The Joe Rogan Experience - #1800 - Gavin de Becker

Episode Date: April 1, 2022

Gavin de Becker is a leading authority on the prediction and management of violence. A three-time presidential appointee, he and his firm Gavin de Becker and Associates have provided protection, investigation, and threat assessment services for numerous high profile individuals and organizations.

The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. Hello, Gavin. Hey. Pleasure to meet you in person, in the flesh. You too. We obviously have a lot of friends in common, and I'm glad to be here. I'm glad to have you here.

And I'm glad to talk about, we have a lot of shared interests, but this survival signals that protect us from violence. Now this is, I've always wanted to talk to you because you are truly an expert on preparedness and cautionary tactics and what to do and not to do, like in terms of security and how to protect people. What is your background? How did you get started in all this? Bad childhood. Violent childhood is the way I started.

When I was 10 years old, my mother shot my stepfather in front of me. Oh, Jesus Christ. And that was one of many sort of gun incidents in our family. Was your stepfather violent or something. No, he wasn't. My mother was. And how that's unusual, right? It is.

It's the it is the more unusual of the two. You know, the two genders. Certainly men are more violent, more often throughout history. So I had that experience, but and a whole bunch of others. My mother was a heroin addict. She committed suicide when I was 16. And so I saw a lot of stuff. I saw a lot of criminality. I saw a lot of violence. And I guess I developed kind of like a an ambassador between the two worlds. I spoke both languages. You know, if I had a few other disadvantages, there's no way I would have,

you know, succeeded in life. I would have died young. Like if I'd been a black kid with the same circumstance, I'd have been in big trouble. And so that life brought me to a fascination with when John Kennedy was killed, I was 10, and I was home from school. And it just absolutely captivated and fascinated me. Not so much the issue of who killed him or the conspiratorial sides of these things, which are very real, not so much that, but the actual physics of how you prevent assassination. And that interest stayed with me throughout my life. And I eventually, I've had an odd life. So as I tell you this story, you'll be ready for it to be unusual. But by the time I was 19, I had already read and devoured everything I could

on this subject, which was pretty limited. Most of the stuff on anti-assassination strategies I wrote later in life, but there wasn't a lot to read at the time. And at 19, I got a job working for Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton. And they were the most famous people in the world, maybe not known to everybody today, but she was a big movie star and he was a big movie star. And at that time, there was really only Jackie Onassis and Elizabeth Taylor and the Queen of England. Those were the giant media figures. Now we've got hundreds of media figures and Marilyn Monroe, who had died already. And I worked for them starting as a kind of flunky. Do you know the word? A gopher.

And then and through the course of everybody above me being fired, I ended up being what's called traveling chief of staff. And I traveled with them around the world. I got to work with protectors and intelligence agencies in South Africa and in Israel and in Mexico and all over Europe. And I learned a lot. And I observed everything. And when I was done, I was 21, and I wrote an article about public figure protection in the private sector for a law enforcement journal. in the private sector for a law enforcement journal. And everybody assumed I was a 55-year-old ex-FBI agent, but I was 21 years old. And so I used to get asked to come and give speeches. And when I would arrive, they would look around. You know, is your dad with you? You know,

they'd look around. And I had a mustache. I used to darken it because you could see through it. And I gave speeches. And I got better and better at it. And giving speeches, you have to be right. You know, you get tested a lot by audiences. And so I was driven by the idea of accuracy and a good intellectual process because I didn't have – I wasn't a former cop. I wasn't an FBI agent, et cetera. Later, I became all that kind of stuff. Later, I got appointed by the president of the Department of Justice Advisory Board and

work with CIA and FBI and all the things that have gone on between 10 years old and today. By the way, the reason I mentioned that is sometimes when somebody wants to say something shitty about me, they say, oh, his whole training is that he had a bad childhood. Could we count the 55 years between then and now, perhaps? But ultimately, I developed a company that is a consulting company that advises people at risk and wrote books on the topic and did a lot of research and study on the topic. So when you were 19 years old, how did you get this job working with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton? It's a good question. So I went to Beverly Hills High School. We were on welfare and food stamps,

but my grandfather got a one-room apartment in Beverly Hills where we could lie, and my sister and I would say we lived in Beverly Hills, use that address. So I went to Beverly High, and there I met a lot of friends who are still friends today. And one of them was Gina Martin. And Gina Martin was Dean Martin's daughter. And so I went to work for her mother for $60 a week, which I still have, by the way. And one day, Elizabeth Taylor came over to their house. And Gina and I, my girlfriend and I, we sat up at the balustrade and looked through the railing. And I thought, Elizabeth Taylor, I didn't really even know who she was. But I thought, this is going to be a big deal.

And in came this giant, you know, big hair and all this stuff. And then a few months later, somebody called me and said, she's looking for an assistant. And will you go meet with her? So I went to the Beverly Hills Hotel to meet with her. And she wasn't there. Her boyfriend was there. I met with him. I got hired.

Can you type? Yes. Couldn't type. Do you speak French? Yes. Don't speak French. Why French? They were going to France two weeks later.

So I got the job. Then I went home. And I later. So I got the job. Then I went home and I told my friends I got this job. It's unbelievable. I turned on the television and Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton have gotten back together. She's left her boyfriend and I see her going through the airport paparazzi and my career is over. I never even met her. And then a few months later, got another call. And this time she was back in Los Angeles with the same boyfriend. And we had her and Richard Burton broke up already. So she was great to me, very, very nice and kind.

And one day she came into my office and she said – I was working at the house and she said, can you take me to the tropical fish place tomorrow? And I thought, yeah, sure. That would be great. And her boyfriend was a guy named Henry Weinberg and he used to take her. And so I thought maybe he's going to be a little jealous or something. But I figured I'll take her. This means driving some Rolls Royce I've never driven. I didn't have a car at the time. And I was supposed to pick her up at her house, meet her there at 10 a.m. About 1045 in the morning, I wake up at home. Fuck, I have totally blown it. I am. I've missed the appointment completely. I rushed like crazy

to get to the house, get there by noon. She's gone to the fish place and she comes into my office afterwards, clearly to fire me. And she says, Gavin, thank you so much for what you did this morning. That was that was a very admirable thing to do. But, you know, I don't know what it is yet. And she says, you knew Henry would be jealous. And so you stood back and let him take me to the fish place. So that was great. OK, world, I'm in.

So I kept the job. Wow. And then home one night and a friend of mine calls and says, put on the television. And it's Elizabeth Taylor back with Richard Burton, has left her boyfriend. And my career is over again. So I'm done, finished. It's over. And a few weeks later, she calls me.

And she says, would you be willing to come to work for me and Richard in Europe? I don't think I'd ever been to Europe. Maybe I'd been one time to England at that point. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, yeah. And I say, you know, Richard Burton was an intimidating British actor. And so I said to her, what should I call him? Do I call him Richard? Do I call him Mr. Burton?

And she said, Richard, he wants to know what he should call you. And in the background, I hear, I don't give a shit, love. Fuck, I'm going to have a rough time with this guy. And then I show up and we live in Switzerland for a year, live with them in their house. And the very first night he comes to talk to me and we talk for like six hours. I'm 19 years old. Wow. And I love him and he loves me. I don't just mean in that moment. I mean through our lives. And we stayed even after I left working for them, we stayed friends until he died at maybe 50, 50 years old from alcoholism. Wow. So that was an interesting start, just the way things went.

Well, he must have been close to death then, right? Because how old was he then? He was 45 probably when we met. Or maybe that's an interesting question. I have to look. You know, I was in Jerusalem a few years ago, and I stayed at the same hotel where Elizabeth and Richard and I had stayed when we made a trip to Israel. And she had converted to Judaism in the 60s because she was married to a guy named Mike Todd. And so she was an enormous big deal in Israel. There were Elizabeth Taylor theaters. When we landed, the entire tarmac of the airport, hundreds of thousands of people. And I thought, wow, Israel is a really disorganized country.

They let everybody on the tarmac, but it was obviously because of Elizabeth being there. And so I was learning quickly about this and this kind of stuff. And while we were there, many experiences went out with the Kissingers and crowds and blah, blah, blah. experiences went out with the Kissinger's night crowds and blah blah blah but many years later as an adult and in my 60s I was at that hotel and I was looking around at all the pictures they had of famous people and there I find Elizabeth and Richard and me and so it gave me the idea to download the diaries of Richard Burton which which I had never read. He used to keep a diary all the time when we were traveling.

If he was drunk or in trouble, I used to go get the diary out of the room so it wouldn't get stolen by photographers or news media people or housekeepers or whatever. Handwritten? What? Handwritten? Yeah, tiny, tiny, tiny, tiny. He'd be writing all the time. And so I had two experiences

with that diary that are good teachers for my kids now. One is that one day he went to sleep and he was on a bender. He was an alcoholic and he was having a hard time. And I saw the diary sitting just folded over the armchair. And I thought, well, I better grab that so a housekeeper doesn't get it. And I pick it up and I turn it over and I read it curious, like, what does he always write in here? And my eyes land on these words, must get rid of Gavin when we get back to London. Good teaching. Oh, boy. So anyway, now years later, I'm at the King David Hotel and I download this book and it's a book of his diaries. And I think, oh, am I in there? So I start looking around and I find passages that, you know, by this point it's been 45 years

or so since I worked for them. And I find these passages from him. One of them says, Gavin gave us a long letter yesterday telling us that he's right about everything and we're wrong about everything. I have no memory, but it sounds like some young Gavin move. right about everything and we're wrong about everything. I have no memory, but it sounds like some young Gavin move. And then, you know, other entries regarding me, but one of them that really struck me is that he said there were days and days without any entry. There'd be five days with no entry. And at the end of it, he would say, lost five days, five days gone. And I realized that I was a kid living with this couple and really had no idea what they were going through and what he was going through with alcoholism and what she was going through with drug addiction. Were they always like that or is this a response to the pressures of fame?

Because one of the things that I've encountered and you meet a lot of movie stars and celebrity type people, especially rock stars, it's not just the life on the road and the partying that goes with that, but it's in response to the pressures of so many people wanting your attention and so much focus on you. A lot of them turn to something to dilute that. Yeah, no question. I mean, Elizabeth was famous from when she was 11 years old. So she starred in a big movie called National Velvet. She became an international sensation. Richard was not. He grew up poor in Wales and then was thrust into this circumstance. He was a stage actor and suddenly thrust into this circumstance of being in this couple. And they had a lot of, you know, tabloid stories and controversies. But on your main point, yeah, I have a, you know, I've had a real front row seat on fame

and the pressures that go with fame. And it's a highly unnatural circumstance, right? If we go back a thousand years, there was no such thing. You could be known in your community. You could be called the king, Caesar, but nobody met you or knew you or saw you. The vast majority of people had no connection to you. And now you have people who are known to millions and billions of people. If you're a female singer, you're singing romantically to

somebody. If you're a female actress or male, your face is closer to people than you would ever be unless you were going to kiss them or hit them. You would never see all the little lines in somebody's face and have this kind of intimacy. And I think physiologically, our bodies are not able to distinguish between that which we see in media and that which we see in our actual lives. And so it is an enormous pressure to have everybody you meet, you'll recognize some of this yourself, that everybody you meet will have some idea about you in advance. Everybody you see will have seen you first. You're at a restaurant going like this, Everybody you see will have seen you first. You're at a restaurant going like this, they've already made you. And that's a weird distortion of you want to meet somebody and build a relationship, right? You don't want to meet somebody and they already have their 50% done. and assert yourself. Years ago, the Beatles had a line that the whole world went crazy and used the four of them to do it.

And that they were the only four people in the world who didn't experience the Beatles. Jamie had a very similar statement the other day. I've heard that before, but yeah, I just thought of it in the same way. Oh, about the Beatles? Well, like me and him experience the world without the show, kind Oh, about the Beatles. Well, like, me and him experience the world without dealing with this show,

kind of. That's right. Like, we don't, you know, because we're weirded out because we're so insulated. Like, the show is so small in terms of, like, the amount of people

that work on it. It's just me and Jamie. So me and Jamie and whoever the guest is communicate. We have fun. It's just like a bunch of people, you know, three of us talking. And it reaches millions of people.

Yeah. And that escapes us in this moment. So all the people that are listening, that are listening right now, that are driving in their car and at the gym and wherever you listen to the show or watch the show, these people experience the show. We are a part of the show. So for us, it's just life. So all the controversy behind it, they can bring it into work and go, did you hear about this guy that's on the JRE

that said this and that? And like, oh, I heard that's bullshit. Or, oh, I know about that. And then these conversations break out and all the controversy breaks out and we're blissfully immune to it. Yeah. But the world has changed so much for us because when we go out, then we experience it. Then we experience all these conversations and all the controversy and all the people and all

the attention. It's just strange. Yeah. I think as I mentioned, physiological, because we're not physiologically prepared for it. When you meet somebody, you don't have a place in your organism to put they already have a full opinion of me. It's a little bit like racism or discrimination or a police officer's experience. A police officer pulls you over and everybody lies to him. Everybody treats him different. Everybody's real, real nice or everybody's got a story to tell. And so they're not engaging with the human being. They're engaging with the uniform. Fame is a uniform. It's on the outside of you. That totally makes sense. And especially I've always thought that of cops, like that people need to take that in consideration. And also that cops, when they pull people over, they're really genuinely worried about being shot and killed.

I mean you might think, hey, I was only going 10 miles an hour over the speed limit. The cop is thinking, this guy could be an on-the-run criminal and I could get shot in the face right now. Of course. Of course. Yeah, cops are having a tough run right now all over the country. They really are. So did they, like Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, when you first started working with them, were you old enough or aware enough that they were dealing with this pressures of fame and of celebrity and that they were diluting it through alcoholism and pills and that that's why they were doing that? No, I really wasn't. I had, you know, I was learning along the way and they must have had experiences together where they say, man, this Gavin kid could really take it. But of course, I'd had

this childhood already where the dramas that they were going through were pretty mild. My older sister said a thing years ago that some boyfriend of hers overturned a table in anger and was sort of moving toward her. And she said to him, you're going to have to do a lot more than that to get my attention. Because we were just low blood pressure. We'd been through so much already as kids. And so we went through this sort of, you know, academy of university of adversity. And so I didn't see and didn't understand what their circumstance was at the time. I certainly saw the outer look of it, but my view was, and I think a lot of people have this view, oh, famous people, they're built for it or they're just famous people. They forget, well, they weren't just famous people two weeks ago or

two years ago or two decades ago. And so it's regular people to whom a circumstance occurs, right? It doesn't change anything about you as a person and how you engage with people individually. But if something has happened to you, and you specifically are a good example of it because of, you know, the controversial element. By the way, I don't think you're controversial. I think what, you know, controversy gets made on the outside, it doesn't get made in here. I haven't seen a lot of hot arguments in here. And so that thing gets stuck to you, and it's basically an outfit you're wearing. And it's your life now. Yeah, it's weird.

For the most part, most people don't interact with me like I'm controversial. The vast majority of people that I meet are just friendly. The problem is when people want something. That's a problem. People always want me to – they want to give me a book that they wrote or they want to talk to me about being on the show because of some experience they've had. That becomes exhausting because they want to do it while you're eating dinner. Of course.

They want to do it while you're ordering food somewhere. Yeah, I like this one that people come up to the table. And I've been with so many famous people through my career and life that I've seen every variation of it. And they say, oh, can I take a fast picture of you? And if the person says yes, well, not with the fork in your hand. Oh, so now you want to direct me and take a fast picture. You know, not like this. It becomes an entitlement. There's a feeling of entitlement and a feeling of, you know, this is the protocol for approaching a famous person is that I say to you, can I have your autograph? And you say yes, no matter what you're doing, argument with your wife, difficult times in life, you know, just lost something, just gained

something, doesn't matter. This is the protocol that people know. And they think that's the only one. And, of course, what I've learned is stand back and leave people alone or call out a nice thing. Well, definitely don't interrupt them while they're eating. They're just people eating. And, you know, I'm sitting there having a conversation with my kids, and I've had this before, where people come up and they want a photo. And I'm like, we're having dinner. And, you know, and they're like, come on, man. I'm like, what if everybody did that? Then I'm not having dinner with my kids and I'm not talking to photo and I'm like, we're having dinner. And they're like, come on man.

I'm like, what if everybody did that? Then I'm not having dinner with my kids and I'm not talking to them and I'm talking to you. You need to come on. You need to realize this is silly. If I'm leaving, when I'm leaving, you wanna take a photo, sure. I'll take a photo with you when I'm leaving.

