Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 2/7/22: Breakdown of the Rogan Controversy, Gofundme Power, Foreign Policy, CNN Drama, Big Pharma, & More!

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

Krystal and Saagar talk about the Rogan cancellation saga, gofundme's battle with Canadian truckers, state department lies on Ukraine, Syrian civilians killed in a drone strike, CNN in disarray, the financial interests behind Rogan smears, the campaign against Rogan as anti-politics, & how big pharma broke the American healthcare systemTo become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show uncut and 1 hour early visit: https://breakingpoints.supercast.com/To listen to Breaking Points as a podcast, check them out on Apple and SpotifyApple: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/breaking-points-with-krystal-and-saagar/id1570045623 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4Kbsy61zJSzPxNZZ3PKbXl Merch: https://breaking-points.myshopify.com/John Abramson’s Book: https://www.harpercollins.com/products/sickening-john-abramson?variant=39935390089250 For more on Rogan as anti-politics, here is Ben Burgis’s Book: https://www.amazon.com/Canceling-Comedians-While-World-Burns/dp/1789045479  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Good morning, everybody. Happy Monday. We have an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed, we do. Many, many big stories that are breaking this morning on the foreign policy front. We've got developments with regard to Ukraine. Actually, an incredible moment that we have to show you. One of the best. Rare instance of a reporter, and this guy is pretty consistent, though, actually pushing State Department spots, asking for evidence of some of the claims that they're making. So we'll show you that. Also some questionable claims about a raid in Syria and exactly the number of civilian casualties and what happened there.

We've got some updates on the mess going on, the CNN in disarray, I guess is how we should phrase it. CNN in disarray. Yeah. And some big updates on what's going on with the money that was raised for that trucker convoy protest in Ottawa, Canada. We'll tell you about that. And guests were excited about John Abramson. We've been working on getting him on the show. For a while, he wrote a book called Sickening.

We both heard him on the Joe Rogan podcast. The racist Joe Rogan podcast. Which is where we will start this morning. So there's a lot of updates here. And I just want to go through all the pieces of what has transpired since last we spoke. You guys remember there was a whole controversy over two guests that Rogan had on, Dr. Robert Malone, Dr. Peter McCullough. There was, you know, he was accused of spreading misinformation and there was a lot of concern around his take on vaccines. So that was the initial foray, the initial tax on Rogan. He then comes out and essentially apologizes, says, look, I'm going to do better.

I'm going to have people on with a variety of views. I'm going to try to be better prepared. I hear your criticism. I'm going to try to do better. So that sort of starts to die down. It basically is dead after he puts out the video. And he has that compiled thing where he goes, well, this was misinformation. He destroys their narrative in a single video. Yes. So then they've got to try another tactic because they've sensed like a

little bit of blood in the water and a little bit of concern from Spotify, who of course had decided to put labels on any of his podcasts that have COVID information. So then this video compilation emerges of Rogan over years of his podcast, and these all came from years in the past, saying the N-word. And it's just him saying the word. There's no context around it, so you have no idea what context in which he said it.

Of course, we come to learn this is when he's quoting other comedians. He's debating when this person used it and what that meant. So this is definitely not him like using this as a slur at people. But you look at the video and it looks absolutely terrible, right? So then at the same time, let's go ahead and put this element on the screen. People start to notice that a bunch of his old episodes are getting pulled from Spotify. And if you look at this list, this is a handful of the ones that get pulled. Ultimately now I think it's up to over 110 different episodes that have been pulled.

You can see some of the people are those you might expect, people like Alex Jones. And other ones you're like, wait, what? Like Kyle Kalinske as one example. They also pulled down The Amazing Atheist, Duncan Trussell. I mean, just...

Michael Malice. Across the board. And so, there's been this sort of narrative of, oh, these must be the episodes where he said the N-word.

Definitely not the case because, number one, he didn't say it nearly as many times as 130 episodes or whatever. And number two, I mean, Kyle remembers his episode with Rogan. There were no racial slurs involved. So this, okay, so this is happening. The next piece is that under pressure, Rogan comes out and makes a really fulsome apology for language that he's used in the past, jokes that he's told in the past that he himself finds to be offensive and racist.

Let's take a listen to a little bit of Joe's apology. Hello, friends. I'm making this video to talk about the most regretful and shameful thing that I've ever had to talk about publicly. There's a video that's out. That's a compilation of me saying the N word. It's a video that's made of clips taken out of context of me of 12 years of conversations on my podcast. And it's all smushed together. And it looks fucking horrible even to me now i know that to most people there's no context where a white person is ever allowed to say that word

never mind publicly on a podcast and i agree with that now i haven't said it in years but for a long time when i would bring that word, like if it would come up in conversation and instead of saying the N word, I would just say the word. I thought as long as it was in context, people would understand what I was doing. And so the very latest piece, and we can put this, jump forward to A5, we got an email from Spotify to their employees giving sort of their view of what happened here. This is from the CEO, Daniel Eck. He says, and this is a long letter. I won't read it all, but I'll read a portion here.

He says, there are no words I can say to adequately convey how deeply sorry I am for the way the Joe Rogan experience. Controversy continues to impact each of you. Not only are some of Joe's comments incredibly hurtful, I want to make clear they don't do not represent the values of the company. I know this situation leaves many of you feeling drained, frustrated and unheard. This is also significant. The second paragraph. So keep this up. I think it's important you're aware that we've had conversations with Joe and his team about some of the content in his show, including his history of using some racially insensitive language. Following these discussions and his own reflection, he chose to remove a number of episodes from Spotify. He also issued his own apology over the weekend. Go ahead and put a six up on the screen now. This is another portion of this letter, kind of the conclusion. They go on

to talk about, you know, we really want to make sure that we're thinking about this, that I've had conversations. Some have been supportive. Others have been incredibly hard. All of them made me think. One of the things I'm thinking about is what additional steps we can take to further balance creator expression. With user safety, I've asked our team to expand the number of outside experts we consult with on these efforts and look forward to sharing more details. And the long and short of it, kind of the headline from this letter that Daniel X sends to his employees there at Spotify is that do not believe that canceling Joe Rogan is the solution. So Sagar, that kind of brings us up to date with more or less what has transpired. Let me just say a couple of things and then I'll hand it to you for your reaction. First of all, you know, the elephant in the room, of course, for us is that we're friends with Joe. We like

Joe. And not only that, but Joe has been incredibly good to us. He helped us, you know, when not only did he have us on his show twice, but when we were thinking of going independent. It's the first call. He was the person that said to us, do it. I'll have your back. I know you guys can make it. Like, we were very nervous about it. And he was extraordinarily encouraging. So there's no doubt that, like, we are not neutral or unbiased in this. However, I also want to say that I think if you look at our record of defending people that we like and people we really, really don't like when it comes to free speech issues, I think you will see a very consistent pattern. You only have to look to last week when we were defending Whoopi Goldberg and

Dan Bongino, I think, to see that we've had a pretty consistent take on this issue. Go ahead, Sokka. I'm glad you said that. And this is important, too. Look, I'm trying to take my emotion out of this and look at this dispassionately, as if I had never met Joe Rogan, as if he never helped us out in the way that he did. I won't be perfect about it, but take that, obviously, with a grain of salt. Understand where I'm trying to come from. When I see this, I see Spotify trying to have the best of all worlds. They want Rogan without the warts, but they also want his 11 million listeners. I saw it described from a podcast expert, like a media person,

that Joe's episodes are akin to a Taylor Swift album per day on the platform in terms of their economic value, just to get people to try and understand what that means in terms of user engagement, driving subscription, and all of that. The problem that I have with this statement is that he's like, look, canceling Joe is the wrong thing, but balancing listenership with user safety, oh man, here, you know, you had thought labels were enough. Then the experts,

anytime the experts start to get involved, I know that the anti-racist hucksters are marching on in. And even worse within this is he says that I'm going to be dedicating $100 million to historically marginalized communities and artists. What the hell does that mean? Once again, you are basically paying off, you know, the opposition in order to keep quiet so that they'll come onto your platform and not say anything. And also, if you think that paying them off is going to work, I have news for you. Go and see how it's worked out at almost every other company. That's the big problem that I have with this statement. In terms of the actual events themselves, this is all hypocrisy. I'm sorry. Our president, and I put this out there,

has said the N-word, you know, while quoting it in public in the year 1985. Do I think that that's what makes him a racist? No. But when you strip context out of everything, that's what's going to happen. Dave Portnoy put out a statement. I'll be talking about some of that in my monologue. You know, people have been going after him because he was, you know, singing along to lyrics of a Ja Rule song while introducing Ja Rule like five years ago. And they're like, this is what makes you a racist. No, that's outrageous. We either live in a society with context or don't. Should Joe have said it? Probably not, okay? I'm not going to sugarcoat it. What are you doing? He obviously agrees with that. Yeah, and I think he agrees with that now, too. Should he have been saying this? But, you know, also consider the times. Ten years ago was a really long time. Some of these jokes and other

things. I remember also that our former president, Barack Obama, who Joe loves, made big headlines when he went on Mark Maron's podcast, 2016, and said, I don't want racial politics in this country to come down to whether you can say the N-word or not. He actually fully said the N-word on the podcast. Listen to Obama, okay? Obama is the one who actually came out and said this. I'll be the only guy to defend Joe and quote Obama at the same time. But I'm just trying to put this in a societal point of view. Howard Stern, I mean, so many people in public life, many of the people who were trying to cancel Joe themselves, some guy, Winslow, I'll be talking about him tomorrow, who got the rocks to denounce Joe Rogan. And I'll also be, you know, do a full thing on that. Well, he himself used the N-word

many times in his books. My point is, let's not play this game, okay? Let's not try and assume, you know, the character and the fulsomeness of someone's soul based upon a very maliciously cut clip from a very suspect group that I'll also be digging into. So, I think it's important to deal with the actual statements that were made, you know, saying the N-word over and over again. Again, I think the context of this really matters. That doesn't excuse it. But clearly, Joe was saying he hasn't done this in a long time. He had already realized this was not a good thing for him as a white dude to be saying. He comes out and apologizes. But the problem is, it's really not about the N-word or the anti-vax information it's really not about that

keep in mind as you were pointing out first of all there's a huge amount of power and money in this is massive um he is has is the tent pole of spotify and their podcast outfit. He is the number one podcast, not just here, but in 90 different markets for Spotify. So they have obviously huge vested interest here and their competitors have a huge vested interest in hobbling him and in taking him down because this has been massively significant for Spotify. So there's that piece. Then you have all the people, all the circle of people who, you know, the media types, the sort of like corporate mainstream media types who are jealous of Joe, who don't like the fact that they don't have control over what he says, who he has on. He hasn't been effectively, you know, subjected to shame and control and coercion

in the past. You have the fact that, you know, now that he has this exclusive deal with Spotify, it sort of gave these people an opening. It gave them a cudgel. It gave them a cudgel. That's exactly the right word because now it's no longer, look, Joe's doing his thing and, you know, what are you going to do about it? Because he's on his own. He's independent. Yes, at YouTube he was there, but he wasn't exclusive. He didn't have this big deal with them. He wasn't sort of like their product. He's just using their platform. So it was a different relationship. Now you have another place where you can apply pressure through the Spotify CEO, through their employees who I'm sure are very distressed and that they were sending a lot of you, we know from historic- Distress.

