The David Pakman Show - 10/13/22: Fetterman Stroke-Shaming, More Herschel Walker Lying

Episode Date: October 13, 2022

-- On the Show: -- Douglas Rushkoff, media theorist, Professor at CUNY Queens College, and author of the new book "Survival of the Richest: Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires," joins David to discuss billionaires, capitalism, and much more. Get the book: https://amzn.to/3rQmlTZ -- Right-wing media are now going after Democratic Pennsylvania Senate candidate John Fetterman for his use of closed captioning for interviews after his stroke -- Republican Georgia Senate candidate Herschel Walker's own mother is now calling his claim to Cherokee ancestry a lie -- Failed former President Donald Trump told an employee to move documents at Mar-a-Lago after the now-infamous subpoena was received, and there is reportedly surveillance footage -- A judge rules that Donald Trump must sit for a deposition in the rape case against him -- Infowars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is ordered to pay nearly $1 billion in a number of settlements from the latest defamation trial in Connecticut -- The David Pakman Show has been banned from posting content to TikTok due to disastrous automated content moderation and mass reporting from right wingers -- Tulsi Gabbard's new show logo is eerily similar to the David Pakman Show logo -- Voicemail caller reports that her 81-year-old Canadian grandmother watches The David Pakman Show daily -- On the Bonus Show: "Stop the steal" people are training poll "observers" for 2022, Dennis Prager says there's no secular argument against adult incest, Tulsi Gabbard plans to campaign for Republican, much more... 👕 Rhone: Code PAKMAN saves you 20% at https://www.rhone.com/PAKMAN 🌿 Sunset Lake CBD: Get 20% OFF using code PAKMAN at https://sunsetlakecbd.com 👩‍❤️‍👨 Try the Paired App FREE for 7 days at https://paired.com/pakman 💪 Athletic Greens is offering FREE year-supply of Vitamin D at https://athleticgreens.com/pakman -- Become a Supporter: http://www.davidpakman.com/membership -- Subscribe on YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/thedavidpakmanshow -- Subscribe to Pakman Live: https://www.youtube.com/pakmanlive -- Subscribe to Pakman Finance: https://www.youtube.com/pakmanfinance -- Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/davidpakmanshow -- Like us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/davidpakmanshow -- Leave us a message at The David Pakman Show Voicemail Line (219)-2DAVIDP

Speaker 1 Speaker 1 Well, my friends, today is such an important show that I actually got a haircut for today's show. The right wing is now attacking John Fetterman for his stroke, and yet they continue to say absolutely nothing about Herschel Walker's complete inability to think or speak or coherently explain his views on even a single issue, making it very obvious that this isn't really about John Fetterman's condition. So let's back up and kind of reset the stage in Pennsylvania. There's a very important Senate race. The Republican nominee is television doctor Mehmet Oz. The Democratic nominee is the lieutenant governor John Fetterman. John Fetterman had a stroke some months ago, and as part of his recovery, he is having auditory processing issues.

And as a result, we learned recently during an NBC interview that when he is interviewed, he uses closed captioning, meaning that there is a voice to text mechanism which shows him on a screen what he is being asked to kind of contextualize that. Here's a report explaining it and an interview he gave using that technology. Another pivotal Senate race in Pennsylvania, now considered a toss up. Our Dasha Burns spoke with Democrat John Fetterman in his first in person sit down interview since he suffered a stroke. And Dasha, this was not a typical candidate interview. No, Lester, because of his stroke, Fetterman's campaign required closed captioning technology for this interview to essentially read our questions as we asked them. And Lester,

in small talk before the interview without captioning, it wasn't clear he was understanding our conversation. Can voters stress that you will be able to do this job on day one? Yeah, of course. This is Pennsylvania Democratic Senate candidate John Fetterman's first in-person sit-down interview since a stroke sidelined him from the campaign trail for months. That auditory processing where I'll hear someone speaking, but sometimes I'll be able to be precise on what exactly that they're saying. I use captioning. His campaign sometimes I'll be able to be precise on what exactly that they're saying. I use captioning. His campaign required that he be allowed to use a transcription program on his computer during our interview. I always thought I was pretty empathetic,

emphatic. I think I was very, excuse me, empathetic. You know, that's an example of the stroke empathetic. All right. So you get the picture. Now, I am not going to pretend for a second that this is a non issue. What we are told by doctors is that this is not a cognitive issue of Fetterman understanding concepts, but that it is an auditory processing issue, which often takes time to get back to normal for someone who has suffered a stroke. In other words, it's turning the audio into meaningful messages in his brain. Now, the right many on the right are saying he should just withdraw immediately. And in fact, as if this is going to be a fair conversation, Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo had Fetterman's opponent, Mehmet Oz, on and she said the following. Well, it's also

very questionable to understand the need for this computer to be with him. And how is he going to make decisions about Pennsylvania and fight for the Pennsylvanian people if, in in fact he needs to have a device alongside him. So is this just all the time he needs that device or now, by the way, Maria Bartiromo can't even do a TV show without a teleprompter and an earpiece where producers can talk to her. So it's it's kind of a weird direction to go. Just during an interview. I don't understand.

No one knows. We've not been actually exposed to this before. It's the first in-person interview. Here we are, you know, less than a month before the election. And I've been asking John Fetterman to answer questions on the campaign trail. Initially he wasn't even on the campaign trail for the first couple of months. But answer questions from voters, answer questions from reporters while you're actually campaigning. That's what we normally do in a democracy.

