The Joe Rogan Experience - #1640 - Josh Rogin

Episode Date: April 27, 2021

Josh Rogin is a journalist, political analyst, and author of "Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi, and the Battle for the 21st Century".

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day you can talk watches we can talk anything you know i have a a instagram influencer watch account do you really yeah it's got like 22 000 followers what's it called it's called watch the ramen it's where i combine my love of watches and my love of japanese ramen into? Yeah, it's got like 22,000 followers. What's it called? It's called Watch the Ramen. It's where I combine my love of watches and my love of Japanese ramen into one Instagram account. It's never been done before. That's an interesting combination. And what I do is I take pictures

of my watches and I review the watches and the ramen together. And I pair them, I mean, to some extent. It's kind of a tongue-in-cheek. There you are. Boom. Look at that. Oh, that's hilarious. You get to fucking watch the spoon. That's the Seiko version of your moon watch. Ohcheek. There you are. Boom. Look at that. Oh, that's hilarious. You get to fucking watch it with a spoon. That's the Seiko version of your moon watch. Oh, wow.

That's a beautiful watch. The story is, I don't know if you're, are you taping this? Yeah. This is good shit. Okay, the story is that Admiral Pogue, on his moon mission, was supposed to take the first chronograph into space, and the Omega people had a branding agreement with NASA, so they gave him an Omega moon watch. then he didn't like it he what he trusted his old Seiko that's what he trusted so he took this watch in his pocket which was his and this is not the same exact watch obviously it's a

a version of a recreation of it and uh he took off his Omega once he got into space and he put on his his Seiko chronograph and which was then forever called a Pogue. So this was actually the first chronograph worn in space. Not the Omega one, despite what you may have heard. That was fake news. Fake news. And now that's considered a Pogue. So is that a quartz watch?

No, that's an automatic watch. It's not automatic, but I thought that was the problem with the watch in space, was that with no gravity, that the moving of the gears wouldn't be the same. Admiral Pogue would dare to disagree with you because he just did it, and that was like 1973. Maybe he didn't give a fuck about the time. He just loved that watch. No, no. He needed it to time. The whole point was that he needed it to time the bursts so that he wouldn't incinerate himself in the atmosphere.

Oh. And he didn't trust the Omega. He knew how to use his watch. Oh, I see. So he was like, I'll take this watch for the pictures, but then I'm going to get my old trusty Seiko out of my pocket because I can't die on this mission right now. Oh, wow. And I trust my Seiko.

And that's obviously not as prestigious of a watch, but now it's amongst watch freaks and geeks considered to be one of the ones you want to collect. That's so weird because a watch expert was explaining to me the reason why the moon watch from Omega is a wind up is because you can't rely on gravity because the automatic movements, you know, these little things and they swing back and forth depending upon like your watch.

I don't know if that guy was foolish or but I'm like Admiral Pogue is the watch is called the Pogue for a reason. Right, right, right. Makes sense. Makes sense. So that's a weird combination though. Ramen and – why didn't you just have two separate accounts? Well, because that hasn't been done before.

No one's ever combined reviewing ramen restaurants and reviewing watches together and then pairing them appropriately in most cases. No, the real reason is because I – as a lonely reporter for 17 years traveling back and forth to Japan and Asia, I just got super into the food scene, especially in Tokyo. I used to live in Tokyo. I worked for the Japanese newspaper there. I used to teach English there for a couple of years. In Shin-Yokohama, Japan. I was 23, fresh out of college. Oh, wow.

Living my best life in, like, an apartment the size of this table. I had, like, one burner. But I loved it. And then as I got older I started getting into watches and then my Instagram was like all watches and ramen my wife was like nobody wants to see that she's like can you just stop put it posting that I'm like oh I'll just make its own thing and then people started to like it and in the ramen community people started to learn about watches and in the watch community people started to learn about ramen

and communities were brought together. Way to go, dude. People seemed to like it. Now we're going to have a ton more followers. Yeah, for sure. David Lee Roth moved to Japan for a bit. Have you been there? Yes, I have.

It's amazing, right? Yeah, I've only been there once for the UFC, but I really enjoyed it. I was there for a couple days. I didn't get to see much, but we went to some great sushi restaurants and got a chance to ... The fight fans there are really... It's really interesting because they're super, super polite. We didn't get to see much, but we went to some great sushi restaurants and got a chance to, and the fight fans there are really, it's really interesting because they're super, super polite. And they're really quiet, and then when something happens, like they applaud, like a guard pass or something that's like real technical, they all applaud. They get very excited about it. I once went to a Slipknot festival, Knot Fest Tokyo, because my brother-in-law is the drummer for Slipknot, Jay Weinberg, and so I'd never been to a Slipknot festival, Notfest Tokyo, because my brother-in-law is the drummer for Slipknot, Jay Weinberg.

And so I'd never been to a Slipknot concert before, so we just went. And 25,000 Japanese fans, Slipknot fans, in rows, standing politely, perfect rows. And then the song would come on and they'd be like, you know, doing this. And then the song would come off and they'd politely wait for the next song. It was hilarious. Wow. Yeah. It's a different culture. Yeah. It's a different culture.

Yeah. Really different. Like alien. Well, I wouldn't use that word. I don't mean in a bad way. I mean it's so different from what we are here in America with the obnoxious people and the way people are on the street in particular. They're so polite and everyone's so – it's very orderly.

That's one way to look at it. I mean, you know, I wasn't planning to analyze the Japanese psyche right now, but let me take a shot at it. You know, there's two things that I think really struck me about Japan. One is that, you know, we have like a 200-year history. They've got a 5,000-year history, okay? Yeah. So for them, our history is like a snap, right? So they have things that they are doing

that they have brought from their ancient times that they totally forgot why. They have no idea why they're doing all these things. The tea ceremony takes four hours and the sumo rules are as such and the food is cooked this way. And the tradition itself is a beautiful thing, but it's long detached from any sort of rationality.aism is like this right you know like why don't you eat this or that i don't know that's how we always are doing it and the other thing is that you know they it's because it's so an island it's like an island in many more ways than one and in a sense they've been able to develop with less influence not zero influence but less influence from the outside world so they've developed in a way that's unique to them that has little to do with what we were doing 5,000 years ago.

And what that taught them is that they need to rely on each other on this island, which is basically 90 percent mountains. They don't really grow anything. They're like little rice patches that are like this big and there's no oil. So they had to come together as a community. And it's a very Confucian kind of thing where you focus on, you know, the consensus and that shows itself in their politics and in their society. And basically, when you have a country that operates by consensus, that can have very good, bad outcomes like World War Two when the, you know, like, oh, the consensus is we got to attack everybody. Or it can have very good outcomes like, oh,

the consensus is we all better wear masks and nobody should get Corona. So, you know, it could go either way, but it's they they see each other as as a community and as a family and they act as such and that's there is a confucius element to that but there's also sort of like a community element to that that again i like for the most part but also can get in the way sometimes if you just want to buck the system or do something interesting yeah they also have an ancient system of discipline and respect sure comes from feudal Japan and also just martial arts in general. They're known for being the birthplace of many styles of martial arts and also where many styles of martial arts that maybe came from China were refined and changed in Japan. Well, you know more about that than me, but I do remember going to a Pride show in 2002.

Do you remember Pride? Sure, yeah. It was crazy, man. I mean, I know- Tell people Pride was the competitor to the UFC in the early 2000s and had enormous events. Huge events, like 80,000 people. Saitama Super Arena.

Exactly. And that was the first time that I really saw up close all these different styles being posed against each other. Yeah. You saw like, oh, who could really fight? You know what I mean? No, they did it in a very unique way in Japan. They really did.

And it was the envy of the martial arts world because of the fact that they did have, and it's what's strange is that like it went away. That's what's really weird. Yeah, man. I mean, they had the biggest martial arts scene in terms of the ability to have 90,000 people in a super arena.

At the time, America was not like that. As a matter of fact, it wasn't even that popular in America at the same time. It wasn't really popular in America until 2005 when The Ultimate Fighter was on television on Spike TV. And the finals between Stefan Bonner and Forrest Griffin became this huge event because it was just this wild fight. It was just perfect timing and the worlds collided in this perfect way. And then it became this emerging sport.

But in Japan, it was already huge. Yeah, I always think of Japan as going like five years into the future. You know what I mean? It's like the near future. But an orderly version of the future. Yeah, it's a wonderful country. The people are, you know, they can seem cold but they're not. They're very warm.

They're just very, you know, particular about the way that they interact and they appreciate if you go to their country that you learn some of these things which I tried to endeavor to do in my two years living there. I don't think I really got to the bottom of it. I know that when my parents showed up, they did not follow any of the practices. They were not, you know, like my dad's like eating on the train. I'm like, Dad, you can't do that.

He's like, well, I don't care. I got a bag of chips. I'm going to eat them, you know, stuff like that. So it takes a while to learn, but if you do the work and you learn the language, and again, I'm like what they call functionally illiterate, like I can speak and understand Japanese, but I can't read or write anything. Well, that's cool that you can speak it. To get around, to communicate with people.

So they super appreciate that. And Japan is actually a very diverse place in a sense in that if you go west to Kyoto and then you keep going to Kyushu or you go north to Sapporo, you will find crazy nuances and differences in the culture and the food and the people there that will blow your mind. And I started my career working for the Japanese newspaper, the Asahi Shimbun, in their D.C. office.

That's how you started, as a journalist. I'm a failed Japan scholar. Like, you're a failed kickboxer? Not failed, but you know what I mean. You didn't set out to be like a... Yeah, I would go with that. Yeah. So, you know, I wanted to work in U.S.-Japan relations and eat ramen and travel back and forth and, you know, work at a think tank or something like that. And nobody wanted to hire me for that because, you know, Japan's like one of those countries that's like basically okay. Like if

you study a problem country like Russia or Iran or something like that, there's industry for that. There's money for that. You know, somebody wants to know about that. But, you know, the Japan scholarship community is very small and it's very hard to break into. And I'm not like one for schooling. You know what I mean? Like I graduated GW in four and a half years flat. And like that was it.

Like there was no graduate school coming, which just wasn't going to happen. I spent my time at GW working at the DC Improv, you know.rov, which is a whole other story that you don't want to hear. Well, we'll get to that. Okay. We can certainly get to that. But anyway, so I found this country that I loved, and I wanted to spend time studying it. So the job that I found was working at the Japanese newspaper. It's called the Asahi Shimbun.

It's like their New York Times. And big bureau, lots of journalists. And if you're the Japanese journalist at the Washington Bureau of the biggest newspaper, you're the shit. You're the cream of the crop, right? And so there I am, 24 years old. I didn't know anything, but I spoke Japanese. So they hired me and they're like, go to the Pentagon. And I said, why? They said, you're the Pentagon reporter. I said, what are you talking about? They're like, yeah, this is a true story. They said, go to the Pentagon. Donald Rumsfeld was the briefer, 2004.

Wow. And they said, go early, sit in the front row. If he calls on you, ask him anything about Japan. It doesn't matter what he says. That's going to be news for us. So I said, OK. So I got there super early. And I had a little notebook.

It's a little bit smaller than this one. And I sat in the front row. And the thing's about to start. And Rumsfeld, for people who don't remember, there used to be these things called briefings you know what i mean where like officials would like talk to us and tell us things sorry about what's going on in the government you know they don't really do that anymore like the briefings now we're all crap they're all bullshit but most of them anyway but back then rumsfeld didn't care he would tell you anything you wanted to know he wanted you to know it he wanted to spar with you it. You know, he lived for that kind of stuff. And so I sat in the front row and

Martha Raddatz from ABC, she's coming out of the bullpen, you know, two minutes before the thing starts. And she looks at me and she says, you're in my chair. And I said to her, I don't see any names on the chairs. And she looks at the Wrangler and he says, yeah, this isn't high school. We don't have assigned seats here. This is the Pentagon. And she's got to go names on the chairs. And she looks up the Wrangler and he says, yeah, this isn't high school. We don't have assigned seats here. This is the Pentagon. And she's got to go sit in the back. Okay, so she's already pissed at me. Why did she think that she could just take your chair?

Traditionally, I should have, out of respect, given the very famous senior producers the seats that they sit in. It's just the rule. It's just like a custom. But I didn't know that. But saying it to you that way, you're in my chair? Yeah. I love Martha Radd. She's a very nice person, and she's a great journalist.

But suffice to say, at that moment, I was just like, no, I'm not moving. What did she say to you? She's like, OK, I guess I'll go sit in the back. And then the thing starts. And Rumsfeld's doing his performance. Iraq this, insurgency that. Where's Osama bin Laden? Is the insurgency stronger weaker

than it was yesterday and he's like just he's just like the master of this stuff not that i'm not endorsing his policies i'm just saying he's the best so he calls me randomly and i asked him something about japan and his face lights up and he talks about the us japan relationship for 35 minutes he drained the entire press conference until the bell rang all we were talking about was like okinawa basing or whatever you know and and uh all the other reports but now they were super pissed because i had wasted their chance to ask 20 more times where's the sound of inline where's the sound of line we don't know where's the sound of line we still don't know where's we still don't know you know and i went back to my bosses with a notebook full of donald

rumsfeld talking about japan and it was a front page article in seven million Japanese newspapers that I couldn't read. Wow. And to this day, I don't know what the article said, but I got the quotes. Big score. And I was like, what do I do now? They're like, do it again tomorrow. So for three years, I was Rumsfeld's foil in that room. And I didn't know if the fix was in until one time I didn't ask anything.

And he stopped me in the hallway and I didn't even think he knew my in until one time I didn't ask anything and he stopped me in the hallway and I didn't even think he knew my name and he said Josh what are you tired today I could have used you in there and he was looking to just take away from all the big shit didn't grin on his face oh wow and that's when I knew the fix was in right and I was like okay so me and Donald Rumsfeld are making news in Japanese for three years. And my bosses think that I'm just like the best thing since sliced bread. That's hilarious. It ended in a two-week trip to Guantanamo Bay.

That is a mindfuck story I can't even get into right at this moment. But if you want to come back to it, I'll do it. Okay. But anyway, eventually I had to get a job in the American media. Because if you're like the white guy at the Japanese newspaper, there's no upward mobility for you. So, again, I tried to get a bunch of Japan jobs, consulting jobs, think tank jobs. Didn't get any. But I got a job working for a trade publication writing about the Pentagon because I knew how to cover the Pentagon. And then, you know, those Japanese journalists who I had worked with because, you know, people don't understand.

It's like young journalists these days get thrown onto the heap, right? There's no training. Like maybe you went to like if you went to journalism school, that's a great leg up. I didn't do that. You know what I mean? So usually you have to be like the most aggressive or the most clever where you join a team. And if you join a team, you get the welfare of that political team that can promote you through your career. But I didn't have any of that.

But I had something that these people didn't have, which is I was trained by these top, top, top Japanese journalists who taught me the things that they never teach, which are like how to source, how to dig, you know, how to pour through documents, how to use data, how to understand budgets, how to understand how these agencies work on the inside. And that takes years and years and years to learn. That's the work of covering the government that a lot of people still do, but not as much as they used to. And I used those skills to break stories. So I became a scoop master and I just started breaking stories. And the more I broke stories, the better jobs I got. I went to Federal Computer Week Magazine, Congressional Quarterly, Foreign Policy Magazine, covered the State Department. Then I covered Daily Beast then Bloomberg View and now the Washington Post

and I also have a side gig at CNN I'm a part time contributor there what a weird way to launch your career I fell ass backwards into journalism my quest to eat more ramen that's the sad truth of the matter and when did you get out of Japan? how long were you there for?

I was there for a year I worked for the Japanese newspaper in DC so you worked for them through America. Exactly. I worked in their Washington bureau. Like they've got a bunch of Japanese journalists who don't speak English and they need some American kids to like run around and interview people to help. You know, we were like a team.

Did you consider learning the language in terms of like how to write and read? I tried. I just, I'm not a good student. As my transcripts will bear out all right i was like i i think i was like eight when i was like wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute i don't want it i don't want someone at the front of the room telling me what's what you know what i mean i just want to i want to figure it out for myself and you know so that led to like a few bad life choices in terms of like studying for exams when I was actually probably at the improv,

you know, not sober. And then, you know, basically my, your options limit. Right. Um, no, but I mean, listen, again, you know, I think if I was meant to become a U S Japan scholar, I probably, that would have been one thing. I think things happen for a reason. And you know, that's life, man. You know, would you have predicted 20 years ago that you'd be sitting here right now? Like you'd never have thought of that. Right. You try to take the opportunities where you can. You try to be authentic. And when those two things interact, you take a step.

And sometimes that step leads you to a good place. Sometimes it doesn't. Yeah. No, for sure. I don't plan anything. I just keep going. You know, that's like – this is not advice. This is not a good way to go through life. But it kind of is. You just have it to work out. You're wrong. I mean, you know, that's like, it's not, this is not advice. This is not a good way to go through life.

But it kind of is. We just have it to work out. You're wrong. I mean, you're right. It's not advice, but it is advice. Like, it's not advice in a traditional sense. Yeah. No, it's not for everybody.

But it is advice in the sense that, like, if someone, like, identifies with you, like, that guy's kind of like me. Like, it will work. No, don't do what I did. Study. Get good grades. Don't do what you did. Study, get good grades, go to grad school. Don't do what you did specifically, but do what you did in terms of, like, you know, this is what you were interested in.

You had passion and drive, and it does apply to everything. I think if you can find the thing that you love to do and you can find someone to pay you for it, then do that. You know what I mean? And that was quite lucky because, again, I never thought of being a journalist until I was one. My wife, on the other hand, who's a fabulous journalist for PBS NewsHour, Allie Rogan, she started interning in journalism. She worked on it in college. She worked at NBC. She worked at ABC. This is what she wanted to do. And in the end, I think, in part for that reason also, because she looks better on TV than me, she's going to end up being a lot more successful than I am.

But I'm not – I'm cool with that. I love that actually. I just want to sort of work in this business, have a career, and make a living. And at the point where doing what I love and getting people to pay me for it doesn't work out, I'll do something else. Like I'm not – it's not an end for me. It's just a means. It's a gig end for me. It's just a means. It's a gig.

It's a thing that you enjoy doing. It's a thing that I've gotten, I think, kind of good at over 17 years of doing it, and I don't have any other skills. So I'm kind of stuck in a way. But if I get canceled after if I say like, fuckabee on TV instead of huckabee or something like that, then I'll go get a real estate license or whatever. It's not going't, you know, I don't, it's not going to, it's not going to crush my soul if I don't. But on the other hand, I would like to continue my career in journalism, at least for the, you know, not get canceled.

How caffeinated are you right now? I don't want to say. I mean, it seems like. This is actually just actually how I am all the time. My wife will attest to that. But yes, there's been a couple cups of coffee yeah that Black Rifle's strong

it's good stuff um Black Rifle Coffee this is fun man yeah it's fun to have you here man I became aware of you because you got

in a squabble with a comedian where someone punched you Dan 9 yeah it was I forget what happened I forget how I found out about it

maybe because we share a similar last name is that is that when someone was like hey do you know this guy who got punched by a van? I think so. I forget what it was. Do you know the true story of that incident has never been told? The true story?

