On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, Joe talks about his experience running for Vice President of the United States with Donald Trump. He talks about what it's like running for a presidential candidate, what it was like to be the VP nominee, and how he and his family reacted to the news that he was running for president. Joe also tells the story of how his 7-year-old son found out that his dad had been chosen as Trump's running mate, and the awkward moment that happened when he called his own son to tell him the news. Joe also shares a story about the first time that his son met Donald Trump, and why he thinks it's a good thing that he doesn't have a clue what's going on in the background of the conversation. And, of course, he also talks about the time his son accidentally told a joke to Donald Trump when he was 7 years old, and it got him in hot water for telling a joke that a 7 year old could only cuss like a sailor. It's pretty funny, don't you think? Check it out! Joe Rogans Podcast by day, by night, all day! All day, all the time! -Joe Rogan Podcast by Night, All Day, by Night! All Day All Day by Day, All The Time by Night by Night by Night All Day By Night, by Day by Night - All Day by Day - By Day, By Night by Day All The Way by Day - By Night By Night All By Night - by Night By Day By Day , All Day - All The Things That Don't Give Me A Chance To Know About Me, I Can't Do It, I Do It All The Right Way, I'll Tell You What I Can I Can Do It? , I'll Give You Something That Matters To Me, And Then I'll Do It To You, And I'll Gotta Have It, And You'll Hear It, So I'll Think About It, Too, And Give Me Something That's Good By Me, and I'll Have It By Me Say It, by Me & I'll Hear Me And You Can't Say It And I Will Hear It And Think It & Think It Out, I Will I'll Say It Out & I Will Think It And Hear It Out And I Can Hear It & I Can See It And See It, By Me And I Don't Have It And Say It & See It & Hear It In A Positive Place
00:00:24.000You know, I was just telling you this earlier, but the first time that I've been in a public spot without Secret Service in the room is right now.
00:00:31.000So I'm like looking around for these guys.
00:01:07.000Well, actually, what happened is I got a text message from a staff member on his team that says he just missed a very important phone call.
00:01:14.000And I don't know, you know, because there's so much inbound traffic that I think it just went straight to voicemail.
00:01:20.000So I call him back and I'm like, hey, sir, what's going on?
00:01:23.000He said, JD, you just missed a very important phone call.
00:01:25.000I'm going to have to pick somebody else now.
00:01:29.000You know, I'm about to shit a brick here.
00:01:31.000And then he says, no, no, I'm just kidding, obviously.
00:02:00.000And I'm just anxious for him to get this statement out, because in my mind, it's not final until the statement is actually out.
00:02:06.000And he talks to my son, and he reads the statement that he is going to put out on Truth Social announcing that I'm the VP nominee of the Republican Party.
00:02:16.000And he's like, what do you think about that, Ewan?
00:02:17.000And my son Ewan's like, oh, that's pretty good.
00:02:27.000And of course, I remember this story because in particular, the Madison Square Garden rally of a few days ago was the first time that my son actually met Donald Trump.
00:02:38.000So he'd spoken to him on the phone, but hadn't actually met him until the rally at MSG. And my seven-year-old really wanted to tell him a joke.
00:02:45.000And he remembers this phone conversation.
00:02:48.000And so he tells him this joke, and Trump kind of chuckles, but also is probably judging me because it was a somewhat inappropriate joke for a seven-year-old to tell, but here we are.
00:02:57.000Well, that's the only ones that seven-year-olds remember.
00:03:02.000Well, it's like, you know, I have terrible language, and it's one of my many flaws, but I was raised by my very working-class grandmother, and she was actually very, interestingly, she was a very devout Christian, but she also had, you know, a language that would make a sailor blush.
00:03:17.000And so I talk like that because I was raised by this woman.
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00:07:37.000Everyone's trying to find a way to squeeze in those extra hours of gameplay.
00:07:58.000Life can be chaotic, but you shouldn't have to miss out on the latest Call of Duty just because you've got, I don't know, responsibilities.
00:08:48.000I mean, one of the first times that I sort of spent like a large amount of time with Trump was in 2021. And I was thinking about running for the Senate.
00:08:54.000So I was down to Mar-a-Lago talking to him.
00:08:56.000And my initial reaction on seeing him was like, oh my God, you look really good.
00:09:00.000You actually look healthier now than you did six years ago.
00:09:04.000Normally presidents age very, very badly.
00:09:08.000Yeah, I mean, look, I definitely thought, okay, obviously, this is a big thing, right?
00:09:12.000I talked about it with my wife a lot because she was a working corporate litigator.
00:09:20.000And we definitely – it was a marital conversation, in some ways a tough one because, you know, even though, yeah, I'm a senator, we're still pretty anonymous, right?
00:09:28.000Like we can go on vacation or we were until this happened.
00:10:37.000So we want to go for a walk with the kids in Central Park.
00:10:41.000And normally you would walk out of your hotel and walk into Central Park and hang out with your family.
00:10:46.000Now it requires we have to notify Secret Service.
00:10:48.000And so then they have to scope out an area where they can make sure that it's going to be properly safe.
00:10:53.000And so instead of walking out our hotel room and taking a walk in Central Park, We hop in a car and show up in some random part of Central Park that's 20 blocks away.
00:11:01.000And then, of course, as soon as we get out, everybody's like, well, who the hell is this?
00:11:04.000Because there are 14-car motorcade there.
00:11:06.000So the lack of anonymity is definitely an annoyance that comes along with it.
00:11:11.000But, I mean, I'm the kind of person where you just take the good with the bad.
00:12:10.000Or, you know, like one of the first things that happened, we're back at our house in Cincinnati the weekend after the RNC convention and And we're sitting there watching, like, some stupid show, Emily in Paris, on Netflix or something, which, sorry, I don't mean to call that a stupid show.
00:12:23.000I actually think Emily in Paris is a masterpiece, but set that to the side.
00:12:28.000But we're watching some show on Netflix, and, you know, you see one guy walk past your window, and you see another guy walk past your window, and it's just a Secret Service agent patrolling just little things like that.
00:12:57.000They sort of see them as their police protectors.
00:12:59.000Our seven-year-old, it's funny, you know, he's in second grade, and one of his buddies, their parents came to us and said, do you know that the kids are playing this game in school called Boss Man?
00:13:12.000Where basically one second grader will walk down the hallway or down the playground flanked by two separate second graders.
00:14:20.000And that was kind of my attitude towards it.
00:14:22.000I started to realize that Trump was thinking pretty seriously about making me his VP nominee probably earlier this year because he would ask me a lot about who I thought the VP nominee should be.
00:14:53.000The morning that he was shot in Butler, PA, was the first time that he and I ever talked about it.
00:14:59.000So that was a Saturday, just thinking about, I guess it was probably June 13th, because I think the convention started June 15th.
00:15:06.000I go down to Mar-a-Lago that morning, Saturday morning, and I'm talking to him for the first time, because the media always asked me, I was like one of the rumored shortlist candidates, I kept on getting these questions from reporters, have you ever had this conversation with Trump?
00:15:34.000Look, I think that there were a couple of senators that were being considered, a couple of governors, a couple of former cabinet secretaries.
00:15:41.000But you don't really know because when Donald Trump sat me down, I mean, he talked about 10 different people that he was thinking about naming.
00:15:47.000And this was two days before he made this election.
00:15:49.000So he's playing like a little, like let's see how JD thinks game.
00:16:22.000And then he looks at one of his staff members who's in the room.
00:16:25.000He's like, actually, wouldn't it really set the world ablaze if we just made the decision today?
00:16:30.000And so why don't you come up with me and we'll just do the announcement in Butler, Pennsylvania?
00:16:35.000And I said, and of course not knowing at the time what was going to happen, I was like, absolutely, let's get this over with because I'm sick of not knowing.
00:16:57.000You know, the initial reaction is I actually thought they had killed him because when you first see the video, he grabs his ear and then he goes down and I'm like, oh my God, they just killed him.
00:17:07.000And I was so, I mean, first I was so pissed, but then I go into like fight or flight mode with my kids.
00:17:13.000I'm like, you know, all right, kids, you know, we were at a, we were at a mini golf place in Cincinnati, Ohio.
00:17:19.000I grabbed my kids up, throw them in the car, go home and load all my guns and basically stand like a sentry at our front door.
00:19:30.000And people were yelling and saying, this guy's got a gun, he's on the roof.
00:19:34.000You know, there was that crazy, I think it was a BBC reporter, somebody with an English accent who did the report on the ground with the guy.
00:19:42.000You know, he's got a MAGA hat on and a Bud Light.
00:22:15.000But no, the Nashville Shooter, I mean, just while we're on the topic, went in and murdered a bunch of children at a Christian school because he or she, like whatever, was motivated by some very radical trans ideology.
00:23:06.000Okay, so I don't know your religious background, but I'm a convert to Catholicism.
00:23:10.000I was raised Christian, became an atheist, came back to Christianity, got baptized Catholic like five or six years ago.
00:23:17.000And what is so interesting about this in this house, we believe, is it's so similar to the creed that you declare every day at a Catholic mass, right?
00:23:29.000We believe And one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God.
00:23:34.000And there's almost a similar cadence between the Christian creed and what these guys are doing with this hyper-woke stuff.
00:24:03.000It was like gay rights as religious rights, but the second rights was RITES. And it was a guy who was like a pro-gay rights guy, but sort of made the observation that when you get into the really radical trans stuff,
00:24:19.000you actually start to notice the similarities between a practiced religious faith.
00:24:46.000Well, I mean, he's basically like now what you would call a Trump Republican, but he's a political philosopher and he writes about economics, right?
00:24:53.000That's sort of how I got connected to him.
00:24:54.000I had no idea he was gay when I first met him.
00:25:35.000Because, again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone, and now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it that they're like, we didn't want to give pharmaceutical products to nine-year-olds who are transitioning their genders.
00:25:45.000We just wanted to be left the hell alone.
00:25:47.000Well, a lot of gay guys feel like the whole movement is homophobic, which is ironic, because they think that people think there's something wrong with being gay, so what you really are is a girl.
00:26:37.000Well, and this used to be something that the old left, right?
00:26:39.000The criticism that was made of American healthcare, which I always thought made some sense as a conservative guy, is that when you have the profit motive influencing government policy around healthcare, then yeah, okay, sometimes the profit motive can be a good thing, like we're going to develop life-saving cancer drugs.
00:26:57.000And I'm fine with people making a big profit for that.
00:27:00.000But then sometimes they'll try to manipulate government policy to make their own drugs more profitable, not because it's good for health, but because these people just naturally, like most people, want to make some money.
00:27:18.000You know, this person, you can read about it in the New York Times, later disavowed our friendship and leaked our text messages to the New York Times.
00:27:26.000But the breaking point was I came out against this gender transition for minors when I was running for the Senate a few years ago.
00:27:33.000And she's a transgender individual, and she kind of flipped out on me.
00:27:36.000And the thing that I never understood, because she's like very much an old school leftist, is...
00:27:42.000Are you not at all a little bit worried about how rich people are getting by prescribing experimental therapeutics to 9, 10, 12-year-old kids?
00:27:52.000Like, this used to be something that the American left would have gone crazy about.
00:27:57.000And now the only people who are raising concerns about it are conservative Republicans.
00:28:02.000But we should be concerned when, because it's not just like the lobbying and the influence.
00:28:08.000I mean, there's something called the Diagnostic Statistical Manual.
00:28:11.000It's sort of the manual of psychiatric disorders.
00:28:14.000And I think that we're on the DSM-5, as it's called, which is the fifth edition of this manual.
00:28:20.000You have drug companies that are making money that are lobbying to have, you know, child dysphoria put into our psychiatric manuals because then psychiatrists will treat that condition and then those pharmaceutical companies will get rich from it.
00:28:37.000Somebody should be interrogating whether the political incentives of our country actually align with the financial incentives of the pharmaceutical industry because oftentimes the answer is going to be no, but nobody's asking that question.
00:28:50.000Well, we've always known that children are very easily influenced and that children shouldn't be allowed to make life-changing decisions when they're very young.
00:29:56.000Which shows you the corruption of science is that we're actually not publishing studies that suggest that gender transition craziness has reached the boiling point.
00:30:08.000I have a four-year-old and two-year-old.
00:30:10.000Every single day, my four-year-old or two-year-old will come to me and say something that is batshit insane because they're four and two.
00:30:18.000Like, my four-year-old will come and say, Daddy, I'm a dinosaur.
