On this episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, the podcast by day, the host is joined by the writer and editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast, Alex Blumberg. They discuss the latest in the Iran crisis, the ongoing conflict between the US and Iran, and the Israeli attack on Tel Aviv.
00:01:08.000Complete, like, the older post-war era is just over.
00:01:11.000Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, articulated that at the World Economic Forum, probably better than the Trump administration did, saying very clearly that older rules-based order is gone.
00:01:21.000You saw AOC try to sort of articulate it, but she sort of fell apart at the Munich Security Conference in February.
00:01:28.000So this is an administration that is, I mean, and I don't even think they're thinking.
00:01:32.000I wrote a piece and I decided not to publish it because I was sort of like, decapitation doesn't really work for regime change, but it's not clear that they're really out for regime change or they're just asserting power, shaking up things.
00:01:45.000I mean, some of it's art of the deal, changing the person that we're negotiating with.
00:02:29.000Like, and what's happening in Tel Aviv, it's hard to know what's real and what's not because there's a lot of fake video going around and a lot of weird posts on X.
00:02:39.000So it's, you know, when I do peek in, it's hard to know.
00:03:10.000I mean, I think the president is - there's been some just, you know, Rubio said something about how, oh, we had to act because we knew that Israel was going to act anyway.
00:03:32.000There's nobody, nobody pulling for all of that.
00:03:34.000You know, the Russians or whoever, now the Israelis, you know, it's just he's clearly, I mean, Elon gave him, you know, $250 million and he still didn't give him even the electric car credit.
00:03:59.000That's what's so wild about it is that this older foreign policy establishment, which was like, let the experts decide what the right foreign policy, you know, all these think tanks.
00:04:17.000I don't think for a minute before Munich.
00:04:21.000But I don't think it's going to come back.
00:04:22.000And I think that that's what the Prime Minister of Canada realized.
00:04:25.000I think that's what the Europeans are starting to realize is that this is a completely different world that we live in than the one we lived in just a couple of years ago.
00:04:32.000It just doesn't make any sense to me unless we're acting on someone else's interests, like particularly Israel's interests.
00:04:39.000Like if they had supposedly dismantled their chances of making the nuclear bomb, whether or not that's true, I mean, it's so hard to know.
00:04:49.000He was unsatisfied, and just like he was like, I'm not getting anywhere in these negotiations, and I'm going to replace the person I'm negotiating with.
00:04:57.000It's just, you know, turn over the table, like change things up.
00:05:12.000I'm just saying I think that's what explains it.
00:05:16.000They haven't done a very good job explaining it because I think that it just sounds to some extent like what it is, which is that they're acting without they're sort of like, well, does it result in regime change in Iran?
00:05:27.000They might say that we want that or whatever, but that's not ultimately – they're not acting on the basis of achieving regime change.
00:06:59.000If you had a guerrilla conflict break out around those oil facilities, I mean, it's already more expensive because you have to heat up that particular type of, it's really heavy oils.
00:07:08.000If you heat it up to get it out of the ground, then you have to heat it to transport.
00:08:14.000I mean, I've never seen a politician act that independently.
00:08:17.000I mean, a president act that independently.
00:08:20.000So I'm skeptical of, I mean, I think that Rubio was sort of like, well, they were going to attack, and so we had to, you know, there's some of that, but I just think Trump's doing what he wants to do.
00:09:59.000He was also critical of the Democrats' approach, which was the sort of the mainstream IAEA-approved approach, because, of course, under international law, Iran has the right to nuclear energy and to nuclear facilities, including nuclear centrifuges and the enrichment.
00:10:15.000Iran has the right to all that under international law.
00:10:18.000And Trump doesn't agree with that, and he's not going to let international law get in his way.
00:10:22.000So when you say he has a right to it, you're talking just about nuclear power.
00:10:50.000But the Obama administration was like, we can do, you know, we can lift sanctions in exchange for controlling their nuclear program.
00:10:56.000Trump has not for a very long time agreed with that approach.
00:10:59.000I think he was criticizing it for many years before 2016 before he decided to run, but definitely for the last 10 years.
00:11:06.000Did you read the thing today that came out that they're discussing some sort of a leaked transmission that seems to be an activation of terror cells?
00:12:08.000I mean, I think we see that these terrorists are able to do an incredible amount of damage with pretty simple rifles.
00:12:13.000You know, and sometimes was it the French, the club, that particular terrorist action, there were other people that were using bombs that only killed one or two people, but the guys with the machine guns were able to gun down dozens of people.
00:12:30.000I think that's where a lot of Americans, when it happened, the reason so many people were against it, I believe a majority is against it, is because you're like, great, you know, first of all, is it going to be another endless war?
00:12:39.000And second of all, are we going to get a bunch of terrorist actions here?
00:12:42.000I think if we did, I don't think support for the war goes up.
00:12:52.000I mean, the whole situation internationally has been so tense already with what's going on in Gaza, with what's going on in Ukraine.
00:13:03.000And to add this to the pile, it's like, I mean, it genuinely feels like there's a real possibility that we might be entering World War III.
00:13:28.000I think they expected that, though, right?
00:13:30.000I mean, it makes Iran look pretty isolated.
00:13:33.000I mean, I will say, you know, I was totally, obviously, maybe not obviously, but very much on the left and was opposed to all the stuff Reagan was doing.
00:13:44.000I'm not going to say he was the only reason.
00:13:46.000There was obviously a bunch of weakening within.
00:13:48.000But I mean, he really did push back against communism.
00:13:51.000He challenged the entire foreign policy establishment on the basic view of just, you know, of just kind of keeping it, you know, keeping the communists where they were.
00:14:02.000And instead, Reagan really pushed back against it and said, there's got to be regime change.
00:14:05.000It sort of almost had a moral, certainly there's a defense buildup, but a moral argument.
00:14:09.000And I think it had a big impact to bring down communism.
00:14:13.000So I'm obviously have very mixed feelings about it.
00:14:18.000The Iranian regime is just so evil and so awful that every time you see videos of people taking these courageous actions, you're like, somebody bring that regime down.
00:14:27.000On the other hand, that country is pretty, the people of that country are pretty radical.
00:14:32.000And the Shah in 1979, I just spent last night watching all the old 60 Minutes from the 70s.
00:14:43.000There was also a lot more state repression from his intelligence services.
00:14:48.000But the country was full of radical Muslims who wanted that when all that instability, they wanted to revert back to a radical Islamist regime.
00:14:56.000And that's still, now I've seen other estimates that say that the current regime is incredibly unpopular in Iran.
00:15:02.000But how that works out, it's really hard to say.
00:15:05.000But there is something, I caution my own, I talk back to my own anti-interventionist instincts when I think about Reagan just being like, you know, we're not going to do just containment strategy anymore.
00:15:15.000We're actually going to talk back to communism because people deserve to be free.
00:15:20.000And now, is everything better for, you know, is everything fine in Russia?
00:15:24.000But I mean, communism was just awful, you know, just a totally soul-killing, you know, crushing, you know, a giant lie.
00:15:34.000So I think we have to kind of keep that in mind.
00:15:36.000And especially when you're in a moment of just such incredible chaos like we're in now.
00:15:40.000I told my students, I'm like, you get to live through one of the most interesting moments in history, certainly in the last 80 years, because the entire paradigm where the United States had these allies and everything's going to go through the Security Council and we're going to try to make it to the UN and there's got to get agreements and all this stuff, that's just gone.
00:15:57.000I mean, it's just, it's gone to the part where they don't even, where you're kind of like, how are you, what's going to happen inside Iran?
00:17:05.000I don't know if there's anybody in Cuba, really.
00:17:08.000And the older regime under the Biden, the open society people, the open society establishment, they had somebody for Venezuela, this Machado woman.
00:17:16.000But Trump gets up there and he just goes, yeah, she doesn't have enough support.
00:17:48.000And I mean, in this kind of the this beautiful collapse of communism, which occurred so peacefully with the Berlin Wall and the guard eventually just sort of like it's just in the vibes.
00:17:57.000And the guards are just like, yeah, we're not guarding this wall anymore.
00:18:26.000And so, but, you know, never, you never know.
00:18:29.000I mean, these guys then might just negotiate more what the Trump administration wants.
00:18:33.000And I think the Trump administration is like, we'll just keep killing your leaders until we get somebody in there that will make a deal with us.
00:18:40.000I think that's how Trump thinks about it.
00:18:47.000Because it's funny because it's funny because it's so Joe, it's just like you just look at all the think tanks and all the white papers and the State Department and the planning and whatever.
00:18:57.000And it's just like Trump's just, he's going to listen to Tucker.
00:19:00.000He's going to listen to any, and he's going to decide what to do.
00:19:04.000This episode is brought to you by Visible.
00:19:06.000Folks, there's one thing nobody wants this season, and that's getting catfished.
00:19:11.000And it's not just dating profiles that are putting you at risk.
00:20:31.000So initially, Anthropic was hesitant to allow them to use autonomous weapons, right?
00:20:36.000I don't know the status of it, but you saw the OpenAI, the head of OpenAI Autonomous, she was the head of Autonomous Weapons, I think.
00:20:44.000Don't give me exactly right, but she just quit like a couple of days ago on X, and it was just like a huge story.
00:20:49.000So you have a bunch of you have a rift in between.
00:20:55.000Now, I think Sam and Elon are both on board and want to keep working with the DOD, but it looks like Anthropic broke and then Hegset was like, well, but then we're going to punish you for this.
00:21:10.000That's very consistent with a kind of nationalist vision, which is that, which the Trump administration has, which is that your security strategy, your economic strategy, your border strategy, it's all a single, your industrial strategy, it's all a single thing.
00:21:24.000Your trade strategy, it's all a single thing.
00:21:27.000And I think for Trump, it's just, you're either asserting power and using your leverage and demanding more, or you're engaged in managed decline.
00:22:05.000And we just had a guy in power that opened our borders, that kind of gave a blank check to Ukraine.
00:22:12.000It seems like at a minimum with Trump, you have somebody that is taking responsibility in ways where Biden would be like, well, we're going to work with our allies.
00:22:21.000And it was just all kind of like it was like it was all kind of going to be decided in this, you know, what Curtis Yarvin famously calls the cathedral, you know, just the single thing of the media and the think tanks and the academics.
00:22:36.000And the working class of this country elected me to show strength and to demand a better return on our investment in terms of protecting our allies for our people.
00:22:47.000So that part of it, I think, is really overdue and really necessary, an assertion of why the West is special, why we need to defend the West.
00:22:56.000Is bombing Iran and replacing the Khomeini with his son?
