The Joe Rogan Experience - #1599 - Tulsi Gabbard

Episode Date: January 21, 2021

Tulsi Gabbard is a Former United States Representative, presidential candidate, and Iraq War veteran. Currently, she serves as the leader of Tulsi Aloha, a political action committee.

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day hey good to see you too you got notes look at you you're prepared yeah you know what are you a congressman or something something like that i was was. Does it feel weird to be a former congresswoman? I don't know. It's a crazy time. And I'm back in Hawaii. I'm getting a lot of surf in and yoga, meditation. And yeah. Does it feel better?

Yeah. Yeah. You know, I'm so grateful to the people of Hawaii that I had the privilege of being able to serve them and represent them. It's getting crazier and crazier to see the divisiveness in the country and the divisiveness in Congress. And unfortunately, it's just getting worse. I mean, it seems to be getting progressively worse over the time that I've been there, but especially now. The thing that really concerns me is that I don't see a way it turns around. Like, I don't see a method. I don't see a mechanism

where this ship just goes and turns back into the port of Normalville. It seems like once the division becomes so strong and so polarizing, the other side wants to destroy the other side. And the two are locked in mortal combat. And there's no recognition that we're all part of one gigantic continental community

called the United States. I mean, that's what it's supposed to be. We're supposed to be a part of this. We, that's what it's supposed to be. We're supposed to be a part of this. We're a country. We're supposed to be a part of a community. The United States of America. We're literally in a, I want to say completely nonviolent, but semi-nonviolent civil war.

Yeah. I mean, that's what it seems like. It's, I mean, it's not rocket science on how and why we got here. When you look at politicians, people on both parties capitalizing off of this divisiveness for fundraising for themselves, their campaigns, their political parties, stoking these divisions so that they can win elections and so on. And then you have so much of the mainstream media doing the exact same thing. Big tech and social media doing the exact same thing, stoking these divisions, fueling that fire because they figured out it gives them better ratings.

They get more eyeballs watching and same thing on social media. They start pushing so much of this divisive rhetoric towards people that that stokes more of these flame and gets more clicks and more attention and more views, which goes to kind of in this country, people not motivated by their hunger for power, and also making decisions about, hey, where are we getting our information? How are we responding to kind of this divisive rhetoric and this hate? Yeah, I'm in the middle of matt taibbi's book hate ink which is i haven't read it yet it's very good although i'd send him a a message today i'm like why don't you read your own books because i'm listening to the audio book and it's some other always best when the author reads their own book right that's what i think especially when it's someone who's distinct as matt like right his voice is very i want to hear him read it but

yeah it's probably annoying to do but also i think a lot of the publishers don't want the authors to read it they want to hire a professional do it really yeah i've had friends that have written books that have encountered that but anyway the book is excellent and it sort of highlights how all these factors sort of coalesce together and created this tsunami of shit that we're living in right now and uh it's it's it it's it's really confusing because you could sit around it with total peace of mind and try to imagine a way that this resolves itself and i don't see it other than like you said some spectacular leader like someone who but even that if you find someone that the other side will find some way to demonize them or or distort their their positions or you know take anything they've said out of context and

paint them as the worst person that's ever lived. We live in this world of no nuance. We live in this world of clickbait and the social media algorithms that really fuel hate in the most spectacular way I think that our civilization has ever seen. I don't think we've ever seen a force like social media, like the algorithms that people are locked into with Facebook and with all these other platforms that literally

send all the things that piss you off your way, because those are the things that we engage with more. Yeah, I agree. There's not been a phenomenal like social media that our country or the world, for that matter, has dealt with before. It's going to take more than just one phenomenal leader to unify the country and to to serve the people and to serve the best interests of the country and who will then take the kinds of legislative action necessary to start to rein in this almost unlimited power that these big tech monopolies have to manipulate the information that people are seeing, the kinds of posts that people are exposed to, again, without consideration for what the consequence is, but instead saying, hey, this will get the most clicks. This is how we can sell this information to get more ads and make money, and so on. And that's where I've seen as much as politicians today may complain about the censorship that they're seeing through big tech and the kinds of power that they have. And this is on both sides of the aisle. How come they're not actually doing anything about it?

They've held some hearings and they've done some things. But when you look at the legislative changes that that can and should be made to this Section 230 provision that essentially gives big tech legal immunity to do kind of whatever they want. Why aren't they doing something about? And this is where you have leaders who take money from all these big tech monopolies and, you know, raise money from them and all their friends for their campaigns and whatever. They're almost beholden to them. And therefore, I don't expect that we'll see any action on meaningful reforms to address this unless we get new people in office or we say, you know, hey, you can't take money from these PACs. We've talked about this before, about the corrosive and corruptive influence that it has on leaders who are supposed to be serving the people yeah rather than google or facebook yeah and google at this

point in facebook have so much money yeah to be on their bad side to have them support a candidate that's contrary to your position like if you're you're in a position of censorship and there's another candidate that's like listen we don't have to censor you know help me out like i'll let you guys do i think you're good people you're just trying to do your best work and it's a crazy world like there's no need yeah there's no no no no need for congress to legislate the senate doesn't have to come down on you. The president should never say. You're a private company. And this is the argument.

And I legitimately see both sides of it. Because when this Parler ban thing came out, I was very concerned. But I was also concerned that Parler was allowing these people that were on there that were organizing violence. So if there's no moderation at all, and they're on, and they're saying, hey, we're bringing pipe bombs, I don't know what they were saying, but if they were saying something along those lines, we're going to attack the Capitol, we're going to zip tie and kill every politician we have,

like, aren't, you should probably do something about that. Yes. So where does the line get drawn as to what you censor and what you don't, what you report and what you don't? And you report and what you don't? And the argument that Tim Cook laid out was that the things that were on Parler, the reason why they pulled it from the App Store, is that they need some moderation. That's what he was saying. And he was saying once they have that moderation, they'll be allowed back on the App Store, which seems fairly reasonable. The problem is it's kind of a slippery slope.

fairly reasonable the problem is it's kind of a slippery slope like okay you you take that out threats of violence you know uh plans of attacks on federal buildings but then where does where does that line get drawn like when when do you allow free speech to just rain is it can you dock someone because i you know can you like they don't they don't censor anything at parlor right so i don't know the full extent of their rules but i've listened to some of the interviews that the founder uh has done and the ceo has done over the last couple weeks because i shared the exact same concern that um de-platforming an app like Parler could very easily happen to any other entity that is trying to provide an alternative to the big, you know, the Facebooks and the Twitters and the YouTubes and so on. What they have said is that they have, they had some jury system set up where they have

like a hundred people who sit on a virtual jury, where if post is reported this jury looks at it and makes that decision is this protected speech under the first amendment or not and so what the founder of parlor said was basically that um if there were posts that were inciting imminent violence they weren't up for longer than 24 hours it was because they just got backlogged. Like there was more than they could handle in moderating it. This was what he said. I haven't, you know, verified all this or looked into it myself, but that's the argument they're making. But the bigger argument is whether it's Parler or if this is happening on Facebook or Twitter or any other social platform is the line is drawn on speech that is protected under the First Amendment.

And as we're talking with this example, that is speech that is inciting imminent violence. That's the precedence that's been set with the First Amendment and ruled by the Supreme Court as speech that is not protected under the First Amendment. And there are a few other examples on that. And I think that's exactly what should happen because under the law right now, this Section 230 that gives these online companies legal immunity, the language specifically says that they have the power to remove, quote, otherwise objectionable content. What does that mean? Exactly. It can mean anything to anybody, whether it is protected under the First Amendment or not. whether it is protected under the First Amendment or not.

And it's shocking. I don't know how that phrase was allowed to be passed into law, but it's there. So those two things are the things that can be changed very easily by law. Amending that Section 230, take away that provision that says that they can censor objectionable content. But God, so many things are objectionable. But something objectionable to you may not be objectionable to me and vice versa. That's the issue.

And then change that line that basically says if it is speech that is protected under the First Amendment, you don't touch it. If it is speech that is protected under the First Amendment, you don't touch it. If it's outside of the First Amendment, like the example that we're talking about, then you have the power to delete those posts. And there's decades of Supreme Court precedents that can be pointed to as the guideway for these tech companies to make those decisions of, okay, is this something that is a violation of the First Amendment or is not protected by the First Amendment or not? Those are the reforms that I believe need to be made. Yeah, that is only reasonable. The idea that otherwise objectionable or something that's objectionable,

that is so open-ended. Exactly. It's so bananas. And that's why we're seeing what we're seeing with big tech. Another big fear of something like shutting down Parler, and now I'm going to put on a tinfoil hat right now, is we know for a fact there are foreign actors, there are entities that specifically go onto social media

with the purpose of stirring up controversy and causing disruption and having these fake conflicts. The Internet Research Agency in Russia is a fantastic example of this. It is only one of many, I'm sure, that exist in multiple different countries. Renee diResta's work on this, and I know you've had an issue with her with something that they did, what her company had done about you previous to this, right?

Yes. While I was campaigning for president, I believe they were cited as a source, essentially, for stories saying that I was some kind of Russian asset. Essentially, that's really what the heart of it was. I know she had nothing to do with that, but this was before I believe she even became a part of that. How did they set this story up? How does someone come up with a story that says that you are some sort of a Russian asset unfounded accusations like that. People like Hillary Clinton, for example, and having that accusation echoed in other parts of the media and by other so-called influential individuals.

I don't know. I think they're like, oh, well, we think that there are Russian bots that are helping Tulsi in her campaign. I have never seen any evidence or proof of that. And I think that really is what gets to the heart of it. Okay. But if there were Russian bots helping you, that doesn't mean that you had anything to do with that. And I think there's probably Russian bots that are helping anyone who's contrary to something that they're opposed to. Like, if there's a bunch of people that want Hillary Clinton to be president, I can guarantee you there's a bunch of people that don't. Now, if there's a bunch of people that don't, they're going to come with a reason to support or enhance the the profile of a person that's opposed to her there's this weird manipulation that's going on with social media that was highlighted by renee di resta's work that is beyond like if you if you think oh it's probably like a few no there's hundreds of thousands of

posts they cited that were done. And there's millions of interactions like this. It has a significant effect of moving the needle and it's memes and it's pages. And they were doing this shit and they were manipulating people to try to cause conflict. And I'm sure there was some of that about every single candidate. And I don't think it's necessarily as much of supporting one individual candidate as another as it is causing conflict. And I think if Russia's playing this long game and China's playing this long game, which historically that's what they do, right? What they want to do ultimately is get us at each other's necks. The best way to do that is to just raise up the conflict bar.

Like, is it at six now? Jack it up to nine. Let's get these fucking people to really hate each other. And that, if someone says, oh, Tulsi Gabbard's a Russian asset, well, Jesus Christ, you served overseas twice, two separate occasions. You're a congresswoman for six years. Eight years years excuse me eight years this is crazy that's crazy talk like do you think she's an embedded spy that just like they they planted it from the moment she was born in hawaii like they said oh i got a plan let's take this little baby and groom her to be a russian spy and i got a good idea let's have her serve overseas and put her life in danger.

Let's have her help wounded veterans when she's over there. Let's have her exposed to the horrors of war so she comes out against these interventionist foreign policies that have led us into these countless endless wars. That's a good way to construct a Russian agent. That is the tinfoil hat speaking it's so fucking dumb it is so it's such a dumb thing to say but they say it like it's nothing because it's one of those things and i saw them say it on the view like when joy behar's reading off her card

they say it like it's just a it's a thing that you can say like like you're moving a chess piece you know like you're doing this and then i'll do that russian agent how about that you know oh you're a toady or you're a this or you're a that and the the lack of nuance in these conversations and the lack of understanding like what what is happening when you do things like this exact the consequences the consequences are grave for for all people because it's not like this is what people have said about laws. And one of the things that people said about the Patriot Act is that when Obama was, when they were talking about mass surveillance and the things that Snowden revealed and some of the things that the NSA were doing, You got a guy in office that you love, like Obama, and you think it's going to be fine because he's in office. Understand that there's a guy that's probably going to be there in four years or in eight years that is not going to be your friend.

Exactly. It's not going to be who you like, and he's going to have access to those same laws. This is why it's so important that we not change these laws. This is why it's so important that we don't give the government massive ability to just look into your emails and listen to your voicemails. Yeah. And why it's so important for us, especially now, to stand up for freedom of speech, for freedom of the press, for that exact reason. And that's what's so disturbing about a lot of what we've seen starting to play out over the last week or two with an increasing call for people to say,

well, you know, maybe we need to start shutting down certain new media entities that are promoting or saying things we don't like or shutting down people's Twitter accounts because they're saying things that we don't like. This is a double-edged sword. This is a double-edged sword. And you think that we're experiencing, that some are experiencing, this is a threat. This is a threat to us all. And that's something that I and, you know, friends of mine, I think all service members understand truly in our heart of hearts, we take that oath to support and defend the Constitution so seriously that we are willing to give our lives to defend people's rights to free speech, whether we agree with that speech or not. And what I was getting into with this parlor thing is we don't know where those threats emanated from.

And they easily could be from foreign agents. Those things that people write, when you have an account and anyone can sign up for it, threats emanated from and they easily could be from foreign agents those things that people write when you have an account and anyone can sign up for it I guarantee you some of the shit stirring that led to the attack on a Capitol was coordinated by people that wanted to see chaos maybe I mean I'm sure a lot of it was people that really did believe that they were patriots. And there's a lot of simple-minded people. Like one of the things you're seeing about the people that were arrested,

like the QAnon shaman who lives with his mom, who's posted an FBI pedophile theories on the internet. I mean, these people are out there, right? And they're easily duped, and they're're easily led and they don't have a lot going on and if somebody riles them up and then they have 30,000 or 300,000 of their fellow morons and they're all together crazy shit can happen so it's like i don't know what the answer is because on one hand like yeah if there's an organizing place where these people are getting together and they're really planning to do something as horrific as what happened, well, you should probably stop that.

But the problem is if you do shut that whole platform down because of these bad agents, you make it so that any platform can be shut down by any bad agents that come in and start doing something along those lines. bad agents that come in and start doing something along those lines. So if a new competitor to Facebook or a new competitor to Twitter comes along, the easy way to shut them down, you infiltrate them with scumbags, real or created. You have these people that jump on board, whether it's Gab or Minds or any of these other alternative social media networks, and you can just flood the gates with hate. And then everyone's going to be calling for them to be censored and shut down and what you're essentially doing you're reinforcing the monopoly that currently exists it's a strange monopoly like YouTube YouTube has been great to me I

have no problems with YouTube my issue is it is very strange when there is one company that does something like you can upload video to it that becomes the predominant company on earth yeah the one and it's owned by google like jesus that is so crazy that one company has this thing that is it's not simple in terms of technically i'm sure it's very complicated but as far as a concept of like, you make a video, you upload it. This is a social network where anybody can upload their videos to. Why is there only one that's this big that has that kind of power? Well, you couple that with the fact that it's owned by Google.

So if I go online on Google and start searching for a video, whose video platform do you think is going to pop up first? Yes. YouTube's. Exactly. And this is Rumble.com's big... video who do whose whose video platform do you think is going to pop up first yes youtube's exactly and this is this is rumble's rumble.com's big uh i think they're filing a lawsuit against google right now for that reason because rumble.com is is maybe one of the or i don't know how many alternatives to youtube there are but it is a alternative to youtube. And they're alleging that Google is consistently ranking their own YouTube pages on videos much higher up in a Google search than they would rank a video

that's hosted on rumble.com. And that kind of power is why many of us believe that these big tech companies need to be broken up because you do have essentially a monopoly that is difficult, if not impossible, to break through. Yeah, that's crazy that they're so intertwined like that. And also crazy that I've never even heard of Rumble before. I didn't either until like a week ago. And then I saw a headline that Rumble.com is suing Google. And I clicked. I'm like, this is interesting.

