The Joe Rogan Experience - #1668 - Krystal Ball & Saagar Enjeti

Episode Date: June 16, 2021

Krystal Ball and Sagaar Enjeti are political commentators and hosts of the YouTube show and podcast "Breaking Points".

the joe rogan experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day we're rolling so uh guys have a new show hey joe what's up i just want to say i told you i knew it was gonna work yeah would never would have happened without you I knew it was going to work. Yeah. Never would have happened without you. I knew it was going to work. I was like, why are you trapped? I mean, it really is actually true. We've been thinking about going independent for a while because it's just more consistent with our values. The Hill takes money from all kinds of people that are very contrary to the things that we've been talking about. But, you know, it's scary.

I got kids. I got, you know, bills. Health insurance. Health insurance, all this stuff and so i think especially during covid when we couldn't actually directly interact with the audience in person it's hard to know how real it is so when we talked to you and we're like oh we're thinking about it we're kind of nervous and you were you weren't just like maybe you were like yes do this it actually really did help us to make the move

so thank you no no question terrible person to take advice like that from because i'm always like jump yeah fucking jump well in this case it was the right call so broken clock or whatever it's really scary um and it's one of those things where we were telling you this before where you're like you don't know uh if you're like am i gonna miss this you have these guys you have to support like i don't have to deal with all this am i gonna miss this you have these guys you have the support like i don't have to deal with all this like administrative stuff and like set design and upload but honestly we love it so much like we we wrapped i think our second show so we could finally i got and i texted her i was like this is amazing like we're free yeah we do it the way that we want we produce

it the way that we want and just having all the like big stuff out of your mind in terms of like the pressures of corporate media, because to be clear, like the Hill never like directly censored us. Right. But and you've talked about this. It's about these outside interests, like there's interests that their company has that have nothing to do with us, but could impact their interests based upon what I say. And I've told this story publicly now about what happened, but like we were doing a segment, this basic segment, I want to be very charitable. And once again, to be clear that he'll never said anything. They said, don't say this or whatever, but we're talking about the seniority system for Democrats in

Congress. And I was like, this creates really perverse incentives because you have all these really old people who run Congress, like Maxine Waters waters who's like 80 years old here's all i said maxine waters will be chairwoman of the financial services committee till the day she dies that's it so i later find out her fucking press secretary called someone at the hill and said saga is issuing a death threat against maxine waters what do i want to say? I want to say, go fuck yourself. I'd be like,

literally put me on the phone with them. Go fuck yourself. But here's the problem. And once again, the Hill didn't say anything, but I have to know this in the back of my mind. Hill reporters have to go

and talk to Maxine Waters. That's literally part of their job. Like she's chairman of the Financial Services Committee. She has a lot of access. One of the most powerful people in Washington. She does other shit with the Hill.. She has a lot of access. One of the most powerful people in Washington. She does other shit with The Hill.

And so in the back of my mind, I'm like, can I say whatever the fuck I want about Maxine Waters? I mean, they didn't tell me to say it. But even if it's the back of my mind, like I would be lying if I wasn't saying that that wasn't with me a little bit. Right. Like you're always thinking you're like, man, you're a human being. They're not going to fuck with me. They're going to try and fuck with your boss. but they're putting it out there in the air though so they're making you think about it yeah that's the whole purpose of it that's exactly right and

there were things too like i didn't even want because the whole ethos of our show is we're independent minded right we're not carrying water for anyone we have our views we're very up front about those views but we're not doing partisan cheerleading here we're not carrying water for anyone. We have our views. We're very upfront about those views, but we're not doing partisan cheerleading here. We're not carrying water for any corporation or entity or anything like that. And so even the appearance of the Hill's a corporate entity and they're taking money from these various places, that's their right to do. Even the appearance that that would affect our coverage really, really bothered me. And so I'll give you a perfect example. I don't know if you, do you know about this case of Steven Donziger? It's a crazy thing. He's a lawyer who won a massive lawsuit

against Chevron for the horrific things that they did in Ecuador and basically like destroyed the whole area. And he wins a nine billion dollar, I think it was, suit against them, largest in history. They hit him. They're trying to fight back against him. They hit him with a contempt of court charge, which is a misdemeanor, which is nothing. He's been under house arrest for now two years, completely unprecedented show trial. It's an insane situation. And we were working on getting him booked to talk about this. And meanwhile, I'm seeing tweets that are saying Crystal and Sagar aren't covering this

because the Hill's taking money from the American Petroleum Institute now that wasn't true at all we talked to him we talked to other people about the case we covered the case but I hated that that was even a legitimate by the way question in people's minds so those things like that and I have to say like Sagar I was worried there would be things that i really missed about having the corporate structure like just that support system around we feel so free doing the show is just an absolute pleasure we feel unencumbered it's it's actually even more of a relief in the audience has showed up for us even more than we ever could have expected it was

amazing i mean it i mean i got you Maxine, you can't control me now. You got nothing on me. The thing is, like, what they did by saying that you issued a death threat against them is literally that is everything that's wrong with politics and everything that's right about your show is that you guys are just present and honest

and you see things and you talk about those things without biases. And you have perspectives, but you don't't have biases and the problem with these people is it's all bullshit and so like by saying that they know you didn't really issue a death threat of course he knows he knows he knew when he opened his mouth everyone the crazy thing is they're playing a game this happened twice so this happened to another time. So I was doing a lot of reporting around TikTok. And I was noticing all of these former Republican lawmaker lobbyists are working now for TikTok because I heard they were paying top dollar rates. So I do some investigation. This is basic Google.

I went on Google and I was looking at who TikTok has been hiring. And one of them, I'm not kidding you, is the former head or a part of the department of homeland security cyber security division who is now working for tiktok the chinese government okay for a chinese controlled app all right so i put that on the show i did a whole monologue about all these people who work in washington you know i was like you want to see the revolving door this is is these people are complete like like murder for hires in terms they're mercenaries they don't give a shit about you they don't give a shit about america any of this stuff the former cyber security lady is now working for tiktok all right and it's public and so i put it

on the show what do you think happens tiktok calls somebody over at the hill and says saga is threatening the lives of the people at tiktok and i'm like yeah once again fuck you very dangerous man yeah i'm a dangerous man i. very dangerous man over here. Yeah, I'm a dangerous man. I'm a dangerous man. Left and right. You're very brave for inviting him in here today, Joe.

Thank you, thank you, Joe. I know you're MMA trained, but apparently, yeah, I'm issuing death threats like left and right.

But again, now once I have to think about this, I'm like, this is crazy. And here's the other problem. The Hill was taking ad dollars at the time from Huawei. So Huawei, which is a Chinese telecom company. And I was thinking other problem. The Hill was taking ad dollars at the time from Huawei. So Huawei, which

is a Chinese telecom company. And I was thinking in the back of my mind, man, if TikTok was real smart, they'd buy some advertising at The Hill. Because then I'd really have to be like, no shit. Why was The Hill taking money from Huawei? Was this after the ban? I don't know. Once again, they can do whatever they want. They're megabits. But that is a weird one, right? It's not on us.

Everyone takes money from Huawei. Wapow, New York Times, all of them. Everybody takes money from it, whoever they can. I mean, the media business in some ways, it was really brought back from the dead by Trump because he increased traffic so much and subscriber numbers so much for the New York Times and Washington. I mean, that's the irony of his whole attack on the media was the best thing that ever happened to the media.

But the overall model is in free fall. of his whole attack on the media was the best thing that ever happened to the media. But the overall model is in freefall and people are revolting. I mean, that's really what with the success of your show, with, you know, what what has happened with Breaking Points, our new show that has been totally wild is people don't want this spoon fed narrative. They don't want to have to think about about like, why is this paper covering these politicians in this incredibly fluffy way? Because they're more interested in maintaining their access and maintaining their social status within that club than they are in actually getting the facts right in a way that can be that can require sometimes courage that can be uncomfortable sometimes with your social set. And so I really do see it as kind of a watershed moment where some of the old models are dying and people are are are sick and tired of having their attention monetized or sick and tired of being fed whatever the like safe mainstream narrative is. And all they want

is just someone who look may get it wrong sometimes but is really just trying to figure out what the truth of the matter is yeah it's it's a it's actually a viable strategy to tell the truth now as far as like a marketing yeah yeah do you remember that clip of the amy robach and epstein where the disney she worked and that she laid it all out there she didn't even know but this is what I'm talking about. She was like, oh, the palace got involved. Right. And they started calling this.

And then Will and Kate's, that's it. That's all, that little peek behind the curtain. Isn't it amazing that that lady, her doing that in front of the camera, and not knowing that they were even filming. Exactly. And then someone takes it and releases it. Everybody gets a chance to see. So what do they say not on camera?

Well, there's a few of these things that are happening, right, like how about the John Cena one? Oh yeah, yeah. The John Cena one was a wake up call for America, because all these fucking pro wrestling fans are like, wait a minute, he's speaking Chinese, like this is real. Yeah. This shit is real.

Yeah. John Cena's speaking Mandarin, he's apologizing for calling Taiwan a country. I know. And is he using a filter, because he looks slightly Asian. Yeah. Right?

He looks panicked. So we later found out the man speaks fluent Mandarin, which kind of helps. We figured it out. In 2014, Vince taught him or had him take lessons to learn Mandarin

so that he could go and appeal to the Chinese market. Yes. What? He's a genius. Vince McMahon's a fucking genius. That guy's a killer when it comes to making money,

so I get it. Wow. He wanted him to appeal to to making money, so I get it. Wow. He wanted to appeal to the Chinese market, so they gave him classes. Look, it's a difficult thing to learn. It's amazing how well he spoke it. It's one of the most difficult languages. A lot of people were like, wait, what is going on here? That movie proves everything about what went wrong with America, with Hollywood, entertainment.

That movie, Vin Diesel begged to open that movie in China because all of their opening dollars come from China. Fast and Furious 9. First, I did a whole monologue about this and I was like, do we really need 9? That's like the first question. I didn't even know. Do we need 9? We do. I mean, look, the ones with The Rock, shout out to The Rock, are actually awesome.

This one doesn't have The Rock? I don't know, actually. I haven't watched it. Whatever F6 is where The Rock was in it, I love The Rock. You were fine with the John Cena thing, but you draw the line at No Rock. Yeah, No Rock? How are you going to have Fast and Furious without The Rock? It's a joke.

That's outrageous. But F9 makes all of its money in China. And so what happens is that Hollywood- The numbers are crazy. It was $140 million or something like that. This is the difference. It was $160 million opening weekend. 134 of it was from China. Exactly. Right. And so Hollywood and these companies know, Universal Pictures, who was

owned by NBC, who's owned by Comcast, all have business in China. And Hollywood, Disney, and all the, I mean, the Mulan thing, that was insane. When Mulan, at the end of the live action Mulan, they thanked the Chinese agency in the credit section, which is responsible for carrying out some of the Uyghur genocide in Xinjiang. They thanked them openly in the credits, and they have never apologized for it. They put it in the end of the credit section. Thank you to the Turpan Security Agency or whatever, who they worked with when they were filming Mulan in China. This is Disney, an American corporation. And it's not just that. It's because they have Disneyland Shanghai. Disney has massive business in China, all of their future outlooks and growth. And look, I get it. Their job is to make money and increase value to this shareholder. And there's a billion

people in China. They basically maxed out market penetration whenever it comes to the US. But these are American companies. We made these. And Americans need to ask, is it cool that the richest and most powerful people in this country are sold out to China? I'm John, but... The country's not about anything other than money. I mean, we just abandon every value other than profit maximization and the bottom line. That's what people need to understand about all this woke shit. Yes. It's really not about changing culture. It's about money. I mean, that's...

It's about power. You know, it's just like, it's funny. There's a big article in the New York Times today about inside an Amazon warehouse, right? And Amazon was the first to say Black Lives Matter and put that banner up on their page and everything. And look, I support a lot of goals of that movement. But you read through this article and you find out, first of all, the way they treat their largely black and brown warehouse workers, I mean,

it's despicable. They intentionally make sure they cannot move up the ladder. That's part of their business policy is if you're an hourly worker, you're not going to get promoted. And they try to force you out after three years because they think you're getting lazy. So this is the company that can, on the surface level, say Black Lives Matter because they think that's good for their profit maximization and their brand and their shareholder value. At the same time, what they're actually doing in real life, wildly different than that. So- And they specifically target black and brown people in this way? Well, they target their warehouse workers who are, so the warehouse workers are 50 some

percent black and brown. Management is 50 some, is overwhelmingly white and Asian. What is, I thought the whole thing about Amazon was that you could move up the ladder. Nope. Walmart, who I'm also not a fan of, they actually promote from within. So most Walmart managers start out as hourly employees. So at least they have a track up. And again, I'm not a fan of Walmart, okay?

Amazon intentionally, and this is what the New York Times revealed, they intentionally have a system because Bezos said he believes that these human beings are lazy and that after, you know, that they're going to do the bare minimum. He was quoted saying this? Bezos was quoted saying they're lazy? Or Jamie, if you can pull that. I think there's a difference between lazy and having a shitty job.

People need to understand that. When you're abused, You're treated like a robot and a cog day in and day out. You're fired. Like if you are a little bit slow on your tasks, you might get fired by a freaking app. Like that's how dehumanizing it is. Let's explain to people

who don't understand how it works over there. Does anybody want to explain? Yeah, I mean they work in the warehouse. Right, so they have phones that are on there. Everything's tracking your movements, steps, bathroom breaks as well. So the warehouses are also very large. So let's say you technically have a 20 minute break. It might take you 10 minutes to actually walk to the break room and back. So you actually have what, like a

two minute break while you're in there. And the whole thing around Amazon and why everyone should care is because Amazon under the pandemic exploded. Their stock price went up from, I think, 1,000 or so to a couple $3,000. Bezos personally, his wealth increased by $70 billion. Amazon is now the second largest employer in the United States. And this is incredibly important because as more Amazon market adoption happens, they are basically going to become the employer of choice. Whatever your grocery store or whatever was in your small town, these are the rural working class Americans. This is their only job. So when you have one company which has all of this overwhelming power over rural working Americans and even suburban Americans, because this is Amazon strategy. Dayton, Ohio is a good example. Alec McGillis, he wrote a great

book on Amazon. Shout out to him. Talked about how Dayton was like this Silicon Valley of America in the 1900s, you know, manufacturing, middle class jobs. Now, Dayton's prized economic value comes from the fact that it's one day's drive from one third of the US population. So it's a great place for cardboard. So everybody there is all just involved in creating cardboard and other Amazon infrastructure. So the Amazonification, so to speak, or whatever, of America makes it so that if, let's say 30 years ago, you grew up in your town, you may have to go to Walmart, HEB. We're here, you know, I grew up here in Texas, Kroger as well, McDonald's, something like that.

Now it's basically like McDonald's, Dairy Queen, and Amazon. And when Amazon is the prime market employer They are the sole determiner of market conditions Increasingly, so it's Walmart and Amazon which are number two and we're talking about Millions of people who are now working at this company So people are like why do you guys talk so much about Amazon because I can see the trends this company's not going anywhere Look props to them like Like, I love Amazon. Like, I order a lot of stuff on Amazon.

But increasingly becoming aware of the price of what it takes to do overnight delivery to your house at 4 a.m. in the morning or increasingly becoming aware of the fact that they are basically on this mission to drive price down as much as possible and squeeze as much out of their workforce. That is where it's troubling. What was the furniture thing that we just covered? Yeah. This was crazy. Well, and did you see their delivery drivers are so, like, the demands are so intense they're having to pee in bottles and shit in bags.

Right. And they admit it. Shit in bags? Literally. That's where I draw the line. I don't really care if a guy has to pee in a bottle, but if a gal has to pee in, like, a dog bowl. Right. That's bad. I'm like, this seems wrong.

And this happened publicly. I would like to click the button that's like, I'll pay a little bit more if you can promise me no driver had to shit in a bag in order to get this to me tomorrow. We kind of glossed over this thing where you said that Jeff Bezos said that people are lazy. Here's what the New York Times says. So I got the quote. So here's what the New York Times says. Amazon's founder, Jeff Bezos, did not want hourly workers to stick around for long, viewing a large disgruntled workforce as a threat. This other executive recalled who worked at Amazon but then left. Company data showed that most employers became less eager over time, he said, and Mr. Bezos believed people were inherently lazy.

What he would say is that our nature as humans is to expend as little energy as possible to get what we want or need. That was embedded throughout the business, from the ease of instant ordering to the pervasive use of data to get the most out of employees. So guaranteed wage increases stop after three years, and Amazon provided incentives for low-skilled employees to leave. So every year they would offer associates thousands of dollars to resign. every year they would offer associates thousands of dollars to resign. They made sure that any position they gave people sort of the illusion of promotions being available, but then there'd be one promotion available for hundreds of people. And they very seldom hire or hire management from within their own ranks. It's like they view us. it's totally class stratified is basically the bottom line. And of course, lower classes in America are disproportionately black and brown.

It's not like they're specifically targeting black and brown people, but you have one class of people that they see that is worthy of doing the grunt work and shitting in the bag. And one class of people that they think of is worthy of like actually having the more intellectual jobs and running the place.

It's, you know, it's a really abhorrent way of viewing human beings, essentially. And so this is part of the kind of, again, rot of America that I also think is reflected with the John Cena thing, etc. It's like you're certainly more of a capitalist than I am, but you can't have a country where the only frickin value is money. It's just you see the sickness of people who have all these addictions. Last year was the worst year on record for overdose death. You see the suicide rate spike. I mean, you see people who just feel like they have no meaning and no purpose and no grounding and no community. And all the life being sucked out of these human beings in these communities, it's just disgusting. The problem is money's quantifiable. And happiness and love and camaraderie and friendship is not. It's squishy.

You can't put it on a scale. Put that quote back up again. This kind of shit drives me nuts, and I can't believe they actually report this. When it says it's been alleged that Bezos has barked out questions like, are you lazy or just incompetent at employees, and referred to the publishing industry as a sickly gazelle. Well, first of all, what is, how the fuck does that get printed?

It's been alleged that he's barked out questions. Unless you have a video of him saying that, shut the fuck up because that kind of shit is nonsense. Like you can't say. I actually know Brad Stone a little bit. Especially when you have, when it's not attributed. Right. So, like, this is different.

This isn't the New York Times article I was referencing where they actually, they talked to the workers. Some of these executives who worked with Bezos went on the record. And then you can judge, like, who's telling the truth here. Yeah. It's just one of those things. Like, look, I'm most certain that that man values money in a very high and probably disproportionate way. There's no way he doesn't, right? And he's not really known to be very charitable, right?

Isn't that one of the knocks on him? He doesn't give away a lot of money and the ex is just throwing it around like it's a beach ball at a party. I think she just announced another billion. Good for her. I mean, look, she's already like 40 billion. She could keep five stashed away. You won't even notice. This is the problem I have, though,

because to what Crystal was referencing, and again, look, I'm more capitalist than Crystal, but I look at what's happening with Bezos and with Amazon and this unionization drive, which there was a recent failed unionization drive at one of their warehouses in Bessemer, Alabama. So Bezos reportedly got pissed that politicians were shitting on Amazon. And so I think it was Representative Mark Pocan tweeted out like, Amazon workers are peeing in bottles. And Amazon's actual Twitter account was like, you don't believe the peeing in bottle story,

do you? And he was like, yeah, I i do and then all of these former amazon employees and current started reporting official like company guidance around peeing and shitting what to do company guidance yes and so you can see you don't really believe in the thing and then they had to go and correct it and they were like you actually it's true are some of our workers actually do pee in bottles and a lot of this comes down to this jeff bezos his wealth increased by 70 billion dollars and i've heard scott galloway say this who's actually i've actually heard this um which is that what is this this is incredible oh yeah so they recruit people to be fake amazon employees. And anytime someone tweets something like, you know, what we're talking about here, they'll come in and be like, I'm an Amazon employee.

And my name's Bob. This is my favorite. Yeah. Husband, father, happy Amazon employee. Oh, my God. It's fucking dude perfect. It's dude perfect. Yeah, I'm like every teenager.

Is that a real person? Dude perfect. He's famous on YouTube. He's like one of the biggest YouTubers. He like throws shit into like footballs and stuff. No, I know who those guys are. That's him? Yeah, and they used his face.

Oh my God, they used his face? Yeah, so they didn't even do a good job. Okay for AT? With their troll operations. Oh, happy Amazon employees. That's so crazy. Oh, it's a mess. Goodbye, James.

But how do you know? But hold up. Just to be cynical. How do you not know that this was someone who hates Amazon who does this as an obvious goof? No, but they- But you know what I'm saying? Like you're playing 3D chess. The documents, Ken Klippenstein, amazing journalist, who one of the reasons why he gets these stories is because he reaches down to the rank and file

instead of the execs. He had leaked to him the guidelines and the protocols of how to be an Amazon bot on Twitter, basically. Like how to set up your handle, the types of things to say, what bot on Twitter, basically. Oh, Jesus. Like how to set up your handle, the types of things to say, what things not to engage with. Do you remember when Howard Stern got busted doing that? Did he? No, I don't remember that.

Yeah, there was a conference. He had a conference for all of his employees and there's a video that got leaked telling all the employees to make fake accounts and then tweet at celebrities that you want to be on Howard Stern. That is so unbelievably crazy. You don't have your employees do that.

I do. That's why I'm covering up right now. I'm throwing him under the bus because I'm guilty of the same thing. I thought that was common protocol. No, I've never even advertised this show. It's one of the things that I'm very happy about. So I do have one more Amazon anecdote for you that Sagar was referencing. So they've started, you know how Wayfair and other companies, they'll do like delivery

and they'll assemble your shit for you, your furniture or whatever. So Amazon's trying to compete with them and they're just taking the normal drivers. They're not giving them any training in furniture assembly. Like this isn't their specialty or whatever. And they're just like, now do this also. And they give them these specific time limits for how long it's supposed to take them to assemble these various pieces of furniture. Now, you're maybe good at this stuff. I'm definitely not that good at that stuff. I don't think Saugers would do it. Terrible. So anyway, here's the allotments. Amazon allotted 11 minutes and 15 seconds for two drivers to transport a 59-part ottoman to a customer's

room of choice, unpack, and assemble it according to one schedule. And this is like typical of the type of timing. And it's not like there's no consequence if you don't meet that timeline. If you don't meet that timeline routinely, you're fired. So this is the type of demands that they put on workers that are just completely unrealistic. So I don't even remember what an ottoman is. It's like drawers and stuff?

