The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1936 - Krystal Ball & Saagar Enjeti

00:00:12.000 Alright, now the first time we did this, my hair was fucked up the whole time and another one of y'all's told me about it, so I hope we're better friends now. 0.84

00:00:22.000 You just don't say a word.

00:00:24.000 Is that recorded?

00:00:25.000 Did you record that?

00:00:26.000 We should leave that part in.

00:00:27.000 I was just like, you look beautiful, Crystal. 0.99

00:00:29.000 I watched it afterwards and I was like, what the fuck? 1.00

00:00:32.000 Mine was fucked up too, you know? 0.99

00:00:32.000 Okay, number one, it's different. 0.99

00:00:34.000 Number two, I had like, this piece was like protruding.

00:00:38.000 I've been bald, like shaved head for like 13 years now or something like that, so I don't even think about it. 0.99

00:00:44.000 Like, your hair's fucked up. 0.99

00:00:45.000 I'm like, who cares? 0.99

00:00:46.000 Yeah.

00:00:47.000 I get it, though.

00:00:49.000 I get it.

00:00:49.000 Sorry.

00:00:50.000 It was a real betrayal, but it's okay.

00:00:51.000 I'm so sorry.

00:00:52.000 We're moving forward.

00:00:53.000 It's really on him, because you and I were just getting to know each other then, so it was really his fault.

00:00:59.000 You guys are a very unusual combination.

00:01:02.000 It's very funny, because having someone who's on the right and having someone who's on the left, it's usually some sort of a formulaic thing.

00:01:10.000 You know what I think of Hannity and Combs?

00:01:13.000 Yes.

00:01:13.000 Do you remember that?

00:01:14.000 Yeah.

00:01:14.000 Oh, God!

00:01:15.000 Well, because it was fake.

00:01:16.000 That was a thing.

00:01:17.000 Exactly.

00:01:18.000 It's kind of hard to describe what we do, because if you say, like, you know, we're on the right and we're on the left, it does sound like this sort of thing that, like...

00:01:27.000 Little bit country.

00:01:27.000 I'm a little bit rock and roll.

00:01:29.000 Remember that?

00:01:29.000 Right, yes.

00:01:30.000 Or, like, that terrible CNN show, Crossfire, is the other thing.

00:01:34.000 Who was on that one?

00:01:36.000 Well, the original one was Tucker.

00:01:37.000 Paul Begala.

00:01:38.000 Paul Begala. 1.00

00:01:39.000 Fuck, there were two words. 0.99

00:01:40.000 And then they did the reboot of it, which was... 0.99

00:01:44.000 Tucker was on the right and Tucker even back then.

00:01:48.000 And Tucker used to have bow tie on.

00:01:50.000 That was when he had the bow tie.

00:01:52.000 He's never lived down.

00:01:53.000 People still, in their head, I feel like that's the picture they get of Tucker, even though he hasn't worn it.

00:02:00.000 But he's just like seared into people's memories that this is what this man wears.

00:02:06.000 There's something about bow ties.

00:02:08.000 There's Crossfire.

00:02:09.000 Oh, that's Carville?

00:02:11.000 And there's the infamous Jon Stewart when he just destroyed that.

00:02:16.000 Yeah, and then they did the remake with Newt Gingrich.

00:02:19.000 Remember that?

00:02:20.000 Oh, and Elliot Spitzer was on there, right?

00:02:23.000 No, no, that was another terrible show.

00:02:26.000 So Newt Gingrich and Van Jones.

00:02:28.000 That was Stephanie Cutter, who was one of the most unlikable people ever created it. 1.00

00:02:34.000 And then Essie Cuff is actually a long time.

00:02:37.000 She and I were at MSNBC together.

00:02:40.000 So she and I are friends.

00:02:41.000 So I can't say anything bad about her.

00:02:42.000 She's a very nice person.

00:02:43.000 I love her.

00:02:45.000 I don't know who that other lady is. 1.00

00:02:47.000 Stephanie Cutter?

00:02:48.000 She works for Obama.

00:02:51.000 Was she a Hillary person? 1.00

00:02:53.000 I can't remember.

00:02:54.000 It was bad.

00:02:57.000 Anyway, that's not what we're doing, I hope.

00:02:59.000 No, you're not doing that at all.

00:03:01.000 But what is really fascinating is that having these long-form discussions like you guys do, uncensored and undirected, without an executive leaning over your shoulder and telling you what to do, It's the best way to discuss things.

00:03:17.000 And when I get to hear from a reasonable person on the left and a reasonable person on the right who respect each other, it gives me hope.

00:03:25.000 Like, hey, we can all get along.

00:03:27.000 Like, we can sort through what's good and what's bad.

00:03:31.000 It's possible.

00:03:32.000 That is actually the core goal of the show.

00:03:36.000 Because, I mean, we are living through incredibly, like, politically fraught times where you have a lot of people whose whole business model is to persuade you that, like, half the country hates you and is destroying the country and it's existential and we're headed to civil war.

00:03:51.000 And so I feel like if Sagar and I can, you know, agree on some things, which we do, and have debates on topics that are, you know, difficult and tense and fraught and be able to do that day after day in a way that is respectful, that's like, not just trying to score points,

00:04:07.000 but actually trying to learn from each other.

00:04:09.000 You know, I hope it makes a small difference in the political atmosphere.

00:04:14.000 Yeah, I mean, what I'm most proud of in our analytics is half the audience is genuinely right and half the audience is genuinely left.

00:04:21.000 And one of the pitches that we give our people, we're like, hey, if you're gonna support us, you're not gonna agree all the time.

00:04:26.000 So you're almost conditioning people to be like, hey, this is a message that I'm buying into.

00:04:30.000 And I think the most impactful, sometimes you don't meet people or whatever and they're like, man, I watched a show with my dad and I'm just like, dad, Crystal's what I believe.

00:04:38.000 And dad is like, I'm with Sagar on some things.

00:04:40.000 And then we sit down and we talk about it afterwards.

00:04:43.000 We're building that for people.

00:04:44.000 That's so important, man.

00:04:45.000 It's so important.

00:04:47.000 Because that is one of the dangers in independent media.

00:04:50.000 There's a lot that's so exciting about independent media right now.

00:04:54.000 I mean, you see the traditional media is just like dying.

00:04:56.000 The ratings are failing.

00:04:57.000 People are abandoning them in droves.

00:05:00.000 Obviously, trust has completely fallen off a cliff.

00:05:02.000 But there are some pitfalls in independent media, too.

00:05:05.000 And one of them is that you develop an audience that is one ideology that just wants to hear one thing and is there to hear what they already think about things.

00:05:14.000 And so I think because of the fact that we have different opinions and our different political ideologies, that has sort of protected us against having an audience that is there for any one particular idea.

00:05:28.000 And, you know, we'll see sometimes, like, people go, oh, you guys said this and that.

00:05:32.000 We disagree with you.

00:05:33.000 And it's like, you know what?

00:05:34.000 If this isn't the thing for you, you owe it to yourself to go somewhere else where you're going to hear every day, I guess, whatever it is that you want to be told from within your bubble.

00:05:42.000 Well, I think you guys have reached a point where I have to give you the speech.

00:05:46.000 And it's like, you've got to stop paying attention to the comments.

00:05:50.000 It's so true. 0.84

00:05:51.000 I've been giving this speech for like three years.

00:05:53.000 I've been giving this speech.

00:05:53.000 I'm telling you, I'm right.

00:05:55.000 I'm right on this.

00:05:56.000 You are right.

00:05:57.000 Kyle actually preaches this to me all the time, too.

00:06:00.000 No, Kyle's indoctrinated.

00:06:02.000 Yeah, he's fully bought in.

00:06:04.000 He's fully on board with the philosophy.

00:06:05.000 It's so true, though. 0.98

00:06:06.000 It's true.

00:06:07.000 Yeah.

00:06:08.000 It's like you feel like you should engage with your fans and everything like that, but you just got to tell them, look, I love you guys. 0.99

00:06:14.000 Just, I'm not reading your shit. 0.99

00:06:15.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:06:16.000 I love you.

00:06:17.000 I love you.

00:06:17.000 I do this for you.

00:06:19.000 I hope you enjoy it.

00:06:19.000 I'm happy that you enjoy it.

00:06:21.000 I'm not reading your shit. 0.99

00:06:22.000 The hardest is whenever it's people who pay, help support the show, and they'll be like, I pay $10 a month, and I pay you to represent me. 0.99

00:06:30.000 I'm just like, all right, man.

00:06:30.000 Then maybe you should cancel, because that's actually not what we're here for.

00:06:33.000 Not reading that.

00:06:34.000 I'm not engaging. 1.00

00:06:35.000 I'm not fuck you and you. 1.00

00:06:37.000 I'm not going to do that. 1.00

00:06:39.000 God, that shit will get in your head, too. 0.99

00:06:41.000 It will mess with you in terms of just your clarity of thoughts. 1.00

00:06:45.000 100%.

00:06:45.000 I mean, the trade-off is sometimes people do have good critiques, valid critiques, good ideas, whatever.

00:06:52.000 100%.

00:06:52.000 You know, there is a trade-off there.

00:06:54.000 You're missing some of that. 0.99

00:06:55.000 Ultimately, I also buy into the Rogan philosophy of just don't read the shit. 0.99

00:06:59.000 Well, as you guys get bigger and bigger, the numbers become more and more untenable. 1.00

00:07:05.000 It just becomes ridiculous.

00:07:06.000 Yeah, it's true, too. 0.81

00:07:07.000 You can't engage.

00:07:08.000 And it's also, we are creatures of community.

00:07:12.000 And when there is any negativity, that negativity gets highlighted so much more so than positivity.

00:07:20.000 And by the way, you don't need positivity.

00:07:22.000 You're good.

00:07:23.000 You guys know you're good.

00:07:24.000 You guys, you know what I'm saying?

00:07:25.000 Like, you're objective.

00:07:26.000 Neither one of you is crazy.

00:07:29.000 Sometimes.

00:07:30.000 Yeah, but you don't have a distorted perception of what you do.

00:07:34.000 You guys do great.

00:07:35.000 You do great work.

00:07:36.000 You try hard. 1.00

00:07:37.000 You can't, like, those little negative ones, they will get in your fucking head. 1.00

00:07:42.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:07:42.000 Because we're creatures of community. 0.99

00:07:44.000 And that person that you don't know that lives in fucking Indiana that is on meth and is, like, really mad because, you know, the progressive in her district doesn't represent her views. 1.00

00:07:53.000 And she's, like, typing the meanest fucking shit. 1.00

00:07:57.000 Like, even though you know that that's nonsense, this is probably a crazy person, that's in your head now. 1.00

00:08:02.000 You know, the toughest thing actually was when we, and by doing the show, is actually by disconnecting from the broader, like, because in traditional media, the way it works is like, we used to go on Fox.

00:08:12.000 When you're in Fox, it's like an ecosystem.

00:08:14.000 You're in the green room, there's all the other conservatives that are around you, and then there's all these other people who work in conservative ink, like conservative world.

00:08:21.000 And you can't dissent.

00:08:22.000 And actually, the best, most rewarding part of our show is we're not connected to the system anymore. 0.99

00:08:27.000 I'm like, I don't give a shit. 0.99

00:08:28.000 Like, they're like, I don't really appreciate, you know, Trump's person or whatever, some Trump flacky. 0.99

00:08:32.000 He's like, you didn't say this about President Trump. 0.99

00:08:34.000 I'm like, I don't give a fuck. 0.99

00:08:34.000 I'm like, what are you gonna do? 0.99

00:08:35.000 You're gonna take me on Fox?

00:08:36.000 I don't care.

00:08:37.000 I don't care.

00:08:37.000 I don't actually want to be on Fox.

00:08:38.000 I'm like, I could be on my own show.

00:08:40.000 But being disconnected from the broader DC machine, it totally frees you up for conversation on Stop the Ste- anything.

00:08:47.000 Anything that's controversial. 0.99

00:08:49.000 And I can just be like, I think this is bullshit. 0.99

00:08:50.000 I truly, 100% guys, I believe this is bullshit. 0.99

00:08:53.000 I see commentators out there who I know- Don't believe what they're saying. 0.99

00:08:57.000 And are saying it because they have to.

00:08:59.000 They have to maintain their context.

00:09:00.000 They have to maintain their salary.

00:09:01.000 That's the corruption.

00:09:02.000 That's horrible.

00:09:03.000 And that's like a self-imposed corruption if you're doing that online.

00:09:07.000 Yes.

00:09:08.000 And some people are doing it online.

00:09:09.000 And you guys are not.

00:09:11.000 And I really appreciate it.

00:09:12.000 I know that I'm watching you guys.

00:09:14.000 I'm getting real opinions.

00:09:15.000 I'm getting well-thought-out, informed opinions.

00:09:20.000 And you guys are going to be cool to each other.

00:09:23.000 I mean, we do take it really seriously.

00:09:26.000 And I think we take it this year even more so than ever.

00:09:31.000 You know, our biggest podcast download and our biggest YouTube numbers last year were right when Russia invaded Ukraine.

00:09:39.000 And, you know, you talk about a high stakes situation where it's It's very difficult to sort through all the propaganda to really figure out what's going on.

00:09:47.000 And, you know, we were trying our best to do that in real time.

00:09:50.000 And the fact that so many people came to us to try to understand this conflict and what the U.S.'s role in it, what it should be, that really meant a lot, number one.

00:10:01.000 But it also, I think, put on both of our shoulders like a real sense of, all right.

00:10:06.000 We've got to make sure we're on top of our show.

00:10:07.000 We've got to read as much as we possibly can.

00:10:09.000 We need to go back and look at, like, Russian nuclear doctrine and just go as deep as we possibly, you know, are capable of on this topic.

00:10:16.000 Because there are a lot of people who tell us we're it in terms of the news that they consume. 0.51

00:10:22.000 So we have shifted to focusing, you know, we still do, like, fun and stupid and silly topics or whatever and indulge whatever our little hobby horse interests are.

00:10:30.000 But we've shifted the program somewhat to do more Yeah, I think.

00:10:55.000 You're going to have to have that kind of serious coverage of hard news events that people feel like they can trust what you're presenting them. 0.98

00:11:04.000 And listen, we say all the time, sometimes we're going to fuck up. 0.96

00:11:08.000 Sometimes we're going to be wrong about something. 0.99

00:11:09.000 We're going to predict something.

00:11:10.000 It doesn't happen, whatever.

00:11:11.000 That is going to happen 100% of the time.

00:11:14.000 But what you can count on us for is we're always going to come back.

00:11:16.000 We're going to correct it.

00:11:17.000 We're going to own up to the mistakes.

00:11:18.000 And we are trying from the beginning our very best to sort through what the truth of the situation is.

00:11:24.000 Yeah, every six months I do a monologue.

00:11:25.000 I'm like, here's everything I got wrong.

00:11:27.000 I was like, totally wrong about this.

00:11:28.000 People love it, too.

00:11:29.000 Totally wrong about that.

00:11:30.000 I'm like, here's my thought process at the time.

00:11:32.000 I'm like, I didn't think this was going to happen.

00:11:33.000 But man, Ukraine has been a doozy. 0.99

00:11:35.000 I'm like, we've said some controversial shit over the last couple of years. 0.99

00:11:38.000 I've never experienced a level of pushback than going against the Ukraine narrative. 0.97

00:11:42.000 That is like, number one, the most controversial topic I have ever seen discussed yet in politics.

00:11:49.000 My favorite moment of the beginning of the Ukraine conflict was Candace Owens.

00:11:56.000 Having a Twitter battle with the New York Times.

00:11:59.000 Oh, yes.

00:12:00.000 Where the New York Times says to Candace Owens, like, where are you getting your information from that they're corrupt in Ukraine? 1.00

00:12:07.000 And she goes, your newspaper?

00:12:10.000 And then she puts all these different links that show all the different stories from as recently as 2017 that's talked about the immense corruption. 0.99

00:12:19.000 What the fuck is wrong with you guys? 0.99

00:12:21.000 You're supposed to be the New York Times! 1.00

00:12:24.000 This is one of the primary ways that we've been gaslit in this conflict.

00:12:29.000 And it just came out, I don't know if you saw this, you probably did, that Zelensky fired a bunch of his cabinet officials over corruption.

00:12:38.000 And it was like, they were taking these fancy vacations to Europe.

00:12:42.000 One of them was accused of basically overcharging the military for meals.

00:12:49.000 The amount that we have sent to Ukraine, propping up not only their military, but their government, their economy, etc., when they're taking that money, that's coming directly out of the U.S. taxpayer pocket.

00:13:00.000 And nobody reported on any of this until Zelensky fired people.

00:13:05.000 And then we were allowed to be like, yeah, there's some problems with corruption there, maybe a little bit.

00:13:09.000 Maybe we should worry a little bit about where the weapons are going and what exactly is happening there.

00:13:13.000 But before then, you weren't allowed to say it.

00:13:14.000 Even better, the Times actually changed its headline.

00:13:17.000 They were like, Ukraine goes corruption drive.

00:13:19.000 And it was like, Zelensky aims to stamp out corruption just to make it a little bit less like the appearance.

00:13:24.000 I have some fun numbers for everybody.

00:13:26.000 This is from a past monologue I've gone.

00:13:29.000 USAID currently at $100 billion is double what the entire rest of the world has given to Ukraine in one year surpasses what we gave the Afghan military in 20 years.

00:13:39.000 The total amount to Ukraine now exceeds all US military aid To the country of South Vietnam between 1956 and 1975. Wow.

00:13:48.000 A hundred billion dollars.

00:13:51.000 And listen, I think what Russia did was wrong. 0.58

00:13:55.000 I think it's an atrocity.

00:13:56.000 I think the Ukrainian cause is just. 0.98

00:13:59.000 But the total lack of debate, the lack of willingness to say, like, hey, when we got into this, what you sold to the American people is you're going to provide defensive weapons only so Ukraine could defend itself.

00:14:12.000 I think?

00:14:34.000 No debate. 0.95

00:14:35.000 And that's the thing that, you know, however you feel about the Ukraine conflict and, you know, the buildup to it and how we got here and all of those things, I think at the very base level, the total lack of an ability to have dissent and debate and understand the potential consequences of what we're doing That is fucking terrifying,

00:14:55.000 because we are talking about a nuclear-armed superpower that we are engaged in a proxy war with, and you're basically not allowed to say, hey, how does this end?

00:15:04.000 What do we need to do to try to get to negotiated settlement here?

00:15:08.000 How do we avoid having a conflict with this nuclear-armed superpower?

00:15:12.000 World War III seems like a bad thing to have on the table right now.

00:15:16.000 And you guys are one of the few voices of reason that will say that, that agree on both sides of the fence.

00:15:24.000 And this is a thing that I... There's a lot of videos out now.

00:15:28.000 And I don't know if these people get these videos, but I get them.

00:15:32.000 I get these videos of horrible war encounters in Russia and Ukraine.

00:15:39.000 It's horrendous.

00:15:42.000 And it brings me to this thing that I... I think about a lot.

00:15:46.000 Because I think about things that other people do for a living and their jobs, and I think about, like, they live in a world that I don't understand.

00:15:53.000 You know, there's, like, I'm fascinated by professional chess players.

00:15:57.000 They live in a world that I don't understand because I don't play chess.

00:15:59.000 I kind of know how the pieces move, but I've really only played, like, maybe ten times my whole life.

00:16:05.000 There's a thing that people have.

00:16:08.000 It's a quality of being a human being.

00:16:10.000 You only know what you know.

00:16:12.000 And other things become like these sort of like ethereal narratives.

00:16:17.000 They're not necessarily real and war is one of them. 0.76

00:16:20.000 Yes.

00:16:21.000 War is one of them. 0.98

00:16:22.000 There's a thing that people, the way my friends who've served talk about war is so Titanically different than the way people who ideologically support or disavow it. 0.93

00:16:36.000 Like, you don't know what the fuck you're talking about if you say, there's no need for a military. 1.00

00:16:40.000 You're crazy. 1.00

00:16:41.000 We are going to get subjugated. 1.00

00:16:43.000 Someone will come here with men with guns. 1.00

00:16:46.000 If you take away all the guns that everybody has and no more military, we're fucked. 0.99

00:16:50.000 And if you don't think that, it's because you've never gone to the dark parts of the world. 0.99

00:16:54.000 Or you've never gone on Telegram.

00:16:55.000 I'll send you some videos.

00:16:57.000 I saw a guy get killed with a hammer yesterday.

00:16:59.000 Jesus.

00:17:00.000 This is so important for people to understand, which is that we are 75 years removed from what war on the European continent actually looks like.

00:17:08.000 One lifetime. 0.85

00:17:09.000 I've been on fucking LiveLeak since I was like 12, which is probably bad for you. 1.00

00:17:12.000 Terrible for you. 1.00

00:17:13.000 Terrible for you.

00:17:15.000 My girlfriend's like, what are you watching?

00:17:18.000 I'm like, what?

00:17:18.000 And she's like a beheading or something like that.

00:17:20.000 My wife will come into my office and I have to pause videos.

00:17:23.000 And I'm like, you really want to see this?

00:17:25.000 They always say yes, but then they can't handle it.

00:17:28.000 I can't handle it.

00:17:29.000 I don't do well with blood. 0.99

00:17:31.000 The point, though, is that, you know, we have to try and convey this to people and just say, like, hey, when you're on Twitter and you're like, hey, you know, fuck you, you know, anybody who is against the narrative, you're like, this is not a joke. 0.99

00:17:40.000 Like, hundreds of thousands of Russians are dead. 0.98

00:17:43.000 Hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians are dead.

00:17:45.000 Millions are displaced.

00:17:46.000 We have no idea what the endgame is like.

00:17:49.000 And, you know, just what Crystal was saying.

00:17:51.000 I have this thing where, you know, the Fight Club line, like, on a long enough timeline.

00:17:54.000 I'm like, on a long enough timeline, Ukraine is getting everything that it wanted. 0.73

00:17:58.000 So originally it was like, no fly zone.

00:17:59.000 And Biden was like, I'm being responsible.

00:18:01.000 I'm saying no.

00:18:02.000 Well, first they ruled out Patriot missile systems.

00:18:04.000 Patriot missile systems are now on the way to Ukraine.

00:18:06.000 They ruled out tanks.

00:18:07.000 Now tanks are on the way to Ukraine.

00:18:08.000 Right now, there's an article talking about how F-16s, they're thinking about sending...

00:18:12.000 Pentagon, F-16s.

00:18:14.000 Biden says no now!

00:18:15.000 Right, exactly.

00:18:16.000 He was saying no to tanks like five days before they sent tanks.

00:18:20.000 And here's the thing.

00:18:21.000 He doesn't remember that though.

00:18:22.000 Yeah, you're right.

00:18:24.000 You gotta dig deep too.

00:18:25.000 Like, for example, originally we were like, we just want Ukraine to take back What it originally lost. 0.78

00:18:30.000 And listen, if I was Ukrainian, I'd be pushing for the same thing.

00:18:33.000 Absolutely.

00:18:33.000 I have 100% sympathy.

00:18:34.000 They are not in the wrong here.

00:18:35.000 They've been invaded by a foreign and aggressive power.

00:18:38.000 That said, like, we got to think about what's best for us.

00:18:41.000 Right now, there's a New York Times article about US warms to helping Ukraine take back Crimea. 0.97

00:18:46.000 I'm like, well, hold on a fucking second. 0.94

00:18:48.000 I'm not saying it's just that Russia took Crimea in 2013, but they formally annexed it. 0.99

00:18:53.000 And if you ask people in Russia, Crimea is Russia.

00:18:55.000 So if they use if Ukraine uses a Pentagon provided F-16 to bomb Crimea, now what?

00:19:01.000 Like now that's a violation of Russian nuclear doctrine.

00:19:05.000 They've updated their nuclear doctrine, by the way, to not even say it's defensive.

00:19:08.000 They can say they can use it in any capacity that Vladimir Putin wants to.

00:19:12.000 That was a significant change.

00:19:14.000 If you look in the history of the way that the great superpowers actually consider their own nuclear first strike use, it's something that is considered ironclad and then boom, it changes like that.

00:19:24.000 You're not even going to hear about this.

00:19:25.000 And I was heartened a while back when there were some leaks that came out of the Biden administration.

00:19:31.000 That he, at a donor event in San Francisco or something, said basically, we've got to make sure we avoid World War III. I'm paraphrasing.

00:19:40.000 But he was like, we've got to avoid nuclear war.

00:19:43.000 We've got to avoid World War III. And I was like, OK, good. 0.94

00:19:46.000 He's thinking about that.

00:19:53.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:20:00.000 Oh, Jesus.

00:20:09.000 And it's like, okay, number one...

00:20:11.000 Was there a timeline before they could press the button?

00:20:13.000 Exactly.

00:20:14.000 Oh, they didn't blow up the whole world yet, so we should be fine.

00:20:17.000 Oh, we're fine.

00:20:17.000 I mean, that's insane, number one.

00:20:19.000 And number two, the idea that Russia hasn't escalated in response to our actions is just not true.

00:20:26.000 They've been striking critical energy infrastructure, including, you know, in and around Kyiv, which was an escalation.

00:20:32.000 They went through with a conscription that there, you know, was very politically dicey for Putin.

00:20:37.000 There's rumors that they may go through with another draft.

00:20:40.000 So the idea that they just like took all of this lying down didn't escalate is a fantasy to start with.

00:20:46.000 But it's incredibly dangerous and foolish to think just because they didn't push the nuclear button yet that, oh, it's all fine and he's just full of it.

00:20:53.000 Thank God there's people like you guys out there, because there's so many people that they have Ukraine in the same category of importance and significance as they do climate change.

00:21:05.000 Climate change, which is a real thing, but it's a politically divisive alleyway where you're not allowed to veer from the course and even look at any kind of science.

00:21:15.000 It's the same thing with Ukraine.

00:21:17.000 A support for Ukraine is undeniable.

00:21:20.000 You must put it in your Twitter bio.

00:21:22.000 And you guys are saying, you're not saying don't support Ukraine, but you're saying, look where this is going.

00:21:27.000 Do you understand what this is? 0.83

00:21:28.000 Because you can't just openly support something you don't understand without a comprehensive view of what the fuck the factors are and how it got to be that way in the first place. 0.59

00:21:37.000 And you're not going to hear that in a five minute clip on mainstream news. 0.74

00:21:42.000 You're just not going to.

00:21:43.000 It's so important for us to internalize that message.

00:21:45.000 We're not saying we hate Ukraine.

00:21:47.000 We're not saying we don't even support Ukraine.

00:21:49.000 The Ukrainian cause is just. 1.00

00:21:50.000 What we're saying is, what about our interests?

00:21:53.000 There are interests that supersede Ukraine.

00:21:55.000 If I was Ukrainian, I would do exactly what they were doing. 1.00

00:21:58.000 But guess what?

00:21:59.000 Ukraine does not exist without the United States. 0.68

00:22:01.000 We provide the vast majority of the military there for the diplomacy perspective.

00:22:05.000 If we cut off military weapons to them tomorrow, that's it.

00:22:08.000 Done.

00:22:08.000 They literally are forced to the negotiating table.

00:22:11.000 I'm not even saying we should do that.

00:22:12.000 I'm saying, what is the endgame?

00:22:14.000 And, you know, in my neighborhood, there's more Ukraine flags than there are American flags.

00:22:17.000 It's like Ukraine flag, gay pride flag, no American flag. 0.99

00:22:20.000 But then it's like, okay, if you go to those people and if we would just say what they said, they say, this is disgusting. 0.96

00:22:25.000 This is Russian propaganda. 0.57

00:22:26.000 It's up to the Ukrainians for when they want to stop. 1.00

00:22:29.000 And I said, yeah, I completely agree.

00:22:30.000 But it's also up to us for whatever we stop providing them weapons.

00:22:34.000 We're like, hey, if you want to defend this part of your territory, that's totally fine.

00:22:39.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:22:56.000 The first year of every Russian conflict is a total shitshow. 0.93

00:22:58.000 If you look at Finland, if you look at the first year of Hitler's invasion, even going all the way back to Napoleon and some of the Tsar's campaigns before that, they lose a shit ton of people. 0.94

00:23:07.000 It looks like a complete mass.

00:23:08.000 They fire a bunch of generals, all of this.

00:23:10.000 And then what do they do?

00:23:11.000 They use their vast...

00:23:13.000 The Russian Colossus is known out of that for a reason because they have a shitload of people. 1.00

00:23:17.000 They have a lot of military materiel.

00:23:19.000 They amass it and they throw it at them.

00:23:21.000 And so...

00:23:22.000 People are like, you know, Sager, Crystal, like what you guys are saying will be valid, but Ukraine is winning.

00:23:26.000 Look, we are barely a year into this.

00:23:29.000 One year into the First World War, I could make the easy case that Germany was going to win the First World War. 0.89

00:23:33.000 Second World War, I could easily make the case the Nazis were going to win. 0.99

00:23:36.000 If I go back to Civil War, I could easily make a case the Confederates were going to win. 0.99

00:23:40.000 All three of those, it didn't happen.

00:23:42.000 Why?

00:23:42.000 Because these things go on for a long time.

00:23:45.000 You have no idea what it is.

00:23:48.000 And one of the reasons that many of those conflicts, first and two, went on and ultimately came to the conclusion they were, was because millions of lives were lost.

00:23:56.000 And the whole point from those conflicts, if you look at the way that people talked, was we have to learn the lesson.

00:24:01.000 We have to learn the lesson, but it's been 75 years, and now this is all a game.

00:24:05.000 This is a tweet that people are saying about Ukraine, but it says real-world consequences.

00:24:09.000 That's it.

00:24:10.000 That's it, exactly.

00:24:10.000 And the total lack of an ability to have a reasoned debate without just being, like, smeared as a propagandist.

00:24:16.000 Yes.

00:24:17.000 Again, don't read the comments.

00:24:19.000 It is a terrifying moment.

00:24:21.000 And, you know, there's a couple things that do give me some heart, which is, number one, even though, like, I can't really blame the people who are just, who can't understand seeing it another way, because the propaganda that is coming from every network, really,

00:24:36.000 like, almost across the board...