And the concern, of course, is that if you don't ever leave your home and answer questions, we don't know the answers to the questions you're asking. All right. So this is the this is the approach that they're going with here. The reality is that while we can be concerned about Fetterman's recovery, Oz is so dangerous and so unqualified and so pathetic that, of course, Pennsylvania voters should still vote for John Fetterman. If indeed what we are being told by doctors about Fetterman's condition is wrong or his recovery goes in a different way than predicted, I'm thinking ahead many steps, but he could

resign and hopefully then Democratic Governor Josh Shapiro can select a replacement until the next election. Oz has no business even being in this race. And so there is really no choice to be made here. Now, here's Jon Fetterman's take on all this. Will you be releasing updated information from your doctor on your health before November 8th? I would say that if there was anything that changed or whatever, I absolutely would have updated that. Other than the progress that I've made, it's evident. I certainly not would have been able to sit in front of you back in May or in June or you know, or July, because they recovered the kind of recovery that I need

in order to be absolutely, whatever, getting better and better. And I think the ultimate kinds of transparency is to be in front of thousands of people on a stage, not using a teleprompter. Most often kinds of politicians use a teleprompter, but nobody wonders if he or she is able to do the job or anything like that. And it's simply about that's how that's the kind of campaign that I've run on. Speaker 1 So listen, we can all be honest and recognize that that this is not the same John Fetterman right now from before the stroke. We can also understand that there's not really a choice here where, oh, Fetterman had a stroke.

So we're going to vote for the completely clueless, unqualified hypocrite Mehmet Oz. That doesn't make any sense either. And the right very in a very contrived way talking about this in the context of Fetterman. But yet they don't even mention that Herschel Walker, the Republican candidate in Georgia, cannot speak, cannot think lies endlessly. And you can't tell if he's disoriented or deliberately lying or what they are total hypocrites. And if you are going to raise these questions about Fetterman now, where have you been for a year on Herschel Walker, who is an embarrassment to the mere concept of a candidacy? Let's talk a little bit about Herschel Walker next. Listen, Herschel Walker has been caught in another lie, this time by his own mother,

by his own mother. You might remember that one of Herschel Walker's kids, Christian Walker, turned against him and denounced him early last week, calling him a liar, calling him a hypocrite. Well, now Herschel Walker's mom is saying that story he told about being full blooded Cherokee Native American. That story absolutely isn't true. The Daily Beast reporting Herschel Walker's full blood Cherokee claim is news to his mom. Let's start with the video clip. This is from a couple of weeks ago. Here's what Herschel Walker had to say about his own supposed Native American ancestry. Because I tell you, I found something out. I found something out there.

I mean, I found something out there. I mean, I found something out. My mom just told me that my mom's grandmother was full blood Cherokee. So I'm Native American. I was like, oh, hello. So I'm I'm a I'm a super mud. I don't know what I am. But this was so funny.

This was so funny. I said, Mom, why never said anything to us? Yeah. So he found out that he's a full blood Native American. Turns out his mom has no idea what he's talking about. There is a very good Daily Beast article here, which let's see if I can pull up. We have gotten a very unfortunate paywall here all of a sudden. And I want to have this for us so that we can see it. His mother indicating she is not aware of such family history. If you check out the article, you see that Walker's mother, Christine, spoke to Huffington Post and said she has no idea

if an immediate ancestor was full blooded Cherokee. She said she grew up hearing stories about her father's mother being kin to the tribe, clarifying that her grandmother was believed to be related to Cherokee peoples in some way, but didn't know how doesn't know how far back the Cherokee heritage goes and has no further information. Herschel's Herschel Walker says, I'm full blood Cherokee. Recall that when Elizabeth Warren had actual stories in her family about being Native American, this is the treatment that she got. Because, you know, we're talking too soon. We got a year and a half left. It's like when I called Pocahontas, Pocahontas, I should have waited six months because she then went out and got that test. One thousand twenty fourth.

And I've always said I have more Indian blood in me than she has in her. And I have none. I have none. But it's more than she has. One thousand twenty. And this went on for months with Elizabeth Warren. But I brought it up too soon, so I don't talk about it anymore. But if she should be the candidate, which I tend to doubt,

but if she should be, we'll bring it up again. And I think it'll be very successful. One thousand twenty four. How about this? I was driving her crazy. So she went out and hired a guy to check the blood. I'm sure he had a lot of fun doing that. He checked her blood and found out that many, many, many, many, many, many years ago,

there could have been somebody and he could have been Indian. OK, so that persisted for months. Now, Herschel Walker just straight up lying. His own mother says, I have no idea what he's talking about within two weeks. And silence, silence from the very same Republicans who were saying, oh, Elizabeth Warren did something so wrong, stolen privilege and all these stolen benefits by claiming to be Native American, which, by the way, wasn't even true. The double standards. You know, I don't really care who's Native American. I don't really care about, you know, if there's if there's a cognitive issue or a health issue, whatever Fetterman Walker would just be consistent, guys. That's all I'm asking for. Just please

be consistent. Let me know your thoughts. Find me on Twitter at Deepakman. We will take a very brief break and be right back. I have a really tough time finding dress shirts I like. They're either uncomfortable or they're tight or they're loose or hot or itchy. And that's why it's been so great to discover the commuter shirts made by our fantastic sponsor, Roan. Roan's commuter shirt is a reinvention of the men's dress shirt. It's the most comfortable dress shirt I've worn. Roan's comfortable four way stretch fabric provides the breathability and the flexibility that leaves you free to enjoy what life throws your way could be a long day at work, could be brunch with the family.