It's like the thing that you put your feet on. Oh, okay. Also, 59-part ottoman does sound really crazy. It seems like a very elaborate ottoman, but to put it together in 11 minutes and unpack it and deliver and all that is crazy. How do you put it together? I'm a little confused. I think the guys, what they

do is they drop it off and then they unbox it and put it all together for you. Like you can pay like $60 extra. I've done this before. So just put the legs on it? Actually, I don't know. 59 pieces? There was a photo on that one. I'm not sure, Jamie, if you can find it. But when you say 59 pieces, how many of them are screws? I have no idea. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, that's a good question. But still, 11 minutes is ridiculous. Crazy. They have some other examples here too. 11 minutes to bring it into a house is ridiculous. 7 minutes to deliver and assemble a 234-pound dining table is another example. 44 seconds. Three minutes and 44 seconds for drivers to transport. So they have to bring this mattress there, bring it to the customer's room of choice,

unpack it, and install it. Mattress that weighs 104 pounds. How many minutes do you get for that? Three minutes. That's crazy. Crazy. Yeah. What if it's a big house?

What if they have stairs? Then you're fucked. Then you're fired. Then you're shitting in a bag so that you can make it to the next one. I mean, seriously, that's what it is. That Amazon, what I wanted you to get into is the fact that they get timed. Like, say, if someone orders something, you have to get, like someone orders a a bicycle pump you have to get to that bicycle pump and put it in a box that's right and they track all of your movements yeah all of that is tracked and and if you don't make

it it's not like a human being even bothers to tell you you're fired you just get a notification on your fucking tracker right so what is the the solution to something like that it seems like when you start putting money as the most important thing above the health and the happiness of the people that work for you. Yeah, that's a great question. What is the solution? And is the problem stockholders? Is the problem the fact that this is a private company or public company rather? And so there's a lot of different people that get a chance to, they have a say because the ultimate duty is to make sure that the company continues to make more money every year.

No one's happy with just things being flat. They're doing their job. Here's the problem. We actually solved this over 100 years ago. They're called unions. And this is something that Crystal and I, I definitely depart from a lot of my conservative friends on this, which is that if you really think about it, a union is a very inherently conservative organization.

It's a non-governmental institution of people who band together and then use their collective power in negotiation with management. Now, the problem, though, right here with Amazon is Amazon is virulently anti-union. They will basically do anything they possibly – and this is basically an official Bezos policy. Like we will not negotiate on unions. They threw everything they possibly could at the Bessemer election. And look, I mean, they did win. And that's the reason why they raise their wage like $15 an hour, or I think it's $17 an hour now. And they're like, we have the best healthcare and all this is because it's basically like, you're going to

get this, but don't you goddamn dare unionize. And it's not just Amazon. Walmart, I think, just recently, they said they're going to give all of their employees a free Samsung phone, but it's like 729,000 employees. And buried within the stuff is that you're going to be tracked when you get that phone. Now the phone is with you, and that's the company phone. And the company phone is going to collect all of this data, exactly as you're talking about. You only have 15 seconds in order to go and get this and place it into the bin, which is the average time. And oh, you have sciatica. Fuck you. Oh, you have your leg is broken or like you're in a boot or something because you were injured on the job. Fuck you. I once read this Daily Beast story, which was

horrific, where it aggregated like a FOIA thing of all of the suicide calls from Amazon warehouses. So it's like, we got another one over here at the plant. They're like, we got another one. They're like, oh, you know, somebody just jumped or like, oh, this guy's, you know, he's saying, no, look, a lot of people work in Amazon plants. So it's not like there's a lot of numbers and stuff here. And I'm not just singling out Amazon because actually, like I was explaining, it's they're the top of the labor market. So the

problem with our labor market is that our current workforce does not have enough power to negotiate with the shareholder class. We solved this in the 1920s and 30s. We had a whole fight about this in our politics around unions and worker power and wages. And I mean, I saw a politician, I can't even remember who it was, talking about this with relation to Uber, where they're like, well, you know, they can just go and they can leave if they have, if they can just leave and go work somewhere else. But in many cases, like I'm explaining with Amazon, if you work in a town where the only thing you can do is work at the warehouse, you don't have a lot of power. And so we have to go back to a scenario where workers have some power in negotiation. Look, I think shareholder capitalism has grown amok. We have a lot of

problems. That being said, there's a lot, obviously, to the engine of why we are the preeminent world economy and the preeminent society. The problem is it's become unchecked, is that basically 1975, 1980s and so onward, the shareholder march, that's what led us to the China problem. These are the Wall Street and the shareholder class are the ones they knew that it was going to screw working class jobs here in the US. They're the ones who pushed for more free trade with China. And then the political class are the ones who said not only is shit going to be cheaper because that was the trade off said, not only is shit going to be cheaper, because that was the trade-off. They're like, shit's going to be cheaper in America. Congratulations, it's all cheaper. We also lost our entire middle class,

especially in the industrial Midwest. But China's going to become more liberal and free and open. And that was a total failure. Instead, we have imported Chinese autocracy to our country. Fucking John Cena, LeBron James, and Jamesames harden are on the side of the ccp over their own citizen shack is the only guy who spoke up for daryl morey whenever it came to shack he was like the face of america you know it's like it's totally crazy the chinese understand us better than we do in some ways because they they get that like money's the weak spot and so you ask what the answer is i mean look it look, it's not straightforward. But basically, there's two pieces. There's a policy piece that Sagar's talking about, giving workers, rebalancing the scales. There used to be a balance on the

scales where workers that had more power within the workplace. You had fewer of these gigantic firms that just control the entire market. So there's a policy piece here that's extraordinarily important. There's also a societal choice. Like, do we want to put cheaper, cheaper, cheaper as the only thing that we care about, right? It is that fundamental choice of like, if you can click the button on Amazon, that's like, I'll pay a little more or I'll wait like an extra half a day for the worker to be able to feed their family and like live a decent life and not have to shit in a bag. Do we want to make that choice? Because right now, the whole structure of society is basically set up to cater to, frankly, people like us who are doing well and we want to have everything at our fingertips as cheap as possible, as soon as possible, every experience,

et cetera, et cetera. And it's become wildly unbalanced so that if not a majority close to a majority of the population, it really is very hard to live. Housing prices are going insanely up. So the idea of a working class family affording a home anywhere in America is just wildly out of reach. That's a one way that you can basically build wealth in America. You have no choice in terms of employers. So if you hate Amazon or they fire you or whatever, you're fucked because there's nothing else in your town because everything's else been sucked out to China. Especially during the coronavirus pandemic.

And they're the only ones hiring. A disaster. So many businesses are gone and so many big corporations have gotten bigger. 100%. It's really scary. I mean, we all saw this coming at the very beginning. We knew it was going to be a bonanza for the people who already had everything.

And that's exactly what happened. I don't think it's just us. I think they knew it too. 100%. This is one of the reasons why the really skeptical people, the people that are very cynical about things, think that some of the lockdown was on purpose. about things think that some of the lockdown was on purpose and that what people were trying to do was trying to accentuate the power that these big corporations had. See, I think it's more of a failure. I dissent in that. I think we needed to make sure we got the virus under control and all those things. But at the beginning, there was a false choice

that was made. There was this false choice where they said well you can either have your job or you can have lockdown well we didn't have to do it that way there was a possibility of just hey listen backstop people's payrolls keep them attached their jobs we if we had done that from the beginning we would have spent so much less money than we ultimately spent that's part of the problem but the other problem was essential businesses yeah deciding which businesses are essential, deciding that Walmart's essential but a small restaurant is not. Correct. That kind of shit is crazy.

It's because the Walmarts of the world have power. Exactly, that's what I'm saying. Yeah, that's what it was. They knew, they had to know that some of this was going to result in businesses going under and that was going to result in their market share growing.

Absolutely. That's where people are cynical and conspiracy minded. They look at this and they say, this is almost like a calculated attack. I wish it was calculated. I think it's worse. I think it's incompetent. It was Trump and it was culture war.

It became becoming pro lockdown became. So we live in D.C. We had like we had the highest mass compliance in the country. And our city was crazy. Until Fauci came out and said that you can wear a mask outside, don't have to wear a mask outside. Everyone was double masking in my neighborhood. I live in like the heart of white liberal America. And what really has happened is that people's brains rotted under Trump.

And so when Trump was anti-lockdown, short circuit, it's over. There's no discussion. That's the Wuhan lab leak. Exactly the same thing. 100%. If Trump says it, it's lockdown bullshit. Did you guys see the Jon Stewart rant? We just saw it this morning. It was incredible.

Brilliant. Wait, I haven't seen it yet. Fucking play it. I haven't seen it. Stephen Colbert. And Colbert tries to jump in Stephen Colbert. It's fucking, and Colbert tries to jump in and stop him. Really?

Because he's a huge lib now. That's his whole thing. And he plows over him. Colbert was a Catholic. Oh, Colbert used to be so good. The old show was fucking brilliant. Yeah, because he was a parody. And now he's the real person.

He's like this pure Biden lib. It's sad. What happened to you? It's yuck. It makes me really sad. It's yuck. Yes, indeed. But listen,

this is a big part of the problem with Hollywood in general, is that you really can't stray outside the ideology. You have one ideology, and that ideology is crippling the entire city of Hollywood. Let's hear this, because when Jon Stewart goes off, it's fucking genius. And he's saying what everyone has been saying, but he did it in a brilliantly comedic fashion. This guy's a genius, Jon Stewart, honestly. He's such a fucking great guy. And because he's the guy from The Daily Show and because everyone knows he's progressive and always has been, he's the perfect guy to get this out. But you know, before we play this, the thing about him is, yes, he's always progressive,

but he was always willing to take shots and call out hypocrisy wherever he saw it. So you knew what his ideology was, but he did not pull punches. No. And that was why people loved him. It also made his points on the right much more valid because you knew he's taking shots at the left, too. 100%. That's what people don't understand at CNN.

If you only attack the people that are on the right, no one listens to you. If the moral of every single story is Trump is bad, certainly at some point he did something that was worthy of praise, right? And Fox News is the same thing. The moral of every story is Democrats are destroying the country. It's like, why are you even watching this? This is so boring soundbites they exist in soundbites they don't understand that people view them as a whole so people view everything that they say and they don't understand that when you do that over and over again people get cynical it's like we see your game here

this is like let's play this because it's so goddamn good let's scoot a little in there yeah and i'm not gonna get covered but here i'm gonna get something um i'm honestly these people Scoot a little in there, Jamie. Yeah. Here. Last time, well, actually, the first time we talked during COVID, I was still in South Carolina. That's right. You were locked down. I was locked down there, and the family, Evie and the kids were the actual crew. That's right. That's how we were doing it. We're, and the family, Evie and the kids, were the actual crew.

That's right. That's how we were doing it. Scoot up a little. Scoot forward a little bit. It was so cool. So I will say this. And I honestly mean this. I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to science. Science has, in many ways helped ease the suffering of this pandemic,

which was more than likely caused by science. Look at Colbert sitting back. He's like, no, no. And that's kind of. Hold on a second no no no no no no no no is he doing spit take listen yeah it's coffee i wouldn't do that i wouldn't do that to you i'm all what do you what do you what do you mean by that do you mean like perhaps there's a chance that this was created in a lab there's an investigation chance well i i i i if there's, I'd love to hear it.

I just don't know. Is there evidence? There's a novel respiratory coronavirus overtaking Wuhan, China. What do we do? Oh, you know who we could ask? The Wuhan novel

respiratory coronavirus lab. The disease is the same name as the lab. That's just... That's just a little too weird. Don't you think. And then they ask those scientists, they're like, how did this... So, wait a minute. You work at the Wuhan Respiratory Coronavirus Lab. How did this happen? And they're like,

mm, a pangolin kissed a turtle. And you're like, no. The name of your lab, if you look at the name... Look at the name. Can I... Let me see your business card. Show me your business card. Oh, I work at the coronavirus lab in Wuhan. Oh, because there's a coronavirus loose in Wuhan.

How did that happen? Maybe a bat flew into the cloaca of a turkey and then it sneezed into my chili and now we all have corona. Like, come on. Okay, okay. What about this? What about this? Listen to this. Wait a second. Colbert, get out of the fucking way. Let him rant. Oh my God. There's been an outbreak of chocolatey goodness near Hershey, Pennsylvania Oh, I don't know maybe a steam shovel made it with a cocoa bean

He's so uncomfortable. That could be. By the way, I gave them all tuberculosis. It is. That could very well be. And Anthony Fauci and Francis Collins. I don't want to hear that guy. Was he going to cover for Anthony Fauci looking into it now? Just stop.

Oh, now he's looking into it. Yeah, now he's looking into it. But that was the other thing that was crazy, the differences between the way people on the right and the left were looking at those emails, the Fauci emails that got leaked. Yes, that's such a great point. So many people were saying the fact that what hellscape world we live in where anyone could look at those emails and think that Fauci is a villain is so insane and shows you where we're at right now. Like, hold the fuck on. You've got emails where this guy is saying that masks don't work. Right.

In February. Yes. While he's been telling everybody you have to mask up. You've got emails where he's saying, hey, is this coming from a lab? Like, he's talking to people. And here's the thing is, is like no one is above reproach right and the minute that you buy into this like great man theory it leads to some fucking ugly places fauci just recently went on msnbc did you see this and was like you're attacking criticizing

criticizing me is the same as attacking science i I think he even used the third person. Yeah, criticizing Dr. Fauci. Dr. Fauci is the same as criticizing science. And the reality, of course, is that as it looks increasingly likely that the lab leak theory was correct, asking those questions isn't harming science. That's bolstering science. That's bolstering the quest, the neutral quest for truth. That's all any of us are talking about here.

And there was a scientist in the emails that was reaching out to him saying, when you examine this closely, there's aspects of this virus that seem to be engineered. Yes. That same scientist. Inconsistent with evolutionary theory. They communicated. Then that same scientist with evolutionary they communicated then that same scientist changed his tune publicly then when all the emails came out deleted his twitter account whoa and now he's

moving to the moon and what's even worse joe is he was actually the person who ring who was the ringleader of the nature magazine piece i think it was march of 2020 saying that coronavirus definitively did not come from the lab so in january 31st 2020 sends fauci an email saying that the coronavirus genome is not consistent with evolutionary theory aka fucking man-made okay i didn't aka fucking man-made i didn't get freaked out until the guy from the who would not say taiwan yes right remember that of course that was early on that's when i got freaked out i was like what the fuck is going on because when when you won't even say the name of a country because you're worried

about offending china and we're supposed to believe that these people are completely unbiased i was like i got scared well it's just it's crazy we're not getting all the information there's no way we are and it's not just china and this is the theory about the thing about the lab leak and why i actually want to deculture you had josh rogan on and he did an excellent job. That guy's amazing. What he expertly shows is if this is true, the lab leak hypothesis is true. Yes, the Chinese covered it up. Guess what? The Chinese are liars and they covered up SARS and they've covered up basically everything that's come out of their country for the last like 30 years. That's not a shocker. The shocker is Dr. Anthony Fauci, 2017, reverses the ban on gain of

function research, directs this funding to EcoHealth Alliance, Dr. Peter Daszak, who then gives it to the Wuhan Institute of Virology for the study of novel bat coronaviruses. And then when the pandemic turns around, we take Dr. Peter Daszak as the only American to join the World Health Organization's investigation team into whether coronavirus leaked from a lab. And on 60 Minutes, I forget who was interviewing him. She goes, well, wait. So how did you verify it? Did you just ask them?

And he goes, well, what else can we do? Because he's also half British. And that's how he goes. Well, what else can we do? Oh, we could read emails. We could also see that Peter Daszak, as of two days ago, has been caught lying. He said there were no live bats inside of the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Sky News Australia just revealed a 2017 video that bats were present inside the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

And the deputy director says, before this, China had no experience in BSL for lab. That's the highest level safety for a laboratory. But we have been here. And I don't forget. I don't want to misquote him. But he said something along the lines of creating new viruses, synthesizing new viruses. And what Fauci and Dr. Xi, who is the head of the Wuhan Institute of Virology, they're playing fucking games. Fauci and Rand Paul, when Rand Paul was pressing him, he was like, we did not fund gain of function research. He's trying to define it as explicitly what is on the record as him funding. Dr. Xi is the same thing. We were not doing gain of function research here at the lab.

This is actually amazing. I don't know if you caught. doing gain of function research here at the lab. This is actually, this is amazing. I don't know if you caught, she did an email interview with the New York Times, which was mostly, I mean, it was just, you know, the standard like state party line from China. But they asked her about gain of function research. And I'm sure your listeners mostly know that gain of function research is basically modifying these to see what, how can we make these pathogens more dangerous, right?

And it's in and of itself very dangerous because these things do leak from labs relatively routinely. And she says, we were not doing gain-of-function research because what we were doing wasn't making it more virulent or dangerous. It was seeing if it could jump from species to species. I'm sorry. It was seeing if it could jump from species to species. I'm sorry. Isn't that like the definition of making it more dangerous for us? Seeing if you can make it jump into our species. Like that seems like that's pretty dangerous.

So they're trying to play these games saying it's not technically gain of function. How does Fauci get away with standing there under oath and saying. Media. Right. It's all media pressure. Which is he's the god. It's the anti-trump derangement syndrome right fauci was put up as like the anti-trump guy and he became this liberal icon

i mean there are these signs in washington dc of people's yards i don't know if you have them here but it's literally his face on a sign and like thank you dr, Dr. Fauci. This is what we're dealing with, Joe. This is what we're dealing with. That's the level of hero worship, right? And again, no one is above reproach. Every human being is flawed. And especially when you're in that kind of position of power and you have certain incentives, like you have to ask questions about these things.

But there was another element, too. And this was, frankly, an ingenious play by the media and the scientific community is not only was it, oh, Trump and his band of wackos are the ones that are promoting this theory, but also that this theory is somehow racist. And the moment that the lab leak theory was pegged as racist, that's when it really became toxic for anyone in the mainstream to ask questions about because you don't want to be pegged as like, oh, well, you're just pursuing this racist conspiracy theory. And my thought has always been from the beginning, like, first of all, we just need the answer like neutrally to look at what actually happened here. But second of all, if we're playing the which is more racist game, it seemed way worse to me when people were like, oh, Chinese people eat bats and that's disgusting and they're so weird. And that's how we all got this pandemic. That seemed to me way more problematic than the idea that a lab that, by the way, the USA is funding, that something leaked accidentally

from that lab. So that was really the thing that put this all off the table was this strategic weaponization of, you know, what is a very real problem of alleging racism. It's the scientific community teamed up with them. Well, basically, they got the luckiest fucking break of their lives that Trump was president because they teamed up with the media and they made it so that it was racist to question. Even recently, the lead New York Times reporter on covid tweeted and then deleted. Are we ever going? Someday we will acknowledge the racist origins of the lab leak theory. New York Times reporter was in charge of COVID. Right. This is still in their in their brains. They have brain worms because of Trump. And I was telling Crystal because of Trump,

35 percent of this popular, you could have smoking gun proof. Their lab leak theory was true. 35 percent of the population, hardcore Democrats who watch MSNBC, they'll never believe it. They'll always say that it's racist. And here's the problem, which this is the same problem with all Trump stuff. If gain, if this is true, we should be having a national conversation around gain of function research. We should have a Wuhan commission around gain of function research. Instead, they want to do a January 6th commission in order to reconstruct the events of a day where we all fucking know what happened. Okay, it's over. We know. I'm not saying it wasn't terrible, but that is not what the driving conversation, what is it fucking, it's June 15th. Why are we still talking about January 6th? We should be talking right now. Did U.S. government

funds explicitly directed towards novel coronavirus research, which led to the worst pandemic in a century and cost the global economy trillions of dollars? And as Josh is the first one to point out, the response from the scientific community has been we need more gain of function research, $1.2 billion to the global VIROM project. And so once again, the scientific community wanted all of this covered up. They teamed up with the media to protect their funding resources, because what people forget, Fauci is actually the king of funding. The National Institute of Infectious Disease, I believe that's NIAD, that's what he's in charge of. They are the primary funding authority for huge amounts of the scientific community. We had Dr. Brett Weinstein on our show and he was explaining this to us, which is that if you're inside of that research

system, you need access to those dollars to keep your lab afloat. Like for my dad is a professor at Texas A&M. And so I know a little bit about funding and like the way that you keep your tenure positions in a lot of these universities is you have to like continually bring funding in. So both my parents are professors there. And so like a lot of the professorial game is getting money from granting institutions. Now in the science community, it's from the National Science Foundation, it's from the National Institute, or whatever, Fauci is the head of the National Institute of Health. They have to keep the dollars flowing. So if you admit this is gain of function research, you start asking questions, NIH and Fauci can fucking cut you off. Like, this is a

whole business. It's a multi-billion dollar, I mean, it's an industry because it's about research. And look, the core theme of our show is like follow the money right so follow the money where's the money lead at least fauci peter dazak and it's like look i don't want to sound crazy but this is basically like a global conspiracy in terms of the chinese government it's a total cover-up of the chinese government the u.s government the guy who was on the fucking tv and we were all supposed to trust this entire time and it turns out like he's the guy who reversed the ban in the first place in order to take advantage of the chaos under Trump. And I know it's so complicated.

And regular people, this is what bothers me most about the mainstream media. People want to live their lives and they want answers. And increasingly, they know they are being lied to, but they do not have the time because it's our job in order to, you know, explain all this about Peter Daszak and the World Health Organization, what is gain of function research, how Washington actually works, the global funding structures, etc. People are being lied to. They have been completely lied to on the story. I think I do think this is the biggest failure since Iraq WMD. I think this is WMD 2.0. Well, and there's a couple things that are really important about it. I mean, number one, just knowing how the pandemic started so we can

avoid it in the future. That would be a good thing. But number two, it really does reveal the brokenness of the media and the way that they were complicit here, the way that they actually bought the lies because they were viewing everything through this culture war lens rather than just looking for and searching for the facts. So they looked at they looked at, OK, I know Dr. Fauci. I've been talking to him for years. I have this like relationship with him and I trust him. And on the other side, we have these crazy kooks. So I'm not even going to dig any further. I'm just going to assume that what these people are saying is correct. And again, you layer on the charge of racism and it makes a very potent brew. So it shows the way that these failures and vulnerabilities within the media can lead to wildly misleading the entire population for a year on what I mean, you'd have to say this was one of the most important questions of the entire year.