00:23:00.000Mashat, is what's happening in Venezuela.
00:23:48.000But yeah, I mean, my view is like, I don't see an interest in that war continuing.
00:23:53.000I don't know how it's in the interest of the working of working class Americans or Americans.
00:23:57.000And I have the same questions about Iran and Venezuela and Cuba.
00:24:01.000But I think that is a totally different paradigm than the one that we had from 1945 to 2024.
00:24:06.000Aaron Trevor Barrett, well, the idea of tolerance with the last administration, that seems just to be a narrative.
00:24:13.000It seemed to be a political strategy of keeping the borders open to increase populations in blue states, raise the census, get more congressional seats, and then a path to citizenship where you'd have permanent voters.
00:24:53.000I think Cecilia Munoz, who's one of the more moderate advocates and was in the Obama administration, I think she said something like, Biden just wanted to give the left, just felt like he wanted to give the left what they wanted.
00:25:04.000And that's what, you know, the Soros think tanks and the, you know, the very progressive immigration groups have been advocating.
00:25:12.000He did the same thing on climate, so it makes sense.
00:25:14.000I know Elon talks a lot about how, oh, it's about importing voters and whatnot.
00:25:18.000Maybe, but it's not even clear that that's a good strategy that's going to work.
00:25:58.000I mean, the other statistic that I learned from David Shore, who's like one of the top Democrat pollsters when he was talking to Ezra Klein after the 2024 elections, he was like, if all eligible voters had voted, Trump would have won by 3 percentage points rather than 1.5.
00:26:14.000So I always think it's kind of funny because the Republicans are always trying to make it harder for people to vote.
00:26:19.000But under that calculation anyway, and maybe it's just Trump.
00:26:22.000Maybe other Republicans won't be able to get it.
00:26:23.000But when you say harder for people to vote, what do you mean?
00:26:39.000Back like decades, people have been talking about mail-in voting just being too open to fraud.
00:26:45.000Well, maybe, but then the question is, does it really benefit?
00:26:48.000I mean, in other words, if David Shore is right, if everybody who could vote had voted, Trump would have won basically by twice the margin.
00:26:57.000Well, I don't know if that's necessarily true, but when I see laws like what California has where you're not allowed to show ID, there's only, I mean, I've tried, tried to find some sort of charitable way where that would make sense other than you want to open the door for fraud.
00:27:38.000I mean, but then the interview that saw that it's an incredible video because then he goes to like, I think he goes to Harlem or he goes to like a black neighborhood in New York and he was just asking black people, he's like, do you have an ID on you?
00:27:48.000And it was like, everybody was like, yeah, like, what's the matter with you?
00:27:51.000Well, it's also, we just got done with three years of you need an ID to prove that you have been vaccinated.
00:27:58.000So you need to be able to have that to go to work, to get on a plane, to eat at a restaurant.
00:28:10.000Well, yeah, that was about, that was because the left wanted to control people's behavior.
00:28:15.000And on voting, the old, I know because when I talk to my progressive friends about it, you know, and family and friends, it's very much like, no, we can't put barriers in the way of voting because that's what they did during Jim Crow.
00:28:50.000I mean, I think if you sit down with any rational person and no one's watching, you know, there's no cameras on them, and you asked them, does that make any sense?
00:29:15.000I find it totally reasonable, and I support it.
00:29:17.000I'm just saying that if you make it, I'm just saying you may, the Republicans may, it may result in outcomes that are not the predictable ones that they think they'll get.
00:29:25.000Just because Trump was, at least, and Trump is maybe a special case.
00:29:29.000But I mean, he's able to turn out reluctant voters.
00:29:56.000If you're just being conservative, it's 10 times Austin.
00:29:59.000You let 10 Austins in in four years of people who you have no idea who they are.
00:30:06.000Yeah, and Americans were on board with closing the borders, and then when it came time to actually asking all the, getting those folks to leave that came in, all the support disappeared, right?
00:30:18.000It's showing up at Home Depot and just rounding people up and raiding places and going to restaurants and pulling people out of their houses.
00:30:25.000I think people got very uncomfortable with the idea of militarized police wearing masks on the street.
00:30:31.000And then when you find out that these guys have only been trained for seven weeks and they get a $50,000 signing bonus, and then you find out that a giant percentage of them are Latino, which is kind of crazy.
00:30:42.000You know, like the two guys who shot that guy in Minnesota, they're both Latino.
00:30:46.000And yeah, I mean, that's what you get when you have completely untrained, unprepared people.
00:30:52.000The whole Minnesota thing with Alex Peretti is a complete cluster fuck.
00:30:56.000I still have not seen verification of whether or not the narrative that makes sense is true.
00:31:04.000But the narrative that makes sense was that there was an accidental discharge of his gun as they were pulling it away from him.
00:31:10.000And then that led to them thinking that maybe he still had the gun on him because you're in the chaos of arresting someone.
00:31:16.000Someone says he has a gun, a gun goes off, and then they shoot the guy.
00:31:22.000I bet when they do the proper evaluation of it, they're going to find multiple mistakes by the law enforcement.
00:31:29.000And then there was the thing with the woman who got shot where you have a guy who had almost been run over just a couple of weeks before and been dragged in his car.
00:31:37.000The guy who shot her had been dragged by another vehicle.
00:32:20.000It's not organic that it just happened to be taking place in the very same place where you found hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, right?
00:32:28.000This is one of the clearest, most obvious distractions you've ever seen In the public arena, like where you have these people who are being paid to protest.
00:32:40.000They give them money to go out there and protest.
00:33:39.000They want it to happen this way because then this kills all the support for people that, you know, were kind of on the fence whether or not I should be deporting all illegals.
00:34:24.000Yeah, they did a fairly poor job of it.
00:34:26.000Like, why were they focused on Minneapolis?
00:34:30.000I think most people don't understand how radical the left in Minneapolis is because you think it's a Midwestern place, but it's actually got a long radical left tradition.
00:34:38.000And as you were saying, I mean, Alex Predty, he should have been arrested several days before when he had a gun on him and got into an altercation with the police.
00:34:46.000They should have arrested him then, and then they could have, the judge could have done a lot of different things, but they could have taken away his gun.
00:34:50.000They could have put a restraining order on him so that next time he showed up and people would know to look for him, then he would have been kept out of the area.
00:34:57.000Do you know the story about the gun that he was carrying?
00:35:19.000So I don't know if this is completely accurate because this is obviously the fog of chaos of these type of altercations and situations.
00:35:27.000There's a video that many people have reviewed, and it's their conclusion that if you watch the video, when one of the ICE officers removes his gun, even though he does not have his finger on the trigger, has his hand on the gun and his fingers on the slide.
00:35:43.000As he's moving off, it appears the gun goes off.
00:35:47.000Now, they've zoomed in on it and shown that it does look like the gun's going off, and it does correspond with the sound of a gunshot.
00:38:11.000I mean, and I'm not making that claim, but I mean, his behavior was, I mean, the recklessness of the gun choice mirrors the recklessness of his behavior in those instances.
00:38:21.000And I heard people being like, oh, well, he, you know, he was just defending that poor woman.
00:38:25.000There was a police officer engaged in an arrest of a person, and Alex Predi intervened in that.
00:38:30.000I mean, I think you could mess around with that.
00:38:31.000It was a little, I don't know if it was an arrest.
00:39:17.000But it's like – I just don't think that's appropriate behavior to go and get – that's not the tradition of like – I mean I think there's a nonviolent left-wing tradition that's actually quite beautiful and spiritual.
00:39:31.000And like Thoreau and Gandhi and King, that's not what was going on in Minneapolis.
00:39:37.000Well, that's not at all what's going on.
00:39:38.000This is a part of the problem with these things being organized, right?
00:39:41.000Organized, paid protests, and also people being radicalized by narratives.
00:39:46.000Then, of course, very different than what was going on with the civil rights movement.
00:40:37.000And I think this guy, whatever his mental health struggles were, they appeared to exist.
00:40:42.000It seems like he was a troubled guy already.
00:40:45.000So a thing comes along that defines them, a cause that they're going to stand up for and fight for because their life's probably a fucking mess and their mind is probably a mess.
00:40:56.000And they look at this, they look at it like it's this black and white binary situation good guys and bad guys and let's fuck all these fascists and he's kicking taillights and you know and getting involved in pushing matches with ICE agents.
00:41:12.000Like all that stuff can should and can get you arrested.
00:41:15.000Yeah, I mean, I think on the organized issue, remember like the civil rights movement was really well organized in terms of people weren't being paid for it.
00:41:24.000It wasn't being promoted on social media.
00:42:06.000And so one of them was about actually, I mean, the other thing is that pull back a little bit further.
00:42:12.000Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement was about affirming our liberal democratic Western civilization.
00:42:18.000Black people wanted to be a part of it.
00:42:20.000This stuff where you're like, we want to open the border and defund the police and basically start attacking all of these institutions of liberal democratic civilization.
00:43:10.000And when you're taking criminals and just releasing them from jail and you have no cash bail and you're doing all these things, if you want to put on the fucking tinfoil hat, you would do that because you want chaos, because you want chaos so you can have more rules and tighten down on people and have more control over the civilization.
00:43:28.000I mean, I think in that, I mean, I think like it's not empathic to allow more violent crime.
00:43:35.000Like, I don't think that's empathy towards victims.
00:43:37.000So I don't think, I wouldn't call it empathy.
00:43:39.000And not only that, but like when you look at like who these folks are, and I spent a lot of time looking at them and was one of them, they hate Western civilization.
00:43:48.000They hate the United States of America.
00:43:51.000Like it's an anti-civilization thing that's motivating it.
00:43:55.000And that's not to say that like MSNBC watchers don't feel, oh, I feel bad for that person.
00:44:00.000But I mean, I always, you know, it's like the people I hear complaining about ICE, they don't know any illegal immigrants.
00:44:07.000They've never talked to them other than maybe their server or that, you know, but they don't even really talk to their gardeners or their or their, you know, their maids.
00:44:15.000It's like the idea that they have empathy implies a deep understanding of someone's situation.
00:44:22.000And so I think it's a misdescription of empathy.
00:44:25.000I think in some ways it's more quite the opposite of that, that they're actually not showing empathy for all the people that are hurt by their policies, whether it's open borders or enabling addiction or euthanizing poor and mentally ill people in Canada or transing kids.
00:44:41.000I don't think that those things are empathic.
00:44:44.000And the person that's doing them, I don't think, is suicidal.
00:44:47.000If anything, they're actually quite full of themselves and quite arrogant about what they're doing.