00:24:38.000 It's very strong and it's very hard to avoid that.

00:24:41.000 So I have sympathy for that perspective.

00:24:43.000 But even so, a poll just came out that had, from NBC News, they buried this at the very end of their write-up of the poll.

00:24:50.000 Public's now 50-50 split on continuing aid to Ukraine.

00:24:54.000 So people are questioning, even though they're being fed so much propaganda.

00:25:00.000 I think that is a credit to the rise of independent media. 0.70

00:25:03.000 I think it's also a credit to the fact that they don't fucking trust the mainstream friends anymore.

00:25:07.000 But because of independent media, the trust is informed, or the lack of trust, rather. 0.85

00:25:12.000 Right.

00:25:13.000 It's not just knee jerk.

00:25:14.000 I hope.

00:25:15.000 I mean, that's my hope looking at those numbers.

00:25:17.000 I think your hope is 100% correct.

00:25:19.000 I think you're right.

00:25:20.000 I think you guys are very important.

00:25:21.000 Glenn Greenwald, very important.

00:25:23.000 Jimmy Dore, very important.

00:25:25.000 Kyle Kalinske, very important.

00:25:27.000 People who are real people that actually have done the homework and are going over the details.

00:25:32.000 And can inform people.

00:25:33.000 Because there's so many people out there.

00:25:36.000 I talked to Dave Smith about the history of the conflict between Russia and Ukraine.

00:25:40.000 I was like, what?

00:25:41.000 And he informed me about the coup in 2014. I'm like, oh my god.

00:25:45.000 There's a lot of backstory.

00:25:46.000 And then we played the video on the Colbert show.

00:25:50.000 Oh, that's right.

00:25:50.000 The old Colbert show.

00:25:52.000 It's like Gideon something?

00:25:54.000 The guy from the Times?

00:25:56.000 He's selling a book and in the book he's comparing Russia and Ukraine to Batman and Robin.

00:26:02.000 And he's like, Ukraine is Robin and we want to take Robin and bring him over to our side. 0.80

00:26:08.000 And it's like this open secret that they're doing this.

00:26:12.000 There were cables that actually WikiLeaks released.

00:26:17.000 And a friend who's a great journalist, Bronco Marcitech, who's been looking at the Ukraine conflict with a critical eye, he sorted through these cables.

00:26:27.000 And he found all of these diplomatic cables from the prior era, where you had NATO allies, you had U.S. officials.

00:26:36.000 Who were all saying, hey guys, Russia has red lines here with regard to Ukraine and floating NATO membership with Ukraine is a real violation of their hard red lines and were very fearful.

00:26:48.000 And they laid out exactly the trajectory that we could find ourselves on.

00:26:53.000 Now, that doesn't deny Russia agency or, you know, Putin and the Kremlin agency for invading.

00:27:00.000 No one made them do that.

00:27:02.000 However, it is to say that, you know, there was a time when you were allowed to acknowledge that U.S. policy could lead to this exact event.

00:27:11.000 And now when you even suggest that us, you know, floating NATO membership with Ukraine and saying that they were going to be made apart, that some of these things were exacerbating and they crossed the red line and You know, created a situation that was incredibly tense where this is the predictable outcome.

00:27:25.000 Again, you're not allowed to talk about that now.

00:27:27.000 Well, it's also, like, to bring back the chest analogy, is if you looked at war and you ignored the human casualties and the horrors and the fact that it should absolutely be avoided at all costs and all human deaths are valuable and bombing apartment buildings and all the horrible shit, 0.98

00:27:45.000 it's terrible and evil. 0.69

00:27:47.000 But this isn't like...

00:27:50.000 We are being fed a narrative that Russia made a big move and there was no other moves.

00:27:55.000 Right.

00:27:56.000 And when we find out about the moving of weapons closer to Russia, the discussion of them joining NATO, and you realize Russia is getting moved on.

00:28:07.000 There's moves.

00:28:08.000 Now, you absolutely be correct in saying the correct response is not blowing up apartment buildings and starting a war and invading a country.

00:28:16.000 You're right.

00:28:17.000 But this is not an unprovoked situation.

00:28:20.000 It didn't just come out of nowhere from a madman.

00:28:22.000 We're not getting this narrative on television.

00:28:25.000 This is a new time.

00:28:27.000 And the only way to get this discussion is you guys.

00:28:30.000 It's people like you. 0.71

00:28:32.000 And that's what's so fucking important about today. 0.98

00:28:36.000 And that's what's so dangerous about censorship. 0.98

00:28:38.000 And that's what's so dangerous about these partisan ideas where you're willing to, like, you're willing to absolutely ignore good points that the other side says, because then you would give them some sort of credit in winning this ideological bullshit game we're all playing. 0.92

00:28:54.000 That is so well said. 0.98

00:28:56.000 It drives me nuts, especially on corruption.

00:28:58.000 You know, you were talking about censorship, but corruption is a great one where everybody wants to talk about Hunter Biden on the right.

00:29:02.000 I would love, listen, we can talk about Hunter Biden all day.

00:29:05.000 We've been covering it.

00:29:05.000 He's a guy who got hooked on drugs.

00:29:10.000 And likes to get his dick sucked. 1.00

00:29:12.000 And who doesn't? 1.00

00:29:14.000 That's not what the problem is.

00:29:17.000 It's just revealing a very corrupt system that everyone wants to ignore.

00:29:23.000 Exactly.

00:29:23.000 And then we were like, hey, let's talk about Jared Kushner.

00:29:25.000 And then a lot of people on the right side, I'm like, hey, you know, this guy, it's actually great.

00:29:30.000 There are internal Saudi documents where he asked the Saudi Royal Kingdom fund or whatever for a billion dollar investment in his new fund, private equity fund, right after he leaves the White House.

00:29:40.000 The internal emails are like, I don't think this guy's a very good investor.

00:29:43.000 I'm not sure this would be a good use of our capital.

00:29:45.000 And MBS, the crown prince, is like, give him the money.

00:29:48.000 They're like, send him the billion.

00:29:51.000 He intervened personally to get Jared his $2 billion.

00:29:54.000 I think it was $2 billion.

00:29:55.000 $2 billion for his fund.

00:29:57.000 That's a baller friend to have.

00:29:59.000 Yeah, but if you're on the right, let's not talk about that.

00:30:02.000 Let's talk about Hunter Biden and his laptop.

00:30:03.000 And of course, the Democrats.

00:30:04.000 We had Ted Lieu, Congressman.

00:30:06.000 This was back in the old days at the Hill at Rising, but I'll never forget.

00:30:10.000 We were pressing him on Hunter Biden, these boards that he was on, and the money he was getting, whatever.

00:30:14.000 He's like, people sit on boards and they get paid money.

00:30:17.000 It was so part of the Washington water that they swim in.

00:30:22.000 He couldn't even conceive that it was a problem.

00:30:26.000 Now, it may not be illegal, but that's an issue in and of itself.

00:30:30.000 The fact that he could just hand-wave away...

00:30:33.000 Well, it's semi-legal.

00:30:35.000 Oh, no, it's just straight legal.

00:30:36.000 That's the crazy part.

00:30:38.000 It's sketchy.

00:30:39.000 It's legal, but it's sketchy.

00:30:40.000 Yes.

00:30:41.000 Yeah.

00:30:41.000 But to your point about censorship and the total lack of willingness to challenge your own side's narrative, did you just see this Columbia Journalism Review report that came out about Russiagate?

00:30:52.000 Sagar and I were looking at it.

00:30:53.000 Oh, it's fantastic.

00:30:54.000 It's really long in-depth.

00:30:56.000 I mean, it's overdue, right?

00:30:57.000 It's like way after the fact.

00:30:58.000 But I think this is one of the first, certainly mainstream, and CJR is as mainstream as they come, mainstream attempts to actually go back through the Russiagate narrative Where it started, how it was sold to the American people, and all of the lies and especially the omissions.

00:31:17.000 And they take a really hard look at the New York Times as kind of the main player in the story.

00:31:21.000 There were other villains as well, but the New York Times was the main player.

00:31:24.000 And they would report something that, you know, they would shade it to look as bad as possible with regards to Trump-Russia connections.

00:31:32.000 They would get some other piece of information that was exculpatory.

00:31:36.000 Wouldn't be in the paper at all.

00:31:37.000 And they got all kinds of, you know, millions of new subscribers to their paper who were there to hear this, like, you know, elaborate tale of Russian conspiracy and the Manchurian candidate and whatever.

00:31:49.000 And the underlying narrative that at least I take away from the CJR report is New York Times and MSNBC and a lot of other places.

00:31:57.000 We're good to go.

00:32:19.000 They will never admit that they did anything wrong here.

00:32:22.000 They just move forward and pretend like none of it ever happened.

00:32:25.000 And it is astonishing.

00:32:27.000 And then they turn around and wonder, like, why does no one trust us?

00:32:29.000 We just don't get it.

00:32:30.000 Yeah, well, we have to make laws against disinformation. 0.55

00:32:34.000 That's what we have to do.

00:32:36.000 Misinformation, malinformation, all of those are bad.

00:32:39.000 And this is where we can control the narrative.

00:32:41.000 Are you going to be the one who determines what's fact and what's fiction?

00:32:45.000 And actually, in the piece, they were like, the U.S. has the lowest media trust in 42 developed nations. 0.94

00:32:51.000 And they're like, yeah, how does that fucking happen?

00:32:52.000 I don't think that's true, because I think there's an insanely strong trust in independent media. 0.96

00:32:57.000 You are right.

00:32:58.000 They're pointing to the mainstream media.

00:33:00.000 These people that are – they're just who they are.

00:33:03.000 You know who they are.

00:33:05.000 And it's possible to do now.

00:33:07.000 You can be a real person.

00:33:09.000 You don't have to be a propagandist or a spokesperson for the state. 0.99

00:33:12.000 You can be a real person and tell people what the fuck is going on. 0.99

00:33:16.000 Because this is a wild game that other people are playing on our behalf with money that they've gotten from our taxes where we don't even get a say in what the fuck they spend it on. 1.00

00:33:25.000 It's crazy. 0.98

00:33:27.000 It's crazy and it doesn't affect your daily life.

00:33:31.000 You drive to the same place.

00:33:32.000 You say hi to your neighbors.

00:33:33.000 It seems fine. 0.99

00:33:35.000 But you're dealing with a fucking destructive empire that has been doing things to other countries that if you saw them, if you were boots on the ground, you would be horrified if you watched a drone bomb a wedding party in Yemen. 0.98

00:33:50.000 If you were a part of something in another country that we're involved in, that our tax dollars have gone to, that we have just written off as being not of concern. 0.98

00:34:00.000 Right, right.

00:34:01.000 Which is crazy!

00:34:02.000 Yemen is a great example. 0.99

00:34:04.000 I mean, across the board, humanitarian organizations around the world say this is the greatest humanitarian crisis that is unfolding in the entire world.

00:34:12.000 And, you know, we are highly complicit in this through our support of Saudi Arabia. 0.51

00:34:17.000 You don't see Yemen flags on people's cars.

00:34:19.000 You don't see the news media talking about it.

00:34:22.000 You don't see them humanizing the children that are starving and dying there.

00:34:27.000 And so, you know, part of the way that the information ecosystem is shaped is what they decide to care about, what they decide to cover, the way they decide to cover it, and what just gets pushed off the page entirely out of sight, out of mind.

00:34:41.000 I think this is an important part to talk about with this, that With human beings, when human beings work inside corporate systems and these systems have goals and everyone's working together and there's a hierarchy of people and you're not allowed to step out of line,

00:34:59.000 we develop a way of thinking that is almost like it's a tribal way and it's kind of a religious way.

00:35:07.000 And I'm curious to know how you guys feel about your ability to be completely independent outside of that and how that's affected the way you think about things.

00:35:16.000 Because for me, personally, having all these conversations with so many different people about so many different subjects, I'm a different person.

00:35:26.000 Yes.

00:35:26.000 Like, I'm a completely different person.

00:35:28.000 It's shaped me so...

00:35:29.000 It's like the most...

00:35:33.000 Bombarding, overwhelming education that it's like very difficult to process, but if you're in a corporate environment It's very hard to think independently.

00:35:45.000 It really is.

00:35:46.000 You don't have the time.

00:35:47.000 You don't have the notion.

00:35:48.000 You definitely don't benefit from it.

00:35:51.000 You don't have the incentive.

00:35:52.000 That's the big one. 0.99

00:35:53.000 Yeah, if you speak out, you're fucking penalized. 0.99

00:35:54.000 You can lose your job. 0.98

00:35:56.000 Just things that aren't even, like, out of line.

00:35:59.000 Like, I remember there was a hockey guy.

00:36:00.000 He was a hockey commentator.

00:36:03.000 And he said that all lives matter.

00:36:05.000 And he got fired. 1.00

00:36:06.000 Holy shit. 1.00

00:36:09.000 What an egregious misstep. 1.00

00:36:12.000 All lives matter.

00:36:13.000 You know, I got my start in media on MSNBC. Yes, I know.

00:36:16.000 So, I mean, am I a different person from those days?

00:36:19.000 God, I certainly am.

00:36:20.000 That's why I wanted to bring it up to you guys.

00:36:22.000 I go back and look at it.

00:36:23.000 And, you know, some of it I watch and I'm proud of.

00:36:26.000 You know, I focused on a lot of the same issues I do, like labor and economic inequality, economics, things that I really care a lot about.

00:36:34.000 Especially on foreign policy, though.

00:36:35.000 Some of that stuff I go back and watch and I'm like, oh my God, this is so cringe.

00:36:39.000 And I just bought into the corporate line.

00:36:43.000 Now, ultimately, shortly before I was let go, I did a monologue when Hillary Clinton was building up to run for president.

00:36:51.000 It was back in 2014. So this was early on.

00:36:54.000 And I did this whole thing that was like, she's sold out to Wall Street.

00:36:58.000 People are going to hate this lady. 1.00

00:36:59.000 She's like the terrible candidate for the moment.

00:37:02.000 Please don't run.

00:37:04.000 And I was allowed to say it, right?

00:37:06.000 I delivered my thing.

00:37:07.000 I did it exactly how I wanted to do it.

00:37:10.000 Afterwards, I get pulled into an office and, you know, great, Molly, everything's fine.

00:37:15.000 But next time you do any commentary on Hillary Clinton, it has to get approved by the president of the network.

00:37:23.000 Yeah.

00:37:24.000 And think about, you know, I mean, I would love to say that I did further Hillary Clinton commentary.

00:37:30.000 There's no doubt about it.

00:37:31.000 But I would love to say that didn't affect me and I was just there to be a truth teller.

00:37:34.000 But listen, I'm a human being.

00:37:36.000 I'm sure I responded to the incentives in that system of like, I don't want to get in trouble with the boss.

00:37:40.000 For sure.

00:37:41.000 So that's the way that it works.

00:37:44.000 That's a very blatant example, but oftentimes people know where the boundaries are.

00:37:50.000 They know what they're allowed to say, and so they don't need that direct intervention of censorship.

00:37:55.000 And also, by the way...

00:37:57.000 These people, most of them in cable news, they're not really there because they're talented.

00:38:01.000 They're there because they're reliable purveyors of whatever it is that that network wants to purvey.

00:38:07.000 So that's ultimately why they get the job and they understand the parameters of the task.

00:38:11.000 Well, there's just a thing that happens when you're connected with someone.

00:38:15.000 If you're connected financially, if you're connected in a friendship way.

00:38:20.000 That's why cronyism works.

00:38:23.000 Yes.

00:38:23.000 That's a good point.

00:38:24.000 Absolutely.

00:38:25.000 They weasel their way in.

00:38:26.000 And look, I can give you examples of it in my own life.

00:38:28.000 Yeah.

00:38:29.000 Like, if anybody ever comes to me with any kind of criticism of Dana White, and I'm like, you're going to the wrong guy.

00:38:37.000 Like, that guy's my brother.

00:38:39.000 I'll never say a bad thing about him. 1.00

00:38:41.000 If I didn't know him, if he was some asshole that lived in some other country, I would probably talk shit about him like that. 1.00

00:38:48.000 I talk shit about everything. 1.00

00:38:49.000 But I love that guy to death and I'll never say a bad word about him. 0.98

00:38:52.000 So it's like you're not – if you're coming to me for objective journalism about one of my friends, you know, you got the wrong person.

00:38:59.000 Yeah, but you're open about it, right?

00:39:00.000 That's the most important part.

00:39:02.000 We got the wrong person.

00:39:03.000 But I won't say any – I won't lie.

00:39:06.000 But I won't ever say anything negative about my friends.

00:39:09.000 It's just like I don't think that's necessary.

00:39:11.000 And that's something that happens when you get a shit ton of money involved and you get relationships and you're drinking scotch together at a private club and you're discussing the advertising revenue and we'd like to donate a bunch of money to CNN. We'd like to figure out a way that we can work together.

00:39:28.000 You know, hey, I'm a fucking Captain Billionaire, and I want to donate all this money to all these people that own media organizations. 0.88

00:39:36.000 And I would, you know, I'd like to be your friend. 0.98

00:39:41.000 That's it.

00:39:41.000 Be your friend.

00:39:43.000 It's cool, right?

00:39:43.000 Who doesn't want to go to fun parties?

00:39:44.000 It's just friends.

00:39:45.000 We're friends.

00:39:46.000 Yeah, it's all part of a system.

00:39:48.000 We're fishing.

00:39:49.000 This is the other thing, actually, I was hoping to bring up, is I don't think people understand that cable is a fake business model.

00:39:55.000 Yeah.

00:40:12.000 And so, like, when you buy cable, like Cox Communications or whatever, they pay, or Comcast, for example, they pay CNN and MSNBC and Fox to be a part of the bundle.

00:40:22.000 The vast majority of the profit of these cable channels comes from the bundle.

00:40:27.000 So CNN made a billion in profit just last year, all propped up by the bundle, because they're getting paid just to exist.

00:40:35.000 I mean, can you imagine if we were getting paid to exist, not based upon our actual numbers?

00:40:40.000 Yeah.

00:40:40.000 You can actually reach less people and make more money.

00:40:43.000 And so it's all part of this fake system.

00:40:46.000 But I mean, the benefit is, is that with the rise of independent media, more and more advertisers are waking up, the less eyeballs, the less of an incentive for the bundle to actually pay them to be a part of it. 0.69

00:40:56.000 And that's why I was actually really excited by Amazon striking that deal with the NFL, because I'm like, yes, get the rights away from these people, because that is what props up all kinds of bullshit that we don't have like a small d democratic input with our eyeballs. 0.71

00:41:17.000 Mm-hmm. 0.70

00:41:38.000 I do think it's a dangerous moment for people.

00:41:42.000 And one thing we've been covering a lot on the show is you have a kind of breakdown in previous national stories and narratives.

00:41:51.000 And people are very, like, story-driven.

00:41:52.000 You know, you have a breakdown in, I'm not a religious person, so this is, like, not my bag, but you have a breakdown in religion.

00:41:58.000 So some of the stories that have kind of, like, held the country together and that people helped use to make sense of their life, or even the story about the American dream.

00:42:07.000 Yeah, I think.

00:42:24.000 Are willing to sell a narrative to, you know, a lot of folks who feel kind of lost, kind of adrift, and don't like existing in that chaos.

00:42:33.000 So it's like, you know, whether they're being scammed by, like, SBF or this, like, Congressman George Santos who, like, made up every aspect of his life.

00:42:43.000 That guy's amazing.

00:42:44.000 Crystal's obsessed with him. 0.77

00:42:45.000 I just find him a disgrace.

00:42:46.000 You see pictures of him where he's a drag queen of Brazil? 0.79

00:42:49.000 Yeah, Katara. 0.81

00:42:50.000 Yeah.

00:42:50.000 Absolutely.

00:42:52.000 Drag-ish. 1.00

00:42:53.000 Now you can't criticize him anymore.

00:42:55.000 He's trans.

00:42:56.000 The part I'm obsessed with him is, first of all, I just can't imagine being that person who can, like, whoever he was across from, he was going to tell them what they wanted to hear.

00:43:10.000 When the dude was like, I'm into volleyball, he's like, I was a star volleyball player at a college he didn't even go to.

00:43:16.000 I have a very good friend who texted me today.

00:43:19.000 And he told me, I'm here with this guy who knew you from Boston and this and that and that and this.

00:43:24.000 And I say, what's his name?

00:43:27.000 He tells me the name. 1.00

00:43:28.000 I go, that guy's full of shit. 1.00

00:43:29.000 I don't know that guy. 1.00

00:43:30.000 And so then he tells me that he took a picture with this guy and the guy pretended that he was texting it to me.

00:43:39.000 Whoa.

00:43:40.000 These are real people. 0.92

00:43:42.000 There's real people that are just crazy.

00:43:44.000 And that's the thing, is I'm like, how many of these people are out there, number one?

00:43:47.000 And number two, I just feel like his ability to rise and make it to Congress says so much about the cracks FTX execs maxed out on donations.

00:43:59.000 I didn't even know that.

00:44:00.000 Of course they did.

00:44:03.000 That right there is like the perfect news story for our era. 1.00

00:44:07.000 Look at that American flag fucking pin on the lapel. 0.99

00:44:10.000 I love it. 1.00

00:44:10.000 This is America's Congressman right here. 1.00

00:44:12.000 Have you seen the video where he's like, hi, my name is Anthony Devalder. 1.00

00:44:16.000 And you're like, who the fuck are you? 1.00

00:44:17.000 He's a full on con man. 1.00

00:44:19.000 Full on comment. 1.00

00:44:20.000 There are so few people that want to be congressmen and so few people that want to get involved that you could be a fucking loon. 1.00

00:44:29.000 A fucking loon with all the right bullet points and you can get all the way in. 1.00

00:44:34.000 He told people what they wanted to hear. 1.00

00:44:36.000 You know, to the donors, he was like, I'm a wealthy businessman.

00:44:40.000 I'm highly successful.

00:44:41.000 I worked at Goldman Sachs, all this stuff.

00:44:43.000 They're like, oh, this is our kind of guy.

00:44:44.000 To the electorate and the Republican, he pitched that he's like this trailblazing, you know, Americans, I am the American dream, like Latino, gay, all this stuff.

00:44:53.000 I mean, it really was incredible the way that he told people what they wanted to hear.

00:44:58.000 And so that's a part that...

00:45:00.000 I'm really interested and obsessed with because all of these people are like a reflection of the holes and vulnerabilities in society.

00:45:07.000 You know, same thing with Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX. He told people in Congress, he told the media, he had this very specific cultivated image of his like wacky hair and his like dressed down look and whatever, that he was the eccentric genius or whatever.

00:45:23.000 And a lot of people who were supposed to be super smart in the business press and in the regular press and on Capitol Hill, they all bought it hook, line, and sinker.

00:45:34.000 After Bernie Madoff, you're not going to fool us again.

00:45:37.000 Oh yeah, right.

00:45:38.000 We've got it all.

00:45:39.000 We figured it out.

00:45:41.000 We got it now.

00:45:41.000 It's not like Theranos was like five years ago.

00:45:44.000 Theranos was an abnormality, sir.

00:45:47.000 But again, people like that are rare and they don't really get through.

00:45:52.000 It's actually a good thing, though, just to show people these people aren't that smart. 0.98

00:45:56.000 When I first came to D.C., you get to the White House, and you're like, holy shit, this is the White House. 0.99

00:46:01.000 It's like when I met Trump and interviewing him in the Oval Office, and I'm like, holy shit, I'm in the Oval. 0.99

00:46:06.000 That's JFK who's there. 0.97

00:46:07.000 This is where Nixon did this thing.

00:46:09.000 But then some guy comes in with his shoes off, and you're like, Oh, this is just an office.

00:46:15.000 It's just a normal building.

00:46:16.000 And so you've got to take that veneer off.

00:46:18.000 Most people actually get this.

00:46:19.000 I'm probably just weird.

00:46:20.000 Which is, like, these people aren't that smart.

00:46:22.000 They're the billionaires. 1.00

00:46:23.000 They're actually fools. 0.99

00:46:24.000 Like, Sam Bankman-Fried raised a billion dollars when he was literally playing Counter-Strike while he was on a Zoom call. 0.99

00:46:29.000 And he was playing a video game. 0.99

00:46:31.000 He said some bullshit and, like, something about a banana. 0.99

00:46:34.000 And they gave him a billion dollars. 1.00

00:46:36.000 This is one of the top-tier venture capital firms in the world.

00:46:39.000 Yes.

00:46:40.000 I mean, these are supposed to be...

00:46:42.000 The most sophisticated investors and just totally bamboozled by this guy.

00:46:48.000 And then on the other end, a lot of people who bought into what he was selling or NFTs that were being sold or whatever random crypto scams were out there.

00:47:02.000 You know, they had their own vulnerabilities of maybe they were hurt in the financial crash.

00:47:06.000 Maybe they feel like it was disproportionately young men, right?

00:47:09.000 So maybe they feel like the American dream of like getting the house and having the family and the, you know, the like...

00:47:17.000 Basic middle class prosperity wasn't really open to them and they're being sold this sort of hero journey narrative about, you know, fortune favors the brave and you got to get in early and this is secret special knowledge that's going to allow you to achieve your goals of wealth creation that has been held out to you of like what is at the core of being a man.

00:47:38.000 It's a very seductive story.

00:47:39.000 Why is it all connected to the manscape?

00:47:43.000 The manscape and crypto and NFTs.

00:47:47.000 Because it all is this whole.

00:47:48.000 You know, it's interesting.

00:47:49.000 Some of the most viral content that we've done in like the last several months is just problems with men.

00:47:54.000 Like we did this video.

00:47:54.000 It's like the problems of boys and men with an author, Richard Reeves, who's actually fantastic.

00:47:58.000 He wrote a great book on this.

00:47:59.000 You'd have a great conversation with him, actually.

00:48:01.000 It went super viral.

00:48:02.000 And he talks a lot.

00:48:03.000 He's like, look, I understand.

00:48:05.000 He's like, I'm not an anti-feminist.

00:48:07.000 He's like, what we are talking about, though, is in the last two decades, we've had a crisis amongst young men.

00:48:12.000 And something we talk about on the show is what Crystal's getting at with the decline of the American dream, like the idea that you were going to do better than your parents.

00:48:19.000 And that's just not really true anymore.

00:48:22.000 Even if you went to school and you have a shit ton of of student debt, even if you're working class in terms of wage growth, upward mobility.

00:48:29.000 People who are graduating from high school, who are men and working class having much more trouble actually finding a mate.

00:48:37.000 So there's a big college imbalance right now where a lot of men are dropping out of college.

00:48:41.000 They no longer feel Accepted and you're reaching almost 60-40 splits of women and men in college, especially who are graduating.

00:48:49.000 A lot of women who have college degrees don't actually want to date somebody who doesn't have a college degree. 1.00

00:48:54.000 And so there's this big imbalance in the dating market.

00:48:56.000 And then also among single men, you see a big decline in lifetime wages.

00:49:02.000 But what really makes me really sad is the drug overdose numbers and they die much earlier.

00:49:08.000 They're much less likely to exercise, much less likely to fulfill A stronger life.

00:49:13.000 And that's what gets to the charlatanism of being able to buy into the charlatan.

00:49:17.000 Signing up for some MLN scheme that you might see online.

00:49:21.000 Buying crypto.

00:49:23.000 By the way, you're looking at a crypto victim.

00:49:24.000 I lost $5,000 on BlockFi. 0.99

00:49:26.000 Got fucked out by that. 0.99

00:49:29.000 There's a lot of men that feel by their very existence that they're bad. 1.00

00:49:33.000 Yeah.

00:49:34.000 It's a big cultural problem.

00:49:49.000 That I think we have to look at all human beings as just human beings.

00:49:53.000 Yeah.

00:49:54.000 And you can't help that you were born a man.

00:49:57.000 And you can't help the things that you enjoy.

00:49:59.000 Like if you enjoy going to football games.

00:50:01.000 You enjoy getting loud with your friends.

00:50:03.000 This idea of toxic masculinity.

00:50:06.000 It's like...

00:50:07.000 Yeah, there's toxic aspects of men, and that's real.

00:50:11.000 That's a reality of being a male human being.

00:50:14.000 If you look at the history of war, it's all started by men. 0.70

00:50:17.000 Men did all of it. 0.98

00:50:18.000 Men do all the raping. 1.00

00:50:20.000 I had this guy on the podcast once. 0.98

00:50:21.000 It was hilarious. 0.58

00:50:22.000 He goes, You know, statistically speaking, men get raped more than women do. 1.00

00:50:27.000 I go, yeah, by other men, you fucking idiot. 1.00

00:50:30.000 I go, it's not packs of cheerleaders raping football players. 1.00

00:50:34.000 The fuck is wrong with you? 1.00

00:50:36.000 The problem is 100% men. 1.00

00:50:39.000 That's the problem with manosphere is that there's grifters in the manosphere that aren't actual real men.

00:50:44.000 Yes.

00:50:45.000 And by real men, I mean, they don't have resolve.

00:50:47.000 Like, if you took them on a hike, they would get tired.

00:50:50.000 They would sit down.

00:50:52.000 You would have to leave them behind.

00:50:53.000 They're not...

00:50:54.000 The word tough is a word, but it's like, oh, you're tough? 0.98

00:50:59.000 No, mental toughness is fucking important. 0.52

00:51:01.000 It's a really important quality of life, and it's been diminished to this thing that's like a part of toxic masculinity ideology, and it's... 0.98

00:51:10.000 Well, and this is where, you know, the Andrew Tates of the world come in and they, like, perform this just, like, caricaturish, ridiculous, masculine whatever they're doing. 0.81

00:51:19.000 And then also maybe as a sex trafficker, we'll find out. 0.97

00:51:22.000 We'll see what happens there.

00:51:24.000 But it again speaks to the fact...

00:51:34.000 Yeah.

00:51:36.000 Yeah.

00:51:37.000 Yeah.

