing to do.

00:33:48.000 I imagine so.

00:33:49.000 Just stacks of hundreds.

00:33:51.000 If you want to try it sometime, call me up.

00:33:53.000 But he was looking at Lamborghinis.

00:33:54.000 He was looking at muscle cars. 1.00

00:33:55.000 He was looking at a bunch of different shit. 1.00

00:33:57.000 Good for him, man. 1.00

00:33:57.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:33:58.000 No shame in that game.

00:33:59.000 No.

00:33:59.000 It's fun to watch, though.

00:34:01.000 A guy walk in with a duffel bag filled with cash.

00:34:05.000 Wow.

00:34:06.000 Yeah.

00:34:08.000 Anyway, that's the Dan Inan story.

00:34:10.000 Sorry, Dan Inan.

00:34:11.000 Not sorry.

00:34:13.000 Prick.

00:34:14.000 Sorry.

00:34:14.000 That's how I found out about you, though.

00:34:15.000 I take that back.

00:34:16.000 I take that back.

00:34:16.000 That's how I found out about you.

00:34:18.000 So when your name came across again about this book...

00:34:20.000 Well, thank you, Dan.

00:34:21.000 You got me booked on the Joe Rogan Show.

00:34:22.000 Made you popular.

00:34:23.000 It's nothing to do with the fact that my name is...

00:34:24.000 Chaos Under Heaven.

00:34:26.000 There's a lot we could talk about.

00:34:27.000 Talk about Jamal Khashoggi for sure, but we're...

00:34:30.000 I want to talk about this.

00:34:32.000 So we were talking earlier about the...

00:34:34.000 There was a real problem.

00:34:37.000 With the lab leak hypothesis in that Trump was so adamant in calling it the China virus, the Chinese virus, that there was a lot of people that wanted to resist the idea that it was possible that this thing had come out of this level 4 lab that just happened to be coincidentally in Wuhan.

00:34:57.000 Now that he's out of office, it's being entertained.

00:35:00.000 Not just entertained, it was on the cover of Newsweek.

00:35:02.000 A lot of top-level scientists are really examining and they're supporting this hypothesis that it's more likely than unlikely.

00:35:14.000 Is there a question?

00:35:16.000 Sorry.

00:35:17.000 No, I was going to say, we were talking earlier that there's very few people that were in support of this, and that you found it to be crazy.

00:35:27.000 Right, right, right, right, right.

00:35:28.000 Okay, so, standard disclaimer, we don't know how the coronavirus outbreak started.

00:35:35.000 You don't know, I don't know, he doesn't know.

00:35:38.000 Literally no one knows.

00:35:39.000 Well, I don't know that nobody knows.

00:35:40.000 I just know that I know knows.

00:35:42.000 There might be somebody who knows who hasn't told us.

00:35:44.000 Maybe in Wuhan.

00:35:45.000 Exactly.

00:35:45.000 Or maybe in Beijing.

00:35:46.000 Maybe.

00:35:47.000 But we'll get to that.

00:35:47.000 Or maybe in the WHO. So before anyone says that we're trying to push the lab accident theory.

00:35:54.000 No, no, no.

00:35:54.000 We're not pushing the lab accident theory.

00:35:56.000 The argument that I make in the book, and I... I think I lay out a bunch of evidence to support this argument, but you be the judge, is that we have to investigate the lab accident theory.

00:36:05.000 In other words, not that we know it came from the lab, but that there's enough circumstantial evidence that we can't rule it out. 0.92

00:36:10.000 And when I understand very intimately, actually, How this story got so fucked up. 0.73

00:36:17.000 And here we are in April 2021, and it's been a year, a year. 0.69

00:36:24.000 And we have no information that is getting us closer to the virus. 0.54

00:36:29.000 All the investigations have been crap, okay? 0.85

00:36:32.000 There's a lack of curiosity. 0.98

00:36:34.000 Both in governments around the world, in international organizations, and in the media.

00:36:39.000 And I'm not a media critic, but I'm just a guy who worked in the media for 17 years.

00:36:44.000 It's kind of a shock that nobody seems to care, frankly, about the origins. 0.82

00:36:48.000 But to talk about the origin story, we sort of have to first go back and understand how the story got so fucked up. 0.71

00:36:55.000 It's really important.

00:36:56.000 And I'm going to do that as concisely as possible right now.

00:37:00.000 You remember back in March, April 2020, it was a very crazy time in all of our lives, right?

00:37:05.000 Things were disrupted.

00:37:06.000 People weren't getting sick.

00:37:07.000 We didn't get a lot of good information.

00:37:10.000 We didn't know what was going on.

00:37:11.000 People were losing their livelihoods, their businesses, their family members.

00:37:16.000 And this was the time when the coronavirus pandemic, as you remember, started to get very political.

00:37:22.000 Like for the first couple few weeks, it was like, hey, we got a problem here.

00:37:25.000 Maybe we do.

00:37:26.000 Maybe we don't.

00:37:26.000 We all got to come together in this thing.

00:37:28.000 Around March or April is where everybody started to get onto teams.

00:37:31.000 I'm on team mask.

00:37:32.000 I'm on team hydrochloroquine. 0.99

00:37:34.000 I'm on team shooting bleach into my butt. 0.99

00:37:36.000 Whatever the team is, right? 0.99

00:37:38.000 I'm on team science.

00:37:40.000 I'm on team, you know, Biden, Beijing Biden, Hunter Biden laptop.

00:37:44.000 I'm on that team.

00:37:45.000 And that's how Washington is.

00:37:47.000 Frankly, it's factional, right?

00:37:49.000 Now, because of my odd story that I just laid out for you, I happen not to be in any of these factions.

00:37:54.000 You know what I mean?

00:37:55.000 I just never joined any of them.

00:37:56.000 I deal with all of them, and I move between them.

00:37:59.000 So I'm watching all of this happen, and I'm thinking, oh, wait, this is really dangerous, because the coronavirus origin story is not just about blaming China.

00:38:08.000 Because, of course, you could blame China for a number of things in the pandemic, for hiding the science, for hiding the scientists, for dealing with the journalists, for not locking down.

00:38:14.000 If you're just about blaming China, and I'm not, you have ample reasons to blame China.

00:38:20.000 The origin story is about figuring out how this happened so that it doesn't happen again.

00:38:24.000 In any...

00:38:26.000 Disaster in the world.

00:38:27.000 It's a plane crash or anything.

00:38:29.000 The obvious thing to do is to figure out what happened.

00:38:31.000 Because otherwise, how can you inform policy and politics to make sure that doesn't happen again?

00:38:36.000 It seems pretty obvious.

00:38:37.000 But at that time and space where we're all living in this dystopian crisis, that wasn't the most important thing.

00:38:42.000 The most important thing is like, you know, where's grandma?

00:38:45.000 Is everyone safe?

00:38:46.000 What should I do?

00:38:46.000 How do I get my job back?

00:38:48.000 You know, stuff like that.

00:38:49.000 OK, so talking about the coronavirus origin was very considered very impolite.

00:38:53.000 And add to that the fact that the Chinese government called, and this is in the book, called the State Department and told them if you talk about the origin publicly, because some of it had begun to be discussed, you won't get your masks.

00:39:04.000 You want your masks?

00:39:05.000 You want your PPE? Remember those plane loads that are coming from your factory?

00:39:10.000 It's like the American factory in China, but in the crisis it wasn't an American factory at all because they just nationalized that shit. 0.98

00:39:16.000 And they're like, if you don't want your masks, then go ahead, talk about the coronavirus. 0.99

00:39:19.000 Wow.

00:39:20.000 And I talked to a very, very senior Trump administration official who was just like, yeah, we have to shut up about it.

00:39:27.000 But it informed their thinking in the sense they're like, oh, okay, well, we have to make changes in our We're good to go.

00:39:35.000 We're good to go.

00:39:46.000 You're telling me the outbreak happened next to these two labs.

00:39:49.000 There's a bunch of labs, but these two major labs, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control.

00:39:54.000 We have a CDC, they have a CDC, theirs is in Wuhan.

00:39:57.000 You're telling me that this outbreak happened next to these labs, and what are the labs doing?

00:40:02.000 Oh, they're making bat coronaviruses more virulent through what's known as gain-of-function research.

00:40:08.000 And they're doing that.

00:40:09.000 They have the most bat coronaviruses in the world. 1.00

00:40:13.000 And the research that they were doing was to make them more infectious towards human lungs through something called the ACE2 receptor and the S proteins, the technical term.

00:40:23.000 And then we have a virus outbreak in Wuhan that's a bat coronavirus where the ACE2 receptor is the exact same thing.

00:40:30.000 It's not the exact same virus, but it's pretty close.

00:40:32.000 Shouldn't we check out that lab, you know?

00:40:35.000 And this became chatter inside the US government, like, again, bubbling up inside the system.

00:40:39.000 I'm catching this chatter.

00:40:40.000 I'm like, oh, I should probably check that out because I have some sources on China.

00:40:43.000 I was already writing the book, by the way.

00:40:46.000 And so then I found out there were these cables where these US diplomats had gone to this very lab, the Wuhan Institute for Virology, two years before and wrote back these cables warning, first of all, that there were a lot of safety problems at the lab, that they didn't know how to operate their lab, they were begging for more help.

00:41:02.000 The cables were meant to get them more help.

00:41:04.000 The help never was given.

00:41:06.000 But moreover, they warned about this specific research.

00:41:09.000 And the guys who were writing these diplomatic cables wrote that, hey, because some of the research was published, right?

00:41:14.000 They didn't publish everything they did, but a lot of it was published.

00:41:17.000 And a lot of it was done with American researchers.

00:41:20.000 And these cable writers, these diplomats, were like, hey, we got a problem here.

00:41:23.000 This lab is under-resourced and understaffed, and they're doing risky research on bat coronaviruses that could infect humans.

00:41:30.000 That was two years prior.

00:41:31.000 Okay. 0.95

00:41:32.000 And now that we're in the middle of a pandemic where a back-coronavirus is affecting humans, a lot of people inside the government were sort of like, oh, remember those cables from two years ago that nobody gave a shit about? 0.82

00:41:41.000 Like, dust them off. 0.93

00:41:43.000 Let's see those.

00:41:43.000 You know what I mean?

00:41:44.000 And I heard about them and I'm like, I got to get these cables.

00:41:47.000 I'm like, this is a big story.

00:41:48.000 I got to get these cables.

00:41:49.000 I got to figure it out.

00:41:50.000 So I went to all my sources.

00:41:51.000 I was like, we can't give them to you.

00:41:52.000 Eventually I found a source who gave me the cables and I published the cables.

00:41:56.000 And that In a sense, was the beginning, well, one big reason why the lab accident theory started to take root in the public space.

00:42:04.000 Because now, by the way, the State Department, people think that the State Department leaked them.

00:42:08.000 That's not true.

00:42:09.000 Pompeo was super pissed at me, personally.

00:42:12.000 Because I met with him later.

00:42:13.000 He was very, very pissed.

00:42:14.000 He yelled at me.

00:42:15.000 He was not a happy man.

00:42:16.000 Because, again, they didn't want to piss off the Chinese because they wanted our masks. 0.96

00:42:19.000 So I had thrown a wrench into that by floating this Now, again, the cables don't tell you what happened in the pandemic because they were written two years before, but suffice to say, they predicted the pandemic, or at least predicted that this could be something that could happen from these labs.

00:42:33.000 And then Pompeo turned on down.

00:42:35.000 He's like, yeah, we probably think it was the labs.

00:42:39.000 And then they asked Trump the next day, they're like, do you think it was the labs?

00:42:41.000 He's like, well, I can't really get into it, but yeah, it was probably the labs, okay?

00:42:43.000 Yeah.

00:42:44.000 Now, Pompeo and Trump, to their discredit, were going beyond the evidence.

00:42:49.000 In other words, they were politicizing the issue from the jump, okay?

00:42:53.000 And that immediately went beyond what we knew at that time.

00:42:56.000 And Tom Cotton did the same thing, right?

00:42:58.000 He said things that if you look back...

00:43:00.000 Look pretty reasonable in April 2021. But when he said them in February, oh, well, they're doing military research at the lab.

00:43:06.000 And, you know, he was sparking something that he couldn't control.

00:43:09.000 So he got tart as a conspiracy theorist. 1.00

00:43:11.000 Pompeo and Trump got tart as assholes. 1.00

00:43:13.000 In fairness, you know. 1.00

00:43:18.000 Like, they weren't doing the right thing either, but here I was in the middle.

00:43:25.000 I'm just like, can't we just figure this out?

00:43:26.000 Can't we just figure this out?

00:43:27.000 So then here comes the scientists, okay?

00:43:29.000 And this is the craziest part of this, is that...

00:43:33.000 You know, the scientists who are the best friends of the lab, and I'll name a couple of them.

00:43:37.000 Basically, they're doing this gain-of-function research, which is, again, they collect all the viruses in the wild, and then they bring them to this lab, or a bunch of labs, different labs, and they play around with them and see what's what.

00:43:47.000 And the idea is to predict and preempt the pandemic, right?

00:43:51.000 And this is a $200 million program funded by U.S. taxpayers.

00:43:55.000 For 15 years.

00:43:56.000 You've got the American scientists, the European scientists, the Chinese scientists going to every cave in Yunnan and this and that, finding all the most dangerous viruses, bringing them back to the lab, and then playing around with them.

00:44:06.000 This was research that was actually banned by the Obama administration in the U.S. That's why they were doing it all in China, by the way, because the Obama administration had put a moratorium on it.

00:44:15.000 And some of it, because it was risky, because there were accidents, because live accidents happen all the time.

00:44:19.000 And so they moved some of it over to China, and they kept some of it, they grandfathered some of it over in the US. This program, I mean, first of all, it didn't predict the pandemic, did it?

00:44:32.000 Right?

00:44:33.000 Because the pandemic happened, so they didn't predict it.

00:44:34.000 So that's one thing.

00:44:36.000 But the theory is that in doing all of these experiments to make these viruses more virulent, more dangerous, they've created a super virus, not manufactured, not engineered.

00:44:50.000 It's a natural evolution.

00:44:52.000 What they do is they run it.

00:44:56.000 We're good to go.

00:45:00.000 We're good to go.

00:45:05.000 We're good to go.

00:45:13.000 And that's how we got into this mess.

00:45:14.000 But the problem was, once that theory was floated, the scientists who were involved in that research got on TV and they said, how dare you look at the lab?

00:45:22.000 It cannot possibly be the lab.

00:45:24.000 You're a racist and a conspiracy theory if you dare to mention the lab. 0.96

00:45:28.000 And if you utter it, you shall be shunned, right? 1.00

00:45:31.000 Shunned, Amish style, shunned. 1.00

00:45:32.000 And that happened, okay?

00:45:35.000 And these scientists, and I'm putting at the top of the list a guy named Peter Daszak, who runs the EcoHealth Alliance, who I've talked about lots of times before, To this day, tell us that we don't need to look at the lab, okay?

00:45:47.000 And again, I'm not saying the lab did it.

00:45:48.000 I'm just saying we should investigate all the theories.

00:45:50.000 Let's investigate the natural spillover theory, which is basically that, I can't make this up, that a bat bit of pangolin that traveled a thousand miles and then that spilled over to humans 10 miles from the lab.

00:46:00.000 That's the other theory.

00:46:02.000 Again, it might be true.

00:46:04.000 I don't know.

00:46:05.000 You don't know.

00:46:06.000 Or it could have been the lab with all the bat coronaviruses. 0.99

00:46:09.000 If you came into this conversation in April 2021 not knowing how Pompeo and these scientists had all corrupted the conversation, you would think we should probably take a look at that lab. 0.93

00:46:20.000 But what happened was because these scientists were covering their own asses, they were – I think? 0.95

00:46:30.000 I think? 0.99

00:46:41.000 I ran with that narrative.

00:46:42.000 I was there.

00:46:43.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

00:46:44.000 There was a lot of pressure to do that because Trump's a liar and because he was using racist terms like, I won't repeat, but like for the virus. 0.99

00:46:51.000 And that's bad. 0.99

00:46:52.000 And he weaponized the issue in a really cruel way.

00:46:56.000 And there was a rise in Asian-American hate.

00:46:58.000 And those things did happen.

00:46:59.000 Those are real.

00:47:00.000 And those are horrible things for our society, for those members of our community.

00:47:04.000 At the same time, none of that has anything to do with the lab.

00:47:08.000 But because the issues got so conflated, now to even mention the lab accident theory became something that could get you criticized as being a racist or conspiracy theorist or worse.

00:47:18.000 And that's what happened to...

00:47:20.000 Oh, and then WHO does the investigation.

00:47:22.000 Who do you think they hired to do the investigation? 0.99

00:47:25.000 Who?

00:47:28.000 The scientists who were the best friends of the lab.

00:47:31.000 Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance.

00:47:33.000 He was on the investigation team.

00:47:35.000 Jamie Metzl had come on here and explained the whole situation to us.

00:47:39.000 Okay, so you covered that.

00:47:40.000 Exactly how you're describing it.

00:47:42.000 Yeah, I know Jamie.

00:47:43.000 Yeah.

00:47:45.000 Jamie and I hung out once in Dharamsala, India with the Dalai Lama.

00:47:49.000 Whoa.

00:47:49.000 It's a true story.

00:47:50.000 But anyway, back to this.

00:47:57.000 Where was I? Oh yeah.

00:47:59.000 So they hired the best friends of the lab to investigate the lab.

00:48:02.000 It's like hiring Robert Kardashian to investigate OJ. You know what I mean?

00:48:07.000 And when they interview these guys on TV, they always say the same thing.

00:48:10.000 Don't you want the best friends of the lab to interview the lab?

00:48:12.000 We know the most about it.

00:48:14.000 We're doing the research.

00:48:15.000 It would be like Robert Kardashian being like, I know OJ really well.

00:48:19.000 Let me do the investigation.

00:48:20.000 I'll figure out the truth.

00:48:21.000 I'll get to the bottom of this.

00:48:22.000 So anyway, they go to the lab for three hours, talk to their best friends, look at them straight and they're like, did you do it?

00:48:27.000 No, we didn't do it.

00:48:27.000 Okay, case closed.

00:48:29.000 And then they concluded in their WHO report that...

00:48:32.000 The lab theory is very unlikely.

00:48:33.000 We don't need to look into the lab.

00:48:35.000 Case closed.

00:48:35.000 And everybody was like, oh, that doesn't make any sense.

00:48:39.000 We can't have that.

00:48:40.000 These guys have a conflict of interest.

00:48:42.000 Their careers are tied to this lab.

00:48:45.000 If the lab were found to be guilty, again, we don't know.

00:48:47.000 I don't know.

00:48:48.000 You don't know.

00:48:49.000 Peter Daszak doesn't know.

00:48:50.000 Well, maybe he knows, but I don't think he knows.

00:48:53.000 You know, their legacy, this entire project of 200 billion dollars, $200 million, rather, to dig up viruses all over the world would be kaput. 0.85

00:49:01.000 It would have to necessarily be stopped, this whole industry.

00:49:05.000 Okay, now here's the part where I'm going to get a little controversial.

00:49:08.000 Are you ready?

00:49:08.000 Is it okay?

00:49:10.000 Sure.

00:49:10.000 Okay, so if I've gotten you that far, again, just to say that I don't blame anyone out there for having this notion that this lab accident theory is kind of a kooky thing that was cooked up by Mike Pompeo or something like that.

00:49:24.000 I get why you think that.

00:49:25.000 But now Trump's not—he's not here anymore, right?

00:49:27.000 We don't have to argue about Trump anymore, hopefully, ever again, right?

00:49:32.000 And we can just look at the piles of circumstantial evidence, and there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it could have come—there's some circumstantial evidence that it could have come from nature.

00:49:40.000 I feel that the lab theory has more compelling circumstantial evidence because, again, they were doing that kind of research.

00:49:46.000 They also—there was a huge cover-up in there.

00:49:49.000 Virus database went mysteriously offline somehow in December 2019. There's also the evolution of the virus itself, right?

00:49:55.000 So Robert Redfield, who was the CDC director at the time, a trained virologist, he says, I took a look at this virus, and I concluded that it is so powerful that it must have been evolved in a lab setting.

00:50:07.000 And he pointed to the gain-of-function research, and they called him a racist, a conspiracy theorist, and all the rest.

00:50:11.000 Now, here's the controversial part.

00:50:15.000 The godfather of that industry, the head of the pyramid, is a guy you may have heard of called Anthony Fauci.

00:50:23.000 I've heard of that guy.

00:50:24.000 Right?

00:50:26.000 Yeah.

00:50:27.000 Do you want to hear more?

00:50:28.000 Yeah.

00:50:29.000 Okay.

00:50:31.000 So, Anthony Fauci, the hero of the pandemic, is the most important person in the world of gain-of-function research there is.

00:50:40.000 Okay.

00:50:40.000 In other words, he is, and not just him, there's Francis Collins at the NIH and some other people, but basically he is the one dispersing all of the grants for this.

00:50:50.000 He is the one who pushed to turn it back on after Obama turned it back off.

00:50:53.000 That's a whole other crazy story.

