The Joe Rogan Experience - April 01, 2022


Joe Rogan Experience #1800 - Gavin de Becker

Topics
fame pressures cops and fame pressures pre-incident indicators violence prediction Pegasus 2 vulnerabilities ivermectin control of information Omicron vaccine testing concerns governments' tests & controls HPV vaccine dangers pharmaceutical drug commercials side effects and ads body armor bulletproof clothing stopthemandates.com porn Free Speech platforms stop signs experiment
Hosted by
Joe Rogan
Guests
Gavin de Becker
Mentioned
Richard Burton Elizabeth Taylor Hunter Biden Pfizer Ronald Reagan Gavin De Becker Jeff Bezos Gardasil Vioxx John Lennon Ivermectin Jamie David Hasselhoff Trevor Burrus Sean Cassidy Gio Martinez Brian Fogel Susie Be Beatles Henry Weinberg and 40 more
Joe Rogan Experience #1799 - Yannis Pappas Joe Rogan Experience #1801 - David Mamet

Episode Stats


Length

2 hours and 51 minutes

Words per minute

182.11

Word count

31,272

Sentence count

2,548

Harmful content

Misogyny

21

sentences flagged

Toxicity

168

sentences flagged

Hate speech

25

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I sit down with a man who is a legend in the field of public figure protection. He s been around a long time, and is a man of many talents. He is a writer, a public speaker, and an expert on public figure security and safety. He also has a fascinating story about how he got started in his career, and how he became one of the most respected public figure protectors in the world. He s also an author, a speaker, a consultant, and a public figure advocate for public figure safety and security. He has been a friend of mine for many years, and I ve always wanted to have him as a guest on the show because he has so much knowledge and experience in this field. This episode is a must listen for anyone who wants to learn how to be a better public figure protector and how to protect others. I hope you enjoy listening to this episode and that it makes you think about how important it is to have someone in your life who is well versed in public figure and security, and who is willing to put in the work to make sure that others are safe and well protected. Thank you Gavin. You are a great friend and a wonderful human being and I m grateful to have you on the podcast. Peace, Blessings, Cheers, EJ, Ej and Joe -Everest and Joe. -Gavin and Elesa - Joe and Ephraim and Ej and Joe - - Ej & Ej@ & EJ&J & . -Joe & E. and . . And Ej&EJ&S , EJ & - Joe - and EJ/EJ/ -BJ&A -S. & J.J. -EJ -J.E. & JB. & J.B. ( ) -P.J . .J.&J. . .EJ. & B. & A.J., EJ. ( ) -E.A. & S. EJJ. , J.S. & R. (S. .S. (J.B., ) (A.J.'S.& J.M. (E.J.) -A. (AJ)