The true story. I've been waiting 10 years to tell this story. Feel free. Okay. Now, here's the thing. Okay. Again, we're not, you know, So I worked in the DC Improv Right

In 1999 As a GW Junior Right It was great I was just like What's a GW Junior George Washington University

Oh It's like Two blocks from the Improv Alright Oh okay I needed beer money They needed waiters Simple as that

I'll never forget I walked in There was a guy named John Did you ever play at DC Improv Yes You remember a guy named John X I don't I only played it once Okay And it was quite a while ago Anyway There's a guy named John did you ever play at DC Improv? Yes. You remember a guy named John X? I don't

I only played it once and it was quite a while ago. Anyway there's this manager named Allison Jaffe who's the owner now was the host then and Mike Barbiglia was a host I worked with him

Mike Barbiglia? The comic? Yeah yeah he was at Georgetown when I was at GW Oh he was the host of the show. No no he was literally the host

that takes you to your seat and tells you That's what I was thinking you said. That's what he was. Oh wow. I was a waiter and he was the guy who takes your ticket and shows you to your seat and tells you to give your napkin. That's what I was thinking you said. That's what he was. Oh, wow. I was a waiter, and he was the guy who takes your ticket and shows you to your seat because he was trying to break into the business. And he always had notebooks. He was always writing.

He was a very smart guy, as you know. He was very cerebral comic. But we were friendly. I didn't care. I wasn't trying to break into stand-up comedy. I just wanted – we had money, and so wasn't trying to break into stand-up comedy. I just wanted, you know, we had money. And so I was like trying to work there. But I got to hang out with all my stars, all my favorite stars.

So it was like, you know, all the living color guys. David Allen Greer would always come through. Keenan Ivory Wayans. A lot of the, like Dave Attell was a big one. Dave Chappelle lived in D.C. at the time well he didn't live in D.C. at the time but his mom lived there and that was like his hometown so he would do these

like endless four hour sets where he would try out all his new shit and we would just sit there full house no one would ever leave you never saw anybody

you know perform like that you know and so it was just a great job I eventually got fired it's a separate story neither here nor there it's water under the bridge but anyway I stayed in touch

with them and allison who was the host she became the owner and uh you know and so i kept in touch with her and i would go to every year they had this thing called the celebrity dc comedy contest it was like a charity event which actually like turned out to be corrupt in the end because yeah the guy who was running it was like i'm the charity the charities never got any much that's it no he's probably gonna sue me but the point is that it's true anyway so anyways they would have they would have our like Joe Lieberman would get up and do like six minutes of blue stand-up there was pretty funny you know Grover Norquist was always doing that was back and he was blue I see what you did there I see what you did got it I see what you did there. Got it. I see what you did there. It was very punny.

Blue meaning dirty. Yeah, like sad comedy. Not like, oh, blue, like sad. Like he was working blue, yeah. That not a stand-up term? Did I use that? Blue is dirty. Oh, yeah, blue, that too.

Yeah, but that's what blue stands for. Like, do you work blue? It's a weird, it's very obscure. You never hear it anymore, but that's what it used to be back in the 90s, I guess. He works blue. Okay, so I massacred that. I massacred that.

No, but you did it in a sense of, he would say, depressing shit. It was dark. Dark. It was dark. He did a lot of black, maybe it's black comedy, is that right? Yeah. Anyway, we're getting off the subject. Black comedy's a very different thing.

Can we get back on track with this story? We only got three hours. Wasting time. Let's get back on track. So anyway? We only got three hours. Wasting time. Let's get back on track. So anyway, Dan Ninen is the ringer. They paid him to be the ringer, the one paid guy who gets paid. Everyone else is doing it for charities. And if you don't know who Dan Ninen is out there, he was first made famous because he's like the Silicon Valley tech guy who decided to toss it all and become a stand-up comedian because that was his true calling.

And he would do all these corporate gigs for these Silicon Valley companies. He made a bunch of money, performed for Obama. He got a little buzz. He bought 400,000 followers on Twitter. That was like one thing. And anyway, he was supposed to be this clean comic. He's like, I'm the clean comic that you can invite to your corporate event, right? He's not like playing over like, you know,

trying to do comedy over like stripper music like you were packing with, you know what I mean? Like he's a corporate guy. So he wasn't doing road gigs. He was doing just these sort of- He was doing some of that, but mostly the corporate conference stuff, which is fine.

That's all well and good. Anyway, his act was just like, it was crap, right? It was just like not funny. And I was tweeting about it from my seat on the high tops in the back. And to be fair, I was tweeting sarcastic stuff about all the comics, but the other ones are like journalists and politicians. They don't care. And because I worked there and because I was like using the club's Twitter feed, someone showed it to him. Oh, you were doing it through the DC improv?

I just tagged them. No, I just tagged them. So the staff saw it. They showed it to him in the green room. through the DC I just tagged them no I just tagged them so the staff saw it they're like they showed it to him in the green room and he comes to the back of the room

he says are you Josh Rogan I said yes he punches me in the face and I was like have you ever been sucker punched I mean you've been sucker punched you're kind of shocked you're like did that just happen

right and there's like by the way there's like seven journalists who are there covering the thing we're not covering the thing we're just going for the free drinks and and they're all like did that just happen so I start tweeting By the way, there's like seven journalists who are there covering the thing. We're not covering the thing. We're just going for the free drinks.

And they're all like, did that just happen? So I start tweeting, Dan Knight had just punched me in the face. And then he starts like – you know, these jokes are terrible, like election, erection, you know, like weirdly, vaguely problematic jokes for an Indian guy to make, right? And then he sees me tweeting about him and he comes back and he swings at me again he's like flailing again again he hit me he comes back again yeah so he doesn't think i'm gonna get arrested i just punched a guy let me get the fuck out of here no he wants to stop me from tweeting about it yeah mashable said i was the first person to ever live tweet my own assault true story so anyway so that allison the owner she calls the cops they arrest him um and you know it was it became a big story because of the seven journalists who were there to cover they didn't

want to cover joe lieberman's black you know whatever this is a much better story so they immediately there were seven art before he posted bail there were seven articles about it and then that became viral and that became a big thing and the taiwanese media made like a animation of my assault like an animation depiction of it is that available online yeah yeah yeah you can pull that up right now it's it's hilarious it's like it's not that long they did a pretty good job with it uh anyway so then i was like you know what okay fine it happened it's like a little viral moment you know no big deal i wasn't hurt or anything and then this i want to use my words carefully motherfucker this sociopathic violent hack starts lying on tv and radio i never punched him i never did this he made it all up what is this going on and i'm a i'm a columnist now so i can tell you what i really i'm like i can say these

like at that time I didn't want to get into a public thing like I'm not allowed to do that and he just by the way he pled guilty and did probation whatever I didn't even care then through an intermediary he called me and tried to bribe me to to pull the charges like give me a bunch of money how much uh I think the number that I was quoted was 10 grand that's not enough it's not that i'm not taking any brought like i'm a journalist i can't take 500 grand to stop talking i don't like where this conversation is coming because every man has his praise i mean everybody already knows about it i he just wanted to avoid the charge because i wrote on the chart you know i understand so anyway this guy is like for years and years and years

telling lies about me in public and then he like just the story changes every time he's like oj like he in his mind he doesn't believe he did it you know what i mean it changes the story a lot yes but but like that's why i say there must be like i'm not a doctor i'm not there's an issue there's an issue some sort of pathology and then i started meeting other comedians like hasam and anj was like yeah, this guy's crazy. He gets into all these crazy emails. He's like, he's very aggressive. He's harassing and this and that.

They're like, you better steer clear of him. And then, you know, actually the problem solved itself because this article came out in 2017 about how he was totally lying about his age the whole time. He was like the millennial comic, but he was like 55. Did you know this? I didn't know. He was quoted. I didn't the whole time he was like the millennial comic but he was like 55 did you know this i didn't know he was quoted like he would get all these he was giving this is a real example he was giving uh sex tips in cosmopolitan as a 31 year old you know quoted on the record but he was like 55 at the time so he's a fraudster a fraudster okay a classic fraudster in the classic sense and uh now now i don't think he's worked sincester, a fraudster, okay? A classic fraudster in the classic sense. And now I don't think he's worked since, so we might be piling on to him cruelly. So in that sense, I would like to say that.

I'm sorry, Dan. But you forced me. You have to take into consideration cancel culture. No, I mean, he was canceled before. But you have to take into consideration it coming after you if you're piling on. I don't want to be unduly punitive against Dan Nine. The bottom line is the true story has never been told until this moment, Joe Rogan. Well, I'm glad you told the true story.

Okay, and now I had to get that off the chest. Now let's talk about something real. Yeah. Well, that sounds like a great education, though, for a young guy to be working at a place like DC Improv because it's you got a chance to see so many great comics come through there it's probably really fun black wild place to be yeah no it was just like you know and then we would go out drinking afterwards you know i mean and like i you know there's this place called the big hunt in dc so i record and uh you know

like have you ever seen the show insomniac yes Yes. That's his life. I used to drink with Dave Vitello at the Big Hunt. That was exactly what it was. Listen, I know Dave very well. He's one of my favorite comedians. He's one of the greatest of all time. I agree with that. He doesn't get nearly enough credit because he has zero intent to publicize himself or to get more famous. He doesn't want to play the game.

It's not just that. He's not interested in being famous. He doesn't care. All he cares about is telling not just that. He's not interested in being famous. He doesn't care. All he cares about is telling more, better jokes. He's one of my favorites by far. Dude, last time I saw him, it's been a while, but other than the last time we did the podcast, I saw him at the improv.

He showed up. I was doing a show at the LA Improv, and he's like, hey, can I do some time? I'm like, fucking of course. Come on, man. Get in there. And so he goes up, and it was only like at the end of the night. It was probably like 100 people in the room or so.

And I'm telling you, man, it made me think like, God, why isn't this guy more famous? It was a late show because we had a 10 o'clock set or a 10 o'clock start. And it was probably like 12, 30. so it was at the end of the show and he's he's up there and just so he's just so good man he's so tight and funny and loose and polished and and trying out new shit and when it doesn't go it would the new shit doesn't go well it's even funnier then he'll shit on himself and his jokes and God, he's good.

So good. But I remember just sitting there thinking like, this is a shame that more people don't know how good this guy is. He should be selling out arenas all over the world.

Like, he really is that good. That's a, everyone should go download his album. Yeah, wears the same fucking clothes every day.

Black cap, black shirt. There's a lot of guys like that in the stand up business. There's a lot of guys like that in the stand-up business. There's a lot of guys like that. Like Brian Regan, okay? But Brian Regan's very huge. Is he bigger than David Bell? Yeah, he's huge.

Brian Regan does, like, still does Red Rocks. Brian's brother. I don't know if Dennis is doing comedy anymore. But Dennis was a great comic. He used to come through, and I used to hang out with him. I think Dennis stopped doing comedy. Well, that's a darn shame, because he was really funny. He was very good. He always started with the same joke used to hang out with him. I think Dennis stopped doing comedy. Well, that's a darn shame because he was really funny. He was very good.

He always started with the same joke. Every set, same joke. He'd be like, you know they say making the first million is the hardest. I'm finding that to be the case. Well, he was always deadpan and his brother was like way more. Goofy. Yeah. Brian is like really like fun

and silly and Jay Moore was always great Dave Chappelle was always great Louis Black was always great Kathy Madigan oh sure yeah

she was there a lot Flip Orly did the hypnosis stuff all the time oh isn't that wild it works I never thought it worked but I saw it work

there was a guy Frank Santos in Boston that used to do it. Comics would go and watch and go, this is crazy, but it is real. It really can. There's a certain percentage of the population that can get up there and they can talk them into all kinds of crazy things. David Alan Greer, super nice guy.

Real good guy. Tommy Davidson, pretty nice. He's nice to me. Okay, can I tell you one crazy story? And then we've got to talk about China or something like that. But I'll tell you one crazy story And then we gotta talk about China or something like that But I'll tell you This one crazy story

I probably shouldn't tell this But who cares Then don't tell it Okay Was it about Tommy No Okay So Kenan Ivory Wayans

Demanded like 25 grand Or he wouldn't go on They had to pay him out Like the entire thing And he was like I need it all in cash right now Or you have no chance They had to like scramble

And go get like 25 thousand dollars in cash out of some vault somewhere. They didn't even know what to do. These were the types of things that went on. That's a crazy thing. Why did he need that money right away? He wanted to be paid up front in cash. I don't know.

Cash is a weird thing to want. I want it. Bags of it? Yes. Thank you. Do you have any? No, but I went to a place once Yes please That sells cars And

Offset That's the dude Who's married to Cardi B right? Was Was He was there With a dude And the dude had like this

Designer bag Filled with cash Nice And they were looking at Like Lamborghinis and shit Yeah I was like damn This is the rap world

Yeah IRS will come get you, though. Well, I don't think it wasn't that he wasn't paying taxes. No, the place that sells the cars is very legit. You have to pay taxes. They're not fucking around. Shout out to Fusion Motorsports. Is it about where he got the cash?

Is that the- No. He got it from rap gigs. I mean, they give it to him. They just love paying for things in cash. Hey. Yeah. I think it's just a fun thing to do.

I imagine so. Yeah. Just stacks of hundreds. Let me know if you want to try it sometime. Call me up. But he was looking at Lamborghinis, and he was looking at muscle cars. He was looking at a bunch of different shit. Good for him, man.

Yeah. No shame in that game. No. It's fun to watch, though. A guy walk in with a duffel bag filled with cash. Like, wow. Yeah. Yeah.

Anyway, that's the improv. That's the Dan Inan story. Sorry, Dan Inan. Not sorry. Prick. Sorry. That's how I found out about you, though. I take that back.

I take that back. That's how I found out about you. So when your name came across again about this book. Well, thank you, Dan Inan. You got me booked on the Joe Rogan Show. Made you popular. It has nothing to do with our fact that my name is Rogan. Chaos Under Heaven.

There's a lot we could talk about. Talk about Jamal Khashoggi for sure, but I want to talk about this. So, we were talking earlier about the... There was a real problem with the lab leak hypothesis in that Trump was so...

He was so adamant in calling it the China virus, the Chinese virus, that there was a lot of people that wanted to resist the idea that it was possible that this thing had come out of this level four lab that just happened to be coincidentally in Wuhan. Now that he's out of office, it's being entertained. Not just entertained, it was on the cover of Newsweek. Not just entertained, it was on the cover of Newsweek. A lot of top-level scientists are really examining and they're supporting this hypothesis that it's more likely than unlikely.

But we were saying- Is there a question? Sorry. No, I was going to say, we were talking earlier that there's very few people that were in support of this and that you found it to be crazy. Right, right, right, right, right. Okay, so standard disclaimer, we don't know how the coronavirus outbreak started. You don't know. I don't know. No one knows.

He doesn't know. Literally no one knows. Well, I don't know that nobody knows. I just know that I know knows. There might be somebody who knows who hasn't told us. Maybe in Wuhan. Exactly. Or maybe in Beijing. Maybe. But we'll get to that. But maybe in the WHO. So before anyone says that, like, we're trying to push the lab accident theory. No, no, no. We're not pushing the lab accident theory. Well, the argument that I make

in the book, and I think I lay out a bunch of evidence to support this argument, but you be the judge, is that we have to investigate the lab accident theory. In other words, not that we know it came from the lab, but that there's enough circumstantial evidence that we can't rule it out. And when I understand very intimately, actually, how this story got so fucked up. And it's in here we are in April 2021. And it's been a year, a year. And we have no information that is getting us closer to the virus. All the investigations have been crap. OK, there's a lack of curiosity, both in governments around the world and international organizations and in the media. And I'm not you know, I'm not a media critic, but I'm just a guy who worked in the media for 17 years. It's kind of a shock that nobody seems to care, frankly, about the origins.

But to talk about the origin story, we sort of have to first go back and understand how the story got so fucked up. It's really important, and I'm going to do that as concisely as possible right now. You remember back in March, April 2020, it was a very crazy time in all of our lives, right? Things were disrupted. People were getting sick. We didn't get a lot of good information. We didn't know what was going on. People were losing their livelihoods, their businesses, their family members. And this was the time when the coronavirus pandemic, as you remember, started to get very political. Like for the first couple few weeks, it was like, hey, we got a problem here. Maybe we do. Maybe we don't. We all got to come together on this thing.

Around March or April is where everybody started to get onto teams. I'm on team mask. I'm on team hydrochloric queen. I'm on team shooting bleach into my butt, whatever the team is. Right. I'm on team science. I'm on team, you know, Biden, Beijing, Biden, Hunter Biden laptop. I'm on that team. And that's how Washington is. Frankly, it's factional. Right. Now, because of my odd story that I just laid out for you, I happen not to be in any of these factions. You know, I mean, I just never joined any of them. I deal with all of them. I move between them. So I'm watching all of this happen and I'm thinking, oh, wait, this is really dangerous because this story is not, the coronavirus origin story is not just about blaming China. Because of course,

you could blame China for a number of things in the pandemic, for hiding the science, for hiding the scientists, for killing the journalists, for not locking down. If you want to, if you're just about blaming China, and I'm not, you have ample reasons to blame China. The origin story is about figuring out how this happened so that it doesn't happen again. You know, in any disaster in the world, if it's a plane crash or anything, the obvious thing to do is to figure out what happened. Because otherwise, how can you inform policy and politics to make sure that doesn't happen again? It seems pretty obvious. But at that time and space where we're all living in this dystopian crisis, that wasn't the most important thing. The most important thing is like, you know, where's grandma? Is everyone safe? What should I do? How do I get my job back? Stuff like that.

Okay. So talking about the coronavirus origin was considered very impolite. And now add to that the fact that the Chinese government called, and this is in the book, called the State Department and told them, if you talk about the origin publicly, because some of it had begun to be discussed, you won't get your masks. You want your masks? You want your PPE? Remember those plane loads that are coming from your factory? It's like the American factory in China. But in the crisis, it wasn't an American factory at all because they just nationalized that

shit. And they're like, if you don't want your masks, then go ahead. Talk about the coronavirus. Wow. And I talked to a very, very senior Trump administration official who was just like, yeah, we have to shut up about it, you know, but we're but it informed their thinking in the sense they're like, OK, well, we have to make changes in our government, in our society so that the next time this happens, we don't have all the masks in China. You know what I mean? So that's a separate issue. We'll deal with that later. Right now we need the masks. So I heard about this. So so there were some people inside the government were like, wait a second. You're telling me the outbreak happened next to these two labs. There's a bunch of labs, but like these two major labs, the Wuhan Institute of Virology and the Wuhan Center for Disease Control.