And I heard an interview with the, it's a Canadian company. And they do, it's essentially the same thing that Google does. They got something a little bit different that they deal with copyrights differently or something like that. But yeah, what is rumble.com? Then I started looking up and figuring out who they are and what they do. But it's very telling that not a whole lot of people know who they are. Well, it's, you know, I started using DuckDuckGo. Yeah. And it's, it's interesting when

you look for something on Google, and you cannot find it. Yeah. And then you look for it on DuckDuckGo and it's there right away. Yeah. I was looking for the story of the doctor in Florida who took a COVID vaccine and died very quickly. And relatively healthy, 50-something-year-old doctor. And, you know, it's an anomaly. It's rare. But rare things happen when people take medications.

It's just part of medicine. They were hiding it on Google. You could not find it. I was putting in all the keywords, the guy's name. I couldn keywords, the guy's name. I couldn't remember the guy's name. The guy's age, Florida, doctor, vaccine, death. All these different things.

Couldn't find it. Duck, duck, go. Right away. Usually those would be enough indicators for you to get the right story or something close to it. No. I mean, these were like NBC News,

a bunch of different local publications that highlighted this story. I couldn't find it on Google. So they were trying to suppress any information that would lead people to not want to take the vaccine. Interesting. Which is, you know. Also dangerous. Also dangerous. That even people who are merely asking questions,

just trying to get information. Or just a news story. I understand the vaccine is important. I understand controlling the pandemic is important. I understand this. All these things make sense to me. But I don't understand the curation of information to the point where you're actually actively hiding something

that's contrary to what, you know, the public mainstream idea of what you should be doing is. Yeah. It gets real weird. That's what's so dangerous and kind of makes it hard to believe that this is happening in America, that is supposed to be this beacon of freedom of speech and freedom of the press and all these other things. But, you know, you brought up this issue of bots and divisiveness, and it's not only the bots, but also just the anonymous, what do you call them, like the couch Twitter warriors or keyboard

warriors or whatever, trolls. A simple solution could be just that there is a requirement that when you register an account that you are a real person and you use your real name yes that's a great but the problem with that is there's legitimate cases where whistleblowers are necessary in large companies where a person's really worried about the repercussions of this especially if that large company that's doing something terrible can get away with it and then they actively target the individual that was the whistleblower if they're posting if the whistleblower is posting information that what you're saying yeah so if there's some if there's some story if like say if you're working for some company

and they're doing something awful they're polluting something they're doing they're doing something not supposed to be doing and you work for that company you feel compelled to reach out if you reach out with your own name, two things happen. One, you get exposed, and two, you can no longer be working for that company anymore. You don't have access to it. So you can't continue to push out all of this information that might be very important to the public. Fair enough.

I think that if you look at kind of the route that Edward Snowden took in finding a partner in some form of media, whether it's traditional media or new media, to be able to help be your voice to alleviate that kind of targeting could be an answer. It's a legitimate concern for sure, but a way to protect yourself. in that in that case but it's like what do you but i also see the real value in making people be accountable for their words exactly and and just that and and i've seen it and heard it all i've seen it and heard it all of uh how much people are willing to say obviously online that they will never ever say to your face. And I will count members of Congress in that batch. Yeah, well, I'm sure.

They're just humans. Yeah. Yeah. Was it disappointing being in Congress and seeing that kind of behavior? If you have this ideal of what a representative of our democracy is supposed to be and then seeing people that are petty and that are sneaky and doing little was it this was my first impression getting elected uh got elected 2012 got there and sworn in in january of 2013. And I remember calling home.

I think I was talking to my family, my parents or somebody. And I was like, this place is like high school. Even on the House floor, that's the only time we're all together, usually for votes. And you've got everybody, all 435 members there. And you see the little cliques gathering in their designated corners, like the cafeteria tables. you see the little cliques gathering in their designated corners, like the cafeteria tables. And, you know, one clique is kind of, you know, giving the mean girl's side eye to the other clique. And like, oh, if you're hanging out on that side of the room with those people, what's wrong with you? Really?

Yeah, man. It's, I mean, it's funny, but it's so terrible when you understand that this is the power base for decision making in our country. And you're like, how is this even possible? It's possible because so often people will vote for a candidate because like, they have a really cool ad on TV or like, yeah, that person, you know, is a good looking guy or a good looking girl or they talk good. They talk nice. Sounds smart. Yeah, all right.

Check. Rather than like, all right, what are your capabilities? What are your qualifications? Like, what kind of judgment will you exercise in making decisions that affect literally every single aspect of our lives as Americans in this country. And so it's terrible that we have this kind of makeup in our government, but also like we as voters have to do a much, the power's in our hands ultimately in how we're making decisions in choosing who gets to work for us and not forgetting that, not forgetting that those people who work in the United States Capitol, they work for us when it comes right down to it.

And so we have the power to hire and fire. I think that people have developed such a sophisticated way of manipulating folks that the thing about running for office particularly running for president it's it's one of the weirdest things where the most important job ever yeah you don't have to be qualified you just have to be chosen so you don't have to have any experience in government you don't even really have to know how government works. All you have to do is get enough people that are willing to give you a try and you can have the nuclear football. Like, not saying Trump, I'm not saying Biden, but if someone comes along, some ridiculously popular person that knows absolutely nothing about government but they're like justin bieber he wants to be president i fucking love that guy like that is not outside of the realm

of possibility all you if you if you have some incredibly charismatic person and you you like them over marco rubio or whoever the fuck it is, Ted Cruz. You're like, well, that guy sucks. This guy can sing his ass off. Let's go with him. But you're literally giving someone the power to run the greatest army the world has ever known. The most insanely technologically advanced civilization on earth and the one with the most weapons.

You're going to let a person who wins a popularity contest they can run this yeah man i mean i i lived through this i literally just lived through this but what's the alternative well people first of all need to kind of have the veil lifted yes on on on what this is and how both political parties play into this and the media plays into this. You know, I saw from the very day that I announced my candidacy for president, you know, I ran for president out of concern of some very real issues that our country is facing, wanting to bring voice to those issues and actually do something about it. The rise of North Korea's nuclear capabilities, capabilities for example and how we in hawaii lived through

the reality of that threat when we got that that missile alert that came through that caused you know families to to go and like tell people about that real quick if they forgot so this was January 2019, early one Saturday morning. The civil defense alert system in our state sent out a text message to every cell phone in the state, blared warnings on the radios, the sirens on television saying, missile incoming to Hawaii. This is not a drill. Take shelter. This is not a drill. And so the response to that was like, holy shit, this could be the end. An incoming missile to Hawaii from North Korea would literally mean the destruction, not only of Hawaii, but the aftermath and everything else would have a much, much bigger impact. So that's how people responded,

you know, grabbing their little kids and running in, like, where do you take shelter, like going into the bathtub and hunkering down? There was a father, there's a video of a father who got his like little eight year old daughter and lowered her down a manhole and was was I think he said something in the video like if we survive this, try to come find me. And there are countless other stories of I heard from from a father who he had one child who was in downtown Honolulu the other was on the west side of Oahu which is a good 45 minute drive and he was physically in the middle and and in those moments he was sitting there knowing he had minutes to live, trying to decide which child he was going to go and drive to and spend those last minutes of life with. The seriousness of this is something that has and continues to be lost on the leaders of our country.

And this was one of the main reasons that I ran for president, so that I could do something to make sure that no other American, no other family went through what we went through in Hawaii on that day. I announced my candidacy for president, so that we can talk about these very serious issues. And on day one, immediately, literally that very day, within minutes, mainstream media starts attacking. That's when the whole Russian asset thing began. These seeds were planted to say, oh, she's some kind of suspicious candidate,

you better watch out. The smears started, the building of this caricature of me as something that has nothing to do with who I am, my experience, my background, my capabilities, what I'm advocating for. Nope, the media didn't want to talk about that. The other candidates didn't want to talk about it. Going on the debate stage, okay, I'm going to, this is a national stage to be able to raise these very serious issues about the nuclear threat that our country faces, this new Cold War, and what we need to do to walk back away from the brink of nuclear

catastrophe. Nobody wants to talk about it. They want to go towards the superficial attacks. They want to go towards the he said versus she said, and ultimately the things that will cause ratings to go up and that will further this popularity contest that you're talking about, which ultimately all of this is the ultimate disservice to voters because it takes away their ability to make this informed decision about who should hold the nuclear football and what experience they bring, what kind of judgment they would bring, what football and what experience they bring, what kind of judgment they would bring, what kind of foresight they bring to this most powerful and important job and responsibility.

Now, having had the moment to step back away now that all is said and done and time has passed, what do you think was the catalyst? Like, why did they immediately attack you? Because I've talked to you about this before. I've talked openly about this before. If you want a woman president, you got one right there. I mean, you're talking about, again, a woman who's served twice overseas, congresswoman, all these great accolades.

You're an attractive woman you're very well spoken like what's what's missing i don't i didn't understand i'm like what is it about you that they decided they were going to attack is as much as they could try the biggest thing they had was this russian asset shit so it's like this mysterious like this like foggy thing like maybe she's an asset to russia that was the best thing they could come up with as much as they were trying to attack you so what what was it about you where what was it where they felt like you were a threat what was it about you was it that you weren't willing to play games was it was it about you? Was it that you weren't willing to play games? Was it that you weren't beholden to the party line? Like, what is it? So they plant those seeds of doubt to try to get people to be like, I don't know about her. I don't know. I don't know if we can trust her.

But why would they do that to you well they refuse to engage on the substance to argue against or agree with with what i'm saying um first of all and and second of all my track record throughout my time serving in congress pointed to the fact that i'm not willing to play their game. I'm not willing to be anybody's puppet. That I will speak out for ending these costly, destructive regime change wars. I will speak out for ending this new Cold War and nuclear arms race that is literally threatening humanity, the American people, our country, and humanity on this planet if it's allowed to continue down the road that we are on,

that I'm not taking the money that's coming from all of these different corporate PACs and the political party leadership that they are all in bed with, that ultimately my goal and my motivation is to be a voice for and to serve the American people and actually speak the truth. Do you think that it's the unwillingness to take money from PACs? I think it's a combination of all of those things that lead to the fact that I'm not

going to dance their dance. I'm not going to dance their dance. I'm not going to play their game. I will not be controlled by anybody else, whether it's the political leadership, the corporate leadership, or whoever it is that's coming in and often has words saying, yeah, you know, I don't know.

If you do that, you might ruin our chances to win in the next election. If you do that, then you might make it so that this big defense contractor isn't going to write a big check to fund the convention or whatever the case may be. And those are very real conversations that happen in Washington all the time. Have you had these conversations with people? I have been, I have not directly been um threatened with that or had those conversations because i don't take their money so they probably look at you like but i've i've been in the rooms where they have those conversations around yeah i was vice chair of the dnc right so when when they're looking at uh okay we got to raise x amount of money for either this

this campaign this race or for the convention that is a multimillion dollar kind of, I mean, it kind of should be like NASCAR, where they should have posters up all over the place saying, hey guys, these are the corporations that are paying for this thing that's supposed to be kind of one of the hallmarks of our democracy so that voters can actually see what's behind it. In a comedy sketch, right? Or was it Robin Williams or someone?

I forget who it was who had about their jackets should have labels on them, just like a NASCAR car does. So you've been in the room when people have had these conversations, but they've never brought it up to you. Do you think that like there's an assumption that you're not willing to play those games so it's a risky conversation to have

probably probably there there was one vote there was one vote that i i don't i don't remember what the vote was exactly, but I was not sure on how I was going to vote. And the vote was coming, it was coming up pretty quick. And it's, you know, these votes are often not so simple as, you know, they're usually complex because they're either, the bill is very big and there's, you've got to weigh the pros and the cons and the benefits and the risks and so on. And I was not sure how I was going to vote with the Democrats on this. Because if you don't, then you will help the quote unquote opposition beat Democrats in the next campaign. That was essentially what they said. And, you know, it was at that point that they lost me.

They didn't want to come and say, hey, Tulsi, here's why we think you should vote for this bill based on the substance, that this is what this bill will do to help the American people in this country. Instead, they came at me with a purely political argument and lost me right away. The conversation basically ended there. What is that feeling like when you're in that conversation? Because that was the first time you had that kind of a conversation. That directly, that directly. Yeah.

Was it, was it a feeling of, were you disheartened by it? Was it, why am I a congresswoman? What am I doing here? Was it upsetting? It was,

um, it was disheartening because it showed that these people who I had worked with and around for quite some time really had no idea who I was and am and what drives my decisions on the votes that I take, for example, and that something like that would not only not work, but would further hurt their cause. And it was disheartening because it was yet another indicator of what drives the political decisions being made by some of the most powerful people in our country is that what's going to win the next election what's going to help us or what's going to hurt us what can we use against the other guys in order to be more successful and either gain power or hold on to power and that's where if you look at and there is there's so much legitimate frustration about why isn't congress doing something about this? We saw this around the stimulus checks, the direct checks just a few months ago, and how those so-called negotiations dragged on for months and months and months and months. All of a sudden, they get an

agreement right after the election is over. It's literally playing politics with people's lives. You got people losing their jobs, people stuck at home, people worried about being homeless, playing politics with people's lives you got people losing their jobs people stuck at home people worried about being homeless who that one-time check of fourteen hundred dollars two thousand dollars whatever it is that can be the difference for them between food or no food home or no home and yet you have people in washington playing politics worried about well if we do this now it might help trump or if we do this now, it might help Republicans. Yeah, that was the conspiracy theory. The conspiracy theory was that part of the reason why the stimulus checks hadn't gone out, part of the reason why, you know, there was so much stricter lockdown and economic damage because of those lockdowns in Democratic states was because

they were concerned that if the economy rebooted and started going back up again that it would help trump and trump would be able to say hey you know everything's doing great again we're going to make america great once again we're past this covid and we're gonna it's gonna keep getting bigger and bigger and bigger and people would be like yep he's right hey he he really did have the economy booming before that covid hit hey we really were doing better than ever with unemployment and that's a terrible conspiracy it's a terrible it's a terrible thing to even consider and i hate even bringing it up but man it's crazy how how much devastation has happened in so many of these communities,

in so many of these cities, and how little consideration they've put into the fact that these people are losing everything they've ever worked for. They seem to think this is the only solution. The only solution is this. But you look at other states and you go, well, that's not true. Other states have managed to save far more businesses by allowing people to make their own decisions. And it's a horrible conspiracy. It's horrible to even consider that one of the reasons

why the strictest lockdowns have taken place in the blue states and the blue cities is because they were concerned with the economy rebounding. Yeah, I want to talk about the lockdowns and COVID. But just on that point that it's not such a stretch as to call it a conspiracy, because things like this happen in Washington all the time. And one of the clearest examples was around this bill called the First Step Act, which was a criminal justice reform bill that essentially, if passed, would result in a lot of people who were in prison for a very long time for nonviolent minor drug violations.

Or, for example, like the girlfriend of a drug dealer who got caught on conspiracy charges literally because she was in the room and around whatever her boyfriend was doing. This bill would have made it so that these people got to go home to their families. As we were working to try to pass this bill, and it was a bipartisan bill, both in the House and the Senate, and it had the President Trump's support. There were very prominent Democrats who publicly were saying, don't support this bill because it's not perfect. And because if it was passed, then Donald Trump would be able to say he did it, it was passed, then Donald Trump would be able to say he did it, that this was a victory and, you know, a feather in his cap, and that he'd be able to go across the country and say, hey, look what I did. So they were openly advocating for, hey, let's not do this right

now. Let's wait until after 2020 and then do it so that it could be done under a Democratic president. Never mind all of the people who are locked up and who have been locked up for over 20 years away from their families and their kids, unable to see their kids grow up. Never mind the consequences of that. It's about politics. And we don't we don't want that guy to get a win at all. That's crazy. It is absolutely crazy. So, I mean, there's a good ending to this story in that this

bill did eventually get passed. So those people who are advocating for that lost, but it provides a window into that mindset of that dangerous mindset of leaders in both political parties who are willing to sacrifice the well being in and the lives of the american people to advance their own political ambition and cause and power it's so disgusting it is disgusting it's so scary too it's so scary to think that this is something they can justify these people that are representatives of the american people they think that this is the way to go about business because donald trump is bad you know this this is their mind. No matter what you do, don't help Donald Trump.

