Comedian Dave Smith joins the pod to talk about the opening of his new comedy club, The Improv, and the time he was abducted by aliens at a comedy club. Plus, we talk about what it's like to be a comedian in New York City, and what it was like opening the Improv Comedy Club. And, of course, we get to hear Dave's story about how he got into stand-up comedy, and why he doesn t want to do standup anymore. And, as always, thank you for tuning into HYPEBEAST Radio and Business of HYPE. Please don't forget to rate, comment, and subscribe to our other shows MIC/LINE, The Anthropology, The HYPE Report, and HYPETALKS. Please remember to rate and review the podcast on Apple Podcasts, and tell a friend about it! if you like what you hear, please HIT SUBSCRIBE so we can keep bringing you high quality, high quality content. Thank you so much for being a friend of the pod, and thanks for supporting the pod! -Joe Rogan. -The Joe Rogan Experience is a podcast by day, by night, all day, with a comedy podcast by night. Thanks for listening to the pod? -J.J. R. Rogan and thanks to Dave Smith for coming on the pod for making it all happen. . Joe Rogans J.Rogan The J.O.P. Experience by Day, by Night, All day, All Day All Day, By Night, By Day, All by Night by Night All Day by Night by Night - All Day By Night by Day by Day - By Night by Day All Day - by Night J. by By Night - By Day by Morning, by Day J. ROGAN (A.R. , All Day On The Pod all Day, all Day by Morning J. & Evening J. O. By Night J., by Night By Day By Day by Evening J/ Evening, by Evening, By Morning J/ Night, by Any Day, By Morning, By Evening, All By Day J/Nights, By Late J. J. By Evening J? - By Anytime J. and Evening J, By Anywhere J/Night J/A Night,
00:01:18.000But it's cool to see something, you know, like, there's something cool about having a concept in your head and then seeing it manifest into reality.
00:01:25.000Because I remember, you know, you talking about this over the last couple years, like, we're going to do this, and it's going to be like this, and then, like, it's cool to see it materialize.
00:01:32.000I've never done anything like this before, obviously.
00:01:35.000But, I mean, to have an idea and to just, like, go all in on this idea and just really try to cut in zero corners and just do the best version of it.
00:01:48.000And there was a lot of delays because, you know, we said, okay, let's change this, let's change that, let's do this, let's do that.
00:01:54.000And when I had an idea, you know, an idea to change things, it's just like you have to kind of follow through with it.
00:03:21.000Now, I'm in the position where I was talking to Adam about it, because he's trying to find me a weekend, and then I was like, oh, I'm free this weekend, and he's like, you know, I offered that to Schultz, but let me see, and then I have to be like, You know, you don't want to book Andrew Schultz, man.
00:05:50.000And it's almost because it's your club, and you know the crowd knows that, they know that they're coming for comedy here.
00:05:56.000And it's just great, because that's one of the things that's, especially in cities across America now, in terms of regular showcase clubs, it's different when you go out and headline, because that's kind of like your crowd coming.
00:06:07.000But just random spots and stuff, that's a lot of comics that's kind of in the back of their mind.
00:06:12.000Like, oh man, is there going to be someone here who's looking to get offended at something I'm saying?
00:06:43.000I remember I had a bit about this on my hour that I put out in 2017 and it was just like right when Donald Trump you know like first came into office but I remember like working out stuff at clubs in New York City and if you started a premise About Donald Trump,
00:07:00.000you could feel the tension in the room where people are being like, you better not like him.
00:07:05.000Like, you better get to the point where you're against him.
00:07:23.000And there was an anti-Trump protest and I was watching this guy and this guy this fucking stereotypical liberal progressive white guy was walking down the street and he was He was chanting out,
00:11:52.000I think it's anxiety, and I think it's panic, and I think no one can understand, even you and I who perform live in front of strangers all the time, we would never be able to understand the kind of pressure I mean,
00:12:14.000he went out of his way to say that he was going to have a black woman.
00:12:20.000Like, it was a thing that he wanted to do.
00:12:22.000It was like they had these diversity and inclusivity checkpoints that they had to reach.
00:12:29.000Which is also just a really shitty thing to do to her.
00:12:33.000It's like a really profoundly selfish thing, if you think about it.
00:12:37.000Because if you wanted, say, you wanted to make Kamala Harris your vice president because, you know, you want a woman of color in there or whatever, the thing to do would be to say, I'm going to find the absolute best, most qualified person, and then pick her.
00:12:53.000But if you do that, that would be more generous toward her.
00:12:57.000Because then it makes it look at least like she was the best person for the job.
00:13:00.000Whereas if you say, I'm going to make sure I pick a black woman, now you get all the brownie points for how woke you are.
00:13:09.000But now you kind of undermine her as like, well, she's the best black woman I could find.
00:13:18.000A lot of people think it's a good thing.
00:13:19.000I've talked to a lot of intelligent people that think it's important for representation.
00:13:24.000And I'm like, I could see how you would say that in a lot of jobs, but this is probably the most important one that anyone could ever have ever.
00:14:55.000It's very similar in some ways to affirmative action, right?
00:14:59.000And affirmative action, in my opinion, is you're addressing a problem without addressing the root of the problem.
00:15:08.000The root of the problem is why are so many people of color disenfranchised?
00:15:13.000Why are so many people who grow up in neighborhoods Where there's rampant crime and violence, and why haven't they fixed those fucking neighborhoods?
00:15:23.000They're dumping so much money into all these problems overseas, we have systemic problems in America that never get addressed.
00:15:29.000And this is like generations it takes to fix these problems.
00:15:51.000So who are the people that have the least opportunities?
00:15:53.000The people who are in the most fucked places.
00:15:55.000Those are you can fix that there's ways you could you could dump tons of money and resources into inner cities into these problem areas with law enforcement with with community centers places where people could go where they have like things to do and people can train them and in whether it's athletics or Different jobs and different and show them and mentor them.
00:16:21.000That's all That's not like prohibitively impossible.
00:16:24.000You're not saying like they all deserve their own nuclear power plant.
00:16:29.000It's like what you're saying is totally doable.
00:16:32.000And that's the way to fix all these problems of disparity because People that grow up in wealthy communities where everyone is sort of trying to achieve things, there's a vibe of those places, and so many of those people from those places wind up succeeding.
00:16:50.000Yeah, I think it's—a lot of it, I think, also is that there's a very kind of, like, shallow narrative about what it is that keeps people in these areas down, and so it's kind of like, you know, it's just a Well, it's racism or it's systemic racism.
00:17:06.000Just these kind of terms that aren't specific.
00:17:08.000It's like, wait, what is actually happening here?
00:17:11.000And so much of the problem is that, like, the kind of culture and family units have just been destroyed.
00:17:21.000And then it's like, you can pump money into, like, the public schools there, which we do.
00:17:25.000We spend a lot of money on public schools, and they're still crappy schools, and the results are still bad.
00:17:30.000And if you're not, like, you know, even back in, and there's a lot of, like, Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell, who are both, like, two black conservative really brilliant thinkers, they both wrote a lot about this, how, like, in the 40s, Even during, there was,
00:17:45.000you know, segregation in the South and there was like a whole bunch of horrible policies.
00:17:49.000But even back then, you know, you could walk around Harlem with no threat of like violence or anything like that and family units were together.
00:17:58.000I believe the black legitimacy rate was higher than the white legitimacy rate at the time.
00:18:02.000And there were a lot of policies that came in that really destroyed like the family unit.
00:18:10.000The rise of the welfare state was a really big one.
00:18:13.000It kind of subsidized single parenthood.
00:18:17.000People respond to incentives, even though it seems like that's an ugly thing to think.
00:18:22.000But if you pay people for having children out of wedlock, you do get more of it than you otherwise would have.
00:18:28.000And the other major one to meet was the war on drugs.
00:18:32.000Which I just think was absolutely devastating to these neighborhoods.
00:18:36.000Just like with prohibition of alcohol, where I think was still the highest homicide rate in American history was under prohibition of alcohol.
00:18:44.000And then once they legalized alcohol again, it drastically reduced in the next few years.
00:18:49.000The same thing with the prohibition of drugs.
00:19:17.000Yeah, well, getting the political will up to do it is something.
00:19:21.000But, I mean, you even see it even with this, you know, we got like 100,000 ODs a year now, and so much of it is driven by the fact that people are getting fentanyl and shit that they don't even know that's not supposed to have fentanyl in it because it's in black markets.
00:20:14.000The whole just war on drugs thing is such a strange issue because logically everyone knows that when you legalize things, and certainly when you decriminalize things, you get a giant drop in violent crime, you get a giant drop in addiction.
00:20:32.000It's so counterintuitive, but people are so terrified because drugs have been so devastating.
00:20:38.000Because I think that if we did legalize all drugs and it happened quickly, you're going to have more overdoses.
00:21:52.000Apparently, because there's so many states where marijuana is still illegal, most of the illegal weed is actually being grown on state land by the cartels.
00:22:03.000Yeah, there's a guy named John Norris.
00:22:05.000He wrote a book called Hidden War, and he came on the podcast to discuss it.
00:22:08.000He actually was a game warden and wanted to have a job checking fishing licenses and stuff, doing game warden stuff.
00:22:16.000And he detailed it in the book how they found this creek that had been diverted and dried up.
00:22:23.000And they thought maybe a farmer had done this, or some obstruction, and they traced it to this grow-up that was in the middle of the forest.
00:22:32.000And his unit became like a tactical unit, because they were having gunfights with cartel members.
00:22:39.000Instead of it being like Game Warden, now it became like a DEA type situation where you're running into these public land grow-ops where these guys, they take this area and they level it and they grow weed there and these guys were camping there.
00:22:56.000You know, they had guns and it's wild shit, man.
00:26:12.000Like, ah, it's like you just, but it's just also like, you know, in the same way that if any of us had like, you know, our 85 year old grandpa at the table, every now and then if they say some things, you're going to roll your eyes, you're almost like, yeah, you can't expect him to be with the times on this.
00:26:25.000You're like, just stop making Biden talk about this stuff.
00:27:07.000I didn't think, I thought they were going to replace him as the nominee at the last minute in 2020. I was shocked he did that, and I was sure he'd be a one-term president.
