The Adam Mockler Show - Joe Rogan Slowly Realizes Elon Musk SCREWED US ALL

Episode Date: May 31, 2025

Adam Mockler with MeidasTouch Network breaks down Donald Trump's two buddies, Joe Rogan and Elon Musk talking about DOGE cuts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

All right, I'm excited for this. I want to show you all this clip of Joe Rogan talking to singer-songwriter Bono about USAID on his show. Now, for a little bit of backstory, this clip has been going viral in right-wing maga-circles for all of the wrong reasons. They are splicing it up dishonestly and trying to claim that Bono has no clue what he's talking about in regards to USAID and the consequences of slashing it when everything he says is correct. In fact, right-wingers had to dishonestly edit this clip so he wasn't able to make his full point, which is, of course, what MAGA has to do to keep their followers tucked away and away from reality. So we're going to break down this clip. We're going to break down what they say.

And I'm going to show you some of the charts and studies supporting Bono's correct claim that the slashing, the rapid cutting of USAID has led to an estimated 300,000 deaths. So without further ado, let's jump in. with Joe Rogan and singer-songwriter Bono talking about USAID. Just recent report, it's not proven, but their surveillance enough suggests 300,000 people have already died from just this cutoff,

this hard cut of USAID. So there's food rotting in boats, in warehouses. There is, this will fuck you off. will not be happy, no American will, but there is, I think it's, 50,000 tons of food that are stored in Djibouti, South Africa, Dubai, and wait for it, Houston, Texas. And that is rotting rather than going to Gaza, rather than going to Sudan, because the people who know the codes are for the warehouse, are fired, they're gone. And so this, I don't know, I just, it's, I'm, what do you think?

What, what is, what is that? That's, that's not America, is it? Well, it's not America. And everything he said there was incredibly true. Now, when the right wingers posted this video, they didn't post that full clip. There were certain parts that were left out. So I made sure to seek out the full conversation, the full clip I went and I searched, and I found out exactly when they were talking about this.

And then I fact checked it. And Bono is completely. right with everything he says there. In fact, he is extra right. If you read this article, Brooke Nichols, a Boston University infectious disease mathematical modeler and health economist has developed a tracker that attempts to fill the gap of wondering, what are the effects of this? As of Monday, the model showed about 96,000 adults and 200,000 children have died because of this admin's cutbacks for funding and for aid groups and organizations across the globe. You can see the tracker. Death caused by

funding discontinuation, child deaths up to 206,000, adult deaths, 98,000, deaths per hour, 100, and it keeps increasing by the hour by the minute. So everything Bono said there was right. Now, of course, this is a mathematical model based on sample groups. It's not going to be, these numbers aren't exactly perfect, but. Well, they're throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Right. Right. This is the problem. The problem is, for sure, there have been, a lot of organizations that do tremendous good all throughout the world. Also, for sure, it was a money laundering operation. For sure, there was no oversight. For sure, billions of dollars are missing. In fact, trillions that are unaccounted for, that were sent off into various,

they don't even know where, because there's no receipts. The way Elon must describe that he said, if any of this was done... I have a few problems. I'll go back a few seconds so you can keep listening. But I have a few problems with what he said already. There were no receipts. Joe Rogan even points that out. With a lot of these transactions, Elon Musk was enabled to provide any evidence that this was a money laundering scheme. The only evidence we would have are the words of Elon Musk and the people around him. And like, I'm not even being cheeky here. Elon Musk was deep in a drug addiction. I'm not going to use his sources for USAID. But secondly, the question you want to be asking is what's the return on investment or what's the trade-off? Obviously, any level of corruption

is not okay, right? But if there is $10 million of money laundering happening and then $400 million going towards stopping children with cancer from dying in like Mumbai or whatever the hell you want to say, right? And we cut all $410 million and say we cut waste, fraud, and abuse, you are doing more harm than good. The return on investment will be negative. because what happens when four years down the road, we have to actually start doing care in Mumbai or some sort of disease begins to spread because our preventative measures couldn't take care of it and then it costs us $900 million or it costs us $6 billion in the form of COVID. The point is sometimes these preventative measures provide a return on investment and just nuking

all of it will be more expensive in the long run. In the long run, it won't be more expensive tomorrow. It won't be more expensive next week. but in the long run, these things do come back. Where? Because there's no receipts. The way Elon must describe that he said, if any of this was done by a public company, the company would be delisted and the executives would be in prison. But in the United States, this is a standard.

The United States government is not a public company with a top-down CEO. And Biden left office when it was clear that Trump won in the 73 days, they spent $93 billion. dollars from the Department of Energy on just radical loans, just throwing money into places. And there's no oversight, no receipts. Like the whole thing is, there's a lot of fraud, a lot of money laundering. But also, we help the world.

And when you're talking about making wells for people in the Congo to get fresh water, when you're talking about food and medicine to places that don't have access, like, Like, no way that should have been cut out. And that should have been clear before they make these radical cuts. Like, there's got to be a way to keep aid and not have fraud. And you can't say, we're going to kill everything so that there's no fraud. But then you're killing all the good and you're doing it without letting anybody know that's going to happen. So no one's...

Exactly. See, here's a thing. That little, the 22nd tangent that Joe Rogan just went on talking about how you can't overextend the cut. is number one, what I was saying, but number two, Maga cut that part out. They posted this clip on Twitter, and they tagged poor Bono repeatedly. They said, ha, you got owned, you got owned. But they cut that part out of Joe Rogan conceding the point. So now there's a clip with tens of millions of views that Elon Musk himself responded to,

can I remind you? Elon Musk respond into the edited version of this and said, Bono is such an idiot. I can't believe he said this on Joe Rogan's show. when Joe Rogan agrees with him at the end of the clip. Let me play this one more time. No way that should have been cut out. And that should have been clear before they make these radical cuts.