But when I'm sitting down and I have a fork and I have food in my mouth, I'm like, get the fuck out of here. This is crazy. So is it inappropriate for me to ask for a photo right now? No. I brought you a book that I asked you. Well, I'm excited to read this book because a good buddy of mine really, really enjoyed this book.

And he said it was very valuable to him. you have about this, you know, about security and psychology and threats of violence and all those different things. Because of your childhood, and then because of your experience initially with Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, did you know, like, when you started working with them, that this childhood that you had and this this chaos would would help you form this career is that how you got into it like realizing that you were working with these famous people these famous people like uniquely vulnerable and that you could somehow another protect them way before that I think I knew at 10 years old I had a vision that there would be a company that that you

know people who were at-risk public figures might have a manager or an agent if they were in show business or a family office or a corporation or if they were religious leaders, they'd have a church. And they would also have this consulting company that I envisioned, 10 years old. And I'm not the only person who's had an experience like that where you, you know, you have some certainty about what's going on. I have a dear friend who won an Oscar, and she designed her Oscar dress at 10 years old. What? Yeah. No, not an actress living in Massachusetts somewhere, no chance of being an actress. And when she got to college, the acting teacher in the theater class said to the whole class on day one, only one of you will ever make it in

show business statistically. And she looked around, she thought, oh, these poor kids. Well, she was right. She was right. But how weird is that when someone is right about something like that? I think it happens with a lot of, you know, look, as I get older, it happens more frequently that something slips into the flow. And I'm not as surprised anymore when things work together the way they do. The universe has got a lot of mystery to it. And, you know, my childhood and then the things I did afterwards were, you know, were sort of part of a story. And I don't take credit for crafting that story. I didn't you know, I couldn't get myself with Elizabeth Taylor or get myself with Ronald Reagan or cause these things to happen, I guess. But I watched the movie and it's been it's been super

interesting. So you're 19 years old. You work with them. How long does this relationship last? I worked with them and lived with them for two years. Two years. Yeah. And then I wrote this paper that got picked up by the National Criminal Justice Reference Center, which is a part of the Department of Justice and given to every police department in America. Back then? Yeah, back then. And it was a four-part series on not about the Burtons but about public figure protection in the private sector. And I was a four-part series on, not about the Burtons, but about public figure protection in the private sector. And I was a good writer.

Public figure protection in the private sector when you were 21 years old? Yeah. Yeah. But it was only of interest to law enforcement. But you weren't law enforcement back then. You were just an assistant to two famous people. Well, I had become, I became their, to use the lofty title, their traveling chief of staff. So when we would go to cities, it was me who arranged security and logistics. And I learned, and I had this really good gift you might like from your own, you know,

Eastern self-defense training. And that is that in the mind of the beginner, there are many possibilities. And in the mind of the expert, there are few, right? The expert says, oh, we tried that. That doesn't work. The beginner says, why do they do it that way? How about this way? And that's been my whole career. I wasn't a cop. I wasn't a Secret Service agent. But I've worked with Secret Service now and worked on research projects with them and, you know, trained police departments all over the country. And it isn't always the path of, you know, going to college and learning a particular skill. I'm glad I didn't, by the way. I went to college for one course,

one class, criminal investigation. And then when I got appointed as a senior fellow at UCLA School of Public Policy, and I had to give a little speech, I thanked the dean because you're the first person to ever put me through college. And I've only been here for 20 minutes. But I drove through Princeton once was my other college experience. But look, not everybody has the life that is in the system. And the system offers certain, makes certain promises. If you do certain things, if you go to medical school, maybe you'll become a doctor. I think those promises get broken very often by big systems. But I just had a different life, a different circumstance. And I did research just like a scientist. And I met with people and I studied and we did experiments and we do all variety of things in my company. But it wasn't

at a university. But that is a very unusual thing for a 21-year-old to do with no real background in law enforcement, other than the fact that you were coordinating with them when you were traveling with Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. That's strange. You would write a paper, and then that paper would actually be taken seriously. Yeah, it was. Nobody thought I wrote it, but it was, at the time, it was taken seriously. And there wasn't a lot on the topic. And most people who had experience in this field were cops. And police departments have exactly zero training on public figure protection. It's not, you know, it's its own discipline and much more so now. And I was just fascinated by it. And I still am.

And I was just fascinated by it, and I still am. So you leave this in your early 20s, and what do you do from then? So the next thing that happened is friends and people that knew me would recommend me to others who were just becoming famous and say, you know, you ought to talk to this guy, Gavin D. Becker. Maybe he has some advice for you. And so a good friend of mine at the time was a kid named Sean Cassidy, and he became a big teen idol. He was just my friend in high school. And he went off. He had an interesting experience, too, because he was our high school buddy. He was a couple of years younger than me. We used to pick on him like crazy, keep him in the middle of the pool at a friend's house. We wouldn't let him go

to the edge until he was getting really tired because he was smaller than us. And we were what I would call bullies. No, I call it fun bullies. But it's the same thing. Yes, bullies. And he went off to Germany and had an experience of being the Beatles. We did not know it. We didn't know. You've got to come back and be in the pool again and be treated like shit again and ultimately he did become a big teen idol in America and and I was a natural person to give him advice and guide him through that circumstance he was like David Hasselhoff in that regard like he would go to Germany and he'd be huge in the beginning but then he became huge all over the world I mean that was the first place he was family was yeah and

he he became you know cover people magazine and big recording artist and all that stuff. His sister was in love with him when I was a kid. Yeah, a lot of sisters. And, in fact, now as adults, we would go into a restaurant, and he could tell if the person seating you was of a certain age, we're going to get a great table, right? Some people would say, oh, you know, I was a big fan of your brother because his older brother David has also famous and then other people would say Oh my god, you were on my you were on my bedroom wall all through childhood. Of course. They're now 56 years old

Is he still alive? Oh my gosh, Sean. Oh, yeah David's not but Sean is alive a big TV producer and and and a TV writer smart guy But anyway, so then I had an experience with him then he referred me to somebody else then comes a whole But Sean is alive, a big TV producer and a TV writer, smart guy. But anyway, so then I had an experience with him. Then he referred me to somebody else. Then comes a whole series of clients. And this company began to be formed. And around 1980, a dear friend of mine, Morgan Mason, still a dear friend, went to work for Ronald Reagan. Speaking of controversial and unpopular,

that was like going to work for Trump out in Hollywood. You know, Ronald Reagan was the worst thing in the world. He'd been governor of California. And so he went to work for Ronald Reagan. And guess what happened? Reagan became president when everybody said, you're wasting your time and he'll never become president. And he called me and gave me a job. I was now, I probably was 26, and he gave me a job as a director of special services group for the president's inaugural. And this president, because he'd been in show business, had all kinds of people coming, Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin and Johnny Carson, et cetera. And right at the beginning of my getting there, John Lennon was assassinated. And the Lennons had also hired me to do work for them if they went on

tour. And they were deciding whether to go on tour based on the success of his last record album called Double Fantasy. And they decided not to go on tour. I never met them at that time, I did meet her later. But so I went up to New York and we had this – a bunch of meetings after he was assassinated, sad memories. And interestingly, I learned later that I was at Blair House. I was now working for Reagan. We're now working for President-elect Reagan as director of special services group. And I was at Blair House in the morning where the president-elect was staying. And then I flew to New York for this meeting after John Lennon was killed. And I later learned that John Hinckley made the same trip the same day and flew back on the same trip the same day. He also went and stood outside the Dakota building where John Lennon was killed in getting up his courage to eventually shoot President Reagan.

And he shot him a few months later. So then Reagan became president and he was the oldest president at that time. Not anymore. But he was the oldest president at that time and he appointed me as the youngest appointee ever at Department of Justice on the President's Advisory Board. So I'm kind of giving you the process of how this particular life happened. And I remember, you know, being on that advisory board and there was the Supreme Court Justice, Chief Justice from Arizona was on the board with me and a Supreme Court Justice from California and the Sheriff of San Diego County

and this kid, you know, and know, sitting at the table at our first meeting. And as an icebreaker, I said, well, has anybody here ever been arrested? Knowing that, of course, none of these people would have been arrested. And every single one of them had a story about being arrested. We went around the table. I had mine. They had theirs. You know, it would be I was standing in line with my, you know, 20-year-old son, and the guy behind me said such and such. And my son took a swing at him and I took a swing at him and we all went to jail. Or it would be I was in college and my girlfriend called the police because I took the record collection and I got arrested.

Every single one of them, Supreme Court justices, chiefs of police, head of the Pennsylvania Crime Commission, all of them had a story of being arrested. Crime Commission, all of them had a story of being arrested. And my asking that question was an icebreaker that, you know, that made our relationship work. Suddenly this 26-year-old kid in the room who doesn't know shit about shit was actually kind of interesting. And so that led to some big research projects that I got done, the biggest one being on assessment of threats to public figures that I worked on for five years. And that was published and became a big deal, again, in law enforcement. And it led to all kinds of things. And then I got appointed to something by George Bush also, not the younger, but the older George Bush. So it essentially started out as almost like a word of mouth. And then you just start working for people, your reputation grows, and then you

do more and more research, you get more and more involved in it. Did you also find that there was a lack of understanding of what was necessary to protect people? That like there was, you know, when you're talking about your beginner's mindset, were there people that were doing it incorrectly? And like, what flaws did you find? I think the biggest, yes, is the answer. And it's a good question because it was a, you know, in those days when John Lennon was assassinated, there then came a few in a row and they tend to group all kinds of sort of media age violence groups. So if you have a school shooting, you'll have another and another within a geographical area. Right now, by the way, at the present moment in the United States, we're having multiple victim shootings almost every day.

So something that used to happen every few months and be a giant story is now happening all the time. We'll cover that maybe later. But on your question, I think the biggest mistake that people were making in public figure protection was the belief that threats, a direct death threat, I'm going to kill you, was the most important communication that could be assessed in advance. And that was simply not true. What I learned through research and then later wrote about is that of every public figure attack you've ever heard of, of everyone you've ever known where a public figure was killed, not any of them were threatened directly by the person who killed them in advance. Really?

So, and likewise, none of the people who made a direct threat to a public figure later shot that public figure. So, when I started, everybody was very, you know, responsive to a public figure, later shot that public figure. So when I started, everybody was very, you know, responsive to a direct threat. It's a death threat. He says he's going to kill me. And I learned that other kinds of communications were far more indicative of who will show up. And I learned that the art, and still today, the art and craft of what I do and what my company does is try to avoid unplanned encounters, unwanted encounters. Because if you avoid all the unwanted encounters, you're also avoiding the dangerous ones. And you can be sure that nobody who travels a thousand miles to get a

meeting with you or waits outside your house if you're a famous person is going to hand you a check for a million dollars. That's not what they're coming for. It's always something for them. And it's always something inappropriate because millions of people write fan letters or emails or are admirers of a recording artist or a politician or whatever. But very few, statistically speaking, make what we call targeted travel, you know, get figure out where somebody lives or where they work and travels to see them. So my approach was different from others, which was to try to detect as early as possible those individuals who might pursue encounters. And from that to where we are now, we now have the largest library in the world of threat material directed to public figures. I think it's about 600,000 pieces of communication.

People who send blood, people who send bullets, people who send body parts. They send blood? Oh, yeah. Body parts? Yeah, we've had everything. Like what kind of body parts? We've had a finger. We've had—

Their own finger or somebody else's? Their own. We've had explosives. We've had facsimile bombs, blood, hair, skin. So someone cut their own finger off to send it to a celebrity? Yeah, to a public figure. Can you say off to send it to a celebrity? Yeah. Can you say who they did it to? No.

No? But, I mean, our whole podcast would be talking about weird things people have sent to public figures. What was the message with the finger? I'll give you another one that I remember the message for, which is somebody sent an animal they had killed and said, I killed this because it was beautiful like you. Oh, Jesus. So there's no direct threat there.

But clearly, somebody has that much emotional investment. It's a serious topic. And so that is probably the biggest change I made in my contribution was that direct threats were not the most important pre-incident indicator. And before that, they were considered... They were. If you went to cops when I was starting and you said, look, we've got this person and he's written 10,000 letters to one public figure. He goes every single day to the mailbox to check and see if she's responded. He's mentally ill. He's lost his job. And we're concerned about him.

Cops would say, well, did he make a threat? Well, it is a threat. The circumstance includes hazard. But in those days, they responded only to threats. And now we've made a lot of progress in that, that there are other kinds of communications that are pre-incident indicators. I just want to give you and your listeners this little acronym, which is PIN, pre-incident indicators. So before everything that ever happens, there are PINs. And so one of the things in my work and in my book and in the masterclass that I've done, what we're trying to teach people about is what are the early pre-incident indicators of people in your life who turn violent or people who aren't yet in your life who turn violent.

In other words, can we predict violence in advance? And the answer is we can. And so you go from this to, I mean, I don't want to make this big leap into the Jeff Bezos thing, but it is, it's very fascinating to me. You were involved in finding out how Jeff Bezos' phone got hacked, and you were involved in connecting it to the Saudis and that whole thing. How did this all come about? Well, I have promised, I wrote one op-ed for the Daily Beast about this. And in that op-ed at the end, I say, I'll never say another word on this case because I'm turning it over to the federal government. Now it's a few years ago. So what I can share is only that which has been public and a lot wasn't public. But the circumstance did involve MBS, who's the prime, you know, the prince of Saudi Arabia. And he did send a text with a video to Jeff Bezos. They knew each

other. They had met. They had exchanged phone numbers. And embedded in that video was a system that downloaded something that then later connects to a website and downloads something more sinister like Pegasus 2, which is a system that governments around the world use to get into your phone and then they have full control of your phone. So it doesn't immediately connect to it? No, it doesn't download immediately because it's a bigger package. What you're getting in your first incursion into a phone or laptop or iPad or whatever, you're getting a very small file, a little executable file that then later reaches out via the internet. And that executable file could be a website. It could be...

Yep. And does it exist only on the physical phone itself or is it in the operating system? And if you change phones and like upload to the cloud and then re-upload or re-download on a new phone, does that spy software make it onto your phone again? Probably not, but we don't know completely. Whether it does or it doesn't, when a government wants you, like the U.S. government or Saudi, basically there are two kinds of countries in the world when it comes to incursions into smartphones. There are original developers, the United States, China, Soviet Union, and Israel. So there are original developers of programs that do these things.

And then there are the purchasing countries, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, and all 190 other countries. By the way, I say 190. Do you know there isn't even a consensus about the number of countries in the world? Countries can't even agree on that. Is that because of like Taiwan? Taiwan is a good example. Yeah. So the best way I can put it to you is that if a government wants you from an informational point of view, wants to get into your phone, they have you. These systems are extraordinarily robust, powerful, as I learned more and more

about them. It's not actually my area of expertise, cybersecurity, but as I had to learn more about it for myself and for clients, when the Saudis wanted to get into a phone, they could. What if you're communicating only through direct encryption devices or applications rather like Signal? Yeah, it's a very good question. So if Signal encrypts the package going back and forth between the two devices over the internet. So if you have interception between device A and device B, it'll be encrypted. But that's not what happens with things like Pegasus 2. Pegasus 2 is a very high-end system, and it's in your phone just like you're in your phone. Everything you can do on your phone, I can do from 7,000 miles away in some Saudi

government office. And so Signal doesn't help you with that. I do think, however, by the way, Signal is a foundation. It's not a for-profit company, so I'm glad to promote it. I do think they have something very valuable on Signal, and that is disappearing messages, which is if you and I were exchanging Signal communications, we could set, in one week, make all this disappear. In one hour, make all this disappear, up to four weeks. That's very valuable because otherwise our text messages, look, I was tasked to do this for myself when the Saudi thing started, which is I have to think about everything that's on my phone. Holy shit. Every communication I had, you know, for years, every text I sent, every photo, every argument, every joke that would be taken out of context, you know, it's a very hard thing to do because we're like a mind.

We're collecting all of this data in the phone. And so Signal is valuable. I think Signal is a good service. But it doesn't solve the problem if a government wants you. If a government wants information, they can get it through programs like Pegasus 2. Right. Well, how does Pegasus 2 get on your phone? Well, different ways.