00:51:44.000 An assault on the middle class, on the working class, where it becomes so much harder to be able to fulfill that cultural narrative of what it is supposed to be to be a man.

00:51:57.000 I think that's been, this is this woman, but, you know, from my external perspective, I think that's been really, really devastating.

00:52:05.000 And I don't want to pretend also, though, like it's like only young men who are getting scammed right now.

00:52:09.000 Everybody has.

00:52:11.000 There's, sorry, what was the name?

00:52:13.000 LuLaRoe.

00:52:14.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:52:15.000 And there's a great series about this MLM multi-level marketing scheme of these fucking ugly leggings that a bunch of Midwestern housewives for some reason loved these things. 1.00

00:52:31.000 There they are! 0.99

00:52:32.000 That's it! 0.99

00:52:33.000 They are hideous.

00:52:34.000 You and I are on the wrong page here because I think those are kind of fly.

00:52:38.000 I like them. 0.99

00:52:40.000 That's some shit if my wife wore, I'd be like, I like those. 1.00

00:52:43.000 Would you let your wife buy them off Facebook Live from another Mormon lady? 1.00

00:52:47.000 100%.

00:52:48.000 I don't have any say over what she buys.

00:52:49.000 That's how we work.

00:52:50.000 Get those for your wife for our birthday and see how she feels about it. 0.75

00:52:53.000 I'm a non-criticizer of my wife's behavior.

00:52:55.000 That's a good idea.

00:52:58.000 The thing that they sold...

00:53:00.000 To the women who ended up selling these beautiful leggings. 1.00

00:53:04.000 I think they're fly.

00:53:05.000 Beautiful fly leggings.

00:53:07.000 I like them. 0.99

00:53:07.000 Stars on them and shit. 0.99

00:53:08.000 I like it. 0.97

00:53:08.000 You're going to be able to make your own money. 0.97

00:53:10.000 You're going to have this financial independence. 0.99

00:53:12.000 Yeah, you sell them to other people who like cool shit. 0.98

00:53:14.000 You're going to be able to still have time with your kids. 0.99

00:53:17.000 You're going to be able to have it all.

00:53:18.000 But then...

00:53:20.000 As the thing went on, and originally there was like a real demand for these leggings and people really did want them.

00:53:24.000 So you felt like, oh, I'm doing the thing.

00:53:25.000 But then as time goes on, the only people who are making money are the people who are convincing more to get into the legging sales business.

00:53:34.000 And, you know, it's a classic basically pyramid scheme.

00:53:38.000 And over time, the quality of the leggings degrade.

00:53:40.000 They're sending out packages that smell bad and they're ripped and whatever.

00:53:43.000 But the bottom line is the only way to make money was by bringing in more people after you, which is definition of MLM. That was for the Midwestern housewife or whatever. 1.00

00:53:53.000 Maybe they just have a marketing problem because someone should tell them how fly those leggings are. 1.00

00:53:58.000 You made that fucking guy's dick. 1.00

00:54:01.000 You're going to get contacted. 1.00

00:54:03.000 Next thing you know, we're going to listen to Joe's podcast and he's like, this is brought to you by LuLaRoe.

00:54:08.000 I like him.

00:54:08.000 Have some little mini mouses on him.

00:54:10.000 Let's go.

00:54:11.000 Let's go.

00:54:12.000 But I think it's also a broader cultural thing where being in the mainstream, you know, mainstream masculinity is not really represented.

00:54:20.000 And because of that, that also opens a space for a lot of grifters.

00:54:24.000 I mean, I was looking at that with the whole Liver King thing.

00:54:27.000 Oh, yeah.

00:54:28.000 Which I know you covered quite a bit, but I saw something I called it.

00:54:32.000 I didn't cover it.

00:54:33.000 Oh, did you?

00:54:33.000 Yeah, I called it way in advance.

00:54:35.000 I'm like, that guy's on the sauce.

00:54:36.000 Just from looking at him?

00:54:37.000 A hundred percent.

00:54:39.000 So you just don't naturally get that way?

00:54:41.000 Yeah, you can naturally get that way if you have superior genetics and you're in your 20s.

00:54:48.000 You're right.

00:54:49.000 This dude was how old?

00:54:51.000 He's like 45. He's carrying around too much mass.

00:54:55.000 By the way, in your 20s, your hormones are flying. 1.00

00:55:01.000 If you're 21, 22 years old, there's some natural guys that I follow that are fucking jacked. 0.99

00:55:07.000 But it's a different kind of jack. 0.99

00:55:09.000 That guy's a juiced-up jack.

00:55:11.000 I think something's going on with his abs, too.

00:55:14.000 Oh, yeah.

00:55:14.000 The surgery?

00:55:15.000 You think that's real?

00:55:16.000 I don't know, but anyone who's willing to lie about doing steroids when it's so obvious to anyone who understands hormonal optimization and steroid use and like that More Plates More Dates guy, Derek.

00:55:29.000 Love that guy.

00:55:29.000 I love that guy.

00:55:30.000 You know, he called it, we both called it way in advance, like there's not a chance in hell.

00:55:35.000 There's no way.

00:55:36.000 It's like if you look at Mr. Olympia.

00:55:37.000 Right.

00:55:38.000 Right?

00:55:39.000 No one!

00:55:41.000 Thinks they don't take steroids.

00:55:42.000 Zero people!

00:55:44.000 And you would be correct. 1.00

00:55:46.000 But then when you look at that, do you blame him because you know all his competition's doing the same shit, right? 0.99

00:55:51.000 What is that? 0.99

00:55:51.000 No, no, she means Mr. Olympia. 0.99

00:55:56.000 Of course.

00:55:56.000 That's the same way I think about Tour de France.

00:55:59.000 Tour de France is a dirty sport, and it always was, and the greatest documentary about it is Icarus.

00:56:06.000 It's not about Tour de France, but it's about bicycle racing and doping and how prevalent it is worldwide.

00:56:13.000 It's amazing.

00:56:14.000 Have you seen it?

00:56:15.000 We had him on the show.

00:56:16.000 Brian Fogel?

00:56:16.000 Yeah, we had Brian on the show.

00:56:17.000 Amazing.

00:56:18.000 He's the same guy that did The Dissident, the Amal Khashoggi documentary, which is another amazing documentary. 0.97

00:56:24.000 He's fucking fantastic. 0.98

00:56:27.000 But it's a dirty business! 1.00

00:56:28.000 It's a dirty business!

00:56:31.000 So other people are doing it, too?

00:56:32.000 Okay.

00:56:33.000 But that's why I want people to be honest in the manosphere. 0.92

00:56:36.000 I work out at a bodybuilding gym, and so I'm like, there's guys who are on gear, and then there's guys who aren't fucking on gear. 0.85

00:56:41.000 And that's just what it is. 0.99

00:56:43.000 But the Liver King thing drove me nuts, because you were looking at teenagers who thought, they're like, oh, this is real if I eat bull testicles, or if I buy whatever his bullshit supplements are. 1.00

00:56:52.000 I don't want to say bullshit. 1.00

00:56:53.000 Whatever his supplements were. 0.98

00:56:54.000 I don't think the supplements are bad because what he's doing is desiccated organ meat.

00:56:58.000 And there's actually been peer-reviewed studies on feeding desiccated liver.

00:57:03.000 I think it was to...

00:57:04.000 See if you can find it.

00:57:04.000 I think it's to mice.

00:57:06.000 I also want to see the abs when you have a chance.

00:57:08.000 His abs?

00:57:09.000 Yeah.

00:57:10.000 Well, there's quite a few people that have those now.

00:57:12.000 People are accusing Oscar De La Hoya of having them now.

00:57:15.000 I saw Oscar say he got etching.

00:57:17.000 He got etching.

00:57:18.000 Oh, okay.

00:57:18.000 He's being honest.

00:57:19.000 Okay.

00:57:20.000 Oscar's being honest.

00:57:21.000 Good for him.

00:57:23.000 Good for Oscar.

00:57:24.000 So those look, to me, preposterous.

00:57:28.000 Yeah.

00:57:28.000 The amount...

00:57:29.000 It just doesn't make sense.

00:57:31.000 Now, you do have people that are outliers.

00:57:34.000 Like, there's certain people that just have bizarre traps or crazy back muscles.

00:57:38.000 Like, right there, if you show me that picture on the right, I would say...

00:57:42.000 That looks fine.

00:57:44.000 That's a guy who's just jacked.

00:57:46.000 But there's something about the one on the far left where he's holding up the piece of liver.

00:57:50.000 Yeah.

00:57:50.000 That is just like, what is going on there?

00:57:53.000 Yeah.

00:57:54.000 I buy that.

00:57:55.000 Especially knowing now. 1.00

00:57:57.000 Sauce to the fucking gills! 1.00

00:58:01.000 That was the best part about Derek's video. 1.00

00:58:02.000 It's like 12 grand a month on his entire hormone stack.

00:58:05.000 Well, when Derek got a hold of all of the...

00:58:08.000 Yeah, I mean, come on, son.

00:58:10.000 Look, they look great, but...

00:58:12.000 Do they, though?

00:58:13.000 I mean, it's not to my taste.

00:58:14.000 I'll just say that.

00:58:15.000 Oh, you're just being nice to Kyle.

00:58:22.000 I want to see Kyle on the sauce.

00:58:24.000 You know what it is?

00:58:25.000 It's like, people like different things.

00:58:27.000 You can't...

00:58:28.000 Oh, you're wrong. 1.00

00:58:29.000 That music sucks. 1.00

00:58:30.000 No, it sucks to you. 1.00

00:58:32.000 Some people want a giant, juiced-up fucking Viking dude. 1.00

00:58:36.000 That's what they want. 0.99

00:58:38.000 And some people want an Alex Honnold, the guy who climbs the rocks.

00:58:41.000 Oh, yeah.

00:58:41.000 I love that guy.

00:58:42.000 Slim and lean.

00:58:43.000 People like different things.

00:58:44.000 To some people, that's the optimal physique.

00:58:47.000 The problem is there.

00:58:48.000 A little.

00:58:59.000 He's in the middle of full exertion there, right?

00:59:02.000 He's throwing a spear. 0.73

00:59:03.000 Look, the guy's built like a brick shithouse.

00:59:06.000 No if, ands, or but.

00:59:07.000 You don't get that way without putting in a lot of work.

00:59:09.000 That guy works hard.

00:59:11.000 There's no way.

00:59:12.000 There's no way you get there without the hard work.

00:59:15.000 Like, the real tragedy in this is that this guy had an opportunity to say what's possible with chemical intervention, Here's the pros and cons, and this is the dangers of it.

00:59:26.000 Also, this is the nutrition that I take to optimize my body, which is also critical.

00:59:32.000 You cannot get to that physique with just steroids. 0.98

00:59:36.000 You must have amazing work ethic, incredible discipline, ability to push through Exertion and just have a fucking force of will. 0.97

00:59:47.000 And you have to have amazing nutrition. 0.98

00:59:49.000 You have to be really fucking healthy to allow all those tissues to recover and nourish them and then stay that lean. 0.92

00:59:56.000 So you have to be very disciplined with your diet. 0.98

00:59:59.000 So what he's done is very, very, very impressive.

01:00:02.000 But he lied.

01:00:05.000 That's the problem.

01:00:06.000 And it's such a disservice.

01:00:07.000 I admit I haven't watched a lot of Liver King content.

01:00:11.000 I'm not exactly in the core demo for this.

01:00:14.000 Is he a charismatic guy?

01:00:16.000 Do you feel like if he hadn't cheated and lied and whatever, he still could have made it?

01:00:21.000 I don't know.

01:00:24.000 We don't know.

01:00:25.000 I think so.

01:00:26.000 I think that there's been a bunch of people that are openly taking performance-enhancing drugs and have enormous social media platforms.

01:00:33.000 I don't think that's the problem.

01:00:36.000 I think the problem is just being dishonest.

01:00:38.000 If you're the liver king and you're talking about your stack and explaining to people what you take, and that you're doing it all legally, and then you're also eating all this food, the question is, is that a thing that would influence other people to do that when they shouldn't do that?

01:00:54.000 And I think that's a personal choice.

01:00:56.000 I think the real responsibility that someone has when you're in that situation, if you are doing that stuff, You should be honest about what you're doing and then also honest if something goes wrong.

01:01:07.000 Yeah, I think it's important.

01:01:08.000 So I didn't get into health and fitness like two years ago or so.

01:01:12.000 And it's so important to have realistic expectations about what you can do, about what you can get, about what it actually means to diet. 0.99

01:01:21.000 So like Dr. Lane Norton, who I use his app, Carbon, like, you know, you realize after a couple of weeks into a cut, you're like, oh, this fucking sucks.

01:01:27.000 And you're like, and I'm only losing, you know, I'm only losing whatever, two pounds a week.

01:01:32.000 And then also even with heavy resistance training, four times a week, diet relatively on point. 1.00

01:01:38.000 Shit is hard, man. 1.00

01:01:39.000 It takes years. 1.00

01:01:40.000 Like you are not going to look like Liver King overnight.

01:01:42.000 And that's actually important to understand that.

01:01:44.000 Well, I mean, number one, you just aren't going to look like Liver King unless you do what he did.

01:01:49.000 But number two, I mean, yeah, some people that's just never going to be on the menu.

01:01:53.000 Totally.

01:01:54.000 But I'm more saying, like, for kids, especially, you know, look, I didn't know a fucking thing before I started consuming all this content, like Puberman and all these other folks, Derek, all these videos.

01:02:03.000 And Derek had a video once of a guy who was, like, one year out, I think. 0.51

01:02:07.000 It was like, this is what a realistic, like, six pounds of muscle looks like.

01:02:09.000 And he was like, yeah, it doesn't look great.

01:02:11.000 He's like, but that's what it looks like, man.

01:02:13.000 And I was like, yeah, that's actually very helpful to me as somebody who was just starting off from the ground.

01:02:17.000 And then I think about 22-year-old me.

01:02:19.000 I would've fallen for it, man.

01:02:21.000 I would've bought the supplements.

01:02:22.000 I would've bought the, you know, if I was 18 years old, absolutely! 0.63

01:02:24.000 I'm like, fat kid in College Station. 0.76

01:02:26.000 If you really thought that's all it took to get jacked. 0.95

01:02:28.000 Yeah, I'm like, that's all it takes? 1.00

01:02:29.000 I'm like, fuck yeah, I'll do it. 0.99

01:02:30.000 Sign me up, yeah. 0.98

01:02:30.000 It's like, you gotta consume good information and have real expectations around that stuff. 0.98

01:02:35.000 And that's the biggest problem, I think, with, like, manosphere and Instagram culture and all that.

01:02:39.000 There's some great ones out there, like Lane, like Huberman, and a few others, but...

01:02:43.000 There's a lot of fraudsters.

01:02:45.000 Well, and to go back to Andrew Tate, apparently part of what he's arguing is like, oh, this is just a character that I'm playing.

01:02:51.000 But it's like, you know, at the end of the day, does it really...

01:02:54.000 Is he arguing that?

01:02:54.000 I think so.

01:02:55.000 I think I saw that.

01:02:56.000 But at the end of the day, does it matter if you're playing a character if people believe it?

01:03:00.000 You know, then there's no difference whether you're just like playing a ridiculous character because you're still selling the same thing to a public that's buying it.

01:03:08.000 Yeah, then what do you do about Stephen Colbert?

01:03:10.000 Yeah.

01:03:12.000 The Colbert Report.

01:03:13.000 He just worshipped him because he was great.

01:03:15.000 That was a character.

01:03:16.000 He was great on that show.

01:03:17.000 That show was so funny.

01:03:19.000 That character was amazing.

01:03:21.000 It was.

01:03:21.000 It was amazing on The Daily Show.

01:03:23.000 When he went and did the roast of the president at the White House Correspondence with George W. That was so amazing.

01:03:29.000 I like it so much better than the real one.

01:03:31.000 I know.

01:03:31.000 The real guy who does the talk show.

01:03:33.000 The new one is so cringy.

01:03:34.000 You need to get them Daily Show writers back.

01:03:36.000 Let's go back in the closet, buddy.

01:03:38.000 Yeah.

01:03:38.000 Last time we were here...

01:03:40.000 Put the character back on.

01:03:41.000 It was so much funnier.

01:03:42.000 I remember last time we were here was the day after he fucked up Jon Stewart's bit.

01:03:46.000 About Lampli Co. 0.97

01:03:48.000 You're stepping on him.

01:03:49.000 I got that from here. 1.00

01:03:50.000 You were like, you're stepping on his fucking bit. 1.00

01:03:51.000 100% on purpose. 0.99

01:03:52.000 That was the first time I watched that thing was here live with you guys.

01:03:56.000 Hilarious.

01:03:56.000 Well, the narrative was like he saw his yacht slipping away.

01:04:00.000 He's like, no!

01:04:02.000 Well, I'd like to see some evidence if you have it.

01:04:05.000 I've had dinner with the folks at Pfizer.

01:04:08.000 They're wonderful people.

01:04:09.000 But I don't even think it's that.

01:04:11.000 I think it's like the social proof thing.

01:04:13.000 Like we were talking about.

01:04:13.000 I mean, people feel like, oh, this is my club and this is my tribe.

01:04:16.000 And so I got to like represent them or I'm going to get backlash.

01:04:19.000 I'm not going to get invited to the party.

01:04:20.000 Have you ever seen him dancing with Chuck Schumer?

01:04:23.000 Of course.

01:04:24.000 And they high fives Chuck Schumer.

01:04:26.000 It's amazing.

01:04:27.000 It's amazing.

01:04:28.000 You're in the club, buddy.

01:04:28.000 You made it.

01:04:30.000 Congratulations.

01:04:31.000 Yes!

01:04:32.000 Hope it feels good.

01:04:33.000 But that is what was the only thing that was available until independent media arose.

01:04:39.000 Yeah.

01:04:39.000 You had to do that.

01:04:41.000 And if you wanted to be the...

01:04:42.000 That's true.

01:04:42.000 That's why Jay Leno hid in the closet when they were discussing The Tonight Show.

01:04:48.000 Everybody wanted to be the head of a late night talk show.

01:04:51.000 And if you could find a way to get to that spot, that was the holy grail.

01:04:56.000 That was the thing.

01:04:57.000 That everybody wanted to get to.

01:04:59.000 I watched that documentary, The Comedy Show.

01:05:02.000 Or The Comedy Store.

01:05:03.000 About The Comedy Store.

01:05:04.000 That era was so crazy.

01:05:06.000 All anybody wanted was to get on that.

01:05:09.000 Actually, I don't know.

01:05:10.000 I'm of two minds.

01:05:12.000 I didn't grow up in that.

01:05:13.000 I was born in 92, so by the time I was aware, I was on the internet.

01:05:17.000 There seems something comfortable about that mass media environment, like the three channels, the Walter Cronkites.

01:05:22.000 Everybody looks at that as an era, which was better. 0.99

01:05:24.000 But, you know, a lot of the reading I've done in terms of JFK and Vietnam lies and all that, I think shit was just as bad. 0.98

01:05:31.000 It was like we just didn't hear about it. 0.98

01:05:33.000 People just had no idea what was going on.

01:05:35.000 But, you know, I mean, when you talk about JFK, which is like, this is another one of the things that I've gotten really into.

01:05:40.000 I mean, it's not like the public bought the narrative.

01:05:43.000 That's true.

01:05:43.000 They never bought the narrative.

01:05:45.000 They still don't buy the narrative, you know.

01:05:47.000 But I do think in general, it was easier for them to sell a unified, like, propagandistic narrative to the American people, except when it came to things that were just, like, farcical on their face.

01:05:57.000 Right.

01:05:57.000 Well, and you have something like a late-night talk show.

01:06:00.000 It's so easy to co-opt.

01:06:02.000 All you have to do is just, like, advertise on it.

01:06:04.000 Right.

01:06:05.000 And then you kind of control what the people can and can't talk about.

01:06:09.000 It's not hard at all.

01:06:10.000 I mean, that's the thing with the existing, like, the legacy media business models.

01:06:16.000 There's no—you know, CNN has a new boss, and he's saying different things and trying to—it's like— You're still dealing with the same beast here, though.

01:06:23.000 Same incentive structure.

01:06:24.000 You're going to find yourself falling into the exact same mistakes and holes.

01:06:28.000 I mean, that's why, you know, you see the same dynamic going on at Twitter right now, where it's like the part of the reason they were making the censorship decisions they were was because of ideology.

01:06:38.000 And I think that comes out in the Twitter files like you had a couple of people.

01:06:41.000 You had a lot of people who didn't want to make a decision.

01:06:43.000 They're just like, you know, that's in general.

01:06:45.000 People don't like being responsible or making decisions.

01:06:47.000 And a couple of really ideological actors.

01:06:50.000 But you also see in the fallout with advertisers fleeing now that a lot of the reason these censorship decisions were driven was about the money.

01:06:58.000 It was about the bottom line.

01:06:59.000 It was still, just like with legacy media, it was the advertisers shaping what was the bounds of acceptable discourse.

01:07:06.000 You see that on Twitter.

01:07:07.000 You see it on YouTube.

01:07:08.000 I mean, anywhere that's ad supported, you're going to have that same dynamic. 1.00

01:07:10.000 We have that shit constantly on YouTube. 1.00

01:07:12.000 It's like you do a video about Jeffrey Epstein, fucking kiss it goodbye. 1.00

01:07:15.000 Oh, you did a video about, you know, the vaccine, forget it, kiss it goodbye. 0.99

01:07:18.000 You did a video about gain of function.

01:07:20.000 Oh, my favorite was about, do you remember the Chinese tennis star Peng Shuai?

01:07:24.000 She accused that guy of rape.

01:07:27.000 That video got demonetized on our channel and they were like, hey, All videos on sexual assault are demonetized. 0.99

01:07:32.000 Well, first of all, when you do news, sometimes the news is fucking bad.

01:07:36.000 So, you know, I don't know what incentive you're setting here, but we've done other videos on sexual assault that weren't demonetized. 0.54

01:07:42.000 Yeah, they told us literally anything to do with, like, a Me Too story.

01:07:50.000 That's it.

01:07:52.000 That's all it is.

01:08:02.000 I mean, we built our business model so that we could try to insulate ourselves from those incentives because we're human beings, too.

01:08:08.000 And we don't want to be so arrogant to assume that we're not also shaped by whatever incentive structure we ultimately live in.

01:08:13.000 But yeah, that's how you end up with Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, etc., making very similar content moderation decisions because ultimately it's all about what the advertisers are going to feel comfy with.

01:08:24.000 Let me tell you a story about when we got the Spotify deal.

01:08:27.000 Yeah.

01:08:27.000 Tell us.

01:08:28.000 We were always getting demonetized.

01:08:29.000 We got demonetized.

01:08:30.000 YouTube paid us a lot of money, and I... Look, I'm not an anti-YouTube person.

01:08:35.000 I love them.

01:08:36.000 I think the problem with YouTube is monitoring at scale.

01:08:39.000 Yes.

01:08:39.000 And managing the insane amount of content that goes through YouTube.

01:08:44.000 It's fucking impossible. 0.66

01:08:45.000 And then you have ideological actors that are inside the company, and you have... 0.99

01:08:52.000 Mandates.

01:08:52.000 And they have their own opinions about things that lean heavily left.

01:08:57.000 But we were getting demonetized like 25% of our videos.

01:09:01.000 But it's like, okay, I don't change.

01:09:03.000 This is what I do.

01:09:04.000 And most of the money that I was making was actually off of advertisers on iTunes, on Spotify.

01:09:10.000 So you were good.

01:09:11.000 So we go over to Spotify.

01:09:12.000 And then magically, all our demonetization stops.

01:09:16.000 Really?

01:09:16.000 Because they wanted to get all the rest of them.

01:09:17.000 They wanted to get the money before we left.

01:09:20.000 Oh, that's fascinating.

01:09:21.000 Right, Jamie?

01:09:22.000 Did we have any of them that were demonetized after Spotify that might have been like, one?

01:09:26.000 That is fascinating.

01:09:28.000 Maybe one if we had Alex Jones on or something.

01:09:30.000 Yeah, I was just going to say that.

01:09:31.000 They were like, oh, the Alex Jones one.

01:09:33.000 We'd like that cash, but we just can't do it. 0.99

01:09:35.000 Yeah, or someone like fucking super off the grid crazy. 0.85

01:09:40.000 I don't remember who it was, but maybe we had one. 0.77

01:09:43.000 But it was the difference between 25% of our revenue from YouTube.

01:09:48.000 So you would self-censor.

01:09:50.000 And I know that there's many friends that I have that are making YouTube shows and they self-censor.

01:09:55.000 Let me give you a good example.

01:09:56.000 We cover the news, obviously.

01:09:57.000 So YouTube has a policy where if you play a clip of Trump claiming that the election was stolen, that they're going to take down that whole video.

01:10:04.000 And I was like, well, so we're a politics show.

01:10:08.000 We cover Donald Trump when we play clips.

01:10:10.000 That doesn't mean necessarily that we agree or endorse those clips.

01:10:14.000 So how are we supposed to cover the news?

01:10:17.000 And they were like, well, as long as you say that it's not true.

01:10:20.000 And I'm like, yeah, OK, even probably would say that anyway.

01:10:23.000 But it's like, why are you dictating the way that I have to do my coverage?

01:10:28.000 We're going to cover a State of the Union in a couple of days, like a live stream.

01:10:31.000 So that's Biden.

01:10:32.000 I mean, are we supposed to interject every time he says something that's not true and live fact check it?

01:10:37.000 No, because that's outrageous.

01:10:38.000 You play the clip and then afterwards you're like, OK, here's what I thought about the State of the Union.

01:10:42.000 If Trump is he's going to be possibly the next president, United States, very least the probably the next Republican nominee.

01:10:48.000 How are we supposed to set that standard? 0.98

01:10:51.000 Like, you can't just make shit up for people like Nixon says, I'm not a crook. 0.98

01:10:55.000 Exactly. 1.00

01:10:56.000 And then you're like, well, he might be a crook. 0.89

01:10:59.000 Right, right.

01:11:01.000 Yeah, you have to be able to discuss it.

01:11:04.000 If someone says something crazy, you have to refute it.

01:11:07.000 Right, right.

01:11:08.000 And the other piece is, you know, it'd be one thing if the standards were consistent and clear, but they're just like, you just don't know.

01:11:16.000 I mean, just like with your videos, suddenly they were monetized and, huh, who knows why or what happened or what that conversation was like.

01:11:23.000 And so it makes it a challenging situation.

01:11:28.000 I understand their place.

01:11:29.000 I understand what they're doing.

01:11:31.000 I get it.

01:11:31.000 I understand they're trying to make the most money possible.

01:11:35.000 There's an enormous industry that's around that, and they're incredibly successful.

01:11:39.000 And I'm very, very happy for YouTube.

01:11:41.000 Same.

01:11:42.000 But it's an issue.

01:11:43.000 Yeah.

01:11:43.000 That, in particular, is a giant issue.

01:11:46.000 That's a logical problem.

01:11:48.000 But the problem is, if you say, okay, we'll let Crystal and Sager talk about it, because they're going to mock this guy's claims, but then you're going to have some right-wing, like, QAnon person who's going to put it, and then they're going to have it, and we need to do this because of that,

01:12:04.000 and then it's a call to arms, and they're like, oh, Jesus.

01:12:07.000 Well, it's a free country.

01:12:08.000 You know, at the end of the day, you just got to step back and be like, you know what?

01:12:11.000 Is it a free country still?

01:12:12.000 I don't know about that.

01:12:14.000 Supposedly.

01:12:14.000 Here's my real question about election fraud.

01:12:17.000 What percentage of election fraud do you think exists?

01:12:21.000 Because I don't think it's zero.

01:12:23.000 I don't think it's zero, but I think it's fairly.

01:12:27.000 I mean, they go, you know, they'll go back and do like recounts when you have a close election or whatever.

01:12:32.000 Usually the count changes by maybe 50 or 100 votes, but they've never been able to uncover like a large scale.

01:12:40.000 One of the only ones recently that may have shifted the results.

01:12:44.000 Remember this one in North Carolina?

01:12:45.000 Yep.

01:12:45.000 It was actually a Republican candidate who won because they were using this sketchy system of ballot harvesting, and that one actually got uncovered, and it was a very close race, and it was enough to throw the result.

01:13:01.000 That's one of the only instances I know where there was enough sufficient to actually change what the result was.

01:13:08.000 It's important you ask that question, too.

01:13:09.000 And we covered this at the time.

01:13:10.000 We were like, look, we're not going to make fun of you.

01:13:12.000 We're going to cover every single lawsuit that the Trump campaign filed.

01:13:15.000 We're like, here's the lawsuit.

01:13:17.000 Here's what they allege happened in Milwaukee.

01:13:19.000 Here's what they allege happened in Arizona.

01:13:21.000 Here is what they were able to prove in court.

01:13:23.000 At the end of the day, that's probably what matters, right?

01:13:25.000 Here's the judge ultimately dismissed it in this case.

01:13:28.000 And I believe it.

01:13:29.000 I don't remember the exact number of—I want to say it was like 40 or 50 cases.

01:13:33.000 Every single one of them was thrown out.

01:13:35.000 And so I think with election fraud, it's important also to think about what level of fraud is being alleged, what exists actually today, how corrupt our elections actually used to be.

01:13:46.000 In some measures, we actually have some of the least election fraud in modern American history.

01:13:51.000 We're sitting in Texas.

01:13:52.000 One of my favorite books, Means of Ascent, which is about how LBJ straight up stole the 1948 Senate election here in Texas.

01:13:59.000 There's a lot that happened with JFK, too.

01:14:01.000 It's like Box 13, where they straight up stuffed ballots on day six of the Democratic primary before the things were about to get counted.

01:14:10.000 And there was a whole Supreme Court lawsuit.

01:14:12.000 Anyway, LBJ is never president without stealing that election.

01:14:14.000 JFK, a lot of dead people voted in Chicago in 1960. West Virginia...

01:14:21.000 I want to revise my previous statement about that North Carolina election being the only one.

