In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, Joe and I talk about how to deal with the cold, ice baths, and cold saunas. We also talk a little bit about Max Holloway and his Samoan pride. Joe also talks about his experience in the ice bath and how he dealt with hypothermia in the sauna. And of course, we talk about some other stuff too. Enjoy the episode and remember to tweet me if you have any thoughts or opinions on any of the topics covered in this episode! Timestamps: 1:00 - How to handle the cold 4:30 - What's the worst thing you can do in the cold? 6:00 Ice Baths 8:15 - Is it better to suffer for the full 3 minutes or the full 20 minutes or the whole 20 seconds? 11:40 - How cold is it better than hot water 13:30 What s your favorite thing to do in a sauna 16:00- How cold water is better than heat 17:30- Is it more tolerable 18:20 - Is there a point where you get better or worse than hot 19:20- Is cold better? 22:40- What s the worst you do in cold water? 23:40 24:00 -- Is cold the better thing? 25:30 -- Is it's better than warm? 26:40 -- How bad? 27:10 - What s better than the worst? 29:00-- Is it worse? 30: What's your favorite type of sauna? 32:00? 35:00 | 32:10 33:10 -- How do you feel about it? 36:00 // 35:30 | What s good? 37:10 | What do you think about cold water ? 38:30 // 39:40 | What are you going to do next? 39:00 / 40:00 +40:00 & 41: What s a good day? 45:00/46:00 @ home? 47:00 After a day of cold water podcast? , 45:30 & 45:20 46:30 / 47:30/46 48:40/47 & 47:20/55
00:04:30.000There's some pretty reasonably priced options for coolers that you could actually do in a bathtub now.
00:04:35.000There's a bunch of different ways you should do it, but if you've got the scratch, like one of these blue cubes or something similar, or Morosco makes a really good one too, they're really good.
00:04:44.000I can see how the after feeling gets kind of addictive.
00:04:50.000I'm sure someone will reach out to you.
00:05:36.000Somebody was telling me that the decriminalization crew, they gave an American flag made out of hemp to a member of Congress to fly above the Capitol.
00:05:51.000You know, I would get people when I was in Congress calling and saying, hey, it's, you know, my friend is retiring from the military from 30 years.
00:05:58.000Can you fly a flag in honor of him or her?
00:06:01.000And so you get a little certificate with it.
00:06:03.000And there are many flags that go up and down every day that are given as gifts to people.
00:06:08.000So someone did it with a flag, American flag made out of hemp.
00:06:12.000And apparently it caused major problems within the DEA and within the administration saying, how dare you?
00:06:20.000How could anyone allow this to happen?
00:08:50.000A really viable and thriving industry in our country because people are growing crops of hemp, but they've got to go through all of this crazy THC testing.
00:09:02.000And I've talked to people who are farmers and business people who are investing in this, and they've had to throw entire crops away because of...
00:09:12.000I don't know the details about the testing, but it just...
00:09:15.000One plus one doesn't equal two when you look at the reality of the benefits of hemp and the farming process and the concerns that they have within the DEA. So is the concern if it has any level of THC at all becomes illegal, even if you're just processing it as a commodity and you're not using it?
00:10:35.000What's interesting, I mean, for us in Hawaii, I mean, tourism is the biggest economic driver we have.
00:10:40.000And every time there's, you know, in the post 9-11 when people weren't traveling so much, during COVID, when everything shut down, businesses go out of business.
00:10:49.000Small businesses are driven out because if they don't have that driver.
00:10:52.000So the conversation always comes up about, okay, well, we've got to diversify our economy.
00:10:55.000And this is one of those areas that has huge potential for a small island state like ours in Hawaii to And what's interesting is Mitch McConnell...
00:11:10.000Their state is also a state that is promoting hemp as a major agriculture driver.
00:11:17.000So there's opportunity there, but it requires a lot more education from those both in the administration and in Congress to actually take down those barriers and allow it to actually truly be an industry in America.
00:11:29.000When we first started selling hemp protein on it, we used to have to get it from Canada.
00:12:38.000You know, I mean, again, it's lack of education, it's fear, and it's like, well, this is banned by the federal government, so the military must comply.
00:12:44.000But at the same time, the guy within the army, the civilian who was putting out this policy...
00:12:53.000He also said you're not allowed to eat anything with poppy seed.
00:12:55.000You can't eat a poppy seed muffin because you might piss hot.
00:13:59.000I've seen sober people go into a room that's filled with pot and everyone comes out like a little loopy, like, you're breathing in the same air.
00:15:33.000I introduced legislation in Congress to deschedule it completely because it shouldn't be.
00:15:39.000The wildest thing is how it happened in the first place.
00:15:41.000The wildest thing how it happened in the first place is because it was all...
00:15:44.000William Randolph Hearst and Harry Anslinger.
00:15:47.000And so what happened was William Randolph Hearst, who owned Hearst Publications, he also owned not just newspapers but he owned paper mills and he owned forests.
00:15:57.000So he had all these forests that they would cut down the wood and use it to make paper.
00:16:02.000Well, if they were going to transfer over to hemp, this is going to be very costly.
00:16:07.000And the cover of Popular Science magazine in, I think it was 1930, find out what year that cover was.
00:16:14.000It says, Because they came up with a new machine, and it was called a decorticator.
00:16:21.000And this new device was a device that allows you to effectively process the hemp fiber in a much quicker and easier way.
00:16:28.000So it's this machine that grinds it up.
00:16:30.000And so once they do this, they go, oh boy, we figured out, they've solved this problem of hemp.
00:17:17.000So once they had this ability to really quickly turn it into fibers, then big industry starts getting involved.
00:17:25.000And what they start doing is they start making these stories and putting them in the newspaper about Mexicans and black people smoking this new drug called marijuana and raping white women.
00:17:39.000And marijuana was not Marijuana was a wild Mexican tobacco.
00:17:48.000It was a slang for a wild Mexican tobacco.
00:19:53.000In this film, you will see the ease with which this vicious plant can be grown in your neighbor's yard, rolled into harmless-looking cigarettes, hidden in an innocent shoe or watch case.
00:20:06.000In this startling film, you will see dumpsters lure children to destruction.
00:21:45.000And it's ridiculous that it's always existed.
00:21:47.000And that it was going on almost 100 years ago.
00:21:51.000And what's also important about it is, the problem with something like that is that now you don't trust the media, right?
00:21:57.000Now if you don't trust the media, and then you go out and try it yourself, you don't have real accurate information.
00:22:02.000Because now there's like this, there's these narratives that have been created that aren't based on truth, and so you don't know where to go.
00:22:09.000You don't know what's real and what's not, and then you have people that tell you it's harmless, and then you have people tell you, well, there's people like me that go, Nah, because I'm like, it's not harmless.
00:23:01.000Because if one group is saying that this is a Schedule I chemical and it's very dangerous, then all your friends are just smoking weed and going to the movies.
00:23:16.000And because we don't have the ability to just honestly talk about things without everything getting so weird and like the hemp thing, like having a hemp flag, like this is a problem with the DEA. Hey guys, don't you have fentanyl to worry about?
00:24:23.000I know so many people that take it for like aches and pains and And it actually helps some people with anxiety, too, which is interesting.
00:24:30.000The conflict here is, as you know, you know, as majority of states in the country have legalized it in some fashion, whether it's medicinal or recreational or whatever, all these different levels.
00:24:40.000But because of the federal prohibition, essentially, you know, you've got banking.
00:24:47.000It is a multi, I don't know, multi hundred million dollar industry, at least at this point.
00:24:53.000But in order to be able to conduct business with the bank, the bank and the business owner faces a potential federal charge of a crime.