It is a no-click incursion, meaning you don't have to click on anything. Typically, you would get a text, and you would open that text, and that would download the little executable file. Or you would watch a video, and it would be in the video. But now, the newest Pegasus systems, they don't even need you to do anything. They can send you a message on WhatsApp. And even if you never, even if you delete it, even if you never open it, they can get in your phone. But what if you don't use WhatsApp? It's a help, by the way, I don't recommend WhatsApp.

Why is that? Because WhatsApp has had a, for some reasons that I don't want to share and for some reasons that I do want to share, WhatsApp has had a particularly vulnerable circumstance with regard to people getting into other people's phones. Now, having said that, there are thousands of people right now all over the world working on nothing but getting into the new iPhone operating system. And then there's thousands of people at Apple working on nothing but being sure that the new operating system is impenetrable. And this just is an arms race that's going to go on forever. So you were saying that if you get a message through WhatsApp, but what if you don't get a message through WhatsApp? Is that executable if just a blank text message comes your way and you don't open it? Less than that, unfortunately. You can get nothing at all with Pegasus 2. You can get nothing at all. They can enter a telephone number and they can get into your phone.

Nothing at all? No text messages? So you have no idea whatsoever? That's correct. And that's a problem with zero-day exploits, which is you don't know what happened and you go on for months and months and months not knowing that somebody's in your phone is a problem. And how do you find out if someone's in your phone? Well, it depends on the circumstance. In the case you described, I was notified originally by somebody in CIA, then notified eight times by the FBI about the information they had learned. And then we began to do to do, you know, work on the phone itself. And you learn about it in those ways, which is very difficult, by the way, because Pegasus 2, I feel like I'm giving a commercial

for Pegasus 2, but most people can't buy it anyway. But Pegasus 2 is not sitting in an armchair waiting for you to arrive. Hey, I'm over here. It is extremely well hidden right down at the very core levels of a phone or an iPad. But there are strategies for finding it, and they're challenging, and they're evolving all the time. for finding it and they're challenging and they're evolving all the time. There are whole organizations like Citizen Lab and a really great expert, Anthony Ferrante, who used to work for Obama at the White House

on this kind of stuff, he's now in private practice. They've had a lot of success. They even have found Pegasus 2 in the wild, meaning before there was a reason to be suspicious, they've identified it. And it's a tricky game because it, let's say you were targeted by the Mexican government, which happened a lot to people, and you have it on your phone and you think you are being monitored in some way. So you get rid of your phone. You turn it off. You put it in the top drawer. Well, Pegasus will say, hey, this activity has just stopped. Self-delete. It'll self-destruct. So now you don't even have any evidence that it ever happened, even if you could get an FBI

involved. So Pegasus sends a signal to the person that's using the spyware to tell you that that phone is not active any longer? Well, they know. They see immediately, hey, Joe isn't texting his friends anymore. So they know that right away. So they execute it independently? Nope. It can happen internally. Because what happens, remember when it's turned off or the battery is taken out or a wide variety of things can happen that with a, quote, suspect phone, it will self-destruct on its own after a few days of no contact. That's one of the things they market. I got all their marketing material. And at the time, you know, when we were really doing this investigation, we were getting a lot of content from around the world. It's sold by a company called NSO, which is in Israel, based in Israel. And it's a very

dark game all over the world involving governments and other powerful people. And most people say, well, what do I care? Nobody wants to get into my phone. And they're right. But if you are a person who is subject to the interest of government anywhere in the world, it's very hard to have privacy. So if you don't get a message through WhatsApp, what are the other vulnerabilities? Like, could you get a message through Twitter? Can you get a message through Instagram? Yes, you could get a regular text. A regular text. Yeah. Pegasus One, which did require that the user click on something, but Pegasus Two is a no-click exploit. Nothing has to happen.

So someone can just send you a text, you don't even have to open it? Not even send you less than that. What I'm saying is that the high-end Pegasus system that's used by Saudi Arabia and other countries, all they need to do is have your phone number. That's it. Nothing more. So they have your phone number, they have access to all your photographs, your messages, everything you send. Turn on your phone as a microphone right now in this room. Turn on your phone as a camera right now. And even it's so smart. Let's say it makes an audio recording of a phone call.

And it doesn't download it right now. It waits until the phone is quiet and it's late night in the target destination like in your home. It's late night. And then it downloads it at night so that you don't even see a reduction in performance, right? And then people who are sort of watching the cost don't see spikes of all kinds of activity. In the case you talked about, gigabytes of data was taken out of that phone. Gigabytes? Yeah. How many gigabytes are on a phone? No idea. How many gigabytes are on a phone? No idea.

Don't know. So anyway, yeah, the short punchline on this is that there is no way to – there's a lot of products being sold that do the best they can. But depending on who wants you, there really is no way – if the central intelligence agency wants to get into somebody's phone overseas, they can do it. Now, is there a difference between operating systems? Like is there more of a vulnerability to Android than there is to iPhone? I hear, again, not an expert, but I hear that there's more vulnerability to iPhone, but that might be because they are the ones that are targeted most often and that thousands of people are working on all the time. Yeah, that was my question. Like, what about one of those de-Googled Android phones

that are becoming more... Probably better, but I don't know. You don't know. Because there's a lot of people that are swearing by those now that have moved to these operating systems that have been manipulated to the point where they don't send information, you can't get tracked, GPS doesn't work, all that stuff. Yeah, it's good to have the least, the lowest number of apps you can have on a phone, the better, if you're talking about just using it for phone calls. The challenge I have, because I get, you can imagine, every product is brought to me, usually given to me for free to try, hoping that clients will want it or that my company will want it. I see everything.

But the challenge is, it's a moving target. So if somebody says today, oh, we've got something great for such and such, two weeks later, people have been able, adversaries have been able to work on it, and it's an arms race. And so it's sort of like saying, hey, I got this great new thing, you know, a catapult, and I can throw fiery bombs over the wall of a castle. That's not so interesting anymore now that we have tanks. These things continue to evolve. Do you anticipate there ever being a time where they can circumvent that and there will no longer be exploits like that? Or is this just a new reality that people have to live with? I anticipate it going in the other direction, which is that it becomes far more accessible for far more people and that anything

we do, you know, online is subject to being intercepted and seen more and more. You know, a lot of people, like I have clients who could be targeted by China, could be targeted by Russia, could be targeted by France, could be targeted by the United States, by other companies, by powerful adversaries. And they often say, well, I just treat every communication as if it could be heard. But the reality is that as human beings on a phone call, we are unguarded. You don't want to have a phone call with me or a conversation that's completely guarded where I'm like this all the time. And so the reality is that this is going to be a vulnerability in people's lives, period.

And it's going to expand. Expand, sure. And do you think it's going to expand to the point where regular people have access to everyone else's phone and all their data? I think it will expand to where motivated people and not governments could get access to other people's data. And, you know, there are even laws, some in the U.K., where, you know, why should people be able to have a secret encrypted communication? What are they trying to hide? Government is challenged by it, right? Yeah, I've seen those. People in power are challenged by that stuff. And so, well, because we might want to have a communication that the government isn't part of. That would be the reason. But people in power don't like it. And so slowly,

it will erode that way as well. Well, those are some of the dumbest arguments ever, like why would you want encrypted communication? And there was during, after January 6th in particular, there was a lot of talk of the dangers of encrypted peer-to-peer messages and applications, which I thought was hilarious. Just because there's a few nuts that storm the Capitol, you want to have all encrypted messages illegal or encrypted messages apps? You think they're a problem because a tiny fraction of the people that use it are up

to nefarious actions? Yeah. Well, it's a goofy – the know, the government equation throughout human history is always to protect its power as much as possible. And the absolute wet dream of every government on earth is the internet and the way we engage with it, right? I mean, if you read 1984, still a fantastic book, by the way. Interesting thing, it's 70 years old, that book. a fantastic book, by the way. Interesting thing, it's 70 years old, that book. And year before last, 2020, it was the 17th bestselling book in the country. It was a top 20 bestselling book. Wow. Isn't that encouraging, though, about people having their head screwed on right? In other words,

that they were aware that some of what they're seeing is not just pandemic or is not just politics. It is also a profound gathering of power. And there's never been a day in human history, not a moment, that there weren't well-funded people, close to people in power, working on the best new weapon or the best new method for controlling other people. Why was MBS trying to get into Jeff Bezos' phone? Hard always to predict what someone else, you know, what's going on in their heads. I can just tell you the circumstances at the time included that the Saudi government was negotiating a multi-billion dollar deal with Amazon.

And so that's one. I think the far more likely one is that Jeff was the owner of the Washington Post. And the Washington Post was employing Jamal Khashoggi. And he was just really ramping up his communications that were making MBS crazy. We had sources inside the Royal Palace and the family, and who said that MBS's first thing every morning was to open the Washington Post website and look at what was in there. He was very stressed by it. And as you may have heard, he became so stressed that he, you know, ordered the killing of Khashoggi. Yeah, I followed that very closely. And I had Brian Fogle on when he was promoting The Dissident. And that documentary is terrifying. And the response by the world, the world stage is terrifying too, because they kind

of just waited to see how much outrage was out there and then sort of accepted the fact that this head of state killed a journalist and had him dismembered in a consulate. I mean, the whole story is beyond crazy. I mean, flew a hit team with a coroner amongst them. I mean, there's audio recordings apparently. Yes, there are. Yeah. So I worked on that case a lot and know Brian well. And it's good that you mentioned The Dissident because it's a fantastic documentary and it too got canceled in every way possible. Yes. And so it became very difficult to see. I'm sure you can see it now.

Well, no, it's not difficult to see. It became difficult to promote. That's what I mean. Well, I promoted it. I think he had a really hard time finding streaming services to accept it. That's what I thought was fascinating, that even Jeff Bezos, who had been victimized by this intrusion on his privacy, he wasn't willing to have it stream on Amazon Prime. You could buy it, and you could buy it on iTunes, but the amount of people that would buy something versus the amount of people that would stream something for free on Netflix it's a big difference and he was just coming off of this Icarus documentary which was award-winning it was a huge hit for Netflix and he felt like Netflix is just gonna have welcome him with open arms for his next project because obviously the guy's super talented yeah and they were like uh-uh interested. That's how powerful that guy is. Yeah. That's how powerful people are in general. And Brian Fogel won an Academy Award for Netflix, their first one, for Icarus. And I agree. I thought right alongside him, of course,

Netflix will want this. This is a hell of a documentary. This is incredible. I mean, you've seen it. It's got amazing information and amazing insight. But that is where we are. We are in, you might have heard about this. We are in a cancellation culture, you know, with a tremendous amount of- I heard about that. You did. I thought so. So you are paying attention to what's going on. Yeah, it's going on. It's going around like the flu. Yep. And so that is a, you know, the use of the word dangerous, for example, when you said, you know, it's dangerous for people to be able to communicate encrypted end-to-end encryption. Anytime that word is floated, that something is dangerous, what you want to hear that as is it's dangerous to government.

That's who it's dangerous to. I mean, governments have been in this game of using fear to control human behavior and to control their own populations throughout history. There's never been anything else. And so when we see any time a government wants us to fear something, it's very important to ask yourself and really learn about what that thing worth fearing in the ways that the government is telling us? Because government wins from a frightened population all the time. And there's been examples of it. You know, President Woodrow Wilson wanting to get support to get into World War I, he formed a virtual police state, like something out of 1984, with people, you know, fired and people losing their careers and people being lynched and new sedition laws and all variety of things. And if you weren't with us, you're against us. And it was pretty severe. So it's happened before post 9-11, of course. And I just found an amazing one, by the way, I want to tell you, it's so amazing. It's slightly off the topic of me, but King Charles in the 1600s banned coffee houses in England. Why? Because coffee houses were places that people gathered together and talked, and they'd be a little, you know, amped up because

of the coffee, and they'd be feeling good with each other. And so he put out a proclamation, I'm quoting it here, restrain the spreading of false news and licentious talking of matters of state and government. And he said that this bold discourse that was going on, this is really worth it, that the public assumed to themselves a liberty, not only in coffee houses, but in other places and meetings, both public and private, to censure and defame the proceedings of state by speaking evil of things they do not understand and causing jealousy and dissatisfaction in the minds of my subjects, the king's subjects. But I want to give you one more piece of this.

The following year, he extends it to not just coffee houses, but any place that sells coffee or chocolate or tea. And I'm not joking, by the way. This is true. And then the following year, he does another proclamation. And this one says, Spreaders of false news or promoters of anything malicious against the state will be considered seditious, you know, going against the government. Wow.

What year is this? 1672, 73, 74. So that's where fake news came from. Yeah, no shit. And that's right. But interesting. Why I why I wanted to share that with you is that here we are on, you know, the Joe Rogan experience, which has had its share of of shit flung at it for literally just having conversations. Nothing, nothing more going on in here. No collection of weapons or plans to overthrow the government. And I always like to remind people that these things are not new. They're human nature, meaning governments have done this always. And every word I just read in that thing, it's amazing. He wanted to ban coffee houses.

And now people want to ban end-to-end encryption or anything else that will allow for an actual open dialogue. Well, there's people that are openly talking about amending the First Amendment, changing it and saying maybe we shouldn't have so much free speech. Maybe free speech is a problem, which is crazy. It's crazy that there's so many people that have a voice and have a say in matters, and they're so short-sighted that that's one of the things that they would actually say. Yeah, I think it is, but it has existed before. And I think it's important to remember that if you look at human history, it's almost all tyranny. And the United States and Western Europe is a tiny sliver of the pie. It's a tiny period in human history in which we grew up

with freedom of speech. And we grew up with these protections from the court and from the Constitution. But it's not some permanent state of affairs. It definitely won't last forever. And I say to people who want to change any amendment, want to make an amendment to the amendments in the Constitution, you almost don't have to because major media companies have done it anyway. Major media companies, New York Times, CNN, et cetera, et cetera, something your listeners might not know about called the Trusted News Initiative that's run by BBC, which is a whole collection of major media companies from all over the world who decide together on how to handle certain stories. And that's how you get, you know, 5,000 headlines that say ivermectin is a horse paste. Ivermectin is an animal drug in the same way that antibiotics are an animal drug, meaning we have a shared biology with other animals and it can be given

to all kinds of beings. But of course, it's a people drug, won the Nobel Prize as a people drug, given billions of times as a people drug. But when you looked at what happened with you, you had a monolithic approach in media where everybody said the same thing, horse-paced, horse-paced. And that's because of a monolithic approach in corporate media right now. And so who's at the helm of that? Well, the BBC Trusted News Initiative is certainly the most organized version that we're aware of. But I think in any of these things, like what we're experiencing for the last two years, people want to find a single villain. You know, it's Klaus Schwab, it's Bill Gates, it's pharma companies, whatever it may be, because it's a simpler narrative.

And unfortunately, it's not a simple narrative. What happens is this. Many, many people have competing incentives to exploit a new thing. So, for example, when 9-11 happened and, you know, airplanes flown into buildings, there came up companies that reinforced the concrete on government buildings as if they could stop a fucking airliner. Ridiculous. But the government spent millions of dollars on it, on reinforcing windows and reinforcing the outsides of buildings. My point being that in our current world, if you used to make perfume, now you make hand sanitizer. If you used to make bumper stickers, now you make stickers that say stand six feet apart that are on the floor of the supermarket.

If you used to make fabric scarves, now you make masks. And so everybody is inclined by the momentum of commerce to jump on to anything that has everyone's attention. In attention, there is money to be made in the area of attention. So when governments of the world say, you know, there's a virus, and if you're over 60, it'll kill you. That was the first, you know, that was the original information. And when that gets etched on the tablet, it's very hard to change people's minds after that, even though we learned that it was far more, you know, you were far more vulnerable if you were older, if you were frail, if you were, I mean, look at Canada. 70% of the people who died in Canada whose deaths are attributed to COVID were nursing home residents.

Meaning, what do you go to a nursing home for, by the way? You're dying. That's it. In Los Angeles County, the average stay in a nursing home, a Medicare nursing home is six months. You have six months to live. So when we learned, myself included, I heard about the pandemic and thought, oh shit, over 60, you get it, you die. So all kinds of cautions and care and concern. Then I got that first report that came out of Italy, which showed that 94 percent of the people had 2.7 fatal comorbidities,

meaning they already had other diseases that could kill them. I didn't. And they already were elderly. I wasn't. They were in many cases overweight, all variety of problems. And the point being that it was highly age stratified. This disease is highly age and health stratified. And so young people, you know, a kid in college, you don't have a challenge from this disease. Now, quickly, if Dr. Fauci were in my pocket right now, he would be climbing up here to yell at me, oh, yeah, but we've got a lot of young people who were killed. First of all, it's not a lot relative to anything. And secondly, people get killed in car accidents. Life is a sexually transmitted, always fatal, communicable disease. That is what life is, right? It is a condition that is sexually transmitted, always fatal, and communicable. We cannot eliminate all risk, and government always pretends they can. After 9-11, the color codes. It's a red day. It's a yellow day. The UK is using the color codes in this pandemic. And it looks like comedy when you see it. You know, this is a yellow day.

