In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience podcast, the host talks to Alex Schellenberger, the founder and host of the podcast about his trip to Brazil and the impact of Elon Musk's decision to ban a Supreme Court justice. Alex also talks about how the government in Brazil is trying to silence all forms of free speech, including the media, and why he's fighting for the rights of all Brazilians to be able to freely express their opinions and voice on social media. Joe also explains why he thinks the ban is unfair and unfair, and what he's doing to fight for the freedom of the press and the right to free speech in general in Brazil. Joe is a regular contributor to the New York Times and the New Yorker, and is one of the most influential people in the tech industry. He's also the author of the best-selling book, and is a frequent contributor to TechCrunch and The Huffington Post, and has been featured on Forbes and The Daily Wire, and many other publications. This episode was produced in the Guardian, The Guardian, Slate, and The Guardian. The New Republic. It was edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and edited by Alex Blumberg. It was produced by Rachel Goodman and edited and produced by Patrick Muldowney, with additional editing by Matthew Bolland and Alex Blanchflower. Thanks to Caitlin Durante and Rachel Ward, and Ben Kuchta, and Rachel Goodman, and Matthew Boll and Emma Jacobs, and Jake Chapman Horowitz, and Sarah Abdurrahman Mckinnon, for their excellent reporting on the situation in Brazil and their reporting on what's happening in Brazil, and the efforts to expose the censorship in the country, and how it's affecting the situation and the reaction to it, and their ongoing efforts to make it more transparent and fair and just a little bit more transparent in the process, and more. . Thank you for listening and supporting the podcast, and thank you for supporting the show, and for supporting it! , and for sharing it with your support, and we hope you re listening and sharing it on your friends, and tweeting us on your thoughts on it. , we really do appreciate it, we really appreciate it. Thank you, and supporting it, we really really well! - Thank you. - Sarah, Sarah and Sarah, and thanks for listening, Sarah, too, and Good Morning Brazil podcast, Sarah!
00:00:32.000And three days later, that was back in March, three days later Elon just throws down and starts to attack this main Supreme Court justice who's the guy that's now banned X. So X is banned in Brazil.
00:01:24.000The most dramatic part is that they were the judge.
00:01:27.000This is a Supreme Court justice who is basically the dictator of Brazil, was demanding that particular journalists and politicians just be banned, not only from acts, But from every other social media platform, which is a tactic that we had seen in earlier censorship files,
00:01:47.000we had done something on something called the Cyber Threat Intelligence League with Taibbi, showing it was an early military Censorship operation.
00:01:58.000And they had a list of tactics, and one of them was to get people banned on every platform.
00:02:03.000So you're basically like just depersoning people, just destroying their career.
00:02:08.000You can't make a career as a journalist or a politician if you're banned from every platform.
00:02:12.000So that was one of the most dramatic parts, all in secret, open investigations, ongoing.
00:02:19.000And basically, there's no checks and balances.
00:02:24.000So that came out and Elon responded like three days later and was like, yeah, Brazil's like the worst in the world and just starts attacking the Supreme Court justice as like Darth Vader and Voldemort and doing what Elon does.
00:02:39.000Fast forward to last month and they had a huge protest in Sao Paulo, one of the largest free speech protests in history, which was itself just amazing and inspiring because free speech has been something that we didn't really think we had to fight for.
00:02:54.000So to see like hundreds of thousands of people in the streets of Sao Paulo was amazing.
00:03:16.000And the crowds just, you know, they knew about the Twitter files.
00:03:19.000Afterwards, we go down and it's just, you know, it's just a lot of emotion and anger, but also hope.
00:03:26.000The Brazilian people are, for me, it's like one of the most exciting cultures in the world because they're so expressive.
00:03:32.000The president, like while he's speaking, he's like crying.
00:03:35.000You know, it's a very like emotionally open culture.
00:03:39.000So now, I mean, the question for Elon, they're having to negotiate this, is do you out of principle keep X banned in Brazil to defend the several dozen people that the government is requiring be banned permanently?
00:03:54.000But that means that 20 million Brazilians are denied X as a platform.
00:03:59.000Or do you go along with what the government's demanding and hope to fight for another day?
00:04:07.000We actually don't know, but probably under 100. And what are they being accused of that the government is saying is so important that they need to be banned?
00:04:44.000And he didn't even know this until the Twitter Files Brazil came out.
00:04:49.000And then Elon did release, because the House of Representatives, Jim Jordan, asked for these internal files from X, he subpoenaed them.
00:04:57.000So we even learned more information from those files.
00:05:00.000They showed that Van Houten had—he was supposedly being deplatformed for election misinformation, but it turned out that the video he posted was posted the day after the elections, and it had to do with labor issues, had nothing to do with elections.
00:06:18.000I mean, for me personally, the funny thing is I had this – just coincidentally, I have this deep relationship with Brazil because I lived in Brazil in the early 90s.
00:06:26.000I was – I was actually working towards my PhD in the semi-Amazon.
00:06:52.000I mean, even up until the censorship part.
00:06:56.000I mean, when you start censoring, you're just like, not to digress, but it's kind of like, you know, back in the 90s, we were anti-war, pro-free speech, and pro-gay rights.
00:07:05.000Now the left is pro-censorship, pro-war, and engaged in horrible medical mistreatment of gay children in the name of trans medicine.
00:07:16.000So it's like, literally, like, who changed here?
00:07:18.000You know, my values did stay the same.
00:07:38.000The thing is that in Latin America, like everybody on the left, even some of the center left, they actually had a lot of respect for Fidel.
00:07:47.000I know it's amazing, but they really did.
00:08:47.000Our socialism is going to be democratic socialism.
00:08:51.000And that was my attraction to Brazil, too, was that – I mean here you – I mean and to the Workers' Party and to Lula.
00:08:56.000I mean he was super – he had all the stuff that you loved about the left, but he was going to respect free speech.
00:09:03.000So I – basically after the tour files Brazil and the Workers' Party and Lula just start defending censorship, then I start going after Lula, too.
00:09:13.000And I'm like, you lied to me and this is unacceptable.
00:09:29.000Because, you know, if you read the histories, I've been, you know, I'm now, by the way, so we're going to spend three months in Austin every year now because I'm the CBR chair of politics, censorship, and free speech at the University of Austin.
00:09:40.000I'm the first and only endowed chair there.
00:10:06.000You know, the French parliament where they split people left and right became a way to refer to liberals and conservatives.
00:10:14.000Conservatives were about protecting tradition, about propriety, don't say certain things.
00:10:17.000You know, that was like what conservatives were.
00:10:20.000And then if you go to the United States, like one of the most dramatic instances of censorship here is the early part of the 20th century with the Sedition Act and that's when they were, you know, arresting socialists, incarcerating thousands of people.
00:10:45.000I mean, what's clear about the censorship that's going on is it's counter-populist.
00:10:50.000So Jair Bolsonaro, like Trump, is a populist candidate.
00:10:54.000So one thought experiment would be if Bernie Sanders had become president in 2016. Would the deep state have sided with – would they have sided with the right, with the Republicans to censor a populist Democratic Party?
00:11:14.000Clearly – I mean I would say the – if you look at what the global elite, which is kind of a center-left elite in Europe, Brazil, United States, Canada – It really wants to censor on COVID elections and migration.
00:11:32.000And they do the migration, mass migration stuff around hate.
00:11:35.000So like if you criticize mass migration, it's hate speech and you should be censored.
00:11:39.000So clearly, this is a reaction by the deep state against populism, which clearly threatens them, their ability to build a wage war when they want to wage war, to move people around.
00:12:03.000I mean, obviously, the story that—the traditional story had been that this is compassionate and, you know, it's the right thing to do and want to bring people in.
00:12:11.000There's so many—I mean, the Democrats and the Europeans, they went so far with it that it actually hurt—it's hurt them politically.
00:12:18.000Like, you know, Kamala may lose— I think there's probably some truth to the idea that Democrats are bringing in folks to increase Democratic voters.
00:12:42.000That's something that John Judas and Rui Teixeira wrote a whole book about called The Emerging Democratic Majority, where they talked about how Latinos are going to side with Democrats.
00:12:53.000And then another part of me just wonders if it's related, is that there was a concern that populism...
00:13:00.000Because I mean the danger – the threat of populism is that it's popular.
00:13:04.000So the threat of populism is that the people actually govern rather than these deep state organizations that have constrained – that pre-internet constrained what was acceptable.
00:13:18.000They narrowed the so-called Overton window.
00:13:22.000With populism, you get potentially populations that say, we don't want to go to war in Ukraine.
00:13:29.000We don't want to support foreign wars.
00:13:34.000And for a variety of reasons, these deep state organizations, by which I mean Department of Homeland Security, FBI, CIA, State Department, Absolutely freaked out about it, as are the kind of global elite that end up supporting the NGOs pushing for that same agenda.
00:13:49.000George Soros, Craig Newmark, Piero Midiar, the people that basically end up financing the NGOs that the US government then comes along and finances, which, by the way, is another thing that we keep discovering.
00:14:02.000We'll be in Brazil and we'll be like...
00:14:04.000Wow, these NGOs are doing the exact same thing in Brazil that they're doing in Europe.
00:14:08.000Oh, and they happen to be funded by George Soros.
00:14:11.000They happen to have a fact checking groups that come along and fact check as a pretext for censorship.
00:14:16.000They do advertiser boycotts against the social media companies in order to control the social media companies.
00:14:22.000Obviously, there was this huge infiltration of Twitter.
00:14:24.000I mean, since I saw you last, we discovered what basically looks like a CIA effort to take over the content moderation at Twitter.
00:14:32.000It was former CIA people, Aletheia Group, which basically was – we discovered these internal memos where they're basically trying to come in and create a special new content moderation, which is, of course, code for censorship.
00:14:58.000They basically were – in the internal – in the sales pitches from this aletheia group, they were selling – they were basically hyping the criticisms that Twitter was getting for not censoring enough.
00:15:12.000And then they were saying, well, we're going to bring all this intelligence experience and we've got these people that are really skilled at foreign languages.
00:15:20.000I mean they were promising to bring in people that spoke all these different languages.
00:15:24.000And there was some internal resistance within Twitter, but it basically was on track to happen, and then Elon buys Twitter, and it all ends.
00:15:32.000What do you think would have happened if he didn't buy it?
00:16:17.000So do you think when social media first came along they sort of underestimated the potential and they let it become what it is and then once it got so huge then they tried to infiltrate like perhaps after 2016?
00:16:34.000Then they try to infiltrate and kind of realize it's a little too late because there's just too many people like yourself and substack people and podcasters.
00:16:45.000Too many popular people on Twitter that have huge accounts that are on it all day long and monetizing it and acting as legitimate independent journalists without any sort of oversight.
00:17:00.000They were using social media to support...
00:17:03.000I mean, CIA, Intelligence Community, Defense Department were using social media for Arab Spring, you know, for the color revolutions in Eastern Europe.
00:17:22.000The holy grail for—I mean, it's like Sun Tzu.
00:17:24.000The best way to win is by not having to fight.
00:17:26.000So if you can not have to fire any bullets, if you don't—CIA 1.0 after World War II, it's a crude military overthrow of governments.