00:25:03.000And so it's, you know, the second, third, fourth order of effects of this scheduling of cannabis is very, very far-reaching and creating a worse problem, which, you know, is, you know, okay, so we do this on the black market,
00:25:19.000does this just become a cash industry, or where does this go?
00:25:22.000Yeah, and the problem also is by having some states have it legal and some states have it illegal, then you still open up a market for illegal sales in the country, and what happens is the cartel comes in and they start growing it on public lands.
00:25:38.000I had a guy on the podcast, his name is John Norris, and he started off as a game warden.
00:25:43.000So he started off as a guy who's going to check fishing licenses and stuff.
00:25:47.000One day, they find that a stream has been diverted, and they're trying to figure out why, why the stream has dried up.
00:25:53.000So they make their way up the stream, and they find this irrigation system that's set up for an illegal marijuana grow up in the middle of public land in California.
00:26:06.000So it goes from him being a game ward to now they have dogs and bulletproof vests.
00:26:10.000They're getting in shootouts with the cartel.
00:26:12.000Because they're making millions of dollars, but they're using really dangerous chemicals and pesticides that are illegal to use on crops in America.
00:26:21.000They're just using that shit up there.
00:26:23.000So who knows what the fuck you're getting if you're living in one of these states that has illegal pot.
00:26:28.000Because when California changed the law and made marijuana legal recreationally, they made growing marijuana without a license.
00:27:02.000He said that, I think, believe, John said at the time of our podcast that 90% of all the marijuana that's being sold in the states where it's illegal is all from these grow-ups, a lot of them in California, on public land by the cartels.
00:27:34.000But if you keep everything illegal, you're going to just prop up the government of these countries that is allowing this stuff to come in and they're allowing people to grow it or they can't do anything about it because the cartel has so much money and so much power that the government is basically helpless.
00:27:55.000And it's being propped up by Americans.
00:28:14.000But also, if you don't do that, you're just going to empower our neighbors to the south who happen to be drug dealers, some of them, and they're making billions of dollars selling drugs to America.
00:28:26.000And you're killing kids at a rate higher than ever in recorded history.
00:29:50.000We went out to film a little mini-documentary about what's happening at the border in San Diego.
00:29:57.000There's a lot of attention being put on Texas and Arizona, but California's border is a whole different dynamic, both because they've got You know, a long stretch of border where you're crossing in and you're going straight to mountains, you know, big open spaces.
00:30:13.000But then you've got the very dense urban corridor, I suppose, where people, whether they're coming in through the water or they're just coming across the border, where they can disappear into neighborhoods very quickly.
00:30:28.000But there's a few things that were very eye-opening and interesting.
00:30:31.000Number one is we know that the borders are open because we know how many people are coming through.
00:30:36.000The numbers that are being reported, I think, is close to 9 million now just over the course of the Biden administration.
00:30:47.000People coming in and we were just driving around and we saw groups of people gathering in different locations from all over the world, illegal immigrants, and seemingly happy and going to the place where they were told to go or they knew that Border Patrol was going to pick them up.
00:31:02.000And knowing that they will get processed, claim asylum, and most of them will be out with a plane ticket anywhere in the country within 24 hours.
00:31:16.000And I've talked to some of the Border Patrol agents and they're not allowed to say anything on the record, but just the frustration that's being felt where they can't even do their job.
00:31:27.000What is the justification for the plane ticket?
00:31:32.000They don't have the ability to house people where they are.
00:31:44.000And I went and I talked to a lot of them.
00:31:46.000I sat down and talked with people from Brazil, from Egypt, from Colombia, from Venezuela, from different parts of Eastern Europe, people from all over the world coming here with the known plan in this well-oiled machine.
00:32:03.000And I'm talking about this because it is very directed to the cartel, directly connected to the cartel's We're good to go.
00:32:25.000And so we spent a couple of days at the border there and then went into the city of San Diego and went and started talking to some homeless people and talking to people who were clearly, clearly extremely high on multiple drugs.
00:32:42.000And we're walking around with one of the community relations police officers there who's just plainclothes.
00:32:47.000He's walking around and keeping an eye on what's going on there.
00:32:50.000But we talked to this one guy who had a crack pipe in his hand.
00:32:53.000He seemed barely conscious, but he was engaging in a long conversation with us.
00:34:31.000It's the only thing good that I have in my life is when I get high.
00:34:35.000And if you take that away, my life is terrible.
00:34:38.000And if you've been an addict for a long time, the longer you're an addict, in fact, the more that's true, right?
00:34:43.000Because the more your life is a wreck, and then you're forced to deal with it when you come off and you realize, like, oh my god, I'm 45 years old and I'm a heroin addict.
00:35:12.000And they seek comfort in failure because they've become accustomed to failure.
00:35:16.000So the pressure of doing well and of staying sober and keeping healthy, it's almost too much.
00:35:24.000Just the maintaining, the psychological, the anxiety, all the fear that comes with failing, that you just want to fail just so you can just feel comfortable again.
00:35:40.000The human mind is so susceptible to so many different things, whether it's cults or addictions or, you know, I mean, we're very weirdly vulnerable to a lot of, like, very strange things.
00:35:54.000And a lot of these things, I think, a lot of the mental issues are accentuated by social media.
00:36:25.000When that becomes your reality, dealing with people and perceptions and, you know, measuring yourself against whatever you're seeing and all of it, and you slip out of the real world and building real relationships and friendships and having real conversations.
00:36:46.000And we're very, very fortunate because especially young girls today, and Jonathan Haidt's work on this has been really interesting.
00:36:54.000His book, The Cobbling of the American Mind is a great one.
00:36:57.000And it's all about what you could see, like, exactly when social media is invented, all this self-harm and all the suicidal thoughts, suicidal ideation and suicide all goes up for girls.
00:37:14.000It's such a bizarre thing that a person can get super-duper famous just dancing on an app that goes online and then they make millions of dollars and they're like your age.
00:37:26.000And you're like, what's wrong with me?
00:37:52.000There's this guy, they were doing this study on AI girlfriends where people have interactions with AI. This guy was spending $10,000 a month on his AI girlfriend.
00:38:47.000The sense of purpose is, like, so attractive to people that there's so many kids that want to be, like, so righteous, and they just want to, like, criticize and yell at other people who don't feel the same way they do.
00:38:59.000And so, like, you're seeing these Israel versus Palestine things on school campuses.
00:39:20.000I oppose it on the grounds of free speech and civil liberties.
00:39:24.000Speaking of fomenting fear, this is one of those pieces of legislation that's, if you just read the talking points for those who support it, and it's supported by many people in Congress on both sides of the aisle, you think like,
00:39:41.000oh my gosh, we've got a national security risk and you've got concern for our kids and all of this other stuff.
00:39:46.000But when you actually read the language and understand the implications of what this legislation does, it's not really about TikTok at all.
00:39:55.000It's about government being able to choose what platforms are acceptable and what are not, and what we as Americans are able to either get information from or put information out.
00:40:09.000And then you look at, okay, well, if they're giving themselves that authority, how will it then be enforced?
00:40:15.000Then you get into the civil liberties concern of the Fourth Amendment of government overreach and trying to figure out, okay, well, now I'm going to have to look into your phone and figure out if you're the guy who's using the VPN to illegally download this app.
00:40:30.000Then you're looking at You know, the designation is that if you have 20% or more ownership stake or stake in a business that has been designated by our government to be illegal because of its association with a foreign adversary,
00:40:52.000there are a few countries listed there, but the president would have the power to designate any other country a foreign adversary without any kind of, you know...
00:41:02.000Congress wouldn't have to take action.