00:50:54.000 He turned it back on without really consulting the White House.

00:50:57.000 That's breaking news.

00:50:58.000 Never been reported.

00:50:59.000 Just broke some news on your show right now.

00:51:01.000 Yes.

00:51:02.000 He consulted the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is like a part of the White House, but he didn't You know, the White House put a pause on it, and then he, like, undid the pause.

00:51:12.000 The details are a little sketchy.

00:51:13.000 I'm not saying that he did anything necessarily wrong or illegal.

00:51:17.000 I'm just saying that a lot of people that I know inside the Trump administration had no idea this had turned it back on. 0.99

00:51:22.000 He found a way to turn it back on in the mess of the Trump administration, because the Trump administration is full of a bunch of clowns, right? 0.96

00:51:28.000 So at the end, you could get stuff done if you just knew how to work the system. 0.95

00:51:32.000 Fauci is the head of that system.

00:51:33.000 What was his incentive?

00:51:35.000 That's his whole career.

00:51:38.000 So what he would say, and again, to be perfectly fair to him, he's trying to predict the next pandemic.

00:51:44.000 He thinks this is the way that you predict the next pandemic.

00:51:46.000 By digging up all these viruses, we've got to dig up more and more viruses and play around with them because we're going to find how they evolve.

00:51:52.000 Then we're going to come up with therapeutics and vaccines and all this stuff.

00:51:54.000 But there were no therapeutics.

00:51:56.000 Right, but we did have vaccines quicker than most because the DARPA funded a program to make mRNA vaccines 10 years ago that actually worked.

00:52:06.000 You know, that was a military-funded program, but we can get to that in a second.

00:52:09.000 But that's not related to this.

00:52:12.000 Right, so that's a very fair observation.

00:52:16.000 In other words, the $200 million program to predict and preempt the pandemic failed, to predict and preempt the pandemic, but it may have also sparked the pandemic.

00:52:25.000 May have sparked, but here's my question.

00:52:28.000 When I read all about the research they were doing, I didn't see what they were doing to prevent it.

00:52:36.000 I just saw what they were doing was examining these viruses and trying to find out how they work and trying to see what happens when they get more virulent.

00:52:43.000 But what I didn't see is the invention of therapeutics.

00:52:48.000 I hear what you're saying.

00:52:49.000 I'm willing to give these scientists the benefit of the doubt that their honest goal was to create, do good science to prevent and predict.

00:52:57.000 Oh, I am too.

00:52:57.000 That's not what I'm saying.

00:52:59.000 I don't know if they produce therapeutics.

00:53:01.000 What I'm saying, did they have a lack of funding in that department?

00:53:04.000 Was all the funding allocated towards examining the viruses themselves and not towards developing some sort of a therapeutic?

00:53:14.000 It's a good question.

00:53:15.000 I don't know the answer to that question.

00:53:16.000 But what I do know is that the majority of their time was spent digging up viruses in the wild and bringing them back to these labs.

00:53:22.000 But Fauci, when he started it back up, did he start it back up with the intent to just uncover more information so we'd be better informed?

00:53:32.000 His argument was this is vital research.

00:53:34.000 The longer we pause it, the more danger that we're in.

00:53:37.000 I'm trying to save the world.

00:53:39.000 And so we got to turn this stuff back on because this is how we're going to save the world from the next pandemic, which I'm sure he believed.

00:53:44.000 I'm sure a lot of these people believed.

00:53:45.000 But there is another school of thought out there.

00:53:47.000 And the other school of thought is, hey, instead of taking $200 million to dig up viruses and make them more dangerous, why don't you put that money into monitoring and surveillance in the places where the bats are?

00:53:56.000 In other words, if you put resources where the outbreaks are likely to occur, then you can squelch them when they pop up because actually viruses change every day and trying to predict the pandemic is a fool's errand.

00:54:06.000 That's another scientific school of thought.

00:54:08.000 That's not the one that Fauci's in.

00:54:10.000 But the reason that there's no debate about this is because the NIH and NIAID structure is such that everyone gets funded by them.

00:54:16.000 They're funding everybody.

00:54:17.000 So if you are in the field of virology, there's a 99.99% chance that you're getting money from Anthony Fauci in one way or another.

00:54:25.000 Your grants, your careers, your chairmanships.

00:54:27.000 So there's no dissent allowed in that community.

00:54:30.000 I learned a lot about the scientific community and the virology community over the last few years.

00:54:34.000 No dissent allowed.

00:54:35.000 So no debate?

00:54:36.000 I talk to scientists all the time who say, I think this gain-of-function research is really dangerous.

00:54:40.000 I can't say anything.

00:54:40.000 I'm going to lose my grant.

00:54:41.000 I'm going to lose my career.

00:54:43.000 This happens to me all the time.

00:54:44.000 And when Robert Redfield spoke up because he's a big macher and he's a head of the CDC, he said, it's my opinion that it came from the lab.

00:54:53.000 Because he can't declassify a bunch of classified information on CNN. But he's talking about what he knows, right?

00:54:59.000 It's obvious to everyone who's in the know that he's seen the intelligence and he's not just talking out of his ass. 0.99

00:55:05.000 He's not some Joe Schmo virologist. 0.99

00:55:07.000 He was the head of the CDC. He's seen all of the secret, secret stuff, even the stuff I never got a whiff of.

00:55:12.000 And he went on TV and said, hey, I think this probably came from the lab.

00:55:17.000 We should probably look at the lab.

00:55:18.000 And he was called a racist and a conspiracy theorist. 1.00

00:55:21.000 But by foolish people. 0.99

00:55:22.000 But what he's saying... 0.98

00:55:22.000 But Fauci's disagreed with him publicly. 0.98

00:55:24.000 Right.

00:55:24.000 So that's the thing.

00:55:25.000 So if you just think about it, just for once, again, I'm begging people out there, just like, think again.

00:55:31.000 Whatever you thought about the lab accident, it doesn't matter.

00:55:33.000 Whatever you tweeted in 2020, March, it doesn't...

00:55:36.000 Nobody cares, right?

00:55:37.000 And the same thing for the media.

00:55:39.000 Let it go, yeah.

00:55:39.000 Because it's all confirmation bias now.

00:55:41.000 Like, oh, I tweeted this in March 2020 and I want it to hold up.

00:55:45.000 Nobody cares what you tweeted in March 2020. Let's just have a rational conversation about what are the likely ways we got into this horrible crisis that we're in.

00:55:54.000 And so for people in the know who are listening to Robert Redfield, it's clear that he's calling out Anthony Fauci.

00:56:00.000 In other words, he's pointing to the gain-of-function research, which he knows because he's the head of the CDC, reports up to Fauci.

00:56:06.000 He knows that, right?

00:56:07.000 But he's not saying that because even that's too hot for him to say.

00:56:10.000 And the scientists are not going to say that either.

00:56:13.000 Now you have a lot of people sort of on the right-wing media and the MAGA media who've been saying that for a long time, but they don't have any credibility with the mainstream media.

00:56:20.000 And I'm just in that weird space where I wrote a book about US-China relationships, so I had all this good reporting, and I'm not MAGA media because I criticize Trump in my columns all the time.

00:56:30.000 So I am mainstream media, but I'm saying we should look at the lab, and it messes with people's minds because they're like, oh, why is he doing this?

00:56:37.000 Why is Josh pushing the lab back?

00:56:38.000 I'm not pushing the lab back.

00:56:39.000 That's the problem today with these rigid ideologies.

00:56:42.000 Exactly.

00:56:42.000 Everyone's on teams.

00:56:43.000 It's all factional.

00:56:44.000 Yes, yes.

00:56:44.000 But I don't care.

00:56:45.000 I don't even care if the lab accident theory is true.

00:56:47.000 If the natural origin theory is true, then great.

00:56:50.000 I will leave the ticker tape parade celebrating Peter Daszak and Anthony Fauci down Fifth Avenue.

00:56:57.000 I'm happy to do that. 0.95

00:56:58.000 All I'm saying is that we have to also look into these labs and that we can't hire The best friends of the lab to look into the labs because they have a clear conflict of interest and they fucked it up already.

00:57:09.000 What is the argument? 0.70

00:57:11.000 Is that so crazy?

00:57:11.000 Does that make me a crazy person?

00:57:12.000 No, I'm on your side.

00:57:14.000 I don't think it's crazy at all.

00:57:15.000 I've converted...

00:57:16.000 Well, Jamie converted you, but I'm confirming it.

00:57:19.000 That's all.

00:57:20.000 We have to be able to talk about this.

00:57:22.000 Yes.

00:57:23.000 Yes, we have to be able to talk about this, and that is part of the problem.

00:57:26.000 But what is the compelling argument against the lab leak theory?

00:57:31.000 Do they have one?

00:57:32.000 That's fair.

00:57:32.000 Yeah, so there's two things.

00:57:34.000 There's argument and there's evidence.

00:57:35.000 So the most compelling argument that I've heard for the natural spillover theory is that most of the pandemics, or most of the outbreaks, Over time have been from natural spillovers, the vast majority of them.

00:57:44.000 Right.

00:57:45.000 That's a statistical argument.

00:57:46.000 Now, again, that doesn't speak to this pandemic because statistics are just statistics.

00:57:51.000 It doesn't tell you.

00:57:52.000 It's not actual data, right?

00:57:53.000 It's not actual facts.

00:57:54.000 So that's one thing, like SARS spilled over naturally.

00:57:56.000 Now, I would say to that, SARS spilled over naturally where the bats are.

00:58:01.000 Right.

00:58:01.000 Not a thousand miles where the labs are.

00:58:03.000 Where a penguin walks over there.

00:58:04.000 Which should tell you something.

00:58:05.000 Yeah.

00:58:06.000 Right.

00:58:06.000 Or a palm civet or a raccoon dog, whatever.

00:58:08.000 Right, right, right.

00:58:09.000 And then what Peter Daszak will say on TV, who says all the time, is that, oh, well, we know that the market, the Wuhan market, the seafood market, they call it a wet market.

00:58:17.000 It's just a market.

00:58:18.000 You know, you go to Asia, there's markets everywhere.

00:58:20.000 We know that the market had the animals that could have been the pass-through animals.

00:58:24.000 In other words, they had pangolins in the market.

00:58:26.000 Now, to me, that's not evidence either.

00:58:28.000 That's just, again, a plausible theory.

00:58:31.000 Now, why is it that despite a year of searching for every pangolin and palm civet and mink and raccoon dog from, you know, Kathmandu to Kabul— Peter Daszak and his friends have never found—they never found any pangolins linked to the outbreak, right?

00:58:46.000 There's no— Yeah, that's what I was going to get at.

00:58:48.000 So this is another trope, and this is a trope that, like, we have an opportunity to actually fix right here in this moment, which is that, you know, it drives me crazy when this is written into news stories because it's not true, which is that— You'll see there's no evidence of the lab leak theory and there's lots of evidence of the natural spillover theory.

00:59:06.000 That's what a lot of objective journalists will write into their news stories because they've been writing that for a year and they never thought about it really for more than two seconds or whatever.

00:59:15.000 And the truth is that, you know, I think there's much more evidence, circumstantial evidence to be sure of the lab leak theory.

00:59:22.000 But either way, if you say there's no evidence, then you have to admit that there's no evidence of either theory. 0.98

00:59:27.000 In other words, we don't know shit. 0.95

00:59:29.000 OK, there's no proof. 0.99

00:59:30.000 In other words, there's no animal that links to the market.

00:59:33.000 By the way, the Chinese CDC disavowed the market theory in May 2020. Nobody cared. 0.91

00:59:37.000 Nobody noticed.

00:59:38.000 The Chinese CDC, they said it didn't come from the market.

00:59:41.000 The market was an amplifying event, not an origin event.

00:59:44.000 Some people went to the market, they found some people who had it, they never, the first people that they found that had it, they never went to the market, they didn't know anything about the market.

00:59:52.000 So, again, and then you have, I think there's, it's very plausible that this spilled over in nature.

00:59:58.000 It's also very plausible that it spilled over into the lab, that it was the result of gain-of-function research gone awry at the lab, and we have to investigate them both.

01:00:06.000 And that's, I think, I don't, I can't, again, I understand why that's a controversial thing to say, but it ought not to be.

01:00:14.000 Well, what is the argument when they talk about the Nazis?

01:00:16.000 And then there's the Popsicle Theory.

01:00:18.000 Did you know about the Popsicle Theory?

01:00:19.000 No, what's that?

01:00:20.000 Oh, this is the best one.

01:00:21.000 So after a year of like, you know, so we're not talking about the elephant in the room, which is really the most important thing, which is the CCP, which is the Chinese government, which is lording over all of this, right?

01:00:33.000 Because it's...

01:00:34.000 Impossible to talk about this without talking about the fact that the Chinese government has had a year-long campaign to cover up the origin, to squelch the science, to jail and disappear anyone who said anything that wasn't the party line, and then to use the scientists who are the best friends of the lab to launder a bunch of really horrendous disinformation.

01:00:54.000 And that's not to say that the scientists are assets.

01:00:56.000 That's not what I'm saying.

01:00:57.000 I'm saying that they have an overlapping interest.

01:00:59.000 If you're a scientist, you don't want the lab thing to be true.

01:01:01.000 And if you're the Chinese government, you don't want the lab thing to be true. 0.76

01:01:04.000 You have an overlapping interest.

01:01:05.000 They're not colluding.

01:01:06.000 They're not working together.

01:01:07.000 They just happen to say the same exact thing.

01:01:10.000 And in the case of the WHO report, they actually did work directly together.

01:01:14.000 And what they say is that, okay, well, if we can't find the palm civet...

01:01:18.000 You know, that, like, made the thousand-mile walk from Yunnan to Wuhan without spilling over once until it got to the lab doorstep.

01:01:24.000 Maybe it came out on a frozen food package from Norway.

01:01:26.000 Like, let's go check every frozen food package, distribute to a point that, like, you know, that shipped anything, any box into Wuhan in the four months before the outbreak.

01:01:37.000 But hold on a second.

01:01:37.000 Why frozen food?

01:01:39.000 It's the only...

01:01:40.000 The Chinese government came up with another explanation.

01:01:42.000 If it wasn't the market and it wasn't the lab, well, maybe the virus was on the box of frozen food that came from Norway.

01:01:48.000 Why Norway?

01:01:49.000 I'm just saying it could come from anywhere.

01:01:51.000 In other words, or maybe it came from, you know, Japan or Thailand or anywhere.

01:01:55.000 They don't have an origin. 0.99

01:01:56.000 It's bullshit, is what I'm trying to say, because it's a crazy thing to say. 1.00

01:02:00.000 Right. 1.00

01:02:00.000 It doesn't pass the laugh test. 1.00

01:02:02.000 Forget about Occam's razor.

01:02:03.000 I'm talking about the laugh test.

01:02:04.000 When you hear something, can you think about that being true without cracking up in your mind?

01:02:08.000 It doesn't pass because what that would lead you to is to searching every frozen food package that's ever been shipped into Wuhan, which creates 100 years of busy work that leads you to no conclusion whatsoever.

01:02:20.000 But the Chinese government loves this because for the CCP... Confusion is enough.

01:02:25.000 They don't need to find the source.

01:02:27.000 They just need to make sure we don't find the source.

01:02:29.000 They control their information environment.

01:02:32.000 Their people have no choice but to hear the things that they say, and anyone who says something different disappears.

01:02:38.000 They're working on our information environment.

01:02:39.000 This is part of the influence part of the book.

01:02:42.000 They're trying to change our discussion by getting into our information space and corrupting it for their own malign And in this case, it has a direct effect on our public health because we need to figure this out so we can figure out how to prevent the next one.

01:02:56.000 So this is the, again, I'm not saying the scientists are working with them.

01:02:59.000 I'm just saying the line that they're pushing is the same line now being pushed by these same exact scientists. 0.71

01:03:04.000 Which would only lead you to searching every frozen food package that ever came into Wuhan in the last two years, which is crazy, which is a fool's errand.

01:03:12.000 It's another way to distract us from the thing that we need to do, which is to take a look at these labs.

01:03:16.000 Did anybody question this frozen food narrative?

01:03:21.000 I mean, it got ridiculed on the internet, but these scientists are not ridiculing it?

01:03:25.000 They're not saying, hey, this doesn't even make sense?

01:03:27.000 They're pushing it.

01:03:28.000 So the ones that are talking are pushing it.

01:03:30.000 But why frozen food?

01:03:30.000 This is what I'm concerned with.

01:03:32.000 In other words, the Chinese government wants us to believe...

01:03:36.000 So again, they're trying to avoid blame because they're trying to avoid liability.

01:03:39.000 Right.

01:03:40.000 Three million deaths.

01:03:41.000 Right.

01:03:42.000 No statute of limitations on three million deaths.

01:03:45.000 Right.

01:03:46.000 Every one of those coffins comes with a lawyer, okay?

01:03:49.000 Think about that.

01:03:50.000 Yeah.

01:03:51.000 They're thinking ahead.

01:03:52.000 We're thinking about, you know, should we wear masks or can I go out to a bar tonight?

01:03:56.000 The Chinese government from the get-go has been way ahead of us in looking forward to the next stages of this crisis.

01:04:03.000 The disease is only the first stage.

01:04:05.000 There's going to be broad economic upheaval.

01:04:08.000 They're doing vaccine diplomacy on a broad scale.

01:04:11.000 They're using vaccines to threaten and blackmail and bribe countries all over the world. 0.65

01:04:14.000 We're not playing that game.

01:04:15.000 Then they're thinking about, okay, what's the legal liability of us for this thing?

01:04:20.000 Do they want to close down their own labs?

01:04:21.000 No, they don't want to do that.

01:04:22.000 They've got their own interests.

01:04:24.000 So they have many, many reasons to distract us from the real mission of finding the source of this virus.

01:04:31.000 Now, some people will say, well, oh, you just want to blame China.

01:04:34.000 But here's the crazy part.

01:04:36.000 If the lab accident theory turns out to be true, and again, we don't know.

01:04:40.000 You don't know.

01:04:40.000 I don't know.

01:04:43.000 My wife doesn't know. 0.96

01:04:44.000 My parents don't know.

01:04:45.000 But if it does turn out to be true, it doesn't just implicate China.

01:04:50.000 The big reveal of the lab accident theory is that it implicates us.

01:04:55.000 That it points the finger back at us because we're the ones who sponsored that research.

01:04:59.000 We're the ones who built up this industry.

01:05:01.000 We're the ones who, you know, it was mostly the French, but who built this lab in China in the first place, okay?

01:05:06.000 We had this bet on China, and this sort of fits into the broader U.S.-China relationship, which is the bigger scope of the book.

01:05:12.000 That if we just engage with China as much as we could and help them out as much as we could, that that engagement and cooperation would in turn convince them to liberalize, first economically and then politically, and then we could avoid the Cold War and we would all live in peace and happiness.

01:05:26.000 That was the basic, I'm simplifying it to be sure, stance of US foreign policy towards China since 1972. Okay, and scientific cooperation was held up as the bastion of that, because if you can't cooperate on stopping a pandemic, what could you cooperate on?

01:05:40.000 But the problem is that the Chinese government doesn't think that way, and they don't see it that way, and they're not liberalizing, and it's becoming increasingly obvious to everyone, slowly but surely.

01:05:51.000 And over the course of the Trump administration, more and more parts of American society sort of realized this idea that, oh wait, they're weaponizing their engagement Against us for their interests, which are adverse to ours.

01:06:03.000 They wish us harm, in other words.

01:06:05.000 Not the Chinese people. 1.00

01:06:06.000 I'm talking about the party.

01:06:08.000 Not even the Chinese government.

01:06:09.000 The party, which operates like a cartel.

01:06:11.000 It's like the Gambino family if they ran the largest country in the world. 0.67

01:06:15.000 That's what it is. 0.63

01:06:17.000 They have factions and they kill each other and they hate each other.

01:06:21.000 And they're secretive.

01:06:23.000 And, you know, they're more scared of each other than anyone else because they're constantly killing each other.

01:06:28.000 Really?

01:06:29.000 Oh, yeah.

01:06:29.000 It's vicious.

01:06:30.000 I mean, it's just like the mafia. 0.85

01:06:32.000 If you get too famous, you get whacked. 0.96

01:06:34.000 Whacked. 0.80

01:06:35.000 It happens all the time.

01:06:37.000 Just look what happened to Jack Ma and Alibaba.

01:06:40.000 But Jack Ma, he's still alive, right?

01:06:42.000 Yeah, no, he did better than most.

01:06:44.000 The head of Angbang Insurance Group, the guy who met with Jared Kushner in 2018, they tried to work out that alleged corruption.

01:06:51.000 He got an 18-year prison sentence.

01:06:54.000 The head of HNA, which is like a multinational conglomerate, he fell off like a four-foot wall twice.

01:07:02.000 Twice.

01:07:02.000 Just to make sure.

01:07:03.000 You know, if you Google China, people are falling out of windows.

01:07:07.000 What do they not screw their windows in?

01:07:09.000 Famous businessmen constantly falling out of windows.

01:07:12.000 They're very nasty to each other.