And what do I do? Duck, not breathe, stay under the kitchen counter. What do I do with this information? And then you see how do people actually die? Overweight, heart disease, diabetes, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And that was a little diatribe you just said. So this Trusted News Network, like in the instance of COVID and in my recovery in particular, they concentrated on one thing, and that one thing was ivermectin. And it was one of many things that I listed. I listed Z-Pak.

I listed prednisone. I listed monoclonal antibodies. And I said also ivermectin. I said IV vitamin drips and NAD as well, I think. But all they concentrated on was ivermectin. And then there was all these stories, like all over the world, about me taking horse dewormer. And it was very specific. It was horse dewormer.

Even though ivermectin, by the way, I found some stuff in my cabinet that was heartworm medication for my dog that was ivermectin by the way i found some stuff in my cabinet that was heartworm medication for my dog that was ivermectin yeah and uh i was like wonder what's in this i was like wonder if this is ivermectin this is all after the fact and i was like holy shit this is ivermectin too but they had come up with one narrative one narrative that they all stuck to yeah and that was horse dewormer why do you think that's the case? Because why would they concentrate on only one aspect of this laundry list of medications that I took? Well, in your case, you mentioned that one. They did a similar hit job that was years in the making on hydroxychloroquine. I say years in the making. For anybody who hasn't read Robert Kennedy's book called The Real Anthony Fauci, you can skip right to the last chapter and have your socks blown off in terms of things that are going on in the world.

It's got 3,200 citations. Everything is very carefully researched and studied, and it's been the number one book in the country for – Silently. Silently. We're coming up on 25, 30 weeks now without a single review in the United States. Now, when in our lives did that ever happen? That a book is the number one bestselling book in America and nobody reviews it. So it goes to the same question. You're asking how you have a monolithic opinion that is, that is, uh, foisted on the public. And it's why Joe, this show has been so important, not because you give people advice or you give them some specific, you know, guidance and tell them what to do, but because you just

give another, you can hear another view. Anytime you hear only the government view in world history, that's been bad news. And when in world history was it the good guys who were, you know, censoring books? That's just not the way it works. But I want to go to your question specifically on ivermectin. Any treatment for COVID-19 was a threat to the emergency use authorization and a threat to vaccines. The reason being that the emergency use authorization is not available if there are treatments available, right? So that's why they had to go nuts on hydroxychloroquine and why they had to go nuts on ivermectin, because if there was a viable treatment available to the public,

then you do not get an emergency use authorization. And what is the emergency use authorization? The emergency use authorization allows you to go from step one to step 30 in 100 days instead of 12 years. Right. Before you would inject something into somebody's body. It used to be that vaccines took seven, eight, nine, 10 and on the average 12 years to be approved by the FDA. This is 101 days. And so ivermectin was a threat. And if people knew it was a viable treatment or any early treatment, by the way, I mean, how can you have a government health system that doesn't even bother to say to people through a pandemic, take vitamin D, meaning that's an absolute epidemic in America. You know, people don't go out. And what did the government do? Stay home. Don't go outside. Watch television. Eat everything you can possibly eat. And they don't say a word about your health. And it's

supposed to be public health, but it isn't public health anymore. It's much more focused on specific outcomes. I still haven't answered your question, though, which is how it happens. It's this group of shared incentives. So you have the pharma companies where the incentive is not small, right? Pfizer, upwards of $60 billion already, just on this one consumer product. Moderna in the 30s. These are enormous, enormous events, and it's the best business in the history of the world because they have no liability. They cannot get sued for any effect from these particular products. And even 500 years ago, when you went into the town square and you bartered with somebody to buy something off him, if it turned out to be shitty, you could bring it back to him and say,

hey, man, this thing you sold me isn't what you said it was. And you could engage with him, not with pharma, right? No matter what happens from these particular products, they cannot have liability. But how do all these media outlets share this narrative? What is their incentive? What's their incentive? Well, I can't speak to or pretend to know every incentive, but I can look from the outside and see what we do know. Every major news program is sponsored predominantly right now by Pfizer, literally Pfizer, not just a company or drug companies in general, but they've been pharma companies for a decade. Meaning that's what, if you watch

regular television and you see commercials, you're going to see pharma commercials for a decade. Meaning that's what, if you watch regular television and you see commercials, you're going to see pharma commercials, all those commercials that, you know, tell you about the adverse effects, et cetera. Do you think that there's a specific conversation that gives them this narrative? Or do you think that they know that their interest lies in keeping these pharmaceutical companies happy so that there's this sort of like understanding? I think it's human nature. I think you know it. Now, can there also be conversations? Sure. There's a, you know, the former head of Fox who's died now, I forgot his name, Fox News. He said to a good friend of mine, I will never put

on, he was talking about a particular guest who was perceived as going to speak adversely about vaccines. He said, I'll never put him on because Pfizer is our primary. You know, this is how we run this place is based on these sponsors. So that is just an incentive. Other incentives would be in the beginning, in the beginning of this pandemic, would be to get rid of Trump, meaning mainstream or corporate media had had enough. They had whatever their philosophical beliefs were about Trump. And so all bets were off.

A very interesting example was the New York Post story on Hunter Biden. New York Post, oldest newspaper in America, started by Alexander Hamilton, for God's sake, runs this story about Hunter Biden's laptop. runs this story about Hunter Biden's laptop. And the Biden campaign, he hadn't won yet, floated the idea that it was all Russian disinformation. And 50 former intelligence officers wrote a public letter saying it has the earmarks of Russian disinformation, meaning it looks like it could be Russian disinformation. But the really bad thing that happened is Twitter would not allow you to share the story and Facebook would not allow you to share the link. So the story was literally killed. And guess what? Two weeks ago, the New York Times has now come out and acknowledged that it wasn't Russian

disinformation. It is Hunter Biden's laptop. By the way, I don't care about me. I'm not a political person. Don't care about Biden. Don't care about Trump. Don't care about Hunter Biden. It's not interesting. But what is very interesting and important to me is the control of information in terms of censorship. And I didn't like it. I didn't like it either. Why do you think that they're admitting that it's real now? Probably because indictments might be coming. There might be some kind of charge arising out of an investigation or, you know, the New York Times has done this before. Big media companies do it, which is eventually they say everything,

right? You can't believe it could possibly happen, but eventually there'll be an article saying these 70 studies about ivermectin might actually speak to some remote, impossible efficacy for this drug. When the Pfizer – ivermectin is of a category of drug that Pfizer's new drug is of the same category. Big surprise. Protease inhibitors. Exactly. Well, it's also been shown to stop viral replication in vitro. All the way back to 2012. So, and many, many studies around the world.

My point here, though, is I, you know, you asked earlier about my life and childhood. I think by not living a conventional life, I ask questions. And I have a phrase in my company, which is always go 10 questions deep. So you don't just say, oh, there's going to be guards at every post. You say, well, what are they told to do? What are their instructions? What's their qualifications? Are they standing together and talking? Or are they divided? You know, there's 10 questions to ask to get to the real information. And it might be genetic, it might be circumstance, but some people, yourself included, are curious, right? And you can, if you said something to me now that I'm, I don't know if that's accurate, I'm curious. I want to

look it up. I want to see what I can learn about it. But people are not that way, some people, with government proclamations. Right. And so it's considered everything, you know, fake news. If you disagree with these particular public health officials, and an interesting thing to remember about, for example, the FDA, 25% of new pharmaceuticals are later recalled. They're not perfect. The FDA is not perfect. They let things go out that later are found to be problematic. Opioids being a big example. Opioids for 11-year-old kids, which our current head of the FDA, who's been at the FDA before and a consultant to 15 pharma companies in the interim, of course. He presided over, you know, over all variety of opioid problems that have led to some of the biggest fines in American history, criminal fines against pharma companies, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer.

And yet today we've decided I have this fear. Please let me put it somewhere. Will you hold it for me, government? Will you hold it for me, Pfizer. And yet today we've decided, I have this fear. Please let me put it somewhere. Will you hold it for me, government? Will you hold it for me, Pfizer? You tell me I'm okay. And like children, people have done that. And I encourage people, ask questions. That's a very good way of putting it. The fact that people put their faith in, put their faith in it's an industry that's been the most deceiving the most ruthless the most willing to allow people to die for profit I mean when you look at what they did with Vioxx and that you know I had a John Abramson on the podcast to talk about that because he worked with that case and he's explaining how they knew that it was going to kill people. They knew that it was going to have these sort of cardiorespiratory

problems and blood clots and the like, and it wound up killing someone in the neighborhood of 60,000 people. And they were fined, but yet they're still in business. These are the same companies that people are defending as somehow or another amazing because they've come up with this solution to what is this, for many people, this existential crisis, this terrifying reality of a virus that is going to kill a certain amount of people no matter what you do. And there's got to be some sort of a solution. Then there's this one solution that gets presented. And everybody who thinks of themselves as being a good person or wants other people to think that they're a good person stops all questioning of this one group of companies

that has been notoriously the most deceptive. It's amazing. It's amazing the willingness to just believe people that have been profit motivated and driven and willing to do whatever the fuck it takes to get products to market, regardless of whether or not they're even effective or more effective than the current products that are available that are safe. Yeah. Well, I want to say, since you mentioned Vioxx, that the president's nominee and the current head of the say, since you mentioned Vioxx, that the president's nominee and the current head of the FDA presided over the Vioxx disaster as well, and even went against

an advisory board recommendation and approved Vioxx. And so Vioxx leads to fines of more than a billion dollars, but he gets to be head of the FDA again. When Abramson was on one thing that he told me that blew me away he said when scientists do peer-reviewed work on whatever the pharmaceutical drug company is working on at the time whether it's painkillers or anti-inflammatories whatever it is they don't get access to the data they get access to the interpretation of the data from the pharmaceutical companies. And then they do their papers, which is fucking madness. It is. And I think the public probably assumes that trials, like trials for a new pharmaceutical product, are, you know, the material is studied by the government in some government lab. But that's not what happens, of course. by the government in some government lab. But that's not what happens, of course. These trials are run by the pharmaceutical companies using independent companies that are beholden to them.

And so going back to your original question about how you have a monolithic opinion, I think the corporate media in America at the beginning wanted to disadvantage Trump and advantage Biden. And by the way, I'm all, you know, I get it. I get that people have strong opinions about Trump or about Biden or about politics in general. I think you can make a good argument that we'd be better off with a change, and you can make a good argument that we'd be better off keeping Trump. I mean, you can go around that stuff all you want. What happened, though, is that they succeeded at, you know, in a very close election. They succeeded at at Biden winning. And that's not considered, of course, election tampering, not letting the public know about the Hunter Biden laptop, for example, which would be a big thing in a normal campaign. Right. The president's son. And he's got references to the president inside his emails. He's working with other governments.

I mean, it wouldn't be nothing. Not just normal. Not just alleged child pornography. All kinds of stuff. So more to be learned. But here's my point, that then it happened, and there was success. Biden won. And I think that then the overall structure that accomplished that now had a lot of power and simply did not stop using it because the next one, you know, it started around vaccine disinformation. the Trusted News Initiative organized itself, that we'll all find out what's true and we'll tell the public that that's bad information and this is good information. But it then morphed to regular politics with the Hunter Biden thing. And now I doubt it will be given up. There are very few people in world history that give up power. Never. Yeah, it just doesn't happen. And what's fascinating to me is that so many people are willing to pretend that this isn't happening.

They're willing to stick their head in the sand and think that all these other folks that are making a big deal out of this, they're Trumpers or they're this or, you know, they have these biases that don't allow them to see the truth. And, you know, and there's also a bunch of people that bought into things early on. And because they bought into it, they have this established narrative in their head, and they're not willing to say that they were wrong. They're not willing to say that they had an incorrect assumption, or that they bought into the narrative because the government was saying it, and they were scared, and they wanted to have some sort of a feeling of comfort and also wanted to signal to all the people around them that they're doing their part, that they're a good person. Yeah, I think that's all accurate.

And if you are a sports league, for example, and you have mandated that the young athletes get the vaccines and boosters for young athletes, and then someone has myocarditis and collapses or dies. The sports team does not want to say we were wrong. So they double down. And we're seeing a lot of doubling down altogether. And by the way, I think it's awesome that people have their opinions, whatever they are and however they got them. What I strongly oppose is any effort to censor various views. The idea that there is an okay scientist to talk on your show and that there's another one that's not okay to talk on

your show is itself a little bit alarming because, you know, your show in particular, these are conversations. You don't like it, don't listen. Well, not only that, it's which scientists you're talking about like are you talking about very respected scientists that are some of the most published ever in their field yeah like i mean if you're if you're talking about people that are quacks that you can prove that they're full of shit and they haven't worked in years and they're just nuts and they've got schizophrenia like then you're talking about one thing but if you're talking about people that are amongst the most

published doctors ever in their field and you're saying there's something wrong with them because they've deviated from the narrative about one particular subject ever in their whole career yeah now you're mad are you sure yeah like how well how how much do you believe in this we have a real problem in this country too with that there's only two countries in the world where pharmaceutical companies are allowed to advertise that's a problem yeah there's new zealand which is apparently far more restrictive than America. And then there's America. Everybody else thinks we're crazy. Yeah. Yeah, it would. You know, even when I was growing up, you would learn about medications from your doctorcase and samples of the new pharmaceutical, usually a cute girl. And she would meet with the doctor personally. He'd look forward to that meeting and she'd say, oh, here's a bunch of samples you can give out to people.

And here's our paper on how good and safe it is and on and on and on. And some of those drugs were thalidomide, meaning they weren't all perfect. And the idea that we think that a product, this is the most successful product in world history, by the way. This makes Coca-Cola look like nothing. There is no other product in world history that billions of people have taken and that is going to be taken billions of times more as it comes into its fourth and fifth approved booster here in the United States.

So my problem with all of it is I don't even have to have a medical opinion. I have to have an opinion that I want all the information. Just imagine you go to your doctor and he says, so let me tell you about this product. And he says, I want to give you this piece of paper about the product. And I said, what about the other papers you have over there? He says, I don't want you to see those. Beg your pardon? I don't want to tell you that stuff. What do you mean you don't want to tell me that stuff? Informed consent is telling me the two sides of the issue, what's favorable about this product and what's unfavorable about this product, so that I can make a decision. Well, informed consent, you know, went out the window here

in these last two years. And I think that the something that I care about is that people be allowed to have a dialogue and have access to information. They can make their own decision on anything, but have access to information. And I'm always stunned when people say, I don't want to, I don't want to see that guy, that interview. You know, some interview you've had, for example, I don't want to watch that guy. Oh, what do you know about that guy that you're not watching? What is it you know about that guy? Well, I read that such and such. Where? What?

And you ask 10 questions and people fall off at about question number three. It's just articles of faith. It's like a religion. And it's just a belief system. I look for somebody to invest my confidence in. If Fauci looks like a good guy, I'll do him. Yeah, and it's not just a lack of information, it's a withholding of pertinent information, like that the CDC didn't want to release the data on

the booster for ages 18 to 49. Well, let's go for, that's right, now let's go further than that. They said it was going to contribute to vaccine hesitancy. That's right. Like, what the fuck are you even saying? How would it? Yeah. Or that it would be misinterpreted. Thated that's what they said what does that mean all the more reason for us to to want to see it of course and to want to but that's not your job the point is that that's not your job your job is not to like your job is not to form a consensus opinion amongst the general public through the way you present things. Your job is to give them the data and to allow the public health experts and the scientists to interpret that data in a way that makes the most sense to people. Your job is not just to say, we're going to withhold this

data because we personally don't feel that it's within the best interest to let people know the facts. That's crazy. Yep. And crazier is the way it's been accepted. The FDA, for example, went to court to not release the Pfizer trials data that they had, the safety data. They asked for 55 years to release it. Then they lost an early one. They went back to court and asked for 75 years to release it. Now, every time I say that, I turn to you because every time I say that, I have to tell people, Google it. Google FDA, Pfizer, 75 years. Because people don't believe it. They don't believe that those guys stood in court and said, we want 75 years to release this data. By the way, 400,000 pages. Supposedly, that was read and fully absorbed by the FDA experts in 100 days.