Like we have a CDC. They have a CDC. There's this in Wuhan. You're telling me that this outbreak happened next to these labs. And what are the labs doing? Oh, they're making bat coronaviruses more virulent through what's known as gain-of-function research. And they're doing that. They have the most bat coronaviruses in the world. And the research that they were doing was to make them more infectious towards human lungs

through something called the ACE2 receptor and the S proteins, the technical term. And then we have a virus outbreak in Wuhan that's a bat coronavirus where the ACE2 receptor, it's the exact same thing. It's not the exact same virus, but it's pretty close. Shouldn't we check out that lab? And this became chatter inside the US government, like again, bubbling up inside the system. I'm catching this chatter. I'm like, oh, I should probably check that out because I have some sources on China. chatter. I'm like, oh, I should probably check that out because I have some sources on China.

I was already writing the book, by the way. And so then I found out there were these cables where these U.S. diplomats had gone to this very lab, the Wuhan Institute for Virology, two years before and wrote back these cables warning, first of all, that there were a lot of safety problems at the lab, that they didn't know how to operate their lab. They were begging for more help. The cables were meant to get them more help. The help never was given. But moreover, they warned about this specific research. And the guys who were writing these diplomatic cables wrote that, hey, because some of the research was published, right? They didn't publish everything they did, but a lot of it was published. And a lot of it was done with American researchers.

And these cable writers, these diplomats were like, hey, we got a problem here. And these cable writers, these diplomats were like, hey, we got a problem here. This lab is under-resourced and understaffed, and they're doing risky research on bat coronaviruses that could infect humans. That was two years prior. And now that we're in the middle of a pandemic where a bat coronavirus is infecting humans, a lot of people inside the government were sort of like, oh, remember those cables from two years ago that nobody gave a shit about? Like, dust them off. Let's see those. You know what I mean?

And I heard about them, and I'm like, I got to get these cables. I'm like, this is a big story. I got to get these cables. I got to figure it out. So I went to all my sources. Like, we can't give them to you. Eventually, I found a source who gave me the cables. And I published the cables.

And that, in a sense, was the beginning. Well, one big reason why the lab accident theory started to take root in the public space. Because now, by the way, the State Department, people think take root in the public space. Because now, by the way, the State Department, people think that the State Department leaked it. That's not true. Pompeo was super pissed at me personally, because I met with him later. He was very, very pissed. He yelled at me. He was not a happy man. Because again, they didn't want to piss off the Chinese because they wanted our masks. So I had thrown a wrench into that by floating this. Now, again, the cables don't tell you what happened in the pandemic because they were written two years before but suffice to say they predicted

the pandemic if the lab or at least predicted that this could be something that could happen from these labs and but then pompeo turned on dom he's like yeah we probably think it was the labs and then and then they asked trump the next day they're like do you think it was the labs he's like well i can't really get into it but yeah yeah, it was probably the labs. Okay. Now, Pompeo and Trump, to their discredit, were going beyond the evidence. In other words, they were politicizing the issue from the jump. Okay. And that immediately went beyond what we knew at that time. And Tom Cotton did the same thing, right? He said things that if you look back, look pretty reasonable in April 2021. But when he said them in February, oh, well, they're doing military research at the lab.

And, you know, he was sparking something that he couldn't control. So he got tart as a conspiracy theorist. Pompeo and Trump got tart as assholes. In fairness, you know, like they were they were they were they weren't doing the right thing either. But but here I was in the middle. I'm just like, can't we just figure this out? Can't we just figure this out? So then here comes the scientists, okay?

And this is the craziest part of this is that, you know, the scientists who were the best friends of the lab, and I'll name a couple of them. Basically, they're doing this gain-of-function research, which is, again, they collect all the viruses in the wild, and then they bring them to this lab or a bunch of labs, different labs, and they play around with them and see what's what. And the idea is to predict and preempt the pandemic. And this is a $200 million program funded by U.S. taxpayers for 15 years.

You've got the American scientists, the European scientists, the Chinese scientists going to every cave in Yunnan and this and that, finding all the most dangerous viruses, bringing them back to the lab and then playing around with them. This was research that was actually banned by the Obama administration in the U.S. That's why they were doing it all in China, by the way, because the Obama administration had put a moratorium on it. And some of it because it was risky because there are accidents because lab accidents happen all the time. And so they moved some of it over to China and they kept some of it. They grandfathered some of it over in the U.S. And this program, I mean, first of all, it didn't predict the pandemic, did it? Right. Because the pandemic happened. So they didn't predict it.

So that's that's one thing. But the the the the the theory is that in doing all of these experiments to make these viruses more virulent, more dangerous, they've created a super virus, not manufactured, not engineered. It's a natural evolution. What they do is they run it from the virus into mice that have human lung characteristics, and they do it a few thousand times, and they see which ones get the most dangerous. And then they're like, oh, let's look at these. times and they see which ones get the most dangerous. And then they're like, oh, let's look at these, you know. So the theory is that that lab accident, you know, pushed this virus onto the world a thousand miles from where the bats are, by the way. And that's how we got into

this mess. But the problem was once that theory was floated, the scientists who were involved in that research got on TV and they said, how dare you look at the lab? It could not possibly be the lab. You're a racist and a conspiracy theory if you dare to mention the lab. And if you utter it, you shall be shunned, right? Shunned, Amish style, shunned. And that happened, okay? And these scientists, and I'm putting at the top of the list a guy named Peter Daszak who runs the EcoHealth Alliance, who I've talked about lots of times before, to this day, tell us that we don't need to look at the lab, okay? And again, I'm not saying the lab did it. I'm just saying we should

investigate all the theories. Let's investigate the natural spillover theory, which is basically that, I can't make this up, that a bat bit a pangolin that traveled a thousand miles and then that spilled over to humans 10 miles from the lab. That's the other theory. Again, it might be true. I don't know. You don't know. Or it could have been the lab with all the bad coronaviruses. Now, if you came into this conversation in April 2021 not knowing how Pompeo and these scientists had all corrupted the conversation, you would think we should probably take a look at that lab. But what happened was because these scientists were covering their own asses, they were telling people not to look at the lab. And because most journalists and most Americans will look at Trump and Pompeo and then they look at a bunch of scientists, they're like, oh, yeah, I'm going to go with the scientists. You know what I mean? It's a natural thing. I get it. I understand why the media ran with that narrative. I was there. You know what I mean? There was a lot of pressure to do

that because Trump's a liar. And because he was using racist terms, like I won't repeat, but like for the virus and that's bad. And he weaponized the issue in a really cruel way. And there was a rise in Asian American hate. And those things did happen. Those are real. And those are horrible things for our society, for those members of our community. At the same time, none of that has anything to do with the lab. But because the issues got so conflated, now to even mention the lab accident theory became something that could get you criticized as being a racist or conspiracy theorist or worse. And that's what happened to... Oh, and then WHO does the investigation.

Who do you think they hired to do the investigation? Who? The scientists who were the best friends of the lab. Peter Daszak and the EcoHealth Alliance. He was on the investigation team. Jamie Metzl. Come on here and explain the whole situation to us. Basically, exactly how you're describing it.

Yeah, I know Jamie. Yeah. Jamie and I hung out once in Dharamsala, India with the Dalai Lama. Whoa. It's a true story. But anyway, back to this. Where was I? Oh, yeah.

So they hired the best friends of the lab to investigate the lab. It's like hiring Robert Kardashian to investigate O.J. You know what I mean? And when they interview these guys on TV, they always say the same thing. Don't you want the best friends of the lab to interview the lab? We know the most about it. We're doing the research. It would be like Robert Kardashian being like, I know O.J.

really well. Let me do the investigation. I'll figure out the truth. I'll get to the bottom of this. So anyway, they go to the lab for three hours, talk to their best friends, look them straight in the eye. Did you do it? No, we didn't do it. Okay. Case closed. And then they concluded in their WHO report that the lab theory is very unlikely. We don't need to look into the lab. Case closed. And everybody was like, oh, that doesn't make any sense. We can't have that. These guys have a conflict of interest. Their careers are tied to this lab. If the lab were found to be guilty again, we don't know. I don't know. You don't know. Peter Daszak doesn't know. Well, maybe he knows, but I don't think he knows.

You know, their legacy, this entire project of $200 billion, $200 million rather, to dig up viruses all over the world would be kaput. It would have to necessarily be stopped, this whole industry. Okay, now here's the part where I'm going to get a little controversial. Are you ready? Is it okay? Sure. Okay, so if I've gotten you that far, again, just to say that I don't blame anyone out there for having this notion that this lab accident theory is kind of a kooky thing that was cooked up by Mike Pompeo or something like that. I get why you think that. But now Trump's not – he's not here anymore.

We don't have to argue about Trump anymore, hopefully, ever again. And we can just look at the piles of circumstantial evidence, and there's plenty of circumstantial evidence that it could have come – there's some circumstantial evidence that it could have come from nature. I feel that the lab theory has more compelling circumstantial evidence because, again, they were doing that kind of research. There was a huge cover-up, and the virus database went mysteriously offline somehow in December 2019. There's also the evolution of the virus itself, right? That's what Robert... So Robert Redfield, who was the CDC director at the time, a trained

virologist, he says, I took a look at this virus, and I concluded that it's so powerful that it must have been evolved in a lab setting. And he pointed to the gain-of-function research and they called him a racist and a conspiracy theorist and all the rest. All right. Now, here's the controversial part. The godfather of that industry, the head of the pyramid, is a guy you may have heard of called Anthony Fauci. I've heard of that guy. Right? Yeah. Do you want to hear more? Yeah. OK. So Anthony Fauci, the hero of the pandemic,

is the most important person in the world of gain of function research there is. In other words, he is not just him. There's Francis Collins at the NIH and some other people. But basically, he is the one dispersing all of the grants for this. He is the one who pushed to turn it back on after Obama turned it back off. That's a whole other crazy story. He turned it back on without really consulting the White House. That's breaking news. Never been reported.

Just broke some news on your show right now. Really? Yes. He consulted the Office of Science and Technology Policy, which is like a part of the White House, but he didn't, you know, the White House put a pause on it and then he like undid the pause.

The details are a little sketchy. I'm not saying that he did anything necessarily wrong or illegal. I'm just saying that a lot of people that I know inside the Trump administration had no idea this had turned back on. He found a way to turn it back on in the mess of the Trump administration because the Trump administration is full of a bunch of

clowns, right? So at the end, you could get stuff done if you just knew how to work the system. Fauci is the head of that system. What was his incentive? That's his whole career. So what he would say, and again, to be perfectly fair to him, he's trying to predict the next pandemic. He thinks this is the way that you predict the next pandemic by digging up all these viruses. We've got to dig up more and more viruses and play around with them because we're going to find how they evolve. Then we're going to come up with therapeutics and vaccines and all this stuff. But there were no therapeutics. Right. But we did have vaccines quicker than most because the DARPA funded a program to make mRNA vaccines 10 years ago that actually worked.

That was a military-funded program, but we can get to that in a second. But that's not related to this. Right. So that's a very fair observation. In other words, the $200 million program to predict and preempt the pandemic failed, to predict and preempt the pandemic. But it may have also sparked the pandemic. May have sparked. Exactly.

Here's my question. When I read all about the research they were doing, I didn't see what they were doing to prevent it. I just saw what they were doing was examining these viruses and trying to find out how they work and trying to see what happens when they get more virulent. But what I didn't see is the invention of therapeutics. I hear what you're saying. I'm willing to give these scientists the benefit of the doubt that their honest goal was to create, do good science to prevent and predict. Oh, I am too.

That's not what I'm saying. I don't know if they produce therapeutics. What I'm saying, did they have a lack of funding in that department? Was all the funding allocated towards examining the viruses themselves and not towards developing some sort of a therapeutic? It's a good question. I don't know the answer to that question. But what I do know is that the majority of their time was spent digging up viruses in the wild

and bringing them back to these labs. But Fauci, when he started it back up, did he start it back up with the intent to just uncover more information so we'd be better informed? His argument was, this is vital research. The longer we pause it, the more danger that we're in. I'm trying to save the world, and so we've got to turn this stuff back on because this is how we're going to save the world from the next pandemic,

which I'm sure he believed. I'm sure a lot of these people believed. But there is another school of thought out there. And the other school of thought is, hey, instead of taking $200 million to dig up viruses and make them more dangerous, why don't you put that money into monitoring and surveillance in the places where the bats are? In other words, if you put resources where the outbreaks are likely to occur, then you can squelch them when they pop up because actually viruses change every day and trying to predict the pandemic is a fool's errand. That's another scientific school of thought. That's not the one that Fauci's in.

But the reason that there's no debate about this is because the NIH and NIAID structure is such that everyone gets funded by them. They're funding everybody. So if you are in the field of virology, there's a 99.99% chance that you're getting money from Anthony Fauci in one way or another. a 99.99% chance that you're getting money from Anthony Fauci in one way or another. Your grants, your careers, your chairmanships. So there's no dissent allowed in that community. I learned a lot about the scientific community and the virology community over the last few years. No dissent allowed. So no debate? I talk to scientists all the time who say, I think this gain-of-function research is

really dangerous. I can't say anything. I'm going to lose my grant. I'm going to lose my career. This happens to me all the time. And when Robert Redfield spoke up because he's a big mocker and he's a head of the CDC, he said, it's my opinion that it came from the lab because he can't declassify a bunch of classified information on CNN, but he's talking about what he knows, right? It's obvious to everyone who's in the know that he's seen the intelligence and he's not just talking out of his

ass he's not some joe schmo virologist he was the head of the cdc he's seen all of the secret secret stuff even the stuff i never get got a whiff of and he and he went on tv and said hey uh i think this probably came from the lab we should probably look at the lab and he was called a racist and a conspiracy theorist but by what he's saying but fauci's disagreed with him publicly right so that's the thing so if you if you just think about it just for once again i'm begging people out there just like think again whatever you thought about the lab accident it doesn't matter whatever you tweeted in 2020 march it doesn't nobody cares right and the same thing for the let it go yeah because it's all confirmation bias now like oh i i, I tweeted this in March 2020 and I want it to hold

up. Nobody cares what you tweeted in March 2020. Let's just have a rational conversation about what are the likely ways we got into this horrible crisis that we're in. And so for people in the know who are listening to Robert Redfield, it's clear that he's calling out Anthony Fauci. In other words, he's pointing to the gain of function research, which he knows because he's the head of the CDC, reports up to Fauci. He knows that, right? But he's pointing to the gain of function research, which he knows because he's the head of the CDC reports up to Fauci. He knows that. Right. Right. But he's not saying that because even that's too hot for him to say. And the scientists are not going to say that either. Now, you have a lot of people sort of on the on the right wing media and the MAGA media who've been saying that for a long time,

but they don't have any credibility with the mainstream media. And I'm just like in that weird space where, like, I wrote about you know u.s china relationship so i had all these this good reporting and i'm not bag of media because i criticize trump in my columns all the time so i am mainstream media but i'm saying we should look at the lab and it messes with people's minds because they're like oh why is he doing this why is josh pushing the lab i'm not pushing the lab that's the problem today with these rigid ideologies exactly everyone's on teams it's all factional. But I don't care. I don't even care if the lab accident theory is true. If the natural origin theory is true,

then great. I will leave the ticker tape parade celebrating Peter Daszak and Anthony Fauci down Fifth Avenue. I'm happy to do that. All I'm saying is that we have to also look into this lab, these labs, rather, and that we can't hire the best friends of the lab

to look into the labs because they have a clear conflict of interest and they fucked it up already. What is the argument? Is that so crazy? Does that make me a crazy person? No, no, I'm on your side. I don't think it's crazy at all. I've converted your, well, Jamie converted you, but I'm confirming it. That's all. We have to be able to talk about this. Yes. Yes, we have to be able to talk about this. Yes. Yes, we have to be able to talk about this. And that is part of the problem. But what is the compelling argument against the lab leak theory? Do they have one?

That's fair. Yes. So there's two things. There's argument and there's evidence. So the most compelling argument that I've heard for the natural spillover theory is that most of the pandemics or most of the outbreaks over time have been from natural spillover. The vast majority of them. Right. That's a statistical argument. Now, again, that doesn't speak to this pandemic because statistics are just statistics. It doesn't tell you. It's not actual data, right? It's not actual facts. So that's one thing, like SARS spilled over naturally.

Now, I would say to that, SARS spilled over naturally where the bats are. Right. Not a thousand miles where the labs are. Where a penguin walked over there. Which should tell you something. Right. Or a palm civet or a raccoon dog or whatever. Right. Not a thousand miles where the labs are. Where a penguin walks over there. Which should tell you something. Right. Or a palm civet or a raccoon dog, whatever. Right, right, right.

And then what Peter Desik will say on TV, who says all the time, is that, oh, well, we know that the market, the Wuhan market, the seafood market, they call it a wet market. It's just a market. You know, you go to Asia, there's markets everywhere. We know that the market had the animals that could have been the pass-through animals. In other words, they had pangolins in the market. Now, to me, that's not evidence either. That's just, again, a plausible theory.

Right. Why is it that despite a year of searching every pangolin and palm civet and mink and raccoon dog from, you know, Katmandu to Kabul, Peter Daszak and his friends have never found any pangolins linked to the outbreak, right? There's no- Yeah, that's what I was going to get at. So this is another trope. And this is a trope that we have an opportunity to actually fix right here in this moment, which is that, it drives me crazy when this is written into news stories because it's not true, which is that you'll see there's no evidence of the lab leak theory. And there's lots of evidence of the natural spillover theory that's what a lot of objective journalists will write into their

news stories because they've been writing that for a year and they never thought about it really for more than two seconds or whatever and the truth is that you know i think there's much more evidence circumstantial evidence to be sure of the lab leak theory but either way if you say there's no evidence then you have to admit that there's no evidence of either theory. In other words, we don't know shit. There's no proof. In other words, there's no animal that links to the market. By the way, the Chinese CDC disavowed the market theory in May 2020. Nobody cared. Nobody noticed. The Chinese CDC, they said it didn't come from the market. The market was an amplifying event, not an origin event. Some people went to the market.

They found some people who had it. The first people that they found that had it, they never went to the market. They didn't know anything about the market. So, again, and then you have – I think it's very plausible that this spilled over in nature. It's also very plausible that it spilled over into the lab, that it was the result of gain-of-function research gone awry at the lab. And we have to investigate them both. And that's, I think, I can't understand. Again, I understand why that's a controversial thing to say, but it ought not to be.

Well, what is the argument when they talk about the natural spillover theory? And then there's the popsicle theory. Did you know about the popsicle theory? No, what's that? Oh, this is the best one. So after a year of like, you know, so we're not talking about the elf in the room, which is really the most important thing, which is the CCP, which jail and disappear anyone who said anything that wasn't the party line, and then to use the scientists who are the best friends of the lab to launder a bunch of really horrendous disinformation. And that's not to say that the scientists are assets.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that they have an overlapping interest. If you're a scientist, you don't want the lab thing to be true. And if you're the Chinese government, you don't want the lab thing to be true. You have an overlapping interest. They're not colluding. They're not working together. They just happen to say the same exact thing.