00:44:52.000I mean, I use the word pathological altruism in San Francisco, and I say it's close to Monkhausen syndrome by proxy.
00:45:00.000Maybe it is Monkhausen's syndrome by proxy, but I don't think it's, I worry about affirming, because I think that's how progressives go.
00:45:07.000They go, oh, well, if the homeless are worse off, that's just because we care so much.
00:45:43.000We have something, we've been working on it too, like the Canadian Euthanasia Program.
00:45:47.000And it's like every year the numbers just keep going up and up.
00:45:50.000And it reminds me of when you interview homeless service providers in San Francisco, they'll be like, yeah, no, we're doing an amazing job.
00:45:56.000Every year we serve more and more people.
00:45:58.000It's like, right, you have the wrong incentives.
00:46:02.000You have an incentive to serve to incentive to create homelessness, and that's what they've done.
00:46:07.000Well, if you get more money, if you have more homeless, your incentive is now not to eliminate homelessness because that's your job.
00:47:06.000That doesn't count the $24 billion that California gave.
00:47:11.000So that money's going to single-resident occupancy hotel owners.
00:47:16.000It's going to nonprofit service providers who are just bringing food and, you know, alcohol and drug paraphernalia to make it easier for people to do drugs and overdose and live in tents on the street.
00:47:29.000It's very expensive to kill that many people that way.
00:47:34.000Right, but it's really about the amount of people where that's their industry.
00:47:39.000That there is an industry in taking care of the homeless situation and addressing the homeless situation.
00:47:46.000And, you know, Koleon Noir, when he was on the podcast, he was explaining to me that he went to San Francisco and he was like, why is it so bad up here?
00:48:37.000It's neither permanent nor supportive.
00:48:39.000It's often warehousing addicts where they die.
00:48:42.000I mean, we know that they die at very high levels in those little, this is a little crummy, you know, single-resident occupancy rooms.
00:48:47.000They bought a lot of motels that were low-income, you know, low, you know, cheap motels, converting them, having, but they don't really, there's no, I mean, all that money should have gone into a centralized addiction and psychiatric care system.
00:49:02.000Cal psych is what it should have been.
00:49:03.000And instead, it's just, it's just kind of, yeah, it's just basically incentivizing people to live on the streets and use hard drugs and die in overdose.
00:49:13.000I mean, if you wanted to make it better, you would incentivize them and pay them based on the amount of people that are no longer homeless.
00:49:31.000There's no like, you know, secret room where they're rubbing their hands and being like, oh, that we're going to make a lot of money this way.
00:49:36.000It's just, you know, when you interview them, it's a very basic view.
00:49:40.000You know, it's just these people are victims.
00:49:42.000They're victims of white supremacy and capitalism.
00:49:45.000And to victims, everything should be given and nothing required.
00:49:48.000Well, I think that's a nice narrative, but I think once you start getting monthly paychecks from the homeless industrial complex, I think your incentive is to keep this party going.
00:53:23.000If you're a security guy, the last thing you want to do when there's one of you and two of those other guys is Deal with a situation that way where you push a guy.
00:53:32.000I'm I have to say it's so interesting you said I'm always surprised when I see them do like.
00:53:36.000That was the same thing that happened with the pretty we were just talking about.
00:53:39.000Don't you think this guy's probably armed too, I mean, but also he shouldn't have pushed that guy that way.
00:53:48.000I mean, the whole thing is fucking stupid.
00:54:12.000The security guy just walked up to those guys and pushed him.
00:54:15.000When you're details to take care of the mayor, you should be escorting him around that and getting him away from any potential trouble, like the brazenness of just walking up and pushing that guy where you don't know how to fight at all.
00:54:28.000It's very clear when you watch the way they grappled with each other, he doesn't know what he's doing.
00:54:33.000This episode is brought to you by Intuit Turbo TAX.
00:55:42.000Seven weeks, and a lot of them are financially incentivized.
00:55:44.000Because if you can get $50,000, if you're in debt and then you could take this job on, I don't, when they get the $50,000, how long do they have to stay on the job for to have that money, to have that signing bonus?
00:55:57.000Or is it one of those things where you get the $50,000 as a signing bonus, but you pay it like a record deal type deal where it's not really your money?
00:56:14.000They're just a bunch of bad choices made by this administration on that one.
00:56:20.000Someone's read it, comments saying they have no personal experience, but they've heard that it's 50K over four years if you're in good standing at the end of those four years.
00:56:33.000But for some people that have no job opportunities and nothing on the horizon, that $50,000 looks like, look, it's an extra $25K a year or an extra $25K for four years?
00:56:55.000But either way, it's $50,000 that you would not have been able to make ordinarily.
00:57:00.000I mean, we had police shortages before 2020.
00:57:03.000We had a bunch of police shortages after that, mostly by police officers who were just felt mistreated by the society and by their local mayors who said that they were evil.
00:57:12.000Well, didn't a lot of cops resign when Adam Donnie got elected?
00:57:16.000And then a bunch of police officers were driven out during COVID.
00:57:20.000So that was already our security forces have been, you know, and they were just people underestimate how important it is to feel like important in your job and respected.
00:57:32.000And it's not just about the money because they would be offering more money.
00:57:34.000But I think a lot of people are like, oh, no, I don't want to be in a job where people are spitting at me or throwing urine and not just a job where your life is on the line.
00:57:41.000Yeah, your life is already on the line and then you're mistreated by the wider society, which actually creates additional risks, you know, as this chaos in Minneapolis shows.
00:57:50.000So yeah, it's just people want to believe that they're doing something that is appreciated by the community.
00:57:56.000And so when the community decides that they're against policing, your civilization is pretty far gone.
00:58:00.000Right, but this is the difference between policing and this ICE thing.
00:58:03.000The ICE thing is a different thing, right?
00:58:14.000They're looking at it like in the progressive narrative is like no one's illegal on stolen land and we need to have open borders and illegals or immigrants rather are the foundation of this country and you hear all that those narratives.
00:58:30.000The president and the administration, they wanted to pick a fight, obviously, with this left-wing, with activists in this left-wing city.
00:58:35.000Thought it would redound to their benefit to show how crazy the left was and it backfired on them.
00:58:40.000Well, I think they wanted to do something about the amount of illegal fraud that was just recently exposed in Minneapolis.
00:58:47.000I don't know that that's, but you wouldn't do it with ICE raids, though.
00:58:53.000If you have illegal immigrants that are responsible for hundreds of millions of dollars in fraud, and you know at least some of them are illegal, it seems rational that you would send ICE in to find out who's illegal and who's not and put a stop to some of it.
00:59:05.000And there's also this nationwide focus on this one place because of the Nick Shirley videos.
00:59:11.000Yeah, though I think that the motivate, my understanding is that the motivation was to motivate people that are here illegally to self-deport.
00:59:45.000Because of course there's this thing called e-verify where you just have the employers have to prove that everybody you're employing is here legally and they don't want to do that.
00:59:53.000The Trump administration doesn't want to do that because they'll upset in particular, like the agricultural lobby, but other construction who depend on.
01:00:01.000So it's a, it's a funny, it's not great, I don't know.
01:00:06.000I have the perfect you know answer to the other one.
01:00:08.000But obviously, like politically, the president doesn't feel like they can do e-verify and maintain support from the business community for his political agenda.
01:00:18.000But you end up with a kind of underclass that's here illegally but that's protected because they're working in a sector that the president and the administration wants to protect.
01:00:27.000But then you're also self-deporting people.
01:00:29.000I'm not sure exactly how they're thinking about it, but that appears to be what the heart of their goal is is well, this was always what a lot of people on the left back in the day would say that illegal immigrants was.
01:00:43.000This was like a KOCH Brothers thing, this was like a right-wing thing that they wanted this for, for exactly what you just described, and that this is not a left-wing progressive idea, and that what it would do is would lower the wages for the lower class and the middle class of this country, and it would be bad for the citizens.
01:01:02.000And so you don't want unchecked illegal immigration.
01:01:05.000Unchecked illegal immigration would just be for the right because they're the ones who own these massive corporations that are profiting off of illegal labor.
01:01:13.000They don't have to pay them health care, any of the things that are, you know, that cost money.
01:01:19.000Yeah, I mean, the left was always balancing a sort of open society.
01:01:24.000You know, they wanted, the Soros Foundation always wanted to have a free movement of people.
01:01:28.000That was sort of their view of part why the Holocaust occurred is that you couldn't move people, you know, or at least the persecutions, you couldn't move people as easily.
01:01:36.000But then you had the working class, you know, who were negatively affected by bringing in migrants who would push down wages and unions who are a big part of the Democratic Party.
01:01:44.000So the Democrats were sort of divided on it for a while, but they managed it.
01:01:48.000And Hillary and Obama would sort of, if you look at when they were competing in 2008, they were very carefully, like there was a whole thing around like driver's licenses, whether she would give them or not.
01:01:59.000And Obama accused Hillary of kind of playing both sides of it, you know, typical thing.
01:02:04.000But they also both spoke out strongly against mass migration.
01:02:08.000Fast forward 10 years, you know, fast forward much more than that.
01:02:11.000It was at 16 years into today, and now you've got a much more working class Republican Party who's unified around keeping the borders closed and restricting the supply of low-income, unskilled workers.
01:02:25.000I mean, it was really weird to watch people that are always defending supply and demand and economics and economic policy then say, oh, no, but having open borders and having all these working class people come in is going to have no impact on wages when obviously it would.
01:02:39.000And I think that's now, that's also now gone.
01:02:42.000I think that's another thing that's just Trump has just changed.
01:02:44.000I don't think you're going to see Democrats going back to advocating that kind of mass migration again.
01:02:50.000But you could see a world where they would push back against what has happened, what they would say the barbaric nature of some of these ice raids and then saying – there's a filter of ice water in that too if you'd like.
01:03:03.000You don't have to not have your bottle.
01:03:43.000Isn't that also, though, because the blue state governors were more welcoming of them?
01:03:47.000There's a little bit of that, but there was also the idea that you're going to juice up the congressional seats because you're going to change the census.
01:03:54.000Maybe, although California lost seats, right?
01:05:54.000And so you literally get the this is like this is what people worry about democracy.
01:05:59.000You get all the, it's very democratic, but you get these powerful unions and they're able to change the laws like that.
01:06:05.000I mean, it's called the Curly effect because there was a Boston mayor named Curly who made everything so bad for his political opponents that they left.
01:06:12.000But the consequence was that he ended up gaining more power.