That doesn't seem likely. Doesn't seem likely, no. And so, you know, this is, by the way, for me, it's just one subject among many where I encourage people. By the way, even my books, my books are about personal responsibility. You learn it. Don't rely on the government. Don't rely on the police. Don't rely on the corporation to be sure the lighting in the parking lot is okay. So now you're safe because they put lights up. You learn about your own internal nuclear defense system.

And that – so my buttons get pushed around this topic because the misuse of fear causes extraordinary anxiety. Look what it's done, you know, in the whole world throughout history, but, you know, in recent times. And I want to tell you an interesting thing. I mentioned earlier that you have world history and tyranny is the norm. That is the default for world history. And we're this tiny little sliver. And it's quite an unusual experiment we're doing and have done in Western Europe, the United States, Canada. And to me, it's something really worth protecting. Like, you got to really, you know, no, no, we said free speech, we mean free speech. Even if you got to listen to that guy on Joe Rogan who you don't want to hear, turn it off. But we don't want him to be censored, for example. And so what I've seen with fear being used just in my lifetime, it starts with

fear of the other, the Russians. Russia is a country, and they're going to hurt us. They're going to send nuclear bombs toward us. Then it goes to communism. Sorry. Then it goes to communists, their people. Then it goes to communism. Now we're down to an idea. And after 9-11, it goes to to communism. Now we're down to an idea. And after 9-11, it goes to, you know, terrorists. Then it goes to terrorism, a strategy. Then it goes to, you know, you're either with us or against us. And the point I'm making is that it gets smaller and smaller and smaller, right down to the smallest particulate matter ever, which is like talcum powder, much smaller, which is a virus. And in all these things I just described to you, only government can tell you if you're in danger and only government can fix it.

They have that in common, right? You couldn't even know whether you had COVID in the beginning for 18 months. Tests were not allowed as a public product. What do you mean? You couldn't go buy tests in the beginning. Well, I was using tests very early on. Well, not the very beginning. Very beginning. Well, I was using tests very early on. Not the very beginning. Very beginning. We hired a service.

You were going and getting places. Yes, people could do it as a service, but there was not a consumer product that you could go into the pharmacy and buy. I see what you're saying. That took a year and a half? Yeah. So government took 14 months. So government took responsibility to say, you've got it. Now, it's a little bit like you live in a village 500 years ago and

there's the witch doctor. But there were tests available. You could go to centers and get tested. Yes, but you could not have the consumer test. You couldn't have it on your own in your home because I think they thought that people would do it incorrectly. Well, okay, that's a generous thought. But honestly, when you stop and thinking about it, you're talking about something that is important. When you're reporting the number of COVID cases. If someone's doing it incorrectly and they're getting a false negative, but then they actually do have COVID and they wander around and spread it because they incorrectly used a home test. Like until they knew that there was, I mean, that's a big piece of information. If you're talking about a pandemic, especially early in the pandemic, where people were legitimately concerned that it was going to kill everybody.

I mean, in March of 2020, people were terrified of this. If they had a test then and people misuse everything. So you're allowing the general public to take something and give them a false sense of security. And they could potentially use that false sense of security to bypass safety protocol and go out and spread this deadly virus. That makes sense to me, that you would only be able to get tested in places where people are trained to do it correctly. Okay. So why is it now available to everybody in the store? Well, I think the concern about the virus is lessened because of vaccines and then because of previous infection and then because of education. Enough people have understood now that your vulnerabilities increase because of

obesity, your vulnerabilities increase because of vitamin deficiencies and all sorts of other factors that I think people have a more comfortable sense. I mean, there's still a bunch of like very paranoid people out there that are highly ridden with anxiety that still wear double masks when they're walking around outside. I see them every day, but there's always been people in our culture that are overwhelmed by anxiety and overwhelmed by fear. And those, you know, there's a spectrum, of course, there's people that were maskless in the early days, like, fuck it, I don't care. And then there's people who are like cautionary but not sure how much risk is really truly involved.

I think we kind of have as a general base of fear and anxiety over the virus, it's greatly diminished. And now particularly because of Omicron. Because of Omicron, I think most people who get it, and there's this weird narrative where people get it and they're sick, but they go, thank God I'm vaccinated because it was really mild. You should go get vaccinated. Well, I wasn't vaccinated. It was really fucking mild for me. This is a mild virus. You're just saying that because you want to justify the fact that you got vaccinated. I think for the early version of the virus and for the Delta, vaccines helped a lot of fucking people. I'm not anti-vaccine in any way, shape, or form, although it's been said that I am. I'm not. I encourage a lot of people to get vaccinated,

but I don't like bullshit. I don't like false narratives. And that's what's going on today. You're seeing a lot of people that are saying things that don't necessarily make sense because it justifies their life choices or their choices. When it comes down to testing, though, I think it's probably wise that, especially in the early days, when we weren't exactly sure what's going on. I mean, it's easy to look at that as a Monday morning quarterback and say they should have done this. But when you're looking at what people did in the early days, if you gave people home tests and they weren't good or they weren't good at it and they did a shitty job, you would get a totally distorted idea of whether or not you were safe and you probably would cost lives. You probably would go to visit your mom when she was sick. I hear your position on that. I think the concern of government was a slightly

different one, which is that if consumer tests were available, we could decide on our own, yeah, we will have that wedding. Yeah, we will go to that funeral. Yeah, we will test everybody. I believe in testing, by the way. I think it's great. People who are concerned about getting the virus. But do you think that they would stop people from doing tests because they wanted to control people? They wanted to stop people, they wanted to stop weddings, they wanted to stop gatherings, regardless of whether they were safe? Well, of course they wanted to control people. That's a given. The motive is the issue. Are you wanting to control people because it's in their own best interest to do so, because they'll get

sick less often? Or are you wanting to control people because it's in their own best interest to do so because they'll get sick less often, or you're wanting to control people because it's your default position and when you get it, you know, it's the greatest wet dream you ever had, what we saw with mayors and governors and city officials of all kinds who sort of their inner bureaucrat came out or dictator came out. So the question isn't whether they wanted to control people. They wanted to control the numbers as well. And so when you have tests that are only done by official sanctioned locations that report back the information, you have a far greater connection to the data, right? If I just do it at home, that test isn't recorded somewhere. So I do think that in all of the things I mentioned about governments and the narratives of fear that have been used, they all have an element of only the government

can help you and only the government can tell you whether you've got it. I agree with you, but I also think there's a real problem managing its scale. You're managing millions and millions and millions of people. To offer options when you're thinking about something that you really need to control, which is the spread of a deadly disease. To have options available for people which would create gray areas. Look, if you're not reporting, if you just buy a home test and you decide whether or not it's accurate or inaccurate. Like you can get a home test and test positive for COVID and just fucking lie to people and say, yeah, I tested, I'm good. Like if you go to a place and they tell you whether or not, I mean, there's still a,

there's an area of inaccuracy with all these tests, right? They're not a hundred percent accurate, but if you go to a place and you get tested, at least they have an accurate recording, or at least they have an accurate recording of the test results. Yes. They don't know if their test results are accurate, but they do. Well, we tested 100,000 people, and out of those people, you know, 2% of them were positive for COVID. So this is the local infection numbers. Don't you think that that would be a valuable thing?

I think it was a valuable thing, and I don't argue that it's valuable. I argue that government steps in when there are opportunities. You've heard the phrase- I think that's true. You've heard the phrase, you know, no crisis should ever, don't never let a crisis go to waste. Steps in and the amount of control that comes around a virus because it scares people, I mean, everything you just said should apply equally to the flu. Everything you just said. It does, and that's what scares me. What scares me is the notion that people might start using these same sort of draconian measures of control with something that we've always just accepted as a part of everyday life.

Now, a lot of people have accepted COVID, and they're encouraging people to accept COVID as endemic, and this accepted as a part of everyday life. Now, a lot of people have accepted COVID, and they're encouraging people to accept COVID as endemic, and this is just a part of life now. Well, that's always been how we accepted the flu, but I'm hearing a lot of talk of mandatory flu vaccines. I'm hearing a lot of talk of mandating things, and that makes me nervous because I do know that there's a financial incentive. Whenever there's any kind of financial incentive and you do know that these financial incentives trickle down into media, which shapes narrative for the entire population, like as a whole, we should be super fucking concerned about that.

I am. It's one of the reasons I'm here. I think that piece is it's not about the virus and it's not about the pandemic. That is just the latest iteration of a time that can be used to empower government and reduce the power of the people. And I give you a fast example. If we had a community group of 100 people and we got together to do something in the community and we said, hey, well, let's have Bob and Susie be in charge. They'll be the administrators, right? That's 2% of the people in our 100-person group. And then Bob and Susie say, hey, everybody stay in their homes. Don't come out. Don't do this. Don't do that. And start giving us all variety of instructions. In that little democracy that

we had, this little 100-person democracy, we would say, we don't want 2 percent telling everybody what to do. And we'd laugh at them. Bob and Susie started saying ridiculous things. Now, in the actual – the non-metaphorical version of this, it's a minuscule percentage of our population in any country controls the rest of the population. And what do they tend to like, people in power? What they tend to like is, throughout history, the king and queen would look over the castle wall. First of all, they always have a castle wall, a question we can ask ourselves, why is that? But the reason is,

they look over the castle wall and they see the people fighting with each other. They're disagreeing over things and they give each other a hug because that is the best news possible. It's only when all the people agree that they have a risk of coming over the castle wall. You follow my thinking? So division itself that we are experiencing and which you're at the center of often, this whole idea that – I won't – I don't have to go down. But my point is division itself is beneficial to those in power. is division itself is beneficial to those in power. Well, that's one of the reasons why they love the whole right-left paradigm, but yet you see them all working together on certain things. Yeah. So, you know, I'm not an anarchist. I'm very much a believer in the United States and

its constitution. And when you can deviate, you know, Robert Kennedy makes a good point in his book that there is no pandemic exception in the Constitution. And they knew what pandemics were, right? They had had pandemics. Oh, yeah. And so there was, and he said, there's no exception for liquor stores to be considered, you know, an essential business. But there is reference in the Constitution to churches, which were closed. So my objection is that – or my observation, I should say. It doesn't matter whether I object. My observation is that we all ought to care a lot, whatever the reason, when government seeks to assume a lot of power.

There's a little town in Arizona a few months ago had three people escape from their jail. three people escaped from their jail. And the sheriff, looking for the three people who escaped from the jail, who embarrassed their sheriff's department, did a lockdown of the little town. Everybody go home. So they got to search for these three people without those pesky citizens going about their lives and going to work and going to restaurants. So the idea of lockdown suddenly becomes part of our accepted lexicon. And so I have said throughout that I am also not anti-vax. I am also not even anti-pharmaceuticals. We're going to need pharmaceuticals at different times in our lives. You can't speak about vaccines as if they're one thing.

Right. There have been vaccines taken off the market because they're dangerous. There's the Gardasil vaccine that's downright dangerous and terrible and shouldn't be given to nine-year-old boys who don't have, you know, who cannot get cancer in their female sex organs. They don't have female sex organs, but nine-year-old boys right now are scheduled in the American Pediatric Association to get Gardasil, which is a very bad drug. What is Gardasil for? It's for cervical cancer and HPV. But they can get HPV.

Yeah, but the- But nine-year-old boys, Jesus Christ. It would take us the whole show, but HPV vaccine is a bad vaccine. And it is a dangerous vaccine. It is not worth it. And HPV is not clearly demonstrably going to lead to cancer for your little girl in 40 years, because you have these cancers that are serious cervical cancer in your 50s. So you're taking this little girl right now, nine years old, 10 years old, and you're saying, gee, I don't want her to get

cervical cancer. Well, it's not her we're talking about. It's her in 40 years we're talking about. And cervical cancer is highly treatable. It's not a terrible killer. And we don't even know if the vaccine works. And it has a lot of serious problems. The package insert for that particular vaccine is macabre. How so? You read the side effects and the adverse events, which you know they have to list in order to get immunity from prosecution, from lawsuits.

And so that happens to be a bad one. But rather than dwell on that too much, tetanus is a good one, right? If my kid got a big injury, I'd be running into the other tetanus shot. And you don't have to do it when they're in the crib. Polio is a great one. There's many great vaccines. Polio have been beneficial. There hasn't been a case of polio since 1986 in the United States, but polio vaccine isn't so bad for you. And so majority of polio in the world today is actually vaccine form polio, interestingly. Yeah. we showed that during an Alex Jones podcast.

He brought that up, that they were giving kids vaccines for polio in Africa, and that this was actually causing the children to get polio. And I was like, how is that real? And he brought up an AP article. And I was like, whoa, this is mainstream. This is a AP article. Yeah. And I was like, whoa, like this is mainstream. This is a mainstream article. Well, it's like what I'm about to say now, that the early COVID test had about a 90% false positive rate. Is that real? 90%. And why I could bring it up so comfortably is I've got a New York Times article that lays it out completely. Probably if he does New York Times 90% COVID test, you'll probably find that article. Now, when false positive, like how so? Was it false positive because it was a PCR test and

they ran it at too many cycles? That's an example. And by the way, our government, we didn't have to run it at 45 cycles and 30 cycles. Other countries were running it at... Your coronavirus test is positive. Maybe it it shouldn't be the unusual diagnostic test may be simply too sensitive and too slow to contain the spread of the virus so this is from when scroll down that's the article july of 2021 just stay right there for a second um i'm looking for you're gonna many of the people are not likely to be contagious, and identifying them may contribute to bottlenecks that prevent those who are contagious from being found in time. But researchers say the solution is not test less or skip testing people without symptoms, as recently suggested by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Whoa.

Instead, new data underscore the need for more widespread use of rapid tests, even if they are less sensitive. Keep going, keep going, keep scrolling down for a second. Not reading, just scroll down, scroll down, scroll down. So the rapid tests are better. Scroll down, scroll down. So listen to this. In three sets of tested data that include cycle thresholds compiled by officials in Massachusetts, New York, and Nevada, So this is people that were testing positive, that were testing positive at high cycles of PCRs. And they couldn't get, they wouldn't be symptoms and they couldn't make you sick.

Well, they've lowered the cycles of PCRs dramatically, right? I don't know about whether that's done nationally, but it was recommended. I'll just read one more quick paragraph. The United States recorded 45,000 new corona cases. If the rates of contagiousness in Massachusetts and New York were to apply nationwide, then perhaps only 4,500 of those people may actually need to isolate and submit to contact tracing. But here's a point. Is that currently where they are right now? And is it still possible for the virus to replicate inside their body and they would eventually become contagious? It's a good question because some are pre-symptomatic. That is true. Meaning they were going to get worse. That might very

well happen. It just hasn't, the virus hasn't replicated enough in their system yet. But there's a reason that you saw countries all over the world have 80% asymptomatic cases, right? The other way to say that is, the way we would have said it pre-COVID, our whole lives is, oh, you not sick, right? You don't have any symptoms. And 80% to 90% of the people having no symptoms is called not sick historically. percent of the people having no symptoms is called not sick historically. So now we're searching for something that the testing process allowed for a great deal of disruption in the United States. I happen to believe in the test more for the negative than for the positive, just FYI. I'm sorry, more for the positive than for the negative because, okay, now you're going to take a nine out

of 10 chance and I'm not going to come to your dinner party because I tested positive, right? I would do that. But then I don't get sick, and then I don't get sick, and then I don't get sick, and I never get sick. That's not called you have COVID. That's called you're not sick. Historically, we did not call something a case of pneumonia or a case of the flu unless you had the flu. Right. Wasn't that your whole life? Right.

unless you had the flu. Right. Wasn't that your whole life? Right, but the contagious aspect of COVID, it's so much more contagious than any of these other diseases that you're citing. The problem is that the consequences of being incorrect are so much higher, because especially if you're dealing with Omicron, right?

Even though Omicron is very mild, it's so contagious. And I say very mild, I should say very mild for me yeah so for some people i guess apparently not so mild i couldn't even believe i actually had covet i came in here and i had a canceled podcast i was like what like my nose is running i was like like this i go this is it i got worked out today i got covet and it never got bad never got anywhere the next day i was negative right and you were And you were taking vitamin D beforehand. You were taking zinc. I take care of myself across the board.