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daily bonus show, the commercial free audio and video streams of the show and exclusive members only town halls where I open the phone lines and take questions from you, from the members. Sign up at join Pacman dot com. We're continuing to learn in fits and starts and spurts and bits and pieces. I don't know more and more about the extraordinarily bizarre times at Mar-a-Lago related to this FBI search warrant, the raid, the documents, et cetera. And the latest from The Washington Post is that Donald Trump told a worker move boxes of documents after the government subpoena was received, which is another indicator, if true, that Donald Trump knew exactly what was where and was specifically involved in trying to hide documents from authorities, key witness and security camera footage.

There's video offer evidence of Trump's actions after the government subpoena. People familiar say, look at this. A Trump employee has told federal agents about moving boxes of documents at Mar-a-Lago at the specific direction of the former president. According to people familiar with the investigation who say the witness account combined with security camera footage offers key evidence of Donald Trump's behavior as investigators sought the return of classified material. The witness description and footage described to The Washington Post offer the most direct account to date of Trump's actions and instructions leading up to the FBI search on August 8th. Where agents were looking for evidence of potential crimes, the people familiar with the investigation said agents said agents have gathered witness accounts indicating that this is the key element. After Trump advisers received the subpoena in May for any classified documents remaining

at Mar-a-Lago, Trump told people move boxes to his residence at the property. That description of events was corroborated by security camera footage. There is video which showed people moving the boxes, said the people who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation. No comment from the Justice Department. No comment from Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich, other than the Biden administration has weaponized law enforcement and fabricated a document hoax in a desperate attempt to retain political power. Folks, this is more evidence of obstruction. This is Trump trying to hide his alleged violations

of the Espionage Act. This was immediately called fake news. And then, of course, it's oh, we have the footage. We have the video footage. We have the surveillance footage showing a staffer moving boxes out of the storage room and moving them to another location. So there is really one major story here. And many dozens of you every single day write to me and say, David, there's sort of like tons of evidence that this

guy obviously should be indicted. We're not saying imprisoned. We're saying evidence for an indictment and then go through the process and determine whether there is guilt. The real story here to me continues to be the DOJ, Department of Justice, FBI, law enforcement, federal law enforcement investigating all of this. They have an almost absurd amount of evidence at this point in time to justify an indictment. Doesn't guarantee a guilty verdict. It doesn't guarantee necessarily even a guilty plea. But if this were anyone other than a former president, there is such extensive evidence that there would have

been an indictment already. Why is there no indictment? Is Merrick Garland not actually willing to indict? We had this investigation in New York, which we covered. And if you've been watching the show, may ring a bell in which two of the investigators resigned. And of course, when this happened, the Trumpists all came out of the woodwork and they had the same story ready to go. And that story was, oh, the investigators resigned because they realized it's a witch hunt and there's no evidence. That was wrong. The resignations were actually quite the opposite. The investigators resigned because despite all of the evidence they were finding, they

believed that there was not actually a willingness from higher ups to indict Trump. They felt the investigators felt as though their work was completely in vain, that they were doing the work. They were finding the evidence, and yet they would bring it, bring it, bring it to their bosses. And they sensed a total lack of willingness from their bosses to actually go through with an indictment. They said, what the hell are we doing here?

There were working in vain. We're working for nothing. And they resigned at this point in time. And we will see as we're recording today's show. The January 6th committee hearing is taking place, scheduled to start momentarily. You will probably know more about it than I know now by the time today's episode goes live. The amount of evidence is really piling up here. Are we going to get an indictment? And remember, I'm actually for law and order. So when I say, are we going to get an indictment? I don't go to lock anybody up. I don't go to railroad anyone

with charges. What I go to is there seems to be enough evidence for an indictment. That's the step I'm talking about. The right, on the other hand, claims to be for law and order. And yet they say lock up Hillary. Lock up Joe Biden. Lock up Hunter Biden. Lock up Antifa. Lock up BLM. lock up people who haven't even been charged. And in many cases who aren't even under investigation, that's not law and order. Law and order is look at all this evidence against Trump. It's time to indict. That's where we are. Another interesting story, legal story related to the failed former president that I briefly want to talk about. A judge has ruled that Donald Trump indeed must give evidence

in this defamation lawsuit related to alleged rape by Donald Trump. The Hill reports a federal judge has denied former President Trump's motion to pause the proceedings of a defamation suit against him from a woman who has accused him of rape while appeals over the case play out, setting him up for a deposition next week. This is I know Trump was recently deposed by Letitia James. This is another deposition in another case. Now, as a reminder, this is not a criminal rape case. This is a lawsuit for defamation related to the things Donald Trump said about a rape accuser. E. Jean Carroll, U.S. District Judge, writes The Hill. Lewis Kaplan ruled yesterday that Trump's argument didn't meet the legal threshold

required for a stay to be issued. Trump has been pushing for the U.S. to be substituted in E. Jean Carroll's lawsuit against him because the comments Trump made denying her claim and criticizing her happened when he was president. Trump's argument is I shouldn't be the defendant in this lawsuit for the things I said about E. Jean Carroll, including if I recall correctly, that she's not really his type, as if that's a reason rather than saying I don't rape people. He said she's not my type. Doesn't make sense that I would have raped her. Insane. He says he

was president at the time and thus really the federal government should be the defendant rather than him. The Hill notes the details of the case here. Carol accused Trump of raping her at a Manhattan department store in the 90s. Trump has countered by accusing Carol of lying and making remarks criticizing her appearance. Yeah. Trump requested that proceedings in the defamation case that Carol filed be paused while the D.C. Court of Appeals weighs whether Trump was acting in his official capacity. When I said she was too ugly to rape, I was functioning in an official capacity. So the federal government should be the defendant. That's where we are in 2022. At this point in time,