00:30:21.000I'm going to take them to the Dinosaur Transition Clinic and put scales on them.
00:30:26.000Well, the other thing is if you were encouraging them, and some parents, I'm just going to say it, even though it sounds gross, they want their kid to be a part of the LGBTQ thing because it looks like a flag of virtue that they can post in their front lawn.
00:31:05.000It becomes a social signifier for a lot of parents.
00:31:08.000And we have to be honest about that fact.
00:31:10.000And if you look at where the gender craziness is the most common, it's most common among upper middle class to lower middle class white progressives.
00:31:22.000Now, you could believe, okay, that there's just like something genetic going on in the mind of a wealthy white progressive.
00:31:29.000Or you could believe that this is a cultural trend that we should be questioning a lot more than we are right now.
00:31:35.000And unfortunately, here's one thing that I really worry about.
00:31:44.000People are very good at rationalizing things.
00:31:45.000If you are a, you know, middle class or upper middle class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper middle class kids.
00:32:04.000But the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be Trans.
00:32:13.000And is there a dynamic that's going on where if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege, right?
00:32:41.000And again, I think it's important to sort of, you know, most people are not saying, oh, I'm white privileged, how do I become part of the privileged set?
00:32:51.000But it's these weird ways in which these ideas creep into the mainstream.
00:32:56.000And people are very good at rationalizing these things.
00:32:59.000And so what I think 20, 30 years ago, even among very well-to-do white progressives, like an 11-year-old boy says, I think that I'm a girl.
00:33:08.000Most of the time we would have said, oh, that's ridiculous and crazy and, you know, ha ha ha, and come back to me in a couple of days.
00:33:16.000Now I think there's this massive incentive to try to say, oh my God.
00:33:23.000And I also think it's, to your point, very warping on the minds of young kids because what they're now doing is taking normal adolescent curiosity and normal adolescent discomfort.
00:33:35.000Like, I don't know a single person who went from the ages of 10 to 15 who didn't say, oh, like, sometimes I had some, you know, weird ideas or I dressed weird for a couple of years or something, right?
00:33:46.000It's a confused The confusing phase for most Americans, we take that normal adolescent confusion, and then we try to medicalize it, and nobody's saying, oh, when we do medicalize it, by the way, a lot of pharmaceutical companies get very rich off of it.
00:33:59.000Not only very rich, but then the child is sterilized.
00:34:02.000I mean, this is for a lot of these kids.
00:34:04.000They'll never be able to have children ever again.
00:34:06.000If they change their mind, if they one day decide, oh, I was just going through a confusing time in my life, but now I've ruined my voice with hormones.
00:34:22.000So this is where I had the real breaking point with a friend that I mentioned earlier, is she made this argument that puberty blockers are fully reversible.
00:34:37.000The idea that if you give puberty-delaying, puberty-blockers, whatever you're going to call them, to kids who are 11, 12, 13, that that's fully reversible, that is completely and preposterously insane.
00:34:50.000Now even the most radical advocates of trans healthcare do not say that, right?
00:34:56.000Because look, I mean, you have sexual dysfunction, you have, to your point, you know, hair in weird places that won't go away, you have voice changes that won't go away.
00:35:05.000We're experimenting on tens of thousands of American children.
00:35:22.000Well, it just shows you how a lot of this, you know, if you can call it a mind virus or whatever it is, it does make people behave religiously.
00:36:42.000Not only that, it like ruins chances of getting scholarships.
00:36:46.000If you were the number one player, and then all of a sudden some guy comes along who wears lipstick, now he's the number one girl on the team.
00:37:03.000Well, when you see them in the actual swimming pool competing, it looks like the biological males are running at 1.5x speed and everybody else is running at normal speed, right?
00:37:17.000And to your point about it destroys opportunities for scholarships, I mean, go back to the original reason why we wanted girls' sports, why we have Title IX in the United States of America to begin with.
00:37:27.000Like, we recognize that competitive sports, like, what does it teach?
00:37:30.000It teaches you how to participate on a team.
00:37:33.000It teaches you to recognize your own weaknesses and the strengths of your teammates and vice versa.
00:37:38.000I'm the father of a two-year-old daughter.
00:37:40.000I want my daughter to learn these important life skills.
00:37:43.000I don't want her going into athletic competitions where I'm terrified she's going to get bludgeoned to death because we're allowing a six-foot-one male to compete with her in sports where you should not have biological males competing with biological females.
00:37:57.000Not only that, but they get to change with them in the locker rooms.
00:38:00.000There was one in Canada where a 50-year-old man identified as a teenage girl.
00:38:21.000The problem with that is people – there's a psychological condition called autogynephilia, and autogynephilia is where men are sexually aroused by the idea of dressing and behaving like a woman, but they're heterosexual.
00:38:34.000Now, all of a sudden, these people with this known psychiatric disorder are allowed to just identify as a woman, and you're a bigot if you don't let them change in the world.
00:38:43.000Yeah, and you're expected to empower them at the expense of young women who are very often much more vulnerable for obvious reasons than young men.
00:38:52.000And it reminds me of, so the very first congressional delegation trip that I ever took was to Paris.
00:38:59.000And it's part of the Paris Air Show, and Ohio has all these aviation interests, and Anyway, long story short, I was talking to a very conservative woman at the Paris Air Show who was from Mississippi, and she was probably 65, 70. And it was really interesting because I was just like,
00:39:16.000She had never been to Paris before, and I'm just, you know, interested in people.
00:39:19.000So I was asking her, and she said, you know what's really interesting is I just feel like...
00:39:24.000Paris, I would think of as very liberal, but I actually think Paris is more conservative than some of the big cities in the United States.
00:39:31.000And I said, oh, tell me more about this.
00:39:33.000And this woman doesn't know me very well, and she's clearly kind of embarrassed to tell me, but she walks through, she says, well...
00:39:39.000I just don't see any people, like when you're in Paris, the girls are girls and the boys are boys.
00:39:45.000And that's true in Paris, and that's not necessarily true in some of our big cities.
00:39:50.000And then she says, Senator Vance, I'm embarrassed to tell you this, but when I was in New York City recently, I saw a grown man who was walking around in a miniskirt, and then she gets very quiet and she said, Senator Vance, I could see his balls.
00:40:33.000If that's what you're doing, you're a pervert.
00:40:35.000And I want all of us to say, whatever your political persuasion, just say, no, that's weird.
00:40:40.000You're not allowed to walk down the street and flash children in the middle of America's biggest city.
00:40:47.000And it reminds me, Emmanuel Macron, who's the leader of France, made this observation about Somebody asked him, why hasn't all the transgender stuff made its way into France?
00:40:57.000And Emmanuel Macron says, well, in France, we have two genders, and that's plenty.
00:41:02.000I kind of wish that was the attitude that we had in the United States of America.
00:41:08.000Well, have you ever heard Marc Andreessen break down why Woke is like a cult?
00:41:19.000And he talks about how you can be excommunicated from the cult if you don't follow the doctrine, you have to follow religiously to the letter.
00:41:26.000That's where all this stuff, like if you're allowing guys to just have their balls hanging out walking down the street because it's empowering, and because you're being inclusive, you're empowering perverts.
00:41:37.000Yeah, it's a cult and it's a religion, but with one big difference.
00:41:40.000And I think this is, you know, actually, this observation is probably one of the things that led me back to my own faith.
00:41:45.000But I sort of just a fundamental background belief I have about humanity is, you know, we're the hardware, right?
00:42:17.000It has the excommunication part, but it doesn't have the forgiveness and redemption part.
00:42:22.000Most people recognize that even if you violate some fundamental moral value that I have, if you apologize and try to be a good person, we're going to be forgiving.
00:42:32.000We want people to be able to live together.
00:42:35.000There is this weird thing with the woke stuff, and you see this, and I feel bad when comedians in particular do it, I'm sure you've seen this, but when anybody does this, where they'll go and say, well, I'm really sorry.
00:42:48.000They'll sort of prostrate themselves when they make an offensive joke, or they do something they're not supposed to do, and they expect redemption, but no, no, no.
00:43:52.000So it's this thing that behaves like a religion, but it's not really well thought out, and it's very illogical, and it also combines pharmaceutical drug companies, and there's a lot of other weird shit that's attached to this religion that you kind of need.
00:44:06.000If you're going to do this whole woke thing and go guns a-blazin', you're going to have to get drugs involved.
00:44:14.000They're going to have to do hormone blockers.
00:45:00.000And maybe we should be asking ourselves, this is sort of more of a Bobby Kennedy point, but Why are we putting all this weird crap into our food, into our water?
00:45:10.000Maybe we should be a little bit more skeptical, like my body is a temple, rather than I'm gonna welcome even more pharmaceutical intervention into the human body.
00:45:19.000It's very interesting how some religions view the body as a temple and some religions almost invite the pollution.
00:45:26.000I think the woke thing is inviting the pollution.
00:45:28.000Well, they're also inviting – see, one of the weirdest things is if you are on the wrong side of their ideology, like if you're aligned with Trump like RFK Jr. is, now all of a sudden I've seen like people on the left that are trying to dismiss a lot of the things that he says.
00:45:48.000About additives in food, about atrazine, fluoride in the wall, all these different things.
00:45:53.000Because now they're connecting not having toxins in your food with a right-wing idea.
00:46:10.000Well, and it raises one of my sort of core political beliefs is that our politics is focused on fake shit and distractions to distract us from the real stuff, right?
00:47:14.000And one of the first things that happened when I was a senator is he had this terrible train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, got a lot of headlines.
00:47:20.000And it was a mistake at the time that wasn't obvious.
00:47:23.000They basically set off a few of the chemical cars, which, I mean, if you see the images, it looks like a nuclear bomb went off.
00:47:58.000I think we should focus on the real stuff.
00:48:00.000And unfortunately, it's true of the environmental policy, but it's true of a lot of other stuff.
00:48:04.000We just don't talk about the real thing.
00:48:06.000The carbon footprint thing is very concerning to me because I'm seeing this concept being pushed out of having an app that monitors your carbon footprint and limiting the amount of travel you can do and limiting the amount of things.
00:48:25.000And if you can do that, then you can get away with a lot of things.
00:48:28.000You can get away with a lot of policy.
00:48:30.000You can get away with a lot of decisions that are made that people wouldn't agree with because you're going to limit so many things about their life they're going to become accustomed to being Governed in that way.
00:48:41.000It's disturbing to me that there's also profit that's being made off the green movement.
00:48:45.000There's a lot of people who are making a lot of money off of these environmentally conscious things.
00:48:53.000$50 million to Kamala Harris, by the way.
00:48:55.000All those bullshit fake food, that fake meat, which is not good for anybody.
00:49:59.000So I rolled out a flat thing of crescent rolls, I put raw broccoli on top of it, I sprinkled ranch dressing, and I stuck it in the oven for 45 minutes.
00:50:44.000I'm just very skeptical when someone is promoting things for either global health or for the environment, and then I find out that they have a ton of money invested in companies that could fit those needs.
00:51:07.000We have to look at the financial incentives of this.
00:51:09.000I mean, so one of the big things that me and President Trump confront all the time is the accusation that we're somehow, like, in bed with Russia.
00:51:15.000Which is, like, the dumbest thing in the world to me.
00:51:17.000Like, I don't really care about Russia.
00:51:19.000I just don't think we should have a nuclear war, like, writ large.
00:51:37.000It's not because they care about climate change.
00:51:38.000It's because they want the Germans and everybody else to buy Russian natural gas.
00:51:42.000And they realize that if the Germans and French close down all their coal and nuclear factories, Russia is going to have them by the balls.
00:51:49.000How do they get the Germans to close down their nuclear factories?
00:53:19.000Well, we were talking about how you asked, why do the Germans shut down the nuclear facilities?
00:53:25.000And I know, you know, it's they're shutting down coal, they're shutting down any of their base power.
00:53:30.000And leaning really into solar and wind.
00:53:33.000But, again, the green energy movement in Europe is heavily funded by the Russians because the Russians want to have, because they produce so much natural gas, they want to have Europe by the balls.
00:53:44.000So, again, how do they convince them to shut down their nuclear power plants?
00:53:48.000Well, in the same way that Bill Gates is convincing us to eat fake meat is they fund all this stuff and they make it about the environment.
00:54:05.000The funniest thing ever was when Elon showed a photo of Bill Gates next to a photo of a pregnant man emoji and he said, if you want to lose a boner real quick.