It's not just those things. It's many things. It's exercise. It's cardiovascular fitness. It's sauna, cold plunge, massive amounts of vitamins. It's all these things. I get IV drips. I do a lot of things that are extraordinary in terms of what the average person does.

Well, no risk factor is more important than good health and bad health. Why did this become such a focus for you, though, who's a security expert? Well, two things. One is I had to advise a lot of people on how are we going to navigate life in this new circumstance, everything from, you know, in the beginning. We were told that it will live on packages that come from the store. So you're cleaning packages or you can get a pizza delivery. The outside of the box will kill you, but the inside, the pizza will be just fine. You remember this period where you're cleaning everything, you know, you're wiping off the bananas before they come into the house. And so it was my challenge to manage life for people during this circumstance. And it's also just my general curiosity. The second issue that affected me a lot

is that we have a lot of, I've got 570 employees, a lot of them young people and a lot of them out of the military. And we had our own four cases of myocarditis inside. We also had a young man come out of the military and come to our physical fitness requirements and while running on the track, 33 years old, fall down and die. He was not our employee. He was applying to be an employee of ours. And so it was in my interest to learn a great deal about whatever the risks are from both the vaccine and whatever the risks are from the virus. And to do what I think people wisely do, which is compare the two things and make your decision about how to administer it. As an employer, I had to decide, was I going to

mandate vaccines, for example? And so you looked at it in terms of the way you look at other security concerns. What's the accurate assessment of threat? Exactly correct. And I had a bunch of clients ask me, you know, I'm this age, I'm in this general physical condition, just not asking me for medical advice, but they're asking me for statistical information on, you know, what are the risks here? So in the beginning, after we got the Italy information, what you had to do to die of COVID in the beginning, if you were, say, 53 years old and fit, first you had to get COVID. what you had to do to die of COVID in the beginning, if you were, say, 53 years old and fit, first you had to get COVID. Then you had to ignore it for a few days. Then you had to go to the hospital. Then 90% of people were sent home, not admitted. So then you

had to be admitted. Then you had to go up to the ICU. That's 87% didn't get to the ICU. to the ICU. That's 87% didn't get to the ICU. And then you had to be put on a ventilator, and then you could die. So there was quite a series of things you had to go through in order to say, this is a giant risk to the individual, right, to a specific individual who's fit. Much different when you're looking at it from a public health perspective and you're looking at a global population that is, you know, you pick a number, 40 percent obesity, extraordinarily high amounts of diabetes, for example. And so I had to do a, you know, just a statistical look at every kind of risk. We do it when clients go to another country. What are the risks in that country? Everything from, you know, being pickpocketed all the way to getting a disease. What, for example, would you take a yellow fever vaccine going to a country with yellow fever? Yes, you would take a yellow fever vaccine. But some people don't take

the flu vaccine, for example. And the flu vaccine has the same rap that you described earlier, where people say, oh, I got the flu. Good thing I got that flu vaccine. It was milder. What form of science is there that tells you it would have been worse if? It's just an unknowable thing, and it's a genius marketing mechanism. It is, because so many people repeat that. Yeah. I want to go back to something that I said about Gardasil, which is that the commercials for Gardasil are a little girl talking to camera and she says, do you know about this, mommy? Do you know about this, daddy? After the information.

So they think, my little girl dying of cervical cancer. And so it's a brilliant product because in half the circumstances that people get cervical cancer, their parents will already be dead. They've already bought the product, given it to them two and three times, by the way. It has boosters as well. And it has one of the worst side effect profiles of any vaccine, but it pushes the button. Here's a product, your little girl. The problem is, excuseax, not pharmaceutical drugs. The problem is if you can advertise, if you can advertise and you can manipulate people and change their opinion based on theatrics, right?

You have music and people dancing and holding hands and spinning around in a wheat field. Like that is so manipulative. And we are subject to manipulation and when it's something that is so important like making critical health decisions you know I mean how many of these you know consult your doctor and then they're rattle off a list of things that could go wrong like your asshole becomes a fire hydrant of blood like it's like there's so many of these fucking commercials like so many

times i'm watching television like how many goddamn drug commercials are there i mean i would like to know what television what percentage of advertisers are pharmaceutical drugs there's a guy who can find out yeah like what percentage of television ads are pharmaceutical drugs. And if you do news, news programs, I think it's just about everything is a pharma. Yeah. Everything's brought to you by Pfizer.

75%. Yeah. Holy shit. Yeah. Holy shit. Brilliant products because people are sick in America. It's not a healthy population.

That is a crazy number. In 2020, TV ad spending of the pharma industry accounted for 75% of the total ad spend. Yeah, good question. Now, let's Google this. Television news. What percentage of the ads on television news are from pharmaceutical companies? By the way, Joe, have you never seen that little compilation that says brought to you by Pfizer? Oh, I had it on my Instagram page.

Oh, good. Brought to you by Pfizer. Anderson Cooper, brought to you by Pfizer. And it's never going to go away. And we're, unfortunately, again, they don't have that in England. They don't have that in Ireland. They don't have that in fucking Egypt. They don't have that.

They don't have that in, name a country. They don't have it. And those side effects that you hear at the end, of course, cannot compete with the images. You know, the two old people and he gets another six weeks of life because of flamulamulab. Yeah. And it says, you know, life, it's projected up on the thing, they're walking through the field. And then afterwards to say, well,

the side effects are these terrible things. And they always say them fast. Yeah, and they're almost funny, some of them, obviously. One of them that I liked a lot was feelings of euphoria. I'll take that fucking quote. Suicidal thoughts. Yeah, the ones that give you suicidal thoughts but don't worry about it don't you want to not have diarrhea

what are you saying yeah but it's like the problem is manipulative ads are effective they work if your person is sitting at home and you don't feel good and there's an ad that comes on and these people are living the way you would like to live they're dancing around they're laughing and smiling you're like i want to dance around yeah i want to laugh and smile i want to be like these folks yeah like that that's one thing if you're selling toasters well it's innocuous it's not gonna hurt anybody it's just a toaster but if you're selling something that could potentially change a person's entire life if it goes sideways. You know, you're giving me a good idea, which is what about a law that prohibits pharmaceutical advertising like virtually every country in the world?

That would be an interesting thing for a politician to look at at the federal level. Oh, my God, would they come for him? Well, they're coming. Just my even saying it right now, they're coming for me. And you're already in the shit level. Oh my God, would they come for him? Well, they're coming, just my even saying it right now, they're coming for me and you're already in the shithouse. But 75% is such a crazy number when you think about the amount of money involved in. Now it makes sense when you look at the narrative of all these television news companies and media companies all pushing the same thing. They're basically pushing for their boss. Their boss now is a pharmaceutical company. So if they've got that kind of money to spend 75% of the ads. Yeah.

I think it's more on news shows, by the way. I think it's just about everything on news shows. Jamie's in the middle. We can't find a differentiation on it, really. Because the news won't tell you the news. Those fucks, they're hiding it. Do you remember earlier when you said one of the things of being famous is people asking for something and wanting something? Yeah.

I want something. What do you want? I want to mention that Gift of Fear, my book, is now a masterclass. Oh, you're very good. That's funny. On the head, please, if you would. There we go. Anyway, that is now a masterclass. That is 10 masterclasses. It's available for free, not charging anything. It's at giftofear.com, and it'll be's available for free. I'm not charging anything. It's at giftofear.com, and it'll be on YouTube for free as well. You're kidding me. There it is. You are kidding me.

Masterclass on personal safety. And that is the end of my shameless advertisement. Oh, except I want to say this. At the core of that book, it is really about people listening to their intuition. And if you can imagine, you know, a woman in an office building late at night alone, she's leaving her job and the elevator doors open up and there's a guy inside who scares her for whatever reason, how he's dressed, how he looks, that he's there, whatever it may be. And she says, I'm not going to be the kind of person who doesn't get in the elevator. I'm not going to be the kind of person who doesn't get in the elevator. I'm not going to be the kind of person who judges this guy. And so she gets into a steel soundproof chamber with somebody she's afraid of.

And there's not an animal in nature that would ever do that. And so my work is really to encourage people just this one little thing, which is to listen to your intuition. And that master class is that I went back after, this book is 25 years old, and I went back and interviewed, first of all, I just got 17 women together. Every one of them had a truly profound experience of violence. And I think that would be true if I got 17 people together in a room in America. You know, you'd either know somebody, it'd be one, you know, one removed, or it'd be you that had some experience of violence. Much more so with women though, right? That's true. And in fact, there's a thing in the master class

where we ask people on the street, men and women, when's the last time you thought about yourself being in danger? And the men would be like, hmm, danger? Nope, can't think of anything. And the women would all be yesterday, today, when I parked last night, where I park, where I go. So it's just a different world for men and women in society. And it's so so a lot of that book is about, you know, listen to your intuition.

And and a lot of the masterclass, the idea came from Oprah that she did a bunch of shows with me. And then 10 years later, she did a 10 year anniversary show on this book. And I thought and got some of the people together who were involved. And I thought, well, let me go back and get these people together and do this thing where we just sit around and have a conversation. And I got, you know, a woman whose child was killed at the Newtown school shooting, someone else whose daughter was killed by her boyfriend, a man who shot his own brother by accident when he was a kid. Very interesting perspective because you never hear from that person.

You know, you hear you get the news stories about the tragedy. But the guy who has to go through life, you know, having had that accident, that shooting accident. And and then a bunch of experts, FBI, LAPD, et cetera. And I think it can help people. And I think it can help people now when there's a lot of fear and a lot of crime and a lot of demonstrations and a lot of upset in society right now. In fact, it's even, you know, I saw you talk about Will Smith. Even decorum in general is being broken in this time in America, in that a lot of people are on edge. You have a lot more multiple victim shootings. You have a lot more violence. You've got these break-ins in California where 70 people break into a store at the same time that laws are changing that says we're not

going to prosecute in California, most cities for anything over, unless it's over $1,500 theft. So people just walk into a CVS and pick up something or a Target store, walk out. Yeah, it's nuts. So it's a hard time. And I know there's a lot of fear. And I always want to remind people that there are women who were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, but the fear they were thinking about was terrorists, you know, during 9-11. So more people have died at the hands of boyfriends and husbands than died at 9-11, triple. And so we focus on the wrong things, right? You know, on our refrigerator, we might have the doctor's name and number, but we don't have the nuclear

emergency search team phone number, you know, the black helicopters that the Pentagon has, because it's not in our thinking day to day and it shouldn't be. But we let television news program our fears. And years ago I was doing a book tour for this book and a guy said to me, a television producer, he said a little – he had a guest on talking about the flesh-eating disease that has come and gone in our consciousness. Do you remember it? It was a big news story. You could get the flesh-eating disease that has come and gone in our consciousness. Do you remember it? It was a big news story. You could get the flesh-eating disease. And I met this woman who was going to be interviewed. And I thought later on she could have told me about the flesh-eating disease before I shook hands with her. I thought jokingly, but she didn't. And I didn't get it.

And she didn't have it. She only wanted to talk about her fear of it. They couldn't find somebody with the disease. So I said to the news producer, you know, what the fuck? What are you doing? Like, this is a thing that six people got in another country. Why is this a news segment here? He said, well, another, he said, a little worry never hurt anybody. And I put it in one of my books because a little worry is the cause of hypertension and drug addiction and alienation from people and fear of each other and all this stuff that goes on programmed, our fears programmed. And my teaching is that things to fear actually have not changed. They are each other. They are the relationships you're in. And so you have a choice when you're getting into a new relationship with an employee, with a boyfriend or girlfriend.

You have choices and you can observe the circumstance you're in and you can predict violent behavior. People have that capacity, just like every other animal in nature does. You know, if you see two wolves come together on some mountain path and one of them puts his ears back and shows his teeth and his hair stands up on his back, the other one, and then he attacks the other wolf, right? The other wolf does not say, oh, my God, I had no idea that was coming. But people do that every day. They participate in their own victimization without recognizing that they have every piece of information that they need in their intuition, which, by the way, the word intuition, the root of it is inter,

and it means to guard and to protect. Do you encourage people to take self-defense courses or to learn martial arts? I do, particularly a kind of self-defense class sometimes called model mugging, where you may have seen it where the perpetrator is in a padded suit. And for women who are not going to invest years in some self-defense class, suit. And for women who are not going to invest years in some self-defense class, it's very valuable because it teaches them to strike. Many women, maybe most, have never really hit anybody to hurt them. And so with a padded assailant, this kind of training, often called model mugging and there are other names for it, which is available in every major city,

is something I really believe in because it lets you engage with somebody physically and prevail. And it teaches you a few tricks, not at the level that somebody who takes martial arts courses, but I like martial arts for every purpose, for confidence, for self-defense, for health, I think in every way. So yeah, even in this book, more in my later books, but in this book, there's a discussion about, about model mugging and that kind of engagement where you just sort of gain some muscle memory about what it is to actually strike somebody, you know, in my, we have a different opinion on that. Good. Cause I don't believe in that. I just, I don't believe you're going to learn how to effectively hurt someone in such a short period of time.

And I think in particular for women, the problem is just by their own and for the, because of their own anatomy, they don't have the ability, a lot of them, I should say, don't have the ability to actually harm someone hurting them. You're just going to make them angry. I don't think you really learn anything in those environments, in those classes. I don't think you really learn anything in those environments, in those classes. When I used to teach martial arts, one of the things that I had a problem with was trying to gently explain to someone that everything they had learned in one of those classes was useless. Like the idea that you should drop to your back and start kicking up.

Because women have greater lower body strength than upper body strength all of this only would work on a moron everything everything about like maybe it's better than not knowing anything but all of it would only work on someone who's weak and the idea that a weak person would attack a woman is very unlikely if it's a very strong powerful man you may even anger them if you try to strike first. A real fundamental understanding of actual martial arts is the only thing that's gonna save you. And in particular, jujitsu. A martial art where a lighter, smaller person actually can prevail over a bigger person because they have skills

and they understand techniques they understand positioning they understand leverage and they've applied it over and over and over and over again so that in times of extreme stress they can perform because most people when encountered with actual violence will freeze up because they don't know what it's like to be in actual physical conflict. One of the great things about jiu-jitsu is you are in constant violent conflict in class. It's controlled, but you're going full blast. And because of that, when a situation occurs and you have to grapple with someone. You have muscle memory completely built in. You will know exactly what to do.

It won't be a question of thinking. It'll be a question of the leg is open. There's the trip. I get double underhooks. We're down on the ground. I move to side control. Block the punches. Block the eye gouges.

Move to mount. Elbow to the face. All those things are just going to be ingrained in your system. You'll know how to take a rear naked choke in because you've done it thousands of times you take a fucking class for a couple hours and you're like no and you punch the guy no and you're like yeah i'm out gonna go out there and stop mugging someone's gonna punch you in the fucking face and you're gonna forget everything i don't believe in those things i don't like like i don't believe you can learn french in an hour i don't believe you can learn French in an hour. I don't believe you can learn martial arts

and how to defend yourself against a guy in a giant Stay Puft marshmallow costume. That shit doesn't work. So it sounds like you have an opinion on this. Yeah, man, I have an opinion on it. I just think there's no shortcuts to self-defense. There's no shortcuts to being able to

take care of yourself. And I think what bothers me is that there's some people that walk out of those classes, and I don't know how they're taught, if they're taught this way, but they walk out with an interpretation of it. They're misinformed. And I think they have this false confidence that I think is dangerous. And if you think you're just going to go around punching people, you know, that you think are a threat and that that's going to protect you because you took a class, like, that's not likely. You want some argument? Yes.

Okay. Two things. You're going to love my book because it's got a great deal about what are the natural elements of the physics of safety and how it works. And obviously avoiding a physical encounter that is dangerous is far and away the better outcome. But, you know, you said two things here that I want to play back for you. One is you said, I don't know what goes on in those classes. I agree. That's one.