01:14:27.000 I mean, to me, the most obvious example of election fraud was the 2000 presidential election where it was like, you know, top down and they had all the officials in place to get them to stop the count and like, okay, it's going to be George W. Bush.

01:14:39.000 So, in my opinion, that was probably the greatest election fraud.

01:14:42.000 Yeah, I mean, you got the Secretary of State.

01:14:44.000 What was it?

01:14:44.000 So you think that there was John Kerry, right?

01:14:47.000 It was Gore.

01:14:48.000 No, that was Bush v.

01:14:49.000 Gore when it went to the Supreme Court.

01:14:50.000 Which one was John Kerry?

01:14:51.000 That was O4. O4 was a weird one too, right?

01:14:54.000 There were some allegations about...

01:14:55.000 This was a Democratic allegation against Ohio, which went GOP. But there was nothing on the level of...

01:15:02.000 So 2000's the one.

01:15:04.000 Well, 2000, remember, that was with the hanging chads.

01:15:06.000 Jeb Bush, George's brother, Was the governor of the state.

01:15:11.000 So he was like in control.

01:15:13.000 And so basically, you know, they they when it looked like, OK, if we actually count on these ballots, it's going to go to Gore.

01:15:20.000 I don't remember.

01:15:20.000 Do you remember Hacking Democracy?

01:15:22.000 Of course.

01:15:23.000 Yeah.

01:15:23.000 Hacking Democracy.

01:15:24.000 Yeah.

01:15:25.000 HBO Democracy.

01:15:27.000 The documentary rather covered the the issue with the Diebold machines.

01:15:31.000 Yes.

01:15:32.000 The Diebold machines had a third party input available, where a third party could input information that would change the numbers.

01:15:41.000 And they did it live.

01:15:43.000 Like, they did it on film.

01:15:45.000 And they showed how this can be done.

01:15:47.000 When was this from?

01:15:48.000 I don't know anything about this.

01:15:49.000 It was about the Bush elections, because one of the allegations was that Diebold was a huge contributor to the Republican Party.

01:15:56.000 Wasn't there some Cheney connection there, too?

01:15:58.000 Of course! 1.00

01:15:59.000 That guy doesn't have his fucking hands and everything? 0.99

01:16:03.000 He's like immortal too. 0.99

01:16:05.000 He's literally in the Bible.

01:16:06.000 It's important though.

01:16:07.000 He's a man with no heartbeat.

01:16:09.000 Remember when he had that fake heart?

01:16:11.000 We had no heartbeat.

01:16:12.000 We had three hearts, right?

01:16:14.000 Well, he had an artificial thing going on where he had no pulse.

01:16:18.000 So it was just like circulating his blood.

01:16:21.000 Now he's got someone else's heart in there.

01:16:22.000 He's a creepy one.

01:16:23.000 I used to have a joke about him.

01:16:24.000 They had one Secret Service agent that didn't get to eat what everybody else ate, and he was on this vegan diet, and they were giving him all these pills. 0.99

01:16:33.000 Like, what the fuck? 0.99

01:16:34.000 Why am I jogging every day? 1.00

01:16:37.000 And he was just the guy, the moment Chaney drops dead, they fucking shoot this guy in the head. 1.00

01:16:42.000 Takes him duck hunting. 1.00

01:16:43.000 Open up his chest and pull his fucking heart out and stuff it into Dick Chaney. 1.00

01:16:47.000 They take him on the duck hunt. 1.00

01:16:48.000 Chaney shoots him.

01:16:49.000 The quail.

01:16:50.000 Quail hunt.

01:16:51.000 Do you know those are the most gross hunts of all time?

01:16:55.000 They just open a box and they let these birds fly out.

01:16:58.000 It's called a canned hunt.

01:17:00.000 Wow.

01:17:00.000 They're the grossest hunts of all time.

01:17:02.000 How do you enjoy that?

01:17:03.000 Well, I don't know.

01:17:04.000 You have to be a person just shooting birds out of the sky.

01:17:07.000 Well, we have this thing, and I did this post once about the hierarchy of dead animals on social media.

01:17:14.000 Okay.

01:17:14.000 And I said, okay, I'm going to show you a piece of fish.

01:17:18.000 No one's gonna be offended.

01:17:19.000 And then I'm gonna show you a dead fish.

01:17:22.000 Still, fish, they don't even take care of their kids. 1.00

01:17:24.000 Fuck fish. 1.00

01:17:25.000 Right? 1.00

01:17:26.000 No one cares about fish.

01:17:26.000 And then I was holding up a dead turkey.

01:17:28.000 Yeah.

01:17:28.000 Like, this is a turkey I shot.

01:17:30.000 Okay.

01:17:30.000 And then I had a package of bear meat.

01:17:33.000 And I'm like, this is just bear meat.

01:17:34.000 What kind of bear?

01:17:34.000 Black bear that I ate.

01:17:36.000 I shot him and I ate him.

01:17:38.000 Black bear is a very edible and delicious food. 0.79

01:17:40.000 In fact, the pioneers that traveled across the country during the Daniel Boone days, they preferred black bear meat over venison.

01:17:48.000 Because of the fat, I'm assuming.

01:17:49.000 It was closer to beef.

01:17:50.000 It's very close to beef.

01:17:52.000 So they ate bears and they used deer for skins.

01:17:56.000 So they all wore their clothes, their buck skins. 0.99

01:17:59.000 Interesting.

01:17:59.000 Yeah.

01:18:00.000 A buck, the word buck, the dollar buck, comes from one buckskin is worth a dollar.

01:18:06.000 So that's where a buck comes from.

01:18:08.000 I think you've had him on, Clay Newcomb, is that right?

01:18:10.000 Yeah, he's got a great series on this.

01:18:12.000 He's amazing.

01:18:13.000 Clay Newcomb is the Bear Grease podcast.

01:18:16.000 He's a brilliant guy from Arkansas.

01:18:18.000 I love that guy to death.

01:18:20.000 And he talks about the history of Of this country and wild animal conservation and stuff.

01:18:27.000 But that's one of the parts of the story is that people ate bears.

01:18:33.000 That was the favorite food.

01:18:36.000 That's the picture of my bear meat. 0.58

01:18:38.000 And so did people, were they like, you're a monster, you murdered Winnie the Pooh, basically?

01:18:42.000 No, no, no.

01:18:42.000 Everyone was fine with it because I didn't have a dead bear.

01:18:44.000 But if it was the dead bear, that might be different.

01:18:47.000 Yeah, well there's pictures of me with a dead bear.

01:18:49.000 Oh, that's fine.

01:18:50.000 People get very upset at it.

01:18:51.000 But look, I ate that bear.

01:18:52.000 And by the way, that bear...

01:18:55.000 Here's something that people need to understand about bears, because people think about bears like, oh, there's a beautiful animal in the forest, and it's also a teddy bear, and it's Winnie the Pooh.

01:19:04.000 I was there when there was a brawl between a male bear and a female bear, and the female bear scared the male bear off, and the male bear killed one of her cubs, and then she ate the cub.

01:19:19.000 Oh my god.

01:19:20.000 So she scared the male bear off of the cub that was killed, and then she ate the cub. 1.00

01:19:26.000 Oh my god.

01:19:26.000 You know there's that bear fighting grizzly man?

01:19:28.000 My friend saw it.

01:19:29.000 Oh, that's horrible.

01:19:29.000 He was there while this happened, while we were all in camp.

01:19:32.000 That's crazy.

01:19:33.000 Yeah, so, you know, and there's, I mean, you're hunting something that can kill you, too.

01:19:38.000 There's kind of a wild part of that, too.

01:19:41.000 Like, you're not just hunting a deer, which people don't have a problem with.

01:19:44.000 You're not hunting quail that have just been released from a fox for your pleasure.

01:19:48.000 My joke about Cheney was he shot his friend in the face and his friend apologized.

01:19:52.000 He's like, sorry, I look like a bird. 0.98

01:19:56.000 Don't kill me, bro.

01:19:57.000 I mean, he got shot in the face by Darth Vader. 0.99

01:20:01.000 You gotta let it go.

01:20:02.000 You gotta let that one go.

01:20:04.000 It's so weird how much the culture has changed in terms of the way that theocratic right and the way they would think about who was advocating for censorship.

01:20:12.000 That's where I grew up in.

01:20:13.000 I grew up here in Texas.

01:20:14.000 And then it's like you get to D.C. and I feel like everything changed very quickly.

01:20:19.000 Well, it was always bipartisan, honestly, because if you go back to the Tipper Gore days, that was Al Gore's wife and she was the one that was advocating for censorship of rap videos and rap songs.

01:20:29.000 What was it called?

01:20:30.000 The V-chip?

01:20:31.000 Or something like that?

01:20:32.000 It was like the censorship chip in television or video games, I want to say.

01:20:37.000 It was a whole moral panic around rap music.

01:20:39.000 That was like, what, early 90s?

01:20:42.000 80s, 90s stuff?

01:20:42.000 Well, yeah, I remember.

01:20:43.000 I was...

01:20:44.000 Oh, yeah, there it is.

01:20:45.000 Not allowed yet.

01:20:46.000 This is what I got. 0.97

01:20:47.000 It prevents blowjobs. 0.98

01:20:49.000 This keeps you from getting on a jet that's gonna get you in trouble. 0.99

01:20:54.000 Yes.

01:20:57.000 What is that?

01:20:58.000 Oh my god.

01:21:01.000 That's where they ended up with just this.

01:21:04.000 Oh, TVPG, yeah.

01:21:06.000 Yeah, and they started putting the ratings on the video games.

01:21:09.000 Yeah, it was a whole moral panic thing.

01:21:11.000 It was in like 1989, 1990. I remember I was at a gym on a treadmill, listening to Straight Outta Compton for the first time.

01:21:20.000 And I was like, holy shit! 0.99

01:21:23.000 Like, this is crazy! 0.99

01:21:25.000 Like, at the time, I was like a young man in my early 20s who was a kickboxer.

01:21:30.000 And I was like, this is kind of nuts.

01:21:32.000 Wow. 1.00

01:21:32.000 I was getting into a ring with fucking no clothes on in my underwear, kicking people in the face. 1.00

01:21:41.000 And I was like, these guys are a little wild. 1.00

01:21:44.000 These guys are wild.

01:21:46.000 I mean, I was living the wildest life.

01:21:48.000 I had no health insurance.

01:21:49.000 I was out there fighting for no money.

01:21:51.000 Yeah, I was traveling around the country.

01:21:53.000 I felt alive, though.

01:21:53.000 Oh, man, I was alive.

01:21:55.000 But it was...

01:21:56.000 But listening to that, I was like, this is crazy.

01:21:58.000 So I can imagine if you're some, like, dumpy housewife who's married to some politicians, like, I'm gonna put a stop to this! 1.00

01:22:05.000 This is outrageous!

01:22:06.000 Your son comes home straight out of Compton!

01:22:08.000 You know, like, no, no, no, not my Billy!

01:22:10.000 Yeah, that's so true.

01:22:12.000 I mean, I don't know.

01:22:13.000 I sort of struggle with now, like, the music that is...

01:22:21.000 I'm not saying any of it should be censored, but in terms of my own personal choices in the household, what's appropriate for the kiddos.

01:22:29.000 I take an approach that was—my parents were hippies, luckily.

01:22:33.000 My mother and my stepfather were hippies, and they didn't care what I did.

01:22:36.000 They were like, I want you to be you.

01:22:39.000 You could swear if you want to.

01:22:41.000 Wow.

01:22:42.000 You can say whatever, but don't swear when you go to school and you get in trouble.

01:22:45.000 Don't swear around people's parents.

01:22:46.000 They'll get upset at you.

01:22:47.000 Yeah.

01:22:47.000 And they just were real reasonable about it.

01:22:49.000 So because of that, I had this open way of communication.

01:22:52.000 So I have that with my kids.

01:22:54.000 I'm like, you can swear.

01:22:55.000 My wife used to get upset in the beginning. 1.00

01:22:57.000 She was like, stop saying fuck. 1.00

01:22:59.000 Around the kids. 1.00

01:23:00.000 I'm like, they need to know that that's a word.

01:23:02.000 Because someday someone's going to say it, it's going to make them feel bad.

01:23:04.000 But like, I can see that when they're in even like third grade, fourth grade, where they're able to understand there's things we can say here, but we can't say in this other place.

01:23:13.000 But I mean, I have a five year old in kindergarten right now.

01:23:15.000 I don't know that she would really get to make the distinction.

01:23:18.000 I understand that, but eventually that information is going to get to her.

01:23:23.000 Sure.

01:23:23.000 So it's like, when do you tell her Santa Claus isn't real?

01:23:26.000 I just don't need her teacher thinking I'm a bad person.

01:23:29.000 Right.

01:23:29.000 I live in a small town, okay?

01:23:31.000 I don't want to be outcast.

01:23:33.000 She definitely shouldn't be saying it.

01:23:34.000 I got to keep up appearances.

01:23:36.000 That's what I'm saying here.

01:23:39.000 I know that feeling.

01:23:40.000 She definitely shouldn't be saying it.

01:23:43.000 Yeah, don't say it.

01:23:44.000 I don't say it when I'm around people that I think are going to be offended. 1.00

01:23:47.000 If I go over to someone's house and I meet their parents and their older folks are gay, what the fuck's going on, Bob? 0.99

01:23:52.000 Like, I don't do that. 1.00

01:23:53.000 How are you, sir?

01:23:54.000 Nice to meet you.

01:23:55.000 Hi, nice to meet you.

01:23:56.000 I'm not going to say who.

01:23:58.000 I'm not going to name check. 0.83

01:23:59.000 I did an interview a little while ago, and they sent me a list of words I wasn't allowed to say, and it was fucking hilarious.

01:24:06.000 What was that list that they gave of problematic new words and new phrases?

01:24:10.000 I put that out there.

01:24:12.000 It was from Stanford University.

01:24:16.000 Wait, is that the one that said the French?

01:24:20.000 No, that was the AP. Did you see that?

01:24:23.000 The AP put out their style guide or whatever.

01:24:26.000 It was like, don't put the in front of a group.

01:24:28.000 It could be offensive.

01:24:29.000 It's othering.

01:24:30.000 And one of their examples was...

01:24:32.000 People with disabilities, the French... 0.99

01:24:34.000 I was like, well, and it said, refer to them as people with, so it was like people suffering from Frenchness. 0.72

01:24:39.000 Yes.

01:24:40.000 Oh, my God.

01:24:41.000 That is an affliction.

01:24:42.000 Oh, my God.

01:24:43.000 University language guide, grandfather housekeeping, spirit animal are problematic words.

01:24:48.000 Spirit animal? 0.92

01:24:48.000 Spirit animal is a problematic word. 0.92

01:24:50.000 Oh, man.

01:24:50.000 I thought that was just for funsies.

01:24:53.000 Grandfather?

01:24:54.000 I thought that Spirit Gemma was just a... 1.00

01:24:56.000 Listen, ninja is something you can't take from us.

01:25:01.000 I, from the martial arts community, you are not allowed to say that ninja is a pejorative.

01:25:08.000 Because ninja is something that we like... 0.99

01:25:10.000 We will talk about a guy who's a jiu-jitsu expert and like, dude, that motherfucker's a ninja. 0.99

01:25:14.000 It's a compliment. 0.99

01:25:15.000 That's a thing.

01:25:15.000 Okay, listen.

01:25:16.000 I agree with you.

01:25:18.000 But the one that I just can't even understand the rationalization of is grandfather.

01:25:25.000 I can imagine how a deranged mind would come up with these other ones.

01:25:29.000 Look what it says.

01:25:30.000 The clause originated in the American South in the 1890s is a way to defy the 15th Amendment and prevent black Americans from voting.

01:25:36.000 What?

01:25:36.000 Oh, I see.

01:25:37.000 Because it was referred to as the grandfather clause.

01:25:39.000 But that means, though, that the grandfather name was grandfathered into the grandfather clause.

01:25:44.000 So why get rid of that?

01:25:46.000 Yes, because the grandfather name, that's like way before that.

01:25:48.000 Why don't you just teach people what the grandfather clause is? 1.00

01:25:50.000 Just, yeah, get rid of that stupid fucking clause. 1.00

01:25:52.000 Like, don't get rid of the name grandfather. 1.00

01:25:55.000 That's so dumb! 0.95

01:25:56.000 There's so many more grandfathers than there are grandfather clauses. 1.00

01:25:59.000 Yes!

01:26:00.000 There was another one, Jamie, I think you can look for.

01:26:02.000 I think it was Stanford, and there was one that was around merit or something like that.

01:26:06.000 Hold on, go back to that, because it said preferred pronouns are problematic.

01:26:10.000 Where were you right there?

01:26:11.000 Yeah, here it goes.

01:26:12.000 Hold on.

01:26:12.000 The language guide also considers preferred pronouns as problematic, because the term preferred suggests that a person's pronouns are optional.

01:26:22.000 So what are you supposed to say?

01:26:25.000 Mandatory pronouns.

01:26:26.000 Your pronouns. 1.00

01:26:27.000 Follow the rules or die. 1.00

01:26:29.000 I like this one. 0.98

01:26:30.000 Phrases with man.

01:26:32.000 Manpower.

01:26:33.000 Oh, yes. 0.99

01:26:33.000 That's so silly. 0.99

01:26:35.000 Well, I mean, that maybe. 0.99

01:26:38.000 Maybe you can make an argument for that if you're working at a 50-50 fucking workplace. 0.97

01:26:43.000 Even a 90-10 workplace. 0.99

01:26:44.000 And 10% of them are women.

01:26:46.000 Like, man hours.

01:26:47.000 Like, what about human hours?

01:26:49.000 You can say human hours.

01:26:50.000 Sure you can.

01:26:50.000 You could.

01:26:50.000 That's not an issue.

01:26:51.000 Yeah, but are you really taking offense at that?

01:26:53.000 But grandfather.

01:26:53.000 Yeah.

01:26:53.000 Leave Grandpa alone!

01:26:55.000 Yeah, come on. 1.00

01:26:56.000 What the fuck are we doing? 0.96

01:27:00.000 But the thing is, once people get things established, they never will stop. 0.98

01:27:04.000 Like, we're good.

01:27:05.000 We have a perfect balance in society.

01:27:07.000 No, they want to keep pushing.

01:27:08.000 And if they're pushing in that general direction to try to restrict language, define what's acceptable.

01:27:14.000 You're right, though, that it is such a bipartisan instinct.

01:27:17.000 It's much more about control than it is anything else.

01:27:21.000 Because we see the right, I think, very strategically has embraced the narrative of...

01:27:39.000 What about porn?

01:27:41.000 That's the crazy thing about Twitter. 1.00

01:27:43.000 Twitter still has hardcore porn. 0.99

01:27:45.000 Yeah. 0.98

01:27:45.000 Which is really weird. 0.98

01:27:46.000 They honestly do a pretty good job, I feel like, of keeping it...

01:27:49.000 What does that mean?

01:27:50.000 What does it show up in my feed?

01:27:51.000 Exactly, that's what I mean.

01:27:52.000 It's like, if you aren't there for like...

01:27:54.000 Right, if you're not following... 0.99

01:27:55.000 Dicks and asses, you're not going to get it in your feed. 1.00

01:27:57.000 And if you are, then you are. 1.00

01:27:59.000 Yeah.

01:27:59.000 I saw somebody tweet at us once, they're like, love crystal ball and soccer.

01:28:02.000 I was like, oh, who is this guy? 0.99

01:28:03.000 I show up and there's just a giant dick in my face. 1.00

01:28:05.000 He's like a male porn star. 1.00

01:28:06.000 He's a male porn star. 1.00

01:28:06.000 I love that guy. 1.00

01:28:07.000 I was like, alright.

01:28:07.000 I love that guy.

01:28:08.000 Shout out to him.

01:28:09.000 You're political too.

01:28:10.000 Absolutely.

01:28:11.000 They gotta fight for their rights, maybe more than anyone else. 1.00

01:28:13.000 Just because you fuck on camera doesn't mean you're not a person. 0.99

01:28:19.000 It's a wild time to be alive. 1.00

01:28:22.000 But that's why I think that a show like yours is so important.

01:28:24.000 Because you are from the right and you are from the left.

01:28:26.000 And I think I'm like a person without a country.

01:28:29.000 I'm an island.

01:28:30.000 I really do.

01:28:31.000 I'm so left-wing on so many different things. 0.99

01:28:34.000 But then they get to a certain number of things and I'm like, no fucking way. 0.99

01:28:37.000 Stop. 0.99

01:28:38.000 Because you're denying crazy.

01:28:40.000 You're denying all sorts of real psychological conditions.

01:28:44.000 Amid backlash.

01:28:45.000 Stanford pulls.

01:28:46.000 Harmful languages. 1.00

01:28:47.000 Amid backlash.

01:28:48.000 Duh, guys. 1.00

01:28:49.000 Get out of your fucking bubble. 1.00

01:28:51.000 Those are people that need to read the comments. 1.00

01:28:53.000 Sometimes people shouldn't, but Stanford should read the comments.

01:28:55.000 They should read the comments.

01:28:57.000 I think there's a lot of people who feel like you do, Joe.

01:28:59.000 I was so laughed my whole life.

01:29:02.000 We both feel the same way you do in terms of like, you know, I don't see myself as like fitting with the Democratic Party and everything that they're doing.

01:29:09.000 I just saw like Nancy Pelosi is endorsing Adam Schiff for a California Senate. 0.98

01:29:13.000 When you read through the way that man lied to the American public through all of Russiagate, you're like...

01:29:17.000 Yeah.

01:29:17.000 He should be, like, in prison for perjury, not being bolstered by one of the most powerful women in the country for the United States Senate.

01:29:25.000 Do you see him sitting next to Ilian Omar, where she's apologizing for talking about it's all about the Benjamins?

01:29:30.000 Yeah.

01:29:30.000 Which is just about money.

01:29:31.000 She's talking about money.

01:29:32.000 She shouldn't have apologized.

01:29:33.000 I mean, I'll go ahead and say it.

01:29:34.000 That's not an anti-Semitic statement.

01:29:35.000 I don't think that is.

01:29:36.000 It's about Benjamins or money. 0.99

01:29:38.000 You know, the idea that Jewish people are not into money is ridiculous. 0.99

01:29:41.000 Listen. 0.99

01:29:42.000 That's like saying Italians aren't into pizza. 1.00

01:29:44.000 It's fucking stupid. 1.00

01:29:46.000 I mean, listen. 1.00

01:29:46.000 It's fucking stupid. 1.00

01:29:47.000 I understand that the way she phrased it, like she could have phrased it a different way so that people would have less of a freakout, but can you not talk about the influence of money in D.C.? Of course. 1.00

01:30:00.000 I mean, there's a very obvious reason why for my entire life, There's been a uniparty consensus around our policy vis-a-vis the Israeli government and a total inability or unwillingness to criticize the Israeli government. 0.59

01:30:15.000 It has everything to do with organization and, yes, money, just like every other fucking interest in D.C. And so, yeah, the fact that she said that she got kicked off the Foreign Affairs Committee. 0.99

01:30:25.000 Look, I have issues and disagreements with Ilhan Omar, but she actually is one of the more courageous voices on foreign policy who's willing to call out some of the hypocrisy and bullshit In U.S. foreign policy, extremely rare in terms of United States Congressmen. 0.91

01:30:39.000 So it's actually kind of a real loss that she got kicked off that committee.

01:30:42.000 Whether you agree with her or not, she has a bold opinion, and that opinion is not her own.

01:30:47.000 There's many people that have that opinion, and they should be represented. 0.99

01:30:50.000 My point is she's sitting right next to Adam Schiff, and no one says shit. 1.00

01:30:55.000 She doesn't say, yeah, yeah, I probably should have said, hey, motherfucker, what did you say? 1.00

01:30:59.000 You said some crazy shit that wasn't true at all. 1.00

01:31:03.000 No, he loved having his face on the cameras during all the Russiagate stuff. 0.99

01:31:09.000 And he would go out there and just go right up to the line of basically saying, yeah, we got the goods on Trump in Russia.

01:31:15.000 And he fed it so hard.

01:31:18.000 And then you look at that and what a disservice it was.

01:31:22.000 What a giant, elaborate conspiracy was constructed to distract the American people from so many more important things that were going on.

01:31:30.000 And here's one of the key figures. 0.97

01:31:32.000 And he is very likely to be the next senator from California, especially with fucking Nancy Pelosi's endorsement now. 0.99

01:31:38.000 Insane. 1.00

01:31:39.000 It's fucking ridiculous. 1.00

01:31:40.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:31:40.000 No, I agree. 1.00

01:31:40.000 You know, it's also funny in terms of, like, what you're not allowed to say, what you get censored off of a committee for. 1.00

01:31:44.000 Like you said, look, I don't agree with Ilhan Omar on a lot. 0.97

01:31:47.000 I mean, I also don't think that it should be out of bounds to talk about influence of any government, including the Saudi government, of which a lot of these people are on the take of hypocrisy, which drives me fucking crazy. 0.99

01:31:59.000 It's crazy. 0.92

01:32:00.000 Yeah, it's like, you know, they'll censor, or they'll go after Eric Swalwell, rightfully, in my opinion.

01:32:04.000 What did he do?

01:32:06.000 Okay, he had a relationship of some kind with a Chinese spy.

01:32:09.000 He basically slept with a Chinese spy.

01:32:11.000 It may not have been. 0.53

01:32:11.000 Some of those Chinese ladies are very hot in his defense. 0.53

01:32:13.000 He says it was not.

01:32:14.000 And this was apparently before he was married.

01:32:17.000 It's hard to resist.

01:32:18.000 And he says he had no idea.

01:32:18.000 Her name was Fang Fang?

01:32:20.000 No idea she was a Chinese spy.

01:32:22.000 Jamie, I'm sure you can find a picture of her.

01:32:23.000 There's a picture of the two of them together.

01:32:24.000 You get a hot sext from Fang Fang.

01:32:27.000 What are you going to do?

01:32:28.000 You meet her at a conference. 1.00

01:32:28.000 You're a fucking nerd. 1.00

01:32:29.000 You're the weirdo who always wants to be a congressman. 1.00

01:32:31.000 She's in a lingerie in front of a mirror. 0.99

01:32:32.000 Sends you a picture.

01:32:33.000 Who among us?

01:32:34.000 Let's go.

01:32:35.000 Let's go.

01:32:36.000 As long as I don't tell her any secrets. 0.99

01:32:38.000 Who gives a shit? 0.99

01:32:39.000 No harm, no foul. 0.99

01:32:40.000 No harm, no foul.

01:32:41.000 No harm, no foul.

01:32:42.000 There she is.

01:32:43.000 There she is.

01:32:44.000 Look at him and look at her.

01:32:45.000 Let's go champ. 1.00

01:32:45.000 He looks like a fucking dork. 1.00

01:32:46.000 Let's go champ. 1.00

01:32:48.000 Of course he did.

01:32:48.000 Yes.

01:32:49.000 She had, like, intentionally, I think my recollection is, infiltrated a bunch of, like, San Francisco's sort of, like, Democratic donor circuits.

01:32:56.000 The crazy thing is, she's like a seven. 0.85

01:32:57.000 You know, imagine if they brought up one of their bombshells.

01:32:59.000 She was probably, like, the early ones.

01:33:01.000 Listen. 0.99

01:33:02.000 You know how the Russians send out the first fucking group of people to die? 1.00

01:33:05.000 If you're a seven and you know how to stroke a congressman's ego, you're going to be fine. 1.00

01:33:09.000 Oh, yeah.

01:33:10.000 Especially with a couple of cocktails.

01:33:11.000 Yeah, you didn't need to send in a ten.

01:33:13.000 He was...

01:33:14.000 Probably better.

01:33:15.000 You trust the Seven.

01:33:16.000 She's a regular gal. 1.00

01:33:17.000 It was like Maria Bettina.

01:33:19.000 She was like the Russian one. 1.00

01:33:21.000 She seduced a bunch of NRA members. 0.96

01:33:24.000 It's like 2018. We actually exchanged her.

01:33:27.000 She's back in Moscow.

01:33:28.000 We did a prisoner exchange for her. 0.99

01:33:30.000 Isn't she like... 1.00

01:33:33.000 A lawmaker now?

01:33:34.000 I'm pretty sure she's a lawmaker now. 1.00

01:33:36.000 Yeah, you're right.

01:33:36.000 I think she was elected to the Duma or something like that.

01:33:38.000 So what did she do to the NRA people?

01:33:40.000 She would go to a bunch of CPAC and NRA conferences and ingratiate herself with GOP officials and then she would sleep with them and then basically try and get as close to Trump as possible.

01:33:52.000 There's a lot of governments that do this, right?

01:33:54.000 The Israeli government does this, the Russian government, the Chinese government.

01:33:57.000 What was she trying to do?

01:33:58.000 What was her goal?

01:34:00.000 Like, I think a lot of it's related to trying getting sanctions off of certain oligarchs.

01:34:04.000 That's what a lot of it comes back to.

01:34:05.000 She was in a real, like, long-term, ultimately, relationship with, like, somebody high up in the NRA. Yes, yes.

01:34:13.000 NRA, something like that.

01:34:15.000 Like, she was living with him and, like...

01:34:17.000 So, the idea was to get close to power, I guess, basically.

01:34:21.000 I never saw The Americans. 0.99

01:34:22.000 Oh, great fuck, great, great show. 1.00

01:34:24.000 That's all I heard. 1.00

01:34:26.000 I didn't watch it either.

01:34:26.000 But it's the same thing, right?

01:34:28.000 It was like Russian spies that were integrated.

01:34:31.000 Tell me we don't do that, too.

01:34:32.000 Of course we do.

01:34:33.000 Of course we do.

01:34:35.000 100%.

01:34:36.000 It's a dirty mess.

01:34:40.000 I mean, that's the argument, like, kicking Chinese companies out of America.

01:34:43.000 Like, hey, they don't let us do it.

01:34:45.000 You know why, too?

01:34:47.000 If you look at it, they explicitly, when they banned Google, Facebook, and all that, they're like, they're going to use it to shape our population and spy on us.