Transcript

Transcripts from "The Joe Rogan Experience" are sourced from the Knowledge Fight Interactive Search Tool. Explore them interactively here.
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:12.000 Hello, Gavin.
00:00:13.000 Hey.
00:00:14.000 Pleasure to meet you in person, in the flesh.
00:00:16.000 You too.
00:00:16.000 We obviously have a lot of friends in common, and I'm glad to be here.
00:00:19.000 I'm glad to have you here.
00:00:20.000 And I'm glad to talk about, we have a lot of shared interests, but this survival signals that protect us from violence.
00:00:31.000 I've always wanted to talk to you because you are truly an expert on preparedness and cautionary tactics and what to do and not to do, like in terms of security and how to protect people.
00:00:47.000 What is your background?
00:00:48.000 How did you get started in all this?
00:00:49.000 Bad childhood, violent childhood is the way I started.
00:00:54.000 When I was 10 years old, my mother shot my stepfather in front of me.
00:00:59.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.
00:01:00.000 And that was one of many sort of gun incidents in our family.
00:01:04.000 Was your stepfather violent or something?
00:01:06.000 No, he wasn't.
00:01:08.000 My mother was.
00:01:10.000 Wow, that's unusual, right?
00:01:11.000 It is.
00:01:12.000 It is the more unusual of the two genders. 1.00
00:01:16.000 Certainly men are more violent more often throughout history.
00:01:19.000 So I had that experience and a whole bunch of others.
00:01:22.000 My mother was a heroin addict. 0.96
00:01:23.000 She committed suicide when I was 16. And so I saw a lot of stuff.
00:01:29.000 I saw a lot of criminality.
00:01:31.000 I saw a lot of violence.
00:01:32.000 And I guess I developed kind of like an ambassador between the two worlds.
00:01:37.000 I spoke both languages.
00:01:39.000 If I had a few other disadvantages, there's no way I would have succeeded in life.
00:01:44.000 I would have died young.
00:01:46.000 Like if I'd been a black kid with the same circumstance, I'd have been in big trouble.
00:01:49.000 And so that life brought me to a fascination with when John Kennedy was killed, I was 10, and I was home from school, and it It's just absolutely captivated and fascinated me,
00:02:06.000 not so much the issue of who killed him or the conspiratorial sides of these things, which are very real, not so much that, but the actual physics of how you prevent assassination.
00:02:17.000 And that interest stayed with me throughout my life, and I eventually – I've had an odd life.
00:02:23.000 So as I tell you this story, you'll be ready for it to be unusual.
00:02:27.000 But by the time I was 19, I had already read and devoured everything I could on this subject, which was pretty limited.
00:02:34.000 Most of the stuff on anti-assassination strategies I wrote later in life, but there wasn't a lot to read at the time.
00:02:40.000 And at 19, I got a job working for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton.
00:02:45.000 Yeah.
00:02:53.000 And at that time, there was really only Jackie Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor and the Queen of England.
00:03:00.000 Those were the giant media figures.
00:03:01.000 Now we've got hundreds of media figures.
00:03:03.000 And Marilyn Monroe, who had died already.
00:03:06.000 And I worked for them starting as a kind of flunky, do you know the word?
00:03:10.000 A gopher.
00:03:11.000 And through the course of everybody above me being fired, I ended up being what's called traveling chief of staff.
00:03:19.000 And I traveled with them around the world.
00:03:22.000 I got to work with protectors and intelligence agencies in South Africa and in Israel and in Mexico and all over Europe.
00:03:29.000 And I learned a lot.
00:03:31.000 And I observed everything.
00:03:33.000 And when I was done, I was 21. And I wrote an article about public figure protection in the private sector for a law enforcement journal.
00:03:44.000 And everybody assumed I was a 55-year-old ex-FBI agent, but I was 21 years old.
00:03:49.000 And so I used to get asked to come and give speeches.
00:03:52.000 And when I would arrive, they would look around, you know, is your dad with you?
00:03:55.000 You know, they'd look around and I had a mustache.
00:03:57.000 I used to darken it because you could see through it.
00:04:00.000 And I gave speeches.
00:04:02.000 And I got better and better at it.
00:04:05.000 And giving speeches, you have to be right.
00:04:08.000 You know, you get tested a lot by audiences.
00:04:10.000 And so I was driven by the idea of accuracy and a good intellectual process because I didn't have – I wasn't a former cop.
00:04:21.000 I wasn't an FBI agent, etc.
00:04:23.000 Later, I became all that kind of stuff.
00:04:25.000 Later, I got appointed by the president of the Department of Justice Advisory Board and worked with CIA and FBI and all the things that have gone on between 10 years old and today.
00:04:34.000 By the way, the reason I mention that is sometimes when somebody wants to say something shitty about me, they say, oh, his whole training is that he had a bad childhood.
00:04:42.000 Could we count the 55 years between then and now, perhaps?
00:04:45.000 But ultimately, I developed a company that is a consulting company that advises people at risk.
00:04:54.000 And wrote books on the topic and did a lot of research and study on the topic.
00:04:59.000 So when you were 19 years old, how did you get this job working with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton?
00:05:04.000 It's a good question.
00:05:05.000 So I went to Beverly Hills High School.
00:05:08.000 We were on welfare and food stamps, but my grandfather got a one-room apartment in Beverly Hills where we could lie and my sister and I would say we lived in Beverly Hills, use that address.
00:05:19.000 So I went to Beverly High, and there I met a lot of friends who are still friends today.
00:05:25.000 And one of them was Gina Martin, and Gina Martin was Dean Martin's daughter.
00:05:30.000 And so I went to work for her mother for $60 a week, which I still have, by the way.
00:05:41.000 And one day, Elizabeth Taylor came over to their house.
00:05:44.000 And Gina and I, my girlfriend and I, we sat up at the balistrad and looked through the railing, and I thought, Elizabeth Taylor?
00:05:50.000 I didn't really even know who she was, but I thought, this is going to be a big deal, and in came this giant, you know, big hair and all the stuff. 0.85
00:05:57.000 And then a few months later, somebody called me and said, she's looking for an assistant, and will you go meet with her?
00:06:05.000 So I went to the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet with her, and she wasn't there.
00:06:08.000 Her boyfriend was there.
00:06:09.000 I met with him.
00:06:10.000 I got hired.
00:06:12.000 Can you type?
00:06:13.000 Yes.
00:06:14.000 Couldn't type.
00:06:15.000 Do you speak French?
00:06:16.000 Yes.
00:06:17.000 Don't speak French. 0.92
00:06:18.000 Why French?
00:06:19.000 They were going to France two weeks later.
00:06:21.000 So I got the job.
00:06:26.000 Then I went home, and I told my friends I got this job.
00:06:29.000 It's unbelievable.
00:06:30.000 I turned on the television, and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton have gotten back together.
00:06:34.000 She's left her boyfriend, and I see her going through the airport paparazzi, and my career is over.
00:06:40.000 I never even met her.
00:06:42.000 And then a few months later, got another call, and this time she was back in Los Angeles with the same boyfriend.
00:06:49.000 So her and Richard Burton broke up already?
00:06:53.000 Three times when I was with them.
00:06:54.000 Three times broke up and three times back together.
00:06:56.000 And then we...
00:06:57.000 So I started working for her.
00:07:00.000 She was great to me.
00:07:02.000 Very, very nice and kind.
00:07:04.000 And one day she came into my office and she said...
00:07:07.000 I was working at the house and she said, can you take me to the tropical fish place tomorrow?
00:07:13.000 And I thought, yeah, sure.
00:07:14.000 That'd be great.
00:07:15.000 And her boyfriend was a guy named Henry Weinberg.
00:07:18.000 And he used to take her.
00:07:19.000 And so I thought maybe he's going to be a little jealous or something.
00:07:21.000 But I figured I'll take her.
00:07:22.000 This means driving some Rolls Royce.
00:07:24.000 I've never driven.
00:07:25.000 I didn't have a car at the time.
00:07:26.000 And I was supposed to pick her up at her house, meet her there at 10 a.m.
00:07:31.000 About 10.45 in the morning, I wake up at home.
00:07:35.000 I have totally blown it.
00:07:37.000 I missed the appointment completely.
00:07:39.000 I rush like crazy to get to the house, get there by noon.
00:07:42.000 She's gone to the fish place.
00:07:44.000 And she comes into my office afterwards, clearly to fire me. 0.73
00:07:47.000 And she says, Gavin, thank you so much for what you did this morning.
00:07:52.000 That was a very admirable thing to do.
00:07:55.000 I don't know what it is yet.
00:07:57.000 And she says, you knew Henry would be jealous, and so you stood back and let him take me to the fish place.
00:08:02.000 So that was great.
00:08:03.000 Okay, world, I'm in.
00:08:05.000 So I kept the job.
00:08:07.000 Wow.
00:08:07.000 And then home one night, and a friend of mine calls and says, put on the television, and it's Elizabeth Taylor, back with Richard Burton, has left her boyfriend, and my career is over again.
00:08:19.000 Wow.
00:08:21.000 So I'm done.
00:08:22.000 Finished.
00:08:23.000 It's over.
00:08:23.000 And a few weeks later, she calls me and she says, would you be willing to come to work for me and Richard in Europe?
00:08:30.000 I don't think I'd ever been to Europe.
00:08:32.000 Maybe I'd been one time to England at that point.
00:08:34.000 And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:08:36.000 And I say, you know, Richard Burton was an intimidating British actor and so I said to her, what should I call him?
00:08:44.000 Do I call him Richard?
00:08:45.000 Do I call him Mr. Burton?
00:08:46.000 And she said, Richard, he wants to know what he should call you. 0.99
00:08:49.000 And in the background I hear, I don't give a shit, love. 1.00
00:08:53.000 Fuck, I'm going to have a rough time with this guy. 1.00
00:08:56.000 And then I show up and we live in Switzerland for a year, live with them in their house. 1.00
00:09:01.000 The very first night, he comes to talk to me, and we talk for like six hours.
00:09:05.000 I'm 19 years old.
00:09:07.000 Wow!
00:09:07.000 And I love him, and he loves me.
00:09:10.000 I don't just mean in that moment, I mean through our lives.
00:09:13.000 Even after I left working for them, we stayed friends until he died at maybe 50, 50 years old from alcoholism.
00:09:22.000 Wow!
00:09:23.000 So that was an interesting start, just the way things went.
00:09:27.000 Well, he must have been close to death then, right?
00:09:29.000 Because how old was he then?
00:09:30.000 He was...
00:09:33.000 He was 45 probably when we met or maybe that's an interesting question.
00:09:39.000 I have to look.
00:09:39.000 You know, I was in Jerusalem a few years ago and I stayed at the same hotel where Elizabeth and Richard and I had stayed when we made a trip to Israel.
00:09:49.000 And she had converted to Judaism in the 60s because she was married to a guy named Mike Todd.
00:09:56.000 And so she was an enormous big deal in Israel.
00:09:58.000 There were Elizabeth Taylor theaters when we landed, the entire tarmac of the airport, hundreds of thousands of people.
00:10:05.000 And I thought, wow, Israel's really a disorganized country. 0.98
00:10:07.000 They let everybody on the tarmac, but it was obviously because of Elizabeth being there.
00:10:11.000 And so I was learning quickly about this and this kind of stuff.
00:10:15.000 And while we were there...
00:10:19.000 Many experiences went out with the Kissingers and crowds and blah, blah, blah. 1.00
00:10:25.000 But many years later, as an adult in my 60s, I was at that hotel.
00:10:31.000 And I was looking around at all the pictures they had of famous people.
00:10:35.000 And there I find Elizabeth and Richard and me.
00:10:38.000 Oh, wow.
00:10:38.000 So it gave me the idea to download the diaries of Richard Burton, which I had never read.
00:10:45.000 He used to keep a diary all the time when we were traveling.
00:10:47.000 If he was drunk or in trouble, I used to go get the diary out of the room so it wouldn't get stolen by pop photographers.
00:10:55.000 News media people or housekeepers or whatever.
00:10:58.000 Handwritten?
00:10:59.000 What?
00:11:00.000 Handwritten?
00:11:00.000 Yeah.
00:11:01.000 Tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny.
00:11:02.000 He'd be writing all the time.
00:11:03.000 And so I had two experiences with that diary that are good teachers for my kids now.
00:11:09.000 One is that one day he went to sleep and he was on a bender.
00:11:13.000 He was an alcoholic and he was having a hard time.
00:11:15.000 And I saw the diary sitting just folded over the armchair.
00:11:18.000 And I thought, well, I better grab that so a housekeeper doesn't get it. 0.99
00:11:21.000 And I pick it up.
00:11:22.000 And I turn it over, and I read it, curious, like, what is he always writing here?
00:11:26.000 And my eyes land on these words.
00:11:29.000 Must get rid of Gavin when we get back to London.
00:11:34.000 Good teaching.
00:11:36.000 Oh, boy.
00:11:37.000 So now, years later, I'm at the King David Hotel and I download this book.
00:11:41.000 And it's a book of his diaries.
00:11:42.000 And I think, oh, am I in there?
00:11:43.000 So I start looking around.
00:11:45.000 And I find passages that, you know, by this point it's been 45 years or so since I worked for them.
00:11:52.000 And I find these passages from him.
00:11:54.000 One of them says, Gavin gave us a long letter yesterday telling us that he's right about everything and we're wrong about everything.
00:12:02.000 I have no memory, but it sounds like some young Gavin move.
00:12:05.000 And then, you know, other entries regarding me.
00:12:08.000 But one of them that really struck me is that he said there were days and days without any entry.
00:12:15.000 There'd be five days with no entry.
00:12:17.000 And at the end of it, he would say, lost five days.
00:12:20.000 Five days gone.
00:12:21.000 And I realized that I was a kid living with this couple and really had no idea what they were going through and what he was going through with alcoholism and what she was going through with drug addiction.
00:12:34.000 Were they always like that, or is this a response to the pressures of fame?
00:12:39.000 Because one of the things that I've encountered, and you meet a lot of movie stars and celebrity-type people, especially rock stars, It's not just the life on the road and the partying that goes with that, but it's in response to the pressures of so many people wanting your attention and so much focus on you.
00:13:02.000 A lot of them turn to something to dilute that.
00:13:06.000 Yeah, no question.
00:13:07.000 I mean, Elizabeth was famous from when she was 11 years old.
00:13:11.000 So she starred in a big movie called National Velvet.
00:13:13.000 She became an international sensation.
00:13:16.000 Richard was not.
00:13:17.000 He grew up poor in Wales and then was thrust into this circumstance.
00:13:22.000 He was a stage actor and suddenly thrust into this circumstance of being in this couple.
00:13:27.000 And they had a lot of tabloid stories and controversies.
00:13:32.000 But on your main point, Yeah, I've had a real front row seat on fame and the pressures that go with fame, and it's a highly unnatural circumstance, right?
00:13:43.000 If we go back a thousand years, there was no such thing.
00:13:46.000 You could be known in your community, you could be called the king, Caesar, but nobody met you or knew you or saw you.
00:13:53.000 The vast majority of people had no connection to you.
00:13:56.000 You have people who are known to millions and billions of people.
00:14:01.000 If you're a female singer, you're singing romantically to somebody.
00:14:05.000 If you're a female actress or male, your face is closer to people than you would ever be unless you were going to kiss them or hit them.
00:14:14.000 You would never see all the little lines in somebody's face and have this kind of intimacy.
00:14:19.000 And I think physiologically, our bodies are not able to distinguish between that which we We're good to go.
00:14:46.000 And that's a weird distortion of, you know, you want to meet somebody and build a relationship, right?
00:14:53.000 You don't want to meet somebody and they already have their 50% done.
00:14:56.000 And now you have to undo it and assert yourself.
00:15:02.000 Years ago...
00:15:03.000 You know, the Beatles had a line that the whole world went crazy and used the four of them to do it.
00:15:09.000 And that they were the only four people in the world who didn't experience the Beatles.
00:15:15.000 Jamie had a very similar statement the other day.
00:15:17.000 I've heard that before, but yeah, I just thought of it in the same way.
00:15:20.000 Oh, about the Beatles?
00:15:21.000 Well, like, me and him experience the world without...
00:15:25.000 Without the JRE. That's right.
00:15:29.000 Because we're weirded out because we're so insulated.
00:15:33.000 The show is so small in terms of the amount of people that work on it.
00:15:37.000 It's just me and Jamie.
00:15:39.000 So me and Jamie and whoever the guest is communicate.
00:15:44.000 We have fun.
00:15:45.000 It's just like a bunch of people, you know, three of us talking.
00:15:48.000 And it reaches...
00:15:50.000 Millions of people.
00:15:51.000 And that escapes us in this moment.
00:15:55.000 So all the people that are listening, that are listening right now, that are driving in their car and at the gym and wherever you listen to the show or watch the show, these people experience the show.
00:16:05.000 We are a part of the show.
00:16:07.000 So for us, it's just life.
00:16:08.000 So all the controversy behind it, they can bring it into work and go, Did you hear about this guy that's on the JRE that said this and that? 0.99
00:16:16.000 And like, oh, I heard that's bullshit. 0.97
00:16:17.000 Or, oh, I know about that. 0.99
00:16:19.000 And then these conversations break out and all the controversy breaks out and we're blissfully immune to it.
00:16:25.000 But the world has changed so much for us because when we go out, then we experience it.
00:16:32.000 Then we experience all these conversations and all the controversy and all the people and all the attention.
00:16:37.000 It's just strange.
00:16:39.000 Yeah, I think I mentioned physiological because we're not physiologically prepared for it.
00:16:44.000 When you meet somebody, you don't have a place in your organism to put, they already have a full opinion of me.
00:16:51.000 It's a little bit like racism or discrimination.
00:16:54.000 Or a police officer's experience, right?
00:16:56.000 A police officer pulls you over and everybody lies to him.
00:17:00.000 Everybody treats him different.
00:17:01.000 Everybody's real, real nice or everybody's got a story to tell.
00:17:04.000 And so they're not engaging with the human being.
00:17:07.000 They're engaging with the uniform.
00:17:08.000 Fame is a uniform.
00:17:10.000 It's on the outside of you.
00:17:12.000 That totally makes sense.
00:17:13.000 And especially, I've always thought that of cops, like, that people need to take that in consideration when, and also that cops, when they pull people over, they're really genuinely worried about being shot and killed.
00:17:24.000 I mean, you might think, hey, I was only going 10 miles an hour over the speed limit.
00:17:28.000 The cop is thinking, this guy could be an on-the-run criminal, and I could get shot in the face right now.
00:17:34.000 Of course. 0.97
00:17:34.000 Of course. 0.97
00:17:35.000 Yeah, cops are having a tough...
00:17:37.000 A tough run right now all over the country.
00:17:39.000 They really are.
00:17:40.000 So did they, like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, when you first started working with them, were you old enough or aware enough that they were dealing with the pressures of fame and of celebrity and that they were diluting it through alcoholism and pills and that that's why they were doing that?
00:17:59.000 No, I really wasn't.
00:18:01.000 I was learning along the way, and they must have had experiences together where they say, man, this Gavin kid could really take it.
00:18:09.000 But of course, I'd had this childhood already where the dramas that they were going through were pretty mild.
00:18:16.000 My older sister said a thing years ago that some boyfriend of hers overturned a table in anger and was sort of moving toward her.
00:18:23.000 And she said to him, you're going to have to do a lot more than that to get my attention.
00:18:27.000 Because we were just low blood pressure.
00:18:29.000 We'd been through so much already as kids.
00:18:32.000 And so we went through this sort of academy of university of adversity.
00:18:38.000 And so I didn't see and didn't understand what their circumstance was at the time.
00:18:42.000 I certainly saw the outer look of it.
00:18:45.000 But my view was, and I think a lot of people have this view, oh, famous people, they're built for it.
00:18:51.000 Or they're just famous people.
00:18:53.000 They forget.
00:18:53.000 Well, they weren't just famous people two weeks ago or two years ago or two decades ago.
00:18:57.000 And so it's regular people to whom a circumstance occurs, right?
00:19:02.000 It doesn't change anything about you as a person and how you engage with people individually.
00:19:07.000 But if something has happened to you and you specifically are a good example of it because of, you know, The controversial element – by the way, I don't think you're controversial.
00:19:20.000 I think what controversy gets made on the outside, it doesn't get made in here.
00:19:24.000 I haven't seen a lot of hot arguments in here.
00:19:27.000 And so that thing gets stuck to you and it's basically an outfit you're wearing.
00:19:35.000 And it's your life now.
00:19:39.000 Yeah, it's weird.
00:19:40.000 For the most part, most people don't interact with me like I'm controversial.
00:19:44.000 The vast majority of people that I meet are just friendly.
00:19:47.000 The problem is when people want something.
00:19:50.000 That's a problem.
00:19:51.000 People always want to give me a book that they wrote or they want to talk to me about being on the show because of some experience they've had.
00:19:58.000 That becomes exhausting because they want to do it while you're eating dinner.
00:20:02.000 They want to do it while you're ordering food somewhere.
00:20:05.000 Yeah, I like this one that people come up to the table.
00:20:08.000 And I've been with so many famous people through my career and life that I've seen every variation of it.
00:20:13.000 And they say, oh, can I take a fast picture of you?
00:20:15.000 And if the person says yes, well, not with the fork in your hand.
00:20:18.000 Oh, so now you want to direct me and take a fast picture.
00:20:21.000 You know, not like this.
00:20:23.000 It becomes an entitlement.
00:20:25.000 There's a feeling of entitlement and a feeling of, you know, this is the protocol.
00:20:30.000 For approaching a famous person is that I say to you, can I have your autograph?
00:20:34.000 And you say yes.
00:20:36.000 No matter what you're doing, argument with your wife, difficult times in life, you know, just lost something, just gained something, doesn't matter.
00:20:43.000 This is the protocol that people know, and they think that's the only one.
00:20:46.000 And, of course, what I've learned is stand back and leave people alone or call out a nice thing.
00:20:52.000 Well, definitely don't interrupt them when they're eating.
00:20:54.000 They're just people eating.
00:20:56.000 I'm sitting there having a conversation with my kids, and I've had this before, where people come up and they want a photo, and I'm like, we're having dinner.
00:21:03.000 And they're like, come on, man.
00:21:05.000 What if everybody did that?
00:21:06.000 Then I'm not having dinner with my kids, and I'm not talking to them, and I'm talking to you.
00:21:09.000 You need to come on. 0.97
00:21:11.000 You need to realize this is silly.
00:21:13.000 If I'm leaving, when I'm leaving, you want to take a photo?
00:21:17.000 Sure.
00:21:18.000 I'll take a photo with you.
00:21:19.000 I'm leaving. 0.99
00:21:19.000 But when I'm sitting down and I have a fork and I'm eating food in my mouth, I'm like, get the fuck out of here. 0.99
00:21:24.000 It's crazy. 0.79
00:21:25.000 So is it inappropriate for me to ask for a photo right now?
00:21:27.000 Nah.
00:21:29.000 I brought you a book that I asked you.
00:21:30.000 Well, I'm excited to read this book because a good buddy of mine really, really enjoyed this book.
00:21:35.000 And he said it was very valuable to him.
00:21:37.000 And the perspective that you have about this, you know, about security and psychology and threats of violence and all those different things, because of your childhood and then because of your experience initially with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton,
00:21:57.000 Did you know when you started working with them that this childhood that you had and this chaos would help you form this career?
00:22:07.000 Is that how you got into it?
00:22:09.000 Realizing that you were working with these famous people and these famous people are uniquely vulnerable and that you could somehow or another protect them?
00:22:16.000 Way before that.
00:22:17.000 I think I knew at 10 years old, I had a vision that there would be a company that people who were at-risk public figures might have a manager or an agent if they were in show business or a family office or a corporation or if they were religious leaders,
00:22:32.000 they'd have a church.
00:22:33.000 And they would also have this consulting company that I envisioned, 10 years old.
00:22:38.000 And I'm not the only person who's had an experience like that where you have some certainty about What's going on?
00:22:44.000 I have a dear friend who won an Oscar, and she designed her Oscar dress at 10 years old.
00:22:50.000 What?
00:22:50.000 Yeah.
00:22:51.000 Not an actress, you know, living in Massachusetts somewhere.
00:22:54.000 No chance of being an actress.
00:22:55.000 And when she got to college, the acting teacher in the theater class said to the whole class on day one, you know, only one of you will ever make it in show business, statistically.
00:23:08.000 And she looked around and she thought, oh, these poor kids.
00:23:10.000 LAUGHTER Well, she was right.
00:23:14.000 She was right.
00:23:14.000 But how weird is that when someone is right about something like that?
00:23:17.000 I think it happens with a lot of, you know, look, as I get older, it happens more frequently that something slips into the flow and I'm not as surprised anymore when things work together the way they do.
00:23:30.000 The universe has got a lot of mystery to it.
00:23:32.000 And, you know, my childhood and then the things I did afterwards, We're sort of part of a story.
00:23:42.000 And I don't take credit for crafting that story.
00:23:45.000 I couldn't get myself with Elizabeth Taylor or get myself with Ronald Reagan or cause these things to happen, I guess.
00:23:52.000 But I watched the movie, and it's been super interesting.
00:23:56.000 So you're 19 years old.
00:23:58.000 You work with them.
00:23:59.000 How long does this relationship last?
00:24:02.000 I worked with them and lived with them for two years.
00:24:05.000 Two years?
00:24:06.000 Yeah.
00:24:06.000 And then I wrote this paper that got picked up by the National Criminal Justice Reference Center, which is a part of the Department of Justice and given to every police department in America.
00:24:17.000 Back then?
00:24:18.000 Yeah, back then.
00:24:19.000 And it was a four-part series on, not about the Burtons, but about public figure protection in the private sector.
00:24:27.000 And I was a good writer.
00:24:29.000 Public figure protection in the private sector when you were 21 years old?
00:24:33.000 Yeah.
00:24:33.000 Yeah.
00:24:34.000 But it was only of interest to law enforcement.
00:24:36.000 But you weren't law enforcement back then.
00:24:38.000 You were just an assistant to two famous people.
00:24:41.000 Well, I had become, I became their, to use the lofty title, their traveling chief of staff.
00:24:46.000 So when we would go to cities, it was me who arranged security and logistics, and I learned.
00:24:50.000 And I had this really good gift you might like from your own Eastern self-defense training, and that is that in the mind of the beginner, there are many possibilities, and in the mind of the expert, there are few.
00:25:04.000 The expert says, oh, we tried that.
00:25:06.000 That doesn't work.
00:25:06.000 The beginner says, why do they do it that way?
00:25:09.000 How about this way?
00:25:10.000 And that's been my whole career.
00:25:12.000 I wasn't a cop.
00:25:13.000 I wasn't a Secret Service agent.
00:25:15.000 But I've worked with Secret Service now and worked on research projects with them and trained police departments all over the country.
00:25:21.000 And it isn't always the path of...
00:25:25.000 You know, going to college and learning a particular skill.
00:25:28.000 I'm glad I didn't, by the way.
00:25:29.000 I went to college for one course, one class, criminal investigation.
00:25:36.000 And then when I got appointed as a senior fellow at UCLA School of Public Policy and I had to give a little speech, I thanked the dean because you're the first person to ever put me through college.
00:25:46.000 And I've only been here for 20 minutes.
00:25:48.000 But I drove through Princeton once, was my other college experience.
00:25:53.000 But look, not everybody has the life that is in the system.
00:25:57.000 And the system makes certain promises.
00:26:01.000 If you do certain things, if you go to medical school, maybe you'll become a doctor.
00:26:04.000 I think those promises get broken very often by big systems.
00:26:08.000 But I just had a different life, a different circumstance.
00:26:12.000 I did research just like a scientist and I met with people and I studied and we did experiments and we do all variety of things in my company, but it wasn't at a university.
00:26:21.000 But that is a very unusual thing for a 21-year-old to do with no real background in law enforcement other than the fact that you were coordinating with them when you were traveling with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor.
00:26:34.000 That's strange.
00:26:35.000 You would write a paper and then that paper would actually be taken seriously.
00:26:39.000 Yeah, it was.
00:26:40.000 Nobody thought I wrote it, but it was.
00:26:42.000 At the time, it was taken seriously.
00:26:44.000 And there wasn't a lot on the topic.
00:26:46.000 And most people who had experience in this field were cops.
00:26:51.000 And police departments have exactly zero training on public figure protection.
00:26:56.000 It's its own discipline and much more so now.
00:26:59.000 And I was just fascinated by it.
00:27:02.000 And I still am.
00:27:04.000 So you leave this in your early 20s and what do you do from then?
00:27:11.000 So the next thing that happened is friends and people that knew me would recommend me to others who were just becoming famous and say, you know, you ought to talk to this guy, Gavin D. Becker.
00:27:21.000 Maybe he has some advice for you.
00:27:23.000 And so a good friend of mine at the time was a kid named Sean Cassidy, and he became a big teen idol.
00:27:31.000 He was just my friend in high school.
00:27:32.000 And he went off.
00:27:34.000 He had an interesting experience, too, because he It was our, you know, high school buddy.
00:27:38.000 He was a couple of years younger than me.
00:27:39.000 We used to pick on him like crazy, keep him in the middle of the pool at a friend's house.
00:27:43.000 We wouldn't let him go to the edge until he was getting really tired because he was smaller than us and we were what I would call...
00:27:50.000 Bullies? 0.86
00:27:51.000 No, no.
00:27:51.000 I call it fun bullies.
00:27:52.000 But it's the same thing.
00:27:53.000 Yes, bullies. 0.77
00:27:54.000 And he went off to Germany.
00:27:57.000 And had an experience of being the Beatles.
00:27:59.000 We did not know it.
00:28:00.000 We didn't know. 1.00
00:28:01.000 You've got to come back and be in the pool again and be treated like shit again. 1.00
00:28:04.000 And ultimately, he did become a big teen idol in America. 0.99
00:28:08.000 And I was a natural person to give him advice and guide him through that circumstance.
00:28:14.000 He was like David Hasselhoff in that regard?
00:28:16.000 Like he would go to Germany and he'd be huge?
00:28:18.000 In the beginning.
00:28:19.000 But then he became huge all over the world.
00:28:21.000 But that was the first place he was famous?
00:28:22.000 It was, yeah.
00:28:23.000 And he became, you know, cover of People Magazine and big recording artist and all that stuff.
00:28:27.000 My sister was in love with him when I was a kid.
00:28:29.000 Yeah, a lot of sisters.
00:28:31.000 In fact, now as adults, we would go into a restaurant and he could tell if the person seating you was of a certain age, we're going to get a great table, right?
00:28:41.000 Some people would say, oh, you know, I was a big fan of your brother because his older brother David Cassidy was also famous.
00:28:48.000 And then other people would say, oh my God, you were on my bedroom wall all through childhood.
00:28:54.000 Of course, they're now 56 years old.
00:28:55.000 Is he still alive?
00:28:56.000 Sean is?
00:28:57.000 Sean, oh yeah.
00:28:58.000 David's not.
00:28:59.000 David's not, but Sean is alive, a big TV producer and a TV writer, smart guy.
00:29:05.000 But anyway, so then I had an experience with him.
00:29:07.000 Then he referred me to somebody else.
00:29:09.000 Then comes a whole series of clients, and this company began to be formed.
00:29:15.000 In 1980, a dear friend of mine, Morgan Mason, still a dear friend, went to work for Ronald Reagan.
00:29:24.000 Speaking of controversial and unpopular, that was like going to work for Trump out in Hollywood.
00:29:29.000 You know, Ronald Reagan was the worst thing in the world.
00:29:31.000 He'd been governor of California.
00:29:33.000 And so he went to work for Ronald Reagan and guess what happened?
00:29:36.000 Reagan became president when everybody said, you're wasting your time and he'll never become president.
00:29:40.000 And he called me and gave me a job.
00:29:44.000 I was now, I probably was 26, and he gave me a job as a director of special services group for the president's inaugural.
00:29:51.000 And this president, because he'd been in show business, had all kinds of people coming, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Johnny Carson, etc.
00:29:57.000 And right at the beginning of my getting there, John Lennon was assassinated.
00:30:03.000 And the Lennons had also hired me to do work for them if they went on tour.
00:30:08.000 And they were deciding whether to go on tour based on the success of his last record album called Double Fantasy.
00:30:15.000 And they decided...
00:30:18.000 Not to go on tour.
00:30:19.000 I never met them at that time.
00:30:21.000 I did meet her later.
00:30:24.000 So I went up to New York and we had a bunch of meetings after he was assassinated.
00:30:32.000 Sad memories.
00:30:34.000 And interestingly, I learned later that I was at Blair House.
00:30:37.000 I was now working for Reagan.
00:30:39.000 We're now working for President-elect Reagan.
00:30:41.000 As director of special services group.
00:30:43.000 And I was at Blair House in the morning where the president-elect was staying and then I flew to New York for this meeting after John Lennon was killed.
00:30:51.000 And I later learned that John Hinckley made the same trip the same day and flew back on the same trip the same day.
00:30:58.000 He also went and stood outside the Dakota building where John Lennon was killed in getting up his courage to eventually shoot President Reagan.
00:31:07.000 And he shot him a few months later.
00:31:10.000 So then Reagan became president and he was the oldest president at that time.
00:31:14.000 Not anymore, but he was the oldest president at that time.
00:31:17.000 And he appointed me as the youngest appointee ever at Department of Justice on the president's advisory board.
00:31:23.000 So I'm kind of giving you the process of how this particular life happened.
00:31:28.000 And I remember, you know, being on that advisory board and there was the Supreme Court Justice, Chief Justice from Arizona was on the board with me and a Supreme Court Justice from California and the Sheriff of San Diego County.
00:31:42.000 And this kid, you know, we're sitting at the table at our first meeting.
00:31:46.000 And as an icebreaker, I said, well, has anybody here ever been arrested?
00:31:50.000 Knowing that, of course, none of these people would have been arrested.
00:31:52.000 And every single one of them had a story about being arrested.
00:31:56.000 We went around the table.
00:31:57.000 I had mine.
00:31:58.000 They had theirs.
00:31:59.000 You know, it would be I was standing in line with my, you know, 20-year-old son and the guy behind me said such and such.
00:32:05.000 And my son took a swing at him and I took a swing at him and we all went to jail.
00:32:09.000 Or it would be, I was in college and my girlfriend called the police because I took the record collection and I got arrested.
00:32:15.000 Every single one of them, Supreme Court justices, chiefs of police, head of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, all of them had a story of being arrested.
00:32:22.000 And my asking that question It was an icebreaker that, you know, that made our relationship work. 0.99
00:32:31.000 Suddenly this 26-year-old kid in the room who doesn't know shit about shit was actually kind of interesting. 0.97
00:32:36.000 And so that led to some Big research projects that I got done, the biggest one being on assessment of threats to public figures that I worked on for five years. 0.99
00:32:51.000 And that was published and became a big deal, again, in law enforcement.
00:32:55.000 And it led to all kinds of things.
00:32:57.000 And then I got appointed to something by George Bush also, not the younger, but the older George Bush.
00:33:02.000 So it essentially started out as almost like a word of mouth, and then you just start working for people, your reputation grows, and then you do more and more research, you get more and more involved in it.
00:33:12.000 Did you also find that there was a lack of understanding of what was necessary to protect people?
00:33:19.000 When you're talking about your beginner's mindset, were there people that were doing it incorrectly?
00:33:24.000 What flaws did you find?
00:33:27.000 I think the biggest—yes is the answer, and it's a good question because it was a—you know, in those days when John Lennon was assassinated, there then came a few in a row, and they tend to group all kinds of— We're good to go.
00:33:51.000 We're good to go.
00:34:04.000 Maybe later.
00:34:05.000 But on your question, I think the biggest mistake that people were making in public figure protection was the belief that threats, a direct death threat, I'm going to kill you, was the most important communication that could be assessed in advance.
00:34:19.000 And that was simply not true.
00:34:21.000 What I learned through research and then later wrote about Is that of every public figure attack you've ever heard of, of every one you've ever known where a public figure was killed, not any of them were threatened directly by the person who killed them in advance.
00:34:35.000 And likewise, none of the people who made a direct threat to a public figure later shot that public figure.
00:34:43.000 So when I started, everybody was very, you know, responsive to a direct threat.
00:34:49.000 It's a death threat. 0.88
00:34:50.000 He says he's going to kill me.
00:34:51.000 And I learned that other kinds of communications were far more indicative of who will show up.
00:34:57.000 And I learned that the art, and still today, the art and craft of what I do and what my company does...
00:35:03.000 Is try to avoid unplanned encounters, unwanted encounters.
00:35:06.000 Because if you avoid all the unwanted encounters, you're also avoiding the dangerous ones.
00:35:11.000 And you can be sure that nobody who travels a thousand miles to get a meeting with you or waits outside your house, if you're a famous person, is going to hand you a check for a million dollars.
00:35:20.000 That's not what they're coming for.
00:35:21.000 It's always something for them.
00:35:23.000 And it's always something inappropriate because millions of people write fan letters or emails or are admirers of a recording artist or a politician or whatever, but very few, statistically speaking, make what we call targeted travel.
00:35:40.000 You know, figure out where somebody lives or where they work and travels to see them.
00:35:44.000 So my approach was different from others, which was to try to detect as early as possible those individuals who might pursue encounters.
00:35:53.000 And from that to where we are now, we now have the largest library in the world of threat material directed to public figures.
00:36:00.000 I think it's about 600,000 pieces of communication.
00:36:03.000 People who send blood, people who send bullets, people who send body parts.
00:36:06.000 They send blood?
00:36:07.000 Body parts?
00:36:08.000 Yeah, we've had everything.
00:36:09.000 What kind of body parts?
00:36:10.000 We've had a finger.
00:36:12.000 Their own finger or somebody else's?
00:36:14.000 Their own.
00:36:15.000 We've had explosives.
00:36:17.000 We've had facsimile bombs, blood, hair, skin.
00:36:21.000 So someone cut their own finger off to send it to a celebrity?
00:36:24.000 Yeah.
00:36:25.000 Can you say who they did it to?
00:36:27.000 No.
00:36:28.000 But, I mean, our whole podcast would be talking about weird things people have sent to public figures.
00:36:34.000 What was the message with the finger?
00:36:36.000 I'll give you another one that I remember the message for, which is somebody sent an animal they had killed and said, I killed this because it was beautiful like you.
00:36:45.000 Oh, Jesus.
00:36:46.000 So there's no direct threat there, but clearly somebody has that much emotional investment.
00:36:52.000 It's a serious topic.
00:36:53.000 And so that is probably the biggest change I made in my contribution was that direct threats were not the most important pre-incident indicator.
00:37:04.000 Trevor Burrus And before that, they were considered?
00:37:07.000 Ben Wattenberg They were.
00:37:07.000 If you went to cops when I was starting and you said, look, we've got this person and he's written 10,000 letters to one public figure.
00:37:14.000 He goes every single day to the mailbox to check and see if she's responded. 0.97
00:37:19.000 He's mentally ill. 0.99
00:37:20.000 He's lost his job and we're concerned about him. 0.99
00:37:24.000 Cops would say, well, did he make a threat?
00:37:26.000 It is a threat.
00:37:28.000 The circumstance includes hazard.
00:37:30.000 But in those days, they responded only to threats.
00:37:34.000 And now we've made a lot of progress in that, that there are other kinds of communications that are pre-incident indicators.
00:37:40.000 I just want to give you and your listeners this little acronym, which is PIN, pre-incident indicators.
00:37:49.000 So before everything that ever happens, there are PINs.
00:37:52.000 And so one of the things in my work and in my book and in the masterclass that I've done, what we're trying to teach people about is what are the early pre-incident indicators of people in your life who turn violent or people who aren't yet in your life who turn violent.
00:38:06.000 In other words, can we predict violence in advance?
00:38:09.000 And the answer is we can.
00:38:11.000 And so you go from this to, I mean, I don't want to make this big leap into the Jeff Bezos thing, but it's very fascinating to me.
00:38:21.000 You were involved in finding out how Jeff Bezos' phone got hacked, and you were involved in connecting it to the Saudis and that whole thing. 0.99
00:38:32.000 How did this all come about?
00:38:34.000 Well, I have promised – I wrote one op-ed for the Daily Beast about this.
00:38:41.000 And in that op-ed at the end, I say I'll never say another word on this case because I'm turning it over to the federal government.
00:38:46.000 Now it's a few years ago.
00:38:47.000 So what I can share is only that which has been public and a lot wasn't public.
00:38:53.000 But – The circumstance did involve MBS, who's the prince of Saudi Arabia.
00:39:02.000 And he did send a text with a video to Jeff Bezos.
00:39:08.000 They knew each other.
00:39:08.000 They had met.
00:39:09.000 They had exchanged phone numbers.
00:39:10.000 And embedded in that video was a video.
00:39:14.000 It's a system that downloaded something that then later connects to a website and downloads something more sinister like Pegasus 2, which is a system that governments around the world use to get into your phone and then they have full control of your phone.
00:39:32.000 So it doesn't immediately connect to it?
00:39:34.000 No.
00:39:34.000 It doesn't download immediately because it's a bigger package.
00:39:37.000 What you're getting in your first incursion into a phone Or laptop or iPad or whatever.
00:39:44.000 You're getting a very small file, a little executable file that then later reaches out via the internet.
00:39:51.000 And that executable file could be a website.
00:39:54.000 It could be...
00:39:54.000 And does it exist only on the physical phone itself?
00:39:57.000 Or is it in the operating system?
00:40:00.000 And if you change phones and, like, upload to the cloud and then re-upload or re-download on a new phone, does that...
00:40:10.000 Does that spy software make it onto your phone again?
00:40:13.000 Probably not, but we don't know completely.
00:40:15.000 Whether it does or it doesn't, when a government wants you, like the US government or Saudi or...
00:40:21.000 Basically, there are two kinds of countries in the world when it comes to incursions into smartphones.
00:40:28.000 There are original developers, the United States, China, Soviet Union and Israel.
00:40:34.000 So there are original developers of programs that do these things.
00:40:37.000 And then there are the purchasing countries, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and all 190 other countries.
00:40:44.000 By the way, I say 190. Do you know there isn't even a consensus about the number of countries in the world?
00:40:49.000 Countries can't even agree on that.
00:40:50.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Is that because of like Taiwan?
00:40:52.000 Trevor Burrus, Jr.: Taiwan is a good example.
00:40:53.000 Yeah.
00:40:57.000 The best way I can put it to you is that if a government wants you from an informational point of view, wants to get into your phone, they have you.
00:41:06.000 These systems are extraordinarily robust, powerful, as I learned more and more about them.
00:41:12.000 It's not actually my area of expertise, cybersecurity, but as I had to learn more about it for myself and for clients, when the Saudis wanted to get into a phone, they could. 0.93
00:41:22.000 What if you're communicating, rather, only through direct encryption devices or applications, rather, like Signal?
00:41:30.000 Yeah.
00:41:31.000 It's a very good question.
00:41:32.000 So Signal encrypts the package going back and forth between the two devices over the Internet.
00:41:39.000 So if you have interception between device A and device B, It'll be encrypted.
00:41:45.000 But that's not what happens with things like Pegasus 2. Pegasus 2 is a very high-end system, and it's in your phone, just like you're in your phone.
00:41:55.000 Everything you can do on your phone, I can do from 7,000 miles away in some Saudi government office.
00:42:01.000 And so Signal doesn't help you with that.
00:42:03.000 I do think, however...
00:42:05.000 By the way, Signal is a foundation.
00:42:07.000 It's not a for-profit company, so I'm glad to promote it.
00:42:11.000 I do think they have something very valuable on Signal, and that is disappearing messages, which is if you and I were exchanging Signal communications, we could set, in one week, make all this disappear.
00:42:20.000 In one hour, make all this disappear.
00:42:22.000 Up to four weeks.
00:42:23.000 That's very valuable, because otherwise, our text messages...
00:42:26.000 Look, I was tasked to do this for myself when the Saudi thing started, which is I have to think about everything that's on my phone. 0.98
00:42:34.000 Holy shit. 0.87
00:42:35.000 Every communication I had for years, every text I sent, every photo, every argument, every joke that would be taken out of context, it's a very hard thing to do because we're like a mind. 0.98
00:42:48.000 We're collecting all of this data in the phone.
00:42:51.000 And so Signal is valuable.
00:42:52.000 I think Signal is a good service.
00:42:55.000 But it doesn't solve the problem if a government wants you.
00:42:57.000 If a government wants information, they can get it through programs like Pegasus 2. Right.
00:43:04.000 Well, how does Pegasus 2 get on your phone?
00:43:07.000 Well, different ways.
00:43:08.000 It is a no-click incursion, meaning you don't have to click on anything.
00:43:14.000 Typically, you would get a text, and you would open that text, and that would download the little executable file.
00:43:20.000 Or you would watch a video, and it would be in the video.
00:43:23.000 But now, the newest Pegasus systems, they don't even need you to do anything.
00:43:29.000 They can send you a message on WhatsApp, and even if you delete it, even if you never open it, they can get in your phone.
00:43:35.000 But what if you don't use WhatsApp?
00:43:37.000 It's a help, by the way.
00:43:38.000 I don't recommend WhatsApp.
00:43:40.000 Why is that?
00:43:44.000 For some reasons that I don't want to share and for some reasons that I do want to share, WhatsApp has had a particularly vulnerable circumstance with regard to people getting into other people's phones.
00:43:57.000 Now, having said that, there are thousands of people right now all over the world working on nothing but getting into the new iPhone operating system.
00:44:05.000 And then there's thousands of people at Apple working on nothing but Being sure that the new operating system is impenetrable.
00:44:11.000 And this just is an arms race that's going to go on forever.
00:44:16.000 So you were saying that if you get a message through WhatsApp, but what if you don't get a message through WhatsApp?
00:44:22.000 Is that executable if just a blank text message comes your way and you don't open it?
00:44:27.000 Less than that, unfortunately.
00:44:28.000 You can get nothing at all with Pegasus 2. You can get nothing at all.
00:44:32.000 They can enter a telephone number and they can get into your phone.
00:44:35.000 Nothing at all?
00:44:36.000 No text messages?
00:44:37.000 So you have no idea whatsoever?
00:44:39.000 That's correct.
00:44:39.000 And that's a problem with, you know, zero-day exploits, which is you don't know what happened, and you go on for months and months and months not knowing that somebody's in your phone is a problem.
00:44:49.000 And how do you find out if someone's in your phone?
00:44:51.000 Well, it depends on the circumstance.
00:44:53.000 In the case you described, I was notified originally by somebody in CIA, then notified eight times by the FBI. about the information they had learned and then we began to do you know work on the phone itself and you learn about it in those ways which is very difficult by the way because Pegasus 2 I feel like I'm giving a commercial for Pegasus 2 but most people can't buy it anyway but Pegasus
00:45:23.000 2 is not sitting in an armchair waiting for you to arrive.
00:45:27.000 Hey I'm over here.
00:45:28.000 It is extremely well hidden Right down at the very core levels of a phone or an iPad.
00:45:37.000 But there are strategies for finding it, and they're challenging and they're evolving all the time.
00:45:44.000 There are whole organizations like Citizen Lab and a really great expert, Anthony Ferrante, who used to work for Obama at the White House on this kind of stuff.
00:45:54.000 He's now in private practice.
00:45:56.000 They've had a lot of success.
00:45:58.000 They even have found...
00:46:01.000 Pegasus 2 in the wild, meaning before there was a reason to be suspicious, they've identified it.
00:46:06.000 And it's a tricky game because let's say you were targeted by the Mexican government, which happened a lot to people.
00:46:14.000 And you have it on your phone and you think you are being monitored in some way, so you get rid of your phone.
00:46:21.000 You turn it off, you put it in the top drawer.
00:46:24.000 Well, Pegasus will say, hey, this activity has just stopped.
00:46:27.000 Self-delete.
00:46:29.000 It'll self-destruct.
00:46:30.000 So now you don't even have any evidence that it ever happened, even if you could get an FBI involved in it.
00:46:35.000 So Pegasus sends a signal to the person that's using the spyware to tell you that that phone is not active any longer?
00:46:42.000 Well, they know.
00:46:43.000 They see immediately, hey, Joe isn't texting his friends anymore.
00:46:47.000 So they know that right away.
00:46:48.000 So they execute it independently?
00:46:50.000 Nope.
00:46:51.000 It can happen internally because what happens, remember when it's turned off or the battery is taken out or a wide variety of things can happen, That, you know, with a, quote, suspect phone, it will self-destruct on its own after a few days of no contact.
00:47:05.000 That's one of the things they market.
00:47:07.000 I got all their marketing material.
00:47:08.000 And at the time, you know, when we were really doing this investigation, we were getting a lot of content from around the world.
00:47:14.000 It is sold by a company called NSO. Which is in Israel, based in Israel.
00:47:20.000 And it's a very dark game all over the world, involving governments and other powerful people.
00:47:27.000 And most people say, well, what do I care?
00:47:30.000 Nobody wants to get into my phone.
00:47:32.000 And they're right.
00:47:33.000 But if you are a person who is subject to the interest of government anywhere in the world, it's very hard to have privacy.
00:47:43.000 So if you don't get a message through WhatsApp, what are the other vulnerabilities?
00:47:48.000 Like, could you get a message through Twitter?
00:47:49.000 Can you get a message through Instagram?
00:47:52.000 Yes, you could get a regular text.
00:47:53.000 A regular text.
00:47:54.000 Pegasus 1, which did require that the user click on something, but Pegasus 2 is a no-click exploit.
00:48:01.000 Nothing has to happen.
00:48:03.000 So someone can just send you a text, you don't even have to open it?
00:48:07.000 Not even send, less than that.
00:48:08.000 What I'm saying is that the high-end Pegasus system that's used by Saudi Arabia and other countries, all they need to do is have your phone number.
00:48:16.000 That's it.
00:48:17.000 Nothing more.
00:48:17.000 So they have your phone number, they have access to all your photographs, your messages, everything you send.
00:48:23.000 Turn on your phone as a microphone right now in this room.
00:48:26.000 Turn on your phone as a camera right now.
00:48:28.000 And even, it's so smart.
00:48:30.000 Let's say it makes an audio recording of a phone call.
00:48:34.000 And it doesn't download it right now.
00:48:36.000 It waits until the phone is quiet and it's, you know, late night in the target destination, like in your home.
00:48:42.000 It's late night.
00:48:43.000 And then it downloads it at night so that you don't even see a reduction in performance, right?
00:48:47.000 And then people who are sort of watching the cost don't see spikes of all kinds of activity.
00:48:53.000 In the case you talked about, gigabytes of data was taken out of that phone.
00:48:59.000 Gigabytes?
00:48:59.000 Yeah.
00:49:00.000 How many gigabytes are on a phone?
00:49:02.000 No idea.
00:49:03.000 Don't know.
00:49:04.000 So anyway, yeah, the short punchline on this is that there's a lot of products being sold that do the best they can, but depending on who wants you, there really is no way, you know, if the Central Intelligence Agency wants to get into somebody's phone overseas,
00:49:20.000 they can do it.
00:49:21.000 Now, is there a difference between operating systems?
00:49:24.000 Like, is there more of a vulnerability to Android than there is to iPhone?
00:49:28.000 I hear, again, not an expert, but I hear that there's more vulnerability to iPhone, but that might be because they are the ones that are targeted most often and that thousands of people are working on all the time.
00:49:40.000 Yeah, that was my question.
00:49:41.000 What about one of those de-Googled Android phones that are becoming more...
00:49:48.000 Probably better, but I don't know.
00:49:50.000 You don't know.
00:49:51.000 Because there's a lot of people that are swearing by those now that have moved to these operating systems that have been manipulated to the point where they don't send information, you can't get tracked, GPS doesn't work, all that stuff.
00:50:04.000 Yeah, it's good to have the lowest number of apps you can have on a phone, the better if you're talking about just using it for phone calls.
00:50:11.000 The challenge I have, because I get, you can imagine, every product is brought to me, Usually given to me for free to try, hoping that clients will want it or that my company will want it.
00:50:20.000 I see everything.
00:50:21.000 But the challenge is it's a moving target.
00:50:24.000 So if somebody says today, oh, we've got something great for such and such, two weeks later, people have been able – adversaries have been able to work on it and it's an arms race.
00:50:34.000 And so it's sort of like saying, hey, I got this great new thing, you know, a catapult and I can throw fiery bombs over the wall of a castle.
00:50:41.000 That's not so interesting anymore now that we have tanks.
00:50:43.000 These things continue to evolve.
00:50:47.000 Do you anticipate there ever being a time where they can circumvent that and there will no longer be exploits like that?
00:50:54.000 Or is this just a new reality that people have to live with?
00:50:58.000 I anticipated going in the other direction, which is that it becomes far more accessible for far more people and that anything we do, you know, online is subject to being intercepted and seen more and more.
00:51:13.000 You know, a lot of people, like I have clients who could be targeted by China, could be targeted by Russia, could be targeted by France, could be targeted by the United States, by other companies, by powerful adversaries.
00:51:23.000 And they often say, well, I just treat every communication as if it could be heard.
00:51:29.000 But the reality is that as human beings on a phone call, we are unguarded, right?
00:51:34.000 You don't want to have a phone call with me or a conversation that's completely guarded, where I'm like this all the time.
00:51:39.000 And so the reality is that this is going to be a vulnerability in people's lives, period.
00:51:45.000 And it's going to expand.
00:51:47.000 Expand, sure.
00:51:48.000 And do you think it's going to expand to the point where regular people have access to everyone else's phone and all their data?
00:51:55.000 I think it will expand to where motivated people and not governments could get access to other people's data.
00:52:00.000 And, you know, there are even laws, some in the UK, where Why should people be able to have a secret encrypted communication?
00:52:08.000 What are they trying to hide?
00:52:10.000 Government is challenged by it, right?
00:52:12.000 Yeah, I've seen those.
00:52:12.000 People in power are challenged by that stuff.
00:52:14.000 And so, well, because we might want to have a communication that the government isn't part of.
00:52:19.000 That would be the reason.
00:52:20.000 But people in power don't like it.
00:52:22.000 And so slowly it will erode that way as well. 0.99
00:52:24.000 Well, those are some of the dumbest arguments ever. 0.97
00:52:26.000 Like, why would you want encrypted communication? 0.96
00:52:29.000 And after January 6th in particular, there was a lot of talk of the dangers of encrypted peer-to-peer messages and applications, which I thought was hilarious.
00:52:41.000 Yeah.
00:52:42.000 Just because there's a few nuts that stormed the Capitol, you want to have all encrypted messages illegal or encrypted messages apps?
00:52:53.000 You think they're a problem because a tiny fraction of the people that use it are up to nefarious actions?
00:53:00.000 Yeah.
00:53:01.000 Well, it's a goofy—you know, the government equation throughout human history is always to protect its power as much as possible.
00:53:10.000 And the absolute wet dream of every government on Earth is the Internet and the way we engage with it, right?
00:53:16.000 I mean, if you read 1984— Still a fantastic book, by the way.
00:53:21.000 Interesting thing, it's 70 years old, that book.
00:53:24.000 And year before last, 2020, it was the 17th best-selling book in the country.
00:53:30.000 It was a top 20 best-selling book.
00:53:32.000 Wow.
00:53:33.000 Isn't that encouraging, though, about people having their head screwed on right?
00:53:36.000 In other words, that they were aware that some of what they're seeing is not just pandemic or is not just politics.
00:53:42.000 It is also a Why was MBS trying to get into Jeff Bezos' phone?
00:54:07.000 Hard always to predict what someone else – what's going on in their heads.
00:54:10.000 I can just tell you the circumstances at the time included that the Saudi government was negotiating a multibillion-dollar deal with Amazon.
00:54:21.000 And so – That's one.
00:54:24.000 I think the far more likely one is that Jeff was the owner of the Washington Post and the Washington Post was employing Jamal Khashoggi and he was just really ramping up his communications that were making MBS crazy.
00:54:39.000 We had sources inside the The Royal Palace and the family, and who said that MBS's first thing every morning was to open the Washington Post website and look at what was in there.
00:54:50.000 He was very stressed by it, and as you may have heard, he became so stressed that he, you know, ordered the killing of Khashoggi.
00:54:57.000 Yeah, I follow that very closely and I had Brian Fogel on when he was promoting The Dissident.
00:55:05.000 And that documentary is terrifying.
00:55:08.000 And the response by the world, the world stage, is terrifying too because they kind of just waited to see how much outrage was out there and then sort of accepted the fact that this head of state Killed a journalist and had him dismembered in a consulate.
00:55:28.000 I mean, the whole story is beyond crazy.
00:55:31.000 I mean, flew a hit team with a coroner amongst them.
00:55:37.000 I mean, there's audio recordings apparently.
00:55:39.000 Yes, there are, yeah.
00:55:40.000 So I worked on that case a lot and know Brian well.
00:55:44.000 And it's good that you mentioned The Dissident because it's a fantastic documentary.
00:55:49.000 And it, too, got canceled in every way possible.
00:55:51.000 Yes.
00:55:52.000 And so it became very difficult to see.
00:55:54.000 I'm sure you can see it now.
00:55:55.000 Well, no, it's not difficult to see.
00:55:56.000 It became difficult to promote.
00:55:57.000 That's what I mean.
00:55:58.000 Well, I promoted it.
00:55:59.000 I think he had a really hard time finding streaming services to accept it.
00:56:04.000 That's what I thought was fascinating, that even Jeff Bezos, who had been victimized, By this intrusion on his privacy, he wasn't willing to have it stream on Amazon Prime.
00:56:15.000 You could buy it, and you could buy it on iTunes, but the amount of people that would buy something versus the amount of people that would stream something for free on Netflix, it's a big difference.
00:56:26.000 And he was just coming off of this Icarus documentary, which was award-winning.
00:56:31.000 It was a huge hit for Netflix.
00:56:33.000 And he felt like Netflix was just going to welcome him with open arms for his next project because obviously the guy's super talented.
00:56:40.000 And they were like, uh-uh, not interested.
00:56:43.000 That's how powerful that guy is.
00:56:44.000 Yeah, that's how powerful people are in general.
00:56:48.000 And Brian Fogel won an Academy Award for Netflix, their first one, for Icarus.
00:56:55.000 And I agree.
00:56:56.000 I thought right alongside him, of course Netflix will want this.
00:57:00.000 This is a hell of a documentary.
00:57:01.000 This is incredible.
00:57:02.000 I mean, you've seen it.
00:57:03.000 It's got amazing information and amazing insight.
00:57:05.000 But that is where we are.
00:57:08.000 You might have heard about this.
00:57:09.000 We are in a cancellation case.
00:57:12.000 I heard about that.
00:57:13.000 You did, I thought so.
00:57:14.000 So you are paying attention to what's going on.
00:57:16.000 Yeah, it's going on.
00:57:17.000 It's going around with the flu.
00:57:18.000 Yep.
00:57:19.000 And so that is a, you know, the use of the word dangerous, for example, when you said, you know, it's dangerous for people to be able to communicate encrypted end-to-end encryption.
00:57:32.000 Any time that word is floated, that something is dangerous, what you want to hear that as is it's dangerous to government.
00:57:40.000 That's who it's dangerous to.
00:57:41.000 Governments have been in this game of using fear to control human behavior and to control their own populations throughout history.
00:57:50.000 There's never been anything else.
00:57:51.000 And so when we see any time a government wants us to fear something, it's very important to Ask yourself and really learn about what that thing is.
00:57:59.000 Is that thing worth fearing in the ways that the government is telling us?
00:58:03.000 Because government wins from A frightened population all the time. 0.56
00:58:06.000 And there's been examples of it.
00:58:08.000 You know, President Woodrow Wilson wanting to get support to get into World War I. He formed a virtual police state like something out of 1984 with people, you know, fired and people losing their careers and people being lynched and new sedition laws and all variety of things that if you weren't with us,
00:58:27.000 You're against us.
00:58:28.000 And it was pretty severe.
00:58:29.000 So it's happened before.
00:58:30.000 Yeah.
00:58:31.000 Post 9-11, of course.
00:58:32.000 And I just found an amazing one, by the way.
00:58:34.000 I want to tell you, because it's so amazing.
00:58:36.000 It's slightly off the topic of me.
00:58:38.000 But King Charles in the 1600s banned coffee houses.
00:58:43.000 In England.
00:58:44.000 Why?
00:58:45.000 Because coffee houses were places that people gathered together and talked and they'd be a little, you know, amped up because of the coffee and they'd be feeling good with each other.
00:58:54.000 And so he put out a proclamation.
00:58:57.000 I'm quoting it here.
00:58:58.000 Restrain the spreading of false news and licentious talking of matters of state and government.
00:59:04.000 And he said that this bold discourse that was going on, this is really worth it, that the public assumed to themselves a liberty, not only in coffee houses but in other places and meetings, both public and private, to censure and defame the proceedings of state by speaking evil of things they do not understand.
00:59:23.000 And causing jealousy and dissatisfaction in the minds of my subjects, the King's subjects.
00:59:28.000 But I want to give you one more piece of this.
00:59:30.000 The following year, he extends it to not just coffee houses, but any place that sells coffee or chocolate or tea.
00:59:36.000 And I'm not joking, by the way.
00:59:38.000 This is true.
00:59:38.000 And then the following year, he does another proclamation, and this one says, We'll be considered seditious, you know, going against the government.
00:59:51.000 Wow.
00:59:51.000 What year is this?
00:59:53.000 1655, 1672, 73, 74. So that's where fake news came from.
00:59:59.000 Yeah, no shit. 1.00
01:00:00.000 And that's right. 0.99
01:00:01.000 But interesting, why I wanted to share that with you is that here we are on... 0.96
01:00:07.000 You know, the Joe Rogan experience, which has had its share of shit flung at it for literally just having conversations. 0.63
01:00:14.000 Nothing more going on in here. 0.92
01:00:16.000 No collection of weapons or plans to overthrow the government.
01:00:19.000 And I always like to remind people that these things are not new.
01:00:24.000 They're human nature, meaning governments have done this always.
01:00:28.000 And every word I just read in that thing, it's amazing.
01:00:31.000 He wanted to ban coffee houses.
01:00:34.000 And now people want to ban end-to-end encryption or anything else that will allow for an actual open dialogue.
01:00:42.000 Well, there's people that are openly talking about amending the First Amendment, changing it and saying maybe we shouldn't have so much free speech.
01:00:49.000 Maybe free speech is a problem, which is crazy.
01:00:53.000 It's crazy that there's so many people that have a voice and have a say in matters and they're so short-sighted that that's one of the things that they would actually say.
01:01:03.000 Yeah.
01:01:04.000 I think it is – but it has existed before and I think it's important to remember that if you look at human history, it's almost all tyranny and the United States and Western Europe is a tiny sliver of the pie.
01:01:19.000 It's a tiny period in human history in which we grew up with freedom of speech and we grew up with these protections from the court and from the constitution.
01:01:31.000 But it's not some permanent state of affairs.
01:01:35.000 It definitely won't last forever.
01:01:36.000 And I say to people who want to change any amendment, want to make an amendment to the amendments in the Constitution, you almost don't have to because major media companies have done it anyway.
01:01:48.000 Major media companies, New York Times, CNN, etc., etc., something your listeners might not know about called the Trusted News Initiative that's run by BBC, which is a whole collection of major media companies from all over the world who decide together on how to handle certain stories.
01:02:06.000 And that's how you get, you know, 5,000 headlines that say Ivermectin is a horse paste.
01:02:14.000 Ivermectin Is an animal drug in the same way that antibiotics are an animal drug, meaning we have a shared biology with other animals and it can be given to all kinds of beings, but of course it's a people drug, won the Nobel Prize as a people drug,
01:02:31.000 given billions of times as a people drug.
01:02:33.000 But when you looked at what happened with you, You had a monolithic approach in media where everybody said the same thing.
01:02:41.000 Horse pace.
01:02:41.000 Horse pace.
01:02:42.000 And that's because of a monolithic approach in corporate media right now.
01:02:47.000 And so who's at the helm of that?
01:02:49.000 Well, the BBC Trusted News Initiative is certainly the most organized version that we're aware of.
01:02:55.000 But I think in any of these things like what we're experiencing for the last two years, people want to find a single villain.
01:03:03.000 You know, it's Klaus Schwab, it's Bill Gates, it's pharma companies, whatever it may be, because it's a simpler narrative.
01:03:08.000 And unfortunately, it's not a simple narrative.
01:03:11.000 What happens is this.
01:03:13.000 Many, many people have competing incentives to exploit a new thing. 0.98
01:03:18.000 So for example, when 9-11 happened and airplanes flown into buildings, there came up companies that reinforced the concrete on government buildings as if they could stop a fucking airliner. 0.99
01:03:29.000 Ridiculous. 0.99
01:03:30.000 But the government spent millions of dollars on it. 0.85
01:03:32.000 On reinforcing windows and reinforcing, you know, the outsides of buildings.
01:03:36.000 My point being that for in our current world, if you used to make perfume, now you make hand sanitizer.
01:03:44.000 If you used to make bumper stickers, now you make stickers that say, stand six feet apart, that are on the, you know, the floor of the supermarket.
01:03:51.000 If you used to make, you know, fabric scarves, now you make masks.
01:03:57.000 And so everybody is inclined by the momentum of commerce to jump on to anything that has everyone's attention.
01:04:07.000 In attention, there is money to be made in the area of attention.
01:04:12.000 So when governments of the world say – You know, there's a virus, and if you're over 60, it'll kill you.
01:04:18.000 That was the first, you know, that was the original information.
01:04:21.000 And when that gets etched on the tablet, it's very hard to change people's minds after that, even though we learned that it was far more, you know, you were far more vulnerable if you were older, if you were frail, if you were, I mean, look at Canada.
01:04:36.000 70% of the people who died in Canada whose deaths are attributed to COVID were nursing home residents.
01:04:43.000 Meaning, what do you go to a nursing home for, by the way?
01:04:46.000 You're dying.
01:04:46.000 That's it.
01:04:47.000 In Los Angeles County, the average stay in a nursing home, a Medicare nursing home is six months.
01:04:56.000 You have six months to live. 0.99
01:04:58.000 So when we learned, myself included, I heard about the pandemic and thought, oh, shit, over 60, you get it, you die. 0.99
01:05:05.000 So all kinds of cautions and care and concern. 0.98
01:05:08.000 Then I got that first report that came out of Italy, which showed that 94% of the people had 2.7 fatal comorbidities, meaning they already had other diseases that could kill them.
01:05:19.000 I didn't.
01:05:20.000 And they already were Elderly, I wasn't.
01:05:24.000 They were in many cases overweight, all variety of problems and the point being that it was highly age stratified.
01:05:30.000 This disease is highly age and health stratified.
01:05:34.000 And so young people, you know, a kid in college, You don't have a challenge from this disease.
01:05:41.000 Now, quickly, if Dr. Fauci were in my pocket right now, he would be climbing up here to yell at me, oh yeah, but we've got a lot of young people who were killed.
01:05:49.000 First of all, it's not a lot relative to anything.
01:05:52.000 And secondly, you know, people get killed in car accidents.
01:05:57.000 Life is a sexually transmitted, always fatal, communicable disease.
01:06:04.000 That is what life is, right?
01:06:06.000 It is a condition that is sexually transmitted, always fatal, and communicable.
01:06:10.000 We cannot eliminate all risk.
01:06:12.000 And government always pretends they can.
01:06:15.000 After 9-11, the color codes.
01:06:17.000 It's a red day.
01:06:19.000 It's a yellow day.
01:06:19.000 The UK is using the color codes in this pandemic.
01:06:23.000 And it looks like comedy when you see it.
01:06:25.000 You know, this is a yellow day.
01:06:26.000 And what do I do?
01:06:27.000 Duck?
01:06:28.000 Not breathe?
01:06:29.000 Stay under the kitchen counter?
01:06:30.000 What do I do with this information?
01:06:32.000 And then you see, how do people actually die?
01:06:35.000 Overweight, heart disease, diabetes, etc., etc., etc., etc.
01:06:39.000 And that was a little diatribe you just said.
01:06:41.000 So this trusted news network, like in the instance of COVID and in my recovery in particular, they concentrated on one thing, and that one thing was ivermectin.
01:06:54.000 And it was one of many things that I listed.
01:06:57.000 I listed Z-Pak. 1.00
01:06:59.000 I listed prednisone.
01:07:01.000 I listed monoclonal antibodies.
01:07:04.000 And I said also ivermectin.
01:07:05.000 I said IV vitamin drips and NAD as well, I think.
01:07:09.000 But all they concentrated on was ivermectin.
01:07:11.000 And then there was all these stories, like all over the world, about me taking horse dewormer.
01:07:17.000 And it was very specific.
01:07:19.000 It was horse dewormer.
01:07:20.000 Even though ivermectin, by the way, I found some stuff in my cabinet.
01:07:24.000 That was heartworm medication for my dog that was Ivermectin.
01:07:29.000 And I was like, wonder what's in this?
01:07:31.000 I was like, wonder if this is Ivermectin?
01:07:32.000 This is all after the fact. 0.98
01:07:33.000 And I was like, holy shit, this is Ivermectin too. 0.97
01:07:36.000 But they had come up with one narrative. 0.99
01:07:39.000 One narrative that they all stuck to.
01:07:41.000 And that was horse dewormer.
01:07:42.000 Why do you think that's the case?
01:07:44.000 Because why would they concentrate on only one aspect of this laundry list of medications that I took?
01:07:53.000 Well, in your case, you mentioned that one.
01:07:55.000 They did a similar hit job that was years in the making on hydroxychloroquine.
01:08:00.000 I say years in the making.
01:08:01.000 You know, for anybody who hasn't read Robert Kennedy's book called The Real Anthony Fauci, you can skip right to the last chapter and have your socks blown off in terms of things that are going on in the world.
01:08:12.000 3,200 citations, everything is very carefully researched and studied, and it's been the number one book in the country for— Silently.
01:08:21.000 Silently.
01:08:22.000 We're coming up on 25, 30 weeks now without a single review in the United States.
01:08:27.000 Now, when in our lives did that ever happen, that a book is the number one bestselling book in America and nobody reviews it?
01:08:32.000 So it goes to the same question you're asking, how you have a monolithic opinion.
01:08:36.000 That is foisted on the public, and it's why, Joe, this show has been so important, not because you give people advice or you give them some specific guidance and tell them what to do, but because you just give another,
01:08:52.000 you can hear another view.
01:08:53.000 Anytime you hear only the government view in world history, that's been bad news.
01:08:58.000 And when in world history was it the good guys who were censoring books?
01:09:03.000 That's just not the way it works.
01:09:04.000 But I want to go to your question specifically on ivermectin.
01:09:09.000 Any treatment for COVID-19 was a threat to the emergency use authorization and a threat to vaccines.
01:09:20.000 The reason being that the emergency use authorization is not available if there are treatments available.
01:09:27.000 So that's why they had to go nuts on hydroxychloroquine and why they had to go nuts on ivermectin.
01:09:32.000 Because if there was a viable treatment available to the public, then you do not get an emergency use authorization.
01:09:38.000 And what is the emergency use authorization?
01:09:40.000 The emergency use authorization allows you to go from step 1 to step 30 in 100 days.
01:09:47.000 Instead of 12 years, right?
01:09:49.000 Before you would inject something into somebody's body, it used to be that vaccines took 7, 8, 9, 10, and on the average 12 years to be approved by the FDA. This was 101 days.
01:10:00.000 And so ivermectin was a threat.
01:10:03.000 And if people knew it was a viable treatment, or any early treatment, by the way, I mean, how can you have a government health system that doesn't even bother to say to people, through a pandemic, take vitamin D? Take zinc.
01:10:17.000 You know, there are many experts who feel that this was a pandemic of low vitamin D, meaning that's an absolute epidemic in America.
01:10:26.000 You know, people don't go out, and what did the government do?
01:10:28.000 Stay home, don't go outside, watch television, eat everything you can possibly eat, and they don't say a word about your health.
01:10:35.000 And it's supposed to be public health, but it isn't public health anymore.
01:10:38.000 It's much more focused on specific I still haven't answered your question, though, which is how it happens.
01:10:46.000 It's this group of shared incentives.
01:10:48.000 So you have the pharma companies where the incentive is not small, right?
01:10:53.000 Pfizer, upwards of $60 billion already, just on this one consumer product, Moderna in the 30s.
01:11:01.000 These are enormous, enormous events, and it's the best business in the history of the world.
01:11:07.000 Because they have no liability.
01:11:09.000 They cannot get sued for any effect from these particular products.
01:11:13.000 And, you know, even 500 years ago, when you went into the town square and you bartered with somebody to, you know, buy something off him, if it turned out to be shitty, you could bring it back to him and say, hey, man, this thing you sold me isn't what you said it was.
01:11:26.000 And you could, you know, engage with him, not with pharma, right?
01:11:29.000 No matter what happens from these particular products, they cannot have liability.
01:11:35.000 But how do all these media outlets share this narrative?
01:11:39.000 Like, what is their incentive?
01:11:41.000 What's their incentive?
01:11:42.000 Well, I can't speak to or pretend to know every incentive, but I can look from the outside and see what we do know.
01:11:50.000 Every major news program is sponsored predominantly right now by Pfizer.
01:11:56.000 Literally Pfizer.
01:11:56.000 Not just a company or drug companies in general, but they've been pharma companies for a decade.
01:12:02.000 Meaning that's what, if you watch regular television and you see commercials, you're going to see pharma commercials.
01:12:07.000 All those commercials that, you know, tell you about the adverse effects, etc.
01:12:11.000 Do you think that there's a specific conversation that gives them this narrative or do you think that they know that their interest lies in keeping these pharmaceutical companies happy so that there's this sort of like understanding?
01:12:24.000 I think it's human nature.
01:12:25.000 I think you know it.
01:12:27.000 Now, can there also be conversations?
01:12:28.000 Sure.
01:12:29.000 There's a, you know, the former head of Fox who's died now, I forgot his name, Fox News.
01:12:34.000 He said to a good friend of mine, I will never put on, he was talking about a particular guest who was perceived as going to speak adversely about vaccines.
01:12:44.000 He said, I'll never put him on because Pfizer is our primary, you know, this is how we run this place is based on these sponsors.
01:12:51.000 So that is just an incentive.
01:12:53.000 Other incentives would be in the beginning, in the beginning of this pandemic, would be to get rid of Trump.
01:13:00.000 Meaning mainstream or corporate media had had enough.
01:13:05.000 They had whatever their philosophical beliefs were about Trump.
01:13:08.000 And so all bets were off.
01:13:11.000 A very interesting example was the New York Post story on Hunter Biden.
01:13:15.000 New York Post, oldest newspaper in America, started by Alexander Hamilton, for God's sake, runs this story about Hunter Biden's laptop.
01:13:24.000 And the Biden campaign, he hadn't won yet, floated the idea that it was all Russian disinformation.
01:13:32.000 And 50 former intelligence officers wrote a public letter saying it has the earmarks of Russian disinformation, meaning it looks like it could be Russian disinformation.
01:13:45.000 But the really bad thing that happened is Twitter would not allow you to share the story.
01:13:49.000 And Facebook would not allow you to share the link.
01:13:53.000 So the story was literally killed.
01:13:55.000 And guess what?
01:13:56.000 Two weeks ago, The New York Times has now come out and acknowledged that it wasn't Russian disinformation.
01:14:01.000 It is Hunter Biden's laptop.
01:14:04.000 By the way, I don't care about me.
01:14:06.000 I'm not a political person.
01:14:07.000 Don't care about Biden.
01:14:08.000 Don't care about Trump.
01:14:08.000 Don't care about Hunter Biden.
01:14:10.000 It's not interesting.
01:14:11.000 But what is very interesting and important to me is the control of information in terms of censorship.
01:14:16.000 And I didn't like it.
01:14:17.000 I didn't like it either.
01:14:18.000 Why do you think that they're admitting that it's real now?
01:14:24.000 Probably because indictments might be coming.
01:14:26.000 There might be some kind of charge arising out of an investigation or, you know, the New York Times has done this before.
01:14:33.000 Big media companies do it, which is eventually they say everything.
01:14:39.000 You can't believe it could possibly happen, but eventually there'll be an article saying these 70 studies about ivermectin might actually speak to some remote and possible efficacy for this drug.
01:14:55.000 Ivermectin is a drug.
01:14:57.000 Of a category of drug that Pfizer's new drug is of the same category.
01:15:01.000 Big surprise.
01:15:02.000 Protease inhibitors.
01:15:03.000 Exactly.
01:15:03.000 Well, it's also been shown to stop viral replication in vitro.
01:15:08.000 All the way back to 2012. And many, many studies around the world.
01:15:14.000 My point here, though, is I, you know, you asked earlier about my life.
01:15:20.000 In childhood, I think by not living a conventional life, I ask questions.
01:15:26.000 And I have a phrase in my company which is always, go 10 questions deep.
01:15:31.000 So you don't just say, oh, there's going to be guards at every post.
01:15:34.000 You say, well, what are they told to do?
01:15:37.000 What are their instructions?
01:15:39.000 What's their qualifications?
01:15:40.000 Are they standing together and talking?
01:15:42.000 Or are they divided?
01:15:43.000 You know, there's 10 questions to ask to get to the real information.
01:15:46.000 And it might be genetic.
01:15:49.000 It might be circumstance.
01:15:50.000 But some people, yourself included, are curious, right?