00:55:00.000It's kind of like Davos, but for national security.
00:55:02.000And I went there and it was like a big deal for me because I went in there as the one skeptic in the entire, this like massive Euro complex.
00:55:10.000I went as the person skeptical of continued escalation in Ukraine because I think that what we're doing in Ukraine is insane and that we should have a policy effectively of promoting peace in the region.
00:55:20.000And we walk in, and one of the people that I'm on this panel with is the leader of the German Green Party.
00:55:28.000And, you know, she's like 30 years old, and she really, really cares about Russia, Ukraine.
00:55:35.000She's like the youngest person in the German government.
00:57:13.000Think about how many pharmaceutical advertisements you watch when you watch a football game.
00:57:16.000Yeah, let's get into this because this is an interesting one.
00:57:19.000So one of the things that happened that separated us from the rest of the world other than New Zealand is in the 1990s they allowed pharmaceutical drug companies to advertise.
00:57:59.000I bet if you ask the American people, you know, I bet that's one of those things if you put it to a national vote instead of representatives.
00:58:06.000The problem with representatives is special interest groups.
00:58:09.000Special interest groups and lobbyists and the amount of money.
00:58:12.000Yeah, the whole conduit of money into politics is fundamentally broken.
00:58:17.000Okay, here's the thing, and I say this as a critic of pharmaceutical advertising, whenever I see a pharma ad, and I pretty much only see them when I'm watching football, I'm always shocked that they actually influence anybody, right?
00:58:28.000Because it's like, oh, take this drug for rheumatoid arthritis, and you can have all these positive experiences, and it's like, oh, the side effects are, you know, erectile dysfunction, rashes on your face, suicidal ideation, tumors in your brain, and you'll hate yourself and be depressed,
00:58:52.000So I actually think that the real corruption is not really that they persuade Americans.
00:58:57.000I mean, if you're going to take a drug, you're probably going to take a drug based on conversations with your doctor more than a pharma advertisement, but they do corrupt the media ecosystem.
00:59:07.000Because if you're getting all that money from the pharma companies, then you're not going to launch investigations into some of the things you should be launching investigations into.
00:59:15.000And that's why it's dangerous, because it's not like these are completely innocent companies and have never done anything wrong.
00:59:21.000So if you all of a sudden have them removed from your list of people that you're investigating just because they advertise, they've essentially bribed you.
01:00:09.000So, Jorana, this guy on the street in D.C., and he had just quit his job for this pharmaceutical lobbying organization, or he was talking about quitting.
01:00:18.000He's like, man, we just did something that's very dark.
01:00:20.000And basically, what they had figured out is because American Indian tribes, Native Americans, have tribal sovereignty.
01:00:28.000And so they figured out, I guess, that if they gave some Native American tribe some fraction of a fraction of a penny of the royalties from the sale of opioids that they could actually insulate themselves from litigation around the prescription opioid epidemic.
01:00:47.000And I guess this guy thought it was so dirty that he was like, I can't work for this organization anymore.
01:00:54.000And I was like, holy shit, that is some pretty dark stuff.
01:00:58.000So you guys are giving some Native American tribe-like pennies so that you can insulate yourself from pharmaceutical litigation.
01:02:18.000Well, yeah, and this is like one of the things that I think is genuinely different about, and I don't want to get too partisan political here, but about Donald Trump's Republican Party.
01:02:27.000I mean, obviously, like, there are corporations that we're more pro certain businesses, and we tend to be more anti certain businesses.
01:02:38.000But fundamentally, I think President Trump has changed the mindset of the Republican Party to where it was like instinctively always pro-corporate.
01:02:47.000We're now sometimes willing to ask, well, is this corporation's interest in the American interest?
01:02:51.000Like there was this famous quote, I believe, from the leadership of GM back in the 1950s.
01:02:57.000That General Motors' interest is America's interest.
01:03:00.000And I'm probably butchering the quote, but sort of paraphrased.
01:03:03.000Can anybody really in 2024 say that Google's interest is America's interest?
01:03:08.000Or Apple, which employs thousands of slaves in Shenzhen, is Apple's interest is America's interest?
01:03:17.000And the fact that we're at least somewhat skeptical of corporate power in the Republican Party I think is a very good trend for us.
01:03:24.000It is kind of weird that one of the wokest companies, if you thought about like woke companies and like super progressive and like on the right side of everything, Apple.
01:04:05.000Well, and talking about distractions, right?
01:04:07.000The distraction, like, distraction politics versus real politics.
01:04:11.000If Apple says hashtag BLM and gives a few million dollars to a trans rights organization, then the entire political left ignores that they're profiting off of slave labor.
01:05:31.000But my job is public and social policy.
01:05:35.000And what really pisses me off, and frankly, what should piss off more Republicans, because if Historically, the Republican Party has been the more pro-corporate party.
01:05:43.000We should be saying, the more that these corporations are engaged in social policy, in particular, left-wing social policy, the more that we should be saying, I don't know that I want to give you everything that you want, which is, of course, what the historical party did, but I think is much different in the last few years.
01:06:00.000I'm just scared that the tentacles of the pharmaceutical industry are so deeply entrenched in politics and in media that you can't just shake them off.
01:06:10.000You can't just say, hey, you can't advertise on TV anymore, or hey, you no longer have exemption from responsibility from the side effects of certain drugs.
01:06:20.000Because that whole thing they pulled off with exemption of...
01:06:27.000Pharmaceutical companies being responsible for injuries from vaccines.
01:07:03.000The fact that we're not even allowed to talk about that, even, you know, no, like, serious injury, but even the fact that we're not even allowed to talk about the fact that I was as sick as I've ever been for two days...
01:07:14.000And the worst COVID experience I had was like a sinus infection.
01:07:20.000And you don't even, you know, everybody that I know, or a lot of people I know, they talk about the second shot that they got of the vaccine was really, made them really, really sick.
01:07:30.000Well, that's a side effect, and not a side effect that we even talk about enough in this country.
01:07:35.000No, and it's also, again, we're talking about companies that have a long history of lying and being forced to pay criminal fines, and then we're giving them this exemption from being responsible for any of the side effects.
01:07:50.000Yeah, and who do you think those big pharma companies donate to politically in 2024?
01:08:15.000Are they so entrenched that it's impossible to, these things that disturb us, the fact that they have exemption from any responsibility because of the vaccine, the fact that they have the ability to advertise on television, can those things be removed?
01:08:30.000I think it's a possible thing, but because I haven't actually done the work to figure out how many of my colleagues would sign on to this, I can't say whether it's like a certain thing or a likely thing or just something that we should be working on.
01:08:42.000I mean, here is an interesting thought experiment.
01:08:45.000If there was one thing that we could do to rein in the pharmaceutical companies, what would it be?
01:08:51.000Would it be liability on the vax stuff?
01:08:56.000My intuition is actually it might be the advertising on the healthcare stuff because that's the way in which they engulf the media into this whole scam.
01:09:05.000That would be great, but the vaccine thing is important too because...
01:09:21.000And that becomes very religious, just like all these other things that we talked about, where you have this thing that everybody speaks about in hushed tones.
01:09:30.000People know people that have been vaccine injured.
01:09:32.000Particularly people on the left, they're very reluctant to discuss it, even publicly.
01:09:37.000I know people who are public people who have had serious vaccine side effects who do not want anyone to talk about it.
01:09:44.000They're scared of being labeled an anti-vaxxer.
01:09:47.000I have a Senate colleague who doesn't want to talk about it, but worries that it's like permanently affected his sort of sense of balance and dizziness and vertigo.
01:10:11.000I think they make Great drugs that help people in all sorts of conditions and diabetes medication, insulin.
01:10:17.000Like the sickle cell stuff that's coming out now, we maybe have cured sickle cell disease in black Americans because of a gene therapy.
01:10:27.000I read about it a couple weeks ago, actually, that the first experimental therapy, and it was hard for the kid who took it, but you had like an 11 or 12-year-old black American just walk out of the hospital, and he's probably cured of sickle cell disease.
01:10:41.000But I actually think that in some ways, what we should be encouraging these companies to do is that, right?
01:10:47.000We want them to develop the life-saving drugs.
01:10:51.000We don't want them to get rich by shielding themselves from liability or working with Native American tribes so that they don't get sued.
01:10:59.000And I actually think there maybe even is a harmony between those viewpoints because if they had to get rich by developing life-saving therapeutics, and that's the only way they could get rich, then they'd probably do more of that.
01:11:10.000But again, that's where public policy comes in, and that's where my job is to make sure that when the pharmaceutical companies get rich, they get rich by curing diseases, not by doing weird, psychotic things with Native American tribes.
01:11:22.000And you can't have this argument that we need exemption from responsibility because otherwise we're not going to be able to profit off of these things.
01:11:37.000It's one of the biggest problems with corporate America is socialized costs but privatized profits.
01:11:42.000And what you really want is that you want major American companies, and I'm a believer in the market economy, you want them to absorb the benefits but also the costs, and that's often what doesn't happen.
01:11:55.000So I talked about this train disaster in East Palestine and, you know, the railroad companies hate me because I kind of went on a crusade against them afterwards.
01:12:02.000And what I realized is think of all the costs of that disaster.
01:12:06.000Think of the health care costs, the welfare costs from people who lost their jobs, the declining home values in that community, just all of the costs absorbed by that community.
01:12:16.000And the railroads are paying slap on the hand fines.
01:12:20.000And it sort of occurred to me that the reason they're not more serious about these train disasters is because they're privatizing the rewards.
01:12:27.000But when a major train disaster happens, who picks up the tab?
01:12:32.000It's the local residents and it's the American taxpayer.
01:12:35.000And that's something that fundamentally has to change.
01:13:02.000And I actually, this is one of my biggest frustrations, probably my single biggest frustration over my time in the Senate, is when this happened, a bunch of the residents came to me It's actually very sweet and even kind of patriotic, but certainly self-sacrificing where they said,
01:13:18.000look, no one knows what the effect of this shit is going to be 15 years down the road, right?
01:13:24.000Because we weren't worried about, okay, a guy drinks the water in East Palestine and drops dead.
01:13:30.000The water levels did not have toxins at that level.
01:13:33.000But the question was, what happens when you're imbibing the stuff, breathing it in, drinking it at trace levels for 10, 15 years?
01:13:42.000Like, do you have weird diseases down the road?
01:13:47.000But you can only study that in the moment.
01:13:50.000And so we actually, working with a public health epidemiologist in North Carolina and some in Ohio, we actually came up with a plan.
01:13:59.000Like, here's what you would need to do.
01:14:01.000You'd collect samples in the first six months to a year after the disaster.
01:14:05.000I'm talking about, like, fingernail clippings, things like that.
01:14:08.000You'd establish a baseline of toxins in people's blood, and then five years later, ten years later, you'd try to figure out what the toxins were in people's blood five years, ten years down the road.
01:14:19.000And then you'd ask yourself, what weird diseases, if any, are people starting to develop after 5, 10, 15 years, right?
01:14:26.000The long-term health effects of this stuff.
01:14:28.000And it was, in some ways, a really interesting thing to study because we had never had a chemical disaster where we tried to study the effects of years down the road.
01:14:37.000And of course, how much would this cost?
01:14:39.000Between $5 and $20 million over the whole lifetime of the study.
01:14:45.000We couldn't even get some of my colleagues in the United States Senate to give a shit.
01:14:50.000And it's really frustrating to me because the time has now passed, right?
01:14:53.000All these people who are saying we are volunteering to be a guinea pig to understand the long-term health consequences.
01:14:59.000The time has passed and we're never going to know because we didn't get the money to do the very small amount of money to do that study then.
01:15:45.000Even just give us a couple million dollars to collect the samples and get the study started, and then we'll privately fund it down the road.
01:15:51.000We couldn't get anything from them, and I think it was just, they were like, eh, we've got bigger fish to fry.
01:15:56.000So do you know what efforts have been made to clean that area up, or what actually can be done?
01:16:01.000Oh yeah, no, I mean, look, we've definitely...
01:16:41.000Yeah, and a lot of people, it's a rural area, so a lot of people are in well water.
01:16:44.000A lot of people are just breathing in the air.
01:16:47.000And we won't even know what the health consequences are for those folks for years.
01:16:50.000We won't know, and we may never really know because we didn't collect the samples at the time.
01:16:54.000Because you've got to establish the baseline.