01:34:52.000 Why would we do that?

01:34:52.000 And then we're like, yeah, let's get TikTok on in here.

01:34:54.000 It's all good. 0.99

01:34:55.000 Well, not only that, let's, like, let them fly a fucking balloon over the country. 0.99

01:34:58.000 Oh, my God. 0.99

01:34:59.000 It's crazy, right?

01:35:00.000 I mean, the funny thing is, it really is, like, it's such a shell game because, like, we know they're spying on us.

01:35:07.000 They know we're spying on them.

01:35:09.000 But you can't be so fucking obvious about it where your spy balloon is there and a commercial airline jet is, like, spotting it. 0.84

01:35:16.000 And so, like, you can't be so obvious. 0.91

01:35:18.000 But it's floating around.

01:35:19.000 Does it have power?

01:35:21.000 Well, so I don't know, but it was spotted actually over one of the three sites in the United States which has intercontinental ballistic missiles.

01:35:28.000 And of course, it just happened to fly there and it drifted off, of course, according to the Chinese government.

01:35:33.000 But we already knew that their spy satellites are able to see this area and collect whatever data there is to collect.

01:35:42.000 So what's the purpose of balloons?

01:35:44.000 That's a great question.

01:35:44.000 I don't know.

01:35:45.000 Just to stick it in your face?

01:35:47.000 It's like when, you remember when Nancy Pelosi visited Taiwan and China just shot a bunch of missiles into the ocean? 0.56

01:35:52.000 Killed some dolphins?

01:35:54.000 Yeah, I think that was wildly irresponsible of her to go though. 0.96

01:35:57.000 I mean, especially at the State Department and Biden, they were like, don't do this.

01:36:00.000 I did a joke about it. 0.95

01:36:01.000 I was like, I think they're trying to kill that lady. 0.88

01:36:03.000 She's making too much money. 1.00

01:36:04.000 You're like, Nancy, go on. 0.99

01:36:06.000 You're fucking enough for everybody. 1.00

01:36:07.000 We've got a special trip for you. 1.00

01:36:08.000 You're stealing too much money.

01:36:10.000 What does it say there, Jamie?

01:36:11.000 They don't care about that, Joe.

01:36:12.000 The balloon has the ability to maneuver and had changed course.

01:36:15.000 Oh, terrific.

01:36:15.000 How did it drift off course, then, if they have the ability to maneuver?

01:36:18.000 Well, it changed course.

01:36:19.000 Oh, okay.

01:36:20.000 I mean, it didn't drift off course.

01:36:21.000 It seems like it's under its own power.

01:36:23.000 So, that's the worry about shooting it down was the payload.

01:36:28.000 Like, it's large.

01:36:28.000 Right.

01:36:29.000 The worry was that there would be debris that would hurt the civilian population, and then the other thing I saw was that they actually wanted to be able to observe it more and see what it was and capabilities and whatever, and it might be more useful to it in the sky than shot up into a billion figures.

01:36:47.000 Well, the Avengers have a net they could shoot out of a jet.

01:36:49.000 You're telling me the United States doesn't have a net?

01:36:51.000 I don't know, man.

01:36:52.000 That's a compromised position.

01:36:53.000 I like that.

01:36:55.000 So did you hear about the circumstance of why it was found?

01:36:58.000 Because a commercial airline pilot is the one who saw it.

01:37:00.000 And so I'm like, well, did we know it was there before the pilot called?

01:37:04.000 He was probably so bummed out, he probably was hoping it was a UFO. Oh, I know.

01:37:07.000 Please let it be a UFO. He's like, Joe Rogan's going to have me on to talk about this.

01:37:13.000 This is going to be great.

01:37:14.000 Well, we were at 35,000 feet.

01:37:17.000 Yeah.

01:37:20.000 That's too obvious, though.

01:37:21.000 It's too obvious.

01:37:22.000 It was too rude of injury technology.

01:37:24.000 Well, I always wonder about what those things are that people keep spotting.

01:37:26.000 I mean, we don't really totally know about their capabilities.

01:37:30.000 As you know, I go quite deep on this.

01:37:32.000 Yeah.

01:37:33.000 Do you go deep on it at all, Crystal, or do you just roll your eyes when you start spilling UFOs?

01:37:38.000 I don't roll my eyes.

01:37:39.000 She just grabbed her drink.

01:37:41.000 That's an instinct.

01:37:43.000 I don't roll my eyes.

01:37:44.000 I just, it's not like, I don't go deep the way he does.

01:37:48.000 I find it interesting.

01:37:49.000 I find it question mark, but I can't say I've like, you know, gone deep down the rabbit hole.

01:37:54.000 There's more important things to concentrate on in the moment.

01:37:56.000 I wouldn't say that.

01:37:57.000 I just say like for whatever reason, it's not my thing that I'm like super fascinated by.

01:38:00.000 The mystery of alien life.

01:38:01.000 Do you think that is a more male-oriented thing?

01:38:05.000 Definitely possible.

01:38:06.000 You think so?

01:38:07.000 Well, here's the thing.

01:38:08.000 Out of all the people that I've interviewed that are UFO experts, they're all men.

01:38:12.000 All Sasquatch experts.

01:38:13.000 All men. 0.93

01:38:14.000 I have a joke about Sasquatch experts. 1.00

01:38:17.000 I think they're all unfuckable white dudes. 1.00

01:38:19.000 Hey, Les Brown is a fucking gem, okay? 1.00

01:38:22.000 Don't say that about him. 0.99

01:38:23.000 This is the last thing you're going to find when you go looking for Bigfoot. 1.00

01:38:26.000 Black people. 0.99

01:38:28.000 You're more likely to find Bigfoot than you are black people looking for Bigfoot. 1.00

01:38:32.000 It's like a bit I had. 1.00

01:38:33.000 It's all unfuckable white dudes. 0.99

01:38:36.000 There's like those shows that Bigfoot aren't. 1.00

01:38:38.000 Black people aren't buying it. 1.00

01:38:40.000 They're like, we got real shit going on in our lives. 1.00

01:38:43.000 Where the fuck did you guys get excited about this? 1.00

01:38:45.000 It is some white guy shit. 1.00

01:38:46.000 It's unfuckable white guys. 1.00

01:38:49.000 My friend, Essie Cup, who we had on the screen earlier, I wouldn't say she's a Sasquatch expert, but she's super into them. 0.98

01:38:56.000 Of course.

01:38:56.000 So it's a little tiny fly in the ointment of your theory here.

01:38:59.000 I don't think it's fair to put Sasquatch and UFO in the same category.

01:39:01.000 It 100% is.

01:39:03.000 Because I hope they're both real.

01:39:04.000 Don't...

01:39:09.000 I hope they're both real.

01:39:10.000 I just think there's a lot more evidence on the UFO side.

01:39:13.000 Yes, there is.

01:39:14.000 But there's also evidence that there was an animal that was a bipedal hominid that lived alongside of human beings.

01:39:20.000 Oh, interesting.

01:39:20.000 An enormous one.

01:39:21.000 An enormous one.

01:39:22.000 It's called Gigantopithecus.

01:39:24.000 It's absolutely real.

01:39:25.000 In the Pacific Northwest?

01:39:26.000 Well, it was in Asia.

01:39:28.000 And this was during the time before the Ice Age when the Bering Land Bridge was available.

01:39:32.000 There was an animal that they discovered in an apothecary shop in China, and I believe it was in the 1920s.

01:39:38.000 An anthropologist was there, and he found these enormous primate teeth. 0.80

01:39:42.000 I might be fucking this up. 0.81

01:39:43.000 I don't think I am, though. 0.99

01:39:45.000 He found these enormous primate teeth, and he was like, what the fuck is this? 0.99

01:39:49.000 And where'd you get this? 0.99

01:39:50.000 And it led to an investigation.

01:39:52.000 They found the site where these things were recovered, and they found more. 0.98

01:39:55.000 And they found jawbones that would indicate that this animal is bipedal, which means it stood up on two legs, and it was fucking enormous. 0.84

01:40:04.000 Like, eight-foot-tall, gorilla-like, orangutan-like creature that existed alongside human beings. 0.50

01:40:11.000 Okay, but we don't know exactly like when did the...

01:40:13.000 We know for a fact that they existed 100,000 years ago because of these bones.

01:40:18.000 But that doesn't mean they didn't exist 50,000 years ago or 10,000 years ago.

01:40:23.000 We don't know.

01:40:24.000 And if they did exist 10,000 years ago, it makes sense why the Native Americans would have many, many names for these creatures.

01:40:31.000 And they didn't really have mythical creatures.

01:40:34.000 That's what a Gigantopithecus would have looked like.

01:40:38.000 Jesus, wow.

01:40:38.000 So it was an enormous great ape that lived alongside us and absolutely 100,000 years ago.

01:40:46.000 And then they found many other creatures that were really interesting that we didn't know existed that absolutely lived alongside human beings.

01:40:55.000 One of them was the hobbit man from the island of Flores.

01:40:58.000 That one I knew about.

01:40:59.000 So that's Homo Floresis.

01:41:01.000 That was Indonesia, I believe.

01:41:02.000 Didn't they have some local lore also about that, like the elders...

01:41:08.000 Had some connectivity to when that species existed alongside of them?

01:41:13.000 Yes, they call it the Orang Pendek.

01:41:15.000 And by the way, Hawaii has a similar legend.

01:41:18.000 I talked to a gentleman in Hawaii when I was there recently, and he was just an old timer.

01:41:24.000 He was great.

01:41:25.000 And he was telling me all the different names that the native Hawaiians have for things.

01:41:29.000 And he was explaining how there was a creature that supposedly lived when the first people got here.

01:41:36.000 And it was a small, hairy, ape-like creature that is similar to what's been spotted in Vietnam and in other parts of the world in these jungle areas.

01:41:45.000 They call it the Orang Pendek.

01:41:47.000 And it's identical to this hobbit person. 0.94

01:41:50.000 So when they existed, who knows?

01:41:53.000 They might have existed 500 years ago or 100 years ago or 50 years ago. 0.95

01:41:57.000 We don't fucking know.

01:41:58.000 But we do know that there were a bunch of different kinds of ape-like creatures that existed alongside of us. 0.97

01:42:06.000 And they think that these Homo floreensis were really close to human.

01:42:10.000 They were on a branch.

01:42:12.000 They used tools.

01:42:13.000 They hunted.

01:42:14.000 They worked together.

01:42:15.000 And they might have communicated.

01:42:16.000 They might have had a language.

01:42:18.000 We don't know.

01:42:19.000 This is why I think it all connects to UFOs, where it's like, I just got to...

01:42:23.000 I can't imagine but stepping back and dreaming of.

01:42:25.000 Like, Earth.

01:42:26.000 We don't even know what it looked like 2500 BC. Beyond that, we have no idea.

01:42:31.000 That's when written history begins.

01:42:32.000 You've talked a lot with Graham Hancock, his ancient apocalypse series, and the reason why I think there's a connectivity is like, what's possible, man?

01:42:39.000 That's with the UFO thing.

01:42:40.000 I'm like, if there is ancient life here or multiple forms of alien life or, you know, some connectivity between that or even past contact of all this, it's like our entire understanding of the world is just completely wrong.

01:42:52.000 And I just find that so seductive, I guess, like that idea.

01:42:56.000 Maybe that's foolish and maybe that's, you know, part like a male thing like you're talking about. 0.75

01:43:00.000 But there's enough there that we can't help but be interested. 0.95

01:43:04.000 We're like, what's happening? 0.89

01:43:05.000 You just persuaded Sagar he was just shitting on the Sasquatch people and now he's like all in. 0.88

01:43:09.000 I'm talking more about Homo Florensis. 0.78

01:43:11.000 The Sasquatch is more likely because it definitely existed.

01:43:18.000 Like they know that within the time that human beings were alive, we're going to have stories about this creature.

01:43:22.000 Now whether or not those stories persist long after the creature is extinct and people pretend they see it when they're really just seeing black bears that are walking upright, which they do all the time.

01:43:32.000 I've seen black bears walk upright.

01:43:34.000 And if black bears have a hurt paw, there was a famous black bear in New Jersey that had a very badly damaged front paw so it would walk on its rear legs.

01:43:45.000 It would walk upright like a seven foot tall animal.

01:43:48.000 That's crazy.

01:43:49.000 Which is just like, if you saw it through the trees, you'd be like, oh my god, it's a giant ape. 0.99

01:43:52.000 I saw one in Glacier National Park and I was like, Holy fuck, these things are so big. 0.98

01:43:56.000 I don't think people really knows how big a bears are. 0.99

01:43:58.000 Bears are big.

01:43:59.000 Well, if Galicia National Park, was it a brown bear or a black bear?

01:44:01.000 Yeah, there was a black bear and a brown bear.

01:44:03.000 We saw both.

01:44:03.000 I got really lucky.

01:44:04.000 We were in Montana, and we were at this grizzly preserve where they'd taken these problematic grizzlies that raid people's garbage and shit. 0.99

01:44:12.000 They said grandfather? 0.98

01:44:20.000 Yeah, and they fed this thing a frozen watermelon, and this bear crushed this frozen watermelon like it was a grape.

01:44:29.000 Like you and I would do a grape.

01:44:31.000 Just took giant bites out of a frozen watermelon.

01:44:34.000 Wow. 1.00

01:44:35.000 And I was like, imagine the power of this fucking thing. 1.00

01:44:38.000 They're so big. 1.00

01:44:40.000 You ever seen a jaguar?

01:44:41.000 Not even alive.

01:44:42.000 Yeah, I only saw one in a zoo, but they are some of the most majestic creatures.

01:44:46.000 You know about El Jefe?

01:44:47.000 No, I don't.

01:44:48.000 El Jefe is the only jaguar in the United States that's been spotted in the United States.

01:44:51.000 They used to be prevalent.

01:44:52.000 Yeah.

01:44:53.000 When the pioneers came across the country, they spotted multiple jaguars.

01:44:56.000 They were everywhere.

01:44:57.000 There's even sightings of jaguars in the northern states.

01:45:01.000 But for whatever reason, they either were wiped out or whatever happened.

01:45:05.000 But there's a jaguar that keeps traveling from Mexico, and that's El Jefe.

01:45:11.000 There he is.

01:45:11.000 Wow.

01:45:13.000 That's crazy. 1.00

01:45:15.000 Look at that fucking beautiful thing. 1.00

01:45:17.000 I wonder how long jaguars live for, like, what their natural lifespan is. 0.99

01:45:21.000 Well, they know this one jaguar because they've taken so many trail cam photos of it.

01:45:25.000 Their spots are, you know, you can identify them from their spots if you get still photos of high resolution.

01:45:30.000 It's like a fingerprint kind of thing.

01:45:31.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 1.00

01:45:31.000 And this one jaguar is just this lone 200-pound cat that makes his way through and he's just, fuck. 1.00

01:45:38.000 That is wild. 1.00

01:45:39.000 That is wild.

01:45:40.000 It's an amazing, amazing animal.

01:45:41.000 If there's only one. 1.00

01:45:42.000 If they're everywhere, you're fucked. 1.00

01:45:44.000 Nice to watch it on the camera. 1.00

01:45:46.000 Otherwise, you're like a tribe in the Amazon. 0.99

01:45:48.000 You go to get water, you're fucking terrified. 0.98

01:45:50.000 It's kind of like wolves. 0.99

01:45:51.000 Have you ever seen a wolf? 1.00

01:45:52.000 They're fucking huge. 1.00

01:45:54.000 Gigantic. 1.00

01:45:54.000 And you're like, man, that's pretty scary. 1.00

01:45:56.000 Well, we eradicated them, and then these fucking eco people are like, we need to bring them back. 1.00

01:46:00.000 They're our friends. 0.99

01:46:02.000 The wolves are amazing.

01:46:04.000 Until they're eating your family, until they're trying to get into your house. 0.96

01:46:08.000 Your livestock or whatever.

01:46:09.000 I have a buddy who lives in BC and he watched one kill a horse.

01:46:13.000 Wow.

01:46:14.000 A pack of wolves killed a horse.

01:46:16.000 That's crazy. 0.99

01:46:17.000 So it was like late at night and they hear all this barking and barking and they look out from his fucking bedroom window to one of the stalls and you see a pack of wolves devouring a horse. 0.99

01:46:27.000 Wow. 0.99

01:46:27.000 Jesus. 0.99

01:46:27.000 They got really hungry and it was cold and they took a chance. 0.99

01:46:30.000 Wow.

01:46:31.000 There was a story.

01:46:33.000 Sorry, do you remember this?

01:46:34.000 There was this town in New Hampshire.

01:46:37.000 That like super ideological libertarians took over and they like moved to the town.

01:46:43.000 They like voted themselves onto the town council and they went about getting rid of like every single regulation they possibly could, including the ones that had to do with like the proper way to store your trash to avoid attracting bears.

01:46:59.000 I don't remember this.

01:47:01.000 You don't remember this?

01:47:01.000 This made such an impression on me.

01:47:03.000 Because it was such a tale of ideological arrogance.

01:47:07.000 You're like, oh, the free market will work it out.

01:47:09.000 Well, next thing you know, bears are coming into town.

01:47:12.000 Bears are mauling people. 0.99

01:47:14.000 They have this whole massive bear mauling issue in this New Hampshire town because of their ideology.

01:47:21.000 Well, there's a similar situation in New Jersey.

01:47:23.000 In New Jersey, New Jersey has the most bears per capita of any place in the country, including Alaska.

01:47:32.000 I think including Alaska.

01:47:34.000 They have a ton of black bears.

01:47:35.000 Yeah, it's all black bears.

01:47:36.000 But the governor ran on a platform of getting rid of the bear hunt.

01:47:40.000 Because people think, you know, most of these people that are in high population areas, they don't have encounters with bears. 1.00

01:47:45.000 They think of bears like, why would you want to kill a bear, you fucking asshole? 1.00

01:47:48.000 But meanwhile, these people are getting killed by bears. 1.00

01:47:51.000 A student from Rutgers was killed by a bear.

01:47:53.000 And then they started seeing a giant uptick, 200% uptick in human bear encounters that were problematic.

01:48:00.000 We've played this video many times of, what is it, Far Rockaway?

01:48:04.000 Far Rockaway, New Jersey?

01:48:06.000 Is that where it was? 0.99

01:48:07.000 Where these fucking enormous bears are duking it out in a really suburban area. 0.99

01:48:13.000 Far Rockaway is like New York City suburbs, right? 0.99

01:48:16.000 Yeah, I thought that was like Queens or something.

01:48:18.000 Is that Far Rockaway?

01:48:19.000 No.

01:48:19.000 It just sounds right.

01:48:21.000 It's New Jersey. 0.89

01:48:23.000 Goddammit, why can't I remember it? 0.96

01:48:25.000 We played this clip.

01:48:26.000 It is Rockaway.

01:48:27.000 Okay.

01:48:27.000 Okay, watch this.

01:48:29.000 Because it's fucking bonkers. 0.99

01:48:31.000 This is on people's... 0.99

01:48:32.000 That's like...

01:48:33.000 These are two 300 pound bears. 0.99

01:48:35.000 They're fucking huge. 0.99

01:48:36.000 Like in your yard. 1.00

01:48:36.000 100% in the yard. 1.00

01:48:38.000 And they're fighting over trash.

01:48:40.000 So what happens is they get, or maybe breeding, they get access to the trash in the area.

01:48:46.000 And when another male is there, they try to scare the male off.

01:48:50.000 And these two bears just start duking it out.

01:48:53.000 And when they start duking it out, they're knocking over trash cans and they're piling out into the streets.

01:48:58.000 So these people are in their cars filming this.

01:49:00.000 Oh my God.

01:49:02.000 I mean, look at giant chunks of fur flying off of them.

01:49:04.000 These are huge bears. 0.99

01:49:07.000 These are giant predators that will 100% kill your dog, 100% kill your kids.

01:49:12.000 You leave a baby outside, the baby's dead, the bear eats it and runs away with it.

01:49:16.000 They don't have any morals, they don't have any ethics, they're playing by a totally different set of rules than you would imagine from a Disney movie.

01:49:23.000 But this is what happens when you don't control predators.

01:49:27.000 The wildlife conservationists have long been saying, you have to keep these animals in check, because it's bad for them, it's bad for the people, and the nutty people are like, yeah, but we're in their area.

01:49:40.000 But they don't understand, like, you know, right where we are, the hill country.

01:49:43.000 Yeah.

01:49:43.000 200 years ago, probably in this spot, it was a bloodbath.

01:49:48.000 It was brutal.

01:49:48.000 Pure Comanche range versus rival Indian groups, like complete just slaughter for resources.

01:49:57.000 Like, I don't think people really get what it really was like, even 150 years ago, like, if you think about Buffalo and the range and the conquering of the Old West, I've read so many books about that time period, just because I'm so fascinated by it.

01:50:10.000 That era of what it was like and what the actual West and the range and all that was, it was a dangerous place.

01:50:17.000 I've read a lot about Theodore Roosevelt and some of his original encounters on some of his hunting trips with bears and everything.

01:50:25.000 It's just completely, completely outrageous.

01:50:27.000 Where's the Arrowhead, Jamie?

01:50:28.000 Do you know where it is?

01:50:29.000 It's missing.

01:50:31.000 Oh, here it is.

01:50:32.000 We have an arrowhead from here.

01:50:33.000 Oh, wow.

01:50:34.000 So I have a friend who has a ranch out here, and their ranch is overwhelmed with arrowheads.

01:50:41.000 Really?

01:50:41.000 Yeah.

01:50:41.000 Wow.

01:50:41.000 They dig all the time, and they find these things.

01:50:44.000 That's crazy.

01:50:45.000 That was an absolute Native American arrowhead that they used either for war or they used it for hunting.

01:50:53.000 Aren't you not supposed to pick them up?

01:50:54.000 I didn't pick it up.

01:50:56.000 It was a gift.

01:50:57.000 It was a gift from a friend.

01:50:58.000 But in Texas, I think the rules are a little bit different because it's their land.

01:51:02.000 I did find one on a hunting trip once in Nevada, and I was informed that I was supposed to leave it behind.

01:51:06.000 I knew that was a law.

01:51:08.000 Because I've looked for them before, too.

01:51:09.000 And they're like, even if you find it, you just got to put it back.

01:51:11.000 I'm a lawbreaker, bro. 1.00

01:51:13.000 If I find it in Arrowhead, that shit's mine. 0.99

01:51:16.000 It's like, I'm not going to leave it here for somebody else to pick up. 0.99

01:51:18.000 That's true.

01:51:19.000 What do you think is the most difficult of the animals that you've hunted?

01:51:23.000 Neil guy.

01:51:24.000 I just hunted a Neil guy recently, which is an Indian animal that evolved around tigers.

01:51:30.000 And I've never seen an animal that runs so fast when you hit it.

01:51:35.000 I thought I shot this Neil guy with a bow and arrow, and it was a perfect shot.

01:51:41.000 And I was really sure that it was a perfect shot.

01:51:43.000 It was a 52-yard shot, centered my pin, watched the arrow hit it, and that animal ran off like on a full sprint like it wasn't even remotely injured.

01:51:52.000 And I was like, oh no.

01:51:54.000 Like, what happened?

01:51:55.000 And it ran 130 yards until it died at a full clip.

01:52:01.000 That's a whole football field.

01:52:02.000 Wait, what did they look like?

01:52:03.000 I've never heard of that animal.

01:52:04.000 See if you can pull a photo of a Neil guy.

01:52:06.000 Where was his show?

01:52:07.000 South Texas.

01:52:08.000 Oh, interesting.

01:52:08.000 So there's more Asian and exotic African animals in South Texas than often in Asia and in Africa.

01:52:19.000 There's some animals that are, in their country, are endangered.

01:52:23.000 But in Texas, they hunt them regularly.

01:52:25.000 That's a Neil guy.

01:52:26.000 And that is an animal that evolved around tigers.

01:52:29.000 And those dudes, you can't get close to them, and if you hit them, they run like there's nothing wrong.

01:52:35.000 Like, that animal had an arrow that went through its vitals in a perfect shot, passed through its body, went 30 yards past its body where it found the arrow.

01:52:44.000 It's kind of built different.

01:52:46.000 It's like a deer but super juiced up.

01:52:51.000 It was a perfect shot.

01:52:54.000 The animal died.

01:52:56.000 They say that happens with rifles. 0.97

01:52:58.000 They were telling me they shoot those with a.300 Win Mag and they have to have another one in the chamber because the guide will do a follow-up shot on the animal because they're so fucking tough because they evolved around tigers. 0.96

01:53:10.000 Yeah. 0.95

01:53:11.000 So, like, everybody's like, well, I'll just live off the land. 1.00

01:53:14.000 Like, good luck, bitch. 1.00

01:53:17.000 You're gonna need a grocery store, motherfucker. 1.00

01:53:19.000 You're not designed for this. 1.00

01:53:20.000 That's kind of the scary part, though, when you realize how unconnected you are.

01:53:23.000 Like, if you don't have any skills.

01:53:25.000 Oh, my God.

01:53:25.000 I've been watching Last of Us.

01:53:26.000 Heard it's great. 0.99

01:53:27.000 It was fucking fantastic. 0.99

01:53:28.000 Really? 0.99

01:53:29.000 The last episode just...

01:53:30.000 Broke me.

01:53:30.000 People out there, no spoilers.

01:53:32.000 I won't say anything.

01:53:33.000 I'll watch it like three years from now when it's outdated.

01:53:36.000 It's brutal.

01:53:36.000 Anyway, I was like, man, this is...

01:53:38.000 Because I listened to your Mike Glover episode and I was like, yeah, man, I gotta get prepared. 0.99

01:53:41.000 And I'm like, I don't know a fucking thing. 0.97

01:53:42.000 I'm like, what am I doing here? 0.99

01:53:44.000 I don't know a thing and I've been doing it for 12 years.

01:53:46.000 I've been hunting for like 11 years now.

01:53:49.000 Yeah, I'm still a rookie.

01:53:51.000 It's one of those skills where you have to put it in from a very early age.

01:53:55.000 And when you learn about indigenous tribes, or I read a lot of history, like the Mongols I know you're into as well, they start learning when they're like three or four years old.

01:54:02.000 Like they start pulling bows before they can, like barely when they can start walking.

01:54:06.000 So it becomes part of the actual culture itself.

01:54:09.000 And that level of skill, I don't know if you could teach that at this point in the West.

01:54:13.000 Oh, you could.

01:54:14.000 100%.

01:54:14.000 Yeah, you could if people had to.

01:54:16.000 People are so adaptable.

01:54:17.000 Necessity.

01:54:18.000 We were talking the other day about people that live in the Congo that are working in these cobalt mines, and I was like, you've got to imagine if this is what you were born into, because humans are so adaptable.

01:54:28.000 We're so accustomed to whatever we're accustomed to.

01:54:31.000 And if you live there, you would do what everyone else is doing, because you would get by.

01:54:35.000 And if you were born into a nomadic tribe that traveled around and followed the buffalo, you would be hunting them the same way they did.

01:54:42.000 That's just what people do.

01:54:44.000 We adapt.

01:54:45.000 And that's the whole idea behind Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson's theory about the restarting of human civilization, is that we have achieved a very high level of sophistication, which explains the pyramids and Gobekli Tepe.

01:55:00.000 It explains all these immense stone structures where they move stones with some unknown technology from as many as 500 miles away.

01:55:09.000 1,000 tons stones through the mountains. 0.97

01:55:12.000 We have no idea how the fuck they did it. 0.97

01:55:14.000 And then you go 5,000 years later and you have barbarians. 0.99

01:55:18.000 And like, what happened? 0.98

01:55:19.000 Well, most likely a fucking natural disaster that forced people to figure out a way to adapt. 0.99

01:55:24.000 And overcome. 0.99

01:55:25.000 And I think that's one of the reasons why, if we go back a few thousand years ago, you have these people with these brilliant minds that live these unbelievably barbaric lives.

01:55:35.000 And I think it's because they're the descendants of people that had to survive whatever was left over after the sophisticated civilization was hit by comets.

01:55:43.000 Crystal just bought me a copy of the Perry Reese map, that famous map, which was the Ottoman Admiral written like 1513. I think he drew it and he based it off from the Library of Alexandria and it includes that 10,000 year old coastline of Antarctica.

01:55:58.000 Pretty good Christmas gift.

01:55:59.000 It was a great Christmas gift.

01:56:00.000 It's amazing.

01:56:01.000 I love that.

01:56:02.000 It's amazing.

01:56:03.000 And the more evidence that gets uncovered, the more that's a very viable theory.

01:56:08.000 Because the core samples, the hard physical data of those core samples shows that somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,800 years ago, there was massive impacts all over the earth.

01:56:20.000 As much as 30% of the Earth shows evidence of this.

01:56:23.000 30% of the Earth shows evidence of iridium in high levels, which is very rare on Earth, but very common in space.

01:56:29.000 Nano diamonds from the impact, carbon from burnt everything. 0.99

01:56:33.000 I think people got fucked up. 0.93

01:56:35.000 Somewhere around 12,800 years ago, the end of the Ice Age. 0.98

01:56:39.000 And I think those guys are right.

01:56:40.000 I think the more data that gets uncovered, which is like almost every day, they're finding new discoveries that point to that.

01:56:46.000 They're finding new impact craters.

01:56:48.000 They found a giant impact crater in Antarctica.

01:56:50.000 They found a giant one off the coast of New Zealand.

01:56:53.000 We get hit.

01:56:55.000 And when we get hit, all bets are off. 1.00

01:56:57.000 All your fucking hard drives are useless. 0.99

01:56:59.000 All the known knowledge that you get off the internet is no longer available to you. 0.99

01:57:03.000 And we start from scratch.

01:57:04.000 And that is a 100% possibility for us right now.

01:57:09.000 Right now we're fearful of sort of the other direction.

01:57:13.000 But have you played with the chat GPT stuff?

01:57:17.000 Like the AI that's going to...

01:57:19.000 I don't know.

01:57:21.000 Revolutionize everything.

01:57:22.000 Or will it?

01:57:22.000 We don't know.