01:07:16.000 But that's, again, if you think of it just like a mafia family, that's sort of how it operates.

01:07:21.000 They're working together, and Xi Jinping is the head of it.

01:07:25.000 Now, what that means for us is that, getting back to the issue at hand, is that Our scientific collaboration may be with these Chinese scientists who are very nice people who also want to solve the pandemic, who dedicated their life to solving pandemics, and that's what they've been doing for 20 years.

01:07:40.000 They don't get to make the decision.

01:07:41.000 They've got a party guy standing behind over their shoulder, who's got a general standing over his shoulder, who's got another party guy standing over his shoulder, who's got Xi Jinping standing over his shoulder.

01:07:50.000 And that's what a lot of Americans don't understand.

01:07:53.000 Like, how could, oh, I thought we were just doing open science.

01:07:55.000 What could be bad about that?

01:07:56.000 What?

01:07:57.000 They're gonna hide stuff in the labs?

01:07:58.000 Why would they do that?

01:08:00.000 But for the people inside the government who understood how the CCP operates, of course it's what they would do.

01:08:05.000 And for the people who saw how they responded to the SARS virus in 2002 and 2003, that's exactly what they did.

01:08:10.000 They did the same things.

01:08:11.000 They did it over again.

01:08:12.000 Just this time it killed 600,000 Americans.

01:08:15.000 Now, again, that doesn't excuse our poor response. 0.99

01:08:17.000 That doesn't excuse any of the bullshit that Trump put us through that made it much worse. 0.98

01:08:22.000 I'm just saying there's plenty of blame to go around. 0.97

01:08:24.000 What that tells us about our relationship with China, again, not the Chinese people. 0.99

01:08:30.000 You wouldn't blame the Italian people for the mafia, so you wouldn't blame the Chinese people for the CCP. But what it tells us is that this is an organization that has to be viewed with clear eyes.

01:08:40.000 And the clear eyes are that They covered up the origin.

01:08:44.000 They covered up the science.

01:08:45.000 They still won't give us the data that they have to this day.

01:08:48.000 And this is having a direct effect on our security and our prosperity and our public health.

01:08:54.000 And so we're going to have to do something about that.

01:08:56.000 And what I say is that we have to start here.

01:08:59.000 We have to start investigating our labs, the gain-of-function research that we're doing here.

01:09:02.000 You see that happening a little bit now. 0.95

01:09:04.000 You see some congressmen, some more scientists like Jamie Messel, by the way, You know, took a lot of shit, man, when he started talking about the lab accident theory a year ago. 0.98

01:09:14.000 He was just getting attacked all the time. 0.98

01:09:18.000 I mean, me too, to a lesser extent, but I'm a journalist.

01:09:20.000 That comes with the territory.

01:09:22.000 That was one of the problems with Trump, is that everything that he endorsed was so problematic that even if it didn't make any sense to oppose it, people opposed it just based on the fact that it was his.

01:09:31.000 Exactly, exactly.

01:09:33.000 And you know what, but...

01:09:34.000 I don't like being on Trump's side any more than anybody else.

01:09:37.000 You're not on his side.

01:09:38.000 You're on the side of the truth.

01:09:39.000 Thank you.

01:09:40.000 Yeah.

01:09:41.000 Thank you.

01:09:42.000 Thank you.

01:09:43.000 And I like the way you just weaved your way through this.

01:09:46.000 It was brilliant.

01:09:47.000 The thing that scares me terribly is that there's still people, despite the fact that this evidence is slowly emerging, there's still people that are ideologically opposed to it being true, so they're fighting it hook, line, and sinker.

01:10:02.000 Here's what I say to those people.

01:10:04.000 The origin of the coronavirus is not a political question.

01:10:07.000 It's not an ideological question.

01:10:09.000 In fact, it's not even really a scientific question.

01:10:11.000 It's a forensic question.

01:10:13.000 Something bad happened.

01:10:14.000 We need to find out what happened.

01:10:15.000 It's not for scientists to solve.

01:10:18.000 It's for forensic investigators to solve.

01:10:20.000 And we're actually impeding that investigation with this adherence, this blind adherence to ideology.

01:10:26.000 Of course.

01:10:27.000 That's what's dangerous, and that's what scares me. 0.98

01:10:29.000 And it's getting worse because, I mean, we're a year and a half into this thing, and we don't know shit. 0.92

01:10:33.000 Oh, here's another angle, which is, like, help you understand the intelligence community, right? 0.80

01:10:38.000 Our intelligence, our vaulted $80 billion intelligence community.

01:10:42.000 $80 billion, okay?

01:10:44.000 Now, you'll notice, and a lot of people point this out, that when...

01:10:48.000 When I started publishing about these cables, you know, and the scientists came back and were like, oh, you can't talk about the lab accident theory.

01:10:55.000 Don't look at the lab.

01:10:56.000 We went to the lab.

01:10:56.000 We talked to the scientists.

01:10:57.000 They said they were innocent.

01:10:59.000 And case closed and shut up, you know.

01:11:03.000 When that happened, the intelligence community leaked to the mainstream press that there was no evidence to support the lab.

01:11:09.000 That's where this no evidence thing came from, right?

01:11:12.000 Now, because I was sort of inside the system...

01:11:14.000 I was writing this book and I actually had real no-shit sources.

01:11:18.000 I was able to sort of trace how that happened.

01:11:21.000 There was a gap.

01:11:22.000 There was an intelligence gap.

01:11:23.000 In other words...

01:11:27.000 I think?

01:11:46.000 And for that reason, he was like the early warning system side of the government and for Trump and along with a couple other people.

01:11:54.000 But he was mostly ignored and shouted down by the political people, right?

01:11:57.000 Because they're like, how dare you close the economy?

01:11:59.000 What are you going to shut down travel from Europe in the middle of the election season?

01:12:02.000 That's crazy.

01:12:03.000 You're going to lose the election.

01:12:04.000 Now, of course, the political people were 100 percent wrong because if Trump had done a better response, he might have won the election.

01:12:10.000 And his failed response actually cost him the presidency when people realized that he didn't know what he was doing.

01:12:15.000 But at that moment, guys like Matthew Pottinger were like, hey, we really think this came from the lab. 0.98

01:12:20.000 The intelligence people, who also didn't like some of them anyway, who didn't like the Trump people, leaked there was no evidence to fuck with the Trump people. 0.99

01:12:27.000 And the mainstream media ran with it because, like, isn't it great to fuck with the Trump people? 0.99

01:12:30.000 They leaked it or they decided to run with that narrative to fuck with the Trump people? 0.99

01:12:35.000 Because it's not a leak if they knew it wasn't factual. 0.97

01:12:38.000 No, it's factual, but it's misleading.

01:12:41.000 Right.

01:12:41.000 I see what you're saying.

01:12:42.000 Because there is no evidence.

01:12:43.000 There's no evidence either way.

01:12:44.000 Right.

01:12:44.000 Got it.

01:12:44.000 They could have leaked.

01:12:45.000 There's no evidence of the natural spillover, but they leaked.

01:12:47.000 There's no evidence.

01:12:48.000 They were rebutting what Pompeo and Trump were saying.

01:12:52.000 And people talk about – I'm not going to use the term deep state, but this was an attempt by them to reset the narrative or somebody in the intelligence community, a bunch of people.

01:13:02.000 But what had actually happened was that Pottinger went to the intelligence community and said, what do you have?

01:13:07.000 Okay, give me the SIGINT. Give me the satellite shit. 0.99

01:13:11.000 Do we have any human sources on the ground? 1.00

01:13:12.000 We've got to look at everything.

01:13:13.000 He didn't say, go prove the lab theory.

01:13:15.000 He said, give me everything on every theory.

01:13:17.000 If you've got the market theory smoking gun, give me that too.

01:13:21.000 And so he put out this sort of tasking, which is what they do at the White House, and give me everything you got.

01:13:25.000 And there wasn't anything. 0.99

01:13:28.000 They didn't know shit. 1.00

01:13:29.000 They still don't know shit. 1.00

01:13:31.000 And if this doesn't blow your mind, nothing will. 1.00

01:13:34.000 Think about the intelligence failure that that represents.

01:13:38.000 Just think about for a second that after 9-11...

01:13:43.000 We took our $80 billion intelligence community machine and shifted it over to the jihadis.

01:13:51.000 And then we took some of it and we shifted it back to Russia.

01:13:54.000 And then we took some of it, we shifted it to like China, like spies, like people trying to honey trap mayors and stuff like that.

01:14:00.000 That's what they do. 1.00

01:14:01.000 They'll throw a bunch of Chinese spies at American mayors to try to get them to fuck them. 1.00

01:14:06.000 And then they compromise, you know, like old tradecraft. 1.00

01:14:08.000 Nobody was looking at this universe of risky...

01:14:23.000 I think?

01:14:26.000 I think?

01:14:32.000 And then they leak, oh, there's no evidence for the lab theory.

01:14:33.000 It was like, oh, Trump is wrong.

01:14:35.000 Let's have a party.

01:14:37.000 And a year later, we still- What a failure.

01:14:40.000 Huge intelligence.

01:14:41.000 Massive intelligence failure.

01:14:42.000 That in any sane world, you would have a commission, you know, like a 9-11 style commission would be like, how did this happen?

01:14:49.000 Not just, how did this happen?

01:14:51.000 How did we get into this dystopian, crazy reality that we're all suffering in?

01:14:56.000 And not just Americans, 7 billion people.

01:14:59.000 Suffering.

01:14:59.000 To this day, much worse than us.

01:15:02.000 A lot of countries, much, much worse than us.

01:15:05.000 And no one's curious.

01:15:06.000 No one cares.

01:15:07.000 There's two Republican committees that issued letters on this.

01:15:12.000 That's all I could ever find.

01:15:13.000 A year later, zero Democrats are interested in this.

01:15:16.000 I mean, there's a few people in the media, not really.

01:15:19.000 A couple.

01:15:20.000 They're doing their best.

01:15:21.000 I'm doing my best.

01:15:23.000 I don't know.

01:15:24.000 Nobody listens to me.

01:15:25.000 What are you going to do?

01:15:26.000 Well, they're going to listen to you.

01:15:28.000 We'll see.

01:15:29.000 It's just one of those things where...

01:15:30.000 I'm going to listen to you.

01:15:31.000 If I can convince you, that would be like a watershed moment in this conversation.

01:15:35.000 Well, I've been aware because of Jamie and because of many other people that the whole way it was established that it was the natural spillover was very faulty.

01:15:44.000 But not to the extent that you're laying it out here today.

01:15:47.000 I'm taking you a couple more layers down into the system to tell you what was going on inside the beast.

01:15:51.000 And again, I'm just blurting it all out because I don't have an agenda.

01:15:57.000 I don't care...

01:15:59.000 I'll tell you what I know.

01:16:00.000 I'll tell you what I don't know.

01:16:01.000 And what I know is that from Jump, there were a lot of very serious people who wanted to look into this lab and for a number of fucked up reasons that we've just discussed.

01:16:09.000 It's still not happening.

01:16:10.000 To this day, it's still not happening.

01:16:11.000 There's no plan for it.

01:16:13.000 No one's even really...

01:16:15.000 I haven't heard anybody come up with a plan for it.

01:16:17.000 How is that?

01:16:17.000 How is nobody more curious about how we got into this mess?

01:16:21.000 By the way, now I'm really going to blow your mind.

01:16:23.000 Guess what the...

01:16:25.000 Guess what the plan is to respond to the pandemic, the official international government plan, scientifically.

01:16:33.000 What's the plan?

01:16:34.000 Just guess.

01:16:35.000 I don't know.

01:16:36.000 To take this gain-of-function research and to times it by six.

01:16:41.000 What?

01:16:42.000 Really?

01:16:43.000 Really?

01:16:43.000 Let that sink in for one second.

01:16:46.000 Really?

01:16:46.000 It's called the Global Virome Project.

01:16:48.000 To take this $200 million program to predict and preempt the pandemic, which...

01:16:53.000 Didn't predict and preempt, which may have sparked the pandemic.

01:16:56.000 We don't know, but may have.

01:16:57.000 And to dump another $1.2 billion into it, a lot of which is U.S. taxpayer money, to take the Fauci-Datastic Project and just make it huge, much bigger.

01:17:09.000 According to the website, to dig up 500,000 new dangerous viruses from the wild to bring back the lab supply.

01:17:16.000 That's the plan.

01:17:16.000 That's our current response plan.

01:17:18.000 Now, don't you think...

01:17:19.000 Who's initiating this?

01:17:20.000 I mean, it's an international consortium of scientists from many, many, many countries.

01:17:26.000 Do you think they're taking advantage of the fact that there is this need for an understanding for how to fix a situation like this if it were to occur in the future, the doubling down?

01:17:39.000 There's sextupling down on their mistake, if it's a mistake.

01:17:43.000 But all I'm saying is, shouldn't we find out?

01:17:47.000 Increase this research sixfold?

01:17:49.000 If it is...

01:17:49.000 And here's the other thing.

01:17:51.000 Even if it didn't cause the pandemic, there's a risk, right?

01:17:54.000 So when the WHO releases its report, the task report says, we went to the lab for three hours.

01:18:00.000 They told us they didn't do it.

01:18:01.000 We said, sorry to bother you.

01:18:03.000 And case closed.

01:18:04.000 As they're releasing that report, the head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros, who most right-wing outlets accuse of being totally compromised by the CCP. Again, I don't think that's the case.

01:18:14.000 I think he has a conflict of interest.

01:18:15.000 I think he's...

01:18:16.000 You know, again Is that the guy that was in that interview with the journalist who refused to say the name Taiwan?

01:18:22.000 No, I think that was a different guy.

01:18:24.000 But that's another part of the problem is the self-censorship that goes on in these organizations.

01:18:27.000 But my view on the WHO is we should fix it, not nix it.

01:18:30.000 In other words, these organizations are flawed, but if we destroyed them, we'd just have to build them again.

01:18:36.000 So we should probably engage it, not get rid of it.

01:18:40.000 But anyway, he comes out in the speech during the release of the report, and guess what he says?

01:18:44.000 He says, we've got to look at this lab.

01:18:45.000 And you guys didn't do enough to look at the lab.

01:18:47.000 In other words, he crapped on his own report in the middle of releasing the report.

01:18:53.000 Wow.

01:18:54.000 Now...

01:18:55.000 Again, just as a curious human being, I'm like, oh, why would he do that?

01:19:00.000 Well, he was trying to save his credibility and the credibility of his organization, because now it seems pretty clear and obvious to more and more people that we're going to have to take a look at these labs.

01:19:08.000 So as time goes on, the investigation will reveal more of this.

01:19:13.000 More people will start looking into it now that it's no longer taboo.

01:19:17.000 Hopefully.

01:19:17.000 Now that Trump's not in office.

01:19:18.000 I don't know.

01:19:19.000 Maybe...

01:19:19.000 What I find is that, because I've been having a lot of these conversations, is that, again, when people come to this issue without all that baggage, we have this rational conversation that you and I are having right now.

01:19:32.000 But when people come to it with the baggage that they had from 2020, it immediately descends into like, oh wait, I tweeted this in March 2020, and this is why I think this is still right.

01:19:40.000 And they have to defend it. 0.97

01:19:41.000 It's fucking maddening. 0.99

01:19:46.000 I'm a pretty laid-back guy, as you can tell. 0.99

01:19:48.000 You know what I mean?

01:19:49.000 I'm not into Twitter, but I had to get into a couple Twitter wars over this because I couldn't help myself.

01:19:55.000 I'm not going to call out any names.

01:19:56.000 You know who you are.

01:19:58.000 But there were very famous people, people much more famous than me, who were like, oh no, this is all conspiracy.

01:20:06.000 Hey guys, we've got to come together on this thing.

01:20:08.000 We've got to forget.

01:20:09.000 Think again.

01:20:10.000 Think again.

01:20:11.000 Have you ever heard of this book, Think Again, by Adam Grant?

01:20:14.000 No.

01:20:14.000 You should have him on the show.

01:20:15.000 I would love to.

01:20:16.000 He's a behavioral scientist, I think, I don't know if that's his real title, at UPenn.

01:20:20.000 And he wrote this great book.

01:20:22.000 And it says that, you know, what we're lacking in our politics and in our discourse and in our society is the ability to challenge our own assumptions and that when new information comes in and to To have some sort of constructive disagreement and testing where we can allow ourselves to be wrong because the important thing is not to be right first.

01:20:42.000 The important thing is to be right at the end.

01:20:45.000 You want to be right when the chips are all down.

01:20:47.000 You want to be right at the conclusion of it.

01:20:51.000 Yes.

01:20:51.000 And so in order to do that, you have to be willing to admit that you might have been wrong in the beginning.

01:20:55.000 And when the new information comes in, you have to rethink your assumptions and rethink.

01:20:58.000 It's more of a scientific method to thinking, but because journalists are the way we are, You know, being right is an end in itself.

01:21:08.000 So we get obsessed with that.

01:21:10.000 And then, of course, for the mainstream media, if you're wrong, you get dunked on by the right-wing media, right?

01:21:15.000 But if you're the right-wing media, you're wrong.

01:21:17.000 There's not really that many consequences.

01:21:19.000 So for the mainstream media guys like me, we're always like on edge because we got to be right 100% of the time.

01:21:24.000 And if they catch us once being wrong, then that's like a huge damage to our credibility.

01:21:29.000 And don't get me wrong, I believe that we should be held to that higher standard. 0.99

01:21:33.000 I believe that journalists, because we're out there calling people out for their shit all day long. 0.99

01:21:36.000 Right. 0.98

01:21:36.000 So yes, I agree, but I'm not perfect. 0.98

01:21:39.000 I make mistakes.

01:21:39.000 I've made mistakes.

01:21:41.000 If you watch some of the YouTube videos, you will see.

01:21:45.000 Mistakes have been made.

01:21:46.000 I'm not a perfect journalist, but I'm trying to get it right.

01:21:48.000 And that's the integrity, is not worrying about whether or not getting it right means that I was wrong the first time.

01:21:54.000 It's your intent.

01:21:55.000 Your intent is to get it right, not to obfuscate, not to cover up your past mistakes by ignoring data that's contrary to that.

01:22:03.000 But it's tough because people have confirmation bias.

01:22:05.000 Of course.

01:22:05.000 You know, and it's a real thing and you have to think about it.

01:22:08.000 And people have source bias.

01:22:09.000 You know what I mean?

01:22:10.000 Imagine you're covering the pandemic.

01:22:12.000 And those scientists are your best sources.

01:22:15.000 Right.

01:22:15.000 That's what happened.

01:22:16.000 Yeah.

01:22:17.000 The guy's on like 60 minutes.

01:22:19.000 The double, triple, quadruple, whatever they're doing with the gain-of-function research scares the shit out of me because has this been approved?

01:22:28.000 Is this just a plan?

01:22:30.000 No, no.

01:22:30.000 They've been doing it for 15 years.

01:22:32.000 No, no, no.

01:22:32.000 I mean, now, knowing the response, knowing what happened...

01:22:38.000 Oh, the Global Virome Project.

01:22:39.000 So the Global Virome Project, which is a $1.2 billion expansion of the global...

01:22:43.000 Not just gain-of-function research, but the overall industry of collecting viruses from the wild.

01:22:48.000 Some of which is gain-of-function research.

01:22:50.000 They may do lots of different things with these viruses.

01:22:52.000 But the idea is, like, let's go to every cave in Yunnan and Indonesia, find the worst viruses that we can.

01:22:58.000 We find a really bad one.

01:22:59.000 That's great.

01:22:59.000 We're going to break back to the lab and see what's what.

01:23:01.000 That idea is – that is still the current plan.

01:23:06.000 I'm told that there are people looking at it.

01:23:10.000 The funding hasn't actually gone out.

01:23:11.000 But if you ask, that's still the current plan.

01:23:13.000 In other words, there's not another plan.

01:23:15.000 But does it include treatments this time?

01:23:19.000 Well, I mean that would be done by a different – Right.

01:23:22.000 But if you're examining all these viruses and they're doing what they did with these mice by passing it from one to another and seeing what's the most virulent strain, what are you doing other than empowering the viruses?

01:23:35.000 You're gaining an understanding, but what good is that gain of understanding if there's no significant treatments that are being developed simultaneously?

01:23:43.000 No, no.

01:23:43.000 I'm sure that they have a plan to link that research with treatments and this and that.

01:23:48.000 But that was never done in Wuhan.

01:23:53.000 Right, but they didn't link it to anyone and develop treatments.

01:23:56.000 I'm not sure.

01:23:57.000 As I said, I don't want to say something.

01:23:59.000 I understand, but they clearly didn't have a treatment.

01:24:02.000 Right, but where did the treatment come from?

01:24:03.000 The treatment was the mRNA vaccines.

01:24:05.000 But that's from the original SARS, right?

01:24:07.000 No, it's not.

01:24:07.000 Well, it's from what was originally a DARPA-funded defense program.

01:24:11.000 Right, what you were saying earlier.

01:24:12.000 So think about that.

01:24:13.000 That's like a government investment in a new technology that it worked.

01:24:17.000 The mRNA vaccines.