00:27:16.000And I'm still now not even convinced he's going to be the nominee in 2024. But the more time goes on, I guess they're actually doing this.
00:27:24.000Well, the fascinating thing is they will not allow for the primaries.
00:28:33.000I don't agree with everything the guy says, but the major theme of his speech was that there is this unholy alliance of big business and big government, and they're working together to screw over the American people.
00:28:49.000Damned if anyone can argue that that's not true.
00:30:06.000But I don't know exactly where he is on his uncle and his father's, you know, assassinations.
00:30:11.000But I know that his dad was completely convinced that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy that they weren't telling us about.
00:30:21.000He did not buy it all into the, like, Lee Harvey Oswald lone, you know, wolf thing.
00:30:25.000So it's got to also be, you're a different type of outsider to the system if you believe the CIA killed your uncle.
00:30:32.000That's a little bit different than just like, you know, while I disagree with my opponent, I respect his, you know, opinion or something like that.
00:30:42.000That's a real like, no, you understand how evil and corrupt this system is.
00:30:47.000And that's what makes him an attractive candidate to me.
00:30:49.000I like people who recognize how evil and corrupt the system is, because it really is both of those things.
00:31:26.000What they did, I mean, in the book, I mean, I don't want to paraphrase, I want to make sure I'm accurate about this, but they tested vaccines on foster kids, including babies.
00:31:38.000Like, when you read what they did during the pandemic and...
00:31:57.000When he talks about Arthur Ashe and Arthur Ashe taking AZT and dying very quickly afterwards and that Arthur Ashe didn't even have any symptoms before he got on medication.
00:32:09.000Well, I think one of the things that a lot of people have woken up to this over the last few years with all of the COVID insanity, and I think a lot of people have woken up to this over, say, the last 20 years of all the disastrous wars in the Middle East, is that it's very...
00:32:26.000It's very easy for them to just be like, oh, look, we have consensus amongst the expert class.
00:32:31.000You know, like we have consensus amongst the scientists that this is we need lockdowns and then we need these vaccine mandates and we need all of this and all the science.
00:32:40.000But then once you actually like look into it a little bit, you realize that it's like, no, it's not that there's consensus amongst the scientists.
00:32:47.000It's that any scientist that doesn't agree with the consensus gets kicked out.
00:32:51.000They all get excommunicated and silenced.
00:32:54.000And then, oh, it's this completely corrupt group that is very involved with this money-making machine.
00:33:00.000And you're like, oh, there's such perverse incentives here.
00:33:03.000And people realize this when, after time, it just gets demonstrated that what they were saying is wrong.
00:33:11.000No one can argue anymore that if you get the COVID vaccine, you can't get or transmit COVID. No one's arguing that anymore because you can't keep up that lie anymore.
00:33:24.000I mean, that lie was being pushed on mainstream news just a couple of years ago.
00:33:29.000Well, dude, me and you were talking about this stuff.
00:33:32.000It seems like not really that long ago, right?
00:33:34.000That we were having some conversations where there'd be these clips of what we were saying, and it would be like, look at this COVID misinformation.
00:33:44.000The World Health Organization is now saying that the vaccine shouldn't be given to kids.
00:33:49.000And the thing you said that was so controversial that Fauci had to comment on it was you were like, you know, for young people, I don't know if I'd really tell you to take this vaccine.
00:34:21.000The woman, I'm blanking on her name, but she was on the task force, the original task force in 2020. She's the lady who's always there at the podium with Trump and Fauci.
00:34:31.000She said, in like a kind of diplomatic way, But she was like, now, she goes, I always knew that it wouldn't prevent transmission, and I felt that we overreached when we were making that claim.
00:34:45.000Lady, all of the policies that you put into place were built around that idea.
00:34:51.000The whole idea of vaccine mandates and vaccine passports and all of this, this was all predicated on the idea that it wasn't just your choice, right?
00:35:00.000It wasn't just like, oh, you're choosing for your own health risk, that you were protecting other people.
00:35:04.000That was the whole idea that the whole thing was based on.
00:35:07.000If that's not true, then there was no justification for this.
00:35:10.000And millions of people lost their jobs over this.
00:35:13.000Not to mention just the amount of people who were just disenfranchised in major cities across the country.
00:35:18.000You couldn't go to a restaurant or couldn't go to a basketball game or whatever.
00:35:22.000Which may seem less important than the ones who lost their job, but it's still fucked up.
00:35:26.000It's all fucked up because it was also incentivizing people to go along with something that they might not have wanted to do.
00:35:31.000And then when you see the amount of people that got damaged because of that, both financially, physically, vaccine injuries, ostracized from their communities, how many marriages broke up, how many friendships broke up.
00:36:08.000I mean, it's really like it's something to look back on it now a few years later and just like how crazy it was that we did this like the lockdowns that you were just like people were at home watching TV to find out from their governor holding a daily press conference telling you what you're allowed to do today.
00:37:19.000Yeah, and I do think, like, I'm not—my personal view is that I think, like, I think for the people at the very top, like, I really do think there should be criminal charges.
00:37:29.000I think we should have Nuremberg-type trials for what people did.
00:37:32.000I think it's one of the greatest crimes perpetrated on the American people by the government— Especially if we funded the research that caused it in the first place.
00:38:12.000But I do think there should be some process where some type of reconciliation, but I don't think people should forget Like, I don't think people, like the thing you were just saying about Arnold Schwarzenegger and stuff like that and all that.
00:38:26.000Don't forget what these guys were willing to jump on board with.
00:38:34.000Like, they pushed it pretty far and these guys were completely on board.
00:38:37.000Like, is it really that unthinkable to say if they were like, hey, we're going to round up the unvaccinated and put them into camps, take them away from their family, you know?
00:40:02.000And the fact that people don't recognize that, and they can't just make these logical thoughts about the future.
00:40:10.000Like, if we do this, what happens if someone gets in power and they're evil, and they already have these new controls that we put in place?
00:40:17.000Like, that was during the NDAA. Remember when Obama was like, we would never, you know, detain people for no reason?
00:40:58.000That you are in some way connected to some type of group.
00:41:02.000And Obama signed it into law, but he put a signing statement on the bill and said, I do not plan on invoking this privilege and we do not plan on detaining anyone.
00:41:11.000But you're like, but that's not enough to veto the bill?
00:41:14.000Like, yes, this bill does technically repeal the Bill of Rights.
00:42:37.000And the rules are, if you're an American citizen, are you have to be charged with a crime, and then you get a lawyer in a suit, and a judge in a robe, and 12 people who are like pooled randomly, and they decide if you're guilty of a crime.
00:42:53.000And by the way, they can, he was in Yemen at the time, but they can charge you and have a trial, and if you don't show up to it, they still, you know what I mean, like convict you of it.
00:43:31.000There was one report that came out about that that I think said somewhere in the neighborhood of like 95% of the people killed in drones were collateral damage, were not the targets of the drones.
00:43:43.000People like to think of these things as they call them precision strikes.
00:43:51.000And yeah, a lot of innocent people die.
00:43:52.000And then out of those, it's even higher than that because what they're counting as the target of the strikes just means you were put on a list, which does not always mean that you were actually a terrorist because what happens is a lot of times they're working with these groups on the ground.
00:44:08.000They kind of bribe them to rat out who's a terrorist.
00:44:11.000But a lot of times those groups are just giving you like their enemy.
00:44:14.000Like someone they want to get killed, or they're just coming up with names because they want you to keep bribing them.
00:44:19.000The whole thing was such a clusterfuck, man.
00:44:21.000And some of it is still going on to this day, although now we've decided to flirt with an even much more dangerous nuclear war.
00:44:29.000But yeah, and even the drone bombings weren't the worst of what Obama did.
00:44:34.000You know, the worst of what he did was overthrowing Muammar Gaddafi in Libya, funding the anti-Assad rebels and starting a civil war in Syria, funding the Saudis and giving them the green light and refueling their fighter jets so they could genocide the people of Yemen for eight freaking years.
00:45:35.000I'm trying to think if I can remember.
00:45:37.000He has this thing where he's like, he's like, I love this country, and so do you, and so does John McCain.
00:45:43.000The men and women who have fought and died in our armed forces have been Democrats and Republicans and independents, but they did not die defending a red America or a blue America.
00:45:52.000They died defending the United States of America.
00:46:09.000He did say some good things when he ran, though.
00:46:11.000He ran on some really good policies like ending the wars and closing Guantanamo Bay and repealing the Patriot Act and restoring the rule of law and ending torture and all.
00:46:39.000I think I put probably more blame than anyone else on him.
00:46:44.000Because he was supposed to be the response.
00:46:51.000And like, that's the way this system of government is supposed to work, or so they say.
00:46:57.000It's like, well, we have these democratic processes, you know, so you can, you know, if you're upset with these guys, you can kick the bums out and vote for these guys.
00:47:06.000And obviously, we all know it's like, then they narrow it down to two teams, and those two teams happen to have the same policy when it comes to, you know, the military-industrial complex or the banking-industrial complex or the pharmaceutical-industrial complex.
00:48:00.000I bet if you were friends with Obama...
00:48:03.000If you really were friends with him, if you could have a couple of drinks, maybe spark up a joint and talk to that guy, if he really trusted you and knew you were never going to tell anybody, I bet he could tell you some shit.
00:48:17.000I'm more of like a believer in what Putin has said about this.
00:48:23.000When he talks about how he's been through three different presidents and they all have these plans.
00:48:29.000And he goes and they get into office and people that are dressed in a suit like mine come and sit them down and tell them how everything works.
00:48:38.000How much access to the real understanding of how the government works is ever going to be given to a junior senator who's running for president?
00:48:50.000I bet there's no conversation about it.
00:48:52.000I think once you get in, once you're in the Pentagon, Once you're in the Oval Office, once you're meeting with these people and you realize, like, holy shit.
00:49:00.000And then you realize this machine behind you that's pushing all the buttons and you're a spokesperson for this machine.
00:49:09.000I think this might be why they hated Trump so much because I think that speech just didn't work on him.
00:49:15.000There's this story, and I don't know if this is true or not, but it sounds so true.
00:49:19.000I think it was in Bob Woodward's book.