01:06:15.000So all of when everybody moves to, you know, when all the like moderate Democrats move to Austin or Miami or Denver or wherever, California just ends up locked in more to a progressive agenda.
01:06:36.000And also, I mean, it seems like the tech community is now backing this San Jose mayor who's running, who's a very, he's Democrat, very moderate.
01:07:11.000And it really took things getting so bad where they were telling Mark Andreessen, as he said to you on your show, that they were shutting off whole parts of AI.
01:07:19.000The Biden administration was openly threatening AI and this huge new.
01:07:24.000I'm not saying that there's not, but I think at some point the tech community, which had been, you know, either leaning Democrat for a long time since the Obama era, you know, or wanted to stay out of politics because they just wanted to focus on their machines and their investments.
01:07:39.000They don't really want to be involved in politics.
01:07:42.000And so hopefully, because it's not, I mean, when you see what Soros has done and you really appreciate the power that one billionaire can have, you kind of go, why is there nothing like that, you know, on the other side?
01:07:56.000And so I hope that that's starting to happen.
01:07:58.000But yeah, when you start to chase out the billionaires and the billionaires just give up on California, then it's got to be whoever's remaining to try to put the money behind the guy that can get some change there.
01:08:08.000Yeah, that's, I mean, I don't see a pathway where California anytime soon turns around.
01:08:48.000I mean, say Matt Mahan or somebody more moderate gets in to be governor, Rick Caruso runs for L.A. mayor again.
01:08:55.000I mean, honestly, like, if somebody can't defeat Karen Bass after she let Los Angeles burn away, which is now, we now know for a fact was just totally preventable, absolutely preventable.
01:09:05.000I was saying at the time, but now we know.
01:09:07.000They tried to rewrite the report, but it's clear it was totally preventable.
01:09:25.000And she goes to flies to Ghana for this little junket presidential inauguration, palling around when she should have been in L.A. with a command headquarters.
01:09:34.000And if she wasn't, then Gavin should have been.
01:09:37.000Schwarzenegger, towards the end of his administration, they would just mobilize planes full of water, those huge cargo planes full of water, before there were fires, just to start to circulate, just to get ready to put stuff out.
01:09:49.000This idea that there was this idea promoted that it was inevitable that the fires that, oh, eventually it's just no, like it's absurd.
01:09:57.000Like, of course, you can protect it with adequate fire.
01:09:59.000People, oh, the pipes weren't big enough.
01:10:00.000No, like, maintain your reservoirs, have water in them.
01:10:04.000Even the one that was like, was like not repaired yet, which should have been repaired, they could have kept, they could have air-gapped the pipes so that it didn't contaminate the water supply, but left it for firefighting.
01:10:43.000Yeah, so I mean, I think there is a way for California to come out.
01:10:47.000And my view is like, look, you've got, it's on the tech billionaires.
01:10:52.000And I know some of them have left, and obviously they don't need it, but there's still a lot of billionaire rich guys in California that are perfectly capable of financing an alternative effort.
01:11:03.000Remember, 75% of San Francisco voters want to arrest people using fentanyl in public.
01:11:34.000People are really, it's not like anything has changed that significantly.
01:11:38.000They will, in fact, when I interview people in San Francisco, they're a little reluctant to admit that's gotten better because I think they don't want to take any pressure off the politicians.
01:11:47.000So, I mean, I do think it's rescuable, but it's hard.
01:11:51.000When you say it's gotten better, like, how so?
01:11:53.000Mostly the encampments are being broken up.
01:11:56.000Now, you see a little, you see more of that sort of thing that we just saw in the video where there's like, I call them like a little more of like a nest.
01:12:13.000They had a chance to save themselves and they ended up voting for the wrong person for mayor and it's just as bad as ever.
01:12:19.000So, but I think if you get San Francisco, LA, and a new governor in place, I think you've got the makings to save it.
01:12:26.000Have you seen this video where this guy does this description of what's going on in Oakland and then drives across the county line into the next place and it's immediately all done?
01:12:35.000And you just see what the difference between two different forms of government and how it works.
01:12:40.000I didn't see that one, but I saw the one between Venice and Santa Monica.
01:12:43.000I was there when they Venice and Santa Monica was somewhere like, you're like, why are there tents?
01:13:04.000Yeah, they cleaned that up pretty quickly.
01:13:06.000And then they and then the voters fired their city council member who represented them, who was total, crazy radical, Chesapeake-level radical, and replaced him with a more moderate person.
01:14:09.000There was a comic from the comedy store that filmed something.
01:14:12.000He went like undercover and he had, like in his past, he had some, I don't think, I think currently he was sober when he did this, but he decided to go there and film and stay in one of these encampments just to show what it was like.
01:14:27.000And this is like 2006-ish, six-ish, somewhere around there.
01:14:32.000And it was fucking nuts, even back then.
01:14:35.000And, you know, we talked about the story of how Skid Row with the whole Jerome Hotel and how it all started.
01:14:43.000Skid Row was the place where they would take all the homeless people and all the people that were problematic and they would move them there and keep them there.
01:14:50.000And the idea was that you just keep them out of Beverly Hills, keep them away from Hollywood.
01:14:55.000We're doing movies and we've got famous people walking around.
01:15:09.000It's not that different from the tenderloin in the sense that those are places where the single resident, those are the places where the really cheap hotels were.
01:15:15.000They were like often for like working, you know, like working people that were in town temporarily, like temporary hotels.
01:15:22.000Like you would just get your own little, that was how primitive they were.
01:15:25.000And then it just evolved over time and then they became, all of them became subsidized for the homeless.
01:15:30.000But yeah, it's, I don't think, I think California, I think it's important.
01:15:35.000I think with Trump, and again, like him or hate him or disagree or whatever, you see the potential of this country in particular to make a big change.
01:15:44.000And I think that it's ultimately resulted from an unleashing of, you know, social media made it all possible.
01:15:50.000It allowed for people to get, you know, accurate information for the first time in a different paradigm.
01:15:55.000So I don't want to lose hope on the Golden State.
01:17:29.000So let's move on to happier subjects, shall we?
01:17:33.000So what do you think about all this UAP talk?
01:17:36.000It's one thing that Trump has said that he's going to release whatever files that they might have on UAPs, alien terrestrial beings, all this jazz.
01:18:34.000And then Trump comes up and he goes, Obama revealed classified information with a little grin on his face because he's a little rivalry with Obama.
01:18:43.000I might help him out by declassifying it.
01:18:53.000It's theater, but I mean, something really comes out.
01:18:56.000This is just another distraction to keep us from thinking about all the other things that are going on.
01:19:01.000But you can't be so, I mean, we should get into Epstein files too, because I do think I have a different view of Epstein now.
01:19:06.000But look, I just think we've been asking for more transparency like we had in this very brief period in the mid-70s with the church committee hearings.
01:19:29.000But I don't think we should hold both.
01:19:32.000We should be happy that there is an acknowledgement that there's a lot of government files and that there's some commitment to release them.
01:19:40.000Because I do think it's easier to get new Epstein files released after you have some Epstein files released than if you have none.
01:21:06.000So like they're not – we do see – they do release warfare.
01:21:11.000Various times they do release things and you can kind of go, OK, that means that we have – I don't think – what I'm saying is the main excuse has been not to reveal our methods for getting – we're just talking about UAP here, getting photographs and video.
01:21:27.000We know that a huge amount of it exists.
01:21:30.000They haven't even released the full, you know, gimbal and go fast videos.
01:21:35.000There's a whole bunch more video left.
01:22:21.000So I think that now there is, I was going to say the UAP community, there isn't really an organized one, although Jesse's doing an amazing job of organizing it.
01:22:30.000We should be really specific and say, you know, here's what we want.
01:22:36.000Representative Nancy Mace wrote an open letter to the intelligence and military community saying, here's a set of documents that we want to release.
01:22:44.000So I think the good news is we're like, look, the president has said he wants this.
01:22:47.000We've identified a bunch of documents, identified a bunch of videos in film.
01:22:51.000Yeah, I mean, are they going to withhold stuff?
01:23:00.000Okay, so I think they make a really good point in Age of Disclosure that if they did release things, the real problem is misappropriation of funds lying to Congress.
01:23:12.000And the fact that some of these, you would assume that the way these things are being handled, if they do have crafts, if there is some sort of a back engineering program, that back engineering program is going to be held by a military contractor.
01:23:29.000So whatever the contractor is, whether it's Rocket Dyne or whoever has it, right?
01:23:34.000You would imagine that the other competing groups would be very pissed off that they didn't have access to this thing and they could sue.
01:23:43.000The misappropriation of funds lying to Congress, people could go to jail.
01:23:52.000If there's so much money that's being shuffled away into these black ops projects, if there's no oversight, then who knows where the money's going, right?
01:24:49.000But he was sort of talking about, because I think Eric Weinstein was asking these really hard questions, like, okay, well, like, how many people are in this reverse engineering program and what is it?
01:25:02.000I haven't seen it yet, so I can't comment on that.
01:25:04.000But I know both skeptical and open-minded at the same time.
01:25:10.000There is a like, yeah, I just definitely think there's a lot more than they've revealed.
01:25:16.000I think my skepticism on the reverse engineering stuff, I mean, obviously there's crash retrieval because they're just retrieving, it could be foreign or they're retrieving something.
01:25:25.000The reverse engineering, I mean, if it's advanced tech, nuclear just took so much.
01:25:30.000I mean, I'm just familiar with the history of nuclear, just so much effort to create nuclear energy.
01:25:35.000And you'd have these huge, it was a huge enterprise, thousands of people.
01:25:39.000If they're not, I mean, that's why I kind of go, and I mean, a whole other form of propulsion.
01:25:44.000I mean, it's just really, it would require so many, so such a big bureaucracy.
01:25:50.000That's where I'm a little skeptical that that exists because I don't know how you maintain a cover-up that long.
01:26:05.000Well, especially when you're dealing with government contractors and military contractors, they have a long history of keeping a tight lip when it comes to all sorts of top-secret projects that they're working on.
01:26:18.000I mean, it's weird because if you look at the UAP Task Force, which was created by people that had, you know, it was that comes out of, they have OSAP and then ATIP and then UAP Task Force, and then they create Arrow, which is much more like what Blue Book was, which is their whole point is to debunk and dismiss, I think.
01:26:44.000But the UAP Task Force was people that seem genuinely interested in it, and they have potential explanations and three separate things.
01:26:51.000So that means that they didn't know themselves.
01:26:53.000And so I would think that if there was some reverse engineering program, then you would have a better idea than just three potential explanations.
01:27:02.000But that's assuming they actually got access.