00:41:07.000You are also implicated if you are someone who the government determines to be influenced by or connected with one of these countries that is a foreign adversary.
00:41:17.000And so, you know, Elon Musk has talked about this.
00:41:20.000It is not outside of the realm of the—not only possible, but the probable—that if they wanted to say, okay, well, you know, Elon Musk is doing business with this country that we don't like, and oh, he also owns this platform called X— I think Ron Paul said it best when he said that this legislation is the most,
00:41:49.000and I'm paraphrasing, but he said it's the most egregious violation of civil liberty since the Patriot Act was passed in the wake of 9-11.
00:41:57.000And when you look at the arguments that are being made around both of those pushes, they are very eerily similar in invoking national security concerns.
00:42:07.000And the language and the way that's written is intentionally vague that puts far more power into the hands of the executive branch, just like the Patriot Act did, to single-handedly say, well, this is a good guy and this is a bad guy.
00:42:23.000And that has a direct implication on Americans.
00:42:28.000And wasn't there another recent thing that passed that allows more observation of people through cell phones?
00:43:05.000Section 702 of FISA gives our government the authority to surveil foreign actors, essentially, to try to identify terrorist threats.
00:43:17.000But part of that is they have the ability to capture all of the conversations.
00:43:24.000If you talk to somebody in another country that they're interested in, they can then go in and capture all of your information as an American citizen.
00:44:11.000I think it was Benjamin Franklin who said, if you are choosing security over liberty, you will neither be secure, nor will you have liberty.
00:44:22.000That's not an actual quote, but that's basically the point here.
00:44:25.000And that's the false choice that so many of these politicians are forcing on the American people is...
00:44:31.000You can either be less free and more safe, or you can be more free and, oh, by the way, you're going to invite more terrorist attacks or more national security incursions on our country.
00:44:42.000And it's just BS. It is BS. It's also very un-American.
00:44:57.000Like, you know, if you thought of them as something other than a three-letter name, like DEA, CIA, NSA, just a bunch of people, you would go, well, why is this like the DEA? Why is this 10,000 people?
00:45:13.000Telling all these other people what to do.
00:45:15.000There's way more of them than there are of us.
00:45:17.000If it was just in this room and Jamie turns out to be the cop and he says, hey, I'm going to put you two in prison because I heard you like hemp.
00:46:07.000This is the problem is that, you know, every elected official swears an oath to support and defend the Constitution.
00:46:14.000Yet, as we saw with this most recent example, they are so ready to undermine our Fourth Amendment rights in the Constitution that I know some of them are doing it with good intention, but without actually considering that the challenge and responsibility of those in government and those who have this power is to strike that correct balance between ensuring that our liberties and our constitutional rights Are protected.
00:46:42.000You swear an oath to do this when you take this job while also ensuring, okay, well, we can do both and we must do both.
00:46:51.000We can be safe and secure and also be able to live free without worrying about every time you pick up your phone or you make a phone call wondering if the government is surveilling us.
00:47:01.000And then you add on to that what's happening now where, you know, like January 6, for example.
00:47:07.000I was working out in the gym, a Marine Corps gym in Hawaii down the street from our house, bumped into a guy who I met.
00:47:15.000It's a long story, but I met him when the Rocks stunt double was getting his traditional Samoan tattoo.
00:47:54.000But how is it that, you know, years later, years later, they go and find this guy and his family in a rural Mormon community in Laie in Hawaii.
00:50:21.000And these two dopes who just like, just dumbasses, like ADIQ dumbasses that just get tricked into this fucking, they cosplay and they go, we're going to kidnap her.
00:51:23.000So I've talked to different people than the FBI and what they've shared is that there's kind of like a bifurcation in the agency where there are people who are really, really angry and frustrated about the politicization of the FBI that's occurring by the heads.
00:51:40.000And then there are others who are just like, full send, we're on board, let's go.
00:51:46.000And it's creating a lot of friction and a lot of fear within the agency.
00:51:53.000I don't know if the agency had people get confused.
00:51:55.000That's the CIA. That's probably some similar things going on there.
00:51:58.000But within the FBI, a lot of fear that you got to watch what you say around even your own colleagues and your own peers.
00:52:57.000And you have people that go in with good intentions and they get corrupted by systems that are corrupt.
00:53:03.000That's where, for the, you know, across, whether it's the FBI, the Department of Justice, all of these, it matters, you know, who's in charge.
00:53:11.000These are all civilian-led organizations.
00:53:54.000I just saw one on Instagram the other day from like 1985 where a newscaster is, I think it might have even been black and white, and she's saying, the climate change scientists tell us that we may only have 10 years before the earth is destroyed.
00:54:14.000And then whoever made this clip, they juxtaposed her clip with one from Bernie Sanders saying the exact same thing with a different date, you know, how many decades later.
00:54:26.000And the problem is, when you fear monger, you distract people from the real issue.
00:54:54.000Just imagine how psychotic it is to have a species that goes into another dimension that it's not a resident of and uses nets and just takes everything it can get and catches a bunch of dolphins and shit in there that it doesn't want anyway and they all die.
00:55:45.000And so that is getting ignored because everyone is talking about fossil fuels.
00:55:51.000I wonder how much of this is pushed by foreign countries through social media.
00:55:58.000Because there is a thing that you can do and nudge conversations in a certain way with bots and with fake statistics and with fear-mongering.
00:56:16.000And I think through TikTok and through probably Facebook and YouTube and all these different things, and Instagram, I'm sure, there's countless bots that are putting out videos and pushing narratives and find their way into your algorithm, and they affect the way people think about things.
00:56:34.000If you go to Chinese TikTok, it's all Academic accomplishments, martial arts demonstrations, science achievements, and you can't go on after 10 p.m.
00:57:08.000I had dinner the other night with a family.
00:57:12.000It was during the holiday of Passover, and this question came up about what would happen if another 9-11-style terrorist attack or some major...
00:58:06.000It should be a serious concern also when you really take into consideration how many genuinely dumb people there are.
00:58:13.000And when you have a situation like October 7th in Israel, I saw within days, before Israel did what they did in Palestine, within days, I saw people justifying the attacks on October 7th because of the treatment that Israel has given to the Palestinians.
00:58:33.000That's crazy to say that you think people should be indiscriminately shot and killed and just in mass at a fucking rave, like paratrooping.
00:58:42.000You think that's okay because of what Israel's done?
00:59:00.000And that's where, you know, some of the things that they're chanting at, that these protesters are chanting at Columbia University and some of the other ones.
00:59:08.000We hope that October 7th happens 10,000 times over, they say.
00:59:52.000They've infiltrated universities, you know, the famous Yuri Besbinov speech from 1984, which is crazy when you hear it today, because he called it.
01:00:01.000He knew it was going to happen, and it's happening, and it's happening from college campuses outward.
01:00:20.000They're a little bit unrealistic, and they're all captured by this status game that's going on on campus where you're trying to be the most radical, like, oh, he's so radically pro-Palestine.
01:00:32.000You know, and then that really becomes a thing.
01:00:34.000You become virtuous, and you become attractive.
01:00:37.000You become interesting without actually being interesting, just because you have this rabid adherence to an ideology that's right now in vogue.
01:01:00.000This is the question about things like tick-tock like and and Twitter and all of them all of them because I guarantee you it's not just foreign countries kids I Guarantee you there are people in this country that are using it.
01:01:16.000Yes, I know I guarantee you people do it to try to influence the way people think about things and When you see posts, I've seen posts multiple times saying outrageous things.
01:01:29.000And I'll just, okay, let me click on this guy.
01:01:31.000And it's usually some letters and numbers and name maybe and a bunch of numbers.