00:49:20.000I can't remember where it was, but this may not be true, but it just sounds so true that I guess after Trump won the election and he goes to Camp David, I think this is still while he was president-elect.
00:49:33.000It might have been right after he got in.
00:49:35.000But I guess he goes and he's at this CIA-like thing, and they said that he came in, and there's a wall where For agents who died in the line of duty.
00:49:46.000And they said Trump just walks in and stands right in front of it, which is crazy disrespectful to do.
00:49:51.000And he just starts talking to the room about how tremendous his victory was.
00:49:55.000He just gets there and he's like, everyone said we were going to lose, but we won big and we won both.
00:50:00.000I don't know if that really happened, but it so sounds like that really happened.
00:50:03.000And you can just imagine all these CIA agents just like, we got to get rid of this guy.
00:50:09.000But what you said about the stuff, like the speech they get...
00:50:58.000I'm not sure if that is, like, what happened with that because I have heard that, like, his brother said he started drinking again or something like that.
00:51:04.000So I don't know the details of that story exactly.
00:51:06.000Oh, I would drink too if assassins were after me.
00:51:08.000If I was working on uncovering CIA corruption, Not just working on undercover and CIA corruption, but you were embedded with these soldiers and they got comfortable with you.
00:51:19.000And then you printed all the things that they said.
00:51:22.000But what's very interesting about that is that it was a really good...
00:51:26.000It was a really important story because it makes you recognize that, like, wow, even these, like, very high-ranking generals are talking shit about the president.
00:51:33.000Like, this fucking asshole doesn't know what he's doing.
00:51:36.000But so McChrystal, before that interview, he went...
00:51:40.000To the media, because Obama, I guess, gave him the surge he wanted, but he put an end date on it.
00:51:46.000He was like, but our troops will be out by this date.
00:51:49.000And so he went to the media and told them that, you know, he said, I haven't had any contact with the president and we haven't been talking since this and that.
00:51:55.000And then the media was like, put all this pressure on Obama.
00:51:58.000Like, you're not even talking to your guy over there in Afghanistan?
00:52:01.000And basically kind of tied his hands politically.
00:52:04.000So that he kind of just had to continue the war.
00:52:07.000And there's a lot of stuff like that that happens.
00:52:10.000And with Trump, I mean, it was reported that they lied to him about the number of troops in Syria.
00:52:16.000And when he said he wanted to pull the troops out, they lied to him and said there were far less than there actually were.
00:52:58.000But, like, so many of the Trump haters will talk about, like, you know, undermining our democracy and he incited an insurrection against, like, this democratic republic or whatever.
00:53:10.000But then you'll see things like, look, this just came out within the last week and a half or so, that we now know that it was...
00:53:19.000It was Blinkett, the current Secretary of State, before he came in, who requested that the CIA put together this letter that said there were 50 intelligence experts who had determined that the Hunter Biden laptop had all the earmarks of Russian disinformation,
00:55:31.000It's like when people say that people are losing trust in these institutions, it's like, well, yes, but it's because they've found out what the institutions are doing.
00:55:41.000It's like if your wife found out that you're cheating all over her and you're like, well, this is a problem because she's losing trust in me.
00:55:47.000It's like, well, yeah, but she shouldn't trust you because she found out what you're doing.
00:55:56.000Because when you have any kind of a position like that where you have just insane power over information and policy and what gets done and no one No one is managing it from outside of it that's saying,
00:56:53.000Lying to the American people or exposing the American people to information that has been hidden from them, that's deeply disturbing, that would change their opinion on things.
00:57:21.000We're a wild, fucking amazing experiment in self-government.
00:57:26.000But we gotta stick to the fucking rules.
00:57:28.000And if you get people in power and no one is able to stop them from not sticking to the rules, and then when they do violate the law, there's no consequences.
00:57:49.000Yeah, well, like you said, we are kind of all of those things.
00:57:52.000You know, we're like, we are this like, you know, it's like in the wise words of the great Eminem, I'm all for America, fuck the government.
00:58:01.000You know, like we're a great- But not even fuck the government, fuck the bad parts of the government.
00:58:05.000There's people in the government that are trying to do the right thing.
00:59:23.000It's wild that they think they can say that because they used to be able to say that with no recourse.
00:59:27.000They're operating in a world where there was no internet.
00:59:30.000They still have that programming from the world of no internet.
00:59:33.000Yeah, and also operating in a world...
00:59:35.000You know, it's kind of like what you were talking about with the CIA getting so much power that it just becomes so corrupted.
00:59:40.000And I think a lot of the story of America and how we've just become so degraded is really kind of goes back to the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fact that what Charles Krauttenhammer called the unipolar moment.
00:59:54.000That in the 90s it was like, oh, for the first time ever...
01:00:02.000And this really is like what all of those guys said, like all the neoconservatives, like the Project for a New American Century and those guys.
01:02:04.000You know, Donald Trump can say that, and I would say, I think his rhetoric has been much better on this than Joe Biden's, and at least he's talking about negotiating.
01:02:12.000Do you think there's a way to somehow or another?
01:02:14.000Does the president have that kind of power, where the president could go in and say, I want to meet with Putin, I want to organize a negotiation, I want to end this right now?
01:02:26.000He could say it, you know, and then see what, I don't know.
01:02:29.000He would have to get NATO to pull their arms back.
01:02:32.000Well, I mean, the president has a lot of leverage there.
01:02:45.000I think that's what Putin's point was about getting into office.
01:02:48.000Yeah, I think I think that's that's what he was saying.
01:02:51.000And it does seem like there's a lot of truth to that.
01:02:53.000I also one of the things that makes me skeptical about how great Trump would be on this, that Trump wasn't very good on this issue while he was in.
01:03:00.000I mean, Trump was the one who sent the weapons into Ukraine.
01:03:04.000This is, you know, when he got impeached, it was famously over the Ukraine gate thing was he said he was they said it was a quid pro quo where he was holding up the weapons.
01:03:35.000And so either they're really bad at deterrence, or it actually was a provocation, because it certainly didn't deter Vladimir Putin from going in.
01:03:44.000And I think that, and Trump also got us out of the INF Treaty.
01:04:05.000It certainly couldn't be any worse than what the plan is right now.
01:04:09.000And, you know, to your point that you made, because I know last time I was on the show, I talked a lot about this, like, kind of the cause of this war in Ukraine.
01:04:17.000And I put a lot of blame on American foreign policy, and it went super viral.
01:04:22.000And I heard back from some people who disagreed.
01:04:26.000But the funny thing about it is that it's not...
01:04:29.000Like, when I was talking about, like, NATO expansion and how much of a provocation this was to the Russians, when you were talking about, like, the good people in government, it's not like it's just...
01:04:40.000Kooks or, you know, crazy libertarians like me.
01:04:44.000It was not just like Ron Paul and Noam Chomsky and Pat Buchanan, like the outsiders who were all against NATO expansion.
01:04:50.000But the list of people within the government, within the national security apparatus who completely opposed NATO expansion is really impressive and long.
01:05:00.000There's a lot of, like, really wise people within the government who were completely against NATO expansion in the 90s when it first started.
01:05:08.000At least three Secretaries of Defense, Robert McNamara, Robert Gates, George W. Bush and Barack Obama's Secretary of Defense, William Perry, who was Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of Defense at the time.
01:05:23.000They all opposed it in like the strongest possible language and all explicitly for the reason that this will provoke a conflict with Russia.
01:05:32.000George Kennan, who was the founder of the containment strategy, the old school cold warrior.
01:05:39.000There's this great interview he gave with Thomas Friedman from The New York Times.
01:06:41.000Oh, but one more little detail on this, because this is really interesting.
01:06:45.000So, in 2008, in February of 2008, there was a private cable that the current CIA head, Burns, Bill Burns, who's currently the head of the CIA. At the time, he was the ambassador to Russia.
01:07:02.000And so he sent a private message to Condoleezza Rice, who was the Secretary of State at the time.
01:07:07.000The only reason we know about this is because of the heroic Julian Assange.
01:07:41.000He says, Ukraine and Georgia's NATO aspirations not only touch a raw nerve in Russia, they engender serious concerns about the consequences for stability in the region.
01:07:51.000Not only does Russia perceive encirclement and efforts to undermine Russia's influence in the region, but it also fears unpredictable and uncontrolled consequences, which would seriously affect Russian security interests.
01:08:03.000Experts tell us that Russia is particularly worried that the strong divisions in Ukraine over NATO membership, with much of the ethnic Russian community against membership, could lead to a major split involving violence or, at worst, civil war.
01:08:16.000In that eventuality, Russia would have to decide whether to intervene, a decision Russia does not want to have to face.
01:08:25.000Now, there's another memo that comes out later that year where he says, and it's a really interesting thing, where he goes, he said, Ukrainian entry into NATO is the brightest of all red lines.
01:08:37.000And Burns says to Condoleezza Rice, again, not to the American public, just to let the Secretary of State know, like, this is what I'm saying.
01:08:42.000He goes, I've spoken to everyone over here.
01:08:45.000He goes, from the craziest right-wingers to Putin's sharpest liberal critics.
01:09:09.000Then this is what they were telling him.
01:09:12.000And three months after that memo that we were just reading, so this was in February, they had the Bucharest Summit where NATO announced that Georgia and Ukraine were coming into NATO. And this is what...
01:09:23.000It's like our ambassador to Russia told our Secretary of State, do not do this.
01:10:21.000One more note that I'll say is that Bill Clinton's Secretary of Defense, he wrote about this in 2015. So this is after the coup in Ukraine, the Maidan Revolution, and after Putin took Crimea.
01:10:36.000And he basically said that, like, this is all my fault.
01:10:41.000And that his biggest regret was that he didn't resign over NATO expansion.
01:10:44.000I think he said his biggest regret was that he didn't do everything he could to stop it and that he didn't ultimately resign over it because this was destined to be the future.
01:10:54.000People will say, I know people will argue with me on this and they'll say, but NATO is just a defensive alliance, so why should Vladimir Putin care if we expand this defensive alliance?
01:11:07.000And it's like, yeah, it's a defensive alliance except for all the times it's not.
01:11:10.000You know, except for all the times it fights aggressive wars like in Serbia or Libya or Afghanistan.