00:17:37.000CIA 2.0 regime change is you put a bunch of people in the street, peaceful protest, get the head of state to resign or call an early election and then overthrow the government that way.
00:17:46.000So social media was a tool of U.S. government statecraft— I think it was basically Brexit.
00:18:02.000Duderte in Philippines is another right-wing populist that gets elected.
00:18:31.000I just read this beautiful history of the printing press and Oxford history.
00:18:35.000And the printing press at first, you know, 15th century, first hundred years, the Catholic Church is just like, we love the printing press.
00:18:44.000You know, we're just cranking out Bibles and It's going great.
00:18:48.000And then Martin Luther gets a hold of the printing press and prints his theses, which are mostly attacking the church for corruption, for selling indulgences as a way to pay for your sins, basically.
00:19:11.000Well, I mean, long story short, there's like a long period of revolutions and wars and the Protestant Reformation and then the Counter-Reformation.
00:19:20.000And they're like the printing presses.
00:19:21.000They're like hiding them in people's houses.
00:19:23.000The church and the government is trying to – is arresting people for having printing presses.
00:19:27.000The printing presses go to Netherlands.
00:19:29.000They're sneaking the printing presses into the Netherlands.
00:19:31.000And so it's like, you can't help but see, you're like, wow, it's like VPNs.
00:19:35.000Because in Brazil, when they were like, we're going to ban X, we're like, get a VPN, you know, and VPN in.
00:19:40.000Still hard for people to post publicly, because that would obviously show that they were on it.
00:19:44.000But still, it's like, you're always, and this is sort of an argument, this would be an argument for Elon to cut a deal to get X back up in Brazil.
00:19:52.000And I'm not saying that's what he should do.
00:19:53.000I'm just saying, one argument for it is that, you know, stay in the game.
00:19:57.000Don't let them confiscate your printing press out of principle or pride because at some other point, you're going to be able to find a way to work around that censorship.
00:20:08.000Does Brazil have something similar to our First Amendment?
00:20:12.000They have a line in their constitution that is extremely strong that there should be no censorship for social or political issues.
00:20:20.000The problem is that their constitution is so long and it was created by so many people that there's then all these other caveats like you can't engage in racism.
00:20:45.000It made me—the whole experience, by the way, because, you know, when you're growing up and you go to—you know, you go to, you know, elementary school and high school and the teachers are telling you the Constitution of the United States is so special and you're just like, oh, come on, you know, like, whatever.
00:20:59.000But you realize when you get older and you realize the First Amendment— It's so radical because basically every other country in the world, certainly every other Western country, the progression of free speech was you would ask the king for permission.
00:21:15.000He's like, oh, king, can we criticize you for this?
00:21:17.000And he'd be like, oh, okay, we'll allow you to do that.
00:21:19.000But free speech was something gradually granted to the people.
00:21:49.000In the 250 years after the Constitution is ratified in 1789. And so that's why it's so amazing is that like you just never – I mean this history I just read of free speech is so amazing because like you get all these battles over how much free speech to have.
00:22:19.000The speech comes before the government.
00:22:22.000You don't have a government and then have free speech.
00:22:25.000We have free speech as an inalienable right from God or from our creator or just something that we're saying that we have.
00:22:32.000And then you make a government based on speech.
00:22:35.000So this Orwellian idea that we hear, including You know, tragically, from Barack Obama and now his two secretaries of state, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton, and Bill Gates, they're saying we have to have censorship to protect democracy.
00:22:51.000It's like the most Orwellian, un-American idea.
00:23:43.000I believe the last time I checked, nobody knows how many times, actually, Bill Gates was with Jeffrey Epstein.
00:23:49.000He went out and did this, you know, really, he did this PBS interview where he just looks guilty the whole time in his defense of talking about Epstein.
00:23:57.000Is that with that woman where she, when he says, well, he's dead now.
00:24:40.000There's known connections to Mossad and I just don't believe that Mossad operates in the United States without CIA approval.
00:24:49.000So the prevailing theory is what most people believe is that they brought these people there under this premise that you're going to be there with heads of state and industry and famous people and scientists and this is going to be an amazing place for exceptional people.
00:26:22.000When he was going through his divorce, Melinda, you see the leaks to the New York Times about Epstein occurred while she's negotiating over the divorce.
00:26:40.000You don't need Epstein to explain Gates.
00:26:42.000But I mean, Gates, he just came out with a Netflix documentary.
00:26:45.000This wasn't some like offhanded remark.
00:26:48.000He comes out with a whole Netflix documentary talking about specifically at great length about why we need to have censorship apparatus in place.
00:27:51.000And this idea that you have to use, you can't have people talking about inconvenient things that eventually turn out to be true seems crazy to not push back on.
00:28:02.000And the fact that he said that and there was no response whatsoever in mainstream media.
00:28:06.000There was no New York Times articles written about it.
00:28:09.000The Washington Post didn't cover it and talk about how fucking insane it is to say something like that, especially after what we've been through.
00:28:28.000And, you know, I mean, I just pointed out that simple fact that I just point out the vaccine didn't obviously prevent infection or transmission.
00:28:35.000And the crowd, you know, how can you say that and whatever?
00:28:39.000And it's like because it because everybody knows it reduced hospitalizations and reduced death.
00:28:46.000But the point isn't – I'm not arguing about the vaccine.
00:28:48.000I'm arguing that it didn't do what they said it did.
00:28:51.000And nobody's actually – and then they just gaslight you as though that were the reason they were telling you to get the vaccine in the first place was to reduce hospitalization and death.
00:28:59.000No, they were telling you that it was going to reduce infection and transmission.
00:29:02.000Well, everybody's seen that Rachel Manow clip, right?
00:29:11.000And when we know that the fact that the people that died of COVID, the vast majority of them have four-plus comorbidities, and we know that some ungodly amount of the population was vaccinated, was it like 80%, something like that?
00:29:25.000But you're saying that we don't know...
00:29:29.000Well, because you could compare the vaccinated to the unvaccinated group, right?
00:29:34.000Could you, though, if you have 80% of the people that are vaccinated and the 20% that are unvaccinated, are they of a particular political leaning?
00:29:43.000And what are the health metrics of that particular political leaning?
00:29:47.000Like, has anybody done some sort of an analysis on the people that did versus didn't?
00:29:53.000Like, what was their state of their physical health or metabolic health before they made these decisions?
00:30:00.000Because ideally what you would look at if you wanted to find out if it stopped transmission or, excuse me, hospitalization or death, you would want to look at the overall body of human beings and then we have a bunch of things that we do know,
00:30:43.000Man, I'm not an expert on COVID. You also have to take into account how many people were put on ventilators who wound up dying, which we now know was a terrible idea.
00:30:52.00080% of the people they put on ventilators died.
00:30:55.000We know remdesivir had terrible health consequences.
00:30:58.000We know there's a bunch of things that people are connecting to the vaccine that no one is admitting, you know, and that hospitals and especially employers are very reluctant to say that these mandated vaccinations caused these serious health consequences that we know are real.
00:31:19.000And then we have this mysterious uptick Of all-cause mortality that everyone wants to conveniently ignore and no one wants to make some sort of correlation or causation.
00:31:28.000So do we really know that it prevented death?
00:34:01.000And the majority of polio cases today are vaccine-derived polio.
00:34:05.000So there's a particular strain of vaccine that causes people to get polio.
00:34:10.000And there's a particular strain of polio, rather, that comes from that vaccine.
00:34:14.000So what's your bottom line on vaccines right now?
00:34:17.000I am not a vaccine expert, but I am a person that has been lied to for four years and so blatantly and so obviously when you look at Fauci talking to Rand Paul and just lying openly about whether or not they funded gain-of-function research and the fact that he got away with all that.
00:34:34.000The fact that the White House tells you for the unvaccinated you're looking in a winter of severe illness and death.
00:34:43.000And it seems to me they were doing that to maximize profits because they wanted to keep selling these things.
00:34:49.000And a lot of people got extremely rich.
00:34:52.000Many billionaires were created because of the pandemic, because of the COVID vaccine.
00:34:56.000It's all very spooky to me because I think there's a long history in this country of people Doing things for money, knowing that people are going to suffer because of it.
00:35:06.000It's just sort of a human thing if you can get away with it.
00:35:08.000If it is illegal and you have the protection in place and you know that you're going to profit largely from this, you do it.
00:35:13.000It's also in the United States is worse because Europe did not require the vaccine.
00:35:20.000They pulled out a lot quicker than we did, too.
00:35:21.000I mean, they did not require for children in particular, right?
00:35:23.000Like, I just interviewed Tracy Hoag, and she was saying that she spends a lot of time in Denmark, and Denmark said, don't give your kids the vaccine.
00:36:04.000Well, in that case, it was just more like they were – I mean it was like kind of a collective gaslighting where everybody has now – I mean I think it's unconscious by the way.
00:36:11.000I don't think they're deliberately doing it.
00:37:02.000I mean, it's very like, I mean, what he calls science is not actually, what Fauci and Hotez and Bill Nye call science is not actually science because science is a process.
00:37:13.000The way they talk about it is more like a doctrine.
00:37:31.000Sometimes you have experiments in labs, but science in the world of ecological biology is just going out there and counting the number of gorillas or whales.
00:37:39.000So when they say science, they really mean like, obey me.
00:38:38.000Because remember, it comes out – science comes out of Christianity.
00:38:43.000It comes out of this desire to understand God's creation.
00:38:46.000And then over time, the church gives more and more freedom to these scientists to study things that end up being quite inconvenient, like the earth revolves around the sun or there's evolution or all these different things that scientists discover.
00:39:30.000See if you can find how he figured out where he initially came up with the concept of science.
00:39:36.000But it was understanding nature through measurement.
00:39:44.000I forget exactly how he came up with it, but I'm 99% sure it came to him in a dream.
00:39:49.000I believe it was an angel that brought him this information in a dream.
00:39:53.000I mean, all these early scientists, including Newton...
00:39:57.000A French philosopher and mathematician believed that he had three dreams in November 10, 1619 that revealed the basis for the scientific method and his philosophical methods.
00:40:06.000He was possessed by a genius who revealed answers in a dazzling light.
00:40:10.000He went to bed exhausted and dreamed three dreams.
00:40:13.000He envisioned reforming all knowledge, understanding the nature of existence and how to be certain of that knowledge.
00:40:19.000Descartes' dreams are considered a philosopher's dream and are considered to be authentic.
00:40:26.000His interpretations of the dreams are supported by biographical material, neuroscientific theory and psychoanalytic theory.
00:40:33.000Descartes Dream is also the subject of The World According to Mathematics, a series of essays that examines the influence of mathematics on society.
00:40:40.000The essays consider how mathematics can be applied to civilization, how these applications can be beneficial, dangerous, or irrelevant.
00:40:49.000So it came to him in a dream, the idea of it initially.
00:40:52.000It's very interesting, right, that human beings lived for so long before the scientific method came along and now it has become this weird thing that's been captured by people or so-called experts, the spokespeople for the science, which is always dangerous when you have an enormous group of intelligent people,
00:42:04.000But when he translated it into German and all these different languages that people could read and said, hey, this is up to you to interpret what God said, the church was like, hey, fuckface, you're cutting in on our racket.