01:24:19.000 It's amazing technology.

01:24:20.000 And that was developed so that we could respond to any virus, not to respond to the coronavirus.

01:24:25.000 The beauty of the mRNA technology is that you can apply it to the virus you don't know about, which, again, is the big criticism of all of this natural virus project.

01:24:34.000 The virus is changing all the time.

01:24:36.000 One virus is changing every single day.

01:24:38.000 So you could dig up 500,000 viruses.

01:24:41.000 The next day, those 500,000 viruses will be different.

01:24:43.000 So what are you really doing?

01:24:44.000 Now, again, I'm not a scientist.

01:24:46.000 I know that this is an honest debate inside the scientific community by people who think that this research and whether or not it led to therapeutics, I don't know the details.

01:24:53.000 Again, I've got to be transparent about the limits of what I don't know everything about.

01:24:57.000 But the bottom line is that that argument, that scientific project, which I'm sure does include a path towards therapeutics.

01:25:05.000 How far they got, I'm not sure.

01:25:08.000 That's one way to do it.

01:25:09.000 The other way to do it is to take all that money, all of it, all these scientists, the whole industry, and do something different.

01:25:15.000 And it's called mitigation, surveillance, pre-stocking of supplies, so that when the outbreak happens, again, probably where the bats are, probably where the viruses live.

01:25:29.000 If I had to guess where the outbreak is going to be, you know, which is again a very weird thing about this when it happened a thousand miles away next to the lab.

01:25:35.000 You could spend all that money.

01:25:37.000 You could probably save a lot more lives.

01:25:38.000 That's the argument.

01:25:39.000 Well, other ones break out in agricultural centers.

01:25:42.000 Yes.

01:25:43.000 In other words, any theory that you have, you could point to an example.

01:25:46.000 But it doesn't matter because all we care about is this example.

01:25:50.000 Is the coronavirus, COVID-19 pandemic that we're all in?

01:25:53.000 That's the one we need to figure out.

01:25:55.000 So can we figure it out?

01:25:56.000 Is it okay?

01:25:57.000 Can I say that?

01:26:01.000 Even if that involves asking some tough questions of Anthony Fauci, who I'm sure, again, is a very nice man who dedicated his life to solving viruses.

01:26:09.000 And if it turns out that his research helped spark the pandemic, well, okay, I'm not accusing him of doing anything illegal or wrong.

01:26:18.000 He was going through a regular process.

01:26:20.000 He was doing approved stuff, as far as we know.

01:26:23.000 But he wasn't personally doing it, right?

01:26:25.000 He was doing it in a lab that was cited in 2018 for safety violations.

01:26:29.000 In many, many labs all over the world, including this lab in Wuhan.

01:26:32.000 Now, the person I do think bears a little bit more responsibility is those people in the Chinese labs that were not doing the public research.

01:26:41.000 And this is a new thing that I'm talking about now, which is that the Trump administration, again, in its Trumpian kind of way, on the very last week of existence, put out the statement.

01:26:51.000 On January 15th, making claims about the lab.

01:26:54.000 Bold claims. 1.00

01:26:56.000 And they did a lot of shit in that last week. 0.99

01:26:59.000 You know what I mean? 1.00

01:27:01.000 The rioters came, you know what I mean?

01:27:03.000 And then they were like, everything was very weird. 0.99

01:27:07.000 D.C. became a very fucked up place. 0.99

01:27:09.000 I've been living there 24 years. 1.00

01:27:12.000 Capital's still fenced in, right?

01:27:15.000 75% fences are gone.

01:27:18.000 The Capitol Building is still pretty secure.

01:27:21.000 I was there for the first time last week.

01:27:23.000 It was very weird and very sad.

01:27:26.000 I attended, quite accidentally, the funeral of a Capitol Police officer, the latest one.

01:27:33.000 The guy that got hit by a car?

01:27:35.000 Yeah.

01:27:36.000 It was tragic.

01:27:37.000 I spent a lot of time covering Capitol Hill.

01:27:39.000 My wife covered it for a long time.

01:27:41.000 My wife could have been in that building that day if she hadn't switched jobs very recently. 1.00

01:27:46.000 And, you know, that shit is scary. 1.00

01:27:48.000 And, you know, walking around D.C., it looked like, you know, the green zone. 1.00

01:27:52.000 That's very...

01:27:53.000 That hit me.

01:27:54.000 It really affected me. 0.99

01:27:57.000 But anyway, in that last week, in that confusion, they pushed through a lot of shit. 0.91

01:28:01.000 And Pompeo came out with a statement saying, oh, well, we have all this declassified intelligence about the labs, that there were sick researchers at the lab with COVID-like symptoms in September and October 2019, that there was undisclosed coronavirus research at the lab that they didn't tell us about. 0.95

01:28:16.000 They published some of it, and that they were doing military work at the lab, again, that they didn't tell us about.

01:28:21.000 Now, these are amongst some other claims, but these are the three big claims that Pompeo made.

01:28:25.000 Now, of course, We're good to go.

01:28:36.000 We're good to go.

01:28:49.000 You've got to check this out.

01:28:50.000 Is this true?

01:28:50.000 They put out these statements.

01:28:51.000 And to their credit, they did.

01:28:53.000 They checked it out, and they said, yeah, the facts are true.

01:28:55.000 Now, what the Biden administration said, the State Department, anti-belief State Department said, we confirm these facts.

01:29:00.000 In other words, our intelligence does in fact show that there were sick researchers at the lab, that there was undisclosed coronavirus research at the lab, and that there was some undisclosed military work at the lab.

01:29:09.000 However, we do not agree with the Trump and Pompeo statement that the lab probably did it.

01:29:14.000 Okay?

01:29:14.000 That was their hedge, right?

01:29:15.000 And if you think about it, the Biden people are being...

01:29:19.000 Fair, you know, because they don't want to take a stance because they're like you. 0.98

01:29:25.000 They weren't part of the bullshit in 2020. They weren't there. 0.98

01:29:28.000 They weren't in office.

01:29:28.000 They don't care which way it turns out.

01:29:30.000 They know it might be the lab.

01:29:31.000 It might be the natural spillover.

01:29:32.000 So they confirm the facts, but not the political...

01:29:35.000 Assertions of the Trump administration.

01:29:37.000 But just going that far, just to say that we confirmed these facts, was significant.

01:29:41.000 They didn't have to do that.

01:29:42.000 They went and checked all of the intelligence, what we had, and said, yeah, there is this suspicious activity at the lab that we didn't previously know about.

01:29:50.000 Now, nobody really...

01:29:52.000 When the Biden administration releases lab accident theory data, silence.

01:29:58.000 Robert Redfield...

01:29:58.000 I remember when Robert Redfield was like, hey, we should probably look at this lab.

01:30:01.000 The New York Times headline said...

01:30:04.000 Robert Redford, former CDC director, pushes debunked theory.

01:30:09.000 Yeah.

01:30:09.000 I was like, wait a minute.

01:30:10.000 Who debunked it?

01:30:11.000 Did I miss a meeting?

01:30:12.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

01:30:13.000 Because I just wrote a fucking book about it. 0.99

01:30:14.000 What do you think that's about? 0.99

01:30:16.000 Confirmation bias and source bias.

01:30:17.000 Is that really all it is?

01:30:19.000 Yeah, I think so.

01:30:20.000 I mean, again, I worked in the media 17 years.

01:30:22.000 I worked for eight different news organizations.

01:30:24.000 It's mostly incompetence.

01:30:26.000 It's not a conspiracy.

01:30:27.000 I don't mean a conspiracy.

01:30:28.000 What do you mean?

01:30:30.000 You tell me what you mean.

01:30:31.000 But to say something that's so egregious, to say that it's debunked when it hasn't been debunked, there's got to be some sort of motivation to do that.

01:30:42.000 I mean, I think some of it is like orange man bad.

01:30:44.000 Yes.

01:30:45.000 We can't let Trump be right.

01:30:47.000 Like, guess what? 0.99

01:30:48.000 The broken clock is right twice every fucking day. 0.99

01:30:51.000 So I think a lot of it is that. 0.99

01:30:54.000 Because, again, you could say that Trump pushed it.

01:30:56.000 He did say things.

01:30:58.000 They did offer things without evidence.

01:31:00.000 They made mistakes.

01:31:00.000 He also...

01:31:02.000 Merge racism and the origin story in a horribly destructive way in the sense that we can't even untangle it.

01:31:09.000 So now if you're on the progressive side, this is why the progressives got mad at Redfield because they're like, oh, you're fueling AAPI hate, right? 0.56

01:31:17.000 And I get why they think that, right?

01:31:20.000 And I tried to – I wrote a column about this where I basically just – Tried to elevate the voices of AAPI lawmakers.

01:31:27.000 You're saying Asian-American, Pacific Islanders?

01:31:29.000 Yes, exactly. 1.00

01:31:31.000 Most people don't know what the fuck you're saying. 0.99

01:31:32.000 Sorry about that. 0.99

01:31:33.000 It's a DC jargon.

01:31:35.000 You know, what I argued is that it's a tragedy that Trump used the China issue to stoke anti-Asian hate, which is, I think, a fact, an undeniable fact.

01:31:47.000 However, now that Trump is gone, we have to separate these two things.

01:31:51.000 In other words, we can be critical of the Chinese Communist Party Without being racist against Asian Americans.

01:31:56.000 In fact, it's crucial that we do that because the Chinese Communist Party intentionally stokes our racial divides, including our anti-Asian hate, in order to divide our society to undermine our democracy to advance its own interests. 0.97

01:32:11.000 Tons and tons of propaganda and trolls, state media.

01:32:15.000 You should have seen it.

01:32:17.000 The first time Yang Jishu, the state counselor of China, met with Tony Blinken, he criticized him about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd, right?

01:32:24.000 Why is he doing that?

01:32:26.000 In the meeting, in the diplomatic meeting, right?

01:32:28.000 And if you look at their embassies and their state media, and it's, I mean, it's a multi-billion dollar enterprise.

01:32:33.000 Constantly pumping out, how does America treat its Asians? 1.00

01:32:36.000 Look at this statistic.

01:32:37.000 Look at that statistic.

01:32:38.000 Now that, in a sense, is a very clumsy kind of propaganda.

01:32:42.000 That's what we can see.

01:32:43.000 And it's increasing all the time. 1.00

01:32:45.000 And again, with the Facebook groups and the whole thing, all the same shit the Russians did. 0.97

01:32:50.000 And it's meant to drive a wedge into our society to inflame our existing tensions, again, to undermine our own confidence in our society and our democracy. 0.99

01:32:59.000 Oh, look, democracies are so messy.

01:33:01.000 You have freedom of the press, but everyone's pushing fake news.

01:33:04.000 And look at China.

01:33:05.000 It's so wonderful.

01:33:07.000 There's a million newspapers.

01:33:09.000 There's only one story.

01:33:11.000 You go to the bookstore.

01:33:13.000 This is the book you need to read.

01:33:14.000 You better download it.

01:33:15.000 And by the way, if you don't download it, we're going to ding your social credit score.

01:33:19.000 And so that's the overt part.

01:33:23.000 Then there's the influence part, which, again, is a big subject of the book, which is Harder to talk about because it's less visible.

01:33:30.000 And this is the seeding of American institutions with cash and favors and relationships that the Chinese Communist Party has deftly built over decades on both sides of our political spectrum, but also in our institutions, in academia, in Wall Street,

01:33:47.000 especially in Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in our sports.

01:33:50.000 In Hollywood, okay?

01:33:52.000 And you see it everywhere.

01:33:54.000 And, you know, there are certain watershed moments where it pops into our public consciousness.

01:33:58.000 And I'm talking about the NBA here, right?

01:34:00.000 You had one guy, Daryl Morey, who I've, I don't know if you know this, is a former DOD and CIA contractor and a MITRE researcher, a smart guy.

01:34:11.000 He did, like, the Moneyball research.

01:34:12.000 He's, like, a brilliant national security guy who happened to find himself as the manager of the Houston Rockets.

01:34:17.000 While they're cracking down on Hong Kong, he says one tweet, and the NBA is fined, punished to the tune of $400 million?

01:34:24.000 You know, canceled in China.

01:34:26.000 You know, major scandal.

01:34:27.000 And his tweet was just in support of the Hong Kong protesters?

01:34:30.000 Is that what it was?

01:34:31.000 Yeah.

01:34:31.000 One tweet.

01:34:32.000 And they punished the entire industry.

01:34:34.000 It was the biggest scandal in sports history, really.

01:34:38.000 And all of a sudden, millions of people are like, wait a second, we can't tweet something?

01:34:43.000 They're going to punish our entire company?

01:34:44.000 Maybe the whole league?

01:34:46.000 You know, $400 million is not...

01:34:48.000 Nothing to sneeze at.

01:34:49.000 And of course the NBA, and this is kind of like what I argue in the book, they didn't know how to deal with that.

01:34:54.000 They didn't understand, much like the American scientists, much like the American media, they didn't know what they were dealing with.

01:34:59.000 So what Adam Silver did, quite tragically, was he went to the guy who he thought would have the best line on it, Joseph Tsai, the head of the Brooklyn Nets, who's like a CCP party member.

01:35:09.000 He's like a kid-eating Taiwanese billionaire, but he's like a chief promoter of the... 0.84

01:35:15.000 What did you call him?

01:35:16.000 A kid-eating...

01:35:18.000 CCP party member, kid-eating.

01:35:20.000 What did you say?

01:35:21.000 No, no, no.

01:35:21.000 Delete that.

01:35:22.000 I never said kid-eating.

01:35:23.000 What did you say, though, after that?

01:35:25.000 You said CCC party member.

01:35:27.000 CCP party member.

01:35:28.000 And then you said something else.

01:35:29.000 Canadian, Taiwanese, billionaire.

01:35:31.000 You're talking so fast.

01:35:33.000 It's not like you're saying, kid-eating, Taiwanese, billionaire.

01:35:36.000 What?

01:35:37.000 For the record, I did not accuse Joseph Tsai of eating any kids.

01:35:40.000 We can cut that out.

01:35:41.000 We'll cut out the confusion.

01:35:42.000 No, no.

01:35:42.000 Believe it.

01:35:43.000 I just want to make it clear.

01:35:45.000 I was so confused what you were saying.

01:35:46.000 Sorry.

01:35:47.000 Canadian.

01:35:47.000 Okay.

01:35:48.000 So Joseph Tsai puts out this Facebook post, which basically is the Chinese Communist Party line.

01:35:53.000 You may not criticize Chinese policy.

01:35:56.000 1.4 billion Chinese people were super offended by that tweet.

01:35:59.000 Never mind that they don't have Twitter in China.

01:36:01.000 It's completely banned.

01:36:03.000 And so what the NBA did was what all these companies do when they get punished by the CCP is they bow and scrape and beg for forgiveness and promise never to do it again.

01:36:12.000 So they're saying 1.4 billion Chinese people were offended by a tweet in support of Hong Kong protesters who were seeing their freedoms impinged upon by the policies of the CCP. Correct. 0.96

01:36:23.000 But that's not true, of course, because they don't have Twitter in China.

01:36:26.000 It's banned.

01:36:26.000 Not only that, it doesn't make sense.

01:36:28.000 And it doesn't make sense.

01:36:29.000 But anyway, the NBA eventually, then they got dunked on by Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke and any politician who wanted to be tough on China, right?

01:36:39.000 And this is like D.C. It's like very good politics to be tough on.

01:36:41.000 I'm really tough on China. 0.99

01:36:43.000 NBA, how dare you count out to the Chinese Communist Party and, you know, not fire Daryl Morey and apologize and blah, blah, blah.

01:36:51.000 And my reaction was like, wait a second.

01:36:54.000 Why are we expecting the NBA to deal with the Chinese Communist Party?

01:36:57.000 That's not fair.

01:36:58.000 They're not a foreign policy organization.

01:37:00.000 They don't know what to do.

01:37:02.000 They're not powerful enough.

01:37:03.000 And they probably don't understand the dynamics.

01:37:06.000 Clearly, they learned, but once they were in the soup, it was too late.

01:37:10.000 And they eventually course-corrected, but they're still trying to repair all that damage.

01:37:15.000 How did they course-correct?

01:37:16.000 Well, they issued a statement expressing support for Daryl Morey's right to free speech.

01:37:20.000 But then they issued a different statement in Chinese that was less supportive.

01:37:25.000 And then they paid their penance, or whatever it was, and tried to maintain their relationships in China and tried to move on.

01:37:33.000 But my point is that that's how the CCP operates.

01:37:38.000 They will ruin your industry, your business, for the slightest offense.

01:37:44.000 This happened two weeks ago.

01:37:46.000 With H&M and Nike.

01:37:48.000 And it's because the business is tied to China because China does do business with the NBA. Huge business.

01:37:56.000 Huge business.

01:37:58.000 And you think that this is...

01:38:00.000 Is it because China enjoys having the NBA as an entertainment entity?

01:38:08.000 Or is it...

01:38:09.000 Chinese people love the NBA. That's what it is?

01:38:11.000 The NBA is huge in China.

01:38:12.000 It's also, if you think about it from the NBA's perspective, that's their growth.

01:38:17.000 That's their future.

01:38:18.000 That's their biggest growing market for everything, from jerseys to games to you name it.

01:38:23.000 And with a lot of sports, that's the case, too.

01:38:26.000 And with Hollywood, and with the stock markets, and with Silicon Valley tech companies, and with American universities, all of the sectors of American society see the Chinese economic market as a huge lure, as well they should.

01:38:37.000 And they do edit films to appease the standards of the Chinese party.

01:38:42.000 Self-censorship is the cost of doing business.

01:38:45.000 Right, but there's certain things they do, like in Doctor Strange, the Tibetan master was replaced by an Anglo-Saxon woman.

01:38:54.000 Yeah, this is my Tibetan face mask, and now this episode will never be aired inside mainland China.

01:39:01.000 Did I just...

01:39:01.000 Just now?

01:39:02.000 Well, I think it's probably already not going to be aired because of all the shit you said. 1.00

01:39:05.000 Yeah, that too. 0.99

01:39:06.000 But now this will really seal it.

01:39:10.000 And good.

01:39:12.000 That's not to say we shouldn't engage the Chinese people.

01:39:14.000 We need exchanges.

01:39:15.000 We need to have business there.

01:39:16.000 And this is another sort of conundrum of the U.S.-China relationship that I try to take a stab at in my book, which is that...

01:39:24.000 We have to engage with the Chinese people.

01:39:26.000 We can't decouple our economies.

01:39:28.000 We can't live in two different worlds forever.

01:39:30.000 It's not going to work.

01:39:31.000 But we have to find a way to live with China, and we have to convince the Chinese government to find a way to live with us in a way that doesn't compromise our security and our prosperity and our... 0.75

01:39:41.000 Public health.

01:39:42.000 In other words, you know, while we want, we would love, it's not about regime change.

01:39:46.000 It's not about a Cold War.

01:39:48.000 These are sort of like bumper stickers that people throw out to dissuade people from having an honest conversation about how to deal with a Chinese Communist Party that is becoming increasingly problematic in ways that affect our lives. 0.91

01:39:58.000 And what I'm trying to say is that, you know, we have to be clear that, you know, this is not about China or the Chinese people.

01:40:06.000 This is about the party.

01:40:07.000 This is the way the party operates.

01:40:09.000 Do you think that that So there's that company that was airing the NBA games.

01:40:14.000 They're making a lot of money off of that.

01:40:16.000 They didn't want to stop airing the NBA games.

01:40:18.000 They had to do that because the party said so.

01:40:20.000 When Nike...

01:40:20.000 What did H&M do?

01:40:22.000 They put up a statement questioning whether or not the cotton they were getting from Xinjiang was made with forced slave labor.

01:40:29.000 Just like, hey, we're going to look into it.

01:40:31.000 For that one statement, their entire business in China was crushed.

01:40:36.000 Nike, same thing.

01:40:38.000 For years, they resisted.

01:40:39.000 These companies, again, they're in a tough position.

01:40:40.000 I get it.

01:40:42.000 Hey, the cotton that you're sending us, was that picked by forced labor slaves?

01:40:48.000 Are we allowed to ask?

01:40:49.000 Is it okay?

01:40:49.000 Just for that, Nike's business was destroyed inside China.

01:40:55.000 How so was it destroyed?

01:40:58.000 They literally create a...

01:40:59.000 Well, they do boycotts.

01:41:01.000 And again, it's not like here where you can boycott something, but you have to convince people.

01:41:04.000 There, it's like if the government says there's a boycott, there's a boycott.

01:41:08.000 And then your company can't sell anything in China, and that's 40% of your business. 1.00

01:41:13.000 You're fucked. 1.00

01:41:14.000 It's a pretty big incentive. 1.00

01:41:16.000 And none of these companies are powerful enough to stand up to the CCP on their own, which is why I think they have to work with the U.S. government in some sort of way, but that's not really going on because...

01:41:26.000 Politicians just want to dunk on the companies or they want to criticize them for not doing the right thing. 0.93

01:41:30.000 But there's no positive incentives to say to the NBA, hey, listen, why don't we get together on this thing and we'll use our diplomatic pressure and our diplomatic tools to make sure that American companies and industries don't get punished by the party for bullshit, like a tweet.