Yes, from historic events as well, that there is at least some group of the Spotify employees who are very upset about all of this and how this is all going. Then you have the anti-vax direction, you know, saying Malone and McCullough, who, look, I have my issues with those podcasts as well, which I talked about and which we had Dr. Prasad on to go through the claims and talk about, which is the right way to handle these things. But so that doesn't really land. But Joe comes out and makes a statement and Spotify puts these labels on the podcast. And there's, that creates a little bit of blood in the water. Now, look, I don't blame Joe for doing that. I thought his, I thought his comments were very gracious.

I thought they were very heartfelt. And ultimately, when you're in these sorts of circumstances, like, you have to be true to yourself and respond to them in the way that is going to make you feel like you handled it in the best possible way. So I don't blame him for doing that, but I do think that that put a little bit of blood in the water and it sort of enabled this next very coordinated attack. Sagar's going to be breaking down in his monologue just how coordinated

that is. But let's just say there's a Democratic super PAC involved to tell you how organic all of this outrage manufacturer is. And then just so you really know, this has nothing to do with like him saying the N word or offensive language or whatever, you know, Kyle and I were trying to rack our brains for what he said in his episode that might've gotten it pulled because there certainly was no, I don't even think they talked about race in that entire, you know, three hour long discussion. But one thing they did talk about was Jamal Khashoggi and Saudi Arabia. And also, Kyle was very aggressive and very outspoken about the war that they're prosecuting in Yemen and how they're causing famine. He was very outspoken about some of their, you know, sort of barbaric practices,

public beheadings and those sorts of things. Well, lo and behold, Spotify just like right now enabled podcasts in the Saudi market. Is that the reason why? It's a great cover though. Could be, could be. But it's certainly not about sort of offensive language because there was nothing in that podcast that would fall in that category.

There also, I think they talked about Epstein as well, which was another thing they were like, interesting, maybe. But there was also a moment in there that was kind of a little bit prophetic where they talked about the problem with censoring all of these independent media outlets. And look, I know Joe has a big contract for Spotify, so he's technically corporate media. But the whole fight over this is about the fact that corporate media has not been able to control him, has not been able to rein him in, has not been able to dictate who he has on and what he says and what sort of topics he covers.

So that's why I make the distinction. But take a listen. This is A4 Control Room. Take a listen to some of what they had to say on that now banned podcast. Speaking of social media, have you seen all these purges recently? There's a new round of it that just happened. No, who got purged? They're all, almost all, alternative media accounts.

Hmm, that's not good. It is a scary time because you see that this can impact, you know, really anybody who's not towing the line, if you will. The internet went through a phase of like, just totally free and open, wild, wild west type thing. And now it looks like they're trying to reel it back in and it's like that's the viewed as the public square it's supposed to be that these social media outlets which are so gigantic and so powerful that this is now the public square so to be able to censor people in these in these forums should be considered unconstitutional yeah kind of ironic that that's the sort of conversation they were having on a podcast that you now cannot find anywhere. I got to be honest, I'm kind of offended that we didn't get taken off neither episodes. I guess I wasn't hardcore enough. If we're lucky enough to be back on, I'll bring the fire. Here's what I really have to say, especially about this. How are we supposed to check what he said when they took it down? This is part of the problem. Kyle's got to rely on his memory. I hear that there's some guy online who's got all the episodes downloaded. You have to

contact him and he'll send you one. By the way, whoever you are, please send them to me. I've been trying to get in touch. But all of this is important whenever it comes to the delineation of language. Because I see these dishonest morons online saying, Joe is corporate media. You know, he works for a corporation. Okay, you really want to play this game? Establishment media. It's very clear. Here is the thing. The Joe Rogan experience will probably never ever be allowed to happen again because it slipped through the cracks. It was never supposed to be this way. He will be the first person to tell you that. And so because they never had a hand in molding it, in booking it, in shaping it, in promoting it, any of that. He never did any

PR, ads, interviews. That makes it so that when it becomes so much bigger than them, it is a direct threat to their authority. And that is what it is all about. That's what that clip was about. That's what the censorship, as you pointed out over the weekend, of the right and the left guess. It's about power and it's about control. And the dishonest actors out there pretending to care about this clip of Joe saying the N-word, they are the biggest hypocrites on the planet. Apply the same standard then to Joe Biden and to Howard Stern and to so many of the people in American public life. Obama, like I said previously, right? Context doesn't matter. Okay. I mean, this is part of the thing whenever we come down to litigating this without any context, without any good faith, and especially whenever we try to make it all about using race in particular as a cudgel and to make it so that these words lose meaning.

And by the way, if you care about race and race relations in this country, you don't want that. You want these to have the real palpability that they originally had to maintain the power of the attack and the label in the first place, because they have erased it from all of our discourse. Millions of people out there, they see through this. They know exactly what's happening. And so, like I said, I would be saying all of this in this defense if I never met Joe Rogan. I've been a fan of his from a long time, when I was a young guy riding the metro. The funniest thing is I told you the most controversial things that he believes are that the Sphinx is like 10,000 years old. So like, I mean, personally, big archaeology should be the people who should be trying to- Yeah. I mean, there's a lot to be said about the- Yeah. And I

get, this is the other thing that upsets me about this, is if you're a kind of normie person- Yeah, I get it. I get it too. this has penetrated to the point that like my mom's talking to me about it. My girlfriend's sisters are like, what's going on? My mom just figured out how to listen to my podcast. Okay. Seriously. Like in the last month. So it has broken through to the entire world. I told you before when we were talking about this, my friend who was in Brazil back home visiting our family was like, what's going on with Rogan? All the Brazilian radio stations are talking about it. Bolsonaro apparently is defending him. So that's part of the reason.

Yeah, it's just like, okay, thanks. But to get back to your point about race and just to use Joe Biden as an example here, think of the harm that Joe Biden has done to black people in this country through his career. Think about the crime bill and mass incarceration and the drug laws and his involvement in creating the crack cocaine mass disparity. I mean, you want to talk about people who have really harmed black people in this country? Please, saying this word in context and as part of quoting people, this pales in comparison. And the only reason I say this is, and this is something I'll talk about a little bit more in my monologue, to point out what a silly distraction all of this is from the real work of making this country and this world a better place. You know, it comes down to, do you trust the people in this country to be

grown up adult Americans to be able to listen to a podcast that may have things that are a little edgy or even sometimes blatantly offensive and not be able to like turn into the KKK? Do you actually trust your fellow human beings here to participate in a democracy? Because that's what this comes down to. And if the answer is no, then we're in a really bad place. I do want to say, even though this feels like this tidal wave of like mass public outrage, I do think that it's relatively, this is like a relatively elite online conversation where the voices are extremely loud. But most people that I think are going about their normal days have a lot deeper concern than what Joe Rogan said on a podcast in 2011. However, that doesn't

mean that the fight doesn't matter because these are the people who, number one, have disproportionate power. And number two, it's really sad because they're also oftentimes the people who in another era, their activist impulses would have been part of an effort for real collective human beings to engage in that democracy and not be like so thrown off course by a podcast that we can't coexist. And number two, where our greatest activist impulses are channeled towards helping the powerful become even more powerful. So that's one of the things that is really troubling about this and why I think we've focused so much time on it, because it is part of this really larger fight of what kind of a country are we going to live in? Is it going to be a democracy? Is it going to be a police state? What are we going to spend our time and collective energies doing? Are we going to be policing podcasts from 2011? Are we actually going to try to do something for the collective good? And I just want people to know that, you know, I don't begrudge anyone who, like, listens to these words or these old jokes or whatever and feels like this was really offensive and this wasn't okay.

But I want you to understand that this was not some organic, like, mass outrage. This was orchestrated. It is a hatchet job. And at bottom, it's about power and money and who has control. Yeah, power, money, and control. And in a way, to your monologue's point, they're gaslighting all of us into trying to make us focus. And luckily, we have this show so that we can talk about Rogan and we can talk about all the stuff that also matters. So let's move on to another story, the GoFundMe story, which is also about power, control,

tech, and money. Let's go ahead and put this up there on the screen. A really stunning display. GoFundMe, after raising tens of millions of dollars, not the organization itself, but a petition on the platform for the Canadian Trucker Convoy, says that no further funds would be distributed directly to the organizers of the Freedom Convoy protests. And the firm specifically said, quote, we now have evidence from law enforcement that the previously peaceful demonstration has become an occupation. So this is a very important point, Crystal. The Freedom Convoy of the truckers who are originally protesting vaccine mandates, but really more it's become a catch-all for all restrictions in Canada on top of vaccine mandates and restrictions,

lockdowns, masks, et cetera, has become a force where they've occupied, not even occupied, I don't even want to use their language. They have taken up certain parts of the city. In Ottawa, they're honking their horns. They're getting a lot of community support, both in the United States, but also within Canada as well. And it's turned into a real grassroots movement. Now, as some grassroots movements, it has raised tens of millions of dollars online. But the Ottawa police and the Canadian government have taken an incredibly hard line against these truckers. Now, there has not been use of force yet, although apparently that remains in the cards and it is possible, but they've been denounced by the prime minister. They've been denounced by the police. They've been accused of all sorts of things. As usual,

the truckers are now racist because one guy had a Confederate flag in the convoy of like, by the way, we also don't even know yet how big this thing is. Some said 50,000, some said a thousand, who knows? It's not. Who knows? It's not 50,000. It's not 50,000. Yeah, it's more like 1,000 if you take a look at the vote. The numbers, in terms of participants at the biggest rallies, it was like 8,000. That's right. In terms of number of trucks, it was in the hundreds to maybe 1,000.