00:42:16.000We need people that are the spokespersons for God, the people that are going to tell you what God meant.
00:42:22.000You don't get to decide what God meant.
00:42:24.000That fucking dude is dressed like a wizard.
00:42:28.000So they're wearing these crazy costumes that regular people don't get to wear, which makes you think, well, he's got the wacky costume and the fish head hat.
00:43:04.000Like, they actually do studies where they, if you put somebody in a white scientist's coat or a white doctor's coat or put a stethoscope on them, people trust them more.
00:43:58.000The test of whether or not you're defending free speech, same as the test of your defending science, is that—bring it on.
00:44:05.000Well, as soon as you're censoring people like Jay Bhattacharya and, you know, Peter McCullough and, you know, Robert Malone, as soon as you're doing that, like, okay, how is— These people are rock-solid credentialed physicians.
00:44:21.000Peter McCullough has the most scientific papers published in his field in human history.
00:44:30.000Like, this is a legitimate scientist slash doctor, and he's telling you.
00:44:55.000We're stifling debate, which everyone knows is the wrong way to do it.
00:44:59.000Even if he's wrong, the correct thing to do is to get him publicly to talk to someone who is right and have the world see how this person who is right is going to correct him on the errors of his analysis.
00:45:24.000We need to do a devastating takedown of these fringe epidemiologists, referring to the Barrington Declaration that Bhattacharya and the two other – Martin Koldoff.
00:45:35.000Koldoff and then Sunitra Gupta from Oxford I think is the third.
00:45:41.000But yeah, even a more dramatic example is like a lot of the people that did the early pioneering work showing that COVID escaped from a lab were like anonymous people on the internet, anonymous sleuths.
00:46:35.000It's just bizarre when that happens with science and mathematics and with all these different things that we thought of as these Hard sciences.
00:46:51.000I mean, American Academy of Pediatrics, my friend Marty Macari just came out with this amazing book called Blind Spots, where he looks at American Academy of Pediatrics.
00:48:25.000So you have the inert virus, you have the dead virus, and you have this agitator, this thing that causes people to have this reaction, and then they find the inert virus, they develop antibodies for it, that's how vaccines work.
00:48:41.000Severe allergic reactions and can cause you to become allergic to various things, including peanuts.
00:48:48.000I'm butchering this for sure, but Brett Weinstein has made this argument, and he believes that's possibly why he has a severe wheat allergy.
00:48:58.000I mean, in this case, they had a pretty good study comparing American kids to Israeli kids, and the Israeli kids had peanuts at young ages, and they didn't have these allergies.
00:49:06.000Do they have the same vaccination schedule?
00:49:17.000I mean, what's so amazing about that, assuming that Marty's account is correct, what's incredible about that story is that you had...
00:49:23.000So first of all, something like over 14 years went by before they did a study showing that depriving the kids of peanuts at a young age was creating allergies.
00:49:32.000But there's a whole field called immunology, and there's all these immunologists who were watching this happen, and they would know from their basic theory, which has been around for thousands of years, that you would end up creating...
00:50:19.000But what's amazing, when you look at it, you know, Chris Rufo surfaced this glossary, this DEI glossary, diversity, equity, inclusion glossary, that was all these words that you were supposed to use.
00:50:30.000You know, basically woke language you're supposed to use.
00:50:33.000And she was the DEI, going around and making the professors and the faculty all use this language.
00:50:46.000This accomplished person, you've achieved a lot.
00:50:49.000I mean, maybe you're actually part of the problem in some ways, but how is it that you would just—some faculty member gives you a list of a glossary and you just go, oh, okay, I'm going to use your words?
00:50:59.000It's like something's going on in these institutions where people are bullied into— Things that they know are wrong, you know?
00:51:29.000Emperor's New Clothes, where everybody in the room is like, this glossary is racist and insane, or telling parents not to give kids peanuts is insane because we've never had more allergies since we started banning this.
00:51:43.000I think that is one of the remedies, I think, of the internet age and having these alternative media.
00:51:50.000That is a remedy to basically have people calling bullshit on it from outside those institutions.
00:51:56.000Because, I mean, this is American Academy of Patriotics.
00:51:58.000If you're just an ordinary new parent and you're, you know, oh, the other one, by the way, is infant formula recommending seed-based, AAP recommended seed-based infant formulas, which were terrible for kids.
00:52:10.000And of course, we know that breast milk is superior for all these reasons and the antibodies and creating the immune system response.
00:52:17.000So, I mean, here you have the major organization recommending how to take care of kids with not one but four separate health scandals that it helped to create.
00:52:27.000Why should that organization even exist anymore?
00:53:11.000And that's the big question is how is it like that the institutions – and we're taking this concept of iatrogenesis where the classic example is you go to the hospital for some ailment and you end up getting an infection and die.
00:53:27.000Taking that and looking at a whole bunch of other institutions, why – when the news media demand censorship and create propaganda, the FBI creating crimes and entrapment potentially with informants and others,
00:53:43.000what's happening in these institutions that they end up creating the problems that they're trying to solve or that they're claiming to solve?
00:53:50.000The crazy thing is it seems to be an emergent behavior pattern.
00:53:55.000When people get into power, when people have power, they always go in this very particular direction of control.
00:54:02.000And this was what the founding fathers of the Constitution, the people that founded this country, when they were laying it out, they were trying to prevent that from taking place.
00:54:10.000And they had this very elaborate plan to sort of subvert normal human behavior, to stop it from taking...
00:54:37.000And I mean, there's this famous – I can't remember if it was Jefferson or somebody who – one of the founding fathers that was like, we need a revolution every 50 years or something.
00:54:46.000That's – clearly we're overripe for massive reform.
00:54:50.000In 1975, we had the church committee hearings, which is where we found out about the CIA assassinations and MKUltra and the poisons and all the stuff that the CIA was doing.
00:55:36.000The second guy that was recruiting people to go fight in Ukraine.
00:55:38.000Well, he sounds like a full-on loon, you know?
00:55:41.000And I think when you're—if I was an intelligence agent and I was trying to do this kind of stuff, I would find people already out of their fucking minds.
00:57:23.000And I mean, first of all, I reported out that, you know, you go to his house and he was homeless and he was a drug addict and he had mental illness.
00:57:32.000And you go to his home in Berkeley and there's a Black Lives Matter sign and a rainbow flag and all that.
00:57:36.000But the media all reported that he was a right wing Trump supporter.
00:57:46.000But in that case, they didn't hesitate to release that information that he had been posting about QAnon and criticizing the Democrats and whatnot.
00:57:54.000So it's clearly ideologically selective of which assailants' political information gets released.
00:58:02.000Well, and then unfortunately there was a bunch of conspiracy theories that he was his lover and he was in the house.
00:58:08.000But if you see the guy while he's talking to the cops and holding the hammer and Paul Pelosi is trying to hold onto the hammer, the whole thing is mad.
00:58:15.000Like, why is Paul Pelosi still have a drink in his hand?
00:58:17.000Like, dude, you're in a mortal struggle with a man who has a fucking hammer in his hand and you're holding the hammer with one hand because you want to keep your drink.
00:58:24.000I couldn't figure out why the cops didn't just go grab the hammer in that moment.
00:58:41.000Slow this guy down and relax him and calm him down while the cops were arriving and just didn't ever feel like he was going to get hit in the head with a hammer, which is what wound up happening.
01:00:44.000I mean, no country—I mean, we have a lot of guns, and then you have no proper psychiatric or mental health care system, which is crazy because now you have telehealth, and we should have a bunch of ways to deal with it, but it's just not who we are, I guess.
01:00:59.000Well, it's also—it's very difficult to get people to seek treatment.
01:01:11.000Everybody has a different level of mental illness, right?
01:01:13.000And so there's also different causes of this mental illness, and there's different medications at work, and they don't really know until they try it on you.
01:01:21.000And then we find out now that the entire theory that it's based on, which is that there is some sort of chemical imbalance, is incorrect.
01:01:31.000So then, okay, we have to take this holistic view of the body and the mind and the health of the individual based on lifestyle and choices and community and friends and all these different things that we don't want to take into consideration.
01:01:45.000Instead, they're just giving people pills.
01:01:48.000And they give people pills and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't and sometimes it causes a dissociation effect.
01:01:56.000These dissociatives, these weird drugs that people take where they don't even exactly know what the fuck they're doing while they're doing it.
01:02:05.000And we also, unlike Europe and whatever, we don't allow, we don't coerce, we don't mandate antipsychotics to people with schizophrenia or those kinds of treatments.
01:02:16.000We're much more libertarian than that.
01:02:18.000I mean, this guy, particularly the Pelosi guy, I actually – I can't prove it, but my theory would be that he – that there may not have been an underlying mental illness.
01:03:03.000Mark Andreessen, who you add on, was making this point about ayahuasca, which is very fashionable among the elite set.
01:03:10.000And I think the point that resonates with me is when I was working in San Francisco, after the Summer of Love, 1967, when everybody shows up in San Francisco and they're tripping out on acid, The privileged kids, the educated elite, they go back to Yale and Harvard at the end of the summer.
01:03:27.000But the working class kids, the kids that were not as educated, lower middle class, they hung around in San Francisco and got addicted to speed and heroin.
01:03:36.000And that was the early beginnings of the homelessness crisis.
01:03:39.000Was this after the sweeping psychedelics acts of 1970 when it made everything Schedule I? No, this is back in the Summer of Love, which is 1967. So even in 67, they were doing Speed?
01:04:13.000It really works like people take it and the people I've never fucked around with any of it but the people that I know that have tried Adderall they tell you like you feel like you could do anything and You get things done and that's attractive to everybody whether you're a hippie or a capitalist or anybody you feel more empowered until you don't until you don't yeah Especially when it stops working well and you keep taking more and more of it and then actually you know you're out of your mind you're losing your teeth and Right.
01:05:05.000We don't encourage, and I don't mean like disciplining a person, I mean self-discipline.
01:05:09.000We don't encourage this concept that to be able to force yourself into doing difficult things, you empower yourself and strengthen, you strengthen your mind and your resolve and your spirit.
01:05:21.000And you can, and if you genuinely gravitate towards positive results, positive results in your social life, positive results in business, positive results in artistic endeavors, If you genuinely gravitate towards those things, that is probably going to keep you on the right path in life.
01:06:14.000It actually was, we now understand now that it was part, it became part of Christianity for, that's why, because Christianity, the correction to Judaism, of course, that's all about compassion and care.
01:06:34.000Because, of course, I mean, the problem with the focus on the trauma, you know, is like everybody suddenly has trauma and you can sort of become obsessed with it as opposed to like, no, the whole point of becoming a full human being.
01:07:31.000There's other people like Nietzsche, which would say, hey, most people can't cope with the seriousness.
01:07:36.000But they're saying everybody has this internal potential.
01:07:38.000It's what leads to the human potential movement, the self-help movement.
01:07:42.000I was looking at 1964, they passed the Civil Rights Act.