And they just were absolutely complicit in a total cover-up where you couldn't even talk about it well it's also there's no democrats that are questioning fauci the way that ran paul is or senator kennedy no one else is doing that yeah because they're in the same boat they don't want to be branded as racist which is and this happens point in time robert it's not about chinese people anymore it It's about Fauci and Daszak. Do you know, Doug? How is it racist to ask them what they knew? But I think it's also because Fauci has achieved such hero status among a lot of the Democratic base.

But don't you think that that's teetering almost Cuomo-like right now? No, I actually don't. I really don't. Joe, Cuomo's approval rating amongst Dems in New York is like 65%. Like, it's not, you know what I mean? But Fauci, though, I don't think- He actually said something logical yesterday. Oh, really? What was that?

Well, someone was talking to him about, what do we do about the unvaccinated people? And he goes, I'm vaccinated. Are you vaccinated? If you're vaccinated, don't worry about it. Yeah, thank God. That's what he said. And everybody's like, wait a minute, what the fuck did he just say here i'll send it to you jamie because it's it's pretty funny because he's actually making sense which is like kind of hilarious yeah these what's

fascinating i think around all of that is because you're seeing the price of the culture war in real time and you're seeing exactly right that's what how much damage this can it can do to this country whenever you have the media sold out in this way. Donald McNeil, who actually got canceled. He got canceled for, oh, because he said the N-word on a high school trip. There's a whole other thing. Yeah, I know that story. So anyway.

Because someone called somebody that and he said, did this person say that word? And because of that, he got canceled. And years ago. Let's hear this. Let's hear this because it's kind of hilarious. Because you have the vaccine. I am vaccinated. You may not be vaccinated.

But you don't pose a risk to me because I am vaccinated. So if you are vaccinated, what are you worrying about? Unvaccinated, what are you worrying about? Now the only question is the effective rate of the vaccine, which is 80, 90 percent, whatever it is. So if you're concerned about that, get a vaccine. Well, there'll be unvaccinated people. That's their problem. Thank you. This is crazy.

This is crazy. He's talking logic. Yeah. Trump is gone, man crazy he's talking logic yeah well and here's trump is gone man everything's normal again and this is the thing that i hated around this whole pandemic is like and trump definitely made all of this worse with the culture war and like the whole like the anti mask stance and all this you have people who built up identities around whatever their pandemic era choices were yes and then the media fed this like you know the left media it was like the people who built up identities around whatever their pandemic era choices were.

And then the media fed this like, you know, the left media, it was like the people who are, if you're having a hard time right now, the people to blame are those like crazy right wing, like your neighbor, your friend, your uncle down the street who has views that are different from yours. And if you're listening to right wing media, it's like the real villain are these people that are wearing double masks, et cetera, et cetera. And it just feeds this, It's like the real villain are these people that are wearing double masks, et cetera, et cetera. And it just feeds this this partisan hatred, this sectarian like hatred between these two camps. And then it makes it impossible to get to the facts of things like lab leak because everybody's just feeding it through these stupid cultural lens. And meanwhile, the people like we were talking about before who profited and benefited off of all of these this misery and pain and suffering, they don't they face no scrutiny. They get off scot free because the media is so interested in the political class are so interested in making us all hate each other and blame each other for the things that are going wrong in the country.

This is what I was saying to Donald McNeil thing, because I want people to know this. He admitted after he was fired from The New York Times, he says, I did not believe the lab leak theory because Trump was saying it. And here's what he said. I have been friends with Dr. Fauci and Peter Daszak for a long time. I have known them to never mislead me. So I trusted them whenever it came to the lab leak. He admitted it. This is the former science reporter at The New York Times. He was a star before the whole cancellation. This is what it comes down to. I mean, in a way, like props, Donald, like thank you for telling the truth, which is that you were like, I didn't trust Trump, but I trusted Peter Daszak and Fauci and them. But it's all out there in the open. And that's the culture.

That's the culture of the entire elite media class, which is they they we there was this poll we covered in was it January? I think it was post January 6th where it's like, what's the top concern for Democrats? It was Trump voters. And it was amongst, I think, GOP voters. It was illegal immigrants. And then it was Democrats. No, it wasn't the top concern. It was the number one threat.

Oh, yes. To the country. And if you ask Democrats. I thought it was white supremacy. That's the same thing. Panic love. That's the same thing. For Democrats, number one was Trump supporters. I think white supremacy was probably like same thing right that's the same thing for for democrats it number

one was trump supporters i think white supremacy was probably like number two or three and for republicans it was it was immigration so again like those people and liberals right those were the so it was rather than thinking about the people who actually have power who got wildly rich off of your suffering this year. It's like the media has conditioned everyone to just hate each other and think that your neighbor, your friend, your mom, whoever in your life that holds different views from you, be they liberal or conservative, that they're the real problem. They're the real threat. Think about that language, the real threat. It's not war or peace or climate change or anything like or a natural

disaster it's your neighbor and that situation cannot persist in america i mean that doesn't lead to anywhere anywhere good at all if you actually think that that is the scariest thing to to your life and like the future for your kids can't live and it allows the political class to just do nothing all they have to do is point fingers. That's it. And the crazy thing is this is like a self-imposed mass hysteria. You would think that like there's someone manipulating the strings behind the media to try to get us to hate each other, but it's not.

Everyone's doing it on their own. It's just a profitable strategy. That's what it is. But you're right. It's a confluence of events. It's the confluence of three networks of stratified media, liberal and conservative out there. This is the ethos of our show. When we broke away, they're like, this is what we believe in.

We believe in making people hate each other less and hate the corrupt ruling class more. That's what we believe. And we'll see. We can see exactly how this manifests itself, which is like I was talking about the January 6th commission because this really bothers me. And it's like I said, I was horrified by January 6th. I think what happened was terrible. really bothers me. And it's like I said, I was horrified by January 6th. I think what happened was terrible. I still see, if you are a journalist in Washington, I see these CNN correspondents running up and chasing down senators in the hallways being like, Senator, what about the

January 6th commission? Senator, do you support against January 6th commission? What about, you know, subpoena power whenever it comes to January 6th commission? Meanwhile, and we recently covered this, there is a national reckoning around home prices in America. Okay, but they're not mutually exclusive, right? But the January 6th thing is important. See, it is important, but is it the six months later is it should be the ruling number one conversation of a journalist? I think it's really important. And one of the reasons why I think it's important

because it highlights the reasons why a guy like Donald Trump is so fucking dangerous is because a guy can incite a bunch of morons to do something really fucking stupid. And now that he's silenced off of social media, and now that, you know, that actually did happen, once it becomes a thing, it could be like mass shootings, right? They didn't exist, then they did.

Now they're a thing. That could be a thing again. If it was a real commission, I would believe you, Joe. But knowing how these things work, I know that this commission would be some sort of bullshit, like the Benghazi report before it or many of these others. The way that the politics works around it, it will dominate the news cycle. And here's the thing, though. Washington actually is a zero-sum game. Like when I'm talking about mutual exclusivity, it actually is. Senate floor time is the most precious thing in D.C. So whatever the driving

conversation of the D.C. is that day, it is actually detracting from somewhere else because these people take vacations literally every other day. The August recess is coming up, all of this. So when we focus on, I mean, look, the presidency, like the presidency is really about 100 days. And after that, you're like running for the midterms. And after that, you're running for reelection in terms of the last, what I think, like 75, 80 years of the American presidency, the vast majority of major legislation moves in the first couple of months of the administration, and that's it. You're totally dead.

And so for the fact that January 6th continues to dominate American politics, I agree with you. It's completely important. And if it was a real commission, yes. But I know that there are these titanic other issues moving within American politics and that are getting zero attention. Lab leak is actually number one. Maybe somebody should go and ask a Democratic senator whether they believe in the lab leak theory or not. This is the mutual exclusivity is because the CNN reporter must ask this because he needs to

give his bosses something to air on the nightly news that day, which is part of the editorial agenda. The Fox News reporter has to do the same thing. And it comes together to mask all of these incredibly important issues. So it's it really is a tragedy because it's like you said, I don't want to downplay Jan 6. I actually think it was terrible. And it does show like the power of, you know, of a demagogue, like of a charlatan whenever you become president but whenever we're focusing on that at the expense of everything else and maybe we should even ask why are these people all like like why are you willing to storm the capital for trump i can help you out please tell me yeah they're idiots there's a lot of idiots it's very easy to survive but i think i think here's that's what but that. Here's where I really agree with you.

January 6th was like a case study in all that's gone wrong in the country. And you're absolutely right. I think what you said is really profound about this is a thing that happened, and now you're very likely to see similar repeats, similar type of, whether it's on the right or the left or whatever. And you just know that the the sort of partisan commission that will come out of Washington, we know what the answer will be. The answer will be number one, Republicans are bad and Donald Trump is bad. They will do if you were

going to really get to the root of what's going on, it would implicate too many Democrats as well who've been happy to play this game of mutual demonization and existential politics that only lead to, you know, these sort of horrific outcomes. And again, that doesn't take agency away from any of the people who did this shit, who are morons and like deserve whatever, you know, whatever punishment is appropriate. The problem is what this what this will lead to is number one, Donald Trump's bad. OK, we get that. We all know that and we have our feelings about it. Number two, this justifies us taking more surveillance power, creeping into your life more, demonizing the other side, quote unquote, even more. And so 100%, I mean, actually, you could think about our show and what we do every day as

trying to get to the roots of how you end up in a fucking terrible place like January 6th. Do I think that our political class is going to do it? No, of course not. Of course not, because it implicates too many of them. So they'll just search for the partisan answer. They'll search for the answer that hands them more power and hands the sort of surveillance state and police state more power. We're already seeing that. Joe Biden just made a big announcement about all of that. And then we'll move forward. So he announced, and I haven't had a chance to read through all the details, but there's a new big initiative to essentially use the powers that we deployed against Islamic terrorists now against the domestic population. So treating sort of domestic extremism in the same way that we treat it.

How do you define domestic extremism? Well, that's the question. And that's what January 6th Commission is about. That is the question. Because, look, today, I fucking hate white supremacists. You know, I mean, it's a monstrous ideology. But one day it's that, and the next day, just like we saw with Islam. I mean, some of these people who were arrested for supposedly aiding and abetting terrorism is totally set up. They never would have even thought about a plot if the FBI hadn't encouraged them to create a plot. It helps to bolster someone's career because then they can say, look, we went out and got the bad guys and we disrupted this bombing plot, etc., etc. They get elevated in the media. Their career flourishes.

coming plot, et cetera, et cetera. They get elevated in the media. Their career flourishes. You've got people who now have even more surveillance powers into all of our lives. And that question of, OK, now who is a domestic terror? Like that is the question. And that's where this all ends up ultimately becoming very scary. I saw this in The New York Times post January 6th. They're saying that, you know, people are now using encrypted messaging in order to pass potentially dangerous ideas. So what is the what is the what is the idea? You have to. Well, we need we need access to signal because people are having dangerous conversations. Some ex-white supremacists use signal maybe in order to plan January 6th.

OK, a lot of people use the phone in order to do all kinds of shit. Does that mean that all phone conversations should be tapped all of the time? This is insane. Or they said the same thing about podcasts. Yes, RSS feeds. I'm sure you saw that too, right? There was a big New York Times article about how podcasts are this unregulated, Misfinformation.

Unfettered. That's the word they like to use. Unfettered conversations are happening on these podcasts. That's what we do. And we have to shut that down. Well, that's why they're popular. Can't have that, Joe. They're popular because of unfettered conversations.

And this is what I want to underscore, is that when you allow this to happen in the hands of these like monsters, is that they will use it not to any, what you're talking about is a good faith effort to be like, this is fucking crazy. And I actually read a profile of one of the guys, I hate to laugh about this, but some of the people who died on January 6th had heart attacks. And it was because it was like the most exciting day of their lives. Like while they were storming the Capitol. I read a profile of one of these guys. People that were storming the Capitol died?

People were storming the Capitol. They were so excited. There were like four people who had heart attacks. Eating meatball subs all day. Clogged arteries. It's hard to find a healthy diet in this country, Joe. I was reading about this man and this man he's a former obama voter who was i think he's from alabama he was a pro-publica

obama voter was an obama voter not that long ago and the union he was i think he was part of a union and he had a good warehouse job and a lot of that left in the mid-2000s and he started blaming the elites no of course right for taking away that. And Trump spoke to him in a way that nobody had spoken to him before. This was Trump, unadulterated culture. And that actually made me really sad because I was driving before the election around Reno, Nevada. It was a very rural part of the country. And right on the side of the road, there was this farmer or rancher or something. He had a big house and a massive sign. It was like 20, 30 feet. And it just said, Trump, colon, fuck your feelings. And I really really realized I was like, that was the core appeal is that Trump gave the power to 75 million people. Remember, he won 10 million more votes what you're talking about they feel so dismissed disgust like the disgust like emanates from washington from new york from hollywood from everywhere through every organ of our culture

that in trump they were able to say fuck you that was their one that's all they have left they don't have anything else left and so and I don't want to downplay once again, but like you have to ask this question. How did this Obama guy storm the Capitol and then die of a heart attack because it was one of the most exciting days of his life? Isn't it, you know, idiot? Yeah, maybe. But like this, this manifests itself all in very dangerous conditions. And so that's when I see all of these games. Like I remember post January 6th, we're talking about we need to do what we did in Iraq here in D.C.

I'm like, no, that was terrible. I'm like, dude. Who's saying that? I think it was Joy Reid who was talking about debathification. And if anybody wants to know, so I don't want to go too deep around a rabbit hole, but the only reason I'm in politics is because of my opposition to the Iraq war. And I grew up not far from here in College Station, which was very pro-Iraq war. And I thought I was losing my fucking mind as a teenager. De-bathification was the policy where we basically unemployed in a single day all of the people who used to work for the Saddam regime in Iraq. Oh, they were also happened to be the situation where

you had to be a bath party member if you wanted to take out the trash or the military, the police, all of that. So the country fell to shit in six months, and that's how the insurgency happened. And it was amazing to me watching Joy Reid and many others talking about Iraq and war on terror style policy, saying that we need to do that to our own population. That is the ultimate agenda. We see John Brennan and all these CIA guys saying the same thing. Yes, there we go. We need more counterterrorism strategies, more dangerous than we've seen in Al Qaeda. And the urgent most terror is like this language. I know what this language means. It means billions more dollars to the CIA, to a new creation of some fake like National Domestic Terror Center, which will be a fancy new building in McLean, Virginia, so that people can spy on you. And then once that happens, you think they're going to give that up? The funding never dries up. It has to keep coming or people lose their jobs. And once you work for the federal government, it just continues to like march on and on and on. So we both identified this

very soon. I even saw, I don't want to attribute the quote directly to him, but I saw some suggestions somewhere about like, these are the type of people we would drone strike in Iraq, some former military. I'm like, dude, what is happening here? This is crazy. This is totally crazy. And yet, I mean, look, it hasn't happened yet, but like there were a lot of discussions about a new domestic war on terror law and you don't even really need a new war on terror law all you need to do is to redefine what domestic terrorism means the fbi can do basically whatever the fuck it wants like i have read some of these uh affidavits of the islamic terrorism this shit is scary they're like i mean they give her like right up the line of entrapment where they're like hey do you want to bomb something and we talked about it the other day on the podcast that there was a guy who was a 19 year old kid right and they

they gave this kid a fake bomb they talked him into it he thought he was in with al-qaeda right they gave him a fake bomb they gave him a phone to detonate it the moment he pressed the buttons on the phone they swooped in and arrested material support for terrorism 25 to life that's it yeah now he's locked down forever there was a um i think it was the Times that did a whole expose on the Herald Square bomber. Do you remember this? I remember when this was a news, I think it was at MSNBC when the news broke. Oh, they've disrupted this plot, et cetera, et cetera. You dig into the details of what actually-

Where was Herald Square? Herald Square in New York. So the New York City subway- Oh, where Macy's is. Yeah, Macy's, Herald Square. Gigantic subway station, tons of people. So you see that and you're like, oh my God, this close call. This was crazy. So, number one, the FBI informant radicalized this guy, started showing him pictures. He was a devout Muslim. They start showing him pictures of like Abu Ghraib and all these horrific things, radicalize him towards the West. towards the West. Then they're encouraging him to help them with the planning. They get down to it and he starts to balk and go, I don't really want to be involved with this. And I got it. He actually

says, I need to talk to my mom about this. Okay. This is the sort of like horrible terrorist threat did not actually, the only thing he agreed to do is he was like, okay, maybe I'll serve as a scout, but I have to ask my mom about it. And that was enough. And again, careers were made off of this. So those are the – So that's all he said? Maybe I'll serve as a scout? So he was willing – he agreed technically to serve as a scout. And then they swooped in.

Yep. Yep. So that's it. Material support for terrorism. They got all these guys to show up at the airport during the whole ISIS thing. The moment you buy an airport ticket, that's material support for terrorism to the Islamic State and you show up and they can arrest you right at the gate. And so it becomes an industry

and all I'm saying is I don't want to turn that industry on more people that it's already been turned on. How do we stop this? Here's the question. I guess speaking about it's going to help, but how do you stop this whole widespread domestic surveillance system from expanding.

Because that's the real concern. And the way to ensure that there's support for expanding is to continue this division amongst people. That's right. That's exactly right. Don't buy into it. Don't buy into the whole like, fuck the Democrats, fuck the Republicans. The problem is a lot of people live in these worlds

where they're very isolated and they don't know anybody outside of their own ideological bubble. Exactly right. And we self-sort, right? I'm going to have a drink. Go ahead. If anybody wants one, let me know. I know that's a little early in the day for me.

Yeah, me too. I'm kind of freaking me out. You know, I think the hopeful piece is like people are searching out people like you. People are searching out places like breaking points. They're searching for because, you know, most people in their normal lives, they don't experience it as like, oh, my God, this person across town is like the real threat to me. They don't experience that isn't the reality of their daily lives. And so I do think that there's an innate hunger for a different way of approaching this, because there is this is the perfect and this is the perfect example of

like with the domestic surveillance, you know, when it was the war on terror, you had a lot of progressives who are very, like clear about civil libertarian, like they stood up for the principle, they really knew where they stood. And now that we're talking about the domestic terrorism, well, suddenly they've totally flipped. Now they're pro-surveillance state. Can we stop for a second? Look at that. Pull that article up again. Look at the language that's being used and recognize who's doing this.

Right. Recognize what Barr said. It was Baker. Was it Baker? Right. Oh, sorry. Okay. When you find it, put it back up.

Because the issue is, look at, okay, Baker, I'm sorry. Baker argued that the counterterrorism strategy should be reserved for the much more dangerous forms of terrorism we've seen from ISIS and Al-Qaeda. But intelligence officials say the threat to the homeland from Islamic terrorism is greatly diminished. And the Biden administration says domestic terrorism, in quotes, has evolved into the most urgent terrorism threat the United States faces today. Think about that. What the fuck kind of crazy shit is that? Think about that. How much domestic terrorism are we experiencing?

Correct. Are we experiencing domestic terrorism? No. terrorism we experience correct well i mean are we experiencing domestic terrorism no that we had a bunch of yahoos that were living in their mom's basement that did a really fucking stupid thing and oddly enough there's a lot of videos of cops opening up gates right what is that about are those cops trump supporters is that what that is there has not been an explanation but and here's the other piece that you gotta love right if you had, did you read any of the stuff about like the Keystone Cops level failures on that day? Because you're talking about, yeah, this was like a few thousand people.

If you'd had it properly manned. As opposed to the way they did it with Black Lives Matter when Black Lives Matter was near the Capitol. Oh, forget about it. It was like. Lockdown. Right. It was. Helicopter circling overhead.

It's like aliens were coming. Yes. And so for this, okay, so they don't have the manpower. They didn't take the, it's not even intelligence. Yeah. Seriously. It was all out there in the open. They thought it was just going to be a protest and a bunch of people cheering and they had

no preparation. And then their riot shields were like locked on a bus so they couldn't, and they didn't have the key, so they couldn't get to them. Some of them who did have riot shields they cracked and broke so this is total total failure on the part of the capitol hill police and everybody who was involved in making sure and securing that building and so what is the answer rather than being like you all fucked up and here's how you need to do it differently they hand them a larger budget they They hand them more millions, more money. The problem was not money.

The problem is that they didn't take it seriously. They didn't have the manpower. They didn't have just like the basics of their equipment. And so the answer is we're going to give you more money and more power. I will never forget Election Day in Washington. Sorry, Inauguration Day. It was the green zone. So our studio, our old Hill studio, was at 16th and K, which is right across from the White House.

We were unable to access it. There were military Humvees that were in the streets. It was a total lockdown. It was literally being in a war zone. And I was looking around. I lived there for 10 years, and I was like, this is the nation's capital. That's sad. There are armed men in the streets.

And here's the thing. Maybe Inauguration Day, even though I thought it was bullshit. They were there for months. They were there. I think in February it had cost $500 billion. And I used to drive past. Wait, what? Million.

Yeah, 500. Oh, yeah, sorry, 500 million. Half a billion. Sorry, sorry, sorry. Half a billion dollars. I was like, wait a minute. Someone's stealing money. Pour another drink, Joe. Still $500 million. I was like, wait a minute. Someone's stealing money. Pour another drink, Joe.

Still $500 million. I'm going to spark a joint. But they were there, and the reason they had to stay is because Congress was like, well, there's a QAnon forum where they say maybe real inauguration day is March. So all of these National Guardsmen, yeah, they have to stay until March. And then the permanent fencing was up there for a long time. Like even today, you cannot enter the Capitol building, which this is our nation's capital. It used to be a very open and free place, which I always thought was amazing. You see these tourists walking through, and I think it's important.

It's the people's house. And it was there for months and months. We're talking about we probably spent – the official numbers haven't been released, probably like $1.5 billion on that deployment of National Guardsmen to Washington, D.C., turning it into a green zone, into a militarized zone. For what? And again, for what? The image of the world that we broadcast from Biden's inauguration was a locked down city, afraid of its own shadow, as you said, over a bunch of yahoos who stormed the Capitol. You have 100 more cops on that day with riot shields. It looks completely and totally different. And what happened? The National Guard and all those guys, they got billions more in the grants. The Capitol Police, I think a few people were fired, but no real reckoning with that. They got millions more dollars and we're all just supposed to move on.