Okay, so all of this is really important. But the problem is that this has become now GoFundMe is the cudgel through which people who are trying to raise money for a cause they believe in, and GoFundMe is supposed to be the platform, is now acquiescing to the demands of law enforcement. That is a terrible standard. Let's put this up there. Which is Ottawa police puts out a statement, we want to thank GoFundMe for listening to our concerns as a city and a police service. The decision to withhold funding for these unlawful demonstrations is an important step and we call on all crowdfunding sites to follow. Now, what did we just talk about in our Rogan block, Crystal?

Which is you can live in a free society or we can live in a police state. The definition of a police state is when the police get to decide what cause is worthy and what is not. Now look, Canada, you know, it's not America. They don't have the Bill of Rights, ostensibly free, but a lot more like the Europeans. This is still, though, an American company, which masquerades itself domestically as, oh, well, we don't take sides, even though they have in the past. This is the most absolute demonstration that they will listen to people in authority when it's a cause that they don't like and that they will then use their platform to deny a key part of the online fundraising system towards people just because they disagree with their aims.

And their justification here could have obviously been used against BLM. It obviously wasn't, right? Those people have raised tens of millions of dollars, and there's a lot of questions about where that money has gone. But the point is that they shouldn't have pulled it from BLM either. They shouldn't pull it from anybody. Anybody should be allowed to raise money here unless it's explicitly violating the whole, like, doxing, you know, the violence, the actual cardinal rules of the Internet for when things should get taken down. Absent that, these truckers, they're protesting, okay? Protests, they get to raise money,

especially on an American platform like GoFundMe who's doing this at the behest of the Ottawa police. I spent a lot of time looking into this one because I think it's this type of story. First of all, we're not there, right? And we don't have- It's also not our country. It's not our country. We're not there.

And so I really wanted to spend a lot of time doing research about what is really going on. How's the media portraying it? What are the participants themselves saying? I listened to a lot of audio of people who are involved in it themselves talking about what it's about and how they feel about it. And I think there's a few things that are important to say here. First of all, I don't doubt that if you live in Ottawa, this is a tremendous pain in the ass. Sure. Right? It's, I feel total sympathy for you. They're honking their horns all night. It's extraordinarily loud. You're having trouble getting around your city and just like living your normal life. I get it. And by the way, I think we can relate to it. Having been living here a couple of summers ago during the George

Floyd protests when. And during the inauguration. And during the inauguration after January 6th. I mean, it just was like one thing after another where. But there were times when, I mean, this city was under a military lockdown. Helicopters circling overhead. Every street barricaded with massive military vehicles and Humvees and armed, you know, openly armed soldiers. So I definitely get the frustration of having your normal life disrupted. However, there have been

only three arrests from this protest. They were for relatively minor infractions, is my understanding, things like property destruction. And I do think that there has been an effort because the cause is broadly unpopular in Canadian society. But I think there has been an effort to use the actions and the language of a few to broadly tar the whole movement. The one Confederate flag is a good example. The one dude who said this is going to be our January 6th is another good example. And from listening to the comments of the people who are involved themselves, which were broadcast by CBC, which has not been very charitable to them, they have been trying to really police their own people. So there were instances of people using Nazi iconography, swastikas, yellow stars, and the like. Now they say, we're saying that they're the Nazis,

not that we're in support of Nazis. I have no idea. I do know that that sort of imagery and symbology can be very offensive and it's not helpful to their cause whatsoever. They seem to know that as well and are trying to crack down on that sort of direction. So I don't want to sanitize and say these are like all just salt of the earth people. There's no extremist elements or anything like that. But the important thing is that the root of their protest is a legitimate line of debate, which is about whether you agree with them or not. Should we have these vaccine requirements? Should we have these lockdowns? Should we have these mask mandates?

We disagree with this and we want to make our voices heard. And frankly, I think that their approach to it has been very creative and has been very effective, certainly in getting people's attention and inspiring people in Canada. But also, obviously, this has been a big story here as well. The reason it's relevant to us is because of the GoFundMe piece, because this is an American company that is incredibly significant in terms of a fundraising platform. And for them to be able to have the say

over who's able to actually raise funds for their cause and who's not, that's where things start to get very uncomfortable. Because again, you're just, you're handing over control of society to a few tech oligarchs, letting them say, who can have a podcast? Who can be on YouTube? Who can raise money, funds? Who can host on, you know, on the cloud? who can exist on the app store. You really are closing off avenues and making it so that there are these incredibly powerful gatekeepers. And once again, if you think this is just going to stay with the right, go ask all the leftists who have been canceled and who have been deplatformed and who've had their podcasts taken down about how that

ultimately all works out. I honestly think it's worse than the tech piece because they didn't take responsibility. They gave it to the cops. They were like, no, the cops say it's bad. You're like, well, OK, so that's the standard. I mean, let's take the logical extrapolation of that in terms of tech people listening then to the law enforcement agencies. You think the FBI doesn't have an interest in taking down this podcast after all the January 6 coverage that we've made here or the Capitol Police talking about their spying abilities, or the Department of Homeland Security. Luckily, we have the First Amendment. We can say whatever we want, but we don't have a right to be on YouTube. We don't have a right to be on Spotify or whatever. Any of those people could then go ahead and

partner with the platform and the cops if they made the request. I'll take it one step further up the tech stack, if you will. Let's say GoFundMe didn't do this. What if Visa and MasterCard and other credit card processors, there's only like three or four in the entire country, decided they would no longer process transactions at the behest of law enforcement towards the Ottawa truckers? Well, that's pretty scary. And actually, that's already happened in several instances. Now, that was against white nationalists, but the standard has been set. And especially if they use it and listen to the cops, especially in a time of turmoil and protest and occupation, whatever you want to call it, about what's happening. So the point is that these American tech companies are setting the standard of listening to foreign law enforcement. OK, GoFundMe Hong Kong. What's going to happen? GoFundMe Saudi Arabia.

Let's women go ahead and try and start a GoFundMe in Saudi. Boom. Done. GoFundMe Iran. GoFundMe Russia. GoFundMe Ukraine. GoFundMe Germany even. You know, all of these places have outrageous anti-free speech laws. The standard that they're setting is that the locals get to decide what is cool and what is not. Now, okay, that's fine from a democratic sense, but not from an American tech company sense. And especially if they're going to import that standard here to the U.S. So that's my biggest concern on all of this. I listened as part of my research for this.

I listened to a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation podcast that was truly insane. They brought in this woman who is an expert in like terrorism financing. Oh, good, yeah. And then she was using all of this language that was plucked straight from Russiagate talking about, we don't know where these funds are coming from. using all of this language that was plucked straight from Russiagate, talking about, we don't know where these funds are coming from, this is foreign influence in our country. And she wasn't actually, she wasn't talking about Russia,

she was actually talking about the United States. Yeah, of course. But it was all, like, meant to be very nefarious and very sketchy. I mean, first of all, it was just completely invented because she had no idea who gave the money, where the money came from. And so that enabled her to concoct this whole sort of like idea of a nefarious cabal that was supporting this because it was interesting her language too

because the reason she first decided to investigate it was because it struck her that it was not likely that they organically raised that much money, which speaks probably to her own bubble of the people that she lives around and the views that they hold and that they wouldn't be the type that would give to a cause like this. But that's the type of misinformation that's being used. And it's to the point that they're actually going to have like a government hearing and inquiry into the source of the funds and all of this. So that's some of the heat that has been created around this money and where did it come from and what is it going to? So originally GoFundMe was like, we're going to give it to charities. Now they are refunding it to the people involved.

But, you know, those people who gave that money, they they want to support this cause and they have every right to whether you like the cause or not. I personally have issues with, you know, the stances they're taking. I have no doubt that they're like, you know, a widespread anti-vax sentiments within the group. But who cares? It's about believing in democracy, even when it's uncomfortable, even when it's messy, believing that people have a right to raise their voice in protest. And that in that give and take, you're going to come to some sort of consensus about what your society is going to look like. And, you know, it's just a sad state of affairs that you have so many people who, again, another time would be very energized. They would have activist impulses dedicated to, hey, how do we, how do we forge a better collective good? How do we stand up against the man? And now what are they spending their energy doing?

Like begging tech oligarchs to have more, to take more control over society. Yeah, I think that's well said. Let's go ahead and move on to Ukraine. This is an important story, one of the most stunning displays that I've seen from the American press in a long time. That being said, the journalist who we're about to show you, Matt Lee, I actually was in the State Department press corps for a very short period of time. I got to see him in action. He is somebody deeply skeptical of all administrations, lived through a lot of lies, and it very much shows on his kind of weather-beaten face and in his language. But this

exchange over a recent claim from the U.S. government is truly incredible. So we'll set it up a bit, which is that the U.S. government had come out over the weekend, or sorry, on Friday, and they said, we have evidence that the Russians are planning a video which is going to be some false flag attack with crisis actors, which then is going to be a pretext for the invasion. That's all they said. And a lot of us said, okay, show us the evidence. What's the evidence? And their claim is that simply uttering that claim that the Russians are doing this is evidence that that declassification of being able to say it is enough for all of us. And it was crystallized in this moment with Matt Lee pressing

him on saying, show me the actual evidence and watch this former CIA ghoul squirm under real questioning from the press, offering up nothing and showing us that, yeah, they don't have a whole lot to back up what they're saying. Let's take a listen. Thanks. Okay, well, that's quite a mouthful there. So you said actions such as these suggest otherwise, suggest meaning that they suggest they're not interested in talks and they're going to go ahead with some kind of a... What action are you talking about? One, the actions I've just pointed to. What action are you talking about? MR PRICE, One, the actions I've just pointed to. The fact — What action? MR PRICE, The fact that Russia continues to engage in disinformation campaigns.

Well, you made an allegation that they might do that. Have they actually done it? MR PRICE, What we know, Matt, is what we – what I have just said, that they have engaged in this activity, in this planning activity. Well, engage in what? Hold on a second. What activity? MR PRICE, But let me — What activity? MR PRICE, Because obviously this is not – this planning activity. Hold on a second. What activity? What activity? MR PRICE Because obviously this is not the first time we've made these reports public.