01:07:47.000Within a few months, Lyndon Johnson goes and gives this famous Harvard – I'm sorry, Howard University speech where it's like – I was just shocking how quickly it occurs where it's just basically about all the problems of the black community and how we still owe this debt to the black community and how the black community has been victimized.
01:08:04.000Like, here's this moment where you could be like, hey, look, we've just leveled the playing field.
01:08:26.000And it then has just expanded to everybody, including children, where, like, part of the over-involved mothering of children is to treat children as though they're victims.
01:09:15.000I mean, often you get professional women, they're like, I'm scheduling my C-section.
01:09:19.000Right, right, because they don't want to also blow out the hoo-ha.
01:09:22.000The reason why I brought up trauma before is I think that's one of the legitimate uses of psychedelics that I think it's pretty provable that there's positive outcomes, particularly MDMA for soldiers.
01:09:39.000This is what MAPS had been working on.
01:09:41.000And when you ask people in the service of their country to go overseas and kill people, And become a part of a war and get shot at and see their friends die.
01:09:52.000Those people are going to come back with unimaginable strain on their psyche.
01:10:18.000I mean, apparently, I don't have experience with it, but apparently an unbelievably brutal, introspective experience where you see your entire life and it's sort of laid out why your behavior patterns exist and the way they exist.
01:10:30.000And oftentimes they combine the Ibogaine experience with another psychedelic, whether it's psilocybin or 5-MeO, DMT, or there's a bunch of different ones that they try and all of it has to be done In other countries, a lot of them, it's done in Mexico because it's illegal in the United States.
01:10:46.000But I have personally talked to people.
01:10:49.000I had Sean Ryan on the podcast the other day.
01:10:51.000A personal experience of how it changed his life.
01:10:53.000I know multiple soldiers where it's changed their life.
01:11:05.000But soldiers are the most stoic motherfuckers.
01:11:07.000Those Navy SEALs, they're the most stoic fucking get shit done people you're ever going to run into in your life.
01:11:13.000And if they're still struggling, maybe these things are tools.
01:11:16.000I agree with you that both marijuana and real psychedelics, hard psychedelics like LSD, I think there's certain people that shouldn't do anything.
01:11:27.000And I think the only way we find that out is we run real studies and do real tests and really try to understand what...
01:11:33.000Get some real science behind the mechanism behind these things and what is wrong with these people that are freaking out and what is the cause of these psychotic breaks?
01:11:50.000There's something taking place in the body that all the wires get crossed and now this person thinks they're getting Satan's talking to them.
01:12:43.000And so, you know, it's like, you have PTSD, you had trauma from from, say, fighting a foreign war, you were abused as a child, or you were raped as a woman.
01:12:51.000And I think those you can get some insight, spiritual insight, existential insight to confront your demons.
01:12:57.000But you're still gonna have to get up every day and confront those demons.
01:12:59.000That's true, but I think it's a tool in the toolbox, and I think to demonize that tool because some people have a bad effect on it, it's like to demonize all the things that people enjoy that you could consider legal vices, like gambling.
01:13:11.000I do not think you should outlaw gambling, but I think some people should not fucking gamble.
01:13:17.000I grew up, well, in my 20s, my early 20s, in a pool hall.
01:13:22.000And, you know, I played pool like eight hours a day, played competitively, and I was around a lot of gamblers, a lot of gamblers.
01:13:43.000And there's some people that should not do marijuana, and there's some people that should not drink.
01:13:47.000There's some people that there's a lot of things that they shouldn't do.
01:13:50.000They don't have whatever it is that allows you to pick up a glass of whiskey, have a drink, and then the next day, boy, I feel like shit, I'm going to the gym.
01:14:00.000And then you don't drink again for a month.
01:14:02.000There's some people that realize there's certain vices that you can do in moderation and they're fine.
01:14:07.000A couple glasses of wine at dinner and everyone's laughing and having a great time.
01:14:12.000But there's certainly some people that cannot handle that.
01:14:17.000And I think we need to give those – if you want a better, stronger society, we need to develop tools for – All people to follow that will give you a better life, including people that have issues with alcohol and gambling and sex and,
01:14:32.000you know, fill in the blanks, drugs and whatever it is that you're interested in and that you're addicted to, rather.
01:14:38.000And I think there's a bunch of tools that can be used If used correctly.
01:14:44.000Just like I used to say, you could take a hammer.
01:14:47.000You could build a house with a hammer.
01:14:49.000Or you could hit yourself in the face if you're fucking crazy.
01:14:53.000It doesn't mean that we should get rid of hammers.
01:14:55.000It's like some people have used psychedelic drugs and had incredible insight and it's completely changed their lives and now they're better for it.
01:15:03.000And then there's some people that we can point to that lost their way and they're gone now.
01:15:20.000When you're taking something that's made in some fucking hippie's bathtub while he's listening to the Grateful Dead, what are the odds that you know exactly what the dose is?
01:15:33.000Especially if you're doing a drug today.
01:15:35.000Because if you're doing a drug today, you're rolling the dice on whether or not you're going to die of a fentanyl overdose, even if you're taking something that you would think would be completely benign, like, you know...
01:15:48.000But there's other stuff that people are taking, like molly.
01:15:50.000They're taking molly, and it's not really molly.
01:15:52.000It's laced with fentanyl, and they die.
01:15:53.000They're taking street drugs, like anti-anxiety medication that are forged drugs that are actually laced with fentanyl, and they're dying from that kind of stuff.
01:16:04.000There's people that, you know, maybe they developed an addiction to benzos, and then their doctor says, look, I'm cutting you off, and then they fucking find it on the streets, and they die from fentanyl overdoses.
01:16:14.000So I think there's tools that could be used.
01:16:18.000I think this panacea, this idea that it's a one-shop-fits-all, you go do ayahuasca, now you're a better person, I don't believe that.
01:16:25.000I think there's a lot of work to be done.
01:16:27.000I think there's a lot of work to be done and I think there's a process as we are growing as human beings.
01:16:33.000You start off as a child where you don't get to pick your parents and they bring with them a bunch of baggage because they were raised by people in the 1940s and they didn't know what the fuck they were doing.
01:16:43.000And they were raised by people who literally came over on boats from Europe to escape tyranny and chaos and they came over to America to The most desperate wage work you could possibly get.
01:16:56.000Dock workers, steel workers, factory workers, they would do anything.
01:17:01.000They would take any jobs, they would work on railroads and whatever the fuck they could, because they just wanted to be able to eat, right?
01:17:19.000I think we are blessed in this time that you can hear a lot of speeches from brilliant people.
01:17:26.000There's a lot of great brilliant people that have talked about I think?
01:17:53.000To discount one, like psychedelics, because there's a bunch of people that abuse it and get fucked up from it, I think is foolish.
01:18:01.000Because the profound effects that these things have should not be minimalized.
01:18:06.000They shouldn't be dismissed because they're illegal.
01:18:09.000They shouldn't be dismissed because of ignorance.
01:18:11.000And they certainly shouldn't be dismissed by people who have not experienced them and have not had those profound changes that take place in their perspective on life, because there's a lot of people.
01:20:15.000But I mean, whatever tolerance he has is preposterous and it's not that guy who, you know, he's in grad school and he does some bong hits from his friends and has a schizophrenic break and thinks that the government has put a recording apparatus in his pencils.
01:20:30.000You know, people lose their fucking way and it's not everybody.
01:20:34.000And I think we have to figure out, like, what is causing it, not eliminate it for the vast majority of people who don't have that effect.
01:22:43.000Every kid gets together in parties and they all figure out a way to drink.
01:22:46.000But my point is if alcohol – if prohibition had succeeded in the 1920s and we had illegal alcohol in the United States, no one would know how to drink.
01:23:27.000Like, you shouldn't buy it, but why should it be that only criminals sell it if we absolutely know that there's a market for it?
01:23:35.000Should we allow people—if you listen to Dr. Carl Hart, who, to me, is the most brilliant person that I've ever met that does heroin all the time— I don't know if he does it all the time, but he says it's wonderful.
01:23:56.000He was a guy that was studying the effects of these things and realized that there's a bunch of gaslighting as to what their actual effects of the pure versions of these things are.
01:24:04.000And that this concept that they are unbelievably addictive and you can't stop yourself, he thinks is false.
01:24:10.000He's smarter and more educated about that subject than I am.
01:24:14.000Well, I mean, but look, the more available it is, the more people use, the more people use, the more addiction you get.
01:24:21.000But can you see that the same concept can be used to – the same narrative can be used to control free speech?
01:24:39.000So it is- But couldn't you see how you could say the problem in our society is that a bunch of people are saying things that are incorrect and the only way to stop that is to censor them.
01:24:47.000The problem in society is that some people are drinking too much.
01:24:51.000The way to stop that is to moderate their drinking and control them.
01:24:55.000The problem with people that are addicted to drugs is we need to make drugs illegal so no one can become addicted to drugs.
01:25:01.000But it doesn't work that way because humans don't work that way and humans don't like other humans telling them what to do.
01:25:08.000If it was just you, me, and Jamie on an island and I decide that coconuts are illegal and I'm going to put you in a cage that I created out of bamboo if you drink coconut milk because I think coconut's bad for you and everybody else is saying, dude, I fucking love coconut.
01:25:46.000It's because they became more available.
01:25:48.000Right, but because those drugs—look, it all started with the Sackler family, right?
01:25:51.000It all started with oxycodone and all that stuff.
01:25:54.000But the reality is that there's a bunch of people that are addicted to these drugs, and the way they're getting them is by getting drugs that are tainted with fentanyl, and that's a primary cause for the people that are overdosing.
01:26:11.000Because if just those opiates, pure opiates, were available, you could make an argument that those 75% would still be alive if they died from fentanyl overdose.
01:26:21.000No, they would also be dying of opioid overdose.
01:27:01.000And then there was also never an opioid that was prescribed as an everyday thing because pain is something that you shouldn't have to live with.
01:27:09.000That's what the – when I asked the Dutch, why don't you have an opioid?
01:27:13.000They didn't say because we don't have greedy pharmaceutical companies.
01:27:16.000They said because the doctor – when you go to the doctor, the doctor doesn't say, you have some pain.
01:27:21.000And this is – the Dutch are famous for this.
01:28:13.000So let's imagine this sweeping act in 1970 does not take place and all these psychedelics, whether it's psilocybin, including marijuana, which is made illegal because of prohibition.
01:28:24.000Prohibition went off and then they started, you know, they went after marijuana.
01:30:01.000But if you're a 35-year-old man, who's to tell you that you shouldn't be able to try heroin?
01:30:05.000I mean, you have to make a decision as a society because, I mean, look, so Carl is right that most people that do opioids or heroin don't become addicted.
01:30:14.000The people that do become addicted, most of them are able to quit on their own.
01:30:18.000So only a small percentage of people become so addicted that they die from it.
01:30:25.000So are we going to just condemn the most vulnerable people?
01:30:29.000In other words, the 112,000 people that died of drugs and drug poisonings and drug overdoses last year are by definition the most vulnerable to those drugs.
01:30:36.000Are we just going to sacrifice 112,000 people from drugs so Carl Hart can get high on heroin?
01:31:40.000This is one of the reasons why you learn from other people's failures.