01:16:56.000That was what my epidemiologist guy that I talked to...
01:16:59.000In North Carolina said, you've got to establish the baseline.
01:17:03.000Because here's what's going to happen, right?
01:17:04.000Fast forward 10 years, people get weird cancers.
01:17:07.000Sometimes because of chemical spills, sometimes just because that's human biology.
01:17:11.000Somebody will sue the train company, which is Norfolk Southern.
01:17:20.000We'll sue the train company and they'll say, I've got this weird cancer because of you.
01:17:25.000And what Norfolk Southern will say is, no, you don't.
01:17:28.000You don't have this weird cancer because of me.
01:17:30.000You have it because of just, you know, you sort of lost the game of Russian roulette that is human biology.
01:17:36.000And what we could have said conclusively was yes or no.
01:17:40.000And unfortunately, we're not going to be able to say that.
01:17:42.000But this is one of the things, like when we're in office...
01:17:45.000The first, not the first, but the first disaster that we have, hopefully there aren't any, but there always are, first chemical disaster that we are, we're going to take the infrastructure of that study, and right away, we're going to try to establish a baseline.
01:18:03.000When you have a spill of that magnitude, can you actually get everything out of the ground?
01:18:08.000Do you have to just remove all the ground?
01:18:10.000How would you test the groundwater to make sure that it doesn't...
01:18:14.000To their credit, and you're not going to hear me praising these guys that much, but...
01:18:20.000The local EPA folks, I actually think, did a pretty good job there on the water side, because what they basically did is they just ran the water in the creeks through a filtration system, cleaned it, oxidized it, and then got the chemicals out of it and then put it back into the system.
01:20:28.000Well, it also, I mean, apparently they couldn't get the encrypted messages that were sent, so I'm pretty careful about making sure I use Signal and iMessage and all that stuff.
01:20:42.000I try not to worry too much about shit I can control.
01:20:44.000But one thing that came up, by the way, in that, and I'll go back to your question, is about the grid.
01:20:50.000One thing that came up in that is the way that they hacked, and it was also President Trump's phone, apparently, too.
01:20:56.000The way that they hacked our phones is they used the backdoor telecom infrastructure that had been developed in the wake of the Patriot Act.
01:21:05.000And this is something that I think should be a much bigger part of the controversy over the Patriot Act is when the Patriot Act was passed, like AT&T, Verizon, they had to build all of these systems.
01:21:37.000If they have anything on me, I can't be too pissed off at them.
01:21:40.000At least they named themselves Salt Typhoon.
01:21:42.000But the answer to the question about the grid is, this is actually one of these things where if we had a functional government, it's pretty easy to develop the systems.
01:21:51.000Because if you do like an EMP attack, right?
01:21:54.000Ron Johnson, who's a senator from Wisconsin, is really preoccupied with this.
01:22:00.000What it really screws with is the power transformer system.
01:22:04.000So what we should have is basically a backup power transformer for every major system in the United States of America just sitting in a warehouse that's turned off.
01:22:14.000And because it's turned off, it won't be affected by an EMP pulse.
01:22:17.000And then if there is an EMP attack, you just get those transformers to swap out the ones that were destroyed, and then the grid is back up and running.
01:22:24.000It's actually a scandal, I think, that the federal government has not just at one point, with all the money that we spend on defense and everything else, just said, we're going to spend $15 billion to buy enough power transformers to have a backup for every transformer in the country.
01:22:38.000Yeah, one of the things that Trump talked about that a lot of people probably weren't aware of was the damage that these wind Turbines are doing to whales.
01:24:45.000It's like we're brainwashed to think that these things somehow or another are beneficial because they're attached to this idea of being environmentally conscious.
01:24:54.000And I got the thought behind them, right?
01:24:56.000I understand why we were trying to turn.
01:24:58.000That's obviously a source of energy because you have wind blowing through.
01:26:03.000And again, we focus on the carbon footprint thing, and we don't talk about the fact that there are these massive environmental hazards.
01:26:10.000It goes back to the distracted politics versus the real stuff.
01:26:13.000And we should be talking about the real environmental consequences of wind power.
01:26:18.000It's one of those things that, again, is much like a religion where you must stay with the doctrine.
01:26:24.000You must follow it by the word because if you step out of line and say, actually, when you look at these studies, it doesn't really show that the world is warming.
01:26:35.000It shows that over the last X amount of thousands of years, we're in a gradual cooling period.
01:26:41.000And that what's really terrifying is global cooling.
01:26:44.000Randall Carlson, who's an expert in asteroid collisions and the Younger Dryas impact theories, fascinating guy, but he says that the periods in history where we came very close to extinction are like when there's an ice age.
01:27:00.000When there's global warming, you just move to where it's not so warm, and that's what people have done forever.
01:27:07.000Well, and you deal with it technologically, right?
01:27:10.000This is the thing that the solution to global warming for however long this warming trend lasts is to deal with it technologically, right?
01:27:18.000I mean, if you look at the number of people who die from disasters in the United States, it's going down because we've gotten better at predicting stuff and helping people deal with things.
01:27:27.000And of course, you still have terrible things like Hurricane Helene, but they are luckily part of a downward trend and people losing their lives from terrible storms.
01:27:36.000And, you know, if you really think, like if you really think that carbon, this is another reason why I'm somewhat skeptical of like the carbon obsessives is if you think that carbon is the most significant thing, the sole focus of American civilization should be to reduce the carbon footprint of the world.
01:27:54.000Then you would be investing in nuclear in a big way.
01:27:57.000And then when you say that, the environmentalists say, well, you've got all these poison rocks to deal with afterwards.
01:28:02.000Well, the poison rocks problem is a less significant problem than the carbon problem if you think that we're all going to go extinct in 100 years.
01:28:09.000So let's deal with the most pressing problem.
01:28:13.000And their solution is to buy solar panels that are disproportionately made in China which has the worst carbon footprint and growing of any country in the entire world.
01:28:24.000They obviously don't believe their own bullshit which is why I'm somewhat skeptical of what they say.
01:28:28.000Also, when you have a movement and your spokesperson is Greta Thunberg and not some insanely intelligent scientist who's done years of research on this stuff, and there's also not a consensus among scientists.
01:28:41.000There's a lot of scientists that are heretics, that are stepping outside the lines, that are saying that this is not an issue.
01:28:47.000And then they're also pointing out the fact that carbon is what trees consume, and there's more greenery in the world today than there was 100 years ago, which is a very inconvenient thing for people.
01:29:17.000It's so not true, and it's also, historically, like, one of the craziest moments in history, in my opinion, is the Mongols and what the Mongols did in the 1200s.
01:29:29.000They lowered the carbon footprint of Earth.
01:29:48.000These places that had been overcome by agriculture were then reconsumed by nature.
01:29:53.000And it lowered the carbon footprint of Earth.
01:29:56.000Well, there is a fundamentally, it raises the point, there's a fundamentally anti-human element of the radical environmental movement in the United States of America.
01:30:03.000They're saying we have to reduce population.
01:30:11.000And then when you read Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and I encourage everyone to read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, because it's not just about this crisis that we went through with COVID-19.
01:30:25.000It's about a host of different things that were done.
01:30:29.000And one of them was a vaccine that was supposed to be a DPT vaccine that they were giving to girls in Africa that was just birth control.
01:30:43.000They were giving them HCG. And they were giving them this enhanced schedule.
01:30:48.000I don't want to screw this up because my recall is not the best.
01:30:51.000But the reality is there was experiments done on unwitting, unknowing African women where they gave them this thing that was supposed to be a vaccine against a disease, but it was really sterilizing them.
01:31:54.000And because they have so much influence and so much power and so much money is being generated, they're allowed to get away with these things.
01:32:02.000Well, just think about that from the perspective of these poor people.
01:32:05.000I assume the polio vaccine thing happened in Africa or did it happen somewhere else?
01:32:09.000Some white dude shows up, says that he cares about you, gives you a shot that's going to, you know, prevent you from getting some disease, and then you become, like, permanently disabled or you even die because of it.
01:32:20.000Like, think about what effect that has on how those Africans perceive our civilization.
01:32:27.000And are we going to have, you know, are they going to, like...
01:32:30.000We're going to have a conflict in 30, 40 years because people are so pissed off about us coming in and giving them healthcare that isn't actually healthcare.
01:32:39.000I mean, this is one of my big things with the Russia-Ukraine conflict is people don't realize how much of Africa's food supply comes from the Ukraine, like an astonishing amount.
01:32:47.000So if you have this war that goes on forever...
01:32:51.000And there's not enough food going to Africa.
01:32:54.000Are you going to have a bunch of starving, desperate people who are, like, pissed off because they're starving, who hate European civilization because they don't have, you know, they're not getting the food that they were expecting to get?
01:33:06.000Like, we never think about the knock-on effects of this stuff, right?
01:33:10.000Like, yeah, it's really dark and really evil that we're giving them polio.
01:33:13.000I also wonder, the people who live in the village that got polio, what the hell are they going to be doing in 30 years?
01:34:33.000There's this movie that's probably like extremely influential to my entire political worldview and I didn't realize until last night because I got into Austin late.
01:34:53.000I watched the movie a ton when I was, like, eight, nine years old, and I didn't realize how much that movie has had an influence on me until I watched it last night.
01:35:02.000Okay, so, all right, Furious Styles, a lot of his stuff about not letting financial institutions buy up all the stuff in your communities.
01:35:12.000Obviously, he's talking about black people in L.A. and not, you know, white people in rural, small-town America.
01:35:17.000But I was like, oh, like that's maybe the first place that I ever heard this idea.
01:35:21.000Or he talks about like the importance of fatherhood, the importance of especially young boys having a father in the home.
01:35:27.000It's like, I got that from boys in the hood.
01:35:29.000And obviously it spoke to me when I was a kid because I grew up at the time and I didn't have much of a relationship with my dad.
01:35:36.000He makes this observation, math being racist.
01:35:39.000He's criticizing the SAT for being culturally biased.
01:35:42.000But then he says the only part that isn't culturally biased is the math.
01:35:46.000And it's like, oh, this is like a black nationalist in the mid-80s, because that's kind of the philosophy of this movie is what you might call like old school black leftism.
01:35:56.000This movie in the 1980s is saying something that I wish a lot of white liberals would hear today, which is actually math is not racist.
01:36:05.000It's one of the things that's definitively not racist is math and numbers.
01:36:12.000Well, math is racist is one of those ones where if you heard that in a cocktail party, you'd be like, what?
01:36:19.000Like, if someone behind you was saying math is racist, you'd be like, what the – we've got to get out of here, honey.
01:36:23.000I'd say I want to go – I want one of what they're having, and I want to hang out with those guys.
01:36:28.000That's my – okay, by the way, this is my – you know, an act of bipartisanship.
01:36:34.000The one thing that Republicans, man, that we're really – I think we got really wrong in the last few years is the anti-Hunter Biden stuff.
01:36:42.000I want to go hang out with Hunter Biden.
01:36:46.000I mean, I'm maybe the only Republican.
01:36:48.000That dude, that dude knows how to have a good time.
01:36:50.000He was like Hunter S. Thompson without the writing talent.
01:37:25.000When he put on the MAGA hat in front of those guys and they all cheered and he insisted on keeping the hat and he took it with him, I think he's very, very resentful that he got ousted in what was essentially a coup.
01:37:55.000And when I discussed that with Zuckerberg, and he openly admitted it, that the FBI had contacted him and told him that it was Russian disinformation.
01:39:05.000This is where I always get pissed about the media conversation around what happened in 2020, is what they'll do is they'll sort of find the craziest conspiracy theory about what happened in 2020. They'll debunk it and say,
01:39:21.000oh, look, this shows that nothing bad happened in 2020. There's a nonpartisan organization that actually looked at what would have happened to Americans' votes That was the fun part.
01:39:59.000And direct evidence of the corruption.
01:40:03.000And a nonpartisan organization said that knowledge, which was suppressed by the entire American media and big tech scene, That would have changed millions upon millions of votes.
01:40:15.000And we know that the number in four swing states was 88,000 votes that were the difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden winning the 2020 election.
01:40:23.000So set to the side all of the other arguments about fraud and all the other rule changes that happened in the midst of COVID, we know that big tech colluded with our own sort of...
01:40:35.000The one thing I'll say about Zuckerberg is, like, I don't know him super well, I've never had a problem with him, but I do wonder if it's a convenient excuse.