Kaplan wrote in his ruling, the court could rule either way on the question. But Trump gave no reason for him to conclude that the ruling would be in his favor. He also found that Trump failed to show a meaningful, meaningful threat of irreparable injury if a stay is not put in place. Listen, you can't sue me for defamation because I was acting in my official capacity as president at that time. Now, what do we expect he will do? If indeed he is deposed, probably plead the fifth at his last deposition with Letitia James, Trump pled the fifth about 400 times. Trump previously has said only the mob pleads the fifth. You don't plead the fifth if you're innocent. His own experience with the deposition changed his mind on that. Surprisingly, the important thing to remember is that as a defendant in a civil suit, pleading the fifth

may not be as useful to him as it can be in a criminal case. I heard from a criminal defense attorney who said, you know. In this is a criminal defense attorney who wrote to me and said, David, sir, with tears in his eyes, he said, David, sir, when I defend people criminally, juries are given instructions that the lack of testimony from my client or pleading the fifth cannot be used to draw negative inferences or to point towards guilt. You can't hold against them that they don't testify or that they pled the fifth in a civil lawsuit. Trump or whoever pleading the fifth or refusing to answer questions can be used to draw a negative inference and theoretically as part of a guilty

verdict. We're thinking many steps ahead, but an important difference in terms of civil versus criminal. Now, I know many of you are wondering, what about the criminal aspect of this? To be honest, I don't know where that stands. I know that there are questions as to statute of limitations. This alleged event happened during the 90s and a number of other obstacles. But what we are dealing with right now is a civil suit for defamation, wherein I'm sort of breaking this down to its its kernel of truth. Trump sort of said E. Jean Carroll is not attractive enough for me to actually have raped. She's not my type, which is a crazy thing to say. We'll have more on this and other stories from today on our Instagram.

You can find that at David Pakman show and we will be right back after this short break. One of our sponsors is paired the app for couples every day paired gives you and your partner questions, quizzes, games to have fun, to stay connected, to deepen your conversations and get to know each other better. What's great about it is you don't even have to be in the same room, especially with the baby right now. My girlfriend and I are quite busy and paired really helped us to stay connected. You get a daily question to answer. You can't see your partner's answer until you answer yourself and their questions about everything, relationship, life, intimacy, other things. And all of the exercises were developed by academic psychologists and expert relationship

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That's P.A.I.R.E.D. dot com slash Pacman for a free trial. The info is in the podcast notes. It's great to have back on the program today. Douglas Rushkoff, who's a media theorist, professor at CUNY Queens College and also author of the new book Survival of the Richest Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires, which I recently read and very much enjoyed. Really great having you on today. I appreciate it.

It's good to see you. So the kind of jumping off point of the book is that you are invited by some billionaires to meet with them. And the meeting sort of goes a little bit differently maybe than you anticipated, where they want advice not so much about the technology of how to survive a possible impending mass catastrophic event, but more sort of like sociocultural and psychological questions about like, how do I prevent my security force from turning against me and sort of like taking all my food and kind of this type of thing? And one of the big points you make in the book, which I find interesting, is that

these billionaires are now looking to sort of insulate themselves from the consequences of the very system that they used to enrich themselves in the first place. Talk first, just kind of generally about this space that exists, this sort of catastrophe and disaster planning space. And is it only billionaires or is it also like the hundred millionaires that are into this? Give us a sense of the lay of the land. Speaker 3 Well, it's interesting. I mean. These guys, in some ways, these guys give a bad name to preppers everywhere. You know, I've had a lot of preppers since doing this book

and real preppers are generally involved in strengthening their communities. They understand that when you have community resilience, when you've got local farms, when you've supported that, everyone's going to do better. And these guys are not preppers in that sense. They've got such a go-it-alone, self-sovereign, individual, extreme libertarian understanding of technology and money and identity that they wither without catastrophe. They want a private island. They want a little seasteading raft of their own. They want their own country, their own government, their own social network, their own virtual womb that can care for them. So oddly enough, I started to look at their disaster prep and catastrophe mindset more as a way of justifying what they've been doing all along. You know, there's, I just read a piece by Cory Doctorow about Epson printers and how

Epson makes a printer that bricks itself after it prints out a certain number of pages. It just bricks itself. And there's no really good reason for it, except that they want to sell another printer, you know, and they justify it that, oh, well, the parts are going to be worn out by then. So we spare the user the hassle of having a broken printer and we just lock it, you know. But there's a guy, right? There's and I'm assuming it's a guy. There's a guy at Epson printers somewhere thinking, well, yes, this means I'm going to have to send more kids into the mines in Africa to get the rare earth metals to make another printer. And yes, we're going to have to take that existing printer and just chuck it onto a landfill where it's going

to leach toxic chemicals. And yes, I am actually shortening the amount of time between now and whatever catastrophic climate event takes down our civilization. But the margin I'm making selling these extra printers must be making me enough money so I can get my kids to a Rudolf Steiner school and get a goat share and live in a private farm somewhere and be insulated from this, that I can stay that much ahead. And that's really what it's always been. These guys with an exit strategy mentality needing to stay just one or two steps ahead of the rest of the investors so they can get out with their carpet bag before the thing comes down.