01:57:23.000 Yeah, that's a question, right?

01:57:25.000 We've been playing with it.

01:57:26.000 We're actually doing a live show tonight in Austin.

01:57:29.000 Well, it'll be last night by the time this comes out, probably.

01:57:32.000 But we put into the chat GPT, like, write a monologue in the voice of Sagar and Jetty about UFOs.

01:57:40.000 And it does a thing.

01:57:42.000 It's all right.

01:57:44.000 The grammar is good.

01:57:46.000 It doesn't sound like Sagar at all.

01:57:49.000 The sort of grammar they use and the way they approach it.

01:57:51.000 Ladies and gentlemen, it's time we have an important conversation.

01:57:55.000 If you wanted to be grandiose, it was very important.

01:57:59.000 That'd be like 90s politicians.

01:58:01.000 Ladies and gentlemen, it's time we have an important conversation.

01:58:02.000 Have you heard Lex Friedman talk about it, though?

01:58:05.000 I hadn't gone fully through your podcast the other day.

01:58:07.000 I'd be interested to hear what he has to say.

01:58:09.000 He said...

01:58:09.000 Chat 4.0 is on the way.

01:58:11.000 Oh, that's right, because it has more information that's going to be available to it.

01:58:14.000 It's going to be way, way, way better.

01:58:16.000 See, I listened to Sam Altman, who's the CEO of OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT.

01:58:22.000 I heard he got a question about the fourth version, because there is a lot of speculation that it's going to be like...

01:58:28.000 A whole other universe in terms of his capabilities, that it's going to be more closely approximating actual intelligence in a way that's going to really super freak people out.

01:58:38.000 That's what a lot of people like Lex and others, I guess, are projecting.

01:58:42.000 He was really trying to pour cold water on that idea, but that may just be because he doesn't want to get it overhyped.

01:58:49.000 He wants to set the bar low so that when the thing actually drops, It lands with an appropriate, I guess, fanfare.

01:58:56.000 The real thing of concern is that this didn't exist four years ago, three years ago, two years ago, and now it exists and it's gotten better really quickly.

01:59:05.000 Maybe it did exist two years ago, but it wasn't publicly consumable.

01:59:09.000 It didn't have a chat.

01:59:10.000 Right.

01:59:11.000 See, that's the thing.

01:59:12.000 Actually, this was, again, listening to this interview with Sam Altman, he was talking about how he was actually really surprised by the way that the public, when they got to play with it, were like, oh my god.

01:59:25.000 Because in his mind, working so closely with the technology, this just felt like the next logical step.

01:59:31.000 But for people who hadn't been deeply, you know, enmeshed in the details of the technology, when suddenly you had this thing in front of you and you could play with it and then you've got this, like, the image generators and whatever, that it kind of blew people's minds.

01:59:45.000 And we've been talking about how you've got universities professors who are freaked out.

01:59:50.000 Yeah.

01:59:50.000 This is our favorite.

01:59:51.000 About kids cheating on tests and using this to write their essays and whatever.

01:59:55.000 And so I do think it's going to require a kind of entire rethink of the university experience, of what parts of what human beings can do are more difficult to replicate by the machine.

02:00:10.000 Because the machine can spit out a Sager and Jetty theoretical UFO monologue, but it can't create new ideas, right?

02:00:16.000 It's lacking a sort of, like, creativity.

02:00:19.000 For now.

02:00:20.000 Yes, for now.

02:00:21.000 For now.

02:00:22.000 That's the real thing is for now.

02:00:24.000 Because I think it's going to.

02:00:26.000 And I think within five years it's going to be better at us.

02:00:29.000 Better at being us than us.

02:00:31.000 But that's actually important, and it's one of the fun things that we're seeing through the ChatGPT education, which I love.

02:00:36.000 And actually, it's fascinating. 0.76

02:00:37.000 We get a ton of feedback on those segments because it's a lot of college kids are fed up with bullshit busy work.

02:00:43.000 A lot of professors are tearing up their entire syllabus, and they're like, all right, now we're going to go to oral examination.

02:00:49.000 We're going to have a discussion in class.

02:00:52.000 And I was like, that's great.

02:00:52.000 That's great.

02:00:53.000 That's fantastic. 0.99

02:00:53.000 You shouldn't be doing a bullshit essay first draft. 0.99

02:00:57.000 But that also teaches you how to write, which is actually important. 0.96

02:01:00.000 Actually, I don't know if it does, actually.

02:01:01.000 It could.

02:01:02.000 Well, but if you have, so the comparison they make is to, like, the invention of the calculator.

02:01:09.000 Yeah.

02:01:09.000 It's like, you still need to understand the math to know what to put into the calculator.

02:01:14.000 Right. 0.99

02:01:14.000 But you don't need to know how to do all that shit by hand. 0.99

02:01:16.000 Can we pause this? 0.99

02:01:17.000 I have to pee so bad.

02:01:18.000 Yeah, absolutely.

02:01:19.000 Go ahead.

02:01:19.000 Let's use the restroom.

02:01:20.000 We'll be right back.

02:01:21.000 Woo! 0.99

02:01:22.000 All right, we're back.

02:01:23.000 Thanks so much better.

02:01:25.000 Chat TPT. Chat TPT. Colleges.

02:01:28.000 And I do think part of the freak out right now is because most automation that has like killed people's jobs has been service workers, has been blue collar. 0.98

02:01:41.000 And now you have a lot of white collar workers who are like, oh shit, this could be coming for me. 0.75

02:01:46.000 Do you see the BuzzFeed thing? 0.99

02:01:47.000 No, I did not.

02:01:47.000 That BuzzFeed hired ChatGPT or is going to use ChatGPT to auto-generate listicles.

02:01:51.000 Yeah, they laid off.

02:01:53.000 Yeah, there we go.

02:01:53.000 They just laid 10% of their staff off.

02:01:55.000 Oh, my God.

02:01:56.000 Oh, and by the way, didn't their stock skyrocket?

02:02:00.000 Yeah, their stock went up, I want to say 95% in a single day.

02:02:04.000 Fire people will give you more money.

02:02:06.000 Hooray! 0.97

02:02:06.000 What a great system we have. 0.97

02:02:07.000 Not great!

02:02:08.000 But doesn't that leave room for Substack people? 1.00

02:02:12.000 Yes, absolutely.

02:02:13.000 And doesn't it leave room for creators that you get an obvious look into their mind and they take pride in their writing? 0.99

02:02:21.000 I would say to young kids, I would say, fuck around with ChatTPT. 0.88

02:02:25.000 I'd say, figure out what it does because it's an important thing. 0.99

02:02:29.000 But learn how to write.

02:02:32.000 I think it's good for you.

02:02:33.000 And I think if you want to get better at whatever you're doing that requires writing, like if you're going to be a journalist, even if you use ChatGPT to give you a framework, you should learn how to be creative.

02:02:42.000 It's good for you.

02:02:43.000 I do think that's a good point, and it's where the calculator analogy kind of fails, because the calculations are the calculations.

02:02:51.000 There's no style or voice that goes into it.

02:02:55.000 Whereas, you know, I mean, Sagar and I write a lot every single week.

02:02:59.000 I know you write a lot as part of, you know, being a comedian.

02:03:03.000 And when you do that a lot over time, you develop your own voice.

02:03:07.000 You develop your own style that you maybe aren't going to come to if you're starting with the ChatGPT framework.

02:03:14.000 Even if you're not just wholesale, like, taking whatever Chat gives you and, like, selling that off as your own.

02:03:19.000 Even if you're taking it and workshopping, whatever...

02:03:22.000 It's not quite the same as staring at the blank piece of paper and creating it in your voice.

02:03:28.000 And the satisfaction that you get.

02:03:30.000 Absolutely.

02:03:30.000 The satisfaction when you write something that you enjoy.

02:03:33.000 That you're like, oh, I did a lot of work on this and I'm really proud of it.

02:03:36.000 Yeah, it is.

02:03:38.000 I mean, you know, we write these monologues for the show and like...

02:03:41.000 We do three a week.

02:03:42.000 So some of them are going to be great.

02:03:43.000 Some of them are going to be, you know, solid.

02:03:46.000 Some are going to be like, oh, it was a bit of a struggle.

02:03:47.000 But when you get that one that it's like you have the idea and you're able to lay it out in a way that you feel like really captures what you were trying to say and, like, makes a point that you feel like hasn't been made before, that's wonderful.

02:04:00.000 That's why I'm celebrating it with the classroom, though.

02:04:02.000 Because I had to do—when I was in college, we had so many bullshit, like, busywork quizzes that they were just doing to assign so they could check a box on the syllabus. 0.52

02:04:10.000 Now, they're sitting in the classroom being like, what do you think? 0.95

02:04:13.000 They have to test you live to see if you're either paying attention.

02:04:16.000 I think that's great.

02:04:16.000 Like, that's— Ultimately, what did we really get out of college?

02:04:20.000 I don't know. 0.96

02:04:21.000 In terms of what I use right now, even you were talking about writing, a lot of that was bullshit academic writing. 0.52

02:04:26.000 When I learned how to write for journalism, it's totally different.

02:04:28.000 It's like all the opposite rules, actually, in terms of the way you do it.

02:04:32.000 But from what's useful in life is being able to understand ideas, Yeah.

02:04:57.000 Talking with this professor, there's a professor right now at UPenn, Wharton, who's actually requiring ChatGPT in the classroom.

02:05:03.000 He's like, no, no, no, no, no.

02:05:03.000 For entrepreneurship, we're all going to use it.

02:05:05.000 We're going to learn how to use this tool together, and then we're going to talk about it in the classroom.

02:05:10.000 That's what education actually can be.

02:05:12.000 And so I talk a lot about higher education corruption.

02:05:15.000 And really what it is to me is, you know, places charging $80,000 a year, which is outrageous, putting these kids into debt and not teaching them anything which is actually useful in the real world.

02:05:25.000 And I think this is useful.

02:05:27.000 It's just like a...

02:05:28.000 Learning.

02:05:29.000 It's just like a stamp of approval.

02:05:30.000 Yeah, it's a credential.

02:05:31.000 You know, it's a credential.

02:05:32.000 That's what it is.

02:05:33.000 I mean, I will say, so I studied economics, and we obviously talk a lot about economics. 0.99

02:05:38.000 But the shit that I learned was like... 0.99

02:05:41.000 You know, it's all very doctrinaire. 1.00

02:05:43.000 It was all very like...

02:05:44.000 Supply and demand.

02:05:45.000 Yeah.

02:05:45.000 I mean, it was like a lot of stuff I had to like unlearn the propaganda of, you know, ultimately.

02:05:50.000 Oh, that's a great point, too.

02:05:51.000 This is how the Federal Reserve works.

02:05:52.000 And then we're doing all these segments about the Fed.

02:05:53.000 I'm like, well, maybe it shouldn't.

02:05:55.000 And then it's like, oh, this is all a human design system.

02:05:57.000 So you'll read books.

02:05:58.000 It's like something on Jekyll Island on the creation of the Fed and then what the Fed's actual mandate is.

02:06:03.000 And you're like, oh, the Fed has a lot of Over our society, over our economy, over our politics, actually.

02:06:09.000 There's a lot of arguments about certain politicians never would have gone if the Fed hadn't been doing the policies that they had, like Jimmy Carter in 1979 with Paul Volcker.

02:06:17.000 We're living actually in an era right now of tremendous departure from previous Federal Reserve policy.

02:06:23.000 We went from a zero interest rate environment to higher interest rates.

02:06:26.000 The economy right now is the craziest thing you've ever seen.

02:06:28.000 So the jobs numbers actually came out this morning.

02:06:30.000 We are at one of the lowest unemployment rates in modern American history.

02:06:34.000 Since 1969. Right, so it's a great economy, right?

02:06:37.000 But wage stagnation, it's not keeping up with inflation of goods.

02:06:42.000 Try buying a house right now.

02:06:43.000 Mortgage rates are a disaster.

02:06:45.000 They're falling slightly.

02:06:46.000 We've been talking a lot about the used car industry.

02:06:49.000 Car loans are a total nightmare.

02:06:51.000 You're seeing all these charlatans in the economy.

02:06:54.000 Like, what is this?

02:06:54.000 What has been created?

02:06:55.000 The tech layoffs is a good example.

02:06:57.000 You have Google cutting 10%, Amazon cutting 10,000 jobs.

02:07:02.000 Salesforce cutting 10,000 jobs.

02:07:04.000 All of this was just because of cheap money.

02:07:06.000 And so that makes you take a step back and be like, wow, the Fed is a non-democratic institution.

02:07:12.000 You and I have no input on the Fed whatsoever.

02:07:14.000 The president appoints a chair and the rest of those people get confirmed by Congress.

02:07:18.000 And then after that, it's up to them.

02:07:20.000 They could nuke the entire U.S. economy if they wanted to. 0.57

02:07:22.000 It's literally up to like 14 people. 1.00

02:07:24.000 And you're like, holy shit. 0.99

02:07:26.000 So much of my life is determined by these folks. 0.99

02:07:29.000 I don't think people realize that. 0.95

02:07:30.000 And it's intentional that they make it very opaque and make people feel dumb, like they don't understand it.

02:07:36.000 It's intentional? 0.90

02:07:37.000 Very intentional.

02:07:38.000 This is actually Alan Greenspan sort of innovated this of like Fed speak, where any pronouncement he made was like incomprehensible if you didn't have a PhD in economics.

02:07:49.000 And it hasn't always been like that in American history.

02:07:52.000 You know, Fed policy, monetary policy was hotly debated.

02:07:55.000 There were like populist revolts over it.

02:07:57.000 William Jennings Bryan.

02:07:58.000 But there's a real anti-populist movement to consolidate power in the hands of a few credentialed bureaucrats by posturing like, oh, we're just sort of like doing the math and it's just a calculation and there's no morals involved.

02:08:11.000 We don't need to understand what other people think about it and to make it feel like, oh, we've got this because we're the credentialed experts when, you know, in reality, these are things that affect people's lives.

02:08:21.000 But on the fakery in the economy, I think this is one of the under-told stories of our era.

02:08:30.000 We were talking a lot about incentives earlier.

02:08:33.000 The incentives for corporate America are not to innovate, not to create new products, certainly not to invest in their workforce.

02:08:41.000 It's all to engage in financial engineering to reward themselves and their stockholders.

02:08:48.000 So stock buybacks.

02:08:49.000 This year I just saw a stat.

02:08:51.000 Largest first quarter or first month of the year stock buybacks that we've ever had.

02:08:57.000 You look at companies like airline companies where you think, oh, they're making their money by flying people around or whatever.

02:09:02.000 No.

02:09:03.000 Actually, they're giant hedge funds, and most of their money comes from financial manipulation.

02:09:09.000 It started with, let me hedge the cost of jet fuel, but then that turns into big business, and so they basically become Wall Street.

02:09:16.000 Apple, this is one of...

02:09:17.000 Rana Faruhar, who's a very smart financial thinker, she wrote a book that highlighted this statistic.

02:09:24.000 Apple, when they released the iPod, their stock that year actually went down.

02:09:29.000 When they did financial manipulation and like gigantic stock buybacks, their stock goes up.

02:09:34.000 So it just shows you how much of our whole economy big picture is basically fake, geared towards financial engineering and not towards actual innovation, development, like growing a company based on a good idea and a good product.

02:09:51.000 Well, you talk about this with your phone all the time, right?

02:09:53.000 You're like, my iPhone, what was it?

02:09:55.000 iPhone 4 is not all that different from iPhone 14. That's an exaggeration, but like iPhone 11 and iPhone 14 aren't that different.

02:10:01.000 Apple has actually increased its revenue significantly through its bundle of services by increasing the amount of costs it can pull from the App Store.

02:10:09.000 I've got my Mac here, so everything is locked in here.

02:10:12.000 Software as a service, everything is linked into the Apple bundle.

02:10:16.000 That Tim Cook's great – there's a great book.

02:10:18.000 I forget exactly the name.

02:10:20.000 I think it's Apple – Life After Steve.

02:10:21.000 So after Steve Jobs died.

02:10:23.000 Steve was a product guy.

02:10:24.000 He would invest hundreds of billions of dollars into R&D, into creating game-changing, beautiful new products.

02:10:30.000 Tim Cook is a managerial type.

02:10:32.000 His job is to squeeze as much money out of the stock price.

02:10:34.000 So how do you do that?

02:10:35.000 A, you park $100 billion or whatever overseas so you don't have to pay – Taxes on it.

02:10:40.000 B, you don't invest necessarily in brand new R&D. You invest in making sure that people get the new phone every year.

02:10:46.000 You invest in paying $2.99 for that iCloud bubble.

02:10:50.000 I mean, imagine what that is at scale.

02:10:52.000 And at scale, what they're doing is locking people into services with Apple, which are recurring subscription revenue.

02:10:58.000 It's a shitload of money.

02:10:59.000 And I think their stock is at the highest level ever.

02:11:02.000 But when's the last time you held...

02:11:04.000 Okay, you have a Tesla.

02:11:06.000 When you got into a Tesla, it's like picking up the iPhone 4 for the first time. 0.99

02:11:09.000 And you're like, holy fuck, I can't even believe this is real. 0.98

02:11:12.000 This is a new thing. 0.99

02:11:13.000 The first time I had an iPhone 4, it had that beautiful back.

02:11:16.000 And it was like Steve Jobs described it as looking like a Leica camera or something. 0.95

02:11:21.000 I remember holding it and just being like, this is the coolest fucking thing I've ever seen. 0.92

02:11:24.000 I felt the same way whenever I got into a Tesla. 0.94

02:11:26.000 I'm like, I'm not in a car, I'm in a computer.

02:11:27.000 I'm in a computer that drives.

02:11:29.000 And that leap, think about how rare that is.

02:11:32.000 Over the last 20 years.

02:11:34.000 You had Marc Andreessen on, and Peter Thiel also has a famous quote on this.

02:11:37.000 He's like, we were promised flying cars, and all we got was 140 characters.

02:11:40.000 Except now we have 280 characters.

02:11:42.000 It's like, yeah, I mean, you know, we had some tech advancements, but at the end of the day, like, I've been using the same relative phone for the last 10 years.

02:11:50.000 And if you were to ask me in 2012, when the first time I picked up that iPhone 4, I would be like, no way, man, 10 years from now, who's gonna know?

02:11:56.000 We're gonna have Oculus, or we're gonna be living in this, like, brave new world, for example.

02:12:01.000 And We're not really there.

02:12:02.000 ChatTPT is the first time I felt excited about something.

02:12:04.000 I'm like, that's new.

02:12:05.000 That's something.

02:12:06.000 Now, is it good?

02:12:07.000 I don't know.

02:12:08.000 Well, I mean, any sort of tech progress.

02:12:11.000 There's good.

02:12:12.000 There's bad.

02:12:13.000 There's trade-off.

02:12:14.000 And you hope the good is more than the bad.

02:12:17.000 It usually is.

02:12:17.000 What's fascinating is there's a never-ending push towards technological innovation that we don't ever see stopping.

02:12:25.000 We are 100% addicted to having the newest, best, greatest, latest, and then companies will continue to do that.

02:12:33.000 I mean, they're going to be manipulating stock prices. 0.99

02:12:35.000 But at the core of it, if you want people to buy shit, you have to make better shit. 0.99

02:12:40.000 And so you're going to have people that are— I wish that was the core of it, though, now, right? 0.99

02:12:43.000 Well, at least at the end of the line of what gets done— It's like if you looked at the Earth from above, I use this analogy all the time, if you didn't know us, if you were from some other culture, some other planet, and you were trying to observe what human beings do, well, they make stuff.

02:12:58.000 They keep making better stuff.

02:13:00.000 There's a bunch of other stuff that goes on.

02:13:01.000 There's a bunch of...

02:13:04.000 This is keeping up with the Joneses, materialism, but what that does ultimately is it forces you to buy more stuff.

02:13:10.000 The materialism instinct that people have, it's a base thing, it's like silly, why do it?

02:13:16.000 It's a part of human beings for some strange reason, a status thing.

02:13:21.000 And that status thing allows people to continue to innovate and buy new stuff and continue to make better and better versions of that thing so you're compelled to buy it.

02:13:30.000 And that's ultimately leading towards something. 0.95

02:13:33.000 So much of public companies in particular, this is where the incentives are the most fucked up.

02:13:39.000 The amount that they spend on research and development now is way less than it used to be number one and dramatically less than private companies.

02:13:47.000 Because, again, I was telling you the other day about this, what might be...

02:13:51.000 The greatest corporate con like in history from this Indian industrialist who was at least up until like the last week, the richest man in Asia, like fourth richest man on the planet after like, you know, Elon and Bezos and Bill Gates. 1.00

02:14:09.000 And there's no doubt his company is big.

02:14:11.000 He's got close ties in with the Modi government.

02:14:14.000 He's built ports.

02:14:15.000 He's involved in energy, runs airports, all this stuff.

02:14:19.000 But there was a big 100-page report that came out from this group called Hindenburg Research, which is known for sort of identifying fraudsters.

02:14:27.000 They're short sellers, so let me be clear.

02:14:28.000 They have a financial incentive also on the other side.

02:14:30.000 They're betting on this company going down.

02:14:32.000 But what they revealed was essentially that this guy, allegedly, they deny it, had set up all of these shell companies that they were using to manipulate their stock, which propped up the company's value, which also hid how bad their debt situation was,

02:14:49.000 that his brother was controlling a bunch of these shell companies.

02:14:53.000 And so over the course of the past, what, week and a half, his suite of companies, like seven different companies, have lost like half their Their value.

02:15:02.000 $100 billion in value.

02:15:03.000 $100 billion.

02:15:04.000 He's lost half of his fortune in a week, 10 days, something like that.

02:15:11.000 The scheme is actually not all that dissimilar from the SPF thing, which is basically Mauritius, which is offshore.

02:15:17.000 They were using Mauritius-based shell companies to have cash there that they actually owned to buy their own stock, inflating the stock price.

02:15:27.000 Based on inflation of stock, they're able to borrow— The actual cash against that stock.

02:15:32.000 So the actual value of the stock wasn't as high as it supposedly was.

02:15:36.000 SBF kind of did the same thing by issuing that own token, which they then claimed had value and then borrowing actual cash based on the value of this false token.

02:15:45.000 And that's how you get the billions and billions that stack up on each other.

02:15:49.000 And this would all be funny if Adnani was not one of the most powerful men in India.

02:15:53.000 If his companies did not prop up and not was invested in by the, I think it's the State Bank of India, there is a tremendous amount of exposure in the Indian economy.

02:16:04.000 And Nani is a hero there alongside Ambani and a few of the other industrialists.

02:16:09.000 There's a good book, if anyone's interested, called The Billionaire Raj, which is specifically about the rise of these new Indian oligarchs.

02:16:15.000 And the amount of power that they yield in India is tremendous. 0.99

02:16:19.000 So this is not a joke.

02:16:20.000 I mean, this really would be like if Bezos was going down.

02:16:22.000 Yeah.

02:16:23.000 It's that level.

02:16:24.000 But if anything, it's not even comparable because we have a lot of Bezos's.

02:16:27.000 They really only have like 12, like 15 of these types of guys.

02:16:31.000 And this guy was number one.

02:16:32.000 Yeah.

02:16:32.000 He was the biggest.

02:16:32.000 Wealthiest man, not just in India, but in all of Asia.

02:16:35.000 And like that, half his wealth gone.

02:16:39.000 They were doing a stock sale, like $2.5 billion, raise more cash for the company, whatever.

02:16:47.000 And he had to actually back out of it because of all of this.

02:16:52.000 There's a video I'm talking about.

02:16:53.000 He's like, we are well capitalized.

02:16:55.000 We have great assets.

02:16:56.000 Good balance sheet.

02:17:02.000 And his response, now listen, I want to be clear, the response was 435 pages.

02:17:08.000 I do not claim that I read all of it, but in part, what it said was basically like, this is an attack on India, rather than responding to the specific claims he's playing to sort of like Indian nationalism to try to rally the troops.

02:17:21.000 It's a smart thing to do.

02:17:22.000 If you criticize Anthony Fauci, you're criticizing science.

02:17:25.000 Exactly.

02:17:26.000 That way he pulled the Fauci move.

02:17:27.000 That's what he did.

02:17:29.000 I don't think it's working for him quite as well, though.

02:17:31.000 Wow.

02:17:32.000 That's crazy.

02:17:33.000 Right?

02:17:33.000 Wow.

02:17:34.000 What a house of cards.

02:17:35.000 How many businesses are like that?

02:17:37.000 Exactly.

02:17:38.000 Who knows?

02:17:39.000 Good question.

02:17:39.000 That thing about SBF was, if CZ never does that tweet, what happens, man?

02:17:44.000 He could be on the Forbes, not even the Forbes 400, on the Forbes 100. SBF, if this whole thing had been going, it's kind of like Madoff.

02:17:52.000 Madoff only fell apart.

02:17:52.000 I went deep on Madoff after SBF, and it was only 2008 that brought him down.

02:17:57.000 If the recession doesn't happen, Madoff sails off into the sun.

02:18:01.000 He's fine.

02:18:03.000 I think SBF, I think whether it was then or sometime in the future, I think his ticket was going to get punched.

02:18:10.000 He's on amphetamines and banging nine other weirdos in a penthouse in the Bahamas. 1.00

02:18:16.000 Those people are off the fucking rails. 1.00

02:18:19.000 They were nuts. 1.00

02:18:20.000 Which I would be rooting for them if they weren't doing a swindle. 1.00

02:18:23.000 If they were really super geniuses that were pulling off some amazing financial move, I'd be like, fuck yeah. 0.99

02:18:30.000 Go nerds. 0.99

02:18:31.000 Let's go.

02:18:33.000 Because, I mean, so much of crypto is collapsing now.

02:18:37.000 And, I mean, that's why it looks like they got so overextended at Alameda, which was basically the crypto hedge fund, because they placed all these bets.

02:18:49.000 The bets were going south.

02:18:50.000 They needed more cash.

02:18:51.000 And so they're tapping into their customer accounts over at FTX. It's all story of leverage, yeah.

02:18:57.000 I just feel like with so many of these crypto bubbles and schemes and whatever, it's like they're just rediscovering all of the worst ills of the banking system.

02:19:07.000 You know, it's like, oh, we did this new thing.

02:19:09.000 We discovered a bank run.

02:19:12.000 Like, wow, this is what happens when people freak out and come and get their cash.

02:19:15.000 We talked about it in the green room, that they need regulation.

02:19:17.000 Well, they need...

02:19:20.000 They need enforcement.

02:19:23.000 It is a little complicated because, I mean, look, ultimately, you know, FTX was unwound.

02:19:28.000 The existing laws do not let you commit fraud.

02:19:33.000 So there needs to be enforcement.

02:19:35.000 Now, one of the things that we are keeping an eye on...

02:19:40.000 Is at some point in the FTX run-up when he's buying all these politicians and he's buying all his like puff piece coverage and the New York Times and everywhere else, there was actually some effort to investigate him coming from the SEC. And there was a bipartisan group of lawmakers that sent a letter that was like,

02:19:58.000 hey, he's our boy.

02:19:59.000 Like, don't...

02:20:00.000 They're like, don't touch the crypto industry.

02:20:02.000 What are you doing?

02:20:03.000 He happens to have donated to all of them.

02:20:05.000 Yeah, specifically about this guy.

02:20:07.000 And so did that lead to the regulators saying like, I guess we're going to like take a light touch.

02:20:12.000 We're not going to dig into this.

02:20:13.000 I don't know.

02:20:13.000 That's a question that I have about how all this works.

02:20:15.000 But, you know, I think that's part of why him in particular cultivated this image on Capitol Hill.

02:20:22.000 He cultivated this image with the media and was able to hold up the scheme for as long as he did.

02:20:28.000 Yeah, it's a tough one.

02:20:29.000 I don't know.

02:20:30.000 On the one hand, I'm a lot more...

02:20:32.000 I guess I'm more sympathetic to the original idea of Bitcoin.

02:20:35.000 To be fair, Bitcoin is very different than a lot of these other shitcoins that are out there in terms of the invention by the invention of this mysterious man, and then it has a limited number of supply, the original selling point of it as a hedge against inflation,

02:20:51.000 and also where I thought it was the most important was the idea of being able to get around Sanctions, regulation, people being able to censor you.

02:20:59.000 Where a lot of that came apart, though, and this was scary, was, if you remember, right before Ukraine, what was one of the biggest stories in the country?

02:21:04.000 Canada.

02:21:05.000 And the Canadian freedom protesters.

02:21:07.000 And how the Canadian government was seizing their banks.

02:21:11.000 And then what was even crazier is they were actually seizing their Bitcoin.

02:21:14.000 So it actually showed us one of the big choke points in crypto.

02:21:18.000 I have some friends who work in the industry, and I haven't really gotten a good answer on this, which is, you know, to be able to seize Bitcoin, it's because a lot of it was sent on the platforms, which are itself regulated.

02:21:27.000 So, for example, Coinbase is still subject in the United States to U.S. regulation, and Canada, similarly.

02:21:33.000 So the idea of the censorship-free money, it's possible if you know how to do it.

02:21:37.000 I barely know how to do it.

02:21:39.000 Wait a minute.

02:21:39.000 So they...

02:21:41.000 The government of Canada went into Coinbase and extracted Bitcoin?

02:21:45.000 I'm not going to say it was Coinbase necessarily, but they were...

02:21:47.000 Jamie, I'm sure you can find this.

02:21:49.000 It was Canadian government seizes cryptocurrency sent by U.S. citizens to the actual Canadian freedom protesters.

02:21:55.000 And that was one of the problems was that because some of that was on the exchanges, which are subject to regulation, it's the same thing as if I were trying to wire them money to a prohibited group in Canada.

02:22:05.000 But you were looking at that and you're like, man...

02:22:07.000 You know, that level of censorship resistance, which I really still really believe in, like, we got to have something, you know, in terms of, there's a current lot of pressure right now for the Fed and for the United States to create like a centralized digital currency.

02:22:18.000 And even, I mean, essentially, cashless, we don't, we basically live in a quasi cashless society right now.