01:01:36.000And then I click and I realize, oh, fake person.
01:01:55.000There's no question that this is happening and the social media algorithms are feeding it and playing right into it in our attention and our minds are the commodity.
01:03:13.000And that's the fallacy and that's kind of the falsehood of the argument for people who are pushing that TikTok ban bill is if they're claiming they're concerned about data security and privacy and making sure that our data is protected.
01:03:31.000Because every single one of these social media or big tech companies is collecting as much as they possibly can.
01:03:37.000And if you think they're not selling it to the highest bidder, whether they be an American company or a foreign company, of course they are.
01:05:04.000A groundbreaking move that has sent shockwaves through the biotech industry.
01:05:07.00023andMe, the leading personal geonomics and biotechnology companies, officially announced the sale of its entire DNA database to the Chinese government for an astonishing $10 billion.
01:05:47.000It's humans selling other humans' data.
01:05:49.000Whether you call them Facebook or Google or the DEA, it's just a bunch of people.
01:05:54.000And if they don't have to follow the same rules that you follow, then we have real problems.
01:05:59.000And when you have entire groups of people that are dependent upon technology that's controlled almost entirely by one ideology, And then you let the government get involved, like they did with Twitter, and you see with the Twitter files,
01:06:17.000You let the government have a back door, and they started sneaking around and telling you what to do and what not to do, and you were complying?
01:06:25.000People were telling other people that they couldn't have experts from Harvard and Stanford talk about medical problems.
01:06:57.000The FBI is calling and saying, hey, we'd really like you to do X, Y, or Z. In my mind, I'd be like, okay, what am I going to be investigated for outside of this if I say no?
01:07:08.000What are the consequences going to be?
01:07:10.000If you're a person working at Twitter, this is not you.
01:08:03.000If you're working at Twitter, and this old Twitter, and you're like super woke, and you've just been drinking lattes and going into the meditation room, then all of a sudden you get an email from the FBI like, I don't want to fuck up this job.
01:08:28.000You could call them the FBI and call the DNA. They're human beings and human beings that have that kind of power over other human beings in a country that's supposed to value freedom.
01:08:44.000And that's where this isn't just like some rogue FBI agent doing this or some rogue...
01:08:49.000You know, bureaucrat in an agency who's going and doing this.
01:08:52.000This is an expressed policy coming from the Biden administration in this example to go and use big tech to silence certain people's voices and to decide who does the government want to be heard and who needs to be silenced.
01:09:11.000Obviously, we could talk all day about the cozy relationship that many politicians have with big pharma, and it's not a surprise that they're going to act in favor of big pharma rather than in favor of the truth or free speech or people's health and well-being.
01:09:30.000And is the Biden administration's policy to decide that they are the arbiter of what is misinformation, disinformation, what is information, what is true and what is not, and that they will use the tools available to them both within the government as well as outside of the government in the case of big tech and social media to be able to enforce that.
01:09:51.000And that's really the, you know, for people who aren't paying attention to this stuff at home and are just trying to live their lives and, you know, go to work and take care of their kids and just live their life, it's easy to fall victim to, like, well,
01:10:07.000the government wants what's best for us and they don't want us to be manipulated by misinformation or disinformation.
01:10:12.000And so this is the line that they use.
01:10:18.000So once again, we're going to take away some of your freedom and some of your privacy and tell you who you should be listening to and what information you should be getting.
01:10:51.000And then they stand there and say, well, we are the champions for women, if they cannot even accept objective truth.
01:10:59.000We're living in the strangest of strange times.
01:11:01.000I also think that a lot of that stuff is being accentuated by social media, manipulated intentionally, because I think if you can just get those narratives out there enough, That affects the gullible people, that affects sensitive people, that affects people on the spectrum,
01:11:16.000it affects a lot of people, and then they start getting rewarded for leaning into one type of ideology, and then it's affecting people.
01:11:26.000We are affected by our environment, and to pretend otherwise is just silly, especially when you're talking about young people.
01:11:33.000Young people are particularly susceptible to propaganda, which is why they have young people wear suicide vests.
01:12:00.000And it's just as sick to try to like indoctrinate them into these crazy ideologies because It's just people want other people to join their fucking team.
01:12:16.000We're seeing the fruits of the shift in our education system away from actually teaching about the Constitution and the founding documents and the Federalist Papers and the thought process behind that went into forming the Constitution and the Bill of Rights.
01:12:36.000In our schools, basic government, basic 101 on what is this country really about?
01:12:41.000What is the foundation that we were built upon?
01:12:44.000And what does it mean to you in your everyday life?
01:12:48.000And talking about the Bill of Rights and the First Amendment and going down the list.
01:12:51.000Because that has been absent largely from our education system for so long, it creates, again, this vulnerability of young people being susceptible.
01:13:03.000They're not rooted in an ideology of freedom and what that means in our lives and why it's important, why we will fight to defend and protect it.
01:13:13.000And so then they're like, well, I don't know.
01:13:15.000Maybe what Hamas is offering is a superior ideology or superior value system than what we have here in America, which a lot of these kids are saying.
01:13:27.000Whether they realize fully what it is or not, they are falling victim to that ideology, that radicalismist ideology, which would be completely oppressive in the lives that they are trying to live here.
01:13:43.000Yeah, the whole proposal behind it is best highlighted by the meme, Queers for Palestine.
01:14:25.000Well, that's that's where, you know, the this again, Hamas had this whole thing planned, like, you know, gaining the compassion, the sympathy of the world.
01:14:36.000How did they think that they were going to do that?
01:14:39.000That they knew how Israel would react and they were ready with social media and all of the means of communication to play on the sympathies of people, the compassion and kind-hearted people around the world.
01:14:55.000And turn people's attention away from the 1,200 people that were murdered and killed and the people that were raped on that attack on October 7th.
01:15:08.000Their goal being ultimately to influence populations around the world towards this Islamist ideology that they want to govern the world under Islamic rule, under Sharia law.
01:15:22.000And we've seen already how it's been successful in some parts of the world, even in Europe and France.
01:15:27.000Somebody was saying that I think it's 25% of France is already living under Sharia law.
01:15:38.000And so this ideological war that's being waged is not—it's being waged by one side, and there's not a counter-narrative.
01:15:48.000There's not a counter-war being waged on the other side to defeat it with a superior ideology of freedom and what we value as a society.
01:15:55.000And that puts— This mission and this effort, and it's not just Hamas, obviously, Al-Qaeda and ISIS and other terrorist organizations around the world, they all have that same objective, which poses the greatest short and long-term threat to people who value freedom and to civilization.
01:16:17.000And we're also so uniquely vulnerable in that we do have this sort of democracy.
01:16:27.000It's obviously heavily influenced by money.
01:16:32.000And then with the open borders, so you have all these people funneling into the country, and so you have an erosion of confidence.
01:17:01.000If I was going to try to destroy the country, that's how I would do it.
01:17:04.000If I was going to try to destroy the country, I would radicalize the kids, I would give them the stupidest ideas and run them in their head.
01:17:13.000Boys can be girls, girls can be boys, boys can compete against girls in sports if they think they're a girl.
01:17:20.000Queers for Palestine, you know, the death to the Jews, yell it out unironically.
01:18:13.000I was shocked, like everyone else, at not only their statements, but how every one of them sitting at that table on that day said almost the exact same thing.
01:18:23.000And knowing how much preparation, because when people come, I don't care who you are, but when you come and testify before Congress, you go through preparation.
01:18:31.000And if you're the president of an Ivy League university, you're gonna have a whole team of people sitting there telling you, okay, well, here are the questions you should probably be prepared to answer.