It was the most shameful response that I have seen yet. And then the domestic terrorism thing that you're seeing there. All of this is about money, in my opinion. It's an industry backed up by ideology. That's money and power. It is money and power that concentrates and then they use the justification of January 6th in order to blow up the budget for billions and billions more. And then they'll use some. And here's the thing. They have to not manufacture. I don't want to use my words carefully, but the Herald Square thing is an example what you were talking about with a 19 year old that they're going to go out there on these forums and start grooming kids and saying hey do you fucking hate you know like do you hate brown

people or something well you should buy this thing and buy a ticket to come to this convention the moment you buy the ticket they're going to fucking nail you right and what what is that going to do did that work on Islamic terrorism? Actually, no. Did that keep anyone safer? Yeah. No. You actually radicalized someone who wasn't radicalized before.

Congratulations. Spent billions of dollars on it and it has to perpetuate. So it will first it's here. And it's like you asked a great question at the top of this conversation. What does domestic extremism mean? It means whatever the fuck they want it to mean. So in the height of the pandemic, let's say that Biden was president president is anti-masking domestic extremism are those weirdos who stormed the michigan capitol i'm not endorsing this but like you know the michigan capitol thing

it was like months ago are they domestic extremists yeah maybe according to those are the guys that wanted to kill the governor no no no that was a plot i'm talking about there was at one point they like stormed the michigan cap They were like, we're not going to wear masks. Anti-lockdown protesters. It's like 100 people. Look, and let's be clear. This is one of the bipartisan. No president comes into office and says, I'm going to give some of these powers that I have that I think have gone too far. I'm going to give some of that up.

None of that do that. Why would you do that if you're president? So today, it's Biden and it's Democrats in charge. And so the focus is on white supremacists or people on the right. Under Trump, he wanted to make Antifa classified as a domestic terror organization. Now, look, if people break the law in Antifa or they're violent or whatever, like obviously they should be dealt with. We don't need any new laws to do this. So this isn't like, okay, we're only going to go after the ones on the right or the left. Like if you're thinking this is going

to benefit your political cause, you need to put that aside. This has to be about, you asked what we can do to push back. Like it really has to be people who have actual principles, who apply them consistently, even when they think it might hurt, quote unquote, their team. And that's where you just, you know, the media and the political class obviously goes in the complete opposite direction where they flip flop constantly, depending on what's convenient for them in that day. And we're in a dangerous situation because the quote unquote liberal outlets have spent the past four years elevating people like, you know, former heads of the CIA and former heads of the FBI and all of these people who want nothing more than to get the next surveillance contract to continue to further the power of themselves and their buddies and the institutions that they always represented. And those people are now seen as like liberal heroes.

So it does put us in a very vulnerable and dangerous situation. And it's a very clear strategy. If you're some sort of an outside agency that's trying to fuck with people and you want to get on forums or get on social media and incite people in one direction or the other and we don't know how many of the people that post on facebook or how many of the people that post on twitter are that that's very very true it makes us it makes us a more fragile society and that's why the whole russian memes thing i've actually read a lot i've heard you talk about it too the internet research fascinating absolutely fascinating there's a 2015 new yorker profile on the internet research agency and all that stuff too but you have to have something to manipulate and for it to be real

right like we're only fucked with because we've allowed our population to basically be ripped apart. Like we are increasingly seeing this. This is why I focus on the economics as well. We are becoming a completely stratified society. Like people are flocking to mega cities like Los Angeles. Well, not now. But Austin is actually a very good example of a lot. Arizona had a lot of incoming.

Florida as well, which is that you have the professional managerial class basically concentrating in these mega urban environments. And this sounds crude, but like breeding with each other, having kids, you know, together. And again, there's nothing wrong with this. Like people who go to college generally want to marry somebody else who went to college. But then they want to move somewhere where other people also went to college. And then you raise your kids in such a way that you all have the same values. But this has now happened over 40 years or so. And what has happened, Charles Murray, who shall not be named, actually wrote an entire book about this called Coming Apart. This was based upon 2010 data. And you

actually saw that zip codes were completely being ripped apart by education level. And the more that this happens, and the trend continues, where more educated people marry other educated people, and they increasingly become raised away from one another, then you're just going to hate each other. And the people who got the short end of the stick are very normal, average people who are like, hey, I like living 10 miles away from my mom. There's nothing wrong with that. I moved to Washington. I grew up in College Station. You know, I'm very atypical. A lot of people stayed behind. There's nothing wrong with them.

But let's say I stayed there. I lived 10 miles from my mom. Right. Well, there you go. And that's a good thing. That's actually a good thing for society. Because then if you need your kids to be washed, you could call your mom. You don't have to call somebody, you know, a random stranger, drop them off at daycare.

There's a lot of social family benefits that come from a lot of this, which actually make us a more cohesive society. But our economy is basically ripping the country apart. And that increasingly also makes it so that if you voted for Trump, you're much less likely to vote and live and near anyone who voted for Biden and vice versa. This is the whole cyber suburban phenomena, which is that the more that people live and raise their kids in a bubble, then they're going to make it so that like where I live, for example, they don't know. I don't think the people I live around, all the Black Lives Matter, gay pride flags, everything is, you know, all of the flags are in the windows and all of that. I don't think they even know anybody who thinks differently. And when they do, they hate them. And what they don't recognize

is that they have an immense cultural power that they are projecting onto the rest of the country. And the rest of the country, they feel your hatred, but a lot of them just want to live their lives. Eventually, though, the feeling of that hatred manifested the hatred back. That was the Trump phenomenon. And so the more that we continue to just be stratified by economic lines, it has all these horrific societal benefits of a lot of these intelligence people. Who do you think they are? I know where they all live. They live in the wealthiest suburbs. The four wealthiest counties in America surround Washington, D.C. It's all bureaucrats. It's people who work in defense contracting.

It's like Bethesda, Loudoun County, Fairfax, and all these people, it becomes this business of hating one another. And it's just so incredibly profitable. And I mean, look, we try very, very hard, but we're dropping a bucket. And look, it's a privilege to be here, one of the largest platforms in the world. And if that's what we can get out, the message is we cannot live this way. We cannot live in such a way where you don't even know somebody who thinks differently than you. And then, look, we're in tribal people. Like, we're tribal. It's built into our DNA. Hating one another actually is quite natural. And that is why a lot of people exploit that for dangerous purposes. But you can't live in a cohesive country that way, especially America.

We're a very young country. We're not not united by blood we're not united by generally like common cult like i'm you know my parents are from india and i identify fully as an american citizen it's because of the ethos of who we are like i read tales about the civil war i almost cry like thinking about i'm not related to any of these people but i'm like this is this is part of who we were, like union troops dying and fighting to free slaves. When I think about that, I feel a deep connection with it in our history, but we're losing that because we're increasingly losing any connection to one another. So there was a study that just came out recently that I actually think is incredibly important. I don't know if you know the economist Thomas Piketty, but he's done some of the sort of like seminal work, not just here in the US, but across Western

European democracies as well, on class and income inequality and like the way that these societies are coming apart. And what he found, and you know, I think this very much is some of the points that you've been making, Joe, is like, in places where these tribal culture war politics are put at the center, the economics and just like trying to get people the basics of a decent life. It completely falls by the wayside because you look at the you look at the numbers over the past year. You look at the fact that you have these billionaires who got wealthier and wealthier and wealthier and regular people got so fucked. Either you were forced into the front lines and your health completely disregarded and getting sick and overwhelming numbers and all of that, or you lost your job completely. Right. That was the reality for most working class Americans. So you look at that and you're like, where's the backlash? Where's the political response?

Where's the balancing of the scales so that at least, you know, you got a fighting shot if you're a working class person in this country? And the answer is, and this is what his research over 21 different Western democracies showed, the answer is culture war is so good at distracting people and pitting them against each other versus focusing on any of those concerns. That's a bonanza for political class. It's a bonanza for financial elites. That's a bonanza for the Jeff Bezos's and the Walmarts of the world. Because then all you have to do to be on the right side of those culture wars, you know,

you throw up a Black Lives Matter banner, even as you're screwing over your black and brown, it doesn't matter. You said the right words. It means for our political class, Nancy Pelosi, all she has to do is like kneel and can't take off. Everyone's like, oh, she's amazing. That was wonderful. Joe Biden, it was. It was wonderful. Incredible.

It was one of my favorite political moments ever because it was so transparent. It's so perfect. It was like a magician with no sleeves. Or like I loved Elizabeth Warren at the DNC. She put Black Lives Matter, BLM in school blocks behind her. And like this is on the right, it at the DNC. She put Black Lives Matter, BLM, in school blocks behind her. And on the right, it's the same thing. All you have to do is be like, I hate cancel culture. And can you believe what they're doing with Dr. Seuss and Potato Head?

That doesn't have any legislation. You're not proposing any legislation. You're not trying to make people's lives better. You just have to say the right words to culturally signal to your base. And it lets you completely off the hook. So that's why there's never any sort of like political response or massive backlash to the complete pulling apart of America. Yeah, our cultural wars has hijacked our tribal instincts. Yeah. Instead of looking at ourselves as one enormous tribe, we've decided that we're separate tribes and that we need to get rid of one tribe

in order to have peace. But guess what? If they ever did that, like let's just imagine a world where the left assassinated all the people on the right. They would find people on the left who aren't left enough.

Correct. And they would separate and they would divide and conquer. That's happening already. That's already happening. Yes, it is. Amongst the already happening yes it is like the mega right versus the other right the progressive right the woke right never trump right exactly right the froms of the world and yes and all of this is just it's such a great point it's just a fucking like it's a sideshow like it's a soap opera as as like the country that's what it is. It's kayfabe.

He talks about kayfabe all the time. We all need mushrooms. That's what we need. This is psychedelic mushroom centers all over the country. You've been doing all these monologues now about psychedelics. Well, it's actually really important.

That was one of the things they thought in the 60s and 70s is like we're going to get everybody LSD and then we're all going to get along. It didn't quite work out. LSD is more tricky. Sue, I haven't done

any of these substances. You've done none of them? You've done none of them? No, I am planning. What are you planning? Well, so psilocybin

is now decriminalized in DC. Ah. So that's my plan for it. But I feel like I need some time and space to...

No, microdose. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Just a little bit. A little bit is nice just to go, oh, I get it. Okay. Am I going to turn into Post Malone? No.

But is it worth having... That was one of the best podcasts we ever did. It was a great podcast. We were blasted. To do a podcast on mushrooms shows mushrooms can't be bad. I mean, all we talked about about was Post fighting off a wolf. I think you've talked about Roblox too, which my kids are also totally obsessed with.

My daughter's finally abandoned Roblox. How old is she? She just turned 11. My son just turned 8 and he is so addicted. You know what happens is she has friends back in California and they play Roblox on the iPad online against each other.

And so she'll have two iPads going on one that's FaceTiming. Yeah. So she's FaceTiming her friend and the other one they're Robloxing. Yes. So they're playing this game. And then the one thing that is kind of creative is they invent rooms. Right. So they develop like they actually construct and she wants to show me these things that

she's constructed. It's kind of interesting. So he also has gotten super into like then there's YouTubers that play roblox yes and you watch them and he'll be like fucking crazy he'll be like he'll be like mom you have to watch this video it's essential he'll say something like that it's like an hour long i'm like i'm sorry lolo i love you so much i am not watching your hour-long roblox video she was telling me about how much her son's addicted to roblox and i saw the roblox ipo and i was like any app that can get this many kids i was like it's gonna make a lot so i bought some stock i was like oh let's do it no no there's

money that you have to pay during the game that's right and like on my phone i get these alerts requests for my daughter wanting more robux that's right, that's right. I'm like, what the fuck is this? My son, this is so cute. So he's playing soccer. And at the beginning of the last season, they were all like introducing themselves as part of the team and whatever. And he said something. They were supposed to say something about themselves. And he's like, I'm Lowell and I really like Roblox.

And all the other kids were like, oh, my God, that's me too. I love Roblox. It was this massive revelation like oh my god that's me too i love roblox like it was this massive revelation like wow we're all just alike so anyway roblox yeah my yeah they're all tick tocking and roblox and well maybe maybe that shared communal experience will bring the country back together see tick tock is actually the opposite though this is where i get i hate to be this guy, to like turn into something serious. My 13-year-old is the one who really into TikTok. TikTok is actually

a hyper-personalized algorithm, which is that it serves up stuff specifically. I don't use TikTok because of the Chinese factor. Well, can you explain the whole factor? Because it's one of the most pervasive apps that any software engineer has ever back-engineered. You're not on there,

are you? No. Okay. It is one of, no, it's a revolution in social media. No,

it's not bad. No, I would be impressed. You'd be impressed if I was? I would be kind of impressed. If I was out there TikTok-ing?

Yeah. Well, it's not all dancing. The world needs that, Joe. The world does need that. I mean, there's some very-

Jerry Eclipse are very popular on there. Oh, there you go. We're popular. I have a big beard. No, there were lots of like Bernie TikTokers.

So my 13-year-old is very into TikTok. And so she shares, I don't understand how to navigate through the app because I'm too fucking old, but she shares with me some of the content and some of it is genuinely hilarious. I see some of it go viral. Yeah. In terms of the social- The internet is filled with hilarious people. It's very creative. It's very creative.

But I mean, from their recommendation algorithm, basically, as I understand it, which is that they track almost every minute thing that you do within the app, like how fast that you take to swipe up, and they are able to build a hyper-personalized algorithm specifically to you. And the reason why is this takes out all the bullshit from Facebook and Twitter,

and it boils it down to what social media's job actually is, keeping you on that app as long as humanly possible. And I saw recently TikTok actually surpassed Instagram in terms of time on app here in the United States, where we have tens of millions of people who are spending more time there than on Instagram. You're taking money out of Zuckerberg's pocket whenever you do that. And now you're giving it to, I forget his name, the ByteDance CEO. Now you're giving money to the ByteDance guy

because that is the best. ByteDance? ByteDance. It's the parent company of TikTok. They bought TikTok. Well, no, they own TikTok. Or whatever.

The creator, yeah. In America, it's a different TikTok than China? Well, TikTok USA is a subsidiary of TikTok which is owned by ByteDance. But everything's owned

by China now, right? Correct. So it's like it doesn't matter. Yeah, I mean, it's not like like this one's directly owned by china as opposed to indirectly like john how far can this go in terms of like china's influence this is what's confusing because a decade right but that's what i'm saying a decade ago there was nothing two decades ago there was nothing that's actually that's a misconception a decade ago no no two decades ago well actually three decades ago 2001 is when George W. Bush signed permanent normal trade relations with

China, which was basically, we are not going to have to renew free trade relations with China, basically gave them unfettered access to our markets. So that is when you can actually look at the Federal Reserve graph, US manufacturing jobs drops off a cliff after 2001. So then what happened in 2008? We went bankrupt. Guess what? The Chinese, because they have a state-run economy, come up and they gobble up a huge portion of American manufacturing, of a lot of our companies which were cash strapped, who needed cash injections. The Chinese are like, oh, here, we're right here. They're fake billionaires who are all propped up by the Chinese government. Around 2010 is when you could see some of this happening. Actually, weirdly enough, Obama produced a very good documentary on this called

American Factory, which is on Netflix. Oh, that is actually fantastic. It's like this. Yeah, this GM plant, which closed and was bought by this Chinese billionaire. And there was all this like culture clash because the Chinese are like just work them like 24 hours a day and they're like no like we don't do that here. We have a union. We have a union. No it's crazy. You should watch it.

It's a really good documentary. I maintain faith in Obama for some strange reason. You still do? He's one of the only politicians that I think I'm sure he got compromised once he got in there but he's the only guy that I think, I'm sure he got compromised once he got in there. But he's the only guy that when I hear him talk, I really genuinely feel you can tell a lot about a person by watching him talk. Interesting. And when I see Clinton talk, I'm like, how many people have you killed?

When I see Obama talk, I'm like, I think this is a guy that was an idealistic young man that entered into politics and slowly became intertwined in an unfixable system. Isn't that worse, though? Isn't it worse to see that happen? Maybe, but what do you do? What does a man do? I mean, you see, like, post-presidency, I mean, he just- He's my favorite. Mask off, Joe.

Our friend Matt Stoller calls him the Instagram president because his first trip after presidency is going hanging out with like billionaire Richard Branson. Got to get paid. No, no, no. See, that's isn't that the problem? It's time. Which is that Obama has actually trying to turn himself into this culture, like becoming his wife's book. That was a fucking stadium tour across the. That was the best selling book in this country.

Right. So he's turning himself and his wife into this, like, Instagram – she's basically, like, trying to turn herself into the new Oprah. And Obama is turning himself into this, like, weird amalgamation of, like, woke capitalism. I saw this recent thing where it was, like, Obama implores Chicago business community to go against environmental activists who oppose his new library in Chicago. And look, like whatever, he can do whatever he wants. But I was just like, man, like you think about the insurgent campaign of Barack Hussein. I was inspired by Obama when I was a kid. I mean, it is crazy name.

And he beat Hillary. I was like, this is fucking crazy. This guy beat Hillary. And then he got elected with one of the greatest and possibly we won't we won't probably not see a mandate like that in popular vote for a long time because of the culture war. And what a missed opportunity. What I mean, he was I remember I was living abroad, though, and people were so happy. And I was remember I was like, dude, we're going to get out of Iraq. We're going to get out of Afghanistan. Like we're going to come together. We're going to rebuild. And what happened? By 2010, it was all blown to shit. What do you think happened? Well, Obama bought into basic... I've thought a lot about this. I think we both have, which is that

he basically allowed himself to get co-opted by the political system. He did not realize that he actually had transcended above it. And he could have been an FDR like figure in terms of calling for, frankly, much more transformative program. But really, what he leaned into was he was trusted the generals, right? I think the greatest mistake that he ever made 2009, David Petraeus and many of the other generals were like, because he had run on, I'm going to fight the good war. And they were trying to get him to do a surge in Afghanistan, which he eventually agreed to. And he was this new president. And they basically leaked against him about all of his inclinations not to do it. And so he went forward, but then he also put a two-year timeline on it.

So it was the worst of all worlds. We had thousands of troops who were killed in Afghanistan for two years. And we had a two-year deadline where we were just going to pull them out. He didn't have the courage in order to actually fulfill the electoral mandate that he ran on. He also I don't think he ever really I mean, I think that people projected on him what they wanted to see. That's a problem. And so I think two things. Number one, look, the obvious answer is who brought him to the dance, who funded he got more Wall Street money than anyone else. And you can draw a direct line between Obama and then the backlash to Obama is Trump. Why?

Because when Wall Street collapsed, they bailed out all these guys. They screwed over regular. They didn't help regular homeowners. They let the economy go to crap. Didn't do what was necessary to make sure regular people were going to be OK. And so, yeah, eight years down the line, you get this huge backlash to that. So I think that's one of the reasons. I think he also just didn't understand the moment that he was living through. I mean, right there, I think that that is truly a pivot point where Barack Obama is inaugurated. You've got a majority in the House. You've got a super majority in the Senate. You've got a super majority in the Senate. You've got a neoliberal system, you know, that the sort of like Reagan era and Clinton era system that is breaking down here and around the world. And the response to that was, let's do this like terrible health care program that's going to like modestly improve things, but mostly give away the store to the health insurance industry.

Let's bail out the banks and have zero accountability and not send a single banker to jail and let homeowners die on the vine. Like the moment called for a sort of more fundamental rethinking of the direction that we were heading in for the country and shoring up, making sure working class people were going to have a basic life of dignity. And he failed to meet that moment. And so now, you know, when I see him, I think I see a lot of cowardice. Like he just did an interview with a Jewish publication. First of all, it was an email interview. I always think those are total bullshit where you can just send in your responses. Someone else can draft him. But OK, if the former president United States gave us an email interview, we would take it as well. There were something like 12 questions that were asked. He answered like five of them.

Anything that was remotely hot button. They asked about Israel, of course. They asked about Iran, of course. Anything to do with those topics. He just did not respond. And it made me think to myself like, geez, there are he may be the most popular politician in America right now. Right. A lot of people feel exactly like you do. Like, this is a man who has moral clarity. And like, this is someone who I look to as a leader. And when have we needed that sort of moral leadership more? And instead, you're just like building your brand and hanging out with Bruce Springsteen

and avoiding anything that might be remotely controversial. What's interesting about the Bruce Springsteen thing is it's not successful. It's terrible. Have you listened to it? It's garbage. What's interesting about the Bruce Springsteen thing is it's not successful. It's terrible. Yeah, it's a shit podcast. Have you listened to it? It's garbage. I talked about it and I said it couldn't possibly be good.

And then I listened to it and it's worse than I thought. It's horrible. We played some clips on our show. But here's my thought about it. I feel like he could do a good one. Yes, but he's not unchained. What does that mean, though? What he needs to stop worrying is like, I'm not going to piss people off.

But isn't he worth like a half a billion dollars? And isn't he like one of the most popular people in the world? He's not a half billion. So what's holding him back? He has plenty of money. He's got 60 million, right? He's got plenty of money. His daughters are going to be good.

But he's okay. And he's also in his 50s, right? So like, where does it go? Exactly. Where do you go with this and i think about that with with so many people who have that kind of cultural power and already wealthy and like everything is these safe moves and they're so fearful of damaging i can tell you what happens yeah yeah as you get wealthier and wealthier you start getting more and more paranoid really what i have dreams of i have dreams of falling really yeah yeah it's a it's real weird

i never used to have those falling off things like falling off mountains falling out of trees yeah the weird because i realize i've gotten into this weird place where i don't have a lot of people that can relate to me uh and it gets very strange but but also you'd never feel like you have enough there's a real sickness involved in it and And I am a very introspective, self-critical person. I don't like anything I do. So I am always examining myself. Yeah, there's like two me's. There's this me

that can kind of just plow through everything. And then this other me that goes, what the fuck are you doing? And I'm like talking to me while I'm doing it. Really? Is this your sauna time? Yeah, the last 10 minutes of the sauna gets deep.

Because it's so, I'm close to death. You know, it's 200 fucking degrees in there. I can't, I can't. And it's 10 minutes to go, and I don't want to be in there anymore. And so then I start confronting the reality that I can't make it. Like, I can't be in there more than the 10 minutes.

Like, maybe I can get another 20 out of my body before I collapse. Yeah. But I'm close. You know, it's 200 fucking degrees in there. Do you ever bail? No. Never. There's no bailing.