01:27:07.000Yeah, I mean, if they open themselves up for, if they do have access, then you open up those questions, misappropriation of funds, lying to Congress, military contractors having access to these vehicles.
01:27:41.000I think they have a lot more photos and videos showing, demonstrating this incredible phenomenon, but I'm not sure that they know what it is.
01:27:49.000And I'm pretty skeptical that they have a secret reverse engineering program just because I don't see how they would have carried it out for this long.
01:27:57.000Because Jesse's theory, of course, is that it would date back to the 50s.
01:28:01.000And it just, there's just too many possibilities for too many deathbed confessions from people to reveal this knowledge.
01:28:34.000Well, then we should go demand the documents.
01:28:35.000I mean, that would be something where we just need to be like, look, these are the documents that we want, and it's on this place these years.
01:28:44.000Well, one of the things that Bob said is he thinks some of the documents that he was shown were horseshit, and he thinks it's on purpose.
01:28:49.000He thinks that those fake documents, that the fake narratives are a hook.
01:28:55.000So that if somebody does spill the beans, they know exactly who would, who was doing it, because they could point to, like, maybe if you're involved in, you know, X program, they give you some bullshit narrative on top of the real truth, right?
01:29:59.000So then you kind of go, like, the only people really, I mean, it seemed like the level of sophistication to create this would have been the government.
01:30:06.000And so then you're sort of like, well, why would they have done that?
01:30:09.000One of the answers is it was just this is called passage material to be able to detect counterintelligence activities.
01:30:15.000I'll tell you another one that I can't quite figure out.
01:30:17.000I mean, for me, it says a lot of effort to, and why that narrative, I mean, like, another thing I was told people say is they'll go, well, they're using the UAP stuff as cover for secret weapons programs.
01:30:28.000And you're like, well, why would that work as cover?
01:30:30.000And they go, well, because then it's a way to distract attention.
01:30:34.000I was like, but why would that distract attention?
01:30:39.000You go, as opposed to like within the military, you're like, look, we don't, this is secret research that's really important to national security.
01:30:46.000Instead, they're like, oh, no, this is UFO crash retrieval, so don't pay attention to it.
01:30:51.000That seems like you're a recipe for creating more interest in UFOs.
01:30:56.000So there's a lot of things that the government has done where you're like, it's almost like, assuming that is, by the way, we know that the government, the U.S. Air Force, did, you know, in the early 80s, make this guy Paul Benowitz go crazy who was seeing things over Kirtland Air Base.
01:31:10.000And then this guy, Richard Doty, you know, was they would be feeding him all this information, convincing him of an alien attack.
01:31:18.000And he basically ended up going crazy from it.
01:31:20.000It's this amazing story told by this by this book, Mirage Men, also a documentary.
01:31:25.000And you look at it and you kind of go, and they go, well, it was to cover up a secret weapons program at Kirtland Air Base.
01:31:30.000And it's like, it's like, I'm not even disbelieving it, but it's like, that's just such a like, why would that be the best way to do that?
01:31:39.000And why would you be so sure that that wouldn't attract interest from people rather than distract it?
01:31:44.000So there's a bunch of things that don't make sense.
01:31:46.000And so even if it is all, you know, which is the skeptic view, you know, is that it's some combination of government disinformation, sci-fi, you know, dreams, hypnosis, hypnagogic states, and then kind of the power of belief.
01:32:02.000You know, I just reviewed this new book on Barney and Betty Hill, where the author thinks that it was that really was a combination of her stress of being an interracial couple, her nightmares, and then hypnosis, where they then confabulate this whole story.
01:32:18.000That's the basic skeptic view is that it was sort of, but the government's involved in it, and that's always strange because you're like, why is the government involved in that?
01:32:27.000Why are you all parts in the Betty and Barney Hill story?
01:32:29.000No, no, in the UFO in creating in these UFOs, assuming that they did the MJ-12 or somebody did the MJ-12, but certainly in the case of the organizations, why would they have anything, right?
01:32:41.000Why would they have why would you be doing things?
01:32:44.000Like the thing with the Paul Dotie and the Paul Benowitz or the Richard Doty and Paul Benowitz is like, why was that the best?
01:32:50.000I mean, it's just, why was that the best way?
01:32:53.000Like, if somebody observes strange activity over Kirtland Air Base and they discover this, why was that the right approach?
01:33:21.000But then you see some of the designs and how the wheat is actually woven and how they have these exploded nodes, almost like they're microwaved.
01:33:30.000And they've examined these things and it seems like there's some energy that's created these things.
01:33:35.000And also the sheer size and scale of some of these things with no footprints leading into them or out of them.
01:33:44.000And just the geometric precision of some of them, it's really weird.
01:33:50.000Like there's, of course, it's eyewitness accounts.
01:33:52.000It's hard to know if they're being accurate, but people who've flown over areas where there's nothing there, flown back two hours later.
01:33:59.000And there's these football field size Mandelbrot sets.
01:34:04.000There was the Julia set over next to Stonehenge was the one that the guy flew over and there was nothing there.
01:34:10.000And a couple of hours later, there was the Julia set, which is a spectacular fractal.
01:34:18.000That's what's really as much precision as you can get by folding over wheat.
01:34:21.000But when you look at it like from above and you don't get to the micro, you're looking at these things that they really do scale in a fractal way.
01:34:34.000It's very fucking strange and difficult to reproduce.
01:34:38.000You would imagine something like that would take a long fucking time to plot out and plan.
01:34:45.000You'd have to have some sort of tools and instruments, not just to fold over the wheat, but if you're going to interweave the wheat, like what is your method of doing that?
01:34:56.000And how are you doing it where, you know, this one is one dimension and then the next one is precisely three-fifths of that dimension.
01:35:05.000Next one is slightly, and they're fractal.
01:35:08.000Well, it gets really even weirder than that.
01:35:10.000So you know how I just described this case of this Air Force counterintelligence guy driving this guy, Paul Bennett, it's crazy at Caribbean Affairs.
01:35:16.000That book is written by Mark Pilkington.
01:35:20.000Mark Pilkington is one of two guys that claim to have created all the crop circles.
01:35:25.000The other guy is a guy named John Lundberg.
01:37:44.000Now, maybe there's someone, I haven't seen anything earlier than that, but that's like on its own is really amazing that that was the first time that they had created a visual representation of pie.
01:39:14.000But yet you get almost at least you could say, oh, I could understand how they would be describing it this way, but it's kind of the same thing that other people have been describing.
01:39:26.000Like the Zimbabwe story, a lot of these other stories, it's kind of the same story over and over and over again, which makes you go, okay, well, what, does it have to be from outer space?
01:39:37.000Or is it possible that there is something here that is like far older than us that has somehow or another removed itself from our view.
01:40:00.000Like we didn't know we needed to do those until you guys showed up.
01:40:02.000And it makes more sense as like you could see it as a, I mean, I got very into, I haven't interviewed her yet, but I'm about to.
01:40:09.000There's an anthropologist at Stanford named Tanya Luhrmann.
01:40:12.000And she's done this incredible work on religions where she, like anthropologist, a good anthropologist, and also this guy, Bowman, like they, they're agnostic on whether or not like those beings are real.
01:40:24.000Like they're just like, we're really interested in like the culture and the psychology and the experience of it.
01:40:29.000But she had this, she, she was like, did her field work with magicians and witches in England?
01:40:35.000You know, like, you know, like modern witches and not magicians like magic tricks, but like the old, who's the famous magician?
01:40:50.000Like, but they were like, so she didn't really believe in it, but she would, they were like, you have to practice witchcraft in order to do this.
01:40:55.000And she had like multiple anomalous experiences.
01:40:59.000One of them that she woke up and there was five druids in her room beckoning to her.
01:41:06.000She had another instance where they were trying to like conjure energies to like turn off, to like shut down her watch.
01:41:13.000And she felt a huge energy surge through her and shut off her watch.
01:41:16.000And her point is that she thinks that the practice, we put too much focus on the beliefs, but she says like the practices themselves, I don't know if she would say conjure.
01:41:26.000I also interviewed Diana Pasulka on it.
01:41:28.000They would say more like reveal these different realities.
01:41:32.000So they're much more, it's a very interesting set of work because they're not trying to answer the question of whether the druids were really in her room or not.
01:41:42.000I mean, the watch thing, you know, apparently definitely happened.
01:41:45.000But apparently, definitely is a weird way to figure out.
01:41:56.000The conjuring thing is strange because that's a recurring theme that you go outside and you have these experiences where you say, I'm not afraid.
01:42:08.000And give it enough time with enough intention.
01:42:11.000Apparently, things will appear in the sky.
01:42:14.000My favorite one is the black guy talking about Yahweh, who where the local ABC newscaster goes out, and it's going to be one of those, haha, this guy thinks that he can conjure UFOs.
01:42:23.000And they go out with him and he conjures an orb.
01:42:27.000That's like an incredible, that's like one of my favorite of those videos.
01:42:31.000And the newscaster's like, he calls, literally, they see him calling his, I think it's like an NBC affiliate or an ABC affiliate somewhere.
01:42:55.000I've talked to multiple people that have actually done this.
01:42:58.000Oh, people, it's that have gone with these, you know, air quotes, experts.
01:43:04.000And they go out to some deserted area and you call these things.
01:43:09.000There's a second guy, white guy, that also does it.
01:43:12.000And Reuters did a whole story on him because apparently there's a whole bunch of people around that they saw it.
01:43:17.000And of course, Jake Barber, who's this former, you know, contractor, helicopter pilot, contractor for Special Forces, announced that he was going to go and conjure UFOs and bring one down.
01:43:32.000We met up with Prophet Yahweh, seer of Yahweh, at Doolittle Park off Lake Mead.
01:43:37.000We picked the day, we picked the time, and we picked the location.
01:43:41.000Everyone's going to think you're absolutely nuts.
01:43:43.000Well, I thought I was absolutely nuts.
01:45:23.000I think it's, I love it because I don't think it's going to convince any skeptics.
01:45:29.000But it's like one of the few things in our world where it inspires a set of wonder and a set of awe.
01:45:35.000And for those of us that struggle with our faiths, it's inspiring because it is sort of a spiritual, like, I mean, he calls himself Yahweh, right?
01:45:43.000So there's like, it wasn't about like gray aliens or whatever.
01:46:09.000Which is sort of like, I asked Diana, I was like, how is that different from God?
01:46:14.000Because he's sort of a control system that is his view is that there's a control system that's evolving human consciousness and it will manifest different things or in relation to the humans over time.