01:41:45.000 But we're not sophisticated enough in our discussion of China or in our government response to China to actually make that happen.

01:41:51.000 But I think that's basically where we have to go.

01:41:56.000 Inescapable question, which is, if Nike's using slave labor for their shoes, why are sneakers so expensive?

01:42:04.000 What's the overhead?

01:42:07.000 It's a very good question.

01:42:08.000 How are sneakers $150?

01:42:10.000 But anyway, that's neither here nor there.

01:42:12.000 What would they cost if you paid people well?

01:42:15.000 Exactly.

01:42:16.000 Yeah.

01:42:17.000 And what's happening?

01:42:18.000 Is it just greed?

01:42:20.000 Yeah.

01:42:20.000 Massive profit margins?

01:42:22.000 Yeah.

01:42:23.000 So anyway, this is a long way of saying that the parties – to understand China, you have to understand that the party is in control of everything and that dealing with that is just the way things are now.

01:42:35.000 And that doesn't mean that we have to have a Cold War or that we have to decouple from China. 0.93

01:42:39.000 It just means we have to figure out a new way to first try to convince them not to do the worst things and then second, to protect ourselves if they insist.

01:42:48.000 One of the things that's confusing to people is that this was never a narrative a decade or two decades ago.

01:42:54.000 This is a fairly recent discussion that we're having about China.

01:42:58.000 China was an innocuous, just an enormous country with a lot of people just two decades ago.

01:43:04.000 Nobody thought about this at all.

01:43:06.000 They didn't think about China as being this incredibly influential superpower that had particularly its tentacles in terms of business, like how much business they own.

01:43:18.000 During the pandemic, there's been a lot of purchasing different stocks and learning how much China has bought percentages of companies.

01:43:31.000 Right?

01:43:32.000 Absolutely.

01:43:32.000 That's another thing that's happened during the financial crisis.

01:43:36.000 Yeah.

01:43:36.000 Well, I mean, so I get this a lot because there's a group of China hands.

01:43:41.000 These are like the old guys who have been managing, I would say, mismanaging the relationship since 1972, since we had our opening, right?

01:43:48.000 And what they'll say is that, what are you talking about?

01:43:51.000 This is a new problem.

01:43:52.000 We've been dealing with this for 40 years.

01:43:54.000 And we had these extensive plans of how to deal with China, and some of them worked and some of them didn't. 0.97

01:43:58.000 And then China went a different way.

01:44:00.000 And I get that.

01:44:01.000 That's the discussion inside the China Hand community of these old gray-beards, kind of like ivory tower kind of guys, all of whom I know, right? 0.99

01:44:09.000 But I'm not that.

01:44:10.000 I'm not a China Hand.

01:44:11.000 I'm just a journalist, right?

01:44:12.000 Right.

01:44:13.000 But what I say to that is that, yeah, that's fine, but first of all, how's that going?

01:44:17.000 You know what I mean?

01:44:19.000 The China Hand's managing the relationship.

01:44:21.000 How's that looking right now?

01:44:22.000 And then secondly, what I say is, It's clear that this has to be a discussion that has to be had by all Americans because no longer does it affect just the China-watching community.

01:44:32.000 Now it affects all of us.

01:44:34.000 If you're sitting in your house, if you haven't seen your grandmother in a year, if you're worried about getting sick and dying, you know instinctively, and we can debate how much, but you know that some of that is because of the decisions and policies of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party.

01:44:47.000 In other words, what happens in Beijing doesn't stay in Beijing.

01:44:50.000 You know, now that they're intentionally interfering in our politics, our sports, our music, our Hollywood films, our stock markets, our Silicon Valley tech companies, and our academic campuses, We have to get more people into this conversation.

01:45:05.000 That's what I'm here to do today.

01:45:06.000 There will be millions of people who have never thought this much about China, and I'm trying to engage them honestly.

01:45:12.000 You know what I mean?

01:45:12.000 I'm trying to convince them not to think what I think, but to educate themselves and join in a constructive discussion about how we deal with this shared problem.

01:45:22.000 And that's a very difficult discussion to have, and it's almost impossible to have in Washington because Washington is so fucked up right now. 0.72

01:45:29.000 But I saw that discussion happening On campuses and inside Silicon Valley tech companies and inside Wall Street firms and inside the government. 0.96

01:45:37.000 And the problem was that all these discussions were siloed. 1.00

01:45:39.000 And then when the FBI comes a knocking at your university and says, hey, we've got to take a look at all your China research, universities are like, fuck you. 0.99

01:45:46.000 Because in America, our institutions guard their independence fiercely and rightly. 0.99

01:45:52.000 So they're not trying to get the FBI to help them.

01:45:55.000 But on the other hand, this is a problem they kind of need the FBI's help for.

01:45:59.000 Yeah.

01:46:13.000 When you're going over this kind of information, and you're writing a book like this, and you have all this data that you just spilled out, do you feel like a man without a country?

01:46:25.000 I don't mean a literal country, but I mean in terms of being connected to a group of people that see your point, because you're stepping out there sort of in violation of both ideologies.

01:46:38.000 Well, no, I mean, in a way, I think that I'm putting a voice to a lot of things that a lot of people have been talking about privately for a very long time.

01:46:47.000 And there's, you know, first of all, inside the government, you know, these are a lot of issues that people were wrestling with, and very honestly, in many cases, even well before Trump.

01:46:58.000 It just didn't get talked about publicly for a lot of the reasons we've already discussed.

01:47:03.000 Can I get a hit of that?

01:47:04.000 Yeah.

01:47:05.000 Give me that mug. 0.77

01:47:06.000 Oh, this mug has...

01:47:08.000 One of them's empty.

01:47:09.000 Look at that.

01:47:10.000 You got my brand, too.

01:47:11.000 Buffalo Tracer.

01:47:13.000 You ever drink the Eagle Rare?

01:47:15.000 I don't know.

01:47:16.000 It's like one of the sub-Buffalo Tracer brands?

01:47:18.000 All right, now we're talking.

01:47:19.000 Yeah, I feel like this conversation's getting so heavy.

01:47:25.000 We could use a little booze.

01:47:26.000 Oh, that's the stuff.

01:47:27.000 Yeah.

01:47:31.000 Can I answer your question?

01:47:33.000 Yes, please.

01:47:33.000 Nobody cares about me.

01:47:35.000 I'm just a guy doing his job, okay?

01:47:38.000 I get attacked sometimes.

01:47:40.000 It doesn't matter. 0.98

01:47:41.000 Nobody gives a shit about whether or not I'm in a team or not. 0.97

01:47:45.000 I'm just trying to do my best to report the story, to do the reporting. 0.98

01:47:50.000 And I'm not the only one.

01:47:51.000 There are more and more people.

01:47:52.000 So yes, for a while, people like me who are doing this reporting, again, difficult things to talk about.

01:47:57.000 Chinese influence in our schools.

01:47:58.000 That's a complicated thing.

01:48:00.000 It pits two American interests against each other.

01:48:02.000 We want academic freedom, but we also want, you know...

01:48:05.000 Funding for research.

01:48:06.000 Yeah, and I get that.

01:48:08.000 It's a very tough thing.

01:48:09.000 There are more and more people every day.

01:48:10.000 What is the influence in the schools?

01:48:14.000 Three types.

01:48:18.000 Okay, so one is just money, so much money.

01:48:22.000 I'm talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of donations. 0.99

01:48:25.000 And if you think that money isn't corrupting, then you're a fool, okay? 0.97

01:48:29.000 And when you have a school take $200 million to build their law school, and it's all from a Chinese Communist Party-linked billionaire... 0.95

01:48:40.000 That school is not putting out research criticizing the Chinese government ever.

01:48:45.000 They've just bought that school.

01:48:46.000 And the way that they do it is through a network called the United Front.

01:48:50.000 And the United Front dates back to Maoist times.

01:48:53.000 It's still referred to as striking the party's enemies by using the party's friends.

01:48:58.000 And the United Front system in China is part of the party.

01:49:01.000 It's baked into its DNA. And what they do is they lord over the party's interactions with anyone who's not in the party.

01:49:07.000 Some are in China, some are overseas Chinese, and some of them are foreigners like us.

01:49:12.000 And the way that they do that is through proxies.

01:49:14.000 And what they do is they set up hundreds all over the world of these proxy figures and organizations which launder the money, billions and billions of dollars, into our institutions, hand over fist all day long for years and years and years and years.

01:49:30.000 And no one ever...

01:49:32.000 Kept track of it.

01:49:33.000 Now people keep track of it a little bit, but not really.

01:49:38.000 The Trump administration tried to force these universities to report on their foreign funding because they're supposed to, by law, report when you get a certain amount of money.

01:49:45.000 None of them were doing it. 0.97

01:49:46.000 They found all sorts of bullshit and all sorts of corruptions. 0.96

01:49:50.000 So that's the number one way they do it is they take billions of dollars, they give them to their proxies, which are like Hong Kong billionaires or, you know, Malaysian billionaires or whatever. 0.99

01:49:58.000 Somehow they find it.

01:49:59.000 It's Thai billionaires, somebody who has an interest in doing business with the party and has billions of dollars.

01:50:04.000 And somehow they find their way onto American campuses in all sorts of crazy ways.

01:50:09.000 OK, there's a really good story about this in the book about UT Austin.

01:50:14.000 Because we're in Austin.

01:50:15.000 I'm not even going to tell you because I want people to buy the book.

01:50:17.000 But there's a UT Austin story in there.

01:50:19.000 It'll blow your mind about how they tried to use Chinese Communist Party money to fund the China Center at UT Austin.

01:50:26.000 And some of the professors were like, wait a second.

01:50:29.000 Because these were China professors and they're like, wait a second, is this a good idea?

01:50:33.000 And it became a huge scandal inside the school and the Washington congressional offices got involved.

01:50:38.000 I got involved.

01:50:39.000 I wrote a column about it and they rejected the money.

01:50:41.000 And that was like the first time they had ever done that.

01:50:43.000 And this this Chinese influence operation that was targeted at UT Austin at the LBJ school was thwarted.

01:50:50.000 But that would never have happened a couple of years ago because people weren't even discussing it this way.

01:50:54.000 That's a real example.

01:50:56.000 So that's one.

01:50:56.000 The other one is through Confucius Institutes.

01:50:59.000 Do you know what these are?

01:51:00.000 So there are language and cultural learning centers implanted inside universities all over the world, hundreds of them.

01:51:10.000 And, you know, I joined the Confucius Institute at GW just to see.

01:51:15.000 I wanted to see if there was, like, any corruption there.

01:51:18.000 And I'm an alumnus, so I just, like, I signed up.

01:51:21.000 You could just sign up.

01:51:22.000 I audited Chinese 101. I'm like, let's see what's going on as part of the reporting for the book.

01:51:29.000 And I took Chinese 101, and guess what?

01:51:33.000 There was no malign Chinese influence in the Chinese 101 class.

01:51:37.000 We were just a bunch of People learning Chinese.

01:51:39.000 A bunch of college kids.

01:51:41.000 I went to the reception at the bar that I used to hang out at when I was in college.

01:51:46.000 I'm 20 years later.

01:51:46.000 I'm the 40-year-old guy at the bar.

01:51:48.000 And they come up to me and they're like, Mr. Rogan, why do you want to study at the Confucius Institute?

01:51:54.000 And I just looked at them.

01:51:55.000 I said, education is a lifelong endeavor.

01:51:58.000 That was it.

01:51:59.000 Because I didn't want them to know that I'm trying to squeeze out the foreign influence in the Confucius Institute.

01:52:04.000 Anyway, that one was fine.

01:52:06.000 Other universities, it's a different story.

01:52:08.000 They use the Confucius Institutes to plant spies.

01:52:11.000 You don't have to plant them in the GW one because Washington is full of spies.

01:52:15.000 It's true.

01:52:16.000 You put them anywhere.

01:52:17.000 You can't swing a dead cat without hitting a couple spies in Washington.

01:52:20.000 They're everywhere.

01:52:21.000 Everywhere.

01:52:21.000 So do you just assume when you're talking to people that they could possibly be spies?

01:52:25.000 Well, I mean, they're not...

01:52:26.000 Some of them are really easy to spot.

01:52:28.000 You know what I mean?

01:52:29.000 Like, the Russian guy with, like, the belt up to here and, like, the white patent leather loafers who's like, oh, Mr. Rogan, you're here at this bar, too?

01:52:40.000 Oh, let's all have a drink.

01:52:41.000 You're like, okay.

01:52:42.000 I know you, man.

01:52:43.000 I know you, man.

01:52:44.000 Do you drink with him anyway? 1.00

01:52:45.000 Fuck yes. 1.00

01:52:47.000 Absolutely. 1.00

01:52:49.000 I had a lot of good times hanging out with spies.

01:52:52.000 Yeah.

01:52:53.000 There's this one Russian guy, oh my god. 1.00

01:52:56.000 Like we were talking about Pegasus before the podcast outside. 0.99

01:53:00.000 My phone is fucked, by the way. 0.98

01:53:02.000 The Chinese already heard this podcast before. 0.99

01:53:04.000 It's true.

01:53:06.000 There's a whole story there, too.

01:53:08.000 Why don't you get a new one?

01:53:09.000 I did.

01:53:09.000 It's at the hotel.

01:53:10.000 I just haven't loaded all the apps on it yet.

01:53:12.000 Oh, okay.

01:53:12.000 But, yeah, no, I was calling my wife.

01:53:14.000 You shouldn't load any apps on it.

01:53:16.000 That's what I'm going to do.

01:53:17.000 Now I know.

01:53:18.000 I was calling my wife, and then a guy from the Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency picked up the phone instead of my wife.

01:53:25.000 Whoa.

01:53:26.000 And he didn't know why.

01:53:27.000 He was getting my call, and I didn't know why I was calling him.

01:53:30.000 And it happened like three different times.

01:53:32.000 Whoa.

01:53:33.000 And then I tweeted about it, and everyone was like, oh, that's super weird.

01:53:35.000 But I never really figured it out.

01:53:36.000 Why'd you tweet about it?

01:53:38.000 Seems like I would want to investigate privately before I put that out to the GP. I was trying to get the Homeland Security Department to check it out.

01:53:46.000 Right.

01:53:47.000 So I was like, if I tweet about it, they'll have to...

01:53:49.000 I thought it was the US government spying on me.

01:53:51.000 I don't think that anymore.

01:53:51.000 I don't think that's what happened because they checked it out.

01:53:53.000 They found out that I was actually talking to a cyber infrastructure security agency person.

01:53:58.000 I actually did...

01:53:59.000 They found that guy.

01:54:00.000 His name's Sidney.

01:54:02.000 But he didn't know why he was getting...

01:54:03.000 And they don't really do that at that agency anyway, so it didn't really make any sense.

01:54:07.000 So what do you think was going on? 0.95

01:54:09.000 Someone's fucking with my phone. 0.99

01:54:11.000 I don't know. 0.99

01:54:11.000 Somebody is... 0.99

01:54:12.000 I don't know who. 0.99

01:54:14.000 Well, after this conversation, I can imagine why people are fucking with your phone. 0.99

01:54:17.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:54:18.000 No, I mean, again, it comes with the territory.

01:54:19.000 But there was this one Russian guy I used to hang out with all the time.

01:54:22.000 And we were like, before I was married, we used to smoke Russian cigarettes and just like eat steaks and drink all the time.

01:54:29.000 And, you know, I don't have any secret.

01:54:32.000 I don't have any clearance.

01:54:33.000 I can hang out with whoever I want to hang out with.

01:54:35.000 You know, that's the fun of being a journalist.

01:54:37.000 One time the FBI came knocking on the door.

01:54:39.000 They were like, Mr. Rogan, have you seen this man?

01:54:42.000 And he's like my buddy, Andre.

01:54:44.000 I was like...

01:54:44.000 Andre!

01:54:45.000 I was like...

01:54:47.000 No comment.

01:54:48.000 And they're like, well, you know, we just want to let you know that we think he's a Russian spy.

01:54:54.000 I'm like, noted.

01:54:55.000 Goodbye.

01:54:56.000 And I just hightailed it out of there.

01:54:58.000 So, yeah, that's...

01:55:00.000 What's the difference between Russian cigarettes?

01:55:04.000 They're like, take off the filter.

01:55:07.000 Camels.

01:55:07.000 I don't know what they were, but they were pretty strong.

01:55:10.000 Camels don't have filters, right? 0.94

01:55:11.000 No, they do.

01:55:12.000 They do?

01:55:12.000 Some of them do?

01:55:13.000 Is that what it is?

01:55:14.000 Yeah, it's rough.

01:55:15.000 Some camels have...

01:55:16.000 It was like a test.

01:55:17.000 He would give me the Russian cigarettes to see if I could smoke them.

01:55:19.000 Oh, thank you.

01:55:19.000 But I quit smoking many years ago, thanks again to my...

01:55:22.000 Did you?

01:55:23.000 You smoke cigars?

01:55:24.000 I'll have occasional cigars.

01:55:25.000 You want one right now?

01:55:26.000 You want to smoke a cigar in the middle of the show?

01:55:28.000 Why not?

01:55:29.000 Yes, please.

01:55:30.000 We're already drinking.

01:55:31.000 Okay.

01:55:31.000 I feel like this is getting juicier.

01:55:33.000 Oh, I got more shit. 1.00

01:55:34.000 I know you do. 1.00

01:55:36.000 What do we got here?

01:55:40.000 These are from Foundation Cigar Company.

01:55:44.000 Okay. 0.98

01:55:45.000 They put these fucking weird wrappers on them, but you get underneath that, you get the real thing. 0.98

01:55:49.000 Nice. 0.99

01:55:51.000 Shout out to them.

01:55:53.000 Do I get any free Buffalo Tracer? 0.99

01:55:56.000 Yeah, give it whatever the fuck you want, bro. 0.99

01:55:57.000 I'll give you a bottle. 1.00

01:55:58.000 You want a bottle of Buffalo Tracer?

01:55:59.000 No, no, no.

01:56:02.000 This experience is rewarding enough.

01:56:06.000 But no, we have like a case of it.

01:56:08.000 They sent us a shitload of pop the top.

01:56:10.000 Awesome.

01:56:11.000 Yeah, just hear it like this.

01:56:13.000 Got it.

01:56:13.000 There you go.

01:56:15.000 There you go.

01:56:17.000 Yeah.

01:56:18.000 Buffalo Trace is one of our sponsors, so they sent us a bunch of it.

01:56:21.000 I just love the fact they're actually older than America.

01:56:24.000 I love Buffalo Trace.

01:56:25.000 Yeah, they're great.

01:56:25.000 It's a fantastic whiskey.

01:56:27.000 But it's also, I just love the fact that they're from 1773. They've been continuously distilling whiskey in this country.

01:56:38.000 Mm-hmm.

01:56:40.000 Now we're partying.

01:56:43.000 Oh, that's tasty.

01:56:44.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:56:45.000 Good shit, right? 0.99

01:56:50.000 Thank you. 0.99

01:56:53.000 My pleasure.

01:56:54.000 Thank you.

01:56:54.000 They sent me a box recently that actually has my face on the wrapper.

01:56:58.000 Sweet.

01:56:59.000 They made a little, not on the wrapper, on the little, what is that thing called?

01:57:03.000 The band.

01:57:04.000 I have no idea.

01:57:04.000 The band.

01:57:06.000 Awesome.

01:57:07.000 Yes.

01:57:08.000 Shout out to them.

01:57:11.000 They hooked us up.

01:57:13.000 So...

01:57:14.000 Where were we?

01:57:15.000 Spies, Russian spies, white loafers. 0.76

01:57:18.000 Oh, yeah.

01:57:19.000 That's not what we're talking about.

01:57:20.000 The government calls you up.

01:57:21.000 Oh, yeah.

01:57:22.000 Academia.

01:57:22.000 Yes.

01:57:23.000 You want to go back to that or you want to go for Russian spies?

01:57:25.000 Whatever you want to talk about, man.

01:57:26.000 No, it's your show, man.

01:57:28.000 No, but you're a guest.

01:57:29.000 I want you to be you.

01:57:32.000 So, just express yourself.

01:57:33.000 I don't know any other way to do it.

01:57:34.000 I know you don't.

01:57:35.000 That's what I like.

01:57:35.000 I like it.

01:57:37.000 I'm enjoying this very much.

01:57:38.000 I have no choice.

01:57:39.000 I think this is the first of many conversations that they don't kill you.

01:57:42.000 I hope so.

01:57:44.000 Yeah, you might want to, you know, delete your Google search history after this, just in case. 0.99

01:57:49.000 My search is already fucked. 0.96

01:57:51.000 And believe me, what are they going to find about me? 0.99

01:57:54.000 That's true.

01:57:54.000 Kind of an open book.

01:57:55.000 So American universities, right?

01:57:58.000 So here's a great example of a really tough problem in US-China relations, which is that we want Chinese students to come to America, right? 1.00

01:58:07.000 Not just for the schools who make a bunch of money off of it, but because that's a key way of having our societies not fall into these silos where we can't deal with each other, which is terrible, right?