And so. You can't bail. And your brain doesn't just like shut off. Because, you know, I was a swimmer. And I always felt like the minute that you just like surrender to like getting out or stopping or whatever it's just not an option is actually the moment when a lot of the suffering stops because your brain is just like sealed the exits that's not an option well there's still the physical suffering of the sauna there's no getting around it there's no avoiding that but i just do

breathing exercises but i i know in the back of my, I play the most fucked up game. Here's the fucked up game. I give myself extra minutes if I think about it. So I do these. Does that work? Yeah, it works. I feel like that would make me think about it more. It does work.

How many extra minutes? I get one extra minute every time I think about it. Wow. Yeah. So if I say, man, I really want to get out of here. Okay, pussy, one more minute. Here you go. Do the audiobooks help?

Because I know you listen to audiobooks. Yeah, but the last 10 minutes there's no books because it's too confusing. I can't listen. I can't listen to anything in the last 10 minutes. Yeah, you're just too, wow. The last 10 minutes is just struggle. Yeah. But that's, so it makes me examine this very strange position that I'm in because I see

other people. So that's one of the reasons why I'm so curious about Obama, because he's such an immensely popular, but also an immensely wealthy person. And I know he said some things that resonate, like when he was talking about people and judging people, that human beings are very messy. That was a good comment, actually. It shows his wisdom. But he could come forward. He won two, do you know how fucking hard it is to win two presidential elections? His name was Barack Hussein Obama. This is actually what pissed me off about him, which is like he won white working class voters overwhelmingly in 08. And they stuck with him in 2012, then abandoned the Democrats for Trump in 2016.

He's a huge part of that story. And yet he never is introspective about it. It's always made me so angry i remember he did this interview with david remnick right after trump won he was like maybe the country just wasn't ready for me he's like maybe you know and i was like fuck you man like that was one of the things that he was saying to bruce springsteen that i thought was really odd they were talking about reparations and that uh he was saying i forget what his exact words were, but something about white people were not willing to accept the idea of having responsibility for reparations.

And, you know, it's an interesting subject, right, because if you really take it back to the corporations that actually did benefit from slavery, they still exist. Some of them exist. Yeah. And there's certainly deep economic ties that you can track and you can go all the way back to slavery. But then there's people like yourself and people like myself that are children of immigrants.

Yes. I'm a grandchild of immigrants. You're a child of immigrants. And this is what America really is supposed to be. The most fascinating thing about America to me is that we are all children of immigrants. I look at the problem, the slavery problem and the reparations problem, as a massive failure of the community of America. And I think you look at these impoverished communities, you look at these places like whether it's Baltimore or the south side of Chicago or these places that have a deep history of poverty and of gangs and crime and violence.

And then you look at what happened during the COVID pandemic where all of a sudden there was these trillions of dollars that were allocated to these major corporations to make sure that they didn't fail. And my perspective is we – instead of thinking of corporations, let's think of it as problems. Like what is one of the major problems in this country? Well, one of the major problems in this country is people that are born into communities that are fucked. And they don't have a fair shot. They don't have a fair chance. They're stuck in this situation where everyone around them is involved in some sort of crime. Or they're deeply impoverished

or there's gang violence and maybe there's no family around them and maybe the only family is the gangs this is the problem with america and if we don't address this we're going to continue to pump out the same disenfranchised angry people that don't feel like they're represented by the system and we've done nothing about that no nothing that has nothing to do he oversaw that and it's and it's a but he what is he gonna do well he could have to your point about reparations black homeownership was at the lowest level under barack obama's presidency because it turns out black people dramatically lost their houses disproportionately but that was the 2008 but right he came aboard when that was happening right but he could have bailed him out no like. Like, that was his whole thing.

Like, he presided over the largest drop in black wealth in modern American history, and he's out here talking about white grievance? Now, look, I'm not saying there isn't white grievance, but Barack Obama was president of the United States with a massive Democratic mandate, supermajority in the United States Senate, and then squandered it. And this is what I mean, which is that, yes, Obama is a smart man and he does understand culture and all of that, but he absolves himself of many discrete choices that he made, which directly led to a lot of the problems that he's bitching about and blaming other people about. Sorry, that's a big pet peeve.

What you're talking about, though, it really goes very deep because what you're talking about is it turns the american dream that ideal of like anyone can make it if you just try hard it turns it into really a cruel joke so if you're a person like that sure you may have uh one one-off barack obama who's just like such a genius that he's able to transcend those circumstances. And then we hold those people up like, look, it's a, the system is working. The meritocracy is working, et cetera, et cetera. And so in this country, you have a lot of people who struggle every day, right? Just to be able to afford an apartment and start a family, put food on the table, just the basics of life. And they think it's their fault because of the failures of that basic promise, right? Where, yeah, it turns into now rather than seeing the

larger problems in the country and seeing where the blame really lies, I turn it inward to, oh, it's my fault. I must not have done something or I must not be smart enough. I must not be good enough. And that just compounds the sort of sickness of it. There's a way to look at it that relates to fighting in an odd way. And the way to look at it is weight classes. Like there's a gentleman that just won this weekend. His name is Brandon Moreno and he becomes the very first ever Mexican born UFC champion. I saw that. He weighs 125 pounds. That's what he weighs in at. Wow. And he's probably like 5'3 or 5'4. Wow. Not a very big guy. And he's an amazing fighter and incredible. Now, if that gentleman had to compete against someone like Jan Bohovic, who's the light heavyweight champion, or Francis Ngannou, who's the heavyweight champion, he would have

no fucking chance. Zero chance. Because he's born a small person. Right. There is no ifs, ands, or buts. He's a guy that makes, I mean, he weighs 125 pounds and he's a grown man. I mean, I can't imagine a world where a 125-pound man

can beat a man who's a skilled 265-pound man like Francis Ngannou. It's not gonna happen. That episode, by the way, was incredible. Francis is incredible. His story is incredible. It's one of the most deeply moving things I've ever done. But Brandon Moreno, this gentleman,

there's the two of them together. But that man, Brandon Moreno, is fucking fantastic. I mean, he's just an incredible fighter, I mean, an incredible athlete, an incredible example of what a human being can do. He was a huge underdog in the first fight with Davidson Figueredo. It turned out to be a draw. They had a rematch Saturday night, and he won, and he won by finish.

He's incredible. I love this guy. I love his story. I mean, I'll cry if I start talking about it. But you're right to point to that. But it is like that. It's not fair. It's just not fair But it is like that. It's not fair. It's just not fair.

We make weight classes because it's not fair. Because a guy like that is not going to be able to beat a guy like Francis Ngannou. It's not fair. Right.

If you have some kid who's born in poverty-stricken Baltimore and you expect that kid to do as well as someone who lives in Calabasas, California who goes to private

schools. You're out of your fucking mind. It's not fair. Whose parents spend every day cultivating them and tutors and all that stuff. But those assholes will say, well, you got to work harder. That's right. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps. This is the myth of meritocracy.

Another problem that we talk about. And then they'll buy their college admissions too, by the way. Some of them will. Some of them will. But this is the lack of perspective and if you live inside your own bubble, like we were talking about, you don't know that these other people exist in

this realm where this neighborhood, this community, where they can't get out. They can't get out. It's so hard. Or maybe they have different values. It's just fucking so hard to get out. If everybody around you is poor, it's so hard to get out and there's nothing everybody around you is poor and it's so hard to get out system is failing and you don't know anyone who's working in these quote-unquote jobs of the future and they don't exist in your town i mean we imitate our atmospheres forget about it if you're around a bunch of hard-working people that are dedicated

you tend to try to adopt their values and that's what you admire when you're around a bunch of people that are going in and out of jail and then you assume that's going to happen to you and when it does happen to you, you actually get kind of support from the community, especially if you don't rat, if you don't tell the cops. And the only way out is like what? You're going to be a rap star or you're going to be a comedian or you're going

to be an athlete? Look, you see the same thing. I lived in Kentucky and I've done work in West Virginia and that's where my family's originally from is West Virginia. I mean, you see the same thing. And I lived in Kentucky and I've done work in West Virginia. And that's where my family's originally from is West Virginia. I mean, you see the same thing. Yes. In Appalachia. Yes.

You know, where you go in some of these towns in southern West Virginia that were coal mining towns. And that's basically gone and dead. And there's just, there's nothing there. Deep poverty. Deep poverty. It's not an accident. That was the epicenter of the opioid crisis. Like people are just, they're holding on to whatever they can, whatever helps them get

through their day. And it's, and that is the, that is the lie of the meritocracy. The idea that someone from there has an equal chance, they're going to make it, et cetera, et cetera. And, you know, I'm not for, I don't think everyone should have the same, like I'm not a communist here, but we're a wealthy country. We make a choice to allow people to remain in poverty. But here's the other thing, too.

If you're a patriot, if you're a person who believes in exception, like exceptional Americans, you believe in this concept that this is a unique place, wouldn't you want less losers? Right. And if there's more people that are out there kicking ass, it's better for everybody. That's such a great point. They're selfish. I don't think they understand what it means. I think people,

this is why I think everybody needs mushrooms. It's like, it makes you more compassionate. Really? Not just mushrooms, like there's a lot of different psychedelics,

including MDMA, which is like MAPS, who I had Rick Doblin on recently. They're doing a lot of work with soldiers and people with PTSD and trying to unite communities with this stuff. There's something about our deeply ingrained ideas of

conflict that are so unnecessary. And if we could figure out a way to allocate money to help these problems in a real way, not to just align bureaucrats' pockets. Yesterday on the podcast, we were showing all the salaries of the people that are working on the homeless crisis in los angeles oh wow it's like holy shit some of them are making a quarter million dollars plus a year it's fucking it's an industrial complex and everything they're farming homeless people's what they're doing and they don't there's no incentive whatsoever to fix it and solve it if we could figure out as a country how to slowly but surely you like but there has to be an ethic because instead of looking at it tribally instead of looking at it as like this culture war looking at we're all one giant fucking community and what do we share in common we want our loved

ones to be safe and happy we want everybody to have a good living we want everybody to be able to find their dream and pursue it whatever their their dream is, whatever their thing is. And that's what we should be doing as a team. If there was only four of us, we would look at it that way. But when there's 400 million of us, we lose sight of things because there's a diffusion of responsibility. And people profit off of making sure that we don't see each other that way. They can't let us see it that way. And this is, again, the structural thing. Yeah, wow. There's a they there. And I think that there's a lot of people with a lot of moneyed interests whenever it comes to keeping this system architectured. And, again, this was saying about the confluence.

It's not intentional. It all just, like, happens to come about in a certain way. And then coming out of that is very fucking hard. And then coming out of that is very fucking hard. This is the problem where I was saying about the meritocracy, which is that the biggest mistake America made is we convinced our upper class that they earned it. So it used to be that we actually had a pretty deep sense of like noblesse oblige amongst the elite in America. You can look at Teddy Roosevelt, the Roosevelt family. What does that phrase mean? Noblesse oblige, like the obligation of the nobility to give back to the lower class.

How dare you know that everybody, think that everybody knows that? Sorry, sorry, sorry. Did you know what he meant? Yeah, all right, all right. It's like the idea that to those who much is given, much is required. With great power comes great responsibility. So Uncle Ben. And so when you think about what happened is that we convinced everybody that, as you're saying, Calabasas, buying your way into the college.

That kid is like, I worked my fucking ass off and I got my ass. And you're like, you're from Calabasas. You don't even know about all of the things that got you to where you were. And I'm not saying you didn't work very hard, but there were a lot of structural things in place in order to make. And then you moved to New York City and you're like, I'm working my fucking ass off in New York City. And these poor pieces of shit down in West Virginia. Why can't they just get a job? Why don't they?

Why doesn't their mom get them a tutor? Why? They don't even know that that's so far outside of the realm of the lived experience of millions of working people. And the more that that happens. And remember, I think we're at with college 40 percent. And the more that that happens, and remember, I think we're at with college, 40%. So we have like 25, 30% of the population, which actually genuinely believes that they earned their place to where they are. Many cases they did, but with the help of a lot of the structures underneath them, and

they feel zero obligation to their fellow American. And not only that, now we have msnbc cnn fox turning these two groups against each other and there's a whole lot of money to be made not just amongst the purveyors of the hate but at the very top i always say about this that gridlock in washington is an in-kind donation to people who are the oligarchs. As in, because the system is working so well for so much of the oligarchic elite, it makes it so that the less that happens, business is good. Like, business continues exactly the same way. You can work the systems there, you know, on the edges, and you're going to continue making billions, billions, and billions. People are going to

continue losing their place. And you have the richest people in our country who genuinely hate so many of their fellow americans it's just i don't know what you can do with that you got to get them on mushrooms did you um i actually want to ask you more about that but um did you i have more questions in that area but uh okay did you follow any of the the studies around ubi and what people so the stockton cal California mayor, who actually now lost his seat, but he was doing this experiment there and they came out with the results of like, I think the people in that town who participated in the trial, it wasn't a lot of money they got.

It was like 500 bucks a month. And it was incredible how actually transformative that was for people. It was like one guy, I remember they profiled, this was extraordinarily moving to me. He had a job he hated and he was so sort of close to the edge financially and didn't have any sort of like paid leave or whatever. Basically you miss a day and you either lose a paycheck or lose your job. He was so close to edge financially. He couldn't even take one day off to go and interview for another position. So with just that $500, it was like, okay, I can buy myself a suit and I can go interview for a different job in an area that he actually had a skill set and he was able to get that job and to be able to move forward. And it just makes you

realize like the whole thing is dependent on people having zero choice, right, in terms of their employers. They can't opt out, being so locked into this thing that they have zero breathing room. So, you know, a lot of the critique of UBI is always like, oh, you give people money and they're just going to spend it on like booze or Cheetos or drugs and they'll be lazy, et cetera, et cetera. And what the results have found is actually the polar opposite. And what the results have found is actually the polar opposite. People are able, they actually get jobs at higher rates because they have the luxury and the flexibility to get the interview closed and get the skills that they need to be able to do that. Or to pick and choose.

To pick and choose rather than just having to take this one thing that you might have a little bit of a luxury to wait. And so one of the things that I find fascinating that's happening right now is you've probably seen the statistics about the number of people who are quitting their jobs, the number of jobs that are going unfilled, because people actually had this experience that was forced on them over the course of the pandemic of changing their lives around. And it created an experience of like reassessing the values of, okay, number one, you know, if I'm in one of these frontline industries where my health was put at risk for fricking $7 and 25 cents, or even less than that, if you're working for tips, do I really like, do I want to go back to that?

So you have at the working class, you have massive shifts in terms of the type of work people are doing. You have in the professional class, people moving. You have people saying, listen, I actually liked being able to see my fucking kids during the week and remote working. And if you want me to come back to the office, fuck you, I'm getting a different job. I'm going in a different direction. So you actually were in the midst of a huge worker, uncoordinated worker revolt. Where that leads, I don't think anyone could possibly say. In fact, I think the whole ramifications of this coronavirus and what ultimately happens coming out of the

pandemic, I don't think we have any idea. But there are going to be massive ramifications for years and years to come. And we're starting to get a little taste of those reassessments and those value reassessments right now in some of the numbers that are coming out. I see it as revenge, which is that we made a choice at the beginning, which is that Washington decided we had two choices. We could push people into the unemployment system or what they did in Europe and what some politicians here, I think it was Josh Hawley, Bernie Sanders and a few others, put forward a proposal about payroll subsidy, basically making it so that businesses could keep people on payroll even during the lockdown. And that way, when you come out of lockdown, your employees still work for you.

Well, we said, no, let them quit, file for unemployment. The state system can distribute that and whatever. So we separated people from their jobs. When we made that choice, we fucked the business and we fucked the employees. And we pushed them. So we shut the business down. We said, fuck you. Basically not going to bail you out.

There was some success in this paycheck protection program. And I don't want to minimize that. Some. Some in air quotes. But not nearly what it should have been. And many people had a lot of problems with unemployment. They got, you know, things opened back up and then closed down. So they were on unemployment, off unemployment, back on unemployment.

It was a total fucking mess. And what has happened is now people are like, yeah, you know what? Driving for Uber is kind of shitty. They're like, I haven haven't done in a year and maybe i'm not going to go back or actually that job really kind of sucked or you know i just don't want to do it anymore and so this great reassessment of work in america is happening because we were disconnected from it and in a way i see the politicians are all freaking out about this right now this is like the number one conversation in dc and so how so what do you mean? Oh, well, because the conversation is around unemployment insurance, because the conversation is, should we continue to have the

supplemental three hundred dollars a week of unemployment insurance going to people because it's discouraging people from work? So the basic idea is, is that if unemployment might be higher than a wage at a normal job, then you're basically subsidizing unemployment and you're screwing over the business. It's like we got to make life more miserable so that these people are forced back into the workplace at their shitty jobs for $7.25. And it's always people that don't have shitty jobs that feel this way.

Of course. And we never ask the question of like, that's what I don't understand. Why don't we make the wages higher? And why don't we make the working life better so that people actually want to come back? If you're begrudging them over a measly $300 temporary unemployment insurance and your only answer is we need to make their life more hellish so that they come back into the workplace. And like you said, we never ask that question about the professional class people who get

automatic salary raise or whatever. We never act like that's going to end the world. It's only people at the bottom of the income spectrum that is like, ah. You also could easily change it. You could easily change it and make it so that the $300 a week became a hiring bonus or so that if you went and you got a job, this helps out the worker because they get the $300 a week extra from the government. Plus, the business doesn't have to necessarily raise its wage to like $17 or whatever. But if you did that, though, the hiring bonus, wouldn't the employer be able to hold that over the head of the employee? That if you get fired, you lose your $300 as well?

Well, I think you could make it transferable. So right now, it is mutually exclusive. But I worry about companies like Amazon that are doing those kind of weird, shitty practices. Because here's my perspective. Amazon that are doing those kind of weird shitty practices because here's my perspective like if you imagine if like let's say they didn't go Union and what let's say they just just had some sort of some sort of a meeting where they they

Managed this situation in a much better way where they gave people more time and more money and they relaxed all their standards. They had some sort of mediation where they came to a conclusion like, listen, we want you to feel better about this. And then you looked at the real quantifiable numbers and you recognize that there's a significant dip in profits because part of the way you make the profit is you got to squeeze blood out of a rock. Every dollar. So every dollar, and it counts up, and then Jeff Bezos just keeps getting more buff, and now he's going to the moon, right?

He's flying rockets and shit. I worked out a cross from him at the gym once, and I was like, is that fucking Jeff Bezos? He goes after it. I wanna give it to him. Sure he does. He's a fucking psycho. He absolutely goes after it.

He's a fucking psycho. By himself. He's probably by himself. No trainer? How long goes this? This was two years ago. Dude, it was right after the sexting scandal. And I really want to be like, you ever heard of Signal, dude?

You know, like Signal, like disappearing messages? Well, his problem was he opens up WhatsApp messages from Saudis. Yes. Well, actually also. Did you see The Dissident? Well, yes. Oh, that was a great movie. Thank you for turning me on to that.

No, uh-uh. Brian Fogel's The Dissident? Yeah, yeah. Oh, that was a great movie. Thank you for turning me on to that. No, uh-uh. Brian Fogel. Brian Fogel's The Dissident? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Sensational. He details what happened. The Saudis sent him a signal message, or excuse me, a WhatsApp message. And he clicked a link, and that link used Pegasus, which is the Israeli app that allows

them to get full access to his phone. Oh, no. They got pictures of him and his lovely lady friend. But by the way, who gives a shit? No, I don't care. But I do want to address this because this is actually important. So the Saudis did hack his phone, Joe. But apparently it's his girlfriend's brother who sold those texts to the National Enquirer.

How fucked up is that? I didn't know that's true, though. Because he admitted it came out in court, emails between Michael Sanchez, Lauren Sanchez's brother, and the National Enquirer. So this all came out in the court of law. And this is a crazy story. I actually did a whole monologue on this because it's how Bezos actually weaponized his ownership of the Washington Post to benefit his bottom line, which is he made it seem like the Saudis targeted him because he was Jamal Khashoggi's boss,

when in reality, because he owns the Washington Post, the reality is Lauren Sanchez's brother, Michael, is a piece of shit, who sold his sister's texts to the National Enquirer, and then charged his sister $25,000 a month as a crisis PR manager in order to negotiate with the National Enquirer. So he's getting paid from both sides here. This was Brad Stone's book, he just wrote about it and uh about bezos i think it's amazon unbound so what bezos did he did this masterful pr campaign where he's like the saudis are targeting me because i was jamal kashogi's boss and he made it into this

whole like moral fight when it was really like a family squabble has this been proven this is all yeah it's all out there. Has the brother admitted it? I don't think he's admitted it, but his emails are public record because of a court case. So his emails expose the text message? His emails with the National Enquirer. So he did? He's selling the email, selling the text messages. Isn't that gross about his sister?

Can you imagine, I don't even. That's the wrong guy to fuck over. Right. Right. Because he's a ruthless guy who works out by himself. Exactly. And he used to be a ruthless guy works out by himself exactly and he used to be a poor guy selling books out of a garage and now he wants to be the king of the universe he is the king he looks like lex luther he does we're gonna say we were gonna say that

mentality of wanting more and more like do you get that because that's what i get it that's the thing i can't come i'm like you're the richest man on the planet you could give all your workers about you could make life good for them and you would still be richer than you could ever spend the money. Like, help me understand that. It's a quantifiable thing. Like, if you're playing a numbers game, if you're used to 100 and then you get 200, now you're used to 200. If you're used to 200 and you get 300, you're used to 300.

If you find out you can get 1,000, you get that 1,000. Then you have 1,000, you're like, you know, I heard there's a guy who has 10,000. Holy shit, how does he get 10,000? Well, he worked extra hard and he fucked his employees over. Do you think that's a human thing? Yes. It's a number thing. It's a game thing. Do you think that that's just like

a characteristic of people who become wildly wealthy like him? Do you think that part of the reason that he became wildly wealthy is he was different than other humans and that the reason, part of the reason that he became wildly wealthy is he was different than other humans and that he had this obsessive thing? There's two factors. There's that, and there's also the factor

that what he's doing is trying to be wildly wealthy. So you're trying to tell a guy to not go so fast when you have the fastest car in the world. Right. So you're in a race, but you're like, lay off the gas a little bit, buddy. What a person like that needs is some other extraneous competition that thrills him, whether it's mountain hiking.