01:46:25.000And so he looks at the apparition, the Maria or St. Mary apparitions in Spain and the airships of the late 19th century where people saw these things that looked like Zeppelins, even though they hadn't been invented yet.
01:46:40.000All of these things, he says, his view is they're sort of being sort of produced in some relationship as well with our culture.
01:47:11.000I mean, I like again, this anthropologist Luhrmann, you know, she says, you know, William James is this famous Harvard psychologist who wrote a book about the varieties of the religious experience in 1902.
01:47:23.000And he says, everybody wants to kind of be like, is it real or not real?
01:47:28.000And he says, I think there's something more.
01:47:30.000There's not, so this very, you know, skeptic or debunker thing, which is like, oh, no, it's just got to be a, that thing's got to be a bird.
01:47:38.000And it's like, well, but it really, you haven't just calling it that.
01:47:42.000And as they point out, it's like they showed up when they wanted to.
01:47:44.000I mean, it's a pretty amazing, if it's just a coincidence, it's a really amazing one.
01:47:48.000And so I think for me, it's like, because I am a Christian and it is hard to believe in an all-powerful and all-good God because he obviously allowed the Holocaust to occur and allows terrible things to occur.
01:48:03.000And I love, there's another one I love right now.
01:48:04.000I was like a British woman in the 50s doing an interview about seeing what she calls a Mexican hat UFO over her house.
01:48:11.000And the kids saw it, and everybody in the village made fun of her and they ridiculed her.
01:48:16.000And she's like, but it's, you know, but it's, I saw it, and it was real.
01:48:18.000And it was like, it's like, those are like our, those are spiritual experiences, I think.
01:48:25.000So I don't know that, like, I want the files released from the government.
01:48:29.000I'm also skeptical that it's going to tell us what it is because I think at some level, we're not supposed to get more, much more information about what it is.
01:48:36.000I think it's something else is going on.
01:48:39.000Or maybe it's having a positive effect.
01:48:42.000I think it's, I think, one of the, sometimes people get really mad at UFO believers.
01:49:01.000So, you know, UFO, like for the most part, UFO, people who are interested in UFOs are dreamy seekers, spiritual.
01:49:09.000And I think it's, I think it's wrong to, I think it's lovely and wonderful.
01:49:14.000And it reminds us of, you know, that we're small.
01:49:16.000On the one hand, we're humble about our knowledge and there's just surrounded by mystery.
01:49:20.000I mean, you're so much of your career and this platform has been to allow us to talk about things that are unexplained and that, or where the explanations don't really seem to explain it.
01:49:31.000There's something more, as William James would say, there's something more.
01:49:35.000And I think that the denial of anything more, this idea that, oh, we know everything and we know where the, I mean, we don't know anything.
01:49:45.000They're more silly than the believers because this idea that, like, look, if there is a, if you have a completely novel experience, like say if you are Commander David Fraver and you encounter this Tic-Tac-shaped object that's hovering over something that appears to be a ship that's under the water, this thing takes off at an absolutely preposterous speed that is documented both on radar and visually and on camera, right?
01:50:13.000So they've got video of this thing moving.
01:50:16.000They say that it went from above 50,000 feet above sea level to sea level in less than a second, which would require more energy than the entire United States produces in a year in order to get an object to move that quickly.
01:50:32.000And it does that with no heat signature.
01:50:34.000Okay, if this is all true, just that alone.
01:50:37.000Now imagine you have this completely novel experience.
01:50:41.000And because I haven't had it and you haven't had it, and Jamie hasn't had it, well, it's very simple and easy to dismiss it.
01:50:49.000But if this happened, what do you expect the person to do?
01:50:55.000Would you expect a decorated pilot in the Navy, a guy who has a rock-solid record, who is, there's nothing about him that screams that he's a kook or he's mentally ill.
01:51:09.000And when you talk to him, he's incredibly meticulous, very intelligent, very disciplined.
01:51:17.000His face, it looks like he had a spiritual experience.
01:51:28.000But I had a look on my face that reminded me, that sort of, that sort of, that sort of like that starry eye, the look in your face where you've experienced the wonder and the awe of being alive and we're on this planet and we don't really understand it all, but it's beautiful and it's okay.
01:51:44.000And I think that that's the spiritual, I mean, that's where it's like he's been touched by, I don't, you know, I'm not imposing this, but he's sort of touched by God in some way or touched by something.
01:52:21.000And even if there was some contact, I don't know if that would really tell you all the answers.
01:52:26.000Well, what I could imagine is that they have acquired both eyewitness, video, radar, all the various sensors, data.
01:52:39.000And they've done this with multiple instances of these things.
01:52:44.000And they are trying to assess what this is.
01:52:47.000And they have a long-standing study of these things that would both be disturbing and confusing to a lot of people and disruptive to society.
01:52:59.000I'm sure you're well aware of Hal Putoff and what happened with him during the Bush administration, where they brought him in.
01:53:07.000Now, this is assuming Hal's telling the truth, and I have no reason to think he's lying.
01:53:12.000They brought him in and a bunch of other scientists and a bunch of other thinkers and said, I want you to create a chart on one side, list the positive aspects of disclosure, and the other side, what are the negative ramifications of disclosure?
01:53:29.000Government, religion, the finances, all the different things that could happen in the world.
01:53:35.000And the negatives outweighed the positives, and they decided not to disclose.
01:53:39.000But the premise that he was brought in with this was saying, we have acquired physical crafts that are not of this world.
01:53:47.000We have biological entities that are not of this world.
01:53:51.000And we are part of some sort of a back engineering program.
01:54:10.000I think he ignores the memos from experts in generals.
01:54:12.000If he was in office and that was the case and they came to him and, you know, and someone like Tucker or someone that's influential to him could sit down with him and talk to him, and he thought it would gain their favor, he might just release it.
01:54:23.000I mean, it's wild because on the one hand, it looked like it was spontaneous, but on the other hand, you know, Laura Trump, who's like someone that's like a trusted family member who's like really competent, like they sent her in to like take over the RNC and fix it and fire all the people and get their loyalists in there.
01:54:37.000She was out there talking, saying that, you know, oh, the Trump is I was hearing a lot of noise, but it wasn't from people that I trusted, so I didn't report anything on it.
01:54:44.000But I was hearing a lot of noise too that the Trump administration was considering doing something, but you didn't know.
01:54:49.000I didn't know if it was circular reporting.
01:54:50.000But I thought the Laura Trump thing was interesting because I don't think, I don't see her as sort of a, she's not just speculating or bullshitting.
01:54:58.000You know, she's a trusted, you know, kind of trusted source for that.
01:55:03.000So she said that, and then Obama was asked about it, and then Trump made that announcement.
01:55:06.000So I don't know what they have planned.
01:55:08.000You know, we were pushing on the intelligence community privately to release the stuff and it was going nowhere.
01:55:12.000The Obama thing was nuts because the guy didn't have any follow-up questions.
01:55:16.000That was part of what was really weird about it.
01:55:51.000I mean, and he told, Obama told one of the late night hosts, I can't remember if it was Kimmel or Colbert or somebody, but he said they said something like, tell us what you know.
01:56:25.000I don't know if you want to get into it, but I have a slightly different view of Epstein than I think I did.
01:56:29.000Well, before we get into that, you know, Tucker's thoughts on this whole UFO UAP thing.
01:56:36.000He thinks they're like angels and demons from the Bible, and he thinks that they've always been here.
01:56:42.000And, you know, I'm sure you're aware of like the book of Enoch, the book of Enoch, which was one of the original biblical texts that wasn't included in the canon, but just because of a few rabbis decided it didn't jive with the Torah.
01:56:55.000And they found the book of Enoch along with the book of Isaiah as a part of the Dead Sea Scrolls.
01:57:01.000And when you find out that there was a biblical text that was contemporary to books that did make it into the Old Testament, and that they talk about the watchers who come from above and mate with humans and create this race of giants called the Nephilim who destroy everything and consume everything.
01:57:25.000And you're like, what the fuck is this?
01:57:52.000And part of when you're going to church and they're going over the Old Testament, like, okay, this week we're going to go over the book of Enoch and we're going to figure out who the watchers are.
01:58:08.000The crazy thing that Wes Huff told me was that the book of Isaiah that they found in the Dead Sea Scroll predates the oldest version of the book of Isaiah by more than a thousand years.
01:58:21.000When they found it, they found out that there was a book of Isaiah that is a thousand years older than the one they thought was the oldest one, and it is verbatim.
01:58:30.000It's verbatim from the one that's a thousand years later, which is kind of crazy.
01:58:36.000But then it's also in the same fucking caves as the book of Enoch.
01:59:00.000Like, it's like, well, no, now, like, we've been around for, you know, humans around for like millions of years, but the last 150 years, we really figured it all out and we figured out that all human knowledge before, you know, whatever, some recent time period is nonsense.
01:59:16.000It's very arrogant, but look, I'm a believer that history is far older than we think it is.
01:59:21.000And I think the more time goes on, the more that gets revealed.
01:59:25.000So when you're talking about something that's 4,000 or 5,000 years old, I think really you're talking about a retelling of a far older story.
01:59:34.000And I think It's very difficult when you're dealing with people that don't have an understanding of science.
01:59:56.000What was the original experience that someone documented in story?
02:00:01.000And then that story was relayed over and over and over again, generation after generation, until it's eventually written down.
02:00:07.000And then they study it and take it literally.
02:00:10.000And then also translating it from Aramaic, which is the Dead Sea Scrolls, ancient Hebrew, all these different languages to Latin and Greek and eventually English.
02:00:39.000Like, I'm absolutely fascinated by the story of Jesus Christ.
02:00:42.000Because if you wanted to come up with a way that people would live that would absolutely be far more beneficial than just going on natural instincts and tribal behavior, and you would follow Jesus' teachings.
02:00:58.000Like, I can't find a flaw in the way he tells you to live life.
02:01:06.000There's a lot of religions that involve, you know, torturing non-believers and raping infidels and being able to do terrible things to the people that don't believe your religion.
02:01:48.000And one of the things I talk about is like the people that I go to church with are the most fucking polite people I've ever met in my life.
02:02:13.000No, it seems like that's most likely a story where people are telling it generation after generation after generation, but there was probably something happening.
02:02:25.000Then you take into account some of the stories from the Old Testament, like the book of Ezekiel, which I'm absolutely fascinated by.
02:02:31.000Book of Ezekiel and his account of the wheel within a wheel and the fire flashing forth continually and in the midst of the fire as it were gleaming metal.
02:03:09.000Yeah, I think this is one of the things that Tucker goes back to.
02:03:12.000The Christian story is so beautiful and so important.