You'll remember that just a few weeks ago. I'm sorry. Made what report public? MR PRICE If you'll let me finish, I will tell you what report we made public. We told you a few weeks ago that we have information indicating Russia also has already prepositioned a group of operatives to conduct a false flag operation in eastern Ukraine. So that, Matt, to your question, is an action that Russia has already taken. It's an action that you say that they have taken, but you have shown no evidence to confirm that. And I'm going to get to the next question here, which is, what is the evidence that they, I mean, this is like crisis actors, really? This is like Alex Jones territory you're getting into

now. What evidence do you have to support the idea that there is some propaganda film in the making? Matt, this is derived from information known to the U.S. government, intelligence information that we have declassified. I think you know — Okay, well, where is it? Where is this information? MR PRICE It is intelligence information that we have declassified.

Well, where is it? Where is the declassified information? MR PRICE I just delivered it. No, you made a series of allegations and statements — MR PRICE Would you like us to print out the topper? Because you will see a transcript of this briefing that you can print out for yourself. That's not evidence, Ned. That's you saying it. That's not evidence. I'm sorry. MR PRICE

What would you like, Matt? MR PRICE I would like to see some proof that you can show that — MR PRICE — Matt, you have been — — that shows that the Russians are doing this. Ned, I've been doing this for a long time — MR PRICE — I know. That was my point. — as you know — MR PRICE — — you have been doing this for quite a while. You know that when we declassify intelligence information, we do so in a means – we do so with an eye to protecting sources and methods. And I remember that Kabul is not going to fall. I remember a lot of things.

So where is the declassified information other than you coming out here and saying – Matt, I'm sorry you don't like the format, but we have declassified information other than you coming out here and saying? Matt, I'm sorry you don't like the format, but we have declassified— It's not the format. It's the content. I'm sorry you don't like the content. I'm sorry you— It's not that I don't like the content. I'm sorry you are doubting the information that is in the possession of the U.S. government. What I'm telling you is that this is information that's available to us. We are making it available to you in order for a couple reasons. One is to attempt to deter the Russians from going ahead with this activity. Two, in the event we're not able to do that,

in the event the Russians do go ahead with this, to make it clear as day, to lay bare the fact that this has always been an attempt on the part of the Russian Federation to fabricate a pretext. Yeah, but you don't have any evidence to back it up other than what you're saying. It's like you're saying we think – we have information that the Russians may do this, but you won't tell us what the information is. MR PRICE Well, that – MR PRICE And then when you're asked – MR PRICE That is the idea behind deterrence, Matt.

That is the idea behind deterrence. And when you're asked – MR PRICE It is our hope that the Russians don't go forward with this. MR PRICE, when you're asked what the information is, you say, I just gave it to you. But that's not what — MR PRICE, you seem not to understand — MR PRICE, that's not the way it works. MR PRICE, you seem not to understand the idea of deterrence.

MR PRICE, no, no, no, you don't understand — MR PRICE, we are trying to deter — MR PRICE, you seem not to understand the idea of — MR PRICE, the Russians from moving forward with this type of activity. That is why we are making it public today. If the Russians don't go forward with this, that is not ipso facto an indication that they never had plans to do so. But then it's unprovable. My God, what is the evidence that you have that suggests that the Russians are even planning this? That is the perfect way to handle that.

You have to scorn them exactly to their faces and show them that what they are saying is outrageous. We have evidence. I just gave it to you. That's not evidence. That's you speaking. That doesn't mean anything. That's just you saying some stuff, okay? We continue to find that Washington makes these outlandish, crazy claims, which leads them to have the hottest rhetoric in the ongoing dispute between Ukraine and Russia.

And if you do want to broaden it out, you can say the Europeans and Russia. Put this up there on the screen. U.S. assessments continue to find Russia could seize Kiev in days, cause some 50,000 civilian casualties in Ukraine. I mean, what year is it? You know, 1939? What's happening here, Crystal? Which is that the rhetoric used from Washington does not match the rhetoric or the actions that are being pursued on the continent. Right now, Macron is practicing shuttle diplomacy between Europe and Russia, trying to hammer out some diplomatic agreement. And the U.S., as Matt Lee says, is putting out some Alex Jones-level insanity in terms of its claims about

what exactly is going to happen. That's a crazy claim. If you have evidence, publish it. I'd love to see it. This would be like Adlai Stevenson at the Cuban Missile Crisis. I mean, like, we have evidence that the Russians put missiles in Cuba. And everybody's like, okay, where is it? At least we brought pictures that time. I mean, this time they won't even give us that. What's happening here? I think it also says a lot about what they expect from the press corps, that they think they could just assert something that is, look.

Well, it did work, actually, Crystal. Yeah. On CNN, they parroted it. They go right along with it. Yeah, that you could put on something that is quite a pretty wild claim. Look, I don't put anything past the right. I don't trust them either. I mean, maybe. But this is out there.

I mean, as he says, it sounds like some Alex Jones, like, crisis actors and all of this. And this is, like, plot number three that they've claimed the Russians are planning here and uncovered us. And, you know, the Brits are partnering with us to sort of distract from their own problems at home. But so, listen, I think it says everything that they think that the press will just take this, their assertion backed by nothing, as complete fact. And the other thing that we've seen with this really consistently is the language around if you are willing to dissent from their narrative, you are immediately tarred as a traitor. You and I right here. Yeah. Propagandists.

Russian propagandists. Russian propagandists. For doubting Washington. For doubting Washington. All of that stuff. There was actually, I mean, this was kind of funny, too. David Frum, don't normally check out his Twitter feed that often, but Ben and Jerry's put out this statement that just said, You cannot simultaneously prevent and prepare for war.

We call on President Biden to de-escalate tensions and work for peace rather than prepare for war. Sending thousands more U.S. troops to Europe in response to Russia's threats against Ukraine only fans the flame of war. Incredibly reasonable sentiment, very consistent with their historic pro-peace orientation. And David Frum quote-teets that and says, congratulations to Tucker Carlson on his appointment as CEO of Ben & Jerry's. Like, just the language and the rhetoric around this is so ridiculous. You're not allowed to say, hey, here's what's going on from Russia's perspective. Here's why they're looking at it this way. Here's what some of their motivations are,

which, again, in the New York Times this morning, they're laying out what Macron is trying to do and is trying to assert the European position. Good. Because they have a lot more directly at stake in this in terms of their energy prices than we do. And one of the things that The New York Times says is that they're trying to figure out how to acknowledge that Russia has a little bit of a point when it comes to NATO expansion without backing off of, you know, the promises that have reliable stenographers from the press that will just write down whatever they say is fact, no evidence needed, that they feel like they can do this and they can get away with it, and they largely can. No, you're right. And there was a moment on the exact same day that we want to show you about Syria. So let's go ahead and move on to that. What happened, Crystal? Yeah, so you guys probably saw this news that there was a big raid in Syria that took out an ISIS leader. I'm going to totally butcher his name. I'm sorry, but his name is Abu Ibrahim

al-Hashimi al-Qurashi. Qureshi. Qureshi. Yeah. Okay. Was killed Wednesday. I'm reading from CNN right now. During a U.S. counterterrorism raid in northwest Syria, Biden announced that on Thursday morning. Biggest U.S. raid in that country since the 2019 operation that killed the last ISIS leader, Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. So what the U.S. says, what they claim without evidence at this point, is that he blew himself up as U.S. forces approached his compound and that self-immolation or suicide bombing resulted in multiple civilian casualties. However, there's a lot of facts that don't add up here. The number of civilian casualties that the U.S. is claiming does not match what independent organizations on the ground are saying the number of civilians that were killed during this operation. And so once

again, on the very same day that we were having pushback over the whole Ukraine situation, we also had some pushback from reporters about the narrative that the White House was laying out with regards to how this raid exactly went down. Let's go ahead and put this tweet up on the screen. Aboard Air Force One, a reporter asked White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki for evidence to back up the claim that Qureshi detonated a suicide bomb. Psaki responds by asking whether skeptics think the U.S. military is not providing accurate information, and ISIS is providing accurate information. Let's go to the next tweet. The reporter did not back down.

That reporter said, I mean, the U.S. has not always been straightforward about what happens with civilians, and I mean, that is a fact. Great points there. Let's go ahead and put the next piece up on the screen. So this shows the discrepancy. The Syrian civil defense group, the White Helmets, says that 13 people were killed in the raid. Meanwhile, the Pentagon spokesman, John Kirby, says that four civilians and five combatants, that would be a total of nine people, died during the operation. So there's a discrepancy

already from the jump about how many civilians were actually killed, not to mention no actual evidence provided that the civilians who were killed were actually killed by Qureshi and his suicide bomb. So it's another instance where typically for years and years, everyone in the press would just parrot whatever the official line was, no evidence needed, yay, go USA, and they would move on. This is a very rare instance of a reporter who's saying, listen, I hear your narrative, but I would like to see some evidence here. And of course, we know from, and what this reporter alluded to, we know from lots of reporting from The Intercept over many years, recently from The New York Times, that the number

of civilian casualties is dramatically higher than they've ever acknowledged, that there are a few precautions put in place to avoid civilian casualties, that they're covered up after they happen. And of course, we saw that horrific, horrific case in point of what happened with that drone strike in Afghanistan. I mean, look, if you have evidence, you have to release it. And, you know, the reporter is correct. I have no sympathy for Abu whatever al-Qureshi. I have also don't put it past them to blow up a bunch of kids. But the White Helmets, and this is the other problem, White Helmets, a State Department funded thing, you know, a lot of people have called them, you know, propagandists themselves in the past. So it's hard to believe. But, you know, in general, they try to save

civilians and they put out a lot of videos during the Syrian civil war. Even they are saying that there's a lot more casualties. Okay. I mean, maybe ISIS killed them. You have to tell us. And I don't believe them. Should you? How many stories we've done here on the show? Blowing up that dam in Syria, lying about it. Obviously, the ISIS drone strike, lying about it, botching it, covering it up, not punishing anyone. Look, maybe they killed some civilians. Admit it. I mean, you know, it's the fog of war. It may even be understandable, but you have to admit to it. Why don't you say anything? And what was the planning behind this operation? That was the other problem, is that Biden was trying to turn this into some Osama bin Laden moment. Trump did the same thing

with Baghdadi. It's like, look, neither of these guys even compares to Osama. It's not even close in terms of the direct relationship, the way Americans feel about it, all of that. And they try to use it as some chest-beating moment to gin up their own popular support, which I personally found very gross. Well, I do think the timing of it is noteworthy here because obviously Biden under a lot of pressure here, not things, you know, not going that well with Ukraine, things not going well with COVID, things not going well with the economy. And so, yeah, this was a nice way to try to put a feather in his cap of we got the bad guys. Meanwhile, you also killed a bunch of kids. Do you remember the 2012 Joe Biden speech at the Democratic Convention? Joe, uh, bin Laden is dead and GM is alive. He said it over and over

again. This was a huge political benefit to Obama at the time when he was running for reelection. It's kind of hard to remember, but that was Biden's whole thing. He was like, we killed Osama. He said it over and over and over again in his speech. You know, you should go and watch it, if not just to see how different he was at the time. The reason why all this matters is that it's fuzzy, and we shouldn't trust these people whenever they make claims. I do want to say, though, and this just bothers me, it took the war in Afghanistan and the collapse of Kabul before everyone's eyes and the military's lives over the last 20 years for these people to wake up and be like, okay, hold on a second.