01:31:42.000Like, there's not a lot of people that are crack advocates, because crack didn't really work out good for fucking anybody.
01:31:48.000No one's out there telling people to take crack.
01:31:50.000But if the government came out with some sort of, or not the government, a pharmaceutical drug company came around and the FDA approved it, and it was some sort of a medication that gave you the exact same effects as crack, But they told you this is a great drug for people to overcome timidity.
01:32:05.000Timidity is a real problem in our culture.
01:32:17.000But using that synthetic heroin and using it so ubiquitously and prescribing it is what caused that epidemic.
01:32:22.000You tricked people into getting addicted by telling people it wasn't addictive and then telling people they need it because of pain.
01:32:29.000And then, of course, your whole body's in agony because it's addicted to this stuff, and when you get off of it, or you try to get off of it, you're in terrible, terrible pain.
01:32:41.000So if we didn't have that happen, and in 1970 they didn't pass this act that told people that things like Ibogaine, that cure people of addictions, actually rewire the mind in some substantial way, that It stops all those addictive pathways and stops people from wanting to engage in these self-destructive behaviors because it makes you so aware of why you're doing it in the first place.
01:33:04.000We made all of those illegal at the same time.
01:33:06.000If that hadn't been done, we would have a much greater – if they hadn't been done and if all of these compounds had been pursued under the – The name of real science.
01:33:33.000I mean, who knows what the actual numbers are, but it's hundreds of billions of dollars that are being earned south of our border by these ruthless, murderous gangs who control the drug trade because it's illegal in the country that has the most demand for it.
01:33:47.000Yeah, although let me respond to that last part.
01:33:51.000But remember, Obama comes in and he restricts opioid prescriptions around 20—I think it was like 2009, 2010. Right.
01:34:00.000So people are now going into fentanyl directly or from marijuana or whatever.
01:34:11.000So, I mean, I'm not denying any of, like, yeah, I mean, ultimately, kids need to be raised right, you need more self-control, you need more delayed gratification, 100%.
01:34:19.000I also support marijuana decriminalization.
01:34:21.000I mean, drugs have two dimensions, right?
01:34:23.000There's one dimension, which is the inherent toxicity of the drug, and the other dimension is how you use it.
01:34:29.000Marijuana, nobody's ever overdosed from it.
01:34:33.000But I mean, really, compared to other drugs, marijuana is fairly low toxicity.
01:34:38.000Alcohol, you know, actually, when you read the history of alcohol prohibition, it did actually have health benefits, alcohol prohibition, because people drank less.
01:35:14.000But they chase it, makes it more expensive because it's less available.
01:35:19.000Now, you get to kind of go, well, okay, so then you get to – we have a real-world case, which is marijuana.
01:35:24.000We've legalized marijuana in California and many other states.
01:35:28.000The criminal element controlling the marijuana growth and industry in California is larger and more violent and more dangerous than it was before we decriminalized it.
01:35:41.000Well, I mean, I think it's mostly because the market for black, the black market for marijuana is still much larger than the market for legal.
01:35:49.000In other words, you can buy marijuana for much cheaper, you know, informally through your dealer on the street than you can if you go into the store.
01:35:55.000And some of that's, I will grant you that it's because the California, you can imagine when California decides to make marijuana legal, it's going to add a huge amount of tax and it doesn't require a set of costs that legal marijuana is just much more expensive.
01:36:24.000So because they made marijuana legal, growing it illegally was just a misdemeanor.
01:36:30.000So because of that, 90% of all the marijuana that's grown to all the places where it's illegal, all the states that it's illegal, comes out of California.
01:36:42.000Even though it's legal in California, it's...
01:36:45.000There's an illegal market and this is the safest place to grow it because it's just become a misdemeanor and we are also a very unique country and we have these wide swaths of land that are public that people could just go out on and just go for a walk in the woods.
01:37:03.000And so they go out there and they set up shop and they use unbelievably toxic poison pesticides and herbicides and that shit gets in your illegal marijuana.
01:38:22.000I think what's going on is the black market exists because it's illegal in other states and you develop these enormous criminal organizations and they infiltrate legal stores in California and they do a lot of shady shit in California too, but they exist because it's illegal.
01:38:36.000So you think if marijuana were legal and across the whole United States, there would be no black market?
01:38:41.000There would be, but it won't be a powerful It's a unit like the cartel in Mexico.
01:38:46.000The cartel in Mexico is like a government.
01:38:49.000It's like an enormous, terrifying government of people that are profiting off of drugs because drugs are illegal in the United States.
01:38:57.000If everything was legal here and you could grow it yourself, I'm with you on marijuana, not cocaine, not heroin, not fentanyl.
01:40:11.000It makes you think about things in a different light.
01:40:14.000Carl Sagan was a famous cannabis user, and he has a very famous quote about cannabis, about there's states of mind that are achievable on cannabis that he doesn't think are achievable any other way.
01:40:44.000And if you have a history of mental illness in your family, which many people do, mental illness seems to be something that's inherited, that some people have a tendency towards certain mental states.
01:40:55.000There's a lot of arguments about that.
01:40:56.000I'm not the one to say yes or no, but maybe you should not do these things if your family has a tendency towards schizophrenia, if you've had your own mental struggles, if you've had moments where...
01:41:06.000I know people that have had schizophrenic breaks or they've come back.
01:41:09.000I have a couple of friends that had real problems and now they're normal again and not with medication.
01:41:14.000They just sorted it out and they figured it out.
01:41:19.000I think it's always so important to remember that the people that have the worst problems are definitely a small minority, but the question is, how many people are we willing to sacrifice?
01:41:29.000How many people do we sacrifice every year because of alcohol?
01:41:31.000How many people do we sacrifice every year because of sugar?
01:41:34.000Do you know that heart disease is one of the biggest killers of human beings in this country?
01:41:38.000And how much heart disease is preventable because of lifestyle and diet?
01:42:59.000Well, in Vancouver, they had this experiment where they said, we're going to go give hydromorphone, which is an opioid, as a harm reduction to people that use fentanyl and heroin.
01:43:14.000And it's been a total nightmare because it gets diverted And people will sell it in order to buy fentanyl.
01:43:48.000But it's illegal to do that with morphine.
01:43:50.000There's laws already that prevent you from doing that if you want to follow the law.
01:43:53.000So it's people that are willing to break the law and do this.
01:43:57.000If there's a reasonable law that gets put forth in terms of age of use, age of discretion, and it probably—honestly, I mean, no one's going to buy it, but it probably should be 25, right?
01:44:09.000That's when the frontal lobe fully forms and, you know— Your decision making is all fucked up.
01:44:14.000And if you're hitting the bong every day while your brain is forming and this frontal lobe is under development, of course it's going to have an effect on it.
01:44:23.000It's going to have an effect on if you're on Prozac.
01:44:25.000It's going to have an effect on if you're drinking every day.
01:46:05.000That's different from having a government program to assist it because you would say, well, it always starts to think, we're not going to promote it.
01:46:14.000But in fact, the people that are involved in assisting suicide are basically selling it.
01:46:18.000There's this amazing BBC clip of this woman, this doctor that's been assisting people with their suicide.
01:46:24.000And it's impossible to listen to her and not feel like she's promoting it.
01:46:29.000Because he benefits from it, which is nuts.
01:46:31.000It's nuts to have people benefit financially from people deciding to kill themselves.
01:46:37.000They're telling people that have long COVID, come on in.
01:46:51.000Yeah, I don't know the exact number, but we looked it up recently, and it's been increasing significantly.
01:46:56.000And it's also, yeah, one of the changes, as you mentioned, was it's now from people that have life-ending illnesses to people with psychiatric disorders.
01:47:06.000Right, or people with just depression, simple depression.
01:47:09.000Or there was a one, I just read a case of a woman, I didn't check to see if it's true, but I'm assuming a young woman who was sexually assaulted and depressed.
01:47:17.000And I think it was in the Netherlands.
01:47:20.000They have assisted suicide there as well?
01:48:57.000But I think, unfortunately, you could apply that perspective to almost everything that people do that's dangerous and tell people they can't make these choices anymore because we're going to lose people.
01:49:08.000And I think you really want to be honest about that one.
01:49:33.000I think we should do that with marijuana.
01:49:34.000I think we should do that with psilocybin.
01:49:36.000I think we should also take into account the people like these veterans like Sean Ryan that I was telling you that have had these experiences from psychedelics that have changed their life in a huge way.
01:49:46.000And for these people that sort of dismiss that and poo-poo that and say, oh, Carl Hart just wants to get fucked up, I don't think that's really fair.
01:49:54.000And I think you have to apply the same ideas of freedom where you have it with speech to especially behavior like drug use where it's not affecting anyone but yourself.
01:50:05.000And we already have laws that you're not allowed to drive intoxicated.
01:50:09.000And if someone does something and commits a crime while they're intoxicated, that's also illegal.
01:50:14.000We have laws that prevent bad behavior.
01:50:16.000And those laws, it's already criminalized.
01:50:19.000So I think the real problem is not these things.
01:50:24.000The real problem is, like, all things that people get to try out.
01:50:29.000There's a lot of people that are going to fuck up with everything.
01:50:32.000And I would feel better—I mean, I don't think Carl—I read his book and I interviewed him.
01:50:36.000I don't think he's— Honest about the trade-offs.
01:50:39.000I think he sells it as though it's just an injustice that we don't have legalized drugs and then dismisses this very well-established reality that greater drug availability results in more addiction and more problems.
01:50:52.000Yeah, I don't think you could shuck off the trade-offs, just like you can't shuck off the alcohol deaths.
01:50:57.000I think there's something like 90,000 people every year die from alcohol or alcohol-related accidents.
01:51:02.000Well, yeah, but the difference is like when you die on fentanyl, you smoke it and you're dead.
01:51:10.000Yeah, people that are dying in their 80s and 90s.
01:51:12.000Yeah, you can have a couple of drinks and you're definitely not going to die, most likely.
01:51:15.000But I think what Karl Hart is kind of saying from his own perspective is that he had a very different opinion of what they did and the dangers of them before he started researching them.
01:51:26.000And then once he became a clinical researcher, then he realized, like, oh, this is not—and then he started experimenting with them.
01:51:32.000I mean, literally, he's like—I mean, he's literally a world expert in drugs.
01:52:02.000One of the most amazing groups, there's two famous studies, the Vietnam veterans who were addicted to heroin that come back to the United States.
01:52:56.000Is arrested multiple times from, you know, when he starts his criminal career and as a teenager all the way into his 40s.
01:53:03.000And they keep letting him off because they're racist, actually, and they're saying, oh, you know, you're a victim and whatever.
01:53:12.000Basically, is getting to a place of just very serious addiction, finally gets arrested in a way so that he can get into recovery.
01:53:19.000The white guy gets arrested once, and because they're not lenient on him, he ends up getting into recovery right away.
01:53:27.000So I think if we can find some common ground, it would be that you would enforce some basic laws so that if you're out there on the streets dealing drugs or you're sleeping in a tent on the sidewalk after you've been told multiple times, Right.
01:55:13.000Well, first of all, shut down the open-air drug markets.