Yeah. And in the book you refer to the mindset, which I think incorporates some some of these ideas that you're talking about here. You know, one of the things that I I've read is, you know, the prepper, the sort of like normal preppers and then the billionaires you're talking about here and then like everybody else, whatever. Some of the advice I've read kind of is summarized as follows, which is, listen, it makes sense to plan for like a 10 to 14 day cataclysm of some kind, food, water, maybe electricity with a generator. You know, that makes sense. Beyond that, it is so truly difficult to really set yourself up to survive what we might call long term in such an event that it's not even really

worth thinking about. That is increasingly something I'm reading from a lot of these. Right. But when you say that, though, the implication of that. And that's what the implication of that is. That means that becoming a billionaire, even without the catastrophe, is not the way to make yourself the most safe and resilient overall. Exactly. Exactly. And so I guess when is it that the billionaires think that doesn't apply to them because of the amount of money that they have? It's that the billionaires are aware that they've spent the last 10 or 20 years of their lives externalizing so much harm to the rest of the world that they are afraid of it coming back at them like karma. You know, most of these guys, they are unconscious tech bro billionaires for the first 10 or 20 years. And then they go down

to Burning Man and do some ayahuasca and realize, oh, my God, the planet is crying out to me. She's dying. You know, they have the same realization. But then on the G5 back to San Jose, they're like, OK, now how do I protect myself from her? Like the angry girlfriend that you haven't called in a long time. The planet is coming for revenge. So the question that I found really interesting from the book, which I already mentioned, is this idea of I can do everything right as a billionaire with every resource available to me. But if we really get to a cataclysm, my security team might just turn against me and be like, let's kill this one guy and we can keep all the food and we can survive. You talk in the book about, well, the way to

preempt that is probably to for the years leading up to this event, build relationships and cooperate and, you know, make it so that they would see you as one of them, so to speak, and not not try to do that. Is that really are they satisfied with that advice? No, because they understand what that advice is, is really a Trojan horse to try to break down their mentality. Right. I said to them at that at that talk, I said, well, the way to make sure your head of security doesn't kill you in the bunker is pay for his daughter's bat mitzvah today. Right. You know, and I meant that in some ways as a little Jewish joke, but they would have

to do more than pay for that one guy's daughter's bat mitzvah. And while you're at it, think about your workers. And while you're at that, think about the people living in the community around. Think about the the if you're a Facebook executive, think about the tent village right outside corporate headquarters. Who are those people? Right. And how do you look at them not as a city problem, but as a human problem? You know, not something to bulldoze out of there, but something to actually address and look at the actual impact of your company on the world. So if they started thinking that way, then there might not be a catastrophe for them to hide from at all. Right. But they're attached to it. And that's partly I

mean, that's really what the book looks at is how to capitalism and the history of technology and science and this kind of dominator mindset. How do they all combine to create this kind of colonial vision where all they can do is operate one level above the rest of us? You know, they kind of go from zero to one, as Peter Thiel would say, or go meta, as Zuckerberg would say, or do derivatives of derivatives, as a finance guy would say say it's always one level up. That's what what Stuart Brand said back in the 70s. You know, we are as gods and we may as well get good at it. And the tech bros have taken that as as kind of a gospel truth. Is your sense that these folks you've talked to are more convinced that such a world changing event is coming than other

groups? Or is it simply that they are more focused on using their resources to prepare themselves for it? They're more convinced, actually. And that's you know, it's funny. After I wrote the first article on this book, I've gotten calls from lots and lots of people in interesting places. And one of them is a giant hedge fund, which is a a hedge fund that's positioned for global calamity. It's got a few billion dollars in there. And they showed me their PowerPoint with charts from the World Bank and the climatologists of this and like, okay, in the next 10 years, these regions will become unlivable. 10 years after that, these ones will be the only ones that have fertile soil. This is why we recommend buying land in Northern Canada, Siberia, Greenland, and this part of Antarctica. And like,

oh my God. And so if they're being pitched those kinds of things that we are not pitched, and they're so realistic, and I suppose probable, right, because people with real money do real studies, then I think they are sort of more aware of it than we are. And I think they understand that they're more causal to it than we are. We're just eating our food and throwing out some plastic bags occasionally and feeling guilty that we know the recycling actually uses more energy than it would make to make a new plastic bottle or whatever, you know, where, but these guys, it's like, oh no, you're doing major, you're doing things at scale, you know, and you're doing things at scale with a business model that looks at all the damage as an externality to your business. And you're aware that those externalities