Maybe we should ask the questions here. Yeah, we should ask more questions. Okay, like, you know, I shouldn't cry tears that it's coming now, but it's like, hey, you know, we could have saved a lot of people if this had happened in the past. I will say this. It shows you how weak they ultimately are.

They don't, nobody believes them anymore. And you shouldn't. They've lied to our faces over and over and over again. Also, what are all these troops doing in Syria in the first place? I don't remember having a conversation around that one because, you know, they didn't just come in from Iraq or wherever. There's a base of like a couple hundred guys who are just sitting in Syria. It's 2022. We killed Baghdadi in 2019. The caliphate collapsed in what, 2018?

Are we just now going to sit in Syria forever? By the way, the Syrian government doesn't want us there. I'm not saying I like Assad or whatever. It's his country. He won the civil war, okay? Fine. So listen to them. This is the thing I don't really seem to understand.

Congress is supposed to authorize these types of occupations and invasion of a foreign nation. I mean, you know, we should have a conversation around that. And they just do these little operations here and there, and they hope that we don't hear about it. And when we do hear about it, everybody's supposed to chest beat. But every once in a while, a little bit of information, thanks to the Internet, starts to squeak out. And, you know, we learn about Niger. You're like, hey, what happened in Niger? What was all that going on there?

How did these four guys end up in the middle of the desert and one of them get shot with no air support on some crackpot mission? Also, why are troops in Niger in the first? Somalia, Yemen, the very first week of Trump's presidency, Navy SEAL gets shot in the chest in Yemen on some crazy kill capture mission against Al Qaeda, where also a bunch of kids were killed. No questions. I mean, these are all, this has been happening for a long time. I would just put it in that context. These reporters, they've let a lot of this slide. And I was there. And let's

not oversell it. This is one person. Yeah, right. Who's like, hey, I want to see the evidence. But it says a lot about how much they've been exposed. That you even have a single reporter who's willing to say, you know, your narrative about the suicide bomb, maybe it's true, but I don't think— I don't put it past them. Yeah, we don't put it past them, but there's even just a question of like, well, okay, let's see the evidence because you people will tell us whatever is most convenient for your storyline.

The Niger example is a great one because there's been even more information come out about, you know, they tried to blame the dead. Oh, yeah. Oh, they went off on their own. It was a rogue mission. And they come to find out, no, it wasn't. No, it wasn't. This was authorized from the top. You all just don't want to have your hands dirty on something that went so horrifically wrong.

So tiny little bit of skepticism here is nice to see. Yeah, that's right. All right. Got some lighter news here from CNN. CNN in disarray. Let's put this first piece up on the screen. So, of course, we've been tracking Andrew Cuomo. Chris Cuomo gets fired.

Jeff Zucker gets taken out as part of that because apparently he was having a long-time affair, which apparently everybody knew about and was totally consensual but the person he was having an affair with was a former Andrew Cuomo aide and it sure looks like Chris Cuomo is kind of getting his revenge here

by basically threatening to expose the whole thing and that there was a lot more going on with regards to Zucker and his brother Andrew than ultimately meets the eye because, of course, you know, Zucker's line is, oh, Chris was totally doing this on his own. I had nothing to do with it.

And so we have to fire him. We, you know, killed the bad apple. So now we're getting some details of how much money is at stake here and how much money Chris Cuomo may be able to extract from CNN with some of the apparently successful tactics he's been using. Daily Mail said in that tear sheet, fired CNN anchor Chris Cuomo was hoping to secure an $18 million lump sum payout following his departure last year. I think that was the entirety of the rest of his contract.

But he's been told to set his sights lower, with him unlikely to receive anything more than around just a mere $9 million. Just a mere $9 million. Just a mere $9 million. Sagar, that he's looking like he's likely to get out of this. That's right. I mean, it's not cheap there, living that life. There are apparently AT&T, CNN's parent company, said to be in negotiations to reach a deal that would see the fired anchor receive half of the $18 million he had been vying for. So looks like CNN, AT&T are poised to offer Chris Cuomo a little bit of hush money to keep some of the uglier, dirtier details of how this all went down under wraps.

So that's one piece. The other piece, the next piece that we can put up on the screen here is the staffers, the anchors at CNN are not happy because they see how exactly how this went down. And they are totally freaked out about what this is going to mean for them and their next and their jobs going forward. Jake Tapper kind of led the charge here. This was in a meeting with the WarnerMedia CEO, Jason Kyler. Tapper says, I'll just read you this relatively long quote, but you can see the direction of where they go. If you could address the perception,

because we're all going to be asked about this, the perception that Chris Cuomo gets fired by CNN, Chris Cuomo hires a higher powered lawyer who has a scorched earth policy, who then makes it very clear to the world that unless Jeff gives Cuomo his money, they're going to blow the place up. Stuff starts getting leaked to gossip websites about Jeff and Allison. Then weeks later, Jeff comes forward, discloses this and resigns,

not willingly. An outside observer might say, well, looks like Chris Cuomo succeeded. He threatened Jeff, said we don't negotiate with terrorists, and Chris blew the place up. How do we get past that perception that this is the bad guy winning? Now, I would strenuously object to the idea that Jeff Zucker is the good guy and Chris Cuomo is the bad guy, when in reality what was about to happen is it was going to be exposed that Jeff Zucker also was the bad guy.

What I love about all these guys, Tapper and Jim Acosta and the rest of them, they are freaking out because Zucker protected them at all costs to the higher up executives. People need to know this. AT&T did not like CNN. That's why they're selling it basically to Discovery as part of some big major deal. Down in Dallas, they had been wanting to cap CNN and cut costs for a long time. Zucker was the person who pushed back against all of that. And part of the reason that it was sold and given to Discovery in the first place is because Discovery also wanted to take things in a different direction, but was perhaps willing to spend more cash. Now, Acosta, Tapper, and the rest of the clowns, their worst behavior was not only protected

but encouraged by Zucker. That's why they love Zucker. In fact, it has come out that Jake Tapper held a shiva of, like, solemnness on Friday night when they all found out the news for all the morning CNN staffers. That's how much they love this guy, okay? And the reason why is because he was at his core

the developer and the protector of the clownish behavior over the last five years. I can't underscore this enough. It was his idea. He believed not only it was good for business, but he believed that it was the best possible thing that you could do for the country. Kind of found himself as this anti-Trump person, even though he himself was the guy who created Trump over on The Apprentice.

And what I find especially hilarious is that the CNN talent are telling on themselves because they're protecting Zucker. They have no ethical qualms here with the fact that the boss was banging one of his subordinates and that at that time him and that subordinate were coordinating with Andrew Cuomo, her former boss, both talking points that has now come out and in terms of encouraging him to go on Chris Cuomo's show for higher ratings in the first place. They have no problem with that. Not only no problem, they are outwardly talking about how Zucker is the best person in media. Now, look, you say what you will about Fox and all that. Not only no problem, they are outwardly talking about how Zucker is the best person in media. Now, look, you say what you will about Fox and all that. I didn't see a lot of people being, after Roger Ailes was canned, saying, oh, but Roger, you know, he was the best boss. It's like, no, everyone's like, okay, Roger. Yeah, Roger was an asshole. Yeah, it's like, he was not a nice, okay, sure. But like, you know, arguably more successful than Zucker.

And more what I say when I point to that is that they're saying the quiet part out loud, which is that they value his loyalty to them in defense of their shenanigans and idiocy more than actual journalistic integrity. And I think that that is pathetic and disgusting. I mean, Zucker created a real full service economy there at CNN because he was definitely a part of elevating Trump. I mean, first of all, the apprentice. But during Trump's campaign, you know, they were infamous for how much they were showing his rallies. They'd show his empty podium rather than Hillary Clinton's speech, right? Probably was more entertaining. I'm sure it was more, right? I mean, and so they're a business. They care about the ratings.

They care about the money. And Jeff was leading the charge on all of that. And then once Trump gets into office, they decide to completely orient themselves in opposition to Trump. And people like Jim Acosta become big stars as, you know. He's got his own show now. Not nobody watches it. And so it's great for Trump. He's got his own show now. Nobody watches it. And so it's great for Trump because he's got this great villain that he can point to and he can, you know, fake news and all that stuff.

It's great for them. They get book contracts. They get great ratings. They get to, you know, be the opposition in the Trump show. So none of this was about, like, let's do what's right for the country. It was great for their business. And now that that business model is dead, at least for the moment, they've also been really, really, really struggling. So that's sort of the back context here. But it is incredible that

there doesn't seem to be any concern from the talent whatsoever about the fact that it also came out, there's at least reported, you know, allegations that he was helping Andrew Cuomo on his coronavirus briefings and, you know, being, serving as much of an advisor to Andrew Cuomo as apparently Chris Cuomo was. So then when he turns around, that also gives you insight into why Chris Cuomo was able to hang around for so long, because this was a very uncomfortable situation for Zucker that, you know, if it all comes out that not only is Cuomo advising his brother,

but you're advising his brother and you're, you know, you're whoever, whatever we want to call her, your lady is also advising Cuomo. This is not going to look good for you. The funny, this is, we have to play you some of this. Brian Stelter has been

a very consistent lackey for the higher-ups at CNN. That's how someone who's so profoundly untalented can end up with a big job at a network

is you're good at playing the inside game, which clearly he was during the whole Chris Cuomo fallout. I remember he famously was like, this is such a strange, who could ever anticipate this situation?