Oh, now he has space. Yeah, I don't think that's really going to do it because that's part of his brand. Right, right. It's almost like he needs an actual, like maybe he needs to take up chess. You know what I'm saying? Like you need to figure out- Oh, he needs to become like a triathlon runner or something. Yes, something along those lines. That's. Yes, yeah something along that's probably better Right because that's like a real struggle

But there needs to be something in which he's kicking ass cuz he obviously was no disrespect Jeff He's a nerdy little guy right and now he's a beast right if you look at the pictures of what he used to look like Versus what he looks like now. He's clearly on testosterone. You know what I can tell you? Because I am, bitch. I know what it does. I know what it does. His traps are huge. He was doing the lat pull. I was like, holy shit. He's a big jack guy. Well, lat pull don't

actually work your traps. Traps actually go up. Sorry, everyone. No worries. We can go this way and get your traps. The point is, what he's doing is he is conquering. It is a natural human characteristic. He's conquering, and he's figured out a way to conquer

and do it where he gets some criticism, but he can kind of justify it, and yet he's still plowing forward with this monolith that he's created. And now this monolith has become virtually unstoppable. It's become this massive thing that you use, I use, we all use. I use Amazon basically every day.

I'm a fucking giant customer. I don't go to the store for toothpaste when I can just click on the thing and I get that toothpaste sent to my fucking mailbox. My problem is by the time I get to the store, I'm gonna forget what I fucking went there for. I got shit to do. I'm out here conquering, but I'm not.

See, like, I understand the motivation behind it because it's a natural human characteristic. If you're, if you have, you want more and if this is,

all you do is business because he's a businessman. Those guys are the most susceptible to this trait, this, this characteristic rather. Yeah. This thing,

this inclination, this inclination is to continue to continue to try to win this game how have you found ways to step out of that or do you think you've fallen susceptible to i'm a comedian it's a different thing i've made money accidentally all my money has been made by doing the same thing i just i don't think about i mean i i'm obviously aware of money but when i do stuff i just do like the people I don't like seek out only celebrities or do you know like one of the things that we're talking about the Howard Stern thing and I'm

by the way giant Howard Stern fan I think he's the number one reason why I can do what I do if it wasn't for him he's the seed like Lenny Bruce is the seed that led to Richard Pryor that led to Bill Hicks and Sam Kinison, that led to me, and Chris Rock and Chappelle and all these guys. We all owe Lenny Bruce. He was the first. Howard Stern is the first in this genre.

He's the first guy that started talking about real shit and taking chances. He got sued by the FCC. It's a totally different thing, what he experienced. And he's not the same guy that he was then because he doesn't have to be because now he's worth a billion dollars. Right. But one of the things that they were doing in this meeting that was leaked was he was

saying we got to get celebrities. We need an A celebrity and a B celebrity. And it's all about like raise those numbers up, raise those numbers up. I never think of that. I don't care. If I meet a guy at a gas station and he's cool, I go, what do you do? And he's like, I make fucking flowers out of metal. And I'll just go like, what do you mean?

Come over here. And I'll talk to him. You know, I don't, what I started doing, I keep doing. Right? What I started doing was talking to my friends and then I got a chance

to talk to some interesting people like Graham Hancock was one of the first guests and I got a chance to talk to these people and I'm like, oh, now that I get

X amount of downloads, I can get these fucking cool people to talk to me. Yeah. Because I didn't have a way to get them to talk to me before. Like the idea that way to get them to talk to me before. Like the idea that I could get a guy like Randall Carlson to sit across from me for

three hours with no phones, with no nothing and talk to me about his theory about how the human race has been reset multiple times because of asteroidal impacts and explain it because there's a comet that comes into our neighborhood every X amount of thousands of years and it's trackable and it's also trackable by core samples when they do core samples they find all this nuclear glass that indicates impacts and this impacts coincides with the drop-off of civilization also the changing of the climate and the ice age is like holy shit I can get a guy like that that's's what I'm into. I'm not into money. Money's great.

I don't want to worry about money. But clearly for the Bezoses or the Warren Buffetts of the world or whatever, the money was the point. If it wasn't the point, it becomes the point. With Warren Buffett, I think he's an investor. He's in the money. He's a businessman. It is the money.

Right. With Bill Gates, it's probably something that came along, right? Because he was a coder. He was interested in computer programs. He was interested in computer programs. He was interested in operating systems. And along the way, you start protecting your investments and your assets. And next thing you know, you're balling. And when you're balling and you're hanging out with Jeffy Epstein on Fuck Island,

you know, it's just all of it gets crazy, right? That report that came out where he was like, Gates routinely would complain about melinda to epstein i'm like he was getting relationship but you're getting relationship advice but hold on that's the same as that's the same as jeff bazel saying people are lazy we don't know if that's real it's like it's such a it probably comes from melinda's divorce team props to her but like yeah who the fuck knows some of the stuff we're learning here is completely... By the way, that guy, fuck. You give that lady

whatever the fuck she wants. You're worth $150 billion. Give her what she wants. Why wouldn't you anyway? But it's that mentality. That's what it is. You really want her to go out and talk about Jeffrey Epstein. Just give her whatever she wants.

You still have billions. It's all so utterly bizarre. Well, I read about this. This actually came out as a result of the divorce. We talked about it on the show, about his Nobel meeting. So Gates is obsessed with getting a Nobel Peace Prize. Obsessed. He's like, I want the Nobel Peace Prize.

Because now he has billions. He's like, I need the Nobel Peace Prize. That's his new thing, right? So he enlisted Epstein. This is why him and Epstein were close, into trying to get him the Nobel Peace Prize. And it has come out, Norwegian press reported, that Epstein actually facilitated a meeting with the head, the chairman of the Nobel Committee with Bill Gates and Epstein. I think this was in his house in Norway or maybe it was a meeting in France. But that is part of what – because I keep asking the question.

I'm like, what is Leon Black? He's an Apollo billionaire, 9 billion. What can he get from Jeffrey Epstein he can't get anywhere else? What's an Apollo billionaire? Apollo management? It's a private equity fund. He's a Wall Street titan. And so he's the one who came out and paid Epstein $150 million

for fucking tax advice. So a guy worth $9 billion can't get taxed you can call the head of goldman sachs you call jamie diamond and i'd be like i need your fucking best tax guy right now and of course jamie diamond's gonna give him his best tax guy whomever so like what was jeffrey epstein offering leon black and bill gates that they could not get anywhere else bill gates is one of the richest men in the world and you start to see how these like networks of power, this was Epstein's like superpower, is he was like, oh, I can get you a meeting with the Nobel Committee.

He's like, I'm facilitating, and remember he knew all these scientists. I talked to Lex Friedman about this when I was a little bit on his podcast. I was like, how did this happen? And he's like, well, you know, all these nerds who were like MIT scientists and like, he just cared, right?

Like he took an interest in them. so he took and facilitated this whole network and gates is trying to like use epstein to get himself the nobel peace prize i'm like this is so insane because it reveals the pathology of gates where it's like being one of the richest men in the world it's not enough i have to have the recognition that I saved lives. Can I offer an alternative theory? Please. What if Epstein realized that Gates' ego is easy to stroke and that he's a nerd that never got laid and that you could maybe bring him around some beautiful

young ladies and then say, you know what I can do for you? I can get you the Nobel Prize. Maybe it wasn't Gates' idea at all. Maybe he was corrupted by the lifestyle. Maybe you're right. I don't know. It repeats itself over and over again. Right, because the guy was, that was his whole business.

Yeah. We don't know what Epstein's exact affiliation with intelligence communities and Mossad and all that shit was, but let's assume,

let's assume he knew some people that knew how to manipulate folks. Yeah. If you're looking at a guy like Bill Gates, you ever see him dance?

Yeah. Oh, horrible. Let me show you him dance. Have you seen him dance? No, but a guy like Bill Gates, you ever see him dance? Yeah. Oh, horrible. Let me show you him dance. Have you seen him dance? No, but I would like to now. Let's see him dance. Pull up Bill Gates dancing. We'd understand something about a human being

that dances the way he dances. You know, look at this. Here we go. Oh, boy. Watch him dancing. You see that? Okay, if I saw that, I'm sorry I asked for this.

If I saw that, and I'd be like, I can get Bill to a party and I can talk him into almost anything. If I see that guy, if I could spend some time with him and bring him to a fucking island filled with hotties, some of them which may or may not be 18. Well, that's. Look at him. Look at him dance around. Look at him.

Look at him. Come on. Listen, this is exactly what we're talking about. Like, I mean, I don't hate the guy. I use Microsoft. I type on a Windows laptop. I don't have a problem with him. I don't.

I see him as a human being. And I see where he is as a human story, where it's an amazingly alien proposition to be a man who is worth 150 billion dollars it's fucking bananas and then also to be this guy that has massive amounts of influence and massive amounts of eyes on him and he's a guy who dances like that and he dances like that i mean that and that is the problem the power and then i mean Bill Gates basically runs global public health. And this has become a major problem in terms of getting vaccines distributed to the rest of the world. And not just with this, also in the AIDS epidemic, he believes very much in like monopoly patent power. And so he sides with all the pharmaceutical companies in making sure that their like patent monopolies are enforced. pharmaceutical companies and making sure that their like patent monopolies are enforced. So, you know, whether you like him or not, et cetera, et cetera, the idea that you have these few billionaires that have so much control. I mean, Bezos basically controls the U.S. labor market.

Bill Gates basically controls public health. And that's not to say that he hasn't done some good things there, but it's a scary thing to just like outsource all of what we're doing in a certain sphere to a guy who dances like that isn't a weird thing that's going on right now with the patents and the the vaccines yeah because the narrative has always been we have to get everyone vaccinated it's so important to get everyone vaccinated and now the narrative is we can't give up this intellectual property because it will take these people too long to manufacture these vaccines. And they're like, the fuck it would. They're ready right now.

No, the factory owners are like, no, actually, we're ready. We could have been doing hundreds of millions of doses by now. Okay, this is huge. So the pharmaceutical industry will tell you we're investing in life-saving research, and that's why we need this patent protection, etc., etc. Every one of the new drug molecules developed over the past decade has been funded by public research. What they're good at is taking that public research and bringing a product to market. Okay, mRNA technology used in the vaccine, that wasn't started. That was publicly funded research over decades that now they are profiting off of massively. These vaccines will be some of the most profitable drugs in history, but it's not enough for them.

So, yeah, they're full of a pack of lies. And Bill Gates went on TV and said the same thing like, oh, well, these factories aren't really up to snuff and it's not going to work, etc., etc. Just totally carrying water for them because he has an ideological commitment to the shit that they're saying. Meanwhile, the Johnson & Johnson factory just had to get rid of 60 million doses. Right. Yeah. Well, and there were problems there.

Or one of the factories. That was the one in, I think it was outside of Baltimore. And there'd been problems there before. Yeah. And politicians had just looked the other way with a well-placed campaign contribution, I'm sure. And so, yeah, I mean and so yeah i mean the whole thing the whole our entire health care system is just a total fraud is the bottom line well it's a

funded thing for profit and all things for profit eventually lean towards generating the most amount of profit possible yes but but also socialism doesn't work either so it's like it's a human thing in in that human beings are these weird messy creatures and we don't have a clear binary solution it's not a one or a zero it's not a black or white medicare is more efficient and has better results in the private health care system though and i will say it does but does it generate the kind of vaccines that they've been able to pump out? Yeah, that's what I'm just saying is like the government funded all this stuff. This was all public research that basically all these vaccines have been built off of the last decade.

Every single new drug developed by the public research. So do you think that it's possible that they could do some sort of a non-for-profit government distribution of pharmaceutical products? Yes, I absolutely think that's the case. So do you think that that would be the way to do it, to counteract the fact that there's a for-profit pharmaceutical? Yes, I do. Well, let me just say this, because I think your point, it is bigger than just the healthcare system, right?

When you have it just be about profits, and profits are the only, like, what are you incentivizing? You're not actually incentivizing health right what you're incentivizing is people to have chronic illnesses that require a lot of treatment oh lo and behold america has a lot of chronic illnesses that require repeated treatment right that's you're actually incentivizing a system to keep people sick so it's not a surprise then when that's the result that you ultimately get. And that's where, you know, this country, what I said earlier of like the only value is money. There are some fields where maybe that makes sense. But in a place like health care, where we're talking about people's health or in a place like education, we're talking about people just like learning and acquiring knowledge. There's all these fears.

When I think about drug legalization, it's the same thing that I'm concerned about. Are these just going to become another like, you know, quiver in the air of big pharma? There are these areas of life that there should be values other than just profit maximization. Yeah. This is where I think that the big realignment that's happening is around that. Look, we had a system and we've recognized the power of American capitalism and profit in order to generate extraordinary things. But we can't erase the government role in Operation Warp Speed in bringing the vaccines

to bear. And there's actually, I forget what the terminology is called, where whenever so much government subsidy or whatever is involved, the government has the ability in order to waive vaccine IP protection and actually not necessarily seize it or whatever, but they march in rights. Right. So they have the ability to come in and say, no, we're going to distribute it X way and do this, this and this. That is what we've lost, which is that what we have lost is the recognition of the power of the government and the socialized benefits of a lot of this infrastructure is another example.

Big fight happening right now in D.C. The big one is around how are you going to pay for it? And, you know, deficit questions and all and all that aside a huge portion of the senators want like user fees and what does that mean they want fucking gas taxes they want to tax regular working class americans to pay for all these brand new roads now first of all infrastructure is like the one thing you probably should deficit finance if there is such a thing because it can explode economic benefits. It's an investment. Exactly.

And all the benefits that come from that are massive. But who is also the beneficiary of so much of this? Amazon. I mean, do you think better roads aren't going to help Amazon delivery times? Should Amazon maybe not pay for some of this? Should Walmart not pay for some of this? Walmart's distribution system is West in class, right? How do you think they fucking get there? The American highway system. But a lot of these senators and the Chamber of Commerce and all these other people are like, no. And that's actually effectively a tax on the South because

a lot of people drive here more than up North. So we're talking about user fees, average working people, drivers and others, they're going to pay for the new roads and then Amazon can offer you like three-hour delivery or two-hour delivery. This is the problem that we have, which is that what they want, the current structure, is for people to pay for the stuff that everybody benefits them. And increasingly, as they are benefiting from everything, they want to even continue to push down every single and i just see this like all across the system like we're pushing all of the costs down in the personal financial system and more like late fees and all of this and i understand like the problems in creating banks and all that but one of the things that we've discovered is that it's so much more expensive to be poor in america than it is it's like you get all, apparently, when you're rich or like whenever you have

money in your bank account, like, oh, then we're going to waive this fee or, you know, waive that. But like when you're poor, oh, you have to you can't have a real bank. You have to go use, you know, pay a fee to get a money order or something. All of these things just stack up and they become the structural like a structural inability in order for you to move up the ladder. And we see this in everything. Well, and we just found from those leaks of the tax returns of the nation's

all these people, they're paying nothing in taxes. Well, the Elon Musk thing was so strange because he gets paid in loans. Right. Yeah. So he doesn't really get money from. Right. Well, because he owns something and he borrows against it. And you know, what's

interesting is apparently in that very first Supreme court case that said like, essentially you, you can't tax things that you haven't had a cash out event. There were scholars at the time that predicted exactly the method that Elon and many others use to avoid. So since he's taking a loan and living off the proceeds of the loan, he's not technically cashing out his shares. And so there isn't a taxable event, quote unquote. What is he supposed to do, though, in that circumstance? In what circumstance? In that circumstance.

We're talking about how he gets paid in loans. I didn't understand it because I'm looking at him like, wait a minute. OK, OK. He's worth $150 billion. Right. But once you're worth $150 billion, let's imagine you've earned $150 billion.

You have that $150 billion in the bank. Do you have to pay taxes on that? No, you don't. You do have to pay property taxes, and you do have to pay whatever. He doesn't own property. Right. I was going to get to that. He does in California, so he does have to pay in California because he spends a considerable amount of time in California.

So he pays California state taxes. He pays property taxes on his one thing in the Bay Area. But what is he supposed to do? What does he say? Well, that's a story about him. I mean, they obviously go to all these elaborate means to avoid any taxable event. But I think what he's doing is not wrong. It's not illegal.

It's not illegal. But what should he be doing? The problem isn't necessarily him. The problem is a system that enables the richest among us to pay zero in taxes. If he's genuinely not making an income because he just takes loans off of

the money. This is around capital gains because I'm sure he's had to sell some stock as well as Jeff Bezos. Instead of engaging in all the financial engineering like let me take out a loan etc he could just cash on some of the stock but then that would be a taxable event it still would be taxed at less than like if a regular wage earner 15 is earning you know he's a unique situation though because he looks at money as an attack vector and i don't i talked to him about it i don't understand the perspective.

Like, why worry about it? Right. He's like, because people hate on him because he's a billionaire. It's like being a billionaire is an attack vector.

So I'm giving up all my homes. An attack vector? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because people are going to tell, look at you, your fucking big fancy house.

Like, I own nothing. Yeah. So he owns nothing. See, the conversation's actually, this is convoluted around you. Well,

this is why, because he's not really concerned with making a shitload of money. He makes a shitload of money. Yeah. But he's really, he is a very unique guy. And I can speak to this personally from my personal, no one around community. Right, right. That's not what he's thinking about.

He's thinking about putting people on Mars. He's thinking about making the most insane cars to get people to adopt electric cars. He's thinking about drilling holes under the ground to make people go through tunnels so that we don't have any traffic. He's thinking about making solar power with roof tiles so it makes it efficient and easy for people to adopt. Right. He really is thinking about all these things. What I'm thinking about is a system that would have a regular wage earner, like earning 60K a year or whatever, paying higher taxes than someone who's a billionaire. That's what I'm thinking about,

which is insane. And you know, really too, around the billionaire conversation, it always drives me crazy. We think of billionaires in America as Bezos, Elon, and all of those. That's actually not how you become a billionaire. We crunched the numbers for Forbes 2020. The number one predominant way that you become a billionaire in America today is private equity and hedge funds. It's just financial engineering, trading money, making front-running trades

in terms of the whole Robin Hood thing, Citadel, Ken Griffin. That's how you make, you don't, look, if we lived in a country where we made billions with Elon, I would be very, very happy because we're creating shit

and we're, even Bezos. Look, a lot of Bezos hate. Amazon is fucking incredible. You know what's not incredible? Silver Lake Capital Management, where you don't fucking do anything. And you're basically just a leech on the American financial system, driving up taxes because or driving up the prices of stocks because you're front running people's trades and you're making it so that you make point0.0003 more per trade.

And if you do that at scale, you become a billionaire. That's how you actually become a billionaire in America today. Let's also not pretend that it's like an accident. Oprah's cool. Shout out to Oprah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Shout out to Oprah. I like Oprah.

I've got issues with Oprah, too. Anyway, so let's not pretend that it's an accident that we have the tax system that we have. Yes. Right. Let's not pretend that. So at the January 5th, the day before the January 6th thing happened, there was a regulation, new regulation that was pushed through that will allow these private equity executives to save something. I mean, hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes. And the guy who wrote the regulation, his old job was helping rich people to avoid taxes. So he, like, writes out, gets zero coverage because the riot happens, and understandably people are paying attention to that. But, you know, the hundreds of millions of dollars are spent in Washington over, you know, the past decade just from the private equity industry lobbying forces to make sure

that they can avoid paying essentially any taxes on what they're doing. And look, this isn't just about like, you know, eat the rich or attack the rich, et cetera, et cetera. But we talk about the problems in the country coming apart and people sort of losing faith in every institution and the structures of government and the entire nation as a whole, like this is a bedrock principle of fairness. The sense that everybody's got skin in the game, that this is a more or less, you know, nobody expects anything to be 100% fair, 100%, but that this is more or less fair. And then you look at like, you know, Elon Musk's secretary

or the person who's like delivering this or security guard or whatever, he's paying a higher tax rate guard or whatever, he's paying a higher tax rate than the billionaire. That's fucked up. And so when you have that realization throughout the public, it really does destroy just sort of the faith in the nation as a whole. In the New York Times story, this made me so angry. They quoted somebody from the IRS. You are three times more likely to be audited if you make less than twenty five thousand dollars a year than you are if you're one of these private equity people yeah three times more likely they are people that make less than twenty five thousand think about what

it means to make twenty five thousand dollars a year in america you're fucking poor you are a blown tire away from bankruptcy that's so insane that is bullshit is that because they're auditing waitresses i was exactly it's probably bartenders and bartenders but you know what it's because it's because the irs's funding has been so stripped over decades that they don't have the resources going after the private equity guys is very complex millions it takes millions of dollars to investigate all the fucking legal structures they've got lawyers backing them up and all that. So they go after, because their funding has been so stripped down, they go after the low-hanging fruit.

And so you're much, much, much more likely to be audited if you are a working class person than if you're a wealthy person. $25,000 a year. Think about what that means to make $25,000 a year. It's so crazy because who are they saving and how much are they saving? We got an extra $1,000. But how much are they saving? We got an extra $1,000, but how much money? Imagine if someone is screwing over their taxes by $1,000. How much money does it cost to find that out?

Exactly. But isn't it a business? There's a business of making sure that homelessness doesn't really get resolved because then you'd lose your quarter million dollar a year job. I think it's just necessity. I'm starting to ask good questions. It's just necessity it's just necessity because humans yeah humans are weird we're not supposed to be doing this this is a whole new thing we've been plugged into what do you mean capitalism society all of it money and civilization and the anonymous nature of it yeah but so disconnected from but at scale civilization at scale like Civilization at scale.

Like working with money that's electronic. We're supposed to be trading like, here's two pieces of gold. Give me a donkey. I've got a banana. Or a rock. Can I have your orange or whatever? That's worth being in India. That's true though.

That's true. I mean, that is really true. And so a lot of, yeah, I don't know that we're handling that transition very well right now. I don't know we're handling that transition well either. Because people just feel very adrift. It's not even like the finances and the misery that comes from not being able to have confidence that you're going to be able to provide for your kids. That's a very real thing. It's real.

But I think just as real as that is this sense of like, what am I even doing here? Well, it goes back to what you were talking about earlier with universal basic income. And this is one of the things that I felt that attracted me to Andrew Yang. We're talking, I'm like, yeah, there's gonna be some people that get lazy. Yeah, there's gonna be. But that's just humans, man. If you gave that to someone with ambition, I don't think they'd be lazy. I don't think it's going to stifle ambition. I think ambition is something that's developed over for the root cause of your determination is, whether it's you were ignored as a child or whether it was your parents worked hard and you recognize that hard work has inherent benefits, whatever it is.