01:58:17.000 At the same time, there's a threat there.

01:58:20.000 Because once they build these Confucius Institutes...

01:58:23.000 Oh, by the way, there's a lot of corruption in the Confucius Institutes.

01:58:25.000 Then they tell you that you can't have the Dalai Lama come to your campus because they could offend 1.4 billion Chinese people.

01:58:31.000 That's a real example.

01:58:33.000 And then they have these student associations, which are linked up with the consulates.

01:58:36.000 And what they do is they monitor the Chinese students.

01:58:39.000 So if you're a Chinese student in America, you still don't have free speech because everyone's watching everybody.

01:58:43.000 And if you say the wrong thing, boom, you're on the next plane back to... 1.00

01:58:47.000 China and your whole family is fucked. 1.00

01:58:49.000 Okay? 1.00

01:58:50.000 So then we're like, oh, well, when Chinese students come to America, should we protect them? 0.83

01:58:56.000 Should they be able to say what they want? 0.99

01:58:58.000 Or is that none of our fucking business? 0.99

01:59:00.000 On the other hand, I think we're good to go. 1.00

01:59:19.000 I think?

01:59:40.000 I think?

02:00:01.000 Just any despot and dictator in the world who will purchase it, you know?

02:00:06.000 And that's the grand struggle.

02:00:09.000 It's not really about the US versus China, it's about Free and open societies responding to China's rise where it affects us.

02:00:17.000 And because Trump was Trump, this got framed as a US-China Cold War.

02:00:21.000 But the honest way to talk about it is an international response to China's actions as it rises.

02:00:26.000 And that response requires dealing with all these other countries which have different interests.

02:00:30.000 But there are cases where the interests overlap and there are cases where our values overlap.

02:00:35.000 And we have to take advantage of those overlaps in order to join together to, again, Combat the biggest country in the world that's run by a mafia organization.

02:00:43.000 And these are very, very complicated things to think about.

02:00:47.000 And that's where that discussion, again, is not really happening.

02:00:51.000 Despite all you get is like, you know, China bad and then, oh, don't say bad about China.

02:00:57.000 You're a cold warrior.

02:00:58.000 And that's like the level of the...

02:01:05.000 Is it possible that the recognition of this issue, and especially when it relates to American institutes of higher learning, could allow them to understand the whole in the logic of having these sort of closed ecosystems where they have this,

02:01:23.000 there's echo chambers in American institutions of higher learning now.

02:01:29.000 So many universities are—they're not liberal in the sense of what we originally thought of as—they're leftist.

02:01:37.000 And because of that, they won't even entertain opposing viewpoints or have debate.

02:01:44.000 Which is very dangerous.

02:01:45.000 Sure.

02:01:46.000 It's also...

02:01:47.000 This is not to say that you should support those other ideas, but you've got to entertain them and debate them and squash them with better logic.

02:01:56.000 Right.

02:01:57.000 And if you don't do that...

02:01:58.000 If you don't have the space to do that.

02:01:59.000 Right.

02:01:59.000 The simple, lazy way to handle it is to stop it, and to pull fire alarms, and to yell at people, and to not have people that have opposing viewpoints, and don't allow conservatives on your campus.

02:02:11.000 But I think it's really dangerous, and I think it opens us up to more manipulation.

02:02:17.000 Not just China, but whatever foreign entities are, and we know they are.

02:02:21.000 We know Russia's doing that with the Internet Research Agency.

02:02:25.000 They're manipulating our biases.

02:02:27.000 And they're aware of them, and so they're using our own struggle that we're having internally with free speech and with open discussion and honest debate.

02:02:37.000 And they're reinforcing the idea that it's a good thing to stop this stuff and to squash it.

02:02:44.000 And we're proving them right by acceding to their...

02:02:46.000 Yes, exactly.

02:02:47.000 I'm hoping that the silver lining is we recognize that one of the reasons why the First Amendment is so important, it's we need to figure out who's right.

02:02:57.000 And the only way to figure out who's right is to listen to who's wrong and to have the person who's right debate the person who's wrong, and let's find out where the facts are, and let's also agree to disagree occasionally.

02:03:09.000 Isn't that okay?

02:03:10.000 Constructive disagreement.

02:03:12.000 It's not anymore. 0.99

02:03:13.000 In this country now, if you are in any way conservative, you're a Nazi and you're a racist and you're a terrible person and you're against history. 0.96

02:03:23.000 That's not the case.

02:03:24.000 There's a lot of people that are fiscally conservative but socially liberal.

02:03:28.000 Yeah, like me.

02:03:30.000 I think I am as well.

02:03:32.000 Certainly, there's a lot of me that leans towards, like, I understand human nature, right?

02:03:38.000 And this is one of the reasons why I'm a big proponent of the Second Amendment.

02:03:41.000 I don't understand why people don't understand that there's times where you can defend yourself with a firearm.

02:03:48.000 How is that not, how is that, when you see people saying that, oh, if you are in favor of the Second Amendment, you're in favor of mass shootings, you're in favor of No, that's not what I'm saying.

02:04:02.000 What I'm saying is the reality of human beings.

02:04:05.000 These ideologies, the problem with them, specifically in this country, is that you get lumped off into camps.

02:04:14.000 And if you don't agree with one side...

02:04:16.000 It's teams.

02:04:17.000 Yes.

02:04:18.000 Factions.

02:04:18.000 Chris Rock had a great bit about it years ago about gangs.

02:04:21.000 That you're in a gang.

02:04:22.000 You're in a liberal gang.

02:04:24.000 You're in a conservative gang.

02:04:25.000 And he's right.

02:04:26.000 He did a great job of putting it into comedy.

02:04:29.000 And Chris does an awesome job of doing that with a lot of subjects.

02:04:32.000 But with that in particular, it really resonates today.

02:04:37.000 Because people don't have the time to research like you've done with China.

02:04:42.000 Or like many people have done with many subjects.

02:04:44.000 And really find all the nuances and find all the things that are uncomfortable to discuss, like you're discussing with all the things about COVID-19, like the things you're discussing about the CCP and their influence and all these different businesses and entertainment.

02:05:00.000 There's a lot of people that don't have the time to do that.

02:05:02.000 So when you start criticizing, you know, in any way, China, they equate you to racist.

02:05:08.000 And don't you understand about the anti-Asian American hate that's elevated in this country right now?

02:05:14.000 It's a tragedy.

02:05:15.000 It is a tragedy, but it's a tragedy that's held up by our education institutes.

02:05:21.000 And that's the biggest tragedy.

02:05:23.000 They're supposed to be the people that rise above this.

02:05:27.000 But inside their own institutions, there's these echo chambers.

02:05:31.000 And these echo chambers, they want to reinforce what they've already been pushing for all this time, and they don't want to open the idea.

02:05:40.000 There's a reason, right?

02:05:41.000 Yes.

02:05:41.000 So first of all, I agree with everything that you said.

02:05:44.000 We're...

02:05:45.000 To the word.

02:05:45.000 But the way that hits me when I filter that through my own intellectual prism is that the incentives are driving people into those things.

02:05:54.000 In other words, why are journalists on Team Trump or Team Trump?

02:06:01.000 It's because that's the incentive that results in their success in their careers.

02:06:07.000 That's the human nature.

02:06:08.000 The corporations have the incentive.

02:06:10.000 What's their incentive?

02:06:11.000 To make money for their stockholders, not to defend human rights for the Uyghurs, right? 0.90

02:06:15.000 The colleges, their incentives are not to get sued, so they have to create all these crazy safe spaces and the such, right?

02:06:20.000 So if we build our incentive system to drive people into the teams and then we're like, why is everybody on teams?

02:06:26.000 And then isn't that fucking up our own discourse?

02:06:29.000 Well, it leads me to the conclusion that, okay, well, maybe we have to change the incentives.

02:06:34.000 And when you talk about conservatives and liberals, again, I think the only reason that people even listen to me on this topic, if they do, I hope they do, is because I'm criticizing Trump and I'm praising Trump.

02:06:46.000 That messes with their minds, right?

02:06:47.000 I'm criticizing the CCP, but I'm not a conservative.

02:06:50.000 I'm You know, a center-left Democrat.

02:06:54.000 You know, I always have been.

02:06:55.000 I never, you know, preach about it because it's not relevant really to the U.S.-China relationship in any serious way.

02:07:00.000 But, you know, I've been doing this for 17 years. 0.99

02:07:03.000 I never, you know, joined the conservative media because I never joined the liberal media because I didn't believe in either of that shit. 1.00

02:07:08.000 I think my basic premise is both sides are fucked. 1.00

02:07:11.000 Both sides are corrupt in their own ways. 1.00

02:07:13.000 And by the way, as a journalist, if you're Criticizing both sides, you get double the stories.

02:07:18.000 If you can pull that off, if you can source on both sides and criticize both sides, you get double the scoops and double the credibility.

02:07:25.000 Again, I'm not perfect.

02:07:26.000 I haven't always done that perfectly.

02:07:28.000 I'm sure I have my own source bias.

02:07:29.000 I've made mistakes.

02:07:31.000 But that's how I think about it.

02:07:32.000 So you have to think for yourself, first of all.

02:07:35.000 And the only way you can really do that is if you're not bound by your incentives and your paymasters.

02:07:41.000 If you work for an organization, like, remember all those conservative newspapers that are like, organizations like, oh, Trump's terrible, Trump's terrible.

02:07:48.000 And then they switch, like, Trump's great.

02:07:49.000 As soon as you won. 1.00

02:07:51.000 Fucking hypocrite. 1.00

02:07:52.000 How could you do that? 1.00

02:07:52.000 How do you look at that and then look at that and not realize that you just exposed yourself as a hypocrite? 1.00

02:07:57.000 Also, there's a weird badge of honor that you're a never-Trumper. 0.99

02:08:01.000 That you're a never-Trumper Republican.

02:08:03.000 Right.

02:08:03.000 What does that even mean?

02:08:04.000 If you read the book, there's a ton of stuff that the Trump administration did right on China.

02:08:10.000 Not Trump, really, to be honest, because he was kind of a...

02:08:13.000 What's the correct word? 0.99

02:08:18.000 Moron, I guess is the word I'm certain. 0.96

02:08:19.000 In other words, that he... 1.00

02:08:21.000 Not to be too unfair to him, a fool? 0.98

02:08:25.000 There's a story in there about how the coronavirus is, the news is coming out, and people like Pottinger, the guy I told you about, and other people are like, hey Trump, listen, this is bad. 0.98

02:08:35.000 We've got to get on top of this.

02:08:37.000 And Trump's like, well, okay, let me talk to Mick Mulvaney.

02:08:40.000 Mick Mulvaney's like, no, it's going to be fine.

02:08:41.000 Don't worry about it.

02:08:42.000 He's like, okay, I've got two competing sets of advice.

02:08:45.000 And he talks to his good friend Xi Jinping.

02:08:47.000 And Xi Jinping, what does he tell him?

02:08:49.000 February 6th, March 26th, two calls, exclusively reported in Chaos Under Heaven, where he says, hey, listen, Trump, it's going to be fine.

02:08:58.000 It goes away during warm weather.

02:09:01.000 Herbal medicine will treat it.

02:09:02.000 We've got it under control.

02:09:03.000 All lies coming from the Chinese president to the American president directly.

02:09:08.000 And two days later, Trump is saying...

02:09:10.000 Oh yeah, don't worry, it's going to be fine.

02:09:12.000 Many people are saying it's going to go away in warm weather.

02:09:14.000 He didn't say that many people were saying it was his good friend Xi Jinping, right?

02:09:18.000 He believed Xi Jinping.

02:09:19.000 That had a horrible effect on our policy and on the health and safety of millions of Americans.

02:09:25.000 But that's what happened.

02:09:26.000 That's not a good story for Trump.

02:09:28.000 At the same time, I'm prepared to argue that there are lots of things that the Trump administration did to reset our conversation on China that the Biden administration is continuing for a very good reason because they make perfect sense.

02:09:38.000 Right.

02:09:39.000 So what we're missing from our conversation is nuance.

02:09:41.000 And yes, constructive disagreement is a huge part of that.

02:09:44.000 But I don't know.

02:09:45.000 I don't know enough about American universities on how to solve that.

02:09:47.000 But I do see something inspiring, actually, which is that when I started speaking to a lot of these college students about these issues, And you know what I found, which surprised me actually, is that they get this, okay?

02:10:00.000 And, you know, I'm 42 years old.

02:10:04.000 I don't have my finger on the pulse of what's going on inside the Generation Z community, admittedly.

02:10:10.000 But I've talked to enough of these students who say, no, no, no, we understand that genocide against Uyghur Muslims is bad and we can't stand for it.

02:10:19.000 That's probably the biggest...

02:10:21.000 That's the biggest...

02:10:23.000 That's an issue...

02:10:25.000 Yes, as it ought to be.

02:10:26.000 But that's the issue that really gets people concerned with what is actually happening over there.

02:10:31.000 Good.

02:10:32.000 Because there's a lot of people that weren't aware of that.

02:10:35.000 Right.

02:10:35.000 And then they see some of the stories that are coming out about these people being shipped off into camps.

02:10:41.000 They don't know where they're going.

02:10:42.000 And they're like, wait a minute, what is happening here?

02:10:44.000 Are we on the wrong side of history with this?

02:10:46.000 In our urge to not appear racist and to not criticize China because of that, we might be allowing this to happen by being silent.

02:10:57.000 Well, the whole world is allowing it to happen, has been allowing it to happen, and it's still happening to this day.

02:11:02.000 What is their motivation for doing this to these people?

02:11:06.000 To destroy the Uyghur national, cultural, religious identity. 1.00

02:11:12.000 And these are Muslims that are in China?

02:11:15.000 They're some of the Muslims.

02:11:17.000 Now keep in mind- Uyghur Muslims is what they're targeting specifically though, no?

02:11:20.000 So in this region of China, which is a very resource-rich region that has been ruled by different elements of Chinese leadership over the course of hundreds of years, there resides a rich tapestry of ethnic minorities.

02:11:33.000 Now, the Uyghur Muslims in Xinjiang are the largest of, let's say, 12 million out of 20 million people in this particular province, right?

02:11:43.000 And, you know, what started many years ago was slow but steady encroaching upon their rights and their freedoms, okay?

02:11:53.000 And then this took its form in a number of different ways.

02:11:56.000 But what really made it sinister was not the camps, actually.

02:12:00.000 It was the mass surveillance, monitoring, and persecution that happens before you get to the camp, before you even...

02:12:08.000 Yeah.

02:12:11.000 Yeah.

02:12:13.000 Yeah.

02:12:17.000 Yeah.

02:12:28.000 Cameras that sit atop the streets that can spot a Uyghur by their facial recognition so that the police can come down and tell you what's what. 1.00

02:12:37.000 And these people were living in an open-air prison before there were ever concentration camps.

02:12:41.000 Now, then the destruction of hundreds of mosques, then all of a sudden...

02:12:46.000 All of the journalists and leaders and thinkers and musicians and artists and political leaders disappeared, right?

02:12:53.000 That was before the camps. 0.98

02:12:55.000 And there were a lot of people like, wait a minute, this is pretty fucked up. 0.97

02:12:58.000 They don't know what happened to those people. 0.99

02:13:00.000 They don't know if they were imprisoned or murdered.

02:13:02.000 They have no idea, right?

02:13:03.000 Some of them were confirmed to be murdered.

02:13:05.000 Some of them are still in prison.

02:13:07.000 Most of them, you have no idea where they are.

02:13:10.000 I've got to relight this.

02:13:12.000 Anyway, so then the camps.

02:13:13.000 Then they came up with these camps, which are like, I mean, listen, I get that there's like, there were a couple terrorist incidents, but imagine if, you know, we had a couple terrorist incidents here.

02:13:23.000 And I'm not saying we treated Muslims well after 9-11.

02:13:25.000 We did not.

02:13:26.000 I have many Muslim American friends who were treated horribly and continue to be, actually. 0.90

02:13:30.000 And that's a stain on our country and our society.

02:13:33.000 But we didn't build indoctrination camps and put two million Muslims in them.

02:13:37.000 You know, yes, did we do that with the Japanese? 1.00

02:13:40.000 Sure, yeah, but let's just deal with this for one second.

02:13:44.000 And, you know, now there's a ton of just like really horrendous, pernicious genocide denialism.

02:13:50.000 And that's what the Chinese are pumping out right now. 1.00

02:13:52.000 The Chinese Communist Party, rather.

02:13:54.000 No, these are wonderful centers.

02:13:56.000 Look at this video of these people singing a wonderful song.

02:13:59.000 They're very happy here.

02:14:00.000 Everybody loves it. 1.00

02:14:02.000 And it's all bullshit. 0.99

02:14:03.000 And, you know, what I did, of course, right in the book is what I interviewed a bunch of survivors. 0.99

02:14:08.000 Okay?

02:14:08.000 Because whatever statistic you have, and the legal definition of genocide is a determined thing.

02:14:15.000 And it says that, you know, the intent to destroy a group of people in whole or in part, okay...

02:14:22.000 And now there's two key things in there.

02:14:24.000 One is the destroying in part, and the other is the intent.

02:14:28.000 So what a lot of people will say is, well, we don't know their intent. 1.00

02:14:31.000 Maybe they're just fucking with the Uyghurs because they fuck with everybody. 1.00

02:14:34.000 Or maybe that's just like, now concentration camps are the way that Chinese do business, and that's horrible, but it's not genocide. 0.99

02:14:40.000 But setting the legal definition aside, what I decided to do is interview a bunch of the survivors.

02:14:46.000 And their stories are true.

02:14:47.000 They're not lying.

02:14:48.000 And their scars are real.

02:14:49.000 They didn't invent their scars that they showed me.

02:14:52.000 And their stories are harrowing.

02:14:54.000 And just for a couple examples, just to paint the picture, We have this thing called Radio Free Asia, where you have people broadcasting news in other languages.

02:15:05.000 It's paid for by the U.S. government.

02:15:06.000 It's a little bit controversial, but basically a lot of journalists trying to do their best to report news.

02:15:17.000 We're good to go.

02:15:33.000 In Washington doing reporting on this, they were some of the first to break the news of the camps.

02:15:37.000 Some of it we saw from satellites.

02:15:39.000 All of a sudden there's a grass field, then there's a huge camp, right?

02:15:42.000 Looks like a prison, acts like prison, walks like a prison.

02:15:44.000 It's a prison.

02:15:45.000 And these journalists, 26 of them, every single one of them, all their family members were scooped up and put into the camps.

02:15:51.000 All of them.

02:15:52.000 Americans.

02:15:53.000 Their fathers, their mothers, their aunts and uncles disappeared.

02:15:56.000 They never heard from them again for the crime of reporting on the camps, okay?

02:16:00.000 So that's one thing.

02:16:01.000 They target anyone who refuses to shut up about it.

02:16:04.000 Then I met this young woman named Vera Zhou.

02:16:08.000 And Vera Zhou was a 20-year-old—she's not even Uyghur, actually.

02:16:10.000 She's Hui Muslim. 0.99

02:16:12.000 And she was a student in Seattle at University of Washington.

02:16:15.000 And she goes home to visit her dad in Xinjiang, and she logs onto her VPN to file her homework for college.

02:16:20.000 They have a University of Washington virtual private network.

02:16:24.000 Three hours later— We're going to need you to come downtown.

02:16:29.000 What?

02:16:30.000 What happened?

02:16:30.000 Just come with us.

02:16:32.000 Three hours later, she was in handcuffs.

02:16:34.000 Eight hours after that, she was in a camp.

02:16:37.000 Okay?

02:16:38.000 So, an American resident, Chinese national, 20-year-old young woman, sophomore in college, never heard a fly, not a terrorist, not even a dissident, just trying to go to college, trying to do her homework.

02:16:52.000 She spent five months in the camp.

02:16:54.000 The story is awful.

02:16:56.000 But then that was only the beginning of her nightmare because then she got let out of the camp for an interesting reason and she couldn't leave China.

02:17:04.000 So she was stuck.

02:17:04.000 They wouldn't give her a passport back.

02:17:05.000 Spent another two years in China waiting for them to get her passport back.

02:17:09.000 They finally gave it to her.

02:17:10.000 She came back to Seattle. 1.00

02:17:12.000 Her credit was fucked. 1.00

02:17:13.000 She lost her apartment. 1.00

02:17:14.000 She'd be de-enrolled from her school because she didn't pay her bills or attend the classes while she was in the camp.

02:17:20.000 And the University of Washington didn't lift a finger to help her. 0.88

02:17:23.000 And her whole life was fucked up for the simple crime of pressing click on the VPN once. 0.98

02:17:29.000 That's a capricious form of abuse. 0.99

02:17:33.000 And that's not even getting into the next stage.

02:17:39.000 So then you've got the open-air prison that is Xinjiang.

02:17:42.000 Then you've got the camps.

02:17:45.000 Oh, but wait, you get out of the camp.

02:17:46.000 Your nightmare is just beginning because now you've got to go to the factory.