How could you figure out what to do when it was very obvious this conflict of interest and that, you know, the way they'd handled it was totally unacceptable. So here is the sort of like absurdly fawning language that Stelter has been using to talk about Jeff Zucker. Is why? Why'd this happen? This is the ugliest shakeup at CNN since the days Ted Turner was still walking the halls. Zucker was in charge one minute and he was gone the next. So why?

Even employees who didn't like him are mad because this made CNN look bad. So they want to know why. They want to know what happened. But most staffers did like him. Many loved him. Many felt Zucker was the best boss they'd ever worked for. They would walk into war zones for him, and sometimes they did.

And in return, Zucker protected them, defended them, cheered for them. He was like a heat shield. That's the best way I can explain it. He shielded his staff from all sorts of heat. Look, they're using hagiographic language, but he's just telling you what I just told you. He was the heat shield, all right. And look, some of that heat probably should have come. I am truly relishing, Crystal, to see what happens behind the scenes. This website, Radar Online, which actually had the Cuomo story originally, has a new piece, which I find

personally hilarious. Let's put this up there on the screen. It turns out that Chris Wallace is having a, quote, meltdown over the Zucker-Allison-Galas scandal and is said to be at war in the DC Bureau with Jake Tapper. Wallace is apparently getting paid eight to to $10 million a year. Hilarious. Just think about that. $8 to $10 million to anchor CNN+, which nobody is going to watch. This thing is going to be the $100 million boondoggle. I'm also looking forward to that story.

But what they point to is that Wallace thought he was going to be coming over to work for Zucker, and now Zucker himself is out. He apparently is at war with Jake Tapper over journalistic disagreements and all that, which I find very funny. I think this place is going to implode. And I'll tell you why, which is that Discovery's CEO, by of CNN, who was like, I think CNN needs to go back to its news roots. This is terrible. Jason Kyler hated Jeff Zucker, by all accounts, because he was a tech guy and he thought Zucker and all these D.C., New York people were clowns. Correct, Jason. Clean house while you have the chance. Well, that's the other part is this looks a little bit like his revenge. Yeah, well, his revenge, I mean, listen, take it, okay? I think it's fine. I, what I see very much is an opportunity where you can actually clean house over that network. I mean,

I'm not saying you could ever turn around CNN Plus after some of the hiring decisions that it made, but I don't know, maybe you can do something different. But there are a lot of people in the executive chair who have hated this show and or have hated this network for a long time and the direction it went under Jeff Zucker. And they're in charge now. And if you're Jim Acosta, you know, it's not gonna be a good time for you, buddy, because his ratings are, we would be living under a bridge if that few people watched our show and we were independent, just to put it in context. Don Lemon is the same thing. These people are really going to suffer. These people are getting paid to anchor these

streaming shows. I mean, I can just tell you that economics does not work out for Chris Wallace. There is like not one person in the country who is going to subscribe to CNN Plus to see Chris Wallace. I agree. And that's what these salaries ultimately should be used to justify. I mean, Rogan is the perfect example of, yeah, he got a big deal, but actually he's, you make the case he's underpaid. He was dramatically underpaid. Because of the number of people that he actually brings in as converted to premium subscribers. I mean, this is a huge moneymaker for Spotify.

Why? Because he actually has an audience that cares about what he has to say and is going to show up for him. These people they're hiring, no one cares what these people have to say. And so it's ridiculous. I will say the one thing that I don't think there's any savings CNN plus that's, that's a done deal. But the one thing that will rescue CNN is Trump. And it reminds me, you know, it reminds me very much of at MSNBC, you know, during the Obama years when I was at the end of when I was there. Ratings are way down. They did the same thing. We've gone too far left.

It's too progressive. Imagine saying that now. But anyway, that was the thinking. It's like we've got to get back to the same thing. We've got to get back to our roots as NBC News. We're going to plug Brian Williamson. He's going to do breaking news. We're going to use these people like Kate Snow and all these NBC News journos are going to be given shows.

We're going to get the opinion out of here. And then Trump shows up. And, of course. Saves the whole thing. The shows that are doing the best are the ones that are willing to be the most insane and deranged when it comes to Trump and especially the Russia conspiracies. And so, you know, MSNBC looking at the bottom line makes a total and complete shift. It's going to be the same thing with CNN. They're going to try to pivot back to like we're the straight news journos.

The minute Trump comes back on the scene, it's going to shift around right again. Because that's, you know, that's the only thing that has worked for them over these past number of years. Otherwise, they were dead in the water. Yeah. So I might as well gouge my eyes out live. Pretty much. All right, Sokka, what are you looking at? Well, there is always more to the story than it seems. I've watched with great dismay as the tide has turned against Joe Rogan in one of the most transparent witch hunts that I've ever seen in my lifetime. First, he was the purveyor of vaccine misinformation. Then, he destroyed them with his response. Oh, okay, now he's a racist. When this one dies down,

he'll be a transphobe, a misogynist. They are pulling out all the stops. I, along with many others, are resolved to fight back against them. But therein lies the question, who is them? It's a great question, one I have spent hours trying to get to the bottom of. So come along with this journey with me. I have previously laid out the various music interests at play behind Neil Young and the original boycott campaign

from Blackstone and the hedge funds to Amazon Music. But the recent effort against Rogan has inspired deeper investigation, and I have found that this is even bigger than I originally thought. Something I took notice of Thursday is that this entire manufactured controversy began right before Spotify earnings season. The reason that matters is that the controversy caused a big headache for the CEO, Daniel Ek, and it coincided with a not-so-great earnings report for Spotify, the company, meaning that

whomever is striking against Rogan had maximum leverage as the stock plunged by 20%. It's in the downtimes that these companies are the most vulnerable. Now, I'm not claiming Rogan is the only reason that stock went down, but let's say organically it would have gone down to like 18, and now it's down 20. That 2% is literally hundreds of millions of dollars in value. Every tiny tenth of a percentage point matters at this level that we're talking about. And if you think that sounds far-fetched, it's not. Literally right now, Business Insider just dropped its second ridiculous hit piece on Barstool founder Dave Portnoy, right before his company, Penn Gaming, had its earnings calls. The best part?

They did it twice in a row, a transparent effort to destroy his net worth. They do this all the time. It's a piece of the playbook. But again, that they question. Well, it could be a lot of people. Per my friend, Unusual Whales, here are the companies that are short Spotify, big time. RBBN Fund, Calamos Investment Trust, run by a billionaire, Luthold Funds Inc, Guidestone Funds, Morningstar Alternative Funds, Northern Lights Fund Trust III. It's difficult to dig into who exactly owns these and controls them, but I'm putting them out there in the world for all of you to see, perhaps for others to take on the mantle. The other question to always look into is the Latin phrase, qui bono, who benefits?

On this one, we all know the answer. No single person has benefited more from this fracas than Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. As I previously reported, Neil Young, of course, is immediately starting giving people a four-month free deal on Amazon Music after leaving Spotify. And the company put both Young and Mitchell right smack dab on its homepage, using the controversy to try to get signups and generate even more revenue. But the craziest thing I saw was this true hit job was a helpful guide from the Washington Post

who wrote an entire article titled "'How to Quit Spotify Without Losing Your Music." Just a helpful lifestyle tidbit, of course, except who owns the Washington Post? Oh, that's right, Jeff Bezos. Article just so happens to include handy little instructions about how to port all your music off of the platform

if you just so happen to turn over to Amazon Music. Now, one of the reasons I knew bigger forces were at play is because this is an old school Washington play. Almost nothing you see is organic or authentic. And that even includes the Joe Rogan racial controversy. So while the clip of him saying the N-word over and over again is one that's existed for years, there's a group on Twitter that was most responsible for disseminating it to black artists and urging cancellation.

It's called Patriot Takes. Now here's a statement from Patriot Takes taking credit for this. They say they're gonna keep going. It's out in the open. So who the hell are these people? Let's investigate per their website. Patriot Takes is a group dedicated to exposing right-wing misinformation. Oh, okay, nothing shady about that.

Who funds them? They are partnered with an organization called Midas Touch. Now, Midas Touch describes itself as a, quote, producing the best pro-democracy political videos and content and include a political action committee. That's interesting, a super PAC. So this is a world I know a lot about. Who exactly has donated to this political action committee? Well, per my research, one of the biggest donors to Midas Touch PAC is none

other than Bette Midler, the washed up actress who most recently said West Virginia is full of, quote, poor, illiterate, and strung-out people, in reference to Joe Manchin. They're not sending their best, in other words, is what she said. But who else? Of course, also on the list, Reid Hoffman. Hoffman is probably the single largest donor in Democratic politics today, next to George Soros. He has donated some $400 million to these types of groups and all sorts of shady efforts, including funding a literal fake news publication in Alabama to try and swing the Senate election down there. So here we have a shady Democratic media group who is finding these clips, funded by Silicon Valley billionaire and a Hollywood actress, as well as a lot of other types.

Now, as for the operation itself, let's look deeper. Midas Touch Group is run by three brothers, one of whom was once a social media manager for Ellen DeGeneres. Now, the group was a resistance media operation, which generated cringe clicks during the 2020 election. But by 2021, even Rolling Stone magazine unveiled the effort as one that took millions of dollars from big donors and anti-Trump liberals and appears to have dramatically oversold its influence. It's basically a blue Lincoln project. So do you guys get the big picture now? Wall Street, Jeff Bezos, big Democratic donors, resistance media operation. This is a political hatchet job I know quite well.

I recognized it the moment I saw moveon.org and Ultraviolet get involved last week. And I'll continue to stand up for Rogan in the only way that I think I uniquely can, following the money, uncovering the corridors of power. We're never going to give up here on the show. That's the thing, Crystal. I mean, you look at this group, Midas Touch Super PAC. And if you want to hear my reaction to Sager's monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Let's go ahead and get to your monologue, Crystal, because I know you've got a great point about anti-politics here. Well, guys, there are, in one sense, about a billion things going on in the world. More important than the current efforts to shame, smear, and censor one single podcaster.