02:22:24.000 If you think about China, one of the ways that they're able to implement their social credit score system is everything is within the WeChat app.

02:22:31.000 Over there.

02:22:32.000 An Alipay.

02:22:33.000 It's all integrated, not only for your social credit core system, your Uber, all of that is there, and you tap to pay.

02:22:38.000 Well, that's great for convenience.

02:22:40.000 It's also, oh, if you piss off the government, you can't pay for anything anymore.

02:22:44.000 You can't get a bus ticket.

02:22:46.000 You can't get all that.

02:22:47.000 So I don't know what the...

02:22:49.000 The problem is, when you have the wild, wild west, the people are going to rise to the top. 0.52

02:22:55.000 It's not an accident that you end up with psychopathic charlatans like SBF at the top of this thing.

02:23:01.000 You know, because it is like the time, in a way, the time before you had like a central bank and when you had all these different currencies competing with each other in the U.S. And so I, too, was sympathetic to the original idea behind crypto,

02:23:18.000 which is like, you know, look, fiat money is also just based on what we all decide to put value on.

02:23:24.000 Now, I would say like our fiat currency is also backed by the United States government and the military, etc.

02:23:28.000 So that would be the most powerful country of the So there is more than just like a belief in it at this point, but okay.

02:23:34.000 And so if we have this like mode of exchange and this sort of like anarchist principles of organization, it was really a response, a philosophical response, the failures of 2008. When you see how bankrupt are and corrupt our existing financial institutions are and how rigged and how much they lie and how captured the political system is.

02:23:56.000 And so I understand the impetus for it.

02:23:59.000 But in reality, it has never been used as actual currency to a significant degree.

02:24:06.000 It just became a purely speculative vehicle.

02:24:11.000 And to your point, like the idea that the three of us could just go out and be like, we're making Rogan coin and like, we bought- We could make a shitload of money on that, by the way.

02:24:20.000 We like hired Kim Kardashian to sell you Rogan coin and if we can like pump it up and do the confidence game enough, then we can run away with real cash and leave all these people holding the bag.

02:24:31.000 When I look at that, I'm like, I think this went astray.

02:24:34.000 Yeah, it went astray, 100%.

02:24:35.000 No doubt.

02:24:36.000 I think this went wildly astray.

02:24:38.000 But isn't that inevitable?

02:24:38.000 Yeah.

02:24:39.000 I think it was.

02:24:39.000 That's what they would say.

02:24:40.000 With some new emerging thing, you're going to have some crazy people that rise to the top?

02:24:43.000 It's like what Crystal was saying with the original U.S. currency.

02:24:45.000 You know, we didn't have centralized greenbacks in the United States until the Civil War.

02:24:49.000 And that was because the government literally wanted to be able to print money and buy weapons and goods with it without having to pay gold.

02:24:56.000 Before that, we had state-issued and banknotes, which was like a total free-for-all.

02:25:00.000 In the U.S. It was actually kind of wild.

02:25:02.000 And it literally took the Civil War to be able to push back against that.

02:25:05.000 And guess what?

02:25:06.000 There was a ton of charlatans.

02:25:07.000 There were silver runs.

02:25:08.000 There were bank runs.

02:25:09.000 There was like multiple panics of like 1816 or whatever.

02:25:13.000 Or even leading up to the Great Depression and the stock market crash of 1929, there was a whole buildup in the 20s of people were introduced to the idea of buying stock online.

02:25:31.000 And so after 1929, there were a lot of banking reforms that basically made banking boring, right?

02:25:43.000 They separated all the gambling and wild speculation out from the just like basic Customer deposit, like regular bank that people go to.

02:25:52.000 And then, you know, over the years, that was eaten away and those regulations were eaten away.

02:25:57.000 And eventually you ended up sort of back to a pre-1929 situation where they were again allowed to speculate in these wild ways and there was no separation.

02:26:06.000 And so after the...

02:26:08.000 Yeah, I think. 0.99

02:26:29.000 I understand the response of crypto and looking at this and being like, this system is fucked. 0.97

02:26:34.000 We need to just do our own thing. 1.00

02:26:37.000 It's corrupt. 0.99

02:26:38.000 It's disgusting. 0.93

02:26:38.000 I totally get that. 0.93

02:26:40.000 But I think the only answer to it is to have better reforms of the existing system to make it safe and less corrupt and not have this wild speculation that can create these bubbles that just destroy the entire economy and people's livelihoods.

02:26:57.000 Yeah, that's great.

02:26:58.000 Well, that's what they would say.

02:26:59.000 They're like, look, the system is corrupt.

02:27:01.000 If 2008 happens and we have Dodd-Frank and the system doesn't get fixed, what are we supposed to do?

02:27:07.000 I actually get that.

02:27:08.000 I don't know.

02:27:09.000 I'm really of two minds of it.

02:27:10.000 On the one hand, I deeply sympathize with the individualism of like, look, we're going to take it into our own hands, boys.

02:27:16.000 Nobody's coming to save us.

02:27:17.000 This is all we got.

02:27:18.000 There are a lot of preppers actually who bought Bitcoin are sitting on hundreds of millions of dollars because they bought in very early.

02:27:23.000 So shout out to those guys. 0.72

02:27:25.000 On the other, look, at the end of the day, systems can change if enough people actually want to do something about it.

02:27:30.000 We've talked a lot about the stock market ban.

02:27:32.000 I think that's actually probably step one.

02:27:34.000 If we get to the point where we can just ban members of Congress from trading stocks, the institutional trust I think that we could all then have within the system, just at a baseline level, it would help a lot.

02:27:46.000 It would help a lot.

02:27:47.000 To be able to get that.

02:27:48.000 But of course, Nancy Pelosi is the speaker.

02:27:50.000 First she says, what was it?

02:27:52.000 We live in a free market economy.

02:27:53.000 We're allowed to participate.

02:27:55.000 I just wish we would participate.

02:27:57.000 When she said that, like, push the microphone. 0.68

02:28:01.000 Walked off the stage.

02:28:02.000 Your Nancy Pelosi impression is pretty good.

02:28:04.000 That was wild.

02:28:05.000 When she just walked off the stage, like, that is wild.

02:28:08.000 I mean, she's not the only one, though.

02:28:10.000 I mean, it's a completely bipartisan issue.

02:28:12.000 Oh, yeah.

02:28:13.000 And a lot of these guys...

02:28:14.000 And, you know, they'll claim, like, look, I don't have any inside information. 1.00

02:28:17.000 I'm like, look, motherfucker, you're guilty. 1.00

02:28:19.000 Like, you've got to prove that you're innocent. 1.00

02:28:21.000 Honestly, I mean, whether...

02:28:23.000 Listen, they do.

02:28:24.000 And, like, obviously, these are not geniuses.

02:28:26.000 And they're all, like, beating the market and beating people who are expert at this and whatever.

02:28:31.000 George Soros and Warren Buffett are not as good as Paul Pelosi.

02:28:34.000 Yeah.

02:28:34.000 Oh, wow.

02:28:35.000 He's better.

02:28:36.000 He's better at trading.

02:28:37.000 He's just an amazing trader.

02:28:38.000 You see the Google trade just the other day, right before the antitrust suit was filed, it sold like $3 million.

02:28:43.000 And once again, you're just never going to convince me that you didn't know about that.

02:28:45.000 He knew, they knew, she knew, they knew.

02:28:49.000 Let's theoretically say, all right, we believe it, like they didn't use their inside information.

02:28:53.000 It almost doesn't matter.

02:28:54.000 Yeah, it doesn't. 0.94

02:28:55.000 Because ultimately the bottom line is people fucking think that you used your information and, you know, are benefiting from it.

02:29:02.000 And by the way, when you look overall, like you could look at any individual trade and be like, oh, maybe, maybe not, who knows? 0.99

02:29:08.000 But when you look at the numbers overall and you're like, all you motherfuckers are beating the market, no fucking way. 0.99

02:29:14.000 How is it possible? 0.99

02:29:15.000 Unusual wins.

02:29:16.000 And if you look at the actual speculation, the actual sales and trades, you know, they... 0.99

02:29:23.000 They fucking know. 0.99

02:29:24.000 They know something. 1.00

02:29:25.000 And they're not doing anything about it.

02:29:26.000 Unusual Whales, shout out to him.

02:29:27.000 He's really one of the guys who sparked this whole movement.

02:29:29.000 Who is Unusual Whales? 0.95

02:29:30.000 He's like an anonymous Twitter account, and he's one of the first people who actually published.

02:29:34.000 Independent journalist type.

02:29:35.000 He published the first trading.

02:29:37.000 This was like 2021. Maybe 2020, actually.

02:29:40.000 We're some of the first people who actually...

02:29:42.000 Picked it up originally about the congressional trading numbers.

02:29:45.000 We went through the exact Senate.

02:29:46.000 He loops it all together as an institution and the way that it was able to beat the market consistently year after year after year.

02:29:52.000 And this is all publicly available.

02:29:54.000 Shout out to him.

02:29:55.000 He's a great dude.

02:29:56.000 Yeah, definitely give him a follow.

02:29:57.000 He's really...

02:29:58.000 He does really good work.

02:29:59.000 And it's a lot.

02:30:00.000 You can actually see it all right there.

02:30:01.000 The full trading report on politicians in 2022. And again, totally bipartisan.

02:30:05.000 Debbie Wasserman Schultz, Patrick Fallin, Susie Lee, David Joyce, Gary Peters.

02:30:09.000 Look at the blue and the red there, all within the graph.

02:30:12.000 And you can even see, like, look, it's everybody.

02:30:15.000 Like, from all across the board, people who are supposedly against the system, people who are totally within the system.

02:30:21.000 And that's what makes it so disgusting.

02:30:24.000 We have got to ban this.

02:30:26.000 19.8%?

02:30:27.000 What does that mean?

02:30:28.000 Well, she was down to 0.8%. 0.78

02:30:31.000 And that's the other thing with Paul Pelosi.

02:30:32.000 The guy is extraordinarily leveraged.

02:30:34.000 He's always trading options.

02:30:36.000 He's not even just buying and selling individual stocks.

02:30:38.000 He's making much larger bets on these things. 0.99

02:30:41.000 I mean, he's got $100 million in access to shit you and I don't have. 0.99

02:30:45.000 Wait, Debbie Wasserman Schultz at the top there. 1.00

02:30:47.000 Yeah, she's good.

02:30:47.000 Nice little portfolio return.

02:30:49.000 I don't even know who that is.

02:30:50.000 51% on year-over-year in 2022, which is crazy.

02:30:55.000 I mean, if you compare that to the S&P 500, I'd actually be curious about the 2022 S&P 500. Yeah, there you go.

02:31:00.000 So S&P 500 is down 18%.

02:31:02.000 Look at every single one of these individual members who are able to have portfolios, which are beating the total market.

02:31:09.000 It's just outrageous.

02:31:10.000 Pelosi's off her game, though. 0.87

02:31:11.000 Look at that.

02:31:11.000 She's actually off her game.

02:31:12.000 It seems like they threw just because everybody was onto their shit. 1.00

02:31:15.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:31:16.000 They fucking threw a little bit. 0.99

02:31:17.000 But look at the red and blue. 0.99

02:31:19.000 Exactly.

02:31:20.000 Oh, it's bipartisan.

02:31:21.000 Yeah.

02:31:21.000 100%.

02:31:21.000 Completely.

02:31:22.000 And the top is red.

02:31:23.000 Well, and this is like a story of hope and it's very depressing because...

02:31:30.000 There was a whole grassroots movement to be bipartisan.

02:31:35.000 The Republicans were pissed off about Pelosi and Democrats were pissed off about the Republicans. 0.99

02:31:39.000 Everybody was like, all right, this is fucked up, right? 1.00

02:31:41.000 Any thinking person who cares about the country would be like, this is fucked up. 1.00

02:31:45.000 Why are we doing this? 0.98

02:31:46.000 And so then, because there's this organic movement, you see actually some people in the mainstream press start to cover it.

02:31:53.000 There was actually a reporter at Insider.

02:31:55.000 They started digging into the details of these trades and compiling reports.

02:31:59.000 That leads to that, when you're talking about Nancy Pelosi at that press conference, that leads to her actually getting asked a question about it.

02:32:05.000 And wasn't it incredibly revealing her response in that moment?

02:32:10.000 That leads to a backlash.

02:32:11.000 Kevin McCarthy sees an opportunity with Republicans about to take it.

02:32:14.000 He starts posturing like, oh, if Republicans take the House, we're going to do the stock ban. 0.97

02:32:18.000 Of course, they haven't said shit about that since then. 0.94

02:32:20.000 Pelosi actually feels some pressure like, all right, we're going to do we're going to try a thing. 0.91

02:32:24.000 And they sort of like poison pill that to make sure it doesn't happen, too.

02:32:27.000 And that's where the you know, it's a mixed bag because you're like, all right, we got it on the menu.

02:32:32.000 There was a lot of pressure.

02:32:33.000 Politicians heard it.

02:32:34.000 They had to do something.

02:32:36.000 But then both parties, again, found ways to just completely, you know, let the issue slide and not actually have to change anything.

02:32:43.000 That is an independent media story, though, because that's one of those where that guy published it.

02:32:46.000 We started talking.

02:32:47.000 This is not just us.

02:32:47.000 This is a lot of people.

02:32:48.000 Dave Portnoy.

02:32:49.000 There's a lot of other people out there who've talked about it.

02:32:51.000 A lot of independent media.

02:32:52.000 People like you have also brought it up.

02:32:54.000 That kind of put it in the cultural pop culture conversation.

02:32:56.000 You got TikTokers out there doing Pelosi trades like they have huge accounts. 0.98

02:33:01.000 Where Gen Z and millennials are totally bought into how corrupt the system is, that floats upward with the outrage.

02:33:07.000 Insider picks it up.

02:33:08.000 And President Biden actually originally had a line in the State of the Union just last year where he was going to endorse a congressional stock rating ban.

02:33:16.000 The line was pulled at the very last minute.

02:33:18.000 Of all the things...

02:33:20.000 You know, you listen to those state of the... 0.99

02:33:21.000 It's like a laundry list of checking the box on every fucking thing. 0.99

02:33:24.000 25 checkboxes. 0.99

02:33:26.000 And that's the line.

02:33:27.000 That's the line that gets pulled.

02:33:28.000 Amazing, right?

02:33:29.000 At whose request?

02:33:30.000 That's a great question.

02:33:31.000 I would love for somebody in the press to dig into that.

02:33:33.000 And, you know, Biden, to his credit, when he was a senator, he actually had a personal rule for himself.

02:33:39.000 He did not engage in this.

02:33:42.000 He did not buy and sell stock.

02:33:44.000 So he would actually have a place of moral authority to say, like...

02:33:48.000 Let's not do this anymore.

02:33:49.000 But somebody got to him.

02:33:51.000 Wow.

02:33:52.000 Mm-hmm.

02:33:52.000 Yeah.

02:33:52.000 That's a real corruption story.

02:33:54.000 Dirty pistons.

02:33:55.000 Yeah.

02:33:56.000 Well, and again, like, Republicans, you know, all these people, like, the Republican holdouts or Kevin McCarthy, the apostatingly populist or whatever, this was not one of the demands that they made of, like, let's get stuck.

02:34:06.000 They should have made that demand.

02:34:07.000 They should have made it, but, you know, there's a reason why they didn't.

02:34:09.000 And, like I said...

02:34:10.000 It needs to be more public outreach.

02:34:11.000 Well, we're talking about it right now.

02:34:12.000 Maybe it'll help.

02:34:12.000 There you go.

02:34:13.000 Honestly, there's a lot of Republican lawmakers who are obsessed with the JRE. Maybe they'll listen to this.

02:34:17.000 There you go.

02:34:18.000 Make your pitch.

02:34:19.000 I mean, and like I said, McCarthy, he brought it up at a moment when he thought it would serve him politically, but then the moment he actually got the gavel and took power, nothing.

02:34:28.000 That's the key to getting what you want in politics, though.

02:34:32.000 That's, you know, look, these people, they're never going to do anything because it's the right thing.

02:34:34.000 You've got to force him to do it so that it's politically advantageous.

02:34:37.000 And look, there's actually a lot of room for some politician out there. 1.00

02:34:41.000 Originally, I think it was John Ossoff, the senator from Georgia.

02:34:43.000 He's a young guy.

02:34:45.000 He's like 30-something.

02:34:46.000 He's like maybe 37, relatively young.

02:34:48.000 I guarantee you, he's pretty online from what I can tell.

02:34:51.000 He was the one who caught this.

02:34:52.000 He goes, oh, I'll just introduce a bill to ban this.

02:34:54.000 He got a ton of good press for being the first senator to actually propose a ban.

02:34:58.000 So we need to make it and create a system where right now it's politically advantageous to sell out To K Street, which is the lobbyists, that's where they all sell out to big business, Wall Street, military, industrial complex, any of these people.

02:35:10.000 I think what I would love to do, and one of the aims of the show was creating and rise with independent media and working with everybody is to create an alternate system where you get rewarded for.

02:35:22.000 We had a big conversation about Ukraine.

02:35:24.000 Just let one politician say it.

02:35:26.000 Right now we've had like maybe two who have ever raised any questions.

02:35:30.000 Rand Paul was one of the old people. 1.00

02:35:31.000 He goes, I'm not going to even vote against the aid for Ukraine.

02:35:34.000 Let's just have an auditor to make sure that it's all being spent right.

02:35:38.000 Like an inspector general.

02:35:38.000 Nothing.

02:35:39.000 They don't even vote for that.

02:35:40.000 Yeah.

02:35:41.000 And by the way, like what did we just talk about?

02:35:43.000 Zelensky just fired like half of his cabinet for corruption allegations.

02:35:47.000 Who do you think is paying the cabinet?

02:35:48.000 Who's paying all the bills?

02:35:49.000 We're literally balancing their budget.

02:35:52.000 The United States Congress is.

02:35:55.000 Their economy is completely propped up by the United States.

02:35:59.000 And it might lead us to World War III. It's possible.

02:36:01.000 It's certainly possible.

02:36:02.000 But when we were talking about Ukraine, one of the things that I wanted to bring up that I didn't is, is there a solution?

02:36:10.000 If we're not going to donate tanks and missiles and jets, what is the rational solution?

02:36:17.000 Is there a way to mitigate the loss of life?

02:36:20.000 Is there a way to negotiate a way out of this?

02:36:24.000 Is there a way, on paper, other than Russia saying, you win, what is the way?

02:36:31.000 Well, the way would be, look, these are the conditions, Ukraine, at which we are going to support you.

02:36:36.000 After that, we are not going to provide you offensive aid because we believe that we should have a diplomatic solution.

02:36:44.000 You could convene.

02:36:45.000 I mean, look, there's been no real effort between President Biden and Vladimir Putin to actually even sit down.

02:36:50.000 Right now, there's all these EU G7 leaders that are actually inside of Ukraine.

02:36:55.000 None of them are asking any questions about diplomacy.

02:36:58.000 It's very, really what it is, is this is a grand European NATO problem.

02:37:02.000 So we all need to sit down together and hash it.

02:37:05.000 And look, if the Russians pull out of them, that then okay, like game on. 0.85

02:37:09.000 Like you're the ones who are pulling out.

02:37:10.000 You're the ones who are saying that we're not going to have any engagement on this whatsoever.

02:37:14.000 But we haven't even tried that.

02:37:16.000 It was in the very beginning of the war.

02:37:17.000 We actually, there were some negotiations that were happening.

02:37:19.000 Yeah.

02:37:21.000 I'm not going to pretend this would be easy.

02:37:23.000 Like, oh, put me in there. 1.00

02:37:25.000 That's the shit that Trump is truthing now. 1.00

02:37:28.000 He's like, we'll get a deal on Davo. 1.00

02:37:29.000 Very easy to do. 1.00

02:37:32.000 You're ridiculous. 1.00

02:37:33.000 It's not easy to do. 1.00

02:37:34.000 It's a complex situation.

02:37:35.000 It'd be incredibly difficult.

02:37:36.000 There may be no opening for diplomacy, especially right now.

02:37:39.000 But Sagar is right to point to the fact that early on in this conflict, there actually were meetings happening between Russian officials and Ukrainian representatives.

02:37:50.000 There were talks that were happening.

02:37:53.000 And reportedly, they were kind of working out an outline.

02:37:57.000 There were still very difficult sticking points, you know, based on the reporting that's available.

02:38:02.000 And Boris Johnson, who was at that point Prime Minister of the UK, and of course they have been our closest ally in all of this, was dispatched to go to Kiev and give the message to Zelensky.

02:38:14.000 This was reported actually in Ukrainian press.

02:38:16.000 We do not want you to make a deal.

02:38:19.000 That was our posture.

02:38:21.000 We do not want diplomacy.

02:38:22.000 We do not want negotiations.

02:38:35.000 They are where they are, 100% because of us.

02:38:38.000 This is an incredibly dangerous situation because of the proxy nature of it, because Russia certainly sees themselves and they accurately should as being in a proxy war versus us.

02:38:48.000 And so the idea that we have no say and no influence over whether or not there are negotiations is completely bunk.

02:38:57.000 And so, you know, that's the piece where my other concern is that we're sort of building up to another Afghanistan situation where, you know, we went in with one goal, like, okay, we're going to get the bad guys, we're going to get Osama. 0.80

02:39:10.000 And then when we failed at that, we end up with this 20-year occupation and total disaster at the end of it.

02:39:19.000 And no one can really say how or why we were there for so long.

02:39:23.000 Like, how do we get to some sort of exit ramp in Ukraine?

02:39:26.000 And here the stakes are so much higher because, as you point out, it's like nuclear war and World War III on the line.

02:39:32.000 And even if that's like a tiny chance, we should care a lot about that tiny chance.

02:39:38.000 Did you see Jimmy Dore on Tucker Carlson?

02:39:41.000 Yes.

02:39:41.000 What was he talking about?

02:39:43.000 China? 0.73

02:39:43.000 I think that's what it was. 0.73

02:39:44.000 I saw a clip that was floating around.

02:39:45.000 I didn't see it.

02:39:45.000 See if you can play it.

02:39:46.000 It was the other day.

02:39:48.000 But he was talking about the industrial military complex.

02:39:51.000 Yes.

02:39:52.000 And the influence that they have on what we're doing in the world.

02:39:57.000 And this idea that we're some sort of...

02:40:00.000 Have you found it?

02:40:01.000 I don't want to paraphrase it.

02:40:02.000 But he went on this very, very powerful anti-war rant.

02:40:08.000 Let's play this from the beginning.

02:40:11.000 Should I use a different source first?

02:40:14.000 I don't know what this channel is.

02:40:16.000 Jamie, I'm pretty sure it's on his Twitter.

02:40:18.000 I thought I saw, on Jimmy's Twitter, I thought I saw a clip that was floating around there.

02:40:23.000 On Jimmy Dore's Twitter?

02:40:24.000 Yeah.

02:40:26.000 What was that one?

02:40:28.000 The one I had?

02:40:29.000 Something about China?

02:40:31.000 That was the clip I knew that he was on Tucker.

02:40:33.000 I knew he was there to talk about China.

02:40:34.000 I'm not sure.

02:40:36.000 There it is.

02:40:36.000 Let's play that.

02:40:38.000 Hold up.

02:40:44.000 We're the ones provoking this war.

02:40:46.000 Just like we provoked the war in Ukraine, we are now provoking a war with China. 0.62

02:40:51.000 And who benefits?

02:40:53.000 I'll tell you right now.

02:40:54.000 Your enemy is not China. 0.86

02:40:56.000 Your enemy is not Russia. 0.58

02:40:57.000 Your enemy is the military-industrial complex which has been fleecing this country to the tunes of hundreds of billions and trillions of dollars.

02:41:05.000 How many times are we going to have a defense secretary say, hey, we can't account for two trillion dollars in the Pentagon again?

02:41:12.000 Which has happened twice now in my lifetime.

02:41:15.000 So, again, people are being...

02:41:17.000 The war machine cannot be stopped.

02:41:20.000 Who's running this country?

02:41:21.000 The war machine.

02:41:22.000 It certainly isn't Joe Biden making these decisions.

02:41:24.000 I would like to know who is making these decisions.

02:41:27.000 And I just want to remind everybody, the United States is the world's terrorist.

02:41:31.000 We just set the Middle East on fire in the last 20 years, and now we're doing a proxy war in Ukraine, which we provoked, NATO provoked, and was just admitted that we provoked it by the former Prime Minister of Germany, and now we're trying to sable-rattle with China, and they're predicting a war. 0.69

02:41:48.000 Again, China's not going to invade us.

02:41:50.000 China's not our enemy.

02:41:51.000 We might have an economic war.

02:41:53.000 That's what these are.

02:41:54.000 These are economic wars.

02:41:55.000 These are wars for in Ukraine.

02:41:57.000 It's about liquefied natural gas and making sure Germany and Russia never come together because we fear Russia's natural resources and manpower, and we fear them getting together with Germany with their technology and their capital. 0.87

02:42:10.000 And so that's why we blew up the Nord Stream pipeline.

02:42:12.000 That's why we're doing the Ukraine war. 0.75

02:42:14.000 This is all about hegemony, imperialism, and economics.

02:42:18.000 And if there's a Marine somewhere, it's there because they're about to steal some natural resources from another country.

02:42:24.000 As everybody's screaming about what a bad guy Putin is for invading Ukraine, the United States is currently occupying a third of Syria.

02:42:32.000 And which third is that?

02:42:33.000 It's the third that has the oil.

02:42:35.000 And how do I know we're there to steal their oil?

02:42:37.000 Because the President of the United States said so.

02:42:42.000 We're not even benefiting economically.

02:42:44.000 That's, I mean, of course, that's the rub.

02:42:45.000 Jimmy Dore, appreciate it.

02:42:47.000 Thank you.

02:42:48.000 Nord Stream, man.

02:42:49.000 I forgot about that one.

02:42:50.000 Yeah.

02:42:51.000 You remember how immediately people were like, oh, it was Russia, all of that.

02:42:55.000 And then an independent panel actually just came out, I want to say a month ago.

02:42:59.000 And they're like, no, we don't think it was Russia.

02:43:00.000 Yeah.

02:43:00.000 I was like, well, who was it?

02:43:01.000 They're like, we may never know.

02:43:03.000 Yeah.

02:43:04.000 Like, oh, really?

02:43:04.000 It was really only a few people who could have done it.

02:43:06.000 We'll never know.

02:43:09.000 Who killed Epstein?

02:43:10.000 We may never know.

02:43:11.000 We may never know.

02:43:13.000 I mean, the bottom line is, we've talked a lot about incentives.

02:43:17.000 What's the incentive for the people who make bombs?

02:43:20.000 They're trying to make money.

02:43:22.000 And they're very influential.

02:43:24.000 They donate a lot of money in Washington.

02:43:26.000 They go, you know, revolving door, not just from, like, Government officials, but also they go on CNN and MSNBC and whatever, and it's never disclosed like, oh, and by the way, this person is like on the board of Raytheon and happens to have a vested financial interest in what we ultimately do here.

02:43:42.000 So, listen, it's...

02:43:44.000 It's at the core.

02:43:46.000 The profit motive is at the core of a lot of what happens in this country.

02:43:49.000 It's Eisenhower's speech when he was leaving office.

02:43:50.000 That's it.

02:43:51.000 That's interesting.

02:43:51.000 You know, something crazy is that even the Navy secretary, we just covered this, he came out and was like, in a few months, we may have to choose between arming ourselves and arming Ukraine.

02:44:00.000 And then the Biden administration made him come up and, quote, clear up that comment.

02:44:04.000 He's like, oh, I didn't mean it that way.

02:44:06.000 It was just, well, no, he actually did mean it that way, because it turns out that we've been sending so many munitions and stuff that we have over to Ukraine.

02:44:13.000 Yeah, there you go.

02:44:14.000 If the defense industry can't boost production, arming both Ukraine and the U.S. will become challenging.

02:44:19.000 He literally came out and said that we may have to choose if these weapons makers don't get their act together, because actually, and this is the other thing where, you know, military industrial complex.

02:44:28.000 One of the things that we forget is they're not actually particularly good at what they do.

02:44:31.000 If we look at the F-35 program, it was a colossal disaster.

02:44:35.000 It was over a trillion dollars.

02:44:36.000 It cost way too much money.

02:44:39.000 The U.S., I want to say it was the Zumwalt class, a new...

02:44:44.000 Navy people are going to freak out at me, but it's either a destroyer or something.

02:44:47.000 It's supposed to be a new generation ship.

02:44:49.000 We were going to build dozens of them.

02:44:51.000 We only ended up building three.

02:44:52.000 They cost a shitload of money.

02:44:54.000 The gun costs a million dollars a round in order to fire it.

02:44:58.000 So we're not able to even produce what we need.

02:45:02.000 This is a big fight during the Iraq War, too, where guys in the Pentagon would rather fund boondoggle programs than stuff that was actually protecting the lives of our soldiers, like MRAPs.

02:45:12.000 Like, they didn't want to fund some of the stuff that was actually protecting American soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan.

02:45:18.000 The A-10 Warthog is another good example. 0.99

02:45:21.000 Cheap Plane, which actually has ability to assist people in a tactical situation because they're more interested in their, you know, ridiculous flying shit. 0.99

02:45:28.000 And Jimmy also points to the correct thing, which is the Pentagon did just fail its fucking audit. 0.99

02:45:32.000 You know, we don't really talk about that. 0.98

02:45:35.000 They fail it every year.

02:45:37.000 They fail it every year.

02:45:40.000 It's a congressionally mandated audit.

02:45:42.000 Every other government agency is able to get through their audit.

02:45:47.000 And the Pentagon, there you go, fails its audit for the 5th century.

02:45:51.000 There's no consequences to this either.

02:45:53.000 They're getting more money than ever.

02:45:55.000 What are you spending it on?

02:45:55.000 It's not even close.

02:45:57.000 It's not like they're off by a few pennies.

02:45:58.000 It's by like a few trillions or something.