are growing big enough to impact your life and the lives of your kids. In the book, you talk about technology that some see maybe naively as maybe a way out of some of the problems that we've created for ourselves. You talk a little bit about solar panels and electric vehicles, I think. And now I'm not sure if I'm if I'm if this is from the book or from articles you've written. But in any case, you've expressed that you are less optimistic about some of these technologies being able to kind of meet our energy needs in a truly eco friendly way. I think there's a lot of legitimacy to that. The carbon footprint of solar panels, which degrade over time. And then what do we do with them? Rare earth minerals required for electric vehicle batteries. What do you do with the battery has reached the end of

its usable life, et cetera. Maybe I'm naive, but isn't there some degree to which those are problems that can be significantly improved upon by by engineering and the technology simply improving from where it is today that will change the scale and actually make those technologies genuinely game changers? Maybe not the solution, but significantly significant improvements. Oh. Moving away from fossil fuels and combustion is a necessary part of the planet. Planetary civilization moving toward sustainability. OK. Saying over the next 10 years, we're going to convert every car to an electric car and every

house to a solar panel house in order to get to zero carbon emissions by 2030 is crazy because the amount of stuff that we would dig up in order to do that with the amount of the factories we'd have to open to build all those cars and do all that stuff and build all those batteries would destroy us faster than anything else. So that's my volunteer fire alarm. The volunteer fire department in our town is old tech. That's what we're hearing now. They send that alarm and then they check their pages to see where's the fire and they go. It's community, right? You got to love it. You got to love it. And they're volunteers. It's going to go one more time. They do it twice, like if people woke up and didn't hear how many beeps it was to know if they're active. But these are all great. But the amount of energy we're using now is, you know, a great energy theorist named Nate Huggins talks about this. It's like a pulse of energy.

We're not using energy in like a way. We're using like explosions of energy in order to power these cities. The hundreds of thousands of years of stored energy that gets burnt in like two days is massive and unsustainable. So we also need to reduce the amount of energy we use. And that's not shockingly hard. We built the American landscape around the needs of the automobile industry, where people have to drive to get to work and all. So there are many, many ways to reduce our energy footprint, that of our corporations and that of us as individuals. And it involves

a lot of economic rejiggering, too. If you've got an oil industry that's depending on resource depletion and you've got all these pensioners who are dependent on the oil industry or an S&P 500 or GDP that's depending on the growth of companies that are destroying us. You kind of do have to do more than the physical reengineering of energy production, but the the code engineering of our economy, you know, and that's where it gets scary. Yeah. You mentioned GDP. So, again, I don't remember exactly where you wrote this, but I've read something you wrote about, you know, a criticism of 401ks and the sort of stock market

as a pyramid scheme, I think was the analogy that that you used. I'm there's this interview I remember at some point Noam Chomsky gave where he was sort of like confronted. And I use that in scare quotes. He was confronted about the fact that despite all of his criticisms of all these different types of companies, his like retirement accounts are invested in the same kind of index funds that everybody uses. And his response was something like, well, yeah, I mean, what you want me to keep the money under my mattress or something along those lines? Are you despite your view on the impossibility of indefinite growth based on GDP growth on a planet with limited

resources, your criticism of 401k, et cetera. Are you invested in the same stuff? Some. Yeah. I mean, that was the main thing. I'm in a group called Equitable Enterprise at Institute for the Future in there, like in Palo Alto. And they were talking about all these new models and all this. And that's what I brought up in the first meeting. I said, what if we all took 50% of our retirement savings and invested them locally or in land trusts or in other things? And people are like, well, I won't really. We've got to make structural change.

And I was like, yeah, you've got to make structural change and all that. But what if we, by example, did it and then encouraged everybody else to take just half of their retirement savings? Let's say we could only, they kept saying it was just such a small measure. I said, what if we could only move a couple of trillion dollars into local economics? You know, what would that do? It would be massive, a massive amount of change. One of the main things I'm looking at is how do we, and I hate using words like scale, but how do we make it really easy for people, instead of selecting S&P index fund, to select local index billion small businesses fund?

How do we invest in land trusts? You know, you're going to get different kinds of returns. You're going to end up getting dividend returns and earnings returns rather than the capital gains of selling some massively thing. You're not going to get 100x returns on restoring local businesses, at least not for that long. You know, you might at the beginning as we recover a local economy. But, you know, that's what I'm looking at. So I'm looking at lots of I mean, I'm invested in land trusts and there's some local farming things, you know, funds where you you you lend money to farmers at a low interest rather than a bad thing. And just because I earned money doesn't mean I'm allowed to have my money be worth more later. I'll save up money for my retirement, but I also then,

in addition to wanting to get to just hold my money, certainly at the rate of inflation. I want to create a community that will support me when I'm older so I'm not entirely dependent on my cash to take care of me when I'm old. And that means engendering a different kind of society. And you walk around Europe, you see old people, they're living in the house with their kids. They're part of the social fabric. They're out there on the stoop at night playing with the babies and taking care of the little ones so the husband and wife can go down to the movies and the teenagers can make out over there. It's like an interdependent society. That's what a social economy is. That's what Marx was talking about, not some big top-down

central government organization. He was like, no, no, no. Economics is social. It's people doing things for one another. And maybe it's not on the ledger. Maybe there's not a Dow or a block chain keeping track of whether grandma took care of the kids for two hours. So now someone's going to give her a bath. You don't need to put that on the block. Last thing, just because you mentioned it, is the entire crypto thing over? No, the entire crypto thing is not over it. It may have gone through. It may have gone through the dotcom bust equivalent of 1999, 2000. And then we'll see. You know, there was there were two possibilities after the dotcom bust. We kind of got Blogger and Friendster

and Napster and some interesting things. But then we also got MySpace and Facebook and Instagram and the ucky ones won, right? Rather than the kind of pro-social creative ones. I'd be interested to see if the young crypto community that I'm still aware of, the kids who are making NFTs for good reasons, not to become millionaires, but to support their art, and the kids who are building DAOs, you know, DAOs that help other people make DAOs in order to figure out the governance structure of their organization or their community. If those people win out, then crypto could come back in a positive way. If crypto comes back as you know what it was before, which is a way for assholes to speculate on abstract assets, then, you know, all is lost. The latest book is Survival of the Richest Escape Fantasies of the Tech Billionaires.