Okay? And the Kiss of WHO report, they actually did work directly together. And what they say is that, okay, well, if we can't find the palm civet, you know, that, like, made the thousand-mile walk from Yunnan to Wuhan without spilling over once until it got to the lab doorstep. Maybe it came on on a frozen food package from Norway. Like, let's go check every frozen food package, distribute a point that shipped anything, any box into Wuhan in the four months before the outbreak. But hold on a second. Why frozen food? The Chinese government came up with another explanation.

If it wasn't the market and it wasn't the lab, well, maybe the virus was on the box of frozen food that came from Norway. Why Norway? I'm just saying it could come from anywhere. In other words, or maybe it came from, you know, Japan or Thailand or anywhere. They don't have an origin. It's just bullshit is what I'm trying to say. Because it's a crazy thing to say. Right.

Because it doesn't pass the laugh test. All right. Forget about Occam's razor. I'm talking about the laugh test. When you hear something, can you think about that being true without cracking up in your mind? Okay, it doesn't pass because what that would lead you to is to searching every frozen food package that's ever been shipped into Wuhan, which creates 100 years of busy work that leads you to no conclusion whatsoever. But the Chinese government loves this because for the CCP, confusion is

enough, right? They don't need to find the source. They just need to make sure we don't find the source. They control their information environment. Their people have no choice but to hear the things that they say. And anyone who says something different disappears. They're working on our information environment. This is part of the influence part of the book, right? They're trying to change our discussion by getting into our information space and corrupting it for their own malign ways. And in this case, it has a direct effect on our public health because we need to figure this out so we can figure out how to prevent the next one. So this is the – again, I'm not saying the scientists are working with them. I'm just saying the line that they're pushing is the same line now being pushed by these same exact scientists,

which would only lead you to searching every frozen food package that ever came into Wuhan in the last two years, which is crazy, which is a fool's errand. It's another way to distract us from the thing that we need to do, which is to take a look at these labs. Did anybody question this frozen food narrative? I mean, it got ridiculed on the internet, but these— But these scientists are not ridiculing it they're not saying hey this doesn't even make sense. They're pushing it so the ones that are talking are pushing it. But why frozen food? This is what I'm concerned with. How many ways in other

words the Chinese government wants us to believe so again they're trying to avoid blame because they're trying to avoid liability. Right. Three million deaths. Right. No statute of limitations on three million deaths. Right. No statute of limitations on three million deaths. Right. Every one of those coffins comes with a lawyer. OK. Think about that. Yeah. We're talking. They're thinking ahead. We're thinking about, you know, should we wear masks or can I go out to a bar tonight? The Chinese government from the get go has been way ahead of us in looking forward to the next stages of this crisis. The disease is only the first stage. There's going to be broad economic upheaval.

They're doing vaccine diplomacy on a broad scale. They're using vaccines to threaten and blackmail and bribe countries all over the world. We're not playing that game. Then they're thinking about, okay, what's the legal liability of us for this thing? Do they want to close down their own labs? No, they don't want to do that. They've got their own interests. So they have many, many reasons to distract us from the real mission of finding the source of this virus. Now, some people will say, well, oh, you just want to blame China. But here's the crazy part. You don't know. I don't know. You know, my wife doesn't know. My parents don't know. But if it does turn out to be true, it doesn't just implicate China.

OK, the big reveal of the lab accident theory is that it implicates us, that it points the finger back at us because it points because we're the ones who sponsored that research. We're the ones who built up this industry. We're the ones who, you know, it was mostly the French, but who built this lab in China in the first place. Okay. We had this bet on China and this sort of fits into the broader US-China relationship, which is the bigger scope of the book, that if we just engage with China as much as we could and help them out as much as we could, that that engagement and cooperation would in turn convince them to liberalize, first economically and then politically, and then we could avoid the Cold War and we would all live in peace and happiness. That was the basic, I'm simplifying it to be sure, stance of U.S. foreign policy towards China since 1972.

And scientific cooperation was held up as the bastion of that, because if you can't cooperate on stopping a pandemic, what could you cooperate on? But the problem is that the Chinese government doesn't think that way, and they don't see it that way, and they're not liberalizing, and it's becoming increasingly obvious to everyone. Slowly but surely, and over the course of the Trump administration, more and more parts of American society sort of realize this idea that, oh, wait, they're weaponizing their engagement against us for their interests, which are adverse to ours, that they wish us harm, in other words. Not the Chinese people, not the I'm talking about the party, not even the Chinese government, the party. Right. Which operates like a cartel. It's like the Gambino family if they ran the largest country in the world.

OK, that's what it is. OK. And they have factions and they kill each other and they hate each other. And they're secretive. And, you know, they're more scared of each other than anyone else because they're constantly killing each other. Really? Oh, yeah. It's vicious. I mean, it's just like the mafia. If you get too famous, you get whacked. Whacked.

It happens all the time. Just look what happened to Jack Ma and Ali Baba. But Jack Ma, he's still alive, right? Yeah, no, no. He did better than most. Alibaba. But Jack Ma, he's still alive, right? Or you think that's not him? He did better than most. The head of Ongbong Insurance Group, the guy who met with Jared Kushner in 2018, they tried to work out that alleged corruption. He got an 18-year prison sentence. The head of HNA, which is like a multinational conglomerate, he fell off like

a four-foot wall twice. Twice? Just to make sure. If you Google China, if you Google like China and like falling people like falling out of windows, like what do they not screw the windows in? Right. People constantly famous businessmen constantly falling out of windows. There's like they're they're very nasty to each other. sort of how it operates. They're working together and Xi Jinping is the head of it. Now, what that means for us is that, getting back to the issue at hand, is that our scientific collaboration, maybe with these Chinese scientists who are very nice people who also want to solve the pandemic, who dedicated their life to solving pandemics, and that's what they've been doing for 20 years, they don't get to make the decision. They've got a party guy standing behind over their shoulder, who's got a general standing over his decision. They've got a party guy standing behind over their shoulder who's got a general standing over his shoulder

who's got another party guy standing over his shoulder who's got Xi Jinping standing over his shoulder. And that's what a lot of Americans don't understand. Like how could, oh, I thought we were just doing open science. What could be bad about that? What, they're going to hide stuff in the labs? Why would they do that? But for the people inside the government who understood how the CCP operates

of course it's what they would do. And for the people who saw how they understood how the CCP operates, of course, it's what they would do. And for the people who saw how they responded to the SARS virus in 2002 and 2003, that's exactly what they did. They did the same things. They did it over again. Just this time it killed 600000 Americans. Now, again, that doesn't excuse our poor response. That doesn't excuse any of the bullshit that Trump put us through that made it much worse. I'm just saying there's plenty of blame to go around. And what that tells us about our relationship with China, again, not the Chinese people, you wouldn't blame the Italian people for the mafia, so you wouldn't blame the Chinese people for the CCP. But what it tells us is that this is an organization that has to be viewed with clear eyes. And the clear eyes are that they covered up the origin, they covered up the

science, they still won't give us the data that they have to this day. And the clear eyes are that they covered up the origin, they covered up the science, they still won't give us the data that they have to this day. And this is having a direct effect on our security and our prosperity and our public health. And so we're going to have to do something about that. And what I say is that we have to start here. We have to start investigating our labs, the gain-of-function research that we're doing here. You see that happening a little bit now. You see some congressmen, some more scientists like Jamie Metz. Jamie Metz, by the way, took a lot of shit, man, when he started talking about the lab accident theory a year ago.

He was just getting attacked all the time. I mean, me too, to a lesser extent, but I'm a journalist. That comes with the territory. That was one of the problems with Trump, is that everything that he endorsed was so problematic that even if it didn't make any sense to oppose it, people opposed it just based on the fact that it was his. Exactly. Exactly.

And you know what? But I don't like being on Trump's side any more than anybody else. You know what I mean? You're not on his side. You're on the side of the truth. Thank you. Yeah. Thank you.

Thank you. Thank you. That's, and I like the way you just weaved your way through this. It was brilliant. The thing that scares me terribly is that there's still people, despite the fact that this evidence is slowly emerging, there's still people that are ideologically opposed to it being true. So they're fighting it hook, line and sinker. Yeah. Here's what I say to those people. The origin of the coronavirus is not a political question. It's not an ideological question. In fact, it's not even really a scientific question.

It's a forensic question. Something bad happened. We need to find out what happened. It's not for scientists to solve. It's for forensic investigators to solve. And we're actually impeding that investigation with this adherence, this blind adherence to ideology. Of course. That's what that investigation with this adherence, this blind adherence to ideology. Of course. That's what's dangerous. And that's what scares me. And it's

getting worse because, I mean, we're a year and a half into this thing and we don't know shit. Oh, here's another angle, which is like, help you understand the intelligence community, right? Our intelligence, our vaulted $80 billion intelligence community, $80 billion. Okay. Now you'll notice, and a lot of people point this out, that when I started publishing about these cables, and the scientists came back and were like, oh, you can't talk about the lab accident theory. Don't look at the lab.

We went to the lab. We talked to the scientists. They said they were innocent. And case closed and shut up, you know? When that happened, the intelligence community leaked to the mainstream press that there was no evidence to support the lab. That's where this no evidence thing came from, right? Now, because I was sort of inside the system and I was writing this book and I actually had like real no shit sources, I was able to sort of trace how that happened. And, you know, there was a gap.

There was an intelligence gap. And, you know, there was a gap. There was an intelligence gap. In other words, what happened was a guy by the name of Matthew Pottinger, who was the deputy national security advisor at the time, who spoke Chinese, who used to work as a Wall Street Journal reporter. He was a marine intelligence guy. Really interesting guy. His wife is a virologist. His brother is an epidemiologist. He was reading Chinese social media.

He was in the know. He was at the nexus of all this information. And for that reason, he was like the early warning system inside the government and for Trump and along with a couple other people. But he was mostly ignored and shouted down by the political people, right? Because they're like, how dare you close the economy? What are you going to shut down travel from Europe in the middle of the election season? That's crazy. You're going to lose the election. Now, of course, the political people were 100% wrong because if Trump had done a better response, he might have won the election. And his failed response actually cost him the presidency when people realized that he didn't know what he was doing. But at that moment, guys like Matthew Pondra were like, hey, we really think this came from the lab.

The intelligence people, who also didn't like some of them anyway, who didn't like the Trump people, leaked there was no evidence to fuck with the Trump people, and the mainstream media ran with it, because like, isn't it great to fuck with the Trump people? They leaked it, or they decided to run with that narrative to fuck with the Trump people? Because it's not a leak if they knew it wasn't factual. No, it's factual, but it's misleading. Right. I see what you're saying.

Because there is no evidence- There's no evidence either way. Right. Got it. They could have leaked there's no evidence of the natural spill you're saying. Because there is no evidence. There's no evidence either way. Right. Got it. They could have leaked. There's no evidence of the natural spillover. Right. But they leaked. There's no evidence. They were rebutting what Pompeo and Trump were saying. And people talk about, I'm not going to use the term deep state, but this was an attempt

by them to reset the narrative or somebody in the intelligence community to reach a bunch of people. But what had actually happened was that Pottinger went to the intelligence community and said, what do you have? Okay, give me the SIGINT. Give me the satellite shit. Do we have any human sources on the ground? We've got to look at everything.

He didn't say go prove the lab theory. He said give me everything on every theory. If you've got the market theory, smoking gun, give me that too. And so he put out this sort of tasking, which is what they do at the White House, and give me everything you've got. And there wasn't anything. They didn't know shit. They still don't know shit. And if this doesn't blow your mind, nothing will. Think about the intelligence failure that that represents. Just think about for a second that after 9-11, that after 9-11, we took our $80 billion intelligence community machine and shifted it over to the jihadis.

And then we took some of it and we shifted it back to Russia. And then we took some of it, we shifted it to China, like spies, like people trying to honey trap mayors and stuff like that. That's what they do. They'll throw a bunch of Chinese spies at American mayors to try to get them to fuck them. And then they compromise, you know, like old tradecraft. Nobody was looking at this universe of risky research

that was going on in this network of labs that did involve the military of China. They weren't pointed at it. And that's where the pandemic hit. So we're always looking under, we're always fighting the last war. We're always looking under the lamppost for our keys. You know what I mean?

But then something happens, and then Pottinger goes and he's like, hey, what do we have on these labs? Like, we don't have shit. And then they leak out. There's no evidence for the lab theory. And everyone's like, oh, Trump is wrong. Let's have a party. And a year later, we still – What a failure.

Huge intelligence – massive intelligence failure that in any sane world, you would have a commission, you know, like a 9-11 style commission would be like, how did this happen? Not just how did this happen? How did we get into this dystopian, crazy reality that we're all suffering in? And not just Americans, seven billion people suffering to this day, much worse than us. You know, in a lot of countries, much, much worse than us. And no one's curious. No one cares. Like, there's, like, two Republican, you know, committees that are, like, issued letters on this. That's all I could ever find.

A year later, zero Democrats are interested in this. I mean, there's a few people in the media, not really. You know, a couple. You know, they're doing their best. I'm doing my best. I can't, you know. I don't know. Nobody listens to me. What are you going to do? Well, they're going to best. I'm doing my best. I can't, you know, I don't know. Nobody listens to me.

What are you going to do? Well, they're going to listen to you. We'll see. It's just one of those things where... I'm going to listen to you. If I can convince you, that would be like a watershed moment in this conversation. Well, I've been aware because of Jamie

and because of many other people that the whole way it was established that it was the natural spillover was very faulty, but not to the extent that you're laying it out here today. I'm taking you a couple more layers down into the system. To tell you what was going on inside the beast. And again I'm just

blurting it all out because I don't have an agenda. I don't care how you... I'll tell you what I know. I'll tell you what I don't know. And what I know is that from jump there were a lot of very serious people who wanted to look into this lab. And for a number of fucked up reasons that we've just discussed, it's still not happening. To this day, it's still not happening.

There's no plan for it. No one's even really, I haven't heard anybody come up with a plan for it. How is that? How is nobody more curious about how we got into this mess? By the way, now I'm really going to blow your mind. how we got into this mess. By the way, now I'm really going to blow your mind.

Guess what the... Guess what the plan is to respond to the pandemic, the official international government plan, scientifically. What's the plan? Just guess. I don't know. To take this gain-of-function research

and to times it by six. What? Really? Let that sink in for one second. Is that really? It's called the Global Virome Project. To take this $200 million program to predict and preempt the pandemic,

which didn't predict and preempt, which may have sparked the pandemic, we don't know, but may have, and to dump another $1.2 billion into it, a lot of which is U.S. taxpayer money, to take the Fauci-Daszek project and just make it huge, much bigger, according to the website, to dig up 500,000 new dangerous viruses from the wild to bring back to lab supply.

That's the plan. That's our current response plan. Now, don't you think- Who's initiating this? I mean, it's an international consortium of scientists. It's from, from many, many, many countries. Do you think they're taking advantage of the fact that there is this

need for an understanding for how to fix some of these situations like this, if it were to occur in the future? They're doubling down. They're sextupling down on their mistake, if it's a mistake. But all I'm saying is, shouldn't we find out

before we increase this research sixfold? And here's the other thing. Even if it didn't cause the pandemic, there's a risk, right? So when the WHO releases its report, the task report says, we went to the lab for three hours. They told us they didn't do it. We said, sorry to bother you. And case closed. As they're releasing that report, the head of the WHO, Dr. Tedros, who most right-wing outlets accuse of being totally compromised by the CCP. Again, I don't think that's the case. I think he has a conflict of interest. I think he's, again— Is that the guy that was in that interview with the journalist who refused to say the name Taiwan?

No, that's different. I think that was a different guy. But that's another part of the problem, is the self-censorship that goes on in these organizations. But my view on the WHO is we should fix it, not nix it. In other words, these organizations are flawed, but if we destroyed them, we'd just have

to build them again. So we should probably engage it, not get rid of it. But anyway, he comes out in the speech during the release of the report, and guess what he says? He says, we've got to look at this lab. And you guys didn't do enough to look at the lab. In other words, he comes out in the speech during the release of the report. And guess what he says? He says, we got to look at this lab. And you guys didn't do enough to look at the lab. In other words, he crapped on his own report in the middle of releasing the report. Wow.

Now, again, just as a curious human being, I'm like, oh, why would he do that? Well, he was trying to save his credibility and the credibility of his organization because now it seems pretty clear and obvious to more and more people that we're going to have to take a look at these labs. So as time goes on, the investigation will reveal more of this, more people start looking into it now that it's no longer taboo, now that Trump's not in office. Hopefully. I don't know. Maybe. What I find is that, because I've been having a lot of these conversations, is that, again, when people come to this issue without all that baggage, we have this like kind of like rational conversation that you and I are having right now. But when people come to it with the baggage that they had from 2020, it immediately descends into like, oh, wait, I tweeted this in March 2020.

And this is why I think this is still right. And they have to defend it. It's fucking maddening. And, you know, i'm i'm i'm i'm a pretty laid-back guy as you can tell you know what i mean like i'm not into like twitter but like i gotta i had to get into a couple twitter wars over this because i just like i couldn't i couldn't help myself i'm not gonna call out any names you know who you are um but they're like they're like very famous people uh people much more famous than me who

were like oh no this is all conspiracy. I was like, hey, guys, we got to come together on this thing. We got to forget. Think again. Think again. Have you ever heard of this book, Think Again, by Adam Grant? No. You should have him on the show. I would love to. He's a behavioral scientist. I think, I don't know if that's his real title, at a UPenn. And he wrote this great book. And it says book and it says that what we're lacking in our politics and in our discourse and our society is the ability to challenge our own assumptions and that when new information comes in and to have some sort of constructive disagreement and testing where we can allow ourselves to be wrong because the important thing is not to be right first. The important thing is to be right at the end. You want to be right when the chips are all down. you know, being right is an end in itself.

So we get obsessed with that. And then, of course, for the mainstream media, if you're wrong, you get dunked on by the right wing media, right? But if you're the right wing media, you're wrong. There's not really that many consequences. So for the mainstream media, guys like me, we're always like on edge because we got to be right 100 percent of the time. And if they catch us once being wrong, then that's like a huge damage to our credibility. And don't get me wrong. I believe that we should be held to that higher standard. I believe that journalists because we're out there calling people out for their shit all day long. Right. So, yes, I agree. But I'm not perfect. I make mistakes. I've made mistakes. You know, if you watch some of the YouTube videos about... You will see there have been

mistakes have been made. I'm not a perfect journalist, but I'm trying to get it right. And that's the integrity is not worrying about whether or not getting it right means that I was wrong the first time. It's your intent. Your intent is to get it right, not to obfuscate, not to cover up your past mistakes by ignoring data that's contrary to that. But it's tough because people have confirmation bias. Of course. And it's a real thing and you have to think about it.

And people have source bias. You know what I mean? Imagine you're covering the pandemic and those scientists are your best sources. Right. That's what happened. Yeah. The guy's on like 60 Minutes.

This double, triple, quadruple, whatever they're doing with the gain-of-function research scares the shit out of me. Because has this been approved? Is this just a plan? No, no. They've been doing it for 15 years. No, no, no. I mean now with knowing the response, knowing what happened.