01:11:15.000Other than that, I guess, they claim it's a defensive alliance.
01:11:18.000But from Vladimir Putin's perspective, this isn't a defensive voluntary alliance.
01:11:23.000This is the European wing of the American empire, the most war-hungry country in the world.
01:11:29.000Who's started seven wars in the last 20 years and slaughtered millions of people.
01:11:33.000Like, from his perspective, when you put dual-use rocket launchers in Poland, that's not like...
01:11:39.000The official reason is we're just trying to make sure that Iran can't nuke Europe with the nukes that they don't have.
01:12:09.000Man, it's just that all these guys, these same dumb neocons who had this policy to remake the Middle East, they're the same ones who also had the policy to expand NATO all the way to Russia's border.
01:12:19.000And man, was this just the dumbest, most reckless policy ever that's now put us in a position where we are closer to a risk of World War III and nuclear war than we've ever been in my life.
01:12:43.000You know what I didn't consider until this all broke out?
01:12:47.000When I started looking at the borders of Russia, you know, when people are explaining why this is so important and why control of Crimea and why control of all these places is so important, once you look at what used to be the Soviet Union,
01:13:03.000you realize, like, oh, there's all these countries that are connected to them.
01:13:31.000This is what freaks me out about this whole UFO thing.
01:13:34.000I wonder how many of those fucking things that we're seeing is a government who's reached some form of technology that we're not aware of yet.
01:14:09.000That basically he said that once NATO kept expanding so much that they left him no choice but to develop faster and crazier missiles and different technologies.
01:14:18.000And it's just like, you know, it's weird because I've heard a lot of people...
01:14:22.000I've heard people on this show and on lots of other shows say that the big concern they have is Vladimir Putin winning the war, taking all of Ukraine, or just keeping the parts that he wants or something like that, and that then he might be like, oh, hey, I can get away with it.
01:14:40.000That to me seems very far-fetched, like he's having enough trouble just taking Ukraine.
01:14:44.000I really doubt he's moving on Poland next, but it's like, okay, I understand kind of in theory where that concern is, but what about the concern if he loses?
01:14:56.000What if he's humiliated on his own border and Russia is completely destroyed and humiliated?
01:15:06.000What if he's convinced that he's done and he's going to be overthrown or he's going to die?
01:15:13.000To me, that's actually the most dangerous scenario because really nobody's probably going to launch the first nuclear strike unless they're already convinced they're dead anyway.
01:16:15.000Well, that's why it's so crazy because you'll hear people like Lindsey Graham and idiots like that will talk about if Putin's overthrown, almost like it's a given that things are better than.
01:16:26.000Even if it didn't go to a failed state like Libya, how do you know it's not just a far worse right-wing dictator who comes up and takes over?
01:16:34.000If there's one thing we've learned from the 20th and 21st centuries, it's like sometimes you can overthrow a government and it can be much worse than the one that you overthrow.
01:16:43.000You know, governments were overthrown after World War I in Russia and Germany.
01:16:49.000And then came in Lenin, Stalin and Hitler, right?
01:16:52.000Like, it can get a lot worse, even if it's not a Gaddafi, you know, failed state type deal, which is also much worse.
01:16:59.000But you could be looking at something, you know, that's far worse than what we have right now.
01:17:04.000But isn't it amazing that that's taken place so many times and yet we still have this idea that overthrowing them or getting rid of our enemy is that's the solution to the problem.
01:17:24.000I mean, they fucking got together and worked shit out.
01:17:28.000Here's when Obama said that the greatest regret of his presidency was not thinking about what would happen the day after they overthrew Gaddafi.
01:18:37.000It fueled a lot of, if you, the 9-11 conspiracy guys, like even some of the kooky guys, it fueled a lot of them because it was basically this, it was a think tank It's founding signatories were like the Bush administration.
01:18:50.000It was all the neocons in the 90s who were out.
01:18:53.000So it was Robert Kagan and, you know, like Bill Kristol and Dick Cheney and, you know, like all the Paul Wolfowitz, all the kind of like neocons who ended up taking power in George W. Bush's administration.
01:19:07.000And they laid out their plans for what they wanted to do.
01:19:10.000And one of their plans involved overthrowing Saddam Hussein in Iraq and And fighting multiple wars and NATO expansion in Europe.
01:19:17.000And so the 9-11 conspiracy theorists would jump on this and go, aha, this is why they brought the towers down, just so they could get the war in Iraq that they always wanted.
01:19:27.000Whereas I think the simpler explanation was just like, they took advantage of the opportunity when it came and realized they could get what they wanted.
01:19:47.000The 20th century was the century of America.
01:19:49.000And now what's our plan for the next century?
01:19:52.000What's the plan for the new American century?
01:19:54.000And they actually say in one of the most famous policy papers, it's really something to say, is they go, look, We have no real threat to our vital interests right now.
01:20:04.000There are no real threats to America, our dominance right now.
01:20:08.000And so what we need to do is fight wars in multiple theaters.
01:20:11.000So we need to go and now show our dominance to the rest of the world.
01:20:15.000And so they're actually saying, if you read between the lines, not that much.
01:20:19.000They're like, we don't need to fight a war, but let's go fight them.
01:21:14.000And it's also, it's all out there, and you're not hearing it.
01:21:18.000You know, and this is, the fact that journalists aren't, like, putting this in everyone's face, that this very information that you're giving out today...
01:21:43.000These guys have all had to stick to their principles and leave to listen to this, because this is very fucking wild.
01:21:55.000About 10 days after 9-11, I went through the Pentagon, and I saw Secretary Rumsfeld and Deputy Secretary Wolfowitz.
01:22:02.000I went downstairs just to say hello to some of the people on the Joint Staff who used to work for me, and one of the generals called me in.
01:22:08.000He said, sir, you've got to come in and talk to me a second.
01:22:38.000He says, there's nothing new that way.
01:22:40.000They've just made the decision to go to war with Iraq.
01:22:43.000He said, I guess it's like we don't know what to do about terrorists, but We've got a good military and we can take down governments.
01:22:51.000And he said, I guess if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem has to look like a nail.
01:22:57.000So I came back to see him a few weeks later, and by that time we were bombing in Afghanistan.
01:23:03.000I said, are we still going to war with Iraq?
01:23:05.000And he said, oh, it's worse than that.
01:23:06.000He said, he reached over on his desk, he picked up a piece of paper, and he said, I just got this down from upstairs, meeting the Secretary of Defense office today, and he said, this is a memo that describes how we're going to take out seven countries in five years, starting with Iraq,
01:23:22.000and then Syria, Lebanon, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and finishing off Iran.
01:25:04.000Each time, they had their own little propaganda story for why we had to go into this war now.
01:25:10.000And you're like, no, motherfucker, this was always planned.
01:25:13.000You decided in 2001 you were doing this.
01:25:15.000So don't tell me this is because Gaddafi is about to go genocidal, or because Saddam has weapons of mass destruction, or because Bashar al-Assad is killing his own people.
01:26:25.000Can you at least acknowledge that our politicians are the biggest hypocrites in the fucking world when they say things like, Vladimir Putin's a war criminal?
01:26:34.000Vladimir Putin invaded a sovereign nation.
01:26:39.000Did you ever see, by the way, and again, it's pretty entertaining to me, but Vladimir Putin, he gave two speeches, I think, when he first invaded in 2022, but he did one where he ran down the list of presidents.
01:26:56.000He did one where he was, like, he needled Bill Clinton for his war in Serbia.
01:27:00.000And he was like, he goes, well, there's an ethnic minority being oppressed, so we have to go to war, right, Bill Clinton?
01:27:07.000And then he goes, we gotta check out about weapons of mass destruction, right, George W. Bush?
01:27:12.000And then, like, kind of, like, went down the list.
01:27:14.000And the point he's essentially making, and he's kind of right about it, and he's like, you have no leg to stand on to tell me that I can't do this.
01:27:26.000You guys sure can, so why the hell can't I? And that doesn't mean he's justified in doing it.
01:27:32.000It means like really none of them are justified.
01:27:34.000But the level of hypocrisy that America thinks we're in any position to lecture anyone about war.
01:27:41.000But isn't it fascinating that as long as the people are in a place that we don't have a lot of familiarity with, and as long as the people speak a language that we don't understand and we can't read, It seems like less is going on in some strange way.
01:27:59.000Like if the United States did what it did to any of these other countries, it did to England.
01:29:52.000But this has been a major push from the Biden administration since he first, but even before he took office, just after the election in 2020, that this is their new thing is like a domestic war on terrorism, that the big threat that they're worried about is domestic terrorism, which is a very loose definition.
01:30:10.000What they're worried about is someone trying to oppose them.
01:30:13.000There's kind of this war on dissidence.
01:30:15.000And it's very creepy that the same people who pushed for these wars in the Middle East are now the ones saying, oh yeah, and we need to, and they're calling it the same thing.
01:30:27.000They're saying, we need to bring what we had over there right here.
01:30:31.000They're calling you domestic terrorists.
01:30:32.000It's the Department of Homeland Security that was created in the name of the War on Terrorism.
01:30:37.000This is now going to focus on, you know, this problem we have here at home, which is like...
01:30:44.000Again, it's just like the fact, like what you were saying, like, okay, if they did this to England or if they did this to Chicago or whatever, it would be so much more blatant to us, you know, but it's like, oh, they do it to Iraq or they do it to Somalia.
01:30:58.000But you're like, but those people who were okay doing that there...
01:31:02.000Don't be so comfortable that they won't do that to you, too.
01:31:04.000It's like if there was someone who had attacked kids, and then you were like, yeah, but they did that over in a different neighborhood.
01:31:15.000I'm letting them babysit my kids today.
01:31:18.000I mean, you know, I know it was a different neighborhood where they spoke a different language, but that person's comfortable killing kids.
01:31:25.000Like, I don't think you want them anywhere around your kids.
01:31:28.000And like, that's kind of what we've got with these people in our government.
01:31:31.000Like, they're comfortable making decisions where innocent people die and die by the millions.
01:31:37.000Like, if you add up the death toll of all the wars, it's in the millions.
01:31:42.000Somewhere in the range of two to four millions.