You've got hunger, poverty, war, despair, climate collapse. Just take your pick. We're in the midst of a new Cold War-style conflict between two nuclear powers centered around Ukraine. The Fed is making economic life-or-death decisions right now as we speak. Inequality has soared during the pandemic to world historic levels, leading to a dystopian split screen like Jeff Bezos commanding the deconstruction of a historic bridge in order to accommodate his massive yacht. While on the other hand, you've got his former workers like Daquan Smith forced into homelessness for the crime of advocating for a union. In a certain sense, any of these topics would be a

better use of our time than Joe Rogan versus the libs. Yet ironically, the very fact that the nation has become so consumed with whatever bad words Rogan has said over its multi-decade career, instead of a serious inquiry into any of the problems I just mentioned, that is in and of itself actually a gigantic issue. I don't want to be dramatic here, but the personal moral purity way of doing politics is truly a cancer and it's eating away at our pseudo-democracy. In other words, part of why we can never address any of those real problems is because the public is continually distracted and titillated by these fake personalized problems. But it's actually so much worse than that because they are not just a

distraction. Their centrality in our public discourse makes any sort of collective action virtually impossible. It reminds me of this infamous 1944 CIA manual on how to destroy the productivity of an organization. It's called the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, and it contains the following advice. Take a look at this. Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible. Take a look at this. to our entire society. In fact, debating the personal character of Joe Rogan and similar obsessions, they are a potent form of anti-politics. It feels like you're engaging in politics, like you're adding your voice to a cacophonous and vibrant democracy, but you're not. You're stuck wandering endlessly around a fake Potemkin village of democracy, while elites with an

interest in maintaining the status quo are left free to make the real political decisions. You are relitigating the context within which Joe Rogan said the N-word in 2013, while the Fed decides whether or not to fork over a few more trillions to Wall Street, and private equity giants decide whether young people will ever be able to buy a home or start a family, and the oil and gas industry buys out politicians to continue forcing the planet off a climate cliff. Now, Neil Young, he was the first artist to pull his music from Spotify, and actually his arc over the course of his life is really illuminating. His original forays into activism, they were about bolstering a mass struggle against war, protesting the killings of young students at Kent State who were gunned down for their

activism against the state. Under George W. Bush, he was part of a free speech toward decrying the reactionary censorship of anti-war voices. But in our modern climate of democracy sabotage, he's flipped. Now his ire is directed at Spotify for allowing too much free speech. He's the same guy, same activist impulses, yet now his activism is dedicated to bolstering power rather than fighting it. And his remedy is too perfect as well. He's pushing his fans and their dollars to one of the most powerful and nefarious companies on the planet, Amazon. Rogan's thought crimes are given higher moral priority than Amazon's mass exploitation, monopoly rigging, and modern-day indentured servitude.

But Neil Young is emblematic of an influential activist population that has been tricked into thinking that they are fighting for democracy when they are actually fighting for tech oligarchs and media barons to have more power. In an ingenious sleight of hand, good and well-intentioned people who in a previous era would have fought, like Neil Young, for real democratic change in action, have instead been persuaded that handing over as much control of the public square as possible to our modern-day aristocracy is somehow sticking it to the man. They believe that the most powerful people on the planet are the ones to be trusted, and that their own powerless relatives and neighbors are the ones to be held in contempt and held to account. Because that's what the instinct towards censorship, that's what it is about at its core.

It's not really about Joe Rogan. It's about adult Americans not trusting their fellow adult Americans to be able to listen to a podcast or read a Facebook post without becoming murderous, raving lunatics. And that makes these constant moral purity debates active democracy sabotage instead of just a simple bread and circuses distraction. How are you ever going to engage in collective struggle for change of the sort that led to victory for the abolitionists and the suffragists and the civil rights movement when the collective has been deemed too evil and too deplorable for a decent person to engage with at all. Why would you even want to

institute universal programs when they would benefit these evil and nasty people who can't even be entrusted to listen to a podcast without basically becoming the KKK? How will you challenge corporate-friendly media at scale when every channel that challenges conventional orthodoxy is tarred as a racist grift. After all, if you trust your fellow Americans to behave like grown-ups in a democracy with its necessary messy swirl of information, then whatever Rogan says, whatever guess he has on, they're really no big deal. Matt Taibbi's essential book, Hate Inc., tracks how such a large number of Americans were persuaded to trust tech oligarchs drunk on power more than their neighbors and relatives who happen to have

different political views. The constant stream of propaganda from Fox News and CNN and MSNBC, it is all aimed at terrifying the people about their fellow citizens. Your struggles aren't because of a system rigged by plutocrats to deliver riches for themselves and desperation for you. No, the real threat to your well-being is your cute, curious aunt or the college kids posting their pronouns to TikTok. That's how you end up with the GOP literally poised to run on no platform and probably win historic gains. They don't have to promise that they'll deliver on anything in particular, just that they will serve as a check on the half of the country that their voters believe to be the problem. Democrats have their list of dangerous people and ideas they want to see banned, that they believe the American people can't be trusted with. And Republicans have their own list of dangerous people and ideas they believe the American people can't be trusted with.

That's what the CRT panic, anti-protest laws, and book banning movements are really all about. Democrats think you can't listen to a three-hour discussion with Robert Malone without deciding vaccines or implanting microchips. Republicans think you can't raid Ibram X. Kendi without wanting to lock white people into prison camps. I reject this corrosive, anti-populist view that seeks to place power in a few concentrated hands, where the only pseudo-political struggles are whether or not our elected reps will signal that they're on our side in that culture war. In fact, a belief in actual democracy, obnoxious and frustrating as it can sometimes be, is actually at the very core of why I do this show at all, and why I'm so proud of its large and ideologically diverse audience,

and why I call myself a populist. I know it can sound really hokey, but I really wanted to demonstrate that it's okay in a democracy to deal with people who might have different views than you. In fact, it is essential, even that you might agree with them in some areas, that you might even find them to be loyal friends, trusted colleagues, that they can serve as partners in a democratic project, even though, yes, sometimes they might drive you nuts. Look, there are only two paths from where we are now. One is towards an authoritarian police state, and the other is towards a real democracy. The less that we trust our fellow adults to be able to handle bad or wrong or dangerous information, or information that just

doesn't accord with our own political sensibilities, the harder we will fight for the police state and demand an end to our own democratic rights. Look, we act like our democracy is most in danger of being stolen by a cabal of nefarious wrongdoers, when the much more likely scenario is that we will willingly hand it over in exchange for censoring and banning the people we think are bad. So the cancer at the core of the fight over Joe Rogan right now, it is both a distraction from real problems and it is a symptom of how much the nation has been poisoned against itself. And this cancer, mark my words, if allowed to metastasize, will destroy whatever good is left in the American ideal. And so on the one hand, Sager, it's silly. You can say it's bread circuses. I see people... And if you want to hear my reaction to Crystal's

monologue, become a premium subscriber today at BreakingPoints.com. Really excited to be joined by our next guest, Dr. John Abramson. He's written a book, Sickening, How Big Pharma Broke American Healthcare and How We Can Fix It. This is something where he appeared on the Joe Rogan Experience and Crystal and I were absolutely stunned by how good of an episode it was. Really excited to read the book. Haven't had that chance yet, but we have Dr. Abramson here in order to break some of this down. Thank you so much for joining us, sir. We really appreciate it.

Well, thank you for having me. I appreciate it. My pleasure. Absolutely. So let's go a little bit into the book. What are some of the top line ways of which you were able to expose the way that big pharma has rigged and destroyed the American healthcare system? And this is absent of the vaccine conversation, although we will get into that as well. Right. So I spent about 10,

after my first book came out, Overdosed America, lawyers started to call me to serve as an expert in litigation against the drug companies, plaintiff's lawyers. And I spent about 10 years inside the corporate hard drives. There would be up to 20 million documents in each case. And over those 10 years, I learned what the drug companies are doing. I know what's going on. I know how they've taken over the create the impression that doctors are practicing the best medicine for their patients by prescribing new inexpensive drugs. And consuming resources that would be better spent on social determinants of health and other approaches than giving expensive new drugs. I know how that happened. Some of it I can tell. And some of it remains sealed. other approaches than giving expensive new drugs. I know how that happened. Some of it I can tell, and some of it remains sealed. But the bottom line is that American healthcare

is performing horribly. Americans' healthy life expectancy, the number of years they live in good health, now ranks 68th in the world. It's gone down from 38th to 68th between 2000 and 2019. And for that awful health, we're spending an extra $1.5 trillion a year on our health care. This ought to be the biggest story. This is bigger than 9-11. There are more people. The excess death rate in the United States is like we're having a 9-11 every two and a quarter days, every single two

and a quarter days, three jumbo jets going down every day. And this story is not covered. So what are the roots of that issue? Because, yeah, I mean, you look around the rest of the developed world, they're not seeing these spiking rates of diabetes deaths, of overdose deaths, these excess deaths that you're tracking closely. So what is the root cause of these issues? Yeah, I think there are that the production and dissemination of what doctors take as medical knowledge has been turned over to the commercial interests. So essentially the research agenda is set by commercial interests. They control the studies. They control the data, own the data, do the analyses, mostly prepare the manuscripts for publication.

The peer reviewers, we physicians are taught to trust that peer-reviewed articles in medical journals are the gold standard and we should determine our medical practice according to the peer-reviewed studies. What we're not taught is that the peer reviewers don't even get to look at the data for themselves. They have to accept what the drug companies have, largely the drug companies, have sent them. So on the one hand we've got the control of medical knowledge having been given over to the commercial interests without adequate oversight. And on the other hand, we have the dissemination to the public of that information largely influenced by the drug companies because the enormous amount of advertising that they do. Right.

Yeah, this was the part that I was really stunned by during your episode was about the specific data. So the list is where we can involve a vaccine conversation. Doctor, how have you found it difficult to balance two things? Number one, the drug companies have rigged trials in the past, have not been honest so much so that they've had to pay multibillion-dollar fines, and the actual efficacy of a medicine. How do we, as laymen, how are we supposed to balance our mistrust rightfully with actual information? How do you look at that problem? It's a huge problem, Sagar. And what we need to do is look at all the data and make our own decisions. In the case of the vaccinations,

Pfizer is fighting with the FDA as its partner to slow walk the release of the data from its original large study of efficacy and safety of vaccines, and the FDA is making the claim that they should get 75 years to release the data from that study, it's craziness. It's craziness that the public doesn't get access to that data. Now, that would seem to support an anti-vaccine position, that we don't have the data, and if the data weren't hiding something, Pfizer would probably be more likely to volunteer it.