02:03:17.000You know, Rene Girard's view of Christianity as really stopping the cycle of scapegoating.
02:03:23.000You know, scapegoating where, and I'm seeing it right now as part of the reason we've been pushing back against the moral panic on Epstein, is that you scapegoat the thing.
02:03:32.000You know, traditionally it literally was a goat, but you scapegoat the person or whatever.
02:04:08.000I mean, they scapegoated Jesus, really.
02:04:10.000I mean, you kind of go, you scapegoat.
02:04:12.000The purpose of the scapegoating was for the community to unite the community and scapegoat to put all of its sins on one thing and then kill it or get rid of it.
02:04:23.000And that was the way the community would restore unity.
02:04:25.000Christianity said, no, we're not going to do it that way.
02:05:13.000And it's not to say that Christians, you know, obviously there was fighting the Muslims and there's some interesting revisionism there, but it's a beautiful religion.
02:05:22.000Those terrible things have been done under the guise of Christianity.
02:05:27.000If you listen to the teachings of Jesus Christ, they're not following his teachings.
02:05:31.000So it's like that's just human behavior that they have tagged on to Christianity.
02:05:37.000So when people say Christianity is responsible for horrible atrocities, I say no.
02:06:31.000And if anything, if he's not the Son of God, if this was an actual historical figure, what an insanely wise human being who didn't have these thoughts that are inherent to all of us of vengeance and lust and greed.
02:07:10.000And Tucker thinks that this whole UFO thing is somehow connected to the spiritual realm and that we're – Well, because we've been told for so long that there is no spiritual realm.
02:07:20.000That spiritual realm is just a mental illness.
02:07:23.000You know, it's like, I love how he's like the Yahweh thing.
02:07:44.000People that have had like intense breakthrough psychedelic experiences, one of the first things they go, maybe there is a God.
02:07:50.000Like maybe I don't know what I'm talking about.
02:07:53.000Because if I just experienced that and that's a real thing that you could have while alive on earth where you are confronted with divine wisdom and love in some weird, strange form.
02:08:05.000You know, when there's a lot of people that believe that that's the source of a lot of religious experiences.
02:08:09.000And instead of alienating and making those things illegal, we should study them and make them a part of the religious experience because it's probably what they were originally.
02:08:22.000And so now that people are having spiritual experiences with UFOs, it's wonderful.
02:08:25.000And they should talk about them and kindle them.
02:08:28.000I think the thing about psychedelics that's so interesting is that, at least my experience with them, was that you become, you don't become so attached to your ideas and your beliefs.
02:08:39.000And so, which is a big problem in our society, is people that get too attached to their egos get attached to their beliefs as opposed to like, oh, I thought that.
02:08:47.000I mean, I've made my whole career out of being wrong about things and then correcting them.
02:08:52.000But I think it's hard because you do, it's really great quality.
02:09:29.000And that's like, that's what, that's what we should be going for.
02:09:32.000But it does require, for me, being humble about my limitations before some higher power is really important place to begin.
02:09:40.000Because if you think there's no higher power or that the other one is like souls, we don't talk about souls enough.
02:09:46.000A new friend of mine at the university was talking about how important it is to really care for your soul and to care about other people's souls.
02:09:55.000That's one of the things that Christianity is so good at: that you have something divine inside of you connected to something divine outside of you and that your behaviors affect its treatment.
02:10:02.000And when you tell people that you're just, you know, a meat suit and you're just worm food and your life doesn't matter and that it's all just random and pointless, that's a terrible story.
02:10:19.000But when you kind of go, no, you have, there was one of the most beautiful, I loved all the Charlie Kirk videos that went out after his death because there were so many ones where he had these beautiful moments.
02:10:26.000But he's talking to these women that are doing the OnlyFans.
02:10:30.000And they're describing, they're trying to shock him and saying just really kind of crude things about their sexuality and how like the sex they have, it doesn't matter to them.
02:10:39.000And he was like, I just don't believe that.
02:11:00.000I mean, one of the things that this anthropologist that I'm really into is talking about, she says, it's the more the God, the more different the God is from humans, the harder it is to believe in them.
02:11:09.000And so people like Christians in particular, she would talk about their, even evangelical ones, are always complaining about not believing enough and not having enough faith.
02:11:17.000Because it is so hard, because you do have the Holocaust problem, the problem of evil.
02:11:21.000Why, if the God is all powerful and all good, is he allowing the Holocaust?
02:11:25.000Why, you know, with these terrible things.
02:11:27.000And part of the answer for Christians has been, well, because he wants us to exercise free will and to be in touch with our better sides and to realize our potential as moral humans and moral souls.
02:11:42.000But it is, I find, I was glad to hear that her say that people struggle with it because I certainly do as well.
02:11:48.000Well, I mean, I think everyone struggles with it.
02:11:52.000I'm just, I'm really fascinated by it.
02:11:55.000I'm fascinated by it because when I go to church and I listen to them talk about various passages in the Bible, my mindset is always like, what was the real experience?
02:12:06.000Like, what are we missing out of these tales?
02:12:10.000What are we missing out of these recounting of these experiences?
02:13:10.000But it's like, what's really weird is some of these people that think that what's going on in Iran is to light the fire to bring, to have Jesus return, to light the signal fire.
02:13:22.000Like, did you hear those recountings by these non-commissioned officers that went into these briefings, combat briefings?
02:14:11.000He urged us to tell our troops that this was all part of God's.
02:14:14.000Now, this is the guy who goes through, this is a combat readiness briefing.
02:14:18.000Urged us to tell our troops this is all part of God's plan.
02:14:22.000And he specifically referenced numerous citations of the book of Revelations referring to Armageddon and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.
02:14:29.000He said that President Trump has been anointed by Jesus to light the signal fire in Iran to cause Armageddon and mark his return to earth.
02:14:39.000And they said that the guy was saying this had a giant smile on his face, which made it all the weirder.
02:14:43.000Like, see if you could find that in there.
02:15:47.000So then I did a – I did – I had read this article about code words in the Epstein files and I did the shrimps.
02:15:52.000And then I had some stuff about pizza and grape juice in there, about grape soda.
02:15:56.000And my co-author, Alex, was like, dude, you can't go.
02:15:58.000If you can't go full Pizzagate, you got to like, so we kept it out.
02:16:02.000And then the Times mentioned the pizza thing.
02:16:05.000So I wrote some on X about it, but I ended up taking it down because I was like, I don't really know.
02:16:10.000This one, I mean, what weirded me about the pizza one was where his urologist was like, take your erection dysfunction pills, and then we'll go out and get pizza and grape soda.
02:16:21.000And I was like, that is creepy, you know, as hell.
02:16:34.000There's other ones, like, people are like, the jerky is like cannibalism and whatever.
02:16:38.000It's like, well, it didn't help that the restaurant owner was like, the restaurant's name was like cannibal and something.
02:16:44.000But I'm skeptical that that's what that was.
02:16:48.000Well, you would be skeptical unless you were part of some of these fucking bizarre satanic rituals and then you would go, oh my God, it's real.
02:16:54.000Like there are, look, people have sacrificed people, right?
02:17:19.000I don't want to believe that these people, these multi-millionaires and billionaires that go to this island and engage in all this crazy shit aren't doing something like child sacrifice or cannibalism.
02:17:32.000Well, let's start with the thing that I think a lot of us thought it was, which is that it was an intelligence community sex blackmail operation.
02:17:44.000I mean, a creepy guy doing creepy things.
02:17:47.000There's just, that's, we call that a dog bites man story.
02:17:50.000You know, what makes it a man-bites dog story is like, is that you kind of go, wow, it's like Mossad and CIA running a honeypot.
02:17:56.000I mean, that's the premise of Whitley Webb's two-volume book, One Nation Under Blackmail.
02:18:02.000But when you look at it, like, we don't see that.
02:18:06.000We see one case where Epstein emails himself something that sounds like it's in the voice of the Bill Gates science advisor, Boris Karsich, I believe is the name.
02:18:16.000And in it, they talk about, oh, you know, it's the famous email where he says, oh, you know, I got STDs.
02:18:22.000It says you got STDs from Russian hookers or from Russian women, and then you tried to slip antibiotics, or you wanted me to slip antibiotics in Melinda's drink.
02:18:31.000And Melinda, like, asked her about it.
02:18:47.000Just from the email, we know that there at least implies that he's got dirt on people and that he is exercising, is doing something with this dirt that he has on Epstein or on Bill Gates, rather.
02:19:08.000Because we just have emails between him and other people.
02:19:11.000Inside those emails, we find a lot of creepy shit.
02:19:14.000We find that one description where he was talking to this woman where she said, I'm doing and investigating a story about an island where they bring children for sex.
02:19:25.000And he goes, she almost had a heart attack when I told her that person is me.
02:19:29.000Well, he was talking about the rumors and gossip about him.
02:19:33.000But he wasn't saying that he's bringing children to his island for sex.
02:20:20.000I just think what we see from the files, and I think Mike Bence has sort of pointed out the ways in which Epstein might have been a contractor or a financier or somebody hiding money for the intelligence community.
02:20:33.000Beyond that, I don't see any evidence that he was doing much for the intelligence community, if at all.
02:20:40.000But you're only getting emails and only half of the emails, right?
02:20:45.000So there's only three million emails that have been released.
02:20:48.000There's another 3 million that the FBI possesses that they're not releasing, right?
02:22:02.000And remember, Boris, the science advisor, wanted Gates to pay for a bigger apartment for him in New York.
02:22:07.000It appeared to be part of him threatening Gates to get something that Boris wanted.
02:22:12.000So maybe Epstein was advising him on it.
02:22:14.000But I mean, to have a the other thing I'm struck by these emails, Joe, is that there are so many different attorneys, people of the FBI, people in the Eastern District, the Southern District, the Florida Southern District.
02:22:32.000Why would they all have to be in on it?
02:22:33.000Well, because they would be, they're in these, I mean, they're in this, they're reviewing the information.
02:22:36.000They're trying to bring, you know, they're trying to bring action against him.
02:22:41.000Well, it depends on who are the powerful people that are implicated and what kind of influence they have over what gets released and what doesn't get released.
02:22:50.000Clearly, names were redacted that are powerful people that are not victims.
02:22:55.000So that shows you right there that there's some influence.
02:23:31.000Yeah, I mean, the redactions, I mean, they were making them.
02:23:34.000I mean, it was like powerful people's names.
02:23:38.000Yeah, but I mean, I mean, look at, like, we're in the midst, I mean, literally the people that are being canceled for this, like Peter Attia, these people are like victims of a, we're in the middle of a complete, you know, you know, moral panic.