01:18:41.000The question that Elise Stefanik asked was not outside of the realm of like, here's what the frequently asked questions would be.
01:18:49.000And the fact that their answers were all the same and how they were smirking as they were giving that answer, I was very surprised by it.
01:19:00.000Maybe I shouldn't have been as surprised given what they're doing.
01:19:05.000I think we're sending our kids to cult camps.
01:21:15.000And how much of that money is coming from China?
01:21:17.000And how much of the influence is coming from Russia?
01:21:19.000How much of the influence like in the past has shaped these people?
01:21:23.000So you have this system where academics go to school, they learn, they get indoctrinated and they start teaching and they never enter into the real world.
01:21:31.000And they make this cycle and those are the people that keep indoctrinating more people and now they're infesting these social media apps and they're infesting all of these tech companies.
01:21:43.000And everybody else is like, what are you doing?
01:21:47.000But it's all coming from universities.
01:21:50.000It's coming from the kids that get indoctrinated in these ideologies.
01:21:54.000And I remember when I first started talking about this in like 2015 or 16, whenever the Jordan Peterson thing was happening, at first it was Brett Weinstein and Evergreen College.
01:22:03.000And people were like, why do you care what's happening in these obscure colleges?
01:22:23.000They believe that you should have a day where you tell white people they have to stay home when it used to be that it was an appreciation of people of color so they could take the day off and they would get paid.
01:22:47.000But telling people, white people, they have to stay home and then threatening them with baseball bats if they don't have people roaming the parking lot with bats.
01:22:54.000When I saw that, I was like, this is crazy.
01:22:56.000And so many people were saying, why do you care?
01:22:58.000Well, they're going to go out in the world.
01:23:02.000And if this is happening there, it's not an isolated situation.
01:23:32.000The problem is not everyone is seeing what's really happening.
01:23:36.000You still have the AOCs of the world and many people within the leadership of the Democratic Party This is the direction we are headed.
01:23:47.000And that's a very dangerous thing for so many reasons, but obviously because they're in a position of power and how they're using that power and how they're undermining the rule of law and choosing, again, who gets to speak freely and who gets to go and do whatever they want,
01:24:03.000break the law, disturb the peace, acts of violence, no, because what you think that their cause is justified.
01:24:12.000But meanwhile, others who would do the very same thing would be charged with a crime.
01:24:17.000Imagine if AOC got to write history books and they said, why do people sneak into America in 2024?
01:24:42.000Maybe some of the stops along the way, they only speak Chinese, and they have Chinese signs, and it seems like there's a concerted effort to get people in from China.
01:25:10.000Forget the guys who go in and steal 50 Apple iPhones from the store and run out and jump in their car or all of these other things.
01:25:19.000It's hard to believe that a person who's a member of Congress can say that with a straight face.
01:25:25.000Well, the best one was, do you ever see the conversation that she had with the news reporter where the reporter was asking her to clarify her thoughts on Israel and Palestine?
01:26:14.000There are these girls who, again, I don't know where this video is, I'm sure it's everywhere now, but they left Columbia to go and stand with the students protesting at NYU. And somebody said, well, why are you here?
01:26:30.000They're like, oh, we're here to stand in solidarity with the protesters.
01:26:34.000What is NYU doing that you're protesting?
01:26:48.000They're just out there being virtuous.
01:26:50.000Somebody asked us to come, so we're just coming to stand in solidarity.
01:26:53.000Well, there's this thing that you can do now where if you just yell out the thing that's popular, now you become cooler than you really are.
01:27:14.000These were major drivers for me in leaving the insanity of what has become today's Democratic Party and where I have seen and heard directly from so many people who are or have already woken up to that fact of literally just being common-sense-minded Americans who are just...
01:27:55.000It's the consequence of money being involved in politics and that seems like that web is so deep and those roots run so deep that to try to stop that now is almost impossible.
01:28:08.000It's almost like the only way to solve this is to give corporations conscience.
01:28:14.000It's like the only way to solve this is You've got to figure out, like, who is funding what and why?
01:28:23.000Why is so much money being spent on this versus that?
01:28:28.000And one of the things about AI is that If AI is asked at a certain point in time, when it becomes sentient or really super powerful, what is the solution between the conflict between Ukraine and Russia?
01:28:45.000And AI gives a real comprehensive analysis of the US government-funded coup from 2014 and how NATO has been moving arms closer to Russia.
01:28:58.000Lays it all out and like this is the definitive objective.
01:29:02.000No ideology, no bullshit reason why this is happening.
01:29:06.000And these are the companies that are pushing the conflict and this is the amount of money they're making from it.
01:29:11.000And here's the amount of money that's missing because there's corruption involved in Ukraine.
01:29:16.000As much as people don't want to admit, one of the wildest ones was Candace Owens on Twitter where the New York Times They tweet at her like, what evidence do you have of corruption in Ukraine?
01:29:27.000And she's like, from your own fucking newspaper?
01:29:50.000And it probably was not from Israel, but was actually one of the Islamic terrorists had launched a bomb and it accidentally landed in the parking lot.
01:30:00.000And no effort to actually, truly, not in the fine print on the back page of the paper, but actually make sure that they got the facts right.
01:30:09.000Well, and certainly no equivalent coverage of the actual true story versus the original story, which you should do.
01:30:18.000It's like, yeah, maybe you got bad information.
01:30:29.000I mean, it's the same reason why with Julian Assange, you know, back when, you know, his criminal charges were first coming up, they were saying, hey, this is a threat to journalism, that you can't suppress the free press.
01:30:46.000It is a violation of the First Amendment.
01:30:48.000And if you go after Julian Assange today...
01:31:09.000They have become, unfortunately, a political arm of the Democrat elite.
01:31:14.000And it's the same reason why they stopped reporting on actual corruption in Ukraine, because they get, okay, what's the narrative that we've got to push?
01:31:22.000And they're not going to go against it.
01:31:25.000Not allow facts and journalism to get in the way of that.
01:32:21.000But even if that's a pretty tight turnaround when you look at that, but that doesn't negate all of the other provisions within that law that further violate our civil liberties.
01:32:44.000But I had him on the podcast quite a while ago and he said that all this uproar over TikTok is total bullshit.
01:32:51.000He said what it is is the Chinese are eating our lunch.
01:32:55.000Like they've developed an app that is more addictive And collects data just like our apps do, and we don't like it.
01:33:03.000We don't like it because their one is way better.
01:33:06.000And so they're trying to do something to shut it down because they're using it to influence us and like, hey, we're the only ones allowed to do that.
01:33:14.000And when he said that, I was like, I never really considered that because I always was like, oh, there's TikTok is like really bad.
01:33:21.000You've got to like read the fine print, and it is bad.
01:33:24.000I mean if you look at just the terms of service like when you're agreeing, you know, the conditions that you agree to, like they get to monitor your keystrokes.
01:33:32.000So that means they can probably monitor your passwords.
01:33:36.000They can probably check out all your emails.
01:33:38.000They get to monitor other computers that are connected to the network even if they don't have TikTok on them.
01:33:50.000When you and I are having a conversation and then all of a sudden we talk about Toyota trucks and there's an app for a Toyota truck, like, hey, did you guys know that we were talking about, are you listening, Google?
01:34:15.000Yeah, I mean, it makes total sense, of course.
01:34:19.000Elon and X, well, Elon specifically, was the only one who stood up amongst our American big tech companies to say, no, this is a very bad bill.
01:34:29.000The others, to my knowledge, were very, very silent, or they were actually coming out in support of it.
01:34:38.000The other piece of that is, other than X and TikTok, the Biden administration has been very successful at working with Google and Meta, Facebook, Instagram, in being able to control quote-unquote disinformation and information.