Oh, the Global Virome Project. So the Global Virome Project, which is a $1.2 billion expansion of the global, not just gain-of-function research, but the overall industry of collecting viruses from the wild. Some of which is gain-of-function research. They may do lots of different things with these viruses. But the idea is like, let's go to every cave in Yunnan in Indonesia, find the worst

viruses that we can. We found a really bad one, that's great. We're going to break back to the lab and see what's what. That idea is still the current plan. I'm told that there are people looking at it. The funding hasn't actually gone out. But if you ask, that's still the current plan. In other words, there's not another plan.

But does it include treatments this time? Well, I mean, that would be done by a different... Right. But, I mean, if you're examining all these viruses and they're doing what they did with these mice by passing it from one to another and seeing what's the most virulent strain, like, what are you doing other than empowering the viruses? You're gaining an understanding. But what good is that gain of understanding if there's no significant treatments that are being developed simultaneously? No, no. I'm sure that they have a plan to link that research with treatments and this and that.

But that was never done in Wuhan. That's not the part that would have been done in Wuhan. Right. But they didn't link it to anyone and develop treatments. I'm not sure. As I said, I don't want to say something. I understand. But they clearly didn't have a treatment.

Right. But where did the treatment come from? The treatment was the mRNA vaccine. But that's from the original SARS, right? No, it's not. Well, it's from what was originally a DARPA-funded defense program. Right, what you were saying earlier. So think about that.

So that's like a government investment in a new technology that it worked. The mRNA vaccines. It's amazing technology. And that was developed so that we could respond to any virus, not to respond to the coronavirus. The beauty of the mRNA technology is that you can apply it to the virus you don't know about, which again is the big criticism of all of this National Viral Project, which is that the virus is changing all the time. One virus changes every single day. So you could dig up 500,000 viruses. The next day, those 500,000 viruses will be different. So what are you really doing? Now, again, I'm not a scientist. I know that this is an honest debate inside the scientific

community by people who think that this research and whether or not it led to therapeutics, I don't know the details. Again, I got to be transparent about the limits of what I don't know everything about. But the bottom line is that that argument, that scientific project, which I'm sure does include a path towards therapeutics, how far they got, I'm not sure. That's one way to do it. The other way to do it is to take all that money, all of it, all these scientists, the whole industry, and do something different. And it's called mitigation, surveillance, pre-stocking of supplies so that when the outbreak happens, again, probably where the bats are, probably where the viruses live. If I had to guess where the outbreaks are going to be, you know, which is, again, a very weird thing about this one.

It happened a thousand miles away next to the lab. You could spend all that money. You could probably save a lot more lives. That's the argument. Well, other ones break out in agricultural centers. Yes. In other words, any theory that you have, you could point to an example, but it doesn't matter because all we care about is this example,

is the coronavirus, COVID-19 pandemic that we're all in. That's the one we need to figure out. So can we figure it out? Is it okay? Can I say that? Even if that involves asking some tough questions of Anthony Fauci, who I'm sure, again, is a very nice man who dedicated his life to solving viruses. And if it turns out that his research helped spark the pandemic, well, OK, I'm not accusing him of doing anything illegal or wrong. He was going through a regular process. He was doing approved stuff, as far as we know. But he wasn't personally doing it, right?

He was doing it in a lab that was cited in 2018 for safety violations. In many, many labs all over the world, including this lab in Wuhan. Now, the person I do think bears a little bit more responsibility is those people in the Chinese labs that were not doing the public research. And this is a new thing that I'm talking about now, which is that the Trump administration, again, in its Trumpian kind of way, on the very last week of existence, put out the statement on January 15th saying, making claims about the lab. Bold claims. Okay. And they did a lot of shit in that last week. You know what I mean?

Like, the rioters came. You know what I mean? And then, like, they were like, everything was very weird. You know, D.C. became a very fucked up place. And I've been living there 24 years. Capital's still fenced in, right? No. 75% of the fences are gone.

Oh, okay. The Capitol building is still pretty secure. And I was there for the first time last week. It was very weird and very sad. And I attended quite accidentally the funeral of a Capitol Police officer, the latest one, you know, because now they're- To the guy that got hit by a car. Yeah. And, you know, it's tragic. You know, I spent a lot of time covering Capitol Hill. My wife covered it for a long time. You know, my wife could have been in that building that day

if she hadn't switched jobs very recently. And, you know, that shit is scary. And. You know, my wife could have been in that building that day if she hadn't switched jobs very recently. And, you know, that shit is scary. And, you know, walking around D.C., it looked like, you know, the green zone. That's very, that hit me. It really affected me. But anyway, in that last week, in that confusion,

they pushed through a lot of shit. And Pompeo came out with a statement saying, oh, well, we have all this declassified intelligence about the labs, that there were sick researchers at the lab with COVID-like symptoms in September and October 2019, that there was undisclosed coronavirus research at the lab that they didn't tell us about. They published some of it, and that they were doing military work at the lab, again, that they didn't tell us about. Now, these are amongst some other claims, but these are the three big claims that Pompeo made.

Now, of course, for understandable reasons, they're like, how dare you? Everyone comes, Greta Thunberg, how dare you? How dare you, Mike Pompeo? And, you know, at the time I was like, well, you know, shocking if true, but I can't trust the Trump administration either because they have a habit of lying.

So the Biden team comes in and I gave them a couple of weeks to get set. I was like, hey, you got to check this out. Is this true? They put out these statements. And to their credit, they did. They checked it out and they said, yeah, the facts are true. Now, what the Biden administration said, the State Department, Anthony Blinken's State Department said, we confirm these facts. In other words, our intelligence does in fact show that there were sick researchers at the lab, that there was undisclosed coronavirus research at the lab, and that there was some undisclosed military work at the lab. However, we do not agree with the Trump and Pompeo statement that the lab probably did it. Okay. That was their hedge, right? And if you think about it,

the Biden people are being fair, you know, because they don't want to take a stance because they're not, they're like you. They weren't part of the bullshit in 2020. They weren't there. They were in office. They don't care which way it turns out. They know it might be the lab. It might be the natural spillover. So they confirm the facts, but not the political assertions of the Trump administration. But just going that far, just to say that we confirm these facts was significant. They didn't have to do that. They went and checked all of the intelligence, what we had, and said, yeah, there is this suspicious activity at the lab that we didn't previously know about. Now, nobody really, when the Biden administration releases lab accident

theory data, silence. Robert Redfield, I remember when Robert Redfield was like, hey, we should probably look at this lab. The New York Times headline said, Like, hey, we should probably look at this lab. The New York Times headline said, Robert Redford, former CDC director, pushes debunked theory. Yeah. I was like, wait a minute. Who debunked it? Did I miss a meeting?

You know what I mean? Because I just wrote a fucking book about it. What do you think that's about? Confirmation bias and source bias. Is that really all it is? Yeah, I think so. I mean, again, I worked in the media 17 years. I worked for eight different news organizations. It's mostly incompetence.

It's not a conspiracy. I don't mean a conspiracy. What do you mean? You tell me what you mean. To say something that's so egregious, to say that it's debunked when it hasn't been debunked. Yeah. There's got to be some sort of motivation to do that. I mean, I think some of it is like orange man bad.

Yes. We can't let Trump be right. Like, guess what? The broken clock is right twice every fucking day. You know, like, you know, so I think a lot of it is that like, oh, because again, you could say that Trump pushed it, right? He did say things. They did offer things without evidence.

They made mistakes. He also merged racism and the origin story in a horribly destructive way in the sense that we can't even untangle it. So now if you're on the progressive side, this is why the progressives got mad at Redfield, because they're like, oh, you're fueling AAPI hate. Right. And, you know, and I get why they think that. Right. And and I tried to write a column about this where i basically just tried to elevate the voices of aapi lawmakers you're saying asian american pacific islanders yes exactly so most people don't know what the fuck you're sorry i'm sorry about that it's a dc jargon um you know what i argued is that you know it's a it's a tragedy that trump used the china

issue to stoke anti-asian hate, which is, I think, a fact, an undeniable fact. However, now that Trump is gone, we have to separate these two things. In other words, we can be critical of the Chinese Communist Party without being racist against Asian Americans. In fact, it's crucial that we do that because the Chinese Communist Party intentionally stokes our racial divides, including our anti-Asian hate, in order to divide our society, to undermine our democracy, to advance its own interests. How do they do that? Tons and tons of propaganda and trolls, state media. You should have seen it.

The first time Yang Jiechi, the state counselor of China, met with Tony Blinken, he criticized him about Black Lives Matter and George Floyd. Why is he doing that? In the meeting, in the diplomatic meeting, right? And if you look at their embassies and their state media, and it's, I mean, it's a multi-billion dollar enterprise, constantly pumping out, how does America treat its Asians? Look at this statistic. Look at that statistic.

Now, that, in a sense, is a very clumsy kind of propaganda. That's what we can see. And it's increasing all the time. And again, with the Facebook groups and the whole thing, all the same shit the Russians did. OK. And and it's meant to drive a wedge into our society to inflame our existing tensions, again, to undermine our own confidence in our society and our democracy. Oh, look, democracies are so messy. What you have freedom of the press, but everyone's pushing fake news, you know. And look at China. It's so wonderful. There's a million newspapers. There's only one story. You go to the bookstore. This is the book you need to read that you better download it.

And by the way, if you don't download it, we're going to ding your social credit score, you know? And so that's the overt part. Then there's the influence part, which again is a big subject of the book, which is harder to talk about because it's less visible. deftly built over decades on both sides of our political spectrum, but also in our institutions, in academia, in Wall Street, especially in Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in our sports, in Hollywood, okay? And you see it everywhere. And there are certain watershed moments where it pops into our public consciousness, and I'm talking about the NBA here, right? You had one guy, Daryl Morey, who I've, I don't know if you know this, is a former DOD and CIA contractor and a MITRE researcher, a smart guy. He did like the Moneyball

research. He's like a brilliant national security guy who happened to find himself as the manager of the Houston Rockets while they're cracking down on Hong Kong. He sent one tweet, and the NBA is punished to the tune of $400 million, you know, canceled in China you know major scandal this tweet was just in support of the Hong Kong protesters is that what

it was yeah one tweet and they punished the entire industry the all there's the big scandal in in in in sports history really and all of a sudden millions of people are like wait a second we can't tweet something they're going to punish our entire company, maybe the whole league? You know, $400 million is nothing to sneeze at. And of course, the NBA, and this is kind of like what I argue in the book, they didn't know how to deal with that, okay? They didn't understand what they're, much like the American scientists, much like the American media, they didn't know what they were dealing with. So what Adam Silver did, quite tragically, was he went to the guy who he thought would have the best line on it, Joseph Tsai, the head of the Brooklyn Nets, who was like a CCP party member. He's like a kid eating in Taiwanese billionaire, but he's like a chief promoter of the –

What did you call him? A kid eating? CCP party member. Kid eating. What did you say? No, no, no. Delete that. I never said kid eating.

What did you say, though, after that? You said CCP no. Delete that. I never said kid eating. No, what did you say, though, after that? You said CCC party member. CCP party member. And then you said something else. Canadian, Taiwanese, billionaire. Okay, you're talking so fast. Okay, I got to slow down. It sounds like you're saying kid eating, Taiwanese, billionaire.

What? For the record, I did not accuse Joseph Tsai of eating any kids. We can cut that out. No, no, believe it. I just want to make it it. I was so confused what you were saying. Canadian. Okay, so Joseph Tsai puts out this Facebook post, which basically is the

Chinese Communist Party line. You may not criticize Chinese policy. 1.4 billion Chinese people were super offended by that tweet. Never mind that they don't have Twitter in China. It's completely banned. So what the NBA did was what all these companies do when they get punished by the CCP is they bow and scrape

and beg for forgiveness and promise never to do it again. So they're saying 1.4 billion Chinese people were offended by a tweet in support of Hong Kong protesters who were seeing their freedoms impinged upon by the policies of the CCP. Correct. But that's not true, of course, because they don't have Twitter in China. It's banned. Not only that, it doesn't make sense. And it doesn't make sense. But anyway, the NBA eventually, then they got dunked on by Ted Cruz and Beto O'Rourke

and any politician who wanted to be tough on China, right? And this is like, in D.C., it's like very good politics to be tough on China. I'm really tough on China. And NBA, how dare you count out to the Chinese Communist Party and, you know, not fire Daryl Morey and apologize and blah, blah, blah. And my reaction was like, wait a second. Why are we expecting the NBA to deal with the Chinese Communist Party? That's not fair.

They're not a foreign policy organization. They don't know what to do. You know, they're not powerful enough. And they probably don't understand the dynamics. They don't know what to do you know they're not powerful enough and they probably don't understand the dynamics they don't understand they clearly they learned but once they were in the soup it was too late you know and they eventually course corrected but they're still trying to repair all that damage and how did they course correct well they issued a statement expressing support for daryl morey's right to free speech but then they issued a different statement in chinese that was less supportive.

And then they paid their penance or whatever it was and tried to maintain their relationships in China and tried to move on. But my point is that that's how the CCP operates. They will ruin your industry, your business for the slightest, the slightest offense. This happened two weeks ago with H&M and Nike. And it's because the business is tied to China because China does do business with the NBA. Huge business. Huge business. Huge business. And you think that this is, is it because China enjoys having the NBA as an entertainment entity or is it? Chinese people love the NBA.

That's what it is? The NBA is huge in China. It's also, if you think about it from the NBA's perspective, that's their growth. That's their future. Right. You know, that's their biggest growing market for everything from jerseys to games to you name it. And with a lot of sports, that's the case too. And with Hollywood and with the stock markets

and with Silicon Valley tech companies and with American universities, all of the sectors of American society see the Chinese economic market as a huge lure, as well they should. And they do edit films to appease the standards of the Chinese party. Self-censorship is the cost of doing business.

Right, but there's certain things they do, like in Doctor Strange, the Tibetan master was replaced by an Anglo-Saxon woman. Yeah, this is my Tibetan face mask, and now this episode will never be aired inside Mainland China. Did I just... Just now?

Well, I think it's probably already not going to be aired because of all the shit you said. Yeah, that too. But now this will really seal it. Okay. And good. You know what I mean? That's not to say we shouldn't engage the Chinese people. We need exchanges. We need to have business there. And this is another sort of conundrum of the US-China relationship that I try to take a stab at in my book, which is that, you know, we have to engage with the Chinese people. We have to have we can't decouple our economies. We can't live in two different worlds forever. It's not going to work. Right. But we have to find a way to live with China. And we have to convince the Chinese government to find a way to live with us in a way that doesn't compromise our security and our prosperity and our public health.

In other words, you know, while we want, we would love, it's not about regime change. It's not about a cold war. These are sort of like bumper stickers that people throw out to dissuade people from having an honest conversation about how to deal with a Chinese Communist Party that is becoming increasingly problematic in ways that affect our lives. And what I'm trying to say is that, you know, we have to be clear-eyed that, you know, this is not about China or the Chinese people. This is about the party. This is the way the party operates. Do you think that, so there's that company that was airing the NBA games, they're making a lot of

money off of that. They didn't want to stop airing the NBA games. They had to do that because the party said so. When Nike, what was it, what did H&M do? They put up a statement questioning whether or not the cotton they were getting from Xinjiang was made with forced slave labor. Just like, hey, we're going to look into it. For that one statement, their entire business in China was crushed. Nike, same thing. For years, they resisted. These companies, again, they're in a tough position. I get it. Hey, the cotton that you're sending us, was that picked by forced labor slaves?

Like, are we allowed to ask? Is that okay? Just for that, Nike's business was destroyed inside China. Propaganda campaign. How so was it destroyed? They literally create a – well, they do boycotts. And again, it's not like here where, like, you can boycott something, but you have to convince people. There, it's like if the government says there boycott something, but you have to convince people.

There, it's like if the government says there's a boycott, there's a boycott. And then your company can't sell anything in China, and that's 40% of your business. You're fucked. It's a pretty big incentive. And none of these companies are powerful enough to stand up to the CCP on their own, which is why I think they have to work with the U.S. government in some sort of way, but that's not really going on because politicians just want to dunk on the companies or they want to criticize them for not doing the right thing, but there's no positive incentives to say to the NBA, hey, listen, why don't we get together on this thing and we'll use our diplomatic pressure and our diplomatic tools to make sure that American companies and industries don't get punished by the party for bullshit, like a tweet.

But we're not sophisticated enough in our discussion of China or in our government response to China to actually make that happen. But I think that's basically where we have to go. And which brings up another inescapable question, which is, if Nike's using slave labor for their shoes, why are sneakers so expensive? What's the overhead? It's a very good question. How are sneakers $150? But anyway, that's neither here nor there. What would they cost if you paid people well? Exactly. Yeah. And what's happening? Is it just greed?

Yeah. Massive profit margins? Yeah. So anyway, this is a long way of saying that the parties, to understand China, you have to understand that the party is in control of everything and that dealing with that is just the way things are now. And that doesn't mean that we have to have a Cold War or that we have to decouple from China. It just means we have to figure out a new way to first try to convince them not to do the worst things, and then second, to protect ourselves if they insist. One of the things that's confusing to people is that this was never a narrative a decade or two decades ago.

This is a fairly recent discussion that we're having about China. China was an innocuous, just an enormous country with a lot of people just two decades ago. Nobody thought about this at all. They didn't think about China as being this incredibly influential superpower that had particularly its tentacles in terms of business, like how much business they own. During the pandemic, there's been a lot of purchasing different stocks and learning how much China has bought percentages of companies, right? That's another thing that's happened during the financial crisis.

Yeah. Well, I mean, so this is a, I get this a lot because, you know, there's a group of China hands. These are like the old guys who have been managing, I would say mismanaging the relationship since 1972, since we had our opening, right? And, you know, what they'll say is that, what are you talking about? This is a new problem. We've been dealing with this for 40 years. And we had these extensive plans of how to deal with China and some of them worked and some of them didn't. And then China went a different way. And I get that. That's the discussion inside the China hand community of these old gray beards, kind of like ivory tower kind of guys, all of whom I know. Right. But I'm not I'm not that I'm not a Chinese. I'm just a journalist. Right. But what I say to that is that, yeah, that's fine.

But like, first of all, how's that going? You know what I mean? How you're the China hands managing a relationship. How's that looking right now? And then secondly, what I say is it's clear that this has to be a discussion that has to be had by all Americans because no longer does it affect just the China watching community. Now it affects all of us. If you're sitting in your house, if you haven't seen your grandmother in a year, if you're worried about getting sick and dying, you know instinctively, and we can debate how much, but you know that some of that is because of the decisions and policies of the Chinese government and the Chinese Communist Party. In other words, what happens in Beijing doesn't stay in Beijing. And, you know, now that they're intentionally interfering in our politics, our sports, our music, our Hollywood films, our stock markets, our Silicon Valley tech companies and our academic campuses, we have to get more people into this conversation. That's what I'm here to do today. There will be millions of people who have never

thought this much about China, and I'm trying to engage them honestly. You know what I mean? I'm trying to convince them not to think what I think, but to educate themselves and join in the constructive discussion about how we deal with this shared problem. And that's a very difficult discussion to have. And it's almost impossible to have in Washington because Washington is so fucked up right now. But I saw that discussion happening on campuses and inside Silicon Valley tech companies and inside Wall Street firms and inside the government. And the problem was that all these discussions were siloed. And then when the FBI comes a knocking at your university and says, hey, we got to take a look at all your China research, universities are like, fuck you.