We've been speaking with the book's author, media theorist and professor Douglas Rushkoff. Always great having you on. Really appreciate it. Oh, I appreciate what you do. I often have a very hectic schedule and I don't always have the time to plan the exact nutrition of all of my meals. But our sponsor, Athletic Greens, just makes it easy to make sure I'm getting the nutrients I want. I've been using it for almost a year now, and it's great. AG1 by Athletic Greens is a delicious plant based blend of 75 high quality vitamins, minerals and probiotics from whole food sources. If I have just one small scoop of AG one a day, I know I'm getting the nutrition and nutrients that I want that support

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media story. InfoWars conspiracy theorist Alex Jones has been ordered to pay nearly a billion dollars in his latest trial, flipped out, started requesting money from his audience. We are going to look at the verdicts. This is just unbelievable. The Associated Press article on the screen lays out the specifics. specifics, Alex Jones ordered to pay nine hundred sixty five million dollars for his Sandy Hook lies. Jurors ordered Jones to pay nearly a billion dollars to Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting victims, relatives and an FBI agent who said he turned their loss and trauma into years of torment by promoting the lie that the rampage was a hoax. This is the second big judgment against Jones for spreading the myth that the deadliest school shooting in history never happened. The verdict came in a defamation suit filed by some of the families of 26 people killed in that 2012 shooting, plus an FBI agent among the

first responders. You may recall we covered it and spoke to lawyer Mark Bankston. A Texas jury in August awarded nearly 50 million dollars to the parents of another slain child, Robbie Parker. Remember, Robbie Parker lost his six year old daughter, Emily. He's one of the people that Alex Jones suggested was a so-called crisis actor. Here is an incredible moment. The verdict's being read in the courtroom. Ladies and gentlemen, the jury, please listen to your verdict. It is read. Verdict.

The jury has reached our verdict as to damages in this case. We award damages to each plaintiff against Alex Jones and Free Speech Systems LLC as follows. Roman number one, compensatory damages. Instructions. Fill in both numbers for each plaintiff, then go to section two. Please enter your damages assessments for each plaintiff then go to section two. Please enter your damages assessments for each plaintiff on the lines below. To plaintiff Robbie Parker,

A, defamation slash slander damages past and future, $60 million. B, emotional distress damages past and future, $60 million. Wow. Total fair, just, and reasonable damages to plaintiff Robert Parker and against Alex Jones and Free Speech Systems. We have line A and line B. Total $120 million. Initial by juror number one.

To plaintiff David Wheeler. A, defamation slash slander damages damages past and future, $25 million. B, emotional distress damages past and future, $30 million. Total fair, just, and reasonable damages to plaintiff David Wheeler and against Alex Jones and Free speech systems and line A and line B, fifty five million dollars. These verdicts continued and continued and continued in different plaintiffs being awarded varying amounts of money. Remember what attorney Mark Bankston told us when I interviewed him a few weeks ago that these subsequent cases would end in four wars. They would end in four wars. Now,

Alex Jones says that that's not going to happen. And he immediately, immediately took to the air waves and started asking for money. Essentially, take a listen to this. They want to scare everybody away from freedom and scare us away from questioning Uvalde and what really happened there or Parkland or any other event. And guess what? We're not scared and we're not going away and we're not going to stop. And literally for hundreds of thousands of dollars, I can keep them in court for years. I can appeal this stuff. We can stand up against this travesty, against the billions of dollars they want.

It's a joke. So please go to Infowarsstore.com and get vitamin mineral fusion. Get X3. Right. The solution to this travesty is getting vitamin mineral fusion. All the great products that are there that keep us on air at InfoWars store dot com. Yeah. So I don't know whether this will end InfoWars. You know, one of the questions I had for plaintiff's attorney Mark Bankston, who was involved in the Texas case, was what about collecting the money? OK, you got it.

You got a judgment. You got a verdict. How do you collect the money? He said, without going into detail, that as attorneys, they have ways of doing that and that they will collect the vast majority of this money. Now, does Alex Jones have a billion dollars? Not from everything I knew, but is the whole point that the verdict exceeds his actual assets by so much that it will completely

end InfoWars. Now, to be clear, I think it's important to say it's not about taking pleasure in the financial demise of Jones or InfoWars necessarily. It's more that there has to be some responsibility for people who have public platforms. And I include myself in this. There has to be some responsibility and accountability. And the financial and legal problems should correlate with the degree to which your actions are deplorable, wrong, dishonest and unethical. Jones actions over the last many years be going beyond even the Sandy Hook fiasco have been the lowest of the low. And so it is just that the financial

and legal consequences are commensurate with that. That's the point, not about cheerleading someone's financial ruin. We will follow it. We will see what can be collected. And there are more cases coming, folks. This is not the end of it. Right wingers have gotten us banned from being able to post to tick tock. I don't even know where to start, but this is, quite frankly, completely demoralizing. We have been posting on the platform TikTok for a while now.