01:55:18.000Don't have this thing of repeated—if you overdose and the system has to come out to reverse the overdose, next time they come out, it should be a choice of jail or rehab.
01:56:58.000Like, San Francisco's like a hoarder's house, but way worse.
01:57:02.000It's like the idea behind it of it being compassionate is like there should have been a course correction when you realize the results of that.
01:57:09.000There's nothing compassionate about letting people shoot up in the streets and have your whole block filled with needles and human poop.
01:57:35.000He's both a terrible, terrible politician and he's a terrible bureaucrat.
01:57:40.000His latest thing on homelessness is he's like, well, this time I'm going to give out the money to the counties and they're going to give me a plan.
01:57:45.000It's like you've been doing that for your entire time as governor and lieutenant governor.
01:57:50.000I'm sure you've seen the list of the people that work on the homeless in California and the salaries they get.
01:57:59.000It's a sick bureaucracy that creates sickness.
01:58:03.000I'm not saying it's deliberate, it's unconscious, but it's Munchausen syndrome by proxy.
01:58:08.000It's creating, making your child or making your community sick so that you can treat them.
01:58:13.000And there's very few countries that have figured a way out of that once that already takes place.
01:58:18.000It's very hard once you lose the norms.
01:58:22.000This is an amazing book called Weird about Western industrialized educated societies and they just talk about these core values of working hard, delaying gratification.
01:58:40.000I think that's the one that people don't want to say, especially people that fancy themselves intelligent.
01:58:45.000I think a big part of our problem is we have lost All sense of religious virtue and values as a culture.
01:58:54.000And we've rejected them under the guise of you being too intelligent for religion.
01:58:58.000And the results of that is like if you...
01:59:01.000Just look at the results in terms of the way people feel about life.
01:59:06.000If you really do believe in God, you will feel about life like that it is a gift and is a miracle and you will live a more righteous and just life.
01:59:17.000And I don't know if it's true, but I know that if you believe it's true, and Jordan talks about this, he won't say whether or not he believes in God, but if you act as if God is real, you'll have a much better life.
01:59:30.000They know when you meet a really good Christian person who does charitable things and this wonderful, lovely person who actually lives by the Bible, not a hypocrite.
02:00:15.000There's all these people that are secular that are like, yeah, we're with you, but they don't actually do the work like the Salvation Army.
02:00:19.000When I did a fentanyl protest in Los Angeles, the Salvation Army shows up and they're effective on the free speech issues in Europe.
02:00:26.000There's a group called Alliance Defending Freedom.
02:00:37.000I mean, when I look at my grandfather, who was a farmer in Indiana, lived to 101. After he died, I interviewed his neighbors and I was like, what?
02:00:45.000And they were like, oh, yeah, the neighbor over there is 98 and that neighbor is 97. And I was like, why does everybody live so long around here?
02:01:07.000I mean, there's this really interesting book by Leah Greenfield that argues that the increase of mental illness in Western countries over the last 100 years is just this incredible pressure on the individual to make all these choices.
02:01:23.000My grandfather was like, there weren't that many...
02:01:38.000Yeah, and then you go, I want to be, change my gender.
02:01:41.000I mean, the levels of choices that people have, it's overwhelming, as opposed to, like, he basically didn't choose any of the major things in his life, he didn't choose any of them.
02:02:04.000I mean because you were saying it's not just that – there's two things that are going on.
02:02:08.000First, people just – the church didn't explain the world very well.
02:02:12.000Suddenly you have these scientists that are like, well, actually the earth revolves around the sun, guys.
02:02:18.000And then there's a story about evolution, which may not be correct, but nonetheless, the scientists had a much better story of reality than the church did.
02:02:26.000And then the other thing is that just as you get wealthier, you just have more money, there's more choices, there's more things to do, and you're sort of like, why am I going to go along with what some priest did?
02:02:56.000But to dismiss all the ideas behind it, I think it's foolish.
02:03:01.000I mean, the Dutch, for example, they're very secular.
02:03:05.000I mean, these Western European societies, far less belief in God than in the United States.
02:03:10.000And yet somehow, you know, they keep raising their kids to be more disciplined than we're raising our kids.
02:03:16.000They don't have as—they have, you know— Their cultural philosophy is better.
02:03:18.000There's like an inner—I do think it's a stoicism in the sense that it's—you know, it's like when I would—my parents—it's funny because Jonathan Haidt, at one point, he was asked, I think, by—I can't remember who.
02:03:31.000Someone asked him, like, who's better parents, left-wingers or right-wingers?
02:03:52.000And then you'd be like, will you get me some food?
02:03:55.000They would teach us how to push a chair next to the kitchen counter to climb up and make your own food.
02:04:00.000They had a philosophy that was if the kid can do it, the kid should do it.
02:04:05.000As opposed to now it's like I think there's just these over-involved parents that are like, oh, I want to take care of you.
02:04:11.000And so the kids end up getting coddled.
02:04:13.000Somehow, for whatever reason, in Europe, those core values of self-reliance...
02:04:20.000You know, when I interviewed like the progressive homeless service providers in the United States, they were in San Francisco and other places, they would say things like, oh, that's the whole buy your bootstraps philosophy, which is just so oppressive.
02:04:34.000It's like, no, actually, it's completely liberating to be told that you have the power to do these things.
02:04:40.000I mean, that's basically what Tony Robbins is telling people all the time, right, is that you have the inner resources, the inner power.
02:05:02.000Or that there's some injustice in the system, some systematic oppression that's keeping them from succeeding.
02:05:09.000But the reality also is that some people are born in terrible circumstances.
02:05:13.000And then there's no beginning, finish.
02:05:16.000There's no starting line that's the same.
02:05:18.000But this thing where like after the George Floyd where it's like the Obamas and affluent black families are saying, oh, yeah, I'm worried about my kids.
02:05:36.000I mean, these messages are constantly being told to people that basically the broader society is essentially unfair as opposed to telling them that really the playing field is more level than it's ever been.
02:05:49.000And the crazy thing is up until about 2012, that's what we thought.
02:05:55.000A lot of people do, because there's sort of a political incentive to communicate that way, and to promote this idea that it's everybody's fault, and everybody goes, and then you get white guilt involved, like,
02:06:24.000It just got to this weird point somewhere around 2012 where it was everywhere in society and you had to encounter unconscious bias and unconscious racism training in the workplace.
02:06:37.000So then you get these grifters who their only jobs to tell you that everything is racist and their only job is to berate you and scare you into You have to give in to whatever their demands are in terms of the numbers of employees that have to be X,
02:06:52.000Y, or Z, and they develop these very rigid rules that you have to follow.
02:06:59.000They're controlling what you're allowed to say, the way you're allowed to discuss things.
02:07:04.000If someone says anything about a person that is of a particular group, that becomes either homophobic or transphobic or racist or you're not taking into account all these other factors that led that person.
02:07:39.000There was always people that were saying there was...
02:07:50.000I mean, think about how Obama was raised by his white mom, you know, by a single mom, you know, and his grandparents were there.
02:07:57.000She didn't teach him that he was a victim, that he was helpless against society.
02:08:01.000He literally became the president of the United States, the most difficult job to get on Earth.
02:08:07.000It's the greatest American success story you can imagine.
02:08:10.000I mean, here he's like reelected in 2012. Like, this stuff is starting, you know, Black Lives Matter starts in, I think it was like, was it 2015 or was it 2013?
02:08:43.000But that's actually a tragedy, especially for young black men.
02:08:49.000In this country, this idea that he does once in a while, he'll say something about it.
02:08:54.000But I mean, the whole Black Lives Matter movement, which was, you know, just a tragedy, you know, where the grotesque exaggeration of police killings of unarmed black men, he was in a position to push back against that.
02:09:09.000And they didn't do it, and he hasn't done it since he left office.
02:09:11.000So that's why I say I blame him just because of what he hasn't done.
02:09:15.000Because there have been grotesque uses of police brutality on black people, and we all know it.
02:09:21.000The problem is if you say that it's not as big of a problem, we have very specific instances where it was a problem.
02:09:38.000But it doesn't mean that it's not still a giant issue if you're a black man and you encounter cops and you're terrified.
02:09:43.000I mean, it's about one or two dozen a year.
02:09:47.000That's still a lot of people that died that didn't have to die if the police weren't incompetent or if they weren't racist or if they weren't fucked up on PTSD because a lot of them are.
02:09:57.000But if you calculate the increase of the number of black people killed because the police pulled back in reaction to Black Lives Matter, what we call the Ferguson effect...
02:11:04.000You know, Chamath was on the podcast recently and he thinks that San Francisco is going to experience a rebirth because of AI. And his perspective is that the super nerds are like more in charge of San Francisco now.
02:11:16.000And so these sort of mid-level grifters who are into virtue signaling, which is like how you got ahead in a lot of these businesses where you're not really exceptional as a person.
02:11:27.000But you fit a good quota, and you're kind of a DEI hire, and next thing you know, you're the CEO of a big company.
02:12:06.000And Marc and Chamath and all these folks that are doing that now, it's courageous because— If you step out of line with the ideology, with the ideology supports, you get attacked.
02:14:16.000And I think the other thing that I've realized in the last year and a half of doing the Twitter files and other censorship files is that – because I used to think that my support for free speech, that our support for free speech was sort of like natural or something.
02:14:28.000But I realized like it was taught to – Like, I remember my father teaching me about Skogi and telling me that the ACLU had defended the right of Nazis to march through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors.
02:14:39.000And I remember being horrified by it as a very, you know, woke kid and being like, that's very insensitive.
02:14:45.000And my dad kind of being like, well, yeah, but here's why we do it that way.
02:14:51.000Because actually censorship would then be used against other people.
02:14:55.000And he would also make this point, and I was making this yesterday to my future students at University of Austin, is that you want to know who the Nazis are.
02:15:03.000You actually want to know who the Nazis are and you want to argue with the Nazis.
02:15:30.000But I do think there's a whole younger generation that never got indoctrinated into the religion of free speech in the ways that we as Gen Xers did.
02:15:37.000Well, I think they're learning it more now because it's being discussed now because it's under threat.
02:15:41.000And I think people need to understand the ramifications of giving the government control – They're not truthful.
02:15:49.000There's no instances where you could look back and say, well, the government never lies about this.
02:15:53.000There's not one thing, whether it's healthcare, whether it's international relations, whether it's their political opponents, whatever it is.
02:17:48.000So you could tell truthful stories about vaccine injuries.
02:17:52.000They would attribute that, they would put that in the category of this is going to contribute to vaccine hesitancy.
02:17:57.000So they would put the label of malinformation on that one and we could silence that.
02:18:02.000Well, and that was in the Facebook files, where the Facebook's top researcher says to the White House, they go, hey, our research shows that if you censor true stories of vaccine side effects...
02:18:15.000Shocking as it sounds, people will become more suspicious of the vaccine.
02:18:19.000So it's actually, yeah, they do contradict themselves in that sense.
02:18:24.000I think the Hunter Biden laptop story, we talk about it a ton.
02:18:28.000But what was so important about it is that the disinformation campaign comes before the censorship.
02:18:34.000They go out and they say, and this will be a segue to our conversation about UFOs.