02:17:49.000 What factory? 1.00

02:17:50.000 Shut up. 1.00

02:17:50.000 Just get in the car. 1.00

02:17:51.000 We'll take you to the factory.

02:17:52.000 Now you're picking cotton or sewing together Nikes.

02:17:55.000 You can leave the factory, but you can't go home.

02:17:59.000 Oh, we're going to pay you, so you're not a slave, but you don't have a choice. 1.00

02:18:02.000 You better show up at that fucking factory. 1.00

02:18:05.000 And that's your life now. 1.00

02:18:06.000 What about my kids?

02:18:07.000 Well, what do you mean, what about your kids?

02:18:08.000 Well, when I went into the camp, I had a newborn baby.

02:18:10.000 Well, we had no choice.

02:18:12.000 We had to send that kid to an orphanage somewhere, and you'll never see him again.

02:18:16.000 Maybe you will, maybe you won't.

02:18:17.000 Some of the people got their kids back, some didn't.

02:18:19.000 And then there was another woman who I interviewed who said when she was finally let out of the camp, they were like, oh, we have to give you a medical check.

02:18:30.000 And they put her under, and then when she woke up, they were like, okay, you can go now.

02:18:34.000 They had given her a hysterectomy. 0.99

02:18:38.000 Holy shit. 0.99

02:18:39.000 This is mass forced sterilization and mass forced abortion, all these things. 0.99

02:18:44.000 Okay, now people will quibble about the data.

02:18:46.000 I'm saying I've talked to humans who this happened to.

02:18:49.000 They're not lying.

02:18:50.000 I looked into their eyes.

02:18:51.000 They're not lying.

02:18:51.000 And there are many, many stories.

02:18:53.000 And that's the thing about all...

02:18:54.000 I mean, it's the same...

02:18:55.000 I hate to use this analogy because it's like God wins law, but when you think about the Chinese government, This is a real example, a boat with 17,000 tons of human hair. 0.84

02:19:07.000 17,000 tons of human hair from Xinjiang.

02:19:12.000 And do you think that hair was given over willingly by those Uyghur women? 1.00

02:19:16.000 Do you think they were properly compensated for that hair?

02:19:20.000 Because the ones I talked to said they didn't get a dime for the hair that was shaved off their head that got put on a boat and sent to California.

02:19:27.000 When the Trump administration, again, something they did right, had the audacity to say, no, we're not going to take that human hair, and we're not going to put it on...

02:19:34.000 It's not really an issue for you, by the way.

02:19:36.000 But, like, most people didn't want to put...

02:19:38.000 Once they know that the hair was shaved off of the concentration camp victims' heads, they don't want to put it on their heads.

02:19:43.000 You know what I mean?

02:19:44.000 Because, in essence, Americans are good people.

02:19:48.000 Once they're aware of these atrocities, they don't want to be complicit in them.

02:19:51.000 And we turned back that boat that had the 17,000 tons of human hair, and then... 0.92

02:19:55.000 The Communist Party went crazy and Punish the companies and, oh, sanctions, you Cold War crazy, you hawk Pompeo Americans, what are you doing to us? 0.99

02:20:03.000 You guys are all racist. 1.00

02:20:04.000 That's what we're dealing with. 0.99

02:20:05.000 We're dealing with, do you want to put the concentration camp hair on your head? 0.75

02:20:09.000 Do you want to put the forced slave labor cotton on your back?

02:20:13.000 And to be honest, most Americans had no idea, right?

02:20:17.000 And they're like, okay, well, now that I know that...

02:20:20.000 And then some of them, after they're learning, they still won't care.

02:20:23.000 Some of them will say, that's not my problem.

02:20:25.000 That happens over there.

02:20:26.000 That's not over here.

02:20:27.000 But what I'm saying is that if you – again, if you believe in sort of the idea of human dignity, the path of the enlightenment, liberty and democracy and human rights and people can choose what they want to do and choose who they want to worship and choose who they want to love,

02:20:45.000 these are the things – More than geopolitics matter to human beings at their core, then these actions can only be described with one word, and that word is evil.

02:20:55.000 And that word evil is a big word, and it deserves some justification.

02:21:00.000 It deserves some explanation.

02:21:01.000 At the same time, it's kind of a word that we can't live without for some reason, because when we see it, it's so clear and it's so stark that we have to call it out.

02:21:12.000 How far does this extend in terms of businesses?

02:21:15.000 Like, so much of what we buy today is manufactured in China, including Apple products.

02:21:22.000 Well, that's one thing.

02:21:23.000 So, a lot of these companies are realizing that they've become corporate hostages of the CCP, and that's a tough calculation for Apple.

02:21:30.000 Again, I'm not insensitive to the bind that they're in.

02:21:35.000 And again, I don't think there's any easy solutions, but what everybody misses, actually, That's one part of the problem.

02:21:43.000 Forced technology transfer.

02:21:44.000 You hear a lot about IP theft and trade subsidies and all the things that were part of the trade war, by the way, which was not a whole other subject.

02:21:52.000 But that's not really the way that we're supporting.

02:21:56.000 That's not really the problem.

02:21:58.000 The problem is...

02:22:00.000 That hundreds of millions of Americans are unwittingly funding all of these malign Chinese companies passively through their pensions and investments and indexes and other Wall Street companies. 0.99

02:22:16.000 In other words, what I'm trying to say is that the biggest transfer of power and wealth to these malign Chinese companies and to all Chinese companies comes from Wall Street, comes from American firms who have been drastically increasing their involvement, 1.00

02:22:32.000 assistance and holdings of these Chinese companies, including the ones that build the concentration camps and the cameras that sit atop the concentration camp walls. 0.56

02:22:39.000 And the companies that sell the cotton, but also the companies that build the missiles that are pointed at us, and the companies that are doing the spying of our cyber hacking.

02:22:48.000 And if you just think of that just for one second, and this is like a chapter about this in my book, but this is like the bleeding edge. 0.98

02:22:53.000 Now we're getting to the bleeding edge, because we're getting to the real shit here. 0.99

02:22:59.000 And the real shit is that... 1.00

02:23:03.000 I think? 1.00

02:23:19.000 You would think, oh, wait a minute.

02:23:21.000 Now I'm invested in the success of these companies.

02:23:24.000 And, of course, from the Chinese side, that's exactly what they want. 0.99

02:23:27.000 They want to build a constituency inside of our society such that, again, to put Americans to a choice between interests.

02:23:34.000 Oh, wait.

02:23:35.000 If we sanction Hikvision, this is a real example.

02:23:37.000 They make the cameras.

02:23:39.000 Their cameras are amazing, right?

02:23:42.000 They can search through a crowd and find the Uyghur. 1.00

02:23:44.000 That's the Uyghur. 1.00

02:23:45.000 Okay.

02:23:46.000 But if you don't care about that, it's just a great camera.

02:23:49.000 Wall Street is pumping money into that company, left, right, and center.

02:23:52.000 Now, the U.S. government is sanctioning that company.

02:23:55.000 But what's the point of sanctioning the company if Wall Street is going to come in and fund it times 10?

02:23:59.000 It doesn't make any sense.

02:24:00.000 It's crazy.

02:24:01.000 But just what I've just said there is also too hot for TV. People can't wrap their minds around it because they're still...

02:24:07.000 We're good to go.

02:24:22.000 Again, we don't want to decouple.

02:24:24.000 We don't want to say we can't invest in China.

02:24:26.000 We need to do business in China.

02:24:27.000 We should do business in China. 0.96

02:24:30.000 At the same time, there's got to be some limits.

02:24:31.000 There's got to be some points where we say, okay, well, maybe the company that builds the cameras that sit atop the concentration camp walls, maybe that's one we shouldn't pour Americans' money into.

02:24:42.000 And by the way, once 100 million Americans are invested in that company, it's going to make it a lot harder to sanction that company because they're going to have a constituency.

02:24:48.000 You know, they're tying our financial interests to their political interests.

02:24:53.000 Again, it's not for the benefit of China. 0.85

02:24:55.000 It's for the benefit of the party who wants to do a genocide against Muslims.

02:24:59.000 That's not really economic interest. 1.00

02:25:01.000 That's the party doing its evil shit. 1.00

02:25:04.000 Jesus Christ. 1.00

02:25:06.000 That's interesting, right?

02:25:07.000 It's terrifying.

02:25:09.000 Yeah.

02:25:09.000 Because it seems like it's impossible to decouple.

02:25:13.000 We shouldn't decouple.

02:25:13.000 We just have to figure out where the lines are.

02:25:16.000 And the big sort of reveal is that this effort to sort of change China is not going to work.

02:25:24.000 It wasn't going to work.

02:25:25.000 It shouldn't be our job.

02:25:26.000 It's hubristic, right?

02:25:27.000 All of the restraint crowd people, all of the libertarians out there who are like, oh, this is just another scam to Have the military industrial complex have an excuse for endless defense budgets.

02:25:40.000 Now we're going to have the new Cold War with China. 0.97

02:25:41.000 That's going to be the thing we're going to spend all of our trillions on to replace Afghanistan, right? 1.00

02:25:46.000 I hear that a lot.

02:25:47.000 I get that a lot.

02:25:48.000 But what I'm trying to say is I get that.

02:25:50.000 But here's what I would say is that the competition with China is really not a military competition, okay?

02:25:55.000 So yes, we're going to need some military stuff, but don't get too concerned.

02:25:59.000 I mean, be concerned about the horrendous abuses of the military-industrial complex, which are real, but that's not the point of the China competition.

02:26:07.000 Economic, ideological, and technological competition for most.

02:26:11.000 And the real action is really in the markets.

02:26:15.000 It's really in the capital markets.

02:26:17.000 And Wall Street doesn't want to talk about that for very obvious reasons because they're getting rich.

02:26:21.000 And the press that covers Wall Street doesn't understand geopolitics and the political press doesn't understand Wall Street.

02:26:28.000 And all I did was try to connect those as much as I could in like half a chapter, which is incomplete to be sure.

02:26:34.000 But that doesn't get us to anyway how we deal with it.

02:26:37.000 And what the Trump administration tried to do is they tried to order these Wall Street companies to divest. 1.00

02:26:41.000 And these Wall Street companies were like, fuck you. 1.00

02:26:44.000 And that's an unsettled question. 1.00

02:26:46.000 But I would just ask any listener or viewer out there, if you knew that your pension was tied to concentration camps, do you care?

02:26:55.000 Does that bother you?

02:26:57.000 Some people may say no.

02:26:58.000 It's none of our business.

02:27:00.000 But I say it bothers me.

02:27:01.000 I don't want my pension being used to build concentration camps. 0.85

02:27:06.000 That's just me.

02:27:06.000 So that's what I'm going to try to argue against and try to affect change if I can.

02:27:11.000 So far it's not going very well.

02:27:14.000 It's not.

02:27:15.000 I'm sure.

02:27:15.000 So what about products?

02:27:17.000 Well, that's the other thing.

02:27:19.000 It's what you said about the information hill.

02:27:22.000 People don't have time to climb that hill.

02:27:24.000 Does this shirt that I'm wearing, does this involve some slave labor?

02:27:28.000 Maybe.

02:27:28.000 I don't know.

02:27:29.000 And I spent all my time on this shit. 0.99

02:27:30.000 I still don't know. 1.00

02:27:32.000 I'm wearing Adidas right now.

02:27:34.000 There's some abuses in the product.

02:27:36.000 What has Apple done?

02:27:38.000 Has Apple done anything to try to mitigate this?

02:27:40.000 And is it more morally sound to buy a Samsung product?

02:27:44.000 Or do they have the same sort of ties in China as well?

02:27:47.000 No company that does manufacturing in China is immune from the pressures. 0.84

02:27:52.000 What Apple did was they moved their cloud servers for Chinese users inside China, essentially giving up on the privacy of those Chinese users.

02:27:59.000 They erased a bunch of Hong Kong apps from the App Store at the Chinese Communist Party's demand because they were helping the Hong Kong protesters figure out how to protest for freedom and democracy.

02:28:13.000 They're constantly kowtowing. 1.00

02:28:16.000 They're the prime example because they're fucked. 1.00

02:28:18.000 They're in a hostage situation. 0.99

02:28:20.000 One of the stories that hasn't even really broken out yet, that nobody really talks about, is when Apple wanted to change its privacy controls to give people with their iPhones actually more control over their data, all their Chinese partners decided to ignore that and build a workaround.

02:28:33.000 In other words, you have 10 major Chinese tech companies that are producing content and apps for iPhones who are declining to follow Apple's rules.

02:28:43.000 There's nothing Apple can do about it because if they protest, the Chinese Communist Party is going to literally shut down their profit-making ability, and that's a huge, huge, huge business.

02:28:52.000 So it gets to your decoupling question, which is like, okay, if we can't change China, and we shouldn't try because it's hubristic to think that they're going to become like us, China's going to develop... 0.75

02:29:03.000 In a way determined by the Chinese people one way or the other.

02:29:06.000 That's what four decades of U.S. military intervention failures should have taught us, is that we can't change these countries, okay?

02:29:13.000 But what we can do is we can put them to a choice.

02:29:15.000 In other words, we can say, okay, if you're insistent on doing this bad behavior, we're going to act accordingly and change our behavior to respond.

02:29:23.000 And that could be a mix of increasing the cost of the bad behavior.

02:29:26.000 That's what tariffs are about.

02:29:27.000 People will say tariffs are about lots of different things.

02:29:29.000 They're really about Imposing a cost on the Chinese industry so that it's harder for them to do business the wrong way.

02:29:36.000 And then we're going to take measures to protect ourselves, which means some decoupling.

02:29:39.000 It means we don't have to have everything here, but we better have some masks.

02:29:43.000 You know what I mean?

02:29:43.000 How about masks?

02:29:44.000 Okay, well, nobody thought before 2019, what's the difference?

02:29:48.000 We don't need mask factories.

02:29:49.000 Why would you build a mask factory?

02:29:51.000 It's a thousand times cheaper to do in China.

02:29:53.000 Now, you don't have to make that argument. 0.99

02:29:55.000 Everybody knows we're going to need our own fucking masks, right? 0.99

02:29:58.000 Why? 0.99

02:29:58.000 Because there's going to be another pandemic and we don't want to have to bow and scrape and promise to shut up about Hong Kong just to get our masks. 0.99

02:30:06.000 And the manufacture of medicines.

02:30:08.000 Medicines, high technologies.

02:30:12.000 Semiconductors, components, stuff like that.

02:30:14.000 5G. There's an issue right now with chips, with chips for trucks and cars.

02:30:19.000 All of that.

02:30:20.000 We don't produce semiconductors.

02:30:23.000 Okay, well, what should we do about it?

02:30:26.000 Let's have that discussion.

02:30:27.000 We could build our own semiconductor foundries.

02:30:30.000 That's one idea.

02:30:31.000 We could fund them with the government.

02:30:32.000 That's another idea.

02:30:33.000 We could make partnerships with the Taiwanese companies.

02:30:36.000 That's complicated.

02:30:37.000 Okay, that's another good idea.

02:30:38.000 These are all good ideas.

02:30:39.000 None of them are actually progressing because we're all...

02:30:43.000 You know, talking past each other and, you know, trying to like, you know, talking about like, you know, whether or not it's okay to say Wuhan virus, you know what I mean?

02:30:50.000 That's the level of our discussion.

02:30:51.000 So just as far as we've gotten in this time, it's way farther than I've ever gotten in my entire life talking about this stuff, to be honest with you.

02:31:02.000 We're good to go.

02:31:30.000 And because Washington is so broken after Trump, really broken.

02:31:34.000 I mean, I've been there for 24 years.

02:31:35.000 And it's always been sort of this like functional, what I call functional dysfunction.

02:31:39.000 Nothing worked the way it was supposed to.

02:31:41.000 But it kind of all muddled along.

02:31:43.000 Budgets got done.

02:31:45.000 Everybody was kind of equally unhappy, but equally happy.

02:31:48.000 Trump smashed that.

02:31:49.000 He flipped over the chessboard.

02:31:51.000 And you could say that that needed to be done, but what he failed to do is set it back up again.

02:31:56.000 That's what the Biden administration is charged with doing. 0.95

02:31:58.000 And I think they're making an honest effort to do that, but they're also caught by their own politics and their own bureaucracy and their own infighting and their own bullshit, which is natural. 0.99

02:32:07.000 But the dichotomy of the book is that we have this awakening in American society to the challenge of a rising China But the first inning was played by the Trump administration, and because they were such a mess—so it's called chaos under heaven—they fucked a lot of it up. 0.99

02:32:26.000 Now, when you say they fucked everything up— No, no, not everything. 0.97

02:32:29.000 Just some of it. 0.95

02:32:30.000 Okay, they fucked it up and they broke it. 0.95

02:32:33.000 How'd they break it? 0.83

02:32:34.000 What specifically fucked up the system that wasn't immediately reparable upon removing him from office?

02:32:42.000 Okay, so just take a look at the trade war, right?

02:32:44.000 So Donald Trump, I read every book that he professes to have written, and a ton of them mention China, right?

02:32:54.000 And a lot of them say the same exact thing, which is that we got a problem here.

02:32:57.000 The Chinese government has been taking advantage of our economy and we need to stop. 1.00

02:33:01.000 And that's what he said in the campaign trail.

02:33:03.000 He was determined to do that.

02:33:06.000 I understand the trade war was very unpopular, and even amongst Republicans, the idea of tariffs and all of this trade stuff was like an anathema to their core ideological belief system.

02:33:16.000 Okay, I get that.

02:33:17.000 But what you saw, actually, inside the government, underneath, was a genuine effort to find ways to convince the Chinese government to do something different.

02:33:27.000 But the problem was that Trump was such a Bad tactician, right?

02:33:31.000 He had this vision of like fixing the thing, but he varied between different ways to do it that he kept handing the trade issue.

02:33:38.000 First, he handed it to Wilbur Ross, then Jerry Kushner, then Steve Mnuchin, then Lighthizer, and then Navarro.

02:33:45.000 And it was just such a disaster policy and bureaucracy-wise.

02:33:51.000 We're good to go.

02:34:12.000 But it didn't actually solve any of the problems.

02:34:15.000 And so that was a big missed opportunity right there, right?

02:34:19.000 Same thing with like, you remember, did you follow this TikTok WeChat fan thing?

02:34:23.000 Yeah.

02:34:24.000 That was a crazy one because, you know, again, once Trump realized that Xi Jinping had lied to him, his good friend Xi Jinping, who they had chocolate cake.

02:34:33.000 Remember with that chocolate cake that we had at Mar-a-Lag?

02:34:36.000 The most beautiful chocolate cookie I ever saw in your life.

02:34:39.000 And he really thought they were really good friends, you know? 0.94

02:34:42.000 And so, like, you know, once he realized that that was all bullshit and that actually they weren't friends, he turned on Xi Jinping and he unleashed his national security people to do whatever they wanted.

02:34:54.000 The first thing they're like, we're going to ban TikTok. 0.76

02:34:56.000 Which is a weird hill to die on if you think about it.

02:34:59.000 Because it's TikTok.

02:35:00.000 I get it.

02:35:01.000 I don't have it because I don't want...

02:35:03.000 I think there's definitely some risk there.

02:35:05.000 We don't know how much.

02:35:06.000 But probably not the number one issue in U.S.-China relations that we need to address.

02:35:09.000 But anyway, they issued an executive order banning TikTok.

02:35:12.000 Okay, well, that's a pretty serious thing.

02:35:14.000 We're now banning Chinese tech companies.

02:35:16.000 Okay, well, that's kind of interesting.

02:35:18.000 We should do that pretty carefully.

02:35:19.000 So he does that, but then he hands the negotiation over to Mnuchin, who switches the priority from banning TikTok to saving TikTok.

02:35:27.000 And he tries to make a deal with Oracle and the Chinese company to IPO TikTok to make everybody rich.

02:35:33.000 He takes it back from the national security people. 1.00

02:35:35.000 And then the Chinese government was like, no, fuck you. 1.00

02:35:37.000 We're not doing that. 1.00

02:35:37.000 We're not handing you TikTok. 1.00

02:35:38.000 That's our golden goose.

02:35:40.000 You can't have it.

02:35:41.000 And then they sued us in American courts and the whole thing got kaflooey. 0.56

02:35:45.000 So that's a good example of where they took a very serious issue and then totally screwed it up because of their own incompetence.

02:35:52.000 And the desire to make a profit.

02:35:54.000 Well, the national security people and the Wall Street people inside the administration fought each other and canceled each other out.

02:36:01.000 They nullified their own, and both of them lost.

02:36:04.000 What did you think about the Huawei ban?

02:36:08.000 So that's interesting.

02:36:09.000 So again, for those people who don't know, Huawei is like the biggest Chinese telecom company there is.

02:36:17.000 They're all over the world.

02:36:19.000 And the Trump administration went around the world saying, hey, African country, South American country, you better not do Huawei.

02:36:27.000 Why not?

02:36:28.000 Well, it's a huge security vulnerability.

02:36:30.000 Okay, well, what do you have to offer us in its place?