We have built up more than 200000 followers on TikTok. The fastest growth of any platform on which we have ever published content has been TikTok. The growth has been incredible. It has become a huge part of our content distribution. TikTok's content moderation system is a disaster. It's heavily automated and it appears as though when human reviewers are involved, they either don't understand the content or are hypocrites. I don't know. And because we have had dozens of videos flagged by right wingers, wrongly flagged as violating

all sorts of different disinformation policies, although most of those we have appealed successfully. Enough of them we have not that now we are banned from posting to tick tock for some period of time. Take a look at this. When we enter tick tock, we now see your account is in view only mode. That means can't post, can't comment due to multiple violations of our community guidelines. Your account is restricted to view only mode.

The next violation could result in being permanently banned. This is a major hit to what we are doing and the messages we are trying to get out. Look at some of these examples of our violations. Senator Mike Braun says he would be OK leaving the legality of interracial marriage to states. That was from March. We posted that and said how horrible it was that Mike Braun said that Mike Braun really said that we got a violation because the content was found to be intended to deceive or mislead. That's insane. We were debunking what Mike Braun genuinely said.

Next example, I interviewed Bobby Python, a Republican for U.S. Senate. He made false claims about the 2020 election. I debunked those claims. And we got a violation for that. Trump is confused by election fraud documentary. This was an interview that Luke Beasley did with someone who told lies about the 2020 election. Luke Beasley confronted those lies, lies. We called out those lies

and it was found to violate community guidelines. And we also have one which is under appeal, wherein Donald Trump called Joe Biden the enemy of the state. That's literally what Trump said. We talked about how corrosive and destructive that is. We received a community guideline strike. These are right wingers mass reporting us. So what can we do? I don't know. If you work at TikTok, if you know anyone who works at TikTok, please get us in touch. Email info at David Pakman dot com. This is a really important platform on which we are reaching young people who vote. This is a huge part of our outreach and the MAGA people by mass reporting us have gotten it taken away and part. Listen, they do this on every platform. They do this on YouTube. YouTube has

figured out how not to allow these people just simply because they don't like my opinion to shut down my channel. Tick tock has not figured it out. You know, anyone at TikTok, please get in touch. Put us in touch. We need help. In addition, get yourselves a membership on our website. We all all of these platforms take up time and resources. And every time that something like this happens, we then have to request additional help and additional resources and additional time.

The best thing we can do in order to not rely on any individual platform is to continue growing the direct support from our viewers. So I would love it if you signed up at join Pacman dot com coupon code. Big voting. Twenty two gets you a discount. All right. I posted this to my Twitter yesterday and so many people were insanely triggered by it. As many of you heard, former Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard announced that she was leaving the Democratic Party earlier this week. Not a surprise. She's been a right wing reactionary for a long time. She also started a podcast. I came across it. It looks like she just copied our logo. I mean, straight up. It just looks like she copied our logo. We have both logos up on the screen right now. The David Pakman show, the Tulsi Gabbard

show. The concept is exactly the same as our logo. It is a sort of square logo, slightly rectangular with the and show in perfectly vertical, non italicized text. And then much like in our logo, where David Pakman is slightly italicized and at an angle, it's the exact same with Tulsi Gabbard. Now I posted this to my Twitter. Seventy percent seriously, 30 percent in just I mean, it's clearly our logo. I'm not claiming to have a copyright on on slanted italicized text. The Tulsi stands or tool cells or whatever you want to call them. They went nuts coming out

of the woodwork saying, David, you're a shill. You don't own copyright on italics. You're a disgusting person. These folks are so triggered, guys. It's sort of a joke, but also it does seem like someone copied our logo. Relax, OK? We're just having a good time. And by the way, the podcast, the Tulsi Gabbard podcast, it sounds like Ben Shapiro. I mean, the idea that she was genuinely a Democrat. It's a pathetic joke. We have a voicemail number. That number is two one nine two David P. This may be my favorite story about one of our newest viewers, an 81 year old Canadian grandmother. Listen to this.

Speaker 4 Hi, David. I'm a longtime listener. So I just wanted to tell you a funny story. My 81 year old grandmother who found you on Facebook, I recently found out that she watches you every day. So you can put that in the bank up here in Canada. I love that. Additionally, I just wanted to mention that I really appreciate your slight comical nuances

that you have on the show. I really appreciate that because life and politics can get so serious very quickly. So I appreciate having a laugh every day when I watch your show. Well, I really appreciate that. And say hello to grandma for me. I absolutely love that. We have a great bonus show for you today. The Stop the Steal people are training so-called poll observers to wreak complete havoc in November at polls around the country. Dennis Prager says that there is no secular argument against incest. Were it not for religion, everybody would be, I guess, having sex with their sister. Sounds weird.

And then Tulsi Gabbard is immediately jumping into campaigning for a Republican. She's now an independent. She left the Democratic Party, but she's not a right wing nut, but she's immediately campaigning for a Republican. OK, all of those stories and more on today's bonus show. Don't miss it. Sign up at join. Back in.