Yeah. But this, I mean, we've seen this, I think, exacerbated over this past administration, but this is not something new either. I mean, this is something that has, I think, been increasingly becoming more and more of a problem that's gotten us to this point of where we are that's so hard to hear it's so hard to hear because uh what you just said should be criminal because that is not representing people it's not representing innocent people it's not representing people that are unjustly accused it's not representing our legal system in the best form of it possible. Yeah. It's awful.

It is. I just, I want to keep going back to, country that our founders envisioned for us and those foundational pillars that are put in place, the central part of that is our democracy. And so as we may feel hopeless at times, like there's like what in the world can we do against these powerful forces of darkness and greed and power and so on there the mechanism that is in place for us to change this is is through our elections and as

many people who you know there are i mean people feel hopeless like why even bother to go vote why even bother because i'm just one person or my voice doesn't have power? This is the power that we have in our hands to start to change this. There is nothing stopping us from going to the ballot box and saying, like, you guys had your chance and you have not fulfilled that incredible trust and responsibility that we as voters have placed in you. fulfilled that incredible trust and responsibility that we as voters have placed in you, you're out. And choose leaders who are, who are committed to that mission of service, that servant leadership, looking out for the best interest of the American people in our country. I think there's also a problem where people don't know whether or not their leaders are looking out for the best interests of the people. They don't know.

They want to believe, and they don't really have enough time to find out either. Most people are filled. Their days are filled, right? They have a job. They have a family. They have a mortgage. They have crises of their own. They have their own hobbies and needs, and then they have to vote for mayor.

Like, oh, shit. Like, what's this guy doing? What's his deal? Oh, I heard some bad things about him. heard he's a russian asset right i mean that that's literally the kind of cursory examination that most people have of elected officials this is why it's so important for um for us to be able to have uh fair and balanced and unbiased sources of information and media to turn to because people are busy and they don't have time. Like, you know, I go through a ton of different news sources every day and try to figure out the reality of what may be happening

here or in different parts of the world. Most people aren't, they don't have the ability to focus on that. I introduced legislation called Reinstate the Fairness Doctrine Act, which the fairness doctrine was in place essentially to hold the news media that uses our public airwaves accountable to provide balanced information to the american people where if you're reporting one view on the news the fairness doctrine said you have to report the other view as well so that the viewer the listener at home can say like okay this is what that side is saying on this issue that's what that side's saying i'm going to figure out what i think is what actually makes sense the fairness doctrine was repealed it we need to reinstate the Fairness Doctrine. When was it repealed? I believe it was repealed during the Reagan administration.

Makes sense. And it would go a long way towards providing more of that balanced news coming from those, again, who are using the public airwaves. And secondly, I think that the more people are aware that we have an incredibly biased corporate media that is driven by profits, not by actually a sense of responsibility to the public, then I think there's opportunities to look for, and I think we've got to do our best to try to create those balanced news platforms that not only just report facts and information, but also represent views from across the spectrum.

Now, would that apply to only broadcast television, like NBC, ABC, CBS, like that kind of stuff? Yeah. But that's a problem, because nobody's watching that shit anyway. Isn't it a problem? I mean, cable news is where the meat is, right? That's where the real battle's going down.

And you have two entities. And one of the things that Taibbi outlines so well in his book is what went wrong with the Trump thing. Is that initially Trump was this buffoon who was running for president and was saying a bunch of crazy shit and everybody thought he was not going to win and so they would highlight how ridiculous he was thinking that what that would do was going it was going to make people dismiss him as a real candidate and even you know respectable newspapers and respectable television shows like CNN and New York Times are saying Hillary Clinton's like 96% likely to win. So they had put all of this emphasis on what an idiot Trump was. They had highlighted all the outrageous things he was saying.

They showed the videos from all of his rallies. And what they had done was they had inadvertently given him massive amounts of publicity. And they painted him as a buffoon. Then he wins. And then once he wins, they shifted gears. They go, okay, we have to change and now just attack him at every turn. And during that time, this is one of the things in the book where they're describing the record profits they were making because it's extremely profitable

to put something on television that everybody's watching. If Trump is saying Mexicans are all rapists, everybody's like, holy shit, he said what? And the ratings would go up. So every time he would say something ridiculous like that, they would make money. And then the

money went from that to the money got made in highlighting everything that's wrong with him and then the money came from turning him into this it wasn't that hard but turning him to this mega villain right and then the money on fox was highlighting the the the how bad the liberals were, highlighting how ridiculous they were being about all the different, how Trump derangement syndrome is ruining our democracy. And to watch those two things play out against each other simultaneously,

it's a wild thing to see. And I mean, the politicians were doing the same thing. Yes. You know, you just pointed out, you've got cable news that hates Trump, cable news that loves Trump, the same thing that they're doing, all that they're doing, you know, reporting like historic levels of fundraising for their party, one party or another, all of it centered around this Trump consciousness, this obsession with Trump every single day. We've gone through this now for not only the last four years. You go back to the campaign, you say the last five, six years that we as a country have lived through this profiting essentially off of Trumpism. And meanwhile, while this is happening, there are incredibly important issues that are not being talked about, not being reported on, not being acted on by Congress.

You look to North Korea, for example. North Korea has, over this period, been increasing their nuclear capabilities to the point where now they have nuclear submarines. You have this basically tearing up and destroying these nuclear nonproliferation treaties that are supposed to keep us in the world more safe from a potential nuclear war. Those are all gone. And there's a nuclear arms race that is ensuing now and a new Cold War between the U.S. and Russia and China, these two other nuclear-armed countries.

You have our agriculture, our environment. You have bees and bugs and butterflies now being destroyed and posing a great threat to our ability to grow crops, not only here but around the world. There are so many different issues, very, very real serious issues. Have you heard much about that at all over the last few years? No. Have you seen action by Congress to address these very real issues? No. Why? It's because they're all looking at, hey, how do we profit off of Trump? this Trumpism, this Trump consciousness, this obsession behind and focus on the future, focus on these real issues, focus on these real challenges and how we as a country need to come together to be able to solve them and not contribute to the mess and the destruction and the nonsense that we've seen play out over these last several years. I don't see, I agree with you wholeheartedly.

Because they're gonna try to play it out longer because I'll bet you anything, people are sitting around in these cable newsrooms right now saying like, oh shit, how are we gonna make money? Like, what are we gonna focus on now? What are we gonna talk about now? And yeah, I just, I think the more of us who choose not to contribute to be a part of that and contribute to that and lend our eyeballs or our mind or our time to that, the more quickly

we can try to force the conversation towards things that actually matter to us. Yeah, I completely agree with you, but I don't see anybody else agreeing with you. This is what bothers me the most. There's more of us than them, though. That's the thing. I think you're right, but it's not a popular thing that gets distributed. It's not a popular thing that gets, that it's not out there. This is not, you know. Well, you have a pretty, you got a lot of eyeballs and ears on your platform, sir. So I think we can spark something.

I hope so. To make, really seriously, make some real change and point, take the spotlight away from where it's been and focus it where it should be, which is on the people. Yeah. Whose voices really have not been heard throughout this time. Well, they still would like there to be some representative that they can hang their hat on. Like someone who's like, that's my guy. She's my woman. Like this makes sense.

I like the way they think and i don't see a lot of that out there right now i don't i don't see someone who's not particularly invested in the party but more so invested in all these problems that you're talking about and about you know saying that we have to abandon all this partisan bullshit, all this pettiness and all this divisiveness that we've lived off the last four years. And particularly these organizations, like you're saying, like Cable News, that's their business model. What are you asking them to do?

Start becoming a charitable organization? What are they going to do? This is what they do. They stir shit up. So we can impact that, though. We can impact that by not buying their shit that they're selling. Well, I think it's going to do this is what they do they they stir shit up so we can impact that though we can impact that by not by not buying their shit that i think it's going to happen exactly and this is where this is where i think we've already seen a trend of people who are taking their attention away from uh that model and uh the crap that they're selling and instead you know they're looking for new media, alternative media,

other voices, other platforms that are actually going in-depth and talking about real things that matter, about real issues that matter, having real conversations. Yeah. Mom, that's what we would hope for. Another thing I heard, this is really crazy, that Trump is going to start a third party that he's been talking about starting a party called the Patriot Party, which is like, holy shit.

I don't know anything about that. Again, rearview mirror. Rearview mirror. I don't believe he's going to be in the rearview mirror. I just don't. I think people are going to get bored. I think it's going to, a few months will go by or whatever it is until he's in the news again and then uh it just won't be exciting without him and then i think we need a

foil we need someone look the fucking 2021 season it's gonna be pretty boring if trump's not involved at all like if if this was a long-running show like Ozark or something like that, right? Oh, gosh. We get to the new season when he steps down. Like, this can't be it. Oh, I see what they're going to do. They're going to pretend that everything's going to be fine. We've got Biden.

We've got Harris. We've got a lot of really diverse people in the cabinet. This is going to be wonderful. We got it. We nailed it. it everything's great and then something that's what the worry is yeah well i mean look there there are sadly a lot of really important and serious things that we could and should be talking about that should capture our attention. And be able to, as the people, provide that pressure to our leadership

and hold them accountable for whether or not they're doing their job and actually working for the people or not. But you're talking about like a reasonable, you're talking like a reasonable, responsible person. That's not human. But there's not that many of you out there. I think there are Joe.

I think there are. I think we're a bunch of grown up babies with phones and they just, we're just tweeting up a storm and watching YouTube videos. That's what I think. I think people are so addicted to this drama. I mean, my God, watching Twitter over the last few days has been like watching people

complete an ultra marathon like they're they're making we're gonna do the finish line we're there we're there they cross the line and yeah we made it we did it we did it it's over fuck you like there's so many people like playing you know having memes and this and and these like self-aggrandizing posts about like to directly to trump dear mr president fuck you and this and that and celebrities are doing and all these people are getting in on and it is a fascinating thing to watch because i'm like okay you made it across the line now what what happens next we can do with all this you got it you like the fight you like you like the conflict what are you gonna do with all this? You like the fight. You like the conflict. What are you going to do with all this energy?

You got this conflict energy. Let's re-channel that. Let's re-channel that. To real problems? To actually fight for the people against those who wield the power. Yeah, but that's not fun. What's fun is a bad guy. Bad guys are fun.

We need another bad guy. We got plenty of those. Trust me. We got plenty of bad guys. I know, but we don't have a bad guy like trump but here's here's the thing is and i agreed like people who have been uh looking forward to january 20th as though this is going to solve all of the all of the problems that our country has faced uh are missing the problems that our country has faced are missing the reality that the way we got here are because of some some deeply seated problems that that have pre-existed uh the previous

administration and that still exist in our country today which is why i think it's so dangerous for some uh leaders especially in the democratic party and in the media over the last few days, who are so easily dismissing the 70 plus million people who voted for Trump as though they are all the KKK or they are all this or that, throwing them into that bin that Hillary Clinton called the deplorables. And this is the reality of how dangerous that train of thought, I think, is going to continue to reveal itself unless, look, you know, Joe Biden gave a very unifying speech for his inauguration. Joe Biden gave a very unifying speech for his inauguration. It is that the pressure is on him to deliver. For the country's sake, I wish him well in working towards that. But it's not going to be an easy task.

And ultimately, he will be held accountable for his own actions in whether he is, is able to be that unifying force, or if we end up seeing, and address some of these deeper seated problems. You know, he said in his speech that whether you voted for him or not, that his goal is to serve you, the American people, you know,

again, the pressure will be now on, on him to actually show that is true through his actions and actually actively reaching out to those 70 plus million people who didn't vote for him. Yeah, I mean, it would be wonderful if we all got together united and said, let's wish him well. And let's let's cheer him on and hope he does a fantastic job and all of you trump supporters who thought that he was a puppet of the institution wish him well like what for our country be happy be happy if he's if he's right and you were wrong my concern is that one of the things that trump did that was really disturbing was this this narrative that the elections were stolen and

that he won by a landslide and even using certain things as an example that were easily disproven like one of the things that he used as an example kyle kalinsky actually discussed it on the show we did an election day show and and Kyle Kalinsky was explaining Pennsylvania. And he said the way Pennsylvania works is the first votes they count are the walk-up votes, the people that actually go to the polls. Those votes are going to be, they're going to lean heavy in Trump's favor

because he's put out this narrative, go vote in person, whereas the Democrats have put out this narrative to mail in your vote. So the first votes that get counted are going to be the votes of the people that walk up. It's going to skew heavily towards Trump. But then once they count those and they start counting the mail-in votes, it's going to lean much heavier towards Biden. And people are going to call shenanigans, but this is why it's happening.

So Kalkulinski lays this all out on the show day of the election. It plays out exactly, exactly like he said. Trump was way ahead. Then they start counting in the mail-in votes. The mail-in votes lean very heavily towards Biden. Biden ultimately winds up winning. But the way Trump describes it is if it's this grand scheme. We go to bed, and all of a sudden a sudden you know we go to bed way ahead and then all of a sudden they magically find all these

votes and then it leans towards biden like no no no no this is how it was going to go if you are a political pundit and you understand the system and how it works this was how it's going to go so all the people that are the same people like i heard she's a russian asset the people that give a cursory examination of all these different things that don't have the time to go on these deep dives they're all going to hear that story and go do you hear what they did in pennsylvania those sons of bitches in the middle of the night they came in with trucks of fucking ballots and all went to biden mysteriously or the thing that happened in georgia when they were saying oh they were hiding ballots underneath the table. And then when the people that were observing left, then they

pulled the ballots out. But no, you hear from the actual Georgia official, and he goes, that's not what happened at all. Here, you can see them bringing, here's the video of them bringing in those ballots. They store them under the table because you got a limited amount of room to move. They stored it under the table in clear view of these observers. They were told that they were going to go home, and then they got a phone call saying, no, you need to keep counting. So after those people left, that's when they get the call and they say, okay, let's keep counting. So they pull those ballots out. But it gets talked about by Rudy Giuliani and all these other people like, oh, this is this nefarious plot they hid these ballots underneath the table and if you're just

looking at the video footage from a surveillance camera and you don't know exactly what happened that scenario makes sense to you so there's so many people that have this distorted perception of what went down and they really believe that this was all stolen. Now, here's another problem. The amount of voter fraud is not zero. It's never zero. That's true. It's not zero. So if you ask them, is there any voter fraud? They have to say yes, because it is. There's some voter fraud. There's probably voter fraud left, and there's probably voter fraud right. And Nancy Pelosi was saying that the election was rigged in 2016. She was saying that it was a scam.

She put it on her Twitter. This is the same exact thing that Republicans are doing today and they're calling for them to resign from Congress. So you see how political parties use certain narratives to their advantage, depending on if it is. If it's their name, their party, their candidate that's on the block or not. And again, this goes back to how dangerous this hyper-partisan divisiveness is when you've got people in positions of power and influence manipulating the narrative according to serve their own interest. The hypocrisy of this is very evident. And the hypocrisy of these same leaders in talking up a big or making a big stink about these things when it serves their interest, but turning a blind eye when it doesn't is also very real.