Some people learn how to achieve goals or work hard or have dreams. If you give those people a certain amount of money so that their basic needs are cared for, food and shelter, I think we'll have more people that are successful. We'll have more people that pursue their dreams rather than just chase an empty life of labor. And that's what actual freedom looks like. It's not just the technical right to be able to, you know, pursue this or that end when you don't really have the means to pursue it. It's the ability to have meaningful choice. And for millions and millions, perhaps a majority of Americans, they have no meaningful

choice that they can make. I would be really I'm sorry. No, there's a big debate on the right right now around like, is the culture gone or is it an economic problem the culture as in as in like oh well people aren't getting married anymore like are people not for I've given up on the family like I've people given up on is that true is there a drop-off oh there's a huge drop-off 2018 was the lowest marriage rate on record and that's exactly that's what I was going to say this is my always my counter is people like getting married people want to get married the number one reason they didn't get married in 2018 was because of money. People want to have kids. This is a big debate as well around the fertility rate. Our fertility rate is below replacement. It's very, very low. It continues to drop. You had that fantastic testosterone book. I'm so glad or the sperm count book. I'm glad that you did. I'm glad that you did. All of these confluence of events are making it so that we are really,

we are basically failing our civilizational priority, which is replacing itself. And so again, though, you look at America and you say, why are people not having kids? Yes, there is some cultural drop off in the people who don't necessarily want to have kids, but people want to have around 2.2 kids when they're surveyed. Like if you survey women and also like fathers and, or sorry, would be fathers, they want to have around 2.2, which is above replacement rate. I think we're around 1.7. In terms of that, what is the number one reason that people cite for not being able to have kids? It's money, which is that it's either daycare, or it's I don't have the ability to provide, or it would be really expensive, because I think I forget what average cost is per birth in America for the average like incur cost that you will. I can't afford the diapers.

I can't afford in order to change my life. Oh, that means I would have to leave my job. That is where I'm saying, look, guys, maybe the culture has changed a lot. But it sounds like money actually can fix a lot of our problems in terms of marriageability. We actually could increase our marriage rate dramatically if we if we bait it so that people weren't mired in student debt or mired in personal finance or frankly just had the ability in order to provide for a basic family based maybe on one income. Same thing whenever we have kids. If you want people to have more kids, they want to like people are crying out being like, I want to have more children, but I cannot.

This is what they tell. I think it was the American Community Survey, which is like a branch of the Commerce Department, which does a lot of the census data. And you can see so clearly. But guess what? And this is my biggest departure from a lot of the Republicans. I'm like, they're not they're not proposing shit like they're not proposing like increasing, you know, payment. They're the ones voting against it. They're voting against child tax

credits. Here's one of the most insanely depressing ideas that I've read about was people that are in, they have debt, student loan debt, and they're getting their social security docked. Yeah, because they can garnish your wages even when you're dead. You can't even

go bankrupt. Social security, one of the weirdest things about student loan debt is it's the only thing that you carry no matter what. That's right. Even if you go bankrupt, you still owe it. It's horrible. It is a dirty, dirty, dirty game because they figured out a way to use people as human batteries. That's exactly.

When they're 18. Do you know what being 18? I mean, look, I remember 18. I do. I was dumb as fuck. If I had to take out a $200,000 loan, I was like, oh, whatever. I mean, thank God. Didn't have to.

Shout out to the parents. Listen, I still have a small amount of students that I'm paying off. Do you? Yeah. I mean, listen, don't cry for me. I'll be fine paying it off. But isn't that crazy? Coming out of college and then you are starting negative whatever.

And that affects what you know what line of work you go into like why is it that so many of our best and brightest minds go in and like play with money on wall street adding absolutely nothing part of it is this story you've got to make the money to pay back your freaking loans it brings me back to the same thing about trying to figure out how to make less losers yep i think that education should be free because i think that our should be free because i think that our country if we pay for the roads we pay for firefighters and all these things that we agree which are you know socialism concept concepts like firefighting is kind of a socialism concept

public goods public goods yeah what the fuck is more public good than education than investing in your people your community your human Yes. And also enlightening people. But also making sure that it's not like the same sort of indoctrination bullshit that's going on in a lot of universities. I just ran into that problem, right? Which is that why are a lot of Republican voters not going to support that? Because they're like, fuck the university. They fucking hate us. Well, you read some of the shit that they're saying.

It's cult stuff. Yeah. But Republicans still want their kids to be able to go to college. Of course. They just don't want their kids to be indoctrinated into Marxist ideology. Exactly. Well, it's this intolerance of dissent. And it's really scary.

And I think it comes from this sense of, like, you know, people feel that things are very chaotic. And Trump was a genuinely, like, terrifying experience for a lot of people. This is pre-Trump. It is pre-Trump. And there's this sense, you know, as someone who is on the left, like throughout history, this was the standard left wing position. I mean, you support free speech and censorship and these like McCarthyism and all this stuff has always targeted the left. Go look at COINTELPRO, all this stuff. Look at COINTELPRO, all this stuff.

And now you have this really rigid ideology that if you step out of line even a little bit, you know, everyone's going to come for you. And people are afraid to really say what they think. And it does it. It really does pervade. It pervades the media. It just leaves people afraid. It has consequences in terms of their career trajectory. afraid it has consequences in terms of their career trajectory and it ultimately leads to things like you know ignoring the lab leak theory because someone somewhere was like oh it's racist everyone's like oh we can't say that then the biggest intellectual dishonesty yes yeah that's

it the biggest change i was actually recently talking with this guy frank di stefano on my podcast actually we should talk about that too uh i forgot about that uh in terms of what we weren't allowed to mention on the hill uh which was actually our own respective podcast uh crystals is crystal kyle and friends go sub on sub stack that's right and the realignment with marshall kossoff uh we finally get to have our due and be free and actually talk about you couldn't talk no we weren't no joe we were not we were not we were not allowed to mention i so my i had written into my contract before i even joined the hill because i had hosted this podcast with marshall um so he was allowed to come on the show but crystal started her podcast with kyle and he wasn't allowed to come on she couldn't even

acknowledge right that we had these out so he couldn't come on as a guest on your show let me tell you how stupid this is how stupid this is so kyle kalinsky yeah um obviously has a big following of his own we start this podcast together and yeah they told me i can't have him on as a guest on pricing kyle was routinely one of our best guests in terms of traffic so you're just like why would you just came on breaking points he got 100k views you just came on breaking points so thank you kyle shout out to kyle so out of nowhere they just said you have to stop having Kyle on. Yes.

Even though he was one of the highest traffic. Oh, my God. And of course, Kyle's like, okay, whatever. And we're, you know, also like, all right, whatever. But they're hurting themselves. That's how stupid it was. This is old media mindset. And you understand this more than anybody.

You understand collaboration on the internet, which is that on YouTube, among podcasting and more, you have a scenario where when you go on each other's podcast, when you do each other's shows and more, everybody collectively rises together and actually the wealth increases, the profile increases and more. This is an old TV mentality because on TV with cable, you have to get locked in, right? Like if you're watching Fox and you're not watching CNN, CNN is losing. If you're watching CNN, you're not watching MSNBC, MSNBC is losing. That's old media, like in terms of the scoops. But this new media independent environment, we have people, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi,

all these people with, I mean, technically, I guess, competing subscription products, but that's not how it works, which is maybe somebody who watches our show who doesn't necessarily become a premium member or whatever they really really appreciate glenn and they see them out and then they go and they subscribe to him and then maybe it works vice versa it's a famine mentality it is guys like glenn glenn greenwald and matt taibbi are crucial in this time yeah because they are the bravest journalists amongst us. Glenn is fucking fearless. Glenn is a fucking monster. He's a monster.

And so is Matt. They're monsters because these, the, in the best way possible because they are not attached to any ideology in terms of like what you're supposed to say. And they will, and Glenn particularly fights against it tooth and claw the moment he sees it.

He's so brave brave and it's so important to have people like that out there because if you don't support them they're the fucking if they go down if they go down the whole thing goes down and we're all exactly well and i think about i mean i think about glenn a lot i mean both because you know i consider him a friend i respect the hell out of him he obviously was a big part of rising success and he was our very first guest on breaking points but this man literally risked his life and his freedom for his principles multiple times i mean first with snowden um he very much thought the u.s government very possible that the u.s government would come after him take his freedom and his criticism in brazil criticism of the

fucking president was going after him literally they were trying to put him in jail yeah these are like murderous thugs. And I mean, political assassinations have happened there very recently. And yeah, they went after him, tried to put him in jail. Jamie just pulled up that dude that just might have been a part of the Clinton body count. Yeah. And so Glenn has literally put his life. So you think he's going to be afraid if you say some mean thing about him on Twitter or on MSNBC or whatever?

He doesn't care. I talked to him about this. He goes back and forth with people on Twitter. I'm like, why do you do that? I don't know how he does it. I took your advice. I went way off because of you. Don't you feel better?

Oh, I can't even describe it. He has that personality, though, where he's in it for... He likes to fight. He doesn't even fuck. He's a little honey badger. Guys's in it for he likes to fight. Yeah, it's funny. Honey badger. Guys like fucking Jim Acosta. Yeah, my former White House press colleague, Jim Acosta, made millions of dollars with his books and like his bullshit performances there in the Rose Garden. And it's like he actually is presenting himself and profiting off of gaslighting millions of Americans into thinking that he somehow risked his life by behaving like an asshole while he was in the White House briefing room.

And then you have guys like Glenn and you have guys like Matt who wrote this whole thing about the financial power elite and, you know, with Goldman Sachs and then Glenn Greenwald, who's literally being pursued by the Brazilian government. And they have the audacity to say that they're misinformation purveyors or they're not real journalists. I mean, that is what makes me so angry because the entire corporate media infrastructure is not about producing actual journalism, especially when the power elite is the Biden administration. I don't know if you saw this. Brian Stelter recently had the White House press secretary on his show on CNN. And he said, what are we getting wrong about the White House? He invited the White House press secretary, the paid propagandist of the United States government.

And his first, I think, first question, I don't want to say too much, but one of his questions to her in his very limited airtime on cable news was, what does the press get wrong about the Biden administration? does the press get wrong about the biden administration so he invited her to correct his network and other network other media's coverage on his cable show what the fuck is that that's crazy it's what you would expect from a guy like that yeah that's what i love her so much it's so weird i'm like this woman is paid to lie to you yeah but that's nothing against her that's just that's literally the job description is paid propagandas. It's not really that they love her. It's they don't really have an opinion other than what is the orthodoxy? What are they supposed to say?

Right. What we're talking about with Glenn and with Matt and with you guys, one of the things that I love about you guys is that I know that you're telling me, whether you two disagree with each other or whether you agree or what, I know you're telling me what you really think about things. Yes. And you're not a part of some sort of weird cabal of influencers who's like got together and decided to support some strange ideology that's cast down upon by billionaires. Right. It's so hard. Some strange ideology that's cast down upon by billionaires. Right. It's so hard to do, though. I can't tell you for the amount of pushback that we both receive from our respective, quote unquote, sides, like the amount of shit that you will take. When we called when we called out Stop the Steal, I burned a lot of bridges with a lot of people on the Trump right.

And that is why I personally I barely identify with them anymore. So when you think of yourself as a right-wing person, do you think of yourself as a fiscally right-wing person? Because I don't see you as like a socially right-wing person. Well, see, this is interesting. And I actually think everything is changing. Old social conservatism was about abortion, guns, and gay marriage. Now, the abortion conversation is still 50-50. Gay marriage, I think 70% of Republican voters in the latest Pew Research poll support gay marriage. That's a positive trend. Gay marriage, I think 70% of Republican voters in the latest Pew Research poll support gay marriage.

That's a positive trend. It's very crazy, actually, if you think about where things have moved in 20 years. Obama didn't even run on gay marriage in 2012. Hillary Clinton, until 2013, didn't support gay marriage. 2014. Really? It's crazy. When you think about how crazy that has changed, I think social conservatism today is actually one of the best pieces I read on this. Shout out to Matthew Walther. It's called one of the best pieces I read on this shout out to

Matthew Walther is called rise of the barstool conservatives so if you were to ask me who I think like the most uh the biggest like right-wing social icon in America right now 25 years ago I would have said like Franklin Graham or something like that I think he's Dave Portnoy I I really think it is somebody like Portnoy who is anti-PC. The current social conservatism, or at least the way that I think things are moving forward, is anti-woke, anti-PC. And that is where I think the emerging fights are around the—so, for example, around abortion or something. It's not that you—like Portnoy or whatever, he's not personally pro-life. I think he's actually on the record that way. But he's also probably not going to actively be hostile towards people who are pro-life. He's pro-business. Correct. He's

very pro-business. This is where my politics change a little bit because I'm extraordinarily anti-PC, very against the anti-woke stuff. But I am much more, I would say, well, I call myself centrist when it comes to economics because I know what the actual populace believes on economics. They're extraordinarily, you know, I mean, taxing people who are rich is extraordinarily popular. Florida, which has voted for Trump, why 3.2% higher than Barack Obama won that state, also voted overwhelmingly for a $15 minimum wage. So how the fuck does that happen? Oh, I know why. Because actual voters voters whenever you take the culture part of it out they're actually very much for paying higher wages taxing the rich rebalancing our

financial system making it so what i was talking about people being able to get married and more it's the culture woke piece of it which just drives everybody this is how you know the world is upside down florida is the most rational part of the country. It shows you how toxic the Democratic Party brand is, that they're like, we want the stuff that you claim that you want, but we want nothing to do with it. But we fucking hate you. Well, you see it on the front line. You see Pelosi and Schumer on their knees with African garb on. That's crazy.

And you know that's horseshit. Right. You know that's horseshit. And thinking that that's real. And then, yeah. People thinking that it's going to work because, first of all, they're older, right? So they evolved their ideology before the internet came around and so they they're used to bullshitting people they're both used to bullshitting people with like they're like a comic that has a 20 year

old act and uh they're like hey here's my nixon impression and people are like who the fuck is nixon i saw a comic like that actually it was terrible he was like he used to be on snl i don't want to i don't want to, I don't want to. Yeah, I know who you're talking about. Okay. So actually, so one of the things around this, though, is that I personally, at least kind of how I view myself, is like a spokespeople for so many of the completely underrepresented in America. We're in a great state, Texas, like where I'm from. I always think about people. So you saw the large hispanic swing

towards trump here in south texas yes so in laredo for example and mccallan just elected a gop mayor which is fucking crazy yeah but it's 85 hispanic town nobody speaks for somebody who is latino maybe third or fourth generation who's skeptical of mass immigration but who also is like pro-life, pro-$15 minimum wage, pro-Medicare for all, and pro-gun. Nobody speaks for that person in American politics today. And that is where I think the emerging future is. I think that the future of any Republican party, if they want to survive, given the inability to win the popular vote seven out of eight last presidential elections is changing their stance on economics and become and what it is is embracing this anti-pc against the liberal

intelligentsia and elite now this is all easier said than done because what's crystal immediately going to say yeah because they're owned by the fucking billionaire class because they're never going to give it up mitch mc tell them the mitch mcconnell thing about this tax leak story oh yeah this is this is fucking crazy yeah so we were just talking about the tax returns of billionaires yeah well i heard that mitch mcconnell's response to that was we need to lock up everyone who was involved in down hunt them down the people who leaked the tax imagine yeah your response to the story is that I love your response to it we need to hunt down the people who made it possible

for billionaires to not pay any fucking taxes how about that not only that if you were a billionaire and this is not a slight on my friend Elon but if you were a billionaire like if I ever become a billionaire I want to pay taxes I don't mind paying taxes I don't even think about it I don't care I mean I think that you're supposed to pay if I ever become a billionaire, I want to pay taxes. I don't mind paying taxes. I don't even think about it. I don't care.

I mean, I think that you're supposed to pay. If I could pay 50% more and know that my money is going to educating people. When you kind of do that with philanthropy, you kind of do that with charitable donations, but it's not the same. Because all that stuff, you don't understand what's the administrative cost how much is actually getting to people well and what's the priority see this is the thing too about why did they get to donate their money to what they so for example with bill gates we've never had this before um that he was funding that project to dim the sun this isn't a real this is real wired so according so thanks shout out to wire the way he apparently now he doesn't want

to dim the sun anymore. They've abandoned that project because of funding constraints, divorce. But we have not lived in a scenario where one person actually could fucking dim the sun. And he could do it through philanthropic research around carbon or whatever. I don't remember exactly what the justification of it is. I don't remember exactly what the justification of it is. I think I want to say, as an American citizen, of like, no, you don't get to dim the sun, Bill Gates. Not only that, do you understand that that is one of the premier conspiracy theories about the idea that the global elite wants to reduce the population by half? One of the conspiracy theories.

He is involved in so many of the conspiracy theories. He's involved in the massive vaccination and people worried about the... All the nutbags are worried about massive vaccinations trying to depopulate the earth. All the nutbags are worried that he's going to spray things into the sky and somehow or another it's going to come down

and ruin our water supply and our food. Who the fuck knows if it would because it's an unprecedented experiment, but even crazier. All of this goes back to the Sumerian text and this is where it's really weird. There's a guy named Zechariah Sitchin who wrote some incredibly controversial books and one of them was, I think was called the ninth planet I think what is it called anyway Zacharias Hitchin was a guy who is a linguist and a scholar who he took ancient cuneiform tablets okay from

Sumer and his his idea out of all this stuff, and he wrote all these books about it, was that there was another planet that's on an elliptical orbit that would come in and out of Earth every 3,600 years. And they genetically manipulated the lower primates to create human beings. And they came here to mine gold because their atmosphere had deteriorated and they wanted to suspend reflective gold particles in their atmosphere. And Earth has a very large amount of gold. So they would come here and get gold and they would get people to mine this gold for them and make gold very valuable. So here's the thing.

If you think this is obviously. How does Gates get there? This is a nutty conversation, right? So if you go back to ancient civilization, why the fuck would gold be valuable? When you're talking about people that barely had money for food, imagine giving someone a piece of gold

and they give you a cow. Why would you give someone a cow for a piece of gold? Wouldn't you want metal that you could turn into iron? Something you'd turn into weapons iron something you turn into weapons used for a tool well what

Zechariah Sitchin believed and you know if you ever follow like ancient Sumer it's a very bizarre civilization very bizarre in the fact that they had a detailed map of the solar system like 6,000 plus years ago including Pluto with all the planets in the

correct order. And they have these weird images of really tall, giant, human-like people with little monkey people sitting on their lap, like human beings with tails. Okay. Strange shit, right? All right. And he believes, and most people don't agree with him. There's a whole website by other Sumerian scholars.

It's like sitcheniswrong.com. You can go there and they break down and there's a disagreement about all this. But anyway, he was saying that the reason why these aliens would come here is because they wanted our gold. And they wanted our gold to suspend particles into the atmosphere to protect us against the rays of the sun. And that's what they were doing on their planet. They were coming here to get our gold so they could suspend it into the sky to protect their planet. This is what fucking Bill Gates is talking about. He's literally talking about suspending particles in the sky to protect us against the rays of the sky. But this is how bonkers it is.

I mean, Zechariah Sitchin wrote this book in the fucking 70s. He wrote this book. the fucking 70s. Whoa. He wrote this book, what was his book called? Zechariah Sitchin. He's a strange cat. It sounds like it. Me and my buddy Eddie Bravo used to get high as fuck and read these books, and it's so crazy. Wait, so do you buy it? No.

Oh, okay. No, I don't buy it. I don't. No, no, no, no, no. I don't know do you do you buy it no okay no i don't buy it i don't no no no no i don't buy it but i'm fascinated by how many of the things that when you talk about super elites right the crazy conspiracy theories of super elites is always see this is the thing like i talk about a lot of things that i don't buy and some people find that very problematic right you know they don't like uncomfortable they don't like it they don't like that i even bring some of these things up because i'm like why why is that real like why

does this one fucking billionaire want to vaccinate everybody why is this one billionaire want to suspend reflective particles in the atmosphere bill gates i would like it more if he did want to vaccinate everybody he's been standing in the way of global vaccination is the truth yeah but he does do weird stuff like in Sudan they're vaccinating a bunch of farmland. Oh yeah. Well he's like the number one farm land owner in America. And Jamie pulled up some articles that

dispute that. But then I've seen so many that confirm it. And Jamie pulled up some that confirm it too. So he owns a shitload of land in America. I think he provides McDonald's with all their corn or some shit like that. Story from yesterday. Oh, potatoes, excuse me. Private farmland owner in the U.S.

accounting for more than 269,000 acres. I think he also provides McDonald's with all their potatoes. Really? That one I didn't know. Google that. Google whether or not... Oh, right there. Go back. Oh, yeah, it does say that. Right there. Right there. Potato farmer.

Bill Gates is a McDonald's fucking potato farmer. You nailed it. And you can see his farms from space. And then you wonder, and then people in the media are like, why do people believe all these crazy conspiracy theories? Because some of it's fucking true. But just imagine a guy that is genetically modifying crops, a guy that wants to spray the sky.

That's the project. Stratosphere controlled perturbationation experiment Scopex. But go to Zechariah Sitchin. Like Zechariah Sitchin's Sumerian text translation. Yeah, I was trying to dig through that to find out what he specifically said. It's complicated shit. But the thing is, he wrote about this. Sitchin wrote about this in the 1970s.

It wasn't even proposed as a theory about or a possible solution to global warming until the 2000s. It was somewhere in the 2000s that someone was talking about suspending reflective particles in the atmosphere. But one of the things about gold that's a very unique reflective particle, gold is a crazy, crazy metal in that you can take a very small piece of gold like like see this coin this is a navy seal coin if you could take this coin and put it on this table a coin of gold can cover the entire table oh with if you can get it so thin you can get it so thin it's so malleable and so

unusual and it's just it's like gold plating that's why gold plating is so interesting the counter argument about some of these things, because there are other things like, oh, did this book predict this happen or whatever? Like with so many books being written in any given year, isn't one of them going to weirdly accurately predict something that happens? Yeah, but this is not fiction. Right? This is the problem with this book is it's not fiction.