01:40:43.000I don't doubt that the FBI said, hey, this is Russian disinformation, but these companies still have to take some agency over this too, right?
01:40:49.000So I think it was both the corruption of the FBI and the intelligence services, but also the big technology companies themselves.
01:40:56.000And I think fundamentally, if they had not done what they did, Donald Trump would have won another term as President of the United States.
01:41:03.000You're never going to be able to convince me that if millions upon millions of swing voters knew the evidence of Joe Biden's corruption and it was staring them in the face, that we would not have been able to pull that one out.
01:41:14.000Well, Zuckerberg has gotten really into mixed martial arts.
01:41:19.000He's gotten really into jujitsu and really into training.
01:41:22.000And there's very few things that will turn you into a conservative more than martial arts training.
01:41:31.000There's no way to get ahead other than hard work.
01:41:34.000Well, have you seen all these studies that basically connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics?
01:42:02.000Well, I think there's, like, socially liberal, like, live and let live, do whatever you want, as long as you're not hurting anybody, which is really what I am.
01:42:22.000And this has always been a conservative idea, is that you're really supposed to make your mark in this world and get up in the morning and work hard, and you should be proud of that.
01:42:34.000So everybody who really trains hard and gets good has a certain level of just a true understanding of the real relationship, the mathematical equation of focus, time, energy,
01:42:49.000and discipline versus positive results.
01:43:35.000But yeah, I mean, you know, one of my closest friends in the tech world is David Sachs.
01:43:38.000And Dave and I have talked about this because we were both like, it's funny, we were both sort of critical of Trump in 2016. But we came, you know, that criticism from a right-of-center perspective.
01:44:15.000Well, I mean, he's just – look, he's very anti-woke.
01:44:19.000He's very, very into foreign – what I would call foreign policy realism.
01:44:24.000Like why are we starting these stupid wars all over the world?
01:44:26.000We should be – our foreign policy should be more pro-peace.
01:44:29.000And it's just crazy to me because he's so inflammatory about it that I'm – And by the way, I love it, right?
01:44:36.000You know, I agree with a lot of what David says, and even when I disagree, I know he's a smart guy, but he is just saying, look, I don't give a shit.
01:44:44.000If you're going to come after me, come after me, but I'm going to say what's on my mind.
01:44:48.000And I think, you know, a lot of people are going in that direction, which is fundamentally a good thing.
01:46:17.000Look, I try not to be too partisan because I know a lot of people watch your show, but this is to me the biggest and most fundamental difference between Kamala and President Trump in the campaign is, you know, whether it's Biden calling people garbage or Tim Walz calling people fascist and Kamala calling people Nazis.
01:46:35.000Or endorsing explicit censorship, we're not trying to censor our fellow Americans, right?
01:46:41.000We'll attack Kamala and our policies and our ideas, but we're not trying to say you should be silenced because you disagree with us.
01:46:47.000That is anathema to everything that I believe in.
01:46:51.000And that is what's happened in the modern Democratic Party, at least at the leadership level, is they've gotten really comfortable with the idea of silencing people who disagree with him, such to the point where, like, it's not even that Tim Walz thinks that Hate speech should be censored.
01:47:06.000It's that the governor of a state could utter that phrase without recognizing how fundamentally subjective it is.
01:47:12.000Or Hillary Clinton saying that we want to censor misinformation.
01:47:15.000She has come out and explicitly said that we have to censor disinformation and misinformation.
01:47:27.000We don't want people to have total control.
01:47:29.000And they can utter it without the American media Going completely bananas just suggests there's something broken about the political culture of the left.
01:47:39.000I mean, there are people on CNN and, you know, CBS and all these other sort of mainstream networks.
01:47:46.000All these corporate networks that will say, you know, when Donald J. Trump says that if you riot after the election, you're the enemy of the people or you're an enemy within, like that is a major threat to democracy.
01:47:58.000But Hillary Clinton saying that we should censor disinformation, they're just Yeah, no big deal.
01:48:03.000And the fact that they can get so fired up about what I think is a pretty common sense observation that if you riot, law enforcement should have a response to it, but they think that it's the end of the – they don't care at all.
01:48:15.000They don't care at all when Hillary Clinton and Tim Wallace endorse explicit censorship.
01:49:10.000It's amazing because you see Colbert scrambling and he's trying to like, Jon's like, do you think maybe the lab that was the Wuhan coronavirus lab Maybe it came from there!
01:49:27.000I mean, the whole argument for the start of COVID that wasn't from the Wuhan lab was basically, as I understood it, that a bat had gotten a weird coronavirus and had like fallen into a guy's soup.
01:49:55.000And he was immediately pilloried as this terrible racist.
01:49:59.000And, you know, It's just, it's bizarre that we're not allowed to talk about things in the United States of America.
01:50:06.000I will say, I think it's gotten better.
01:50:08.000This is one of my more optimistic views is, you know, when we're all locked in our houses in the summer of 2020, I think that did weird things psychologically to everybody.
01:50:18.000And I think that a lot of people rebelled against it, and we're probably in a better position now in 2024. Like Chamath would not have come out, I love Chamath, would not have come out for Donald Trump in 2020. Right.
01:50:31.000Now he's hosting fundraisers and giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to our campaign.
01:50:35.000So I think the fact that you have so many old school liberals and old school leftists say, we're done with this bullshit is actually a pretty good sign.
01:50:44.000Yeah, there's still social consequences to it, but not nearly as high as they were four years ago.
01:50:53.000Because now you have this Wild West, uncensored version of social media that's run by this super genius madman who has all the money in the world.
01:51:05.000Without him, we're in a lot of trouble.
01:51:08.000Because let's say Twitter never gets purchased.
01:51:11.000They run the same way they've run it in the past, where they're being influenced by whatever companies and whatever agencies decide to remove posts or remove people and Ban Donald Trump and ban a bunch of different conservatives and ban a bunch of people that were outcasts and they just decided they were controlling the discourse.
01:51:33.000Well, then you have no outlets other than Parler.
01:51:52.000Instead of it being just a place where conservatives can go and talk about things and not be censored like they were on Twitter, then they get infiltrated with all this hate shit, and then it becomes a hateful place, and they don't even want to go, so now they're homeless.
01:52:26.000They did all this stuff, and it turned out that all the things they were saying were either lies or were incorrect, and there's no repercussions.
01:52:35.000And so you're seeing all this in real time, and no one on the left has any problem with it, which to me is insanity.
01:52:42.000And the people that do have a problem with it, their solution seems to be to just go to the right.
01:52:46.000They don't even feel like you can reform the left.
01:52:49.000People are just like Tulsi Gabbard becomes a Republican.
01:52:51.000People are just abandoning this, like, I can't talk to That's right.
01:52:55.000I'm doing an event with Tulsi Gabbard tonight in Pennsylvania.
01:53:25.000And I think that, I think what's going on is the entire modern Democratic Party grew up in an era where there was consensus, right?
01:53:35.000Walter Cronkite could say something about the Vietnam War, and it turned out he's probably right about that, actually, and it collapsed public support for the Vietnam War.
01:54:04.000People trying to reimpose it from the top, it actually degrades the very thing that you're trying to create.
01:54:08.000Because I've seen, I mean, family members of mine who got really radicalized because they were like, wait a second, should we be masking three-year-olds in our schools?
01:54:16.000Like, does that do something to their language development?
01:54:18.000And then they would get kicked off of Facebook because a person with 900 Facebook friends who has no public profile dared to, like, question the prevailing narrative.
01:54:27.000And again, they ended up being right about it.
01:54:30.000I actually think that what the left is doing Yeah.
01:54:49.000And there's been some course correcting.
01:55:33.000Might as well be a propaganda outlet of the Democratic Party.
01:55:36.000If you look from the Hunter Biden laptop to any number of stories where they just tow the left wing line almost instinctively, the problem was with the journalism at the Washington Post.
01:56:02.000And frankly, they're lying a lot in the negative direction about my running mate, and they're lying a lot in the positive direction about Kamala Harris.
01:56:08.000So what I would like to see from Jeff Bezos is a commitment to the Washington Post not just being a Democrat super PAC. I don't give a shit if he hires a few more conservative columnists.
01:56:18.000What matters is, do they hold their journalism to anything like a high standard?
01:56:24.000And if they don't do that, then to me, it's just window dressing.
01:56:27.000But it seems like that's at least a step in the right direction.
01:56:30.000You have an argument against Donald Trump on the front page next to an argument for Donald Trump and let two different intelligent people state their cases, one from a conservative perspective, one from a liberal perspective, and let's see what resonates with you.
01:56:50.000I just think that unless you change the underlying journalism to make it more fair, it's going to be only a step in the right direction rather than fixing the problem.
01:57:18.000Okay, so Matt is, even though he writes for Breitbart, and I know that most people assume that Breitbart is just this right-wing rag...
01:57:26.000Matt is, he has one of the best contacts of journalists in Washington.
01:57:32.000Like, he knows what's going to happen in the country before most left-wing journalists because he talks to the liberals, he talks to the conservatives, he has allies on Capitol Hill.
01:57:41.000I'd love to see the Washington Post hire a guy like Matt Boyle and say, Matt, go and do what you're going to do.
01:57:47.000And obviously, it's not going to be able to have a political bias to it, but go and investigate.
01:57:52.000If you want to go investigate Kamala Harris's campaign, go and do it.
01:57:55.000But that is what it would look like, is empowering conservative and independent journalism in the same way that Jeff Bezos has empowered left-wing journalism.
01:58:03.000If I see that happening, then I'll be a little bit more optimistic about his stewardship.
01:58:08.000Well, could you imagine if there's the same sort of scrutiny on Kamala's speeches and appearances in these media outlets as there is on Trump's?
01:58:36.000So I think that what happened there, having done some – try to understand that a little bit better is they basically just edited her answer down a lot so that she didn't sound like a total insane person.
01:58:49.000Because what aired, I think, on the smaller – what aired on the channels online that had a smaller pickup – Was the rambling.
01:59:22.000They did change the answer, and they changed it in a way to protect her.
01:59:24.000And then, importantly, they refused to release the transcript, right?
01:59:28.000So my attitude would be, just release the transcript, let people see what she actually said, so that you at least have some integrity as a journalistic outlet.
01:59:36.000You, of course, I'm sure, paid attention to the kerfuffle over a comedian at the Trump rally at MSG. I think you even know this guy, right?
02:00:46.000A tenuous connection to the Trump campaign.
02:00:48.000And on the other hand, you have the actual sitting president at a vice presidential campaign event telling the entire country at an event sanctioned by the Kamala Harris campaign that half of Americans are garbage.
02:01:05.000And I guarantee the media is not going to cover this in the same way.
02:01:10.000I don't know if Jamie can bring this up, but I tweeted about this last night, that Politico, when they have initially tried to write the story about what had been said...
02:01:20.000By Joe Biden, they said that Biden had called racism against Puerto Ricans garbage.
02:01:37.000So Politico tried to like retcon this.
02:01:40.000It turned out there was a video so we could actually see for ourselves what was actually said.
02:01:45.000But the amount of dishonesty in the American media really is off the charts.
02:01:48.000It is, but also with Joe Biden, I think at this point in time, he's literally that crazy guy on the porch yelling at the neighbors.
02:01:56.000I mean, no one thinks he's there, which is also one of the fascinating things when they asked her, when did you know that he was mentally impaired and why didn't you talk about it earlier?
02:02:09.000And there's this Joe Biden has always done the amazing work that Joe Biden does.
02:02:50.000We need to build an opportunity economy because if Americans don't have opportunity, then they're not going to have the opportunity to be Americans.
02:02:58.000And it's like, what the hell did you just say?
02:02:59.000The opportunity to generate wealth and generational wealth.
02:03:15.000I think that she is the Michael Jordan of using as many words as possible to say as little as possible.
02:03:22.000There's actually a certain gift that she has because you listen to her talk – And you're 100, 200 words into it, you're 500 words into it, and you're like, what the hell did she just say?
02:03:36.000And that actually, I mean, okay, so yeah, there's a certain political skill in saying a lot without actually saying anything, but it actually worries me about her being president.
02:03:47.000Okay, there are all these substantive policy disagreements and we could talk about, okay, I don't like her border policies.
02:03:52.000But what does she do when she's in a meeting with a world leader and she has to, like, know the details of public policy to negotiate with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping?
02:04:04.000Like, one of the major things that you do as a president is you participate in economic negotiations.