On the other hand, there's real-world data, and we know that people who are unvaccinated have about 20 times the risk of dying of COVID, and there's no question that these vaccines are effective. And I would urge everybody to get vaccinated and get boosted when it's recommended. But we need to liberate the data. And it's just another example of how the pharmaceutical industry is controlling this game. I mean, what kind of market could you have when the consumers, the purchasers, the users aren't allowed to see the data upon which the claims that their product is useful and safe are being made? It makes no sense. Could you just, so people can make this really concrete, walk through an example of, you know, from the development of a drug to the trials that

are performed to how it's presented to the FDA to how it's ultimately presented to doctors and then how it's prescribed to patients, how this all works and the way that that process has been corrupted. I know you have some really specific examples in the book of how this has all gone down. Yeah. So what happens is drug companies fund about 86 percent of clinical trials now. And almost all clinical trials are about drugs and devices. They're not about how to improve Americans' health in a more general way. So the drug companies fund the trials and they hire companies called contract research organizations to do the research. Now, in 1991, academic medical centers did 80% of the research and the academics could play a role in designing the studies and picking the outcomes and the doses and the populations that were in the study and analyzing the data and writing it up.

In 1991, 80%. That dropped to 26% by 2004. So what happened is the drug companies took control of almost three quarters of the research. And because they could pull the rest of the research, they exerted influence over the academic medical centers for the 26% of the research they were getting. So they own the data. They do the analyses.

They send in the manuscript. Generally, they play a role in writing the manuscript that gets sent to the journal for peer review. The peer reviewers look at it, they look for obvious mistakes, but they don't have the data. So it's assumed that when the article is peer-reviewed, the peer reviewers have thoroughly reanalyzed the data and make sure that the study is saying what the manuscript says. That doesn't happen. So the doctors read the peer-reviewed article in the medical journal thinking that they're doing what they're supposed to do, but it's not vetted.

And they accept that as fact and they start prescribing drugs based on that. And then those articles get collected up into clinical practice guidelines. But the experts who write the clinical practice guidelines that set the standards for medical care, they too don't get the data. They have to rely on the commercial analysis of the data that's published in the medical journals. So that information is what forms the basis of what's called evidence-based medicine that all doctors are supposed to practice to provide the best care to their patients. The doctors don't understand that that information has not been verified. So that's how the standard is set.

And that's, we've got a tailwags dog situation. The pharmaceuticals spend about 17% of our total medical budget. So they're not spending all the money, but what they're doing is in teaching doctors how that money should be spent. And it should be spent on the products that they've decided to invest in as a research, in their research agenda, not because they'll produce the most health, but because they will produce the greatest financial return on investment. So that's our system.

It's close to the system in other countries. The difference in the United States is we don't have guardrails that exist in other countries. So we don't have independent health technology assessment. We don't have an organization that looks at all the data and determines which therapies are most effective for patients. The FDA tells us which drugs we can prescribe, but the FDA does not tell us which drugs we should prescribe. And almost all the other countries have that. We don't have, yeah. And it would be easy, we were the first country to have health technology assessment,

and it got scuttled with Newt Gingrich's contract with America in 1995. So now we were the first to have it, and now we're practically the only country not to have it. Fascinating. And similarly, we don't allow cost-effectiveness therapy, cost-effectiveness studies to be funded by federal money. We don't allow the cost of drugs to be included in the recommendations of therapy made by government-sponsored organizations. So what we've got in broad brushstrokes is the drug companies are controlling what doctors think they know about the best way to practice medicine, and we don't have the guardrails that other countries have. So let's get into the how we can fix it part then.

You have an exhaustive list, but give us some of the top line ways. What are some of the best ways we can fix our health care system? Well, number one is peer review has to be real. This is ridiculous. We're now operating on scientific standards that predate the Enlightenment. You know, we're back in the 1600s here. So peer reviewers have to have the data if they're going to verify, allow their analysis to be used as saying that the study, the results of the study that are presented are actually true. So we've got to fix peer review. We need a national mechanism of health technology assessment, an independent agency or organization that gets all the data and that makes recommendations about which drugs are

most effective. And I know you're interested in insulin. That's a big example. We are spending an extra $20 billion a year on insulin analogs, the latest iteration of bioengineered insulin for people with type 2 diabetes, and it's no better. We can reinvest that $20 billion in helping people at risk of diabetes to participate in active lifestyle counseling and healthy lifestyle activities in their communities, and we get a lot more health out of it than that. We need to control the price of drugs, not just because the drugs are too expensive. They are. We spend three and a half times more. The price of brand name drugs in the United States is three and a half times more than it is in other OECD countries.

But that price funds the distortion of our health care. the profit that in the United States, two thirds to three quarters, excuse me, two thirds to three quarters of global pharmaceutical profits come from the United States. All that money creates this huge machine that can lobby, that can hire PR, that pays doctors to be key opinion leaders. And that money itself distorts our health care system. So just doing those few things,

having health technology assessment, having cost effectiveness research, controlling the price of drugs, and rebalancing our research agenda so that it reflects the health needs of the American people and not the financial wishes of the pharmaceutical industry, that would go a long way. And one other thing would help, which is when drug companies are found guilty of wrongdoing, they ought to be subjected to penalties that are commensurate with the crime. So that when people misrepresent science and reap profits in the billions of dollars range that are ill-gotten because their data hasn't been adequately represented, that's stealing a billion dollars. And somebody steals $20, they get in trouble. But if you steal a billion dollars, you're okay.

Those simple measures would go a long way towards bringing American healthcare back towards the function of the other wealthy countries. Yeah. Last question for you, John. The media has tended to talk about vaccine hesitancy solely as like a personal responsibility story, like these bad people are making me listen to the wrong podcast or whatever. And so they're not protecting themselves and they're not protecting their communities by doing the right thing and getting the vaccine. What have you thought about those narratives and how do you think that your research

about the genuinely malign influence of big pharma has impacted the level of vaccine hesitancy that we have in this country? Crystal, that's really an important issue. And in fact, Robert Kennedy's book, which I wouldn't endorse, I'm not giving it a shout out, he starts his book and the introduction of his book starts with a quote from me about drug company information. I am not an anti-vaxxer, but the question that you ask is a really important one because people are aware that they're not getting the real data. And now Pfizer and the FDA joining arms to prevent the release of the data from Pfizer's big study, that fuels anti-vax sentiments.

It's like, how can you expect us to take a drug when we can't see the data? And that's a very legitimate point. And I want to make sure that your listeners understand that they deserve the data and that the anti-vax folks who use that to support their argument are not wrong. But the real world data shows that these drugs do, the vaccines do way more benefit than harm. And I would say that the drug companies not being forthright about their data does way more harm than benefit. And this ought to create a public outcry to liberate that vaccine data so people know what they're getting. Yeah, I think that's really well said. Doc, the last thing is, is that we were all talking about this before the segment, but you, like we said, we heard you on the Joe Rogan experience. Has it been frustrating that, you know, for all the talk in

the media of Dr. Robert Malone and Dr. Robert McCullough, I distinctly remember during your episode of not only handling these issues with grace, talking about big pharma and the rot of the healthcare system, but also pushing back yourself on booster shots, around vaccination, myocarditis. Could you speak to that element of censorship in our modern discourse, if you feel comfortable? Yeah, absolutely. Joe was a perfect gentleman with me. I didn't temper, I didn't say anything with him

that I'm not saying with you, and perhaps I went further out on a limb in terms of being critical of the pharmaceutical industry. That's not getting press. And I think it's not fair to Joe. Now, that said, we do have a problem as we're now in a real age of rapid transition about how people get their information. And for reasons that I don't completely understand this anti-vax sentiment is primal almost. So that when people come on to the media and they make an anti-vax argument, for some reason, it has credence that it ought not to have. The information's not been verified. And we do need to come up with some way

to have guardrails on the quality of information that gets out on the internet without censoring that information. We haven't worked that out. And I think Joe is kind of at the forefront of raising the question of how we deliver a wide spectrum of information and at the same time ensure that that information is responsible, that both sides of the argument are presented. And I think what Joe wrote, maybe there are excesses, Maybe he's used language that should never be used. I to people is unclear. But I think Rogan's not getting quite the fair deal that he should get. He's brought a lot of good information too. Thank you, sir. Very caricaturist view of him out there right now. Thank you so much, doctor. Great to have your insight. Really appreciate it. Thank you both. Thank you both.

Thank you guys so much for watching. I mean, can't appreciate you all more. You know, we were consumed by all of this this weekend. And every time I was just like, thank God the business is the way it is. Because, you know, both of us, our public stance of defending Rogan, I see all sorts of accusations crawling out of the woodwork. And, you know, look, guys, you enable us to have the wherewithal to not care about any of that because we rely only upon you for our business, the core of it. We've expanded now.

We added the Matt Stoller collaboration that dropped over the weekend. I was stunned by how many of you watched it. I love that. I mean, we're continuing to find people like him. We're going to continue to grow. We've branched out. Our clips are now on Instagram, on TikTok, to find people like him. We're going to continue to grow. We've branched out. Our clips are now on Instagram, on TikTok, to my own chagrin. But, you know.

You have to exist in the society as it is. Yes, I critique society and I exist in society. So what are we supposed to do for our Gen Z fan base? You can go and follow us there. Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, all of that. But you guys, premium subscriptions at the end of the day, are the people who fund us. Who enable us to bring you both the Stollers of the world, the Abramsons, and to just take the stands that we feel genuinely 100%. You will always know that that's where we're coming from, not from any other influence. So thank you all, and we really appreciate you.

Love you guys so much, and we will see you back here tomorrow. Have you ever thought about going voiceover? I'm Hope Woodard, a comedian, creator, and seeker of male validation. I'm also the girl behind Boy Sober, the movement that exploded in 2024. You might hear that term and think it's about celibacy. But to me, Boy Sober is about understanding yourself outside of sex and relationships. It's flexible, it's customizable, and it's a personal process. Singleness is not a waiting room. You are actually at the party right now.

Let me hear it. Listen to VoiceOver on the iHeartRadio app, Sam, luckily, it's You're Not the Father Week on the OK Storytime podcast, so we'll find out soon. This author writes, My father-in-law is trying to steal the family fortune worth millions from my son, even though it was promised to us. He's trying to give it to his irresponsible son, but I have DNA proof that could get the money back. Hold up. They could lose their family and millions of dollars? Yep. Find out how it ends by listening to the OK Storytime podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Camp Shane, one of America's longest running

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