01:33:34.000It's really interesting what the public perception of Tucker Carlson is, or particularly how polarizing he is to people, that it's almost like you're there describing a different person than he actually is.
01:33:50.000I think he was the most interesting person in cable news, the most thoughtful, most intelligent.
01:34:22.000Such, like, the lone voice in, like, really the corporate press, who was completely opposed to the military-industrial complex, completely opposed to big pharma and all of the COVID insanity, was really good on, like, speaking up about a lot of really important issues.
01:34:38.000Issues that you would think, like, a good leftist Would at least appreciate that he's good on that issue, you know?
01:34:59.000He would be completely against the Republican Party, was viciously critical of the Republican Party, hates the Republican establishment.
01:35:06.000I've seen so many people be like, he bought into Trump's claims that the election was stolen, and I'm like, I don't know, dude, do you watch him?
01:35:17.000Because I watch his show, and that's actually not true.
01:35:20.000He took a lot of heat from this from right-wingers that immediately following the election of 2020, He really aggressively called out Trump's lawyers, Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell, I think was the other one, because they were making claims about the Dominion voting machines,
01:35:40.000And Tucker Carlson went on his show and he goes, okay, if this is true, it's the biggest story in the history of the United States of America.
01:36:11.000And it's like, yeah, but you don't watch his show.
01:36:13.000So you don't get that, like, what he was saying was, yeah, the Dominion vote flipping thing is bullshit.
01:36:18.000No one's ever provided any evidence of that.
01:36:20.000But the fact that big tech and the intelligence agencies work together to undermine the Hunter Biden story to get Joe Biden across the finish line is bullshit.
01:36:41.000I promise you, whoever replaces Don Lemon has the same exact views as Don Lemon and the same exact views of everybody else at CNN. And that's not true for Tucker Carlson.
01:36:50.000Like, at least there was a guy out there who, like, would disagree with the rest of the people in his network, disagree with both political parties.
01:37:00.000He's really designed for the Internet.
01:37:07.000I mean, if I was a person in a position of power and a wild card like Tucker Carlson got released from Fox News and maybe Rumble makes a deal with him or something like that, do you have any fucking idea how big that would be?
01:37:21.000It could make that app, it could make that platform.
01:37:26.000I mean, if Tucker Carlson goes over there, it would be worth it for them to invest a considerable amount of money.
01:37:31.000But if I was Fox News, that's the last thing I would want.
01:37:35.000So I would make sure that we have him locked up to For the entire term of some contract, some no-compete, and pay him off.
01:37:44.000You'd be better off just giving him the same amount of money he made when he was on the air.
01:38:02.000It was very shocking seeing him leave.
01:38:05.000Yes, I was surprised, although in hindsight, one of those things where I was surprised right away, and then two days later, I'm like, how was he ever even there?
01:38:50.000Yeah, it just seems like kind of surreal now looking back at it almost, but Bill O'Reilly did leave and he went and started a podcast or something, I think.
01:39:17.000Just talking to my in-laws about scanning a document or something like that, let alone telling them how to download an app and listen to a podcast.
01:39:26.000Try to talk your mom through one of those things.
01:40:32.000Is it when people get together in these echo chambers and they reinforce each other's ideas to the point where anybody that opposes that is just the enemy?
01:40:40.000Is it just some tribal thing that just automatically happens when people are allowed to gather in large groups like they do on social media?
01:40:48.000I think that certainly plays a role, a major role.
01:40:53.000I think that there's also like, I think the thing kind of came unglued, like the establishment kind of came unglued.
01:41:04.000I think the George W. Bush administration, the wars and the financial crisis, Really set into motion like a bad, dangerous thing.
01:41:19.000I think there was like an effort to distract away from...
01:41:24.000Like I think there were powerful people who wanted to distract away from how much the powerful people had fucked over the country.
01:41:30.000And then there was kind of like this effort to pit people against each other.
01:41:34.000And then I think it was very easy for people to fall into that and just get very, very tribal and very, very isolated.
01:41:41.000I also think there was like this knee jerk reaction from journalists to not confront their own obvious failure.
01:41:50.000Like, in that they hadn't really been reporting on the things that actually, you know what I mean?
01:41:55.000Like, imagine there was this, like, ticking time bomb, like the subprime mortgage, you know, crisis, and you were just oblivious to it.
01:42:02.000And you've been reporting on all these stories, and you weren't reporting on the time bomb that was about to blow up on the working class in America.
01:42:12.000The problem is that this other guy is lying to you.
01:42:16.000And when Trump got elected, which I think very much was a reaction to a lot of that stuff, I think that then it was like that's when it really all fell apart because the media, it was so obvious that this guy who you were telling everyone,
01:42:31.000well, this guy can't possibly win and no one cares about what he has to say.
01:43:06.000It's like a banker in his corner office and outside his window is all the Occupy Wall Street people protesting and he's on the phone and he says, introduce them to identity politics.
01:43:28.000Do you think the government is that competent that they could brilliantly socially engineer civilization that way?
01:43:34.000I think a lot of the private interests that own our government are pretty competent, actually.
01:43:38.000You know, I think the government works in very sloppy ways, but if you look at it from the perspective of, say, like, you know, Lockheed Martin and Pfizer and companies making, you know, Hundreds of billions of dollars in profits.
01:43:53.000The system's working very well toward that end.
01:43:56.000And I just don't think it was completely organic that after we had these disastrous wars and a financial crisis and after you had the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement that all of a sudden on some grassroots level we were like, we need to have a national conversation about chicks with dicks.
01:44:49.000Yuri Bezmenov gave a speech describing exactly America in 2023, describing how Russia had eroded, the Soviet Union had eroded all of our institutions and gotten in there and implanted ideas of Marxism and reinforced these ideas and that this was...
01:45:12.000It's undoubtedly going to lead to the demise of America.
01:45:35.000Government ownership of the means of production.
01:45:37.000It's more now it's just kind of like it's really like corporate control of government with this weird like what they call cultural Marxism which I don't like the term because it means different things to so many different people but the idea that like Marx had this economic view that everything all of human history was a class struggle between like the oppressor class and the oppressed class And if you applied that to cultural issues,
01:46:06.000it describes wokeism to a T. That everything can be reduced to white, black, straight, gay, cis, trans, men, women.
01:46:16.000It's like everything is the oppressor class versus the oppressed, which is such a shallow, stupid way of analyzing anything.
01:46:27.000To reality than that simplistic way of looking at things.
01:46:31.000But it's so attractive to people, which is really fascinating.
01:46:35.000And that was what Yuri had described in the speech and how it would become, how it would captivate people.
01:46:44.000Here's an interesting thing about something like that.
01:46:46.000Even though we're saying everything he described seems to be happening right now.
01:46:51.000He describes wokeism to a T. He described what's happening in this country to a T. I still have an impulse, an undeniable impulse to reject it.
01:47:05.000There's a part of me, for whatever weird reason, and I think everybody has this part of that, that doesn't want to believe that something's happening while it's happening.
01:47:14.000There's a thing that's going on right now because we're so accustomed to being able to do what we do.
01:47:22.000We're so accustomed to be able to drive to work and do this and hang out with your family and go out with your friends.
01:48:58.000There's, like, all of this stuff right around you, but if you try to zoom out, and you try your best to be disinterested and just analyze, and you go, okay, so where are we right now at the United States of America?
01:49:11.000So we are a republic that turned into an empire, got expanded all over the world, something I think 700-something bases in 135 different countries, trying to rule the entire world.
01:49:25.000Through the process of doing that, we've spent ourselves $30 trillion into debt, and now we see massive cultural decay into just like decadence.
01:50:58.000I'm just at the age, my daughter is four, my son is one, and I'm just at the age now where I'm starting to hear some of the words that I say coming back out, and you're like, ah.
01:51:08.000So that's going to be the next chapter.
01:51:09.000When my daughter was three, my youngest daughter was three, we were skiing.
01:51:54.000It's so funny because you have like this life, right, where you're like, so you're like with your wife when you're just a couple before you have kids and you're just a couple.
01:52:10.000Number one, I can try to watch my mouth.
01:52:13.000And I'm like, babe, I'm going to be honest with you.
01:52:16.000Very low percentage chance that that works out well.
01:52:18.000And the other one is what you said, where you're just like, okay, let them understand it's just a word, but also let them know, okay, look, there's time and places where you can't use these words.
01:53:09.000The whole thing was very interesting to grow up that way because from the time I was seven, I felt like an outsider because I had moved a lot.
01:53:18.000But then also, I had these parents that were really open-minded and very liberal.
01:53:24.000And they were like, this is all bullshit.
01:53:28.000I remember being a child when the war in Vietnam ended.
01:53:32.000I think I was like 10 years old or something like that, thinking, this is great.
01:53:36.000Now we're not going to have wars anymore.
01:54:12.000I thought we weren't doing this anymore.
01:54:13.000And you know what's so crazy about that first war in Iraq?
01:54:16.000Is that, because I remember I was a little kid, a very little kid.
01:54:19.000I was born in 83, so I was, you know, eight.
01:54:22.000When we first fought that war, but I remember being aware of it.
01:54:25.000I remember seeing the speech when George H.W. Bush announced we were going.
01:54:29.000And they, the whole, like, all those same neocons who later went to Project for a New American Century, they were all in the George H.W. Bush administration, and then they went into his son's administration.
01:54:42.000That they had conquered Vietnam syndrome, as they called it.
01:54:46.000You see, from their perspective, the country had this terrible Vietnam syndrome after Vietnam, meaning that people didn't really want to fight wars.
01:54:57.000They had this attitude that, like, we shouldn't fight wars because they can be really bad.
01:55:01.000But see, now, George H.W. Bush, this hero, he conquered that because they showed how easy the war was.
01:55:23.000And Joe, 30 years later, we still have a military presence in Iraq.
01:55:29.000That's how easy that war was, is that all of these years later, and the war continued through Clinton, not technically a war, but a full blockade of the country, bombing campaigns, massive sanctions, tons of people dying.
01:55:54.000I don't exactly remember, but I saw someone make an argument for why their estimations were wrong and the study wasn't right.
01:56:03.000Anyway, he was arguing, and it seemed pretty compelling.
01:56:05.000It seems like, oh, that actually sounds right, that they were counting the wrong way, kind of.