02:18:41.000FBI gets the laptop in December 2019. They know it's Hunter Biden's laptop.
02:18:46.000They know it's not Russian disinformation.
02:18:48.000Aspen Institute, which is funded by the U.S. government and very close to the intelligence community, then goes and brainwashes journalists and the social media companies into into preparing that there could be a hack and leak coming around Hunter Biden's laptop.
02:19:03.000And of course, Mark Zuckerberg made history here with you when he told you that the FBI had come to him in the summer of 2020, warning of a hack and leak operation.
02:19:12.000So they do that, and then when the laptop comes out, they demand that it be censored.
02:19:17.000But the key thing there is that there was an organized disinformation effort around that laptop by people that were fed that by the FBI. This is why I'm so confident now in saying that both the FBI and the CIA It interfered in the 2020 election because they ran this disinformation campaign whereby censorship was one part of it,
02:19:36.000but it was actually the part that came after the disinformation.
02:19:39.000And it probably would have had a significant effect on the outcome of the election.
02:19:43.000I mean, I personally—I voted for Biden, by the way.
02:19:46.000And when I saw that story, I was like, there's clearly something wrong with it.
02:20:26.000It's disinformation, because they knew it was not true, right?
02:20:29.000And then the CIA, remember, Gina Haspel was director of the CIA for Trump.
02:20:36.000She was part of it because she approved the letter from the 51 former CIA directors and leaders that said that it had all the earmarks of a Russian information operation.
02:20:47.000She approved that letter within hours.
02:20:50.000All she had to do, I mean, look, assuming she didn't know, Right.
02:21:43.000I got to segue on that because here's the craziest thing.
02:21:47.000That Aspen Institute Hunter Biden disinformation operation was run by two people, Vivian Schiller and Garrett Graff.
02:21:55.000Vivian Schiller is this just wild, you know, she was New York Times, NPR, Twitter executive, high-level executive, now runs Aspen's digital initiative.
02:22:10.000You know, acclaimed nonfiction book writer, they did the Hunter Biden disinformation campaign where they program and brainwash these journalists and the social media platforms in advance of the release of the Hunter Biden story.
02:22:24.000Well, guess who wrote the big book Dismissing UFOs earlier this year?
02:23:15.000She goes, they says there's something like they both kind of go, well, you know, the reason we this is just UFOs are obviously a conspiracy theory is because, you know, the government can't, you know, the government is incompetent and can't get away with this kind of thing.
02:23:34.000Because, of course, the U.S. government is actually very good at keeping secrets.
02:23:38.000You know, from the making of the atomic bomb until today, there are a lot of secrets that the U.S. government is actually quite capable of holding.
02:23:46.000And nobody knows that better than Vivian Schiller and Garrett Graff of the Aspen Institute, who ran the Hunter Biden operation.
02:23:52.000So what they're doing is they're deliberately...
02:23:57.000I mean, I use PSYOP or whatever you want to call it, because a lot of people, our ordinary normie experiences of government is going to the DMV, right?
02:24:06.000So you go, wow, the DMV, yeah, that's the government.
02:24:08.000The people that are working at the CIA and the FBI at those high levels are best—they're like some of the smartest people in the world.
02:24:16.000I mean, these are people that they're recruiting them out of the Ivy Leagues.
02:24:18.000The idea that these agencies are incompetent—and I'm not saying that they're always competent—but these are some of the premier spies that have ever existed.
02:24:26.000And the idea that somehow the U.S. government can't carry out these operations to keep it secret, that's obviously wrong.
02:24:32.000And then we have all these whistleblowers coming forward.
02:24:35.000So that's the prelude to today's story.
02:24:55.000I encourage people to read it in part to understand what's the most sophisticated take by the US government.
02:25:02.000The less sophisticated treatment was by Sean Kirkpatrick, who was the recently departed head of the That's the All Domain Anomaly Resolution Office that was created by the Senate that came out with this very dismissive report about UFOs.
02:25:24.000The head of Arrow left and has now just been ridiculing and attacking all the UFO whistleblowers including David Grush and Lou Elizondo and all these folks.
02:25:35.000So basically, this is a book of a history of UFOs, and it basically just goes through every single major case and shows you why it's just not a UFO. I mean, basically, it's showing why it's a natural phenomenon.
02:25:48.000So it's essentially doing what Project Blue Book does.
02:25:51.000It's absolutely an extension of—it's really—and remember in 1953, the CIA created something called the Robertson Panel, and the Robertson Panel comes out and says the U.S. government should just focus on debunking UFO cases and including ridiculing people,
02:26:08.000which is a very cruel treatment of people because it's such a devastating—socially so devastating to be ridiculed.
02:26:15.000And then you get the Condon Report, the Condon Committee, which is the University of Colorado, 1966-1968, same thing, dismisses this, suggests it's all kooks.
02:26:26.000But Garrett Graff's UFO book is more sophisticated.
02:26:30.000It's actually a little bit more gentle in the sense that it's dismissing all these things.
02:26:35.000It's also talking about, like, these may be natural phenomena.
02:26:39.000It might be plasmas or ball lightning, you know, and then they kind of go through the psychological estimation.
02:26:44.000But the whole book is aimed at just absolutely dismissing the phenomena.
02:26:49.000I mean, that's the whole purpose of it.
02:26:50.000I think some of the phenomena should be dismissed.
02:26:54.000I think that's one thing that we really need to accept when we try to develop an objective sense of what's really going on, that ball lightning is real.
02:27:08.000And if you ever see ball lightning and you imagine you're a person alone in the forest and you saw ball lightning, you would 100% shit your pants.
02:27:17.000You'd be like, oh my god, there's a fucking alien here and they're going to get me and they're going to take me like Travis Walton.
02:27:23.000I also think there's something going on with the government.
02:27:26.000I believe that they have, and this is a pure guess based on no evidence at all, I think they probably have some super sophisticated propulsion program that's based on something that is an entirely new set of physics.
02:27:40.000It's probably based on some sort of gravity propulsion.
02:27:43.000There's long been speculation that eventually there'll be an ability to create something that does not rely on conventional propulsion.
02:27:54.000There's long been some sort of an understanding of a manipulation of gravity.
02:27:58.000In fact, there was an article Some science journal from like 1957 that was talking about the new wave of gravity devices.
02:28:10.000It's going to be gravity planes and we're not going to use propulsion anymore.
02:28:15.000People have always wondered if we're eventually going to crack that.
02:28:18.000And if they did crack that, I think the problem is...
02:28:22.000I think a lot of these things are drones and I think the problem is a biological life can't survive those speeds I think those things are moving at these insane rates of speed because there's Nothing alive that's piloting them and so that's why humans can survive and that's why you know No humans can survive that kind of g-force.
02:29:40.000And he also makes this argument that there's a cultural context as to what people see, and that a lot of these people that live in Ireland, they see leprechauns and elves and fairies, and that It's quite possible that this is not from another planet,
02:29:59.000that this is some sort of extra-dimensional experience, that these things come from somewhere that's here but not here, and that this is why they've existed forever, and this is why there's no evidence of them, and they come and go as they please, and they're probably a completely different type of thing than what we are,
02:30:16.000this bizarre carbon-based life form that we are.
02:30:19.000There are probably some Parallel evolution that took place somewhere else that's probably gone on a million years past where we are.
02:30:32.000There's some sort of a spiritual element to it.
02:30:34.000It's not as simple as a metal ship comes from another place and lands here.
02:30:39.000But I also think the metal ship coming from another place might be real, too.
02:30:42.000If you just take into account the sheer vastness of the universe and the unbelievable possibilities of the variety of life, You would think there's got to be intelligent life.
02:30:55.000And if we do have some sort of super sophisticated drone technology that doesn't rely on conventional propulsion systems, which there's evidence of, okay?
02:31:05.000If you look at the GoFast video, if you look at the FLIR video and David Fravor's experiences with the TikTok where they got video of that thing, they got radar of that thing.
02:31:13.000So we know something can move that way that fast.
02:32:16.000But when the government wants to dismiss all of them as being explainable and nonsense, and it's the same people that dismissed the 100-bit laptop story, yeah, you should get nervous.
02:33:13.000It just, it really, like, literally, it felt like it was pulling my left eye.
02:33:18.000The left, like, I was looking at them and it felt like, you know how, like, it's almost like you're being cross-eyed, but it felt like it was literally pulling my left eye.
02:33:24.000And then it just did a set of squiggles like that, and then a cloud bank came over and covered it up.
02:33:31.000You know, I don't know what it was, I had no drones.
02:33:43.000I couldn't tell how high up they were.
02:33:46.000And then the other one I saw was actually in a suburb of Houston, or was it Dallas?
02:33:53.000And I was running at night, and there were these two guys there, two black guys, young guys, that had just gotten out of their car, and I had seen these orange orbs.
02:34:08.000And then they were filming them with their cameras, and I went over them, and I was like, what are those?
02:35:41.000People found out on Google there were some mentions of that back, I think, when Gresh brought it up in 2023. And since that was made public on Twitter, it seems that Google has removed those searches.
02:36:37.000Of course, searches for it skyrocketed, but there was one other time it was displayed in a large blip, June 2023. Just as modern UAP crash retrieval story broke, David Grush went public and hearings were planned.
02:37:33.000You ever wonder if maybe they're fucking with you and they find out where you are and they send some drones over to this place, get them to start talking?
02:37:40.000I mean, I felt better because there were two other guys there, you know, and I have their info.
02:38:19.000And the part of me that's skeptical of it is because I know a lot about nuclear energy and nuclear power, and it took a huge amount of effort to build the bombs.
02:38:27.000Huge amount of effort, huge number of people.
02:38:30.000So the idea that anti-gravity was then sort of like, oh yeah, we just did that in like a couple of years or something, that strikes me as really improbable.
02:38:41.000Yeah, very improbable in a couple of years.
02:38:42.000But if they're doing it over decades, they're doing it with retrieved crashes, which seems to be a part of the narrative.
02:38:59.000It gets weird because there's a bunch of inventions they attribute to crashed retrievals where they back-engineered stuff.
02:39:07.000You know, I would imagine that if I was a super sophisticated society from another planet and I saw these struggling apes, I would give them some hints.
02:40:14.000When you've got these guys like, you know, Grush is the best example, but there was another pilot, there was another jet that was with him, multiple witnesses that saw this thing physically.
02:40:26.000Whatever these things, Brian Graves, when they see these things, what are these?
02:44:01.000Because there's some sort of a program that exists that they want to hide.
02:44:07.000And the best way to hide it is to continually bring up and then debunk...
02:44:13.000These fake programs for crash sites, for dealing with aliens.
02:44:18.000I would make a bunch of things that are absolutely provably untrue that could eventually be proved as untrue, attribute them to these people, and then have everything else that gets said about the subject get reduced to nonsense.
02:44:31.000Because that's essentially what it does.
02:44:32.000If you start talking about UFOs and UAP programs, you're a cuckoo.
02:46:47.000Well, they're not being told what this is.
02:46:50.000No, I'm not denying that it's absolutely illegal.
02:46:52.000But I'm saying that if it is illegal and has been done this way for so long...