02:04:10.000Like, what tariffs are we going to apply on your goods unless you lower the tariffs on ours or vice versa, right?
02:04:16.000You have to be able to know a little bit about your job to be the President of the United States.
02:04:20.000And I don't know that she has an ounce of curiosity about public policy in this country.
02:04:25.000That's what scares the hell out of me.
02:04:27.000Well, it's just strange that everyone's accepting that this person who is the least popular vice president ever...
02:04:34.000Is now the solution to the problem and that the media machine in just a few days did this 180 and just sold her as the solution and as long as they keep her from having these conversations where she's allowed to talk,
02:05:10.000And we don't really know how she's handled pressure because she's only done it for a little while.
02:05:13.000And if you just look at Donald Trump's public schedule, J.D. Vance's public schedule versus Kamala Harris, dude, it is striking how little she does.
02:05:47.000I mean, look, there's this story out there.
02:05:48.000To be clear, I have no idea if it's true, but there's a woman who has gone on the record and said that Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris's husband, smacked her in the face in France.
02:05:59.000Okay, that's been reported on the media.
02:06:00.000I'm sure you guys can find it if you want to.
02:06:14.000If you are a domestic abuser, that usually doesn't stop with one person.
02:06:18.000Like, most domestic abusers are serial domestic abusers.
02:06:21.000Is it in the public interest to do some investigation about whether the White House The president could be sharing the White House with the person who is engaged in domestic abuse.
02:06:33.000That is in the public interest to know.
02:06:36.000Not only is the American media not that interested in it, but most importantly, you don't have the time to really investigate some of these accusations.
02:06:42.000Meanwhile, every time somebody says anything about Donald Trump without an ounce of evidence, the American media picks it up and runs with and makes an entire news cycle totally and curious about what's going on with Kamala Harris.
02:06:54.000But I think over time, what's interesting is most people are becoming aware of this extreme bias, the difference in the scrutiny that's applied to Trump.
02:07:04.000But you go back into this question you asked me about Jeff Bezos.
02:07:07.000This is why you need good reporters who have the investigatory skills, who are empowered by their employers to go out and do the investigations like, you know, your platform.
02:07:18.000You're having more honest and open conversations than anything that's happening in the corporate media.
02:07:22.000It's like one of the reasons why I listen to your show, one of the reasons why I'm happy to be here.
02:07:26.000But you don't have like a person working for you who's going to go to like France and talk to this woman and investigate whether this is true.
02:07:34.000This is why, you know, I've told Elon this, but like the most useful piece of philanthropy, if you're a right of center American, would be to set up a nonprofit organization We're good to go.
02:08:09.000Well, there's also the amount of left-wing media versus right-wing media is pretty disturbing.
02:08:15.000What is the percentage of networks that lean left?
02:08:20.000CNN clearly, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS. And then you have Fox.
02:08:35.000And if you just look at, I mean, you and a few others are the only people who can compare with the actual platform size of an NBC or CBS. I mean, yeah, fewer people watch them now than they did 20 years ago.
02:08:47.000But if you look, man, like, you're still getting five to eight million viewers every single night for each of the major networks on the nightly news.
02:08:59.000And, you know, to your point about, like, the comparison, you know, Fox News, number one, if you look at Fox News' viewership compared to NBC's, there's just dwarfs, NBC dwarfs it.
02:09:10.000But more importantly in some ways is Fox News, which I do think is very important, But yeah, they have a right of center bias, certainly.
02:09:19.000But if you look at how much Fox News is covering the left fairly versus the right, it's much more balanced than like an NBC, right?
02:09:29.000Like NBC would never have an interview with Donald J. Trump where the journalist is asking tough questions, but is like sitting down and broadcasting Donald Trump for an hour.
02:09:38.000Fox News would do that for Kamala Harris.
02:09:40.000And they did do that for Kamala Harris.
02:10:04.000Well, because the expectation is that you're going to interrupt and you're going to fact check and you're going to try to actually do the job of an interviewer.
02:10:10.000But the expectation is that if you touch Kamala with anything other than kid gloves, you know, you're not allowed to do that.
02:10:17.000But I think, again, I think most people are upset.
02:10:20.000It's one of the reasons why the movement is so – the movement towards Trump, they're so enthusiastic.
02:10:53.000That way we're going to keep him from being in the office.
02:10:56.000I use this analogy a couple times publicly.
02:11:00.000So what's interesting to me about toddlers, and I've talked with Tucker Carlson about this, Toddlers lie in a way that's very different from how everybody else lies, right?
02:11:13.000So, like, if you're telling a lie, normally, you know, hey, did you do that thing?
02:11:18.000You would say, no, no, no, somebody else did it, or they kind of qualified a little bit.
02:11:36.000He likes to help me out a lot when I bake.
02:11:39.000And I go to the bathroom, and the Oreos that we're supposed to put in the Oreo cake, like crumble them up and put them in the cake, like half of them are gone when I get back.
02:11:46.000And I'm like, buddy, what happened to the Oreos?
02:11:49.000And he looks at me, and without a hint of irony or shame, he says, I didn't eat the Oreos, you did.
02:11:57.000So that's the way that Kamala Harris lies, is I didn't eat the Oreos, you did.
02:12:02.000Not only does she actively brag and has her administration actively bragged about trying to arrest her political opponents, she will go out and say that if Donald Trump is the president, he's going to arrest his political opponents, even though he already was president and he didn't do that.
02:12:15.000Did you see she went on Shannon Sharpe and said that he's going to take away your Second Amendment rights?
02:12:20.000The person who literally wants to confiscate firearms, Kamala Harris, is saying that Donald Trump wants to take away your Second Amendment rights.
02:12:53.000Eric Holder, who was Obama's attorney general, was found in contempt of Congress, or at least was – there was – Congress found him in contempt.
02:13:09.000The contempt of Congress that Steve Bannon engaged in is that the J-6 committee or one of these banana republic committees from the congressional Democrats, they issued him a subpoena.
02:13:39.000Kamala Harris is literally using the power of government, has already used the power of government to jail her political opponents, and she's saying that Donald Trump is going to do the thing that he didn't do and she did when they were in respective positions of power.
02:13:52.000Do you think it's because they're worried that if he gets into power and he gets back in the office that he's going to start investigating a lot of this stuff and the 51 former intelligence agents?
02:14:03.000That's exactly what they're afraid of.
02:16:26.000So what President Trump has said and what I've said is abortion is now a matter for state legislatures, state voters to determine.
02:16:36.000And there's, I mean, one, that's always what the argument was, right?
02:16:40.000If Roe versus Wade goes away, then the state legislatures, the state populations are going to make each individual abortion decision.
02:16:47.000The same way that, like, you know, California has different laws on a whole host of subjects that Alabama does.
02:16:53.000The idea is that, yeah, California would make its own abortion policy.
02:16:56.000Alabama would make its own abortion policy.
02:16:58.000So there's a basic sort of principle of federalism at work there.
02:17:02.000But I also think that, you know, knowing Donald Trump well, I think he's motivated also by desire for us to just stop having a culture war over this particular issue and to let the voters in these states make these decisions while the national government focuses on things like Lowering the cost of groceries and lowering the cost of housing and securing the southern border.
02:17:23.000And I think there's actually some great wisdom in that because, you know, think about this.
02:17:28.000Abortion has not really been a political issue for 50 years.
02:17:31.000Now, we say that it is, and obviously we disagreed about it and people fought about it.
02:17:34.000It was always something the Supreme Court said, this is the way it is.
02:18:04.000And I think, you know, having children has been like a revelatory experience for me.
02:18:08.000And I want our country to be more pro-family, more pro-child.
02:18:11.000I think there are all these things that we can do at the federal level to make our country more pro-family and more pro-child, you know, make childcare easier.
02:18:19.000I've actually sponsored legislation to stop the surprise medical bills that happen when people, and I've seen this with my own wife, you go to the hospital, you come home, you've got a beautiful baby, but you've also got a $20,000 unexpected bill because you choose the wrong, you know,
02:18:34.000the wrong out-of-network healthcare provider when you're at the moment of delivering a baby.
02:18:39.000Like, there are all these things we can do.
02:18:40.000To make it easier for young women, young families to choose life.
02:18:46.000But Donald Trump, I think, wants abortion policy, and he said this explicitly, to be decided at the state level.
02:18:52.000I'm not, it's not possible for me to get pregnant.
02:18:57.000So when I think about these things, according to some people, depends on who you ask.
02:19:02.000But I think when you talk- You need to get with the 21st century, man.
02:19:05.000It's possible for a man to get pregnant now.
02:19:07.000For most people, I think one of the issues is, for a lot of people, one of the issues is that men are making decisions for what women can and can't do.
02:19:18.000And one of the more concerning aspects of this is, like, say if you live in a state, like Texas, where there's a limit to when you can get an abortion, I think it's like six weeks, which a lot of people think, at that point in time, you can't even tell whether or not you're pregnant, and this puts a lot of women in very vulnerable positions.
02:19:37.000Then there's this thought that they could go to another state where it is legal and have an abortion, but they could be possibly prosecuted for that in their state.
02:19:53.000There's a place in the country where it's legal to have a medical procedure, and you live in a state where it's not legal, that your state can decide what you can and can't do with your body, which is essentially based on a religious idea.
02:20:07.000I'm not criticizing it one way or another, but I'm saying that a lot of what this choose life thing is about, that life is precious, and life is sacred, and life begins at the moment of conception.
02:20:16.000And some people agree with this, but other people disagree with this.
02:20:20.000And it seems to be a lot of it is based in religion.
02:20:24.000My concern is using that to dictate whether or not a person can legally travel to another state.
02:20:32.000I don't think the government should be monitoring where you travel or what you do when you travel, as long as that thing is legal.
02:20:39.000And I'm concerned with this idea that you could be prosecuted for it in your state for doing something that's legal somewhere else.
02:21:10.000I think, so to your point about it being a religious idea, I mean, I would say, I know a number of non-religious people who are very pro-life.
02:21:17.000And I think the honest answer is that what we're doing is we're trying to figure out what is the right balance between autonomy and life.
02:21:25.000And I say this as somebody who, when Ohio made this decision, I campaigned very aggressively for the more pro-life position in the state of Ohio and my side lost.
02:21:42.000I think one of the things that I took as a learning, as a guy who cares about this issue, is Republicans, we've got to earn the people's trust because they don't trust the idea that when we say that we're pro-family, we don't just mean pro-birth.
02:21:57.000A lot of people say, you're pro-birth, but you're not actually pro-family.
02:22:00.000And I think there's a lot that we can do as Republicans to try to earn back the trust of the American people.
02:22:06.000But if I'm trying to represent as fairly as I can, the pro-choice and the pro-life position, here's what I think is really going on, is you have something.
02:22:16.000Now, some people would say, maybe religiously motivated and maybe not, that it's a human life.
02:22:22.000But it at least has the potential to be human life.
02:22:24.000And then on the other hand, you have, again, I freely recognize this, you have a woman who wants to make a choice about what she wants to do with her own body.
02:22:33.000Those are two very profound values, both of which I think are valuable, right?
02:22:39.000I mean, I think autonomy is really important.
02:22:41.000I also think life is really important.
02:22:42.000And what we're trying to talk about fundamentally, I think, again, I'm trying to be fair to both sides here, is to balance the interest in life against the interest in autonomy.
02:22:52.000And I think that the way to do that, at least my view, is to let the American people debate and talk about and argue about this issue and come to this decision on a state-by-state basis.
02:23:05.000And again, California, Florida, Ohio, Alabama, we're going to have different solutions to this particular problem.
02:23:12.000But that's what we're trying to do, right?
02:23:17.000And other people are trying to say, I think autonomy really matters.
02:23:20.000And the truth is that 95% of Americans would probably say there's some way to strike the balance in the middle.
02:23:27.000You know, where most of Europe has ended up here, and it's actually striking because you think of Europe, again, as a more socially liberal place than America.
02:23:33.000Almost every place in Europe has ended up effectively where late-term abortion outside of cases of medical necessity is banned outright.
02:23:43.000And then, you know, early stage abortion is allowed.
02:23:46.000That's how most societies that democratically settle on this.
02:24:20.000And that's the balance that people are trying to strike.
02:24:22.000It's very complex, and people don't want to look at it that way.
02:24:25.000I always discuss, when I talk about abortion, I say it's one of these very human issues where it's very strange, where most people think, like, at the moment of conception, if you could just remove those cells and keep them from multiplying, that's less bad than if you wait six months.