01:34:58.000So when you look at from a government standpoint, well, if you're concerned about data security and privacy, why aren't you doing it across the board and treating every social media company that Americans use with that same standard?
01:35:11.000Well, maybe they're just going after the ones that they can't actually control and intimidate into doing their work for them, which is why it makes sense why Elon Musk and others would say, well, of course, if today it's TikTok, then why wouldn't it be X tomorrow?
01:35:27.000It's interesting to me that people don't seem to understand the value and importance of a guy like Elon, who's this wild billionaire character who likes to dunk on people.
01:35:38.000Like, that guy being like, did you see that thing that he posted the other day?
01:36:29.000I mean, his brain is a fucking tornado of information just flying around all the time, and I think it helps him to be able to just fuck around and be silly.
01:36:39.000But he was the only one that recognized that there's a real problem if you have the entire narrative Being controlled by one ideology through all the social media apps, and that's what's going on.
01:37:18.000I don't know how it is now, but I guarantee some of that was fake, too.
01:37:22.000I guarantee when they came up with these alternative platforms that people wanted to squash the idea of having people that were free outside of Twitter and Facebook that were reasonable people that just wanted objective conversation,
01:38:36.000Yeah, and so then you don't have an alternative, and you go back to Twitter, and you just deal with the fact that you're being censored, and you deal with the fact that if you're a left-wing person, you can say the most outrageous shit, even call for violence against people.
01:38:47.000Twitter caught selling data to government spies while complaining about surveillance.
01:39:05.000It uses AI technology to constantly monitor public activity on social media and other parts of the web.
01:39:10.000In doing so, its clients often law enforcement can receive customized real-time alerts on what's brewing online, which helps them to respond to natural disasters or, more ominously, spy on protests, notes The Intercept.
01:39:27.000Does allow them real-time alerts of what's brewing online.
01:39:31.000So you're not saying they're censoring people.
01:39:33.000You're saying that they're allowing them to look at data.
01:39:37.000So that data could be like how many people are posting about some sort of a protest where they want to burn down a church or whatever the fuck it is.
01:39:48.000You're talking about a different thing than banning people from posting things, especially these people that are experts from Harvard and MIT and This is a different thing.
01:40:08.000It says, the story revealed the surveillance firm pays for special access to a fire hose of data from Twitter.
01:40:15.000I'd be curious about what that fire hose of data is.
01:40:20.000It says, data miner has a unique contractual relationship with Twitter whereby they have real-time access to the full stream of all publicly available tweets.
01:40:30.000But it's just publicly available tweets that are already available.
01:40:34.000So it's like a very high-level search function?
01:40:37.000A company representative sent an email to the government agency per the report.
01:41:09.000Curating the tweets that are coming into your feed.
01:41:11.000That's part of what he's been complaining about online is how many people, and they blocked access to many programs that did have access to the API because it costs money for them every time someone's taking that, so they just kind of cut it all off.
01:41:24.000Like I used to use TweetDeck to look at Twitter all the time.
01:43:36.000It's SMS. And so now they're going to adopt RCS. So the idea is, since you can't have iMessage on everything, at least you'll have encryption and you'll be able to send large file sizes.
01:44:36.000The thing with kids, I think with teenagers, see if this is true, I believe I read that it was something like 86% of all teenagers, it was some high number, of all teenagers use iPhones.
01:44:49.000Like, you're shunned if you use an Android.
01:45:07.00087% of teens in the USA have an iPhone, while 88% expect an iPhone to be their next phone, according to a survey from investment firm Piper Sandler.
01:46:46.000What they did is they took a blurry image of the moon and they put it on a desktop computer and then took a photo with the camera of the blurry image on the desktop computer and it filled it in and made it pretty.
01:48:37.000I tried using the Google Translate app when I was down at the border and talking to different people from different parts of the world and it sucked.
01:48:48.000It's like the intent I think was for that to happen is like you just turn on the microphone and then I could speak and they could see in the screen like it's translating into their language and then they could respond in their language and you're just seeing it play out real time but it didn't work.
01:50:25.000But it is what they're saying is the most secure means of communication.
01:50:30.000Obviously, technology is never 100% secure.
01:50:33.000But the fact that it does not have the same ad ID numbers that every one of our other phones has, Apple, Samsung, whatever, makes it so that we are able to protect more of our information than we would otherwise.
01:50:50.000Right, but do you get to use apps with that?
01:51:49.000Or you would say, look, the kind of people that want a phone like this, these rah-rah-fuck-the-government people, these type of people that might get visited by the FBI, give them a phone, call it the Patriot phone or whatever the fuck you want to call it.
01:52:10.000So I asked them, it sounds like this is the perfect kind of phone for people in the military or people who are conducting different kinds of operations because of all of these protections and so on and so forth.
01:52:21.000And they said they're intentionally not selling to the U.S. government because they don't want that doubt to be in people's minds that this is some kind of op that's happening that will allow some kind of surveillance to take place.
01:53:44.000Because when you look at the interconnectedness between, you know, Tesla and you look at obviously the power element and then the car element and then you look at the content platform that they are building X into,
01:54:01.000like the vision that they have for it to be the one-stop shop, not only for all different kinds of media, but for, you know, payment and interaction and business and commerce and everything else.
01:54:14.000It's interesting when you look at that direction of connectivity.
01:54:17.000It is also interesting that if you have a Tesla, and I have one, I love it.
01:56:30.000Freedom of the Press Foundation acted as Signal's fiscal sponsor.
01:56:33.000Between 2013 and 2016, the project received grants from the Knight Foundation, the Shuttleworth Foundation, and almost $3 million from the U.S. government.
01:56:53.000Article claims signals origins as a U.S. government asset are...
01:57:01.000Asset are public record and a lack of funding is because of the CIA? Found this article that makes it claim that Signal's origins as a U.S. government asset are a matter of extensive public record even if the scope and scale of the funding provided has until now.
01:57:18.000Does anyone here know what public records they're referring to here?
01:57:22.000It says if so, does anyone have links to these public records?
01:57:39.000But Tucker said that he was communicating through Signal and that the government contacted him and said, we know that you're setting up a meeting with Putin.
01:58:25.000We need to go and capture all of Tucker's data.
01:58:27.000For example, I have no idea if this actually happened, but let's say that's the scenario.
01:58:32.000That court, and this is public information, that court approves 99.9999999% of all requests that the government makes to go in and surveil American citizens.
01:58:43.000It's essentially a rubber stamp, which is exactly the problem.
01:58:47.000That's where I could foresee, okay, well, Tucker's communicating on Signal.
01:58:52.000This surveillance law that just was strengthened recently when Congress passed it and Biden signed it into law allows that to happen.
01:59:03.000So Signal, unplug phone, all that stuff.
01:59:07.000If that's the case, if they have the ability to read signal, don't you think they have the ability to read every single piece of information that gets sent from your phone?
01:59:44.000An interesting thing about, I asked this same question about this unplugged phone.
01:59:50.000And if you're using, which I hadn't heard before about any other app, but if you're using their version of Signal, their, you know, texting app that you can do calls and FaceTime and whatever through with another app on another unplugged phone,
02:00:06.000Every time you connect a call or you send a text message, it generates a new encryption key.
02:00:12.000Versus Signal, which is when you download it and you set up your account or whatever, that is your key.
02:00:20.000But would you have to have an unplugged phone for me to talk to you in that encrypted app?
02:01:26.000Never acknowledged in any serious way by the mainstream media.
02:01:29.000Signals origins as a U.S. government asset or a matter of extensive public record, even if the scope and the scale of the funding provided has until now been secret.