02:36:33.000 Well, nothing. 1.00

02:36:34.000 Oh, okay, well then fuck you. 1.00

02:36:36.000 And then, you know, the Chinese come in, they're like, hey, they don't come in and say, hey, would you like to buy Huawei? 1.00

02:36:41.000 They say, hey, would you like to get rich?

02:36:44.000 And would you like to have your dictatorship absolved of any war crimes in the UN? And we're going to build you a house in a soccer stadium.

02:36:53.000 And then we're going to give everybody in your country phones.

02:36:57.000 And for free.

02:36:58.000 And then we're going to give you a 5G technology that's going to make your economy go whiz, whiz, whiz at 30 cents on the dollar.

02:37:04.000 And that's it.

02:37:06.000 Happy birthday.

02:37:07.000 And these dictators are like, yes, please.

02:37:09.000 I'll take that.

02:37:09.000 That sounds good to me.

02:37:10.000 And then here comes Mike Pompeo.

02:37:12.000 He's like, oh, you better not do that.

02:37:14.000 USA's going to be very angry with you.

02:37:15.000 They're like, okay, well...

02:37:17.000 We're good to go.

02:37:35.000 But then bungled it in the execution.

02:37:38.000 And so now it's just like a mess that the Biden administration has to clean up.

02:37:42.000 And there really is a significant risk.

02:37:45.000 Here's one more thing.

02:37:45.000 Sorry.

02:37:45.000 Oh, please go.

02:37:46.000 So there's a million examples.

02:37:48.000 But this is what you have to understand about the CCP is that it's never just one thing.

02:37:53.000 For them, it's all connected.

02:37:54.000 It's all connected on their side.

02:37:56.000 So they go into a country like China Mobile.

02:37:59.000 This is a real example.

02:38:00.000 They went to Ethiopia and to Addis Ababa.

02:38:04.000 You know, you want telecom infrastructure?

02:38:07.000 Here you go.

02:38:08.000 30 cents on the dollar.

02:38:09.000 The technology is great, by the way. 1.00

02:38:11.000 Don't let them tell you that the Chinese tech is crap. 0.99

02:38:12.000 It's not. 0.99

02:38:13.000 It's amazing.

02:38:14.000 They've done amazing things with engineering.

02:38:16.000 And they're very, very skilled engineers.

02:38:18.000 And, oh, so all these people get their phones.

02:38:21.000 And they're like, all the phones, you know, these people never had landlines.

02:38:24.000 And all of a sudden, they all got cool cell phones.

02:38:26.000 And cell phones are loaded with a game.

02:38:28.000 And what's that game?

02:38:29.000 Oh, well, that game is, you know, poker, virtual poker.

02:38:32.000 Okay, well, there's $100 on here.

02:38:35.000 Oh, I'm going to start playing virtual poker.

02:38:36.000 They all start playing virtual poker.

02:38:38.000 Of course, they all lose a bunch of money, and then all of a sudden, knock on the door comes.

02:38:43.000 It's the local Chinese gang come to collect. 0.99

02:38:46.000 Okay?

02:38:47.000 Now, what does that tell you?

02:38:53.000 Tells you that the Chinese telecom companies are working with Chinese gangs who are working with the Chinese government.

02:38:57.000 So they come to collect because you lost money, so you don't have it connected to a credit card?

02:39:03.000 Once they connect it, once they are bought in, and once there's a debt to be paid, that debt is collected by a different Chinese organization that's not a company, it's a criminal organization. 0.64

02:39:13.000 What I'm trying to get to here is that the CCP works with the actual Chinese gangs.

02:39:17.000 In Hong Kong, the triads, which are like the Chinese gangs, beat up the protesters, right? 0.92

02:39:22.000 Why are they doing that?

02:39:23.000 Why are the Chinese gangs acting on behalf of the CCP to beat up Hong Kong protesters?

02:39:29.000 It's because they're working together.

02:39:31.000 The Chinese Communist Party...

02:39:36.000 Yeah.

02:39:39.000 Yeah.

02:39:42.000 Yeah.

02:39:43.000 Yeah.

02:39:58.000 We're good to go.

02:40:24.000 And so we are at a significant disadvantage.

02:40:27.000 Correct.

02:40:28.000 And there's no acknowledgement of it, nor solution.

02:40:32.000 I mean, there's some acknowledgement of it, but the solutions are...

02:40:35.000 I haven't seen that.

02:40:35.000 But even the Huawei ban.

02:40:37.000 I mean, Huawei's just been banned in the United States, and they're not allowed to use Google.

02:40:40.000 But what that's allowed them to do is start their own...

02:40:43.000 I mean, it might be even worse.

02:40:45.000 They start their own ecosystem.

02:40:46.000 Right.

02:40:47.000 It's inevitable.

02:40:49.000 And their own ecosystem, I'm sure, is way more porous and susceptible to...

02:40:55.000 So you've got to go to these countries.

02:40:56.000 If we were smart, what would we do is we'd go to these countries and say, listen, do you like your cell phones with spying or without spying? 0.98

02:41:03.000 Now, I know a lot of the listeners are going to, doesn't the NSA spy on all our shit too? 0.99

02:41:10.000 Yes, we spy. 0.99

02:41:11.000 Yes, we're guilty of this stuff too.

02:41:12.000 I'm not excusing the US government's abuses.

02:41:15.000 And believe me, I spent years and years reporting on the US government's abuses just because I am a Washington guy who reports The Washington Post.

02:41:24.000 I'm against US government abuses.

02:41:25.000 So again, two ideas in our head at the same time.

02:41:28.000 The US government can abuse its spying powers and the Chinese government can abuse its spying powers.

02:41:32.000 But basically, it's not the same.

02:41:35.000 And if you build an AT&T or a Verizon network or if you build a Huawei network, those two things are not the same.

02:41:44.000 And both of them have vulnerabilities.

02:41:46.000 But I'd rather have the non-Huawei network.

02:41:49.000 But these countries would also rather have it because they know that once they get bought in, once they take the bribe, once they take the corruption, once they take the package, that's it.

02:41:58.000 They're sold.

02:41:59.000 There's no going back.

02:42:00.000 You can't untangle yourself from that.

02:42:02.000 They would, in many cases, prefer to work with us if we had something to offer.

02:42:07.000 In other words, we can't just bash China that's not productive.

02:42:10.000 We have to have an alternative that's based on our values, that's based on rule of law and free commerce and companies that are less susceptible to governments buying.

02:42:23.000 And we're not doing that.

02:42:25.000 But if we had a more proactive, more aggressive counter, that would help.

02:42:30.000 That would help a lot.

02:42:31.000 But it seems like there were so many steps behind, they didn't anticipate any of this.

02:42:36.000 Some people did, but those people were ignored for many, many years.

02:42:38.000 And the Trump administration, in a way, was a chance for those people to have their voices heard.

02:42:42.000 And that's why you saw so much change in U.S.-China policy that you did.

02:42:46.000 Unfortunately, those people also had to deal with Donald Trump, and so that's why it got all screwed up.

02:42:51.000 Again, I think the Biden administration, to their credit, is thinking about these things very hard, you know?

02:42:56.000 They want to understand what are the things that the Trump administration did that were good, what were bad, but they're taking a while, you know?

02:43:03.000 The Chinese Communist Party is not waiting.

02:43:06.000 They're actually speeding up their plans.

02:43:07.000 If you look around the world, what did they do during the coronavirus pandemic?

02:43:10.000 They invaded part of India. 0.99

02:43:12.000 It's a pretty fucked up thing to do. 0.99

02:43:14.000 It backfired, right, because the Indians are now more anti-CCP than they ever were. 1.00

02:43:19.000 They're aggressive against Taiwan.

02:43:21.000 They did horrible things in Hong Kong.

02:43:23.000 I mean, horrible things.

02:43:25.000 And they increased their oppression of the Uyghurs and the Tibetans, by the way, and the Inter-Angolians and anyone else who didn't shut up. 0.95

02:43:32.000 So they're speeding up.

02:43:34.000 Now that we're sort of attuned to it more, they're speeding up their plans, and our response has to speed up as well. 0.95

02:43:40.000 This is such a fucked up subject because what I'm looking at, if you're watching this play out... 0.92

02:43:48.000 I don't see a real good way out of this. 0.99

02:43:52.000 I don't see a way where they don't have some pretty significant influence on us, even more so than what they have now over the next decade or two.

02:44:03.000 How does this end?

02:44:04.000 How does this end?

02:44:05.000 I don't know. 0.98

02:44:07.000 But you have to be pretty fucking... 0.97

02:44:08.000 I mean, having written this book and having researched this for that long, you've got to be pretty concerned. 0.96

02:44:14.000 Yeah, I mean, yeah, I've spent a lot of time on this, but there are a lot of people...

02:44:18.000 How does this end is a really interesting question, because again, you know, there are some people who say we have to bring down the CCP right now, like Steve Bannon, you know, and Peter Navarro and these guys, and they're like, okay, well, listen, if this is the reality, then we've got to bring those guys down right now.

02:44:33.000 How is that even possible?

02:44:34.000 It's not, and we shouldn't try.

02:44:36.000 But this is what some people will say.

02:44:39.000 And what I say is that we have to figure out a way to...

02:44:44.000 Have a relationship between the rest of the world and China that both sides can live with to avoid the conflict that neither side wants. 0.55

02:44:49.000 In other words, people think the Cold War is the worst scenario.

02:44:52.000 No, it's not.

02:44:53.000 Cold War is not a good scenario.

02:44:54.000 Hot War is the worst scenario.

02:44:55.000 Exactly.

02:44:55.000 Thank you.

02:44:56.000 That's the worst scenario.

02:44:58.000 So the question is, how do we avoid that?

02:45:00.000 Because that's actually the worst thing.

02:45:01.000 And I argue, and many people like me argue, that the best way to avoid it is by confronting this problem now, by addressing it now, that the more we let it fester, that the more powerful and evil and expansionist and aggressive and repressive the CCP gets, And guess what?

02:45:15.000 It's all going in that direction.

02:45:16.000 But according to all of the evidence and everything we see, The more dangerous this situation becomes because their appetite grows with the eating. 1.00

02:45:24.000 The more powerful they get, the more they tell us to go fuck ourselves. 0.99

02:45:28.000 And so we have a limited amount of time to prove to them that we actually do desire a world where they can have their country. 0.99

02:45:37.000 It doesn't mean we're going to shut up about their atrocities, but it means that what we're concerned most about is what their actions are in our countries.

02:45:44.000 That the real fight against the CCP and the competition with China Begins inside of our own borders, in our schools, in our markets, in our Silicon Valley tech companies, in our sports, and in our movies.

02:45:55.000 And that's where we have to focus the most of our efforts.

02:45:57.000 Then we have to join with our allies and partners, specifically in the region, who are facing the same problem that we are.

02:46:03.000 And so that's how this ends, is that, you know, in the best case scenario, is that we convinced the Chinese Communist Party to limit its ambitions such that we can all live together and avoid the hot war. 0.62

02:46:14.000 But ignoring the problem is not a strategy.

02:46:16.000 And history shows us that when you face expansionist, totalitarian, pseudo-religious dictatorships, inevitably they keep expanding and they keep gaining until confronted.

02:46:29.000 What's the worst case scenario?

02:46:30.000 The hot war.

02:46:32.000 Okay, outside of the hot war, is there another scenario that you could see that also would be similarly worst case in terms of what they've done to Hong Kong?

02:46:40.000 Yeah, they changed the world to be safe for autocracy and repression.

02:46:43.000 In other words, they compromise us and are so powerful that we can't stand up to them that we lose what Christopher Hitchens would call our way of life.

02:46:52.000 That's what I'm concerned with.

02:46:54.000 I'm concerned with that we become them to confront them.

02:46:57.000 That's a terrible scenario, too.

02:46:58.000 But that's a scenario that's likely.

02:47:00.000 Yeah.

02:47:01.000 I mean, let's hope not.

02:47:03.000 But yes, when you see – that's why we have to stand up against things like self-censorship in our own society. 1.00

02:47:08.000 That's when Daryl Morey tweets something, everybody who believes in the enlightenment and individual liberty and the path of human dignity It has a responsibility to say, no, fuck you. 0.99

02:47:19.000 We can tweet whatever we want. 0.99

02:47:21.000 And they have to learn that we're going to tweet whatever we want, whether they like it or not.

02:47:25.000 And they can't tell us not to.

02:47:26.000 Because that's the slippery slope where we're, okay, well, we can't have a China studies program that talks about Tibet.

02:47:32.000 I mean, it already happened in Hollywood.

02:47:33.000 When's the last time we saw a Hollywood movie about Tibet?

02:47:35.000 It's been about 20 years.

02:47:36.000 20 years!

02:47:37.000 I haven't seen one.

02:47:38.000 What's Richard Gere doing?

02:47:39.000 These are the guys out of work.

02:47:41.000 There's a reason.

02:47:44.000 There will become a tipping point where we're so invested in these Chinese companies that sinking them, even if they're committing atrocities, will sink our own economy. 1.00

02:47:52.000 So that we have to figure out what we have to protect, where we have to decouple, and where we don't.

02:47:57.000 There are plenty of places where we don't.

02:47:59.000 That's fine.

02:48:00.000 We should encourage interactions, and we should keep encouraging our shared Essential oneness.

02:48:09.000 There's something just true about the fact that all humans share some sort of commonality.

02:48:16.000 Even people in China.

02:48:18.000 Are you on Clubhouse at all?

02:48:20.000 I did it once.

02:48:22.000 I thought it was ridiculous.

02:48:23.000 You didn't like it? 0.77

02:48:23.000 No, it's a podcast for people that don't have a podcast. 0.77

02:48:26.000 Yes, exactly.

02:48:26.000 Yeah, that's why I like it.

02:48:27.000 I don't have a podcast.

02:48:28.000 But there's people with podcasts that jump on there.

02:48:30.000 And I'm like, when do you talk to your kids?

02:48:32.000 That's true.

02:48:33.000 But, you know, I found it to be a refuge during the quarantine because I could connect with people that I couldn't meet with.

02:48:39.000 Oh, that makes sense.

02:48:40.000 So for me, it was a pressure release valve.

02:48:44.000 But the point is, this is crazy, for like six weeks, it wasn't banned in China.

02:48:49.000 And there were thousands of people from mainland China On the app talking with Tibetans and Ai Weiwei and Hong Kongers and dissidents and Americans and in Chinese.

02:49:01.000 And what I witnessed is that they actually were not all that different.

02:49:05.000 Actually, these people want the same things that we want. 0.98

02:49:07.000 And they are not stupid. 0.98

02:49:09.000 They're not brainwashed. 0.99

02:49:12.000 They understand their government.

02:49:14.000 They know what they're dealing with.

02:49:15.000 They might think about it differently than us.

02:49:17.000 They're not as critical of us.

02:49:19.000 They don't know everything.

02:49:20.000 There was this one woman who didn't know about the Xinjiang concentration camps, but she learned about it.

02:49:24.000 Were you speaking her in Chinese?

02:49:25.000 She was in English.

02:49:26.000 I was in the English room, so I don't speak Chinese.

02:49:28.000 Okay, you only speak Japanese.

02:49:29.000 No, but there were a lot of my friends who were Chinese speakers were in these other rooms, and we were having this crazy community of people who were coming together, and then the Chinese Communist Party shut it down.

02:49:42.000 So they shut it down in China, and you can't even get it through a VPN? There are some people who have found out tricky ways to get through the firewall, but they do so at great risk.

02:49:50.000 Because what we then found out is that Clubhouse is built on Chinese tech.

02:49:54.000 Of course it is.

02:49:56.000 It's not encrypted.

02:49:57.000 And their servers are all from a Chinese company based in Shanghai.

02:50:01.000 And those people may have gotten scooped up, and I pray for them.

02:50:06.000 Even though I'm not religious.

02:50:08.000 Really?

02:50:09.000 Yeah, we're pretty sure that, you know, all the conversations could have been monitored, all those people were put in.

02:50:14.000 And then when they shut down the app, all these, the people who were still left were like, oh my god, Clubhouse, what have we done?

02:50:19.000 We just, we might have just gotten ourselves, you know, ruined our whole lives. 0.92

02:50:24.000 And, you know, Clubhouse didn't do shit, as far as I can tell. 0.68

02:50:28.000 Well, it's still an invite-only app that's in kind of a beta form, right? 0.95

02:50:33.000 Anybody can get an invite.

02:50:34.000 I need 20 invites right now.

02:50:36.000 It's not as exclusive as you should.

02:50:37.000 Well, anybody like you.

02:50:38.000 No, no, no.

02:50:39.000 I'm telling you, it's a false exclusivity.

02:50:41.000 It was early on, but now it's like basically anybody can join.

02:50:45.000 But my point is that if you engage with Chinese people, good things happen, and we need to somehow preserve that engagement without succumbing to the party's rules and edicts and doctrines.

02:50:56.000 And that, again, is a very difficult thing that I'm not prepared to give you the perfect solution for at this moment. 0.97

02:51:04.000 Dude, you freak me the fuck out. 0.82

02:51:06.000 Mission accomplished. 0.90

02:51:07.000 This is a super uncomfortable conversation.

02:51:09.000 I thought it was really productive.

02:51:10.000 I felt good about it.

02:51:12.000 I got a lot off my chest.

02:51:13.000 Well, I know you did, and it really was very productive in a lot of ways.

02:51:18.000 And I settled my score with Dan Nynan, which I've been waiting a decade to do.

02:51:22.000 You have no idea.

02:51:23.000 Well, Dan Nynan in some way introduced us.

02:51:26.000 So I found out about you.

02:51:28.000 Like when you were pitched to be on the podcast, I'm like, oh, that guy.

02:51:32.000 Yeah, I remember that story.

02:51:34.000 And then I read all the rest.

02:51:36.000 And I was like, oh, okay.

02:51:38.000 Everything happens for a reason.

02:51:39.000 Yeah, maybe. 1.00

02:51:41.000 Fuck, man. 1.00

02:51:43.000 Anyway, another reason to drink. 1.00

02:51:44.000 Yeah.

02:51:45.000 Salute.

02:51:46.000 Cheers.

02:51:46.000 Cheers, man.

02:51:48.000 Well, thanks for being here.

02:51:49.000 Thanks for having me.

02:51:51.000 How long did we go?

02:51:52.000 It's like three hours.

02:51:53.000 Jesus.

02:51:54.000 Yeah, but I'm not going to sleep well. 0.99

02:51:58.000 This is a fucking reoccurring problem. 0.99

02:52:01.000 Can I leave on a note of optimism then? 0.99

02:52:03.000 I'm going to cheer you up a little bit.

02:52:04.000 Sure.

02:52:05.000 You have optimism?

02:52:06.000 Yeah.

02:52:07.000 Okay.

02:52:07.000 You know, this struggle for human dignity and individual liberty is universal.

02:52:15.000 It dates back to Descartes and Spinoza and Thomas Paine.

02:52:20.000 Thomas Jefferson and Orwell will continue in future generations.

02:52:25.000 In other words, the long arc of history does bend towards justice.

02:52:29.000 Despite how bleak it looks now, in the end, people do want those things.

02:52:35.000 Our offer is better.

02:52:36.000 People don't want to live on their knees.

02:52:38.000 People don't want to be chattel of the party state.

02:52:40.000 People want to think for themselves and love who they want.

02:52:42.000 That's better.

02:52:43.000 If you ask any person, even any Chinese person, who doesn't have a mind or standing over them, they'll choose that thing. 1.00

02:52:49.000 So if we keep that idea in our mind, then we don't have to worry about if you're Republican or Democrat or American even.

02:52:55.000 It doesn't even matter because this is a universal truth that human dignity and individual liberty and rights are things that we all must strive for and that we all have a responsibility to advocate for.

02:53:06.000 And if we keep focused on that mission, then we can take the politics out of this and we can join in our shared humanity and make some progress.

02:53:13.000 That sounds awesome, but how do you get a country that's under the grip of a totalitarian party, under a regime that does have supreme control, under a regime that is more than willing to commit genocide and force people into slave labor?

02:53:30.000 How do you convince them that that's not the way to go, especially when they have ultimate control and it's been insanely profitable and the power that they've amassed is unprecedented?

02:53:43.000 In terms of the ability to control what's kind of a capitalist society, it's kind of capitalist, right?

02:53:49.000 It's not communist in a traditional sense where they've taken away all the incentive.

02:53:55.000 They've allowed people like Jack Ma to amass billions of dollars.

02:53:59.000 It's a weird sort of hybrid.

02:54:02.000 It's like a virus that's evolved.

02:54:06.000 The only honest answer is, I don't know.

02:54:09.000 I don't know either.

02:54:10.000 To be continued.

02:54:11.000 To be continued.

02:54:12.000 The book's available right now, ladies and gentlemen.

02:54:15.000 It's called, and non-binary folks, Chaos Under Heaven, Josh Rogan. 0.99

02:54:20.000 Thanks, brother.

02:54:21.000 Appreciate you, man.

02:54:22.000 Let's have you in again.

02:54:23.000 Let's do this more often.

02:54:24.000 Anytime.

02:54:25.000 Thank you.

02:54:26.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - April 27, 2021

Joe Rogan Experience #1640 - Josh Rogin

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript