The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1935 - Kyle Kulinski

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:13.000 Hi, Kyle.

00:00:13.000 Hello, sir.

00:00:14.000 Good to see you, brother.

00:00:14.000 Good to see you, too, man.

00:00:15.000 That was a great set last night.

00:00:16.000 Thank you.

00:00:17.000 It was a lot of fun.

00:00:17.000 Yeah, that was a lot of fun.

00:00:18.000 Isn't that place crazy?

00:00:19.000 That place is crazy.

00:00:20.000 It used to be an EDM club.

00:00:21.000 We turned it into a comedy club.

00:00:22.000 That's hilarious.

00:00:23.000 How long ago?

00:00:24.000 Just by coming here.

00:00:24.000 Two years ago.

00:00:25.000 Two years ago it was an EDM club? 0.84

00:00:26.000 Two years ago it was like a bunch of dirty people that were doing MDMA and dancing around.

00:00:33.000 I feel like last year, it wasn't, like, I don't think they had that cool projection of the alien on the back.

00:00:38.000 Oh, yeah, no.

00:00:40.000 Yeah, it's like they've upgraded it in just a year.

00:00:42.000 Yeah.

00:00:42.000 Well, it's, you know, become a thing.

00:00:44.000 You know, we're there every week.

00:00:47.000 And then the club opens up within a couple of weeks.

00:00:49.000 I'll show you that tomorrow.

00:00:50.000 Yeah, and you got a lot of comedians who have joined you here, right?

00:00:54.000 12 world-class comedians moved here.

00:00:57.000 And they all, come on, they all just followed you, right?

00:00:59.000 They saw what you did and they were like, all right, let's go there.

00:01:01.000 Well, I kind of let them know, like, you don't have to be there.

00:01:04.000 You don't have to be in Hollywood, stuck in traffic, and you don't have to deal with, like, it was always, in California, there was always the lure of Hollywood because they were going to give you work.

00:01:16.000 Right?

00:01:17.000 You'd get on a sitcom, and you would do talk shows, you'd do all these different things, but those aren't really a thing anymore.

00:01:23.000 Yeah.

00:01:23.000 And so, what else are you going to be there for?

00:01:26.000 Movies?

00:01:26.000 How many movies are there?

00:01:27.000 You can go in for movies.

00:01:29.000 And what do you want to do?

00:01:30.000 Like, everybody wants to do stand-up.

00:01:32.000 Like, Stan Hope said it once, and I thought about it, I was like, Dad, that's right.

00:01:35.000 He's like, really what you're doing when you're doing a television show is it's an ad to get people to go see you do stand-up.

00:01:42.000 Yeah, that's what it is.

00:01:43.000 How many of your comedian friends still do TV, movies, stuff like that?

00:01:49.000 A few of them.

00:01:49.000 A few of them do?

00:01:50.000 Yeah, they're trying to do more movies now, like Burt just did a big movie, The Machine, and it was a real problem because it got delayed because it's all about Russia.

00:01:59.000 It's about him going to Russia.

00:02:01.000 It's a true story about him.

00:02:02.000 Yeah, I remember his famous... 1.00

00:02:03.000 The fucking trailer is hilarious. 0.98

00:02:06.000 It looks great, but they held it for a long time, and then we released the trailer. 0.99

00:02:11.000 On the podcast we did recently.

00:02:13.000 So now they're going to release the movie because the trailer got received so well.

00:02:17.000 Because they were worried.

00:02:17.000 People were going to say, you know, it's about Russia.

00:02:19.000 You can't have a funny movie about Russia.

00:02:22.000 But nobody really cares.

00:02:23.000 So who was pressuring them over it?

00:02:26.000 It's not a pressure thing.

00:02:27.000 It's a fear thing.

00:02:28.000 They're like, oh, let's not release this.

00:02:30.000 Let's hang on to this.

00:02:31.000 They did that with North Korea. 0.61

00:02:33.000 You remember when...

00:02:34.000 Yeah, that's the interview.

00:02:35.000 Who's the dude's name?

00:02:36.000 I'll blank it on his name right now.

00:02:37.000 Franco?

00:02:37.000 Yeah, James Franco.

00:02:38.000 And Seth Rogen.

00:02:39.000 Yeah, and they were like, hey, we don't want to cause any problems or whatever.

00:02:42.000 Yeah.

00:02:42.000 Which is like, it's hilarious to think that Kim Jong-un is somewhere.

00:02:45.000 Like, what did James Franco say about me?

00:02:47.000 How is he joking?

00:02:48.000 Well, I'm sure they're pissed.

00:02:50.000 But, you know, whatever.

00:02:51.000 These guys are pissed about everything, isn't they?

00:02:53.000 I know.

00:02:53.000 Well, you know, some of the propaganda that comes out of there is like...

00:02:57.000 World-class silly, you know, it's like they have effectively a state religion where, I mean, they said famously, uh, Kim Jong-il in his first round of golf, he shot like, I don't know, it was like, yeah, something ridiculous. 0.62

00:03:11.000 Yeah, so they go top-notch with their propaganda. 0.97

00:03:14.000 His first round of golf, imagine.

00:03:16.000 Which is beyond impossible.

00:03:17.000 I don't even think...

00:03:18.000 It might be impossible to shoot even par your first round of golf.

00:03:22.000 Yeah, how would it be possible?

00:03:23.000 I couldn't even hit the ball the other day.

00:03:25.000 These guys were driving him and, who's with us?

00:03:28.000 Cheeto.

00:03:29.000 Andrew Santino was here, and they were whacking the golf ball.

00:03:33.000 I missed it like three times in a row, just trying to hit it.

00:03:36.000 It's one of those things where, in theory, you feel like, I could do this.

00:03:40.000 I hit that little thing over there.

00:03:41.000 Yeah, how long is it to do that thing?

00:03:41.000 Yeah, it's a big green.

00:03:42.000 It's 120 yards away.

00:03:43.000 I got this.

00:03:44.000 And then you get up and you realize, like, oh, this is...

00:03:46.000 A lot of people have trouble just making contact.

00:03:48.000 You hit behind it, it's called a duff, and then it goes, like, five yards or whatever.

00:03:52.000 You thin it, and it goes way over the green.

00:03:54.000 It's a very difficult game.

00:03:55.000 I've been playing it my whole life.

00:03:55.000 I know Jamie's, like, obsessed with it now.

00:03:58.000 Yeah, Jamie's out there with that simulator every fucking day. 0.98

00:04:01.000 That's all you hear. 0.99

00:04:02.000 I would be with him if I was here.

00:04:04.000 If I lived here, we'd be playing golf at least twice a week.

00:04:07.000 I try to do that in the summer in New York, at least. 0.99

00:04:10.000 It's such an addictive game that I can't fuck with it. 0.98

00:04:12.000 I don't want to be one of you guys. 0.99

00:04:14.000 Well, I think I agree with you that that's a legitimate fear.

00:04:18.000 I just feel like if you did get addicted, you'd be like, this is awesome.

00:04:22.000 I'm sure I did, but I love pool. 0.98

00:04:24.000 I play pool so much, I can't be fucking around with another game. 0.99

00:04:28.000 Too much! 0.99

00:04:29.000 It would be four or five hours.

00:04:31.000 If you're into golf and you go play 18 holes of golf, it's going to be minimum four hours.

00:04:35.000 Yeah, that's the thing about it.

00:04:36.000 I could play pool, I could have a few games in an hour and be done.

00:04:40.000 You can play pool when it rains out.

00:04:42.000 There's a lot of stuff you can do.

00:04:44.000 Yeah.

00:04:45.000 So the Kim Jong-un thing, yeah.

00:04:47.000 That movie, I never saw that.

00:04:49.000 Did you ever see the interview?

00:04:50.000 I never saw it.

00:04:51.000 First of all, I don't even know if they actually ended up releasing it.

00:04:53.000 Do we know if they ended up releasing it, Jamie?

00:04:55.000 I know they postponed it a little bit.

00:04:57.000 I believe it was.

00:04:57.000 No, it's definitely on streaming services and everything.

00:04:59.000 Okay.

00:05:00.000 They had that big Sony hack that happened as it was supposed to be released.

00:05:03.000 Oh, that's right.

00:05:04.000 And then that was like being, it wasn't like the debate or the full thing that they were after, but they wanted the movie to be withheld.

00:05:13.000 Yeah, and I couldn't believe over Russia you said for the Burke movie.

00:05:17.000 That's amazing.

00:05:17.000 So it's like basically anything that causes political problems, they say, hey, don't release this.

00:05:22.000 But like everything is controversial.

00:05:24.000 You know what I mean?

00:05:24.000 So how can you do that?

00:05:25.000 It was just, I mean, it was the timing of it, right?

00:05:28.000 You know, Russia invades Ukraine and then that's right when he finished it.

00:05:33.000 Yeah, that's poor timing.

00:05:34.000 Yeah, they couldn't say, look, Russia's fun.

00:05:37.000 These guys are drunk.

00:05:38.000 We're robbing a train.

00:05:39.000 Yeah, that wouldn't work out too well.

00:05:41.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:05:42.000 But it's a funny fucking movie. 0.98

00:05:43.000 So the answer to the question is like, yeah, some of my friends are still doing movies. 0.99

00:05:48.000 Tom's doing some movies.

00:05:49.000 But really, the bulk of what everybody does now is podcasts and stand-up.

00:05:54.000 And you don't have to do that stuff anymore.

00:05:56.000 So that was one of the allures to get people to come here.

00:05:58.000 It's like, hey, the number one podcast in the world is here.

00:06:01.000 And Your Mom's House is a huge podcast.

00:06:04.000 Tim Dillon's here, which is another huge podcast.

00:06:08.000 Tony Hinchcliffe has Kill Tony here.

00:06:09.000 That's a huge podcast.

00:06:11.000 So it's like, there's a lot of reasons to come here.

00:06:14.000 It's like, there's a new scene here.

00:06:16.000 Yeah.

00:06:16.000 And it emerged during the pandemic.

00:06:18.000 Well, I saw Tim Dillon, this was just before the pandemic, just before I feel like he blew up.

00:06:23.000 We were, probably was just when you moved here, we were here and we saw him perform.

00:06:27.000 And I remember looking at Corin and saying...

00:06:30.000 This guy's going to be big.

00:06:31.000 He's going to be huge.

00:06:32.000 He's already getting way bigger.

00:06:34.000 He's selling out theaters now, but he's going to be one of the biggest comics.

00:06:37.000 Well, he's pretty close to one of the biggest comics in the world right now.

00:06:41.000 It's one of those things where his potential is massive.

00:06:45.000 Well, that's, you know, like, what's the black comedian's name from last night?

00:06:49.000 What's his name?

00:06:50.000 Brian Simpson?

00:06:50.000 He was phenomenal.

00:06:52.000 Yeah, he's amazing.

00:06:52.000 And I feel like he needs to get his due.

00:06:55.000 He's gonna get his due.

00:06:56.000 Yeah, he is, because he was really funny, and I'd only seen him maybe once before or something, but I feel like he's undervalued.

00:07:03.000 Well, he's still getting better.

00:07:05.000 He's coming into his own.

00:07:06.000 In just the time that I've known him, he's got quite a bit better.

00:07:09.000 He's one of those guys that's just like all the pieces are falling into place right now for him.

00:07:14.000 He did a Netflix special, and now people know him from that, and now he has a bunch of new material that he's working on.

00:07:20.000 Like last night, he's working on a bunch of new stuff, and he's better all the time.

00:07:24.000 He's like at that 10-year mark where guys really start to put it together and take off.

00:07:29.000 He was homeless, he was telling me.

00:07:32.000 And it wasn't too long ago that he was homeless.

00:07:34.000 Yeah, not that long ago.

00:07:35.000 A couple guys we work with were homeless.

00:07:37.000 Like Hans Kim, who wasn't there last night because he's in Hawaii right now.

00:07:41.000 But Hans Kim was homeless just a year ago.

00:07:44.000 And then a few months later, he's doing arenas with me.

00:07:49.000 How does that happen?

00:07:50.000 Is it your impact?

00:07:51.000 They come on your podcast, they get a little bit of a name for themselves, they get some spots?

00:07:55.000 Like, how does that work?

00:07:56.000 What's the pipeline?

00:07:57.000 Well, he's doing Kill Tony, and Kill Tony's a huge show, and he's a regular on Kill Tony, so he does a new minute of stand-up every week on Kill Tony.

00:08:04.000 And so there's that.

00:08:06.000 And then I start taking him with me on the road, having him open with me and Tony.

00:08:12.000 And so that's how he's doing arenas.

00:08:15.000 He's doing arenas with me.

00:08:16.000 And then he starts selling out on his own.

00:08:19.000 Now he's doing headlining tours.

00:08:20.000 So he's going out and selling out comedy clubs, and he's doing great.

00:08:24.000 What an amazing story.

00:08:25.000 I wonder, like, how many people out there are kind of similar in that they would be hilarious if given the opportunity, but they never really step on stage or things in life don't quite come together and they're stuck at their 9 to 5 or whatever.

00:08:36.000 It really makes you think, like, what percentage of people can do this if given the opportunity and if they get on stage?

00:08:42.000 You think so?

00:08:43.000 Yeah, there's a lot of...

00:08:44.000 There's the funniest guy that I ever met.

00:08:46.000 Never did stand up.

00:08:47.000 This is a guy that I used to work with that was a private investigator.

00:08:50.000 I was his assistant for a while.

00:08:52.000 It was really, he lost his license drunk driving.

00:08:54.000 And so he needed someone to drive him around.

00:08:57.000 And so he put an ad out.

00:08:58.000 This is like, you know, the 80s.

00:09:00.000 He put an ad out for a private investigator's assistant and I started working for him.

00:09:04.000 And I would, it was mostly like insurance scams.

00:09:08.000 People that were, you know, doing insurance scams, we'd take photos of them working when they were supposed to be debilitated.

00:09:13.000 And he was funnier than anybody I'd ever met.

00:09:16.000 Wow. 0.97

00:09:16.000 He was so fucking funny. 0.97

00:09:18.000 And what's crazy is his cousin owned a comedy club. 0.99

00:09:21.000 His cousin was one of the owners of the Comedy Connection, this guy Bill Downs.

00:09:26.000 So this guy, Dave Dolan, who's my buddy, we stayed friends for life until he died, which was a couple years back.

00:09:33.000 But he was, without a doubt, he would have been a brilliant comic.

00:09:37.000 Without a doubt.

00:09:38.000 He just had no desire.

00:09:40.000 Do you agree with me that there's different kinds of funny?

00:09:42.000 There's some people who can be funny off the cuff, naturally in a conversation, and then there's people who can actually take it to the stage.

00:09:49.000 Because, in my opinion, the stage is something totally different.

00:09:54.000 It's one thing to do off-handed, quick comments and play off what other people are saying, but if you're up there and the spotlight's on you and you got nobody else to play off of, that's like a different kind of funny.

00:10:03.000 It's a different way of delivering it.

00:10:04.000 It's a different kind of funny, but if you understand funny, it's just a matter of putting together subjects in a way that utilizes your sense of humor.

00:10:16.000 Like, if you can do it in a conversation, most likely you can do it on stage.

00:10:20.000 But it won't be easy.

00:10:22.000 It's like golf, right?

00:10:23.000 So if you can whack a golf ball and you can knock it into the hole, well, hey, you can kind of play golf.

00:10:29.000 Now, how good can you play golf?

00:10:30.000 Can you play golf in a tournament?

00:10:32.000 Can you play golf under pressure?

00:10:34.000 It's like everything else.

00:10:37.000 But comedy is different in that it seems like you're just talking.

00:10:41.000 So it seems so easy.

00:10:43.000 I can talk.

00:10:44.000 You can talk.

00:10:45.000 It seems like easy to talk.

00:10:46.000 Just go talk.

00:10:47.000 But once you start doing it, you realize like, oh, this is like a mass hypnosis I'm doing.

00:10:52.000 This is way more complicated than you think it is.

00:10:55.000 But it can be done.

00:10:57.000 But it's not like, you know, there's certain things if you're physically limited, you're never going to be able to do.

00:11:04.000 You know, like if you're frail, you're never going to be a linebacker.

00:11:08.000 It's just, it's insurmountable.

00:11:10.000 But if you're funny, you can figure out comedy.

00:11:14.000 It's just how much effort do you put in?

00:11:16.000 How much time do you put in?

00:11:17.000 How objective are you about your skills?

00:11:20.000 You know, how introspective are you?

00:11:24.000 How well can you see how people are perceiving what you're doing?

00:11:28.000 What's the flaws in your delivery?

00:11:29.000 And what's the flaws in the way you're piecing the material together?

00:11:33.000 I mean, it's complex.

00:11:34.000 Yeah, there's so much, I feel like there's so much pressure for a comedian because you have to get laughter within reasonable timeframes.

00:11:42.000 Yeah.

00:11:42.000 So you could try, if two or three punchlines flop in a row, now all of a sudden people are thinking like, you're bombing.

00:11:48.000 Yeah, you are bombing.

00:11:49.000 And you lost the crowd.

00:11:49.000 You know what I mean?

00:11:50.000 You have lost the crowd.

00:11:51.000 But that's a very difficult thing because you compare it to something I do where I do like political commentary.

00:11:54.000 I don't need a laugh.

00:11:55.000 If I get a laugh, it's just extra.

00:11:57.000 I just get to babble and have no consequences, and people either accept it or they won't, but it's not the same level of pressure.

00:12:04.000 Because if I don't get a laugh, it's like, he's a commentator.

00:12:07.000 What do you expect?

00:12:08.000 Exactly.

00:12:09.000 Yeah.

00:12:10.000 It's not easy.

00:12:12.000 I mean, it takes a long-ass time to get good at it.

00:12:15.000 Some people are very...

00:12:16.000 We were talking about Chappelle when I met him when he was 19. He was good then.

00:12:20.000 He was really good then.

00:12:21.000 Some people just...

00:12:22.000 They have a better head start.

00:12:24.000 They have a better personality for it.

00:12:26.000 Maybe they studied comedy when they were young because they were big fans.

00:12:31.000 They were always watching it.

00:12:32.000 They kind of developed an understanding of patterns and delivery and stuff.

00:12:38.000 Whereas some people, they're just the funny guy at work and people talk them into an open mic night.

00:12:42.000 But I've seen guys like that.

00:12:44.000 There's this guy that went on to be an executive at Comedy Central, and he kind of stopped doing stand-up.

00:12:50.000 But he used to work in an office somewhere, and one night I saw him do an open mic night thing.

00:13:01.000 It wasn't exactly an open mic night.

00:13:04.000 It was like guys were talking people into going on stage that were funny at work or something like that. 0.99

00:13:11.000 And he went on stage and he fucking killed with his suit on, with his tie on. 0.98

00:13:15.000 It was really funny. 0.98

00:13:16.000 And I remember talking to him and I go, hey man, his name is Geordie Fox.

00:13:20.000 And I remember saying, hey dude, you can be a funny comic, man.

00:13:23.000 You can really do this.

00:13:24.000 And he did it for a little while, but then he just like, whatever reason, he just went on to be an executive at Comedy Central.

00:13:30.000 And he kind of stopped doing it.

00:13:32.000 But you saw a spark right away where I was like, if you just focus and drive, you can do this.

00:13:41.000 But that's a big ask for some people.

00:13:43.000 What I find interesting is, and I noticed this from the different comedians last night, some people, the delivery can be totally different and be good in different ways.

00:13:52.000 So some people, like, they tell a story and it's a slow build-up to a big punchline.

00:13:56.000 And then other people, like Tony Hinchcliffe, this is the sense I got from him, is that when he talks, every word seems kind of, like, weighty.

00:14:02.000 Like, everything kind of lands, and he's getting a laugh every, whatever, 20 seconds.

00:14:06.000 Where he needs to just say one sentence, and boom, the crowd goes off, whereas some other comedian could sort of build up to a laugh.

00:14:12.000 Like, little jokes along the way, and then hit you with a big punchline, whereas Tony's, like, hitting you over and over and over.

00:14:17.000 And it's very tight.

00:14:18.000 His set was very tight.

00:14:19.000 Where it's like, every word in this is in a place where I'm gonna get the maximum result. 0.98

00:14:24.000 Which, to me, it's like, you crack some sort of fucking code to be able to do that. 0.98

00:14:28.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

00:14:28.000 Tony's a dedicated professional. 0.99

00:14:30.000 You know what I mean?

00:14:31.000 He's really dedicated.

00:14:32.000 That dude's obsessed with comedy.

00:14:34.000 I mean, he's constantly going over his material.

00:14:37.000 We're constantly having calls where he'll call me up, oh, dude, this Black Adam bit now, it's got this and it's got that. 0.96

00:14:42.000 He'll tell me the new punchlines he came up with when he was in Denver and, you know, we're howlin'.

00:14:46.000 And we're always, like, bouncing.

00:14:48.000 You know, you saw us hanging out in the green room.

00:14:49.000 We're always bouncing stuff around.

00:14:51.000 Yeah.

00:14:52.000 It's a beautiful workshop.

00:14:54.000 The green room is amazing.

00:14:55.000 Because when you've got William Montgomery, and Bryan Simpson, and David Lucas, and me, and Tony, and we're all fucking around, and Ron White's there, and we're all bouncing stuff around.

00:15:04.000 Oh, is he usually there, too?

00:15:05.000 Some days?

00:15:05.000 Ron White lives here, too.

00:15:06.000 I wish I saw him.

00:15:07.000 We've seen twice we've been to that club, The Vulcan, and he wasn't there either time, but I would have loved to see him.

00:15:12.000 I always thought he was really funny.

00:15:13.000 I'll see if I can get him to come out tonight, because we're doing The Creek in the Cave tonight.

00:15:16.000 But yeah, Ron's in town.

00:15:17.000 We have Tim Dillon, Ron White, Tom Segura, Christina Prasitsky, Tony Hinchcliffe, David Lucas, William Montgomery, Hans Kim. 0.98

00:15:26.000 We have so many fucking people that live here now. 0.97

00:15:28.000 So are there any ego issues between those people? 1.00

00:15:30.000 Because they're all such big personalities.

00:15:32.000 They all can fill the room with their own personality.

00:15:34.000 So is there any butting heads or does everybody get along nicely?

00:15:37.000 No.

00:15:37.000 Massive camaraderie.

00:15:38.000 It's a beautiful community.

00:15:39.000 It's really good here.

00:15:41.000 Really good.

00:15:42.000 Like shockingly good.

00:15:43.000 Like as good as the Comedy Store was.

00:15:44.000 It's amazing.

00:15:45.000 And everybody also recognizes there's something unique about this thing that's emerging here.

00:15:50.000 Because there was like a little community here.

00:15:51.000 There's some pretty talented people here.

00:15:52.000 You know, like they were kind of getting going and doing like little open mics and little small shows they put together here.

00:15:57.000 But now it's like thriving.

00:15:59.000 And so there's these people that are moving here just to do stand-up.

00:16:03.000 People that have this dream of doing stand-up.

00:16:04.000 They're trying to get on Kill Tony.

00:16:06.000 And there's clubs all around town now because the feeling of comedy being in Austin is like very tangible.

00:16:13.000 So, so many people are excited about it.

00:16:15.000 So, it seems like the breakup, eventually, between Hollywood and comedy was inevitable, given that, you know, with Hollywood, everything is sort of pre-produced and very particular, and you got executives telling people what they can and cannot say, and everything's very kind of scripted on that front.

00:16:30.000 Whereas comedy was always, in a sense, the anti-Hollywood, because it's like, alright, here anything goes.

00:16:35.000 You say whatever you want, and then let's just, you know, see what happens.

00:16:39.000 And so it seems like the breakup was inevitable at some point, that now, you know, they've moved away from Hollywood.

00:16:44.000 And it seems like, I don't know, you would know better than I would, like, who's still left in Hollywood and L.A. versus who's in New York, and now it seems like here there's almost maybe the biggest scene here now.

00:16:54.000 Yeah, there's a giant scene here.

00:16:56.000 New York still is a very good scene.

00:16:58.000 There's still elite comics in New York, and there's still some really good comics in LA. It's just less of them.

00:17:04.000 A lot of people moved away.

00:17:06.000 Theo moved to Nashville, Theo Vaughn...

00:17:08.000 Oh, is there a comedy scene there?

00:17:10.000 A little bit, a little bit, you know, but like there's Nate Bargatze, who's fantastic.

00:17:14.000 He's there.

00:17:15.000 But Theo's gonna move here now, so it's like he's excited about it too.

00:17:20.000 Like, there's so many people that have moved here.

00:17:22.000 It's crazy.

00:17:23.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:17:24.000 On any given night, we'll have like, fuck, eight comics up at the Vulcan. 0.99

00:17:29.000 It's wild. 0.98

00:17:29.000 It was packed yesterday. 0.98

00:17:31.000 Coldest day of the year.

00:17:32.000 Worst weather day in Texas.

00:17:34.000 33 degrees.

00:17:35.000 Icy.

00:17:36.000 And I said to Crystal before we went in corn, I was like, I bet you there's going to be 50 or fewer people there when we go.

00:17:41.000 And we showed up.

00:17:42.000 It was packed.

00:17:43.000 Yeah.

00:17:43.000 On a Wednesday night.

00:17:45.000 Yeah.

00:17:45.000 With ice on the roads and people.

00:17:46.000 But, you know, somebody made a good point.

00:17:47.000 They were like, a lot of these people lost power.

00:17:50.000 And, like, they're going to get warm, too.

00:17:51.000 Like, they're actually like, let's watch some comedy, but also let's get warm.

00:17:53.000 But it's also, it's packed there every night.

00:17:55.000 It's always packed. 0.98

00:17:57.000 It's a fucking cool thing. 0.97

00:17:59.000 Because it's a new thing. 0.99

00:18:00.000 It's very exciting.

00:18:01.000 And the town, it's such an artsy town. 0.95

00:18:04.000 I mean, the live music here is fucking amazing. 0.86

00:18:08.000 There's so many talented people. 0.97

00:18:09.000 There's this band, The Nether Hour.

00:18:11.000 There's really talented young guys that are here, and they're just working all the time.

00:18:16.000 They're at this bar, this night, and this bar, that night.

00:18:18.000 And this guy, Ellis Bullard, who's fucking amazing, is like honky-tonk dude, who's really fucking good and really cool guy, too.

00:18:25.000 He's out here, and then Gary Clark Jr.'s out here. 0.91

00:18:28.000 And now Suzanne Santo moved here from Honey Honey and she's here and there's so many good local bands that you could like on any given night, like on Monday night they go out to the Continental Club after they do Kill Tony and all the local guys get together and jam and it's incredible.

00:18:45.000 It's like the vibe of, like, live performances here.

00:18:48.000 Do you still love comedy as much as you did in, like, the 1990s?

00:18:53.000 More.

00:18:53.000 More?

00:18:53.000 Yeah, I love it.

00:18:54.000 Yeah.

00:18:55.000 I got that vibe being in the green room with you guys.

00:18:57.000 I got the sense, like, we could literally be in 1998 right now and Joe would be doing, like, the same thing, just with different comics around.

00:19:04.000 Yeah, and the fact that there's like this energy to this place too makes it more exciting.

00:19:10.000 You know, and also I'm in this part where I'm just developing new material.

00:19:13.000 So it's like now I have to like really be invested in trying to make these new bits work.

00:19:19.000 It's like when you get together an hour and you're headlining and it's killing, it's like, okay, now I just got to keep this polished and tight.

00:19:25.000 But when you have new stuff, it's like, I gotta figure out a way to make this work.

00:19:29.000 And that's exciting too.

00:19:30.000 So what percentage, because some of the jokes were older jokes, but what percentage of it was new stuff would you say last night?

00:19:37.000 Last night was half.

00:19:37.000 Half new stuff?

00:19:38.000 Half of it was new.

00:19:38.000 That's a lot of new stuff.

00:19:39.000 Yeah.

00:19:39.000 That's a lot of new stuff.

00:19:40.000 Yeah.

00:19:41.000 And that's over the last four or five months that I've developed all that new stuff.

00:19:45.000 So it's exciting.

00:19:46.000 And it's dangerous because when you record, and I recorded something, I haven't released it yet.

00:19:51.000 But when I record something, I then have to throw all that material away and come up with a whole new hour.

00:19:57.000 So what I do is I record and then in the time before I release it, that's like crunch time.

00:20:05.000 We have to develop a whole new set and then when I release the special, then that material's burnt forever.

00:20:10.000 So now I have to figure out how to make this new stuff as good as the old stuff.

00:20:15.000 I feel like riffing, when you're talking, feels a lot easier to me than like writing something down and then trying to go through it in a way.

00:20:23.000 Because if I write something down and I try to go through it, I feel like I start sounding robotic and I'm not connecting to it as well.

00:20:29.000 So when I riff, that's when people are more interested in what I'm saying because, you know, you could hear that it actually is coming from my core as I'm saying it.

00:20:36.000 So that's what seems very difficult about comedy to me is that, because you always talk about how you write.

00:20:40.000 And so, like, you have to write down your bits, and then you have to deliver it in a way that doesn't feel robotic, that feels like you're still connecting with the words.

00:20:47.000 Yeah.

00:20:47.000 And so I was, like Tony said last night, he's like, I don't even write.

00:20:50.000 He said, I don't even write my bits.

00:20:52.000 Yeah, Tony does it differently than me.

00:20:54.000 And to me, I feel like if I was a comedian, I'd be more like him, because if I write it down, I'll be like, and then this is the part of the joke where, like, it just wouldn't come out.

00:21:01.000 Right, but you don't have to say it that way.

00:21:04.000 Like, I think...

00:21:07.000 Everybody does it differently, and some people don't ever write, and some of the best comics alive don't ever write.

00:21:13.000 But I feel like you should do all those things.

00:21:18.000 I feel like comics are inherently lazy.

00:21:22.000 That's a funny sentence.

00:21:24.000 That's one of the reasons I led them to do comedy.

00:21:25.000 They're like, I don't want to work. 1.00

00:21:26.000 Fuck this. 1.00

00:21:27.000 Fuck this job. 1.00

00:21:28.000 And then you say something funny about the job, and everyone's like, ah! 1.00

00:21:31.000 And then you're like, oh, maybe I'm funny.

00:21:33.000 Well, that sort of rebellious mentality leads you to not want to be disciplined.

00:21:39.000 But I think there's a big value in sitting in front of a computer and just spending time going over ideas.

00:21:46.000 Like some of my best bits, I've come up with just writing.

00:21:50.000 Just sitting down and writing and then piecing them together.

00:21:53.000 And then the skill is to try to figure out a way to riff those concepts and get it to the point where it's funny.

00:22:00.000 Do you see a big difference day to day in terms of your delivery?

00:22:05.000 Like, some days we go up there and just be like, I'm just off today.

00:22:08.000 Like, I'm just not nailing it today.

00:22:09.000 And other days you're like, oh, I'm, you know, cranking it right now.

00:22:13.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:22:14.000 Yeah, there's days where you're better.

00:22:15.000 But it's also, it's like, you got to figure out, well, what was different about the day when I was off?

00:22:20.000 You know, maybe I didn't get as excited.

00:22:22.000 Maybe I didn't pace enough and warm up enough.

00:22:24.000 Maybe I didn't, like, treat it with a lot of weight.

00:22:26.000 Like, you got to, like, there's a lot of heaviness to, like, going on stage.

00:22:29.000 Like, here we go.

00:22:30.000 And then you also have to be looser on stage sometimes.

00:22:34.000 There's a lot of variables, which is why it's exciting.

00:22:37.000 Do you feel like the more pressure the better?

00:22:39.000 The more pressure you feel, the better you do?

00:22:41.000 Yeah, you need some pressure.

00:22:42.000 I get nervous for every show.

00:22:44.000 That means you love it.

00:22:46.000 Tiger Wood said that.

00:22:47.000 He's like, yeah, I get nervous before every round, and that's how I know I still love it.

00:22:50.000 Yeah, that's what fighters say, too.

00:22:53.000 Fighters say the worst feeling is when you're not nervous.

00:22:56.000 Because if you're not nervous, and you go, and some of them are fine with that, but a lot of them, they want to be on edge.

00:23:03.000 They want to be in the green room, getting ready, like...

00:23:07.000 Yeah.

00:23:08.000 You know, because then the nerves and everything, you're excited about this moment, and it's an important moment for you, and that's important.

00:23:17.000 You know you care.

00:23:18.000 Yeah.

00:23:19.000 You know you care in a situation like that.

00:23:21.000 Yeah, you gotta care.

00:23:21.000 You gotta care, and people don't like to be uncomfortable.

00:23:23.000 But I think through being uncomfortable, that's where the growth comes.

00:23:28.000 That's where you learn things.

00:23:29.000 Yeah, well, after you feel nervous, and then you do the thing and you do it well, the feeling of relief you get afterwards is amazing.

00:23:39.000 You know, I felt it like I went on the PBD podcast recently, Patrick Ben David, and I went in there knowing, I mean, they're sort of like a grind set...

00:23:48.000 Make money.

00:23:49.000 Make money, hustle culture, that sort of stuff.

00:23:52.000 And I went in there, and as somebody who's on the left, you know, they're not really going to agree with me on it, but they're nice enough guys, and they're in favor of open dialogue and discussion of different ideas, and I was like, hey, this should be fun.

00:24:02.000 And so I went in there knowing it was a little bit like the lion's den, so I was a little nervous, but I went in there, and the conversation went great, they're really nice guys, you know, we got a great reaction to it, and the feeling afterwards of relief was like, ugh.

00:24:13.000 That's interesting, because you went in there ready to do battle.

00:24:16.000 No, so I didn't go in there thinking there's going to be a fight.

00:24:20.000 But contentious, perhaps.

00:24:21.000 Yes, I thought they're not going to agree with me on some stuff, and so I need to be able to explain myself in a way that can change their mind, or at least give them pause and make them rethink it.

00:24:30.000 And I think I largely succeeded on that front.

00:24:33.000 A lot of people in their own audience said, you know, hey, I like what this guy had to say.

00:24:36.000 No, you did a great job.

00:24:37.000 I watched some clips from that.

00:24:38.000 You did a great job.

00:24:39.000 He's a great guy.

00:24:40.000 He really is a great guy.

00:24:41.000 He's fair.

00:24:42.000 He was fair.

00:24:43.000 Genuine.

00:24:43.000 Yeah, he was genuine.

00:24:44.000 He wasn't trying to like, you know, because some people, if you have a debate and they're different perspectives, some people will go in with like, I'm going to own this person mindset.

00:24:51.000 And that's not him.

00:24:52.000 He just genuinely wanted to know, like, how do you think about this?

00:24:54.000 Tell me what you think about this.

00:24:55.000 Even when he doesn't agree with you, he's fair.

00:24:57.000 Correct.

00:24:57.000 Yeah, he's a very genuine person, and that's the appeal, and that's why he's doing so well.

00:25:02.000 You know, we talked about that, the authenticity, that we talked about last night with Crystal, saying, with you guys, and with Sagar, and with Jimmy Dore, and even if you don't agree with people, What they're saying?

00:25:15.000 I know that's what you genuinely believe and feel and it's based on thinking, it's based on your research, it's based on your comprehension of whatever the subject you're talking about.

00:25:28.000 This is your real opinion and that's what people are missing in mainstream media and that's why you guys are eating their lunch.

00:25:35.000 That's why you're killing it.

00:25:36.000 There's a real reason for it because people have been deprived of that by executives, And networks that are orchestrating everything and giving people talking points and making people stay in these narrow parameters.

00:25:49.000 Did you say there was a woman that was, I forget who she was interviewing, but she was talking about something about climate change.

00:25:55.000 And she was asking a question and then she goes, okay, alright, I'm getting in trouble now.

00:26:01.000 Let me, because she has an earpiece in it. 1.00

00:26:03.000 Oh shit. 1.00

00:26:04.000 And so someone's saying, get off the climate change, stop talking about it. 1.00

00:26:06.000 Yeah, producer in the ear.

00:26:07.000 And so she has to course correct in the middle of the thing, which is virtually impossible.

00:26:12.000 Yeah.

00:26:13.000 And also fucks up the flow that makes people resonate with what you're saying.

00:26:18.000 Because I want to know that if you and Patrick David are disagreeing about a subject, I want to know that it's your thoughts and his thoughts.

00:26:28.000 Like, let me see which one I agree with.

00:26:31.000 Let me see why Kyle feels the way he feels and why Patrick disagrees.

00:26:35.000 And let me see them work this out.

00:26:38.000 And sometimes that takes 30 or 40 minutes.

00:26:40.000 Yeah.

00:26:40.000 And if you're doing CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, you got a four-minute hit in and out, man.

00:26:46.000 Ask one question, give me one cut-and-dry answer, and then let's move on here.

00:26:51.000 Nobody's learning anything.

00:26:52.000 And also, the people who are on screen, you don't know what they actually think about this thing.

00:26:56.000 Because they're on a network where maybe if they tell you the thing they really think, that's going to buck the orthodoxy, and then they're in trouble, and then they're out.

00:27:03.000 Exactly.

00:27:03.000 Because I think networks are afraid of Backlash.

00:27:08.000 So if somebody says something, let's say, that's true, but also goes against the grain, they might see a response from the audience.

00:27:15.000 They'll be like, oh, we don't want any advertisers to flee.

00:27:19.000 Let's cut this controversy off.

00:27:20.000 And honestly, that is the worst thing you could possibly do.

00:27:23.000 The best way to handle it is, and I do this too, if I'm going to say something where I feel like My own audience isn't even gonna agree with me on this.

00:27:29.000 Yeah.

00:27:30.000 You still, you gotta say it if you're telling the truth and then just let the chips fall where they may. 0.90

00:27:33.000 And one of the things I learned from you is just don't engage, you know, with Twitter and the mentions and YouTube comments because if you're getting good criticism, that's one thing, and you can tell when a criticism is fair, but if you're getting criticism that you're like, this isn't even close to true and now it's making me feel like shit, 0.78

00:27:51.000 And then you're angry and then you respond to that.

00:27:52.000 Yeah, it's like, what's the point? 0.74

00:27:53.000 I'm going to waste three hours feeling negative emotions because some douchebag is attacking me when they don't even know what I really think on the issue?

00:28:00.000 Yeah.

00:28:00.000 Then that's a totally different thing, you know?

00:28:01.000 Or they've just seen a clip where you might have looked at both sides of it, but they're only seeing this one side that you're looking at, and they're like, oh, Kyle is turning his back on this and that, and like...

00:28:13.000 And then you're like, no, I'm not.

00:28:14.000 And then you're like, you get into it.

00:28:17.000 Don't engage.

00:28:18.000 Don't engage.

00:28:18.000 Yeah, don't engage.

00:28:19.000 It keeps your mind pure, too, if you're like, you know, for what I do, I've got to read a lot of articles and watch a lot of videos and then react to it.

00:28:26.000 And I have more of an untainted perspective if I go right to the source, read it, and then I react.

00:28:32.000 Whereas if I see what other people are saying first, I don't want it to, like, sort of taint my own process going through the original material.

00:28:38.000 You know what I mean?

00:28:39.000 Right.

00:28:39.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:28:40.000 It's a complex little dance we're doing.

00:28:42.000 It's interesting.

00:28:43.000 Yeah.

00:28:43.000 But the beautiful thing is that now you're getting these people that aren't influenced by a group of people that have a vested interest on gaining some financial benefits from this show being successful.

00:28:59.000 Yeah.

00:29:02.000 Navigate it, move it in a way that they think is going to be the most commercially successful.

00:29:06.000 But they're not the people with the opinions.

00:29:08.000 They're not the people that are funny.

00:29:09.000 They're not the people that are putting out the entertainment value of it.

00:29:12.000 They're just the people that are profiting off of it.

00:29:14.000 And those are generally the people that fund it.

00:29:16.000 The executives, the network, the people. 1.00

00:29:18.000 But that's why CNN sucks. 0.97

00:29:20.000 It's because they're trying to do that, but you can't do that. 0.95

00:29:22.000 And so you have these people that are willing to do that.

00:29:25.000 You have the Brian Stelters and the Don Lemons that are willing to play ball and stay narrow.

00:29:30.000 And they're in these narrow pathways and people just don't like it.

00:29:34.000 They just don't resonate with it.

00:29:36.000 Because you know that's not a real person.

00:29:38.000 That's not who you are.

00:29:40.000 Yeah.

00:29:40.000 Crystal and I have honestly tried to go above and beyond on that front because we don't want any money from certain sources tainting us.

00:29:48.000 Because this is what happens with traditional media.

00:29:50.000 If you're taking a lot of money from Raytheon and Boeing and Pfizer and then if you really buck the narrative and you say, hey, you know what?

00:29:57.000 I think we should maybe nationalize Big Pharma.

00:29:59.000 Yeah.

00:29:59.000 Then you're going to be kicked out right away.

00:30:01.000 So the way we do it is we have the default ads on YouTube, which is thankfully there's a buffer there.

00:30:06.000 So like, you know, AdSense deals with that.

00:30:08.000 And I've never had a conversation with an advertiser over a decade of doing this.

00:30:11.000 So that's one way we make money.

00:30:13.000 The other way is Patreon, which is just people tipping because they like what I say and like what I do.

00:30:17.000 Five bucks a month, eight bucks a month, whatever it may be.

00:30:19.000 And then the other way Crystal and I have done it is with Crystal Kyle and friends in particular.

00:30:23.000 We have a sub stack and people pay five dollars a month.

00:30:25.000 They get the video of the interviews and they get it a day early.

00:30:28.000 And that makes it, again, so I've never had a conversation with any advertiser in over 10 years of doing it.

00:30:34.000 I've gone above and beyond on purpose so that people know, look, even if you disagree with me, this is 100% coming from a genuine place.

00:30:41.000 Yeah, that's awesome.

00:30:42.000 That's the future, I think.

00:30:43.000 And I think that's a commercially viable way to do it, too.

00:30:47.000 You can do it and make a living, especially when you realize that, you know, if you're working at CNN, you've got to realize there's probably, like, hundreds of people that are working there that aren't the entertainment.

00:30:56.000 Right.

00:30:56.000 So, like, there's so many different pieces of the pie that get sliced up and chopped up, whereas you don't need as much money to be financially successful with your show, as successful as you would be if you were on a network.

00:31:09.000 Right.

00:31:09.000 Here's the issue, though, is that YouTube, unfortunately, has set up a tiered system.

00:31:15.000 So they have authoritative news, and then they have what's called borderline content.

00:31:20.000 And so shows like mine are put into the borderline content category.

00:31:23.000 Yeah, and I'll tell you what.

00:31:24.000 They're afraid of, because back in 2017, there was some like, big company ad, like a Nestle ad or something, that ran on a white nationalist video.

00:31:33.000 And so a bunch of media outlets wrote these articles that were like, oh my god, look what YouTube's doing, they're radicalizing people, this is terrible.

00:31:39.000 And so YouTube reacted to that by, they just wanted to cut their losses, and they said, just defund news and politics right now.

00:31:46.000 That was what was called adpocalypse.

00:31:47.000 So they cut off all the funding overnight for independent news.

00:31:51.000 What was the catalyst for that?

00:31:52.000 What was the video that did that?

00:31:54.000 I don't know what the actual video was.

00:31:55.000 I know it was like a white nationalist video that ran like an official ad.

00:32:00.000 We should find out what that was.

00:32:01.000 Yeah, you'd have to go back to 2017 articles to find it.

00:32:03.000 Because I remember ad-pocalypse, but I remember just going, what is going on?

00:32:08.000 And not paying attention.

00:32:09.000 Yeah.

00:32:09.000 I covered it at the time.

00:32:11.000 It was huge for us because we were one of the ones affected.

00:32:13.000 We literally all the money wiped out overnight, and we didn't know when it was going to come back.

00:32:17.000 Now, thankfully, it did come back about a week or two later, but it was never really the same since then, and it was in 2018, I believe, the YouTube CEO said, look, we're addressing the misinformation and disinformation problem, and so now we have authoritative content and borderline content, and so the YouTube algorithm pumps the authoritative content and suppresses the borderline content.

00:32:37.000 PewDiePie.

00:32:38.000 Is it PewDiePie?

00:32:39.000 PewDiePie?

00:32:40.000 But PewDiePie was not a white nationalist. 1.00

00:32:43.000 He's just a shit poster. 1.00

00:32:45.000 You know, he's like a funny guy. 1.00

00:32:47.000 If this is true, then it's even worse than I remember it being.

00:32:51.000 PewDiePie in 2017, the most subscribed YouTuber of all time, at the time, rather, excuse me, came under fire for posting videos that YouTube deemed anti-Semitic and hate speech.

00:33:00.000 These videos included references and jokes about Adolf Hitler, as well as two Indian men holding a sign stating death to all Jews. 0.68

00:33:19.000 Oh, I see. 0.99

00:33:27.000 Okay.

00:33:28.000 Yeah, so they rolled out this whole system to deal with this, and they end up suppressing us You know, and basically putting us in league with stuff like that.

00:33:38.000 Yeah.

00:33:39.000 So, you know, it's a struggle.

00:33:41.000 It is a struggle because we were growing at a tremendous clip.

00:33:43.000 Yeah.

00:33:43.000 And then basically overnight, it's like they flipped a switch in the algorithm and boom.

00:33:47.000 Now the issue is with recommendations.

00:33:49.000 So now if you're already subscribed to me, you're going to see a bunch of my stuff pop up.

00:33:52.000 If you're not subscribed to me, it is very unlikely you're going to get one of my videos pop up in the recommended algorithm.

00:33:58.000 So you can't really grow when that's the case.

00:34:00.000 You're just basically keeping your fan base.

00:34:02.000 So the way you grow is doing other people's podcasts and getting people from their fan base to come to you, like Patrick Bat-David.

00:34:10.000 Well, not even that.

00:34:11.000 It used to be if you typed in whatever news thing you were interested in, one of the top videos could be a secular talk video.

00:34:18.000 But now, if you type it in, it is never that.

00:34:19.000 There was a time when we used to run circles around CNN. They'd get like 2,000 views a video back in like 2015. And we were getting way more than that, 30,000 or whatever it was.

00:34:28.000 And then now you go look at any CNN video, even though the thumbnails are shit, the titles are shit, the content is shit, they'll get 300,000, 400,000 views. 0.99

00:34:36.000 Because that's what... 0.99

00:34:37.000 YouTube can decide to make somebody or break somebody like that.

00:34:40.000 Just by tweaking the algorithm.

00:34:41.000 If they decided, hey, what if once every six months we put a secular talk video on the front page of YouTube, that would immediately double the size of my audience.

00:34:49.000 It's interesting.

00:34:50.000 I wonder how much they think about that impact.

00:34:52.000 And I wonder if they just look at it in terms of bottom line, making money.

00:34:56.000 That's what it is.

00:34:57.000 They're scared of advertisers running away.

00:34:59.000 And look, they don't know what I'm going to say.

00:35:01.000 They don't know what I'm going to say.

00:35:02.000 For all they know, I'm going to come out tomorrow and say, I think the flatter theory is real.

00:35:06.000 And then it's like, okay, boom, scandal.

00:35:07.000 Then they'd suppress me even more, right?

00:35:09.000 But they don't know that there's a body of work there.

00:35:11.000 I put my record up against anybody else's in terms of giving the facts and the information.

00:35:14.000 And then I give my take on it, of course.

00:35:16.000 But the facts and the information comes first.

00:35:18.000 And they just throw us in league with the borderline content.

00:35:20.000 And they say, look, he's not reputable because he's not with a major media outlet.

00:35:24.000 And, of course, the irony is all these major media outlets have made horrendous mistakes over the years.

00:35:29.000 And I'm being kind by calling it mistakes.

00:35:30.000 Like, these are the people who cheerleaded us into the war in Iraq.

00:35:33.000 Exactly.

00:35:34.000 Exactly.

00:35:35.000 And they don't get docked in the algorithm if they do something that's incorrect.

00:35:38.000 Did you see the conversation that I had with Jan Werner about that?

00:35:40.000 I did not know.

00:35:41.000 Yeah, it was the exact same thing where he was talking about that the government should be regulating the internet.

00:35:47.000 That's crazy.

00:35:47.000 And I was like, what are you talking about?

00:35:49.000 That's anti-First Amendment. 0.94

00:35:50.000 That's like the very first thing in the Constitution.

00:35:53.000 He just has this idea of the government, and by government he means left-wing government only, that they're going to be altruistic and they're going to look at it the right way and do the right thing.

00:36:01.000 I'm like, What are you saying?

00:36:03.000 I'm like, these are the same people that brought us into the Iraq war under false pretenses. 0.80

00:36:07.000 He's like, no, no, no, that was politicians.

00:36:09.000 I go, that's the government.

00:36:10.000 The government is politicians.

00:36:11.000 Well, we need better politicians.

00:36:13.000 Like, no, no, no. 0.99

00:36:14.000 No, you need people to be able to sort this shit out. 0.99

00:36:16.000 It's going to be messy. 0.99

00:36:18.000 That's the thing.

00:36:18.000 It is going to be messy, yeah.

00:36:19.000 They want it to be not messy.

00:36:21.000 There's no way.

00:36:22.000 There's no way.

00:36:23.000 You gotta accept the fact that it's going to be messy.

00:36:25.000 Who's gonna watch the Watchmen is the old saying.

00:36:28.000 So like, you set up this, you set up this like, you know, this overlord group that gets to determine everything, but it's like, what about when they're wrong?

00:36:34.000 And they're gonna be wrong from time to time, because sometimes the conventional wisdom ends up being wrong, sometimes it ends up being right, but you never, you don't know, you have to, like you said, it's gonna be messy, you gotta try to figure it out, and anybody putting their thumb on the scale and trying to change the outcome by, you know, fiat from above, that's not the way it's supposed to work.

00:36:50.000 Right.

00:36:51.000 And it's not just that their conventional wisdom is going to be wrong.

00:36:54.000 It's that they're being fed propaganda.

00:36:57.000 Absolutely.

00:36:57.000 And they're disseminating it.

00:36:59.000 Absolutely.

00:37:00.000 Ad hoc, with no questioning it whatsoever, no pretense, no worry.

00:37:06.000 Yeah, they have a lot of sources inside the FBI and the CIA. And if the government comes out with their official line, they just write it up like little stenographers.

00:37:15.000 They're stenographers.

00:37:16.000 They're not journalists.

00:37:17.000 They're not reporters.

00:37:17.000 You're supposed to fact check them, too.

00:37:19.000 Somebody in the CIA says something, you still got to say, hey, is it right or is it wrong?

00:37:22.000 One of the best examples of that is the Twitter files.

00:37:25.000 You see no coverage of this on CNN. No coverage of this astounding collusion between intelligence agencies and a social media network to suppress accurate information that would harm the political party that's in power.

00:37:41.000 Which is fucking wild. 0.94

00:37:43.000 It's wild that the news isn't covering this. 0.99

00:37:47.000 Arguably, that's as big a scandal as Watergate. 0.90

00:37:50.000 It's as big a scandal as any other times in the past where we've found that there's been some really shady shit going on that would change the way people would see a narrative. 0.75

00:38:02.000 Remember when you had Mark Zuckerberg on? 0.82

00:38:04.000 Yes.

00:38:05.000 And Zuckerberg was like, yeah, the FBI reached out to us and they said, you know, hey, there's going to be a disinformation dump from Russia coming.

00:38:12.000 And so we were ready when the Hunter Biden thing dropped.

00:38:14.000 And it's like, okay, well, this is a perfect example of they were just wrong.

00:38:18.000 They said, oh, this isn't Hunter Biden's laptop.

00:38:21.000 You know, it's no big deal.

00:38:22.000 This is just Russian disinformation.

00:38:24.000 And then it turns out it was his laptop.

00:38:26.000 And so and Mark Zuckerberg was almost doing a victory lap by saying, hey, I only suppressed it in the algorithm.

00:38:31.000 As opposed to banning it.

00:38:32.000 He was like, oh, I didn't ban it, so therefore I'm, you know, good on me.

00:38:35.000 I don't think he was doing a victory lap.

00:38:37.000 I think he was just being accurate, and it seemed better than the way Twitter handled it.

00:38:42.000 Right, and it was, but it's still, this is exactly what we're talking about, the algorithmic suppression, where it's like, look...

00:38:48.000 Just let people decide for themselves.

00:38:49.000 And yes, you're going to have the occasional circumstance where maybe a flat earth video does get 2 million views, right?

00:38:56.000 Dude, I love a good flat earth video.

00:38:57.000 Yeah, that's the thing.

00:38:58.000 Like, sometimes these conspiracy theories, if you look at it as just like a creativity thing, it's interesting, right?

00:39:02.000 Like, oh my god.

00:39:03.000 They can find a way to make a case for a position that's so absurd where it makes you go...

00:39:08.000 Huh!

00:39:09.000 Exactly.

00:39:09.000 But that's okay, right?

00:39:10.000 And some people will fall down the rabbit hole, and that sucks, but I do think you have to have some degree of faith that most people are going to be like, yeah, no, this is kind of bullshit. 0.98

00:39:19.000 Isn't it interesting, though, because that kind of stuff doesn't work on you, right? 0.99

00:39:25.000 Right?

00:39:25.000 If someone talks about hollow earth and there's dinosaurs living in the lava, it's not going to work on you.

00:39:31.000 But the concern is that it's going to work on some people.

00:39:34.000 And what they'll use as an example is things like QAnon.

00:39:40.000 Right.

00:39:41.000 Which sets up January 6th.

00:39:43.000 But then they'll ignore the fact that the FBI has agent provocateurs that are instigating these people to go into the Capitol.

00:39:52.000 So they're only talking about the dangers of QAnon.

00:39:55.000 Like, what about the dangers of the federal government riling these people up?

00:39:59.000 Or agents from the federal government who are just trying to accomplish something that's going to enhance their career?

00:40:04.000 Yeah.

00:40:05.000 Like we talked about last night.

00:40:06.000 That's right.

00:40:07.000 And you know what?

00:40:07.000 The way I think about that is very simple.

00:40:10.000 If QAnon is spreading like wildfire, and it's batshit fucking crazy, which it is, then the burden is on people like me to explain, hey, here's why this is batshit. 0.92

00:40:20.000 Here's why this is wrong. 0.58

00:40:21.000 Let me show you how these things don't match up.

00:40:22.000 Let me show you.

00:40:23.000 And again, the issue is, if it's coming from an independent voice, if the debunking is coming from an independent voice where, like, you know, you know I'm not beholden to anybody, you know I'm telling you what I really think, and I'm very detailed in responding to it, then that's eventually how you win on that front.

00:40:36.000 You're not going to win just by saying, just totally ban it, because then, you know...

00:40:39.000 We had a conversation the other day with a guy in the airport who was totally convinced.

00:40:42.000 Sweet guy, very nice, and all of a sudden, out of nowhere, he brings up, you know, I think Trump won.

00:40:47.000 I think Trump won the election.

00:40:48.000 And there's no way that Biden guy won.

00:40:50.000 And it's like, you know, I don't want to create more people like that.

00:40:54.000 I need to be able to respond in real time, bring a convincing case, and then just make people go, okay, at the very least I'll move to agnosticism as opposed to believing an incorrect thing.

00:41:04.000 Right, and the QAnon thing, that's why Into the Storm was so important.

00:41:08.000 Is that that Andrew Callahan one?

00:41:10.000 Oh no, that's the other.

00:41:11.000 What was the guy's name that did the documentary series on HBO? Did you see it?

00:41:16.000 Andrew Callahan, I think it is that one, right?

00:41:18.000 Into the Storm is the new one with Andrew Callahan?

00:41:21.000 No, he's the new one.

00:41:23.000 He's the new one.

00:41:23.000 Is that what you're referring to?

00:41:24.000 The newer one?

00:41:25.000 No, I'm referring to the...

00:41:26.000 I had the gentleman on who made that documentary.

00:41:29.000 I wanted to say it, but I want to say the wrong name.

00:41:30.000 I think I know the one you're talking about.

00:41:32.000 I think it was on Hulu, the one you're talking about.

00:41:34.000 No, it was on HBO. It was on HBO? Yeah.

00:41:36.000 Okay.

00:41:36.000 Well, I saw that one with Crystal.

00:41:38.000 The Asian guy who ended up being Q. That one? 1.00

00:41:41.000 Yes.

00:41:42.000 Yes.

00:41:42.000 That's it.

00:41:43.000 That was a great one.

00:41:44.000 Good documentary.

00:41:44.000 It was amazing.

00:41:45.000 Yeah.

00:41:45.000 Because that's the only way you're going to really unravel that.

00:41:49.000 Correct. 0.84

00:41:49.000 And then you get to see, like, oh, these people got duped, and this is why, and this is, like, what's attractive about it, that these people are on the inside, they understand the secrets, and everybody's being lied to, and they're going to fucking bring back the real government, and... 0.84

00:42:03.000 This was the other one you were talking about.

00:42:04.000 Yeah, this was the newer one with Andrew Callahan.

00:42:06.000 Oh, This Place Rules.

00:42:08.000 He also did.

00:42:09.000 This was also about QAnon, but I saw the one you were just talking about.

00:42:12.000 I didn't see this new one.

00:42:13.000 I saw the one you were talking about, and it was a very, very good documentary.

00:42:16.000 Very good documentary.

00:42:17.000 Well, it's very good because you get so deep into...

00:42:21.000 The motivations behind these people, they're all a bunch of social outcasts and weirdos, and they find this group and it gives them meaning, and then it becomes their whole identity.

00:42:30.000 A lot of these people are just looking for something to care about, just looking for purpose, just looking for meaning.

00:42:36.000 And they would rather take a wrong answer than they would something that's right, but nobody makes a case for the thing that is right.

00:42:43.000 You know what I mean?

00:42:43.000 And so again, that's on people like me.

00:42:45.000 The burden's on people who are in the position that we're in to try to give an alternative.

00:42:51.000 Hey, you don't have to believe this nonsense.

00:42:53.000 Jeffrey Epstein, that's real.

00:42:55.000 That happened. 0.99

00:42:56.000 But it's also not the case that it's a demonic, satanic, pedophile cult run in the pizza shop basement with Hillary Clinton doing child sacrifice. 0.95

00:43:05.000 You can be nuanced on this stuff.

00:43:07.000 You can say the Epstein stuff is real, there's a lot of questionable stuff there, but also they're not literally demon-worshipping Evil people in a basement of a pizza shop.

00:43:14.000 You know what I mean?

00:43:14.000 It's evil enough.

00:43:15.000 You don't have to bring the supernatural into it.

00:43:17.000 It's so true. 0.84

00:43:17.000 That's right. 0.84

00:43:18.000 It's fucking... 1.00

00:43:18.000 It's trafficking. 1.00

00:43:20.000 Yes.

00:43:20.000 It's sex trafficking.

00:43:21.000 And it's also involving leaders of giant financial institutions, politicians, celebrities, scientists.

00:43:31.000 I need to see that black book.

00:43:32.000 That Epstein black book.

00:43:33.000 You had Bill Clinton.

00:43:35.000 You had Donald Trump.

00:43:36.000 You had all these...

00:43:37.000 Bill Gates?

00:43:38.000 Billionaires, yeah, billionaires, celebrities.

00:43:41.000 They're all lying about it.

00:43:41.000 He was the CEO of Elite Sex Crimes Incorporated, and then he died in jail.

00:43:47.000 Yeah, mysteriously.

00:43:48.000 Did you see this video with Bill Gates recently?

00:43:49.000 Yes, I did.

00:43:50.000 I should have had dinner.

00:43:51.000 Well, have you seen Whitney Webb's take on Bill Gates's connection to Jeffrey Epstein?

00:43:57.000 It goes way further.

00:43:59.000 It goes way back.

00:44:00.000 His wife has blown the whistle on this and was like, oh, Bill Gates is saying he just had a couple dinners with him or whatever. 0.82

00:44:06.000 His wife's like, let me tell you something. 0.99

00:44:08.000 That's not true.

00:44:09.000 He was really close with him.

00:44:10.000 Not just close with him, but went to the island.

00:44:13.000 He knew him very well.

00:44:15.000 They had all sorts of business dealings together for quite a long time.

00:44:19.000 It goes way back.

00:44:20.000 You know, he knew him...

00:44:23.000 Whitney Webb was on Russell Brand's show recently, and she went into great detail.

00:44:30.000 She's fascinating.

00:44:31.000 She can pull up data and information off the top of her head. 0.80

00:44:35.000 She's such a good researcher.

00:44:36.000 But just absolute facts about the connection between Gates and him.

00:44:42.000 Yeah, it's a lot of very famous, very wealthy people.

00:44:47.000 Yeah.

00:44:47.000 And, I mean, the guy had an island.

00:44:49.000 An island.

00:44:50.000 Like, who has an island?

00:44:51.000 What are we talking about here?

00:44:52.000 Do you know the bit that I'm doing on stage now about that, that, like, you know, people saw Clinton and they're like, oh, we're fine.

00:44:57.000 Clinton's here.

00:44:58.000 That's such a great point.

00:44:59.000 I was laughing hard at that line because it's so true. 1.00

00:45:01.000 Yeah, it gives, like, it gives this the feeling of, like, oh, like, our former national daddy figure is here, so, like, it's everything's okay.

00:45:08.000 One of the things that people will do to try to get me to come to a thing is they'll tell me, hey, this guy's going to be there.

00:45:14.000 That guy's going to be there.

00:45:14.000 They'll send me an email.

00:45:15.000 Hey, Joe, are you interested in coming to our event, our thing, our retreat, or whatever?

00:45:20.000 And blah, blah, blah is going to be there from this band and that comic and this thing.

00:45:24.000 And it's like you go, oh, well, that famous person's going to be there.

00:45:28.000 I can be there, too.

00:45:29.000 Right.

00:45:29.000 Right, that's how they try to get you.

00:45:31.000 So if they can talk one person into doing it that's prominent and recognized, and then you're like, oh, well, I will be in good company if I go there.

00:45:39.000 Yeah.

00:45:39.000 You know, and I think that's what they did.

00:45:41.000 Yeah, you know, I've seen some pretty convincing stuff that Jeffrey Epstein was actually Mossad, Israeli intelligence.

00:45:48.000 Yeah, I've seen that too.

00:45:49.000 Yeah, there was an article, I forget where it was, it may have been Daily Mail, which is a questionable source, but they were talking about how Jeffrey Epstein was meeting with like a former Israeli prime minister.

00:46:01.000 Yeah.

00:46:03.000 So, I mean, he also was meeting with the U.S. president, too, of course, but I think there's some reason to believe that this guy, because yet, if you have dirt on everybody, why do you have dirt on everybody?

00:46:12.000 It's just the craziest thing that they murdered that guy in jail.

00:46:15.000 It's just like, sweep, sweep.

00:46:18.000 That's all done.

00:46:19.000 Let's concentrate on Ukraine now.

00:46:20.000 Yeah, nobody actually believes he killed himself.

00:46:22.000 I haven't met anybody left-wing, right-wing, center, apolitical.

00:46:26.000 Everybody's like, eh, that's kind of sketchy.

00:46:28.000 Yeah, I've met some people that believe it, but they have a reason to believe it.

00:46:32.000 It's like they have this vested interest in wanting to believe it.

00:46:35.000 Yeah, the skeptics.

00:46:37.000 Not even necessarily skeptics.

00:46:39.000 It's like maybe they have some weird connection to it that they don't want you to know about.

00:46:43.000 They want to make it look like it's not that big a deal, and they got them.

00:46:46.000 One of the most eerie ones was when Bill Gates was being questioned about it.

00:46:50.000 He's dead now.

00:46:51.000 He said, he's dead now, so you have to be careful. 0.99

00:46:55.000 What the fuck does that mean? 0.99

00:46:57.000 What the fuck does that mean? 0.99

00:46:59.000 Jesus Christ. 0.99

00:47:00.000 He's dead now, so I guess you have to be careful.

00:47:03.000 Like, what?

00:47:05.000 And Ghislaine Maxwell came out recently and said, I don't think he killed himself.

00:47:09.000 He didn't.

00:47:10.000 Michael Badden, that famous autopsy doctor, the guy who was from the show Autopsy, he said that out of thousands of cases of people hanging themselves, that he's personally investigated, he has never seen anybody with those injuries.

00:47:26.000 That's right.

00:47:27.000 And that those injuries were of a person who was strangled.

00:47:30.000 Yes.

00:47:31.000 And that the broken bones in his neck were indicate of a ligature strangulation.

00:47:36.000 The area where he was strangled was below, low on the neck, which is not where you get when someone's hanging by their own weight, which is higher on the neck because your body weight is dragging it down.

00:47:47.000 He's like, that was someone who got strangled.

00:47:49.000 And the security cameras were magically not working.

00:47:52.000 Yeah.

00:47:52.000 Magically not working.

00:47:53.000 The guards were somewhere sleeping or something.

00:47:56.000 Wasn't it like some former cop, like, juice head? 0.51

00:47:59.000 Yes.

00:47:59.000 Who they think did it?

00:48:00.000 Well, there was a former cop who was a giant dude.

00:48:03.000 Yeah.

00:48:03.000 Who was his cellmate.

00:48:05.000 I think he murdered people.

00:48:07.000 I think that's what he went to jail for. 1.00

00:48:09.000 The cop was fucking jacked, too. 0.99

00:48:12.000 Yeah, he was. 1.00

00:48:13.000 He's still getting the sauce in there behind bars.

00:48:16.000 I don't know if he was still jacked in jail.

00:48:18.000 Oh, was it an old picture in the article I read? 0.89

00:48:20.000 I think it was, but he was a corrupt cop.

00:48:23.000 And if you're a corrupt cop and you're involved in drug dealing and this and that, he probably murdered a few people.

00:48:29.000 What'd they offer him? 0.64

00:48:30.000 Maybe they gave him juice.

00:48:33.000 They're getting him on the cheap if that's all they gave him. 1.00

00:48:36.000 Look at the size of that motherfucker! 1.00

00:48:39.000 Jesus Christ! 1.00

00:48:41.000 Tartaglione over here!

00:48:44.000 Tartaglione tried to help Epstein would have been powerful mitigation in the penalty phase if he was found guilty of any death-eligible charges.

00:48:52.000 So what does it say?

00:48:53.000 The disappearance video...

00:48:55.000 Footage of the financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein's first suicide attempt should mean that his cellmate, ex-Westchester cop Nicholas Tartaglione...

00:49:05.000 That's where I'm from, by the way, Westchester.

00:49:07.000 ...doesn't face the death penalty in a drug-related quadruple homicide.

00:49:13.000 Wow.

00:49:14.000 So that could be... 0.97

00:49:15.000 Look, if I was going to have somebody kill somebody, I'd have that. 0.81

00:49:18.000 Oh, absolutely. 0.88

00:49:19.000 You're going to have somebody strangle somebody?

00:49:20.000 How easy could he do it?

00:49:21.000 Oh, yeah.

00:49:21.000 No.

00:49:22.000 What size of that motherfucker? 1.00

00:49:22.000 Definitely. 1.00

00:49:23.000 Definitely.

00:49:24.000 So maybe that's what they did.

00:49:25.000 Maybe they offered him a plea, or maybe they offered somebody else a plea.

00:49:28.000 But, you know, the evidence that nobody did anything was like, well, no one knew entered into the cell block.

00:49:34.000 That's what they said.

00:49:35.000 We don't have the cameras, but we're reasonably sure that no one entered into the cell block.

00:49:38.000 When I was looking this up, this popped up, too, which said somebody else was his last cellmate.

00:49:42.000 That guy was...

00:49:42.000 Maybe it was a cellmate of his.

00:49:44.000 So he died from COVID-19, they're saying?

00:49:47.000 They're saying his former cellmate died of COVID-19.

00:49:50.000 Who's that guy?

00:49:51.000 I don't know.

00:49:52.000 I'm just saying it's the first time I've ever seen him.

00:49:55.000 Prisonlegalnews.org.

00:49:57.000 But he was released, though.

00:49:59.000 It says he died in his mother's apartment in the Bronx from COVID-19 that he contracted while in the Queens, New York Correctional Center.

00:50:09.000 Maybe.

00:50:09.000 Prior to a state of the Queens, Lockup Reyes was housed at the Manhattan Correctional Center where he was Jeffrey Epstein's last cellmate.

00:50:17.000 Yeah, but that doesn't mean anything.

00:50:18.000 They could be looking for something there.

00:50:19.000 He could have actually just died from COVID. No, that's not what I'm saying here.

00:50:24.000 My point of bringing this up was when I googled Jeffrey Epstein's last cellmate, this guy popped up, not the other guy.

00:50:29.000 Oh, not the juice head guy.

00:50:30.000 But the juice guy was his cellmate at one point in time?

00:50:33.000 Yeah, that was in all the articles that I read at the time of his death brought up that former cop.

00:50:38.000 There's so many levels to this conspiracy and mystery.

00:50:41.000 But again, all this stuff we're talking about, totally reputable sources that showed you everything.

00:50:47.000 And you can connect those dots and be reasonable.

00:50:49.000 But again, you just don't have to go to the QAnon level.

00:50:52.000 Exactly. 0.97

00:50:52.000 The real conspiracies are fucking wild enough. 0.97

00:50:56.000 Absolutely. 0.92

00:50:56.000 And a lot of the conspiracies are out in the open. 0.92

00:50:59.000 The World Economic Forum.

00:51:01.000 Let's have at Davos all these billionaires, all these heads of state get together and tell you their ideas.

00:51:06.000 You know what the World Economic Forum actually is?

00:51:08.000 It's a status quo protection racket.

00:51:10.000 Because they're doing just fine over there.

00:51:12.000 They're the billionaires.

00:51:13.000 You know?

00:51:15.000 They're on top of the world.

00:51:16.000 So all these ideas that they're floating out there, really it's more like...

00:51:21.000 Let's keep what we got going.

00:51:22.000 Because people are suffering as it is, right?

00:51:24.000 I mean, I'm sure you've seen the Oxfam numbers about income and wealth inequality, that the richest 26 people on the planet hold more wealth than the bottom 50% of the world combined.

00:51:37.000 That's the conspiracy! 0.96

00:51:38.000 It's right fucking there! 0.98

00:51:39.000 It's right here! 0.99

00:51:41.000 Isn't that just a factor of the rich get richer?

00:51:44.000 Like, no matter what happens, when people develop exorbitant amounts of wealth, and then they just keep going, they have...

00:51:52.000 I just saw that Elon gained $9 billion over the last week or something like that because stocks go up.

00:51:58.000 That kind of stuff can just accumulate and pile up.

00:52:03.000 Yeah.

00:52:03.000 Well, that's why, look, for a lot of US history, we had a progressive tax system where the more you made and the more wealth you had, the more you were taxed on that.

00:52:12.000 And so that's an attempt to do redistribution to give people at the bottom a reasonable shot.

00:52:19.000 It's saying, okay, Where's the money going?

00:52:22.000 The problem is where's the money going and who gets to decide?

00:52:26.000 Back in the New Deal days, when we had FDR in power, that money went to jobs programs and went to infrastructure and went to unemployment insurance, went to actually help people.

00:52:34.000 What you're concerned about, which I think you're right to be concerned about, is a lot of that money, there was a report that just came out, the Pentagon can account for 59% of the money it's received.

00:52:43.000 That's not a lot.

00:52:45.000 They still have 41% that they know where it is.

00:52:48.000 Literally trillions of dollars.

00:52:50.000 Gone.

00:52:50.000 I'm a glass half full guy.

00:52:54.000 Or 41% full.

00:52:56.000 I'm sure you remember, too, when Biden did probably one of the best things he did, which is pull out of Afghanistan. 0.98

00:53:03.000 The fucking meltdown from the media, the fucking meltdown from the military-industrial complex, they were attacking him over and over from the perspective of, what are you doing? 0.98

00:53:12.000 Why are you leaving? 1.00

00:53:12.000 This is crazy. 1.00

00:53:13.000 You sure you want to do that?

00:53:14.000 Look at all the chaos that's happening.

00:53:15.000 Oh my god, you might want to go back in.

00:53:16.000 That was the perspective. 0.95

00:53:17.000 The perspective wasn't the Afghanistan report that had come out a few years ago, which showed that we literally wasted trillions of dollars and our own generals on the ground were like, we don't know what the fuck we're doing here anymore. 0.78

00:53:27.000 Like, what are we even doing here?

00:53:29.000 I think the real concern was protecting the Americans that were left behind and protecting the people that worked with the Americans, you know, the people that helped them because they were all murdered.

00:53:40.000 Yeah, tens of thousands of them of the, you know, Afghan people who helped us did end up getting left behind.

00:53:46.000 And they're tortured and murdered.

00:53:48.000 I mean, there's some horrific stories from some of my friends who were over there aiding in the extraction.

00:53:54.000 Of American citizens that were stuck there.

00:53:58.000 The way it was done was very scary.

00:54:03.000 So here's the issue with that though.

00:54:05.000 Like, I don't know...

00:54:27.000 I don't know if that's true Don't do it.

00:54:28.000 Don't get out.

00:54:28.000 You're causing a political headache for yourself.

00:54:30.000 And he did because the media hammered him and then his approval rating dropped, even though that was an issue where if you polled people beforehand, like 60, 70, 80% of the country was like, yeah, we need to get out of Afghanistan. 0.76

00:54:38.000 So it's one thing where he actually stood up to the deep state. 0.97

00:54:42.000 He stood up to the military industrial complex, and then he got shit on relentlessly for it. 0.98

00:54:46.000 I understand it was a mess, but... 0.97

00:54:48.000 The alternative is staying there 10 more years, 20 more years, 30 more years?

00:54:53.000 I mean, we got our infrastructures crumbling here.

00:54:55.000 Why are we spending trillions of dollars over there?

00:54:58.000 Yeah, I don't think anybody reasonable disagrees with that.

00:55:02.000 I think the reasonable perspective is, was there a way to get those American citizens out first? 0.67

00:55:10.000 And should that have been done?

00:55:12.000 A lot of them did get out.

00:55:13.000 Jamie, you could look this up if you want.

00:55:15.000 I remember that...

00:55:16.000 So the worst thing that happened was the attack as we were leaving.

00:55:20.000 There was some, like, ISIS attack on an airport. 0.99

00:55:23.000 And then what Biden did was super fucked up because he said, oh, we're going to attack them back. 0.98

00:55:27.000 And he did a drone strike on a house and said, oh, we got the ISIS guys. 0.99

00:55:31.000 And then it came out that was all...

00:55:32.000 They were innocent civilians.

00:55:34.000 They just bombed innocent civilians.

00:55:35.000 What are the numbers on drones?

00:55:38.000 The drone's innocence to actual people they're trying to target is so nuts.

00:55:44.000 There's a guy by the name of Daniel Hale who worked for the government and he was a whistleblower and he showed the numbers under Obama were killing 90% the wrong people.

00:55:55.000 And so he released that and you know what happened? 0.99

00:55:58.000 They put his ass in jail. 1.00

00:55:59.000 Why? 1.00

00:56:00.000 Because he's leaking classified information.

00:56:02.000 So they put him in jail.

00:56:03.000 He's in jail now?

00:56:04.000 Yes, he's in jail right now.

00:56:06.000 And the people who actually were doing the drone strikes and killing 90% of the wrong people, they are not in jail.

00:56:12.000 I know.

00:56:12.000 That's a rough one.

00:56:13.000 Pardon Daniel Hale.

00:56:14.000 Commute Daniel Hale's sentence.

00:56:15.000 Get him out of there.

00:56:17.000 He's right up there with Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, all these names that a lot of people know where it's like, hey, they're kind of getting a raw deal here.

00:56:22.000 This guy Daniel Hale is right up there.

00:56:24.000 Do you think that with all the information that's available now and these narratives that do get discussed, like what you're saying, what we're talking about, what you talk about on your show, That more people are informed of that now so it makes it more difficult for them to do that and ultimately that stuff will diminish over time.

00:56:41.000 It's just the people with actual power don't give much of a fuck of what I have to say or others like me have to say. 0.95

00:56:48.000 But they give a fuck about the American people if the American people don't vote them in anymore because they're upset about that. 0.98

00:56:53.000 Well this is more what we call the deep state. 0.98

00:56:55.000 So CIA, like the people behind the scenes, the Pentagon, the people who are sort of there from administration to administration and they're not dependent on elections.

00:57:01.000 Like these are the people who...

00:57:03.000 They throw the book at a guy like that, you know?

00:57:05.000 Because if you leak something that makes them look good, it's fine that you just leak classified information.

00:57:09.000 You leak something that makes them look bad, like Daniel Hale did, and they'll rain holy hell on you.

00:57:13.000 It's very disturbing when you find out these egregious missteps of justice, where people get imprisoned for leaking information and discussing information, or the Stephen Dossinger case.

00:57:24.000 Oh, yes, that guy.

00:57:25.000 We've had him on Crystal Kyle and Friends.

00:57:27.000 Amazing story.

00:57:28.000 Crazy.

00:57:29.000 Yeah, he basically is like... 0.77

00:57:30.000 If you really get down to the bottom line here...

00:57:33.000 Explain to people what happened.

00:57:34.000 Yeah, so he was imprisoned for basically showing how...

00:57:38.000 I think it was Chevron, one of the big oil companies, flat out poisoned...

00:57:41.000 I think it was Peru.

00:57:43.000 You might want to fact check me on that.

00:57:44.000 I'm not sure it was Peru, but it was a South American country.

00:57:46.000 They basically, like, poisoned the water supply there.

00:57:49.000 They were doing all these terrible practices, polluting everything.

00:57:52.000 And he stood up against them in court and won.

00:57:54.000 And then basically...

00:57:56.000 You know, the Empire struck back and went after him, and he ended up in prison.

00:58:00.000 Yeah.

00:58:00.000 Basically for blowing the whistle on this and getting him out.

00:58:03.000 So here it is.

00:58:04.000 Ecuador, I'm sorry, there you go.

00:58:05.000 Not Peru.

00:58:06.000 So Dossinger, an American attorney known for his legal battles with Chevron, Particularly Anguinda v.

00:58:14.000 Texaco, Inc.

00:58:15.000 and other cases which he represented over 30,000 farmers and indigenous people who suffered environmental damage and health problems caused by the oil drilling in the Lago Agrio oil field of Ecuador.

00:58:27.000 The Ecuadorian court awarded the plaintiffs $9.5 billion.

00:58:31.000 $11.5 billion in 2021 dollars.

00:58:34.000 Okay. 0.92

00:59:05.000 Now, that's all bullshit, just so everybody knows. 0.98

00:59:07.000 There was no fraud, no bribery, no racketeering. 0.99

00:59:09.000 What happened was the people who were corrupt went after him and said he was corrupt.

00:59:12.000 Yeah.

00:59:13.000 And the judge was corrupt who put him behind bars, and he just recently got out. 0.99

00:59:16.000 But this guy went through fucking hell because he exposed that Chevron was flat out poisoning people. 0.99

00:59:21.000 That's great. 0.98

00:59:22.000 So he was placed under house arrest in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of criminal contempt of court, which arose during his appeal against Kaplan's Ricoh decision when he refused to turn over electronic devices he owned to Chevron's forensic experts.

00:59:37.000 In July 2021, U.S. District Judge Loretta Presco found him guilty and Dozinger was sentenced to six months in jail in October 2021. While Dozinger was under house arrest in 2020, 29 Nobel laureates described the actions taken by Chevron against him as judicial harassment.

00:59:56.000 Human rights campaigners called Chevron's actions an example of strategic lawsuit against public participation.

01:00:03.000 SLAP lawsuit.

01:00:05.000 In April 2021, six members of Congressional Progressive Caucus demanded that the Department of Justice review Dossinger's case.

01:00:12.000 In September 2021, the United Nations High Commissioner of Human Rights stated that the pretrial detention imposed on Dossinger was illegal and called for his release.

01:00:23.000 Having spent 45 days in prison and a combined total of 993 days under house arrest, Dossinger was released on April 25, 2022. So let me also add, so yes, he spent 993 days under house arrest.

01:00:37.000 Now the actual laws they're accusing him of breaking, it would have been like a max, I'm going to butcher this, but it was like a month or something.

01:00:43.000 So they kept him under house arrest for 993 days, then he actually went to jail, but even if he had gotten a max sentence, if he had the trial right away, it would have been like a month or something like that.

01:00:50.000 And more importantly, what that does is it scares the fuck out of anybody that's thinking about doing something like that in the future.

01:00:56.000 That's exactly the point.

01:00:57.000 The Empire will strike back.

01:00:59.000 Yeah.

01:00:59.000 And they do.

01:01:00.000 Especially in a situation like that where there's clear evidence that they polluted that area.

01:01:06.000 Undeniable. 1.00

01:01:06.000 Fucking crazy. 1.00

01:01:07.000 Look, this is the impact, and you know this is my big thing, this is the impact of money on politics. 0.99

01:01:12.000 This is the way our system works.

01:01:13.000 I mean, when you have giant corporations and billionaires pay the politicians in campaign contributions, then when those politicians get in there, they're going to represent the corporations and the billionaires and not the will of the people.

01:01:23.000 I mean, you could look at any public opinion poll and it will tell you some very clear preferences among Democrats, Republicans, among everybody, and we don't get those things into law.

01:01:30.000 The stuff that goes into law is a new...

01:01:53.000 It's not because she has people who like her and support her.

01:01:57.000 Yeah, it's spooky.

01:01:58.000 It's spooky because there's no clear path to get money out of politics.

01:02:02.000 So there actually is.

01:02:03.000 One way is to do a constitutional amendment, but that's difficult because you need to get like three-fifths of the state.

01:02:08.000 It's a whole process.

01:02:08.000 It's very difficult.

01:02:09.000 And you're going to have to get the people that are involved in it to agree.

01:02:14.000 Yeah, I mean, so there's this thing called clean elections, which is you ban all the private money, everything is funded by the public, and you're allocated a certain amount, and then you really have a debate and a battle of ideas and different policies, and whoever wins, wins.

01:02:26.000 The fact of the matter is, we used to have laws that...

01:02:31.000 Limited corporate money in politics.

01:02:33.000 There was a, I think it was like, it's called the Tillman Act.

01:02:35.000 I want to say it was like 1907 or something like that.

01:02:38.000 They said, yep, no corporate money in politics. 0.67

01:02:40.000 No corporate money.

01:02:41.000 But what happened was the Supreme Court came along in the 1970s, and then in subsequent cases after that as well, Bucky v.

01:02:46.000 Vallejo, Citizens United, Bellotti, there were a bunch of cases where they basically said, yeah, we're going to go ahead and claim that bribing politicians is free speech.

01:02:56.000 They claimed it's a free speech issue.

01:02:58.000 So if a billionaire wants to give $200,000 or whatever to a PAC or a super PAC or a candidate, it's like, hey, that's their right to do that.

01:03:06.000 And you're just going to drown out.

01:03:07.000 There's some grandma in Cleveland who donates 15 bucks to a politician and wants her social security not to be cut. 1.00

01:03:12.000 And those voices are just drowned out. 0.98

01:03:16.000 The bribing is so fucking blatant, too. 0.97

01:03:20.000 It's so strange, these contributions that people do. 0.98

01:03:23.000 Like Sam Bankman-Fried, for example.

01:03:27.000 Oh, that was so bad.

01:03:28.000 So bad.

01:03:29.000 It was all scam.

01:03:30.000 Everything was a scam.

01:03:31.000 So crazy that that was going on for so long.

01:03:34.000 And unless that Binance guy went after them, That would have kept going.

01:03:40.000 That's right.

01:03:40.000 It would be going on right now.

01:03:42.000 He's the one who kind of, you know, exposed all of it.

01:03:44.000 Yeah, and meanwhile, now they're exposing him.

01:03:46.000 Now his company's falling apart.

01:03:48.000 Well, look, I'm no expert on crypto, but there are many experts who do say, like, it's TikTok.

01:03:54.000 TikTok.

01:03:56.000 The whole crypto industry may implode eventually.

01:03:59.000 Yeah?

01:04:00.000 Yeah.

01:04:01.000 I mean, like I said, I'm no expert on it, but a guy named Matt Stoller, he basically says, like, the whole thing is bogus.

01:04:06.000 Like, everything is like FTX, Sandbank, but freed. 0.96

01:04:08.000 Like, it's all garbage.

01:04:09.000 Well, if people agree that it's money, that's the thing, right? 0.97

01:04:13.000 If people agree that crypto is money and they use it and exchange it and buy things, then it becomes established.

01:04:19.000 One of the problems is, it's a very tiny percentage of it that's actually used as currency.

01:04:24.000 It's like less than 10%.

01:04:26.000 Bitcoin, for example, which is like the most established one, people don't actually use it as currency for the most part.

01:04:31.000 It's a speculative investment.

01:04:33.000 And then now you have interest rates going up, that's affecting everything that's speculative, and they're all going belly up.

01:04:38.000 But the idea behind it, people want a decentralized currency that's not controlled by the government.

01:04:43.000 And so this is the reason why they created it in the first place, and the idea behind it is that We could put it in this decentralized form where we all agree that this is money and it's not being influenced by anyone else and you can exchange it.

01:04:57.000 And with Bitcoin, there's a limited amount of it, right?

01:05:00.000 So there's a benefit in that.

01:05:02.000 You really can't raise it and you can't make more of it.

01:05:06.000 This is it.

01:05:07.000 And, you know, you can exchange it, and its value is determined by the people, but it fluctuates so wildly.

01:05:14.000 That's right.

01:05:14.000 It doesn't act like a stable currency.

01:05:16.000 Even if we're super kind and, you know, we try to steel man their position, there are wild swings, and it's hard to treat something that swings that wildly as a stable currency, because it's not.

01:05:26.000 It's more of an investment than a stable currency.

01:05:28.000 Do you think the wild swings are because it's manipulated, because people that control fiat currency don't want it to ever be stable?

01:05:36.000 Is there any...

01:05:37.000 Evidence of that?

01:05:38.000 No, I think people who got in early on crypto, a lot of them probably made a lot of money on crypto.

01:05:43.000 And then you have this boom cycle where people get into it, here's the new hot thing, more people invest, and then eventually, you know, the rug gets pulled out from underneath them, and the people who came in originally may have made a lot of money, but everybody who came in later bought too late, and they're gonna lose money on their investment, so.

01:05:57.000 Jamie's a big crypto guy. 0.98

01:05:58.000 He knows a lot of shit about this. 0.99

01:06:00.000 All right. 1.00

01:06:01.000 All right?

01:06:02.000 We'll see.

01:06:03.000 Jamie's the number one crypto guy in the world.

01:06:06.000 I look at it, but I don't try to speak out of...

01:06:09.000 I hear things and I believe what people are saying, but I also watch...

01:06:13.000 To me, it's very speculative.

01:06:15.000 I see problems happening all the time.

01:06:17.000 Yeah.

01:06:18.000 I don't understand why certain things are happening.

01:06:20.000 I'm Googling right now.

01:06:22.000 Can you manipulate Bitcoin?

01:06:23.000 People are saying that's the only reason it's going up right now.

01:06:25.000 But I haven't heard anyone lay out a plan of, like, this is how they manipulated it.

01:06:29.000 So they're saying it's going up because people who hold it are manipulating it?

01:06:34.000 Yeah, just a generic Google, though.

01:06:36.000 I don't know who's saying that.

01:06:37.000 Well, look at NFTs, right?

01:06:39.000 Yeah.

01:06:39.000 Like, that's one where...

01:06:41.000 Most people were like, get the fuck out of here. 0.54

01:06:44.000 Really? 0.98

01:06:44.000 You got a cartoon drawing of an ape with a captain's hat on. 0.98

01:06:47.000 It's a million dollars! 1.00

01:06:47.000 And this shit is worth 200 grand. 1.00

01:06:49.000 Like Justin Bieber lost like hundreds of dollars, millions of dollars. 1.00

01:06:54.000 That's a whole other part of what was going on that people, I don't think a lot of people understand that.

01:06:58.000 For instance, just briefly, they were giving celebrities the NFT. Yeah.

01:07:04.000 Giving it to them though.

01:07:06.000 I don't know that a lot of them paid their own money for it, you know?

01:07:09.000 So he didn't lose money.

01:07:11.000 If he would have sold it, that's like an unrealized gain, you know, like that kind of loss.

01:07:15.000 Right.

01:07:16.000 This is part of what happened with Kim Kardashian, too.

01:07:18.000 But no one knew that those people were being given the NFTs, though.

01:07:22.000 Kim Kardashian's a separate thing, I don't think.

01:07:23.000 You had to look through, like, who actually bought the NFT. They found like it was another exchange that was trying to manipulate things.

01:07:30.000 Yeah, see, with the Kim Kardashian thing that I just referenced, she did a post, I think on Instagram, for Ethereum Max, I think it was called.

01:07:37.000 And Ethereum was a more legit cryptocurrency, but Ethereum Max is not.

01:07:41.000 And it's not actually related to Ethereum.

01:07:43.000 It sounds like it's like the next generation or whatever of Ethereum.

01:07:45.000 And so she got paid, I think it was $250,000 to promote this. 0.99

01:07:49.000 And, long story short, the FEC fined her ass because it was a total scam. 1.00

01:07:54.000 And somebody just approached her and said, look, we'll pay you 250 grand if you just do this post. 0.99

01:07:57.000 And she was like, okay, sure.

01:07:58.000 And she did it, and it was basically like a pump-and-up scheme. 0.52

01:08:01.000 Unless there's another one, too.

01:08:02.000 This one got dismissed, but there are multiple ones, I think.

01:08:06.000 Yeah, so the SEC charged her, what, $1.26 million in penalties?

01:08:10.000 There's also the newest one, this class-action lawsuit against all the celebrities that endorsed FTX, right?

01:08:19.000 Dismissal comes after Kardashian paid over $1 million in October to settle with the SEC over a promotion of Ethereum Max.

01:08:25.000 The judge noted that the suit highlights legitimate concerns about celebrities' ability to readily persuade millions of undiscerning followers to buy snake oil.

01:08:37.000 Yeah.

01:08:38.000 It's all really wild.

01:08:40.000 It's interesting, right?

01:08:41.000 Because it's emerging and people are wondering whether or not this is ever going to be legitimate.

01:08:46.000 But if you're right, and if these speculators are right, that it's all going to fall apart, that's interesting, too, to see what happens then.

01:08:52.000 Look, when I look at NFTs, it seems more clear-cut to me.

01:08:55.000 And I've heard your commentary on it and I relate to it because you're just like, nobody's ever been able to explain it to me.

01:08:59.000 I'm like, yes.

01:09:00.000 I get it.

01:09:01.000 With crypto, at least I see some theoretical arguments where it's like, yeah, I could kind of see, you know, but then it all depends on the implementation and how it actually plays out.

01:09:07.000 So I'm a little more agnostic on the crypto front, but on the NFT front, I'm not at all agnostic.

01:09:11.000 Yeah, no, I'm with you 100% on that. 1.00

01:09:13.000 I was approached both about crypto and about NFTs, and both times I was like, fuck off. 0.99

01:09:20.000 I don't want to have nothing to do with it. 0.99

01:09:22.000 Good on you, man.

01:09:22.000 If I don't understand, like, if someone says, hey, we have this amazing new protein powder, it's sugar-free, it's really good for you, it's got all these amino acids, and I can look at the data, and I go, okay, I'll take that, and I'll take it and try it, okay, I'll promote that.

01:09:38.000 That makes sense to me.

01:09:39.000 But if you're saying something that I don't understand, I can't, explain it to me again, like I'm five. 0.99

01:09:44.000 Tell me what the fuck a non-fungible token means. 0.97

01:09:48.000 Like, oh, well, you know, only you own it, but I can take a screenshot of it. 0.99

01:09:52.000 Right.

01:09:53.000 Like, that's crazy.

01:09:55.000 Yeah.

01:09:56.000 Good on you because that shows you have, like, some ethics in how you deal with all, because I'm sure you get, you know, crazy pitches all the time for all different products, but the fact that you say, I'm only going to really, you know, push the ones that I know I like and I know I use, that's big because there are,

01:10:11.000 unfortunately, there are a lot of people who don't do that. 0.99

01:10:13.000 It's anybody who will cut me a paycheck, I'll take the fucking paycheck and I'll say whatever the fuck, and that's how you lose credibility. 0.99

01:10:18.000 That's how people don't trust you anymore. 0.99

01:10:19.000 If you're Hawking something that you don't use and you don't fucking care about, you don't even know about, then why should anybody trust you? 0.54

01:10:25.000 No, I won't do any ads unless it makes sense. 0.96

01:10:29.000 Like, is this a legitimate thing that people use, you know, like ZipRecruiter?

01:10:32.000 Oh, people use it.

01:10:33.000 It helps you get people for the job that you're trying to fill.

01:10:36.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

01:10:37.000 But whenever it gets weird, I'm like, what are we talking about here?

01:10:40.000 Yeah.

01:10:41.000 Is this regulated?

01:10:44.000 Where does this go bad?

01:10:45.000 I mean, do I have any personal experience in it?

01:10:47.000 I don't.

01:10:49.000 Does anybody that makes sense? 1.00

01:10:50.000 And then you see all these people that have a vested interest in it succeeding, and they're making these exaggerated claims, and like, this seems like fucking bullshit. 0.96

01:10:59.000 Yeah, there was a few exposés recently that were really interesting. 0.97

01:11:02.000 One of them was, like, some company was claiming it's, like, high-quality Japanese steel knives.

01:11:06.000 Forget the name of the company.

01:11:07.000 But somebody did an investigation and were like, this isn't high-quality, this isn't Japanese steel.

01:11:13.000 They're flat-out lying. 0.99

01:11:14.000 And a lot of YouTubers were pushing this stuff, and podcasters were pushing this stuff, and everybody, you know, you look like a fucking dunce when you get caught like that. 0.99

01:11:21.000 But for knives, like, is it sharp? 0.98

01:11:23.000 Does it cut things?

01:11:24.000 Like, what are we talking about?

01:11:25.000 Like, a knife is a simple thing.

01:11:27.000 That's true.

01:11:28.000 It's gonna make a claim, though.

01:11:28.000 It's gotta hold up.

01:11:29.000 You know what I mean?

01:11:30.000 Yeah, I guess so.

01:11:31.000 You can't say it's sourced from this place and it's not sourced from there.

01:11:33.000 You know, you're getting some cheap-ass deal and it's supposed to be high-level. 0.99

01:11:36.000 It's just fucking, it's sketchy. 0.99

01:11:38.000 It's not right. 0.99

01:11:39.000 Yeah, well, there's always gonna be that, right?

01:11:41.000 It's always gonna be hard to figure out what's valuable and what's not valuable.

01:11:47.000 The other thing was, they were selling, like, you can become a lord in Scotland or something like that.

01:11:52.000 Remember that?

01:11:53.000 Do you know what I'm talking about?

01:11:54.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.99

01:11:55.000 And people were doing the ads, and it was, you know, I remember looking at it the first time, like, what the fuck? 0.98

01:11:59.000 Like, what are you talking? 0.98

01:12:00.000 It's like the same thing, like, oh, buy a star.

01:12:02.000 Right.

01:12:02.000 Remember that?

01:12:03.000 Right. 0.99

01:12:03.000 It's like, bitch, you didn't just buy a star for $17.99 or whatever. 0.99

01:12:05.000 You talked to Neil deGrasse Tyson, he's like, there is a very fucking robust system where they name stars. 0.99

01:12:11.000 They're not going to name the Kyle Kolinsky star. 0.85

01:12:13.000 Right.

01:12:13.000 They just give you a piece of paper and you spent 500 bucks for that or whatever it is.

01:12:18.000 Yeah, it's an interesting world when it comes to advertising.

01:12:22.000 It's an interesting world when you're trying to figure out what's legit and what's not.

01:12:25.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:12:26.000 I mean, like I said, I think there's degrees and the thing I respect the most is if people only do, hey, I use this, I like this.

01:12:33.000 Well, we were talking last night, you guys were explaining to me about this Indian guy who's one of the richest men in the world.

01:12:38.000 Oh, yeah, so Crystal knows more about that than I do, but apparently he's the fourth richest guy in the world, giant dude, and his whole company that's coming out now is just a total scam.

01:12:49.000 The whole thing's a scam.

01:12:51.000 Yeah, there's a lot of this that goes on, Joe. 1.00

01:12:53.000 There's a lot of this, you know, crazy fucking scam artist bullshit. 1.00

01:12:56.000 A lot of our economy is just scam artists. 1.00

01:12:58.000 I mean, look at the 2008 crash, right?

01:13:00.000 That was all just because total lack of regulation.

01:13:03.000 Everybody thought Wall Street's the smartest guys in the room, bro.

01:13:05.000 They're just doing what's right by everybody. 1.00

01:13:06.000 It's like, no, they're the greediest fuckers in the room. 1.00

01:13:09.000 Adani, how the billionaire's empire lost $100 billion in days. 1.00

01:13:14.000 Holy shit. 0.99

01:13:16.000 So Indian billionaire, how do you say his name? 0.99

01:13:19.000 Guatam Adani has sought to reassure Investors, after his company pulled a surprise by calling off its share sale.

01:13:30.000 On Wednesday, Adani Enterprises said it would return $2.5 billion raised from the sale to investors.

01:13:36.000 The decision will not impact our existing operations and future plans, Mr. Adani has said.

01:13:42.000 The move caps an eventful week, which began with a U.S. investment firm making fraud claims against Adani Group firms.

01:13:50.000 So these fraud claims is what Crystal was explaining last night.

01:13:53.000 Yeah, it's like a very reputable group that has exposed scams previously, and they did this whole detailed report explaining how his whole company is fraudulent, and now the market's reacting to that.

01:14:03.000 Jesus.

01:14:04.000 Yeah.

01:14:04.000 And is it legal scams?

01:14:07.000 Like, there's some scams that are like...

01:14:09.000 Multi-level marketing, yeah.

01:14:10.000 They're legal technically, but they really shouldn't be.

01:14:12.000 Even stock buybacks.

01:14:13.000 Stock buybacks started in the 1980s.

01:14:15.000 Ronald Reagan legalized them.

01:14:17.000 And previously, they were like, we can't allow this.

01:14:20.000 This is crazy.

01:14:20.000 You're just artificially pumping up your own stock price.

01:14:23.000 But now we allow them.

01:14:24.000 So how does that work?

01:14:25.000 I don't know the specifics of how the stock buyback thing works.

01:14:28.000 I just know in the 1980s.

01:14:29.000 There was a good video from Robert Reich.

01:14:31.000 I think we're good to go.

01:14:48.000 And you just reinvest it into your company in a legitimate way, like you pay the workers more, or you do more research and development, or you expand, and then they don't do that anymore.

01:14:57.000 It's all just like, hey, let's pay the shareholders off even more by artificially pumping up the price of our own stock and screw the workers.

01:15:03.000 And it's legal.

01:15:04.000 And it's legal, that's right.

01:15:05.000 Now it's legal.

01:15:06.000 It wasn't back then, now it is, yeah.

01:15:08.000 Bizarre.

01:15:08.000 Yeah.

01:15:10.000 Bizarre.

01:15:10.000 Like how does it all, like, do you envision a real potential time where they get money out of politics and that these kind of things become illegal again and that there's some sort of sanity is achieved?

01:15:28.000 I mean that's a great question.

01:15:31.000 I am of the belief that the best we could do, and maybe this is a little bit of a pessimistic viewpoint, but it really is where I'm at, at least at the moment.

01:15:40.000 Maybe I'm wrong, but there are countries that have sort of achieved significantly better systems in my estimation.

01:15:46.000 Like, I think the Scandinavian region, they're just much better systems overall.

01:15:49.000 People self-report being way happier.

01:15:51.000 These are all countries that have, you know, free healthcare, free education, and The workforces are almost entirely unionized.

01:15:57.000 So they do what's called sectoral bargaining.

01:15:58.000 So they set wages across an entire industry.

01:16:01.000 And what happens in that scenario?

01:16:02.000 They don't even have minimum wage laws in these countries because they don't need it because everybody's part of the union.

01:16:05.000 They make more than whatever a minimum wage would be.

01:16:07.000 And so when I look at those systems, I think like that's That's what I like because, you know, there was a time too in the US with FDR with the New Deal.

01:16:15.000 We were on that path.

01:16:16.000 We were on the path of like, we're going to create a vibrant, thriving social democracy here.

01:16:20.000 We're going to have beautiful infrastructure.

01:16:21.000 People are going to get paid well.

01:16:23.000 We're going to have a thriving middle class.

01:16:25.000 And then with the neoliberal era, all of that was rolled back.

01:16:27.000 You have the introduction of money into politics.

01:16:29.000 You have basically, we became a giant corporatocracy where billionaires and corporations run the show.

01:16:34.000 People never get the things that they actually want.

01:16:36.000 So in my opinion, what you need is sort of like a grassroots movement On specific issues to achieve specific wins.

01:16:42.000 So, you know, one of my big things is universal healthcare.

01:16:45.000 We are literally the only developed country in the world that doesn't have universal healthcare.

01:16:49.000 There's a Commonwealth Fund study that comes out every few years, and they find that we rank 11th out of 11 of the countries that they study when it comes to our healthcare system.

01:16:57.000 So, like, we know how to do it, and there are experts in the world who can construct much better systems, but we don't do it, again, because of the influence of money in politics.

01:17:05.000 The health insurance industry buys the politicians, so they keep scamming.

01:17:08.000 I mean, Big Pharma is, like, the biggest scam going.

01:17:11.000 Over the past 20 years, you've had a situation where they make...

01:17:17.000 Sorry, hold on one sec.

01:17:18.000 Over the past 20 years, it's all tax money that funds new medicine.

01:17:23.000 All that comes out of tax dollars.

01:17:24.000 So what happens is you have grants go to universities, and they do the research, come up with the new drugs, then big pharma swoops in, buys up the intellectual property rights for those things, and then sells it back to us at a colossal profit.

01:17:37.000 So we pay for the research up front, and then they charge us on the back end.

01:17:42.000 It's crazy.

01:17:43.000 So there's an example.

01:17:43.000 I covered a story recently.

01:17:44.000 There's a drug in the UK, a cancer drug coming out of the UK. It costs about $200 in the UK. This is a drug that's existed for decades now.

01:17:52.000 We pay $38,000 for that drug here. 1.00

01:17:56.000 Holy shit. 1.00

01:17:57.000 Total scam. 1.00

01:17:58.000 It's a total fucking scam. 1.00

01:18:00.000 You can look it up. 1.00

01:18:00.000 It was a Raw Story article. 1.00

01:18:01.000 It's a drug for a specific kind of cancer.

01:18:04.000 Type in, like, Raw Story 38,000 cancer drug.

01:18:08.000 $38,000 cancer drug.

01:18:10.000 Yeah.

01:18:11.000 And that's just one example, Joe.

01:18:13.000 I mean, there's so many examples of, like, it's just a giant scam.

01:18:16.000 They're a middleman.

01:18:17.000 $38,398 for a single shot of a very old cancer drug.

01:18:23.000 $38,000?

01:18:25.000 That is so crazy.

01:18:29.000 Wow.

01:18:34.000 Prostate cancer.

01:18:35.000 There you go.

01:18:37.000 Hmm.

01:18:38.000 Wow.

01:18:40.000 Well, we're going through the article there, but that's all the above.

01:18:45.000 Insane.

01:18:48.000 Absolutely insane.

01:18:49.000 So my answer is you need a grassroots movement to try to get universal health care.

01:18:54.000 You need a grassroots movement to try to get a higher minimum wage or get sectoral bargaining across the country.

01:18:59.000 Like, there are things that we can do that would fight back.

01:19:02.000 Now, honestly, when you talk about Joe Biden, he is largely a status quo protector.

01:19:06.000 There are little ways in which he's sort of tweaked it a little bit, where he's doing stuff that you could never even imagine Obama doing.

01:19:13.000 Let's do this in a minute, because I gotta pee.

01:19:15.000 Sure, go for it. 0.99

01:19:15.000 So we'll go over all this shit. 0.99

01:19:17.000 I'm sorry, I've been drinking a lot of water. 0.99

01:19:18.000 No, no worries, man.

01:19:19.000 I'll be right back.

01:19:19.000 No worries, man.

01:19:20.000 In fact, I might pee as well.

01:19:21.000 Okay.

01:19:22.000 And we're back.

01:19:23.000 Okay.

01:19:25.000 Feels good, doesn't it?

01:19:26.000 Yeah, it's so hard to concentrate when you have to pee.

01:19:29.000 So, I was saying, in some very interesting ways, Biden has broken with neoliberal orthodoxy.

01:19:38.000 Like, for example, the reduction of student loan debt.

01:19:42.000 Never before could you imagine a scenario, even under Obama, where he'd be like, let's just wipe out 10k, 20k of debt.

01:19:49.000 Has that been implemented?

01:19:51.000 No, so what happened is, he did it via executive order, and he did it using COVID justification.

01:19:57.000 So when Trump was president, he actually reduced some student loan debt.

01:20:01.000 It was for specific categories, like if you were a disabled veteran and stuff like that, they would reduce your student loan debt.

01:20:07.000 So Biden used that same justification that Trump did, some COVID justification, like, hey, the economy's rough, people are struggling, we're going to wipe out some of this.

01:20:15.000 And what happened was it went through the court system.

01:20:17.000 A couple of courts said, this is totally legal.

01:20:20.000 And then it just got to a court now that said, no, this is not legal.

01:20:24.000 We're going to slap it down.

01:20:25.000 And so it didn't work.

01:20:27.000 But under the 1965 Higher Education Act, he actually does have the right, the education secretary has the right to wipe the debt slate clean because the federal government owns about 90% of student debt.

01:20:38.000 So they already have the authority, but I don't think Biden used the most straightforward interpretation of the law in order to do it.

01:20:45.000 They very well may strike it down, but he could just turn around and say, okay, I'm going to do the exact same thing using the 1965 Higher Education Act, where I do have the authority to do it.

01:20:55.000 Is there plans to do that?

01:20:56.000 I don't know.

01:20:57.000 And this is the thing about Biden, right?

01:21:00.000 He also is a status quo protector.

01:21:02.000 There's some little ways in which he's broken with orthodoxy, but, you know, in other ways he hasn't.

01:21:06.000 So, I mean, I could go through, I'll give you, like, okay, let's go through the bad stuff that Biden did.

01:21:10.000 Okay.

01:21:11.000 So, he ran on him to get us back in the Iran deal.

01:21:14.000 Because Iran, they were, you know, Obama made a deal with the Iranian government.

01:21:18.000 Hey, we sanctioned you, we're holding your money, we'll give you back your own money if you promise you're not going to create a nuclear weapon and we'll allow the IAEA, the International Atomic Energy Agency, to go in there and regulate and make sure you're not Building a nuclear weapon.

01:21:31.000 They agreed to it.

01:21:32.000 The deal was fine.

01:21:33.000 The UN comes out and says, every time we go and follow up, they're following the deal to a T. Trump comes in, pulls us out of it, which is a huge problem.

01:21:42.000 Biden runs on, I'm going to get us right back in it, because it was working before.

01:21:45.000 Now he's president, and he didn't get back in it.

01:21:47.000 And so now we're talking about, you know, regime change is on the table again with Iran.

01:21:50.000 We might have a war with Iran. 0.87

01:21:52.000 All because Biden didn't want to hop back in this deal.

01:21:54.000 I mean, Trump is primarily to blame because he pulled out of it, but then Biden said he was going to put us back in.

01:21:57.000 He didn't put us back in it.

01:21:58.000 Okay?

01:21:59.000 So that's one thing he did, which I hate.

01:22:01.000 Afghanistan.

01:22:02.000 I gave him credit earlier for pulling the troops out of Afghanistan, but the thing that he's doing now is horrendous because he is sanctioning Afghanistan and keeping billions of dollars of their money from their central bank.

01:22:12.000 We've just stole it and we're holding it.

01:22:14.000 The U.S. is holding it.

01:22:15.000 And, of course, the reason he's doing that is because he doesn't want the Republicans to hit him and say, if he releases that money, then they're going to say, oh, Biden's funding the Taliban.

01:22:23.000 And so he doesn't do it but as a result of this you have like women and children and civilians are starving.

01:22:28.000 I mean the country is like in famine right now as a result of this.

01:22:31.000 Is there any evidence that if they release that money that would change?

01:22:34.000 That those people wouldn't be starving?

01:22:35.000 Well if you if you yes if the country had more money you would have less food insecurity you'd have people who can eat but it is true that of course the Taliban is the government there so they would get some of that money.

01:22:45.000 Yes.

01:22:45.000 How much they would it would be up to their discretion.

01:22:48.000 I mean, I'm not sure exactly how it would work with the central bank versus the government and exactly where all the money would go, but it seems to be the general consensus that, you know, by not releasing that money, you are sort of sentencing people to starve.

01:23:00.000 So that's a huge problem.

01:23:03.000 He's backing Saudi Arabia's genocide in Yemen.

01:23:06.000 That's another huge problem.

01:23:08.000 He said, oh, we're not going to give them offensive weapons anymore, but we're still giving them billions of dollars in weapons, and they're using it on civilians in Yemen. 0.77

01:23:16.000 So that's another huge thing.

01:23:19.000 So that was it see this is unfortunately this is what happens a lot of the time with Democrats is like He looks at Trump who just openly supported Saudi Arabia butchering Yemen and was like oh that's not right We're better people than that so we're no no longer gonna sell them offensive weapons But then he just keeps doing the exact same policy and Pretending like no no we're not using this for them to bomb children and mosques and schools and hospitals But that is exactly what they're using it for so it really is just a sleight of hand trick It's the same policy what what categorizes something as an offensive weapon I mean,

01:23:49.000 I don't know.

01:23:49.000 That's the thing, right?

01:23:50.000 It's still the exact same, you know, weapon shipments that we had before.

01:23:53.000 But they're just pretending like, no, Saudi Arabia is using this to be defensive against Yemen.

01:24:01.000 It's just a lie, is what it is.

01:24:03.000 So that's another example of something he's doing this terrible.

01:24:06.000 Also, he, you know, he got a lot of... 1.00

01:24:08.000 Trump got a lot of shit for... 0.99

01:24:11.000 The border and, you know, trying to build a border wall and a policy called Remain in Mexico and a policy called Title 42, which is the pandemic policy where if somebody comes in to the country illegally, there's no due process. 1.00

01:24:22.000 We just ship you right out because we're like, look, to pandemic, you don't get due process.

01:24:25.000 So it's an emergency.

01:24:26.000 We're going to ship you out.

01:24:27.000 Biden actually continued Title 42. He continued Remain in Mexico, and he's filling in some of the gaps in Trump's border wall.

01:24:33.000 So he's doing basically a very similar policy when it comes to the border as Trump did. 0.98

01:24:37.000 So that's another thing that he gets he gets a lot of crap for. 0.95

01:24:41.000 He picked somebody who's like an anti-social security extremist to oversee the program. 0.96

01:24:45.000 That's a problem because they might try to cut it, they might try to privatize it.

01:24:48.000 I mean, to be fair to him, he's actually standing kind of strong on it now because there's this debt ceiling negotiation that's going to come up soon.

01:24:54.000 And Biden is saying, we're not going to cut a penny from social security, but questionable staffing choices that he made, which...

01:25:00.000 Many people think he might actually negotiate and do some cuts to Social Security.

01:25:04.000 He hiked Medicare prices.

01:25:06.000 He sent US troops to Somalia.

01:25:08.000 He bombed Syria. 0.97

01:25:09.000 So there's a number of things that he's done that are just like, you know, I'm a standard American president.

01:25:13.000 I go in line with the empire.

01:25:15.000 I go in line with the corporatocracy.

01:25:18.000 But there are some things he did that are actually genuinely surprising to me, because I expected nothing from this guy.

01:25:23.000 I mean, this is the guy who, when he ran, he said, nothing will fundamentally change to a room full of, like, wealthy donors.

01:25:29.000 You remember that?

01:25:29.000 There was a big story at the time where he was basically saying, you're good, like, we're not going to change too much.

01:25:34.000 But under him, we have, for the first time in my life, we've actually onshored 350,000 jobs.

01:25:41.000 He's done a couple policies with...

01:25:43.000 What does that mean?

01:25:44.000 So, throughout my life, we've been offshoring jobs, which is like our manufacturing jobs, our factory jobs get shipped overseas to China, India, Bangladesh, places like that.

01:25:54.000 And for the first time in my life, it's going the reverse way.

01:25:56.000 There's a lot of jobs coming back here.

01:25:57.000 What's the reason for that?

01:25:59.000 So, one of the reasons is, because of the pandemic, people realized, oh, these global supply chains are kind of a problem.

01:26:06.000 Yeah.

01:26:25.000 And so it's one of the few good things that he's been doing.

01:26:28.000 350,000 jobs have been onshore.

01:26:29.000 To put that in perspective, under Obama we lost jobs, and under Trump we lost about 200,000 jobs for his four years in office.

01:26:35.000 This is the first time in my life it's going the other way.

01:26:37.000 And it took a pandemic for them to realize, like, oh, maybe global supply chains are kind of a problem.

01:26:41.000 What did they do in order to get that to happen?

01:26:46.000 What policies were put into place?

01:26:48.000 What they do is tax credits, for example, and subsidies.

01:26:53.000 You penalize companies for shipping the jobs overseas, or you incentivize them to keep it here.

01:26:59.000 Some of the things that they're doing here are like, Microchip factories, electric car factories.

01:27:04.000 There's a whole bunch of, like, burgeoning industries.

01:27:07.000 And it's in places where it used to be, like, you know, the heart of American car manufacturing.

01:27:13.000 They're bringing a lot of the jobs back to those areas.

01:27:14.000 Which is why it was interesting.

01:27:15.000 In the midterms, you saw the Democrats did pretty well in the Rust Belt.

01:27:18.000 And that was trending the other direction for a very long time, but it stopped and went back towards the Democrats.

01:27:23.000 And I think the main reason why is because Biden was doing those policies.

01:27:26.000 And so people see that there's more job creation there and there's factories that are coming back.

01:27:29.000 Hmm.

01:27:30.000 So that was one of the good things he did.

01:27:31.000 He also lowered drug prices for seniors in the Inflation Reduction Act.

01:27:35.000 Now, that's got an interesting backstory to it, man, because Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema are the two corrupt Democratic senators, the most corrupt Democratic senators. 0.64

01:27:42.000 Corrupt how so?

01:27:43.000 They take the most big money from Pharma, from Wall Street.

01:27:46.000 I mean, they're swimming in donor cash.

01:27:48.000 And we were this close to getting lower prescription drug prices for everybody.

01:27:54.000 But, Kyrsten Sinema took a million dollars from Pharma at the last minute, and she said, I'm not in favor of lowering everybody's drug prices.

01:28:01.000 Let's only do certain drugs, and let's only do it for seniors.

01:28:04.000 And so that's the policy we ended up getting in the Inflation Reduction Act.

01:28:07.000 And when you say she took a million dollars, it's a million dollars in donations to her campaign?

01:28:11.000 That's right.

01:28:12.000 Campaign contributions, yeah.

01:28:14.000 I know.

01:28:15.000 When people learn about how this stuff works, it's mind-boggling.

01:28:18.000 But yeah, we were this close, dude, to getting lower prescription drug price for everybody.

01:28:21.000 Didn't she decide to become an independent now?

01:28:23.000 She did, yes.

01:28:24.000 And she's in no poll is she winning in a theoretical Arizona race between a standard Democrat and a standard Republican.

01:28:31.000 In every poll now, she's like, oh, I'm an independent.

01:28:33.000 She might run again. 0.86

01:28:34.000 She might not.

01:28:35.000 We'll see.

01:28:35.000 But she would come in third, no matter what.

01:28:38.000 So what gives someone the incentive to become independent?

01:28:42.000 I mean, my theory on this, and I don't know for sure, I don't think anybody really knows for sure, my theory on this is John McCain was viewed as like a maverick Republican.

01:28:50.000 He was a Republican who sometimes would buck Republican orthodoxy and vote with the Democrats, right?

01:28:54.000 Like he voted to keep Obamacare when if he went the other way, Obamacare would have been gone under Trump.

01:28:58.000 Remember that?

01:28:58.000 He gave a thumbs up and it was like, oh, see, he's being a maverick or whatever.

01:29:01.000 I think she's doing the same thing in the other direction.

01:29:04.000 So she's always been a Democrat.

01:29:05.000 But she's been a very, very conservative Democrat.

01:29:08.000 She votes like 50% of the time with Republicans.

01:29:10.000 And so she was trying to create that maverick brand in Arizona, like John McCain. 0.95

01:29:14.000 McCain was like a liberal Republican.

01:29:16.000 She was trying to be a conservative Democrat. 1.00

01:29:18.000 But ultimately, look, it's all about...

01:29:21.000 When I look at Kyrsten Sinema, it's all about the money, right?

01:29:23.000 Like, she's going to sell out to whoever the highest bidder is, and Pharma gave her all that money, and so she sold out to them, and she cloaks it in like, I'm being principled, but it's not about that.

01:29:31.000 It says, Kristen Sinema formally enrolls in the party of Wall Street and Big Pharma.

01:29:35.000 The senator's switch to independent aligns her more completely with the special interests that she has so diligently represented since coming to the chamber.

01:29:43.000 Trying to get paid.

01:29:45.000 That's right.

01:29:46.000 Another thing, so Biden announced pretty recently that he's going to pardon federal weed offenders for simple possession.

01:29:54.000 Now, nobody's actually in prison.

01:29:56.000 That's the problem. 0.98

01:29:57.000 But there were 4,000 people who now are going to wipe that from their record so they'll be able to get a fucking job, which is nice. 0.95

01:30:02.000 And then also he said they're going to likely deschedule it or reduce the scheduling. 0.82

01:30:07.000 So right now it's Schedule 1, and you know how absurd that is.

01:30:09.000 So they're either going to take it off that list or they're going to make it like Schedule 2 or 3. Yeah.

01:30:14.000 So they're gonna do that.

01:30:15.000 When is that supposed to take place?

01:30:17.000 Well, he announced the process where they're gonna, you know, do some sort of, I don't know, some investigation into it, and then at the end you're gonna have one of the heads of the agencies come out and give his conclusion, but it's pretty well established.

01:30:27.000 It's either gonna be off the schedule list or it's gonna be reduced.

01:30:29.000 It's the most preposterous thing we have going. 1.00

01:30:32.000 Beyond stupid. 1.00

01:30:33.000 I mean, you have so many states in the country where it is legal. 1.00

01:30:36.000 Yeah.

01:30:37.000 Canadian province experiments with decriminalizing hard drugs.

01:30:41.000 Yeah, I have seen that.

01:30:42.000 That's British Columbia.

01:30:43.000 Yeah, so up to 2.5 grams of such drugs, as well as methamphetamine, fentanyl, and morphine.

01:30:52.000 Canada's federal government granted the request by the West Coast province to try out the three-year experiment.

01:30:59.000 Well, the state of Oregon decriminalized everything.

01:31:02.000 Like, you can get steroids, mushrooms, LSD, everything's decriminalized.

01:31:07.000 I think that's the right thing to do.

01:31:09.000 I think it's the right thing to do, too.

01:31:10.000 It's just trying to sell that to people that are terrified of their children doing drugs is what's weird about it.

01:31:17.000 Like, the idea that a grown adult should be prohibited from using something that Other grown adults disagree with. 0.98

01:31:26.000 It's ridiculous. 0.97

01:31:27.000 Yeah. 0.93

01:31:27.000 As long as you can drink alcohol and take prescription medication that can kill you, like, why are we telling people what they can and can't do with their body? 0.93

01:31:35.000 Yeah, I mean...

01:31:36.000 Especially when there's evidence.

01:31:37.000 Things like marijuana, for example, or psilocybin, which has tremendous therapeutic benefits to people with PTSD, soldiers, people that are dying, that, you know, like, end-of-life anxiety and...

01:31:51.000 Mm-hmm.

01:31:52.000 So I'm sure you've seen the numbers on fentanyl deaths.

01:31:54.000 It's like we have 100,000 overdoses a year now.

01:31:57.000 Yeah.

01:31:58.000 I think even one year was maybe 110,000.

01:32:00.000 And what's interesting about that is the only reason that's happening is because we did that crackdown on the pain pills because about 30,000 people were dying every year from the pain pills.

01:32:09.000 And so they said, oh my God, this is a crisis.

01:32:11.000 We got to stop it.

01:32:11.000 So they cracked down on those pain pills.

01:32:13.000 Doctors are less able to prescribe that.

01:32:16.000 And then those people who were on the pills decided, now I got to go to the black market and get heroin.

01:32:21.000 And some of that heroin is laced with fentanyl, and that's what's leading to people dying.

01:32:24.000 So you take this thing where people mean well, it's like they want, oh, I want to help the addicts, we got to get them off this stuff, let's ban it, let's crack down.

01:32:30.000 But the unintended consequence of that was, now fentanyl is the killer, and it's an even worse killer.

01:32:35.000 And so, generally what happens is, when you do, when you legalize, tax, and regulate, or at the very least decriminalize, it's just healthier for everybody all around.

01:32:42.000 You know, you can have better standards, better guidelines, I mean, we've talked about this before, but during Prohibition, you had people dying from a bad batch of alcohol.

01:32:50.000 Why? 1.00

01:32:50.000 Because it was illegal and somebody was making it in their fucking bathtub and cutting it with some shit that could kill you. 1.00

01:32:54.000 Right, which is what we're having right now. 1.00

01:32:56.000 That's right.

01:32:57.000 It's brought in by the cartels.

01:32:58.000 That's exactly right.

01:32:59.000 That's the issue with that fentanyl.

01:33:00.000 So then we're propping up this incredible illegal business in Mexico, which is, you know, getting them... 0.64

01:33:08.000 immense power and then you're seeing these wars that are going on with the cartels in Mexico.

01:33:12.000 That's right.

01:33:13.000 Crazy.

01:33:13.000 I saw your podcast with Peter Zihon where he was talking about how actually if you look at El Chapo he had consolidated power and he was the leader and then we did this what's called the decapitation strategy you take out the leader and then the thought is oh maybe the rest of the organization will crumble but what happened is you took out the leader and then you had people warring in the streets to determine who the next leader was going to be.

01:33:35.000 Of course.

01:33:36.000 And so it got way worse.

01:33:37.000 Yeah.

01:33:38.000 So, I mean, look, the answer is legalize, tax, and regulate.

01:33:40.000 Put all the cartels out of business if you do that.

01:33:42.000 Right?

01:33:42.000 Just put them out of business.

01:33:43.000 Make it so that, you know, it's all official, reputable companies that if there's a problem, you go to court and settle it.

01:33:49.000 You don't have a shootout in the street.

01:33:51.000 Yeah, but I mean, making cocaine legal in this country.

01:33:56.000 Would be a huge leap.

01:33:58.000 It'd be a really scary thing.

01:33:59.000 A politician would be suicidal to say cocaine should be legal. 1.00

01:34:03.000 They'd be like, what the fuck are you talking about? 1.00

01:34:05.000 How many kids are dying from drug overdoses? 1.00

01:34:07.000 Yeah, I mean, look, it's a crisis of imagination, right?

01:34:10.000 Because there was a time when, like, everything was legal.

01:34:12.000 Like, the first drug laws came late in our history.

01:34:14.000 And now we think of it as like, well, duh, we have the drug laws, but it's not a duh.

01:34:17.000 The big Schedule 1 drug push was in 1970, and that was a response to the psychedelic movement in the 1960s.

01:34:24.000 Did you ever see that quote from one of Nixon's top officials who said the reason why they did the drug war? 0.77

01:34:29.000 They said, look, we had enemies in our White House, and our enemies were hippie white people and black people.

01:34:34.000 They were never going to vote for us. 0.89

01:34:36.000 So, what do we do?

01:34:37.000 Well, you crack down on what you think is their lifestyle.

01:34:39.000 So you criminalize the psychedelic drugs, you criminalize the marijuana, the crack cocaine, and that's how we solved our political problem, is we locked these people up basically.

01:34:47.000 A guy admitted it.

01:34:48.000 It was out in the open.

01:34:49.000 Yeah, it's real obvious what happened.

01:34:51.000 And the consequences are horrible.

01:34:53.000 You know, it's like the same consequences during Prohibition is exactly what we're experiencing now.

01:34:57.000 It's just not organized crime in America, it's more organized crime in Mexico.

01:35:01.000 That's right.

01:35:02.000 Yeah.

01:35:02.000 But people don't want to see that.

01:35:04.000 It's too complex and nuanced an issue for people to say, we're going to legalize all drugs.

01:35:09.000 People would go crazy.

01:35:10.000 Drugs are bad.

01:35:11.000 Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of it hinges on that regulation part because it's legalize, tax, and regulate.

01:35:17.000 I think?

01:35:40.000 We're not saying legalize that stuff.

01:35:42.000 We're saying legalize tax and regulate drugs so you create kind of like a safe alternative that still gives a semblance of that particular high, whether it's an upper or a downer or a hallucinogenic or whatever.

01:35:51.000 And then you have a more safer situation.

01:35:53.000 I mean, look, there's evidence that these safe injection sites, right? 1.00

01:35:55.000 People look at that and they go, oh my god, you're incentivizing people to go take fucking heroin. 1.00

01:35:58.000 This is crazy. 1.00

01:35:59.000 Like, what's wrong with you?

01:36:00.000 The reality is when you have safe injection sites, you have experts there.

01:36:03.000 So nobody's gonna, you're not gonna pass herpes around or pass diseases around.

01:36:06.000 Nobody's gonna overdose because they took a bad batch.

01:36:08.000 You just have professionals there who say, hey, we can save you if something bad happens. 0.98

01:36:11.000 And they can test the drugs to make sure they're not fucking tainted.

01:36:14.000 So really all those things do is make it safer for people. 0.97

01:36:17.000 But just the optics of that are like, ugh.

01:36:19.000 It seems like you're incentivizing going to take heroin. 0.99

01:36:22.000 And the places that have done that, like Oregon, are a fucking holy mess. 0.99

01:36:27.000 That's also part of the problem with decriminalization. 0.95

01:36:29.000 My understanding was that, so they did it in New York City, I don't know if they're still doing it, but like on the first day they saved like a dozen people's lives.

01:36:34.000 You know, and then I think in Portugal they've experimented with stuff like this and they've had some positive results.

01:36:39.000 So, I mean, it's tricky, but, you know.

01:36:41.000 Yeah, Portugal's done a great job of decriminalizing things.

01:36:43.000 I'm on the side of leaning as much as you can towards freedom, but being intelligent with the regulations.

01:36:47.000 That's my instinct, usually.

01:36:49.000 Well, when you talk to guys like Dr. Carl Hart, have you ever seen?

01:36:52.000 I have.

01:36:52.000 I've interviewed him.

01:36:53.000 He's phenomenal.

01:36:54.000 Phenomenal.

01:36:54.000 And his perspective is that we have a very distorted perception of what the dangers of a lot of these drugs are in the first place.

01:37:00.000 It's true.

01:37:00.000 Yeah.

01:37:01.000 And that we have demonized a lot of these things.

01:37:03.000 And, you know, when he first started studying drugs, he was a clinical researcher.

01:37:08.000 He was like a straightforward scientist, teetotaler, wasn't doing anything. 0.96

01:37:13.000 And then he was realizing this is all bullshit and started experimenting personally with these different drugs. 0.96

01:37:19.000 And like there's some great benefits to that if used responsibly, which he does. 0.99

01:37:24.000 He did recreational heroin.

01:37:25.000 He said that was my favorite one.

01:37:26.000 Still does.

01:37:26.000 Yeah.

01:37:27.000 Still does and openly talks about it.

01:37:29.000 And he keeps his job.

01:37:31.000 He does phenomenal writing.

01:37:33.000 And look, the fact of the matter is I think most people We're good to go.

01:38:01.000 But then there's also drugs that could help people get off of these things, like Ibogaine.

01:38:06.000 That's absolutely illegal, but people have had great benefits in going to Mexico and going to these Ibogaine retreats, and then they come back and they have no problems with any of these drugs.

01:38:15.000 Have you ever done that one?

01:38:16.000 No.

01:38:17.000 Is it a psychedelic one?

01:38:18.000 Well, I think it's categorized as a psychedelic, but it's a disassociative, I think.

01:38:26.000 Let's look at what is the That's exactly what you just said.

01:38:30.000 It's a dissociative psychedelic.

01:38:32.000 What it does is, the people that have taken it, let's say Ibogaine is a disassociative psychedelic with, how do you say that word?

01:38:41.000 Onearic?

01:38:42.000 Onearic?

01:38:42.000 Onearic properties that has multiple aforementioned anti-addictive mechanisms, as well as the ability to generate therapeutic psychological insights, suggesting promise in treating alcohol use disorders.

01:38:55.000 So the people that I know that have gone over there, my friend Ed Clay went over there because he had a problem with pills.

01:39:01.000 I think that What it does to people is it lets them recognize what are the patterns that's

01:39:31.000 falling them into this addiction cycle and what is wrong with them.

01:39:36.000 What trauma have they experienced when they were younger that's causing them to try to escape?

01:39:43.000 Yeah.

01:39:43.000 For a lot of people, I think drugs like that are kind of like psychological resets.

01:39:48.000 Yes.

01:39:49.000 You know?

01:39:49.000 And like you mentioned before, we've seen this.

01:39:51.000 There's a whole bunch of studies coming out now with MDMA, with psilocybin, and treating people who have severe PTSD, depression, anxiety, end-of-life concerns.

01:40:03.000 You know, you get diagnosed with a terminal illness, and you feel like you don't even have the fucking will to live, and then you take a trip on the right substance, and all of a sudden you feel...

01:40:10.000 Hope. 0.91

01:40:10.000 You feel happy. 0.91

01:40:11.000 Yes.

01:40:12.000 You know?

01:40:12.000 And so these things have tremendous benefit.

01:40:14.000 But we've had...

01:40:15.000 It's a very weird approach that we've had from the top down now for a long time.

01:40:18.000 Where it's just viewed as, just say no.

01:40:19.000 It's all evil.

01:40:20.000 It's all wrong.

01:40:21.000 Look, these things are benefits, man.

01:40:22.000 I mean, every morning I wake up, I have caffeine.

01:40:25.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:40:25.000 Caffeine's a fucking drug. 1.00

01:40:26.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:40:26.000 Right? 1.00

01:40:27.000 Like, people don't think of it like that.

01:40:29.000 But it's true.

01:40:29.000 You go have a Monster Energy.

01:40:31.000 You have a Red Bull.

01:40:32.000 You have some alcohol at night.

01:40:33.000 Like, you're tweaking your consciousness in various ways.

01:40:36.000 Yes.

01:40:36.000 And it can be an enhancement for sure.

01:40:39.000 I do...

01:40:39.000 I probably...

01:40:40.000 Do better work on my show when I'm on a shitload of caffeine, right?

01:40:45.000 Yeah, but then there's people that really enjoy Adderall, which gets slippery.

01:40:50.000 I used to like that.

01:40:51.000 In college, I used to like that.

01:40:52.000 And then as I got older, I tried it again, and I just felt too, like, zippy.

01:40:58.000 It was like an uncontrolled high.

01:40:59.000 Whereas in the past, it felt like, oh, I feel productive, and I feel like I want to go do stuff.

01:41:04.000 But as I got older, it became like, I feel too jittery.

01:41:07.000 What do you think changed?

01:41:08.000 I don't know.

01:41:09.000 I mean, that's a great question.

01:41:10.000 Life circumstances for sure. 0.99

01:41:11.000 You know, when you're in college and you're going to class and you're fucking off, you know, you don't really have much direction overall, so you probably feel like a nice little kick in the butt with an upper drug is nice. 0.94

01:41:23.000 But, you know, as you get more established and, you know, more of a workaholic than anything else, it just feels unnecessary. 0.95

01:41:30.000 You know, I could still do my work and do it well without being, like, basically high on legal cocaine.

01:41:35.000 I'm just amazed at how many people are on it.

01:41:37.000 It's very common, yeah.

01:41:38.000 It's a very common one.

01:41:39.000 Really common.

01:41:40.000 How much of our culture is fueled by speed?

01:41:43.000 It's a lot.

01:41:44.000 I mean, I feel like it started probably when I was in college is when it was first getting big.

01:41:48.000 But I took it more as like a party thing.

01:41:50.000 Like I'd pop an Adderall and go drink.

01:41:52.000 And man, you drink a lot when you're on it.

01:41:54.000 It's not good. 0.99

01:41:54.000 I don't recommend it, folks, but you drink a fucking lot when you're on that. 0.99

01:41:57.000 Yeah, Shane Gillis was talking about that. 0.98

01:41:59.000 It's a speedball, right?

01:42:00.000 You got the upper, you got the downer, and you're balancing.

01:42:02.000 But look, that is dangerous.

01:42:03.000 When you start mixing stuff, that's when it gets kind of dangerous.

01:42:06.000 You ever had Four Loko?

01:42:08.000 I don't think I have.

01:42:10.000 So that was an interesting one.

01:42:11.000 It was like a speedball in a can.

01:42:13.000 It's almost like a Monster Energy or a Red Bull mixed with high percentage alcohol.

01:42:17.000 Is that still legal?

01:42:18.000 No, so they banned the original formula. 0.99

01:42:21.000 Because the original formula, there were instances of like people fucking having heart attacks and shit. 0.98

01:42:25.000 You know? 0.99

01:42:26.000 If you drink two of those suckers, because they came in a big can back in the day.

01:42:29.000 You drink two of them.

01:42:30.000 Shout out Columbus, Ohio.

01:42:32.000 After the beverage was banned in several states, a product reintroduction in December 2010 removed caffeine, taurine, and guarana as ingredients, and the malt beverage is no longer marketed as an energy drink.

01:42:44.000 So now they took the...

01:42:46.000 So Four Locos still around, but they took out the speed part of it? 0.61

01:42:49.000 Yes.

01:42:50.000 And it's different state by state, too, I think.

01:42:52.000 I think some states are more lenient, some crack down a little more.

01:42:54.000 And yeah, I mean, they had like, what, three, four different uppers in the drink, along with the alcohol? 0.98

01:42:58.000 You'd get fucked up off of it. 0.99

01:42:59.000 Dude! 1.00

01:42:59.000 Oh my god! 1.00

01:43:00.000 I only had one.

01:43:02.000 And I was like, why is everyone talking about this?

01:43:04.000 Because I left Columbus where it started. 0.99

01:43:06.000 It started at Ohio State, and then went off, and then everyone found out how fucked up you got. 0.99

01:43:10.000 They had four local parties. 1.00

01:43:11.000 You'd get fucked up so quick. 1.00

01:43:14.000 Ridiculous. 1.00

01:43:15.000 Back when I was a car salesman. 0.99

01:43:18.000 Miserable. 1.00

01:43:19.000 Fucking miserable. 1.00

01:43:20.000 I didn't want to fucking sell cars. 1.00

01:43:22.000 But it's like, you know, I graduated into the worst economy since the fucking Great Depression. 0.99

01:43:25.000 I graduated into the Great Recession. 0.96

01:43:27.000 And I was like, alright, I guess I'll go do this.

01:43:29.000 I had a political science degree. 0.97

01:43:30.000 I'm like, what am I fucking doing to sell cars? 0.97

01:43:31.000 So I go to sell cars. 0.96

01:43:32.000 And there were some great people.

01:43:34.000 I love the people who I worked there with. 0.97

01:43:36.000 And on a slow day, towards the end of the day, we'd fucking bust out. 0.85

01:43:41.000 I would drink a four loco at work. 0.53

01:43:43.000 One of my buddies, Gary, shout out to Gary, if you're still around, man.

01:43:46.000 He would have a Foster's. 0.96

01:43:48.000 He would drink a big Foster's can.

01:43:49.000 You know, you go to the grocery store, he got the big Foster's can. 1.00

01:43:51.000 And you would get fucked up, man. 1.00

01:43:54.000 Holy shit. 1.00

01:43:55.000 Four Loko is back, but this time in China, where it's called Lu's Virginity Liquor. 0.99

01:44:01.000 Jesus Christ. 1.00

01:44:02.000 Imagine that fucking name. 1.00

01:44:05.000 Imagine the board meeting where they're like, what are we going to call this? 1.00

01:44:08.000 Lu's Virginity.

01:44:09.000 Blackout in a can.

01:44:11.000 Wow.

01:44:12.000 Wow!

01:44:12.000 While the drinks populated in the U.S. waned after a series of hospitalizations and other incidents, it's now being offered on China's giant online shopping portals, Alibaba and JD.com, where it's sometimes being advertised as blackout in a can.

01:44:25.000 Can you order it on Alibaba and get it shipped to America?

01:44:29.000 Probably, right?

01:44:30.000 I don't see why not.

01:44:31.000 I think people can still get it.

01:44:33.000 I think you can make it.

01:44:35.000 We should have a Four Loko episode.

01:44:37.000 Oh, dude.

01:44:38.000 Oh, man.

01:44:39.000 It's a strong high.

01:44:40.000 We should do a Lose Your Virginity episode. 0.99

01:44:42.000 We should do that with a Protect Our Parks one day.

01:44:44.000 If you guys all drink.

01:44:45.000 Oh, my God.

01:44:45.000 You guys drink at Four Loko.

01:44:46.000 It would be crazy.

01:44:47.000 Find out if you can get it.

01:44:50.000 It's just strong.

01:44:51.000 It was 12%.

01:44:52.000 Which is part of what it is.

01:44:54.000 Like a beer is maybe five, six, seven if you're going wild.

01:44:58.000 Nine if you're in Canada.

01:44:59.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:44:59.000 This is almost like shots of liquor.

01:45:01.000 And the problem is it tastes fucking good. 0.99

01:45:03.000 So you can down a can. 0.99

01:45:04.000 You can down a can and you're like, I like this.

01:45:06.000 Oh no.

01:45:07.000 And then it hits you later on.

01:45:09.000 Oh no.

01:45:10.000 But you like it because it's up down.

01:45:12.000 You don't know what you're doing, but you feel good. 0.68

01:45:14.000 God, calling it Lu's virginity is hilarious.

01:45:17.000 Yeah, they're asking to get banned, huh?

01:45:19.000 Well, I guess not in China.

01:45:21.000 I mean, they probably can get away with stuff like that over there.

01:45:23.000 You think so?

01:45:24.000 You think it's less regulated with substances?

01:45:25.000 I've thought they were...

01:45:26.000 I don't know.

01:45:26.000 Because Trump, and this is Trump, so it could be wrong, but he always says in his speech, like, I asked Xi Jinping, do you have a drug problem here?

01:45:32.000 Do you have a drug problem?

01:45:33.000 And Xi says, no, no drug problem. 1.00

01:45:35.000 We kill the dealers. 0.98

01:45:38.000 And so he adds that in his stump speeches to make the argument, like, we should do that here. 1.00

01:45:42.000 Kill the dealers. 0.98

01:45:43.000 Which is hilarious, because he did the First Step Act, which was the opposite of that. 0.98

01:45:46.000 It gave people a second shot if there was some low-level drug offense.

01:45:49.000 And he pardoned Alice.

01:45:50.000 It was one of the best things he did.

01:45:51.000 He pardoned that poor Alice Johnson lady, this grandma who was involved in some weed sale or something years ago. 1.00

01:45:57.000 Remember Kim Kardashian went to the White House and was like, you gotta pardon.

01:45:59.000 He pardoned her.

01:46:00.000 Good on him. 1.00

01:46:01.000 And now he's out there like, we should kill him. 1.00

01:46:03.000 Kill the drug dealers. 1.00

01:46:04.000 Don't you think he's just saying that to rile people up? 1.00

01:46:06.000 It's hard with him.

01:46:08.000 He'll say anything.

01:46:09.000 He'll throw it against the wall.

01:46:10.000 This is something I wanted to talk to you about.

01:46:13.000 Trump vs.

01:46:14.000 DeSantis in 2024. Who's the favorite?

01:46:17.000 Who do you think wins?

01:46:18.000 I don't know.

01:46:18.000 Do you think that happens?

01:46:19.000 It seems like they're positioning that, right?

01:46:24.000 But wouldn't the ultimate be they combine?

01:46:27.000 They combine forces.

01:46:29.000 Never gonna do that.

01:46:30.000 You don't think so?

01:46:31.000 No.

01:46:32.000 Trump's ego, he would never team up. 1.00

01:46:34.000 He's already been shitting on him for the past month. 1.00

01:46:36.000 Yeah, but he shit on people before and brought them into the fold. 1.00

01:46:39.000 Think about all the shit that he said to Ted Cruz and all those other people. 1.00

01:46:42.000 Yeah, but the difference is Ted Cruz cucked himself to Trump. 1.00

01:46:45.000 So Ted bent the knee after a while.

01:46:47.000 And what happened was, that was actually a really interesting story.

01:46:49.000 So he went to the RNC and he said, vote your conscience.

01:46:52.000 Which basically was like, he wasn't endorsing Trump.

01:46:54.000 He was saying, do whatever you want.

01:46:56.000 Like, I'm not endorsing him.

01:46:57.000 Then he got a phone call from his billionaire donor daddy, Robert Mercer I think his name is.

01:47:02.000 And he was like, remember who you work for.

01:47:05.000 And so Ted fell in line, and then he was phone banking for Trump with that Weasley face on, like, yeah, vote for Donald Trump.

01:47:11.000 And so he fell in line.

01:47:12.000 He fell in line.

01:47:13.000 And so I don't think...

01:47:15.000 DeSantis is not going to do that.

01:47:16.000 I mean...

01:47:18.000 If he's smart, I don't think he would.

01:47:20.000 Look, if you had a straight-up race just Trump versus DeSantis, I actually think DeSantis could win that.

01:47:26.000 But the problem for DeSantis is this. 0.80

01:47:28.000 There's already a bunch of other assholes who nobody cares about who are jumping in the race who are going to get 2%, 3%, and that all comes out of DeSantis' numbers and not Trump's numbers. 0.89

01:47:37.000 So if you have a race with 10 different Republicans, nine of them are not Donald Trump. 0.96

01:47:41.000 Nine of them are splitting the non-Donald Trump vote, and there's one Trump who can win with 29% of the vote or something like that.

01:47:47.000 Which is likely.

01:47:49.000 Nikki Haley, she seems like she's gonna run. 1.00

01:47:51.000 She's a fucking total donor creation. 1.00

01:47:53.000 Nobody gives a fuck about her. 1.00

01:47:54.000 She's been told by bridge people, yeah, you're the one, go ahead. 0.99

01:47:56.000 She's gonna get destroyed, right?

01:47:57.000 But she runs.

01:47:58.000 Mike Pompeo, he wants to run.

01:48:00.000 John Bolton, he wants...

01:48:01.000 Like, all these people are gonna run, and then if you have all of them and DeSantis and Trump, you're handing it over to Trump.

01:48:06.000 There are other Republicans who need to get in a room behind closed doors, talk it out, and say, look...

01:48:10.000 We all have egos here, but we gotta put it aside.

01:48:12.000 And they should dole stuff out.

01:48:14.000 DeSantis could say, alright, who wants to be Secretary of State?

01:48:16.000 Who wants to be Vice President?

01:48:17.000 Let's make a deal so I'm the only one running against him, because that's the only way they're gonna take him down.

01:48:22.000 Do you think that's how it goes?

01:48:24.000 I don't because they don't have that level of organization.

01:48:26.000 And you have a whole bunch of giant egos.

01:48:29.000 So I think what's likely is they all run and Trump wins with like 30% of the vote.

01:48:33.000 Because, you know, it's first past the post voting. 0.99

01:48:35.000 If he gets 30% and the closest to him is 21% or whatever the fuck, Trump wins. 0.97

01:48:39.000 And it's in the primary, so it's all registered Republicans. 0.97

01:48:42.000 Correct.

01:48:43.000 Correct.

01:48:43.000 So it's an interesting situation.

01:48:46.000 And Crystal and I and Sagar as well, we've been having this debate back and forth.

01:48:49.000 Because there was a period there after the midterm loss where, There were a bunch of polls showing DeSantis up comfy on Trump.

01:48:56.000 It was like DeSantis by double digits, right?

01:48:59.000 And we were having the debate where I was like, no, I think DeSantis is the favorite.

01:49:03.000 He is the favorite.

01:49:04.000 But now, just recently, new three or four polls came out.

01:49:08.000 Trump's back up double digits.

01:49:10.000 And so it could be a heavyweight slugfest, but also... 0.97

01:49:14.000 I don't know if he has the balls to like jump right in and take them on. 0.94

01:49:17.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

01:49:18.000 Because he is the heir apparent.

01:49:20.000 He is like diet Donald Trump in a sense.

01:49:22.000 So he might feel like if I just wait till 2028, I could probably win it.

01:49:27.000 But his moment is now, right?

01:49:29.000 Because in the midterms, the candidates that were most Trumpy were the ones who lost.

01:49:33.000 So Carrie Lake, she was denying the election left and right. 1.00

01:49:35.000 She was one of Trump's favorites.

01:49:37.000 She lost.

01:49:37.000 Doug Mastriano ran for governor in Pennsylvania.

01:49:41.000 He lost, and he was at January 6th.

01:49:43.000 He was a big-time election denier.

01:49:44.000 Like, all the election deniers, all the ones who really cuddled up to Trump, those are the ones who lost.

01:49:49.000 The more, like, old-school Republicans, like Kemp in Georgia, and he's a guy who said to Trump, remember Trump said, find me 11,000 votes after 2020?

01:49:58.000 Yes.

01:49:58.000 That's the guy who was like, no, I'm not going to do that.

01:50:00.000 And that guy won his election easy in Georgia.

01:50:03.000 So, basically, the more non-Trump Republicans did better.

01:50:06.000 Mm.

01:50:06.000 And so, you know, there's a real, real weakness there.

01:50:10.000 And he was siloed off on Truth Social for a while.

01:50:12.000 He wasn't like, he sort of lost his normie touch a little bit, you know what I mean?

01:50:15.000 He was getting too wacky.

01:50:17.000 And so DeSantis was the heir apparent, but now things are changing.

01:50:20.000 Do you think that Trump comes back to all those social media platforms?

01:50:23.000 Like, what is his, I read something about his deal with Truth Social that it might be up soon.

01:50:27.000 Oh, if that's true, that's interesting.

01:50:29.000 I did read that he's planning on coming back to both Facebook and Twitter.

01:50:33.000 I did read that.

01:50:34.000 But to your point, yeah, my understanding was he had a deal with truth.

01:50:37.000 So the whole value of the company is tied to Trump being on it.

01:50:40.000 And so he pulls out of that.

01:50:42.000 He's pissing off a lot of people who invested a lot of money in that company, which, you know... 0.96

01:50:46.000 He's done shit like that in the past, so I don't see why he wouldn't do it now. 0.98

01:50:49.000 But look, he kind of needs it. 0.99

01:50:50.000 He needs to be back on Twitter.

01:50:50.000 He needs to be back on Facebook.

01:50:52.000 Right, because if he's on Twitter, that's where people are going to go.

01:50:55.000 Correct.

01:50:55.000 It's more accessible.

01:50:57.000 I haven't been at True Social.

01:50:59.000 Have you?

01:50:59.000 No.

01:50:59.000 Let's go to True Social and just see what the front page looks like on True Social.

01:51:06.000 Because I'm fascinated.

01:51:07.000 Because it's one of those neighborhoods that I never go into.

01:51:10.000 Yeah, I mean, it's just...

01:51:10.000 Let's see how you guys are living.

01:51:12.000 Trump land Twitter.

01:51:12.000 You know, that's all it is.

01:51:14.000 Let's see.

01:51:15.000 Click on Learn More.

01:51:16.000 Accept.

01:51:17.000 They're going to make you sign in.

01:51:18.000 Yeah, they're going to make you create an account to do it.

01:51:20.000 Make yourself a little account there, Jamie, and we'll wait.

01:51:23.000 Use your real email, too. 1.00

01:51:25.000 I want to see what kind of shit you can do. 0.99

01:51:27.000 Do whatever you've got to do, but I'm sure you've got some burner emails. 1.00

01:51:30.000 We all do.

01:51:32.000 I'm interested.

01:51:33.000 I'm interested to see what they have.

01:51:35.000 Because, like, every time they create an alternative platform, it always winds up being a lot of the people that got kicked out of these other platforms for being shitheads, and they overwhelm these things when they say, oh, we're not going to have content moderation.

01:51:45.000 And then these people just spam things, and it becomes QAnon and chaos.

01:51:50.000 Gab became, like, literal Nazi central, right? 0.74

01:51:53.000 Really?

01:51:53.000 Oh, Gab was terrible.

01:51:54.000 The guy who runs it was, like, openly kind of anti-Semitic and wild.

01:51:58.000 So that is what happens, unfortunately.

01:51:59.000 You know, they say, hey, we want a free speech alternative, but then it's just the band people go there, and they don't even have the liberals there that they want to dunk on all the time, so it just becomes, like, crazy.

01:52:07.000 You know, and by the way, I don't even trust a lot of the numbers coming out of these alternative platforms.

01:52:11.000 Like, a lot of it'll say, like, you know, what, X number of re-truths or whatever, or X number of video views.

01:52:15.000 Is it a re-truth?

01:52:16.000 That's what it's called, a re-truth.

01:52:17.000 Yeah.

01:52:18.000 I gotta give my phone number.

01:52:19.000 I don't want to do that.

01:52:20.000 You don't have a burner phone?

01:52:21.000 Not on me.

01:52:22.000 They're gonna send me a message. 0.99

01:52:23.000 Oh, shit, I don't have a burner phone on me either. 0.99

01:52:25.000 You're not missing much, Joe. 0.99

01:52:27.000 I want to see!

01:52:28.000 When you signed up, by the way, originally...

01:52:30.000 You need to change your phone number anyway, buddy.

01:52:34.000 Whatever.

01:52:34.000 You were on a waiting list when you signed up originally.

01:52:37.000 When they launched it, people would sign up and they'd be like, you're number 8,212 on the waiting list.

01:52:42.000 And you had to wait to get in there.

01:52:43.000 Why wait?

01:52:44.000 I mean, maybe they just didn't have the infrastructure to get the influx of people who were going to sign up to it.

01:52:48.000 Yeah, there was a big issue at the beginning.

01:52:49.000 I don't know if it's still like that now.

01:52:50.000 It's been around for a while.

01:52:51.000 But originally, you had to wait to get in.

01:52:54.000 Well, there was a lot of talk about people, the progressive people, banning or bailing, rather, on Twitter.

01:52:59.000 And they were going to go over to Mastodon.

01:53:03.000 Mastodon's complex.

01:53:04.000 Yeah, and that was just talk.

01:53:06.000 Nobody went anywhere.

01:53:07.000 Some people did.

01:53:08.000 A few celebrities bailed.

01:53:10.000 But they did it, like, with a very virtue-signally way.

01:53:13.000 You know, they made this announcement.

01:53:14.000 Hey, it's getting gross here.

01:53:16.000 You know, I'm leaving.

01:53:17.000 Love you all.

01:53:18.000 Bye-bye.

01:53:18.000 It's not...

01:53:19.000 You're not gonna...

01:53:20.000 Like, that...

01:53:20.000 I'm sorry, but Facebook is the place.

01:53:22.000 Twitter is the place.

01:53:23.000 It just is what it is, right?

01:53:24.000 So, it's like...

01:53:25.000 But it became the place.

01:53:26.000 Yeah, it did over time.

01:53:27.000 But now that it is the place, it's hard to imagine.

01:53:29.000 I mean, I guess you could kind of argue maybe it'll be like a MySpace situation at some point where these things will go away.

01:53:33.000 But, I mean, they're so big and...

01:53:35.000 Alright, we're close.

01:53:36.000 Oh, we're close.

01:53:38.000 Suggested accounts to both.

01:53:39.000 Suggested accounts.

01:53:41.000 Babylon B, Charlie Kirk, Devin Nunes.

01:53:43.000 I debated that guy, by the way, Charlie Kirk.

01:53:45.000 Yeah?

01:53:45.000 How did that go?

01:53:46.000 It went well.

01:53:47.000 We did a Politicon in like 2018?

01:53:49.000 I met him at a gun range once.

01:53:51.000 Did you?

01:53:51.000 Yeah.

01:53:52.000 I'll skip for now.

01:53:53.000 Yeah, it was a good debate.

01:53:54.000 It was a fun debate.

01:53:55.000 So let's view the feed.

01:53:56.000 So I'm not following anyone.

01:53:57.000 Okay, let's see what we got here.

01:53:59.000 You're not following anybody.

01:54:00.000 I know, so I probably have to follow people.

01:54:01.000 No, no, I'm saying it says that.

01:54:02.000 You're not following anyone.

01:54:03.000 So when you go to the homepage, it doesn't show anything?

01:54:06.000 So this basically without anything on it looks like Twitter.

01:54:08.000 It looks exactly like Twitter.

01:54:09.000 Yeah, this is exactly like Twitter.

01:54:10.000 Yeah, they have check marks, but their check marks are red, not blue.

01:54:14.000 Ah, of course.

01:54:17.000 So you have to follow people in order to...

01:54:21.000 Okay, let's click on...

01:54:22.000 They're truths instead of...

01:54:24.000 Okay, here we go.

01:54:24.000 Oh my god.

01:54:25.000 Anti-Semitic representative. 1.00

01:54:27.000 That's such bullshit. 1.00

01:54:28.000 You remember what she said that they called anti-Semitic? 1.00

01:54:29.000 No, I do not.

01:54:30.000 She was talking about the Israel lobby, and she says, it's all about the Benjamins.

01:54:34.000 That's anti-Semitic?

01:54:35.000 And they said, that's anti-Semitic, that you said that. 1.00

01:54:37.000 She's like, I say the same thing about the fucking Saudi lobby. 1.00

01:54:39.000 It's all about the Benjamins. 1.00

01:54:40.000 They care about money.

01:54:42.000 Donald Trump says, I'm killing everybody in the polls, but Fox News is always able to find an outlier, usually old and non-credible, that makes me look as bad as possible. 0.97

01:54:52.000 They work with the club for no growth, and losers like Karl Rove and their board member Paul Ryan. 0.87

01:54:59.000 Globalists all, in any event, we are winning. 0.82

01:55:01.000 Big MAGA! She doesn't like Fox News now? 0.99

01:55:04.000 Is that what that says?

01:55:06.000 Well, he's always in some sort of battle for ultimate loyalty.

01:55:10.000 That's right.

01:55:11.000 That's his game.

01:55:11.000 And when people step out of line, he goes after them, and they panic, and then they soften their approach.

01:55:17.000 And so it's a very offensive sort of way of dealing with stuff.

01:55:21.000 And to this point, it worked.

01:55:22.000 But now it's starting to work less.

01:55:25.000 Because he's got so many enemies.

01:55:26.000 Because so many people were...

01:55:27.000 Everybody on Fox News was criticizing him when he lost the election. 0.99

01:55:30.000 When all of his candidates shit the bed, they were like, you know what? 0.99

01:55:34.000 Maybe it's time for a new direction. 0.99

01:55:35.000 And he lost it on them.

01:55:36.000 So it was the Bannon trial.

01:55:38.000 So there's all these different things you can follow.

01:55:40.000 It says there's 58 people talking about it.

01:55:42.000 What is that?

01:55:43.000 This is a small chat room.

01:55:45.000 Yeah, I don't think this is a...

01:55:46.000 How many people are actually on True Social?

01:55:48.000 Look at that.

01:55:49.000 309 people talking.

01:55:50.000 127 people talking.

01:55:51.000 That's not...

01:55:53.000 That's not big.

01:55:54.000 I mean, look, if anything, props to them for being honest about the numbers, because a lot of these alternative sites just lie.

01:56:01.000 Right.

01:56:02.000 You know Facebook was caught lying about their video views, right?

01:56:04.000 This was years ago.

01:56:05.000 Really? 0.99

01:56:05.000 You had whole news channels that went belly up because they bet on Facebook over YouTube, and Facebook just lied about the numbers, and when the advertisers figured that out, they pulled all the fucking money. 0.99

01:56:15.000 And so you had these people who were like big YouTubers or had their own news sites and then they went to Facebook and then they ended up losing everything.

01:56:22.000 Really?

01:56:22.000 Because they were rigging the numbers.

01:56:24.000 It was a big scandal, yeah.

01:56:25.000 But why did they go there exclusively?

01:56:27.000 Because they were told that this is the new place.

01:56:30.000 Look at the numbers they're getting.

01:56:31.000 This is amazing.

01:56:31.000 This is where you're going to make most of your money.

01:56:32.000 So a lot of them went exclusively over to Facebook.

01:56:35.000 But was there a financial incentive to go exclusively to Facebook?

01:56:37.000 I don't know.

01:56:38.000 Because it doesn't seem like it makes sense that you wouldn't want to be on both platforms.

01:56:41.000 Yeah, I mean, that's the smart thing to do, right?

01:56:43.000 To do both platforms.

01:56:44.000 Speaking of, I'm actually on Spotify now.

01:56:46.000 Oh, congratulations.

01:56:47.000 Shout out Spotify.

01:56:49.000 You weren't for a long time?

01:56:50.000 No, I was only YouTube for a very long time.

01:56:53.000 Interesting.

01:56:54.000 So are you on video on Spotify as well?

01:56:56.000 No.

01:56:56.000 I don't even know if they have that option for somebody like me.

01:57:00.000 You know what I mean?

01:57:01.000 Because I didn't have any conversation with anybody at the company or anything.

01:57:04.000 We just started posting my show as a podcast on Spotify as well.

01:57:08.000 Interesting.

01:57:09.000 Yeah.

01:57:10.000 Yeah, I don't know how many video podcasts there are on Spotify now.

01:57:13.000 Yeah, that's a good question.

01:57:14.000 I mean, I only listen to you and Breaking Points on Spotify anyway.

01:57:17.000 And are both of those videos?

01:57:19.000 I don't think they have video, no.

01:57:20.000 They're just audio.

01:57:21.000 Interesting.

01:57:22.000 Yeah.

01:57:23.000 Yeah, how many videos are on Spotify?

01:57:27.000 To be honest, I'm not even sure how I would check that.

01:57:29.000 I'm trying to think about it right now.

01:57:31.000 I'm Googling some stuff, but I'm not sure how you would find a database of that because you kind of just have to check the podcast, I think.

01:57:37.000 So you were on iTunes or Apple Podcasts.

01:57:40.000 So that's actually the only platform, podcast platform I'm not on.

01:57:44.000 Really?

01:57:45.000 Yeah, somebody had taken my name before me.

01:57:48.000 Like, I used to do my show on this little nothing site called Blog Talk Radio, and people would take it from that and then put it on Apple.

01:57:54.000 And that account is still there, so I don't have my name on that platform.

01:57:57.000 So all the other podcast outlets, I'm there.

01:58:00.000 You can't contact them? 0.99

01:58:02.000 I mean, it's impossible to get in contact with these fucking people. 1.00

01:58:04.000 We've tried. 0.99

01:58:05.000 I mean, hey, help me out, anybody out there.

01:58:07.000 I would really appreciate that.

01:58:07.000 Their website says as of November it's available for most creators in the world in most markets.

01:58:13.000 Oh.

01:58:13.000 There's a good chance you have access.

01:58:14.000 Video podcasts are now available to creators in most markets around the world.

01:58:17.000 That means there's a good chance you have access.

01:58:19.000 Get started here.

01:58:21.000 That's interesting, so we'll figure that out as well.

01:58:24.000 Do you know one of the main reasons why video got brought to Spotify?

01:58:27.000 You?

01:58:27.000 Yeah, but because of Elon Musk smoking weed.

01:58:30.000 Really?

01:58:31.000 Yes, because my manager said, that's a viral moment that you don't get with audio. 0.99

01:58:35.000 And they were like, oh shit. 0.98

01:58:37.000 Because, like, you have to see it. 1.00

01:58:39.000 Right.

01:58:40.000 Yeah.

01:58:41.000 Yeah.

01:58:41.000 That was a very big moment.

01:58:43.000 Yeah.

01:58:43.000 That kind of a viral moment, you really get more so for video.

01:58:47.000 I mean, people like to share video clips.

01:58:50.000 You know, video clips, they share them on Twitter and YouTube.

01:58:53.000 It kind of has to be video.

01:58:55.000 Yeah, I mean, I'm way bigger.

01:58:56.000 Audio doesn't go viral.

01:58:57.000 Way bigger on YouTube than I am on Spotify.

01:59:00.000 Well, you've been on there for so long.

01:59:01.000 Been on there for a very, very long time, yeah.

01:59:04.000 Yeah, the idea of an alternative social media platform is so interesting because it would seem that both with a video platform, like, you know, a new YouTube, that there would be an opening for someone to sort of recreate the success of YouTube.

01:59:19.000 And then for something like Twitter, there should be an opening for someone to recreate the success.

01:59:24.000 Getting people to commit to posting on a new thing is very hard.

01:59:29.000 And in my experience, anything that tries to do like just a copycat of something else, it never really works.

01:59:34.000 You need to bring something kind of new.

01:59:36.000 Like TikTok, for example, we were talking about that earlier.

01:59:37.000 Yes.

01:59:38.000 It's kind of a new medium the way they do with the short videos and it just sort of captured the generation, the younger generation.

01:59:43.000 And so if you just do a copy of YouTube or a copy of a podcast, it doesn't usually work.

01:59:48.000 It's got to be something a little new, a little different that gets people hooked.

01:59:52.000 Yeah, the TikTok thing is fascinating.

01:59:54.000 I told you Adam Curry's take on it.

01:59:56.000 That he thinks that the reason why they're trying to ban it is that it's competition.

02:00:00.000 And that they're killing the game.

02:00:03.000 And that that's why these...

02:00:05.000 Companies are talking about TikTok being so invasive.

02:00:09.000 But I also read an article by a software engineer that back-engineered the TikTok's program.

02:00:14.000 And they said, no, this is the most invasive software we've ever looked at in terms of what it does to your computer, how it checks everything you're doing, monitors your keystrokes, listens to your recordings.

02:00:25.000 It has access to your microphone.

02:00:28.000 Yeah, I think they're both right, honestly.

02:00:30.000 I think they both make a very good case.

02:00:31.000 The TikTok one's been interesting to me because, like, I see all the arguments that people make, the ones who are like, hey, we gotta ban this thing.

02:00:37.000 Because I think it's true.

02:00:39.000 The Chinese government's probably data-farming everybody and they have everybody's information. 0.77

02:00:42.000 But I also just find it kind of weird that there's, like, a specific focus on them because...

02:00:47.000 They spy on everything we do on every platform.

02:00:49.000 I mean, we had the Patriot Act, which goes all the way back to the War on Terror days, where they're illegally collecting all of our metadata.

02:00:55.000 I mean, you had Edward Snowden on the show.

02:00:56.000 He could explain this stuff way better than I could explain this stuff.

02:00:58.000 So yeah, you have YouTube, Google, I guess, is the parent company.

02:01:03.000 So you have Google, you have Twitter, you have all these...

02:01:05.000 They all have our data.

02:01:07.000 And I'm sure you've had this experience.

02:01:09.000 It's gotten creepy.

02:01:10.000 Like, there was one time I was talking to Crystal.

02:01:12.000 And I mentioned something.

02:01:13.000 I never mentioned it before.

02:01:14.000 Never Google searched it.

02:01:15.000 I think I mentioned the cereal Wheaties or something like that.

02:01:17.000 I go to Amazon. 0.99

02:01:18.000 I got a fucking recommendation for Wheaties, bro. 0.99

02:01:21.000 I was like... 1.00

02:01:22.000 What are the odds?

02:01:23.000 What are the odds that that's just random?

02:01:26.000 Zero?

02:01:26.000 Yeah, about zero.

02:01:28.000 .0001.

02:01:29.000 I'm like, Jesus Christ, that's so invasive.

02:01:32.000 Yeah, it is weird because we've talked about that before.

02:01:35.000 So many times we mention something and then you get an ad for it.

02:01:38.000 And it's like, what is that coincidence?

02:01:40.000 Because people want to say it's coincidence, but it can't be.

02:01:42.000 So what are they doing?

02:01:43.000 Are they just listening to everything you say?

02:01:44.000 I mean, Alexa is probably the worst, right?

02:01:46.000 People who have Alexa. 1.00

02:01:47.000 Sneaky little bitch. 1.00

02:01:48.000 Fucking robot in your house who's spying on your ass. 1.00

02:01:51.000 All the time. 1.00

02:01:51.000 Here's a list of the top ten sites based off of daily active or monthly active users, I guess. 1.00

02:01:56.000 Rank among social media platforms.

02:01:58.000 So Facebook is number one, YouTube is number two, and then there's WhatsApp, which is not really a social media app, it's a messaging app.

02:02:04.000 Then you have Instagram, WeChat, and then TikTok.

02:02:07.000 What is that, man?

02:02:08.000 What's MAUs?

02:02:09.000 What does that mean?

02:02:10.000 Monthly active users, I believe.

02:02:11.000 Oh, come on. 0.87

02:02:12.000 There's only a million on TikTok? 0.98

02:02:13.000 That's horseshit. 0.94

02:02:14.000 I think it's a billion. 0.99

02:02:15.000 Yeah, it's a thousand million, so a billion. 1.00

02:02:18.000 I'm so stupid. 1.00

02:02:20.000 Facebook Messenger. 1.00

02:02:21.000 Interesting.

02:02:22.000 988 million is just below that.

02:02:24.000 Doesn't Facebook own all five of these companies?

02:02:26.000 Four of these?

02:02:28.000 Facebook does not own YouTube.

02:02:30.000 Not that one, but WhatsApp, Instagram.

02:02:32.000 Yes.

02:02:33.000 Do they own WeChat?

02:02:34.000 Who owns WeChat?

02:02:35.000 What is WeChat?

02:02:36.000 I don't even know what that is.

02:02:37.000 It's the same kind of thing, I believe.

02:02:38.000 What's WeChat?

02:02:39.000 That's WhatsApp.

02:02:40.000 There's a new messaging app called IQ that the UFC is using.

02:02:45.000 I saw ads for that.

02:02:46.000 I've never heard of that before either. 1.00

02:02:48.000 I'm too old for this shit. 0.99

02:02:51.000 Then what am I? I can't keep up. 1.00

02:02:53.000 I can't keep up with all this stuff.

02:02:55.000 So it's...

02:02:58.000 It seems China.

02:02:59.000 It's a Chinese thing.

02:03:01.000 WeChat China.

02:03:02.000 Yes.

02:03:02.000 So it's the WhatsApp of China, right?

02:03:04.000 That's the gist of it.

02:03:06.000 Yeah.

02:03:06.000 Okay.

02:03:07.000 A lot of people in other countries use WhatsApp.

02:03:09.000 Like, you go to other countries, you talk to people, they go, what's your WhatsApp?

02:03:12.000 Right, yeah.

02:03:13.000 I'm like, oh.

02:03:13.000 Now, they are encrypted, right?

02:03:15.000 Isn't WhatsApp encrypted?

02:03:16.000 Yes, it's encrypted.

02:03:17.000 And that didn't change recently?

02:03:19.000 I feel like maybe that changed?

02:03:20.000 I do not know.

02:03:21.000 No?

02:03:21.000 Okay.

02:03:22.000 I rarely use WhatsApp.

02:03:23.000 I used to, I don't really use it.

02:03:25.000 Yeah, I used to use it, not much anymore.

02:03:27.000 That's how I talk to Zuckerberg.

02:03:29.000 We WhatsApp each other.

02:03:30.000 Because he probably won.

02:03:31.000 He's like, hey man, look, FBI's listening, CIA's listening, let's go over here.

02:03:34.000 I'm sure.

02:03:35.000 But they should be able to listen to that too, though.

02:03:38.000 If they can monitor your keystrokes, you tell me they can't monitor your keystrokes on an encrypted application?

02:03:43.000 I mean, my understanding is that encryption was the way to protect yourself from that.

02:03:48.000 But I don't know much about this stuff, so you can't take my word for it.

02:03:50.000 Same as Signal, it says.

02:03:51.000 Every WhatsApp message is protected by the same Signal encryption protocol that secures messages before they leave your device.

02:03:58.000 When you message a WhatsApp business account, your message is delivered securely to the destination chosen by the business.

02:04:05.000 Yeah, end-to-end encryption.

02:04:07.000 End-to-end encryption.

02:04:08.000 Okay, so it's basically very similar to Signal, which I use. 0.98

02:04:13.000 Yeah, well, that's one of the things, Twitter DMs, that's one of the things, you should talk to Elon about that, because it's totally, they can see all of that shit. 0.99

02:04:21.000 All of it. 0.99

02:04:22.000 All of it.

02:04:23.000 Yeah.

02:04:23.000 Yeah, which is wild.

02:04:24.000 Wild.

02:04:25.000 Well, not only that, there was a link that I tried to send someone on Twitter DM back during the censorship-heavy days of COVID. I could not send the link.

02:04:35.000 They did that with the Hunter Biden article.

02:04:36.000 Yeah.

02:04:37.000 You couldn't even DM it.

02:04:38.000 Wow.

02:04:39.000 You couldn't even DM it. 0.74

02:04:40.000 Crazy. 0.78

02:04:41.000 Crazy.

02:04:42.000 It's crazy now that we know that it's true.

02:04:45.000 Absolutely.

02:04:46.000 Absolutely.

02:04:47.000 I mean, they had, like, intelligence officials like, this is Russian disinformation.

02:04:51.000 And they knew it was true.

02:04:52.000 Yeah, for sure.

02:04:54.000 It's crazy.

02:04:55.000 The whole thing is so wild.

02:04:58.000 What a concerted effort to try to suppress a legitimate story by the New York Post, which is one of the oldest newspapers in the country.

02:05:07.000 They overreached.

02:05:07.000 I mean, that's what led to the scandal.

02:05:09.000 If they just did what Zuckerberg did, just algorithmically suppress it...

02:05:14.000 Yeah.

02:05:14.000 Nobody would even have known about it.

02:05:16.000 Nobody would have said anything.

02:05:16.000 People would have complained, but it would have been, you know, in and out of the public consciousness.

02:05:19.000 But because they overreach so much, people are like, Jesus fucking Christ, this is crazy. 0.99

02:05:24.000 This is insane. 0.98

02:05:25.000 It's such an overreach, and it also really undermines people's confidence in intelligence agencies, unfortunately.

02:05:31.000 Oh, dude.

02:05:31.000 I mean, be skeptical of everything you hear.

02:05:35.000 Like, look, okay.

02:05:36.000 When it comes to the FBI, yes, I could point to some things that they've done where it was like, good on you.

02:05:40.000 They went after the mafia.

02:05:40.000 They went after the Ku Klux Klan.

02:05:42.000 Like, they've done some good work, right?

02:05:43.000 But at the same time, they also went after Martin Luther King Jr. They sent him a letter that was like, hey man, we know what you're doing.

02:05:49.000 We know you're cheating on your wife. 1.00

02:05:50.000 You probably should just kill yourself. 1.00

02:05:52.000 Ooh, is that what they said to him? 1.00

02:05:53.000 Absolutely, yeah. 0.99

02:05:54.000 They said you should commit suicide. 1.00

02:05:56.000 Whoa. 1.00

02:05:56.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:05:57.000 The FBI sent a letter saying you should kill yourself? 0.99

02:06:00.000 That's right.

02:06:00.000 Do we have access to that?

02:06:01.000 Yeah, I think we can get it now.

02:06:02.000 Yeah.

02:06:03.000 You've never seen it?

02:06:04.000 I don't know if I have.

02:06:05.000 Maybe I've forgotten about it.

02:06:06.000 So what they do, the FBI, like, they're not ideological in a traditional partisan sense.

02:06:12.000 What they are is they're all about protecting the establishment and the status quo.

02:06:16.000 So if they feel like a threat is coming from the right, they'll go after the right.

02:06:19.000 If they feel like a threat is coming from the left, they'll go after the left.

02:06:22.000 There it is.

02:06:23.000 So, King, there's only one thing left for you to do.

02:06:27.000 You know what it is.

02:06:28.000 You have just 34 days in which to do.

02:06:31.000 This exact number has been selected for a specific reason.

02:06:34.000 It has a definite, practical, significant.

02:06:38.000 You are done.

02:06:39.000 There is but one way out for you. 0.99

02:06:41.000 You better take it before your filthy, abnormal, fraudulent self is bare to the nation.

02:06:50.000 Now, they tried to do this to Malcolm X as well, but he lived a squeaky clean life. 0.81

02:06:55.000 He was not cheating on his wife.

02:06:57.000 Look how this is written. 0.99

02:06:58.000 No person can overcome facts, not even a fraud like yourself. 1.00

02:07:04.000 Lend your sexually psychotic ear... 1.00

02:07:16.000 Wow! 1.00

02:07:30.000 Male and female! 0.99

02:07:32.000 Giving expression with you to your hideous abnormalities. 0.99

02:07:36.000 This is crazy. 0.83

02:07:39.000 So this is the 60s.

02:07:40.000 And they're not even the worst of the intelligence agencies, Joe.

02:07:44.000 The CIA is way worse.

02:07:46.000 Have you ever listened to the Blowback podcast?

02:07:49.000 No.

02:07:49.000 You would love that podcast.

02:07:51.000 So they go into the history.

02:07:52.000 I think they do one on the Iraq War.

02:07:55.000 They give you everything that led up to it, why they did it, what the people were saying to each other behind the scenes, what the motivations were.

02:08:00.000 They do it with our war on Cuba, like Bay of Pigs and how we were trying to get rid of Fidel Castro.

02:08:05.000 They walk you through all this.

02:08:07.000 They do a phenomenal job.

02:08:08.000 And basically, I mean, the CIA... Their whole job was like paramilitary for the US government, trying to topple, in this case, Cuba, to put back in a puppet dictator.

02:08:19.000 Because the guy who came before Fidel Castro was Batista, and he was a vicious dictator.

02:08:25.000 And basically, Cuba was like a gangster mafia state.

02:08:28.000 You had, like, famous gangsters had a stake in the casinos over there.

02:08:32.000 It was like the playground of the U.S., basically.

02:08:34.000 And so people there were terribly exploited. 0.80

02:08:36.000 That guy was a vicious dictator.

02:08:38.000 He was toppled by Fidel Castro.

02:08:39.000 And then it was the mission of the CIA for so long. 1.00

02:08:42.000 We got to get this fucker out of there. 0.99

02:08:43.000 And it's all the stuff's on the record. 0.99

02:08:46.000 All the stuff's...

02:08:46.000 It's incredible, the stuff that...

02:08:47.000 I mean, even today, like, we're doing with Venezuela what they were doing with Cuba back then.

02:08:54.000 Where we're trying to overthrow what happened under Trump.

02:08:56.000 It was continuing under Biden. 0.77

02:08:57.000 Now it's actually changing a little bit because Saudi Arabia is acting a fool over their oil and they're not giving us as much as we want.

02:09:04.000 And so now you have the U.S. government is sort of slowly opening talks with Maduro.

02:09:09.000 Yeah, maybe we can be friends because they got a lot of oil in Venezuela.

02:09:12.000 So what happened with Saudi Arabia that this relationship soured?

02:09:18.000 I mean, how much of it does anything have to do with the Jamal Khashoggi murder?

02:09:22.000 I think a lot of it does, yeah.

02:09:24.000 So when Trump was in there, yeah, they did...

02:09:26.000 MBS killed Jamal Khashoggi, they chopped him up into little bits and pieces, and Trump didn't even do...

02:09:31.000 He didn't even give, like, lip service to doing the right thing.

02:09:34.000 He didn't even say, like, don't do that, that's fine.

02:09:36.000 He did nothing.

02:09:37.000 In fact, he continued sending them weapons and money.

02:09:40.000 Didn't he say something like, we do similar things?

02:09:42.000 I think that was in context of a different interview when he was talking to Bill O'Reilly before the Super Bowl.

02:09:47.000 Anyway, yeah, so Biden, you know, mouthed some of the right things about Jamal Khashoggi.

02:09:54.000 And like, I think he said, we're going to make Saudi Arabia the pariah state that it should be. 0.98

02:09:58.000 He said something like that.

02:09:59.000 And when MBS heard that...

02:10:02.000 No.

02:10:03.000 So he even started talking to Russia.

02:10:06.000 He started talking to a lot of our enemies and making deals with Iran.

02:10:08.000 No, not Iran.

02:10:09.000 They hate Iran.

02:10:09.000 He was making deals with Russia behind the scenes.

02:10:12.000 And it was just some mild criticism.

02:10:14.000 And now we keep going to them in response to the oil markets because with the war in Ukraine, there's a lot of issues with the oil market where it's not doing well.

02:10:22.000 And so when we had really high gas prices, Biden went to MBS and was like, you got to help me out here.

02:10:27.000 You got to release more barrels of oil per day.

02:10:30.000 And he didn't do it. 1.00

02:10:32.000 He basically said, fuck off. 0.99

02:10:33.000 And then it was right after that, you saw these articles about how Biden was talking to, or, you know, top U.S. officials were talking to Maduro in Venezuela, trying to get, slowly ease back into some sort of a business relationship with them. 1.00

02:10:44.000 But it wasn't that long ago, it was just a few years ago, they were trying to overthrow this fucker. 0.99

02:10:47.000 They were trying to overthrow Maduro. 0.98

02:10:49.000 Remember, they pretended like the guy Juan Guaido, totally unelected, did not win an election, and we were just pretending, Trump was pretending, like, yeah, that's the president now.

02:10:58.000 He's the president.

02:11:00.000 It's not Madero.

02:11:01.000 This is the real president. 0.94

02:11:03.000 I'm very ignorant about Venezuela, unfortunately. 0.89

02:11:05.000 I don't really know exactly what's going on over there.

02:11:07.000 Yeah, well, they were so reliant on oil.

02:11:10.000 Remember Hugo Chavez was the leader there?

02:11:12.000 They were doing okay with their oil, but when we sanctioned them, then they had nothing.

02:11:19.000 It became a super poor state, massively high inflation almost overnight because we cracked down on them.

02:11:24.000 And so now with Maduro, it's a similar situation, but it looks like maybe relations will change if the situation with Saudi Arabia doesn't work itself out because we'd want to do more oil deals with them.

02:11:36.000 And then all of a sudden you'll start seeing articles about like, maybe we had this guy wrong.

02:11:40.000 Maybe he wasn't such a human rights abuser. 0.99

02:11:42.000 How do you keep track of all this shit? 1.00

02:11:44.000 I mean, I just read... 1.00

02:11:44.000 It must be overwhelming, though, to have... 1.00

02:11:47.000 I'm interested in it, you know? 0.80

02:11:48.000 Yeah, no, I'm sure, but I mean, it must be still overwhelming, just the sheer amount of information that you have to fucking pay attention to.

02:11:54.000 I mean, I feel like it's actually very similar to you.

02:11:57.000 When you're interested in something, you go down a rabbit hole and you'll read everything about it, and then you know a lot about the topics that you read about.

02:12:02.000 And it's just the same thing for me.

02:12:03.000 It just happens to be very...

02:12:04.000 It was directly involved in politics that I'm interested in.

02:12:07.000 You know, and so I'm reading about foreign policy, I'm reading about domestic policy, I'm reading about economics, and, you know, you just...

02:12:12.000 Sometimes I'm good and I can remember the facts, other times I need to sort of jot them down when I'm doing my show and hit the points that I know I need to hit, you know what I mean?

02:12:20.000 Do you enjoy this as it is, or do you ever plan on going into politics?

02:12:27.000 Oh, no, I don't want to go into politics, no.

02:12:29.000 I don't want to do that.

02:12:30.000 Isn't that wild, though, because you're so interested in politics?

02:12:33.000 I mean, I'm interested in following it, learning about it, thinking of solutions, and calling bullshit on the system.

02:12:41.000 You know, like, that's what I'm interested in.

02:12:42.000 If you actually are in the game, man, it's just a different world.

02:12:47.000 I mean, you know, it's dirty.

02:12:49.000 I don't even know if somebody like me, because I would come out and say, I'm not taking billionaire money, I'm not taking corporate money, I'm going to raise it all through small dollar donations, and I'm still probably going to only come up with one-tenth the amount of money I would need to even be competitive.

02:13:00.000 And then when you add the media into the game too, and their effect, then you're done.

02:13:04.000 Because they'll dig up every little thing I've ever said in my life, go through my old tweets, and go through my old YouTube.

02:13:09.000 They'll find things, take them out of context, post them, and that's it.

02:13:12.000 It's over.

02:13:14.000 But you enjoy the commentary aspect of it.

02:13:17.000 Yeah, I mean, I just find this stuff interesting.

02:13:19.000 I like to share the things that I read that I think are interesting.

02:13:22.000 Because there's so many things I come across where I'm like... 0.73

02:13:25.000 Damn, I want people to know about this. 0.99

02:13:27.000 I think the media, they just go towards the dumbest stories, the most sensational stories, the cheap clicks, the cheap headlines. 0.99

02:13:36.000 But if I'm reading about the Inflation Reduction Act, which passed, and I'm going through the provisions, I'll see... 0.99

02:13:43.000 This is a really good fucking provision. 0.98

02:13:45.000 Nobody's even talking about this. 0.99

02:13:46.000 Like, people don't even know, like, what just happened.

02:13:49.000 Just to give an example, remember when there was this bill called the PACT Act, which was struck down in Congress.

02:13:56.000 And the PACT Act was to give healthcare to toxic burn pit victims who are U.S. veterans.

02:14:03.000 They voted that down.

02:14:05.000 They said, no, we're not going to give health care to these toxic births. 1.00

02:14:08.000 So what happened was Jon Stewart saw that.

02:14:10.000 God bless him.

02:14:11.000 He gets out there and he starts doing interviews. 1.00

02:14:13.000 He starts calling these people out by name like, this motherfucker voted against it and this asshole voted against it and I brought these guys here who are struggling to fucking breathe and they're going to tell you what their situation is. 1.00

02:14:22.000 And that was an instance of there was so much shame brought about by Jon Stewart going on the crusade that the media actually got whipped into shape and were like, oh shit, we gotta talk about this. 1.00

02:14:31.000 So Fox News, MSNBC, CNN, they all talked about it. 0.68

02:14:34.000 And that actually led to change because then they had another vote and it passed.

02:14:37.000 And so when I look at that, I think like, yes, I see my role similar to that.

02:14:42.000 I'm nowhere near as big as Jon Stewart is, right? 0.93

02:14:45.000 But that's one of those things where when the story first came out, Nobody's fucking talking about it. 0.90

02:14:50.000 They just voted down a bill to give healthcare to toxic burn victims who are U.S. veterans. 0.97

02:14:54.000 Nobody was talking about it.

02:14:55.000 And so I look at that and I'm like, our media is broken.

02:14:57.000 It is broken.

02:14:58.000 If you can't look at that, like, their outrage meter is broken.

02:15:01.000 You know what I mean?

02:15:02.000 They get outraged at all the weird...

02:15:03.000 Like, a comedian makes a joke that...

02:15:05.000 Some people are offended by it. 0.99

02:15:06.000 It's like, oh, let's talk about this for fucking a week. 0.99

02:15:09.000 Distractions. 0.99

02:15:10.000 It's just distractions.

02:15:10.000 And so I view my job as like, let me tell people the things that I think are actually interesting, that I think they should know, that should be the news of the day, the big story of the day.

02:15:19.000 And so that's my role.

02:15:21.000 The difference between someone being outraged at a legitimate, important thing versus what's going to get clicks, that's part of the problem, right?

02:15:30.000 Because what they're looking for in the media is the things that are going to get the most attention.

02:15:34.000 Yeah, I agree, but I also think they're short-sighted.

02:15:37.000 Like, I think they sell people short in terms of what is interesting.

02:15:42.000 Because if you tell people all the information, the real world is crazy enough.

02:15:46.000 The actual things that are going on are crazy enough where they are kind of, like, shocking and interesting.

02:15:51.000 But yes, it's easier to get the cheap headlines with cheap topics, and that's what they do.

02:15:55.000 They lean into that.

02:15:56.000 And also, they have a financial incentive not to talk about the real issues in the system.

02:16:00.000 Yeah.

02:16:01.000 Because they're the beneficiaries of the system.

02:16:02.000 There's so many different things to think about, which is part of the problem.

02:16:07.000 If someone has a job, and during that job they're required to use all the resources to benefit the company and they're working on things all day, and then when they're off work, then they're supposed to be paying attention to Venezuela and Jeffrey Epstein and the Twitter files and the this and the that.

02:16:25.000 My God, there's so much.

02:16:27.000 And then they're getting their news, many people, from one-hour mainstream news broadcast where they do a cursory examination of a few very specific topics.

02:16:39.000 That's right.

02:16:40.000 And I don't blame those people for not knowing about something.

02:16:44.000 It's not their fault.

02:16:45.000 Like you said, they're working all day.

02:16:46.000 They're busy.

02:16:47.000 They're just trying to pay the bills. 0.99

02:16:48.000 And they're just getting fed absolute garbage. 0.75

02:16:51.000 So I'll give you another example of something I thought was amazing is...

02:16:54.000 They did this extended child tax credit about two years or so ago, and that reduced child poverty by 50%.

02:17:04.000 50%.

02:17:06.000 And then they let it expire.

02:17:09.000 And now it's just gone.

02:17:11.000 Stop and think about that.

02:17:12.000 We reduced child poverty by 50% like that!

02:17:17.000 And nobody stopped and said, well, hold on.

02:17:18.000 This kind of implies that child poverty is a choice.

02:17:21.000 Like, we made a choice as a nation to keep the child poverty rate what it was, right?

02:17:26.000 And so you had this brief moment where they reduced it 50%, and then that just goes away.

02:17:31.000 How long was a brief moment for?

02:17:33.000 A year?

02:17:33.000 You know, it was part of, was it part of the IRA? It was part of one of the COVID relief bills.

02:17:39.000 They did the extended child tax credit.

02:17:40.000 People were struggling and they said, we'll give you $3,000, I believe the number was, for every child who is six or younger.

02:17:48.000 Six or younger or six or older?

02:17:49.000 Anyway, one grouping was $3,000.

02:17:51.000 The other group was $3,600 per child.

02:17:54.000 And that had, it was an amazing impact.

02:17:57.000 I mean, you had, there were studies coming out showing that like depression and anxiety were reduced as a direct result of those people who got those payments.

02:18:03.000 And this is something that nobody talks about.

02:18:05.000 It wasn't a big deal, you know, in the media.

02:18:08.000 I've never heard it.

02:18:09.000 See, this is what I'm talking about.

02:18:10.000 Yeah.

02:18:10.000 I know another great example is you've had Andrew Yang on the podcast before.

02:18:15.000 You've talked about UBI before.

02:18:18.000 There was a study that came out of Stockton, California.

02:18:21.000 There's the mayor in Stockton, California is a guy by the name of Michael Tubbs.

02:18:25.000 And he decided to do this UBI pilot program, which is like, okay, I'm going to try to get 500 bucks a month to a group of people and just see what happens.

02:18:34.000 See how this changes their lives.

02:18:36.000 See what they spend the money on and all that stuff.

02:18:38.000 So they did this program, 37% of the money went to food, 22% went to, like, home goods and clothes and shoes and stuff like that.

02:18:46.000 10% went to car costs, and 11% went to utilities. 0.99

02:18:50.000 Less than 1% actually went to, like, alcohol or fucking off type shit. 0.99

02:18:55.000 Really? 0.99

02:18:55.000 Right? 0.99

02:18:55.000 Yes. 0.99

02:18:56.000 And so this was an example, like, UBI worked and it had the effect of, by the way, it didn't even affect unemployment.

02:19:03.000 Unemployment went, excuse me, employment went up.

02:19:07.000 Unemployment went down when you do this program.

02:19:09.000 Do you think that that's scalable?

02:19:11.000 I mean, all the evidence that we have right now is yes.

02:19:14.000 There's obviously a tipping point where if you give too much, you might disincentivize people from doing other things.

02:19:20.000 Right, so what's the right number?

02:19:21.000 That's the question.

02:19:22.000 I mean, there are people much smarter than me who will debate that and find the right line.

02:19:25.000 And what did they give in Stockton?

02:19:26.000 They gave $500 a month.

02:19:28.000 No strings attached.

02:19:29.000 That's a reasonable amount because you can't live off that.

02:19:32.000 It just helped people.

02:19:34.000 Employment went up, productivity went up, people self-reported better well-being, lower stress, kept people out of debt.

02:19:41.000 Imagine if they scaled that nationwide, what the implications would be, and where would the money come from?

02:19:46.000 That's one of the things that I found fascinating about Bernie's ideas, is that Bernie wanted to take a very small percentage of stock trades, You know, these things where they're speculating.

02:19:58.000 And it was like less than a cent for each one of them.

02:20:01.000 And then that would generate an enormous amount of money because of the amount of stock trades.

02:20:06.000 And his argument was it wasn't going to hurt business, but it was going to greatly benefit people.

02:20:12.000 Yeah, I mean, we have tremendous body of evidence that redistribution works really well.

02:20:17.000 I mean, this is what FDR was about.

02:20:19.000 This is what the New Deal was about. 0.82

02:20:20.000 Yeah, you tax the wealthy a little more.

02:20:22.000 Right now, there was a study that came out a few years ago, after the 2017 Trump tax cut bill, 83% of the benefits went to the top 1%.

02:20:29.000 And it just, I mean...

02:20:32.000 They pretended like it was for the working class, but it wasn't for the working class.

02:20:35.000 It was for the wealthy.

02:20:36.000 And so now we have billionaires actually pay a lower effective tax rate than a middle class person.

02:20:45.000 The effective tax rate for a billionaire is now lower than it is for a middle class person.

02:20:49.000 And you can fact check me on that, Jamie.

02:20:51.000 Yeah.

02:20:52.000 So, in other words, we're doing a regressive tax system.

02:20:55.000 It's not even a flat tax.

02:20:56.000 Flat tax is when somebody says, like, hey, do like 15% across the board, everybody pays 15%.

02:20:59.000 It's not even that.

02:21:00.000 It's a working class person pays a higher tax rate than a billionaire does, as a percentage.

02:21:05.000 If they did this universal basic income thing, like, say if they kept that number, $500 a month, and they do it across the country, like, what income bracket would receive this?

02:21:15.000 It'd be universal.

02:21:16.000 So you get $500 to billionaires.

02:21:18.000 Yeah, but you're going to tax them more, so it's going to cancel out and then some.

02:21:22.000 Mm.

02:21:22.000 You know what I'm saying?

02:21:23.000 It's basically an attempt to try to get people who need the money the fucking money. 0.99

02:21:25.000 That's all it is. 0.99

02:21:26.000 Right.

02:21:27.000 You know?

02:21:28.000 Bill Maher had a good line.

02:21:29.000 He's like, I did a study.

02:21:30.000 You know what poor people are lacking? 0.90

02:21:31.000 Money.

02:21:32.000 Huh.

02:21:33.000 And it's like, yeah, fair enough.

02:21:34.000 Yeah, fair enough.

02:21:36.000 Interesting.

02:21:39.000 Yeah, I mean, a lot of people got sour on the idea of universal basic income when they saw how people didn't want to work when they got COVID relief.

02:21:49.000 I think that was largely bogus.

02:21:52.000 I mean, because look at the unemployment rate right now, right?

02:21:55.000 It's like, what, 3.5% or something like that?

02:21:57.000 It's like the unemployment rate was relatively stable in this area, but there were all these media articles about like, oh, nobody wants to work because they got one check for $1,400.

02:22:06.000 I think there's also a thing that happened to people where their employment was taken away, and then they had to reassess their values and what they wanted to do with their life.

02:22:13.000 I think that had a significant impact.

02:22:15.000 Absolutely.

02:22:15.000 Because there was a lot of people that were like deep in the grind and thought they were going to be rewarded for it, and then all of a sudden, boom, everything's taken away from them.

02:22:22.000 And then like, what the fuck am I doing?

02:22:24.000 I want to do something different. 0.94

02:22:25.000 It was a real wake-up call for a lot of people.

02:22:27.000 I think you're right about that.

02:22:28.000 And that's why you see a lot of people now like, I don't want to go back to the office. 0.80

02:22:30.000 If my job wants to make me go back, I'm not going to fucking go back to the office. 0.83

02:22:33.000 I'm not going to do that. 0.87

02:22:34.000 RV sales went through the roof during the time of the pandemic.

02:22:37.000 Some people were like, hey, I want to travel.

02:22:39.000 I'm reassessing.

02:22:40.000 And look, it's a good thing.

02:22:42.000 There was a poll I read a long time ago.

02:22:44.000 Only like 18% of Americans feel engaged when they're at work.

02:22:48.000 That's crazy. 0.99

02:22:48.000 Which is like, dude, less than 20% of the country likes their fucking job. 0.99

02:22:52.000 This is like a crisis. 1.00

02:22:54.000 That's so crazy.

02:22:54.000 So of course you're going to have depression high, anxiety high, all these issues that are associated with that.

02:22:59.000 I mean, you're lucky, I'm lucky, we happen to do things that we really like, but imagine being somebody who doesn't Doesn't like your job?

02:23:06.000 Yeah, well, I've been that person in the past.

02:23:08.000 Me too, yeah.

02:23:08.000 You have too.

02:23:09.000 Yeah, it's not a fun existence.

02:23:11.000 The difference between the overall happiness of being able to do what you enjoy versus doing something that you have to do, it's immeasurable.

02:23:19.000 It's night and day.

02:23:20.000 The impact that it has on your psyche, the way you think about life, the way you think about the weekend, the way you think about Monday morning...

02:23:27.000 It's just a totally different way of existence.

02:23:30.000 And also, it's not like these people that are in that 18% that enjoy their job, like, they suffer more.

02:23:38.000 They're more, generally speaking, they're happier, they live better, they have a better possibility for the future, they're enthusiastic about it, whereas the vast majority of those people, That are doing something they don't want to do, they're barely even getting ahead.

02:23:55.000 That's right.

02:23:55.000 What percentage of people are actually saving money and putting together a nest egg?

02:24:01.000 How many people are living check to check?

02:24:04.000 Over 70%.

02:24:05.000 Jesus.

02:24:05.000 Over 70%.

02:24:06.000 You know, Crystal did a good thing recently.

02:24:08.000 There was some study that came out which showed the happiest people, what profession they're in, and the most depressed people, the happiest were farmers.

02:24:17.000 Really?

02:24:17.000 They were the happiest people and then I believe the least happy were like lawyers, people who like work kind of office jobs.

02:24:27.000 Probably massive hours too.

02:24:29.000 Yeah, but the theory was like the people who, and I'm forgetting the others that were at the top, but the theory was that like people who are more working with their hands, they're outside, they're actually doing something of value, that those are the people who are happier.

02:24:42.000 And that makes sense to me, you know? 0.96

02:24:44.000 Farmers, that's a fucking hard job. 0.99

02:24:47.000 It is, yeah. 0.99

02:24:47.000 And also there's fewer small farmers now. 0.99

02:24:49.000 It's mostly the big...

02:24:50.000 Yeah.

02:24:51.000 Yeah.

02:24:52.000 Man, that's shocking.

02:24:54.000 Farmers.

02:24:55.000 I would think it'd be like artists or something.

02:24:57.000 Someone who does something that...

02:24:58.000 Some artists are tortured, you know?

02:25:00.000 Yeah, that's true too, right?

02:25:01.000 Yeah.

02:25:02.000 Yeah, and that's why they're artists in the first place.

02:25:03.000 They have all these emotions and conflicted ideas, and it comes out in their art.

02:25:08.000 But you've talked about the impact of nature too.

02:25:10.000 You know, like when you're out in nature, and I feel this...

02:25:12.000 I get it to a much lesser extent because the thing that I'm doing in nature is not really in nature golf.

02:25:17.000 But it is in nature.

02:25:18.000 Well, yeah, you're out, the grass is there.

02:25:20.000 It's a manipulated nature. 0.79

02:25:21.000 It is a manipulated nature, but like when I'm out there after I play, I feel fucking great. 0.75

02:25:25.000 You feel great. 0.96

02:25:25.000 We were talking about people that are getting cancer from putting golf tees in their mouth. 0.96

02:25:30.000 Do you know about that?

02:25:31.000 I did not know about that. 0.99

02:25:32.000 That's fucking terrifying. 0.99

02:25:33.000 Well, you know, I knew a guy who got like severe cancer and he was one of many people in his neighborhood because of runoff from a golf course. 0.99

02:25:42.000 Because golf courses use so many pesticides and herbicides and that this was getting into the water supply.

02:25:50.000 And this guy is like a fake femur.

02:25:52.000 He had bone cancer.

02:25:53.000 So one of his femurs had to be replaced with like a rod. 1.00

02:25:57.000 Yeah, heavy fucking shit. 1.00

02:26:00.000 And, Jamie, weren't you the one who was telling me about it? 1.00

02:26:03.000 Probably, yeah.

02:26:04.000 I'm reading a story on our favorite website, Snopes, that's actually true.

02:26:08.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:26:09.000 About a guy in the Navy who bit off a T, and it almost killed him in like 10 days or something, it says.

02:26:16.000 What?

02:26:17.000 He had an allergic reaction, though, I believe, to the pesticide or fungicide.

02:26:21.000 He died 10 days later after a toxic substance had burned the skin from 80% of his body and caused major organs to fail.

02:26:29.000 The toxic substance was determined to be an FDA-approved fungicide that had been sprayed on the Army-Navy golf course twice a week.

02:26:40.000 Pryor apparently had a hypersensitivity to the chemical used in the fungicide causing a severe allergic reaction.

02:26:49.000 That's one, but what I'm hearing about is mouth cancers.

02:26:53.000 Yeah, from the T. Yeah, so you're imagining they're spraying all these golf courses to keep them pristine and rolling nice, and then you put it in your mouth because your hands are free.

02:27:04.000 I mean, how many things are like that that we don't even think about now, we don't even know about?

02:27:08.000 Like, you know, the Monsanto thing.

02:27:10.000 What's the name of that?

02:27:11.000 Roundup.

02:27:11.000 The Roundup stuff.

02:27:12.000 There's a lot of evidence that that stuff causes cancer.

02:27:14.000 A lot of evidence.

02:27:15.000 And there's just a lot of places that are just like, we're just going to not care.

02:27:19.000 Well, not only that, have you seen the numbers when they look at people's urine and blood and they test how many people test positive for Roundup?

02:27:26.000 It's extraordinary.

02:27:28.000 Google that.

02:27:29.000 What percentage of people that were tested found Roundup in their body?

02:27:36.000 It's a very high number, and a lot of the shills were like, oh, it's a minimal amount of parts per million.

02:27:42.000 Parts per million of something that kill you?

02:27:44.000 You're not making me comfortable.

02:27:46.000 Yeah.

02:27:47.000 Oh, here it goes.

02:27:49.000 Okay.

02:27:50.000 According to the Center for Disease Control Prevention, found that 80% of Americans have glyphosate in their urine. 1.00

02:27:57.000 Holy shit. 0.99

02:27:58.000 The health consequences of the situation are unknown. 0.99

02:28:01.000 Oh, my God.

02:28:01.000 Though many scientists insist glyphosate is linked to cancer and other health issues.

02:28:06.000 Yeah.

02:28:07.000 And that's just to kill weeds. 0.85

02:28:08.000 Uh-huh.

02:28:09.000 Jesus Christ.

02:28:10.000 Yeah.

02:28:11.000 Well, that's the byproduct of monocrop agriculture, which is also something that people need to understand how dangerous this is to the topsoil, how dangerous it is to environment, the runoff that gets into streams and rivers.

02:28:24.000 And, you know, we had Will Harris from White Oak Pastures on who explained that in depth about how he came to an understanding of the dangers of this stuff.

02:28:33.000 converted his industrialized farm to a regenerative farm and it took 20 years to do it.

02:28:37.000 Oh my god!

02:28:38.000 It's very difficult, very time-consuming.

02:28:40.000 He has a lot of money invested in keeping it the way it is.

02:28:43.000 And he was a guy that I actually had on the podcast because I saw him On Fox News.

02:28:48.000 He was on this mainstream show, and they gave him five minutes, and the guy was trying to hurry him along.

02:28:53.000 And Will talks in a very slow and deliberate manner.

02:28:57.000 Wow.

02:28:58.000 Where he picks his words carefully.

02:29:00.000 Very interesting guy to talk to.

02:29:01.000 Fascinating.

02:29:02.000 Really intelligent human.

02:29:04.000 And very, I mean, has amazing ethics and character, the way he decided to do this.

02:29:10.000 So I talked to him for three hours.

02:29:12.000 Yeah.

02:29:12.000 First of all, I'm happy that Fox actually had him on.

02:29:15.000 That's surprising, because normally they take the anti-environmentalist... 0.99

02:29:18.000 But they had him on the shit on Bill Gates. 0.99

02:29:20.000 Oh, I see. 0.99

02:29:21.000 Because Bill Gates is buying all the farmlands.

02:29:23.000 Right, yeah. 0.99

02:29:23.000 Well, that's fucked up. 0.99

02:29:25.000 I mean, that's not good. 0.99

02:29:27.000 I'm not for that.

02:29:28.000 No.

02:29:28.000 Well, the idea that he is this altruistic person that's only doing these things because he's a philanthropist, that doesn't bide with the profits that he makes from these ventures.

02:29:40.000 There's incentives that are other than philanthropy.

02:29:43.000 Yeah, he had a phenomenal PR campaign for years, which portrayed him as like, he's the good billionaire, bro.

02:29:51.000 He's just looking out for everybody.

02:29:52.000 Not only that, but it was funded.

02:29:54.000 Like, that PR campaign, when you find out how much money he donated to these major news organizations, those donations were sizable in the hundreds of millions of dollars, which is really wild.

02:30:03.000 I know.

02:30:04.000 See, that's a big problem, too.

02:30:05.000 And this happened with Sam Bankman-Fried, as well.

02:30:07.000 There were a bunch of puff pieces written about Sam Bankman-Fried, and come to find out, he donated a lot of money to all these different sites.

02:30:13.000 And that's the sort of conflict of interest shit, to come full circle back to what we were talking about before, that's the sort of conflict of interest shit that you're never going to get good, unbiased, fair, objective reporting from an outlet that's funded by...

02:30:25.000 I mean, you see a Sunday show, they'll have a commercial for Lockheed Martin or something, and you're like... 0.95

02:30:29.000 Lockheed Martin?

02:30:30.000 And what's the impact of that?

02:30:31.000 I mean, I remember I was reading a Politico article one time, and it said at the top, I think it was either funded by, or like, from Lockheed Martin or from Raytheon, and the article was about how, like, we needed to go to war with, I don't know if it was Syria or one of the other countries over there.

02:30:43.000 It was like, yeah, we gotta go to war.

02:30:45.000 Yeah. 0.99

02:30:46.000 Well, I'm more likely to take your opinion seriously if you don't have a financial interest vested in going to fucking war. 0.99

02:30:52.000 Like, what are we talking about here? 0.99

02:30:54.000 This is insane!

02:30:55.000 It's insane.

02:30:57.000 But how does one take money out of those things?

02:31:00.000 How does one take money out of the news?

02:31:02.000 Well, that's the thing.

02:31:02.000 It's so hard.

02:31:03.000 It's so hard.

02:31:04.000 I mean, so you could do public funding, sort of like PBS, but even PBS now doesn't, it's not just purely public funding.

02:31:10.000 No, no, they have establishment narratives that they promote as well.

02:31:13.000 Of course.

02:31:13.000 And they think they're doing the right thing by promoting those narratives.

02:31:17.000 Yeah.

02:31:18.000 They definitely do.

02:31:19.000 But I mean, the other way is small dollar donors.

02:31:21.000 But again, it's almost like I got kind of lucky and people who started when I started doing what I do, we got kind of lucky because it was more of a meritocratic algorithm in YouTube where, like, we got a little bit of popularity, we got enough of a following so that when they did, you know, crack down, we're still, you know, not as affected as we could be.

02:31:38.000 I mean, there are some great YouTubers.

02:31:39.000 This guy Mack, good politic guy.

02:31:42.000 He does great videos and he just gets crushed by the algorithm.

02:31:44.000 If he started when I started, he'd be as big as I am.

02:31:47.000 But he didn't.

02:31:47.000 He started like two years ago or whatever.

02:31:49.000 And he gets no traction.

02:31:51.000 And it's all because of YouTube.

02:31:52.000 It's not because of him.

02:31:53.000 What's his channel?

02:31:55.000 GoodPolitikGuy.

02:31:56.000 Good politic guy.

02:31:57.000 Yes, that's his channel.

02:31:58.000 Yeah, he's a good guy.

02:32:00.000 We like Mac.

02:32:01.000 That's very unfortunate.

02:32:03.000 And that brings up the idea, the possibility of an alternative platform that doesn't operate in those same algorithms.

02:32:10.000 And I think one of the plans that Elon has for Twitter is to try to incentivize people to publish on Twitter.

02:32:18.000 Videos?

02:32:19.000 Yes.

02:32:20.000 Videos and by giving them a larger percentage of the ad revenue and by not hindering them with this sort of complicated algorithm that only favors establishment positions.

02:32:31.000 I mean, it'll be interesting to see where that goes and how far he'll get, but like, you know, he said originally like he was against shadow banning and then at some point he said freedom of speech is not freedom of reach and we're gonna like not spread far and wide the stuff that he deems hateful.

02:32:45.000 But then the question is like, what is hateful?

02:32:46.000 That's the question.

02:32:47.000 How do you do that?

02:32:48.000 How do you do that?

02:32:50.000 Somebody asked him about, hey, are you going to bring Alex Jones back on the platform?

02:32:53.000 And he was like, no.

02:32:54.000 You know, so it's like, okay, well, I don't think we could rely on one single person to make these decisions.

02:33:00.000 These are the sorts of things.

02:33:01.000 My whole answer has always been regulate YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, all these big social media companies like their public utilities and expand First Amendment protections.

02:33:11.000 So then you actually have law backing up.

02:33:13.000 That doesn't mean people could go on there and do direct threats of violence, because direct threats of violence are illegal, right?

02:33:18.000 There's still going to be some things where you can't do that.

02:33:20.000 But outside of that, Yeah, I'd like to see it.

02:33:22.000 Way more free, way more open.

02:33:24.000 When it comes to YouTube, I'd love for them to go back to more of a meritocracy of the algorithm where, if you do good, it spreads far and wide.

02:33:30.000 And like I said, you may have some instances where a conspiracy video pops off, and that's gonna suck.

02:33:35.000 It's going to be messy.

02:33:36.000 But at the same time, it's gonna be messy, but that messiness is way better than having some overlords determine, based on their own biases and their own feelings, what they think should spread and what they think shouldn't spread.

02:33:45.000 Especially when you know there's clear evidence it's manipulated by money.

02:33:48.000 Absolutely.

02:33:49.000 Yeah.

02:33:49.000 Absolutely.

02:33:50.000 Yeah, the idea that a bad idea should be suppressed versus a bad idea should be refuted by better ideas.

02:33:59.000 That's really the essence of debate, and that's how we come to an understanding of what's real and what's not.

02:34:04.000 And a lot of, I'm sorry, but a lot of people are just lazy.

02:34:07.000 Like, I don't, look, I don't think CNN is good at debunking ideas that they dislike.

02:34:13.000 I don't think they're good at it.

02:34:14.000 And so I think it's sort of like a cheap shortcut to be like, oh, just sort of jerry-rig the algorithm a little bit, and let's get rid of that.

02:34:20.000 You know what I mean?

02:34:21.000 And it's just lazy.

02:34:22.000 People who actually care about this stuff, who care about the facts and the information, you need to be able to spread it to new people and debunk things that are incorrect.

02:34:30.000 And look, it's hard, right?

02:34:32.000 Because a lot of people, if you go down a conspiracy rabbit hole and you really believe it, you know all these little data points and things you could pull out and say, well, what about this?

02:34:38.000 And it's hard, but you know what?

02:34:40.000 Doesn't matter.

02:34:41.000 You still got to get in there.

02:34:42.000 You got to have the debate.

02:34:42.000 You got to have the conversation.

02:34:43.000 And sometimes you'll win.

02:34:44.000 Sometimes you'll lose.

02:34:45.000 But you got to engage in that because that's the only way you're going to change people.

02:34:48.000 One of my favorite things when I go to these like the Politicon events like they used to have, people would come up to me and tell me like, I want to thank you because you took me out of going down a very bad path.

02:34:57.000 And that always felt so rewarding to me.

02:35:00.000 Because, you know, I treat people like they're people.

02:35:03.000 And somebody might be going down a bad path and going towards down that pipeline where they like some alt-right troll or whatever, and then it's like, you know what, I watched you, I thought you were fair in how you debunked it, and you won me over.

02:35:14.000 And that's the way to do it.

02:35:15.000 That's the only way to do it.

02:35:16.000 There's also people that feel alienated, right?

02:35:18.000 And then there's a group that sort of accepts them, and so then they become captured by their audience, or captured by the group that they're a part of, and then they say things and lean towards things that this group accepts.

02:35:30.000 That's exactly right.

02:35:31.000 There's a lot more that goes into this.

02:35:33.000 It's just general human psychology that is overlooked.

02:35:36.000 Yeah.

02:35:37.000 You know, and it's like, if you treat people like people, and you meet them where they are, and you say, one of the biggest things is going, hey, you know what, I think on that one you have a point.

02:35:45.000 That's a good point.

02:35:46.000 Yes.

02:35:46.000 Right there.

02:35:47.000 It's very, very important.

02:35:48.000 But, this other thing, here's where I disagree on this other thing, let's talk it out, right?

02:35:51.000 And that makes people go, oh.

02:35:53.000 At least you're honest, right?

02:35:54.000 It's funny, I've always had a love-hate relationship with libertarians, because I love them, they love me on certain issues.

02:36:01.000 When it comes to civil liberties, when it comes to war, I love this Kyle guy, man, he's right about everything.

02:36:05.000 But then when we get to economics, they totally disagree with me, and they're hardcore, ardent capitalists, and I'm over here advocating for social democracy.

02:36:13.000 Ayn Rand.

02:36:13.000 Yeah, but it's fair and it's good and it's fun because we'll agree where we agree, we disagree where we disagree, and let's see what happens.

02:36:21.000 And so as long as you keep that dialogue going, I guess the only caveat here is when you're dealing with a quote-unquote bad actor.

02:36:26.000 You know what I mean?

02:36:27.000 Somebody who doesn't even believe what they're saying, but they're just saying it.

02:36:30.000 That's a little different because then it's like, well, how do you deal with somebody who they're not even having a real conversation?

02:36:35.000 Yes.

02:36:36.000 So that's harder when you deal with that.

02:36:37.000 But don't you think that the more people there are like you, the more stuff like that becomes transparent?

02:36:43.000 I think so.

02:36:44.000 I like to think so.

02:36:45.000 I think so for discerning people. 0.97

02:36:47.000 That's my dilemma about conspiracy theories and nonsense, is that I do know that some people get sucked into the QAnon stuff and all the wacky shit, but I don't. 0.55

02:36:58.000 So, if I don't, why you tell... 0.72

02:37:01.000 Like, if I don't get sucked into Flat Earth, and I think it's funny if I watch a video, who are we protecting?

02:37:08.000 And why are we protecting them in that manner where we're suppressing something that doesn't affect people Who are discerning and intelligent.

02:37:15.000 Yeah.

02:37:15.000 Like we're infantizing, infantilizing people in a certain way.

02:37:20.000 We're protecting them because you're not smart enough to recognize that this is nonsense.

02:37:23.000 Or you're not diligent enough to look at the possibility that it's nonsense and look at the alternative perspectives and the arguments against it.

02:37:31.000 Yeah, and look, I mean, some percentage of the population, yes, they're gonna end up wherever they're gonna end up, and they're gonna go down some bad rabbit holes, but again, that's the price of freedom.

02:37:39.000 The question is, how do we limit that as much as possible in an honest and open way?

02:37:44.000 Right.

02:37:44.000 That's the question.

02:37:45.000 And then there's the question of people that are manipulating these narratives on purpose in order to get people to argue with each other.

02:37:53.000 Yeah, I've heard you talk about that many times before.

02:37:56.000 Which is fascinating.

02:37:56.000 Well, you said the whole...

02:37:57.000 What was it?

02:37:58.000 The biggest Christian Facebook pages were not even...

02:38:01.000 20 of the top Christian Facebook pages, 19 of them, were run by Torrell Farms.

02:38:07.000 That's amazing to me.

02:38:08.000 It's wild.

02:38:09.000 Yeah.

02:38:09.000 But it makes sense, right?

02:38:10.000 I mean, why wouldn't you do that? 0.99

02:38:12.000 If you want to fuck with these people and rile them up and get them to lose their faith in democracy and faith in the system and faith in... 0.99

02:38:18.000 That's how you do it. 0.99

02:38:19.000 And then also get them upset about certain things and get them to act and get them to do things.

02:38:24.000 Yeah, see, and that's a harder—I don't know how to deal with that problem.

02:38:27.000 Like, if I was running Twitter, I wouldn't know how to deal with the problem of, like, total spam, you know what I mean?

02:38:34.000 And people doing, like, what you're saying, like, this isn't even a real person, a real thing.

02:38:37.000 Like, the whole point is trolling.

02:38:40.000 Like, I don't know how to deal with that.

02:38:42.000 I always look at a post now when I see people getting angry at things.

02:38:45.000 I'm like, how many of these people are real people?

02:38:56.000 Yeah.

02:38:59.000 One of the things we learned from the Twitter files, Lee Fong did some great reporting of The Intercept.

02:39:04.000 They...

02:39:05.000 The U.S. government asked for special status for certain accounts that would push the narrative that they want to push.

02:39:13.000 Special status?

02:39:14.000 Yeah, so like, again, it all goes back to algorithm.

02:39:16.000 Like, we need to put this tweet in front of more people.

02:39:19.000 Can you help us get it in front of more people?

02:39:20.000 They were asking Twitter to do that.

02:39:21.000 And a lot of the stuff was like anti-Iran stuff.

02:39:24.000 Yeah, it was pro-Saudi Arabia stuff.

02:39:26.000 It was trying to force a narrative that makes it look like it's grassroots.

02:39:30.000 There was a whole Saudi bot issue.

02:39:33.000 One of the biggest investors in Twitter was a Saudi Arabian.

02:39:35.000 I don't know if it still is, but one of the biggest investors was a Saudi Arabian government official, and there was a huge bot problem with pro-Saudi bots.

02:39:44.000 The bot thing is so strange because that was one of the main contentions when Elon was buying it.

02:39:50.000 When they were saying we have 5% bots.

02:39:53.000 And he was like, how did you determine that?

02:39:54.000 And I think they determined that by like 100 different pages.

02:39:58.000 And they went to 100 people's Twitter pages and they determined that 5% of them.

02:40:02.000 Oh, like small sample size type stuff?

02:40:04.000 Yeah.

02:40:05.000 See, I didn't know if he was trying to do that to get a better negotiating position.

02:40:08.000 Because he was saying if it's more than X percentage, I'm not going to buy Twitter.

02:40:12.000 Like, they made the deal, then he said, only if it's X number or less bots.

02:40:15.000 Right, prove it to me.

02:40:16.000 Yeah, he said, prove it to me.

02:40:17.000 But I think what he was trying to do was like, The number is going to be higher than what you say it is.

02:40:22.000 Therefore, give me X amount of a discount.

02:40:24.000 You know what I mean?

02:40:24.000 It could have been a negotiating tactic.

02:40:26.000 I'm sure that was part of it.

02:40:28.000 It makes sense that it was part of it.

02:40:29.000 But also, you would like to know.

02:40:31.000 Because we brought up the fact that there was a former FBI analyst who went over Twitter.

02:40:37.000 And he said that the number of fake accounts could be as high as 80%.

02:40:43.000 80%?

02:40:44.000 Yeah, see if you can find that article again.

02:40:45.000 Oh, Jesus Christ.

02:40:46.000 That's like we're all talking to ourselves.

02:40:48.000 We're all over there.

02:40:49.000 There's still, you know, there's millions and millions of people that are on Twitter.

02:40:52.000 So out of those millions and millions of people, 20% of them are legitimately human beings.

02:40:56.000 But I mean, if you were a government, or you were a corporation, or you were someone that had a vested financial interest in pushing a narrative, it kind of makes sense.

02:41:06.000 What?

02:41:06.000 Eight in ten Twitter accounts fake claims top security expert as Musk laughs.

02:41:13.000 Yeah.

02:41:15.000 If that is true, that is absolutely absurd.

02:41:20.000 Yeah, so this is it.

02:41:21.000 Dan Woods, head of intelligence at cybersecurity company F5, who spent more than 20 years with the U.S. federal law enforcement and intelligence organizations, told The Australian that more than 80% of Twitter accounts are probably bots,

02:41:37.000 a massive claim.

02:41:38.000 As Twitter says, only 5% of its users are bots or spam.

02:41:42.000 Wow.

02:41:44.000 And then Musk tweets, sure sounds like higher than 5%.

02:41:47.000 Yeah, while tagging the article.

02:41:50.000 If I had to take a guess as to what was fake, I would say between 10% and 20% if I had to guess.

02:41:56.000 But that's totally anecdotal.

02:41:57.000 It's based off my own personal experience.

02:41:58.000 Still a lot.

02:41:59.000 And if you weaponize that, you could really shape a narrative and get an argument going and also disincentivize people.

02:42:07.000 You could incentivize people to not talk about certain things if they're getting attacked.

02:42:10.000 Yeah, that's definitely a real thing.

02:42:13.000 I mean, I do find everything's always better face-to-face.

02:42:17.000 Always.

02:42:18.000 Always.

02:42:19.000 Always better face-to-face, even if on paper you guys disagree totally. 0.89

02:42:22.000 I mean, there are people who agree with you who might shit on you relentlessly if it's just on Twitter or through the computer.

02:42:29.000 And there's the real problem of virtue signaling, that people say things specifically to try to garner likes. 0.96

02:42:36.000 It's like a natural human reward thing.

02:42:39.000 Yeah, the holier-than-thou thing.

02:42:41.000 I mean, there's a lot of that on the left, where people will be like, I'm leftier than thou, and I'm more pure than thou, and I'm the only uncorrupted one in the conversation.

02:42:49.000 And it's like, what are we even doing here?

02:42:51.000 What is this?

02:42:52.000 Yeah, and they see people getting a certain amount of positive attention, so they decide to chip them down and attack them.

02:42:57.000 For their positions.

02:42:57.000 It's really weird.

02:42:58.000 There's so much that's involved in that.

02:43:02.000 It's human emotions and incentives and why they do things and what do they really mean by what they're saying and how many people are just objective and they have a healthy understanding of their own biases.

02:43:16.000 Yeah.

02:43:17.000 Why are they saying what they're saying?

02:43:19.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:43:20.000 It's a shit way to communicate. 0.99

02:43:22.000 Well, I mean, I don't even do it anymore. 0.99

02:43:23.000 I told you this.

02:43:24.000 It's, you know, you helped get me to this position.

02:43:27.000 But, you know, back in the day, I think everybody goes through some point on Twitter where they engage and go back and forth. 0.99

02:43:32.000 After a while, you're like, the fuck am I doing? 1.00

02:43:35.000 Yeah, I feel like shit. 1.00

02:43:36.000 Why am I doing this? 1.00

02:43:37.000 This is so stupid. 1.00

02:43:38.000 Somebody's saying, you believe X. I know I don't believe X. But I'm arguing with you about what I believe? 1.00

02:43:44.000 Yeah.

02:43:44.000 What is that?

02:43:45.000 And it could be over nonsense.

02:43:46.000 Nothing.

02:43:47.000 It could be over nothing.

02:43:48.000 Yeah.

02:43:49.000 It's amazing how that affects people psychologically.

02:43:52.000 And it's a lot of people go through that.

02:43:53.000 Even people, big names, well-known, they'll just be fighting on Twitter all day and it's like, what are you doing?

02:43:58.000 And it could be about nothing.

02:44:00.000 The other night in the green room, me and Tony Hinchcliffe were fucking with Brian Simpson because Brian Simpson is an Android user. 0.51

02:44:08.000 And we're joking around about different things.

02:44:10.000 I'm like, why do you like it so much?

02:44:11.000 And he's explaining, it's customizable, all these things that make sense.

02:44:14.000 And I go, do you have a flashlight right here?

02:44:18.000 I go, watch this.

02:44:19.000 I press a button, I got a flashlight.

02:44:21.000 Can you do that?

02:44:22.000 And he's like, well, I could have a widget and this.

02:44:24.000 I go, no, you don't have that.

02:44:25.000 You don't have that.

02:44:26.000 I go, do you have a button like that right there where your camera pops up?

02:44:29.000 You don't have that, do you?

02:44:30.000 And then he's like, oh.

02:44:32.000 And then I took a picture of him and then I posted it on Instagram and I said, iPhone for life, Brian Simpson.

02:44:37.000 And so immediately he was like, oh man, now the comments, the comments.

02:44:42.000 I go, don't read them.

02:44:43.000 So he starts reading them.

02:44:44.000 And he's engrossed in the Android versus iPhone arguments in the comments.

02:44:49.000 And I see him getting obsessed because he's pro-Android.

02:44:53.000 So he's like ideologically attached to this idea that Android's a better platform.

02:44:58.000 And so he's...

02:44:58.000 He's, like, immersed in these arguments.

02:45:00.000 And so we were just joking about all night that he's going to be up till 4 o'clock in the morning reading comments about Android and iPhone.

02:45:06.000 He might be.

02:45:07.000 It's weird because I like the freedom of being able to go on Twitter and these social media outlets and do whatever I want, but at the same time, I know...

02:45:14.000 There he is.

02:45:15.000 Meanwhile, it's a blurry-ass picture, too.

02:45:17.000 It's not even a good picture.

02:45:18.000 Well, I took it, like, instantaneously as I... I just wanted to get...

02:45:22.000 Because he's looking at his face like...

02:45:24.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.99

02:45:25.000 But like, so the psychological effects of these online fights, it's gotta be super negative, but like, I don't want to ban the social media platforms, but I do know that we'd all be much happier if we didn't have them, but I believe in the freedom to go on them and use them, but it's like, this is, we're all, fuck. 0.91

02:45:41.000 I mean, I feel like that says a lot about The way the system works today, right? 0.90

02:45:44.000 We all know certain things are terrible for us, but it's like, well, I do it.

02:45:49.000 How many people feel good after online arguments?

02:45:52.000 That's a really good question.

02:45:53.000 Some people live for it. 1.00

02:45:54.000 They live for the fucking, I'm gonna get in there. 1.00

02:45:56.000 There is a certain personality trait. 1.00

02:45:58.000 Don't you think there's a certain personality trait with some people where they're just shit stirrers? 1.00

02:46:02.000 And that's how they get their kicks, right? 0.99

02:46:04.000 And it's probably a minority, tiny percentage of the population, but some people are all about it.

02:46:10.000 And that's where they get their dopamine rush, that's where they get their little serotonin kick. 0.99

02:46:14.000 Such a fucked up way to live. 0.99

02:46:16.000 Yeah, it is. 1.00

02:46:17.000 Yeah.

02:46:17.000 It is.

02:46:18.000 Some weird social maladjustment issue from when you were a kid, probably.

02:46:21.000 We're just not designed to communicate in text.

02:46:23.000 There's so much lost, so much context lost.

02:46:26.000 You know, you don't know what the person's thinking and saying.

02:46:29.000 You don't know who they are.

02:46:30.000 You don't know what their life is like.

02:46:32.000 You don't know what their incentive are to say things like that.

02:46:35.000 Yeah, reading, that is an issue, right?

02:46:37.000 Reading texts and like, just totally misinterpreting the tone of it.

02:46:40.000 Yeah.

02:46:41.000 You know what I mean?

02:46:41.000 Oh, yeah.

02:46:42.000 You're like, damn, this is a fucking dry-ass response. 1.00

02:46:44.000 Like, why is this guy not like me? 1.00

02:46:45.000 What the fuck? 0.99

02:46:46.000 Well, I love a really subtle troll account. 1.00

02:46:50.000 There's some really subtle troll accounts that are fucking amazing. 0.97

02:46:53.000 They're so, just, like, so subtle. 0.96

02:46:57.000 Yeah, like, it could be real, but it's not.

02:47:00.000 I feel like there's a guy, Nick Adams, I want to say his name is, Australian guy, he plays the role of, like, the super MAGA dude, and I'm super convinced it's a troll.

02:47:09.000 I'm 100% convinced, but it's right on that line, though, right?

02:47:12.000 It's, like, right there!

02:47:13.000 Because there are people that are like that.

02:47:15.000 That's what's nuts.

02:47:17.000 You know, like Tatiana McGrath.

02:47:18.000 Yeah, that's been around for a while.

02:47:20.000 Andrew Doyle, which is a hilarious guy, who created this super woke, crazy left-wing character that people oftentimes retweet unknowing that it's parody.

02:47:30.000 Yeah, I mean, I've seen fights.

02:47:32.000 Over that.

02:47:33.000 Yes. 1.00

02:47:34.000 Somebody says, like, this is a fucking crazy bitch, and then it's like, this is not real. 1.00

02:47:38.000 Yeah, this isn't real. 1.00

02:47:39.000 Did you see what happened with this yesterday, Aaron Foster?

02:47:42.000 Oh, this was a joke.

02:47:44.000 Oh, I know somebody who fell for it.

02:47:46.000 I know somebody who fell for it.

02:47:47.000 They were telling me about it.

02:47:48.000 What did he say?

02:47:49.000 He said that the NFL gives them a script before the season, and they go over it, and it's a week-by-week breakdown of what happens.

02:47:56.000 Oh, like the games?

02:47:58.000 The rig?

02:47:58.000 Yeah, and he went super deep with how rigged it is.

02:48:01.000 And they were just playing it like it was real.

02:48:03.000 The clip went out, and I got sent it by at least a couple people that were like, see, I told you it was fake.

02:48:07.000 I'm like, dude, they're joking.

02:48:10.000 Aaron Foster, that's hilarious that he did that.

02:48:12.000 He's a funny dude, though.

02:48:14.000 He went deep with it, too.

02:48:15.000 He went, like, really over the top.

02:48:17.000 But somebody told me it was real.

02:48:19.000 The NFL script.

02:48:21.000 People want it to be real.

02:48:22.000 Yeah.

02:48:23.000 I will say, though, talking about rigged sports, the NBA, the way the refs act, super suspect.

02:48:29.000 Well, we have had evidence.

02:48:31.000 Very clear evidence.

02:48:31.000 That's right.

02:48:32.000 That refs do get paid off. 1.00

02:48:34.000 Gambling stuff.

02:48:35.000 And they rig it.

02:48:36.000 And, I mean, LeBron James, there was like three or four games in a row. 0.99

02:48:42.000 Where every single game it was a shit call and they lost as a result of it. 0.99

02:48:46.000 I was watching the game the other night. 0.98

02:48:48.000 I forget who they were playing, but they straight up, they hacked his arm when he was going up for a layup.

02:48:53.000 They just hacked his arm.

02:48:54.000 And the ref didn't blow the whistle.

02:48:56.000 And if he made that layup, which he was going to, that was game.

02:48:59.000 And so then it went to overtime and the Lakers lost. 0.99

02:49:03.000 Fucking crazy! 0.99

02:49:04.000 He doesn't get too emotional on the floor, but after that play, he was livid. 1.00

02:49:10.000 As a LeBron fan, he gets very emotional all the time.

02:49:12.000 Well, that was worse than I ever saw before.

02:49:14.000 Right or wrong?

02:49:14.000 He laid on the ground for like a minute afterwards.

02:49:17.000 He was holding his head like, ah!

02:49:20.000 Here's maybe the play, I think.

02:49:22.000 They found out that the referee and his family apparently are huge Boston Celtics fans.

02:49:27.000 Oh my god.

02:49:28.000 That's a conflict of interest.

02:49:29.000 Do they have the slow-mo of it?

02:49:30.000 Because on the slow-mo you see he gets hacked.

02:49:32.000 His arm gets hacked.

02:49:33.000 No slow-mo.

02:49:35.000 I mean you can't tell from right here.

02:49:36.000 But he does get fouled.

02:49:37.000 They didn't call a foul.

02:49:38.000 They just said they missed it.

02:49:39.000 Which is bad.

02:49:40.000 A lot of people are betting on these games.

02:49:41.000 They apologized after.

02:49:43.000 There's a huge amount of money being bet now.

02:49:43.000 That's crazy if the referee had some sort of tie to the Celtics.

02:49:48.000 Correct.

02:49:48.000 And that's where going online afterwards could be a problem because you can then find pictures and make it seem like it and you can put a narrative out there and it can get amplified very fast.

02:49:58.000 Now everyone just believes this narrative that maybe or maybe not this referee is a Celtics fan and his family is a Celtics fan.

02:50:05.000 Well, there's biases like that, and there's gambling, which is even more insidious. 0.97

02:50:08.000 Yeah, but look, whatever the reasons are for this one, we don't even need to get into the intentions of the refs, because just the plain facts of the matter are, that was a shit call, because of that the Lakers lost the game, and that's bad enough. 0.96

02:50:20.000 You know what I mean? 0.99

02:50:21.000 You don't even need to go levels deeper than that to be like, you guys gotta get your shit together. 0.59

02:50:24.000 For the first time ever, I saw the refs actually apologized. 0.97

02:50:27.000 They released a statement the day after, and I'm like, I was gonna fuck this one up.

02:50:30.000 I've never seen that before.

02:50:31.000 And I think that's because it was LeBron. 0.99

02:50:33.000 Like, they're apologizing because they just fucked over at the king. 0.99

02:50:36.000 Ooh, wow. 0.99

02:50:38.000 The next day happened again in the NFL, though. 0.97

02:50:40.000 There's big controversy, extra plays given, ending didn't happen the way maybe the NFL wanted it to go, so everyone thinks they fucking scripted it.

02:50:48.000 Well, people always think fights are fixed.

02:50:50.000 Did you ever see the Tyson Fury, Deontay Wilder controversy? 0.99

02:50:55.000 It's the dumbest controversy.

02:50:57.000 But people were convinced that Tyson Fury's gloves weren't attached properly, and that he was punching with gloves that, like, the glove wasn't even attached to his fist. 0.98

02:51:06.000 He was punching him with the part.

02:51:09.000 See, that's not the best example because that's a common thing that happens when you punch someone, your wrist gets bent backwards.

02:51:17.000 But what Tyson Fury does, if you understand boxing, this is a common thing, the way he throws punches, he throws punches like this and then he'll throw a hard punch.

02:51:29.000 So he's touching you and showing you things and in the process of doing that, if you look at it in slow motion, his hand goes way back and it will even look like the glove's not attached.

02:51:41.000 And so he has these really long ass arms and knuckleheads were thinking that His wrists were actually in the wrapped area.

02:51:48.000 And so the wrapped area is hard and no padding at all. 0.97

02:51:52.000 And then he was hitting him with that.

02:51:53.000 And Deontay Wilder saw these videos and was like, this guy cheated me, he was hitting me. 1.00

02:51:58.000 Oh shit, really? 0.98

02:51:59.000 Yeah, see if you can find the video of it. 0.99

02:52:01.000 Was this the first or the second fight?

02:52:02.000 That they had.

02:52:03.000 The second fight.

02:52:03.000 Because the first one was close, the second one was not.

02:52:06.000 Right, right.

02:52:07.000 Well, what happened in the first fight was Tyson Fury got knocked down and almost knocked out in the 12th round, but then came back to win the round, and the way he won the round was by putting Deontay Wilder on his heels, making him back up.

02:52:20.000 And then he realized, I believe, from that round and that approach, that's the way to fight Deontay Wilder.

02:52:26.000 Because even though he got knocked down at the beginning of the 12th round, he wound up winning The remainder of the round and even had Deontay hurt at one point in time.

02:52:34.000 I think that that is what started it.

02:52:37.000 But then in the second fight where he overwhelmingly beat Deontay Wilder, Deontay came up with all these excuses like he was wearing this thing, it was too heavy when he walked out and his water got poisoned.

02:52:49.000 And Tyson Fury was cheating.

02:52:50.000 It was terrible.

02:52:53.000 It was a terrible look from a great fighter.

02:52:56.000 Because whether he had people in his ear or whether he just was unsophisticated in his analysis of what happened.

02:53:03.000 See if you can find the video where people were using this as an example.

02:53:07.000 Because if you look at it in slow motion, it looks like, look, People were thinking, see how his hand is moving back like that?

02:53:17.000 But that's normal.

02:53:19.000 That is absolutely normal.

02:53:21.000 And they were saying that the gloves weren't actually attached and that see how he was like punching him without hitting with the knuckle that he was actually the knuckles were where the wrists were.

02:53:32.000 But it's not.

02:53:33.000 It's just you're looking at something in slow motion so it looks weird.

02:53:38.000 And so the people that were, you know, that thought about conspiracies too much, they thought that that was what was going on.

02:53:45.000 You see how his wrists are moving?

02:53:46.000 Please explain what is in Tyson Fury's gloves.

02:53:49.000 They cheated.

02:53:50.000 Bronze Brommer.

02:53:52.000 That first fight, I thought Deontay did win.

02:53:55.000 I thought that Tyson Fury was down for the count.

02:53:57.000 But the second fight, it wasn't even close.

02:54:00.000 Well, he didn't win because Tyson Fury got up.

02:54:04.000 Wasn't it a 10 count, though?

02:54:05.000 The count was long.

02:54:07.000 But it's not Tyson Fury's job to get up at the correct 10-second mark while he just got rocked and dropped.

02:54:13.000 It's his job to listen to the referee when the referee says 8, 9, and then he gets up at 10. It might have already been 10, but he doesn't know that.

02:54:22.000 Yeah, but would a different ref have done it differently?

02:54:24.000 Would a different ref say, that's it?

02:54:26.000 Possibly.

02:54:26.000 Well, here's my take on it.

02:54:27.000 It should have been a digital count.

02:54:29.000 And that digital count should start.

02:54:31.000 It should be very clear and obvious to everybody.

02:54:33.000 It shouldn't be up to the referee to decide the pace of the count.

02:54:36.000 Another example of that is Mike Tyson versus Buster Douglas.

02:54:39.000 When Mike Tyson knocked down Buster Douglas, he knocked him down for more than 10 seconds. 0.99

02:54:44.000 No shit! 0.97

02:54:45.000 This video has all four of them synced up. 0.99

02:54:47.000 And what does it say?

02:54:48.000 It just shows the knockdown.

02:54:50.000 Oh, see, boom.

02:54:51.000 So Mike Tyson drops him.

02:54:53.000 Or, excuse me, this is actually...

02:54:56.000 They got all of them in there.

02:54:56.000 It's all four of them.

02:54:57.000 Yeah, it's all four of them.

02:54:58.000 So, let's see.

02:55:00.000 Eight, nine, ten.

02:55:02.000 Buster Douglas is down past ten.

02:55:04.000 And then he gets up.

02:55:05.000 See?

02:55:06.000 And this was argued by Don King after.

02:55:10.000 Let's see that again. 1.00

02:55:10.000 No shit. 1.00

02:55:11.000 Yeah, so let's see the Douglas one. 0.99

02:55:13.000 So Tyson hits him, boom, down.

02:55:15.000 And now you see the count.

02:55:17.000 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. He's out.

02:55:27.000 Wow.

02:55:27.000 Buster Douglas was out.

02:55:28.000 He was out, but it's not his job to know how many seconds are going on.

02:55:33.000 Yeah.

02:55:33.000 It's his job to respond to the referee's count.

02:55:36.000 The lack of objectivity, I like your point about using the clock, because the lack of objectivity drives me crazy.

02:55:41.000 Yes.

02:55:42.000 I want to leave as little as possible up to subjective interpretation, you know?

02:55:46.000 And so when you get a call egregiously wrong, it's like, you gotta change the rules to make it so you don't.

02:55:51.000 Yes.

02:55:52.000 I mean, they should have a digital count where the whole audience could see.

02:55:58.000 Where when the guy goes down, ten seconds starts.

02:56:01.000 Nine.

02:56:02.000 Eight.

02:56:02.000 You should see it.

02:56:03.000 Just like that.

02:56:04.000 And that's the only way you should do it.

02:56:06.000 You should never, because sometimes referees, you go, one!

02:56:10.000 Yeah, weird count.

02:56:11.000 And then they'll extend the count.

02:56:14.000 Has there been any history in fighting of gambling issues?

02:56:17.000 Yes.

02:56:19.000 And is it just old school or is it new also?

02:56:20.000 New.

02:56:21.000 There's a big controversy in the UFC currently. 0.99

02:56:23.000 No shit. 0.99

02:56:23.000 Yes. 0.99

02:56:24.000 There's one of the coaches, this guy named James Krause, who's a known gambler.

02:56:28.000 And he actually has a gambling...

02:56:31.000 Was it a Discord server?

02:56:34.000 Discord server.

02:56:35.000 And one of his fighters, there's a lot of like late money that came in, like strong money against this fighter.

02:56:44.000 And the guy, it turns out, had an injury and threw a kick and went down early in the fight and got stopped.

02:56:52.000 And then he was suspended.

02:56:55.000 The coach is suspended.

02:56:57.000 No longer can that coach referee or can he train fighters.

02:57:02.000 So anyone who's a UFC fighter who trains at his gym had to leave his gym.

02:57:07.000 Yeah, and so it's a real big deal.

02:57:10.000 So people were spending, and then the UFC banned gambling for any of its athletes.

02:57:15.000 Wow.

02:57:16.000 Yeah, I mean, look.

02:57:17.000 I think any of the trainers as well.

02:57:19.000 See, that's the interesting thing, because on the one hand, like, I'm in favor of gambling being legal.

02:57:23.000 Yes.

02:57:23.000 I mean, I don't think it should be.

02:57:25.000 Illegal. 0.93

02:57:25.000 But on the other hand, it's like you do introduce a whole new set of problems when it comes to sports because now there's massive incentive to just let's fucking rig this. 0.93

02:57:34.000 I'll pay you two million dollars to take the fall. 0.70

02:57:36.000 You want that?

02:57:37.000 That's life-changing money.

02:57:38.000 You know what I mean?

02:57:39.000 And then you have a whole other set of issues.

02:57:41.000 It's hard.

02:57:41.000 I don't know how you do it and then you regulate it effectively where you don't have issues like that.

02:57:45.000 Or is it just something that we're never going to get rid of, right?

02:57:47.000 Is it like crime where nobody can say, oh, let's abolish all crimes.

02:57:50.000 It's not possible, right?

02:57:51.000 We're always going to deal with some level of crime.

02:57:52.000 Is it the same thing for cheating?

02:57:54.000 Is there always going to be some level of cheating because of gambling?

02:57:56.000 I think there's going to be always people that want to try it.

02:57:59.000 But sunlight is the best disinfectant.

02:58:02.000 To be able to see it and know what's going on and then penalize those people.

02:58:06.000 But there's always been accusations of bad judging and boxing that's related to gambling, related to money, related to bribes.

02:58:15.000 I mean, it's been from the beginning of time.

02:58:17.000 The mob has always been involved in organized boxing.

02:58:22.000 We're good to go.

02:58:26.000 We're good to go.

02:58:47.000 He's the nicest.

02:58:48.000 Such a nice guy.

02:58:49.000 He's the best.

02:58:49.000 I love that guy.

02:58:50.000 And he moved to Texas, too.

02:58:51.000 He's a Texas guy.

02:58:52.000 Uh, Corrin was saying he looked up his record.

02:58:54.000 He didn't know much about him.

02:58:55.000 He looked up his record when we got back to the hotel. 0.99

02:58:57.000 He was like, we just met the fucking Michael Jordan. 0.99

02:59:01.000 Of UFC. Well, he's without doubt one of the all-time greats. 0.98

02:59:05.000 I mean, I don't know if you'd call him the Michael Jordan of the UFC. I think that you'd say that about Jon Jones, maybe.

02:59:10.000 But he's without doubt one of the all-time greats.

02:59:13.000 I mean, he was a UFC heavyweight champion.

02:59:15.000 He was the king of Pancrase. 0.98

02:59:17.000 He fought in multiple organizations.

02:59:20.000 Universally respected one of the the first elite strikers to compete in MMA because in MMA you had these guys that were like really good at one thing or another thing But you know to have a guy like boss who came over who had that Dutch kickboxing style and he was like an intelligent animal That's how he fought just like intelligent marauding berserking guy who just destroyed people he was an amazing amazing fighter So he did the Tyson-style blitzkrieging

02:59:51.000 of his opponent?

02:59:52.000 Well, he fucked a lot of people up, that's for sure. 0.99

02:59:56.000 Relentless power. 0.99

02:59:57.000 And just super hyper-aggressive.

02:59:59.000 The Dutch are known for this Muay Thai style, this kickboxing style, and they're some of the greatest fighters in kickboxing history who have come out of Holland.

03:00:09.000 Now, you put a guy like that up against a jiu-jitsu expert.

03:00:13.000 Well, Bas knows jiu-jitsu.

03:00:15.000 He knows jiu-jitsu, too.

03:00:16.000 Yeah, I mean, he submits guys, too.

03:00:17.000 The thing is, Bas was one of the first guys to incorporate leg locks.

03:00:22.000 No, Bas is a very, very well-rounded fighter.

03:00:24.000 I mean, he could do everything. 0.99

03:00:26.000 But when you had to stand with him, you were in deep shit. 0.99

03:00:29.000 He was just a really good striker. 0.88

03:00:31.000 So now, does everybody in the UFC know both?

03:00:34.000 Yeah.

03:00:34.000 Everybody does now?

03:00:35.000 Pretty much.

03:00:36.000 Wow.

03:00:37.000 You still have some specialists that are really good at stand-up, but their vulnerabilities are the ground.

03:00:42.000 You know, like Alex Pajera, who is the UFC middleweight champion, is just an elite kickboxer who's learning grappling, but his grappling is not nearly as good as his striking.

03:00:53.000 But the problem is every fight starts standing up.

03:00:55.000 And so when you're standing up with him, you're dealing with one of the most dangerous human beings on planet Earth.

03:01:00.000 And so just trying to get him on the ground is so dangerous.

03:01:04.000 You've got to get close to him, you're gonna get hit with a knee or a punch, and he's good at takedown defense.

03:01:09.000 But he's not like an elite wrestler.

03:01:11.000 He's not the most well-rounded fighter, but he's the UFC champion.

03:01:15.000 That's interesting though, because then that sort of undermines the point a little bit that jujitsu is the main thing.

03:01:21.000 That's not real anymore.

03:01:21.000 No?

03:01:22.000 No, no.

03:01:23.000 I would say the main thing is to be well-rounded.

03:01:28.000 And some guys are really good at just being a specialist.

03:01:31.000 Like the guy he beat, Israel Adesanya, who was the middleweight champion at the time, is also a specialist.

03:01:37.000 He's a specialist in kickboxing.

03:01:39.000 So his specialty and Pejera's specialty were the same specialty.

03:01:44.000 But Pejera is bigger, and he had knocked Israel out in kickboxing.

03:01:48.000 So that was one of the reasons why it was such a highly anticipated fight, was because everybody knew that Stylebender, Israel Adesanya, is one of the greatest strikers in the world.

03:01:57.000 So for him to be fighting another guy who's one of the greatest strikers in the world, and a guy who had already knocked him out, everybody anticipated, like, this is going to be a wild encounter.

03:02:07.000 I always wonder about size like that.

03:02:09.000 You remember Bob Sapp?

03:02:10.000 Sure.

03:02:10.000 And you remember Butterbean?

03:02:12.000 Sure.

03:02:12.000 Like, I just got the sense, and I don't know anything about fighting, but when I look at it, I just got the sense, like, this guy's just so large that I feel like he wins fights from being large.

03:02:20.000 Well, Bob Sapp most certainly won some fights from being large.

03:02:24.000 It's not that he didn't have any skills.

03:02:26.000 He certainly was skillful, but he was also 375 pounds with abs.

03:02:30.000 Just a mountain of a man.

03:02:32.000 Yeah, he was a walking pharmaceutical factory.

03:02:35.000 And he was also fighting in pride.

03:02:38.000 But that's not him at his best, his most fit.

03:02:41.000 You gotta see him, Bob Sapp, look at that.

03:02:44.000 That's him at his most fit. 0.99

03:02:45.000 Look at the fucking size of that guy. 1.00

03:02:47.000 He was so big. 1.00

03:02:49.000 I mean, he was just enormous and skillful.

03:02:53.000 I mean, he wasn't the most skillful guy, but he was very skillful.

03:02:58.000 Go ahead.

03:02:58.000 But Mirko Krokop, who only weighed like 250 pounds, knocked him out in a kickboxing fight.

03:03:03.000 Wow.

03:03:04.000 He broke his eye socket with a straight left hand.

03:03:07.000 Yeah.

03:03:08.000 Jesus Christ.

03:03:08.000 Do you remember Kimbo Slice?

03:03:10.000 Sure.

03:03:11.000 Yeah, Kimbo, when I was in high school, there were these huge street fight videos of Kimbo.

03:03:15.000 Yeah, it's the backyard fights. 1.00

03:03:16.000 Kimbo, fuck somebody up, bro. 1.00

03:03:18.000 Let's watch this. 1.00

03:03:19.000 Those were crazy.

03:03:20.000 Those were crazy, those backyard fights.

03:03:22.000 And then he did the UFC for a little bit, right?

03:03:23.000 Yes, yes.

03:03:24.000 Was he successful?

03:03:25.000 Yeah, he fought in the Ultimate Fighter.

03:03:27.000 He did pretty well.

03:03:28.000 But he was a guy that was really lacking grappling.

03:03:31.000 Right. 0.97

03:03:31.000 And by the time he got to the UFC, he already had fucked up knees. 0.97

03:03:34.000 It was hard for him to get better at grappling. 0.53

03:03:37.000 And he wound up being a big fighter in this organization called Elite XC that they were doing for a while.

03:03:45.000 Until he fought a really good fighter.

03:03:47.000 He fought this guy named Seth Petruzzelli.

03:03:49.000 And he was supposed to be fighting Ken Shamrock.

03:03:52.000 It's kind of a funny situation.

03:03:55.000 Shamrock apparently cut himself accidentally, like the day of the fight, something happened.

03:04:02.000 I forget what it was, but pulled out of the fight.

03:04:05.000 And so they had to fight.

03:04:07.000 Kimbo was the star.

03:04:08.000 And so they had this guy, Seth Prezzelli, take Kimbo's place.

03:04:13.000 Take Ken Shamrock's place.

03:04:14.000 Excuse me.

03:04:15.000 Take Ken Shamrock's Vice to fight Kimbo.

03:04:18.000 I found out about it in the green room of the punchline.

03:04:22.000 I had just got off stage in Atlanta, and we were watching it on the screen, and I called it right away. 0.99

03:04:28.000 I go, oh my god, Seth Petruzzelli's gonna fuck him up. 0.99

03:04:31.000 And so it's a six-second knockout. 0.99

03:04:34.000 So it's me, and there's a video of me backstage going...

03:04:38.000 Seth, this is a terrible fight for Kimball Slice. 0.99

03:04:40.000 Seth Petruzzelli is going to fuck him up. 1.00

03:04:41.000 Watch. 1.00

03:04:42.000 And then Seth Petruzzelli winds up knocking him out in six seconds.

03:04:45.000 Wow.

03:04:45.000 And like I told you.

03:04:46.000 See, that shows the difference between somebody with a lot of knowledge about it versus somebody like me.

03:04:50.000 Slice, this is a last minute replacement. 0.99

03:04:52.000 I got to think Seth Petruzzelli is going to fuck him up. 0.97

03:04:56.000 If I'm wrong, you'll never see this. 0.99

03:05:00.000 So here's... 1.00

03:05:02.000 This is a bad motherfucker, by the way. 1.00

03:05:04.000 I just think Seth Petruzzelli is going to fuck him up. 1.00

03:05:09.000 This is the beginning of the fight. 1.00

03:05:16.000 Holy shit! 0.99

03:05:21.000 Yeah, so that was one of those things where I was like, oh, there's a difference between a backyard brawler and an elite MMA fighter. 0.99

03:05:27.000 The difference is pretty stark.

03:05:29.000 Yeah, because me and my buddies, you watch those street fights, and you're like, bro, nobody can beat this guy up.

03:05:35.000 This guy's a monster.

03:05:36.000 That's how he looks like. 0.97

03:05:37.000 A real fighter.

03:05:39.000 And that's somebody who's just more highly trained, has a better skill set.

03:05:43.000 Yeah, so he had a cut.

03:05:45.000 So he sustained a cut from a headbutt during a light workout.

03:05:50.000 Sometime within the last 24 hours.

03:05:51.000 In an interview on CBS, Ken Shermock said the cut required six stitches.

03:05:55.000 He said, I was warming up, getting loose, and caught a head and didn't think much of it.

03:06:01.000 So I must have head-butted.

03:06:03.000 Next thing I know, a couple of drops are dripping from my head.

03:06:06.000 He said he went to CBS, went to look to hopefully glue it together or something, but it needed six stitches.

03:06:12.000 We were trying to figure out a way to do this, but we came down here and the commission said we weren't going to let me fight.

03:06:18.000 Now, Ken Shamrock was an actual fighter, but he also was in probably WWF back in the day, not even WWE. Yeah, and then for a guy like Kimbo, I don't know if he ever did that kind of wrestling, but he should have.

03:06:28.000 He would have been huge, right?

03:06:29.000 He would have been huge.

03:06:30.000 Did he do it at all?

03:06:31.000 Jamie, did he do that?

03:06:31.000 That article I pulled up said there was talks of him going to it.

03:06:34.000 He wound up dying, unfortunately.

03:06:36.000 He was a great guy.

03:06:37.000 He was young, right?

03:06:38.000 He wasn't old.

03:06:39.000 Yeah.

03:06:40.000 Did he die of a heart attack?

03:06:42.000 I forget.

03:06:43.000 Something along those lines.

03:06:46.000 Unfortunate.

03:06:47.000 Great guy, though.

03:06:48.000 And what a personality. 0.97

03:06:49.000 And, you know, had the balls to fight in the UFC. I mean, took a chance and, you know, decided, like, the UFC said, well, we'll take you in, but we want you to go through the ultimate fighter, which is their proving ground. 0.94

03:07:01.000 So they have, you know, these guys live in a house together and fight.

03:07:05.000 And he won that?

03:07:06.000 Yeah.

03:07:06.000 No, no, he didn't win.

03:07:07.000 Oh, he didn't win it?

03:07:08.000 No, he wound up losing to Big Country, this guy Roy Nelson, who took him down, got on top of him, put him in a crucifix, and just punched him in the face until the referee stopped it. 0.99

03:07:18.000 No shit. 0.98

03:07:19.000 His grappling wasn't up to par. 0.99

03:07:20.000 But that's, you know, specialist stuff.

03:07:23.000 Yeah.

03:07:26.000 Before we wrap up, do you want to...

03:07:29.000 You want to talk a little bit about DeSantis?

03:07:30.000 Because I know you're kind of a fan of him, right?

03:07:32.000 Well, sure.

03:07:34.000 I'm kind of a fan of what he did with COVID. I'm kind of a fan that he looked at the reality of who the disease was hurting, and he said, we need to protect our vulnerable people, but we don't want to destroy our economy.

03:07:48.000 And he allowed people to make their own choices, and it turned out to be correct.

03:07:54.000 Now, what's interesting, I don't know if you saw this the other day, but Trump started going after DeSantis on COVID. Yes.

03:08:00.000 And he was saying, like, bro, we shut down the beaches, bro.

03:08:02.000 Yeah, I know.

03:08:04.000 Which is kind of funny.

03:08:05.000 Trump was involved in, at least partially, shutting down the country, in a sense.

03:08:10.000 So he goes after DeSantis over it.

03:08:11.000 Well, you know, he's playing politics, you know?

03:08:14.000 Yeah, so that's your big thing that you like about him, is he was a little more live and let live on the COVID stuff.

03:08:20.000 Well, he didn't take away people's freedom.

03:08:21.000 Yeah.

03:08:22.000 And I felt like there was a lot of people that were overreaching.

03:08:24.000 Well, certainly, you were in LA at the time, right?

03:08:27.000 Yes, exactly.

03:08:27.000 That was my response, because LA was horrific in their overreach.

03:08:31.000 Well, you said they've even banned outdoor dining.

03:08:33.000 Yes.

03:08:33.000 For no reason.

03:08:34.000 When there was already no evidence.

03:08:35.000 No evidence.

03:08:36.000 And my friend who worked for the state, who worked in the, well, it's actually my friend's brother, who worked for the state in their COVID, you know, whatever the fuck it was, whatever they called the organization, where they were determining what the laws were.

03:08:51.000 He brought up, like, why are we banning outdoor dining?

03:08:54.000 There's no evidence that shows that it's transmitted that way.

03:08:57.000 And the woman who he was working with said, it's for the optics.

03:09:02.000 Shutting down all these businesses in a time where they were already struggling.

03:09:06.000 I mean, California, or I'm sure San Francisco as well, but LA lost something in the neighborhood of 75% of their restaurants during this time.

03:09:14.000 That's crazy.

03:09:15.000 Yeah.

03:09:15.000 And then Newsom was caught at that restaurant at the same time.

03:09:18.000 Yeah.

03:09:18.000 They said he wasn't even outdoor dining.

03:09:20.000 He was indoor dining.

03:09:20.000 None of those people lost any money by shutting people's businesses down.

03:09:25.000 That's part of the problem, is that their financial situation was unaffected by these decisions that they made.

03:09:32.000 And these decisions that they made, it was the first time in my life where I realized how important it is what your mayor and your government do.

03:09:40.000 And when you have a government and a mayor and a governor that can decide to shut businesses down arbitrarily, gyms, the places where people can be the most healthy, they decided to do these things that radically affected people's lives and it turned out they were wrong.

03:09:55.000 And that's what I liked about DeSantis, that he looked at when they opened up the state and he was being roundly criticized, he said, we have to protect our most vulnerable, we have to protect our elderly, we have to get them vaccines, we've got to do this, but everybody else, you should be able to make your own decisions.

03:10:09.000 Yeah, I definitely understand that aspect of it, because when the data came in on how different states were affected, it seemed to be the case that states that were a little bit more lax with those sorts of things fared just the same as the ones that were really cracking down hard.

03:10:25.000 But they didn't fare as bad economically.

03:10:27.000 They did much better economically in those other states.

03:10:30.000 Yeah, and I mean, I also, to his credit, he did the...

03:10:34.000 Monoclonal antibodies, like, free little clinics.

03:10:37.000 I gotta pee again, unfortunately.

03:10:38.000 Okay, go ahead.

03:10:39.000 We'll continue this.

03:10:39.000 One more thing, and then we'll wrap this up.

03:10:41.000 Alright, you got it.

03:10:41.000 We're already, like, three and a half hours in, right?

03:10:43.000 Better?

03:10:44.000 Yes!

03:10:45.000 It's good to be hydrated, but it's bad to have to pee when you're doing podcasts.

03:10:48.000 I'm proud of myself that I peed less than Joe Rogan in the podcast, and you're the expert.

03:10:52.000 You're the bladder.

03:10:54.000 Person.

03:10:54.000 Yeah, well, I did my blood work recently and I found out I was dehydrated.

03:10:58.000 So you gotta drink more water.

03:10:59.000 Okay.

03:10:59.000 So I've been drinking a shitload of water.

03:11:01.000 Yeah, I feel like that's actually common that people don't drink as much as they should.

03:11:05.000 You know what I mean?

03:11:06.000 That's kind of common.

03:11:06.000 Generally, I'm good about it, but this one time where I got my blood work done, I just left.

03:11:10.000 I didn't even know I was going to get my blood work done that day, so I left from the sauna and went there, which I think probably affected it.

03:11:16.000 Absolutely.

03:11:17.000 For sure.

03:11:17.000 No doubt about that.

03:11:18.000 But still, it's enough to me to go, well, I didn't even know that I was dehydrated.

03:11:22.000 All right, I gotta up my...

03:11:23.000 Yeah.

03:11:23.000 Yeah, no, that's for sure.

03:11:25.000 Right thing.

03:11:25.000 Anyway.

03:11:27.000 DeSantis.

03:11:28.000 So, because I know you were also a fan of Bernie.

03:11:31.000 Yes.

03:11:32.000 And they're like polar opposites in terms of the rest of their policies.

03:11:35.000 Well, I'm a fan of him for different reasons.

03:11:36.000 Right, yeah.

03:11:37.000 But I know you said that you thought he would make a good president.

03:11:39.000 And there's a bunch of things about him that I think would probably change your opinion on it.

03:11:44.000 Like, for example, he thinks weed should stay illegal because it smells bad.

03:11:48.000 Is that really his opinion, that it smells bad?

03:11:51.000 Does he not know about edibles?

03:11:52.000 He said it smells, quote, putrid, and he wants it to stay banned because of that.

03:11:56.000 Oh, that's hilarious.

03:11:57.000 Is that really his rationalization?

03:11:59.000 Jamie, if you want, you can pull that up.

03:12:00.000 Yeah, that's what it says here, but it's legal in Florida, or medically.

03:12:04.000 It says marijuana should remain criminalized because of its putrid odor.

03:12:09.000 Polling compiled by the University of North Florida showed that most Floridians want the adult use of marijuana to be legal in the Sunshine State.

03:12:16.000 That's certainly not the case.

03:12:18.000 In fact, under state law, the possession of up to 20 grams of cannabis is punished by $1,000 fine and up to a year in prison.

03:12:25.000 Possession of greater amounts is a felony.

03:12:27.000 So what is he said?

03:12:27.000 What I don't like about is if you go to some of these places that have done it, the stench when you're out there, I mean, it smells so putrid.

03:12:34.000 I want people to be able to breathe freely. 0.94

03:12:37.000 Well, that's silly.

03:12:39.000 But that's also like, I want to know the context. 0.71

03:12:44.000 I mean, that's a quote.

03:12:49.000 The smell of marijuana.

03:12:51.000 DeSantis demurs on marijuana legalization but can't stand the dank stank.

03:12:55.000 Well, okay, you don't have to like the smell.

03:12:59.000 You know, I mean, that doesn't necessarily mean that's why he wants it illegal.

03:13:03.000 He just doesn't like the smell.

03:13:04.000 A lot of people don't like the smell.

03:13:06.000 But it's not legal there recreationally, right?

03:13:08.000 Not yet.

03:13:09.000 No, not yet.

03:13:09.000 No?

03:13:10.000 No.

03:13:10.000 It's not legal here either.

03:13:12.000 Would he sign the bill is the question, you know?

03:13:14.000 And it seems to me like he would, because he's a social conservative by and large, you know, like that's his perspective.

03:13:20.000 Another one is he, they had a vote in Florida, a direct vote on raising the minimum wage during the 2020 election.

03:13:26.000 And so Trump won the state, but 60% of Florida voters voted for a minimum wage increase.

03:13:33.000 They wanted to make it 15. And leading into that, DeSantis said, don't do that.

03:13:37.000 I'm against doing that.

03:13:39.000 Did he have a rationalization?

03:13:42.000 I mean, I didn't see if he did, but just the fact he's against it was a strike against him in my mind.

03:13:47.000 But the voters voted for it, and that is the law.

03:13:51.000 So, because they had the direct vote, and I don't know if he has any legal recourse, so it's becoming law, but he told them don't vote for it.

03:13:59.000 So that was a big issue.

03:14:00.000 Because I know you're a fan of legal weed, you're a fan of raising the minimum wage.

03:14:06.000 He's also a big Wall Street guy.

03:14:07.000 I mean, a lot of these Republicans, you don't have to look too far into the surface to find out they're all playing the same game.

03:14:14.000 He took $20 million from Wall Street.

03:14:16.000 He did $5.7 billion in tax cuts and giveaways to corporations.

03:14:21.000 Apparently 99% of companies in Florida pay no corporate income tax.

03:14:26.000 So it's one of the states that corporations go to sort of, you know, it's a field day over there.

03:14:32.000 And remember, he was feuding with Disney.

03:14:34.000 Remember when he was feuding with Disney? 0.97

03:14:35.000 And he was like, you know, you guys are fucking woke and this has got to stop. 0.86

03:14:39.000 But he let them keep a $578 million tax break at the same time. 0.96

03:14:42.000 And at that same time, he also did a $1 billion tax hike on regular Floridians with a new sales tax.

03:14:51.000 Well, the amount of business that Disney must be bringing into Florida is insane.

03:14:56.000 Right.

03:14:58.000 Which is all the reason they don't need more of a subsidy, right?

03:15:01.000 Yeah. 1.00

03:15:01.000 Like, let them fuck it. 1.00

03:15:02.000 They'll be able to swim. 1.00

03:15:03.000 They're not going to sink.

03:15:04.000 Like, let them be.

03:15:05.000 What do you think that is?

03:15:06.000 Do you think there's just some financial chicanery, some behind the scenes? 0.99

03:15:10.000 I think if you're the governor of Florida and you know how big Disney is...

03:15:14.000 Mm-hmm.

03:15:14.000 You might talk a game every now and then of like, yeah, we don't like these guys or whatever.

03:15:18.000 They're too woke.

03:15:19.000 But when push comes to shove, he's cutting the check.

03:15:21.000 I don't remember what that was in regard to, the woke thing.

03:15:23.000 I don't recall.

03:15:25.000 It was a very specific instance.

03:15:27.000 Yeah, I don't either.

03:15:28.000 I don't remember it either.

03:15:29.000 But he had a big fight with them, but ultimately he gave them their tax break.

03:15:33.000 And then the other thing is, so there's a big sugar cane industry in Florida.

03:15:37.000 And they lead to a lot of pollution because they do these things called burn fields.

03:15:42.000 It's part of the process involved with the sugarcane.

03:15:46.000 And he came in and shielded them from any legal accountability.

03:15:51.000 So people can't sue them over that.

03:15:54.000 Yeah.

03:15:54.000 And the Florida Republican Party took a $350,000 contribution from the sugarcane industry and then in turn he...

03:16:03.000 Protected them from legal liability.

03:16:05.000 And when you're saying pollution, there's particulates in the atmosphere because of the burning?

03:16:10.000 Yeah, they say that because of those sugarcane burn fields, there's increased risk of cancer and red tide.

03:16:17.000 Have you ever heard of red tide in Florida?

03:16:18.000 That's the ocean red tide?

03:16:20.000 Yeah, there's some weird ocean red tide thing.

03:16:22.000 Apparently, the burning of the sugarcane helps lead to that as well, along with, like you said, the particulate matter, which could lead to cancer.

03:16:31.000 The burning of it, that's like a common agricultural approach, right?

03:16:35.000 Where they do that to sort of revigorize the, that's not a word, but reinvigorate the soil, right?

03:16:43.000 The topsoil, is that what they're doing?

03:16:45.000 I mean, there's some industrial reason why they do it, but I think there was conversation around, hey, we got to regulate this, we have to make it, you know, we got to lower the cancer rate, we got to lower the red tide, we got to figure this out.

03:16:55.000 And there's a direct correlation between those burns and cancer instances?

03:17:00.000 Yeah.

03:17:00.000 There's a lot of health problems around those things, yeah.

03:17:05.000 He's quite the opposite of Bernie.

03:17:07.000 I think he's...

03:17:09.000 He's an establishment Republican who's good at PR, basically.

03:17:14.000 I think he's positioned himself—so there's two parts to politics.

03:17:17.000 There's politics and there's policy.

03:17:19.000 On the politics front, I think he's actually plotted his way around brilliantly, where, you know, he is the heir apparent to Donald Trump, and there's a chance he could even beat Donald Trump in a Republican primary.

03:17:30.000 And honestly, I think any Democrat should fear him over Trump in a general election.

03:17:34.000 I think even half-dead Joe Biden can defeat Trump again.

03:17:38.000 Really?

03:17:39.000 You think so?

03:17:39.000 Yeah, well, see, the problem is, Trump has siloed himself off, and he can't shut up about the 2020 election.

03:17:45.000 It's rigged, it's stolen, it's, you know, and it's, he comes across as whiny.

03:17:49.000 And the Republicans, under his leadership, got wiped out in the 2018 midterms, they got wiped out in the 2020 main election, and they got wiped out in the 2022 midterms.

03:17:57.000 Well, people either love him or they hate him.

03:18:00.000 And I don't think there's as much polarity when it comes to DeSantis.

03:18:04.000 That's right.

03:18:04.000 DeSantis has a much better chance of gaining back some of the moderates that kind of fled.

03:18:09.000 Yeah.

03:18:09.000 They just want conservative economic policies.

03:18:12.000 Right.

03:18:13.000 And so I think he would be a good general election candidate, but in terms of how he governs, it would be George W. Bush, it would be George H.W. Bush, it would be Trump, it'd be all the same stuff.

03:18:25.000 Tax cuts for the wealthy, super-serve Wall Street, keep the military-industrial complex going.

03:18:30.000 Who do you like if Biden drops out?

03:18:34.000 The only person I'm interested in at the moment is Marianne Williamson.

03:18:38.000 Because there's some chatter about she might primary Joe Biden.

03:18:42.000 And I would love that.

03:18:44.000 Because, look, the problem with Biden...

03:18:47.000 There's a lot of problems with Biden.

03:18:48.000 But, like, ideologically, the problem is...

03:18:51.000 He has no grand vision, right?

03:18:52.000 Like, there is no, here's what I'm trying to do, here's what I'm trying to get to, here's the ideal.

03:18:56.000 It's very, like, I call him a status quo manager.

03:18:58.000 It's like, I'll do some tweaks around the edges here and there, and we'll make some things a little bit better here and there.

03:19:02.000 But he's also dead, right?

03:19:04.000 Like, he's a zombie.

03:19:05.000 And then you have Marianne Williamson, who I think she... 0.99

03:19:09.000 Would run in the spirit of FDR. She would say we got to go back to the Democratic Party used to be the Workers' Party.

03:19:14.000 It used to look out for people and we need to get back to that.

03:19:16.000 So we need to do things like universal health care.

03:19:18.000 We need to do things like universal education.

03:19:20.000 We need to have higher wages. 0.59

03:19:23.000 And that's more my politics.

03:19:25.000 So right now she's the only one I'm interested in.

03:19:26.000 There's a decent chance that she challenges Biden.

03:19:28.000 And I think that'll be interesting for this reason.

03:19:32.000 Polls show over 60% of Democrats are like, we're done.

03:19:36.000 We're done with this.

03:19:37.000 Come on.

03:19:39.000 We've got to move on from this.

03:19:40.000 Do you buy into this idea that that's one of the reasons why they keep finding these classified documents?

03:19:46.000 Oh, see, I don't...

03:19:47.000 That they're trying to push him out?

03:19:48.000 I think it's incompetence, to be honest.

03:19:49.000 Really?

03:19:50.000 I think you have a...

03:19:50.000 It's a fun theory.

03:19:52.000 It's interesting to think about, right?

03:19:54.000 But I think the Democratic establishment kind of realizes that they need him because Kamala's worse.

03:20:02.000 Yeah.

03:20:02.000 Which is wild.

03:20:04.000 Wild, right?

03:20:05.000 Kamala's worse.

03:20:06.000 Mayor Pete is worse.

03:20:07.000 Yeah.

03:20:07.000 These are people who are more unpopular than Biden.

03:20:09.000 Yeah.

03:20:09.000 They would rather take a half-dead Joe Biden than take one of those and roll the dice.

03:20:14.000 What about Newsom?

03:20:16.000 So, Newsom is plotting like he wants to run, but he would never primary Biden.

03:20:20.000 He's a good little Democrat, and he'll fall in line and go through the process, and he'll think 2028 is my time.

03:20:25.000 That's what he'll think.

03:20:26.000 But, you know, a lot of these people are secretly waiting in the wings for Biden to croak.

03:20:30.000 Which could happen any second.

03:20:31.000 Absolutely, it could happen.

03:20:33.000 And then Newsom would run in 2024. But he's trying to, you know, he's starting to edge his way in there.

03:20:41.000 And again, for him, I think he would have a better chance than a Kamala or a Mayor Pete, but I still think he's got the slimy politician feel to it.

03:20:48.000 There's a lot of stuff to pick apart in his record, as you accurately pointed out.

03:20:51.000 I mean, there's just...

03:20:53.000 Look, this is the era of the outsider.

03:20:55.000 It's the era of the outsider. 0.96

03:20:56.000 Trump ran as an outsider.

03:20:57.000 He won.

03:20:58.000 Biden was the return to normal guy.

03:21:00.000 Like, okay, Trump's guy's getting a little crazy.

03:21:02.000 Let's go back in this direction.

03:21:03.000 But it's still the era of the outsider.

03:21:05.000 People still want something fresh, something different, something from outside of the political system to come in and bring about real change.

03:21:11.000 It's not like politics used to be.

03:21:12.000 Where it's like, if you're the most buttoned up, if you're the most clean, if it's your turn, then it's your turn. 1.00

03:21:16.000 Now it's more like, holy shit, this is fucking crazy. 0.99

03:21:19.000 The whole hell's breaking loose. 0.99

03:21:20.000 Let's get some people with good ideas in there who are actually smart.

03:21:24.000 Alright.

03:21:25.000 Well, listen, man, it's always a pleasure talking to you, brother.

03:21:28.000 Always a pleasure talking to you.

03:21:29.000 Tell everybody how they can consume your program, both programs.

03:21:34.000 Spotify, I'll say, first of all.

03:21:35.000 Everybody check out the Kyle Klinski Show.

03:21:37.000 It is on Spotify.

03:21:38.000 Check me out over there.

03:21:39.000 I'm with Joe over on Spotify.

03:21:41.000 It's fun.

03:21:42.000 YouTube is Secular Talk, youtube.com slash secular talk.

03:21:46.000 And then we also have Crystal Kyle and Friends over on Substack, where Crystal Ball and I, this is my Spotify page here.

03:21:51.000 Crystal Ball and I do a show together.

03:21:53.000 We do an interview show together, and we bring people on and we talk to them, people we're interested in.

03:21:57.000 And that's over on Substack.

03:21:58.000 And you guys are doing a live show in Austin.

03:22:00.000 Correct, yeah.

03:22:01.000 So we have the Paramount Theatre tomorrow night, and I think we're sold out.

03:22:05.000 We might have maybe a couple tickets left, but if you're in the Austin area...

03:22:09.000 Come to the Paramount Theater tomorrow.

03:22:11.000 They're going to get this tomorrow, so that would be Friday, February 3rd.

03:22:15.000 Correct.

03:22:15.000 Today.

03:22:15.000 Tonight.

03:22:16.000 Yes, tonight.

03:22:16.000 Tonight.

03:22:17.000 So it's going to be myself, Sagar, Crystal, and then Marshall.

03:22:21.000 And it'll be fun.

03:22:21.000 We've got some stuff.

03:22:22.000 We're lined up for a debate.

03:22:23.000 We enjoy sparring, going back and forth on some stuff.

03:22:25.000 Beautiful.

03:22:26.000 You know?

03:22:27.000 All right, brother.

03:22:27.000 Thanks for having me, man.

03:22:28.000 I appreciate it.

03:22:28.000 Appreciate you.

03:22:29.000 Always good to see you.

03:22:30.000 All right.

03:22:31.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 03, 2023

Joe Rogan Experience #1935 - Kyle Kulinski

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