01:56:09.000So it probably wasn't 500,000, but maybe it was 100,000, whatever.
01:56:12.000It was like children just starving due to this blockade.
01:56:15.000And it was also one of the main things that really pissed off Osama bin Laden, radicalized him against America.
01:56:22.000It was one of his stated grievances in his declaration of war on America because we kept the bases in Saudi Arabia to enforce the blockade around Iraq.
01:56:32.000And he was like, okay, so you have your bases in our holy land to starve other Muslims to death?
01:56:38.000And that pissed off a lot of people over there.
01:58:10.000They killed a guy with a sledgehammer.
01:58:13.000You're seeing people get shot in foxholes at close range.
01:58:16.000You're seeing, like, HD footage of this stuff.
01:58:21.000War becomes very abstract to people who haven't experienced it, I think.
01:58:26.000It's hard to even believe or wrap your head around.
01:58:29.000It's hard to even think that in a society where we have the technology that me and you are sitting in this room and we're also speaking to millions of people and we'll...
01:58:43.000You know, go to a shop and buy something and get lunch and then we'll go do comedy tonight and someone will be like, oh, great, thank you very much.
01:58:50.000It's like a civilized society that we still just have mass murder sprees where we just agree like we haven't figured out a different way to settle these disputes.
01:59:06.000Certainly for me, I don't think anyone's completely capable who hasn't seen it, and certainly that applies to me, of really understanding what that is.
01:59:15.000But it's bad, and it's just like, I don't know.
01:59:18.000I can't believe more people aren't just...
01:59:22.000Fiona Hill, I think I talked about this last time I was on, but Fiona Hill, again, this is in Foreign Affairs magazine, not like...
02:00:17.000When you're going about your day just hanging out in New York and fucking visiting your favorite coffee shop, it's hard to believe that you're a part of that.
02:00:37.000Attention span, you know, as a country.
02:00:39.000But it's like, when you look at, so one of the absolute best people on the war in Russia and Ukraine, people really want to learn about this stuff, is John Mearsheimer, who is the dean of the realist school of foreign policy.
02:00:54.000This guy is not, again, not a non-interventionist libertarian like me, just like a scholar who's like, talks about foreign policy and stuff.
02:01:01.000And he's written and spoken extensively about Ukraine-Russia.
02:01:05.000And he was one of the big opponents of this whole policy.
02:01:09.000And meanwhile, so after the government was overthrown, the one that Gideon Rose was so happy about when we stole Ukraine away, we stole Robin from Batman, Victoria Nuland and Gideon Rose and all of those people who were pushing for this policy, they all said,
02:01:26.000Ukraine is choosing to join the liberal world order, and they're choosing democracy and hope, and everything's going to be wonderful for them.
02:01:35.000And John Mearsheimer said, and his quote was, it was in a lecture he gave in 2015, he said, America is leading Ukraine down the primrose path.
02:01:46.000And which I didn't understand what that means exactly, but it sounds real good.
02:01:50.000But what it means basically is like, we're leading you down this beautiful path that ends in your demise.
02:01:56.000And then basically, we were encouraging them to play tough with the Russians.
02:02:01.000And it's like, don't worry, you got America's got your back.
02:02:03.000You know, it's like you, it's like you convincing some dude who doesn't know how to fight, like, go fight this guy.
02:02:53.000And so it's just like, it's horrible, like, but that's kind of, that's one of the things that, you know, one of the things that's so interesting about this war, too, is like, when people will defend it, I almost want to ask people, so why, if this war is so necessary,
02:03:09.000or it's so necessary for us to arm them, why shouldn't we intervene militarily?
02:03:13.000Why isn't America's military going into Ukraine?
02:03:38.000But so then what does it go from like a certainty of nuclear war to what's the risk of nuclear war if we're just fighting a proxy war and giving them hundreds of billions of dollars and pledging till the end that will drive Russia out?
02:04:45.000You know, like, it's kind of reasonable to say we cannot tolerate Soviet nuclear warheads pointed at us from a little island a few miles off our coast.
02:06:39.000And yet you're so reckless with it that, you know, it's like it's funny.
02:06:42.000I remember Glenn Greenwald making this point when people would talk about like people were at the national security apparatus or whatever would be talking about how how reckless it is that Snowden just like gave all of this information out.
02:06:54.000And you're like, well, then weren't you pretty reckless, too?
02:06:57.000Because if this information is so vital, you didn't even know it was gone.
02:07:01.000They didn't even know it was gone until The Guardian published it.
02:07:11.000Well, just right before that, one of the other real interesting thing is that they came out, so a couple days after the leak first was getting reported, the Reuters had a piece, an article,
02:07:27.000where they had three high-level U.S. officials Under anonymity, said that, you'll never believe this, Joe, it had all the hallmarks of Russian disinformation.
02:07:40.000And so isn't it just amazing that they'll go, and then like two days later, they completely gave up on that and went, let's just smear the kid who did it.
02:07:49.000You know, like, forget all that stuff.
02:07:51.000There were some interesting revelations from the documents.
02:07:57.000Things like, evidently, there are NATO and U.S. military embedded in Ukraine, like, assisting them, basically, which is pretty dangerous.
02:08:13.000Western Special Forces Operating Inside Ukraine.
02:08:16.000One document dated 23 March refers to the presence of a small number of Western Special Forces operating inside Ukraine without specifying their activities or location.
02:08:26.000The UK has the largest contingent, 50, followed by Latvia, 17, France, 15, and the US, 14, the Netherlands, 1. Western governments typically refrain from commenting on such sensitive matters, but this detail is likely to be seized upon by Moscow.
02:08:42.000Which has in recent months argued that it is not just confronting Ukraine, but NATO as well.
02:08:49.000And essentially, look, this was the...
02:08:52.000I think when Putin ultimately decided to invade Ukraine last year, I think basically what he concluded...
02:09:06.000They brought Ukraine into NATO. Even though Ukraine is not an official NATO country, at this point they backed the coup that overthrew the democratically elected government under Yanukovych.
02:09:19.000They poured weapons into the country and they were doing joint training exercises with NATO and the Ukrainian military.
02:09:26.000And I think Vladimir Putin was basically like, we told them this was our brightest of red lines and they crossed it.
02:09:42.000But he could have cut off all natural gas to Europe.
02:09:44.000He could have dropped a nuke in the ocean.
02:09:46.000I mean, he could have done something before he did this, you know?
02:09:49.000But he basically concluded that Ukraine is de facto a member of NATO. And if you look at the way we're responding to this whole thing, he's kind of right.
02:09:58.000I mean, like, we're backing them all the way because they were invaded.
02:10:02.000That's what we're supposed to do to a NATO country, you know?
02:10:05.000And so this is bad that this comes out.
02:10:07.000Although, I gotta say, I'm surprised to some degree how much, you know, they've...
02:10:12.000I mean, if the Nord Stream bombing didn't, you know, like, do it, I don't know if just, like, some special forces being embedded there is gonna, like, you know, create some big escalation.
02:10:27.000Well, look, dude, I mean, there's been in the last year- Because, you know, Trump predicted that Germany, if they don't take steps to stop this, they're going to be completely dependent upon Russian oil.
02:10:38.000And it was one of those things where people were making fun of him at the time.
02:10:43.000I don't know if I completely agree with Trump on that, but there's no question that— But they are dependent upon it now, right, because of the Nord Stream pipeline blowing up?
02:11:14.000Because the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world was Germany and Russia going to war.
02:11:20.000In World War II, something like 30 million people died just in that conflict.
02:11:25.000It's like the worst thing that's ever happened in the history of the world.
02:11:28.000And so for them to be interconnected and interdependent, which is how I would see it, trading, you know, like where goods cross borders, armies don't have to, that old saying, I think it would have been a good thing for them to be together.
02:11:39.000Oh, look, now you're directly incentivized to not be enemies because you want the cheap natural gas and they want your money for their cheap natural gas.
02:11:50.000There's a big view from the neoconservatives and the neoliberals, the kind of establishment, that this is the scariest thing.
02:12:00.000The scariest thing is that Germany and Russia align.
02:12:06.000And I don't know exactly if this is true, but some people, like, I'm blanking on the guy's name, the guy who founded Stratford, Friedman.
02:12:16.000He basically said that this is the centerpiece of American foreign policy since World War II. That like the whole idea of NATO is to like keep Germany in and Russia out.
02:12:28.000And that their biggest fear is that Germany and Russia would...
02:12:35.000Unite against us, and that could be the only thing that could really challenge American power, is like the ingenuity of Germany with the manpower and natural resources of Russia.
02:12:45.000So there's a lot of people who have been against this from the very beginning.
02:12:49.000No one would ever think of that today.
02:12:52.000Like, your average person today would think, maybe Germany and Russia could unite again.
02:13:24.000And I'll say somewhat understandably, while German independence is a big concern to them, they still live with that kind of like, this is the great fear that Germany will rise again one day.
02:13:35.000And like, oh, if they're connected with Russia like this, ooh, they're not under the EU's thumb and NATO's thumb anymore.
02:13:41.000Now they could possibly go in a different direction.
02:13:43.000So for years, there were a lot of people who were against this.
02:13:47.000Now, when Russia invaded Ukraine, they did turn off the pipe.
02:14:18.000What if there's pressure on them to decide to turn these pipes on?
02:14:22.000And that this might be, then Germany might start, you know, siding with Russia, or at least if they're getting their natural gas from Russia, they're not going to be so harsh on Russia, and they're not going to be so willing to play ball with the EU. And there's already, you know, like a history of this,
02:14:38.000like what I was talking about before at the Bucharest Summit in 2008, when they announced Ukraine was going into, would Eventually joined NATO. It was Merkel was really against it.
02:14:52.000So they're already a little concerned that, like, maybe Germany is not quite as anti-Russia as we are.
02:14:57.000And so going into the winter, I think they were concerned there was going to be a strain on power in Germany, and they might be tempted to turn that pipeline back on.
02:15:06.000And so they made sure it's, as Victoria Nuland said, a hunk of metal at the bottom of the sea.
02:15:12.000Could you fucking imagine if sometime in the future we're going to war with Germany and Russia united against America?
02:16:29.000The whole thing is just, it's all in front of our faces.