And again, this is where we have the opportunity to hold people accountable. There's a major issue that I brought up over a year before the 2020 election about how there are certain states that don't have any paper backups to their electronic systems. So in theory, if any of these systems were hacked in any kind of way, where you could manipulate the outcome of, you know, manipulate people's votes to swing the election one way or the other, there would not be an auditable paper trail that, you know, election officials could use to point to, okay, well, this is actually how many people voted for this candidate or that candidate, but this is

where the electronic system was manipulated and got it wrong. So the bill that I introduced was called the Securing America's Elections Act. It was a bipartisan bill that very, very simply still allowed supported states in their responsibility that they have to run elections that's constitutionally provided but it said if you have an electronic system you have to provide you have to provide a voter verified paper backup meaning like in hawaii you have like i've i've gone and i used the machine there before and you punch it in and before you submit your ballot it's got a printout that says okay these are all your candidates if it's correct you submit and they keep that paper backup on hand or

you just use a paper ballot either way you have an auditable paper trail and it would have provided federal funding for states to be able to implement this and put it in action made the case to republican and democratic leaders pass this bill 2020 is a big election coming up. We want to make sure that we reduce the amount of vulnerabilities that exist and maintain the integrity of our election so that people aren't raising these concerns. There should be any question in people's minds that these electronic systems have any vulnerability at all.

Congress chose not to pass the bill was there arguments against it not that i heard so what was the reason why they passed why they went against it i mean it it just wasn't done there there were no legitimate arguments against it i heard i heard some states saying like oh well we don't know if we want to change it or whatever. But if the federal government had the ability to go in and that's what my bill did. It tied this change to federal funding to administer the elections, to provide that as an incentive.

So the point is to have some foresight and have leaders with foresight in Congress to say, you know what, 2020 is going to be a big election. There'll be a lot of eyes on it. Critical outcome one way or the other. Let's take action now in order to prevent people questioning the integrity of our election and therefore our democracy. Many of those same people who are complaining or raising concerns about this today are people who chose not to take action that could have prevented us in large part from being in the situation that we are in.

So holding these leaders accountable and calling them on their crap is essential if we want to actually start to see some change. I don't understand what the incentive would be to not pass this. Is there a financial burden that's attached to this? Is it prohibitively expensive? It is not prohibitively expensive. I mean, some states just went and did it on their own because they recognize, I believe Virginia was one of them, they hold off-year state elections in the odd years. And they recognize the threat of this because there's like a hacking convention in Vegas every couple of years or something. And they bring in like all of these even young, you know, teenagers. And they had this thing called Election Village.

And they showed they used replica electronic voting systems from different states. And some of these kids hacked into these systems within 10 minutes, 15 minutes. An 11-year-old changed election results on a replica Florida state website in under 10 minutes. Look at her. Yep. Wizard. Done.

I wonder if that's the real kid because that's kind of fucked up if it is. That is the real kid. Oh, my God. Why are they showing these kids' faces? She's probably being heavily recruited, man. Oh, my God, right? The fucking Russians are right now knocking on her door. Good evening. the real kid oh my god why are they showing these kids heavily recruited oh my god right the fucking russians are right now knocking on our door good evening like to talk to child is 11 years old

we have questions what you learn and how you learn that right there though that is um states like virginia said like that is a serious problem and they spent the money and they fixed it and and i it was some virginia election officials came before congress and said hey we did this it worked really well and it's the first time we've not had any complaints about the integrity of our election systems did you ever see hacking democracy the hbo documentary no it's it was about the diebolt machines the same the same issue that happened in the past. And it showed on the documentary that they could adjust the results. They could adjust the results because there was a built-in, into the Diebold systems,

there was a built-in access for a third party. Wow. Yeah. Whatever. What's the big deal, Tulsi? Just our democracy. Let's talk about pronouns because that's what's important. The amount of distractions that people are subject to today, too, is also unprecedented because of social media.

So concentrating on these key issues and really important things like murder hornets, it's hard. It's hard to do because there's so much shit going on. It's like your news feed is constantly inundated with things. You look at the first thing, the first thing that this new Congress did, 117th Congress, right after being sworn in, first week of January. of, say, passing a bill that would mandate that limited resource of vaccines that we have go directly towards the most vulnerable seniors who are right now dying at the highest rates because of COVID. Instead of doing something real and important that would actually save people's lives and reduce hospitalizations in this country, reduce hospitalizations in this country. The thing that they passed was this administrative rules package that deleted all mention of mother, father, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, son or daughter, and instead changed it to say in the House of Representatives, when you're referencing anyone who holds, I don't know

what you call it, this title, this position, it's not mother or father, it's now parent. It is now parent-in-law, not mother-in-law or father-in-law. It is now child. What do you do for aunt and uncle? Or sibling. You say parent's brother, I think is what they said, or parent's sister. Which parent? Exactly. Which one? I don't know. You can say don't know say parents brother so that's gendered though right what it would if uh she

chooses to now parent sibling it would be parent sibling that's what it would be but this is all very important but this is this is what i'm talking about though and this is where people just like give me a break give me a break this is the most important thing that that you feel is the highest priority to take action on in this new year in this new congress well if you're on twitter that is the most important thing or the least important thing depending upon which what twitter feed you follow yeah i'm concerned and uh like i said i'm concerned about the way uh trump rejected the the election results that they're similar to the way a lot of the Democrats rejected the 2016 results, and that they, I don't think, I understand that they want their side to win,

but I don't think they understand the ultimately corrosive impact this is going to have on the confidence that people have in democracy yeah I died in election results the people right now Republicans there's some ungodly number it's like in the high 70% this is what the most recent see if you can find this Republicans that believe the election results were lit illegitimate I think it was in the 70s which is just bananas. I mean, even if you asked Democrats after 2016, I don't think it would be that high. You know, maybe if you said how many people believe Russia had a part in Donald Trump being elected, maybe that'd be a little higher.

But at least they probably thought that the people that voted, voted. Like that it was probably ultimately representative of how the people voted they thought those people had been misled they probably thought propaganda was involved and there was a bunch of you know really uh incorrect stuff that was said that led people to vote the wrong way but i think they probably more or less believe that donald trump won it's probably very disheartening i don't know i mean if you talk to hillary clinton she won i don't talk to that lady well anybody who does yeah well she did win the public i mean she she won the popular vote she really did i mean that's a fact right so yeah

that kind of goes against the russian narrative right there it's like what a slippery game you're playing yeah you're gonna let more people vote for Hillary, but just the right amount in the swing states so you get the electoral college vote? The danger of overall eroding people's confidence in our elections and the integrity of our elections. elections and also i mean and and i think the the whole kind of cancel culture goes along with this and and the censorship and the suppression of people's free speech is because if they feel that that they don't have a voice to speak on whatever they want to speak on and if they don't have a voice through their votes, then what's left? Right, right. And this is where, and I think we've seen this over what happened on January 6th, but also over this past year, where people feel that the only way that they can bring about changes through violence. And this is the dangerous consequence of where this partisan divisiveness takes us. And it also points to the dangerous normalization of this kind of politically driven violence

where one side kind of says, well, it's okay if I agree with your motivation for going and burning down buildings and rioting and looting and whatnot. But it's not okay if I disagree with the motivation of these other people. And that normalization of taking kind of the conflict culture that exists online and is now being embodied and manifested in reality in different ways, again, as a symptom and a byproduct of this hyper-partisanship and this divisiveness, this is the dangerous reality that is coming about because of people who are more interested in their power than they are interested in the well-being of our country, our freedom, and the American people. So much of this just comes down to leadership or the lack thereof and people who are more interested in serving their own selfish interests rather than fulfilling this huge obligation and responsibility to serve the interests of the people first.

Not just selfish interests, but also tribal interests. The interests of the Democratic tribe or the Republican tribe. That's, like I said, what I'm really worried about with the way Trump is addressing his loss, is that this January 6th thing that we saw is indicative of that. And then he like denounced the people who did it like he's telling them that you have to be strong you need to show a show of force and these people storm i mean the ultimate show of force they literally knocked over security guards beat a guy to death storm the capitol the whole thing is so fucking strange and hearing that

he wants to start another party like oh jesus christ and call it the patriot party remember the patriot act yeah that's that's an unpatriotic and not only that like calling it the patriot party is such like but it's so it's almost like what i would expect out of this whoever's writing this goofy fucking script for this wacky show we're on like yeah that's what it would be the the guy who left off now he's going to start the patriot party and all the page the true patriots are going to line up for him look there's a lot of people out there that are dying for someone to tell them what to do and that's scary that's a real problem it's a real problem there there's so i mean mean, look, there's so much fear that's out there.

There's a lot of pain, a lot of frustration. And my hope is, I want to be really optimistic here. My hope is that by getting to a place where we can see each other once again as Americans where we can see each other once again as Americans and not one side, and you talked about tribalism, like my tribe is the good guys and your tribe is the bad guys, you're the enemy, we're not, is that when we can get back to a place where we see each other as Americans and respect each other

and go back to the fundamentals of this country, then we have the ability to have a real dialogue and not to say that we're going to agree on everything, not to say we're not going to have fierce debates on substance around how we solve the great problems of our time. But when we come from that place of saying that we know we need to solve these problems for the sake of the people in our country, then we know we will end up in a good place with a positive outcome.

One thing that does give me hope is online pundits is that they, they, the ones that are not beholden to these gigantic corporations, the ones that aren't a part of a network, they can speak more freely and more honestly. And one of my favorite shows is The Hill, Rising on the Hill. Those guys are great.

Crystal and Sagar are right and left, okay? She's left, he's right. And the two of them are super reasonable and honest and objective. And they talk about things in a very reasonable manner. And even if they disagree, it's polite. disagree it's polite and it's like it's possible to do it's also clearly honest and clearly objective this is possible to do and i think that shows like that and they're showing doing very well by the way very well which shows there's a

hunger for this there's a starvation yeah and i think shows like that can lead the way because this is the way we need to behave with each other. It used to be your neighbor was a right-wing nut and you were growing alfalfa sprouts and you could all get along. You're like, hey, Mike, how's the gun collection going? You could be friends. Yeah. You could be friends with people that have different opposing points of view.

Yeah. I have some pretty fucking crazy friends. We all do. And I love them to death, yeah. I mean, what happened? Why does America have to be so separated, divided on this imaginary line that we create? Because most of us, if you look at our core beliefs,

what do we really want? We want friendship. We want love. We want community. We want our family. We want to have opportunities for our businesses. And we want to have the freedom to express ourselves and the freedom to practice whatever cultural rituals or religions that you choose to practice. And this is what we all agree on. And then there's economic disagreements. And then there's disagreements on

education and healthcare. But God, those are the small ones. Those are not the big problems that most people encounter in their everyday life. Most people in their everyday life have a very, have a reasonable set of beliefs that they all kind of can meet in the middle. Yeah. And even on those big ones that you're talking about, and I found this throughout my campaign for president in the town halls, hundreds of town hall meetings that we had where, for example, what it boiled down to was while people had different ideas on the best way to like what our health care system should look like. It came down to like if your child is sick, you want to be able to make sure that your child gets the best care possible. Yes. you want to be able to make sure that your child gets the best care possible.

Yes. That if your mother comes down as is diagnosed with cancer, that her job or your job or your social status is not going to affect her ability to get the best care possible with education. Tell me one parent that doesn't want their child to get a good education. I know a guy do you like you do have crazy friends joe i'm just kidding i'm just kidding we got some other issues we got to deal with there but you get the point right yeah no i do you get the point and so you know the economy you know what what what person doesn't want to have you know just a great opportunity to earn a good living so you don't have to fear for yourself or your family's safety and economic security?

So, yes, we are going to have wildly different ideas perhaps on how we can achieve these things, which is okay. That's not a bad thing that we come up with some of our best ideas when we have these debates with an openness and a respect to know like, hey, I got this idea, let me hear yours. And maybe there's some good ideas that came from mine and from yours, and we can kind of figure out the right path forward for all of us. And this is where it all stems down to being able to have the conversation. And that is so much of what's missing in washington yeah where you know i'll i don't know this was this was in my first few years in congress people unwilling what to speak of have a conversation even like just say hello um you

know there's the there's a a gym in the basement of the house that that uh a lot of members are going and work out in members of Congress go out and work out in. Who gets after it? Who really gets after it in Congress? Well, other than me, of course. You do. You get after it more than any of them. You might be the only Congresswoman that ever puts workout videos online.

Maybe. Of you working out. That's actually probably true. But they're impressive. I've got to tell you, I'm impressed. I appreciate that. It's important. You do hard stuff. It is important. You do hard stuff.

It is important. But you do difficult stuff. You get after it. Yeah. You're not doing curls. No, no, no. You're doing box jumps and shit. Yeah.

Yeah, you're doing plyometrics. I love it. I watch it. It's such a great way to, I mean, for me, it's such a great way to start the day, kind of clean the slate uh get that physical exertion out that i mean yoga for me it's it's yoga meditation and and working out that um yeah but there's a group of us in conger when i was there um a very good friend of mine mark wayne mullen from oklahoma congressman he actually used to be an m fighter and a wrestler. And so that's how we became really good friends.

Small group of us. There was a bipartisan group. He craps the whip. He's invited Randy Couture there. Randy's like led a workout there. Oh, wow. It's such a great way to just bond as people. And some of those like are the core of our workout group democrats and republicans they all came out

to abraham and my wedding in hawaii and like we're actually really good friends that's cool and it all was centered around just kicking each other's ass in the morning and talking shit and all the other stuff that happens in the gym that's awesome but but what i was going to say is one morning there's a yoga class happening in there and um then speaker Boehner was participating in the yoga class. And I saw him on the House floor later. He was walking down the main aisle. And just as he was about to leave, I was like, Speaker, I saw you in yoga this morning. That's awesome. Good job. I put my hand up and I high fived him and he smiled and laughed a little bit. But as this was happening, was a another democrat

who was like waiting to pass and we were getting in her way and when she passed once the high five was done she started muttering like something to her staff she's like i can't believe tulsi would do that and gave me the look of like utter absolute disgust that you cross this simple basic human interaction was the ultimate offense going back to once again how unfortunately so much of congress is is like high school and how at a most basic level, like, come on, we're people. Let's treat each other like people. And, you know, you can have, and there's a number of things that I disagree with John Boehner on, on issues,

but let's have those conversations and also be able to say, you know what, I recognize that you're a person too. And yoga is a good thing for everybody. Oh, yeah, yeah. But that's just, you know, it's one example of many. It's a good thing for everybody, and and yoga is a good thing for everybody oh yeah yeah but that's just you know it's one example of many it's a good thing for everybody and it's also a good thing to find out what someone's made out of yeah because you could kind of like be a man like and go work out hard and grunt and everything like that and like oh that guy really works out hard go to a yoga class

and you find out how long you hold that pose for before you quit. When do you put your foot down? You know, that's a different kind of strength. It's a mental strength. Exactly. Exactly. And the ability to, you know, just stop and find that focus and that peace in yoga breathing, yoga meditation, and stop looking in the mirror and checking out how big your muscles are. You know what I mean?

Exactly. It's fucking gross. You know, it's another thing my yoga instructor said once that I'll never forget. She was saying that one of the most difficult poses is in the dead body pose because you want to move. The corpse pose, yeah. Yeah. She's like, you want to move, corpse pose yeah she's like you want to move but you can't she goes just lay there and breathe and it is hard to do really it's hard

to do in a weird way do you i usually fall asleep at the end well there's there's a couple of those poses that are in the middle there's one of them that's in the middle where you you lie down and when you do the beacom series there's one of them in the middle where they used to call it Bikram now they just the place that I was going to they they changed it to just hot yoga because he's a scumbag yeah yeah and also he didn't really invent those moves oh no not at all they've been around for thousands of years exactly yeah and even that pattern and even doing it in hot climate yeah like he didn't invent it he just he just went and made a bunch of money for you yeah hilarious but when you're exhausted and your body's overheating and you're lying there it's hard yeah

lay there you want to move around yeah but you just got a chill and it's hard to do yeah it's hard to just lay there yeah and it's hard to do. Yeah. It's hard to just lay there. Yeah. But it's so, so, I mean, it's life changing if you allow it. It's very good for you. Yeah. And physical. Well, good for you for high-fiving them.