02:24:51.000And there is a moral intuition there that obviously, like, something that looks and feels like a baby is more valuable than, you know, something that just looks like a clump.
02:25:17.000The thing that I find, again, as a person who leans more in the pro-life side of this debate is, okay, so you will sometimes hear people on the left say, well, late-term abortion doesn't happen.
02:25:30.000Well, there's an organization called the Guttmacher Institute.
02:26:37.000Again, there is a balance to strike here.
02:26:39.000But usually in American society, we recognize that the way to strike that balance is to debate it as citizens, and not to have like lawyers and judges make these determinations for us.
02:26:51.000Believe it or not, Joe Biden had one of the most logical takes on it a long time ago.
02:26:54.000A long time ago, back when he could talk real good.
02:27:06.000And I do think that there's something that is really weird about this whole debate where, you know, thank God, to be clear, this is not true of the gross majority of our pro-choice citizens.
02:27:16.000But you do sometimes see people, like, they'll go on TikTok and they'll celebrate having an abortion.
02:27:34.000I think that a lot of them just felt like they were completely trapped, and they made the decision that was ultimately right for them.
02:27:41.000Again, my argument is we need to try to gain those women's trust back because clearly the Republican Party on this issue has lost a lot of trust.
02:27:51.000Baking birthday cakes and posting about it afterwards.
02:27:53.000They recognize that this is a medical procedure and this is, you know, something that they felt they had to do.
02:28:01.000But celebrating something like that is just bizarre to me.
02:28:05.000And I'm much more comfortable with the people who say safe, legal, rare than I am with the people who say let's shout our abortion from the rooftops.
02:28:13.000Well, it's just this rebellion thing, you know, and it's also rebellion.
02:28:16.000Like, the concept in the zeitgeist is that abortion had always been, you know, Roe v.
02:28:22.000Wade had always been the law of the land, and then all of a sudden that was taken away, and you have these religious men who are trying to dictate what women can and can't do with their bodies.
02:28:33.000No, look, I mean, again, I understand that.
02:28:35.000I understand the pushback against that.
02:28:37.000But I think you can go, like with so many other issues, you can go way too far about it.
02:28:42.000And it becomes trying to celebrate something that at the very best, if you grant, I think, every argument of the pro-choice side, it is a neutral thing, not something to be celebrated.
02:28:52.000I think there's very few people that are celebrating, though.
02:28:54.000It's just the extreme weirdos, the TikTok people.
02:28:56.000Well, but it's like everything, right?
02:28:58.000And I try, you know, this is something that is dangerous about social media.
02:29:03.000The danger of social media with me is not to me that I live in my own echo chamber and just have views reinforced.
02:29:10.000The danger is that I'm only exposed to the crazy people on the other side who make it easier for me to adopt my own worldview because I'm saying, oh, it's just people celebrating.
02:29:22.000When in reality, like you said, most American women, even those who are pro-choice, are not celebrating this thing.
02:29:30.000I think that's one of the insidious things about the social media algorithm, is that it highlights things that people engage with, which is more outrageous, more things that they find reprehensible.
02:30:18.000And that's why I talk about, you know, the importance of regaining trust is just I've had enough conversations with people who don't like the Republican Party's, even their perception of the Republican Party's views here, that if you talk to reasonable people, you gain a different perspective than if you talk to the unreasonable people.
02:30:35.000And I think a lot of people are only informed by headlines and by real quick things that they see on television.
02:30:42.000And so they form these narratives in their head, and this is what they're operating off of.
02:31:09.000And it's – there's not like a reasonable – and that's the one thing that I think the Republican Party has done poorly is like be a little bit more balanced in some of these controversial social issues.
02:31:22.000You know, like the one thing that people are worried about right after Roe v.
02:31:27.000Wade was gay marriage and gay marriage laws.
02:31:30.000And people are thinking, well, it's religion that overturned Roe v.
02:31:34.000Wade, and religion is probably going to overturn these gay marriage laws.
02:31:39.000And people are very terrified about that, too.
02:31:41.000Yeah, which obviously, that's not something we're trying to do.
02:31:44.000But it's interesting to me that how much people focus on the religious element of it.
02:31:59.000Because, I mean, basically because of the argument that often, you know, sort of Republicans will use about making it a state issue, is she said, look, you can be pro-choice, as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, but the avenue to make abortion policy should be legislatures, not judges.
02:32:35.000People who aren't, you know, I'm obviously a person of faith.
02:32:37.000They don't want people of faith to force their values down people who don't agree with them.
02:32:42.000But I'm sort of comfortable with every one of us kind of having our zone.
02:32:48.000And within that zone, I don't want people to come in and tell me what to do.
02:32:53.000Like, in my home, I'd like to be able to raise my kids with my religious values, and I'd like to be able to teach my kids what I think, and you should be able to teach your kids what you think.
02:33:01.000And then we recognize that the more public the zone, the less that I get to control what you do.
02:33:07.000And that's part of living in a pluralistic society, and I'm very comfortable with that.
02:33:11.000I think, unfortunately, the modern left seems to be less and less comfortable, even with people of faith having their own private zone.
02:33:31.000It's not the majority of our fellow citizens.
02:33:34.000But Part of living in a pluralistic society is accepting that every man's castle or every woman's castle is his or her own.
02:33:43.000You've got to have respect for people within those castles.
02:33:45.000And then we should hopefully just have some common sense things that everybody can agree on when we're talking about public spaces.
02:33:52.000I think for a lot of people, worst case scenario, when they start thinking about religious influence on The way they're allowed to behave and the way their state is governed.
02:34:08.000Worst case scenario is a state adopts Sharia law.
02:34:14.000And I think all these people that would cry against the concept of Islamophobia really need to understand what that means and what you're talking about.
02:34:23.000And to say that that's an outrageous and ridiculous idea that's never going to take place, it's kind of already worked its way into some societies.
02:34:49.000Stuff like that starts getting real weird.
02:34:51.000And when you have people that are openly saying, our goal is, and they've talked about this in Toronto, activists have said, our goal is to outbreed everyone who is not Muslim and vote it out and put Sharia law in place.
02:35:10.000Well, and that's what to me is so crazy about some of the hyper left-wing reaction to the idea that somehow I want to force every man, woman, and child to go to my church is ridiculous.
02:35:22.000I've never had any interest in doing that.
02:35:25.000But where you see actual real religious tyranny is increasingly in Western societies where you've had a large influx of immigrants who don't necessarily assimilate into Western values but try to create, I think,
02:35:41.000a religious tyranny at the local level.
02:35:43.000And if you think that won't happen at a national level, you're crazy.
02:37:24.000But it goes along with this thing that we've been talking about.
02:37:28.000I think essentially people have sort of a built-in mode, a program in their mind that accepts religious doctrines.
02:37:36.000And these religious doctrines could be woke or It could be, you know, hardcore right-wing conservative, Christian fundamentalism, or it could be Islamic doctrine.
02:38:27.000Again, this is a new thing because this is not Bill Clinton liberalism.
02:38:31.000This is something that we're seeing today where they don't even want to talk about...
02:38:35.000The quality and the backgrounds and the skills of people coming to our country, somehow it's fundamentally racist to say, well, we don't want certain people of certain backgrounds to be in the United States of America.
02:39:10.000Are we talking about people who speak English as a second language and don't have criminal backgrounds?
02:39:14.000Or are we talking about people who don't even read and write in Spanish and do have criminal backgrounds?
02:39:19.000Because those same groups of people, even though they come from the country we call Mexico, are going to assimilate and contribute to America's society much differently.
02:39:27.000There's something in the modern liberal mind that doesn't even allow you to ask the question Who does America benefit from bringing into this country?
02:39:35.000And if the answer is we don't benefit, then why would we bring them into the country?
02:39:39.000Well, it's also the concept of being anti-open border somehow or another became attached instead of safety.
02:39:53.000And when, you know, you confront people and say, do you know that Venezuela is literally opening their prisons and instructing people to just cross into America?
02:40:52.000Well, you see this in some communities where because they're small towns and because rapid migrant influx can happen very quickly, where the town population has been doubled.
02:41:02.000Okay, so you don't even have to assume people are criminals.
02:41:05.000What does it do to the local public school when all of a sudden a thousand newcomers show up We're good to go.
02:42:09.000What do you think is the goal behind allowing this to take place?
02:42:14.000Now, first of all, one of the things that Kamala Harris has said was that there was a bill that could have fixed the border problem, but that Donald Trump did not want it to take place because he wanted to keep this as a political talking point.
02:42:52.000Number two, it codified what's called catch and release, where a person comes into our country, they're an illegal immigrant, but they say, no, no, no, I'm not an illegal immigrant.
02:43:28.000In other words, even if Donald Trump became president, this is why he really hated it, is that he would not be able to undo catch and release if he won the election.
02:43:36.000It would be codified into American law.
02:43:40.000Nothing on the border wall, nothing on an immigration system called parole, which is supposed to be a case-by-case, you grant parole to people who are fleeing tyranny.
02:43:51.000But Harris has used parole to the tune of millions upon millions.
02:43:56.000Mass parole, whole categories of country have been paroled into the United States.
02:44:01.000It didn't do anything to solve that problem.
02:44:54.000And I think it was good on you in the debate with Tim Walz when they fact-checked you.
02:44:59.000They tried to fact-check you and say that this has always been in place, and you stepped up and said, no, no, no, this app is new, and this app was specifically used for shipping, and now they're using it to schedule people to illegally come into the country.
02:45:19.000I mean, obviously speculation a little bit, but what do you think the motivation of allowing this to take place and the disproportionate number of people that have moved to swing states, which is also like a little suspicious?
02:45:31.000So it depends on how many tinfoil hats do you have in this room?
02:46:20.000Like, why do you hate Donald Trump so much?
02:46:21.000Because, again, I was sort of a Trump skeptic in 2015. And at this point, I was kind of, you know, starting to really get on the Trump train.
02:47:08.000Like, that is the best argument for Donald Trump's immigration policy, is that American workers are getting higher wages, and this is why this corporate CEO hates it.
02:47:16.000So whatever the industry is, you've got a lot of people who want cheap labor, and they don't want to pay American workers higher wages.
02:47:24.000I do think there's also a power dynamic to it.
02:47:26.000In particular, I think Kamala Harris and the Democrats, they want to give these millions upon millions of illegal aliens the right to vote.
02:47:34.000They want to make it easier for them to participate in our elections.
02:47:37.000And that means fundamentally the end of American democracy.
02:47:40.000Because you're talking about 25 million people here.
02:47:42.000If Kamala Harris gives 10 million of those people legal status and allows them to vote in American elections, then, you know, say 70-30 they go Democrat, Republicans will never win a national election in this country in my lifetime.
02:47:55.000And the only way to get them on your side would be the Republicans offer the same services and maybe even be more generous in letting illegals in.
02:48:15.000Lifetime is probably overstating it, but you'd have to – it would take 30 years for the Republicans to get to a point where we could even compete with these newcomers.
02:48:22.000But again, it will have degraded the voting power of the people who have the legal right to be here.
02:48:26.000And it would essentially turn these states blue forever, the same way they've done California.
02:49:22.000Now, it also – you may not appreciate this, but even if you don't give people the right to vote, it really distorts congressional apportionment and then the Electoral College.
02:49:34.000So how many – we have 435 congressional seats.
02:49:39.000The way that you draw those congressional districts is that you try to draw them evenly based on population so that everybody has equal representation, right?
02:49:48.000One person, one vote, fundamental principle of American law.
02:49:50.000But you don't just count the American citizens.
02:50:27.000That Democrats went nuts over and litigated, was litigated in the courts, so we would have to try again, that would ask citizenship status during the U.S. Census.
02:50:38.000The idea being that if you ask more people their citizenship status, you get fewer people who are answering that question.
02:50:45.000I think that we should make it, and I do think this would require an act of Congress, but I think that it would be constitutional, is we should just say that illegal aliens are not counted for purposes of congressional representation.
02:51:45.000But, you know, my view, and I'm sure you've got many, many listeners in the great state of California, the next time you're pulled over by a police officer, just tell them that you're on your way to vote.
02:52:16.000The same level of support for voter ID exists in the black community as in the white community.
02:52:21.000It's about 75-80% of blacks, 75-80% of whites support voter ID. But they're basically saying that black people can't get identification.