02:01:37.000The apt brainchild of shadowy tech guru, Moxie Marlinspike, by the way.
02:01:59.000In 2013, by his now-defunct Open Whisper Systems, the company never published financial statements or disclosed the identities of its funders at any point during its operation.
02:02:10.000Some's involved in developing, launching, and running a message app used by countless people globally will nonetheless be surely significant.
02:02:18.000The newly published financial records indicate signals operating costs for 2023 alone are $40 million and projected to rise to $50 million by 2025. Rosenfeld boasted in 2018 that OWS never took VC venture capital funding or sought investment at any point,
02:02:38.000though mysteriously failed to mention millions were provided by the Open Technology Fund.
02:05:12.000Yeah, it is very interesting because there are other phones that I've seen in the past who have tried this and not succeeded.
02:05:19.000And I don't know whether it was a virtue of the time in our country where people maybe just weren't that interested in having a secure means of communication or a secure phone.
02:05:30.000Well, people don't want the inconvenience and most people don't have to think about this, right?
02:05:34.000So they're not thinking about the government looking at everything they do.
02:06:25.000The problem is, when you have these walled gardens, like Apple's ecosystem, it's very difficult when you have everything over there, all your stuff, your email, your this, your that.
02:06:51.000It is interesting to me that more and more people are paying attention to government surveillance, their ability to reach into our private information, and who is allowing that to happen.
02:07:06.000I think they count on the majority of us not being aware.
02:08:24.000Don't you think if they really thought that the oceans were going to rise 100 feet in the next week, that the fucking insurance companies would go, hey, you can't buy that.
02:09:13.000Well, we had, you know, the active volcano that we've had on the Big Island for so long, but the actual...
02:09:18.000The flow that happened through neighborhoods when the floor of the volcanic shelf within the crater fell through, the lava went down and started flowing through all these lava tubes that were running beneath fully occupied neighborhoods.
02:09:36.000People had bought land and built houses in those neighborhoods knowing it was, I think it was a Lava 3 zone, which is like, you're building on top of an active volcano's lava tubes.
02:09:47.000You have to know that you're assuming that risk.
02:09:52.000When that happened, there were, you know, lava spouts and little mini craters that were formed within so many of these different communities.
02:10:08.000And as soon as there was a crack in the pavement, we'd be like, okay, we've got to mark that one down on the map.
02:10:13.000Because that is, you know, the next day you see the steam coming up as though it's a lava vent.
02:10:19.000And then within the next day or two, you would have an active, like, 20, 30, 40 feet in the air lava spilling up.
02:10:25.000Right in the middle of, like, a normal kind of suburbia-ish neighborhood.
02:10:30.000And this happened in over 20 different locations within this particular area.
02:10:37.000And it was mind-blowing to go there one day after the other after the other and see how quickly a beautiful little neighborhood turned into a complete bed of lava.
02:10:50.000So this then begs the question, like, oh, is your home insured?
02:10:55.000There was one insurance company in the entire world that would insure homes that were built in a Lava 3 zone.
02:12:08.000The remediation effort is still underway.
02:12:11.000And the biggest challenge for the families who were directly impacted by that, who were left homeless, is the fact that they still don't have anywhere to go.
02:12:20.000You know, they've been put up in Airbnbs or in hotel rooms for a period of time.
02:12:27.000On Maui, the hotels are like, hey, we need to be able to start welcoming in tourists back into the island.
02:12:36.000And so the governor is trying to work out a plan to be able to provide some form of semi-permanent housing for people.
02:12:42.000If they were to try to go out and rent a house on the market, it is purely unaffordable.
02:12:48.000And there are a number of families who are now faced with the tough decision of, do we just pick up and go and move our life out of Hawaii and to the mainland?
02:12:57.000Which is heartbreaking, given how many of those families—I mean, they've been in that community in West Maui or in Lahaina for generations— What is happening with the people that had mortgages?
02:13:07.000So if they had a mortgage and their home was burnt down and they haven't gotten money from the insurance company and they haven't been able to rebuild, do they still have to pay that mortgage while this is all going on?
02:13:17.000I haven't heard that raised as an issue.
02:13:20.000I would hope that the mortgage company would recognize what's going on, but that's a good question.
02:13:26.000I haven't heard it raised as an issue from either residents or as part of the conversation around housing for them.
02:13:39.000There are so many layers of toxins in the ground that have to be cleaned up and removed before people can go in and actually start to rebuild.
02:13:51.000But to speak of just the inspection and the permitting process and so forth...
02:13:55.000So the layers of toxins just from the fire?
02:13:58.000From the fire and you know you had like a gas station with underground fuel tanks that burned like completely to ash on the ground.
02:14:06.000The toxins that came from all you know different construction and and everything else that exists in the environment.
02:14:24.000This is the reason why they can't rebuild?
02:14:26.000Yeah, and they knew from the outset it was a known fact that it would take, I mean, if it only takes a year, that is an expedited timeline, is what I've been told.
02:15:19.000You know, I remember specifically when the fires had just happened, the White House brought in the director of FEMA to talk to the White House press corps, and someone asked the question, what are you, FEMA, what are you actually doing for the people who've been impacted by this tragedy?
02:15:36.000And the director stood there with a straight face and proudly said, well, we have provided a one-time payment of $700 to everyone who has been impacted by this fire or displaced by this fire.
02:15:48.000And that was her big announcement that she was there to make.
02:16:44.000And residents on Maui, they were being told, like, okay, well, hey, if you accept this kind of aid from FEMA, you are ceding some sense of your sovereignty or decision-making ability with regard to your land or your property.
02:16:59.000And all of the red tape, essentially, that caused a people, a community...
02:17:06.000Who are rightfully skeptical about government coming in and saying, okay, well, we're going to help you when that same government said, oh, yeah, hey, we may at that time, and the governor said this, and then he corrected himself later on, but he's like, oh, yeah, we're thinking about and talking about how we can turn this entire place,
02:17:23.000have the government take ownership of it and turn it into some kind of memorial or some kind of workforce housing.
02:17:30.000Which obviously made people really freaking mad to say like, well, who the hell are you to come in here and say, you're just going to take our land?
02:17:37.000You're just going to take it and do what you want with it?
02:17:39.000So they're obviously very skeptical and rightfully so about, you know, the fine print.
02:17:46.000What does it mean if I accept a few bucks here or there from the federal government?
02:17:50.000What power am I ceding to you to determine my future, the future of my family and our home?
02:17:55.000And unfortunately, the rest of the country has forgotten about it.
02:18:06.000One of the things that has just recently come out, first of all, the Maui Police Department, they did an audit of what went wrong, what did we do wrong, what should we have done better, and kudos to them for actually doing this.
02:18:20.000And I think they came up with like 92 recommendations on things that needed to be fixed.
02:18:28.000They shared that with municipalities all across the country as like, hey, here are the hard lessons that we learned.
02:18:33.000You guys should take note and try to protect yourselves from having to go through what we went through.
02:18:39.000Other agencies at the county level and at the state level have not been so honest or transparent about their shortcomings.
02:19:49.000Disturbing doesn't even put it lightly when you know there are people who are being burned to ash, burned alive in their community, and their text exchange is like, oh, ha ha ha, is the fire still going?
02:20:03.000LOL, yup, now it's going in another place.
02:20:15.000He didn't show up and show his face publicly until like seven days after the fire.
02:20:21.000And then he went and he did one press conference and then he quit and resigned.
02:20:24.000But there has not yet, and I hope investigations are ongoing, there has not been any kind of accountability at the various failure points that existed in this response.
02:20:37.000If the government wanted to take over that land, the best way to do it is to drag this out and make it so that people have no other choice.