Yeah. And, you know, the thing about them treating it like high school, the problem is most people live their fucking lives like it's like high school. Yeah. You know? high school the problem is most people live their fucking lives like it's like high school yeah you know i mean i i know people that are growing adults with children that treat life like high school you know when they pick their kids up at school you know this one's over there that look at how she's dressed i can't believe her husband lets her go out like that it's like fucking high

school you know uh that is that is a whole other thing yeah well it's about people it's like humanity responsibility and awareness and you know the effect of our actions and our words on other people and and especially if you're a parent on your kids what kind of example you're setting it's also just not seeking growth as a human being like it Like being satisfied with the mindset that you have, you know, 10 years ago or 15 years ago and just maintaining that nonsense for the rest of your life. There are grown babies, you know, they're literally like a 55 year old baby man. And that's out there treating life like they're a 12 year old storming temper tantrums and acting like an idiot.

And they don't get any better. There's no self-reflection. And if you come visit them in 10 years, it'll be more of the same. They just have less energy. And probably more bitterness and more... More angry. Yeah. Angry at the world.

Didn't give them their just due. Our sons are precious. Which is so sad, really, because it... I mean, life is so short. It is real short. And to be alive and to be in a place where, look, we have so many blessings and opportunities and comforts that people in a lot of other parts of the world don't have. And it's just unfortunate to waste all of that opportunity. It is. And ultimately, the benefit of those people is you get to learn from

their failures yeah you get to learn from their mistake it's a horrible thing to learn from someone's literal wasted life but you can learn absolutely and if you know people like that like when i was in high school uh i had a friend and his cousin i've talked about too many times we'll say one more time his his cousin was a coke addict he was selling coke and i learned from watching his life fall apart like whatever i do stay the fuck away from that stuff yeah because it was like knowing someone who got bit by a vampire like watching his whole life wrap around this drug yeah and selling it and then just withered away lost a bunch of weight and looked all fucking scrawny and shit you can learn from other people's failures you can learn from their lack of growth and when you see it and it makes you uncomfortable there's a value in that like people say that

experience is the best mistake or is the the best teacher i think other people's failures are the best teacher like i don't want to be so you don't have to go through it yourself first yeah i don't want to be like her i don't want to be like him that's the best i don't want to be like they if i want to non-gender it are you into that now joe oh that's my new thing yeah i don't believe in gender anymore when i when i buy a puppy i just i don't even ask because it doesn't let the puppy name itself let the puppy decide yeah if it lifts its leg to pee i assume it's a whole new world it's a whole new world yeah it is it's uh it's a weird one yeah you know we're gonna get through it but i think um there's gonna be some real hiccups along the way and there always are there always are and and speaking of learning from you know other people's experiences, I think this is what we've gone through as a country and as a people. This is a teachable moment for us.

If you don't like what's happening around you right now, take a moment, pause, and whether it's individually, ourselves, or really collectively collectively stopping for that introspection to say how did we get here yeah and how can i be a positive force for shifting it's not easy it doesn't happen overnight it doesn't happen because one person has been elected president it happens when we collectively start to make those better choices about the impact that we are making on others, the kinds of things we're saying, the things that we're tweeting out. And, you know, instead of just like, whatever you're thinking on social media or whatever, you know, just taking that like, okay, just think about it. Just think about it.

What kind of impact do you want to make? This is where I think we have the opportunity to shift. And this is something that I want to be able to, that I plan to be able to do, to help contribute to now that I'm not in Congress, is to be able to kind of create a platform for sharing real in-depth information so that people have a place to go to look at different issues that we're dealing with at any given time, share my own insights

based on the experience that I've had on both the problem as well as how we can work towards a real common sense solution, but also just have a platform for these kinds of real conversations, much like the ones that I've had, you know, throughout my presidential campaign,

throughout my time in Congress, throughout my time in the military, both with people here and around the world, that show when it comes right down to it, when you actually sit across from someone, maybe over a meal, that we have so much more in common than we realize. Just like my friends I work out with

in the morning in the gym. We have so much more in common than we realize just like my friends i work out with in the morning in the gym we have so much more in common than we realize at the superficial level and so um this is one of the things that i'm going to be doing is uh launching a podcast show uh that's crazy you're gonna do a podcast i know what i actually i looked, I looked back, I think it was the last time I was here with Jocko, right? That was the last time I was on your show was, you're like, Tulsi, you should do a podcast and actually have a long form platform to talk about issues. Because, you know, as we saw throughout the debates and other things, it's the soundbite, it's the tweet, It's the superficial.

Yeah. And they're, they're, you know, at that level, there's only an interest in soundbites and caricatures and not an interest in actual real conversation and, and in-depth focus on substance.

Yeah. Long form discussions. Yeah. It's the really, the only way to find out how a person actually thinks. Yeah. You take a little snippet of things. You can mischaracterize it.

And that's the problem with Twitter. I mean, I see so many people arguing with people on Twitter. And I watch them argue and I go, I got to believe if they were alone in a room, they wouldn't be hashing it out like this. Yes. They'd probably find some common ground. Yes. Hopefully. Yeah. it out like this yes they'd probably find some common ground yes hopefully yeah you know hopefully

they'd be able to communicate in a way where they would be able to relay each other's thoughts without having to insult each other and say horrible shit and you know just i've seen it happen i've seen it happen um over and over throughout my presidential campaign in those town halls sometimes they were small rooms Sometimes they were rooms with thousands of people. Always had a Q&A session at the very end of the town hall after I said what I wanted to say. And time and time again, even when people came with that combative kind of attitude and spirit,

when they're heard and they feel heard and there's an openness to have a discussion oftentimes that combativeness and those tensions i've seen brought down yeah where people are actually um open to having that that kind of conversation and open to hearing a different perspective uh that that they may not have considered. And also recognizing, again, like we talked about with all these different issues, like at our core, no matter who we are, where we come from, the color of our skin,

all of those things, who we voted for, who we voted against, at our core, we really do have more that we agree on than we disagree on. We have more in common. I think that also speaks to you because I think that if you went to Trump's town halls and they had a Q&A, they would not have the same result.

I don't think you would have people reaching across the aisle and having reasonable discussions. You're a reasonable person. And I think that is one of the more important aspects of leadership, like who the leader is. I'm sure when you're giving out this town hall and these people are in this room together, they're feeding off of that kind of energy. It's not this like divisive combative energy that's other politicians put out. And I think that fosters this idea of community and it allows people to have the confidence to maybe be a little more kind than they would be if they were insecure. Like I had to lash out this fucking liberal before they come at me with some Nazi shit. And, you know, and this is what happens with people they if if you put them in an environment where they feel like you know i think the thing here is to be nice yeah this is the thing to do is yeah and then they'll try it and the other person goes i can't believe he's being nice yeah

i'm gonna be nice too that's true and then they're nice to each other and then you know i thought i was gonna not like you i thought i was gonna not like you. I thought I was going to not like you. And they shake hands. Totally. That's a beautiful feeling. It is a beautiful thing. And this is something I started to do at these town halls where to make people feel more comfortable. I said, OK, I want to see a show of hands.

Raise your hand if you're a Democrat. You know, a bunch of hands went up. I'm Democrat. I said, OK, raise your hands if you're a Republican. And it usually started with one person kind of like looking around, raising their hand. And then slowly more hands started going up and everybody sitting up a little taller. And they're like, oh, my God, I'm not alone. Not the only one. Raise your hands if you're an independent. Raise your hands if you're a libertarian. And just taking a few minutes to do that.

Immediately, people were just like wow this is a representation of america we are all sitting here in this same room and all here because we care about our country and that's the starting point yeah for those discussions it's all the starting point is also being able to have a reasonable discussion and being calm about it. I brought up your appearance on The View, but that was one of my favorite appearances on The View because you were one of the only people that didn't actually get upset. You just corrected them. You slowly but surely. You could see Joy Behar.

Her glasses were shaking. She's pulling out her cards. She had notes of different things, insulting things to say to you. It was kind of hilarious. And you kept your shit together, and you just calmly refuted all that and explained who you are. And that kind of energy that you brought to the table as a presidential candidate was very exciting to me.

And that kind of energy at a town hall, I guarantee you, is a large part of why people were willing to have these reasonable disagreements and discussions. And that's what we need. Yeah. This idea that we're separated and there's a red and a blue and we're team this or team that. I'm on team donkey. Fuck you. I'm an elephant. Like, that is crazy.

This is most of what we agree on or disagree on is we can work these things out. And a lot of people that either are on one side or the other, they decide that they're a part of this tribe because they don't want to be out on their own. They don't want to be independent. They don't want to be adrift in the wind. And they want to have the social connection to other people that have like-minded beliefs. And so they'll alter their beliefs to fit their community. They'll alter their beliefs to fit in with other human beings. Yeah. I mean, it's what people do. It's a common thing. Yeah. And being able to create those spaces like you do here. I mean, I've, I lost track of how many people who came to my campaign because like, I heard you on Joe Rogan.

what draws people to your show because they know that it will be a fair and open and respectful dialogue, whether you agree with who you bring in or not. It's kind of not, not even really the point, but so many people came and, and people from across the spectrum is this one woman who came at the end of the town hall. And she's like,

I don't know, maybe 70 years old she's like Tulsi I'm here because I saw you on Joe Rogan I was like that's awesome that's crazy I was like I don't think you're the kind of person people think of when they think of Joe the Joe Rogan audience but it just crows that there there shows that there's such a cross-section of Americans again who are hungry for this dialogue and to be able to reach out and to hear different perspectives. And so, yeah, I mean, this is something that I want to be able to help contribute to being that voice for common sense and facts and truth and freedom and to

create that space where we can actually get to know each other better. The world needs a whole lot more of that. So when are you going to do this? Uh, in the next few weeks, it is, um, people can go on.

Now I've got a trailer up. The show is called, this is Tulsi Gabbard. Can we watch it right now? You can listen to it. I don't know if that's going to be as interesting. Are you going to have video and audio? I am actually.

I am video and audio. Where are you going to do it out of? You're going to do it from Hawaii. So you're going to do it remotely with guests. I's going to be as interesting. Are you going to have video and audio? I am, actually. I am. Video and audio. Where are you going to do it out of? Are you going to do it from Hawaii? So you're going to do it remotely with guests? I'm going to do it out of Hawaii, but maybe when COVID stops being such an infectious thing a little bit later, I'd love to do as much in person as possible and just kind of do it like a roadshow, a weekly roadshow. Yeah.

There's something about the in-person ones so much better yeah i mean like i i've yeah that would be my preference so i'll invite people to come out to hawaii take a vacation we'll film we'll film a show there yeah i'll do i limit my zoom ones now to people on other continents and people that are older right like really can't travel right they're worried about their health right because it's just the conversations are always so it's like they're hollow it's like a hollow easter bunny remember you just get those hollow ones you know damn it's a hollow one yeah you get those other ones that are solid you're like oh yeah look at all the

chocolate you know yeah yeah that's what it's like it looks like a podcast but it's a hollow chocolate bunny yeah yeah so there's um yeah i will get to do in-person ones when it's a little bit more safe to do it but uh in the meantime you know it'll be a mix of of of it's not going to be primarily conversations will be conversations but it also just you know uh north korea for example i'm going to do a piece just talking about North Korea and really getting into depth about how we got here and the failures that have caused us to reach this point. And I think where we can go on these sorts of, where we can go and address a lot of the

issues like this that people aren't really getting in the news. Are you going to do all this completely independent? Yeah. Yeah, that's the move. Are you going to do all this completely independent? Yeah. Yeah, that's the move. Yeah. Because if you, you know, there's a lot of podcast networks out there and there's a lot of production houses that put together podcasts and they'll lure you in with talks of, we already have advertisers, we can do this, or we'd like to offer you 60% of the revenue

and, you know, can you know we'll we'll take the rest and it's i think with everything happening especially now but even you know uh leading up to what we've seen in the last few weeks just putting yourself in a position where someone else has the power to tell you like man man, I don't like what you said there. Yes. Yank. Exactly. Uh, I don't want to be in that position. Yeah. You know, you don't want to be in that position. Yeah. It could, it's also like being as many platforms as possible. Right. It's a good move too. Especially in the early days. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Exactly. It's, uh, you know, it's a weird time when someone can just decide that they don't like you or that what you're doing is problematic. And just find a reason.

Yeah. Find or create a reason to be able to deplatform you. Yeah, that's one of the reasons why I went to Spotify is because they had a vested interest in me succeeding. Sure. Like instead of worrying about me being pulled for their network. Right. It's not that I never really worried about that with YouTube, but it's always possible. It is possible

There was some weird shenanigans. They would do with demonetizing specific episodes Just randomly and we would decide like we would we would question it. What does that mean to demonetize? It means you don't make any ad revenue You don't make the ad revenue from that episode and they just decide and so it's a way it's a way and i'm not necessarily saying that this is why they did it but this is what happens because of it it's a way of censoring people without censoring people because you say oh uh were you guys talking about covid oh yeah no we can't we can't put ads on that yeah why would you want to put ads on something that's one of the primary concerns

of the entire fucking planet yeah why put ads on that. Yeah. Why would you want to put ads on something that's one of the primary concerns of the entire fucking planet? Yeah. Why put ads on that? Right. You know, oh, did you guys swear? Did you swear? Oh yeah. We're going to have to demonetize that.

There was a lot of weird stuff like that. Yeah. And so I was like, listen, they're great overall, but the arbitrary decisions that are oftentimes done by people that work there. Right. So someone has like the, someone has the ability to decide whether you make money off something or whether you don't make money off something.

And it's not the primary concern, but it points to an issue. And the issue is someone being able to dictate what you can or can't talk about or someone incentivizing you to talk about something or not talk about something. Exactly. It's the principle of the matter. I don't want to be a part of that. Yeah.

It's not that I distrust YouTube. I think the problem is not them. I think the problem is managing at scale. I think they are dealing with billions of minutes of time that's just being thrown at them and uploaded constantly. And I don't know how many employees they really have, but it can't be enough. And there's no way they can watch every minute of every show that gets uploaded on their network. They don't have that kind of time. It's not physically possible.

How many different people upload on YouTube? We've figured this out before, but it's in physically possible how many different people upload on youtube we've figured this out before but it's in the millions right jamie 500 hours of video are uploaded to youtube every minute worldwide wow wow 500 hours every minute yeah 720 000 hours of video uploaded every day to youtube well good luck getting someone to watch all that shit. Exactly. It's not even that. It's their fault. It's like, how do you get all the ISIS beheading videos down?

How do you get all the Nazi videos down? How do you find all that stuff? Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I don't know how they do it. But the danger, like you said, the danger of the principle of the matter is that, let's say they don't have the means to, I don't know how their process works, but let's say somebody clicks on your video or my video and reports it as, you know, whatever. Let's say they report it as a video that's, that's supporting. Yeah. Problematic.

I don't know what YouTube's process is to have any kind of fairness in seeing whether it is problematic or not. Or is it just like, ah, somebody reported it. We're going to yank it because it's safer to yank it. Yeah. And, you know, therefore put the person whose show it is in a pretty difficult situation.

Yeah. I don't know what you would do differently either if I was them. Right. I mean, how would you manage that kind of time? Right. I, yeah, I don't know the answer to that. Right. I don't know the answer to that. Right. I don't know the answer. I mean, ultimately, we want them to have, I'm just actually, I wasn't going to show this here, but my husband sent me the edit of the video trailer. I don't know if, I don't have Jamie's number.