02:23:50.000I mean, we're now, it's like Me Too version two.
02:23:53.000I mean, people are having to leave boards.
02:23:54.000I mean, look, these are people I don't like.
02:25:00.000I think like, you know, they were, I mean, I'm glad the files were released.
02:25:04.000There was definitely problems with the redactions.
02:25:06.000There was also a case where the members of Congress were trying to get stuff redacted.
02:25:09.000Names got redacted of people that, like, I know in one case, there were people that were getting licenses for guns that had nothing to do with Epstein on a list.
02:25:17.000In another case, other people's names were revealed who were not guilty of anything.
02:25:21.000So that's why you protect those people.
02:25:24.000I think you go, everybody, the logic right now is that anybody who had any interaction with Epstein had to have known of all the abuse he was doing and are somehow responsible for it.
02:26:24.000And, you know, Mike, I mean, when Mike Benz was in here, and Mike has done a deep dive, this, he's sort of like, look, at best, you get Epstein tied up with intelligence with the Iran-Contra stuff.
02:26:33.000But he wasn't, I mean, there's two things to see here.
02:26:35.000With his relationship to the intelligence community, he was at best a contractor financier, which means he's not an important player in deciding covert clandestine operations.
02:26:44.000It was the, it's, you know, the head of state.
02:27:18.000Or maybe it did work and it's problematic that it does work because it kills all these people that have all this other money in various energy modalities.
02:27:25.000I just, I mean, I go, fusion is like a whole, I mean, the idea that we have a secret, that we've secretly tapped cold fusion and are hiding it for some reason.
02:27:33.000Or that he was on the way to breaking through to cold fusion and then they killed all of his research.
02:28:54.000Well, Larry Summers was, you know, he had to step down because he made those remarks about women as president, and then he just had to step down as professor.
02:29:02.000And I say this, look, I say this genuinely, as someone that is not a Larry Summers fan, I don't think, I think it's ugly what he did.
02:29:09.000He was trying to get advice from Larry Summers about how to bet a Chinese economist, and they were gross in their emails, and it's terrible.
02:29:16.000But I don't think that you lose a job at Harvard over that.
02:29:18.000I don't think that Peter Tia should lose his job at CBS over that.
02:29:57.000Like, he needed to get a deal with the Department of Justice for his client, Ariana de Rothschild.
02:30:04.000He hires Catherine Rumler, who was Obama's White House chief counsel, and she goes and makes a deal at the Department of Justice: $45 million fine for the Rothschilds, $10 million for Catherine Rummler, $25 million for Jeffrey Epstein.
02:30:18.000Everyone's like, where did his money come from?
02:30:21.000Like, you realize, I mean, one of the things, Succession actually had a little subplot about it.
02:30:26.000Like, there's a few people in the world that do these crazy, high-level deals, like often like mergers and acquisitions, that have these obscene fees because they're taking some tiny percentage.
02:30:38.000I think the thing we didn't realize is that when you read the files, is the levels at which Epstein was operating.
02:30:43.000I mean, his social and emotional intelligence is just off the charts, which is often rare among somebody that's that good analytically, someone that really understands like investments in the economy to be so.
02:32:04.000It's like you go rescue people and they're in that world.
02:32:08.000So these situations are much more complex.
02:32:12.000I think the final thing on Epstein that kind of made me question is that I, like a lot of other people, had assumed that someone murdered him.
02:32:18.000But you start looking at the evidence for that.
02:32:22.000And even this last round, last few days, there's some new things that people point to, but they actually are not actually evidence of it.
02:32:29.000They said, you know, Epstein's brother's attorney or Epstein's brother's examiner said that he broke his hyoid bone, and the hyoid bone is not usually broken in hangings, only in strangulations.
02:32:42.000Actually, it is broken in hangings, particularly for older people.
02:33:24.000And then they mysteriously don't pay attention to the cell of one of the most important defendants of any case, any gigantic public case involving enormously famous public figures.
02:34:49.000Why would you put a guy who's one of the most high-profile defendants in any case ever in a cell with a hired killer who's a giant gorilla, like this huge fucking jacked Italian guy?
02:35:02.000But he wasn't in the cell with him that night.
02:35:11.000I don't think there's any doubt about that, right?
02:35:13.000I don't know if there's, I don't, I've never seen him say it, but I do know that he said that guy tried to kill him, and they found him unresponsive 18 days before.
02:35:58.000Yeah, I knew that story, but I mean, he didn't have a cellmate at the night of his death, right?
02:36:03.000That was one of the mistakes they made is that because he was on Supposed Me on Suicide Watch, he was supposed to have a cellmate, didn't have a cellmate.
02:36:09.000I think that, look, I know, but 18 days before he did have a cellmate, and 18 days before, he said that guy tried to kill him.
02:36:15.000But 18 days before, he tried to commit suicide.
02:38:18.000And wouldn't you imagine if you're dealing with multiple billionaires that may be compromised by the evidence that this guy's going to relay in a trial, that that would be one of the times that they would want to exert that kind of influence?
02:38:30.000And like I said, in our piece, we wrote, it's possible.
02:39:56.000It's not much of a stretch that Epstein would have killed himself.
02:39:59.000It's not much of a stretch that that guy killed him either if he's telling the truth that there was a report 18 days before that that guy tried to kill him.
02:40:23.000And the change for me is going from really looking like a homicide to really not knowing because there's some evidence that I had not considered before that.
02:40:49.000Seyche conducted a post-suicide watch report.
02:40:51.000Epstein denied suicidality and stated, I have no interest in killing myself and that it would be crazy to take his life, although he was depressed and unhappy about his current legal situation.
02:41:05.000He was told he will remain on psychological observation in the near term.
02:41:09.000He said, look, and you see even there, he says he didn't recall he got the marks on his neck.
02:41:40.000But I'm saying we agree we don't know.
02:41:42.000Yes, but you're dismissing these major factors of him being a cell with a contract killer, him saying 18 days before the guy tried to kill him, then finding him unresponsive, that someone tried to strangle him 18 days before.
02:41:54.000Yeah, but I mean, there's just, you can make a case either way, is my point.
02:41:58.000You can make the case that he was murdered.
02:42:00.000I certainly can, but at a certain point in time, when enough circumstantial evidence, it's fucking weird, like the cameras being down, the guards being asleep.
02:43:54.000Did you find the email where he's talking about the lady on the island where she's saying that we brought children to an o that someone brought children to an island?
02:44:05.000Remember, he's faced with life in prison.
02:44:08.000He loved his decadent, hedonistic life.
02:44:11.000There's plenty of motivations for him to kill himself rather than live in prison the rest of his life.
02:44:16.000And remember, I think it was like a day or two before he lost his bail appeal.
02:46:04.000you guys have moved around so if you kind of go so for me if i go if i go we don't know if it was a homicide or suicide um The intelligence community work was, appears to be of a long time ago, and he was a contractor.
02:46:16.000We don't have any other evidence of a sex blackmail operation other than that email.
02:46:21.000Now, there is one other thing that I thought was one for the theory that he's a blackmailer is that he put he's like we have emails of him putting cameras in Kleenex boxes hidden cameras in Kleenex boxes with motion detectors was that in order to engage in a blackmail operation or was he just a pervert to blackmail people Okay,
02:46:46.000your friend told me about the projects he's doing researching a really bad guy who gets children for sex sent to his island.
02:46:54.000She almost fainted when I told her that person is me.
02:47:00.000No, no, I think he's saying that she's writing a story.
02:47:04.000It was about him, but I don't think he's admitting that he's bringing children to his island for sex.
02:47:09.000I don't know about you, but if I was sending an email and I was talking about someone researching someone who's sending children to an island for sex, I would also include that I let her know that that was bullshit.
02:47:23.000Well, she ends up coming in and meeting with them, right?
02:47:27.000So she ends up coming to meeting with her, and I don't know if he gives her money or something or funds her, but it's like, yeah, I mean, the only thing is that, like, without justifying, I mean, I think that after 2008, there's not, I don't think there's any evidence, and I could be wrong, there's not a lot of evidence that anybody under age came to, you know, that Epstein, you know, abused anybody under 18.
02:49:09.000But we also don't have three million files.
02:49:12.000We also, like, the thing is that we don't, he doesn't need blackmail to make money.
02:49:16.000Well, he also doesn't need blackmail in order to be able to get people to do things and influence them.
02:49:22.000And if you have video of people fucking people and doing things they're not supposed to be doing and you're giving them drugs and he got them on this island for these wild parties, they're more inclined to do things that would do stuff for you.
02:49:35.000I mean, I'll tell you, I mean, FBI confiscated a lot of films and videos.
02:49:56.000Visitors describe a bathroom reminiscent of James Bond movies, hidden beneath a stairway, lined with lead to provide shelter from attack and supplied with closed-circuit television screens and a telephone, both concealed in a cabinet behind the sink, wrote the Times.
02:50:10.000The townhouse is now reportedly owned by Wexner's even more mysterious protege, Jeffrey Epstein.
02:50:48.000So, but Epstein, I mean, in other words, if you use it, like if you actually like use your blackmail, I think it's very hard then to maintain your reputation as somebody.
02:50:58.000Now, maybe it was sort of hovering, never articulated.
02:51:12.000You know, I think then being like, oh, I have blackmail material on you and you need to do it.
02:51:16.000I mean, he's getting people to do what he wants them to do for money, you know, for feeling like good vibes, being in on some Israeli peace talks.
02:52:01.000Someone on Twitter had a, or X has a very long, I was reading it earlier and got bored, but it's very long about the link with the lottery.
02:52:16.000I mean, Mike also points out that he was leased this incredible mansion in New York by the State Department, but then the State Department like sued him.
02:52:25.000So it's, you know, they're like he if he was like really less Wexner, give him a house in Manhattan.
02:52:30.000And then, well, didn't that, didn't the big house, that was the, this was a previous mansion.
02:52:35.000He couldn't give it a fucking mansion.
02:52:37.000Thing I told you about someone found that the person who notarized that $10 transfer of the house conveniently filmed like the best 9-11 footage.
02:52:48.000And those are the 3 million, like the timing of those missing files is right around the 2001 time period.
02:52:56.000I mean, I think that what the files are important is that we saw he's able to make his money as a high-level fixer.
02:54:00.000I mean, if you're going to say that, well, he doesn't put the blackmail stuff in email, but he's going to put in an email that he's bringing children to the island.
02:54:06.000I mean, I think he's being sarcastic there.
02:54:10.000I think he's saying, oh, that guy is me.