You know, because in America, our institutions guard their independence fiercely and rightly, you know, and so they're not trying to get the FBI to help them. But on the other hand, this is a problem they kind of need the FBI's help for. And that's, again, a level of sophistication that we're just not at yet. level of sophistication that we're just not at yet. And hopefully the book is meant to sort of bring everybody to some sort of base level of understanding of the problem that we're dealing with so that we can talk about the solutions. When you're going over this kind of information and you're writing a book like this and you have all this data that you just spilled out, and you, do you feel like a man without a country in a lot of i don't mean a literal country but i mean in terms of like being connected to a group of people that see your point

because you're you're stepping out there in sort of in violation of both ideologies well you know i mean in a way i think that i'm putting a voice to a lot of things that a lot of people have been talking about for sure privately for a very long time. And first of all, inside the government, these are a lot of issues that people were wrestling with, and very honestly, in many cases, even well before Trump. It just didn't get talked about publicly for a lot of the reasons we've already discussed. Can I get a hit of that? Give me that mug. Oh, this I get a hit of that? Yeah.

Give me that mug. Oh, this mug has... One of them's empty. Look at that. You got my brand, too. Buffalo Trace. You ever drink the Eagle Rare? I don't know. It's like one of the sub-Buffalo Trace brands?

All right, now we're talking. Yeah, I feel like this conversation's getting so heavy. We could use a little booze. Oh, that's the stuff. Yeah. Yeah, this is a – it's just – Can I answer your question? Yes, please.

Nobody cares about me. I'm just a guy doing his job, okay? I'm like – I get attacked sometimes. It doesn't matter. Nobody gives a shit about whether or not I'm in a team or not. I'm just trying to do my best to report the story, to do the reporting. Yes. And I'm not the only one.

There are more and more people. So, yes, for a while, people like me who were doing this reporting, again, difficult things to talk about. Chinese influence in our schools. That's a complicated thing. It pits two American interests against each other. We want academic freedom, but we also want, you know. Funding for research. Yeah, and I get that. It's a very tough thing. It pits two American interests against each other. We want academic freedom, but we also want, you know... Funding for research. Yeah. And I get that. It's a very tough thing. There are more and more people every day. What is the influence in the schools?

Three types. Okay. So one is just money, so much money. I'm talking about hundreds of millions of dollars of donations. And if you think that money isn't corrupting, then you're a fool. And when you have a school take $200 million to build their law school, and it's all from a Chinese Communist Party-linked billionaire, that school is not putting out research criticizing the Chinese government ever. They've just bought that school. And the way that they do it is through a network called the United Front. And the United Front dates back to Maoist times. And it's still referred to as striking the party's enemies by using the party's friends. And the United Front system in China is part of the party.

It's baked into its DNA. And what they do is they lord over the party's interactions with anyone who's not in the party. Some are in China, some are overseas Chinese, and some of them are foreigners like us. And the way that they do that is through proxies. And what they do is they set up like hundreds all over the world of these proxy figures and organizations, which launder the money, billions and billions of dollars into our institutions, hand over fist all day long for years and years and years and years.

And no one ever kept track of it. Now people keep track of it like a little bit, but not really. The Trump administration tried to force these universities to report on their foreign funding because they're supposed to, by law, report when you get a certain amount of money. None of them were doing it. They found all sorts of bullshit and all sorts of corruptions. So that's the number one way they do it is they take billions of dollars. They give them to their proxies, which are like Hong Kong billionaires or Malaysian billionaires or whatever. Somehow they find it's Thai billionaires, somebody who has an interest in doing business with the party and has billions of dollars.

And somehow they find their way onto American campuses in all sorts of crazy ways. Okay. And there's a really good story about this in the book about UT Austin, because we're in Austin, that I won't, I'm not even going to tell you because I want people to buy the book, but there's a UT Austin story in there. It'll blow your mind about how they tried to like use Chinese Communist Party money to fund the China Center at UT Austin. And some of the professors were like, wait a second, because these were China professors. And they're like, wait a second, is this a good idea? And it became a huge scandal inside the school. And the Washington congressional offices got involved. I got involved. I wrote a column about it and they rejected the money. And that was like the first time they had ever done

that. And this this Chinese influence operation that was targeted at UT Austin at the LBJ school was thwarted. But that would never have happened a couple of years ago because people weren't even discussing it this way. That's a real example. So that's one. The other one is through Confucius Institutes. Do you know what these are? No. So, you know, there are language and cultural learning centers implanted inside universities all over the world hundreds of them and i you know i i joined the confucius institute at gw just to see i wanted to see if there was like any corruption there and uh i'm an alumnus so i i just like i signed up you could just sign up for like iited Chinese 101. I'm like, let's see what's going on.

As part of the reporting for the book. And I took Chinese 101. And guess what? There was no malign Chinese influence in the Chinese 101 class. We're just a bunch of people learning Chinese. A bunch of college kids. I went to the reception at the bar that I used to hang out at when I was in college. I'm 20 years later. I'm the 40-year-old guy at the bar.

And they come up to me and they're like, Mr. Rogan, why do you want to study at the Confucius Institute? And I just looked at them. I said, education is a lifelong endeavor. That was it. Because I don't want them to know that I'm trying to squeeze out the foreign influence in the Confucius Institute. Anyway, that one was fine. Other universities, it's a different story. They use the Confucius Institutes to plant spies. You don't have to plant them in the GW one because Washington is full of spies. It's true.

You put them anywhere. You can't swing a day cat without hitting a couple spies in Washington. Really? They're everywhere. Everywhere. So do you just assume when you're talking to people that they could possibly be spies? Well, I mean, they're not. Some of them are really easy to spot.

Like the Russian guy with the belt up to here and the white patent leather loafers who's like, Oh, Mr. Rogan, you're here at this bar too? Oh, let's all have a drink. You're like, okay. I know you, man. I know you, man. Do you drink with them anyway? Fuck yes.

Absolutely. I had a lot of good times hanging out with spies. There was this one Russian guy. Were you worried about them sending you text messages? Like we were talking about Pegasus before the podcast outside. My phone is fucked, by the way. The Chinese already heard this podcast before. It's totally compromised.

It's true. For sure. There's a whole story there, too. Why don't you get a new one? I did. It's at the hotel. I just haven't loaded all the apps on it yet. Oh, okay.

But, yeah, no, I was calling my wife. You shouldn't load any apps on it. That's the new one. That's what I'm going to do. Now I know. Yeah. I was calling my wife, and then a guy from the Cyber Infrastructure Security Agency

picked up the phone instead of my wife. Whoa. And he didn't know why he was getting my call, and I didn't know why I was calling him. And it happened like three different times. Whoa. And then I tweeted about it, and everyone was like, oh, that's super weird. But I never really figured it out. Why did you tweet about it?

I thought that— Seems like something I would want to investigate privately before I put that out to the GP. I was trying to get the Homeland Security Department to check it out. Right. So I was like, if I tweet about it, they'll have to... I thought it was the US government spying on me. I don't think that anymore. I don't think that's what happened because they checked it out.

They found out that I was actually talking to a cyber infrastructure security agency person. They found that guy. His name's Sidney. But he didn't know why he was getting... And they don't really do that at that agency anyway so it didn't really make any sense so what do you think was going on someone's fucking with my phone I don't know somebody is I don't know who well after this conversation I could imagine why people are fucking with your phone yeah no I mean it again comes with the

territory but there was this one Russian guy I used to hang out with all the time and we were like before I was my used to smoke Russian cigarettes and just like eat steaks and drink all the time. And, you know, I don't have any secrets. I don't have any clearance. I can hang out with whoever I want to hang out with. That's the fun of being a journalist. One time the FBI came knocking on the door. They were like, Mr. Rogan, have you seen this man?

And he's like, my buddy, Andre. I was like, Mr. Rogan, have you seen this man? And he's like, my buddy, Andre. I was like, no comment. And they're like, well, you know, we just want to let you know that we think he's a Russian spy. I'm like, noted. Goodbye. I just hightailed it out of there. So, yeah, that's it.

What's the difference between Russian cigarettes? They're like, take off the filter. Like camels. I don't know what they were, but they were pretty strong. Camels don't have filters, right? No, they do. They do? Some of them do?

Paul Mall is the one that does. Is that what it is? Yeah, it's rough. Some camels have no filters? It was like a test. He would give me the Russian cigarettes to see if I could smoke them. Oh, thank you. But I quit smoking many years ago.

Thanks again to my- Did you? You smoke cigars? I'll have a casual cigar show. Want one right now? You want to smoke a cigar in the middle of the show? Why not? Yes, please.

We're already drinking. Okay. I feel like this is getting juicier. Oh, I got more shit. I know you do. What do we got here? These are from Foundation Cigar Company. Okay.

They put these fucking weird wrappers on them, but you get underneath it, you get the real thing. Nice. Shout out to them. Do I get any free Buffalo Tracer? Yeah, you get whatever the fuck you want, bro. I'll give you a bottle. You want a bottle of Buffalo Tracer? No, no, no.

This experience is rewarding enough. But no, we have a case of it. They sent us a shitload. Pop the top. That's awesome. Yeah, just here like this. Got it. There you go.

Got it? There you go. Yeah. Buffalo Trace is one of our sponsors, so they sent us a bunch of it. I just love the fact they're actually older than America. I love Buffalo Trades. Yeah, they're great. It's a fantastic whiskey.

But it's also, I just love the fact that they're from 1773. They've been continuously distilling whiskey in this country. Mm-hmm. Now we're partying. Oh, that's tasty. Yeah. Good shit, right? Thank you. My pleasure.

Thank you. They sent me a box recently that actually has my face on the wrapper. Sweet. They made a little, not on the wrapper, on the little, what is that thing called? The band. I have no idea. The band. Awesome. Yes. I have no idea. The band. Awesome.

Yes. Shout out to them. They hooked us up. Where were we? Spies, Russian spies, white loafers. Oh, yeah. That's not what we're talking about. The government calls you up.

Oh, yeah, academia. Yes. You want to go back to that or you want to go for Russian spies? Whatever you want to talk about, man. No, it's your show, man. No, but we're talking about. The government calls you up. Oh, yeah, academia. You want to go back to that or you want to go for Russia's spies? Whatever you want to talk about, man. No, it's your show, man. No, but you're a guest. I want you to be you. I don't know any other way to do it.

I know you don't. That's what I like. I like it. I have no choice. I think this is the first of many conversations that they don't kill you. I hope so. Yeah, you might want to delete your Google search history after this, just in case. Well, my search is already fucked.

And believe me, what are they going to find about me? That's true. Kind of an open book. Yeah. So American universities, right? Yeah. So here's a great example of a really tough problem in U.S.-China relations, which is that we want Chinese students to come to America, right? Not just for the schools who make a bunch

of money off of it, but because that's a key way of, you know, having our societies not fall into these silos where we can't deal with each other, which is terrible, right? At the same time, there's a threat there because once they build these Confucius Institutes, oh, by the way, there's a lot of corruption in the Confucius Institutes. Then they tell you that you can't have the Dalai Lama come to your campus because they could offend 1.4 billion Chinese people. That's a real example.

And then they have these student associations which are linked up with the consulates. And what they do is they monitor the Chinese students. So if you're a Chinese student in America, you still don't have free speech because everyone's watching everybody. And if you say the wrong thing, boom, you're on the next plane back to China and your whole family is fucked.

Okay. So then we're like, oh, well, when Chinese students come to America, should we protect them? Should they be able to say what they want? Or is that none of our fucking business? On the other hand, if we put big barriers up to these Chinese students, aren't we becoming the thing that we hate? Aren't we becoming the thing that we're fighting, which is a closed society that treats people from outside badly? I can't go to China right now.

The last time I went to China was 2016. There's no way I could get a visa at this moment. All the Washington Post reporters were kicked out even before. You know what I mean? So we don't want to become the thing we're fighting. We have to, the best way to compete with China is to be the best version of ourselves, to make sure that our model is the attractive one. And the way that we do that is, my opinion, is by living up to our values and by being decent and tolerant and pluralistic and open and free and democratic and standing up for human rights and the rule of law and all those things

that we profess to believe in. Not that we've done a great job of it. Like I watch your show. You have plenty of people who point out all the flaws in that history. I agree with that. Yeah, mistakes were made. But nevertheless, that's our argument to all the countries in the world because what they're doing is they're exporting that authoritarian model, not in the exact same way, but the technologies and everything, to any despot and dictator in the world who will purchase it. And that's the grand struggle. It's not really about the US versus China. It's about free and open societies responding to China's rise where it affects us. And because

Trump, this got framed as a US-China Cold War. But the honest way to talk about it is an international response to China's actions as it rises. And that response requires dealing with all these other countries, which have different interests. But there are cases where the interests overlap, and there are cases where our values overlap. And we have to take advantage of those overlaps in order to join together to, again, combat the biggest country in the world that's run by a mafia organization. And these are very, very complicated things to think about. And that discussion, again, is not really happening. All you get is like, you know, China bad,

and then, oh, don't say bad about China, you're a cold warrior. And that's like the level of the discourse. And it's crazy, and it's really, it's the opposite of what we need. And that's sort of like where I'm at on it. Is it possible that the recognition of this issue, and especially when it relates to American institutes of higher learning, could allow them to understand the hole in the logic of having these sort of closed ecosystems where they have this there's echo chambers in American institutions of higher learning now I mean all so many universities are

there they're they're not just they're not liberal in the sense of like what we originally thought of as their leftist and because of that they they won't even entertain opposing viewpoints or have debate, which is very dangerous. And it's also, this is not to say that you should support those other ideas, but you've got to entertain them and debate them and squash them with better logic. And if you don't do that- If you don't have the space to do that. The simple, lazy way to handle it is to stop it and to pull fire alarms and to yell at people and to not have people that have opposing viewpoints and don't allow conservatives on your campus.

But I think it's really dangerous, and I think it opens us up to more manipulation. If not just China, but whatever foreign entities are, and we know they are. We know Russia's doing that with the Internet Research Agency. They're manipulating our biases, and they're aware of them, and so they're using our own struggle that we're having internally with free speech and with open discussion and honest debate, and they're reinforcing the idea that it's a good thing to stop this stuff and to squash it. And we're proving them right by acceding to their, yes, exactly. I'm hoping that the silver lining is we recognize that one of the reasons why the First Amendment is so important,

it's we need to figure out who's right. And the only way to figure out who's right is to listen to who's wrong and to have the person who's right debate the person who's wrong. And let's find out have the person who's right debate the person who's wrong and let's find out where the facts are let's find and let's also agree to disagree occasionally isn't that okay i mean constructive disagreement it's not it's not anymore if you're in this country now if you are in any way conservative you're a nazi and you're a racist and you're a terrible person and you know you're against history it's like that's not case. There's a lot of people that are physically conservative but socially liberal.

There's a lot of people that – Yeah, like me. Yeah. I think I am as well. Certainly there's a lot of me that leans towards – like I understand human nature, right? And this is one of the reasons why I'm a big proponent of the Second Amendment. I don't understand why people don't understand that there's times where you can defend yourself with a firearm. How is that not, how is that,

when you see people saying that, oh, if you are in favor of the Second Amendment, you're in favor of mass shootings, you're in favor of horrific acts of violence and crime against people. No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is the reality of human beings. These ideologies, the problem with them, specifically in this country, is that you get lumped off into camps. And if you don't agree with one side- It's teams. Yes. Factions. Chris Rock had a great bit about it years ago about gangs, that you're in a gang. You're

in a liberal gang, you're in a conservative gang. And he's right. It's like, he did a great job of putting it into comedy. And Chris does an awesome job of doing that with a lot of subjects. But with that in particular, it really resonates today because people don't have the time to research like you've done with China, or like many people have done with many subjects and really find all the nuances and find all the things that are uncomfortable to discuss, like you're discussing with all the things about COVID-19, like the things you're discussing about the CCP and their influence and all these different businesses and entertainment.

There's a lot of people that don't have the time to do that. So when you start criticizing in any way China, they equate you to racists. Don't you understand about the anti-Asian American hate that's elevated in this country right now? It's a tragedy. It is a tragedy, but it's a tragedy that's held up by our education institutes. Correct. And that's the biggest tragedy. They're supposed to be the people that rise above

this. But inside their own institutions, there's these echo chambers. And these echo chambers, they want to reinforce what they've already been pushing for all this time, and they don't want to open the idea. There's a reason, right? Yes. So first of all, I agree with everything that you said to the word. But the way that hits me when I filter that through my own intellectual prism is that the incentives are driving people into those things. In other words, why are journalists on Team Trump or Team Democrat or Team Scientist? It's because that's the incentive that results in their success in their careers. That's the human nature. The corporations have the incentive. What's their incentive? To make money for their stockholders, not to defend human rights for the Uyghurs,

right? The colleges, their incentives are not to get sued. So they have to create all these crazy safe spaces and the such, right? So if we build our incentive system to drive people into the teams and then we're like, drive people into the teams, and then we're like, why is everybody on teams? And then isn't that fucking up our own discourse? Well, it leads me to the conclusion that, okay, well, maybe we have to change the incentives. And, you know, when you talk about like conservatives and liberals, again, I think the only reason that people even listen to me on this topic, if they do, I hope they do, is because I'm, you know, I'm criticizing Trump and I'm praising Trump. That messes hope they do, is because I'm criticizing Trump and I'm praising

Trump. That messes with their minds, right? I'm criticizing the CCP, but I'm not a conservative. I'm a center-left Democrat. I always have been. I never preach about it because it's not relevant really to the US-China relationship in any serious way. But I've been doing this for 17 years. I never joined the conservative media because i never joined the liberal media because i i didn't believe in either of that shit i think my basic premise is both sides are fucked right both sides are corrupt in their own ways and by the way as a journalist if you're criticizing both sides you get double the stories like if you can pull that off if you can source on both sides and criticize both sides

you get double the scoops and double the credibility. That's not – again, I'm not perfect. I haven't always done that perfectly. I'm sure I have my own source bias. I've made mistakes. But that's how I think about it. So you have to think for yourself first of all. And the only way you can really do that is if you're not bound by your incentives and your paymasters.