It's, this is deciphering the oldest language known to man. Right. But still, I meaning the oldest language known to man. Right. But still, I mean, the same sort of principle applies. Like, if there's this much body of research on these various times and beings and places, et cetera, and this much conspiracy writing about it, surely some part of it is going to be like, oh, my God, they predicted the thing. Someone sounds like a skeptic. You know what's funny, Joe? Someone sounds like she doesn't smoke any weed Crystal's finally realizing

wrong on the second count Crystal's finally realizing where all my you know what I'll come in but I do need to do shrooms so we're gonna have to work on that she's realizing where

all my crazy shit comes where I'll be like I was reading this book but it's got Graham Hancock and I was like there's a city so I get it all so all my friends

who are they're like have you been fucking listening to Joe Rogan again? Because I'll be like, listen, there's aliens. We can get there too. But like, and the UFOs. But they're always like, they're like, because I show them.

I was like, I got these rare meats in my freezer. And they're like, have you been fucking listening to Joe Rogan again? I'm like, what? I got a water buffalo steak. Who fucking cares? It's good for you. I'd be like. It is good for you. I'd be like. It is good for you.

Yeah. Yeah. These things are obviously fun. Right. And we don't know. I mean, like, I'm not a scientist. The problem is the podcast reaches too many people. So when I talk about this wacky shit, then people are like, you're spreading dangerous

conspiracy. I remember Media Matters wrote this whole article about me being a piece of shit because I talked about the lab leak theory. Oh, yeah. Oh, wow. Guess what? But it was like, it wasn't even me talking about it. It was Brett Weinstein, and he was explaining it from a scientific perspective.

He was talking about the actual components of the virus and what we know about it and why, and he was very careful about the way he described it. Yeah. He said it is more probable than not that it came from a lab i i think this is the why i believe so much in your platform and why i'm frankly such a big fan is because i know that you're just bullshitting sometimes but the power that you have to be able to elevate these types of conversations is incredibly important

hancock in particular like you had hancock on over a decade ago the archaeology community said he was totally full of shit Oh, guess what half the stuff that he set out has actually turned out to be true Yeah, and so your questioning of conventional wisdom has actually played a direct role in influencing our understanding Lab leak is another one. I frankly Weirdly the two most important people to UFO disclosure are yourself and Tom DeLonge, right? Tom DeLonge's fucking Blink-182. Not only that. Tom DeLonge broke my heart many years ago.

He was the worst guess I've ever had about UFOs. Because he fucking believes everything. That's right. That's the problem. He doesn't have a facility to sort. I was like, something's wrong. There's like two wires and you need to go like this and they're not doing that. They're like this and they're not doing that

That's actually a problem in some of these areas that are like pushed down in the mainstream Is the people that stick with it are the ones who will embrace the wildest shit and then wasn't that continue to do what it? It wasn't that it was something wrong Literally off literally watches things that are obviously fake and he believes in them oh dude it was like when you had less stroud that made me so sad oh the bigfoot thing i fucking love that i love that but he was obsessed with big anyway but well he is a financial interest in believing that bigfoot exists you know because he was doing that survivor man bigfoot show but when it comes to survival craft and it was amazing he tarred his own brand by becoming some Bigfoot unfortunately I think you're probably right yeah but he did believe in it meanwhile here's what's crazy you know when I first talked to him about

that I had never been in the woods around bears and so he was talking about these uh these sounds that he heard in the woods but then I went I was in Canada And I saw bears fighting And that's the sound They make That's the exact sound Wow I mean the exact sound Yeah

You can find videos of it They go like this They puff their chest up And they breathe heavy They make gorilla sounds Whoa They can pull up See if you can pull up

Bears fighting sounds Because they don't just go They go like this They sound like gorillas did you ever watch grizzly man oh my god I've watched it a thousand times I'm excited to judge the accuracy of your bear's fighting impression

grizzly man is like the best unintentional comedy ever Werner Herzog is a fucking brilliant comedian he's a genius but there's this there's a scene where the sheriff looks at the cameras talking about the guy goes I thought he was retarded and it is I like I remember being on my couch I fell down onto the ground oh my god is this real is this documentary real but it was also sad there was a lot of sadness in there because that guy who was out there in the woods was basically... I'm hoping this works.

Yeah, back it up a little. They're not doing anything. But they just did it. Back it up a little. They're just walking. But in the beginning they did it. I know, they're not doing anything. But just the sound.

Just go back to the sound. They weren't doing anything. They're just walking. Jamie, bring it back to the beginning because they said it. You could hear it. They make a noise. They were just walking. Jamie, bring it back to the beginning because they said it. You could hear it. They make a noise. They're just walking around right now. Yeah, but there's a noise that they made that you played that I heard.

I made an accidental click and there wasn't anything going on. I'm telling you. But where did you click it? It was like right here. Okay. This intense scrap between two brown bears. Well, this is what they do. They're sidelining each other.

It's super weird. Circling each other, kind of. See, if you're in your fucking tent, and it's dark at night. Oh. I would scare the shit out of me. Hear that? Hear that right there. Back it up a little bit.

That right there. That's it. Oh. I see what you're saying. bit. That, right there. That's it. Oh. I see what you're saying. This. Yeah, this. It's a fucking gorilla noise. Whoa.

They do. I've seen bears with my own eyes fighting, doing this. And it was a male bear that came around, a female bear who had cubs. And the female bear was like, get the fuck out of here. And she got him. And the male bear was like, get the fuck out of here. And she got him. And the male bear was like. You watched this? I was like 100 yards away or less.

Less than 100 yards away. It was wild. They were black bears, so they're a little bit less scary. Yeah. Still, that'll humble you. But it was fucking sketchy. That'll humble you.

Yeah, because they get on their hind legs and you see this fucking eight foot bear. They're so big. Yeah. Well, and you know, they could just do whatever they wanted to. Yeah, because they get on their hind legs and you see this fucking eight foot bear. They're so big. Yeah. Well, and you know they could just do whatever they wanted to. Oh, yeah. Well, have you ever seen one run fast? They run faster than the fastest sprinter that's ever lived.

And they're so big. They just take off and you can't. They look like this lumbering thing. And they're running really fast. You're like, fuck. You know what show I was obsessed with was Life Below Zero. Oh, my God. I love that show.

Oh, really? Love that show. Oh, wait, no. You had Glenn Villeneuve on. I listened to that interview. I had two people on it. I had Glenn Villeneuve on and I had that woman, Susan. Oh, Sue Akins.

Yeah, Sue Akins. Yeah, dude, I'm obsessed with her show. She's amazing. She's fucking badass. That gangster, you want to know what that lady did? A bear attacked her, broke her hip. She went to the hospital, right? she had to drag herself away got to the hospital got out of the hospital shot the bear and ate it holy she doesn't

give a fuck fucking she chain-smoked cigarettes and just kill shit all right she's my hero she went back and shot the bear and ate it because there was this coyote killed my chickens in california and i wanted to eat it and i camped out i was like for fucking days i had a perch on my balcony with my bow and i even tied one of the dead chickens to a pottery plant you know a pot that you pot plants in yeah and i tied it and i waited and i had a whole plan i was going to eat the coyote is gonna i was gonna shit into a garbage bag and throw it over my fence so that the other coyotes, after I ate him, would know that I

ate their friend. I had a plan. I was so angry. What does coyote taste like? We're gonna find out. It's game. I was gonna find out. You gotta like vivisect it. What was that? Skinwalker Ranch? Did you know about all this? Yeah, I went there. So what was it like? Nonsense.

Bunch of meth heads. You know what's weird though? What is it? This is the- Here's the thing. It's a UFO hotspot. It's also a place where a lot of people do meth. Okay.

The two of them together, you gotta go, huh. Okay. But here's the thing. Skinwalker Ranch is the reason that we have the UFO report that's coming right now.

Well, Robert Bigelow is. That's right. And Bigelow was on my podcast, and he's a very nice guy, but unfortunately he believes a lot of things that don't make any sense. Like, he heard some noise downstairs, and he believes that it was ghosts. Like, he's got this weird...

People, like, they make these connections, and you go, why are you making this connection? And then you ask them, and they don't have an answer. And Bigelow's a genuinely very nice guy and a very smart guy and a very successful guy, but he's a fucking true believer. And those true believers, those are the ones you got to go,

man, I wish you weren't a true believer. Yeah. Because he, but here's the other thing. To be able to look at things objectively. He has immense resources and he might have access to things that he's not willing to discuss, and it's hard to tell. Well, that's always the frustrating thing.

Because he's obsessed in a way that you almost, like, want to get that guy alone and get his trust and go, come on, man, what have you fucking seen? What are you really now? What have you fucking seen? Isn't that always the case, though? You've had that one guy, Jacques Vallée? Jacques Vallée, yeah. And he's, like, supposedly in possession of the—and I'm't that always the case, though? You've had that one guy, Jacques Vallée. Jacques Vallée, yeah. And he's supposedly in possession of the—and I'm like, release the materials, dude. This is where I get very annoyed by a lot of cases.

I know he does. Jacques Vallée knows some things. And so I'm just like, release it. This is part of my frustration. One thing that he discussed that was really fantastic was that there are alloys and there's these samples of metals that if a company was to construct this metal, it would cost billions of dollars to do so. And there is no known version of this alloy that exists on Earth. And there's an actual alloy that they're testing and working on right now.

And through Jeremy Corbell and George Knapp and all these leaks and releases from the Pentagon, people are now understanding that not only is this a real phenomenon, but there's actual video footage that cannot be explained of things that show no visual propulsion system, no visible propulsion system, no heat signature. And when from the Tic Tac incident off the Nimitz in 2004, they have video of this thing taking off, going thousands of miles an hour in a way that any other known craft that we've ever constructed would just obliterate just through the g-forces well and just it really challenges our notion of physics i mean even just like the basic laws and you know physics

was my dad's a physicist um by atreides long retired what does he think about it what does he think about this stuff? Have you ever talked to him about it? That's a good question. I haven't talked to him much about it. But, you know, physics, when he's older, he's 86. And so when he was coming up through college, like physics was a hotline of him

where there were all kinds of developments there. It was really considered the frontier. Now that profession seems to have gotten kind of stale. And actually, Osweiler in a similar way where it's like you have to have this particular ideology and you have to pursue within string theory. And if you're looking at theories outside of that, then you're not going to progress in your career. And there's this sort of groupthink mentality that's set in. But that's part of why I find it really fascinating is because like this is defying what we – the basics of what we understand about how the universe works.

So what's going on there? I love the story too because, I mean, first of all, there's no bigger question you and i are both nuts dude i know we have problems i'm sorry everyone we share things we text each other we're both real we have real problems but i will say this which is that it intersects i was a pentagon correspondent once upon a time and so what really pissed me off at this recent new york times story i did a big monologue on this is the pentagon has this forth report. So they got to pre-leak the report and have their journalists write it the way that they want. And I know how they do it. They do an embargo off the record and they say, here are the findings, which is the findings. This is what the Times headline was, which was

that the government finds no evidence of aliens, none. And you oh shit that's a crazy story and you read it in the first paragraph and also no evidence that it's not so you read even deeper the first of all this is take this with a grain of salt the government says it's not a secret usa technology okay well they're not going to admit it even if it actually was so i'll cast that one aside but the most important one to me was the government finds and dismisses the weather balloon theory saying that crosswinds or whatever at the time changing wind directions dismisses the fact that the objects seen on the FLIR are weather balloons. Weather balloon is the top explanation by the debunkers, by the professional debunkers. So I'm like, wait, so the real headline is that the government has no fucking idea what this was, dismisses the first, you know, the main debunked theory around this. And then this is where the military industrial complex part of this comes in.

But they're like, and maybe it's China or Russia, like intelligence officials worry that it's China and Russia. Why? Because they want to put it into a box which they can explain and try to use it to get Congress maybe to fund something else. And to be clear, I've dismissed the PSYOP theory that the government is disclosing all this as a PSYOP for funding. This is a coordinated campaign. I think they were dragged kicking and screaming because of Bigelow, because of Harry Reid, Jeremy Corbell, and all the videos. Christopher Mellon. Christopher Mellon, exactly. Yeah, who's also been on. Like I said, Tom DeLonge, because by bringing Lou Elizondo and all that forward in the New York Times is what broke this open.

And that is what pisses me off, which is that the government is actually just not admitting the truth, and the media is going along with it, which is that we have no fucking idea what's going on. They have no idea. That's okay. That's fine. We have the most sophisticated tracking equipment that we know of in terms of what science can do. And off the Nimitz, they track this thing going from 50,000 plus feet above sea level

to 50 in less than a second. They have no idea what it is. They have no idea how it did it. And then it went to their cat point. So it disappeared, took off, and went to the very point where they were supposed to meet up later. They had a predetermined point where the jets were supposed to fly to. And this thing went there like, I know where you're going, bitch. I know what you're up to.

Yeah, and who the fuck knows what it is or what. I mean, we could speculate all day long, but one of the things that Jeremy released is these things that go into the water. The transmitting vehicle. That was crazy, too. We played it on the show. It's fucking crazy. They're filming this with night vision off of an aircraft carrier in the middle of the ocean where no drone

could ever fly. That's the thing that people talk about drones. Drones don't stay in the sky very long, folks. Thank you. It's like an hour and a half, two hours. They can't just fly around forever. They can't go hundreds of miles. They just can't. They have to be launched somewhere that's close to the area they're traveling to.

I was very disappointed. I'm a big fan of Neil deGrasse Tyson, but I was disappointed in kind of that. And Musk does the same thing. He's like, camera resolution. Listen, Musk is a fucking alien. That's why he's dismissed. He's got to distract everyone from the truth. He's also on my show, and I got him in trouble by smoking weed,

and he almost lost his top secret clearance with NASA. And his stock price dropped. Well, it went back up the next day. Yeah, he's fine. But when I talk about aliens, like, no aliens. Come on. Get away. I just want to say that.

Shoo, shoo. Shoo, shoo. Bad ideas. He's protesting too much. Sorry. 14 hours There you go They can go for a long time But this is a different thing

That's the drone This is No no no no no This is a predator drone This is a completely Different kind of thing This is the size Of an aircraft carrier

I think he started I mean to start A jet I know I know I'm just arguable The thing I've been Thinking about is What if someone

Could put the Tesla Technology In A commercial drone? How fast would that fucking thing go? Yeah. Actually, that would be awesome. But the Tesla –

We can't. Pull that back, Pat. It goes 115 horsepower engine. Okay. So this is a thing that goes slowly because it's got 115 horsepower engine, which is one of the reasons why it can go so far or so – yeah, for so many hours. So that thing scoot along at 300 miles an hour at a maximum of 50,000 feet. Well, okay.

Well, I'm definitely wrong about that then because I'm thinking about drones that are civilian drones. That's what I was thinking about the things that – well, this goes to the whole – this is what Neil deGrasse Tyson said. But if that can scoot along at 300 miles an hour, I don't think it can do that for 14 hours, right? I think once it goes – it's like a fighter jet. The thing about fighter jets is when they go really fast, they can't... They burn gas. That's why they all can mid-air refuel. Yeah. They can't go for very long going really fast. That's just the one they're talking

about, though. That's that one. Right. They might have some other ones they need that go way... Yeah. That's a good point. So what... Well, here's the real point, right? What if they've developed a nuclear-powered drone, right? Because we always drone? Like a carrier, right? Yeah, because we know that they have submarines. They said that these nuclear-powered aircraft carriers can go for months at a time.

Years, I think. Yeah, like years, rather. Like just on the power of nuclear energy. Especially the supercarrier. Right. So imagine if someone devised, and it's not outside the realm of possibility, right? They can figure out some way to make a nuclear-powered drone. I found this story, but I couldn't find enough info on it.

But there's this picture that exists of crash drones from Iran and Saudi Arabia that are triangular-shaped. You don't know any information about what's in them because they're not telling you. That looks like a jet. It's shaped like a jet, right? about what's in them because they're not telling you. That looks like a jet. It's shaped like a jet, right? The weird one was the ones that were pyramid-shaped because they seemed to be three-dimensional,

literally like flying pyramids. And they were flying in formation. Yeah. But again, if you have nuclear power and you could figure out a way to propel, that's the other thing, though, is these things don't have visible propulsion systems. That's exactly right.

That's where it gets really weird. All of human flight, you have to put something out in order to go forward. Since the Wright brothers, actually, this whole UFO thing got me really interested in the history of flight, so that's a whole other conversation. But with Degrassi-Tyson and the photo theory, like why have, guess what, guys? In the middle of the night, the transmedium vehicle, that was at 11 p.m. in the middle of the fucking ocean. Wait, so is what he's saying basically like why aren't there any good, normal – Why aren't there better photos? Like we all have these cameras on us all the time.

Why is there a single like high-resolution? Why isn't there a single photo? And so this is like the big – they're like, look, like if you would think – and here's my thing, which is that, yeah, the current ones are grainy because actually it's a miracle that we have video at all of something moving in the mid at night time in the middle of a fucking ocean or at how high was favor like 50 000 i forget how high he was whenever favor was up so it's like okay or whoever got that video which i think was the guy who came up after him it's like yeah no shit it's grainy no shit it's like that's what radar looks like whenever you're looking at heat signatures. It's also they're trying to identify things to shoot down out of the sky. They're not looking at things like they're not trying to get Instagram pictures.

Your camera phone. Try and zoom in on your camera phone next time at night and see how good your shitty resolution is. How fast? 15,000. Well, 15,000. They have zero understanding of how fast it went because it literally disappeared in front of their eyes. It went so fast, it just vanished. Yeah.

Gone. That would be hard to capture. That would be hard to capture on a map. Thank you, Crystal. Thank you. That's my humble opinion. Imagine being a guy who's a fighter pilot and you're out there in the middle of the ocean and you follow this thing. It's a tic-tac shaped object as big as your airplane. And it just goes.

And you're just sitting there going, oh, what the fuck? And multiple people saw it. So there's two different jets and four different people looking at it. And you're like, hey, guys. At different angles, too. From above, from bottom, and after. What in the fuck? And then you contact the Nimitz and they go, yeah, we've been following these things.

Didn't they say in the 60 Minutes thing this was like a regular occurrence? A regular occurrence. Ryan Williams. Yeah. The pilot, Ryan Williams. He said, I saw these things up there almost every day. That's wild. The thing that drove me the craziest about Neil deGrasse Tyson was this concept that

why would they care about us? I know. God, thank you. It's like he didn't really even think of that. It's like he's got like these pre-programmed responses to these things that he brings up in these why would they care about us he's such a jovial fun guy that's a fun thing to plug it's like a comic with his act i love that guy i love cosmos but i was disappointed because it's like like you were like we're fucking fascinating i mean i don't think that he you know i don't think

he strays out of the bounds of you know know, like what's the orthodoxy. I mean, my theory is, why did everything ramp up after 1947? Which is that we use the atomic bomb in 1945. They're like, hey, fuckheads. Exactly. They're like, wait, they're like, wait, these fucking chimps can kill each other. And not just that, they could kill us. Or they could kill planets.

And if you look at sci-fi, and I know I'm getting deep here, which is that the use of nuclear weapons is almost always how you know when humanity went ladder up in civilization. And if you think about how much that changed, I would want to pay attention. Like, if you're just paying attention, and you're like, oh, you know, they're fighting, you know. Well, all

the things that Bob Lazar talked about in that Jeremy Corbell documentary, which is, by the way, my favorite documentary ever about UFOs and my absolute favorite conversation I've ever had with anyone who claims to have had an experience. I talked to Travis Walton. That was amazing. But Bob Lazar was by far the most fascinating because, A, he seems insanely sincere. B, he knows so much about science, so much about propulsion. B, he knows so much about science, so much about propulsion.

And C, the things that he talked about in the 1980s proved to be true, including element 115. That was just like theoretical. Yeah, that is wild. Until the 2000s. And then someone figured it out with a particle collider. But he was talking about this was what they used and that they had a stable version of this. And you've got to think about what. And this is the other thing that you talked about,

like if you brought a nuclear reactor to someone in the 1400s, they would think it was witchcraft. And this is what the kind of technology that whatever these things are, whether they're from the future, whether they're us from the future, or whether they're from another dimension, or whether they're from another planet, whatever the fuck it is, they have technology that is indistinguishable from magic and bob lazar allegedly according to him worked on trying and attempting to back engineer this

thing and when he describes his experience with it he has been insanely consistent forever since the 1980s i do wish he hadn't he because we would talk about this where he had like a migraine i wish he just you know he was getting those before we this where he had like a migraine podcast i wish he he just you know he was getting those before we nothing against bob but like and like i respect his story yeah it just it he had an affect where if you were really skeptical like imagine if that was your introduction to ufos like for me i always tell people i'm like you start with favor yeah the most unimpeachable person there is you listen to to him on your pod, listen to him on LexPod. You listen to that,

you're going to believe that some shit happened. Now, you can think that the sensor went wrong. You can think that maybe, you know, the radar fucked up or weather balloon. Mass hallucination. Fine, okay, fine. I mean, I would accept that, but he believes what he's saying.

Then, you know, you listen to people like Christopher Mellon. You look at the videos, Jeremy Corbell, George Knapp, and all these guys have put out for a long time. Stick within the realm of the respectable that has been vetted by journalists. Then it's time to listen to Bob. See, this is where soccer is.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's when you're ready for it. Yeah, I'm like, Bob's when I push all my chips in. I'm like, I'm all in on this. Well, gravity propulsion, right? Transmedium vehicles. How the fuck? Everyone's like, oh.

I saw some idiot online he was like how would it even move between air and water i'm like oh wow let me yeah this is this was the real break for saga with trump when he failed to release that's right that's when he said fuck this breath yeah we're gonna do your podcast that's right. So let's wrap this up. All right, let's wrap it. Let me just tell you how happy I am that you two are independent. I think you guys are fantastic.

I think your two together in your show is one of the most important things out there because it's a rare thing that's unmolested from the corporate media and from the ideologies on the left and the right. And you have your own opinions on things. You have your own perspectives. But I know I can trust you guys. I know you're honest. We would never be here without you.

So thank you so much. So, so much. And we're even, I mean, I think we both feel even more free, if that's possible. Free beyond. We feel light. We feel very light. When you guys, when we had that conversation on the phone,

I'm like, fuck them. Let's go. You were very definitive and thank you for being so it worked it was the nudge we needed it really was the nudge we needed

so thank you I'm so happy you guys exist so thank you bless you Joe thank you bless you bless you alright bye everybody Thank you.