02:52:28.000When they say that voter ID is racist, they're implicitly saying black people can't get identification.
02:52:33.000I think that's an actual racist concept.
02:52:36.000I actually assume that black citizens are my fellow Americans, and they can do the same thing that every other citizen can do, which is get identification.
02:53:11.000They say that they don't want illegal aliens or illegal voters to vote.
02:53:15.000The Harris administration right now is litigating a lawsuit against the governor of Virginia because the governor of Virginia, using a state law, kicked about 1,500 people or maybe it was 6,500, but it was some number of people off the Virginia voter rolls because they checked a box That said they were non-citizen.
02:53:34.000Well, if you're non-citizen, you can't be on the voter rolls.
02:53:36.000So he kicked all of the non-citizens off the voter rolls.
02:54:02.000The American media has barely even covered the fact that in the middle of a very consequential presidential election, Kamala Harris's Department of Justice is suing to keep illegal voters on the voter rolls.
02:54:19.000So it's like for Trump to win, he has to win by an enormous margin.
02:54:24.000He has to overcome a lot of this shenanigans.
02:54:27.000Well, as President Trump says, we want to make it too big to rig.
02:54:31.000Look, I encourage all of your listeners, whether you agree with us on all the issues or not, if you agree with censorship, then vote Kamala Harris.
02:54:38.000And if you think Americans should be able to say what they want to say, then get out there and vote.
02:54:43.000That's obviously part of the reason why I'm here is I want to get people out there to vote because I do think that we need to overwhelm the system with so many voters that we ensure that we get the representative government that we actually deserve as a country.
02:54:57.000And that's not going to happen unless people get out there and vote.
02:55:00.000Is one of the things that I think is an important issue that kind of gets put aside is I know a lot of veterans in particular and a lot of people with some severe trauma that have had psychedelic therapy.
02:55:14.000And they've had to go to other countries to do it.
02:55:16.000They've done some of it illegally in America.
02:55:19.000But I know far too many guys who have had PTSD, who have had An incredible experience and been alleviated of all these...
02:55:58.000But the therapy for people that are suffering from severe PTSD has been incredibly beneficial.
02:56:04.000They've shown that with the MAP studies, but they've also shown it anecdotally.
02:56:08.000I know a bunch of different guys that have gone down to Mexico and had psilocybin journeys and all these different things where they've encountered...
02:56:17.000These experiences that have made them sort of rethink who they are, alleviated them of a lot of the stress and a lot of the trauma that they've experienced, and given them peace.
02:56:29.000The concept of Schedule 1 is that there's no medical benefit.
02:56:33.000And if these people are experiencing, first of all, cessation of smoking, people that have had issues with addiction, Ibogaine treatments, another one that they've found, which is not something that anyone would ever abuse recreationally.
02:56:47.000I've never done it, but apparently it's an excruciating experience.
02:56:50.000But the rate of curing addiction is tremendous from it.
02:57:27.000The scheduling of these things, in particular like marijuana, like marijuana is legal on a state level with, I think, almost half the country now, if not more, but yet federally illegal.
02:57:38.000And if you go to the history of why it was federally legal in the first place, it coincides with what happened with prohibition of alcohol.
02:57:47.000Right after prohibition of alcohol, Interesting.
02:59:43.000Solves a problem more than 6,000 years old.
02:59:45.000Hemp a crop that will not compete with other American products.
02:59:47.000Instead, it will displace imports of raw material and manufactured products produced by underpaid coolie and peasant labor.
02:59:54.000It will provide thousands of jobs for American workers throughout the land.
02:59:56.000So everybody was really high on hemp as a commodity because of this new machine that you could process hemp fiber with where you can make...
03:00:04.000Much more superior paper, superior clothing.
03:00:09.000Literally, the Mona Lisa was painted on hemp.
03:00:11.000The first draft of Declaration of Independence was written on hemp.
03:00:14.000They used to use it for paper back then.
03:00:16.000So then William Brandoff Hearst, who owns Hearst Publications, also owns all these paper mills and forests filled with trees.
03:00:24.000So they, to combat this industry, exactly.
03:00:29.000And so we're still trapped under this propaganda that was distributed in the 1930s by incredibly powerful people.
03:00:36.000And this is why it's illegal on the federal level.
03:00:40.000And even though you have medical marijuana that's been showed to help people with chemotherapy and wasting disease, help people that have appetite problems and people in chronic pain, it's still listed as a Schedule I drug federally, which to me is unconscionable.
03:01:33.000The thing that I wonder about is if you, you know...
03:01:39.000I do, there's a part of me that worries a little bit about kids doing a lot of this stuff.
03:01:43.000And I wonder, you know, to your point about consent and the brains development and all these things, I really worry about, do you have an increase in usage among minors?
03:01:51.000And so what I'd like to get is some sort of legal regime that, you know, again...
03:01:55.000It's not like criminally prosecuting or prosecuting at all people for smoking a joint, but also where we can actually ensure that it's kept out of public spaces.
03:02:04.000That's kind of my attitude towards it.
03:02:06.000And I think that's the right approach.
03:02:07.000I mean, on the psychedelic thing, what would need to be done...
03:02:13.000Because I know, to be clear, I know absolutely nothing about this.
03:02:16.000So this is me, you know, asking a question, not committing to some public policy.
03:02:21.000You have to be careful with this stuff, especially six days from an election.
03:02:24.000But I had never heard about, you know, because I'm a veteran, too.
03:02:27.000I spent four years in the United Marine Corps, went to Iraq, went to Haiti once.
03:02:31.000And is there any, like, what is the pathway, I guess, or what do you think should happen for veterans accessing psychedelics?
03:02:42.000Well, there's so many anecdotal stories about veterans experiencing relief that I think it should be available to them, especially veterans.
03:02:51.000I think that we put our veterans through...
03:02:54.000But is it like an FDA thing is making it possible for them to get the therapy?
03:03:49.000But I think the people that are not should have access to that because I believe in freedom.
03:03:53.000And I believe in the freedom to explore things that have great benefits.
03:03:57.000And I keep going back to veterans because I think we require an insane thing of them.
03:04:04.000We take regular people who live in civilized society, we send them over to Afghanistan and Iraq and have them engaged in the absolutely most brutal things that people do, which is war.
03:05:29.000I know a lot about veteran suicides and veteran mental health, this proposed solution.
03:05:35.000Like, literally the first time I've heard about this.
03:05:36.000Well, you could get real cynical as to what's the resistance.
03:05:38.000You could say the companies that make psychotropic drugs, SSRIs and the like, and companies that have a vested interest in continuing to sell these things would not want something that causes people to have a profound psychological change that doesn't require them to be on these things anymore.
03:06:07.000So, the mental health thing in the United States is really, really worrisome.
03:06:13.000Because, you know, when I talk about...
03:06:16.000Obviously, we have a big gun violence problem in the United States of America.
03:06:18.000And I talk about mental health, because obviously that's a part of what's going on here.
03:06:22.000It's what they say is, well, every other country has mental health, meaning advocates of strict gun laws say every other country has mental health problems, but they don't have the same gun violence problem that we do.
03:06:35.000If you look at like SSRI prescriptions, selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, it's like Prozac, that category of mental health therapeutics.
03:06:44.000We take something like six times as much as our peer countries economically.
03:06:49.000So clearly there's something with mental health treatment in the United States that is very, very broken.
03:06:54.000There's also a direct correlation between school shooters, mass shooters, and SSRIs.
03:07:01.000Most of the people that have committed mass shootings, and not talking about gang shootings, but a bunch of them were on psychotropic drugs.
03:07:29.000Prescribed psychiatric drugs and that if you bring that up, you are taking away from this argument they want to say where they want to blame everything on the guns.
03:07:39.000It's all about gun control and we need more gun control.
03:07:57.000Because we have so many firearms in the United States of America that even if I bought into the gun control argument, you're never going to be able to get sufficient guns off the streets.
03:09:00.000When we talk about gun violence problem, what we're really talking about primarily is gang violence.
03:09:06.000That's where a lot of the gun violence, I think a majority of the gun violence is coming from, which is not to say it's not a problem, but it's not the same problem that obviously gathers most of the headlines.
03:10:17.000We're doing Veterans Town Hall, as a matter of fact.
03:10:20.000I think we're doing Western PA, but I need to check.
03:10:23.000I don't know where I'm going from day to day, but...
03:10:25.000Yeah, she obviously cares a lot about veterans' issues.
03:10:28.000And, you know, the most important veterans' issue is, yeah, the mental health thing really matters, but it's that we shouldn't be sending them to stupid wars.
03:10:35.000Well, that was one of the most insane things that Hillary Clinton did when she tried to say that she was a Russian agent.
03:10:50.000She was a congresswoman for eight years, and she just decided to call her a Russian agent.
03:10:54.000Hillary Clinton, by the way, who's not served in the military at all, and at least her husband and her daughter haven't served in the military at all.
03:11:05.000I mean, that's literally where she got that streak of gray in her hair.
03:11:08.000Tulsi is a legitimate servant to the United States of America, and the accusation that she's not comes from people who want to send Americans To wars that have no connection to our national interest.
03:11:20.000I mean, this is the biggest difference, I think, between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is actually foreign policy.
03:12:17.000Of course, her dad was a major owner, or I believe that he owned a pretty significant stake in Halliburton.
03:12:22.000But I actually think, I don't want to overstate that, because I actually don't think that's most of what's going on.
03:12:27.000And this is maybe a background view that I have that I should interrogate a little bit more, but I tend to think that people aren't expressly financially motivated.
03:12:37.000I think they're much better at rationalizing their financial motivation is somehow good.
03:12:42.000So I don't think Liz Cheney, to be fair, even though I can't stand her, wakes up and says, oh, I want to get rich, so I'm going to support the Ukraine war so that Raytheon can continue making all these missiles.
03:12:52.000I think what's going on is they have convinced themselves that the post-World War II American consensus, this entire idea that we're going to remake the entire world in America's image, they think that that is the most important, the most valuable project.
03:13:09.000They're going to do it as much as they can, even though I think it's run its course.
03:13:14.000I think we should have learned in Iraq we can't turn everybody into the United States of America, nor should we want to.
03:13:18.000But these guys can't quite give up on it.
03:13:21.000It's just a powerful psychological motivation.
03:13:23.000If you go back to when the Soviet Union fell, right, when the Berlin Wall fell in the late 80s, early 90s.
03:13:30.000There was this sense among American leaders, right?
03:13:33.000Bill Clinton takes over in 1992, that we had reached what was called at the time the end of history, that Western liberal democracy was going to triumph.
03:13:44.000There was going to be no more ethnic conflict, no more religious conflict, no more regional conflict.
03:13:49.000And I think these guys bought the idea so profoundly that That they can't really wake up and recognize that for the past 40 years we've tried their theories and their theories haven't worked.
03:14:02.000There's also the craziest thing that happened to me during this campaign was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris and the left went crazy.
03:15:12.000The biggest foreign policy threat that we face in the Middle East is Iran, and we created a massive ally of the Iranians and the Iraqis, and none of the people who actually presided over that disaster are saying, oh, maybe we really, really screwed up,
03:15:27.000and maybe we should reevaluate some of our assumptions.
03:15:44.000It is close, but I am confident because it's close, but it's close in a way that favors us, right?
03:15:49.000The undecided voters tend to be voters who are more aligned with us.
03:15:53.000I think the early voting data looks really good.
03:15:55.000I think that You know, people just fundamentally don't want to do more of the same, and Kamala Harris is more of the same.
03:16:01.000I think some of our arguments that Kamala Harris is the candidate of censorship is starting to really break through.
03:16:08.000But, you know, to your listeners, if you agree with what I've said here, get out there and vote.
03:16:13.000Because, like, there is something to be said for me and Donald Trump actually sat and had a conversation, and, you know, hopefully I didn't make a complete fool of myself, but they just don't do that.
03:16:24.000Like, why would we make a person who's terrified of talking about what she wants to do and what she believes, why would we make her a president of the United States?
03:16:31.000The only way to make that not happen is to vote for me and Trump on or before November the 5th.
03:16:40.000I feel good about it, but I don't feel great about it because there are a lot of ways in which Democrats are going to try to motivate their base down the stretch.
03:16:48.000There are a lot of ways in which, yeah, I mean, I wouldn't put it past them.
03:16:52.000I don't know exactly what it looks like in five or six days, but I know that the best thing that we can do to prevent that from happening is to get out there, make our voices heard.