You can eardrop it to him. Yeah. I mean, ultimately, it comes down to being able to make sure that these big tech monopolies are making decisions about content, like we talked about, based on the principles of the First Amendment. decades of precedence for this, which provide very clear guidelines and markers that big tech or frankly any platform can look to and have those be the boundaries that are transparent and clear to everyone so that users or content creators aren't left questioning and wondering like, why the heck did, why did this get pulled? I don't understand. Right. Which is what's happening now. And it's also you you really can't answer every one of those people that's another problem if you have that many people uploading stuff constantly how are you

going to answer all those people exactly so my thoughts of going with spotify besides the money was that it seemed like it made more sense to have someone who has a vested interest in the show succeeding and they want, they have no interest in pulling me off their network. They actually want me to be on there. Yeah. Yeah. And they want more people to see what you're doing. If you do your show,

um, are you planning on a video element of it? Yeah, you are. I, this is a drop box link. Should I just give you my phone? I wouldn't trust him.

He's going to go right to your pictures. It's okay. Look for some secret folder you might have. Surfing and whatever. That's it? Are you boring? Surfing and food and- What's in the book?

All the stuff. This is literally just like notes. On what? Notebook. But you had it open when you sat down? Yeah, yeah. No, I mean, there's just some of the things that... Like we talked about a lot of things that I was hoping to talk about and some things

that I wanted to be reminded of. Yeah. Yeah. A lot of the, you know, the cancel culture, the freedom of speech, Bill of Rights issues, and things like that. Yeah, I think the cancel culture is just a big part of what we were talking about earlier with social media. It's just like this, it's so easy to gravitate towards hate. It's so easy to be angry. It's so easy to lash out. It's like, it's a weird way to communicate. It's not healthy. And it's the primary way that most people express themselves in a public forum.

And one of the dangers of this right now is just the, you know, casting broad aspersions against people. We were talking about this as I was walking in this morning of, you know, people are talking about racism a lot, but they're not referring to kind of the racism and assumption of guilt against like white male Americans right now. And that clip from Congressman Steve Cohen on CNN from the other day. Yeah, that's what we're talking about. Explain that. So Congressman Steve Cohen was on CNN talking about potential insider threats from the National Guard who are deployed to our nation's capital right now

to over 25,000 of our National Guard soldiers, I believe from every single state. And the point that he was making was that because only 20% of white males voted for Joe Biden, and, well, that means, you know, the rest obviously voted for Trump, and the military is still a predominantly white male. Is that true in the culture? 25% of the white males voted for Joe Biden in the country? That's what Steve Cohen said. Not just in the National Guard? No, no, no.

In the country. What? Is that real? I haven't verified that. But that's what he said. We need to verify that right now because that doesn't even make sense. That seems way off. In saying that, he says, well, therefore, given the military is predominantly white male,

it's safe to assume that 75% of the guard has likely voted for Trump and therefore could not be trusted to uphold their oath to support and defend the Constitution and fulfill the mission that they've been tasked with in our nation's capital. And the troubling statement that he used was, given these numbers, quote, the suspect pool is large. So casting doubt and suspicion on the vast majority of the National Guard in this case, because of their race and their gender and who they may have voted for as though they cannot be trusted to uphold the responsibility and the oath that we all take for wearing this uniform is is one example of this i mean it is it's it's blatant racism and tribalism that is incredibly incredibly dangerous yeah yeah it's also virtual signaling you know it's also a thing that you can say where people go yes and they give you they give you a little heart you go boy they like it you know it's a he got he got criticized for it for him but he didn't apologize. His comeback was like, well, I support the National Guard. Like, I've been in the National Guard for over 17 years.

By you saying, by you making this assumption that the people I've served with are... 75% racist. Yes. Yeah, it's crazy. You don't support the National Guard. Don't even pretend. And you shouldn't be in Congress. for not rolling it out to elderly people because elderly people are predominantly white and that we should instead do it give it to people that are essential workers first because essential workers

are more often people of color and that this will balance things out like literally say if more white people die it'll be better because we'll have more of a balance this came from the cdc's advisory committee responsible for deciding who should get the vaccine yes first or not yes who was the guy that said it though there was one per and everybody blew a fucking gasket because that is really a crazy thing the problem is like i don't remember the name of who said it but all members of this advisory committee supported it except for one guy who was like this is not based on science because if you look at the statistics over 80 percent of people dying in this country from covid are people over the age of 65.

Yeah, if you want to save lives, you would give it to the older people. And like 50% of people being hospitalized over 65. So yes, if you want to save lives, if you want to make it so our ICUs aren't like at max capacity, then give the, prioritize the vaccine based on age instead of occupation. There is a concern though that essential workers are the ones who spread it more easily because they have to be in contact with people. I'm glad you mentioned that. So it's not that cut and dry. So these essential workers that are getting it, like these folks have to be at work.

So if they have to be at work, they're more likely to be contracted. If they get the vaccine and they're protected from it, then it will spread less likely. So there's two things there. First is who the CDC designates as an essential worker. I'll get to that in a second. But all of this is built on the assumption that this vaccine will prevent the transmission of the virus, which is what we're hearing from some so-called health experts, which we're hearing from some in the media. It's not been scientifically proven. I've gone back and looked at the applications and the data that was put forward to the FDA

to get approval from Pfizer and Moderna. the FDA to get approval from Pfizer and Moderna. And these vaccines have been scientifically established to largely prevent serious health complications and death from COVID once you're vaccinated. That has been scientifically established. Nowhere in their trials was it scientifically established that these vaccines would prevent the transmission of the virus. And so I see it almost every day. And it's incredibly dangerous where media outlets and some some people who are healthcare professionals are propagating this, this, I mean, it's a lie. It's's not true but they're basically saying that that well you know people who have to go and work in these jobs um that are essential workers they need to

get vaccinated so they don't spread it or even you know first responders we had a we had a local news station in hawaii who shared a really emotional interview from a first responder younger woman who had just gotten vaccinated. And she said, like, finally, I can go and visit my grandmother and not be worried that I am going to give her the virus, because I'm taking care of people who have COVID every day. And what is so dangerous about that is she got the vaccine. If she has then gone and visited with her grandmother, she could still, and Dr. Fauci's talked about this and others, because this virus lives inside your nasal passage, you can be vaccinated and you can still pass it on. and you can still pass it on. And it could have a devastating effect on someone,

for example, who is elderly and who is vulnerable to this and who has not gotten the vaccine. So anyone who is saying that, well, we have to vaccinate these people or those people based on their occupation because we don't want the virus to spread, it has not been scientifically established that the vaccines prevent that. And this is why they're all, you know, Fauci and these other guys, they're like, even if you're vaccinated, you have to still wear the mask, you still have to do

social distancing, because of the potential for that. So I think that's such an important thing for people to know, especially as people are getting vaccinated, not to have this false sense of security that just because you've gotten the vaccine, now you can go visit grandma in the nursing've gone through all the CDC slides that the advisory committee put forward on who is a frontline essential worker and who's an essential worker. Healthcare professionals and first responders, obviously, yes, they are so overworked. They are overtaxed. They should be getting the vaccine right alongside our elderly over 65. But if you start getting past them, and the people who are listed as frontline essential workers, according to the CDC, you're talking about anybody who works in manufacturing, anybody who works at a grocery store, anybody who works at a gosh, what were some of the other ones in agriculture in any sector. Basically, you're talking about, I don't know, half of all working

people in frontline essential jobs. And then you go on to the essential workers, teachers and day care workers, they're included in that as well. And then you go on to essential workers, people who work at banks, people who work in the media, basically almost everybody else who is in the workforce as essential workers. So this goes back to the thing that you originally said, is that part of their decision-making process was this kind of justice component and making decisions based on who gets the vaccine, making decisions about who gets to the vaccine first not based on who is most likely to die or get seriously ill but instead based on occupation it's i i kind of understand why you would want the people that are forced to work to get vaccinated before people that are not forced

to work that makes sense you know it's, it's just, it's very difficult when you hear that you're, you're, you want essential workers to get vaccinated and they could still spread it. Cause that seems to me to be, that needs to be really expressed. Clearly. Very clearly. It's not being expressed clearly much at all. That could be a real problem. It is because again, you, let's say you have that example.

I mean, people over 65, my parents included, you're pretty much stuck at home because of the very real danger that if you go out and you get infected, you could die. Yeah. of this fact about how the vaccines have not been scientifically established to prevent the transmission of the virus, that that's not being directly told to every single person who gets it, is a real problem because then they go home. Or they go and visit their parents who they haven't seen for a long time or their grandparents and could be carrying the virus and transmitting it unknowingly because they think like, I'm good now. I'm safe. And so that has to be part of this. I mean, to me, there's a direct scientific correlation based on facts that if you look at the people who are dying and who are being hospitalized, predominantly they are people over 65 years old.

If we want to reduce those numbers, those are the people who should be prioritized to get this limited number of vaccines that we have. First, then followed by younger, healthy people. I mean, to me, and by doing that, you know, really, we could reduce the numbers of COVID-related death by about 80%, reduce the numbers of COVID-related hospitalizations by, I think it's like 48, 49%. That would have a massive, massive effect on people's lives and on our country. Yeah, well said. And weird that that's not being said more often. Yeah. I've been pushing both our state leadership in Hawaii and also the Trump administration. So the Trump administration, just in the last few days, I think it was January 12th, I think,

the Department of Health and Human Services did actually adjust their recommendations. And they said vaccines need to urgently go towards people over 65. It is something that they have strongly recommended to the states. At this point, it's up to the states to choose whether to implement it or not. Texas has. Texas is one of those states that has. And there are a few others. But at this point, kind of the lives of our parents and grandparents are in the hands of the decisions being made by the governors and state health officials in each state.

How has Hawaii had a quarantine for a long time, right? Had quarantine for a long time, right? Had quarantine for a long time. Recently, that quarantine is lifted for travelers, whether you're a resident or a visitor, if you're coming in with a negative COVID test taken within 72 hours prior to arrival. How's that worked out you know it's our art we have amongst the lowest number of uh i think our infection rate is amongst the lowest in the country uh slowly visitors are starting to come back it's still i mean it's nowhere even close to what it would be uh otherwise or what it was um but you know i think it's a this is something this is an approach now that you know, I think it's a, this is something, this is an approach now that, you know, I think anybody coming to the U.S. now from a foreign country now has to do something similar. So it's not 100% protection, but it provides that layer of protection to make sure that,

yeah, people aren't getting, I mean, people aren't getting, people shouldn't be getting onto airplanes if you're sick. Right. Have they seen cases jump up since this has been implemented, since they have a lot of people to come with a COVID test? Not significantly, no. I think there may have been, I don't know the exact numbers, but, you know, it's kind of, the numbers are quite small. Spikes that we've seen in our daily reports seem to come after holiday weekends, times when people are gathering in large numbers and so on. Is there any discussion in Hawaii about health and nutrition and exercise and the importance that that plays on the immune system? Not enough. Not enough. Not enough.

the importance that that plays on the immune system? Not enough. I don't know. Not enough. It's, you know, I think because it's Hawaii, there's, I mean, being outdoors, surfing, hiking, swimming, you know, this is such a big part of life. But, yeah, I mean, this has not been a focus by our health department or in Hawaii, and I think even nationally. It's unfortunate that just basic health and wellness

has not been more of a focus in talking about prevention. Yeah, well, the economic impact for the state has to be insane. Because so much relying on tourism, right? I mean, it's the number one driver of our economy. And it's not just the people who are working in hotels, right? It's all of the other people in that economic chain, you know, all the way to the farmers who are growing food, who usually are able to sell to the restaurants in the hotels, the restaurants in the community. It's, yeah, it's had a really devastating effect.

It's had a really devastating effect. And how to like for a state like Hawaii, it seems like the only way that it bounces back is to let tourism back in. If that's the number one driver of the economy, it's not like there's a bunch of other variables that can be put into play, right? It's challenging. You're right. But it's it's challenging. challenging. Well, first of all, I think a lot of local people are saying like, you know, uh, it's kind of nice not being flooded with, you know, millions of tourists every day. And maybe there's a way to take a more balanced and sustainable approach to welcoming people back into the state. Um, that also is more, more sustainable in that, you know, marine life are thriving. Our reefs are doing much better than they ever have. It's just the environment in Hawaii.

Like, you know, people who are out in the water every day, they're like, my gosh, it's like Mother Earth finally got a chance to breathe. That's so great, but also so disappointing. Yeah. It's eye-opening, though. And so, you know, they're having conversations like, hey, maybe there's like a month out of the year or some period of time where we should just kind of maybe put a pause on things, let the environment reset. I don't know. There's different ideas being put forward.

A month's probably not enough, though, unfortunately. Yeah. Ten months is really what it needed. Yeah. Well, it's gotten it. And this is really just the beginning, right? Yeah. If you left Hawaii alone for ten years, then you would see what's up, right?

I have a giant concern with fishing practices and what's happening with the ocean. Because I don't think it's nearly being regulated enough. And it's terrifying. And when you think about the possibility of them literally pulling every fish out of the ocean inside of the next 150, 200 years, that's really possible. We could see the numbers that things are down. There was a documentary that I watched about a Japanese tuna fisherman. And they were talking about what it used to be like when they would, you know, have these tuna hauls and they would come in and the sushi restaurants, all these different places would come in to look at the fish versus what's available now. And it's a radical decrease in the population of fish.

Yeah, that overfishing. I mean, I think a lot of what's happening with, you know, I't know all of the the mechanics of how they do it but it's kind of like the ocean version of factory farming yeah essentially where you see in both cases an incredibly devastating long-term effect um on on the environment as a whole which has a direct i mean it has a direct impact on all of us you know in the ocean on the air as a whole, which has a direct impact on all of us. In the ocean, on the air we breathe, on the water we drink, on our land and our ability to have good soil to actually grow food that people can eat.

There has to be a change in the policies and the laws that govern these industries. Because otherwise, we're going to get to a place, like you said, like there just won't be any more fish in the sea. It's such a crazy thing to think of that a giant percentage of the Earth's surface and we suck all the living things out of it and stick them on plates. surface and we suck all the living things out of it and stick them on plates yeah and they're i mean there's there's got to be a a global approach to this because we live this planet's not very big right but then we share so much of it there's some people in some countries that are like not interested sorry gonna keep wailing sorry not interested kind of keep burning coal and if there's i think I think there's economic incentive given how much more we are all connected

as countries in the world because of our economies. You know, I think it gets harder and harder if a country like ours were to say, hey, let's work with you on this. I think it's harder to kind of silo yourself out. It's tough. Look, I'm not saying it's harder to kind of silo yourself out. It's tough. Look, it's,

I'm not saying it's going to be an easy thing, but leadership. Yeah. Taking leadership. Um, so this podcast that you're doing when you, uh, launch this and you,

uh, especially after COVID relaxes and you take it on the road, do you have, uh, an end goal with this? Is this something you're going to do in addition to other things that you're planning on doing with your time?

Yeah. Yeah, this I think will end up being one of a number of things that I'm doing. Really as a means, taking the experience that I had, especially from my campaign, where my interest and goal was to really talk about and focus on the great issues of our time,

but finding that the mainstream media is really only interested in creating a caricature and the soundbite and the smears. That's kind of what motivated me to create this platform as a means to, that's why I called it, This Is Tulsi Gabbard. This is me in my voice, sharing my views and my insights and my experience on all these different issues, and also capturing that beauty that I experienced both during my campaign and just over the years of all of these different people I've met with such different and diverse views and backgrounds, but finding the beauty of that commonality that's

captured to be able to highlight and showcase that through different conversations, I think, can have a really positive effect in inspiring people to do the same, to dig deeper, to look for the truth, to maybe challenge their own perspective or view on something by considering someone else's, and to spark those conversations in their own circles. We are just so fortunate that there's an opportunity now that you can express yourself like that, where you can't be misrepresented. And if people want to misrepresent you, other people just have to listen to you and go, that's not who she is at all. Right.

You don't listen to this is Tulsi Gabbard. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's what will happen. If you want to know, just listen. That is what will happen. It's interesting that you say the mainstream media misrepresented you because don't you think that the mainstream media had to have been guided to misrepresent you it's not as simple as they just decided to pick on you like there are some other players involved in that oh absolutely has to be

absolutely they wouldn't have decided that because I think if there was no opposition, they would have decided to support you because people have been looking for a woman president forever. We're probably going to get it in about four months, but they've been looking for a woman president. I mean, how long do you think he's going to last? Let's be honest. I hope he lasts forever. I do too.