02:20:52.000There's a Native Hawaiian leader, famous surfer, navigator for the Hokulea and traditional Hawaiian navigation, Archie Kalepa.
02:21:02.000He has been one of the most stalwart leaders for the community during this whole period in time, organizing emergency response and food and shelter and community gatherings.
02:21:15.000People come and play music at the end of the day throughout this whole crisis period and has been leading the charge.
02:21:21.000He's very well respected in the community.
02:22:14.000I heard from one guy, they were looking at, well, hopefully, maybe it might be September, it might be October, but, you know, it's one of those things that one of the guys who's out there actually doing this is just saying, well, you don't know what you're going to deal with until you're actually dealing with it, and it might take longer,
02:22:31.000it might not take as long, but it's one of those things that they're not figuring out as they go, but they are being confronted with things as they go.
02:22:40.000Is this one of those issues where you wish that maybe you still were in Congress?
02:22:46.000Because at least you could be talking about it.
02:22:49.000And I talked with leaders in Congress and people who I still know there and just calling for oversight and accountability from the federal government because we saw many points of failure, everything from the immediate response to the whole water issue and the fact that there wasn't any water coming through people's hoses during that time.
02:23:36.000And there was a state water management official, apparently, who had some say in this of saying, well, you know, I don't think that we should turn the water on for this period of time because we don't know exactly what's going to happen.
02:23:50.000But my point is, all of these things need to be very clearly investigated because people's lives and property were absolutely destroyed because of this.
02:24:01.000So was it because that water is a valuable commodity?
02:24:04.000They didn't allow it to be used by the people that were experiencing the fire?
02:24:16.000It was like, well, we want to make sure that the water is being distributed equitably, and so we don't want to give it to one group of people over another group of people.
02:24:27.000It really didn't make any sense what the argument was, but it was like, hey, you missed that critical juncture in that window because you were trying to ruminate.
02:24:37.000It was something to do with equity and some theoretical...
02:24:52.000There's also the thing about having above ground wires.
02:25:01.000At a place that experiences storms, but also on West Maui is traditionally a drier part of the island that also experiences wildfires, even small ones on a regular basis that if they're not immediately controlled, you end up with what happened.
02:25:18.000This is so disheartening that it's not receiving more attention.
02:25:37.000That's where the opportunity, and it is such a dire picture, you know, it's a time where we're surrounded by literally insane people who are making decisions that further their own interests and their desire to either hold on to power or grow their power at the cost of the well-being of the people and at the cost of our fundamental freedoms.
02:26:04.000And that's where this election, our using our voice, our defending our freedom of speech by speaking the truth and speaking freely, all of these things and our engagement with them as Americans,
02:26:20.000as citizens, It matters more than anything else.
02:26:25.000Because if we continue to go down this track, we will continue to see our freedoms undermined until we wake up one day and this will no longer be the America that we know and that we love.
02:27:04.000Being grounded and having the confidence in the Constitution and these fundamental rights and freedoms is kind of like, okay, well, you know, we'll figure out the rest.
02:27:15.000But all of that, for everything that we've talked about, censorship and control and big government overreach and all of the government surveillance, all of these different things point to the very real risk and domestic threat that we face.
02:27:34.000Yeah, there's just so many factors that are simultaneously taking place.
02:27:39.000There's surveillance, there's the invasion, which is kind of an invasion.
02:28:36.000And these are like, hey, they got a family, they got young kids, they got school, they got jobs.
02:28:41.000And they were denied saying, well, we don't think that you have...
02:28:45.000We don't have confidence that you will come back to your life in Italy.
02:28:50.000And yet, again, people are coming through the border every day, being picked up.
02:28:55.000Border Patrol has become like this Uber drivers for people who are breaking our laws from the moment they step across the border into our country illegally.
02:29:06.000And, okay, so then they go out in the country.
02:29:08.000Nobody knows where they are, who they are.
02:29:10.000Are they really going to show up for a court date in two years or three years?
02:29:14.000And nothing is really truly being done about this.
02:29:25.000It almost seems like it's all designed to erode our faith and to make this whole thing something that's way easier to control.
02:29:34.000Because the way our system is set up right now, if you can express the freedom of speech, if you actually can do that, it makes it very difficult to really control a narrative.
02:29:50.000And they're terrified of a truly free society where we can have a truly free open marketplace of ideas.
02:29:59.000They're terrified of people being able to, you know, and I saw this when I ran for president in 2020. We're seeing it again in different ways in 2024 where they want to control what information you get about certain candidates, what information you're not allowed to see, who is being pushed forward and who is not.
02:30:39.000And they feel justified in what they're doing, that they are the righteous ones, that they are standing up for America and standing up for democracy, so much so that they are willing to destroy our democracy to save it in their minds, which is a dangerous, dangerous mindset that we could see in foreign dictators in different parts of the world and throughout history.
02:32:32.000I think that's where there is, you know, there is a silver lining in what we have been through through COVID and through everything that's happened since.
02:32:41.000I think more and more people are waking up.
02:33:08.000It's what I focused on in my book, For Love of Country.
02:33:14.000The truth about what is happening in our country, the experiences that I had in the Democratic Party that caused me to leave the party.
02:33:24.000And understanding that in this situation, and there's a lot to be fixed across both parties and the government, but in my experience and in the situation we are in right now with the Biden-Harris administration, they cannot be allowed to remain in power.
02:33:39.000We can agree or disagree on different issues and it's good and we should and we should have those conversations.
02:33:44.000But when you look at the unprecedented abuse of power, That they are engaging in, undermining their rule of law, politicizing our government entities, targeting Americans, targeting Americans who happen to be their political opposition, whether it's Donald Trump or the mom who's protesting at a Board of Education meeting to have a say in what kind of education her child is getting.
02:34:11.000And if we, the American people, don't do something about this and stop them and hold them accountable, What happens in these elections?
02:34:20.000If they're allowed to remain in power, they will tell us, hey, you gave us a mandate.
02:34:26.000You said, hey, good job, thumbs up, keep at it, and we'll see everything that's happened just continue to escalate to a point where I have no doubt that our freedoms will be eroded to a point where it'll be virtually impossible to get them back.
02:35:27.000I appreciate your words, your friendship, your support, and your being such an incredible stalwart voice of truth and providing a platform for real discussion.
02:37:27.000Because I don't really read it anymore.
02:37:29.000You know, before I recorded it, I do more audio books as well than I do...
02:37:34.000I read every now and then, but most of the time I'm actually, like if I'm on a plane sometimes I read, but most of the time I'm sitting there listening to stuff in the sauna or listening to something when I'm driving.
02:37:54.000I poured my heart into writing this book, and I care very much about the issues that we're talking about, and I care very much about our country.
02:38:02.000And so in some parts of the audiobook, it was emotional, talking about some of the experiences that I've had.
02:38:11.000While I was deployed and really, truly conveying what's at stake and the responsibility.
02:38:20.000And so I go through a lot of the problems.
02:38:23.000It's important, obviously, to talk about the solutions and the call to action for every one of us as Americans.
02:38:30.000I don't care what your party affiliation is.
02:38:35.000I'm urging people to leave this Democrat Party behind because they are abusing their power and undermining our Constitution.
02:38:43.000Just as our founding fathers did when they created these founding documents, they disagreed heavily on a lot of different things.
02:38:51.000They had fierce arguments and debates, but they came together around the most fundamental principles of our country that are centered around freedom.
02:38:59.000Our ability to live in peace and pursue prosperity, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
02:39:05.000Now is the time that we have to come together as Americans around those foundational principles and get our country back on track.
02:39:14.000That is the most important task before us as Americans.