01:15:56.000 And you can – if you said something to me now that – I don't know if that's accurate.
01:15:59.000 I'm curious.
01:16:00.000 I want to look it up.
01:16:01.000 I want to see what I can learn about it.
01:16:03.000 But people are not that way, some people, with government proclamations.
01:16:08.000 And so it's considered – Everything, you know, fake news.
01:16:12.000 If you disagree with these particular public health officials, and an interesting thing to remember about, for example, the FDA, 25% of new pharmaceuticals are later recalled.
01:16:26.000 They're not perfect.
01:16:28.000 The FDA is not perfect.
01:16:29.000 They let things go out that later are found to be problematic, opioids being a big example.
01:16:35.000 Opioids for 11-year-old kids, which are current head of the FDA, who's been at the FDA before, and a consultant to 15 pharma companies in the interim, of course.
01:16:47.000 He presided over, you know, over All variety of opioid problems that have led to some of the biggest fines in American history, criminal fines against pharma companies, Johnson& Johnson, Pfizer.
01:17:01.000 And yet today we've decided, I have this fear.
01:17:05.000 Please let me put it somewhere.
01:17:07.000 Will you hold it for me, government?
01:17:08.000 Will you hold it for me, Pfizer?
01:17:09.000 You tell me I'm okay.
01:17:11.000 And like children, people have done that.
01:17:13.000 And I encourage people, ask questions.
01:17:16.000 That's a very good way of putting it.
01:17:18.000 The fact that people put their faith in It's an industry that's been the most deceiving, the most ruthless, the most willing to allow people to die for profit.
01:17:33.000 I mean, when you look at what they did with Vioxx, I had John Abramson on the podcast to talk about that because he worked with that case, and he's explaining how they knew that it was going to kill people.
01:17:48.000 They knew that it was going to have these sort of cardiorespiratory problems and blood clots and And the like, and it wound up killing someone in the neighborhood of 60,000 people.
01:17:57.000 And they were fined, but yet they're still in business.
01:18:01.000 These are the same companies that people are defending as somehow or another amazing because they've come up with this solution to what is this...
01:18:10.000 For many people, this existential crisis, this terrifying reality of a virus that is going to kill a certain amount of people no matter what you do.
01:18:21.000 And there's got to be some sort of a solution.
01:18:23.000 Then there's this one solution that gets presented.
01:18:25.000 And everybody who thinks of themselves as being a good person or wants other people to think that they're a good person Stops all questioning of this one group of companies that has been notoriously the most deceptive It's amazing.
01:18:42.000 It's amazing the willingness to just believe people that have been profit motivated and driven and Willing to do whatever the fuck it takes to get products to market Regardless of whether or not they're even effective or more effective than the current products that are available that are safe.
01:19:00.000 Yeah Well, I want to say since you mentioned Vioxx that the president's nominee and the current head of the FDA presided over the Vioxx disaster as well, and even went against an advisory board recommendation and approved Vioxx.
01:19:15.000 And so Vioxx leads to fines of more than a billion dollars, but he gets to be head of the FDA again.
01:19:21.000 When Abramson was on, one thing that he told me that blew me away, he said, when scientists do peer-reviewed work on whatever the pharmaceutical drug company is working on at the time, whether it's pain killers or anti-inflammatories, whatever it is, they don't get access to the data.
01:19:39.000 They get access to the interpretation of the data from the pharmaceutical companies. 0.94
01:19:44.000 And then they do their papers, which is fucking madness. 0.54
01:19:48.000 It is, and I think the public probably assumes that trials, like trials for a new pharmaceutical product, the material is studied by the government in some government lab. 0.95
01:20:02.000 But that's not what happens, of course.
01:20:04.000 These trials are run by the pharmaceutical companies using...
01:20:10.000 And so, going back to your original question about how you have a monolithic opinion, I think the corporate media in America, at the beginning, wanted to disadvantage Trump and advantage Biden.
01:20:26.000 And by the way, I'm all, you know, I get it.
01:20:28.000 I get that people have strong opinions about Trump or about Biden or about politics in general.
01:20:33.000 I think you can make a good argument that we'd be better off with a change and you can make a good argument that we'd be better off keeping Trump.
01:20:41.000 I mean, you can go around that stuff all you want.
01:20:44.000 What happened, though, is that they succeeded at, you know, in a very close election, they succeeded at Biden winning.
01:20:53.000 And that's not considered, of course, election tampering, not letting the public know about the Hunter Biden laptop, for example, which would be a big thing in a normal campaign, right?
01:21:03.000 The president's son, and he's got references to the president inside his emails, and he's working with other governments.
01:21:08.000 I mean, it would be a big...
01:21:09.000 It wouldn't be nothing.
01:21:11.000 Not just alleged child pornography.
01:21:13.000 All kinds of stuff.
01:21:14.000 So more to be learned.
01:21:16.000 But here's my point.
01:21:17.000 That...
01:21:19.000 Then it happened and there was success.
01:21:22.000 Biden won.
01:21:23.000 And I think that then the overall structure that accomplished that Now had a lot of power and simply did not stop using it.
01:21:33.000 Because the next one, you know, it started around vaccine disinformation.
01:21:38.000 That's how the Trusted News Initiative organized itself.
01:21:42.000 That we'll all find out what's true and we'll tell the public that that's bad information and this is good information.
01:21:48.000 But it then morphed to regular politics with the Hunter Biden thing.
01:21:52.000 And now I doubt it will be given up.
01:21:54.000 There are very few people in world history that give up power.
01:21:57.000 Never.
01:21:57.000 Yeah, it just doesn't happen.
01:21:59.000 And what's fascinating to me is that so many people are willing to pretend that this isn't happening.
01:22:08.000 They're willing to stick their head in the sand and think that all these other folks that are making a big deal out of this, they're Trumpers, or they're this, or they have these biases that don't allow them to see the truth.
01:22:21.000 And there's also a bunch of people that...
01:22:24.000 Bought into things early on and because they bought into it They have this established narrative in their head and they're not willing to say they were wrong They're not willing to say that they had an incorrect assumption or that they bought into the narrative Because the government was saying it and they were scared and they wanted to have some sort of a feeling of comfort and also Wanted to signal to all the people around them that they're doing their part that they're a good person Yeah.
01:22:49.000 I think that's all accurate and if you are a sports league, for example, and you have mandated that the young athletes get the vaccines and boosters for young athletes and then someone has myocarditis and collapses or dies,
01:23:07.000 The sports team does not want to say we were wrong, so they double down.
01:23:11.000 And we're seeing a lot of doubling down altogether.
01:23:13.000 And by the way, I think it's awesome that people have their opinions, whatever they are and however they got them.
01:23:20.000 What I strongly oppose is any effort to censor various views.
01:23:27.000 The idea that there is an okay Scientist to talk on your show and that there's another one that's not okay to talk on your show is itself a little bit alarming because, you know, your show in particular, these are conversations.
01:23:40.000 You don't like it, don't listen.
01:23:41.000 Well, not only that, it's which scientists are you talking about?
01:23:45.000 Like, you talking about very respected scientists that are some of the most published ever in their field?
01:23:52.000 Yeah. 0.99
01:23:52.000 Like, I mean, if you're talking about people that are quacks, that you can prove that they're full of shit, and they haven't worked in years, and they're just nuts, and they've got... 0.99
01:24:04.000 Schizophrenia. 1.00
01:24:05.000 Then you're talking about one thing.
01:24:07.000 But if you're talking about people that are amongst the most published doctors ever in their field, and you're saying there's something wrong with them because they've deviated from the narrative about one particular subject ever in their whole career, Now you're mad?
01:24:24.000 Are you sure?
01:24:26.000 How much do you believe in this?
01:24:29.000 We have a real problem in this country, too, with that there's only two countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise.
01:24:38.000 That's a problem.
01:24:40.000 There's New Zealand, which is apparently far more restrictive than America, and then there's America.
01:24:45.000 Everybody else thinks we're crazy.
01:24:47.000 Yeah.
01:24:48.000 Yeah, it would, you know, even when I was growing up, you would learn about medications from your doctor, who you hoped had, you know, got the best information.
01:24:56.000 And slowly, throughout my life, you now had people would come to the doctor's office with a nice briefcase and samples of the new pharmaceutical.
01:25:05.000 Usually a cute girl. 1.00
01:25:06.000 And she would meet with the doctor personally.
01:25:08.000 He'd look forward to that meeting.
01:25:09.000 And she'd say, oh, here's a bunch of samples you can give out to people.
01:25:12.000 And here's our paper on how good and safe it is and on and on and on.
01:25:16.000 And some of those drugs were thalidomide, meaning they weren't all perfect.
01:25:21.000 And the idea that we think that a product – this is the most successful product in world history, by the way.
01:25:28.000 This makes Coca-Cola look like nothing.
01:25:31.000 There is no other product in world history that billions of people have taken and that is going to be taken billions of times more as it comes into its fourth and fifth approved booster here in the United States.
01:25:44.000 So my problem with all of it is I don't even have to have a medical opinion.
01:25:49.000 I have to have an opinion that I want all the information.
01:25:53.000 Just imagine, you go to your doctor and he says, so let me tell you about this product.
01:25:58.000 And he says, I want to give you this piece of paper about the product.
01:26:01.000 And I said, what about the other papers you have over there?
01:26:03.000 He says, I don't want you to see those.
01:26:05.000 Beg your pardon?
01:26:06.000 I don't want to tell you that stuff.
01:26:07.000 What do you mean you don't want to tell me that stuff?
01:26:09.000 Informed consent is telling me the two sides of the issue, what's favorable about this product and what's unfavorable about this product, so that I can make a decision.
01:26:17.000 Well, informed consent, you know, went out the window here in these last two years.
01:26:20.000 And I think that the something that I care about is that people be allowed to have a dialogue and have access to information They can make their own decision on anything, but have access to information.
01:26:32.000 And I'm always stunned when people say, I don't want to see that guy, that interview.
01:26:37.000 You know, some interview you've had, for example.
01:26:38.000 I don't want to watch that guy.
01:26:40.000 What do you know about that guy that you're not watching?
01:26:42.000 What is it you know about that guy?
01:26:44.000 Well, I read that such and such.
01:26:46.000 Where?
01:26:46.000 What?
01:26:47.000 And you ask ten questions, and people fall off at about question number three.
01:26:51.000 It's just articles of faith.
01:26:53.000 It's like a religion.
01:26:55.000 And it's just a belief system.
01:26:57.000 I look for somebody to invest my confidence in.
01:27:00.000 Fauci looks like a good guy.
01:27:02.000 I'll do him.
01:27:03.000 Yeah, and it's not just a lack of information.
01:27:05.000 It's a withholding of pertinent information.
01:27:08.000 Like the CDC didn't want to release the data on the booster for ages 18 to 49. Well, that's right.
01:27:16.000 Now, let's go further than that.
01:27:17.000 They said it was going to contribute to vaccine hesitancy.
01:27:20.000 That's right. 0.99
01:27:20.000 Like, what the fuck are you even saying? 0.99
01:27:22.000 How would it be misinterpreted? 0.99
01:27:25.000 That's what they said.
01:27:26.000 What does that mean?
01:27:26.000 All the more reason for us to want to see it, of course.
01:27:29.000 But that's not your job.
01:27:31.000 The point is that that's not your job.
01:27:33.000 Your job is not to...
01:27:36.000 Your job is not to form a consensus opinion amongst the general public through the way you present things.
01:27:44.000 Your job is to give them the data and to allow the public health experts and the scientists to interpret that data in a way that makes the most sense to people.
01:27:54.000 Your job is not just to say, we're going to withhold this data because we personally don't feel that it's within the best interest to let people know the facts.
01:28:04.000 That's Crazy.
01:28:06.000 Yep.
01:28:06.000 And crazier is the way it's been accepted.
01:28:09.000 The FDA, for example, went to court to not release the Pfizer trials data that they had, the safety data.
01:28:17.000 They asked for 55 years to release it.
01:28:20.000 Then they lost an early one.
01:28:23.000 They went back to court and asked for 75 years to release it.
01:28:26.000 Now, every time I say that, I turn to you because every time I say that, I have to tell people, Google it.
01:28:30.000 Google, FDA, Pfizer, 75 years.
01:28:34.000 Because people don't believe it.
01:28:35.000 They don't believe that those guys stood in court and said, we want 75 years to release this data.
01:28:39.000 By the way, 400,000 pages.
01:28:42.000 Supposedly, that was read and fully absorbed by the FDA experts in 100 days.
01:28:47.000 That doesn't seem likely.
01:28:49.000 Doesn't seem likely, no.
01:28:51.000 And so, you know, this is – by the way, for me, it's just one subject among many where I encourage people – by the way, even my books.
01:29:01.000 My books are about personal responsibility.
01:29:03.000 You learn it.
01:29:04.000 Don't rely on the government.
01:29:05.000 Don't rely on the police.
01:29:06.000 Don't rely on the corporation to be sure the lighting in the parking lot is okay so now you're safe because they put lights up.
01:29:12.000 You learn about your own internal nuclear defense system.
01:29:17.000 And that – so my buttons get pushed around this topic because the misuse of fear causes extraordinary anxiety.
01:29:25.000 Look what it's done, you know, in the whole world throughout history but, you know, in recent times.
01:29:30.000 And I want to tell you an interesting thing.
01:29:31.000 I mentioned earlier that you have the world – you have world history and tyranny is the norm.
01:29:36.000 That is the default for world history and we're this tiny little sliver.
01:29:40.000 And it's quite an unusual experiment we're doing and have done in the Western – in Western Europe, the United States, Canada.
01:29:47.000 And to me, it's something really worth protecting.
01:29:50.000 Like you got to really, you know, no, no.
01:29:52.000 We said free speech.
01:29:53.000 We mean free speech.
01:29:54.000 Even if you got to listen to that guy on Joe Rogan who you don't want to hear, turn it off.
01:29:58.000 But we don't want him to be censored, for example.
01:30:00.000 And so what I've seen with fear being used just in my lifetime, it starts with fear of the other, the Russians. 0.97
01:30:09.000 Russia is a country.
01:30:11.000 And they're going to hurt us. 0.99
01:30:12.000 They're going to send nuclear bombs toward us. 0.63
01:30:14.000 Then it goes to communism. 0.56
01:30:16.000 Sorry.
01:30:17.000 Then it goes to communists.
01:30:18.000 They're people.
01:30:19.000 Then it goes to communism.
01:30:21.000 Now we're down to an idea.
01:30:22.000 And after 9-11, it goes to, you know, terrorists.
01:30:27.000 Then it goes to terrorism, a strategy.
01:30:29.000 Then it goes to, you know, you're either with us or against us.
01:30:33.000 And the point I'm making is that it gets smaller and smaller and smaller, right down to the smallest particulate matter ever, which is like talcum powder.
01:30:40.000 Much smaller, which is a virus.
01:30:42.000 And in all these things I just described to you, only government can tell you if you're in danger and only government can fix it.
01:30:49.000 They have that in common, right?
01:30:51.000 You couldn't even know whether you had COVID in the beginning for 18 months.
01:30:56.000 The tests were not allowed as a public product.
01:30:59.000 What do you mean?
01:31:00.000 You couldn't go buy tests in the beginning.
01:31:02.000 Well, I was using tests very early on.
01:31:04.000 Well, not the very beginning.
01:31:05.000 Very beginning, you were going...
01:31:06.000 No, we hired a service.
01:31:07.000 You were going and getting places.
01:31:08.000 Yes, people could do it as a service, but there was not a consumer product that you could go into the pharmacy and buy.
01:31:13.000 Oh, I see.
01:31:13.000 I see what you're saying.
01:31:14.000 That took a year and a half?
01:31:15.000 Yeah.
01:31:15.000 So government took...
01:31:16.000 14 months.
01:31:17.000 So government took responsibility to say, you've got it.
01:31:21.000 Now, it's a little bit like you live in a village...
01:31:24.000 500 years ago and there's the witch doctor.
01:31:26.000 But there were tests available.
01:31:27.000 You could go to centers and get tested.
01:31:29.000 Yes, but you could not have the consumer test.
01:31:31.000 You couldn't have it on your own in your home because I think they thought that people would do it incorrectly.
01:31:36.000 Well, okay, that's a generous thought.
01:31:38.000 But honestly, when you stop thinking about it, you're talking about something that is important.
01:31:43.000 When you're reporting the number of COVID cases, if someone's doing it incorrectly and they're getting a false negative, but then they actually do have COVID and they wander around and spread it because they incorrectly used a home test, like until they knew that it was...
01:31:58.000 I mean, that's a big piece of information.
01:31:59.000 If you're talking about a pandemic, especially early in the pandemic, where people were legitimately concerned that it was going to kill everybody.
01:32:06.000 I mean, in March of 2020, people were terrified of this.
01:32:09.000 If they had a test then and people misuse everything, So you're allowing the general public to take something and give them a false sense of security, and they could potentially use that false sense of security to bypass safety protocol and go out and spread this deadly virus.
01:32:26.000 That makes sense to me, that you would only be able to get tested in places where people are trained to do it correctly.
01:32:32.000 Okay, so why is it now available to everybody in the store?
01:32:36.000 Well, I think the concern about the virus is lessened because of vaccines and then because of previous infection and then because of education.
01:32:47.000 Enough people have understood now that your vulnerabilities increase because of obesity, your vulnerabilities increase because of vitamin deficiencies and all sorts of other factors that I think people have a more comfortable sense.
01:33:01.000 I mean, there's still a bunch of like Very paranoid people out there that are highly ridden with anxiety, that still wear double masks when they're walking around outside.
01:33:11.000 I see them every day.
01:33:12.000 But there's always been people in our culture that are overwhelmed by anxiety and overwhelmed by fear.
01:33:19.000 And those, you know, there's a spectrum, of course. 0.99
01:33:21.000 There's people that were maskless in the early days, like, fuck it, I don't care. 0.98
01:33:25.000 And then there's people who are, like, cautionary, but not sure how much risk is really, truly involved. 0.97
01:33:31.000 I think we kind of have, as a general base of fear and anxiety over the virus, it's greatly diminished.
01:33:37.000 And now, particularly because of Omicron.
01:33:40.000 Because of Omicron, I think most people who get it, and, you know, there's this weird narrative where people get it, and they're sick, but they go, thank God I'm vaccinated.
01:33:49.000 Because it was really mild.
01:33:50.000 You should go get vaccinated. 0.97
01:33:52.000 Well, I wasn't vaccinated and it was really fucking mild for me. 0.94
01:33:55.000 This is a mild virus. 0.95
01:33:57.000 You're just saying that because you want to justify the fact that you got vaccinated. 0.99
01:34:02.000 I think for the early version of the virus and for the Delta, vaccines helped a lot of fucking people. 0.94
01:34:07.000 I'm not anti-vaccine in any way, shape, or form, although it's been said that I am. 0.96
01:34:11.000 I'm not.
01:34:11.000 I encourage a lot of people to get vaccinated.
01:34:13.000 But I don't like bullshit. 0.95
01:34:15.000 I don't like false narratives. 0.99
01:34:17.000 And that's what's going on today.
01:34:20.000 You're seeing a lot of people that are saying things that don't necessarily make sense because it justifies their life choices or their choices.
01:34:28.000 When it comes down to testing, though, I think it's probably wise, especially in the early days, when we weren't exactly sure what's going on.
01:34:37.000 I mean, it's easy to look at it as a Monday morning quarterback and say they should have done this, but...
01:34:41.000 When you're looking at what people did in the early days, if you gave people home tests and they weren't good, or they weren't good at it and they did a shitty job, you would get a totally distorted idea of whether or not you were safe, and you probably would cost lives.
01:34:57.000 You probably would go to visit your mom when she was sick.
01:35:01.000 I hear your position on that.
01:35:03.000 I think the concern of government was a slightly different one, which is that if consumer tests were available, we could decide on our own, yeah, we will have that wedding.
01:35:12.000 Yeah, we will go to that funeral.
01:35:14.000 Yeah, we will test everybody.
01:35:15.000 I believe in testing, by the way.
01:35:16.000 I think it's great, people who are concerned about getting the virus.
01:35:19.000 But do you think that they would stop people from doing tests because they wanted to control people, they wanted to stop weddings, they wanted to stop gatherings, regardless of whether they were safe?
01:35:31.000 Well, of course they wanted to control people.
01:35:34.000 That's a given.
01:35:37.000 The motive is the issue.
01:35:39.000 Are you wanting to control people because it's in their own best interest to do so because they'll get sick less often?
01:35:45.000 Or are you wanting to control people because it's your default position and when you get it, you know, it's the greatest wet dream you ever had, what we saw with Mayors and governors and city officials of all kinds who sort of their inner bureaucrat came out or dictator came out.
01:36:02.000 So the question isn't whether they wanted to control people.
01:36:04.000 They wanted to control the numbers as well.
01:36:06.000 And so when you have tests that are only done by official sanctioned locations that report back the information, you have a far greater connection to the data, right?
01:36:18.000 If I just do it at home, that test isn't recorded somewhere.
01:36:21.000 Right.
01:36:21.000 Right.
01:36:21.000 So I do think that in all of the things I mentioned about governments and the narratives of fear that have been used, they all have an element of only the government can help you and only the government can tell you whether you've got it.
01:36:36.000 I agree with you, but I also think there's a real problem managing at scale.
01:36:40.000 You're managing millions and millions and millions of people.
01:36:44.000 To offer options when you're thinking about something that you really need to control, which is the spread of a deadly disease, To have options available for people which would create gray areas.
01:36:57.000 Look, if you're not reporting, if you just buy a home test and you decide whether or not it's accurate or inaccurate, you can get a home test and test positive for COVID and just fucking lie to people and say, yeah, I tested, I'm good.
01:37:11.000 If you go to a place and they tell you Whether or not, I mean, there's still an area of inaccuracy with all these tests, right?
01:37:19.000 They're not 100% accurate.
01:37:21.000 But if you go to a place and you get tested, at least they have an accurate recording, or at least they have an accurate recording of the test results.
01:37:30.000 Yes.
01:37:30.000 They don't know if their test results are accurate, but they do.
01:37:32.000 Well, we tested 100,000 people, and out of those people, you know, 2% of them were positive for COVID. So this is the local infection numbers.
01:37:41.000 Don't you think that that would be a valuable thing?
01:37:44.000 I think it was a valuable thing, and I don't argue that it's valuable.
01:37:47.000 I argue that government steps in when there are opportunities.
01:37:52.000 I think that's true.
01:38:01.000 That comes around a virus because it scares people.
01:38:05.000 I mean, everything you just said should apply equally to the flu.
01:38:09.000 Everything you just said.
01:38:10.000 It does.
01:38:11.000 And that's what scares me.
01:38:12.000 What scares me is the notion that people might start using these same sort of draconian measures of control with something that we've always just accepted as a part of everyday life.
01:38:23.000 Now, a lot of people have accepted COVID and they're encouraging people to accept COVID as endemic.
01:38:27.000 And this is just a part of life now.
01:38:30.000 Well, that's always been how we accepted the flu.
01:38:33.000 But I'm hearing a lot of talk of mandatory flu vaccines.
01:38:36.000 I'm hearing a lot of talk of mandating things.
01:38:39.000 And that makes me nervous, because I do know that there's a financial incentive.
01:38:43.000 Whenever there's any kind of financial incentive, and you do know that these financial incentives trickle down into media, which shapes narrative for the entire population.
01:38:53.000 Like, as a whole, we should be super fucking concerned about that.
01:38:58.000 I am. 0.79
01:39:00.000 It's one of the reasons I'm here.
01:39:01.000 I think that piece is it's not about the virus and it's not about the pandemic.
01:39:06.000 That is just the latest iteration of a time that can be used to empower government and reduce the power of the people.
01:39:14.000 And I give you a fast example.
01:39:16.000 If we had a community group of 100 people and we got together to do something in the community and we said, hey, let's have Bob and Susie Be in charge.
01:39:25.000 They'll be the administrators, right?
01:39:27.000 That's 2% of the people in our 100-person group.
01:39:30.000 And then Bob and Susie say, hey, everybody stay in their homes.
01:39:33.000 Don't come out.
01:39:35.000 Don't do this.
01:39:36.000 Don't do that.
01:39:37.000 And start giving us all variety of instructions.
01:39:40.000 In that little democracy that we had, this little 100-person democracy, we would say, we don't want 2% telling everybody what to do, and we'd laugh at them. 0.88
01:39:48.000 Bob and Susie started saying ridiculous things.
01:39:50.000 Now, in the actual, the non-metaphorical version of this, it's a minuscule percentage of our population in any country controls the rest of the population.
01:40:01.000 And what do they tend to like, people in power?
01:40:04.000 What they tend to like is, throughout history, the king and queen would look over the castle wall.
01:40:09.000 First of all, they always have a castle wall, a question we can ask ourselves, why is that?
01:40:13.000 But the reason is, they look over the castle wall and they see the people fighting with each other.
01:40:18.000 They're disagreeing over things and they give each other a hug because that is the best news possible.
01:40:23.000 It's only when all the people agree that they have a risk of coming over the castle wall.
01:40:28.000 You follow my thinking?
01:40:28.000 So division itself that we are experiencing in which, you know, you're at the center of often.