02:16:33.000Well, it's an act of industrial terrorism and, like, environmental terrorism to do this.
02:16:38.000And, you know, Cy Hirsch reported, and I trust that guy a lot more than I trust most other journalists, and he reported that it was America.
02:17:10.000It's like, you can't, like, I don't know, you can't make this shit up.
02:17:12.000That is such a crazy thing for a journalist to write.
02:17:16.000Well, I mean, I remember sometimes you can just kind of like, you know, you can just look at these things logically.
02:17:22.000Like I remember in 2017 is when I was still a contributor on Essie Cup Show and she was at CNN. And the big story came out that Assad had gassed his own people.
02:17:38.000And I remember right away, and this is before any of those OCPW whistleblowers came out or anything like that, but just right away, I remember the day after, being on TV and just being like, I don't think he did this.
02:17:51.000And they're like, how can you say that?
02:18:11.000And so now you're telling me for no strategic military advantage, he just did the one thing that will keep this war going and maybe end up like Muammar Gaddafi?
02:19:17.000When I say America did this or America's wrong, I'm not talking about you or your daddy or your hometown or anything like that.
02:19:23.000I'm just talking about, like, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush and Barack Obama and Dick Cheney and Donald Trump and, you know, all of them.
02:19:35.000Turns out these guys aren't good people.
02:19:38.000It's so wild when you, if you looked at us from outside of us, and you looked at the human race and these patterns that repeat themselves over and over again, you would wonder, like, why aren't they seeing these patterns?
02:19:53.000Like, why don't they recognize when these things are happening, as they've happened to so many civilizations before?
02:19:59.000Like, what is it about watching everything erode before your eyes that's not shocking enough to wake people up to what's happening?
02:20:07.000Well, sometimes I think there's kind of like a pattern and there's big forces at play that are hard for individuals to get a hold of, you know?
02:20:17.000Like, there's kind of this thing where there's like...
02:20:20.000Governments are power centers and they're just...
02:20:38.000But the government isn't in the market.
02:20:41.000It's not like, oh, I have to provide something of value in order to get more people voluntarily to listen to my show or come to my business or something like that.
02:23:29.000And I remember when George W. Bush came and gave that speech on the megaphone.
02:23:35.000And it was almost perfect in his simplistic way, where he goes, I want you to know We hear you in Washington, D.C. And pretty soon, the people who knock down these towers, they're going to hear you too.
02:24:03.000You know, but it was just like, that's kind of how it is when you're hurt and you feel like you got hit and they killed our people.
02:24:09.000Well, we're going to fucking kill your people, motherfucker.
02:24:11.000But then you kind of realized, and this is what like Ron Paul taught me, is it's like, yeah, okay, you know that impulse that you just had?
02:24:46.000It's like, you know, I remember literally saying this when I was arguing with Essie Cupp and them on our show, where they'd be like an attack.
02:24:53.000Even like the littler ones, I remember there was one where like a New York guy, some Muslim guy in New York, like hit people with his car, and he was like, said he was part of ISIS or something.
02:25:02.000I don't even know how connected he was.
02:25:03.000And they're all like, well, don't we have to do something about this?
02:25:07.000I mean, don't we have to go bomb, you know, Syria or do something about this and you're like, right.
02:25:11.000You just got hit and now you feel like we have to do something.
02:25:23.000Well, maybe that's their perspective too.
02:25:27.000And also, once you blow shit up, people want to blow shit up back.
02:25:31.000Yeah, and now you're just continuing this on.
02:25:33.000And so like, oh, we got to fight him over there so we don't fight him over here.
02:25:35.000But you're like, well, maybe that actually ensures that we have to fight him over here.
02:25:40.000And isn't it wild that during this most chaotic of times in our history, if we think about the future of the world, we think about the possibility of war.
02:27:41.000There have been examples of that before where that happens.
02:27:44.000They try to do something and they realize this is going to be too, like, too many people are going to be upset about this.
02:27:50.000Yeah, wasn't there talk during the Obama administration about some sort of regulation of the internet?
02:27:55.000Yeah, the SOPA, the SOPA and the PIPA, there were like these proposals that were like real deal going to regulate the internet.
02:28:01.000Not like big tech censorship shit, like really the government was going to regulate the internet.
02:28:05.000I'm telling you, Joe, they'd have shut your show down if that shit had passed.
02:28:08.000If SOPA had passed, there's no way your podcast goes through the pandemic.
02:28:13.000There's no way you're allowed to have dissident doctors and scientists on to give like their point of view on how the whole every policy is wrong.
02:28:51.000We're gonna need a mass awakening in this country, but we're also gonna need, like, powerful people.
02:28:57.000This is like what you see, what's really encouraging with Elon Musk buying Twitter, is you kind of see that, like, yeah, that's necessary, too.
02:29:03.000You gotta have, like, a badass billionaire who's, like, on board with this, who can actually do something about it.
02:29:48.000Again, it's like what I try to say with the Ukraine thing.
02:29:51.000It's like, look, if the people who didn't have anything to say over what happened in Yemen over the last seven years are really upset about the humanitarian crisis in Ukraine, it's like...
02:30:14.000And in the same sense, the people who are all for big tech, look, you may really hate if there's a neo-Nazi or something like that on Twitter or something.
02:30:29.000They got no problem sending weapons to the neo-Nazis in Ukraine, which, by the way, we haven't touched on that, but there's some real-deal ones in there.
02:30:36.000But my point is, it's not that they hate neo-Nazis.
02:35:00.000Well, aren't they just 1% state-funded?
02:35:03.000No, it's actually much more than that because then they, like, they...
02:35:07.000It's like 1% is directly funded by the state, and then they also take money from local groups that have collected taxpayer money and stuff like that.
02:35:18.000Crystal Ball did a thing on their show kind of breaking this down.
02:35:23.000So it's actually, in reality, it's more than 1%.
02:35:27.000But regardless, they take taxpayer-funded money, so I think there's nothing wrong with labeling them that.
02:35:33.000And if taxpayers are forced to fund any amount of a news organization, and then that news organization is going to turn around and say, like, we won't report on the Hunter Biden laptop, or we won't do this, or we won't, you know, their stuff during COVID was just god-awful.
02:35:48.000I have no problem with them having a little label there, especially one that pisses them off.
02:36:31.000Opinions were mixed on whether or not Elon Musk was making a sex joke or just thumbing his nose at the Canadian Broadcast Corporation or both.
02:36:40.000So, yeah, it says 69% government-funded media.
02:37:25.000This is a good time to show you this video.
02:37:27.000Video shows how China is using AI in their schools.
02:37:31.000Again, so this is from an Instagram account that is popular.
02:37:35.000What they show is like an edited video.
02:37:37.000I don't know how accurate all this is though.
02:37:39.000China know exactly when someone isn't paying attention.
02:37:48.000These headbands measure each student's level of concentration.
02:37:51.000The information is then directly sent to the teacher's computer and to parents.
02:37:59.000Classrooms have robots that analyze students' health and engagement levels.
02:38:04.000Students wear uniforms with chips that track their locations.
02:38:08.000There are even surveillance cameras that monitor how often students check their phones or yawn during classes.
02:38:14.000But schools say it wasn't hard for them getting parental consent to enroll kids into what is one of the world's largest experiments in AI education, a program that's supposed to boost students' grades while also feeding powerful algorithms.
02:38:40.000I'm always a little bit skeptical of some of these things because you're kind of like, okay, is this just like one random school is doing it this way in China and it's like a little experiment?
02:38:48.000Because I have heard people say that...
02:38:50.000I've heard people who run businesses in China.
02:39:07.000You know, and I almost like wonder, like, sometimes we do get a lot of propaganda about China, because there's also a whole bunch of people, like, who are real hawkish toward them.
02:39:17.000So I always try to kind of be skeptical of some of this.
02:41:15.000If you go to antiwar.com, which I recommend everyone do every day, and just search Adrian Zenz there, they did a really good piece breaking down.
02:41:24.000It's straight up like his math is wrong.
02:41:25.000It's not even like there's an argument about this.
02:41:27.000It's like, no, look, he's got these numbers completely wrong.
02:41:30.000It's just people get real carried away with this shit.
02:41:32.000My biggest concern is just that after this whole stand in Ukraine, Taiwan is gonna fucking be next.
02:41:38.000And it's like, oh, so now we're gonna be flirting with a nuclear confrontation with Russia and China.
02:41:42.000So that's my biggest concern in all of this.
02:41:45.000I do agree, though, that the whole AI in the classroom and all this shit is creepy as fuck.
02:42:33.000That you want to pay attention to them more or less.
02:42:38.000There's an education you're getting in a shitty class, believe it or not.
02:42:42.000You're getting an education on what happens in a shitty class, about how much you hate it and how much it sucks and how stupid your teacher is and how disinterested they are in the subject that they're teaching you and how they expect total compliance and they don't understand human emotions and the way people think and behave.
02:43:55.000And if that kid doesn't have a strong figure at home, if that kid doesn't have someone at home that's kind and generous and works hard and is very engaged in them with their life, Then they think that that's what adults are like.
02:44:19.000That's still better than full compliance.
02:44:22.000Yeah, I want my kids to develop, like, discipline and a work ethic, and I want, like, all of that stuff, but I don't want them to do it because the robot's watching them.
02:44:30.000I want them to live and be a human, and then be convinced that, like, oh, it's really awesome to develop these things, because life's better that way.
02:44:37.000But there's also something that we have to take into consideration, that there's a wide spectrum of things that people are interested in, and oftentimes when kids are bored in class, their imagination is running wild, And they'll start thinking about what they want to do with their life.
02:44:53.000They'll start thinking about things through boredom.
02:44:57.000But Joe, if we just give them this pill, they'll pay attention.
02:45:55.000It's wild that different ways of thinking about life and different things being interested in whether or not you can pay attention can be a disease.
02:46:03.000Like, if you can't pay attention to things, we think there's something wrong with the way your mind works.
02:46:08.000But meanwhile, those kids who can't pay attention to things, watch them play a fucking video game.
02:47:40.000Like they'd get out there and they'd draft these people into an army and tell them to go to war and they'd like piss themselves and run away.
02:47:47.000And they were like, what are we going to do about this?