The other one is you said maybe they will be slightly better off than they would have been. I agree. That's one. The other one is you said maybe they will be slightly better off than they would have been. I agree. And so the fact is we're not going to get 220 million American women or young girls, I've got two daughters, to all become jiu-jitsu experts. And a little jiu-jitsu is also dangerous, you probably feel. I don't think that's true. I took one lesson. Is that enough for me? No. Okay. I'm just making the same point you made. That's less than a little. A little is a year. I understand. My point is, though, that not being competent at something is not good in either circumstance. So model mugging is six hours. It's six weekends. Typically, there are all kinds of courses, and there are advanced courses as well. But we just don't see that the same way because I have to leave people. By the way, my books do not say go to a model mugging class and that's the end of the book. But you

know how difficult it is to generate force, right? Yes. And I know how little force it takes. It takes 16 pounds of force to break a knee, for example. Listen. And that's what's talked about. That's not going to work. This is where you don't have practice on kicking knees. This idea that a knee is going to break, that's if you lean the knee sideways and let someone hit it. Well, except that many women who've taken model mugging courses have had success at prevailing during violent encounters. And so if you accept the premise, that's your premise, you said it, which is it may leave people a little bit better off. It's not designed to, you know, make them into MMA fighters. It's designed to give them some

courage to resist and run because resistance is a very important part. What do you have available to you if you're a woman raped? And let's remember which one of us has interviewed 25,000 of those women. So you have the ability to comply and then run away if you get an opportunity. You have the ability to resist. You have the ability to resist and then comply or comply and then resist. So you have a few options. And generally speaking, I won't be there with some victim at the time of that emergency, but generally speaking, resistance is more valuable. And resistance in getting away is most valuable. And you talked about a big predator, for example. There are basically two kinds of predators. I'm going to speak global categories for a moment.

Men, who are practicing predation against women. There's two types. There is the persuasion predator. That's far and away the most common. Doesn't need to be strong. Doesn't need to be big. He's not using force. He is using persuasion to get you into that place, that location where you can't get away and where you can't call for help. That's the most common persuasion predator. The other one, the power predator, very rare. He just charges out of nowhere like a bear. And he's brave. He's bigger. He's courageous. And I agree with you that for the power predator, other than the ability to get away quickly, you are not going to have a successful fight with a power predator. It's 2% of the predators in the world, in the Western world. But nonetheless, I agree with you on that.

But for the persuasion predator, the teaching early for your daughter and my daughters, what am I being persuaded to do here? Why is this person not listening to me when I say no? Why is this person wanting to go to this more remote location? Why is he saying lock the door at the end of work when he's the manager and I should. All of those early intuitions are how you actually save your life or save yourself from a violent. Well, that all makes sense to me. I had no idea that it was six hours or six weeks of doing it.

That actually makes sense more too because you're explaining to people possible scenarios and how to get out of them. I just don't like the idea of giving people false confidence about their physical prowess. And maybe this is on my own personal bias from actually being a martial arts instructor and talking to people that were saying, do I really need to learn this? Because I learned that I can just palm strike you in the nose. And you know, man, you palm strike a guy in the nose. Like there's a very high likelihood that's going to not do much well so i don't think our our uh disagreement is enough to end the friendship yeah no i don't think we're even

disagreeing because i think in many ways i'm ignorant to the protocol that they're prescribing if they're doing it for six weeks i think there's something about long courses where i don't think you can get anything in a class this one woman that I'm referring to was one of my former students. She had taken one class and, you know, there was this one class where this guy had this big blue foam thing on and she was explaining what, you know, what they told her to do. And I'm like, God, you don't want to be on your back. Like you want to run away. You want to get the fuck out of there. Like this idea that you're going to be on your back and you're going to kick someone, that shit, that's not going to work. So you just did something, Joe, that is such an interesting example of Joe Roganism,

which is you went from your opinion, which is very well informed because you have a lot of experience, and then you heard some new information, and then you said, you know, maybe I don't know enough about those classes. Well, as soon as you said six. I get it. But I want to give you this compliment from a 67-year-old man to a who knows what you are now. Fifty-four. There you go.

So I have so much more wisdom. But the compliment I want to give you is that very few people do what you just did. And I see you do it all the time and it's a kind of a hallmark of this show, which is it's okay. I also see you get criticized for it. Oh, he begins with one opinion. He ends up with another opinion. You mean human being? You mean thoughtful, curious person? So I just, I was impressed. It was just fun to be sitting over here and see you have a strong opinion and then see, well, there's something more I need to know about this. If more people in America would do that, we would not have mandates. And why am I opposed to mandates? Because mandates for vaccination is one step away from mandates for anything else.

My opinion on this is, you know, I'm talking about women's self-defense courses, but in many ways it's actually not about women. It's about men having a delusional perspective of their own ability to defend themselves, which is very, very common, more common than with women. Women in many cases are physically more vulnerable than men in most cases. And so when someone is teaching self-defense course, again, I probably shouldn't have said that I don't agree with it because I don't know how they're running their course, but I've seen a lot of women's self-defense courses and I'm like, man, that is not going to work. And I really get upset by giving people false confidence. There are so many men out there that have this delusional idea of their ability to defend themselves. And it's so crazy. And it's amazing How the ego can play tricks on you to the point where there's men out there starting fights They have no idea how to fight. It's real legitimately like to back to speaking French

It's like having an argument with someone when you don't even understand their language, right? Like you you might know poly vu francais and you're literally getting in a fucking debate with them this is what it's like to get into a physical altercation if you don't know how to defend yourself. So I want to share two things with you. In my company, we employ a lot of people who are coming out of the military. And we have a training academy they go to. And one of the things that we're using is attack dogs, police dogs. using is attack dogs, police dogs. And what we do is we put somebody in a bite suit and we have a variety of exercises, one where they're put in the back of a van and they are told you have to

feed the dog. If it comes over the seat, it's going to get to your legs, your hands, and your head are all not covered. So you've got to feed the dog. And so you're just like this with this dog right here that wants to hurt you, right? The dog don't know anything but want to hurt you right and then there's another exercise where you run and you're chased and the dogs are pretty good at judo they're you know these are trained police dogs they want to pull you down and get you on the ground but the reason we do that training and we've had a lot of people go to the hospital in that training so it's not bullshit it's very real is the specific point you were making, which is the grappling, the sweating, that this thing really wants to hurt me. If people haven't had that experience, then they get into a fight and they're basically

in trauma immediately, instant trauma. Yes. And they freeze, as you said. And so I'm just agreeing with you. And I have a question for you, but you go first. I think there's some real value in giving people some examples of scenarios that you should avoid. There's some real value in giving people, before it ever gets to a physical encounter, giving people some real clear boundaries you should never let someone cross, particularly women. My concern is, and I have a deep concern about this, is people having a distorted perception of their ability to defend themselves.

Because I see it from people that think that they know how to fight, from men more than even from women. But from women, I think the consequences concern me far more. Because with men, I worry about men getting beat up by other men because they're delusional and they'll start fights. But I'm not thinking of them as a victim the way I'm thinking of a woman as a victim. So when a woman has a distorted perception because of a class and a rony, I mean, there's so many of these goddamn self-defense classes that are teaching them nonsense. And, you know, one of them is like kick the knees out. Like, are you good at that? Are you practicing kicking knees?

You know how hard it is to kick someone in the fucking knee? By the way, another one of the classes, another type is called impact training. And that one is six weekends. And it's teaching a lot. It's teaching some verbal engagement. It's teaching to know when you're in trouble. It's teaching to understand that you don't have ways to run. It's teaching a lot of things. And so my question goes back to your question, which is, could people be better off? You've got over here, you know, 60 people who would take jujitsu and do it for 10 years. And then I've got over here, 80 million people who won't. And so something, you know, you still want to give something to these people in terms of training. And you'll see a lot of it in that master class is just a lot of training about recognizing the situation you're in. Most people are victimized because of their own cooperation with the victimizer.

They're cooperating. What about weapons? Do you encourage people to carry a weapon? Do you encourage them to carry tasers or mace or like, especially women? Like, how do you handle those types of situations? Other than through my work, there's in my company, you know, my clients have protectors, so they have bodyguards with them and they're in a different circumstance. But if I were just talking to sort of the public as I do through a book, I do like pepper spray. I think it's a valuable thing to remove the vision of somebody who has put you in a situation where you're in fear. You know, in terms of recommending,

like, would I recommend somebody have a gun in the bedside drawer? No, because I don't have enough information yet. You got to tell me who we're talking about. Who are we talking about? What degree of training are they going to go to? There's an example in this book, In the Gift of Fear, where a woman, while she's asleep, takes the gun from underneath her pillow and shoots herself in the face, thinking it's her asthma medicine. And so my concern- What? Yeah.

Yep. True story. My concern about firearms- Jesus Christ. In the bedside table, for example, is that you're asking somebody, it's like asking somebody to fall into a deep sleep and then wake up going 80 miles an hour in a 16-wheeler truck and perform well, swerve at the right time. That's the situation you're in when you're awakened in the middle of the night and there is an intruder in your bedroom. But let me ask you this. Wouldn't

it be better if you get woken up in the middle of the night because there's an intruder in your home to have a gun than to not have a gun? Well, the example I gave you, though, was not an intruder in your home. The example I gave you was an intruder at the foot of your bed. And so now I don't know the answer. Depends on who the person is. You have to, you know, a gun is not, it's a fantastic consumer product. It lasts longer than the consumer that buys it, right? It lasts for hundreds of years, if well taken care of. And people pay $300, $500 for the gun, whatever it is. And they now believe, just like you feel about self-defense, they now believe, oh, I'm safe. The guy in the gun store says, this is the one that'll do it for you. Yeah, it'll do it for you if you're smart, if you're sober,

if you have some detection system downstairs that gave you some heads up, if you are reasonable, if you're not shooting your 10-year-old kid. If you're trained. If you're trained. Thank you. And so, you know, I think it's about, it's in my second book, about 75% of people shot in the home are family members or friends. But isn't that generally like acts of violence, committing crimes of passion? It's conflict and accidents. Is it most of them conflicts or is it most of them accidents? I don't know.

But too many of them are accidents, whatever the number is. And so, you know, I have a strong belief in smart guns. This is a very controversial topic as well, because there isn't a smart gun consumer product, there's one coming, that's very good. Why? Because the smart gun, just like my phone, cannot function unless it's being operated by the owner who's authorized, my thumbprint, my face, whatever it may be. And so the good smart gun that is coming is facial recognition and fingerprint recognition, both. And it cannot be shot by the nine-year-old son of the plumber who's looking around your house on a Saturday while you're not thinking about it. And so the accidental shootings to me, there's a lot on them in the master class as well,

are by far the most tragic. These situations where the eight-year-old kid kills his six-year-old sister or kills his mother or, you know, those lives are all ruined. The dead person is easy, but the other lives are all ruined. So I'm a believer that when you ask me do I recommend guns, I own hundreds of guns because of my company. So I'm not anti-gun. I'm not for gun control. But I am a believer that it really is a matter of who's the person, what's their level of training, and what's the circumstance. And so let's say you had a dog. If you have a dog downstairs that gives you a heads up that somebody's going crazy, now you have some time to gather yourself.

You have some time to arm yourself. If you have a firearm that you know how to use, all good. But if you just have a gun in the bedside drawer and it sits there for 15 years and you think you're safe now, that's as bad a mistake as the mistake you're talking about with taking a 20-minute self-defense class. Yeah, I agree. I agree wholeheartedly. that is a genuine issue with the accidental shootings and a genuine issue with people being delusional and their ability to use that in a high stress situation where they really, you know, adrenaline is so crazy and anxiety is so crazy. When you're in the middle of a thing like that, you have tunnel vision, you can't see well, if you don't know how to stay calm under pressure, if you don't experience a lot of physical stress and you don't know what to do. By the way, that's the reason those courses are

important because they do give people the ability to understand what it is to be engaged, pushed down, knocked over, struck. And even that by itself is valuable for somebody to not freeze up in quite the same way. Forget whether they win the engagement. That's a different question. But we have exercises, for example, if you ever come to our academy and we're moving our headquarters to San Antonio, by the way. So our academy is going to be here. But we've got a jet there, an aircraft that's got the engines taken off and is used for we put people in it, we fill the thing with smoke, we turn off the lights and say, get out. Guess what most people can't do? Get out. Because they've never had the experience. Your academy is what? Oh, for my company, we train people in public figure protection. So they go through 18 weeks

altogether. But the essential protection skills, the earliest academy is at a facility. Right now, it's a 70-acre place in Los Angeles. I hesitated because it might be 170. It shows you how disconnected I am. But we have a jet aircraft. We have pools that are used to really stress people. This is relevant to your point. We put people in the pool, and a little like I used to do with my friend Sean Cassidy when I was younger, we don't let them near the edge. We get them into panic.

We pull them down from underneath. So we have the dog thing. And all of these things are called stress inoculation, right? If you never had it, what you're describing, you know, that people break into the house and suddenly they're going to shoot somebody, make a split-second decision, and they've never had any of those experiences, they won't do as well as they would do, right? An experienced soldier versus, you know, some other 18-year-old kid or a police officer who's been in some shootings. We are trying to train your heart rate to stay low, right? If you engaged with me physically, if you and I were going to fight, and a few minutes ago, the argument was getting pretty close, I think. If you and I were going to fight, you'd have a lower heart rate than some other guy who's never had a fight, right?

And with a lower heart rate, you get to what you were talking about. You get to avoid panic. You get to make decisions. Like we have a thing where we have a vehicle and there's a sniper and we're shooting at you while you're walking a protectee to the car. And we're hitting you with some munition. We don't wear any protective gear. It hurts. It makes the car. And we're hitting you with some munition. We don't wear any protective gear. It hurts. It makes you bleed. And it's stressful. And it's noise and all that stuff. And then you have to operate car key, for example, or operate 911. And your fingers are this big when

you're panicked. You can't even call 911. So a lot of what we're training to do is training for stress inoculation and for courage. By the way, you can come to our academy. I would love to. Yeah, you'd be good at it. Sounds fun. Because the dog thing isn't something you'll get somewhere else. A lot of stuff you wouldn't get somewhere else. And we've had a lot of clients come to the academy, and it's interesting, and had clients' kids come. And you can get injured, but we're more careful, clearly, than we are with our actual employees. And, you know, years ago, we had an employee say, well, I don't want to have marks on my back from being shot at by simunition. Goodbye.

If you're worried about marks on your back from simunition, why don't you go with the client to, you know, to Zimbabwe in two weeks when there's some controversial event, give him a speech. And so we're training, increasing the likelihood of courage. Do you provide, I know there's some companies that create Kevlar clothes. Is that stuff legit? Like I've seen that online and always wanted to talk to someone about that. A little bit. So we do very much believe in body armor depending on what's going on. But these are just clothes. This is not. I'm going to get to that. And so all that stuff gets sent to us, as I said earlier, for free. I'd be the biggest consumer of a product if it was a great product. But there are clothes, there are suits, there are definitely overcoats that work real well, because an overcoat's already

bulky, right? But a garment like what you're wearing now, it will come that you can have something that will stop a bullet going through a thin garment. The problem is it can't stop the energy. Right. And so you need, you know, people have been shot, cops you've heard about, where they have a steel plate in the body armor in addition to the body armor. And we have that body armor where you can slip in a steel plate, very light body armor. Well, what's that about? Well, that's because if you get hit

there, you don't even have to deal with the trauma, right? When you get shot, when a cop gets shot wearing a bulletproof vest, even a heavier type, they're hurt, right? It's not easy. I believe very much in body armor, by the way, for our protectors. Anybody who's in a position where they might have to engage with a gun and they think they're there because, like a cop thinks, you know, you're there because you might have to engage in a gunfight, body armor is very valuable. But thin clothing, not yet. It's just not there yet. So the impact still happens, but it's not getting the penetration. That's true.

It's not getting the penetration of the bullet, but it's still getting the penetration of the energy. And so that's the piece that isn't resolved. Why body armor, like a vest that a cop wears, is many, many, many, many layers. And it's a bit, if you felt it, it's a bit wide and strong, and it does do some disbursement of that energy. Something as thin as you're wearing or I'm wearing might stop penetration, but not stop the energy energy, and still the energy is the problem. But isn't there still some benefit in not being penetrated? Isn't it at least a slight diminishment of the amount of trauma that your body experiences? It's probably more than slight.

So these are such great Joe Rogan questions because this is what you do. You keep going. I love it. Probably more than slight benefit, probably a substantial benefit. Whether we're there, though, in terms of all the fashion and all the clothes that people want to wear, I'm not recommending to people anything that I've seen yet. And I've seen some pretty nice stuff. Now, I do recommend conventional light body armor under your clothes if you're doing the most controversial speech of your life or you're an at-risk public figure or you're a protector in our company or a cop, of course, secret service agent, very few wear it, but more should wear it.