I hope Joe Biden lives forever and becomes a god. I wouldn't go that far. That's what I hope. Good for you. I but if i had a bet to place i i don't think he gets it to two years well let's not bet on the man's life first i'm not saying his life i'm saying as president i just said i want him to live forever but if i have to make a bet to how long he's going to stay in office but you saw that one uh conversation that that he's had where he was talking about him and Kamala that if they had a disagreement, he would just say that he had an injury or an illness. I did not see that.

You never saw that? It is the most bizarre thing. What? Oh, please find that, Jamie. You know what I'm talking about, Jamie? No. Joe Biden saying that he would fake an illness or say he has an illness. Yeah.

Do you want to try one of these pineapple jalapeno drinks? I will try that. It's got CBD in it. Thank you. No THC, though. Okay. It's got my face on it, too. Even better.

Yeah, it's my flavor. I worked with Kill Cliff to develop this. Nice. Tell me whether or not you like it. Okay. No pressure. Pineapple is my... Pine pineapple and jalapeno i like on pizza i'm just gonna i know that's that's a controversial statement but i love pineapple you're a vegetarian but i like pineapple and anchovies pineapple anchovies is the bomb diggity i know it seems

like it would be disgusting it's good good that's good right that is good that's not bad no that's really good yeah i like that no sugar. No sugar. Yeah, no sugar. 25 milligrams of CBD. B vitamins. Did you find it, Jamie? I think. Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's it.

That's exactly it. What? You got to listen to this because it's bananas. Listen to this. The first lady to be told me she holds them for you. Yes, she does. But not with, she and Kamala have become friends. But all kidding aside, it's a matter of the thing, we are simpatico on our philosophy of government

and simpatico on how we want to approach these issues that we're facing. And so I don't have, and when we disagree, it'll be just like, so far it's been just like when Barack and I did. It's in private. She'll say, I think we should do A, B, C, or D. And I'll say, I like A, don't like B and C. And it's okay. And like I told Barack, if I reach something where there's a fundamental disagreement we have based on a moral principle, I'll develop some disease and say I have to resign.

We don't have that. He's talking about when he was vice president. Yeah. That's what he's talking about. And I think his expectation that Kamala does the same. But he said, just like. I know. I know.

To me, it's clear he's talking about when he was VP, though. To me, it's fun to pretend it's not clear. I'm sure it is. It's a bonkers thing to say. The guy's saying he's going to fake a disease. That's what I heard. Is that what you heard, Jamie? You heard that too, right?

The guy's going to fake a disease. I have this disease of reading context, and I cannot... Well, you got to stop that if you want to work for me. Listen, that's going to be a real problem. Context nuance bananas. What are you doing? What are you, a communist?

I think we should have a pool. We should have a JRE pool where we bet how long he lasts. I say two years. I think two years is a reasonable amount of time for a 78-year-old man. You know, to ask someone to work after 80, I think that's unreasonable.

I'm not even going to go here, man. I'm not going to go here. Well, I hope he lives forever and, again, becomes a god like Thor or something and just rules the country in a perfect way. I don't want anybody like Thor running the country. What about fat Thor? Remember when he got fat and he was drinking a lot of beer? That was pretty funny.

It was kind of a cool Thor. That was a little sad, though, man. when he got fat and he was drinking a lot of beer? That was pretty funny. It was kind of a cool Thor. That was a little sad though, man. When he got fat? Yeah. Well, he just loses the weight. Come on, dude. Don't say that.

Now you're fat shaming all the people that are fat. They're all like, what? It's sad that I'm fat? Fuck you, Tulsi. I was your number one supporter. And they're crafting a little tweet right now to you. What do you say to that? What do you say?

Get up and do something about it. Yeah, do something about it. Yeah. Get healthy. Well, did you see the cover of Cosmopolitan Magazine that had all these overweight women that said this is healthy? No.

Oh, good lord. I don't read enough Cosmo, apparently. Tulsi, you've been living in some sort of a cave somewhere. I was going to post about it on my Instagram, but I'm like, I legitimately feel like an asshole

if I talk badly about people that are fat as long as they're guys i'm okay with it but i feel bad talking bad about fat women it was a fat guy but like get the fuck out of here it's not healthy it's a fat guy but fat i don't know why it's like because i look like a douchebag it's a problem and obviously i'm a meat only if it's a woman though not a man yeah if it's a man i'm like fuck you fatso but if it's a woman i'm like i can't i was gonna i had a thing i was gonna post on instagram i'm like this is just me you know i don't want to hurt anybody's feelings yeah i i mean there there's look there's there's health issues and complications that can contribute to you know people gaining weight and you know i i have friends and i know people who have other

other underlying issues that make it difficult for them to either whether follow a certain diet or you know be physically active or or whatever so it's not it's not to make fun of people but it's it's to encourage overall health and well-being i think that's really what it is and doing doing what you can and if what you can do is go for a walk every day go for a walk every day yes i couldn't agree you know make make better choices as as it relates to food and nutrition and i just don't think it does anyone any good to lie and say this is healthy it's also the number one comorbidity factor when it comes to covid death you got a picture for me oh i didn't i thought we were not doing that oh no i just want to i want to show it to her just because she so she could see how fucking crazy it is i i have it save you there this is healthy that's not the one but

there's another one that had well the one with the the biggest one is the lady in the blue and they got one for her so they had a series of them well that is healthy that's healthy well see it says women okay so they're doing a bunch but yeah okay they had a bunch of different women but i agree with that it says women on why wellness doesn't have to be one size fits all yeah that's true that's true but they had morbidly obese people right they were saying this is healthy yeah and there was one where the lady like her she had no neck like her head started here and she was just this big overweight body there are clearly health yeah it's a giant it's yeah you're literally morbidly obese yeah

like that's that's terrifying yeah to say to a person that this is healthy yeah in a major you're hurting them you're hurting them by doing it and and i think that that's kind of part of the bigger thing and i've seen this around around covid as well like give people the truth yeah give us the truth and let us take actions based on that information and and just like this like you know there are serious health complications and issues that that are there if you are morbidly obese that is that is a fact that's based on science um you know early on early on in the um uh the covid pandemic when they were saying like oh masks won't do anything to help protect you or others from getting right yeah and obviously it comes out later that, oh, well, he only said it because there weren't enough medical grade masks to go around. But he had his own motive for saying it, even though he knew it wasn't actually true.

Just give people the facts and the information. It's like crying wolf. You're crying wolf. You're doing a terrible thing because no one's going to believe him now. Now he could say, well, you have to wear a mask now. Well, why would I believe you? Back in March, you said no one should have to wear a mask. And it's just like the, you know, well, you can't, you know, COVID spreads more rapidly if you have people gathering in close quarters. Yeah. Shoulder to shoulder. Large groups of people.

Don't do it. But it's okay to do it if you are, you know. Protesting. Exactly. If you're at a protest and, uh you know people agree with the cause but well that was one of the you can't go to a funeral you can't you know yeah bury your loved ones right because that's not a just enough cause de blasio had the craziest one he was saying you can protest but as long as it's a black lives matter protest that's the only protest yeah

yeah but all of these things like these things and then uh you know you have gavin newsom going and having dinner at a fancy restaurant and then you have freaking surfers getting arrested for going out and surfing by themselves on the beach yeah literally police chasing them down the beach like trying to arrest this guy who's not in a large group of people in a public place this is the hypocrisy that people, you know, absolutely lose faith and trust in the decisions that they're making. And again, points to like, well, this is what happens when you have people who are incompetent in positions of power and leadership. Well, it's also their attitude towards everyone else. It's they don't want to follow the rules

they're asking other people to enforce. This is the same man that was telling people to wear a mask in between bites of food. And he also lied about being outdoors. He was outdoors? No, he wasn't. There's a fucking chandelier above you, man. It makes something bad even worse.

Yeah. Like once he got found out because of that video or the picture, whatever it was. No, no, no, no. He got found out and then the pictures came out after he said it because he was saying it was outdoors.

And then the people saw the pictures like, there's a chandelier above you, bro. Yeah. It's supposed to be the stars. Like that's outdoors. Outdoors is space. Yeah. It's not a fucking chandelier, you crackhead.

And also right next to people. No social distancing. No masks. It's like, fucking chandelier, you crackhead. And they're also right next to people. No social distancing. No masks. It's like, come on. It's so gross. And what we were talking about earlier, the people that are in the restaurant business really feel like political pawns. They don't feel like it makes any sense. There was another one I saw in California where this woman had been told to shut down her restaurant. I think it was when they shut down both indoor and outdoor dining not too long ago. And her restaurant was right next to some big film production that was feeding the crew and doing what they're doing, going on with their production. But her little restaurant was not allowed to keep their doors open made no sense absolutely no sense no sense there's no science behind it

there's also there's no common sense there's no evidence that it spreads outside there's no evidence it's the whole thing is bananas and to see her crying and and furious that she spent all of her hard-earned money that she didn't even have because she was locked out for so long of her business now finally gets open she's doing some outdoor dining just trying to stay alive they make her shut down with no evidence whatsoever it doesn't make any sense and the woman who made the decision to shut down all outdoor dining dined outdoors the very day she did it no kidding yes and lied about what she did it for she said that she did it to say goodbye

to the rest the restaurant workers at her favorite place they talked to them no one talked to her she didn't say goodbye to anybody she just wanted to eat like everybody else does it's a great restaurant i want to eat outside it's i just don't you know my friends who run felix my friend janet zuccarini she's the owner of Felix. It's my favorite restaurant in LA. It's in Venice. It's an amazing place. She had the perfect statement. She said they're just throwing shit against the wall hoping something sticks. There's no evidence

that it's coming, that the COVID spread is coming significantly from restaurants. They need to do something. So they go, we're going to shut this down. We're going to shut that down. Colorado recently had a study that showed there's no evidence that the spread is coming from gyms they're like there's no evidence these are healthy people these are people that are exercising and working out hard where you're getting it from is people in tight groups where they're on top of

each other like you're forced to be when you're stuck at home yeah that's when people are getting getting it yeah the the leadership that is making decisions not based on science or basic common sense but instead making these decisions that are seemingly completely arbitrary and not only making arbitrary decisions but are being total hypocrites in doing so and not following and abiding by the very rules that they set is it is what is causing so much angst and frustration and loss of faith and trust in these officials that we are supposed to trust to guide us through public health crises like the one that we are facing. as a country are doing, I think, so much worse off than many other countries or other countries who've handled this whole situation far more responsibly, making decisions that are based on science and common sense. Yeah, we've handled it the worst. Yeah. It's bananas. Yeah. I would like an alternate ending. You know, I would love if, you know, you don't have some DVDs that give you the option of an alternate ending. When I was a kid, I read those books where you got to choose your own adventure. Like you get to pick.

There's like five different options on how you get to choose how the book ends. I would have loved to have seen what would have happened in these states if Obama had been president. Like what if this had happened instead during the Trump administration? What if this had happened in 2012 or 2014 or something like that? Like, what would be different? Would they allow things to open? How much of what happened was people using people's businesses as political pawns, was

using the economy as a political pawn? I really wonder, and I hate that I do, because it doesn't seem out of the realm of possibility yeah i don't know the answer to that it's a pretty powerful hypothetical gotta get the dvd but yeah right click alternate ending get the blu-ray you get the alternate ending but that politicizing of this crisis has been a major contributor to the problems that we are seeing you know and and yeah I mean so many of these things we're talking about they kind of all go back to this same root cause where we have people whether they're elected or the the bureaucrats that the elected people put into power making decisions not based on what's in

the best interest of the people that That's what it comes down to. Whatever the motive is, power, party politics, campaigns, money, all of these different things, it all points to that same place where the concept of servant leadership, people in these positions actually being motivated to make decisions based on how they can best serve the people and our country. It's just it's lost on so many levels. And that's what we've got to bring back. Now, when you were a congresswoman, how much time did you spend in DC versus time in Hawaii? I got back to Hawaii as often as possible. On average, like two to three times a month was the flight from DC it's a good 12 13 hours from takeoff to landing not including like it takes about 45 minutes to drive the airport in DC and you have to fly to LA and then

fly to Hawaii my usual stopovers were like from DC to Hawaii was usually LA or San Francisco Honolulu to DC was usually like Houston or Denver. Long, long flight. The jet lag was probably the, you know, six, five or six hour time difference.

Yeah. That was, that was a bigger challenge, but it just, it made a world of difference to me to get back home, be on the ground, be able to go out and see people, listen, see what's going on, get in the ocean and just like have that reset as often as possible so that I never wanted to get in a place where I felt comfortable in Washington. Good for you.

Somebody asked me that in an interview early on or year one or two, they're like, oh, so do you feel like you fit in now in Washington? I'm like, God, no. I don't ever want to feel that way because unfortunately, Washington is like this bubble that's so disconnected from reality that it makes it so that these decisions that are being made are, they are disconnected from reality, the reality that people are living every day. Do you plan on living the same way when you're doing your podcast? Do you plan on living,

basing in Hawaii and then traveling? Just going a lot of different places. Yeah. And I, you know, with, with once, once things start to come down a little bit with some timing and travel,

and I think it'll just be cool to be able to go out and meet people where they are, whether it's their home or they work or, or whatever, and be able to talk to them about a whole host of different things, not just politics. You know, this is,

I want this to be about life, you know, there's, there's so much about who we are as individuals. I think we can, like you said, we can learn a lot. We can gain a lot when we learn more about who we are as people. Yeah. I know you're an optimist. So give me the

optimist perspective of how you think this country bounces back from COVID, from the lockdowns, from the economic disaster that we're currently enveloped in. So my optimism points to the hope that we find, and this is what I hope happens in Hawaii as well, is that we find some innovation and ingenuity in how we can move forward together as a country in hawaii having a predominantly tourism-based economy is a recipe for failure should something like this happen and it happened before after 9-11 where everything tanked because people weren't flying so the lives and the livelihood of people in places like hawaii and there are others cannot be dependent on a massive event like this. So let's diversify the economy. Let's look at how we can invest in, you know,

new industries, entrepreneurs, innovators in, in different areas and different sectors. And so from an economic perspective, I hope that we come through this maybe with different ideas on how we approach things and how we can better harden ourselves. Some of it is not possible, but I hope that there are new ideas. And I hope that I really think that we as a people are becoming more health aware because of this. And we'll look at our own health

and that of those around us so that we are better protected as people in situations like this. Yeah, I really, really hope so. I really hope people start taking on a regular exercise routine, start eating healthier and start supplementing their diet with vitamins, I think nothing could be better to protect you from something like this happening again. And I think in a lot of ways, we got lucky with this disease. And it sounds like a terrible thing to say, but this disease, you saw my friend who was here earlier, she got it, she got over it like that. She didn't even know she had it. That's not the case with the plague.

There's no asymptomatic versions of the plague, right? You get it and you're horribly ill and most people don't live. We're lucky. We got lucky with this one. This is not like the swine flu. This is not like some of the worst pandemics the world's ever seen. It's not Ebola. We got fairly lucky. It's still horrible. It's not

minimizing the deaths and the sorrow and the sadness of people that lost loved ones. But this could have been far worse. And I think that's part of the problem is that we expected it to be far worse when the pandemic was first arriving on our shores. And then we never really made the adjustments to treat it for what it really is. Yeah. And that, that focus both for the short term and the longterm on health and wellness, I think is, is at the heart of all of this. I think it is, um, you know, you, you've done a lot on this show to talk about vitamin D for example, and, uh, how important it is that, you know, we're, we're taking it, that we're taking

these different supplements that help strengthen our immune system and protect us specifically from this virus, but just help us be healthier overall. I went and looked, I looked on the CDC website to see what they had to say about it. Nothing. I think they recently had something about vitamin D. Did they? Yeah, fairly recently in december okay in december like somebody sent it to me uh oh look hey the cdc has finally posted something about i hope so implementing vitamin d into your diet yeah yeah all i could find like the initial

thing that came up was like this has not been proven to blah blah blah well they don't want you running around letting people cough in your mouth. Right. But there's a better way to be able to say, hey, here are some things you can do to better improve your health and your immune system. There's a whole list of them. Yeah. I mean, there really should be. And we have talked about this in the podcast.