02:46:58.000The odds of you untangling that, they're going to fight against that with tooth and nail because that's going to put a lot of people in jail.
02:47:05.000It's going to get a lot of people fired.
02:47:07.000A lot of people are going to lose their careers.
02:47:08.000If they lied to Congress, if they misappropriated funds, there's a lot of weird stuff that gets attached to that.
02:47:14.000And so I think there is some sort of, whether it's the government, whoever's doing it, there's some sort of sophisticated disinformation campaign that's essentially a tie to everything.
02:47:25.000There's a disinformation campaign that's tied to medicine.
02:47:28.000There's a disinformation campaign tied to fluoride in the water.
02:47:32.000There's a disinformation campaign that's tied to almost everything.
02:47:35.000The idea that there wouldn't be for UFOs is kind of crazy.
02:47:49.000I have a feeling there's a lot going on, and I think they have infantilized us for so long that to give up the reins of that is the same thing that people, like, why they don't want to give up the reins of free speech.
02:48:51.000And if you wanted to create a misinformation campaign or you wanted to confuse the waters even more, I'd have a bunch of fake whistleblowers.
02:48:58.000I'd get agents to say a bunch of crazy shit about biological entities and mind control and Shut down nuclear power plants.
02:49:07.000I'd have them say all kinds of crazy shit that's provably untrue.
02:49:33.000The problem is you need a Samsung phone because you'd have better zoom.
02:49:35.000I had a friend just send me a similar video from Ohio where his mom took and thought it was some orbs flying over and it looked honestly weirder than this.
02:49:43.000And he found out a couple hours later it was a memorial service and there was a bunch of lanterns that got left up.
02:50:41.000This is the one from my friend that sent me, but look, there's like two or three things that come together here, and they're starting to fly together.
02:50:47.000That looks more like aliens to me, but they found out it was lanterns.
02:51:34.000If you didn't know what that is, if you didn't know that this is like tectonic plates shifting against each other and they release energy and you see this stuff flying through the air, it's so crazy looking.
02:53:38.000This person says that there's a lot of it.
02:53:41.000And they describe one case of an F-22, which is an amazing fighter jet, being escorted by a set of UAP orbs out of its target mission area.
02:53:56.000Another case of a UAP declining from very high up in the atmosphere and coming right over an aircraft carrier that the entire crew saw.
02:54:07.000So some incidents that have not been reported.
02:54:11.000The report is in the hands of members of Congress.
02:54:15.000And this is a critical time because, again, if you are a skeptic, if you're a debunker, whatever, you should not want the government spreading disinformation on this.
02:54:25.000If you want to get to the bottom of it, we should get to the bottom of it.
02:54:30.000And then the other pitch I'd make on this issue is that these people that I'm interviewing, if they're, first of all, if they're actors, they're incredible because they are genuinely terrified when I talk to them.
02:54:44.000You know, most actors aren't very good actors.
02:54:46.000So I'm always like, these guys are the greatest actors I've ever met, these people.
02:54:53.000So they need better whistleblower protections.
02:54:55.000And if you interview congressional staffers, members of Congress, they will acknowledge that whistleblowers do not have proper protections, whether for UAPs or anything else.
02:55:43.000All I'm really confident saying, because in other words, I'm very much an incrementalist in the sense that, like, I like my stories to move the ball for.
02:55:50.000It's been over a year since I've done a story on this, and I was always like, I'm not going to, I'm not somebody that wants to just, I mean, on some things I'll write a similar story like free speech or whatever, but on this issue I'm like, I'm not going to write a new story unless I really have something.
02:56:02.000I'm very confident that the government is not revealing all that it knows, and that Arrow, the organization that the Congress created to reveal what the government knows, did not reveal what it knows, and that really it was engaged.
02:56:17.000Because look, it's one thing to be like...
02:56:21.000But then for the guy that was running that program to come out and actively disparage people in the ways that they're doing, that's character assassination.
02:57:11.000But it also makes me wonder, what's the motivation?
02:57:13.000And you must have formed some sort of a personal opinion on what's going on.
02:57:19.000Or at least you have an inclination towards what's going on.
02:57:22.000I mean, I think that if you read through the histories, so, I mean, I just think the problem is that there's so many possibilities of what's going on.
02:57:33.000Like I said, I'm a little skeptical that we've mastered anti-gravity because that would just be so game-changing and I think it would just take a huge amount of effort.
02:57:43.000I have interviewed people that are not comfortable coming forward yet that say that we have and claim direct evidence of that.
02:57:53.000And it's just not – I can't unfortunately say much more about it.
02:57:56.000And these are folks that want stronger whistleblower protections to be able to come forward.
02:58:01.000But I find it hard to believe just because of my knowledge of nuclear that we've got those capabilities.
02:58:06.000I also, you know, like what's amazing is like the most, for me, one of the most amazing parts of this is when you just go into the newspaper archives and you're reading stories from the 40s and the 50s and the 60s and 70s and you're seeing, and that's part of the reason I'm also with you.
02:58:19.000I'm skeptical that we are getting any closer because there's a way in which like you read New York Times Magazine stories from the 1960s and 70s that actually treat the subject differently.
02:58:29.000Not with ridicule, but treated seriously.
02:58:32.000And they actually were reporting on government programs and whatnot.
02:58:36.000Well, Project Blue Book was essentially designed to ridicule the people that thought they saw something.
02:58:42.000J. Allen Honick, when he left Project Blue Book, became a UFO proponent.
02:59:26.000We need to have those protections for whistleblowers.
02:59:27.000They need to pass this disclosure legislation.
02:59:30.000And anybody who, in my view, who, anybody that's like a debunker or a skeptic or whatever, who says that we shouldn't pass legislation to disclose what the government knows, for me, that person is acting in bad faith.
02:59:41.000Because if you're really sure that there's nothing there, then you should be first in line to demand disclosure.
02:59:46.000Do you think there's a genuine fear in giving people this information and having a collapse of society if it turns out to be true?
02:59:54.000If there was a full disclosure and all this top secret video that has been hidden that's really high resolution, All that stuff gets released, and the government says, this is what we know.
03:00:55.000Well, I think the society collapses because we're faced with an intelligent being that's been able to...
03:01:01.000It visit us for ages whenever it wants, and we weren't aware of it.
03:01:05.000And the illusion that anyone of human race is in control of this Earth and can lead us from some sort of a position of knowledge and strength in the face of this overwhelming force from another planet, that would be a collapse of rules and of society,
03:01:25.000the like, that we have never seen before.
03:01:27.000Because no one would listen to anyone anymore because there would all of a sudden be a new daddy in town and people would want to figure out what the new daddy wants them to do.
03:01:35.000It depends because, I mean, I think that you have a scenario where it goes, again, we're just completely...
03:01:53.000I mean I think if they were like they're – actually the abductions are all real and we signed a deal to trade technology for abductions, that could be problematic.
03:02:01.000Trevor Burrus Do you think that's real?
03:02:30.000No, but we also— We do that to primates?
03:02:32.000Well, but we've gone through—I mean, I included how we've protected gorillas in my book, Apocalypse Never, and we actually— I saw a gorilla in a zoo just a few years ago.
03:03:29.000So following Michael's story, the DOD has now commented, the Department of Defense has no record present or historical of any type of SAP called Immaculate Constellation.
03:04:07.000To keep everybody fucking clueless and guessing and keep all the infighting going on, wouldn't you release a bunch of shit that's not necessarily true?
03:04:15.000If I was really running a secret government UFO retrieval program and we were in contact with extraterrestrials, I would release a bunch of nonsense all the time that makes it look stupid.
03:06:50.000I think there's a long – if it's real, if it's a real phenomenon that the highest levels of the government are aware of, I think it's been kept under wraps for so long it's almost impossible.
03:07:01.000It's like a person coming out of the closet.
03:07:06.000You know, it's like it's been so long you've been lying, it would cause so many problems if you came out and told the truth.
03:07:12.000And I think it's very difficult for people that have been lying to hundreds of millions of people about one of the biggest questions that humans have ever had.
03:07:30.000I mean, remember Mike Pompeo, Trump's CIA director, when he was asked why they didn't release all the JFK files, he said because some of the people involved are still alive.
03:07:39.000So that is potentially a plausible reason if we assume Mike Pompeo was telling the truth about why they didn't release all the JFK files.
03:07:45.000Well, especially all these people that have been lying to Congress and misallocating funds and are a part of these programs that are hidden programs.
03:08:22.000The fact that people have been lying about UFOs forever is crazy.
03:08:25.000You mentioned the Bob Lazar case, and I don't know if it's true or not, but I think the ad hominems, when you see them using ad hominem character assassination, you're like, well, wait a second.
03:09:41.000I don't think I would allow us to be alone.
03:09:43.000I think I'd keep a close look on us fucking crazy assholes.
03:09:46.000They're very—if we're not alone, then the phenomenon is just so elusive.
03:09:52.000Or much more advanced and doesn't want us to be aware completely of its presence, and it's monitoring these psychotic monkeys who have this propensity to be constantly intoxicated, who are also in control of thermonuclear weapons and are enforcing magical lines they drew in the dirt.
03:10:33.000Well, I think one way to ensure that you don't have to kill all the people is to go to the people that have the biggest weapons and say, we're here.
03:11:14.000Well, the reason why my club, the rooms are named Fat Man and Little Boy, is because those bombs that they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that started a whole wave of UFO sightings.
03:11:25.000I mean, just logically, if I was from another planet and I saw, oh, we've just detected a nuclear bomb went off on whatever they call our planet.
03:11:35.000Like, let's go see what they're up to and go check in on them.
03:11:38.000They probably visit infrequently, just like scientists, when they're going looking for sloths, they visit infrequently.
03:12:14.000If you're going to be the type of thing that can figure out how to get here from another planet, you're going to be really fucking curious.
03:12:19.000The curiosity that is required to allow you to figure out interstellar travel is pretty bananas.
03:12:31.000I think they're probably aware that there's an adolescent period that every intelligent species goes through when it has the power to blow itself up and it doesn't have the wisdom to not do it.
03:12:42.000Because there's clear examples right now every day all over the world of people killing people, blowing people up.
03:12:49.000You can see it in the news every day with what's going on in the Middle East, what's going on in Ukraine.
03:12:53.000It's really clear that we have the power but we don't have the wisdom.
03:12:57.000And so there's probably an evolutionary period where this intelligent animal adapts and learns from its mistakes and eventually gets past these base primate instincts of greed and envy and lust and anger and retribution and retaliation gets past this territorial instinct and recognizes that we are truly all connected but it takes a long time biologically I think the thing that helps it along is technology,
03:13:26.000and I think there's this furious battle of trying to claim ground and control technology's influence on people because we know it's an overwhelming influence, and we know that the technology that has allowed people to have truth, maybe for the first time in human history,
03:13:41.000where anyone like yourself can come on a podcast like this, an independent journalist, and you can reach Millions and millions of people.
03:14:34.000I mean, it's a great time to be in journalism.
03:14:36.000It's a great time for real journalism because you're confronted with so much bullshit and propaganda and that people reject that bullshit and propaganda and they're turning towards real journalists.