Like there's got to be a way to keep aid and not have fraud. And you can't say we're going to kill everything so that there's no fraud. But then you're killing all the good and you're doing it without letting anybody know it's going to happen. So no one's, it's not like they had three years to prepare. Let's build a new infrastructure. Let's make sure that everything's set up. They want to change and they want to change quickly and do the nature of American politics. They have about two years before the midterms, right?

So everything has to get done as quickly as possible. You have to show a growth in GDP. You have to show that the economy is booming again under these ideas. Make America first. Terrorists for the world. Bring back American manufacturers. All these things are contradictory. You want to bring back American manufacturing, but then you want to remove the income tax with tariffs

on the world, but then you want the debt to be the same, but then he's going to increase the debt by $5.3 trillion, you know, at least Joe Rogan seemed to have stumbled upon the fact that USAID is very, very helpful at the end of the day. Here's the thing. If we take a step back, yes, there are a lot of conspiracy theories that Joe Rogan is floating, but it is good that he was able to acknowledge at least a little bit of the gray or the nuance that USAID is very, very helpful in many, many ways for other countries. Again, the question is, what's the return on investments. It's so annoying because Elon Musk will look at $22 million going towards disease prevention in a South African country and then slash that without realizing that, yes, you just

saved $22 million, but you may have just cost us $400 million in the long term when this disease ends up at our doorstep. And this happens over and over. Many such cases, let's continue. In this mad rush to do it all as quickly as possible while cutting out as much waste as possible. Oh, yeah. And then regarding the point of doing this all as much as possible, you're sprinting towards the midterms, then you're not making the government more efficient. If you're cutting things that don't give you a return on investment, you're not making the government more efficient. If you're slashing and shuddering entire agencies without even looking at the receipts and then admitting afterwards, you don't even know if there were receipts, which is why Joe Rogan was like, there were no receipts at all, then that is not making the government more efficient. Elon Musk, by the way, he's had 40 different regulatory investigations into his companies, pause. since he took office, saving him tens of billions of dollars, but he can't even demonstrate that he saved us, any money whatsoever. They claimed they were going to save $2 trillion, lowered it to $1 trillion, then announced $150 billion in savings,

and then the ledger was so riddled with errors we can't even verify $50 billion. So Joe Rogan then continues to talk about the budget. Mad rush to do it all as quickly as possible while cutting out as much waste as possible. Yeah. But the ironic thing is, is even though Elon Musk has proposed all these things and the Doge committee has proposed all these things, they've made no cuts in terms of the budget. They've cut nothing. They vote against it. It's such a tiny part. I mean, if it's big government or whatever people want to shrink,

I get the instinct. But this, the life-saving part, it's like the little finger of the giant. Right, exactly. I mean, and I've met all these people. And I'm sure there's part of it, you know, there's, I think about 10% of it goes to things like governance and, you know, human rights organizations. You might say that's political and we shouldn't be involved in that. And there's reforms, I imagine, that might have been necessary. But do you have the reforms? But to destroy, to vandal.

I mean, it felt like with glee, these life support systems were being pulled out of the walls. And I was reading today, you know, it's like, I think it's in Christianity today, and they're just talking, I think it's called Christian Relief, one of these organizations. And they're dealing with malnourished kids. And they are having the conversation now about we don't have the funds. We have to choose which child to pull off the IVs. And it just seems to me, like, a kind of, I don't know if evil is a strong word, too strong words, but what we know about pure evil is... It's not strong enough in this case, and I'm sorry to pause it,

but everything Bono said is absolutely true. There is one point that he makes that is super key. He says, you can have reforms without just yanking out life support. And even if we're going to be charitable and say that, there are reforms to be made, which sure, within the U.S. government, there are reforms to be made. You can do that by asking with the NIH, for example, the National Institute of Health. You can go to the director of each agency and ask them for receipts and for some sort of audit on what their agency has done. And then you meet with them one-on-one and you have to have

them justify. What is this expense for? You better be able to justify what this is for, and hey, maybe they have a good justification. And then you go through and you are surgical. If you're Elon Musk, you have access to so many resources, you have access to so many top-tier employees, yet you choose 19-year-olds to use AI to sift through data and shudder entire agencies. Yeah, I'm sorry that we're a little bit skeptical of your overall intentions, and let's continue. But what we know about pure evil is it rejoices in the debts, you know, of the squandering of human life. And by the way, on Twitter afterwards, everybody was calling Bono an idiot. Everyone on Twitter,

including Elon Musk, called him an idiot. Someone said Bono got completely punked on Joe Rogan or that he got owned. This seems like a solid, compassionate, empathetic conversation. Anybody who's looking at it through the lens of somebody getting owned on Twitter is likely pure evil themselves. I'm going to go ahead and leave it at that. You know, I get comments like this one. Keep up the informative news, Adam. This needs to be amplified. If you want to help amplify it and join the crew, make sure you drop a like. Make sure you subscribe below. We're going to be building out a network of different voices. It's for everybody and anybody. The network is for everybody. But we're going to be having a wide array of young voices, of people who have been on the field, who have worked in

DC. It's going to be amazing. Stick around. Make sure you subscribe. And I'll see you in the next one. Peace out.