02:47:49.000And so they were like, we got to get them at a young age and really like indoctrinate them toward like being subservient to the state.
02:47:57.000And Horace Mann, who's considered, you know, the godfather of education in America...
02:48:04.000He literally said, I think it was in the late 1800s, he literally said, we're adopting the Prussian model.
02:48:09.000And he was like, but, you know, surely if this model can be used to support, like, Prussian, you know, like authoritarianism, it can also be used to support republicanism of America, you know, and like, oh, support the great republic.
02:48:22.000And it's literally, I mean, that is the first thing they would do at schools is like, have you pledge allegiance to your government, you know?
02:48:29.000And that's why I do think it's interesting when a lot of these...
02:48:33.000You know, like right-winger types today, they'll be like, oh my god, they're propagandizing these kids in school.
02:48:37.000And I will grant that I do find the latest insane gender sexualization of kids to be particularly troubling.
02:48:46.000It's not like it's a new thing that they're propagandizing kids in school.
02:48:49.000In fact, that's kind of what the whole thing was set up for.
02:48:52.000And it's like, it's, you know, like my kids are like, I got little kids, but like, even just from like, Like, my four-year-old, man, it's just like the state of these little kids.
02:49:31.000Like, they want so badly to know things and participate in the adult world.
02:49:36.000And then we're like, oh, okay, well, what we're going to do with you for the next 14 years is send you to go sit in a row of desks and memorize and regurgitate information that an authority figure hands to you.
02:50:26.000And, of course, because the schools are largely monopolized by the government, there's also not that much ability to change things and try new things.
02:50:35.000I think there's a really important factor that goes on with schools, though.
02:50:41.000These kids getting together and recognizing that these teachers are idiots.
02:50:47.000When you have a conversation with your kids as they get older, they're going to tell you about some idiot teachers.
02:50:51.000And these conversations are hilarious.
02:50:53.000I got to witness some in California because my daughter, during the pandemic, was on Zoom.
02:52:39.000Does that squash it in so many people that only a few of tortured childhoods get out?
02:52:48.000And maybe we associate creativity and we associate brilliant art with people with tortured childhoods for all the wrong reasons.
02:52:56.000Do you ever hear that, I've always loved this quote so much, but someone asked Jerry Seinfeld, or they were like, when you were a kid, were you like the funny one in your group of friends?
02:53:06.000And he went, we were all funny, and then everyone else got jobs.
02:54:30.000But he said something about people who are in a job that they hate or in a career that they hate, and they'll think about, well, I can't leave and pursue something else because what about all the risks of doing that?
02:54:42.000And you're like, yeah, what about the risks of not doing that?
02:54:44.000What about the risks of doing something that makes you miserable for the rest of your life?
02:54:48.000Because that seems like a risk worth considering, you know?
02:54:52.000I was really lucky in having no stability when I was young, which doesn't make sense, if you think about it, because you want to provide your children with as much stability as possible.
02:55:01.000But I was really lucky that I didn't, because I didn't believe in, like, normal systems.
02:55:40.000Like if you have just a life you enjoy, it's actually beneficial.
02:55:44.000But this idea of sitting and doing a job all day that I was completely unemotionally attached to, not creatively attached to, I couldn't do it.
02:55:53.000But if I had to do some stuff for money that I knew was temporary, I could do that.
02:56:16.000No, I'm well aware of it in myself, too, where there'll be things sometimes that like something like even like shopping, like clothes shopping or something like that, if it's like going slow, I'm like, I've never been so miserable in my entire life.
02:56:32.000I don't know why this is so excruciatingly painful.
02:56:48.000Because marijuana and shopping, it's a totally different experience.
02:56:52.000Then you're just having fun, you're relaxed, and just walking around.
02:56:56.000You could walk around with the slowest shopper ever and just make fun of everything that happens.
02:57:00.000Dude, I mean, I started smoking pot like very young in life, like 14 maybe, and I became like an everyday smoker very quickly.
02:57:09.000And I think there was something to that connection, that the things that were so boring and miserable to me in life were like, oh, now this is fun.
02:57:47.000I was like, oh yeah, this is an amazing job.
02:57:50.000For the record, I don't recommend other 14-year-olds.
02:57:52.000There were problems with it, and it wasn't for the best.
02:57:57.000I was very fortunate that I was, from high school age to the time I started doing stand-up, I didn't party at all, very, very rarely, because I was competing.
02:58:09.000So because of that, I was always scared to lose, and I was always scared that I would lose because I had gotten drunk and then I was hungover.
02:58:16.000And you're not talking about losing a basketball game.
02:58:18.000You're talking about getting kicked in the face and knocked unconscious.
02:59:40.000He's the GOAT. I mean, if you're gonna have a GOAT, I don't think you can argue that John's not THE GOAT. I think the argument really is, who are the greats?
02:59:51.000Because it's so subjective if Nurmagomedov was better than John Jones.
03:00:08.000Do you understand how crazy it is to watch a guy storm through an entire division with masters like Justin Gaethje, a master of destruction.
03:00:25.000There's an argument that he's the GOAT. There's an argument that Mighty Mouse is the greatest expression of martial arts in the history of combat sports.
03:01:20.000How do you know Mighty Mouse was 36 then?
03:01:23.000That guy, when he was in his prime, like when he beat Cejudo the first time, when he stopped him in the first round, he was the ultimate expression.
03:01:43.000I go to hug him, and he turns and just to fuck with me, hits me in the body, touches me, the most gentle touch, with two knees so fast that I couldn't believe they actually moved that quickly.
03:01:57.000It was just, he went, just did that to me.
03:02:03.000When he hit Cejudo with those knees to the body, I remember watching that going, I don't think I've ever seen anybody land a knee to the body more precisely.
03:02:16.000It's a shame that he left the UFC when he did and didn't get, like, the third fight with Cejudo, a rubber match there, I think would have been so huge.
03:02:36.000But I think he just didn't quite have the moment.
03:02:38.000There was also talk of him moving up and fighting TJ Dillashaw, and I think there was a contractual dispute or something like that didn't happen.
03:02:44.000But it's a shame that he didn't get one of those, like, Huge moments because even when he beats a hood of the first time He wasn't like that big of a name yet, right?
03:02:53.000Like people didn't know like who that was whereas like the by the third fight.
03:02:57.000It would have been like a huge thing, you know And then GSP also is in the conversation.
03:03:03.000He's got to have an argument Yeah, he's in the conversation for sure the dominance of the welterweight division And the fact that he beat everyone he ever faced and came back and won the middleweight title after a leave, that's hard to not consider him there.
03:03:53.000The first fight's the most impressive because he didn't train for it.
03:03:55.000That's just the most impressive thing is that Jon Jones pulls out the first fight in the later rounds.
03:04:01.000He wins the decision by dominating the later rounds in a fight that he didn't train.
03:04:05.000And we had never seen him in a dogfight before at that point.
03:04:08.000You were like, sometimes there are these guys, I remember thinking the same thing with Israel Adesanya when he fought Kelvin Gaslam, whereas all we had seen from him was just like dominating everybody.
03:04:19.000And so there's something, there's kind of a question mark A little bit with that where you don't know, you know, some people like when the going gets tough, kind of like look for a way out.
03:04:28.000And I remember, if you remember in that fight in the fourth round, Kelvin fucked him up in that fourth round.
03:04:34.000He really hurt him and he was busted up.
03:04:35.000And you remember before the fifth round starts is that he looks at him and he's like, I'm prepared to die for this.
03:06:31.000He can get cracked, and there's some speculation that some of that has to do with the fact that he's cutting so much weight.
03:06:37.000Michael Bisping, I believe there was a few other fighters.
03:06:43.000Oh, I think it was Sugar Sean O'Malley.
03:06:45.000We're talking about this insane weight cut that this guy makes to get down to 185 pounds and the fact that that could affect his ability to absorb punishment.
03:07:07.000And so they give him this little ability to recover and he survives and then he winds up.
03:07:12.000Winning and knocking out pay it or knocking out Adesanya in this spectacular fashion hits him with this monster left hook But that's the thing about that guy.
03:07:20.000That's what's so terrifying about fighting him And that's why is he so special that he's like I can figure this motherfucker out Well, I you also got a look at it like you know There's like a winner versus loser mentality to that.
03:07:35.000And I remember thinking of this going into that last fight where like, look, you could look at it and say, I was fighting my best fight and he still got me.
03:11:01.000Oh, but his movement when he fights is so unusual.
03:11:04.000So this is why they did this is why they like stripped the title right away because they were just like this is gonna be relinquished the title.
03:13:04.000And that's what I'm worried about when I hear people having a catastrophic shoulder injury and then saying, I'm gonna get back in there as quickly as possible.
03:13:20.000I mean, when people recover from like, Aljamain Sterling recovers from a neck surgery where they replace one of his discs with an artificial disc and goes on to retain the title.
03:13:41.000Shoulders do seem like the trickiest one, though.
03:13:44.000And they seem like the ones that, like...
03:13:46.000You know, it's weird, like, when you see people...
03:13:47.000I remember this from, like, basketball, like, in, like, high school and shit, where there'd be someone who, like, their shoulder popped out, like, they dislocated their shoulder, and then that just happens to them.
03:13:56.000Then that's just a thing that, like, regularly...
03:13:59.000Like, not, like, all the time, but you always, like, know it could happen again.
03:14:43.000That's what Knees Over Toes guy is really interested in.
03:14:46.000His whole thing is about strengthening all the muscles around your knee.
03:14:51.000And strengthening the muscles around your shoulders is so important too.
03:14:53.000And so often when people are training in a thing, Whether it's jujitsu or Muay Thai or anything, you're only training doing that thing.
03:15:02.000And that thing can strengthen you, and it certainly will.
03:15:05.000But it would benefit you to doing things to prevent injuries and strengthening joints and strengthening the tissue around vulnerable areas in your body, whether it's your neck or your shoulders or your knees.
03:17:31.000And on that note, dude, we're like almost four hours in.
03:17:34.000Oh, can I just say the one thing that I wanted to say for you is that my favorite wrestling storyline ever was during the first Iraq war that we were just talking about, Sergeant Slaughter defected and became a pro-Iraqi.