01:40:36.000 This whole idea that I won't – I don't have to go down.
01:40:39.000 But my point is division itself is beneficial to those in power.
01:40:45.000 Well, that's one of the reasons why they love the whole right-left paradigm, but yet you see them all working together on certain things.
01:40:51.000 Yeah.
01:40:51.000 Government – so I'm not an anarchist.
01:40:54.000 I'm very much a believer in the United States and its constitution.
01:40:58.000 And when you can deviate – Robert Kennedy makes a good point in his book that there is no pandemic exception in the Constitution.
01:41:08.000 And they knew what pandemics were.
01:41:10.000 They had had pandemics.
01:41:12.000 And he said there's no exception for liquor stores to be considered an essential business, but there is reference in the Constitution to churches which were closed.
01:41:23.000 So my objection is that, or my observation I should say, it doesn't matter whether I object, my observation is that We all ought to care a lot, whatever the reason, when government seeks to assume a lot of power.
01:41:37.000 There's a little town in Arizona a few months ago that had three people escape from their jail.
01:41:42.000 And the sheriff, looking for the three people who escaped from the jail, who embarrassed their sheriff's department, did a lockdown of the little town.
01:41:50.000 Everybody go home.
01:41:51.000 So they got to search for these three people without those pesky citizens going about their lives and going to work and going to restaurants.
01:41:59.000 So the idea of lockdown suddenly becomes part of our accepted lexicon.
01:42:06.000 And so I have said throughout that I am also not anti-vax.
01:42:12.000 I am also not even anti-pharmaceuticals.
01:42:15.000 We're going to need pharmaceuticals at different times in our lives.
01:42:18.000 You can't speak about vaccines as if they're one thing.
01:42:22.000 There have been vaccines taken off the market because they're dangerous.
01:42:25.000 There's the Gardasil vaccine that's downright dangerous and terrible.
01:42:29.000 And shouldn't be given to nine-year-old boys who cannot get cancer in their female sex organs. 0.59
01:42:36.000 They don't have female sex organs. 1.00
01:42:37.000 But nine-year-old boys right now are scheduled in the American Pediatric Association to get Gardasil, which is a very bad drug.
01:42:44.000 What is Gardasil for?
01:42:45.000 It's for cervical cancer and HPV. But they can get HPV. Yeah, but the...
01:42:53.000 But nine-year-old boys, Jesus Christ.
01:42:55.000 It would take us the whole show, but...
01:42:58.000 The HPV vaccine is a bad vaccine.
01:43:02.000 And it is a dangerous vaccine.
01:43:04.000 It is not worth it.
01:43:05.000 And HPV is not clearly demonstrably going to lead to cancer for your little girl in 40 years because you have these cancers that are serious cervical cancer in your 50s.
01:43:16.000 So you're taking this little girl right now, 9 years old, 10 years old, and you're saying, gee, I don't want her to get cervical cancer.
01:43:22.000 Well, it's not her we're talking about.
01:43:23.000 It's her in 40 years we're talking about.
01:43:25.000 And cervical cancer is highly treatable.
01:43:27.000 It's not a terrible killer.
01:43:29.000 And we don't even know if the vaccine works.
01:43:31.000 And it has a lot of serious problems.
01:43:34.000 The package insert for that particular vaccine is macabre.
01:43:39.000 How so?
01:43:40.000 You read the side effects and the adverse events, which you know they have to list in order to get immunity from lawsuits.
01:43:53.000 That happens to be a bad one.
01:43:54.000 But rather than dwell on that too much, tetanus is a good one, right? 0.77
01:43:57.000 If my kid got a big injury, I'd be running in to get a tetanus shot.
01:44:01.000 And you don't have to do it when they're, you know, in the crib.
01:44:04.000 Polio is a great one.
01:44:05.000 There's many great vaccines.
01:44:08.000 Polio have been beneficial, you know, there hasn't been a case of polio since 1986 in the United States, but polio vaccine isn't so bad for you.
01:44:15.000 And so, you know, majority of polio in the world today is actually vaccine-based.
01:44:21.000 You know, form polio, interestingly.
01:44:23.000 Yeah, we showed that during an Alex Jones podcast.
01:44:28.000 He brought that up, that they were giving kids vaccines for polio in Africa, and that this was actually causing the children to get polio.
01:44:37.000 And I was like, how is that real?
01:44:39.000 And he brought up an AP article.
01:44:41.000 And I was like, whoa, this is mainstream.
01:44:44.000 This is a mainstream article.
01:44:46.000 Well, it's like what I'm about to say now, that the early COVID test had about a 90% false positive rate.
01:44:54.000 Is that real?
01:44:55.000 90%.
01:44:55.000 And why I could bring it up so comfortably is I've got a New York Times article that lays it out completely.
01:45:00.000 Probably if he does New York Times 90% COVID test, you'll probably find that article.
01:45:05.000 Now, when false positive, like, how so?
01:45:08.000 Was it false positive because it was a PCR test and they ran it at too many cycles?
01:45:12.000 That's an example.
01:45:13.000 And by the way, our government, you know, we didn't have to run it at 45 cycles and 30 cycles.
01:45:18.000 Other countries were running it at...
01:45:21.000 Your coronavirus test is positive.
01:45:24.000 Maybe it shouldn't be.
01:45:25.000 The unusual diagnostic test may be simply too sensitive and too slow to contain the spread of the virus.
01:45:32.000 So this is from when?
01:45:33.000 Scroll down.
01:45:33.000 That's the argument.
01:45:34.000 July of 2021. Just stay right there for a second.
01:45:40.000 Many of the people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time.
01:45:50.000 But researchers say the solution is not test less or skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
01:45:59.000 Whoa! 0.71
01:45:59.000 Instead, new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests, even if they are less sensitive. 0.71
01:46:07.000 Keep going, keep going, keep scrolling down for a second.
01:46:10.000 Not reading, just scroll down, scroll down, scroll down.
01:46:12.000 So the rapid tests are better.
01:46:13.000 Scroll down, scroll down.
01:46:17.000 So listen to this.
01:46:18.000 In three sets of tested data that include cycle thresholds compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada, up to 90% of people testing positive carried barely any virus, a review by the New York Times found.
01:46:32.000 So this is people that were testing positive that were testing positive at high cycles of PCRs.
01:46:36.000 And they couldn't get symptoms and they couldn't make you sick.
01:46:40.000 Well, they've lowered the cycles of PCRs dramatically, right?
01:46:45.000 I don't know about whether that's done nationally, but it was recommended.
01:46:48.000 I'll just read one more quick paragraph.
01:46:50.000 The United States recorded 45,000 new corona cases.
01:46:53.000 If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing.
01:47:04.000 But here's the point.
01:47:05.000 Is that...
01:47:06.000 Is it currently where they are right now and is it still possible for the virus to replicate inside their body and they would eventually become contagious?
01:47:13.000 It's a good question because some are pre-symptomatic, that is true, meaning they were going to get worse, that might very well happen.
01:47:19.000 It just hasn't, the virus hasn't replicated enough in their system yet.
01:47:22.000 But there's a reason that you saw countries all over the world have 80% asymptomatic cases, right?
01:47:28.000 The other way to say that is, the way we would have said it pre-COVID our whole lives is, oh, you not sick.
01:47:36.000 Right?
01:47:36.000 You don't have any symptoms.
01:47:38.000 And 80 to 90 percent of the people having no symptoms is called not sick, historically.
01:47:43.000 So now we're searching for something that the testing process allowed for a great deal of disruption in the United States.
01:47:51.000 I happen to believe in the test more for the negative than for the positive, just FYI. I'm sorry, more for the positive than for the negative because, okay, now you're going to take a 9 out of 10 chance and I'm not going to come to your dinner party because I tested positive, right?
01:48:03.000 I would do that.
01:48:05.000 And I don't get sick, and then I don't get sick, and then I don't get sick, and I never get sick.
01:48:09.000 That's not called you have COVID. That's called you're not sick.
01:48:14.000 Historically, we did not call something a case of pneumonia or a case of the flu unless you had the flu.
01:48:22.000 Wasn't that your whole life?
01:48:23.000 Right, but the contagious aspect of COVID, it's so much more contagious than any of these other diseases that you're citing.
01:48:32.000 The problem is that the consequences of being incorrect are so much higher, especially if you're dealing with Omicron.
01:48:39.000 Even though Omicron is very mild, It's so contagious.
01:48:43.000 And I say very mild, I should say very mild for me.
01:48:45.000 For some people, I guess, apparently not so mild.
01:48:48.000 I couldn't even believe I actually had COVID. I came in here and I had a canceled podcast.
01:48:51.000 I was like, what?
01:48:53.000 Like my nose is running.
01:48:54.000 I was like, like this.
01:48:56.000 I go, this is it.
01:48:56.000 I go, it worked out today.
01:48:57.000 I go, COVID? And it never got bad.
01:49:00.000 Never got anywhere.
01:49:00.000 The next day I was negative.
01:49:02.000 Right.
01:49:03.000 And you were taking vitamin D beforehand.
01:49:05.000 You were taking zinc.
01:49:07.000 I take care of myself across the board.
01:49:09.000 It's not just those things.
01:49:11.000 It's many things.
01:49:12.000 It's exercise.
01:49:13.000 It's cardiovascular fitness.
01:49:14.000 It's sauna, cold plunge, massive amounts of vitamins.
01:49:18.000 It's all these things.
01:49:20.000 I get IV drips.
01:49:21.000 I do a lot of things that are extraordinary in terms of what the average person does.
01:49:25.000 Well, no risk factor is more important than good health and bad health.
01:49:30.000 Why did this become such a focus for you, though, who's a security expert?
01:49:36.000 Well, two things.
01:49:37.000 One is I had to advise a lot of people on how are we going to navigate life in this new circumstance.
01:49:43.000 Everything from, you know, in the beginning, we were told that it will live on packages that come from the store.
01:49:48.000 So you're cleaning packages or you can get a pizza delivery.
01:49:52.000 The outside of the box will kill you, but the inside of the pizza will be just fine.
01:49:55.000 You remember this period where you're cleaning everything, you're wiping off the bananas before they come into the house.
01:50:00.000 And so it was my challenge to manage life for people during this circumstance, and it's also just my general curiosity.
01:50:08.000 The second issue that affected me a lot is that we have a lot of – I've got 570 employees, a lot of them young people, and a lot of them out of the military.
01:50:17.000 And we had our own four cases of myocarditis inside.
01:50:22.000 We also had a young man come out of the military and come to our physical fitness requirements and while running on the track, 33 years old, fall down and die.
01:50:33.000 He was not our employee.
01:50:35.000 He was applying to be an employee of ours.
01:50:37.000 And so it was in my interest to learn a great deal about whatever the risks are from both the vaccine and whatever the risks are from the virus.
01:50:47.000 And to do what I think people wisely do, which is compare the two things and make your decision about how to administer it.
01:50:55.000 As an employer, I had to decide, was I going to mandate vaccines, for example?
01:50:59.000 And so you looked at it in terms of the way you look at other security concerns.
01:51:02.000 What's the accurate assessment of threat?
01:51:05.000 Exactly correct.
01:51:05.000 And I had a bunch of clients ask me, you know, I'm this age, I'm in this general physical condition, just not asking me for medical advice, but they're asking me for statistical information on, you know, what are the risks here?
01:51:18.000 So in the beginning, after we got the Italy information, what you had to do to die of COVID, In the beginning, if you were, say, 53 years old and fit, first you had to get COVID. Then you had to ignore it for a few days.
01:51:31.000 Then you had to go to the hospital.
01:51:34.000 Then 90% of people were sent home, not admitted.
01:51:37.000 So then you had to be admitted.
01:51:38.000 Then you had to go up to the ICU. That's 87% didn't get to the ICU. And then you had to be put on a ventilator and then you could die.
01:51:48.000 So there was quite a series of things you had to go through in order to say this is a giant risk to the individual, right, to a specific individual who's fit.
01:51:59.000 Much different when you're looking at it from a public health perspective and you're looking at a global population that is, you know, if you pick a number, 40% obesity, extraordinarily high amounts of diabetes, for example.
01:52:13.000 And so I had to do a, you know, just a statistical look at At every kind of risk.
01:52:19.000 We do it when clients go to another country.
01:52:20.000 What are the risks in that country?
01:52:22.000 Everything from, you know, being pickpocketed all the way to getting a disease.
01:52:26.000 What, for example, would you take a yellow fever vaccine, going to a country with yellow fever?
01:52:32.000 Yes, you would take a yellow fever vaccine.
01:52:34.000 But some people don't take the flu vaccine, for example.
01:52:37.000 And the flu vaccine has the same rap that you described earlier, where people say, oh, I got the flu.
01:52:43.000 Good thing I got that flu vaccine.
01:52:45.000 It was milder.
01:52:47.000 What form of science is there that tells you it would have been worse if?
01:52:53.000 It's just an unknowable thing, and it's a genius marketing mechanism.
01:52:57.000 It is, because so many people repeat that.
01:52:59.000 Yeah, I want to go back to something that I said about Gardasil, which is that the commercials for Gardasil are a little girl talking to camera, and she says, do you know about this, mommy?
01:53:13.000 Do you know about this, daddy?
01:53:16.000 After the information.
01:53:17.000 So they think, my little girl dying of cervical cancer.
01:53:21.000 And so it's a brilliant product because in half the circumstances that people get cervical cancer, their parents will already be dead.
01:53:27.000 They've already bought the product, given it to them two and three times, by the way.
01:53:31.000 It has boosters as well.
01:53:33.000 And it has one of the worst side effect profiles of any vaccine.
01:53:38.000 But it pushes the button.
01:53:39.000 Here's a product, your little girl.
01:53:41.000 The problem is, excuse me, not pharmaceutical drugs.
01:53:45.000 The problem is if you can advertise.
01:53:48.000 If you can advertise and you can manipulate people and change their opinion based on theatrics, right?
01:53:55.000 You have music and people dancing and holding hands and spinning around in a wheat field.
01:54:00.000 Like, that is so manipulative.
01:54:03.000 Of course.
01:54:03.000 And we are subject to manipulation.
01:54:05.000 And when it's something that is so important, like making critical health decisions, you know?
01:54:11.000 I mean, how many of these, you know, consult your doctor, and then they rattle off a list of things that could go wrong. 1.00
01:54:18.000 Like, your asshole becomes a fire hydrant of blood. 1.00
01:54:21.000 Like, it's like there's so many of these fucking commercials. 1.00
01:54:24.000 Like, so many times I'm watching television, I'm like, how many goddamn drug commercials are there? 0.99
01:54:30.000 I would like to know what percentage of advertisers Are pharmaceutical drugs? 0.95
01:54:37.000 There's a guy who can find out.
01:54:38.000 Yeah, like what percentage of television ads are pharmaceutical drugs?
01:54:43.000 And if you do news, news programs, I think it's just about everything.
01:54:48.000 Really?
01:54:48.000 Yeah.
01:54:49.000 Everything's brought to you by Pfizer, right?
01:54:52.000 75%.
01:54:53.000 Yeah. 1.00
01:54:54.000 Holy shit. 1.00
01:54:57.000 Yeah. 1.00
01:54:58.000 Holy shit. 1.00
01:55:00.000 Yeah. 1.00
01:55:00.000 Brilliant products because people are sick in America. 1.00
01:55:04.000 It's not a healthy population.
01:55:05.000 That is a crazy number.
01:55:08.000 In 2020, TV ad spending of the pharma industry accounted for 75% of the total ad spend.
01:55:16.000 Yeah, good question.
01:55:18.000 Now, let's Google this.
01:55:20.000 Television news.
01:55:21.000 What percentage of the ads on television news are from pharmaceutical companies?
01:55:28.000 By the way, Joe, have you never seen that little compilation that says, Brought to you by Pfizer?
01:55:32.000 Oh, I had it on my Instagram page.
01:55:33.000 Oh, good.
01:55:33.000 Brought to you by Pfizer.
01:55:35.000 Anderson Cooper, brought to you by Pfizer.
01:55:39.000 And it's never going to go away.
01:55:43.000 And we're, unfortunately, again, they don't have that in England.
01:55:46.000 They don't have that in Ireland.
01:55:48.000 They don't have that in... 1.00
01:55:50.000 Fucking Egypt. 1.00
01:55:50.000 They don't have that. 1.00
01:55:51.000 They don't have that.
01:55:52.000 Name a country.
01:55:53.000 They don't have it.
01:55:53.000 And those side effects that you hear at the end, of course, cannot compete with the images.
01:55:58.000 You know, the two old people and he gets another six weeks of life because of flamenambulat. 0.99
01:56:03.000 And it says, you know, life.
01:56:05.000 It's projected up on the thing.
01:56:06.000 They're walking through the field.
01:56:07.000 And then afterwards to say, well, the side effects are these terrible things.
01:56:12.000 And they always say them fast.
01:56:13.000 Yeah, and they're almost funny, some of them, obviously.
01:56:16.000 One of them that I liked a lot was feelings of euphoria. 0.99
01:56:20.000 I'll take that fucking call. 1.00
01:56:22.000 Suicidal thoughts. 1.00
01:56:23.000 Yeah.
01:56:24.000 Yeah, the ones that give you suicidal thoughts.
01:56:26.000 But don't worry about it.
01:56:27.000 Don't you want to not have diarrhea?
01:56:29.000 What?
01:56:30.000 What?
01:56:30.000 What are you saying?
01:56:32.000 Yeah.
01:56:32.000 But it's like the problem is manipulative ads are effective.
01:56:37.000 They work.
01:56:38.000 If your person is sitting at home and you don't feel good and there's an ad that comes on and these people are living the way you would like to live.
01:56:45.000 They're dancing around.
01:56:46.000 They're laughing and smiling.
01:56:47.000 You're like, I want to dance around.
01:56:49.000 Yeah.
01:56:49.000 I want to laugh and smile.
01:56:50.000 I want to be like these folks.
01:56:52.000 Yeah.
01:56:53.000 That's one thing if you're selling toasters.
01:56:55.000 Well, it's innocuous.
01:56:56.000 It's not gonna hurt anybody.
01:56:57.000 It's just a toaster.
01:56:58.000 But if you're selling something that could potentially change a person's entire life if it goes sideways...
01:57:06.000 You know, you're giving me a good idea, which is what about a law that prohibits pharmaceutical advertising like virtually every country in the world?
01:57:16.000 That would be an interesting thing for a politician to look at at the federal level.
01:57:20.000 Oh my god, would they come for him? 0.94
01:57:22.000 Well, they're coming, just my even saying it right now, they're coming for me, and you're already in the shithouse.
01:57:27.000 But 75% is such a crazy number when you think about the amount of money involved in it.
01:57:32.000 Now it makes sense when you look at the narrative of all these television news companies and media companies all pushing the same thing.
01:57:39.000 They're basically pushing for their boss.
01:57:41.000 Their boss now is the pharmaceutical companies.
01:57:44.000 If they've got that kind of money to spend 75% of the ads, Yeah.
01:57:48.000 I think it's more on news shows, by the way.
01:57:50.000 I think it's just about everything on news shows.
01:57:52.000 Jamie's in the middle of Google.
01:57:55.000 Because the news won't tell you the news. 1.00
01:57:56.000 Those fucks, they're hiding it. 0.99
01:57:58.000 Do you remember earlier when you said one of the things of being famous is people asking for something and wanting something? 1.00
01:58:03.000 Yeah.
01:58:04.000 I want something.
01:58:05.000 What do you want?
01:58:10.000 Is now a masterclass.
01:58:11.000 Oh, you're very good.
01:58:12.000 That's funny.
01:58:13.000 On the head, please, if you would.
01:58:15.000 There we go.
01:58:16.000 Anyway, that is now a masterclass.
01:58:19.000 That is 10 masterclasses.
01:58:22.000 It's available for free.
01:58:23.000 I'm not charging anything.
01:58:25.000 It's at giftoffear.com, and it'll be on YouTube for free as well.
01:58:29.000 You're kidding me.
01:58:30.000 There it is.
01:58:31.000 You are kidding me.
01:58:32.000 Masterclass on personal safety.
01:58:34.000 And that is the end of my shameless advertisement.
01:58:38.000 Oh, except I want to say this.
01:58:40.000 At the core of that book, it is really about people listening to their intuition.
01:58:44.000 And if you can imagine a woman in an office building late at night alone, she's leaving her job. 0.97
01:58:51.000 And the elevator doors open up and there's a guy inside who scares her for whatever reason.
01:58:56.000 How he's dressed, how he looks, that he's there, whatever it may be.
01:58:59.000 And she says, I'm not going to be the kind of person who doesn't get in the elevator.
01:59:03.000 I'm not going to be the kind of person who judges this guy.
01:59:05.000 And so she gets into a steel soundproof chamber.
01:59:09.000 With somebody she's afraid of.
01:59:11.000 And there's not an animal in nature that would ever do that.
01:59:14.000 And so my work is really to encourage people just this one little thing, which is to listen to your intuition.
01:59:20.000 And that masterclass is that I went back after.
01:59:24.000 This book is 25 years old.
01:59:25.000 And I went back and interviewed.
01:59:27.000 First of all, I just got 17 women together.
01:59:29.000 Every one of them had a truly profound experience of violence.
01:59:32.000 And I think that would be true if I got 17 people together in a room in America.
01:59:36.000 You know, you'd either know somebody...
01:59:38.000 It'd be one, you know, one removed or it'd be you that had some experience of violence.
01:59:41.000 Much more so with women though, right? 1.00
01:59:43.000 That's true.
01:59:43.000 And in fact, there's a thing in the masterclass where we ask people on the street, men and women, when's the last time you thought about yourself being in danger?
01:59:52.000 And the men would be like, hmm, danger?
01:59:56.000 Nope, can't think of anything.
01:59:57.000 And the women would all be yesterday, today, when I parked last night, where I park, where I go. 1.00
02:00:02.000 So it's just a different world for men and women in society.
02:00:06.000 And it's And so a lot of that book is about, you know, listen to your intuition.
02:00:10.000 And a lot of the masterclass, the idea came from Oprah that she did a bunch of shows with me.
02:00:17.000 And then 10 years later, she did a 10-year anniversary show on this book.
02:00:21.000 And I thought, and got some of the people together who were involved.
02:00:26.000 And I thought, well, let me go back and get these people together and do this thing where we just sit around and And have a conversation and I got, you know, a woman whose child was killed at the Newtown school shooting, someone else whose daughter was killed by her boyfriend,
02:00:41.000 a man who shot his own brother by accident when he was a kid.
02:00:45.000 Very interesting perspective because you never hear from that person.
02:00:48.000 You know, you hear, you get the news stories about the tragedy but the guy who has to go through life, you know, having had that accident, that shooting accident.
02:00:57.000 And then a bunch of experts, FBI, LAPD, etc.
02:01:01.000 And I think it can help people.
02:01:02.000 And I think it can help people now when there's a lot of fear and a lot of crime and a lot of demonstrations and a lot of upset in society right now.
02:01:12.000 In fact, it's even, you know, I saw you talk about Will Smith.
02:01:16.000 Even decorum in general is being broken in this time in America in that a lot of people are on edge.
02:01:26.000 You have a lot more multiple victim shootings.
02:01:28.000 You have a lot more violence.
02:01:30.000 You've got these break-ins in California where 70 people break into a store.
02:01:35.000 At the same time that laws are changing that says we're not going to prosecute in California most cities for anything unless it's over $1,500 theft.
02:01:44.000 So people just walk into a CVS and pick up something or a Target store and walk out.
02:01:47.000 Yeah, it's nuts.
02:01:48.000 So it's a hard time and I know there's a lot of fear and I always want to remind people that...
02:01:54.000 There are women who were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, but the fear they were thinking about was terrorists, you know, during 9-11.
02:02:03.000 So more people have died at the hands of boyfriends and husbands than died at 9-11, triple.
02:02:09.000 Oh, sure.
02:02:10.000 And so we focus on the wrong things, right?
02:02:13.000 You know, on our refrigerator, we might have the doctor's name and number, but we don't have the nuclear emergency search team phone number, you know, the black helicopters that the Pentagon has, because it's not in our thinking day to day, and it shouldn't be.
02:02:25.000 But we let television news program our fears.
02:02:29.000 And years ago, I was doing a book tour for this book, and a guy said to me, a television producer, he said a little...
02:02:36.000 He had a guest on talking about the flesh-eating disease that has come and gone in our consciousness.
02:02:44.000 Do you remember it?
02:02:44.000 It was a big news story.
02:02:46.000 You could get the flesh-eating disease.
02:02:47.000 And I met this woman who was going to be interviewed, and I thought later on she could have...
02:02:52.000 She could have told me about the flesh eating disease before I shook hands with her, I thought jokingly, but she didn't and I didn't get it and she didn't have it.
02:02:59.000 She only wanted to talk about her fear of it.
02:03:01.000 They couldn't find somebody with the disease. 1.00
02:03:02.000 So I said to the news producer, you know, what the fuck? 0.99
02:03:04.000 What are you doing? 0.99
02:03:05.000 Like, this is a thing that six people got in another country.
02:03:08.000 Why is this a news segment here?
02:03:10.000 He said, well, another, he said, a little worry never hurt anybody.
02:03:14.000 And I put it in one of my books because a little worry is the cause of hypertension and drug addiction and alienation from people and fear of each other and all this stuff that goes on programmed, our fears programmed.
02:03:28.000 And my teaching is that things to fear actually have not changed.
02:03:32.000 They are each other.
02:03:34.000 They are the relationships you're in.
02:03:35.000 And so you have a choice when you're getting into a new relationship with an employee, with a boyfriend or girlfriend.
02:03:42.000 You have choices and you can observe the circumstance you're in and you can predict violent behavior.
02:03:48.000 People have that capacity, just like every other animal in nature does.
02:03:54.000 Two wolves come together on some mountain path and one of them puts his ears back and shows his teeth and his hair stands up on his back.
02:04:01.000 The other one – and then he attacks the other wolf, right?
02:04:03.000 The other wolf does not say, oh my god, I had no idea that was coming.
02:04:07.000 But people do that every day.
02:04:08.000 They participate in their own victimization without recognizing that they have every piece of information that they need in their intuition, which by the way, the word intuition, the root of it is inter and it means to guard and to protect.
02:04:24.000 Do you encourage people to take self-defense courses or to learn martial arts?
02:04:29.000 I do.
02:04:30.000 Particularly a kind of self-defense class sometimes called model mugging where you may have seen it where the perpetrator is in a padded suit.
02:04:40.000 And for women who are not going to invest years in some self-defense class, it's very valuable because it teaches them to strike. 1.00