If you work for an organization – remember all those conservative newspapers that are like uh organizations like oh trump's terrible trump's terrible and then they switch like trump's great you know as soon as you won fucking hypocrite how could you do that how do you look at that and then look at that and not realize that you just expose yourself as a right and there's also this weird badge of honor that you're a never trumper that you're a never trumper republican right what does that even mean like there are a lot if you read the book, there's a ton of stuff that the Trump administration did right on China, okay? Not Trump, really, to be honest, because he was kind of a – what's the correct word? Moron, I guess is the word I'm – in other words, that he – not to be too unfair to him, a fool? words that he i i don't not to be too unfair to him uh a fool and like there's a there's a story in there about how the coronavirus is like this is like the news is coming out and you know people

like pottinger the guy i told you about and other people are like hey trump listen this is bad we got to get on top of this is not you know and trump's like well okay let me talk to mick mulvaney mcgrady's like no it's gonna be fine don't worry about it he's like okay i've got two competing sets of advice. And he talks to his good friend Xi Jinping. And Xi Jinping, what does he tell him? February 6th, March 26th, two calls exclusively reported in Chaos Under Heaven where he says, hey, listen, Trump, it's going to be fine. It goes away during warm weather. Herbal medicine will treat it. We've got it under control. All lies coming from the Chinese

president to the American president directly. And two days later, Trump is saying, oh, yeah, don't worry, it's gonna be fine. Many people are saying it's going to go away in warm weather. He didn't say that many people were saying was his good friend Xi Jinping, right? He believed Xi Jinping. That had a horrible effect on our policy and on the health and safety of millions of Americans. But that's what happened. That's not a good story for Trump. At the same time, I'm prepared to argue that there are lots of things that the Trump administration did to reset our conversation on China that the Biden administration is continuing for a very good reason, because they make perfect sense. Right. So what we're missing from our conversation is nuance. And, yes, constructive disagreement is a huge part of that.

But I don't know. I don't know enough about American universities and how to solve that, but I do see something inspiring actually, which is that when I started speaking to a lot of these college students about these issues and you know what I found, which surprised me actually, is that they get this. Okay. And, and, you know, we, we like I'm, I'm 42 years old, you know, like I'm not, I don't have my finger on the pulse of what's going on inside the Generation Z community, admittedly. But I've talked to enough of these students who say, no, no, no. We understand that that genocide against Uyghur Muslims is bad and we can't stand for it. And that's probably the biggest. That's the biggest. That's that's an issue.

Probably the biggest, that's the biggest, that's an issue. As it ought to be. Yes, as it ought to be. But that's the issue that really gets people concerned with what is actually happening over there. Good. Because there's a lot of people that weren't aware of that. Right. And then they see some of the stories that are coming out about these people being shipped off into camps.

They don't know where they're going. And they're like, wait a minute, what is happening here? Are we on the wrong side of history with this? In our urge to not appear racist and to not criticize China because of that, we might be allowing this to happen by being silent. Well, the whole world is allowing it to happen, has been allowing it to happen, and it's still happening to this day. What is their motivation for doing this to these people to destroy the Uyghur national cultural religious identity and these are Muslims that are in China there are some of the Muslims

now keep in mind your Muslims is what they're targeting specifically though no so in this I mean in this region of China it was a very resource rich region that has been ruled by different elements of chinese leadership over the course of hundreds of years there resides a rich tapestry of ethnic minorities now the uighur muslims in xinjiang are the largest of like let's say 12 million out of 20 million people in this particular province right and uh um you know what what started and years many years ago was uh slow but steady encroachment upon their rights and their freedoms okay and then this took its form in a number of different ways but what that what really made it sinister was not the camps actually it was the mass surveillance monitoring and persecution that happens before you get to

the camp. Before you even knew there was something called a concentration camp in Xinjiang, you know that every move of your life is monitored. They took the technology, the AI and the facial recognition, which was developed in part with American tech companies quite willingly, and then funded by Wall Street, by the way, american investor dollars building funneling to the companies that are building the cameras that sit atop the the the streets that are that can spot a uighur by their facial recognition so that the police can come down and tell you what's what and these people were living in an open-air prison before there were ever concentration camps now then the destruction of hundreds of mosques. Then all of a sudden, all of the journalists and leaders and thinkers and musicians and artists and political leaders disappeared. Right. That was that was before the camps.

And there were a lot of people like, wait a minute, this is pretty fucked up. They don't know what happened to those people. They don't know if they were imprisoned or murdered. They have no idea. Right. Some of them were confirmed to be murdered. Some them are still in prison some of them most of them you have no idea where they are i gotta really relight this um anyway so then the camps then they came up came up with these camps which are like i mean listen i get that there's like there were a couple terrorist incidents but imagine if you know we had a couple terrorist

incidents here and i'm not saying we treated we treated Muslims well after 9-11. We did not. I have many Muslim American friends who were treated horribly and continue to be, actually. And that's a stain on our country and our society. But we didn't build indoctrination camps and put two million Muslims in them. You know, yes, did we do that with the Japanese? Sure. Yeah.

But let's just deal with this for one second. And, you know, now there's a ton of just like really horrendous, pernicious genocide denialism. And that's what the Chinese are pumping out right now, the Chinese Communist Party rather. No, these are wonderful centers. Look at this video of these people singing a wonderful song. They're very happy here. Everybody loves it. And it's all bullshit. And, you know, what I did, of course, writing the

book is what I interviewed a bunch of survivors. OK, because whatever statistic you have and the legal definition of genocide is a determined thing. And it says that, you know, the intent to destroy a group of people in whole or in part. OK, and now there's two key things in there. One is the destroying in whole or in part, and the other's two key things in there. One is the destroying in whole or in part, and the other is the intent. So what a lot of people will say is, well, we don't know their intent. Maybe they're just fucking with the Uyghurs because they fuck with everybody. Or maybe that's just like now concentration camps are the way that Chinese do business. And that's horrible, but it's not genocide. But setting the legal definition aside,

what I decided to do is interview a bunch of the survivors. And their stories are true. They're not lying. Okay. And their scars are real. They didn't invent their scars that they showed me. And their stories are harrowing. And just for a couple examples, just to paint the picture, every, you know, we have this thing called Radio Free Asia, where you have like people broadcasting news in other languages. It's paid for by the US government. It's a little bit controversial, but basically a lot of journalists trying to do their best to report news to other people around the world. Some in Europe. This was used during the Cold War. Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty were a key part of convincing the East Germans that they had a better life awaiting for them if they could just throw off the dictatorship.

part of convincing the East Germans that they had a better life waiting for them if they could just throw off the dictatorship. Anyway, skip ahead 50 years. The 26 journalists, Americans, mostly Americans, who work for Radio Free Asia in Washington doing reporting on this, they were some of the first to break the news of the camps. Some of it we saw from satellites. All of a sudden, there's a grass field, then there's a huge camp, right? Looks like a prison, acts like a prison, walks like a prison. It's a prison. And these journalists, 26 of them, every single one of them, all their family members were scooped up and put into the camps. All of them. Americans.

Their fathers, their mothers, their aunts and uncles disappeared. They never heard from them again for the crime of reporting on the camps. So that's one thing. They target anyone who refuses to shut up about it. Then I met this young woman named Vera Jo. And Vera Jo was a 20-year-old. She's not even Uyghur, actually. She's Hui Muslim. And she was a student in Seattle at the University of Washington. And she goes home to visit her dad in Xinjiang, and she logs on to her VPN to file her homework for college. You know, they have like a University of Washington virtual private network.

Three hours later, we're going to need you to come downtown. What? What happened? Just come with us. Three hours later, she was in handcuffs. Eight hours after that, she was in a camp. Okay. So an American resident, Chinese national, 20-year-old young woman, sophomore in college, never heard of FLY, not a terrorist, not even a dissident, just trying to go to college, trying to do her homework. She spent five months in the camp. The story is awful.

But then that was only the beginning of her nightmare because then she got let out of the camp for an interesting reason and she couldn't leave China. So she was stuck. They wouldn't give her her passport back. Spent another two years in China waiting for them to get her passport back. They finally gave it to her. She came back to Seattle.

Her credit was fucked. She lost her apartment. She had been de-enrolled from her school because she didn't pay her bills or attend the classes while she was in the camp, and the University of Washington didn't lift a finger to help her, and her whole life was

fucked up you know for the simple crime of pressing click on the VPN once that's a capricious form of abuse you know and you know that's not even getting into you know the the the next stage so then you've got the the open-air prison that is Xinjiang then you've got the camps but then oh but wait you get out you've got the camps. But then, oh, but wait, you get out of the camp. Your nightmare is just beginning because now you've got to go to the factory. What factory? Shut up. Just get in the car. We'll take you to the factory.

Now you're picking cotton or sewing together Nikes. You know, you can leave the factory, but you can't go home. You know, oh, we're going to pay you. So you're not a slave, but you don't have a choice. You got to show up at that fucking factory. And that's your life now. What about my kids? do you mean what about your kids well when i went into the camp i had a newborn baby well that you know we had no choice we had to send that kid to an orphanage somewhere and you'll never see him again sometimes maybe you will maybe you won't some of the people got their kids back some didn't right and then

i there was another woman uh who i interviewed who said when she was finally let out of the camp they were like oh we have to give you a medical check and they put her under and then when she woke up they were like okay you can go now they had given her a hysterectomy so this mass force sterilization

and mass force abortion all these things people will quibble about the data. I'm saying I've talked to humans who this happened to. They're not lying. I looked into their eyes. They're not lying. And there are many, many stories. And that's the thing about all, I mean, it's the same. I hate to use this analogy because it's like God wins law, but when you think about the Chinese government sending, this is a real example, a boat with 17,000 tons of human hair. 17,000 tons of human hair from Xinjiang.

Okay. And, you know, do you think that hair was given over willingly by those Uyghur women? Do you think they were properly compensated for that hair? Because the ones I talked to said they didn't get a dime for the hair that was shaved off their head that got put on a boat and sent to California. And, you know, when the Trump administration, again, something they did right, had the audacity to say, no, we're not going to take that human hair and we're not going to put it on her. It's not really an issue for you, by the way. But like most people didn't want to put once they know that the hair is was shaved off of the concentration camp victims heads, they don't want to put it on their heads. You know what I mean? Because in essence, Americans are good people. Once they're

aware of these atrocities, they don't want to be complicit in them. And we turned back that boat that had the 17,000 tons of human hair, and then the Communist Party went crazy and punished the companies and, oh, sanctions, you Cold War crazy, you hawk Pompeo Americans, what are you doing to us? You guys are all racist. That's what we're dealing with. We're dealing with, do you want to put the concentration camp hair on your head? Do you want to put the forced slave labor cotton on your back? You know, and to be honest, like most Americans had no idea, right? And they're like, okay, well, now that I know that, you know, and then some of them after

the learning, they still won't care. Some of them will say, that's not my problem. That happens over there. That's not over here. But what I'm saying is that if you, again, if you believe in sort of the idea of human dignity, you know, the path of the Enlightenment, liberty and democracy and human rights, and people can choose what they want to do and choose who they want to worship and choose who they want to love. These are the things more than geopolitics matter to human beings at their core. Then these things, these actions can only be described with one word, and that word is evil. And that word evil is a big word and it deserves some justification.

It deserves some explanation. At the same time, it's kind of a word that we can't live without for some reason, because when we see it, it's so clear and it's so stark that we have to call it out. How far does this extend in terms of businesses? So much of what we buy today is manufactured in China, including Apple products. Well, that's one thing. So a lot of these companies are realizing that they've become corporate hostages of the CCP, and that's a tough calculation for Apple. Again, I'm not insensitive to the bind that they're in. Yeah. Okay? And again, I don't think there's any easy solutions. But what everybody misses, actually, is not...

That's one part of the problem. Forced technology transfer. You hear a lot about IP theft and trade subsidies and all the things's one part of the problem. Forced technology transfer, you hear a lot about IP theft and trade subsidies and all the things that were part of the trade war, by the way, which was not, you know, a whole other subject. But that's not really the way that we're supporting, that's not really the problem. The problem is that hundreds of millions of Americans are unwittingly funding all of these malign Chinese companies passively through their pensions and to all Chinese companies comes from Wall Street, comes from American firms who have been drastically increasing their involvement, assistance and holdings of these Chinese companies, including the ones that build the concentration camps and the cameras that sit atop the concentration camp walls and the companies that sell the cotton, but also the companies that build the missiles that are pointed at us and the companies that are doing the spying of our cyber hacking. And if you just think of that just for one second, and this is, there's like a chapter about this in my book,

but this is like the bleeding edge. Now we're getting to the bleeding edge because we're getting to like the real shit here. Okay. And the real shit is that, you know, hundreds of millions of Americans, your pension, everything is, you don't manage that. That's not like invested. That's most people. I don't know about you, but for me, I trust my pension to whoever's running that pension. Now, if you knew that that pension was increasing its holdings in these malign Chinese companies, you would think, oh, wait a minute. Now I'm invested in the success of these companies. And of course, from the Chinese side, that's exactly what they want.

They want to build a constituency inside of our society such that, you know, again, to put Americans to a choice between interests. Oh, wait, if we sanction Hikvision, this is a real example. They make the cameras. Their cameras are amazing, right? They can search through a crowd and find the Uyghur. That's the Uyghur. OK. But if you don't care about that, it's just cameras are amazing right there if they didn't search for crowd find the weaker that's the weaker okay but if you don't care about that it's just a great camera wall street is pumping money into that company left right and center now

the u.s. government sanctioning that company but what's the point of sanctioning the company for she's gonna come in and funded times ten it does make any sense it's crazy but that just what i've just said there is all also but too hot for t.v. people can't wrap their minds around it because they're still trying to figure out, you know, about the IP theft and the trade subsidies or whatever other bullshit that we've been talking about for the last 20 years. But these Wall Street firms, rather than wake up to the sort of, you know, challenge that we're in and have an honest discussion about how to mitigate the risks. Again, we don't want to decouple. We don't want to say we can't invest in China. We need to do business in China. We should do business in China. At the same time, there's got to be some limits. There's got to be some

points where we say, OK, well, maybe the company that builds the cameras that sit at the top of the concentration camp walls, maybe that's one we shouldn't pour Americans' money into. And by the way, once 100 million Americans are invested in that company, it's going to make it a lot harder to sanction that company because they're they're going to have a constituency you know they're tying our financial interests to their political interests again it's not for the benefit of china it's for the benefit of the party who wants to uh do a genocide against muslims that's not really uh economic interest that's the party doing its evil shit. Jesus Christ. That's interesting, right? It's not. It's terrifying.

Yeah. Because it seems like it's impossible to decouple. We shouldn't decouple. We just have to figure out where the lines are. And, you know, the big sort of reveal is that this effort to sort of change China is not going to work. It wasn't going to work. It shouldn't be our job. It's hubristic, right? All of the restraint crowd people, all of the libertarians out there who are like, oh, this is just another scam to have the military industrial complex have an excuse

for endless defense budgets. Now we're going to have the new Cold War with China. That's going to be the thing we're going to spend all of our trillions on to replace Afghanistan. I hear that a lot. I get that a lot. But what I'm trying to say is I get that. But here's what I would say is that the competition with China is really not a military competition. So, yes, we're going to need some military stuff, but don't get too concerned. I mean, be concerned about the horrendous abuses of the military-industrial complex, which are real.

But that's not the point of the China competition. It's an economic, ideological, and technological competition foremost. And the real action is really in the markets. It's really in the capital markets. And Wall Street doesn't want to talk about that for very obvious reasons, because they're getting rich. And the press that covers Wall Street doesn't understand geopolitics and the political press doesn't understand Wall Street. And all I did was try to connect those as much as I could in like half a chapter, which is incomplete to be sure.

But that doesn't get us to any way how we deal with it. And what the Trump administration tried to do is they tried to order these Wall Street companies to divest. And these Wall Street companies were like, fuck you. And that's an unsettled question. But I would just ask any listener or viewer out there, if you knew that your pension was tied to concentration camps, do you care? Does that bother you? Some people may say no. It's none of our business. But I say it bothers me. I don't

want my pension being used to build concentration camps. That's just me. So that's what I'm going to try to argue against and try to affect change in if I can. So far, it's not going very well. It's not. I'm sure. So what about products? It's what you said about the information hill. People don't have time to climb that hill. So does this shirt that I'm wearing, does this involve some slave labor? Maybe. I don't know. And I spent all my time on this shit.

I still don't know. I'm wearing Adidas right now. There's some abuses in the product. Probably. What has Apple done? Has Apple done anything to try to mitigate this? And is it more morally sound to buy a Samsung product? Or do they have the same sort of ties in China as well?

No company that does manufacturing in China is immune from the pressures. So what Apple did was they moved their cloud servers for Chinese users Party's demand because they were helping the Hong Kong protesters figure out how to protest for freedom and democracy. So they're constantly kowtowing. And again, they're the prime example because they're fucked. They're in a hostage situation. One of the stories that hasn't even really broken out yet, that nobody really talks about, is when Apple wanted to about it because if they protest, the Chinese Communist Party is going to literally, you know, shut down their profit-making ability. And that's a huge, huge, huge business.

So it gets to your decoupling question, which is like, okay, if we can't change China and we shouldn't try because it's hubristic to, I think that they're going to become like us. China's going to develop in a way determined by the Chinese people, one way or the other. That's what four decades of U.S. military intervention failures should have taught us, is that we can't change these countries, okay? But what we can do is we can put them to a choice. In other words, we can say,

okay, if you're insistent on doing this bad behavior, we're going to act accordingly and change our behavior to respond. And that could be a mix of increasing the cost of the bad behavior. That's what tariffs are about. People will say tariffs are about lots of different things. They're really about imposing a cost on the Chinese industry so that it's harder for them to do business the wrong way. And then we're going to take measures to protect ourselves, which means some decoupling.

It means we don't have to have everything here, but we better have some masks. You know what I mean? How about masks? Okay, well, nobody thought before 2019. What's the difference? We don't have to have everything here, but we better have some masks. You know what I mean? How about masks? Okay, well, nobody thought before 2019, what's the difference? We don't need mask factories. Why would you build a mask factory? It's a thousand times cheaper to do in China.

Now you don't have to make that argument. Everybody knows we're going to need our own fucking masks, right? Why? Because there's going to be another pandemic, and we don't want to have to bow and scrape and promise to shut up about Hong Kong just to get our masks. And the manufacture of medicines. Medicines, high technologies, semiconductors, components, stuff like that, 5G. There's an issue right now with chips, with chips for trucks and cars.

All of that. We don't produce semiconductors. Okay, well, what should we do about it? Well, let's have that discussion. We could build our own semiconductor foundries. That's one idea. We could fund them with the government. That's another idea.

We could make partnerships with the Taiwanese companies. That's complicated. Okay, that's another good idea. These are all good ideas. None of them are actually progressing because we're all talking past know, talking past each other and, you know, trying to like, you know, talking about like, you know, whether or not it's okay to say Wuhan virus, you know what I mean? That's the level of our discussion.

So just as far as we've gotten in this time, it's way farther than I've ever gotten in my entire life talking about stuff, to be honest with you, because it takes three hours to get to the point, which is that, OK, we have a complex problem and good meaning people who may disagree have to come together and come up with complex, complex solutions. And all those solutions aren't perfect and they all require tradeoffs. And if we get out of Afghanistan, that should give us a little bit more attention to focus on this. And maybe we don't need to have 80 billion dollars of intelligence community shit pointed at jihadis in Yemen. We could take some of that and point it at some of these labs because guess what? That's actually also very important. And because Washington is so broken after Trump, really broken. I mean, I've been there for 24 years and it's always been sort of this like functional, what I call functional dysfunction.