And I had Dr. Mark Gordon on recently, and he talked to me about quercetin which is an ionophore and zinc and the two of them in combination i could send you this study but there's a peer-reviewed study on quercetin and zinc and apparently zinc when you take it is zinc has powerful antiviral properties to it but it's it's difficult for it to get in the cells it doesn't absorb as easily but with an ionophore like quercetin it allows it to get into the cell more. And he said this also could be the case for curcumin and turmeric, which are, you know, they have anti-inflammatory properties and they could also help absorb it together. But he recommends quercetin and you can get it from Amazon, from any vitamin store or whatever. It's

not expensive. It's a normal vitamin. but you uh quercetin you take a thousand milligrams of quercetin and 30 milligrams of zinc my friend andrew marr who is here with him uh he does jujitsu and he did jujitsu with a guy who was feeling like shit and uh he got tested after like he was rolling like felt weak and fatigued and so after he's rolling he went to the doctor got a test and then called andrew go dude i'm sorry but uh i'm positive for covid andrew never got it because he's taking quercetin and zinc and andrew is a veteran and he's a part of um mark gordon uh works with him on the warrior angel foundation it's basically treating soldiers with traumatic brain injuries and treating them with a series of anti-inflammatory nutrients, as well as some different hormones and medications that helps these guys.

But one of the things that he recommends highly is quercetin and zinc. Yeah. And the two of them in combination probably protected him from getting COVID from a guy who's doing jujitsu. I mean, it's pretty intimate. You're doing jujitsu. I mean, yeah, that's pretty intimate. You're sweating on each other. Yeah. Breathe each other's.

I mean, you're right on each other. Exactly. Yeah. And he didn't get it, which is pretty crazy. That's incredible. Pretty crazy.

I mean, obviously it's one anecdotal. Yeah. I don't, I'm not saying go do jujitsu with people who are COVID positive. If you take zinc, of course, that's important clarification.

Yeah. It's pretty important. Cause people are like, Hey, I'm going now. Bobby says he's sick, but now I'm going to fucking kick his ass because he's tired. And because I took, what is it called? Quercetin? I took quercetin once. I'll send you the study.

Yeah, yeah. I'd be interested to see it. I mean, this is all legit stuff. But also just how it's helping people, soldiers and service members with traumatic brain injury. Because so many people come back and are struggling with traumatic brain injury, because so many people, you know, come back and are struggling with the side effects of that and are just given like these hardcore prescription drugs that aren't ultimately helping address the underlying problem and just end up causing more sickness or side effects and more drugs and more side effects in that endless

cycle to be able to have a really holistic response to be able to help what are you doing there fella what happened you watching some stuff while we're doing the show it's uh quercetin is a part of dr gordon's protocol he's a large protocol of different nutrients and vitamins and and things that will help these guys. And one of the things that happens to a lot of these soldiers that have experienced traumatic brain injuries or they've been hit by blasts from kicking open doors and things along those lines is a lot of inflammation. Inflammation is like the root of evil for everything. It really is. And it really is and dr

gordon is i mean he's a saint of a human being i mean he literally dedicates all of his time to working with these soldiers that have experienced traumatic brain injury treats most of them for free and the money that he does raise literally pours right back into the organization he's a man of like he's like i have this is what he says is quote he goes I need a bottle of scotch a month yeah doesn't have any needs yeah so he's completely dedicated but he's a brilliant guy who you know when he's on the show he just rattled off study after study off the top of his head and explain why these things work well in conjunction. But he takes quercetin and zinc.

Yeah. That's something that just before I was leaving Congress, I was talking with some Department of Defense officials who are responsible for health and wellness, and they're starting to shift more. They're talking about shifting more towards a holistic approach to care, both preventive care for service members, as well as how people are being cared for when they come back after having gone through, you know, TBI and a whole host of other physical issues, you know, overexposure to different metals and everything else. I think there's a long way to go, but I was really pleasantly surprised to see at least the language is starting to change. The mindset is starting to change to say, you know, I mean, the amount of money that

we as taxpayers spend on health care for our service members alone is pretty astronomical. We need to provide our service members the best healthcare possible. The healthcare that's being provided right now is not the best healthcare possible. In many cases, it's just like, okay, here's more drugs rather than actually solving,

figuring out why are so many of our service members getting sick? Why are so many service members coming back from multiple deployments maybe in their late 30s getting sick? Why are so many service members coming back from multiple deployments, maybe in their late 30s, getting sick and dying from cancer, or coming down with serious respiratory problems? Like actually, you know, there's now okay, toxic burn pits are a serious issue that's contributing to this. Okay, so how do we deal with this? How do we how do we try to minimize or prevent the ramifications of this exposure and stop,

you know, you can't mitigate every single risk. Obviously, if you're going in a war zone, there's going our Vietnam veterans did who were exposed to Agent Orange and then so many dying off from cancer directly related to that exposure. So that kind of change in mindset needs to change within the DOD as well as the VA. Yeah, I wasn't even aware of toxic burn pits until people on the podcast explained. I think it was Evan Hafer, right? Was it Evan Hafer? I listened to that one. Yeah.

Yep. It's crazy. I think the numbers of service members who have had prolonged exposure to massive toxic burn pits are underestimated. I think so, too. When you look at the millions of troops who've deployed not once but multiple times i we had a massive toxic burn pit on the camp where i was that soldiers were literally assigned to pulling security around this burn pit so they their place of duty every day was next to this burn pit breathing everything in and that was literally everything from you know paints plastics construction waste human waste like metals everything uh and it just you know i mean there was a huge like um what do you call it just a huge cloud of this this uh ashy soot

kind of fog that was over our camp all the time it's crazy um it's crazy that that's their solution for dealing with garbage. to acknowledge that this is a problem and to link that acknowledgement with actually providing care and support to service members who are getting really sick because of that exposure and their family members you know husbands and wives who are quitting their jobs because now they have to become full-time caregivers um it's i've introduced uh congressman brian mass from Florida, who's also a veteran. He lost both of his legs and an arm. He was a explosive ordinance disposal guy. He and I have worked together on this, introducing legislation, basically pushing for more transparency so we know exactly how many people who have been exposed so that there's a better handle

on how we can make sure that if these people start getting sick, then you're getting the care and the compensation that you deserve because of this risk that you obtained while you were serving. Now, before I let you go, we have to talk about our boy, Max Holloway. Yes. Did you watch that? Oh my gosh. Did you watch that?

Yes. It's like he's on another planet. That was incredible. He's's like he's that was incredible he's in the matrix that was incredible he's literally on another planet right yeah i just i i've just i was like so stoked and so excited and so mind blown watching him it was incredible and that guy he was like how he's like dodging these like looking away. And Calvin Cater is a killer. I don't know much about him. Oh, my God.

He's elite. He was the guy in the division on the outcome where a lot of people looked at him and goes, that guy's a future champion, including me. I mean, he is a killer. Calvin Cater is a killer. It's not just Max Holloway's performance. It's that he had that performance against Calvin Cater that's what was so spectacular about it and the fact that Calvin was widely considered the best boxer in a division

before that fight Wow the fact that max beat the brakes off of him yeah I mean he landed more strikes than anyone has ever landed in the history of the sport in one fight credible and he holds number one, number two, and number three now. Yeah. Max is a freak. He's amazing. And couldn't be a nicer guy. Couldn't be nicer.

Yeah. I mean, we're like all of Hawaii. We're so proud of him. And Punahele Soriano, he also had a great fight that same night like these fighters coming out of Hawaii obviously we love them we're proud of them because they're coming from Hawaii but but you look at Max and he represents what we call aloha which is that respect and that kindness and um you'd like no you ain't rolling over for anybody. But like when it's time to fight, you're going to fight.

But you don't lose that sense of respect and aloha and that kindness. He's such a likable guy too. Do you know he learned how to fight, learned how to strike from watching UFC video games? I did not know that. Playing video games. He would do something in the video game and it would work. And then he would try it out. And then he would try it out in sparring i'm not kidding i'm not kidding he literally didn't have like a legit striking coach in the beginning of his career he talked about it on the podcast that's incredible

i was like what are you talking about he goes yeah he goes i would try it in the game is this kid out in yni like oh bruh yeah exactly that's exactly what he's like wow he was in the shadow of bj penn yeah actually yeah because bj was one of the all-time greats yep and he was the man out of hawaii yeah but i would say that bj's strength was in grappling yes more than striking right well no his strength was very high in striking too i mean he knocked out mad hughes with one punch. He stopped Sean Shirk with strikes. BJ fucked a lot of people up with strikes. But his problem was ultimately, I think it was more of a discipline and a conditioning problem. Max has no problems like that.

Max's conditioning is off the charts. I mean, it's something that's redefining what people in the sport think is possible in terms of output. Right. He's insane. Yeah. Watching that fight, I watched it again yesterday. I was like, this is bananas. The amount of strikes he's landing.

And the force, right? On an incredibly dangerous guy in Calvin Cater. And he's still under 30. This is the thing. Khabib nerga meadow watched the fight and kibib said max holloway has the potential to be the greatest fighter ever that's that is huge coming from kibib coming from arguably the greatest fighter ever yeah like the guy kibib is i mean if he's not the if it's either john jones him or mighty mouse those are the three widely discussed goats thes. The greatest of all time. And I kind of lean

towards John Jones because of his accomplishments. Because he's beaten more people over a longer period of time. But Khabib has barely lost a round. He lost like a couple of rounds in his whole fight, in his whole career. Never been dropped. Dominated everybody.

And he's undefeated at 29 and 0 which is madness in a division like 155 is he still is he retired he's not sure he's not sure he's waiting i thought that last fight i thought he was like this is what he said but he's decided that if something spectacular happens on saturday night with connor and dustin poyer he might make a comeback he's gonna make a comeback he's in his prime he's he's a destroyer he's gonna be bored yeah i think he promised his mom after his father died his father died from covid oh wow yeah and um his mom made him promise that this was his last fight and uh so he beat justin gaethje who was thought to be the most dangerous guy in the division. He beat him.

But you know what? This Conor and Dustin Poirier fight is going to be so huge. Are you calling that one way or the other? No, I'm not going Abu Dhabi. I'm right here, Tulsi Gabbard. I have a show with Dave Chappelle. Are you putting the odds on one guy or another on that?

Oh, I never do that, Tulsi. I never do that. I think it's a very interesting fight. I think Dustin's a far better fighter than the first time they fought. But I think Conor's better too. And Conor, I know a lot of people that have witnessed his training camp and I've seen

a lot of videos and I've seen a lot of conversations about his training for this. He's very, very well prepared. He's very focused. I think he felt like he fucked up in the Khabib this. He's very, very well prepared. I mean, he's very focused. I think he felt like he fucked up in the Khabib fight. He wasn't focused enough. He had too many distractions, and he just didn't fight his best. That said, even if he was in tip-top magoo in the best shape of his life, Khabib's Khabib.

And ultimately, Khabib's strength in grappling is so overwhelming. He does that to everybody. Everybody. Everybody gets mauled. That's what you're signing up for. I'm signing up to take a chance at winning, but also most likely going to get mauled. Read the fine print.

That's exciting, though. I am so excited about Max Holloway. Max reached out today to try to get on the show, so I'm going to try to get him on as soon as possible. Good. Catch him on his way back, maybe. Maybe. I'm just blown away by him. I don't even understand it. I mean, it was

so damn good. It was humbling. Sometimes you watch an athlete, and they put out a performance that's so far above everybody else. You just got to go, wow. Like everybody was calling it the performance of the decade.

Like everybody. Yeah. I can see why. Which is crazy. I can see why. And I was surprised in some of his post-fight interviews when he started talking about how he wasn't really sparring in his training for the fight. No, he didn't spar at all. At all.

And to have that kind of performance yeah without sparring and and why he said he's not sparring right well i think he had decided uh i think possibly after dustin poirier fight that he had taken too many shots in sparring and that it was not necessary right he's like i already know unnecessary risk and i think there's a real good argument for that i think sparring initially is very important for fighters because you got to learn timing and distance but there's a way to do that when a guy has as much experience as max does with that obviously it worked yeah you know i mean but that is a that's a raging debate in fighting whether or not sparring is important it's certainly important initially right to get the fundamentals to get

the muscle memory and to get the movement right yeah but there's ways to do it where you're not hitting each other right you know there's drills that you can do and there's drills with pads um there's there's quite a few guys that have implemented that though yeah and it's it's controversial but i don't know with with max i'd say whatever you just did, keep doing that. Yeah, keep at it. If it's not sparring, then never spar again. Yeah. Because, I mean, that was phenomenal. I saw that side-by-side meme somebody did with Muhammad Ali and Max Holloway.

Did you see that? No, I didn't see that. With they're almost in exactly the same stance, like that wide front back leg stance where they're just like dodging the other guy's punch. Oh, really? And it's uncanny how similar they are in the pose yeah in the pose and just how they're uh there you go there it is oh that's crazy look at that yeah that's yeah they're like mirror images of each other even even they're the the opposing fighters almost mirror images of like big miss that was

nuts in the last round when he dropped his hands and was talking to the commentators like i'm the best boxer in the ufc while he's dodging punches like what the fuck man he was just feeling it yeah he was clearly completely there and again couldn't be a nicer person i fucking love that guy yeah yeah same here so he did um he did i think this was after he first got the belt for the first time, came back and they organized a hometown parade for him in Wai'anae. I went just to congratulate him and just celebrate him and Yancy Medeiros who had fought that same night.

But it was the coolest thing to see Max at home in his hometown and to see how many kids and young people were so inspired and so excited to see one of their own go out and freaking get it done and never forget his roots and where he came from. That's awesome. And it just embodied who he is and why people at home are so proud that he goes out and he fights the greatest fighters in all parts of the world,

but he never forgets where home is and who his family is and what made him who he is. That's awesome. That's amazing. Good for him and good for you. So here's awesome. That's amazing. Good for him. And good for you. So here's the, this is Tulsi Gabbard. Let's hear it.

Aloha, everyone. I want to tell you about a new project that I'll be launching very soon. Over the last several years, one of the most beautiful things that I have experienced and appreciated throughout my service in public office and in the military are the people I've met from all across the country, from around the world, and the incredible conversations that we've shared. So whether it was visiting a farmer in Iowa or a pastor in South Carolina, or a small business owner in Syria. We are all connected. Children of God, brothers and sisters, and we have so much more in

common than we may realize. Now more than ever, during these dark and divisive and dangerous times, we have the opportunity to be a positive force, to help heal the divide, to treat each other with aloha, with respect and love, and better understand each other. So on my show, I will go beyond the soundbite and share in-depth information, insights, and thought-provoking discussions. And I'll answer your questions, whether they are about foreign policy, politics, the environment, or maybe just questions you have about life, yoga meditation, music, surfing, or food. We will tackle the great challenges of our time together. We will go where others won't,

gain new perspectives, and we will never shy away from the tough conversations. So I hope you'll join me. Click subscribe, and I look forward to seeing you soon. Aloha. All right. There it is. There it is. Look forward to seeing you soon. I look forward to seeing you as well. Congratulations on your new venture. And I can't wait to see it.

Great to catch up with you. Always great. Always great to see you. Next time, hopefully it's out in Hawaii. Yes. Sounds good. Let's make it happen. All right.

Thank you, Tulsi. Thank you, Joe. Bye, everybody. Aloha. Bye, everybody.