02:04:47.000 Many women, maybe most, have never really hit anybody to hurt them. 1.00
02:04:52.000 And so with a padded assailant, this kind of training, often called model mugging and there are other names for it, which is available in every major city, is something I really believe in because it lets you engage with somebody physically and prevail and it teaches you a few tricks,
02:05:10.000 not at the level that somebody who takes martial arts courses, but I like martial arts for every purpose, for confidence, For self-defense, for health, I think in every way.
02:05:22.000 So yeah, even in this book, more in my later books, but in this book there's a discussion about model mugging and that kind of engagement where you You sort of gain some muscle memory about what it is to actually strike somebody.
02:05:37.000 We have a different opinion on that.
02:05:39.000 Good.
02:05:39.000 I don't believe in that.
02:05:41.000 I don't believe you're going to learn how to effectively hurt someone in such a short period of time.
02:05:46.000 And I think in particular for women, the problem is just because of their own anatomy. 1.00
02:05:52.000 They don't have the ability, a lot of them I should say, Don't have the ability to actually harm someone hurting them.
02:05:58.000 You're just going to make them angry.
02:05:59.000 I don't think you really learn anything in those environments, in those classes.
02:06:04.000 When I used to teach martial arts, one of the things that I had a problem with was trying to Gently explain to someone that everything they had learned in one of those classes was useless.
02:06:19.000 Like the idea you should drop to your back and start kicking up.
02:06:23.000 Because women have greater lower body strength than upper body strength. 1.00
02:06:26.000 All of this only would work on a moron. 1.00
02:06:30.000 Everything about it. 1.00
02:06:32.000 Maybe it's better than not knowing anything, but all of it would only work on someone who's weak.
02:06:38.000 And the idea that a weak person would attack a woman is very unlikely.
02:06:42.000 If it's a very strong, powerful man, you may even anger them if you try to strike first.
02:06:49.000 A real fundamental understanding of actual martial arts is the only thing that's gonna save you.
02:06:55.000 And in particular, jujitsu.
02:06:57.000 A martial art where a lighter, smaller person actually can prevail over a bigger person because they have skills and they understand techniques, they understand positioning, they understand leverage, and they've applied it over and over and over and over again so that in times of extreme stress they can perform.
02:07:19.000 Because most people, when encountered with actual violence, will freeze up.
02:07:23.000 Because they don't know what it's like to be an actual physical conflict.
02:07:26.000 One of the great things about jiu-jitsu is you are in constant violent conflict in class.
02:07:33.000 It's controlled, but you're going full blast.
02:07:37.000 And because of that, when a situation occurs and you have to grapple with someone, you have muscle memory completely built in.
02:07:46.000 You will know exactly what to do.
02:07:48.000 It won't be a question of thinking.
02:07:50.000 It'll be a question of The leg is open.
02:07:53.000 There's the trip.
02:07:54.000 I get double underhooks.
02:07:55.000 We're down on the ground.
02:07:56.000 I move to side control.
02:07:58.000 Block the punches.
02:07:59.000 Block the eye gouges.
02:08:00.000 Move to mount. 0.99
02:08:01.000 Elbow to the face.
02:08:02.000 All those things are just going to be ingrained in your system. 0.92
02:08:05.000 You'll know how to stick a rear naked choke in because you've done it thousands of times. 1.00
02:08:09.000 You take a fucking class for a couple hours and you're like, no! 1.00
02:08:13.000 And you punch the guy, no! 1.00
02:08:14.000 And you're like, yeah, I'm going to go out there and stop mugging. 1.00
02:08:17.000 Someone's going to punch you in the fucking face and you're going to forget everything. 1.00
02:08:21.000 I don't believe in those things. 1.00
02:08:23.000 I don't believe you can learn French in an hour.
02:08:25.000 I don't believe you can learn martial arts and how to defend yourself against a guy in a giant Stay Puft marshmallow costume. 1.00
02:08:33.000 That shit doesn't work. 1.00
02:08:34.000 So it sounds like you have an opinion on this. 1.00
02:08:37.000 Yeah, man, I have an opinion on it.
02:08:38.000 I just think there's no shortcuts to self-defense.
02:08:42.000 There's no shortcuts to being able to take care of yourself.
02:08:44.000 And I think what bothers me is that there's some people that walk out of those classes, and I don't know how they're taught, if they're taught this way, but they walk out with An interpretation of it.
02:08:57.000 They're misinformed.
02:08:58.000 And I think they have this false confidence that I think is dangerous.
02:09:03.000 And if you think you're just gonna go around punching people, you know, that you think are a threat, and that that's gonna protect you because you took a class, like, that's not likely.
02:09:13.000 You want some argument?
02:09:15.000 Yes.
02:09:15.000 Okay.
02:09:17.000 Two things.
02:09:18.000 You're gonna love my book.
02:09:19.000 Because it's got a great deal about what are the natural elements of the physics of safety and how it works.
02:09:26.000 And obviously avoiding a physical encounter that is dangerous is far and away the better outcome.
02:09:33.000 But, you know, you said two things here that I want to play back for you.
02:09:37.000 One is you said, I don't know what goes on in those classes.
02:09:40.000 I agree.
02:09:41.000 That's one.
02:09:42.000 The other one is you said maybe they will be slightly better off than they would have been.
02:09:46.000 I agree.
02:09:48.000 And so the fact is we're not going to get 220 million American women or young girls, I've got two daughters, to all become jiu-jitsu experts.
02:09:57.000 And a little jiu-jitsu is also dangerous, you probably feel.
02:10:01.000 I don't think that's true.
02:10:03.000 I took one lesson.
02:10:05.000 Is that enough for me?
02:10:06.000 No.
02:10:06.000 Okay, I'm just making the same point you made.
02:10:08.000 That's less than a little.
02:10:09.000 A little is a year.
02:10:10.000 I understand.
02:10:11.000 My point is, though, that not being competent at something is not good in either circumstance.
02:10:18.000 So model mugging is six hours.
02:10:21.000 It's six weekends.
02:10:21.000 Typically, there are all kinds of courses and there are advanced courses as well.
02:10:25.000 But we just don't see that the same way because I have to leave people – by the way, My books do not say, go to a model mugging class, and that's the end of the book.
02:10:34.000 There's a great deal more to it.
02:10:35.000 But you know how difficult it is to generate force, right?
02:10:37.000 Yes, and I know how little force it takes.
02:10:39.000 It takes 16 pounds of force to break a knee, for example.
02:10:43.000 And that's what's talked about.
02:10:45.000 That's not going to work.
02:10:46.000 This is where you don't have practice on kicking knees.
02:10:49.000 This idea that a knee is going to break, that's if you lean the knee sideways and let someone hit it.
02:10:56.000 Well, except that many women who've taken model mugging courses have had success at prevailing during violent encounters. 1.00
02:11:03.000 And so if you accept the premise that's your premise, you said it, which is it may leave people a little bit better off.
02:11:09.000 It's not designed to, you know, make them into MMA fighters.
02:11:14.000 It's designed to give them some courage to resist and run.
02:11:18.000 Because resistance is a very important part. 0.66
02:11:20.000 What do you have available to you if you're a woman raped? 1.00
02:11:23.000 And let's remember which one of us has interviewed 25,000 of those women.
02:11:26.000 So you have the ability to comply and then run away if you get an opportunity.
02:11:33.000 You have the ability to resist.
02:11:34.000 You have the ability to resist and then comply or comply and then resist.
02:11:38.000 So you have a few options.
02:11:40.000 And generally speaking, I won't be there with some victim at the time of that emergency, but generally speaking, Resistance is more valuable.
02:11:50.000 And resistance in getting away is most valuable.
02:11:52.000 And you talked about a big predator, for example.
02:11:56.000 There are basically two kinds of predators.
02:11:58.000 I'm going to speak global categories for a moment.
02:12:01.000 You mean men?
02:12:03.000 For men who are practicing predation against women, there's two types.
02:12:07.000 There is the persuasion predator.
02:12:09.000 That's far and away the most common.
02:12:11.000 Doesn't need to be strong.
02:12:12.000 Doesn't need to be big.
02:12:13.000 He's not using force.
02:12:14.000 He is using persuasion to get you into that place, that location, where you can't get away and where you can't call for help.
02:12:20.000 That's the most common persuasion predator. 0.99
02:12:22.000 The other one, the power predator, very rare, he just charges out of nowhere like a bear.
02:12:28.000 And he's brave, he's bigger, he's courageous.
02:12:30.000 And I agree with you that for the power predator, other than the ability to get away quickly, you are not going to have a successful fight with a power predator.
02:12:39.000 It's 2% of the predators in the world, in the Western world, but nonetheless, I agree with you on that.
02:12:44.000 But for the persuasion predator, the teaching early for your daughter and my daughters What am I being persuaded to do here?
02:12:52.000 Why is this person not listening to me when I say no?
02:12:55.000 Why is this person wanting to go to this more remote location?
02:12:58.000 Why is he saying lock the door at the end of work when he's the manager and I should – all of those early intuitions are how you actually save your life or save yourself from a violent situation.
02:13:08.000 Well, that all makes sense to me.
02:13:10.000 I had no idea that it was six hours or six weeks of doing it.
02:13:14.000 That actually makes sense more too, because you're explaining to people possible scenarios and how to get out of them.
02:13:20.000 I just don't like the idea of giving people false confidence about their physical prowess.
02:13:25.000 And maybe this is on my own personal bias from actually being a martial arts instructor and talking to people.
02:13:31.000 That we're saying, do I really need to learn this?
02:13:33.000 Because I learned that I can just palm strike you in the nose.
02:13:37.000 And, you know, man, you palm strike a guy in the nose, like there's a very high likelihood that's going to not do much.
02:13:44.000 Well, so I don't think our disagreement is enough to end the friendship.
02:13:51.000 No, I don't think we're even disagreeing because I think in many ways I'm ignorant to the protocol that they're prescribing if they're doing it for six weeks.
02:13:58.000 I think there's something about long courses where I don't think you can get anything in a class.
02:14:03.000 This one woman that I'm referring to was one of my former students. 1.00
02:14:07.000 She had taken one class.
02:14:09.000 And there was this one class where this guy had this big blue foam thing on and she was explaining what they told her to do.
02:14:16.000 And I'm like, God, you don't want to be on your back.
02:14:18.000 You want to run away. 1.00
02:14:20.000 You want to get the fuck out of there. 1.00
02:14:21.000 This idea that you're going to be on your back and you're going to kick someone, that shit, that's not going to work. 1.00
02:14:25.000 So you just did something, Joe, that is such an interesting example of Joe Roganism, which is you went from your opinion, which is very well informed because you have a lot of experience, and then you heard some new information, and then you said, 0.99
02:14:41.000 you know, maybe I don't know enough about those classes.
02:14:43.000 Well, as soon as you said six...
02:14:45.000 I get it, but I want to give you this compliment.
02:14:47.000 From a 67-year-old man to a who knows what you are now.
02:14:50.000 There you go.
02:14:51.000 So I have so much more wisdom.
02:14:53.000 But the compliment I want to give you is that very few people do what you just did.
02:14:57.000 And I see you do it all the time.
02:14:58.000 And it's a kind of a hallmark of this show, which is it's okay.
02:15:02.000 I also see you get criticized for it.
02:15:04.000 Oh, he begins with one opinion.
02:15:05.000 He ends up with another opinion.
02:15:06.000 You mean human being?
02:15:07.000 You mean thoughtful, curious person?
02:15:09.000 So I just was impressed.
02:15:11.000 It was just fun to be sitting over here and see you have a strong opinion and then see, well, there's something more I need to know about this.
02:15:17.000 If more people in America would do that, we would not have mandates.
02:15:22.000 And why am I opposed to mandates?
02:15:23.000 Because mandates for, you know, vaccination is one step away from mandates for anything else.
02:15:30.000 My opinion on this is, you know, I'm talking about women's self-defense courses, but in many ways, it's actually not about women.
02:15:38.000 It's about men having a delusional perspective of their own ability to defend themselves, which is very, very common.
02:15:45.000 More common than with women. 1.00
02:15:47.000 Women, in many cases, are physically more vulnerable than men, in most cases.
02:15:53.000 And so when someone is teaching self-defense course again, I probably shouldn't have said that I don't agree with it because I don't know how they're running their course, but I've seen a lot of women's self-defense courses and I'm like, man, that is not gonna work. 1.00
02:16:09.000 And I really get upset by giving people false confidence.
02:16:13.000 There are so many men out there that have this delusional idea of their ability to defend themselves.
02:16:18.000 And it's so crazy.
02:16:20.000 And it's amazing.
02:16:23.000 How the ego can play tricks on you to the point where there's men out there starting fights and they have no idea how to fight.
02:16:32.000 It's legitimately like, back to speaking French, it's like having an argument with someone when you don't even understand their language. 0.98
02:16:39.000 Like you might know Paulie-vous Francais and you're literally getting in a fucking debate with them. 0.74
02:16:44.000 This is what it's like to get into a physical altercation if you don't know how to defend yourself. 0.92
02:16:50.000 So I want to share two things with you.
02:16:51.000 In my company, we employ a lot of people who are coming out of the military.
02:16:56.000 And we have a training academy they go to.
02:16:58.000 And one of the things that we're using is attack dogs, police dogs.
02:17:03.000 And what we do is we put somebody in a bite suit, and we have a variety of exercises, one where they're put in the back of a van, and they are told you have to feed the dog.
02:17:14.000 If it comes over the seat, it's going to get to your legs, your hands, and your head are all not covered.
02:17:19.000 So you gotta feed the dog, and so you're just like this with this dog right here that wants to hurt you.
02:17:23.000 The dog don't know anything but wanna hurt you.
02:17:25.000 And then there's another exercise where you run and you're chased, and the dogs are pretty good at judo.
02:17:31.000 These are trained police dogs, they wanna pull you down and get you on the ground. 0.89
02:17:34.000 But the reason we do that training, and we've had a lot of people go to the hospital in that training, so it's not bullshit, it's very real.
02:17:40.000 Is the specific point you were making, which is the grappling, the sweating, that this thing really wants to hurt me.
02:17:46.000 If people haven't had that experience, then they get into a fight, and they're basically in trauma immediately, instant trauma.
02:17:55.000 And they freeze, as you said.
02:17:56.000 And so I'm just agreeing with you, and I have a question for you, but you go first.
02:18:00.000 I think there's some real...
02:18:03.000 There's some real value in giving people some examples of scenarios that you should avoid.
02:18:08.000 There's some real value in giving people, before it ever gets to a physical encounter, giving people some real clear boundaries you should never let someone cross.
02:18:18.000 Particularly women my concern is and I have a deep concern about this is people having a distorted perception of their ability to defend themselves because I see it from people that Think that they know how to fight from men more than even from women.
02:18:33.000 Yeah, but from women I think the consequences concern me far more because with men I worry about men getting beat up by other men because they're delusional and they'll start fights but that I I'm not thinking of them as a victim the way I'm thinking of a woman as a victim.
02:18:48.000 So when a woman has a distorted perception because of a class, an erroneous... 0.99
02:18:52.000 I mean, there's so many of these goddamn self-defense classes that are teaching them nonsense. 0.99
02:18:58.000 And, you know, one of them is, like, kick the knees out. 0.99
02:19:00.000 Like, are you good at that?
02:19:02.000 Are you practicing kicking knees? 1.00
02:19:04.000 You know how hard it is to kick someone in the fucking knee? 1.00
02:19:05.000 By the way, another one of the classes, another type, is called impact training. 1.00
02:19:09.000 And that one is six weekends.
02:19:13.000 And it's teaching a lot.
02:19:15.000 It's teaching some verbal engagement.
02:19:17.000 It's teaching to know when you're in trouble.
02:19:19.000 It's teaching to understand that you don't have ways to run.
02:19:21.000 It's teaching a lot of things.
02:19:23.000 And so my question goes back to your question, which is, could people be better off?
02:19:28.000 You've got over here, you know, 60 people who would take jujitsu and do it for 10 years.
02:19:34.000 And then I've got over here 80 million people who won't.
02:19:38.000 And so something, you know, you still want to give something to these people in terms of training, and you'll see a lot of it in that masterclass, it's just a lot of training about recognizing the situation you're in.
02:19:50.000 Most people are victimized because of their own cooperation with the victimizer.
02:19:55.000 They're cooperating.
02:19:56.000 What about weapons?
02:19:58.000 Do you encourage people to carry a weapon?
02:20:01.000 Do you encourage them to carry tasers or mace or like especially women? 1.00
02:20:06.000 Like how do you handle those types of situations?
02:20:09.000 Other than through my work, there's in my company, you know, my clients have protectors, so they have bodyguards with them.
02:20:16.000 They're in a different circumstance.
02:20:17.000 But if I were just talking to sort of the public as I do through a book, I do like pepper spray.
02:20:23.000 I think it's a valuable thing to remove the vision of somebody who has put you in a situation where you're in fear.
02:20:30.000 You know, in terms of recommending like what I recommend, somebody have a gun in the bedside drawer.
02:20:36.000 No, because I don't have enough information yet.
02:20:38.000 You've got to tell me who we're talking about.
02:20:40.000 Who are we talking about?
02:20:40.000 What degree of training are they going to go to?
02:20:42.000 There's an example in this book, in The Gift of Fear, where a woman, while she's asleep, takes the gun from underneath her pillow and shoots herself in the face, thinking it's her asthma medicine.
02:20:56.000 What?
02:20:57.000 Yeah, true story.
02:20:59.000 My concern about firearms in the bedside table, for example, is that you're asking somebody, it's like asking somebody to fall into a deep sleep and then wake up.
02:21:12.000 Clear-headed.
02:21:13.000 Wake up going 80 miles an hour in a 16-wheeler truck.
02:21:19.000 And perform well.
02:21:20.000 Swerve at the right time.
02:21:21.000 That's the situation you're in when you're awakened in the middle of the night and there is an intruder in your bedroom.
02:21:27.000 But let me ask you this.
02:21:28.000 Wouldn't it be better if you get woken up in the middle of the night because there's an intruder in your home to have a gun than to not have a gun?
02:21:35.000 Well, the example I gave you, though, was not an intruder in your home.
02:21:38.000 The example I gave you was an intruder at the foot of your bed.
02:21:41.000 And so now I don't know the answer.
02:21:43.000 Depends on who the person is.
02:21:44.000 You have to – you know, a gun is not – it's a fantastic consumer product.
02:21:48.000 It lasts longer than the consumer that buys it, right?
02:21:51.000 It lasts for hundreds of years if well taken care of.
02:21:54.000 And people pay $300, $500 for the gun, whatever it is, and they now believe, just like you feel about self-defense, they now believe, oh, I'm safe.
02:22:03.000 The guy in the gun store says, this is the one that'll do it for you.
02:22:05.000 Yeah, it'll do it for you if you're smart, if you're sober, if you have some detection system downstairs that gave you some heads up, if you are reasonable, if you're not shooting your 10-year-old kid.
02:22:16.000 If you're trained.
02:22:16.000 If you're trained.
02:22:18.000 Thank you.
02:22:18.000 And so, you know, I think it's about, it's in my second book, about 75% of people shot in the home are family members or friends.
02:22:26.000 But isn't that generally like acts of violence committed in terms of passion?
02:22:31.000 It's both.
02:22:31.000 It's conflict and accidents.
02:22:34.000 So I have a...
02:22:34.000 Is it most of them conflicts or is it most of them accidents?
02:22:38.000 I don't know.
02:22:38.000 But too many of them are accidents, whatever the number is.
02:22:41.000 And so, you know, I have a strong belief in smart guns.
02:22:45.000 This is a very controversial topic as well because there isn't a smart gun consumer product.
02:22:50.000 There's one coming that's very good.
02:22:51.000 Why?
02:22:52.000 Because the smart gun, just like my phone...
02:22:58.000 We're good to go.
02:23:02.000 We're good to go.
02:23:07.000 It's facial recognition and fingerprint recognition, both.
02:23:11.000 And it cannot be shot by the nine-year-old son of the plumber who's looking around your house on a Saturday while you're not thinking about it.
02:23:18.000 And so the accidental shootings to me, there's a lot on them in the master class as well, are by far the most tragic.
02:23:25.000 These situations where the eight-year-old kid kills his six-year-old sister or kills his mother or, you know, those lives are all ruined.
02:23:33.000 The dead person is easy, but the other lives are all ruined.
02:23:36.000 So I'm a believer that when you ask me, do I recommend guns?
02:23:40.000 I own hundreds of guns because of my company.
02:23:42.000 So I'm not anti-gun.
02:23:44.000 I'm not for gun control.
02:23:45.000 But I am a believer that it really is a matter of who's the person, what's their level of training, and what's the circumstance.
02:23:53.000 And so let's say you had a dog.
02:23:55.000 If you have a dog downstairs that gives you a heads up that somebody's going crazy, now you have some time to gather yourself.
02:24:02.000 You have some time to arm yourself.
02:24:04.000 If you have a firearm that you know how to use, all good.
02:24:07.000 But if you just have a gun in the bedside drawer and it sits there for 15 years and you think you're safe now, that's as bad a mistake as the mistake you're talking about with taking a 20-minute self-defense class.
02:24:16.000 Yeah, I agree.
02:24:17.000 I agree wholeheartedly.
02:24:18.000 I think that is a genuine issue with the accidental shootings and a genuine issue with people being delusional and their ability to use that in a high-stress situation.
02:24:33.000 Adrenaline is so crazy and anxiety is so crazy.
02:24:36.000 When you're in the middle of Thing like that you have tunnel vision you can't see well if you don't know how to stay calm under pressure if you don't experience a lot of physical stress And you don't know what to do the way that's the reason those courses are important because they do give people the ability to Understand what it is to be engaged pushed down knocked over struck and And even that by itself is valuable for somebody to not freeze up in quite the same way.
02:25:02.000 Forget whether they win the engagement.
02:25:04.000 That's a different question.
02:25:05.000 But we have exercises, for example, if you ever come to our academy – and we're moving our headquarters to San Antonio, by the way.
02:25:12.000 So our academy is going to be here.
02:25:14.000 But we've got a jet there, an aircraft that's got the engines taken off and is used for – we put people in it.
02:25:20.000 We fill the thing with smoke.
02:25:21.000 We turn off the lights and say, get out.
02:25:22.000 Guess what most people can't do?
02:25:24.000 Get out.
02:25:25.000 Because they've never had the experience.
02:25:27.000 So your academy is what?
02:25:28.000 Like, what is the idea?
02:25:29.000 Oh, for my company, we train people in public figure protection.
02:25:31.000 So they go through 18 weeks altogether.
02:25:34.000 But the essential protection skills, the earliest academy, is at a facility.
02:25:39.000 Right now, it's a 70-acre place in Los Angeles.
02:25:43.000 I hesitated because it might be 170. Shows you how disconnected I am.
02:25:49.000 We have a jet aircraft.
02:25:51.000 We have pools that are used to really stress people.
02:25:55.000 This is relevant to your point.
02:25:57.000 We put people in the pool, and a little like I used to do with my friend Sean Cassidy when I was younger, we don't let them near the edge.
02:26:02.000 We get them into panic.
02:26:03.000 We pull them down from underneath.
02:26:05.000 So we have the dog thing, and all of these things are called stress inoculation.
02:26:11.000 If you never had it, what you're describing, you know that people break into the house and suddenly they're going to shoot somebody, make a split-second decision, and they've never had any of those experiences, they won't do as well as they would do, right?
02:26:24.000 An experienced soldier versus some other 18-year-old kid or a police officer who's been in some shootings.
02:26:31.000 We are trying to train your heart rate to stay low.
02:26:35.000 Right?
02:26:35.000 If you engaged with me physically, if you and I were going to fight—and a few minutes ago, the argument was getting pretty close, I think—but if you and I were going to fight, you'd have a lower heart rate than some other guy who's never had a fight.
02:26:48.000 Right?
02:26:49.000 And with a lower heart rate, you get to—what you were talking about, you get to avoid panic.
02:26:53.000 You get to make decisions.
02:26:54.000 Like, we have a thing where— We have a vehicle and there's a sniper and we're shooting at you while you're walking a protectee to the car. 0.66
02:27:02.000 And we're hitting you with simunition.
02:27:04.000 We don't wear any protective gear.
02:27:06.000 It hurts.
02:27:06.000 It makes you bleed.
02:27:07.000 And it's stressful and it's noise and all that stuff.
02:27:10.000 And then you have to operate car key, for example, or operate 911. And your fingers are this big when you're panicked.
02:27:17.000 You can't even call 911. So a lot of what we're training to do is training for stress inoculation and for courage.
02:27:26.000 By the way, you can come to our academy.
02:27:27.000 I would love to.
02:27:28.000 Yeah, you'd be good at it.
02:27:29.000 Sounds fun.
02:27:30.000 Because the dog thing isn't something you'll get somewhere else.
02:27:32.000 A lot of stuff you wouldn't get somewhere else.
02:27:35.000 And we've had a lot of clients come to the academy, and it's interesting, and had clients' kids come.
02:27:39.000 And we don't – you know, you can get injured, but we don't – we're more careful, clearly, than we are with our actual employees.
02:27:47.000 And, you know, years ago we had an employee say, well, I don't want to have marks on my back from being shot at by simunition.
02:27:53.000 Goodbye.
02:27:54.000 If you're worried about marks on your back from Simunition, why don't you go with the client to Zimbabwe in two weeks when they're at some controversial event giving a speech?
02:28:02.000 And so we're training, increasing the likelihood of courage.
02:28:07.000 Do you provide, like, I know there's some companies that create Kevlar clothes.
02:28:14.000 Is that stuff legit?
02:28:16.000 Like, I've seen that online and I always wanted to talk to someone about that.
02:28:18.000 A little bit.
02:28:19.000 So we do very much believe in body armor depending on what's going on.