Nothing worked the way it was supposed to. But it kind of all muddled along. Budgets got done. Everybody was kind of equally unhappy, but equally happy. Trump smashed that, right? He flipped over the chessboard, okay? And you could say that that needed to be done, but what he failed to do is set it back up again. That's what the Biden administration is charged with doing. And I think they're making an honest effort to do that, but they're also caught by their own politics and their own bureaucracy and their own infighting and their own bullshit which is natural but what you know the reason that we like the the the the dichotomy of the book is that we have this awakening in american society to the challenge of a rising china and but the first inning was played by the trump administration and because they were such a mess so it's called chaos under heaven, they fucked a lot of it up. Now, when you say they fucked everything up.

Not everything, just some of it. Okay. They fucked it up and they broke it. How did they break it? What specifically fucked up the system that wasn't immediately reparable upon removing him from office? Okay. So just take a look at the trade war, right? So Donald Trump, I read every book that he professes to have written, and a ton of them mention China, right? And a lot of them say the same exact thing, which is that we've got a problem here. The Chinese government has been taking advantage of our economy and it needs to stop, and that's what he said in the campaign trail.

He was determined to do that. And I understand the trade war is very unpopular. And even amongst Republicans, the idea of tariffs and all of this, you know, trade stuff was like an anathema to like their core ideological belief system. OK, I get that. But what you saw actually inside the government underneath was a genuine effort to find ways to convince the Chinese government to do something different. But the problem was that Trump was such a bad tactician. He had this vision of fixing the thing, but he varied between different ways to do it that he kept handing the trade issue. First, he handed it to Wilbur Ross, then Jerry Kushner, then Steve Mnuchin, then Lighthizer, and then Navarro.

And it was just such a disaster policy and bureaucracy wise that it had no chance of achieving its own aims. So he took this big shot at fixing the trade relationship. He didn't get shit. The phase one deal is meaningless. What's $50 billion worth of soybean sales when you have a $6 trillion pandemic and a $600 billion IP, you know what I mean? It's crazy. It's piddly. It matters to those soybean salesmen. Those guys are very happy, but it didn't actually solve any of the problems. And so that was a big missed opportunity right there, right? Same thing with like, you remember, did you follow this TikTok WeChat ban thing? Yeah.

That was a crazy one because you know again once trump realized that xi jinping had lied to him his good friend xi jinping who they had chocolate cake remember with that chocolate cake that we had at mar-a-lago the most beautiful chocolate cake you ever saw in your life and uh he really thought they were really good friends you know and so he like you know once he realized that that was all bullshit and that actually they weren't friends, he turned on Xi Jinping and he unleashed his national security people to do whatever they wanted. The first thing they're like, we're going to ban TikTok, which is a weird hill to die on if you think about it. Because it's TikTok. Like, I get it. Like, I don't I don't have it because I don't want.

I think there's there's definitely some risk there. We don't know how much uh but probably not the number one issue in U.S. China relations that we need to address but anyway the issue did executive order banning TikTok okay well that's a pretty serious thing we're now banning Chinese tech companies you know okay well that's kind of interesting we should do that pretty carefully so he does that but then he hands the negotiation over to Mnuchin, who switches the priority from banning TikTok to saving TikTok. And he tries to make a deal with Oracle and the Chinese company to IPO TikTok to make everybody rich. He takes it back from the national security people. And then the Chinese government was like, no, fuck you.

We're not doing that. We're not handing you TikTok. That's our golden goose. You can't have it. And the whole thing – and then they sued us in American courts and the whole thing got kaflooey. So that's a good example of where they took a very serious issue and then totally screwed it up because of their own incompetence. And desire to make a profit. Well, the national security people and the Wall Street people inside the administration fought

each other and canceled each other out. They nullified their own and both of them lost. And, you know, TikTok is... What do you think about the Huawei ban? So that's interesting. So, again, for those people who don't know, Huawei is like the biggest Chinese telecom company there is. They're all over the world. And the Trump administration went around the world saying,

you can't, hey, you know, African country, South American country, you better not do Huawei. Why not? Well, it's a huge security vulnerability. Okay, well, what do you have to offer us in its place? Well, nothing. Oh, okay, well, then fuck you. And then the Chinese come in. They're like, hey – they don't come in and say, hey, would you like to buy Huawei? They say, hey, would you like to get rich?

And would you like to have your dictatorship absolved of any war crimes in the UN? And we're going to build you a house and a soccer stadium. And then we're going to give everybody in your country phones for free. And then we're going to give you a 5G technology that's going to make your economy go whiz, whiz, whiz at 30 cents on the dollar. And that's it. Happy birthday. And these dictators are like, yes, please, I'll take that. That sounds good to me. And then here comes Mike Pompeo. He's like, oh, you better not do that. USA is going to be very angry with you. They're like, OK, well, we care about that, too. But we're going to take all of the money and corruption and all the shit that the Chinese are offering us. So it's a great

example of sort of and then, of course, Trump changes mind about it are offering us. So it's a great example of sort of, and then of course Trump changes mind about it all the time. So it's another great example of how they took this important issue and they brought it up to the fore rightly, drew a circle around it rightly, because it is a risk, but then bungled it in the execution.

And so now it's just like a mess that the Biden administration has to clean up. And there really is a significant risk. There's one more thing. Sorry. Oh, please go. So there's a million examples. But this is what you have to understand about the CCP is that it's never just one thing.

For them, it's all connected. It's all connected on their side. So they go into a country like China Mobile. This is a real example. They went to Ethiopia and to Addis Ababa. You want telecom infrastructure here you go 30 cents on the dollar the technology is great by the way don't let them tell you that the chinese tech is crap it's not it's amazing they've done amazing things with

engineering and they're very very skilled engineers and uh oh so all these people get their phones and they're like all the phones you know these people never had landlines and all of a sudden they all got cool cell phones and cell phones are loaded with a game. And what's that game? Oh, well, the game is, you know, poker, virtual poker. OK, well, there's $100 on here. Oh, I'm going to start playing virtual poker. They all start playing virtual poker.

Of course, they all lose a bunch of money. And then all of a sudden, knock on the door comes. It's the local Chinese gang come to collect. Okay. Now, what does that tell you? What does, I don't know. It tells you that the Chinese telecom companies are working with Chinese gangs who are working with the Chinese government. So.

They work with, in Hong Kong. So they come to collect because you lost money. So you don't have it connected to a credit card? Once they connect it, once they are bought in, and once there's a debt to be paid, that debt is collected by a different Chinese organization. That's not a company. It's a criminal organization. What I'm trying to get to here is that the CCP works with the actual Chinese gangs. In Hong Kong, the triads, which are like the Chinese gangs, beat up the protesters, right? Why are they doing that? Why are the Chinese gangs acting on behalf of the CCP

to beat up Hong Kong protesters? It's because they're working together. The Chinese Communist Party and the actual criminal gangs are as close as lips and teeth, as Matt would say. Am I getting it? What I'm trying to get to here is that this is a complex problem because on their side, they're mixing all of these things. Industry, politics, criminality, diplomacy, bribery, corruption, development. All of those things are part of their strategy, which is very organized and marching apace. which is very organized and marching apace. And we don't think about it that way.

We're attacking different tentacles of the problem. But until you realize that actually it's all one big problem and it's all connected, then you can't think about the ways to respond appropriately. Well, it's organized and inexorably connected to the party. Exactly. So there is no business without the party. Exactly. And so we are at a significant disadvantage. Correct.

And there's no acknowledgement of it nor solution. I mean, there's some acknowledgement of it, but the solutions are, I haven't seen that. But even the Huawei ban, I mean, Huawei's just been banned in the United States and they're not allowed to use Google. But what that's allowed them to do is start their own. I mean, it might be even worse. They started their own ecosystem. Right. It's inevitable.

And their own ecosystem, I'm sure, is way more porous and susceptible to... yeah. So you got to go to these countries... if we were smart, what would we do is we'd go to these countries and say, listen, do you like your cell phones with spying or without spying? Now, I know a lot of the listeners are going to say, doesn't the NSA spy on all our shit too? Yes, we spy. Yes, we're guilty of this stuff too. I'm not excusing the U.S. government's abuses. And believe me, I spent years and years reporting on the U.S. government's abuses. Just because I am a Washington guy who reports to the Washington Post. I'm against U.S. government abuses.

So again, two ideas in our head at the same time. The U.S. government can abuse its spying powers, and the Chinese government can abuse its spying powers. But basically, it's not the same. And if you build an AT&T or a Verizon network, or if you build a Huawei network, those two things are not the same. And both of them have vulnerabilities, but I'd rather have the non-Huawei network. But these countries would also rather have it because they know that once they get bought in, once they take the bribe, once they take the corruption, once they take the package, that's it, they're sold. There's

no going back. You can't untangle yourself from that. They would, in many cases, prefer to work with us if we had something to offer. In other words, we can't just bash China. That's not productive. We have to have an alternative that's based on our values, that's based on rule of law and free commerce and companies that are less susceptible to government spying. We're not doing that. But if we had a more proactive, more aggressive, you know, counter, that would be, that would help. That would help a lot. But it seems like there were so many steps behind, they didn't anticipate any of this. Some people did, but those people were ignored for many, many years.

And the Trump administration, in a way, was a chance for those people to have their voices heard. And that's why you saw so much change in U.S.-China policy that you did. Unfortunately, those people also had to deal with Donald Trump. And so that's why it got all screwed up. Again, I think the Biden administration, to their credit, is thinking about these things very hard. You know, they want to understand what are the things that the Trump administration did that were good, what were bad. But they're taking a while, you know, and the Chinese Communist Party is not waiting. They're actually speeding up their plans. If you look around the world, what did they do during the coronavirus pandemic? They invaded part of India. It's a pretty fucked up thing to do.

It backfired, right, because the Indians are now more anti-CCP than they ever were. They're aggressive against Taiwan. They did horrible things in Hong Kong. I mean, horrible things. And they increased the repression of the Uyghurs and the Tibetans, by the way, and the inner Mongolians and anyone else who didn't shut up. And so they're speeding up. Now that we're sort of attuned to it more, they're speeding up their plans. And our response has to speed up as well. This is such a fucked up subject because what I'm looking at, if you're watching this play out, I don't see a real good way out of this.

I don't see a way where they don't have some pretty significant influence on us, even more so than what they have now over the next decade or two. How does this end? How does this end? i don't know but you have to be pretty fucking i mean i haven't written this book and haven't researched this for that long you got to be pretty concerned yeah i mean i mean yeah i've spent a lot of time on this but there are a lot of people how does this end is a is a really interesting question because again you know there are some people who say we have to bring down the CCP right now, like Steve Bannon, you know, and Peter Navarro and these guys. And they're like, okay, well, listen, if this is the reality,

then we've got to bring those guys down right now. I don't think that's possible. It's not. And we shouldn't try. And, but this is what some people will say. And what I say is that we have to figure out a way to have a relationship between the rest of the world and China that both sides can live with to avoid the conflict that neither side wants. In other words, people think the Cold War is the worst scenario. No, it's not. Cold War is not a good scenario. Hot War is the worst scenario. Exactly. Thank you. That's the worst scenario. So the question is, how do we avoid that? Because

that's actually the worst thing. And I argue, and many people like me argue, that the best way to avoid it is by confronting this problem now by addressing it now that the more we let it fester that the more the powerful and evil and expansionist and aggressive and repressive the ccp gets and guess what it's all going in that direction but according to all of the evidence and everything we see the more dangerous this situation becomes because their appetite grows with the eating okay and the more powerful they get the more they tell us to go fuck ourselves. And once... And so we have a limited amount of time to prove to them that we actually do desire a

world where they can have their country. It doesn't mean we're gonna shut up about their atrocities, but it means that what we're concerned most about is what their actions are in our countries. That the real fight against the CCP and the competition with China begins inside of our own borders, in our schools, in our markets, in our Silicon Valley tech companies, in our sports, and in our movies. And that's where we have to focus the most of our efforts. Then we have to join with our allies and partners, specifically in the region, who are facing the same problem that we are. And so that's how this ends, is that, you know, in the best case scenario is that we convince the Chinese Communist Party

to limit its ambitions such that we can all live together and avoid the hot war. But ignoring the problem is not a strategy. And history shows us that when you face expansionist, totalitarian, pseudo-religious dictatorships, inevitably they keep expanding and they keep gaining until confronted. What's the worst case scenario? The hot war. Okay, outside of the hot war, is there another scenario that you could see that also would be similarly worst case in terms of what they've done to Hong Kong? Yeah, they changed the world to be safe for autocracy and repression. They changed the world to be safe for autocracy and repression.

In other words, they compromise us and are so powerful that we can't stand up to them, that we lose what Christopher Hitchens would call our way of life. That's what I'm concerned with. I'm concerned with that we become them to confront them. That's a terrible scenario, too. But that's a scenario that's likely. Yeah. I mean, let's hope not. But, yes, that's why we have to stand up against things like self-censorship in our own society.

That's when Daryl Morey tweets something, everybody who believes in the enlightenment and individual liberty and the path of human dignity has a responsibility to say, no, fuck you. We can tweet whatever we want. And they have to learn that we're going to tweet whatever we want, whether they like it or not. And they can't tell us not to, because that's the slippery slope where we're, okay, well, we can't have a China studies program that talks about Tibet or, I mean, it already happened in Hollywood. When's the last time we saw a Hollywood movie about Tibet? It's been about 20 years. 20 years. I haven't seen one. What's Richard Gere doing? He's the guy's out of work. Right. You know, there's a reason. So are we going to let and there will become a tipping point where we are so invested in these Chinese companies that sinking them, even if they're committing atrocities, will sink our own economy so that we have to figure out what we have to protect, where we have to decouple and where we don't. You know, there are plenty

of places where we don't. You know, that's that's fine. We should encourage interactions and we should keep encouraging you know our shared essential oneness you know like there's there's something just true about the fact that we're all humans share some sort of commonality even people in China there was there's you are you on Clubhouse at all if you ever do clubhouse I did it once I thought it was ridiculous you didn't like it oh it's a podcast for people that don't have a podcast yes exactly yeah that's why i like it with podcasts that jump on there and i'm like when do you talk to your kids that's true but you know i i found it to be uh a refuge during the quarantine because i could connect with people that i couldn't meet with oh that makes sense so for me it was it was a pressure release valve but the point is this is crazy for

like six weeks it wasn't banned in china and there were thousands of people from mainland china on the app talking with tibetans and ai wei wei and uh hong kongers and dissidents and americans and in chinese and what i witnessed is that that they actually were not all that different. Actually, these people want the same things that we want. And they are not stupid. They're not brainwashed. They understand their government. They know what they're dealing with.

They might think about it differently than us. They're not as critical of us. They don't know everything. There was this one woman who didn't know about the Xinjiang concentration camps, but she learned about it. Were you speaking to her in Chinese? She was in English. I was in the English room, so I don't speak Chinese. Okay, you only speak Japanese. No, but a lot of my friends who were Chinese speakers were in these other rooms,

and we were having this crazy community of people who were coming together, and then the Chinese Communist Party shut it down. So they shut it down in China, and you can't even get it through a VPN? There are some people who have found out tricky ways to get through the firewall, but they do so at great risk. Because what we then found out is that Clubhouse is built on Chinese tech. Of course it is. It's not encrypted. Their servers are all from a Chinese company.

Oh, Jesus. And those people may have gotten scooped up and I pray for them, even though I'm not religious. Really? Yeah, we're pretty sure that all the conversations could have been monitored. All those people were put in. And then when they shut down the app, all the people who were still left were like, Oh, my God, Clubhouse, what have we done? We might have just gotten ourselves, ruined our whole lives.

And Clubhouse didn't do shit as far as I can tell well there's it's still an invite only app that's in kind of a beta form right anybody can get an invite you're on 20 invites right now it's not as exclusive as you no no I'm telling you

it's a false exclusivity it was early on but now it's like basically anybody can join but my point is that if you engage with Chinese It's a false exclusivity. It was early on, but now it's like basically anybody can join. But my point is that if you engage with Chinese people, good things happen. And we need to somehow preserve that engagement without succumbing to the party's rules and edicts and doctrines. And that, again, is a very difficult thing that I'm not prepared to give you the perfect solution for at this moment. Dude, you freak me the fuck out. This is a super uncomfortable conversation.

I thought it was really productive. I felt good about it. I got a lot off my chest. Well, I know you did, and it really was very productive in a lot of ways. And I settled my score with Dan Ninen, which I've been waiting a decade to do. You have no idea. Well, Dan Ninen in some way introduced us.

That's how I found out about you. Like when you were pitched to be on the podcast, I'm like, oh, that guy, yeah, I remember that story. And then I read all the rest. And I was like, oh, okay. Everything happens for a reason. Yeah, maybe. Fuck, man.

Anyway, another reason to drink. Yeah, salute. Cheers. Cheers, man. Anyway, another reason to drink. Yeah. Salute. Cheers. Cheers, man. Well, thanks for being here. Thanks for having me. How long did we go?

How long was it? It was like three hours. Jesus. Yeah, but I'm not going to sleep well. This is a fucking reoccurring problem. Can I leave on a note of optimism then in order to cheer you up a little bit? You have optimism? Yeah. You know, this struggle for human dignity and individual liberty is universal.

It dates back to Descartes and Spinoza and Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson and Orwell and will continue in future generations. In other words, the long arc of history does bend towards justice. And that, you know, despite how bleak it looks now, in the end, people do want those things. Our offer is better. People don't want to live on their knees. People don't want to be chattel of the party state. People want to think for themselves and love who they want. That's better. If you ask any person, even any Chinese person who doesn't have a mind or standing over them, they'll choose that thing. So if we keep that idea in our mind, then we don't have to worry about if you're

Republican or Democrat or American even. It doesn't even matter because this is a universal truth that human dignity and individual liberty and rights are things that we all must strive for and that we all have a responsibility to advocate for. And if we keep focused on that mission, then we can take the politics out of this and we can join in our shared humanity and make some progress. That sounds awesome. But how do you get a country that's under the grip of a totalitarian party, under a regime that does have supreme control, under a regime that is more than willing to commit genocide and force people into slave labor? How do you convince them that that's not the way to go, especially when they have ultimate control and it's been insanely

profitable and the power that they've amassed is unprecedented. In terms of the ability to control what's kind of a capitalist society, it's kind of capitalist, right? It's not communist in a traditional sense where they've taken away all the incentive. They've allowed people like Jack Ma to amass billions of dollars. It's a weird sort of hybrid. It's like a virus that's evolved. The only honest answer is,

I don't know. I don't know either. To be continued. To be continued. The book's available right now, ladies and gentlemen. It's called, in non-binary folks,

Chaos Under Heaven, Josh Rogan. Thanks, brother. Appreciate you, man. Thank you. Let's have you in again. Let's do this more often. Anytime. All right? All right. Thank you. Bye, everybody. thanks brother appreciate you man thank you let's have you in again let's do this more often anytime

alright thank you bye everybody