Secret service agents don't wear body armor? It's optional. And I think it's a mistake because one thing that you want a protector to be able to do is stop the bullet from going through me, something like a 223 or something, going through me and into you. So the excuses for all variety of people who choose not to wear body armor is comfort, I'm hot. I've had this with people in my company over the years. It's hot because it's 102 degrees outside. It's not hot because you're wearing body armor. Because it's 102 degrees outside. It's not hot because you're wearing body armor. You want to know what's hot?

Accelerated lead. That is hot. And so we have an absolute policy, absolute requirement, body armor on every assignment. That makes sense. So the answer is like Kevlar clothing might help you a little bit, but it's not enough. Yeah, and it's not there yet in terms of being flexible enough that you would wear it, right? Meaning if I asked a client, would you please wear this? It's enough to get a client to take half the precautions we asked them to get. But will it get there? I think it will get there. It won't stop energy, but I think it will get there. I was looking at an online company that was selling bulletproof clothing that people wear over their vests,

that the clothing itself would stop the penetration of a bullet. Yeah, there are suits and there are various things. But the heavier the jacket, you know, I see Putin wearing it, all variety of public figures who are at risk. The heavier the jacket, the more likely it is to contain, from a fashion point of view, the body armor and make a real difference. You know, the lighter it gets, the less effective it is. That's just the way. Same thing with bulletproof car. We've got a bunch of armored cars, bullet resistant, not bulletproof.

And you go very thick and you get better and you go the lightest one where the window can go up and down normally and it's not as good. Right. When it comes to it's not as good. Right. When it comes to preventative measures or precautionary measures, how far do you take things? Like in terms of like your own personal, do you, in terms of like complete anarchy, the society collapses, do you have like a getaway place? I do. And, but it also, you know, I make this pitch to clients often because it also has other value, right? I have a home in another country that's awesome in Fiji. It's already been written about. And it's, we've got a 25 acre organic farm. We've got our own well, we've got our own power supply, but it wasn't built as a doomsday location. It was built to, we love Fiji and I've got, you know, I adopted eight kids there

and raised them. So it's a big part of my life. But it's all really, yeah. Wow. One died during lockdowns because of lockdowns, 31 years old. So I'm pissed about that. But what happened is he got diagnosed with leukemia, which is not that serious if you're 31 years old. I mean, it's a serious disease, but you're not going to die. And so we would normally just get on a plane and go to Australia. Australia wouldn't let him in and lockdown. Then New Zealand wouldn't let him in. Then the United States wouldn't let him in.

We finally got India to agree to take him, and he died the night before the flight. After six weeks of bullshitting with these countries to let in somebody who needs care. So that was a pisser. But yeah, I raised 10 kids altogether, two of them here with me who are 12 and about to be 14. Why did I mention that? Oh, Fiji. So I believe in having a place, but it also needs to have other value. I'm not really big on the bunker that you never visit. Have a place that has value and years ago a client said Well, yeah, but when things go to shit, you can't get there And I said well you don't wait for things to go to shit, right?

You see you don't wait for riots in the streets of Los Angeles You see all these indicators and you say all right now I'm so glad I have that place in Fiji or wherever it is you get out early Yeah, the drag however is that some clients of mine have places in Canada, for example. Well, guess what? It's not so free. Not a good place for a bug out, Shaq. Or New Zealand or Australia.

Right, right, right. I expect I won't go to New Zealand or Australia for the rest of my life. Why is that? Just the nature of how that society, both of those societies, but I'll take Australia, became, you know, so dictatorial and totalitarian over this issue, the abuse of citizens. It was really dark. And somebody said to me, can you believe it? You know, they were immigrants originally and they were prisoners. They should really resist and not like this kind

of treatment. And I said, yeah, you have to remember they were also the prison guards. Right? That's also part of the history. Also, they're unarmed. That was a big argument for the Second Amendment. It was a big argument that that kind, those kind of draconian measures, stopping people from working unless they comply or complied with mandates, would never work in America. By the way, speaking of mandates, you saw that Washington, D.C. event against the mandates that had a bunch of doctors speaking and firemen and all kinds of people. So that is happening again April 10th in Los Angeles. And I support it because, again, I don't need any medical opinion.

And I support it because, again, I don't need any medical opinion. I don't need to like or dislike a particular pharma product to support the idea that mandates are destructive. Today, you might love it because you're afraid of COVID. Tomorrow, it will be something else. And tomorrow, it might be you. And so I really believe in the people who are standing up and saying that mandates themselves, without regard to why, mandates themselves are destructive. And that's April 10th in Los Angeles. You'll find it somewhere. I think it's StopTheMandates.com.

StopTheMandatesUS.com, something like that. So I encourage people to go. And if you're lucky enough to be on The Joe Rogan Show, you talk about things you believe in. I hear you. You talk about things you believe in. I hear you. It's one of those topics of conversation where people don't like to say that. Because if you say, I don't believe in mandates, you get pushed into this anti-vax category.

In fact, they've actually changed the definition. Yeah, please go ahead. Just that the definition of anti-vaxxer is now somebody who opposes vaccination and opposes mandates? That seems crazy. That should be called anti-mandate, not anti-vaxxer. But yeah. That seems crazy because a lot of those people are actually vaccinated that are saying this. More than a lot. More than a lot.

When you're talking about the doctors in the hospitals, you know, we had 34,000 medical workers fired in New York for not wanting to get vaccinated. It's not a smart decision. Especially since some of them actually had natural immunity because they had COVID. That was one of the weirder things where they were denying natural immunity, denying that it's a thing. Now they're coming out and saying- Just starting. Just starting. But they're saying that it's more effective, more effective. Yeah. Just starting. But then you got somebody like Paul Offit who was saying the only way out of this is vaccination. There's no other way out of it.

Who's Paul Offit? A big-time consultant to CDC, just one of the big-time vaccine doctors, vaccine promoters. You know, when I talk about vaccines or you say anti-vax, you got to remember we're talking about a suite of products that are all different. People think vaccines. It's like saying, do you use drugs? Exactly correct. Well, I drink coffee. Exactly correct.

So do you, so, you know, pharmaceuticals, there's great ones. Give it to me when I get a bee sting. Please give me the thing I need. Give me penicillin if I get a crap. That's right. Absolutely. But you can't say, here's one in a black box. I'm not going to tell you what it is.

I'm going to force you to take this one. I'm not going to tell you what's inside. Just shut up and turn over. And then I'm going to withhold data on the adverse events. That I'm not so attracted to. And so I'm not anti-vax. But each one of the products is a consumer product that the public has to assess and make a decision about.

Do you think over time this is going to be looked at unfavorably? Do you think like history, when they look back on this moment, we're going to learn from what like this, the way human beings reacted en masse to this? Yeah, probably. The reason I'm saying probably, and this is a bit discouraging what I'm going to say, is that, you know, I mentioned throughout human history, governments have been in the business of how can they control the only population they really care about. It's not the enemy. It's their own population. And that is just

human nature, right? If you're made the chief of the village, you don't want to not be the chief of the village. And so that process has been getting more and more perfected over time. So that process has been getting more and more perfected over time. 1984, Orwell predicted that television and electronics and other things would be important parts of this, and God bless him. He was right. So what my concern is is that maybe the methods of controlling populations are close to perfected. That is a concern I have, meaning with technology as it is, with social media, pushing the buttons that you're a bad person if you say this or that. Like I'm a bad person today, right?

I've opposed mandates. What, do you want people to die? Do you want to kill people? Do you want to kill my grandmother? That's not actually what I said. I said I oppose mandates. And I oppose lockdown. We oppose additional government control. I do.

Which is essentially what a mandate is. That's right. And there may be a place for draconian actions by government, but you have to choose that very, very artfully and carefully because you're never going to get it back. Yes. That is the problem. That's what's important. And so if we, you know, it turns out it's most of our conversation today about that subject, which, you know, people asked me what I was going to talk about. I said, I don't know.

It's Joe Rogan. So what's he going to ask? I have no idea what it's going to be. But this, my reality is that we have a beautiful experiment in America, an extraordinary constitution. You realize when America was formed, the idea that you would say to the king, you can't come into my house with your goons. The king would laugh at you and kill you on top of that, right? So we were a country in a pendulum swinging away from control by one individual. And every country on earth today that's controlled by one individual is bad news. All of them.

Saudi Arabia, Russia is an example. And so- North Korea. Yeah. And what's a country that isn't? Our country. And so it's a very beautiful thing. And I'm really, I want to answer very directly the question about, will we look back on this

and think, wow, that was an overreaction? Yes, of course, intelligent people would look back on this one day and say, that was an overreaction. Yes, of course, intelligent people would look back on this one day and say that was an overreaction. It was an overreaction to imprison Japanese people and put them in prison camps in 2000 – I mean in World War II. And we're now making amends for that and we're compensating people. But we were scared. We were scared that the Japanese were going to be – we'd been attacked and blah, blah, blah. There's similar reactions right now to Russians. That's right. That's right. That's right. Exactly. And so-

Not similar, I should say. I mean, obviously there's no internment camps, but there's a lot of fear. Yeah. And who will use fear all the time? People in power. Yeah. Right? So I'd like to think we will look back soon, by the way, and say, well, wait a minute, maybe we weren't so right about this and this and this and this, and maybe that was a little much. And maybe we shouldn't have had children in school wearing masks that don't work, that they're not wearing properly, that are under their nose anyway, but they have to do it. Maybe we shouldn't have done that to

kids developing their language skills who can't see mouths. And maybe we shouldn't have frightened these kids to think that everybody is going to kill them because they're carrying a virus and to touch the doorknob and then somebody spray that doorknob. All this shit went on and is going on in some schools right now. So maybe we shouldn't have inoculated 12-year-old kids with boosters after they had myocarditis, for God's sake. Maybe we shouldn't have done all that. That's true. They had myocarditis, for God's sake. Maybe we shouldn't have done all that. That's true.

What I'm concerned about, though, is will the information even become known? Because you and I both talk to a lot of people, and you say, what about this FDA thing, wanting 75 years? And they say, that's not true. That's fake news. But it is true. Sorry to interrupt, but do you think we have the, because we've got to wrap this up soon, but do you think we have the potential for an uncensored social media network that's not a dumpster fire? Because there's been some attempts at uncensored social media, but a lot of them are not that good. You go there, they're filled with assholes and trolls, and I don't even know if the people that are posting on those are real people or if

they're people that are been sent over there to try to ruin these companies we don't but everything you just said applies to Facebook with the only difference being that Facebook will censor certain kinds of things right and has tens of thousands of people to do it by the way so will we get one I would take it even with all the shit for For example, there's, you know, the streaming services like BitChute and give me another one, Odyssey. And there's one I'm forgetting. Rumble. Rumble. Thank you very much.

I'm sure I could find all kinds of things on Rumble I would hate, but I'm not looking for shit I hate. Right. And if I hate it, I might not watch it or I might watch it because I'm curious. But I'm a 67-year-old intelligent thinking person. I mean, porn is like this. Porn is downright destructive. If you find the darkest, most horrible thing you can imagine and your kids find it, I think it's bad news. But they have to learn in life, like I did, what am I going to look at? Where am I going to give my attention? What am I going to believe? What am I going to look at? Where am I going to give my attention? What am I going to believe? What am I going to question? And for me, the process of questioning

government is what makes this country extraordinary. That is, and if we're not allowed to question the king, if the king can just say, as Biden did, by the way, if you get this injection, you will not get sick and you will not spread it to anyone else. That was not true. I don't think he's lying, by the way. I just think he doesn't fucking know. But that's a problem when your president can say that and I can't question it. And that's the moment we're in.

And so long answer to your question is will we look back with help from you and others to just provide an alternate view and let the consumer decide. Maybe we look back on it, but it's also possible that it will disappear. Well, it seems that there's the potential for an extraordinary shift in our ability to ascertain what's right or wrong if someone created a social media platform that was uncensored that did abide by the freedom that we expect from the First Amendment I know it doesn't apply to private companies that's the argument always these are private companies but when you get to something like Twitter that is so extraordinarily influential its reaches I don't know how many people are on Twitter,

but it's fucking insane amounts of numbers. And information can spread so quickly on there, good and bad, real and false. But you've got to figure out a way to not censor people, especially not censor people that just have disturbing but accurate information like the Hunter Biden laptop story. That alone, the fact that that alone was removed from Twitter should disturb the shit out of

people that just want the truth, especially when you realize that that was a factor in choosing the president. And clearly the administration is not doing well. I mean, I'm not a Trump supporter and I didn't vote for him, but I'm saying if you look at what happened and that had an absolute influence on the election. And on the planet earth. And I agree with you. And I think that, you know, many people I know, and you know, Joe, if we talked about the Hunter Biden laptop, they say, oh, that's Russian today. Say that's Russian disinformation because the New York Times article was this big that has them coming around.

But all the other stuff was so enormous. Well, it's going to take time. Yeah. And and it's got to take a a re we need to get hold of our free speech platforms again. Like I could say something here. Presum presumably I have free speech in your presence, and if I said certain things, you'd say, get the fuck out of here. Like, I don't agree with that. That's too far. What are you talking about? We all have a line. Words can get us to, and controversy and words can get us to argument and words can get us to solution, of course. So the words are the key. As our friend Sam Harris would always say, it's so important to have good discourse. Yet our friend Sam Harris has also taken a very

strong position, doesn't want to hear anything about an alternate view. He's very much endorsed the alternate view and took issue with some guests you had. And, you know, this idea that you platformed guests, you mean a fucking famous doctor who's one of the developers of the mRNA vaccine platform that's being used right now? His opinion, we just don't want to have. Is that what it means? So a lot of people have, you know, it's a mixed model these days. And I think if we can capture again the idea, here's the point, main point. If Facebook were less controlled, then people know they have to be more careful. Meaning right now they're just being told, daddy's going to take care of it. You won't see anything you shouldn't see. Daddy

Zuckerberg or daddy government. And if you said, hey man, you're going to see a lot of shit on here. So be careful. Have your kids be careful. You're going to see a lot of opinions that aren't true. Be an astute consumer of information. There is an experiment done in Switzerland where they removed all the stop signs from certain communities, Sweden, pardon me, and it actually worked that people were more cautious. In other words, you come into an intersection, there was no stop sign, right? They reduced signs. It's a Wikipedia article. You can find it. It won't be that interesting. But the idea was it transferred from government to you the responsibility to stop at that intersection and look around. And it actually improved safety, right? People knew, I can't rely on this. What am I going to do? That sign says go 50 miles an hour.

I'm going to do that, and I'm still going to have a crash. I'm still going to have accidents. So it moved the responsibility to the driver. And if we did that with social media, which is, of course, there's all kinds of shit. You know where you find shit, by the way? Novels, human beings, movies, being human. Well, it also used to be a gigantic part of the internet. It was just chaos.

And it didn't ruin society when that was the case. No. It made things uniquely interesting because it was a first moment in time where we had access to information in that way. And having these nannies and gatekeepers in the form of Facebook and Twitter, it's not helping us. It's dividing people even further and it's polarizing the strong elements of the far right and the far left. Yes. And I think that's extremely detrimental because I think most people lie somewhere in the center and they have ideas from both sides. And if you give people the ability to debate things,

to have controversial or maybe even incorrect opinions But then someone comes along and shows how those opinions are incorrect if someone's paying attention Who's an outside observer they get a chance to see the argument play out and they form their opinion based on what's a stronger? Position yeah, what's a stronger argument And nobody telling us what the truth is. I want to decide what the truth is about something. Especially when these people are people like the president who get shit wrong all the time. These are not people

that are good at this. What'd you find? Oh. Facebook bug led to increased views of harmful content over six months. What is this, buddy? The story just broke while we were live. I sort of saw some headlines going around. They found stuff that was supposed to be demoted, you know, for

nudity, violence, downranking, and it was being actually promoted instead of being the opposite. And it'd be interesting, so we'll see if the country falls apart because of six weeks of Facebook failing. I doubt of nudity people, naked people, and having sex. Gavin, thank you very much.

Your book, A Gift of Fear, has been out. It's been out for a long time, and I'm going to start reading it. I haven't read it yet, but I heard it's excellent. I promise you it's good. I really enjoy our conversation. Me too. It was great. Thank you very much.

I really appreciate you. You too. All right. If anyone wants to get a hold of you, what's the best way? Gdba.com. GavinDeBecker.com is one way do you use any social media no no no no good for you no and um and then the uh giftoffear.com website they can see that uh that uh master class for free and i'm i'm glad to be rich enough to do it that way

i am glad you're doing it that way too. Thank you very much. Bye everybody.