02:28:23.000 But these are just clothes.
02:28:24.000 No, this is not.
02:28:25.000 I'm going to get to that.
02:28:26.000 And so all that stuff gets sent to us, as I said earlier, for free.
02:28:29.000 I'd be the biggest consumer of a product if it was a great product.
02:28:33.000 But there are clothes, there are suits, there are definitely overcoats that work real well because an overcoat's already bulky, right?
02:28:39.000 But a garment like what you're wearing now, it will come that you can have something that will stop a bullet going through a thin garment.
02:28:46.000 The problem is it can't stop the energy.
02:28:48.000 And so you need, you know, people have been shot, cops you've heard about, where they have a steel plate in the body armor in addition to the body armor.
02:28:57.000 And we have that body armor where you can slip in a steel plate, very light body armor.
02:29:01.000 Well, what's that about?
02:29:03.000 Well, that's because if you get hit there, you don't even have to deal with the trauma, right?
02:29:08.000 When you get shot, when a cop gets shot wearing a bulletproof vest, even a heavier type, they're hurt.
02:29:14.000 It's not easy.
02:29:15.000 I believe very much in body armor, by the way, for our protectors.
02:29:21.000 Anybody who's in a position where they might have to engage with a gun and they think they're there because, like a cop, thinks you're there because you might have to engage in a gunfight, body armor is very valuable.
02:29:33.000 But thin clothing, not yet.
02:29:35.000 It's just not there yet.
02:29:36.000 So the impact still happens, but it's not getting the penetration.
02:29:41.000 That's true.
02:29:42.000 It's not getting the penetration of the bullet, but it's still getting the penetration of the energy.
02:29:47.000 And so that's the piece that isn't resolved.
02:29:48.000 Why body armor, like a vest that a cop wears, is many, many, many, many layers, and it's a bit, if you felt it, it's a bit wide and strong, and it does do some disbursement of that energy.
02:30:00.000 Something as thin as you're wearing or I'm wearing Might stop penetration but not stop the energy and still the energy is the problem.
02:30:06.000 But isn't there still some benefit in not being penetrated?
02:30:10.000 Isn't it at least a slight diminishment of the amount of trauma that your body spends?
02:30:15.000 It's probably more than slight.
02:30:17.000 So these are such great Joe Rogan questions because this is what you do.
02:30:22.000 You keep going.
02:30:23.000 I love it.
02:30:23.000 Probably more than slight benefit, probably a substantial benefit.
02:30:27.000 Whether we're there, though, in terms of all the fashion and all the clothes that people want to wear, I'm not recommending to people anything that I've seen yet, and I've seen some pretty nice stuff.
02:30:36.000 Now, I do recommend conventional light body armor under your clothes if you're doing the most controversial speech of your life or you're an at-risk public figure or you're a protector in our company or a cop, of course, a Secret Service agent.
02:30:50.000 Very few wear it, but more should wear it.
02:30:53.000 Secret Service agents don't wear body armor?
02:30:55.000 It's optional.
02:30:56.000 And I think it's a mistake.
02:30:58.000 Because one thing that you want a protector to be able to do is stop the bullet from going through me, something like a.223 or something, going through me and into you.
02:31:07.000 So the excuses for all variety of people who choose not to wear body armor is comfort, I'm hot.
02:31:15.000 I've had this with people in my company over the years.
02:31:18.000 It's hot.
02:31:19.000 Because it's 102 degrees outside.
02:31:21.000 It's not hot because you're wearing body armor.
02:31:24.000 You want to know what's hot?
02:31:26.000 Accelerated lead.
02:31:27.000 That is hot.
02:31:28.000 And so we have an absolute policy, absolute requirement, body armor on every assignment.
02:31:33.000 That makes sense.
02:31:34.000 So the answer is like Kevlar clothing might help you a little bit, but it's not enough.
02:31:41.000 Yeah, and it's not there yet in terms of being flexible enough that you would wear it, right?
02:31:46.000 Meaning if I asked a client, would you please wear this, it's enough to get a client to take half the precautions we asked them to get.
02:31:51.000 But will it get there?
02:31:52.000 I think it will get there.
02:31:53.000 It won't stop energy, but I think it will get there.
02:31:55.000 I was looking at an online company that was selling bulletproof clothing that people wear over their vests, that the clothing itself would stop the penetration of a bullet.
02:32:07.000 Yeah, there are suits and there are various things.
02:32:09.000 But the heavier the jacket, you know, I see Putin wearing it, all variety of public figures who are at risk.
02:32:17.000 The heavier the jacket, the more likely it is to contain from a fashion point of view.
02:32:22.000 The body armor and make a real difference.
02:32:25.000 The lighter it gets, the less effective it is.
02:32:27.000 That's just the way.
02:32:28.000 Same thing with bulletproof car.
02:32:30.000 We've got a bunch of armored cars, bullet resistant, not bulletproof.
02:32:33.000 And you go very thick and you get better.
02:32:36.000 You go the lightest one where the window can go up and down normally and it's not as good.
02:32:40.000 Right.
02:32:41.000 When it comes to preventative measures or precautionary measures, how far do you take things?
02:32:50.000 Like in terms of like your own personal...
02:32:52.000 In terms of like complete anarchy, society collapses, do you have like a...
02:33:00.000 Like a getaway place?
02:33:02.000 I do.
02:33:04.000 But it also, you know, I make this pitch to clients often because it also has other value, right?
02:33:10.000 I have a home in another country that's awesome in Fiji.
02:33:12.000 It's already been written about.
02:33:14.000 And we've got a 25-acre organic farm.
02:33:16.000 We've got our own well.
02:33:17.000 We've got our own power supply.
02:33:18.000 But it wasn't built as a doomsday location.
02:33:21.000 It was built to – we love Fiji.
02:33:23.000 And I've got – you know, I adopted eight kids there and raised them.
02:33:25.000 So it's a big part of my life.
02:33:27.000 Did you really?
02:33:27.000 Yeah.
02:33:27.000 Yeah.
02:33:28.000 Wow.
02:33:29.000 One died during lockdowns because of lockdowns, 31 years old.
02:33:35.000 So I'm pissed about that.
02:33:37.000 But what happened is he got diagnosed with leukemia, which is not that serious if you're 31 years old.
02:33:44.000 I mean, it's a serious disease, but you're not going to die.
02:33:46.000 And so we would normally just get on a plane and go to Australia.
02:33:48.000 Australia wouldn't let him in and lockdown.
02:33:51.000 Then New Zealand wouldn't let him in.
02:33:52.000 Then the United States wouldn't let him in.
02:33:54.000 We finally got India to agree to take him and he died the night before the flight after six weeks of bullshitting with these countries to let in somebody who needs care. 0.97
02:34:03.000 So that was a pisser.
02:34:06.000 But yeah, I raised 10 kids altogether, two of them here with me who are 12 and about to be 14. Why did I mention that?
02:34:15.000 Oh, Fiji.
02:34:16.000 So I believe in having a place, but it also needs to have other value.
02:34:20.000 I'm not really big on the bunker that you never visit.
02:34:22.000 Have a place that has value. 0.97
02:34:24.000 And years ago, a client said, well, yeah, but when things go to shit, you can't get there. 0.99
02:34:28.000 And I said, well, you don't wait for things to go to shit, right? 0.99
02:34:31.000 You see, you don't wait for riots in the streets of Los Angeles. 0.98
02:34:34.000 You see all these indicators, and you say, all right, now I'm so glad I have that place in Fiji or wherever it is.
02:34:41.000 Right, you get out early.
02:34:42.000 Yeah.
02:34:43.000 The drag, however, is that some clients of mine have places in Canada, for example.
02:34:48.000 Well, guess what?
02:34:50.000 It's not so free.
02:34:51.000 Not a good place for a bug out, Jack.
02:34:53.000 Or New Zealand or Australia.
02:34:55.000 Right, right, right.
02:34:56.000 I expect I won't go to New Zealand or Australia for the rest of my life.
02:34:59.000 Why is that?
02:35:00.000 Just the nature of how that society, both of those societies, but I'll take Australia, became so dictatorial and totalitarian over this issue, the abuse of citizens.
02:35:15.000 It was really dark and somebody said to me, can you believe it?
02:35:18.000 They were immigrants originally and they were prisoners. 0.99
02:35:22.000 They should really resist and not like this kind of treatment.
02:35:26.000 And I said, yeah, you have to remember they were also the prison guards.
02:35:30.000 That's also part of the history.
02:35:32.000 Also, they're unarmed.
02:35:34.000 That was a big argument for the Second Amendment. 0.86
02:35:36.000 It was a big argument that those kind of draconian measures, stopping people from working unless they complied with mandates, would never work in America.
02:35:47.000 By the way, speaking of mandates, you saw that Washington, D.C. event against the mandates that had a bunch of doctors speaking and firemen and all kinds of people.
02:35:56.000 So that is happening again April 10th in Los Angeles.
02:35:59.000 And I support it because, again, I don't need any medical opinion.
02:36:03.000 I don't need to like or dislike a particular pharma product to support the idea that mandates are destructive.
02:36:12.000 Today, you might love it because you're afraid of COVID. Tomorrow, it'll be something else.
02:36:16.000 And tomorrow, it might be you.
02:36:17.000 And so I really believe in the people who are standing up and saying that mandates themselves, without regard to why, mandates themselves are destructive.
02:36:26.000 And that's April 10th in Los Angeles.
02:36:28.000 You'll find it somewhere else.
02:36:29.000 I think it's stopthemandates.com, stopthemandatesus.com, something like that.
02:36:34.000 So I encourage people to go, and if you're lucky enough to be on the Joe Rogan Show, you talk about things you believe in.
02:36:41.000 I hear you.
02:36:44.000 It's one of those topics of conversation where...
02:36:49.000 People don't like to say that.
02:36:51.000 Because if you say, I don't believe in mandates, you get pushed into this anti-vax category.
02:36:57.000 In fact, they've actually changed the definition.
02:37:00.000 Yeah, please go ahead.
02:37:01.000 Just that the definition of anti-vaxxer is now somebody who opposes vaccination and opposes mandates.
02:37:07.000 That seems crazy.
02:37:08.000 That should be called anti-mandate, not anti-vaxxer.
02:37:10.000 That seems crazy because a lot of those people are actually vaccinated.
02:37:13.000 Right.
02:37:14.000 That are saying this.
02:37:15.000 More than a lot.
02:37:16.000 More than a lot.
02:37:16.000 When you're talking about the doctors and the hospitals, you know, we had 34,000 medical workers fired in New York, in New York, for not wanting to get vaccinated.
02:37:25.000 It's not a smart decision.
02:37:27.000 Especially since some of them actually had natural immunity because they had COVID. That was one of the weirder things, where they were denying natural immunity, denying that it's a thing.
02:37:36.000 Now they're coming out and saying...
02:37:38.000 Just starting.
02:37:38.000 Just starting.
02:37:39.000 But they're saying that it's more effective.
02:37:41.000 More effective.
02:37:43.000 Yeah, just starting.
02:37:44.000 But then you got somebody like Paul Offit who was saying the only way out of this is vaccination.
02:37:51.000 There's no other way out of it.
02:37:52.000 Who's Paul Offit?
02:37:53.000 A big-time consultant to CDC, just one of the big-time vaccine doctors, vaccine promoters.
02:38:00.000 You know, when I talk about vaccines or you say anti-vax, you've got to remember we're talking about a suite of products that are all different.
02:38:07.000 People think vaccines...
02:38:09.000 It's like saying, do you use drugs?
02:38:10.000 Exactly correct.
02:38:11.000 Well, I drink coffee.
02:38:11.000 Exactly correct.
02:38:12.000 So, you know, pharmaceuticals, there's great ones.
02:38:17.000 Give it to me when I get a bee sting.
02:38:19.000 Please give me the thing I need.
02:38:21.000 Give me penicillin if I get...
02:38:22.000 That's right.
02:38:23.000 Absolutely.
02:38:23.000 But you can't say, here's one in a black box.
02:38:25.000 I'm not going to tell you what it is.
02:38:27.000 I'm going to force you to take this one.
02:38:28.000 I'm not going to tell you what's inside. 0.99
02:38:29.000 Just shut up and turn over. 0.78
02:38:30.000 And then I'm going to withhold data on the adverse events. 0.97
02:38:32.000 That I'm not so attracted to.
02:38:34.000 And so I'm not anti-vax, but each one of the products is a consumer product that the public has to assess and make a decision about.
02:38:43.000 Do you think over time this is going to be looked at unfavorably?
02:38:46.000 Do you think history, when they look back on this moment, are going to learn from the way human beings reacted en masse to this?
02:38:57.000 Probably.
02:38:58.000 The reason I'm saying probably, and this is a bit discouraging what I'm going to say, is that, you know, I mentioned throughout human history, governments have been in the business of how can they control the only population they really care about.
02:39:11.000 It's not the enemy.
02:39:12.000 It's their own population.
02:39:13.000 And that is just human nature, right?
02:39:15.000 If you're made the chief of the village, you don't want to not be the chief of the village.
02:39:19.000 And so that process has been getting more and more perfected over time.
02:39:25.000 In 1984, Orwell predicted that television and electronics and other things would be important parts of this, and God bless him.
02:39:35.000 He was right.
02:39:38.000 What my concern is, is that maybe the methods of controlling populations are close to perfected.
02:39:44.000 That is a concern I have.
02:39:46.000 Meaning, with technology as it is, with social media, pushing the buttons that you're a bad person if you say this or that.
02:39:53.000 Like, I'm a bad person today, right?
02:39:54.000 I've opposed mandates.
02:39:56.000 What, do you want people to die?
02:39:57.000 Do you want to kill people? 1.00
02:39:58.000 Do you want to kill my grandmother? 0.99
02:39:59.000 That's not actually what I said. 0.98
02:40:01.000 I said I oppose mandates.
02:40:03.000 We oppose additional government control.
02:40:07.000 Which is essentially what the mandate is.
02:40:09.000 That's right.
02:40:09.000 And there may be a place for draconian actions by government, but you have to choose that very, very artfully and carefully because you're never going to get it back.
02:40:19.000 Yes, that's what's important.
02:40:21.000 And so if we, you know, it turns out it's most of our conversation today about that subject, which, you know, people asked me what I was going to talk about.
02:40:28.000 I said, I don't know.
02:40:29.000 It's Joe Rogan.
02:40:30.000 So what's he going to ask?
02:40:31.000 I have no idea what it's going to be.
02:40:32.000 But this, my reality is that That we have a beautiful experiment in America, an extraordinary constitution.
02:40:41.000 You realize when America was formed, the idea that you would say to the king, you can't come into my house with your goons. 0.94
02:40:48.000 The king would laugh at you and kill you on top of that, right?
02:40:51.000 So we were a country in a pendulum swinging away from control by one individual.
02:40:57.000 And every country on earth today that's controlled by one individual is bad news.
02:41:02.000 All of them.
02:41:03.000 Saudi Arabia, Russia is an example.
02:41:07.000 North Korea.
02:41:08.000 Yeah.
02:41:08.000 And what's a country that isn't?
02:41:10.000 Our country.
02:41:11.000 And so it's a very beautiful thing.
02:41:13.000 And really, I want to answer very directly the question about will we look back on this and think, wow, that was an overreaction.
02:41:23.000 Yes, of course.
02:41:24.000 Intelligent people would look back on this one day and say that was an overreaction.
02:41:28.000 It was an overreaction to imprison Japanese people and put them in prison camps in 2000 – I mean in World War II. And we're now making amends for that and we're compensating people and – but we were scared.
02:41:39.000 We were scared that the Japanese were going to be – we'd been attacked and blah, blah, blah.
02:41:43.000 There's similar reactions right now to Russians.
02:41:45.000 That's right.
02:41:45.000 That's right.
02:41:45.000 That's right.
02:41:46.000 Exactly.
02:41:48.000 Not similar, I should say.
02:41:49.000 I mean, obviously, there's no internment camps, but there's a lot of fear.
02:41:52.000 Yeah.
02:41:53.000 And who will use fear all the time?
02:41:56.000 People in power.
02:41:57.000 Yeah.
02:41:57.000 Right?
02:41:58.000 So I'd like to think we will look back soon, by the way, and say, well, wait a minute.
02:42:03.000 Maybe we weren't so right about this and this and this and this, and maybe that was a little much.
02:42:08.000 And maybe we shouldn't have had children in school before.
02:42:12.000 Wearing masks that don't work, that they're not wearing properly, that are under their nose anyway, but they have to do it.
02:42:18.000 Maybe we shouldn't have done that to kids developing their language skills who can't see mouths.
02:42:23.000 And maybe we shouldn't have frightened these kids to think that everybody is going to kill them because they're carrying a virus and to touch the doorknob and then somebody spray that doorknob. 0.99
02:42:31.000 All this shit went on and is going on in some schools right now. 0.98
02:42:34.000 So maybe we shouldn't have inoculated 12-year-old kids with boosters after... 0.99
02:42:40.000 They had myocarditis, for God's sake.
02:42:42.000 Maybe we shouldn't have done all that.
02:42:44.000 That's true.
02:42:44.000 What I'm concerned about, though, is will the information even become known?
02:42:49.000 Because you and I both talk to a lot of people, and you say, what about this FDA thing, wanting 75 years?
02:42:56.000 And they say, that's not true.
02:42:57.000 That's fake news, but it is true.
02:42:59.000 Sorry to interrupt, but do you think we have, because we've got to wrap this up soon, but do you think we have the potential for an uncensored social media network that's not a dumpster fire?
02:43:11.000 Because there's been some attempts at uncensored social media, but a lot of them are not that good.
02:43:18.000 You go there, they're filled with assholes and trolls, and I don't even know if the people that are posting on those are real people, or if they're people that have been sent over there to try to ruin these companies. 0.74
02:43:29.000 Yeah. 0.98
02:43:29.000 But everything you just said applies to Facebook, with the only difference being that Facebook will censor certain kinds of things and has tens of thousands of people to do it, by the way. 0.98
02:43:39.000 So will we get one? 0.99
02:43:41.000 I would take it even with all the shit. 0.99
02:43:43.000 For example, there's, you know, the... 1.00
02:43:54.000 I'm sure I could find all kinds of things on Rumble I would hate, but I'm not looking for shit I hate. 0.99
02:44:00.000 Right. 0.95
02:44:02.000 I might not watch it or I might watch it because I'm curious, but I'm a 67-year-old intelligent-thinking person.
02:44:09.000 I mean, porn is like this.
02:44:11.000 Porn is downright destructive.
02:44:13.000 If you find the darkest, most horrible thing you can imagine and your kids find it, I think it's bad news.
02:44:19.000 But they have to learn in life, like I did, what am I going to look at?
02:44:24.000 Where am I going to give my attention?
02:44:25.000 What am I going to believe?
02:44:26.000 What am I going to question?
02:44:27.000 And for me, the process of questioning government is what makes this country extraordinary.
02:44:34.000 If we're not allowed to question the king, if the king can just say, As Biden did, by the way, if you get this injection, you will not get sick and you will not spread it to anyone else.
02:44:45.000 That was not true.
02:44:47.000 I don't think he's lying, by the way. 0.98
02:44:48.000 I just think he doesn't fucking know. 0.98
02:44:50.000 But that's a problem when your president can say that, and I can't question it. 0.99
02:44:54.000 And that's the moment we're in.
02:44:56.000 And so long answer to your question is, will we look back with help from you and others to just provide an alternate view and let the consumer decide?
02:45:07.000 Maybe we look back on it, but it's also possible that it will disappear.
02:45:12.000 Well, it seems that there's the potential for an extraordinary shift in our ability to...
02:45:19.000 Ascertain what's right or wrong if someone created a social media platform that was uncensored, that did abide by the freedom that we expect from the First Amendment.
02:45:32.000 I know it doesn't apply to private companies.
02:45:34.000 That's the argument always.
02:45:35.000 These are private companies, but when you get to something like Twitter that is so extraordinarily influential, it reaches I don't know how many people are on Twitter, but it's fucking insane amounts of numbers.
02:45:48.000 And information can spread so quickly on there.
02:45:52.000 Good and bad.
02:45:54.000 Real and false.
02:45:55.000 But you've gotta figure out a way to not censor people.
02:46:00.000 Especially not censor people that just have disturbing but accurate information like the Hunter Biden laptop story.
02:46:07.000 That alone, the fact that that alone was removed from Twitter should disturb the shit out of people that just want the truth.
02:46:15.000 Especially when you realize that that was a factor in choosing the president.
02:46:20.000 And clearly the administration is not doing well.
02:46:24.000 I mean, I'm not a Trump supporter, and I didn't vote for him, but I'm saying if you look at what happened, that had an absolute influence on the election.
02:46:34.000 And on the planet Earth.
02:46:35.000 And I agree with you, and I think that many people I know, and you know, Joe, if we talked about the Hunter Biden laptop, they say, oh, that's Russian.
02:46:43.000 Today, say that's Russian disinformation, because the New York Times article was this big that has them coming around, but all the other stuff was so enormous.
02:46:51.000 It's going to take time.
02:46:53.000 Yeah.
02:46:53.000 And it's got to take a – we need to get hold of our free speech platforms again.
02:47:01.000 Like I could say something here.
02:47:03.000 Presumably I have free speech in your presence. 0.99
02:47:05.000 And if I said certain things, you'd say, get the fuck out of here. 0.99
02:47:09.000 I don't agree with that. 0.99
02:47:10.000 That's too far.
02:47:11.000 What are you talking about?
02:47:12.000 We all have a line and controversy and words can get us to argument and words can get us to solution, of course.
02:47:21.000 So the words are the key.
02:47:23.000 As our friend Sam Harris would always say, it's so important to have good discourse.
02:47:27.000 Yet our friend Sam Harris is also taking a very strong position, doesn't want to hear anything about an alternate view.
02:47:34.000 He's very much endorsed the The alternate view and took issue with some guests you had.
02:47:42.000 And this idea that you platformed guests. 0.81
02:47:44.000 You mean a fucking famous doctor who's one of the developers of the mRNA vaccine platform that's being used right now? 0.95
02:47:52.000 His opinion we just don't want to have. 0.98
02:47:54.000 Is that what it means?
02:47:55.000 So a lot of people have...
02:47:58.000 It's a mixed model these days.
02:48:00.000 And I think if we can capture again the idea, here's the point, main point.
02:48:05.000 If Facebook were less controlled, Then people know they have to be more careful, meaning right now they're just being told, Daddy's going to take care of it.
02:48:13.000 You won't see anything you shouldn't see.
02:48:15.000 Daddy Zuckerberg or Daddy government. 1.00
02:48:18.000 And if you said, hey, man, you're going to see a lot of shit on here. 0.99
02:48:22.000 So be careful. 1.00
02:48:22.000 Have your kids be careful. 1.00
02:48:24.000 You're going to see a lot of opinions that aren't true.
02:48:26.000 Be an astute consumer of information.
02:48:30.000 There is an experiment done in Switzerland where they removed all the stop signs from certain communities.
02:48:36.000 Sweden, pardon me.
02:48:37.000 And it actually worked that people were more cautious.
02:48:40.000 You know, as you come into an intersection, there was no stop sign.
02:48:43.000 Right?
02:48:44.000 They reduced signs.
02:48:44.000 It's a Wikipedia article you can find.
02:48:46.000 It won't be that interesting.
02:48:47.000 But the idea was it transferred from government to you the responsibility to stop at that intersection and look around.
02:48:56.000 And it actually improved safety.
02:48:59.000 People knew, I can't rely on this.
02:49:01.000 What am I going to do?
02:49:02.000 That sign says go 50 miles an hour.
02:49:05.000 I'm going to do that, and I'm still going to have a crash.
02:49:07.000 I'm still going to have accidents.
02:49:08.000 So it moved the responsibility to the driver. 0.99
02:49:12.000 And if we did that with social media, which is, of course, there's all kinds of shit. 1.00
02:49:16.000 You know where you find shit, by the way? 1.00
02:49:18.000 Novels. 1.00
02:49:19.000 Human beings, movies, being human.
02:49:22.000 Well, it also used to be a gigantic part of the internet.
02:49:25.000 It was just chaos.
02:49:27.000 It didn't ruin society when that was the case.
02:49:30.000 It made things uniquely interesting because it was the first moment in time where we had access to information in that way.
02:49:38.000 And having these nannies and gatekeepers in the form of Facebook and Twitter, it's not helping us. 0.52
02:49:46.000 It's dividing people even further and it's polarizing the strong elements of the far right and the far left.
02:49:53.000 And I think that's extremely detrimental because I think most people lie somewhere in the center and they have ideas from both sides.
02:50:00.000 And if you give people the ability to debate things, to have controversial or maybe even incorrect opinions, but then someone comes along and shows how those opinions are incorrect, if someone's paying attention who's an outside observer, they get a chance to see the argument play out and they form their opinion based on what's a stronger position,
02:50:21.000 what's a stronger argument.
02:50:23.000 And nobody telling us what the truth is.
02:50:25.000 Yeah.
02:50:26.000 Like, I want to decide what the truth is about something. 0.99
02:50:28.000 Especially when these people are people like the president who get shit wrong all the time. 0.99
02:50:32.000 Sure. 0.98
02:50:33.000 These are not people that are good at this.
02:50:34.000 What'd you find?
02:50:35.000 Oh.
02:50:37.000 A Facebook bug led to increased views of harmful content over six months.
02:50:41.000 What is this, buddy?
02:50:42.000 The story just broke while we were live.
02:50:44.000 I sort of saw some headlines going around.
02:50:45.000 They found stuff that was supposed to be demoted, you know, for nudity, violence.
02:50:51.000 Downranking.
02:50:51.000 And it was being actually promoted instead of being the opposite.
02:50:55.000 And it'd be interesting, so we'll see if the country falls apart because of six weeks of Facebook failing. 0.75
02:50:59.000 I doubt of nudity people, naked people, and having sex. 0.95
02:51:03.000 Yeah.
02:51:04.000 Gavin, thank you very much.
02:51:05.000 Your book, The Gift of Fear, has been out.
02:51:07.000 It's been out for a long time.
02:51:09.000 And I'm going to start reading it.
02:51:11.000 I haven't read it yet, but I heard it's excellent.
02:51:12.000 I promise you it's good.
02:51:13.000 I really enjoyed our conversation.
02:51:15.000 Me too.
02:51:15.000 It was great.
02:51:16.000 Thank you very much.
02:51:16.000 I really appreciate you.
02:51:17.000 You too.
02:51:18.000 All right.
02:51:19.000 If anyone wants to get a hold of you, what's the best way?
02:51:23.000 GDBA.com, gavindebecker.com is one way.
02:51:26.000 Do you use any social media?
02:51:27.000 No, no, no, no, no.
02:51:28.000 Good for you.
02:51:29.000 No.
02:51:30.000 And then the giftoffear.com website, they can see that masterclass for free.
02:51:37.000 And I'm glad to be rich enough to do it that way.
02:51:40.000 I am glad you're doing it that way, Tim.
02:51:42.000 Thank you very much.
02:51:43.000 Bye, everybody.