02:46:02.000 It's like, yeah, and everyone's just like, yeah, this is fine.

02:46:04.000 Where do you think that money's gone?

02:46:06.000 That's a great question.

02:46:07.000 There you go.

02:46:07.000 Where does it go?

02:46:08.000 Representing $7 trillion in assets.

02:46:13.000 That's what we spent on the war on terror, just so people know.

02:46:15.000 The entire GWAT was $7 trillion, and that's what's missing.

02:46:18.000 I'm actually reading the sentence wrong.

02:46:19.000 The $7 trillion is the part they were able to give a clean bill of financial aid.

02:46:22.000 That was only 39%.

02:46:23.000 It was actually much more than $7 trillion.

02:46:25.000 Oh, my God.

02:46:27.000 So if 40% is $7 trillion, then we'll double it.

02:46:29.000 That's quite a system we have here.

02:46:30.000 We're talking about almost $9 trillion.

02:46:32.000 That's more than we spend on the entire GWAT. Our entire economy is $15 trillion.

02:46:37.000 I want people to let that sink in here.

02:46:38.000 But we can't have healthcare.

02:46:40.000 That'd be too much.

02:46:41.000 It costs too much.

02:46:42.000 Can't do it.

02:46:43.000 No universal basic income.

02:46:43.000 We can't afford it.

02:46:44.000 Yeah, we can't afford that.

02:46:45.000 Where's that money going, though?

02:46:46.000 Who knows?

02:46:47.000 I read once that they have one of the largest HR systems in the entire world.

02:46:51.000 I was like, on what?

02:46:52.000 What are they spending that on?

02:46:53.000 A lot of it—look, I have no idea.

02:46:56.000 That's the point.

02:46:57.000 Even with terms of Ukraine, there was a great—this is a great media episode. 0.95

02:47:00.000 CBS News did a whole documentary about how many of the weapons that we were sending to Ukraine were not making it to the front line, which is bullshit, right?

02:47:07.000 Because if we're going to take all these weapons, I would at least hope a Ukrainian soldier is using it to protect— His own life.

02:47:13.000 Literally, the day after that documentary went live, he had to delete it.

02:47:17.000 CBS News retracted it and said, no, actually, the situation has changed.

02:47:20.000 It's not true.

02:47:21.000 That report was out of context.

02:47:23.000 We're going to reissue it.

02:47:24.000 It was out of date.

02:47:25.000 They said it was out of date.

02:47:26.000 And they were talking about the vast majority of the arms we were sending to Ukraine weren't getting there.

02:47:30.000 Also, we have no audit.

02:47:32.000 We have no way to independently verify that anything that we send to Ukraine is actually being used by Ukraine in the way that we want it to.

02:47:39.000 How much money have we sent over there?

02:47:41.000 In terms of how much we've actually spent...

02:47:43.000 Military aid or overall?

02:47:44.000 If you want to look it up, Jamie, it's called like Der Kegel or something like that.

02:47:48.000 There's a tracker that does country by country and breaks it by economic, financial, and military.

02:47:54.000 I believe we have sent approximately between $25 and $30 billion.

02:47:59.000 We have an extra $70 billion appropriated to Ukraine.

02:48:03.000 Here's another crazy thing, because we actually read these laws because we talk about our show.

02:48:06.000 So it doesn't just work like...

02:48:08.000 The President of the United States shall have X amount of money to send tanks to Ukraine.

02:48:11.000 No.

02:48:12.000 It's a slush fund.

02:48:13.000 Biden has a $70 billion slush fund, completely to the discretion of the President of the United States.

02:48:19.000 He could wake up tomorrow if he wanted to and ship any weapons system in possession of the United States over to Ukraine.

02:48:25.000 We have no congressional authority.

02:48:27.000 It has already been appropriated.

02:48:29.000 We have no way as a population to push back against that.

02:48:33.000 Congress abdicated its responsibility in this case. 0.99

02:48:36.000 Or he could not wake up tomorrow and then it all be in the hands of fucking Kamala Harris. 1.00

02:48:41.000 That's the only thing that scares me more. 0.99

02:48:42.000 Can you imagine that lady with her finger on the button? 1.00

02:48:44.000 We're fucked. 1.00

02:48:45.000 His 80-year-old heart is the only thing keeping us alive right now. 1.00

02:48:48.000 I mean, at least Biden stood up to the generals when it came to Afghanistan.

02:48:52.000 At least he had that in him, Kamala Harris.

02:48:56.000 Scary. 1.00

02:48:57.000 Scary shit. 1.00

02:48:58.000 You know she would start a war with Russia. 1.00

02:49:00.000 Do you think so?

02:49:00.000 She'd bumble us into one.

02:49:02.000 I think so.

02:49:03.000 In terms of her competence, she cares about MSNBC. She cares about groupthink.

02:49:08.000 She cares about the elites really loving her.

02:49:11.000 Biden, to his credit, on some areas of foreign policy.

02:49:15.000 It's very easy to be manipulated by these people because you see what happened when Biden pulled out of Afghanistan.

02:49:23.000 And I acknowledge it was a mess.

02:49:25.000 It was a disaster.

02:49:26.000 It was ugly.

02:49:27.000 It was not good.

02:49:28.000 All of that.

02:49:29.000 But you see the way that they came out in force because they hated this decision.

02:49:34.000 They wanted us to continue to be there forever because this was like the endless gravy train for them.

02:49:38.000 And so, you know, that was the most effective, most potent criticism against.

02:49:43.000 It was uniform across the board with the media.

02:49:45.000 And so that they did the same sort of stuff to the leak against you.

02:49:51.000 They'll really damage your approval rating.

02:49:53.000 They're really tied in with the media in terms of like, you know, they're leaking to their sources and they will go on and make their own case, et cetera, with no disclosure that they have financial incentives involved.

02:50:04.000 It's very, very easy to be manipulated by the people who want to be in a place forever or want to start a war or whatever it is.

02:50:12.000 Absolutely.

02:50:12.000 Yeah.

02:50:13.000 I mean, I think Trump was subject to the same forces.

02:50:17.000 Obama was subject to the same force. 0.93

02:50:19.000 And I think part of why Biden in this limited instance was able to buck that trend is maybe perhaps just because he's been around for so fucking long. 0.85

02:50:28.000 Obama got totally rolled by the generals.

02:50:30.000 Great book, Bob Woodward, Obama's Wars, about the very first year of the Obama presidency.

02:50:35.000 He promised to run on the good war, Afghanistan, but he's not necessarily wedded to a surge. 0.92

02:50:40.000 The Obama's Wars book just details how Biden was the only guy in there being like, Mr. President, what the fuck are we doing in Afghanistan?

02:50:47.000 He's like, why should we send 40,000, whatever, more troops? 0.89

02:50:50.000 What are we going to do?

02:50:51.000 What's our endgame?

02:50:52.000 Let's just have a counterterrorism mission.

02:50:54.000 And David Petraeus, Mike Mullen, and all the other generals in the Obama White House were leaking against President Obama and actually actively undercutting him to the New York Times and to the press to create a Obama is soft on terrorism narrative, specifically so they could do a surge in Afghanistan under Stanley McChrystal.

02:51:12.000 And look, it's complicated.

02:51:14.000 But if we look back on that, Did it really buy us anything in the long war of history with Afghanistan?

02:51:19.000 I know personally people who were blown up during the surge in Afghanistan, and I also know how much it hurts them emotionally to watch ground that they fought and lost their brothers for, lost limbs for, get retaken by the Taliban several years earlier.

02:51:34.000 It's just like we're talking about with Ukraine.

02:51:35.000 What is the endgame?

02:51:37.000 And the endgame is not something that Washington really likes to talk about.

02:51:41.000 And even if you're looking at the pullout situation on Afghanistan, it's like, well, why should we stay in Afghanistan?

02:51:46.000 If you're listening to the media, it was like, because so Afghan girls can go to school.

02:51:49.000 And look, I feel very bad for Afghan girls.

02:51:52.000 I do not wish a situation where they are unable to go to school.

02:51:55.000 Does that mean that we should have people there in perpetuity and spend $200 million per day and have Several American soldiers get blown up by an IED. I'm sorry, I don't think so.

02:52:04.000 I think there's a lot of bad shit that's happening all across the world.

02:52:06.000 But they're never going to frame it that way. 0.98

02:52:08.000 And that's why, man, the media on this, on war in particular, they offer no nuance.

02:52:14.000 Afghanistan was a real red pill moment for Crystal and I. And look, I'm not defending it. 0.98

02:52:18.000 I'm not saying it wasn't a shit show. 0.99

02:52:19.000 What's the alternative? 0.99

02:52:20.000 They were like, oh, we should have surrounded the city of Kabul. 0.99

02:52:22.000 I'm like, so you want to send thousands of American soldiers to create a perimeter around the city of Kabul?

02:52:28.000 That suicide bomb that happened in the airport, it would have been that times 100. In terms of we were occupying and surrounding an entire city, there are valid criticisms of we should have held on to Bagram, we shouldn't have abandoned the military base or whatever.

02:52:42.000 And that's a tactical consideration.

02:52:43.000 I'll leave that to the people whose job it is.

02:52:45.000 But on a broader strategic level, why should we have stayed in Afghanistan?

02:52:49.000 And I haven't heard a particularly good answer to that. 0.99

02:52:52.000 You know how much they actually cared about the women and girls by the fact that now that those women and girls are starving in a mass famine, they don't give a shit. 0.99

02:53:00.000 They don't cover it. 0.98

02:53:01.000 They don't cover the fact that we're partly connected to it because of the fact that we are continuing to hold their central bank reserves.

02:53:10.000 Now we're over that.

02:53:11.000 We've moved on.

02:53:12.000 Now we're focused on humanitarian stories elsewhere.

02:53:15.000 So it's just very selective and it's weaponized humanitarianism because Americans are good people.

02:53:21.000 Like people don't want to see someone suffering.

02:53:24.000 And so they'll use the legitimate humanitarian concerns to try to achieve their aims. 0.99

02:53:30.000 And then once those aims are accomplished or not accomplished, they don't give a shit. 0.99

02:53:34.000 Yeah. 0.98

02:53:35.000 This is not a rosy picture you two are painting.

02:53:38.000 Well, it can be.

02:53:40.000 We went from the stock ban, which I thought was a rosy one.

02:53:42.000 I wanted to talk to you about something that I remember you discussing that I wanted to get clarity on.

02:53:48.000 What was that story that you discussed where there was a company that was working with China, and China had bought a large stake in the company.

02:53:57.000 It was about chips and AI. Yes.

02:53:59.000 Okay.

02:54:00.000 I forget the exact name of the company, Jamie, but it's basically called the heist of the century.

02:54:05.000 If you Google like heist of the century, China, semiconductors, I think it was called AML. It was a British semiconductor company.

02:54:12.000 Any American or Western business is required to do business in China has to have a Chinese subsidiary.

02:54:17.000 So essentially what happened is the Chinese subsidiary, I believe of AML, was stealing the technology from within it.

02:54:25.000 And after they were reprimanded for something like this, the CEO of the Chinese subsidiary just said, nope, I'm taking it.

02:54:32.000 He stole all of their IP, created an independent business backed by the Chinese government, and is now spinning up, based on their IP, semiconductors that were originally intellectual property of this British semiconductor company.

02:54:44.000 And the reason that this matters is that is just the tip of the iceberg for IP theft that is happening with respect to China.

02:54:52.000 It's one of the reasons why if you look at Chinese or American businessmen who do business over there, they fully and readily admit the amount of IP that has just been straight up stolen through their fake legal process of this Chinese subsidiary. 0.59

02:55:05.000 But really, it's just a farming operation.

02:55:06.000 There's no such thing as private industry in China.

02:55:09.000 You know, I talked about with TikTok.

02:55:10.000 All the time, the CEO, Zhang Ximing, he actually was forced to pull one of ByteDance's apps from the Chinese app store and apologize because it was not supporting, quote, socialist principles.

02:55:22.000 He was like, I apologize.

02:55:23.000 This is the CEO of TikTok today, the owner of TikTok.

02:55:28.000 Everything there is totally controlled by the government.

02:55:31.000 They're very savvy and they're very smart.

02:55:33.000 And at this point, they've actually even reached a point where in some cases, they don't even need our IP. In some areas, they are far more superior and advanced than we are.

02:55:42.000 One of the ones that scares the shit out of me is electric vehicle batteries, so the entire EV battery supply chain.

02:55:48.000 It's connected to China in some way.

02:55:50.000 You've talked about the cobalt and all that.

02:55:52.000 And one of the things that Siddharth brought up on your show was that it's the Chinese companies that are working with these Congolese gangs. 0.99

02:55:58.000 Chinese don't give a shit about labor. 1.00

02:55:59.000 I mean, it's not like we give a shit either, so to be fair. 0.99

02:56:01.000 But anyway, they're willing to come in and be like, Look, we want the cobalt. 0.99

02:56:04.000 Give it to us.

02:56:05.000 This is actually part of the reason why Elon is in a precarious position.

02:56:08.000 A huge part of the Tesla EV battery supply chain is in China.

02:56:12.000 Even here in the United States, a lot of the new EV battery plants that are being built, it's a Chinese subsidiary and a conglomerate that is behind that.

02:56:21.000 And look, what did we come through with the whole pandemic?

02:56:24.000 If you're going to have critical supplies being manufactured and connected to China in some way, they're always going to put their interest, as any country should, above your own. 0.95

02:56:33.000 You need to have some sort of resilience.

02:56:36.000 Taiwan is another example.

02:56:39.000 TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturer, they are building a plant here in Arizona.

02:56:43.000 They're building, I think it's a $100 billion plant, which is great.

02:56:46.000 I'm glad that they are, but it takes a decade to spin those things up.

02:56:49.000 They create 92% of the world's most Advanced chips. 0.95

02:56:54.000 If we have a conflict in Taiwan, I always talk about this on the show, we are all turning this shit into the government so that they can create missiles and bombs. 0.98

02:57:02.000 Like, they will literally need to rip the semiconductors and chips out of our cell phones, out of our computers, because we're not going to have anything. 0.97

02:57:10.000 92% of the world's most advanced chips.

02:57:12.000 Everything goes dark.

02:57:14.000 Everything is turned over into some sort of ration thing.

02:57:17.000 Chips is the new gold.

02:57:19.000 It is one of the most precarious as an industry for the United States that we remain in.

02:57:23.000 The Chips Act was a great step in the right direction that the Biden administration passed, but tip of the iceberg, man.

02:57:29.000 That's a whole other level.

02:57:30.000 I mean, that is the, like, if we're looking for a more positive story, less, like, gloom and doom.

02:57:36.000 The Biden administration has, like, dipped their toe in the water of industrial policy, recognizing that, I mean, the best response to China, the problem for us is being so interdependent, where, you know, The pandemic, you come to realize, 0.99

02:57:52.000 like, oh, fuck, they make all the masks. 0.99

02:57:55.000 Vitamins, drugs. 0.99

02:57:56.000 And then the other piece is we realized with these sprawling just-in-time supply chains that they were incredibly fragile, right? 0.99

02:58:07.000 That if you have a disruption, your whole economy is, like, going to go to shit. 0.98

02:58:11.000 You're going to have inflation. 0.89

02:58:12.000 You're going to have all these backups at the ports and all this stuff.

02:58:16.000 They have dipped their toe in the water of having industrial policy that makes us more resilient, less reliant on these other countries, including the Inflation Reduction Act had a lot in it for bringing that green energy production and EV battery production to our shores and has requirements about where those batteries are built and where the sourcing comes from.

02:58:38.000 But it really is just starting to dip your toe in those waters, ultimately.

02:58:43.000 We're more than a decade out.

02:58:44.000 It's still so difficult.

02:58:45.000 I mean, the sourcing on the EVs is such a nightmare.

02:58:48.000 And if you're trying to get, you know, Conflict Creek cobalt or lithium, right now there's a huge battle right now in South America, in Mexico, in Chile and elsewhere where Chinese companies are trying to buy all of the lithium deposits, which of course you need for a lithium operation.

02:59:01.000 Ion battery. 0.97

02:59:02.000 And if we also, I mean, look, this shit takes a long time. 0.98

02:59:05.000 I think that's the one thing I want people to, you don't just snap your fingers and build a semiconductor fab. 0.99

02:59:09.000 You need water.

02:59:11.000 If a single human hair gets into the TSMC facility, the whole thing shuts down.

02:59:15.000 This is the most sophisticated manufacturing basically in the entire world, and we're trying to rebuild it overnight.

02:59:22.000 It's very, very, very difficult.

02:59:25.000 And then even if you think about from an infrastructure point of view, so we have an explosion right now in electric vehicles.

02:59:30.000 I think that's great.

02:59:31.000 I think EVs are really cool.

02:59:32.000 They're really fun to drive.

02:59:33.000 But if you don't have a Tesla, if you're driving long range, where are you going to charge it?

02:59:38.000 It's not like we have a ton of EV battery stations.

02:59:42.000 We need the infrastructure.

02:59:42.000 We don't have the same gas station infrastructure that we all have.

02:59:47.000 We're decades behind on that.

02:59:49.000 So anyway, I would love for the US government to intelligently invest in it.

02:59:54.000 And a lot of this is ideological. 0.98

02:59:55.000 So another thing with the inflation reduction has a bullshit name. 0.89

02:59:59.000 You supposedly just called it like a clean energy bill, which probably would have pulled better than a fake inflation reduction. 0.97

03:00:04.000 Whatever.

03:00:04.000 That was Joe Manchin's innovation.

03:00:05.000 One of the important things is ideology, right?

03:00:07.000 Which is not ideologically investing in technology because we want it to work, but because it actually works.

03:00:11.000 Nuclear is a huge part of this conversation.

03:00:13.000 We talked a ton about it on our show.

03:00:15.000 For a long time, we had tax credits.

03:00:17.000 Clean energy tax credits were only applicable to wind and solar.

03:00:21.000 Wind and solar are fine.

03:00:22.000 I think they have a lot of problems.

03:00:24.000 Solar in particular is very filthy in order to manufacture.

03:00:27.000 A lot of it is manufactured in China, and we actually rely on China to build.

03:00:30.000 You also need the batteries for it to be sustainable for when the wind is not blowing and the sun is not shining.

03:00:36.000 Yes.

03:00:36.000 It's complicated, whereas nuclear has like a 93% rate at which it's always being able to run.

03:00:43.000 It's actually even more powerful than natural gas, very reliable.

03:00:47.000 Unfortunately, we haven't built a new nuclear power plant in the United States since 1974, which is insane, right?

03:00:53.000 And luckily, California decided not to totally lose its mind and close the Diablo nuclear power plant.

03:00:59.000 Here in Texas, I think only 13% or whatever of our power comes from nuclear.

03:01:05.000 We get more power from coal, I believe, here in Texas than we do from nuclear in the year 2023. It doesn't make any sense.

03:01:11.000 The point is, is that even if we wanted to, though, and this is the fair criticism.

03:01:15.000 It takes a long time, but with all of these things, no time like the present.

03:01:19.000 We've got to start now.

03:01:20.000 The current system is not working.

03:01:22.000 Texas, a lot of the power just went out here in Austin.

03:01:26.000 One of the reasons why, from what I've been able to read so far, it's actually not the grid, it's because power lines are constructed above ground.

03:01:33.000 And people are like, okay, well, why do we do that?

03:01:36.000 It's cheap.

03:01:37.000 It's a lot more expensive to have to bury these things underground, so it's a trade-off.

03:01:42.000 Yeah.

03:01:45.000 Yeah.

03:01:58.000 That horrible situation like in Buffalo, right, where people were losing power and freezing to death in their cars.

03:02:04.000 It's like that is why we need to have more forward thinking as a country and actually get some agreement about these things.

03:02:10.000 And frankly, we're going to have to throw a shitload of money at it.

03:02:12.000 Like it costs a lot of money.

03:02:14.000 But the idea that people say, oh, but that's like government subsidy. 0.98

03:02:19.000 Listen, we subsidize the shit out of the oil industry. 0.97

03:02:20.000 You really think we don't subsidize oil? 0.99

03:02:23.000 Of course we do.

03:02:24.000 It's critical energy infrastructure.

03:02:25.000 There's so much regulation around it.

03:02:27.000 You can't even get a new nuclear power plant approved if you were to apply to, I think it's the FERC, it's like the Federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

03:02:35.000 So we need reform on all these things just to make life better in America.

03:02:40.000 And unfortunately, a lot of it is just corrupted so that it's not really possible.

03:02:44.000 And a lot of it is ideological, too.

03:02:46.000 We have to be honest about that.

03:02:46.000 We have a lot of short-term thinking, a lot of profit It's crazy because all the things that we discussed Healthcare,

03:03:13.000 energy, all the issues that we have, and that's where it gets really crazy when you look at the money that we're putting into other things like Ukraine.

03:03:21.000 If we had the resources to do what we're doing right now currently, that means we had the resources to attack all these problems domestically.

03:03:31.000 Yeah, that's right.

03:03:32.000 We just don't have consensus around it.

03:03:33.000 With Ukraine, they snap their fingers basically 99% of what they want. 0.97

03:03:37.000 Nobody in Congress has the balls to actually vote against it. 0.94

03:03:40.000 I believe it was a unanimous vote, I think, or semi-unanimous, or whatever. 0.98

03:03:44.000 Here's the question about that.

03:03:45.000 Why are the Republicans opposed to sending more arms to Ukraine?

03:03:50.000 Why aren't they more opposed?

03:03:52.000 Why are they opposed?

03:03:53.000 Because some Republicans are.

03:03:55.000 Some are.

03:03:55.000 Well, you can count them on one hand.

03:03:57.000 I mean, they might say it, but they all vote for it, right?

03:03:59.000 I mean, how many of them actually voted against it?

03:04:01.000 Jamie, you might be able to look it up what the actual vote count was on the extra 50 billion to Ukraine.

03:04:06.000 I'm not 100 or at least the original 50 billion.

03:04:08.000 It was almost unanimous in terms of what was sent over there.

03:04:11.000 And Look, I think a lot of them, what they're saying is a more financial perspective of what you're talking about.

03:04:16.000 They're like, hey, why should we spend $50 billion to Ukraine if we have all these problems here?

03:04:20.000 I mean, I don't necessarily agree 100% with that feeling.

03:04:23.000 Yeah, 11 senators who voted against the Ukraine aid bill.

03:04:26.000 But that means that 86 of the entire chamber did end up voting for it.

03:04:30.000 If I were to look at it, I'd be willing to bet a lot of them are fiscal Republicans.

03:04:35.000 So Josh Hawley, Mike Brown, yeah, Boozman, Crapo, Hagerty, Lee, Loomis, Marshall, Tommy Toro.

03:04:42.000 These are mostly more libertarian types, so they're going to be more concerned.

03:04:45.000 Yeah.

03:05:08.000 Oh, you're pro-Russia.

03:05:09.000 Oh, you're spouting Putin talking points and all that.

03:05:12.000 It's vicious.

03:05:13.000 And a lot of these people just succumb to that, unfortunately.

03:05:16.000 I really don't know how to get around it.

03:05:19.000 But if I can have anything take away, is what you said.

03:05:22.000 Look, if people were willing to unanimously, relatively agree to send $100 billion to Ukraine, and we have all these problems that we just talked about, that shows you what the priority is.

03:05:31.000 I always look at, what's the bipartisan consensus in Washington? 0.98

03:05:34.000 That's the only shit that actually gets done. 0.99

03:05:36.000 Yeah, well... 0.99

03:05:37.000 Perfect example.

03:05:38.000 So we passed during the pandemic this expanded child tax credit.

03:05:44.000 Phenomenally successful program.

03:05:46.000 Lifted like half of all kids that were in poverty out of poverty.

03:05:51.000 You know, they did research on the way that parents were spending this.

03:05:55.000 They were spending it on their kids.

03:05:57.000 They were spending it on like, you know, enrichment for their children.

03:05:59.000 It was like unanimously great policy that worked really well.

03:06:05.000 And Democrats, Republicans decided they were against it, and Democrats just let it expire without a peep.

03:06:12.000 And so again, it's like, you know, the hard thing is...

03:06:18.000 So many people's political approach is so focused on, like, whatever the cultural outrage of the moment is, that things like that don't even get surfaced, they don't get debated, they don't get discussed.

03:06:31.000 And then this program, which was one of the most successful programs we've done in a long time, just...

03:06:35.000 Oh, that reminds me.

03:06:37.000 I know you've been talking about UBI and concerns about it.

03:06:40.000 So we actually been doing a lot of deep dive into this.

03:06:43.000 And we looked at a couple of new studies.

03:06:46.000 There's a new one actually just came out that a big part of the, quote, labor shortage is actually men who were working much longer hours during the pandemic cutting back on their hours.

03:06:57.000 So it's not—and actually, Matthew Iglesias tweeted this study, if you want to see it, Jamie.

03:07:02.000 It's from the National Bureau of Economic Research.

03:07:04.000 So it's a couple of things.

03:07:05.000 It's a cutback in the amount of hours that people are willing to work.

03:07:09.000 Also, because 2020, with the initial reopening, there was more labor ability to bargain.

03:07:15.000 Many people were not willing to go back to work at the same wages.

03:07:19.000 One of the concerns around unemployment I know that you would raise and others was, oh, well, people are getting all this unemployment.

03:07:24.000 They're not going back to work.

03:07:25.000 And there were certainly some cases of that true.

03:07:28.000 But we had a interesting natural experiment where they actually ended unemployment benefits back in 2021. It had little to no change on the overall employment rate.

03:07:37.000 So even when you took away the unemployment benefits, all of the anecdotal stories of like, I can't get somebody in because they're getting unemployment, they didn't want to work.

03:07:45.000 Actually, when they stopped getting unemployment, a lot of them didn't go back to work.

03:07:49.000 And it wasn't just because they had money saved up, because we know right now we have some of the highest credit card debt in modern American history, which is never a good sign.

03:07:57.000 In fact, many bank accounts are below pre-pandemic levels.

03:08:01.000 And so there's actually just been a fundamental reset in the way, a cultural reset, in the way that a lot of people approach work.

03:08:08.000 A lot of it is women. 1.00

03:08:09.000 One of the fascinating things that happened is we had, for the first time in modern American history, we had an increase actually in the amount of babies that were born.

03:08:17.000 The pandemic baby bump. 0.89

03:08:19.000 That happened from 2020 and 2021. We've almost never had that happen before.

03:08:24.000 People were bored.

03:08:25.000 People were bored and they had more time and they were able to plan pregnancy, be at home, not have to worry about one week or whatever of maternity leave.

03:08:34.000 So we're living in a really interesting moment in the way that people have evaluated their relationship with work.

03:08:39.000 There's a real reorientation going on, especially for like white collar workers who were very wrapped up in their like, you know, whatever their work dramas were and their whole life was centered around work and climbing that ladder and whatever.

03:08:53.000 And so when they were forced to go remote and all of that was stripped away, it was like, why am I, why is this the only part of my life that I'm focusing on?

03:09:03.000 This thing that I don't even really like when I have like a family, I have a community, I have other things that are important to me.

03:09:09.000 And I don't think that that – I think that is a dramatic mindset shift that is probably not going away, like a cultural mindset shift.

03:09:19.000 And you see all these people, too, like moving to different areas, valuing different things in terms of their quality of life.

03:09:25.000 And so, yeah, as we look at the labor force participation rate, A lot of the decline was actually people not leaving their jobs, not that they didn't want to work, but just working fewer hours and being unwilling to dedicate their entire waking life to their job.

03:09:42.000 Well, that's probably a good thing, right?

03:09:44.000 I think it's a good thing.

03:09:45.000 The re-evaluation process is always good because there's going to be a bunch of people that just course correct.

03:09:51.000 Yeah.

03:09:52.000 I mean, I think it's...

03:09:53.000 Listen, the three of us, we get to do things that we really love, right?

03:09:58.000 We really...

03:09:59.000 We're passionate.

03:09:59.000 We feel like it makes a difference.

03:10:00.000 Like, we, you know, eat, sleep, drink it.

03:10:03.000 And that's rare.

03:10:05.000 That's really rare.

03:10:06.000 Most people are, you know, they're, like, punching the clock.

03:10:10.000 They're doing their thing to be able to get a check, to be able to support their families.

03:10:12.000 And so, you know, there's been this sort of, like...

03:10:16.000 I don't know ideology sold around careerism to especially like college educated white collar workers that like this is the thing that's supposed to be who you are in your whole life and I think taking a step back from that and being more intentional about like well is that actually what I want my whole life to be about and maybe there are other things that are outside of the workplace that are more meaningful to me that provide me More happiness or more joy or more fulfillment in my life.

03:10:42.000 I 100% think that that's a positive thing.

03:10:44.000 That's our bright note.

03:10:45.000 We should end on that.

03:10:45.000 There you go.

03:10:46.000 Let's do it.

03:10:46.000 I love you.

03:10:47.000 I found it.

03:10:49.000 I think it's great.

03:10:50.000 Yeah, I think it's a positive direction.

03:10:51.000 Absolutely.

03:10:52.000 Listen, I appreciate you guys very much.

03:10:53.000 I love your show.

03:10:54.000 I'm so glad you're out there.

03:10:56.000 I'm so glad you're independent.

03:10:58.000 You're free.

03:10:59.000 Thanks to you, man.

03:10:59.000 So are we.

03:11:00.000 Trust me.

03:11:01.000 It's because of you guys, 100%.

03:11:02.000 But thank you very much.

03:11:04.000 Thanks for being here.

03:11:05.000 Thank you, Joe.

03:11:05.000 Tell everybody how they can consume your show.

03:11:08.000 Breakingpoints.com.

03:11:09.000 That's the best way.

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03:11:10.000 Watch us on Breaking Points on YouTube, Breaking Points on Spotify, Apple, wherever you get your podcasts.

03:11:15.000 All right.

03:11:15.000 Thank you, guys.

03:11:16.000 Appreciate it.

03:11:17.000 Bye-bye.

03:11:17.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 04, 2023

Joe Rogan Experience #1936 - Krystal Ball & Saagar Enjeti

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Transcript